The Canadian prime minister's reckoning with Trumpism in Davos clashes with his attacks on environmental, Indigenous and labour rights

The Canadian prime minister is a hero around the world for his Davos speech that reckoned with a reconfiguration of power in the shadow of Donald Trump.

But at home, Mark Carney is mirroring the US president by radically centralizing power within his office and cabinet and taking a hatchet to dozens of laws protecting environmental, Indigenous and labour rights, all in order to enact his economic agenda.

Shiri Pasternak is an associate professor in criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University and a member of the Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism research team, a collaboration between critical scholars and Indigenous land defenders across North America

Intel has become the latest target for Good Jobs First, which questions why the chipmaker continues to receive tax breaks from key states, long after setting up shop there, and laying off thousands of workers in those regions.

The non-profit organization, which promotes accountability in economic development, says the chipmaker promised billions of dollars in investment and thousands of high-tech jobs for the areas surrounding its manufacturing plants in Hillsboro, Oregon, and Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

Its report, The Bleeding Edge: How the Public Pays the Costs of Intel's Semiconductor Manufacturing, claims that Intel's property tax breaks cost these communities more than $1.2 billion in lost revenue since 2015, and the brunt of the shortfall has largely fallen on schools funded by those local governments.

For Oregon, Good Jobs First says that property tax abatements from Intel's use of the Strategic Investment Program (SIP) exempted it from at least $1.14 billion, while Hillsboro schools lost $891 million in revenue from 2017 through 2025.

During the same timeframe, Intel paid Oregon $552.4 million in fees, or less than a third of the value of its tax breaks.

In New Mexico, the figures are lower, but still significant. The report puts Chipzilla's property tax exemptions from Industrial Revenue Bonds (IRBs) at $99.6 million in foregone revenue since 2017, while Rio Rancho's Public Schools lost an estimated $43.4 million over the same nine-year period. Here, the company paid $41.6 million in required payments in lieu of taxes from 2017 through 2025, shared among affected local governments.

Good Jobs First also notes that despite these subsidies, Intel was awarded billions under the CHIPS Act funding from the US federal government.

However, the situation with that is somewhat complex, as the company secured an initial $7.86 billion under the Biden administration, of which $2.2 billion is believed to have been paid out.

The incoming Trump administration, however, decided to rethink the scheme, and ended up making an $8.9 billion deal for 10 percent of Intel's common stock, made up of the remaining $5.7 billion of the CHIPS Act cash plus an additional $3.2 billion under the Secure Enclave program to make semiconductors for the military.

At the same time, the chipmaker is estimated by Good Jobs First to have laid off more than 4,700 workers at its facilities in Oregon and New Mexico over the past three years, as the company wrestled with restructuring efforts and dramatic losses.

(These are just a fraction of Intel's total layoffs during the period.)

The issue, according to the non-profit, is that these sites are established Intel facilities which the company has operated for decades. They already have the facilities, infrastructure, skilled workers, and other necessities that a new site might require investment for. Are continued tax breaks truly necessary, Good Jobs First asks, or are they just subsidizing business decisions Intel would make anyway?

It says Intel's track record in Oregon and New Mexico should be taken as important lessons for other communities considering becoming a home to semiconductor manufacturing, and recommends questioning whether state and local tax breaks are even necessary.

"Tax incentives are supposed to encourage investment, not provide companies with an ongoing stream of public support for decades," said Good Jobs First Research Analyst and report author Kristan Wong Karinen.

"Intel has received tax breaks at these campuses for generations, and local leaders should be asking hard questions about why those subsidies are still necessary, especially with the billions of dollars in federal grants and tax credits they receive from the CHIPS Act."

We asked Intel for a statement regarding these claims by Good Jobs First, and in response it told us: "Intel works closely with governments in the regions where we operate to leverage incentives that support leading-edge semiconductor R&D and manufacturing. We are not providing additional details beyond what's available in our annual reports."

Recent targets for the non-profit have been datacenters, and the states offering tax incentives for developers and operators to build within their jurisdiction. Some states were losing billions in lost revenue to server farm projects, while others were failing to disclose their tax shortfall. ®

These are easily the most comfortable headphones I've worn. I've literally had them clipped around my ears all day without noticing them.

The good folks at SoundPEATS have sent me their latest cans to wrap around my lugs. I'm a big fan of these new-style "clip on" headphones. Rather than encasing your ears, or sticking way down into the wax-mines, these clip over your ear. It isn't a tight grip like a paperclip - more like the gentle caress of a tender but firm lover who wants only to delicately pinch your ears.

Look - it's hard writing about this stuff, OK?! Grab a pair and try them; you'll see what I mean. Here's a picture of an attractive model to give you an idea.

All the usual things you'd expect from headphones. AAC and SBC audio codecs are standard, it'll also do LDAC - which will get you higher quality but at the expense of battery life and the ability to connect to multiple devices at once.

The case recharges via USB-C, the battery seems fairly chunky and will quick-charges the headphones. 10 minutes in the case will give them 3 hours of playback.

Each clip has a button - you can change what they do in the supplied app.

IPX6 should be good for wearing in the rain, but you can't go swimming in them.

We all know what headphones can do - play audio, provide a microphone, and let you control the audio coming from your device. The CC3 Pro also have a few other smart features.

Like most decent battery-powered headphones, they will automatically switch off after a predetermined period without use.

There's a privacy mode which adds an EQ filter to reduce sound leakage. It works, but does make the sound slightly murkier.

There's a button on each one - you can use the app to set actions for tap, double-tap, triple-tap, and long press.

The case supports wireless charging, so you can chuck it on any charging puck for a quick top-up.

Outstanding. After a few minutes you will genuinely forget that you're wearing them. Shake your head as hard as you like and they will not fall off. Here's a genuine photo of me doing some manly exercises while wearing them.

Excellent - with a couple of caveats. These are open-ear devices. You can hear the world around you. That is by design and is extremely useful if you need to be aware of your surroundings. You can't block out the world or do active noise cancelling. I was not a fan of the default EQ. The bass wasn't bassy enough for me. It's easy enough to change in the app - but that does require a login.

Voice quality when speaking on the phone was also good. The people I spoke to could hear me clearly and with minimal background noise.

Piece of cake. Open the case, press the button on the back, they're ready to pair.

Sound quality was great, my voice transmitted just fine, and I could easily play/pause and adjust the volume.

Again, dead easy. Ubuntu detected and paired with them instantly.

I've complained to SoundPEATS before about their lousy app. The best thing I can say about it is that you don't have to use it. It's handy for downloading the occasional firmware update and fiddling with the setting. But that's about it.

It obnoxiously insists on needing an Internet connection to change some settings. Stuck on a train in the middle of nowhere and want to adjust your EQ? Tough. Similarly, some functionality is gated behind a login wall - such as the custom EQ and custom sound effects.

Thankfully, the rest of the app is fairly simple to use and will work offline. You can adjust what the buttons do, for example:

Weirdly, you can also download other people's EQ settings.

There's also a firmware update and a bunch of other things to flick on and off.

Other than the app, there are a few niggles which are only slightly annoying.

Firstly, they don't pause when you take them out of your ear. That's a feature which was on the first set of SoundPeats I had and is sorely missed.

Secondly, the default sound profile wasn't very bass heavy. A bit of fiddling in the app and they sounded much better.

While they do charge in either slot within the case, they're incompatible with previous SoundPeats cases. The risk with smaller manufacturers like this is that you won't be able to find a cheap replacement case if you need it.

Launch price is about £75 / €80. That's getting towards the upper end of what I think is acceptable for headphones like this.

Readers of this blog can use code PRCC3PRO for an extra 10% off at Amazon UK or other international Amazon stores. The code should work from today until 30th November 2026.

Ultimately, these are ridiculously comfortable headphones. They won't block out the noise of the environment around you - but that's their selling point. You use these while cycling, wandering through the city, or any other time you need to be aware of your surrounding. If you can put up with the slightly shonky app, these are well worth the price.

Many thanks to SoundPeats for the review pair.

Hundreds of spiders decided to hang out on a power line in Indonesia. They wove their webs around the power lines, creating a giant invisible wall where they all stand guard. This scene is an arachnophobe's nightmare.

Seeing this in the daytime would be one thing. — Read the rest

The post Hundreds of spiders turned a power line in Indonesia into a giant web wall appeared first on Boing Boing.

A kind man named John wanted to help the squirrels in his neighborhood feel safe and comfortable. He built squirrel boxes around his neighborhood to serve as homes and shelters for local squirrels. The squirrel boxes are simple wood shelters that the squirrels can freely enter and exit as they wish. — Read the rest

The post A man built cozy squirrel boxes with cameras inside, and the squirrels love them appeared first on Boing Boing.

The series of photos shows what a particularly cold district in Vorkuta, Russia looks like in the dead of winter. The images at the beginning of the series show a town covered in a heavy blanket of snow, with only slivers of cars and buildings visible. — Read the rest

The post Photos show bedrooms in an Arctic Russian town filled with icicles appeared first on Boing Boing.

Both of these threats have the same roots: private entities seeking to cash in. We have the power to stand against them

A summer of extreme heat, entire villages obliterated in Nepal, a super El Niño breaking records, Exxon publicly saying we may reach 3C by 2050 - could it possibly be any worse?

