Global and U.S. News

Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the Sunday Times that Britain should have an 'honest discussion' about free movement with the EU and that staying out of it was no longer a red line in talks, the Guardian and Al Jazeera report, ahead of a UK-EU summit. Housing Secretary Angela Rayner called the stance 'just pragmatism', while Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood warned of hard trade-offs and some red wall Labour MPs voiced concern. Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage attacked it, Farage calling it a betrayal of Brexit Britain; Labour's 2024 manifesto had ruled out a return to free movement.

Bulgarians voted on Sunday for a president, with acting President Iliana Iotova polling 41% against 28% for former caretaker prime minister Andrey Gyurov among 27 candidates. Both condemned the drone strikes on ships off Bulgaria's Black Sea coast that likely killed about two dozen seafarers, but Gyurov signed a security agreement with Kyiv as premier while Iotova and her backer, Prime Minister Rumen Radev, call for a negotiated end to the war. With turnout expected below the 50% needed for a first-round win, a run-off on Nov. 1 is likely.

The New York Times reports that remains were found in Haiti during the search for four Salvadoran soldiers missing for six days, after El Salvador sent hundreds of troops to find them; President Nayib Bukele denied the bodies were his soldiers. The four, serving with the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force, disappeared on Oct. 18 after gangs ambushed their armoured vehicle outside Port-au-Prince.

President Trump said the United States was weighing an attack on Iran as early as Sunday, suggesting Washington might have to 'finish the job' or might instead reach a deal with Tehran, according to Al Jazeera's running coverage. The Saudi-led coalition said it destroyed a Houthi ballistic missile over Riyadh, and the Houthis told travellers to avoid the city's international airport, which they called a military target. The New York Times reports that new intelligence and the search on all sides for a pretext risk pushing the two countries back to full war, days after America evacuated outposts over a suspected Iranian plot.

Saudi Arabia resumed international flights from Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport on Sunday after weeks of Houthi strikes on the kingdom, Al Jazeera reports; within hours the Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree declared the airport a military target and warned airlines and travellers away. Saudi Civil Defence said shrapnel from two intercepted ballistic missiles fell in Mecca province, including Jeddah and Taif, and a drone and a missile were downed over Riyadh; the coalition said it had intercepted ten more ballistic missiles aimed at the south. The Gulf Cooperation Council called the Mecca interceptions a grave violation of the holy sites, which the Houthis deny targeting.

The Israeli army said it will close every land crossing with the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, election day, after barring Palestinian workers from most areas on Sunday and Monday. The measures extend the lockdown Benjamin Netanyahu ordered after two soldiers were killed at a reserve base in Hebron on Friday; Defence Minister Israel Katz says about 2,000 people have been forced from their homes there and will not return until the army finishes 'dealing with all the Hamas issues', while Hebron's mayor puts the figure at 2,200. The Palestinian Authority called the measures collective punishment.

Algeria's Council of the Nation unanimously approved sending troops to Niger at an emergency session on Sunday, Al Jazeera reports, with the units expected to guard Nigerien oil facilities; the lower house was due to vote later the same day, and the constitution requires two-thirds in both chambers. The vote follows a military cooperation protocol signed in Algiers last week by Niger's defence minister, General Salifou Modi, and Algeria's dispatch of four Su-30 jets to Niamey in August. If the deployment goes ahead it would be Algeria's first military mission abroad since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

Gunmen raided the village of Binnari in Taraba state's Karim Lamido area on Friday, looting shops and burning houses in an attack that lasted up to four hours. Police say they recovered ten bodies and the toll could rise; survivors told AFP they counted at least 20 dead, and Amnesty International says families put it at up to 50. A community leader said about 50 motorcycles carried the attackers, whose identity is unknown, and Amnesty accused the authorities of leaving rural communities 'at the mercy of gunmen'.

Gabon's media regulator, the High Communication Authority, said in a televised statement on Saturday that access to social media had been restored, ending a ban imposed on 17 February on the grounds that online content was fuelling conflict, the BBC reports. The ban covered Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram and came as President Brice Oligui Nguema faced strikes by teachers and civil servants over pay; the opposition called it an abuse of power. The regulator gave no reason for the reversal.

Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program fell from 41.6 million in July 2025 to 36.5 million in June 2026, a 13% drop, according to USDA figures reported by the Guardian, after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act extended work requirements to adults aged 18 to 64 without a child under 14. Arizona's rolls halved over the period; the Congressional Budget Office projects the changes will cut SNAP spending by about $187 billion over ten years, and states now carry 75% of administrative costs. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has called moving five million people off food stamps a big win, while food banks in Michigan and Kentucky's governor report rising hunger.

