I left home with a carry-on suitcase full of clothing two months ago, which means heavy rotation for what I'm wearing. I've been especially happy with the Merino.Tech polo shirt I got as a birthday present earlier this year: it doesn't get stinky, or wrinkled, or itchy and it still looks new. I'm a fan of more expensive brands like Ibex and Icebreaker, but at $60 on Amazon, this one is punching above its price tag.

If you've been sitting on some hotel points that don't seem to get you much in the USA, Canada, or Europe, you might want to plan your next vacation to some destination where you can do better. Since point requirements roughly track room rates for most programs now, you can find great deals in bargain destinations. I recently scored two nights at a Small Luxury Hotel of the World in Malaysia for 50K points total via Hilton. (Their Surpass card from Amex is a great deal.) The 50K cap on the free nights credits from a Marriott Bonvoy card was no problem: a Westin on a tropical island, with a terrific view, was only 35K points per night. Same with IHG in Saigon for my annual free night through their card. I've found similar points bargains from Mexico down to Santiago in the Americas.

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If you're renting a car frequently in the USA, you might want to lean toward Enterprise and their associated brands. The latest JD Power & Associates survey scored Enterprise at the top, with sister brand National scoring second and its leisure brand Alamo coming in at #4. The others to score above the industry average were Advantage, Sixt, and Hertz.

International flight prices are all over the map, but distance does play a big part in it: you'll pay more to fly across an ocean usually than to go two hours away. For flights within a country though, it's more about competition. Some countries have lots of cheap flights criss-crossing their nation, while others have one choice only. I just posted this article on countries with the cheapest domestic flights and found that distances and wealth have very little correlation. You will find great flight deals in India, Thailand, and Mexico, but also in Japan, Norway, Australia, and the USA.

* Editor's note: We're going to release The Best of Nomadico, the First 4 Years e-book in November and paid subscribers will get it for free. We're also going to start restricting some content to subscribers only, so if you've just been lurking on the app, please join us for real as a free or paid subscriber if you like what you see here. We appreciate it!

A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World's Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.

This report belongs to a weekly series summarising the Covid situation across the UK's home nations and other countries.

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This week's report highlights the latest trends in respiratory illness activity across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It also shares provides details on recent Covid activity for selected countries in Europe, North America, and Asia.

Charts for the USA will be updated on Friday, Oct 30 to reflect the latest published data.

This week, Covid trends in the UK show a mixed picture. In England, most indicators fell slightly, suggesting the risk stays low and isn't growing. In Scotland, all indicators increased slightly, with overall activity now at a medium level. Wales continues to see slow increases, with levels sitting at moderate. In Northern Ireland, the data is mixed, but activity remains low.

In England, most key indicators for Covid fell slightly this week indicating a lower risk of Covid. Positivity rates for all tests carried are falling at a national level as well as in most regions. After rising earlier than previous years, Flu test positivity in England has stabilised and is returning to a more normal seasonal pattern.

All key Covid indicators in Scotland increased slightly this week and overall are now at medium levels of activity. Flu levels are rising earlier than previous years,

This week, Covid admissions in Wales again increased and are now at moderate levels, while Flu and RSV hospitalisations remained stable and low.

In Northern Ireland, Covid indicators presented a mixed picture but activity remained low. All indicators for Flu increased but remained at low levels of activity.

Covid levels in wastewater continue to increase slowly this week across most European countries still reporting data, but overall they are still relatively low apart from France which has moderate levels.

For the week ending Oct 17, Covid activity in the USA is likely falling slowly with hospital indicators falling. While wastewater levels remaining unchanged at a moderate level, most states are still seeing low levels overall. Meanwhile, Flu activity continues to rise.

Covid levels remain low in Hong Kong and Singapore, but Flu levels are still high.

The UK's Autumn 2026 Covid Booster campaign started on Oct 1 and details of who is is eligible and how to arrange a vaccination can be found at the following links - England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

By week four of the campaign, vaccine coverage in England had climbed to 42% for people aged 75 and above, and 18% for those who are immunosuppressed. At present, coverage remains lower across the other home nations.

Free Flu vaccinations for those eligible are also available from Oct 1, 2026. Further details can be found at the following links - England, Scotland (invitation letter required), Wales, and Northern Ireland.

As always, it's important to remember that the risk of hospitalisation from Covid increases significantly with age and for the clinically vulnerable. Therefore, it is important to take appropriate measures such as self-isolating when experiencing Covid symptoms and enhancing ventilation or wearing masks whenever possible.

UKHSA have moved to publishing the Flu and COVID-19 surveillance reports fortnightly over the summer so data is only available from the Covid Dashboard this week.

This section starts with the latest data on test positivity rates for Covid in England. It's important to note that positivity is different from prevalence, which reflects the overall percentage of Covid cases in the general population. Appendix 1 offers a more detailed explanation of the distinction.

The following chart shows the test positivity rate for all Covid tests taken mapped against the UKHSA activity thresholds. The thresholds are based on the historical trend for Covid test positivity and, consequently, represent a relative risk. More details on this approach can be found in the Guide to Covid Surveillance Metrics.

The chart shows that the test positivity rate has started to fall, but is still at a low activity level. The rate remains highest at 11.1% for those aged 85 and above, then falls to just 1.9% for individuals aged 5 to 14 years.

The next chart shows that positivity rates for all tests carried out differ between regions. While most regions experienced a fall in test positivity rates, the North East continues to rise fast. Nevertheless, all regions stayed at a low level of activity apart from London which is now has the lowest rate, just within the baseline level of activity. Rates are holding steady in the North West, East Midlands, and Yorkshire and the Humberside.

The following chart highlights the key indicators of Covid in hospitals: weekly visits to Emergency Departments, test positivity rates among patients with respiratory issues, hospital admission and intensive care rates.

This week, hospital indicators for Covid activity again showed a mixed picture but remained relatively low. While test positivity and Emergency Department visits remained broadly unchanged, hospital and intensive care admissions continued to rise slowly.

The next chart in this section compares the positivity rate for hospital patients for the main respiratory viruses. Covid positivity rates fell slightly, while Flu rates stayed the same, with both still at low activity levels. The Rhinovirus rate fell slightly but stayed at the medium activity level. Meanwhile, RSV remains at out of season levels but is starting to increase.

However, the final chart in this section shows that although Flu rates for this year started rising earlier than in previous years they are now returning to a more normal seasonal pattern.

Public Health Scotland has now returned to publishing the Viral Respiratory Diseases in Scotland surveillance report weekly.

The latest edition, published on Oct 29, reported that indicators of respiratory infections are rising slowly, typical for this time in the season.

Flu activity has increased slightly this week, with laboratory confirmed cases activity level moving from baseline to low overall. This increase is reflected by a 40% increase in the number of influenza hospital admissions, which are higher than at the same period in previous seasons.

Covid activity has increased marginally across laboratory surveillance, moving from low to medium activity overall. Increased activity for Covid has also been observed at GPs for a second week. There has been a slight increase in the number of Covid hospital admissions.

The following panel chart presents the latest data for Covid levels in wastewater in blue, weekly Covid test positivity shown in red, Covid hospital admissions depicted in orange, and beds occupied by Covid patients in brown.

All key Covid indicators in Scotland increased slightly this week and overall are now at medium levels of activity. However it remains likely that this wave may be smaller than earlier ones.

The next chart in this section compares the test positivity rates for hospital patients with respiratory symptoms for Covid, Flu, and RSV. Covid positivity rates increased to 6.5% from 5.5% in the previous week, while RSV rates remained below baseline levels. Flu rates rose slightly and remain higher than for Covid.

The final chart in this section shows that hospital admissions for Flu are higher than at the same time in previous years, indicating an early start to the Flu season this year.

The following chart provides the latest trend for weekly hospital admissions for the main respiratory viruses in Wales up to week ending Oct 25, 2026.

Hospital admissions for Covid have increased over the past few weeks but remain at moderate levels.

The weekly Weekly Surveillance Report showed that test positivity increased to 11.6% in hospitals and GP practices for week ending Oct 25, 2026. Finally, the report confirmed that Flu circulation remains at low levels, while Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is holding steady at baseline intensity.

Public Health Northern Ireland's respiratory surveillance report covering Covid activity has now returned to being published weekly. The latest report covers data through to the week ending Oct 25, 2026 and the chart below highlights the test positivity rates for Covid, Flu, and RSV.

Test positivity was highest among the 5-14 age group for Flu (22.5%), the 0-4 age group for RSV (7.8%), and the 75+ age group for Covid (9.3%).

Overall, Flu activity has increased across all surveillance indicators but still remains low. Covid activity showed a more mixed trend across surveillance indicators and remains low. RSV activity also remained at baseline levels although some surveillance indicators have increased.

This section looks at the latest Covid trends in Europe and examines how wastewater patterns align with prevalence and hospital data in selected countries.

The following chart shows the latest levels of Covid up to week ending Oct 22, 2026 as measured by monitoring wastewater in a number of European countries that still publish this information.

This week, Covid levels in wastewater increased in most European countries still sharing this data but remained relatively low apart from in France which is at moderate levels.

Wastewater levels are not the only measures of Covid activity published by these countries and it is valuable to see how well the wastewater trends compare to the other key indicators.

Wastewater levels in Germany and France, when compared with hospital trends, show similar patterns. Interestingly, the Netherlands stands out as the only country in Europe that shares data on Covid prevalence in the population through a weekly survey, which also aligns closely with wastewater trends.

The two charts on the left show Germany's wastewater trends compared to their Covid hospital admissions, while the charts in the middle display France's wastewater levels against the percentage of Emergency Department visits due to Covid. The two charts on the right show waste water levels in the Netherland and the estimated prevalence of Covid in the population based on the weekly survey.

The latest data shows that Covid activity continues to rise slowly in Germany, France and the Netherlands across both sets of measures, confirming that Covid wastewater trends are a reliable indicator of Covid activity.

