Amnesty International UK is launching a new live event series in Brighton on 25 June with musician, writer and mental health advocate Jordan Stephens.

He’ll be leading a conversation about the pressures facing young men today and how stronger communities can help create positive change.

Change The Record: In Conversation with Jordan Stephens takes place on Thursday 25 June at The Old Market in Hove. It’ll bring together Stephens and a panel of guests for an honest discussion about wellbeing, identity, belonging and the social and economic challenges shaping the lives of young men.

Stephens is best known as one half of chart-topping duo Rizzle Kicks. He grew up in Brighton after moving to the city as a child. And he attended a local youth club closely connected to The Old Market.

Ben Hurst, director of facilitation at Beyond Equality, will host the event. It’ll also feature youth sector leader Adam Muirhead and Yunus El-Asri, founder of Young Muslims in Politics.

Together they’ll explore the impact of loneliness, online influences, economic insecurity and shrinking community spaces. And they’ll discuss how young men can play a positive role in building happier, healthier and fairer communities.

The evening marks the beginning of a new Amnesty initiative creating space for young men to come together, challenge division and explore the social and economic pressures shaping their lives – from insecure work and housing to cuts to youth services and community support.

Jordan Stephens – ‘all men are feeling it’

Stephens said:

There’s a lot being said about young men right now, and much of it feels negative, polarised or stuck. This conversation is about honesty, connection and figuring out how men and boys can show up differently for ourselves, each other, and our communities.

Not all men are the problem, but all men are feeling it – the algorithms pushing division, the isolation, the daily grind of economic pressure. It’s important to come together to reflect and work out what we can do to make our communities happier, healthier and fairer for everyone.

Audiences will also hear more about Amnesty’s developing work with young men. And there’ll be opportunities to get involved locally following the discussion.

After the event, attendees are invited to continue conversations informally at the venue bar with organisers, guests and community groups.

Stephens is an artist, actor and author whose memoir Avoidance, Drugs, Heartbreak & Dogs became a Sunday Times bestseller. Alongside his music career with Rizzle Kicks, Stephens has become a leading voice on masculinity and mental health. He recently fronted Channel 4 documentary Hunting My Sextortion Scammer and is co-host of the podcast Miss Me?.

Ben Hurst is director of facilitation at Beyond Equality. The organisation works with men and boys to help create safer and more equitable communities. Over the past decade, Beyond Equality has facilitated conversations with young people, educators, organisations and community groups across the UK and beyond.

Change The Record is Amnesty International UK’s platform for musicians, artists and the wider creative industry to champion and protect human rights. The initiative brings together artists, fans and cultural leaders to resist division and use creativity as a force for freedom and social change.

Event Information

Change The Record: In Conversation with Jordan Stephens, 8pm-9.45pm, Thursday 25 June 2026.

The Old Market, 11A Upper Market Street, Brighton and Hove, BN3 1AS.

Get tickets here.

Featured image via the Canary

By The Canary

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Disability Arts Online is calling on people across the country to share their memories and experiences of the Disability Arts movement. It’s part of a major new heritage project, with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Cripping Culture: A Journey into Disability Arts Heritage is a new project that will save the stories of the Disability Arts movement from being lost and share them through an accessible digital archive, interactive timeline and podcast series.

(Cripping, like queering, uses a reclaimed word to apply a disability lens to culture.)

By gathering the stories and sharing them for anyone to access and engage with online, Cripping Culture aims to support the development of a culture that embraces disabled people’s stories and fills in gaps in existing knowledge.

Disability Arts Online would like to hear from anyone with a link to the Disability Arts movement and is asking them to contribute their own stories to the collection. These could be memories of an event, show or exhibition they attended, something they read, an artist they met, an organisation they were part of or anything else involving disability arts.

Contributions are welcome from people of all backgrounds including artists, writers, producers, performers, curators, musicians, activists or audience members.

By getting as many people as possible from all regions of the UK involved, Disability Arts Online hopes to capture previously untold stories and shed new light on key moments in the Disability Arts movement’s history.

Disability Arts Online is especially keen to hear from people who:

• Are part of the global majority.
• Have intersectional experiences of disability.
• Can tell stories from regions that are currently underrepresented in collections or narratives.

Share your disability arts story

To share your story, visit disabilityarts.online/cripping-culture and submit the online form. Contributions can be text, video, audio or photos that help illustrate your memory. The project wants to know how the memory or experience contributed to both your life and the Disability Arts movement.

