BALTIMORE — O.J. Brigance, the Baltimore Ravens Super Bowl champion who became one of the most inspirational figures in franchise history during a 19-year battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, has died at age 56, the team announced Monday.

Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti confirmed Brigance’s death in a statement that reflected the depth of grief across the organization. “We are devastated by the awful news that we have lost O.J. Brigance,” Bisciotti said. “O.J. was a beloved legend, mentor and man to everyone who was fortunate enough to know him. His infectious smile and the inspirational way he lived and played endeared him to everyone he touched, both inside our building and across this city. This is a tremendously sad day for Baltimore.”

Brigance was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, in 2007 at age 37, when doctors told him he likely had two to five years left to live. He defied that prognosis for nearly two decades, becoming a defining symbol of resilience within the Ravens organization even as the progressive neurodegenerative disease gradually took away his physical abilities.

Ravens executive vice president Ozzie Newsome, who worked closely with Brigance for years, described him as one of the most genuine people he had ever known. “He was a hero to this city long before his courageous battle with ALS and became an even greater inspiration in the way he faced it with the same fight, faith and grace he brought to the football field,” Newsome said in a statement. “O.J.’s service to our community, to the Ravens and the fight for a cure for ALS will never be forgotten. He was and always will be a beloved mentor and man. With heartfelt sorrow, we extend our deepest sympathies to Chanda and the Brigance family.”

Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta, reflecting on 22 years of friendship with Brigance, said he never once witnessed Brigance express anger or frustration over his diagnosis throughout their long relationship. “O.J. inspired us with humility, faithfulness, determination, competitiveness and love for humankind,” DeCosta said. “We never once saw O.J. angry or frustrated by his disease. Instead, we all witnessed a hero who influenced so many people through his unwavering optimism and grit.”

Brigance, a Houston native, began his professional football career with the Canadian Football League’s Baltimore Stallions, helping the team win the 1995 Grey Cup championship. He later transitioned to the NFL, joining the Ravens as a free agent linebacker in 2000, where he became a standout special teams player during Baltimore’s Super Bowl XXXV championship season, recording the game’s first tackle on the opening kickoff. Following a seven-year NFL playing career that concluded with the New England Patriots in 2002, Brigance returned to Baltimore in 2004 to join the Ravens’ front office, eventually leading the team’s player engagement and development department.

His work in that role earned him significant recognition from the league itself. Brigance received the NFL’s Best Overall Player Development Program award for two consecutive years, in 2005 and 2006, along with the Most Outstanding Internship Program Award in 2005 and the Outstanding Continuing Education Program Award in 2007.

Following his ALS diagnosis, Brigance and his wife, Chanda, established the Brigance Brigade Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising money and awareness in the fight against ALS. The foundation has worked to improve quality of life for people living with the disease and their families, providing access to support services, necessary equipment and resource guidance for those navigating a similarly difficult diagnosis.

Former Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, who worked alongside Brigance for years, often referred to him as “the strongest man in the organization,” and remembered him as a man of deep faith who found purpose through extraordinarily difficult circumstances “through the great glory of God,” according to tributes shared following his death.

Brigance’s impact extended well beyond the Ravens’ coaching staff and front office, reaching players who credited him directly with shaping their careers and character. When former middle linebacker Ray Lewis received the Lamar Hunt Trophy after Baltimore’s AFC championship win in January 2013, he turned to Brigance and told him, “You’re my greatest motivation.” Former Ravens safety Ed Reed similarly acknowledged Brigance’s influence during his 2019 Pro Football Hall of Fame induction speech, saying, “You’re the reason why I’m here, man. You’re the reason I became a great professional.”

Tributes to Brigance extended well beyond the Ravens organization following news of his death. Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner, a former teammate, shared an emotional message reflecting on Brigance’s character. “One of my favorite teammates ever!! They don’t build them like this man very often & when I say that, I don’t mean his physical stature but his character, heart & integrity! I will miss you, brother!” Warner wrote.

Throughout his years living with ALS, Brigance remained a visible and engaged presence around the Ravens organization, frequently attending games and practices while navigating the team facility in a motorized wheelchair, consistently greeting those around him with what colleagues repeatedly described as an infectious smile despite the physical toll of his disease.

The Ravens organization, in a statement announcing his death, emphasized that Brigance’s legacy would continue to shape both the franchise and the broader Baltimore community for years to come. “O.J. will be remembered for his service to our community, to the Ravens and to the fight to find a cure for ALS. With heavy hearts, the Ravens organization extends our deepest condolences to Chanda and the entire Brigance family,” the team said.

