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US inflation rose to 2.7 per cent in November, as the Federal Reserve considers how quickly to press ahead with lowering interest rates.

The figure was in line with the expectations of economists polled by Bloomberg but higher than October’s rate of 2.6 per cent.

The data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday underlines concerns about sticky inflation following a previous increase in October.

The Fed is widely expected next week to make its third consecutive quarter-point cut to interest rates, but the trajectory next year is less certain, as the central bank wrestles with its dual mandate to keep inflation close to 2 per cent and maintain a healthy labour market.

On a monthly basis, prices were up 0.3 per cent.

Once food and energy prices were stripped out, core CPI rose 0.3 per cent for the month, or 3.3 per cent on an annual basis.

US stock futures slightly extended their gains after the data was released. Contracts tracking the benchmark S&P 500 gauge were up 0.3 per cent, while those tracking the technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 index rose 0.4 per cent.

Government bonds were muted, with the policy-sensitive two-year Treasury yield steady at 4.15 per cent.

Market pricing on Wednesday indicated that investors were still betting on a quarter-point cut by the Fed next week, which would take interest rates to a new target range of 4.25-4.5 per cent.

Officials have discussed slowing the pace of cuts as rates reach a more “neutral” setting that is high enough to keep inflation in check but sufficiently low to safeguard the labour market.

They argue that if they move too quickly, inflation may get stuck above their 2 per cent target, but moving too slowly could risk a sharp rise in the unemployment rate.

Jobs growth rebounded sharply in November after being dragged down by hurricanes and strikes the previous month.

However, the unemployment rate rose to 4.2 per cent, suggesting the labour market’s acceleration was not strong enough to risk reigniting inflation.

Economists add that while price pressures remain high in service sectors related to housing, they are expected to level off over time.

Some officials in the outgoing Biden administration have expressed concern that the policies of president-elect Donald Trump will damage the economy after he returns to the White House next month.

US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen said this week that the sweeping tariffs proposed by Trump could “derail” progress on taming inflation.

“[Tariffs] would have an adverse impact on the competitiveness of some sectors of the United States economy, and could significantly raise costs to households,” she said at an event hosted by the Wall Street Journal.

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Microsoft’s artificial intelligence head Mustafa Suleyman is building a new team focused on consumer health by hiring staff from a similar unit he once led at Google DeepMind, as the rival companies race to create lucrative applications from the cutting-edge technology.

Suleyman, a British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind in 2010, has hired Dominic King, the former head of DeepMind’s health unit and a UK-trained surgeon, as vice-president of Microsoft AI’s new London-based health team.

He has also poached Christopher Kelly, a clinical research scientist at DeepMind and a neonatal intensive care doctor at Evelina Children’s Hospital in London, as well as two others from his time at the AI start-up.

Microsoft’s new consumer AI health division comes as tech groups rush to turn generative AI into a staple of everyday life, in a bid to drive revenues from the fast-developing technology. Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder and chief executive of DeepMind, is also focused on healthcare, such as leading spin-off AI group Isomorphic Labs, which is working on drug discovery.

Health has become one of the growth areas in the AI boom. Consumers have often turned to the web for health-related queries, and a Deloitte survey this year found that 48 per cent of respondents asked generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Claude health-focused questions.

These include questions about specific health conditions, symptoms and mental health. Microsoft AI’s health unit will focus on these types of consumer health applications using generative AI.

The US tech group, which hired Suleyman earlier this year, confirmed the creation of its new unit. “In our mission to inform, support and empower everyone with responsible AI, health is a critical use case,” said Microsoft. “We continue to hire top talent in support of these efforts.”

Google DeepMind’s health operation, founded by Suleyman, started in 2016 and grew to a team of more than 100 people based in London. The unit had signed a five-year partnership with 10 UK NHS hospitals to process the medical data of 1.6mn patients, and launched an app to monitor patients’ vital signs.

However, DeepMind was later embroiled in controversy over its work for the UK health sector amid concerns about the security of patient data. This led to Suleyman’s unit being spun off in 2019 by parent company Alphabet into a Google unit in California headed by David Feinberg, the former chief executive of Geisinger, one of the US’s largest private health groups.

Suleyman left DeepMind that same year, taking up a new policy role at Google’s California headquarters before leaving in 2022 to do a stint as a venture investor. He later created AI start-up Inflection.

In March, Microsoft hired Suleyman from Inflection as well as most of its staff, including Karén Simonyan, co-founder and chief scientist of Inflection, and a former DeepMind researcher himself.

