High valuations and debt put sector in danger, while fund also warns on government borrowing and cyber-attacks

• IMF warns global economy ‘could soon test the limits of resilience’

The threat of an AI share price crash rippling out across global markets is putting world financial stability at risk, the International Monetary fund has warned.

In its twice-yearly Global Financial Stability Report, the IMF highlighted the sky-high valuations for AI companies along with their increasing debt pile as one reason that risks in the system are “elevated”.

Six Flags says nine rollercoasters across six amusement parks temporarily closed after reported fatal incident on Goliath ride in Georgia

Theme park company Six Flags temporarily closed nine rollercoasters across six amusement parks on Monday after one person died and several others were injured in an incident involving a coaster in Georgia.

A spokesperson for the park said they closed similar attractions across their parks “out of an abundance of caution” after the incident at Six Flags Over Georgia, about 15 miles (24km) north-west of Atlanta.

Russian forces struck several districts of Kyiv late on 12 October with what the Air Force called, by preliminary data, six ballistic missiles. For once, the air-raid alert reached people only after the attack had begun, Ukraine’s Air Force reported.

Reports of Russian ballistic launches are part of the intelligence the US shares with Ukraine, and that data is what lets sirens sound before the missiles arrive, giving civilians a few minutes to hide. Those minutes save lives, which is why the warning gap landed hard amid fears that Washington could cut Ukraine off from such intelligence amid US President Donald Trump's agreement with Russia to let its diesel into the US.

The alert came late because Ukraine’s radar detected the ballistic targets only during the attack, with no advance data on launches from Russian territory, according to the Air Force.

“No information was received about launches from enemy territory. The causes are being established,” the Air Force said.

The stakes are human, presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov, known as Flash, stressed.

“This information is needed first of all by civilians, so that people have time to hide in a shelter,” he said.

Beskrestnov says he does not want to believe the US would leave Ukraine without that data because it is a matter of civilian survival. He urged caution on the cause, saying there were nuances and that it was too early to draw conclusions.

When the sirens fall behind the missiles

However, Ukraine usually sees the launches first. The warning system normally flags Russian ballistic launches before the missiles reach their targets, giving people time to move, but on 12 October, that did not happen, the Air Force noted.

Beskrestnov later added a note of doubt about what flew. The suspected S-400 missiles were not being recorded by partners’ intelligence services, he wrote, stopping short of blaming the lapse on a loss of US data.

Two cities hit within the same hour

The damage in Kyiv was concrete. A missile struck a transport-infrastructure site in the Dniprovskyi district, and another hit a four-story warehouse in the Desnianskyi district, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

Russia struck Kharkiv at about the same time with nine S-8000 Banderol loitering munitions, Mayor Ihor Terekhov reported. One of the last strikes hit a residential building, where people may be trapped under the rubble and a fire is burning.

“Very serious destruction, an entire stairwell collapsed,” Terekhov said.

Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (HUR) released information on the components of Russia’s Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile and the companies involved in its production, according to a statement dated 12 October.

Russia has used Kinzhal missiles to strike targets across Ukraine since the start of its full-scale invasion. However, 22 of the 58 companies in Russia’s Kinzhal production network are not subject to sanctions, the intelligence agency noted.

Kinzhal missile: design, components, and production changes

Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence has published an interactive 3D model of the Russian Kinzhal missile on its War&Sanctions portal.

The 9-S-7760 missile, known as the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal, uses solid fuel and has a single stage. This means the missile does not consist of multiple stages that separate sequentially during flight. About 90% of its components are identical to those used in the 9M723 ballistic missile of the Iskander-M system, HUR noted.

The Kinzhal is equipped with a radar homing seeker, an active jamming station, and a decoy deployment system, according to the statement. The homing seeker helps the missile determine the direction to its target, while decoys are designed to make interception by air defense systems more difficult.

The missile can carry one of two types of warheads: a penetrating high-explosive warhead or a nuclear warhead. Russia is also developing a version with a high-explosive fragmentation warhead that strikes targets through an explosion and fragments. HUR believes this development may be linked to problems with the missile’s accuracy.

In 2026, Russia significantly reduced its state procurement order for Kinzhal missiles and redirected some production resources, components, and raw materials towards manufacturing Iskander-M missiles, HUR noted. Another reason is the limited number of MiG-31I and MiG-31K aircraft used to launch Kinzhal missiles, the intelligence agency reported.

Ukraine intercepts Kinzhal missiles, but has limited resources to do so

Despite their high speed, Russian Kinzhal missiles can be intercepted using US-made Patriot surface-to-air missile systems. In particular, PAC-3 interceptor missiles are designed to destroy ballistic targets and can be used against threats such as the Kinzhal and Zircon, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense reported.

Ukraine is seeking additional Patriot interceptor missiles to defend against Russian ballistic attacks during the winter.

Most of the approximately 1,000 missiles Kyiv has contracted for are not expected to arrive for several years, prompting Ukraine to ask its allies to supply missiles from their existing stockpiles, Defense News reported on 12 October 2026.

Sanctions loopholes allow Russia to obtain foreign components for Kinzhal missiles

Russia continues to use foreign components in missile production despite sanctions. For instance, the US-made Texas Instruments processors were found again in a newer version of the Kinzhal missile, Ukrainian presidential commissioner for sanctions policy Vladyslav Vlasiuk said in September, Interfax reported. According to him, foreign electronics continue to reach Russia through various supply channels.

Earlier, Ukraine had provided its partners with information on more than 100 Russian companies involved in ballistic missile production and urged them to impose sanctions on those entities, according to the President's Office.

On 12 October, the EU Council imposed sanctions on 1,569 individuals and entities linked to Russia’s military-industrial complex, including 826 Russian companies and 743 company CEOs.

Timothy Broglio says Catholics on army firing squad should ask to be excused since it clashes with church teachings

The archbishop who oversees the spiritual care of Catholics serving in the US military condemned the Pentagon’s proposed plans to livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan later this year.

Archbishop Timothy Broglio also stipulated in a Monday statement that any Catholic soldier assigned to the US army firing squad should ask to be excused from that duty, which he described as contrary to the teachings of the church. He joins other Catholic leaders in speaking out against the death penalty and the live stream plans.

Top House Democrats question the ‘corrupt weaponization’ of federal government against Trump’s adversaries

Ilhan Omar’s Democratic colleagues have condemned federal agents’ search of the Minnesota congresswoman’s home on Monday morning, describing it as “deeply disturbing” and emblematic of the Trump administration’s “corrupt weaponization” of the US government.

House Democratic leaders, including the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, party whip Katherine Clark and caucus chair Pete Aguilar, issued a joint statement excoriating the president for the search.

Runners in Moab 240 successfully evacuated from race route after flooding from remnants of tropical storm Rachel

About 70 runners participating in Utah’s Moab 240 ultramarathon were successfully evacuated from the race route on Sunday after being stranded by flooding stemming from the remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel.

The event’s host, Destination Trail, addressed the emergency rescue effort in a social media statement which confirmed that all runners were safe and accounted for.

Three weeks before the US elections, the American right has a new villain for high fuel prices: Ukraine. Ukrainian journalist in the US, Ostap Yarysh, says the MAGA wing of US conservatives is pushing a claim that Ukraine deliberately strikes Russian oil refineries to raise fuel prices, trick US President Donald Trump, and help the Democratic Party before the November congressional vote.

The accusation casts Kyiv’s refinery strikes as a planned political move against Republicans, and it has spread from anonymous social media accounts to national television and members of Congress, Yarysh notes. Yet experts tie the fuel-price spike mainly to the US war with Iran, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, not to Ukraine, and even Russia’s promised 300,000 tons of diesel would barely cover a day's US demand.

The messaging runs through influential American figures. Utah Senator Mike Lee wrote on X that “Zelenskyy is working overtime. To help Democrats in November.”

Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy called Zelenskyy ungrateful for continuing to bomb refineries and complicate the president’s position before the midterms, according to Yarysh’s account.

Blogger Jack Posobiec, who has a multimillion audience, has urged Washington to immediately stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine and cut off its funding, framing the strikes as an attempt to hurt Trump before the vote.

When you cannot fix the problem, try to control the story

Yarysh reads the campaign as damage control. The Republicans’ weak position before the vote stems mainly from the economy and a jump in domestic fuel prices, he says, a problem the promised Russian diesel cannot solve.

Blaming Ukraine serves two purposes, Yarysh argues: it channels voter anger toward an outside culprit, and it gives Trump a ready explanation if Republicans lose in November, that Zelenskyy set him up to help the Democrats.

Not everyone on the right is buying the blame

Even inside MAGA, some push back on that rhetoric. Yarysh points to far-right activist Laura Loomer, who argued that buying Russian oil fills the coffers of Iran’s regime, which she said "chants death to America."

With three weeks to the vote, Yarysh warns that Ukraine should expect many more such accusations, as the information attack is likely to intensify rather than fade before election day.

Ana Reyes demands Trump officials explain East Potomac tree cutting saying it will probably cause ‘irreparable harm’

US district judge Ana Reyes on Monday ordered a 24-hour halt to tree cutting at the historic East Potomac golf course while she decides on an emergency order from plaintiffs concerned that Donald Trump’s plans for the course are moving forward despite a pending court case challenging them.

“Tree removal for routine maintenance is not exempt from this order,” Reyes wrote. “Plaintiffs are likely to suffer immediate and irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary relief.

Here are five stories you may have missed from across the globe

Russian sabotage assaults on Europe should end with more weapons flowing to Ukraine, NATO’s top commander in Europe says. NATO should respond to the attacks by increasing contributions to the alliance’s PURL weapons program or by sending Ukraine more air-defense interceptor missiles, Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Alexus Grynkewich said at the Warsaw Security Forum, Ukrinform reports.

The remark runs counter to a fresh scare. After US President Donald Trump’s diesel deal with Russia, European officials said that Washington had threatened to halt weapons for Ukraine through PURL, the Financial Times reports, unless Kyiv stopped hitting Russian refineries. Grynkewich’s call to expand the program ran the other way.

One of the main goals of Russia’s hybrid operations, from airspace violations to sabotage and cyberattacks, is to break the West’s will to keep backing Ukraine, he stated. The sharpest answer is to prove that assumption wrong, he argued, turning each attack into a reason to send more.

The PURL program that lets allies fund US-made weapons for Ukraine, which drew nearly $5.5 billion in pledges before May.

Name the culprit out loud, and watch Moscow lose its cover

Once responsibility for a specific attack is established, countries should publicly name who did it, Grynkewich noted, so Russia understands it has been exposed and that its network was never as untraceable as it believed.

Moscow bets it can escape blame because the West cannot work out who is behind an attack, in his telling. The response, he urged, should be to show that the West can.

One voice, not thirty-two, is what Russia actually fears

Coordination is the other half. Allies must craft a joint response rather than send Moscow chaotic, uncoordinated signals from individual states, he stressed, and must spell out clearly where their red lines lie.

That unity is itself a deterrent. A single, agreed answer tells Russia the alliance is harder to split than its hybrid campaign assumes, and that attacks meant to divide the West only harden its resolve, he contends.

A month from idea to first kill. A new interceptor drone built by former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov's team with Pavlo Yelizarov, the commander of Lasar's Group unit, soldiers, and engineers, has shot down two Russian jet-powered Geran-5 drones heading for Kyiv, Fedorov says, just one month after development began.

Russia's jet-powered Gerans fly far faster than the propeller Shaheds that Ukraine learned to shoot down, and they remain the hardest targets for its air defenses, which catch only about 55 percent of them. The new drone is fast enough to catch a jet drone before it reaches a city, Fedorov noted, adding that the two Geran-5 kills are the first confirmed for the interceptor.

Crews from Lasar's Group in Ukraine's National Guard ran the combat trials and downed the two drones within days. Fedorov announced the drone on 12 October, Yelizarov's birthday.

A former minister and a legendary commander behind the kill

Yelizarov joined Ukraine's Defense Forces in 2022 and, in January 2026, became deputy commander of the Air Force, responsible for small-scale air defense and systems for intercepting Russian drones, Forbes Ukraine reports. He founded Lasar's Group, which destroyed $12 billion worth of Russian equipment.

Fedorov, who ran the Digital Transformation and Defense ministries before moving to the private sector, says the interceptor is one of several projects his team continues to develop in Ukraine, combining engineering, military experience, and resources.

The next goal: a drone that hunts Shaheds on its own

The drone is not finished evolving. Testing continues as the team refines the technology and raises production, Fedorov said, with the next step a fully autonomous version that can detect and intercept Russian drones without an operator.

The developers also plan to scale the interceptor's use to protect more Ukrainian cities, he added. The push fits a wider drive: Ukraine aims to build up to 400 interceptors a month to chase the faster Gerans.

Russia is building a satellite network that could soon put all of Europe within its reach. The “Rassvet” satellite system is an extraordinary threat, first to Ukraine and then to the rest of Europe, Oleksandr Danyliuk, the head of the private European aerospace and defense technology company Destinus, said at the Warsaw Security Forum, according to Ukrinform.

Rassvet is Russia’s answer to Starlink, a low-orbit satellite network built by Bureau 1440 to give Moscow’s forces communications that no one else can switch off. European states must invest more quickly in cheap, effective, mass-produced systems to counter it.

“They will be able to navigate to any point in Europe without problems. This needs to be stopped,” said Danyluik, a former Ukrainian finance minister, said.

Cheap systems, made at scale

Danyliuk’s prescription is already being used on Ukraine’s front. Europe should invest in inexpensive, effective systems that can be mass-produced, he argues, the same approach Ukraine uses, and that Russia also turns against it.

“This gap needs to be filled as quickly as possible,” he said.

He urged allies not to overlook threats that might look secondary today, pointing to Rassvet as exactly that kind of slow-building danger.

Appearing strong is not enough to deter Russia, Danyliuk argued, because Moscow can gauge how ready European states actually are.

Ukraine races to catch up

Both sides are now scrambling to own the satellite link rather than rent it. Ukraine is building a satellite system of its own, similar to Starlink but beyond any single company’s control, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 4 October.

He argued Kyiv should be free to turn Starlink on Russian military targets, warning that China and other states will share comparable satellite technology with Moscow within months.

By Ukrainian estimates, Russia still needs five to eight years to complete Rassvet, which so far reaches Ukraine only in brief passes. That window is the time Danyliuk says Europe must use.

Seven US senators from both parties said the Trump administration's decision to authorize Russian diesel imports conflicts with a 2022 law banning Russian energy imports and accused it of failing to consult Congress, in a statement on 11 October.

The dispute comes as the war with Iran drives up US fuel prices, which US President Donald Trump has blamed on Ukraine's strikes on Russian refineries. Trump says Russian supplies will help bring prices down, while lawmakers warn that purchases could provide Moscow with revenue to continue its war against Ukraine.

The senators—Republicans Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis, and John Curtis, and Democrats Jeanne Shaheen, Richard Blumenthal, and Ron Wyden—called on the administration to reverse course, saying the US should not provide Russian President Vladimir Putin with “a financial lifeline.”

What the 2022 law requires before the ban can end

The law, signed on 8 April 2022, allows the president to end the import ban only after submitting a certification to Congress. The certification must find that Russia has agreed to pull out its forces and stop the fighting on terms Ukraine's free and independent government accepts, no longer poses an immediate threat of attack to any NATO member, and recognizes Ukrainians' right to pick their own government.

