World
Hundreds of thousands of people marched across France on Saturday for the third weekend in a row, with students, unions and Yellow Vest supporters pressing demands over the cost of living and the state of schools. Most marches stayed peaceful into the afternoon, but police fired tear gas in Paris and Lyon after dark, and groups of masked demonstrators threw paving stones at officers on the edge of the capital. The interior ministry said at least 290 people had been arrested nationwide by the evening, far below the more than 1,000 detained during the first wave in mid-October. The movement has no single leader and lands six months before a presidential election.
Reuters
Politics
A federal judge in California late on Friday barred the Justice Department from threatening or coercing election officials who are processing midterm ballots. Judge Trina Thompson of the Northern District of California issued an eight-page temporary restraining order in response to a suit filed the same day by labour unions representing election workers. She wrote that senior Justice Department and Homeland Security officials had run a campaign to intimidate state and local staff. The ruling capped a week in which the administration lost three bids to set aside roughly 20,000 California ballots it says may have been cast by non-citizens. Election Day is Tuesday.
CBS News
Business
Wall Street ended October with a sharp sell-off and a monthly loss for the two technology-heavy indexes. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 572 points, or 1.09%, to 51,770 on Friday, while the Nasdaq Composite dropped about 2.5% and the S&P 500 lost 1.3%. For the month the Dow gained 1.5%, but the Nasdaq fell 5.2%, its worst month since March 2025, and the S&P 500 slipped 1.2%. Intel posted its steepest one-day decline in more than four decades. Bitcoin also fell after Binance disclosed a $6.3 billion hack, the largest theft of its kind.
Bloomberg
Technology
Nvidia has told the contract manufacturers that build its AI servers to plan for price increases of more than 15% on systems shipping in early 2027, according to reports from Bloomberg, Tom's Hardware and Fortune. The cause is memory rather than silicon: DRAM, NAND and high-bandwidth memory prices have climbed through 2026 fast enough that even a company with gross margins near 75% cannot absorb them. HBM contract prices could rise another 70% to 140% in 2027, and hyperscalers are accelerating in-house chip programmes to reduce exposure to both the shortage and Nvidia's pricing.
Bloomberg
Science
Physicists at Northwestern University have held a single positron, the antimatter twin of the electron, in a cryogenic Penning trap for months and controlled its quantum state one jump at a time. The team calls the device a one-positron quantum cyclotron. Loading takes eight to eleven hours, and the particle then sits at about 0.3 kelvin in a near-perfect vacuum so that it never touches ordinary matter and annihilates. Results appeared in Physical Review Letters on 21 October. The goal is a precise measurement of the positron's magnetic moment for comparison with the electron, a test of a symmetry called CPT.
Northwestern University
Sports
A federal appeals court on Friday reinstated a jury verdict that the National Football League violated antitrust law through its Sunday Ticket package, reviving a case that had been thrown out two years ago. The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the district court in Los Angeles to restore the verdict and hold a new trial on damages. The 2024 jury found the league liable for about $4.61 billion to residential subscribers and $96.9 million to commercial subscribers. The NFL said it was disappointed and is weighing further review.
Reuters
Health
Mice given an experimental compound that blocks an enzyme called AEP lived about 17% longer than untreated animals in a study published in iScience. Untreated mice averaged 24 months at death, treated mice 28, with all animals around 18 months old when the work began. The treated group also showed fewer signs of frailty, better results on exercise, strength and memory tests, and improved metabolic markers including insulin response. The authors argue that AEP sits at a junction of several ageing-related processes. No human trial has been run and the compound is a research tool, not a medicine.
iScience
Environment
The UN biodiversity summit in Yerevan closed on 30 October with a deal that keeps the Kunming-Montreal framework moving and sets up the first formal global review of progress toward its 2030 targets. Finance day produced $60 million in pledges to the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, and donors added about $500 million to the Global Environment Facility and the GBFF. Total commitments to the facility's ninth replenishment now sit near $4.4 billion. Campaigners say that is a fraction of an estimated $700 billion annual shortfall, most of it harmful subsidies rather than missing grants.
UN News