MotoGP, Moto2, and Moto3 teams are heading to Sepang International Circuit in Malaysia this weekend for Round 19 of the 2026 FIM MotoGP World Championship. From October 30 to November 1, the paddock returns to the 3.44-mile (5.54-kilometer) circuit as the overseas campaign enters its final round. Following Jorge Martin's crash at Phillip Island and with Marco Bezzecchi now 50 points behind Marc Marquez, every point becomes crucial as the championship battles intensify. Below, find the latest team press releases ahead of the Malaysian Grand Prix.

More, from a press release issued by Aprilia Racing:

Aprilia Racing ready for Malaysia challenge. 

MotoGP's flyaway tour continues in Malaysia, at the Petronas Sepang International Circuit, for the nineteenth round of the season.
 
Jorge Martín will travel to Malaysia despite the non-displaced fracture of the distal radius he sustained during the sprint. The Spaniard is undergoing the prescribed treatment, and his fitness will be assessed over the coming days ahead of the Grand Prix.
 
Marco Bezzecchi heads to Sepang after taking fourth in the Phillip Island sprint. Sunday's long race, however, was cancelled because poor visibility prevented the medical helicopter from operating.
 
The Petronas Sepang International Circuit, some 50 km from Kuala Lumpur, is one of the world championship's historic venues. At 5,540 metres, it is the second-longest circuit in the championship, with 15 corners: 10 right-handers and five left-handers. It is known for its demanding braking zones, particularly the first and the last, with hard deceleration and a difference of more than 200 km/h between entry and exit speed.

Jorge Martin: I'm getting the treatment I need to recover from the injury and arrive at Sepang in the best possible shape. It's impossible to make any predictions. We have to assess the situation day by day.

Marco Bezzecchi: I can't wait to get to Sepang, especially since we couldn't race at Phillip Island. I'm happy to be going back to a track as fantastic as Sepang. Let's hope the weather is kind to us and that we can carry on with the work we're doing.

More, from a press release issued by Honda HRC Castrol:

Mir set for Malaysian GP return alongside Marini. 

After retiring from the San Marino GP and missing the four subsequent Grands Prix, Joan Mir is targeting a return to action in Sepang alongside Luce Marini.

The Honda HRC Castrol team will be aiming to be back at full strength for the Malaysian GP, Joan Mir given approval by his medical team to return to action and Luca Marini's condition improving day-by-day. A circuit with fond memories and past successes, the Sepang International Circuit is the perfect launch pad for a strong final push in 2026.

Ruled unfit in Australia due to a virus, Luca Marini will need to undertake a medical check before his participation in the Malaysian round can be confirmed. Having focused exclusively on his recovery since Friday, the Italian has felt his strength return and is eager to reunite with his team. Sepang has seen the #10 score points consistently with Honda, achieving a best finish of eighth place in 2025 at the 5.5-kilometre-long track. With the cancellation of the Australian round, this weekend is set to be his 200th Grand Prix start.

A welcome return to his Honda RC213V is on the horizon for Joan Mir, the #36 having put in an impressive amount of work behind the scenes to overcome his medical issue. The 2020 MotoGP World Champion is focusing on getting back into the rhythm of a MotoGP weekend, having last ridden the 1,000cc machine on September 13. With thousands of testing miles collected across the years, the Sepang International Circuit is a familiar place for Mir to return as he targets a final flourish of success in his last four races as a Honda HRC rider.

After the wild weather of Phillip Island, the entire MotoGP World Championship will no doubt have their eyes tuned to the sky throughout the weekend looking for the typical Malaysian rainstorms.

Luca Marini: "Unfortunately we couldn't do more than a couple of laps in Phillip Island and since Friday I have been fully focused on recovering as much as possible. I am starting to feel better and have been able to return to the gym, but a MotoGP bike is always something different. Sepang is a physically demanding circuit with the conditions, certainly it will be a weekend where we change the approach a little bit to make sure we have enough energy for Sunday and a lot also depends on what the weather does. We have to do the medical test before the weekend, but I don't think it will be a problem."

Joan Mir:"It hasn't been an easy period, and I want to thank everyone close to me for helping to keep focused and working towards the end goal. I've been able to do some riding with different kinds of bikes in the past week, and the doctors have given me the green light to return. I am really looking forward to seeing the team again and seeing what we can do in these final races of the year. Sepang is a circuit which holds some good memories for me and for us as Honda and I think it's the correct decision to return at such a familiar track. The most important point of the weekend is to get back on the bike, reconnect with the team and check my feeling."

More, from a press release issued by Ducati Lenovo Team:

Ducati Lenovo Team faces the Sepang challenge seeking the tenth win in red.

19th race of 2026 with the MotoGP circus flying to the Sepang International Circuit. A demanding track and a scorching, very humid climate that will put everyone to the test. A track where the Desmosedici GP boasts a great tradition with 9 victories: from the first successes with Loris Capirossi (1) in 2005 and the dominance of Casey Stoner (2), to the wins of Andrea Dovizioso (2), up to the recent triumphs of Pecco Bagnaia (2) and Enea Bastianini (1). In 2025, the red bike from Borgo Panigale confirmed expectations with Pecco's victory on Saturday and Alex Márquez's (1) victory in Sunday's GP.

After the Sprint at Phillip Island that allowed him to return to first place in the general standings, Marc Márquez is ready to continue being a key player in a crucial weekend for the Championship. A track very different from the Australian one and weather conditions that need to be managed as best as possible.

Coming off a tough weekend in Australia, Pecco Bagnaia arrives in Malaysia ready to bounce back on one of his favorite overseas circuits, an iconic track where he has always been among the most competitive.

Marc Márquez (#93, Ducati Lenovo Team): "Sepang is a completely different track compared to Phillip Island, and the weather here always makes everything more challenging. Saturday's race in Australia gave me a great boost, but we must stay focused: the goal is to keep playing a leading role and manage every session and effort as best we can".

Francesco Bagnaia (#63, Ducati Lenovo Team): "In Australia it wasn't an easy weekend, but Sepang is one of the overseas tracks I love the most. Here the Desmosedici GP has been able to make the difference, and we have wonderful memories. We will work hard right from Friday to immediately find the right feeling and play our cards over the weekend".

More, from a press release issued by VR46 Team:

The Pertamina Enduro VR46 Racing Team goes to Sepang International Circuit, where this weekend the Malaysian GP - the penultimate round of the Overseas - will take place.

MotoGP gets ready to face the second back-to-back weekend of the Overseas and this weekend hits the track at the Sepang International Circuit. The Pertamina Enduro VR46 Racing Team is eager to race at the Malaysian GP after the cancellation of Sunday's race at Phillip Island due to bad weather. Fabio Di Giannantonio and Franco Morbidelli's goal is to confirm the good feelings and the steps forward in this last part of the Asian races.

Di Giannantonio arrives to Sepang in sixth place in the World Standing with 252 points, and he is ready to replicate the good performances of Australia, where he claimed a Sprint podium. On the Malaysian track, the winter tests usually take place, and this weekend won't be the first approach of the year. However, Sepang is different compared to Phillip Island, and this will represent a new challenge for Fabio, who got a sixth place in last year's race as his best result in MotoGP.

Morbidelli has great memories of the Sepang International Circuit, where he claimed two podiums in Moto2: a second place in 2016 and a third place in 2017. The latter result allowed him to be crowned World Champion in the intermediate class. Franco's best result in MotoGP on the Malaysian track is a fourth place he got both in last year's Sprint and race. The Italian-Brazilian rider's goal for the Malaysian GP is to continue making step forward, building on his solid performance on this track.

The Pertamina Enduro VR46 Racing Team will hit the track on Friday for Free Practice sessions, while Qualifying will take place on Saturday at ore 10:50 (local time, +8 UTC). The Sprint will get underway at 3:00 pm (local time, +8 UTC) on Saturday, while the Malaysian GP will conclude on Sunday with the main race, starting exceptionally at 3:00 pm (local time, +8 UTC).

Fabio Di Giannantonio: "We arrive to the Malaysian GP with positivity after the Sprint podium we claimed in Australia. Even if Sunday's race didn't take place, the good result of last Saturday gives us a lot of confidence heading to Sepang, despite being a completely different track from Phillip Island. Also, the conditions will be very different because it will be very hot, but it's a very beautiful track, I like it. In Malaysia, the goal will be to confirm the good feelings, and we aim to have a linear weekend, getting off to a good start right away just as we did so far. It will be a good challenge, and we are eager to go on track."

Franco Morbidelli: "I look forward to riding at Sepang, which is a very different track from Phillip Island. I like the track a lot and I have good memories: here I won the Moto2 World Title in 2017 and, overall, I've always been fast and got good results. This year, we're not where we want to be yet, and on this track, you need a good feeling to be fast. But we arrive to the Malaysian GP with confidence, and we continue working to be competitive again. So, this weekend's goal is the Top10 again."

More, from a press release issued by Monster Energy Yamaha:

Monster Energy Yamaha MotoGP to Return to Action in Sepang. 

Monster Energy Yamaha MotoGP's Fabio Quartararo and Álex Rins are determined to push to the limit at the Sepang International Circuit during this weekend's Grand Prix of Malaysia, Round 19 of the 2026 MotoGP World Championship.

Following the unfortunate cancellation of the race at Phillip Island last Sunday, the Monster Energy Yamaha MotoGP Team are eager to start the action again. They have travelled from Australia to Malaysia for Round 19 of the 2026 MotoGP World Championship, held this weekend at the Sepang International Circuit.

Fabio Quartararo holds on to 15th place in the championship standings, and he will be on the attack again this weekend. He has raced at the Sepang circuit eight times (in the Moto3 class in 2016, in Moto2 in 2017 and 2018, and in MotoGP in 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025) and never finished a full-length race outside the top 7. He came close to a podium in 2016, finishing fourth, and in 2018, 2023 and 2025, when he finished fifth. He had his first and only podium finish on Malaysian soil in 2022, when he secured third place despite riding with a hand injury sustained in a crash earlier that weekend.

Álex Rins arrives in Malaysia holding 20th place in the rankings. The Spaniard was disappointed for the fans that the race at Phillip Island didn't take place and is keen to make up for it with a good show this weekend. He is looking forward to the Malaysian GP, especially since Sepang historically is a good track for him. He secured second place there in 2013 and third place in 2014 in the Moto3 class, and in the premier class he rode to second place in 2018.

The Sepang International Circuit staged its first Grand Prix in 1999 and has been on the MotoGP calendar ever since. The 5.54 km track has a reputation for providing very exciting racing thanks to a mixture of slow and medium-to-high-speed corners (five left and ten right) and two long straights, the longest measuring 920 m. The circuit is also one of the longest tracks of the MotoGP season, and the riders have to negotiate it in extremely hot and humid conditions, making this GP extra challenging.

The Grand Prix of Malaysia is held in the GMT+8 time zone. FP1 will take place on Friday from 10:45-11:30 local track time and Practice will be held from 15:00-16:00. On Saturday, FP2 will be held from 10:10-10:40, and the qualifying sessions from 10:50-11:30, followed by the 10-lap Sprint at 15:00. On Sunday, Warm Up is held from 10:40-10:50 and the 20-lap Race will start at 15:00.

Fabio Quartararo: "I'm happy to be back in Sepang. It's a track that I enjoy, and normally the racing there is always interesting. The bike has changed since last year, so it will be important to see where we stand as quickly as possible on Friday. After what happened in Australia, everyone is looking forward to getting back on track and racing again. The Malaysian fans are always very passionate, and I'm excited to see them this weekend."

