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Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer greets Nigeria's President Bola Tinubu on the steps of 10 Downing Street in central London Thursday, ahead of their meeting on the second day of a two-day state visit to
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Formula One’s smallest team Haas are ready to go on the rampage with Godzilla as they take the fight to bigger rivals this season. The US-owned team, who have Toyota’s motorsport division as title sponsors and are led by Japanese principal Ayao Komatsu, announced Wednesday a season-long collaboration with Japan’s Toho Co. The studio’s reptilian anti-hero, the ‘King of the Monsters’ who has been causing havoc across cinema screens since 1954, is the star of a new ‘Godzilla Minus Zero’ movie scheduled for North American release in November. Haas said the collaboration will debut at the March 27-29 Japanese Grand Prix, with a special livery to be unveiled in Tokyo on March 24, and feature prominently at the team’s home US Grand Prix in Austin in October. “Through this collaboration, get ready for Godzilla to rampage on the world’s fastest stage,” said Keiji Ota, Toho’s ‘Chief Godzilla Officer’. The team are currently punching above their weight in fourth place in the constructors’ standings after two Grands Prix and a sprint race, with Britain’s Oliver Bearman fifth in the drivers’ championship after scoring in all three. Eighth last season, Ferrari-powered Haas are now ahead of former champions Red Bull and only one point behind current champions McLaren. Bearman is two points clear of McLaren’s world champion Lando Norris. Both McLaren drivers failed to start the Chinese Grand Prix last weekend while Bearman lined up 10th and finished fifth. Red Bull had four-times world champion Max Verstappen retire from the race on Sunday while teammate Isack Hadjar was eighth. “We beat Red Bull on merit today, so we were the fourth fastest team... which is incredible,” said Komatsu after the race in Shanghai ended in a Mercedes one-two with Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc third and fourth. “The unfortunate thing for McLaren was that they couldn’t take the race. “We were there to take the benefit, so we just maximised everything. “Coming out of the Bahrain test, I didn’t think we could fight Red Bull at all, and also Alpine looked really quick,” added the Japanese. “(Pierre) Gasly proved that they are quick, but we’ve beaten them on merit.” Alpine’s Gasly finished sixth, more than two seconds behind Bearman. Formula One has 11 teams now but General Motors-backed newcomers Cadillac already boast a bigger headcount than Haas.
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The wealth tax on which Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is campaigning ahead of a March 24 election may appear modest: a 0.5% levy set at such a high threshold that barely 20,000 Danes — one in 300 residents — will pay it. But if the intent was to trigger a divisive, nationwide debate about equality and wealth in the small northern European country that could help the social democrat emerge as leader of a new left-leaning alliance, it may be doing its job. According to political analyst Noa Redington, the proposal reflects a broader pivot by Frederiksen and her Social Democratic Party, which has lost left-leaning voters after going into coalition with the centre-right and introducing tough asylum reforms. “’We still remember that we come from the left, that in our heart, we are red’,” he said of the signal sent out by a tax aimed at raising some $1bn to fund school reforms allowing for smaller class sizes. EUROPE’S LATEST RIFT OVER EQUALITY AND GROWTHVariants of taxes on the assets of the rich have in recent months been championed by left-leaning politicians in France, Italy, Britain, Switzerland, New York and elsewhere as they seek to address anger at inequality and to rally their voter bases. Quentin Parrinello, of the EU Tax Observatory research institute, said tax justice was becoming a growing issue. “You have an increasing number of countries that are faced with difficult choices... And there’s a question that lingers at the end: who needs to foot the bill?” While it is too early to say how the wealth tax plan will shape Tuesday’s general election, a Voxmeter survey on March 17 showed Frederiksen and potential left-wing allies have recently gained support and could even make it over the line to secure a majority. An Epinion survey for the Danish Trade Union Confederation showed Danes split down the middle on the levy, while a Mols-Bjerre Consultants survey for daily Borsen showed 42% in favour, primarily supported by those intending to vote for leftist parties. OPPOSITION FROM BUSINESSDanish captains of industry, from shipping group Maersk’s chair Robert Maersk Uggla to LEGO CEO Niels Christiansen, are resolutely opposed, warning it could push job- and growth-creating entrepreneurs abroad. “I think there is a good chance Denmark will become poorer,” Martin Thorborg, CEO of Danish accounting software firm Visma Dinero, told Reuters of the consequences of a tax he would expect to have to pay. “If we make Denmark poorer, there may