IRAN - Iran's Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a key negotiator in US-Iran talks, has commented on the US midterm election results. "Conscience or the cost of living, Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message," he writes on X. "If the US [government] betrays their public will to serve international paymasters and blackmailers, it will learn our NO comes with a nightmare." Speaking to Fox News earlier, Trump said "we have to do something large" when asked about reports the US was planning further strikes on Iran - adding it could involve a "heavy hit".

USA - Donald Trump lost control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in a disastrous midterm election that threatens to derail the final years of his presidency. Democrats carved deep inroads into Republican heartlands in a blue wave that rolled across the country on Tuesday, winning both chambers and breaking long-standing records along the way. Washington is now set for political deadlock as Mr Trump will struggle to pass legislation against a considerable Democratic majority. He told The New York Times that he was “absolutely willing to accept those results”. Mr Trump did, however, post a picture of a red hat with the word “veto” written on it, and pledged to spike any Democratic legislation using his executive power.

USA - A senior Iranian figure has celebrated the Democratic blue wave, but Trump is thought to be planning airstrikes that would drive fuel prices even higher. President Trump has shown no sign that he intends to change course on Iran for now, even if his party no longer controls the House or Senate. However, in the wake of the midterm results, Trump could not ignore that the unpopular war had taken its toll on his party. “I think a part of it was Iran,’’ he told Fox News. Fuel prices were hovering about 40 per cent higher than they were last year when Americans went to the polls on Tuesday, partly due to the war. “But at the same time people understood the importance of what I’ve done with Iran,” he insisted. The US and Israel have been planning a renewed and intense air offensive that would probably be met with Iranian attacks on US bases and oil installations in the Gulf, driving fuel prices even higher. Leaks to US media have even suggested that a loss would enrage Trump, and he would take it out on Iran.

USA - Voters are turning against AI and data centres, threatening the power of tech billionaires. America’s biggest technology companies just found out how unpopular they really are. The US midterm elections have been dubbed a referendum on President Trump. However, in many states, tech billionaires and artificial intelligence were also effectively on the ballot as opposition to data centres and fears about the impact of AI on jobs and human welfare became a major campaign issue. It did not go well for them, as anti-AI sentiment propelled Democrat AI and data centre sceptics to power. In Texas, a state with some of America’s biggest data centre developments, including vast sites owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the Republican governor has been ousted by Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat who has promised to pause data centre construction. Meanwhile, James Talarico, a 37-year-old Democrat who campaigned on a pledge to introduce stricter data centre regulations, won the US Senate race.

USA - As the likes of Anthropic plough trillions into building the infrastructure needed to power artificial intelligence, communities are fighting back. Colorado City, a desiccated town of 4,000 souls in west Texas, sits 1,500 miles southwest of the gleaming headquarters of Anthropic in downtown San Francisco. Yet it has found itself suddenly and intimately tied to the AI giant in ways that have driven a wedge through the local community. “This data centre has brought a lot of division,” said Sandy Daugherty, a mother of eight who has lived in Colorado City for 18 years. “When they started building this thing, half of us didn’t even know what it was.” Cipher Digital, a data centre developer, quietly bought 250 acres of ranch and farm land that it is rapidly turning into a gigantic, 300-megawatt facility for Anthropic. Daugherty said Colorado City’s population had nearly doubled due to the influx of workers. Rents have skyrocketed and, critically, a crumbling water system has become even worse since construction began. ‘Y’all are blinded by what’s really going on here. This town will dry up.'

USA - About half a year's worth of rain — up to 28 inches — fell along portions of Florida's Space Coast in just a day and a half, from Sunday afternoon to Monday evening, according to radar estimates. "I've NEVER seen anything like this," wrote Tampa-based meteorologist Jeff Berardelli about the event, which was so rare that it had a recurrence interval of more than 1-in-1,000 years in some areas — and it could be a sign of what's to come as the state braces for an unusually active winter thanks to El Niño. Rainfall rates exceeded 4 inches per hour at times.

USA - Rice Krispies and Coco Pops cereals will no longer be made from whole grains of rice, Kellogg’s has revealed. The cereals have been reformulated, with Rice Krispies now using rice flour instead of rice and Coco Pops containing a blend of rice flour and corn flour.

IRAN - Donald Trump has authorized defensive strikes on Iranian targets on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz just one day before the midterm elections, a US official confirmed. Iranian state television reported that explosions were heard on Qeshm Island. The official, who wasn't authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that 'Iranians using surface to air missiles against US assets' had been targeted. The strikes appeared to be limited as opposed to a return to full hostilities but followed President Donald Trump previously saying the US would not launch new strikes on Iran before Tuesday's midterms.

