Russia has started installing magnetometers in the tails or tail fins of its Geran attack drones, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, the Ukrainian president’s commissioner for sanctions policy, said on Facebook on 28 October.

Russia uses its Shahed-Geran series drones in massive daily attacks on Ukraine. Ukrainian forces jam Gerans’ satellite navigation to push them off course, and Russia keeps hardening the drones against it, already fitting them with adaptive antennas. The magnetometer appears designed to go further, giving the drone a heading that doesn’t depend on satellites at all. Earlier this month, Ukrainian military intelligence reported a US-made magnetometer in the upgraded Geran-4.

A new jamming device, and Western parts at the core

Vlasiuk posted photos from a site where Ukraine studies Russian weapons and their components. He said he takes the findings for Ukraine’s sanctions work. He did not say which Geran models carry the magnetometer.

At the same time, Ukraine is studying how a new jamming device works. Vlasiuk did not say where it was found or what it targets.

“Western electronics are at the core everywhere,” Vlasiuk wrote.

Geran-4 already flew with a US-made sensor

On 5 October, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (HUR) said the upgraded Geran-4 carries a new “MOKh” unit built around a PNI5GA magnetometer made by US firm PNI Sensor. The unit works with the SADRA inertial navigation module to cut gyroscope drift and make the drone’s autonomous navigation more accurate.

HUR said Russia also added an electro-optical navigation system called Susanin to the upgraded Geran-4. It compares camera images with a reference image stored in memory to keep the drone on its route to the target. The new K5 version of the Geran-5 uses a similar system.

Presidential adviser Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov warned on 28 October that if Russia starts using Susanin en masse on Geran-5s and other drones and missiles at night, Ukraine may have to go back to switching off lights, especially on roads.

A six-day ceasefire in the Ukrainian city of Oleshky continues to hold as humanitarian aid is expected to arrive on Friday

Good morning. Canada and the European Union are moving ahead with plans to strengthen economic and security ties, but one idea has been taken off the table. Ahead of a summit in Montreal, the EU has dropped a proposal to designate Canada an “associate member” after objections from several member states.

With his poll numbers tanking and his behavior getting odder, the remark seems more appealing to himself than to voters

As he criss-crosses the nation, stumping for Republican candidates, Donald Trump keeps asking voters to use their imaginations.

“In this election, I’m asking you to pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot. Just pretend,” he urged at a Kansas rally as he campaigned for the incumbent senator Roger Marshall and gubernatorial challenger Ty Masterson last month.

Elizabeth Warren and others joined by unions and industry experts in warning against the weakening of regulations

The senator Elizabeth Warren, the congresswoman Ilhan Omar and several other Democratic lawmakers are calling on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) to abandon a rollback of respirator mask regulations, a change the lawmakers say would weaken worker protections against hazardous substances.

Under the proposed rules, employers would face fewer requirements to provide workers with respirators masks when working with substances including “lead, asbestos, formaldehyde and inorganic arsenic, among other chemicals”, the lawmakers wrote in a letter to the Osha assistant secretary, David Keeling, a former UPS and Amazon executive.

Marilyn Hampton, who regularly bought supplies for and gave rides to children, was honored at public meeting

US schools are often named after presidents, historical figures and civil rights leaders. And soon joining those ranks is a retired longtime Texas school custodian known for going above and beyond her duties by buying classroom supplies for children in need and helping students with their assignments.

That heartwarming story centers on Marilyn Hampton, whose former employer of 39 years – the Aubrey independent school district (AISD) – recently moved to rename its new elementary school No 5 in her honor.

Legacy Church’s endorsements violate law banning tax-exempt nonprofits from endorsing political candidates

A megachurch in New Mexico has endorsed two Republican candidates running in this year’s midterms, including a Donald Trump-backed candidate running in one of the blue state’s few competitive races. The church’s endorsements, which violate federal law banning tax-exempt nonprofits from endorsing political candidates, come as the Trump administration is challenging that ban in federal court.

In mid-August, pastor Steve Smothermon of Legacy Church, a nondenominational church with nine locations across the state, told his congregation about one of the candidates: “Greg Cunningham has faithfully served our church for 14 years and shares our biblical values. Let’s pray for him, support his campaign, get registered, and vote to flip this seat for someone who will stand for God, our Constitution, and a better New Mexico!”

Regulator demands companies explain how and why they charge different prices for the same product or service

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is demanding some of the US’s biggest airlines, ride-share companies and retailers divulge how they are using algorithms and loyalty programs to target customers and drivers with different prices and wages.

