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1. Javier Blas:

The Iran war has triggered the largest energy crisis in history, or so the conventional wisdom says. Epochal stuff — but only half-true, because oil is only half the story.

Thanks to the shale revolution and an enviable geological endowment, US and Canadian natural gas consumers are dodging the economic fallout of the Iran conflict. For America, long worried about its reliance on foreign fossil fuels, it’s an embarrassment of riches.

While European and Asian consumers are now paying north of $30 per million British thermal unit for their gas, US buyers pay around $3 per mBtu. Last week, US gas prices briefly touched a two-year low of $2.5 per mBut — in the middle of an energy crisis. Canadian costs are even lower, at about $1.5 per mBtu.

The price difference between gas in Europe and Asia versus North America, reaching now a ratio of 12 times, has never been wider; not during the 2022 gas shock following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nor in 2011-2012 after the Fukushima nuclear accident, which forced Japan into gas to keep the lights on. (Source: bloomberg.com)

2. The Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. is backing a quick resumption of Russian natural-gas sales to Europe via pipelines running through Moscow’s wartime enemy—Ukraine—as part of negotiations aimed at securing an energy ceasefire ahead of the coming winter, according to U.S., European and Ukrainian officials.

The idea, broached by U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff during trips to Moscow and Kyiv in September, would involve selling Russian gas via a U.S. intermediary to circumvent European sanctions—and could create a lucrative opportunity for American investors, people who attended the discussions said.

Under current European Union legislation, all purchases of Russian natural gas must be phased out by the end of 2027. Leaders of Europe’s biggest nations have said that they have no interest in restoring their dependence on energy supplies from a country they view as their top strategic threat. (Source: wsj.com)

3. The Wall Street Journal:

For decades, Europeans have been happy to surrender around half of their pay to the state. In exchange, they could expect to retire in their 60s on a relatively comfortable, state-funded pension.

No longer. Stretched public finances and a rapidly aging population are threatening this covenant, stoking fear and anger across the continent oer the future of a cradle-to-grave welfare state voters had long taken for granted.

The outrage is particularly sharp in France, where employees have generally been able to retire at 62 with a tax-funded pension based on their past salary—a promise the cash-strapped, overindebted government is struggling to honor.

Concern about the sustainability of France’s welfare state has been a key driver of the protests that have shaken the country in recent weeks. It is also calling into question the tacit generational contract under which younger workers pay for their elders’ retirement. (Source: wsj.com)

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Posted and Upcoming Podcasts: Available now: Josh Tyrangiel on AI and Charlie Cook on the mid-term elections. Later this week: (1) A conversation with Sir Richard Moore, former head of MI6, the British Intelligence Service, and (2) a post-election analysis with a guest-to-be-named-later.

1. These days, the people leading AI labs believe it could transform their industry, the global economy and perhaps the fate of humanity. OpenAI’s chief scientist has called it the only way to remain on the frontier. A co-founder of Anthropic says it “might be the most important technical trend in the world.” And unless you work in AI, you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s a phenomenon known as “recursive self-improvement,” or RSI, which roughly translates to AI building smarter AI. Anthropic refers to it as “closing the loop,” a cycle in which each improvement makes the machines better and faster at improving themselves. (Source: wsj.com)

2. The future coming at you: RSI in one chart.

3. An AI agent using Claude Sonnet 5 autonomously performed gene therapy brain surgery on a mouse, choosing the drug, the brain region, and the coordinates, then driving the stereotaxic arms itself. Dr Gabriel Ocana-Santero (Oxford, co-founder and CEO of Y Combinator-backed Exin Therapeutics) gave the agent 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a motorized surgery rig (custom-built on Arduino) with cameras, and one goal: reduce seizures. The agent worked out what was causing the seizures, then chose a therapy that boosts the brain’s natural ‘calming’ signals, targeted only at the cells that produce them. It worked out exactly where to inject using three research papers, then injected a tiny dose while watching through the camera for bleeding, checking the camera 32 times during the operation. (Sources: lifearchitect.substack.com. More on this here and here.)

4. Scientists can now edit genes in precise locations deep in the brain and body without the use of invasive surgery or implants, thanks to new work from researchers at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. The team demonstrated their technique, which uses a combination of ultrasound, light-emitting nanoparticles, and photo-controllable gene-editing proteins, by successfully altering genes in mouse brains at selected locations. The work – the latest advance in controlling the ever-expanding universe of CRISPR-family gene editors – was published Sept. 28, 2026, in Cell and led by Wu Tsai Neuro Faculty Scholar Guosong Hong, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford Engineering, and Michael Lin, a professor of neurobiology and of bioengineering at Stanford Medicine and Stanford Engineering. (Sources: news.stanford.edu, cell.com, neuroscience.stanford.edu)

5. Meet Sabrina Pasterski, the theoretical physicist often dubbed the "Next Einstein" who famously built her own airplane at age 14 and flew it at 16. This video explores how she went from a garage mechanic to a Harvard Ph.D. whose work on Celestial Holography was cited by Stephen Hawking. (Sources: physics.mit.edu, youtube.com. Italics mine.)