Alex Rins: "I'm really looking forward to racing in Sepang. After Phillip Island, all we want is to get back on the bike and put on a good show for the fans - for sure they were all disappointed last weekend. I've always enjoyed this track, and I've had some good results here in the past. The conditions can be quite tough because of the heat and humidity, but that's part of the challenge. We'll work hard from the first session, try to find a good feeling with the bike, and see what we can achieve during the weekend."

Massimo Meregalli - Team Director: "After an unusual end to the Australian GP weekend, our focus is now fully on Sepang. Historically, this circuit has often suited our package, and it is a track where both Fabio and Álex have achieved strong results in the past. We also have valuable reference data from our previous testing here, although the bike has continued to evolve since then. Sepang is always a demanding venue because of the heat, humidity, and the physical nature of the layout, but it also provides a good benchmark to assess performance. We are motivated to make the most of this weekend."

More, from a press release issued by Prima Pramac Yamaha:

Prima Pramac Yamaha MotoGP heads to Malaysia after a missed opportunity in Australia. 

After the cancellation of the Australian Grand Prix due to extreme weather, Prima Pramac Yamaha MotoGP heads straight to Sepang for the Malaysian Grand Prix. Jack Miller arrives looking to build on his strong performance at Phillip Island, while Augusto Fernandez continues his work with the team and aims to regain his race rhythm.

The cancellation of Sunday's Australian Grand Prix left Prima Pramac Yamaha MotoGP with a sense of a missed opportunity, particularly for Jack Miller. The Australian had shown strong pace throughout his home Grand Prix weekend, securing fifth on the grid and eighth in the Sprint, matching his best result of the season and scoring his first points in a Saturday race this year. The cancellation denied him the chance to race one last time at his beloved Phillip Island in front of his home fans, making the Sprint result an important memory from his final MotoGP appearance at the iconic venue. The team now turns its attention to Malaysia, where the next round of the championship takes place this weekend.

The Sepang International Circuit presents a different challenge for the YZR-M1. Its 5.543-kilometre layout features 15 corners and two long straights, including a 920-metre main straight, placing a strong emphasis on acceleration, braking stability and top speed. These characteristics could make it a demanding circuit for Yamaha, although Miller has previous experience of competitive results at Sepang, having finished sixth in 2022 and eighth in 2023.

Weather could also play a role in the weekend. Rain showers are common in Malaysia at this time of year, and wet conditions could offer Miller an opportunity to make the most of his strengths. The Australian showed encouraging pace in the wet at Phillip Island and will aim to carry that confidence into the Malaysian round, whatever conditions the team encounters.

For Augusto Fernandez, the priority remains building mileage on the YZR-M1 and getting back into the rhythm of racing. As Yamaha's test and development rider, he knows the bike well, but each race weekend provides valuable experience working with Prima Pramac Yamaha MotoGP and adapting to the team's approach. Sepang is a circuit he already knows, offering a useful opportunity to continue progressing and build confidence ahead of the final rounds of the season.

Jack Miller: "I'm looking forward to Malaysia. We've done plenty of laps around Sepang over the years, and it's a track I enjoy riding. It'll also be nice to get back to some warm weather, and hopefully we can have a positive weekend."

Augusto Fernandez: "I'm looking forward to Malaysia and to having another opportunity to keep improving with the team. Every lap is important for me at the moment, as I work to get back into the MotoGP race rhythm as quickly as possible. Sepang is a track I already know, which should help me focus on building my feeling with the bike and understanding the package better. We'll keep working step by step and make the most of the weekend, whatever the conditions."

Gino Borsoi - Team Director: "Of course, it's a shame for Jack and the whole team that we couldn't take part in the race. This was a particularly important occasion for Jack, as it was his final MotoGP Grand Prix at Phillip Island. At least he was able to race in the Sprint, where he delivered his best performance of the season, scored points and put Yamaha inside the top ten. He'll take that memory away with him, and it's one he truly deserves.
He could probably have achieved even more today, but these are the circumstances we have to accept. The riders' safety must always come first, and I believe Race Direction made the right decision."

The post MotoGP: Teams Are Ready For Sepang appeared first on Roadracing World Magazine | Motorcycle Riding, Racing & Tech News.

Around this time of year, elaborate decorations featuring ghosts, vampires, zombies, witches and werewolves adorn front doors, gardens and shop windows across the country.

But you may be surprised to hear that in the animal world, there are many real-life creatures with similar tendencies to these fictional characters of our Halloween nightmares.

The southern grasshopper mouse (Onychomys torridus) howls at the moon to defend its territory and attract mates, a little like werewolves in films. These nocturnal rodents stand up on their hind legs, point their nose upwards, and produce high-pitched sounds.

Grasshopper mice are voracious carnivores, preying upon scorpions, beetles, grasshoppers, and even other mice. They are also immune to the stings of their favourite food - the bark scorpion (Centruroides sculpturatus). Grasshopper mice can block the chemical pathway that transmits the signal from the venom, essentially numbing themselves to the pain. They then bite off the scorpion's tail, rendering their prey defenseless to their fate.

These little rodents are so formidable that they will unhesitatingly attack anything that is appropriately sized and considered to be food, even if it might be dangerous.

Small mammals, like grasshopper mice, play crucial ecological roles in their ecosystems. For example, through digging their burrows, they can act as ecosystem engineers (species that modify the environment) creating microhabitats for other species.

The emerald jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa) is a stunningly beautiful and ecologically important species. Not only do they act as casual pollinators for a range of plant species, they are also an essential biocontrol; an organism that controls the population of a pest species.

Over millions of years they have evolved the morbid ability to sting cockroaches and turn them into compliant zombies upon which they lay their eggs. When these eggs hatch, the larvae devour the zombified cockroach from the inside out.

Small birds called oxpeckers (Buphagus species) and large ungulates (hoofed mammals) were considered to have a mutually beneficial relationship. When these birds removed pesky ticks and other parasites from their mammalian companions, they were rewarded with a quick, tasty meal. Oxpeckers are often spotted travelling around on the backs of these larger animals.

However, research has highlighted that this relationship may be more complicated than previously thought. Oxpeckers will pick at open wounds to consume blood and flesh - inflicting injuries, preventing wound-healing, and increasing the risk of infection in their hosts.

Witches are well known for creating magical potions but some insects do this too. Bombardier beetles can blast would-be predators with explosive chemicals discharged from their abdomens at temperatures of 100°C. They do this by mixing hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide within their bodies in a small reaction chamber - their cauldron, if you will - to create this explosion.

Some other insects use chemicals not as a defence mechanism, but to woo a mate. This isn't an elixir of love, but instead the combination of a chemical and an enzyme (Luciferin and luciferase) that causes a beautiful, if slightly eerie, glow.

The fireflies of the family Lampyridae are actually beetles, whose males flash these colours enthusiastically to attract a waiting female from the undergrowth. Beauty and intrigue aside, fireflies are useful throughout their native range. As larvae they feed on many soft-bodied invertebrates, preventing pest outbreaks and maintaining maintaining a natural equilibrium of species in the soil and leaf litter.

Some frogs in the family Centrolenidae are so translucent, or ghost-like, that they have become known as glass frogs.

Found in the tropical forests of Central and South America, these extraordinary frogs spend much of their lives in the trees and play an important role in the ecosystem. They help regulate insect populations through predation and act as prey for a variety of other species, including in aquatic food webs as tadpoles inhabiting streams. In many ways, they occupy multiple levels of the rainforest ecosystem, linking both terrestrial and freshwater environments.

Come Halloween, many people embellish their houses with plastic skeletons and toilet-paper clad mummies. One insect does a similar thing - the aptly named bone-house wasp (Deuteragenia ossarium). Known for hunting another Halloween favourite, the spider, it decorates the nests it makes for its young with a pile of ant corpses. This morbid tableau provides sensory camouflage for the nest, keeping intruders well away.

All these species are important components of their ecosystems - from keeping pest populations in check or being prey themselves for other animals, to acting as ecological indicators allowing us to monitor environmental changes. Ecological indicator species are key species within ecosystems that help us understand more about how our impact on the planet is affecting other species. Animals respond to different things in the environment, so their populations and behaviours can indicate whether the environment is changing for the better or worse.

These animals may have some rather terrifying tendencies, but unlike the fantasy characters of our horror-film nightmares, they don't disappear after All Hallows' Eve. They also have real environmental benefits that endure.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

A lot of electric two-wheeler brands have confirmed a presence at EICMA 2026, which runs from 3 to 8 November at Fiera Milano Rho. The first two days are reserved for trade and press; the show opens to the public from 5 to 8 November.

The electric line-up, in alphabetical order, spans full-size electric motorcycles, urban scooters, off-road bikes and youth race machines. Most electric exhibitors are clustered in Halls 6, 9, 10 and 11. Below is what each brand has announced so far … Have a good visit at EICMA!

EXCLUSIVE Researchers identified at least 83 attacks against 61 public GitHub repositories, including popular open source projects such as Google LangExtract, Trivy, Brave browser, and MLflow, in what they suspect is a coordinated campaign to execute commands in CI/CD environments and steal credentials and access tokens.

It all happened very quickly, the Radware threat hunters said in an exclusive interview with The Register. Most (77) of the malicious items were published during a 43-minute time span on September 1, with the remaining six occurring within the next two minutes.

"Our guess is that the final aim was a supply-chain attack in which the attacker gains credentials for the repo, and then he has the power to change the contents - the code - as he wishes" and then push the malicious changes to others, Radware VP and researcher Gabi Nakibly told The Register.

Nakibly and fellow Radware researcher Zvika Babo say they suspect a single individual is behind this supply chain campaign. This attacker used 74 different GitHub accounts, many of which had legitimate development histories, meaning they were likely compromised.

"Considering that dozens of accounts posted the same type of payload, on the same day, within a narrow time window, and to the same infrastructure, it is reasonable to assess that the activity was coordinated," the team wrote in research shared ahead of publication with The Register.

They discovered the campaign while investigating prompt injection in GitHub - and they told us the attack chain is part of what makes this supply-chain campaign novel, and extremely stealthy.

First, the attacker publishes an issue, pull request, or comment containing malicious commands hidden in HTML comments. This ensures the content is not visible in the rendered page. Plus, a GitHub event - like a pull request or issue - can automatically trigger a workflow if the repository is configured to respond to that event, meaning the attacker can be pretty hands-off at this point.

"The workflow automatically is triggered within a second, and if the workflow is indeed vulnerable, then the attack is executed successfully," Nakibly said.

The workflow incorporates attacker-controlled content directly into shell source code, and the shell executes the hidden, malicious command, which hoovers up environment variables and attempts to exfiltrate those to an attacker-controlled server.

While the researchers examined logs from actual runs, and told us they found two cases containing evidence that the malicious command ran inside the automation environment, they can't definitively say whether the attacker successfully obtained repository write permissions, modified source code, or compromised downstream software. But they're trying.

"The big picture is that the attackers are trying to find every possible way to get inside the repos to get credentials," Nakibly said.

Plus, "the attacker doesn't need to compromise the repository or to have access to its codebase" to do this, Babo added. "Basically, every user with a GitHub account can try to run this attack - it's very easy to start this attack."

