Rachel Reeves, please, let’s make budgets boring again | Heather Stewart

Rachel Reeves should put us all out of our misery this Wednesday with a tax-and-spend statement bold enough to make future budgets boring again.Ask any economist or policy wonk and they’ll tell you the buildup to this year’s budget has been among the most drawn-out and chaotic they can remember.Treasury insiders are adamant they have maintained the same “Labour values” throughout and that Reeves first scribbled down her top three priorities – the NHS, the cost of living and the public debt – as long ago as July.But the combination of volatile bond markets, pass-or-fail fiscal rules, and Reeves’s decision to leave herself with less than £10bn of headroom against them, has led to months of uncertainty and indecision.It is not meant to be like this: aside from the agenda-setting first budget that follows a general election victory, and outside economic crises, (though goodness knows we have had plenty) budgets should be reassuringly dull

Bad season of bird flu in UK hits supply of Christmas turkeys

UK poultry producers are battling a “bad season” of bird flu, with cases much worse than at this point last year, putting a squeeze on supplies of Christmas birds including turkeys, chickens and ducks.Two industry insiders said they expected supplies of all poultry to be tight ahead of the festive season, especially for organic and free-range birds, which are seen as the most vulnerable to infection.There are also likely to be fewer heavier birds available as some producers have started processing them earlier to try to avoid the risk of infection.About 5% of the UK Christmas poultry flock, including turkeys, ducks and chickens, representing about 300,000 birds, are thought to have been culled so far this season.The current avian influenza outbreak has seen higher numbers of cases in the UK than last winter, although it is not yet as severe as 2022/23, which was the largest outbreak the country has ever experienced

Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI

When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts sayKrista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion on the ethics of artificial intelligence. As an AI worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk – a marketplace that allows companies to hire workers to perform tasks like entering data or matching an AI prompt with its output – Pawloski spends her time moderating and assessing the quality of AI-generated text, images and videos, as well as some factchecking.Roughly two years ago, while working from home at her dining room table, she took up a job designating tweets as racist or not. When she was presented with a tweet that read “Listen to that mooncricket sing”, she almost clicked on the “no” button before deciding to check the meaning of the word “mooncricket”, which, to her surprise, was a racial slur against Black Americans.“I sat there considering how many times I may have made the same mistake and not caught myself,” said Pawloski

Bro boost: women say their LinkedIn traffic increases if they pretend to be men

Do your LinkedIn followers consider you a “thought leader”? Do hordes of commenters applaud your tips on how to “scale” your startup? Do recruiters slide into your DMs to “explore potential synergies”?If not, it could be because you’re not a man.Dozens of women joined a collective LinkedIn experiment this week after a series of viral posts suggested that, for some, changing their gender to “male” boosted their visibility on the network.Others rewrote their profiles to be, as they put it, “bro-coded” – inserting action-oriented online business buzzwords such as “drive”, “transform” and “accelerate”. Anecdotally, their visibility also increased.The uptick in engagement has led some to speculate that an in-built sexism in LinkedIn’s algorithm means that men who speak in online business jargon are more visible on its platform

McLaren apologise to Norris, Piastri and fans for Las Vegas GP disqualification

McLaren have held their hands up and issued an apology to their drivers after their breach of Formula One regulations led to the disqualification of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, the two leading title contenders, from the Las Vegas Grand Prix, and putting the F1 drivers’ championship within the grasp of reigning champion, Max Verstappen.The race was won by the Red Bull driver but Norris took a strong second and Piastri fourth. However, four hours after the race and following an investigation by the FIA, both were disqualified after the skid blocks on the floor of their cars were found to have been worn down below the 9mm limit defined in the rules.“We apologise to Lando and Oscar for the loss of points today, at a critical time in their championship campaigns after two strong performances from them all weekend,” said McLaren’s team principal, Andrea Stella. “As a team, we also apologise to our partners and fans, whose support means so much

Verstappen back in F1 title race after Norris and Piastri disqualification follows his Las Vegas win

Max Verstappen swept to victory at the Las Vegas Grand Prix in dominant fashion, enough as he crossed the line to keep him just clinging on to hopes of retaining the world championship. But more than four hours after the race had concluded, the Dutchman found himself catapulted right back into the fight as the McLarens of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were disqualified.Norris had finished second and Piastri fourth, solid enough results to maintain an advantage over Verstappen, but two hours after the race the FIA announced it was investigating the wear on the skid blocks on their cars. They were found to be worn down beyond the limits of the regulations, leading to a double disqualification, as the rules around skid wear, which ensures the cars run at the prescribed height, are hard and fast and there are almost no mitigating circumstances.Verstappen, who had been 49 points behind Norris, has advanced to just 24 behind, the same deficit as Piastri, with two meetings remaining