The UK says it will establish a national AI Biosecurity Lab (AIBL) to help strengthen its defences against emerging biological threats.

As part of Wednesday's Budget, the government will commit £100m to establishing the new, "world first" institute with the support of leading AI firms.

The chancellor will also pledge millions of pounds in spending across a range of initiatives aimed at shoring up the UK's ability to respond to evolving cyber, biological and AI-enabled threats.

"AI will transform daily life: every firm, community, hospital, school, and every aspect of our economy can benefit," John Healey said.

"I understand and share the concerns of working people, so I am setting out a distinctively British approach to AI.

"One that doesn't leave workers behind and defends our national interest, while ensuring the benefits of AI-enabled growth are felt right across the country."

The full details about the role and remit of the new lab are yet to emerge.

But the AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said it would be a "major new global institution" that brings together "world-leading scientific expertise" to ensure the UK can safeguard its citizens and goals as AI develops.

"That means staying ahead of emerging threats, from cyber attacks to biological risks, while building more of the critical technology our security depends on," he said.

"By backing British science, advanced chips and our own AI companies, we can strengthen our national security, rebuild Britain's industrial strength and create good, skilled jobs across the country."

The AI Biosecurity Lab's creation will also be supported by leading AI developers, with OpenAI and Anthropic providing £200m worth of AI model credits that can be spent on the use of their models.

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The Chancellor's plans to boost AI spending will also see an additional £120m committed to the UK's AI Security Institute (AISI).

Established by the former Conservative government in 2023, the lab evaluates the risks of the most advanced and powerful models - and has been championed for its role in helping build a collaborative and open approach to AI testing.

The additional funding announced by the Chancellor will aim to help ensure the lab can continue its efforts and work, particularly amid growing calls for technical standards and guardrails for AI development.

It will come alongside a £60m investment in what it coined a "National Cyber Shield" which it said would use agentic AI to boost cyber-defences, and £70m funding towards a National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability (NERV) Centre.

This, it said, would harness AI tools to detect cyber vulnerabilities across the UK's critical infrastructure and economy.

It comes after the UK government revealed it was among organisations around the world to have taken some sites offline as a precaution after critical flaws were surfaced in a popular programming language.

Researchers who helped surface the vulnerabilities in PHP - a popular server-side scripting language used in web development for decades - warned platforms which use it could be exposed to potential hacks.

There have been no reports of any successful exploits of the flaw, coined php2shell, so far.

But experts have warned that the incident shows how quickly and easily bugs which have lain long dormant may be surfaced - and potentially exploited - using AI.

Do you have any views, comments or questions about this story?

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Getting older is something few of us want to think about. Yet how we fund our later years, and how much we'll get, has been a hot topic.

The triple lock formula - state pensions increasing by the greatest of 2.5%, earnings growth, or inflation - means those benefits have risen far faster than the earnings of workers since its introduction in 2011.

But as housing costs have also been rising fast, pensioner poverty has actually increased slightly in the last decade.

Nevertheless, even if you take those costs into consideration, pensioners are less likely to be in relative poverty - that is, having to get by on less than 60% of the income of the typical household - than families with children or working-age people.

And funding the triple lock has already cost the state billions more than initially envisaged. With that cost set to balloon further, the debate over whether that is sustainable, or fair, has raged for a while.

Andy Burnham intends to start a new system in a few years, which would see the state pension increase by at least inflation or 2.5%, and remove the automatic annual link with average earnings. It will likely mean less generous increases, although it will keep track with earnings growth over the longer term.

But are pensioners being short-changed in other ways? How do we compare with other countries?

One way of measuring that is to look at how generous the typical pension is relative to workers' average earnings - the replacement rate.

The OECD considers the outlook for those born at the start of the millennium in different countries on average wages, and assumes the pension system as it existed in 2022 is in place.

On that basis, looking at the basic state pension, retirement benefits in the UK look low compared with other wealthy countries.

And that is even when you consider that our system compels workers to be automatically enrolled in occupational schemes.

If you consider both of those, then after tax, UK retirement benefits would be 54.2% of average UK earnings, compared with an average of 63.2% across wealthy countries.

Burnham vows to end existing pension triple lock in 2030 to help fund care

State pension likely to top £13,000 a year

What is the triple lock and why are people talking about it?

But then there is income from other occupational and personal pensions, which are more prevalent in the UK. Include those and the gap narrows.

However, that does also mean that those relying on just the state pension for their incomes are a fair bit worse off than many retired people elsewhere.

So does that make the case for boosting spending on public pensions in the UK?

Well, the amount spent on the state pension is set to top £150bn a year, the single most expensive benefit to fund.

But other figures from the OECD show that the UK state spends a lower amount on total retirement benefits, relative to the size of its economy, than the average wealthy country.

Firstly, this is about political choices, and the UK chooses to dedicate larger amounts to items such as universal healthcare.

And secondly, with ageing populations, the OECD reckons the amount needed for pensions may be set to soar in many nations by 2060 (the exceptions largely being those that are deploying changes).

Its predictions for the UK are likely to rise by less under the revised triple lock system being put in place by Andy Burnham but it may still mean more borrowing.

As it is, £1 in every £13 the UK government spends is to pay the interest on existing debt. And countries with more generous pensions, such as Italy, have faced pressure to reform.

So in many ways, with auto-enrolment into workplace pensions, the UK appears to be ahead of the game in insisting on universal privately funded pensions for workers. But that system raises another issue: the gender pension gap.

The gender pension gap is the difference between the average pension income of men and women aged 65 and over, as a percentage of men's average pension income.

It found that the typical gap in most wealthy countries is around 22.8% in favour of men.

