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UK will be second-fastest-growing G7 economy, IMF predicts

BBC News

The UK is forecast to be the second-fastest growing of the world's most advanced economies this year and next, according to new projections from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The rates of growth remain modest at 1.3% for both years, but that outperforms the other G7 economies apart from the US, in a torrid year of trade and geopolitical tensions. However, UK inflation is set to rise to the highest in the G7 in 2025 and 2026, the IMF predicts, driven by larger energy and utility bills. UK inflation is forecast to average 3.4% this year and 2.5% in 2026 but the IMF says this will be temporary, and fall to 2% by the end of next year. The G7 are seven advanced economies - the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan - but the group doesn't include fast-growing economies such as China and India.


Mark Cuban Would Still Have Dinner With Donald Trump

WIRED

The billionaire investor campaigned for Kamala Harris, but thinks tech execs have a "moral imperative" to play nice with the president. Back in May, Mark Cuban appeared in his last episode of ABC's after spending more than a decade on the show investing in--or deprecating--entrepreneurs' big ideas. But that doesn't mean the billionaire is going away. Yes, Cuban loves to talk--about ideas, about the future, about what it takes to actually make America healthy again. Or, at least, to get Americans more affordable drugs, which Cuban is endeavoring to do with his startup, Cost Plus Drug Company. Nor does Cuban, like many billionaire businessmen, shy away from talking politics: Does he like President Trump? But would he join the president for dinner like so many of his peers have in recent months? With enthusiasm, according to a conversation we had for this week's episode of . Keep reading to find out why. Just so you know--well it's too late now--we always start these conversations with some rapid-fire questions. What is the smartest investment you ever made? What's the dumbest purchase you ever made? Alright, one word to describe the startup pitches that you hate. Would you rather invest in passion or in numbers? Tell me a little bit about why.


California cracks down on water theft but spares data centers from disclosing how much they use

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. A data center stands in downtown Santa Clara. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have tracked data centers' growing water footprint in California. He says California is "well positioned" to support the data center boom, and he is reluctant to "impose rigid reporting requirements."


WHO warns of increase in antibiotic-resistant infections - with STIs, UTIs and gut bugs becoming harder to treat

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Hamas executes'collaborators' in Gaza as it clings to power amid fears Trump's peace deal is already at risk Internet star who demanded free seats for fat fliers vanished without trace... now the Daily Mail has learned the heartbreaking reason why Donald Trump tells crowds there are world leaders he'doesn't like at ALL' as he teases who they are How Diane Keaton's closest friend helped her to achieve her'lifelong ambition' just months before she died - and the poignant legacy it leaves Kate and Wills' fresh start at their'forever home': Why they have fast-tracked their move to house they will never leave - even when he becomes King'It's Meghan Markle 3.0': Why the duchess has set tongues wagging that she's plotting another Sussex relaunch'as she holds cosy meeting with new editor of US Vogue' Trump's ominous warning to Macron at Egypt summit: 'You will see what is about to happen' Neil Diamond, 84, sang Sweet Caroline and worked with Cher as well as Barbra Streisand... see him now Insiders reveal how reluctant Katy Perry finally gave in to'persistent' Justin Trudeau... as sexy yacht photos get spicy response from his ex-wife Awkward moment Donald Trump asks Giorgia Meloni'You won't be offended if I say you're beautiful, right? Horrors endured by Israel's last 20 hostages: Chained, tortured, and starved. Lindsey Halligan removes senior DOJ official after taking over Virginia US attorney's office Gorgeous Bay Area enclave filled with hippies becomes America's ANGRIEST town over plans for huge affordable housing project MLB fans hail'greatest play in baseball HISTORY' after Dodgers thought they hit grand slam in Brewers game Father launches campaign to become sheriff as he faces murder trial for killing teenage daughter's abuser Infections that are resistant to antibiotics continue to threaten global health, experts have warned--as hospitals report an alarming rise in the number of deaths driven by drug resistant strains. According to the World Health Organisation's (WHO) latest surveillance report, one in six bacterial infections were resistant to antibiotic treatments in 2023. Alarmingly, more than 40 per cent of antibiotics lost efficacy to treat common urinary tract, blood, gut and sexually-transmitted infections between 2018 and 2023, figures show.


