According to BBC News, Daisy Hill hospital in Newry will stop providing inpatient maternity care on a temporary basis from 23 November.

Board members of the Southern Health Trust backed a proposal to shift the services to Craigavon hospital, with the trust saying it cannot hire enough consultant obstetricians to staff both sites safely.

From the end of the month the trust will have two substantive consultants plus three locums, against a requirement for eight substantive consultants.

The consolidation plan has drawn strong opposition in Newry and the wider area, including South Down and South Armagh, and faces a legal challenge.

A pregnant 40-year-old woman was due to lodge papers at the High Court on Tuesday afternoon, seeking a judicial review to make the trust delay the plan.

Steve Spoerry, the Southern Trust's chief executive, said there was no alternative.

Steve Spoerry, who heads the Southern Trust, apologised to the community but maintained there was no alternative.

The move is described as temporary, yet there is currently no time-frame for bringing the services back to Daisy Hill.

Spoerry said Daisy Hill will keep providing antenatal and postnatal services.

Doubts have been raised over whether Craigavon can cope with the 1,700 additional births it is expected to receive because of the change.

According to Cloudflare, Zero Wire is a new public feed hosted on Cloudflare Radar that reports on critical security developments in the manner of a news wire.

Cloudflare says AI is increasing how many critical vulnerabilities are found and how fast, and expects this to raise pressure on security teams to gauge the impact of each disclosure.

Cloudflare says every briefing pairs a plain-language explanation with the teams that ought to investigate, suggested actions, and links to vendor guidance and supporting evidence.

Cloudflare says Zero Wire does not try to list every CVE; it concentrates on critical CVEs in Internet-facing software and is meant to sit alongside vendor advisories and vulnerability databases.

Cloudflare says the Zero Wire homepage sorts briefings into Needs attention and Reference groups, adding that a Reference label does not indicate that all affected systems have been patched.

Cloudflare says briefings point to outside material, including CVE records, research and evidence of exploitation such as the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog.

Cloudflare describes a WAF mitigation as a compensating control limited to the traffic it covers, saying it does not substitute for fixing vulnerable software or for following vendor remediation guidance.

A Hugging Face blog post presents StateBench, a benchmark for measuring how well language models follow entity details as they change across long documents.

StateBench is split into four difficulty tiers, and each tier allows more complex kinds of state updates than the previous one.

In the easiest tier, called r-trivial, a value is set a single time and never changes afterward.

In the hardest tier, called general finite, one variable may copy the current value of another, much like keeping track of a ball as cups get swapped.

Four frontier models were evaluated: GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, Claude Opus 5.5 and Gemini 3.8 Flash.

Those frontier models did well on r-trivial and aperiodic tasks, yet their accuracy was 13% or lower on the longest tasks in the general finite tier.

The researchers built several 275-million-parameter models from scratch using StateBench, then evaluated them on sequences much longer than any seen in training.

Out to tens of thousands of assignments, Gated DeltaNet and hybrid models remained nearly perfect on the three easier tiers; transformers lost accuracy on longer inputs and never learned the general finite tier.

The post says transformers could not learn the hardest tier even when trained on it directly.

In the authors' view, a better grasp of the update types each architecture can cope with may help shape how future models are built and trained.

According to Harper's Bazaar, the CFDA holds an annual dinner at the Natural History Museum in New York, where it gives awards to both emerging and established names in American fashion.

Harper's Bazaar says Keke Palmer hosted this year's event, and the presenters included Matt Damon, Demi Moore, Cole Escola, Naomi Osaka and Lupita Nyong'o.

Harper's Bazaar reports that Ralph Lauren won the menswear award for a third time, Diotima's Rachel Scott won womenswear for a second time, Ana Khouri took the accessory honor and Colleen Allen was named Emerging Designer.

Harper's Bazaar reports that Anthony Vaccarello, who recently announced he is leaving Saint Laurent after ten years as creative director, was named International Designer of the Year, while Tory Burch, Linda Fargo and Gap Inc. also received honors.

According to Harper's Bazaar, photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin received the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award, and architect Peter Marino was given the Fashion Icon Award, among other honors.

According to NASA, the meteor in the photo likely did not come from the comet shown, since thousands of comets have recently passed through the inner Solar System and linking a meteor to a particular comet is difficult.

