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KEEP UP, KIDS! David Carbert, 87, finished his 400th Parkrun on Saturday at the Humber Bridge Country Park event, and he thinks the running may have added years to his life, the BBC reports.

Carbert showed up for the first time 10 years ago, aged 77, full of trepidation. “I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, but everyone welcomed me,” he said. “You know it’s one big happy family here.” His reason for starting: “Really, I didn’t want to sit around at home vegetating.”

The numbers: his personal best of 28 minutes 13 seconds came at age 80. These days he covers the 5km (3.1-mile) course in around 38 minutes. He stretches at home before every run and goes out in all weathers unless there’s deep snow or ice. And he’s not done; he’s aiming for 500 Parkruns, when he’ll be nearly 90.

“We love him – he is an inspiration,” said event director Helen Penn. “I think he’s only just getting going.” Neighbour and running mate Tony Nicholson called him a role model, with one complaint: “We have a sprint at the end and he always wins. It really annoys me.”

Carbert’s post-race report? “I’m a bit shattered at the moment, but I’ll recover.”

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

Source: BBC News

NO GROOM? NO PROBLEM! When Bridget Devaney’s fiancé suffered a medical emergency and their planned elopement, and then the relationship, fell apart, she didn’t quietly close the chapter. She went online and invited strangers to come celebrate the wedding that never happened, BBC News NI reports.

The nudge came in April, when a photographer emailed to check on her postponed wedding plans. A friend suggested advertising a women-only group trip on her anonymous social media profile. Hundreds of inquiries poured in. “When these women signed up for this trip, they didn’t know my name. They didn’t know what I looked like,” said Bridget, who splits her time between the US and Killarney in the Republic of Ireland.

In the end, 11 strangers from the US, Canada and Wales signed on. Janae Pettit, a design consultant from Utah, spotted the post on 1 April and figured it was a prank. “It was April Fool’s Day, but Bridget was like, ‘this is not a joke!’” Shana Johnson of Minnesota signed up before she’d even cleared it with her partner. “It was kind of like we were all long-lost friends,” she said.

Earlier this month the group spent a week on the north coast, hitting the Giant’s Causeway, the Dark Hedges and Londonderry, and capping it with a “non-wedding day” photoshoot. Photographer Rob Dight of Epic Love Photography, who had extended Bridget’s deposit after her fiancé was injured, was “blown away” to learn mid-shoot that the women had met just three days earlier. “It was kind of a ‘jaw-on-the-floor scenario’… It was just so wholesome,” he said.

The group chat is still going, and more trips are in the works. Bridget’s takeaway: “There is community if you want to find it… You just have to keep trying.”

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

Source: BBC News NI

TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS ON FOOT! Former paratrooper Karl Bushby set off from Punta Arenas, Chile, in November 1998, aged 29, to walk an unbroken path home to Hull in England. Now 57, he is on his final few miles, the BBC reports.

He set himself two rules and never broke them: no returning to the UK until the walk was done, and no transport to move forward. Along the way he hacked through the jungles of the Darién Gap, crossed the frozen Bering Strait (in 2006), and just weeks ago swam the English Channel to land near Dover. The total: about 36,000 miles across four continents.

Waiting at the finish: his 36-year-old son Adam, a 12-year-old granddaughter he has never met, his father and brothers, and his mother, at the gate of the childhood home he left 28 years ago.

It hasn’t been glamorous. Bushby says he spent only about 15 of those years actually walking; the rest went to visas, “dealing with geopolitics,” and Covid delays, often waiting it out in Mexico where living was cheap. “I’m dealing with the day-to-day stuff – punctures, just trying to find a place where you can wash your underwear,” he told the BBC. “It’s not as glorious as it looks.” Before sponsors and a book deal, he says he was a “penniless backpacker” living on donations and even food discarded by the roadside.

The scary part may be the finish line. “Everything that I am and everything that I know of me is going to go away,” he said. “I will have to figure out who I am again.”

His verdict on the planet after all those miles? “I personally have met the very best of humanity… The kindness of strangers made it all come together. I couldn’t have done it without the world.” And his first fish, chips and mushy peas in almost three decades? Nobody does it like the Brits, he says.

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

Source: BBC News

BAD MOVE, OTTAWA! Parks Canada is ending its search-and-rescue dog programme in Banff National Park, cutting the sole dog handler role as part of public service cuts, and the backlash is fierce, the BBC reported.

