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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Volkswagen faced further pressure over its Xinjiang links as British parliamentarians called on the UK government to investigate the carmaker’s compliance with the country’s slavery laws following a Financial Times investigation into an audit of its factory in the Chinese region.

The FT on Thursday reported that the audit, which VW claimed cleared it of allegations of forced labour in Xinjiang, had in fact failed to meet international standards.

Sarah Champion, Labour MP and chair of the international development select committee, said: “There needs to be an investigation not only into Volkswagen but into supply chains of most major products.”

Champion, who is calling for stronger UK legislation to crackdown on forced labour in international supply chains, added that companies were turning a blind eye to human rights abuses in their supply chains as they prioritised commercial gains.

Liam Byrne, another Labour MP and chair of the House of Commons business and trade committee, said the issues with the audit provided “fresh evidence for why we need to quickly overhaul the UK’s modern slavery laws to deliver far tougher transparency through the supply chains of big firms”.

He urged the UK to introduce legislation similar to the US Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act or usher in a facility inspection regime that would give UK customers, suppliers and investors the protections they “want and need against the abuse of forced labour”.

Conservative MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith, co-chair of the hawkish Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said he was planning to table a parliamentary question demanding that ministers examine the German company’s compliance with the UK’s Modern Slavery Act.

“Following the FT’s report, I am calling on the government to carry out a thorough investigation into VW’s supply chains,” Duncan Smith said.

Human rights groups in Xinjiang have documented widespread abuse against the mainly Muslim Uyghur ethnic group, with reports that hundreds of thousands of people were detained in the region from 2017 to 2019. Beijing has denied allegations of human rights abuses.

Under the 2015 slavery act, companies that supply UK customers must annually disclose what action they have taken to ensure no modern slavery exists in the business or its supply chains.

After pressure from human rights groups and investors, VW in December said that it had carried out an audit of its plant in Xinjiang, which is run by a joint venture with state-owned SAIC.

It said that the audit, carried out by Berlin-based consultancy Löning and an unnamed Chinese law firm, had applied the internationally renowned SA8000 standard and found “no indications of any use of forced labour”.

But a leaked document, which was also reviewed by Der Spiegel and ZDF, showed failures to comply with the standard.

The plant in Xinjiang has become a headache for VW amid growing tensions between Beijing and several western governments, including the US. Earlier this year, thousands of Porsche, Bentley and Audi cars were held up in US ports after a discovery of a Chinese subcomponent in the vehicles that breached the country’s anti-forced labour laws.

VW executives have remained reluctant to close the plant, which no longer produces cars and only employs 197 people, as this would risk harming the company’s lucrative relationship with SAIC.

It could also hurt the company in China, where consumers in the past have boycotted brands that acknowledge controversies in Xinjiang that Beijing vehemently denies.

Chinese consumers boycotted brands including H&M and Nike three years ago after they pledged not to buy Xinjiang cotton — a scenario that VW, which has already been losing share in its most profitable market, has been careful to avoid.

VW did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the development in the UK. The carmaker on Thursday said that it “always complies with legal requirements in its communications”, adding that “investors or the public have never been deceived”.

The UK Department for Business and Trade did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A two-year-old boy has died after a TV fell at his home in what is believed to have been a “tragic accident”, police have said.

Carter Walsh was rushed to hospital after he was injured in Fisher Close, Wigan, at about 14:15 BST on Thursday, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said.

He later died despite treatment from medics.

A GMP spokesman said they were still examining the circumstances but believed it was “a tragic accident with nothing suspicious”.

It is believed the TV dislodged before falling and that a fireplace was also involved.

More than £1,000 has been raised via a Gofundme page in the toddler’s memory.

THIS is the bloodcurdling moment teen “murderer” Carly Gregg, 14, giggles in court after allegedly shooting her own mom in the face.

Gregg, now 15, allegedly killed 40-year-old math teacher Ashley Smylie, in their home in Mississippi in March.

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At the start of proceedings on Thursday, Gregg was caught on Court TV footage trying to sickeningly stifle a laugh.

Footage shows the 15-year-old break a smile before quickly covering her mouth with her hand.

