Ministers said to be considering bill to wipe out British Steel’s debts

Ministers are reportedly considering legislation to relieve British Steel of debts that have risen to nearly £1bn, as the government considers how best to prepare the Scunthorpe steelworks for sale.The government took control of the business last month after it said its Chinese owner, Jingye Steel, planned to close the plant within days. The move required emergency legislation that was passed in a historic recall of parliament.Jingye remains the legal owner of British Steel, despite the takeover, and is owed money by the company. Those debts would probably have been wiped out in a liquidation

Government considers sale of Brexit border checkpoint in Kent – reports

The UK government is reportedly considering selling a post-Brexit border check facility in Kent that could fall out of use as a result of this week’s trade pact with the EU.The site, based in Sevington, Ashford, was erected in 2021 with capacity for 1,300 lorries that were expected to face extra checks on plants and animal goods, including dairy and meat, entering and leaving Britain after Brexit.However, the deal between the UK and EU struck earlier this week is expected to remove the need for routine health and veterinary certification on the import and export of farm products ranging from fresh meat and dairy products to vegetables, timber, wool and leather.The government is now looking for a company willing to buy or repurpose the Sevington border control point.Ministers are said to have approached Eurotunnel directly, according to the Financial Times

Scattered Spider is focus of NCA inquiry into cyber-attacks against UK retailers

A hacker community known as Scattered Spider is a key suspect in a criminal inquiry into cyber-attacks against UK retailers including Marks & Spencer, detectives have said.Scattered Spider, a loose collective of native English-speaking cybercriminals, has been strongly linked with hacks against M&S, the Co-op and Harrods. M&S said on Wednesday it will take an estimated £300m hit to profits after its systems were hacked last month.The UK’s National Crime Agency, whose remit includes combating cybercrime, said the group was a focus in its investigations.“We are looking at the group that is publicly known as Scattered Spider, but we’ve got a range of different hypotheses and we’ll follow the evidence to get to the offenders,” Paul Foster, the head of the NCA’s national cybercrime unit, told the BBC

Most AI chatbots easily tricked into giving dangerous responses, study finds

Hacked AI-powered chatbots threaten to make dangerous knowledge readily available by churning out illicit information the programs absorb during training, researchers say.The warning comes amid a disturbing trend for chatbots that have been “jailbroken” to circumvent their built-in safety controls. The restrictions are supposed to prevent the programs from providing harmful, biased or inappropriate responses to users’ questions.The engines that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude – large language models (LLMs) – are fed vast amounts of material from the internet.Despite efforts to strip harmful text from the training data, LLMs can still absorb information about illegal activities such as hacking, money laundering, insider trading and bomb-making

Lewis Hamilton ‘to make three new films’ but Verstappen snubs F1 screening

Lewis Hamilton has revealed his film production company is working with screenwriters to write and produce three films in the future. The seven-time world champion was speaking after a private screening of the forthcoming film F1: The Movie, held on Wednesday night in Monte Carlo, on which he was a producer and an adviser.“At the beginning you see all the different logos for the different production houses and my one comes out, which I worked on for so long, which is Dawn Apollo and it was just amazing to see that,” he said. “This has gone in very high. Couldn’t go any higher for my first movie but we will be producing more movies in the coming years

Scientists warn Enhanced Games athletes of heart attack risks and having libidos ‘killed off’

Enhanced Games competitors run the risk of their libido being “killed off” as well as a greater chance of heart attacks and psychiatric issues by taking performance enhanced drugs, leading experts have warned.Prof Ian Broadley, whose research has been supported by the World Anti-Doping Agency, and his colleague Martin Chandler, a research fellow who specialises in PEDs, also told the Guardian that organisers’ claims that banned drugs can be made safer if taken under medical supervision are “incorrect and misleading”.Organisers of the Enhanced Games revealed on Wednesday that they will stage a four-day event in Las Vegas next year, but confirmed that they had already given the Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev $1m for dipping under the 50 metre freestyle world record time by using banned drugs.Meanwhile the Australian former Olympic swimmer, James Magnussen, has said that he “feels like 18 again” after taking testosterone, peptides and banned drugs, including BPC-157, CJC-1295 and the growth hormone ipamorelin to prepare for the event.However, Boardley and Chandler have warned that Magnussen and other Enhanced Games competitors are underestimating the risks and dangers from taking steroids and other experimental drugs