You can share multiple stories about different events, projects, artists or organisations. These can be in English or British Sign Language. Disability Arts Online can offer access support for anyone who might require it to submit their contribution.

Colin Hambrook, Heritage Project director, said:

It doesn’t matter who you are, if you have a story to tell that involves disability arts in the UK, then we want to hear from you. Everyone who shares a memory will play an important part in the Cripping Culture project, saving our heritage for future generations.

It is important for the legacy of the Disability Arts movement that we capture stories of events from all regions of the UK that may have not been previously recorded.

We want to celebrate the vast breadth of disability arts activity that has occurred across time. Please help us share this call out far and wide.

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Stuart McLeod, from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, said:

We’re proud to support Cripping Culture: A Journey into Disability Arts Heritage, a project that will safeguard and share the diverse stories of the Disability Arts movement.

Thanks to National Lottery players, this project will ensure that voices and experiences which have too often gone unheard are preserved and shared for generations to come.

By inviting people from across the UK to contribute their own stories, it will help build a more inclusive and representative picture of our shared cultural heritage.

The Cripping Culture contributions call out is open until Friday 14 August 2026.

To find out more about the project and share your story, visit disabilityarts.online/cripping-culture.

Cripping Culture: A Journey into Disability Arts Heritage is a three year project. It has received almost £250,000 in funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Featured image via the Canary

By The Canary

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We hope you love the products we recommend! All of them were independently selected by our editors. Just so you know, HuffPost UK may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page if you decide to shop from them. Oh, and FYI — prices are accurate and items in stock as of time of publication.

Sorry, but unless you’ve stomached the central line in a heatwave, you don’t know what hot is. Think: dripping with sweat, an unsavoury smell, and all round regret that you didn’t stay home.

As someone who can go from cool, calm, and collected to hot and overstimulated in a second, I always need to have a solution on-hand.

Mostly, that involves wearing skirts (like every day) and, until now, carrying a paper fan I can flap furiously at myself and anyone who comes within 20cm of me.

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But honestly, that doesn’t always do the job. So when I saw Shark had launched a three in one fan that fits in your bag, I got all hot and bothered.

Designed for indoor or outdoor use, the fan comes with three attachments: a high speed fan, a water misting head, and a cooling paddle, which can lower your skin temperature by up to nine degrees.

My review of the Shark ChillPill

Honey Jane Wyatt/ HuffPost

First impressions

Having heard so much hype around this product on social media, I was excited to see whether this could make a serious difference to my comfort in the heat.

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Although the Pill comes in six colours, I ordered the Iced Latte colour, which I’m pleased to report goes well with a whole range of summer outfits (if you care about that…).

I’m a creature of habit, so the idea of having three heads to choose from is slightly intimidating. If there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I’m only going to use one of them at a time – and obsessively.

You’ll never catch me carrying all three heads in my bag, so I knew I had about 48 hours to figure out which head I preferred before I settled on the one it came with (the fan head).

Luckily, there’s a heatwave going on – in case you hadn’t noticed – so I had plenty of opportunity to experiment.

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Honey Jane Wyatt/ HuffPost

After fully charging the Pill, which takes around 3.5 hours from an empty battery, I loaded it up with the mist head.

I have curly hair, which requires a careful balance of adding and avoiding moisture to prevent frizz, so I predicted that would be the head I’d use the most.

The package comes with three spare wicks, and the mist head is loaded with one already, so all you have to do is add water to the head and add it on to the fan.

To turn the Pill on, you switch the button on the side, click the black screen head, and twist it clockwise to increase the intensity.

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This head allows you to run the fan and mist at the same time, and clicking on the screen once will provide a constant stream of mist, while two clicks means it will be expelled in pulses.

To make sure it’s travel-friendly, you can either rest it against the table and angle the head towards you, or hold it as a handle. In this instance, I used the handle to get precise with where the water was going.

As expected, I didn’t love the sensation of being sprayed with water while at home, but when I used it again at a weekend picnic, it was just what I needed to cool me down between copious amounts of day drinking.

Honey Jane Wyatt/ HuffPost

Next, I used the basic fan head. Unsurprisingly, this is the most versatile for using when at your desk or during your commute.

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The fan has 10 intensities, and on the lower settings, it’s perfectly quiet, meaning it won’t distract your colleagues if you balance it on your desk.

But, when you’re out and about you’ll likely want to use it on the higher settings, and let’s just say it’s not exactly subtle.

