Happy Monday. A very special day for the accountants in your life this week with the UK Autumn Budget set to be unveiled on Wednesday.

It’s where we learn where all the government tax money is going to be coming from, and where it is going to be spent. Chancellor John Healey has the honours for the first fiscal plan under Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Fasten your seatbelts.

Notable UK earnings this week: AstraZeneca (AZN), HSBC (HSBA), Shell (SHEL), GSK (GSK), BP (BP), Lloyds (LLOY), Standard Chartered (STAN).

Notable US earnings this week: Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Eli Lilly (LLY), Visa (V), ExxonMobil (XOM), Mastercard (MA), Coca-Cola (KO), Caterpillar (CAT), Intel (.

📈📉

📦 EnerMech announce another carbon capture gig. Read more

🌊 Jackdaw set for North Sea gas production. Read more

🧼 £600m design contract up for grabs for overhaul to clean up mucky Windermere. Read more

Inflation up again
Britain’s inflation problem has done what every weary household dreads: it’s gone up again. Annual consumer price inflation climbed to 3.5% in September, from 3.1% in August, according to the Office for National Statistics - the highest since October last year and a touch above what economists had pencilled in. About as subtle as a middle lane hogger on the M25.

The main culprit was fuel, with diesel prices pushing transport costs higher and doing a fair impression of a budgetary wrecking ball. Transport inflation rose 6.6% year on year, while services inflation picked up to 3.7%. Housing and household services rose 5.3%, communication costs were up 5.8%, and food inflation, for once, sat still at 1.3% - a small mercy, though not exactly a feast.

The timing is awkward, naturally. The numbers landed a week before the Labour government’s Autumn Budget on 28 October, which is expected to grapple with the cost-of-living squeeze. With Halloween just around the corner, the economic mood is less trick-or-treat and more “genuinely frightened by the boiler bill”.

Job cuts at Barclays amid AI drive
Barclays is trimming 5,000 roles, about 5% of its workforce, as the bank leans harder into artificial intelligence and broader efficiency drives. Around 1,000 jobs have already gone, with the remaining cuts due to be wrapped up by the end of the year - not exactly the sort of festive atmosphere you’d hope for with October already leaning towards bonfire nights, Halloween and general calendar doom.

The bulk of the losses are expected in the UK and will mostly hit operational and functional roles, though Barclays said the axe will fall globally. Chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan said the bank’s technology investment over recent years is now feeding through, arguing that AI is the icing on the cake, not the cake itself - a neat way of saying you still need the boring plumbing before the shiny robot stuff can do its trick.

Answer me this, briefly
Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle has made repeated pleas for brevity at PMQs, and the numbers explain why: Andy Burnham averages 51 seconds per answer, against 33 for Liz Truss, 35 for Boris Johnson, 38 for Keir Starmer and 39 for Rishi Sunak. "Can I just say I admire the prime minister?" Hoyle said. "My problem is I'm not going to get through the list". A No 10 source had a ready explanation: "It's because he actually answers the questions".

Hands off, Big Ben
The clocks went back overnight, and spare a thought for the Cumbria Clock Company, which looks after Big Ben's change. The pressure is on ahead of Remembrance Day. The rest of us will spend a week getting the oven clock wrong and thinking we’re lazy geniuses that our cars are now on time.

Trump approval at record low ahead of midterms
Donald Trump is staring at a fresh political headache, with a Reuters/Ipsos poll showing his approval rating has slipped to a record low. Just 31% of Americans said they approved of his performance in office, with worries over high gasoline prices and the looming November 3 congressional elections leaving voters looking distinctly cross, as if someone had taken the last Mince Pie in the office kitchen..

Trump ordered to sit for deposition against BBC
A US federal judge has told President Donald Trump he must sit for a deposition by 11 December in his $10bn defamation case against the BBC. If he misses that deadline, the court can impose sanctions, including potentially throwing the whole thing out - a rather expensive way to discover that time, unlike a campaign slogan, does not bend to your will.

The row centres on a 2024 Panorama documentary about the US Capitol riots, which Trump says was edited in a way that wrongly painted him as a “violent insurrectionist” and damaged his brand. His lawyers claim the programme caused “massive economic damage” and amounted to a “brazen attempt” to influence the US election, while the BBC has denied defaming him. In other words: not exactly a cosy Christmas special.

At a hearing in Miami, US Magistrate Judge Enjolique Lett ruled that Trump must give evidence by the deadline unless the discovery period is extended beyond 18 December. The BBC had asked the court to force the president to appear after he pulled out of an agreed 16 October date, citing “matters of national importance” - a phrase that in political circles tends to mean “the diary is suddenly rather full”.

Chip off the old bot
Just Eat is removing AI-generated menu pictures after its software took British food a little too literally. A Belfast cafe's bacon and egg soda bread became bacon and eggs floating in a glass of cola, a Manchester "chip muffin" - a chip butty to most of us - arrived as chips poking out of muffins, and garlic bread turned up in the shape of a plane - presumably thanks to a misspelling of "plain". A "cheese roll", naturally, became sushi. The company says it is "in the process of removing" the images, adding that "as with any new technology, it isn't always quite right the first time".

Fold your horses
The reviews are in for Apple's passport-shaped iPhone Duo. Prices start at £2,000, the 7.6in matte inner screen impresses, but it gets hot, swaps Face ID for Touch ID, has cameras that are merely OK and is, in the reviewers' words, an "early adopter special". Meanwhile, someone built a robot called Hingey to fold the phone 17 times a minute for eight hours while she slept - 32,640 folds in all.

Remote possibilities
Fed-up telly owners are vibe-coding their smart TVs, using AI-built tools with names such as cleanyourtv, tv-detox and dumbtv to strip adverts, bloat and tracking out of Android and Google TV sets. One user went further and turned their homescreen into a Pokémon town. Not every story has a happy ending, mind - one person bricked a Samsung TV trying it with Claude. Turning it off and on again remains the traditional British approach.

Barking up the wrong tree
The expedition to Nikumaroro, in Kiribati, hoping to solve the Amelia Earhart mystery has concluded that the intriguing "Taraia Object" was most likely a collection of large trees deposited along the island's sandspit. Much of it had washed away, leaving a single Y-shaped segment, and its tell-tale shine came from a carbonate coating. Ninety years on, the trail goes cold - much like that cuppa you forgot about.

Fin-tastic celebrity
A 3m female dusky shark that turned up in a Busan canal on 18 September has become South Korea's most unlikely star. Bukangi drew 1.6 million visitors, inspired commemorative soju, a baseball mascot in a shark cape and an honorary city ambassadorship, and even got a visit from President Lee Jae Myung.

Fans have launched a petition "on behalf of Bukangi" demanding government support for a 30,000-seat baseball stadium by the canal. After being guided out of the canal she promptly swam back, but on Thursday an outer net was removed and she headed for the open sea. Like any good houseguest, she needed showing the door twice.

Flick of genius
Prof Patrick Barrie, 61, of Cambridge's chemical engineering department, has retained the tiddlywinks World Singles title, beating Dave "the Dragon" Lockwood, 73, from the US, 26-23. The match lasted seven hours at the Castle Inn pub in Cambridge, with umpire Harley Jones - chair of the English Tiddlywinks Association - armed with a torch. About 120 people appear in the world ratings, and the modern game dates from Christ's College in 1955. Seven hours in a pub over a game of counters - some of us call that a Tuesday.