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Following a surge in claims, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden will ban 'rogue' firms from charging pensioners to help them receive disability benefits.

A pensioner recently contacted my department in tears about a benefits claim that had been made on her behalf. She didn't know what it was for and feared it could get her into trouble.

The role that he is best known for made him an icon and one of the most recognizable figures from 1980s television.

Andy Burnham called yesterday for 'an honest discussion' about the merits of a return to allowing free movement of people between Britain and countries of the European Union.

From the student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley: Richard Borcherds, a UC Berkeley professor and Fields medalist, no longer grades his students' homework. After seeing how many of his students used AI to consistently receive top scores, he felt there was "no point" in paying readers to grade for correctness in homework, as AI use is now unavoidable. Borcherds revealed this in a sit-down interview Tuesday, following OpenAI's announcement that AI agents apparently solved one of mathematics' most difficult unsolved problems, the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. "If AI continues to improve at present rate, then, in a few years, there'll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can't do better," Borcherds said. Borcherds said he currently grades on completion if a student hands in their homework. He admitted that it is "not a very good system," but at the moment, he has no alternative... Campus has tried several AI detection tools, including Turnitin and Rumi, but have determined that these tools aren't adequate enough to be standardized on campus. The article points out that at the university, each class's AI policy "is up to the discretion of faculty."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A hate preacher's former right-hand man is using TikTok to claim most convicted terrorists are jailed simply for reading magazines and holding placards.

What a relief to find a thick drug dealer. Most of them are urbane toffs like Theo James in The Gentlemen or ultra-cool masterminds like Peaky Blinders kingpin Tommy Shelby.

Davina McCall has long been a trusted voice in highlighting important health issues faced by women in mid-life.

BeamFS creator Aurelien Desbrieres is not calling for a merge, but is requesting feedback on an 18-patch proposal that takes the place of FTRFS, an earlier filesystem he proposed in April. The Linux/Open Source blog It's FOSS reports: Filesystems that can repair damage, like Btrfs and ZFS, usually do it by falling back on a spare copy of the data. BeamFS skips that and stores Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes inside every block. Every read gets checked against those codes, and small amounts of damage are corrected before the data reaches the application. If the filesystem can tell the damage is beyond repair, the read fails with an error instead of returning the wrong bytes... In his technical report, ext4 and ext3 returned wrong data without any error, while Btrfs refused to read the file. BeamFS returned the correct file every time except once, when a flip hit a pointer to the file's data and it refused the read. "Aurelien says he used Anthropic's Claude to write the code, the tool that checks the patches, and the cover letter..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former England footballer Shaun Wright-Phillips has become the fourth celebrity to be voted off Strictly Come Dancing.

The collision, involving a white Nissan Juke and a black Audi A3, took place at a junction on the A37 Wells Road in south Bristol at around 4am on Sunday.

An American exorcist, who claims to have evicted demons from 50,000 people over 50 years, has described what he believes is a terrifying new way the devil is claiming victims.

Daisy May Cooper has revealed she was trolled and shamed after losing 10 stone and panicked her change in appearance would result in her getting fewer roles. 

It comes as one union rep called for a dedicated Garda bike theft unit to protect the livelihoods of the 'vulnerable', largely migrant workforce.

"Despite massive investments and widespread hype around AI , the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech," writes the chief economist at U.S. asset management firm Apollo Global. He adds that "there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth... [M]ainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins." VC-backed companies are spending more and more on tokens, but mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it. As long as agentic AI and token spending are confined to a small part of the economy, the macroeconomic effects of AI will be very limited... The question looking ahead is whether, even as models become commoditized, mainstream corporate America can turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins. That may be harder than it sounds. AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment. Judgment depends on context, and the answer varies with which human or which model you ask. Perhaps most importantly, AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins. The bottom line is that the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector. More details from TechCrunch: Apollo's Torsten Slok focuses on what he calls the S&P 493 — the S&P 500, minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — finding that profit margins and revenue per worker appear to be flat, with no evidence that AI is improving productivity... Recent studies have also found that AI has yet to deliver significant productivity gains.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andy Burnham hasn't even been Prime Minister for 100 days and already they're advising us to stockpile bottled water and toilet paper.

The woman was attacked after entering the enclosure of two male Persian leopards at Safaripark Beekse Bergen in Hilvarenbeek on Saturday morning.

Two people have been killed after a hit-and-run driver plowed into a 30-person-strong cyclist group on a Halloween ride in Montclair, California late Saturday night.

The foremr newsreader is said to be devastated by the end of her marriage to financier Justin Bower - and now she is saying goodbyre to their East Sussex farmhouse too.

Kremlin crony Dmitry Medvedev said the Ukrainian leader had done more damage to Trump's interests than interventions in Venezuela, Cuba and Iran combined.