well be less inequality, but this will affect the weak in our society more than the rich,” he said. Other countries have tougher wealth taxes. In Norway, for example, individuals pay 1% on net wealth between 1.76 mn and 20.7mn crowns ($182,000-$2.1mn) and, since 2022, 1.1% above that. About 12% of the population paid it in 2023. To be sure, if the 0.5% tax was implemented on Danish fortunes above 25mn crowns ($3.86mn), it would come on top of Denmark’s inheritance tax, an exit tax and Europe’s highest top marginal income tax rate at 60.5%. Yet, that has not stopped Denmark’s richest 1% garnering a growing share of the country’s wealth — up from 26.4% in 2020 to 29.8% in 2023 and 2024, according to Statistics Denmark. Indeed, on a broader metric, more than half of all Danish household wealth is concentrated within the top 10% of households, making Denmark the third least-equal country in the OECD club of advanced economies after the United States and the Netherlands. LESSONS FROM NORWAY’S LEVYDenmark’s Social Democrats abolished an existing wealth tax in 1997, and in 2022, under Frederiksen, the party voted against a progressive wealth tax proposal. Critics, including members of Frederiksen’s outgoing grand coalition formed in 2022, still say it is the wrong approach. “If we are to do more — and we must, in order to take care of some of the most vulnerable members of society — then the solution is not to make Denmark poorer,” Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen, leader of the right-leaning Liberal Party, said in a debate with Frederiksen on Sunday. Parrinello, of the EU Tax Observatory, argued that wealth taxes encouraged ordinary citizens to pay their own taxes if they restored trust in the tax system and showed that the rich were paying a fair share. “Is democracy about one person, one vote, or is it about one dollar, one vote, and those with more dollars have more rights and more rights to pay less tax than us?” he said. US economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize laureate, on Tuesday threw his weight behind the proposal, urging European governments to follow suit. “Does anybody think that if you tax Bill Gates by 0.5% he will stop working? Or Jeff Bezos? No - they are going to go on doing exactly what they are doing.” The experience of Norway — with a wealth tax dating back to 1892 — offers fodder for both sides of the argument. Data from conservative think-tank Civita show 261 residents with assets above 10mn crowns left Norway in 2022 and 254 in 2023. But despite the exodus, revenue from the wealth tax has gradually risen to a not-trivial 0.6% of national output.
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Jos Buttler is refusing to accept his England career is over despite admitting he had a “poor tournament” at the recent T20 World Cup. Widely regarded as one of the outstanding white-ball batsmen of his generation, Buttler managed just 87 runs in eight innings at the tournament as England reached the semi-finals before losing to co-hosts and eventual champions India. “Obviously I had a poor tournament, which is disappointing,” Buttler, who remains on an England and Wales central contract, said on his For the Love of Cricket podcast with former England fast bowler Stuart Broad. “But I have been playing some of the best cricket of my (career) in recent years, so hopefully I can get back to playing my best. “I certainly have ambitions (to play for England again), but no longer being a captain, I am not a selector and whatever, so what will be, will be.” Buttler, 35, is set to play for Gujarat Titans in the upcoming Indian Premier League and hopes time away after the World Cup “up the mountains” in France with his family will leave him feeling reinvigorated. “I couldn’t have been further away from cricket, which for me at the time was just perfect,” said Buttler. “It is exactly what I needed.” “Obviously the tournament didn’t go personally how I would have liked it to go, and I just felt like I needed some space from cricket and not to think about the game, and I could not have been further away from cricket where I was in that week.” Buttler, a member of England’s 2019 one-day international World Cup-winning team and also the skipper for their T20 triumph in Australia three years later, added: “It was really refreshing - I really enjoyed it, a complete sort of release, and slowly but surely, I would say at the start of this week, (I am) just starting to reflect a bit and have a few thoughts about what is important to me and my cricket, and why it probably didn’t go quite as I would’ve liked. “There’s elements that I actually don’t really know exactly,” he said. “For all your best intentions and hard work and efforts to perform, it just didn’t work, and sometimes that is OK as well.“That is something I have had to realise. It wasn’t for a lack of effort, it just didn’t quite happen.” Related Story
