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A FIRST — AND NOT THE GOOD KIND! French authorities say they’ve detected the first known human case of the Shamonda virus, in a patient who died in early October, the BBC reported Thursday.

Shamonda mostly hits cattle, spread by infected midges, and has turned up in sheep, goats, alpacas and horses. In cows it causes fever, diarrhoea and poor milk production. Human infections? Previously unheard of. “Until now, the Shamonda virus was considered non-transmissible to humans,” France’s health and agriculture ministries said, despite decades of the virus circulating in Africa and Asia.

Officials think the patient caught it from a midge bite in eastern France, where animal cases were first found in the spring. The person was being treated for a serious illness at a hospital in Lyon and had neurological complications “very likely linked” to the virus, based on early findings.

Now the calm-down part: health officials call it an “exceptional case in a severely immunocompromised patient” and say there is currently no risk to the public.

But the bug is on the move. Europe’s first animal cases showed up in late July, and it has since been found in farm animals in Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain and Jersey. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control is monitoring and investigating how it reached a human, and the case has been reported to the World Health Organization.

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

Sources: BBC News

CHECK YOUR ATTIC — NOW! A retired decorator from Woking, England, is a millionaire after his Pokémon card collection sold for £1.56 million at auction, the BBC reported.

He had no idea the cards were worth anything until he read in his local paper about one card fetching more than £6,000. The collection, 42 sets sealed in mint condition in custom binders, had sat in his attic for 15 years.

Back in the late 1990s his son was swapping cards at school. Dad thought they “looked nice” and might be a good investment, and bought some complete sets from a seller in Malaysia on eBay. “He had his own cards, but he never got to touch these, I’m glad to say,” the man, who asked not to be named, told the BBC.

Get this: one set that cost him £300 sold for £75,000. The top lot, a Legendary Collection Complete Master Set with a near-mint Charizard, was estimated at £15,000 to £20,000 and went for £100,000.

Surrey auction house Ewbank’s says it’s the UK’s most valuable trading card auction ever, beating a £872,000 sale in London on 9 October, and may be a European record. Andrew Ewbank, who ran the sale himself, told bidders he was “going for a lie down” afterwards. We don’t blame him.

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

Sources: BBC News

THE MACHINES ARE TAKING THE DESKS! British banking giant Barclays is cutting around 5,000 jobs as it brings more artificial intelligence into its work, the BBC reported Thursday.

The bank says 1,000 posts are already gone, and another 4,000 will go by the end of this year. That’s about 5% of its global workforce. The cuts center on its UK retail bank, but a big share is expected to fall in India, where some UK back-office work is done. About 60% will hit support functions, developers included.

Not every cut is down to AI, Barclays says. It calls them part of a long-running modernisation plan, and boss CS Venkatakrishnan put it this way: “AI is the icing on the cake not the cake.” Still, “We will employ the AI at scale,” he said.

Meanwhile the money keeps rolling: Barclays posted £2.3bn profit for July through September, up on last year, though slightly below forecasts. It expects its efficiency drive to save another £1.1bn in 2027.

And it’s not alone. HSBC, Standard Chartered and Danske Bank have all flagged AI-related job cuts this year. Analyst Will Howlett of Quilter Cheviot said the industry is reaching the point where tech spending “translates into fewer people being required to run the business.” Translation: check your inbox.

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

Sources: BBC News

WAITER, THERE’S AN EGG IN MY COKE! UK food delivery app Just Eat has been testing AI to make pictures for menu items that didn’t have photos yet, the BBC reported. It went about as well as you’d think.

A Belfast cafe’s bacon and egg soda bread showed up as a glass of fizzy drink with a cooked egg and bacon floating in it. Other dishes came out as chips poking out of muffins. A “cheese roll” became slabs of cheese rolled up like sushi. And thanks to a misspelling, one garlic bread came out shaped like a plane, presumably because someone meant “plain.”

Users on the Just Eat UK subreddit have spent days posting the best of the worst. The AI pictures carry a label saying so, and the BBC spotted many of the stranger ones still on menus.

A Just Eat spokesperson said the company is “in the process of removing” the bad images and will stop making more until the AI is further developed. “We’ve been trialling AI-enhanced images, and as with any new technology, it isn’t always quite right the first time,” they said, adding that it works with tens of thousands of small restaurants on photos, including funding professional local photographers.

