Tropical Storm Milton, currently in the Gulf of Mexico, has strengthened throughout the weekend and is expected to become a hurricane later Sunday, according to an advisory posted by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) on Sunday morning at 9 a.m. EST.

The NHC stated that a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) aircraft showed Milton gaining strength, and there is an increased “risk of life-threatening impacts” for parts of the Florida West Coast.

Currently, a “Tropical Storm Watch” is in effect for the coast of Mexico from Celestun to Cancun, though interests remain throughout the Yucatán Peninsula, Florida, the Florida Keys, and the northwestern Bahamas.

Hurricane and storm surge watches could be required for portions of Florida later on in the day.

On Saturday afternoon, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a State of Emergency for 35 counties, writing that the storm will impact “communities still recovering from recent Major Hurricane Helene.” As of Sunday morning, that State of Emergency has been expanded to 51 counties.

In a press conference on Sunday morning about disaster preparedness, DeSantis focused on containing the effects of debris from Helene ahead of Milton’s arrival. He urged residents to  prioritize preparation throughout the rest of the weekend, Monday, and Tuesday. 

“We are using every resource at our disposal to help our local communities to get the debris out…this is all hands on deck,” DeSantis said. “This is not a good track for the state of Florida.”

As of early Sunday morning, Milton’s center was moving slowly eastward, and is forecast to quicken across the Gulf of Mexico and reach the west coast of Florida during the week. The storm’s winds increased to 60 m.p.h as its eye currently lies around 850 miles west southwest of Tampa, Florida.

Rainfall amounts are predicted to be 5 to 8 inches, with localized targets up to 12 inches through Wednesday night in Florida which bring “risk of flash, urban, and areal flooding.” Mexico is expected to get less rainfall—2 to 4 inches—across the Yucatán and Cuba. Surf swells are also expected across “much” of the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, which could cause “life-threatening surf and rip current conditions.”

Milton comes on the heels of an already extremely active hurricane season, especially for Florida.

Read More: Here’s What You Need to Know About Hurricane Kirk’s Expected Path

Less than two weeks ago, Florida’s west coast was hit hard by Hurricane Helene, which made landfall in the state as a Category 4 storm. The devastation and damage from Helene spread from Florida, with its death toll—per the the New York Times as of Friday afternoon—climbing to at least 225 people. The NHC is also tracking Hurricane Leslie and Hurricane Kirk, though the former currently poses no hazard to land, and the latter’s impact currently is contained to surf swells causing “rip current conditions.”

A policewoman has been killed and 10 others injured in a shooting in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, local authorities said.

The gunman was shot dead at the scene after what police described as a “suspected terror attack” at the city’s central bus station.

The victim has been named as Shira Chaya Suslik, a sergeant from Israel’s border police.

Israel’s ambulance service said medics are treating ten people for injuries, some of whom suffered gunshot wounds.

One of the injured is in a “moderate to serious” condition and four others are in a “moderate condition”, the ambulance service said.

They have been taken to the nearby Soroka Hospital.

Police said a preliminary investigation showed the gunman was “eliminated in a few seconds by the security forces” who were there.

Shortly after the attack, Israel’s Transport Minister Miri Regev called for the families of “terrorists” to be deported from the country.

“The time has come for a deterrent punishment to prevent the attacks on Israeli territory,” she wrote on X.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid described the attack as “severe and despicable”, writing on X “we must act hard against terrorism”.

Last week, seven people were killed in a shooting and knife attack in Tel Aviv after a gunman opened fire at members of the public in the Jaffa area.

Israeli authorities have said they are on high alert across the country ahead of the one year anniversary of Hamas’s assault on southern Israel on 7 October last year, which triggered the current Gaza war.

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The writer is a general partner of Air Street Capital and co-author of the State of AI report

Frontier artificial intelligence labs are unusual beasts. Unlike other businesses, a number of their founders believe their life’s work has the potential to end the world. Yet the vast sums needed to develop capable models forces them to demonstrate immediate commercial success.

OpenAI’s unconventional structure was a creative way of reconciling these tensions — on paper at least.

By combining a not-for-profit oversight board with a for-profit commercial entity that limited returns, it hoped to allow researchers concerned about existential risk to live under the same roof as their revenue-minded peers, safe in the knowledge that excessive financial returns could not override their mission to do good. 

Now, OpenAI is widely expected to dispense with its non-profit status. Investors who took part in its latest $6.6bn funding round can recover their money if the conversion does not take place.

This is unsurprising. Any founder or investor will tell you that no amount of corporate structural Jenga can glue together a team that is not aligned.

