Norway's sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest with assets of more than €2 trillion, may once again be allowed to invest in firms that make nuclear weapons under a proposal published on Thursday.

In politics, as in business, nothing is ever truly final. Many thought the rift between Elon Musk and Donald Trump was permanent, especially after Musk posted a virulent accusation on X in early June 2025. "Time to drop the really big bomb: realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files," he wrote, tagging Trump's X account. "That's the real reason they haven't been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!" The message came just after the Tesla and SpaceX founder had slammed the door on the Trump administration, where he had tried to slash public spending through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Trump was indeed mentioned in the "Epstein files," as would later be revealed when the Department of Justice published a trove of documents from the investigations into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But Musk's post was quickly deleted and, 16 months later, all appears to be forgiven – or nearly so. On September 29, Musk returned to the White House for a tech summit, where he sat to the left of the US president. A major investor in China with Tesla, Musk was also seated at the head table just five days earlier during the White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping. And on October 8, Musk received the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific distinction in the US, from Trump himself.

What Musk failed to mention on his X account, which has 241 million followers, is that he is also still active in politics – albeit with his checkbook. As revealed by a New York Times investigation on October 12, the world's richest man, with a fortune estimated by Bloomberg at $966 billion, has already invested more than $366 million campaigning for the midterms, scheduled for November 3. His goal: to prevent the Senate from flipping to the Democrats and, in particular, to stop the victory of one of them – James Talarico, in Texas, where Elon Musk has based most of his financial interests, including SpaceX and Tesla.

The Democratic candidate vanished from public view for 10 days, sparking an unfounded rumor – spread by MAGA networks – about a supposed secret psychiatric hospitalization in Ohio, which the hospital in question has denied. Musk was quick to fan the flames. "The Talarico campaign is hiding something big that voters ought to know about," Musk wrote in a response to X user Eric Daugherty on October 11.

Interests to protect

Musk appears intent on quietly taking the place of the Koch brothers, the billionaire industrialists who made and unmade midwestern Republican candidates in the 2010s. His foray into this arena is something of a surprise after previous stinging defeats, including failing to prevent a Democrat from winning a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, despite pouring tens of millions of dollars into the race. "I'm going to do a lot less in the future," he told Bloomberg in May 2025, during the Qatar Economic Forum. "I think I've done enough."

Since then, Musk, who once considered launching his own party, has toed the line, sensing that breaking from the Republican-Democrat duopoly is near impossible. Born in South Africa, Musk is unable to launch a personal bid for the US presidency, but he has a great deal at stake, notably in tech, space, and artificial intelligence. The billionaire needs government contracts in aerospace, but above all, he needs a host of permits to launch his satellites, develop autonomous vehicles, run his data centers, and conquer the telecoms market.

Musk has tried to straddle the line between business and politics. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth appointed Musk to co-lead a task force on the future of warfare, along with Palmer Luckey, founder of the defense firm Anduril, and former Republican speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

Trump and Musk once again find themselves politically aligned, but also – increasingly – internationally aligned. With Trump announcing a deal to import Russian diesel and urging the Ukrainian president to organize elections and stop bombing Russian energy infrastructure, Musk appears to have followed suit with his Starlink and Starshield satellites, which have had their speeds throttled and capped at 160 kilometers per hour, hampering the effectiveness of Ukrainian drones. "I am sure they knew what they did, absolutely," said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. "It's a big mistake."

A 'genius' and a 'titan'

On Wednesday, former Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov wrote on X, "Starlink connectivity at speeds of up to 160 km/h is being restored. Removing Starshield’s speed limit entirely is now critical for Ukraine’s defense. Thank you, elonmusk. We hope for your continued support." But Musk deflected, replying: "Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS."

Under Biden, Musk was accused of not activating satellites that would have enabled a Ukrainian offensive in Crimea. The decision was made in close consultation with the White House, following direct discussions with Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and chairman of the joint chiefs staff, General Mark Milley.

