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Five men are in custody and dozens of homes were evacuated after police received calls about suspicious vehicles near RAF Fairford.

Taylor Swift’s “I Knew It, I Knew You” reaches No. 1 on the Pop Airplay chart, extending her all-time record to 16 leaders.

Coca-Cola has not been kind when it comes to getting rid of slower-selling flavors, even when they have a dedicated fanbase.

The most famous example of that is the company’s 2020 decision to stop making TaB, its first diet soda.

That inspired the SaveTaBSoda Committee, a group of fans of the diet beverage who want to force Coca-Cola to bring it back.

“We’re TaB drinkers on a mission to save our soda. The SaveTaBSoda Committee was formed in October 2020, shortly after the Coca-Cola Company announced the planned discontinuation of TaB soda,” the group shared on its website.

Coca-Cola has not given in, despite a protest at the company’s headquarters, a petition, and multiple other efforts to force the company to bring back the classic soda.

That doesn’t mean Coca-Cola never brings back a classic flavor. The company has two cult-favorite holiday sodas, and one of them was discontinued in 2021. Another was canceled in 2018, but a variation of it will make a 2026 return to shelves.

Coca-Cola Cinnamon is not coming back

Coca-Cola Cinnamon, introduced in 2019, was a limited-time offer for the Christmas season. The company trumpeted the flavor in a 2019 news release, which is no longer on the company’s website.

“Coca‑Cola also is spicing up the season with the limited-edition launch of Coca‑Cola Cinnamon, which blends the delicious taste of Coca‑Cola with a warm cinnamon flavor associated with the holidays,” the company wrote.

The company brought back Cinnamon Coke in 2020 but not in 2021. It has not returned since.

In 2023, Coca-Cola ignored a request from TheStreet for a comment on the fate of Coca-Cola Cinnamon.

Coca-Cola has discontinued many sodas over the years.Shutterstock

Coca-Cola brings back another holiday classic

In 2013, Coca-Cola introduced Sprite Cranberry for the holiday season.

“Both products take the refreshing taste of traditional Sprite and combine it with a splash of sweet and tart cranberry notes,” the company shared in a press release.

It was the first new Sprite flavor since Sprite Remix in 2005.

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“We’re incorporating one of the most popular flavors of the season with the No. 1 lemon-lime brand to celebrate the holidays,” Sprite Brands executive Kim Paige said at the time. “Over the years, our fans have increasingly demanded Sprite with cranberry flavor, and we’re excited to give it to them with the crisp, clear, caffeine-free, naturally flavored taste they already love about Sprite.”

That flavor was brought back every year seasonally until 2018, when it was discontinued. In 2019, however, Coca-Cola introduced a new take on the drink, Winter Spiced Cranberry.

“Coca-Cola changed the classic Sprite Cranberry — which had been a holiday staple for six years — to a new warm spice- and cranberry-flavored lemon-lime soda. The holiday Sprite became an immediate favorite,” Allrecipes reported.

While the new variant has appeared every year since the old one was killed, Coca-Cola had not commented on whether it will return this year. Several social media accounts that track beverage releases have, however, confirmed the return.

“Holiday soda season is coming very soon! Coca-Cola Holiday Creamy Vanilla and Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry are both set to return in mid-October 2026, including Zero Sugar options,” Snackwire reported.

All Things Hallows, which covers seasonal product releases, also reported on the return.

“Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry: The seasonal favorite returns in Original and Zero Sugar,” it shared on its Facebook page.

Kroger has added a page listing the returning Sprite, but it’s still showing as unavailable. Walmart also has a product listing, but it shows no stock.

Pepsi’s holiday classic can’t return

In 2023, Pepsi discontinued a holiday favorite by killing the entire brand it was part of.

PepsiCo dropped its entire Sierra Mist product line. That meant Sierra Mist Cranberry Splash was quietly killed as the company replaced Sierra Mist with Starry as its lemon-lime soda. 

It won’t prevent Pepsi from offering a seasonal flavor this winter, according to Sodaseekers, a top Instagram page covering the beverage industry.

“The newest Pepsi holiday innovation is almost here! The product images seen here came from an official database, confirming this release,” the Instagram page wrote next to pictures of Pepsi Vanilla & Cream, in full and Zero Sugar.

It will be released in October and is expected at all Pepsi retailers, the site reported.

