Washington postponed its war, and the weather took the oil anyway

Trump rules out an Iran strike before the midterms — and oil rises anyway

Trump posted on Thursday that "we will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the midterm elections to be held in the United States on November 3rd," while saying the US naval blockade of Iranian ports stays in place. The statement reversed a harder line from Wednesday, when he said he no longer wanted a deal, and it followed NBC reporting that he and his national security team had discussed resuming large-scale military operations within weeks — a decision he has not yet made. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Markets did not take the reassurance: Brent rose more than 4% to above $104 a barrel, because the same day the Houthis claimed cruise and ballistic missile attacks on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Najran airport and the King Khalid air base, their third consecutive day of strikes on Saudi airports. Images verified by CNN showed smoke over Terminal 4 in Riyadh; Saudi authorities said they intercepted two ballistic missiles and that falling debris damaged a kindergarten and a clinic. Diplomats in Riyadh were told to shelter in place. Three people were killed and 36 wounded in Wednesday's attacks on Riyadh and Abha, after which the Saudi-led coalition said it struck 82 Houthi military targets in Saada, Hodeidah, Al-Jawf and Marib.

Why it matters: Trump has removed the one upside risk traders had been pricing for the next four weeks, and the price went up regardless. That is the market saying the supply problem is no longer about what Washington decides — it is about Gulf infrastructure being hit every day while a fifth of the world's seaborne oil sits behind a closed strait.

Sources: CNBC · Reuters via US News · France 24 · Euronews

Hurricane Isaias has shut in two-thirds of Gulf oil output, with landfall due tonight

Isaias, the first Atlantic hurricane of an unusually late season, strengthened to a Category 2 storm on Thursday with sustained winds near 105 mph, and the National Hurricane Center expects it to touch major-hurricane strength briefly early Friday before coming ashore on the north-eastern Gulf coast late Friday or early Saturday, somewhere between Mobile and Destin. Offshore shut-ins went from about a quarter of production on Wednesday to roughly 62.9% by Thursday — about 1.28 million barrels a day of oil and 1.13 billion cubic feet of gas — with 121 of the Gulf's 371 manned platforms evacuated. BP cleared Na Kika and Thunder Horse; Shell and Chevron curtailed operations. Forecasters warn of 5 to 7 feet of storm surge for Mobile Bay and the coast from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, to Indian Pass, Florida, and Florida has declared a state of emergency. Analysts put roughly 2.7 million barrels a day of refining capacity — about 14% of the US total, concentrated around New Orleans, Baton Rouge and the Mississippi and Alabama coasts — inside or near the projected track.

Why it matters: Offshore production comes back within days of a storm passing; refineries do not, and American fuel inventories are already thin because the Hormuz closure has kept crude expensive all autumn. Gasoline and diesel prices are the single biggest drag on Trump's approval rating four weeks before the midterms, and this is the one input neither the Pentagon nor the Fed can negotiate with.

Sources: gCaptain · Fox Weather · NBC News · Reuters via US News

OpenAI is earning $50 billion a year, not $70 billion — and the AI trade sold off on it

The Financial Times reported on Thursday, and CNBC and Bloomberg confirmed, that OpenAI told investors its annualised revenue approached $50 billion at the end of September. Reports in late September had put the figure near $68–70 billion. The gap is an accounting one rather than a shortfall: the higher number included gross revenue booked through OpenAI's cloud partners, which the company itself does not count, and investors comparing it with rivals that do report partner sales had pushed the estimates up. OpenAI says its run rate grew 77% in the third quarter and its enterprise business 107%. Markets treated the correction as new information all the same. A gauge of major chipmakers fell 3.4%, with Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave all lower, and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.25% — its second consecutive decline.

Why it matters: The valuations of the companies selling picks and shovels to OpenAI are built on assumptions about how fast its revenue compounds. Nothing about the business changed on Thursday; only the number investors had been extrapolating from did, and a fifth of it turned out not to belong to OpenAI. That is a sensitivity worth knowing about in a market where two chip stocks have been carrying the index.

