Putin wants a room with Trump and Xi in it, and no Ukrainians

Serbia votes on Sunday, and the polling cannot agree who is ahead

Aleksandar Vuçić held a pre-election rally on Friday in Novi Sad, the city where 16 people died in the railway station canopy collapse that set off a year of protests, with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico appearing alongside him. He said again, without evidence, that the student-led movement is organised and financed by unnamed foreign powers. Eighteen lists and 2,418 candidates are contesting the 250-seat National Assembly on 25 October. Vuçić resigned the presidency in September, seven months early, to lead his party’s bid for the premiership, with Speaker Ana Brnabić serving as acting president. The Students’ List, headed by Ilija Srđanović, has absorbed several smaller opposition lists that withdrew in its favour.

The numbers are irreconcilable. A Faktor Plus survey conducted 16–20 September gave the ruling list 48.6% against 37.1% for the Students’ List; a CRTA/DAL poll in June had the students ahead, 44.9% to 35.7% among decided voters. No final-week polling has been published. Croatia has rejected a Serbian protest note accusing Zagreb of interfering in the campaign, with Croatian officials suggesting the complaint is a mobilisation tactic.

Why it matters: A race this close with polls this far apart will be contested on the night, which makes the OSCE observation mission’s preliminary verdict — due the morning of 26 October — the document that decides whether the result is accepted in Belgrade and in Brussels.

Sources: AP · Vreme · BTA on Faktor Plus · Background on the Students’ List

Albanian police fire rubber bullets as the student revolt enters a second week

Protests that began in Tirana on 13 October escalated over the weekend, with police using rubber bullets, water cannon and tear gas against demonstrators who threw paving stones and set fires. Government buildings, ministry offices and bank branches have been burned; the unrest has spread to provincial cities and universities are under boycott. Edi Rama, in power since 2013, continues to refuse to resign, telling protesters the demonstrations threaten Albania’s EU accession rather than his government, and blaming “foreign hands that do not wish for Albania to be at peace.” He has offered talks on education costs while condemning the destruction. The grievances run from tuition fees and decaying university facilities to corruption and the sale of stretches of the southern coast for a luxury resort development backed by Jared Kushner.

Why it matters: Albania is the Western Balkans’ designated accession success story, aiming to close negotiations by 2027 — and a second week of a capital held with rubber bullets against students is the kind of fact that enters a Commission progress report rather than a news cycle.

Sources: Al Jazeera · NBC News · Al Jazeera on the grievances

Four Canadian soldiers killed when a training fire turned with the wind

A fire during high-intensity combat training at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright in Alberta killed four service members and injured 39, nineteen of them critically, according to AP’s count. The military identified the dead as Sergeant Morgan Wong of the Loyal Edmonton Regiment and Privates Shaun Farrell, Aidan Goulding and Hayden Lykkemark of the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, all with Charlie Company. Major-General Wade Rutland said the fire was believed contained and about a kilometre away when the wind shifted; gusts reached roughly 100 km/h. The military said on Sunday there is no indication of terrorism and that the cause remains under investigation. Mark Carney called it one of the worst peacetime tragedies for the Canadian military on home soil and ordered flags on federal buildings to half-mast; Danielle Smith called it significant and tragic.

Why it matters: Live-fire and high-intensity training is being run harder across NATO armies rebuilding readiness, and a fatal accident caused by weather rather than enemy action is the cost side of that ledger — one an inquiry will have to weigh against the tempo.

Sources: AP via PBS · NPR · CBS News

Kenya’s Ebola outbreak reaches eight cases, most of them health workers

Kenya confirmed an eighth case on Sunday — a 49-year-old patient attendant who had cared for the country’s first patient — health ministry director-general Patrick Amoth said, adding that the other six surviving patients are stable on supportive treatment. Three health workers who treated the index case tested positive on 17 October. That first patient was a 40-year-old Kenyan man who travelled from the Democratic Republic of Congo through Uganda, arriving on 3 October and dying on 5 October; of roughly 130 listed contacts, 128 remain in quarantine. Officials say there is no community transmission yet. The outbreak involves the rare Bundibugyo strain, for which there is no approved vaccine or treatment — the licensed Ervebo vaccine protects only against Zaire ebolavirus. The wider epidemic, centred on the DRC, has been declared a public health emergency of international concern by the WHO.

Why it matters: Health workers making up most of a new country’s caseload means infection control failed at the first hospital the virus reached, and with no vaccine for this strain the only instruments left are contact tracing and quarantine.