She then proceeds to pretend like she is leaning on her hand to continue covering her mouth.

Gregg still has a slight smile as the clip continues to play – despite being accused of murdering her own mother.

Gregg was 14 years old when she murdered her mom inside their home in Brandon, Mississippi, outside Jackson, after the two argued over her marijuana usage, prosecutors allege.

Horrifying surveillance footage in the house showed Gregg wearing a Nirvana tee and dark pants, walking from the kitchen to another room that morning before gunshots and screams rang out.

Gregg shot her mom in the neck, stole her phone, and went back to the kitchen to text her stepdad while playing with their two dogs, prosecutors allege.

The eerie video showed a stone-faced Gregg staring at her mom’s phone while she texted her stepdad, Heath, “When will you be home, honey?”

Gregg also texted a friend, referred to only as BC in court, and asked them to come over, prosecutors claim.

When BC came to the house, Gregg asked them, “Have you ever seen a dead body?” before leading the friend inside.

By the time Heath came home, BC was standing outside, where they heard gunfire.

Heath managed to wrestle the gun out of Gregg’s hand and then called police, prosecutors allege.

His shoulder was grazed by a bullet, but he otherwise came out unscathed.

Gregg, now 15, has pleaded not guilty by way of insanity, and her lawyers are claiming she blacked out during the shootings.

At the time of the killing, Gregg had been smoking marijuana for about six weeks and was on the anxiety and depression drugs Lexapro and Zoloft.

One psychiatrist testified that she was experiencing hallucinations around that time.

Gregg’s lawyers told the court that she has no memory of her mother’s murder.

DISTURBING BEHAVIORS

On Thursday, Gregg started her fourth day of trial with disturbing courtroom behavior by being caught laughing.

A raft of mental health professionals testified for Gregg’s case and debated the severity of her mental health struggles.

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The teen had a troubled relationship with her mother but was described as a gifted child who excelled in school, Gregg’s former counselor Rebecca Kirk testified in court.

Gregg skipped the fourth grade and had no history of violence.

Her biological father was allegedly abusive toward her and had been diagnosed as bipolar.

Kirk saw Gregg for nine weeks at the beginning of 2024 for counseling and said the teen described some mental health struggles but seemed relatively normal.

The pair spent most of their time talking about school, and Gregg excitedly told Kirk she was reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The book follows the main character’s conflicted feelings of guilt after he murders his neighbor.

Another professional, Dr. Jason Pickett, interviewed Gregg after her mother’s death and said, in his opinion, the teen does not meet the insanity requirements.

He doubted the teen had bipolar and questioned whether her father suffered from the mental disorder either.

Meanwhile, Dr. Andrew Clark, a medical psychiatrist, argued on Wednesday that Gregg had “blacked out” the day of the killing.

However, he suggested that Gregg could be capable of faking a mental health condition.

Gregg was offered a plea deal to serve 40 years in prison, but she dismissed it.

She faced a potential sentence of life in prison.

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Investors seeking to buy into OpenAI’s latest $6bn-plus funding round are making an unprecedented bet that the ChatGPT-maker will become the world’s dominant artificial intelligence company and be worth trillions of dollars.

The San Francisco-based start-up is finalising a new fundraising valuing the company at $150bn. Thrive Capital, Josh Kushner’s venture capital firm, has already provided at least $1bn to the company in recent weeks, according to people with knowledge of the deal.

OpenAI aims to raise an additional $5bn or more. Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft — the three most valuable technology companies in the world — are in talks to join the funding round. Others seeking to invest are New York-based Tiger Global and United Arab Emirates-backed fund MGX, according to multiple people with knowledge of the discussions. The deal is expected to close imminently.

However, other leading tech investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital — Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalists and existing OpenAI backers — are sitting out of the round, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Investors in the deal said it was highly unusual in its scale and structure. Venture investors such as Thrive and Tiger typically write far smaller cheques for less established start-ups, hoping for 10 to 100 times their money back.

