WhatsApp ‘drops’, price hikes and queues in scramble for solar eclipse specs
A sign on Oxford Street in London telling customers that the solar eclipse glasses have sold out. Photograph: Deborah Solomon/The GuardianView image in fullscreenA sign on Oxford Street in London telling customers that the solar eclipse glasses have sold out. Outside Whitechapel tube station, there was a makeshift stall selling the glasses for £10 a pop.
- ▪A sign on Oxford Street in London telling customers that the solar eclipse glasses have sold out.
- ▪Photograph: Deborah Solomon/The GuardianView image in fullscreenA sign on Oxford Street in London telling customers that the solar eclipse glasses have sold out.
- ▪Outside Whitechapel tube station, there was a makeshift stall selling the glasses for £10 a pop.
The Guardian — World publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under world. We currently carry 3,053 of its stories.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | The Guardian — World |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/12/secret-drops-whatsapp-threads-queues-hunt-solar-eclipse-specs |
| Publication time | Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:54:15 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-12T16:01:32.452Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-12T16:01:32.452Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ccCw138NuTDG · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A sign on Oxford Street in London telling customers that the solar eclipse glasses have sold out. Photograph: Deborah Solomon/The GuardianView image in fullscreenA sign on Oxford Street in London telling customers that the solar eclipse glasses have sold out. Photograph: Deborah Solomon/The GuardianSolar eclipsesWhatsApp ‘drops’, price hikes and queues in scramble for solar eclipse specsAmid doubling prices and fraying tempers, shoppers hunt for elusive eyewear to prepare for rare eclipse of sun Europe solar eclipse – latest updatesHelena Horton, Deborah Solomon and Rachel HallWed 12 Aug 2026 11.54 EDTFirst published on Wed 12 Aug 2026 11.52 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleA secretive WhatsApp group was pinging with notifications throughout Wednesday, letting its members know where…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — World.
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