Vjetrenica, which means wind cave, is located in the south of Bosnia and Herzegovina, about 25 km (15 miles) north of the Adriatic town of Dubrovnik, where cruise liners in high season arrive daily with thousands of visitors

International News via Reuters:

As southern Bosnia sweltered in 40 degree Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), tourists have taken shelter in the constantly cool temperatures of the UNESCO-listed Vjetrenica cave.

Vjetrenica, which means wind cave, is located in the south of Bosnia and Herzegovina, about 25 km (15 miles) north of the Adriatic town of Dubrovnik, where cruise liners in high season arrive daily with thousands of visitors.

Numbers allowed to visit the cave are limited because of the sensitivity of the environment. Its constant 11 degrees Celsius (52 F) temperature year-round has made it a refuge for biodiversity as well as for humans.

Visitor groups of a maximum of 80 at a time explore some of the 7.5 km labyrinth of dark corridors and spacious chambers, where legend says fairies used to dance all the way down to the Adriatic Sea. 

“Initially when we are entering the cave, it’s a nice wind and then it’s very cold and it does not only give a cool for your eyes but also for your body,” said Ranjithkumar Rajendran, a neurobiologist based in Germany, who visited the cave with his family.

“It’s literally like free air conditioning,” said Mila Jankovic, a young Serb living in England.

Davor Bakovic, director of the Vjetrenica public institution that manages the cave, said increasingly intense summer heatwaves had meant that more than half of last year’s 21,000 visitors to the cave arrived during the summer months. 

He also said Vjetrenica was working with scientific organisations to try to protect the biodiversity of the cave, which has been home to hundreds of organisms.

The most famous is Proteus anguinus, the European blind cave salamander that can live up to 100 years.

Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic; editing by Barbara Lewis

Siemens said it was seeing strong demand for data centres used to process AI, as well as for AI-enabled software and devices used to control factories and buildings

International News via Reuters:

Siemens is benefiting from the AI investment boom, the German industrial group said on Thursday, reporting its highest-ever quarterly industrial profit and raising its full-year guidance.

Siemens said it was seeing strong demand for data centres used to process AI, as well as for AI-enabled software and devices used to control factories and buildings.

Sentiment was also improving from aerospace, defence and machine building customers, prompting the company to raise its full-year profit guidance after beating third-quarter expectations.

“Our sharp focus on driving industrial AI and our strong positioning in attractive markets give us a solid foundation for our success,” Chief Executive Roland Busch told reporters.

The company’s industrial AI products, which help customers speed up innovation and improve productivity, were driving growth, he added.

Siemens was also benefiting from strong demand from the electronics and semiconductor makers, many of which are expanding capacity to supply AI-related equipment and chips.

“There is tremendous demand for electronics,” Busch said. “They are building more and more factories and they need to be automated, which is where Siemens’ business comes in.”

Siemens was working with nine of the top 10 largest data centre providers, he said, while orders had increased by a triple-digit percentage in the first nine months of its 2026 fiscal year.

HIGHEST QUARTERLY INDUSTRIAL PROFIT

Companies like Siemens, Swiss rival ABB and France’s Schneider Electric are seeing surging demand as Big Tech races to add data centres, chips and electricity capacity for AI training and operation.

Capital spending by five of the largest technology companies, a key driver of the global data-centre boom, is expected to rise 75% in 2026 from more than $400 billion in 2025, the International Energy Agency said in April.

For the quarter to the end of June, Siemens reported industrial profit rising 25% to €3.52 billion ($4.09 billion), its highest quarterly figure, beating forecasts for €3.18 billion in a company-gathered consensus.

Revenue rose 7% to €20.79 billion, ahead of forecasts for €20.64 billion, while orders picked up 13% to €27.90 billion, also a quarterly record.

Siemens raised its full-year earnings per share for the year ending in September to €11.20 to €11.50, from €10.70 to €11.10 previously.

Its shares fell 5.2% in mid-morning trading. Up to Wednesday’s close, they had gained nearly 20% from the beginning of the year to hit a record high at €291.50 in the session.

The company also said it had agreed with German tax authorities on the treatment of Siemens Healthineers shares that it plans to distribute to investors following the planned spin-off, meaning the distribution would be tax-free for Siemens shareholders.

($1=0.8660 euros)

Reporting by John RevillEditing by Linda Pasquini, Miranda Murray and Alexander Smith

French brokerage Portzamparc said profitability was well above its expectations, helped by higher oil prices and contained operating costs

International News via Reuters:

French oil producer Maurel & Prom reported a 78% jump in its half-year net income to $191 million on Thursday, boosted by higher crude prices, and said crude exports from Venezuela were expected to normalise in the second half of 2026.

French brokerage Portzamparc said profitability was well above its expectations, helped by higher oil prices and contained operating costs.

The company resumed crude oil sales from Venezuela in June, after receiving a license from the U.S. to operate there in February, though uncertainty remains over the country’s contribution to the business and how the situation will unfold, an analyst told Reuters.