This section provides details of Covid activity in USA and Canada.

Charts for the USA will be updated on Friday, Oct 30 to reflect the latest information.

As of the week ending Oct 17, 2026, Covid indictors of activity in the USA present a mixed picture. While hospital indicators show falling levels of activity that are low, wastewater activity levels remained at moderate levels. While the risk remains low in most states, those in the Southeast and West are showing higher levels of activity.

The following chart shows the weekly trend for the national key Covid indicators covering wastewater activity levels, percent of emergency department visits due to Covid, test positivity, and the hospital admission rate in the USA.

The panel chart shows that the hospital indicators of Covid activity have continued to fall in the week ending Oct 17, 2026, and are at relatively low levels. However, although Covid levels in wastewater were stable they remained at moderate levels although this may be due to the addition of new testing sites.

While Covid levels are likely falling, Flu activity is increasing earlier than in past years, though it remains at low levels, as illustrated in the following chart.

The next chart shows the Covid trends by state as estimated by the CDC for Oct 20, 2026. Most States are showing a declining trend, depicted in green, or no change as highlighted in grey. This week, only 10 states are showing a likely growing or growing trend, marked in orange or red, just like last week. All states have low or very low levels of Emergency Department visits for Covid.

A reminder that the trend represents the direction of activity only and does not indicate the level of activity. Consequently, this map should be used in conjunction with other data like the percent of Emergency Department visits due to Covid.

States marked with vertical bars have low percent of visits to Emergency Departments (ED) for Covid and those marked with horizontal bars have very low percent of visits. More details information is available by hovering your cursor over any State.

The final map for the USA presents wastewater analysis for week ending Oct 17, 2026 presents a contrasting picture. While Wastewater activity levels for Covid are low in many States, several are showing high or very high activity levels. For example, wastewater activity levels in Florida remain very high, whereas Emergency Department visits for Florida are low and falling.

Each State is coloured based on activity levels, ranging from very high (dark red) to very low (light green), with grey indicating no data available. States with increasing activity levels are marked with cross-hatching. It is important to understand that the wastewater activity level is relative to the lowest levels seen in the past two years. Consequently, it is not a fixed absolute scale across all years. It is primarily a measure of how current wastewater viral levels compare with recent low levels in that State.

Activity levels are low in most States but are higher in some States in the West and Southeast regions.

In Canada, data for the week ending Oct 10, 2026, shows that Covid wastewater levels stayed at moderate levels, although levels in the western provinces are higher. Flu A activity is starting to rise and is now at a moderate level.

The weekly Canadian respiratory virus surveillance report provides further details on the activity of respiratory viruses. The latest report, covering data through the week ending Oct 17, 2026, indicates that Flu activity has continued to rise earlier than normally expected. Flu test positivity has reached 6.5%, surpassing the seasonal threshold of 5%, marking the official start of the Flu season. Meanwhile, test positivity for Covid and RSV remains stable and at low activity levels.

This section provides the latest information on Covid and Flu activity levels in Hong Kong and Singapore.

The following chart displays the key Covid indicators for Hong Kong up to the week ending Oct 24, 2026. Although Covid levels in wastewater samples increased in July, the latest hospital surveillance data shows that the overall local activity of Covid has fallen to very low levels and the recent wave is over.

However, Flu presents a very different picture and the following chart shows that the Flu levels in Hong Kong are presently very high.

The next chart presents the weekly Covid positivity rate for tests carried out on patients with respiratory symptoms in Singapore up to week ending Oct 10, 2026. It shows that Covid activity peaked in May, consistent with the previous two years, and has now fallen to low levels.

However, although Flu activity is falling in Singapore it remains moderately high, similar to Hong Kong.

The NHS Autumn Covid booster campaign started on October 1, 2026. People aged 75 years and older, residents in care homes for older people, and those aged 6 months and over with a weakened immune system will be offered a dose of the Covid vaccine this spring. These are same criteria used for the Spring 2026 and Autumn 2025 booster campaigns.

Full details of eligibility and the vaccines being used for the Spring campaign can be found in the UK Governments Green Book published here.

The following chart shows the number of Covid vaccinations given by week for each of the booster campaigns in England.

During the first four weeks of the Autumn 2026 campaign in England, 3,063,101 booster doses were given, providing 42% coverage for people aged 75 and older and 18% coverage for those who are immunosuppressed. This is slightly higher than the first four weeks of the Spring 2026 campaign but 497,908 fewer than the Autumn 2025 campaign, which had the same group of people eligible.

The final chart in this section shows the Autumn 2026 Covid booster coverage for each of the eligible cohorts by home nation. Coverage is generally highest in England, but coverage for the immunosuppressed group is lowest in all four home nations,

Although the amount of data currently being published is reduced, the information available for all home nations show that Covid activity is low in England. However, Scotland is seeing increases and is now at medium activity levels. Wales and Northern Ireland are seeing slow increases but remain relatively low.

Covid levels in wastewater are low but rising slowly across most European countries, particularly in France. In the USA, Covid activity is staring to fall and is at low levels, except in a few states.

Flu levels are starting to rise earlier than in previous years in some countries.

As always, if you have any comments on this Covid Situation Report or suggestions for topics to cover, please post a message below.

Thanks for reading Seeing The Forest for the Trees! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Positivity rates are derived from the results of hospital laboratory tests conducted on patients exhibiting symptoms of respiratory diseases. Test positivity is the percentage of patients who test positive for Covid of the total number of patients tested. Since the individuals tested for this measure are not a representative sample of the general population it differs from prevalence, which is derived from a representative sample of the population.

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The post Breaking into IT? Start with nine CompTIA exam prep courses for $24.99 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Netanyahu is seeking to build a new coalition with Jewish "opposition" parties to ensure the continued exclusion of Arabs from government in Israel. It will be a long and convoluted process but I expect he will eventually succeed. In the meantime he remains in power.

Next week Trump will lose control of both Houses in Washington and face challenges to his executive power. Both Trump and Netanyahu will need a new war emergency to strengthen their domestic position.

I shall therefore be surprised if there is not a major US/Israeli assault on Iran by mid November, to destroy Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons (as opposed to Israel's real ones).

This will have disastrous consequences for everybody involved. If Trumpenyahu seeks actually to topple the Iranian government it is going to require unprecedented levels of force, such as an invasion of many hundreds of thousands of ground troops or the deployment of a nuclear weapon. Merely resuming the murderous conventional bombing will have no more result that it did before. A spectacular event might be attempted such as the destruction of the oil facilities on Kharg Island, but the environmental consequences would be enormous and choke the Gulf States, while Iran's retaliation would be massive and the economic impacts unquantifiable.

Trump and his circle have already seen the potential for vast fortunes to be made by insider trading and futures speculation in the on/off attacks on Iran we saw previously, but a return to limited and sporadic violence is not going to meet the scale of Trump and Netanyahu's political necessity.

Personally, I have applied to go to Iran in early November to be able to report truthfully on the country and on what happens, as any attack will be accompanied by a major wave of anti-Iranian propaganda. I appreciate that this is dangerous, but I have a compulsive belief that those of us who see how dark the world is turning have a duty to stand up against invigorated western Imperialism, which currently threatens a multi-front war that could blossom into World War III.

It is extraordinary that zionists are claiming that, as Arab Israelis can vote, the Israeli elections disprove apartheid. The entire political discussion in Israel centres on how to form a coalition while keeping Arabs out of government.

In the entire history of Israel there have only been 2 Arab Muslim cabinet ministers. Both were very short term and both were token "Minister Without Portfolio" - meaning they had no power over anything and crucially had zero Jewish personnel under them.  The notion of any Arab Israeli ever instructing a Jewish Israeli is anathema to the racist mindset.

That is, if you are interested, 00.8% of all full ministers in the history of Israel have been Muslim Arabs, who comprise almost 20% of the population.

There have also been three Druze ministers over that 78 years.

Within the Knesset itself, Arab members have been repeatedly reviled, spat at, punched and entirely marginalised. The so called Israeli "opposition" explicitly campaigned both for continuing the policy in Gaza (they did not call it Genocide by name but that is what they meant), and for excluding any Arabs from the Israeli government.

Zionism is plainly racism. It is proven beyond reasonable discussion on the above facts about exclusion of Arabs from government. Yet we have the entire political and media class in the UK attacking the English Green Party in a sustained onslaught for saying this simple truth. We also have schools in England being forced to teach uncritical support for Israel as a compulsory subject, based on a nonsense report by a committed zionist, commissioned by a committed zionist minister in hock to the Israeli lobby.

The report's claim that 70% of Jewish schoolchildren had suffered anti-semitism at school, based on the self reporting of the personal experience of 29 sixth formers, has been widely ridiculed.

In general, even aside from the numerous self faked instances involved in anti-semitism reporting, it is essential the UK government stops accepting the self-reporting of Jewish victimhood without question or analysis. This is a privilege it accords to no other group.

I have reported over decades on the ludicrously inflated alarmist claims of the Community Security Trust of double digit increases almost in anti-semitic incidents every single year - often high double digit increases - which if true would now amount to millions of incidents annually.

They include, for example. saying "Free Palestine" as an anti-semitic incident if it is within the hearing of a Jewish person.

The Community Security Trust receive £21,000,000 million annually in UK government money to safeguard the Jewish Community.

By contrast the equivalent body for the Muslim community, the British Muslim Trust, receives £650,000. This is a "safe" Muslim organisation whose leadership group is replete with Orders of the British Empire. A more active Muslim body, Tell Mama, used to receive the grant but was closed down after a right wing and zionist campaign against it, on the grounds it was inflating anti-Muslim incidents.

For example, Andrew Gilligan published in an attack article in the Telegraph that only 7% of Tell Mama's documented incidents involved physical violence against Muslims. Yet this is a higher percentage than ever found in the equivalent statistics from the Community Security Trust, whose grant is not only not cancelled but ever-increasing. Indeed every single criticism levelled by Gilligan at Tell Mama - criticisms which led to the cancellation of that group's funding - is much more true of the Community Security Trust.

