Tag: WorldNews

'Utterly wicked' nursery worker who abused children in his care jailed for 18 years  BBCLondon nursery worker who sexually abused children jailed for 18 years  The Guardian

F1 2026 pre-season testing in Bahrain featuring Lando Norris, George Russell, Charles Leclerc and Isack Hadjar  BBCF1 2026 cars in pictures at Bahrain testing  BBC

AI fakes and disinformation spread in first Bangladesh election since student protests  BBC‘Like Eid’: Bangladeshis hail landmark election, many vote after 17 years  

Jim Ratcliffe sorry his ‘choice of language offended some people’ after saying UK colonised by immigrants – politics live  The GuardianRatcliffe says sorry his language 'offended some people' after criticism of immigration comments  BBC

Keir Starmer latest: Reeves hits back at Streeting as Labour infighting escalates  The TelegraphKnives out for Wes Streeting amid cabinet fury over failed coup  The Times

'Vast majority' of parents should be told if children question their gender, schools told  BBCView Full coverage on Google News

Minneapolis immigration enforcement operation to 'conclude', officials say  BBCTom Homan says that surge of immigration enforcement in Minnesota is ending - US politics live  The Guardian

Greg James: Radio 1 Breakfast DJ set for Comic Relief challenge  BBC'A ludicrous challenge' – BBC Radio 1 presenter to ride 1,000km on a tandem for charity  Cycling Weekly

From Brontë to Ballard, Orwell to Okri: the best songs inspired by literature – ranked!  The Guardian

Footballer Thomas Partey facing two additional rape charges  BBCThomas Partey charged with further counts of rape  The TelegraphThomas Partey

BBC Verify has been examining some of the Manchester United owner's claims.

Two US citizens were killed in Minneapolis during the crackdown dubbed "Operation Metro Surge".

Lawmakers accused Bondi's justice department of making improper redactions to Epstein files as she fired back.

The Manchester United co-owner previously said the UK had been "colonised" by immigrants.

The FA is celebrating England head coach Thomas Tuchel's new deal as a coup - but the timing revives memories of its Fabio Capello blunder, says chief football writer Phil McNulty.

The court hears that the dogs who killed Ian Price in Staffordshire had previously attacked other people and pets.

School leaders welcome the "greater clarity" on how to handle the polarising issue for parents and pupils.

Team GB's men's curlers reinforce their credentials as Winter Olympic gold medal favourites with a statement 6-3 win over Sweden.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy orders a review of the deal on public interest and competition grounds.

The culture secretary tells The Guardian newspaper that recent political turbulence is "unforgivable".

WP Engine's third amended complaint against Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg alleges that Mullenweg had plans to impose royalty fees on 10 hosting companies beyond WP Engine for their use of the WordPress trademark. The amended filing, based on previously sealed information uncovered during discovery, also claims Mullenweg emailed a Stripe executive to pressure the payment processor into canceling WP Engine's contract after WP Engine sued Automattic in October 2024. Newfold, the parent company of Bluehost and HostGator, is already paying Automattic for trademark use, according to the complaint, and Automattic is in conversations with other hosts. The filing challenges the 8% royalty rate as arbitrary, citing Mullenweg's comments at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 where he said the figure was based on what WP Engine "could afford to pay." Internal Automattic correspondence cited in the complaint includes Mullenweg describing his approach to WP Engine as "nuclear war" and w

Anthropic has raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round that values the Claude maker at $380 billion as the company prepares for an initial public offering that could come as early as this year. Investors in the new round include Singapore sovereign fund GIC, Coatue, D.E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ, MGX, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Greenoaks and Temasek. Anthropic raised its funding target by $10 billion during the process after the round was several times subscribed. The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, now has a $14 billion revenue run rate, about 80% of which comes from enterprise customers. It claims more than 500 customers spending over $1 million a year on its workplace tools. The round includes a portion of the $15 billion commitment from Microsoft and Nvidia announced late last year.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Palo Alto Networks opted not to tie China to a global cyberespionage campaign the firm exposed last week over concerns that the cybersecurity company or its clients could face retaliation from Beijing, according to two people familiar with the matter. The sources said that Palo Alto's findings that China was tied to the sprawling hacking spree were dialed back following last month's news, first reported by Reuters, that Palo Alto was one of about 15 U.S. and Israeli cybersecurity companies whose software had been banned by Chinese authorities on national security grounds. A draft version of the report by Palo Alto's Unit 42, the company's threat intelligence arm, said that the prolific hackers -- dubbed "TGR-STA-1030" in a report published on Thursday of last week -- were connected to Beijing, the two people said. The finished report instead described the hacking group more vaguely as a "state-aligned group that operates out of Asia." Attributing

