‘Sunshine Saturday’: UK firms expect 5% January rise in holiday bookings

UK travel companies are bracing for one of their busiest periods for bookings as winter-wearied consumers plan sunny breaks, with package holiday bookings forecast to be up 5% this January.The Civil Aviation Authority, the regulator that administers the Atol travel financial protection scheme, has forecast that 200,000 more holidaymakers will book trips this month compared with the 4.3 million who did so in the same period last year.January is well known as a boom time for holiday planning as households crave something to look forward to after Christmas, with demand peaking at the weekends, particularly the first one – known in the industry as Sunshine Saturday for its bumper number of bookings.However, booking patterns are forecast to shift this year towards quieter destinations, such as Malta’s sister island, Gozo, and long-haul locations, according to TravelSupermarket

China’s BYD overtakes Tesla as world’s biggest electric car seller

China’s BYD overtook Tesla as the world’s largest electric carmaker in 2025, after the US company run by Elon Musk reported a slump in deliveries at the end of the year.BYD sold 2.26m battery electric cars during the year, easily outstripping the 1.63m deliveries reported on Friday by Tesla for the same period.The switch is a symbolic moment in the rise of China’s car companies, which have used the transition to electric cars to try to dominate the global automotive industry

Reddit overtakes TikTok in UK thanks to search algorithms and gen Z

Reddit, the online discussion platform, has overtaken TikTok as Britain’s fourth most visited social media service, as search algorithms and gen Z have dramatically transformed its prominence.The platform has undergone huge growth over the last two years, with an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches. Three in five Brits online now encounter the site, up from a third in 2023, according to Ofcom.Its popularity is rising fastest with younger internet users. It is now the sixth most visited organisation of any kind by UK users aged between 18 and 24, up from 10th a year earlier

Elon Musk’s Grok AI generates images of ‘minors in minimal clothing’

Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok posted on Friday that lapses in safeguards had led it to generate “images depicting minors in minimal clothing” on social media platform X. The chatbot, a product of Musk’s company xAI, has been generating a wave of sexualized images throughout the week in response to user prompts.Screenshots shared by users on X showed Grok’s public media tab filled with such images. xAI said it was working to improve its systems to prevent future incidents.“There are isolated cases where users prompted for and received AI images depicting minors in minimal clothing,” Grok said in a post on X in response to a user

What a 14-year-old Instagram sensation and six-hitting superstar tells us about life and cricket | Barney Ronay

It’s that time of year again, a time of lists and countdowns, of soul-crushing AI brain-vomit ringed by adverts for miracle dental implants. In the spirit of the season the tech website Feedpost produced its own list on New Year’s Eve of the Top 100 Kid Influencers on Instagram And YouTube in 2025, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s fine and definitely not strange or creepy [narrator’s voice: it is strange and creepy].Don’t think about end times. Don’t think about plagues of woodlice, flames licking at your feet

Green shoots no laughing matter as Ben Stokes insists fifth Ashes Test is ‘big game’

“I don’t think a groundsman has ever been under as much pressure as the guy here this week.” Ben Stokes had a smile on his face during his final pre-match press conference of this Ashes series at the Sydney Cricket Ground, as he responded to a question about the nature of the pitch for the fifth Test, which starts on Sunday.This is no laughing matter, however, for Adam Lewis, curator of the SCG, who has already been moved to defend the greenish tinge at the edge of the strip a day before a single ball has been bowled.In a surprising twist to Australia’s obsession with grass lengths in the week since England’s two-day victory in Melbourne, Lewis also described how he “shuts out the noise” while rolling, mowing and watering the strip. “I don’t scroll, I don’t have social media, so I try and keep all that negative energy away from me