Sources: Bloomberg · CNBC · TechCrunch

Serbia's main election monitor says one in three ruling-party campaign events broke the rules

CRTA published its campaign monitoring report on Thursday, 17 days before the 25 October parliamentary vote, and found that roughly one in three on-the-ground activities of the "Aleksandar Vuçić — United Serbia" list that its observers watched involved manipulation or possible legal violations: suspected signature forgery, misuse of public resources and office, and offers of money, help or jobs in exchange for support. It also faulted the broadcast regulator REM and the Anti-Corruption Agency for failing to enforce the law consistently, which it said compounded the governing list's advantage. Programme director Raša Nedeljkov said intercepted private conversations were broadcast on the pro-government channel Informer at least ten times in the campaign's first phase, some of them altered, and cited credible allegations that 14 people — student activists and one MP among them — had phones infected with spyware. He called the Foreign Ministry's decision not to open polling stations in several countries where enough voters had registered, and the requirement that diaspora voters cast ballots on Serbian time, "electoral engineering." Separately, the National Bank of Serbia left its key rate at 5.75% on Thursday for a record 25th month.

Why it matters: Serbia's opposition is not arguing that the count will be rigged so much as that the campaign is. Surveillance of candidates and closed diaspora polling stations are the kind of complaint that cannot be resolved after the fact, which is why both sides are already building the case for disputing the result on 26 October.

Sources: N1 · Balkan Insight · Bloomberg

A Russian glide bomb killed at least 30 people at a bus stop in Kramatorsk

Two city buses were hit in Kramatorsk, in Ukraine's Donetsk region, at about 10 a.m. on Thursday. The initial toll of 12 dead rose through the day to at least 30 killed and 18 injured, with the State Emergency Service later citing 33; some victims have not been identified. Ukraine's National Police said the weapon was a UMPB D-30 SN guided glide bomb. Kramatorsk and neighbouring Sloviansk suspended public transport. It was the deadliest single strike in weeks in a war that has settled into a long-range exchange while the front line barely moves: Kyiv's blackouts are deepening as Russia works through Ukraine's power and gas infrastructure for a fifth time this month, while Ukraine's defence ministry claims its drone campaign has disabled more than half of Russia's refining capacity. European Council President António Costa phoned Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday to invite him to next week's EU leaders' summit, where two negotiating clusters on Ukraine's accession are expected to open.

Why it matters: Glide bombs are cheap, launched from inside Russian airspace and effectively unstoppable by the air defences Ukraine has; they are the reason front-line cities are emptying. The strike lands a week before EU leaders decide what else to fund, and it is the kind of civilian toll that moves that argument more than any briefing does.

Sources: Ukrainska Pravda · ABC News · Kyiv Post · Ukrainska Pravda

Germany arrested the former head of its foreign intelligence service for treason

August Hanning, 80, who ran the BND from 1998 to 2005 and then served as a state secretary in the interior ministry, was arrested on Monday on suspicion of treasonous espionage, obtaining state secrets, attempted treason and espionage. Federal prosecutors allege the arrangement began in spring 2010, five years after he left the service, and that Manfred D., his former chief of staff — who went on to serve several of Hanning's successors between March 2012 and March 2026 and so retained access to classified material — passed him roughly 2,000 documents, many of them classified, on subjects including Iran's nuclear programme and the Russian armed forces. Manfred D. was also detained, on suspicion of aiding and abetting. Prosecutors have not named the foreign service alleged to have been the recipient, and it is not clear whether the material reached it. German public broadcaster ARD called it the first time a figure this senior in the intelligence community has faced a charge of Landesverrat in the post-war era.

Why it matters: The alleged channel ran for over a decade through a serving chief of staff who kept his clearance across four BND presidents — which makes this a story about how the agency controls access to its own archive, not about one retiree. It arrives while Berlin is the largest European funder of Ukraine's war and is being asked to share more intelligence, not less.