The law also requires consultation with four congressional committees and a report at least 45 days before certification. The termination takes effect 90 days after certification unless a joint resolution of disapproval is enacted into law during that period. The senators allege the administration failed to meet the consultation and reporting requirements. Their statement does not establish whether a certification has been submitted.

Treasury’s license cites sanctions rules, not the 2022 law

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control issued General License No. 135 on 9 October, authorizing certain transactions involving Russian-origin diesel that would otherwise be restricted under US sanctions regulations. It runs until 7 April 2027 and cites sanctions regulations, not the 2022 import-ban law.

Explore further

EU blacklists 1,569 Russian arms suppliers and their bosses in its biggest sanctions round ever, as Trump eases up on Moscow

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended the deal on Fox News on 11 October, saying the administration would proceed under existing legal authority. He said lawmakers who argued that either the earlier law or the current Lindsey Graham sanctions law prohibited the deal were wrong, and argued the agreement would lower prices, Reuters reported.

How much diesel Trump says Russia will supply

Trump said on Truth Social that Russia would immediately supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel to US and global markets, followed by 500,000 tons in November and 1 million tons after that. He said Russia would deliver another 3 million tons “within a short period of time,” depending on the condition of its diesel refineries. The promised volumes have not been independently verified.

Russia partially lifted its diesel export ban on 10 October, allowing 500,000 tons onto the global market at this stage, the Russian government said, according to state news agency TASS.

A House bill to block Russian oil purchases

Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick plans to introduce the Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Act to block Russian oil purchases and use a discharge petition to force a House vote, Axios reported. The procedure can force consideration of a bill if 218 House members sign. Republican Rep. Don Bacon said he would support the bill and called Trump's decision a serious mistake, according to Ukrainska Pravda.

Barrasso defends the deal. Zelenskyy calls it an investment in war

On CBS's Face the Nation on 11 October, Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming, called the deal “another point of leverage” for Trump to use against Putin. Asked whether the decision violated US law, Barrasso said the president was balancing competing priorities and had to make tough decisions.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram on 9 October:

“Allowing Russia to sell petroleum products is an investment in a war that must be ended, not prolonged.”

Trump also expects Ukraine to stop striking Russian refineries under his proposed energy ceasefire, a White House official told Axios. Zelenskyy said Kyiv would halt such strikes if Moscow did the same.

Kyiv just cleared the important roadblock for Budapest, which stood between Kyiv and EU membership talks. Ukraine’s parliament has passed a bill on schooling in minority languages, meant to finally lift Hungary’s block on the country’s path toward EU membership, with 266 of the 450 lawmakers voting in favor, UNIAN reports.

Hungary has been the lone EU member blocking the opening of four of Ukraine’s negotiating clusters, stages of the membership process, over how Kyiv treats the Hungarian minority in Ukraine's Zakarpattia region. Roughly 80,000 ethnic Hungarians live in it, and Budapest had tied Ukraine’s entire EU course to their language rights.

Lawmakers have instructed the parliament’s speaker to sign the law without delay and send it to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

What the law changes in schools

The bill keeps Ukrainian as the main language of education, but guarantees classes in minority languages where they exist. Minorities may study in the official languages of EU member states alongside Ukrainian, and pupils may use their language in other forms of communication on school grounds.

A school can gain the status of a national-minority institution if more than half of its pupils study in that minority language, provided that language is an official EU language. Parents of at least two-thirds of a minority class can also ask the school to expand the list of subjects taught in Ukrainian.

The dispute dates back years

Ukraine’s 2017 education law and 2019 language law narrowed minority-language schooling and required more Ukrainian in secondary grades, which then-Hungarian leader Viktor Orban treated as an attack on the Hungarians of Zakarpattia, blocking Kyiv’s NATO and EU steps for years, EUalive reports. Kyiv’s position was that the laws applied to all minorities and excluded Russian.

Hungary’s newer government, in office since spring 2026, inherited the veto. Budapest lifted it on the first cluster, which the EU opened in June, Ukraine’s first since gaining candidate status in 2022, but made the rest conditional on this law.

With the bill passed, Hungary is set to allow the EU to open two more clusters, on the internal market and competitiveness, at a Council meeting in Luxembourg on 13 October. Kyiv aims to open all its clusters by year’s end.

Mayor calls for end to agency’s operations in city after agents shot and wounded man with five-year-old in car

The New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, on Sunday compared US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s recent shooting of a man in the Manhattan enclave of Marble Hill to a mass shooting scene – and called for an end to the agency’s operations in his city.

Mamdani’s joined MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff for his first media interview since ICE agents shot and wounded Oscar Belgal, 28, during an enforcement operation while he was in his car with his five-year-old child also inside.

JoAnna Mendoza draws on unique biography to connect with voters in Arizona battleground – can she flip a key swing seat?

On a recent morning, Tucson mayor Regina Romero knocked on a yellow door above a mat emblazoned with a cat’s silhouette and the words “go away, peasants”. A young man cracked the door open and stood there silently, a toothbrush dangling from his mouth.

After giving him a moment to finish brushing his teeth, the mayor introduced herself and asked if the man had heard of JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat running to unseat Republican congressman Juan Ciscomani. Romero handed him a pamphlet and rattled off her candidate’s virtues. The young man stood stone-faced, until she mentioned that Mendoza had served for nearly two decades as a US marine.

The EU adopted its largest-ever round of sanctions listings on 12 October, targeting the suppliers behind Russia’s war industry, the Council of the EU announced. The bloc acted as Russia keeps killing Ukrainian civilians every day, while US President Donald Trump eases sanctions on Russian diesel.

Russia’s planned winter campaign against Ukraine’s infrastructure depends on arms factories fed by a web of component suppliers and on oil revenue that still flows despite Ukraine’s refinery strikes, so every supplier cut off from that web raises the cost of waging it. As Washington eases off, Europe’s own pressure has a gap: its ports still take record volumes of Russian Arctic gas, and a full ban on long-term contracts starts only in 2027.

Missile suppliers top the list

More than half of the new listings hit the supply chain for ballistic missiles that Russia “uses to kill Ukrainian civilians every day,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in the statement. Russian attacks killed more than 150 people in the past week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 11 October.

The list names 826 Russian companies, mid-level firms the Council calls the “core” of Russia’s arms industry, with at least €20 billion in yearly turnover, and 743 people who run them. They make parts for missiles, drones, and military aircraft, from semiconductors and radars to explosives and navigation systems. Their assets are frozen, EU firms may not finance them, and the executives may not enter the EU.

Foreign ministers ratified a deal EU envoys reached on 7 October. Ukraine’s sanctions commissioner Vladyslav Vlasiuk said 60% of the listings came from Ukrainian proposals.

Ministers reject the diesel deal

EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg vowed to keep the sanctions despite Trump’s diesel deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Euronews reported. Kallas addressed Washington directly as she arrived.

“The US is our biggest ally, but our message is clear: if we want to end this war, the only way we can do this is (by) putting more pressure on Russia,” Kallas said.

Irish Foreign Minister Helen McEntee called the deal “concerning,” and Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys said it was “not the European way.” Kallas warned that an energy truce covering only refineries would favor Russia, since Ukraine has one refinery and Russia “plenty.”

Trump announced the diesel deal on 9 October, and the US Treasury waived sanctions on Russian diesel until April 2027. Zelenskyy said the EU would provide about €3 billion more in military aid this week.

Washington presses Kyiv

Trump expects Ukraine to stop hitting Russian refineries under his proposed energy ceasefire, a White House official told Axios. Zelenskyy said Kyiv would halt such strikes if Moscow did the same. On 10 October, Trump told reporters it was time for Ukraine to get a new president. Germany’s foreign minister, Britain’s defense secretary, and a senior lawmaker from Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party backed Zelenskyy, while the Kremlin sided with Trump.

