A cyberattack targeting supermarket refrigeration systems has left shelves empty across France. Hackers remotely raised temperatures to 50 degrees Celsius, triggering fires and forcing hundreds of stores to discard food.
Published On 13 Oct 202613 Oct 2026
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FANS of Michael Jackson will be looking at the competition and hoping to beat it when his latest memorabilia goes under the hammer.
The late King of Pop’s original Thriller jacket and Motown 25 glove are being put up for Auction in Abu Dhabi.
On December 7, the iconic garments will headline Julien’s Auctions’ Fashion Legacy Evening Sale.
Created by Deborah Nadoolman Landis, the red leather jacket was one of two created for Michael’s 1983 video – with the other shredded for the zombie scenes and now on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Estimates for the jacket up for auction are only available upon request by interested bidders. It last sold in 2011 for almost £1.4million.
Michael wore the white rhinestone glove, tipped to fetch £700,000, the same year at the taping of Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever.
READ MORE ON MICHAEL JACKSON
In 2022, a massive collection of Michael Jackson memorabilia was being auctioned with an estimated value of £2.5million.
The 32,000 items linked with the King of Pop were being sold as a single lot in a private online auction on behalf of an anonymous owner.
The collection was originally intended for a museum in Los Angeles, but plans fell through and it was auctioned through House of Consultants.
The owner said: “This is a rare opportunity to buy cultural heritage from the most influential artist of the century.”
WASHINGTON — President Trump says his administration will make one-time payments of $90 per person to help more than 20 million Medicare enrollees pay for their Part B premiums. It will cost about $2 billion.
Less than one-third of all Medicare recipients are eligible for the payments, which are expected to be sent out this week. Not eligible are roughly 35 million Medicare Advantage enrollees, millions of people with disabilities who get premium assistance and low-income Medicare recipients.
The election-year promise that the Republican president made over the weekend comes as the Nov. 3 midterms are fast approaching, with the cost of living and healthcare expenses among the top issues for voters.
Some questions and answers about the payouts:
Some 20.8 million people in the original Medicare Part B who are living in the United States, not receiving premium assistance from Medicaid or not paying an income-related monthly adjusted amount.
Medicare Advantage enrollees, who make up more than half of the eligible 64.2 million Medicare beneficiaries, will not receive a payment, according to KFF, a healthcare research nonprofit. Nor will 12 million low-income older adults and people with disabilities who get premium assistance.
The Part B program covers expenses such as doctor’s visits, ambulance services and lab tests. Total monthly costs generally start at about $200 and vary with income.
Allison Schuster, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that the administration “is enabling Americans to take control of their health by putting money directly back in the hands of Medicare patients.”
According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services website, eligible beneficiaries will receive one $90 rebate this month, with most getting a direct deposit on or around Friday. Others will receive a paper check from the Treasury Department later in October.
Juliette Cubanski, director of KFF’s program on Medicare policy, said the payment will be automatic.
“As far as a benefit goes, people don’t have to call or sign up — it’s just money they receive directly, but not everybody on Medicare will receive this money.”
A White House fact sheet says people can call (800) MEDICARE ([800] 633-4227) to check their eligibility for the premium rebate. To check on payment status, people should call the Social Security Administration at (800) 772-1213.
Payments will come out of the Medicare Improvement Fund created by Congress in 2008 and intended to make improvements to the Medicare fee-for-service program.
The fund was created to improve program management and conduct oversight of contracts and contractors, according to the Congressional Budget Office, but its purpose has expanded after various legislative changes.
This is not the first time the fund has been used.
President Obama’s administration, along with Congress, redirected $20 billion to expand healthcare coverage through the Affordable Care Act.
But under Trump, it is the first time that the fund has been used to directly pay recipients.
Critics of Trump’s promise characterize the $90 payments as a preelection stunt designed to sway voters rather than address structural problems in healthcare costs and administration.
The top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, said in a statement that “this is another desperate attempt by a failed president to escape Americans’ revulsion with his failed agenda, amounting to one tank of Trump-inflated gas.”
Trump recently promised $500 rebate checks to an estimated 1 million Obamacare enrollees across 30 states whom the White House alleged were overcharged by the Biden administration for some fees.
Cubanski said the Medicare rebate payments were being doled out when Americans were feeling the bite of higher food, energy and gas prices. Surging healthcare costs are only compounding those pressure, she said.
“This might be helpful for people but it might not go very far.”
Hussein writes for the Associated Press.
Islamabad, Pakistan – More than 9.5 million people have received subsidised petrol under a special fuel relief scheme launched by Pakistan’s prime minister, Federal Minister Shaza Fatima Khawaja told Al Jazeera on Wednesday.
The initiative, aimed at lower-income citizens, comes as the government attempts to help households deal with fuel price increases tied to the war on Iran.
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The scheme, launched in September, offers 100 rupees ($0.36) off every litre of petrol to owners of motorcycles, rickshaws and small cars, through a text-message system.
