The Daily Brief — UK & World News, Curated Morning and Evening

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Morning Briefing

Saturday 24 October 2026 — 11:33 BST

What It Means For You

If you are following the Budget on Wednesday: the only substantial measure announced on the record so far is £100m for an AI biosecurity laboratory, within a £165m initiative. Everything else being reported — energy support, a bank levy, the size of the headroom — rests on unnamed sources and is not confirmed.
If your area won levelling up money: an analysis of data released under freedom of information law finds 821 of 1,347 funded projects were still incomplete in May, and that in 73 council areas with accepted bids not one project has been finished. The money was allocated between 2018 and 2021.
If you drive: Brent settled on Friday at its highest since April after Iran threatened oil facilities across the Gulf. Pump prices follow crude with a lag of a week or two, and motor fuel was the largest single driver of September’s inflation figure.

GEO Geopolitical

Israel Seals Hebron as 200 Families Are Displaced Overnight

Israeli forces have raided at least 15 towns across the northern West Bank and sealed Hebron, closing seven of its entrances. The city’s municipality says up to 200 families were forced from one neighbourhood overnight. The army says the operation will last several days. Israel votes on Tuesday.

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Friday was the announcement; overnight it became execution. Bulldozers wrecked a three-storey building, hundreds more families were ordered out of a second area, and a correspondent on the ground reports the army using emptied homes as temporary outposts and raising the Israeli flag over them. Israel’s high court has issued a temporary order halting the demolitions after an urgent petition by a human rights lawyer, who said: “What we saw today was an attempt to copy the illegal practices used in Gaza, in the heart of the West Bank.” The defence minister, Israel Katz, was explicit about the model: “The Jenin refugee camp model arrives in Hebron. Every clan neighbourhood in Hebron from which the terrorists emerged today will be evacuated of its residents.” The Israeli rights group B’Tselem says the offensive amounts to “collective punishment and acts that could constitute war crimes”. Two cautions belong here. The 200-family figure is the municipality’s own and one Israeli outlet reports only dozens of evacuations. And a closure of the territory had already been planned for Tuesday’s election, so this is not purely a response to Friday’s attack.

US Spy Chief Says Iranian Plots to Kill Americans Are Advanced

America’s director of national intelligence told the secretary of state, in a dated unclassified memo, that Iran has substantially increased efforts to target American personnel and that lethal plotting has “reached advanced stages”. The memo names no targets, no countries and gives no indication of timing. Four more embassies are cutting staff.

Dive deeper

What makes this reportable is that it is a written, dated document from a named official rather than an anonymous briefing, and that two outlets have obtained it and quote the same sentence. What it does not contain is any evidence a reader can inspect, and it remains one government’s assessment of an adversary at a moment when that government is weighing whether to resume strikes. It also sits awkwardly beside the president, who days earlier accused Iran of “making up fake hits, mines, and everything else” in the Gulf — so the same administration is asserting that Iranian plots are real and advanced while calling Iranian claims of Gulf attacks fabrications. The staff reductions cover Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, all already on restricted operations; only Saudi Arabia is under an ordered departure. Brent settled on Friday at $116.72, up 3.1% and the highest settlement since 29 April, after Tehran threatened oil facilities, undersea cables and datacentres across the Gulf if a new offensive begins. At least 21 people have been killed in attacks on Saudi airports this month.

France Deploys 70,000 Officers as a Fourth Protest Weekend Begins

Some 70,000 police and soldiers have been mobilised across France, a fifth more than last weekend, and 24 Paris metro stations are closed. Police banned the planned march from Bastille to Nation and the organisers’ legal appeal failed. Courts have overturned bans in Marseille and Limoges.

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The Paris march has been confined to a route between two outer gates, from one until seven, though groups are preparing a two o’clock start instead; bans on unauthorised demonstrations remain in force in Lille, Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Grenoble, Toulouse and Amiens. The reason given for the Bastille ban was the “high density of businesses similar to those targeted” the weekend before, when hundreds of shops were smashed and looted in Paris over two nights and thousands more across the country. Shopkeepers boarded up overnight — opticians, supermarkets, pharmacies. Meanwhile the National Rally is holding its congress in Orléans, with about 5,000 members today and ten thousand expected at a campaign launch tomorrow, against twenty to thirty thousand counter-demonstrators. The general secretary of the CGT union placed the blame squarely: this violence “comes from speeches that convey racism, anti-Semitism, violence, which essentially come from the speeches of the far right”. Parallel protests are planned today in Italy, Spain, Austria, Portugal, Albania and Ireland.

Russia and Ukraine Agree a Local Truce for a Starving City

Both Moscow and Kyiv have confirmed a localised ceasefire in the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, to evacuate residents and bring in aid. Each says its forces will stop firing at two in the morning on 27 October. The White House, which announced it, gave a later date.

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This began as a White House claim and has become a story because both belligerents have now confirmed the same thing, which is rare. The American first lady said she had “successfully secured” the truce in a city “on the brink of disaster”, and that residents who wish to leave “will receive co-ordinated support and transportation to their preferred destination. I anticipate some will want to go to Russia, and some to Ukraine.” About 6,000 people are thought to remain of the 24,000 who lived there before the invasion, among them 200 children. There has been no gas or electricity since 2023, residents have resorted to eating garden weeds, and a single hospital opens a few days a week for critical amputations. The head of President Zelensky’s party in parliament confirmed that an operation to unblock the settlement would begin shortly. Two limits worth stating: the White House put the start at 29 October where both Moscow and Kyiv said the 27th, and nobody has said how long the ceasefire will hold.

Serbia Votes Tomorrow With a Student List Level Against Vucic

Serbia holds parliamentary elections on Sunday, with a movement grown out of almost two years of anti-corruption protests mounting the most serious challenge to the governing party since it took office in 2012. Its 250 candidates have no political background, and the list has no leader.

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The protests began after 16 people died when a railway station canopy collapsed at Novi Sad, and the candidates were chosen by university faculty assemblies rather than by a party. The list is headed by a cardiologist who would not necessarily become prime minister, since the movement has deliberately refused a hierarchy. A reported 150,000 supporters attended its final rally in Belgrade on Thursday night. Aleksandar Vucic stood down as president in order to run again as prime minister, and has cast the movement as foreign-backed and bent on bringing down the state. The candidate at the top of the student list framed it as restoration rather than rupture: “We offer to our citizens the core values of civilised society, which this previous regime has taken away from our citizens.” Reliable polling is scarce and analysts expect an extremely tight result. The thing to watch is whether a movement with no leader and no machine can convert street numbers into seats — and whether the governing party accepts the count if it cannot.

UK Domestic

Treasury to Fund World-First AI Biosecurity Lab With £100m

The chancellor will put £100m into a new AI Biosecurity Lab, within a £165m biosecurity initiative, alongside up to £200m of model credits and computing power pledged by OpenAI and Anthropic. It is the first substantial Budget announcement to be made on the record. The Budget is on Wednesday.

Dive deeper

The distinction between those two sums matters and is easily garbled: £100m is government cash, while the £200m is in-kind credits from two private companies, so the “up to £300m” figure in circulation is arithmetically right but blurs the two. The laboratory will be an independent non-profit modelled on the AI Security Institute, working with the health and animal health agencies, the defence laboratory and the medicines regulator, with Google DeepMind and Basecamp Research as partners. No location and no timetable have been published. Around it sits a wider package: another £120m for the AI Security Institute, a £60m national cyber shield including a £25m challenge fund, a £70m vulnerability centre, £60m more for the sovereign AI fund, chip design capability in Edinburgh and two centres of excellence in Manchester. John Healey said he was setting out “a distinctively British approach to AI — one that doesn’t leave workers behind and defends our national interest”, and the AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, was blunter about the reasoning: “We cannot afford to rely entirely on technology built overseas.”

Six Warnings as Boelo Arrives, With Amber Wind From Tonight

Six weather warnings now cover the United Kingdom as Storm Boelo arrives, including two amber wind warnings that begin at nine tonight across mainland Scotland, the Western Isles, northern England, northern Wales and north-west Northern Ireland. Gusts could reach 80mph on exposed coasts. The warnings in force this morning are yellow.

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The disruption has started well ahead of the amber period. Fourteen Caledonian MacBrayne sailings have been cancelled, along with Irish Sea crossings between Belfast and Liverpool, Belfast and Cairnryan, and Dublin and Holyhead. England has three flood warnings and fourteen alerts, with flooding expected at Scarborough and in Staffordshire; Scotland has warnings across ten areas including Aberdeenshire, Fife and the Lothians. Rail operators are closing lines rather than slowing them: the Ayr line goes from nine tonight, Oban and Mallaig from about ten, and three Highland routes from the start of service tomorrow. One operator is advising against all but essential travel across the north today and tomorrow, another against travelling north of Preston on Sunday. Supt Andy Barclay of Police Scotland asked drivers to “consider if your journey is really necessary”, noting that stopping distances “can be at least double on wet roads”. Storm Austen has not finished either: 5,774 properties in England and Wales were still without power at a quarter to ten this morning, most of them in the south-west. The clocks go back at two tomorrow morning.

Most Levelling Up Projects Still Unfinished Years After Funding

Of 1,347 projects funded under three levelling up programmes, 821 were not complete as of May this year, according to an analysis of data released under freedom of information laws. In 73 council areas that won money, not a single project has been finished. The money was allocated between 2018 and 2021.

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The three funds had their own deadlines and all have slipped: the high streets money was due to be spent by March 2024 and the town and levelling up funds by March 2026. Those commitments have since been folded into a single regeneration fund with a deadline of March 2028, and the present government’s own replacement, worth £5.8bn, pays out at £2m a year over ten years for each place. Completion has been slowest in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and low in north-west England and Yorkshire; Blackburn with Darwen has eight projects and none complete, Leeds eight and none closed. Andy Haldane, the former Bank of England chief economist, was scathing about the design rather than the delivery: it was “better than nothing”, but “in some ways the kind of worst of Whitehall. Because all the decisions were centralised. There looked to be degrees of pork barrel politics rolled into which places got it.” Two honest limits: this is one newspaper’s analysis rather than official statistics, and it identified 59 completions since the data was collected.

Tories’ Former Campaign Chief Sentenced Over Election Betting

Anthony Lee, the Conservatives’ former director of campaigning, has been given ten months and two weeks suspended for cheating at gambling, having bet on the date of the 2024 election using information from a private meeting called by the then prime minister. He and his wife stood to win more than £23,000.

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His wife, Laura Lee, received four months and two weeks suspended for a year, and Amy Hind, a former party employee then working as an NHS business support manager, six months suspended. All three admitted the offence at Southwark Crown Court on Thursday, having been charged by the Gambling Commission. Sentencing them, Judge Tony Baumgartner said their conduct “risked undermining” public confidence in the Conservative Party “as an institution”, as well as trust in the democratic process and the integrity of the gambling system. The case is not over: other defendants are due to be tried next year and in 2028, and the former Conservative member of parliament Craig Williams, who was the then prime minister’s closest parliamentary aide when the election date was chosen, pleaded guilty in June and will be sentenced later. The sums involved are small against the damage; what the prosecutions establish is that the date of a general election was treated by people inside the governing party as a tradeable piece of information.

Green Councillors Face a Labour Deadline Over Zionism Policy

Green council groups have until Sunday to disown their party’s policy that Zionism is a form of racism, after which Labour’s national executive will decide whether local power-sharing arrangements continue. Nine authorities are exposed, three of them direct coalitions. Two alliances have already broken.

Dive deeper

The motion, passed by members at the Green conference in Brighton last month, describes Zionism as an ideology supporting an “ethnonationalist Jewish state” that has led to the “disenfranchisement and destruction” of Palestinians, and backs “a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine” — which includes present-day Israel. Four of the Greens’ five members of parliament have criticised it, and the party leader, who did not vote, has called it “imperfect” and wants it amended. The consequences are already landing locally: Green councillors have left the ruling alliance at Runnymede, and the Labour group leader on Lewes District Council has resigned from his own party to sit as an independent cabinet member. In Stafford, where a Green cabinet member holds the climate portfolio, Labour has confirmed a process would be triggered to remove him if the group refuses. The Stafford Green leader said they were “formulating a response” they would like to put to members first. A Green spokesperson called it “disappointing and wrong” to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

One To Read

The Slick You Can See From Orbit

BBC News · Satellite imagery matched to a damaged Panama-flagged tanker traces an oil slick spreading more than 35km off the United Arab Emirates. Amid competing claims about who is hitting ships in the Gulf, this is the part that can be verified.

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Evening Briefing

Friday 23 October 2026 — 16:17 BST

What It Means For You

If you want to be better prepared for disruption: the government is asking households to keep enough tinned food and bottled water for three days. The free first step it recommends is the priority services register, which obliges energy and water suppliers to give extra help to people who need it.
If you pay a water bill in England or Wales: the environment secretary has told regulators that affordability must come first in the price review running to 2029. Nothing has been cut yet — on the last review, average bills are still set to rise 36% across the second half of the decade.
If you are saving for a first home: earnings limits for the new government-backed equity loan are reported at £110,000, or £140,000 in London, and are expected to be confirmed at the Budget on Wednesday. No department has confirmed those figures yet.

GEO Geopolitical

Netanyahu Orders Extensive West Bank Operation After Soldiers Killed

Two Israeli soldiers were killed and three others wounded in a gun attack at a checkpoint outside Hebron, and both Palestinian assailants were shot dead. The prime minister has ordered an operation he says will involve evacuating residents and going house to house. Israel votes on Tuesday.

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The gunfight lasted more than twenty minutes, and accounts of how badly the survivors were hurt differ between outlets. Hebron, a city of more than 200,000, has been cordoned off, and this is the fourth West Bank-wide closure in a month — roads remain open to Israeli drivers, settlers included. Benjamin Netanyahu’s description of what follows was unusually explicit: “We will evacuate the residents, we will go from house to house, we will also seize the weapons there, and all the terrorist infrastructure will be dealt with and destroyed.” His finance minister went further, calling for “a comprehensive military campaign to dismantle the Palestinian Authority… Exactly like in Gaza and Lebanon”. Two cautions belong with this. Mr Netanyahu’s assertion that the gunmen were Hamas members planning a larger attack is his own, offered without evidence. And the stated precedent is not reassuring: the operation he invoked, launched in January 2025, displaced tens of thousands of people from northern refugee camps according to the United Nations, which also counts at least 96 Palestinians killed in the West Bank since the start of this year.

One Killed as Paris Drive-By Shooting Investigated as Terrorism

A gunman killed one person and wounded five, three of them seriously, in drive-by shootings in two towns south-west of Paris. A twelve-year-old girl was shot eight times and is in a stable condition. A 39-year-old man known to police, but not to the intelligence services, has been arrested.

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The rampage ran through Trappes and then La Verrière in the Yvelines, taking in a petrol station, a medical centre and a playground, and lasted just under a quarter of an hour before five officers from the anti-crime brigade stopped it. The national anti-terrorist prosecutor has taken the case, opening it for murder in connection with a terrorist enterprise — but has also, pointedly, urged caution about the identity of the victims, and the interior minister says the motive remains unclear. The mayor of Trappes has gone much further, calling it “probably one of the first attempted mass killings motivated by Islamophobia and racism”; that is his characterisation and not a finding of the investigation. Even the weapon is disputed, described by one police account as an older semi-automatic and by the interior minister as “a military-grade weapon, or at least an automatic weapon”. Separately, and not connected to this attack, France is bracing for a fourth weekend of protest: some 70,000 officers are being deployed, Paris’s curfew runs to Monday, and the Louvre will close on Saturday.

Brent Tops $116 at a Six-Month High on Expected Iran Strikes

Brent crude rose 2.7% to above $116 a barrel, its highest since 30 April, as investors priced in renewed American strikes on Iran. It is on course for a weekly gain of nearly 6%, a third consecutive week of rises. Oil traded at about $72 before the war began in February.

Dive deeper

The trigger is reporting that American and Israeli forces have plans for fresh strikes after the midterm elections on 3 November, which rests on unnamed United States officials and should be read as such. Around it sit three harder facts: Tehran has threatened to attack oil facilities, undersea cables and datacentres across the Gulf if a new offensive begins; Saudi Aramco has told staff to evacuate its headquarters at Dhahran; and Ukraine’s continuing strikes on Russian diesel refineries are tightening refined supply at the same time. Richard Hunter of the broker Interactive Investor put the repricing plainly: the reports were “enough for the price to pop, after what many had considered would be a brief conflict is now in its eighth month”. For scale, Brent peaked at about $126 at the end of April before falling back, so this is a return towards the war’s highs rather than a new extreme. Iran’s army chief said his forces are “fully prepared” for asymmetric warfare, a claim carried by Iranian state media and close to one we reported on Wednesday.

Gunmen Kill Six at a Church Funeral in Southern Jordan

Six people were killed and 28 wounded when gunmen opened fire on mourners at a Greek Orthodox church in Karak governorate, south of Amman. The attackers fled and a manhunt is under way. No group has claimed responsibility, and the death toll was revised down from an initial seven.

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Between 150 and 200 people were in and around the church, and most of those killed were aged between fifty and seventy; the firing went on for about five minutes. How many attackers there were is not settled. Jordan’s public security directorate says two, and a mourner who was there described one man with a rifle and one with a pistol — but closed-circuit footage verified by one broadcaster appears to show three men approaching the church, all of them carrying handguns. A government spokesman called the attack “heinous” and the prime minister is to chair a meeting of the security council attended by every minister. The context that makes this land hard in Jordan is Karak itself: a governorate where, as one Middle East correspondent put it, Christians and Muslims “have lived side by side for generations… This community prides themselves on its interfaith solidarity and coexistence.” Christians number about 300,000 in a population of roughly 11.5 million. An attack in Karak in 2016, claimed by Islamic State, killed ten people.

Ukraine Says Starlink Is Still Throttled Despite Trump’s Claim

Ukraine’s defence ministry says there is no confirmation that restrictions on Starlink have been lifted, after President Trump said Elon Musk had “put it back”. Speeds remain capped so that drones moving faster than about 100mph lose their connection. Kyiv is now moving to build a satellite network it controls.