As of October 13, the threat hunters identified 83 GitHub items with a verified payload across 61 different repositories. The repos span AI frameworks, security tools, development infrastructure, databases, and other widely used open source software projects.

The Radware report lists agno-agi/agno (42.7K stars), ToolJet/ToolJet (41.1K), google/langextract (38.9K), aquasecurity/trivy (38.4K), CopilotKit/CopilotKit (38K), and podman-container-tools/podman (33K), among the most popular.

Other notable targets included QwenLM/qwen-code (28.5K), mlflow/mlflow (28.4K), discordjs/discord.js (26.8K), cilium/cilium (25.6K), brave/brave-browser (23.9K), dotnet/maui (23.3K), Homebrew/homebrew-cask (22.2K), github/docs (21K), apache/doris (16K), and PX4/PX4-Autopilot (12.8K).

"These projects are used by thousands of organizations," Babo said.

The researchers disclosed their findings to all of the projects' maintainers, and most of the repositories were closed or fixed, but they can't confirm that all of them were.

This campaign follows several earlier supply chain attacks against open source security and dev tools as attackers increasingly look for new methods to steal credentials and other secrets.

"There is no way to stop the attackers from attempting," Nakibly said. "The only way is to make sure that the workflow code is resilient, and not vulnerable to such attacks."

The researchers recommend applying least-privilege access to CI/CD workflows, and separating as much as possible workflows triggered by external events from jobs with elevated permissions.

"Developers should treat external content as untrusted, and also limit the secrets and environment variables that are available to the workflow," Babo said. ®

The Document Foundation (TDF) says LibreOffice has no built-in AI features and that its core developers do not use LLMs - but community contributors face different rules.

In a Fediverse post, someone who goes by the handle of argv[-1] highlights three LibreOffice commits this year that acknowledge the use of LLM coding assistants.

Two of them - Inheritance when setting paragraph style font size to 100% or +0pt and Enable relative font sizes in Calc cell styles - date from April and credit Claude with helping identify the fixes. More recently, September's Add Copy Image button to screenshot dialog acknowledges using GitHub Copilot in VS Code to generate the BitmapTransferable class, while the copyButtonHandler method was written manually with LLM/code-completion assistance.

This is hardly a fatal flaw - after all, it's getting hard to find any major FOSS project with absolutely no LLM-generated code in it these days.

However, The Document Foundation says that the leading FOSS office suite is AI-free. As we noted when it released version 26.8 in August, we interpret this statement as a jab at its former development partner Collabora. Back in June, we noted that increased AI integration was a headline feature in Collabora CODE 26.04. CODE is Collabora's web-based office suite, based on LibreOffice code.

TDF - the primary maintainer and custodian of LibreOffice since its 2010 fork from Oracle-controlled OpenOffice.org - has made the absence of built-in AI a selling point. In September, it published a blog post declaring that no AI is now a feature. Meanwhile, on October 21, TDF announced 9.4 million downloads over eight weeks - excluding Windows updates and downloads of older releases, which are counted separately. The foundation acknowledged that the reasons for the growth are difficult to determine.

TDF's direct response on Mastodon is dismissive:

"Ah, another high-quality Mastodon discussion. Again: No core developers use LLMs. We rely on contributions from the wider community and don't explicitly list tools people can't use - but we do require people disclose when they use LLMs and generally discourage the practice. We carefully review submissions by contributors to make sure the code quality is good and that the patch author understands their own code. LLMs are prohibited for students. That is not 'slop'."

In other words, TDF's approach resembles what some commenters have compared to the Debian approach: LLM coding assistants are permitted for some contributors, subject to disclosure and human review. For AI advocates, this is the only pragmatic response - which could be summarized as the "AI is just a tool" school of thought.

However, since this admission does seem to contradict the very visible public no-AI message, some LibreOffice users are really rather unhappy. Our favorite comment so far is from Argentinian developer Federico Schonborn, who slyly noted:

"When a bakery announces they won't put asbestos in their cake frosting you must not point out they're already putting asbestos in their cake filling, you see."

We asked TDF's spokesman Italo Vignoli for comment. He pointed us to TDF's Development/AI policy, and added:

"There isn't any departure from the public statements about LO 26.8, as they were about user features and not about development."

As "Skjeggtroll" succinctly put it:

"It strikes me as odd to ban all use of LLM for the commit message, but still allow its use for the actual code." ®

The wait for a new Raspberry Pi Zero may be nearly over, judging by the raspberrypi/linux repository.

Among the merged pull requests is one titled "Add device tree for Pi Zero 3 W and Pi 4A," suggesting new hardware is on the way, including a successor to the very long-in-the-tooth Pi Zero 2 W.

The board launched five years ago. Its 512 MB of memory was hardly generous, but it offered considerable bang for the buck. At the time, we reckoned performance was closer to the Raspberry Pi 3 than the flagship Pi 4, but perfectly adequate provided you didn't open too many browser tabs at once.

According to the source tree, as reported by Phoronix, the new board could use the Broadcom BCM271, up from the RP3A0 in the current Zero. If so, that would be a significant performance gain, though it's unclear whether the 1.5GHz clock speed of the Pi 4, which uses the same SoC, will be retained.

Heat is a concern as the Pi 4 gained a reputation for running hot under load without active cooling, and it throttles performance when temperatures climb. A board as small as the Zero will have even less room to shed heat.

Assuming that challenge can be met, it would be a worthy upgrade for the venerable Pi Zero 2. There is no word on how much memory it is likely to have - we can't imagine much given the current cost of RAM and the need to keep the price at least close to that of the Zero 2 W, which can still be had for around $18.

The code also hints at eMMC storage is mentioned, but that seems unlikely to reach the finished product, probably because of the cost.

Alongside the Pi Zero 3 W is a Raspberry Pi 4 Model A. Where the Zero 3 W is a clear upgrade, the 4 Model A looks more like a cost-cutting measure amid rising hardware prices. Model A boards typically have less memory, and no Ethernet port, and the 4A appears to have a single HDMI output rather than twp.

Things could change before any hardware ships. We asked Raspberry Pi if anything was in the pipeline, but the company said it had nothing to add.

Enthusiasts will welcome an upgraded Pi Zero after more than half a decade, provided the price is right and it doesn't run too hot. At the same time, a cut-down Pi 4 carries the whiff of inevitability in an era of rising component costs. ®

The artificial intelligence industry was poised to act as a kingmaker in the midterm elections.

Super PAC networks bankrolled with millions of dollars from Anthropic and OpenAI executives spent heavily in competitive primaries earlier this year, including a high-profile race in New York City. They were touted as the looming successor to another single-issue group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, as AIPAC moved its spending underground.

Yet as public outrage over data centers and AI's threat to jobs soared, artificial intelligence super PACs dramatically throttled back spending on congressional races compared to the primaries. The biggest AI super PAC network has spent only modestly ahead of next week's general election — and mostly in safe seats.

An Intercept analysis of AI spending in the 2026 midterms, based on Federal Election Commission records and independent race ratings, shows that only 5 percent of their direct expenditures have gone to contested general election races. The industry's avoidance of the contested races that could determine control of the next Congress suggest that the PACs have realized how the public has soured on the tech, campaign finance and industry observers told The Intercept.

Related AIPAC Isn't Retreating. Here's How It's Already Shaping the Next Congress.

"Essentially these companies underestimated how much the public despises the data center buildout, and the inescapability of AI systems that no one asked for that say they will automate jobs and maybe kill us all," said Rick Claypool, a research director for the president's office at Public Citizen, a nonprofit campaign finance watchdog.

Although there is still time for a last-minute flurry of spending, the story of AI's role in the 2026 midterm elections may turn out to be the story of a single race — a primary in New York — that forced the industry to step away from the limelight.

Claypool's group released an analysis earlier this year of "corporate supremacist" super PACs, a new breed of campaign committees modeled on a crypto super PAC called Fairshake that spent tens of millions on the 2024 elections.

The model was to amass a massive war chest and use it to punish candidates who opposed the company's preferred government regulations, while throwing cash at allies or potential allies from both parties.

Related Who's Spending in Your Congressional Election? We Tracked the Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms.

The first big AI super PAC to launch in August 2025 was Leading the Future, which was bankrolled by the president of OpenAI and its investors. A rival super PAC network, Public First, launched months later with the goal of countering Leading the Future's influence. Its donors include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who gave $1 million. Anthropic has also given a nonprofit associated with Public First millions of dollars, while stipulating that the money cannot be used on elections. Public First says that it supports tighter regulations than its rival.

The two networks plowed $50.7 million into the primaries, campaign finance records show. Most of that money was spent on primary races where the outcome was in doubt, driven by an eye-popping $21.3 million the networks spent on supporting or opposing a single congressional candidate, Alex Bores, in the Democratic primary for New York's 12th Congressional District.

Bores, a New York State Assembly member, attracted the ire of those in the industry who favor a laissez-faire approach by authoring an AI regulation bill in the state legislature.

Leading the Future succeeded in defeating Bores, who lost to his State Assembly colleague Micah Lasher in June. But the group drew intense blowback in the process. Many observers suggested Leading the Future's spending had boosted Bores rather than hurt him, because it gave him a chance to position himself as a foe of the AI industry — while also benefiting from a PAC aligned with the Public First network.

"Down to the wire, they were sweating," Bores told The Intercept, referring to Leading the Future. "I think people who have been in politics for a while will realize that their spending really served to elevate the issue of AI."

Leading the Future did not respond to a request for comment.

After wading into contested primary elections, the two leading AI super PAC networks have held back from spending on competitive general elections — even though they have plenty of money in the bank.

Until a few days ago, Public First had spent nothing on general election races. Leading the Future has spent only $7.4 million on general election races as of October 26, according to the FEC data, despite having $34 million in cash on hand across its network as of its most recent report.

Only 31 percent of that total has gone toward competitive races, as measured by the independent analytics website FiftyPlusOne. The only reason Leading the Future has spent money on competitive general election races at all is because it's backing U.S. Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., who filled the seat of her late brother Lindsey Graham and is now facing an unexpectedly fierce challenge from a Democrat to win a full term in ruby-red South Carolina.

"They are not going to have an impact on the balance of power in Congress," said Shaunna Thomas, one of the founders of Guardrails Alliance, another new super PAC set up to counter Leading the Future's influence. "They are spending money on candidates who they think will protect their ability to control if and how they are regulated."

Public First has only recently started spending a relatively small sum on a handful of general election races. The spending had amounted to $1.1 million as of the morning of October 26, according to processed FEC data.

Asked for comment on how its strategy has changed since the primaries, a Public First spokesperson said that it was still trying to support "strong advocates for AI regulation."

"Public First was founded as a counterweight to Leading the Future, and that fight looks very different today. Leading the Future is going dark. Its biggest backers are walking away," said Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez, the spokesperson.

Related Google DeepMind Engineer Resigns in Protest of Pentagon Contract

Into that gap have stepped new groups pushing for tougher AI regulation such as the Guardrails Alliance, which bills itself as a grassroots alternative to corporate-backed super PACs. It is funded in large part by Silicon Valley tech workers but has taken a more aggressive stance against "tech oligarchs." Guardrails has spent about $2 million thus far and reported having $1.2 million on hand as of October 14.

About three-quarters of voters are less likely to support a candidate they know has received support from an AI super PAC, according to a Data for Progress poll of more than 3,000 likely voters in Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio commissioned by Guardrails. Voters were more concerned about spending from AI companies than from crypto companies or AIPAC.

