The European Union is preparing a comprehensive five-year defense strategy, including the creation of a 'drone wall' designed to counter threats from Russia and Belarus.

India "can't do it immediately, it's a little bit of a process," Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

Data: The Conference Board and The Business Council; Chart: Axios Visuals A key measure of CEO confidence dipped slightly lower into negative territory, according to a survey of executives out Thursday morning. * About two-thirds said they expect stagflation over the next year and a half. Why it matters: It's a sign of the uncertain business environment — as leaders grapple with a constantly changing policy landscape, particularly around tariffs. --- By the numbers: Confidence dipped one point from the previous quarter, to 48, per the report from the Conference Board, a nonpartisan think tank and the Business Council, an association of CEOs. * A number below 50 reflects more negative than positive responses. * 64% of CEOs said that they are preparing for a mild economic slowdown with slightly increased inflation pressure — a one-two punch known as stagflation. * Only 22% said they were preparing for a "balanced economy with trend growth and gradual reduction in inflation pressure." Friction point: The CEOs said geopolitical, cyber and AI are their top concerns. * While 81% said they expect AI to "fundamentally change most job roles in their organization within five years," only 9% said that's already happening. The big picture: The White House's trade policy has bounced around all year. At the moment, President Trump is threatening 100% tariffs on Chinese goods, a move that would be devastating for American companies. "There is still a lot of uncertainty overall in terms of economic policy, in terms of geopolitical events," Stephanie Guichard, a senior economist at the Conference Board, tells Axios. * Policy has changed so fast in the past 10 months, it takes time to figure out where we are going, she adds. Yes, but: Confidence has bounced back from the big dip it took last spring when the president's initial "Liberation Day" tariff announcement rocked markets. * And the share of CEOs who say they plan on increasing hiring and capital investment increased from the previous quarter. How it works: From Sept. 22 through Oct. 6, the Conference Board surveyed 130 CEOs in the Fortune Global 500, most of them in the U.S.

I am not celebrating the end of the ‘war’ because this was not a war – and it’s not over, either Thank you, Donald Trump. Thank you, Benjamin Netanyahu. Thank you, Jared Kushner. Let’s all pause, shall we, and have a moment of appreciation for these three wise men who have finally brought peace to the Middle East. Blessed are the peacemakers! And, of course, thank you to the Israeli military which, as a US taxpayer, I have done my part to help fund. To echo Kushner: “Instead of replicating the barbarism of the enemy, [Israel] chose to be exceptional.” Continue reading...

Russia is winning less territory in the Ukraine war as it redeploys forces.

In a Knesset speech, Trump urged Israel to reconcile with its longtime foe Iran. Both governments dismissed the idea Amid the fanfare accompanying Donald Trump’s trip to the Middle East and Israel’s ceasefire with Hamas, one aspect of the US president’s pitch as a peacemaker went relatively unscrutinised. In the highly unlikely setting of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, Trump proffered an olive branch to an even less likely recipient: the Jewish state’s arch enemy, Iran. Continue reading...

States are battling for their piece of $50 billion in federal rural health funding, but it's not just hospitals vying for the money. Tech startups and policy demands are raising the stakes as Medicaid cuts loom.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has appointed Olha Reshetylova (Kobylynska) as Ukraine’s Military Ombudsman.

