Latest News

About 550,000 people marched on Saturday over fuel prices, the cost of living, and public services, including schools. Speaking from the Élysée, Macron said the country feels anger and shame, and he set the demands of the marchers apart from the people who burned buildings and looted shops. The interior ministry said about 1,000 police officers were injured on Saturday, seven of them seriously. Rioters gutted the 19th-century city hall in Limoges, and the clock tower and roof collapsed. Looting and clashes continued on Sunday in Paris and Lyon, where police used tear gas and stun grenades. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said several thousand people from the far left targeted public buildings, and that looters then hit shops in several cities. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, said police chiefs mishandled the day. Marine Le Pen condemned political forces that encourage violence. The presidential election is in April. Student protests that began last month grew on Saturday when trade unions joined.

The Saudi Press Agency carried the statement at 18:37 local time on 18 October. Civil Defense said strikes on civilian sites violate international humanitarian law, and that its teams followed the standing procedure. The same day the Saudi-led coalition said it intercepted two ballistic missiles aimed at Khamis Mushait, two drones in the Riyadh region, and one drone in the Eastern Province. Two Saudi crew members died when an AH-6i helicopter crashed in Najran. The coalition attributed that crash to a technical malfunction. The Houthis said they shot down a Saudi Apache near Najran, and the coalition rejected the claim. The Gulf Cooperation Council, meeting for its 168th ministerial council in Manama, said an attack on one member is an attack on all six under the joint defense agreement. Houthi-affiliated Al-Masirah said strikes and sniper fire in Taiz and Saada on Saturday killed 13 people and wounded 29. A strike on Riyadh airport last week killed 13 people.

Anthropic published the plan on 18 October. The fund is a wholly owned limited liability company, so grants can go to nonprofits or as direct payments to particular groups. The board may add 2 percent of the shares, at its discretion, for every 50 percent rise in company value above a baseline that is still unpublished. Anthropic said the equity in the fund stays out of lobbying and out of political gifts in the United States and abroad. The co-founders pledged at the start to donate 80 percent of their own equity, and about half of employees use a match. Anthropic said those pledges plus the new fund come to roughly 20 percent of the shares, before any later addition. The company already set aside $200 million to study how AI changes work. An August Pew Research Center survey found that 71 percent of U.S. adults expect AI to leave fewer jobs in the country over the next two years. Business Insider put a 5 percent stake near $48 billion on the valuation from May. In 2025 OpenAI set up a nonprofit foundation that holds a stake in the company. Elon Musk said he recommended giving the shares directly to the public. Palmer Luckey said the public-good definition helps people outside the United States and would send billions out of the American economy.

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, released 13 October, called it the sixth straight quarter of an annual decline. Shipments also fell 12.5 percent from the previous quarter. Huawei shipped 12.2 million phones, up 17.3 percent from a year earlier, and its share rose from 15.2 percent to 21.1 percent. Apple's share was 17.8 percent, up from 15.8 percent. iPhone shipments fell 4.3 percent from a year earlier and 15.1 percent from the previous quarter. Oppo held 15.5 percent, vivo 15.3 percent, Xiaomi 13.8 percent, and Honor 13.0 percent, and their shipments fell 17.6 percent, 24.9 percent, 20.4 percent, and 24.2 percent. Arthur Guo, a senior analyst at IDC, said vendors are passing higher memory and component costs into retail prices, and that buyers are keeping phones longer. The iPhone 18 Pro went on sale on 18 September, so the quarter includes less than two weeks of those sales. The first half of 2026 was down about 4 percent from a year earlier.

The China Automotive Battery Innovation Alliance released the September figures on 15 October. Installations rose 14.7 percent from a year earlier and 10.4 percent from August, the high month of 2026 so far. CATL installed 35.49 gigawatt-hours, and its share was down 0.52 points from August. BYD was second at 18.29 gigawatt-hours and 21.09 percent. Lithium iron phosphate accounted for 74.5 gigawatt-hours, 85.5 percent of installations. In the commercial-vehicle table, CATL led with 9.49 gigawatt-hours and a 45 percent share. In battery-electric passenger cars, CATL led with 21.92 gigawatt-hours and a 42 percent share, and BYD had 12.91 gigawatt-hours and 25 percent. In plug-in hybrids, CATL held 29 percent and BYD 24 percent. Ternary batteries were 12.3 gigawatt-hours, 14.1 percent of the month, and CATL held 67.78 percent of that chemistry.