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Serhii Beskrestnov, a military expert who advises President Zelensky, was precise about why isolated improvements prove nothing: there have been “cases in which Starlink has operated at speeds slightly above the imposed limits, but this is likely due to SpaceX’s algorithms or specific conditions of use, rather than any lifting of the restrictions”. One soldier reported losing connection at 50mph in a car. Who imposed the cap is still unowned. The claim that Mr Musk ordered it comes from a single newspaper we cannot read directly; he denies it and has pointed at the Pentagon, which controls the military network, while the White House denies deliberately limiting anything. Mr Trump’s own account was airy: “Whether I called or whether somebody else called, doesn’t make any difference… The bottom line, he put it back.” A senior Democratic senator has opened an inquiry, warning that the episode “raises serious questions about who controls critical capabilities the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars to procure”. Kyiv’s answer is to stop depending on it: Nokia and the Finnish firm ICEYE have signed a letter of intent with its defence ministry.

UK Domestic

Storm Austen Cuts Power to 18,000 Homes as Brighton Pier Collapses

More than 18,000 homes across parts of England and Wales were without power this afternoon as Storm Austen crossed the country, with a gust of 84mph recorded at Jersey Airport. Part of Brighton’s derelict West Pier collapsed into the sea. No casualties have been reported.

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Cornwall Council dealt with about 250 emergencies, 150 of them fallen trees, though most major roads have reopened. In Wales almost 2,000 properties lost supply between Milford Haven and Usk, the worst of it in Cardigan with more than 500 homes off. The amber warning for Cornwall, Devon and the Isles of Scilly expired at ten this morning and yellow warnings run into this evening. The forward-looking point matters more: a fresh amber warning for wind takes effect at nine tomorrow night and runs for 24 hours, covering Scotland, the north coast of Northern Ireland, Cumbria and Northumberland, with gusts to 80mph on exposed coasts, a danger to life from flying debris and what forecasters call a good chance of power cuts. One practical consequence is already visible in the Channel Islands, where the chief executive of the islands’ Co-op warned of fresh food shortages from a ferry backlog, with essential medication being prioritised: “It’s rare we get this level of disruption to storms backing up so quickly.” Transport Scotland’s advice for tomorrow was blunter — “only go out if it’s necessary”. The West Pier opened in 1866, closed in 1975 and had already been declared beyond repair.

Burnham Urges Households to Keep Three Days of Food and Water

The prime minister has encouraged people to keep tinned food and bottled water sufficient for three days of disruption, as a government preparedness campaign launched this week. He said it was “not about panic buying”. The official guidance is framed entirely on severe weather and names no other threat.

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It is worth being precise about what this is, because the framing has run ahead of the document. The campaign is the first stage of a three-year programme, it rebrands advice the government has published since May 2024, much of which has not changed, and its headline step is free: signing up to the priority services register. It matches the three-day standard used in France, Ireland and the Netherlands, and more than 500 organisations have agreed to repeat the message. The security minister’s stated rationale is that households who prepare “reduce pressure on emergency services, helping them prioritise people who need more support”. Asked whether this amounted to scaremongering, the defence secretary said the government wanted people “alert but not alarmed” and that there was no “specific thing we’ve got in mind”. The Conservative leader’s objection was about priorities rather than the advice: “Families can stock up but what’s going on with defence, the cyber attacks, the hybrid warfare?” A disaster-planning academic who says she has lobbied for such a campaign for sixteen years called Britain “light years” behind Scandinavia, while suspecting the advice was hurried out ahead of the storm.

Healey Promises to Cut £800m a Year of Business Paperwork

The chancellor has promised savings of almost £800m a year in administrative and tariff costs, five days before the Budget, saying firms are “fed up with form-filling and pointless paperwork”. More than £600m of that is regulatory reporting, with up to £155m from extending tariff suspensions on over 250 products.

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The itemised components are a simplification of company reporting worth up to £290m a year, the removal of duplicative reporting for asset managers at £105m, and £116m from streamlining house buying and selling. Those published figures come to roughly £755m, so “almost £800m” is the government’s own rounding of a total whose parts fall a little short. The requirement for the smallest firms to file profit and loss accounts at Companies House is paused until April 2028, which the Federation of Small Businesses welcomed as “averting a huge new weight of red tape on the very businesses with the fewest resources to deal with it”. The wider target is to cut the administrative burden of regulation by a quarter by the end of this Parliament, which the Treasury puts at 280 million hours a year. The business secretary supplied the line of the day — “a baker should be filling pasties, not forms” — while the CBI’s chief executive was cooler: “The test now is delivery.” One caveat readers should hold: this is a claimed saving to business, not a tax cut and not a saving to the Exchequer. The individual measures are published on Budget day.

Retail Sales Fell 0.4% in September as Warm Weather Hit Clothing

Retail sales volumes fell 0.4% in September, after a 0.7% rise in August, though they remain 0.8% higher than a year earlier. Non-food stores drove the decline, with clothing, footwear and sports equipment down on lower footfall. It is the last reading on household spending before the Budget.

Dive deeper

The statisticians’ own explanation for the clothing weakness is the weather rather than the consumer: autumn and winter ranges did not perform in what was the joint-fourth warmest September on record. Household goods fell too, on hardware. Set against the month, the quarter looks steadier — sales across the three months to September were still 0.7% up on the previous quarter and 1.5% up on a year earlier — so this interrupts a recovery rather than reversing it. One line is worth pausing on: volumes of fuel sold rose on the month even as pump prices continued to climb, which is an unusual pairing and sits oddly beside the motor-fuel inflation that drove September’s price figures. Online sales values fell 0.4% after a 3% rise in August but are 6.8% above a year earlier, and the online share of all spending slipped only fractionally, from 28.9% to 28.8%. The response rate to the survey was 59.1%, covering 92.4% of turnover. The next reading comes on 20 November, which is to say after the Budget rather than before it.

Environment Secretary Intervenes in Water Price Review for First Time

Dame Angela Eagle has written to regulators and to water company chief executives in England and Wales setting conditions for the next five-year price review, which concludes in 2029. She told them affordability must come first. The intervention stops short of demanding that bills be cut.

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The letter’s central demand is that “affordability means a laser focus on value for money for customers”, and it warns company bosses that this will “not be a business-as-usual price review… it is the beginning of a long-term transition to a different model for the water sector”. Alongside affordability it requires investment in new technology and in early intervention on leaks and sewage, and more decision-making power for local communities and leaders. The reason it matters is the last review. In 2024 the regulator authorised a £104bn modernisation programme and set average bills on course to rise 36% across the second half of the decade; the largest single allowance went to Southern Water, whose customers face paying 53% more by 2030, an average of £642 a year. Thames Water, separately, has recently asked its creditors for a further £2.4bn. A ten-year plan due after the Budget is expected to hand ministers firmer powers to lower bills and direct investment. Two honest limits: this rests on a single outlet, and the letter itself has not been published.

One To Read

A Vaccine Made for One Patient

BBC News · In a trial of 1,137 melanoma patients, adding a personalised mRNA vaccine to immunotherapy cut the risk of dying or the cancer returning by 42%. Full results are presented in Madrid tomorrow and are not yet peer-reviewed.

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Morning Briefing

Thursday 22 October 2026 — 11:25 BST

What It Means For You

If you are on a means-tested benefit: letters confirming £150 off your energy bill this winter start arriving today, going to around six million households. Every billpayer on a means-tested benefit now qualifies, and the government says the scheme is funded to 2030-31.
If you heat your home with gas: the prime minister has asked the chancellor and the energy secretary to examine removing standing charges from gas bills and report back. Nothing is decided, the average gas charge is about 30p a day, and prices are forecast to rise 16% in January.
If you bank or shop online: fraud rose 11% to 4.5 million incidents in the year to June and computer misuse 23%. Separately, some council and NHS websites went offline this week over a software flaw, and six Scottish councils still report problems with payments.

GEO Geopolitical

Russia Fires 21 Missiles at Kyiv Hours After Agreeing Talks

Three waves of ballistic missiles struck Kyiv from Wednesday evening, 21 in all, hours after the Kremlin said President Putin had agreed in principle to resume three-way talks. President Zelensky said at least two people were killed and 34 injured, five of them children. Twelve regions were attacked overnight.

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What Russia agreed to is narrower than it sounds. A Kremlin foreign-policy aide said after Wednesday’s St Petersburg meeting that talks could resume only after 10 November — a week after the American midterms — possibly in Abu Dhabi, and at technical level only. The same aide dismissed the proposals the American envoy had brought from Oslo: “there wasn’t much there that was useful”. Mr Putin has not agreed to meet Mr Zelensky at all. Then came the missiles. Residential blocks, energy sites, a railway station, the metro, shopping centres and a monastery were hit; metro infrastructure was damaged near the Pivdenny bridge over the Dnipro. In Kharkiv region a woman was killed and four injured. The toll is still rising: Ukraine’s emergency service had earlier put it at one dead and 22 injured. Mr Zelensky’s own framing was mordant — the missiles came from Russian “humanitarians” — and his foreign minister was blunter: “Appeasement, servility, and flattery will not stop this war. Only strength will.” Moscow’s mayor separately claimed Ukraine sent 630 drones at the Moscow region, a Russian figure that nobody independent has confirmed.

AI-Found PHP Flaw Forces Governments to Pull Websites Offline

Two critical flaws in the PHP programming language, uncovered with the help of artificial intelligence, allow an attacker to run commands on a web server without any password. America’s National Security Agency told organisations to patch at once or take systems offline. Britain’s budget watchdog took its own website down.

Dive deeper

The flaws, together dubbed PHP2Shell, had sat in the code for more than a decade and were found by two security firms using large language models. The response has been precautionary and very wide: the National Cyber Security Centre told British organisations to consider taking systems offline and to check for “backdoors installed by an attacker”, and the Office for Budget Responsibility pulled its website down — a week before it publishes its forecast alongside the Budget. NHS Scotland went dark; at one point seven of Scotland’s 32 councils and six of its 14 health boards were offline, and six councils still report problems with payments. Edinburgh, Bristol and Oxford councils, the Paris police prefecture and the Dutch national digital identity service all went down. Amazon found an exploit attempt against a decoy server on 17 October, four days before public disclosure. But the distinction that matters has been drawn by the people best placed to overstate it. The researcher who found the flaw called it the most serious he had ever seen, then added: “it doesn’t look like exploitation has taken off or been widespread.” Attempts are not breaches.

Two Killed at Dammam Airport as US Orders Diplomats Out

Saudi Arabia’s aviation regulator says two people were killed and eight injured in an attack on King Fahd International Airport on Wednesday evening. Washington has ordered non-emergency staff and their families to leave Saudi Arabia. Brent crude rose about 3% to around $112 a barrel.

Dive deeper

An ordered departure is mandatory rather than advisory, and its scope is narrower than first reported: a State Department spokesman said it covers Saudi Arabia only, and called reports of similar withdrawals from the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar and Bahrain “inaccurate”. His stated reason was that Houthi attacks on civilian airports and infrastructure “have the potential to escalate rapidly”. The dead at Dammam were a Saudi citizen and an Indian resident; the toll rose from one overnight. Notably, the regulator did not say what kind of attack it was and the Houthis have not claimed it. Saudi authorities put the death toll from attacks on the kingdom’s airports since the start of October at 21, and said four more drones were intercepted on Wednesday night. A drone at the Shaybah oilfield killed two contractors, from the Philippines and Nepal. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards claimed their navy struck four vessels over alleged illegal oil transfers and that three more hit mines west of Hormuz; no vessels were named and nobody independent has verified it. They also warned that if the trend continues “the conflict will extend to” American bases in the region.

France Now Borrows More Dearly Than America as Protests Loom

French ten-year borrowing costs rose about nine basis points to just over 5.08%, moving above the equivalent American yield for the first time since 2013. The premium over German debt is the widest in almost fifteen years. Protests are banned across central Paris today and in Lyon on Saturday.

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France crossed 5% on Wednesday for the first time since 2002, and the move is now spilling outwards: Italy’s spread over German debt widened by almost four basis points and Spain’s is the widest since June last year. The cause is a budget nobody can pass sitting on top of a weekend of rioting, with the deficit at 5.1% of national income and debt at 115.6%. Carsten Brzeski of ING drew the uncomfortable conclusion for Frankfurt: the European Central Bank will “very likely stay on hold next week”, and “without any solution, bond markets have taken over the ECB’s role, making rate hikes less likely”. The policing is on the same scale as the borrowing. Today’s ban covers the Elysée, both chambers of parliament, the Louvre, the Champs-Élysées, Bastille and République from eight in the morning until eight at night; a junior interior minister said the weekend police presence would be 20% larger than last. In Lyon, where the mayor says between 150 and 200 shops were looted, all protests are banned on Saturday. Thailand, Malaysia and China have issued travel advisories.

Judge Fines Meta $25bn Over Eleven Years of Privacy Lies

A judge in New Mexico has ordered Meta to pay $25bn, the largest fine in the company’s history, finding it wilfully misled users about who controlled their data between 2010 and 2021. The state’s attorney general called it a warning to Silicon Valley. Meta says the ruling makes it all but impossible to do business there.

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The judgment followed a two-week trial in Santa Fe, and the finding is about honesty rather than any single breach: “Facebook promised users that they controlled their data. This was false,” the judge wrote, adding that the deception went to “the heart of Facebook’s core business practices”. The scale is worth putting in proportion. The sum is roughly a quarter’s profits for a company that reported revenue up 26% to $64.5bn last quarter, with profits tripling to $9.8bn; one account has the full calculated penalty at $219bn before the judge reduced it. The number of violations is given as more than 40 million by one outlet and more than 43 million by two others. Forty-eight other states settled similar claims; New Mexico, with a population of about two million, went to trial alone and will put the money into its education fund. Meta’s chief legal officer said the case amounted to “a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online”. The attorney general’s reply was that a small state’s judgment “should be a clear warning to everyone in big tech”.

UK Domestic

Barclays to Cut 5,000 Jobs as Profits Rise Before the Budget

Barclays will shed about 5,000 roles, some 5% of its global workforce, after pre-tax profits rose 12% to £2.3bn in the third quarter. Its chief executive said an expected Budget tax rise on banks would be “bearable” but questioned the signal it sends. Roughly a thousand of the cuts have already been made.

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Two things are being conflated in the coverage and both are worth straightening. The first is geography: the 5,000 is a global figure against a workforce of about 93,000, the cost-cutting is focused on the British retail bank, but a significant proportion of the actual job losses is expected to fall in India, where back-office functions are performed. These are not 5,000 British jobs. The second is artificial intelligence. The finance director tied about 60% of the reductions to support functions, “including fewer developers, as AI makes our people more productive”. But asked how many cuts were attributable to AI, the chief executive declined to give a number and put the bulk of the gains down to years of technology investment: “it is the icing on the cake — it’s not the cake”. On the Budget, six days away, his position was unusually candid: the bank makes about half its money outside Britain, so “this is not a question of a financial hit to us. It’s bearable. It is a question of proportion and it’s a question of market signaling.” Profits matched forecasts; group income of £7.4bn fell short of the £7.61bn expected.

Fraud and Computer Misuse Rise as Knife and Gun Crime Fall

Fraud rose 11% to 4.5 million incidents in the year to June and computer misuse 23% to 817,000, according to official figures published this morning. Over the same period knife offences fell 6% to 48,615, firearms offences 8% and homicides 1%. Overall crime showed no significant change.

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The statisticians’ own summary is that crime against individuals and households has generally fallen over a decade “with some notable exceptions, such as fraud” — and the exceptions are where the growth is. Bank and credit account fraud alone rose 13% to 2.8 million incidents. Computer misuse is up sharply year on year yet remains 54% below its 2017 level, so the rise is a rebound rather than a record. Two figures in the release need handling with care. Recorded robbery appears to have risen 10%, but that is mainly an artefact of better recording of robbery from businesses; robbery of personal property actually fell 7%. And a reported jump in domestic abuse, to 9.6% of adults from 7.8%, comes with an explicit warning from the statisticians that changes to their own questionnaire have “likely affected the domestic abuse estimates and scale of the increase” and that it is too early to say whether it represents a new trend. Shoplifting, which has driven much retail commentary, was down 2% at 519,516 offences.

Judges Get Power to Confine Killers Who Skip Sentencing

Under rules laid before Parliament today, Crown Court judges in England and Wales will be able to order offenders who refuse to attend their sentencing to be confined to a cell for 21 days, stripped of privileges for 84 and barred from social visits for 27. Visits from their children are exempt.

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The reasoning is that existing sanctions do not bite. Refusing to attend is already contempt of court, carrying a fine or up to two years’ additional imprisonment, but for a murderer serving decades the department concedes that extra time “can offer little deterrent”. Social visits can also be restricted to one every four weeks for 84 days, and the powers extend to offenders removed from court for disruption, not only those who refuse to appear. For 18- to 20-year-olds the maximum periods are shorter. Catherine McKinnell, the prisons minister, said criminals “should not be able to pick and choose when they face justice”. Claire Waxman, the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, said refusal “compounds trauma and robs families of one of the very few moments of accountability”, adding that it is “now essential that these powers are used consistently”. The aunt of Zara Aleena, murdered in 2022, said removing privileges “would rebalance the power in the justice system from offender to victim”. The Prison Reform Trust asked for evidence that sanctions actually increase attendance. The rules take effect next year.

Rosebank Decision Pending as Department Dismisses Reports as Speculation

Reports that the energy secretary is minded to refuse the Rosebank oil field have been met with an on-the-record denial: her department says “this is speculation” and that each project will be assessed on its merits. A decision is expected before the end of the year. The reports rest on unnamed sources.

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What Miatta Fahnbulleh has actually said on the record is narrower than the reporting but points in the same direction. Drawing the distinction with Jackdaw, approved on Wednesday, she said: “One is a gasfield that caters for the domestic market, while the other is an oilfield that is mainly for export. It is right that we judge each application in its own right, and it is absolutely critical that the decision is consistent with our climate obligations, our carbon budgets and the end destination we need to get to.” There is nothing on the government’s own publication service beyond the live case file, which does record one fact nobody has written up: the developer changed from Equinor UK to Adura Operations in February. Both fields are applications under existing licences, so neither touches the manifesto commitment to issue no new ones. The chair of the all-party group on climate change, the Labour MP Afzal Khan, said approving Rosebank on top of Jackdaw “cannot be justified”. Jackdaw alone is estimated to add 36 million tonnes of carbon emissions; the reported estimate that Rosebank would emit roughly seven times as much is a newspaper calculation, not an official one.

