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The joint statement comes as US President Donald Trump seeks a new meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The United States, South Korea and Japan have reiterated their longstanding call for North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, a move  Pyongyang has repeatedly ruled out.

The three countries addressed the issue on the sidelines of the Group of 20 (G20) meeting in the US city of Atlanta on Thursday, with their top diplomats reaffirming their “resolute commitment to the complete denuclearisation” of North Korea, according to a readout by the US Department of State.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun and Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi also pledged the “full implementation” of United Nations Security Council resolutions, including a ban on supporting revenue for North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.

The statement comes despite repeated overtures to North Korea by US President Donald Trump, who held a series of historic summits with its leader, Kim Jong Un, during his first term in office and has continued to call Kim a “friend”.

Last year, Trump bucked a long-held US policy by conceding that North Korea was already “sort of a nuclear power”.

More recently, he has played down concerns about North Korea’s nuclear programme and expressed a desire to meet Kim again. Speculation is mounting that the two leaders could reconnect at next month’s APEC summit in China, which Trump is due to attend.

Analysts and South Korea’s spy agency say Kim may have conveyed Pyongyang’s position on potential talks with Trump to Beijing during a recent visit to the Chinese border city of Dandong.

South Korea’s dovish President Lee Jae Myung – who has repeatedly offered Pyongyang talks without preconditions – suggested in September that Washington seek a freeze, rather than the immediate elimination, of the North’s nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief.

Critics have said such an approach risks tacitly accepting North Korea as a nuclear-armed state while allowing Pyongyang to win sanctions relief without giving up its arsenal.

Despite long-running UN sanctions, North Korea, which is backed by Russia and China, has enshrined its status as a nuclear-armed state in law. Pyongyang’s government has declared its atomic arsenal to be permanent and irreversible.

Pyongyang denounced a joint statement on Saturday by a group of nations monitoring sanctions implementation against it, pledging that “the stereotyped sanctions racket of the US and the West can neither influence the position of the DPRK (North Korea) as a nuclear weapons state.”

European champions PSG registered their sixth league victory, and sit two points clear at top of the Ligue 1 standings.

Flying ‌fullback Achraf Hakimi grabbed a hat-trick as Paris Saint-Germain went on a rampage to thrash ⁠bottom-placed Le Havre 5-1 and extend their Ligue 1 lead on Friday.

The European champions, who have several regulars out injured, could afford to leave ⁠more of their key players on the bench and still come away with an impressive victory as they moved to 20 points from their opening nine league fixtures.

They ⁠are two points ahead of Lille and four above third-placed Rennes, who have 16 points.

Lille moved above Rennes into second, thanks to a late goal from veteran Olivier Giroud, who came off the bench to score an 86th-minute winner for a 1-0 derby ‌victory at home over RC Lens.

Rennes were handed a 5-2 drubbing at Nice, who continued their improving form with a fourth win in five outings.

Elye Wahi netted a hat-trick for Nice, who moved up to seventh after narrowly avoiding relegation last season.

An all-round display from Hakimi

On top of his three goals at Stade Oceane, Hakimi had two assists for the goals scored by Mika Godts and Senny Mayulu after Josh Maja had given the ⁠hosts the lead.

It was PSG’s ninth consecutive victory in all ⁠competitions.

Le Havre suffered a fifth consecutive defeat and sit bottom with two points, but they briefly dared to believe as Maja handed them an early lead.

Hakimi set up Godts for the equaliser before putting his side ⁠ahead in the 28th minute with a shot in at the near post.

The Morocco international then netted from a free kick ⁠into the bottom corner in the 55th minute before ⁠being at the centre of a counterattack that saw Mayulu make it 4-1 in the 62nd minute.

Hakimi completed his hat-trick with a deflected effort in the 69th minute.

“I am happy because some players had very ‌little playing time. If we want to win trophies, we need everyone,” said PSG coach Luis Enrique.

Despite calling time on his playing career two decades ago, it is still rare for Shearer to find himself with a weekend off.

Now a regular pundit on Match of the Day, as well as co-commentating on England games and sitting alongside Gary Lineker and Micah Richards on The Rest Is Football podcast, he has become one of the most respected pundits in the game.

But that was not always going to be the case.

Unsure of whether he would enter the world of management or media post-retirement, Shearer served as interim Newcastle manager in 2009 for the remaining eight games of the season.

It ended badly, with the Magpies relegated and Shearer never returning to the dugout.

“Newcastle were were in desperate trouble and I could never say no – we were bottom of the league, fighting for our lives,” he said.

“I should have known that when I signed the contract on April Fool’s Day that it wasn’t going to work out!

“I always felt that I was going to go into it again and I wanted to. I had a couple of interviews and got offered the job at Cardiff. And then things changed … and I thought, ‘what am I doing here?'”

That ended Shearer’s brief brush with management and he returned to punditry, spending his weekends travelling between Newcastle and Salford for Match of the Day.

“It is such a long day. For me travelling from Newcastle, it’s a probably 19-20 hour day,” he said.

“What people don’t realise is that you’re meant to be at your brightest and your liveliest when you go on live at 10:30, whereas if you’re watching football all day on the settee, you’re ready to nod off at that time.”

Watching so much Premier League football, at least Shearer is able to monitor that goal-scoring record of his.