This part of the Bell report was particularly interesting.

I would have no problem at all sitting down to eat with a Jewish person, but I would have qualms about sitting down to eat with an open zionist of any race - which is not to say I would not do it, but I would worry about how confrontational the meal might turn.

According to Bell that makes me an anti-semite, and this is where his insistence that schools accept the IHRA definition, conflating anti-semitism with criticism of Israel, is key.

Soft zionists - those who wish the long term genocide of the Palestinian people and theft of Palestinian land to proceed without too much outcry - had hoped for a change of face to lead the project - though the notion that Eisenkot, the architect of the Dahiya Doctrine of destruction of entire communities, is any less genocidal than Netanyahu is a nonsense.

Now Netanyahu is still there, and my bet is that Naftali Bennet or another "opposition" leader will join him on the basis of excluding Arabs from government.

I also strongly suspect that the increase in Arab representation will lead to the end of Palestinian representation in the Knesset, through a change to the voting system, the banning of parties or simple disenfranchisement. There is precedent: Israel formally considers occupied East Jerusalem a part of Israel proper, but the 400,000 Palestinian residents there do not have the vote. Jewish settlers there do have a vote.

There is every sign that the Burnham regime is even worse than the Starmer regime on Israel and the Middle East. Burnham has sent UK fighter jets to Saudi Arabia to support attacks on Ansar Allah and the Yemeni people. Burnham has capitulated in the effective closure of the UK Consulate General in East Jerusalem, and expulsion of British diplomats, without retaliation. Burnham has brought in no new sanctions against Israel and stopped no arms supplies. Trumpeted sanctions against illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank were a lie - nothing has happened.

Above all, the persecution of supporters of Palestine Action continues unabated.

The government has no obligation to continue the case in the Supreme Court. To frame this as "letting the courts decide" or "obeying the rule of law" is sickening hypocrisy. The question is not whether the government has draconian powers in law, which will be accepted by the Supreme Court. The question is whether it was moral and correct to use them in this way.

It would, for example, be legal to abolish old age pensions and invalidity benefits. If parliament voted for it, the Supreme Court would uphold it. The question is not if the Supreme Court will allow it, it is whether it is the right thing to do. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood's equation of Palestine Action activists with skinhead gangs who attack immigrants was appalling.

I believe that happily we have reached a turning point. It was hubris for Healey to make a £10 billion donation to the Nazi friendly Ukrainian dictatorship in a budget which focused attention on the very real fall in living standards in the UK. Reaction across social media and in legacy media website comment threads has been overwhelmingly negative.

It has taken time for the wide gap between the public and the Establishment on the crimes of Israel to have a major effect, but I sense a change there too. Netanyahu has retained power, and the conviction of grannies and aged priests in the UK as terrorists is due to get fully underway in the New Year. Huge increases in already the World's highest grid energy bills are going to happen at the same time.

The attacks on Iran and the Ukrainian destruction of Nordstream have had a massive combined effect on world energy prices. The people are not stupid; they understand this. It is also increasingly plain that the war agenda encompasses both the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

The Devil's Coalition of USA, Ukraine and Israel led the resistance at the UN to the General Assembly vote condemning the illegal blockade of Cuba.

It feels as though events are moving at fast forward, hurtling us helter skelter either towards the widespread war which western "liberals" are advocating, or to the overthrow of neoliberalism. I do not currently see where we could land between those two alternatives.

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Oracle expects to earn more from existing application customers as it embeds AI in its enterprise software suite.

Speaking at Big Red's investor day on Wednesday, Chris Leone, executive veep of application development, said Oracle will layer usage-based revenue on top of its subscription model.

"The more work that gets done by AI in our system, the more revenue we will see because they're consuming AI units as that work is getting done. We don't have to add more seats in order for us to now generate more revenue," he said.

Earlier this month, Oracle revealed its Fusion Claw runtime, designed to help customers control AI agents that automate business processes. It targets ERP, finance, and supply chain management in cloud-based Fusion applications running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Customers will pay for more work done inside Oracle applications, and Leone said Fusion Claw will also automate work done outside of Fusion.

The promise of more revenue for Oracle, and higher bills for customers, came as the company sought to reassure investors about its spending, borrowing and revenue as it chases a share of the AI market.

Oracle is funding a datacenter spending spree with negative cashflow and borrowing. OCI is set to host large language model builders, notably OpenAI, alongside its own customers' workloads. Oracle spent $55.7 billion on datacenters and cloud infrastructure in fiscal year 2026, which ended in May, and plans to spend between $90 billion and $95 billion in fiscal 2027.

That will require more debt. In 2027, Oracle hopes to raise around $40 billion in debt and equity, on top of the $18 billion in debt it raised in September 2025.

In a notice to investors this week, Oracle said it expects fiscal 2030 revenue of $225 billion, a compound annual growth rate of 35 percent from 2026. It expects positive cash flow by the second half of fiscal 2028, with capital spending falling the following financial year. Investors reacted positively.

Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia also told shareholders the company will use AI to help implement its software, a plan he called as important as putting AI in the software itself. He argued AI will cut implementation time, bringing existing and new customers to OCI faster and boosting revenue.

"On-premises customers can now move far more easily to the cloud by leveraging the AI tool sets to automate migrations and decrease the cost and time to implement. They don't have to be Oracle customers; they can be competitive customers."

Sicilia said enterprise application software users' reluctance to change had been a major "headwind" for Oracle, one he hopes AI will ease.

"Our large remaining base of on-premises customers are going to start to adopt this technology quite quickly. When we move customers from on-premises to cloud, we see a multiple increase in revenue," he said. ®

I was pretty sure the Knicks just needed to settle down, but the fans and the city and journalists and to some extent the team were still living mentally in June, in the aftermath of the greatest sports win in a long time. Then the team lost three, probably because they too were in the bubble of last year. This is the team that when asked how they felt about their chances in the playoffs when they were sweeping a team like the Sixers or Cavs, they would say -- the score in the next game is 0-0. If you believe it was your shit that made you win, try again. It's why rich people lead such miserable lives. They think they won the game, heh but no one wins the game, you may just get a reprieve to play again in the next season, as the Knicks are doing now too.

Last night's game was a perfect demo of why we love this version of the team so much. When someone isn't making their shots, they sub a bench player who adds the spark they needed, and everyone plays with gusto. There's always a new man up on this team or so it seems.

It was good that everyone got the doom and gloom out of their systems, don't mistake this season as a repeat of last season. You're not entitled to anything and bet against it being quite different. Everyone is a year older. Mitchell Robinson is gone. But last night we were reminded of the overall character of the team which seems now to be constant. Every freaking bench player is a phenomenon. How did they get such a bench? Great business people who understand the sport, and coaching that knows how to manage a talented team to go all the way, and players that are close to each other, and feel the team.

I said this durning the doom and gloom, I could cruise for another 50 years on the high from last season. But I am ready for more love from this team and from the city that loves the Knicks even when they suck (please remember that) and we should feel no less proud when they don't.

Despite Trump's war on EVs, the US Department of Energy has launched the new "BattMan" battery innovation accelerator led by experts at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The post Sure Looks Like Trump Loves EVs After All appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Ahead of the Circular Economy Act, a joint letter from T&E, Recharge, Clean Tech for Europe and EIES calls for concrete measures to support the effective scaling of Europe's material recovery and recycling capacity. Recovering materials from end-of-life batteries is a key means to secure much needed critical minerals (CRMs) ... [continued]

The post Scaling European Battery Recycling via the Circular Economy Act appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Something I learned from my trip to China: you can be fast followers if you're willing to learn from the best. Sometimes a bit of distance can improve your perspective. Walking down the silent streets of Beijing I listened to the future of mobility. Statistics can't convey the silence of ... [continued]

The post What Europe Can Learn From China If It Wants To Save Its Industry appeared first on CleanTechnica.

With the COP31 climate summit in Turkey looming, all eyes are on China to see what the country will push for in the negotiations.

At COP30 last year, China helped to secure a "dialogue" on climate-related "unilateral trade measures", as well as a two-year "work programme" concerning climate finance.

The nation also championed south-south cooperation throughout the conference and co-led a summit on methane, alongside Brazil and the UK.

In a recent press conference, China's environment vice-minister Li Gao noted the need to "uphold multilateralism" and send a "clear political signal" that the global community is united around climate action. 

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Li also pledged to advocate for an "open and efficient" trade system that "facilitates" adoption of clean-energy technologies.

On the more traditional topics of mitigation and finance, Li highlighted the need to "address insufficient emission reduction efforts by developed countries and inadequate financial support" for developing countries.

Carbon Brief asked six leading experts on China what they believe China wants from COP31 and what signals they will be watching for. 

Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.

• Kate Logan
• Ma Jun 
• Yao Zhe 
• Prof Ryna Cui 
• Dr Joseph Dellatte 
• Prof Jeremy Wallace 

Director of the China climate hub and climate diplomacy, Asia Society Policy Institute

In an era where global climate cooperation is severely challenged, China's top priority at COP31 will be upholding multilateralism. With most "big ticket" items under the Paris Agreement now complete and constrained expectations for major new breakthroughs at COP31, China may be satisfied with a conference that produces no major drama and little else.

Nevertheless, expect China's vision for multilateralism to have a distinct flavor to it. Chinese officials may again leverage the COP stage to oppose unilateralism and promote an open and fair international trade system, reflecting Beijing's persistent frustration with tariffs and other measures that have inhibited the global flow of Chinese clean technologies. One question is whether they will do this through existing spaces or push for a dedicated agenda item on trade, given that COP30's trade outcomes, championed by China, mostly relegated discussions to mid-year technical meetings.