NASA says Comet C/2025 R3 (PanSTARRS) was imaged in April from Hautacam, France, with a blue ion tail and a dust tail, far behind the meteor, and that the Southern and Northern Taurids, from Comet 2P/Encke, and the Leonids, from Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, peak in November.

According to Nintendo Life, the 5th of November brings Ocarina of Time, with other large Switch releases coming afterward.

A Switch 2 Edition of Pikmin 4 and ports of Stellar Blade and Metaphor: ReFantazio are part of the upcoming slate, Nintendo Life says.

Top Switch 2 and Switch picks for roughly the next two months open the guide, with further games and accessories listed after them.

Link opposes Ganondorf's bid for the Triforce in Ocarina of Time, which the guide describes as made from scratch for Switch 2.

Players can command Oatchi by voice in the Pikmin 4 update, which also adds a Dandori Academy mode with 72 stages arriving over time.

The Atlus game reached other platforms in 2024 and now comes to Switch 2 as a Game-Key Card, Nintendo Life notes.

Nintendo Life says the Rayman release is a Game-Key Card and includes Rayman Origins: Enhanced Edition.

A late delay moved the Ubisoft platformer out of October, the site says.

According to the guide, the Dragon Quest monster-raising spin-off has an eShop demo and is also a Game-Key Card.

Nintendo Life says it tried the Monster Hunter Wilds port at TGS and was impressed, and it reports that a demo is on the eShop.

BBC Sport's account has a match official unintentionally causing a leg fracture to an East Carolina college football player during the opening half of the team's victory over Temple.

BBC Sport reports that David Coleman Jr, an East Carolina defensive back, was on the field with team-mates between plays when an official ran toward a spot near the 40-yard line.

BBC Sport describes the official losing footing while coming up behind the group and skidding into contact with Coleman Jr, and the impact sent the defensive back forward onto the turf.

BBC Sport reports that Coleman Jr remained down and was later carried off by two team members to keep weight off the injured leg.

BBC Sport reports that coach Blake Harrell confirmed a half-time X-ray showed Coleman Jr had fractured a fibula in the incident.

BBC Sport reports that Harrell offered thoughts and prayers for the player, called the incident wild and said such a thing had not been seen from an official in the coach's experience.

BBC Sport reports that East Carolina won 17-9 and that Coleman Jr had one tackle before leaving the field.

NASA's feature shows a new image or photograph of the universe every day, and a professional astronomer writes a short explanation to accompany it.

According to NASA, the Moon's color changes with the night and the hour; seen from beyond Earth's atmosphere, it looks a brownish gray while shining by reflected sunlight.

NASA describes full Moon colors that one astrophotographer photographed in Italy over 10 years. It links red, yellow and blue tones to atmospheric effects, calls the purple Moon's cause unclear, and credits air surrounding Earth with bending the light behind the dim red of the July 2018 total lunar eclipse.

Kimi Antonelli is now the youngest driver to take the Formula 1 title, in the championship's 77th year, BBC Sport reports.

BBC Sport puts Antonelli's age at 20 years and 68 days, which beats Sebastian Vettel's mark of 23 years and 133 days from a first title in 2010.

Antonelli's championship came in a second F1 season, according to BBC Sport.

BBC Sport says Antonelli set age records this season by taking pole position in China and then, at the following race in Japan, the championship lead.

Monaco made Antonelli the youngest driver with a grand slam, which BBC Sport describes as pole, fastest lap, victory and every lap led.

BBC Sport says Antonelli's 2025 rookie season produced 150 points, under half the 319 of Mercedes team-mate George Russell.

BBC Sport notes that the youngest F1 race winner is still Max Verstappen, whose victory in Spain in 2016 came at 18 years and 228 days.

BBC News reports that the new charity hopes outdoor pursuits can improve men's mental health and reduce isolation.

Connect Outdoors is launching alongside an International Men's Day event at Maughold's Venture Centre, where organisers expect about 80 participants.

The charity wants research showing which support men are most likely to engage with, and it argues that services have often been created without consulting them first.

Kate Bergquist is the charity's chief executive.

Archery, yoga, ice baths and guided walks are among the activities available.

Bergquist said men's mental health would be a key focus, pursued through conversation-prompting activities rather than by promoting mental health as the main draw.

Organisers hope surveys completed at Sunday's event will help reveal which activities and approaches engage men most effectively.

Gary Thomas supports the event and runs Walking for Wellness, which offers Manx hill walks.