Zelenskyy offered to hold elections after a 60-day ceasefire, and Kallas said elections are impossible while the war goes on. The Institute for the Study of War assessed that Russia exploits Ukraine’s legal ban on wartime elections to drag out the war.

Russia offers Ukraine a single day without strikes for its elections. Russian leader Vladimir Putin is ready to order a halt to strikes on Ukraine only on the day of a presidential election, if Kyiv decides to hold one, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov says, Russian state agency TASS reported.

The offer answers Ukraine’s call for a real pause: on 11 October, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated Ukraine could hold elections if Putin agreed to a full ceasefire of at least 60 days, ABC News reported. Against the backdrop of Russian strikes that killed more than 150 Ukrainian civilians in a single week, Moscow counters with a one-day truce confined to voting day.

“...If they really want to hold elections in Kyiv, the president of Russia, the supreme commander-in-chief, will be ready to give the order not to strike Ukraine on election day. Specifically on election day,” Peskov said.

His statements followed US President Donald Trump’s call on 10 October for Ukraine to choose a new president, saying a change of leadership could help reach peace with Russia, according to Suspilne.

Trump also criticized Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries amid his new agreements to supply a low volume of diesel into the US.

Moscow rejects the 60-day pause

Peskov has outright dismissed the longer truce. Ukraine needs 60 days not to hold elections but to heal its wounds and continue the war, he argues.

He has claimed Russia had been willing to resume peace talks after Russia’s own State Duma elections, but accused Ukraine of launching massive strikes on Moscow to disrupt that vote. Peskov has gone further, claiming Ukraine shelled polling stations and killed several members of district election commissions in the Russian-occupied regions it calls its own.

What Peskov left out

The accusations are Russia’s and remain unverified. Peskov offered no evidence for the claims about polling stations or election officials, which echo long-running Kremlin talking points.

He also made no mention of Russia’s own strikes on Ukrainian civilian targets over the same period, including attacks on energy sites and residential buildings.

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Russia interfered in the 2016 referendum that took Britain out of the European Union, in podcast excerpts released on 11 October, the Associated Press reported. His remarks are believed to be the first time a British prime minister has publicly acknowledged such meddling.

Russia’s information war keeps running through Europe’s ballots. German security sources said in August that Moscow was escalating disinformation before state elections, and Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation found more than 200 Russian fake news sites aimed at France last year.

One question, one clear answer

Burnham told The Rest Is Politics podcast that he asked his advisers whether Russia had interfered in the 2016 vote. He asked after taking office in July.

“I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was,” he said.

He argued that such things must now be put clearly on the record. He did not say how Russia interfered or offer evidence, and Moscow has long denied interfering in foreign votes.

Burnham said he had discussed Russian interference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin the previous week. “You know he was saying to me that the AfD are clearly linked to Russia, funded I believe,” Burnham said, referring to Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party. Putting such interference on the record would help “voters in Germany and France understand that some of this politics is instigated via our enemies, namely Russia,” he added.

Years of silence

In 2020, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee found that the government had actively avoided investigating whether Russia meddled in the referendum. The report noted open-source signs of Russian attempts to sway the Brexit campaign. The government, it said, had never looked for hard evidence.

The government rejected the committee’s call for a review.

“We have seen no evidence of successful interference in the EU Referendum,” it said.

That same year, London said Russian actors had almost certainly tried to interfere in the 2019 general election. The government said they did it by amplifying leaked UK-US trade documents online.

From 2019 to 2016

Three weeks ago, Burnham stopped short of this. At the UN General Assembly on 22 September, he said the Kremlin spends around £1.3 billion each year on manipulating information. That is roughly $1.7 billion at recent exchange rates. He cited evidence that Russian agencies tried to interfere in the 2019 general election, but he did not mention 2016.

In the same speech, he said Britain had already helped Moldova protect its elections from Russian interference.

The ordinary security camera watching a street or a parking lot has quietly become a weapon of war. Ukraine’s Security Service has identified about 40,000 surveillance cameras since Russia’s 2022 invasion that Russian forces and spy agencies could have used to snoop, find targets and correct strikes, and has protected, reoriented or blocked them, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The discovered threat reaches well beyond Ukraine: Dutch intelligence warned in July that Russian state actors are systematically hacking cameras across Europe to track arms deliveries to Ukraine and the whereabouts of Ukrainian troops.

AI makes it faster

About 1.2 billion internet-connected cameras now watch the world, in doorbells, traffic lights, and baby monitors, and almost any of them can be hacked, the journalists found.

In Ukraine, the danger is lethal. In 2024, Russian hackers took over residential webcams in Kyiv, including one that a condominium association had installed, to find targets and adjust missile strikes on the capital, Ukraine's Security Service says.

Spying on Europe’s edge

Evidence of European reach keeps surfacing. Cybersecurity firm CloudSEK has recently uncovered an exposed server it suspects belongs to a Russian-speaking hacker, containing hundreds of webcam images of Ukrainian defense, government, energy, and communications sites, as well as scenes of daily life.

Many of the images came from locations near Ukraine’s border with NATO member Romania, CloudSEK says.

The Dutch warning and the server point the same way: cameras far from the front line are feeding Russia data on how the West arms Ukraine.

Ukraine turns the lens back on Russia

Ukraine also uses the same tactic inside the occupied territory. The international hacker group Team OneFist took control of a camera in Sevastopol, in occupied Crimea, and used it to watch Russian ships, submarines, and helicopters, spotting a previously unknown air base that Ukraine later struck, damaging planes and air defenses.

Team OneFist also reached cameras on the Kerch Strait Bridge, learning that Russia had installed motion sensors beneath the bridge to guard against waterborne attacks. Penetrating a well-placed camera gets analysts closer to targets at less risk than any secret agent.

New York judge also orders administration to cancel remaining portion of a $20m advertising purchase

A federal judge has ordered Donald Trump’s administration to temporarily halt the broadcast of taxpayer-funded television ads promoting the president ahead of the 3 November midterm elections.

Effective as of 6.45pm ET on Sunday, US district judge Jennifer L Rochon of the southern district of New York issued a temporary restraining order aimed at the ads that is meant to stay in effect for at least 14 days.

Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex thinned out social media bots, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 12 October. Network data do show Yandex’s automated traffic collapsing after the strikes. Disinformation researchers say that traffic is search crawling, not trolls. A Ukrainian social media monitor told Euromaidan Press its own data show no clear drop in bot activity either.

Russian influence operations are a live threat to European votes. In August, the Matryoshka network fabricated news clips aimed at Sweden’s general election. German and French authorities flagged the same network targeting Germany’s local votes and French presidential hopeful Gabriel Attal. A way to switch such networks off would hand allies a new tool, which is why the claim needs testing.

The president’s claim

Addressing the Warsaw Security Forum by video link, Zelenskyy said that once Ukraine began answering Russia’s operation against Ukrainian data centers and its strikes reached Yandex, many social media platforms suddenly became a little easier to breathe on.

Many people noticed less hatred, discord, and provocation because there were fewer bots, he said. It was quite clear where those bots came from, he noted. Their disappearance once Yandex went down proves again that Europe is not the source of the problems, he added.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius said at the same forum that allies should ask Zelenskyy to strike more data centers in Russia, answering a question on how to protect their elections from interference.

Three data centers in four days

Drones first hit Yandex’s data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, on 8 October. Yandex said it shut the site down completely. The next day, a strike on its Kaluga site completely disabled several modules, the company said. Yandex calls Kaluga its largest data center, Russian science outlet T-Invariant noted.

Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point said its FP-1 long-range drones carried out that strike.

After the first strike, on Sasovo, a source at Yandex summed up the mood for The Bell: “Things are rotten. We keep working.”

