A teenager driving for the first time since passing her test found herself trapped in gridlock for eight hours on the M25 in Essex this week, one of numerous drivers left stranded after a crash near a major shopping center triggered a full closure of part of Britain’s busiest motorway.

The disruption began around 5:30 a.m. local time Thursday following a crash near junction 31 for the Lakeside Shopping Centre in Grays, Essex. What was initially expected to be a routine incident response turned into a prolonged closure, with the affected stretch of motorway not reopening until 8:40 p.m. that evening. National Highways said the extended shutdown resulted from a combination of factors, including an oil spill that required roughly a quarter of a mile, or 400 meters, of road to be resurfaced, with the hot weather further slowing the cooling process needed before repairs could be completed.

Among those caught in the resulting gridlock was Beatrix, a 17-year-old from Romford, east London, who was making what should have been a 20-minute journey with a relative on one of her first drives since passing her driving test. Beatrix said she and her cousin lost all means of navigation early into the ordeal after both of their phones died, leaving them to rely on road signs alone to find their way. “It was me and my cousin in the car and both of our phones died. So, we didn’t really know how to get back and we were following road signs,” Beatrix said. “I’ve never driven on the M25… so, that was very scary.” Despite the pressure of the situation, Beatrix said she believed her driving instructor would have been impressed with how she handled the unexpected test of her still-fresh skills, even as one of her arms became sunburned from sitting in the stationary traffic for hours. Temperatures in Grays reached 29 degrees Celsius, or roughly 84 degrees Fahrenheit, on Thursday, adding to the discomfort for drivers stuck without air conditioning relief for extended periods. Beatrix added that her parents, unable to track her location and unaware of when she might eventually make it home, were “so worried” throughout the ordeal.

Beatrix was far from the only driver whose journey was dramatically extended by the closure. Rosie Potter, a 29-year-old civil servant, described what should have been a roughly hour-long drive from Lakeside to Colchester turning into a more than nine-hour ordeal. Potter left the retail car park at 1:30 p.m. and did not arrive home until 11 p.m. that night. She recalled growing increasingly anxious as evening approached without any resolution in sight. “I thought, ‘Oh no, am I gonna be stuck in my car overnight in the dark in an area that I don’t really know very well?’” Potter said. She described the practical difficulties of being trapped for so long without basic necessities. “You can’t sit there for eight, nine hours with your engine running and your aircon running,” Potter said. “There’s no water. There’s no access to any toilets. There’s no food. There’s nothing. There’s nothing around.” Potter also described encountering other stranded families in similarly difficult situations, including parents who had left home for a quick errand only to find themselves stuck for hours without supplies for their children. “There were people with babies that had literally nipped out to the shops and were then stranded for hours and had no milk, no bottles left for their children,” she said.

Some motorists sought refuge at the Thurrock service station, only to find themselves unable to leave the car park once traffic backed up further. Sara Tidy, a 63-year-old journalist traveling from Stansted Airport to her home in Benenden, Kent, described the scene at the service station as chaotic but at times almost communal, with drivers finding creative ways to pass the time. “Literally hundreds of cars” filled the area, Tidy said, describing children playing tennis in the car park to stay entertained during the wait. Tidy also spoke with members of a band who were traveling to a gig outside Norwich and risked missing their performance entirely because of the delay. “They had their drums and guitars and stuff on the tarmac to entertain themselves,” she said. Tidy also described encountering a woman in the car park who was in urgent need of medication and growing increasingly distressed as the hours passed without any clear resolution to the closure.

The scale of the disruption extended well beyond the immediate crash site, with severe congestion reported across Grays, Purfleet and the wider Thurrock area throughout the day. According to reporting on the incident, two lanes of the clockwise M25 and an associated entry slip road remained closed for most of the day, with queues stretching approximately 10 miles back toward Brentwood. One motorist, Graham Potter, described the scene as “absolutely ridiculous traffic gridlock at Lakeside,” noting that his daughter had been stuck in stationary traffic for seven and a half hours.