U.S. Army Humvee-based AN/TWQ-1Avenger short-range air defense systems (SHORADS) have been set up near President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, as well as at Donald J. Trump International Airport, about three miles to the west. The Avengers were deployed about two weeks ago amid heightened concerns about the president’s safety.

Iran threatened Trump’s life long before he ordered the joint attack with Israel on the Islamic Republic in February. Airstrikes wiped out much of Iran’s senior leadership structure at the onset of Operation Epic Fury. Now the American leader is mulling over plans to renew attacks on Iran as early as next week. In addition, Trump has been the target of assassination attempts and threats not connected to Iran. There may also be elevated security concerns surrounding the midterm elections.

Officials would not provide any specific reasons for the presence of the SAM systems when we asked.

“At the request of the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) and under NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] and USNORTHCOM [U.S. Northern Command] authorities, NORAD and USNORTHCOM recently deployed ground-based air defense [GBAD] assets and Counter-Unmanned Aircraft System capabilities in and around Mar-a-Lago, Florida,” the commands told us in a statement. “These assets add a complementary layer of technology to enhance protection. Due to operational security, we are unable to provide additional details. For further detail, we refer you to the USSS.”

“The U.S. Secret Service is operating in a heightened threat environment, and we continuously adapt our protective operations to incorporate cutting-edge tools, technology, and methods to safeguard our protectees,” the Secret Service told us. “At the request of the U.S. Secret Service, NORAD and U.S. Northern Command are providing Counter-Unmanned Aircraft System capabilities in support of our protective operations.”

NORAD/NORTHCOM declined to say what kinds of ground-based air defense assets are involved or where they are set up. However, Getty Images photographs show two Avenger systems set up on a floating platform in Lake Worth Lagoon on the Mar-a-Lago shoreline and one on the beach.

There are also at least two Avengers at nearby Trump International Airport.

The command did confirm to us that it sent its Counter-Unmanned Aircraft System Fly-Away Kits to support these operations. These are rapidly deployable systems to react to drone threats or ongoing incursions consisting of passive and active sensor systems, such as electro-optical and infrared cameras, Ku-band radar, and electronic support measures, to help spot, classify and track drones. Electronic warfare systems can also be deployed as part of these fly-away kits.

The Avenger is a turreted system with two launchers, each capable of holding four Stinger heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles. The Stinger missiles they fire have been upgraded to deal with drones. Avengers are meant for point defense of forces on-the-go but have also played a major homeland defense role since 9/11. One is even hard-mounted on a rooftop near the White House for air defense purposes.

The deployment of these systems illustrates just how seriously the U.S. Secret Service is taking the threat of drones. Drone technology, including first-person view types and those equipped with fiber optics, is rapidly proliferating around the world and Iran has been both a user and distributor of these weapons. The Islamic Republic has uses long-range kamikaze drones, which could be a particular threat, especially considering Trump’s estate’s close proximity to the sea, which offers a most likely launch option. It’s also worth noting that traditional aircraft are also a threat and the Stingers are capable of dealing with them too.

These assets are meant to augment the NORAD-enforced temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) over the Mar-a-Lago airspace. There is a standing TFR that runs through Oct. 20, 2027. Additional ones are created when Trump visits the area.

“More than 160 planes and drones have breached the airspace over Palm Beach since the restrictions took effect in October 2025, according to an Aug. 11 FAA filing in federal court” that was first reported that month by the Palm Beach Daily News.

The most recent publicly announced incursion took place Oct. 24.

“A NORAD F-16 fighter aircraft intercepted a general aviation aircraft over Palm Beach, Florida, at approximately 12:20 p.m. EST today after the aircraft entered a NORAD-enforced FAA Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) area over Mar-a-Lago,” the command stated in a media release at the time. “After the fighter jet executed a standard headbutt maneuver to gain the pilot’s attention, the civilian aircraft established communication and safely exited the restricted airspace in full compliance with flight instructions.”

These combat air patrols (CAPs) are standard for presidential visits. Even when Trump is at Mar-a-Lago for days, there are usually CAPs flying overhead, which are extremely resource-intensive, as we explained in a previous story about one that took place during Trump’s first term.

The deployments of Avengers to Florida mark at least the second time since August that these systems have been used to protect Trump. Avengers were seen on Aug. 9, when Trump was attending the final round of the LIV Golf Bedminster tournament at his New Jersey golf course.

In that situation, NORAD told us that when deployed to assist the Secret Service in protecting POTUS, the Avenger systems are operated by the 263rd Army Air and Missile Defense Command. The command today declined to say if that is the case with the current deployments.

On Aug. 1, the White House shared a video of Trump talking with soldiers at Bedminster. In the background was an Avenger.

Trump, as we noted earlier in this story, has already been the subject of several assassination attempts and threats.

The most notable came on July 13, 2024, at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a man fired a shot at Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee. Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was killed, and a bloodied Trump was whisked away.

Prior to those attempts, Iran made a golf-related threat against Trump.

An image highly suggestive of a drone targeting the then-former President Trump on a golf course in a “vengeance” strike in retaliation for the death of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was posted on Twitter by an account for Iran’s then-Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The U.S. military killed Soleimani in a drone strike in Iraq in January 2020, which had already prompted public threats from Iranian officials, including against Trump specifically.

Twitter suspended the @khamenei_site account around 15 hours after the post when the image first appeared on Jan. 21, 2020.

