MIDDLE EAST - On Monday, Saudi Arabia’s Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman arrived in Tehran. He will partake in talks between the countries that signed the Makkah Joint Defense Agreement (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan) and Iran. These talks are significant and will test the new agreement. The Makkah Joint Defense Agreement is a defense agreement, partially modeled on NATO. Some have questioned how the agreement will function, however. The Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia led to questions about whether Turkey and Pakistan would help Riyadh.

EUROPE - The surging Alternative for Germany (AfD) wants to destroy the EU if Alice Weidel, its leader, replaces the deeply unpopular Friedrich Merz as chancellor. Ms Weidel has demanded the bloc be turned into a loose federation of “sovereign nations”, or face a Brexit-style “Dexit” referendum if she wrests power from the centre-Right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). “We would like to rebuild and reform the European Union,” the hard-Right leader said in the European parliament in Strasbourg. “The EU is not a group of sovereign states any more. National parliaments and governments need to take over the decision-making process.”

UK - The modern military should use AI instead of manpower wherever possible, the head of the Royal Air Force (RAF) has said. Air Chief Marshal Sir Harv Smyth said Britain’s military should adopt an “autonomy, not flesh” philosophy and master AI in case of future conflict. He said he had seen AI technology gain the equivalent of 50 years of “human air combat training and experience” in just 14 days during a recent simulation. The RAF chief referred to the “steel not flesh” Second World War doctrine that embraced new technology to avoid “bloody and costly trench warfare”. “Given today’s changing character of war, I would argue strongly that the modern paradigm must now become autonomy, not flesh.” Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute on Monday, Sir Harv said: “AI never gets tired. AI doesn’t lose consciousness at 9G. AI doesn’t get mentally exhausted at the end of a 10-hour mission, and my own personal nemesis in a cramped fast jet cockpit, AI definitely doesn’t need to go to the loo when it is miles from home.”

USA - Microsoft has put up to 60,000 jobs at risk, including roles in the UK, as the tech giant seeks to trim costs. The company, which has 223,000 workers globally including 6,000 in Britain, has offered thousands of workers a type of voluntary redundancy in an effort to cut its headcount. Staff across the United States, Canada, India and the UK will be offered the “buyout” package, which allows workers to leave with a lucrative package, with those affected working in finance, HR, AI, Microsoft Copilot and the company’s Xbox division. The move comes as Microsoft seeks to shrink the number of workers as it turns to AI to complete more tasks.

UK - Baked beans, bottled water and batteries are selling out at supermarkets after the Government warned households to stockpile survival packs in case of cyber attacks. Shoppers were unable to buy several brands of bottled water and other durable essentials from Ocado, the online grocer, on Monday. It comes after Wes Streeting, the Defence Secretary, urged Britons on Thursday to prepare “be ready” emergency kits that include three days’ worth of non-perishable food and bottled water.

UK - For the un-prepped among us, who haven’t yet acted on the Government’s advice to stock up on essential food items in readiness for a geo-political catastrophe, our larders on the morning after the apocalypse will be pretty useless when it comes to feeding our hungry families. Our parents and grandparents would have been far better prepared for the apocalypse, in the 1960s and 1970s, when British larders were stuffed with instantly edible tinned meals. Any self-respecting family would have been able to lay its hands on a cupboardful of tins of “chunky chicken”, “chunky steak”, spaghetti Bolognese, baked beans, spaghetti rings, macaroni cheese, and Frey Bentos pies. That post-apocalyptic meal would have been rounded off with a choice of tinned rice pudding, tinned peaches, tinned mandarin oranges, or tinned fruit salad containing scarlet glacé cherries.

UK - Sales of toilet paper have soared after the Government urged households to stockpile items and prepare a “be ready” kit in case of an emergency. Manufacturers reported a surge in orders days after ministers had called for people to prepare supplies in the event of a cyber attack or severe storm. On Thursday, Wes Streeting, the Defence Secretary, urged Britons to prepare “be ready” kits for emergencies, including bottled water and three days’ worth of non-perishable food. In the days since, essential items, including baked beans, radios and batteries, have sold out. However, other retailers said they had seen a muted response in the wake of the announcement, while the British Retail Consortium pointed out that food availability remained good and stores remained well-stocked with essential products.

