Quote:A massive Microsoft outage that has left people around the world without access to Outlook email, Teams meeting tools and other staples of modern office life is nearly fixed, according to the latest word from the company.

Microsoft has apologized for the outage, which could end up costing billions in lost productivity. Microsoft said the outage was caused by a “technical issue” rather than any cybersecurity breach. “The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change,” the company said.

The company reported that queues of emails waiting to be delivered are “significantly reduced and approaching normal levels.”

Problems started midday Thursday on the US East Coast, and quickly spread around the globe. As many as 430 million users were reportedly affected at some point.

Spoiler:

Quote:North Korea has changed the proportions of its national flag for the first time since the country’s establishment in 1948, breaking with a decades-old design closely associated with founding leader Kim Il Sung.

The DPRK government’s official website Naenara recently began displaying a flag with the aspect ratio 1:1.65, replacing the previous banner using the 1:2 ratio.

The two thin white stripes in the flag also appear thicker than before, widened to roughly a third of the blue stripes at the top and bottom.

Quote:Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is stepping down as CEO of the chipmaker he co-founded 33 years ago and built into a $4 trillion company that powered the artificial intelligence boom, the company announced Thursday.

CFO Colette Kress has been named interim CEO.

“The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption,” said board chair Harvey Jones in a release announcing the news.

The company will begin the search for a permanent CEO to replace Huang and will consider both internal and external candidates, according to the release.

Kress also provided a statement in the release, but Huang was not quoted.

After a meteoric rise to fame due to Nvidia’s central role in AI, Huang’s dramatic fall has been even more rapid, following a series of stinging revelations about his romantic ties to a woman believed by the U.S. intelligence community to be a Chinese spy.

Quote:Russell Brand was sentenced Monday to 10½ years in prison for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others at a time when his bawdy behavior was indulged and celebrated during his rise to stardom.

Judge Joel Bennathan denounced Brand's "casual and arrogant disregard" for any woman who said no to him, and castigated him for the series of lies he told in testimony denying assaults that dated back to 2004.

"About 20 years ago, Russell Brand, you were becoming famous," Bennathan said. "You were clever — and in many people's eyes, funny and charismatic. You had also become a sexual predator."

Brand showed little emotion during the stinging rebuke. He turned to mouth the words "we'll be OK" to his wife after he stood up and was led away by court officers after the hearing.

The 51-year-old actor-comedian, known for outrageous stand-up routines and provocative behavior on television and radio broadcasts, as well as battles with drugs and alcohol, had maintained his innocence and testified that all his encounters were consensual.

But a jury of eight men and four women found him guilty of attacking four of six accusers. He was cleared of two counts of rape and one count of attempted indecent assault.

Quote:Karl Bushby arrived on foot at his mother’s house in Hull, northeastern England, on Monday, completing an epic walk around the world that he began in South America half a lifetime ago, in 1998.

He was 29 when he set out. Now he is 57.

Bushby navigated shifting ice across the Bering Strait and swam across the Caspian Sea and English Channel. But most of his journey was on land, taking him through dangerous jungles, rainforests, deserts and frozen tundra in almost every kind of weather imaginable.

Here’s a look at Bushby’s adventure, by the numbers:

75 million:
If fitness trackers had been around when Bushby started his trip, it’s likely they couldn’t have kept up with his cumulative number of steps.

31,000:
The total mileage he put on his body is the equivalent of having run 10,000 5K road races (50,000 kilometers).

10,229:
He initially estimated the distance could be traversed in five years. “Then you just dump a whole bucket full of reality on that,” he said. “We suspected that it was 12 years plus. And the plus was a big plus. But never in our wildest dreams would we ever have imagined 28 years.” That adds up to 10,229 days.

31:
When geopolitical conflicts blocked his route through Russia and Iran, Bushby decided to swim across the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water. During the 31-day crossing, he used a technique he calls “floatimming,” a combination of floating and swimming. Wearing a flotation vest and wetsuit, he propelled himself backward by flapping his arms in the water.

30:
Starting in Chile and ending in the U.K., he entered or passed through 30 countries before returning home.