The controversies now seem long forgotten. Musk's efforts to cut spending produced no real financial effect, except for destroying the US Agency for International Development and eliminating 300,000 jobs. The Supreme Court will review access to DOGE's classified archives. But for Trump's circle, all of that is ancient history.

As a sign of their reconciliation, Trump praised the entrepreneur while presenting him the National Medal of Science on October 8: "Elon is our modern-day Thomas Edison," he said. "Elon, I want to congratulate you. You're my friend and all of that. But you are a very, very special guy. Thank you very much, and congratulations, Elon." "Quite honestly, there’s nobody like him," Trump continued. "Few Americans in history have done more to advance America’s national interest."

The European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Orbán government’s 2022 limits on teachers’ right to strike were unlawful and disproportionate. The decree forced schools to hold classes during strikes. Education Minister Judit Lannert said the ruling backed her ministry’s move to ease the rules.

The EU and Moldova have opened accession negotiations on two policy clusters covering the internal market and competitiveness and inclusive growth.

Péter Magyar said he will meet Volodymyr Zelensky in Brussels, with another meeting in Berehove possible later this fall, and called Ukraine’s new minority-language education law a historic breakthrough. He also welcomed the end of the 2022 conditionality procedure, worth 4.2 billion euros, and is negotiating to end a daily fine he says has cost Hungary roughly one billion euros.

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Ukrainian attacks on data centres of tech giant Yandex have thrown key facets of Russian daily life into turmoil, disrupting services ranging from email and taxi apps to dating sites and even electronic key fobs for Moscow apartment buildings.

Ukraine has severely damaged three of Yandex’s six data centres in the past week, wreaking havoc in a country whose tech ecosystem is centred around one vast, state-aligned company. Launched as a search engine in 1997, Yandex has become Russia’s answer to Google, Uber, Amazon and OpenAI rolled into one.

Thousands of businesses depend on its infrastructure, meaning the strikes have hit not only Yandex services but reams of unrelated companies. The disruption followed a wave of summer strikes on Russian refineries, which forced millions to queue for hours at petrol stations.

Kyiv said the attacks were in retaliation for Moscow striking Ukraine’s data centres. But the fallout in Russia has been far greater, exposing vulnerabilities created by the Kremlin’s long-term drive to centralise and control the IT sector. Many of those efforts focused around Yandex, which was forcibly sold in 2024 to investors tied to President Vladimir Putin.

“Russia has become a victim of its own policy . . . this triggered a worst-case scenario,” said Alena Epifanova, a research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Russians have struggled to access their Yandex emails, open work files or book taxis. In some cities, timetables disappeared from bus stop displays. And residents of many Moscow apartment blocks found themselves unable to enter shared courtyards because the barrier gates were operated by a single company reliant on Yandex infrastructure.

Users of Yandex Pay — a banking and payment service that took off after Apple Pay left Russia — awoke to find their account balances vanished. Yandex insisted “the money is safe”. Meanwhile, hundreds of websites have been working intermittently, including Russia’s main dating app Twinby and McDonald’s copycat Vkusno i tochka.

One Muscovite, who asked not to be named, said she was no longer able to access the free wheelchair-accessible Yandex taxi she uses to take her disabled 10-year-old to school. For two days, they have navigated the metro instead, with multiple changes and few lifts or ramps.

Some people fear years of work have disappeared. “I lost a website I had for 10 years. All the databases, photos, reviews are likely gone,” Alyona Zhiganova, founder of travel agency Proadventure, said in a Facebook video, barely holding back tears. She had previously used a US cloud provider, which stopped working after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Yandex’s entire ecosystem relied on six data centres, two of which were shut down completely by the attacks, while a third had several modules knocked out.

It has not said how long repairs will take. A person close to the company’s management said, without giving a timeframe, that they hoped to “quickly” restore “functionality” — meaning all services would be running but “somewhat more slowly than usual”. Returning to “full capacity”, however, would take several months, they said.

In a sign of the gravity of the situation, the head of Russia’s digital ministry said on Tuesday that authorities would “protect these facilities”. Putin had recently placed responsibility for anti-drone defences on businesses themselves, urging them not to seek state support.

