World
Two high-speed trains collided near Urda in Toledo province on Wednesday morning, killing at least 68 people in Spain's worst rail disaster since 2013. A Renfe AVE carrying 397 passengers ran into the rear of an Iryo train with 147 people on board that had stopped further up the Madrid-Seville line. Two carriages went down an embankment. Renfe says its train had been authorised to continue and struck the stationary unit for reasons it cannot explain. Spain's transport minister called the cause an inexplicable error and said the control centre's decisions will be examined. It is the second crash this year involving the same two operators.
BBC News
Politics
President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama spent the final week of the US midterm campaign in the same battlegrounds, offering voters competing accounts of the economy. Trump held two rallies in Texas on Tuesday, his fourth trip there since Labor Day, campaigning for Senate candidate Ken Paxton. About 210 million registered voters will decide the full House and a third of the Senate on November 3. Polling averages put Trump's approval in the high 30s, and cost of living is the top voter concern. Democrats are favoured to take the House while the Senate remains close, with Michigan, Texas and Alaska the tightest races.
Reuters
Business
Brent crude traded near $114 a barrel on Wednesday after touching above $117 twice in the past week, the highest level since April. Prices are up about 77 percent on the year as Iranian attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz keep a war premium in the market. October has been the worst month for attacks on shipping in and around the strait since tracking began in 2017. The waterway carried about a fifth of world energy supplies before the conflict began in February. Hints of renewed talks pulled a few dollars out of the price, and Russia is raising diesel output under new export quotas.
Reuters
Technology
Google unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday, fifteen days after widening access to Gemini 4 Argon. The new frontier model is restricted to a small group of cybersecurity defence firms through Google's Fairwind programme rather than a public API. Google says Carbon finds vulnerabilities, builds exploits and writes patches better than Argon, and produces secure code at more than twice Argon's success rate on internal tests. It holds first place on SEC-bench Pro and ExploitGym. Introductory pricing matches Argon at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
Reuters
Science
A Southwest Research Institute team used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on three dates around its closest approach to the sun. The spectra show a strong water-ice band near 3 microns and gas emission from water, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, but the weaker 1.5 and 2.0 micron ice bands are faint or missing. The team says the ice sits in micron-scale aggregates heavily mixed with dust. That signature matches frozen bodies beyond Neptune, suggesting planet-building ice forms in a similar way around other stars.
Southwest Research Institute
Sports
Fourth-tier Fleetwood Town, 18th in League Two, knocked Premier League champions Arsenal out of the Carabao Cup 5-3 on penalties at Highbury Stadium on Tuesday. The tie had been halted for more than eight minutes in the second minute when referee Michael Salisbury spotted an unauthorised drone above the pitch and police were called. Fulham loanee Aaron Loupalo-Bi put Fleetwood ahead on 21 minutes and Viktor Gyokeres equalised in the 50th. In the shootout Jay Lynch saved Bruno Guimaraes' kick and teenage defender Conor Haughey scored the decisive penalty, triggering a pitch invasion.
ESPN
Health
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has passed 10,000 infections since it was declared in May, making it the fastest-growing outbreak on record. Government figures from 19 October showed 9,277 confirmed cases and 4,478 deaths across 64 of 167 health zones in eight provinces. The outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, for which there is no approved vaccine or treatment, so tools used against earlier Zaire strain outbreaks do not apply. The WHO has declared a public health emergency. Cases have been imported to Kenya and Nigeria.
NPR
Environment
President Donald Trump said at a Texas rally that his administration is terminating a Biden-era rule aimed at cutting methane emissions from oil and gas drilling. He said the change would save $45 billion and unlock 210 million barrels of oil, about ten days of US consumption. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin had previewed the move, including elimination of the Super Emitter Program that forces operators to repair large leaks found by satellites, and looser standards for small wells. Methane accounts for roughly a third of greenhouse gas emissions. It is the latest step in a wider rollback of climate policy.
NPR / AP