Global and U.S. News

Vladimir Putin ordered the release of Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old former teacher held for more than four years on mercenary charges, as he met Trump envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg on Wednesday; no prisoner swap was involved, and Trump said it followed his direct request. Witkoff called Putin "a humanitarian", handed over "some ideas" for a peace deal and said technical-level talks between the US, Russia and Ukraine would follow; the Kremlin agreed to them "in principle". The Guardian notes few signs of a breakthrough, with Moscow holding to its demand for all of Donetsk.

The four countries signed a "Badr" memorandum of understanding on Wednesday to expand joint weapons production and research and technology cooperation, with the stated aim of reducing their dependence on foreign suppliers, Al Jazeera reports. No terms, funding or timelines were published, and nothing reported so far describes a mutual-defence commitment.

Elon Musk said Tesla and SpaceX are exploring a combination and that merging them "would be a good idea"; both companies have formed committees to study it, and a deal would create a company worth well over $3 trillion, according to the NYT and WSJ. Tesla reported flat revenue and lower profit on weaker vehicle sales for the third quarter, but positive free cash flow. Reuters reported before the results that Barclays expected SpaceX, which absorbed xAI in February and listed in June, to be the likelier acquirer.

Why it matters: A merger would fold Tesla's balance sheet into SpaceX's AI spending, concentrating more of the AI build-out's capital needs in one Musk-controlled company.

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion, one of the largest penalties ever imposed on the company, after a Santa Fe jury found in September that it misled residents about its data practices around the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the NYT and BBC report. Reuters reported at the verdict that the jury found 26 of 29 challenged statements misleading, with more than 43 million violations at up to $5,000 each. Meta has said it disagrees with the verdict.

Meta reported record third-quarter revenue of $64.6 billion and said it will split its stock and create a new class of non-voting shares, letting it sell equity to fund AI investment without diluting Mark Zuckerberg's control, according to the FT and WSJ. The NYT reports that Meta raised its AI spending again even as the outlays weigh on its cash flow.

Why it matters: A hyperscaler turning to new equity to pay for AI capex is a sign that internal cash is no longer covering the build-out.

Abbott plans to spin off its nutrition unit, which has about $8.5 billion in annual sales and includes Similac and Pedialyte, as an independent public company, the WSJ and FT report. The FT notes the unit is at the centre of lawsuits over baby formula.

A New York Times/Siena poll released two weeks before the midterms finds likely voters favour Democratic congressional candidates by 11 points and puts Trump's approval at a new low for the survey. The Times says the map still favours Republicans but cracks in their base leave them exposed in both chambers.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused, for now, to let the Bureau of Prisons enforce its February 2026 policy ending hormone therapy, surgeries and related accommodations for transgender inmates, leaving a lower-court block in place, the NYT and NPR report. Judge Royce Lamberth had blocked the policy in August in a class action brought by three inmates, and the D.C. Circuit declined to pause his order, SCOTUSblog reported. The ruling breaks from the court's recent pattern of siding with the administration on transgender issues.

Democratic-aligned groups filed a sweeping lawsuit asking a judge to stop the federal government from ordering voters disqualified, among other steps the plaintiffs say amount to voter suppression ahead of the November 3 midterms, the NYT reports.

Yields on French ten-year government bonds hit 5 percent, the first time since 2002, the FT reports, up from 3.2 percent in late February on worries over the public finances and political stability. The WSJ also reported eurozone yields rising, with the French ten-year at its highest in years after weeks of riots.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed concerns that the AI investment boom poses systemic risks to the financial system, the FT reports, speaking to financiers at a closed-door charity event with $7,500 tickets.

Why it matters: The Treasury secretary chairs the council charged with spotting systemic risk, so his view of AI-related debt and valuations sets how much official scrutiny the build-out's financing gets.

U.S. stocks rose on Wednesday, led by the Nasdaq, after strong results from SpaceX eased investors' concerns about the profitability of artificial intelligence and lifted chip makers, the WSJ reports. The rally follows the AI sell-off's worst week since April 2025.

Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, said "not a single gram" of enriched uranium would be removed from Iran, though he did not rule out supervised downblending at home. Parliament speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf told Pakistan's army chief Asim Munir in Tehran that Iran had "nothing new" to tell Washington and still expects its conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz to be met, Al Jazeera reports.