EUROPE - Europe faces a gas shortage this winter unless Donald Trump strikes a deal with Iran, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned. Gas reservoirs could shrink to just 10 percent full if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed until early next year and the Continent suffers a cold winter, the agency said. Once storage sites fall below 30 percent of working capacity, the rate at which they can deliver gas to European homes and factories starts to slow. “This would leave the European market exposed to late cold spells,” the Paris-based IEA said in its quarterly gas report on Tuesday. The squeeze would also leave Europe scrambling to refill its storage tanks next summer from a much lower level, keeping the war-inflated gas price higher for longer. The IEA’s warning comes as the world waits to see how Mr Trump will seek to end Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which he has vowed to do after the US midterm Congressional elections on Tuesday.

UK - Artificial intelligence will create novel threats at a once unimaginable scale in the coming months, says GCHQ. Britain faces an “unprecedented rise” in cyberattacks in the coming months because of AI, according to GCHQ. Richard Horne, the chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), will warn on Tuesday that artificial intelligence is helping to “industrialise” cyberattacks and could create novel threats. In a speech at the NCSC, which is part of GCHQ, Horne will say: “In the coming months, we face a real prospect of an unprecedented rise in the number of cyber incidents… vulnerabilities that have been tolerated for far too long can now be discovered and exploited at a scale and pace that was once unimaginable.” He adds that “AI has the potential to become a genuinely novel cyber capability, enabling new forms of attack and fundamentally changing cyber security”.

RUSSIA - Western Europe is falling apart – we should prepare for what comes next. Europe’s political crisis may bring new leaders, but Russia has little reason to assume they will choose peace over confrontation. Nevertheless, Russia can’t base its security on the assumption that European political upheaval will produce more sensible leaders even if the temptation to hope for a peaceful transformation of Europe is understandable. Hope isn’t a strategy, and history provides ample grounds for caution. Russia must therefore prepare not for the miracle of a Western Europe reconciled to peaceful coexistence, but for the possibility that its internal crisis will once again find expression in confrontation abroad. Whatever political forces eventually emerge from the present turmoil, preparing for a military confrontation with our European neighbors must remain one of Russia’s central strategic priorities.

UK - Telling someone who identifies as a cat that they are human will be illegal under an 'unworkable' Labour law, a new report warns. The wording of the bill intended to outlaw conversion therapy against trans and gay people is so 'extraordinarily broad', the study claims, that it would even protect those who call themselves 'catgender'. Primary school pupils could also be taken to court over remarks made about classmates who want to change sex, according to the damning assessment of Labour's Conversion Practices Bill co-written by Britain's former equalities watchdog, while parents face up to five years' jail if they refuse to fund their children's gender surgery. The report says the draft legislation breaches the right to a fair trial by introducing the contentious ideology of 'gender identity' into law by the back door, and will allow activists to bring private prosecutions against their opponents.

USA - Thousands of residents have been evacuated from their homes as flash floods swept through the US. Heavy rainfall caused “catastrophic flooding” on Sunday, forcing entire towns to evacuate. In Pagosa Springs, Colorado, a town of some 2,000 residents in the Rockies, severe weather caused more than $13 million in damage, according to the area’s water and wastewater service providers. The San Juan River was forecast to crest at more than 20ft on Sunday night. The Archuleta County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement: “To put the forecast into perspective, during the devastating 1911 flood that wiped out most of what existed as the town of Pagosa at that time, the San Juan River crested at approximately 17.8ft. This is a potentially catastrophic flood event.”

UK - The term “mogging” has been chosen as the Collins word of the year. The word, which means outperforming or outshining, is said to be the “fast-growing slang” among Generation Z and Generation Alpha, those born since 1997. It saw off competition from other words such as “Manchesterism”, “carspreading” and “hydration break”. Lexicographers at Collins Dictionary chose the word after monitoring their database, Collins Corpus, which draws upon language used on social media. Use of the “playful and ironic” term “mogging” has risen by 210 per cent, and the word featured on badges worn by young attendees at the Conservative Party conference last month.

SWITZERLAND - Scientists are on the threshold of a first glimpse into the “zeptoverse” — a minuscule world where exotic new particles may be hiding — after British-led researchers made a breakthrough by observing a one-in-ten-billion event using the Large Hadron Collider. After a 42-year search, an ultra-rare event has been captured at Cern in Switzerland in which a subatomic particle called a beauty meson decayed to produce two even smaller particles called muons. Beauty mesons exist for less than two trillionths of a second before decaying, and only one in every ten billion undergoes this specific type of decay, making it incredibly difficult to detect. The finding could unlock the door to discovering particles that exist at the scale of one zeptometre, or one sextillionth — which is one billionth of a trillionth, or one 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th — of a metre.