Group working-interest production averaged 37,890 barrels of oil equivalent per day in the first half of 2026, up 1% from a year ago and 3% from the second half of 2025.

Free cash flow rose 21% year-on-year to $77 million. The company also raised its ordinary dividend paid out in August by 15% to €0.38 per share, or around $90 million in total.

Separately, Canadian oil and gas producer Gran Tierra Energy said on Wednesday it had agreed to sell its oil operations in Colombia and Ecuador to Maurel & Prom for $1.33 billion, including debt, which would mark the French company’s entry into Ecuador and expand its oil portfolio in Colombia.

Shares of Maurel & Prom were up 2.3% at 0800 GMT.

Reporting by Zakarya Meliani and Jerome Terroy in Gdansk, editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak

The shakeup comes during a pivotal juncture for Google DeepMind: the flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch

International News via Reuters:

Google parent company Alphabet on Wednesday announced a leadership overhaul of its AI division, with AI chief Demis Hassabis leaving his main managerial role and several leaders of its Gemini model, including veteran engineer Jeff Dean, departing the company.

The shakeup comes during a pivotal juncture for Google DeepMind: the flagship version of its latest Gemini model remains unreleased despite a planned June launch, sparking investor and industry concerns that Google is falling behind its rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, each of which scooped up a star Google AI staffer this summer.

Shares of Alphabet fell 4% after the news.

Hassabis, a Nobel Prize recipient, will take the newly created title of Alphabet’s chief scientist and transition from being Google DeepMind CEO to being its chairman, he said in a memo to staff. He cited the closeness of artificial general intelligence (AGI), an advanced state of AI in which computers in essence become as smart as humans, as the impetus for his role change.

“(Hassabis) and I have been long discussing a role that allows him to put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI,” Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai said in a separate company-wide memo. “It’s work that is vitally important to Alphabet and humanity, and I can’t imagine a better person than Demis to do it.”

Koray Kavukcuoglu, the unit’s chief technology officer, will assume day-to-day responsibilities. He will hold the title of senior vice president, rather than CEO, of the business unit, in addition to his parallel role as Alphabet’s chief AI architect.

Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le — some of Google’s most famous and lauded AI and engineering leaders — left the company to launch a startup called Discovery Loop, which will focus on researching breakthroughs in machine learning, science and engineering. The startup is structured as a public benefit corporation.

Alphabet did not provide any details on what precipitated the moves or their coincident timing.

As Reuters detailed in a report last year, some people who have worked with Hassabis said he put scientific pursuits often ahead of making money for Google. The London-born scientist targeted a Nobel Prize as a business objective for DeepMind, three people familiar with the effort said. He worked against other efforts, insiders previously said, that could have meant new revenue for Alphabet or a better footing in the AI race. Allies inside Google rejected the notion that he was too focused on long-term science or gave short shrift to the business.

Senior leaders in Google Cloud, the company’s main AI revenue engine, cheered Kavukcuoglu’s takeover on Wednesday as welcome news for advancing commercialization efforts, according to a source with direct knowledge.

Kavukcuoglu had already been more directly involved than Hassabis in collaborations between DeepMind and Cloud, and his appointment as head of the AI lab was expected to steer Gemini towards a more product-oriented direction, the source said.

Hassabis will explore research and strategy related to societal impacts of AGI and will have few direct reports, an Alphabet spokesperson told Reuters.

In his company memo, Hassabis touted the “great progress” on Google’s AI models including an unreleased upgrade called Gemini 4.

He also said in his memo that he would spend more time with Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company that spun out of DeepMind, which he founded and remains CEO.

“I’ve always believed the No. 1 application of AI should be to improve human health,” he said. “It’s time for AI to prove its unequivocal value to the world, and what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer.”

BRAIN DRAIN

Dean and Hassabis were considered the two leading AI figures at Google for years before the field became the center of technological innovation.

Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 and continued to run the lab from London after selling it to Google for around $650 million in 2014.

Dean in 2011 co-founded Google Brain, a U.S.-based unit he led that researched AI separately from Hassabis’ team. By then, he was already a revered figure inside Google known for his collaboration with Ghemawat on many of the landmark infrastructure projects that still power the company today.

In 2023, after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT caught Google off guard, Pichai announced the merger of DeepMind and Google Brain into a new organization called Google DeepMind. Hassabis was appointed its CEO and Dean its chief scientist.

Until recently, Dean, Vinyals and Noam Shazeer had co-led development of Gemini. Under their stewardship, Google released Gemini 3 last November which the industry widely saw as closing the gap with leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

But subsequent advances from those rivals, as well as momentum for cheaper Chinese open-source models, have set Google on the defensive. At Google’s annual developer conference in May, Pichai and other Google leaders touted Gemini’s cost advantage, rather than its state-of-the-art capabilities.