Last year, tensions between OpenAI’s non-profit board and Sam Altman, its co-founder and chief executive, led to Altman’s dramatic firing. He was rapidly rehired and the board has since been replaced. Several senior executives have left the company, including co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.

Altman is now free to arrange the company as he pleases. Without a profit cap, it should be even easier for OpenAI to raise the funds it needs.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit research organisation and created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019. At the Paris Peace Forum last November, Microsoft president Brad Smith even spoke admiringly of it — comparing it to Meta, where founder Mark Zuckerberg maintains control by holding shares with extra voting rights.

“Meta is owned by shareholders. OpenAI is owned by a non-profit,” said Smith. “Which would you have more confidence in? Getting your technology from a non-profit? Or a for-profit company that is entirely controlled by one human being?”

While it might seem surprising that investors like Microsoft were willing to accept this unusual structure, it was less of a sacrifice than it appears at first sight. First, OpenAI is not yet profitable so returns remain theoretical. Second, Microsoft was set to receive 75 per cent of OpenAI’s eventual profits until it recouped its initial investment and the subsequent profit cap did not kick in until a healthy return. Microsoft’s decision to back Altman also suggests that it believed one human being has substantial sway over that company too.

Still, any structural oddity can put off investors and OpenAI’s funding needs are vast. If it now adopts the public benefit corporation model employed by AI peers such as Anthropic and xAI, investors need not be concerned that lofty goals will get in the way of profits. While this requires companies to pursue social goals, there are no exacting standards needed to demonstrate compliance.

As generative AI products begin to drive billions of dollars a year in revenue, more teams are being forced to move away from philosophical debates and decide if they’re serious about commercialisation or not.

But there is no inherent conflict between running a straightforward for-profit company and building safe, robust technology. Reckless behaviour that regulates an industry out of existence endangers profits.

Companies like Google DeepMind and Anthropic have more conventional structures than OpenAI and have built substantial AI safety teams. In this industry, complicated corporate engineering achieves very little.

Sue Gray has quit her role as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, saying she “risked becoming a distraction”.

She had been caught up in rows over pay, after the BBC’s political editor revealed her salary was higher than Sir Keir’s, and donations from Lord Alli.

A Downing Street spokeswoman confirmed Ms Gray is to take up a new role as the PM’s envoy for nations and regions.

Labour said Ms Gray will be replaced by Morgan McSweeney, who was previously chief adviser to the PM and masterminded Labour’s election campaign.

Resigning, Ms Gray said it had been an honour to “play my part in the delivery of a Labour government” as Sir Keir’s chief of staff, both in opposition and in No 10.

“However in recent weeks it has become clear to me that intense commentary around my position risked becoming a distraction to the government’s vital work of change,” she said.

“It is for that reason I have chosen to stand aside, and I look forward to continuing to support the prime minister in my new role.”

Ms Gray has been subject to intense internal briefings and criticism in a government yet to reach its first 100 days in office, and it’s that level of dysfunction that has made it clear to Sir Keir that something needed to shift.

The recent Labour conference was overshadowed by controversy over clothing donations from Labour peer and longstanding donor Lord Waheed Alli, for whom Ms Gray reportedly authorised a temporary Downing Street pass after the election.

Much more damaging for her, though, was the level of anger towards her at the heart of government, indicated by high level sources being willing to leak the BBC confidential details of her salary.

One reason for that turbulence was special advisers in the team being asked to take pay cuts, on top of unhappiness about a lack of contracts after the election victory.

Now the prime minster has reshuffled his top team, not only by promoting Mr McSweeney, but also making four other appointments, most notably by hiring a strategic communications lead.

These announcements tell us publicly what people within government have been saying privately for weeks, with the perception that not enough of the right people were in the right roles or the right structures – and this, it is believed, contributed to missteps and unforced errors by the government.

The government’s list of planned announcements, known internally as “the grid”, had been under the command of Sue Gray, but will now be under the control of the No10 communications team, where some believe it should always have been.

The move follows private frustration voiced by several sources over Downing Street’s communication strategy, which has led to the appointment of James Lyons as a strategic communications lead.

Mr Lyons is a former political journalist at the Sunday Times and the Daily Mirror, who went on to work for the NHS and for TikTok, and he will now be in charge of plotting the government’s communications strategy three, six and nine months ahead.

Sir Keir now also has two new deputy chiefs of staff, Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson, and a new principal private secretary – a key civil service role for every prime minister – in Nin Pandit.