6. Iran’s Supreme Leader ordered his top military commanders to prepare for renewed confrontation with the US and Israel and expand Tehran’s options for retaliation, even as his top diplomat signaled progress in diplomatic talks. “Every level and type of threat must be met with an immediate, effective response, without geographical limitations,” Mojtaba Khamenei told the heads of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Army and the General Staff of the Armed Forces, according to a statement Saturday on Telegram. (Sources: bloomberg.com, t.me/rahbar_ir)

7. The Wall Street Journal:

Three American service-members were killed in a July 17 Iranian strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in the Jordanian desert. Satellite imagery shows the nighttime attack damaged at least 19 buildings where troops sleep.

It was one of the deadliest nights of the war for U.S. forces. But it wasn’t the only attack targeting American troops where they live and sleep. That same week, Iran hit multiple housing units at other U.S. military installations across the region.

The July strikes marked an alarming shift in Iran’s tactics and revealed an improvement in the regime’s ability to sequence attacks and hit targets with precision. Iran was taking more direct aim at the buildings that house American troops, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite data, Iranian military statements and interviews with U.S. officials.

The Journal’s analysis offers the most comprehensive public accounting of the war’s damage to American facilities to date. (Source: wsj.com)

8. Russia is testing exporting grain through the Arctic port of Murmansk, thousands of kilometers from the farms where it is grown, as Ukraine’s drone campaign has all but cut off its traditional route via the Black Sea. A bulk carrier in Murmansk started loading 29,500 tonnes of wheat on Wednesday for a trial shipment to buyers in north Africa, according to the port’s Telegram channel, adapting facilities normally used to handle fertiliser for grain. The extraordinary detour illustrates how the escalating battle for control of the Black Sea has upended trade in Russia, the world’s biggest wheat exporter, and Ukraine, another major supplier, despite relatively strong harvests in both countries. The disruption has driven up costs for overseas buyers even as prices received by Russian and Ukrainian farmers have plunged. (Source: ft.com)

9. China’s economic activity slowed sharply in October, with gauges of manufacturing, services and construction all pointing to a loss of momentum. The official manufacturing purchasing managers index fell to 49.3 in October, down from 50.1 in September, said the National Bureau of Statistics on Saturday. (Source: wsj.com)

10. Tens of thousands of demonstrators converged on India’s capital earlier today in a display of mass resistance to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and recent changes to the voter roll. The event, organized by India’s largest opposition political party, the Indian National Congress, is the latest in a string of large protests to ripple through New Delhi since this summer. The demonstrators have marched under different banners, with separate leaders and demands. But they have all expressed unhappiness with Mr. Modi’s nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which has led India since 2014, and its initiative to update India’s voter rolls. (Source: nytimes.com)

11. Hooded rioters looted stores in Frankfurt late on ​Saturday after tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets across Germany's biggest cities to demand better education and lower living costs. The protests ‌followed a wave of Gen Z-led demonstrations across Europe this year. In Serbia, student-led activism helped unseat the country's longtime leader at the ballot box, while protests in France have descended into rioting and looting. The German protests organised by the campaign group “Gen Z regelt” — “Gen Z takes charge” in German — took place in 34 cities including Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich. The group says it opposes compulsory military service and wants ​greater investment in education as many young Germans struggle with rising costs. In Frankfurt, Germany’s financial hub, at least two stores were looted as protests turned ​violent, with several more damaged and police trying to get the situation under control, according to a Reuters witness. (Sources: reuters.com, theguardian.com)

12. Cryptocurrency exchange Binance says it has replaced 90% of the ⁠amount stolen after a record $6.3 billion hack of its platform by a group the FBI identified as being backed by North Korea. The remaining 10% of tokens are less liquid, meaning they ⁠may take ​longer to buy, the company said in a post on X on Saturday. Co-CEO Richard Teng said separately that the company was “committed to covering the ⁠remaining 10%” and that “users will not bear the financial impact of this incident”. (Source: theguardian.com)

13. Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

(Source: centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/2026-senate)

14. Today’s New York City Marathon begins long before the race itself.

News Items Science Editor Joanna Thompson training:

(Sources: joannathompson.work, instagram.com)

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Quick Links: The Kremlin is refusing to compromise on its original maximalist demands from 2022. The US State Department approved the possible sale of 500 PAC-3 Patriot ballistic missile interceptors to Ukraine. Delivery will reportedly not occur for several years. Russia and Ukraine completed a remarkably successful humanitarian mission in occupied Kherson Oblast, as some Ukrainian civilians returned to Ukrainian-controlled territory. The Pentagon is buying drones by the thousands even as Chinese and Russian manufacturers crank them out by the millions. You’d think someone at DOD would pick up the phone and call Perry Boyle. Germany fails to meet gas storage target as winter approaches. Rating agency Fitch hits France with unscheduled outlook downgrade. Hundreds of thousands of protesters march across France for third week in a row. US vaccine policy creates ‘huge opportunity’ for Europe. Politico interviews Mark Carney. American bosses are desperately trying to de-MAGAfy. Charlie Cook: A unicorn election in red America. More than 7.5 million Texans voted early in 2026 election, matching 2018 pace. While Michigan Republicans circle the wagons around Mike Rogers, Democrats are firing rounds into a circular firing squad. Sen. Ricketts (R) leads (49%-43%) in Nebraska. DeepMind introduces Gemini 4 Carbon, our strongest model with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long horizon capabilities. US tech stocks tumble as concerns over AI spending intensify. Housing theft happens almost 11 times a day in Mexico City.