Voters were more concerned about spending from AI companies than from crypto companies or AIPAC.

The dislike for data centers and AI cuts across party lines. In Michigan's purple 7th Congressional District, Democratic candidate Will Lawrence has seized on data centers as one of his leading issues.

"The politics of this are terrible. Eighty percent of everybody is against it, whether you're a Democrat, independent, or Republican," he told supporters at a recent town hall.

Notably, neither of the super PAC networks has intervened in Lawrence's race, despite it being one of the closest in the nation. (Lawrence's campaign has pointed out that Elon Musk, who leads AI company xAI, has spent against Lawrence via his America PAC.)

There are emerging signs that the big AI super PAC networks are changing tactics in response to that public distaste. Public First's dark-money affiliate donated $3 million since August to a preexisting super PAC supporting California state Sen. Scott Wiener, one of two Democrats vying to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi in California.

Leading the Future, meanwhile, gave a $500,000 donation on October 9 to a pro-data center nonprofit called Build American AI.

AI super PAC critics are also watching to see what Leading the Future will do, given its large war chest.

"I think they are going to continue to spend. I think they are going to try to do more and more spending that isn't as easily tracked, because they are such political dead weight," said Bores.

When single-issue super PACs know their issue is unpopular, they use vague names, "pop-up" affiliates, and other dubious tactics to hide their activities from voters.

Add another one to the list: Leading the Future has routed more than $30 million of spending through newly minted Delaware corporations, blocking transparency during an election that has been defined by voter backlash against the industry.

Those apparent shell corporations have accounted for the lion's share of the largest artificial intelligence super PAC network's expenses during this year's election.

The practice is a flagrant violation of Federal Election Commission guidelines that require campaign organizations to disclose which consultants, pollsters, and advertisers they are paying, a campaign watchdog alleged in a complaint filed in May.

There may be little recourse for observers worried about the lack of transparency for now, however. The FEC is short of the quorum that would allow it to take action on complaints such as the one filed by the Campaign Legal Center. (Leading the Future, which did not respond to a request for comment, has previously defended its tactics as legal in a statement to Wired.)

The Leading the Future network was funded in large part by an executive at or investors in OpenAI, one of the world's largest AI companies. (In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company's use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

Company president Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna Brockman, donated $25 million to the network last year. When it came time to spend that money, the Leading the Future network leaned on two affiliate super PACs, one for Democratic candidates called Think Big and the other for Republican candidates called American Mission.

Related AIPAC, AI, Crypto, and Gambling Are Hiding Their Big Election Spends

That is a typical tactic of the new breed of single-issue super PACs popularized by the crypto industry. Campaign finance reform advocates say it may help obscure the origin of campaign ads from voters but does not run afoul of any laws itself.

What those super PACs did next raised red flags for watchdogs, however. Since December, American Mission has reported spending $17.4 million through a Delaware-incorporated limited liability corporation called Summit Ridge Media Group, on services ranging from media placement to ad production to consulting.

Think Big has spent $21.3 million through a different Delaware corporation, Lantern Production Consultants, on a similarly wide range of expenses.

The grab bag of expenses is a giveaway that the super PACs are likely using the newly created corporations to hide their true vendors, according to Shanna Ports, a senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.

"There's no way of knowing what is motivating this arrangement — but I know there is backlash to AI. It is possible that the vendors who are working with American Mission and Think Big don't want to be identified in FEC reports," Ports said.

Thomas, of the rival super PAC Guardrails Alliance, told The Intercept she thinks the network is obscuring its spending because a lax regulatory approach has become "politically toxic."

"Their donors don't want to be associated, their candidates don't want their support, and their vendors don't want to be associated," Thomas said. "If you were public, you are running away. If you are not, you are interested in not being exposed."

This story was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.

The post AI Tried to Buy the Midterms — Then the Lobby Learned Everyone Hates AI appeared first on The Intercept.

Users of New Outlook wondering where the option to open an attachment went have a culprit to blame - an Edge update.

The issue underscores how interconnected things are in the Microsoft ecosystem. According to the vendor, an update to Edge 156 "unintentionally enabled an unnecessary configuration," which means some New Outlook users are unable to open email file attachments.

An error stating the file cannot be opened also appears for some, along with an instruction to restart Outlook. However, the "Open" option goes away after the error is encountered. A workaround is to use "Save As" to save the attachment, and then open the file manually.

Microsoft confirmed the issue yesterday afternoon in the advisory EX1528992, and early this morning began rolling out a fix to disable the "unnecessary" configuration. It expects that it'll take 12 hours for the fix to be rolled out, and users will have to close and reopen New Outlook to feel the benefit.

The problem raises some interesting questions. While we'd understand how something unexpected in Edge might cause rendering issues in New Outlook, losing the ability to open attachments because of something an Edge update did is concerning and may make some administrators reconsider the blast radius of software updates.

We asked Microsoft for more information about the "unnecessary configuration" and will update this piece should it respond.

However, the incident highlights connections within Windows that might surprise users. In addition, it shows that, despite a woeful showing on the desktop market share front - although Edge recently "surged" to almost 15 percent last month, according to Statcounter, up from around 10 percent for much of the year - Microsoft's browser can still capture user attention. It's just not the sort of attention the Windows maker might have hoped for.

It is also worth noting that Outlook Classic does not appear to be affected by the issue (according to Microsoft's EX1528992 advisory for Exchange Online).

Impacted users could therefore temporarily add opening attachments to the list of things the old software does that the new software doesn't. ®

Pedro João Santos reports from the latest edition of Portugal's premiere festival for experimental music, where stellar sets from Noémi Büchi, Tygapaw, Marta Salogni and more lead the way

Malcolm Pardon and Gustaf Broms, photo by Adriano Ferreira Borges / Semibreve 

A startled Jocy de Oliveira looks out at the sea: it's well past time the grand piano should be brought ashore. She oversees a woman playing the ivories, drifting in the tide. "What do you expect to achieve this late?", she blurts at the walkie-talkie, wrangling with the producers of her 2005 short film, Noturno De Um Piano. What starts off as an elegant allegory - the instrument set adrift in the ocean, a metaphor for the erosion of high culture...

The post Audiovisual Phantasmagoria: Highlights from Semibreve 2026 appeared first on The Quietus.

Angus Batey looks back 35 years at the 360-degree attack of one of the most creatively independent yet offensive hip hop albums ever made

Classic albums are supposed to be celebrated, but Death Certificate doesn't permit unqualified responses. It's a record made by a young man as talented at needling his listeners as he was at constructing and delivering some of the angriest lyrics in the hip hop canon, and is impossible to love without qualification. If you're not offended by a significant portion of it - no matter who you are, whatever your background - you're not listening properly. Just about the only universal reaction Death Certificate generates is one of awe at the 360-degree ferocity Ice Cube maintains for...

The post America's Most Offensive? Ice Cube's Death Certificate Revisited appeared first on The Quietus.

Leo Chadburn's latest work expands outwards from a seventeenth-century manual of folk dances to a kinetic exploration of human movement, from St Vitus' chorea to raving at Castlemorton Common

English Dancing Master is a dance album, but not in the sense you would usually associate with the term. There is no "succession of repetitive beats" (the phrase used by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to criminalise outdoor raves), ribcage splintering bass or woozy toplines. Instead, we are treated to a reticent male narrator - voiced by Leo Chadburn - and the Phaedra Ensemble in conversation with each other. In fact, it's not really an album at all but a singular radiophonic piece broken up into brief episodes that...

The post Put Your Hands In The Air: English Dancing Master by Leo Chadburn & Phaedra Ensemble appeared first on The Quietus.

Maria W Horn

Melting Pillars of Snow

Melting Pillar of Snow is a dense exploration of time and decay that feels more like a static monument than a living listening experience

Melting Pillars of Snow by Maria W Horn

On Melting Pillars of Snow, Swedish composer Maria W Horn attempts to map the relentless passage of time across five expansive compositions. The record sets out to chart the friction between microscopic moments and deep historical time. Yet for all its conceptual weight and formal intent, the listening experience remains curiously remote, leaving the pieces sounding like static, glass-encased dioramas which may be meticulously assembled, but are emotionally lacking in power.

Lead single 'Scythe of Saturn' sets the template. Built around slow-motion acoustic and electronic friction,...

The post Maria W Horn - Melting Pillars of Snow appeared first on The Quietus.

In the words of the biggest name in the outside elections-spending game, "Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics." 

This midterms cycle, however, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's strategy seems to suggest the opposite. Contrary to its signature slogan, AIPAC's name has become anathema to voters across the political spectrum repulsed by Israel's genocide in Gaza and frustrated by Washington's outpouring of military aid for a foreign government while domestic costs soar.

So it's going underground. As The Intercept reported in December, AIPAC entered the 2026 midterms by returning to its strategic roots — funding other groups and uniting donors, rather than focusing on direct-to-candidate spending. Now, AIPAC has announced that it will no longer officially endorse or contribute directly to candidates. 

Though progressives welcomed the announcement as evidence of AIPAC's retreat, it's far from a sign that AIPAC is backing down. The group is expected to continue spending heavily on elections through its super PAC, which took advantage of campaign finance loopholes to conceal its involvement in several races this cycle until after elections had already passed. To Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, AIPAC's opting for obscurity shows that "its brand has become politically radioactive."

But how much has really changed? As AIPAC shifts strategy, a new project by The Intercept reveals the hundreds of candidates still taking its cash, plus how the money paid off for them. The data suggests that though the pro-Israel lobbying giant may be weakened, it's still dominant.

The Intercept tracked how much the group and its super PAC spent on elections to put pro-Israel candidates on the ballot in this year's midterms — including the money it tried to keep out of the public eye. While AIPAC makes use of a series of new pop-ups and pass-throughs, it still poured millions directly into 2026 midterm races. Its candidates usually still win.

Related AI Tried to Buy the Midterms — Then the Lobby Learned Everyone Hates AI

The new data builds on a 2024 project in which The Intercept documented just how AIPAC shaped the last congressional class. At the time, Donald Trump was preparing for his return to the presidency as Kamala Harris ran a campaign hamstrung by public disillusionment over the Biden administration's unflinching support for Israel's genocide in Gaza. To critics of Israel desperate to stop the violence, the two parties looked equally bleak, and the pro-Israel lobby's grip on Congress appeared unshakeable. 

It's been different this cycle. Primaries across the country saw candidates win after vowing to cut off or restrict military aid to Israel, and incumbents signed on to legislation blocking weapons transfers in an attempt to keep their seats. But the shift should not be overstated: AIPAC still waded into nearly three-quarters of races, and its candidates still won far more often than they lost.

In total, AIPAC or its super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent on 333 of the 473 seats up for election this year.

These are the dollars AIPAC and UDP spent directly in races. The former makes contributions to candidates, while the latter, as AIPAC's leading super PAC, makes independent expenditures, like buying ads. They made up the bulk of the pro-Israel lobby's known elections spending — $53.3 million from AIPAC and $66.7 million from UDP, compared to $53.7 million and $41.4 million last cycle. Simultaneously, the groups took up another tack: making it harder to tell which races they were actually involved in. The group's donors poured money into races where AIPAC didn't officially endorse a candidate. AIPAC's board president hosted a fundraiser for a candidate who swore the group wasn't backing her. And in a series of races, no one knew for certain that AIPAC had spent on the election until after it was over.