National Highways issued a public apology following the extended closure, describing itself as “deeply sorry” for the eight-hour waits drivers endured. Responding to affected motorists on the social media platform X, the organization confirmed it would undertake a formal review of how the incident was managed, from the initial crash response through the extended resurfacing work that ultimately kept the motorway closed for more than 15 hours.

The M25, which forms a roughly 117-mile orbital route around Greater London, is one of the busiest and most heavily trafficked motorways in the United Kingdom, and closures of this length are relatively rare even given the road’s history of periodic congestion and incident-related disruptions. Thursday’s closure adds to a string of recent M25 disruptions in the Essex area, though the combination of an oil spill, resurfacing needs and extreme summer heat made this particular incident notably longer and more disruptive than typical crash-related closures on the route. With National Highways now committing to review its handling of the incident, drivers affected by Thursday’s gridlock said they hoped the review would lead to faster resolution of similar closures in the future, particularly given the extreme heat and lack of basic amenities many described enduring throughout the day.

Players of Minecraft, one of the world’s most popular video games, began reporting widespread access problems Saturday morning, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector, which recorded a spike in user complaints beginning at 10:48 a.m. Eastern time.

Downdetector, which aggregates real-time reports from users to identify potential service disruptions across websites, apps and games, flagged the surge in a post on its social media account, prompting the hashtag #MinecraftDown to circulate among affected players. As of Saturday afternoon, neither Mojang Studios, the game’s developer, nor its parent company, Microsoft, had issued a public statement addressing the reported disruption.

Minecraft’s core online services are managed through a combination of Mojang and Microsoft account systems, which handle player authentication, marketplace access, multiplayer server connections and the Realms subscription service that allows players to host private, always-online worlds for themselves and friends. Because these systems are interconnected, disruptions affecting authentication or login servers can cascade into broader problems across multiple parts of the game, even when a player’s local, offline single-player experience remains unaffected.

Saturday’s reported outage adds to a pattern of periodic service disruptions that have affected Minecraft over the past year, with player complaints on outage-tracking platforms ranging from login failures and marketplace slowdowns to more significant server-side authentication problems. According to data from outage-monitoring service StatusGator, Minecraft has received dozens of user-submitted outage reports within individual 24-hour windows on multiple occasions in recent months, even during stretches when the game’s official status remained listed as fully operational, reflecting how difficult it can be for automated monitoring systems to catch every localized or intermittent disruption affecting a portion of the game’s global player base.

Some of Minecraft’s most disruptive outages in recent memory have specifically affected Realms, the game’s subscription-based multiplayer hosting service. In one previous incident, hundreds of players reported being unable to access their Realms servers after an outage began affecting login functionality, with many users encountering error messages when attempting to open the Realms tab within the game. That disruption, tracked heavily on Downdetector at the time, left affected players unable to reach their own privately hosted worlds even though other parts of the game continued functioning normally for many users.

Frustration among the Minecraft player community over the pace and clarity of official communication during past outages has also been a recurring theme on social media. Users posting on X during previous disruptions have criticized Mojang’s support account for slow or unclear updates during extended outages, with one user asking pointedly during a past incident whether it should take more than a day for the company to acknowledge that Realms was experiencing problems, and questioning whether future disruptions would be handled with similarly limited communication.

Common symptoms reported during past Minecraft outages have included failure to log in through the game’s launcher, error messages indicating the game “couldn’t connect to the Minecraft services,” extremely slow loading times when attempting to join servers or access the in-game marketplace, and, in some cases, players being forced into offline mode despite having a stable internet connection. Third-party launchers and modified clients that rely on Minecraft’s official authentication servers, such as the popular Prism Launcher, have also been affected during past outages, with some users reporting authentication failures even when attempting to verify server connectivity directly.

