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Andrew Cuomo Must Win the Mayor Race

U.S. Envoys Return To Israel To Shore Up Gaza Ceasefire

American envoys returned to Israel to shore up the Gaza ceasefire after a major flare up over the weekend. Presidential envoy Steve Witkoff and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner met with Israeli officials in Tel Aviv to support the fragile ceasefire in Gaza. Tensions remain high after Israel accused Hamas of killing two soldiers. The Israeli military has resumed enforcing the ceasefire. The next stage of the ceasefire focuses on disarming Hamas and establishing an internationally backed authority in Gaza.

Trump On Russia-Ukraine: End War At Current Battle Lines

President Trump says Ukraine should give up territory in order to end the war with Russia. Even though Russia is the aggressor and despite his recent openness to helping Ukraine win, the president now says most of the contested Donbas region of Ukraine should go to Russia. At the current battle line, most of Donbas would be in Russian hands. The president plans to meet with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in the coming weeks.

Trump Says Ukraine’s Donbas Region Will Have To Be ‘Cut Up’ To End Russian Invasion

U.S. Conducts Another Deadly Strike On Drug Smuggling Vessel

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth wrote on X: "On October 17th, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), a Designated Terrorist Organization, that was operating in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility. The vessel was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was traveling along a known narco-trafficking route, and was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics. There were three male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel during the strike—which was conducted in international waters. All three terrorists were killed and no U.S. forces were harmed in this strike. These cartels are the Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere, using violence, murder and terrorism to impose their will, threaten our national security and poison our people. The United States military will treat these organizations like the terrorists they are—they will be hunted, and killed, just like Al Qaeda." Stay with SNC for more coverage on this top story.

Louvre Heist Raises Questions Over Museum Security

Thieves broke into France’s Louvre museum and stole priceless jewelry on Sunday from a section of the museum that houses the French crown jewels. That’s according to the French government, who say the thieves pulled up outside the Louvre on Sunday morning used a crane to smash an upstairs window and then escaped by motorbike. Authorities have yet to say what pieces were stolen. France’s Culture Minister Rachida Dati told TV network TF1 it all took around four minutes. “We have to say that these are professionals. Organized crime today targets objects of art, and museums of course have become targets, because France, as you know, is a country of heritage, a country with historical objects of heritage with great value." A video shot by a museum guide showed visitors filing to the exits, seemingly unaware of the heist. Dati said no injuries were reported and that one piece of jewelry had been found outside the museum. Newspaper Le Parisien said it was believed to be the crown of Napoleon III's wife, Empress Eugenie, and that it was broken. France’s interior minister said a specialized police unit that has a high success rate in cracking high-profile robberies has been tasked with investigating the heist. The theft is likely to raise some awkward questions about security at the museum. Earlier this year, the Louvre, which is the world’s most visited museum, requested urgent help from the French government to renovate its aging halls and protect its art. The Louvre is home to the Mona Lisa, itself the target of a daring heist in 1911. That involved a former employee who was eventually caught with the painting returned two years later.

