Ruling is a fillip for the European Commission in its efforts to clamp down on ‘sweetheart’ tax deals

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Apple has lost a high profile €13bn (£11bn) Irish tax battle with Brussels in a decision which is a boost to the European Commission’s efforts to clamp down on favourable “sweetheart” tax deals for multinationals.

The European court of justice ruling, which had been eagerly awaited, comes after years of legal wrangling over whether the European Commission was right to demand in 2016 that €13bn in “illegal” tax breaks for Apple should be repaid because it gave the iPhone maker an unfair advantage.

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The author of the bestselling Sapiens offers a penetrating critique of the insidious dangers of machine learning and its capacity to manipulate the truth

What jumps to mind when you think about the impending AI apocalypse? If you’re partial to sci-fi movie cliches, you may envisage killer robots (with or without thick Austrian accents) rising up to terminate their hubristic creators. Or perhaps, a la The Matrix , you’ll go for scary machines sucking energy out of our bodies as they distract us with a simulated reality.

For Yuval Noah Harari , who has spent a lot of time worrying about AI over the past decade, the threat is less fantastical and more insidious. “In order to manipulate humans, there is no need to physically hook brains to computers,” he writes in his engrossing new book Nexus . “For thousands of years prophets, poets and politicians have used language to manipulate and reshape society. Now computers are learning how to do it. And they won’t need to send killer robots to shoot us. They could manipulate human beings to pull the trigger.”

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Established apps were taking attitudes to sex and love right back to the 1950s. Thank goodness for something less traditional

Obviously if you are not on any dating apps, you shouldn’t have any opinions about them, and you definitely shouldn’t worry about other people’s opinions of them. But I have been hearing so much about Feeld that I can’t ignore it.

People sometimes call Feeld the “throuples” dating app because of how it started: a tech entrepreneur couple, Dimo Trifonov and Ana Kirova, considering opening their relationship, had an idea for an app that they originally wanted to call 3nder. In fact, it’s not just for throuples, but anything remotely unconventional, dating-wise, from ethical non-monogamy to the most casual one-time-only hookup.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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Oil and gas company to use artificial intelligence to speed up decision-making by engineers

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The oil and gas supermajor BP is to use artificial intelligence to speed up the decision-making of its engineers, after signing a five-year deal with the US spy technology company Palantir.

The British company plans to use large language models to automatically analyse data from its sites and produce advice to help humans come to conclusions.

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Draft bill requires social media platforms to stop children in the restricted age range from accessing their services

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The Albanese government plans to impose a minimum age for teenagers accessing social media and gaming platforms, with legislation to be introduced into parliament before the next election.

The prime minister will announce the nationwide move on Tuesday but will stop short of specifying the age, arguing the government wants to wait for the conclusion of an age-verification trial which begins its final phase this week.

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Apple watchers also expect new colors for the iPhone at the annual launch event, this year titled ‘It’s Glowtime’

Apple is slated to unveil its latest iPhone and a slew of other new hardware on Monday during its biggest product launch event of the year.

The event, held at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California , features the tagline “It’s Glowtime” with the company’s logo surrounded by a colorful aura. New colors for the iPhone and other Apple products are rumored to be coming .

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Calvijn College was one of the first schools in the Netherlands to ban mobile phones. Four years on, officials report its culture has been transformed

Six years ago, as officials at the Netherlands’ Calvijn College began considering whether to ban phones from their schools, the idea left some students aghast.

“We were asked whether we thought we were living in the 1800s,” said Jan Bakker, the chair of the college, whose students range in age from 12 to 18 years.

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Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Diane Abbott, Suella Braverman and Sadiq Khan received between them 85,000 abusive messages, study finds

The UK’s most prominent politicians were subjected to a deluge of abuse on X during the general election period, one of the most comprehensive studies of online abuse in politics has found.

Five politicians – Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Diane Abbott, Suella Braverman and Sadiq Khan – were, between them, sent more than 85,000 clearly abusive messages between 1 May and 30 July, according to the findings from researchers at the University of Sheffield.

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Paulomi Debnath has shared a kiss with her husband every morning for 18 years. Ron Hill ran every day for more than 52 years. When does an enjoyable habit become a compulsion?

Anyone who spotted the run Tom Vickery uploaded to exercise tracking app Strava on 18 February last year might have been a little confused. The 30-minute sprint appeared to have taken place right in the middle of the Channel, not far from Guernsey and heading towards the west coast of France. The run was also, curiously, a ruler-straight line, appearing on Vickery’s public profile as an unbending, inch-long streak of orange in the blue swathe of the app’s virtual sea. Oh, and it was at a world record-breaking pace.

Of course, anyone who knows Vickery wouldn’t have been surprised at all. The 38-year-old triathlon coach from Cambridge was on a two-day ferry trip to Bilbao for a holiday and this rather speedy jog was simply another run on his then nearly four-year daily running streak on Strava. Determined not to break his streak on board the ship, Vickery had risen at 5am to run up and down the deck for his allotted 30 minutes, and the boat’s progress through the water meant he appeared to be running faster than any long-distance runner in the world.

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