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Friday, October 23, 2026

Could lab-made gold crash prices like diamonds? US start-up says it turned mercury into gold

By Quirino Mealha

Published on 23/10/2026 - EURONEWS

Little-known San Francisco start-up Marathon Fusion says it has turned mercury into stable gold at ten times the rate of CERN's record, raising a question that has haunted the diamond trade: could lab-made gold one day sink the price of the mined metal?

Marathon Fusion, a small fusion energy company in San Francisco, announced on Wednesday that it had transmuted, or converted, mercury into stable gold last month, beating a record set by CERN tenfold. The Geneva-based organisation runs the world's largest particle physics laboratory.

The claim, which has not been independently verified, revives an alchemist's dream and a market fear that lab-made gold could do to bullion what lab-grown precious stones did to diamonds.

Founded in 2023 by Kyle Schiller and Adam Rutkowski, a former SpaceX engineer, Marathon develops fuel systems for future fusion power plants, which aim to generate electricity by fusing atoms together, as the sun does.

It lists the US Department of Energy as a partner on its website and won a 2023 award from ARPA-E, the department's agency for high-risk energy research.

Its backers include Breakthrough Energy, the climate technology network founded by Bill Gates, and Anglo American, the mining group that owns De Beers, the world's leading natural diamond company behind the "A diamond is forever" slogan.

In its announcement, the company said it had turned "mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN's record by a factor of 10".

In 2025, CERN said its Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator, had created about 29 picograms, or 29 trillionths of a gram, of gold during its 2015–2018 run. That amounted to around 86 billion gold nuclei, or atomic cores, which existed for only a tiny fraction of a second before being destroyed in collisions with accelerator equipment.

Marathon's method fires neutrons from fusion reactions at mercury, turning it into an unstable isotope, or form of the metal, that decays into gold.

It also claims to have broken a 40-year-old Soviet record with its plasma centrifuge, a machine that spins electrically charged gas at high speed to separate isotopes used in fusion fuel.

It says it is now building a reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density, meaning the most power produced for its size.

The gold claim has not been independently verified, and the material available does not establish how much gold was produced or at what cost.

What happened to diamonds?

Lab-grown diamonds are chemically identical to mined stones.

Although specialists can tell them apart, factories churned them out and sold them for a fraction of the price.

Wholesale prices for lab-grown stones fell 90% to 95% from their 2015 levels, diamond industry analyst Paul Zimnisky said last year, while competition from lab-grown stones also weighed on mined diamond prices.

De Beers launched its own lab-grown brand, Lightbox, in 2018 at $800 (€712) a carat. However, it shut it down in 2025 to focus on natural diamonds.

De Beers made an underlying loss of $511 million (€455mn) in 2025, and Anglo American is in talks to sell its 85% stake for about $1 billion (€890mn) to a group led by former De Beers boss Gareth Penny, according to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter.

Swiss luxury group Richemont, which owns Cartier, and US jeweller Signet, which owns Kay and Zales, are reportedly also in talks to join the group.

Why gold is different

Gold is a far bigger market.

Mines produced 3,672 tonnes in 2025, and about 222,600 tonnes have been mined throughout history, according to the World Gold Council.

Central banks also hold it in their reserves as a safe store of value, and many have been buying heavily in recent years, including those of China and Poland.

Gold traded at $4,062 (€3,617) an ounce on Thursday, more than 27% below its record high of $5,598 (€4,985) in January.

Marathon's own 2025 study estimated that a fusion plant could make about 5 tonnes of gold a year per gigawatt of electricity, roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor.

On that basis, 100 such plants would add an estimated 500 tonnes a year, roughly 14% of last year's mine output.

However, no fusion plant yet sells electricity, and the first commercial ones are still years away. The gold could also contain radioactive isotopes and might need to be stored for up to 18 years before it could be sold, the company has said.

There are currently no public plans to attempt to produce and commercialise the product, but unlike lab-grown diamonds, transmuted gold, once its radioactivity fades, would be impossible to tell apart from the mined kind.

Cop17 biodiversity summit confronts funding gap for wildlife conservation

Almost 200 countries will be in attendance at the United Nations Biodiversity Cop17, opening in Armenia on Monday, to take stock of faltering progress towards the UN’s 2030 nature targets. Wildlife populations are shrinking and protected areas are under threat from drilling and mining, while more money still goes into damaging ecosystems than protecting them.

Issued on: 19/10/2026 - RFI

Wild Asian elephants in China’s Yunnan province, pictured in May 2021. Protecting threatened species is among the goals countries will review at the UN biodiversity summit in Armenia. AP - Hu Chao

By: Amanda Morrow

Cop17 runs in the Armenian capital Yerevan until 30 October. At its core is the first global review of progress since the adoption of a landmark nature pact in 2022.

That agreement set 23 targets, from cutting pollution to saving threatened species and conserving 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans.

Countries are off-track on 22 of them, a draft UN review found.

“Do I think we’re moving in the right direction? Yes, but way too slowly,” said Astrid Schomaker, who heads the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

“I think it’s too early to say whether any of the targets will be reached or not reached. But I think we can clearly say they’re all still reachable – but only with significant changes being made.”

