The shock resignation came for a very specific reason, but the OBR saga will continue with a series of decisions the chancellor will have to make over Richard Hughes' replacement. Firstly the Chancellor will have to find a respected and credible economist to run the OBR. There are several candidates, who might fit the mould of fiercely independent bean counters. The list will be carefully watched by the markets for any departure from the normal model. The problem is that there is some political pressure to do just that.

Budget 2025: What's the best and worst that could happen for Labour? Any big red box moment is risky. Now the chancellor's big choices are out there, what's the best-case scenario for Reeves and Starmer, and what's the worst that could happen next? On the positive side of the ledger, Labour MPs have gone off to their constituencies in a better mood this week. That is in large part down to the chancellor's decision to scrap the limit on bigger families getting some extra benefits.

Starmer could have scrapped child benefit cap last year - why did he wait? I can't remember when I last heard Sir Keir Starmer sounding so passionate. The prime minister's critics regularly lambast him for what they see as robotic or emotion-free communication, but you could not accuse him of that as we spoke on a post-Budget visit to a community centre in Rugby, Warwickshire. I could see it in his eyes and hear it in his tone. I have repeatedly said that I want my government to drive down child poverty.

For months Rachel Reeves has been schmoozing the biggest players in the UK government debt market to ensure the smooth passage of her plans. For months Rachel Reeves has been schmoozing the biggest players in the UK government debt market to ensure the smooth passage of her plans. Bond market power: why Rachel Reeves is keen to keep the £2.7tn'beast' onside Hugely influential traders will be hanging on the chancellor's every word when she announces her budget At just after 12.30pm on Wednesday, the machine will be listening, the trading algorithms ready, and billions of pounds of buy-and-sell orders stacked up awaiting Rachel Reeves's budget. For the first time on the London trading floor of Deutsche Bank, a custom-built artificial intelligence tool will tune in to the chancellor's speech. It will transcribe her words, spot shifts in tone and spit out alerts when the numbers deviate from expectations.

The Business Secretary has insisted the government is making it easier for businesses by reducing red tape. Peter Kyle defended Labour's approach to business, telling the BBC it will implement changes in a way that is pro-worker and pro-business. Ahead of next month's Budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves is launching a crackdown on needless form-filling for businesses at the first-ever Regional Investment Summit in Birmingham. The government has been criticised by firms who say increased employers' National Insurance contributions and the Employment Rights Bill add to the burdens facing businesses. The Chancellor will say at the Birmingham summit on Tuesday that the changes will save firms almost £6bn a year.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has held talks with Germany's Friedrich Merz in Berlin, days after the newly installed chancellor said Kyiv's Western allies had lifted range restrictions on their missiles and would allow Ukraine to use them to strike deep inside Russian territory. Merz made the announcement on Monday as Russia carried out heavy aerial bombardments on Ukraine and both sides launched tit-for-tat drone attacks. That comment sparked hope in Kyiv and put renewed attention on the possibility of Germany supplying Ukraine with Taurus missiles, which the war-wracked country has long requested. However, Merz, in a joint appearance with Zelenskyy on Wednesday, promised the Ukrainian leader that Germany would help his country develop long-range missiles on its territory. He did not make any commitments regarding the Taurus.

A stuttering economy, spiralling government borrowing costs, plummeting approval ratings: little wonder perhaps senior ministers, not least the chancellor, aren't wasting many smiles these days. Remember too Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are the duo that best personify the Labour project of the 2020s; the party's revival and return, grounded in being trusted on the economy. And yet the markets are collectively passing a verdict on Starmer and Reeves's economic plan right now and it isn't exactly a ringing endorsement – and wobbly markets can prompt political wobbles. These shouldn't be overstated, but neither should they be ignored. What we're witnessing is the brutal slog of government playing out; an unforgiving backdrop of economic flatlining, which critics say ministers have made worse.

Tech entrepreneurs will leave the UK "en masse" if the chancellor announces a significant increase in capital gains tax at this month's budget, according to a leading industry investor. Harry Stebbings, a British podcaster turned investor who raised a 400m ( 310m) fund this week, said the UK was "a bad place to do business" because of its tax environment. The Guardian reported last week that the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was considering raising capital gains tax (CGT) to between 33% and 39% in the budget on 30 October. Stebbings said plans to scrap the non-dom tax regime had also sent a negative signal but an increase in CGT – which is levied on the sale of assets such as shares and second homes – would pose the most serious concern to entrepreneurs. "The stance on capital gains tax is by far the biggest [issue]," he told the Guardian.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. UC chancellors get big raises, putting them between $785,000 and nearly $1.2 million The UC regents approved pay raises for seven chancellors at their September meeting. At UC Irvine, above, the chancellor will earn $895,000 a year, effective this month. University of California chancellors will get big salary boosts -- near or exceeding 30% in most cases -- as the Board of Regents agreed Thursday that higher pay was needed to bring leaders of the nation's top public university system closer to what their peers earn. The increases, which will be paid through private sources rather than tuition dollars or state funding, are effective this month and will vary by campus.

We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is trained on a sentence of the form "A is B", it will not automatically generalize to the reverse direction "B is A". This is the Reversal Curse. For instance, if a model is trained on "Olaf Scholz was the ninth Chancellor of Germany", it will not automatically be able to answer the question, "Who was the ninth Chancellor of Germany?". Moreover, the likelihood of the correct answer ("Olaf Scholz") will not be higher than for a random name. Thus, models exhibit a basic failure of logical deduction and do not generalize a prevalent pattern in their training set (i.e. if "A is B'' occurs, "B is A" is more likely to occur). We provide evidence for the Reversal Curse by finetuning GPT-3 and Llama-1 on fictitious statements such as "Uriah Hawthorne is the composer of 'Abyssal Melodies'" and showing that they fail to correctly answer "Who composed 'Abyssal Melodies?'". The Reversal Curse is robust across model sizes and model families and is not alleviated by data augmentation. We also evaluate ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) on questions about real-world celebrities, such as "Who is Tom Cruise's mother? [A: Mary Lee Pfeiffer]" and the reverse "Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?". GPT-4 correctly answers questions like the former 79% of the time, compared to 33% for the latter. This shows a failure of logical deduction that we hypothesize is caused by the Reversal Curse. Code is available at https://github.com/lukasberglund/reversal_curse.