Six Million Households to Get £150 Energy Rebate Letters

Letters confirming £150 off energy bills this winter begin arriving from today, going to around six million households across Britain. Every billpayer on a means-tested benefit now qualifies, after an expansion that added nearly 2.3 million families last year. Separately, the prime minister has ordered a review of gas standing charges.

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The letters will go out between now and January, and anyone who needs to telephone their supplier about eligibility must do so before late February. The government says the scheme is funded through to 2030-31, and the minister for energy consumers, Polly Billington, urged people who think they qualify to “keep an eye out for a letter” — while warning recipients to contact suppliers only by their usual route and not to follow suspicious links, which is a sensible caution given what fraud figures published the same morning show. The standing-charges question is at an earlier stage than the headlines suggest. At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Andy Burnham said he had asked the chancellor and the energy secretary “to look at whether we can remove standing charges from gas bills and to report back to this house at the earliest opportunity”. No mechanism and no timetable have been given, the review covers gas only, and the regulator has consulted for nearly two years without reaching firm conclusions. The averages are about 55p a day for electricity and 30p for gas. Energy prices are forecast to rise 16% in January to a four-year high.

One To Read

The Vanishing Voters

NPR · India’s electoral rolls once held 980 million names. A revision has struck off an estimated 130 million, which critics call the largest disenfranchisement in history and the government calls a clean-up.

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Evening Briefing

Wednesday 21 October 2026 — 17:55 BST

What It Means For You

If you drive or heat your home: Brent crude held near $108 a barrel on Wednesday as attacks on tankers near the Strait of Hormuz and on Saudi energy sites kept markets on edge. Goldman Sachs puts crude freight costs at roughly seven times their level a year ago, a pressure that feeds through to refined fuels.
If a civil servant in your family has died: more than 1,600 bereaved families have waited over 100 days for death-in-benefit claims under the Capita-run pension scheme. Lump sums paid more than two years after notification lose their tax-free status, and the Pensions Ombudsman estimates an 18-month wait for complaints.
If you hold savings or a pension in European bonds: France’s ten-year borrowing cost briefly crossed 5% for the first time since 2002, as Paris struggles to pass a budget through a divided parliament after a weekend of riots.

GEO Geopolitical

Putin Ready to Resume Trilateral Talks After 10 November

President Putin told the American envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg that he would be ready to resume trilateral talks on Ukraine after 10 November, according to his aide Yury Ushakov. Mr Witkoff, thanking Mr Putin for freeing Stephen Hubbard, told him: “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that.”

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Mr Ushakov said the Kremlin wants to discuss a “security framework” for both Russia and Ukraine once the fighting ends, without saying what Moscow would demand. Kremlin officials, quoted by TASS, said progress was “theoretically possible” but required Kyiv to make “necessary decisions”; Dmitry Peskov said the talks would take a long time. Mr Zelensky has insisted that any settlement is acceptable “only when we are at the table of negotiations”. The gap between a Russian “framework” and Ukrainian guarantees is where the next round will be won or lost.

Iran Says It Is “Fully Prepared” to Defend Itself

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Tehran is “firmly committed to seeking a dignified peaceful resolution” but is “also fully prepared to defend ourselves”, adding that Washington had shown no willingness to reach an understanding. President Pezeshkian said the US could not expect dialogue while blockading Iran. Brent was little changed at about $108.

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The Revolutionary Guards said on Tuesday that naval mines had halted tankers using routes Tehran deems unauthorised, claiming two “violating oil tankers were set ablaze”. Houthi strikes on Saudi Aramco facilities at Yanbu and Shaybah have added to supply worries. In London, the son of Lindsay and Craig Foreman, the British couple held in Evin Prison for 656 days, handed the government a petition of more than 100,000 signatures; the Foreign Office said their “health and welfare is a top priority”. With diplomacy stalled on both sides’ public account, oil is pricing a long disruption rather than a settlement.

French Borrowing Costs Cross 5% for First Time Since 2002

The yield on France’s ten-year government bond briefly rose above 5% on Wednesday morning, the first time since 2002, before settling near 4.98%. Investors doubt a fractured parliament can pass the 2027 budget after weekend riots; the finance minister, Roland Lescure, said the government was willing to bypass parliament again if necessary.

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Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu is targeting €54 billion of spending cuts. France remains under the EU’s excessive deficit procedure, with a deficit of 5.1% of GDP at the end of last year against a 3% reference. This year’s budget was forced through without a vote in February using emergency powers; repeating the manoeuvre would deepen the street anger already visible. For Britain, the read-across is uncomfortable: gilt yields remain above 5.3%, and the Budget is a week away.

Houthis Fire Ballistic Missiles at Aden and Mukalla

Yemen’s armed forces said the Houthis fired one ballistic missile at Aden International Airport and three at al-Rayyan Airport in Mukalla. The Houthis said they targeted a military camp in Aden, the seat of the internationally recognised government. Smoke was seen rising near Aden’s airport.

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“Whenever it is broken on the battlefield, it pours its terrorism and aggression onto the lives of citizens,” said the military spokesman Colonel Majed Abdullah al-Nazili. The strikes come days after the Houthis claimed attacks on Saudi energy facilities and airports. The group is widening its target set inside Yemen as well as across the Red Sea and the Gulf, stretching the government’s air defences and the Saudi-led coalition’s patience alike.

Drone Strike on Abyei Market Kills More Than 150

South Sudanese officials said Sudan’s military carried out drone strikes on a market in the disputed Abyei region, killing more than 150 people — one of the deadliest attacks of a war that has spilled across Sudan’s borders. Médecins Sans Frontières treated the injured.

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Sudan’s war between the armed forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces erupted in April 2023, triggering one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises and drawing in local militias and foreign powers. Abyei, claimed by both Sudan and South Sudan, has long been a flashpoint. A strike of this scale on a civilian market across a border marks a dangerous widening of the conflict’s reach.

UK UK Domestic Politics

Burnham Emerges Unscathed From PMQs Over Jackdaw

Andy Burnham came through Prime Minister’s Questions untroubled as Kemi Badenoch struggled to attack the decision to approve the Jackdaw gas field, a move the Conservatives support. She blamed Labour for rerunning the application rather than fighting the legal challenge. Sir Ed Davey warned: “I feel that next week’s budget will not be the growth budget our country needs.”

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Jackdaw is expected to supply about 2% of Britain’s gas for a decade and create 27 jobs; President Trump welcomed the approval. The energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, delivered her statement on the decision from Aberdeen rather than the Commons. Downing Street rejected suggestions that Ms Fahnbulleh was undermining Shabana Mahmood after the energy secretary withheld support for the home secretary’s original proposals on indefinite leave to remain.

Burnham Says Reform Must Act Over “Politics of Poison”

The prime minister told MPs to “root out the politics of poison which has seeped far too far into our politics” after an ITV News exposé of racism in Reform UK, saying he was “still waiting to see the right level of action” from the party. Separately, the Electoral Commission fined Reform £2,187 over missing imprints on campaign material.

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Reform was due to pay £1,750 by 23 September; the fine rose by a quarter when it missed the deadline, and was paid on Tuesday. The breaches covered Reform’s X, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts and a February newspaper advertisement promoting Robert Jenrick. “We take proportionate action based on the facts and circumstances of each case,” said Jackie Killeen of the commission. The sums are small; the cumulative reputational cost for a party leading the polls is not.

Streeting Delays Defence Jobs Plan After Union Pushback

Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, has delayed a plan to bring more young people into defence industry jobs after trade unions objected at the eleventh hour. The MoD confirmed the delay but said the plan would be published “in due course”. It was due on Thursday as part of a week of youth jobs announcements.

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The plan promised at least 14,000 defence apprenticeships a year by 2035. Unions, shown it just before publication, called it weak and said it ignored their role in “build British” defence policy. Mr Streeting is still expected in Telford on Thursday to open a Rheinmetall gun production facility. The episode exposes the friction between Labour’s rearmament drive and its union base just as the government seeks to show momentum on youth unemployment.

Bereaved Civil Service Families Face Tax Bills Over Pension Delays

The Commons public accounts committee has warned that delays at the Capita-run civil service pension scheme could leave bereaved families with tax bills, because lump sums are tax-free only if paid within two years. More than 1,600 families have waited over 100 days for death-in-benefit claims.

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“It is unconscionable that the families of loyal and dedicated civil servants… could potentially face such an unjust financial penalty,” said Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the committee’s chairman. The Cabinet Office says it cannot stop HMRC taxing late claims; families must instead go to the Pensions Ombudsman, which estimates an 18-month wait. The committee wants the law changed so relatives do not pay for administrative failure.

Burnham Backs a Mayor for Wessex by 2028

Asked by the Liberal Democrat MP Edward Morello whether he would commit to a mayor of Wessex by 2028, the prime minister said he would, adding that he was “always happy to create more mayors”. He said he wanted full devolution for the south-west of England.

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Mr Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, has made devolution a signature theme. He told MPs that Cornish MPs had visited No 10 this week to discuss a devolution deal. James Cleverly used his question to contrast police numbers in Manchester and London; Mr Burnham replied that Sadiq Khan had been constrained by a lack of support under the Conservatives. A Wessex mayoralty would extend combined-authority government deep into traditionally Conservative and Liberal Democrat territory.

PMQs — The Key Exchanges 3 exchanges · Wednesday 21 October

Badenoch on Jackdaw: Attack Lines That Did Not Land

Badenoch argued that Labour was to blame for rerunning the Jackdaw application instead of fighting the legal challenge. Agreeing with the decision itself, she found little purchase, and Burnham emerged unscathed.

Davey: “Not the Growth Budget Our Country Needs”

Davey pressed the prime minister on Europe ahead of next month’s UK–EU summit and raised US restrictions on Ukraine’s Starlink access. Burnham said he would seek a better deal on food, energy and immigration at the summit.

Ahmed: Condemn Racism in Reform

Asked by Zubir Ahmed (Labour) to condemn the ITV exposé, Burnham paid tribute to migrant care workers and said “the firmest of action” should follow.

One To Read

When Is a Licence Not a Licence?

The Guardian · John Crace on Jackdaw, the energy secretary’s trip to Aberdeen, and a Westminster day of contortions over the North Sea.

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Morning Briefing

Wednesday 21 October 2026 — 12:18 BST

What It Means For You

If you receive benefits: working-age benefits including the personal independence payment and carer’s allowance will rise 3.5% in April, because the law ties them to this month’s inflation figure. The state pension is set separately and rises 3.9%, under the triple lock, on earnings growth between May and July.
If you drive: petrol rose 8.2p in a single month to 169.5p a litre, the highest since August 2022, and diesel rose 10.7p to 192.5p, the highest since July 2022. Fuel was the single largest contributor to the rise in inflation.
If you have a mortgage: Bank Rate is 3.75% and markets now put a quarter-point rise to 4% on 5 November at close to a certainty. The Budget comes first, a week today, and nothing is decided until the Bank meets.

GEO Geopolitical

Putin Frees American as Witkoff Opens Talks in St Petersburg

President Putin announced the release of Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American held since shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, during talks with the United States envoy Steve Witkoff at a palace outside St Petersburg. Witkoff said there is “a foundation in place to move toward a ceasefire”. No ceasefire and no territorial agreement emerged.

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Mr Hubbard is a retired schoolteacher from Michigan who had served in the National Guard and the Air Force. He was captured in Ukraine in 2022 and convicted at a closed trial in 2024 of fighting for Ukraine as a mercenary, for which he was sentenced to nearly seven years in a penal colony; he was the last American in Russia formally designated wrongfully detained, is in poor health, and is expected to be flown to a military hospital in Texas. Witkoff, filmed in the room, told Mr Putin: “Because of you, he’s going home to his family.” President Trump said he had pressed the Russian president repeatedly over many months. What Washington gave in return, if anything, has not been disclosed, and no quid pro quo should be inferred. Witkoff separately thanked Mr Putin for lifting export controls on Russian diesel, and the Kremlin’s own account has the first cargo leaving within two to three days. The other thread closed today too: President Zelensky confirmed American warning intelligence is reaching Ukraine again, saying simply, “Now it works. It’s great.”

RAF Typhoons to Defend Saudi Skies as the Gulf War Widens

Britain will fly Typhoon fighters on defensive missions over Saudi cities and infrastructure, and has extended an existing refuelling mission for Saudi jets by 90 days. Egypt’s president is seeking parliamentary authority for a defensive mission of his own, with the vote now delayed to Monday. Brent crude rose above $110.

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Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, was explicit that the aircraft “will operate in a defensive role and will not conduct offensive strikes against the Houthis”. The provocation is not in doubt: a missile on Riyadh’s international airport this month killed 13 and injured 308, the deadliest attack in the kingdom in over a decade, and on Monday three ballistic missiles killed 73 police and security recruits, all aged between 18 and 20, at a camp in Shabwa. Britain has sold Saudi Arabia 72 of these aircraft in a deal originally worth £4.4bn and is negotiating 48 more, so it is now defending its own customer. HA Hellyer of the Royal United Services Institute put the obvious question: “What does defensive mean? The UK might say it was defensive but the Houthis would see it as offensive.” On Egypt, one regional official says the contribution would be air defence and aircraft rather than ground troops. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards meanwhile claimed mines had halted three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, naming no vessel or operator, two months after President Trump declared the strait “totally cleared” of mines.

France’s Borrowing Cost Tops 5% as Europe’s Riots Spread to Italy

French ten-year borrowing costs briefly rose above 5% this morning for the first time since July 2002, before easing back just below. The premium over Germany is near 160 basis points, and France now pays more to borrow than Italy. Italy has sent 500 soldiers to Milan after two nights of disorder.

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France’s debt is around €3.6 trillion, or 119% of national income, up from 98% in 2019 and the highest since shortly after the Second World War. The prime minister is seeking €54bn of savings, and his finance minister, Roland Lescure, was asked how he would force a budget through a hostile parliament: “I’m convinced of this because we have no choice. We have the tools to get it passed.” Nearly 2,400 people were arrested in France at the weekend. In Milan, where 271 young people were detained, Giorgia Meloni said “destroying and stealing is not protest, it is crime, and the state’s response must be firm”; her government plans penalties of up to five years and €20,000, and powers to detain 14- to 17-year-olds on evidence of danger before any crime is committed. President Macron, in Doha, attacked commentary he called “unacceptable and stupid from many quarters, including from foreign leaders” who were “campaigning at our expense”. The read-across for Britain is uncomfortable rather than identical: the ten-year gilt is steady today but sits at about 5.4%, close to its own highs, a week before the Budget.

Drone Strike on Abyei Market Kills 153, South Sudan Protests

The toll from a drone strike on a fuel depot at a market in the disputed Abyei region has been revised up from 73 to at least 153, and officials say it is still rising. South Sudan has summoned Sudan’s ambassador in protest. A military source said the Sudanese army carried out the attack.

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The strike hit Amiet Market, about ten kilometres from Abyei town, at around half past eleven on Monday morning, and the fire was still burning the following day. Yohanna Akol Ngor, the Abyei administration’s caretaker information minister, called it “a horrible and shocking situation” and said some bodies had been burned to ashes. Christian Lindauer, who manages an operation for Doctors Without Borders at a nearby hospital, reported more than 20 patients including several critical cases and burns. Satellite imagery has independently confirmed extensive burnt buildings at the market. Against that, a senior Sudanese officer said anonymously that those killed “were RSF members and fuel smugglers” and that the military does not target civilians; the Rapid Support Forces have not commented, and both are interested parties. The United Nations condemned the drone strikes without attributing blame. Abyei is oil-rich, claimed by both Sudans, and has hosted more than 2,800 United Nations peacekeepers since 2011 — one trader noted it is “a weapons-free zone under United Nations protection, yet it was targeted by drones”. Twenty million Sudanese now face acute hunger.

Nigeria Confirms First Ebola Case as Outbreak Reaches West Africa

A woman who arrived from Uganda has tested positive in Abuja, Nigeria’s first case of this outbreak, and 44 contacts are being traced. She developed symptoms on 7 October and was admitted to a private hospital four days later. The strain involved has no approved vaccine or treatment.

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That last point deserves emphasis because it is easily got wrong. This is the Bundibugyo species, which kills close to half of those it infects and for which there is no licensed vaccine or treatment, only trials; the vaccine seen being administered in the region is licensed against a different species of the virus. Jean Kaseya, who runs the Africa Centres for Disease Control, said “we are facing an extremely serious threat” and that this outbreak “has already become the most geographically extensive in history, affecting several countries spread across three regions of Africa”. Nigeria’s health minister, Muhammad Pate, said the government was “doing everything possible to contain this case by tracing all the contacts the individual may have had”. Kenya has nine confirmed cases, all traced to one man who died, with 134 of 135 listed contacts in quarantine. Uganda disputes that the woman was infected on its territory, insisting it has no active cases and that “the location of exposure remains under investigation”. More than 4,000 people have died since the outbreak was confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo in May. Nigeria contained an outbreak in 2014 at 20 cases.

UK Domestic

Inflation Climbs to 3.5% as Fuel Prices Jump Before the Budget

Prices rose 3.5% in the year to September, up from 3.1% in August and above the 3.4% forecasters expected. Motor fuel made the largest contribution: petrol rose 8.2p in a single month to 169.5p a litre and diesel 10.7p to 192.5p. By law this figure sets April’s rise in working-age benefits.

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Two cautions on the detail. The 3.5% is the consumer prices index; the measure that includes housing costs rose 3.6%, and division figures differ between the two, so neither should be quoted without saying which. And these fuel prices are not records, as has been reported in places — petrol is the highest since August 2022 and diesel since July 2022. Underneath the headline, core inflation rose to 2.8% and services to 3.7%, while food was unchanged at 1.3% and actually fell on the month. That split is why economists read the same release in opposite directions. One at J.P. Morgan Personal Investing warned that accelerating services inflation “will create concern that we are starting to see second round inflationary effects beyond energy prices”. One at ING looked at the identical numbers and said there is “zero sign that the UK’s inflation shock is broadening out beyond energy. Second round effects are so far non-existent.” Grant Fitzner, the chief economist at the Office for National Statistics, called the increase “notable”. Markets now price a rise in Bank Rate from 3.75% to 4% on 5 November at close to a certainty.