Barriers to action

Drawing on national reports and other evidence, the review examines where countries have made progress – and what is holding them back where they have not.

Barriers differ between countries, Juliette Landry, a biodiversity researcher at the Paris-based think tank IDDRI, told RFI.

“This is a combination of a lack of political will for some countries,” she said. “But for some others, there is also lack of access to financial resources, lack of capacities, lack of technologies.”

Progress has been stronger on traditional conservation work than on changing the way goods are produced and consumed, one of the root causes of nature loss.

Environment ministries are often left to tackle damage caused by activities in other parts of the economy, creating what Landry described as a “kind of responsibility dilemma”.

Those ministries need more funding both to protect nature and to work with other ministries on changing those activities.

But budgets are being cut in rich and poor countries alike, she said, creating “a major barrier” to delivering on the pact.

Nature in decline

The talks come as wildlife populations continue to shrink. Across nearly 6,000 species, monitored populations fell by an average of 73 percent between 1970 and 2022, the conservation group WWF found in its Living Planet Report this month.

Freshwater populations showed the steepest average decline, at 85 percent, while South America saw the sharpest regional fall, at 95 percent.

“Monitored global populations continue to decline on average, with no evidence yet of that global recovery,” said Andrew Terry, chief conservation officer at the Zoological Society of London, which manages the report with the WWF.

Flamingos are among the wildlife covered by global pledges to protect biodiversity, as countries gather in Armenia to review progress towards their 2030 goals. AP Photo/Emrah Gurel - Emrah Gurel

Targeted conservation has nevertheless helped the populations of some species recover, including tigers, Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tuna, southern African elephants and green sea turtles, the report said.

Zones earmarked for oil and gas overlap more than 61 million hectares of protected tropical ecosystems – an area nearly the size of France – research by the NGO Earth Insight found. Mining concessions, or areas set aside for mining, overlap another 42.7 million hectares of protected areas.

However, simply adding up protected hectares is not enough, the NGO warned. Even if countries reach the 30 percent target, those areas could remain vulnerable to industrial development.

“A majority of those concessions haven’t been licensed yet – certainly plenty are, but that means there’s an opportunity for countries to remove those concessions,” said Tyson Miller, Earth Insight’s executive director.

Funding the damage

The cost of conservation remains a primary obstacle. Under the 2022 Kunming-Montreal pact, countries pledged to raise $200 billion a year by 2030 from public and private sources – including $30 billion in annual international funding for developing countries.

However, they are lagging in this respect, and the wealthy nations under pressure to fill the gap are facing budget squeezes in other areas.

Wars, debt and economic pressures are demanding attention and straining budgets, Schomaker said despite nature being seen as "one of those issues that does not respect political borders".

Corporate contributions have also fallen short. The UN’s Cali Fund, launched in February 2025 with a goal of raising $1 billion a year, has reportedly only collected $6,000.

This fund seeks voluntary contributions from companies that use genetic information from nature, such as drugmakers, to support conservation in developing countries.

Meanwhile UN figures show that governments are spending $2.6 trillion a year on environmentally harmful subsidies. For every dollar invested in protecting or restoring ecosystems, about $30 goes into activities that damage them.

Governments pledged in the 2022 pact to cut subsidies and other incentives that encourage environmental damage by $500 billion a year by 2030, but have made little progress.

Many countries want to reform or scrap those payments, Landry said. “This is money that is actually affecting nature, and this is money that is out there right now.”

But even identifying which payments to change is proving difficult, she added, because countries “can’t even agree on what is counted” as a harmful subsidy.

In its negotiating position adopted last week, the EU urged countries to maintain the ambition of the 2022 agreement and back it with faster action and more public and private funding.

The United States is not a party to the biodiversity convention and does not participate in the talks.

A sperm whale calf swims beside its mother off Guam in June 2001. Protecting marine habitats is part of the global pledge to conserve 30 percent of land and oceans by 2030. ASSOCIATED PRESS - CHRIS BANGS

Community participation

For indigenous peoples and local communities, the summit in Armenia will also determine how much say they have in decisions about protecting the ecosystems they help safeguard.

Governments must agree how a permanent body created for them in 2024 will work, including their participation and decision-making rights, the International Institute for Sustainable Development said in its summit briefing.

A deal in Yerevan could set priorities for the next four years. Once delegates return home, civil society groups are poised to use those commitments to challenge governments over what they are doing to fulfil them.

“We have those political signals that were agreed upon by all those parties, all those countries, but we need some accountability,” Landry said, describing the challenge those groups could put to governments.

“So are you going to be following up on that nationally? What are you going to do to accelerate those actions?”

Volvo Cars announces 2,500 job cuts as it swings to quarterly loss

By Doloresz Katanich with AFP

Published on 23/10/2026 - EURONEWS

Chinese ownership has not shielded Volvo Cars from competition in China, as the Geely-owned carmaker steps up its turnaround efforts amid pressure from local rivals, US tariffs and the removal of EV incentives.

Sweden-based carmaker Volvo Cars said on Friday it would cut about 2,500 jobs worldwide, as US tariffs and strong competition from local brands in China pushed it into a third-quarter loss.

