Three of four bodies handed over on Tuesday night were identified as Israeli hostages.
Day: October 15, 2025
Afghanistan says more than a dozen civilians killed in renewed border fighting with Pakistan
Chancellor also blames austerity and ‘ongoing impact of Lis Truss’s mini-budget’ for growing shortfall in public finances
Rachel Reeves has said tax rises and spending cuts are on the table for this autumn’s budget, as the government aims to tackle a growing shortfall in the public finances which she said was partly due to the lingering impact of Brexit.
Speaking to Sky News, the chancellor said: “Of course, we’re looking at tax and spending” as she prepared for her 26 November statement. “But the numbers will always add up with me as chancellor, because we saw just three years ago what happens when … the Conservatives lost control of the public finances, inflation and interest rates went through the roof.”
Tesla Motors/via REUTERS
- Tesla finally launched “affordable” versions of the Model Y and 3 last week.
- Ex-Nissan COO Andy Palmer told Business Insider the new models can’t compete with Tesla’s Chinese rivals.
- Palmer is known as the “godfather of EVs” for launching the world’s first mass-market electric car.
Tesla’s “affordable” EVs are finally here — and not everyone is impressed.
Andy Palmer, the former Nissan COO who launched the Leaf, the world’s first mass-market electric car, told Business Insider that Tesla’s new Standard models won’t help it fight off fierce competition from China’s EV giants.
“If you take out the features — and Tesla has taken out an awful lot of features — then that creates a new price point, but that new price point doesn’t make it competitive with the Chinese competition, which are stacked with features,” Palmer told Business Insider.
Tesla launched the Model 3 and Y Standard, which cost $37,000 and $40,000 respectively and come without features such as Autosteer, rear screens, and radios, last week.
The lack of features and high price tags left some investors and fans underwhelmed, and Tesla’s share price fell after the new models were revealed.
Palmer, who is known as the “godfather of EVs” for his work developing the Nissan Leaf, said the new Model Y and 3 failed to fill the need for truly affordable EVs in the US.
“The US needs electric cars that are well-specified for less than $30,000,” said Palmer.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Investors have been calling for Tesla to launch more affordable EVs for years. Last week, the Cybertruck maker unveiled the new models, which cost around $5,000 less than their premium counterparts.
It comes as Tesla faces growing pressure from upstart Chinese manufacturers. Although companies like BYD and Geely don’t sell their cars in the US due to high tariffs, they are now rapidly winning market share in Europe and other global markets like Brazil and Mexico.
BYD’s lineup of affordable electric and hybrid cars has proven especially popular in Europe, with the Shenzhen-based company seeing sales surge even as Tesla’s have plummeted.
“It isn’t such a big problem in the US, but elsewhere you have Chinese models that are coming in with lots of features at a very good price point,” said Palmer.
“Stripping back a car doesn’t help you,” he added.
Chinese automakers have increasingly prioritized high-tech features such as autonomous driving and AI assistants as they battle to win customers.
BYD announced in February that it would incorporate advanced self-driving tech into all of its cars, including its cheapest model, the $8,000 Seagull. Meanwhile, Xiaomi’s $30,000 SU7 sedan allows drivers to voice control home appliances from their car.
Palmer, who spoke to Business Insider from China, said Western brands needed a “wake-up call” on the rise of Chinese automakers and had to develop strategies to match them, rather than simply relying on tariffs to keep BYD and its rivals out.
“You have to address the issue rather than standing behind regulatory or tariff rules. They’ll insulate you for a while, but don’t make the problem go away,” he said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Jeff Schear via Getty Images
- Sam Altman says OpenAI will be rolling out age-gated “erotica” to its adult users on ChatGPT.
- “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban says the planned age restrictions will do little to protect kids.
- “No parent is going to trust that their kids can’t get through your age gating,” Cuban said.
Mark Cuban says OpenAI’s venture into erotica for adults is a bad idea.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in an X post on Tuesday that the company will allow “erotica” to appear on its ChatGPT platform for verified adults in December. Altman said OpenAI will also roll out “age-gating more fully” alongside this change.
Cuban said in an X post on Tuesday that OpenAI’s planned age restrictions will do little to shield young children from the adult content that will be introduced on its platforms.