How about throwing AI extinction in the mix?

Alabama attorney Larry Grissett was checking Facebook in late September when he saw a news story about a man he represented in a murder trial more than 40 years ago. According to the article, a federal judge had just vacated the conviction of that client, Charles McCrory.

Grissett was stunned. He later summed up his reaction: "Vindication."

McCrory was 26 years old when he was accused of brutally killing his wife in the small town of Andalusia. He insisted he was innocent — and Grissett believed him. There was no evidence connecting McCrory to the crime; prosecutors seized on a supposed bite mark found on his wife's body, which a state expert claimed to match to McCrory's teeth.

Grissett was never convinced by the so-called bite mark. At McCrory's 1985 trial, he said, Grissett's own dentist sat through the expert testimony and found it preposterous. "He says, 'There's no way that guy can say that,' Grissett recalled. "I mean, anybody with common sense would know that."

In a September 21 ruling describing the case against McCrory as "thin," Trump-appointed Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr., zeroed in on this junk forensic science. Not only would the alleged bite mark not be allowed into evidence today, Huffaker wrote, bite-mark analysis itself "is grossly unreliable and unsupported by relevant scientific bodies. It amounts to nothing more than rank speculation."

Unless the state moves to retry him within the next six months, Huffaker concluded, McCrory must be released from prison.

The ruling was not only momentous for McCrory, who has insisted on his innocence for more than four decades, but it also marked a new victory in the long legal battle against junk forensics — and the discredited discipline of bite-mark analysis specifically.

"Everybody sees this was junk science. You don't have to be a scientist to understand that."

Yet more than a month after the decision, McCrory remains behind bars with no sense of when he might walk out. Although his lawyers asked the court to free him on bond pending the state's decision to release or retry him, the Alabama attorney general's office filed a motion last week asking Huffaker to reconsider his order overturning the conviction. The state's appeals will likely drag out McCrory's ordeal through the holidays and into next year.

In a statement, McCrory's current legal team praised Huffaker's "explicit acknowledgment that criminal convictions based on discredited bitemark evidence cannot stand." Mark Loudon-Brown, senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, and Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project, said they are "grateful for the decision and look forward to continuing our fight to bring Mr. McCrory home."

In 2022, The Intercept published a lengthy investigation into McCrory's case, detailing the flaws in the state's conviction. The case attracted additional media coverage, highlighting the problem of junk forensic science. Despite the glaring problems with the evidence against McCrory, Alabama courts have routinely rejected his appeals and in 2023, the state's parole board denied McCrory release.

Julie Bond McCrory's body was found inside her home in Andalusia on May 31, 1985. Her head was bashed in, and she'd been repeatedly stabbed in the chest. The couple's son Chad, then 3 years old, was found unharmed in his bed. Police quickly pointed to McCrory as their only suspect: He and Julie were separated, and McCrory had been having an affair. At trial, the theory seemed to be that he'd savagely murdered Julie to be free from her.

Related A Bogus Bite Mark Sent Him to Prison for Murder. Alabama Wants to Keep Him There.

The police investigation was cursory at best. Detectives found no physical evidence to connect McCrory to the bloody crime. Meanwhile, they ignored some evidence altogether, including two windows in Julie's bedroom that were found open, but which investigators failed to dust for fingerprints. Police also failed to consider an alternate suspect, a man who worked at an excavating company bordering the McCrorys' backyard and who, just weeks after Julie's murder, committed a home invasion rape of another local woman. He was convicted and sent to prison for that crime. 

Ultimately, the state latched onto a single piece of physical evidence against McCrory: a pair of small indentations on the back of Julie's right arm, which prosecutors concluded was a bite mark made by McCrory's teeth.

To sell this theory, the state employed famed forensic dentist Richard Souviron, a star prosecution witness in the recent and sensational trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Although Souviron initially said he couldn't definitively link the two marks on Julie's arm to McCrory's teeth, at trial he was unequivocal that they matched.

Skin, with its malleability, is a terrible medium for accurately recording any injury.

Bite-mark analysis is based on a two-pronged foundation. First, that the shape and arrangement of our teeth are unique, like DNA, and second, that skin is a suitable substrate for recording this uniqueness. As it turns out, there's no science backing either assertion. In fact, research into the discipline has routinely found the opposite — that human dentition is not unique and that skin, with its malleability, is a terrible medium for accurately recording any injury. This makes bite-mark analysis a random and entirely speculative practice.

Still, after taking center stage at the Bundy trial, bite-mark analysis took off in the 1980s and '90s and, despite not having any basis in actual science, made its way into courtrooms around the country, turning forensic dentists like Souviron into newsmaking, swashbuckling crime fighters.

Related Whistling Past the Graveyard: Why It's So Hard to Rid the Courts of Junk Science

In the years that followed, however, bite-mark analysis was increasingly called into question and ultimately exposed as junk science, a subjective pattern-matching practice that has led to dozens of wrongful convictions. At least four of those, including McCrory's, are cases in which Souviron served as the prosecution's expert.

In 2019, Souviron recanted his testimony in McCrory's case, providing an affidavit to Fabricant and Loudon-Brown, who presented it at a 2021 evidentiary hearing in Andalusia. "As a forensic odontologist I no longer believe the individualized teeth marks comparison testimony I offered in his case was reliable or proper," Souviron wrote. "I no longer believe, as I did at the time of trial, that there is a valid scientific basis for concluding that the injury found on the skin of the victim in this case, assuming that the injury is in fact teeth marks, could be 'matched' or otherwise connected to a specific individual, such as Mr. McCrory."

Despite the fact that their key witness had disavowed the evidence they used to send McCrory to prison for life, prosecutors fought to preserve their conviction. At the 2021 hearing, they insisted that McCrory was guilty, based on the same evidence they presented at trial. They recast the supposed bite mark as "teeth marks," implying that, while bite-mark analysis may be discredited, the study of "teeth marks" is a separate and valid discipline. Even if Souviron had not testified for the state, they argued, jurors could have looked at photos of the marks on Julie's body and the dental molds taken from McCrory and decided for themselves that McCrory inflicted the wounds.

Covington County Circuit Court Judge Lex Short, who presided over the hearing, agreed with the prosecutor. So did the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, which upheld his ruling in favor of the state. But Huffaker did not.

Huffaker took exception to the notion that analyzing "teeth marks" is somehow separate from bite-mark analysis. It is clear, he wrote, "that bitemark identification is based on analysis of individual teeth markings."

But "most importantly, the state court unreasonably determined that, even without Dr. Souviron's expert testimony, a reasonable jury could compare the bitemark evidence with McCrory's dentition themselves and find that it belonged to McCrory," Huffaker wrote. "This finding blinks reality in light of the evidence presented by McCrory at the postconviction evidentiary hearing." In a footnote, he added that "if an expert could not testify about bitemark identification because it is junk science, a jury should not have been allowed to consider it either."

McCrory is not the only person who is still fighting for his freedom decades after being convicted based on discredited junk science. Last year, Chris Duncan was declared innocent nearly 30 years after being sent to Louisiana's death row based on bogus bite-mark evidence. He was released one day before Thanksgiving. In his case, a video showed the state's supposed bite-mark expert manufacturing the evidence that was used to convict Duncan.

As in McCrory's case, Louisiana prosecutors have nevertheless continued to insist their case against Duncan is solid. And as in McCrory's case, this has not gone over well with some judges. Earlier this year, Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Judge John Weimer wrote that bite-mark evidence "should be discarded and no longer have a place in the realm of forensic science."

"Long ago, some who were thought to have the best and brightest minds of that time endorsed 'trial by water' as a means of determining a person's guilt or innocence. We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd, since those who fell victim to those practices often did not survive, regardless of whether they were found guilty or innocent," Weimer wrote. "Thankfully, as scientific knowledge evolved, there was a realization that these practices had no basis whatsoever in logic, reason, or the search for truth, and the practices were discarded."

Related There's a Junk Science Crisis in Criminal Convictions. Sonia Sotomayor Calls It Out in Alabama Bite-Mark Case.

As the holidays approach, McCrory's family remains hopeful that he will soon walk out of prison. His son Chad, who is now in his 40s, has attended a dozen parole hearings with the hope of one day seeing his father released.

Grissett, McCrory's former lawyer, reached out to Chad to share his hope that McCrory will finally come home. While memories have faded in the tight-knit community of Andalusia, many people remember McCrory's case, he said.

"Everybody sees this was junk science," Grissett said. "You don't have to be a scientist to understand that."

It's "sad that it's taken this long," Grissett said. It haunts him that "somebody's still out there who murdered this lady. And I'm afraid that they're not gonna look into that."

The post Prosecutors Want to Keep a Man in Prison for His Wife's Murder — Despite Judge Saying Their Evidence is Junk appeared first on The Intercept.