China may also seek clarity on implementation pathways for existing targets, including nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and the $300bn climate finance goal. Amid US withdrawal, officials remain anxious about additional pressure that Beijing may receive. After vice-premier Ding Xuexiang shared at COP29 that China has provided and mobilised over 177bn yuan ($26.5bn) in climate finance for developing countries since 2016, China has refrained from issuing further quantitative updates, while maintaining the imperative for developed countries to take the lead on climate finance. China may be happy to let other developing countries push this agenda while serving as a broker in the end game to ensure its own interests are protected.

Founder and director, Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs

I think China wants COP31 to reaffirm confidence in multilateral climate cooperation and translate commitments into action. With the risk of overshooting 1.5C almost unavoidable, I expect China to seek clearer delivery of climate finance for developing countries; encourage reductions in potent, short-lived greenhouse gases such as methane; support a just transition; and highlight trade barriers affecting clean technologies.

I will be watching whether negotiations produce credible plans for delivering finance, particularly for adaptation, as well as practical support for implementing national climate pledges. The climate-trade debate will also matter. Can countries address their differences while keeping renewable energy and other clean technologies affordable and accessible? It will be an important test of whether countries can achieve global energy-transition targets by 2030 and turn shared ambitions into measurable emissions reductions.

Global policy advisor, Greenpeace East Asia

At COP31, I expect a continued push from China to integrate more trade perspectives into the climate negotiations. Beijing's new five-year plan on climate action envisions a constructive leadership role in global climate governance, specifically calling for the proper handling of climate-trade issues and the free flow of low-carbon products. It will be critical to watch how this grand strategy plays out on the negotiation floor.

I will also be watching how China responds to the COP presidency's electrification initiative. Beijing increasingly views climate diplomacy through the lens of clean-energy diplomacy - an approach that directly leverages its industrial strength on renewables, electric vehicles (EVs), batteries and grid infrastructure. While China should naturally welcome a global electrification initiative that will lead to larger overseas markets, it likely remains reluctant to link these targets to any commitments regarding transitioning away from fossil fuels.

Associate research professor and research director, University of Maryland Center for Global Sustainability

There isn't much on the formal negotiation agenda for this year's COP. The core theme will continue to focus on implementation and delivery, which I think China has strong interests in. This is because of both progress made domestically with the clean energy transition and the overseas economic opportunities to support other countries' implementation with low-cost Chinese clean technologies. 

One thing exciting for me to watch is that, as China reaches its coal and oil peak, it may open up space for increased interests and leadership in the global "transitioning away from fossil fuels" agenda. This may not happen immediately through formal government negotiations, but more likely through broader bilateral and multilateral engagements. 

As the world navigates options and challenges for the 1.5C overshoot future, China can also contribute critically beyond the energy transition, especially on opportunities for rapid abatement of methane, industrial nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons and other non-CO2 gases as part of its 2035 all-sector, all-greenhouse gas NDC.

Resident fellow and head of energy and climate studies, Institut Montaigne

China will likely seek recognition as a climate leader while defending its position as the world's cleantech manufacturing hub, amid growing trade tensions. I'll watch whether it continues to frame the global transition primarily around access to Chinese technologies and open markets for its exports, or shows greater willingness to discuss cooperation that shares industrial benefits through local manufacturing, joint ventures and technology sharing. Its delegation and pavilion messaging will reveal how Beijing responds to partners seeking their own place in cleantech value chains.

In the negotiations, I'll watch whether China accepts greater responsibility for climate ambition while maintaining its leadership role among developing countries, including through additional voluntary climate finance. Electrification will be another test. Will Beijing support commitments linking electrification to cleaner grids and use its influence to bring reluctant fossil-fuel producers on board?

A Doak Barnett professor of China studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies 

China seems to hold many cards in the notional game of global climate leadership. Its firms have innovated and scaled up production to make solar, batteries and EVs cost-competitive with or cheaper than fossil alternatives. It has led in deployment of these technologies. 

Yet, in preparation for COP31, China seems more interested in fighting battles abroad about "unfair" tariffs on these products than about demonstrating their effectiveness by accelerating adoption of the green-tech revolution at home. China's renewables buildout has slowed dramatically in 2026, while new coal power and coal chemical facilities continue to be built. The Chinese government has restricted firms from taking their best manufacturing innovations out of the country when building factories abroad. 

Climate leadership is up for grabs. I'm watching to see if Beijing will play its cards and show that they are a winning hand.

The post Experts: What China wants from the COP31 climate talks appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Michael Stonebraker introduced Postgres® at Berkeley in 1986. Forty years later, the database he invented is a leading choice for a generation of AI projects, and he is among the sharpest skeptics of how those projects are being built. Bruce Momjian is cofounder and core team member of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, and he works at EnterpriseDB (EDB). In upcoming episodes of AI & Data Horizons by EnterpriseDB (EDB), the Turing Award winner and MIT professor and the Postgres community advocate both make the case that the future belongs to systems that bend without breaking, and to communities that no single company controls.

Stonebraker's first exhibit is text-to-SQL, the promise that a business user can ask a question in plain English and get an answer from the warehouse. Public benchmarks such as Spider and BIRD report accuracy above 80 percent. His team tried the same thing on MIT's own data warehouse—1,400 tables of student, faculty, building, and salary information—using real queries from its SQL log.

"We got zero-percent accuracy. Not 80, not 70, not 40—zero," he said. Adding agentic AI, retrieval, and prompt engineering lifted that level into the teens. Telling the model every table and join term reached the 30s. "Still not ready for prime time."

The reasons are the stuff of every enterprise estate. There is no training data, because the warehouse is not on the public internet. The data is idiosyncratic: among other things, MIT buildings have numbers, not names. The schema has rotted into cryptic table and column names and overlapping views. And real queries are harder than benchmark ones. His team has published its own benchmark, Beaver, and says nobody has broken out of accuracy levels in the 30-percent range.

The deeper problem, Stonebraker argues, is architectural. Large language models are good with text, but "what they are no good at is doing joins of structured data," which is most of what an enterprise holds. Working with the city of Munich's transport department, Stonebraker's team found that answering a single citizen complaint about crosswalk timing meant combining regulations, CAD drawings, trolley schedules, and school-zone maps. Orchestrating that with a language model at the center was, he said, "ridiculously expensive."

The team's answer, a system called Rubicon, uses models only on text, then casts the results into tables and hands the rest to a tabular engine. The orchestrator "looks like a query optimizer." Stonebraker says it is cheaper by a factor of 10 and considerably more accurate than agent frameworks built around a model.

He expects agentic AI to slide from the top of the hype cycle into the valley of despair before a more balanced view emerges. Enterprises hate non-determinism: Approve a loan and reverse it on review, and "that's called a lawsuit." Organizations also need protection from rogue agents. The guardrails inside the database, he notes, largely exist already: decades of access control, complete logs, and triggers that can stop a transaction in its tracks. Data-heavy agents, he suggests, belong inside the data layer as user-defined functions, if the tooling to debug and version them improves.

Stonebraker is equally blunt about the frontier. The models have already used the real training data on the internet, and he knows of no enterprise that will let a model train on its proprietary data. AGI, he said, is "basically marketing hype" from foundation model vendors justifying their valuations.

Why Postgres? "Postgres is the intergalactic answer to open source," Stonebraker said. Its unique feature is that "it's not controlled by any one company." EDB, Microsoft, Google, and others each contribute committers, and nobody steers. He dates its rise to Oracle buying MySQL, when "everybody said: vendor control." For enterprises, that independence is the foundation of sovereignty: retaining control over how and where their data systems operate.

Momjian describes the same structure from the inside. Postgres has no office, no assets, and no legal entity, yet it produces "software better than billion-dollar companies." Its forecasting tool is the community itself, which spots needs early from China, Russia, and the United States. "We only need one person in the world to be supersmart, and that person to tell us what they think."

Both experts describe a design philosophy that favors flexibility over the last few percent of speed. Stonebraker built Postgres to be extended, and that is why it absorbed JSON, full-text search, GIS, and now AI without a rewrite. Momjian adds a second call from the 1990s: Lean on the operating system rather than absorb it, which made Postgres a natural fit for the cloud.

Momjian resists optimizations that buy 5 or 10 percent at the cost of rigidity, since a mistuned system can lose 40 percent. "If you take a Formula One car to the supermarket, there's no place for the groceries." The project plans on a horizon few vendors can match. "We're looking at what would be the impact 5 years from now, 10 years from now."

The new release puts that discipline on show. Several previewed features, including SQL property graph queries and partition merging and splitting, were reverted, because reliability comes first. AI-assisted review is finding problems quickly; the August 2026 patch release for PostgreSQL 18 addressed 28 CVEs.

What remains is practical: REPACK CONCURRENTLY for busy tables, smarter parallel autovacuum, and sequence synchronization for logical replication. Plan Advice, from PostgreSQL major contributor and committer Robert Haas, is the community's answer to Oracle-style optimizer hints it rejected for years. "Somebody found a way of doing it that didn't have the downsides," Momjian said.

The two diverge on how fast AI will write SQL. Momjian expects agents to create databases and generate much of the code. Stonebraker says that will not happen inside the enterprise until data is documented, silos are opened, and the politics change. They agree on the destination. AI needs a relational system to give it permanence and memory, and, in Momjian's words, that is "a game-changer."

Forty years on, the inventor and the steward are betting on the same database.

Contributed by EnterpriseDB

Belgium's finance and tax agency has pulled "several" digital services offline after a cyberattack on the organization.

FOD Financiën confirmed the attack on Wednesday, saying that MyMinfin, the agency's main online tax portal, as well as other online services, are temporarily unavailable while they start the initial investigations.

"This measure helps limit the risks and makes it possible to carry out the necessary technical interventions to ensure the security of our systems," it said in a public announcement.

FOD Financiën added that "this has consequences for tax deadlines in the near future," referring to the October 31 extended deadline to submit tax filings for specific types of income, such as sole traders and earnings from foreign companies.

