A Scottish couple whose teenage son took his own life after being blackmailed on Instagram are suing the platform's owner Meta, in what's thought to be the first UK case of its kind. Murray Dowey, from Dunblane, was 16 when he became a victim of sextortion in December 2023. His parents have now launched legal action against Meta in a US court seeking punitive damages claiming that Instagram was not safe. Meta, which also owns Facebook, has been contacted for comment. It previously said it had made changes to the platform to protect children.

Facing the biggest challenge of his life, Sir Chris Hoy opens up about his journey with terminal cancer and how the mental strength he honed as a six-time Olympic cycling gold medallist is now helping him to inspire others. Watch Sir Chris Hoy: Cancer, Courage & Me on Thursday, 18 December at 21:00 GMT on BBC One, BBC iPlayer and the BBC Sport website & app. Source link

The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday reached consensus on a review of the world’s internet governance arrangements and preserved the current multi-stakeholder model that means governments are just one of many voices that debate the future of the internet. Wednesday’s session caps a process that started in 2003, when the UN convened the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a forum for discussing the role of technology in society. The first WSIS process saw participating nations pledge “to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented information society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge.” It also saw participating nations agree to the multi-stakeholder internet governance arrangements that persist to this day, and which sees organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Society (ISOC), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) each play a role.

Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted associate of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has asked a federal court to vacate or amend her 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. Maxwell, a former British socialite, claims that "substantial new evidence" has emerged from civil cases, investigative reports and other documents demonstrating that she did not receive a fair trial, according to a court filing in New York. The appeal follows several failed attempts from Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021, to try to reduce her prison sentence. It comes as the justice department faces a 19 December deadline to release files related to federal investigations into Epstein.

Australia off-spinner Nathan Lyon has overtaken legendary compatriot Glenn McGrath to move sixth in the all-time list of Test wicket-takers. Lyon, 38, needed two wickets at the start of the third Ashes Test in Adelaide to overhaul seamer McGrath's tally of 563. He moved level by having England's Ollie Pope caught at mid-wicket with his third ball of the game, before claiming his 564th Test scalp by bowling Ben Duckett three balls later. Lyon is now the second-highest Australian Test wicket-taker behind the late legendary leg-spinner Shane Warne, who took 708.

Former chancellor George Osborne is joining artificial intelligence (AI) giant OpenAI. He will lead its "OpenAI for Countries" programme, which is aimed at helping governments increase their AI capacity. Announcing his new London-based role, Osborne said it was a privilege to be joining the company. "I recently asked myself the question: what's the most exciting and promising company in the world right now? The answer I believe is OpenAI," he said on X. The announcement follows news that government-level negotiations between the UK and the US over a tech deal that included greater co-operation in AI…

Archie MitchellBusiness reporter Reuters BP has appointed a new chief executive, making Meg O'Neill the first woman to run a major global oil firm. The London-based energy giant said its current boss Murray Auchincloss would step down less than two years after he replaced Bernard Looney, who was found to have committed "serious misconduct" in failing to disclose relationships with colleagues. BP executive vice president Carol Howle will serve as interim chief executive until Ms O'Neill, who has led Australian energy firm Woodside Energy since 2021, takes up her new role on 1 April.

England will hold discussions with cricket's governing body with the aim of improving decision-making technology following a controversial error on the opening day of the third Ashes Test. Australia wicketkeeper Alex Carey survived a review for caught behind at the Adelaide Oval, only to later admit he edged the delivery bowled by England's Josh Tongue. Carey was given not out because the Snicko technology showed a discrepancy between the sound and pictures of the edge. BBG, the company that provides Snicko, has admitted responsibility for the error. At the close of play on day one, England head coach Brendon McCullum and team manager Wayne Bentley met with match referee Jeff Crowe.