If you could talk to only one independent political analyst about Tuesday’s mid-term elections, it would probably be Charlie Cook.

So that’s what we did.

(News Items Podcast, Episode #29, with guest Charlie Cook. If you prefer, you can listen to it on Apple, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, and many, if not most, of the other podcast platforms. Our podcast producer is Katerina Barton. It was recorded on Friday, 30 October 2026).

Back in 1984, Charlie founded The Cook Political Report, which over time became the single best source for non-partisan analysis of American elections and political trends. It still is.

Charlie’s columns about this year’s mid-term elections have been uniformly superb. So we talked about what he’s written about: (a) the “red undertow”, (b) a “fire, not hire” election, (c) the importance of Michigan, (d) delusional Democrats, and (e) the “unicorn” political environment of 2026.

Good podcasts are made by great guests. Charlie is that.

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Last May, we talked with Josh Tyrangiel about his book, ‘AI for Good‘. A lot has happened since then. The pace of AI’s development has accelerated dramatically. Extraordinary breakthroughs in mathematics and the sciences have been achieved. The Hugging Face “hack” and the PHP vulnerability revelations became major stories and reminded us how treacherous AI can and almost certainly will be.

So we asked him for an update on the AI “story”. Like all good podcasts, it’s really good when the guest is great. Josh is a great guest.

(The News Items Podcast with Josh Tyrangiel. Episode #28. Recorded 29 October 2026. Produced by Katerina Barton. ~46 minutes in length). You can find this podcast, and all previous News Items podcasts, on most of the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon, Spotify and YouTube.

Bio Brief: Josh Tyrangiel is a writer for The Atlantic. He was previously the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and chief content officer for Bloomberg Media. A twelve-time Emmy and Peabody Award–winning producer, he created Vice News Tonight on HBO and has produced numerous feature-length documentaries for HBO, Netflix, and Apple TV. These days, when he’s not writing for The Atlantic, he oversees the production of “Instadocs” on Netflix. The one on the Hugging Face Hack is terrific.

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1. The Wall Street Journal:

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is tightening his grip on the Communist Party with relentless purges and new strictures on discipline, as Beijing gears up for a key personnel shuffle next year that seems set to extend his rule.

Xi’s crackdown on corruption and disloyalty has pruned the party elite so much that the governing Central Committee was reduced this week to its lowest attendance at a policy-setting meeting since the Mao Zedong era.

About a quarter of the 376 officials that were on the Central Committee when its current term started four years ago didn’t attend the elite body’s four-day plenum in Beijing that ended Thursday. Many of the absentees have been felled in Xi’s campaign to cleanse the party.

Those who did show up approved a strategic plan for perpetuating Xi’s efforts to impose “full and rigorous party self-governance,” as Beijing describes its high-pressure enforcement of disciplinary rules and demands for absolute commitment to Xi. (Source: wsj.com)

2. Binance has suspended all deposits and withdrawals after the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange fell victim to an industry-record heist. The exchange put the “estimated total impact” of the hack at about $6.3 billion, adding that it had frozen some $3 billion of affected assets. An “initial investigation” suggested hackers had been able to compromise an engineer’s laptop and withdraw funds from the platform, Binance said, adding that it was working with law enforcement. Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs linked the hack with a North Korean unit known as TraderTraitor, saying that the sums involved would make it “the largest crypto theft on record”. (Source: ft.com)

3. Earlier this year, sources tell WIRED, a contractor caused a security incident at the Department of Defense by connecting a secure centralized system used by multiple agencies to their personal account for Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding agent. It appears that the agent used by the contractor, who is employed by global consulting firm Accenture, then sent information about the DOD system, including login credentials, to a high-risk third-party website. The centralized system contains controlled unclassified information (CUI), which is considered sensitive and not to be released to the public without review. CUI can include information about critical infrastructure, nuclear submarine propulsion, and vulnerabilities to chemical and biological terrorism. Additionally, security experts say, access to the system could allow for the exploitation of even more sensitive ones. (Source: wired.com)

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“I start every day the same way: coffee and News Items.” — Richard Haass, president emeritus of The Council on Foreign Relations (and co-host of 'Alternate Shots’).

