Latest News

Last updated 27 Apr, 07:25 PM

BBC News

Starmer faces vote on inquiry over Mandelson vetting claims - No 10 brands the move "a desperate political stunt by the Conservative Party", which had asked for the vote.

Claire's closes all 154 stores in UK and Ireland with loss of 1,300 jobs - All of the chain's standalone stores have stopped trading in the UK and Ireland.

When Attenborough met the gorillas - the story behind his iconic TV moment - Two new documentaries explore the the fascinating tale behind the defining image of Attenborough's career.

Melania Trump urges ABC to 'take stand' on Jimmy Kimmel after widow joke - In a parody aired days before the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Kimmel called Melania an "expectant widow".

How Kenya's Sabastian Sawe broke the two-hour barrier at London Marathon - Kenya's Sabastian Sawe on becoming the first person to break the two-hour barrier for the marathon.

The Register

The crypto-to-AI bandwagon jumpers' club just landed another member: Core Scientific - They were doing it in Texas... Core Scientific is trading coins for tokens, revealing plans on Monday to convert a 300-megawatt bitcoin mining operation in Pecos, Texas, to an 1.5 gigawatt AI datacenter campus.…

Medical and utility tech companies hacked by digital intruders - Itron, Medtronic disclose breaches in Friday filings Digital intruders recently broke into two major tech suppliers - utility-technology firm Itron and medical-device maker Medtronic - according to filings with federal regulators.…

South Africa yanks AI policy after AI-assisted drafting invents citations - Eish shame man! Maybe you shouldn't ask AI to set the rules for AI use? South Africa has pulled its draft national AI policy after discovering that it was citing sources that exist only in the fertile imagination of a chatbot.…

Friendster rises from the grave to make social media great again - No ads, no algorithm, and you actually have to physically tap phones to add a friend It's been more than a decade since social media platform Friendster went dark, but a new owner has brought it back from the dead - sort of - with the hope he can give exhausted users of modern platforms a reprieve. …

AI reality check: Here's what three companies learned building wallets, homes, and games - Executives from Citi, Home Depot, and Capcom describe early work with AI agents While AI agents have moved from experimental tools to customer-facing workers in a matter of months, the next challenge is governance and reliability once those agents touch real money, real shoppers, and real creative output.…

New Scientist - Home

Coral reefs on a remote archipelago shrugged off a massive heatwave - Scientists were shocked to find that the Houtman Abrolhos Islands’ coral reefs survived a prolonged extreme heatwave in 2025 virtually unharmed, which may reveal how to protect corals elsewhere

Why the keto diet could be a revolutionary way to treat mental illness - You may think of the high-fat, low-carb eating plan as a faddish way to lose weight. But the keto diet is now being used to tackle conditions from severe depression to bipolar disorder and anorexia, with transformative results

Giant Arctic continent launched dinosaurs to world domination - Coincident with the rise of the dinosaurs, a large landmass filled most of the Arctic circle, potentially contributing to global cooling that advantaged the famous reptiles

10,000 new planets found hidden in NASA telescope data - NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has been searching for exoplanets since its launch in 2018, and it turns out it may have found plenty more of them than we had thought

Why your opinion of used electric vehicles is probably wrong - The idea that EV batteries age poorly is a misconception – and a new report has found they often outlive the cars themselves