Brigance is survived by his wife, Chanda, and their family, who have continued the work of the Brigance Brigade Foundation alongside him throughout his nearly two-decade fight with ALS. As tributes continue to arrive from across the NFL and the Baltimore community, Brigance’s legacy is likely to endure not only through his contributions on the football field, including his role on the franchise’s first Super Bowl championship team, but through the ongoing work of the foundation he and his wife built to support others facing the same disease that ultimately claimed his life after nearly 20 years of what colleagues and teammates alike consistently described as unmatched courage and grace.

A California helicopter manufacturer whose R66 helicopter was selected for use in a major new U.S. Army flight training program said the effort could support hundreds of American jobs.

Robinson Helicopter Company, based in Torrance, California, will provide its R66 turbine helicopter for the Army’s Flight School Next program as part of a team led by M1 Support Services.

The program will train the next generation of Army helicopter pilots at Fort Rucker, Alabama. The R66 was selected as the team’s aircraft for the Army’s Initial Entry Rotary-Wing training program.

“Robinson didn’t just check the boxes; it blew past them, beating out competitors on price, performance and resiliency,” company spokesperson Erica Dumas told FOX Business.

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Robinson Helicopter Company will provide its R66 turbine helicopter for the Army’s Flight School Next program as part of a team led by M1 Support Services. (Robinson Helicopter Company)

Robinson Helicopter CEO David Smith said the selection shows that an American-made aircraft can compete with foreign-built products in a critical military training role.

“This is a really powerful demonstration of American-made displacing what are currently foreign products that occupy this very important role of training Army aviators,” Smith told FOX Business. 

Smith said the program will create demand for maintenance workers, instructors and overhaul specialists in Alabama while also driving additional work at Robinson’s California factory.

“There’s an opportunity for us to both sell these aircraft and the parts that feed them for 26 years,” he said, adding that future exports to allied nations could help create “likely hundreds of jobs over time” in Torrance, California.

Robinson says the R66 is 100% U.S.-designed and manufactured, with more than 85% of its parts produced at the company’s vertically integrated Torrance facility.

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Robinson President and CEO David Smith said the selection shows that an American-made aircraft can compete with foreign-built products. (FOX Business)

“We absolutely have the skills, the resources to design, the resources to innovate, and ultimately to make the hard manufactured products that build these products,” Smith said.

The company says the R66 has the lowest acquisition price and direct operating cost of any turbine helicopter in its class over the past decade while giving Army pilots experience with modern avionics, autopilot systems and night-vision capabilities.

Smith said those savings could allow the Army to redirect funding toward other priorities.

“One of the great benefits of this project is it will help the Army allocate more funding to some of the more significant projects they have [in] the future,” he said.

The contract also advances Robinson’s expansion into defense.

“This is a way for us to contribute directly to an area of great need,” he said.

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The contract also advances Robinson’s expansion into defense. (Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Smith also argued that rebuilding America’s defense industrial base will require renewed emphasis on skilled trades.

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“We need to rebuild that first, the appetite and the interest of the workforce to go into these very important skilled areas and make it a fun and cool business to be in again,” Smith said.

Robinson also plans to reinvest proceeds from the program into research and development, including unmanned aircraft and other defense technologies.

“I’m an engineer first,” he said. “And so my mindset is, how can we continue to use wins like this to reinvest in the business and grow in the years to come?”

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More than one-third of English-language web pages published since ChatGPT’s public debut in November 2022 show signs of having been written or substantially edited by artificial intelligence, according to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center, offering one of the most concrete measures yet of how quickly generative AI has reshaped online content.

To conduct the study, Pew researchers used the Common Crawl web archive to collect nearly half a million English-language web pages spanning roughly the past five years, beginning a couple of years before ChatGPT’s release. Researchers then ran the text of those pages through an AI detection tool called Open Pangram to assess how many were likely written or heavily edited by artificial intelligence, according to Pew’s own published findings.

In a random sample of 10,000 web pages collected in July 2026, approximately 10% showed what Pew described as “significant signs of AI authorship.” However, that headline figure includes a substantial share of older pages published well before AI writing tools existed and therefore could not possibly have been AI-generated. When researchers filtered out those older pages and focused exclusively on content published after ChatGPT’s release, the picture shifted dramatically: signs of AI authorship appeared in more than one-third, or 35%, of that more recent content, according to Pew’s report.

“In the July 2026 snapshot, signs of AI authorship can be found in over one-third of pages published after ChatGPT was released,” Pew wrote in its analysis, adding that the finding aligns with other research indicating that a large share of recently published internet content has likely been written or substantially edited using AI tools.

