Move comes as manufacturer’s pre-tax profits fell to £642m in 2025, from £687.3m.

George Bamford is set to become joint chairman at JCB alongside his father, Lord Anthony Bamford, the digger manufacturer has announced.

The news comes as the firm disclosed a decline in profits for the previous year, following a fall in machinery sales amid a “challenging” global economic climate.

The Staffordshire-based construction and agricultural equipment giant is currently ramping up investment across both the UK and US in an effort to spearhead a return to robust growth.

The business was originally established by Joseph Cyril Bamford in 1945.

His son Anthony has helmed the company as chairman since 1975, steering its global expansion, but has now confirmed he will share the position with his youngest son, George.

Lord Bamford said: “Last year, JCB celebrated its 80th birthday and, as we look ahead, we are investing heavily in the future of the business – from the transformation of our Staffordshire headquarters and pioneering hydrogen technology, to our new factory in Texas.

“As part of that next chapter, I’m delighted that my son George will become joint chairman of JCB.

“We have never been a company that stands still, and these investments will ensure JCB is well placed to seize the opportunities ahead.”

George Bamford, who also founded watch brand Bamford Watch Department, will assume the position from the beginning of October.

The announcement coincides with JCB pressing ahead with its new American manufacturing facility in San Antonio, Texas, which is due to open next month. The facility, which will generate 1,500 jobs over the coming five years, will enable the company to sidestep tariff expenses currently impacting UK-manufactured products exported to the US.

JCB is simultaneously boosting investment domestically, with a £100 million redevelopment of its headquarters, incorporating a £60 million fully automated powder paint facility.

On Monday, the group disclosed that turnover declined to £5.7 billion in 2025, compared with £5.8 billion a year earlier.

This followed the firm selling 113,498 machine units for the year, dropping by 5.2% year-on-year.

It reported pre-tax profits decreased to £642 million for the year from £687.3 million in 2024.

JCB chief executive Graeme Macdonald said: “While 2025 was a more challenging year with mixed market conditions around the world, JCB delivered a robust performance overall.

“Despite nil market growth in North America and a 12% market contraction in India – both important markets for JCB – we increased our global market share during 2025, which is an encouraging result.

“The overall outlook for 2026 is for moderate growth, despite ongoing geopolitical uncertainty, and with new capacity coming on stream in Texas and Staffordshire we are well placed to take advantage of it.”

Avanti West Coast train services will be nationalised from March next year, the government has announced.

“For years, we’ve heard stories of Avanti underperforming, with passengers left paying the price. Enough is enough,” Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said.

The move is part of a government plan to improve rail infrastructure, cut train delays and improve experiences for passengers.

Avanti West Coast’s managing director said he was “proud of what we’ve achieved over the last six years”. The company’s contract was due to come to an end on 7 March.

In a post on social media, Prime Minister Andy Burnham echoed Alexander’s comments.

“For years, people have been expected to put up with Avanti’s cancellations, delays, overcrowding, and a service that has failed them time and time again,” he said.

Andy Mellors, managing director at Avanti West Coast, said: “We’re proud of what we’ve achieved over the last six years – from refurbishing our Pendolino fleet and introducing our new Evero trains to running more services than ever before.”

He added: “Over the coming months, we’ll work closely with the government to ensure a seamless transition into public ownership while remaining focused on delivering for our customers and communities.”

In May, Avanti West Coast said one-in-seven rail services will be cut on its busiest routes following a government request to reduce spending.

The company – a joint venture between FirstGroup (70%) and Italian state operator Trenitalia (30%) – predicted the move would cause minimum disruption to passengers and not reduce revenues.

Companies such as Avanti West Coast have their finances heavily influenced by the Department for Transport (DfT) due to contracts introduced in March 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

All train services operated under DfT contracts are being transferred to public ownership.

Great Western Railway – which is owned by FirstGroup – is to be brought under public ownership in December.

Several rail firms around the country are already publicly owned, including Great Anglia and South Western Railway. Welsh services were nationalised in 2021 and Scotland took trains into public ownership the following year.

Instagram will let you pay $3.99 a month to preview someone’s story without showing up on the viewer list, and some users are raising privacy concerns.