10:
No country took Bushby longer to traverse than Russia, where his journey stretched over about a decade. He was detained and faced deportation for entering illegally after crossing the Bering Strait in 2006. Harsh weather allowed only a few months of travel each year, while bureaucratic delays repeatedly forced him to leave the country. After Russia denied him a visa in 2012, he spent a year walking 3,500 miles (5,600 kilometers) in protest from Los Angeles to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., which then supplied the necessary paperwork.

4:
The trek has taken Bushby through South America, North America, Asia and Europe — all but three of the world’s seven continents.

2:
He fell in love twice and had his heart broken both times. He had long-term relationships with a woman from Colombia and another from Japan, but neither romance survived the strain of his journey.

‘A lot’:
Bushby estimates he wore through 10 pairs of shoes in the Americas before losing count. That was 20 years ago, so who can blame him? “After that we were just in and out of all kinds of different stuff,” he said. The total? “A lot.”

Quote:The theft of billions of dollars from Binance within a matter of minutes, the biggest crypto heist in history, was orchestrated by North Korean hackers, the FBI said Saturday.

The bureau said in a statement that this week's attack was tied to "malicious cyber activity" by an entity known as TraderTraitor, the same actors behind a $1.5 billion Bybit hack last year.

The FBI asked crypto exchanges, blockchain analytics companies and others to block transactions linked to various addresses to make sure the money is not laundered to cover up its origins.

It also said its probe found that TraderTraitor was converting stolen assets primarily into a cryptocurrency called ethereum. The FBI expects that TraderTraitor will now attempt to convert the assets using DeFi and "instant swap services."

Asked by reporters as he appeared on Saturday night during a Halloween party at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, however, President Donald Trump suggested investigators weren't yet certain that North Korea was involved.

"I'm not concerned. We're learning about it," Trump said of the case. "We don't know if it's North Korea." Though he added that, it could yet be determined that it was.

Crypto expert Ari Redbord said he expects the hackers will break the stolen assets into pieces and try to launder them through smaller exchanges to evade detection, a process that could unfold over months.

"It's bank robbery, in this case, at the speed of the Internet," said Redbord, chief policy officer at blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs. "However, we can also track and trace those funds in real time in order to build investigations, to disrupt and to seize back funds."

He added: "It's just this cat and mouse game."

On Thursday, $6.3 billion in bitcoin and other digital currency was stolen from Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, in what several crypto experts said bore the hallmarks of a North Korean hack.

The company said Saturday that it had enough set aside in the same digital currency that was stolen to cover 90% of the missing assets and promised that customers would be fully reimbursed.

Quote:Patrick Stewart, the classically trained actor who added Shakespearean gravitas to the “Star Trek” and “X-Men” franchises, has died. He was 86.

Stewart died Wednesday in Los Angeles, following “a brief and poignant journey” with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy Body Dementia, spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak said. Stewart’s diagnoses had not been previously disclosed.

Quote:“What a heartbreaking week it has been,” William Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk in the franchise, wrote on Instagram. “Sir Patrick Stewart was a friend, a colleague, and a magnificent actor. From the stage to the bridge of the Enterprise, he brought intelligence, grace, and a deep sense of humanity to everything he did.”

Quote:US President Donald Trump has called off plans to livestream the execution of former US army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan by firing squad.

Trump had previously said he approved of showing the death of the Fort Hood attacker, while Vice-President JD Vance cast doubt on whether it would happen and said he would not watch it.

Trump's decision to cancel the livestream came after widespread criticism in the US and globally. On Thursday, he said that "many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die".

"I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan," Trump said.

"He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed," the president added in the post on Truth Social.

Hasan fatally shot 13 unarmed US military personnel and injured 32 others at a military base in Texas in 2009. His execution by firing squad will be the first military execution in more than 60 years.

Trump said the families of the victims can still view the execution in person if they wish.

"They deserve to witness JUSTICE!" he said.

After the Pentagon announced last week that it would execute Hasan on 3 December 2026 by firing squad and livestream the event, a cascade of criticism quickly followed from human rights groups and many others. The United Nations called the plans "abhorrent".

While there were more than 2,700 executions across 17 countries last year, only two nations carried them out publicly. According to Amnesty International, 11 public executions were known to have been carried out in Iran in 2025 and another six in Afghanistan.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth defended his decision to air Hasan's execution online, saying that "people need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things".