Khamenei himself was killed Feb. 28 during the opening night of Operation Epic Fury.

There has been extreme concern for Trump’s safety following the launch of that operation, with an Iranian revenge hit on the president being more plausible now than ever. This has triggered major changes in safety protocols, some of which have made headline news.

Alarms were raised earlier this month after U.S. intelligence found Iran has “‘substantially increased’ its efforts to target American diplomats and officials in the Middle East and beyond, with lethal plots reaching ‘advanced stages,’” Axios reported, citing an Oct. 23 memo to Secretary of State Marco Rubio the outlet obtained.

The Avengers are the most visible indication of increased efforts to protect Trump amongst threats that are unlikely to recede anytime soon.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

Authorities ​are struggling to find a way to control the outbreak, with no approved treatments or vaccines.

The death ⁠toll ⁠from Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has surpassed 5,000, government data ⁠show, with authorities yet to find a way to control the ⁠country’s deadliest outbreak of the virus on record.

The latest death toll was announced on Friday.

Ebola has infected more than 10,000 people in the DRC since the outbreak was declared in May.

There are no approved treatments or vaccines to combat the rare Bundibugyo strain of the virus, responsible for the ongoing outbreak.

Delayed detection, conflict and strained health services have helped the virus spread more rapidly than in past outbreaks, reaching eight of the DRC’s 26 provinces to date.

The virus has spread to neighbouring countries as well.

Last week, Nigeria became the fourth African country to report an Ebola case, extending the outbreak’s geographic ‌spread to West Africa. East African countries Kenya and Uganda have also reported cases.

This year’s Ebola outbreak is the second-largest ever, behind only the 2014-2016 epidemic that infected more than 28,600 people and killed more than ⁠11,000 people across Guinea, Liberia ⁠and Sierra Leone.

Some governments have been restricting travel to affected countries or quarantining travellers who have recently visited or transited through them.

On Friday, Saudi Arabia suspended travel to and entry from Kenya, according to the Saudi Press Agency.

The measures include suspending travel by Saudi citizens to Kenya and a pause on issuing all types of visas to travellers from the country.

The kingdom is also prohibiting entry to travellers arriving from Kenya, including those transiting through third countries who have stayed in Kenya or other Ebola-affected countries within the previous 21 days.

In June, Saudi Arabia suspended travel to and entry from the DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan.

The comedian’s bombshell the previous night did provide the programme with a twist to spark it to life after what some viewers saw as a mid-series lull.

On Thursday, the Hollywood Reporter noted, external that the show had achieved record-breaking ratings – before asking: “Why, then, has much of the consensus on social media been that it’s all felt a bit dull?”

Some noted a shortage of true back-stabbing, double-crossing and explosive rows – the things, in other words, that viewers love the most – while the celebrities were more chummy and savvy than previous groups of castle dwellers.

And while there was no shortage of big characters, this season lacked an equivalent to Alan Carr, the hugely popular and apparently hapless comedian who lied and murdered his way to an unlikely victory as a traitor last year.

The drama ramped up in the final, though, and Friday’s episode is likely to have been the most watched TV programme of the year.

Vatican confirms the pope submitted a mail-in ballot in his native Chicago ahead of November 3 midterm elections

Pope Leo XIV has become the first pontiff to vote in a United States general election after casting a mail-in ballot in Chicago, where he was born.

The Vatican confirmed on Friday that the pope submitted a mail-in ballot in the city ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, citing his longstanding belief in civic participation.

Leo, formerly Robert Prevost, “has exercised his right to vote as a United States citizen”, as he has done “whenever he was eligible to do so”, the Vatican’s press office said.

“The Holy Father expresses his belief in the right and the duty of citizens to participate in democratic processes,” it added.

The Vatican did not say which candidates Leo voted for.

In a note commenting on Leo’s vote, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops urged Catholics to put “our faith before our politics” and “uphold human dignity and the common good”.

“In voting, our Holy Father sets the example that encourages each citizen to exercise their civic responsibility,” said the conference’s director of public affairs, Chieko Noguchi.

Leo is a citizen not only of the US but also of Peru, where he lived as a priest and bishop for more than 20 years, as well as of the Vatican, where he is head of state.

US federal law allows citizens living abroad, even those working for foreign governments, to vote via absentee ballot.

Americans working for foreign governments are not automatically at risk of losing their US citizenship, but the US State Department says on its website that it may “actively review” the citizenship status of Americans who “serve as a foreign head of state, foreign head of government, or foreign minister”.

A regular voter

In this year’s midterm elections, voters in the solidly ⁠Democratic state of Illinois, where Chicago is located, will select a successor to retiring Senator Dick Durbin and choose whether to re-elect Governor JB Pritzker.

Leo requested a mail-in ballot on October 3, just 10 days before he underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumour from his right lung. He has slowly been resuming his activities at the Vatican after being released from the hospital on October 17.

Since 2000, Leo has voted in five primary elections as Prevost, requesting Democratic ballots twice and Republican ballots three times, according to records held by the Illinois State Board of Elections, which do not show which candidates he supported.

Illinois voters must declare a party preference to receive a primary ballot.

While registered in heavily-Democratic Cook County, Prevost requested Democratic primary ballots in 2008 and 2010. After moving to the more conservative Will County, he requested Republican primary ballots in 2012, 2014 and 2016.