The distribution of AI-authored content across the web is far from uniform. According to Pew, commercial .com domains showed signs of AI authorship at roughly 10 times the rate found on .edu or .gov domains, both of which registered around 1%. Nonprofit .org domains fell in between, with an AI-authorship rate of about 4.6%, according to Pew’s data. That gap has widened considerably since ChatGPT’s initial release; Pew noted that when the chatbot first launched, the kinds of linguistic patterns that can signal AI authorship appeared at broadly similar rates across the major top-level domains, meaning the current divergence reflects a meaningful shift in how different types of websites have adopted AI writing tools over the past several years.

TechCrunch, which reviewed Pew’s findings, cautioned that AI-detection tools such as Pangram are not infallible and can occasionally misclassify genuinely human-written pages as AI-generated. Even so, the outlet noted that “at scale, the data is likely at least directionally correct,” suggesting the overall trend captured by the study reflects a genuine and substantial shift in online authorship patterns rather than a statistical artifact.

Beyond the headline percentage, Pew’s research identified specific stylistic markers that have become increasingly common across web content and are frequently associated with AI-generated writing. According to the study, the use of em dashes, Oxford commas and certain characteristic phrasing patterns, including constructions such as “it’s not X, it’s Y,” have all become noticeably more frequent in recently published web content, further supporting the broader finding that AI tools are playing an increasingly significant role in how online text gets produced.

Digital Trends, in its coverage of the study, emphasized an important nuance in how the findings should be interpreted. The outlet noted that Pew’s research does not claim one-third of web pages were written entirely by AI with no human involvement, but rather that the pages showed indicators suggesting AI played some role in the content’s production. Modern online writing increasingly blends human and machine contributions in varying proportions, the outlet explained, with writers frequently using AI tools to generate initial drafts, rewrite specific sections, correct grammar, expand shorter pieces into longer articles, or produce search-optimized versions of existing content, meaning a single published page can reflect a complex mixture of human and AI authorship rather than falling cleanly into one category or the other.

The findings have already drawn attention from the digital advertising industry, given the significant overlap between AI-generated content and the broader ecosystem of low-quality, high-volume web content sometimes referred to as “Made-for-Advertising,” or MFA, sites. According to B&T’s coverage of the study, industry observers are urging advertisers and publishers to shift their focus away from simply determining whether a given piece of content was created by AI, and toward evaluating whether that content delivers genuine value to readers regardless of how it was produced. The publication noted that generative AI has dramatically reduced both the cost and time required to produce large volumes of low-value content at scale, a dynamic that has significant implications for how digital advertising inventory gets evaluated and purchased going forward.

Separate research cited alongside Pew’s findings has reached broadly similar conclusions using different methodologies. According to Shelly Palmer’s coverage of related Stanford research, researchers there found that 35% of new websites created since 2022 were AI-generated or AI-assisted, drawing on Internet Archive data to track how the composition of the web has shifted in the years following ChatGPT’s launch, a finding that closely mirrors Pew’s own 35% figure for post-ChatGPT content despite the two studies relying on different underlying data sources and detection methods.

Digital Trends pointed to a notable irony embedded within the broader trend the research documents. AI companies require enormous volumes of human-created text to train their language models, the outlet observed, even as those same AI systems are now responsible for producing an increasing share of the content that eventually gets published online, raising longer-term questions about a web increasingly characterized by humans writing content intended for machines to read, machines producing content intended for human readers, and, potentially, future AI models eventually training on content that earlier AI systems helped generate.

As generative AI tools continue to become more sophisticated and more deeply embedded in everyday content production workflows, researchers, publishers and advertisers alike are likely to continue closely tracking how the balance between human and AI-assisted authorship on the web evolves in the years ahead, particularly given how dramatically the share of AI-influenced content has grown in just the roughly three and a half years since ChatGPT’s initial public release in November 2022.

By Ewa Manthey, Commodities Strategist

Fiscal risks give gold fresh momentum

Gold has climbed from around $4,000/oz in mid-July to around $4,600/oz, returning to levels last seen in May.

The latest move followed the US

Some CenturyLink customers reported ongoing internet and phone connectivity problems in recent days, though independent outage-tracking services have largely characterized the telecommunications provider’s network as operating normally, illustrating the kind of mixed signals that often accompany scattered or regional service disruptions.

CenturyLink, which offers internet, television, phone and home security services across 37 states, provides its television offering either through satellite partner DirecTV or through its own internet-based Prism TV platform. The company has grown substantially through a series of major acquisitions over the years, absorbing Embarq in 2009, Qwest in 2010, Savvis in 2012 and Level 3 Communications in 2017, expanding its network footprint into one of the larger telecommunications infrastructure providers in the United States. The company now operates under the corporate name Lumen Technologies, though it continues offering residential and business services under the CenturyLink brand in many markets.