To be fair, you probably won’t be thinking about noise when you’re dripping with sweat on the bus, but it’s worth keeping in mind that you might get a couple of side eyes from your fellow commuters – not least because they’re jealous of your chill.

Honey Jane Wyatt/HuffPost

Honestly, I wish I’d tried the cooling plate head sooner, but I avoided it because it looks pretty unassuming.

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Let this be your millionth reminder to never judge a book by its cover, because as soon as I used the paddle head while running an event that required me to carry boxes during 34 degree heat, I realised I was very in the wrong.

Instead of blowing air, this paddle collects the coolness from the fan so it makes the area of your skin you hold it against up to nine degrees cooler.

Clicking the screen once will make it slightly cool, and two clicks will enable cooler settings.

It sounds too good to be true, I know, but I am pleased to confirm this was exceptionally life changing. Not only does it provide a welcome shock of icy cold during a hot day, but it has a real lasting impact on your body temperature.

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Final verdict

• Easy to hold
• Fits in your bag
• Battery lasts up to 11 hours
• Strong and cools you down effectively
• Easy to change the heads
• Great that you can balance it on the table

• A little noisy on the higher settings
• Cooling plate and mist heads last up to only an hour on higher settings

After testing this fan for the last three months, I’m pleased to say I am now an electric fan convert. Sorry to my paper fan, but it just doesn’t do quite as good of a job.

I’m a huge fan (sorry, had to be done) of the several settings the Pill comes with. While I can’t say I’m rushing to use the fan head on transport, the cooling plate is more than enough for a refreshing boost, and I know when I’m at the beach the misting head will make me extremely popular.

Huge props have to be given to its battery life: although it will run out in a matter of hours if you’re using it on the high settings constantly, it took a while for my Pill to run out after its initial charge.

If you’re not sure about its bulkiness in your bag, don’t worry, because Shark has also made a whole range of accessories than make carrying it much easier, including a wrist strap and clip attachment.

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My only advice would be to move quickly, it’s already sold out twice already, and with another heatwave set to hit at the weekend, it’ll definitely sell out again!

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Deluded worldviews are everywhere in the Trump regime – they’re a requirement to be part of it. Few come more twisted than white nationalist and fanatical Zionist US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. So twisted that Huckabee thinks Israel has a ‘right’ to take the whole of west Asia. But Huckabee even – and completely ahistorically – thinks the US wouldn’t exist at all if it wasn’t for Israel:

Back to front

Just for the record – and for Trump himself – the US has existed as an independent nation for well over 200 years. Israel was artificially created through ethnic cleansing and massacres in 1948 by Western imperialists – including, among others, the US. To the Palestinian people and anyone with a conscience, this is known as the ‘Nakba’, or catastrophe, and an ongoing catastrophe for humanity. To the likes of Huckabee, it’s apparently the salvation of the US.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

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Labour Jess Asato has commenced legal proceedings against Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI (Alamy)

5 min read35 min

Labour MP Jess Asato has called on the government to create a legal definition of technology-facilitated violence against women and girls, arguing that stronger protections are needed to tackle the growing threat of AI-generated abuse.

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Earlier this year, GrokAI – Elon Musk’s xAI company’s tool – generated non-consensual sexualised images of Asato, including bikini photos and a video showing her being chloroformed and prepared for a sexual assault.

The MP for Lowestoft, elected in 2024, has filed a civil claim in the High Court against xAI, alleging breaches of UK data protection law and misuse of private information.

Asato told PoliticsHome that the Online Safety Act, which started to come into force last year, must be strengthened to protect women, girls and other vulnerable people online.

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As part of this, the Labour government should consider creating a statutory definition of technology-facilitated violence against women and girls, she said.

“At the moment, the violence against women and girls guidance from Ofcom is very comprehensive, but nobody’s following it,” she said. 

“That’s partly because it doesn’t have statutory teeth, and so from my perspective, there is a very good case, which has been made for a while by the women’s sector, that the VAWG [violence against women and girls] guidance should be made mandatory and given proper regulatory status.”

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Asato hopes that her case against X can set a legal precedent by testing whether an AI developer can be held liable for the design and deployment of its system, rather than the person who prompted the generation of the content. 

She said she also hopes that ministers reconsider the introduction of a third-party advocacy body that could assess individual cases, collate evidence of breaches across multiple platforms, and monitor the implementation of the Online Safety Act, explaining that when she discovered the GrokAI-generated images of her, there was “nowhere else for me to go” after X said the content reported did not go against the platform’s standards.

