A weekend of ballots, and a war council nobody announced

Trump's war cabinet met secretly at Camp David, and he says a decision is coming

Vice President JD Vance chaired a several-hour meeting at Camp David on Friday on the Iran war and the Saudi–Houthi conflict in Yemen, attended by Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, special envoy Steve Witkoff, CIA director John Ratcliffe, Joint Chiefs chairman General Dan Caine and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The administration did not announce it; the last comparable gathering was in June 2025, days before Israel attacked Iran. Speaking to reporters on Saturday before a midterm rally in Ohio, Trump referred to “a decision” he will make on Iran. Tehran has not moved: its parliament speaker and lead negotiator said the Strait of Hormuz stays closed until Washington accepts Iran's seven-day reopening plan. Over the weekend the Houthis claimed a missile and drone strike on an Aramco facility near Riyadh, which the Saudi-led coalition called “misleading”; coalition forces did intercept two ballistic missiles and four drones over Khamis Mushait and Jazan on Thursday.

Why it matters: Trump said last week that renewed strikes were “possible” after the 3 November midterms. An unannounced full-cabinet session four weeks before that vote suggests the timetable may be shorter than his public line, and every oil, inflation and interest-rate number below is downstream of it.

Sources: Axios · CBS News · Al Jazeera · Arab News

Bosnia's nationalists sweep the presidency, and the Croat seat returns to HDZ

Preliminary results from Sunday's general election show all three ethnic blocs strengthening. Darijana Filipović of the Croatian Democratic Union won the Croat seat with about 107,000 votes, taking back a post held for most of the past two decades by Željko Komšić, who was barred from a third consecutive term and had endorsed an independent. Denis Bećirović held the Bosniak seat, leading the SDA's Bakir Izetbegović by under three percentage points, and Željka Cvijanović of the governing SNSD led the Serb race. Milorad Dodik, convicted and barred from office last year but still running Republika Srpska's largest party, declared victory: “No one should ask us to change our politics.” The Central Election Commission counted 1,432,269 ballots, a turnout of about 42% — roughly eight points below 2022.

Why it matters: Komšić was the one presidency member elected substantially by non-Croat voters, and his replacement by HDZ hands each of the three nationalist parties a veto inside the same institution. That is the configuration that has frozen Bosnia's EU accession for fifteen years, and the lowest turnout since the war gives it a weak mandate to do it with.

Sources: AP via US News · AP · bne IntelliNews

US hiring nearly stopped in September, and stocks rallied on it

Nonfarm payrolls rose just 29,000 in September against about 84,000 expected, and revisions removed a further 60,000 jobs from the previous two months, leaving August at 133,000. Unemployment rose to 4.2% from 4.1%, though partly because the participation rate climbed to a four-month high of 61.8%. Average hourly earnings rose 0.1% on the month and 3.0% on the year, the slowest wage growth since 2021. Healthcare added 17,000 jobs against a 33,000 monthly average over the prior year; manufacturing added 9,000. Traders cut their bets on a Fed rate rise this year, Treasury yields and the dollar fell, and equities closed sharply higher.

Why it matters: For a month the bond market has been pricing energy-driven inflation that the Fed would eventually have to raise rates against. This report says the labour market is cooling fast enough that it may not get the chance — wage growth at a five-year low is the clearest evidence yet that the inflation now in the system is coming from the Strait of Hormuz, not from American pay.

Sources: BLS · CNBC · Yahoo Finance

Vuçić launches a bid to become prime minister, from the arena he used to fill as president

Aleksandar Vuçić opened his campaign for prime minister on Saturday before a packed Štark Arena in Belgrade, the country's largest indoor venue, in an event carried live by dozens of Serbian channels. It capped a week of touring towns and villages, and follows his resignation as president on 27 September, which cut his second term short by more than seven months and triggered the snap parliamentary election on 25 October. Polling suggests a tight contest between his Serbian Progressive Party and the list fielded by the student-led protest movement that has driven almost two years of demonstrations. The campaign has been marked by repeated physical altercations at party events.

Why it matters: Vuçić has governed Serbia for thirteen years as party leader, prime minister and president; moving to the premiership keeps the power while shifting the office, and it puts his own name directly on a ballot the protest movement has spent two years demanding. A narrow result either way leaves the country without a settled answer about who runs it.

Sources: Al Jazeera · AP via Washington Times

Kosovo has one day left to elect a president or face its fourth election in two years

The Constitutional Court ruled on 23 September that the Assembly's 60-day window to elect a president, which opened on 8 August, expires on 6 October — tomorrow. If no candidate is chosen, parliament is dissolved automatically and Kosovo holds another legislative election, its fourth since December 2025. The obvious deal has already collapsed: on 31 August Albin Kurti's Vetëvendosje and the opposition Democratic League agreed to back Bekim Sejdiu, a former constitutional judge, but six LDK deputies refused and Sejdiu withdrew the next day. A president needs 80 of 120 votes in the first two rounds and 61 thereafter. The UN Security Council is also due to hold its second Kosovo briefing of the year this month.