Overnight on 11 October, drones hit the third site, in Vladimir. Yandex said it fully halted that data center too. Vladimir Oblast Governor Aleksandr Avdeev acknowledged an attack on “infrastructure” near the city. It started a fire and cut power to two substations serving 5,000 residents, he claimed.

What the traffic data show

Automated web requests from Yandex’s network fell to 0.4% of their two-week peak after the third strike, Cloudflare Radar data showed, Cybernews reported. That chart counts automated requests to websites, mostly from Yandex’s own search crawlers. It does not count social media posts.

The chart “has nothing to do with social media,” the Russian opposition analysis group Antibot4navalny wrote.

Russia’s overall bot traffic last week looked much like any other week. Yandex’s own figure began recovering on Sunday. Covert troll farms usually hide behind residential proxies, hacked devices, virtual private networks (VPNs), and Western cloud providers, the outlet added.

What Ukrainian social media shows so far

Yevhen Luzan tracks Ukrainian social media sentiment as an analyst at the Ukrainian nonprofit CAT-UA. Its daily reviews sample about 500 random posts. On 11 October, that sample showed an unusually small share of posts criticizing Ukraine’s authorities, he told Euromaidan Press. Accounts showing signs of bot activity made up only a few tenths of a percent of that criticism. That is within the margin of error.

The same day, though, US President Donald Trump’s deal for Russian diesel supplies dominated Ukrainian feeds. Luzan said a rally-around-the-flag effect could explain the shift, as outrage at Washington crowded out domestic stories.

“To state it definitively and draw a cause-and-effect link from this correlation would be too bold,” he said.

Across the wider pool of about 10,000 daily mentions, CAT-UA sees no significant drop in posting activity in recent days. The curve shows only the usual rises and dips around the start and end of the week, Luzan said.

“For now, even a hypothetical drop in bot farm activity dissolves entirely in the natural fluctuations of the information space,” he said.

How a crawler chart became a bot story

The claim that Russian social media bots fell by half is unproven and built on a misread chart, disinformation analyst Joohn Choe concluded in a fact-check. It traces back to an 8 October post by security researcher Jeremiah Fowler. That post said Russian bot traffic had dropped to 49%. On 11 October, radio reporter Jamie Dupree spread it on X. Tom’s Hardware then ran it under a headline calling the crawler traffic “Russian disinformation bot traffic,” wording it has since changed.

Ukrainian military analyst Tatarigami claimed that Texas separatist accounts with identical “Veteran, Christian, Father, MAGA” bios had gone quiet. He said Quebec separatists and Polish anti-EU accounts went quiet alongside them.

Polish military analyst Jarosław Wolski claimed that AfD’s online support fell 56%, posting a chart without naming its source. Another X user said “Polish” bots had vanished.

Researchers will head to remote Pacific atoll, but sceptics say satellite images unlikely to be of her aircraft

A team of US researchers is approaching a remote Pacific atoll where they suspect the famed aviator Amelia Earhart crash-landed in 1937, in the latest attempt to crack one of the biggest mysteries of the 20th century.

The 17-person expedition was inspired by satellite images taken over several years showing a submerged object in the uninhabited island’s sandy lagoon – evidence dismissed by other longtime Earhart sleuths who say it is probably a fallen tree.

Russia and four allies began five-day military drills in Belarus on 12 October, the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) said. The troops are rehearsing peacekeeping and a biological-threat response. Minsk insists the drills target no one, while Belarus’s army chief calls them deterrence against hostile states.

Russian troops crossed Belarus to advance on Kyiv in 2022, and it now hosts Russian units with Oreshnik missiles and equipment guiding attack drones into Ukraine. Every foreign deployment there worries Kyiv and neighboring NATO members, which blame Minsk and Moscow for border pressure.

Riot police and drone crews in a “peacekeeping” drill

Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan brought more than 1,500 troops and over 300 weapons and vehicles, including about 80 drones, The Moscow Times reported, citing the bloc. Armenia, the sixth member, is not among them. The peacekeeping drill runs in Vitsebsk Oblast, bordering Latvia and Lithuania, with Belarusian riot police and internal troops joining, the bloc’s command said.

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Up to 60 railcars: Belarus wires a border base to take in military trains

Russia sent motorized rifle, reconnaissance, electronic warfare, and drone units from its Central Military District, the CSTO said. Russia, this year’s chair, prioritized peacekeeping readiness and the joint biological protection and medical unit, a bloc general said.

Belarus’s military insisted the drills are planned, yet its army chief called them “one of the measures of strategic deterrence against aggressively minded states” and claimed the West is “effectively preparing for a new hot war.”

Pressure on Belarus’s neighbors

In Latvia, armed, masked escorts from Belarus tried to force migrants across this month, the military said, and raiders stole border cameras hours later. Estonia’s police and border guard chief warned migration pressure could jump before winter, as Russia eases entry from countries like Ethiopia and Belarus passes migrants on to the EU. Lithuania posted up to 100 soldiers on its border with Russia’s Kaliningrad, and in September NATO’s Italian jets downed a drone that crossed in from Belarus. On 9 October, Minsk summoned Ukraine’s envoy over an alleged drone strike on a Belarusian truck in Russia, and Kyiv rejected the “absurd accusations” of “an accomplice in the crime of aggression against Ukraine.”

Belarus keeps its army on alert

In September, Belarusian armor drilled near the Suwałki Gap, NATO’s land link to the Baltic states, and Lukashenka said the whole army would be checked, up to mobilization. On 12 October, he ordered a snap check of a 6th Separate Guards Mechanized Brigade battalion, state news agency BelTA reported. European spy agencies also warn of more Russian assassination plots against defense executives.

Ukraine’s intelligence still rates the threat from Belarus as low, but each new contingent, missile unit, and airborne brigade there widens what Kyiv and NATO’s eastern flank must watch.

A businessman wanted in the US for allegedly bribing top Venezuelan officials has been taken into custody

A businessman wanted for years in the US for allegedly paying bribes to top Venezuelan officials in exchange for lucrative state contracts in Venezuela has been taken into custody.

Alvaro Pulido was indicted in Miami federal court in 2019 and again in 2021 as part of an investigation into his longtime business partner, Alex Saab, a one-time ally of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the state department had been offering a reward of up to $10m for information leading to his arrest.

Boaz Weinstein’s hedge fund is waging an aggressive campaign against the FTSE 250’s Baillie Gifford US Growth Trust

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Here we go again: another episode in the Saba saga, the story of a New York hedge fund causing havoc in the UK investment trust sector by taking big stakes in funds and then demanding change, often in only vague terms.

The best that can be said about Saba Capital (and it’s not much) is that its belligerent boss, Boaz Weinstein, has disturbed the complacency that used to infect corners of the UK investment trust world, meaning companies that invest in other companies. It is now harder for a board to do nothing if the share price sits at a wide discount to the value of the underlying assets for long periods.

Planting cover crops or perennial plants can protect soil amid potential flooding. Congress must act to protect these practices

As forecasters warn that this year’s El Niño could become the strongest on record, concerns are growing about its effect on agriculture and food security.

The United States will not be hit nearly as hard as Central and South America, the Caribbean and southern Africa, but severe weather could cause significant crop loss in some parts of the country.

Liz Carlisle is associate professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming and co-editor of Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods

An AI company now lets cops take a photo and nearly instantly figure out what specific home it was taken in, using only clues in the photo itself, and is clearly pulling data from sites like Zillow and Airbnb. 

The tool, called Raven, shows the increasing power of AI capabilities available to local law enforcement agencies. 404 Media previously reported that both the Los Angeles Police Department and Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office (MDSO) have bought access to Raven, which was previously called GeoSpy. Now, Raven, made by a company called Graylark Technologies, has added features that let cops analyze the interior of homes.