For 55 years, rescue dogs worked the Canadian Rockies, sniffing out skiers and hikers buried by avalanches and finding kids who wandered away from campsites. Banff welcomes more than four million visitors a year.

The last dog on the job, a German Shepherd named Leroy, retired in August. In seven years he helped track 156 people, found 57 who were lost, and helped solve two murders. A new dog was trained and ready before Parks Canada gave notice last week that the programme was going, part of C$145m in budget cuts, local paper the Rocky Mountain Outlook reported.

Parks Canada calls it a “difficult decision” and says “search and rescue operations will continue to be delivered” through other means. More than 5,000 people have signed a petition to bring it back, started by local Conservative MP William Stevenson: “How could they possibly make such a bad choice in where to cut?”

Retired handler Scott Ward, 73, who spent 17 years in the role, put it best, quoting the old warden who trained him: “You can make an armpit smell like a lilac bush and you can put a man on the moon, but nothing can replace the nose of the avalanche dog.”

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

Sources: BBC News

HOLY SMOKE, IT’S A MAIL-IN BALLOT! Pope Leo XIV has submitted his mail-in ballot in Illinois for the midterm elections, becoming the first pope ever to vote in a US election, the BBC reported.

“The Holy Father expresses his belief in the right and the duty of citizens to participate in democratic processes,” the Holy See Press Office said. The Chicago-born pontiff, chosen in May 2025, is the first US citizen to hold the job, and the Vatican says he has voted as an American “whenever he was eligible to do so,” including during his years in Peru.

According to NBC News, he requested his ballot from the Will County Clerk’s Office on 3 October. Less than two weeks later, the Vatican announced he’d had surgery to remove a lower lobe of his right lung after a lung cancer diagnosis. The 71-year-old is still set to travel to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru in early November.

Don’t expect a fan letter from the White House. After the Pope called for peace following US-Israeli strikes on Iran in April, President Trump said: “I’m not a big fan of Pope Leo.” The Pope’s reply: “If someone wants to criticise me for preaching the Gospel… I hope simply to be listened to because of the value of God’s words.”

Elections are on 3 November. Polls suggest Democrats are favoured to take the House. Who the Pope voted for? The Vatican isn’t saying.

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

Sources: BBC News

THE PARTY IS OVER, OR AT LEAST THE BILL JUST ARRIVED! US tech stocks tumbled for a second straight day on Friday as investors balk at the hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into artificial intelligence, the BBC reported.

Intel shares plummeted by as much as 30%, putting the chipmaker on track to lose more than $130bn in value. That came a day after Google owner Alphabet’s market value plunged by more than $500bn. The tech-heavy Nasdaq sank more than 3.5%.

Intel’s finance chief David Zinsner said the firm didn’t expect to bring in more cash than it spent this year, forecast weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue, and said: “Looking ahead, we see the PC slowdown continuing at least through the first half of next year.” And yet it plans to spend even more on equipment.

The carnage spread. Reddit fell 26% after weaker daily user numbers and a warning that Google’s AI search is hurting referral traffic. Roblox dropped nearly 20%. Amazon, which has committed to $220bn in spending this year and revealed it spent more cash than it made, was down about 1.6% after sliding as much as 6% overnight.

The big picture: Meta, Alphabet, Oracle, Amazon and Microsoft have committed to spending $800.6bn between them in 2026. “Investors have turned ruthless, punishing any signs of disappointment,” said Kathleen Brookes of XTB. “The AI trade has had a good run in recent years, but now investors want payback.”

Perspective check: the Nasdaq is still up 7.6% over the past year. But if AI stocks keep stumbling, Brookes warns, “it could suggest the AI trade is past its peak.”

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

Sources: BBC News

WHO YOU GONNA CALL? The Justice Department, apparently! A US investigation dubbed Operation Ghostbusters is going after an alleged scheme that used stolen identities to enroll fake students in American colleges and pocket federal financial aid, linked to a loss of $130m in taxpayer funds, the BBC reported.

Investigators flagged 830,840 potentially fraudulent Federal Student Aid ID numbers tied to nearly $130m in September and October 2026 and recommended they be disabled. That’s aid tied to suspect accounts, not confirmed losses. So far there are five indictments involving Kenyan nationals, with 40 more investigations open.

