Leave with something worth knowing.

The BBC reports it has found evidence that Sudanese paramilitary fighters systematically destroyed el-Fasher's healthcare system during their long siege and subsequent takeover of the city in Darfur a year ago.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk called the findings deeply disturbing, saying multiple RSF attacks on civilian infrastructure, including health facilities, were serious violations of international humanitarian law and may amount to war crimes.

The RSF has rejected the BBC's findings.

Lillian Droniak, 96, is known as Grandma Droniak to her social media followers. She has 15 million followers and has turned her personality into a business.

That business earns enough to cover her nursing home fees of $12,000 a month, or about £9,000.

The commercial logic is not just curiosity. Naomi Baker of influencer marketing agency We Are Social says older creators are attractive to brands because they often have deeply established, highly loyal communities with greater purchasing power, which she says carries a massive premium.

Merck and Moderna announced Thursday that personalized mRNA vaccines against melanoma—the deadliest form of skin cancer—reduced the risk of death or recurrence by 42 percent compared with standard treatment in a late-stage trial. The companies are already engaging with regulatory authorities to get the vaccine approved. The result has bolstered hope that mRNA vaccines and individualized cancer-targeting medicines offer a new paradigm for cancer therapies.

The Guardian described the “mob wife aesthetic” as a look built from massive fur coats, glossy leather, clashing animal prints, coiffed hair and stacks of gold jewellery. The paper linked its popularity to The Sopranos, which first aired in January 1999.

For the show’s 25th anniversary, HBO launched an official Sopranos TikTok account featuring condensed 25-second recaps of all 86 episodes. That brought a new generation to the series—many of them not born when it first aired—and many homed in on the female characters’ gaudy style.

The study analyzed breeding data from 3,421 lakes over roughly three decades, half from volunteer observations in the Canadian Lakes Loon Survey.

CBC reports that, in all cases, the losses are propelled by human activity.

Diogenes Laertius lists a large number of works by Democritus on ethics, physics, mathematics, music and cosmology.

The work itself survives only in secondhand reports, sometimes unreliable or conflicting, so the reasoning behind his positions often needs to be reconstructed.

Much of the best evidence is Aristotle, who regarded Democritus as an important rival in natural philosophy. Aristotle wrote a monograph on him, but only a few passages quoted in other sources survive.

NPR reports that Trump called on legislatures to redistrict now, outside the usual post-census cycle, and that the push set off a chain reaction of political crises across the country.

In Texas, Republicans issued arrest warrants for Democratic legislators who had left the state. Louisiana's governor suspended a primary after thousands of votes were already cast so the lines could be redrawn. In Missouri, the state supreme court found the Republican secretary of state in contempt for sticking with a GOP map that was not legally in effect.

In Aeon, a birth scene in a terraced London house includes nine medical professionals, seven housemates, two grandparents and a cat.

The author rejects the choice between atomisation—what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the 'buffered self'—and hierarchical, authoritarian community, or between girl-boss and trad-wife.

What the author wants instead is a thick web of humans who commit to costly mutual care rather than play a passing role in each other's lives.

A voice agent can have the answer well underway and still leave the caller in silence: the customer waits five seconds while a long, multi-paragraph response is still being generated. The proposed fix is to stop waiting for the whole response and stream synthesis alongside generation.

Each sentence goes to a hosted Kokoro-82M model as soon as the agent produces it, so playback can begin before the full response is finished. Kokoro-82M has 82 million parameters and is small enough to run cheaply on a single mid-tier GPU instance.

The implementation catch is that closing the session after one response would force a new connection for every sentence, undoing most of the latency gain.

Sandra Hüller's voice cracks and she cries during the conversation. She is speaking about a political idea that, she says, did not survive in Germany but is one people can still think about; she names it the socialist idea.

Fatherland is a black-and-white arthouse film and one of four high-profile movies Hüller has in 2026. The others include Rose, Digger and the $684m hit Project Hail Mary.