Borrowing Hits £24.5bn and Debt Passes £3 Trillion

The government borrowed £24.5bn in September, £1.9bn above the official forecast and the most in any single month since March 2021. Debt interest alone came to £10.9bn, the highest September figure since records began in 1997. Public sector net debt is provisionally estimated to have passed £3 trillion for the first time.

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The figures cut both ways and the choice of half decides the story. Against the government: September overshot the forecast by £1.9bn, debt interest overshot by £2bn, and the financial year so far has run £6bn above forecast. In its favour: borrowing of £97.8bn since April is £4.4bn lower than at the same point last year, and debt as a share of the economy — the measure the fiscal rules are judged against — fell to 94.0%, seven tenths of a point down on the year, even as the cash total crossed £3 trillion. That total is a provisional estimate and may be revised. The mechanism connecting this to the Gulf is worth stating plainly: war-driven fuel prices feed the retail prices index, which sets the capital uplift on index-linked gilts, and a 0.6% rise in that index between June and July added £4bn to September’s interest bill on its own. Ruth Gregory of Capital Economics said the numbers “painted a dismal picture” and expects a cautious Budget that leaves “the toughest fiscal choices for next year”.

Jackdaw Gas Field Approved With New Energy Wealth Fund

Ministers have cleared the Jackdaw field in the North Sea, with the regulator granting consent this morning and gas expected to flow from the end of this month. The government simultaneously announced an Energy Wealth Fund, opening with £2bn of North Sea tax revenues. The field creates 27 jobs and safeguards 273.

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The scale claims need care because three different figures are circulating on three different denominators. The official release says Jackdaw will raise domestic gas production by about 6% at peak; because Britain produces roughly 42% of the gas it burns, that is nearer 2% of demand, which is the figure campaigners use. Its life is put at up to 11 years. The fund is not a £2bn fund either: £2bn is an opening payment, with future North Sea revenues flowing in over time. Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, said the decision “is compatible with our legally binding climate commitments” and that the government remains “resolute in ending new licences for oil and gas”, but conceded the gas “won’t lower our energy bills this winter”, and on jobs: “It will create 27 jobs. It will secure 273 jobs. But, look, that was not the primary consideration.” Tessa Khan of Uplift called the project “oversold”. The operator is Adura, owned half each by Equinor and Shell. Consent had to be reconsidered because a 2024 Supreme Court ruling requires the emissions from burning extracted fuel to be assessed. Rosebank is still pending.

Minister Declines to Back Fifteen-Year Wait for Settlement

The energy secretary repeatedly declined in a broadcast interview this morning to say she supports extending the wait for permanent residency from five years to fifteen, a proposal of the home secretary’s now out for consultation. Asked directly, she said: “Don’t put words in my mouth.” Dozens of Labour backbenchers oppose the plan.

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Miatta Fahnbulleh’s formulation was careful rather than hostile. She said reform must rest on “the principle of compassion, contribution”, that the home secretary “has been consulting on this” and would decide, and — speaking, as she noted, “as someone that came to this country as a refugee” — that nobody could look at the system “and not believe that it’s broken”. She also said she backed Shabana Mahmood “100%” in “everything she is trying to do”, which is support for a colleague rather than for a policy. A post on her own constituency website warning that prolonging the wait for settlement could “prolong the process of building cohesion” was subsequently removed. The proposal would raise the qualifying period to fifteen years and apply it retrospectively to 2021. Angela Rayner, the housing secretary, has criticised it publicly and then played down talk of a rift. The prime minister is said to be weighing an exemption for care work, which the Home Office resists on the grounds that it would loosen the visa tie and empty the sector.

High-Risk Cosmetic Procedures Would Be Restricted to Doctors

Under plans put out for consultation this morning, fillers injected anywhere other than the face, including liquid Brazilian butt lifts, would be legally classed as surgery and could be performed only by doctors. Cosmetic surgery would be banned for under-18s. Breaches would carry unlimited fines or penalties of up to £4,000.

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The target is a specific regulatory gap: procedures that are medical in everything but name have been performed by people with no clinical training, sometimes in hotel rooms, because the law did not define them as surgery. Deep chemical peels, so-called vampire facials, dermal micro-coring and some laser treatments would also be restricted to doctors, dentists and certain nurses, midwives and pharmacists. Karin Smyth, the health minister, said anyone undergoing a major procedure “deserve[s] to know you’re in safe hands — not risking your life with a rogue operator”, and that the aim is to “drive cosmetic cowboys out of the market”. Ashton Collins, who directs the register Save Face, was blunter about what the gap has cost: non-healthcare practitioners have “exploited a regulatory loophole” to perform high-risk procedures, leading to “serious and life-threatening complications, including the death of Alice Webb, and victims have been left without justice”. The British Beauty Council’s Victoria Brownlie said the line between a beauty treatment and a medical procedure had blurred in a booming and unregulated market. This is a consultation, not law, and nothing changes yet.

One To Read

Life Beside the Shipping Lane

The Guardian · Twenty-three photographs from the Iranian shore of the Strait of Hormuz: fishermen, ferry crews and port towns living alongside the sea lane the war is being fought over.

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Morning Briefing

Tuesday 20 October 2026 — 07:31 BST

What It Means For You

If you are looking for work or asking for a rise: there are now 691,000 vacancies, the fewest outside the pandemic since 2014, and 2.4 unemployed people for every one of them. Regular pay is growing 3.7% a year, which is 0.6% after inflation on the measure that includes housing costs.
If you park in a private car park: a new code laid in Parliament today guarantees five minutes to decide whether to park and ten to leave afterwards, caps the maximum charge at £100, limits minor slips such as a mistyped registration to £20, and requires charges to be cancelled on appeal for breakdowns, medical emergencies and broken ticket machines. It applies in England, Scotland and Wales.
If you own shares or a second property: the chancellor is reported to have decided against raising capital gains tax at the Budget in eight days. The rate is 18% for basic-rate taxpayers and 24% for higher and additional-rate. Note this rests on unnamed Treasury sources, not an announcement.

GEO Geopolitical

Alberta Rejects the Path to Separation by Three to One

Albertans have voted against beginning a legal process towards leaving Canada by about 76% to 23%, on a projection by the national broadcaster with more than a million votes counted. It was the first of ten questions on the ballot and the electoral commission says the rest may take days. Results were delayed after more than a hundred polling stations extended their hours.

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This is a projection rather than a final count, and roughly a third of ballots were in when it was made, so the margin may move even if the outcome does not. The turnout picture was unusual: 1.35 million Albertans, about 43% of those eligible, had already voted by advance or special ballot before polling day. Thomas Lukaszuk, the former deputy premier who led the campaign to remain, framed it as settled — “we are a solid country that’s united from coast to coast to coast” — and Jeromy Farkas, the mayor of Calgary and an opponent of independence, was careful not to treat it as closed: “no result will permanently put this to bed… The separatist movement sees this as a long-term project.” The more interesting consequence is internal. Jeff Rath, who campaigned for separation, had said he would be “thrilled” with 30%, wants the premier removed and predicts her party could splinter into a new pro-independence one. Danielle Smith called the referendum under pressure from separatists in her own party while opposing independence herself, which is the position she now has to defend from both directions.

Curfews Imposed in Central Paris and Seven Other Cities

After Monday’s crisis meeting the prime minister gave mayors the power to impose curfews where they judged them necessary. Paris police then set one from 23:00 to 06:00 covering the Place de la République and Les Halles, with gatherings banned elsewhere in the centre. Partial curfews followed in Marseille, Bordeaux, Nice, Lyon, Lille and other northern towns.

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The interior minister has survived, but only just and not quietly. Laurent Nuñez tried to resign on Sunday and the president refused, the Élysée citing “the need for continued command of law enforcement” while saying he should be transparent about what it called “intelligence and foresight failings”. Mr Nuñez has admitted police “lost control” in some cities and says two hundred investigators are reviewing footage to identify ringleaders. Sébastien Lecornu has not ruled out a state of emergency and promises a law to make those who caused damage pay for it, alongside a partial unemployment fund. The official figures now stand at more than 2,500 arrested, about a thousand police injured and more than 2,000 shops and businesses affected; the head of the chambers of commerce puts the damage in the hundreds of millions of euros, which is his own estimate rather than an insurer’s. Italy is following the same course: Matteo Salvini is sending five hundred troops to Milan after luxury stores were ransacked, with a security package before cabinet today. No fresh disorder was reported overnight under the curfew.

Saudi Arabia Postpones Its Flagship Investment Conference

The Future Investment Initiative, due in Riyadh from 26 October and marking its tenth year, has been put back to 2027. Expected speakers included the heads of BlackRock and Goldman Sachs and the president of Alphabet. Government staff have been told to work from home until Thursday, and the tower housing the International Monetary Fund’s regional office has asked workers to stay away.

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The organisers’ statement does not mention the attacks at all, citing a wish to deliver “the full scale, extraordinary quality, and unforgettable impact that our community has come to expect”; the connection is the obvious one rather than one they have drawn. What is not in doubt is how Riyadh is now being run. Residents received civil defence alerts of “a hostile aerial threat” on Monday, and firms in the main financial district have also sent staff home. A Houthi military spokesman claims six operations inside Saudi Arabia in forty-eight hours, naming Riyadh’s main airport, oil facilities at Yanbu, the Shaybah field and two air bases, and describing it as retaliation for more than two hundred Saudi strikes; there has been no Saudi comment and none of it is independently verified. Separately a missile strike on a security training camp in Shabwa province killed fifty-three people and injured more than two hundred on the provincial media office’s preliminary count, the only count available. Brent has climbed again this morning to just under $110, reversing most of yesterday's two per cent fall, and no approved source attributes the swing in either direction to a named cause.

Adviser Says Ukrainians Have Died for Want of American Warnings

Serhii Beskrestnov, who advises the Ukrainian president on military technology, says American intelligence has become “incomplete and inconsistent” and that “people [have] already died” as a result. The White House says there has been no change to intelligence sharing. The secretary of state said there had been no pause: “I don’t know where he’s getting these things.”

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His complaint is narrower than it first sounds, and that makes it more checkable: “intelligence data keeps flowing, and the issue is solely with the air raid alert component”. Sometimes warnings arrive before an attack, he says, and sometimes one minute before. He believes the simultaneous satellite and intelligence problems are “probably” American pressure to negotiate, which is his inference rather than anything established. He is also not quite saying what his own president says: Volodymyr Zelensky told American television that sharing had been restored after a three-day pause and that he was “very thankful”, while posting on Monday that of two overnight attacks on Kyiv, one came “without warning, the second with only minimal time to take shelter”. The satellite dispute this column has carried for four editions is now at least clear in its mechanics, if not its blame: the military service restricts units moving faster than 100mph, which is what disables interception. Elon Musk says the American government controls access because the system was built for the Pentagon; the president denies involvement. Kyiv says it is looking for an alternative.

Kenyan Preacher Convicted of 191 Murders, Nearly All Children

Paul Mackenzie, who led a church in the south-east of the country, has been convicted in Mombasa of murdering 191 people, all but one of them children. Twenty-eight other leaders were convicted alongside him. All had pleaded not guilty, insisting nobody was forced to die. More than 400 bodies have been recovered in total and only 26 identified.

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Justice Diana Kavedza Mochache delivered an eight-hour judgment finding that followers believed Mackenzie was “Jesus’s mouthpiece”. His teaching forbade education and described modern medicine as evil. One co-accused said he had told followers that anyone who “resisted the directive to fast must be forced to go to heaven through kicks and blows”. Burials in the forest were called weddings, and the dead “were celebrated as having wedded with Jesus”. A witness described a pregnant woman forbidden to nurse her newborn, who died twelve days later; she was then “instructed to fast to death and follow her children”. The scale is still not established. Mackenzie was arrested in 2023 after a police tip-off and bodies were exhumed from shallow graves in the Shakahola forest near the coast; Monday’s judgment covers 191 of them and investigations into the rest continue. No sentencing date has been given. The identification problem is the part that will outlast the trial: four hundred bodies, twenty-six names.

UK Domestic

Vacancies Fall Below 700,000 for the First Time Since the Pandemic

There were 691,000 vacancies in the three months to September, down 21,000 on the quarter and the fewest outside the pandemic since 2014. Unemployment fell 0.1 percentage points to 4.7% and employment rose to 75.3%. Regular pay grew 3.7%, or 0.6% after inflation. The statisticians attribute the vacancy fall mainly to smaller firms citing higher labour costs.

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One caveat belongs at the top: the 21,000 fall sits inside the statisticians’ own confidence interval of plus or minus 32,000, so the direction is clearer than the magnitude. What is harder is the breadth. Vacancies fell in fourteen of eighteen industry sectors and in four of five size bands, with the largest single fall — 21,000 — among firms employing between one and nine people, which is precisely where the complaint about employment costs has been loudest. Construction lost 7,000. There are now 2.4 unemployed people for every vacancy, up from 2.5 a quarter ago, and payrolled employees are 111,000 lower than a year ago. Two further figures deserve attention. Total pay growth, which includes bonuses, has slipped to 3.7% from 3.9% — the statisticians note it was last lower in the autumn of 2020, when it was 2.8%. And public sector regular pay is growing at 6.3% against 3.0% in the private sector, which they attribute to the timing of pay awards rather than any underlying divergence. No Treasury or Bank of England response had been issued when this was published.

Healey Said to Have Decided Against Raising Capital Gains Tax

Treasury sources say the chancellor is minded not to increase capital gains tax at the Budget on 28 October, a broader position than the decision reported last week against equalising it with income tax. There is no named source and no Treasury statement. Lord O’Neill, a former adviser to the prime minister, said a rise would send “the wrong message to business”.

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It is worth being precise about what this is: a briefing to a newspaper, relayed, with no minister, spokesman or denial attached. The only words the chancellor is quoted saying are from a speech last month and are not about this tax at all — that he wants “this country as a country of wealth creation” and wants policy to raise “confidence, and investment, and profit in British business”. The direction of travel is nonetheless consistent, and the politics of it are awkward for him. Wes Streeting, now defence secretary, called in May for “a wealth tax that works”; Louise Haigh, now first secretary of state, had argued for moving capital gains closer to income tax. Both were before the change of prime minister in July. Meanwhile senior banking executives have told the BBC they expect taxes on banks to rise instead, which is the revenue the chancellor appears to be substituting. Kemi Badenoch gives a pre-Budget speech today in which she is expected to press him to abandon spending plans and cut borrowing.

Serious Offenders in Secure Hospitals to Lose Universal Credit

Regulations laid today will stop universal credit payments of up to £800 a month to offenders detained in psychiatric hospitals, where the health service already funds their bed and board. About 2,500 people are affected now and roughly 200 a year in future. The government expects to save tens of millions of pounds a year.

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The measure covers hospital orders made under the Mental Health Act in England and Wales and the equivalent Scottish provision, for offences including manslaughter, attempted murder, wounding with intent, rape and rape of a child under thirteen. Murder is not on the list, for the technical reason that a hospital order is not available for it. Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, framed it as a promise kept: “for too long these violent criminals have had their living costs paid by the taxpayer twice over, while their victims and families paid the price.” The families who pressed for it were measured rather than triumphant. Emma Webber, whose son Barnaby was killed in Nottingham in 2023, called it “long overdue, and simply the right thing to do”, adding that “a hospital bed does not erase the egregious crimes committed”. Dr Sanjoy Kumar, whose daughter Grace was killed in the same attack, said that “on the principle of fairness alone, we do not see why taxpayers should fund benefits while they are incarcerated”. The full financial effect is due with the Budget.

Parking Charges Capped at £100 and Car Clocking Banned

A statutory code for private car parks has been laid in Parliament, freezing the maximum charge at £100, guaranteeing five minutes to decide whether to park and ten to leave, and capping minor errors such as a mistyped registration at £20. Operators who do not comply lose access to driver records. Winding back an odometer also becomes a banned practice.

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The enforcement mechanism is the interesting part, because the sanction is commercial rather than criminal: an operator that breaches the code loses access to vehicle-keeper data, without which it cannot pursue anybody. There will also be a first independent scrutiny and oversight board, and charges must be cancelled on appeal where there was a breakdown, a medical emergency, a broken ticket machine or an honest mistake. Just under seventeen million charges were issued last year on the government’s own figure; a higher figure and a daily total circulating this morning come from a motoring organisation’s analysis rather than official statistics. The prime minister put it in household terms: “being a few minutes late back to your car or typing one digit of your numberplate wrong shouldn’t end with a hefty fine landing on your doormat.” The industry body notes that many of the principles “are already reflected in the existing voluntary code”. The RAC says it is not the leap it campaigned for and wants debt recovery fees banned outright; a consultation on those, currently capped at £70, follows next year.

Trust Prosecuted Over Two Children’s Deaths From Sepsis

The care regulator has brought three charges against Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust alleging care was “not provided in a safe way”. Two concern a three-year-old who died within ten hours of arriving at hospital with a temperature of 40C, having waited more than seven hours for intravenous antibiotics. The trust’s local sepsis guidance had not been updated since 2017.

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The third charge concerns a two-year-old discharged in April 2024 who died two days later. At her inquest the assistant coroner Stephen Simblet KC found that a doctor of appropriate seniority had been unavailable for two and a half hours and that she was sent home by a “very junior doctor”. The trust’s chief executive Adam Sewell-Jones says it is “working closely” with the regulator and that with a legal process under way “it would be inappropriate to comment further”. Two things make this worth a column slot rather than a court listing. The first is that prosecuting a hospital trust over the care of individual patients remains unusual, and the charges are brought under the legislation governing safe care rather than through a coroner or a negligence claim. The second is the 2017 date: guidance nine years out of date at the time of a death is a systems finding, not an individual one. Pleas are expected at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court on 3 December. This rests on one outlet’s reporting, which says it learned of the charges rather than citing a published listing.