Hacker News

United Wizards of the Coast - Comments

Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal - Comments

Open-Source KiCad PCBs for Common Arduino, ESP32, RP2040 Boards - Comments

China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus - Comments

“Why not just use Lean?” - Comments

Slashdot

Supreme Court Reviews Police Use of Cell Location Data To Find Criminals - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: When the Call Federal Credit Union outside Richmond, Va., was robbed at gunpoint in 2019, the suspect took $195,000 from the bank's vault and fled before the police arrived. A detective interviewed witnesses and reviewed the bank's security footage. But with no leads, the officer relied on a so-called geofence warrant to sweep up location data from all the cellphones in the vicinity of the bank for the 30 minutes before and after the robbery. The data he gathered eventually led to the identification and conviction of Okello T. Chatrie, now 31, a Jamaican immigrant who came to the United States in 2017. Geofence searches have become increasingly popular as a tool for law enforcement, but critics say they put at risk the personal data of everyday Americans and violate the Constitution. Mr. Chatrie challenged the use of a geofence warrant in his conviction, in a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court on Monday. The justices will examine how the Constitution's traditional protections apply to rapidly changing technology that has made it easier for the police to scoop up vast amounts of data to assemble a detailed look at a person's movements and activities. It has been eight years since the court last took up a major Fourth Amendment case involving the expectations of privacy for the millions of people carrying cellphones in the digital age. In that 2018 case, the court ruled that the government generally needs a warrant to collect location data drawn from cell towers about the customers of cellphone companies. The court has also limited the government's ability to use GPS devices to track suspects' movements, and it has required that law enforcement get a warrant to search individual cellphones. In Mr. Chatrie's case, the government did obtain a warrant, but one that his legal team said was overly broad, violating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitHub Copilot Is Moving To Usage-Based Billing - GitHub said in a blog post today that it is moving Copilot to usage-based billing starting June 1. Base subscription prices will remain the same but premium requests will be replaced with monthly AI Credits that are consumed based on token usage. "Instead of counting premium requests, every Copilot plan will include a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits, with the option for paid plans to purchase additional usage," the platform said. "Usage will be calculated based on token consumption, including input, output, and cached tokens, using the listed API rates for each model. This change aligns Copilot pricing with actual usage and is an important step toward a sustainable, reliable Copilot business and experience for all users." Documentation for individuals, businesses and enterprises, and an FAQ can be found at their respective links. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft To Stop Sharing Revenue With OpenAI - Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is ending revenue-sharing payments to OpenAI (paywalled; alternative source) and making the partnership non-exclusive. "The rapid pace of innovation requires us to continue to evolve our partnership to benefit our customers and both companies," Microsoft said Monday in a blog post. Bloomberg reports: The revised deal is meant to simplify a complicated relationship between two partners that has been foundational to OpenAI's rise and the broader AI boom. OpenAI has since pursued partnerships with multiple cloud providers, including Microsoft rival Amazon.com Inc., to meet its growing computing needs to build and service AI software to a wider audience. As part of OpenAI's restructuring last year as a for-profit business, Microsoft received a 27% ownership stake in the AI startup. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

California's Billionaire Tax Has the Signatures to Make the Ballot - California's proposed billionaire tax appears headed for the November ballot after backers said they gathered more than 1.5 million signatures, well above the threshold needed to qualify. SF Standard reports: Backers of the initiative announced this weekend that more than 1.5 million people signed a petition to bring the one-time, 5% wealth tax to a statewide vote come November. That's well beyond the 875,000 names needed to qualify the measure, and likely sufficient to account for illegible or invalid signatures. The Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West, a union representing more than 120,000 healthcare workers, pitched the tax to make up for federal spending cuts that threaten to shutter hospitals(opens in new tab) and kick millions of people off medical insurance. Proponents of California's wealth tax estimate it would raise $100 billion in one-time revenue, even if some billionaires leave because of the measure. The nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst's Office forecasts tens of billions in upfront revenue, but cautioned that the tax could cost hundreds of millions or more a year if some billionaires move out of state. The proposal, which needs a simple majority to pass, would apply to assets of people with net worth of $1 billion or more who lived in California as of Jan. 1 this year. That means it would affect about 200 people, according to the SEIU-UHW. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DeepSeek V4 Arrives With Near State-of-the-Art Intelligence At 1/6th the Cost - An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: The whale has resurfaced. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup offshoot of High-Flyer Capital Management quantitative analysis firm, became a near-overnight sensation globally in January 2025 with the release of its open source R1 model that matched proprietary U.S. giants. It's been an epoch in AI since then, and while DeepSeek has released several updates to that model and its other V3 series, the international AI and business community has been largely waiting with baited breath for the follow-up to the R1 moment. Now it's arrived with last night's release of DeepSeek-V4, a 1.6-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model available free under commercially-friendly open source MIT License, which nears -- and on some benchmarks, surpasses -- the performance of the world's most advanced closed-source systems at approximately 1/6th the cost over the application programming interface (API). This release -- which DeepSeek AI researcher Deli Chen described on X as a "labor of love" 484 days after the launch of V3 -- is being hailed as the "second DeepSeek moment." As Chen noted in his post, "AGI belongs to everyone". It's available now on AI code sharing community Hugging Face and through DeepSeek's API. The new DeepSeek-V4-Pro model delivers "near-frontier performance" at a much lower price, costing $5.22 for 1 million input and 1 million output tokens compared with $35 for GPT-5.5 and $30 for Claude Opus 4.7. That makes it roughly 1/7th the cost of GPT-5.5 and 1/6th the cost of Claude Opus 4.7, reinforcing VentureBeat's point that DeepSeek is "compressing advanced model economics into a much lower band." While GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 still lead on most benchmarks, DeepSeek-V4-Pro gets close enough that its lower cost could "force a major rethink of the economics of advanced AI deployment." Read more of this story at Slashdot.