Oil prices fall after Trump says Venezuela will send up to 50m barrels to US

Global oil prices have fallen by more than 1% after Donald Trump said Venezuela would hand over 30m to 50m barrels of the country’s blockaded crude to the US.The deal would give the US president the power to sell up to $3bn (£2.2bn) worth of Venezuelan crude stranded in tankers and storage facilities into an already oversupplied global market.The move threatens to drag on oil prices, which last year recorded their steepest annual fall since the Covid pandemic and could plummet further as oil producers continue to pump more crude than needed by the global economy.The international benchmark, Brent crude, fell to just over $60 a barrel on Wednesday, while the US oil price fell by 1

Australia Post apologises for losing Aboriginal artist’s painting worth $4,000

Just before Christmas, Aboriginal artist Bobbi Lockyer packed up a precious painting she had spent more than a hundred hours on and sent it to her client.What arrived at the other end was an empty package.“It’s heartbreaking,” Lockyer, a Ngarluma, Kariyarra, Nyulnyul and Yawuru woman says. The award-winning artist is also angry at what she described as a “cut and paste” response from Australia Post.Sign up: AU Breaking News emailShe says a staff member instructed her on how to pack the $4,000 canvas, and that she sent it express post, with tracking

AI consciousness is a red herring in the safety debate | Letters

The concern expressed by Yoshua Bengio that advanced AI systems might one day resist being shut down deserves careful consideration (AI showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be ready to pull plug, says pioneer, 30 December). But treating such behaviour as evidence of consciousness is dangerous: it encourages anthropomorphism and distracts from the human design and governance choices that actually determine AI behaviour.Many systems can protect their continued operation. A laptop’s low-battery warning is a form of self-preservation in this sense, yet no one takes it as evidence that the laptop wants to live: the behaviour is purely instrumental, without experience or awareness. Linking self-preservation to consciousness reflects a human tendency to ascribe intentions and feelings to artefacts and not any intrinsic consciousness

Wave of Grok AI fake images of women and girls appalling, says UK minister

The UK technology secretary has called a wave of images of women and children with their clothes digitally removed generated by Elon Musk’s Grok AI “appalling and unacceptable in decent society”.After thousands of intimate deepfakes circulated online, Liz Kendall said X, Musk’s social media platform, needed to “deal with this urgently” and she backed the UK regulator Ofcom to “take any enforcement action it deems necessary”.“We cannot and will not allow the proliferation of these demeaning and degrading images, which are disproportionately aimed at women and girls,” she said. “Make no mistake, the UK will not tolerate the endless proliferation of disgusting and abusive material online. We must all come together to stamp it out

Jacob Bethell plays starring role in Ashes Wars Episode 5: A New Hope | Barney Ronay

Et in dystopia ego. In the midst of death, we are in life. On a throbbingly hot deep blue afternoon in Sydney, as this ghost ship of an England Ashes tour creaked towards its final dock, the fourth day of the fifth Test produced an unexpected late plot twist. Something good happened.Jacob Bethell batted for six hours from mid-morning to close of play and scored a hundred of rare beauty at the SCG

Bethell’s elegant first Test century presses pause on Australia’s Ashes party

It was good. So good. So unbelievably good. On the penultimate day of a tour packed with regret for England, a star was born as Jacob Bethell, 22 years young, compiled a truly golden hundred that offered hope for the future.There were no histrionics upon getting there either, no suggestion this was a maiden first-class century compiled in the heat of an Ashes Test