Trump and key allies have accused Omar of immigration fraud, and have called to expel her from the country

Federal agents searched Representative Ilhan Omar’s home on Monday morning as part of a criminal investigation, according to the Department of Justice and reports in the Associated Press and Fox News.

In a social media post later on Monday, Omar criticized the raid as an attempt by the Trump administration “to target political enemies and weaponize law enforcement” and said she would “not be silenced”.

Ukrainian marines planned a clearing operation near Pokrovsk for about a month, their deputy commander said in remarks relayed by Army Inform. The Defense Ministry’s news agency published them on 12 October. He also described the Russian infantry the marines captured as barely trained, hungry, and unwilling to fight.

Russia seized Pokrovsk by seeping small infantry groups into the city a few at a time. Beyond the city, Russian advances stayed limited. ISW assessed on 25 February that the capture brought no further operationally significant gains. Small advances continued, and DeepState mapped one near Bilytske in Donetsk Oblast on 7 October. Every stretch where Ukrainian units stop that infiltration closes the route Russia used to take the city.

What the operation produced

Karyi, the 40th Separate Marine Brigade’s deputy commander, said that Operation Audit cleared about 6 km². The marines suffered no losses while inflicting them on the Russians, he said, and gathered a lot of intelligence. He promised the enemy many more surprises.

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Ukraine makes local gains on Pokrovsk front despite sustained Russian attacks

The brigade had announced an operation by the same name on 26 September. It said then that the marines had cleared 5 km² and captured two Russian soldiers. The brigade also said they had stopped the flow of Russian infiltration on that stretch of the Pokrovsk direction.

Two weeks of training, then the front

Karyi called the two prisoners typical of the Russian infantry now sent against the marines, with all of two weeks’ training behind them. He said Russian recruits spend a month on transfers and paperwork before going into battle. They then walk to their positions for one or two weeks.

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ISW: First Pokrovsk, then Huliaipole—now Russia points its logistics-killing air campaign at the Fortress Belt

If drones or Ukrainian ground groups don’t kill them first, he said, they surrender because they no longer want to fight. They are not fed or given water. He described one parcel a week with a can of stewed meat, and water drunk from the ground underfoot. That, Karyi said, is why the Russian troops facing the marines are demoralized and untrained.

Russia suffered vastly more casualties than Ukraine in September, a senior NATO military official told Bloomberg. Ukraine’s General Staff put the month’s Russian toll only slightly lower.

September’s toll lands on a recruitment system that was already falling short. Ukraine’s military intelligence (HUR) estimated that Russian losses outran new contracts in June and July, when monthly losses ran lower. In August, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, citing military intelligence, warned that Russia is preparing a mass call-up after its parliamentary elections. That vote ended on 20 September.

Where the numbers come from

Russian casualties passed 50,000 in September, up to 28,000 of them killed, the official said. Ukraine’s losses over the same month came to about 5,000, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Russia does not release casualty figures, Bloomberg noted. In late August, Pavlo Palisa, deputy head of Ukraine’s Presidential Office, put Russia’s July losses at 43,000 killed and wounded. Bloomberg could not confirm his figures.

To push forward, Russia keeps feeding troops into “kill zones,” the official said. These are stretches of ground saturated with armed drones, mines, and artillery fire. Maksym, call sign Rumyn, is a deputy company commander in the 46th Airmobile Brigade’s drone battalion. In April, he said the zone once ran 3–5 km deep and is now several times larger.

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Ukraine suffered 10 times fewer casualties than Russia in Vivaldi counteroffensive, veteran says. Ukraine’s innovations in drone and ground robot tactics are changing frontline warfare

Rising stakes for Moscow

Russia’s defense spending is expected to near $199 billion this year, Bloomberg reported, citing two sources close to the government. That is about 40% above the plan the government set in late 2025.

Russian President Vladimir Putin would struggle to wind down the invasion without a political cost, Martin Jäger said last week. He heads Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND).

The debt-collection ecosystem will change as AI takes notes in exam rooms, codes visits and sends billing messages

Medical debt is expected to grow in coming years as Republican-led health cuts come into force this winter. As it does, a changing world of medical billing and debt collection awaits patients: one where artificial intelligence increasingly listens, codes, bills and collects.

Artificial intelligence takes notes in exam rooms, codes visits, sends out billing messages and powers AI agents who text patients in billing portals – all changing the debt-collection ecosystem.

Children’s Health Defense and RFK Jr publicly dispute recent measles deaths to ‘distract’ from damage caused and question vaccines, experts say

The six-year-old girl at the children’s hospital in Lubbock, Texas, burned with fever and struggled to breathe. Doctors soon put her on a ventilator, snaking a thick tube down the child’s throat so a machine could breathe for her; they placed IVs to rehydrate her tiny body and they prescribed antibiotics for any bacterial infections that may have taken hold in the weeks she had spent at home battling measles.

But it was too late. Within a day of being ventilated, the child went into shock, her blood pressure crashed and she went into cardiac arrest. She could not be resuscitated. Her family, and the nation, mourned: she was the first child to die of measles in the US in a decade.

The rise of AI makes the preservation of democracy even more urgent – especially as the technology threatens institutions

AI safety is having a moment. After years as a topic for techies and futurists, the potential risks from artificial intelligence systems – from cyber-attacks to hyper-persuasion to rogue behavior – are suddenly under discussion both in the corridors of power and around kitchen tables.

In fact, the conversation now reaches beyond classical safety concerns, getting into AI’s impact on economic life and the environment, as well as possible responses, from alignment research to government regulation.

German industry expects Russian sabotage against the country’s companies to persist and take more forms, the deputy head of the Federation of German Industries (BDI) told Handelsblatt. His warning follows alarms from Germany’s intelligence services, which describe the country as a main target of Russia’s covert campaign in Europe.

Russia keeps striking Ukrainian cities and power plants every day while trying to weaken the European support that keeps Ukraine fighting. Germany is home to arms makers producing with and for Ukraine, so pressure on its companies targets the supply behind Ukraine’s defense.

Industry expects attacks to last and change form

The warning came from Holger Lösch, the BDI’s deputy managing director.

“German industry is preparing for the threat to persist and for attack methods to become more varied,” he told Handelsblatt. “Companies don’t end up in the crosshairs by chance,” he added.

Russian influence and sabotage operations are no longer an abstract scenario, and companies, critical infrastructure, and defense supply chains are already among their targets, Lösch said. Companies now receive more threat warnings, and their cooperation with the authorities has improved significantly, he noted. “What is still missing are joint procedures to quickly derive concrete measures from warnings,” Lösch said, calling the protection of the economy a cornerstone of national security.

German intelligence describes a Russian shadow war

The warning comes a week after a public hearing of the intelligence oversight panel of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, on 5 October. There, Martin Jäger, head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND), said Russia was waging a shadow war against Germany. “Germany has become a main obstacle to Russian hegemonic power projection in Europe and thus a target of Russian action,” Jäger said. “The danger of attacks against targets in Germany remains real and present,” he warned.

Sinan Selen, head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, told the same hearing that Russia was showing a readiness for sabotage and killings.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on 1 October that Germany was preparing for further hybrid attacks, “including serious ones,” and would respond “quickly and very clearly,” as it did after the drone attack at Leipzig airport.

Drone bombs, arson, and paid saboteurs on German soil

In August, a drone carrying Semtex explosives hit the wing of a Ukrainian An-124 cargo plane at Leipzig/Halle Airport but did not explode. Germany blamed Russia on 1 September, and German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said Germany was not at war with Russia but was a “target of war.”

German authorities suspect Russian intelligence of commissioning an arson attack near two Munich defense firms, and a confidential Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) assessment counted more than 165 suspected sabotage cases in Germany between January and August. The same assessment recorded 747 suspicious drone incidents involving 1,068 drones over critical infrastructure, military sites, and defense companies.