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1. American football can be brutal. Scientists have long known that the hits, tackles and other collisions that are central to the sport come with health risks, but what these impacts do to the brain has been less clear. What we do know is that many footballers have died with brains that have shown evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease associated with symptoms such as mood swings and dementia. But because a diagnosis requires that investigators look for damage in a person’s brain after they die, it’s unclear just how common CTE is among current or former athletes. But now, in a study published in JAMA Network Open, an analysis of medical records from thousands of deceased former NFL players—including hundreds who donated their brains to science—estimates that about 75 percent of these players likely died with CTE. (Sources: scientificamerican.com, jamanetwork.com)

2. A college football team in Utah is donning some curious caps this season. As part of their regular recovery routine, many Brigham Young University players are wearing headsets that shine near-infrared light onto their scalps — and up their noses. Emerging science suggests that the devices may help the brain be more resilient to damage, potentially reducing the risk of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative disease associated with repeated head trauma. Researchers first introduced the headsets to B.Y.U. football as part of a small, randomized trial in 2021. Based on that study’s results — signs of reduced brain inflammation among users over the season — the team ordered more. (Sources: nytimes.com, journals.sagepub.com)

3. Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh on Wednesday left the central bank on track to raise interest rates again this year, even as he stuck to his refusal to offer any explicit guidance on the future path of policy. Operating within his self-imposed communication boundaries, Warsh used his assessment of a strong economy and warnings over persistent inflation to signal the Fed’s job is not yet done. The message reinforced expectations that officials will raise borrowing costs in December — after holding them steady Wednesday — with the potential for another increase in early 2027. Still, Warsh was careful to leave his options open. (Source: bloomberg.com)

4. Being one of Washington’s closest partners no longer means reliably funding the U.S. deficit. Countries and regions most aligned with the U.S. bought a net $174.3 billion of U.S. Treasuries, excluding bills, in the first eight months of 2026, according to an analysis of Treasury and U.S. State Department data. That was the lowest for the period since 2021, and down more than 60% from a year earlier. The shift is noteworthy in Asia, where economies running large surpluses are putting less of that money into U.S. debt. Japan, the biggest foreign holder of Treasuries, bought just $389 million in the first eight months — down 99% from a year earlier. South Korea sold $23.8 billion, the most for the period in records going back to 1977. Taiwan was also a net seller. (Source: Bloomberg, via japantimes.co.jp)

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1. Electrical cables usually excite only audiophiles, but physicists are buzzing about IBM’s announcement today that it has connected two copies of its latest quantum computing chip using aluminum cables nearly 1 meter long. The connections are key to IBM’s ambition to scale up its machines from roughly 100 quantum bits, or qubits, to the thousands needed to make a quantum computer far superior to today’s supercomputers at solving certain problems. “It’s a milestone,” says Andrew Cleland, a physicist at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the work. “They’ve shown for the first time I know that they can take two processors and link them with meter-length cables.” However, some researchers caution the interconnect issue is not yet completely solved. The research paper is here. (Sources: science.org, ibm.com, arxiv.org)

2. Cade Metz, The New York Times:

As A.I. systems have grown increasingly powerful over the past several years, decoding the inner workings of these technologies has only become harder. In 2014, Google's Inception technology spanned several million “neurons,” the fundamental mathematical calculations that drive an A.I. system. The latest systems span trillions…

When Nick Cammarata, an AI researcher, started an “interpretability” project at OpenAI three years ago, he estimated that less than 2 percent of the neurons inside an A.I. system could be properly understood. Now that he has a new way of looking at the problem — which involves a phenomenon he calls “recursive generalization” — he thinks that he can understand the behavior of more than 90 percent of neurons.

He argues that as A.I. systems get larger and larger, their neurons start to line up with particular concepts, like shapes, syllables and sounds. He believes that he and other researchers can ultimately crack the interpretability problem under his methods.

But other researchers argue that his essay raises more questions than it answers. (Sources: arxiv.org, nytimes.com, already-clean.goodfire.com)

3. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, claims its AI models have disproven the exponential time hypothesis – a fundamental assumption that underpins computer science. “This came as a complete surprise, a shock,” says Fedor Fomin at the University of Bergen in Norway. “Nobody I know expected it.” Proposed nearly 30 years ago, the exponential time hypothesis (ETH) tries to put a limit on how quickly computers can solve certain logical puzzles. The simplest way would be to try every possible combination of true or false for each part of the puzzle. ETH proposes that, although it may be possible to do this quicker with shortcuts, the amount of work needed has to grow exponentially as the puzzle gets bigger. OpenAI, however, says its models have devised an algorithm that can beat the previously assumed speed limit for solving logical puzzles, apparently proving ETH false. “Assuming that it is confirmed, this is an enormous breakthrough,” says Leslie Goldberg at the University of Oxford. (Sources: newscientist.com, uib.no/en, cs.ox.ac.uk)

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(‘Alternate Shots’, Episode #43. Co-hosted by Richard Haass and John Ellis. Produced by Katerina Barton. Recorded Sunday, 25 October 2026. If you prefer, you can listen to this episode (and all previous episodes) by clicking on these hyperlinks: Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. We’re on a number of other podcast platforms as well. And YouTube!)

Our take on a wild week: Iran, the Houtis, the House of Saud, the Israeli elections, Ukraine, “Black October” and growing concern about the mid-term elections.

On that last point, if the former Treasury Secretary of the United States of America is concerned that a disruption of the mid-term elections — before, during, or after — will do grievous damage to the rule of law and consequently the U.S. economy……that’s different. As he put (paraphrased): “I never imagined, after 6 decades in public life, that I would ever write the column I wrote for the New York Times.”

