The K-shaped Christmas: wealthy few drive holiday spending splurge while many struggle to get by

A soaring stock market rewards the already well-off but Trump’s handling of the economy has caused his approval ratings to plungeEntering Printemps in downtown New York City feels like an escape. A slight smell of musk hangs in the air as shoppers weave carefully around racks of coats and shelves of handbags and shoes. For the holidays, the store set up a small ice rink on its second floor where skaters perform on weekends.The French luxury retail emporium opened its first New York outlet earlier this year and has said it wants shoppers to feel so comfortable that it feels like their own chic “French apartment”. The store has a bar upstairs, along with a roving champagne cart, and encourages shoppers to sip on their drinks while they browse

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

A robot walks into a bar: can a Melbourne researcher get AI to do comedy?

Robots can make humans laugh – mostly when they fall over – but a new research project is looking at whether robots using AI could ever be genuinely funny.If you ask ChatGPT for a funny joke, it will serve you up something that belongs in a Christmas cracker: “Why don’t skeletons fight each other? Because they don’t have the guts.”The University of Melbourne’s Dr Robert Walton, a dean’s research fellow in the faculty of fine arts and music, is taking a different approach to working out whether robots can do comedy.Thanks to an Australian Research Council grant of about $500,000, he will train a swarm of robots in standup. And, at least in the beginning, they won’t use words

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”

Britain’s Norris pips Verstappen to win maiden F1 world title after third place in Abu Dhabi – as it happened

Time to wave the chequered flag on today’s live blog, and a thrilling F1 season. I’ll leave you with Giles’ Richards race report. Thanks for joining me – see you in March for the Australian Grand Prix. Bye!And here’s Oscar Piastri, who won four of the first six races but ultimately came up short. “We gave it everything, a bit of a gamble on strategy to try and win the race and the championship

Steel, courage and a sense of humour: how Lando Norris claimed his first F1 title

After blows in mid-season the British driver rallied to hold off the challenge of teammate Oscar Piastri and a stunning late run from Max Verstappen to make history in Abu Dhabi “Just want to go have a burger and go home,” was the disconsolate entreaty from Lando Norris when he felt his Formula One world championship hopes had taken a mortal blow after he failed to finish at the Dutch Grand Prix in August. Yet it was testament to the resolution he has shown all season that while down, he was far from out as he proved in going on to claim the title that he felt had slipped away.When Norris took the world championship with his third place in Abu Dhabi on Sunday he became the first British world champion since Lewis Hamilton took his last title in 2020 and, similar to Hamilton’s first in 2008, he had to show his absolute determination to close it out in what has been a rollercoaster ride for the 26-year-old.Quite apart from what has been a gruelling test of his driving ability across a season marked by intense competition, the level of emotional and psychological control Norris has had to demonstrate must not be underestimated.He had gone in as favourite back in Melbourne for the opening race but for great swathes of this season he has been under the cosh