One To Read

The Families Asking Who Bombed Them

Al Jazeera · American air strikes in Somalia have risen sharply and are barely reported. This follows families trying to establish who killed their relatives and on what grounds — the other half of a story this column covered from the shipping lanes yesterday.

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Evening Briefing

Monday 19 October 2026 — 18:06 BST

What It Means For You

If you are travelling to France: the prime minister has called for “local and partial” curfews in parts of some cities after police “lost control” during weekend protests; whole-city curfews such as in Paris are not planned, but check local guidance before you go.
If you drive or heat your home with oil: Brent crude remains close to $110 a barrel as Iranian attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz continue, with at least 15 container ships struck in ten days.
If your family is owed a civil service pension after a bereavement: MPs warn that delays could trigger an “unjust” tax charge, because certain lump sums must be paid within two years of a death to stay tax-free; the Cabinet Office points to compensation routes such as the Pensions Ombudsman.

GEO Geopolitical

Lecornu Calls for Partial Curfews as France Unrest Deepens

France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has called for “local and partial” curfews after the government admitted police had “lost control” in several places during violent weekend protests. Speaking after an emergency cabinet meeting, he said he was “fully resolved to restore public order”. President Macron turned down his interior minister’s offer to resign.

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Tens of thousands of people, angered by rising costs and declining public services, took to the streets across France over the weekend. Lecornu said curfews would be confined to certain areas, such as “symbolic, emblematic places”, rather than whole cities such as Paris; a state of emergency remains available “if deemed necessary”, though he judged partial curfews “more appropriate” for now. The disorder has spilled into the bond market, where French debt sold off on Monday. The test this week is whether targeted measures calm the streets or harden opposition to an already fragile government.

Lavrov Meets Araghchi in Tehran to Discuss the US War

Sergey Lavrov has held talks in Tehran with Abbas Araghchi on his first visit to Iran since February 2025, as Gulf states press Moscow to help halt Iranian attacks and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Araghchi said: “The existing insecurity around the Strait of Hormuz is a direct result of the military aggression by the US and [Israel] against Iran.”

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Araghchi insisted Iran’s policy was to focus on diplomacy, since regional problems have “no military solution”, and turned his fire on Europe, which he said suffers, “just like the Americans”, from miscalculations. On Iran’s eastern flank, Pakistan — itself a mediator between Tehran and Washington — has halted trade at the Taftan and Gabd-Rimdan crossings, stranding about 2,000 lorries; a local official called it “a temporary measure” to support counterterrorism efforts. Moscow’s value to Gulf capitals lies in its access to Tehran; whether that converts into pressure over shipping is the open question.

Iran Strikes at Least 15 Container Ships in Ten Days

Iran has attacked at least 15 container ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz in the past ten days, using drones and mines; twelve vessels were struck in the seven days to Friday, according to UKMTO. On Sunday a ship was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade fired from a small boat north-east of Jubail. Brent ended the London session near $110 after falling earlier on prospective Russian supply.

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Most attacks have been close to the Omani coast, a route Tehran regards as unauthorised, and the escalation appears to have reasserted Iran’s disputed control over the waterway. A vessel sailing from Karachi to Fujairah sank last Wednesday after hitting a mine; all 21 crew were evacuated. Earlier on Monday Brent had slipped to $107.80 as traders weighed extra Russian barrels after Friday’s US sanctions relief, while Ukraine’s drone strikes set fire to an oil terminal in St Petersburg. The market is now caught between two supply shocks pulling in opposite directions.

Zelensky Says Russian Strikes Came With ‘No Warning From Partners’

Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine endured another night of Russian missile and drone strikes “and again there was no warning from partners”, renewing his accusation that Washington is limiting intelligence. Energy infrastructure was the main target, though a clinic, a school and a metro station were also hit. The Trump administration denies changing what it shares.

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The row follows Donald Trump’s weekend charge that Zelensky does not want to end the war, and Washington’s easing of sanctions to allow Russian energy sales in a bid to lower US fuel prices. Ukraine also says it still cannot use Starshield, the military version of Starlink, to intercept drones. Marco Rubio said he was “not sure Zelenskyy knows what he’s talking about, but it wasn’t deliberate”, adding that the slowdown “sort of happened” and had been restored. Kyiv fears the softer US line will embolden Moscow as winter approaches.

Houthi Missile Strike on Yemeni Camp Kills More Than 50

More than 50 security personnel were killed and 200 injured when the Houthis fired three ballistic missiles at a training camp near Ataq in Shabwa province, local authorities say — far above earlier tolls. Rashad al-Alimi, head of the Presidential Leadership Council, condemned a “criminal attack” and promised a “firm response”.

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The Houthis said they had targeted “Saudi enemy concentrations”. Yemen’s civil war has flared since September, when the Houthis seized ground overlooking the Bab al-Mandab Strait; a government offensive launched at the start of October, backed by Saudi-led air power, has since retaken part of the Red Sea coast. Fighting continues there, around besieged Taiz and in Marib and al-Jawf, and the Houthis have answered Saudi air strikes with missiles and drones aimed at Saudi airports and energy sites. The Shabwa strike is among the deadliest of the escalation, and raises the risk to Red Sea shipping alongside Hormuz.

UK UK Domestic Politics

Burnham Calls Youth Unemployment a ‘Moral Failure’

Andy Burnham has warned that almost a million young people not in education, employment or training represent an “economic catastrophe and moral failure”. Writing ahead of a youth jobs announcement expected this week, the prime minister said: “Benefits will become the backstop, not the starting point.” The Conservatives have labelled the strategy “a disaster”.

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ONS figures show around 39% of the near-million so-called Neets are unemployed and 61% economically inactive. The number of 18 to 24-year-olds claiming unemployment-related benefits stands at 331,000, almost double the 2016 level, though below the peaks of around 500,000 after the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic. The government will spend £353bn on welfare next year, just under half on the state pension. Burnham’s framing — investing in success rather than “paying for failure” — sets up a welfare argument that will run into the Budget.

Downing Street Rebukes Hegseth Over Afghanistan Remarks

Number 10 has hit back at Pete Hegseth after the US defence secretary suggested “maybe five” countries contributed to the Afghanistan war, with “one or two” actually fighting. The prime minister’s spokesperson said “the facts speak for themselves”, that more than 450 British personnel never returned, and that “it is wrong to diminish their role”.

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More than 1,100 non-US coalition troops were killed in Afghanistan, and Britain’s campaign in Helmand was among the costliest it has fought since Korea. The spokesperson stressed that the sacrifice was made “in response to an attack on our ally” — a pointed reminder that Nato invoked Article 5 on America’s behalf after 11 September. The remarks are part of a renewed Washington attack on Nato allies, and land awkwardly for a government trying to keep the alliance and the US relationship steady during the Iran war.

Bryant Insists Troubles Bill Is ‘Not an Amnesty’

Sir Chris Bryant, the Northern Ireland secretary, has rejected claims that government changes to the Troubles legacy bill amount to an amnesty for former soldiers, as the legislation returns to the Commons. He called it “completely wrong” to suggest that requiring attorney general consent for serious prosecutions was designed to pardon veterans.

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Bryant described the consent requirement as a “sensible measure” to bring “more consistency” to prosecution decisions. Ministers say the amendments would “significantly reduce” the prospect of veterans facing “rinse and repeat” investigations. Sinn Féin has branded them a “veterans’ charter”, while the DUP complains MPs have too little time to scrutinise them. The bill rests on a joint framework agreed with Dublin; the government must hold that consensus while satisfying MPs who argue veterans’ protections still fall short.

Bank of England Reviews Barclays’ Private Credit Exposure

The Prudential Regulation Authority is reported to be reviewing how Barclays logged total return swaps used to finance loans to private credit firms, after concerns were raised by an insider. The derivatives are said to have been booked in a portfolio implying lower risk. Barclays said its treatment “is consistent with accounting and regulatory capital requirements”.

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If the swaps were misclassified, the bank may not have held enough capital against potential losses, and its profitability could have been flattered. Barclays is said to have built billions of dollars of exposure to private credit through such derivatives; it says the conditions for its booking were “supported by appropriate governance internally and by external advisers”. The review lands as the private credit sector is under strain, and as London shares fell more than 1% on Monday. For regulators, the episode is a test of how far risk has migrated from bank balance sheets into lightly supervised lending.

Reform MSP Quits, Leaving Party Third at Holyrood

Amanda Bland, MSP for Central Scotland and Lothians West, has left Reform UK Scotland to sit as an independent, relegating the party to the third-largest group at Holyrood, one seat behind Labour. She said her “principles and priorities remain unchanged” and gave no further reason.

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A Reform UK source told BBC Scotland that Bland was “very difficult to work with” and had been summoned to a meeting on Wednesday about high staff turnover in her office; she said her resignation was not linked to it. Bland, a member of the criminal justice committee, said she could best hold the Scottish government to account as an independent. Losing second place costs Reform standing in Holyrood’s set-piece exchanges, and comes as the party faces scrutiny elsewhere, including a BBC report that one of its mayors is being investigated over photographs.

One To Read Scouring the Strait of Hormuz for spilt cargo as Iran attacks container ships The Guardian

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Morning Briefing

Monday 19 October 2026 — 07:30 BST

What It Means For You

If you are selling a home or renewing a mortgage: asking prices were cut on more than 3,000 properties a day in September, the most in any month for fifteen years, by an average of nearly 7% or about £21,000. Average two-year fixed rates are now 5.55%, against 4.25% before February, adding roughly £250 a month to a new loan.
If you travel by bus in England: fixed penalties of up to £100 are being introduced for playing loud music, littering, vaping or threatening behaviour. Drivers will not enforce them, and each council’s rules still need the transport secretary’s sign-off, so no fine has a start date yet.
If you have children: the Children’s Commissioner reports waits for a mental health referral ranging from six days in Leicester to 118 in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, and twenty-five areas where fewer than half of children saw a dentist last year.

GEO Geopolitical

Ukraine Launches Its Largest Drone Attack of the War

Russia’s defence ministry says it neutralised 1,015 Ukrainian drones overnight across fifteen regions, Crimea and the Black Sea — the largest aerial attack of the war. Fires burned at the St Petersburg oil terminal and the Ruchi depot, one person was killed and five injured there, and about 20,000 homes in the Leningrad region lost power.

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The thousand-drone figure is the Russian defence ministry’s own and describes what it says it shot down rather than what Ukraine says it launched; Kyiv has not given a number. What is attributed locally is more specific. Alexander Beglov, the St Petersburg governor, said firefighters were tackling blazes at the two oil sites and at industrial warehouses in the Kolpinsky district, and that the city’s main airport was restricting flights “for safety reasons”. Alexander Drozdenko, governor of the surrounding region, put the drones downed there at 145. The retaliation came within hours: Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, said a Russian strike killed a woman overnight, hit a subway station and damaged a twenty-five-storey residential block and a medical facility, injuring three more. Two attacks on Zaporizhzhia killed a woman and wounded a six-year-old girl. Volodymyr Zelensky says Russia has used almost 2,700 attack drones, 1,700 aerial bombs and 66 missiles in the past week and has struck Ukraine’s energy, oil and gas sector seventy-six times since the energy ceasefire was declared — Ukraine’s own count, and not independently confirmed.

Trump Blocks the Russia Sanctions Two Days Before They Bit

The president signed an order on 16 October waiving sanctions that Congress passed and he had signed into law in September. “I am in the process of negotiating Peace,” he wrote, saying he did not want to “drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table”. His secretary of state calls it a sixty-day pause while the economic impact is assessed.

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The administration is now pressing the argument back onto Kyiv. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, told American television that Volodymyr Zelensky should “be very careful about making statements like this that aren’t true” and that it was “very reckless” of him to allege the satellite slowdown had been ordered in Washington — a charge the Ukrainian president repeated at the weekend and which no American or corporate source has confirmed. Mr Zelensky’s own framing has hardened: he told one broadcaster that American support for Vladimir Putin would be a “historic mistake” and another that “steps have been taken to convince Ukraine to capitulate”. A Russian envoy called the waiver “an important and truly historic moment”, which is Moscow’s characterisation and not a fact. The sharpest assessment is from the Institute for the Study of War, which judges that the order “does not support Trump’s stated foreign policy objectives of ending the war in Ukraine and will only enable Russia to continue financing and protracting the war”.

French Cabinet Meets in Crisis as Parliament Demands an Inquiry

The prime minister holds an emergency cabinet meeting today after a weekend the BBC describes as some of the worst public disorder in modern French history. The president of the National Assembly wants a parliamentary inquiry into what happened and why. The interior minister has not resigned, despite calls from left and right.

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The interior ministry’s count stands at about 2,400 arrested and close to a thousand police, gendarmes and firefighters injured, seven of them seriously; an earlier count of 1,800 and more than 500 was superseded during Sunday. An estimated 1,500 shops and businesses were looted or destroyed, though the interior minister puts the number with considerable damage at several hundred, and the mayor of Bordeaux says up to a hundred were looted in that city alone. One protester died of cardiac arrest during the Paris demonstrations, police said, without giving further detail. Emmanuel Macron’s address has been widely criticised for lacking concrete detail, and the curfew and state of emergency that had been rumoured did not materialise. Sophie Binet, who leads the CGT union, accused him of failing to address the cost of living, declining public services or the students’ original complaint. The thing to watch is not this week but the next: fresh mass demonstrations have already been called for a fortnight’s time.

China Grows 4.5% as Factories Offset a Deepening Property Slump

The economy expanded 4.5% in the third quarter against the same period last year, up from a three-year low of 4.3% and ahead of forecasts. Growth over nine months is 4.6%, inside Beijing’s target range. Retail sales rose 1.1% and industrial output 5.5% in September, while property development investment fell 20.6% over the year to date.

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The shape matters more than the headline: this is an economy being carried by its factories and foreign buyers while its households and private investors sit on their hands. The monthly trade surplus reached a record $133.5bn, fixed-asset investment fell 7.2% over nine months, and the property slump deepened rather than bottomed. Sheana Yue of Oxford Economics is blunt that “the prolonged housing slump will continue to limit the spillover from stronger industrial activity to the wider economy” and sees no sign of the sector “bottoming out”. The number that explains the squeeze is in the price data: producer prices rose 5% in September, the fastest in more than four years, while consumer inflation stays below 1%. As Ms Yue puts it, that “potentially leaves firms to absorb more of the cost shock through lower margins rather than higher selling prices”. Eswar Prasad of Cornell expects no rescue: “the government might become more sanguine and maintain a passive approach, rather than infusing stimulus.” The Economist Intelligence Unit forecasts 4.7% for the full year.

World Food Programme Cuts Gaza Rations by About a Third

The United Nations agency says it must “drastically reduce lifesaving assistance” in Gaza for lack of money, cutting the number of people it helps from 1.6 million to 1.1 million. Hot meals from community kitchens fall from 250,000 a day to 150,000, and monthly flour and ration boxes from 1.1 million recipients to 600,000.

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The agency is unusually direct that this is not about access or need. Shaun Hughes, its Palestine director, says the cuts are being made because of finances, “not because the needs are coming down, or because we don’t have access — we do”. It has received less than half as much funding for its Palestinian operations this year as in previous years. The context is that nearly all of Gaza’s 2.1 million people remain displaced and two-thirds rely on food aid to survive; a year after the ceasefire there has been no reconstruction, most people are still in tents, and Mr Hughes describes “poor access to water and sanitation and healthcare”. One constraint compounds the cut: there is no cooking gas in Gaza because Israel treats it as a dual-use item that Hamas could put to military purposes, so prepared meals matter more than raw rations. Families in the hardest-to-reach areas move from a daily meal to one every other day. This rests on a single approved outlet, which interviewed two displaced mothers alongside the agency.

UK Domestic

Private Firms Treating Housed Residents as Cash Cows, Investigation Finds

A broadcast investigation into supported housing for ex-prisoners, people recovering from addiction and women fleeing abuse finds providers drawing large sums in housing benefit for minimal care. One provider received £443 a week — £23,000 a year — for a single resident’s room and support. The department paid £410m for such accommodation in Birmingham alone last year.

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The loophole is in the law: a registered provider need only offer care that is “more than minimal”, and in return the accommodation is exempt from the usual housing benefit caps. The scale in one city is striking — more than 34,000 people are in this kind of housing in Birmingham, against about 22,000 in London, a city more than seven times the size. The money trail is documented rather than alleged. A sister company of one provider bought a house used for this purpose for £191,000 in 2024 and sold it a year later for £410,000, according to Land Registry records; its owner says he spent about £150,000 on renovation and associated costs, and has paid himself £2.9m in dividends over three financial years plus more than £900,000 in other earnings across his companies. One large provider wrote off £1.8m over payments to former directors and companies they ran. The resident at the centre of the case says the advertised support did not exist: “On the adverts, they will often say that you have weekly support sessions, help with GPs. It’s not the case at all.” The leader of Birmingham City Council calls it “a scandal”.

Burnham Calls a Million Young People Out of Work a Moral Failure

The prime minister, writing in a newspaper, says that almost a million 16 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training is “an economic catastrophe and a moral failure. And it must change.” He promises that “benefits will become the backstop, not the starting point”, with the system beginning from a young person’s ambitions rather than their entitlement.

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This is the government adopting on Monday the argument Alan Milburn made on Sunday, when the author of its own review urged ministers to move money out of welfare and into employment support. Mr Burnham’s description of the present system is unusually blunt for a prime minister describing his own state: it “provides an assessment, a payment and, after that, goodbye. Too often there is no support, no offer of skills and no opportunity to get a job.” He blames two years of lockdown, social media that erodes confidence and belonging, an education system built around the university route, and thin job markets. The guarantee he offers is conditional in both directions: “the safety net will always be there for those who cannot work. But if someone can work with the right help, the government has a duty to do everything in its power to make that happen.” Ministers are expected this week to announce tens of thousands of apprenticeships and placements in construction and in professional firms. The Milburn review itself publishes next month, and the Budget is on 28 October.

Asking Prices Cut on 3,000 Homes a Day, a Fifteen-Year High

More than 3,000 properties a day had their asking price reduced in September, the most in any month for fifteen years, by an average of nearly 7% — about £21,000 off a typically valued home. A third of all listed homes were marked down. Reduced homes took 119 days to find a buyer against 39 for those listed once at the right price.

