BHP walks away from latest takeover approach for mining rival Anglo – business live

Kaan Peker, analyst with RBC in Sydney, has said (via CNBC) that BHP’s latest approach for Anglo looks ‘a little messy’:“There’s probably a handful of times when assets like this are up for sale, so BHP may as well assess if the option is open. But it does look a little messy from the BHP side.BHP’s second failed approach for Anglo American does not suggest fears about the global economic outlook, argues Kathleen Brooks, research director at XTB, who says:There was also M&A news over the weekend. BHP made another offer for FTSE 100 miner Anglo American.The UK company is already in a $50bn merger with Teck Resources, which was designed, in part, to rebuff takeover attempts

Minister indicates sympathy for artists in debate over AI and copyright

People rightly want to get get paid for their work, says Liz Kendall, in apparent change of tack to predecessor The technology secretary, Liz Kendall, has indicated she is sympathetic to artists’ demands not to have their copyrighted works scraped by AI companies without payment and said she wanted to “reset” the debate.In remarks that suggest a change in approach from her predecessor, Peter Kyle, who had hoped to require artists to actively opt out of having their work ingested by generative AI systems, she said “people rightly want to get paid for the work that they do” and “we have to find a way that both sectors can grow and thrive in future”.The government has been consulting on a new intellectual property framework for AI which, in the case of the most common large language models (LLMs), requires vast amounts of training data to work effectively.The issue has sparked impassioned protests from some of Britain’s most famous artists. This month Paul McCartney released a silent two-minute 45 second track of an empty studio on an album protesting against copyright grabs by AI firms as part of a campaign also backed by Kate Bush, Sam Fender, the Pet Shop Boys and Hans Zimmer

Civil liberties groups call for inquiry into UK data protection watchdog

Dozens of civil liberties campaigners and legal professionals are calling for an inquiry into the UK’s data protection watchdog, after what they describe as “a collapse in enforcement activity” after the scandal of the Afghan data breach.A total of 73 academics, senior lawyers, data protection experts and organisations including Statewatch and the Good Law Project, have written a letter to Chi Onwurah, the chair of the cross-party Commons science, innovation and technology committee, coordinated by Open Rights Group, calling for an inquiry to be held into the office of the information commissioner, John Edwards.“We are concerned about the collapse in enforcement activity by the Information Commissioner’s Office, which culminated in the decision to not formally investigate the Ministry of Defence (MoD) following the Afghan data breach,” the signatories state. They warn of “deeper structural failures” beyond that data breach.The Afghan data breach was a particularly serious leak of information relating to individual Afghans who worked with British forces before the Taliban seized control of the country in August 2021

Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI

When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts sayKrista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion on the ethics of artificial intelligence. As an AI worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk – a marketplace that allows companies to hire workers to perform tasks like entering data or matching an AI prompt with its output – Pawloski spends her time moderating and assessing the quality of AI-generated text, images and videos, as well as some factchecking.Roughly two years ago, while working from home at her dining room table, she took up a job designating tweets as racist or not. When she was presented with a tweet that read “Listen to that mooncricket sing”, she almost clicked on the “no” button before deciding to check the meaning of the word “mooncricket”, which, to her surprise, was a racial slur against Black Americans.“I sat there considering how many times I may have made the same mistake and not caught myself,” said Pawloski

England plot route to Ashes recovery as Mark Wood admits they were ‘hit hard in round one’

Mark Wood has considered driving straight from Perth to Brisbane – a 2,500 mile (4,000 km) journey over four days – just to fill the extra time created by the chastening start to England’s much-hyped Ashes moonshot.The fast bowler was among a side left “shellshocked” by the galling batting collapse on the second day at Perth Stadium that allowed Australia to power to a one-nil series lead through Travis Head’s remarkable 69-ball century.A nervous flyer, and with the two-day finish having opened up an 11-day gap before the day-night second Test starts at the Gabba on 4 December, Wood went as far as to look into how long it would take to make the journey by road – only to realise the scale of the journey involved.“If I could drive across the country, I would,” said the 35-year-old, speaking to former teammate Stuart Broad on the For The Love Of Cricket podcast. “I did speak to a local who said if you go across the country, that’s a big danger

Does Travis Head’s knock deserve to be among the greatest ever Ashes innings? | Martin Pegan

Cometh the hour, cometh Travis Head. The always swashbuckling but recently out-of-sorts middle-order batter put his hand up and said, “I’ll do it”, as Australia were again left scrambling to find an opener to step in for Usman Khawaja in the first Test. The last-minute decision for Head to partner debutant Jake Weatherald at the top of the order and begin the fourth-innings run chase with England in command is the sort of after-the-fact masterstroke that fills the pages of Ashes history. But even with a backstory of heroic and match-defining knocks, few could have expected Head to flip the script in a Test that had seen just 468 runs scored as 30 wickets fell, with an onslaught that immediately etched its place in Ashes folklore as one of the great innings.Head rocketed to his 10th Test century from 69 balls – the second fastest in Ashes history, the third quickest by an Australian in Tests, and the most rapid in a fourth innings – and celebrated with a few casual twirls of his bat and a half-hearted fist pump