Available for over a year A study found AI chatbots can persuade us with fake facts. We explore what this means for politics. Then we speak to author of The Web Beneath the Waves, Samanth Subramanian, about the importance of undersea cables. Plus: The scientists working together with nuns to save salamanders in a lake in Mexico. Presenter: Chris Vallance Producer: Imran Rahman-Jones Editors: Monica Soriano & Tom Singleton (Image: A colourful composite of a woman with her chin resting on her hands, looking confused. Behind her is an illustration of a laptop. Credit: Getty Images) Programme WebsiteShow less Source link

Police have arrested two people "for racially aggravated public order offences" after they allegedly "shouted slogans involving calls for intifada" at a pro-Palestinian protest in central London. Five people in total were arrested, including one for obstructing the arrests of people shouting slogans and two more for public order offences, one of which was "racially aggravated", the Metropolitan Police said. The arrests came hours after the Met and Greater Manchester Police said they would arrest people holding placards and chanting the phrase "globalise the intifada" - an Arabic word for uprising.

Fifa will finally release its much-anticipated return to video games in 2026, several years after its acrimonious split with developer EA. But it is Netflix, rather than a major game studio, which has secured the rights to the upcoming football game. Once one of the most profitable brands in gaming history, issues including a costly licence prompted Fifa's previous publisher Electronic Arts to stop using the name in 2023 - instead naming its best-selling game EA Sports FC. Netflix said the new Fifa would be developed and published by Delphi Interactive - which has yet to release a video game - and released ahead of the 2026 World Cup.

Two remand prisoners waiting to go on trial for alleged offences relating to Palestine Action have ended a hunger strike protest - but five more are said to be continuing to refuse food. The detainees, in various prisons, have made a series of demands including calling for the ban on Palestine Action to be lifted and for a defence firm with links to Israel to be shut down. The two longest-protesting detainees have been refusing food for 45 days according to supporters - a claim that has not been disputed by officials.

Sale, whose co-owner Simon Orange sold his investment firm in January for an estimated £1bn, are recruiting armed with depth charts, target lists and a big budget. Sanderson has spoken about adding "four or five world-class internationals" to his squad. Newcastle, who previously struggled to hold onto their best players, have recently been taken over by energy drink giant Red Bull, bringing another player to the table for top-end talent. With the Prem's salary cap set at £6.4m, there is plenty of scope for the market to heat up and the merry-go-round to accelerate as clubs pick and choose where to prioritise.

GitHub customers, take notice: Come March, the Microsoft-owned repository host will begin charging for some uses of self-hosted Actions runners. The change comes in the form of a $0.002 per minute charge for self-hosted runners executing jobs on private GitHub repositories. At the same time, GitHub noted in a Tuesday blog post that it's lowering the prices of GitHub-hosted runners beginning January 1, under a scheme it calls "simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub Actions." Self-hosted runner usage on public repositories will remain free, we note.  Regardless of the public repo distinction, enterprise-scale developers who rely on self-hosted runners were predictably not pleased about the announcement. 

Peter Lawwell is standing down as Celtic chairman at the end of December, citing "abuse and threats from some sources". The Scottish champions' board have been the subject of fan protests this season following a disappointing summer transfer window, their exit from the Champions League and with the current side sitting behind Heart of Midlothian in the Scottish Premiership. New manager Wilfried Nancy has also lost his first three games in charge after succeeding Brendan Rodgers, who resigned in October. Source link

The Prime Minister has said Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich must "pay up now" to victims of the war in Ukraine or face court action. Mr Abramovich, the former owner of Chelsea Football Club, pledged in 2022 that the £2.5bn he made from the sale of the club would be used to benefit victims of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But there has been a delay in releasing the funds, which are currently frozen in a British bank account, due to a standoff over how exactly they should be used. The government wants the money to be used for humanitarian aid, but Mr Abramovich insisted it should be used for "all victims of the war" – meaning that Russians could also benefit.

NATO is in an existential race to develop sovereign cloud based technologies to underpin its mission, the alliance’s Assistant Secretary General for Cyber and Digital Transformation told an audience at the Royal United Services Institute last week. Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe said the Ukraine war has highlighted the impact of technology on the battlefield, from drones to AI for targeting. Likewise, it shows the need for a coherent, secure approach to data and similarly coherent and secure cloud platforms to store and process it. “Modern conflict no longer rewards the side with the most data,” Ellermann-Kingombe declared.

