In numbers: Most-liked tweets
Four million
Number of likes (and counting) garnered by a @BarackObama anti-racism tweet in the wake of far-right violence in Charlottesville. It this week became the most-liked tweet in Twitter history. Six of the top 10 most-liked tweets are by Obama or his former official presidential account.
2.7 million
The previous record for most likes on the social media platform: pop star @ArianaGrande expressed how broken she was in the wake of the bomb after her concert at the Manchester Arena in May.
2.4 million
The Oscars selfie organised by presenter Ellen DeGeneres in 2014. It was originally intended to include only DeGeneres and Meryl Streep.
Image of the week: Take a puma
File under “eventful days at work”. Staff at a factory in Itapecerica da Serra, a small town near Brazil’s biggest city Sao Paulo, called in the local fire service this week after discovering a dark brown puma on the office floor. Yes, it looks relatively benign here, but in a short video posted by firefighters it can be seen and heard growling as ferociously as if it had just been threatened with a performance review. The Sao Paulo state fire department said the puma had come out of its habitat because of constant wildfires and has now been captured and passed to an organisation specialising in wild animal rescues. But first it flirted with an attractive middle manager, signed two retirement cards and delivered a 90-deck Powerpoint presentation.
Photograph: AFP/Getty Images/Sao Paulo state fire department
The lexicon: God View
"God View" was an Uber software program that allowed employees of everyone's least favourite ride-sharing company to monitor the real-time locations of customers who had previously booked rides on the service. In 2014, the existence of the program brought a wave of opprobrium upon Uber that most people had forgotten about, largely because the company has been hit by so many scandals since. But this week Uber made a data privacy settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, which said it "rarely monitored" how employees used the tool, despite saying that it had a "strict policy" that prevented inappropriate spying. The settlement does not cover a later Uber tool used to circumvent local taxi regulations, which goes by the 007-esque -name of Greyball.
Getting to know: James Chapman
Described by GQ magazine as the "Rogue One of Remainers", James Chapman (40) is a former chief of staff for Brexit secretary David Davis and, before that, a political editor for the Brexit-championing Daily Mail ("Newspapers are dying," he says). He's now best known as an amusingly blunt defector taking zero prisoners, spending his days tweeting about the imminent "catastrophe" of Brexit, calling for Boris Johnson to be jailed and setting up his own, anti-Brexit political party, the Democrats. But Chapman, who is married to a Greek woman whose residential status was thrown into doubt by the referendum result, has reserved most of his ire for former boss Davis, accusing him of all manner of things. "He can't even make plain ham sandwiches," he tweeted.
The list: Trump distancers
President Donald Trump's now disbanded manufacturing council had already lost Tesla founder Elon Musk over the US withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. But in the wake of his failure to condemn white-supremacist protests in Charlottesville, there was a full-on exodus, starting with this lot.
1. Ken Frazier: the Merck chief executive was the first to resign this week, describing it "as a matter of personal conscience".
2. Brian Krzanich: the Intel boss left to "call attention to the serious harm our divided political climate is causing to critical issues".
3. Kevin Plank: the chief executive of sportswear brand Under Armour also made a fast getaway, citing a desire to promote "unity, diversity and inclusion".
4. Richard Trumka and Thea Lee: two officials from trade union federation AFL-CIO quit saying the council was useless and Trump's bigotry-tolerating remarks about Charlottesville the "last straw".
5. Scott Paul: the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing said he was stepping away because "it's the right thing for me to do". Indeed.