Sources: NPR · CNN · EUobserver

Thursday's session: oil up, chips down, banks worst of all

Equities gave back a second day of the week's records. The S&P 500 fell 0.47% to 7,765.36 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.25% to 27,193.34, both dragged by the OpenAI revenue report and a 3.4% fall in a major chipmaker gauge; the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which holds far less of the AI trade, added 51.77 points, or 0.1%, to 51,231.64. Europe fared worse, hit by oil and by its own bond market: the STOXX 600 closed down roughly 0.75% at about 624, its lowest in nearly four months, with European banks off almost 2% for a second day as euro-zone yields rose — Deutsche Bank, Santander, Société Générale and UniCredit all lower — and Frankfurt's decliners including Volkswagen, Infineon, Bayer and Merck fell 3% to 4.5%. Brent rose more than 4% past $104 a barrel on the Riyadh attacks and the Gulf shut-ins. US Treasuries went the other way for once: the 10-year yield eased about four basis points to roughly 5.23% ahead of a 30-year auction, after touching its highest level since 2002 on Wednesday. Gold was little changed around $4,168 an ounce, up 0.3%, and bitcoin fell 1.7% to about $81,700.

Why it matters: For a month the two sides of this market have been an AI trade going up and a bond market going down. On Thursday the AI trade cracked on its own numbers while yields actually fell, and what did the damage in Europe was energy inflation feeding into rate expectations — the channel that hits banks and industrials rather than chipmakers, and the one that reaches households.

Sources: Yahoo Finance · Reuters via Yahoo Finance · Reuters via Investing.com · CNBC

Seven governments say a Chinese company ran a web portal selling access to stolen email

The FBI, CISA, the NSA and agencies in six other countries issued a joint advisory on Thursday naming Integrity Technology Group, a for-profit Chinese company already under US and UK sanctions, as the operator behind a long-running email theft campaign. According to the advisory, its staff build and acquire tooling, host infrastructure and break into networks, and the operation included a web application that "provides third-party access to stolen email content" — the advisory does not say who those third parties were. The methods described are mundane and effective: a scanner carrying more than 1,300 scripts, password guessing against Microsoft 365 and Exchange accounts, then bulk mailbox copying. Victims include government bodies, law enforcement, healthcare systems and religious institutions across Southeast Asia, Africa and North America, and US critical infrastructure. The same day, the Justice Department announced court-authorised seizures of seven domains supporting two of the tools, Microscan and FishHub, under a case unsealed in the Western District of Pennsylvania. The activity overlaps with what private researchers track as Flax Typhoon, Ethereal Panda and RedJuliett. Integrity Tech denied earlier US allegations in January 2025.

Why it matters: The notable part is the business model, not the tradecraft. A sanctioned contractor built a customer-facing portal for stolen mailboxes, which means state-linked intrusion has a resale market and the people reading a Southeast Asian ministry's email need not be the people who stole it. Seizing seven domains interrupts a service; it does not remove the company that sells it.

Sources: CISA advisory AA26-281A · US Justice Department · The Hacker News · CyberScoop

Two more Nobels: making one mirror image of a molecule, and Anne Carson

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave Wednesday's chemistry prize to Henri Kagan of Université Paris-Sud and Kenso Soai of Tokyo University of Science "for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis." The problem they solved is chirality: many molecules exist as two mirror-image forms with completely different biological effects, and ordinary reactions produce both in equal measure. Kagan found in 1985 that small amounts of a chiral catalyst could tilt a reaction far more than expected; Soai later designed a reaction that produces essentially only one mirror form and amplifies its own handedness as it runs. Every modern single-isomer drug depends on being able to do this. On Thursday the Swedish Academy awarded the literature prize to the Canadian poet, essayist, translator and classicist Anne Carson, 76, "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature" — work including the verse novel Autobiography of Red and Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. The academy reached her in Iceland, where she has held citizenship since 2022, and said she was taken completely by surprise. Each prize is worth 12 million Swedish kronor, about $1.2 million.

Why it matters: Chemistry's prize is this year's second for an enabling technique rather than a discovery, after Monday's for optogenetics — a pattern of rewarding the tool that made a field possible, decades after the work. Carson is the first Canadian to win the literature prize and among the few poets honoured this century.