Clashes with Trump

Since Leo’s ascent to the papacy in May 2025, US President Donald Trump has clashed with the pontiff several times.

Trump criticised the pope for repeatedly condemning the US-Israel war on Iran and for challenging his administration’s crackdown on immigrants.

Earlier this year, Trump called Leo “weak” and captive to the “radical left”, kicking off a remarkable back-and-forth argument.

Leo responded by telling reporters: “I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel, which is what the church works for.”

Fabricated political polling has forced its way into the spotlight during the midterm election period in the United States.

Revelations that a small number of fraudulent firms have released fictitious results – some of which were picked up by news outlets and polling trackers – have raised concerns about how easily false information can acquire credibility.

Those datasets can be used to cast doubt on the electoral process. And when bad actors are unmasked, their existence can be leveraged to undermine voter confidence in election information overall.

The latest example occurred earlier this month, when Wedgewood Polls released a statement on social media admitting its statistics about a bevy of battleground states – like Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Kansas and Maine – were fake.

Wedgewood described its work as “an experimental project” designed to highlight the “vulnerabilities, lack of oversight and overall low barrier to entry” in the US polling industry.

“Having previously worked in the polling and research sector, we watched as the public’s trust in polling eroded alongside a rise in unverified, low-quality methodology,” the firm said in a statement posted to its social media account, which has now been deleted.

It justified its false data as a test to see how easy it would be for fabricated polling to gain traction among voters and the media.

“The short answer: Far too easy,” Wedgewood said.

But Wedgewood’s admission came after its surveys had already circulated through the political information ecosystem, reaching prominent media outlets like The New York Times.

The incident was the second such scandal in the 2026 election cycle, following the exposure of another operation, Median Strategies, which acknowledged in August it had also faked results as a “short-term social experiment”.

In an increasingly polarised US political environment, the incidents have roiled a polling industry – and a public – struggling to adapt to an ever-changing information landscape.

How fake polls gained credibility

Wedgewood, which launched in June, published surveys covering competitive races across several states. Its results attracted attention from political campaigns, commentators and organisations that compile polling data.

The New York Times said its polling tracker had listed 15 Wedgewood surveys between June and October. The newspaper subsequently removed them.

In the wake of the scandal, it explained that the firm had answered questions about its personnel, methodology and funding before its results were included.

While the Times said Wedgewood’s surveys were not incorporated into the newspaper’s own presidential approval or national congressional polling averages, the case revealed a vulnerability in the process by which polling information becomes established as credible.

Polling aggregators help journalists and voters make sense of a crowded field of surveys by collecting results from multiple research organisations. Their value depends partly on their ability to distinguish reliable research from poorly conducted or fraudulent work.

Wedgewood’s success in passing some of those checks suggests that transparency on paper is not necessarily proof that research has been conducted as claimed.

According to FiftyPlusOne, a polling and forecasting website that investigated the firm, inconsistencies in the raw data and the technical identifiers associated with survey responses helped raise suspicions about its authenticity.

The investigation prompted Wedgewood to acknowledge that most of its results were fabricated.

Though Wedgewood has denied trying to mislead the public, some pollsters are not convinced, suggesting the group could was up to something more nefarious.

“We were investigating Wedgewood for faking their data,” said data journalist G Elliott Morris, who was involved in FiftyPlusOne’s probe. “They are trying to cover up for their fraud with the ‘we were doing a social experiment’ excuse.”

How fake polling has impacted elections

The consequences of fake polling extend far beyond the polling industry.

Mallory McMorrow, who ran unsuccessfully in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, has argued that a Wedgewood survey showing her support in the single digits damaged her campaign.

McMorrow said the poll left her volunteers demoralised, and journalists repeatedly contacted her to ask whether she should abandon the race.

Donations, she added, also evaporated, with Democratic supporters looking to other campaigns to invest.

In a social media post, McMorrow described the poll from Wedgewood – and another from the firm Mitchell Research and Communications – as a “one-two punch” that “killed her campaign”. She suspended her Senate bid in July.

“By that point, we took a risk and we spend our money. We put our ads up. They were working. But the damage was done. And I was drowned out by outside spending and the narrative that we had completely collapsed,” she wrote.

Experts say McMorrow’s account illustrates a broader problem: Even when a poll does not accurately measure public opinion, its findings can still influence the decisions of people who believe it does.

Why it matters

The Wedgewood controversy demonstrates how fraudulent data can become ammunition in an already polarised political environment.

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public tracked how discussion of Wedgewood’s admission spread across social media.

Initially, much of the conversation was concentrated among polling experts and people who followed election data. But the story subsequently gained traction among influential political commentators and partisan accounts.

Some posts focused on the fact that prominent outlets and polling aggregators had listed Wedgewood’s results. Others used the revelation to question polling more broadly, particularly surveys suggesting that Democrats were competitive in closely contested races.

The researchers found the controversy became intertwined with claims that polling was systematically misleading voters or understating support for particular political parties.

“Within 24 hours, the right-wing media ecosystem had succeeded in drawing attention to the story and setting some of the most salient frames: that poll numbers around the midterms, especially poll numbers favoring Democrats, cannot be trusted,” the Center for an Informed Public wrote in its analysis.

President Donald Trump, who has regularly made false claims about US election integrity, seized on the revelations to criticise the Times for including Wedgewood’s surveys in its polling tracker.

