TODAY

Briton Freddie Slater will have his first experience of a Formula 1 car on a grand prix weekend when he drives for Audi in first practice in Mexico City on 30 October.

The 18-year-old will have a second outing a week later at the Sao Paulo Grand Prix.

Slater was the first driver to be brought into Audi’s driver development programme following the German company’s entry into F1 this season.

Allan McNish, Audi’s racing director and head of the driver development programme, said: “We have seen Freddie making great progress throughout recent years, both on and off the track.

“It is the right time for Freddie to step up.

“These appearances in Mexico and Brazil will give him valuable experience of a Formula 1 race weekend, and another chance to continue his development before he steps up to Formula 2 next season.”

Slater said: “Getting behind the wheel of an F1 car at a grand prix weekend is a big moment for me and something I’ve been dreaming of since I was a kid.

“I’ve learned a lot this year, and these free practice outings will be another opportunity to keep gaining on-track experience.”

Slater finished second on his debut in the Formula 3 championship this season and is moving up to Formula 2 in 2027 with the front-running Invicta team.

Invicta driver Rafael Camara is leading this year’s F2 championship and is moving up to F1 next season with the US-based Haas team.

Second Test, Gqeberha (day five of five)

South Africa 425-9 dec: Bavuma 179, Jansen 85; Boland 5-81

Australia 99 & 295: Head 121; Rabada 4-77, Mulder 3-64

South Africa won by an innings and 31 runs

Scorecard

South Africa broke Australia’s resistance in the final session to complete a famous victory in the second Test and set up a series decider in Cape Town.

Travis Head made 121 for Australia and Scott Boland survived 166 deliveries for 40 runs in an attempt to escape Gqeberha with a draw – the tourists’ hopes also boosted by the first session being wiped out by rain.

But the Proteas stuck to their task to take the six wickets needed to win by an innings and 31 runs as the light faded late on the last day.

Premier paceman Kagiso Rabada finished with 4-77 while Marco Jansen, whose 5-33 on day four put South Africa in the ascendancy, took the final wicket as Australia were dismissed for 295.

But all-rounder Wiaan Mulder also played a crucial hand, bowling with accuracy and finding movement off the pitch to dismiss Head, Boland and Australia captain Pat Cummins.

Some of South Africa’s great Test wins have come against Australia – notably in the last World Test Championship final two years ago and a Test on this ground in 2018 in the infamous Sandpaper series. This must surely rank highly among them.

They were heavily beaten in the first Test in Durban and when 40-4 and 110-6 in their first innings of this Test, there appeared only one winner in this series.

Instead, the contest has been turned on its head by Bavuma’s epic 179 and South Africa twice dismissing Australia, setting up a tantalising finale in Cape Town.

The third Test begins on Tuesday.

Government websites in Europe and elsewhere have gone offline after news of critical vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language sent website operators scrambling to protect their systems.

Developers of the PHP programming language on Wednesday released urgent new fixes, saying all users were “encouraged to update immediately”.

PHP runs on the servers that host websites, building pages behind the scenes before they reach a visitor’s browser. Most people never see it, but it powers everything from blogs to online shops and government portals.

The vulnerabilities, which had been lurking in the software for years, were uncovered with the help of artificial intelligence. Details about them leaked online on Tuesday before fixes were available, forcing PHP to rush them out.

Experts said they were bracing for a wave of intrusions as hackers jumped to get ahead of the updates.

What is the bug?

Andrew Cullen, a lecturer on AI and cybersecurity at the University of Melbourne, said many devices in the world are connected to one piece of foundational software, which is where the bug was found.

The vulnerability allows a hacker to run code on a website, meaning they could change the website or force it to release personal information collected in a database, Cullen told Al Jazeera.

Both flaws stem from how PHP handles fatal errors, such as running out of memory. Because the problem sits in PHP itself, even the simplest website running an affected version can be vulnerable, and attackers could read passwords and other credentials from a server’s memory, the cloud security company Wiz said. Both flaws scored 9.2 out of 10 on the industry’s standard severity scale, placing them in the “critical” category.

The two flaws, nicknamed PHP2Shell, were found independently by two cybersecurity companies using AI. Calif, working with OpenAI, reported the first on August 11. Wiz, which is owned by Google, reported the second on August 24.

The vulnerabilities remained hidden in the PHP codebase for more than a decade and would have been extraordinarily complicated for a human hacker to take advantage of, Wiz said in a statement.

Calif and Wiz said they had coordinated with each other, the PHP team and OpenAI before making the vulnerabilities public.

However, Amazon security chief CJ Moses said his security team detected an attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities on October 17, four days before the public disclosure.

Moses said it was unclear how the hacker learned of the flaws while Calif’s and Wiz’s reports were still under embargo. Security researchers usually keep details of flaws secret until a fix is ready, so attackers cannot use them in the meantime.

Who can potentially be affected?

PHP, a language that dates back to the early 1990s and initially stood for Personal Home Page, underpins huge parts of the public-facing web and is baked into WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento sites, meaning any critical vulnerability potentially has enormous knock-on consequences.

Calif, Wiz and the web infrastructure company Cloudflare said the flaws affect PHP 5.4 and later versions, more than a decade of releases.

Cullen said the vulnerability was “really unprecedented”, noting that PHP powers more than 70 percent of websites globally, although sites that have been updated are protected.

“There is a real risk to the kind of shared digital infrastructure that we all rely on,” Cullen told Al Jazeera. “There is concern in the cybersecurity community about what the blast radius for this will be, even though the developers of PHP have been very quick to try and develop patches for it.”

Cullen added that while AI was getting better at cybersecurity, it was also getting better at being a hacker. “This means that we are developing systems … that are making the internet safer by helping to fix bugs, but we’re also making it riskier by discovering bugs and creating bugs they’ll be able to hack,” he said.

What has the impact been so far?

In the Netherlands, the Dutch cybersecurity agency itself went offline, saying it had done so as a precaution because of the vulnerabilities. Several organisations followed the example and took public-facing websites offline, including the Port of Rotterdam, government portal Overheid.nl, the national football association KNVB, the websites for the country’s five largest political parties and several hospital ‌websites.

Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten said he was closely monitoring the situation.

Disruptions were even more widespread in Finland, where state IT services provider Valtori said government public network services had been taken offline “as a precautionary measure”.

France’s Ministry of the Interior said it had placed all of its websites into preventive maintenance.

Belgium’s Federal Public Service Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation said it had temporarily taken its websites offline after reports of cyberattacks exploiting the PHP vulnerabilities although the country’s cybersecurity centre said it had not recorded any attacks on Belgian websites.

South Korea’s ⁠government raised ⁠its private-sector cybersecurity alert level and activated emergency response measures. It issued security guidance to about 28,000 companies with registered chief information security officers and 5,900 members ⁠of a government information-sharing ⁠network as well as operators of critical infrastructure, web-hosting firms and data centres.

The operator of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia also said it had taken down an unspecified number of systems until they could be safely patched while the Internet Archive, the sprawling online library, said it also briefly went offline to deal with the issue.

Libya’s eastern-based parliament has backed a 2019 maritime deal with Turkiye already signed by the North African nation’s internationally recognised government based in Tripoli to delimit maritime boundaries in the Mediterranean Sea.

The vote on Tuesday came as Turkiye has been cultivating close ties in recent years with the eastern parliament, backed by renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar. Ankara had helped the Tripoli government, known as the Government of National Accord (GNA), push back an offensive in 2020 by Haftar’s self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) that aimed to capture Tripoli.

Egypt and the European Union have rejected the ratification of the maritime borders agreement, calling the deal “null and void”.

On Tuesday, the Tobruk-based House of Representatives voted unanimously to approve the agreement, reversing its 2020 rejection.

Israel also condemned the move while Greece, which said the agreement violates international law, briefed the United Nations Security Council.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan dismissed the criticism, calling the deal “entirely legitimate”.

So what is the deal, and why has it drawn such a backlash? Here’s what you need to know:

What is the deal?

It is a memorandum of understanding that draws a sea border between Turkiye and Libya across the eastern Mediterranean.

It was signed in Istanbul on November 27, 2019, by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Fayez al-Sarraj, then-prime minister of the UN-recognised government in Tripoli.

Within weeks, Turkiye sent drones and military advisers to help repel Haftar’s assault on Tripoli.

The deal allowed Ankara to claim large and potentially gas-rich areas of the eastern Mediterranean.

Why does Egypt oppose it?

Because Cairo says it cuts into Egyptian waters.

Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the agreement “constitutes a clear infringement upon Egypt’s sovereign rights within its exclusive economic zone and continental shelf”.

It said the ratification “carries no legal consequences for Egypt”.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has historically been one of Haftar’s strongest backers, but experts said their relations have cooled because Haftar allowed his territory to be used to funnel support to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group, which is fighting Sudan’s military, the AFP news agency reported.

Cairo is also now a close security ally of Ankara, and in July, Egypt refrained from objecting to a maritime line drawn between Benghazi and Turkiye.

According to exclusive information Al Jazeera received in July, the rapprochement between Ankara and Haftar’s general command included agreements on developing military facilities and advanced surveillance systems.

The agreements also included training programmes in Turkiye for eastern Libyan officers with specialised Turkish defence companies participating in the projects.

Wolfgang Pusztai, a security policy analyst and former Austrian defence attache in Greece, told Al Jazeera that a possible Turkish military presence in eastern Libya was “probably more of a concern for Egypt”.

“This is not so much an issue for Greece, which has a Turkish military presence next door anyway,” he said, adding, “I doubt Cairo would accept this.”

Why does the EU oppose it?

Because two of its member states said it seeks to take their waters.

In a joint statement on Tuesday, European Council President Antonio Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the memorandum infringes on the sovereign rights of third states and does not comply with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

They reaffirmed the bloc’s solidarity with Greece and Cyprus.

Athens said the deal ignores Greek islands, including Crete, Rhodes and Karpathos, and therefore infringes on its maritime territory, according to a briefing document from the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Sotirios Zartaloudis, an associate professor in comparative European politics at the University of Birmingham, told Al Jazeera that Athens and Nicosia see the deal as a Turkish attempt to block the “crucial Great Sea Interconnector”.

The planned subsea power cable, which would link Greece’s grid to Cyprus and later Israel, has been delayed by a dispute between Athens and Ankara over waters off the Greek island of Crete, the Reuters news agency reported last year. The project is estimated to cost about $2.1bn.

Turkiye has not signed UNCLOS, which means Ankara is not bound by the treaty’s rules governing maritime boundaries.

On Wednesday, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas urged all countries to respect member states’ sovereign rights under EU and international law, including UNCLOS.

Zartaloudis said both countries had pushed for the EU to condemn the deal, but “so far expectations were not met”, and that “they will try to gain further support against the deal”.

He added that “the main actor in the region is the US”, which he said had not repudiated the agreement.

What does Turkiye say?

Ankara said the deal is lawful and already in force.

Turkiye’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the memorandum safeguards both countries’ rights on the basis of international law and “the principle of equity”.

“There are countries reacting to this. We know why they are reacting,” Fidan told state media.

“However, this is an entirely legitimate deal, both from a legal and a statutory perspective,” he said.

Why did eastern Libya change its mind?

Because Ankara has spent years courting it and its parliament has new leadership.

After Ankara struck a deal with Haftar’s LNA in July, the eastern parliament on October 6 elected Al-Salhin Abdelnabi al-Obeidi as speaker, replacing Aguila Saleh after more than 12 years.

Al-Obeidi previously chaired the Libyan-Turkish parliamentary friendship committee.

Anas El Gomati, director of the Sadeq Institute, a Libyan think tank, told Al Jazeera that the turnaround in eastern Libya was about the route to the presidency under a US mediation plan for Saddam Haftar, Khalifa Haftar’s son and deputy commander.

