World
Iran's foreign minister says Tehran has agreed a plan with Qatari mediators to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within two days if the United States meets its conditions, while President Trump says talks are going fine but that he is in no hurry. The diplomacy was complicated by an attack on a Qatari liquefied natural gas tanker in the Arabian Gulf, confirmed by operator Nakilat and condemned by the UAE. Oman is being discussed as a possible broker of a wider Gulf non-aggression pact. Shipping and energy markets are watching Doha closely, and any reopening is expected to be phased rather than immediate.
Al Jazeera
Politics
A federal judge has dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit that sought to block certification of Alaska's Senate results if Republican Senator Dan Sullivan loses. Sullivan said he would honour the outcome of the vote regardless of the ruling. The decision lands a day before midterm elections in which all 435 House seats and 35 Senate seats are being contested. Democrat Mary Peltola, who is running for the Senate seat, delayed campaign events after sustaining minor injuries in a car crash. The case was one of several legal fights over election administration in the closing week of the campaign.
NBC News / Al Jazeera
Business
Binance says it will cover customer losses after an attacker moved about $6.36 billion out of its wallets across ten blockchains on 29 October, the largest crypto theft on record and roughly four times the Bybit hack of 2025. The exchange suspended withdrawals on several networks and later said around $3 billion had been located and frozen across exchanges, while Tether and Circle froze about $2.38 billion. Blockchain analytics firms have linked the attack to a North Korea-associated group. Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said the investigation had not yet identified the attackers.
Reuters / TRM Labs
Technology
GitHub's Octoverse 2026 report says AI agents started more than 40% of pull requests on the platform in September 2026, about 110 million, up from 17% in March. Developers pushed code 17.9 billion times over the year, more than 2024 and 2025 combined. Agent-started pull requests touched multiple files 87% of the time, against 79% for human-started ones. GitHub says the surge has strained its infrastructure and contributed to repeated outages. The report shifts the debate from whether agents are used to how much review work they create.
GitHub Octoverse 2026
Science
An international study led by Mass General Brigham found that a blood test for phosphorylated tau 217 predicted Alzheimer's-related cognitive decline years before symptoms appeared. Among 2,684 older adults with normal cognition at enrolment, those with very high p-tau217 levels had a 38% chance of impairment within five years and a 78% estimated chance within ten, though longer-term data were thinner. The marker added information beyond amyloid PET scans and the APOE4 gene. Results were presented at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference and published in JAMA.
Mass General Brigham / ScienceDaily
Sports
The Milwaukee Brewers beat the Tampa Bay Rays 4-1 in Game 5 to win the first World Series title in franchise history. The club from the smallest market in Major League Baseball built its run on pitching, defence and contact hitting rather than power. The Rays had forced a deciding game with a two-run rally in the 12th inning, keeping the series alive after trailing three games to one. Milwaukee's win ends a drought that stretched back to the team's only previous World Series appearance in 1982.
Associated Press / ABC News
Health
A randomised trial called RESET for Remission found that a low-energy diet plus supervised exercise put type 2 diabetes into remission in 54% of younger adults after 24 weeks, against 4% in a usual-care group. Remission meant HbA1c below 6.5% without glucose-lowering medication for at least 12 weeks. The trial enrolled 96 people with early-onset type 2 diabetes and published its results in the Lancet Regional Health - Americas. Researchers said the programme is demanding, and that support will decide whether it works outside a trial.
The Lancet Regional Health - Americas / ScienceDaily
Environment
The World Meteorological Organization forecasts a seasonal average sea surface temperature anomaly of about +3.8C in the central and eastern tropical Pacific for November to January, the highest since records began and well above the +2.6C peak of 2015-16. It puts the likelihood of El Nino persisting through February 2027 at near 100%. The forecast follows UNEP's Emissions Gap Report 2026, which says holding warming to 1.5C without overshoot is no longer possible and calls for an 18% cut in emissions by 2030 against a 2025 baseline.
WMO / UNEP