An artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI “infiltrated” an Australian government website in June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said.

The agent gained unauthorised accessed to a statistics portal containing “non-sensitive Medicare information”, Albanese told a news conference at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Medicare refers to Australia’s universal healthcare scheme. The breach is among the first publicly reported AI-led hacks of a government website in the world.

OpenAI said it only became aware of the incident in August “during an ongoing review of OpenAI misaligned model activity”, and informed Australian officials on 10 September.

While the review is ongoing, a spokesperson for the AI firm said that it is not believed that any patient records were accessed.

Albanese said the breach occurred in June this year, but OpenAI only informed government officials via email on 10 September.

The prime minister said he spoke directly to CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman to say that it had taken “too long” to inform authorities and “to express Australia’s extreme concern about this incident”.

He said the agent accessed both public and non-public files and a “forensic investigation” is under way to find out if other government systems were affected.

The investigation will be led by the Australian Signals Directorate, the country’s cybersecurity agency.

The public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal is administered by Services Australia, the main hub to redirect users to government services.

He told reporters: “No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing.

“Evidence currently available is there is no broader compromise to the Services Australia network. Nonetheless this situation is obviously unacceptable.”

Earlier this year, OpenAI revealed a group of AI agents it had been testing had escaped from their controls and secretly worked together to hack another tech firm named Hugging Face.

Half of the new intake expected to be through apprenticeships, graduate programmes, internships and trainee roles

Construction behemoth Balfour Beatty has unveiled plans to expand its UK headcount by 2,000 over the next two years.

The firm said its workforce will grow to 16,000, a 30% rise in four years, as it scales up to deliver the nation’s next generation of critical infrastructure.

Philip Hoare, group chief executive at Balfour Beatty, said: “Britain’s infrastructure ambitions will only be realised if the country has the capacity, capability and skills to deliver them.

“Expanding our workforce by 2,000 is a clear vote of confidence in the market. It shows the scale of opportunity ahead and our commitment to investing in the people, projects and technical expertise that will power Britain’s future.”

The company said early-career talent will form a significant part of the recruitment drive, noting that apprentices, graduates, interns and trainees already account for roughly 9% of Balfour Beatty’s UK workforce.

Approximately half of the new recruits are anticipated to come through routes including apprenticeships, graduate programmes, internships and trainee positions.

Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said: “This is exactly what we want to see – a big British company backing Britain and creating 2,000 more jobs.

“We’ve got a huge amount of work to do to get growth in every postcode over the next few years.

“So having British firms investing in people here, and training up the next generation to do those jobs, is really good news.”

Balfour Beatty has bases across the UK, including its Regional Civils arm in Warrington and Power Transmission & Distribution hubs in Derby and Motherwell.

Taylor Swift announced Wednesday that she is releasing an expanded edition of her album “The Life of a Showgirl,” featuring four brand-new tracks, just one day after revealing a new single that had already generated significant buzz among fans.

The 14-time Grammy winner shared the news in a post on Instagram, unveiling the expanded edition, titled “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore,” alongside an updated cover image showing her wearing a short, glitzy gold dress set against a stage-like background, with the new title overlaid in glittering gold lettering. The expanded release is set to arrive Friday, September 25, and is available for pre-order now.

Swift explained the origins of the new material by describing a celebratory trip taken with her longtime collaborators following the original album’s record-breaking debut. “About a year ago, you guys did a truly unfathomable thing. Something that completely blew my mind… You gave The Life of a Showgirl the biggest first week for an album in history,” Swift wrote in her caption alongside the new cover. “I took a trip to Sweden to celebrate with Max [Martin] and Shellback, my two collaborators on this album. Really we just wanted to reflect and take in how grateful we were for the moment we were in, but there was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: We wrote more songs.”

The four new tracks on “The Encore” include “Patient Zero,” the single Swift announced Tuesday, alongside three additional songs titled “Pink Clouding,” “Babylon” and “Cleveland!” The final track’s title nods to the hometown of Swift’s husband, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, who grew up in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Swift said the new songs were written with her fans specifically in mind, framing the expanded release as a direct response to the reception the original album received. “I hope you love them, because they were born out of pure gratitude for your exuberance for and celebration of the album we made,” she wrote to close her announcement.