But parent company Meta is pushing back on claims that Instagram Plus reveals who repeatedly viewed a story.

The feature shows how many times a story was replayed in total, a Meta representative told Fox News Digital, but it does not name the people behind those repeat views.

The subscription also adds a search bar to the existing viewer list, making it easier to check whether a particular person saw a story. Another feature, Story Preview, lets paying users take a quick peek at someone else’s story without showing up on that person’s viewer list.

WHAT META’S NEW TEEN RESTRICTIONS MEAN FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

Meta says Instagram Plus does not reveal who repeatedly viewed your stories, pushing back on viral privacy concerns over its new $3.99 subscription. (Jens Büttner/picture alliance via Getty Images / Getty Images)

“Instagram Plus does not give subscribers more information about other people’s viewing habits,” the Meta representative said. The company said it designed the paid features to give users more “connection, expression, and control.”

META EMPLOYEE ACCUSED OF ACCESSING PRIVATE IMAGES

TikTok user @suhaadada said she tried Instagram Plus on a free trial and was “ready to never use Instagram again.” She argued that the replay number could make a second view seem more meaningful than it is. Someone may simply swipe past a story too quickly and go back, she said.

Instagram Plus is drawing privacy questions, but Meta says the new feature doesn’t expose users’ viewing habits. (Lorenzo Di Cola/NurPhoto via Getty Images / Getty Images)

What unsettled her most, she said, was watching the timestamps beside names on her viewer list. She claimed some names jumped back to the top with updated times, which she took as a sign those people had viewed her story again. She said she found herself refreshing the list throughout the day and worried that other subscribers could draw conclusions about her own viewing habits.

NEW MEXICO SEEKS MASSIVE PENALTY FROM META AFTER JURY FOUND TECH GIANT LIABLE FOR ENDANGERING CHILDREN

Meta is pushing back on claims that Instagram Plus lets users identify repeat story viewers, saying the $3.99 subscription only shows total replays, not who watched again. (Getty Images / Getty Images)

Other Reddit users have made similar claims about changing timestamps. Those accounts have not been independently verified. Meta said replay counts do not identify individual viewers but did not directly address users’ claims that names move to the top of the viewer list with updated timestamps.

She also objected to Story Preview because a person who posts a story may not see everyone who took a look. Meta confirmed that a subscriber can take a mini preview without appearing on the viewer list but said people who post stories are shown a notice explaining that previews may not show up there.

The subscription costs $3.99 a month in the U.S., with prices varying by country, Meta said. It also lets users extend a story by 24 hours, give one story more prominent placement and add posts to their profile or highlights without putting them in followers’ feeds.

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The TikTok user said she would not renew her subscription. Other critics have been just as blunt. One Reddit commenter called the features “stalker central,” while another wrote, “PLEASE paywall instagram so i will finally delete the app.”

Fundamentals

Spot gold was down 0.7% at $4,254.77 per ounce, as of 0010 GMT. US gold futures drifted 0.7% lower to $4,289.70.
Iran insisted that only diplomacy can solve its conflict with the United States and Israel, after US President Donald Trump said he rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end fighting. Oil prices rebounded more than 1%.

The Fed raised rates earlier this month, lifting its target rate range by a quarter percentage point to between 3.75% and 4%. According to CME’s FedWatch Tool, traders are pricing in a 66% chance of a US rate hike in October.

Higher energy prices can fuel inflation by raising costs across the economy. Gold is widely viewed as a hedge against inflation, but it can struggle in a high interest rate environment as rising yields increase the opportunity cost of holding the non-yielding metal.

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Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack said on Friday she is concerned that persistently high inflation risks conditioning the American public to accept elevated prices as the norm, adding the central bank cannot let that happen.
A survey showed US consumer sentiment slipped to a four-month low in September amid worries that rising inflation would erode households’ purchasing power.Among other metals, spot silver fell 1% to $63.67, platinum was down 0.7% at $1,765.28 and palladium lost 0.7% to $1,257.70.

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Inflation across Asia could remain above last year’s levels through 2027 as geopolitical conflicts, higher energy costs and extreme weather combine to keep pressure on food, transport and electricity prices, according to the Asian Development Bank.