The company, majority-owned by Chinese group Geely, reported revenue of 66.9 billion kronor (€6bn) for the third quarter, down nearly 23% from the same period last year.

It swung to a net loss of 5.7 billion kronor (€513mn) for the quarter from a net profit of 4.5 billion kronor (€405mn) a year earlier.

"We continue to operate in a very tough environment with strong external challenges: de-globalisation, hypercompetition and climate change," chief executive Håkan Samuelsson said in a statement.

In response, the company announced an additional 5-billion-kronor (€450mn) savings plan, on top of its earlier cost-cutting programmes. It said the new measures would lead to about 2,000 job cuts in Sweden and 500 more elsewhere, by ending consultant contracts, through natural attrition and through targeted exit packages for employees.

The company expects the full financial effects of these measures by the end of 2027.

The company, which had bet heavily on electric vehicles, said the removal of consumer incentives for fully electric cars and plug-in hybrids in the United States under President Donald Trump had also hit its margins.

In 2024, Volvo Cars dropped a plan to sell only fully electric cars by 2030.

"We are convinced that we have the right long-term strategy addressing these challenges. However, in the short term, with severely challenged volumes, we need to reinforce our turnaround plan with additional decisive actions, lowering our break-even point and improving cash flows to make us more resilient," Samuelsson said.

Struggling along with other European carmakers in the face of a difficult global landscape, Volvo Cars last year announced an 18-billion-kronor (€1.62bn) cost-cutting plan. That plan included around 3,000 job cuts worldwide.

The company said in September that Škoda Auto CEO Klaus Zellmer would replace Samuelsson no later than 1 October 2027.

Building A CERN Beyond Earth Will Take More Than A Bigger Ring – OpEd

October 23, 2026

By Burak Oktenli

Key Takeaways:

The article proposes that space agencies and physics laboratories jointly study the feasibility of a particle collider beyond Earth, noting that a 2022 analysis of an 11,000-kilometer lunar ring suggested proton-proton energies of 14 peta-electronvolts under optimistic assumptions.

It highlights extreme engineering barriers, including an estimated power requirement of about 10 terawatts for synchrotron-radiation compensation—orders of magnitude above planned lunar nuclear reactors—and challenges of cryogenics, thermal control, lunar dust, and machine protection.

The author argues that any such machine would require multinational cooperation, staged technology demonstrations, and a clear scientific case that demonstrates added value over terrestrial projects such as CERN’s Future Circular Collider.

Astronauts flew around the Moon this year, and Europe is deciding on its next great collider. A particle collider beyond Earth could reach energies no terrestrial machine can, but its power, cooling and control problems deserve an open, international study before anyone commits to building one.

In April, four astronauts flew around the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first crew to travel there since 1972. China, which tested its new Long March 10 rocket and Mengzhou crew capsule in February, aims to land its own astronauts before 2030. In May, CERN’s governing council named an electron-positron Future Circular Collider its preferred next flagship and said it could decide on the project by 2028.

The return to the Moon and the search for the next great physics machine are usually reported as separate stories. One of the boldest ideas in physics joins them: a particle collider built beyond Earth. Observatories in space already examine the universe. A laboratory beyond Earth could test its fundamental laws at energies no machine on the ground can reach.

The idea deserves a serious feasibility study, carried out by space agencies and physics laboratories together and open to more than one nation. It also deserves candor about how far it remains from a design.

Why bigger rings matter

The appeal starts with a basic relationship in accelerator physics. In a circular proton collider, the attainable beam energy depends on the strength of the bending magnets and the radius of the ring, as Fermilab’s Vladimir Shiltsev explains in a survey of the field’s ultimate limits. A larger ring can reach higher energies without a proportional increase in magnetic field. Space offers room for structures far larger than any tunnel, while changing almost every condition under which they must operate.

In a peer-reviewed study published in 2022, physicists James Beacham and Frank Zimmermann examined a collider roughly 11,000 kilometers around the Moon. Assuming an optimistic 20-tesla magnetic field, it could reach a proton-proton collision energy of 14 peta-electronvolts, about 1,000 times the design energy of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The same parameters imply about 8.5 terawatts of synchrotron radiation, and the authors concluded that “a power source at the level of 10 TW would thus appear to be required.”

That number needs context. In 2025, NASA set a goal of launching a lunar nuclear reactor producing at least 100 kilowatts of electricity by 2030. The collider study’s requirement is about 100 million times larger. The gap does not kill the idea, but it defines the first research question: what is the most ambitious machine whose energy needs could credibly be met, and would it answer questions important enough to justify building it?

The scientific motivation is real. The Higgs boson’s properties remain a route to testing the Standard Model of particle physics, and the nature of dark matter remains unknown. Future colliders could search for new particles and interactions as well as subtle deviations in processes already measured. Higher energy widens the territory experiments can explore without promising that anything new waits at the next threshold.

A credible proposal must therefore name specific measurements and estimate the data needed to make them. Energy alone is an incomplete measure of performance. Luminosity, which sets how often a given collision occurs, matters because a rare process may require an enormous sample before it can be separated from background. A machine that reached extraordinary energy but produced too few useful events could disappoint.

