Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jewish protesters have mobilized across Israel to resist mandatory military service requirements, staging demonstrations that disrupted major transportation routes throughout the country. The widespread protests featured participants chanting "better death than the army" and expressing willingness to face imprisonment rather than comply with conscription orders. Protest Locations and Police Response Demonstrators blocked critical highways in central, northern, and southern Israel, including Highway 4 near Bnei Brak and Bar-Lev Street in Jerusalem, where some protesters threw stones at vehicles and obstructed light-rail operations.

The Palestinian group Hamas on Wednesday welcomed an advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rebuking Israel over Gaza aid restrictions, saying the ruling confirms that Israel commits acts of genocide by deliberately starving Palestinians and cannot legally enforce settlement policies in the occupied territories. In a statement, the movement said the ICJ advisory opinion rejected Israel’s claims against the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and reaffirmed the vital humanitarian role of the agency and other UN institutions in providing aid to Palestinians in Gaza.

I attended my local No Kings rally near where I live in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. As I wrote on Facebook when I got home: “Just got home from my local No Kings march. Between the Hamasniks screaming ‘Death to Israel!’ and the antifa hooligans toting Bushmasters and all the other assorted terrorists, I barely got out of there with my life.”

President Trump’s unilateral, indiscriminate “drug boat” bombings have expanded from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean. “Yesterday, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel being operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization and conducting narco-trafficking in the Eastern Pacific,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on Wednesday. “The vessel was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was transiting along a known narco-trafficking transit route, and carrying narcotics.

BAGHDAD: Iraq has banned US user-generated videogame platform Roblox due to concerns over child safety, the government said, joining other countries in cracking down on virtual worlds. The government said late on Sunday that the ban was motivated by concerns that the game allowed direct communication between users in ways that exposed children and adolescents to attempts of exploitation or cyber-extortion, and that its content was “incompatible with social values and traditions.”

RAMALLAH: Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Yariv Levin said Wednesday he had ordered the deportation of 32 foreign activists who had helped Palestinians harvest olives in the occupied West Bank, on the grounds they violated a military order. Levin said the deportation order came after a complaint filed by Northern West Bank Settlements Council president Yossi Dagan, who said the activists were “anarchists who carried out provocations in the Samaria area.”

NEW YORK CITY: The US on Wednesday urged the UN Security Council to ease sanctions on Syria, saying this would be a crucial step in efforts to help stabilize the country and support its political transition. The US permanent representative to the UN, Mike Walz, told council members the Syrian government must seize the “historic opportunity” created by President Donald Trump’s decision to pursue sanctions relief for the country.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands: The International Court of Justice said on Wednesday that Israel must allow the UN aid agency in Gaza, known as UNRWA, to provide humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian territory. The Hague-based court was asked last year by the UN General Assembly to determine Israel’s legal obligations after the country effectively banned the agency, the main provider of aid to Gaza, from operating there.

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration has lifted a key restriction on Ukraine’s use of some long-range missiles provided by Western allies, enabling Kyiv to step up attacks on targets inside Russia and increase pressure on the Kremlin, U.S. officials said Wednesday. Ukraine used a British-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missile on Tuesday to strike a Russian plant in Bryansk that produced explosives and rocket fuel, the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces announced on social media.

Barclays BARC 4.87%increase; green up pointing triangle said it reviewed its entire credit book for financial weakness and other red flags after losing nearly $150 million from the sudden bankruptcy of subprime auto lender Tricolor. The British bank was a main lender to Tricolor, which collapsed amid allegations of fraud in September, raising concerns among investors about potential problems in opaque private lending.

0940 ET – U.S. natural gas futures extend their rally on the recent shift in the weather outlook away from overly mild to near normal for late October and early November. Still, cold air needed for substantially bullish outcomes remains scarce, Eli Rubin of EBW Analytics says in a note. “Price volatility is likely in a natural gas market torn between strong near-term supply and longer-term supply adequacy concerns for 2026.” Nymex natural gas is up 1.4% at $3.524/mmBtu. 

Front Month Comex Gold for October delivery lost $43.30 per troy ounce, or 1.06% to $4044.40 today —Down for two consecutive sessions —Down $292.00 or 6.73% over the last two sessions —Down three of the past four sessions —Lowest settlement value since Friday, Oct. 10, 2025 —Off 6.73% from its 52-week high of $4336.40 hit Monday, Oct. 20, 2025 —Up 57.63% from its 52-week low of $2565.70 hit Friday, Nov.

The U.K.’s competition watchdog said it would strengthen its monitoring of Alphabet’s GOOGL 0.24%increase; green up pointing triangle Google and Apple AAPL -2.35%decrease; red down pointing triangle mobile ecosystems under a new law governing business conduct for Big Tech, a setback for the companies as they face added scrutiny across the Atlantic. The Competition and Markets Authority said Wednesday that both Google and Apple’s mobile platforms qualify as companies with so-called strategic market status under the U.K.’s digital markets, competition and consumer law, which is designed to make it easier for the businesses that rely on tech giants’ ubiquitous services to reach customers.