The expanded edition follows closely on the heels of Swift’s announcement of “Patient Zero” on Tuesday, which itself came with its own promotional rollout. In that earlier post, Swift wrote, “I’ve been impatiently waiting to tell you that my brand new single ‘Patient Zero’ will be out on September 25 (!!!!!!!!!!!!) and it’s available to pre-order now on my website for 24 hours,” accompanying the caption with a photo of herself in a black turtleneck leaning against a wall. Alongside the single, Swift offered fans three collector’s edition CDs, standard, acoustic and piano versions, each featuring double-sided covers and available for a limited 24-hour window or while supplies lasted through her website, with two different images tied to the “Opalite” theme included with each CD.

Ahead of Tuesday’s single announcement, Swift had quietly updated her Instagram bio to read, “And, baby, that’s sh0w business f0r y0u,” using stylized zeroes in place of certain letters, while also launching a countdown clock on her website. Fans additionally noticed that Swift appeared to have influenced her own presence on Spotify, where different animations began appearing on the platform’s play and pause button depending on which of her albums a listener had selected.

The original version of “The Life of a Showgirl” was released in October 2025 and went on to post the largest first-week sales total for an album in history, according to Swift’s own account of the milestone in her Wednesday announcement.

Swift’s flurry of recent announcements comes just ahead of another major honor. She is set to receive the first-ever Artist Director Honors at the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards on September 27, a new award category described in a press release as recognizing “groundbreaking music artists whose work behind the camera has expanded the possibilities of music video and advanced the art of visual storytelling.”

The announcements also follow a widely discussed cameo appearance Swift made during the 2026 Emmy Awards broadcast on September 14, when she appeared in a pre-recorded sketch alongside host Mariska Hargitay and cast members from “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” a segment fans and commentators noted was packed with references and Easter eggs. During that appearance, Swift recited a cryptic string of words, “Saccharide. Aries. From the vineyard. North or south,” a moment that fueled fan speculation online in the days that followed, ahead of this week’s confirmed single and album announcements.

With “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore” set for release Friday alongside the previously announced single “Patient Zero,” and Swift’s Artist Director Honors ceremony following just two days later at the MTV Video Music Awards, the pop star is entering an unusually concentrated stretch of major public moments, continuing a pattern of tightly sequenced announcements and surprises that has become a hallmark of how she rolls out new music to her fan base.

Price controls are always a bad idea. They create shortages, profit losses, and eventually much higher prices when the controls are finally lifted. So this administration idea of a diesel export ban, is a problem if it really goes through.

Think of it this way, President Trump would be taking some number of barrels per day of diesel fuel off the market. That’s what a ban is. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the American Petroleum Institute says that of the 8 million barrels of diesel fuel that is traded by sea, America supplies about 1.5 million barrels of diesel, that’s about 20 percent. 

So an export ban would take a big chunk off the market. And that will jack up even higher international prices. Because it’s an internationally traded commodity. There’s really no way around it. Here’s another problem with the diesel export ban. Diesel comes from export production. You can’t just stop producing diesel. If you enforce this ban, presumably it would end drilling and production of oil, because diesel is a distillate of oil.

Yet that includes another distillate of oil which is gasoline. If you knock down crude oil runs, in order to clear the 1.5 million barrels of oil a day diesel surplus that we currently export, gasoline production would fall by roughly between 550,000 and 750,000 barrels of oil per day. Some oil companies think that would translate roughly to a 30 cent hike in the price of a gallon of gasoline, which is not what we want.

So in other words, cutting back diesel for export, means cutting back oil, which means cutting back gasoline, which means shortages of gasoline and higher gasoline prices. Not to speak of the world price of diesel going up. So it would be pretty self defeating. By the way the Northeast will feel the brunt of this, because the Northeast and East Coast import all manner of fuel from overseas. So they’d get slaughtered. Maybe all those climate change greenies deserve it.

Now as I understand it, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent all oppose this diesel export ban. On the other hand, Vice President Vance and some Republican senators favor the ban. The president may be leaning toward it, but I hear the final decision has not yet been made.

Back to the economics of it, we need to increase the nation’s refining capacity everywhere. We need more crude oil, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, all of it. The administration has tried hard to streamline permitting rules and regulations, which is the key, but these things take time.

There may be 65 billion barrels of oil reserves in Venezuela, but lifting that is going to take time. Meanwhile, somehow I have a better solution to the diesel and oil price problem, and that is regime change in Iran, as the president hinted at in his historic United Nations speech yesterday.

And then, while we’re waiting for that, how about taking out the Houthis and reopening the Red Sea, that might get us another 2 million to 3 million barrels of oil coming to market. Getting rid of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is a lot better policy than price controls. Just saying.