• The 2027 Panigale V4 further improves track performance, posting an average lap time improvement of 0.4 seconds at Vallelunga compared to the previous model
• A more efficient Desmosedici Stradale: modifications to the intake, exhaust, and lubrication systems boost power, enhancing high-RPM performance, with the rev limiter now raised to 15,000 rpm, also in gears from 2nd to 5th.
• A new Front Frame with modified stiffness, Dynamic Engine Brake and Race Brake Control allow for later braking, faster corner entry and earlier acceleration on corner exit

Sunnyvale, Calif. - Buying a Panigale V4 means embracing nearly forty years of successes, developments, and innovations that have shaped the history of superbikes. It is a legacy unmatched by any other brand in this segment—spanning seven generations of superbikes that have starred in epic races in the hands of the most beloved riders in production-based world championships, culminating in the historic dominance of the 2026 World Superbike Championship. With the version unveiled at WDW 2024, Ducati fielded a Panigale V4 in the Race of Champions that was a full second faster than the previous model. Now, two years after that launch, the Borgo Panigale manufacturer presents its evolution: the Panigale V4 MY2027.

To create the Panigale V4 MY2027, Ducati focused on every single detail that could enhance performance—just as it does in competition. Leveraging the experience gained in racing—where the seventh-generation Ducati superbike secured the world championship title and various national rider and manufacturer titles upon its debut*—the Borgo Panigale manufacturer has developed the V4 to make it even faster and more effective on the track.

Ducati has refined the engine, aerodynamics, chassis, and electronics,honing every aspect of the bike with one goal: boost its potential and let the rider exploit it more effectively. The result is a Panigale V4 that delivers higher performance and is more intuitive and accessible when riding at the limit.

The Desmosedici Stradale engine produces 209 hp, the 2027 engine received modifications that improve airflow and reduce mechanical friction. Adopting longer final gearing and raising the rev limiter by 500 rpm allows for better utilization of high-end power.

At the same time, Ducati has improved the bike's dynamic behavior during the most critical phases of sports riding—braking, turn-in, mid-corner, and exit—by introducing significant chassis and electronic updates.

The effectiveness of the entire package is confirmed by tests conducted at the Vallelunga circuit, where the Panigale V4 recorded an average lap time improvement of 0.4 seconds compared to the previous model. Many of the features found on the Panigale V4 MY27 were also tested and validated in race conditions by Ducati riders during the Lenovo Race of Champions, contributing to a 0.7-second improvement on the pole position record set by Nicolò Bulega.

• More powerful and efficient Desmosedici Stradale engine

At the heart of the Panigale V4 S lies the Desmosedici Stradale, the engine that represents the most direct technological link between Ducati's production superbikes and the expertise gained in MotoGP. For the 2027 Model Year, updates focus on optimizing the engine's overall efficiency through a revised exhaust system, a new high-flow air intake, and a recalibrated lubrication circuit to reduce power loss.

To maximize the engine's potential, Ducati adopted longer final gearing (17/42 instead of 16/41) and raised the rev limiter to 15,000 rpm in gears two through five. This solution allows the rider to stay in the optimal gear for longer, reducing the number of gear shifts and enabling greater focus on racing lines and riding technique. At Vallelunga, this translates to two fewer gear shifts per lap.

For those seeking the ultimate track performance, the new Akrapovič Full Racing Exhaust PRO is also available; it adds 20 hp and 5 ft lbs of torque while simultaneously reducing the bike's weight by 14.5 lbs. The rider benefits from a bike that accelerates more effectively, reacts more quickly to changes of direction and delivers performance closer to that of a true race bike.

• Chassis: better feeling, more grip, higher mid-corner speed

When working on a bike that is already at the top of its class, the most significant improvements come from refining the overall balance. As a result, Ducati engineers focused their efforts on the ability of the chassis of the Panigale V4 S to maximize tire performance at extreme lean angles.

The key modification involves the Front Frame, where lateral stiffness has been reduced by 12%, improving the bike's ability to keep the tire in contact with the asphalt at high lean angles. For the rider, this results in increased front-end grip, more precise feel during turn-in and an improved ability to tighten the line toward the apex. This, in turn, makes it possible to maintain higher cornering speeds and open the throttle earlier when exiting a turn.

The new final drive ratio also indirectly contributes to the bike's dynamic behavior. By effectively reducing the wheelbase by 8 mm, it makes the Panigale V4 S even quicker in changes of direction. For the rider, this translates into greater nimbleness on twisty sections, making the bike more usable and less physically demanding.

The V4 S version also introduces new adjustable clip-on handlebars designed for track use. Raising them by 10 mm creates a higher riding position, following the trend seen in MotoGP development over recent years. This gives the rider better leverage on the handlebars, resulting in improved control and reduced physical effort during direction changes and prolonged, heavy braking. **

• Electronics

The electronics on the new Panigale V4 S take another step forward by bringing management strategies to the production bike that allow riders to experience sensations and riding techniques increasingly similar to those of official Ducati MotoGP and Superbike riders.

The key new feature is Dynamic Engine Brake; this system replaces the previous Engine Brake Control and uses the DVO (Ducati Vehicle Observer) algorithm to modulate engine braking based on the actual load on the rear tire. This results in more predictable behavior upon corner entry, greater stability when braking at lean angles and increased confidence when riding at the limit.

Alongside Dynamic Engine Brake, the new Race Brake Control makes its debut, derived directly from experience gained with the most exclusive models in the Ducati range. The system increases the rear wheel's contribution during deceleration, allowing for more effective use of available grip.

Working in tandem, Dynamic Engine Brake and Race Brake Control allow the rider to harness rear-wheel braking power typically reserved for professionals. This enables later braking points, allowing riders to maintain speed into corners and execute tighter, more efficient lines. The result is a significant boost in lap efficiency, coupled with a sense of control and confidence for a much wider range of riders.

• Availability

The new Panigale V4 will be available in North American Ducati dealerships starting in February 2027.  The Panigale V4 in the US is priced at $27,995 and the V4 S is priced at $35,995 in Ducati Red. For the Canadian market, the Panigale V4 is priced at $30,495 and the V4 S priced at $38,995 in Ducati Red.

Further information and all images of the new model are available on Ducati Media House.

* 2025 Italian Production SBK Championship with Panigale V4 S, 2026 British Superbike with Panigale V4 R, 2026 EuroMoto SBK with Panigale V4 R

** Adjustment reserved for track use

Panigale V4 S

• Colors
  • Ducati Red with Urban Grey frame and black wheels

• Key standard features
  • Desmosedici Stradale engine, 1,103 cc
  • Maximum power of 209 hp at 12,750 rpm
  • Maximum torque of 89 ft lbs at 11,250 rpm
  • Rev limiter at 15,000 rpm
  • New enlarged front air intake (air pressure +0.6% at 300 km/h)
  • Kerb weight without fuel: 412 lbs
  • Front Frame chassis with optimized lateral stiffness
  • 5 gallon aluminum fuel tank
  • Ducati Electronic Suspension (DES) 3.0
  • Öhlins NPX-30 fork with Öhlins Smart EC 3.0 control system
  • Öhlins TTX 36 shock absorber with Öhlins Smart EC 3.0 control system
  • Öhlins steering damper with Öhlins Smart EC 3.0 control system
  • Forged aluminum wheels
  • Lithium battery
  • Braking system with Brembo Hypure monobloc calipers
  • Pirelli Diablo Supercorsa V4 tires with 200/60 rear
  • Latest-generation electronics package with 6-axis Inertial Measurement Unit (6D IMU): Race eCBS with cornering functionality; Ducati Traction Control (DTC) DVO; Ducati Slide Control (DSC); Ducati Wheelie Control (DWC) DVO; Ducati Power Launch (DPL) DVO; Ducati Quick Shift (DQS) 2.0; Dynamic Engine Brake (DEB), Race Brake Control (RBC), Ducati Vehicle Observer (DVO)
  • Buttons for quick level adjustment
  • New 6.9" full-TFT dashboard with 8:3 aspect ratio
  • Riding Modes (Race A, Race B, Sport, Road, Wet)
  • Full-LED lighting system with DRL and turn signals integrated into the headlight *
  • Single-seat configuration (passenger kit available as an accessory)
  • Pre-configured for Ducati Data Logger (DDL) and Ducati Multimedia System (DMS)

Panigale V4

• Color
  • Ducati Red with Urban Grey frame and black wheels

• Standard equipment same as Panigale V4 S, except for:
  • Kerb weight (without fuel): 421 lbs
  • 43 mm Showa Big Piston Fork (BPF), fully adjustable
  • Sachs monoshock, fully adjustable
  • Sachs steering damper
  • Five-spoke light alloy wheels
  • Lead-acid battery

The post Ducati Panigale V4 2027: The Class Benchmark Evolves appeared first on Roadracing World Magazine | Motorcycle Riding, Racing & Tech News.

Cisco has open sourced a behavior detection engine that watches AI agents, to help security teams prevent rogue agents from going off the rails like they did with the Hugging Face hack - or worse.

It's called Project Quarry, and it aims to provide a "shared language" for evaluating agent behavior, along the lines of what Snort, which Cisco also maintains, did for detecting malicious network traffic and what YARA did for rule-based malware identification.

Most detection tools rely on specific interactions with an AI model or agent. Did it attempt prompt injection? Or did the agent call an attack tool?

"But what is missing is the entire context under which something may occur," Amy Chang, head of AI threat and security research at Cisco, said in an exclusive interview with The Register.

She likened this to credit card fraud detection. Without context, individual transactions such as a small test charge or a single purchase in a location far away from a card-holder's usual location may not raise any flags.

"And then you try again," making another fraudulent purchase, "and that went through, too. So now I'm gonna buy the PS5," Chang said.