Early in-person voting locations in at least 18 remote Alaska villages had not opened, state Sen. Bill Wielechowski told the Division of Elections in a letter on Friday, calling the failures 'shocking'. The Anchorage Daily News reports that early turnout is lowest in the four majority-Alaska Native districts: the Arctic district had cast 27 ballots, 0.3% of registered voters, against nearly 1,400 in a Juneau-area district, out of more than 31,000 statewide. The state's Senate race, in which Mary Peltola is challenging Sen. Dan Sullivan, is among the midterms' closest.

Barack Obama rallied Democrats in Cleveland for Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton and in Detroit for Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, accusing the administration of 'cruelty and corruption' and calling the war on Iran 'unnecessary'. He said there was 'no line' Vivek Ramaswamy would not cross after the Ohio Republican's attack ad on Acton, and defended El-Sayed against attacks on his name and Muslim faith. Trump, casting an early ballot in Florida, defended the Ramaswamy ad; Obama campaigns in Georgia next week before the Nov. 3 midterms.

Luis Sandoval, a 48-year-old Salvadoran, died on Friday at the GEO Group-run D Ray James facility in Folkston, Georgia, where ICE says staff found him with a ligature around his neck; the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is examining the death. The Guardian counts him as the 60th person to die in ICE custody in Trump's second term, about one every ten days this year. A hunger strike at the facility is nearly three weeks old, and a detainee says at least 12 strikers remain and have been threatened with force-feeding; whether Sandoval took part is unknown.

The US Space Force has given SpaceX enhanced access to Space Command's High Accuracy Catalog, its most detailed record of objects in orbit, the first commercial company to get it, the Guardian reports, following a September report by Breaking Defense; in return the government gets data from Starlink's Stargaze sensors. The arrangement follows the 2025 dismissal by Musk's Doge of many staff at the Commerce Department's civil space-traffic programme, Traccs, whose $65 million budget Congress restored. A former Traccs employee said the deal makes SpaceX the de facto source for US space-traffic coordination; neither SpaceX nor the Space Force commented.

President Trump announced at a rally near Macon that Audi will build a $4 billion plant in Georgia to assemble 200,000 SUVs a year, including its Q7, Q8 and Q9, with about 4,500 jobs; construction starts next year and production in the early 2030s, Reuters reports. Audi imports every car it sells in America from Europe or Mexico, tariffs cost it $1.4 billion last year, and its U.S. sales are down 16% this year. Audi will also build 25,000 vehicles a year at Volkswagen's Scout Motors plant in South Carolina.

The Financial Times reports that Europe's luxury groups have lost €250 billion in value as a slowdown in China and cooling stock markets deepen the sector's downturn. LVMH set the tone this month: third-quarter organic sales rose 1% to €18.5 billion, short of forecasts, as fashion and leather goods fell 5% and Asian sales fell 5%, which its finance chief blamed on 'a sharp macro-led deterioration in Chinese consumer sentiment', Reuters reported. Chinese shoppers account for about a fifth of global luxury spending, and a tax crackdown on wealthy individuals in China adds a new headwind.

The Wall Street Journal reports that ten companies, Nvidia and Micron among them, account for roughly two-thirds of this season's corporate profit growth. FactSet's tally shows the concentration: without Micron and Nvidia, blended third-quarter earnings growth for the S&P 500 would be 20% instead of 29%, and without Nvidia and Meta the other five 'Magnificent 7' companies would grow 7.5% rather than 33.2%. Analysts expect the Magnificent 7 to grow more slowly than the other 493 companies in the fourth quarter, for the first time since late 2022.

Why it matters: The profit boom rests on the AI hardware makers whose customers are borrowing to buy from them; a slowdown in that spending would show first in these few names.

Bird flu has circulated for about two months at C&T Fenn Farms, a mink farm near Salt Lake City with thousands of animals, according to ProPublica reporting followed by the Guardian; Utah's state veterinarian asked the USDA for help and was told it does not regulate mink and has no approved vaccine. Farm workers were not monitored for symptoms despite CDC guidance, and the mink have not been culled, as other countries have ordered in similar outbreaks; the Pirbright Institute's Tom Peacock called that very concerning. Brown University's Jennifer Nuzzo said a wave of human infections is unlikely but called officials' apparent lack of transparency troubling.

A line of thunderstorms from the Snowy Mountains to the Queensland border brought severe-storm warnings for Sydney and much of eastern New South Wales, the ACT and Victoria on Sunday, with gusts to 100km/h in central west NSW; the Bureau of Meteorology called the system 'unusually large'. Southern Queensland had eight flood warnings after 200 to 400mm fell on the Sunshine Coast in a week, and the Mary River was forecast to reach major flood level at Tiaro; the bureau expects Monday to be the system's last big burst.