Stellantis takes €22bn hit after ‘overestimating’ pace of shift to EVs

The carmaker Stellantis has said it will take a €22bn (£19.1bn) charge and sell a stake in its battery joint venture after admitting that it “overestimated” the pace of the shift to electric vehicles.Shares in the European-based carmaker, which owns marques including Peugeot, Fiat, Jeep and Citroën, plunged after it said that the move was part of a reset of its business as it also admitted “poor operational execution”.Antonio Filosa, the chief executive of Stellantis, said: “The charges announced today largely reflect the cost of overestimating the pace of the energy transition that distanced us from many car buyers’ real-world needs, means and desires.“They also reflect the impact of previous poor operational execution, the effects of which are being progressively addressed by our new team

Price of average UK home passes £300,000 for first time, Halifax says

The average cost of a UK home passed £300,000 for the first time in January, as house prices increased at the fastest rate since November 2024.Data released by Halifax showed that house prices rose 0.7% month on month last month, the fastest rate since a 1.1% increase was recorded in November 2024. On an annual measure, prices grew 1%

TikTok could be forced to change app’s ‘addictive design’ by European Commission

TikTok could be forced into changes to make the app less addictive to users after the EU indicated the platform had breached the bloc’s digital safety rules.The EU’s executive arm said in a preliminary ruling that the popular app had infringed the Digital Services Act (DSA) due to its “addictive design”.The European Commission said TikTok, which has more than 1 billion users worldwide, had not adequately assessed how its design could harm the physical and mental wellbeing of users including children and vulnerable adults.By constantly “rewarding” users with new content, the Chinese-owned platform fuelled constant scrolling and shifted the brains of users into “autopilot mode”, the commission added, which could lead to compulsive behaviour and reduce users’ self-control.The preliminary ruling accused TikTok of ignoring indicators of compulsive use, such as the amount of time children spend on the app at night

Deepfake fraud taking place on an industrial scale, study finds

Deepfake fraud has gone “industrial”, an analysis published by AI experts has said.Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams – leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus – are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis from the AI Incident Database.It catalogued more than a dozen recent examples of “impersonation for profit”, including a deepfake video of Western Australia’s premier, Robert Cook, hawking an investment scheme, and deepfake doctors promoting skin creams.These examples are part of a trend in which scammers are using widely available AI tools to perpetuate increasingly targeted heists. Last year, a finance officer at a Singaporean multinational paid out nearly $500,000 to scammers during what he believed was a video call with company leadership

Winter Olympics 2026: opening ceremony at Milan’s San Siro and beyond – as it happened

And with that, 60,000 spectators at the San Siro slip into the night. Time for me to go bed too. The games proper start tomorrow, with Great Britain taking on Canada at 9.05am in the mixed curling. Thanks for your messages during this long, whacky, but quite lovely opening ceremony

Intimate and enormous: Milano Cortina opening ceremony tries something different

The showpiece to kick off the Games happened across multiple venues but politics and protests were also presentThe most striking thing about the opening ceremony isn’t a single prop, celebrity cameo or piece of choreography: it’s the geography. For the first time, an Olympic opening ceremony in effect happened across multiple live venues all at once, with Milan, Cortina, Livigno and Predazzo linked into one narrative structure. It felt less like a show in a stadium and more like watching a country perform itself in real time. The organising concept – “Armonia”, the idea that different elements can move together without losing their identity – isn’t just branding. It shapes how the ceremony actually functioned