“This is going to backfire. Hard. No parent is going to trust that their kids can’t get through your age gating. They will just push their kids to every other LLM,” Cuban wrote.
Cuban added that it would not be difficult for kids to access “erotica” on ChatGPT anyway. The “Shark Tank” star has three children with his wife, Tiffany Stewart: two daughters, Alexis, born 2003, and Alyssa, born 2006, and one son, Jake, born 2010.
“Why take the risk? A few seniors in HS are 18 and decide it would be fun to show the hard core erotica they created to the 14 yr olds. What could go wrong?” Cuban wrote in his post.
Representatives for Cuban and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Under OpenAI’s terms of use, users must be “at least 13 years old or the minimum age required in your country to consent to use” their services. Users under 18 must get their “parent or legal guardian’s permission” to use OpenAI’s products, the company added.
OpenAI’s turn toward adult content comes amid similar moves from its competitors. OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, released several AI companions in July, including Ani, a lingerie-wearing Japanese anime girl.
xAI released an AI image and video generator named Grok Imagine in the same month. Unlike other AI image and video generators made by OpenAI and Google, Grok Imagine had a “spicy” mode that allowed users to generate photorealistic NSFW images.
OpenAI’s Altman was initially hesitant about introducing adult content to the company’s platforms. Altman told content creator Cleo Abram in a YouTube video that aired in August that OpenAI hasn’t “put a sex-bot avatar in ChatGPT yet” because it didn’t align with the company’s values.
“I’m proud of the company and how little we get distracted by that. But sometimes we do get tempted,” Altman told Abram.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Scoreboard error gave Academy of Classical Christian Studies team the edge over Apache high school
A US high school girls basketball team is said to have proved “there are still good people in this world” after taking the unprecedented step of returning a championship it had won after realizing they had actually lost the title-clinching game.
The story stems from the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association, where a crucial scoreboard error early in the game gave the girls basketball team at Academy of Classical Christian Studies the edge over its Apache high school counterpart, as CBS News recently reported.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan of supporting anti-Pakistan Islamist militants.
Active pension scheme expected to start in January is part of chancellor’s ‘autumn of reforms’ to tackle economic stagnation
Germans who continue in the labour market beyond retirement age will be able to earn up to £1,750 (€2,000) a month tax-free on top of their pension under a scheme aimed at boosting economic growth and labour force participation rates.
The “Aktivrente”, or active pension scheme, due to come into force in January, was promised on the campaign trail by the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, before he came into office five months ago.
Chancellor cites the UK’s exit from EU alongside austerity and Truss’s mini-budget as issues affecting economy
Good morning. In a much-praised FT column yesterday, Stephen Bush argued that one problem facing the Conservatives today is that “an essential condition for entry into the upper echelons of [the party] is being willing to at least pretend that you think taking Britain out of the EU was a good idea”. As Bush memorably put it, “this is a never-ending lobotomy for the Tories”.
But, to a much lesser extent, Labour has also had a problem with Brexit truth telling. At the last election Keir Starmer knew that he would only win with the support of people who voted to leave the EU in 2016 and as a result Labour avoided any language on Brexit that implied that this group might have been wrong.
Starmer and Reeves are expected to argue that, if it hadn’t been for Brexit, this type of downgrade would not have been needed, and to cite official figures suggesting that if Britain had not left the European Union the economy would be about £120 billion bigger by 2035 than current forecasts suggest it will be.
The message is simple: Farage is ultimately to blame as the man who delivered Brexit with “easy sloganeering” then walked away from the aftermath rather than putting in the hard yards. Or, to put it another way: Farage, not us, is responsible for putting up your taxes.
Austerity, Brexit, and the ongoing impact of Liz Truss’s mini-budget, all of those things have weighed heavily on the UK economy. Already, people thought that the UK economy would be 4% smaller because of Brexit. Now, of course, we are undoing some of that damage by the deal that we did with the EU earlier this year … but there is no doubting that the impact of Brexit is severe and long lasting and that’s why we are trying to do trade deals around the world, US, India, but most importantly with the EU.
Thousands of Pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched in Udine ahead of the match between Italy and Israel int he 2026 World Cup qualifiers.