"Those are the things that Quarry addresses by taking into consideration the entire agent session," she explained. "One tool call may seem in-scope until you realize that that next step is taking that information and sending it to an attacker-controlled inbox or server."

Even data theft is a sequence and not a single agentic action. Agentic AI security firm Invariant Labs demonstrated this with a proof-of-concept attack against GitHub's MCP server that hijacked a user's agent via a malicious GitHub Issue, and coerced it into leaking data from private repositories.

Simply reading a configuration file, or sending a request to an external endpoint may be legitimate agentic actions. However, combining the two can lead to data exfiltration - and shows "why action relationships matter," wrote Chang and fellow Cisco researchers Adam Swanda, Ravikumar Balakrishnan, and Konstantin Berlin in a blog post about Quarry shared with The Register ahead of publication

"A policy can produce a finding when the trace shows a sensitive file read followed within a defined window by an external send," they wrote. "The risk comes from the relationship between the two actions, so the finding should preserve evidence from both."

Quarry covers single- and multi-turn large language model conversations, agents, tool use, Model Context Protocol (MCP) interactions, and multimodal inputs.

In addition to the open source code itself, the project's GitHub repository includes installation instructions, supported Python versions, plugins for Claude Code, Codex and other MCP-compatible agents, configuration examples, rule-writing guidance, and a rule starter pack.

For instance, with the rule pack, "If a base-64 encoded malware is somewhere in the tool call, that would result in a block," Chang said.

The rule format looks similar to a YARA or Snort rule, with a header that details the traffic to examine, content to match, and metadata for tracking the rule. Here's a Quarry rule that flags an agent that reads a credentials file:

While the Cisco Ai researchers have not run Quarry against data describing the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, they suggest that if the intrusion had been read as a complete, step-by-step record of a single session, there were several points where the AI agents' steps would have given a Quarry rule something to act on and flag for humans.

For example, Quarry would probably have flagged internet access from a sandbox.

"The rule can flag specific tool calls that reach an external server asset that wasn't in the task's allow list," Chang said.

"Another one would be credentials found and used somewhere else."

According to OpenAI's technical report about the Hugging Face intrusion, this is exactly what happened on July 10, when an agent validated 14 exposed Hugging Face tokens with write access and shared them.

"The rule would flag that there was a credential in the tool result that then called an outside service, which is likely not within the parameters of what you would want to do in this case," Chang said. "We don't want you to go and search for credentials that may have been leaked or inadvertently exposed and then utilize them to conduct a task."

The Cisco team is quick to say that rules along are not a substitute for chain-of-thought monitors, or other forms of human oversight - but they do help record a pattern that other teams can then "review, test, and apply to their own agents," they wrote.

Herein also lies the benefit of open source, and a collective approach to defending against adversarial use of AI, Chang said.

"Do we have all the answers? No," Chang said. "We all see slices of the problem, and it's important for us to share what we see."®

UK domain registrar 123 Reg (no relation - Ed) says it was the victim of an "AI-driven cyberattack" that exposed customer data.

Customers began receiving their notification emails this week, informing them that their contact information, "related customer relationship data," company VAT numbers, and "product information from an application programming interface (API)" were compromised.

A company spokesperson elaborated, saying this means that names, phone numbers, countries, language and currency preferences, account creation dates, the products on the account, and marketing preferences were affected.

123 Reg described the September 18 intrusion as "the first known AI-driven cyberattack against our company," and told The Register that early signs point toward a China-nexus attacker.

"Our investigation identified IP addresses that we assessed to be the core attacker infrastructure, which were hosted in China and Singapore, indicating a strong Chinese nexus," the spokesperson said. 

"Our investigation further identified AI cyberattack 'skills' hosted on Chinese infrastructure, including copies of skills open sourced by Anthropic and several other AI exploitation frameworks and scripts."

They went on to say that many of the artefacts left behind led 123 Reg to suspect that a Chinese state-sponsored group, known for abusing Claude Code in attacks against at least 30 organizations, could be behind the break-in.

There is also a suspicion that the same group that hit a number of South Korea's financial institutions using open-source Chinese AI tool ARTEX, was behind the attack on 123 Reg too.

"The TA's mirror of 'anthropic_skills,' and the account naming conventions found on the Chinese servers are consistent with preparation of this class of AI-augmented operation," the spokesperson told us. 

"In addition, on October 7, 2026, CrowdStrike published CSA-261162, describing an unknown, likely Chinese-speaking actor that targeted several South Korean financial organizations starting in late September 2026, which is the same period during which we were attacked.

"That actor used ARTEX, an open-source Chinese-developed agentic penetration-testing tool released in July 2026, which was also observed to be used in the attack that targeted us."

The GoDaddy-owned registrar reported the attack to law enforcement agencies, brought in outside cybersecurity support, and notified the FTC, as well as the data protection authorities in the UK and EU.

The company spokesperson added that it worked with Singapore-based ISPs to shut down the attacker's servers in the region, which helped disrupt the attack, in addition to "other actions by us and industry partners."

123 Reg's email to customers stated the attacker's activity "was limited to reading" customer data, although the spokesperson told us "it's possible they created copies of the information," and that this is what prompted the notification.

The registrar urged customers to stay alert to the potential misuse of their data, and to treat communications appearing to come from the company with caution.

"If you receive a message or call and aren't sure it's from 123 Reg, go directly to our website and log in," the email said. "We will never contact you to request your password, payment details, or verification codes by email, text, or phone.

"We also strongly recommend turning on two-step verification (2SV), which helps keep your account protected even if someone tricks you into sharing your password. You can find instructions for setting up 2SV in your 123 Reg account.

"We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused." ®

The question of who controls satellite-based connectivity came into sharp focus in recent weeks after Ukraine's service was throttled and then restored.

Wherever Reg readers stand on those activities involving SpaceX's Starlink and Starshield, reliance on a foreign power that may not stay friendly is now under intense scrutiny. Alternatives exist, including Eutelsat OneWeb's constellation, and more are in the works. The Register toured the Harwell facility of another contender - Open Cosmos.

The business is just over a decade old and operates from multiple locations, including the UK, Greece, and Portugal. It has launched dozens of missions over the years, including its OpenConstellation service, which organizations use to share data from Earth observation satellites.

When it launched OpenConstellation in 2022, the aim was to have 25 satellites offering a mix of spatial and spectral resolution. While other services, such as the European Commission's Copernicus, provide similar data, OpenConstellation lets customers assign satellites specific tasks for specific data collection.

However, it is ConnectedCosmos that will interest users concerned about putting all their connectivity eggs in a basket that might be abruptly snatched away. The first two satellites in the constellation are now in orbit; they were launched by Rocket Lab in January 2026. The business plans to operate more than 96 satellites by the end of 2028 and to achieve full coverage by 2030. The core connectivity backbone will consist of 192 satellites, which founder and CEO Rafel Jordà Siquier described as "the foundation, not the ceiling."

The company reckons it can churn out one satellite per day, and judging by what we saw in Harwell, that figure seems realistic, though it's a far cry from the approximately 70 Starlinks per week SpaceX claimed in its IPO filing.

Because ConnectedCosmos operates from an altitude above 1,000 km, it needs far fewer satellites, though at the cost of latency increases.

Jordi Barrera Ars, co-founder and CTO, told us that latency was "anything between 30 and 80 milliseconds." This is OK for most applications, but not great for some. Direct to smartphone is, for example, not currently on the cards. Open Cosmos's VP of Commercial Satcom, Danielle Edwards, said, "We're very much in the direct device business. Direct to smartphone is not an area that we have an interest in right now."

"Never say never…" she added, "and who knows what might come along next Tuesday. But for right now, the direct device play really is on the IoT side."

During the tour, Open Cosmos showed off its assembly and testing facilities (including temperature and pressure testing), as well as a shaker table that simulates launch conditions. The satellites themselves consist of a common bus, onto which solar panels and the payload are fitted. Then they are stored, ready for launch, in what one company representative called "the satellite nursery".

The approach is interesting: OpenConstellation satellites use the ConnectedCosmos constellation as a connectivity backbone, while the latter also provides point-to-point broadband. According to Open Cosmos:

"The constellation is deliberately designed around the requirements of government, institutional and commercial customers that need secure, resilient connectivity and clear custody of critical data."

It is very much a European alternative to customers who are worried about existing services.

The service on offer from Open Cosmos will not, for example, be suitable for guiding drones traveling at high velocities, that isn't really the point, but it will provide sovereign communication channels that aren't beholden to the whim of a man and a big, red Off switch. Where the Starlink constellation stands at well over 10,000 satellites, the numbers proposed by Open Cosmos are far more modest and less likely to alarm astronomers in quite the same way.

Plus, the company has sector experience through its OpenConstellation platform (as well as custom spacecraft built for individual customers). And, unlike so many in the industry, its satellites and facilities exist beyond PowerPoint presentations. After all, we've seen them. ®

With apologies, this will be my last full thread until Monday. My nephew is getting married and I must travel to England and be an embarrassing uncle, as is the way of things. I'll put out a short Climate thread tomorrow before I leave, and 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.

"High inflation to persist globally into next year, Reuters poll.