Shazeer left for OpenAI in June, less than ⁠two years after Google paid billions to hire him and a team of his researchers away from the startup he led. The same week, senior research scientist John Jumper, who won a Nobel Prize alongside Hassabis ‌in 2024, said he would join Anthropic.

Vinyals, Le and former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever coauthored a 2014 research paper that became foundational to modern AI research by establishing the concept that scaling up data to “pre-train” AI systems would send them to new heights.

“Google has a deep bench of talent but losing these four individuals will leave a mark for some time. Getting innovation and execution back online is not going to be easy and losing key contributors won’t make it any better,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist for Zacks Investment Management.

Discovery Loop received investment from Google and also entered into a partnership with its cloud division to provide computing capacity.

Reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco, additional reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Lisa Shumaker

The school-bus-size object is the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that had launched a lunar lander from Firefly Aerospace toward the moon in January 2025

International News via Reuters:

A SpaceX rocket piece floating in space since last year smashed into the moon at high speed early Wednesday morning, joining the ranks of meteoroids, wayward spacecraft and other pieces of space junk that have bombarded the lunar surface for ages, astronomers confirmed.

The school-bus-size object is the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that had launched a lunar lander from Firefly Aerospace toward the moon in January 2025. Its predicted collision with the moon became a spectacle for astronomers and space enthusiasts eager to watch how it would unfold.

Weighing 4 metric tons (4,000 kg), the rocket body slammed into the moon around 2:35 a.m. ET (0635 GMT), travelling at 5,400 miles per hour (8,690 kph). None of the few spacecraft orbiting the moon were positioned to capture close-up images of the impact.

But at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope detected glimmers of light associated with the impact.

“We can confirm that the telescope detected spectral lines of sodium and lithium gas in the impact plume lasting for 5-10 minutes after impact,” an ESO spokesperson told Reuters.

The impact occurred near the moon’s terminator line, or the boundary of its shadow between the sunlit side and its far side. Similar to past objects that have hit the moon, the rocket stage kicked up a plume of lunar dust that was briefly illuminated by sunlight, but difficult to spot with the naked eye from Earth.

How the impact plume interacted with the sunlight allowed astronomers to glean clues about its composition.

The sodium gas evidenced in the spectra is believed to have originated from the lunar soil, while the traces of lithium may have come from the rocket stage itself, Carl Schmidt, the lead astronomer conducting the impact observations, told Reuters.

“This observation did not go perfectly and this is a very crude analysis, but I wanted to share something quickly, and we can say more about these results in time,” Schmidt said by email.

The impact was unintentional, SpaceX said. The rocket piece was expected to hit near Einstein Crater on the moon’s western limb, which is often difficult to see from Earth.

COSMIC FORCES NUDGED PIECE TO MOON

Such stages typically fall back into Earth’s atmosphere and burn up or plunge into the ocean after boosting the rocket’s payload to a precise spot in orbit. 

But because the January lunar lander mission required more thrust than missions closer to Earth, the rocket’s second stage remained in space, floating aimlessly among thousands of other pieces of space junk that active satellites must steer clear of.

It was not until earlier this year that astronomers determined that the rocket stage, which had dumped its remaining fuel and could not be controlled, was on an orbital trajectory ending at the moon.

“What has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path toward the moon,” Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX director of NASA science and Dragon programs, told reporters on Monday.

“This may be of some — probably minor — scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it,” said Bill Gray, creator of widely used astronomy software Project Pluto, who appeared first to calculate and publish a report predicting the stage’s impact in April.

“By January, I was pretty sure it would hit, though with only a vague idea as to where it would do so. By April, I was confident enough to post an announcement,” Gray said.

Gray said that the impact presents no danger to anyone, “though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of.”

Space junk impacts on the moon are rare. A Chinese rocket stage crashed into the moon in March 2022 after completing a lunar test mission. In 2009, NASA intentionally crashed a rocket stage into the moon to study the plume of lunar material kicked up by the impact, leading to a key discovery that lunar dirt contains traces of water ice.

Several spacecraft intending to softly land on the moon in recent years have crashed instead. Russia’s nuclear-powered Luna-25 mission spun out of control and crashed in 2023. Its small power source of plutonium-238 likely remains harmlessly on the lunar surface.

India’s Chandrayaan-2 lander mission crashed in 2019. Israel’s Beresheet lander crashed that same year. Among the Israeli lander’s payloads were tiny tardigrades, microscopic animals known for surviving radiation and other harsh environments and which may still be on the surface.

NASA intentionally crashed stages from its Saturn V moon rocket into the moon in the 1970s to study the impacts’ seismic effects.

NASA and SpaceX are discussing ways to prevent future lunar impacts, Scheiman said. The U.S. space agency plans to build a lunar base and send routine astronaut missions to the lunar surface beginning later this decade under its multibillion-dollar Artemis program. It would not want errant pieces of space junk impacting those assets.

Reporting by Joey RouletteEditing by Rod Nickel, Alex Richardson and Alistair Bell