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When Abby Fagerlin tried logging into Canvas, a popular educational technology platform, to check on her assignments Monday morning, she couldn’t get in.

That meant the 19-year-old college sophomore, who is studying physics at Pasadena City College, was unable to access materials she needed for her three classes, which were hosted on or linked through the learning management system. After searching online, she realized the Amazon Web Services outage that crippled much of the internet Monday had also temporarily taken down Canvas.

Fagerlin also couldn’t be sure if she’d missed a message from her professors—some of whom she said communicated exclusively with their students through a messaging system hosted on Canvas. Going to talk to one of her professors to ask for physical materials from his class, meanwhile, posed a separate challenge.

“His office hours are [posted] on Canvas,” she said.

It wasn’t just Fagerlin having problems. More than a dozen students at colleges and universities across the country told WIRED the Canvas outage threw off their schedules, preventing them from not just submitting and viewing assignments but also from participating in-class activities, contacting professors, and accessing the textbooks and other materials they need to study.

[...]the disruptions to students are a testament to just how popular Canvas is on college campuses—and how much of modern educational life is increasingly centered on a handful of educational technology platforms.

In early 1995 I was 23 and living in a terraced house in Bristol with four friends, about 18 months after leaving university. I’d given up on trying to be an illustrator, had a bit of freelance work making models for Aardman Animations, and would soon be the only one of my friends not to have permanent work. I was increasingly interested in technology and this brand new thing: Internet.

NICOSIA, Oct 19 (Reuters) - A moderate candidate won Turkish Cypriot presidential elections on Sunday, defeating a hardliner in a pivotal vote that could help revive stalled U.N. talks on reunifying Cyprus.

Centre-left politician Tufan Erhurman sailed to victory with 62.8% of the vote from just over 218,000 registered voters, defeating incumbent Ersin Tatar on a platform of reinvigorating talks with estranged Greek Cypriots on the future of Cyprus.

Erhurman, a lawyer, has pledged to explore a federal solution — long supported by the United Nations — to end the island's nearly 50-year division.

Shortly after Colombian presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot at a political rally in June, hundreds of videos of the attack flooded social media. Some of these turned out to be deepfakes made with artificial intelligence, forcing police and prosecutors to spend hours checking and debunking them during the investigation. A teenager was eventually charged.

Increasing adoption of AI is transforming Latin America’s justice system by helping tackle case backlogs and improve access to justice for victims. But it is also exposing deep vulnerabilities through its rampant misuse, bias, and weak oversight as regulators struggle to keep up with the pace of innovation.

Law enforcement doesn’t yet “have the capacity to look at these judicial matters beyond just asking whether a piece of evidence is real or not,” Lucia Camacho, public policy coordinator of Derechos Digitales, a digital rights group, told Rest of World. This may prevent victims from accessing robust legal frameworks and judges with knowledge of the technology, she said.

Justice systems across the world are struggling to address harms from deepfakes that are increasingly used for financial scams, in elections, and to spread nonconsensual sexual imagery. There are currently over 1,300 initiatives in 80 countries and international organizations to regulate AI, but not all of these are laws and nor do they all cover deepfakes, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Even as the number of youths who identify as LGBTQ rises, so has the number of state-level bills seeking to curtail their rights, a new analysis finds.

The number of bills aimed at rolling back or prohibiting in-school protections and health care access has tripled from 77 in 2020 to some 300 a year in 2023, 2024 and 2025, according to the Movement Advancement Project.

The drumbeat of legislation, report the researchers, has taken a steep toll on the mental health of the students in the crosshairs — regardless of where they live. When the dramatic escalation in legislation started in 2023, 90% of LGBTQ people ages 13 to 24 said politics had a negative impact on their well-being — up from 71% in 2022.

Policies enabling in-school support are particularly important to LGBTQ youth. Slightly more than half say they are accepted by peers or teachers at school, compared with 40% who are supported at home. The presence of even one supportive educator in a child’s life has long been shown to reduce rates of suicidality, anxiety and depression.

The number of young people impacted has risen sharply in recent years, though estimates vary depending on how data is tabulated. According to a recent Gallup survey, almost 2 million — or 9.5% — of teens ages 13 to 17 now identify as something other than straight or cisgender. That’s nearly twice as many as in 2020.

What Mamdani is really testing is whether Democrats can still generate attention through conflict on their own terms. The modern political media landscape only amplifies what bleeds—culture wars, celebrity-like feuds—while ignoring the conflicts that actually define people’s lives: rent that keeps rising, child care that drains a paycheck, transit that doesn’t come. Most Democrats, wary of being cast as divisive, retreat from confrontation altogether or get pulled into the wrong fights.

