UK - Worried Brits are splurging £700 on emergency food kits that can keep a person fed for six weeks, amid growing fears of blackouts, cyberattacks and other future crises. Retailers say sales of long-life food packs and water filtration equipment have skyrocketed in recent weeks following renewed interest in household preparedness. Some of the kits contain enough freeze-dried meals to feed a person for weeks, while others are designed to provide months of emergency food with a shelf life of up to 25 years. The trend follows calls for households to be better prepared for possible disruptions to infrastructure, power supplies and essential services. Meanwhile, Laura Gardener, co-founder of Base Camp Food, said demand has reached levels the company has never experienced before. The business was originally set up to supply freeze-dried food to adventurers heading to destinations such as Antarctica or crossing oceans by yacht. But in recent weeks, survival food has become its fastest-growing category.

USA - We are facing World War III, a global energy crisis, a global fertilizer crisis, a global food crisis, a global cost of living crisis, widespread rioting in Europe and a Super El Niño all at the same time. On top of everything else, now the stock market is crashing. Since the market peaked on October 6th, the losses that we have witnessed over the past month have been absolutely staggering. Of course “Black Thursday” was the worst day of this crash so far. There was just mass carnage everywhere. The AI bubble has been artificially propping up the stock market throughout this entire year. Now the AI bubble has burst.

USA - Donald Trump blamed the soon-to-be-in-power Democrat Party after the market took a $2.5 trillion hit just one day after a blue tsunami drowned Republicans in the midterm elections. The nationwide Democratic victories triggered financial carnage for Wall Street, as their control of the Senate raises the possibility that states may pause construction of more data centers across America. Trump warned that this was the voters' fault for dispatching with his party in a Truth Social post Thursday. 'The Stock Market crashed today because the Dumocrats had a big Tuesday — So sad to see, you only have yourselves to blame!' he wrote. The President more explicitly blamed the downturn on the Democrats in a separate post to his Truth Social page. 'The Stock Market suffered one of the Worst Days in History based on the results of the Election,' Trump said. 'Do not fear, however, we will soon, one way or the other, be BIGGER AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE.'

USA - The Congressional Equality Caucus is celebrating the “Gayest Congress in American History” after the Democrat Party’s sweep of wins across the country Tuesday, taking control of the House and Senate for President Trump’s final two years in office. “The American people have made their voices heard,” the Equality Caucus said on social media, Thursday, with a photo of a rainbow behind the US Capitol Dome. “The 120th Congress will officially be the GAYEST Congress in history! (that we know of),” it announced.

TURKEY - Turkey's parliament on Thursday ratified the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, a defense pact between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, clearing the way for Ankara to send military support to Riyadh amid attacks by Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi terrorists against the kingdom. Under the agreement, signed by the three regional powers in August and sent to parliament for approval last month, an attack on one party constitutes an attack on all. A ruling party lawmaker told Reuters last month that Turkey would also submit a mandate to parliament allowing military personnel to be deployed to Saudi Arabia under the pact.

UK - Buckingham Palace is “fully open” to Commonwealth realms removing the King as head of state, with a senior aide saying: “We have absolutely no difficulty with that.” The King’s first tour of the Caribbean as monarch, which ended on Wednesday, was overshadowed by calls for slavery reparations and republican sentiment. After Charles spoke of the “monstrous injustice” of the slave trade and expressed his “profound personal sorrow”, a communiqué issued by the Commonwealth heads of government meeting welcomed the UK’s agreement to enter into a “good-faith dialogue with affected parties addressing the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans and its historical harms”. Amid calls for reparatory justice from Caribbean realms, there is also a growing debate about removing Charles as sovereign.

ISRAEL - Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot is expected to receive the mandate to form a government from President Isaac Herzog on Thursday, after receiving 67 recommendations from consultations Herzog held [meetings] throughout the week with all the parties that will serve in the incoming Knesset. Following the consultations, Herzog announced that he would grant the mandate to one of the candidates on Sunday, adding he intends to meet with several party heads in private over the weekend to "leave no stone unturned to bring about the formation of a good, stable government for the people of Israel." Eisenkot received the backing of both Arab parties, Ra’am and the Joint List, although their recommendations do not commit them to ultimately joining his coalition.

UK - Mince pies in August? Retailers are only responding to our insatiable appetite for festive treats and our apparent inability to delay gratification. According to Assosia, which monitors product availability, luxury mince pies went on sale in the main supermarkets on September 22 in 2018. This year, it was August 31 on average. What’s going on? Is this a conspiracy by Big Cinnamon? Are the supermarkets and high street cafés trying to lure us away from wholesome fare and make us addicted to vine fruits and allspice? No, we are to blame. Retailers and hospitality outlets can only make a profit if they give punters what they want. And a vast number want Christmas to start in October, many want it to start even earlier.

YEMEN - Saudi-backed government forces stand at a desert checkpoint, their rifles slung over their shoulders, oblivious to the drone hovering above as it drops a small blue grenade. It falls from a clear sky with no roar of jets, before exploding with devastating effect. In another corner of Yemen’s contested front lines, videos show the Houthis using another first-person-view (FPV) drone to target tanks in the sand. Drones have become the Houthi fighters’ most lethal weapon in their efforts to control the Bab al-Mandeb strait, one of the world’s most important shipping lanes. Since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz on February 28 in retaliation for Donald Trump’s war, the Bab al-Mandeb, on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, has taken on an outsized importance. However, FPV drones – cheap, precise and nearly impossible to stop – are now reshaping a conflict that has been rumbling for 12 years.

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.