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,328

Al Jazeera

Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Why are Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine a'red line' for Russia? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he will travel to Washington, DC, to meet his US counterpart, Donald Trump, on Friday. The main topics to be discussed will be air defence and long-range capabilities, Zelenskyy said in a message on his Telegram channel.


Private numbers of Australia PM and Donald Trump Jr publicly listed on website

BBC News

The private phone numbers of several high-profile figures including Australia's Prime Minister and Donald Trump Jr have been published on a US website. Both of their personal contact details remain publicly listed on the site, which uses AI to scrape the internet for information and the BBC has chosen not to name. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's office is aware of the situation - which was first reported by independent Australian media outlet Ette Media - and local authorities are investigating. A spokesman for Australia's opposition leader Sussan Ley, whose private number was also published, said the matter was obviously concerning and they had requested the information be removed. The site claims to have contact details for hundreds of millions of professionals and is used by recruiters and sales representatives.


Learning to sign changed my life after a brain injury

BBC News

As Tina walks onto the stage in front of hundreds of people she is beaming. She's collecting her British Sign Language (BSL) certificate which is the culmination of a journey that began with tragedy. Learning BSL has helped me say words that I cannot speak, she says. In 2018, while returning from a holiday, Tina fell down a flight of stairs and was in a coma for six weeks. The accident caused a traumatic brain injury that dramatically changed her life, leaving her struggling to speak.


Quantifying Information Disclosure During Gradient Descent Using Gradient Uniqueness

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Disclosing private information via publication of a machine learning model is often a concern. Intuitively, publishing a learned model should be less risky than publishing a dataset. But how much risk is there? In this paper, we present a principled disclosure metric called \emph{gradient uniqueness} that is derived from an upper bound on the amount of information disclosure from publishing a learned model. Gradient uniqueness provides an intuitive way to perform privacy auditing. The mathematical derivation of gradient uniqueness is general, and does not make any assumption on the model architecture, dataset type, or the strategy of an attacker. We examine a simple defense based on monitoring gradient uniqueness, and find that it achieves privacy comparable to classical methods such as DP-SGD, while being substantially better in terms of (utility) testing accuracy.


TRAJECT-Bench:A Trajectory-Aware Benchmark for Evaluating Agentic Tool Use

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language model (LLM)-based agents increasingly rely on tool use to complete real-world tasks. While existing works evaluate the LLMs' tool use capability, they largely focus on the final answers yet overlook the detailed tool usage trajectory, i.e., whether tools are selected, parameterized, and ordered correctly. We introduce TRAJECT-Bench, a trajectory-aware benchmark to comprehensively evaluate LLMs' tool use capability through diverse tasks with fine-grained evaluation metrics. TRAJECT-Bench pairs high-fidelity, executable tools across practical domains with tasks grounded in production-style APIs, and synthesizes trajectories that vary in breadth (parallel calls) and depth (interdependent chains). Besides final accuracy, TRAJECT-Bench also reports trajectory-level diagnostics, including tool selection and argument correctness, and dependency/order satisfaction. Analyses reveal failure modes such as similar tool confusion and parameter-blind selection, and scaling behavior with tool diversity and trajectory length where the bottleneck of transiting from short to mid-length trajectories is revealed, offering actionable guidance for LLMs' tool use.


MFTCXplain: A Multilingual Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating the Moral Reasoning of LLMs through Multi-hop Hate Speech Explanation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Ensuring the moral reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a growing concern as these systems are used in socially sensitive tasks. Nevertheless, current evaluation benchmarks present two major shortcomings: a lack of annotations that justify moral classifications, which limits transparency and interpretability; and a predominant focus on English, which constrains the assessment of moral reasoning across diverse cultural settings. In this paper, we introduce MFTCXplain, a multilingual benchmark dataset for evaluating the moral reasoning of LLMs via multi-hop hate speech explanation using the Moral Foundations Theory. MFTCXplain comprises 3,000 tweets across Portuguese, Italian, Persian, and English, annotated with binary hate speech labels, moral categories, and text span-level rationales. Our results show a misalignment between LLM outputs and human annotations in moral reasoning tasks. While LLMs perform well in hate speech detection (F1 up to 0.836), their ability to predict moral sentiments is notably weak (F1 < 0.35). Furthermore, rationale alignment remains limited mainly in underrepresented languages. Our findings show the limited capacity of current LLMs to internalize and reflect human moral reasoning