Petrol prices have risen by nearly 50 percent since the war began on February 28, adding to Pakistan’s economic hardship and putting further pressure on consumers already grappling with rising inflation.
Explaining the process, Khawaja, the minister for information technology and telecommunications, said applicants text their national ID number, vehicle registration, and province to 9771. A second message, sent before each visit to a pump, generates a token redeemable anywhere in the country.
Two- and three-wheelers get 500 rupees ($1.80) a week, capped at four tokens a month. Cars with engines of up to 800cc get 1,000 rupees ($3.60) every 10 days, for three tokens monthly.
After complaints, registration, once a paid service, was made free, and a five-litre minimum purchase was scrapped for the same reason.
Khawaja told Al Jazeera the system had been redesigned based on experiences of users on the ground.
Riders no longer need the vehicle to be registered in their own name, as long as they can supply the exact registration date shown on the documents.
“Even in my own house, there’s a bike registered in our name that our cook uses for daily errands,” Khawaja said, explaining why the ownership requirement for two- and three-wheelers was dropped on September 20.
An earlier cash-transfer scheme in April had reached just over a million bike owners, she said, largely because disbursement required a bank account most riders did not have.
Government officials say that the scheme has been expanded to include wider sections of society, especially those who depend on their vehicles to generate income.
“There’s a benefit; it’s not like there’s nothing,” Shakeel Ahmed, 45, an electrician in Islamabad, told Al Jazeera. “The relief is decent for people who use it normally, for local trips. But for people like us, who put in 1,000 to 1,500 rupees [$3.60-$5.40] of petrol a day, it’s not enough.”
Safiya Aftab, an economist, told Al Jazeera the scheme has reached the people it was meant to.
“The scheme has indeed reached low-income segments of society, people who typically use two-wheelers and 800cc cars. So yes, it’s a good thing that they are subsidising the poor,” she said.
Aftab, however, also pointed to a levy – 114 rupees ($0.41) for every litre – that the government charges. This, she said, was helping the government raise revenue. She said the government is now earning more than 100 billion rupees ($361m) a month from the levy, which is fuelling inflation.
“The levy was originally meant as a sort of environmental tax, to discourage the use of petrol. Now it has become a full revenue earner for the government, one that helps keep the fiscal deficit down,” the economist said.
The Pakistani government has approved 75 billion rupees ($271m) for the scheme’s first three months, through November.
Petroleum Minister Ali Pervaiz Malik put the running cost at 25-30 billion rupees ($90m-$108m) a month at launch. By late September, he said, it had risen to 35-40 billion rupees ($126m-$144m).
Malik has said the government is prepared to run the scheme for up to 10 months, or “until the end of the war”, if needed.
Pakistan is currently under a $7bn International Monetary Fund programme, and an IMF team is in Islamabad this week for talks with the government as it seeks to keep its fiscal commitments on track while responding to the fuel shock.
Officials familiar with the government’s talks with the IMF say the Fund wants relief capped at three months and routed instead through the Benazir Income Support Programme, the country’s main cash-transfer scheme.
Khawaja said the IMF’s position from the outset was that relief had to be targeted, not universal, which was why the scheme was built around actual token use rather than a blanket price cut.
But there are claims that the relief is not reaching all. Cars with engines larger than 800cc, diesel vehicles and public transport are excluded entirely, leading some experts to suggest that the subsidy scheme risks missing the most vulnerable sections of Pakistani society.
“A poor household that uses public transport, walks to work, or relies on diesel-powered transport may receive nothing while still facing higher food and transport costs,” Khaqan Najeeb, a former adviser in Pakistan’s Ministry of Finance, told Al Jazeera.
More than 8.1 million tokens had gone to two- and three-wheelers by late September, compared with fewer than 380,000 for cars, Malik said. A November 2024 Gallup Pakistan survey found that 79 percent of respondents, in rural and urban areas alike, said they use public transport such as buses or wagons.
At 100 rupees a litre, the maximum monthly saving is 2,000 rupees ($7.20) for a motorcycle user and 3,000 rupees ($10.80) for an eligible car owner, Najeeb said, calling it “useful household relief, but not enough to offset the broader cost-of-living shock”.
Petrol has climbed from 266 rupees ($0.96) a litre before the war to nearly 395 rupees ($1.42), despite a partial rollback in April. Inflation rose to 10.3 percent in September from 7 percent in February, Najeeb said.
Sajid Amin Javed, a senior economist at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, said the relief was “minimal”, but added that this was understandable given the IMF constraints on Pakistan.
“The relief is minimal, and that is understandable as we are in an IMF programme,” Javed told Al Jazeera, arguing that cutting the petroleum development levy, which still adds 114 rupees to every litre, would deliver broader relief than a capped subsidy.
“The government is using the petroleum development levy to fill its revenue gap, but that comes at a significant cost in terms of inflation, growth and household welfare,” Javed said.