MIDDLE EAST - Iranian leaders are making all sorts of apocalyptic threats. If they are able to follow through on even some of those threats, the Middle East will soon be thrown into a state of complete and utter chaos. As you will see below, the US and Israel are preparing for a massive campaign of airstrikes on Iran. The Iranians are very well aware of this, and they are pledging to attack oil producing facilities, undersea Internet cables, international airports, desalination plants and the Dimona nuclear reactor in response. If Iran is not bluffing, we really could be facing an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East. On Monday, we learned that two US officials just told CNN that the military is ready to hit Iran really hard once President Trump gives the order…

MIDDLE EAST - For the GCC countries, extensive desalination systems constitute indispensable critical infrastructure. Desalination fulfills 77.3 percent of total water demand in Qatar, 67.5 percent in Bahrain, 52.1 percent in the UAE, 42.2 percent in Kuwait, 31 percent in Oman, and 18.1 percent in Saudi Arabia. Desalination plants are especially important for meeting drinking water needs. Qatar derives 99 percent of its drinking water supplies from its network of desalination facilities, and Bahrain over 90 percent. For Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, the figures are 90 percent, 86 percent, 70 percent, and 42 percent, respectively.

UK - Britain is once again debating national service. Its time may indeed have come once again, but we must be clear about what we want to achieve. Is it about preparing the country for a more dangerous world? Is it about giving direction to a generation too many of whom feel left behind? Or is it simply finding something for young people to do? Done properly, it could achieve all three. Done badly, it could alienate the very generation we need to inspire, and weaken our nation’s resilience rather than strengthen it.

USA - The Pentagon is planning for its major military installations across the United States to be able to operate off-grid for at least 90 days without relying on civilian power grids, external fuel, or water supplies, its chief spokesman confirmed on October 25. Parnell said he created FORTRESS America “because we can no longer rely on two oceans to protect us.” “That outdated assumption no longer reflects the threats we face,” he said. “We don’t want to rely on standard civilian municipal infrastructure to run our national defense. We just simply can’t. It’s an intolerable risk,” Parnell told Fox News. “Power is combat now. Without electricity, you lose communications, water, logistics, assembly lines and just basic military command structures.”

EUROPE - The streets may eventually fall silent, but the struggle over who governs, who pays and what survives is only beginning. These days, European headlines resemble reports from a war zone: from stormed city halls in Marseilles and Lille, to looted boutiques along the French Riviera, burned tourist offices in Lyon, and clouds of tear gas enveloping the Élysée Palace. The ‘day of rage’ in France drew over 800,000 protesters onto the streets – an event that was dismissed by Paris and the European mainstream as merely the “spontaneous revolt of the outskirts” or a “raid by migrants.” However, a closer look at the ‘rebels’ reveals respectable, bourgeois-looking students and well-off citizens engaging in destruction and violence. None of these people know what to expect from the future of mainstream European politics. In this shifting landscape, old institutions are losing their legitimacy, while right-wing political forces – whose ideas are increasingly seen as rational amid the chaos – are emerging on the broader European stage.

USA - Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail. What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.

GERMANY - German Federal Police recorded 98,026 crimes at train stations and on trains in the first half of 2026, with foreign nationals substantially overrepresented among identified suspects in violent, property and sexual offenses relative to their share of the population. In the crime of sexual offenses, foreigners represented 53 percent of suspects. The figures, provided by the Interior Ministry in response to a parliamentary inquiry from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) group, exclude high-volume offenses such as fare evasion. They include roughly 14,000 violent crimes, 1,104 sexual offenses, about 24,000 property crimes, approximately 16,000 cases of property damage, nearly 4,500 drug offenses, and 796 weapons offenses, according to German newspaper Berliner Zeitung. For sexual offenses, 53 percent of known suspects were non-German, with Syrians, Poles and Afghans again ranking highest.

UK - As you travel the highways and byways of Britain in the coming days, a grotesque phenomenon will become apparent: for some unfathomable reason, millions of our fellow citizens have seen fit to adorn the exteriors of their homes (and, Lord knows, their interiors too) with gaudy plastic replicas of ghouls, ghosts, cobwebs, skeletons and other synthetic spectral motifs of the undead.