One social media user summed it up: “Well, that lot just helped my diet.” Another made the real point: they want to see what the food actually looks like, because perfect AI versions “just lead to disappointment.”

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

Sources: BBC News

Is the door creaking open? Russia is “ready in principle” to restart talks with the US and Ukraine on ending the war, Vladimir Putin’s top aide Yuri Ushakov said Wednesday, the BBC reported. He spoke after Putin met Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg.

Ushakov suggested a new round around 10 November in Abu Dhabi. A US official told the BBC that Witkoff and Jared Kushner had proposed a technical-level three-way meeting, which Ukraine accepted in Oslo on Tuesday and Russia accepted on Wednesday. Zelensky said the US wants it “as soon as possible” and “we are in favour of it.” The talks have been frozen since February.

Don’t pop the champagne. Ushakov called the ideas Witkoff brought “not very useful,” and said the talks must focus on “building a security system for Russia and Ukraine after the end of the conflict.” He also said Putin insists his troops are advancing everywhere on the front, a claim Ukraine and its European allies dispute, pointing to a near stalemate.

Zelensky, meanwhile, told Fox News he would accept freezing the war along the current front line. “Freeze and stop,” he said, with security guarantees to be discussed after.

All of this lands in the middle of a nasty row between Kyiv and Washington. Trump has said it is time for Ukraine to get a new president. Kyiv accused the US of withholding missile-warning intelligence, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio called “scandalous,” and Zelensky now says the sharing “works now.” Witkoff called Wednesday’s talks “constructive.” Kushner: “There is still hard work ahead.” You can say that again.

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

Sources: BBC News

THE BIGGEST ONE YET! A judge in New Mexico on Wednesday ordered Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to pay $25 billion, the BBC reported. It is the largest fine ever levied against the company for its business practices.

It follows a two-week trial earlier this year that found Meta spent years lying to the public about how it handled Facebook user data. The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The state also accused Meta of misleading people about how it profited from hate speech and how it enforced its own rules, and the jury agreed on those claims too. Jurors found Meta broke state law more than 40 million times.

Judge Francis Mathew called the violations “willful” and said they spanned “more than 11 years,” from 2010 to 2021. He wrote that communications between senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were “designed to mislead the public.” “The lies extend beyond Facebook’s data practices as well,” he said, going to “the heart of Facebook’s core business practices.”

Get this: the full penalty was calculated at $219 billion. The judge cut it to $25 billion, roughly what Meta earns in profit each quarter. The state had asked for up to $40 billion. Meta argued anything over $3.4 billion would be unconstitutional.

Meta’s top lawyer CJ Mahoney said the ruling makes it “all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” called the suit “a tax on speech,” and said Meta will appeal and win. Attorney General Raúl Torrez fired back: “No corporation is too powerful to be held accountable.” For scale, the FTC’s 2019 privacy fine was $5 billion. This one is five times that.

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

Sources: BBC News

Two trillion-dollar giants, one CEO, and now a very big question. Elon Musk says he is actively considering merging Tesla and SpaceX, the BBC reported. “Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes,” he said on Tuesday’s call about SpaceX’s quarterly results.

Musk said both companies have formed special committees of independent directors to study the idea. “The special committees have not reached agreement on terms of any transaction and there’s no guarantee that they will,” he said. “But I do think there is a lot of merit to merging and a lot to be gained.” He also warned, per NBC News, that “some people out there assume that a SpaceX and Tesla merger is a certainty, and I think that would be overstating it.”

The size is BONKERS. The BBC puts Tesla at roughly $1.5 trillion and SpaceX at $2 trillion, which would make it one of the largest mergers in history. Musk calls himself a “conflicted party,” says he isn’t on either committee, and compared even talking about it to “tap dancing through a minefield.”

The hurdle: at least 50% of Tesla’s shareholders would need to approve, which Musk called “quite a high hurdle to achieve.” His pitch is chips, AI and software, plus Terafab, the chipmaking effort the two companies already share.

Wall Street liked the sound of it. SpaceX shares rose 8% after hours and Tesla gained 2%, per the BBC. SpaceX posted a $4.4 billion profit for the latest quarter, though it lost $1.1 billion over the first nine months of the year. Tesla reports its own results Wednesday. Grab the popcorn.