“The New York Times got caught,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “Everything about The Failing New York Times is ‘ARTIFICIAL’.”

He also suggested the Wedgewood case would help his $15bn defamation suit against the Times.

“Our powerful Lawsuit against them is getting stronger and stronger everyday,” he added.

What can be done?

No laws exist in the US that criminalise fake polls outright.

Some advocacy groups and law scholars have argued that the publication of fake polls constitute commodities and wire fraud, warranting federal prosecution.

“Deterring this sort of fraud before it can happen – and raising awareness of it – is vital,” Tyler Yeargain wrote for the Missouri Law Review in 2020.

He argued that enforcement of election-related laws against fake pollsters has “not been fully utilized”.

“Prosecution would serve a strong federal interest,” he wrote. “The interest at stake is weightier than concerns over how fake polls can shade the accuracy of an academic endeavor in prediction markets. It is instead to deter other wrongdoers, the sort who would weaponize fake polls to manipulate elections.”

Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), which regulates broadcasts in the US, said there has been “a significant surge” in fake polls during the 2026 midterms, urging networks not to amplify them. Otherwise, Carr said, they could lose their licence to operate.

“Broadcasters are prohibited by the terms of their federal licenses from engaging in News Distortion or promoting Broadcast Hoaxes,” Carr wrote on social media. “It is important that broadcasters comply with their public interest obligations.”

But the FCC’s sole Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, disagreed with Carr’s assessment.

“Pollsters who intentionally mislead the public should answer for it, but broadcasters who report publicly available polling data should never be punished when a poll is wrong,” she wrote on X. “FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith.”

Without a clear legal remedy against fake polls, experts argue the onus is placed on media outlets and voters themselves to evaluate the quality of the election data they see.

Mark Baldassare, the survey director of the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), said there are ways to quickly spot which surveys are real – and which are not.

“Look for transparency,” Baldassare told PPIC’s Stephanie Barton in an interview. “A credible survey will list its mission, the purpose of its polling, and its sponsors or funders.”

“A poll guided by partisan groups or campaigns that is publicly released may have a message to relay to the public.”

Brazil has summoned Argentina’s top diplomat in the country to answer questions about right-wing candidate Flavio Bolsonaro, who fled first to Argentina, then to the United States, after losing Sunday’s presidential election.

On Thursday, Brazil’s Foreign Ministry called in Argentina’s charge d’affaires, Maria Emilia Cortes, sources inside the government told the news agency Reuters.

Argentina’s Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno, however, has denied on social media that his government received a formal request for explanations regarding Bolsonaro’s decision to flee into Argentina late on Tuesday.

The circumstances surrounding Bolsonaro’s departure threaten to further strain relations between Brazil’s recently re-elected President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his Argentinian counterpart, libertarian Javier Milei.

After Sunday’s election, Bolsonaro was given a deadline to surrender his passports. Officials ordered him to remain in the country as part of an ongoing legal case.

He is part of an ongoing investigation into a money-laundering scheme, known as the Banco Master scandal.

Investigators are probing a multimillion-dollar payment Bolsonaro received from Banco Master’s former head, Daniel Vorcaro, allegedly to finance a film about his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro.

The younger Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoing and called the case politically motivated.

A senator since 2019, Bolsonaro ran this year as the right-wing presidential candidate for his father’s political movement, the Liberal Party.

But after advancing to the run-off, the senator fell short by more than 4 million votes. Lula won Sunday’s race with 51.8 percent of the vote, securing a historic fourth non-consecutive term.

Bolsonaro, however, has refused to concede, though the Liberal Party has acknowledged Lula’s victory.

Instead, he made an unsubstantiated allegation of electoral malfeasance, pointing to a Supreme Court decision to extend voting hours on Sunday.

Both candidates’ campaigns had requested extensions, though for different reasons: Bolsonaro’s camp pointed to inclement weather delaying voters in parts of Brazil, while Lula’s party raised concerns about efforts to restrict public transport on election day.

But Bolsonaro argued that the last-minute extension had disadvantaged voters in regions considered right-wing strongholds.

After arriving in Miami on Wednesday, he declared himself the “legitimate president-elect” of Brazil.

He, his wife and two daughters had travelled from Brazil through northern Argentina, before boarding a chartered aircraft that passed through Ecuador to reach the US.

US President Donald Trump and Milei, both right-wing leaders, have been openly supportive of the Bolsonaro family.

The Brazilian senator later thanked Milei for his assistance, although he did not provide details about the nature of the help. A spokesperson for the Argentinian president described the journey as a rescue.

Bolsonaro, the spokesperson said, had escaped “from the claws of communism, which seeks to imprison all opposition figures”.

Trump, too, has suggested that Sunday’s election was “rigged”, though he declined to “take sides” after the result was announced.

The US president has previously issued sanctions and tariffs in response to the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, after the former Brazilian president denied his defeat in the 2022 election. He was convicted in 2024 of plotting a coup to prevent Lula from taking power and sentenced to 27 years in prison.

Relations between Lula and Milei have been strained since the Argentinian leader took office in 2023. Milei has repeatedly criticised Lula.

The diplomatic dispute follows an earlier deterioration in relations, with the South American countries each recalling their ambassadors in August after a series of public disagreements.

A wave of youth-led protests has swept Europe, with demonstrators denouncing rising prices and a lack of prospects.

