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RECORD PROFITS, FEWER DESKS! Microsoft says profit for the three months to the end of September jumped to more than $36.6bn, just days after it announced plans to cut its workforce, the BBC reported.

On Monday the company said it would offer buyouts to around 60,000 workers to cut costs while it pours billions into artificial intelligence. It employs more than 220,000 people worldwide, and the voluntary redundancy offer covers teams in Canada, India, the UK and the US.

Quarterly revenue hit $92.3bn, up 19% from a year earlier, driven by a 30% jump in Microsoft Cloud revenue. Shares rose almost 2.9% in after-hours trading in New York on Wednesday.

The company also flagged risks, including its “substantial investments” in AI. Chief executive Satya Nadella said AI is delivering “real-world impact across every industry.”

Not everyone had a party: Google owner Alphabet’s shares fell 9.75% after it reported a 25% drop in quarterly net profit and said it will keep spending heavily on AI. Amazon, Meta and Alphabet are expected to spend more than $700bn this year on AI chips and data centres.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News

FIFTY-SEVEN YEARS! The Milwaukee Brewers are champions of baseball for the first time in franchise history, the BBC reported.

Milwaukee beat the Tampa Bay Rays 4-1 in game five in Florida on Wednesday to take the best-of-seven Fall Classic 4-1. The Brewers’ only previous World Series trip was in 1982.

This is the little guy’s title. The Brewers play in Major League Baseball’s smallest market and had only the 19th-highest payroll of 30 teams this year. They still posted MLB’s best regular-season record for the second straight year, swept the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS, and went 11-2 in the postseason.

Game five: Cooper Pratt singled Brice Turang home in the second, David Hamilton added a run in the fifth, and a William Contreras double plus a Pratt sacrifice fly doubled the lead. The Rays didn’t score until the ninth.

Contreras, 28, was named World Series MVP, the eighth catcher and third Venezuelan to win it. The franchise started life in 1969 as the Seattle Pilots and moved to Milwaukee after one season. Pop the cork, Wisconsin.

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Sources: BBC Sport

CHECK YOUR POCKETS, CANADA! A C$40m Lotto Max jackpot ticket is about to expire unclaimed, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) says, the BBC reported.

The ticket for the 28 October 2025 draw was bought at a retailer in Grey County, Ontario, home to the Blue Mountains and Owen Sound. It’s a popular tourist spot, so OLG thinks someone may have bought it on a trip and forgotten to check it once they got home. It expires at midnight Wednesday “unless the rightful ticket holder comes forward.”

The “sad part,” OLG told CTV News, is that the ticket was never checked on the OLG app or at a store. The winning numbers: 06, 14, 17, 19, 26, 43, 45, bonus 27. OLG says look in clothing pockets, handbags, backpacks, wallets and glove compartments.

If nobody shows, the lottery keeps the money for future games. It’s happened before: a $70m Lotto Max win in Scarborough, Ontario from June 2022 was never claimed, even though 2,700 people called and emailed about it. Atlantic Lottery says about one per cent of prizes go unclaimed, usually much smaller sums.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News

THE BROMANCE GOES ORBITAL! Russian President Vladimir Putin called Elon Musk “a genius, a real genius” on Wednesday and said the two sides are in “close” contact about satellite technology, the BBC reported.

Putin made the remarks at the Russia-Africa Summit in Moscow while touting Rassvet, Russia’s own satellite internet project. “We are in close contact with our American partners, including Mr. Musk,” he said, adding that the contact keeps Rassvet and Starlink satellites from interfering with each other in orbit. SpaceX did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

The scoreboard isn’t close. Starlink says it has launched roughly 13,000 satellites; online trackers show only a couple of dozen Rassvet satellites in orbit. Russia’s embassy in South Africa called Rassvet “Russia’s Starlink alternative” and said it marks only the country’s first steps.

The timing stings. Ukraine has relied on Starlink to hold off Russian forces, but its military suffered sudden Starlink connectivity problems last week, which Musk has admitted SpaceX did intentionally.

It all lands as Washington and Moscow appear to be warming up: President Trump said this month he’d struck a deal to import Russian diesel, waived certain sanctions, and a US citizen was then freed from Russian custody.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News

WHERE IN THE WORLD WAS FLÁVIO BOLSONARO? Florida, it turns out! The Brazilian senator flew to Miami days after losing Sunday’s presidential run-off, ending a frantic guessing game over where he’d gone, the BBC reported.

Brazil cancelled his passport after he missed a 24-hour deadline to surrender it over an ongoing criminal investigation, and police were sent to check border posts. His own lawyers said they didn’t know where he was. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Argentine migration authorities said he, his wife and two daughters crossed into Argentina over land on Tuesday night. Flight tracking data verified by the BBC suggests they left Puerto Iguazú at 12:18 local time on Wednesday for Guayaquil, Ecuador, then flew on to Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport, where they were pictured getting off just before 09:30 local time while aides shielded him with umbrellas. The US State Department confirmed it would issue visas to him and his family.

Re-elected President Lula wasn’t impressed: “those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.”

Sound familiar? His father, Jair Bolsonaro, also left for Florida in December 2022 before Lula’s inauguration, and was still in the US when supporters stormed Brazil’s government buildings on 8 January. Jair was later convicted in a coup trial and sentenced to 27 years.

Flávio faces two investigations before Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court: one over the transfer of nearly $70m from Banco Master to Dark Horse, a biopic about his father, and one over alleged money laundering. He denies both, and loses his parliamentary immunity on 31 January when his Senate term ends. How long he plans to stay in the US isn’t clear.

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Sources: BBC News

SHOWDOWN AT THE CHALKBOARD! A spat among mathematicians is fuelling fears that AI could undermine trust in science itself, the BBC reports.

