Teenage Instagram users will get new privacy settings, its parent company Meta has announced in a major new update.

It is an attempt by Meta, which also owns WhatsApp and Facebook, to reduce the amount of harmful content seen online by young people.

Instagram allows 13-year-olds and above to sign up but after the privacy changes, all designated accounts will be turned into teen accounts automatically, which will be private by default.

Those accounts can only be messaged and tagged by accounts they follow or are already connected to, and sensitive content settings will be the most restrictive available.

Offensive words and phrases will be filtered out of comments and direct message requests, and the teenagers will get notifications telling them to leave the app after 60 minutes each day.

Sleep mode will also be turned on between 10pm and 7am, which will mute notifications overnight and send auto-replies to DMs.

Users under 16 years of age will only be able to change the default settings with a parent’s permission.

But 16 and 17-year-olds will be able to turn off the settings without parental permission.

Parents will also get a suite of settings to monitor who their children are engaging with and limit their use of the app.

Meta said it will place the identified users into teen accounts within 60 days in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, and in the European Union later this year.

The rest of the world will see the accounts rolled out from January.

Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, called the changes “a step in the right direction” but said platforms will have to do “far more to protect their users, especially children” when the Online Safety Act starts coming into force early next year.

“We won’t hesitate to take action, using the full extent of our enforcement powers, against any companies that come up short,” said Richard Wronka, online safety supervision director at Ofcom.

Meta has faced multiple lawsuits over how young people are treated by its apps, with some claiming the technology is intentionally addictive and harmful.

Others have called on Meta to address how its algorithm works, including Ian Russell, the father of teenager Molly Russell, who died after viewing posts related to suicide, depression and anxiety online.

“Just as Molly was overwhelmed by the volume of the dangerous content that bombarded her, we’ve found evidence of algorithms pushing out harmful content to literally millions of young people,” said Mr Russell last year, who is chair of trustees at the Molly Rose Foundation.

Meta said the new restrictions on accounts are “designed to better support parents, and give them peace of mind that their teens are safe with the right protections in place”.

It also acknowledged that teenagers may try to lie about their age to circumvent restrictions, and said that it is “building technology to proactively find accounts belonging to teens, even if the account lists an adult birthday”.

That technology will begin testing in the US early next year.

David Lammy chose to make his first major policy speech as foreign secretary in the lush surroundings of a glasshouse at Kew Gardens.

He recalled how his father brought him to Kew as a schoolboy to experience the rainforest environment of his native Guyana.

The sort of opening you might expect to hear from a politician – especially one promising to make climate change and biodiversity “central to all the foreign office does.”

There’s evidence Mr Lammy’s ambition for a new kind of foreign policy is genuine, however.

Take the education centre he and his wife founded in Guyana four years ago for local students to learn about the country’s last remaining rainforest and how to conserve it.

But delivering on his pledge would test even the greenest of foreign secretaries.

Mr Lammy announced three new initiatives: A clean power alliance that would allow poorer countries to “leapfrog” polluting fossil fuel energy in favour of renewables with the help of richer ones; an overhaul of international finance to help poorer countries reduce their carbon footprints and adapt to the climate impacts they didn’t create; and international leadership on protecting biodiversity.

All of these would be delivered by exploiting the UK’s diplomatic “heft,” he said.

Essential goals if we’re to enjoy a habitable planet – but all very similar to pledges we’ve heard before.

The main challenge is how to divert flows of finance from fossil fuel projects or unsustainable agriculture that drives deforestation to cleaner, more sustainable ones.

And while investment globally is shifting rapidly into renewable energy – which is often less expensive to build – carbon emissions are at all-time highs (though possibly peaking).

The reality is that fossil fuels and conventional agriculture are where the biggest profits are still to be made.

You only need to follow the money, as a recent report by NGO Action Aid did, to see that.