Microsoft is planning to bring smartphone-style app permission prompts to Windows 11, requiring apps to get explicit user consent before they can access sensitive resources like the file system, camera and microphone. The company's Windows Platform engineer Logan Iyer said the move was prompted by applications increasingly overriding user settings, installing unwanted software, and modifying core Windows experiences without permission. A separate initiative called Windows Baseline Security Mode will enforce runtime integrity safeguards by default, allowing only properly signed apps, services, and drivers to run. Both changes will roll out in phases as part of Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative, which the company launched in November 2023 after a federal review board called its security culture "inadequate."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The abrupt closure of El Paso's airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation. The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would be shut down for 10 days, an extraordinary pause that was quickly lifted Wednesday morning at the direction of the White House. Top administration officials quickly claimed that the closure was in response to a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels that required a military response, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declaring in a social media post that "the threat has been neutralized." But that assertion was undercut by multiple people familiar with the situation, who said that the F.A.A.'s extreme

Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company's in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic's Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code in one internal forum thread, and some pointed out the awkwardness of being asked to sell the tool through AWS's Bedrock platform while not being permitted to use it themselves. Kiro runs on Anthropic's Claude models but uses Amazon's own tooling, and the company says roughly 70% of its software engineers used it at least once in January. Amazon says there is no explicit ban on Claude Code but applies stricter requirements for production use.

The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice -- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini -- will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking "are you sure?," according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains. The behavior, known in the research community as sycophancy, stems from how these models are trained: reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, rewards responses that human evaluators prefer, and humans consistently rate agreeable answers higher than accurate ones. Anthropic published foundational research on this dynamic in 2023. The problem reached a visible breaking point in April 2025 when OpenAI had to roll back a GPT-4o update after users reported the model had become so excessively flattering it was unusable. Research on multi-turn conversations has found that extended interactions amplify sycophantic behavior further -- the longer a user ta

AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to "estimate and cover" consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay for 100% of the infrastructure upgrades required to connect its data centers to the electrical grid. In a statement to NBC News, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said: "building AI responsibly can't stop at the technology -- it has to extend to the infrastructure behind it. We've been clear that the U.S. needs to build AI infrastructure at scale to stay competitive, but the costs of powering our models should fall on Anthropic, not everyday Americans. We look forward to working with communities, local governments, and the Administration to get this right."

Meta Platforms' latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant's auditor, Ernst & Young, raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta's accounting treatment, the firm flagged it as a "critical audit matter." This means it was one of the hardest, riskiest judgments the auditor had to make. Such a warning label is rare for a specific, high-profile transaction at a major audit client. Meta moved the data-center project, called Hyperion, off its books in October into a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital. Meta owns 20% of the venture; funds managed by Blue Owl own the other 80%. A holding company called Beignet Investor, which owns the Blue Owl portion, sold a then-record $27.3 billion of bonds to investors. The joint venture is known in accounting parlance as a variable interest entity, or VIE. Meta said it isn't

Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris's hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers -- including the Russian government -- could have used them to access "millions of computers and devices around the world." Williams, a 39-year-old Australian national, pleaded guilty in October and admitted to earning more than $1.3 million in cryptocurrency from the sales between 2022 and 2025. In a sentencing memorandum filed Tuesday ahead of his anticipated February 24 sentencing in a Washington, D.C., federal court, the Justice Department asked the judge for nine years in prison, $35 million in restitution, and a maximum fine of $250,000. Prosecutors described the unnamed Russian buyer -- believed to be Operation Zero, which publicly claims to sell only to the Russian government -- as "one of the world's most nefarious exploit brokers." Williams chose it