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Once playful symbols, these icons now define how we communicate tone and feeling online. But it appears that many are suffering from emoji exhaustion.

The U.S. Postal Service plans to impose its first-ever fuel surcharge on packages (source paywalled; alternative source), adding an 8% fee starting in April as it struggles with rising fuel costs and ongoing financial pressure. The surcharge will not apply to letter mail and is currently expected to remain in place until January 2027. The Wall Street Journal reports: Other parcel carriers, including FedEx and United Parcel Service, have imposed fuel surcharges, as well as a basket of other surcharges and fees, for years. Both FedEx and UPS have dramatically raised their fuel surcharges in recent weeks as the price of oil has increased amid the turmoil in the Middle East. [...] The post office has been trying to increase the volume of packages it delivers. It previously differentiated itself from commercial carriers by saying that it doesn't apply residential, Saturday delivery or fuel or remote-delivery surcharges.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British Special Forces have been cleared to storm Russian shadow fleet tankers after another Downing Street U-turn. Government lawyers had ruled out units raiding Kremlin vessels.

The media regulator originally decided not to investigate complaints over remarks about climate change on two programmes aired by TV channel Talk last year.

The Prime Minister - dubbed Never Here Keir - racked up the huge bill on 39 trips abroad in less than two years in office.

Most young people are told to study hard, go to a good university and snag a job they couldn't possibly get without a degree. 

The Moon and Jupiter converge in Cancer today while Venus connects to healing Chiron.

Kelly Osbourne has treated herself to a new tattoo after news of her shock split from her fiancé emerged this week.

New submitter haroldbasset writes: Canada's Immigration Department rejected an applicant because the duties of her current job did not match the Canadian work experience she had claimed, but the Department's AI assistant had invented that work experience. She has been working in Canada as a health scientist -- she has a Ph.D. in the immunology of aging -- but the AI genius instead described her as "wiring and assembling control circuits, building control and robot panels, programming and troubleshooting." "It's believed to be the first time that the department explicitly referred to the use of generative AI to support application processing in immigration refusals," reports the Toronto Star. "The disclaimer also noted that all generated content was verified by an officer and that generative AI was not used to make or recommend a decision." The applicant's lawyer was shocked "how any human being could make this decision." "Somehow, it hallucinated my client's job description," he said. "I would love to see what the officer saw. Something seriously went wrong here." The applicant's refusal came just as Canada's Immigration Department released its first AI strategy, which frames artificial intelligence as a way to improve efficiency, service delivery, and program integrity. The department says it has long used digital tools like analytics and automation to flag fraud risks and triage applications, and is now also experimenting with generative AI for tasks such as research, summarizing, and analysis. In this case, however, the department insisted the decision was made by a human officer and that generative AI was not involved in the final decision.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The model, 46, shares two daughters with his wife Stephanie Mendoros, and has backed several countries calling for sites such as Instagram and Snapchat to be blocked for teens.

If the Iranians fail to drop their current farcical demands and come to the negotiating table in a serious and credible way soon....

Anais Gallagher supported her actor boyfriend Callum Scott-Howells at the premiere of his film Madfabulous on Wednesday.

'Happy to be back in the booth after such a crazy week,' the actor shared in a reel posted for his 5.2 million followers. He was doing post-production work on his show Reacher.

Chilling CCTV footage shows Tristan Thomas Roberts, 18, luring his mother Angela Shellis, who he previously held hostage for hours, away from their home before launching a brutal attack.

Ross Neville, 35, drank 'to excess' over five hours in Newcastle city centre before getting behind the wheel of his Ford Raptor with Matthew Newton, 28.

Bethenny Frankel put on a sizzling display in a skimpy swimsuit as she enjoyed a Miami beach day on Tuesday.

Apple reportedly has full access to customize Google's Gemini model, allowing it to distill smaller on-device AI models for Siri and other features that can run locally without an internet connection. MacRumors reports: The Information explains that Apple can ask the main Gemini model to perform a series of tasks that provide high-quality results, with a rundown of the reasoning process. Apple can feed the answers and reasoning information that it gets from Gemini to train smaller, cheaper models. With this process, the smaller models are able to learn the internal computations used by Gemini, producing efficient models that have Gemini-like performance but require less computing power. Apple is also able to edit Gemini as needed to make sure that it responds to queries in a way that Apple wants, but Apple has been running into some issues because Gemini has been tuned for chatbot and coding applications, which doesn't always meet Apple's needs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Back to Black actress, 29, looked incredible in an asymmetrical off-the-shoulder number as she posed on the red carpet.

HP IQ can chat, share files, and break down everything people said in the conference room.

You’ve heard the call of Apple Intelligence, jumped for joy over Google Gemini, and cuddled up with Microsoft Copilot. Now, get ready for HP IQ, a local AI and collaboration application HP Inc. hopes will make its business laptops stand apart. Also, get ready for your boss to start recording in-person meetings.…

A proof-of-concept attack on Context Hub suggests there's not much content santization

A new service that helps coding agents stay up to date on their API calls could be dialing in a massive supply chain vulnerability.…