Space changes the engineering

The natural vacuum and cold surroundings of some locations beyond Earth look attractive. Their benefits must be weighed against the real operating environment, including sunlight, nearby surfaces, contamination and the heat the equipment itself generates. A general description of space is no substitute for a thermal or vacuum budget.

Cooling shows why. The Large Hadron Collider’s main magnets operate at 1.9 kelvin, colder than outer space, using an extensive cryogenic system. A machine built on comparable magnets would still need active refrigeration on the Moon or in orbit. Sunshields and careful siting could reduce incoming heat, but neither would remove the internal heat loads.

NASA’s thermal-control guidance explains the constraint. A spacecraft’s temperature follows the balance of heat absorbed, generated, stored and rejected, and in vacuum the excess must ultimately be radiated away. For a collider, the power plant, radio-frequency systems, cryogenic machinery and detectors would all add to that load, so the radiators would have to be designed alongside the accelerator. Moving the machine off Earth also leaves synchrotron radiation in place: particles still shed energy whenever their paths bend, and much of the lunar design’s power would go to replacing it.

An orbital facility and a lunar installation would pose different problems. A collider assembled in orbit would have to hold its components in precise relative position to preserve the beam optics. A lunar ring could be anchored to the ground but would demand surface preparation, transport, assembly and maintenance across extraordinary distances. Lunar dust adds a constraint to every exposed system. NASA notes that dust on solar panels reduces available power, obscures camera lenses and coats thermal radiators, raising equipment temperatures. A credible design would also show how a failed magnet, sensor or cooling module could be diagnosed and replaced, and what each repair would cost in lost operating time.

A laboratory that stays under control

A collider concentrates enormous energy in tightly controlled beams. The energy stored in each beam of the Large Hadron Collider reaches up to 364 megajoules, and CERN’s machine-protection literature describes how uncontrolled beam losses can damage equipment unless loss monitors, interlocks and beam-dump systems act in time. A facility beyond Earth would have to demonstrate equivalent protection under its own conditions.

That requirement should shape the role of automation. Software could tune beams, diagnose faults and schedule maintenance, but independent protection systems should keep the authority to stop beam operation when essential conditions fail. A break in communication with Earth should trigger a predetermined safe response suited to the fault and the machine’s state. Those behaviors should be tested early, including recovery from misalignment, degraded cooling and faulty measurements, before stored beam energy is increased.

A machine too large for one nation

The largest physics machines are already beyond the reach of a single country. The Future Circular Collider would run about 91 kilometers and cost about 15.3 billion Swiss francs, or roughly $19 billion, and its backers are looking to countries outside CERN’s membership to help close the funding gap. China’s rival design, the Circular Electron Positron Collider, was left out of the country’s 2026-2030 five-year plan. Its study leader, Wang Yifang, said the team would try again in 2030 unless CERN’s machine is approved first, in which case, he said, “we will seek to join FCC, and give up CEPC.”

A collider beyond Earth would multiply that logic. The Moon is becoming a field of competing programs, with the U.S.-led Artemis partnership on one side and China’s planned lunar research station, developed with Russia, on the other. CERN itself was founded in 1954 so that scientists from nations recently at war could build a shared laboratory. A serious study of a lunar or orbital collider could serve a similar purpose, giving space agencies a joint scientific question whose answer no single program could reach alone.

There is already a model of cooperation between spaceflight and particle physics. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, installed on the International Space Station in 2011, studies cosmic rays in a search for antimatter and dark matter, run by 44 institutions from America, Europe and Asia under joint U.S. Energy Department and NASA sponsorship. A collider would add the far harder task of preparing, accelerating and repeatedly colliding opposing beams, but the institutional template exists.

Build the research path in stages

The next useful step would be a jointly reviewed study comparing terrestrial, lunar and orbital options against the same scientific objectives. It should quantify the required collision sample and detector performance, then estimate power, mass, construction, operations and eventual decommissioning for each. An elegant ring geometry would have to survive that whole-system assessment.

Technology demonstrations should then target the uncertainties that matter most. A compact flight experiment might test precision beam transport or the behavior of an accelerator component in relevant space conditions. Separate demonstrations could show whether superconducting systems, thermal hardware and robotic maintenance can meet their requirements. Each should answer a defined question that improves the next design decision.

The study should also respect the priorities physicists have already set on the ground. CERN’s strategy keeps completion of the high-luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider as its highest medium-term priority, with the Future Circular Collider as the preferred next flagship. Those are the benchmarks against which any machine beyond Earth must prove its added value.

A CERN beyond Earth could one day become an extraordinary instrument for understanding nature. The case for beginning the study is credible today, and the case for building the facility will have to be earned. The nations now returning to the Moon should decide together what science it is for.

