News Summary: Best Buy 4th-quarter Loss Narrows

Big-name fast food chains, including Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Burger King, are reportedly pulling onions off their menus in certain locations amid a deadly, multistate outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 linked to McDonald's Quarter Pounders. Though the source of the outbreak bacteria has not been confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the leading suspects are the beef patties and the sliced onions used on the popular burger. On Wednesday, McDonald's onion supplier Taylor Farms recalled peeled and diced yellow onion products, according to a notice from US Foods, a supplier of food service operations.

The third and final season of Good Omens, Prime Video's fantasy series adapted from the classic 1990 novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, will not be a full season after all, Deadline Hollywood reports. In the wake of allegations of sexual assault against Gaiman this summer, the streaming platform has decided that rather than a full slate of episodes, the series finale will be a single 90-minute episode—the equivalent of a TV movie. (Major spoilers for the S2 finale of Good Omens below.) As reported previously, the series is based on the original 1990 novel by Gaiman and the late Pratchett.

On Thursday, the United Nations' Environmental Programme (UNEP) released a report on what it terms the "emissions gap"—the difference between where we're heading and where we'd need to be to achieve the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. It makes for some pretty grim reading. Given last year's greenhouse gas emissions, we can afford fewer than four similar years before we would exceed the total emissions compatible with limiting the planet's warming to 1.5° C above pre-industrial conditions.

As H5N1 bird flu continues to spread wildly among California dairy herds and farmworkers, federal health officials on Thursday offered some relatively good news about Missouri: The wily avian influenza virus does not appear to have spread from the state's sole human case, which otherwise remains a mystery. On September 6, the Missouri Health department announced that a person with underlying health conditions tested positive for bird flu, and later testing indicated that it was an H5N1 strain related to the one currently circulating among US dairy cows.

Apple has released new iPhones, new Apple Watches, a new iPad mini, and a flotilla of software updates this fall, but Mac hardware has gone unmentioned so far. That's set to change next week, according to an uncharacteristically un-cryptic post from Apple Worldwide Marketing SVP Greg Joswiak earlier today. Imploring readers to "Mac [sic] their calendars," Joswiak's post teases "an exciting week of announcements ahead, starting on Monday morning." If the wordplay wasn't enough, an attached teaser video with a winking neon Mac logo drives the point home. Though Joswiak's post was light on additional details, months of reliable rumors have told us the most likely things to expect: refreshed MacBook Pros and 24-inch iMacs with few if any external changes but new Apple M4-series chips on the inside, plus a new M4 Mac mini with a substantial design overhaul.

"Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements. They can come back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided." That two-line comment, submitted by major Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, accompanied a patch that removed about a dozen names from the kernle's MAINTAINERS file. "Some entries" notably had either Russian names or .ru email addresses.