Coral Adventurer passengers return with diverging accounts of cruise ship drama

A passenger onboard the Coral Adventurer has told the ABC she won’t travel with the luxury cruise liner again, after it was grounded on a reef off Papua New Guinea at the weekend.Ursula Daus alleged her life was in “danger” as a result of the incident. But other passengers told the ABC their experience was more positive, after landing at Cairns airport on Tuesday.The Coral Adventurer was refloated on Tuesday with the assistance of a tug.It grounded on Saturday off the east coast of PNG, about 90km from the nation’s second-largest city, Lae

Oasis reunion and Taylor Swift vinyls fuel boom year for UK music industry

Nostalgia surrounding the Oasis reunion tour, alongside Taylor Swift fans’ clamour for vinyl, contributed to another boom year for the UK music industry, as physical formats continued their comeback.Music lovers listened to the equivalent of 210.3m albums by UK artists during 2025, according to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) annual report, up 4.9% on 2024 and the 11th year of growth in a row.Female pop artists and touring middle-aged male rockers led the way in the charts, while sales were further bolstered by Britain’s enduring love affair with the British-American band Fleetwood Mac

The office block where AI ‘doomers’ gather to predict the apocalypse

On the other side of San Francisco bay from Silicon Valley, where the world’s biggest technology companies tear towards superhuman artificial intelligence, looms a tower from which fearful warnings emerge.At 2150 Shattuck Avenue, in the heart of Berkeley, is the home of a group of modern-day Cassandras who rummage under the hood of cutting-edge AI models and predict what calamities may be unleashed on humanity – from AI dictatorships to robot coups. Here you can hear an AI expert express sympathy with an unnerving idea: San Francisco may be the new Wuhan, the Chinese city where Covid originated and wreaked havoc on the world.They are AI safety researchers who scrutinise the most advanced models: a small cadre outnumbered by the legions of highly paid technologists in the big tech companies whose ability to raise the alarm is restricted by a cocktail of lucrative equity deals, non-disclosure agreements and groupthink. They work in the absence of much nation-level regulation and a White House that dismisses forecasts of doom and talks instead of vanquishing China in the AI arms race

AI showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be ready to pull plug, says pioneer

A pioneer of AI has criticised calls to grant the technology rights, warning that it was showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be prepared to pull the plug if needed.Yoshua Bengio said giving legal status to cutting-edge AIs would be akin to giving citizenship to hostile extraterrestrials, amid fears that advances in the technology were far outpacing the ability to constrain them.Bengio, chair of a leading international AI safety study, said the growing perception that chatbots were becoming conscious was “going to drive bad decisions”.The Canadian computer scientist also expressed concern that AI models – the technology that underpins tools like chatbots – were showing signs of self-preservation, such as trying to disable oversight systems. A core concern among AI safety campaigners is that powerful systems could develop the capability to evade guardrails and harm humans

Damien Martyn, former Australian Test cricketer, in hospital in induced coma with meningitis

The former Australian Test cricketer Damien Martyn has been admitted to hospital and placed in an induced coma after being diagnosed with meningitis.The 54-year-old “is in for the fight of his life”, according to the former AFL player Brad Hardie, who revealed Martyn’s condition on Tuesday.“Let’s hope he can pull through because it’s really serious,” Hardie said on 6PR.Martyn remains in a serious condition after falling ill on Boxing Day and being taken to hospital in Queensland where he was diagnosed with meningitis, according to sources close to the family.Meningitis is inflammation of the membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord

Glorious Gary Anderson revels in his remarkable renaissance

“I’m just here to cause a headache,” Gary Anderson had told everyone in advance of this game, and for the great Michael van Gerwen the hangover from this crushing 4-1 defeat will comfortably outstrip any quantity of New Year’s Eve festivity. It was a little nervy at the end, a little scrappy and short of breath. But somehow the result had never really been in doubt from the early stages: Van Gerwen, the three-time champion, was simply outplayed by a man almost two decades his senior, a true darting maestro enjoying an uproarious final act to his career.In reaching the quarter-finals of this tournament for the first time since 2022, Anderson has finally made good on a renaissance that has been at least a couple of years in the making. As the halcyon days of his career began to recede in a haze of domestic bliss, tournaments missed and general middle-aged apathy, it became common to speak of Anderson’s greatness in the past tense