About Burak Oktenli
Burak Oktenli holds an MBA and a Master of Professional Studies in Applied Intelligence from Georgetown University. His research addresses the governance of authority in autonomous and AI-enabled systems, and his writing has appeared at the Modern War Institute at West Point, RUSI, RealClearDefense, RealClearMarkets, and Geopolitical Monitor. He is the author of Authority Architectures for Autonomous Systems, a ten-volume series on how authority in autonomous systems is delegated, monitored and recovered, at authority-architecture.me.
View all posts by Burak Oktenli →

BUILD IT HERE

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for L5

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Lagrange 5

Myanmar to import Russian LNG

/ Shaah Shahidh - UnsplashFacebook

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By IntelliNews - Phnom Penh Bureau October 22, 2026

Myanmar is preparing to import Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) while Moscow is also set to supply satellite navigation, communications and Earth observation technology. The two countries signed 12 agreements and memoranda when Myanmar President Min Aung Hlaing visited Moscow in August 2026 and met Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.

According to Irrawaddy, the deals give Russia a fresh outlet for its energy exports as Western sanctions and the war in Ukraine strain its finances. Brown said the liquid portion of Russia's National Wealth Fund fell to a record low of about $159bn on September 1. For Myanmar, the technology arrives as its armed forces fight ethnic armed organisations in a conflict dating back to independence in 1948.

The Myanmar President's Office said the gas talks also covered onward deliveries of Russian LNG to China and Thailand, which would make the country a possible regional hub. Myanmar holds proven reserves of about 22.5 trillion cubic feet of gas and exports much of its output.

In April, Russian Energy Minister Sergei Tsivilev opened energy talks with Ko Ko Lwin, Myanmar's Energy Minister, covering crude oil, LNG and petroleum products. The Myanmar side, through its Ministry of Electricity and Energy, sought long-term supply, secure transport, quality guarantees and favourable prices, and the ministry also concluded a Memorandum of Cooperation with RC-Investments.

After a four-year pause, Myanmar began importing LNG again in late 2025. The cargoes originate at the Bintulu complex in Malaysia and are offloaded at the Thilawa floating storage unit close to Yangon. According to a Kpler forecast, imports in 2026 will reach roughly 0.4mn tonnes, chiefly to supply the Thanlyin and Thaketa power plants.

Russia's commitments under the Roscosmos agreement include an ASPOS opto-electronic telescope station, a COSPAS-SARSAT ground station, navigation data and stations for satellite navigation measurements, as well as help in choosing and training astronauts from Myanmar. Min Aung Hlaing held talks with Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Bakanov on August 19, covering nano-satellites, Earth observation imagery and Rassvet, a low-orbit communications system.

Bureau 1440, the developer of Rassvet and part of Russia's X Holding, describes the network's satellites as "5G base stations in orbit". The network targets an orbit of about 800 km and advertises speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s.

Thursday, October 22, 2026

ANTI NEOCOLONIAL STRUGGLE

From mountain fighters to 'regional power': the rise of Yemen's Houthis

Dubai (AFP) – The Houthis emerged from obscurity in Yemen's hardscrabble north to control swathes of the country and pose a perennial threat to neighbouring Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter.

Issued on: 22/10/2026 - RFI

Supporters of the Houthi group at a rally in Sanaa, Yemen's capital © Mohammed HUWAIS / AFP

From their origins in the 1990s, the Iran-backed former mountain fighters now command the status of regional players capable of inflicting pain on global shipping and oil prices.

Like the other armed members of Iran's "Axis of Resistance", the Houthis are hostile to the West, as befits their slogan: "Death to America, death to Israel."

But unlike Lebanon's Hezbollah, the Houthis, who took the capital Sanaa in 2014 and have weathered a long-running war with a Saudi-led coalition, were not created by Iran.

- 'Not taking orders' -

"At the beginning, there were no structured ties between Iran and the movement," explains Mohammed Azzan, a scholar of Islamic thought who witnessed the Houthis' emergence in Saada, northern Yemen, in the 1990s.

"Relations developed gradually as both sides discovered common interests."

Their bond has strengthened since the Gaza war, which weakened the Palestinian movement Hamas and Tehran's other allies in the Middle East.

The Houthis have been "drawing closer to Iran in pursuit of their own ambitions, without necessarily being under its orders", says Maysaa Shuja al-Deen, a researcher at the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies think-tank.

Their lightning offensive in September, when they captured the parts of the Red Sea coast not already under their control, illustrates the alignment of interests.

Control of the strategic Bab el-Mandeb strait, the Red Sea's southern gateway, while Tehran is choking the Strait of Hormuz on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, "increases Iran's bargaining power," while giving the Houthis "enormous leverage" over Riyadh, says Thomas Juneau of the University of Ottawa.

The road to Sanaa

When it was launched in 2001, the movement styled itself as representing Saada, the cradle of Zaydism -- a branch of Shia Islam, but different to that favoured in Iran.

The northern city, the centre of Yemeni power for centuries, had become marginalised by the central government in Sanaa.

The movement's founder, Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, the son of a prominent religious figure, was already denouncing Israel and the US, using rhetoric inspired by Iran's Islamic revolution.

After he was killed by Yemeni authorities in 2004 the group, later named Ansar Allah ("Supporters of God"), became more radical under his brother, Abdulmalik al-Houthi.

Holed up in the northern mountains, his followers waged six wars against President Ali Abdullah Saleh before joining the uprising that drove him from power in 2012.

In 2014, the Houthis nonetheless allied with Saleh and seized the reins of power in Sanaa, marking the start of their conquest of large parts of Yemen. Saleh was killed three years later, after turning against the Houthis.