Germany and France are preparing for potential protests over the weekend that could coincide with Halloween festivities.

Approximately 150,000 people in Germany have registered to turn out in about 30 cities, including Berlin, Frankfurt and Cologne, to protest on Saturday.

Police plan to deploy thousands of additional officers across the country. Some luxury jewellery shops and clothing stores have boarded up windows to protect against potential looting or violence.

Protests in Germany are led by a group dubbed “GenZ regelt!”, which translates to “Gen Z has got this!”.

The German protest movement’s complaints include the high cost of living, poorly maintained schools, government spending cuts and, more broadly, politicians taking decisions with little regard for the younger generation.

A wave of largely youth-led protests has swept across Europe in recent weeks, many with similar complaints: rising prices, declining educational facilities and what many protesters see as a lack of prospects for their future.

France braces again

Many of those grievances mirror those of the youth-led protests that have convulsed French cities and towns for three consecutive weekends.

Shops and businesses in Paris and other cities were boarding up windows on Friday.

French police are preparing for another weekend of potential protests and violence by deploying 70,000 police officers nationwide. More than 40 metro stations in Paris will be closed.

Authorities have also said face-covering masks will not be allowed at the demonstrations.

France’s interior minister has warned of a “very high risk” of disorder over the weekend.

Two weeks ago, widespread unrest broke out in cities and towns across France as demonstrations against the cost of living and conditions in schools descended into large-scale looting and riots.

Since then, French authorities have sought to clamp down on violent protests, but last weekend saw further demonstrations across the country, including intermittent clashes with the police.

Alain Di Crescenzo, president of France’s Chamber of Commerce, said businesses were worried.

“Shopkeepers can’t wait for Saturday to be over,” Di Crescenzo told broadcaster France Inter.

Halloween “is not helping matters”, he said, “because we’re going to have people wearing masks”.

Earlier this month, authorities worldwide urged website administrators to execute emergency updates after a nonprofit programming foundation flagged critical security flaws that could allow hackers to breach systems.

Government and corporate websites briefly went offline to patch the vulnerabilities, nicknamed PHP2Shell, which were discovered by independent cybersecurity experts using artificial intelligence (AI).

The vulnerabilities were embedded in the code of a widely used open-source web programming language, PHP, for more than a decade. They had gone unnoticed, however, because it would have been too complicated for humans to exploit them without the use of advanced AI.

But cybersecurity experts, as well as those maintaining important software, say PHP2Shell could be the first in a deluge of security flaws exposed by emerging AI. They say much of the world’s most critical digital infrastructure is maintained by volunteers, who often lack the resources and time to respond to newly discovered threats.

“There’s been a lot of people in the AI safety community that said this is one of the first areas where we are going to see the harmful impact of AI,” said Peter Slattery, a research scientist at MIT’s FutureTech, who studies how cybersecurity experts are dealing with the new technology and tracks real-world incidents involving AI.

A digital world built on volunteer work

PHP got its start in 1995, when Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf sought to track how many people visited his online resume. Over time, others around the world improved Lerdorf’s software, and it grew in popularity.

As with other open-source coding projects, anyone could download, modify and share improvements. Websites like Facebook and Wikipedia were built using PHP, which runs about 70 percent of the world’s websites.

In 2021, a dedicated nonprofit, the PHP Foundation, was launched to coordinate development. Like many other foundations maintaining open-source software, it operates on a meagre budget.

Most of the digital infrastructure consumers use is powered by open source software. The Mozilla Firefox browser is open source, as are languages like Perl, Python, and JavaScript. The software that lets a computer communicate with others on the internet is often open source, with many servers using products like Apache HTTP Server, maintained by the Apache Software Foundation.

“The world today, including proprietary software vendors, relies on open source software for its digital infrastructure,” said Amanda Brock, CEO of OpenUK, a nonprofit that supports open source software.

The world’s largest corporations, like Meta, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, depend on that volunteer-built, open-source infrastructure. Now, those companies’ own AI tools are uncovering security flaws in the infrastructure at a pace that needs far more resources for groups like the PHP Foundation to keep up.

“It’s simply not possible with the resources in place to fix all of the known vulnerabilities,” Brock said. “Foundations are attempting to manage these challenges, but the smaller ones don’t have hundreds of millions in funding, and managing this at the pace AI requires is proving impossible.”

A deluge of new bugs to fix

The PHP2Shell vulnerabilities were found through several advanced AI models, which can employ far more complicated attempts to hack past security barriers than humans could.

Developers of other software are also discovering far more security flaws than in the past because AI is being used to probe defences.

Google said it uncovered more than 1,000 security bugs in the last update for its Chrome browser, more than in the last two dozen updates combined. Mozilla, the foundation behind the Firefox browser, found more than 400 security vulnerabilities in April, a significant jump from the previous record of 76 bugs discovered just one month earlier.

“We have maybe 10 times more issues than usual because we are using AI to find them,” said Jarek Potiuk, part of the volunteer security team at the Apache Software Foundation. (In keeping with the foundation’s non-hierarchical ethos, Potiuk said he has no real title).

Potiuk said there is an “industry-wide movement” to conduct scans using AI models and identify security vulnerabilities, much like was done to find the bugs in PHP. But the scans themselves cost money – used to pay for the tokens for AI models – and afterwards, humans must pore over them to weed out false positives.