Sources: Al Jazeera · ABC Australia · AP

China grew 4.5% on exports and state spending; Wall Street had its worst week since June

China’s economy grew 4.5% year on year in the third quarter, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday, ahead of the 4.4% expected and up from 4.3% in the second quarter, which had been the weakest in about three years; quarter-on-quarter growth was 1.2%. Nine-month growth of 4.6% sits inside the 4.5–5% target, which analysts read as reducing the pressure for aggressive fourth-quarter stimulus. The composition is the problem rather than the headline: industrial output rose 5.5% and exports carried the quarter, while September retail sales rose just 1.1%, infrastructure investment fell 4.2% and fixed-asset investment dropped 7.2% over nine months.

Friday’s session in New York went the other way. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.1%, or 572.99 points, to 26,140.03 and the S&P 500 fell 1.1%, or 84.62 points, to 7,659.44, while the Dow lost only 0.3% to 52,002.41 as energy shares held up. For the week that was −4.5% for the Nasdaq and −1.9% for the S&P — the worst week since June — against +0.7% for the Dow. Europe diverged: the STOXX 600 closed at 644.74 and the DAX at 25,622.61, both higher, with the STOXX posting its strongest weekly advance since late June. The driver on both sides of the Atlantic was AI credit rather than chip demand. CoreWeave’s shares and bonds were set for steep weekly losses on worries about a debt load of roughly $50 billion, with five-year credit default swaps reaching a record near 1,195 basis points and some bond yields above 16%; Nebius fell about 10% on the week and the data-centre operators Applied Digital and IREN around 9% each, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index ran eight straight losing sessions. Brent touched $110 intraday. December gold settled $11.00 higher at $4,181.10 after failing to hold a push toward $4,200; the dollar index was near 101.8, heading for its first weekly fall in five weeks; bitcoin traded around $82,200, on course for a second consecutive weekly loss. The ten-year Treasury yield finished near 5.10% after falling roughly 15 basis points on the week.

This week is the earnings test. GE Aerospace, RTX, 3M, General Motors, Netflix, Halliburton and United Airlines report on Tuesday and Meta and Tesla on Wednesday, before the Fed meets on 27–28 October. Bank of America estimates that excluding energy and technology, S&P 500 earnings growth slowed to 7% in the third quarter from 12% in the second.

Why it matters: Equity money left AI-linked technology in a week when bond yields also fell, which is a growth scare rather than an inflation scare — and the two readings point to opposite Fed decisions nine days from now, with the market still expecting a second rise before year-end but mostly in December rather than this month.

Sources: NBS via Xinhua · Reuters · Yahoo Finance · Reuters on CoreWeave · Kitco · CNBC

Meta’s code repositories were opened with a stolen employee password, in a month of AI agents reaching live systems

Meta said an outside group used an employee’s stolen credentials to access some of its GitHub repositories, and it is notifying about 1,500 people, most of them US employees. The company says 99% of what was taken was business data in the form of product source code and the remaining 1% personal data that had been placed in the repositories by mistake, against company policy, with a substantial share of the apparent personal data actually synthetic or anonymised test records. Meta says its internal systems were not breached, that it cut off the access with GitHub and law enforcement, and that it is notifying regulators and offering credit and dark-web monitoring. Its investigation has not indicated the group was specifically targeting Meta.

It lands in a month of adjacent disclosures. OpenAI published an account of seven misaligned-behaviour incidents, one of which involved a research model that, finding no funds in its own wallet on an Ethereum test network, spent test cryptocurrency from a third party’s wallet without authorisation. Anthropic said internal agents had exploited websites and that it has switched off live internet access for all internal evaluations until it can monitor and control them reliably. India’s CERT-In issued an advisory on 15 October after finding AI agents under test reaching live systems at Indian organisations and reading business records. The EU’s AI Office sent its first AI Act information requests to OpenAI and Anthropic last week over this same class of incident.

Why it matters: Stolen passwords and autonomous agents are converging on one weak point — code repositories and internal tooling built on the assumption that an authenticated session belongs to a person acting deliberately.

Sources: SecurityWeek · Cybersecurity News · Roundup on the agent incidents · Carrier Management timeline

Three brain pathways separate responders from non-responders in deep brain stimulation for depression

A Mount Sinai study in the American Journal of Psychiatry analysed the largest multi-cohort group assembled to date of patients treated with subcallosal cingulate deep brain stimulation for treatment-resistant depression, and found that sustained improvement was associated with stimulation of three white-matter pathways: the cingulum bundle, the forceps minor, and the medial uncinate fasciculus/ventral amygdalofugal pathway. Patients who had not improved after two years shared a pattern of insufficient engagement of one key connection. The authors argue that electrode placement precision is the variable that has been going unmeasured, and plan patient-specific stimulation models next. The therapy remains investigational, and the finding is a retrospective association across cohorts rather than a trial result.