Thomas said many people find opening up easier outdoors than in traditional counselling.

Joshua Moore, a barber in Douglas, is involved in the event.

Moore said men often feel comfortable raising difficult issues in barber shops.

According to NASA, Hubble and Webb both observed the Cat's Head Nebula, a small region inside the Carina Nebula about 7,500 light-years from Earth, nicknamed for looking like a cat turned away from viewers.

NASA says ultraviolet radiation and winds from massive stars likely shaped the nebula, while denser pillar material has so far held out against erosion.

According to NASA, Hubble's visible-light view shows a dark pillar of dust, and its glowing red eye may mark a young star partly embedded in dust.

NASA says Webb's near-infrared image shows numerous stars and also faint galaxies in the background.

NASA says the nebula is a temporary structure that will eventually disperse, and that the telescopes' complementary views aid astronomers studying star formation.

Hugging Face says purpose-built models for speech recognition and for decisions can be better, faster and cheaper than handing both jobs to a language model.

With AnyLanguageModel and swift-huggingface both at 1.x versions, Hugging Face says it is bringing the same pattern of familiar Swift interfaces plus model choice to speech and decision tasks.

AnySpeechRecognizer is an implementation of Apple's new speech-to-text API that lets developers pick the engine, for example NVIDIA's Parakeet or Alibaba's Qwen3-ASR running locally on Core ML, and it adds speaker diarization as well.

For yes-or-no, multiple-choice and rating-scale questions, AnyDecisionModel gives typed answers with probabilities, derived from model probabilities rather than generated text, working with on-device models via MLX, Core AI or llama.cpp, or with decision models from Jev or Ollama.

The speaker diarizer can follow up to four speakers, overlapping speech included, and a SpeakerTimeline component links each timed word to a speaker.

Hugging Face took its measurements with the hear command-line tool included in the package, using an M4 Max Mac Studio running macOS 27.0.1.

According to Hugging Face, Parakeet processes one hour of audio in about 20 to 40 seconds when reading a file and about 1.5 to 2.5 minutes in live mode, while Qwen3-ASR is much slower.

Hugging Face cautions that the figures reflect one machine and a few datasets, and that its testing has so far been limited to macOS 27, with no iPhone tests yet.

The story opens with a grandfather waking a boy while it is still dark; the pair then drive by houses and farms to reach a field.

Angela Burke Kunkel, who wrote the new picture book Snow Geese Season, says it concerns a quiet moment in nature that comes to matter greatly to someone.

Kunkel's Vermont home is near the Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area, where geese blanket the ground each fall while migrating south; Vermont Fish & Wildlife says viewing usually runs from early October into mid-November.

Illustrator E.B. Goodale traveled to Vermont to see the geese and was struck by the colors there before sunrise.

For the art, Goodale combined watercolor washes, monoprints made with oil-based inks, and line work in oil paint.

According to Kunkel, Goodale visited Vermont twice; Kunkel also recalls an uncle taking her on a woods walk while her parents were separated.

Kunkel says she tied that childhood memory to the story only after finishing the book.

According to NPR, Taylor Swift's "Patient Zero" held the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for a third week, driven in large part by sales topping 150,000 physical copies, and several artists have lately reached the top 10 for the first time.

NPR says "Nicole Kidman" gives Adéla her first top 10 hit, with lyrics and a video that draw on the actress's films, among them "Babygirl."

NPR reports that Dominic Fike, a singer, songwriter and actor seen in "Euphoria," made the top 10 for the first time with "Babydoll," a song first released in 2018.

Per NPR, "Babydoll" joined the Hot 100 in February after a surge in TikTok interest, and "Bby WOW" marks only the second top 10 entry for Colombian singer Karol G.

NPR Music's Stephen Thompson describes "Bby WOW" as this season's biggest Latin music hit and as a refreshing alternative after a lengthy period in which Taylor Swift and country ballads led the charts.

According to WWD, Grace attended Wednesday night's Westfield London screening of Sunrise on the Reaping wearing a shimmering gown by Almée Couture.

Grace told Entertainment Tonight that her look referenced the arena of the second Quarter Quell, WWD reports.

Per WWD, the gown belongs to the Almée Couture spring 2027 collection and shows botanical motifs over a purple mountain landscape.

WWD says stylist Molly Dickson curated the outfit, which Grace accessorized with diamond drop earrings from Anabela Chan.