Saudi Arabia intervened at the head of a military coalition supporting the exiled government in early 2015, increasing Iran's interest in the Houthis.

Although Iran denies giving support, Yemen's government announced the first seizure of arms destined for the Houthis in 2013.

Deen said Iranian assistance grew from 2016, including the transfer of military expertise as well as communication and negotiation techniques, first through Hezbollah and then directly from Iran.

The Al-Masirah TV channel was launched in Hezbollah's stronghold of southern Beirut before moving to Sanaa, broadcasting Houthi propaganda and Abdulmalik al-Houthi's speeches.

Rarely appearing in public, he cultivates the image of a spiritual guide and defender of the Muslim world against the West and the Gulf countries, which he accuses of serving American interests.

'Disproportionate pain'

Thanks to Iran, the Houthis have acquired drones and long-range missiles, allowing them to establish an "asymmetric balance of power" with Saudi Arabia, says Juneau.

For years, they absorbed Saudi airstrikes by "exploiting Yemen's geography" while "inflicting disproportionate pain" on their neighbour by targeting its infrastructure.

After a truce in 2022 calmed fighting, the movement built up its military production capacity and diversified its arms supply chain, sourcing from China and Russia via smuggling networks in the Horn of Africa.

A report published by The Century Foundation think-tank in February said 35 percent of arms and materials intercepted en route to the Houthis between 2021 and 2025 originated in China. Iran was the next biggest supplier with 21 percent.

"Without Iranian assistance, the Houthis would not be a regional power today," says Juneau.

The Houthis have also benefited from recruiting elements of the former national army, forging alliances with tribes and, most importantly, the "weakness" of the government, which is plagued with internal divisions.

"This has been as essential as Iranian assistance to the story of the Houthis' rise," Juneau says.

© 2026 AFP

Europe’s EV boom has saved these 6 oil-importing countries almost €2 billion since start of Iran war

By Liam Gilliver

Published on 22/10/2026 - EURONEWS

“Every EV on the road reduces exposure to volatile oil markets, and as fleets grow – so does the protection against future supply shocks.”

Electric car fleets have cushioned the spiralling costs of oil imports following the war on Iran and subsequent energy crisis.

Brent crude, which is used as the worldwide benchmark for oil prices, rose to near $100 (around €89) a barrel on 22 October – the highest in five weeks as concern grows over potential escalation in the Middle East.

On February 27, the day before the US-Israel war on Iran broke out, Brent crude traded at $67(€59.63) per barrel, around 32 per cent lower than today’s prices.

The rising costs have been largely attributed to Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, a 167km shipping route that usually carries around one-fifth of the world’s daily oil and seaborne liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies.

At the same time, global sales of electrical vehicles (EVs) have surged by 11 per cent year-on-year, while combustion engine vehicles fell by six per cent in the first eight months of 2026.

How EVs are saving Europe billions

A new analysis by energy think tank Ember found that the EV boom has displaced an estimated 200 million barrels of crude oil, worth $20 billion (€17.82 billion) between March and August 2026

The study, which covers 56 countries that together account for more than 90 per cent of EV sales and more than 80 per cent of all car sales globally, found that China accounted for the largest share of these savings.

The country’s electrified fleet, which consists of around 44 million EVs, has saved $14 billion (€12.48 billion) worth of crude oil.

EU Member States were responsible for a further $3.1 billion (€2.76 billion) of the crude oil displaced by EVs between March and August 2026.

Germany and France represent the largest share in savings at around $760 million and $560 million (€677 million and €499 million), respectively.

However, when comparing oil displacement to each country’s oil consumption, Denmark emerged as Europe’s clear frontrunner.

As of August 2026, the country’s current EV fleet has displaced 6.4 million barrels of oil per year, equivalent to 13 per cent of the country’s oil consumption in 2025.

Elsewhere in Europe, the UK’s EV fleet displaced around $790 million (€704 million) of crude oil in the six months since the start of the fossil fuel crisis. For context, the UK imported £21.5 billion (€25.64 billion) of crude oil in the 12 months to the end of August 2026, according to the UK government

Six European countries (Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK) have together saved almost €2 billion by lowering oil-imports.

EVs reduce ‘exposure to volatile oil markets’

“The countries that invested in EVs before this crisis are now better protected and a growing number are following,” says Euan Graham, a senior energy analyst at Ember.

“Every EV on the road reduces exposure to volatile oil markets, and as fleets grow – so does the protection against future supply shocks.”

Graham adds that the global shift to EVs goes beyond cutting emissions, providing countries with improved “energy security and economic resilience” amid political instability.

Are EVs better for the environment?

The environmental pay-off on EVs depends on how the battery was made and whether it is charged using clean electricity or fossil fuels.

A 2020 report by NGO Transport & Environment found that EVs outperform diesel and petrol cars in all scenarios, even on carbon-intensive grids such as Poland, where they are about 30 per cent cleaner than conventional vehicles.

In the best case scenario, where an EV runs on clean electricity with a battery produced with clean electricity, EVs are already about five times cleaner than conventional equivalents.

