Ministers urged to close £2bn tax loophole in car finance scandal

Ministers are being urged to close a loophole that will allow UK banks and specialist lenders to avoid paying £2bn in tax on their payouts to motor finance scandal victims.Under the current law, any operation that is not a bank can deduct compensation payments from their profits before calculating their corporation tax, reducing their bill.UK banks have been blocked from claiming this relief since 2015, but it has now emerged that those due to pay redress as part of the pending £11bn car loan compensation scheme can exploit it because their motor finance arms are considered “non-bank entities”.The Guardian has learned this includes the operations of big high street names including Barclays and Santander UK, and Lloyds Banking Group, which is the UK’s biggest provider of car loans through its Black Horse division.Specialist lenders in the scandal, which include the lending arms of car manufacturers such as Honda and Ford, also fall outside this taxation rule

Cloudflare admits ‘we have let the Internet down again’ after outage hits major web services – as it happened

Technical problems at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare today have taken a host of websites offline this morning.Cloudflare said shortly after 9am UK time that it “is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs [application programming interfaces – used when apps exchange data with each other].Cloudflare has also reported it has implemented a potential fix to the issue and is monitoring the results.But the outage has affected a number of websites and platforms, with reports of problems accessing LinkedIn, X, Canva – and even the DownDetector site used to monitor online service issues.Last month, an outage at Cloudflare made many websites inaccessible for about three hours

Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’

A single person claims to have authored 113 academic papers on artificial intelligence this year, 89 of which will be presented this week at one of the world’s leading conference on AI and machine learning, which has raised questions among computer scientists about the state of AI research.The author, Kevin Zhu, recently finished a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and now runs Algoverse, an AI research and mentoring company for high schoolers – many of whom are his co-authors on the papers. Zhu himself graduated from high school in 2018.Papers he has put out in the past two years cover subjects like using AI to locate nomadic pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa, to evaluate skin lesions, and to translate Indonesian dialects. On his LinkedIn, he touts publishing “100+ top conference papers in the past year”, which have been “cited by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and more”

Cloudflare apologises after latest outage takes down LinkedIn and Zoom

Cloudflare has apologised after an outage on Friday morning hit websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector, the company’s second outage in less than a month.“Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the internet down again,” it said in a blogpost, adding that it would release more information next week on how it aims to prevent these failures.The outage on Friday came after Cloudflare adjusted its firewall to protect customers from a widespread software vulnerability revealed earlier this week, and was not an attack, it said. Earlier, it said a separate issue had been reported with its application programming interfaces.The issue, which affected 28% of its traffic, lasted for half an hour and was resolved shortly after 9am GMT, it said

Australia v England: Ashes second Test, day four – live

Hear them fall! Atkinson plays a really poor shot off a short ball from Doggett and plinks an easy catch to a gleeful Steve Smith at midwicket. Such a soft dismissal with the plan clearly telegraphed and on the back of the resistance that had gone before. Atkinson has a Test match century to his name but that was poor, poor batting.72nd over: England 229-8 (Atkinson 2, Carse 2) Australia are buzzing now, I don’t think they were particularly worried before but with Stokes at the crease you just never know. Carse joins Atkinson in the middle and nudges for two off his first ball

‘What’s my life like away from rugby? Chaos’: Red Rose superstar Ellie Kildunne on confidence, cowboy dances and why it’s cool to be different

Kildunne is known for her startling speed and audacious tries, but there’s more to the talented full-back than rugby, from a passion for photography to a sideline in DIY tattooingEllie Kildunne says it’s not quite sunk in yet. A couple of months on from winning the Rugby Union World Cup with her England teammates, she’s still on a high. I ask if she slept with her winner’s medal by her bed the night they won. “That night?” She gives me a look. “It’s still by my bed