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The throwaway agents Moscow sent after a Bavarian drone boss arming Ukraine—and how Germany stopped them

Germany’s Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) warns that the threat from low-level agents, locals paid small sums for one-off jobs such as arson or photographing military sites, has increased significantly. European intelligence agencies also report that Russia is increasingly targeting defense company executives, including at smaller drone makers, and the BfV has advised some German firms to hire close protection.

As long as Germany keeps backing Ukraine, Russian pressure on its companies is unlikely to ease, and the gap between warnings and action that industry flagged leaves smaller firms, with fewer resources for security, the most exposed.

Ukrainian president says the deal is ‘news to me’ and that Russia is still attacking energy infrastructure. Plus, investigation into continuing mystery of Havana syndrome

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Good morning. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has said it was “news to me” after Donald Trump announced a partial ceasefire deal in the Ukraine war. The US president had posted to social media to say: “Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed.”

There was no sign that the Kremlin was observing Trump’s ceasefire. According to Zelenskyy, Russian drones took to the sky “throughout the day” on Sunday and there were several airstrikes, including on energy infrastructure. He said Russia hit a power station in Kharkiv – the latest of more than 200 strikes during the past week against electricity generation and transmission facilities in Ukraine.

How has the prospect of a deal been welcomed? Despite the unconventional nature of the announcement, the ceasefire appeared to garner support from Ukraine’s key western allies. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said Paris supported a “real energy ceasefire” and the UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, said a sustained energy ceasefire was “the best route to get energy and fuel back into world markets”.

Will Trump’s deal with Putin bring down gas prices? The agreement to temporarily lift sanctions on US imports of Russian diesel will have little “meaningful” effect on motorists and businesses in the US and overseas, energy and foreign policy analysts have predicted.

Gwinnett county is home to many immigrants and other newcomers, and how it votes could be decisive for Congress

Johanna Park might just be an ambassador for Gwinnett county, Georgia, one of the 10 most ethnically diverse counties in the United States.

Park owns Cafe Amico at Suwanee Town Center, one of her three Italian coffee shops in the area just north of Atlanta. She was born in Korea and lived much of her life in Argentina and Peru. She’s been in Gwinnett for more than 20 years, part of an early wave of Korean immigration that’s built Korean American car dealerships, banks, insurance agencies, supermarkets and restaurants like her own. It’s also a population that’s increasing in influence and not just numbers.

From restaurants to farms to healthcare, the US president’s hardline policies have reshaped Americans’ daily lives

If there is one campaign promise that Donald Trump has kept, it is his pledge to deliver “mass deportations”.

Two years later, voters are living uneasily with the consequences.

As an alleged 2024 gang-rape at Cornell comes to light, universities are grappling with a choice: student safety or alumni donations

Daniel R Schwarz, an 85-year-old English literature emeritus professor, still works at Cornell University after 59 years because he loves teaching and “watching young people grow”, he said.

Most of his students, he also said, have not been part of fraternities at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, where seven men allegedly gang-raped a woman in 2024.

Ukrainian leader says he was surprised by Trump’s ‘energy ceasefire’ announcement, posted as Russian drones hit Kyiv

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has vowed to respond to Russia’s continuing attacks on the Ukrainian power grid as European leaders rally around Kyiv amid a feud with Donald Trump over Ukraine’s strikes on oil refineries.

Speaking to a gathering of European security officials in Warsaw on Monday, the Ukrainian president said Kyiv would retaliate if strikes on its power grid continued: “If Russia does not agree to an energy ceasefire this winter, we will respond.”

Ukrainian strikes hit a site housing Russian troops in Khrustalnyi, a city in Russian-occupied Luhansk Oblast, overnight on 12 October, according to local reports. Satellite fire data recorded blazes at a former motor depot there, in an area Russia once used as a logistics base for its offensive in the region.

Russia keeps attacking in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast and strikes Ukrainian cities and power plants every day. Its offensive depends on troops, ammunition, and fuel moved through occupied Ukraine, so strikes there reach the supply chain behind the front.

Fires at a former motor depot in occupied Khrustalnyi

Ukrainian forces launched heavy strikes around Khrustalnyi in eastern Ukraine overnight, the Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported. It counted three separate fires and one large blaze, and said local residents reported a hit on a site where Russian troops were based. Ukraine’s military had not officially commented on the strike by the publication time of this article on 12 October.

NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), which tracks active fires by satellite, shows blazes at a former motor transport enterprise and an industrial zone in Khrustalnyi, Ukrainian military outlet Militarnyi reported. Three fire hotspots appeared there at 01:10 and spread by 02:07, the outlet said.

Ukraine also hit the site on 16 June 2022, striking an ammunition depot there, and local residents then heard secondary detonations, Militarnyi said. The site served as an important logistics base for Russia’s 2nd Army Corps in its offensive on Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, two cities in Luhansk Oblast, the outlet added.

Explosions at a Crimean airfield Russia used to launch drones overnight

Drones attacked occupied Crimea from the evening of 11 October into the night, and Russian air defenses, including mobile fire groups, fired across the peninsula, Krym.Realii, Radio Liberty’s Crimea service, reported. Explosions sounded in Simferopol, Feodosiia, and Yevpatoriia, among other places, the Crimean monitoring Telegram channel Crimean Wind said, according to the outlet.

Subscribers told the channel about a series of explosions and a glow at Russia’s Hvardiiske military airfield in Simferopol district as air defenses fired. Krym.Realii said neither Ukraine’s nor Russia’s military had commented and that it could not verify the reports independently.

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Ukraine says it struck a Bastion in Crimea, the launcher Russia pairs Zircon and Oniks missiles on

Overnight, Russia also launched attack drones at Ukraine from several directions, including Hvardiiske in occupied Crimea, Ukraine’s Air Force reported.

Ukraine’s General Staff said in August that a 3 August strike on the Hvardiiske airfield destroyed nine aviation fuel tanks and damaged two aircraft hangars.

Ukraine keeps hitting Russian rear areas in occupied territory

On 10 and 11 October alone, the General Staff reported hitting a Russian repair base and supply depots in occupied Luhansk Oblast, along with Russian troop concentrations near Lysychansk and two other towns there.

Ukraine has also kept up its campaign of so-called middle strikes, drone attacks on Russian supply lines in occupied territory beyond the front. French mapper Clément Molin counted 770 confirmed drone hits on Russian trucks in September, up from 630 in August, with the strikes concentrated on supply routes running through occupied southern Ukraine into Crimea.

Strikes on troop sites and airfields far behind the front leave Russia fewer safe places in occupied territory to house troops and launch drones, adding to the battlefield losses Ukraine’s drones already inflict.

In a recent visit to Greece, the secretary of state suggested that Europe must rediscover the values of conquest and expansion

They had obviously worked hard on the backdrop – and it was magnificent. On 7 October, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, delivered a major speech in Athens, outdoors, with the Acropolis behind him. The sun was setting, bathing the ancient scene, including the Parthenon, in the light of the golden hour.

The golden hour, but yet not quite the golden age. This was not Pericles defending democracy. Instead, Rubio offered a haunting vision of the choices facing the west, arguing that the US and Europe must rediscover the values of exploration and conquest that once drove centuries of expansion, or face decline and irrelevance.

Roger Marshall says he has ‘no idea how this happened’ and repaid bill double for 2020 election watch party treats

The Republican US senator Roger Marshall says he has finally paid off a bakery debt – after six years and repeated collection attempts reported by a Kansas business that had supplied a large order of treats for a 2020 election watch party.

“We have absolutely no idea how this happened”, the Kansas senator wrote in a social media post containing a screenshot of the payment on a $678.75 invoice from Holly’s Sweet Treats as well as his $1,300 payment. “And we have repaid the bill … double.”

Quite a few parents aren’t convinced social media and AI are safe, and have been adapting accordingly

When it comes to their kids, many parents don’t trust tech companies any more.