The agency confirmed the deadline will be extended to November 16, by which time MyMinfin, the platform through which such filings would normally be submitted, should be back up and running.

The detail offered up in the public statement reflects the early stage of the investigation; not much is known, although there is nothing to suggest data was compromised.

"Data protection is a top priority for the FOD Financiën," it said. "At present, there are no indications that a data breach has occurred or that data has been compromised. This aspect is also being closely investigated and followed up.

"In the meantime, a large part of our other applications remains available with full or partial functionality. We are closely monitoring the situation and doing everything we can to make the affected services available again as soon as possible."

Spokesperson Francis Adyns told local news outlets that the attack was thwarted within hours, and that it was unable to gain access to applications or data.

"The attack could not be sufficiently expanded within our environment to take over applications or gain access to data," he told Nieuwsblad. "Elements that were potentially infected were isolated. As a result, MyMinfin, Tax-on-web, and Biztax went offline, but the hacking was successfully stopped.

"The various services must be restored in an isolated environment. This requires considerable time to realize, with the necessary caution to rule out new risks." ®

Everyone's favorite Unix init system is adding support for the Unix world's favorite new programming language. What's the worst that could happen?

Don't worry, this isn't here just yet. Agent P and his trusty team released systemd version 262 about a month ago. That means that systemd 263 is now under construction, and developer Christian Brauner announced on Mastodon that his new feature has been merged.

The previous effort, which was pull request #44144, has now been split into five separate parts. Part 1 contains keyring-util and voa-util, described as "helpers for enrolling certificates into kernel keyrings." Part 2, support programs written in Rust, is the banner item. Then come a few more: bind only the headers Rust code uses, wrap the libsystemd-shared helpers systemd-keyring-setup needs, and finally, add systemd-keyring-setup.

There are several important riders to the announcement, and these are spelled out in the second PR:

"Rust is only used for new leaf components. Existing C code isn't ported and nothing that other components depend on is written in Rust."

In other words, before anyone gets too excited, this does not indicate the start of an effort to rewrite systemd in Rust. All it means is that new systemd modules can be written in Rust.

The second bullet point will be more significant for existing Rust developers: "No cargo. Everything is built with meson."

Cargo is the Rust language's package manager and build system. It's the normal way to build Rust applications, as well as to distribute modules of Rust code for other Rust developers to use. However, systemd already has a modern build system. It's called Meson and it's not unique to systemd - it is also used extensively by the GNOME project and the Mesa 3D graphics library. Meson itself is written in Python and uses Ninja to manage the compilation process. Ninja was designed to build Chrome faster, and it's also used for Android.

The third stipulation is that any Rust code must not use the standard library. For those more familiar with C, this may sound extreme, but it's normal for embedded Rust programming.

The project documents the system requirements. It needs Rust version 1.85 or later. That's modest: that version was released in February 2025, and version 1.99.1 appeared earlier this month. It also calls for bindgen version 0.71.1 (from December 2024) or newer, and Meson 1.4.0 (from March 2024). These are relatively old versions - for instance, it's the Meson version included in Debian 13).

Brauner added an interesting little coda in a second Masto post: saying that the team would have liked to support Rust in the core of systemd, but currently, Rust's support for dynamic libraries isn't quite there yet.

It's perhaps worth noting that writing systemd modules in Rust isn't the same thing at all as calling systemd from Rust code. There are several tools for doing that, and they have been around for years: for example, the systemd crate first appeared in 2015. ®

A game is not a moral exemption to your usual self. Sometimes the best way to puncture 'it's just a game' is to show people that you're judging them in reality

• Read more Leading questions

My sister-in-law is nearly 40 but cannot handle losing at board games. No matter how high or low the stakes, she has to win. When she doesn't, she becomes explosive with rage, and often upends the game, sweeps dice off the table, or storms off in a rage. She is otherwise a normal and lovely person, with whom I get on very well. Seeing this side of her makes me deeply uncomfortable and it feels really childish and inappropriate. Will she behave that way with me if I say or do something she doesn't like?

I think in an effort to smooth the tension, my husband's family always laughs and teases her about her reaction. It's like her "special little characteristic" that everyone pretends to love. I wish there was a way to address it but everyone seems to just sweep it under the rug. My husband is aware of how I feel about this.

I recently noted how California's being told by the Trump administration that it can't enforce any of its own telecom consumer protection laws if it wants to receive $1.4 billion dollars Congress already earmarked for broadband expansion under the 2021 infrastructure bill.

That means if California wants money it was already supposed to receive from Congress, it can't enforce its own net neutrality law, telecom privacy law, affordability metrics, reliability targets, or effectively do anything telecom monopoly giants like AT&T and Comcast don't like for the next 14 years.

More specifically, some extremely unpopular Trump NTIA revisions to the infrastructure bill's Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program included a little something called "Condition 50," which would impose a 14 year moratorium on telecom consumer protection in the state. It's just grotesque levels of corruption and regulatory capture, and it's flown largely under the radar.

Tim Wu (Columbia), Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler (Harvard), Jack Balkin (Yale), Zephyr Teachout (Fordham), and Barbara van Schewick (Stanford) have penned a joint letter to Gavin Newsom urging him to refuse to sign the state's BEAD notice of award agreement while Condition 50 is still attached. Or, better yet, legally challenge the federal government extortion:

"California must decide by November 1 whether to sign the Notice of Award for its $1.42 billion BEAD grant. We urge the State not to sign while Condition 50 remains attached, with or without a side letter. The best course is to challenge Condition 50 in court before the deadline: California has strong arguments that NTIA lacked authority to impose the condition, but it has a realistic chance of winning only if it sues before signing the award. If the State decides not to sue, it should decline the award and make clear that California is ready to accept the funds as soon as the condition is removed."

(Since the letter's writing the deadline has shifted to November 2, I'm told). If California signs the letter with Condition 50 attached, the Trump NTIA will argue the challenge belongs in D.C. federal court under a very narrow standard of review, and that California knowingly accepted the condition. Such a case would be extremely difficult to win, the academics note.

Given the total collapse of federal consumer protection and regulatory integrity, AT&T, Comcast, and other giants would be free to rip off consumers — and undermine competitors — with impunity.

Public Knowledge, EFF, Free Press, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, TURN, groups representing rural and low-income Californians, leaders of the Lower Russian River Firewise Communities, the Communications Workers of America, and the California Democratic Party's Rural Caucus have also joined the calls to fight back against the Trump administration before the November 2 deadline.

It's unclear if Newsom, increasingly under fire for being too corporate-friendly to be a serious presidential contender (see: his assistance in getting Larry Ellison's media mergers approved with flimsy conditions), will take a stand here. There's a lot going on in a country being devoured by authoritarian corruption, and trying to prevent telecom monopolies from ripping off captive customers hasn't been much of a priority.

It's worth noting that every other state has signed their letter to receive their funds, in part because telecom lobbying has already neutered state autonomy over broadband in those states. Thirty-three states and D.C. bar their utility commissions from regulating broadband, and in seven more the commission has disclaimed that authority "on its own" (read: AT&T told them to).

The efforts to muzzle California's consumer protection capabilities is just one of numerous extremely unpopular and corrupt changes made to the infrastructure bill program to the benefit of either massive monopolies — or Elon Musk.

I've explored at length (at several different outlets) how $42.5 billion in BEAD funding was supposed to be headed to the states to address broadband improvements. Instead, the Trump administration has hijacked the program, driven billions of dollars of those funds to Musk for inferior satellite service (he'd already planned to deploy without subsidy), and stripped the program of any requirement that these taxpayer funds be dispersed equitably or with an eye on affordability.

You know, because cheap, ultra-fast, fiber optic cable that challenges Comcast is woke.

The $42.5 billion in BEAD money states were supposed to get for broadband upgrades was already effectively cut in half after the Trump administration engaged in Elon Musk favoritism. That meant a lot of money previously slated for cheap, future-proof fiber will instead be redirected to Musk's increasingly congested Starlink Low-Earth-Orbit satellite network.

Now states are being told they won't get any money at all if they engage in policy choices big telecom giants don't like, including enforcing basic reliability and affordability protections.

United Launch Alliance (ULA) has set a target date for its return to flight: Friday, November 13, for a Vulcan launch.

The mission will send 40 Amazon Leo satellites into orbit. A pair of BE-4 engines will power the booster, along with six Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs). A Centaur V second stage, propelled by two RL10C-1 engines, will complete the journey to orbit and deploy the payload.

The launch is the first Vulcan launch for Amazon after eight deployments with ULA's Atlas V. It is also the first since the launch earlier this year for the US Space Force in which an SRB burned through its nozzle during the ascent, treating viewers to some impressive fireworks and controllers to some likely clenched sphincters thanks to a "significant performance anomaly."

In the event, the US Space Force payload successfully reached orbit, but the Vulcan was stood down while ULA conducted an investigation. This wasn't the first time a Vulcan had had issues with its SRBs. A nozzle was shed during the second launch of the rocket in 2024. Things went OK with the third launch. But another problem on the fourth trek to orbit meant a stand-down was unavoidable.

The workhorse Atlas V has continued deploying Amazon Leo satellites during the Vulcan's hiatus. Another 29 were added on a July 2 launch from Space Launch Complex-41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force station. However, Amazon booked 38 Vulcan rocket launches - quite an increase from the eight Atlas V launches ULA has already performed for Leo. It is obviously keen to add more satellites to its growing constellation.

The SRBs are Northrop Grumman units, and the six Graphite Epoxy Motor (GEM) 63XL units will each provide an additional 459,600 lbs (2,044 kN) of thrust at liftoff. That's assuming nothing unexpected burns through or falls off. ULA has not detailed the results of its investigation or any changes it had to make.

