Tag: UK

EU steel tariff hike threatens ‘biggest crisis’ for UK industry | BBC News

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The EU has announced plans to hike tariffs on imported steel in a move the UK’s steel industry has said could be “perhaps the biggest crisis” it has ever faced.

The commission has set out plans to cut the amount of steel that can be imported into the bloc by half, beyond which the new 50% tariffs will apply.

The EU is the UK’s most important export destination for steel, worth nearly £3bn and representing 78% of steel products made in the UK for overseas markets.

The commission has come under pressure from some member states and their steel industries, which have been struggling to compete with cheap imports from countries like China and Turkey.

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UK drops ‘safety’ from its AI body, now called AI Security Institute, inks MOU with Anthropic | TechCrunch

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The U.K. government wants to make a hard pivot into boosting its economy and industry with AI, and as part of that, it’s pivoting an institution that it founded a little over a year ago for a very different purpose. Today the Department of Science, Industry and Technology announced that it would be renaming the AI Safety Institute to the “AI Security Institute.” (Same first letters: same URL.) With that, the body will shift from primarily exploring areas like existential risk and bias in large language models, to a focus on cybersecurity, specifically “strengthening protections against the risks AI poses to national security and crime.”

Alongside this, the government also announced a new partnership with Anthropic. No firm services were announced but the MOU indicates the two will “explore” using Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude in public services; and Anthropic will aim to contribute to work in scientific research and economic modeling. And at the AI Security Institute, it will provide tools to evaluate AI capabilities in the context of identifying security risks.

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Brexit is ‘stifling’ Britain’s trade with Europe and the problem is getting worse | CNN Business

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Brexit is having “profound and ongoing stifling effects” on goods trade between the United Kingdom and the European Union, according to a new report that adds to evidence of the economic damage wrought by Britain’s exit from the world’s largest trading bloc.

Researchers at Aston University in England estimated that between 2021 and 2023, annual UK exports of goods to the EU were 17% lower than they would have been had Brexit never happened. Exports in most sectors have decreased since 2021, according to the report.

“The study highlights that the negative impacts of (Brexit) have intensified over time, with 2023 showing more pronounced trade declines than previous years,” the researchers wrote in the paper published Tuesday.

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Meredith Whittaker reaffirms that Signal would leave UK if forced by privacy bill | TechCrunch

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Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, 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.

“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.

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Third Brexit vote must be different – Speaker | BBC News

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Speaker John Bercow has thrown the UK’s Brexit plans into further confusion by ruling out another vote on the PM’s deal unless MPs are given a new motion.

In a surprise ruling, he said he would not allow a third “meaningful vote” in the coming days on “substantially the same” motion as MPs rejected last week.

With 11 days to go before the UK is due to leave the EU, ministers have warned of a looming “constitutional crisis”.

The UK is currently due to leave the EU on 29 March.

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Business is ‘staring down the precipice’ over Brexit | CNN

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Companies in the United Kingdom are suffering from a bad case of déjà vu after lawmakers rejected a second version of the Brexit deal negotiated by Prime Minister Theresa May.

“Enough is enough,” said Carolyn Fairbairn, director general of the Confederation of British Industry, a business lobby. “It’s time for parliament to stop this circus,” she added, stressing that “jobs and livelihoods depend on it.”

The stunning defeat increases the chances that Britain will crash out of the European Union without a deal in just 17 days — doing big damage to the economy — or that Brexit will be delayed, prolonging the uncertainty for business.

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Brexit: Delay is ‘most likely’ option, says former chancellor | BBC News

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Former Chancellor George Osborne has said delaying the UK’s exit from the EU is now the “most likely” option.

The UK has to choose between no deal – which he compared to Russian roulette – or no Brexit for now, he told the BBC.

MPs are proposing alternative plans to the PM’s deal with the EU, including seeking an extension to the UK’s exit date – it is due to leave on 29 March.

But the prime minister has said the “right way” to rule out no-deal Brexit is to approve her withdrawal agreement.

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Facebook is buying UK’s Bloomsbury AI to ramp up natural language tech in London | TechCrunch

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Perhaps rightly, there has long been a perception that Google-owned Deepmind has been the most aggressive in hoovering up a lot of the U.K.’s best talent in artificial intelligence, but now Facebook appears to be turning its eye to the country.

TechCrunch understands that the social network behemoth is acquiring London-based Bloomsbury AI, a startup that has built natural language processing (NLP) technology to help machines answer questions based on information gleaned from documents. According to sources, Facebook plans to deploy the company’s team and tech to work on combatting fake news and to tackle other content issues.

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Brexit talks: U.K. and EU begin divorce negotiations | CNN Money

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Brexit talks are officially underway.

Officials charged with negotiating the first departure of a country from the European Union were in Brussels on Monday to kick off the most consequential series of talks for the U.K. since the end of World War II.

Chief U.K. negotiator David Davis is meeting his EU counterpart, former French foreign minister Michel Barnier, to grapple with a complex set of questions about the future of trade and migration, how much the country must pay to settle its bill with the bloc, and the rights of millions of citizens who have settled in Britain or Europe.

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Why Western brands are taking a chance on the UK | Fast Casual

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While dining out seems to have lost some of its appeal to US consumers, it’s becoming a more popular option for people in the United Kingdom.

“It is a solid fact that the demand for eating out among UK consumers are growing,” said Elif Polat, Research Analyst at Euromonitor International.

“Consumer foodservice grew by 3 percent in value terms in 2016, an important achievement for the industry considering the fact that UK is a quite mature market,” she said in an interview with FastCasual

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