Featured image: editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News; NBC News

He’s coming home. Russia has released Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American and former teacher from Michigan, as President Vladimir Putin met US envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg on Wednesday, the BBC reported.

Putin delivered the news right at the top of the meeting. “He is at Pulkovo Airport,” he told Witkoff in front of the cameras, Axios reported. President Trump then posted that Hubbard was “on his way back home” and that “there was no ‘swap’ necessary,” saying the release followed a request he “made directly” to Putin last week. Some earlier releases of Americans from Russia came through prisoner swaps.

Hubbard was captured by Russian forces in Izyum, Ukraine, shortly after the 2022 full-scale invasion. He was accused of serving in a defence unit there and was sentenced in 2024 to almost seven years in a penal colony. The State Department had classified him as “wrongfully detained.” CBS News reported he had been in poor health and was expected to be flown to Texas for treatment.

And the politics? Witkoff gushed: “You are a humanitarian also sir, and I salute that.” He also asked Putin to consider renewing three-way peace talks with Ukraine and thanked him for a deal to import Russian diesel. Trump suggested that if sanctions had gone ahead, Hubbard talks “would have come to a complete and total halt.” AP noted the release comes as Trump has taken a series of actions meant to benefit Moscow.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that “much depends on whether the American side can hear something new from Russia today – about peace, and not about continuing the war.” One man is free. The war grinds on into its fifth year.

Featured image: editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News; AP; Axios

Webmasters, put the coffee down. Organizations that run on the PHP programming language are being told to install a critical update TODAY or think about taking their websites offline, the BBC reported.

The PHP security team gave advance notice on Tuesday of a security release fixing two critical vulnerabilities, both rated 9.2 on the CVSS v4.0 scale, per PHP.net. The release was scheduled for Wednesday at 14:00 UTC (9am Central), and the team said it could ship earlier if details went public or attacks showed up in the wild.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre did not mince words: “Where immediate remediation is not feasible, organisations should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated,” it said in an alert. Its counterparts in the EU and Australia issued similar warnings. CERT-EU said the risk scores “indicate the potential for unauthenticated remote code execution,” meaning attackers could potentially install malware and take sites down.

Some aren’t waiting around. The Netherlands’ cyber-security agency says it is taking its own website offline, and the BBC reports the sites of a Dutch public health agency and the lower house of parliament went dark too. Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht said he was “seeing early attacks emerging.”

Why should YOU care? “PHP is everywhere. It quietly powers WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento sites, shared hosting platforms, control panels,” security firm Huntress said. CERT-EU said the flaws could affect every version back to PHP 5, which launched in 2004. Exact affected and fixed versions are due with the release, so check with your host. Yes, we’re looking at our own server too.

Featured image: editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News; UK NCSC; PHP.net; also reported by The Verge

This one is grim, and the world needs to look at it. Sudan’s army is accused of a wave of drone strikes that reportedly killed more than 300 people, including dozens travelling to a funeral, the BBC reported.

On Sunday evening in West Kordofan state, sources told the Sudan War Observatory, a conflict monitor, that 150 people were killed. A truck carrying about 200 mourners was hit as it arrived in the town of Al-Dabab. The group says 145 people died there and five more were killed when a funeral tent was hit, with another 150 injured. A market in Al-Mujlad was also bombed that evening, with the toll not yet known.

Then on Monday, drones hit Amiet Market near Abyei, the disputed border area that Sudan and South Sudan jointly administer. The region’s information minister, Yohana Akol Ngor, told AP and Reuters the death toll had risen from 73 to 153. “It is a horrible and shocking situation,” AP quoted him as saying. A military source told the BBC the army carried out the Abyei attack, calling the market a fuel supply site for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

And this: UN peacekeepers have been in Abyei since 2011, with more than 2,800 uniformed personnel deployed now. “Our area is a weapons-free zone under United Nations protection, yet it was targeted by drones,” one trader told the BBC. BBC Verify’s review of satellite images shows extensive burnt buildings in part of the market. South Sudan has summoned Sudan’s ambassador to protest.

The army hasn’t answered the West Kordofan allegations but says it does not attack civilians. Meanwhile the UN says 20 million people face acute hunger. The war has killed hundreds of thousands and driven more than 14 million from their homes, and drones from foreign suppliers keep pouring in despite a partial arms embargo.

Featured image: editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.

Sources: BBC News