An algorithm that takes just seconds to scan a paper for duplicated images racks up more suspicious images than a person. Nature: Scientific-image sleuth Sholto David blogs about image manipulation in research papers, a pastime that has exposed him to many accounts of scientific fraud. But other scientists "are still a little bit in the dark about the extent of the problem," David says. He decided he needed some data. The independent biologist in Pontypridd, UK, spent the best part of several months poring over hundreds of papers in one journal, looking for any with duplicated images. Then he ran the same papers through an artificial-intelligence (AI) tool. Working at two to three times David's speed, the software found almost all of the 63 suspect papers that he had identified -- and 41 that he'd missed. David described the exercise last month in a preprint, one of the first published comparisons of human versus machine for finding doctored images.

The findings come as academic publishers reckon with the problem of image manipulation in scientific papers. In a 2016 study, renowned image-forensics specialist Elisabeth Bik, based in San Francisco, California, and her colleagues reported that almost 4% of papers she had visually scanned in 40 biomedical-science journals contained inappropriately duplicated images. Not all image manipulation is done with nefarious intent. Authors might tinker with images by accident, for aesthetic reasons or to make a figure more understandable. But journals and others would like to catch images with alterations that cross the line, whatever the authors' motivation. And now they are turning to AI for help.

Some 200 universities, publishers and scientific societies already rely on Imagetwin, the tool that David used for his study. The software compares images in a paper with more than 25 million images from other publications -- the largest such database in the image-integrity world, according to Imagetwin's developers. Bik has been using Imagetwin regularly to supplement her own skills and calls it her "standard tool," although she emphasizes that the AI has weaknesses as well as strengths -- for instance, it can miss duplications in images with low contrast.

Britain's anti-competition regulators have been tasked with investigating Microsoft and Amazon's dominance of the cloud computing market. From a report: Media watchdog Ofcom on Thursday referred its inquiry for further investigation to the Competition and Markets Authority, kickstarting the process. Ofcom said that it had identified features which make it more difficult for U.K. businesses to switch cloud providers, or use multiple cloud services, and that it is "particularly concerned" about the position of market leaders Amazon and Microsoft. "Some UK businesses have told us they're concerned about it being too difficult to switch or mix and match cloud provider, and it's not clear that competition is working well," Fergal Farragher, Ofcom's director responsible for the market study, said in a statement Thursday.

"So, we're referring the market to the CMA for further scrutiny, to make sure business customers continue to benefit from cloud services." Ofcom is concerned that so-called "hyperscalers" like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are limiting competition in the cloud computing market. These are companies that allow businesses of all stripes to carry out critical computing tasks -- like storage and management of data, delivery of content, analytics and intelligence -- over the internet, rather than through servers stored on site, or "on premise."

Long-time Slashdot reader RockDoctor writes: Regardless of their other potential benefits, modern cars, and modern electric cars in particular, involve complex networks of computer code, hardware, and servo systems cooperating (?) to deliver services to the user, like acceleration, steering and braking. Slashdot nerderati know better than most that such complex networks can never show unexpected, non-designed behavior, due to the infallibility of hardware, program coders and system designers... Yeah. Right. "I'll have some of what he's been smoking!" That's Musk-grade optimism.

On Sunday evening, a middle-aged driver in a "brand new" vehicle found it would not decelerate below 30mph (50kmph). He retained steering control, and avoided crashing until police vehicles "boxed in" his vehicle and helped him exit into a police van (most have sliding side doors) from the moving vehicle. The police then "carried out a controlled halt" on the unmanned vehicle, stopping it from driving away with the van's brakes until a roadside assistance technician arrived 3 hours later and managed to shut it down. "[W]hen the [technician] got to me [...] later, he plugged in the car to do a diagnostic check and there was pages of faults," said the "kidnapped" driver from Glasgow. "He said he had never seen anything like it and decided he was not willing to turn the engine on to see what was wrong."

