The 764 network is just one part of a growing online ecosystem that pushes young members into brutal and degrading acts. It has perpetrators and victims in dozens of countries

In late 2024, in a quiet suburb of Stockholm, a 14-year-old boy approached a man in his 80s who was using a walker. He stabbed the man three times in the back.

The video of the attack in Hässelby was streamed and spread quickly. It fed a global online ecosystem that actively encourages and glorifies acts of violence and degradation – the “gamification of harm”, as the researcher Marc-André Argentino puts it.

After her son disappeared, Isabel Miranda de Wallace swore she would bring the culprits to justice. She became a national hero. But did she go too far?

When her son, Hugo, failed to answer his phone on the morning of 12 July 2005, Isabel Miranda de Wallace did not waste a moment. Everyone knew that kidnappings were rife in Mexico City, and Wallace immediately enlisted her brother and nephew to help with the search. They walked the streets near Hugo’s last known location until they came across his SUV. A passerby told them they’d seen someone being forced out of his car and into a nearby apartment, Wallace later said. She also described speaking to a boy who had heard gunshots and seen an injured man being led out of the apartment around 4am. “Within 24 hours, we found his car, then the building where they took my son. We had the case practically solved,” Wallace later said. “But the police didn’t believe us.”

At that time, many kidnapping cases went unreported, as families feared that the police couldn’t be trusted. Those who did go to the police often struggled to get them to take their complaints seriously. But Wallace was different. She was a successful businesswoman, who had set up an advertising agency that owned and operated billboards across Mexico City. “She didn’t beg or say please,” said Federico Döring, a politician and an early ally of Wallace. “She would point her finger at public officials not doing their job – and this was unheard of,” Döring told me. “In Mexico, a lot of people are often afraid to speak up because you don’t know if a politician is in bed with the cartels. That intimidates them, but it didn’t intimidate her.”

The company argues that it’s for individuals to ensure they don’t ‘actively exploit’ this technology. That won’t keep children safe

It took me a while to realise what the man sitting next to me on the train was doing. He was flicking through pictures of a little girl on his phone; zooming in on some, cropping the images. Hardly unusual, of course, except that on closer inspection the pictures were very clearly of the toddler sitting opposite us, playing with her parents. On a crowded train of people mostly staring obliviously at our own phones, a stranger had been covertly photographing that little girl over and over again. And if it hadn’t been for that very visible phone screen giving him away, he wouldn’t have been caught.

That encounter was a while ago but my memory was jogged last week listening to a clip of Meta’s VP of wearables, Alex Himel, talk fondly to the BBC about using his new smartglasses to film his daughter singing in a talent contest. They let him capture the memory without having to watch her through a screen, he said, freeing him to be “kind of living in the moment, head up and hands free”. So far, so sweet. But what about the risk of creeps potentially using them to film other people’s daughters covertly, heads up and hands free? Meta’s smartglasses have a tiny flashing warning light on the frame to indicate when the wearer is recording, but the technology is still new enough that many people don’t think to look for it. And in the age of AI, stolen images of children matter. Taken in real life or scraped from the internet, they’re the raw material for generating realistic-looking child abuse material of the most extreme and disturbing kind. (If that sounds like a grim but ultimately fairly victimless crime, the Internet Watch Foundation warned in a recent report that AI-generated material risks fuelling sexual interest in children, normalising violence and increasing the risk of real-life offending.)

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Since the start of the Iran war in February, there has been a 23% rise in fuel theft, with more than £1.2m stolen from British forecourts each week. Why aren’t the police doing more to apprehend the culprits?

A petrol station tucked away in the suburbs of Birmingham seems an unlikely place for a crime spree. But this garage has become a prime target for thieves. Some fuel runners are easy to spot, approaching the petrol pumps in face masks, but after a recent spate of fill-and-dashes by less conspicuous drivers, no motorist is beyond suspicion. “It could be anyone,” says Shailesh Parekh, who is on high alert, as always.

The 62-year-old owns six forecourts across Birmingham, and today I’m visiting his station in Erdington, a residential area about five miles from the city centre. Parekh remembers a time when a motorist speeding off with an unpaid-for tank was rare. So much so, it would be the talk of the station for months. Those days are long gone. Now, it’s a weekly and sometimes daily occurrence. “In the last three years, it’s been very bad,” Parekh tells me from the back office, where a monitor beams CCTV images from every inch of the forecourt.