In its September update of the Asian Development Outlook, the ADB slightly reduced its inflation forecast for developing economies in Asia-Pacific for 2026 to 4.2%, from 4.3% previously. However, it raised its 2027 projection to 3.5%, from 3.4%.

Although the 2026 revision appears limited, the figures confirm that price pressures are unlikely to disappear quickly. Both forecasts remain above the 3% recorded in 2025, pointing to a more persistent inflationary period for households, businesses and central banks.

The report attributed part of the pressure to conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. Disruptions in oil and refined fuel markets threaten to raise transport, manufacturing and electricity-generation costs in economies that depend on imported energy.

Weather conditions add a second risk. The ADB expects a severe El Niño event, with possible consequences for harvests from India to Thailand. Lower agricultural output could push food prices higher, while reduced hydropower generation could increase dependence on fossil fuels, according to Bloomberg.

Governments are using broad subsidies to contain the impact of higher energy prices. These measures have helped moderate the 2026 inflation forecast, but they also carry a considerable fiscal cost. Relief for consumers could become a longer-term burden on public finances if international prices remain elevated.

Thailand’s recovery remains fragile

Thailand is not insulated from this environment. Higher fuel prices affect transport, distribution and production, while extreme weather can damage agriculture and electricity generation.

The ADB slightly raised its growth forecast for Thailand in 2026 to 2%, from 1.8%, supported by technology exports and regional demand. For 2027, however, it lowered its projection to 1.9%, from 2%.

The combination of persistent inflation and moderate growth leaves Bangkok with limited room for manoeuvre. Authorities can expand support for households, but additional spending could increase fiscal pressure. They can also maintain an accommodative monetary policy, although excessively loose financial conditions could intensify risks in a country with high household debt.

Regional growth will remain resilient, according to the ADB. Growth across developing Asia will moderate from 5.5% in 2025 to 5% in 2026 before edging up to 5.1% in 2027. But a growing economy does not necessarily protect consumers when the prices of essential goods rise faster than incomes, as their analysis report.

For Thailand, the outlook for the coming months will depend on how long the energy shocks last and whether El Niño significantly affects harvests. If both pressures intensify at the same time, the government will have to decide which costs to absorb, which to pass on to consumers and how long it can finance broad-based support.

Asian inflation is not out of control, but it has not disappeared either. In 2027, households will continue to measure the recovery not through regional forecasts, but by the cost of filling the tank, buying food and keeping a business open.

President Donald Trump and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are meeting for a private dinner at the White House on Sunday evening.

Trump confirmed the meeting to Fox News’ Aishah Hasnie.

This comes after the leader of the AI firm raised concerns this month about the technology’s risks, warning that the pace of its advancement needs to be slowed down.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” Amodei wrote in an essay.

ANTHROPIC CEO SAYS AI COULD CURE MOST DISEASES WITHIN NEXT DECADE

President Donald Trump and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are meeting for a private dinner at the White House on Sunday evening. (Getty Images / Getty Images)

Last week, Amodei spoke before the U.N. Security Council about the need for the AI industry to establish international standards and cooperation to manage the threats posed by rapid AI developments and capabilities.

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon also stepped down from the company earlier this month, arguing that leading AI companies are not acting responsibly as AI capabilities rapidly advance.

“I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Jacob Coxon said on Sept. 8.

Trump was asked by Hasnie about Amodei’s call for slowing the pace of AI improvement.

MELANIA TRUMP URGES AI ‘VIGILANCE,’ SAYS AMERICANS NEED TO GET EDUCATED

CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, warned that the pace of AI advancement needs to be slowed down. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images / Getty Images)

“We’re going to talk about it. I’m for let’s go and let’s win. We’re about a year, maybe a year and a half up on China. There is nobody in third place. It’s just us and China. We’re leading by quite a bit. I spoke a little bit about it with President Xi. Not too much, it wasn’t a topic of conversation. Because I think if you, as they say, open it up to China, you give up the lead. But I’ll be speaking to Dario and others,” Trump said.

Amodei was not among the tech industry leaders to attend Thursday’s state dinner at the White House for Chinese President Xi Jinping, although the group included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Trump also said a broader White House meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson and AI executives is scheduled for Tuesday.