Ahead of the COP31 UN climate summit, co-host Türkiye has unveiled its “defining priority” to raise the global share of energy demand by electricity to 35 per cent, up from around 20 per cent, by 2035.

Experts are concerned that the pledge could allow governments to count expanded gas-fired generation as progress towards electrification targets – a move they say will “seriously undermine climate goals”.

“Let’s not let electrification become the Trojan horse of our times, used to hide new fossil fuel consumption rather than promote renewable energy,” says Claire Smith of campaign coalition Beyond Fossil Fuels.

PHP security flaw: Why websites across Europe went dark and what it means for you

By Una Hajdari

Published on 22/10/2026 - EURONEWS

AI models uncovered what OpenAI calls "one of the most impactful" security bugs in recent memory, hidden in PHP for more than a decade. From a Pokémon sleep tracker to the Dutch parliament, websites went dark worldwide to stay ahead of hackers.

Artificial intelligence has exposed two critical security flaws in PHP, a programming language that quietly powers most of the internet, sending organisations worldwide scrambling to shut down websites before hackers can exploit them.

The bugs sat undetected in PHP’s code for more than a decade. It took cutting-edge AI models from OpenAI and Google to turn a long-suspected weakness into a working attack — and now the race is on to close the door.

As AI’s fast-advancing capabilities fuel concern over a new era of cyberattacks, here is what you need to know.

Europe reacts

The Netherlands pulled its DigiD digital identity system, the Overheid.nl government portal and the website of the lower house of parliament, with the Port of Rotterdam, hospitals and the country’s five largest political parties following suit.

Even the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre took its own site down.

Finland’s state IT provider Valtori switched off government web services wholesale “as a precautionary measure,” France’s Interior Ministry put local administration sites into maintenance mode and Germany’s federal IT service ITZBund took down several portals.

CERT-EU, the cybersecurity service for the EU institutions, went further than most, telling any organisation unable to patch immediately to take its websites offline rather than risk being hacked.

The European Commission, ENISA, CERT-EU, Europol and the EU’s network of national cyber response teams also issued a joint statement urging organisations to act immediately, prioritising systems exposed to the internet.

What is PHP and why does it matter?

Created in the early 1990s, PHP is a name that originally stood for Personal Home Page and is the code that runs behind the scenes on roughly seven in 10 websites, according to security firm Wiz Research, which calls it “a backbone of the web”.

While languages such as HTML handle what you see on a page, PHP handles what you do not, such as checking logins, processing payments, serving up content.

It underpins WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, the platforms behind everything from personal blogs to online shops and government portals.

That reach is what turns two bugs into a global event. Wiz said every PHP version released in the past decade is affected by at least one of the flaws, and that even a bare-bones “Hello World” page on an unpatched server could be vulnerable.

A fix was released on Wednesday, with the PHP Foundation telling tech departments around the world that “if you run PHP, it is imperative that you update now.”

Patched versions are PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35. Anything older no longer receives official updates and should be treated as exposed unless a vendor has backported the fix, the European Union’s cybersecurity emergency response team (CERT-EU) warned in an advisory.

The result has been a wave of apps and websites going dark, from the Paris police website to a Pokémon sleep tracker, as developers patch their underlying code. Government sites across Europe were among those pulled offline as a precaution.

How did AI find the flaws?

Both vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 and rated 9.2 out of 10 for severity, sit in the parts of PHP that nearly every request touches, namely memory management and error handling.

If a web request hits PHP’s memory limit at exactly the wrong moment, the software can be tricked into running an attacker’s code without any login.

The PHP Foundation admits its own developers first spotted signs of the problem in 2024, during an external audit.

A theoretical exploit was sketched out, but with no concrete route to an attack and a tiny core team weighing the trade-offs of a fix, work stalled and restarted for months. The foundation called the delay “a structural failure”.

Then AI got involved. In August, security firm Calif, working on an OpenAI-funded audit of PHP’s source code and using OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol model, reported a fully working remote attack with the same root cause.

OpenAI independently flagged the same issue the same day. Wiz followed with further attack vectors two weeks later, using its own Wiz Atlas tool alongside Google’s Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-5.6 Sol.

“With frontier AI models and the right tools, a single researcher completed in a week what previously would have taken a world-class team months of work,” Wiz researchers wrote.

OpenAI called the discovery “one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory,” adding that it “marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact”.

The findings were kept under wraps while a fix was developed.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon, the two CVE identifiers leaked onto online forums and social media.

PHP brought its release forward by a day, and Calif mistakenly published — then deleted — a video showing its proof of concept working against several targets, the PHP Foundation said. Copies spread quickly.

“The trouble with tools like AI is that the moment all the information’s out there, people can weaponise it very, very quickly,” Steve Kerrison, senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the Singapore campus of James Cook University, told AFP.

“That’s why everybody’s acting with such urgency to respond to this issue.”

Have sites already been hacked?

Not necessarily. “Taking websites offline does not necessarily mean they have been hacked. It can be a responsible measure to protect systems while security updates are applied,” said Dimitrios Salampasis of Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology.

The PHP Foundation said its security team inspected the proof-of-concept code circulating after the leak and found no functional exploit at the time of release.