Minecraft remains one of the best-selling and most actively played video games in the world, with a global player base spanning both casual single-player users and large, persistent multiplayer communities hosted through Realms, third-party server hosting services, and Microsoft’s broader Xbox and PC gaming ecosystems. Given that scale, even relatively brief or partial outages affecting login or authentication systems can generate a large volume of user reports in a short period of time, as appeared to be the case with Saturday morning’s spike in Downdetector complaints.

As of Saturday afternoon, it remained unclear how widespread the reported outage was, which specific services or regions were most affected, or how long the disruption might persist before service is fully restored. Given the pattern established by previous Minecraft outages, affected players may see functionality return gradually as different systems, such as authentication, marketplace access and multiplayer server connections, come back online at different times rather than all at once.

Players experiencing issues were advised to check both the official Mojang Support account on X and third-party monitoring tools such as Downdetector for updates, since the game’s own status indicators have not always reflected ongoing incidents in real time during past disruptions. In the meantime, players affected by connectivity issues were encouraged to try standard troubleshooting steps, including restarting the game launcher, verifying account credentials, and checking for any pending software updates that might be contributing to login or connectivity problems on their end before assuming a broader service-wide outage is responsible.

Minecraft’s ownership under Microsoft, which acquired the game and its developer Mojang in 2014, means the title’s backend infrastructure is at least partly tied to broader Microsoft cloud and authentication services, a connection that has occasionally meant disruptions affecting other Microsoft products, such as Xbox Live or Microsoft account services more broadly, have coincided with reported Minecraft issues in the past, even when the underlying cause originates outside the game’s own dedicated infrastructure.

For now, the scope and cause of Saturday’s reported disruption remain unconfirmed, with affected players continuing to share their experiences on social media as they wait for either the outage to resolve on its own or for an official acknowledgment from Mojang or Microsoft regarding what, if anything, is affecting the game’s services. Given the frequency of similar incidents over the past year, some players expressed hope on social media that any official response would come more quickly than during past outages, when communication from the game’s support channels was sometimes criticized as slow or unclear relative to the scale of the disruption being experienced by the community.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to ICICI Bank Limited Q1 FY ’27 Earnings Conference Call.

[Operator Instructions]

Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Sandeep Bakhshi, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of ICICI Bank. Thank you, and over to you, sir.

Sandeep Bakhshi
MD, CEO & Executive Director

Thank you. Good evening to all of you, and welcome to the ICICI Bank earnings call to discuss the results for Q1 of financial year ’27. Joining us today on this call are Sandeep Batra, Rakesh, Ajay, Anindya and [ Abhinek ]. At ICICI Bank, our strategic focus continues to be on growing profit before tax, excluding treasury through the 360-degree customer-centric approach and by serving opportunities across ecosystems and micro markets.

The profit before tax, excluding treasury, grew by 20.9% year-on-year to INR 189.75 billion in this quarter. The core operating profit increased by 15.6% year-on-year to INR 202.35 billion in this quarter. The core operating profit, excluding dividend from subsidiaries increased by 18.3% year-on-year to INR 191.25 billion in this quarter. The profit after tax grew by 15.9% year-on-year to INR 148.05 billion in this quarter.

Total deposits grew by 14% year-on-year and 2.2% sequentially at June 30, ’26. Average deposits grew by 14% year-on-year and 6.1% sequentially and average current and savings account deposits grew by 12.1% year-on-year and 4.7% sequentially during this quarter. The bank’s average liquidity coverage ratio, LCR

Federal health officials confirmed Thursday that shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants in five U.S. states is the source of a widespread outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a parasitic intestinal illness that has now sickened thousands of people across more than 30 states since the outbreak was first identified in early May.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a warning late Thursday advising consumers not to eat shredded iceberg lettuce from Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. According to the CDC’s most recent tally, the outbreak has sickened at least 1,644 people across 34 states, including at least 94 hospitalizations, though officials cautioned that federal numbers lag behind what individual state health departments have reported. Michigan alone reported more than 5,000 confirmed cases as of Friday, including 102 hospitalizations, according to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, a figure far exceeding the CDC’s national count and underscoring how significantly reporting delays have affected the visibility of the outbreak’s true scale.