"…central banks could face a more difficult policy backdrop, with inflation no longer driven only by oil prices but increasingly feeding into wider price measures. Most central banks have raised interest rates only a few times or not at all, and further moves remain possible if inflation pressures broaden."

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/high-inflation-persist-globally-into-next-year-reuters-poll-shows-2026-10-27/

"The Diesel Crisis Is Here To Stay.

"The global diesel shortage is expected to persist well into 2027, as damaged Middle Eastern and Russian refineries continue to constrain fuel supplies. Trump's Russian diesel deal offers little relief, with initial shipments covering less than one-tenth of U.S. daily diesel consumption."

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Diesel-Crisis-Is-Here-To-Stay.html

"'Never-ending' cruise ends journey in Cambodia due to fuel shortages.

"…this week, passengers were told: 'Unfortunately, we were unable to secure the fuel necessary to continue operations. As a result, the Odyssey will enter a temporary layup this afternoon, with crew remaining onboard to maintain the vessel and its essential systems."

https://metro.co.uk/2026/10/27/never-ending-cruise-ends-journey-cambodia-due-fuel-shortages-29744633/

"Yemen's Houthi Rebels Strike Saudi Aramco's Ras Tanura Oil Terminal.

"Yemen's Houthi rebels claim to have hit the Saudi energy complex at Ras Tanura, a gigantic refinery and loading terminal that handles an outsize share of the world's oil supply. It is the latest strike deep into the heart of Saudi territory…"

https://maritime-executive.com/article/yemen-s-houthi-rebels-strike-saudi-aramco-s-ras-tanura-oil-terminal

"Iran's calculations as US escalation looms: Trust, midterms, Hormuz.

"As regional powers step up diplomatic efforts to prevent another escalation in the eight-month United States-Israel war on Iran, Tehran is showing little sign of backing down from its red lines."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/27/irans-calculations-as-us-escalation-looms-trust-midterms-hormuz

"U.S. Warns Gulf of Possible Short, Intense Renewal of Iran War After Midterms…

"The communications through diplomatic and military channels are among a growing number of indications that the U.S. and Israel are readying to launch a new round of heavy combat operations against Iran, risking a major escalation in hopes of degrading Tehran's strength and pushing it toward negotiations."

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-warns-gulf-of-possible-short-intense-renewal-of-iran-war-after-midterms-cd1a55e1

"Three Russian diesel tankers steam for US — including one under sanctions.

"Three tankers laden with Russian diesel — including one blacklisted by European authorities — are scheduled to arrive at US ports next week, raising legal risks for firms involved with bringing the fuel into the country."

https://www.ft.com/content/d847744f-cfa5-4dc5-bdd2-faeee0b584f7?syn-25a6b1a6=1

"Trump shows off tanker with '1m barrels of oil' and floats Venezuela as 51st state.

"Donald Trump suggested Venezuela would become the 51st state of the United States on Tuesday as the president showed off a tanker he claimed had "one million barrels of oil on it" from the country, nine months after deposing its president."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/27/trump-oil-tanker-venezuela

"America Produces Less Than 1% of the Rare Earth Magnets It Needs.

"China's ongoing weaponization of rare earths, which has now been bolstered to include measures to keep individuals with sensitive technological knowledge from leaving the country, gives it leverage over a $1.5 trillion U.S. civilian economy that depends on permanent magnets."

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/America-Produces-Less-Than-1-of-the-Rare-Earth-Magnets-It-Needs.amp.html

"Two AI Chipmakers Make Up 34% of America's Earnings Boom…

"The risk posed by that concentrated earnings growth, analysts said, is the same one underpinning the broader AI investing boom: that the technology ultimately won't deliver on the massive sums of money being poured into it."

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/the-earnings-boom-is-heavily-reliant-on-just-a-handful-of-stocks-21decb53

"The AI bubble has 'already burst' in China…

""Some of the most popular AI stocks — the suppliers of optical equipment to data centres, chipmakers, companies that were seen as providing the nuts and bolts of the AI revolution — have seen their share prices collapse by 50, 60, or 70 per cent in the last few months," he said."

https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/the-ai-bubble-has-already-burst-in-china/news-story/4daa2f51dd153520d4efc402955a5fd4

"Is China's economy broken?

"On the one hand, China's exports are surging… Meanwhile, households are saving rather than spending after the property crash. Property investment is down nearly 20% this year alone. Retail sales are barely growing, and youth unemployment hit nearly 19% in August. And some analysts… think the real, the real growth rate is far, far lower than the actual numbers suggest."

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-chinas-economy-broken/

"Chinese Government to Speed Bond Sales to Stimulate Growth…

"The amount, estimated by China Chengxin International Credit Rating Co. and Industrial Securities, will only be behind the stimulus splurge in 2024. It'll add to the 11.15 trillion yuan raised in net financing so far this year as of Oct. 23, according to Bloomberg calculations based on ChinaBond data."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-28/chinese-government-to-speed-bond-sales-to-stimulate-growth

"[UK] Government issues debt at highest interest rate since financial crisis on eve of Budget.

"The Debt Management Office has been forced to sell nearly £5bn of five-year gilts at their highest interest rate since 2008, underscoring the fiscal challenge facing John Healey on the eve of his maiden Budget."

https://www.cityam.com/government-issues-debt-at-highest-interest-rate-since-financial-crisis-on-eve-of-budget/

"Healey warned 'the dam is breaking' on shop price inflation.

"Retailers have said the long-feared spike in inflation caused by the Iran war's knock-on effects on energy and supply costs is beginning to take hold… Mike Watkins, head of retailer insight at data firm NIQ, said retailers had managed to delay some of the impact of these price rises by working hard to discount products."

https://www.cityam.com/healey-warned-the-dam-is-breaking-on-shop-price-inflation/

"French Consumer Confidence Drops to 13-Year Low After Riots.

"French consumer confidence plummeted to its lowest level in 13 years in October as households reckoned with multiple shocks from a bond market selloff to protests that descended into rioting."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-27/french-consumer-confidence-hits-lowest-since-2013-after-riots

"Fuel shortages worsen across France, hundreds of stations entirely out of supply…

"Government figures from Tuesday (October 27) estimate that 11% of stations in France are out of at least one type of fuel. At the same time, motorists are reportedly using their vehicles less, with the supermarket and service station group Coopérative U seeing sales volumes drop by up to 40%."

https://www.connexionfrance.com/driving/fuel-shortages-worsen-across-france-hundreds-of-stations-entirely-out-of-supply/824153

"Thousands rally outside Portugal's parliament over housing crisis, police operations.

"Thousands of demonstrators gathered outside Portugal's parliament in Lisbon to protest a worsening housing crisis and recent forceful police actions. The mobilization was triggered by a series of weekend police operations where baton-charging officers dismantled protest tent camps set up by housing activists…"

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/thousands-rally-outside-portugals-parliament-over-housing-crisis-police-2026-10-27/

"Riots break out in Bilbao over right-wing event hosted by activist Vito Quiles.

"Nineteen people, including seven minors, have been arrested following violent riots in the Spanish city of Bilbao. The unrest erupted on Monday night, 26 October 2026, during large-scale anti-fascist protests targeting a planned appearance by right-wing online commentator and activist Vito Quiles."

https://news.sky.com/video/riots-break-out-in-bilbao-over-right-wing-event-hosted-by-activist-vito-quiles-13604453

"'Nobody heard us' - why Gen Z are leading protests across Europe.

"A wave of Gen Z-led protests is sweeping across Europe, driven by a deep sense of intergenerational unfairness, economic stagnation, and a feeling that traditional political systems are completely ignoring them."

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/nobody-heard-us-why-gen-z-are-leading-protests-across-europe-2026-10-28/

"EU pressures allies over looming Ukraine funding crunch…

"According to a forecast by the European Commission, seen by the FT, Kyiv's non-EU allies have so far pledged just €4bn for next year, down from €19bn in 2026. G7 members US, UK, Canada and Japan are collectively set to provide just €1bn, the analysis shows."

https://www.ft.com/content/8aba217f-064f-4193-89fc-3565bd2ee910?syn-25a6b1a6=1

"Russian Businesses Delay Payments as Cash Squeeze Deepens.

"Russian businesses are increasingly delaying payments to suppliers as slowing economic growth, higher taxes, falling profits and expensive borrowing strain their finances, raising the risk of a chain reaction of unpaid bills."

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/10/26/russian-businesses-delay-payments-as-cash-squeeze-deepens-a94090

"US bans vehicles from China's BYD at Japan military base, calling them 'unacceptable' risk…

"The ban, which went into effect this week at Kadena airbase on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, has fueled speculation that similar measures could be taken at other US military facilities as part of Washington's crackdown on Chinese technology it suspects of being used to collect sensitive information."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/27/us-bans-byd-electric-vehicles-kadena-military-base

"Japan Joins UK in Urging Households to Prepare Week-Long Emergency Supplies…

"Japan's disaster minister, Goshi Hosono, said the government would issue a nationwide preparedness appeal on 2 November, coinciding with the launch of the country's new Disaster Management Agency. The announcement has also prompted questions on social media about why several governments have been emphasising household preparedness at around the same time."

https://www.inkl.com/news/japan-joins-uk-in-urging-households-to-prepare-week-long-emergency-supplies

"Thai army rejects Cambodia's claims over border barriers and displaced residents.

