Party hopes to win over affluent middle-class voters as leader rejects calls to ‘unite the right’ in conference speech

Kemi Badenoch has announced that the Conservatives would abolish inheritance tax on family homes if elected, prompting criticism that she is prioritising cutting taxes for the rich.

The Tory leader also said couples would be able to leave an additional tax-free sum of £1m to their families, as the party attempts to shore up its traditional base in southern England.

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© Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

© Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

© Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

TaxWatch contradicts claims about David Reuben’s departure and questions stories of super-rich exodus

• Apparent exodus of super-rich suggests UK is no longer billionaires’ playground

When the Sunday Times broke the news that David Reuben, one of the richest men in the UK, had apparently fled to the tax haven of Monaco, there was much pearl clutching. Reuben had moved from his Holland Park house in London to live full-time in the principality.

Labour’s tax regime was blamed and there were said to be fears there would be a cascading effect across the economy, with wealth draining from the UK. It was reported that he had probably left because of potential taxes on wealth in the upcoming budget.

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© Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images

© Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images

© Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images

Microsoft has reportedly secured exclusive cloud-streaming rights for Grand Theft Auto VI, meaning Xbox Cloud Gaming will be the only service able to stream the game at launch. "Rockstar Games still hasn't announced a PC version of Grand Theft Auto VI, so this deal will allow Xbox to market its Xbox Cloud Gaming service to PC players who would otherwise need an Xbox Series X / S or PS5 console," reports The Verge. From the report: News of the streaming rights comes around a month after Microsoft announced some major changes to Xbox Cloud Gaming. From November, the same month Grand Theft Auto VI releases, Microsoft is limiting streaming hours to just 15 hours for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, 10 hours for Premium subscribers, and just five hours for Game Pass Essential. Microsoft is also opening up access to Xbox Cloud Gaming with a pay-as-you-go option next month, rather than being limited to Game Pass subscriptions. The pay-as-you-go option is perfectly timed for Grand Theft Auto VI, allowing those who don't own an Xbox, or who primarily play from a phone, to stream the game by paying for a bundle of hours.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Conservative leader will deliver her keynote speech to Tory conference later

Kevin Hollinrake, the Conservative chair, raised a pint of beer and was joined by his black female Labrador, Zuzu, on stage at the party’s conference in Birmingham, the Press Association reports.

Hollinrake made light of comments by Labour MP Jenny Riddell-Carpenter who said country pubs with “warm beer” and a black Labrador was a “far-right nostalgic vision of Britain”, PA reports.

Everywhere I go, people tell me how much they love Kemi, including in my local pub, that place where I go to drink my far-right fantasy pint. With my far-right fantasy black lab.

As I campaigned to expose the reality of what happened, more and more emerged about life in many of our towns and cities, about police leaders so compromised, so corrupted by the ideology of multiculturalism.

They surrendered their operational independence to those they should have faced down, including many they should have locked up. That is something we should never, ever tolerate.

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© Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters

© Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters

© Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters

If recent complaints are believed, London and the UK are no longer welcoming for ultra-high net worth individuals

London was once globally renowned as the “billionaires’ playground”, where the world’s super-rich could relax in the Georgian townhouses of Mayfair undisturbed by the grasping hand of the state.

But if recent complaints by fleeing ultra-high net worth individuals are to be believed, the city is no longer as welcoming for those who consider themselves to be Britain’s most-persecuted minority.

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© Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

© Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

© Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

OpenAI will begin automatically watermarking text generated with ChatGPT in the European Union, the company has announced. It will also offer the watermarking feature in other regions, but it will be off by default outside of the EU.

The move in Europe is driven by a need to comply with the EU AI Act, which took effect in August. It requires marking content produced by AI models in a way that another tool can detect. Unfortunately, there is still no completely effective and reliable way to do that. A few standards already exist, like SynthID and the C2PA project, but they are relatively easy to circumvent for anyone with basic know-how.

The same is likely true for OpenAI's watermark. Its method is proprietary; the company calls it textGrain, and has published a technical paper explaining how it works. But in general, it works like other LLM watermarking tools we've seen in the past: It puts patterns in the word choices that are not clear to a human reader and that don't meaningfully change the general quality of the output, but that someone with a key can use a specialized detector to find. OpenAI says it will be giving access to the detector to a limited number of researchers and organizations and providing a request-for-approval process for others to be added over time.

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After months of industry and customer speculation, Paramount Skydance has shed some light on the future of the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services.

Paramount Skydance completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) today, ending a monthslong saga that began when Netflix last year announced its own plans to buy WBD. Netflix scrapped those plans in February. Skydance is the name of the company created from the $111 billion merger.

In an announcement today, Skydance said that all of the direct-to-consumer streaming services it owns, including the Discovery+ service that Discovery Inc. (which merged with WarnerMedia in 2022 to create WBD) launched in 2021, “will unify into a single service over time.”

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