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Even as Kemi Badenoch was addressing the party faithful for the first time as their leader yesterday, there was talk of plots to unseat her, writes ANDREW PIERCE.

Arriving ath the Tory Party conference, writes QUENTIN LETTS, it could have been day one of a county cricket match (division two).

Shadow Chancellor Sir Mel Stride will unveil plans for cutting welfare, foreign aid and the size of the civil service to put the public finances on a more stable footing and pave the way for tax cuts.

My wife has had an HMRC letter saying 'Self employed class 2 national insurance contribution due'. To the unsuspecting it looks like a tax demand.

Weighing at an estimated 1,200lb with a broken jaw, Chunk finally brought the first place win home on Tuesday after being the runner-up for the past three years.

The director of a tour operation remembers two tourists arriving in a rural town in Peru determined to hike alone in the mountains to a sacred canyon recommended by their AI chatbot. But the canyon didn't exists — and a high-altitude hike could be dangerous (especially where cellphone coverage is also spotty). They're part of a BBC report on travellers arriving at their destination "only to find they've been fed incorrect information or steered to a place that only exists in the hard-wired imagination of a robot..." "According to a 2024 survey, 37% of those surveyed who used AI to help plan their travels reported that it could not provide enough information, while around 33% said their AI-generated recommendations included false information." Some examples? - Dana Yao and her husband recently experienced this first-hand. The couple used ChatGPT to plan a romantic hike to the top of Mount Misen on the Japanese island of Itsukushima earlier this year. After exploring the town of Miyajima with no issues, they set off at 15:00 to hike to the montain's summit in time for sunset, exactly as ChatGPT had instructed them. "That's when the problem showed up," said Yao, a creator who runs a blog about traveling in Japan, "[when] we were ready to descend [the mountain via] the ropeway station. ChatGPT said the last ropeway down was at 17:30, but in reality, the ropeway had already closed. So, we were stuck at the mountain top..." - A 2024 BBC article reported that [dedicated travel AI site] Layla briefly told users that there was an Eiffel Tower in Beijing and suggested a marathon route across northern Italy to a British traveller that was entirely unfeasible... - A recent Fast Company article recounted an incident where a couple made the trek to a scenic cable car in Malaysia that they had seen on TikTok, only to find that no such structure existed. The video they'd watched had been entirely AI generated, either to drum up engagement or for some other strange purpose. Rayid Ghani, a distinguished professor in machine learning at Carnegie Melon University, tells them that an AI chatbot "doesn't know the difference between travel advice, directions or recipes. It just knows words. So, it keeps spitting out words that make whatever it's telling you sound realistic..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Donald Trump dropped the 'f-bomb' as he hit out at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a phone call discussing a potential ceasefire deal with Hamas.

It is a very highly sought after school

To start off Hospice Care Week, we interviewed the new co-chief executives Kate Heslegrave and Karen Chumbley, who started their roles in August this year.

As the shutdown entered its fifth day on Sunday, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told CNN that he still saw a chance that Democrats would back down.

Mizzy, the notorious TikTok troublemaker, whose real name is Bacari-Bronze O'Garro, has turned his life around after becoming a father-of-two and getting a job in construction.

Scientists have discovered that the specific way an aging brain changes shape, such as its overall structure shifting and regions pulling apart, can serve as an early warning sign for dementia.

If we could remove the 50 most concerning pieces of space debris in low-Earth orbit, there'd be a 50% reduction in the overall debris-generating potential, reports Ars Technica. That's according to Darren McKnight, lead author of a paper presented Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney, which calculated the objects most likely to collide with other fragments and create more debris. (Russia and the Soviet Union lead with 34 objects, followed by China with 10, the U.S. with three, Europe with two, and Japan with one.) Even just the top 10 were removed, the debris-generating potential drops by 30%. "The things left before 2000 are still the majority of the problem," he points out, and "76% of the objects in the top 50 were deposited last century." 88% of the objects are post-mission rocket bodies left behind to hurtle through space. "The bad news is, since January 1, 2024, we've had 26 rocket bodies abandoned in low-Earth orbit that will stay in orbit for more than 25 years," McKnight told Ars... China launched 21 of the 26 hazardous new rocket bodies over the last 21 months, each averaging more than 4 metric tons (8,800 pounds). Two more came from US launchers, one from Russia, one from India, and one from Iran. This trend is likely to continue as China steps up deployment of two megaconstellations — Guowang and Thousand Sails — with thousands of communications satellites in low-Earth orbit. Launches of these constellations began last year. The Guowang and Thousand Sails satellites are relatively small and likely capable of maneuvering out of the way of space debris, although China has not disclosed their exact capabilities. However, most of the rockets used for Guowang and Thousand Sails launches have left their upper stages in orbit. McKnight said nine upper stages China has abandoned after launching Guowang and Thousand Sails satellites will stay in orbit for more than 25 years, violating the international guidelines. It will take hundreds of rockets to fully populate China's two major megaconstellations. The prospect of so much new space debris is worrisome, McKnight said. "In the next few years, if they continue the same trend, they're going to leave well over 100 rocket bodies over the 25-year rule if they continue to deploy these constellations," he said. "So, the trend is not good...." Since 2000, China has accumulated more dead rocket mass in long-lived orbits than the rest of the world combined, according to McKnight. "But now we're at a point where it's actually kind of accelerating in the last two years as these constellations are getting deployed." A deputy head of China's national space agency recently said China is "currently researching" how to remove space debris from orbit, according to the article. ("One of the missions China claims is testing space debris mitigation techniques has docked with multiple spacecraft in orbit, but U.S. officials see it as a military threat. The same basic technologies needed for space debris cleanup — rendezvous and docking systems, robotic arms, and onboard automation — could be used to latch on to an adversary's satellite.")

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Employees are being told to fill in screen skills passports 'designed to create a better, more welcoming and safe place to work' as part of the latest package of measures.

Prosecutors said on Sunday they had opened a 'war crimes' investigation after a drone killed a French photojournalist on assignment in war-torn eastern Ukraine.

Pensioners in their 90s have been admitted to hospital for taking cocaine as the number needing treatment has soared by a third in just two years.

Leading Jewish figures gave defiant speeches in Trafalgar Square before the anniversary of the October 7 massacre in Israel, where they warned they face their biggest threat in a generation.

Aiden Minnis, 38, from Chippenham, Wiltshire, posted footage online of himself setting the crucial travel document alight in front of a large Russian flag.

The three men were stranded in 'appaling conditions' for 42 hours in the Dowber Gill Passage, near Grassington, North Yorkshire, from Thursday until Saturday morning.

The comedian, 49, has confessed his strategy to not using comedy and honing in on his former days of working in a call center in a bid to win the popular BBC game show.