An 86-year-old man has been arrested in connection with the murders of a couple at their farmhouse more than 30 years ago. Harry and Megan Tooze were both found dead with gunshot wounds at their Ty Ar y Waun farmhouse in Llanharry, Rhondda Cynon Taf, on 26 July 1993. South Wales Police undertook a forensic review of the case in 2023 and detectives have now made an arrest for the unsolved murders of 64-year-old Harry and 67-year-old Megan. The man was arrested earlier and is currently in police custody, the force said.

The FCRI did not provide specific details as to why Burns had been stripped of the captaincy and will not be selected for the T20 World Cup. However, it did state the decision had been taken to "ensure stability, harmony and continuity for the team" and was made "solely in the interest of the national team's preparation and serenity ahead of this historic event". The statement added the FCRI "will not comment further on individual matters" though the organisation did also express its "sincere thanks" to Burns for his role in "an important chapter" in Italian cricket.

MPs have blasted the UK government for complacency over surging mobile thefts after a "long-delayed" summit on the issue disappeared into the New Year. In a letter to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Dame Chi Onwurah, chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, raised the prospect of families unwrapping new phones on Christmas Day – then being too scared to leave the house thanks to inaction from phone vendors and the government. Blocking stolen phones from the cloud can be done, should be done, won't be done READ MORE "While people may be worried about keeping their new possessions safe from theft on Britain's streets, it seems that the government is not nearly as concerned about the risks to property and privacy," she thundered.

Sarah TurnnidgeWest of England PA A post-mortem found the preliminary cause of Aria's death was a single stab wound A 15-year-old boy has been charged with the murder of a nine-year-old girl. Police have named the victim as Aria Thorpe, who was found dead at a house in Lime Close, Weston-super-Mare, on Monday evening. A post-mortem examination found the preliminary cause of her death was a single stab wound, Avon and Somerset Police said. The teenage suspect, who cannot be named due to his age, remains in custody and is due to appear at Bristol Magistrates' Court later.

After being elevated from the practice squad for a third time, Smyth is now on the brink of earning a permanent spot on the Saints' 53-man roster. NFL rules state a player cannot return to the practice squad for a fourth time in a season, so if Smyth is to play against the New York Jets on Sunday (18:00 GMT) he would have to be elevated to the senior roster on a full-time contract. While his promotion has not yet been confirmed by the Saints, he says "things are looking good"

Cisco has decided its homegrown AI models are ready to power its products, starting with its Duo Identity Intelligence offering. The model Cisco will use is called “Foundation-Sec-1.1-8B-Instruct”. As described on the Hugging Face model-mart, it’s an open-weight, 8-billion-parameter instruction-tuned “Auto-regressive language model that uses an optimized transformer architecture,” namely Meta Llama-3.1-8B backbone. Cisco tuned the model for cybersecurity applications and optimized it for three uses: SOC Acceleration: Automating triage, summarization, case note generation, and evidence collection. Proactive Threat Defense: Simulating attacks, prioritizing vulnerabilities, mapping TTPs, and modeling attacker behavior.

Nick Triggle,Health correspondentand Jim Reed,Health reporter PA Media Patients are being told to expect disruption as doctors start their five-day strike in England, with NHS bosses saying they are struggling to keep as many services going as they have done in recent walkouts. NHS England said with a wave of flu placing pressure on hospitals, non-urgent services would be affected by the strike, which began at 07:00 Wednesday. This is the 14th walkout by resident doctors, the new name for junior doctors, in the long-running pay dispute. Health Secretary Wes Streeting said the strike had been timed to inflict most damage on the NHS and put patients at risk, but the British Medical Association said it would work with NHS bosses to ensure safety.

Jake and his team are hoping for a lot of things. Hoping AJ is underestimating him, hoping AJ is shot, hoping AJ's inactivity will cost him, hoping AJ is low in confidence, hoping AJ's chin isn't what it once was. But, unfortunately for them, AJ is super switched on. He's had a camp and he's training like he's fighting Oleksandr Usyk or in a Daniel Dubois rematch. I expect my fighter to win inside two rounds with a devastating knockout. He could hit Jake to the body and he would break his ribs and he wouldn't be able to get up.