Top Democrats in Pennsylvania are maneuvering to run against Sen. John Fetterman in a 2028 primary contest, threatening to tear the party apart in the biggest battleground state in the nation. Why it matters: Democrats haven't flipped a GOP Senate seat since Fetterman did it in 2022. He's still popular with Pennsylvania voters, even as Democrats turn on him over his softened approach to President Trump. --- * Potential Democratic challengers are already bashing Fetterman — and each other — years ahead of schedule. * Some Democratic officials are openly contemplating running against Fetterman or keeping the door open to a Senate bid in the event he retires. The big picture: Democrats who could run against Fetterman include Reps. Brendan Boyle and Chris Deluzio and former Rep. Conor Lamb, according to multiple political insiders in Pennsylvania. * 1️⃣ Boyle has been loudly critical of Fetterman on TV and social media, calling him "Trump's favorite Democrat" and accusing him of visiting the president at Mar-a-Lago to "kiss the ring." * 2️⃣ Deluzio has been cultivating a national brand as a young populist leader from the Rust Belt. * 3️⃣ Lamb has won the praise of progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for repeatedly attacking Fetterman, who beat Lamb in the 2022 Democratic primary. The other side: When Axios began reporting on this story, Fetterman texted, "Enjoy your clickbait!" * Asked a follow-up question, Fetterman said, "Please do not contact." * Fetterman later shared an article about a report from a conservative group showing that he is among "the least Trump-aligned Democratic lawmakers" in Pennsylvania, voting with the president 6% of the time. He highlighted that the analysis showed Boyle voting with Trump nearly 14% of the time. * "ACTUAL NUMBERS," Fetterman said. "less clicks." The intrigue: Fetterman has long held presidential ambitions, according to people who know him. * Fetterman did not respond to a question about whether he would run for reelection to the Senate or president in 2028. What they're saying: Asked by Axios if they'll run for Fetterman's seat, the three potential 2028 contenders did not rule it out. * Boyle acknowledged he has a choice to make: "Right now I'm focused on doing all I can to ensure Democrats win back the House in 2026. … After that, I will make a decision about 2028." He's started to build his statewide profile, and activists and labor leaders have encouraged him to challenge Fetterman, said a person familiar with the talks. * Deluzio sidestepped the question, saying he is concentrating on statewide judicial races this year and the midterm elections in 2026. He's appeared at multiple events outside his district, including high-profile rallies with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). He's helped recruit and endorse congressional candidates around the state. * Lamb, an attorney, said he was "in the middle of a trial" and could not immediately talk about the race. Between the lines: A person close to Deluzio said he would take a "good look" at a Senate bid if Fetterman declines to run for reelection. * Deluzio, who hails from the same area as Fetterman, has not been as openly critical of the senator as other Democrats, but he has publicly disagreed with him on policy. * Some former Fetterman aides believe he won't run for the Senate again because he dislikes Washington, D.C. and is now on a political island. Zoom in: A majority of Democratic voters in Pennsylvania disapprove of the way Fetterman is handling his job, according to a September Quinnipiac poll. * "There's a possibility of an opening in 2028, certainly, given the trajectory he is on with Democrats," said J.J. Balaban, a Philadelphia-based Democratic strategist. * There has been rampant speculation in political circles that Fetterman may switch parties, but he has said repeatedly he will not leave the Democratic Party. Zoom out: Fetterman enjoys a positive approval rating overall with voters in his state, which Trump has won twice. * As Democrats look for a way out of the wilderness after losing last year's elections, they have been vigorously debating whether to welcome more moderate and conservative people into the party. * Pennsylvania's 2028 Senate primary will test the size of their big tent. The bottom line: In a sign that Democrats are already looking to outdo each other ahead of a 2028 Senate race, Deluzio took a thinly veiled swipe at Boyle over his recent attacks on Fetterman. * "Keeping a good working relationship with the senior senator matters a lot more to my constituents than taking opportunistic shots at him," Deluzio told Axios without naming names. * Boyle said in response that he had "been quiet" about his concerns about Fetterman for a long time, but that changed a few months ago when he realized the senator's knocks on the party had "such a detrimental effect" on "how congressional Democrats were being perceived."