We end, happily or tediously, depending on your point of view, with Richard’s commentary on the first-place New York Giants. You can almost see Richard’s thought bubble forming: Reggie Jackson is going to rue the day he bet against me.

All of that in less than 30 minutes. Thank you for listening. And special thanks to our new producer, the great Katerina Barton, for putting the pod together so quickly.

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1. Anthropic has officially filed the prospectus for its initial public offering, which means the AI lab has put all kinds of formerly private information on display. While the prospectus contains the eye-popping revenue—and even larger expenditures—you might expect, the biggest section of the filing by far is given over to “risk factors,” which are all the things that could squash Anthropic’s big plans. Or, in this case, humanity itself. While much has been made about the extent to which AI represents an existential threat to humankind, the specific mechanisms by which it could bring about that destruction are largely opaque. If nothing else, the 94 pages that Anthropic’s prospectus devotes to risk factors make clear both where it sees the danger coming from, and the ways in which its researchers are running toward it in order to win the AI arms race. “Sufficiently advanced AI systems could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” the prospectus reads, citing concerns both from critics and regulators and from inside Anthropic itself. (It’s the first of three times the phrase “existential risks” pops up.) (Source: wired.com)

2. From the S-1:

(W)ith the scale of harm that could result from a catastrophic AI-related incident, no single insurer, and potentially the insurance industry in the aggregate, may have sufficient capacity or expertise to underwrite insurance commensurate with such exposure.” (Source: bloomberg.com)

3. Tyler Cowen:

Throughout the tech industry, there is a slowly rising worry about AI breakthroughs in cryptography, which, in theory, could throw open the front door of every email, online transaction, and bank account.

Recent headlines tell the story. “Vitalik Buterin Warns AI Could Break Lattice Cryptography Within Two Years,” reads one, announcing that the cryptocurrency creator has lost faith in systems recently thought to be invulnerable. Even more daunting: “Claude AI Solves 25-Year NSA Cryptography Mystery in Just 30 Minutes.” Now that an AI model from Anthropic (where I am an economic adviser) has cracked through a barrier no human has managed, whether any barrier is safe has become a live question. (Source: thefp.com)

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This is the second of a 4-part series of podcasts previewing the mid-term elections. The guest is Jim Messina, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff to President Obama (in his first term) and campaign manager of the Obama re-election effort in 2012.

A native Montanan, Jim worked on Capital Hill for two decades prior to joining the Obama administration. He now runs a government affairs and strategic advisory firm, recently rebranded The Fortius Group. Most important, he’s a smart and clear-eyed observer of American politics.

The 2026 mid-term Senate elections will be won or lost in what the author Richard Rhodes once called “The Inland Ground”. Specifically: Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas. What will be decisive in each of those states is the rural vote.

We talked about that, the political environment more generally and what might come next, once all the votes have been counted. For more on the national political environment, the Fortius Global’s “slide deck” is clear, concise and well-crafted.

(News Items Podcast, Episode #27, with guest Jim Messina. If you prefer, you can listen to it on Apple, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, and many, if not most, of the other podcast platforms. Our podcast producer is Katerina Barton. It was recorded on Tuesday, 20 October 2026).

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1. Top Chinese Communist Party officials are gathering in Beijing today for a meeting that analysts say will intensify Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign as he paves the way for a fourth term as leader. The fifth plenary session of the Central Committee, known as the fifth plenum, is scheduled to run until Thursday. The closed-door conclave will adopt a “decision regarding strengthening full and rigorous party self-governance,” according to a readout from a Politburo meeting last month. The party’s 20th Central Committee ends its five-year term next year. In China’s political system, a party congress, usually held in October, elects a new committee, which in turn elects the general secretary. Xi, 73, is widely expected to secure another term. (Source: asia.nikkei.com)

2. The best preview of the Central Committee’s fifth plenary session we’ve read is from The Asia Society Policy Institute:

Xi’s dominance should not be mistaken for omnipotence. Commanding Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound in Beijing, is easier than controlling 101 million Party members or dictating policy outcomes across a country as vast and complex as China. In January, he complained that some cadres “constantly proclaim political loyalty” but “comply outwardly while defying inwardly and doing as they please.” In remarks published last year, he accused officials of “causing significant damage” by shirking responsibility, chasing quick results, and obsessing over cultivating their image with superiors. There is a long history of Chinese leaders lamenting the limits of their power. Mao Zedong wryly remarked to Richard Nixon in 1972 that “I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking.”

