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Partridges is to close its flagship fine foods store off Sloane Square in Chelsea, west London, next month amid Labour's tax raid.

The City minister - who is in charge of fighting corruption - is now fighting to keep her job after using properties linked to 'despot' Sheikh Hasina, who was deposed from office last summer.

Nad lad says 30 years of change happening in 3 years ... we're certainly feeling the compression of time

Microsoft has revealed it’s created an engineering team that CEO Satya Nadella feels is needed to cope with a potential huge change to software development processes and applications unleashed by AI.…

Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized, open-source Instagram competitor, labeling them as "spam" on Facebook and removing them immediately. 404 Media reports: Pixelfed is an open-source, community funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is the largest Pixelfed server, which was launched in 2018 but has gained renewed attention over the last week. Bluesky user AJ Sadauskas originally posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted by Meta; 404 Media then also tried to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook. It was immediately deleted. Pixelfed has seen a surge in user signups in recent days, after Meta announced it is ending fact-checking and removing restrictions on speech across its platforms. Daniel Supernault, the creator of Pixelfed, published a "declaration of fundamental rights and principles for ethical digital platforms, ensuring privacy, dignity, and fairness in online spaces." The open source charter contains sections titled "right to privacy," "freedom from surveillance," "safeguards against hate speech," "strong protections for vulnerable communities," and "data portability and user agency." "Pixelfed is a lot of things, but one thing it is not, is an opportunity for VC or others to ruin the vibe. I've turned down VC funding and will not inject advertising of any form into the project," Supernault wrote on Mastodon. "Pixelfed is for the people, period."

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The duo were picked to couple up with each other by the public and are already a firm favourite among fans.

The Chiefs star has only been dating pop sensation Taylor Swift for 18 months but many already expect the A-List couple to be one of the first to take their relationship to the next level in the new year.

Kelce was at the front and center of the broadcast of the Rams' playoff game against the Minnesota Vikings, which was moved from SoFi Stadium to Glendale, Arizona

Rupert Soames urged ministers to think again about measures in the Employment Rights Bill, which he warned would cost jobs and damage growth.

Despite being an ardent Remainer, the Prime Minister acknowledged that the UK now has the freedom to develop its own approach to AI in what he described as the 'global race of our lives'.

Andrew Bowie said the Government's 'ideological' drive to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 would leave Britain 'teetering on the brink of blackouts'.

A new report found 21 per cent of 'Gen Z' and 20 per cent of Millennials said 'the best system for running a country effectively is a strong leader who doesn't have to bother with elections.'

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced a playful giveaway for kernel contributors: he'll hand-build a guitar effects pedal for one lucky developer selected at random, using his holiday hobby skills with pedal kits. To qualify, developers must have a 2024 commit in Torvalds' kernel git tree and email him with the subject "I WANT A GUITAR PEDAL". He'll pick a winner at random, use his own money to buy a pedal kit from a company called Aion FX, and then 'build it with my own shaky little fingers, and send it to the victim by US postal services.'" The Register reports: The odd offer appeared in his weekly state-of-the-kernel post, which on Sunday US time informed the Linux world that release candidate (rc) seven for version 6.13 of the Linux kernel "is slightly bigger than normal, but considering the timing, it's pretty much where I would have expected, and nothing really stands out." Torvalds therefore expects version 6.13 to debut next week, meaning it will arrive after his preferred seven release candidates and without delays caused by the usual holiday-period slowdown. Torvalds then added a postscript in which he revealed that he often uses the holiday season to build LEGO, which he frequently receives for Christmas and his late December birthday. He kept up that tradition last year, but "also ended up doing a number of guitar pedal kit builds" which he described as "LEGO for grown-ups with a soldering iron." [...] Torvalds doesn't play guitar, but did the builds "because I enjoy the tinkering, and the guitar pedals actually do something and are the right kind of "not very complex, but not some 5-minute 555 LED blinking thing.'" He enjoyed the experience and wants to build more pedals, so has decided to give one away to a random kernel developer -- both as an act of generosity and to "check to see if anybody actually ever reads these weekly rc announcements of mine." Torvalds rated his past pedal-building efforts a "good success so far" but warned entrants "I'm a software person with a soldering iron." "I will test the result to the best of my abilities, and the end result may actually work ... but you should set your expectations along the lines of "quality kit built by a SW person who doesn't know one end of a guitar from the other.'"

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Ricki Lake, 56, showed the devastating aftermath of the California wildfires on social media, which left only a few walls standing in her burnt-out home.

The 38-year-old I'll Do It singer has had to rebuild her wardrobe after her $2M house in the Pacific Palisades are burned to the ground during the horrendous fires.

David Crompton, 44, found the note instead of his usual prescription for Tegretol delivered to his home in Leeds, West Yorkshire, days before his death in December

The 2025 Grammy Awards will go ahead amid the LA fires, but with a significant change to the show.

Nicole Kidman has marked a major milestone with her latest film Babygirl.

A sequel video has revealed another embarrassing blow for the unidentified 'Karen' who was body-slammed onto an icy road during a violent road rage incident on January 4 in Toledo, Ohio.

All the consumer electronics weirdness you didn't want to see in person anyway

CES  As the gadget-filled spectacle that CES draws to a close, there's much to anticipate and just as much that leaves us completely baffled.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don't enjoy making music. "We didn't just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people," Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. "And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It's not really enjoyable to make music now [...] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music." Suno AI works like other popular generative AI tools, allowing users to generate music by writing text prompts describing the kind of music they want to hear. Also like many other generative AI tools, Suno was trained on heaps of copyrighted music it fed into its training dataset without consent, a practice Suno is currently being sued for by the recording industry. In the interview, Shulman says he's disappointed that the recording industry is suing his company because he believes Suno and other similar AI music generators will ultimately allow more people to make and enjoy music, which will only grow the audience and industry, benefiting everyone. That may end up being true, and could be compared to the history of electronic music, digital production tools, or any other technology that allowed more people to make more music.

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