UK job vacancies ‘fall to lowest level since pandemic’

The number of job vacancies in the UK has tumbled to the lowest level in five years, research suggests, falling to levels not seen since the pandemic.The number of jobs being advertised slid by 3% in January to 695,000, according to the job search site Adzuna, marking the first time advertised vacancies have dropped below 700,000 since January 2021.Graduate jobs fell below 10,000 for the first time since Adzuna began tracking this in 2016.The research comes days after official figures showed unemployment in the UK had risen to a five-year high of 5.2%, at a time when wage growth is slowing and concerns are increasing that young people are bearing the brunt of the slowdown in hiring

Lamborghini pulls plug on plans to launch all-electric supercar

The Italian supercar manufacturer Lamborghini has abandoned plans to make all-electric vehicles, and will instead focus on making plug-in hybrid cars, after a drop-off in demand for EVs among its wealthy clientele.Lamborghini unveiled its first all-electric concept car, the Lanzador, in 2023, but it is no longer planning to put it into production.The carmaker’s chief executive, Stephan Winkelmann, told the Sunday Times that developing EVs risked becoming an “an expensive hobby” for the brand, given that the “acceptance curve” for battery-powered cars among its customer base was getting “close to zero”.Winkelmann said the Lanzador would be replaced by a plug-in hybrid, meaning its range would consist only of plug-in hybrids by 2030. In the meantime, the company would continue to build combustion engine vehicles for “as long as possible”, he added

US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land: ‘I’m not for sale’

When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company”, sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement.More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2

Amazon’s cloud ‘hit by two outages caused by AI tools last year’

Amazon’s huge cloud computing arm reportedly experienced at least two outages caused by its own artificial intelligence tools, raising questions about the company’s embrace of AI as it lays off human employees.A 13-hour interruption to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) operations in December was caused by an AI agent, Kiro, autonomously choosing to “delete and then recreate” a part of its environment, the Financial Times reported.AWS, which provides vital infrastructure for much of the internet, suffered several outages last year.One incident, in October, downed dozens of sites for hours and prompted discussion over the concentration of online services on infrastructure owned by a few massive companies. AWS has won 189 UK government contracts worth £1

Even greater heights await Australia’s Winter Olympians after success of Milano Cortina Games | Kieran Pender

More than half of the 50-odd Australians who featured in Italy this month were Olympic debutants, suggesting a bright future aheadAustralia’s golden 2026 Winter Olympics campaign ended on Sunday not with a medal, but with a thrilling view of the future. Following the nation’s most successful Winter Games of all time, the denouement suggested that this might just be the beginning.Sixteen-year-old Indra Brown’s fifth place in the freestyle skiing halfpipe on the final day of Milano Cortina was a fitting conclusion to a remarkable Games for team Australia. While Brown missed out on a medal, her performance – just 5.5 points off the podium – was historic all the same

‘Hockey’s not hockey any more’: did three-on-three overtime ruin Canada’s Olympics?

Two Olympic finals between Canada and the US were settled by sudden death. The format made the showpieces feel more like a coin toss than a climaxTwo Olympic finals against the US, two strong performances, two sudden-death losses. Canada is so over overtime.While all good things must come to an end, it’s hard to fathom why hockey’s international rule-makers think that the very best things – huge clashes that were some of the hottest tickets of the entire Olympics – should be ended using three-on-three golden-goal overtime, a concept beloved only by people with a train to catch or firm dinner reservations.Forty-six years after the Miracle on Ice, the US men and women celebrated with a pair of huge assists from the Misrule on Ice