It concluded since the Paris Agreement in 2016, $3.2trn (£2.4trn) of investment – much of it from banks in the UK – has flowed into fossil fuel projects and $370bn (£281bn) into industrial agriculture.

I asked Mr Lammy how he could compete with that, given the UK had just £11.6bn to spend on climate finance in developing countries between 2019 and 2026.

The reply suggested that even that amount of money was no longer guaranteed.

Mr Lammy said: “Meeting the £11.6bn remains our ambition.” But, as we’ve heard repeated by ministers throughout Westminster in recent weeks, he added that “difficult choices” lie ahead for Chancellor Rachel Reeves in her autumn spending review.

However, if, in the absence of much money to play with, Mr Lammy can exploit the UK diplomatic machine to attract partner governments in a climate alliance, it might not be a futile exercise.

There is much governments can do to remove subsidies, favourable tax regimes and other incentives, to make environmentally harmful investments more difficult – and to encourage the kind needed to stabilise the climate and protect biodiversity.

But that requires genuine partnerships that typically are built not just with trust, but cash on the table.

Making money was the driving force of the company behind the doomed Titan submersible and it involved “very little in the way of science”, OceanGate’s former operations director has said.

The vessel imploded on its way to the wreckage of the Titanic in June last year, killing all five people on board.

David Lochridge, who fulfilled the role for two years before being sacked in January 2018, has told a commission into the disaster, that “the whole idea behind the company was to make money”.

He backed up what other ex-employees had already said about the firm’s head, Stockton Rush, that he was volatile and difficult to work with.

Mr Rush was among those who died in the tragedy, along with British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood and Frenchman Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

In a report he wrote after inspecting the first Titan hull, Mr Lochridge said he was “appalled” by the O-ring – a type of seal – and described the hull as “porous paper. It was disgusting”.

But the second Titan hull, the one used in the fateful voyage, was little better, he said, explaining that “they reused these domes. They reused these ceiling faces. Everything was reused. It’s all cost.”

Titan, he said, was “an abomination of a submersible”.

Mr Lochridge alleged the company’s lawyers wrote a “threatening” letter after he raised a complaint with a US safety agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

He told the hearing he had “no confidence whatsoever” in the way the Titan was being built in 2017 and put shortcomings down to “cost-cutting”, “bad engineering decisions” and “the desire to get to the Titanic as quickly as they could to start making a profit”.

“There was a big push to get this done, and a lot of steps along the way were missed,” he added.

CEO Stockton Rush had “no experience building submersibles”, and [former engineering director] Tony Nissen was hiring “children that were coming in straight out of university. Some hadn’t even been to university yet”.

He continued: “There was no experience across the board within that organisation. It was nothing. It was all smoke and mirrors, all the social media that you see about all these past expeditions, they always had issues with their expeditions.”

The submersible made its final dive on 18 June 2023, losing contact with its support ship around two hours later.

Rescuers rushed ships, planes, and other equipment to an area around 435 miles (700km) south of St John’s, Newfoundland.

The search for the Titan attracted global attention and the wreckage was eventually found on the ocean floor around 300m from the Titanic wreck, according to officials.

One-year-old twin girls, conjoined at the head, have been successfully separated during a 14 hour operation led by a leading British surgeon.

Professor Noor ul Owase Jeelani from Great Ormond Street Hospital used leading mixed reality technology to complete the complex procedure on Minal and Mirha in Turkey.

Both are recovering in hospital and are expected to make full recoveries and lead normal lives when they return home to Pakistan next month.

The operation at the Ankara Bilkent City Hospital on 19 July, which included a local team of medics, required two surgical stages and was completed over three months, with the final surgery taking 14 hours.

The girls, who were born in Pakistan, are called craniopagus twins because they are joined at the head.

They shared vital blood vessels and brain tissue and separation of the pair required extremely intricate surgery.

Mixed reality (MR) combines 3D images with the physical world and is used to increase precision during complex operations. It enhances a surgeon’s view of a patient by mixing digital content – like 3D scans – while remaining in the real world.

