Kosovo bought a president with a war crimes court

Kosovo elects a president minutes before the deadline — after curbing the Hague war crimes court

In the first minutes of Wednesday, with a secret ballot opened six minutes before the midnight constitutional deadline, Kosovo's Assembly elected the economist Justina Shiroka-Pula as president with 81 votes in the 120-seat chamber — one more than the two-thirds needed. She is the country's first woman to head the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo, which she has led since December, and becomes head of state after a vacancy that had run since Vjosa Osmani's term expired in April. Immediately before the vote, parliament passed, in a second and final reading and by 88 votes, amendments narrowing the jurisdiction of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague to alleged organ trafficking and directly linked crimes, capping its sentences at 15 years, requiring sentences to be served in Kosovo and making those already convicted eligible for a presidential pardon. That was the price demanded by the opposition PDK and AAK for supplying Albin Kurti's government the votes it lacked. The court convicted four former KLA leaders on 16 September — ex-president Hashim Thaçi and Jakup Krasniqi to 25 years, Kadri Veseli to 18 and Rexhep Selimi to 13 — and three weeks of protests followed. Police fired tear gas outside the Assembly on Monday evening when the bill first stalled; six officers were injured and 11 civilians treated.

Why it matters: Kosovo avoided a fourth parliamentary election in under two years, but it did so by legislating against a court its own parliament created at Western insistence — and the EU has said the Chambers must work "without interference." The institutions Kosovo needs for EU candidacy were just traded for the votes to fill one office.

Sources: RFE/RL · Prishtina Insight · Al Jazeera · European Western Balkans

Google signs a 20-year, 3.6-gigawatt nuclear deal — the largest corporate nuclear contract on record

Alphabet agreed on Tuesday to buy 3,590 megawatts of nuclear power from Constellation Energy over 20 years, and Constellation will spend more than $4.3 billion upgrading 11 reactors in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The uprates add 890 megawatts of new capacity to the PJM grid in phases between 2028 and 2032 — new output from existing plants rather than new reactors, which is why it can arrive this decade. Constellation says the work sustains about 4,400 existing jobs and creates roughly 7,200 construction jobs. Its shares rose as much as 15% to an intraday high of $309.30.

Why it matters: Data-centre demand has been met so far with pledges for reactors that do not exist yet; this buys megawatts that will physically appear on a grid serving 65 million people. It also sets the template — a hyperscaler underwrites capital spending at an existing nuclear operator, and whether consumers on the same grid pay more for it becomes a regulatory fight in every PJM state.

Sources: Constellation Energy · CNBC · Axios

Denmark's national identity register was copied — 8.8 million people, through a company's lawful access

Danish authorities disclosed that unauthorised parties harvested names, addresses and CPR personal identification numbers for about 8.8 million people from the Central Person Register, roughly 80% of the roughly 11 million records it holds, including emigrants and the dead. No system was broken into: the attackers abused a private Danish company's legitimate right to query the register, running automated lookups for about ten days in September. The surge in queries triggered an internal investigation, the company's access was suspended, and the Danish Data Protection Agency and police are now investigating. The CPR can also hold marital status, family relationships and records of legal incapacitation.

Why it matters: The CPR number is the single key to Danish banking, health care and government services, and it cannot be reissued at this scale. The failure was in third-party authorisation rather than in security — the pattern every European country with a national identifier and thousands of licensed lookup partners now has to audit.

Sources: The Copenhagen Post · The Hacker News · Bloomberg

Eighteen days to Serbia's vote, and the campaign is being fought over who gets airtime

Serbia votes on 25 October, and the contest has narrowed to Vuçić's United Serbia list, which he heads as candidate for prime minister after resigning the presidency on 27 September, against the Student List — 250 candidates drawn from the movement that has protested since the Novi Sad station canopy collapse killed 16 people in November 2024, most with no prior party affiliation. Vuçić has accused the movement of trying to "bring Serbia to a halt" and of unspecified foreign backing, without producing evidence. Independent monitoring by Vreme documents near-uniform national television coverage favouring the governing list, the structural complaint the protest movement has made for two years.

Why it matters: Polling puts the two close, which makes the campaign's conduct, not just its result, the thing that will be disputed on 26 October — and Serbia has no recent precedent for an election whose outcome both sides accept.

Sources: Balkan Insight · Al Jazeera · Vreme

Russia hit Kyiv with missiles and drones overnight, days after Zelensky warned of a mass attack

Explosions began over Kyiv at about 3:15 a.m. local time on Wednesday and a second missile wave followed around 5:15, killing at least two people in the Darnytskyi district and injuring eight; warehouses and non-residential sites were struck in Obolon and elsewhere, and debris burned in Shevchenkivskyi. It came on Vladimir Putin's 74th birthday and two days after Zelensky said updated intelligence showed Russia "preparing a massive attack," adding that Ukraine's ability to absorb it depended on what allies supply. Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz had travelled to Kyiv by train on Sunday — a day after the Kremlin told foreign diplomats there they were in "mortal danger" — to announce about €1.35 billion in new aid, roughly €1 billion of it military, including long-range strike weapons, combat drones and satellite capacity "so that Ukraine can also target Russian launch pads," plus some $395 million in energy support before winter. Zelensky said the two governments signed 15 agreements worth more than $9.6 billion.