"The Royal Thai Army has rejected Cambodia's allegation that Thailand is using military force and barbed-wire barriers to redraw the international boundary, insisting that its operations are security measures within territory claimed by Thailand."

https://www.nationthailand.com/news/general/40072816

"India deploys extra forces after protests over dam on Chinese border escalate.

"India has deployed hundreds of additional security personnel in its remote northeast, authorities said on ​Tuesday, after youth protesters clashed with police last week over a plan ‌to build a mega-dam to counter a Chinese hydropower project upstream."

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-deploys-extra-forces-after-protests-over-dam-chinese-border-escalate-2026-10-27/

"The new India-Pakistan 'cold war'. The collapse of dialogue: Why New Delhi abandoned formal talks with Islamabad…

"No high-level dialogue has taken place since 2016. Rather than some temporary diplomatic tantrum, this reflects a paradigm shift in Indian foreign policy, permanently altering the subcontinent's security architecture."

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2026/10/26/world/india-pakistan-cold-war/

"One killed, several wounded in Pakistan-Afghanistan border clash…

"The clashes occurred in the border district of South Waziristan overnight, local police chief Israr Ahmed told dpa. Afghan troops fired artillery and some of the mortars landed in the populated areas including a bazaar, Ahmed said."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/one-killed-several-wounded-pakistan-053328387.html

"Has Pakistan reopened its border with Iran for trade?

"Traders say some exports are crossing border after a weeklong halt, but Tehran says its cargo is not getting through… "Changes in the implementation of Pakistan's E-Form procedure for imports from Iran have created a situation in which traders are effectively and literally unable to dispatch cargo from Iran to Pakistan," [Iran's ambassdor] wrote."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/26/has-pakistan-reopened-its-border-with-iran-for-trade

"Iran threatens South Korean shipping group Sinokor over Hormuz transits.

"The warning is the first direct threat to a specific shipowner for shuttling oil out from the Gulf via the contested waterway, which Iran sees as crucial leverage in its conflict with the US… Lloyd's List reported last week that seven Sinokor vessels had been attacked in the region since the hostilities began…"

https://www.ft.com/content/171ffdaa-e3e7-41b9-a4c6-09c9ace3f719

"Gulf states worry U.S. could pull most troops from region after Iran war.

"America's Persian Gulf allies are increasingly worried that President Donald Trump is indifferent about their regional security concerns and could expose them to further risk by pulling the bulk of U.S. forces out of the Middle East after the war with Iran ends, according to a U.S. official, a former U.S. official and two other people familiar with the matter."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/gulf-states-worry-us-pull-troops-region-iran-war-rcna604349

"Saudi Arabia seeks to mend ties with UAE in Houthi crisis…

"The emerging rapprochement between the Gulf powerhouses comes as Riyadh shores up support from international partners including France, the UK, Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt against the latest campaign of assaults from the Houthis, as traditional ally Washington declines to join the fightback."

https://www.ft.com/content/97a6cadc-aedb-40a1-b583-c410d3278191

"Three Arab countries back Greece against Turkey-Libya maritime accord.

"Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates sided with Greece to denounce a Turkey-Libya maritime accord as a threat to regional security and international legal order in a long-standing dispute over sea borders in the eastern Mediterranean Sea."

https://thearabweekly.com/three-arab-countries-back-greece-against-turkey-libya-maritime-accord

"Jordan attacks militants in Syria in retaliation for church attack.

"Jordan has carried out airstrikes against armed groups in Syria in retaliation for Friday's attack on a Greek Orthodox church in the southern Jordanian governorate of Karak that killed nine people, the Jordanian air force has said in a statement."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/26/jordan-attacks-militants-syria-retaliation-for-last-week-church-attack

"Benjamin Netanyahu holds a narrow lead in the Israeli elections with more than two-thirds of all ballots counted, after Tuesday's vote saw the highest voter turnout in over two decades.

"…forecasts suggest neither would be able to form a majority in the 120-seat Knesset, leaving the door open to prolonged coalition negotiations."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-election-results-live-netanyahu-eisenkot-palestine-exit-polls-b3074560.html

"'Gaza belongs to us!': As Israel votes, settlers set up camp on the border of the Palestinian enclave…

"Located south of the Israeli city of Sderot, the camp, which calls itself the "Gaza Pioneers," buzzed with activity. Preparations were underway for a celebration the following day, when legislative elections are due to take place across Israel."

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/10/27/gaza-belongs-to-us-as-israel-votes-settlers-set-up-camp-on-the-border-of-the-palestinian-enclave_6765420_4.html

"Time 'running out' to reach Yemen's Taiz amid deepening crisis, UN says…

"A mounting humanitarian disaster is gripping Yemen's Taiz after nearly three weeks of a Houthi siege that has prevented supplies from entering the city, the United Nations has warned. The Iran-backed Houthis have encircled Taiz since early October, cutting off the road that links it to Aden…"

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/23/time-running-out-to-reach-yemens-taiz-amid-deepening-crisis-un-says

"'Now or Never': Ethiopia influencers push for Eritrea invasion…

"The Ethiopian army has advanced right up to the border after repelling an offensive by rebels in the northern Tigray state, who were supported by Eritrean troops. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has repeatedly said that securing a base on the Red Sea is a vital national objective for Ethiopia."

https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/3345165/now-or-never-ethiopia-influencers-push-for-eritrea-invasion

"Al Shabaab fighters clash with Turkish-trained Somali troops.

"The Al Qaeda-linked Al Shabaab group has been fighting the government for two decades and still controls large swathes of central Somalia despite a massive international operation against it. It launched an attack on Monday afternoon on Turkish-trained government troops and an allied militia in the Lower Shabelle region in South West State…"

https://www.dawn.com/news/2040362

"Protests Erupt in Eastern Sudan as Currency Collapses.

"Public anger has erupted in various cities across eastern Sudan as the country faces a deepening economic crisis and the near-total collapse of its currency. Demonstrations were reported on Thursday in regions currently under the administrative and security control of the Sudanese Armed Forces…"

https://english.globalarabnetwork.com/2026/10/26/protests-erupt-in-eastern-sudan-as-currency-collapses/

"West warns of famine risk in Sudan as civil war grinds on…

""There is very little to survive on," Yusuf Roble, regional director for Islamic Relief East Africa, told BBC Newsday, describing how people returning to Omdurman were finding their homes destroyed or looted. The war, which began in April 2023, has displaced 14 million people."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj5ynkk6v3pzo

"As their relations continue to deteriorate, Niger's military government on Monday accused Chad of carrying out a deadly drone strike in which two civilians were killed and others wounded.

"In a statement by the authorities read on national television, it said it had summoned the Chadian ambassador following the incident."

https://www.africanews.com/2026/10/27/niger-accuses-chad-of-deadly-drone-attack-in-which-two-civilians-died/

"Ebola cases in DR Congo surpass 10,000 in fastest-growing outbreak…

"It is the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak in the country's history and nearly half of the 10,060 confirmed to have the virus have died, according to data from the DRC's Ministry of Public Health. That also makes it the deadliest outbreak of the disease in the country's history."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/27/ebola-cases-in-dr-congo-surpass-10000-in-fastest-growing-outbreak

"South Africa: More than 500 troops sent to deal with anti-immigration protests in KwaZulu-Natal…

"Anti-migrant marches have been going on for months in South Africa, some leading to violent clashes, provoking international criticism and prompting thousands of African foreign nationals to leave the country."

https://news.sky.com/story/south-africa-more-than-500-troops-sent-to-deal-with-anti-immigration-protests-in-kwazulu-natal-13604332

"Brazil's real sinks after Lula's re-election victory…

""I'm not surprised the real is sinking sharply; traders are covering their bets that assume a Bolsonaro victory and tighter fiscal policy," Rachel Ziemba, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Al Jazeera. Brazil's stock exchange halted trading for 30 minutes."

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/10/26/brazils-real-sinks-after-lulas-re-election-victory

"U.S. troops to train in Colombia to combat security threats…

"The deployment comes amid a shift in Colombia's foreign and security policy under President Abelardo de la Espriella. The right-wing leader recently formalized Colombia's participation in the Shield of the Americas, a regional security coalition promoted by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration."

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/10/27/latam-colombia-us-training-exrcise/5331793122997/

"China urges US to immediately end blockade and pressure on Cuba…

"Fu said the United States' illegal economic blockade and unilateral economic sanctions against Cuba had lasted for more than 60 years and continued to intensify. The General Assembly had discussed the issue for 34 times, yet the relevant resolutions remained unimplemented, he said."

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-10-28/China-urges-US-to-immediately-end-blockade-and-pressure-on-Cuba-1RBESuzeh56/p.html

"El Salvador rushes some 1,000 troops to Haiti after gang ambush, source says.

"The troops' arrival aboard flights in recent days dramatically expands the Central American nation's role in Haiti's long-standing gang conflict. Yet it remains ‌unclear who will command the new Salvadoran contingent, how long it will stay in Haiti or whether more forces will follow."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/around-1-000-soldiers-el-172815445.html

"US military gives Elon Musk's SpaceX access to sensitive tracking data.