The Trump administration is working to help establish a multinational security force for Gaza, vet potential Palestinian civilian leaders, and take the first steps toward rebuilding the enclave, two senior advisers to President Trump told reporters. The big picture: The first week of peace in Gaza has been marked by joyful reunions as well as public executions. An Israeli withdrawal but also deadly clashes. And a peace process that is proceeding as envisioned but is already facing its first potential crisis. --- * Two years of war are over, the exchange of live hostages and prisoners is complete, aid is flowing and bulldozers are arriving to begin clearing away the rubble. * But Gaza's future — who governs, who provides security, what happens to Hamas and to the Israeli occupation force — is still unsettled. State of play: The two Trump advisers told reporters on Wednesday that they're pressing both sides to move into the next phase of the peace process, which involves tackling those big questions. * They also want to begin the rebuilding process in parts of Gaza that are outside Hamas control, particularly the city of Rafah on the border with Egypt. The advisers hope Rafah can become an example for a post-Hamas Gaza. * In the meantime, their priorities are avoiding further clashes along the "yellow line" dividing Israeli and Hamas-controlled Gaza, streamlining aid deliveries, and ensuring Hamas returns the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages. Zoom in: Israeli officials warned President Trump's envoys on Wednesday that the peace process could stall unless Hamas fulfills its obligations around deceased hostages, two Israeli officials and a U.S. official told Axios. * An immediate breakdown was averted when Hamas returned several bodies and Israel backed off its threats of retaliation. * But Hamas now says it doesn't have any additional remains to return, and recovering more will require "efforts and special equipment." Israeli officials acknowledge some of the bodies will be hard to locate, but claim between 15 and 20 could be quickly returned. Between the lines: The U.S. advisers didn't seem to accept the Israeli argument that a failure by Hamas to immediately return more bodies would constitute a violation of the deal. * Both Israeli and U.S. officials close to the process are concerned that hardliners within the Netanyahu government will use the issue to undermine the deal and push for the resumption of the war. Meanwhile on the ground in Gaza, Hamas has sent its security forces into the streets and launched a bloody crackdown. * Hamas has publicly executed alleged collaborators and has also engaged in firefights with rival militias — sparking concerns the group is reasserting control, rather than preparing to give it up. * Trump said Sunday that the U.S. "gave them approval for a period of time" to enforce security, and even said approvingly that the group had taken out "a couple of gangs that were very bad." * However, CENTCOM Commander Brad Cooper on Wednesday urged Hamas to "immediately suspend violence and shooting at innocent Palestinian civilians." Friction point: The deal calls for Hamas to disarm, but the U.S. advisers said Hamas is concerned its fighters will be vulnerable to rival groups if they immediately lay down their arms. * They said they're working with the Turkish, Qatari and Egyptian mediators to define what demilitarization means and how the process should proceed. * The U.S. also wants to create a pathway for Palestinians who feel threatened by Hamas to cross into Israeli-controlled Gaza, the advisers said, adding that Israel supports the idea. There has also been bloodshed along the new line of control behind which Israeli forces have withdrawn. * Israeli forces reportedly killed two Palestinians on Wednesday and five a day earlier. In both cases, Israel said its troops opened fire on "suspects" approaching their positions. * Apart from those incidents along the yellow line, the ceasefire has held. Israel still controls around half of Gaza's territory under phase one of the deal. * The advisers said countries including Indonesia, the UAE, Egypt and Azerbaijan were prepared to contribute troops to a multinational stabilization force. The intrigue: The U.S. is also helping to vet potential members of the technocratic government that's supposed to take control of Gaza, including members of the Palestinian diaspora who wish to return home, the advisers said. What to watch: Negotiating phase two is expected to be extremely difficult, especially when it comes to the demilitarization of Gaza and the conditions under which Israeli forces will pull further back. * Trump claimed to have brought peace to the Middle East for the first time in 3,000 years on Wednesday. But he also warned that if Hamas refuses to disarm voluntarily, it will be done forcibly — possibly even by resuming the war.