By inference, the vehicle did not have a mechanical brake ("hand brake": English; "parking brake": American), which should have been able to keep the vehicle halted regardless of the motor's actions (even if a "clutch" did get burned out). From the only time I've been inside an electric car, I can't say if that is normal; it's certainly something I'll look for if I ever rent another. Had the failure happened at 10 a.m. in the morning, not 10 p.m. in the evening, the body count could have been ... substantial.

A dumb question, stemming from my only use of an electric car: do they have a weight sensor under the driver's seat that locks-out the main motor unless there is (say) 30kg in the driver's seat? Most have some such sensors -- they trigger the "seatbelt not fastened" alarm or silence it for empty seats -- but whether they can override the drive system ... ?

Major fossil fuel companies have committed tens of millions of pounds in funding to UK universities since 2022, it can be revealed, despite many of these institutions having actively pledged to divest from oil and gas. From a report: According to freedom of information requests submitted by the climate journalism site DeSmog, more than $50m in research agreements, tuition fees, scholarships, grants and consultancy fees have been pledged to 44 UK universities by 32 oil, coal and gas companies since 2022. The largest contributors were Shell, the Malaysian state-owned oil company Petronas, and BP. These three companies account for more than 76% of the total figure awarded, having given $25.5m, $6.30m and $5.94m respectively.

A further 10 companies made up nearly 21% of the remaining contributions during this period: Sinopec, Equinor, BHP Group, Total Energies, Eni SPA, Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Scottish Power, Kellas Midstream and Ithaca Energy. Previous reporting from openDemocracy and the Guardian found that between 2017 and December 2021, $108.1m in funding was given to UK universities by some of the world's biggest fossil fuel companies. These partnerships have shown no sign of abating, and DeSmog's research shows an additional $50m has been pledged since 2022, even after 102 higher education institutions promised to stop taking funding from the fossil fuel industry.

A report that hugely overestimated the cost to the UK of reaching net zero emissions has been retracted by the thinktank that published it. From a report: The Civitas pamphlet published on Thursday claimed to offer a "realistic" estimate of the cost -- $5.4tn -- and said "the government needs to be honest with the British people." However, factual errors were quickly pointed out after publication. The most serious error was the confusion by the report's author, Ewen Stewart, between power capacity in megawatts (MW) with electricity generation in megawatt hours (MWh). As a result, he presented an unrealistic "$1.57m per MWh" figure for the cost for onshore wind power. The true number is more than 10,000 times lower at about $60.3 to $84 per MWh. Another error was mixing up billions with trillions. A statement on the Civitas website said: "This report has been taken down from the website because it was found to contain factual errors, it is undergoing revision and a fresh process of peer review. A revised report will be released when this process is completed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Britain's passport database could be used to catch shoplifters, burglars and other criminals under urgent plans to curb crime, the policing minister has said. Chris Philp said he planned to integrate data from the police national database (PND), the Passport Office and other national databases to help police find a match with the "click of one button." But civil liberty campaigners have warned the plans would be an "Orwellian nightmare" that amount to a "gross violation of British privacy principles".

Foreign nationals who are not on the passport database could also be found via the immigration and asylum biometrics system, which will be part of an amalgamated system to help catch thieves. The measures have been deemed controversial by campaigners as the technology could get a match even if images are blurred or partially obscured. Speaking at a fringe event of the Conservative party conference hosted by the Policy Exchange thinktank, Philp said: "I'm going to be asking police forces to search all of those databases -- the police national database, which has custody images, but also other databases like the passport database -- not just for shoplifting but for crime generally to get those matches, because the technology is now so good that you can get a blurred image and get a match for it.

"Operationally, I'm asking them to do it now. In the medium term, by which I mean the next two years, we're going to try and create a new data platform so you can press one button [and it] lets you search it all in one go. Until the new platform is created, he said police forces should search each database separately. [...] Philp said he has already ordered police forces that have access to the passport database to start searching it alongside the police national database, which stores custody images. Officers will be able to compare those facial images against CCTV, dashcam and doorbell technology to help find a match for criminals as prosecution rates are at record lows. He later added: "I would also just remind everyone that the wider public, including shop staff and security guards, do have the power of citizen's arrest and where it's safe to do so I would encourage that to be used. Because if you do just let people walk in and take stuff and walk out without proper challenge, including potentially a physical challenge, then it will just escalate."

