The vulnerability of the civilian energy infrastructure was exposed this week when a drone strike on the United Arab Emirates cut off power to a nuclear reactor. It’s the first time a fully operating nuclear power plant has had to rely on back-up generators because of a military attack, but reactors in Ukraine and Iran have also been threatened by recent conflicts.

Why attack nuclear sites?
A  nuclear power plant might be targeted to cripple an enemy’s power grid, or to force a surrender through the psychological terror of threatening a radiological disaster. An attack on such facilities could also be used to delay a nation’s ability to enrich nuclear material. Or armies might attack, or occupy, a nuclear plant to seize control of a strategic geographic corridor or to prevent defending forces from using the area.

What does international law say?
Under the Geneva Conventions, civilian structures, including nuclear power plants, “are protected against attack”, but the treaties also state that they can be hit “for such time as they are military objectives”. This is a “loophole” that “aggressor states” have “interpreted widely”, said The Guardian’s defence editor Dan Sabbagh.

Attacking a nuclear power plant also breaks legal resolutions passed by the UN Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors.

What would happen if such a site were hit?
An attack on a nuclear site would not necessarily lead to a mushroom cloud or an immediate release of radiation, because modern plants are built with multiple safety systems that can shut down reactors and contain damage. But if the reactor began to degrade, radioactive material could be released and could remain in the environment for years or even decades. And it could potentially spread across borders and enter water systems or settle into soil.

An attack on a nuclear plant would also be a hugely symbolic moment. Although conventional power plants have been “repeatedly bombed” by Russia during the Ukraine war, said Sabbagh, Kyiv’s three functioning nuclear plants have “remained relatively unscathed” because Moscow regarded a direct attack on them to be “taboo”.

Google is so synonymous with online search that its name has become a verb in its own right. But now, as the company seeks to “revamp its decades-old business model to fit the era of artificial intelligence”, said CNN, “Google wants to help you google less”.

‘New era’ for search
Rather than simply typing keywords or short phrases, users of Google’s new Gemini 3.5 Flash model can ask conversational questions, and even interact with agentic AI through live video. Instead of generating only the familiar list of blue links, Google Search will give a customised AI-written summary of the topic being researched. Users can also open a conversational interface by clicking on AI Mode on the main search page, allowing them to ask follow-up questions more naturally.

This marks a “new era for AI search”, according to a Google blog post. The update will allow users to deploy AI agents “just by asking a question”. The company is also introducing a new intelligent, AI-powered search box described as Google’s “biggest upgrade in over 25 years”. Crucially, the shift moves away from the need to click through to web pages for information. Increasingly, Google will function more like an assistant than a traditional index.

‘Vital information literacy skills’
For many people, Google’s search box is the “lobby of the internet”, said Time magazine, so this “radical transformation” signals a major shift in how people use the web. It could “disrupt many industries” that rely on search traffic to attract customers, with news publishers and small businesses particularly vulnerable. Referrals from Google to publishers have “already been suffering from declining referrals” because of AI Overviews, said TechCrunch – “now things will likely get worse”.

Using AI-based searching could also erode important skills, said Riley MacLeod on internet news site Aftermath. Google search is “one of the first and primary places that people experiment with and grow their information-searching skills”. “Spoon-feeding” users AI summaries and “obscuring or bypassing the source of the information” risks depriving people of the opportunity to build the “vital information literacy skills” that they “need more than ever in an AI-obsessed world”.

A performer in a coral reef-inspired costume poses at a show in Sydney organised by the Australian Marine Conservation Society as part of a campaign to end wild coral harvesting. Up to 190 tonnes of coral is taken from the Great Barrier Reef each year. 

David Gray / AFP / Getty Images

Europe’s biggest exhibition of James McNeill Whistler has opened at Tate Britain and it’s a “luscious, seductive blockbuster”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Dedicated to the boundary-pushing American artist who “delighted and scandalised Victorian Britain”, the show features an array of his works, from early sketches to late self-portraits.

At the heart of the show is Whistler’s famous painting of his mother, Anna, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This “odd, ungainly, unforgettable” portrait (pictured above) depicts his parent like a “carving from a medieval tomb” with a “rigid, lightless and cold” face.

That might be the “headline act”, said Laura Freeman in The Times, but a “tiny sketch” of Whistler’s niece steals the show. His drawings and etchings are dazzling evidence of “how precise he could be when he wasn’t having one of his attacks of the vapours”.

This “alluring” retrospective is an “unapologetic display of pure peacockery”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. “Beauty” is now treated like a “dirty word” in some parts of the art world, but the Tate chooses to put Whistler’s “relentless pursuit of beauty” front and centre. “Kudos to curator Carol Jacobi for insisting on its importance.”

Admittedly, there are “too many” reproductions of works that couldn’t travel, and a “glut of minor pieces towards the end” that fail to add much to the show. But the exhibition as a whole “elucidates the alchemical nature of his art”, and there’s something “beguiling” and “daring” about his “wraith-like experiments”, verging on abstraction. “It doesn’t take long to succumb to his spell.”

Young people are not lazy, distracted or entitled – we must not give up on them
Alan Milburn in The Mirror
“Too many young people” who want “to earn their own money” say job-hunting is “like shouting into a void”, writes former Labour cabinet minister Alan Milburn. “That should shame us.” They’re “bursting with potential” yet we’re letting their talent “go to waste”. The pandemic “shut them away in their formative years”, and now they have “no route into work, confidence and independence”. We must change our education and welfare systems to give our youth “a chance to build a life”.

Aboriginal violence is Australia’s blindspot
Julie Szego on UnHerd
The “shocking” murder of five-year-old Aboriginal girl Kumanjayi Little Baby has highlighted Australia’s “political stalemate” around Indigenous policy, writes Julie Szego. “It’s apparently the hardest thing in the world to speak plainly about violence in Aboriginal communities” even as “sickening daily violence” is visited on their women and children. The “energy and goodwill needed to fix systemic problems” is sapped by “collective guilt”. What Kumanjayi Little Baby “needed, what she lacked, was protection”.

Starmer letting Putin off the hook is a betrayal of Britain
Ian Dunt in The i Paper
“Battlefield losses” in Ukraine “are triggering economic calamity” in Russia, writes Ian Dunt. “But instead of increasing the pain on Vladimir Putin”, our government has “quietly announced” that planned new sanctions on Russian oil will be phased in, rather than imposed at once. The US has already introduced and extended a waiver on Russian oil sanctions but “Britain was supposed to be different”, as “the single most consistent supporter of Ukraine on the planet”. We are “betraying our values”.