Dive deeper

Three different measures are circulating this morning and they are not in conflict, so it is worth separating them. Asking prices for newly listed homes rose 1% this month to £371,015; house prices over the past year are down 0.1%; and a third of homes already on the market are being cut, heavily. The first is what sellers hope for, the second is roughly where the market is, and the third is the gap between them closing. The reason is affordability: average two-year fixed mortgage rates have climbed to 5.55% from 5.29% last month and 4.25% before February, which adds around £250 a month to a new loan. Colleen Babcock of Rightmove points to the penalty for getting it wrong first time: “Once a home has been on the market for a while and then has a price reduction, some buyers start asking questions, even when there is nothing wrong with the property. In a market with so much choice, first impressions matter.” The figures are the company’s own rather than official statistics, though a rival firm reports homes for sale up 5% on the year and sales agreed down 9%.

Profit Warnings Hit a Two-Year High Nine Days From the Budget

Listed companies issued 65 profit warnings in the three months to September, the most in two years, with 38% citing the war in the Middle East and rising costs the leading factor in 35%. Housebuilders have now issued fourteen this year, more than in 2008. Nearly a fifth of all listed firms have warned at least once in twelve months.

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The 2008 comparison is the one that should stop a reader: ten warnings from listed housebuilders at the peak of the financial crisis, fourteen already this year. Household goods and home construction was the worst-affected sector of the quarter, which sits uncomfortably beside the asking-price cuts elsewhere in this column — the same squeeze seen from the builder’s side rather than the seller’s. Jo Robinson of EY-Parthenon, which compiles the figures, identifies something that has changed in kind rather than degree: “with the autumn budget around the corner, profit warnings linked to policy change and uncertainty — once concentrated around fiscal events or elections — have become a regular feature of our data. Businesses have shown considerable resilience, but the pace of policy change is making forecasting, investment and capital allocation much harder.” The chancellor has promised the Budget will give households and businesses “breathing space” while conceding the conflict has pushed borrowing costs to their highest in decades. He is reported to be preparing to raise the small business rates threshold from £12,000 to £18,000.

NHS Managers Say up to Twenty Maternity Units May Have to Close

A body representing health managers says the way maternity care is organised in England is not fit for purpose, and that up to twenty of the 155 consultant-led units will have to shut or change role. Units delivering 1,500 to 2,000 babies a year are most at risk, concentrated in rural and coastal areas. Two royal colleges have objected within hours.

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The case for consolidation rests on three things happening at once: a shortage of obstetricians, a sharp rise in planned and emergency caesareans requiring more staff and more theatre time, and buildings described as outdated and decaying. A director at the NHS Alliance, Matthew Hopkins, argues the change is “inevitable” and “the right thing… the safe thing for patients”, and that politicians “must have the courage to make the case for patient safety” and grasp the nettle. The objections came immediately and from the professions themselves. The Royal College of Midwives’ chief policy officer said women and families “rely on local maternity units to be there when they need them”; the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said there are “other solutions to our workforce challenges that are far safer than closing maternity units”. The argument is not abstract. The unit at Barnstaple has been suspended since August over staffing, leaving a fifty-three-mile journey to Exeter, and the trust decides this week whether it can safely reopen. A government maternity taskforce reports before Christmas, and the managers fear it will be tokenistic.

One To Read

Why Somali Piracy Came Back

Al Jazeera · Attacks on shipping have dominated this column for a fortnight, almost all of them in the Gulf. This looks at the other end of the same sea lane, and at how clan networks and surveillance technology have shaped a revival most people assumed had been suppressed for good.

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Evening Briefing

Sunday 18 October 2026 — 23:59 BST

What It Means For You

If you are waiting on the Budget: it is ten days away, and the author of the government’s review into young people out of work has now said ministers should cut benefits to pay for employment support. The chancellor is expected to use a tax on bank profits to fund cost-of-living measures including a new energy support package.
If you have a child who might need A&E: the health secretary has asked the NHS to draw up urgent plans to end corridor care for children specifically, with new accident and emergency standards for children in England and corridor-care figures collected by age for the first time.
If you drive or heat your home with oil: Brent reopened this evening at $108.82 after jumping 3.72% on Friday to $109.86, as reported attacks on shipping around the Strait of Hormuz hit a weekly record. Crude has spent much of the past eight months above $100.

GEO Geopolitical

Four Soldiers Named Among the Dead at the Alberta Base Fire

Four Canadian service members were killed and thirty-nine are in hospital, nineteen of them critically, after a grass fire ignited on a training range and strong winds drove it towards soldiers on exercise. The dead were named on Sunday evening as Sergeant Morgan Wong, Private Shaun Farrell, Private Aidan Goulding and Private Hayden Lykkemark.

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This morning’s edition carried no figure and no cause, because the only ones available came from an outlet we do not use citing unnamed military sources. Both have now been settled on the record, and one of them was wrong. Major General Wade Rutland, commander of the 1st Canadian Division, said a grass fire started on a range and “uncommonly strong winds caused it to spread rapidly and shift direction”. The account that a gas main had been struck during live firing has been contradicted by the military itself, which says investigators do not believe any explosions were caused by oil or gas infrastructure. The toll is four, not the higher number that circulated. Mark Carney, addressing the country from Ottawa, called it “one of the worst tragedies for the forces on Canadian soil in peacetime” and ordered flags on all federal buildings to half-mast. Alberta’s premier Danielle Smith gave the hospital figures; a hospital in Edmonton declared a code orange on Saturday evening and stood it down on Sunday. There is no indication of terrorism. Alberta votes today on beginning the legal process towards a referendum on leaving Canada, and no approved source connects the two events.

French Arrests Double to 2,400 as Macron Speaks of Shame

About 2,400 people have been arrested and around a thousand police and gendarmes injured, the interior ministry says — double and sevenfold the figures available this morning — after 550,000 demonstrated against fuel prices, the cost of living and declining public services. In a national address the president said protesters had “sought to bring down the republic”, and: “We all feel anger and shame.”

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Emmanuel Macron criticised “unbridled violence” and blamed “factious groups from the ultra-left, joined by numerous delinquents” — a diagnosis his government and Marine Le Pen now share, which is itself notable. Prefects and mayors are to draft measures protecting shops and civic buildings, and prefects may be allowed to ban street gatherings. The political cost is landing on one man: politicians on both left and right are calling for the interior minister Laurent Nuñez to resign, after a government that appeared caught out by the scale of Saturday’s violence. The prime minister Sébastien Lecornu said the government would not be “intimidated”. The physical damage is concentrated in Limoges, where the nineteenth-century city hall has been gutted and its clock tower and roof have collapsed. Disorder continued on Sunday at the Place de la République in Paris and on a smaller scale in Lyon, with teargas, stun grenades, e-bikes piled and set alight and graffiti reading “introduction to civil war”. Protests also took place on Saturday in Spain, Italy and Portugal. The number of officers hurt is the figure that has moved most: about a thousand police and gendarmes, on the ministry’s count, against the 150 reported this morning.

St Petersburg Oil Terminal Struck as Kyiv Says Intelligence Is Back

Drones struck the St Petersburg Oil Terminal and the Ruchyi oil depot overnight, killing at least one person and injuring at least five, the city’s governor said. Separately the dispute reported this morning half resolved: Volodymyr Zelensky said American intelligence sharing is working again — “it was blocked for some period of time. And then it was deblocked by the American side… Now it works.”

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Kyiv has not commented on the strikes, so there is no Ukrainian confirmation of them, and Russia’s defence ministry claim to have downed more than a thousand Ukrainian drones overnight is its own unverified assertion. What is attributed on the record comes from Governor Alexander Beglov: fires at both oil sites, twelve apartment buildings and two houses damaged, and Pulkovo Airport temporarily closed. A logistics centre and a data centre belonging to two Russian internet companies were also hit; both confirmed damage and said services continued. On the diplomatic strand, Mr Zelensky still maintains the satellite slowdown was deliberate — “it was a message from the American government to limit the speed. And technically, SpaceX did it” — which remains his own claim with no American or corporate confirmation. Donald Trump wrote that “I am in the process of negotiating Peace” and would not “drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table”, while claiming Mr Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did”. Mr Zelensky says Russia has attacked Ukraine’s energy, oil and gas sectors seventy-six times since the ceasefire was declared — Ukraine’s own count. There is still no sign of a summit.

Gulf States Invoke Joint Defence as Iran Holds Its Hormuz Terms

Gulf Cooperation Council foreign ministers, meeting in Manama, condemned Houthi attacks and invoked their joint defence agreement, under which an attack on one member concerns all six. Iran’s foreign minister said Tehran’s conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz remain in place. No new attack on shipping was reported on Sunday.

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The weekly record of ten vessels attacked, and twenty-three this month, stands where it did this morning; what moved today was the Saudi-Yemen axis rather than the strait. The council also pressed for tighter enforcement of the United Nations arms embargo and urged states to designate the Houthis a terrorist organisation. The coalition says it brought down two drones early on Sunday, near Riyadh and in the Eastern Province, after an earlier interception near the capital. The effect on ordinary life in the Saudi capital is now visible: the Kingdom Centre, one of its landmark towers, has ordered mandatory remote working for office tenants indefinitely. Six people were injured in Najran by a Houthi projectile, with three homes and three vehicles damaged, according to the Saudi civil defence agency. Fighting inside Yemen has displaced more than 233,000 people. Yemen’s foreign minister rejected an Iranian offer to mediate, saying Iran was “offering to mediate a war ignited by the coup of the Houthi terrorist militia with their regime’s backing”. A claim that a Saudi airstrike in northern Yemen killed at least nine people comes from the Houthis’ own news agency and is not carried here as fact.

Trump Endorses Netanyahu Nine Days Before Israel Votes

The American president has endorsed Benjamin Netanyahu for the Israeli election on 27 October, calling him “a Great Warrior Prime Minister, and an even greater Partner for Peace in combatting the Islamic Republic of Iran”. He had withheld the endorsement for months while the two diverged over strategy. It is Israel’s first national vote since the October 2023 attacks.

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The endorsement also praised Mr Netanyahu as “Strong, Brave, and Brilliant in the face of tremendous opposition, including that coming from even Israel, itself” — a formulation that acknowledges how contested he is at home. The reply was immediate: Mr Netanyahu thanked him on X for “tremendous support and the joint work… Together we will complete the mission!” In a party video he told voters “we have crushed Iran” and that the partnership “will continue in order to eliminate the Iranian threat over the next two years, or even sooner”; those are campaign claims rather than established facts and are reported as such. The timing sits awkwardly against the other Israeli story of the weekend. The European Union condemned Friday’s attack by settlers on European diplomats in the West Bank, and the American ambassador has called for the prosecution of those who attacked a photographer during the olive harvest. The election will be the first test of whether the war has changed Israeli politics or merely hardened it.

UK Domestic

Farage Filmed Telling an Aide to Take the Deal Over a Candidate

The year-long undercover film was broadcast tonight. In footage released before it, the Reform leader is recorded discussing a mayoral candidate who had said a then-cabinet minister should “go home to the Caribbean”, telling his communications director an apology would do: “Just take the f***ing deal.” After he leaves, the aide says he would have removed the man “months ago”.

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The documentary went out at 22:20 and no approved outlet had published a review of it by the time this edition closed, so everything here is footage the broadcaster had already released rather than anything revealed on air, and there is as yet no reaction from Reform’s leader or any other party since transmission. What has moved today is the casualty list. A councillor who was deputy mayor of Solihull has resigned every post after being filmed calling Asian families “absolute parasites” and saying the area was “infested”; his own statement concedes “my remarks were wrong, offensive and completely unacceptable”, and the Ministry of Justice has suspended him from his prison service job, calling the comments “despicable”. Two byelections now follow. A candidate in the same borough resigned citing health. In Bromley, Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors have jointly called on a councillor filmed saying the King should be beheaded to stand down. One correction to this morning’s edition: it reported that two Hounslow councillors recorded advocating mass shootings were under investigation; the party now says they are not.

Police Question a Reform Mayor Over Images Shown to a Colleague

Luke Campbell, the Reform mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire, was questioned under caution by Humberside Police this month over allegedly showing a senior female colleague four naked and sexualised images of himself in May. He has not been arrested. The party says he “firmly denies the allegations”, calling them a “meritless workplace dispute”.

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The complainant’s witness statement, submitted to an internal grievance procedure at the combined authority, says she was “deliberately exposed to naked and sexualised images involving the mayor in the workplace, without my consent, and was laughed at when I was visibly embarrassed”, and that “this was unwanted conduct of a sexual nature which violated my dignity”. She says a permanent job offer she had accepted was withdrawn on a video call about three weeks later. The combined authority has confirmed a police investigation. Two cautions. The reporting rests on a single title working from leaked internal documents, and neither the police nor Mr Campbell had commented. And there is a factual dispute inside it: a former Conservative minister who is now a Reform member defended him by saying the image was a magazine cover of him posing naked from the waist up, which the reporting says is contradicted by witnesses who describe a naked man with a visible tattoo that does not appear on that cover. This is a separate matter from the documentary.

Polanski Will Not Overturn the Zionism Motion and Is Not Sorry

The Green leader said he would not try to reverse the members’ motion declaring Zionism a form of racism, that party rules bar amendment until 2028, and that he respects “the democratic will of our members”. Asked whether Israel has a right to exist, he said: “I don’t think any state has a right to exist under international law.”

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The arithmetic is the part worth holding on to. The motion passed in Brighton earlier this month by 1,022 votes to 813, out of a membership of about 230,000 — so roughly eight in a thousand members settled the party’s position on the question now consuming it. Mr Polanski, who is Jewish, did not vote. Two amendments he supported were defeated: one removing the commitment to a single state, the other protecting Jewish members who attend synagogues that consider themselves Zionist. He called a two-state solution “for the birds”, said “I’m not sorry at all”, and on whether Zionism is racist replied that what is controversial is not the motion but the deaths in Gaza. The dissent is internal and named. A former co-leader said it is not “tenable for us to continue the next two years with this policy” and floated a ballot of all members. The chair of the Jewish Greens said there was “no excuse for his not participating”, and says polling of Jewish members was evenly split, which contradicts his claim that a majority supported it.

Milburn Says Cut Benefits to Pay for Youth Employment Support

The author of the government’s review into young people out of work and education says ministers should move money out of welfare to fund employment support: “We’ve got to have a different conversation about the welfare system, it just isn’t working for young people.” A record one million 18 to 24-year-olds are now in that position, and 60% of them have never had a job.

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That second figure is why he calls it detachment rather than unemployment, and why he frames it as a health problem: “the crisis is a health crisis.” It is also an intervention with a date on it. Alan Milburn’s final report has been pushed back by ministers until after the Budget on 28 October, so he is making the argument in a newspaper interview instead, ten days before a chancellor who is under pressure to explain how he closes a multibillion-pound gap without borrowing more. The chancellor announced a £100m local apprenticeship service at his party conference last month and called it “a downpayment on Alan Milburn’s work”. Mr Milburn also hinted at conditionality, saying “there has got to be an obligation on young people to take up those opportunities”, and wants a maximum waiting time for mental health services. Interviewed alongside him, the chair of the government’s review of mental health, attention deficit disorder and autism warned that without action the share of young people with a diagnosable disorder could rise from one in five to one in four.

Health Secretary Calls the NHS Records Breaches a Disgrace

Yvette Cooper said staff accessing the medical records of the Nottingham attack victims, and possible breaches involving a man killed by a tiger, are “a disgrace” and that “there’s got to be proper respect for patients”. One trust has now dismissed fifteen staff in total. A second organisation says records may also have been accessed improperly.

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The number has climbed in stages, which is what makes it look less like a handful of individuals and more like a culture. Nottingham University Hospitals said in May it had sacked eleven people for inappropriately accessing the records of Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates, killed in June 2023; four further dismissals were confirmed on Friday, covering doctors, nurses, registered healthcare professionals and other staff. The trust has informed the nursing and medical regulators, the Information Commissioner and the police, and is testing a new alerting system; its medical director says there is “simply no excuse for accessing the records of a patient without a legitimate reason”. Police have previously said there is no criminal investigation and the Commissioner says it will assess evidence from the trust in due course. The second strand is Yorkshire Ambulance Service, which says the records of William Chapman may also have been accessed improperly. The health secretary said she expects action to be taken; she has not ordered anything specific, and this edition does not suggest otherwise.

One To Read

What Starshield Actually Is

NPR · This column has carried the satellite dispute for three editions and the two sides still describe different systems. A short explanation of what Starshield is, how it differs from Starlink, and why a speed cap on it disables drones.

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Morning Briefing

Sunday 18 October 2026 — 09:19 BST

What It Means For You

If you heat your home with oil: one household in Devon paid about £340 for 500 litres this time last year and just over £600 for the same amount now. The government has accepted a recommendation to regulate the sector for the first time, after the competition authority found 1,700 households were owed compensation for cancelled orders they had to replace at higher prices.
If you expect to need the NHS this winter: almost £140m is going to fourteen urgent care schemes in England, on top of twenty-five new or expanded sites announced in April that will open for winter. More than 7.4 million flu vaccinations had been given in England by 11 October.
If you live in Northern Ireland: resident doctors will hold a twenty-four-hour walkout on Friday 20 November and consultants will run a much-reduced service the following Monday, because seven months into the financial year Stormont still has no budget to pay a rise that doctors elsewhere in the United Kingdom received in April.

GEO Geopolitical

A Tug Is Struck as Hormuz Attacks Hit a Weekly Record

At least ten vessels have been attacked in or near the Strait of Hormuz since last Sunday, the highest weekly figure since the war began, with twenty-three recorded this month. A tug off the United Arab Emirates reported being struck by two projectiles this morning, sustaining damage and one minor casualty, and is continuing on its route.

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Two tankers said to be carrying about two million barrels of crude each caught fire after striking naval mines. That account is the Revolutionary Guard’s own, relayed through Iranian state media, and no approved source has confirmed the mines, the fires or its further claim that one vessel was crossing “with US support”; the ships have not been named. The Guard says both had switched off positioning and radar and were using a route it had not authorised, and its naval commander warned this week that any vessel deactivating its navigation systems would be treated as hostile. The effect on prices is not in doubt: oil reached $110 on Friday for the first time since May and closed the week nearly four per cent higher. Saudi Arabia says two Houthi ballistic missiles aimed at Khamis Mushait and a drone aimed at Riyadh were intercepted, and that residents of the capital received a phone alert warning of “a hostile aerial threat” before it was lifted minutes later. Separately a national guard helicopter crashed in Najran killing two officers, which the Saudi coalition attributes to a technical malfunction rather than enemy action.