The grift is ugly. Stolen personal details sometimes sold online for $4 to $8, often belonging to low-income Americans who never got to go to college. Prosecutors say fraudsters use what’s described as “super intelligence” to complete coursework and keep the ghosts enrolled “semester after semester after semester.” Victims can end up with student loan debt for classes they never took.

One case: Kenyan national Francis Mogambi, who came to the US on the Diversity Visa lottery in 2024, was indicted in Nebraska on 19 October on five counts of theft of government money and five of aggravated identity theft. Prosecutors allege he kept 30% and sent the rest to associates in Kenya. He hasn’t commented, and faces at least 10 years if convicted.

“If you steal taxpayers’ dollars, if you exploit a programme meant to help students, we are resolved to find you and prosecute you,” said Assistant Attorney General Colin M McDonald. US authorities have already seized more than $750,000 from a crypto account in Kenya in a related case.

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

Sources: BBC News

THE BRIDGE IS EMPTY TONIGHT. Sir Patrick Stewart, the actor famous for playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek, has died at 86, the BBC reported.

His family said he died on Wednesday at his Los Angeles home “in the loving care of his wife,” after “a brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy Body Dementia. He is survived by his wife, Sunny Ozell, and his two children, Daniel and Sophie Stewart.

He played Picard in more than 170 episodes between 1987 and 1994, plus four films, and came back for Star Trek: Picard in 2020. He was also Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men films. Before all that he was a Royal Shakespeare Company man from 1966, and the RSC calls him a “colossus of both stage and screen.”

The tributes are pouring in. Sir Ian McKellen, who officiated his 2013 wedding: “He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and, in my case, love.” William Shatner: “Captain Picard stood for the best of us and so did the man who played him.” Hugh Jackman: “We lost one of the greats of stage and screen today.”

Born in Mirfield, Yorkshire, in 1940, he was knighted in 2010, campaigned against domestic violence as an ambassador for the charity Refuge after watching his mother suffer abuse, and backed Huddersfield Town for life. London’s West End theatres will dim their lights for two minutes on 3 November in his honour.

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

Sources: BBC News

THE VAULT IS OPEN! Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, has been hit by what is believed to be the largest crypto hack ever, at $6.3bn (£4.7bn), the BBC reported.

How did they get in? Co-chief executive Richard Teng says the initial investigation suggests it “may have started with a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop,” which gave an attacker access to a service container, “where they submitted unauthorised withdrawal transactions.” He insists it “was not a simple ‘one-click’ action.”

The hit landed on the global exchange, Binance.com. Binance.us says it wasn’t affected. All deposits and withdrawals were suspended as a precaution, and Binance says it will cover all losses from its emergency reserve and company funds. Around $3bn has reportedly been located so far, and the exchange says it is “still on track” to resume withdrawals in 45 hours.

Whodunit? Nobody has claimed it. TRM Labs says several elements resemble earlier attacks linked to North Korea, including the $1.5bn ByBit hack in 2025, tied to the Lazarus Group, also known as TraderTraitor. That isn’t confirmed, and North Korea has always denied involvement.

“You can build a vault with mathematical firewalls, but if the individual holding the keys can be duped, the vault is opened,” said Dr Clive Summerfield of biometrics security firm FARx. Experts warn users to ignore emails and fake “support” accounts urging them to move crypto to a “safe” wallet.

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

Sources: BBC News

THE MASKS JUST CAME OFF, DIGITALLY! Details of more than 41,000 people working for the US Department of Homeland Security have been leaked to the public, the BBC reported.

The leak includes names, work addresses and phone numbers, plus descriptions of their work, for staff including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. More than 21,000 work for CBP and nearly 6,600 for ICE, according to the data, which also lists Homeland Security Investigations, the Federal Protective Service and even CISA, the government’s own cybersecurity agency.

A group calling itself the Department of Peace says it got in through the single sign-on service Okta. Okta says: “Okta is secure, and we have no evidence our data or systems were compromised.” Journalist and researcher maia crimew and the site Distributed Denial of Secrets published the database, named Icepick. It also lists dozens of previously unknown operation names and some of the tech used, including from Cellebrite and Palantir.

DHS says it is “aware of a potential breach and is actively working to address the situation swiftly and effectively.” DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best said the aim was to replace “anonymity with accountability.”

It’s the third government leak or hack in recent weeks: the FBI was hit by ShinyHunters last month, and the Federal Election Commission went offline in recent days over a suspected hacking attempt.

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

Sources: BBC News