This month a predator with ties to the online extortion group known as 764 was sentenced to decades in prison. The mother of one of his victims wants parents to know the truth about this ‘harrowing’ global trend

• Sadistic online exploitation: five warning signs for parents - and how to keep young people safe

“My beautiful, kind, intelligent, trusting daughter had the misfortune of stumbling across a link in a Discord server that led her to your evil and cruel group.

“The grooming of her started immediately, and what followed was unimaginably harrowing and traumatic. You were just one of the group members who abused her, who made her do things that no young person should ever be made to do.”

The movement against datacenters is uniting Americans because they perfectly illustrate how a few individuals hold all the power to control decisions that affect our lives

Bryce Gustafson has been knocking on doors in Indiana for more than a decade. The lead organizer with Citizens Action Coalition (CAC), a consumer and environmental organization, he usually encounters a mix of reactions when he’s out canvassing; whatever issue he’s talking about, there’s always at least a few people on the other side. But at a recent festival in the rural town of Monrovia, Indiana, he was struck by an unusual spirit of unity.

He was there about a proposed datacenter, a 550-acre (222-hectare) Google project in this small town of 1,600 people. “I had 50 people I talked to,” Gustafson told me. “Nobody wanted that datacenter in their community. And at least a half a dozen people came up to me to say, ‘Hey, I voted for Trump. What the heck’s he doing, supporting these things?’”

Campaigners welcome plan to bring IPP sentences to a close but say the move is long overdue

Campaigners have hailed Andy Burnham’s pledge to bring an end to indefinite jail terms as “a day that thousands of families have spent years fighting for”.

The prime minister has said he will “end the injustice” of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences during this parliament, meaning people will no longer be trapped indefinitely under a sentence abolished more than a decade ago.

Project in Zambia shows how teaching young women to negotiate better can have a long-term impact on their prospects

Women making their way in patriarchal societies down the ages have always had to wield their meagre economic power deftly. New evidence from a fascinating research project in Zambia suggests that’s a skill that can be learned.

A team of female US academics have been gathering data for more than a decade, which shows that teaching young women to negotiate better can have a long-term impact on their prospects.

A retired software engineer and a planetary scientist disagreed about putting up flags and nationalising private companies, but were they worlds apart on legalising drugs?

• Want to meet someone from across the divide? Click here to find out how

Finley, 23, London

Occupation Planetary scientist

The cholesterol-busting drugs are more effective the earlier in life they are taken, 15-year research project indicates

Statins can lower the risk of dementia by 15%, and the earlier in life they are taken the higher the chances of avoiding the disease, a 15-year study suggests.

The number of people living with dementia globally is forecast to nearly triple to 153 million by 2050. But experts believe almost half of dementia cases could be prevented or delayed.

As the sex doll industry grows and AI changes the products available, what does it mean to engage in any kind of relationship with a woman-shaped thing?

Two weeks ago, two distressed citizens stumbled across what they assumed was the mangled corpse of a woman, stuffed into a suitcase in a small town about three hours south of Sydney. They called the local police, who in turn issued a statement that a body in a suitcase had been found. The wider public waited sombrely for Australia’s tally of dead women to tick up by one.

But instead, a day later, after forensic analysis, it was determined that the woman in question wasn’t a woman at all. The “body” was that of a sex doll, marked with fake bruises, left to rot on a lonely dirt road. In Australia, as in the UK and some other European countries, it is not illegal to own a sex doll unless it resembles a child. Given the doll’s seemingly mature presentation, police investigations were called off.