Sporked also confirmed that Pepsi would be releasing a Vanilla & Cream flavor.

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The most expensive Medicare decisions do not feel like decisions. They feel like reading one page, getting one clean answer and moving on.

That is how somebody ends up in a plan that drops her cardiologist in March, or else she never learns she qualified for coverage built for her exact situation.

Open enrollment opens Oct. 15 and closes Dec. 7, and what you choose carries through all of 2027. A beneficiary can pick from 32 Medicare Advantage plans with drug coverage this year, a count that excludes employer plans and Special Needs Plans, according to KFF.

Sorting that out used to mean a broker at your kitchen table, a stack of mailers or an afternoon on the government’s Plan Finder.

This fall, far more retirees will type the question into Google and read whatever the AI summary tells them.

A Medicare data researcher spent two months testing what those systems actually return, and found that the answer can turn on a single word the reader happens to choose.

Why Medicare questions are hard for AI to answer

Medicare is not one product. A beneficiary can choose Medicare Advantage, a Special Needs Plan, a standalone Part D drug plan, a Medicare Supplement policy or Original Medicare, and the right answer depends on county, plan year and personal circumstances.

Retirees are already bringing those questions to AI. More than 20% of U.S. adults use AI chatbots for health questions at least sometimes, while only 18% rate the answers as either extremely accurate or very accurate, Healthcare Dive reported, citing a Pew Research Center survey.

Related: Medicare enrollment dates you can’t afford to miss

That wary response to AI answers is justified. AI chatbots answered everyday health questions accurately 76.2% of the time, representing roughly double the error rate of human physicians, according to a Penn State study covered by Medical Xpress.

A Medicare data researcher spent two months testing how well AI systems work to inform beneficiaries, and found that the answer can turn on a single word.

What the Yuma County search test found

David Bynon has published Medicare data since 2012 and now runs a measurement project called the Medicare Visibility Monitor. In Yuma County, Ariz., he typed the kind of query an ordinary beneficiary would: medicare plans yuma county az.

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Conventional Google results read that phrase as Medicare Advantage and filled the page with Advantage advertising and insurance carrier web pages, Bynon told TheStreet. Somebody who did not already know the coverage types could reasonably conclude that Advantage was the entire menu.

After Google’s late-August update he ran the test again. The broad query produced an AI Overview centered on Medicare Advantage, and changing one word to medicare options yuma county az expanded the answer to include Advantage, Special Needs Plans and Medicare Supplement coverage.

“A consumer should not need to know the taxonomy of Medicare before asking what their Medicare choices are,” Bynon said.

That result is what pushed him to build a resource laying out every Medicare coverage type available in a given county. He put it on MedicarePlans.com, his experimental publishing site, then moved the implementation about two months later to Medicare.org, the production site he manages.

He then gave the system a realistic person: turning 65 next month, covered by Medicaid, living with type 2 diabetes and taking Metformin, and unsure what to do.

The AI Overview did well at first. It recognized that holding both Medicare and Medicaid mattered and identified Dual-Eligible Special Needs Plans, known as D-SNPs, as the plan class that fit.

Then it slipped. Its recommendation led to a page listing standard Medicare Advantage plans rather than the D-SNP choices the system had just identified as relevant, according to Bynon’s account and screenshots he supplied.

Nothing in that answer was fabricated. The plans were real and the benefits were real, but a beneficiary following the recommendation would still have been shopping the wrong aisle.

Bynon calls it a context-continuity failure, where a system resolves who you are and what you need, then drops that thread when it picks the sources it hands you.

One stage of the test went better. When the beneficiary said he still did not know which plan to choose, the system stopped recommending and pointed him to the State Health Insurance Assistance Program and Medicare.gov.

5 ways AI answers go wrong on Medicare

Mixing plan years, so 2026 costs get quoted for a 2027 plan

Reading “Medicare plans” as Medicare Advantage only, dropping Part D, Supplement and Original Medicare

Misassigning county service areas, so a plan looks available where it is not

Inventing benefits such as buyback allowances or over-the-counter credits that a plan does not offer

Losing track of your circumstances between diagnosing your situation and recommending where to go next

Source: Trust Publishing Institute baseline report, February 2026, and Bynon’s Yuma County testing supplied to TheStreet

His institute put the average hallucination rate in Medicare plan explanations above 27% in a 50-query sample. That figure comes from Bynon’s own testing, but the report does not publish the queries or the scoring method behind it.

