UK borrowing costs jump again on fears Iran conflict will curb growth

UK borrowing costs jumped for a second day on Tuesday as the potentially damaging effects of the Iran conflict spooked investors concerned that growth will stall across the major industrial economies.Investors fear inflation will rise, driven by rising oil and gas prices, hitting businesses and households just as they are recovering from a long period of elevated inflation.Analysts said higher energy costs were likely to lead to price rises, forcing central banks to delay expected cuts in interest rates until later this year.Brent crude passed $83 a barrel on Tuesday, up from about $60 in December.The government had hoped that last month’s decline in inflation to 3% and a faster fall in Whitehall’s annual spending deficit would further push down the interest on UK debt

Dirty Business and the failure of privatised water | Letters

Since the 1989 privatisation of water in England and Wales we have treated water companies as cash machines, our rivers as sewers and our beaches as middens (Dirty water, death and decline: the inside story of a privatisation scandal, 28 February). Water is a monopoly on an essential resource and it once generated all the income necessary to maintain and update the system. Instead, for more than three decades, the profits from our rising bills have gone into the pockets of venture capitalists.This is one of the biggest robberies perpetrated on an unsuspecting population in recent times. We have lost safe access to the rivers and coastal waters for swimming and other recreation

Iran war heralds era of AI-powered bombing quicker than ‘speed of thought’

The use of AI tools to enable attacks on Iran heralds a new era of bombing quicker than “the speed of thought”, experts have said, amid fears human ­decision-makers could be sidelined.Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, was reportedly used by the US military in the barrage of strikes as the technology “shortens the kill chain” – meaning the process of target identification through to legal approval and strike launch.The US and Israel, which previously used AI to identify targets in Gaza, launched almost 900 strikes on Iranian targets in the first 12 hours alone, during which Israeli missiles killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.Academics studying the field say AI is collapsing the planning time required for complex strikes – a phenomenon known as “decision compression”, which some fear could result in human military and legal experts merely rubber-stamping automated strike plans.In 2024 the San Francisco-based Anthropic deployed its model across the US Department of War and other national security agencies to speed up war planning

Anthropic’s AI model Claude gets popularity boost after US military feud

The AI model Claude has surged in popularity after being blacklisted by the Pentagon last week over ethics concerns.Claude climbed to the No 1 spot on Apple’s chart of top free apps on Saturday in the US – dethroning OpenAI’s ChatGPT, just one day after the Pentagon tapped OpenAI to supply AI to classified military networks. The bot’s app climbed the iPhone app charts in the UK but did not beat out ChatGPT. Claude also raced up the Android charts in the US and UK, though ChatGPT reigned supreme, according to data from Sensor Tower.Claude and other apps by the startup Anthropic suffered outages early Monday amid what the company described as “unprecedented demand for Claude” over the last week

From the Pocket: AFL’s Final Siren documentary is slick but forgettable

You can’t turn on a television right now without stumbling across a football documentary. The highlight of the current crop is surely Adam Kingsley’s paint peeling spray at half-time of last year’s Sydney derby in the GWS Giants documentary No Holds Barred. It was reminiscent of Leyton Orient’s John Sitton berating his team of hapless, bewildered scrubbers in the 1990s. Unlike the Orient, Kingsley’s Giants responded well to the blast.Of all of them, Amazon Prime’s Final Siren: Inside the AFL had the biggest budget and the most hype

Dennis Cometti, Australian sports commentary great, dies aged 76

Dennis Cometti, one of the greats of Australian sports commentary, has died at the age of 76.The West Australian became known for his incisive calling, silky voice and sharp wit in front of a microphone over the course of a career spanning 51 years, which included stints with the ABC, Channel 7 and Channel 9.He was most well known for his work on Australian rules football, although he also commentated on other sports, including cricket and the Olympics. His career came to an end in 2021, when he called the AFL grand final for Triple M.Cometti was famous for the witty one-liners he delivered during games, which became affectionately known as Cometti-isms