The White House and Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, are in a war of words over AI regulation. Why it matters: AI may be the century's most consequential technology, possibly even determining the geopolitical order, and rules are (or aren't) being written right now. --- Catch up quick: Jack Clark, Anthropic's cofounder and policy head, on Monday shared a short essay titled "Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear." * It argues that too many people are pretending that AI cannot threaten humanity, and that we need to acknowledge a different reality before figuring out how to "tame it and live together." * White House AI czar David Sacks responded by claiming that "Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering." Behind the scenes: The fight is as much about state-level regulations as it is federal ones. * The White House supported a 10-year moratorium on state-level AI laws, proposed as part of the Big Beautiful Bill negotiations, arguing that 50 different rules in 50 different states would sow chaos and slow innovation. * Anthropic called the moratorium "too blunt" and, after it failed to become law, endorsed a major piece of AI legislation in California. Zoom out: Both sides support some sort of federal policy, although Sacks' driving philosophy so far has been to unwind federal safety work and "let them cook." A big question for the White House is if Sacks is being hypocritical when accusing Anthropic of "regulatory capture" — given that Sacks and others on the White House AI policy team hail from monied tech interests in Silicon Valley. A big question for Anthropic is if it's being hypocritical when it expresses "appropriate fear" while spending (and raising) billions for the sake of AI advancement. The bottom line: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly supported Kamala Harris for president, and has been noticeably absent from White House tech events — ceding that ground to rivals like OpenAI. * His company's regulatory efforts may help it recruit other safety-first researchers, but it won't help Anthropic gain traction in Trump's D.C.

Donald Trump has again said he’d pressure Fifa to remove 2026 World Cup games from a host city on the basis of that city’s politics, with Boston becoming the third such city to receive such a threat from the US president. Trump also said he would consider a similar action against Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympics on account of potential safety issues. Trump has no legal authority to directly take either action, but he can apply pressure to each competition’s governing body to move host cities. * Could Trump really move World Cup games? The facts behind his threats * Trump threatens removal of World Cup games from Boston, Olympics from LA Continue reading...

A project to grind the rubble created by the Russian invasion into cement is currently undergoing trials inside Ukraine.

On the night of October 16, the Russians carried out another massive attack on Ukraine's gas infrastructure.

The Californian city is the latest place President Donald Trump wants to send federal troops to.

The AI boom is built on a series of bets that the logic of exponential growth will drive the future. How it works: Exponential doesn't just mean "number keeps going up." It means "number keeps going up faster." --- The industry's belief is that perpetually steepening curves will continue to... * improve AI technology itself; * accelerate human demand for its fruits; and * supercharge society's ability to quench AI's thirst for chips, power and data. Why it matters: The tech industry's gamble is one that the rest of the world has now bought into by shoveling trillions of dollars onto the table. Friction point: AI makers expect AI itself to reinforce its own progress in a virtuous cycle. Skeptics fear AI will hit a wall and trigger a global financial meltdown. Exponential curves, with their steadily repeated doublings, can proceed forever in the abstract — but in the real world, every growth plot eventually hits some kind of limit. * Moore's Law, the exponential principle of semiconductor improvement that governed the rise of personal computing, eventually hit the physical limitations of energy dissipation at the atomic level. * Metcalfe's Law, another exponential concept of network value that drove the rise of the internet and social media, hit the limits of human population and imperfect human institutions. AI can't escape reaching its own limits unless it somehow proves to be different from every other revolutionary human invention that preceded it. * AI optimists believe the key to that difference lies in the scenario where AI starts to build itself. * They envision a "take-off" moment when already-rapid advances in AI capacity and reliability start being driven by AI models rewriting themselves in a feedback loop. * The power of this kind of recursive self-improvement drives every scenario of AI utopia or doomsday. Yes, but: Exponential equations are elegant closed systems that produce reliably reproducible results. Our world is messily interdependent and our creations fail in sudden, unpredictable ways. * "Everything is deeply intertwingled," tech visionary Ted Nelson famously noted a half-century ago. "People keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't." AI's machine-learning models are themselves neural networks that represent information in an "intertwingled" way. * But their most successful makers — at OpenAI, Google and Anthropic — have all converged on a brute-force, growth-driven route to the future guided by "scaling laws" that map model size to improved performance. * The leaders of these companies believe that if we keep building the same kind of models bigger and bigger, they will keep getting better — until one day they cross the mysterious "take-off" line into self-improvement. The other side: History suggests that AI's growth in power and usage will eventually level off because, in the real world, every exponential curve eventually flattens. The open question is how far the AI curve can go — how many doublings we can put the technology through — before it reaches a limit. * The limit could be environmental, as AI data center demand for power and water exceeds what nations can support and/or climate disasters trigger revulsion at the technology's wastefulness. * The limit could be financial, if external factors (war, pandemic, political instability) or internal problems (revenue disappointments, technical logjams) cause markets to flip from manic to depressive. * Or the limit could just be a broader disillusionment with AI itself if its hyperbolic promises — personalized PhD tutors! Aging reversed! Universal abundance, and Mars, too! — fail to pan out. Our thought bubble: Silicon Valley is capitalist to the core, and growth is the ideology of capitalism. * But growth without an equitable distribution plan can be a recipe for corruption and discontent. And growth without an ethical compass is a blueprint for exploitation and chaos. * "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell," as the environmentalist Edward Abbey once said. The AI industry has learned the "bitter lesson" that it should stop trying to teach machines a structured set of facts and instead just build ever-bigger machines that know how to learn. * But if it continues to focus on growth for its own sake and fails to steer its growth in a purposeful way, it could have more bitter lessons in store. The bottom line: The trillion-dollar choice AI asks each of us to make is, are we willing to believe that "this time is different" — or do we stick with "what goes up must come down."