“Every project, every foundation is doing this right now – spending enormous amounts of time to find these issues,” Potiuk said. “AI helps to find them, but you have to verify things, you have to review them.”

Earlier this year, Anthropic launched Project Glasswing, offering $100m in credits to support its advanced Claude Mythos AI model to search for security vulnerabilities in the world’s critical software. In one month, more than 23,000 vulnerabilities were found across more than 1,000 open source projects.

The Apache Software Foundation has taken advantage of another scheme, the Alpha-Omega project, to scan for security bugs across the 290 software packages it maintains. The project, backed by companies like Anthropic, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, spends about $7m a year helping open-source developers find critical security bugs.

But those working on finding and fixing the security flaws say the corporate world could be doing a lot more, given the trillion-dollar valuation of companies whose products would not work without free software like the packages the Apache Foundation provides.

“They are helping a lot, but we need more active players in this area,” Potiuk said, “because it’s highly disproportional – the impact it has on the corporate world versus the open source world”.

When a major security flaw like PHP2Shell is uncovered, it often comes down to a handful of volunteers to fix it.

Keeping the internet’s infrastructure as decentralised and open-source as possible is crucial, Potiuk said. Instead of buying out something like PHP, major players like Google or Microsoft could, for instance, pay staff to dedicate some of their work hours to maintaining open-source projects they use.

Real-world targets

The 2021 Log4Shell vulnerability, which allowed hackers to remotely run code on millions of devices through a widely used library maintained by the Apache Software Foundation, underscored the critical role open-source software plays in system security. That bug was discovered without the use of AI.

Suddenly, cars, microwaves and a host of electronic devices connected to the internet were vulnerable, Potiuk said.

“That was the moment when the whole ecosystem realised how important it is to take care of open source,” he said.

A bug like that, if found by a malicious hacker and exploited before there is a chance to patch devices, could have caused a major disruption.

Slattery said the database of incidents he and his colleagues maintain shows that an increasing number of vulnerabilities are being detected, and it is a matter of time before some are exploited in the real world.

“We are starting to see both a lot more vulnerabilities detected and addressed in time, but also attacks on a wide range of systems,” Slattery said. “We have been moving in this direction for a long time. There are more and more things now you can attack.”

Welcome to Bunker Talk. This is a weekend open discussion post for the best commenting crew on the net, in which we can chat about all the stuff that went on this week that we didn’t cover. We can also talk about the stuff we did or whatever else grabs your interest. In other words, it’s an off-topic thread.

This week’s caption reads:

Illustration shows a visit to the Commandobunker of Kemmel, in Heuvelland, Friday 18 March 2022. After World War II, in the middle of the cold war, several countries including Belgium, France and Great-Britain, decide to build a bunker to coordinate west Europe aerian defence. BELGA PHOTO KURT DESPLENTER (Photo by KURT DESPLENTER / BELGA MAG / Belga via AFP) (Photo by KURT DESPLENTER/BELGA MAG/AFP via Getty Images)

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The United States has scrapped a traditional group photo of foreign ministers after European officials refused to be pictured alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

The move exposes deep rifts at the heart of the Group of 20 (G20), whose foreign ministers are meeting in the southern city of Atlanta in the United States for talks overshadowed by the wars in Ukraine and Iran.

“There will be no family photo featuring our European partners together with Mr Lavrov,” German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said, according to the dpa news agency.

Lavrov, who remains under Western sanctions imposed after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, arrived in Atlanta ahead of the talks, Russian state media reported. Moscow said on Thursday that he would use his speech to argue against international sanctions. Ukraine was not invited, the Abu Dhabi-based newspaper The National reported.

A diplomatic source told the AFP news agency that Russia’s presence at the G20 “in no way legitimises its actions”.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas pledged on Thursday to urge G20 partners to strengthen support for Ukraine and pursue accountability through a special tribunal and claims commission, after a Russian strike on a Ukrainian railway station killed at least 14 people earlier that day.

The meeting also comes weeks after US President Donald Trump issued sanctions waivers allowing Russia to export diesel to ease fuel prices before the November 3 midterm elections.

Opening the talks, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged members to cooperate on economic and geopolitical crises threatening global trade, energy and food supplies, and freedom of navigation, dpa reported. Iran blocked the Strait of Hormuz after US-Israeli strikes began in late February, and global energy prices have risen sharply since.

“Both maritime and food security drive economic security,” Rubio wrote on X.

No joint statement is expected. A diplomatic source told the AFP news agency that Washington will instead publish a chair’s summary it has drafted. The source added: “The G20 is no longer really a forum where foreign ministers can reach agreement on a statement.”

No government has said whether Rubio and Lavrov will hold a formal bilateral meeting.

China sent Executive Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu in place of Foreign Minister Wang Yi, according to a delegation list released by the Department of State. South Africa, a founding G20 member, has been excluded by Washington, and the African Union is represented by Burundi’s Edouard Bizimana.

The Atlanta talks are the last ministerial meeting of the US G20 presidency before leaders meet in Miami on December 14 and 15.

Caracas, October 29, 2026 (venezuelanalysis.com) – Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodríguez defended an ongoing plan to privatize state assets and return nationalized companies to former owners on Thursday.

“I have ordered the evaluation of non-essential state assets to be offered to the private sector or returned to their previous owners,” she said in a televised address to the nation.