A high definition 3D model was created of the twins to help train medics in Ankara on what to expect in the operating theatre, as well as allowing the UK-based team to prepare and rehearse the surgery.

Professor Jeelani said: “The technology developed to undertake this work makes a lot of the more routine surgeries we do, safer, less invasive and more effective.

“To be able to give these girls and their family a new future where they can live independently and enjoy their childhood is a special privilege,” he said.

He has led several surgeries involving conjoined twins including three-year-old boys in Brazil in 2022, one-year-old twin girls in Israel in 2021, and in 2019 twin two-year-old girls from Pakistan.

The work was supported by Gemini Untwined, a charity founded by Mr Jaleeni to raise funds for siblings born joined at the head.

According to Gemini figures, one in 60,000 births results in conjoined twins, and only 5% of these are craniopagus children.

The life expectancy of twins who are not separated is very low. About 40% of twins fused at the head are stillborn or die during labour.

One in five GPs is using generative AI tools to help them do their job, despite the risks that come with it, and a lack of training.

GPs are using commercially available tools like ChatGPT to write documentation and even suggest alternative diagnoses for patients, a new study in the British Medical Journal shows.

It’s the largest study of its kind and shows for the first time the extent of AI use in the UK’s GP surgeries.

The study’s author, Dr Charlotte Blease, associate professor at Sweden’s Uppsala University, called the extent of AI use by doctors “surprising” because “doctors haven’t received formal training on these tools and they’re still very much a regulatory black hole”.

Tools like ChatGPT have known issues that could be harmful for patients, including their tendency to “hallucinate”, or make things up.

“Perhaps the biggest risk is with patient privacy,” said Dr Blease. “Our doctors may unintentionally be gifting patients’ highly sensitive information to these tech companies.”

“They may [also] embed biases within care so some patients may be at risk of unfair clinical judgements.

“We don’t know if [AI’s biases] are worse than what arises in ordinary human health care, but there certainly is a risk of bias.”

The team surveyed over 1,000 doctors and of the one in five who said they do use generative AI in their work, 28% said they use it to suggest different diagnoses for their patients.

Another 29% said they use AI to generate documentation after patient appointments.

The majority of NHS staff support the use of AI to help with patient care, with 81% also in favour of its use for administrative tasks, a study by the Health Foundation found in July.

The NHS doesn’t offer much guidance for doctors around how they should use AI, despite healthcare professionals wanting to use it more.

Instead, it asks them to use their “professional judgement” when working with the technology.

Dr Blease, who is also the author of a book on how AI can be used in healthcare, said doctors are “crying out for some concrete advice” on how to use the technology.

“There does need to be targeted training and advice being offered to doctors,” she said.

A partial lunar eclipse of a supermoon was visible across the UK and other parts of the world in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

A supermoon occurs when a full moon is at its closest point to Earth during its orbit, with the Met Office saying this makes it appear 30% brighter and 14% bigger in the sky.

The partial lunar eclipse – when the Earth’s shadow covers part of the moon – took place between 1.41am and 5.47am UK time.

Ahead of the event, Becky Mitchell, Met Office meteorologist, said around 4% of the moon would be covered during the lunar eclipse.

Such an event will not occur again until 2026. But when it does, it will be much more dramatic, with 96% of the moon set to be in shadow.

A photograph captured from Wokingham in Berkshire showed a shadow across part of the supermoon at around 3.45am – the time the partial lunar eclipse peaked.

The partial lunar eclipse was visible across the world, with the spectacle seen in the US, South America, Europe and Africa, as well as small parts of Asia and the Middle East.

The supermoon, one of four that will have taken place by the end of this year, was a harvest moon – named so because it is the closest one to the autumn equinox and around the time of the traditional autumn harvest.

It will be visible for the next few nights. But it was at its fullest on Tuesday.

The first supermoon of this year was on 19 August, and the remaining two are on 17 October and 15 November.