Other recent hires for Microsoft’s AI health unit include Peter Hames, the former chief executive of UK digital health start-up Big Health and Bay Gross, co-founder of digital healthcare provider Cityblock Health.

As part of his broader team, Suleyman has also employed former DeepMind colleagues Nando de Freitas and Trevor Back, who led the start-up’s health research team. However, both de Freitas and Back will not work specifically on Microsoft’s health applications.

A Texas bankruptcy court ruled on Tuesday that The Onion‘s acquisition of Alex Jones‘ disinformation empire, Infowars, could not move forward, dealing a blow to the satirical newspaper. The most surreal media merger in recent memory is now set to disintegrate — at least for now — after almost a month of legal wrangling.

“I don’t think it’s enough money,” U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez wrote in a late-night decision, per NBC News. “I’m going to not approve the sale.” Judge Lopez has left it up to trustee Christopher Murray to decide what to do next. It’s possible that there could be another auction, in which the Onion could once again place bid for the embattled conspiracy theorist’s publication. He could also decide to reexamine the Jones-associated company First United American, which offered a revised bid that has not yet been disclosed, per the AP.

In 2022, Jones was ordered to pay a total of nearly $1.5 billion in civil damages to the families of victims in the deadly 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. Jones had falsely and repeatedly claimed on Infowars that the massacre was a hoax, smearing parents of children who were killed as “crisis actors” — incendiary attacks that saw the grieving families subjected to years of harassment and intimidation by viewers who believed Jones’ lies. In the course of multiple defamation lawsuits brought against him and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, Jones testified that, contrary to his earlier statements, the Sandy Hook shooting was “100 percent real.”

This year, having failed to pay what he owed the victims’ families, Jones asked a judge to convert his personal bankruptcy to a Chapter 7 to liquidate his assets, including the Infowars brand, in order to at least partially cover the massive settlement. The court ruled in September that he could put Free Speech Systems up for auction.

The process took a surprising turn in November, when The Onion revealed that it had placed the winning bid in the court-ordered auction. It was another attention-grabbing stunt for the beloved parody publisher, which had just three months earlier revived its print edition under new parent company Global Tetrahedron, a firm with a jokingly ominous name created to acquire the title from its previous owner in April, with former NBC News reporter Ben Collins stepping in as CEO of the paper. The Onion announced that it would relaunch Infowars and its social channels in January 2025 as sources of irreverent comedy rather than paranoiac diatribes, vowing “to end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor for good.” The brand also partnered with the gun control activism nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety on an ad deal for the revamped Infowars.

Jones was apoplectic over the sale and aired a broadcast that saw him raving that “imperial troops” were storming his studio to seize it from him. That didn’t happen, and a company with links to the right-wing firebrand soon mounted a legal challenge to the takeover: First American United Companies, affiliated with Jones’ dietary supplements business, alleged that The Onion had bid only $1.75 million for Infowars, compared to its offer of $3.5 million, and had therefore won the auction through collusion and fraud. Murray, the bankruptcy trustee overseeing the liquidation of Free Speech Systems, said the First American bid was actually “inferior,” as the total value of The Onion‘s deal stood at $7 million — because most of the Sandy Hook families had agreed to receive a percentage of revenues from an Onion-owned Infowars instead of cash from the sale itself. (These were the only two sealed bids in the auction.)

Meanwhile, Elon Musk — who a year ago made the controversial decision to reinstate Jones’ account on X, formerly Twitter, despite his permanent suspensions from nearly every other social media platform — also took action against the purchase. In legal objection to the sale filed by X in November, the company pointed out that according to its user agreement, they are the owner of Jones’ and Infowars’ accounts on the site, and have no obligation to turn them over to an entity that purchases Free Speech Systems’ collective assets. The unusually aggressive move was a stark reminder that users of such websites do not have ultimate control of their profiles, and threw a potential wrench in The Onion‘s scheme to turn Jones’ digital footprint into a mockery of everything he stands for.

Murray testified on Tuesday before Judge Lopez of the U.S. District and Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of Texas that The Onion‘s offer should be approved over First American’s. In his own testimony, auctioneer Jeff Tanenbaum defended the sale process when Jones’ lawyers pressed him over not holding a live auction.

Jones himself did not attend court this week but used his show to continue complaining about the prospect of The Onion wresting control of his once lucrative conspiracy theory factory. “I can’t imagine the judge would certify this fraud,” he told his audience on Tuesday. “I mean it’s head-spinning the stuff they did and what they claimed.”

Now that the judge has spoken, it’s up to Christopher Murray to decide what happens next — and whether the cathartic punchline of the Sandy Hook families having some say over Infowars’ fate could finally come to pass.