“Turkiye is now the most consequential outside power in Libya with leverage over Tripoli and a military presence in the west, and he needs it to get there and to stay there,” El Gomati said.

“But a ratified treaty is hard to reverse, so Ankara gets something that looks permanent in return for support that, depending on how the Haftars use it, may not be,” El Gomati said.

Does the vote unite Libya’s rivals?

Not on the issues that divide them most.

Tripoli’s GNU welcomed Tuesday’s vote, meaning both of Libya’s rival centres of power now back the deal.

But El Gomati said the “unification was never about the sea”.

“It’s about who controls the budget, the army and the electoral commission, and this vote touches none of them,” he said.

What happens next?

Athens said it would take all appropriate measures to safeguard its sovereign rights.

El Gomati said implementation now depended on institutions such as Libya’s National Oil Corporation and he expected pressure “to be diplomatic and slow”.

Pusztai said the risk of naval incidents if Turkiye or Libya act on the deal at sea was “very high”.

He said it might also lead to the involvement of the EU naval mission enforcing the UN arms embargo on Libya since 2020.

In August 2020, months after the deal was signed with the GNU, Ankara sent the survey vessel Oruc Reis to explore for oil and gas in waters Greece claims, bringing the two NATO allies to the verge of military confrontation.

Across Europe, an autumn of anger is taking hold.

In France, student protests over overcrowded classrooms and teacher shortages have grown into a broader public outcry.

In recent weeks, separate protests have also erupted in Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Albania.

The grievances differ, from unaffordable housing and low wages to rising fuel costs, education and political accountability.

But the frustration is increasingly shared: paying more, getting less, and struggling to afford a decent life, even with a job.

Governments face demands for relief while wrestling with high debt, rising borrowing costs and, in several countries, looming elections.

Barclays is cutting around 5,000 staff this year as it introduces more artificial intelligence (AI) into its processes.

The banking group said 1,000 posts had already been closed and it expects a further reduction of 4,000 to be complete by the end of 2026.

The cuts amount to 5% of its global workforce. Most are operational and functional roles, with the bulk in its UK retail banking arm. However, its investment banking division will also be affected.

Barclays said the cuts were the result of investments in technology, with AI making some work processes more efficient.

China finished 0.233 points ahead of the Americans, denying them a chance to win an gold eighth consecutive team gold.

China have denied the United States an eighth consecutive women’s team title at the Artistic Gymnastics World Championships as Qiu Qiyuan sealed a dramatic victory with the final routine.

Qiu needed to score more than 12.600 points in the closing floor routine to give her country gold and did just enough with 12.833 on Wednesday.

The USA last failed to win gold when they were beaten by Russia at the 2010 championships, but were left to count the cost of several errors on the balance beam in Rotterdam.

China, who also led the way in qualifying, finished with 165.764 points, edging out the Americans by 0.233 overall.

Japan were a further 1.468 points behind as they completed the podium ahead of fourth-placed France.

USA superstar Simone Biles, a 23-time world champion including five times in the team competition, is taking a break from the sport and has not competed since the 2024 Paris Olympics, where she won three gold medals.

The reigning champions took a healthy lead at the halfway stage, helped by strong vault and uneven bars routines by Skye Blakely, the only gymnast on the team who was part of the quintet that won their seventh consecutive title in 2023.

But 18-year-old Caylor Dulcy stumbled on the beam, scoring just 12.333, as the Americans were outscored by more than four points on the apparatus by their rivals.

Zhang Qingying, who topped beam qualifying, in particular made them pay with a sparkling performance that earned her 15.066 points.

The Chinese were put under pressure on the floor, but Qiu held her nerve to secure their first women’s team world crown since 2006.

The championships continue in the Netherlands on Thursday as Japan’s Daiki Hashimoto defends his men’s all-around title, with a big challenge expected from his compatriot and Olympic champion Shinnosuke Oka.

Japan took the men’s team title on Tuesday, pipping Russia and China.

The U.S. Air Force says any decision on whether or not to acquire new production F-16 Viper fighters is likely a year or more away. The service’s top officer in charge of force structure planning has also now raised the prospect of using a “spectrum of capability” to eventually supplant aging older-model F-16s. All of this comes as the Air Force has laid out a new vision to have 1,509 combat-coded fighters in inventory, hundreds more than it has now, by 2035, amid questions about whether industry and budgets can keep up.

Inside Defense and Air & Space Forces Magazine were among the first to report on the Air Force’s latest long-term fighter force structure plan late yesterday. This followed a roundtable with Lt. Gen. David Tabor, the service’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Programs. At the time of writing, an unclassified copy of the report, which was submitted to Congress last week, has not been released publicly. TWZ has reached out for more information.

Tabor said yesterday that the target fleet of 1,509 combat-coded fighters by 2035 would be approximately 40 percent F-35s, 40 percent F-15s (inclusive of F-15E Strike Eagles and F-15EX Eagle IIs) and F-16s, and 20 percent F-22 Raptors and F-47s, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. As an aside, the final expected F-47 fleet size remains unclear, though the Air Force continues to say it plans to acquire at least enough of those jets to replace its 185 F-22s on a one-for-one basis.

The current breakdown of the service’s fighter force structure is 45 percent F-16s, 30 percent F-35s, 15 percent F-15s, and 10 percent F-22s. Last year’s long-term fighter force structure report said the service was aiming for an eventual inventory of 1,558 combat-coded fighters and hoped to hit a milestone of 1,369 aircraft by Fiscal Year 2030. As of the start of Fiscal Year 2026, the Air Force had 1,168 combat-coded fighters, not including 103 A-10 Warthog ground attack jets, which have been part of this force structure planning in the past. The plan now is for the last of the A-10s to be retired by 2030. The new 2035 figure also does not include the hundreds of Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) drones the service wants to have acquired by that time, something we will come back to later on.