Ms Cuthbertson is a Labour veteran, who worked for Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, and has been promoted alongside Ms Alakeson, who worked as a civil servant before working for Labour in opposition and then in No 10.

Thanking Ms Gray for her work preparing Labour for government and in Downing Street, Sir Keir said he was “delighted” she would stay by his side in her new role, and added the shake-up showed his “determination to deliver”.

There is another role that will need to be filled in the coming months, because the most senior civil servant in the country, Simon Case, is stepping down as cabinet secretary at the end of the year, following 18 months of treatment for what is described as a neurological condition.

There had been reports of tension in No 10 between Mr Case and Ms Gray, who replaced him as the head of the Partygate inquiry after it emerged a gathering had taken place in his own office in December 2020.

Lord Gavin Barwell, who worked with Ms Gray in his role as chief of staff to former PM Theresa May, told Radio 4’s The World this Weekend that she had “made the right judgment” to stand down from her role.

“On a personal level I’ve worked closely with Sue…and she is an incredibly dedicated public servant and I feel for her, but I think she’s made the right judgment, which is when you’re in this kind of job once you become the story it becomes very hard to do the job,” he said.

The Conservative peer criticised the Number 10 operation put in place by Sir Keir since becoming prime minister, claiming “because Number 10 hasn’t been right we’ve had government by Treasury, too much doom and gloom.”

He added today was a “crucial moment for the prime minister – he’s got to get the second iteration of his No 10 operation right if he’s going to recover some of the political ground he’s lost over the last couple of months.”

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PwC’s new UK chief has launched an overhaul of its operations in the country, which will involve creating a standalone technology and artificial intelligence unit, in a move that bosses acknowledged could be “unsettling” for staff.

The Big Four accounting firm told employees last week that it would embark on a reorganisation of areas of the business affecting about 2,700 staff and partners, adding that it was part of its “new vision to become the pre-eminent firm”, according to a document seen by the Financial Times.

Under the plan, PwC will create a “digital delivery unit” focused on tech innovation, AI engineering, cloud and data. The firm will also overhaul parts of its consulting, deals, risk and tax practices by moving and merging certain functions, creating six new teams.

It is the biggest internal overhaul of PwC’s UK business in years. It also marks the latest reorganisation of a Big Four accounting firm as the sector seeks to adapt to changing client demand and grapple with how best to structure their fledgling AI advisory businesses, which partners see as a lucrative growth area.

The realignment will create upheaval for about a tenth of PwC’s UK workforce who will be transferred into new teams and service lines. Reorganisations within professional services firms can often lead to jostling for position within the business.

Laura Hinton, PwC’s UK managing partner who was a runner-up to Marco Amitrano in the race to lead the firm earlier this year, was dispatched to break the news to staff last week in a pre-recorded video message.

In the message, a transcript of which has been seen by the FT, Hinton said that the reorganisation was designed to “simplify” the business and “reduce duplication”. She added that it would “create scale and increase our market impact”.

“I know that, for some, change can feel energising, while for others it can feel unsettling,” Hinton said. “As we continue to adapt to our clients’ needs, it’s important that we all get used to being more agile, while continuing to support each other.”

Details of Amitrano’s broader strategy for the firm will be shared with its 1,000-plus partners at briefings on Wednesday, according to several people familiar with the matter.

It comes after a bruising period for the industry, with PwC last month reporting a drop in average partner pay as revenue growth slowed and higher costs and provisions for legal claims hit profits.

Rival Deloitte, which embarked on an overhaul of its global operations earlier this year to cut costs and reduce the group’s complexity, also posted a drop in average partner pay and weaker growth.

PwC’s reorganisation is not designed to cut costs and will not lead to new redundancies, according to a person briefed on the plan. The firm last year axed hundreds of jobs amid a market downturn and also launched a round of “silent lay-offs” in the UK earlier this year.

Hinton said the new digital delivery unit would house 900 “technologists” and work across the firm’s different service lines. It will also be given a “market-facing name”.

“These plans are a work in progress so, although we don’t have all of the detail or answers, we still wanted to share this now to be open and transparent,” she said.

Separately, the firm’s consulting leaders shut down speculation that PwC had plans to sell Strategy&, the firm’s strategy consulting arm, to Bain & Co, or any other buyer, telling staff that the industry rumours were not correct, according to an email seen by the FT.

In a statement to the FT, Amitrano said the changes “reflect our strategic focus on clients, technology and PwC’s global network. They will make it easier for us to collaborate and mobilise teams to better deliver for clients”. The changes will come into effect from January next year.