WWD reports that on Oct. 17 Grace wore a custom Mônot gown recreating the red dress from Jennifer Lawrence's first Academy Awards, and that on Oct. 23 in New York her archival Gucci look referenced the Capitol interview set.

In the film, which WWD says reaches theaters Nov. 20, Grace plays Maysilee Donner, a tribute from District 12.

The Rock Paper Shotgun writer dates the Microsoft SideWinder Game Pad 1.0 to 1996.

At a car boot sale in 2026, the writer paid 2 euros for a SideWinder Game Pad 1.0 and set out to try it with modern PCs and games.

The controller connects through a 15-pin game port, a connector later phased out as USB took over, and the writer says game port-to-USB adapters are now hard to obtain.

The writer's 1990s Creative Sound Blaster Live card did not work with their motherboard, after which they bought two more SideWinders along with a game port-to-USB adapter.

Following further unsuccessful attempts, the writer settled on the newer SideWinder Plug and Play, which offers USB but has fewer buttons.

Playing Titanfall 2, the writer could neither sprint nor turn the camera, and incomplete control mapping also prevented shooting.

According to the writer, the SideWinder held up in Final Fantasy VII, Balatro and Stardew Valley.

The SideWinder brand debuted in 1995 with the 3D Pro and Standard joysticks.

According to the source, Microsoft closed the SideWinder brand in 2003, supposedly because of poor sales.

In the writer's view, the compatibility problem will prove too much for many people.

BBC Sport reports that Andy Reid, the Chiefs head coach, backed the decision to add Justin Tucker to the practice squad by pointing to the suspension Tucker has served.

BBC Sport reports that last year Tucker faced sexual misconduct accusations from 16 Baltimore-area massage therapists relating to the 2010s.

BBC Sport reports that Tucker, 36, who won Super Bowl XLVII with Baltimore, has always denied the allegations and has never been criminally charged.

BBC Sport reports that, after an investigation, the NFL banned Tucker for 10 games for breaching its personal conduct policy.

BBC Sport reports that Baltimore let Tucker go in May 2025, describing the move as a football decision after his form dropped.

BBC Sport reports that Tucker completed the ban last season and can be picked straight away.

BBC Sport reports that at a Wednesday news conference Reid said Tucker had served his suspension and chose not to comment further.

BBC Sport reports that Reid said the club tries to research as well as it can and to speak with many people to make sure things are in order.

BBC Sport reports that, when asked what that research involved, Reid declined to elaborate and said only that he had done some before bringing Tucker in.

BBC Sport reports that Tucker, a five-time All-Pro, made 89.1% of field goals across 13 seasons, second in NFL history, but only 73.3% in 2024, his worst season.

BBC Sport reports that the Chiefs moved for Tucker after a poor run from Harrison Butker, their kicker since 2017, whose 87.3% accuracy ranks fifth in NFL history.

BBC Sport reports that Butker, 31, has missed five of 16 field-goal tries this season, two of them among three attempts in Saturday's 20-3 defeat to the Seattle Seahawks.

In its 25 October 2026 report, Electrek says Wickham Freight Lines took delivery during the preceding week of a solar-powered electric trailer refrigeration unit, which the outlet describes as Australia's first regular production example to enter customer service.

Electrek says Wickham Freight Lines chose to buy the Sunswap Endurance units after testing them this past summer on a 1,670 km Sydney–Brisbane round trip involving more than 30 hours of driving.

According to Electrek, the trial round trip ended with more than 65% of battery capacity still available.

Graham Keogh, a director at Wickham Freight Lines, said the unit's performance, reliability and operational savings exceeded what the company had expected. Separately, he said the technology makes commercial sense for the company's large east coast fleet, which focuses on refrigerated and cold chain freight.

Electrek says conventional refrigerated trailers are powered by diesel generators that run constantly, emitting CO₂ and NOx and contributing to noise pollution.

Electrek reports that the Sunswap Endurance solar-powered reefer can keep food and pharmaceuticals cold in transport without using diesel fuel.

Per Eurogamer, Sony announced the November monthly games for PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium, which arrive on 3 November.

Eurogamer describes Dead Island 2, a first-person zombie action title from Dambuster Studios and Deep Silver, as perhaps the largest game in the selection.

According to Eurogamer, Aspyr remastered the Tomb Raider Darkness Trilogy included in the lineup for modern platforms.