"Bear attacks in Japan have been rising at an alarming rate, so the city of Takikawa [about 570 miles from Tokyo] installed a robot wolf as a deterrent," reports the BBC. "The robot wolf was originally designed to keep wild animals from farmlands, but is now being used by local governments and managers of highways, golf courses, and pig farms." Digital Trends describes the "Monster Wolf" as "complete with glowing red eyes and protruding fangs." [T]he solar-powered Monster Wolf emits a menacing roar if it detects a nearby bear. It also has a set of flashing LED lights on its tail, and can move its head to appear more real... The robot's design is apparently based on a real wolf that roamed part of the Asian nation more than 100 years ago before it was hunted into extinction.

Japanese news outlet NHK reported earlier this month that bear attacks in the country are at their highest level since records began in 2007. The environment ministry said 53 cases of injuries as a result of such attacks were reported between April and July this year, with at least one person dying following an attack in Hokkaido in May.

This week the UK's conservative Daily Telegraph newspaper published an interesting perspective from their world economy editor.

"Saudi and OPEC officials self-evidently do not believe their own claim that world oil demand will keep growing briskly for another generation as if electric vehicles had never been invented, and there was no such thing as the Paris Accord." OPEC had to slash output last October in order to shore up prices. It had to cut again in April. The Saudis then stunned traders with a unilateral cut of one million barrels a day (b/d) in June. All told, the OPEC-Russia cartel has had to take 2m b/d of production off the table at a high point in the economic cycle, after China's post-Covid reopening and at a time when the US economy has been running hot with a fiscal expansion roughly equal to Roosevelt's world war budget.

That 2m b/d figure happens to be more or less the amount of crude currently being displaced by EV sales worldwide, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Yet the mood was all defiance and plucky insouciance at the 24th World Petroleum Congress in Calgary this month... This skips over the awkward detail that EVs are already on track to reach 60pc of total car sales in the world's biggest car market within two years (not a misprint). The cartel is being hit from two sides. Petrol and diesel cars are becoming more efficient, gradually displacing 1.4bn vintage models disappearing into the scrap yard. BP says that alone will cut up to a tenth global oil demand by 2040. With a lag, EVs are now starting to take a material bite, with an S-curve trajectory likely to go parabolic this decade.

China's EVs sales hit 38pc this summer, even though subsidies have mostly been scrapped. This is far ahead of schedule under Beijing's New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Plan. China's Chebai think tank says the emerging consensus is that EV sales will hit 17m or 60pc of total Chinese share by 2025, rising to 90pc by 2030, assuming that the grid can keep up... Vietnam is a few years behind but with similar ambitions. Its EV start-up, VinFast Auto, became the world's third most valuable carmaker after it launched on Nasdaq last month, briefly worth as much as the German car industry before the share price came back down to earth...

OPEC's central premise has long been that the rise of a billion-strong middle class in emerging Asia will more than offset declining oil use in the OECD bloc. That notion is 'withering under scrutiny'... The International Energy Agency (IEA) says global oil demand will peak at 105.5m b/d in 2028 and then flatten for a few years before going into decline... The IEA pulls its punches. The Rocky Mountain Institute argues in its latest report — End of the ICE Age — that half of global car sales could be EVs by 2026, reaching 86pc later this decade.
The article closes by citing "the breathtaking pace of global electrification. The decline of oil in car and bus transport may be closer than almost anybody imagined. OPEC as we know it may be on the cusp of a death spiral."

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Guardian: Heat pumps are more than twice as efficient as fossil fuel heating systems in cold temperatures, research shows. Even at temperatures approaching -30C, heat pumps outperform oil and gas heating systems, according to the research from Oxford University and the Regulatory Assistance Project thinktank...