Why it matters: Kosovo has spent most of two years unable to constitute a working state, and the institution that normally resolves such deadlocks — an election — has now failed three times to produce a governing majority. A fourth campaign would push the EU-brokered dialogue with Belgrade past a year of dormancy, with Serbia heading into its own vote on 25 October.

Sources: European Western Balkans · Security Council Report

Flávio Bolsonaro beats the polls and finishes first; Brazil goes to a runoff

With more than 99% counted, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro took roughly 47% of Sunday's first-round vote to President Lula's 44.9%, short of the majority needed to win outright. Surveys days earlier had him finishing second. Bolsonaro, 45, is the son of the imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro and called the result “the end of the PT era”, saying he “can't wait to regain democracy in three weeks”; Lula said he had not expected the outcome. The runoff is on 25 October, and polling of a head-to-head has had the two roughly level. The campaign has been dominated by crime, corruption and Brazil's relationship with the Trump administration.

Why it matters: Lula is the incumbent and finished second, which is the clearest sign yet that his coalition's hold on the Brazilian electorate has broken. A Bolsonaro presidency would realign the largest economy in Latin America toward Washington on trade, Amazon policy and the BRICS bloc — and would put the judicial case against his father at the centre of national politics.

Sources: CNN · NPR · Washington Post

Friday's session: a bad jobs number was the best news markets had all week

Weak payrolls cut the odds of a Fed rate rise, pulled yields down from multi-decade highs and sent equities up across the board. The S&P 500 rose 56.27 points, or 0.7%, to 7,722.72; the Nasdaq Composite gained 319.27, or 1.2%, to 27,190.86 on renewed buying in AI and chip names; the Dow added 250.40, or 0.5%, to 51,176.96. The 10-year Treasury yield eased to about 5.28% and the 30-year to roughly 5.63%, after both touched 2002 highs on Thursday. Europe rebounded from its bond-driven selloff, the STOXX 600 up 0.75% to 631.35 and the DAX 1.17% to 25,231.20, helped by cheaper crude and the softer US data. Oil fell about 1.5% on the G7 reserve release; December gold slipped $40.00, or 0.95%, to settle at $4,162.30 an ounce as rate-rise bets faded. The euro was around $1.1225 and bitcoin near $84,828, still down about 4% on the year in dollar terms.

Why it matters: Equities and bonds moved together for the first time in weeks, which only happens when the story changes from inflation to growth. The question for this week is whether that is relief or the start of pricing a slowdown — and the services survey this morning is the next read on it.

Sources: AP via Yahoo Finance · Yahoo Finance · Reuters via Yahoo Finance

The G7 opens its emergency fuel reserves, and OPEC+ declines to add a barrel

G7 leaders agreed on 2 October to release up to 100 million barrels of crude and diesel from emergency stocks through the International Energy Agency, beginning immediately over four months with a front-loaded diesel component in the first 20 days. The move follows US pressure on European governments to accelerate releases as diesel prices climbed, and part of the volume is stock already pledged under an IEA-coordinated release in March but never delivered to market; Goldman Sachs estimates it offsets roughly half the recent diesel increase. A day later, the seven core OPEC+ producers — Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria and Oman — agreed to hold November output targets at September levels, extending the pause begun in October. They pumped 25 million barrels a day in August, about 5 million below pre-war levels, with most members below target because of the war. They meet again on 1 November.

Why it matters: With Hormuz shut, the cartel has no spare capacity it can actually ship and the G7 is reduced to drawing down reserves it cannot refill at these prices. Western governments are now the marginal supplier of diesel to their own economies, and that is a four-month fix for a war with no end date.

Sources: Al Jazeera · ABC Australia · CNBC · The National

Trump puts his intelligence director in charge of AI policy, in a “Super Intelligence Force”

Announced in a Truth Social post, the new federal task force is chaired by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, the former SEC chairman, making him the administration's second AI czar after David Sacks left the role in March. Its three vice chairs are FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson, Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor and Pentagon chief technology officer Emil Michael; JD Vance, Pete Hegseth and Scott Bessent will also serve, with Condoleezza Rice and Sacks advising from outside government. It reports to Trump and chief of staff Susie Wiles, and Clayton told the Wall Street Journal a report on the technology's risks and opportunities is due within 120 days. The name follows an executive order last week directing federal agencies to write “super intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence” in official correspondence.

Why it matters: Putting the national intelligence director rather than a technologist in charge, with the FTC chair as a deputy, signals that US AI policy is being organised around security and competition with China rather than around product regulation — and it places the government's antitrust enforcer inside the body that will shape the rules for the companies he polices.