Last month OpenAI said its AI agents had solved a major unsolved problem tied to the famous Navier–Stokes equations, cracking it in 88 hours. The body that runs a prize for the problem said it had “apparently been settled,” but that its review would take time.

Hours before the announcement, NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster went public with concerns. He and Levent Alpöge, who works by day at rival Anthropic, had been chasing the same goal and kept their drafts in OpenAI’s coding tool, Codex. Buckmaster asked whether that work could have fed OpenAI’s, while stressing he was “not accusing anyone of anything.”

OpenAI says nobody there, “human or AI,” saw the other team’s work before it was published. It first said it couldn’t “rule out” that anonymised product data helped its models, then said days later that Buckmaster’s Codex prompts “could not have influenced the system in any way.”

The bigger worry is the flood of AI in research. A Cornell team found about 147,000 phantom citations to research that doesn’t exist last year, and a Stanford analysis found up to 17% of peer-review text at four big computer science conferences substantially modified by a language model. “Generative AI has basically disrupted the whole scientific process,” says science journalist Dalmeet Singh Chawla.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News

ABANDON SHIP! The Villa Vie Odyssey, a cruise ship on a years-long “continuous voyage around the world,” has suspended operations over sky-high fuel costs, leaving passengers stranded in Cambodia, the BBC reported.

The US-based operator, Villa Vie Residences, says the monthly fuel cost per cabin in parts of Asia has jumped to as much as $8,000, up from $1,800, as global fuel prices soared after the Iran war began. Slowing down and sitting in port longer didn’t cover it, and the company said “passing the full increase on to residents is not a realistic solution.”

Roughly 200 passengers were reportedly aboard when they were ordered off in Sihanoukville. Passengers Lanette Canen and Johan Bodin told the BBC the chief executive told them at 6am on Tuesday that they had to leave by 2pm. “It felt like our dream had been crushed,” they said.

The ship left Belfast in October 2024, after months of repair delays, on a trip meant to span 3.5 years and nearly 150 countries. It was more than 750 days in. The company now plans 60 days of “restructuring and recapitalisation,” and says “no outcome is assured.”

Passenger Holly Hennessey summed it up: “It was not on my bingo card of places where I’d be spending a lot of time.”

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News

CATASTROPHE ON THE RAILS! Two trains collided in Spain’s Toledo province on Wednesday morning, and at least 30 people are confirmed dead with the toll expected to rise, the BBC reported.

The crash happened just after 09:00 local time between Mora and Orgaz, about 140km (100 miles) south of Madrid. Rail operator Adif says it involved a Renfe train and one run by private operator Iryo on the Madrid to Seville route. Broadcaster RTVE, quoting the transport ministry, said the Renfe train rear-ended the Iryo train, which was apparently stationary. At least two carriages went down an embankment.

More than 500 people were believed to be aboard: 146 passengers plus a baby on the Iryo train and 397 on the Renfe train, according to the Castilla-La Mancha government. Eighty people are being treated for injuries, 50 of them in serious condition. The cause hasn’t been officially confirmed.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said he was “shocked by the serious train accident in Toledo,” and he and other politicians cancelled Wednesday’s engagements, including campaigning for next month’s election. Hospitals suspended planned surgeries and a Madrid blood centre appealed for “urgent” donations.

This is the second high-speed rail tragedy in Spain this year. In January a derailment in southern Spain sent carriages into the path of a Renfe train, killing 46 people.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News

MANHUNT! Tennessee is hunting for Jacob Allen Morley, 28, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence who broke out of the Northwest Correctional Complex in Tiptonville, about 90 miles north of Memphis, the BBC reported.

The Tennessee Department of Correction says security footage shows Morley breached the perimeter fence on Sunday and fled in his prison uniform. Investigators released video they say shows him stealing a nearby farm’s work vehicle. On Tuesday afternoon that vehicle was found in Illinois, about 120 miles north of Tiptonville. Morley wasn’t in it.

Here’s the jaw-dropper: prison records listed his supervision level as “low,” and he wasn’t eligible for release until December 2083. He’s now on the TBI’s most wanted list, with a reward of up to $2,500. The Highway Patrol has aircraft and troopers in the search.

Morley was convicted in 2025 of first-degree murder in the 2022 killing of his co-worker Cody Birchfield, whose body was found in a metal box under Morley’s home, according to court records reviewed by the BBC. His 2022 arrest followed a police chase into North Carolina.

It’s another black eye for the state’s prisons. Earlier this month a 69-year-old inmate escaped and was quickly recaptured, and the corrections commissioner resigned after a botched execution in September.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News

RING RING, MOSCOW! Finland’s President Alexander Stubb and Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre held a joint call with Vladimir Putin, rare direct contact between the Russian leader and European heads of government, the BBC reported.

The 90-minute call, held from Helsinki, was meant to “convey messages directly regarding future negotiations” on ending the war in Ukraine. “It will not be achieved through silence,” Stubb said. He called the talk “frank and substantive.” Støre admitted there were “big differences in views.”

Putin didn’t budge. The Kremlin said he told them a “just and lasting peace” requires Russia’s “legal interests” be taken into account “fully and unconditionally,” and he repeated his line about the “root causes” of the war. All three reportedly agreed to keep talking by phone.

Stubb says the call was prepared with Ukraine and the US after a meeting in Oslo last week with Volodymyr Zelensky and US envoy Steve Witkoff. Zelensky says he was debriefed afterward. The first US-Ukraine-Russia talks of the year are tentatively planned for early November in Abu Dhabi.

Not all of Europe loved the freelancing. Denmark and Sweden said they weren’t consulted, and Sweden’s Ulf Kristersson said “Europe should stick together rather than going solo.” Stubb and Støre are the first European leaders to call Putin since Emmanuel Macron in July 2025.

Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News