‘Mortified’ OBR chair hopes inquiry into budget leak will report next week

The chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility has said he felt mortified by the early release of its budget forecasts as the watchdog launched a rapid inquiry into how it had “inadvertently made it possible” to see the documents.Richard Hughes said he had written to the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and the chair of the Treasury select committee, Meg Hillier, to apologise.“I felt personally mortified by what happened. The OBR prides itself on our professionalism. We let people down yesterday and we’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme

UK retailers urge faster end to tax break on low-value imported goods

British retailers including Primark, Currys and Boohoo have criticised the government for waiting until 2029 to end a tax break on low-value imported goods that has allowed them to be undercut by the likes of Shein and Temu.The British Retail Consortium, which represents all the major retailers, said there were 1.6m parcels arriving in the UK every day, double the number from last year, and “businesses cannot afford any delay on scrapping the existing rules”.The “de minimis” rule allows overseas sellers to send goods valued at £135 or less direct to British shoppers without paying customs duty and has been criticised for “killing the high street”.Fears about China’s retailers and manufacturers dumping goods in the UK have grown since the US in May revoked its own de minimis exception for Chinese-made goods

Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation

Small changes to the tone of posts fed to users of X can increase feelings of political polarisation as much in a week as would have historically taken at least three years, research has found.A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk’s social platform to increase political division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were boosted, even barely perceptibly, in the feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters there was a large change in their unfavourable feelings towards the other side.The degree of increased division – known as “affective polarisation” – achieved in one week by the changes the academics made to X users’ feeds was as great as would have on average taken three years between 1978 and 2020.Most of the more than 1,000 users who took part in the experiment during the 2024 US presidential election did not notice that the tone of their feed had been changed.The campaign was marked by divisive viral posts on X, including a fake image of Kamala Harris cosying up to Jeffrey Epstein at a gala and an AI-generated image posted by Musk of Kamala Harris dressed as a communist dictator that had 84m views

Foreign interference or opportunistic grifting: why are so many pro-Trump X accounts based in Asia?

When X rolled out a new feature revealing the locations of popular accounts, the company was acting to boost transparency and clamp down on disinformation. The result, however, has been a circular firing squad of recriminations, as users turn on each other enraged by the revelation that dozens of popular “America first” and pro-Trump accounts originated overseas.The new feature was enabled over the weekend by X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, who called it the first step in “securing the integrity of the global town square.” Since then many high-engagement accounts that post incessantly about US politics have been “unmasked” by fellow users.An Ivanka Trump fan account that posts about illegal immigration to the US was shown to be based in Nigeria

NFL on Thanksgiving: Cowboys v Chiefs updates, Lions 24-31 Packers – live

It’s GOOD! Cowboys 20-14 Chiefs 4:09, 3rd quarterPrescott and Lamb fail to connect on 3rd down. Dallas try and draw Kansas City offsides. Try and fail. Brandon Aubrey steps up, nails the 36-yard boot.TOUCHDOWN overturned! Cowboys 17-14 Chiefs 4:12, 3rd quarterThe Cowboys make it out of their end zone this time

Fuzzy Zoeller, two-time major winner haunted by racist Tiger Woods joke, dies aged 74

Fuzzy Zoeller, the two-time major champion whose genial public persona was overshadowed by a racially insensitive joke about Tiger Woods that came to define the latter part of his career, has died aged 74.No cause of death was immediately available. Brian Naugle, tournament director of the Insperity Invitational in Houston and a longtime colleague, said Zoeller’s daughter notified him of the death on Thursday.Zoeller, born Frank Urban Zoeller Jr in New Albany, Indiana, was one of golf’s most outgoing characters across a career that delivered historic highs. He was the first player in more than four decades to win the Masters on his debut, claiming the 1979 green jacket after a three-man playoff