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A powerful artificial intelligence model that appeared anonymously on a developer platform last week has sparked speculation that Chinese startup DeepSeek may be quietly testing its next-generation system ahead of an official launch. The free model, called Hunter Alpha, surfaced on the AI gateway platform OpenRouter on March 11 without any developer attribution and was later described by the platform as a “stealth model.” During tests conducted by Reuters, the Hunter Alpha chatbot described itself as “a Chinese AI model primarily trained in Chinese” and said its training data extended to May 2025, the same knowledge cutoff point reported by DeepSeek’s own chatbot. When asked about its creator, however, the system declined to identify its developer. “I only know my name, my parameter scale and my context window length,” the chatbot said. Neither DeepSeek nor OpenRouter has identified the model’s creator and they did not respond to requests for comment. Hunter Alpha’s profile page describes it as a 1-trillion-parameter model, meaning it was trained using roughly one trillion adjustable values that determine how the system processes language and generates responses. Models with more parameters generally require significantly more computing power to operate. The system also advertises a context window of up to one million tokens, a measure of how much text an AI model can process or remember during a single interaction. A token roughly corresponds to a short piece of text, such as part of a word. “The combination that stood out was Hunter Alpha’s 1 million token context paired with reasoning capability and free access,” said Nabil Haouam, an engineer who builds AI agent systems. “Most frontier models with that context window come with real cost at scale,” he added. Those specifications resemble expectations in local media for DeepSeek’s next-generation V4 model, which Chinese outlets have reported could launch as early as April. DeepSeek, like many of its Chinese competitors, is well-funded, though it has an unusual structure given its parent company is a quantitative hedge fund rather than a tech conglomerate. While the overlap does not establish a direct connection, it has intensified speculation among developers that the anonymous system could be an early test version of the upcoming release by DeepSeek. “The chain-of-thought pattern is probably the strongest signal,” said Daniel Dewhurst, an AI engineer who analysed the model after its release, referring to how the AI model reasons. “Reasoning style is hard to disguise and tends to reflect how a model was trained.” Hunter Alpha’s scale and memory capacity also match specifications that have circulated for DeepSeek V4 since early this year, he said. Still, some developers cautioned that the evidence linking the model to DeepSeek was inconclusive. “My analysis suggests Hunter Alpha is likely not DeepSeek V4,” said Umur Ozkul, who runs independent AI benchmark tests, citing differences in token-related behaviour and architectural patterns when compared with DeepSeek’s existing systems. He said speculation connecting the model to DeepSeek was understandable given the timing and capabilities advertised. Anonymous model launches are not unusual, as platforms like OpenRouter allow developers to send queries to dozens of AI models through a single interface, making them a popular testing ground for new systems. An anonymous model called Pony Alpha appeared on OpenRouter in February before Chinese firm Zhipu AI confirmed it was part of its GLM-5 system five days later. A notice on Hunter Alpha’s profile page said all prompts and completions for the model “are logged by the provider and may be used to improve the model,” underscoring the industry-wide practice of using stealth model launches for unbiased feedback. The model was adopted rapidly after appearing on the platform and processed more than 160 billion tokens as of Sunday, according to OpenRouter statistics. Much of the activity came from software development tools and AI agent frameworks like OpenClaw, which allow AI systems to autonomously plan tasks and interact with external software.
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Desmond Scott's Former Flame He Had Money To Burn On Me ... Now He Better Not Get Burned by Diddy!!! Published March 18, 2026 1:05 PM PDT Play video content TMZ.com Desmond Scott’s ex Marissa
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Holders Paris Saint-Germain, record 15-time winners Real Madrid and Arsenal surged into the quarter-finals of the Champions League on Tuesday, while Sporting produced a brilliant comeback in Portugal to end Bodo/Glimt’s remarkable run.PSG appear to
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World number one Aryna Sabalenka said she is unsure about her return to the Dubai Championships after its tournament director criticised her withdrawal this year, labelling the demand for tougher penalties on late pullouts a
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Multiple Group 1 winners Forever Young and Calandagan are among the likely runners for the 30th Dubai World Cup meeting, at Meydan Racecourse, on March 28.A field of nine has been announced for the $12million
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A clinical Japan swept past South Korea 4-1 on Wednesday to set up a Women’s Asian Cup final against hosts Australia, with the two-time champions putting on a masterclass.West Ham’s Riko Ueki and Tottenham’s Maika
