UK watchdogs need to step in on rip-off bills, which are bad for consumers and the economy | Heather Stewart

Ever felt swizzed by the small print in your mobile contract, bamboozled by a plethora of insurance products or locked into a subscription you signed up for by mistake?Then you are far from alone: a paper on the UK’s productivity predicament suggests the way the markets for some key services work is not only a monumental pain for consumers but bad for the economy, too.Rachel Reeves has promised to tackle the cost of living in her 26 November budget – alongside bringing in tax rises.Briefing in advance has suggested she and her colleagues are focused on cost-cutting levers they can easily pull from Whitehall: removing VAT on energy bills, for example.However, in their paper “getting Britain out of the hole”, the economists Andrew Sissons and John Springford suggest a much more muscular approach to making markets for key services work better.They argue that lack of proper competition for services is an important explanation for the UK’s frustratingly “sticky” inflation

‘I think the city is falling apart’: Leicester braces for a make-or-break budget

Anika* has a full-time job, but says she never eats in local cafes or restaurants and takes her lunch to work. The cost of living is too high for her to buy more than the basics of life.“Everything is so expensive. I cry, and ask myself what more can I do to make things better,” she says.The charity worker lives in Leicester, the local authority where people have the least spare cash after paying taxes, property ownership costs and pensions contributions

Personal details of Tate galleries job applicants leaked online

Personal details submitted by applicants for a job at Tate art galleries have been leaked online, exposing their addresses, salaries and the phone numbers of their referees, the Guardian has learned.The records, running to hundreds of pages, appeared on a website unrelated to the government-sponsored organisation, which operates the Tate Modern and Tate Britain galleries in London, Tate St Ives in Cornwall and Tate Liverpool.The data includes details of applicants’ current employers and education, and relates to the Tate’s hunt for a website developer in October 2023. Information about 111 individuals is included. They are not named but their referees are, sometimes with mobile numbers and personal email addresses

AI firm claims it stopped Chinese state-sponsored cyber-attack campaign

A leading artificial intelligence company claims to have stopped a China-backed “cyber espionage” campaign that was able to infiltrate financial firms and government agencies with almost no human oversight.The US-based Anthropic said its coding tool, Claude Code, was “manipulated” by a Chinese state-sponsored group to attack 30 entities around the world in September, achieving a “handful of successful intrusions”.This was a “significant escalation” from previous AI-enabled attacks it monitored, it wrote in a blogpost on Thursday, because Claude acted largely independently: 80 to 90% of the operations involved in the attack were performed without a human in the loop.“The actor achieved what we believe is the first documented case of a cyber-attack largely executed without human intervention at scale,” it wrote.Anthropic did not clarify which financial institutions and government agencies had been targeted, or what exactly the hackers had achieved – although it did say they were able to access their targets’ internal data

Jannik Sinner sees off Carlos Alcaraz in straight sets to defend ATP Finals title

On his favourite surface and before a rowdy home crowd, Jannik Sinner closed out his immense season with a statement victory against his great rival Carlos Alcaraz, putting together a supreme performance to defeat the Spaniard 7-6 (4), 7-5 and successfully defend his title at the ATP Finals in Turin.Despite his season being slightly abbreviated because of his three‑month doping ban, and Alcaraz seizing the year-end No 1 ranking with a legendary year of his own, Sinner finishes 2025 with six titles, a 58-6 win-loss record and three of the five biggest titles in the year.Sinner is also, without doubt, the dominant player on indoor hard courts. The Italian has now won 31 consecutive matches on the surface dating back to the starring role he played in Italy’s Davis Cup triumph in 2023. At 24 he is the youngest man to defend an ATP Finals title since Roger Federer in 2004 and just the second man after Novak Djokovic to win this title consecutively without dropping a set

ATP Finals tennis: Jannik Sinner beats Carlos Alcaraz to lift title for a second year in a row– as it happened

Jannik Sinner defeated Carlos Alcaraz 7-6(4) 7-5, winning the ATP Finals for the second year in a row, again without losing a set. He is now unbeaten in 31 matches indoors.Alcaraz was the better player in the first set and, at 6-5, held break point on two separate occasions. But both times, Sinner fought back then, in the tiebreak, upped his level to seize the advantage.At the start of the second, Alcaraz broke – the first time Sinner had lost his serve in the competition – but shortly afterwards, the Italian restored parity and from there, was by far the better player, the Spaniard perhaps struggling with a hamstring injury