ULA said: "The integrated team has made great strides in improving our understanding of the solid rocket booster (SRB) anomaly that occurred on the previous Vulcan flight and have identified several potential contributors which have been mitigated through design and process improvements to the nozzle. To support our customers, this upcoming launch will utilize the improved nozzle design, and additional testing and analysis will continue in parallel with the mission. By flying the improved design, ULA gains valuable flight data that validates these improvements and is the most beneficial path in support of all our customers."

US Space Force and Amazon are ULA's biggest customers - and Space Force will be watching. ULA came second to SpaceX in contracts awarded by Space Force for FY25 to FY29. ®

The UK's comms watchdog has put forward four methods of checking netizens aren't kids - dubbed highly effective age assurance (HEAA) - as it prepares for the proposed under-16 social media ban.

The regulator says some adults may not need to prove their over-16-ness to social media platforms that will make inferences about their age based on previous activity, but confirmed that "many" are likely to have to undergo the same verification process.

Big Brother Watch's (BBW) Director Silkie Carlo said: "This plan for a government 'social media ban' is a national ID system by the back door. Both the government and Ofcom have admitted that children will get around the ban, which means the real effect will be normalizing adults and children alike to handing over their passports just to get online."

Ofcom says four methods remain from the seven it initially outlined when the Online Safety Act (OSA) came into force last year.

The seven were capable of verifying whether a subject was 18 years old, but there are fewer viable options for determining the age of 16-year-olds, it said today.

The methods put forward include:

• Photo-ID matching: Checking information displayed on identity documents and analyzing the photo against a live image of the subject taken during the verification process

• Banking checks: An estimated 90 percent of 16-17-year-olds in the UK have a bank account, which they would have provided their identity documents to open. The information processed by the bank can be used to verify whether someone is aged 16 or older

• Digital ID services: An interesting entry, given how quickly these were circumvented once the OSA age-checking requirements came into force. These third-party services analyze a person's photo once, and if it matches the age they claim to be, let them verify their age across other services

• Facial age estimation: A method that even Ofcom admitted isn't quite reliable enough to be used on its own. The regulator said that online services can use technologies to analyze a subject's facial features to determine their age. The same technologies also have a margin of error of a few years, so online services may wish to use a second method of HEAA to verify the results of this check.

The three reserved for those aged 18 and above include credit card checks (only adults can have a credit card), mobile network checks (MNOs require proof of adulthood to remove content blocks), and email checks - using a subject's email address to make educated guesses about their age based on the other types of services with which it is registered.

Ofcom acknowledged that not every 16-year-old will have a form of photo ID, which is required for all four of its HEAA methods, so they will need to acquire one in order to access online services.

It estimates that around 94 percent of 16-17-year-olds in the UK have a form of photo ID, such as a passport, driving licence, or an ID card certified by the Proof of Age Standards Scheme, and that around 150,000 have neither.

BBW's Carlo added: "Hundreds of thousands of people without ID, who tend to be poorer people, and many more who don't want to risk handing their passports over to foreign tech companies will be locked out of huge parts of the internet.

"The plan will kill anonymity online, whilst the UK's culture of speech policing is reaching a crisis point. The policy is painfully misguided, an Orwellian assault on free speech and privacy, and will make children no safer at all."

Ofcom admitted that "the risk of circumvention cannot be entirely eliminated," as some children will find ways to bypass these age checks, no matter how fully they are implemented.

It cited Australia sporadically in its announcement, a country that introduced an under-16 social media ban in December 2025, but has struggled with a large proportion of children devising ways to circumvent these checks.

Ofcom said the UK government intends to adopt, but learn lessons from, Australia's rollout, committing to implementing more robust measures that promote the ban's aims.

It said it has identified some mitigations that could be taken to counter circumvention, such as making it easier for users to report suspected underage social media users, and "using age inference models."

The regulator said it will closely monitor circumvention for the first 12 months after the ban is enforced to understand possible methods to prevent children from finding ways around the age checks.

In May, nearly a year after the OSA's age verification requirements kicked in, researchers found that the existing age checks proved largely ineffective at keeping under-18s away from adult content online.

Some reported beating age checks with just a drawn-on moustache.

England's Children's Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, said recently that the OSA "has made absolutely no difference" to children's ability to access potentially harmful online content.

Commenting on today's announcement, Ofcom chief exec Dame Melanie Dawes said that when the social media ban takes effect, it will take a whole-of-society approach to ensure the ban is upheld.

?This ban will shape the future of children's lives online, so it's important to get it right," she said. "It can work if social media firms do highly effective age checks properly, and we've set out ways that could be achieved. When it comes into force next year, we'll be ready to take swift and firm action against any company that fails to comply.

"We should expect that motivated children will seek to bypass the restrictions - just like alcohol laws can't completely eradicate underage drinking - but there'll be ways for platforms to mitigate this risk. This will be a huge cultural shift for our society, so it'll take time to adjust, and everyone will have a part to play."

The UK government is expected to outline the first set of regulations related to the under-16 social media ban by the end of the year, and Ofcom is in the process of developing draft guidance for platforms. ®

Storm Austen and Storm Boelo swept across the UK in quick succession. Rain lashed windows, river levels rose and the clocks went back. It feels like winter has arrived all at once.

Yet most of England and Wales are still in drought. Parts of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Sussex are in severe drought, the highest level the Environment Agency can declare. South-west and south-east England have had their driest April to September in over 100 years.

But how can this be when it is cold, dark and pouring with rain? Drought tightens or loosens its grip over months, not just a few days. It will be the rainy or dry nature of the months ahead that will decide whether the drought ends, or more worryingly, if it stays into next summer.

Summer droughts grab the headlines and public attention. When we have a dry period over the summer it's everywhere, with brown lawns, hosepipe bans and cracked reservoir beds. But winter is when the UK refills its water stores.

Between October and March, with shorter and colder days, less water evaporates and plants drink far less, so rain finally has the chance to refill our reservoirs. Rain can soak deep into the ground to top up groundwater, the water held in chalk and sandstone rocks beneath our feet, like a giant sponge. Groundwater supplies much of the drinking water in southern and eastern England, but it fills slowly, over months and years.

Think of it like a bank account. A hot summer is a big splurge with lots of withdrawals. But a dry winter means the deposits needed to repay that spending never arrive. That's why a dry winter can do more damage to our water supplies than a heatwave.

This year the account is badly overdrawn. Southern England has just had its driest April to September in more than a century, alongside record summer heat. The Wimbleball reservoir on Exmoor, which supplies around 400,000 people, was full in March, after an extremely wet winter. Then the weather shifted from wetter than normal to dryer than normal. By October, water levels at Wimbleball were down to about 13%.

Droughts that carry on into winter are rare in the UK. Usually the autumn rain arrives, soil gets wetter and water stores recover by Christmas. Every instinct suggests that a stormy autumn should fix things.

In the 2010 to 2012 drought, two dry winters in a row left groundwater in south and east England so low that hosepipe bans came in during spring 2012. Then the wettest April on record arrived, and parts of the country swung from drought to flood within weeks.

What stands out now is how quickly droughts are stacking up. This is the third drought in England in five years. The stores barely have time to recover before the next one begins.

England and Wales can be in drought and experience flooding simultaneously. After months of dry weather it takes a lot of rain to wet the ground all the way through. Storms such as Boelo and Austen bring bursts of heavy rain. Drains are overwhelmed and rivers rise quickly, sometimes spilling out onto their floodplains. But the reservoirs and groundwater that supply our taps respond far more slowly, and need lots of water to fill up. So the type of winter rains make a big difference.

Floods can hit fast. But the key parts of the water cycle are slow. Rain has to wet the soil all the way through before it can trickle down into the rock, and groundwater can take months to respond. The Environment Agency estimates England needs around 120% of normal rainfall between September and April for every area to come out of drought. We would need half a year with consistently more rain than we would expect at this time of year to break this drought.

If rain falls short across the whole winter, then England could start next summer in drought, with even less room for manoeuvre.

But climate scientists don't expect there will be a dry winter every year, either now or in decades ahead as fossil fuel burning continues to heat the planet. Climate projections suggest UK winters will get wetter on average. But averages can hide the danger.

Summers heated by the burning of fossil fuels dry out the soil and drain reservoirs faster, leaving a bigger hole for winter to fill. Winter rain is increasingly arriving in heavy bursts that are harder to capture and more likely to flood. And natural swings in the weather will still deliver dry winters from time to time. Put those together and the chance of a drought rolling into winter, or across two winters, goes up. This is a trend that will keep getting worse as long as we keep heating the planet.

Preparing starts with how we think about water. It is precious, not endless. Yet we have built a system that lets a wet winter rush away to the sea, then rations what is left through a dry summer.

As with other parts of the UK's water system, we are paying the price now for years of chronic underinvestment. Water companies need to move much faster on fixing leaks, which still waste billions of litres every day. New reservoirs are being planned in England, which will help deliver more storage. But they will take more than a decade to build, cost billions of pounds, and cannot be the whole solution.

Read more: England's water crisis needs more than just new reservoirs - here's what will help

There is also a low-tech local answer, that would need regulation and a programme of retrofitting to make a big difference. Rainwater harvesting and water reuse in new and existing homes, sustainable drainage in our towns, and encouraging wetlands and floodplains that hold water like a sponge.

Changes to our landscape and homes can help prevent both problems.

Each of us can help. Take shorter showers, ask your water company about a meter and and fit a water butt to catch rain for the garden. These habits add up.

Autumn storms have started to replenish water reserves, but it's not the finish line. We also need to get ahead of what is likely to happen in years to come.

Hannah Cloke advises the Environment Agency, the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts, the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, local and national governments and humanitarian agencies on the forecasting and warning of natural hazards. She is a fellow of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts. Her research is funded by the UKRI Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council, the UKRI Natural Environment Research Council, the European Commission and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.