“We have a very big meeting on Tuesday where everybody’s coming in and that’ll be very important,” Trump told Hasnie.

Anthropic has been involved in a legal fight with the Pentagon over its designation of the tech company as a supply-chain risk. (Samyukta Lakshmi/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

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Anthropic has been involved in a legal fight with the Pentagon over its designation of the tech company as a supply-chain risk.

In a 2-1 ruling Friday, an appeals court sided with the Pentagon, allowing the department to continue designating Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” for Defense Department procurement purposes.

“Confirmed: @AnthropicAI = Supply Chain Risk. The @DeptofWar does what is right for the Country and our Warriors,” Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said on social media following the ruling.

Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has never shied away from bold predictions, and few have been bigger than his forecast for the company’s Optimus humanoid robot program. According to an analysis published by The Motley Fool’s Ryan Vanzo, turning that prediction into reality would require Tesla to capture an outsized share of a robotics market that, even under optimistic projections, remains far smaller than what the math would ultimately demand.

Musk made the prediction in 2024, saying of the robot, “Optimus, I think, is … literally a $25 trillion market cap situation.” Taken at face value, that statement suggests Optimus alone could help grow Tesla’s total market capitalization by roughly 2,500% from where the company traded at the time.

Musk has built a track record of predictions that often prove overly optimistic, particularly around timelines, even as he has also built multiple trillion-dollar businesses over the course of his career, according to Vanzo’s analysis. That combination, a tendency toward inflated near-term forecasts paired with a genuine history of long-term value creation, forms the backdrop against which analysts have evaluated the Optimus prediction specifically.

To assess whether the $25 trillion figure is realistic, Vanzo’s analysis draws on a separate industry projection from JPMorgan Chase, which estimates that total sales across the robotics industry could reach $2.5 trillion by 2035, up sharply from approximately $100 billion in 2025. Applying Tesla’s current price-to-sales ratio of roughly 13 times to that broader industry projection, the analysis estimates Tesla’s robotics division alone could be worth approximately $3 trillion if the company were to capture 10% of the entire global robotics market by 2035, a scenario the analysis describes as an already ambitious outcome given the scale of competition likely to emerge across the robotics sector over the coming decade.

Even under that relatively optimistic scenario, the resulting $3 trillion valuation for Tesla’s robotics business alone falls dramatically short of Musk’s full $25 trillion prediction, underscoring just how large a gap exists between the industry’s own current growth projections and the scale of value creation Musk has suggested Optimus could deliver.

The analysis also situates the $25 trillion figure within the broader context of the U.S. stock market as a whole. The entire S&P 500 index currently carries a combined value of roughly $70 trillion. If Tesla’s market capitalization were to reach $25 trillion at today’s overall market pricing, the company alone would account for approximately 36% of the entire index’s total value, an outcome without any clear historical precedent among individual companies within a major stock index of that scale.

Vanzo’s analysis does not dismiss the possibility that Optimus could create substantial value for Tesla shareholders over time, but frames any such outcome as likely to unfold over a much longer timeline than Musk’s original framing may have implied, potentially stretching across multiple decades rather than materializing within the coming years. The analysis explicitly cautions that Tesla’s current valuation multiples may not remain constant as the robotics business scales, adding a further layer of uncertainty to any long-term projection built on today’s financial ratios.

Musk’s Optimus prediction is only the latest in a long series of ambitious public forecasts he has made across his various companies, spanning Tesla’s self-driving technology timelines, SpaceX’s Mars colonization plans, and other major initiatives. Financial analysts have generally treated these predictions with a mix of interest and skepticism, acknowledging Musk’s demonstrated ability to build genuinely transformative businesses while also noting his consistent pattern of overestimating how quickly those outcomes will actually materialize.

Tesla shares were trading down 1.54% at last check, even as the broader U.S. stock market posted gains Sunday, with the S&P 500 up 0.51%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 0.93%, and the Nasdaq Composite up 0.48%. Nvidia, a company frequently mentioned alongside Tesla in broader discussions of major technology and AI-adjacent stocks, traded up a more modest 0.22% over the same period.