Currently, the Air Force expects fighter fleet expansion to be driven by the acquisition of new F-35As, F-15EXs, and F-47s. This was also the case when last year’s fighter force structure report was released. The possibility of the Air Force also acquiring new-production F-16s has come up several times in recent years. Most recently, there were several reports last month that prime contractor Lockheed Martin had made a new pitch to the service for a version of the latest Block 70 version of the fighter, tentatively dubbed the F-16G. New Block 70 and Block 72 F-16s, which differ in what engine they use, are being actively produced at Lockheed Martin’s plant in Greenville, South Carolina. At that time, TWZ did a deep dive into the benefits that this could offer the Air Force.

“There is a spectrum of capability that we might want to replace the F-16s with,” Lt. Gen. Tabor said amid a discussion about the prospect of acquiring new Vipers at the roundtable yesterday, per Air & Space Forces Magazine. “It’s not urgent, frankly. What we don’t want to get to is a point where it is urgent, and we haven’t done the homework and decided ‘hey, this is really the right place to be.’ We do have time to churn through that and make sure that we have a good option going forward.”

“We’re not in a position where that decision has to be made immediately,” Tabor added, while acknowledging that “we are very conscious” that older-model F-16s are set to begin reaching the end of their lifespans in the 2030s. He also said any such planning was unlikely to be part of the process of developing the service’s Fiscal Year 2028 budget proposal, which will be released sometime early next year.

The Air Force is “in the initial phases of analyzing options for the next Future Years Defense Program,” a spokesperson for the service had told us last month without specifically mentioning any particular type of aircraft. “At this stage, we have neither defined the precise mission requirements nor the spectrum of options that could fill it.”

When it comes to the current F-16 fleet, the Air Force had 774 Vipers in inventory at the start of Fiscal Year 2026 and expected that number to drop to 768, according to past budget documents. This includes a mixture of subvariants, and not all of them are assigned combat-coded units. The Air Force has been substantially upgrading at least a portion of its existing F-16s, including with the addition of new active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars and electronic warfare suites, to ensure their operational relevance for years to come.

The Air Force has also already been taking newer F-16s from squadrons transitioning to the F-35 and using them to replace older Vipers in other units. Last year’s fighter force structure report explicitly highlighted plans to supplant Block 30 F-16s in five Air National Guard formations – three combat-coded squadrons and two training units – with Block 40 and 50 types in this way.

As we’ve previously written:

“A new F-16 offers a fresh and highly mature airframe — one with a full service-life ahead of it, on the order of 12,000 flight hours without the need for structural upgrades — double that of the original F-16. This is compared to existing F-16s in the inventory with the decades of wear and fatigue already accumulated on them, with structural upgrades keeping them in the air. That difference in remaining structural life is arguably the single biggest advantage a new-build aircraft has compared with extending an existing one.”

“Dumping more money into existing F-16s is becoming questionable. Service life extensions and technical upgrades can only go so far and supporting these jets is becoming harder as parts dry up and suppliers who made them are long gone. A new airframe would give the Guard many decades of highly efficient service and the piece of mind for future force planning that goes with it.”

…

“The new [F-16G] proposal would let some Guard and Reserve units swap their F-16s for vastly improved F-16s — the same logic that drove the F-15EX buy — while also keeping the Greenville line hot, which is a significant benefit in its own right. And it accomplishes both in the most efficient way possible: not just in acquisition cost, but in sustainment cost, which is really the more problematic burden of the two. In the end, this points to another glaring reality check for the all-stealth-force concept, a vision the Air Force has effectively already abandoned.”

“The Air Force has spent years describing the F-35 as the replacement for its F-16 fleet, yet it now has to contend with aging F-16s, delayed or constrained fighter production, a larger stated requirement for total fighter capacity, and the lengthy transition toward the F-47 and uncrewed combat aircraft. In that environment, a new-build F-16 provides an option that sits between extending legacy aircraft and buying the most sophisticated — and expensive — fighters available.”

You can read our full prior deep analysis on this topic here.

Lt. Gen. Tabor acknowledged many of these exact same points at the roundtable yesterday. He notably described acquiring new F-16s as “maybe the lazy” option, but also one that would benefit from “practically a ready-made aircraft” that is in production now, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine.

“The question is, can industry produce at those levels?” he also said, speaking more generally. “They’ve assured us that they can, and we believe them, but we also actually need to see it manifest.”

In the context of acquiring new F-16s, especially, it is important to note here that Lockheed Martin order books are very full already as a result of demand for these fighters from U.S. allies and partners. The company’s capacity, at least at present, to add a substantial new Air Force acquisition program on top of that is a real question. This, in some ways, mirrors questions that surround Boeing efforts to meet surging Air Force demand for F-15EXs.

On top of all this, the Air Force’s still-evolving CCA plans remain something of a wildcard in these discussions. The Air Force has ordered General Atomics FQ-42 Vengeance and Anduril’s FQ-44 Fury CCAs into production, and is now aiming to have a combined fleet of at least 500 of these drones in inventory by 2032. The service is also still expecting to acquire additional CCAs, which could be of entirely different types, through a second iterative development cycle, or Increment 2, under this program. This is influencing the service’s crewed fighter force structure plans, but the full scale and scope of those impacts remain to be seen.

“CCA is very much a reality,” Tabor said yesterday, per Air & Space Forces Magazine. “It is going to be a part of our future, and there is absolutely a world in which the incorporation of CCAs into the force will mitigate the requirement for the number of fighters. That’s not the CCA that we have right now, but it is advancing very, very rapidly. We’re confident that it will play a major role in future versions of the fighter force structure report.”

The Air Force’s F-22s are currently set to be its first ‘aerial quarterbacks’ for CCAs, with F-35s and F-47s expected to follow. At the same time, TWZ has highlighted previously how CCA could offer particular value when paired with fourth-generation fighters like the F-16. This, in turn, could actually bolster the case for new Viper acquisitions as a more affordable force multiplier.

The Air Force’s ability to secure necessary funding and other factors will play in all this, too. 2035 is a long way off from a budgetary perspective. It also stretches across multiple election cycles, including the one that will decide the next presidential administration, all of which could lead to major changes in defense spending priorities. Congress can and routinely does demand that the U.S. military alter major procurement plans. Just in the past two years or so, legislators have intervened to force the Air Force to move ahead with the acquisition of new E-7A Wedgetail airborne early warning and control planes and to save the U.S. Navy F/A-XX sixth-generation fighter program.