Roadsides share some of the characteristics of the open meadows and prairies that pollinators favor. Non-native plants introduced to North America from Europe — sweet clover, chicory and birdsfoot trefoil among them — can still provide nectar and pollen for native bumble bees, solitary bees and hover flies.

The trade-off is traffic: pollinators can be killed by fast-moving vehicles if they stray from the vegetated margins or try to cross the road. A detailed synthesis study concluded that the benefits of roadside enhancements for pollinators likely outweigh the costs.

AWS has made SageMaker AI training sessions available with support for gpt-oss-20b, gemma-4-31B-it, Qwen3.6-27B and Qwen3.8-27B. Your code runs the training loop and reward function in your environment and connects the agent to its tools or simulators, while the training session performs the GPU-heavy work: a sampler generates responses, and a trainer calculates gradients and updates the model weights. AWS says you do not choose instance types, manage clusters or write distributed training configuration.

AWS frames multi-turn reinforcement learning as an important shift in agent training. It also says it does not use customer data or customized weights to train another model.

A security researcher has demonstrated a software-only partial jailbreak of the Switch 2, gaining “userland” access that he says allows homebrew, reverse engineering and modding of Switch 2 games, save backups, and access to most peripherals through MMIO.

The hack relies on the original Switch version of SmileBasic 4, a programming environment and interpreter that runs on Nintendo hardware. The opening is a 32-bit integer overflow that occurs when removing items from an array in SmileBasic. That error gives access to an array pointer, which in turn allows read and write access to portions of system memory.

The 300,000 metric tons that could be exempted from tariffs amounted to around 2% of total US beef consumption. NPR reports that the result was a lose-lose: enough to rattle beef producers, but not enough to help consumers.

Ranchers were already squeezed: margins are always tight, says Zach Raff, an incoming livestock economist at Iowa State University. Drought in much of the western U.S. made hay much more expensive and shrank the nation's beef herd.

Raff said the far bigger challenge from the tariff exemption was the amount of uncertainty it introduced.

Lindquist writes in Past and Present that AI pioneers intentionally injected randomness into algorithms designed to solve problems deterministically, in order to mimic creative thinking.

He traces the origins of AI hallucinations back to that early research and suggests that building machines to mimic human behavior will involve inevitable tradeoffs between creativity and predictability.

One popular route for adding irregularity to otherwise predictable computers was artificial, or random, neural networks.

The 77th annual ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Awards, chosen by a four-member ASCAP committee, recognize books, articles, liner notes, and broadcast programs about music.

Among the concert-music book winners is Tim Greiving’s “John Williams: A Composer’s Life,” which Variety describes as the first-ever biography of Hollywood’s most successful living composer.

Steven C. Smith’s “Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema” received a special recognition award in the concert-music book category; Variety notes it is his second book about Herrmann and doubles as the story of his collaboration with Hitchcock.

On Oct. 15, a collision involving two city transit buses and several other vehicles in Saddle Ridge led to an explosion on a natural gas-powered bus, killing three people and injuring 16.

A week after the crash, Ward 5 Coun. Raj Dhaliwal, who represents the community where the crash occurred, says he wants an independent investigation to consider transit-specific and road design factors.

NOAA’s Oct. 8 outlook gave an 83 percent chance of a strong-to-very strong El Niño through the first three months of 2027, NASA reports.

The most recent very strong El Niño events, in 1997-98 and 2015-16, upended weather patterns, and NASA says the current El Niño rivals those heavyweights.

Normally, trade winds keep warm water piled up in the western Pacific, where it stands higher than in the east. But exactly how the impacts will play out in winter 2026-27 and beyond remains to be seen.

Tennessee execution team members failed multiple times to establish working IV lines in Christa Pike's arms before her attempted execution, her attorney wrote in a court document filed Thursday, PBS NewsHour reports.

Pike, 50, was hospitalized after surviving two doses of pentobarbital as the state tried to execute her on Sept. 30 for the 1995 stabbing death of classmate Colleen Slemmer.

State protocol calls for a second dose of pentobarbital if the first doesn't result in death, but it doesn't spell out what to do if a person survives the second injection.