A Food and Drug Administration trace-back investigation identified a single supplier behind the contaminated lettuce. While the federal government’s initial public warnings did not name the company, Taylor Fresh Foods, based in Salinas, California, confirmed that FDA testing had traced the contamination to a specific independent farm affiliated with the company in central Mexico. In a statement posted to social media on July 17, Taylor Farms de Mexico said it was voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico and had informed the FDA that it would initiate a formal recall. The company emphasized that none of its branded salads or salad kits sold in grocery stores nationwide are connected to the outbreak, noting that those retail products do not contain iceberg lettuce in the first place.

Taco Bell confirmed Friday that it had completed the removal of the affected product from its restaurants nationwide. “As of July 17, Taco Bell has completed removal of affected Taylor Farms lettuce from our restaurants,” the company said in a statement. “Based on ongoing conversations with public health officials, and out of an abundance of caution, Taco Bell worked swiftly to voluntarily remove the product from restaurants and the affected ingredient has been removed from our supply chain nationwide. We took this action to ensure our guests can enjoy their Taco Bell favorites safely. We believe public health is a shared responsibility among restaurants, their suppliers, and authorities, and we are proud to have consistently acted quickly and proactively to protect our guests.”

The CDC has said it is also investigating additional cyclosporiasis illnesses and outbreak clusters nationally that are unrelated to the Taco Bell lettuce findings, meaning not every reported case tied to the broader national surge in cyclospora infections is necessarily connected to this specific source.

Cyclosporiasis is caused by Cyclospora cayetanensis, a microscopic parasite transmitted through contaminated food or water. According to the CDC, symptoms typically begin about one week after exposure, though onset can range anywhere from as soon as two days to as long as two weeks or more after consuming contaminated food. Common symptoms include watery diarrhea, loss of appetite and weight loss, with the illness sometimes persisting for weeks if left untreated. Officials noted the infection is treatable with antibiotics once properly diagnosed, though there is no routine testing for cyclospora, meaning healthcare providers typically only test for it when an outbreak has already raised awareness among clinicians. No deaths have been reported in connection with the current outbreak.

Health officials have emphasized that thorough washing alone cannot reliably remove Cyclospora from produce, since the parasite is resistant to typical rinsing methods. The CDC recommends cooking produce to an internal temperature of at least 158 degrees Fahrenheit, or 70 degrees Celsius, as the most reliable method for killing the parasite when contamination is a concern.

The outbreak has had measurable financial consequences for companies connected to the fresh produce and fast-food supply chain. Shares of Yum Brands, Taco Bell’s parent company, fell nearly 7% over the five trading days following the outbreak’s public disclosure. Other companies that sell fresh lettuce also saw their stock prices affected by the broader health scare, even without direct ties to the confirmed outbreak source. Salad chain Sweetgreen saw its shares plunge nearly 13% over the course of the week, while fast-casual chain Cava fell more than 3%. Both companies saw a partial rebound Friday, with Sweetgreen shares rising more than 17% and Cava climbing about 2%, a reaction analysts attributed to apparent relief among investors once the CDC’s investigation confirmed that neither company’s ingredients were identified as a source of the outbreak. Analysts have generally said any near-term sales or stock price impact facing Taco Bell and similarly affected companies is likely to be limited in scope and duration, particularly once headlines about the outbreak begin to fade.

This is not the first time Taylor Farms has been connected to a significant foodborne illness investigation involving a major fast-food chain. Last year, an E. coli outbreak was traced to onions supplied to several restaurants from a Taylor Farms facility in Colorado, a situation that briefly forced McDonald’s to stop using onions on its Quarter Pounder sandwiches at some locations while the investigation unfolded. On its website, Taylor Farms describes itself as the leading global producer of salads and healthy fresh foods, operating production facilities across the United States, Canada, Mexico and Western Europe, and industry analysts have noted that a small number of large, vertically integrated companies like Taylor Farms dominate the U.S. bagged lettuce and salad supply chain, meaning contamination at a single facility or farm can quickly ripple across numerous restaurant chains and retail products nationwide.