But in the UK women typically get a pension that is a third less than what a man gets - in the main, due to the reliance on private pensions - although it should be noted that the most recent data the OECD has for the UK is for 2021.

Women are more likely to have received lower pay over the course of their working lives, taken career breaks or worked part time. And the hit to pension pots can be stark.

So step back and look at the big picture and British pensioners - and those who have yet to retire - may feel others have it better elsewhere.

But the message from all of this isn't to dwell on outrage but to take action.

The state pension has become more generous over the years, but if you want to enjoy the same kind of retirement as those elsewhere, get saving.

That is - if you can, and if you haven't left it too late.

Do you have any views, comments or questions about this story?

Switzerland says patient is wife of Swiss diplomat and believed to have contracted virus while travelling in Uganda

Health officials across Africa are racing to determine how Nigeria's first Ebola patient ⁠in more than a decade ⁠became infected, amid fears ​the outbreak could spread further after reaching a fourth African country.

The Swiss foreign ministry said on Friday the patient in Nigeria, the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja, had not travelled to the Democratic Republic of ⁠Congo, where the outbreak was first detected in mid-May before spreading to Uganda , Kenya and now Nigeria. The woman was believed to have contracted Ebola while travelling with her husband in Uganda, the ministry added.

The new information contradicts accounts from Uganda, which previously said the woman had travelled to eastern DR Congo, and will raise concerns about the ability of authorities to contain the outbreak, which is already the most geographically widespread in history.

The Ugandan government reported Ebola cases in May and June before WHO declared it Ebola-free in August. A Ugandan government spokesperson told Reuters on Thursday that Uganda had no ​Ebola cases and that, if ​it did, it would make that information ​public.

The World Health Organization said investigations were continuing to establish the likely source of infection for the Ebola patient in Nigeria.

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating whether the patient may have come into contact with an Ebola patient in Kenya, as both travelled from Uganda's Entebbe airport on 3 October, said Dr Wessam Mankoula, head of emergency preparedness and response at the organisation.

Catherine Smallwood, a WHO Ebola incident manager in DR Congo, told a UN briefing in Geneva via video ‌link on Friday that WHO staff in DR Congo had no information showing the patient in Nigeria had travelled to the country.

Smallwood said a link to the case in Kenya was possible, ​but added that officials would need to compare the timing with when the Nigeria patient's symptoms began to tell whether the infection more likely happened at the Ugandan airport or elsewhere.

Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist and member of the WHO's Ebola emergency committee, cast doubt on the theory. "I think that is very speculative unless there is evidence of sharing the same ​space in a manner that could explain that," she said. "Random presence at the same location, a large airport, is not a supported epidemiological link by any standard of what we currently know."

The Nigerian health minister, Muhammad Ali Pate, said Nigeria's case remains contained and that contact-tracing was continuing. "We are trying to contain it so it doesn't go out to the communities. Hopefully, it won't get to that and we are working hard to ensure that," Pate said.

Melaku Yirga, vice-president for Africa at Prosper Global (formerly Mercy Corps), said the confirmation of Ebola in Kenya and Nigeria reinforces the need for countries to work closely together to prevent further transmission.

"What matters most now is speed, sharing information across borders without delay and ensuring frontline health workers and local organiaations have the resources to respond quickly," he said.

Ebola is a highly contagious and often fatal viral disease that affects humans and non-human primates. It spreads through body fluids or contaminated materials and causes organ damage, blood vessel impairment and sometimes severe internal and external bleeding.

The current outbreak is caused by the rare Bundibugyo virus, which has no approved treatment or vaccine. It was first announced on 15 May and has infected more than 9,500 people and killed nearly half of them.

The outbreak is the largest and deadliest in DR Congo's history and second only ​globally to ​the 2014-16 outbreak in west Africa, which infected ​more than ‌28,600 people ​and ​killed more than 11,000.

Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting

The English edition of a think tank report examining China's innovations in environmental legislation and their contributions to global environmental governance was released on Wednesday at the China Pavilion during the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP17.

Titled "China's Innovations and Global Contributions Through the Ecological and Environmental Code", the report was unveiled at an event showcasing research on China's progress in advancing the Beautiful China initiative.

The event was organized by the Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization at the China Pavilion in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. COP17 runs from Monday to Oct 30.

Addressing the event, Yu Hai, deputy director of the center, said the Ecological and Environmental Code has established a scientific and comprehensive modern legal framework for eco-environmental governance.

The code represents China's law-based response to global environmental challenges and offers legal insights and practical experience for international environmental governance and cooperation, he said.

China's top legislature adopted the code on March 12, and it took effect on Aug 15. It consolidates major legal provisions covering pollution prevention and control, ecological conservation, green and low-carbon development, legal liabilities and other areas.

Yu said the report's release coincides with COP17, which is set to conduct the first global review of collective progress in implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Adopted under China's presidency of COP15 in late 2022, the framework sets four long-term goals for 2050 and 23 action-oriented global targets for 2030. Among its targets, it calls for at least 30 percent of degraded terrestrial, inland water, marine and coastal ecosystems to be under effective restoration by 2030.

"The rule of law provides essential support for turning a shared vision of ecological and environmental conservation into lasting institutional safeguards," Yu said.

He said the report systematically explains China's innovations in environmental legislation and provides a platform for exchanging ideas and sharing experience with the international community.

The report was jointly compiled by researchers from the Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization, Xinhua Institute and the Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law.

The English edition of another think tank report, titled Progress and Achievements in Building a Beautiful Countryside in China, was also released at the China Pavilion during the event. It was jointly compiled by the Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization, China Daily and China Environment News.