MotoGP, Moto2, and Moto3 teams are heading to Sepang International Circuit in Malaysia this weekend for Round 19 of the 2026 FIM MotoGP World Championship. From October 30 to November 1, the paddock returns to the 3.44-mile (5.54-kilometer) circuit as the overseas campaign enters its final round. Following Jorge Martin's crash at Phillip Island and with Marco Bezzecchi now 50 points behind Marc Marquez, every point becomes crucial as the championship battles intensify. Below, find the latest team press releases ahead of the Malaysian Grand Prix.

More, from a press release issued by Aprilia Racing:

Aprilia Racing ready for Malaysia challenge. 

MotoGP's flyaway tour continues in Malaysia, at the Petronas Sepang International Circuit, for the nineteenth round of the season.
 
Jorge Martín will travel to Malaysia despite the non-displaced fracture of the distal radius he sustained during the sprint. The Spaniard is undergoing the prescribed treatment, and his fitness will be assessed over the coming days ahead of the Grand Prix.
 
Marco Bezzecchi heads to Sepang after taking fourth in the Phillip Island sprint. Sunday's long race, however, was cancelled because poor visibility prevented the medical helicopter from operating.
 
The Petronas Sepang International Circuit, some 50 km from Kuala Lumpur, is one of the world championship's historic venues. At 5,540 metres, it is the second-longest circuit in the championship, with 15 corners: 10 right-handers and five left-handers. It is known for its demanding braking zones, particularly the first and the last, with hard deceleration and a difference of more than 200 km/h between entry and exit speed.

Jorge Martin: I'm getting the treatment I need to recover from the injury and arrive at Sepang in the best possible shape. It's impossible to make any predictions. We have to assess the situation day by day.

Marco Bezzecchi: I can't wait to get to Sepang, especially since we couldn't race at Phillip Island. I'm happy to be going back to a track as fantastic as Sepang. Let's hope the weather is kind to us and that we can carry on with the work we're doing.

More, from a press release issued by Honda HRC Castrol:

Mir set for Malaysian GP return alongside Marini. 

After retiring from the San Marino GP and missing the four subsequent Grands Prix, Joan Mir is targeting a return to action in Sepang alongside Luce Marini.

The Honda HRC Castrol team will be aiming to be back at full strength for the Malaysian GP, Joan Mir given approval by his medical team to return to action and Luca Marini's condition improving day-by-day. A circuit with fond memories and past successes, the Sepang International Circuit is the perfect launch pad for a strong final push in 2026.

Ruled unfit in Australia due to a virus, Luca Marini will need to undertake a medical check before his participation in the Malaysian round can be confirmed. Having focused exclusively on his recovery since Friday, the Italian has felt his strength return and is eager to reunite with his team. Sepang has seen the #10 score points consistently with Honda, achieving a best finish of eighth place in 2025 at the 5.5-kilometre-long track. With the cancellation of the Australian round, this weekend is set to be his 200th Grand Prix start.

A welcome return to his Honda RC213V is on the horizon for Joan Mir, the #36 having put in an impressive amount of work behind the scenes to overcome his medical issue. The 2020 MotoGP World Champion is focusing on getting back into the rhythm of a MotoGP weekend, having last ridden the 1,000cc machine on September 13. With thousands of testing miles collected across the years, the Sepang International Circuit is a familiar place for Mir to return as he targets a final flourish of success in his last four races as a Honda HRC rider.

After the wild weather of Phillip Island, the entire MotoGP World Championship will no doubt have their eyes tuned to the sky throughout the weekend looking for the typical Malaysian rainstorms.

Luca Marini: "Unfortunately we couldn't do more than a couple of laps in Phillip Island and since Friday I have been fully focused on recovering as much as possible. I am starting to feel better and have been able to return to the gym, but a MotoGP bike is always something different. Sepang is a physically demanding circuit with the conditions, certainly it will be a weekend where we change the approach a little bit to make sure we have enough energy for Sunday and a lot also depends on what the weather does. We have to do the medical test before the weekend, but I don't think it will be a problem."

Joan Mir:"It hasn't been an easy period, and I want to thank everyone close to me for helping to keep focused and working towards the end goal. I've been able to do some riding with different kinds of bikes in the past week, and the doctors have given me the green light to return. I am really looking forward to seeing the team again and seeing what we can do in these final races of the year. Sepang is a circuit which holds some good memories for me and for us as Honda and I think it's the correct decision to return at such a familiar track. The most important point of the weekend is to get back on the bike, reconnect with the team and check my feeling."

More, from a press release issued by Ducati Lenovo Team:

Ducati Lenovo Team faces the Sepang challenge seeking the tenth win in red.

19th race of 2026 with the MotoGP circus flying to the Sepang International Circuit. A demanding track and a scorching, very humid climate that will put everyone to the test. A track where the Desmosedici GP boasts a great tradition with 9 victories: from the first successes with Loris Capirossi (1) in 2005 and the dominance of Casey Stoner (2), to the wins of Andrea Dovizioso (2), up to the recent triumphs of Pecco Bagnaia (2) and Enea Bastianini (1). In 2025, the red bike from Borgo Panigale confirmed expectations with Pecco's victory on Saturday and Alex Márquez's (1) victory in Sunday's GP.

After the Sprint at Phillip Island that allowed him to return to first place in the general standings, Marc Márquez is ready to continue being a key player in a crucial weekend for the Championship. A track very different from the Australian one and weather conditions that need to be managed as best as possible.

Coming off a tough weekend in Australia, Pecco Bagnaia arrives in Malaysia ready to bounce back on one of his favorite overseas circuits, an iconic track where he has always been among the most competitive.

Marc Márquez (#93, Ducati Lenovo Team): "Sepang is a completely different track compared to Phillip Island, and the weather here always makes everything more challenging. Saturday's race in Australia gave me a great boost, but we must stay focused: the goal is to keep playing a leading role and manage every session and effort as best we can".

Francesco Bagnaia (#63, Ducati Lenovo Team): "In Australia it wasn't an easy weekend, but Sepang is one of the overseas tracks I love the most. Here the Desmosedici GP has been able to make the difference, and we have wonderful memories. We will work hard right from Friday to immediately find the right feeling and play our cards over the weekend".

More, from a press release issued by VR46 Team:

The Pertamina Enduro VR46 Racing Team goes to Sepang International Circuit, where this weekend the Malaysian GP - the penultimate round of the Overseas - will take place.

MotoGP gets ready to face the second back-to-back weekend of the Overseas and this weekend hits the track at the Sepang International Circuit. The Pertamina Enduro VR46 Racing Team is eager to race at the Malaysian GP after the cancellation of Sunday's race at Phillip Island due to bad weather. Fabio Di Giannantonio and Franco Morbidelli's goal is to confirm the good feelings and the steps forward in this last part of the Asian races.

Di Giannantonio arrives to Sepang in sixth place in the World Standing with 252 points, and he is ready to replicate the good performances of Australia, where he claimed a Sprint podium. On the Malaysian track, the winter tests usually take place, and this weekend won't be the first approach of the year. However, Sepang is different compared to Phillip Island, and this will represent a new challenge for Fabio, who got a sixth place in last year's race as his best result in MotoGP.

Morbidelli has great memories of the Sepang International Circuit, where he claimed two podiums in Moto2: a second place in 2016 and a third place in 2017. The latter result allowed him to be crowned World Champion in the intermediate class. Franco's best result in MotoGP on the Malaysian track is a fourth place he got both in last year's Sprint and race. The Italian-Brazilian rider's goal for the Malaysian GP is to continue making step forward, building on his solid performance on this track.

The Pertamina Enduro VR46 Racing Team will hit the track on Friday for Free Practice sessions, while Qualifying will take place on Saturday at ore 10:50 (local time, +8 UTC). The Sprint will get underway at 3:00 pm (local time, +8 UTC) on Saturday, while the Malaysian GP will conclude on Sunday with the main race, starting exceptionally at 3:00 pm (local time, +8 UTC).

Fabio Di Giannantonio: "We arrive to the Malaysian GP with positivity after the Sprint podium we claimed in Australia. Even if Sunday's race didn't take place, the good result of last Saturday gives us a lot of confidence heading to Sepang, despite being a completely different track from Phillip Island. Also, the conditions will be very different because it will be very hot, but it's a very beautiful track, I like it. In Malaysia, the goal will be to confirm the good feelings, and we aim to have a linear weekend, getting off to a good start right away just as we did so far. It will be a good challenge, and we are eager to go on track."

Franco Morbidelli: "I look forward to riding at Sepang, which is a very different track from Phillip Island. I like the track a lot and I have good memories: here I won the Moto2 World Title in 2017 and, overall, I've always been fast and got good results. This year, we're not where we want to be yet, and on this track, you need a good feeling to be fast. But we arrive to the Malaysian GP with confidence, and we continue working to be competitive again. So, this weekend's goal is the Top10 again."

More, from a press release issued by Monster Energy Yamaha:

Monster Energy Yamaha MotoGP to Return to Action in Sepang. 

Monster Energy Yamaha MotoGP's Fabio Quartararo and Álex Rins are determined to push to the limit at the Sepang International Circuit during this weekend's Grand Prix of Malaysia, Round 19 of the 2026 MotoGP World Championship.

Following the unfortunate cancellation of the race at Phillip Island last Sunday, the Monster Energy Yamaha MotoGP Team are eager to start the action again. They have travelled from Australia to Malaysia for Round 19 of the 2026 MotoGP World Championship, held this weekend at the Sepang International Circuit.

Fabio Quartararo holds on to 15th place in the championship standings, and he will be on the attack again this weekend. He has raced at the Sepang circuit eight times (in the Moto3 class in 2016, in Moto2 in 2017 and 2018, and in MotoGP in 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025) and never finished a full-length race outside the top 7. He came close to a podium in 2016, finishing fourth, and in 2018, 2023 and 2025, when he finished fifth. He had his first and only podium finish on Malaysian soil in 2022, when he secured third place despite riding with a hand injury sustained in a crash earlier that weekend.

