OBR challenges claims Reeves dropped income tax rise due to rosier forecasts

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has cast doubt on claims Rachel Reeves dropped plans to raise income tax in this week’s budget because of rosier forecasts, pointing out she knew about these well before the change of heart.In a move likely to exacerbate tensions with the Treasury, the OBR chair, Richard Hughes, has taken what he acknowledged was the “unusual step” of writing to the Treasury select committee to explain how its forecast evolved, “given the circumstances in this case”.Reeves’s budget was preceded by a flurry of speculation and briefing, even before the OBR accidentally made its documents available online earlier than intended on Wednesday.The chancellor took the rare step of delivering an early morning “scene setter” speech, on 4 November. This was widely interpreted as an attempt to clear the way for breaching the letter of Labour’s manifesto pledge on income tax by raising rates

Germany to urge EU to soften 2035 ban on sale of new petrol and diesel cars

The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is to urge the EU to soften the 2035 cutoff date for the sale of combustion-engine cars.Merz said he would send a letter to the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on Friday urging Brussels to keep technological options open for carmakers. The sale of new petrol and diesel cars in the EU is scheduled to be banned in a decade’s time.Merz’s letter hardens the battle lines emerging between Germany’s powerhouse car industry and those pleading with Brussels to stick to its flagship green policy, which is designed to help the EU meet its 2050 carbon-neutral target.“We’re sending the right signal to the commission with this letter,” Merz said, adding that the German government wanted to protect the climate in “a technology-neutral way”

One in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, NSPCC finds

Nearly one in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, with harms ranging from threatening to release intimate pictures to revealing details about someone’s personal life.The NSPCC child protection charity also found that one in five parents know a child who has experienced online blackmail, while two in five said they rarely or never talked to their children about the subject.The National Crime Agency has said that it is receiving more than 110 reports a month of child sextortion attempts, where criminal gangs trick teenagers into sending intimate pictures of themselves and then blackmail them.Agencies across the UK, US and Australia have confirmed a rising number of sextortion cases involving teenage boys and young adult males being targeted by cyber-criminal gangs based in west Africa or south-east Asia, some of which have ended in tragedy. Murray Dowey, a 16-year-old from Dunblane, Scotland, killed himself in 2023 after becoming a victim of sextortion on Instagram and Dinal De Alwis, 16, killed himself in Sutton, south London, in October 2022 after being blackmailed over nude photographs

Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation

Small changes to the tone of posts fed to users of X can increase feelings of political polarisation as much in a week as would have historically taken at least three years, research has found.A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk’s social platform to increase political division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were boosted, even barely perceptibly, in the feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters there was a large change in their unfavourable feelings towards the other side.The degree of increased division – known as “affective polarisation” – achieved in one week by the changes the academics made to X users’ feeds was as great as would have on average taken three years between 1978 and 2020.Most of the more than 1,000 users who took part in the experiment during the 2024 US presidential election did not notice that the tone of their feed had been changed.The campaign was marked by divisive viral posts on X, including a fake image of Kamala Harris cosying up to Jeffrey Epstein at a gala and an AI-generated image posted by Musk of Kamala Harris dressed as a communist dictator that had 84m views

From value-adds to networking superconductor: how the weird language of tech dulled sport | Aaron Timms

Finally, a sector more ludicrously hyped than AI. Speaking to Yahoo Sports recently about the launch of Project B, a startup global women’s basketball league, co-founder Grady Burnett declared that “women’s basketball is growing right now as fast as AI”. Come again? There’s no question that women’s basketball is growing nicely, a development that we should all cheer: this year’s WNBA season was the most watched ever. But it is testing credulity to suggest that the sport is growing at anything like the same speed as AI, which since 2022 has gone from the technological margins to the very center of the US economy: by some reports, AI spending accounted for half of the growth in US GDP in the first half of this year. Perhaps I’m missing the real story here and the Federal Reserve is actively keeping tabs on attendance figures at Washington Mystics v Golden State Valkyries games for signs of potential overheating in the US economy

Cummins out of Australia Ashes squad as Khawaja lays into state of Perth pitch

The opportunity that England squandered in Perth appears to have presented itself once more, after Australia opted to play it safe with Pat Cummins and name an unchanged squad for next week’s day-night second Test at the Gabba.Beyond their match-defining collapse on the second afternoon, one of the most galling aspects of England’s eight-wicket defeat in the first Test was the fact that Cummins and Josh Hazlewood – two members of Australia’s fabled fast bowling group – were missing. But the situation officially remains unchanged as Ben Stokes and his tourists look to level the five-match series starting in Brisbane on 4 December. Hazlewood is still absent with a hamstring injury, while Cummins has been held back despite a recent return to training that has included bowling with the pink Kookaburra ball.Cricket Australia offered no specifics regarding this delay for Cummins other than to say Australia’s Test captain will still travel with the squad