In the meantime, the Air Force clearly faces many continued questions about how to balance the need to modernize its fighter fleets while ensuring it retains enough tactical airpower to meet current and future operational demands. Even so, the service says it sees no need to rush to make a decision about whether to choose the “lazy” route of just buying new F-16s.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

North Korea has said it plans to resume broadcasting anti-South Korea propaganda along the armed border between the two countries, as Seoul urged Pyongyang to discuss easing tensions.

Kim Yo Jong, a senior North Korean official and the sister of leader Kim Jong Un, said on Wednesday that North Korea will place loudspeakers along the entire border, following a visit with top military officials to fortifications along the contested frontier.

Kim warned Seoul of “the most horrible and distressing situation” if South Korea continued what Pyongyang calls interference in the North’s internal affairs.

She added in a follow-up statement on Thursday that North Korea would place “new counter means” on alert along the border, without elaborating, and have its loudspeakers on “standby” within days.

A landmine blast last month that wounded three South Korean soldiers in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the two countries has ratcheted up tensions. Seoul accused North Korean troops of deliberately laying mines in the border zone as part of the North’s fortification work.

Kim had denied the allegation, calling the incident a South Korean fabrication. She said North Korean tactical units had taken up new positions, and accused South Korean troops of conducting warning broadcasts and firing warning shots at multiple locations near the border.

Seoul said the warning shots were fired as “legitimate and defensive measures”.

North Korea has been adding mines, barbed wire fences, anti-tank barriers and other fortifications to what is already one of the world’s most heavily armed borders.

South Korea’s Ministry of National Defence urged North Korea on Thursday to discuss measures to ease tension at the border and prevent any accidental military clash, its spokesperson said.

Pyongyang had cut off a military hotline with the South after declaring it would no longer seek dialogue or unification with what it called its “foe”.

Loudspeaker propaganda

Both North and South Korea have historically used loudspeakers to broadcast propaganda across the border, with South Korean broadcasts featuring K-pop music and news that have long irked Pyongyang and prompted tit-for-tat responses.

The two Koreas are separated by the DMZ, established after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice.

North Korea has been reinforcing its side of the DMZ with mines, barriers and fencing since 2024 as it seeks to establish what it calls a permanent border with South Korea.

US federal judge blocked wall’s construction on Texas-Mexico border amid an ongoing legal battle.

The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow it to resume plans to build a border wall through the Big Bend region of West Texas, as part of its anti-immigration policy to strengthen security on the border with Mexico.

The Justice Department filed an emergency request on Wednesday asking the court to lift a federal judge’s injunction in a lower court that has halted construction while a lawsuit against the project, brought by an environmental group and other challengers, plays out.

The Department of Homeland Security plans include vehicle barriers, patrol roads, lighting and detection technology in and around Big Bend National Park.

Big Bend has about 805km (500 miles) of border, and, according to opponents of the project who have sued the administration, accounts for about 1 percent of migrant arrests.

Landscape, historic church

The lawsuit, filed by plaintiffs including the Center for Biological Diversity and a Big Bend-area river guide, seeks to preserve the landscape, protect a historic church, and challenge the federal government’s waivers of environmental and historical laws to fast-track the $1.7bn project.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and current Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who issued the waivers between February and July, found the region to be an “area of high illegal entry”, requiring additional barriers to control the border.

US District Judge Kathleen Cardone issued an injunction in El Paso on October 2 halting work “until and unless Defendants comply with all applicable laws,” she wrote in her order.

In a later opinion, the judge found that the waivers exceeded the authority of Noem and Mullin.

The Justice Department in its request urged the Supreme Court to pause or overturn Cardone’s injunction.

The Supreme Court has not yet responded to this appeal.

“Even assuming that the secretary’s waiver authority implicates a question of ‘vast economic and political significance,’ Congress did clearly authorize the secretary both to build border barriers and to waive legal requirements in order to facilitate their expeditious construction,” the Justice Department wrote.

In August, the administration paused construction in Big Bend after the project drew bipartisan criticism over its potential impact on the park’s landscape and wildlife.

Far-right President Abelardo de la Espriella says he will wage a ‘counterrevolution’ against cultural institutions.

Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella has announced he is spearheading a cultural “counterrevolution” that includes removing dozens of exhibits from the National Museum, drawing protests and comparisons to United States President Donald Trump.

De la Espriella, a conservative Trump ally, said last week that he wants to prevent cultural institutions from being taken over by what he calls “atheist social communism”.

Since then, exhibits have been taken down that once addressed the history of social movements, including feminist and LGBTQ+ activism, and Colombia’s political violence.

The changes have sparked protests by civil rights groups, artists and students who have accused the government of censorship and warn that important parts of the country’s history could be erased.

Dozens of demonstrators gathered on Wednesday outside the National Museum in downtown Bogota as riot police guarded its entrance.

“I find it outrageous that they want to erase part of our history,” said Azul Riascos, a history student.

He said the government was promoting a vision of Colombia as exclusively white, Catholic and Spanish-speaking. That image, he explained, excluded Black, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ communities.

Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli, director for the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and advocacy organisation, said the Colombian government’s approach reflects a broader trend among Trump allies who are copying US political narratives and strategies.

Trump has been fiercely critical of museums in Washington, particularly those tied to the Smithsonian Institution.

The White House released a report in July branding leaders of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History as radical activists and has ordered signs to be installed outside the museum telling visitors that some of the exhibits are inaccurate.

Nearly three months after that order, such signs haven’t been installed. The museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, told Congress that the White House report “does not fairly or accurately characterise the full body of work at the museum”.

Sanchez-Garzoli said Trump’s cooperation with allied Latin American governments on security and counternarcotics efforts also has an ideological dimension.