During the passage of the Online Safety Bill, peers tabled several amendments designed to give individuals stronger representation. Baroness Kidron and others tabled an amendment to establish an Advocacy Body for Children, but it was not accepted. As it stands, Ofcom cannot investigate individual cases.

“That was a real missed opportunity,” Asato said.

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“One of the problems Ofcom has is that if it’s not able to collate individual cases, it isn’t able to see the sum total of the harm that is occurring, and therefore be able to prove back to the companies that they are not following the Online Safety Act.

“Calls are definitely growing for there to be much stronger accountability, either given to Ofcom or another body entirely.”

Dex Hunter-Torricke, who spent more than a decade leading communications for some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including senior roles advising Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt, told PoliticsHome he found it “extraordinary” that the burden is placed on individuals like Asato to have to take legal action against platforms to prevent the generation of non-consensual images.

“Surely this is the entire point of passing legislation to protect people online,” he said. 

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“We need to have a better systemic fix for that. Most people don’t have the resources all the time to go and defend themselves, especially if that might involve a legal case. It’s very, very troubling that after so many years arguing about how to protect people online, we still don’t actually have our right mechanisms in place as a country.”

Asato has welcomed the government’s announcement that it will go ahead with a ban on certain social media platforms for under-16-year-olds, describing it as a “big, brave step”, alongside other announcements such as new plans by the government to force Big Tech companies to activate built-in features or implement technical solutions on smartphones to detect and block nude images for children.

Despite her experience on the site, Asato has decided to continue using X as a social media platform, and not say when asked whether the government should stay on it.

“Many politicians have left X for very understandable reasons of safety and well-being, but I stay on it because I don’t want to be bullied off a platform,” she said.

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Another Labour MP, Alistair Strathern, has proposed a new law to make Relationships and Sex Education mandatory up to 18 to help combat violence against women and girls.

Strathern, who is co-chair of the Labour Group for Men and Boys and a former teacher, said: “For too long, children in further education have missed out because of gaps in the provision of Relationships and Sex Education.

“At a time when the worst corners of the internet are preying on teenagers, with their own harmful takes on what makes a healthy relationship, we surely owe young people far better than this.

‘My bill will put this right and make it mandatory for all settings to give children the space, support and advice they need as they navigate this formative stage. With 16-19-year-olds facing the highest rates of domestic abuse of any age group, the real-world consequences of failing to act couldn’t be clearer.”

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PoliticsHome has contacted the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology for comment.

 

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On 15 June, the government announced a social media ban for under-16s. Since the announcement, there has been much reporting on Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). This software solution allow users to spoof their location, meaning they can get around UK-specific age restrictions. Speaking on this workaround, technology secretary Liz Kendall has basically admitted the government has no solution:

Hahahaha yeah this ban is not going to work https://t.co/OlTlWZ5uZr

— Maxwell Marlow (@maxwell_marlow) June 16, 2026

Social media ban doesn’t keep kids safe

In the clip above, LBC host Nick Ferrari shows Kendall how quick and easy it is to connect with a VPN (answer = very). In response, Kendall explained that she’s going to return with a solution in July. This suggests she doesn’t have an answer now and won’t have one in a month, because they’ve already had half a year to figure this out.

Australia introduced its own social media ban in December 2025. As we know, VPNs are one of the ways which Australian kids have used to get around the ban. And as we also know, the majority of these kids still have social media accounts.

As the Molly Rose Foundation demonstrated:

Three in five (61%) Australian 12-15 year-olds who had accounts on restricted platforms before the ban came into force still have access to one or more accounts. Major platforms have retained a majority of their child users, with 53% of previous TikTok users, 53% of YouTube users and 52% of Instagram users still able to access an account on these platforms.

. …

Molly Rose Foundation warns this data raises major question marks about the effectiveness of Australia’s social media ban, and that given the findings it would be a ‘high stakes gamble’ for the UK to follow suit at this stage.

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Today we warn that Australia’s ban is failing to act as the urgent and decisive firebreak that proponents of a ban have suggested. Instead, it risks offering parents a false sense of safety and risks letting tech firms off the hook for safety failings.

Speaking further on this point, the Canary’s Maddison Wheeldon wrote:

the problem is unregulated, unyielding tech companies and unfettered capitalism – and the government appears to have chosen to go after an easier target in young people instead of holding billionaires accountable.