Nine companies – Delta, United, JetBlue, Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, Target and Walmart – were named in the inquiry, which comes after investigations and lawsuits alleging consumers are charged different prices based on their buying histories and drivers paid different fares based on their personal histories.

‘Really change things for the working class,’ the ex-presidential candidate says

A corporate plutocracy. A broken healthcare system. Massive and widening inequality. Cash-soaked elections. Angry people struggling to pay their bills and disgusted with lawmakers in Washington DC.

Nearly everything that pushed famed consumer-rights advocate Ralph Nader to launch the 2000 presidential run that made him a political pariah in Washington is front and center as the US gears up for the 2026 midterm elections. But this time, things are much, much worse.

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey sent a letter to Meta on Wednesday demanding the company answer for the privacy concerns its smart glasses pose to the public. 

The letter cites 404 Media’s October 2025 investigation into how people use Meta’s smart glasses to harass massage parlor workers. That investigation found Instagram accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views uploaded videos filmed with Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, where men entered massage parlors across the country and solicited the workers for sex work. The full letter is here. 

“Meta’s own disclosures confirm that imagery processed through its glasses’ visual AI features may be retained and used to train AI systems, including with the assistance of human reviewers,” the letter says. “Using intimate imagery for AI development is itself an invasion of privacy when the people depicted have not consented to that use, as is inherently the case for most bystanders captured by Meta’s glasses. Retaining that material for AI development, thereby extending the period during which it can be accessed, disclosed, or misused, exploits people’s highly sensitive information for Meta’s commercial benefit.”

Research published in August revealed how Meta’s platforms encourage an ecosystem of abusive, harassing content from pickup artists and influencers who use Meta’s smart glasses to capture interactions with people minding their own business in public or at their workplaces, who might not even know they’re being filmed. In a January report by the BBC, a woman who was recorded with the glasses said she was “bombarded” with phone calls because her phone number was posted with the video, and men who had seen the video stalked her at work.

Earlier this year, more than 70 people sued Meta, claiming that their intimate images and videos were exposed to workers hired by the company to label the data for AI. In March, Swedish journalists reported that Kenyan data labelers were viewing and annotating uncensored footage from Meta’s smart glasses, including sexual and violent content; Meta ended its contract with those workers less than two months later. These are labor conditions that groups like the Data Labelers Association in Kenya are fighting back against, and for the people whose images are in the videos and photos, it’s an obvious violation of their privacy. People have also been modding these glasses to disable the light that indicates they’re recording for years 

Meta has played dumb about the difference between AI glasses you wear on your face and an iPhone for a long time. Now, these senators want the tech giant to answer for themselves. In the letter, Wyden and Markey demand answers about what safeguards, if any, Meta has in place to prevent the nonconsensual “capture, disclosure, or processing of sensitive and intimate imagery,” whether Meta specifically evaluated the potential for its glasses “to facilitate voyeurism, nonconsensual intimate image capture, or similar privacy invasions,” what imagery it uses for AI training, and whether people can request their biometric and other data captured by its glasses be deleted, along with several more questions about the glasses’ safety and design.

“The reported disclosure of intimate footage to contractors for the purpose of AI training is particularly disturbing. Human review to fulfill a service knowingly requested by the person depicted is one thing; exposing unsuspecting individuals’ intimate moments to strangers for AI training is quite another,” Wyden and Markey wrote. “The individuals whose naked bodies, sexual activity, and other private moments have reportedly been captured by Meta glasses did not knowingly agree to having those images shared with strangers, much less for the purpose of improving Meta’s commercial AI systems. That disclosure and processing is an invasion of privacy, regardless of whether the footage is subsequently published or misused.” 

In the last few weeks, Meta has come under fire for quietly changing its privacy policies for business accounts and granting itself permission to scrape user’s content and connected websites to develop its AI products. 

Meta has been pushing its smart glasses over the years with ads featuring A-list celebrities, including Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, and Kris Jenner (all three in a 2025 Superbowl ad), Doja Cat, Jennie Kim from K-pop group BLACKPINK, and most recently, Kylie Jenner. Guerrilla ad makers have countered with their own anti-AI glasses ads around the world, and people have started calling the smart glasses "pervert glasses" in response to these widespread invasions of privacy they've come to represent. In August, Meta filed a patent to add facial recognition and highlight reel features to its smart glasses.