Reports have spread that they do not work well in low temperatures despite their increasing use in Scandinavia and other cold climates. The research, published in the specialist energy research journal Joule, used data from seven field studies in North America, Asia and Europe. It found that at temperatures below zero, heat pumps were between two and three times more efficient than oil and gas heating systems.

The authors said the findings showed that heat pumps were suitable for almost all homes in Europe, including the UK, and should provide policymakers with the impetus to bring in new measures to roll them out as rapidly as possible.
"The Guardian and the investigative journalism organisation DeSmog recently revealed that lobbyists associated with the gas boiler sector had attempted to delay a key government measure to increase the uptake of heat pumps."

Yesterday the "temporary suspension" of automatic Snap registrations was announced on Canonical's Snapcraft forum by developer advocate Igor Ljubuncic, after what was described as a "security incident". On September 28, 2023, the Snap Store team was notified of a potential security incident. A number of snap users reported several recently published and potentially malicious snaps. As a consequence of these reports, the Snap Store team has immediately taken down these snaps, and they can no longer be searched or installed. Furthermore, the Snap Store team has placed a temporary manual review requirement on all new snap registrations, effectively immediately...

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our snap publishers and developers. However, we believe it is the most prudent action at this moment. We want to thoroughly investigate this incident without introducing any noise into the system, and more importantly, we want to make sure our users have a safe and trusted experience with the Snap Store. Please bear with us while we conduct our investigation. We will provide a more detailed update in the coming days.
Some background from the Linux blog OMG Ubuntu: This isn't the first time the Snap Store has had issues with icky uploads. In 2018 an innocuous-sounding app hid crypto-mining capabilities unbeknownst to users. Not disclosing this in its description rendered it malware (Canonical later clarified to say crypto-miners are allowed so long as they're disclosed).

In this instance it appears that folks have uploaded apps purporting to be official apps/tools for crypto ledger tool Ledger and these apps were able to get folks backups codes (which people enter thinking it's legit) and ...the bad actors can use that to extract funds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: What I felt was fear," says Claudia Duarte Agostinho as she remembers the extreme heatwave and fires that ripped through Portugal in 2017 and killed more than 100 people. "The wildfires made me really anxious about what sort of future I would have." Claudia, 24, her brother Martim, 20, and her sister Mariana, 11, are among six young Portuguese people who have filed a lawsuit against 32 governments, including all EU member states, the UK, Norway, Russia, Switzerland and Turkey. They accuse the countries of insufficient action over climate change and failing to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions enough to hit the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5C. The case is the first of its kind to be filed at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. If it is successful, it could have legally-binding consequences for the governments involved. The first hearing in the case is being held on Wednesday.

Aged from 11 to 24, the six claimants argue that the forest fires that have occurred in Portugal each year since 2017 are a direct result of global warming. They claim that their fundamental human rights -- including the right to life, privacy, family life and to be free from discrimination -- are being violated due to governments' reluctance to fight climate change. They say they have already been experiencing significant impacts, especially because of extreme temperatures in Portugal forcing them to spend time indoors and restricting their ability to sleep, concentrate or exercise. Some also suffer from eco-anxiety, allergies and respiratory conditions including asthma. None of the young applicants is seeking financial compensation.

Lawyers representing the six young claimants are expected to argue in court that the 32 governments' current policies are putting the world on course for 3C of global warming by the end of the century. [...] In separate and joint responses to the case, the governments argue that the claimants have not sufficiently established that they have suffered as a direct consequence of climate change or the Portuguese wildfires. They claim there is no evidence to show climate change poses an immediate risk to human life or health, and also argue that climate policy is beyond the scope of the European Court of Human Rights jurisdiction. "These six young people from Portugal, who are ordinary individuals concerned about their future, will be facing 32 legal teams, hundreds of lawyers representing governments whose inaction is already harming them," says Gearoid O Cuinn, director of Global Legal Action Network (GLAN).