Deaths at a Canadian Military Base as Fire Spreads Beyond It

A fire that crossed the fence at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright in Alberta on Saturday and spread rapidly in high winds has killed and injured people on the base, the defence minister says. No official toll has been given. A hospital in Edmonton declared its high-casualty disaster protocol.

Dive deeper

There is no number, and this edition is not going to supply one: a figure and an explanation involving a gas line struck during live-fire training are circulating, but both rest on a single outlet citing unnamed military sources and no approved source carries either on its own authority. What is on the record is grave enough. David McGuinty, the defence minister, said he was “saddened to share that there have been both fatalities and injuries” and that he “cannot recall an incident like this in recent memory”, describing the situation as “very, very active and delicate” with the federal police involved. The clearest sense of scale comes from a doctor rather than the army: Dr Warren Thirsk, an emergency physician at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, said “this number of patients would overwhelm the city of Edmonton… It’s a disaster. It’s a one in every 15 to 25-year disaster.” The base normally holds about 690 service personnel and 300 civilian staff, and its own medical facilities were overwhelmed. The timing is awkward in another way: Alberta votes on Monday on whether to begin the legal process towards a future referendum on leaving Canada.

Record Arrests in Paris as Unrest Spreads Across Four Countries

Paris police detained 855 people on Saturday, which they say is the highest ever for a single event, within a national total of 1,200 arrests and 150 injured officers. Cost-of-living protests ran the same day in Belgium, Italy and Portugal. The prime minister, visiting officers, said: “It’s a miracle the toll wasn’t higher.”

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The spread matters more than the arrest count. Four European countries saw separate and uncoordinated cost-of-living demonstrations on one Saturday: tear gas and water cannon in Brussels and Liège, tens of thousands in Lisbon protesting at wages and housing where house prices have more than doubled since 2017, and in Milan a crowd that emptied the Piazza del Duomo and a luxury arcade, with about fifty detained, many of them minors. In France the destruction is specific. The prefect of Limoges said the 143-year-old town hall was “largely lost”, that “the roof has collapsed on to lower floors” and two-thirds of the exterior had gone, calling it a “catastrophe for heritage” caused deliberately by “a wild horde”. The interior minister blamed opportunists who “had seen a chance to pillage and loot” and said no state of emergency is planned. Turnout is disputed: the interior ministry counted 550,000 nationally while the CGT union puts it higher. A deputy mayor of Paris described “a level of violence that I believe we had never seen before”.

Zelensky and Rubio Contradict Each Other on Ukraine’s Drones

Ukraine still cannot use the satellite network to shoot down jet-powered Russian drones, its president said on Saturday, giving a precise figure: the service cuts out above 161km/h in Ukraine while working above 180 in the European Union. The American secretary of state replied that he was “not sure Zelensky knows what he’s talking about” and that the service had been restored.

Dive deeper

This is an unresolved dispute between named officials and is reported as one. On one side Marco Rubio says “nobody ordered that Starlink speed to be slowed down. It sort of happened, but my understanding is it’s been restored”, and the American defence secretary told his British counterpart on Thursday that it was back. On the other Volodymyr Zelensky says “nobody there is answering our military or the Ministry of Defense now”, and Ukraine’s chargé d’affaires in Washington said that “based on the data currently available to us, we cannot confirm that these capabilities have been fully restored”. They also disagree on what Ukraine ever had: Mr Rubio insists the military-grade service “has nothing to do with Ukraine” and that Kyiv has asked for access to conduct deep strikes inside Russia, while Mr Zelensky speaks of both products being throttled on Ukrainian territory. Elon Musk’s position is that the military network is “owned and controlled by the US government”. Russia struck more than fifteen power generation and transmission sites on Saturday.

At Least Nineteen Killed in a Festival Crush in Kolkata

Nineteen people died and twenty-five are being treated after a crush at a Durga Puja pavilion, the chief minister of West Bengal said after visiting the hospital. A seven-year-old girl is among the dead. Police say a crowd ran for cover as rain began, an announcement caused commotion, and people fell as the crowd pushed forward.

Dive deeper

Around 3,500 pavilions were set up across the city for the festival and several of the busiest were advised to close to visitors. Police have detained some pavilion organisers, private security staff and others who were on duty. The chief minister announced an investigation by a special team headed by a judge of the state’s high court, which is a more serious instrument than the usual police inquiry and suggests the question is as much about crowd management and permissions as about the weather. Narendra Modi called the deaths tragic and his office announced compensation of 200,000 rupees, about $2,100, for each next of kin and 50,000 rupees for each person injured; the interior minister said the administration was ensuring medical facilities were available. One note on the figure above: it was seventeen when first reported on Saturday evening and nineteen by this morning, and the lower number is still visible on some reports that have not been updated. Crushes at Indian religious gatherings recur with a regularity that makes the inquiry’s terms the thing to watch.

UK Domestic

Cooper Puts Almost £140m Into Urgent Care Before a Hard Winter

The health secretary says winter “will be more challenging for our NHS this year, after such a heavy summer”, announcing almost £140m for fourteen urgent care schemes in England. The largest single award is £42.1m for Queen’s Hospital in Romford, whose emergency department was built for about 325 patients a day and regularly treats more than twice that.

Dive deeper

The detail is in the departmental release rather than the headline. Alongside Romford there is £18.4m over three years for digital work in London emergency departments, £12.9m for same-day emergency care in Nottingham, £12m for an ambulance hub in Shrewsbury, £10m for a new urgent treatment centre at Gorleston and £6.35m for forty additional double-crewed ambulances in the East Midlands. It sits inside almost £2bn of urgent care capital to 2030 and a separate £1.5bn for maintaining the estate. The responses divide along predictable lines but are worth hearing. Yvette Cooper said staff “worked incredibly hard to keep on top of the extra pressure this summer”. The Royal College of Nursing’s England director called the money “just another sticking plaster on a system that is at breaking point”, warning that “the nursing workforce needed to deliver these services goes into winter already running on empty and short of staff”. The shadow health secretary asked where the money is coming from. The health service’s national medical director described flu admissions as the highest he can remember for the time of year.

Reform Suspends an Activist and Says It Is Suing ITV

The party has suspended Jason Powell, who has applied to be one of its parliamentary candidates, over undercover footage in which he reportedly says “you cannot be Muslim and British, it’s like oil and water” and that migrants arriving illegally should be held in “concentration camps”. A spokesman says the party is pursuing legal action against the broadcaster and the production company. The documentary airs tonight.

Dive deeper

The legal action is the hardest new fact here, and it is a change of approach: for most of the week the party answered on process, saying a handful of people who do not share its values occasionally get through vetting. It is now contesting the method in court while an internal investigation runs. Two sitting councillors in the London borough of Hounslow are also under investigation. One, David Kerr, is recorded advocating machine-gunning thousands of men involved in grooming gangs; the other, Adam Parkins, suggests that as prime minister he would hold “Sunday morning executions in the Downing Street rose garden”. Mr Parkins defended himself directly, saying that advocating the death penalty for men who systematically groomed and raped girls is a legitimate opinion; Mr Kerr has been approached for comment. Labour’s party chair said “bad apples don’t fall far from the tree” and that the Reform leader “is incapable of taking responsibility… because he himself shares culpability”. The footage itself has not been independently seen, which is why it is reported here as it is attributed.

Northern Ireland Doctors Call Strikes Over the Missing Budget

Resident doctors will stop work for twenty-four hours on Friday 20 November and consultants will run a much-reduced service the following Monday. The Executive is seven months into the financial year without a budget, so a 3.5% rise recommended by an independent body and accepted by the health minister cannot be paid. Doctors elsewhere in the United Kingdom received it in April.

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This is what a budget vacuum looks like once it stops being an abstraction. Public sector managers have adapted to emergency procedures, money still flows, services are delivered and wages are paid — but a rise that has been recommended, accepted and funded everywhere else in the country cannot be handed over, because there is no budget to hand it over from. Clodagh Corrigan of the British Medical Association put the union’s position in five words: “I don’t know how long you’d like us to wait?” The association met the health minister a fortnight ago and says it was told there would be no rise before Christmas “if at all”. A nurses’ strike may follow. The thing to watch is whether the November dates force a budget or simply demonstrate that one is not coming, because the dispute is not really between doctors and the health department at all — the department agrees with them. It is between the Executive and itself.

Rural Households Face Winter After a Rise of up to 82%

Heating fuel costs have risen by as much as 82% since the start of the conflict, the energy consumers minister told the BBC, calling it “striking” how rural communities with “so many people off grid” are “some of the most exposed”. One household in Devon paid about £340 for 500 litres a year ago and just over £600 now.

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The 82% figure is the minister’s own and no published series behind it could be found, so it is reported as her claim rather than as data. What is on the record is the policy: the government accepted the competition authority’s recommendation to regulate heating oil for the first time five days ago, after the authority found 1,700 households were owed compensation because suppliers cancelled orders and left them to re-order at higher prices. Minimum order levels will be reviewed, and £53m of immediate support went in during March. Polly Billington said “we need to make sure the market is working as fairly as possible”. The households quoted are not confident that regulation reaches the price: one said “I can’t see how regulating it is going to bring costs down”, another that “there is going to be a lot of people who can’t afford it and folk who are going to go cold”, and a third, who saves £30 a month into a scheme for the purpose, said that even so he can no longer afford to fill his tank. Oil hit $110 on Friday, so the direction of travel is not helpful.

Police Rule Out Action Over a Palestine Action Post

The Metropolitan Police will take no further action over a post about the proscribed group written by Sarah Helm, a journalist and the wife of the national security adviser. Specialist officers assessed it and “determined that it did not meet the criminal threshold”. She had written: “God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action.”

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The post was a reply in a discussion about Sally Rooney, who says she can no longer sell her books in the United Kingdom because of her support for the group. The force’s statement is narrow and worth quoting exactly: it was “made aware of a post on X relating to Palestine Action” on Thursday 15 October, the post “was assessed by specialist officers and it was determined that it did not meet the criminal threshold”, and “no further police action will be taken”. The understanding is that there was insufficient evidence the post was capable of encouraging support for a proscribed organisation, which is the offence that would have been in question. Two things make this more than a footnote. The first is who wrote it: the spouse of the official who advises the prime minister on national security, which is why the assessment was always going to be reported. The second is the test itself — proscription makes expressions of support criminal, and where the line sits between sympathy and encouragement is being drawn case by case, in public, by police rather than by Parliament.

One To Read

The Knesset Moves Right Whoever Wins

The Guardian · One poll before the 27 October election puts Itamar Ben-Gvir’s party on nine seats and the heirs of Labour on eight. More than 500,000 Israelis have reached voting age since 2022, and three-quarters of first-time Jewish voters call themselves right or centre-right.

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Evening Briefing

Saturday 17 October 2026 — 17:55 BST

What It Means For You

If you drive or heat your home with oil: Brent crude settled at $109.86 a barrel on Friday, having touched $110 for the first time since May, and attacks on Gulf shipping this week reached a wartime high. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards now say the Strait of Hormuz is “closed”; diesel and heating-oil prices tend to track crude.
If you pay household energy bills: the Resolution Foundation expects bills to rise to around £2,000 from January and wants a temporary discount, averaging £175, for households where no one earns more than £24,000. The chancellor sets out his Budget on 28 October.
If you are under 30: Brussels is in talks with member states to let young Britons work in any job in the EU under a Youth Experience Scheme. Numbers and university fees are still being haggled over ahead of next month’s UK-EU summit; nothing has yet been agreed.

GEO Geopolitical

IRGC Declares Hormuz ‘Closed’ as Attacks on Shipping Hit Wartime High

The navy of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards has declared the Strait of Hormuz “closed”, with four tankers reported hit since Friday, one by a rocket-propelled grenade fired from a small boat. The UK Maritime Trade Operations centre said at least ten vessels had been attacked in or near the strait since last Sunday — a weekly high since the war began — and 23 so far this month, almost double the average.

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Admiral Brad Cooper, head of US Central Command, said late on Friday that 400 ships and 100 million barrels of oil had passed through the strait in the past week. “Let me be clear: The Strait of Hormuz is controlled by the United States and our regional partners, not Iran,” he said. Kpler put flows at 11.6 million barrels a day in the week to 13 October, about 68 per cent of the pre-war baseline. Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, revived the seven-day reopening plan sent via Qatar that Trump rejected last month: “The choice is now America’s.” There are concerns that Washington could escalate after the 3 November midterms.

Sisi Says Egypt Ready to Defend Saudi Arabia Against Houthi Attacks

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said Egypt stood ready to defend Saudi Arabia “if requested” and asked parliament to convene in emergency session to authorise any deployment. “It is inconceivable that we would allow Saudi Arabia, its security or stability to be harmed,” he told a military academy graduation near Cairo. Egypt’s parliament will sit at 1pm on Sunday.

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Since Yemen’s war reignited in July, the Houthis have struck Saudi energy facilities, Aramco’s headquarters and King Khalid International Airport, where 13 people were killed in a single attack last Saturday. They have also blockaded the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to Saudi-flagged tankers. Egypt has its own stake: the Suez Canal has lost about $11 billion in revenue since the Houthis began targeting shipping in 2023. Riyadh signed a mutual defence pact with Pakistan and Turkey in August, though the scope of either’s help is unclear. Sisi stressed Egypt’s role would be defensive and said he would not seek another term beyond 2030.

Zelensky Presses for Paused Russia Sanctions as US Seeks Putin Summit

Volodymyr Zelensky urged supporters to speak out for the US sanctions package Donald Trump paused hours earlier, saying Washington had chosen to “completely disregard the Lindsey Graham Act”. He disclosed that Rustem Umerov, Kyiv’s lead negotiator, met Jared Kushner on Friday, and that the US was working to arrange a three-way meeting with Vladimir Putin in the Middle East, Europe or America.

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The law, which Trump signed last month, targets Russian officials, banks and the shadow tanker fleet, and directs tariffs of up to 100 per cent on the top importers of Russian oil and gas; the waiver landed two days before the implementation deadline. Senator Richard Blumenthal, its co-author, called the waivers “sucking up to Vladimir Putin”. Overnight Russia launched four cruise missiles and 332 drones, striking more than 15 energy sites. Kyiv is also investigating a sudden speed cap on Starshield terminals that slows its drones. A dozen senators, six of them Republicans, had urged Trump to impose the sanctions; expect that pressure to build before next month’s midterms.

Hundreds Arrested as Cost-of-Living Riots Engulf French Cities

More than 270 people were arrested as protests uniting students with a revived yellow vest movement turned violent across France. Protesters burned down Lyon’s tourism office, stormed Marseille’s town hall and torched cars in Paris, where police used tear gas and water cannon. Benoit Payan, Marseille’s mayor, said the situation was “out of control” and called on national authorities to intervene.

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The unrest began last month in high schools in Paris’s poorer northern suburbs and has widened into anger over fuel prices, which have soared since the US-Iran war began. The Yellow Vests claimed 1,756 mobilisations, including protests at refineries, oil depots and ports. Sébastien Lecornu, the prime minister, said more than 900 police had been injured. French public debt is projected to exceed 120 per cent of GDP next year, and borrowing costs are at their highest in more than two decades. With Marine Le Pen leading presidential polls, both the far left and far right are exploiting the turmoil.

Israeli Settlers Attack European Diplomats in West Bank Village

Israeli settlers attacked European diplomats visiting the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh, east of Ramallah, to observe the olive harvest, smashing a vehicle window. The diplomats were reported to be from France, Belgium and Poland. “Impunity for violent settlers must end,” said Maxime Prevot, Belgium’s foreign minister. Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s foreign minister, condemned “the severe acts of violence by Israeli rioters”.

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The IDF said no soldiers were present and the visit had not been coordinated with the military; police have opened an investigation. The attack came a day after settlers beat Heidi Levine, a Washington Post photographer, who needed surgery for a broken rib and fractured vertebrae. Netanyahu’s office called the circumstances “unclear”, prompting a rebuke from the Post’s executive editor. The Israeli monitor Yesh Din has recorded at least 234 harvest-related attacks since 27 September, with soldiers present in more than a quarter. The European Council has urged Israel to reverse settlement expansion; watch whether Paris and Warsaw escalate diplomatically.

UK UK Domestic Politics

Bailey Joins Walkout at IMF Meeting in Protest at Russia

Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, joined finance leaders who walked out of an International Monetary Fund meeting in Bangkok when Anton Siluanov, the Russian finance minister, addressed the group in Russian. The Bank confirmed his participation. Counterparts from France, Germany and several Scandinavian and Baltic countries also left. “This is a very strong signal about solidarity and values,” said Joachim Nagel, the Bundesbank president, who put the walkout at nearly half of all delegates.

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Germany had warned against efforts to bring Russia back on to the international stage, while Erin Browne, the US Treasury undersecretary, said Washington supported Russia’s presence despite European concerns. Siluanov attended a G20 finance meeting earlier this year. Mohammed al-Jadaan, the Saudi finance minister who chaired the steering committee, warned that “buffers have been eroded, and resilience cannot be taken for granted”. John Healey used the same Bangkok meetings to argue that Britain is resilient, citing IMF forecasts that the UK will have the lowest deficit in the G7 by 2029. Britain hosts the G20 next year, with finance ministers meeting in Edinburgh on 8 and 9 July 2027.

Swinney Declares Independence Campaign Under Way in Dig at Burnham

John Swinney told the SNP conference in Aberdeen that the campaign for a second independence referendum “has already begun”, launching a drive called Choose Scotland backed by a six-figure war chest. In a veiled retort to Andy Burnham, the First Minister said: “Some think we should just be like Manchester.” He added: “Scotland is no city. We are no region. We are a nation”. He also pledged to bring buses back into public control by 2031.

