Unions, thinktanks and others say overhaul could provide investment Britain needs

Unions, thinktanks, environmental groups and charities have come together to call on ministers to boost the financial firepower of the national wealth fund to empower it to invest more in Britain and rebalance the country’s economy.

Lower energy bills, the revitalisation of the UK’s industrial heartlands and the provision of more high-quality jobs could all be unlocked by scaling up the NWF, according to a statement from organisations including the TUC, Greenpeace, WWF and the New Economics Foundation.

Turbocharging the retrofitting of homes and buildings.

Giving the public a bigger stake in critical infrastructure through taking part-ownership stakes in key projects.

Launching a targeted investment programme to bring new green industries to communities hit hardest by deindustrialisation.

Supporting a network of regional banks to funnel money into the small businesses that hold up local economies.

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While global billionaires and multinational companies have been lured to its shores, many islanders feel left behind and priced out, with food bank use increasing

On a late Friday afternoon on the Channel Island of Jersey, tourists and locals are flocking to St Helier’s waterfront where the town’s sprawling beach has emerged at low tide.

In one direction, they face the calm waters of St Aubin’s Bay, ringed by a seaside promenade and punctuated with a tidal island hosting the 16th century Elizabeth Castle.

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Toor’s electrifying pictures have made him a global star – and he’s even painted Zohran Mamdani. As the artist hits London’s prestigious Courtauld Gallery, he talks about Manet, mullahs and the mayor

In Salman Toor’s paintings, queer south Asian men hang out in bars, twerk at trippy gatherings and lose themselves in phone screens. Sometimes they huddle in the back of taxis or pillow-fight on beds. In one portrait, a brown man stares apprehensively while facing customs officials. For the 43-year-old Pakistani American artist, it’s crucial that these figures take centre stage, after years of being demonised and erased.

“It excites me that the cuteness and sexiness of brown protagonists can become familiar,” says Toor when we meet at his sun-drenched Brooklyn studio, a few weeks before his first solo show in Europe. “Their stories are not a gay side story in a family saga. It’s the main story. And everyone else is in the background.”

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Modern lifestyles seem to be exacerbating the problem of bromhidrosis – an underresearched condition that is widely misunderstood and devastating for sufferers

If Hayat goes out to eat, she’ll choose a table far away from other diners, ideally by a door or open window. She likewise tries to avoid people at the cinema or on planes, even if it means paying extra – whatever it takes to avoid being too close to others.

She chalks it up to a persistent past insecurity. “I still have that paranoia … It’s just in my head, because of everything I went through.”

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While world leaders prepare for annual UN gathering, shifts in the global order continue in the face of a disruptive American president

In the event of a midterms election battering, it is possible that a deflated Donald Trump, constrained by a Democrat-controlled Congress, will gradually have to face up to the indignity of irrelevance.

While continuing to sign off Truth Social posts with his usual, “Thank you for your attention to this matter”, no one will actually be paying much attention. His meandering press conferences will no longer be carried live by TV networks. The Republican party will move on to the question of his successor. Trump could announce he had changed the name of the Champs-Élysées to Sunset Boulevard and even Google Maps will stifle a yawn. He would become that most pitied of political animals, the lame duck.

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Intensified by this year’s super El Niño, fires in Borneo and Sumatra are emitting toxic air for swathes of the population in Indonesia and its neighbours

For months, parts of Indonesia’s Borneo and Sumatra islands have been ablaze. The fires are sometimes lit illegally as a cheap way to clear land for plantations of oil palm, of which Indonesia is the world’s largest producer.

So prevalent is the technique that it even has a special term: slash and burn.

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Chinese swimmer Yu Zidi wins the first major title of her young career – but says her performance was ‘only so-so’

The 13-year-old Chinese swimmer Yu Zidi set an Asian Games record as she scorched to gold on Sunday’s first full day of competition.

The schoolgirl, who turns 14 next month, took the women’s 200m butterfly crown in a Games-record 2min 05.08sec.