Social media companies have spent the better part of the last decade arguing that their platforms are safe for teens, but quite a few parents aren’t convinced. They, along with a growing number of regulators, have increasingly accused companies like Meta of designing products that are addictive to younger users.

Ukraine has been striking the launchers Russia uses to fire ballistic missiles at its cities, Ukrainian Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara told journalists. He said the strikes have already disrupted some Russian attack plans, but supplies of anti-ballistic interceptors still fall short of the threat.

Russia strikes Ukraine’s cities and power grid with drones and missiles every day as it prepares to leave civilians without power and heat this winter. Ballistic missiles are the part of that barrage Ukraine still struggles to stop, so every launcher put out of action before it fires means fewer missiles to intercept.

Iskander and S-400 launchers hit since September

Ukrainian forces hit eight launchers used for ballistic strikes on Ukraine in September and early October, destroying three and damaging five, Khmara said. They belonged to Russia’s Iskander tactical missile systems and S-400 air defense systems, he added. Such strikes have already forced Russia to cancel or change planned ballistic attacks, the minister said.

The S-400 was designed to shoot down aircraft and missiles, but Russia also uses it to fire ballistic missiles at Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv. In mid-September, Ukraine reported hitting two S-400 launchers near Vygonichi in Russia’s Bryansk Oblast. Russia had used the same systems against Kyiv the night before.

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Can’t intercept the missiles? Hit the factories—Ukraine’s other way to stop Russia’s ballistic missiles

On 23 August, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces had hit an Iskander launcher near the border. He described it as part of a separate operation to hunt nearby launch positions and linked the tactic to low stocks of anti-ballistic missiles.

Strikes on launchers while interceptors stay scarce

Khmara called the launcher strikes Ukraine’s asymmetric response to a ballistic threat that remains critical.

“Existing and potential supplies of missiles for anti-ballistic defense are not enough to fully cover this threat,” he said.

Instead of waiting for large long-term contracts, the Defense Ministry is looking for missiles in partners’ available stocks to speed up transfers, Khmara added. “We need dozens and hundreds of missiles, not one-off deliveries,” he stressed.

Meanwhile, Russia significantly cut its 2026 state orders for Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missiles, Ukraine’s military intelligence said on 12 October. It redirected the production capacity, components, and raw materials to Iskander-M ballistic missiles, the agency added.

Russia’s missile and drone attacks continue

Overnight on 12 October, Russia attacked Ukraine with a Kh-59 guided missile and 121 attack drones, 76 of them jet-powered, Ukraine’s Air Force reported. Air defenses downed or suppressed 89 drones, but strikes hit 15 locations, and the attack was still going on in the morning.

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Russia’s new ballistic missile could reach western Ukraine—and it may be tested there within months

In the week to 11 October, Russia hit Ukraine’s power generation and transmission facilities more than 200 times and its gas and oil sites 17 times, Zelenskyy said. Russian attacks that week killed more than 150 people and injured more than 700, he added.

Jet-powered drones are still the main problem for Ukraine’s air defense. It stops more than 90% of slower propeller-driven Shaheds, compared with about 55% for the jet ones.

Ballistic missiles have struck Kyiv repeatedly this autumn. On 24 September, Russian ballistic and hypersonic missiles damaged a maternity hospital in the capital. On 7 October, a Russian missile barrage killed 22 people in Pryluky, Chernihiv Oblast.

The latest attack by Houthi rebels on Saudi Arabia may prove to be more calamitous for the region than the world imagines

On Saturday, Houthi rebels launched a shocking and deadly attack on Saudi Arabia’s capital city, Riyadh. At the time of writing, the missile strike on King Khalid international airport has killed at least 13 people and left 300 injured, marking a significant turn in a regional conflagration that is only getting more intense. It was the single most deadly attack on any Gulf country since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran in February. In Saudi Arabia, a country that is unaccustomed to such fatalities, the death toll is bewilderingly high and likely to prompt a bloody response.

Over the past year, the Gulf has entered a new era of instability that is not temporary and cannot be reversed. This may feel like an overstatement – casualties have been relatively low, after all, compared with Gaza and Iran – but the gradual erosion of peace and security in places such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE has changed the region more dramatically than its leaders would like to acknowledge.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Father of toddler killed in Erie mass shooting says reported gunman never seemed distressed or out of the ordinary

The man who killed eight people, before turning the gun on himself, in a mass shooting in a home in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Friday was a grandfather who had not shown signs that he was capable of such violence, according to people who knew the shooter.

A man whose toddler was among those killed said on Sunday that the man never seemed distressed or out of the ordinary, the Associated Press reports.

Units of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces have killed or wounded more than 100,000 Russian troops since the start of 2026. That is more than 150,000 since the force was created on 11 June 2025, the force said on Telegram.

Drones have become the deadliest weapon of this war, accounting for about 96% of Russia’s battlefield casualties earlier this year. These hits are verified on video in the military’s Delta system, which is how the force counts only the losses its own pilots confirm.

“Behind these figures is the daily combat work of our soldiers, thousands of sorties, precise strikes, and the constant improvement of unmanned technologies,” Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces said.

Each strike reduces Russia's combat potential and reflects the coordinated work of the force’s units, it added.

A toll that keeps climbing

Overall, drone branches of the Ukrainian Army had carried out more than 1 million verified strikes on enemy targets since January, killing or seriously wounding about 193,500 Russian troops, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry reported in July.

Those strikes roughly doubled over the first half of the year, from about 105,800 in January to more than 200,000 in June, the ministry noted.

Meanwhile, Commander of the separate Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces Robert “Madiar” Brovdi says the numbers are still growing. In the first five days of October, the force’s pilots killed or wounded 2,699 Russian soldiers, 39.7 percent more than in the same period of September.

He tied the rising number to Russia's assaults in Donbas, as the offensives for the fortress-belt cities that have been Ukraine's protection against full region's occupation since 2014, were ongoing.

Why the drone branch matters

The force fields are the cheap, fast weapons that now do most of the killing on the front. Interceptor and strike drones let Ukraine hit troops, logistics, and command posts while keeping its own soldiers farther from the fight.

SpaceX will not cut Ukraine off from Starlink satellite communications, Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, presidential adviser on defense technology, says. The reason is that the company could lose a large share of its revenue.

Ukraine’s troops and drones lean heavily on Starlink, a network Kyiv neither owns nor controls, and Elon Musk has used that control against it before. The latest shutdown fears spread after Elon Musk supported US President Donald Trump's criticism of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“Not a year goes by without it coming up again: ‘They’ll cut off our Starlink.’ The enemy’s Telegram channels fuel these rumors. We have good and stable partner relations with SpaceX,” Flash writes.

Musk is first of all a businessman, and Ukraine brings SpaceX significant profit, so he is sure no one will switch Starlink off in Ukraine, Flash said. Unexpected moves are possible, he added, but of a different kind, such as turning Starlink on for Russia inside its own territory.

The rumors come amid real US pressure

The fears did not appear in a vacuum. After Trump allowed Russian diesel back to US markets, talk spread of "sanctions" on Ukraine if it keeps hitting the Russian refineries that fund Moscow, with the Financial Times reporting, citing European officials, that Trump’s administration has threatened to halt the mechanism for buying US weapons for Ukraine, known as PURL.

Axios has also reported, citing a Ukrainian and an American official, that Washington has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine if it continues striking Russian refineries.

Ukraine is building a backup

The scare feeds a longer effort to reduce dependence. Ukraine is working on a satellite system of its own, something similar to Starlink but beyond Musk’s control, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 4 October.

The timing is the reason, he said: some states will share the technology with Russia late this year or early next, and the Chinese are among them. Moscow is already fielding its own Starlink-style constellation, Rassvet, though for now it reaches Ukraine only in brief passes.