The China Automotive Battery Innovation Alliance counts power batteries and storage batteries together in this series. September production was 237.8 gigawatt-hours, up 57.3 percent from a year earlier and 0.3 percent from August. Power-battery sales were 149.2 gigawatt-hours, up 35.0 percent from a year earlier. Storage-battery sales were 73.5 gigawatt-hours, up 104.4 percent, and they were 33 percent of combined sales. Auto batteries were the other 67 percent. On the same sheet, storage batteries were lithium iron phosphate throughout, and auto batteries were 76.7 percent lithium iron phosphate. The year-to-date volume on the sheet is 1.682 terawatt-hours, up 57.6 percent. Vehicle installations are a separate series and totaled 87.2 gigawatt-hours in September.

A 12 October release said the company bought 250 bitcoin between 5 October and 11 October for about $21.5 million, an average of $86,194, using sales of MSTR common stock and cash. The same week it spent about $192.4 million repurchasing STRC preferred shares, up from $176.3 million the week before. The cumulative cost of the bitcoin is about $64 billion. The stack is about 4.04 percent of the 21 million cap. Strategy described a $4.88 billion reserve for preferred dividends and debt interest, and a separate cash balance of $640.5 million as of 11 October. Holdings grew 0.2 percent in the third quarter, when the company acquired 7,218 bitcoin and sold 5,553. Michael Saylor's Sunday post said "We found room for more orange," the line he used ahead of the 12 October purchase. MSCI has a consultation open on whether companies whose assets are mostly bitcoin stay in its equity indexes.

The tag on GitHub is Toporin/SatochipApplet v0.16-0.1, dated 16 October, and the protocol version is 0.16. pysatochip 0.18.5 shipped with it. Satochip is an open-source Java Card applet for bitcoin keys, and the project says it runs on cards such as a YubiKey Neo. Private keys stay on the card. The old Taproot tweak hashed the XOR of the internal key and the merkle root. BIP341 hashes their concatenation. Key-path-only spends, with an empty tweak, stay on the same bytes. A non-zero merkle root computed on version 0.15-0.1 or earlier fails to match the new tweak. With two-factor approval on, the MuSig2 finalize step now requires an HMAC over the client-supplied signing bytes, and the check runs before the secret nonce is consumed. SignSchnorrHash had been overwriting the tweaked private key after the first signature. The release also checks secp256k1 points on external public keys, and it clears the derived BIP32 key and the tweaked key when the card deselects.

The paper is Li, Gao, Wang, and colleagues, Advanced Science, doi 10.1002/advs.77571, titled Bone marrow macrophage STING signaling is a direct nexus linking marrow adipose expansion to NAD+ depletion and osteogenic decline in skeletal aging. The mice were treated from 12 to 18 months of age. Silencing Sting in macrophages over that span preserved bone density and structure and cut the number of marrow fat cells. Old marrow fat cells release more soluble DPP4, which binds TLR4 and strengthens STING activation when old marrow fluid is present. STING signaling raises CD38, and CD38 on the cell surface breaks down NAD+ and NMN outside the cell. Alendronate, a standard osteoporosis drug, produced a similar change in bone structure in the same experiments. The study is small, and the combined arm leaves the separate contribution of H-151 and of NMN unmeasured. Lifespan.io wrote the paper up on 16 October. David Sinclair is a professor at Harvard Medical School and a cofounder of Life Biosciences.

The paper is Effects of Finasteride exposure on lifespan and locomotor phenotypes, Biogerontology, volume 27, article 181, published 17 October 2026. The primary model is Drosophila, with a mouse behavioral assay alongside. Males showed lower starvation resistance. Neuromuscular junctions changed shape, locomotion fell, and cask expression fell. Overexpressing CASK in motor neurons improved junction shape and locomotion in exposed flies. Finasteride inhibits 5-alpha-reductase and lowers dihydrotestosterone. The 1 milligram tablet is the usual daily dose for male-pattern hair loss, and the 5 milligram tablet is the prostate dose. The abstract ties the drug to prostate enlargement and to hair loss, and it calls for the same questions in other experimental systems.

The paper Sinclair linked is on ScienceDirect as PII S2589936826000629. Sirt1-overexpressing mice cleared an intraperitoneal glucose load faster than wild-type mice. Both groups had high fasting glucose after the long high-fat feeding. Wild-type mice gained weight and fat. The overexpressing mice gained less weight, and the difference was mostly fat. The heart result is partial: complex I-supported state 3 respiration held in isolated cardiac mitochondria. SIRT1 is an NAD-dependent deacetylase. David Sinclair is a professor at Harvard Medical School and a cofounder of Life Biosciences.