Sources: The Nobel Prize · Royal Society of Chemistry · The Nobel Prize · Al Jazeera

Volkswagen tells ID.4 owners to stop charging past 80%, and Stellantis recalls 265,000 Ram vans

In a filing to the US regulator NHTSA dated 6 October, Volkswagen recalled 22,524 ID.4 electric SUVs from model years 2023 to 2026 because the high-voltage battery can suffer thermal propagation — a fire inside the pack. VW has not identified the cause, has no remedy yet, and is telling owners to charge to no more than 80% in the meantime; notification letters go out on 27 November. It follows a Handelsblatt report in late September that VW will recall about 4 million vehicles across VW, Audi, Skoda and Seat over a steering bolt that can corrode, its largest action since Dieselgate. On Thursday Stellantis recalled more than 265,000 Ram ProMaster vans in the US, plus about 20,000 in Canada and over 3,000 in Mexico: water can get into the electric power steering wiring harness and drivers may lose steering assistance without warning. One crash has been linked to the defect, with no injuries; dealers will replace the harness free. Meanwhile Brussels pulled its vote on amending the 2035 combustion-engine phase-out from the 5 October agenda, with 23 November now the earliest likely date. The Commission's December 2025 proposal would soften the target to a 90% fleet CO2 cut rather than 100%, allowing hybrids and range-extender EVs to be registered after 2035.

Why it matters: Three separate reminders that the hard part of this transition is manufacturing quality, not policy. An EV maker that cannot explain why its battery catches fire has to ask customers to use 80% of what they paid for, which is a worse marketing problem than any charging network gap — and it lands while Europe's regulators are already losing their nerve on the 2035 deadline.

Sources: Electrek · Cars.com · Fox Business · Clean Energy Wire

Cleveland forced a decisive Game 5, and the Dodgers get the Brewers again

The Guardians beat the Chicago White Sox 9–5 on Thursday, José Ramírez homering, to level their American League Division Series at 2–2 and send it back to Progressive Field for a winner-take-all Game 5 on Saturday evening, Gavin Williams against Sean Burke. The winner meets the Tampa Bay Rays, who swept the Yankees, in the AL Championship Series — the White Sox are chasing their first appearance in 21 years. In the National League both series are done: the Dodgers eliminated Atlanta and Milwaukee beat San Diego 3–1 in games, setting up a rematch of last year's Championship Series, with the Brewers holding home-field advantage and Game 1 at American Family Field on Sunday. Elsewhere this weekend, Formula 1 reaches Singapore for a sprint round — sprint qualifying on Friday, the sprint on Saturday and the grand prix on Sunday — where Mercedes lead the constructors' championship by a wide margin and Kimi Antonelli leads the drivers'. The NFL opened Week 5 on Thursday night with Tampa Bay at Dallas; the NBA is still in preseason until 20 October.

Sources: ESPN · CBS Sports · Yahoo Sports · Sky Sports

The Nobel Peace Prize is announced in Oslo at 11:00 CEST

There is no clear favourite. Prediction markets put Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms, the volunteer networks feeding civilians through that war, narrowly ahead of Médecins Sans Frontières, with Volodymyr Zelensky, Yulia Navalnaya, UNRWA and Pope Leo XIV behind them; Trump, who has said publicly he deserves it, sits well down the list. Nominations stay secret for 50 years, so all of this is inference. Why it matters: It is the one Nobel that is a political act rather than a scientific judgement, and this year's shortlist is a choice between honouring Ukraine, Gaza or Sudan — a ranking of whose war the committee thinks the world is neglecting.

Source: PBS NewsHour

Isaias makes landfall on the north-eastern Gulf coast late today or overnight

The storm is forecast to brush major-hurricane strength early Friday before coming ashore between Mobile and Destin, with 5 to 7 feet of surge expected along Mobile Bay and the Florida panhandle. Why it matters: Whether the refineries around New Orleans, Baton Rouge and the Mississippi coast take the eye wall decides whether this is a week of lost offshore barrels or a month of higher pump prices — four weeks before Americans vote.

Source: Fox Weather

Saudi airports, for a fourth day

The Houthis have struck Saudi civil aviation on each of the past three days and said on Thursday they expect a long conflict; the Saudi-led coalition answered Wednesday's attacks with strikes on 82 targets in four Yemeni provinces. Why it matters: Trump's pledge not to hit Iran before 3 November does not bind the coalition or the Houthis, and this is now the mechanism by which the oil price moves — which is why Thursday's reassurance did nothing for it.

Source: France 24