To achieve such a return with OpenAI, the company would need to grow in the coming years to become worth at least $1.5tn; larger than Facebook parent Meta and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

Many are persuaded it will. “We’re talking about the path to building a trillion-dollar company,” said a partner at an investment firm that has backed OpenAI. “I don’t think this is unreasonable.”

The advent of generative AI represented “the biggest platform prize since cloud or the internet”, worth multiple trillions of dollars of economic value, they said.

Despite the huge scale of the fundraising, OpenAI has not struggled to attract demand, according to people with knowledge of the deal. As well as writing its own cheque to OpenAI, Thrive is also launching a special purpose vehicle through which other institutions can take a stake in OpenAI, they added.

The lofty hopes for OpenAI are remarkable even for Silicon Valley, where only a handful of Big Tech groups have grown to become trillion-dollar giants. Other big investors are sceptical that the OpenAI deal makes financial sense.

“How would you ever get to a venture-style return on an investment of this sort?” asked the chief investment officer of a US foundation. “I’m not sure what the maths is there, or if there is any maths.”

OpenAI, Thrive, Tiger and Sequoia declined to comment on the deal. Andreessen did not respond to a request for comment. MGX said it had “been continuously engaged in discussions with partners around the world regarding investments in the technology space”.

To achieve the desired returns on investment, OpenAI will need to overcome fierce competition from the wealthiest tech companies in the world such as Google and Meta. It must find the resources to train ever-more expensive models and manage the transition from a fast-growing, chaotic start-up to a corporate behemoth.

OpenAI’s revenues have shot up to about $3.6bn on an annualised basis since the launch of ChatGPT almost two years ago, according to people with knowledge of the group’s finances. But it is still burning through well over $5bn a year and is “not close to breaking even”, as it invests in new models and products in a bid to stay ahead of competitors.

While the cost of training cutting-edge models has winnowed competition, it also obliges start-ups to perpetually seek new investment. Billions more in capital would give OpenAI an edge over Anthropic and Elon Musk’s AI start-up xAI, both of which have raised multibillion-dollar rounds in recent months.

“I don’t think there are going to be 20 foundation model companies, certainly not unless costs come down,” said another investor in OpenAI. “You either win or you fade into obscurity and become MySpace.”

More important still could be closer ties to strategic investors. “[OpenAI] have Microsoft, the biggest enterprise company on the planet. If I could pick another partner it would be Apple, the biggest consumer company on the planet,” said one investor in the company.

“I’m walking into a gunfight with Google and Facebook and I have Microsoft and Apple behind me. It’s not such a bad thing from a distribution and branding perspective,” they added.

Others are deterred by the eye-watering scale of investment and fearful of being overly exposed to a single company. Both Sequoia and Andreessen have also invested in xAI rather than going all-in on OpenAI.

In addition, there are concerns about whether OpenAI can sustain its aggressive growth. The company was rocked by a boardroom crisis last November, in which chief executive Sam Altman was first ousted and then reinstated over a five-day period.

Plans to simplify OpenAI’s unique corporate structure, which came under scrutiny during that crisis, are being discussed. The current fundraising is not contingent on a restructure, according to multiple people with knowledge of the situation.

OpenAI has shed several senior researchers this year, including three of the group’s 11 co-founders. It has also been drawn into a string of legal battles — including high-profile cases against Musk, another co-founder who left in 2018, and the New York Times.

There are also signs of strain in the group’s relationship with Microsoft, which has committed $13bn to OpenAI and hitched its AI strategy to the start-up’s success. The companies are increasingly competing for customers, while Microsoft is building its own consumer AI team under Inflection founder Mustafa Suleyman and has designated OpenAI as a “competitor” in its annual report.

OpenAI’s backers say the company’s growing pains are typical for a hot start-up, drawing parallels to the early tumult at Google and Apple.

They point to a string of new hires, including Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s first chief financial officer, and a revamped board packed with corporate experience as a sign of a more sober approach.

“The stakes are high,” said one investor. “But there has never been a company that has both a dominant enterprise position and a dominant consumer position early on . . . this type of business tends to be ‘winner takes most’: you’re not going to have two ChatGPTs on your phone.”

Additional reporting by Stephen Morris in San Francisco