Medicare enrollment runs Oct. 15-Dec. 7, while AI answers may shape choices.MoMo Productions / Getty Images

Who is feeding AI its Medicare facts

This is the part of my reporting that should matter most to anyone shopping this fall.

Bynon argues the root problem sits upstream. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) publishes authoritative plan data, he said, but spreads it across datasets and interfaces that are not organized around the way consumers actually ask questions.

That gap, in his account, leaves AI systems leaning on private publishers to resolve those questions and present the answers in a form built for retrieval.

To measure who that is, Bynon built a monitor that tracks 2,146 CMS plan IDs and records which publishers get retrieved and cited across Google, Bing, ChatGPT and Copilot. Google’s AI cited Medicare.org for 2,011 of those plan entities and generated 6,169 citations, his September export shows.

Medicare.org is a site Bynon manages. It is owned and operated by Health Network Group LLC, an Allstate (ALL) company. HealthCompare, a licensed insurance agency, may compensate the website when a reader enrolls through Medicare.org’s phone number or MedicareEnrollment.com, according to the site’s disclaimer.

The disclaimer adds that the arrangement does not influence what Medicare.org publishes. The roles are worth separating too, because Bynon runs the publishing technology and editorial systems while the enrollment arrangement belongs to the website’s owner and its licensed agency partner.

“I am compensated by HealthNetwork Group/Allstate to manage its web property,” Bynon told TheStreet. “I have no stake in its outcomes.”

I read the September export against that disclaimer twice. The publisher supplying a large share of the factual assertions inside Google’s Medicare answers is owned by an insurer and can be paid when a reader enrolls.

Bynon is careful about what his numbers prove. “I cannot establish that a particular markup change caused a particular ranking or citation outcome,” he said, describing the work as live-site observation rather than controlled experiment.

One finding in the export deserves a retiree’s attention anyway. MedicarePlanLookup.com was almost absent from conventional Google and Bing results, yet ChatGPT cited it for 1,394 plan entities. MedicarePlans.com ran the same way in reverse, drawing 1,051 ChatGPT citations against 114 from Google’s AI.

“I therefore no longer treat search visibility and answer visibility as interchangeable measurements,” Bynon said. A site you would never find on page one can still be shaping the answer on your screen.

How to pressure-test an AI answer before you enroll

None of this means dropping AI during open enrollment is a good idea. It means treating the answer as a place to start rather than a verdict.

Checks worth 10 minutes before you pick a plan

Ask about your Medicare options rather than Medicare plans, so the answer covers Advantage, Part D, Supplement and Original Medicare

Ask which plan year the answer describes and discard anything still quoting 2026 figures

Say plainly that you have Medicaid, a chronic condition or nursing home care, then check that every plan you are shown actually serves that group

Look up any plan by name on Medicare’s Plan Finder with your own drugs and pharmacy entered

Confirm directly with the plan that your doctors are in network for 2027, rather than relying on a chatbot’s provider-network information

Get free help from your State Health Insurance Assistance Program or 1-800-MEDICARE

Bynon expects Plan-ID queries and AI assistants to take over more of Medicare shopping through 2028, and he has argued to federal regulators that the ecosystem needs a neutral structured publisher. He runs one of the most-cited ones.

Until CMS publishes plan data in a form the machines can read cleanly, the retiree at the kitchen table is the last line of verification. Ten minutes on Plan Finder and one call to the plan cost nothing, and they are the only part of this process that nobody is paid to influence.

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Microsoft has spent the past year watching Anthropic and OpenAI pull ahead in the race to make AI genuinely useful for corporate customers.

 On September 25, the company tried to close that gap in one move. It folded years of separate AI products into a single app built to compete directly with Claude.

The timing is not incidental.

Microsoft’s stock has trailed most of its megacap peers this year. The redesign is a bet that a simpler, more unified product can finally turn Copilot adoption into the kind of growth investors have been waiting for.

Microsoft redesigned Copilot to challenge Anthropic’s Claude

The updated app is organized around three sections. Home combines conversational chat with a task-delegation feature called Cowork. It also embeds full versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint so users can create and edit documents without leaving the app.