According to reporting from Sunday Guardian Live, CenturyLink customers across the U.S. have continued reporting internet and connectivity problems in recent days, with users flagging outages, slow connections and general difficulty getting online. The outlet noted that current outage-monitoring services have shown a mixed picture of the situation: StatusGator listed CenturyLink as operational overall, even while recording dozens of individual user-submitted outage reports over a 24-hour period. As of that reporting, there was no confirmed evidence of a broad, nationwide CenturyLink outage, even as scattered individual complaints continued to surface.

Other independent monitoring tools have offered similarly reassuring assessments of CenturyLink’s overall network status. According to Outage.report, CenturyLink appeared to be functioning normally as of its most recent check, with reported complaint volume falling within the typical range expected for that time of day. The service noted that its most recently recorded incident affecting CenturyLink had occurred more than a year earlier, with no additional incidents logged over the trailing 12-month period based on available monitoring data. Similarly, IsDown reported receiving zero user-submitted issue reports for CenturyLink over a recent 24-hour monitoring window, while ISPDown.com’s tracking likewise showed zero reported outages during a separate 24-hour check earlier this month.

Entireweb’s status tracker offered a slightly more granular picture, noting that CenturyLink had received three user reports over a 24-hour period during a recent check, though none of those reports had come in during the final hour before the assessment was conducted, suggesting any reported issues at that time were relatively limited in scope and had not escalated further.

Despite that broadly reassuring pattern across most monitoring services, individual customer complaints posted to public forums paint a more frustrated picture of periodic, localized service problems. According to comments compiled by UpDownRadar, customers in various states have described extended outages, difficulty reaching customer support, and recurring connectivity issues requiring frequent equipment resets. One user described enduring what they characterized as more downtime than uptime, while another reported an outage that persisted for multiple days without a clear explanation from the company regarding its cause. Such individual, longer-running complaints are common on outage-tracking forums and often reflect localized infrastructure issues affecting specific neighborhoods or service areas rather than problems with CenturyLink’s broader network.

StatusGator’s more detailed incident history for CenturyLink shows a pattern of periodic, relatively short-duration outages scattered throughout the year. According to the service’s records, CenturyLink experienced an internet service outage lasting approximately six hours and 27 minutes in early July, a separate 58-minute service outage in June, a 13-minute internet connectivity disruption later that same month, and a roughly one-hour outage in May. None of those incidents, according to StatusGator, were ever officially acknowledged by CenturyLink through a public statement, a pattern consistent with how many internet service providers handle smaller, regional outages that do not rise to the level of a company-wide announcement.

CenturyLink’s network carries particular significance beyond individual residential and business customers, given the company’s role in supporting critical telecommunications infrastructure across multiple states. According to TechCrunch, CenturyLink experienced a major outage in the past that disrupted 911 emergency call services across several states after a significant disruption at one of the company’s data centers. That outage began shortly after noon Eastern time on a Thursday and caused significant disruption to 911 call centers that extended into the following day, with the company confirming that all consumer services affected by the incident, including both voice and 911 services, had been fully restored by that Friday evening, more than a day after the disruption first began. CenturyLink at the time did not disclose the specific underlying cause of the outage beyond describing it broadly as an issue involving a “network element.” TechCrunch noted that CenturyLink serves as one of the largest telecommunications providers in the country, supplying internet and phone backbone infrastructure to major cellular carriers, including AT&T and Verizon, underscoring how disruptions to CenturyLink’s core network can potentially ripple outward to affect customers of other carriers relying on its underlying infrastructure.

Regulatory records have also documented individual customer complaints regarding CenturyLink service disruptions over time. According to a complaint report filed with Utah’s Division of Public Utilities, one customer reported an extended phone service outage in December 2025 that the company initially attributed to a wet line issue before the service went out again shortly afterward, reportedly due to a fire; the customer’s complaint was not formally resolved until January 2026, illustrating how individual service disruptions can sometimes take considerable time to fully resolve even after being reported to regulatory authorities.

Given the discrepancy between scattered individual complaints and the largely operational readings recorded by most independent monitoring services, any recent reports of CenturyLink problems most likely reflect localized or intermittent issues rather than a broad, company-wide outage. Customers experiencing persistent difficulty with CenturyLink internet, phone or TV service are generally advised to first attempt basic troubleshooting steps, including power-cycling their modem or router, before assuming a wider service-area disruption is underway, and can additionally use CenturyLink’s own official outage troubleshooting tool to check whether a known issue has been identified affecting their specific location. As of this report, CenturyLink had not issued a public statement addressing any specific, ongoing service disruption beyond the routine, generally unacknowledged pattern of shorter regional outages that outage-tracking services have continued to document throughout the year.