Why it matters: Removing the stockpile has been central to U.S. demands; Iran's refusal narrows the room for the diplomacy that briefly lifted markets on Monday.

The lead researcher of a CDC-funded trial that would have withheld the hepatitis B birth dose from half of the newborns enrolled said it "will not move forward" because it lacked government approval. Guinea-Bissau's government now holds the researchers' vaccines, seized in a police search of the Bandim Health Project on Monday. The trial was to receive $1.6 million from the CDC and a matching sum from private partners, and had drawn criticism from vaccine experts as unethical.

A Tunisian military court sentenced Olfa Hamdi, a Tunisian-American who leads the Third Republic Party, to four years in prison and 80,000 dinars ($26,000) in fines for plotting against state security and inciting the military to disobey orders, her lawyer said; the charges stemmed from social media posts. The U.S. State Department said it was closely tracking the case, days after the largest protest against President Kais Saied in years.

Hungarian authorities detained György Matolcsy, who ran the central bank under Viktor Orbán, along with several others in corruption investigations aimed at the former prime minister's circle, the FT reports. The detentions extend the new government's pursuit of Orbán-era officials.

Poland's lower house passed two bills on Wednesday that would remove some criminal penalties for people who help women obtain abortions and allow terminations for foetal abnormalities. The bills still need the Senate and the nationalist president, who is expected to veto them. Rights groups called the change small; abortion remains legal only after rape or incest or when the mother's life or health is at risk, and rallies are planned in 27 cities on Thursday, six years after the 2020 ruling that tightened the law.

Federal prosecutors charged César Jáuregui Moreno, Chihuahua's attorney general until this year, with treason for allowing U.S. agents to take part in an April raid on a suspected drug lab without authorisation; he denies it. The agents' role emerged after a crash that killed two Americans reportedly working for the CIA and two Mexican investigators. President Claudia Sheinbaum insists foreign officials may operate only with federal clearance, amid U.S. pressure over drug trafficking, the BBC reports.

Canada will give its steel and auto sectors billions of dollars in further federal aid to ease the strain from Trump's tariffs on metals and vehicles, the WSJ reports.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said Marco Rubio and UN ambassador Mike Waltz are leading a campaign of threats, from tariffs to visa denials, to get countries to vote against or skip the annual General Assembly resolution condemning the U.S. embargo, due on October 27 or 28. Waltz has acknowledged lobbying European governments to reconsider their support, Al Jazeera reports.

Around 80 Japanese companies were targeted from overseas in hacks bearing traces of Artex, a Chinese open-source AI security-testing agent, the WSJ reports. AFP reported earlier this month that South Korea linked the tool to breaches at more than seven financial institutions affecting over 68,000 people, and that its developer took it closed-source after saying it was abused; about 20 Japanese companies had then reported possible compromises.

Why it matters: It is one of the first documented cases of an AI agent used for intrusions at scale across several countries' companies.

A Delhi magistrate ordered the release of Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, leaders of the Gen Z-led Cockroach Janta Party, after about a week in Tihar jail on trespassing charges, the BBC reports. The group demands the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, accusing the commission of using a revision of voter rolls that has removed about 130 million names to help Modi's BJP; the BJP and the commission deny it.

An AI system found a critical vulnerability in PHP, the programming language used by a large share of websites, the NYT reports, and the FT says the NSA has warned about critical flaws that researchers found using OpenAI and Google models. The disclosure sharpens concern that AI could upend cybersecurity unless defences keep pace.

ARPA-H, the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, awarded $41 million to expand trials testing supplements and already-approved drugs for preventing dementia in people at risk, Science reports, as a blood test for early Alzheimer's nears use.

New Taipei prosecutors charged five men over a plot to injure comedian Huang Yi-hao, alleging a mainland Chinese individual known as "K" promised them NT$450,000 (about $13,900); two defendants drove into his scooter on September 11, leaving him bruised. Prosecutors said the Communist Party is suspected of using "cross-border suppression tactics" to silence dissent through violence; China's Taiwan Affairs Office did not respond, the Guardian reports.