Who is James Murray, the new health secretary replacing Wes Streeting? From a high-profile, media-friendly Secretary of State to a relatively unknown MP, the departure of Wes Streeting and arrival of James Murray has raised eyebrows in the health and political worlds. It is one of the biggest Cabinet jobs with the largest public service departmental budgets. There will be a steep learning curve with no time for preparation away from the front line. Murray says he's deeply honoured to be appointed to the brief and continue Wes Streeting's brilliant work on such a critical mission, but who is he, and what issues will he face in his in tray?

How a gift for shooting the shit turned into an online empire--and a political force. Trust in American mass media has plummeted; more than three thousand newspapers have disappeared in the past two decades, and many people get their news from social platforms. In this chaotic media multiverse, Rogan has emerged as a figure of singular influence. For a long time, I stayed up through the night listening to tall-tale tellers, U.F.O. I could not get enough of it. I was a fairly ordinary kid, Jersey-born, but the house I lived in was shadowed by illness. My mother had been diagnosed with a debilitating neurological disease when she was in her early thirties. Every year, she got worse. During the day, I wanted nothing more than to please my mother, do well in school, lighten her load. At night, I wanted only to climb into the shelter of my bed and turn on the radio. I was hungry for elsewhere, for other lives--for what was being said down the street, over the bridge, beyond the horizon. On clear nights, the signal was strong. You could hear the country expressing itself incessantly: everyone was phoning in, suggesting three-way trades, bitching about the mayor, speaking in tongues, raging, joking, climbing out on a ledge and threatening to jump. When I wanted a few hours of sleep before school, I tuned in to a ballgame on the West Coast. The staticky murmur of the crowd in Anaheim or Chavez Ravine was a sure slide to oblivion. Mostly, though, I wanted nothing to do with sleep. Mostly, I was tuned in, midnight to five-thirty, to "The Long John Nebel Show."

'Children could become attached to a bot rather than a person or imaginary friend, which could hurt their development.' 'Children could become attached to a bot rather than a person or imaginary friend, which could hurt their development.' Advocates are fighting against the $16.7bn global smart-toy market, decrying surveillance and a lack of regulation As the holiday season looms into view with Black Friday, one category on people's gift lists is causing increasing concern: products with artificial intelligence. The development has raised new concerns about the dangers smart toys could pose to children, as consumer advocacy groups say AI could harm kids' safety and development. The trend has prompted calls for increased testing of such products and governmental oversight.

AI startup Anthropic's recent announcement that it detected the world's first artificial intelligence-led hacking campaign has prompted a multitude of responses from cybersecurity experts. In a report on Friday, Anthropic said its assistant Claude Code was manipulated to carry out 80-90 percent of a "large-scale" and "highly sophisticated" cyberattack, with human intervention required "only sporadically". Anthropic, the creator of the popular Claude chatbot, said the attack aimed to infiltrate government agencies, financial institutions, tech firms and chemical manufacturing companies, though the operation was only successful in a small number of cases. The San Francisco-based company, which attributed the attack to Chinese state-sponsored hackers, did not specify how it had uncovered the operation, nor identify the "roughly" 30 entities that it said had been targeted. Roman V Yampolskiy, an AI and cybersecurity expert at the University of Louisville, said there was no doubt that AI-assisted hacking posed a serious threat, though it was difficult to verify the precise details of Anthropic's account.

Paedophiles, scammers, hackers and criminals of all kinds are increasingly exploiting artificial intelligence (AI) to target victims in new and harmful ways, a senior police chief has warned. Alex Murray, the national police lead for AI, said that the use of the technology was growing rapidly because of its increasing accessibility and that police had to "move fast" to keep on top of the threat. "We know through the history of policing that criminals are inventive and will use anything they can to commit crime. They're certainly using AI to commit crime now," he said. "It can happen on an international and serious organised crime scale, and it can happen in someone's bedroom … You can think of any crime type and put it through an AI lens and say: 'What is the opportunity here?'"

This paper introduces a novel pipeline for summarising timelines of events reported by multiple news sources. Transformer-based models for abstractive summarisation generate coherent and concise summaries of long documents but can fail to outperform established extractive methods on specialised tasks such as timeline summarisation (TLS). While extractive summaries are more faithful to their sources, they may be less readable and contain redundant or unnecessary information. This paper proposes a preference-based reinforcement learning (PBRL) method for adapting pretrained abstractive summarisers to TLS, which can overcome the drawbacks of extractive timeline summaries. We define a compound reward function that learns from keywords of interest and pairwise preference labels, which we use to fine-tune a pretrained abstractive summariser via offline reinforcement learning. We carry out both automated and human evaluation on three datasets, finding that our method outperforms a comparable extractive TLS method on two of the three benchmark datasets, and participants prefer our method's summaries to those of both the extractive TLS method and the pretrained abstractive model. The method does not require expensive reference summaries and needs only a small number of preferences to align the generated summaries with human preferences.

Police will use live facial recognition technology in Cardiff during the Beyoncé concert on Wednesday, despite concerns about racial bias and human rights. The technology will be used in Cardiff city centre, but not at the stadium, to "support" the artist's concert at the Principality stadium by identifying wanted individuals and ensuring safeguarding, South Wales police said, as the artist kicks off the UK leg of her first solo headline tour in seven years. A spokesperson for the force said the technology would be used in the city centre, not at the concert itself. In the past, police use of live facial recognition (LFR) in England and Wales had been limited to special operations such as football matches or the coronation, when there was a crackdown on protesters. Daragh Murray, a senior lecturer of law at Queen Mary University in London, said the normalisation of invasive surveillance capability at events such as a concert was concerning, and was taking place without any real public debate.

Fox News contributor Douglas Murray joined'Fox & Friends' to discuss why Musk and other experts are calling for a halt to artificial intelligence systems for six months. In an open letter, tech experts and leaders in the industry called for a six-month pause on AI experiments, a move that Fox News contributor Douglas Murray believes shows a "deep concern" that is growing about the risks of artificial intelligence. The letter, which was signed by Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, reads, in part: "AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society … and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care. Murray said on "Fox & Friends" Wednesday that the request for a moratorium is extraordinary and is a sign that experts are worried. I INTERVIEWED CHATGPT AS IF IT WAS A HUMAN; HERE'S WHAT IT HAD TO SAY THAT GAVE ME CHILLS "The fact that there has now been this stressing that we could be in trouble.

Southwest Airlines Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson will apologize on Thursday before a U.S. Senate committee over the holiday meltdown that led to the cancellation of 16,700 flights and pledge changes to ensure that there will be no repeats. "Let me be clear: we messed up. In hindsight, we did not have enough winter operational resilience," Watterson's written testimony for a U.S. Senate Commerce Committee hearing seen by Reuters says. In other written testimony seen by Reuters, Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) President Casey Murray will tell the committee that the low-cost carrier's "overconfidence" in planning and a "systemic failure to provide modern tools" were responsible for the December meltdown that the union said stranded 2 million passengers and is estimated to have cost it more than $1 billion. Murray will tell the committee that pilots "have been sounding the alarm about (Southwest's) inadequate crew scheduling technology and outdated operational processes for years. Unfortunately, those warnings were summarily ignored."