Closing the gap between what Xi wants and what everyone else does will be a central goal of the 20th Central Committee’s Fifth Plenum, which meets in Beijing on October 26–29 to approve a blueprint for strengthening Party governance. It will probably be the last substantive gathering of the Party’s top 300 or so leaders before next year’s 21st Party Congress, which will select a new Central Committee. Having effectively skipped a plenum in 2023, Xi is assigning the Fifth Plenum the Party-governance business usually associated with a Sixth Plenum. Such plenums can prepare the ground for political change. (Sources: asiasociety.org, et alia)

3. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won Brazil’s presidential election. The left-wing incumbent secured 51.8% of the vote, compared with 48.2% for his rival Flávio Bolsonaro, a son of a putschist former president. In just three weeks, Mr. Lula found more than 10 million new votes. He gained ground nearly everywhere, attracting vast new support in major cities like São Paulo and in his strongholds across the northeast, according to official results. A map of the results shows almost every part of Brazil shifted to the left since the first round of voting. Lula’s rebound in the second round followed a pivot in his campaign strategy to reconnect with low-income and working-class voters, including strong online mobilization that relied heavily on informal messaging through influencers and online communities. A WhatsApp channel called “Lula’s Army” surged from 50,000 to nearly 11 million followers after the first round. (Sources: economist.com, nytimes.com)

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1. Paul Kedrosky:

Increasingly capable AI systems are making it possible to discover and exploit software vulnerabilities at speeds and scales that were previously unimaginable. The world’s enormous installed base of software, much of it old, poorly maintained, and deeply interconnected, is a soft target. We are entering what some call The Hackening, a period of radical technological instability where systemic frailties are everywhere.

You can see it everywhere. For example, the Port of Los Angeles recently reported more cyberattacks per month than it saw in entire years before 2020.

This might be less worrisome if the number of reported software vulnerabilities was not exploding. But it is. After years of steady increases, disclosures of common vulnerabilities (CVEs) accelerated sharply in 2026, with monthly reports now running at several times their 2025 levels. (Sources: paulkedrosky.com, thezvi.substack.com)

(Source: paulkedrosky.com)

2. Kedrosky again:

The global economy runs on interconnected software systems whose security depends on finding and fixing vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. AI is making it vastly cheaper, faster, and easier to search those systems for weaknesses, including in code that has been running for decades.

The result is an increasingly expensive, automated arms race in cybersecurity, with huge advantages for attackers and serious consequences for businesses, infrastructure, and governments. The economic costs of “the Hackening” will likely be enormous. (Source: paulkedrosky.com)

3. The discovery of two ​serious flaws in PHP this week set off a global scramble to ‌keep websites safe from hackers, showing just how critical the three-decade-old open-source programming language is to the internet. Yet the nonprofit foundation that supports PHP, which may underpin up to 70% of sites globally, operates on ​a shoestring budget. “We have one full-time staff member (that's me) and 14 mostly ​part-time contractors,” Executive Director Elizabeth Barron of the PHP Foundation said via ⁠email in an interview on Friday. Board members are unpaid volunteers, and funding ​comes from donations and grants. (Source: reuters.com)

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1. Sorry about this Saturday post, but what happened this week was a bit…. unsettling. This from The Guardian:

Leaders in cybersecurity are sounding the alarm after the discovery of a major vulnerability this week. They are predicting that artificial intelligence tools will expose more fundamental weaknesses in global internet infrastructure in the months to come.

“I no longer think we’re going to be able to patch all bugs,” said Sam Altman on Thursday evening, joining the chorus of executives. In the midst of what’s being called “Black October”, for which researchers used AI to help identify critical flaws in a coding language that is used across millions of websites and may have been unpatched for years, tech executives are warning about the ways AI will be used both to identify and exploit security vulnerabilities at an unprecedented scale and pace.

The next few months will see a “vulnerability tsunami”, according to Jason Clinton, Anthropic’s deputy chief information security officer. “There won’t be enough time to patch critical infrastructure,” Clinton said in a post on X on Thursday evening. Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO, agreed and called it a “code red”.

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We’re ten days out from the mid-term elections. This podcast is the first in a series on the subject. John Heilemann lead us off. Jim Messina is next. Jack Leslie, and (if we can get it scheduled) Daron Shaw will follow. We’ll wrap the series with Charlie Cook, a friend of many decades and the founder of The Cook Political Report, which is the gold standard of non-partisan political analysis in these United States.

There will be a two-part follow-up after the mid-terms, beginning with Katherine Miller from The New York Times, who has covered the campaign from the ground up, talking to and listening in on voters throughout. It will end with…not certain. Scheduling has gotten a bit complicated, mostly because of me.

To listen to the podcast with Mr. Heilemann, click on this link. If you prefer, you can listen to it (and all of the previous News Items podcasts) on Apple, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, and many, if not most, of the other podcast platforms.

This one was produced by our new producer, Katerina Barton, who replaces the great Dale Eisinger, who landed a job at Vox, which is lucky to have him. We recorded it on Monday, 19 October 2026. For more on John Heilemann, keep scrolling.

Roughly speaking, 2026 mid-term elections analysis resides in two “schools.” The first is “macro” (the political environment), which is dreadful for Republicans. You know the menu: the president’s dismal approval ratings, a sour electorate, high prices, diminished purchasing power, corruption, diesel, tariffs, war, etc. All of that points to a “Blue Wave”.

The second is “micro”; which concedes Democrats will win the House but asserts the Senate races that matter (nine, ten or even eleven of them, depending on who you talk to) are all within or nearby the margin of error. The micro school is open to the notion that Republicans might actually keep its current margin (53-47), by holding on for dear life in Red states and picking up Michigan and Minnesota. That might seem far-fetched. It’s not.

