The Met Office has issued two rare red weather warnings for winds “posing a danger to life” as Storm Éowyn batters the UK. The worst disruption is expected in Scotland and Northern Ireland; a record 114mph gust was recorded on the west coast of Ireland early this morning. Dozens of flights have been cancelled and more than 700,000 homes and businesses left without power. Donald Trump has ordered officials to release classified documents relating to the assassinations of John F Kennedy, his brother Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The executive order gives the US director of national intelligence 15 days to present a plan for the documents’ release. The 2025 Oscar nominations have been announced. Emilia Pérez – a wacky musical about a mobster-turned-trans woman philanthropist – leads the field with 13 nominations, including best picture. Other frontrunners include The Brutalist, a historical epic starring Adrien Brody, the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and Wicked. See the full list here.

China is using TikTok to rot our brains

Why is Donald Trump keeping open the Chinese Communist Party’s “window on the 170 million of us with TikTok accounts”, asks Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. The Supreme Court, in its unanimous decision to uphold the law against the app, specifically cited reports of intrusive data collection on US citizens, including contacts and exact locations. In court, TikTok didn’t dispute this. It merely claimed it was “unlikely” the Chinese government would look at the data. Please. I spent five years as the Times’s Beijing bureau chief, living in a bugged apartment and being tailed everywhere I went. And to be fair, when China bought a Boeing 767 as its presidential plane, they found 27 US bugs hidden inside. We spy on them, and they spy on us. “But we shouldn’t make it easier.”

Turning American phones into surveillance devices isn’t the worst part, says Gurwinder Bhogal in UnHerd. Nor is the fact that Beijing can easily use TikTok for “influence operations”, suppressing views or topics they disapprove of, and disseminating pro-China propaganda. More disturbing is that the app is the first “pleasure weapon of mass destruction”. Its famous “for you” algorithm uses AI to track users’ attention, and employs this knowledge to show them, unprompted, whatever content is most likely to hold their gaze. This makes it both “passive and addictive”, potentially inflicting long-term harm on young Westerners by “keeping them distracted, shortening their attention spans and, ultimately, atrophying their brains”. Douyin, the version available in China, is full of science experiments and educational videos, and only accessible to kids for 40 minutes a day, between 6am and 10pm. It’s almost as if the CCP knows that apps like TikTok “make people stupid”.

📕🙄 In keeping with the principle that the “dumbest and/or funniest possible thing” is what always happens nowadays, says Rusty Foster in Today in Tabs, American TikTok users are flocking to another Chinese short video platform called Xiaohongshu, which means “little red book” in Mandarin. They’re apparently not put off by the reference to the collection of Chairman Mao’s sayings – most call the app Red Note – or that the service was co-founded by a guy called Mao.

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