Related The Most Expensive Democratic Senate Primary Has a Winner

The group tested different strategies in different states, spending directly in the Michigan Senate race, for example, while concealing its spending in several other primaries. In those races, UDP gave money to other committees, including a series of "pop-up PACs," groups that registered just before primaries, allowing them to delay disclosing their donors until after the election passed. Several of those groups took money from AIPAC's super PAC, spent on ads against candidates critical of Israel, and then disappeared. 

The pop-ups and pass-throughs represent AIPAC's most talked-about new tactic, but the lobbying group and its flagship super PAC still sunk the bulk of their spending into key races and high-priority states. The Intercept analyzed where AIPAC employed which strategy, how UDP dollars flowed through pop-up PACs, and which candidates received the most AIPAC and UDP cash in their primaries. 

The pro-Israel lobby's biggest investment in the primaries turned out to be a disappointment. UDP spent more than $30 million on ads attacking Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race or backing his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens. Now that El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee, UDP is also battling El-Sayed in his general election contest with Republican Mike Rogers, spending just over $500,000 so far. 

Thanks in part to the deluge of spending, the El-Sayed-Stevens contest was one of the marquee primaries of 2026, pitting a vocal critic of the pro-Israel lobby who could become the first Muslim U.S. senator against an enthusiastic AIPAC cash recipient who famously said: "Israel comes to me in my dreams." It's one of the key races where we're breaking down the money AIPAC and UDP spent in favor of one candidate and against a clear opponent. We're skipping Democratic House candidate Adrian Boafo, who benefited from $5.7 million in UDP spending, because his Maryland primary included 23 other candidates.

After Stevens and Boafo, the top AIPAC and UDP recipient from this year's primaries was Rep. Wesley Bell, a moderate Democrat from Missouri who fended off a challenge from former Rep. Cori Bush to return to the House (AIPAC spent millions to oust her last cycle). When UDP spending is excluded, Bell received more AIPAC funding in the primaries than any other Democrat.

On the Republican side, the top beneficiary was Ed Gallrein, the Trump-backed challenger who unseated Rep. Thomas Massie in Kentucky. Massie, a libertarian critic of all foreign aid — including to Israel — was the relatively rare Republican incumbent AIPAC and UDP opposed.

Often, the pro-Israel groups backed Republican incumbents. Two more top recipients were Sen. Tom Cotton, who easily won his primary in Arkansas, and John Cornyn, who lost to state attorney general Ken Paxton in Texas.

But the greatest Republican recipient of AIPAC largesse — ahead of Gallrein, when UDP is excluded — did not face a primary opponent.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, now facing a tight general election contest against Democratic candidate Troy Jackson, has been a longtime beneficiary of campaign cash aligned with the pro-Israel lobby. Asked by Zeteo last year for her comment on Americans killed by the Israeli military, Collins shook her head and said only: "I am pro-Israel." 

On top of the $53.6 million it spent directly on races this cycle, United Democracy Project poured another $13.1 million into Democratic primaries by giving money to other committees whose names or stated agendas indicated no connection to Israel policy. That $13.1 million, more than triple the $3.5 million United Democracy gave through other groups last cycle, helped fund at least three pop-up PACs that formed this year. 

Related Who's Spending in Your Congressional Election? We Tracked the Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms.

The groups' names offered little insight into their political agendas, as The Lever recently highlighted. UDP spent the most on popup PACs in a series of Democratic primaries around Chicago, where groups with names like Elect Chicago Women, Chicago Progressive Partnership, and Affordable Chicago Now! used their funds to attack candidates running on rejecting AIPAC money or ending U.S. military support for Israel. Several of the groups also received funding from major United Democracy Project donors, and three of them shut down after the primaries and gave their money back to United Democracy Project. 

In other cases, United Democracy Project funded long-established political action committees with ties to current or former House Democratic leaders, like Bold America, which was formed by former members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. That group got almost a quarter of the $12.2 million it reported raising this year from UDP. The UDP share, $2.8 million, was nearly equivalent to the $2.9 million Bold America spent against Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist and pro-Palestine activist who defeated incumbent and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in New York.

The super PAC EDW Action Fund was similar. Former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Cheri Bustos and former Rep. Annie Kuster formed that group in late 2023 as an offshoot of the political action committee Elect Democratic Women. Like Bold America, EDW Action got about a quarter of its funding from UDP. It also provided more than 80 percent of the funding for Pro-Choice Majority Action, a new PAC that formed in May and spent in 12 primaries. The group presents itself as supporting Democratic women, but Pro-Choice Majority Action notably spent against pro-Palestine candidates like Melat Kiros, who ran a primary challenge against Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and won. 

In a statement to The Intercept, Pro-Choice Majority Action spokesperson Lenny Young dismissed reporting characterizing the group as a pop-up PAC and said it had backed 23 candidates with a range of views on Israel across the primaries and general election.

"To suggest that we would deny a Democratic woman from being elected to Congress because of her position on Israel, on either side, misses the whole point," Young said. "We want more Democratic women in Congress because we believe it would improve the lives of women and families. Period."

Bold America did not respond to The Intercept's request for comment. Emails to Elect Chicago Women, Chicago Progressive Partnership, and Affordable Chicago Now! bounced back because the groups have shut down.

UDP gave another $2.65 million to groups that did not spend directly on ads in Democratic primaries this cycle. 

In August, United Democracy Project gave $1.65 million to a group called SD PAC, also known as Save Democracy PAC, which registered in 2020 and has supported Democratic candidates in past general elections. The group did not directly conduct any outside spending in Democratic primaries this year, but it funneled money to affiliate groups that did — some of which funded attacks against progressives.

The other recipient of money from UDP, Palmetto Action, formed in May and only spent in South Carolina's Republican Senate primary. The group backed Sen. Lindsey Graham before his death in July, then received a cash infusion from UDP and started supporting Graham's sister, Darline, ahead of a special Senate primary. The group did not report any additional spending in its last filing due before the general election.

Palmetto Action, Save Democracy PAC, and EDW Action Fund did not respond to The Intercept's requests for comment.

Related Nancy Pelosi's Pick for Her SF House Seat Takes Anti-AIPAC Pledge

If last cycle AIPAC proved that it could leverage its financial advantage to target critics of Israel, its performance this cycle suggests that its money has become a faltering superpower. 

New pro-Palestine groups have sprung up to spend against AIPAC — though their pockets aren't nearly as deep. When candidates went head-to-head this cycle in primaries defined by U.S. military support for Israel's genocide in Gaza, pro-Palestine candidates often came out on top. 

For decades before it started spending directly on elections, "AIPAC operated in the shadows," Friedman, of Foundation for Middle East Peace, said. Its endorsements were once "clear but unofficial," she added, and its funding operated through "informal understandings with big donors and allied but ostensibly independent PACs." 

Today, "AIPAC is trying out a sort of middle road," Friedman said. "It will return in part to the shadows — no direct endorsements, no direct donations — but it will also continue to flex its power directly in elections, via tactics it has been testing and honing these past four years."

If anything, next cycle could see an expansion of the recent pop-up PAC strategy, making it harder to tell when AIPAC is involved — until it's too late. 

The post AIPAC Isn't Retreating. Here's How It's Already Shaping the Next Congress. appeared first on The Intercept.

Decentralized messaging platform Matrix is no longer the upstart it once was. The organization is now a serious challenger to the status quo as concerns about sovereignty and independence reach new heights.

At the organization's recent Malmo event, which grew attendance 30 percent year-on-year, the mood shifted from "yes, this is important" to "yes, we're rolling this out."

Matrix is an open standard for communication. It's a federated system, so there are no central hubs or overseas control to worry about, and it can be used for anything from messaging to voice over IP. Video is also supported.

The system is an alternative to services such as Microsoft Teams. It has become popular in the public sector as governments grow increasingly wary of relying on US tech giants for services that the Trump administration could switch off at will.

However, that increased interest and subsequent roll-outs have brought a level of scrutiny Matrix was not fully prepared for. A recent report regarding anonymous reaction to a roll-out of the technology by the European Commission took Element - the company that puts the lion share of the money into Matrix - by surprise.

One attendee at the Malmo conference observed, "First they [competitors] ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you."

Matrix remains an open standard, however, the open source foundation behind it would certainly welcome more paying members.

"It's true that we're definitely getting more attention than we have had before," said Element CEO Matthew Hodgson.

"We are seeing Matrix ending up on the critical path of digital sovereignty as almost the poster child of the whole thing.

"I'm not sure that we necessarily do want to be the poster child," he added, "We didn't sign up to end up being ambassadors for digital sovereignty, roaming from government to government, but empirically that's where we've ended up, and yeah, that's going to attract attention from people who would rather everyone just kept in their traditional big tech systems."

This comes amid worries about the reliability of international partners, from early projects including France's Tchap messenger for the public sector and Germany's BundesMessenger through to more recent users, such as the Swedish public sector. Indeed, in one memorable demonstration during the Matrix event, messages were sent between French, Swedish, and NATO entities.

"I cannot overstate the strangeness," Hodgson added, "of having various national militaries phoning up every couple of days, saying, 'Look, we need to get on board Matrix too because we need to talk to this country and they're using Matrix, and we need to talk to that country, and they're using Matrix.'"

"It could be for defense, could be national security, could just be healthcare or education, public sector. But that is real. That is why there is a feeding frenzy."

Not that Element or Matrix is trying to build a better Teams than Teams. Patrick Alberts, Element's Chief Product Officer, said, "This is a digitally sovereign communication solution that, by and large, works like Teams in many aspects, but it's not set out to be the faster Porsche here..."

As for the reported complaints from the European Commission over Element's software implementation, Diana Gheorghe, EC head of sector for Communication and Collaboration Services, addressed them directly and described the anonymous complaints as "the natural friction of [a] high-profile rollout that we have done at scale."

Alexandru Vignide, EC service manager for Communication and Collaboration Services, who is very much at the pointy end of making the sovereign communication tools work, noted the speed of the rollout, which began with a proof of concept in Q4 2025, and hit laptops between July and September 2026.

The EC chose the Schengen Cloud Alliance (which includes OVHcloud) for hosting and, according to Vignide, "We wanted to provide a familiar experience for users." Not everyone is impressed with what is rolling out, but it's important to remember that change can be alarming, and this is still early days.

It is, however, a significant one. Gheorghe said that, as well as increasing resilience and business continuity, "We wanted to have vendor diversity. We also wanted to have data control and ownership of the platform."

Microsoft, as an example, would point to the sovereign capabilities of its system. As the Matrix conference kicked off, it announced new capabilities, including additional options for running AI, data services, and confidential workloads on customer-controlled platforms, and highlighted its sovereign partner ecosystem for customers who prefer local expertise.

However, Microsoft (and other tech giants) cannot escape concerns about who ultimately controls the data and what administrations might do with it. In 2025, a Microsoft representative memorably confirmed the US giant "cannot guarantee" data sovereignty to customers in France.

There is, however, a fly in the Matrix ointment. The platform is open source and, like so many open source projects, requires funding. Right now, Element accounts for much of the Matrix Foundation's funding. Hodgson finds this a little frustrating.

"If every government who is operationally dependent on Matrix put the smallest amount of money in the Foundation, the Foundation would have enough money to really start investing in the ecosystem and not be dependent on Element basically picking up the tab."

He acknowledged that things had improved in the last year, but said, "It's not good governance for an open standard to have one big player like Element effectively propping things up."

This isn't uncommon in the open source world, and it's a little disappointing given the ever-increasing importance placed on sovereignty in communications. Alberts commented: "There is confusion in the market that the thing somehow creates itself.

