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It’s week two of budget black-hole gate. When will it all end? Probably after the May elections
Good times for Britain when the chancellor is saved by the Office for Budget Responsibility being slightly more inept than her at a single convenient moment. Following the accidental early publication of the fiscal watchdog’s market-sensitive budget document, chair Richard Hughes has now fallen on his sword. Although it’s possible he meant to fall on his feet but just mistimed it. On Monday we discovered that the OBR’s website is not securely hosted but was built using WordPress. Oh man. That’s definitely budget, but is it responsible? It may as well just have had a Tumblr.
This series of unfortunate events meant the OBR bigwigs were a man down when they appeared before the Treasury select committee this morning, butching out the decision to go to war with Rachel Reeves by releasing their draft economic assessments in the weeks leading up to the budget. Did the chancellor seriously mislead the country about the state of the public finances? That is the £4.2bn question. Are our problems going to turn out to be a whole lot bigger than something that could be addressed with £4.2bn? The answer to that is regrettably too obvious too state.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:43:10 GMT
A flock of Father Christmases share the seasonal songs that capture the magic, merriment and occasional heartbreak that comes with donning the red suit
My father was a Santa and my wife got me into doing it. It’s the best thing I ever did. I do schools, universities, supermarkets, Christmas lights switch-ons … As soon as Santa comes along, everybody melts. One little girl brought her guinea pig, who leapt off her hand and dived straight into my Santa beard. The parents were in stitches while we tried to get him out. My favourite Christmas songs are Eartha Kitt’s sultry version of Santa Baby, because it gets all the adults in the mood to get up and have a boogie with Santa, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, because the lyrics are so pure. No Christmas songs drive me mad. It’s Christmas: they’re all great. Paul Fessi
Continue reading...Tue, 02 Dec 2025 08:23:58 GMT
Anthropic’s chief scientist says AI autonomy could spark a beneficial ‘intelligence explosion’ – or be the moment humans lose control
Humanity will have to decide by 2030 whether to take the “ultimate risk” of letting artificial intelligence systems train themselves to become more powerful, one of the world’s leading AI scientists has said.
Jared Kaplan, the chief scientist and co-owner of the $180bn (£135bn) US startup Anthropic, said a choice was looming about how much autonomy the systems should be given to evolve.
Continue reading...Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:37:55 GMT
As the Xbox 360 turns 20, we celebrate its most influential and memorable games – both exclusives, and those that came to the console first
Originally featured as a minigame in Project Gotham, this 80s-style twin-stick shooter was rebuilt as a standalone digital-only release, attracting a huge new fanbase. Fast, frenetic and super stylish, with lovely vector visuals, it was the game that first showed the potential of Xbox Live Arcade.
Continue reading...Tue, 02 Dec 2025 10:00:27 GMT
The use of ‘nudify’ apps is becoming more and more prevalent, with hundreds of teachers having seen images created by pupils, often of their peers. The fallout is huge – and growing fast
‘It worries me that it’s so normalised. He obviously wasn’t hiding it. He didn’t feel this was something he shouldn’t be doing. It was in the open and people saw it. That’s what was quite shocking.”
A headteacher is describing how a teenage boy, sitting on a bus on his way home from school, casually pulled out his phone, selected a picture from social media of a girl at a neighbouring school and used a “nudifying” app to doctor her image.
Continue reading...Tue, 02 Dec 2025 10:00:28 GMT
Max Rushden is joined by Geoff Lemon, Emma John and Sam Perry to preview the second Test, a day-night affair at the Gabba, with England looking to recover from their embarrassing defeat in Perth
Continue reading...Tue, 02 Dec 2025 10:47:06 GMT
None of the former officers named by the IOPC will face disciplinary proceedings because they have all retired
Twelve police officers would have faced disciplinary cases of gross misconduct for a catalogue of professional failings relating to the Hillsborough disaster if they were still serving, the police watchdog has said.
However, no former officer named by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) will face disciplinary proceedings because they have all retired. Some, including Peter Wright, the chief constable of South Yorkshire police at the time of the 1989 disaster, have died.
Continue reading...Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:00:33 GMT
Official report says forces in England and Wales yet to implement policies for investigation
A quarter of police forces in England and Wales are yet to implement “basic policies for investigating sexual offences”, an official report has found, with women still being failed despite promises of change after the murder of Sarah Everard four years ago.
The report by Dame Elish Angiolini follows an inquiry set up after Everard was murdered by a serving police officer, Wayne Couzens, in March 2021. She was abducted off a London street while walking home.
Continue reading...Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:08:06 GMT
Justice secretary expected to pull back from plans to reserve jury trials from only the most serious cases
The former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner will lay an amendment on Wednesday to speed up the workers rights’ bill, after “considerable anger” that unelected Lords forced the watering down of day-one rights, Jessica Elgot and Pippa Crerar report.
Twelve more prisoners have been mistakenly freed in the past month and two are still at large, David Lammy has said.
I’m not going to give details of those cases, because these are operational decisions made by the police, and you’ll understand if they’re about to arrest somebody they don’t want me to blow the cover.
Continue reading...Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:46:44 GMT
US-led peace push comes as Kyiv says fighting is continuing over important hub
In parallel to Witkoff’s meeting in Moscow, we will also follow Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s first visit to Ireland.
He has arrived in Dublin last night, and has a busy schedule today, paying a brief visit to the country’s new president Catherine Connolly, before meeting with key government figures including the taisoeach, Micheál Martin, and addressing both chambers of the Irish parliament in the afternoon.
Continue reading...Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:48:59 GMT