Full nationalisation of British Steel expected in king’s speech
The full nationalisation of British Steel is expected to be announced in the king’s speech this week, a year after the government took over the daily running of the loss-making business from its Chinese owner.The steelmaker, which employs 3,500 people at its plant in Scunthorpe, came under government control last April amid fears that its owner, Jingye, was planning to shut down the site.British Steel operates the last two remaining blast furnaces in the UK, but its economic control remains with the Chinese company, which bought it out of insolvency in early 2020.An announcement confirming the plans is expected in the king’s speech on Wednesday, according to the Sunday Times, but details of the speech are still being finalised.British Steel was bought by the private equity group Greybull Capital in 2016, but it collapsed into insolvency three years later.
It was bought by Jingye in March 2020.The Chinese company had planned initially to build an electric arc furnace at Scunthorpe and another at a site in Teesside, though negotiations with the government ultimately fell through.Jingye then sought to shut down the blast furnaces in April 2025.Closure of the British Steel plant would have ended Britain’s primary steel-making ability as blast furnaces allow the metal to be made from scratch, rather than relying on scrap.However, by the end of January this year the cost of keeping British Steel running had risen to £377m, and could exceed £1.
5bn by 2028 if it continues at its current rate, according to estimates from the National Audit Office,The company has attracted interest from potential buyers, with the Miami-based retail investor Michael Flacks having declared himself “very” interested in buying it in February,Earlier this month, Sev,en Global Investments, the owner of the UK’s largest electric steelworks, suggested the government should find a single buyer for British Steel and Speciality Steel UK, a move that would create the country’s biggest steelmaker,Although the sector is much smaller than its peak in the 1970s, British Steel is still an important employer in Scunthorpe and supports tens of thousands of jobs in the extended steel supply chain.
Network Rail sources about 95% of its track from the plant,The original British Steel was formed in 1967, when Harold Wilson’s Labour government nationalised more than a dozen private companies to create one of the biggest steel producers in the world,It was privatised by Margaret Thatcher’s government and broken up, but its latest incarnation struggled with high costs and competition from abroad,A government spokesperson said: “We’ve been clear that safeguarding UK steel making is our priority,We’re continuing discussions with Jingye to agree a pragmatic and realistic solution to secure the long-term future of the Scunthorpe site.
Discussions are ongoing and no conclusion or decision has yet been reached.”
AI-powered surveillance company Palantir created a chore coat. Great, now I have no choice but to burn mine | Van Badham
It’s taken me years to find a chore coat with a cut that flatters my big tits but, now that I finally own one, I want to incinerate it.Such is the power of brand contamination; infamous data surveillance megacorp Palantir has decided to bang a logo on a chore coat to sell as corporate merch.Chore coats are the traditional short denim or twill jacket of the 19th-century French working class. Palantir, however, is a company whose public words and commercial-in-confidence activities are inspiring local calls to have its contracts cancelled and its business banned.The gentle French garment is now as cursed as whatever “Marie Amazonette” will ever wear to the Met Gala
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In February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work.Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments.The proposed translation was reassuring, with his job security in mind: L’air de la nuit, vif et vif, était vivifiant (The night air, lively and lively, was enlivening
UK schools should remove pupils’ online photos as AI blackmail threat grows, say experts
UK schools should remove pictures of pupils’ faces from their websites and social media accounts because blackmailers are using them to create sexually explicit images, experts have said.Child safety experts and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) warn that criminals are using AI to manipulate photos of children and then demand cash not to publish them.They are recommending educational institutions remove identifiable pictures of children from their websites and social media accounts – or consider not using them at all.The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said an unnamed UK secondary school had recently been subjected to a blackmail attempt after criminals used the institution’s website or social media accounts to take photos of schoolchildren and then, using AI tools, turned them into child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The blackmailers sent the images to the school and threatened to publish them online if they did not receive money
Meta sues Ofcom over fines regime for breaches of Online Safety Act
Meta has launched a legal challenge against the UK’s media regulator over the fees and fines regime it is enforcing under landmark digital safety legislation.The Facebook and Instagram owner is claiming that Ofcom’s methodology for calculating the charges is flawed and should not be based on a company’s global revenue. Breaches of the Online Safety Act can be punished by fines of up to 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue (QWR) or £18m – whichever is higher.In the case of Meta, which reported revenues of $201bn last year, Ofcom could in theory impose a fine of $20bn for breaches. Under regulations introduced in September, Ofcom’s fees will also be based on a proportion of an organisation’s QWR and apply to businesses that made more than £250m of this revenue a year
‘No one has done this in the wild’: study observes AI replicate itself
It’s the stuff of science fiction cinema, or particularly breathless AI company blogposts: new research finds recent AI systems can independently copy themselves on to other computers.In the doom scenario, this means that when the superintelligent AI goes rogue, it will escape shutdown by seeding itself across the world wide web, lurking outside the reach of frantic IT professionals and continuing to plot world domination or paving over the world with solar panels.“We’re rapidly approaching the point where no one would be able to shut down a rogue AI, because it would be able to self-exfiltrate its weights and copy itself to thousands of computers around the world,” said Jeffrey Ladish, the director of Palisade research, a Berkeley-based organisation which did the study.The study is one more entry in a growing catalogue of unsettling AI capabilities revealed in the past months. In March, researchers at Alibaba claimed to have caught a system they developed – Rome – tunnelling out of its environment to an external system in order to mine crypto
Europe’s AI translation industry told it risks reputation by partnering with US firms
AI companies in Europe risk losing their world-leading status in the field of machine translation, industry figures have said, after the decision by one of the continent’s leading startups to partner with Amazon’s cloud computing division provoked alarm.While businesses in the EU have generally lagged behind the US and China in AI adoption, a small group of European companies have cornered the global market for high-quality machine translations for professional use.The biggest success story is Cologne-headquartered DeepL, an online translator that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments. Used by governments, courts and half of the Fortune 500 list of highest-earning US companies, last year it was reported to have recorded revenues of $185.2m
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