He has been praised for refusing to share data with the Kremlin. But if targeting CEOs worries Musk, Zuckerberg et al, so be it

The shock arrest of Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov as he stepped off his private jet in Bourget airport near Paris over the weekend is a startling, unprecedented event: he faces alleged offences that could include enabling fraud, drug trafficking, organised crime, promotion of terrorism and cyberbullying.

He may not be an Elon Musk or a Mark Zuckerberg, but he is the CEO of a tech platform with 900 million monthly users, and is the first big name in tech to find himself potentially on the wrong side of the European Union’s increasingly strict laws and regulations in the digital sphere.

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Three-quarters of households that park cars on street do not have charger within five-minute walk, data shows

North-east Derbyshire and Redditch in the West Midlands are among the worst public-charger “deserts” for electric vehicles in Great Britain, according to new analysis that found 9.3m households did not have off-street parking where they could install a charger.

More than three-quarters of households that park their cars on the street do not have a public charger for electric vehicles within a five-minute walk, according to the analysis by the consultancy Field Dynamics.

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Exclusive: Developers say the Fieldworker robot will soon be in use in the UK, Australia and Portugal

A new version of the world’s first raspberry-picking robot , a four-armed machine powered by artificial intelligence and able to do the job at the speed and effectiveness of a human, is to be employed on farms in the UK, Australia and Portugal over the coming 12 months.

The developers claim that Fieldworker 1, nicknamed Robocrop, can detect more accurately than previous models whether a berry is ripe, and can pick fruit faster because its grippers have greater reach and flexibility.

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Revisited: Guardian journalist Michael Safi delves into the world of artificial intelligence, exploring the dangers and promises it holds for society

This week we are revisiting the Black Box series. This episode was first broadcast on 4 March 2024.

This is the story of Geoffrey Hinton, a man who set out to understand the brain and ended up working with a group of researchers who invented a technology so powerful that even they do not truly understand how it works. This is about a collision between two mysterious intelligences – two black boxes – human and artificial. And it is already having profound consequences

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A secondhand EV is a possibility for many families as the cost of desirable models, including Kias and Teslas, falls to £15,000

If your current car is on the way out and you think an electric replacement is too expensive, think again. Three-year-old Tesla Model 3s and Kia e-Niros that will do 250-300 miles on a single charge can now be bought for as little as £14,000.

In the last year, forecourt prices for used electric cars have tumbled to the extent that previously unaffordable models are now within the reach of many families for the first time.

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Amid global political and technological chaos, there’s something strangely comforting about seeing skilled craftspeople calmly mending old timepieces

Lately, I’ve been lying awake in the small hours, hypnotised by watch repair videos – pinions, train wheel bridges, pallet forks, barrel arbors, the literal works. Am I interested in watches? No. I could only become less interested in horology by slipping into a coma. My wristwatch hasn’t worked in months, and I may never want to know what time it is again – standardised timekeeping just makes people expect things of me and I don’t feel I can currently deliver. I just want to stay quiet and peaceful while people with teeny screwdrivers talk about amplitudes and restore components smaller than the light in a robin’s eye. This is what the 21st century has made of me. I am not a watch person. I already had my own interests: I’m meant to lie awake reading novels, checking on current affairs, bingeing Korean vampire-medical-action-romcom series. (Lordy, Korean vampires are attractive.) Watches? In a reasonable world, I wouldn’t care if you told me your crown gasket was rotten or your balance staff awry. In a reasonable world I wouldn’t know what the Patek Philippe you were talking about.

But this is the world where the internet isn’t binding us together in knowledge and strength – it’s drowning us in the monetised nightmares of a) a child’s drawing of a haunted candle b) a fascistic South African goblin. Wealth addicts farm us for anxiety clicks and radicalise us as race war foot soldiers. Exquisite computer programming, based on top-grade research, helping rid humanity of work and woe? Nope. We get Shit AI. We didn’t want it any more than we wanted Clippy , but here it is, scraping data everywhere all at once, turning the rich tapestry of human achievement into a slurry of plagiarism, racial bias and porn, then serving it up in disturbing beige nuggets. And if I need to write an email, I don’t want AI to “help” make me sound like a cursed mannequin pretending to be an intern, I want to sound like me. In a reasonable world the power to save our planet or boil it away into radioactive misery and blood dust wouldn’t rest in the hands of a Botoxed Russian mobster with a tracksuit fetish, or a Winnie-the-Pooh lookalike who’s into mass incarceration and maybe organ harvesting. At least the malignant narcissist Hannibal Lecter fan unable to remember which women he has sexually assaulted probably won’t get near the nuclear football again. But why was that even a possibility?

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The UK has the research base, the startups, the venture capitalists, but its presence in the global market is pitiful. The chancellor must step in

Just how bad is the economy? The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, warns that hard choices on tax, spending and borrowing need to be made on 30 October when she delivers the first Labour budget since 2010, so poor is the economic legacy. Phooey, respond those still standing in the shredded Tory party. The economy, clipping along at a growth rate north of 2% this year, is in good shape; it is her giving in to her union “paymasters” that is the problem. She responds that the crisis in public sector pay had to be confronted.

Yet widen the economic lens to the condition of corporate Britain and the scale of its presence in new technologies and the Tory bequest is unambiguously bad. Britain simply does not possess a critical mass of ambitious, sizeable-growth companies at the frontiers of technology capable of leading any private sector investment or growth boom.

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Billionaire CEO, who was travelling aboard his private jet, was subject of arrest warrant, according to TV reports

Pavel Durov, billionaire co-founder and chief executive of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at the Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, TF1 TV said, citing an unnamed source.

Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France.

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AI images posted to Truth Social bore the watermark of a tiny Texas non-profit looking to bankroll X users

When Donald Trump shared a slew of AI-generated images this week that falsely depicted Taylor Swift and her fans endorsing his campaign for president, the former US president was amplifying the work of a murky non-profit with aspirations to bankroll rightwing media influencers and a history of spreading misinformation.

Several of the images Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, which showed digitally rendered young women in “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts, were the products of the John Milton Freedom Foundation. Launched last year, the Texas-based non-profit organization frames itself as a press freedom group with the goal of “empowering independent journalists” and “fortifying the bedrock of democracy”.

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