Democrats need four seats to recapture control of the Senate. The map makes that difficult. The Senate races in Texas, Kansas, Iowa and Alaska, to pick four, are being fought in Red states that Trump carried by wide margins in the 2024 presidential election. Democrats probably need all four, or at least three of the four, to win back the Senate. It will take a “macro” election for that to happen.

John Heilemann is the chief political columnist and partner at Puck. A bestselling author and former staff writer for New York, The New Yorker, and The Economist, John is also a national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNOW. He hosts Impolitic with John Heilemann, a Puck Podcast. His books on the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, ‘Game Change’ and ‘Double Down’, which he co-authored with Mark Halperin, were deeply reported, well-written and (for good reason) critically acclaimed.

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“It’s the first thing I read every morning.“​​​​​​​​​​​ — Rob Manfred, Commissioner, MLB.

1. A powerful gene-editing technique has been used to edit DNA directly in a person’s body — the first known instance of such a treatment. The milestone treatment is part of a clinical trial of prime editing, a technique that can alter DNA with more precision than standard CRISPR–Cas9 methods can. In this case, prime editing was used to treat a condition called Wilson disease by rewriting DNA in liver cells, to erase a mutation that prevents them from eliminating excess copper. Prime Medicine, a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced that it had treated the first person in its trial earlier this month. It expects to announce the first results from the study next year. (Sources: nature.com, primemedicine.com)

2. A groundbreaking vaccine reduced the risk of death or recurrence of melanoma by almost half, an encouraging signal for a treatment seeking federal approval that has boosted the fortunes of drugmakers Moderna and Merck and could usher in a new wave of cancer treatments. The drug, intismeran autogene, which uses messenger RNA (mRNA) to deliver a vaccine tailored to the genetic profile of a patient’s cancer tumor, reduced the risk of recurrence or death from melanoma by 42 percent compared to a standard treatment in a Phase 3 clinical trial, Moderna and Merck announced Thursday. “These results reinforce our conviction that mRNA has the potential to fundamentally change how we treat cancer,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

3. Reuters:

Global firms and governments rushed on Thursday to patch critical flaws in the PHP programming language that underpins much of the ​internet, as cloud firms reported a surge of hacking attempts after the vulnerabilities were disclosed.

The push came after governments in Europe and elsewhere took websites offline as a precaution on Wednesday while website operators scrambled ‌to secure systems running the software.

The emergency shutdowns of banking, airline, rail, tax and government services from Tokyo to Helsinki mark one of the most dramatic tests of the decades-old programming tools that keep the web running, exposing how deeply governments and companies depend on code that few people understand.

The developers of PHP - a computing language like HTML and Python - released fixes on Wednesday for vulnerabilities that had lurked in the software ⁠for years until they were uncovered using AI. They urged users to “update immediately”.

Madeline Lawrence, co-founder of Belgian cybersecurity firm Aikido Security, said that details of the flaws had become public before fixes were ready, ​with attacks reported since.

“Companies are racing to update against attackers who can use AI to exploit them. That’s the whole race,” she said.

As companies and governments deployed patches and suspended websites as a precaution, hacking ​attempts surged into the millions, according to cloud services firm Cloudflare.

“In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a post on X late on Wednesday. “That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.” (Source: reuters.com, Italics mine.)

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1. These days and nights, Demis Hassabis is taking on a new role after a recent leadership shuffle at Google DeepMind, but he’s working as hard as ever on artificial general intelligence. He thinks of AGI as a system with the full cognitive range of the human brain—not just some of our capabilities but all of them. Earlier this year, he felt AGI was still three to five years away. Now he expects AGI within two to three years. “It’s soon,” he tells me. “I’m updating nearer and nearer.” (Sources: nobelprize.org, wsj.com)

2. Chinese scientists have developed a 100-channel single-photon detector, a breakthrough promising to pave the way for broadband quantum networks. State-of-the-art single-photon detectors – essential components underpinning photonic quantum technologies – could previously support a maximum of 32 detection channels for photon signals. Now, a newly developed interconnect scheme by a Shanghai-based team has broken this bottleneck, supporting more than 100 detection channels while maintaining accurate and stable operation. “This work establishes a robust and scalable infrastructure, paving the way for large-scale quantum photonic applications,” the authors said in their paper. Achieved by researchers at the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology (SIMIT) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the breakthrough was published in the peer-reviewed journal Laser & Photonics Reviews in late September. (Sources: scmp.com, sim.cas.cn, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi )

3. The internet (had) a bad day yesterday, from a cybersecurity perspective. Government websites around the world went offline, Reuters reported, after AI discovered critical security vulnerabilities that impacted the programming language PHP. The issues were severe enough that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) advised organizations using PHP on their systems to either immediately update or take their systems offline until they could. But the PHP update wasn’t the only headache cybersecurity folks were facing on Wednesday. Node.js, the open-source JavaScript runtime environment, also dropped a security surprise of its own when it shared that four high-severity vulnerabilities were just patched in its latest release. One allowed remote code execution, and two others would have permitted a TLS validation bypass, potentially allowing attackers to bypass checks intended to verify a server’s identity. (Sources: techcrunch.com, reuters.com, wsj.com. More on this here.)