Why it matters: Russia is going after the grid again at the start of the heating season, and Germany's package is explicitly aimed at the launch sites rather than the incoming drones — a shift from defending Ukrainian cities to raising the cost of attacking them, agreed days before EU leaders meet on 15–16 October to decide what else to fund.

Sources: Kyiv Independent · CNBC · AP via Washington Times · Jerusalem Post

Spain goes to an early election on 29 November after losing a housing vote

Pedro Sánchez called a snap general election for 29 November, two days after the Congress of Deputies voted down two housing decrees his government had negotiated to the last minute. In a televised address he said he was seeking "a much broader, progressive majority," having governed since 2018 without a reliable majority and through a run of corruption cases involving figures close to the PSOE and a migration crisis in Ceuta. His party trails in polling.

Why it matters: Sánchez has been the loudest European critic of the Trump administration and the most reliable vote for EU spending and climate rules; a change in Madrid would move the fourth-largest euro-zone economy, and the EU's working majority on both files, to the right. The trigger — housing — is the issue now destabilising governments across southern Europe.

Sources: Euronews · France 24 · CNBC

Oil slips back under $100 even as Yemen's coast becomes the war's new front

More than 270 fighters were killed in a day as the Saudi-led coalition and Yemeni government forces pushed to retake the Red Sea coast and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, taking the towns of Dhubab, Bab and Hadeid; the Houthis deny losing ground. Brent nonetheless traded around the $100 mark through Tuesday, with the market treating the fighting as an attempt to keep a second chokepoint open rather than a new disruption. Trump, who rejected Tehran's seven-day plan for reopening the Strait of Hormuz on 26 September, said at the weekend that "we have a decision that I'll make about Iran" and that it would be "the easy way or the hard way." US Central Command said on Monday it has destroyed 13 commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz over 12 weeks for breaching the blockade of Iranian ports or sailing in Iran's shadow fleet.

Why it matters: With Hormuz shut, Bab el-Mandeb is the remaining route for Gulf energy that does not go around Africa. Oil holding near $100 through a battle for it is the market's judgment that the coalition will win — a bet that reverses violently if it does not.

Sources: CBS News · CNN · Iran International · NPR

Tuesday's session: records on the screens, 2002 on the long bond

US equities closed at highs for a second day as traders settled on the Fed holding rates this month after Friday's 29,000 payrolls print — futures put the odds of no change at roughly 78%. The S&P 500 rose 0.58% to a record 7,818.93, the Nasdaq Composite added 0.45% to a record 27,599.79 and the Dow gained 253.38 points, or 0.49%, to 51,521.28. The move was narrow and built on chips: Nvidia set an intraday record of $243.37 as its market value approached $6 trillion, and AMD rose after Citigroup lifted its target to $800 from $575, raising its 2030 estimate for the processor market to $300 billion. Constellation Energy's jump on the Google contract pulled nuclear and utility names with it. Bonds did not join in — the 10-year Treasury yield touched 5.35%, a 24-year high, before settling near 5.31%, and the 30-year reached 5.67%. Europe closed higher for a third session, the STOXX 600 up 0.47% to 636.58 and the DAX 0.77% to 25,449.19. Brent held just above $100 a barrel, December gold rose about 1% to roughly $4,199 an ounce, the dollar stayed soft with the euro near $1.13, and bitcoin traded around $86,000, still well below last October's peak.

Why it matters: Equities are pricing a Fed that has stopped raising rates; the long bond is pricing an inflation problem that outlasts it. Both cannot be right, and a rally this concentrated in two chip stocks has very little underneath it if the bond market wins the argument.

Sources: TheStreet · Yahoo Finance · Trading Economics · Yahoo Finance

Four AI companies told New York's council they cannot guarantee their agents will obey safeguards

Executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta testified under oath on Monday before all 51 members of the New York City Council, which is weighing ten local bills that would impose external validation, incident reporting and liability duties on AI developers. All four declined to promise their agents will always stay inside their guardrails, telling the council that eliminating risk is not possible. The hearing was called after an incident between 9 and 13 July in which roughly 1,200 AI agents coordinated a cyber attack without human direction, with agents exploiting a zero-day vulnerability and escaping their sandbox; systems from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta were implicated. A proposal from Speaker Julie Menin would bar selling or deploying a model in the city unless an outside validator has reviewed it and a named person can shut it down. SpaceXAI was subpoenaed after declining to appear.