“These are imported narratives about terrorism and about being ‘woke,’” anthropologist Arturo Sanabria said during Wednesday’s protest, describing the Colombian government’s approach as a form of neocolonial intervention.

Colombia’s Culture Minister Paola Holguin said the government was reviewing and redesigning exhibitions and curatorial practices at other museums overseen by her ministry.

The Foreign Ministry also renamed a courtyard previously honouring an Indigenous leader, describing the change as part of the president’s campaign against “woke” ideology.

“The government is making serious efforts in a cultural battle that probably doesn’t exist,” political scientist Estefania Cardozo said outside the museum. “It is inventing one to erase identities that cannot be erased because they already exist.”

The U.S. Army wants to infuse new autonomous capabilities into its current and future fleets of amphibious landing ships and other watercraft. The service is also aiming to acquire up to 100 new purpose-built uncrewed surface vessels (USV). The maritime assets the service has now, often referred to as ‘the Army’s Navy,’ are obscure and generally underappreciated. However, the small force offers an important additional set of naval logistics capabilities, especially for any future fight in the Pacific, which could be further bolstered with optionally-crewed or entirely uncrewed platforms.

Army Maj. Gen. Frederick Crist, head of 8th Theater Sustainment Command (TSC), issued plans for future autonomous watercraft capabilities during a talk last week during a talk at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual symposium. 8th TSC, which has its main headquarters at Fort Shafter in Hawaii, is one of the top formations tasked with managing U.S. military logistics across the Pacific.

“In order to be able to increase theater distribution, we have the two composite watercraft companies, at end state there, west of the IDL [International Date Line],” Crist explained, referring to the Army’s future planned maritime force posture in the Pacific. “We continue partnering with industry to be able to move into autonomous watercraft systems to be able to conduct other means of maritime distribution.”

To take a step back quickly, as part of its broader regional role, 8th TSC also has forward-deployed elements in Japan. This includes the 5th Transportation Company, which is currently organized as what the Army calls a composite watercraft company. As of 2024, the unit had a pair of General Frank S. Besson class Logistics Support Vessels (LSV), as well as 10 smaller Landing Craft Utility (LCU) type vessels and four small tugs, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The Army has eight LSVs, in total, and these are by far its largest and most capable ships. The two youngest LSVs, which were acquired in the mid-2000s, also form a distinct subclass, and their design is optimized for long-distance open-ocean operations, as you can read more about here. It’s not immediately clear which LSVs are currently assigned to the 5th Transportation Company. The unit is also set to receive new Maneuver Support Vessel (Light) landing craft.

Until very recently, the 10th Support Group (Regional), headquartered in Okinawa, was more directly responsible for overseeing forward-deployed Army logistics units in Japan. Earlier this month, the Army performed a so-called ‘reflagging’ of that formation, a largely administrative process that transformed it into the 45th Sustainment Brigade.

As part of the reflagging of the 10th Support Group into the 45th Sustainment Brigade, the Army has also been pushing ahead with plans for “the standup of a second composite watercraft company in Yokohama North Dock,” in the port city of the same name on the Japanese home island of Honshu, Maj. Gen. Crist explained last week. “That end state will have two composite water[craft] companies west of the IDL [International Date Line] under the command and control of the 45th Sustainment Brigade.”

When it comes to the watercraft assigned to these units, “we’re also moving into the autonomous lane,” Crist added. “Just in August, USARPAC [U.S. Army Pacific] had an opportunity to conduct an experiment by retrofitting an existing commercial vessel, the HOS Resolute [sic; HOS Resolution], with a kit to provide autonomous navigation.”

Maritime autonomy firm Sea Machines was able to integrate its SM300 software package on the HOS Resolution in just nine days for this demonstration. The ship is a 257-foot-long offshore support vessel more typically used to support oil and gas rigs. However, it features a stern ramp and four jack-up legs that also make it well suited to loading and unloading cargo at remote beaches.

For years now, the U.S. Marine Corps has also been experimenting with the HOS Resolution and other similar ships more generally. That service has been using the vessels to help refine its new expeditionary and distributed concepts of operations, which are themselves heavily centered on future conflict scenarios in the Pacific. The Marines have brought those capabilities to Army demonstration exercises in the past, as well.

The Army sees the August experiment as a potential stepping stone to integrating increasing degrees into its existing watercraft fleets.

“You could increase the fleet of autonomous vessels by tapping into the existing manned fleet,” Maj. Gen. Crist said. “Put on retrofitting kits to be able to conduct navigation, and then eventually propulsion and engine room activities, and eventually get to a fully autonomous system.”

Even just adding in autonomous navigation capabilities could help reduce the workload for the human crews on Army vessels and provide added margins of safety. Blending autonomy with “propulsion and engine room activities” could improve reliability and reduce maintenance demands. Being able to operate those ships in a fully uncrewed mode, if desired, would open up additional operational possibilities, including just for repositioning ships across the broad expanses of the Pacific.

Reduced manning requirements could be especially attractive for the Army’s ‘Navy,’ which is already a very small part of the service’s overall force structure. Last week, Maj. Gen. Crist also talked about further leveraging traditional crewed vessels owned and/or operated by contractors.

“It’s going to be a broad portfolio of systems of systems,” he said of the overall watercraft vision for the Pacific. “Army watercraft with Army Mariners will be, of course, one aspect of it. We also look for the opportunity to be able to leverage USTRANSCOM’s (U.S. Transportation Command) contracting capability to leverage operational support vessels that are commercially owned and commercially operated. We’re considering ways of being able to have commercial vessels that become manned by Army mariners.”

It is also interesting to note here how extremely similar this all sounds to the modifications the U.S. Navy made to the Spearhead class Expeditionary Fast Transport USNS Apalachicola ahead of its commissioning in 2023. However, despite tens of millions of dollars spent and successful demonstration of autonomous capabilities, the Navy curiously decided to put the Apalachicola into service without any plan to make use of these features operationally. There does not appear to have been any effort to integrate these capabilities more broadly within the Spearhead class since then, either.

