IRAN - Iranian officials took to social media on Tuesday and Wednesday to gloat over the Democrat Party’s big win in the US midterm elections, taking it as a sign of the American public accepting Iranian victory and turning against President Donald Trump over his military action against Tehran. “Conscience or the cost of living, Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message,” Iranian parliamentary speaker and chief negotiator Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf said on social media platform X. Khamenei said “the Great Satan” still “seeks the unconditional surrender of the Iranian nation,” but “the situation in the Persian Gulf, particularly the Strait of Hormuz, has exposed the myth of an invincible America.” Khamenei adviser Mohammad Mokhber said Trump was “slapped in the face by his own people” on Tuesday night. “The true winner in this arena was Iran, which transferred the cost of the war into the United States,” he said.

UK - In his 2020 book Apocalypse How?, Oliver Letwin, the former Tory minister, imagines a doomsday scenario where Britain’s electricity grid collapses, taking down everything that relies on an internet connection. His chilling message was straightforward. The system that controls the electricity grid and the internet cannot be divorced, and in racing towards a low-carbon system for power generation, we have lost the capacity to quickly bring the grid – and our Wi-Fi systems – back online after a blackout. It was reading his book as light relief in the first wave of the Covid pandemic that made me “dumb down” our smart home. But it doesn’t take an apocalyptic book to see the future. The electricity grid is already creaking without anyone hacking it. The vulnerabilities of our internet-powered economy are already top of mind after the widespread supermarket-fridge hacks across Europe. Hackers turned off the cooling on fridges at more than 700 French supermarkets last month. On Monday, it happened again. The French supermarkets lost their yoghurt. If Britain gets this wrong, we lose the lights. And, as Letwin warned, we may struggle to turn them back on.

FRANCE - Hackers have targeted France’s national blood bank, raising the temperature of its cold storage rooms to boiling point. Facilities at Coolworld, a service provider for the country’s national service, were heated to 110C overnight on Sunday after hackers gained access to the temperature settings remotely, French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné reported. The rooms are normally kept at -30C to preserve donor blood samples. The French Blood Establishment (EFS) said an on-duty technician had detected the unusual rise in temperatures at the facilities on Sunday night. The worker then notified the EFS of the rising temperatures, helping to prevent wider disruption. The Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region was the worst affected, but France’s health ministry said there had been no consequences for patients and no plasma had been destroyed.

UK - The ‘smart home’ crammed with pointless gadgetry is the monstrous child of the ‘Internet of Things’ fad. Commercial refrigerators are being hacked across Europe, putting our food supply in peril. The latest incident this week is even affecting businesses in Britain, with firms in the meat industry saying their fridges defrosted as temperatures ballooned. How can hackers do this? It’s because the equipment is connected to the internet, allowing the device to be controlled remotely, including by nefarious third parties. For this we can thank one of the biggest business fads of the Noughties: the “Internet of Things”, or IoT. Don’t knock it on principle, or blame the supermarkets or the cold supply chains for the crisis. Every day they perform miracles, and can hardly be blamed for striving to become more efficient. It’s a competitive market, and internet connectivity makes it easy to know whether a fridge has failed, and when stock is getting low. Today, our cars are “smart” too. They, like supermarket fridges, can be controlled remotely – which means they are potentially drones that just haven’t been given a target yet. The bill for globalisation has arrived, and the damage could get worse.

UK - The power in my house died, with a faint groan, like the ghost of electricity trying to tell me something. Was it the boiler, the fridge, or the freezer that made that sad, alarming, desolate sound? Or was it the desktop computer, or the laptop? Or the kitchen fan? It was early morning and just about light, so at least we were not groping for a torch. But almost everything I rely on to live as I do – especially, nowadays, computers – depends utterly on a reliable power supply. I thought the moment I had long feared had arrived. Britain’s power system trembles all the time on the edge of a disastrous blackout which could take days to repair and could send our economy stumbling over the precipice.

UK - With cavalier foolishness, how I laughed when Wes Streeting suggested that we should prepare for catastrophe by stocking up with tins of baked beans, bottled water and wind-up radios. But around 10pm on Saturday, October 24 in Kent, Storm Boelo brought the realisation that maybe he had a point. When a tree outside our house came down in the high winds and took out power lines and broadband cables, our comfortable digitally connected existence came crashing down with it. Now, 12 days on, I am still without internet, landline telephone, Alexa, Netflix et al — and it feels like we are living in deprived isolation from the rest of the civilised world. “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone,” Joni Mitchell sang in Big Yellow Taxi — and it’s true.

IRAN - The playbook of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards is neither a secret nor a bluff. If Donald Trump launches a second round of Operation Fury and persists in trying to bomb their regime to its knees, they will retaliate with a scorched-earth policy across the Middle East. They will escalate from attacks on individual vessels to wholesale attacks on the Gulf’s energy and transport infrastructure, drastically tightening a global energy market that has already drawn down a billion barrels of oil inventory and has no margin left for further shocks. “Simply put, the world has eroded its supply buffers,” says Sultan Al Jaber, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. The guards will hit ports, terminals, refineries, pipelines, pumping stations, storage tanks, offshore rigs and logistics hubs. They may well hit electricity systems, which are needed to run the region’s desalination plants and provide almost all the drinking water for the coastal cities on the Gulf shore. The Pentagon is still angling for one last big publicity victory, something Ayatollah Khamenei is determined to deny the enemy that maimed him and killed his father, wife, son and sister.

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.