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Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Google has admitted that its AI agents escaped a sandbox and mounted an attack – but only because testers mistakenly gave its bots internet access. The Big G didn’t disclose the May incident, but The Wall Street Journal learned of the situation, which happened after Google hired Israeli firm Irregular to test its bots’ prowess in a capture-the-flag test. The goal of the exercise was to acquire information from a fictional company without leaving a sandbox. Irregular, which set up the test, made two mistakes. One was to allow internet access from the sandbox. The other was to use the name of an actual company. When Google’s AI made it onto the open internet, it went looking for the actual company – three of them, in all. According to the Journal, Google’s bots found passwords for two targets on the public internet. The software guessed the third password. In a statement sent to The Register, Google said, “In a standard evaluation, the model found public information online and guessed credentials to access websites it thought were part of the test.” According to Google, its models stopped work before using the credentials. “We ensured the three entities were made aware, and we worked with our training partner on the changes they’ve now made to their testing processes,” a Google spokesperson told The Register. “These events highlight the importance of training powerful AI models to act responsibly.” Clearly there’s lots of blame to go around on this one. Irregular clearly erred in allowing internet access from a sandbox. The two companies that left their creds discoverable online should also know better. Whoever used a guessable password may also have been careless. Google’s culpability is another matter because these incidents took place in May – around two months before OpenAI admitted its agents were the source of the July attack on Hugging Face. The search advertising giant therefore sat on the news of its own agents’ activity for around two months and seems to have been in no hurry to disclose the incident until the WSJ learned of the incident. We understand the company decided on that stance because its agents stopped when they perceived danger – unlike OpenAI’s software – and because the incident was clearly the result of several errors. Whether it was right to keep the incident secret in the current climate of growing distrust in AI is another matter. One person who sees no risk of AI causing calamity is US president Donald Trump, who has shrugged off warnings as a “hoax” and said work on AI must not slow due to its economic and strategic significance. Over the weekend, that stance appears to have shifted a little, as Trump used his personal social network to announce he is “forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force” – a reference to the new branch of the US military the president created in his first term. “To that end, I will be announcing, in the near future, the AI ‘Czar,’” Trump added. No detail on either proposal was available at the time of writing, nor did the president explain why a new branch of the military or Czar are needed. Indeed, the same post he used to announce the new agency also states “We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows! However, we will also be looking for BAD, and we can do that, very easily, with our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System.” ®

Al sinds 1896 krijgen leerlingen op min of meer dezelfde manier grammaticaonderwijs. En al sinds 1896 leren ze daar weinig van.

gnsk has added a photo to the pool:

Tom's Hardware reports:


Four plaintiffs subscribed to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that the developers of these AI models violated antitrust laws when they agreed to slow AI development. According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit argues that this agreement would "reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions" and that this coordination started in July 2026 after the leading AI labs signed a statement admitting there is "intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow" development.

The plaintiffs recognize the need for AI development to slow for the sake of safety, but they say that Anthropic founder Dario Amodei's cooperation proposal is a "shortcut" that "substitutes collective restraint for individual accountability." Attorney Nick Rowley, the lead counsel for the plaintiffs, says, "AI will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all if we allow AI safety and protocol ... to be controlled by private self-serving agreements between the world's most powerful 'for profit' technology companies."


"Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond..."
reports the Associated Press:


The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei's proposals in agreement. But the lawsuit also alleges that the coordination began to take shape months earlier. It points to a statement from July 2026 that high-ranking employees from several of the leading AI labs signed that acknowledged the "intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow" development. That statement called on the government to support a global effort to slow automated AI development.
Sam Altman even specificially said "we do not believe we need to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence," notes Tom's Hardware.

However, the Trump administration shot down this idea... Chinese state media also criticized this announcement, saying that the call to put the brakes on AI development is nothing but a response to Chinese competition, especially as Amodei's essay explicitly mentioned the desire to slow China's progress and widen the U.S.'s gap over Beijing

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There is a unit inside the Justice Department whose only job is to prosecute corrupt public officials. It is called the Public Integrity Section. In January 2025 it had about thirty-six lawyers, and today it has two. When people ask why there are no indictments, no convictions and no special counsel, that is the answer. The people who would bring those cases were removed in the first year of the term. The referees left the field, and the game kept going.

Not exactly sure what the story is with The Leah Files on substack, though I would guess that this is the work of a team with resources, presented as the work of one person which raises questions like who's paying for this and why. Nevertheless I am sharing it because there's interesting information here. This section is, imo, the most important part of the summary, and I've saved it for arguing with strangers online: 3. Disabling the detectors Score at month twenty: 8.0 of 10 (8 on proven evidence). Weight: 15 points. This part of the record has the strongest evidence and the least public attention, and it is the part that determines the score. On January 24, 2025, seventeen inspectors general were dismissed in a single night without the thirty days' notice the statute requires. On September 24, 2025, Judge Ana Reyes held the dismissals unlawful, describing the violation as obvious, and declined to order any remedy, on the reasoning that the president could dismiss them again with proper notice. In February 2025 the director of the Office of Government Ethics, confirmed two months earlier to a five-year term, was removed, and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs was installed as acting head of both that office and the Office of Special Counsel, the sole enforcer of the Hatch Act. The Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, which brings pardon-for-pay and foreign bribery cases, was reduced from about thirty-six attorneys to two, and its open cases fell from roughly 190 to about twenty. The FBI's internal audit office and its public corruption squad were dissolved. Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was paused by executive order. The beneficial-ownership registry that would have identified the owners of anonymous shell companies was narrowed so that 99 percent of covered entities no longer report, and this August the database itself was ordered deleted. The Government Accountability Office found six violations of the Impoundment Control Act in 2025, and in September of that year the budget office cut off funding to the council of inspectors general, taking fifteen oversight websites and their whistleblower hotlines offline. This is why the bribery criterion is scored five on proven evidence when the reported pattern would support an eight. The people whose job it is to prove bribery have been removed. When the detectors are off, the absence of convictions carries almost no information, and the question "where are the indictments" describes the mechanism rather than refuting it. This is the Abacha model of governance. The most important figure in this article is not a dollar amount. It is the reduction of the Public Integrity Section from thirty-six lawyers to two.