"The US military has given Elon Musk's SpaceX access to restricted space tracking data, raising a new round of questions about whether the Trump administration is attempting to hand over traffic control in Earth's orbit to a controversial donor. The access also raises new national security questions…"

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/oct/25/spacex-access-sensitive-tracking-data

"'Meaningless as a laptop screensaver': reviewers slate Musk's AI-made Odyssey film…

"Peter Bradshaw's review in the Guardian gave it one star, saying: "Every single dramatic moment - Odysseus's cod-insanity and his agreeing to fight, taking leave of his family, the hardship and adventure of the sea journey and the climactic decision - is all as motiveless and meaningless as the movement of shapes on a laptop screensaver.""

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/27/reviewers-slate-musk-ai-grok-odyssey-film-nolan

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You can read the previous "Economic" thead here. I'll be back on Monday with an "Economic" thread.

The post 28th October 2026 Today's Round-Up of Economic News appeared first on Climate and Economy.

After suffering more than 10,000 corporate meetings, one executive has decided that the world hasn't endured nearly enough management jargon and built an app capable of generating 270 million variations of it.

Dave Doty, who claims to have spent 35 years collecting buzzwords, clichés, and other verbal atrocities inflicted on office workers, turned his life's work into Executive Eightball, an iPhone and Android app designed to help users sound convincingly corporate while saying nothing.

The idea came about after Doty spent decades recording the nonsense he heard in meetings, presumably while everyone else was busy circling back, touching base, and taking things offline.

"I am an executive who has suffered through over 10,000 meetings during the course of my 30 year career," Doty told The Register. "To keep my sanity, in each of them, I wrote down all of the buzz words and business clichés and have built an enormous database of them."

He described his creation as "sort of what would happen if Dilbert and George Costanza had a love child."

The app, which is now available on Apple's App Store and Google Play, takes Doty's collection of corporate waffle and assembles it into sentences that wouldn't look out of place in a CEO's quarterly update or a particularly painful all-hands meeting.

Among the pearls of wisdom it can produce are "We must dashboard the outputs to enable us to focus on operational directives and break the paradigm" and "Drive to cross-functional synergies so we can reengineer the organization and unleash shareholder value."

Doty claims Executive Eightball can produce approximately 270 million unique sentences in 15 languages, meaning workers across the globe can now contribute to meetings without the tiresome business of having an actual idea.

The app's listing promises to help users "Speak fluent corporate nonsense instantly," with suggested applications including office humor, LinkedIn jokes, presentation icebreakers, and, perhaps most appropriately, "Fake CEO energy."

There's a free version, although you'll have to put up with ads and a limited supply of corporate waffle. For $0.99, you can unlock the lot and talk complete rubbish to your heart's content.

The timing is rather fitting. In March, research covered by The Register suggested that people who enthusiastically embrace corporate buzzwords may actually be worse at their jobs. Now there's an app to help the rest of us catch up.

Doty, meanwhile, appears delighted with his contribution to the corporate world.

"This is truly a paradigm shift for corporate leadership and my greatest lifetime contribution to society," he wrote in his latest email, urging potential customers to subscribe to the paid version to "unleash the value."

After 35 years and 10,000 meetings, at least someone has finally found a productive use for all that wasted time. ®

From 80s synthpop and 90s trip hop through to mischievous, glitched-out electronics, Andy Stott talks through 13 records that hold significance to him ahead of the release of his new album, Late Loop

Across a career that now spans more than two decades, Andy Stott's name has become synonymous with a style of electronic music that is patient and understated. Early records like Passed Me By and Luxury Problems dealt in dubbed-out minimalism and hauntingly gritty chuggers, while albums like 2016's Too Many Voices and 2019's It Should Be Us retained some of those qualities while introducing shades of dream pop into his captivating oeuvre. 

On new record Late Loop, which is his first studio LP in five years, Stott explores those...

The post Coming Up for Air: Andy Stott's Favourite Albums appeared first on The Quietus.

Dis Fig

What To Make Of These Mortal Hands

Her debut was called PURGE and it was about her. This one is about what people do to each other, and it is named after the part of the body that does it

What To Make Of These Mortal Hands by Dis Fig

The title tells you where to look. Hands make things and hands wreck them, and Felicia Chen has built her second solo album around that double function. Track ten is called 'A Hundred Hands'. Track six is 'The Snake You Built'. The third track is named after the psaltery, an instrument you have to pluck with your fingers to make a sound at all. None of this is decoration. What To Make...

The post Dis Fig - What To Make Of These Mortal Hands appeared first on The Quietus.

Newly formed Quake AI is a cloud provider that expects its users will be mostly agents rather than humans.

It was created after US-based Rumble Inc acquired German datacenter operator Northern Data in June. The parent then rebranded as RUM Group, a holding company for Quake AI (formerly Northern Data) and the Rumble video platform.

Quake AI is an Nvidia Cloud Partner (NCP) operating a 22,000 GPUs estate, making it a neocloud: a specialized infrastructure provider dedicated to AI workloads.

Yet where other neoclouds are building a full stack of services around their GPU farms, Quake AI wants to make its infrastructure discoverable to AI agents, which may soon be traversing the internet in hordes on behalf of their owners.

RUM Group's chief financial officer Mike Massey told The Register that "Cloud 1.0 - let's call it applications - is like a user interface of how you interact with a machine of some kind."

He added: "Now, if you think about agents, they don't use vision. That's not how they interact with systems. They interact with APIs and with information effectively, and that means they want highly discoverable, highly data-driven platforms..

"So, to us, the things that make GPUs and AI compute easier to consume for humans, things like model-as-a-service, dashboards and one-click settings, are actually orthogonal to, if not detrimental to what agents are going to want, agents are going to want homogeneous compute… to understand and know what your data and your expectations are in terms of performance and uptimes, and then they're going to want to consume that compute as a utility," he claimed.

In other words, Quake AI believes that, at some point, the customers for its compute services are going to be AI agents rather than people, but carrying out tasks on their behalf.

"I think that is the case, and it's the vision that we are driving towards, and you know ultimately agents are in service of people, right?" Massey said.

In its view of things, agents won't go through an intermediary, they'll go to the compute to retrieve the answers they need. "So all of these tool frameworks and all of these things that we have set up, I think, are a hindrance or an encumbrance to what the agents are going to want to consume, which is a utility," he explained.

"Yes, we're a little crazy in this regard," Massey added. "It's different. But I think our worldview is very grounded in the data and the realities. Like, we're a technical team. We understand the engineering, and at the end of the day, I think that most would validate our hypothesis," he continued.

John Hoffman, CEO of Northern Data and acting CEO of Quake AI, compared this with a solution he had been shown of an AI that was developed to navigate the internet by itself.

"I told it I wanted pizza. It went on to DoorDash's website. Typed pizza in the search box, clicked on the pizza with the highest ranking, went to add to order, knows I like pepperoni, and it clicked through all of this," he said.

"Don't get me wrong, this was a good solution that solves the problem. But the amount of compute that you are using to try to get an AI agent to act like a human that has eyes that can see web links is insanity compared to if DoorDash just created an API that is queryable," Hoffman claimed.

Done that way, the compute usage would be one thousandth of the way that the problem was actually accomplished, Quake AI claims, but it will require that everybody embraces the idea of how agents interact.

"And they don't interact with interfaces or applications. They interact with data and APIs. Just give me the raw data. That's what it wants," Hoffman told us.

"I would imagine DoorDash is developing an API for agents," he added. "It just makes sense, and that's why we're doing the same exact thing."

Earlier this year, TollBit, an outfit that tracks AI bot traffic, said that agents were gradually taking over the internet. Its State of the Bots report found that by the end of 2025, there was roughly one AI bot visit for every 31 human visits to a site, up from just one for every 200 human visits at the start of the year.

Last year, consultants McKinsey & Company produced a report saying that the neocloud operators had to evolve beyond being just a provider of GPUs-as-a-service and move up the AI stack to sell services on top of bare metal, or risk being commoditized into competing on price.

Analyst firm Gartner was also reading the last rites for much of the neocloud industry recently, forecasting that AI services are unlikely to deliver enough revenue to cover the expected capital expenditure on IT infrastructure between now and 2030, and that consolidation in the provider market was inevitable.

Quake AI's gamble is that AI agents will be a reality, and that by tailoring its APIs to make it easier for these autonomous software bots to access its resources as needed, it will be one of the winners. ®

Travelling in the modern day and age differs significantly from what it looked like a few short decades ago. Today, it is all about apps: you need applications for navigation, booking accommodation, buying tickets for events, following the local news, staying in touch with friends and family, and more. That also means that you depend on connectivity at all times while abroad.

The problem is that a lot of people still rely on traditional roaming, while the roaming model is out of date. You cannot choose a specific mobile internet plan that suits your travel plans. Instead, operators have split the world into zones, and each zone has its own pricing, limits, and permissions.

That is why many have turned to alternative ways of staying connected, and so far, the travel eSIM has emerged as the most practical solution. Companies like the Swiss eSIM pioneer, Yesim, have recognized the problem that travelers are facing and have come up with a solution. They let you pick a specific plan that will fit your trip. That way, you get to tailor your connectivity experience in advance. Furthermore, you even get to see the price in advance and know exactly what you will have to pay.

The problem with roaming is that your home operator decides what your internet will be like abroad. When you try to book a flight or a hotel room, you will try to get the best deal possible. That means comparing providers, prices, any potential benefits that different providers offer, and the like. However, with roaming, you can't do any of that. The terms of your existing home contract still apply, and connectivity abroad just gets added to it.