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HATTIESBURG, Miss. — Doctors are urging patients to get vaccinated against influenza before flu activity begins climbing this fall, warning that while most cases can be managed at home, the virus can create dangerous openings for life-threatening complications like pneumonia in more severe cases.

Dr. Samuel Twedt of the Hattiesburg Clinic said most patients can manage flu symptoms without needing to see a doctor, but stressed the importance of recognizing when symptoms cross into more serious territory. “Most cases of the flu can be pushed through with Tylenol, Motrin and aggressive fluids like water or Gatorade for electrolytes. But if you’re feeling very, very ill, having difficulty breathing or feeling very faint, I advise you to be seen,” Twedt said.

Twedt identified pneumonia as one of the most serious risks tied to influenza infection, explaining the underlying mechanism by which the flu virus can leave patients vulnerable to secondary bacterial infections. “The influenza virus can just wreak havoc on your immune system. It creates this huge immune cascade that weakens your immune system temporarily. Opportunistic bacteria like Mycoplasma, Streptococcus and Klebsiella, among a whole bunch of others, can use that opportunity to cause an infection. Because your immune system is already weakened, it can be very, very aggressive and life-threatening,” Twedt said. “Pneumonia is the most common cause of death from influenza.”

Twedt and other doctors are encouraging patients to get vaccinated before flu cases begin rising in their communities, rather than waiting until the virus is already circulating widely.

That guidance comes as the country heads into the 2026-2027 flu season following an unusually severe prior year. The 2025-2026 season was driven in large part by a highly mutated influenza A(H3N2) subclade known as subclade K, which some doctors and media outlets referred to as a “super flu.” Doctor visits for flu-like illness during that season reached the highest levels recorded in more than 25 years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In response, federal regulators updated all three virus components of this year’s seasonal flu vaccines, with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommending changes on March 13 specifically aimed at improving protection against the subclade K strain that circulated so widely the previous season.

Predicting exactly how severe the coming season will be remains difficult, according to public health experts. “The only thing that’s predictable about influenza is it’s unpredictable,” said Dr. Daniel Jernigan, a former CDC director and contributing scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Albert Ko, a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, described forecasting flu severity as “a delicate art,” noting that researchers often look to flu activity in the Southern Hemisphere, where winter and flu season arrive earlier in the calendar year, with Australia frequently viewed as an early indicator of what the U.S. might experience in the months that follow.

Despite that uncertainty, public health officials remain unified in emphasizing vaccination as the single most effective tool available for reducing serious flu outcomes. Infectious disease expert Dr. William Schaffner described the purpose of annual flu vaccination in blunt terms, saying it is “designed to keep you out of the hospital, out of the intensive care unit, and out of the cemetery.” Vaccination has demonstrated measurable impact in recent seasons: flu vaccines are estimated to have prevented roughly 240,000 hospitalizations during the 2024-2025 season alone, with that protective effect concentrated primarily among adults aged 65 and older.

Even so, vaccination rates have continued to decline in recent years, according to some public health experts tracking the trend. One expert, identified in reporting as Thacker, said flu vaccine uptake fell below 50% last year, the lowest level recorded in many years. “We were under 50% protection last year, and that was the lowest it has been in many years. Fewer and fewer people are taking the flu shot,” Thacker said, adding that limited access is not the primary barrier. “Believe me, there are tons of places to get the flu shot, so accessibility isn’t really the issue. It’s the issue of choosing not to get it.” Thacker also noted that 179 children died from the flu during the prior season, according to CDC data.

The CDC’s current guidance calls for annual flu vaccination for everyone 6 months of age and older, with most people advised to get vaccinated in September or October, though vaccination remains recommended throughout the season for as long as flu viruses continue circulating. Adults 65 and older are specifically advised to preferentially receive a high-dose, recombinant, or adjuvanted vaccine formulation when available, given their heightened risk for severe complications. Vaccination is considered especially important for people at higher risk of serious flu complications, including young children, pregnant women, adults over 65, and people with chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease or asthma, along with those who live with or care for individuals in those higher-risk groups.

For the 2024-2025 season, the CDC estimated a total burden of 51 million flu-related illnesses nationally, 23 million medical visits, 710,000 hospitalizations and 45,000 deaths, a season the agency classified as high severity based on its standard assessment criteria. With flu activity in the United States typically beginning to rise in October and peaking between December and February, doctors say the coming weeks represent the most important window for patients to get vaccinated before this season’s flu activity begins accelerating in earnest.