The FDA said it continues working with Taylor Farms to determine whether lettuce from the implicated Mexican farm was distributed to any additional locations or retailers beyond the five states currently named in the CDC’s consumer warning. Federal and state health officials said the investigation remains active, and additional updates are expected as testing and case reporting continue in the coming weeks. Consumers who believe they may have symptoms consistent with cyclosporiasis are encouraged to consult a healthcare provider and report their illness to their local health department to assist ongoing surveillance efforts tied to the outbreak.

This article was written by

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Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 this week, unveiling what the company describes as the largest open-source AI model ever made publicly available, with benchmark performance the company says rivals some of the most advanced systems built by American labs including Anthropic and OpenAI.

The model, released Thursday, contains 2.8 trillion total parameters, making it roughly 75% larger than DeepSeek’s V4 Pro, previously one of the largest Chinese open-weight models at approximately 1.6 trillion parameters, and far outpacing Zhipu AI’s GLM 5 series at 744 billion parameters. Kimi K3 is also roughly 2.8 times the size of Moonshot’s previous flagship model, K2.6, released in April. Full model weights are scheduled to be released publicly on July 27, timed to coincide with the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference currently underway in Shanghai.

According to Moonshot, K3 performed “competitively” against Anthropic’s Fable 5, currently among the most capable publicly available AI models, and “substantially outperformed” Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 as well as OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol and GPT 5.5 on the company’s officially released benchmarks, where K3 consistently ranked among the top three models tested. One independent benchmark from Arena.AI reportedly ranked K3 as the best-performing model currently available, ahead of offerings from both Anthropic and OpenAI, though Moonshot’s own reporting placed K3 slightly behind Fable 5 on overall performance.

In a press release announcing the model, Moonshot described K3 as its most powerful open-source coding model to date. “K3 stands as Moonshot AI’s most powerful open-source coding model to date,” the company wrote, adding that the model can “sustain long engineering sessions, navigate massive repositories, and orchestrate terminal tools” while “operating with minimal human oversight.”

The model introduces two architectural innovations developed internally at Moonshot: Kimi Delta Attention, a hybrid linear attention mechanism designed to reduce memory usage and improve processing speed, and Attention Residuals, which the company describes as a drop-in replacement for traditional residual connections that delivers more consistent performance gains as models scale in size. Both techniques had previously been published as open research by Moonshot’s team on GitHub. K3 also supports a 1-million-token context window, positioning it for long-horizon coding tasks and autonomous agent workloads, along with native visual understanding capabilities and an always-on reasoning mode the company calls “thinking mode.” Moonshot said the model uses 21% fewer output tokens than its predecessor on equivalent tasks, and the model’s API is compatible with the OpenAI SDK, lowering the technical barrier for developers already building on OpenAI or Anthropic’s existing toolchains.

Pricing for K3’s API access is set at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, the highest pricing structure of any major Chinese AI lab, though still roughly half the per-task cost of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 and dramatically cheaper than Fable 5, which reportedly costs $50 for an equivalent volume of output tokens. Independent testers have noted that K3’s reasoning mode consumes a substantial number of tokens even on relatively simple tasks, with one test generating 13,241 reasoning tokens for a basic SVG image-generation request, costing roughly 25 cents per query.

Moonshot’s Kimi chatbot has become one of the most widely used consumer AI products in China, and the company’s annualized recurring revenue exceeded $200 million as of April, driven by a combination of paid subscriptions and API usage. The company’s investor base includes several major names in Chinese technology, including Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, HongShan (formerly known as Sequoia China), ZhenFund and 5Y Capital, with total funding raised across four rounds standing at approximately $3.77 billion. Bloomberg reported in June that Moonshot was seeking a new funding round valuing the company at roughly $30 billion, an almost eightfold increase from its $4 billion valuation in late 2024.

