Keir Starmer to make Iceland boss Richard Walker a Labour peer

The formerly Conservative-supporting boss of the supermarket Iceland is to be made a Labour peer when the party appoints another 25 representatives to parliament’s upper house later this month.Keir Starmer will appoint Richard Walker to the House of Lords, the Guardian understands, the culmination of an unusual and rapid political transformation for someone named as a prospective Tory MP candidate a little over three years ago.It was only February this year when Iceland’s executive chair was rating Starmer’s government six out of 10, saying that Labour needed to focus on “inclusive growth and everyday growth” that could “trickle down in everyday people’s lives”.As a Labour peer, Walker will get the chance to push for policies close to his heart including closer relations with the EU and also for a more positive message on the economy.He took over the leadership of Iceland in 2023 after his father, Malcolm Walker, stepped down from the frozen foods chain he had founded in 1973

Bill Kingdom obituary

My husband, Bill Kingdom, who has died aged 69, was a global leader in water supply and sanitation. He worked for 20 years with the World Bank, based in Washington DC from 1999 to 2019, where he led urban and rural water supply and sanitation projects. He developed innovative financial and governance frameworks in south and east Asia, southern Africa, and the Middle East. His work provided access to clean and affordable water for some of the poorest people in the world.Bill’s early career was with Mott MacDonald, the engineering consultants based in Cambridge, from 1978 to 1986

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”

Packers v Bears, Cardinals v Rams, Bills defeat Bengals in thriller: NFL week 14 – live

TOUCHDOWN! Cardinals 17-45 Rams 11:08, 4th quarterJacoby Brissett makes it very slightly more respectable with a 14-yard strike to Michael Wilson.Raiders 17-24 Broncos, final scoreDenver dial up a 10th win in succession to keep firm control of the AFC West at 11-2. LA Chargers are three games behind but can knock it down to two on Monday night. They also sit beside the Patriots at the very top of the conference standings.D’Andre Swift zips up to the goal line and his mate Caleb Williams finishes it off with a short floated throw to Colston Loveland

Lando Norris proud of winning first F1 drivers’ championship ‘my way’

Lando Norris said he is proud of the way he went about winning his first Formula One world championship, stating after an emotional celebration with his McLaren team and family that he was glad he “won it my way”.Norris emphasised that he felt he had raced fairly and without being overly aggressive, an approach for which he has received criticism in not demonstrating the much eulogised “killer instinct”, which he believes he has proved is not necessary by claiming the title.Norris finished in third at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, enough to secure the world drivers’ championship by two points from Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, who won the race but could not overcome Norris’s 12-point advantage.The 26-year-old Briton has been explicit all season that he felt he could win the title and still drive clean, and he felt he had made his point.“That’s one of the things that makes me most proud,” Norris said