VAT will be cut from household electricity bills, the government has announced, as part of new Prime Minister Andy Burnham's pledge to help with the cost of living. The reduction from 5% VAT to zero will come into effect on 1 October, saving a typical household about £45 a year. Ministers said it would be funded by savings from the cancellation of the digital ID programme, which was going to cost £1.8bn The government estimated it will cost £850m this financial year . But Labour's Darren Jones, who was sacked as chief secretary to the prime minister on Monday, accused the government of announcing an unfunded tax cut.

Women use A.I. less than men and do more of the cognitive work at home. The A.I. "family assistant" promises to bridge both divides. In a promotional video for Ollie, an A.I. family assistant, one of the company's founders, Bill Lennon, is about to announce his new venture in front of a camera crew when his phone starts pinging. "THE BABY JUST ON THE CARPET / like A LOT / WHILE I WAS ON ZOOM W AN INVESTOR." Then, a somewhat anticlimactic follow-up: "My sister coming for dinner btw did I tell you???" Lennon does not respond directly to these messages, which are presumably from his wife.

Each year the AAAI recognizes a group of individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence by appointing them as Fellows. We're talking to some of the 2026 AAAI Fellows to find out more about their work. In this interview, we chat to Sanmay Das, who was elected as a Fellow . Could you start with a quick introduction, where you work, and your general area of research? Broadly speaking, I work in multiagent systems. I've done a lot of work at the intersection of AI and economics, and over the last decade or so I've thought a lot about projects in the AI for social impact and social good space. In particular, my interest has been in the allocation of scarce societal resources, thinking about how AI can be integrated, and what it tells us about systems where we don't necessarily want full free market resource allocation.

Datacentre industry representatives disputed the findings and said the sector boosted the economy. Datacentre industry representatives disputed the findings and said the sector boosted the economy. 'Hidden datacentre tax' costing Irish households millions, report says Datacentres used 22% of country's electricity last year, pushing up household bills, study suggests Thu 28 May 2026 09.01 EDTLast modified on Thu 28 May 2026 09.32 EDT Energy demand by datacentres in Ireland has added hundreds of euros to household electricity bills in a pattern that could be replicated across Europe, according to a report. Ireland's growing number of datacentres last year used 22% of the country's electricity, more than all urban homes combined, according to the Central Statistics Office. The equivalent figure in the US and UK is 6%.

The use of residential photovoltaics has increased dramatically in recent years. With battery systems becoming more affordable, the optimal operation of a photovoltaic-battery system can bring significant savings to households. Optimal control requires correct forecasts of underlying parameters, such as photovoltaic power generation, to schedule the battery. While forecasting models have become increasingly accurate due to algorithmic advances and data availability, accuracy is typically measured in generic metrics which might not align with the downstream application. This study proposes a decision-focused learning framework that integrates optimization and prediction by training a Long Short-Term Memory photovoltaic energy forecaster on the downstream optimal scheduling of a battery system. The proposed methodology is compared against a standard two-phase approach. Across a 14-month evaluation period, the decision-focused method reduced average electricity costs across twenty buildings by 3.6% when normalized against performance bounds defined by a perfect forecast and a baseline of no optimization. Critically, this financial improvement was achieved despite the model exhibiting a root mean squared error of 19.9%, significantly higher than the decoupled model's 8.2%. Warm-starting the decision-focused model further improves results, lowering average cost by approximately 8%, while also mitigating the negative impact on statistical accuracy (root mean squared error of 13.7%). The findings are statistically significant at the 0.001 level across the twenty households and for each household individually. These results demonstrate that aligning forecast models with optimization goals is key for achieving cost advantages in PV-battery systems. Future research should replicate these findings on other datasets, alternate forecasting models and alternate optimization algorithms.

The new'AI-powered' healthcare system appears to penalise the poorest. The new'AI-powered' healthcare system appears to penalise the poorest. An AI system used to predict how much Kenyans can afford to pay for access to healthcare, has systemically driven up costs for the poor, an investigation has found. The healthcare system being rolled out across the country, a key electoral promise of President William Ruto, was launched in October 2024 and intended to replace Kenya's decades-old national insurance system. Billed as " accelerating digital transformation ", it aimed to expand access to care to Kenya's large informal economy: the day labourers, hawkers, farmers and non-salaried workers that make up 83% of its workforce.

Work todate has highlighted the challenges inmitigating bias within these datasets.

How dangerous is the US standoff with Venezuela? Is the US economy strong heading into 2026? As the United States economy heads into 2026, the report card emerging on its performance is complicated. By many measures, the world's largest economy appears to be in a strong position. After a tumultuous year marked by President Donald Trump's return to the White House and his swing towards tariffs and protectionism, recent growth has outpaced the expectations of most analysts.

What is in the 28-point US plan for Ukraine? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Can the US get all sides to end the war? Why is Europe opposing Trump's peace plan? Two people were killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on the Russian city of Saratov, regional Governor Roman Busargin said in a statement on Telegram. An unspecified number of people were also injured in the attack.