4. Wired:

The internet’s mad scramble on Wednesday to patch a pair of critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a widely used web scripting language, was already too late to stop every attack, newly released details reveal.

Wednesday’s release of fixes for two critical vulnerabilities in PHP caused administrators and security staff to race to identify and patch vulnerable websites and apps, while attackers inevitably reverse engineered the fixes to learn how to exploit the flaws. Some governments and other groups even proactively took key websites down in anticipation of the release, so they wouldn’t be targeted before they could apply the patches.

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1. (China’s) economy increasingly resembles that of Japan during the long period of stagnation and deflation that followed the bursting of its property bubble in 1990. The parallels are everywhere, from deteriorating demographics, persistent deflation and weak consumer spending to moribund stock and property markets. At around 300 per cent of GDP, according to calculations by Capital Economics, China’s total public and private debt is also closing in on Japanese levels. China’s leaders have studied Japan’s experience in detail, in an effort to avoid the policy mistakes that bedeviled Tokyo’s response to the slump. But despite their efforts, signs of Japan-style malaise, such as reluctant consumers and deflationary pressures, are still proliferating in China. According to Goldman Sachs, an updated version of the Japanization index — a gauge originally devised by the late economist Takatoshi Ito — shows that for the past five years, China has been consistently more “Japanized” than Japan itself. (Source: ft.com)

2. Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration, U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter said. Both Musk and President Trump have expressed anger at Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries in recent weeks, which the president blames for high energy prices. Last week, Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network, the people said, rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless. Musk and Trump discussed the Starlink decision in a call soon after the slowdown became public, while the president was campaigning last week, two of the people said. One of the people also claimed Musk and Trump discussed the matter prior to the decision to throttle Starlink. (Source: wsj.com, 20 October 2026)

3. Elon Musk (14 October 2026):

Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.

Starlink is a commercial service owned and controlled by SpaceX. Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defensive activities and cannot be used for offensive military action, as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company. (Source: x.com)

4. Leaders of Ukraine, Finland and Norway hailed progress in talks in Oslo yesterday about how to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, but they did not announce any breakthroughs. “I think we made genuine progress today,” said Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who co-hosted the talks with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre at the request of Ukraine. They were joined by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s envoy, as well as representatives from France, Germany, the UK, Poland, the EU and Nato. In a press conference after the talks, Stubb said that progress had been made on sticking points to do with Ukraine’s security and the economy, and those proposals would be taken by Witkoff to St Petersburg, where he is set to meet Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. (Source: ft.com)

5. Catherine Belton, The Washington Post:

The Kremlin is counting the Trump administration’s latest turn against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a major triumph and, coupled with political upheaval in Europe, a sign that Western support for Ukraine is finally crumbling.

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1. Scientists have transformed old blood cells into young brain stem cells, which continued to grow younger as they grew older. To do so, they directly reprogrammed red blood cell precursors into stem cells from which neurons can be derived. During this process, the molecular clocks that indicate a cell’s age were reset. For example, blood cells from an 80-year-old were transformed into stem cells with a molecular age of less than 20 years. Since this rejuvenation process occurred very slowly, it is well-suited for a more detailed investigation of the underlying mechanisms. The results were published in the journal Aging Cell. (Sources: uni-bonn.de, onlinelibrary.wiley.com, via sciencealert.com)

2. Researchers built an AI tool that can predict cancer patients’ survival chances by using a single photograph of their face, complementing doctors’ gut instincts to potentially guide treatment decisions, especially when medical data is scarce. The new model was trained to estimate a person’s age or, for those with cancer, their survival chances. The AI was trained on over 40 million images of people’s faces as well as photographs of more than 30,000 cancer patients, many of whom had already died. The tool gave patients risk scores — those with the highest scores were more likely to die within 90 days, according to the research published in the Lancet Digital Health. The scientists say the findings are a first. Doctors are trained to assess patients just by how they look, said Raymond Mak, a radiation oncologist at Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute and one of the study’s authors, but they’re “in general not very good at estimating end of life expectancy.” “We think that using AI, we can capture some of that physiological reserve, risk for mortality, just from a face photo,” (Source: bloomberg.com)

3. MIT Technology Review:

“I think I have good news about the nature of neural networks.” With those simple words of optimism, Nick Cammarata, a researcher at the AI startup Goodfire, kicked off a 26,000-word blog post that has knocked the AI world on its head, sparking wild speculation as well as cautious (and not-so-cautious) celebration.

Cammarata’s claim is that LLMs might in fact be far easier to understand—and thus to monitor and control—than people previously thought. If true (and we’ll come back to that), it’s a huge deal.

After a summer filled with revelations that swarms of agents built by top firms like OpenAI and Anthropic have been breaking their containment and causing havoc on the public internet—often while those companies weren’t aware of what their agents were up to—the AI industry is desperate to get a better handle on the technology it has built.

That’s one reason the blog post landed with such force. “I think this may be remembered as a major moment in scientific history,” one AI researcher posted on X: “I feel like my understanding of what a neural net is has been catapulted into the future by five years or something.” Another called it “the most important AI paper of the year.” (Sources: technologyreview.com, already-clean.goodfire.com, linkedin.com)

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