That means that your operator decides what zones are available, what partner networks you can access, and, most importantly, how much they will charge you. You, as the user, can only accept their terms or choose to look for a different way to secure an internet connection. In other words, there is no flexibility and no participation on your end, you can only take it or leave it.

Take EE as an example - the official terms for their EE Travel Data pass for Canada and the US say that the user gets 500 MB of data per day. This is not nearly enough for someone who will depend on their phone for everything, from paying for food to comparing ticket prices and booking accommodation. The limit is the same for countless other countries, including Australia, China, India, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and the UAE.

It gets even worse for other countries, including Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Indonesia. For these, the daily allowance is only 150 MB. That essentially forces you to ration your data use very carefully and pick what you are going to use it for.

Some providers have introduced daily packages as a secondary roaming option. O2 Travel Bolt On roaming option for Pay Monthly customers charges £7 for every 24 hours of use. They start charging you as soon as you make a call, send a text, or use data for anything. It happens even if your phone updates an app automatically in the background, without you even knowing about it.

As a result, you get barely any connectivity, but still have to pay the full price of this deal. For some, that might be fine, but if you aren't aware of it, you can return home to a surprise bill that you now have to pay.

As mentioned, travel eSIM emerged as an alternative to the roaming model. The first thing to note about it is the difference between an eSIM and a travel eSIM.

An eSIM is a chip that is built into most modern smartphones, tablets, and similar devices. This chip allows users to install operator profiles offered by travel eSIM providers. This can be done remotely, without having to go to the provider's shop. It's as simple as downloading an app.

Travel eSIM uses this chip to create a digital service. That typically includes the provider's app, tariffs, partnered mobile networks, full control of your data, and even top-ups and customer support, should you need them.

The system is also quite practical, as you get to set up everything in advance. You don't have to wait to enter another country to secure your connectivity, but can instead do it from home before you leave on your trip. Start by checking your device's compatibility with eSIM technology. If it's compatible, you can download the operator's app, pick a package for the region you plan to visit, and install the appropriate profile. Then, sit on the plane, travel to your destination, and activate the profile when you get there. You get instant connectivity without having to stand in line at a SIM kiosk, rely on Wi-Fi coverage, or pay high roaming prices.

If you are still not sure if a travel eSIM is the right option, consider the following: A one-week trip from the UK to the US will have you paying £7 per day if you are an O2 Travel user. For seven days abroad, that will end up being £49. Alternatively, if you use Yesim's unlimited package for the US for seven days, the price is only £18.27 as of the time of writing. You buy it upfront, and it won't activate until you start using it after arriving at your destination.

When selecting a plan, you start with the trip itself. In other words, you click on the country or region that you plan to visit. You can also enter the length of your stay there, and how much data you expect you will need. Then, select a tariff to match the parameters.

All terms of the deal will be known to you in advance, including the country that is covered by the plan, how long the plan will last, how much data you get, and how much it all costs. Best of all, everything is managed in the app, so you don't really have to get in contact with anyone.

A package can be selected for a single country, an entire region, or a route that includes several countries. You prepare all of this at home, and activate it after arrival. You even get to keep your home number active, since you don't have to replace your SIM card. That way, any banking messages, service notifications, important calls, 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) texts, and the like can come through and reach you at any time.

If you need a travel eSIM provider, consider the Swiss company Yesim. The firm has been in the travel eSIM market since 2019, becoming one of the pioneers in this sector. Today, it provides connectivity to over 4 million users across 200+ destinations. For travelers, this means that they can rely on one service that they are familiar with regardless of whether they are going on a short holiday in one country or a lengthy, complex trip that will include multiple nations.

Yesim's position as a global provider of connectivity services is also reflected in the fact that the company has become an official partner of the World Players Super League - the largest golf tour in the world. The League holds over 1,800 tournaments in more than 50 countries every year, and is one of the largest events of this kind.

The same global scale is evident in Yesim's pricing options. The firm offers a flexible tariff range, especially when it comes to its most popular packages. For example, the Global Package covers 80+ countries, while the Global Plus Package covers 140+ destinations. These will likely suit those who tend to travel a lot and want to pay a fixed budget. But, if your data needs are unpredictable, you can always pick the Pay & Fly tariff - Yesim's pay-as-you-go model. This is a single eSIM for 170+ countries, and you only pay for the data that you actually used.

Yesim's offer is known for the ease and simplicity of connection. The firm has created an intuitive app where you simply pick a country or a region, install the profile, and activate it in a few taps after getting there. Plus, the app uses automatic network selection. This is possible thanks to SwitchLess Networks technology, which switches the user to the strongest available network at any given time. This is especially important for remote locations, where connectivity is usually unstable, but it can also come in handy for mass events, when the network may struggle to cope with tens of thousands of connections at once.

Yesim also offers the Multiple eSIMs feature, which helps you manage several profiles from a single account. This is convenient for those traveling with their family or a small group. You can even test its service with a trial plan that gives you 500 MB for a symbolic price of £0.45. That way, you can see how it all works for yourself before committing any real money. Lastly, Yesim offers a 15 percent discount to new users who use promocode GETYESIM15, so make sure to use it.

Since modern travel has evolved and is now an app-first experience, the old roaming model is no longer a good fit for an average traveler. Instead, travel eSIMs give tourists the freedom to choose their location, amount of data, and even to know the cost upfront. Yesim is a prime example of the fact that the travel eSIM model works and that it can satisfy the needs of modern-day travellers.

"For Yesim, freedom of connectivity is a fundamental human right that helps people stay close, communicate, and share meaningful moments in spite of distance," emphasizes the company's founder and CEO, Dmitri Verbovski.

Contributed by Yesim

Source: LinkedIn Ultraviolette Automotive | Indian electric motorcycle maker Ultraviolette has outlined its next technology phase. The company introduced a new 100V vehicle architecture called VX-100, a first motorcycle built on it, the X-47 Venom, and several supporting technologies covering battery safety, motor design and rider protection. It also confirmed that the Shockwave will adopt the new architecture, with launch now planned for the first quarter of 2027.

VX-100: a new base for future models

VX-100 is an entirely new platform rather than an update of existing hardware. Ultraviolette says it was developed to raise performance, shorten charging times and improve efficiency, while also enabling more advanced electronics for the rider. The company positions it as the foundation for its upcoming vehicles. No technical specifications for the platform have been released yet.

X-47 Venom: first model on the new architecture

The X-47 Venom is the first production motorcycle based on VX-100. According to Ultraviolette, it is faster, accelerates harder and weighs less than its existing models.

Pyrofuse: battery fault isolation

Pyrofuse is a battery protection system that Ultraviolette describes as derived from aerospace safety technology. Its purpose is to cut off critical electrical faults within milliseconds. The company claims this is the first time such a system has been applied to electric two-wheelers.

UV Lightfury: new electric motor

The UV Lightfury is Ultraviolette's next-generation in-house motor. The focus is on power density: more output from a smaller and lighter unit. Output and weight figures have not been disclosed.

B-Max: reusable safety vest

Outside the motorcycle itself, Ultraviolette introduced B-Max, a reusable safety vest for riders. Details on how it works, its certification and availability were not provided.

Shockwave delayed to Q1 2027

The Shockwave, Ultraviolette's lightweight off-road-oriented model, will now be built on the 100V architecture before it reaches customers. The company lists stronger power delivery, better thermal efficiency and faster charging as the main gains, while keeping the bike's light and simple character. To prepare for production, Ultraviolette is setting up a dedicated Shockwave assembly line inside its existing factory. The switch to the new architecture means the launch moves to Q1 2027.

THE PACK's take:

Guy Salens: "The announcement shows Ultraviolette shifting from individual models to a shared platform strategy, a step that typically precedes a broader model range. The company continues to stress that its technology is developed in India and intended for international markets. For now, the release sets out the technical direction; specifications, pricing and market timing for the X-47 Venom and the supporting technologies are still to be announced."

Pictures launch X-47

All pictures © Ultraviolette Automotive

Drukqs has long been one of John Doran's favourite LPs; with a reissue looming, he attempts to articulate why he loves this critically derided album so much

Drukqs by Aphex Twin

Rereading the contemporary reviews of Drukqs 25 years later is like rubbernecking the aftermath of a motorway crash. Just ahead of release in October 2001, it became wince-inducingly clear that some previously long-term supporters of Richard D. James were ready to start questioning the validity of his art if not gearing up to fully turn on him. His traditional allies in the leftfield press hated the album, that much was clear. "Too much cake and no nuts" was the stinging but memorable summary minted by Rob Young for The Wire, who...

The post Prepared for the Future: the Slow Reveal of Aphex Twin's Drukqs appeared first on The Quietus.

Emissions from exported oil would not count against carbon budget, insiders say - reasoning likely to draw dismay from climate campaigners

The giant Rosebank oilfield can be approved without breaching the UK's emission targets, according to government insiders, in a boost to those in the cabinet who are pushing for it to be given the go-ahead.

The Guardian revealed last week that Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, was leaning towards rejecting the project, but her position has put her at loggerheads with cabinet colleagues, including the chancellor, John Healey, who are lobbying for an approval.