UK households cut back spending at fastest rate in 18 months, Barclays says

Households cut back on their spending in April at the fastest pace in 18 months, as the conflict in the Middle East provoked fears of another cost of living crisis, a report from one of the UK’s biggest banks has suggested.Barclays, which processes nearly 40% of the UK’s credit and debit card transactions, said its data showed there had been a 0.1% fall in card spending last month compared with a year earlier. This was the first year-on-year fall since November 2024.The bank, which analyses the hundreds of millions of transactions made on its debit and credit cards each month, said non-essential spending fell by 0

BuzzFeed sold to Byron Allen, who will take over as CEO in $120m deal

BuzzFeed, the digital media pioneer that was once valued as high as $1.7bn amid a private equity-funded wave of interest in websites that generated massive amounts of online traffic in the 2010s, has finally changed hands for $120m.On Monday, the company announced that a controlling stake in the company has been sold to media entrepreneur Byron Allen. Allen, who often makes large, sometimes unsolicited bids for media companies, is also an on-screen personality in addition to controlling his Allen Media Group conglomerate, which owns networks including The Weather Channel. Allen’s show, Comics Unleashed, will replace the Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS’s schedule starting later this month

Texas accuses Netflix of spying on children in new lawsuit

Texas sued Netflix on Monday, accusing the streaming company of spying on children and designing its platform to be addictive.Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said Netflix has for years falsely represented to consumers that it did not collect or share user data, when it actually tracked and sold viewers’ habits and preferences to commercial data brokers and advertising technology companies, making billions of dollars a year.The Los Gatos, California-based company was also accused of quietly using “dark patterns” to keep users watching, including an autoplay feature that starts a new show when a different show ends. Netflix did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Texas’s complaint follows a spate of lawsuits targeting tech companies over features that the plaintiffs have said are addictive and dangerous to children

AI-powered hacking has exploded into industrial-scale threat, Google says

In just three months, AI-powered hacking has gone from a nascent problem to an industrial-scale threat, according to a report from Google.The findings from Google’s threat intelligence group add to an intensifying, global discussion about how the newest AI models are extremely adept at coding – and becoming extremely powerful tools for exploiting vulnerabilities in a broad array of software systems.It finds that criminal groups, as well as state-linked actors from China, North Korea and Russia, appear to be widely using commercial models – including Gemini, Claude and tools from OpenAI – to refine and scale up attacks.“There’s a misconception that the AI vulnerability race is imminent. The reality is that it’s already begun,” said John Hultquist, the group’s chief analyst

Iga Swiatek finds her flawless best to dismantle Naomi Osaka at Italian Open

Iga Swiatek produced a statement victory in a battle between two of the game’s best, mercilessly dismantling Naomi Osaka 6-2, 6-1 to return to the quarter-finals of the Italian Open.This was the type of confidence-building performance Swiatek, the fourth seed, has been seeking for some time. After a tense opening four games, the four-time French Open champion put together a near flawless match, winning 10 of the last 11 games. Swiatek found a sweet balance between stifling Osaka with her heavy topspin and offensive weaponry while also drawing errors from her adversary with her tireless consistency.In a match that pitted the six-time grand slam champion Swiatek versus the four-time major champion Osaka, this was by far the most eye-catching meeting of the tournament so far

‘You guys wanna see a dead body?’ The slow death of the Philadelphia 76ers’ Process era

The Sixers’ season ended in a humiliating sweep at the hands of the Knicks. There are reasons to believe the franchise can recover though“You guys wanna see a dead body?”Old heads remember that scene in Stand By Me, four boys hike through the Oregon wilderness to find the body of a dead boy. They walk for miles for the morbid prize of seeing something that can’t be unseen. When they finally arrive and stand over the body, nobody says a word. There’s nothing left to say