"So this is a real David vs Goliath case that is seeking a structural change to put us on a much better track in terms of our future."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Imagine demanding an "honest" debate over the cost of net zero in a report full of errors that even a schoolboy would be embarrassed about. Then imagine getting coverage of your report in the Sun, Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Spectator. Sound impossible? Well, let me tell you how Civitas, one of the thinktanks housed at 55 Tufton Street in London, did exactly that, and nearly got away with it. On Wednesday, Civitas published a pamphlet on net zero by Ewen Stewart, whose consultancy, Walbrook Economics, works on "the interaction of macroeconomics, politics and capital markets." Stewart is also a climate sceptic, having written in 2021 that human-caused warming is a "contested theory." Along with Civitas, 55 Tufton Street also houses the climate-sceptic lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation and its campaigning arm Net Zero Watch. These groups previously attempted to spark an "honest debate about the cost of net-zero" in 2020.

The Civitas report claims to offer a "realistic" $5.5tn estimate of the cost of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 and says "the government need to be honest with the British people." This estimate is much higher than the figure produced by the government's official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which has said that reaching net zero would require net investments of $1.71tn by 2050. Note the difference between Civitas's "costs" and the CCC's "net investments." The CCC also found that reaching net zero would generate savings in the form of lower fossil fuel bills worth $1.34tn, resulting in a net cost of $0.37tn. In his report for Civitas, Stewart adopts the well-worn climate-sceptic tactic of simply ignoring these savings. He also ignores what the Office for Budget Responsibility has called the potentially "catastrophic economic and fiscal consequences" of unmitigated climate change. The report was timed to follow hot on the heels of Rishi Sunak's big climate speech, in which he called for an "honest" approach to net zero that ends "unacceptable costs."

"Nissan will make the switch to full electric by 2030 in Europe. We believe it is the right thing to do for our business, our customers and for the planet," said Nissan's chief executive Makoto Uchida. The announcement comes despite the UK postponing its 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars to 2035. The BBC reports: In an interview with the BBC, Mr Uchida said the company was aiming to bring down the cost of electric vehicles for customers, so that they were no more expensive than petrol and diesel cars. "It may take a bit of time, but we are looking at the next few years," he said. "We are looking at it from the point of view of the technology, from the point of view of cooperating with suppliers, and of course working with the government on how we can deliver that kind of cost competitiveness to the consumer," Mr Uchida added. Will that price parity happen by 2030? "That's what we're aiming for," confirmed Mr Uchida.

Mr Uchida also said that the company was fast-tracking a different kind of battery technology, known as all-solid-state batteries (ASSB), which are lighter, cheaper, and quicker to charge. "We are going to have a pilot plant for ASSB in Japan from next year, and we want to ensure they can be mass produced by 2028," he said. "There are a lot of challenges with this, but we do have a solution, and we are on track [to meet that target]", he added.

"As a result of the move to working from home, Meta has walked away from one of its offices in London at the cost of 149 million pounds," writes Slashdot reader Bruce66423. The London Evening Standard reports: Meta paid the FTSE 250 developer 149 million pounds on Monday in order to break the lease on the building, 1 Triton Square. The tech firm, which also owns Instagram, let the space from 2021 following a refurbishment but never moved into the space. Meta has three open London sites including a neighbouring building in Regent's Place, near Warren Street in central London.

Analysts at BNP Paribas Exane claimed Meta has another 18 years on its lease at the site. British Land said it will receive the one-off payment to end the lease but the agreement would also reduce its earnings per share by 0.6% over the six months to next March.

An anonymous reader writes: Chase UK, JPMorgan's UK Bank, has told its customers that it will not carry out transactions related to crypto assets.

The Financial Times writes:

In GNOME Shell there's a dark background for the Quick Settings menu, the calendar applet, and desktop notification-- but in Ubuntu 23.10, "the default Yaru theme uses a light style for GNOME Shell elements," according to the blog OMG Ubuntu.