Eurogamer identifies Monster Train 2, a roguelike deckbuilder, as the only indie title among this month's PlayStation Plus additions.

Eurogamer notes that with this reveal, subscribers have little time left to pick up the October games.

In 2026, 19 research team proposals were picked by NASA's Science Mission Directorate, and the agency says they will open new ways for the public to take part in its science.

NASA says twelve of the selections were made under its Citizen Science Seed Funding Program, known as CSSFP-25.

According to NASA, seven Science Activation teams picked in the most recent competition will engage learners in citizen science tied to the agency's research priorities.

Planet Hunters Roman, headed by Bernard Gaudi of Ohio State University, plans to have volunteers spot exoplanets in Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope data through the way the planets' gravity bends starlight.

Sungrazer 2.0 builds on an effort launched in 2006, and NASA says that effort's volunteers have found 5,204 comets so far, the majority of those known.

Overlap Zoo, a project headed by Benne Holwerda of the University of Louisville, is already open to volunteers, NASA says.

NASA states that the seed funding program is meant to help scientists and other experts create citizen science projects and to enlarge the group of professional researchers using these methods.

NASA reports that Zooniverse, a platform backed by a NASA grant, reached 1 billion classifications in 2026.

Newsnight obtained figures indicating that some retailers saw sales of essential goods rise sharply once the government urged the public to stock up for a possible crisis.

The increase followed a call from Defence Secretary Wes Streeting for people to stockpile goods ahead of emergencies such as extreme weather or a cyber attack.

According to an Iceland spokesperson, the chain's tinned product sales climbed 40% over the weekend, bottled water also sold well, and stocks of those products remain healthy.

Radio sales at Robert Dyas were 160% higher than the previous week, while Maplin cited gains of 92% for radios, 284% for torches and 106% for power banks.

Maplin measured its figures over the days since the government announcement last week, against the equivalent period a month earlier.

Josh Pringle of the online store Sgt Prepper's said the store's sales grew tenfold after the Be Ready campaign was launched.

Preppers Shop UK founder Lincoln Miles told Newsnight that sales jumped 650% following the government announcement.

On 22 October, Streeting advised households to keep tinned goods, baby food, battery torches, phone charging packs and three litres of water per person per day.

Newsnight found that many of the items Streeting listed were among the goods with sharply higher sales.

Streeting told Newsnight it was encouraging to see people take practical steps to get ready for disruption.

Ai2 released the study Old Ideas, Novel Problems along with a benchmark, data and code, plus an automated pipeline for assembling fresh evaluation sets.

The team built an automated pipeline that combed ICLR 2026 peer reviews for passages in which reviewers explicitly addressed originality.

The Human+Generated set pairs the 154 validated human ideas with 154 ideas from a basic LLM generator; the authors treated the generated ideas as less novel, calling these weak labels.

The authors report that, for six LLM judges, minor tweaks to how the evaluation was set up led to sharply different verdicts on identical ideas.

When GPT-5.4 was given a simpler prompt, its accuracy on Human+Generated pairs fell from 93.5% to 40.9%, which is below chance.

A simple Claude Opus 4.6 prompt achieved 0.854 macro-F1 for $2.59, compared with 0.642 for $30.66 from Idea Novelty Checker and 0.772 for $82.05 from Sakana AI's AI Scientist evaluator.

The authors call LLM-based novelty assessment an unresolved problem: how a judge does on human-written research may not predict its handling of AI-generated ideas, and extra search or compute offers no guarantee of consistency.

BBC News reports that a royal portraitist has painted a south London corner shop owner for a project honouring the local role of independent businesses.

Nick Bashall, an artist whose past subjects include Princess Anne, portrayed Kaual Patel, who owns Torridon Convenience Store in Catford.

A new exhibition named Local Royalty is set to unveil the portrait, together with works by other royal artists showing owners of pubs, cafes and takeaways.

Alongside Patel, the exhibition features three more small business owners, all portrayed in a style traditionally linked with royalty and famous figures.

Coca-Cola GB is sponsoring the exhibition, which is scheduled to welcome visitors at London's Saatchi Gallery from 28 October to 2 November.

According to Bashall, the portrait of Patel and the whole background were painted at the easel on site while people moved around them.

Patel took over the shop from his father and uncle, and for two decades has worked to make it a community hub while backing local producers.

Research suggesting that close to 80% of the public regard independent businesses like corner shops as underappreciated prompted the event.