City & Guilds London Institute trustees accused of stalling inquiry into £166m sale
Posted on Saturday May 09, 2026

The board of the vocational charity has shown a ‘catastrophic failure of governance’, according to a member of the group’s council

The trustees of City & Guilds London Institute have been accused of attempting to dodge accountability for a “catastrophic failure of governance” by stalling on the launch of an independent inquiry into the £166m sale of the vocational charity’s training and accreditation business last October.

Members of the 148-year-old body voted overwhelmingly last month for the trustee board to trigger what would be the third investigation into how the foundation sold its operations to the private operator PeopleCert in October.

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Worried Britons ‘prepping’ for major disruption with stash of tins and cash, survey shows
Posted on Saturday May 09, 2026

Fears over a natural disaster or cyber-attack are pushing households into contingency planning, Link survey shows

Millions of Britons are “prepping” for a potential “major disruptive event” by keeping a stash of cash at home, stockpiling tinned goods or ensuring they have a battery-powered torch close to hand, new data suggests.

With war raging in the Middle East and Ukraine, extreme weather becoming more frequent, and warnings that the UK’s critical infrastructure is at risk from cyber-attacks and power outages, many people feel the world has become a more dangerous and chaotic place.

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British Airways fares to rise in attempt to offset £1.7bn fuel cost hit
Posted on Friday May 08, 2026

Owner IAG expects to recover 60% of additional fuel bill caused by Iran war through ‘revenue and cost management’

• Business news – live updates

British Airways fares will rise to try to recoup most of a €2bn (£1.7bn) hit in fuel costs this year, its parent group has said, adding that the Iran war will dent profits.

The International Airlines Group (IAG) said its annual fuel bill was now expected to be about €9bn, up from the forecast €7.1bn, as 70% of its supply was hedged, shielding it from the full impact of soaring jet fuel prices since the start of the conflict.

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‘We are talking about energy security for Europe’: Norway doubles down on oil and gas production
Posted on Saturday May 09, 2026

Norway’s energy minister says country has a ‘responsibility’ to address shortfalls caused by wars in Ukraine and Middle East

In case of any doubt about Norway’s commitment to maintain – and expand – its production of gas and oil offshore, the energy minister, Terje Aasland, has a pithy response: “We will develop, not dismantle, activity on our continental shelf.”

This week, to the alarm of environmental campaigners, he announced that three gasfields off the country’s southern coast would reopen by the end of 2028 – nearly three decades after they closed – to meet a shortfall caused by the impact of the war in Ukraine and disruption to supplies from the Middle East.

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UK schools should remove pupils’ online photos as AI blackmail threat grows, say experts
Posted on Thursday May 07, 2026

Criminals are manipulating pictures found on school websites and social media to create sexually explicit images

UK schools should remove pictures of pupils’ faces from their websites and social media accounts because blackmailers are using them to create sexually explicit images, experts have said.

Child safety experts and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) warn that criminals are using AI to manipulate photos of children and then demand cash not to publish them.

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‘Being human helps’: despite rise of AI is there still hope for Europe’s translators?
Posted on Friday May 08, 2026

A booming tech sector has disrupted translation jobs in publishing – but they could be needed for a while longer yet

In February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work.

Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments.

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Glasner vows to rotate, Arbeloa defends fighting players, Liverpool v Chelsea buildup – matchday live
Posted on Saturday May 09, 2026

⚽ News, discussion and buildup before day’s action
⚽ Premier League things link | Email us here

As always, feel free to email in with any thoughts, feelings, predictions, observations and all that jazz. What are your plans for the weekend? Where will you be watching the football? Let me know!

How the Premier League table looks as things stand…

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Tennis slams’ refusal to discuss money is slap in face for players who are right to threaten boycott | Tumaini Carayol
Posted on Saturday May 09, 2026

Wealthy players asking for more money may feel wrong but the big four tournaments are not sharing the revenue fairly

At some point in the quiet buildup to her opening match at the Italian Open, Aryna Sabalenka decided to attack one of the most contentious subjects in her sport with the same force as her forehand. In her press conference, the subject of the top players’ attempts to attain a greater revenue share from the grand slam tournaments prompted the world No 1 to make a drastic prediction: “I think at some point we will boycott it, yeah,” she said. “I feel like that’s going to be the only way to fight for our rights.”

It marked an escalation in a pay dispute that, until this point, had played out in a series of polite letters and public statements. Over a year ago, in March 2025, the players sent their first letter to the grand slam tournaments. Their requests focused on the grand slams offering a greater percentage of their revenues to the players, contributions to player welfare initiatives, such as pension funds, and closer consultation through a grand slam player council. To the frustration of the player group, the grand slams have still not issued substantial responses to the first two requests.

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