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Burnham, whose agreement any vote requires under the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling, has told Swinney a second referendum is “off limits”. The pro-independence share of the vote fell from about 50% in 2021 to about 41% at May’s Holyrood election. Senior figures see a hung Westminster parliament as the likeliest route; Jenny Gilruth said polling suggests the SNP “would hold the balance of power”, though this week’s Electoral Calculus MRP gave the party 28 seats. Members also backed a motion supporting a UK-wide ban on X, and the party will review its use of the platform. Growing internal dissent and anger over public services threaten Swinney’s ambitions.

British Under-30s Could Work Freely in EU Under Youth Scheme

Brussels is in talks with member states to let young Britons work in any job in Europe under the Youth Experience Scheme, as Andy Burnham prepares for next month’s UK-EU summit in Brussels. Earlier negotiations had raised fears that British under-30s would face tighter restrictions than their EU counterparts, because individual states control work visas. The UK side would accept the arrangement.

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Numbers remain unresolved: Britain wants to keep arrivals below 50,000, while the EU wants a cap of 150,000 visas. Member states are considering delaying their demand for young Europeans to access home fee status, one of the thorniest issues, which Britain has resisted amid pressure from universities. Burnham has warned that “sticking with the status quo is not good enough” and has reopened the rejoin debate. A European Movement UK survey found Britons would vote by 57 to 30 per cent to rejoin. The government said negotiations were ongoing. The summit will show whether the scheme survives the haggling over caps and fees.

Army Chief Warns Britons Must Consent to Sacrifices for Defence

General Sir Roly Walker, the Chief of the General Staff, told around 700 soldiers at Catterick Garrison that citizens must “consent to sacrifices to prioritise defence and security”. “You didn’t know this, but our nation is going to need you,” he said. At least 1,500 personnel, including British, French and German troops, will travel to Poland next month to rehearse a postwar peacekeeping mission for Ukraine.

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Ipsos polling of 1,090 adults found 51% back higher defence spending even if it means extra borrowing, higher taxes or service cuts, yet 48% say there are no circumstances in which they would take up arms for Britain. Some 44% oppose higher spending if their own taxes rise. Lord Ricketts, the former national security adviser, warned that Russian hybrid attacks are “getting more reckless, more dangerous”. RAF jets have reported two near misses with unidentified drones above 10,000ft over the North Sea. John Healey faces a £5 billion gap in planned defence spending ahead of the Budget.

Healey’s Budget Headroom Halved as Borrowing Costs Climb

John Healey’s headroom against his fiscal target has been halved from £24 billion to £12 billion by higher borrowing costs, the Resolution Foundation estimates, eleven days before his first Budget on 28 October. The Chancellor insisted that “my Budget will protect Britain’s resilience through this turbulent time”, as conflict in the Middle East and Ukraine pushes up energy prices and the cost of government debt.

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Debt interest spending is set to run around £14 billion above the OBR’s forecast in 2029-30, and household energy bills are expected to rise to around £2,000 from January. The think tank urges Healey to rebuild headroom to at least £20 billion by raising around £8 billion in tax, for example by ending Capital Gains Tax exemptions on death, lowering the VAT registration threshold and charging National Insurance on partnership income. It also proposes a £2 billion temporary energy discount, worth £175 on average, for households where no one earns above £24,000. The Chancellor must balance the Iran war, defence demands and the cost of living.

One To Read

Houthi Strikes on Saudi Arabia Show the Yemeni Rebels’ Growing Strength

ABC News / AP · How the Houthis grew from some 30,000 fighters in 2015 to as many as 350,000, and why cheap drones and missiles, mountainous terrain and Iranian backing make them so hard for Riyadh to contain — the context for Cairo’s offer tonight.

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Morning Briefing

Saturday 17 October 2026 — 07:55 BST

What It Means For You

If you drive or heat your home with oil: Brent crude ended Friday at $109.86 a barrel, up almost 4% on the day, and overnight Iran’s Revolutionary Guards claimed that a supertanker had struck a mine in the Strait of Hormuz. Diesel and heating-oil prices tend to track crude.
If you are thinking of buying an electric car: Downing Street has not ruled out tariffs on Chinese-made EVs as the price of joining the EU’s Made in Europe scheme. Chinese models currently face only the standard 10% import duty in Britain; higher tariffs could push up prices for buyers, though no decision has been taken.
If you are waiting on the Budget: it is on 28 October, and the chancellor has returned from the IMF meetings in Bangkok to finish it. The Fund’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, urged him to “stay the course” on cutting the deficit; nothing on tax or benefits has yet been announced.

GEO Geopolitical

Trump Waives New Russia Sanctions Two Days Before They Took Effect

Donald Trump has used an executive order to suspend much of the Graham Act, the Russia sanctions law he signed last month, telling Congress the pause “is in the national interests of the United States”. The waivers cover 100% tariffs on the five largest buyers of Russian oil and gas, due on Sunday, and 500% tariffs on Russian goods. Senator Richard Blumenthal called it a “craven, cowardly action”.

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The law also targeted senior Russian figures, banks and the shadow fleet of tankers that keeps Russian energy moving; the waivers stand until officials “determine that further action is appropriate”. It follows last week’s deal to import Russian diesel, which Volodymyr Zelensky says means cash “will start flowing back into Russia”. The criticism crosses party lines: the Republican congressman Don Bacon said the president “is prolonging the war, not ending it”. In Europe, Italy’s defence minister, Guido Crosetto, told the BBC that restricting support for Kyiv “makes absolutely no sense”. Mr Trump, facing midterms next month, blames Ukrainian refinery strikes for high fuel prices; American diesel is up almost 70% since the Iran war began.

Iran Says a Supertanker Hit a Mine on an Unauthorised Hormuz Route

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards say a supertanker carrying more than two million barrels of crude caught fire after striking a naval mine while crossing the Strait of Hormuz by a route Tehran has not authorised. The claim, carried by Iranian media, has not been independently verified. Separately, the UK Maritime Trade Operations centre said a tanker was struck by an unknown projectile north-east of Jubail on Friday; its crew were evacuated safely.

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The claim is Tehran’s answer to mounting pressure at sea. Admiral Brad Cooper, head of US Central Command, says the American blockade has stopped at least $25bn of Iranian crude exports and that “Iran’s government is withholding salaries, pensions and benefits to workers in industries such as oil and energy, manufacturing, construction, security and the IRGC itself”. CENTCOM says it helped Gulf partners move more than 100 million barrels through the strait in the past week. The International Energy Agency’s October report shows Hormuz flows rising by 3.7 million barrels a day to 10.9 million, but it left its projections largely unchanged because of increased Houthi attacks. Brent settled at $109.86 on Friday.

Russian Strikes Kill Eight and Cut Power to a Million Ukrainians

Russian attacks on nine Ukrainian regions on Friday killed at least eight people, injured 60 and cut electricity to more than a million, Ukrainian officials said; most have since been reconnected. Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, Volyn and Rivne were hit, and shopping centres were struck in Rivne and Sumy. In Volyn about 370,000 households lost power, and Lutsk’s mayor warned the blackout could last at least 24 hours.

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United Nations monitors say at least 328 civilians were killed and 2,105 wounded in September, 85% more than a year earlier. “The first two weeks of October were among the deadliest periods for civilians in years,” said Danielle Bell, head of the UN’s monitoring mission. Russia’s military chief told Vladimir Putin on Friday that the assets needed to press the aerial campaign against Ukraine’s energy system had been allocated. The defensive gap is widening: CNN reports that Kyiv has run out of Patriot interceptors, among the few weapons able to stop ballistic missiles, and Mr Zelensky says Starlink operations have improved but are not fully restored.

Houthi Missiles Land Near Aden Airport as the Saudi Front Widens

Yemen’s internationally recognised government says two Houthi missiles landed near the runway at Aden International Airport on Friday, 500 metres from an aircraft preparing to take off; all passengers and crew were safe. The information minister, Moammar al-Eryani, called it “a grave violation of international laws and norms”. It came a day after a deadly Houthi attack on the presidential palace in the city.

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The Saudi-led coalition says it downed missiles and drones over Riyadh on Friday, and government forces claim gains in Marib province. The war is drawing in outside powers: Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, reports that Israel has begun sharing intelligence on the Houthis with Saudi Arabia through Washington, chiefly to secure navigation through the Bab al-Mandab. The Wall Street Journal reports that Iran has given the Houthis training, intelligence and tactical guidance; the group now controls the coastline on its side of the strait, and a strike in Riyadh last weekend killed at least 13. Tehran denies any role and has offered to mediate.

Trump’s Press Secretary Leaves After Five Days in the Job

Katie Zacharia is leaving the post of White House press secretary five days after a 14-minute debut briefing in which she took three questions; a White House official told the Guardian she had been fired. Moments before her exit was announced, Mr Trump said he had told her: “Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider.” She had admitted she never passed the bar exam.

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Ms Zacharia, a little-known conservative commentator, replaced Karoline Leavitt and says she was hired less than a week before her first briefing, at which she referred to her husband as “the president”. Even friendly interviewers turned on her: Sean Hannity asked bluntly, “What happened?” Her departure is the swiftest in Mr Trump’s press operation, beating Anthony Scaramucci’s ten days in the first term; he wrote: “Records are made to be broken.” With November’s midterms approaching, Democrats are using it as evidence of disarray; Hakeem Jeffries posted: “The White House Press Secretary is gone. Maga extremists continue to fall apart.”

UK Domestic

Healey Makes the Growth Case for Heathrow as Burnham Holds Back

The chancellor has struck a markedly warmer note than the prime minister on a third runway. “The case for a third runway at Heathrow has always been a case for growth,” John Healey said in Bangkok. Andy Burnham has called it “a matter for London and Londoners”. The Department for Transport is reviewing consultation responses; Heathrow’s owners want the prime minister’s explicit backing before the end of the year.

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Rachel Reeves made the runway the centrepiece of her growth argument; the Sunday Times has reported that Mr Burnham told the transport secretary he was “unconvinced”. The £33bn project would lift the cap on flights from 480,000 a year to 720,000, demolish hundreds of homes and put the M25 into a tunnel, and Heathrow has suggested opening could slip to 2039. Its owners, including the Qatar Investment Authority and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, are deciding whether to seek planning permission. “We cannot wait for ever,” warned the chief executive, Thomas Woldbye. Mr Healey voted for the runway in 2018.

Police Assess Palestine Action Post by Security Adviser’s Wife

The Metropolitan Police is assessing a post on X by the author Sarah Helm, wife of the national security adviser Jonathan Powell, which read: “God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action.” The group is proscribed as a terrorist organisation. Downing Street said the views were held by “an individual who does not represent the government in any capacity”.

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Ms Helm was defending Sally Rooney, whose novels will not be supplied to UK booksellers after she pledged her royalties to the group. The Campaign Against Antisemitism says Mr Powell “must publicly denounce this rhetoric if he is to continue in post”, and Reform’s Danny Kruger has written to the prime minister; the Green leader, Zack Polanski, said she was “speaking absolute common sense”. The stakes are wider than one post: an estimated 3,700 people have been arrested for showing support since proscription, about 2,500 charged, and a challenge to the ban reaches the Supreme Court next month. Mr Powell, appointed by Sir Keir Starmer, kept his post under Mr Burnham.

No 10 Leaves the Door Open to Tariffs on Chinese Electric Cars

Downing Street says it would “welcome the objective” of including Britain in the EU’s Made in Europe scheme after France dropped its opposition, but a Franco-German proposal would require the UK to align dynamically with EU trade defences, including tariffs on Chinese EVs. No 10 called it “premature to speculate” on terms. China’s embassy said it was “firmly opposed to any discriminatory practice”.

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Chinese EVs face only the standard 10% import duty in Britain, while the EU adds manufacturer-specific duties of up to 35.3%. They are selling fast: BYD’s UK sales rose 78% year on year in September. The industry calculation cuts both ways, since about 80% of UK-made cars are exported, more than half to the EU and 6% to China. Liam Byrne, chairman of the business committee, calls tariffs “a small price to pay”, and warns: “Our China strategy is simply not where it needs to be.” Imposing tariffs could take more than a year; EU lawmakers expect to finalise the legislation by the end of this year or early 2027.

Half of Britons Now Back Rejoining the EU, Polls Suggest

Brexit is back on the agenda as the prime minister talks up closer ties with Brussels. A poll of more than 11,000 people published this month found half of Britons would rejoin and 28% opposed; More in Common’s modelling in June found just 11 of 632 constituencies would vote to stay out. “Sticking with the status quo is not good enough for Britain,” Mr Burnham said this week.

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Professor Rob Ford attributes the shift to demographics and buyers’ remorse: “a lot of leave voters have died, bluntly”. The economic argument is sharpening too: National Farmers’ Union analysis of HMRC data shows food and drink exports to the EU down by more than a third since 2019, with sugar down 70%. Not everyone is convinced the numbers would hold. “The question is, how resilient would that be in the face of a referendum campaign?” asks Luke Tryl of More in Common, and one cabinet minister warns: “We don’t want to restoke division.” Brussels may also be wary while a future Reform government could reverse any deal.

Devon and Cornwall Police Pay Nine Women Over Abusive Officers

Devon and Cornwall police has formally apologised and paid compensation to nine women who allege the force promoted and protected male officers despite knowing they were accused of domestic abuse. The chief constable, James Vaughan, apologised personally; the settlement, after a two-year legal battle, admits no liability. The women say at least four of the officers are still serving; the force denies a cover-up.

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Some of the accused officers served in roles protecting women from male violence; one was allegedly promoted twice after allegations and given a leadership post in the force’s work on violence against women and girls. Three of the women were arrested after counter-accusations by their alleged abusers. “At best it was bad investigations, at worst it was collusion with the attackers,” a former senior figure in the force told the Guardian. The force refused to say whether the officers remain in service, but says none is now in a post related to protecting women, and has promised to improve its handling of police-perpetrated abuse.

One To Read

Brexit’s Back — But Are British Voters Ready to Contemplate a Reversal?

The Guardian · A decade after the referendum, Esther Addley weighs the polling, the demographics and the politics behind Andy Burnham’s reopening of the question — and why pollsters doubt rejoin’s lead would survive a campaign.

Saved Stories

Morning Briefing

What It Means For You

GEO Geopolitical

Israel Seals Hebron as 200 Families Are Displaced Overnight

US Spy Chief Says Iranian Plots to Kill Americans Are Advanced

France Deploys 70,000 Officers as a Fourth Protest Weekend Begins

Russia and Ukraine Agree a Local Truce for a Starving City

Serbia Votes Tomorrow With a Student List Level Against Vucic

UK Domestic

Treasury to Fund World-First AI Biosecurity Lab With £100m

Six Warnings as Boelo Arrives, With Amber Wind From Tonight

Most Levelling Up Projects Still Unfinished Years After Funding

Tories’ Former Campaign Chief Sentenced Over Election Betting

Green Councillors Face a Labour Deadline Over Zionism Policy

The Slick You Can See From Orbit

Evening Briefing

What It Means For You

GEO Geopolitical

Netanyahu Orders Extensive West Bank Operation After Soldiers Killed

One Killed as Paris Drive-By Shooting Investigated as Terrorism

Brent Tops $116 at a Six-Month High on Expected Iran Strikes

Gunmen Kill Six at a Church Funeral in Southern Jordan

Ukraine Says Starlink Is Still Throttled Despite Trump’s Claim

UK Domestic

Storm Austen Cuts Power to 18,000 Homes as Brighton Pier Collapses

Burnham Urges Households to Keep Three Days of Food and Water

Healey Promises to Cut £800m a Year of Business Paperwork

Retail Sales Fell 0.4% in September as Warm Weather Hit Clothing

Environment Secretary Intervenes in Water Price Review for First Time

A Vaccine Made for One Patient

Morning Briefing

What It Means For You

GEO Geopolitical

Russia Fires 21 Missiles at Kyiv Hours After Agreeing Talks

AI-Found PHP Flaw Forces Governments to Pull Websites Offline

Two Killed at Dammam Airport as US Orders Diplomats Out

France Now Borrows More Dearly Than America as Protests Loom

Judge Fines Meta $25bn Over Eleven Years of Privacy Lies

UK Domestic

Barclays to Cut 5,000 Jobs as Profits Rise Before the Budget

Fraud and Computer Misuse Rise as Knife and Gun Crime Fall

Judges Get Power to Confine Killers Who Skip Sentencing

Rosebank Decision Pending as Department Dismisses Reports as Speculation

Six Million Households to Get £150 Energy Rebate Letters

The Vanishing Voters

Evening Briefing

What It Means For You

GEO Geopolitical

Putin Ready to Resume Trilateral Talks After 10 November

Iran Says It Is “Fully Prepared” to Defend Itself

French Borrowing Costs Cross 5% for First Time Since 2002

Houthis Fire Ballistic Missiles at Aden and Mukalla

Drone Strike on Abyei Market Kills More Than 150

UK UK Domestic Politics

Burnham Emerges Unscathed From PMQs Over Jackdaw

Burnham Says Reform Must Act Over “Politics of Poison”

Streeting Delays Defence Jobs Plan After Union Pushback

Bereaved Civil Service Families Face Tax Bills Over Pension Delays

Burnham Backs a Mayor for Wessex by 2028

Badenoch on Jackdaw: Attack Lines That Did Not Land

Davey: “Not the Growth Budget Our Country Needs”

Ahmed: Condemn Racism in Reform

When Is a Licence Not a Licence?

Morning Briefing

What It Means For You

GEO Geopolitical

Putin Frees American as Witkoff Opens Talks in St Petersburg

RAF Typhoons to Defend Saudi Skies as the Gulf War Widens

France’s Borrowing Cost Tops 5% as Europe’s Riots Spread to Italy

Drone Strike on Abyei Market Kills 153, South Sudan Protests

Nigeria Confirms First Ebola Case as Outbreak Reaches West Africa

UK Domestic

Inflation Climbs to 3.5% as Fuel Prices Jump Before the Budget

Borrowing Hits £24.5bn and Debt Passes £3 Trillion

Jackdaw Gas Field Approved With New Energy Wealth Fund

Minister Declines to Back Fifteen-Year Wait for Settlement

High-Risk Cosmetic Procedures Would Be Restricted to Doctors

Life Beside the Shipping Lane

Morning Briefing