Disruptions also spread to Russia’s neighbours, with outages on email, Yandex Pay and websites using the company’s infrastructure in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Belarus. It was particularly disruptive in Kazakhstan, where Yandex controls more than 90 per cent of the market in the two largest cities.

The Kremlin has been working for more than a decade to build a “sovereign internet”, promoting domestic players over western ones and placing critical assets under tight control.

In 2014, following Putin’s remarks about the internet being “a CIA project” with “everything going through servers in the US”, the state forced Russian companies to store all their clients’ personal data inside the country. Yandex became the central player and was finally bought in 2024 by a consortium closely connected to the president.

Ukraine celebrated the opening of two more EU enlargement clusters at a ceremony in Luxembourg on Oct. 13, a key milestone in the process to eventually become a member state.

Ukraine and Moldova have been advancing their EU membership bids in tandem and are currently trying to open all six of the bloc's enlargement clusters — to-do lists of reforms that must be completed to join the bloc.

EU ministers have agreed the bloc’s negotiating positions for the United Nations climate change summit COP31 in Turkey and the biodiversity summit COP17 in Armenia.

Hungarian lawmakers voted on Tuesday to remove anti-LGBTQ+ provisions in a 2021 "child protection" law adopted under nationalist ex-leader Viktor Orbán.

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After FSB officers found her emails with an anarcho-communist group in January 2025, an 18-year-old trans girl from Tyumen was told she faced 15 to 25 years on terrorism charges unless she cooperated. Her handler ordered her, as an LGBTQ person, to befriend a man in a Telegram dating chat and get him to admit he was LGBTQ too. She stalled for about two weeks, then fled by bus to Kazakhstan on her domestic passport and warned the man the authorities were targeting the chat.

Minutes after Ukraine's parliament adopted a language law amendment that significantly improves the situation of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia, Prime Minister Péter Magyar announced the vote in the Hungarian parliament on 12 October. He said thousands of Hungarian children will be able to use their mother tongue and Hungarian schools will operate more freely, and that if the law is signed and published, Ukraine will have met its commitment ahead of the 31 December deadline, which he called a good sign. Turning to the former ruling Fidesz, Magyar said Viktor Orbán had not set foot in Transcarpathia since 2015, not even once since the war began, and accused the party of offering only big words while trying to turn Hungarians at home and abroad against each other. Their "fallen boss" sacrificed above all the security of Transcarpathian Hungarians, he said, adding that the leaders of both countries have now taken the first steps to rebuild trust.

President Donald Trump dismissed concerns that Russia and China might be helping Iran in its war with the US, adding that the two countries would have “too much to lose” in aiding the Islamic Republic.

“If they are, it’s at a very low level, but I don’t believe they are at all,” Trump said in a late Monday Donald J. Trump: I see so many comments from the Radical Left Morons and Lunatics that China and Russia are helping the Truth Social. He added that the US would know about such assistance “very fast.”

China and Russia have maintained close ties with Iran for decades but have denied providing arms assistance to Tehran in its conflict with the US that began in late February. There have, however, been Iran Has a Secret Weapon in War With America: Help From China -- WSJ of military cooperation.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Chinese entities shipped components used in Iran’s drones and missiles, while US officials linked satellite imagery obtained from Chinese sources to an Iranian strike that killed three American troops.

“China has made its position clear on multiple occasions,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a regular briefing in Beijing on Tuesday. “We will continue working with relevant countries and the international community to play a constructive role in restoring peace and stability in the Middle East.”

Western allies believe Iran has most likely added newly manufactured Russian weapons to its inventory and reconstituted large swathes of its missile arsenal during a ceasefire with the US a few months ago, Bloomberg News reported in June.

European leaders are preparing to demand tougher sanctions on Russia at a summit on Thursday, putting them at odds with Donald Trump just days after the U.S. president struck a deal with Vladimir Putin to ease restrictions on Russian diesel exports.

Defence Minister Luke Pollard brands Reform UK’s proposals “disgusting and illegal.”