Cable maker Prysmian is increasingly using recycled copper in the U.S. as Chinese buyers steer clear of the scrap market, its chief executive said, a sign of how trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies are rewiring commodity flows. Copper is a critical metal for modern infrastructure. It is essential for conducting electricity in power grids and a range of defense systems while data centers need it to power artificial-intelligence models, among other uses.

Interest in American M.B.A. programs is shrinking as schools in Asia boom, according to a new survey. Many international students are opting for schools closer to home amid worries about tighter U.S. visa restrictions and job security. Priscilla Chan is making a multibillion-dollar wager to outsmart disease. The de facto leader of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative—which she launched with her husband Mark Zuckerberg—is leading the group’s effort to unlock the hidden causes of disease.

U.S. crude oil inventories fell for the first time in four weeks as refineries raised their capacity use, according to data released Wednesday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Commercial crude oil stocks excluding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell by 961,000 barrels to 422.8 million barrels in the week ended Oct. 17 and were about 4% below the five-year average for the time of year, the EIA said.

The U.S. and Qatar sent a joint letter to the heads of European Union member states asking the bloc to repeal its corporate sustainability rules or scrap some of the provisions. The letter from U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Qatari Minister of State for Energy Affairs Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi sent on Wednesday said the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive will have unintended consequences for liquefied natural gas exports and the availability of affordable energy for EU consumers.

OpenAI twice loosened ChatGPT’s rules for discussing suicide in the year before 16-year-old Adam Raine took his own life using a method the chatbot advised him on, according to an amended lawsuit filed by his parents on Wednesday. Adam’s parents, Matthew and Maria Raine, sued OpenAI in August for the wrongful death of their son, saying he had spent more than 3½ hours a day conversing with ChatGPT, including about suicide, in the weeks before taking his own life by hanging in April.

The U.S. and Israel are considering a plan that would divide Gaza into separate zones controlled by Israel and Hamas, with reconstruction only taking place on the Israeli side as a stopgap until the militant group can be disarmed and removed from power. Vice President JD Vance and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner summarized the thinking in a news conference Tuesday in Israel, where they had arrived to press both sides to…

Israel must allow the United Nations’ aid agency to deliver humanitarian aid in Gaza, the International Court of Justice said Wednesday, labeling the country as an occupying power. The nonbinding opinion by the top U.N. court, requested by the U.N. General Assembly last year to clarify the protections that member states must provide to their staff, carries little practical weight. A bigger issue is the stability of…

Federal Reserve officials, who are unable to receive U.S. economic statistics because of the continuing government shutdown, recently lost access to a separate measure of employment data from a third-party provider. Since at least 2018, payroll-processing company ADP has provided the Fed with access to a data set that includes anonymized information on employment and earnings for millions of workers.

0950 ET – The pressure on gold futures continues, with the most-active contract down 0.9% to roughly $4,071 a troy ounce—that’s after a 5.7% slide Tuesday. “The catalyst appears to be profit-taking in a market that has been hugely overbought in recent weeks,” says ING in a note. “Clearly, market participants were getting increasingly nervous over the sustainability of the uptrend.” While gold is sinking, silver is posting a slight bounce, with the most-active contract up 0.7% to just over $48 a troy ounce after plummeting 7.2% in the prior session. 

0845 ET – The Bank of England could face hurdles evaluating risks in the U.K. private credit market as it lacks direct regulatory oversight on the sector, ING’S Marine Leleux says in a note. BOE policymakers Andrew Bailey and Sarah Breeden on Tuesday told the parliamentary Financial Services Regulation Committee about plans to conduct a system-wide stress test on the U.K.

1133 ET – Canada’s telcos may have hit a pricing equilibrium, that though delicate, could last through 2027, RBC’s Drew McReynolds says. In a report, the analyst says that the sector is now beyond the trough with respect to pricing, growth, valuations and sentiment. He notes the equilibrium is one major pricing or promotional change away from disruption, but “we see more reasons than not why this equilibrium should be sustainable through 2026/2027.” He says this is because the sector needs revenue growth and debt reduction, while their new national competitor, Quebecor, is driven to grow profits to fund network expansion and protect its home market.

0907 ET – Onshore equipment orders for GE Vernova’s wind business in the U.S. are still soft due to regulatory headwinds, CEO Scott Strazik says on a call with analysts. Those customers still face permitting delays and tariff uncertainty, which will probably weigh on the power company’s 2026 onshore revenue, he says. “The onshore volume trajectory remains too difficult to call,” the CEO says.