Sources: CNBC · NBC News · Fortune

A triple-hormone obesity drug cut weight by a quarter — and knee pain and sleep apnoea with it

Full results from Eli Lilly's Phase 3 TRIUMPH-1 trial of retatrutide, a weekly injection acting on three hormone receptors rather than the one or two targeted by existing drugs, were published in the New England Journal of Medicine on 2 October. At 80 weeks, participants on 9mg lost a mean 25.9% of body weight and those on 12mg lost 28.3% — around 64 and 70 pounds. In companion trial data, knee osteoarthritis pain scores fell by up to 4.3 points on the WOMAC subscale, a 73% reduction from baseline, and in patients with moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnoea the apnoea-hypopnoea index dropped by up to 36.1 events an hour, a 61% reduction. Retatrutide is not yet approved by any regulator.

Why it matters: These are peer-reviewed Phase 3 numbers, not topline press releases, and they are approaching the weight loss achieved by bariatric surgery with an injection. The osteoarthritis and sleep-apnoea results matter more than the scale reading: they are what turns obesity drugs from a cosmetic market into a treatment that displaces joint replacements and CPAP machines.

Sources: New England Journal of Medicine · Eli Lilly · Medscape

Volkswagen recalls about 4 million cars over a single steering bolt

Volkswagen Group is replacing the bolt that fixes the steering rack to the subframe across roughly 4 million vehicles worldwide: about 2.16 million Volkswagens, more than a million Škodas, 700,000 Audis and 200,000 SEATs. Road salt and moisture can corrode the single bolt; if it snaps, the steering rack housing can crack and steering can be compromised. The fix is free and the company says it takes under an hour. By volume this is the group's largest safety campaign since the Dieselgate emissions scandal a decade ago.

Why it matters: A load-bearing steering component held by one bolt is a design decision, not a supplier defect, and it spans four brands and most of a decade of shared platforms — which is precisely the risk of the group architecture that made Volkswagen Europe's cheapest mass producer. The cost is manageable; the recall lands as the group is already cutting capacity in Germany.

Sources: Drive · Handelsblatt via GBAF · AutoIndustriya

Manchester City appeal the 114-charge verdict, with sanctions still unset

City lodged their appeal late on Thursday, a day before the deadline, against the independent commission's finding that the club breached Premier League rules on 114 of 115 charges between 2009-10 and 2017-18 — sham sponsorship contracts in which owners covered what sponsors did not pay, off-book payments to players and staff, misstated accounts and failure to cooperate with the investigation. The club argues the opinion contains “clear material errors, of law, principle and fact” and is unsafe. Sanctions, which range from a fine through a points deduction to expulsion or the stripping of titles, are decided separately and have not been set. The appeal must be heard within 12 weeks, with a ruling 30 days after that.

Why it matters: This is the largest regulatory finding in Premier League history against the club that has won most of the last decade's titles, and nothing is resolved: the penalty is undecided and the appeal runs into 2027. Every rival's prize money, and the credibility of financial rules across European football, waits on it.

Elsewhere this weekend: Max Verstappen won a rain-hit Bahrain Grand Prix run at Sepang in Malaysia, ahead of Kimi Antonelli and Lewis Hamilton, with George Russell retiring from a suspected power-unit failure — Antonelli leaves with an 84-point championship lead. In the MLB division series, Milwaukee beat San Diego 4–3 to lead 2–0 and Atlanta beat the Dodgers 3–2 to level at 1–1, while Tampa Bay and the Chicago White Sox lead the American League ties. In the NFL, the Colts beat the Commanders 30–13 in London.

Sources: CBS Sports · ESPN · Formula 1 · MLB

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 11:30 CEST

The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute announces the first of this year's prizes in Stockholm this morning, opening a week that runs through to the economics award on 12 October. It is the one moment each year when a specific line of basic research is handed global attention and a durable claim on funding.

Source: Nobel Prize

US ISM services survey, 10:00 Eastern

September's services index is expected near August's 55.4, with the employment component last at 47.8 — already in contraction. After Friday's 29,000 payrolls, this is the first independent check on whether the slowdown is confined to hiring or has reached activity in the three-quarters of the US economy that services account for.

Source: Weekly event calendar

Kosovo's last working day before the presidential deadline

The Constitutional Court's window closes tomorrow, so any cross-party deal on a candidate has to be assembled today for the Assembly to vote in time. If nothing is agreed, parliament dissolves and Kosovo runs a fourth legislative election inside two years.

Source: European Western Balkans

Whether Washington says anything about Friday's Camp David meeting

Trump has flagged “a decision” on Iran and his cabinet spent Friday unannounced at Camp David. Any statement today on resuming strikes, or on Tehran's seven-day Hormuz proposal, moves crude first and then every rate expectation priced off it.

Source: Axios