Democrat James Talarico’s resounding victory in the Texas Senate race caused a major upset in the midterms for Republicans – and for Elon Musk. According to the Financial Times, the billionaire’s political action committee (Pac) contributed $47m (£35m) to Republican candidate Ken Paxton’s campaign, on top of the $158m he gave the Senate Leadership Fund in September. The money was not enough to stop the seat from turning Democrat for the first time since 1988. In his acceptance speech, Talarico said: “We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas.” “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time,” Musk jokingly wrote on X. BBC

France’s national blood service has said hackers accessed control systems and boosted temperatures at three cold stores stocking vital blood products, in an apparent escalation of recent cyber-attacks on fridges and freezers across Europe. The French blood service (EFS) said temperature and defrosting thresholds had been raised to “very high levels” in the attack, adding that its alarm systems had allowed technicians to intervene before the products were compromised. The Guardian 

According to a renowned Chinese leaker on Weibo, the upcoming iPhone 18 will get performance and battery upgrades, in line with the current iPhone 18 Pro lineup.

This year Apple shook things around by announcing only the Pro models from the iPhone 18 lineup, but reports suggest the company will announce the vanilla models in early 2027. At least the wait might be worth it, as the report suggests two major upgrades coming to next year’s base iPhone. Battery life will see an improvement this year, and it won’t be solely because of the new, more efficient chipset. GSM Arena 

In the Apple earnings call for Q4 2026, new Cn to discuss the results of the previous quarter. Within the discussion the trio quietly confirmed that Siri AI may soon have usage limits. Now, we’ve put Siri AI through its paces and found it to be a remarkably good life assistant across Apple’s fleet of devices after years of Siri directing tricky questions to ChatGPT. But a usage limit could seriously hinder the effectiveness of your Apple assistant.

Revolut says that in less than a year it’s managed to slash its AI coding inference costs by roughly 90 percent by making self-hosted models its default instead of relying primarily on commercial services like Claude. Speaking at the AI Engineer conference in New York last month, David Abitbol, ops and infrastructure lead at the British fintech, described how it saw a 60 percent improvement in coding time and a 70 percent improvement in lead time following its rollout of AI coding tools to roughly 2,000 engineers. Revolut initially adopted GLM-5.1 before moving to GLM-5.3, which it now serves using 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs. The Register

Five years after Virgin Media and O2 merged to create a £31bn telecoms giant, VMO2 is battling falling revenues, ongoing customer losses and over £22bn of debt. Its response? An £800m annual cost-cutting programme, including £300m in workforce savings and a halt to further full-fibre upgrades beyond existing commitments. But t also exposes wider issues in Britain’s broadband industry, where years of network investment have left operators competing for customers in an increasingly saturated market.

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