Messy

Think tank director Maxwell Marlow additionally had this to say:

The political cost is too great for them to do so

— Maxwell Marlow (@maxwell_marlow) June 16, 2026

It’s actually a very common security practice for businesses to use VPNs on their company networks. In other words, there isn’t a simple way for the government to ban VPNs, even if they wanted to. And yet again, it would be adding new layers of complexity to a solution which is already overly complicated.

As many suspect, none of this is to keep children safe; it’s to implement Digital ID by the backdoor, and to allow private companies to scrape our data. In other words, the government doesn’t care if children use VPNs or not.

Featured image via LBC

By Willem Moore

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September 1946: Winston Churchill painting in Belgium | Image: © Churchill Archives Centre

5 min read3 min

At a time of turmoil, political leaders could do no worse than seek inspiration from this revealing and enjoyable retrospective of the paintings of Winston Churchill

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I was delighted, when arts minister, to learn that the Wallace Collection was planning a Winston Churchill retrospective. It might seem a surprising choice for this museum of decorative arts, but it has a splendidly Churchillian connection: the great-granddaughter of Sir Richard Wallace – the Conservative MP who left the collection to the nation – was Odette Pol-Roger. She befriended Churchill over dinner at the reopened British Embassy in Paris in 1944, reserved an entire vintage for him, and sent him a case each year for his birthday.

The wartime premier’s Nobel Prize in Literature is well-known; less so is his renown as an artist. After two of his paintings were pseudonymously accepted into Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, he was elected an honorary academician in 1948. A decade later, a selection of his works toured the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand before a hugely popular show at the Royal Academy in London – but there has been no national exhibition in the UK since his death in 1965. High time, then, for this illuminating and enjoyable show, curated by Xavier Bray and Lucy Davis.

These canvases illuminate the visual metaphors in his famous speeches

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Churchill turned to painting at one of his lowest ebbs, after his dismissal as first lord of the admiralty in the wake of Gallipoli. Ejected and dejected at the age of 40, “the Muse of Painting came to my rescue”. She would remain an inspiration and comfort the rest of his life. “Painting is complete as a distraction,” he later explained. “I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind.” 

Though self-effacing about his “daubs”, the apprentice was typically committed to  improvement. His earliest mentor was the society portraitist and war artist Sir John Lavery. One of the most arresting images in this exhibition is the self-portrait Churchill produced at Lavery’s studio in 1915, shrouded in darkness and shadow, an echo of his turmoil that autumn.

High birth and high office allowed him to seek the advice of other artists. Sir William Nicholson – “the person who taught me most about painting” – stayed at Chartwell and tutored him in still-life, though with a Churchillian twist in the choice of subject: bottles of brandy and Johnnie Walker. Walter Sickert encouraged a greater spontaneity and more vibrant palette – seen in his Moroccan landscapes, or in his 1949 Twenty-Minute Sketch of Lake Carezza, painted en route to the inaugural session of the Council of Europe. To stop him overworking it, his wife Clementine is said to have asked a bodyguard to hide it under his bed.

The nearly 60 works selected here (from an oeuvre of over 500) amply demonstrate his development and curiosity, from hasty despatches from the Great War trenches to sophisticated studies of the state rooms at Blenheim Palace.

Especially revelatory is The Beach at Walmer, painted in 1938 and depicting the Churchill family paddling in Kent. The artist himself stands apart, looking out across the Channel. A Napoleonic cannon follows his gaze, echoing the warnings of the man who, within three years, would be lord warden of the Cinque Ports.

Just as Churchill mobilised the English language and sent it into battle, these paintings show how he deployed every medium in the campaigns he waged. These canvases illuminate the visual metaphors in his famous speeches – read in the audio guide by Sir Gary Oldman – and the list of friends and allies to whom he gifted them (set out meticulously in the catalogue by Lord Roberts of Belgravia) explain how he wielded soft power both at both a personal and geopolitical level. The list of lenders reads like a Who’s Who of the allied powers; parliamentarians will recognise the works on loan from the Churchill Room and the No lobby of the Commons.

This exhibition of the great statesman’s work runs until 29 November, the day before his 152nd birthday. Any other political leaders facing turmoil between now and then might find inspiration in it.

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Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay is a Conservative peer

Winston Churchill: The Painter

Curated by: Dr Lucy Davis & Dr Xavier Bray

Venue: Wallace Collection – until 29 November

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