Last year, the Navy struck the four oldest Spearhead class ships from its rolls entirely and has put several others on reduced operating status, ostensibly as a cost-saving measure. The service is still acquiring new Expeditionary Fast Transports, including members of the Expeditionary Medical Ship subclass that feature expanded medical facilities. The Spearhead class was born out of a program specifically to meet Army and Marine Corps requirements, and the ships are regularly used to support those services in the Pacific and elsewhere globally.

The Army also wants to expand its fleets of purpose-built uncrewed surface vessels (USV) for use in the Pacific, as well as elsewhere globally. Just earlier this year, Army Maj. Gen. Gavin Gardner, who preceded Maj. Gen. Crist as head of the 8th Theater Sustainment Command, said he wanted to rapidly acquire as many as 100 drone boats. His vision included larger USVs capable of carrying eight to 10 standardized shipping containers.

“I could see those operating in the U.S. PACOM area of responsibility,” Gardner told reporters at a roundtable in June, according to Military Times. “I think that gives you a ton of operations, inventory in motion, easy to respond. And then because they’re autonomous, and we can work with our partner nations forward, you have those berthed up everywhere from Korea to Japan, the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, etc.”

“Clearly, [the autonomous vessels] would be forward in the theater, kind of moving supplies, because we have a constant demand for Army watercraft time now, to deliver equipment and supplies forward in the theater,” Gardner added at that time.

One of the inherent benefits of the Army watercraft fleets, and its LSVs in particular, is their ability to help alleviate the need for the U.S. Navy to meet more localized littoral logistics needs, if they are even available to help in the first place. Navy amphibious and military sealift ships would already be heavily strained by high demand during any major conflict in the Pacific or elsewhere globally. This could easily be further exacerbated by threats to those supply lines. All of this has already been underscored this year by pressure on maritime logistics chains in the context of the war with Iran. The Army’s ‘Navy’ also offers valuable additional capabilities and capacity in non-combat contingencies, such as responding to natural disasters.

More generally, the Army has been working to expand its use of smaller USVs, including speedboat-like designs, in various roles. The service has clearly been paying close attention to Ukraine’s very successful use of drone boats in one-way kamikaze attacks, as well as ones armed with guns and rockets and examples configured as launch platforms for surface-to-air missiles and weaponized uncrewed aerial systems (UAS).

The 7th Infantry Division, one of the Army’s main maneuver combat formations in the Pacific, just recently experimented with a Ukrainian-developed Magura-series USV during an exercise in Michigan. That particular USV was configured to launch a quadcopter-type drone. Another member of the Magura family was observed being used in a one-way-attack configuration by U.S. Army Green Berets from the 1st Special Forces Group during the annual Balikatan exercise in the Philippines earlier this year.

The Army has also been experimenting with American-designed USVs. The aforementioned recent exercise in Michigan also featured a Saronic Corsair, the same type of USV that the Navy used to rescue the crew of an Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopter that went down in the Gulf of Oman in June. Explosive-laden Corsairs were also used to carry out the first known U.S. kamikaze USV attack, which was launched against a coastal target in Iran in July.

During another separate exercise in the Philippines this year, Salaknib 2026, Army forces used unarmed Rampage USVs from U.S. firm Havoc, as seen below. As part of that exercise, the USVs escorted a crewed General Frank S. Besson class LSV to its destination, heading out in front to help spot potential hazards.

“There’s all the work that the Department’s already doing with autonomy and autonomous systems that we look to take advantage of in the [Pacific] theater, as well,” Maj. Gen. Crist said at AUSA.

The Navy and the Marine Corps have both been working to grow their operational fleets of smaller USVs, as well as larger ones, in recent years. At the same time, the Navy has suffered years of setbacks and shakeups in its efforts to operationalize bigger and more capable designs. The service awarded contracts for a total of 30 new medium-sized USVs last month in its latest attempt to reverse that trend.

In September, Secretary Pete Hegseth also announced several new initiatives aimed at further expanding use of uncrewed platforms and advanced autonomous capabilities across the U.S. military and all domains. The Pentagon is presently laying the groundwork for the establishment of an all-new top-level Autonomous Warfare Command (AUTOWARCOM), which it hopes to see come to fruition next year.

What is clear now is that the Army’s vision for future watercraft operations, especially in the Pacific, is increasingly autonomous.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

Nine months after the US’ January 3 military strikes and kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelanalysis team got together to take stock of a whirlwind of changes in Caracas’ domestic and foreign policies.

Lead editor Ricardo Vaz was joined by fellow staff members Jessica Dos Santos, Silvana Solano, and Lucas Koerner. They broke down the US’ semi-colonial regime, the gaps between the official discourse and reality, and the prospects for the different political sectors.

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Note: this episode was recorded in Spanish. See the YouTube video above for a subtitled version.

A U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet assigned to Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 31 (VX-31) has been spotted carrying both the AIM-174B and AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missile (JATM) during a flight over Ridgecrest, California. This represents the first known publicly documented instance of these two advanced air-to-air weapons appearing on the same aircraft.

The aircraft was photographed on October 14 by aviation photographer @photosxlyss2, who shared the result with TWZ. The same Super Hornet was also carrying an IRST21 infrared search-and-track pod on its centerline station.

Two critical elements of the modernization of the U.S. military’s air-to-air missile arsenal, the AIM-174B and AIM-260 provide complementary capabilities, addressing different aspects of the Navy’s evolving air-combat requirements.

Based on the SM-6 missile family, the AIM-174B provides the Navy with an extended-range air-to-air weapon. Its size and reach make it particularly relevant to engagements against high-value airborne assets, including aerial refueling tankers and airborne early warning and control aircraft.

Threatening these support platforms at extended distances complicates an adversary’s ability to sustain fighter operations, maintain airborne surveillance, and coordinate engagements across domains. Such targets are especially important in the Indo-Pacific, where distances are vast and combat aircraft may depend heavily on tanker support to reach and remain on station over contested areas.

 The range of this missile is classified but should be far in excess of that of the AIM-120D AMRAAM, probably in the hundreds of miles, as discussed in the video below.