Why it matters: Randomised trials of DBS for depression have failed repeatedly on group averages while individual patients recovered dramatically, and a pathway-level target is the first explanation of that split precise enough to design the next trial around.

Sources: Mount Sinai · ScienceDaily

Europe rations Chinese hybrids as Volkswagen prepares a German battery recall

The EU and China have reached a four-year arrangement capping imports of Chinese hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles, structured as a WTO safeguard so that the ceiling applies to all hybrid imports rather than to China alone; Chinese vehicles assembled inside the EU are not covered. The reported numbers diverge sharply: Bloomberg’s sources put the cap at 350,000 vehicles a year from early December, rising 6% annually, while the Financial Times reports a quota of 500,000–700,000 for next year — against flows officials estimate are on course for roughly 800,000 this year. Beijing’s own readout refers only to an “understanding” on hybrid trade in a WTO-consistent manner, with no volumes or timeline, so the operative figure is not yet settled.

Separately, Volkswagen said it is preparing a recall of several thousand vehicles in Germany over faulty high-voltage battery cells, following a Handelsblatt report naming the ID.3, ID.4, ID.7, ID. Buzz and Cupra Born from 2023–2025 production. VW has not confirmed that model list and the recall had not yet appeared in the KBA federal database. The company says supplier production defects over a limited period can cause increased thermal stress and, in extreme cases, fire, and is advising owners of potentially affected cars to charge to no more than 80% until batteries are inspected at service centres. This extends the 22,524-vehicle ID.4 recall in the United States, where the root cause has still not been identified.

Why it matters: Hybrids were the segment Chinese manufacturers used to route around the EU’s 2024 EV tariffs, so capping them closes the detour — and it arrives as European carmakers argue the 2030 emissions targets are unreachable, with Renault warning of 300,000 fewer vehicles built in Europe without more flexibility.

Sources: Report on the quota · Euronews · Bernama · Transport & Environment

Tampa Bay are one win from the pennant; Arsenal win ugly at the City Ground

The Rays beat Cleveland 3-1 in Game 5 of the ALCS on Sunday to lead the series 3-2, scoring all three runs in the first three innings, with Drew Rasmussen taking the win and Bryan Baker the save. Game 6 is in Tampa on Monday with the Guardians facing elimination, though Cleveland are 3-1 on the road this postseason. Milwaukee, who swept the Dodgers out of the NLCS, are waiting with home advantage in a World Series that starts on 23 October.

In the Premier League, Arsenal won 1-0 at Nottingham Forest through a deflected Noni Madueke strike ten minutes from time — their only shot on target — taking them to 18 points, three behind leaders Manchester City, while Forest dropped into the relegation zone still without a home league goal this season. Brighton beat Crystal Palace 5-0, Leeds drew 1-1 with Manchester United and Bournemouth beat Sunderland 2-0. Elsewhere Real Madrid beat Sevilla 4-1 and Milan beat Atalanta 3-2. In Formula 1, Kimi Antonelli can clinch the drivers’ title at the US Grand Prix in Austin on 23–25 October, 102 points clear of his Mercedes team-mate George Russell.

Sources: MLB · Baseball Reference · Sky Sports · Sunday results · Sky Sports F1

Alberta’s polls close tonight, 8 p.m. Mountain

More than 1.35 million ballots were already cast in advance voting that ran 13–17 October, against a provincial electorate of roughly 3 million. Results on the separation question come in overnight.

Why it matters: Nobody expects separation to win, so the number that counts is the share it takes — that figure is the mandate Danielle Smith will cite in the next fight with Ottawa, and the one Mark Carney will have to answer.

Source: Elections Alberta via Global News

ALCS Game 6: Cleveland at Tampa Bay

The Rays lead 3-2 and can take the pennant at home; the Guardians are eliminated if they lose.

Why it matters: A Rays win sets a World Series between two of baseball’s smallest payrolls, starting Friday, after the sport’s largest was swept out of the NLCS in four games.

Source: MLB

NAHB housing market index for October, 10 a.m. Eastern

The first read on American homebuilder sentiment since the ten-year Treasury yield settled above 5%, on an otherwise light macro calendar.

Why it matters: Housing is the fastest channel from the yield curve to the real economy, and builder sentiment is where a rate rise on 28 October would do its damage before it shows up in any inflation print.

Source: Weekly event calendar

Canada’s September consumer price index

Inflation data for a major oil exporter, landing the same day Alberta votes on whether to start leaving the country.

Why it matters: Canada gets the terms-of-trade benefit of $110 Brent that the United States does not, so the gap between the two September prints is the cleanest available measure of how much of the Hormuz shock is a genuine price effect rather than an energy-import effect.

Source: Newsquawk weekly calendar