World
US special envoy Steve Witkoff met Vladimir Putin at the Constantine Palace in St Petersburg and asked him to consider resuming US-mediated trilateral talks with Ukraine. Russia released detained US teacher Stephen Hubbard before the meeting, and Putin offered help on Iran and fertiliser supplies. Witkoff came from talks in Oslo with Volodymyr Zelensky and European and NATO officials, which a US official called meaningful progress on security guarantees and a post-war economic plan. Zelensky says he hopes to discuss ending the war at a three-way meeting with Putin and Trump. Kyiv and its allies worry Washington is stepping back from Ukraine.
Reuters
Politics
FEMA administrator Cameron Hamilton told state emergency officials in Little Rock, Arkansas that they must build larger financial reserves and stronger response teams to handle most disasters without federal help, with changes possibly starting within six months. He described national mutual aid between states and asked for waivers of some federal environmental and historic reviews. A FEMA report released last week found state agencies are typically understaffed and underfunded. Former local emergency directors said many states have tiny budgets and could not replace federal recovery money without raising taxes. FEMA did not comment on the remarks.
Politico
Business
Meta Platforms, Tesla, IBM and Texas Instruments all beat analyst estimates in quarterly results reported on Wednesday. Meta earned $3.83 per share on record revenue of $64.6 billion, up 26%, but took a $10 billion charge from an $18 billion settlement over social media addiction. It guided to $135-$145 billion in AI capital spending and announced a two-for-one split. Tesla earned $0.48 per share on $28.05 billion revenue, with automotive gross margin of 18.1% excluding credits, 2 million unsupervised robotaxi miles and Optimus production starting in Fremont. IBM beat on software and infrastructure and guided to 4-5% full-year revenue growth.
Zacks
Technology
At GTC Berlin, Nvidia showed the DSX POD, a reference design for building a complete Vera Rubin AI system inside a shipping container, and pushed co-packaged optics for denser networking between racks. On software it introduced the OpenShell reference architecture for running AI agents with guardrails. Google Cloud said A5X instances on Vera Rubin NVL72 systems are now generally available for European customers, and WPP demonstrated a creative agent built on Nvidia Nemotron models and OpenShell. The company also announced a compute donation worth $250 million over five years for UK research on agentic AI safety. Power efficiency was a central theme.
NVIDIA Blog
Science
Researchers at the University of Bonn and University Hospital of Bonn converted immature red blood cells from an 80-year-old donor directly into neural stem cells, skipping the pluripotent stage, and found the cells carried epigenetic age marks of someone under 20. Rejuvenation was gradual and tracked for over 100 days, with about 60 years erased after 50 days. The slow reset gives scientists a model to test which molecules speed up or slow cellular ageing, which matters for Alzheimer's research because age is the strongest risk factor. The study, in Aging Cell, does not offer a treatment for ageing in people.
ScienceDaily
Sports
The NFL said the Philadelphia Eagles will not be disciplined for how they handled quarterback Jalen Hurts's blood clots, with chief medical officer Allen Sills calling the team's care conservative and patient-focused. Hurts has deep vein thrombosis and bilateral pulmonary embolisms after a clot in his left calf reached his lungs, and is expected to miss the rest of the season. He played in London on 11 October, three days after reporting the injury. The NFL Players Association said the league told it no review was planned and demanded a full investigation before conclusions are drawn.
AP
Health
A systematic review and meta-analysis in JAMA Network Open covering 19 studies and nearly 16 million participants found people with ADHD had a 71% higher rate of death from any cause. Suicide deaths were 89% higher, injury deaths 55% higher and natural-cause deaths 27% higher. Medication use was linked to a 25% lower death rate, but only three studies supported that estimate, so the review does not prove that drugs prevent early death. Researchers say absolute risk remains low and point to sleep, injury, substance use and mental health screening as areas families and clinicians can act on.
Medical Daily
Environment
The UN Environment Programme's Emissions Gap report says the world will pass 1.5C within a few years, the first edition to call the miss imminent and unavoidable. It reframes the goal as limiting overshoot to 1.7C-1.8C before returning to 1.5C by 2100. That path needs emissions cuts of 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040 against 2025 levels, plus a tripling of renewable capacity and a coal phase-out by 2040. Existing pledges deliver only 5-8% by 2030, pointing to peak warming near 2.6C. COP31 opens in Turkey next month.
UNEP/CNN