"No, it doesn't. It requires hardworking people. These hardworking people need to be paid, and that payment, in order to support government deployments going forward, ideally also comes from these governments. And some of them do a lot and do it in a great way, and that's amazing.

"But some don't." ®

Welcome back to PWNED, in which The Reg offers cautionary tales from folks who've left their doors wide open to attackers and lived to tell the tale. This week's misadventure involves unpatched older machines and a password that was supposed to send a message to crims.

Our story comes courtesy once again of leading red teamer and pen tester Dahvid Schloss of Suzu Labs.

A client asked Schloss to visit a factory and check the servers there for security holes. The company had been hacked six months prior, made some adjustments, and wanted to make sure that they were bulletproof now.

Schloss' mission, which he chose to accept, was to get domain admin rights.

Schloss drove over to the factory where he noticed a number of Windows 7 servers were connected to the CNC milling machines, even though Windows 10 was by then Microsoft's supported desktop OS. This was to be expected, as companies with proprietary software often use legacy OSes for fear of breaking apps.

At first, Schloss had a hard time breaking in because most of the servers were not connected to the domain. So there was no point in his running the EternalBlue zero-day that would have let him in.

"So I've been looking through these and most of them had been disconnected from the domain, so it's the right move," he said. "Like, yeah, you could run EternalBlue on the network, but you really weren't going to be able to get anywhere with it, cuz you get on the device and what you find: you dump LSASS [the Windows Local Security Authority Subsystem Service], you're like 'All right, there's local admin creds, but the local admin creds on those devices were different from the local admin creds on the majority of workstations."

Finally, Schloss went onto one of the servers that was connected to milling machines and found that it was connected to the network and on the domain. It was vulnerable to EternalBlue and he went and dumped LSASS and found a pair of creds from WDigest, one of which looked like an admin account.

But Schloss thought that it must not be a legitimate admin account when he read the password : "heyhackergof***yourself," but written in leet speak [l337 5p34k].

The resulting string was a strong password, but Schloss assumed that the admins were playing a game with him and left this credential there for him to find. Schloss assumed it wouldn't work and sat on it for a week.

During a briefing he had with the IT crew, he presented his findings and then asked who set up the admin account with this funny password.

"You could see everyone kind of looking at the senior manager of IT like 'that was you, wasn't it,'" Schloss explained. "He's kind of got this face. I'm like 'oh shit, like what?' Turns out that 'heyhackergof***yourself' was the actual password for his admin account."

On Monday, Schloss tried the username and password combo and, lo and behold, it gave him complete control of the entire network. He was then able to get access to other passwords and many of them were also insults directed at potential hackers.

Schloss understood that the team was still angry about a breach they had suffered six months prior and, should they be breached again, wanted to give the finger to the hacker who did it. Unfortunately, their system was still vulnerable because of the outdated machine that was hooked up to the domain and he was able to gain control.

The lesson here is really to patch your systems and avoid using insecure legacy OSes whenever possible, because it was an old machine that let Schloss in, not a weak password.

Indeed, "hackergof***yourself" in leet speak isn't a terrible password, just an embarrassing one if it's exposed. ®

HPE is giving its Alletra Storage MP X10000 another job: holding inference state that would otherwise be evicted from expensive GPU memory and recalculated later.

In testing validated by Kamiwaza using NVIDIA H200 GPUs, the Kamiwaza AI platform, and HPE Alletra MP X10000, the solution achieved up to 20× faster time to first token and 17× higher effective inference throughput versus running without KV cache offload.

The GPUs did not become cleverer. They had less repeat work to do.

The results move a storage decision directly into the discussion about AI economics. Model pricing gets plenty of attention. Paying expensive accelerators to process the same context repeatedly deserves some too.

Especially as enterprises move from chatbots answering individual questions to agents that can turn one request into a small committee's worth of activity.

Agentic workflows repeatedly process documents, system instructions and conversation histories. One agent retrieves information, another evaluates it, a third checks the result, and subsequent steps revisit material the system has already processed.

Some repetition is necessary. Recalculating everything is not.

KV cache retains intermediate attention state, allowing compatible requests to reuse earlier computation. Keeping that cache available can reduce the work required before a model starts producing its next answer.

GPU memory, unfortunately, is neither infinite nor priced as though it were.

Long contexts and concurrent sessions compete for that memory. When reusable cache is evicted and later needed, the inference engine may have to rebuild it. More GPU work, more waiting, and no additional insight to show for either.

HPE Alletra MP X10000 provides a shared tier for offloaded cache, while RDMA for S3 accelerates the storage data path. The proposition: retrieve reusable context rather than make the GPU calculate it again.

Compute once. Reuse often. An unremarkable principle, until the alternative appears on the infrastructure bill.

The Kamiwaza-validated testing used NVIDIA Nemotron 70B and more than 30 concurrent agents under large-context, multi-agent inference.

That matters because this is precisely the sort of real-world workload where repeated context and memory pressure can make cache reuse valuable. Several agents consulting overlapping material create a different opportunity from unrelated, short prompts with little context in common.

Those headline gains are workload-specific. Context length, concurrency, cache hit rates and transfer overhead determine the return. Twenty times faster is a test result, not a universal entitlement.

Buyers should examine the comparison as carefully as the multiplier: the same workload, with and without KV cache offload, and enough concurrency to represent production conditions.

The useful question is how much repeated computation their applications can avoid, and whether retrieving cached context is faster than rebuilding it.

A large performance number without its test conditions is mostly a typography decision.

Cache reuse addresses repeated computation. It cannot rescue a retrieval system that feeds the model half the company's document archive to answer one question.

HPE's broader pitch pairs the X10000 with Data Fabric for governed access to distributed data. The X10000's data intelligence node generates metadata, classification and embeddings at ingest to help applications retrieve relevant context.

That moves preparation closer to where data lands, rather than leaving every application team to assemble another downstream preparation pipeline.

The economic logic is straightforward. More precise retrieval can mean less irrelevant material in prompts and fewer attempts to obtain a useful answer.

Enterprise archives are rarely short of documents. Distinguishing the current policy from six superseded versions and a presentation called "FINAL_final_v7" is the more interesting problem.

Governance also matters when agents retrieve information and act on it. Relevant context still needs to be authorized context. Faster access to something an agent should never have seen is an awkward definition of progress.

That gives HPE two economic levers: improve what enters inference, then reuse computation where possible.

The distinction matters. Better retrieval can reduce prompt size and retries. KV cache reuse reduces processing work; it does not magically shrink generated answers or oblige an API supplier to lower its bill.

Cache offload is becoming a crowded market. HPE's strength rests on combining it with data preparation and governance, rather than winning another feature tick.

The practical test for organizations looking to get more value from their AI is how smoothly data preparation, governance and cache reuse operate as a single system.

Can applications find relevant, permitted information without unnecessary copying and preparation? Can the inference engine retain and retrieve reusable context efficiently? Does the combination sustain useful throughput as context windows and agent counts grow?

Those questions connect the architecture to observable outcomes.

Buyers should ask for cache hit rates, time to first token and sustained throughput on their workloads. They should also examine retrieval quality and whether the system completes the intended task. A faster wrong answer remains a wrong answer, however attractive the benchmark chart.

Cost per terabyte remains relevant. So does the cost of making a GPU read the same briefing for the seventh time.

For more information, visit the HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 web page.

Contributed by HPE

Exclusive: Backbenchers voice alarm over 'intolerable position' faced by Miatta Fahnbulleh over oilfield decision

Furious Labour MPs have been lobbying the prime minister and chancellor not to overrule the energy secretary should she decide to block the Rosebank oilfield.

MPs say they are alarmed at the cabinet splits that have emerged over the issue after sources told the Guardian that Miatta Fahnbulleh was minded to refuse environmental permission for the field.

This year thousands of the golden-coloured butterfly have arrived in Britain in what one expert calls 'a bold attempt at colonisation'

The Queen of Spain has invaded. The enigmatic British visits of this gorgeous golden-coloured butterfly with distinctively shaped, squared-off hindwings have been recorded by lepidopterists for four centuries. Usually there are barely a handful of sightings each summer of a butterfly that is widespread across continental Europe.

This year, thousands have flown in, some from France and Spain that have reached the south coast, and others from the Netherlands, which have fluttered into East Anglia.

Tebay, Cumbria: Historically it's been a tricky thing for hill farms to do, but we've always run ours on organic principles, and now we're fully converting

From 1 November we have change happening on our farm. We have decided to become an organic farm and have started the two-year conversion process with the Soil Association. We've always run the farm on organic principles, but now, with our small shop selling our beef, lamb and pork, we've decided that we will convert, prioritising soil health and biodiversity without the use of chemicals.

It has historically been tricky for hill farms to go organic because many are on commons with shared grazing and no physical boundaries between "hefts", and with shared routes to and from the fell. Now the certifiers are keen to be flexible and adapt, so we have decided to give it a go. The process is funded by the government's sustainable farming incentive scheme, which we were lucky to get into this year as so many farmers missed out.

China's exports in 2026 of clean-energy technologies, such as solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, are on track to cut emissions beyond its borders by 2%, reveals new analysis.

Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and senior fellow at Asia Society Policy Institute

The impact of these Chinese exports on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions around the world grew by 26% year-on-year in the first three quarters of 2026, having already risen by 36% in 2025.

The new analysis for Carbon Brief is based on detailed data for clean-tech product exports, the electricity system in destination countries and emissions during manufacturing in China.

If the latest trends continue for the rest of the year, then Chinese clean-tech exports in 2026 alone will avoid around 450m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) - roughly equivalent to Brazil's annual emissions.

Other key findings from the analysis include:

• Electric car and heavy vehicle shipments grew by 61% year-on-year in the first three quarters of 2026, wind-turbines by 45%, batteries 39%, solar 22% and electric two-wheelers by 21%.
• Over the lifetime of the equipment, exports in 2026 are on track to avoid 8,400MtCO2, equivalent to the annual emissions of the US and India combined.
• This lifetime avoided emissions total for exports in 2026 is up by a quarter from 6,800MtCO2 in 2025 and up by two-thirds from 5,000MtCO2 in 2024.
• Wind- and solar-equipment exports from China in 2026 will generate as much electricity each year as roughly 100 coal-fired power plants.
• While the majority of clean-tech exports by value went to the global north in the first three quarters of 2026, some 76% of lifetime avoided emissions were in the global south.
• This includes 52% of lifetime avoided emissions being in south and south-east Asia, reflecting solar shipments from China being installed onto high-carbon power grids.
• Chinese-owned clean-energy projects built in other countries doubled from 2022-25, but the amount of CO2 avoided remains small compared to equipment exports.

The analysis shows that most of China's clean-energy exports have been built on new or expanded markets, enabling other producers to maintain their own sales volumes.

In addition, clean-energy sales within China are larger than exports for most technologies, but a domestic solar slowdown could exacerbate trade tensions, if it continues.

China has become the pre-eminent producer of clean-energy technologies, from solar panels and wind turbines through to batteries and electric vehicles.

The majority of China's clean-tech production is destined for the domestic market. But it has also become a major exporter - and these exports are avoiding significant amounts of CO2.

Previous analysis for Carbon Brief showed that these clean-energy exports in 2024 would cut emissions in countries outside China by around 1%.