Najeeb, however, argued the scheme should not become a permanent fixture of Pakistan’s energy policy – and should be used only to make oil price shocks “less damaging”.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino is willing to discuss the disbursement of millions of dollars to the member associations of football’s global governing body as the Swiss chief seeks re-election to the post he has held for 10 years amid growing opposition.
The amount of the distributions to individual nations will be on the agenda of the FIFA Council’s October 15 meeting, according to a letter Infantino sent to the heads of the six regional confederations, as reported by media in the United States on Monday.
“I will not prejudge the amount,” Infantino wrote, according to one report. “I will support the greatest level of additional funding that can responsibly be delivered through FIFA’s proper governance process, applied fairly and supported by transparent and auditable arrangements. The ambition is welcome. The financial evidence, governance and implementation must now support it.”
“A single figure can begin the discussion, but it cannot complete a global policy. I have therefore instructed the Secretary General to consolidate all submissions into one integrated assessment for consideration by the FIFA Council.”
The move is seen as Infantino’s latest attempt to placate regional football bodies, as well as their chiefs, in a bid to hold on to his position as the most powerful man in football.
Earlier this month, the 56-year-old confirmed his bid amid widespread criticism of his leadership and the growing threat of legal proceedings.
Infantino has faced stiff opposition since the fallout from his proposed plan to sell approximately 20 percent of a proposed new entity, FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), focused on the commercial and operational facets of the World Cup and other FIFA tournaments.
The Swiss-Italian has been the most powerful man in world football over the past 10 years, but has increasingly lost support from regional football confederations and national associations. Last month, he appeared to be pulling out all the stops in a bid to retain his position, despite growing calls for his ousting and wide-ranging disapproval of his plans.
On Friday, the English Premier League and three other top European leagues called for governance reform of FIFA.
A joint statement with leagues from Spain, Italy and Germany accused Infantino of actively promoting “exploitative ideas rather than safeguarding against them”.
He is seen as a divisive figure in international football, with his close ties to some of the most powerful global leaders and plans for maximising revenue from football viewed as a threat to the game.
With fewer than six months until the next round of elections for FIFA’s presidency, Infantino appears to be losing ground among his usual backers.
FIFA presidents are limited to three terms, each lasting four years.
However, in 2022, Infantino successfully argued that his first spell in charge, which began when he was elected at an extraordinary FIFA Congress in 2016 following Sepp Blatter’s resignation, should not count towards that limit because it completed an interrupted mandate.
His plans to run for a fourth term have been questioned by critics and rights groups, who have asked FIFA’s Governance, Audit and Compliance Committee (GACC) to block the re-election bid.
The financial discussion comes in the wake of UEFA, CONCACAF and the AFC calling for Infantino to resign over the plan.
UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin and CONCACAF’s Victor Montagliani recently wrote a letter to FIFA, seeking payments such as the one Infantino addressed in his letter. Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa, head of the Asian Football Confederation, made a similar request, per the reports.
Among the investors in FFE was to be Joshua Kushner, the brother of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Trump is a close ally of Infantino.
Infantino subsequently abandoned the private equity plan, but he has refused to resign, and he plans to run for re-election in March. With seven weeks remaining for candidates to announce their intention to oppose Infantino, no challenger has stepped forward.
Had Infantino’s FFE plan gone through, each member nation would have received at least $20m. The letter from UEFA and CONCACAF asks for every member association to receive a minimum of $10m from FIFA’s reserves, according to the reports.
VENEZUELA FURY may have crashed out of the running in I’m A Celebrity . . . The Wild Frontier, but boxing champ TYSON’s teen daughter is still sitting pretty.
I can reveal the young entrepreneur aims to launch her own make-up and skincare line.
Plans are afoot for a firm called No Tomorrow, and Venezuela hopes to unveil the range next year as she makes the most of her growing profile.
She also has brilliant inspiration in her corner – her aunt Molly-Mae Hague.
Molly, who is engaged to Venezuela’s uncle Tommy, is now worth an estimated £20million thanks to years of hard graft in the fashion and beauty industries.
A source said: “Venezuela has just turned 17 so it’s a huge achievement to be launching her own business and she’s so excited.
“She has a top team behind her but the ideas are all hers.
“She wants to make her family proud.
“Having Molly-Mae and obviously her mum Paris as inspiration is a huge boost too.”
While details are still being worked out, it is likely that the No Tomorrow x Venezuela Fury range will include everything from make-up and skincare to fake tan and false eyelashes.
Venezuela celebrated her birthday yesterday while on holiday with husband Noah Price.
She earned the break after having a rough time filming Ant & Dec’s I’m A Celeb spin-off in the Canadian wilderness.
Venezuela and Noah, who married in May, quit just 72 hours into filming after she became unwell and started vomiting.
Viewers will be able to tune in to the new reality show when it airs next spring.
But we’ll be hearing a whole lot more from Venezuela before then, I’m sure.
