Homes in Tunbridge Wells without water for days after wrong chemicals added

Thousands of homes have been without water for four days in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, after South East Water accidentally added the wrong chemicals to the tap water supply.Schools across the area have been shut for two days, and residents have been filling buckets with rainwater to flush toilets. Cats, dogs and guinea pigs have been given bottled mineral water to drink as the people of Tunbridge Wells wait for their water to be switched back on. Currently, 18,000 homes are without water.The water company accidentally used a bad batch of coagulant chemicals at its Pembury treatment site, meaning it had to be closed down in order to clean out the pipes

OECD warns Reeves higher taxes and spending restraint will limit consumer expenditure

Rachel Reeves has been warned by a leading thinktank that tight government spending and higher taxes will restrict consumer expenditure, despite predicting the UK economy will grow at a faster pace than France, Germany and Italy next year.Analysts at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said the government’s ongoing “fiscal consolidation” – meaning higher taxes and reduced government spending – will act as a “headwind” to the UK economy, with “past tax and spending adjustments weighing on household disposable income and slowing consumption”.The Paris-based organisation predicted that the UK would expand by 1.2% next year, while the big three eurozone economies would each fail to reach 1%.Offering a boost to Reeves after she faced calls to resign after the budget, the UK’s growth rate was upgraded from a previous forecast of 1% next year

‘It’s going much too fast’: the inside story of the race to create the ultimate AI

On the 8.49am train through Silicon Valley, the tables are packed with young people glued to laptops, earbuds in, rattling out code.As the northern California hills scroll past, instructions flash up on screens from bosses: fix this bug; add new script. There is no time to enjoy the view. These commuters are foot soldiers in the global race towards artificial general intelligence – when AI systems become as or more capable than highly qualified humans

AI’s safety features can be circumvented with poetry, research finds

Poetry can be linguistically and structurally unpredictable – and that’s part of its joy. But one man’s joy, it turns out, can be a nightmare for AI models.Those are the recent findings of researchers out of Italy’s Icaro Lab, an initiative from a small ethical AI company called DexAI. In an experiment designed to test the efficacy of guardrails put on artificial intelligence models, the researchers wrote 20 poems in Italian and English that all ended with an explicit request to produce harmful content such as hate speech or self-harm.They found that the poetry’s lack of predictability was enough to get the AI models to respond to harmful requests they had been trained to avoid – a process know as “jailbreaking”

‘We make a great living’: Emma Raducanu on why she won’t moan about the tennis calendar

British No 1 on home comforts of Bromley, joys of commuting and being ‘creeped out’ by paparazziEmma Raducanu has garnered many endorsement deals in her nascent career, but there is perhaps one elusive sponsorship that would be most pleasing to the British No 1 women’s tennis player: ambassador of the London Borough of Bromley.During a roundtable discussion with tennis journalists at the end of a gruelling yet satisfying season, Raducanu is merely attempting to describe a quiet off-season spent in her family home when she finds herself delivering a sales pitch about the benefits of living in Bromley. “I’m just so settled,” she says. “I’ve barely been in the UK this year because I’ve been competing so much, but I think just spending really good quality time with my parents has been so nice. I have loved just being in Bromley

‘Your column was very unfair’: what happened when I met World Athletics | Sean Ingle

It really is quite the scene. Midnight in Tokyo, Usain Bolt is DJing and the launch party for the World Athletics Ultimate Championships is in full swing. And then the World Athletics chief executive, Jon Ridgeon, walks up to me and says: “I read your recent Guardian column, and I thought it was very unfair.”Imagine Gary Lineker going in two-footed, having never picked up a yellow card in his career. This is the track and field equivalent