The latest analysis shows that China's clean-tech exports in 2026 are on track to avoid around 450MtCO2, as shown in the figure below, which is nearly 2% of global emissions outside China. It is also roughly equivalent to Brazil's annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.

The analysis accounts for the impact of the clean-tech exports in the destination country, as well as the emissions due to manufacturing the products in China.

Looking at the full-year data for 2025, manufacturing clean-energy equipment resulted in emissions of around 170MtCO2 within China, while avoiding 370MtCO2 in other countries. This implies that, in aggregate, it takes six months for the exported goods to pay back the CO2 from manufacturing.

China's solar-equipment exports continue to be the biggest enabler of decarbonisation in other countries, according to the analysis.

In the full-year data for 2025, China exported finished solar panels and intermediate products that correspond to a total generating capacity of 436 gigawatts (GW) once assembled and installed.

(Note that this is measured in gigawatts DC, which reflects the capacity of the panels, whereas capacity measured in AC refers to the size of the wire that connects them to the grid.)

In addition, China exported 8GW of wind turbines. Together with the solar equipment, this will generate approximately 720 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year, based on the average output per unit of capacity for solar and wind in each destination country.

For 2026, China's exports of wind and solar equipment are on track to generate approximately 800TWh of electricity, equivalent to the generation from around 100 coal-fired power plants.

Over their lifetimes, based on the power sources expected to be displaced in each destination country, the solar exports in 2025 will avoid an estimated 6,400MtCO2.

(For more details on the basis for these calculations, see: About the data.)

Solar is therefore the largest source of lifetime avoided CO2 emissions by far, with wind-turbine exports in second place displacing just 180MtCO2, as shown in the figure below.

The 39m electric vehicles exported from China in 2025 included 36m two-wheelers, 2.2m battery electric cars, 160,000 plug-in hybrid cars, 15,000 buses and 30,000 trucks.

In addition, China exported batteries with a capacity of 305 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in 2025, enough to power another 5m battery electric cars once installed, based on typical battery sizes.

Based on typical driving distances and fuel consumption for corresponding fuel-burning vehicles, as well as the CO2 intensity of the electricity grid in destination countries, the EVs and batteries exported in 2025 will avoid an estimated 170MtCO2 over their lifetimes.

Given the sheer number of electric two-wheelers, the amount of oil and resulting CO2 they displace is a key uncertainty. Real-world e-bike studies support an assumption that roughly half of e-bike travel displaces the use of motor vehicles, either cars or motorbikes depending on location.

This suggests that, when taking into account the electricity grid in importing nations, China's electric two-wheeler exports in 2025 will avoid an estimated 40MtCO2 over their lifetimes.

In 2025, some 73% of the lifetime emissions avoided by China's clean-tech exports were in global-south countries, which also accounted for 87% of the growth year-on-year.

In the first three quarters of 2026, global-south countries were responsible for almost all of the increase in avoided emissions compared with a year earlier, as shown in the figure below.

The high share of the global south in avoided emissions reflects large export volumes and power grids that are more carbon-intensive on average, as well as better average solar conditions that result in larger avoided emissions for each gigawatt of solar exported.

On the regional level, South Asia has the largest avoided emissions due to imports of Chinese clean-tech, with strong year-on-year growth both in 2025 and the first three quarters of 2026.

Other top regional destinations in 2026 to date, in terms of lifetime avoided emissions, include south-east Asia, North America, Europe and the Middle East.

However, the exports span the globe, as shown in the map below, avoiding billions of tonnes of CO2 across every continent and in nearly every country of the world.

Among countries, the US has the second-largest avoided emissions after India. It registered a further increase of 12% in 2026, despite increased tariffs, and exceeds the EU as a bloc. The US is followed by Thailand, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Australia.

The EU imports more of every clean energy technology than the US, but the US has higher avoided emissions. This is because average US solar output per unit of capacity is higher - as is the average CO2 intensity of power generation. As a result, every gigawatt of solar installed in the US results in three-times more avoided CO2 emissions than in the EU.

The resilience of Chinese clean-tech exports to the US indicates strong demand for the technology, despite the Trump administration's steps to slow down deployment and discourage imports.

The data suggests that reducing reliance on technology supply from China - a policy aim of recent administrations from both parties - is likely to require scaling up of domestic and third-country manufacturing of the key technologies, in order to meet that resilient demand.

The largest change in the national rankings for avoided emissions from clean-tech exports in 2026, compared with the previous year, has been a fall in exports to the Gulf countries affected by the war in the region.

For electric cars and heavy vehicles, western Europe was the largest destination in the first three quarters of 2026, followed by Latin America and south-east Asia, both of which more than doubled, reflecting the impact of the oil crisis. Exports to the EU gained 39%.

When including batteries and electric two-wheelers, North America and Europe are the largest destinations for avoided emissions due to EV-related exports, followed by Latin America and south-east Asia.

Exports of Chinese solar equipment to the US rose 13% year-on-year in the first three quarters of 2026, once re-routing through different channels is considered. This is a reversal of the dip early in the year, due to a sharp increase in tariffs in June 2025. Exports of EVs and batteries to the US also increased slightly, by 3% in the first three quarters of 2026.

In addition to its clean-tech exports, China is also increasingly becoming directly involved in the development of overseas clean-energy projects.

This can be traced back to the 2021 pledge by Chinese president Xi Jinping, in which he said:

"China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low-carbon energy, and will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad."

As of July 2026, some 69GW of China-linked renewable energy projects were in operation overseas. An additional 100GW are being built, with 280GW in planning but not yet under construction. This renewable energy capacity is supported by 3.5GW of China-linked energy storage projects in operation, with a further 21.4GW of storage in the pipeline. 

China has also financed and built six operating nuclear reactors overseas, with a total capacity of 3.3GW. These are all located in Pakistan and, in 2023, they had a total generation of 26TWh. China began construction on the 1.2GW Chashma-5 reactor in 2024, also in Pakistan, with the plant expected to be operational around 2030.

The expected electricity output of China's newly operating overseas clean-power projects doubled from 2022 to 2025, with a further 6% year-on-year increase in the first seven months of 2026.

The countries with the largest estimated generation from China-linked clean-power capacity are Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Mongolia, Zimbabwe, Laos, Turkey and South Africa.

The list looks slightly different when considering the impact of operating, under construction or planned China-linked capacity on avoided CO2 emissions.

As shown in the figure below, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Indonesia and Pakistan are expected to see the largest avoided CO2, once under-construction projects are completed.

The increase in overseas clean-energy projects has changed China's role in the power-sector development of other emerging countries. Having previously been the main financier of coal-power projects, it is now an important force in developing clean-power generation.

Nevertheless, there are gaps in the implementation of Xi's pledge to end overseas coal-power development, which could be seen to affect its effectiveness and credibility. These gaps are particularly with respect to "captive" coal-power plants linked to industrial projects in Indonesia.

China's overseas clean-energy project portfolio is growing, but remains small compared with the country's equipment exports. For example in 2025, some 8.4GW of solar-power projects with Chinese financing or involvement entered operation and 18GW were newly announced. That year, China also exported 436GW of solar panels and intermediates.

This implies that financing, project development and construction using solar panels and other clean-tech from China is overwhelmingly carried out by local and other non-Chinese actors.

A key concern in countries around the world is that Chinese industrial "overcapacity" is crowding out domestic industries, from automotive to steel or chemicals.

However, analysis of China's clean-tech exports suggests that they have generally been additional, meaning they have not displaced exports by other producers. This could be a sign that China's exports have either captured or enabled market growth for these clean-energy technologies.

For example, the value of EV exports from other countries has grown much more than those from China, as shown in the figure below. These EV exports have been led by the EU27 - particularly Germany - as well as Mexico, Japan, the UK and South Korea.

Similarly, there has been growth in the value of exports of heat pumps, solar inverters and electrolysers from both China and from other countries.

This pattern has not been universal. In the case of wind, China's exports have grown while exports by other producers have declined, representing displacement on the global level.

However, on the level of importing countries, there has not been displacement. China's wind-turbine exports have mostly headed to countries with growing markets, while incumbent producers have seen a decline in sales, in some of their previously important markets.

For some clean-tech, exports from other producers have displaced Chinese supply. For example, tariffs and restrictions on the use of Chinese components have seen other producers expanding into existing markets for solar panels, solar inverters and heat pumps.

At the same time, China's exports of these technologies have been redirected into new markets, which previously imported little solar equipment.

Another indication of additionality is that Chinese clean-tech exports often target different market segments. For example, in the case of EVs, solar inverters and heat pumps, Chinese exports have much lower unit prices than equivalent exports from other producers.

Finally, it is worth noting that there has been much clearer displacement in the case of fuel-burning vehicles, where low-cost products from China have replaced exports from other suppliers.

China's clean-tech exports have become a key enabler of the global clean-energy transition, driving down the cost, opening up new markets and responding to the rapid increase in demand.

China's role as a major supplier of electrification technologies could give it a reason to support a push by the COP31 presidency for a global electrification target.

The country also has a large and growing role in financing and building clean-energy projects in many emerging countries, although this remains much smaller in scale than its exports.

When analysed on the country level, China's clean-tech exports have, by and large, not displaced exports by other producers in absolute terms. Rather, it has captured market growth and opened up clean-energy development in countries that previously did not import the technologies at all.

However, the sharp drop in clean-tech prices means that exporters that have only held their sales volumes steady have seen the value of their exports dwindle. They have also lost market share to China's exports. To retain market share, other exporters would need to expand production capacity.

Clean-energy technology has also become a cornerstone of China's economy, responsible for 16% of all net growth in total exports in the first half of 2026, although the share fell in the third quarter due to the broad surge in exports, even as cleantech growth accelerated as well.

More broadly, clean energy sectors contributed a third of China's GDP growth in 2025. This means that the country has a clear economic self-interest in the success of the global energy transition.

EV and wind deployment has continued to grow also in China domestically, but for solar and battery energy storage, the domestic market has dived after record volumes in 2025.

China's domestic clean-energy market is larger than the export market for most technologies. Only 43% of solar cells and panels, 13% EVs, 17% of batteries and 7% of wind turbines produced in China were exported in 2025, highlighting the importance of the home market for producers.

For solar, however, exports continue to expand and could outweigh China's domestic deployment after a slowdown in the sector in 2026. This could exacerbate overseas concerns about "unfair" trade practices, unless the domestic market picks up again.

This analysis estimates the fossil fuel and CO2 emissions avoided outside China as a result of China's exports of solar, wind, electric-vehicle and battery technology.

Each exported unit of generating capacity is assumed to displace electricity from the grid of its destination country. Similarly, each exported electric vehicle is assumed to displace fuel in an equivalent internal-combustion vehicle.

Export volumes: Solar exports include finished modules as well as intermediates (wafers and cells), each expressed by Ember as finished-panel-equivalent gigawatts, with data taken from Ember's China solar exports tracker. Wind and battery export totals are taken from Chinese industry bodies the China Wind Energy Association (CWEA) and the China Automotive Battery Innovation Alliance (CABIA). They are distributed across destination countries and months using customs-value shares from Ember's China clean-tech exports tracker. Electric-vehicle volumes use vehicle counts from China Customs. Exports to Hong Kong are excluded and replaced with Hong Kong's onward re-exports, treated as Chinese exports.