The second section, called Code, lets users build apps, dashboards, and other software using natural language prompts, built on the same technology that powers GitHub Copilot, according to CNBC.

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The third piece is Autopilot, previously known as Scout. It lets users create always-on agents that run in the cloud, monitor email and Teams channels, and carry out recurring tasks without waiting for a new prompt each time.

Satya Nadella first promised this combined app at the Build conference in June. He told investors on a July 29 earnings call that it would arrive this quarter. The September 25 announcement met that deadline, as reported by GeekWire.

Why Microsoft is playing catch-up

Executives were candid about the motivation. Jacob Andreou, the executive vice president who leads Copilot, acknowledged that adding coding capability to the app is an instance of Microsoft playing catch-up rather than leading the market.

The competitive pressure is real. OpenAI and Anthropic have increasingly bundled chat, coding and agent capabilities together, while Meta’s Muse app has also shot to the top of Apple’s App Store since its launch earlier this month.

Microsoft is trying to differentiate on enterprise trust rather than raw capability. Andreou said sending sensitive company files to a local machine inside a virtual environment was a nonstarter for Microsoft’s customers. That was an apparent reference to Anthropic’s Claude Cowork’s original local-VM architecture, GeekWire reported.

That tension has shown up in less diplomatic ways too.

Nadella separately criticized Anthropic’s restrictions on its Claude Fable model as unusually constrained for a creative tool.

This is even as Microsoft continues integrating Anthropic’s models into Copilot and stands to collect billions in Azure revenue under Anthropic’s own $30 billion cloud computing commitment, TheStreet reported.

The pressure to move fast is real across the sector. Anthropic’s own Claude Cowork rollout has already sent a warning through software stocks broadly.Bloomberg / Getty Images

The stock backdrop behind the redesign

Microsoft’s AI investments have taken longer to show up in results than the market wanted. Shares fell as much as 17% at one point this year, the company’s worst stretch since the 2008 financial crisis.

Paid Copilot seats represented just 3.3% of Microsoft’s roughly 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 user base at the time, according to TheStreet.

Copilot adoption has been the metric most closely watched as evidence of a turnaround. Daily active users had already grown nearly three times year over year before this redesign. More than 1,500 enterprise customers were using both Anthropic and OpenAI models side by side through Microsoft’s own platform.

The company ended one recent quarter with 30 million paid Copilot seats, up 10 million in a single quarter and the fastest seat growth since Copilot launched, while GitHub Copilot separately reached 50 million users.

That growth has started winning over skeptics. Stifel upgraded Microsoft from Hold to Buy in September, with analyst Brad Reback saying the company had clearly turned the corner following its June quarter results.

Goldman Sachs has maintained a constructive view as well, modeling that Microsoft’s Copilot and AI agent strategy could drive more than $35 in earnings per share by fiscal 2030, as reported by TheStreet.

What Microsoft’s moves mean for investors

The redesign puts Microsoft in an unusual position. Even inside the new unified Copilot app, the coding tool lets users choose between OpenAI’s GPT models and Anthropic’s Opus model.

Microsoft is incorporating technology from the very companies it is competing with.

That dependency has not stopped Wall Street from staying broadly optimistic about the stock. Thirty-three of 36 analysts covering Microsoft currently rate it a buy, with an average price target implying more than 50% upside from recent levels.

The pressure to move fast is real across the sector. Anthropic’s own Claude Cowork rollout has already sent a warning through software stocks broadly.

Investors are reassessing which companies can adapt their pricing models as agents begin replacing traditional workflows.

The redesigned Copilot app is less a guarantee of a turnaround and more a test.

Can Microsoft convert its massive existing customer base into paying AI users faster than Anthropic and OpenAI can convince those same customers to switch? How quickly seat growth accelerates from here may be the clearest signal of whether this bet pays off.

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The money parents plan to leave behind will most likely arrive two full decades after financial pressure peaks.

Vanguard analyzed 250,000 401(k) participants and 57,956 inherited Individual Retirement Account (IRA) recipients in its research paper, “Transferring Wealth with Wisdom.”

The debt-to-income analysis drew on data including income, age, and linked credit bureau data for 2023, according to the paper’s methodology notes.

The findings show what happens when the peak years of household borrowing and family wealth transfers land in different decades of life. Participants in their forties had an average debt-to-income ratio of 29%, nearly triple the 9% reported by those in their 20s.