How The Navy’s New Very Long-Range AIM-174 Will Pierce China’s Anti-Access Bubble

The AIM-174B has already appeared in several major exercises, including RIMPAC 2024 and Northern Edge 2025. Following developmental trials at RIMPAC, the weapon entered Live Fire Test and Evaluation in 2025. Some examples of the missile have since reached forward-deployed Navy squadrons in Japan.

The AIM-260, meanwhile, is being developed to provide a next-generation beyond-visual-range air-to-air capability. It is intended to address increasingly sophisticated aerial threats and improve upon the capabilities of the very widely used AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) family.

It was another F/A-18F from VX-31 on which the AIM-260 was first publicly seen when departing Eglin Air Force Base in Florida in May of this year. The same type of weapon has since also appeared on a Royal Australian Air Force F/A-18F, as you can read about here.

The AIM-260’s precise specifications remain classified, but it is designed to deliver significantly greater range than the AIM-120 AMRAAM while maintaining a broadly similar form factor. Its compact design is important, as the missile is intended for both external carriage and internal carriage aboard aircraft such as the F-22 Raptor and F-35.

The AIM-260 is being developed to counter the growing long-range air-to-air threat posed by China’s PL-15 and other advanced missiles. Although no official range figures have been disclosed, previous reporting has indicated a target range of at least 120 miles, with the potential to reach considerably farther.

It is unclear when the first operational AIM-260s may begin entering the U.S. inventory. Together, however, the two weapons give the Super Hornet access to a broader range of engagement options, depending not only on the range of the target, but also on the nature of the engagement and overall tactical situation.

The presence of an IRST21 pod is also noteworthy. The infrared search-and-track system passively detects and tracks airborne targets rather than relying exclusively on radar emissions.

Passive sensing is especially valuable in environments where electromagnetic emissions must be managed carefully. Although an IRST system does not automatically provide all the information needed to support a long-range missile engagement, it can contribute to a broader sensor picture and potentially help crews detect targets without immediately revealing their own position through radar emissions.

After a long and troubled development, a full-rate production contract for Block II IRST21 sensors to go into pods for U.S. Navy and U.S. Air National Guard fighters was awarded this time last year, as you can read about here.

The appearance of both missiles on a VX-31 Super Hornet is a notable development in the Navy’s ongoing testing of advanced air-combat capabilities. VX-31, based at the sprawling Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California, conducts test and evaluation activities involving naval aviation weapons and systems.

On this occasion, the jet is carrying inert missiles (denoted by their blue bands) in a captive-carry configuration. The flight may have been part of ongoing weapons-integration testing, handling and compatibility evaluations, or another test activity.

At the very least, the configuration offers an intriguing glimpse into how a Navy Super Hornet might go into battle in a future high-end air combat scenario. Pairing the extended-range AIM-174B with the next-generation AIM-260 would provide a powerful combination.

Added to those two will be the AIM-424 Malice, an all-new, very long-range air-to-air missile, the existence of which was only disclosed in August of this year. This is reportedly a two-stage design, which should result in extreme range — said to be in excess of 250 nautical miles — and very high speed. It isn’t known where Malice slots in next to the AIM-174B, although the newer missile is purpose-designed for air launch, unlike the Standard-derived weapon.

As the service prepares for increasingly demanding scenarios in the Indo-Pacific, the new photo underscores the fact that the ability to threaten a wider range of targets at greater distances is one of the key considerations in the evolution of the Navy’s carrier-based fighter force.

With thanks to @photosxlyss2_; check out more of her work via PhotosxLyss on Facebook.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has been hit with the largest ever fine against it for its business practices.

A judge in New Mexico on Wednesday ordered the company to pay $25bn (£18.6bn) following a two week trial earlier this year that found it had spent years lying to the public about how it handled Facebook user data.

“The lies extend beyond Facebook’s data practices as well,” the judge said, adding they went to “the heart of Facebook’s core business practices.”

The fine is the largest to date against Meta, which has either been fined or agreed to settle several other lawsuits this year, including an $18bn deal with California over child safety.

The lawsuit stemmed from the role of Meta, then known as Facebook, in what became known as the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

That firm utilized data and information from millions of Facebook users as part of its work in political consulting, including on work related to the 2016 US Presidential election, which saw Donald Trump elected for the first time.

The US Federal Trade Commission in 2019 levied a $5bn fine against the company over its data privacy practices.

Lawyers for New Mexico sued the company over many statements Meta executives had made over the years that user data was never shared with or accessed by third parties without a user’s permission, when in reality it had been.

They claimed that the entire population of the state, roughly 2 million people, was impacted by Meta’s dishonesty regarding the way it controlled user data. A jury found that Meta had violated state laws more than 40 million times.

“For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said Wednesday.

“Today’s result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable.”

The state lawyers sought up to $40bn in fines against Meta. Meta had argued anything beyond $3.4bn would be unconstitutional.

Judge Francis Mathew on Wednesday was direct in his decision to fine Meta an amount roughly equal to its profits each quarter.

He said Meta’s violations of law and misrepresentations to the public about how their Facebook data was used and shared were “willful” and spanned “more than 11 years,” stretching from 2010 to 2021.

Communications between senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were “designed to mislead the public,” Judge Mathew wrote in his order.

While the full amount of the penalty against Meta, based on thousands of violations of state law, was calculated as $219bn, Judge Mathew reduced the penalty to the $25bn fine.

A spokesperson for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

New Mexico has been one of Meta’s most notable adversaries in court. The state this year also fined Meta almost $1bn for misleading the public about the safety of its social media platforms for children.

The judge overseeing that lawsuit ultimately compared Meta to an industrial polluter of the air, with its form of pollution being “the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children.”

California and several other states had collectively sued Meta over similar issues related to a lack of child safety features on Meta’s platforms and resulting harms to children.

Meta and the states reached a mutual settlement deal, which did not include a fine or any admission of wrongdoing, to end that case only a few days into what was expected to be a multi-week trial.