Álex Rins arrives in Malaysia holding 20th place in the rankings. The Spaniard was disappointed for the fans that the race at Phillip Island didn't take place and is keen to make up for it with a good show this weekend. He is looking forward to the Malaysian GP, especially since Sepang historically is a good track for him. He secured second place there in 2013 and third place in 2014 in the Moto3 class, and in the premier class he rode to second place in 2018.

The Sepang International Circuit staged its first Grand Prix in 1999 and has been on the MotoGP calendar ever since. The 5.54 km track has a reputation for providing very exciting racing thanks to a mixture of slow and medium-to-high-speed corners (five left and ten right) and two long straights, the longest measuring 920 m. The circuit is also one of the longest tracks of the MotoGP season, and the riders have to negotiate it in extremely hot and humid conditions, making this GP extra challenging.

The Grand Prix of Malaysia is held in the GMT+8 time zone. FP1 will take place on Friday from 10:45-11:30 local track time and Practice will be held from 15:00-16:00. On Saturday, FP2 will be held from 10:10-10:40, and the qualifying sessions from 10:50-11:30, followed by the 10-lap Sprint at 15:00. On Sunday, Warm Up is held from 10:40-10:50 and the 20-lap Race will start at 15:00.

Fabio Quartararo: "I'm happy to be back in Sepang. It's a track that I enjoy, and normally the racing there is always interesting. The bike has changed since last year, so it will be important to see where we stand as quickly as possible on Friday. After what happened in Australia, everyone is looking forward to getting back on track and racing again. The Malaysian fans are always very passionate, and I'm excited to see them this weekend."

Alex Rins: "I'm really looking forward to racing in Sepang. After Phillip Island, all we want is to get back on the bike and put on a good show for the fans - for sure they were all disappointed last weekend. I've always enjoyed this track, and I've had some good results here in the past. The conditions can be quite tough because of the heat and humidity, but that's part of the challenge. We'll work hard from the first session, try to find a good feeling with the bike, and see what we can achieve during the weekend."

Massimo Meregalli - Team Director: "After an unusual end to the Australian GP weekend, our focus is now fully on Sepang. Historically, this circuit has often suited our package, and it is a track where both Fabio and Álex have achieved strong results in the past. We also have valuable reference data from our previous testing here, although the bike has continued to evolve since then. Sepang is always a demanding venue because of the heat, humidity, and the physical nature of the layout, but it also provides a good benchmark to assess performance. We are motivated to make the most of this weekend."

More, from a press release issued by Prima Pramac Yamaha:

Prima Pramac Yamaha MotoGP heads to Malaysia after a missed opportunity in Australia. 

After the cancellation of the Australian Grand Prix due to extreme weather, Prima Pramac Yamaha MotoGP heads straight to Sepang for the Malaysian Grand Prix. Jack Miller arrives looking to build on his strong performance at Phillip Island, while Augusto Fernandez continues his work with the team and aims to regain his race rhythm.

The cancellation of Sunday's Australian Grand Prix left Prima Pramac Yamaha MotoGP with a sense of a missed opportunity, particularly for Jack Miller. The Australian had shown strong pace throughout his home Grand Prix weekend, securing fifth on the grid and eighth in the Sprint, matching his best result of the season and scoring his first points in a Saturday race this year. The cancellation denied him the chance to race one last time at his beloved Phillip Island in front of his home fans, making the Sprint result an important memory from his final MotoGP appearance at the iconic venue. The team now turns its attention to Malaysia, where the next round of the championship takes place this weekend.

The Sepang International Circuit presents a different challenge for the YZR-M1. Its 5.543-kilometre layout features 15 corners and two long straights, including a 920-metre main straight, placing a strong emphasis on acceleration, braking stability and top speed. These characteristics could make it a demanding circuit for Yamaha, although Miller has previous experience of competitive results at Sepang, having finished sixth in 2022 and eighth in 2023.

Weather could also play a role in the weekend. Rain showers are common in Malaysia at this time of year, and wet conditions could offer Miller an opportunity to make the most of his strengths. The Australian showed encouraging pace in the wet at Phillip Island and will aim to carry that confidence into the Malaysian round, whatever conditions the team encounters.

For Augusto Fernandez, the priority remains building mileage on the YZR-M1 and getting back into the rhythm of racing. As Yamaha's test and development rider, he knows the bike well, but each race weekend provides valuable experience working with Prima Pramac Yamaha MotoGP and adapting to the team's approach. Sepang is a circuit he already knows, offering a useful opportunity to continue progressing and build confidence ahead of the final rounds of the season.

Jack Miller: "I'm looking forward to Malaysia. We've done plenty of laps around Sepang over the years, and it's a track I enjoy riding. It'll also be nice to get back to some warm weather, and hopefully we can have a positive weekend."

Augusto Fernandez: "I'm looking forward to Malaysia and to having another opportunity to keep improving with the team. Every lap is important for me at the moment, as I work to get back into the MotoGP race rhythm as quickly as possible. Sepang is a track I already know, which should help me focus on building my feeling with the bike and understanding the package better. We'll keep working step by step and make the most of the weekend, whatever the conditions."

Gino Borsoi - Team Director: "Of course, it's a shame for Jack and the whole team that we couldn't take part in the race. This was a particularly important occasion for Jack, as it was his final MotoGP Grand Prix at Phillip Island. At least he was able to race in the Sprint, where he delivered his best performance of the season, scored points and put Yamaha inside the top ten. He'll take that memory away with him, and it's one he truly deserves.
He could probably have achieved even more today, but these are the circumstances we have to accept. The riders' safety must always come first, and I believe Race Direction made the right decision."

The post MotoGP: Teams Are Ready For Sepang appeared first on Roadracing World Magazine | Motorcycle Riding, Racing & Tech News.

Around this time of year, elaborate decorations featuring ghosts, vampires, zombies, witches and werewolves adorn front doors, gardens and shop windows across the country.

But you may be surprised to hear that in the animal world, there are many real-life creatures with similar tendencies to these fictional characters of our Halloween nightmares.

The southern grasshopper mouse (Onychomys torridus) howls at the moon to defend its territory and attract mates, a little like werewolves in films. These nocturnal rodents stand up on their hind legs, point their nose upwards, and produce high-pitched sounds.

Grasshopper mice are voracious carnivores, preying upon scorpions, beetles, grasshoppers, and even other mice. They are also immune to the stings of their favourite food - the bark scorpion (Centruroides sculpturatus). Grasshopper mice can block the chemical pathway that transmits the signal from the venom, essentially numbing themselves to the pain. They then bite off the scorpion's tail, rendering their prey defenseless to their fate.

These little rodents are so formidable that they will unhesitatingly attack anything that is appropriately sized and considered to be food, even if it might be dangerous.

Small mammals, like grasshopper mice, play crucial ecological roles in their ecosystems. For example, through digging their burrows, they can act as ecosystem engineers (species that modify the environment) creating microhabitats for other species.

The emerald jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa) is a stunningly beautiful and ecologically important species. Not only do they act as casual pollinators for a range of plant species, they are also an essential biocontrol; an organism that controls the population of a pest species.

Over millions of years they have evolved the morbid ability to sting cockroaches and turn them into compliant zombies upon which they lay their eggs. When these eggs hatch, the larvae devour the zombified cockroach from the inside out.

Small birds called oxpeckers (Buphagus species) and large ungulates (hoofed mammals) were considered to have a mutually beneficial relationship. When these birds removed pesky ticks and other parasites from their mammalian companions, they were rewarded with a quick, tasty meal. Oxpeckers are often spotted travelling around on the backs of these larger animals.

However, research has highlighted that this relationship may be more complicated than previously thought. Oxpeckers will pick at open wounds to consume blood and flesh - inflicting injuries, preventing wound-healing, and increasing the risk of infection in their hosts.

Witches are well known for creating magical potions but some insects do this too. Bombardier beetles can blast would-be predators with explosive chemicals discharged from their abdomens at temperatures of 100°C. They do this by mixing hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide within their bodies in a small reaction chamber - their cauldron, if you will - to create this explosion.

Some other insects use chemicals not as a defence mechanism, but to woo a mate. This isn't an elixir of love, but instead the combination of a chemical and an enzyme (Luciferin and luciferase) that causes a beautiful, if slightly eerie, glow.

The fireflies of the family Lampyridae are actually beetles, whose males flash these colours enthusiastically to attract a waiting female from the undergrowth. Beauty and intrigue aside, fireflies are useful throughout their native range. As larvae they feed on many soft-bodied invertebrates, preventing pest outbreaks and maintaining maintaining a natural equilibrium of species in the soil and leaf litter.

Some frogs in the family Centrolenidae are so translucent, or ghost-like, that they have become known as glass frogs.

Found in the tropical forests of Central and South America, these extraordinary frogs spend much of their lives in the trees and play an important role in the ecosystem. They help regulate insect populations through predation and act as prey for a variety of other species, including in aquatic food webs as tadpoles inhabiting streams. In many ways, they occupy multiple levels of the rainforest ecosystem, linking both terrestrial and freshwater environments.

Come Halloween, many people embellish their houses with plastic skeletons and toilet-paper clad mummies. One insect does a similar thing - the aptly named bone-house wasp (Deuteragenia ossarium). Known for hunting another Halloween favourite, the spider, it decorates the nests it makes for its young with a pile of ant corpses. This morbid tableau provides sensory camouflage for the nest, keeping intruders well away.

All these species are important components of their ecosystems - from keeping pest populations in check or being prey themselves for other animals, to acting as ecological indicators allowing us to monitor environmental changes. Ecological indicator species are key species within ecosystems that help us understand more about how our impact on the planet is affecting other species. Animals respond to different things in the environment, so their populations and behaviours can indicate whether the environment is changing for the better or worse.

These animals may have some rather terrifying tendencies, but unlike the fantasy characters of our horror-film nightmares, they don't disappear after All Hallows' Eve. They also have real environmental benefits that endure.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.