Trump Meets With Australia's PM On Rare Earths, Submarine Deal

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese arrived at the White House on Monday for his first summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, looking for a bigger U.S. commitment to Australia's critical minerals sector as China tightens control over global supply. The center-left Australian leader also expected to discuss nuclear submarines, trade and Indo Pacific stability with Trump, his office said. Albanese travelled to Washington with his minister for resources, but not the foreign and defense ministers. The Trump Administration is reviewing the A$368 billion($239.46 billion) AUKUS agreement, reached in 2023 under then-President Joe Biden, in which Australia is to buy U.S. nuclear-powered submarines in 2032 before building a new submarine class with Britain. While Trump has been intent on rolling back Biden-era policies, Australian officials have said they are confident AUKUS will proceed, with Defense Minister Richard Marles last week saying he knew when the review would conclude. "Australia and the United States have stood shoulder-to-shoulder in every major conflict for over a century," Albanese, re-elected in May for a second term, said in a statement on Sunday. Ahead of Monday's meeting between the two leaders, Australian officials have emphasized Canberra is paying its way under AUKUS, contributing $2 billion this year to boost production rates at U.S. submarine shipyards, and preparing to maintain U.S. Virginia-class submarines at its Indian Ocean naval base from 2027. The delay of 10 months in an official meeting since Trump took office has caused some anxiety in Australia as the Pentagon urged Canberra to lift defense spending. The two leaders met briefly on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York last month. Australia is willing to sell shares in its planned strategic reserve of critical minerals to allies including Britain, Reuters reported last month, as Western governments scramble to end their reliance on China for rare earths and minor metals. Top U.S. officials last week condemned Beijing's expansion of rare earth export controls as a threat to global supply chains. China is the world's biggest producer of the materials that are vital materials for products ranging from electric vehicles to aircraft engines and military radars. Resource-rich Australia, wanting to extract and process rare earths, put preferential access to its strategic reserve on the table in U.S. trade negotiations in April. Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney, said the "mood music is good" for the summit, and "the outstanding bilateral issues are not terribly serious. "The most important thing is for Mr. Albanese to establish a cooperative, professional and hopefully warm relationship with the president," he said. The United States has a large trade surplus with Australia, which is among the countries with the lowest U.S. tariff. Australia's biggest trade partner is China, with exports of iron ore and coal long underpinning its national budget, despite efforts by Albanese's government to diversify export markets after Beijing's $20 billion boycott of Australian agriculture and coal from 2020 to 2023. Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who held talks with Trump's economic adviser Kevin Hassett on critical minerals, told reporters in Washington on Friday that Canberra wanted to do more with the United States, while maintaining a stable economic relationship with China. "We know that American companies desperately need critical minerals, and Australia is very well placed to service that need," he said.

Amazon Struggles To Recover After Major Outage Disrupts Apps, Services Worldwide

Amazon's cloud services unit AWS was struggling to recover on Monday from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world's most popular apps - Snapchat and Reddit - and disrupted businesses globally. The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies. After about eight hours of disruptions, some applications were gradually coming back online as of 12:00 p.m. ET (1400 GMT). But AWS acknowledged that elevated errors were still affecting several AWS services. AWS was down for more than 7,800 users as of 11:46 a.m. ET, according to outage tracking website Downdetector. That figure is higher than the earlier peak of about 5,800 reports at 3:48 a.m. ET. "We have narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services. The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers," AWS said in the latest update on its status page. The issue, AWS said, originated from within the "EC2 internal network." EC2 refers to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS. Businesses use EC2 to run virtual servers that they need to develop, launch and host applications, and can scale up or down on capacity as required. While some apps like Reddit and Roblox had largely stabilised, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat, PayPal's Venmo and Duolingo, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day. AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world's largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft's Azure and Alphabet's Google Cloud. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms - ranging from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems - that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS said on its status page that Monday's outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered outages in 2021 and 2020. According to documentation on the AWS website, the US-EAST-1 site is often the default region for many AWS services. Asked for comment, AWS directed Reuters to its status page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. HOURS LATER, A ROCKY RECOVERY Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident. Snapchat, for instance, last had over 7,500 reports on Downdetector, lower than the peak of more than 22,000 but still higher than the 4,000 outage instances seen at around 7:00 a.m. ET. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS. Amazon's own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, although Downdetector last showed a decrease in severity. Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, along with Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber rival Lyft was also knocked down in the United States. In a post on X, Signal President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage as well, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work. In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were also facing issues, according to Downdetector's UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website. The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and how reliant they now are on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch causing havoc with business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said. "The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service," said Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey's Department of Computer Science. While there has been no indication of a potential cyberattack behind Monday's outage, the scale of the disruption has fed speculation. "When anything like this happens, the concern that it's a cyber incident is understandable," said Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Sophos. "AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset."