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Researchers say that 'heat training' in saunas could be critical in helping us adjust to the scorching summer temperatures.

I didn't know you could lose a pension and haven't with all my other providers some going back 30 years so I am confused as to why this is allowed to happen.

Flat owners in city centres across Britain are seeing the price of their properties plummet, grim new data has revealed.

A remote research station in Antarctica has recorded Earth's lowest temperature in 14 years.

Britons face paying up to £100 million more in energy bills every year because of hundreds of faulty meters on offshore wind farms. There 800 meters running backwards on land and at sea.

Count Binface is expected to receive 20 per cent of the votes in the upcoming Clacton by-election, according to a new poll.

Count Binface is expected to receive 20 per cent of the votes in the upcoming Clacton by-election, according to a new poll.

Gabrielle Carrington appeared in court where she denied murdering Klaudia Zakrzewska - an influencer known as Klaudiaglam - during an alleged road rage incident in Soho in April.

Three Essex residents have won a huge £100,000 each in the latest Premium Bonds draw for August 2026.

Three Essex residents have won a huge £100,000 each in the latest Premium Bonds draw for August 2026.

Under the Government's new Sentencing Act, some 6,000 criminals are due to be freed under the early prison release scheme in a bid to combat jail overcrowding.

Weird times in earnings-land, and we're talking about it on The Reg's home grown podcast

Nicola Peltz has debuted a new 'Elijah' ankle tattoo as she holidayed in St Tropez with husband Brooklyn Beckham on Sunday.

Lady Louise Windsor was cheered on by her boyfriend as she competed in a carriage driving competition in West Sussex this weekend.

Scott Chilton retired last year following 33 years of service after a police watchdog announced he was under investigation for gross misconduct relating to sexual relationships with two officers.

The body of Elisabeth Jane Ross, 38, was discovered inside the suitcase by a homeless man in an abandoned carpark in the Kypseli district of Athens on July 18.

"AI's decimation of call center jobs has begun," reports Bloomberg: Companies including the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Microsoft Corp., Uber Technologies Inc. and Hyatt Hotels Corp. are using automated chat and phone systems to handle work that previously required humans. In some cases, they've already wiped out sizable chunks of their customer service operations, together representing thousands of workers. The specter of automation has long loomed over the call center industry, which employs millions worldwide from the U,S, to India to the Philippines. But until recently, generative artificial intelligence wasn't good enough to move the needle. Now, AI advancements — and pressure on executives to show they're embracing the new technology — have prompted corporations to deploy the tools more widely. Customer service employment in the U.S. is declining and will likely continue to do so as more tasks are automated, Forrester analyst Kate Leggett wrote in a report earlier this year. While it's impossible to determine the future job losses, she estimated that almost half of customer service roles will be affected by 2030. Globally, the steepest job cuts are expected to hit countries like the Philippines, where many Western companies have outsourced their most easily automated work. Salespeople at multiple tech companies told Bloomberg that they routinely pitch call center AI tools as a way of lowering labor costs, undercutting a common industry claim that AI is primarily a way to help workers become more productive rather than kill their jobs... Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the nation's largest lender, has shed hundreds of workers from its chat support line as it wove AI into the system, according to people familiar with the work. This amounted to tens of millions of dollars in savings per year, one of the people said... Microsoft is both one of the largest vendors and adopters of customer service automation tools. This has helped the software giant trim its customer service workforce — a mix of contractors and full-time staff — from about 50,000 to 40,000 in recent years, according to a person familiar with the operations. "If something happened with little Johnny's Xbox in the middle of the night, we can now solve that with AI," Judson Althoff, who runs Microsoft's sales and service operations, said in an interview. Althoff said in April that AI is saving the company about $750 million per year in customer service costs. More complex problems still require human support, but the company is constantly expanding what can be fixed automatically, he said in the interview. Two examples from the article: Last year Hyatt fired 30% of its in-house customer support staff for the Americas, according the hotel-industry news site Hotel Dive. Last week Bloomberg reported Uber had cut 10% of its customer service jobs as part of effort to "embrace artificial intelligence," according to the article. "Today, Uber pushes users to submit support requests through their apps, where they're met with an AI chatbot."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Charlie Hearne-Kingsford, 18, got off the train at Strood following a weekend out in Tottenham in March.

Big Brother star Jade Goody’s widower Jack Tweed has been banned from driving after admitting driving under the influence of cannabis.

Fire crews tackled a field blaze near Panfield Road in Braintree over the weekend.