For investors weighing Musk’s Optimus prediction specifically, the underlying analysis suggests that while the robotics business could meaningfully contribute to Tesla’s long-term valuation growth, reaching anything close to the full $25 trillion figure Musk described would require Tesla to not only dominate a robotics industry still in its early stages of development, but to do so at a scale that would make it, by a significant margin, the most valuable company in stock market history relative to the broader index it trades within. As with many of Musk’s public predictions, the eventual outcome, and the timeline required to reach it, remains highly uncertain, and investors are encouraged to approach such forward-looking statements with appropriate skepticism rather than treating them as firm financial guidance.

BOSTON — A rare inherited change in the EGFR gene was tied to a sharp rise in lung cancer risk, including among people who have never smoked, according to a study in the journal Science.

Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and 23andMe Research Institute analyzed data from more than 3.3 million people. They reported that the EGFR T790M variant raised lung cancer risk about 25-fold compared with people who did not carry it. Among never-smokers, carriers had about 62 times the odds of lung cancer compared with never-smokers without the mutation.

The variant did not show a similar increase across 17 other cancers in the same analysis.

Most U.S. carriers were traced to a shared ancestry linked to British and Irish settlers in Southern Appalachia about 200 to 225 years ago, the team said. Nationwide, the mutation remains uncommon — roughly one in 15,000 to 16,000 people. In some parts of Southern Appalachia, researchers estimated as many as one in 2,000 people may carry it.

Jaclyn LoPiccolo, an attending physician and lung cancer researcher at Dana-Farber and a co-author, said in a statement released with the paper: “Today, lung cancer screening is driven almost entirely by smoking history. Our findings raise the possibility that, in the future, screening could also be dictated by inherited genetic risk. If further studies confirm the benefit, people with EGFR T790M could be identified through genetic testing and offered personalized CT screening to identify lung cancers when they are at their most curable stage.”

She added: “We found that the vast majority of carriers inherited the mutation from the same ancestral lineage. We could trace that lineage to British and Irish settlers in the United States and show that the mutation became enriched after a founder event and genetic bottleneck in Southern Appalachia about 200 years ago. It’s a fascinating example of how human migration and genealogy can shape disease risk, generations later.”

Alexander Gusev, a quantitative geneticist at Dana-Farber, said: “To my knowledge, it’s one of the strongest, if not the strongest, cancer risk-increasing mutations that has ever been found.”

On smoking he said: “Smoking is bad for lung cancer. This mutation is bad for lung cancer. When you do both, your risk is the sum of those two risks. So, you definitely don’t want to smoke.”

U.S. screening guidelines still center on age and pack-years of cigarettes. Never-smokers who develop lung cancer often present later. EGFR mutations are already familiar to oncologists as targets in tumor DNA. An inherited T790M change is different: it is present in every cell from birth, not only in a tumor that has evolved resistance to certain drugs.

The authors suggested that people with a strong family history of lung cancer, multiple lung nodules or tumors, or family roots in parts of the southeastern United States consider speaking with a genetic counselor about testing or CT screening. That is a clinical conversation, not a population mandate.

The study has limits the authors and the Fox News account both flagged. Because the mutation is rare, researchers found relatively few carriers even in a multimillion-person dataset, so the exact size of the risk increase is uncertain. Much of the sample came from 23andMe research participants, who may not match the broader U.S. population. Risk estimates may not apply equally outside the regions where the founder effect is strongest.

The work shows association, not proof that genetic testing cuts deaths. No trial in this report showed that offering CT scans to T790M carriers improves survival. Funding included the National Institutes of Health and the American Cancer Society.

Lung cancer remains a leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Smoking still drives most cases. The new finding does not invert that fact. It adds a small, geographically clustered group whose risk is high even without cigarettes — and higher still if they smoke.

For clinicians, the practical next step is pedigree and geography: unexplained family clusters of lung cancer, especially among never-smokers with Appalachian or British-Irish roots, may justify counseling. For everyone else, the mutation is too rare to turn into a mass screening add-on without more outcome data.

Gusev’s arithmetic is the line that travels. The gene is bad. Smoking is bad. Together they add. Quitting does not erase an inherited allele. It still removes one of the two stacked risks.