What happened
Parliament has passed legislation that will prohibit anyone born on or after 1 January 2009 from ever legally purchasing cigarettes, marking a major shift in UK tobacco policy. The bill has cleared both houses and now awaits royal assent, after which it will come into force. The law is designed to phase out smoking over time by ensuring that younger generations never gain legal access to cigarettes.

Who said what
Health Under-Secretary Gillian Merron described the measure as transformative, telling peers: “It is a landmark bill; it will create a smoke-free generation.” But Conservative peer Michael Morris warned that the policy would concern businesses, saying it “does upset a great many people in that industry”.

What next?
From a public health perspective, “the logic is well established”, said Professor Lisa McNally on The Conversation. Most smokers begin when they are young and “preventing uptake has long been the most effective way to reduce smoking rates”. As the ban gets underway, “the world will be watching”, added McNally, noting that “it won’t be easy”.

What happened
A teenage boy has pleaded guilty to arson after the attack on the Kenton United Synagogue in Harrow, northwest London, on Saturday. The 17-year-old British national from Brent, who can’t be named for legal reasons, admitted to arson not endangering life at Westminster Magistrates’ Court yesterday.

Who said what
The district judge released the minor on bail with conditions, including to live and sleep at his home address and not enter a synagogue.

Two other suspects remain “outstanding” in the investigation, the court heard. Footage was posted online of someone in dark clothes setting fire to a bottle of liquid and throwing it through the window, causing minor damage but no injuries.

The attack was “the latest in a string” of incidents targeting Jewish sites in London, said the BBC. An alleged Iran-backed group calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia has claimed responsibility for most of the attacks.

What next?
The boy is due to appear at Willesden Youth Court on 4 June. A 19-year-old man was also arrested on suspicion of arson reckless as to whether life was endangered, and has been bailed pending further inquiries.

The Internet Archive has been responsible for saving and providing access to trillions of websites over the past 30 years. But AI is putting a damper on its work as large language models are using the data without permission. As a result, many companies are no longer allowing their content to be archived, which could lead to a substantial loss of historical records in the future.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit organisation that is building a “digital library of internet sites and other cultural artifacts”, according to its website. It uses web crawlers to capture snapshots of sites. These are then made available through the public-facing tool the Wayback Machine, which operates like a library. However, amid the rise of AI, the Internet Archive’s “commitment to free information access has turned its digital library into a potential liability for some news publishers”, according to an analysis by Nieman Lab.

Currently, “241 news sites from nine countries explicitly disallow at least one out of the four Internet Archive crawling bots”, including The New York Times and Reddit, said Nieman Lab. The Guardian has also restricted the Internet Archive; the publication does not block the crawlers, but it “excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles”, said tech site Wired.

There is “no widely available public tool comparable to the Wayback Machine”, added Wired. If it “continues to lose access to major news sources, its preservation efforts could erode to the point where early digital records of history become much harder to access or are even lost altogether”.