“The evidence that security researchers are seeing is that nobody was actively performing attacks using the techniques available,” Kerrison said.

The picture is shifting, however. Web infrastructure firm Cloudflare said on Wednesday it had observed attack traffic aimed at its customers, and CERT-EU warned that the public circulation of technical details raises the likelihood that attackers are already probing the flaws.

Larger institutions, from government agencies to news outlets, should be able to patch relatively quickly. Others may be left exposed for far longer.

“There are sites, systems and people out there who will have no idea about this and still won’t for days, weeks and months,” Kerrison warned.

That could include user-run blogs and small business sites, which hackers could hijack to spread computer viruses, send spam or host malicious content.

Could there be other consequences?

Any data breach could come back to haunt customers long after the patch, if their personal information is harvested for phishing attacks — where someone is tricked into handing over a password or payment details.

The tangled, interlinked nature of online systems also means the risk does not end when you update your own server. Many sites rely on third-party services that may themselves run PHP.

If those third parties are slow to patch, “then even though you patched yourself ... you’re still unsecure,” said Rahat Masood, senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

PHP is not the whole story, Kerrison added. Strong cybersecurity means several layers of defence, so that one broken lock does not open every door.

The PHP Foundation, for its part, is using the episode to make a pointed plea. The language runs government services, banks and online stores worldwide, yet its security still rests on a small group of foundation-funded developers and volunteers.

Tools can now find bugs faster than ever, it said, but deciding how to fix them without breaking the web takes experienced engineers.

CYBERCRIME

Websites go dark as AI exposes critical security flaws worldwide

Washington (AFP) – Governments and companies around the world shut down websites as they raced Thursday to protect themselves from hacks after artificial intelligence uncovered critical flaws in a widely used programming language called PHP.

Issued on: 21/10/2026 - RFI

Increasingly powerful AI models can spot weak points in computer scripts that hackers can exploit. © Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP

PHP helps run about 70 percent of the world's websites – from online stores and news outlets to government services – according to Wiz Research, one of the cybersecurity firms that found the two flaws.

Created in the early 1990s, PHP originally stood for "personal home page" but now means "hypertext preprocessor" and sits underneath popular web design platforms.

"These findings rank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history," a Wiz blog post said.

Increasingly powerful AI models can spot weak points in back-end computer code that have gone unnoticed by humans for years.

That has heightened cybersecurity fears, with the number of software vulnerabilities discovered worldwide in 2026 on track to roughly double last year's record total.

PHP programmers released a fix Wednesday, and the US National Security Agency told organizations to patch their sites immediately or pull vulnerable systems offline – a call echoed by authorities from Japan to the European Union.

A platform affiliated with China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology urged the same, warning of "two critical remote code execution vulnerabilities with severe impact" in PHP.

Only sites that run PHP on their own servers are exposed. Many large platforms are built on other programming languages or use operators that could install the fix quickly and were able to stay online.

Rahat Masood, senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, described the discovery as "quite devastating."

It could allow "attackers to get into your servers without any authorisation, without any username or password," she told AFP.

"Once they are in the servers, they can do anything they want" – from stealing sensitive information to modifying website content – she added, urging institutions to "take it seriously."

'New phase'

Government agency sites in countries from Australia to Finland and the Netherlands were among those that went dark, while services from insurance firms, transport operators and media outlets were under emergency maintenance.

Popular apps, including a Pokemon sleep tracker, were also temporarily taken offline while the fix was implemented, while the foundation that runs Wikipedia warned users they could see outages while it addressed the flaws.

"If you run PHP, it is imperative that you update now," the PHP Foundation, which funds developers working on the language, said in a blog post.

Security firm Calif found the flaws in August using OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol model

© ANDREJ IVANOV / AFP/File

Volker Dusch, a security engineer at the foundation, told the Wall Street Journal it was the most serious problem PHP had faced in more than a decade, comparing it to Heartbleed, a 2014 flaw that set off a worldwide rush to patch.

Security firm Calif found the flaws in August using OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol model, as part of an OpenAI-funded audit of PHP's code.

OpenAI said the discovery "marks a new phase, where AI can find security bugs with internet-scale impact."

Wiz, which is owned by Google, said it found them independently weeks later with help from AI models including Google's Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-5.6 Sol.

The flaws had been reported privately to PHP's developers and kept confidential while a fix was prepared.

AI fuels urgency

Details leaked online Tuesday, a day before the planned release of the fix – prompting the rush to take sites offline before hackers could exploit them.

Steve Kerrison, senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the Singapore campus of James Cook University, told AFP that the fear of hackers using AI to quickly and easily exploit the PHP vulnerabilities had fuelled urgency to react.

So far there has been little evidence of damaging attacks, although data breaches could lead to a wave of so-called "phishing" attacks, where hackers use personal details to steal passwords, down the line.

Larger institutions, from government agencies to news outlets, should be able to fix their websites relatively fast, Kerrison said – but others may be left vulnerable.

"There are sites, systems and people out there who will have no idea about this and still won't for days, weeks and months," Kerrison warned.

That may include user-run blogs that could be weaponised to spread computer viruses, spam people or distribute malicious content, he said.