Beyond its use inside China, Moonshot’s models have already gained traction among Silicon Valley developers. Cursor, the AI-assisted coding startup, has used earlier versions of Kimi to help power its Composer 2 coding agent. DoorDash chief technology officer Andy Fang said in an early July social media post that the company delegates “lower-level work to Kimi K2.6.” Thinking Machines also used Kimi K2.5 to help generate early post-training data for its Inkling model, released July 15.

The release of K3 coincided with, and appeared to intensify, a broader selloff already underway in global chip and technology stocks. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company shares fell 7% Friday despite the company reporting a 77% jump in quarterly operating profit, while SoftBank, often viewed by investors as a proxy for OpenAI given its investment stake, fell 9%. Z.ai, a Chinese AI startup that has released a competing model to Kimi, plunged nearly 30% in Hong Kong trading. In the U.S., the Nasdaq 100 fell roughly 1% as of 2 p.m. Eastern time Friday, Nvidia shares dropped 1.2%, briefly ceding its position as the world’s most valuable company to Apple, and Meta shares fell more than 2.4%.

Technology analyst Patrick Moorhead pushed back on characterizing the market reaction as strictly performance-driven, attributing much of the response instead to broader political tensions surrounding Chinese AI development. In an email to CNBC, Moorhead said, “There’s a big debate in Washington DC about whether the U.S. should use Chinese open source models and if U.S. companies should enable the Chinese to use their models,” adding, “The latter is ironic as the Chinese seem to be doing fine with their models.”

K3’s release marks a notable comeback for Moonshot, whose market position had eroded significantly over the prior 18 months following the meteoric rise of rival Chinese lab DeepSeek, whose earlier open-source model releases similarly rattled global markets and intensified competitive pressure across the AI industry. With full model weights set to be published July 27 and Moonshot pursuing a substantially higher valuation in ongoing funding talks, the release is expected to keep pressure on both Chinese and American AI labs as the global race to develop increasingly capable, cost-efficient open-weight models continues to accelerate.

The NatWest Growth Tracker Business Activity Index pegs the region as one of the best performers in the UK

A survey that tracks the health of the region’s private sector companies has remained in growth despite a fallback in activity in June.

The NatWest North East Growth Tracker Business Activity Index, which measures month-on-month changes in the region’s manufacturing and service sectors, declined to 50.8 in June, having stood at 53.8 in May. Scores above 50 denote a growing economy.

The North East outperformed the UK as a whole, however, where activity fell in June. Among the 12 monitored UK regions and nations, only London and the South East recorded better trends for activity.

Within the survey, business confidence strengthened in the North East in June, with optimism regarding output over the coming year rising to a three-month high. Cost pressures receded, according to businesses responding to the survey, while the rate of input price inflation eased to its lowest since February.

But there were concerns at job losses, which came at the steepest levels since November last year and were sharper than the UK average.

Malcolm Buchanan, chair of the NatWest North regional board, said: “The North East saw growth momentum falter as the first half of 2026 drew to a close, according to the latest NatWest Growth Tracker. New business placed with private sector firms increased for the seventh month running, but the rate of growth slowed to a fractional pace that was the weakest over this period and contributed to a much slower rise in overall business activity.

“Nonetheless, the region remained one of only three monitored UK areas to record growth in June, alongside London and the South East. This relative resilience helped support confidence among private sector firms, with optimism about the year ahead rising to a three-month high.

“Companies also reported a further easing in cost pressures at the end of the second quarter. The rate of input cost inflation fell to its lowest since February, though it remained high by historical standards. Firms continued to raise their own charges at a marked, albeit softer, pace as they sought to protect margins from elevated cost burdens.

“At the same time, businesses moved to protect cashflow by controlling expenditure elsewhere. Employment fell at the sharpest pace since November last year, underlining the pressure firms continue to face even as demand remains in positive territory.”

The release of the growth tracker has come ahead of some key economic data showing the state of the regional economy. Unemployment and labour market data will be published next Tuesday, including regional data, followed by national inflation data the next day.