Avoided emissions: For each technology, the analysis combines the destination country's average capacity factor and grid CO2 intensity, both derived from Ember's yearly electricity data. Missing or implausible values are filled with UN sub-regional and then global medians, while all EU destinations are assigned the EU-average grid to correct for re-export hubs such as the Netherlands. For vehicles and batteries, avoided oil and CO2 is estimated based on per-vehicle assumptions compiled from the literature, net of charging emissions at the destination grid. Electric two-wheelers are credited with displacing conventional two-wheeler use for 48% of their travel. Lifetime figures multiply annual avoided emissions by assumed operating lives of 20 years for solar and wind, 10 for vehicles and batteries, or five for two-wheelers. "Embodied" manufacturing emissions are subtracted from these totals. Manufacturing emissions are calculated using average Chinese emission intensities compiled from the literature. National emissions used for comparison are from the Energy Institute statistical review of world energy.

Attributing solar exports to final markets: Because customs data records only a shipment's first destination, the analysis traces Chinese wafers, modules and cells to their final destination using UN Comtrade bilateral import data. It identifies countries that import large amounts of solar modules and intermediates from China and export them further, classifying these onward exports as exports of Chinese goods, as long as they do not exceed the volume each country imported from China. It converts customs values to capacity using Ember's monthly module and cell prices. 

The post Analysis: China's clean-tech exports in 2026 to avoid as much CO2 as Brazil emits in a year appeared first on Carbon Brief.

I will be away until Monday now, so this is a brief thread before I dash to catch a ferry. Kali is going to be very kind and post the odd thing whilst I'm away to keep the site ticking over.

Thank you all for bearing with me, and special thanks to those who contribute financially.

Many thanks also to my friend Barry Smiler for being October's sponsor. Do take a look at his climate site, which nicely complements mine. He recently added some nifty enhancements to his Research page. And for your climate listening pleasure, he suggests this little song.

"Ocean's ability to absorb carbon is weakening as climate change intensifies, UN warns…

"Rising temperatures and changes in ocean chemistry, circulation and ecosystems are weakening its ability to absorb and store carbon, leaving more CO₂ in the atmosphere. And this process "can definitely accelerate" in the foreseeable future…"

https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/10/1168687

"The deep ocean's protection against warming started to change in 2016. Nobody knows what happens now…

"Our new research shows that over the past decade, the Antarctic intermediate water has rapidly become saltier and more dense, and sitting deeper in the ocean. As a result, more heat may reach the deeper waters - with unknown consequences for the world's climate."

https://theconversation.com/the-deep-oceans-protection-against-warming-started-to-change-in-2016-nobody-knows-what-happens-now-293088

"Antarctic Sea-Ice Update:

"As of October 27, Antarctic sea-ice extent is second lowest on record for the day, 3.98 standard deviations below the 1991-2020 average, and about 145,000 km² above the record daily low set in 2023."

[Prof Eliot Jacobson]

https://x.com/EliotJacobson/status/2115420833351102861

"Polar Sharks And Rays Are Losing Their Safe Haven As Sea Ice Declines…

"The very conditions that once made these ecosystems feel so remote are changing, opening the door to greater human activity. And suddenly, those seemingly untouched habitats risk becoming covered in our fingerprints, much like a toddler's sticky handprints smeared across a freshly cleaned window."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissacristinamarquez/2026/10/28/polar-sharks-and-rays-are-losing-their-safe-haven-as-sea-ice-declines/

"Polar Vortex Split Forecast: The Earliest Stratospheric Warming on Record Is Coming…

"The latest forecasts show stratospheric winds collapsing toward a full reversal in early November, splitting the Polar Vortex into two separate cores… An event this early is uncharted territory. With a Super El Niño already shaping the weather pattern, the impacts are harder to track than in mid-winter."

https://www.severe-weather.eu/globa

"Greenland ice sheet shrinks for 30th year in a row.

"Over the 12-month period to August 2026, the world's second-largest ice sheet lost around 135bn tonnes of ice. This major ice loss came as the region experienced a relatively cool start to summer and less surface melt than in previous years."

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-greenland-ice-sheet-shrinks-for-30th-year-in-a-row

"One of Norway's largest glaciers has split apart due to extensive melting.

""We have been monitoring Harbardsbreen for several years because we recognised that the glacier was at risk of splitting apart in this area. We should expect more glaciers to break up, and Norway's ranking of its largest glaciers will need to be revised once we complete a new nationwide survey," glacier researcher Liss Marie Andreassen says…"

https://www.sciencenorway.no/climate-glacier-ntb-english/one-of-norways-largest-glaciers-has-split-apart-due-to-extensive-melting/2729456

"Swiss village remains on alert over unstable Weisshorn Glacier.

"The hanging glacier on the eastern side of the Weisshorn mountain above Randa, in southern Switzerland, will continue to be closely monitored and safety measures will remain in place due to the potential dangers, the authorities said on Tuesday."

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/glaciers-permafrost/swiss-village-remains-on-alert-over-unstable-weisshorn-glacier/92286483

"Slovenia mourns loss of glacier on its highest peak after scorching summer…

"In the last five years, which includes Europe's three hottest years on record, the remaining ice has melted to a handful of isolated pockets, with the final remnant of the main body measuring just a few metres by the end of summer. New photos of the mountainside - taken either side of snowfall this month - confirm that no ice remains."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/oct/27/slovenia-mourns-loss-glacier-highest-peak-scorching-summer

"Residents of the Arava region in southern Israel report being unable to reach their polling stations due to flooding caused by stormy weather.

"The reports in Hebrew media come after heavy rain in the Arava desert and across much of southern Israel prompted the closure of Route 90 in both directions."

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/voters-in-southern-israels-arava-say-they-cant-reach-polls-due-to-flooding-road-closures/

"Families brace for a fourth winter of wind, rain and floods in Gaza's camps…

"When temperatures drop, tents offer little protection for the displaced, with al-Jamal and his family having no choice but to put on more layers of clothing. "We are out in the open. We are living in the street, not in houses that protect us," he said."

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/10/28/gaza-families-brace-for-a-fourth-winter-of-wind-rain-and-floods-in-camps

"Heavy rain triggers flash flooding in Syria.

"Heavy thunderstorms accompanied by hail and strong winds struck wide areas of Raqqa, Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor, as well as parts of the countryside of Homs, Hama and Aleppo today, causing flash floods, flooding and torrents in valleys, and cutting off several roads, according to the Civil Defense."

https://hawarnews.com/en/heavy-rain-triggers-flash-flooding-in-syria

"More historic heat in SOUTHERN AFRICA: Min 29.9 [85.9F] Kariba is HOTTEST NIGHT EVER RECORDED IN ZIMBABWE.

"In BOTSWANA Monthly record at Lephepe: Max. 39.7C. Tomorrow extreme heat again in Mozambique and Malawi."

[Extreme Temps]

https://x.com/extremetemps/status/2115149313634369885

"Since the thermometer was invented, there has never been anything comparable to what we are seeing now in West Asia.

"Still MINIMUMS >30C [86F] in Middle East and tropical nights in The Caucasus at 43N. This won't end anytime soon: Thousands of November records will be pulverized allover the area." [Extreme Temps]

https://x.com/extremetemps/status/2115340129116316145

"At least 3 dead after Cylone Arnab hits southern India…

"At least 180,000 people were evacuated from Andhra Pradesh and Odisha states a day earlier. Flights and train services were cancelled, and some schools were forced to close. Authorities say more than 12 million people live in the cyclone's expected path."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/28/cyclone-arnab-makes-landfall-in-indias-andhra-pradesh

"Ocean warming and herbivorous fish grazing drive kelp forest collapse along Japan's Izu Peninsula…

"Kelp forests, ecosystems formed by large brown seaweeds in coastal waters, provide habitats for numerous fish and invertebrates and are vital to coastal productivity and carbon cycling. However, in recent years, kelp forests have declined throughout Japan…"

https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ocean-herbivorous-fish-grazing-kelp.html

"World's oldest cave paintings under threat as wildfires rage across Indonesia…

"In a cave in South Sulawesi's Maros-Pangkep, an artwork depicting human-like figures interacting with a pig was dated by researchers from Australia's Griffith University to be at least 51,200 years old. In a cave on Muna Island, off Sulawesi, a reddish-coloured hand stencil was dated to at least 67,800 years."

https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/southeast-asia/indonesia-fires-sulawesi-cave-painting-prehistoric-b3071990.html

"Farmers urged to monitor crops as locust swarms threaten south-eastern Australia…

"It said the build-up followed record rainfall across the arid interior in February and March, which had lifted autumn adult numbers, while favourable conditions through autumn and winter had supported survival and breeding."

https://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/cropping/farmers-urged-to-monitor-crops-as-locust-swarms-threaten-southeastern-australia/news-story/657384bc167893895eadc5c6e98d576a

"ABSOLUTELY INSANE HEAT ALL OVER THE AMERICAS:

"Brownsville TX exceptional 98F/36.7C; 36.1 Flamingo AP is HOTTEST OCTOBER DAY IN BONAIRE. Min. 21.0 Arica IS HOTTEST OCTOBER NIGHT EVER RECORDED IN CHILE… 100% of Caribbean with unprecedented heat. CRAZY." [Extreme Temps]

https://x.com/extremetemps/status/2115274437918642669

"Chile: declares eight-month algae emergency across salmon farming regions.

"Chile has declared a preventive emergency across 15 coastal regions, including its main salmon farming areas, amid concerns that El Niño conditions could increase the risk of harmful algal blooms over the coming summer."

https://www.salmonbusiness.com/chile-declares-eight-month-algae-emergency-across-salmon-farming-regions/

"The Ocean 'Was the Color of Chocolate.' Mexico Declares War on Seaweed…

"With climate change helping to fuel a record expansion of the seaweed throughout the Caribbean and up the coast of the U.S. — reaching as far as North Carolina this summer — the Mexican efforts are being held up as a potential test case for a sustainable solution."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/28/world/americas/mexico-seaweed-navy.html

"HISTORIC HEAT IN THE CARIBBEAN:

"MINIMUM 30.4C Bonaire (Dutch Caribbean) is HOTTEST NIGHT EVER RECORDED IN THE CARIBBEAN. 9 minimums in a row >29C: Absolute madness, never happened before in The Caribbean or even in Central and South America."

[Extreme Temps]

https://x.com/extremetemps/status/2115514967487291751

"Unprecedented flooding is quickly becoming a fact of life in some Southern California coastal communities.

"On Monday morning, high tide brought water pouring into business districts in Newport Beach and flooded part of Pacific Coast Highway in Sunset Beach. Sea water levels reached an all-time record high in San Pedro, topping 8 feet. Conditions are expected to get worse Tuesday."

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-10-27/la-me-heat-california-coast-water

"50 Year Record Broken in Ft Lauderdale! Water levels reached 2.51 Ft above mean higher high water, breaking the record for highest water in Port Everglades.

"That beats hurricane Dorian and Nicole. Palm Beach also set its highest level on record in 56+ years… This is due to persistently strong onshore winds, full moon, favorable lunar phase, and sea level rise due to a warming climate." [Jeff Berardelli]

https://x.com/WeatherProf/status/2115411513959714922

"The climate crisis will destroy our economies - we learned this 20 years ago. When will we act?

"Saving the only planet we have makes good economic sense. There is, after all, no money to be made on a dead Earth. There may be costs involved now, but they are worth paying to protect our children from certain destruction."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/28/nicholas-stern-report-climate-consensus-lessons-capitalism

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The post 29th October 2026 Today's Round-Up of Climate News appeared first on Climate and Economy.