"But there's a new GNOME extension that lets you change this without affecting the rest of your desktop..." You can make GNOME Shell dark in Ubuntu by turning the 'Dark Style' toggle on but that also makes apps use a dark theme too. Not everyone wants that; they want a 'mixed' look... [I]f you would like to use dark GNOME Shell elements in Ubuntu 23.10 without using the dark mode preference (which, as said, will turn your apps dark too) then the Dark Style GNOME extension is exactly what you need.
It only works with Ubuntu 23.10 and GNOME 45.

Since 1999, Slashdot has been covering the annual Ig Nobel prize ceremonies — which honor real scientific research into strange or surprising subjects. "Each winner (or winning team) has done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK," explains the ceremony web page, promising that "a gaggle of genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel laureates handed the Ig Nobel Prizes to the new Ig Nobel winners." As co-founder Marc Abrahams says on his LinkedIn profile, "All these things celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."

You can watch this year's entire goofy webcast online. (At 50 minutes there's a jaw-droppingly weird music video about running on water...) Slashdot reader Thorfinn.au shares this summary of this year's winning research: CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK] — Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.

LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND] — Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O'Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA] — Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] — Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet a computer vision system for defecation analysis et al.

COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA] — María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.

MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM] — Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils.

NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN] — Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.

EDUCATION PRIZE [HONG KONG, CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN] — Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA] — Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for 1968 experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.

PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK] — Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.

Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which maintains the nonprofit Signal messaging app, reaffirmed that Signal would leave the U.K. if the country's recently passed Online Safety Bill forced Signal to build "backdoors" into its end-to-end encryption. From a report: "We would leave the U.K. or any jurisdiction if it came down to the choice between backdooring our encryption and betraying the people who count on us for privacy, or leaving," Whittaker said. "And that's never not true." The Online Safety Bill, which was passed into law in September, includes a clause -- clause 122 -- that, depending on how it's interpreted, could allow the U.K.'s communications regulator, Ofcom, to break the encryption of apps and services under the guise of making sure illegal material such as child sexual exploitation and abuse content is removed.

Ofcom could fine companies not in compliance up to $22.28 million, or 10% of their global annual revenue, under the bill -- whichever is greater. Whittaker didn't mince words in airing her fears about the Online Safety Bill's implications. "We're not about political stunts, so we're not going to just pick up our toys and go home to, like, show the bad U.K. they're being mean," she said. "We're really worried about people in the U.K. who would live under a surveillance regime like the one that seems to be teased by the Home Office and others in the U.K."

Amazon, following other streaming platforms looking to further monetize their content, will run ads on its Prime Video service in key markets -- a move that will help offset rising costs and provide a boost to an already robust advertising business. From a report: Ad-supported streaming will be the default on Prime Video in US, UK, Germany and Canada starting early next year, the company said in a statement on Friday. The company has long offered video streaming as part of a package that also includes speedy shipping, music and other perks. Amazon said Prime subsribers will continue to pay $139 annually in the US but will be able to pay an additional $2.99 a month to avoid ads. Pricing in other countries will be anounced later, the company said.

Rishi Sunak has vowed to press ahead with watering down key green measures despite intense criticism, because he still believes the UK will hit its net zero target in 2050. From a report: The prime minister defended defying the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee (CCC) and said he had "absolute confidence and belief" the country was on track to meet its end goal. In a BBC radio interview on Thursday morning, Sunak shrugged off suggestions he had ignored the view of the official body that advises governments on reducing emissions. He said: "I'm very happy to have opinions and advice from everybody, and everyone's entitled to their view. We're very confident -- being in government, with all the information at our disposal -- that we we are on track to hit all our targets."

Sunak told Radio 4's Today programme that Margaret Thatcher would have agreed with his rationale, and that it was not right for "working families" to face significant costs as part of the country's transition to net zero. But he struggled to provide an explanation for claims he had scrapped measures critics said had never seriously been mooted -- such as an alleged tax on meat, compulsory car sharing and forcing households to use seven recycling bins. "These are all things that have been raised by very credible people," he argued. When pressed, Sunak was unable to provide evidence that those specific measures had been suggested by anyone and instead said they had been euphemistically advocated for by bodies such as the CCC.