Hanna Kozlowska

Paweł Adamowicz, the popular mayor of the Polish city of Gdańsk, died earlier today (Jan. 14) from injuries sustained in a stabbing the previous night. A man attacked Adamowicz while the mayor was on stage for the finale of the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity (Wielka Orkiestra Świątecznej Pomocy), a massive annual fundraising drive for equipment for children’s hospitals. The investigation is still underway and the motive is not yet clear, but the stabbing has political overtones.

The Polish intelligence agency this week arrested an executive from the Chinese technology company Huawei, along with a former officer of said agency, on suspicions of espionage for China, Polish media report. The men are Chinese and Polish, respectively.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his annual challenge: hosting public talks about the future of technology. Zuckerberg, who doesn’t like public appearances, will every few weeks meet with leaders, experts and Facebook’s community members to talk about “the opportunities, the challenges, the hopes, and the anxieties” related to the topic, he said in a Facebook post on Jan. 8.

Amazon is getting into the free samples game to get its users to buy even more products.

The world’s largest gadget conference, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), is about to begin in Las Vegas. Modifying Sin City’s famous slogan, Apple took a dig at its competitors, declaring “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone” on a gigantic ad plastered on a side of a hotel overlooking the conference.

This was supposed to be the year Mark Zuckerberg would really start fixing Facebook. It was the CEO’s annual self-improvement project, and, looking at Facebook’s year, it’s probably safe to say that few have ever failed so badly at fulfilling a New Year’s resolution. Scandal has chased scandal, leading to unprecedented scrutiny by governments and the media, backlash from users, and a falling stock price.

Facebook knows everything about you, and a new New York Times investigation shows it liked to share that data with its partners, from other Silicon Valley giants to foreign companies that work with autocratic governments.

About 80% of Americans choose fake Christmas trees over real ones, according to industry data. But among millennials, the generation that prefers experiences over things, the plastic holiday staple has one big disadvantage over its natural competitor. Its journey from a factory in China to the big box supermarket is less Instagrammable than cutting down your own Douglas fir at a local tree farm that might also provide a petting zoo, donuts, and a Christmas-colored sleigh just for your photo-op.

Two reports produced by independent researchers for the US Senate Intelligence Committee, released today (Dec. 17), show that Instagram was a much more significant tool in the hands of Russian operatives trying to influence US politics than previously thought—and was at times potentially more powerful than Facebook.

Up to 6.8 million people may have been affected by the latest bug discovered on Facebook. This time, the leak gave third-party apps access to users’ photos, Facebook said in a blog post.

In the last two years, there’s been a cascade of lawsuits in the US against public officials who have blocked people on social media and deleted critical comments. The list starts with the highest one in the country, president Donald Trump, and goes all the way down to a county board chair.

While social media might generally be seen as a younger person’s game, with Congressional newcomers using Instagram to shed a new light on the daily lives of lawmakers, the most prolific Instagram user in the US Senate is Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, who runs his own account, according to his staff.

If anyone is going to remind you about tax season, it might as well be a pink flamingo.

A UK parliamentary committee released a cache of documents today (Dec. 5) that reveal that Facebook had considered charging developers for user data. They also show that the when considering giving access to data to partners, it favored some companies, while shutting off the access for competitors.

Bill Gates’ book lists are an influential force in publishing, capable of giving a title a sales bump. On Tuesday (Dec. 4), the Microsoft founder shared his favorite books of 2018, which he says is “pretty eclectic” and has “something for everyone.”

Tumblr, a social media platform with historically more lax content moderation than its peers, is banning porn and adult content on its site, starting Dec. 17.

It took only two weeks for Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming to top the 2018 book charts. Its publisher, Penguin Random House, announced on Nov. 30 that the book sold more than 2 million copies across the US and Canada in the 15 days since its launch on Nov. 13. The number includes all formats, including e-book and audiobook.

Ariana Grande’s music video for her song “Thank U, Next” was so hyped that 450,000 people were watching the countdown to the launch on Friday, Nov. 30. The video for the song—a break-up track that is a tribute to self-love—is an homage to teenage romantic comedies such as Mean Girls and Bring it On and choc-full of sentimental cameos (… plus Kris Jenner).

Former US president George H.W. Bush died on Friday night (Nov. 30), aged 94. Throughout his long life, he was a prolific letter writer, leaving behind a veritable library of handwritten pages. They provide a glimpse into the kind of man—and president—he was.

On her kitchen wall in Warsaw, Poland, my grandmother has an old notebook pinned up alongside photos of her grandchildren and our childhood drawings. It’s a calendar, densely filled out in her round cursive with different colored pens.

It’s becoming an all-too-common commute horror story in big cities: an unknown man on the train uses the iPhone’s AirDrop function to send a woman an unsolicited photo of his penis.

Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg requested that the company look into billionaire philanthropist George Soros after he excoriated the tech giant during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, new reports from The New York Times and Buzzfeed show.

A small, publicly owned regional railway operator in Poland will offer onboard confessionals during the Christmas holidays, Polish media report.

Shortly before his last day as a Facebook employee, Mark Luckie, a manager focused on diversity in its partnerships, sent out a company-wide memo about Facebook’s “black people problem.”