Amid fears of fresh bloodshed, the country is hoping its offer of education and employment can provide a model for other nations to follow

It didn’t matter that he was so frail he could barely walk. Rahmatalla Abdeen knew if they found him he would be shot. For two days, the 65-year-old had clung to the back of a moped as it navigated an area teeming with militia.

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had seized this corner of Sudan after crossing the border from Ethiopia. Abdeen was lucky: on 17 May, he became the last known refugee to cross into Ethiopia from Sudan.

The former England manager may be remembered by many for his ‘I’d love it’ rant in 1996, but that should not obscure the remarkable nature of his football career

Kevin Keegan, who has died aged 75, is the only British player to win the Ballon d’Or twice, was the star of Liverpool’s first European Cup-winning team, a messianic figure at Newcastle United as a player and coach, forging a team so memorable that Fifa’s president wrote to commend him, and was the captain and then manager of the England men’s national team. And yet, as Keegan would ruefully reflect, he will principally be remembered by many for an emotional outburst that precipitated Newcastle’s historic failure in a Premier League title race, a TV interview which presaged the coming era of the modern game.

Keegan’s “I’d love it” rant of April 1996, directed at Alex Ferguson, became a meme before the modern meaning of the word and social media even existed, repeatedly played on Sky Sports and becoming indelibly marked in the minds of multiple generations, many not even born when it occurred. It frequently tops polls as the most memorable moment in Premier League history and foreshadowed an era where digital clips and personality narratives would dominate football coverage.

Move is expected to save households around £45 a year in effort to tackle cost of living

Burnham to cut VAT on electricity bills in first cost-of-living move

There is a lot of news to digest this morning. Andy Burnham made significant changes to the cabinet throughout the day and into the night in order to mark a shift in policy direction from his deeply unpopular predecessor. Helpfully, my colleagues Rowena Mason and Peter Walker have done a round up of whose in and whose out, with some insightful details on their careers and, for those who still have jobs, what challenges they will face in their briefs:

Andy Burnham promised to end rough sleeping in England in his first pledge as prime minister, allocating an additional £340m over three years as he seeks to replicate the homelessness schemes he rolled out in Greater Manchester.

New prime minister urged to introduce 2% minimum charge on households with more than £100m in wealth

A wealth tax on the UK’s super-rich households could raise £10bn a year, according to academics who urged Andy Burnham to include the measure in his plans to “make tax fairer” and pay for better public services.

The sum could be raised through a 2% minimum charge on households with more than £100m in wealth and would affect fewer than 1,000 of the richest UK households, according to the study by Gabriel Zucman, a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics, and Ben Tippet, a lecturer in economics and wealth inequality at King’s College London.

Tories, Reform, fossil fuel industry and some in his party lined up against net zero agenda as energy secretary

“Whenever the Labour party feels a bit sad,” according to one close observer of the current government, speaking some months ago, “they wheel out Ed Miliband to talk about rooftop solar.”

It might not have been literally true, but it often felt during Keir Starmer’s premiership as if energy secretary Miliband brought the sun. Unfailingly upbeat, with a simple message that was understandable to voters, he had a clear mission – to decarbonise the UK’s power sector by 2030 – that was seen to be progressing fast.

Revolutionary Guard claims attack on oil tanker and two other ships as US carries out tenth consecutive night of strikes

• Full report: Almost 100 troops injured in recent weeks, Pentagon admits, as Iran launches reprisals on US allies

In Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has built a 14-mile long barrier that separates half of the Palestinian territory that it occupies from the rest of the strip, according to analysis by the Associated Press.

The news agency said satellite imagery show an earthen barrier cutting through the central Gaza Strip in areas where Palestinian communities have been demolished by the IDF. At more than 23km, AP reports that the barrier is equivalent to more than half the length of strip, which is about 40km (25 miles) long and 11km (7 miles) wide.

Along with the barrier, the military told AP it has developed a “security zone” around the line, equipped with intelligence and technological assets. It declined to give details on the route of the barrier when asked how far it would be extended. It said the barrier aimed to prevent infiltration and protect Israeli troops and Israeli communities near Gaza.