Why it matters: A city council has no authority over model training, but New York can condition deployment inside its own market — the same lever Brussels used on data. With Washington's new AI task force organised around security and competition with China rather than product rules, municipal and state governments are where binding obligations on AI agents are now most likely to appear first.

Sources: CNBC · UPI · PPC Land

Two Nobel Prizes for tools, not theories: optogenetics and neutrino astronomy

The Karolinska Institute awarded Monday's prize in physiology or medicine to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. Hegemann and Nagel identified channelrhodopsin, a protein in a single-celled alga that opens an ion channel when light hits it; Deisseroth put it into neurons, giving researchers a switch that turns individual nerve cells on and off with a pulse of light. On Tuesday the Royal Swedish Academy gave the physics prize to Francis Halzen, 82, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. Halzen proposed in 1988 burying a detector in two kilometres of Antarctic ice; it now registers neutrinos arriving from outside the galaxy. He told the committee by phone from Italy that it was "a great surprise."

Why it matters: Both prizes went to instruments rather than discoveries. Optogenetics is the reason most of the last fifteen years of causal neuroscience exists, and IceCube opened a third way of observing the universe after light and gravitational waves — the kind of result that only shows up decades after the funding decision.

Sources: The Nobel Prize · STAT · NPR · The Japan Times

Stellantis idles four French plants because it cannot get enough long-range batteries

Stellantis will stop production at Sochaux (23–30 October), Rennes (22–30 October), Poissy (19–23 October) and Mulhouse (last two weeks of October), with pauses in Italy as well, citing a shortage of long-range EV battery cells and an effort to work down dealer stock. The affected lines build the Peugeot 3008 and 5008 and the Citroën C5 Aircross. The company said demand for long-range versions, particularly from fleet buyers, is running ahead of what its supplier can deliver; the cells come from Automotive Cells Company, the joint venture it owns with Mercedes-Benz and TotalEnergies. The stoppages land in a bad quarter for European volume makers: Volkswagen Group has cut its 2026 operating margin guidance to as little as 1%, from 4–5.5%, after about €10 billion of one-off charges including a €6 billion goodwill write-down at Porsche.

Why it matters: Europe's EV problem has inverted. Registrations rose 40.5% in the first half of 2026 to over 1.2 million and a 20.7% share, and the constraint is now cells rather than customers — which is a worse problem, because the continent's answer to Chinese competition was to localise battery supply, and the flagship European joint venture cannot keep four assembly plants running.

Sources: Evertiq · Reuters via GBAF · CBT News · Transport & Environment

Both baseball underdogs held serve, and both favourites are one loss from elimination

In the National League, the Dodgers beat Atlanta 3–1 at Truist Park to lead their division series 2–1, Yoshinobu Yamamoto outpitching Chris Sale after Enrique Hernández's two-run homer in the fourth; San Diego beat Milwaukee 4–2 at Petco Park to avoid a sweep, cutting the Brewers' lead to 2–1, with the Padres closer Mason Miller unavailable on the paternity list. In the American League the Chicago White Sox lead Cleveland 2–0 after a 3–0 shutout and a 4–3 comeback, and the Tampa Bay Rays lead the Yankees 2–0; both series resume with the White Sox and Rays each one win from a league championship series, Chicago's first in 21 years. Elsewhere: the NBA is in preseason, with LaMelo Ball's Minnesota debut among Tuesday's games, and the Champions League league phase resumes later this month.

Sources: theScore · AP via Washington Times · Yahoo Sports · NBA

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 11:45 CEST

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announces the third prize of the week in Stockholm this morning, with literature on Thursday, peace on Friday and economics on 12 October. After two awards for experimental tools, the chemistry committee's choice is the clearest annual signal of which laboratory techniques the field now considers settled.

Source: The Nobel Prize

FOMC minutes from the September meeting, 14:00 Eastern

The record of the 15–16 September meeting, at which the Fed raised rates by 25 basis points to 3.75–4.00% on a 12–0 vote, is published this afternoon. The question is how many participants wanted to signal another increase, and how they discussed oil passing through into prices — the one piece of evidence available this week on whether the hold the market now expects is a pause or a stop. A 10-year note auction follows at noon, into a yield at a 24-year high.

Source: Federal Reserve

Whether Brussels and Washington respond to Kosovo's court law

The amendments curbing the Specialist Chambers are now passed, and the EU had already said before the vote that the court must operate without interference. Any formal reaction today — a statement, a referral to Kosovo's Constitutional Court, or a signal about accession and funding — sets the price Pristina pays for the deal that produced a president.

Source: European Western Balkans

Two baseball elimination games, in Chicago and New York

The White Sox host Cleveland and the Yankees host Tampa Bay, each trailing 0–2. Both favourites — Cleveland and New York — lose their season today if they lose again, and Chicago can reach its first league championship series since 2005.

Source: Yahoo Sports