Mamdani understands that attention is produced through conflict, and that the answer is not to avoid it but to redirect it. He builds it around affordability—who pays, who benefits, and how power works—making economic struggle visible and emotionally legible. For him, conflict isn’t a distraction from governing; it’s the entry point for persuasion. The goal is not to perform anger but to focus it, to remind people that politics can still change the price of the things that govern their days.

Mamdani’s appeal has little to do with just his youthful vibe. It lies in his answer to two questions the party keeps ducking. Can a Democrat hold attention without turning into a caricature? And once attention is captured, can it be used to make politics legible as a system that changes what people pay and how they live? His method blends traditions that rarely coexist: Sanders’s moral clarity, Ocasio-Cortez’s digital and movement cadence, the “abundance” instinct to build and unblock, the grounded competence of effective executives, and the narrative craft of cultural workers who know how to reach an audience. The point is not style for its own sake. It is persuasion as craft—showing that Democrats can hold the stage on the economy again, speak plainly about power, and still mean what they say.

Aside from a MAGA hat, there is likely no object that feels more emblematic of US president Donald Trump’s return to the White House than the Tesla Cybertruck. The blunt angles and steel doors look futuristic, for sure, but only if the future looks a lot like RoboCop. To some, it’s a metallic status symbol. To others, it’s fascism on wheels. Either way, heads turn.

Cybertruck owners see things differently. “To me, it's just a vehicle that I love,” says Andrew Castillo, a stock trader from Los Angeles. “It has no political affiliations at all to me.”

We’re standing in the parking lot of McCormick's Palm Springs Classic Car Auctions. All around us, a dozen Cybertruck owners—and their cars—bake in the 100 degree heat. They’ve arrived for a meetup organized by Michael Goldman, who runs the 53,000-person Facebook group Cybertruck Owners Only. Though suspicious of the media, they’re eager to set the record straight about the car that they love. WIRED is here to learn how it feels to be out in public in such a politically charged vehicle. Has the past year or so changed anyone’s minds about owning the truck? Do owners like the attention—or are they adding bumper stickers decrying Elon Musk?

As we’re talking, a woman drives by in a small sedan. “Your cars are fucking ugly!” she screams before peeling off. Castillo smiles. “Some people just aren’t playing with a full deck of cards,” he says serenely.

Worldwide solar and wind power generation has outpaced electricity demand this year, and for the first time on record, renewable energies combined generated more power than coal, according to a new analysis.

Global solar generation grew by a record 31% in the first half of the year, while wind generation grew by 7.7%, according to the report by the energy think tank Ember, which was released after midnight Tuesday London time. Solar and wind generation combined grew by more than 400 terawatt hours, which was more than overall global demand increased in the same period, it found.

The findings suggest it is possible for the world to wean off polluting sources of power — even as demand for electricity skyrockets — with continued investment in renewables including solar, wind, hydropower, bioenergy and geothermal energies.

“That means that they can keep up the pace with growing appetite for electricity worldwide,” said Małgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, senior electricity analyst at Ember and lead author of the study.

Shortly after flour disappeared from the market in November 2023, it began to circulate again in the sacks originally intended for distribution by UNRWA. This sudden appearance was the result of an act of mass looting by crowds of hungry people, which we only heard about afterward: they had stormed the UNRWA warehouses, some breaking down the doors while others scaled the walls, and emptied them of their supplies—not only flour, but also tinned sardines, corn oil, milk powder, and dried lentils and chickpeas—in a matter of minutes. Apparently, they’d even taken wooden desks, shelves, and the agency’s archives—all of which could be used as firewood. I bought a sack of looted UNRWA flour for more than four times the usual price and made my way home as if bearing priceless treasure. My wife Ula and her sisters were jubilant, and we were all seized by a dark joy amid the wasteland of fear and grief that grows vaster and more desolate by the day as the war continues to escalate. We felt momentarily comfortable and safe; we could bake our own bread now, instead of waiting under the hot sun for hours in the uncertain hope of finding some at the bakery. But another problem stood in our path: to turn the thin rounds of dough into bread we needed an oven, and all we had in the apartment was a gas canister that barely sufficed to cook our regular meals. We would have to find some other way.

Mud ovens, which are what rural Gazan families have always used for cooking and baking, are dotted across the green patches that lie between the apartment blocks in Hamad City. The women they belong to are generous and volunteer their help when other families turn up needing to bake something, only asking them to bring enough paper and cardboard for fuel. But we didn’t have any paper or cardboard in the house—only my books.

Ula looked at me timidly. “Let’s use one or two for now, and when the war’s over you can replace them,” she said, as gently as she could. “The kids need food more than they need to be read to.” The ugliness of it was devastating. In all the years I’d spent amassing my modest library, it had never occurred to me that I might one day have to weigh a book against a piece of bread for my children. I was stunned by the cruelty of the choice, paralyzed by the question it raised: How had things gotten this bad, this fast?