Inherited IRAs land well after the most expensive years

Household debt-to-income ratios tend to peak between ages 30 and 49, according to the Vanguard data, when mortgages, childcare, student loans, and retirement contributions compete for the same dollars.

Fully 97% of inheritance recipients in the study receive the transferred assets only after the grantor passes away, Vanguard’s research found.

That timing places the typical transfer in a beneficiary’s early 60s, well past the window when additional capital would have its strongest compounding effect.

The benefits of an inheritance hinge on timing and the recipient’s balance sheet, Ekaterina Goncharova, PhD, a Behavioral Economist at Vanguard and the lead author of the paper, noted.

Matt Schulz, Chief Consumer Analyst at LendingTree and author of Ask Questions, Save Money, Make More: How To Take Control Of Your Financial Life, wrote in an August 2026 LendungTree wealth transfer study that households should build retirement plans that work without a family windfall.

A future inheritance should generally be treated as a potential upside rather than a core retirement strategy. Build a retirement plan that works without it, and if an inheritance ultimately materializes, it can improve your financial security rather than rescue it,

Inherited IRAs boosted investable assets by about 66% for recipients in their thirties but only 22% for those in their sixties, the firm’s data showed. 

IRA recipients owe $35,000 more than they inherit

Among IRA recipients in the Vanguard research, 54% had outstanding balances when they received the assets, and the average debt exceeded the inheritance by $35,000.

The total liabilities included mortgages, auto loans, student loans, and revolving credit card accounts, totaling $141,000, compared with a $106,000 inherited IRA balance.

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The paper found that many recipients evaluate the windfall in isolation from their outstanding liabilities. 

Malena de la Fuente, a Behavioral Scientist and Economist at Vanguard and the paper’s coauthor, said the team “were surprised that heirs consider inherited assets and existing debt separately.”

Recipient spending confirms the gap: 68% reinvest the assets, while only 11% direct any portion toward outstanding debt. The low rate of debt paydown persists even though a majority of recipients have liabilities that exceed the transfer’s value, the research found.

About 50% of all recipients reported greater peace of mind after the transfer, though the effect varied sharply with age. Heirs under 55 were 10 percentage points more likely to report that emotional boost than older recipients, the largest age-based gap in the study.

How long recipients wait for an inheritance shapes the psychological impact as strongly as the dollar amount, the researchers concluded.

Vanguard found IRA recipients carried $35,000 more in debt than they inherited, with just 11% using assets to repay liabilities.Galina Zhigalova / Getty Images

Fewer Americans expect a transfer as credit card balances climb

The share of American adults expecting an inheritance fell from 25% to 20% in a single year, Northwestern Mutual’s 2025 Planning and Progress Study found.

Gen Z expectations dropped from 38% to 30%, and millennials fell from 32% to 26%, the steepest declines of any age group in the survey.

Among millennials who still expect an inheritance, 69% described it as critical or highly critical to long-term financial security, Northwestern Mutual reported.

The share of adults planning to leave an inheritance rose from 26% to 31% during the same twelve-month period. The gap between givers’ rising intentions and receivers’ falling expectations widened by 10 percentage points in that single year, the survey revealed.

Credit card debt reached $1.26 trillion in the second quarter of 2026, nearing the record, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported.

Delinquencies on credit cards and auto loans remain elevated, and warrant continued monitoring, Joelle Scally, an economic policy advisor at the New York Fed, said.

Roughly 7% of credit card balances transitioned into delinquency over the past year, a flow rate that has held steady for roughly two years, according to New York Fed data.

What the timing gap means for household balance sheets

Goncharova noted that the returns from an inheritance depend on the recipient’s existing liabilities and on how the transferred assets are ultimately deployed.

Recipients who sought professional guidance reported the largest gains in peace of mind, outstripping every other variable the researchers tested, the Vanguard paper indicated.

Revolving debt at rates above 20% compounds whether or not an inheritance arrives, and the two-decade wait multiplies that cost, the research showed.

Vanguard’s paper notes that whether heirs address high-interest liabilities in the years before a transfer, or wait until the assets arrive, shapes how much of that compounding cost becomes permanent.

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Micron is increasingly important to the S&P 500, and its earnings report has become “a market event in and of itself.”