The most likely future government of the Czech Republic may be less supportive of Ukraine, but is unlikely to block military aid to Kyiv if it is in the Czech interests, including in international forums.

The deployment of a naval task group to Southeast Asia is likely to help Russia strengthen ties with countries in the region.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine has strongly condemned mass searches conducted by Russian occupation security forces in the homes of Crimean Tatars in several districts of Crimea.

ADF, a conservative Christian lobby group that counts among its allies JD Vance, has stated that its goal is to see abortion rights curtailed in Britain Nigel Farage’s obsession with free speech has become the mood music of his own party, the Conservatives and the BBC, so it shouldn’t have been shocking or troubling to learn that he’d testified in the US Congress on 3 September on the subject of this elemental liberty, and how profoundly at risk it is in the UK. His position we could recite in our sleep – it hasn’t deviated, and remains nonsense on stilts. Free speech is only at risk in the UK insofar as 80-year-olds can now be arrested for opposing genocide with homemade placards, and that’s quite a big “only”. But in Nigel’s upside-down world he is remorselessly censored, and a leftist cabal is still calling the shots – and will only get stronger. The troubling element wasn’t what he said, but who orchestrated his appearance. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

President Trump said the judge should be "ashamed" after learning of the verdict.

As a result of drone attacks targeting energy facilities in Russia’s Volgograd region overnight on October 15–16, a fire broke out at an electrical substation.

On the night of October 16, Russian forces attacked Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, halting operations at gas production facilities in the Poltava region.

Melissa Tran is back in Maryland after federal immigration authorities detained her more than five months ago over a non-violent conviction two decades earlier.

President pushes hyperbolic claims of out-of-control crime as city leaders say no need for ‘Trump’s personal army’ Donald Trump suggested Wednesday that San Francisco could be the next city he targets with federal troops, threatening a deployment that local and state officials have said is unnecessary and unwelcome. Speaking at the White House to FBI director Kash Patel, the president said: “I’m going to be strongly recommending, at the request of government officials … that you start looking at San Francisco … one of our great cities 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and now it’s a mess … Every American deserves to live in a community where they’re not afraid of being mugged, murdered, robbed, raped, assaulted or shot.” Continue reading...