The U.S. is pulling non-emergency staff out of Saudi Arabia as attacks there kill three more people; Russian missiles hit Kyiv hours after the Kremlin said it’s ready to talk again; and Pope Leo needs no further cancer treatment. Ten stories as of Wednesday evening, October 21.
1. Riyadh and Dammam / Saudi Arabia. The State Department ordered non-emergency U.S. government employees and their families to leave Saudi Arabia, citing Houthi attacks on “civilian airports and other critical infrastructure” and warning that “the hostilities have the potential to escalate rapidly,” BBC News reported. By evening, a strike on King Fahd International Airport in Dammam killed one person and injured eight, the kingdom’s civil aviation authority said, per Al Jazeera. Earlier, debris from a drone shot down near Saudi Aramco’s Shaybah oilfield killed two people, a Filipino and a Nepali national, according to DW. Neither attack was immediately claimed. Spokesperson Tommy Pigott called reports of a wider Gulf drawdown “inaccurate,” though Reuters and AFP cited sources saying families would leave other Gulf posts too, and the New York Times reported the U.S. and Israel have drawn up plans for a “short but intensive operation” against Iran after the November 3 midterms, The Guardian reported. Saudi Arabia has also called off its “Davos in the Desert” investor meeting because of the strikes, per NPR. Pigott’s post:
2. Kyiv / Ukraine, and St Petersburg / Russia. Russian missiles hit Kyiv on Wednesday night, damaging several houses and injuring six people, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said, just hours after Moscow said it was “ready in principle” to resume peace talks, BBC News reported. Steve Witkoff spent about three hours with Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg; Putin aide Yuri Ushakov floated a new round around November 10 in Abu Dhabi. Donald Trump said peace is “maybe now the closest we’ve been,” and Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Fox News he’d accept freezing the war on the current front line: “Freeze and stop. And of course this is minimum what we need from Russia today.” Ushakov sounded cooler on what Witkoff brought from Oslo: “there wasn’t much there that was useful,” per BBC News, where Steve Rosenberg notes a possible Putin–Trump–Xi meeting on the edges of next month’s APEC summit in China.
3. Paris / France. Ahead of more protests on Thursday, Paris police banned gatherings around the Élysée Palace, Place de la Bastille, both houses of parliament and tourist spots including the Louvre and the Champs-Élysées, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., DW reported. Marine Le Pen hit back at Emmanuel Macron’s claim that AI fakes fed foreign leaders’ “stupid” comments: “The images we saw last Saturday are not generated by artificial intelligence: they show the sad reality of what France has become after 10 years of Macronist rule.” Nearly 150 people have been jailed and more than 800 brought before the courts since Saturday’s riots, and the Financial Times reports EU regulators are looking at pro-Russian and far-right accounts that spread violent videos, per BBC News.
4. Vatican City. Pope Leo XIV won’t need further treatment after surgery to remove a cancerous growth from his lung. Tests confirmed a lung adenocarcinoma that was localized, and “a subsequent oncological assessment has confirmed that no further treatment is necessary,” the Vatican said, BBC News reported. The 71-year-old had the lower lobe of his right lung removed on October 13 and was back in St Peter’s Square on Wednesday for his first general audience since leaving Rome’s Gemelli Hospital, per Al Jazeera. A Latin America trip is planned for early November.
5. Abuja / Nigeria. Nigeria’s first Ebola patient is a 42-year-old diplomat’s wife who spent two and a half weeks on holiday in Kampala, Uganda, Africa CDC chief Jean Kaseya and Health Minister Muhammad Ali Pate told BBC News, contradicting Uganda’s account that she only passed through. Pate says she’s “stable, she’s improving,” while an unnamed official told AFP her condition had deteriorated into multi-organ failure, per Al Jazeera. Nigeria’s CDC confirmed the Bundibugyo strain, which has no vaccine or specific treatment; 44 contacts, most of them health workers, are isolated. Kaseya says the outbreak is “no longer one country’s fight” and will convene Africa’s health ministers next week.
6. Nairobi / Kenya, and worldwide. The UN Environment Programme’s new Emissions Gap Report says that even if every country delivers its climate plan, warming would reach 2.6°C this century; current policies point to 2.8°C, UNEP said. Getting back to 1.5°C by 2100 would take emissions cuts of 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040 from 2025 levels. UNEP says the outlook got worse partly because the U.S. left the Paris Agreement, and NPR noted the U.S. was the only major economy whose emissions rose last year, per NPR. “Overshoot is not surrender,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, per UN News.
7. Chihuahua and Mexico City / Mexico. Federal prosecutors charged César Jáuregui Moreno, Chihuahua’s former attorney general, with treason for letting U.S. agents join an April raid on a suspected drug lab without proper authorization, BBC News reported. It came to light after two Americans said to have worked for the CIA died in an April 19 crash along with two Mexican officers. Jáuregui, of the opposition PAN party, denies it; a hearing is set for Saturday, per Al Jazeera. President Claudia Sheinbaum has insisted foreign agents need prior federal clearance to work in Mexico.
8. New Mexico / United States. A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25bn, the largest fine yet against the company, after a trial found it spent years misleading the public about how Facebook user data was handled, a case rooted in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, BBC News reported. Judge Francis Mathew called the violations “willful” and said they spanned more than 11 years. “No corporation is too powerful to be held accountable,” said state Attorney General Raúl Torrez. Meta’s chief lawyer, CJ Mahoney, said the company will appeal.
9. Bogotá and Cartagena / Colombia. Protesters gathered outside the National Museum in Bogotá as President Abelardo de la Espriella pushed a cultural “counterrevolution” against what he calls “atheist social communism,” pulling exhibits on feminist and LGBTQ+ activism and on Colombia’s political violence, Al Jazeera reported. Separately, authorities seized 7.6 tonnes of cocaine bound for the Netherlands at the Caribbean port of Cartagena, the country’s biggest haul in a decade, per Al Jazeera.
10. Wangaratta / Victoria, Australia. Independent MP Helen Haines has lost both legs after Monday’s alleged car attack outside her office; doctors amputated her right leg on Wednesday after trying to save it, her husband Phil said. “The good news in all this is that Helen is alive and she’s stable,” he told reporters, DW reported. MPs from all sides told federal police and ASIO in safety briefings that they fear for their homes and offices, and several say they’ve paid for their own security upgrades; the AFP logged 1,067 reports of threats and harassment against office holders last year, up from 951 the year before, per The Guardian.
Coming Up
Confirmed dates on The Watch: October 25, Brazil’s presidential runoff (Flávio Bolsonaro vs Lula) and Serbia’s snap parliamentary election. October 27, Israel’s election for the 26th Knesset, and the Fed’s two-day meeting opens in Washington (October 27–28). Full board at the link.