“This is already in motion. The right to private property is guaranteed by our Constitution,” Rodríguez added.

In April, the acting president established a commission to evaluate the “strategic” value of state-owned companies, land, and other assets, to determine whether they should be retained, privatized, or liquidated.

Former President Hugo Chávez implemented a program of nationalizations in the 2000s to assert state control over strategic economic sectors, including electricity, telecommunications, and heavy industries.

After enacting a pro-business overhaul of hydrocarbon and mining legislation earlier this year, the Venezuelan parliament is on the verge of approving the partial privatization of the electricity sector. Foreign companies are likewise in talks to acquire the country’s largest aluminum smelter, while a consortium headed by Sunergon Oil is reportedly pushing the takeover of several industrial plants associated with the oil industry.

Business sector representative Luigi Pisella, who heads the commission, recently proposed a law enshrining multinational corporate participation in privatized public entities alongside local capital.

“I have encountered no resistance to this idea,” he stated in an interview with Banca y Negocios. “Most investors agree it is indispensable to have local partners whose experience is essential to navigate the complex Venezuelan environment.”

Pisella added that “different models of private participation” are being evaluated, but ruled out the “strategic alliances” whereby the state grants the assets in a concession-type deal while retaining ownership. The business sector spokesman argued that “no one is going to invest” without the full transfer of property.

In Thursday’s address, Acting President Rodríguez also promised that workers’ incomes would be increased quarterly next year, with the raise being at least on a par with GDP growth. 

“For 2027 we are scheduling increases to workers’ incomes in four different moments, in amounts that can never fall short of economic growth in the preceding trimesters,” she explained. 

Rodríguez did not mention adjusting the minimum wage, which has been frozen since 2022 and is currently worth around US $0.15. Instead, Venezuelan authorities have leaned on non-wage bonuses, which do not factor into vacation pay, severance, and other labor benefits in what amounts to a de facto subsidy to employers. Public sector workers currently have a monthly income floor of $240.

While Venezuela’s GDP is predicted to grow 5-10 percent in 2026, even raising non-wage bonuses by that amount falls short of inflation. Finance website Ecoanalitica estimates that prices measured in USD will end up rising 20-30 percent in 2026, meaning that an income adjustment pegged to GDP growth would amount to a loss of purchasing power.

In her message, Rodríguez went on to tout ongoing labor reform talks involving business lobbies and select trade unions. 

Private sector associations such as FEDECÁMARAS and FEDEINDUSTRIA want to slash labor costs for employers, further reducing social security contributions and eliminating the retroactive nature of severance pay and other benefits such that any future wage hike would not trigger corresponding increases.

Finally, the acting president defended recent judicial reforms and ongoing US-endorsed talks with a sector of the Venezuelan opposition that will appoint a new Supreme Court and National Electoral Council. The US State Department has claimed that new presidential elections will be held in 2027.

Rodríguez offered no specifics on an electoral timetable, stating only that “there will be elections, with a renewed electoral authority and the world as a witness.”

Edited by Lucas Koerner in Philadelphia, USA.

For the second time in less than a week, a United States appeals court has rejected a petition from the administration of President Donald Trump to set aside 20,000 ballots in California over concerns about non-citizen voting.

The decision came down on Friday, with less than four days until the November 3 midterm elections.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Trump’s request would violate the US Constitution and risk disenfranchising eligible voters.

“The consequence of the United States’s request is not merely ballot segregation, but ultimately both the cancellation of the ballot and the removal of voters from the voting rolls,” the majority wrote in its ruling.

Judges Mark Bennett and Gabriel Sanchez – appointed by Trump and his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, respectively – formed the majority.

A third judge, Trump appointee Patrick Bumatay, issued a dissent, saying the administration’s petition was a “reasonable request”.

The Trump administration has claimed that nearly 20,000 “likely non-citizens” received mail-in ballots to vote in California’s midterm elections on November 3. It sued the state on October 15 to prevent those ballots from being counted.

But the accuracy of the Trump administration’s list has been called into doubt, as have its claims of widespread non-citizen voting.

Election fraud in the US is extremely rare. So is non-citizen voting, despite Trump’s assertion earlier this year that as many as 278,000 foreign nationals across the country were registered to vote.

Like California, states such as Nevada and Washington have also received lists of alleged non-citizen voters, but officials there have found the documents largely inaccurate.

In Nevada, for instance, state authorities issued a statement in September saying the Trump administration had erroneously identified citizens as non-citizens on its list. Not a single name was correct, according to the statement.

California, a Democratic stronghold, will elect 52 members of the House of Representatives, one of Congress’s two chambers, on November 3.

The state has long been Trump’s target for criticism, with the president accusing its Democratic leadership of “cheating” in elections.

But California officials, including Governor Gavin Newsom, have countered that the Trump administration is seeking to meddle in the state’s elections to sow voter distrust and undermine the results.

“This is a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters,” Newsom said in a news release after the October 15 lawsuit.

Non-citizen voting in federal elections is against the law in all 50 US states, including California.

The Constitution’s Elections Clause also grants states exclusive authority to administer elections, though it does allow for Congress to pass regulations concerning voting procedures.

The Trump administration initially sent California its list of 20,000 “likely non-citizens” on October 12, barely three weeks before the midterm election.

California officials refused the administration’s demand to set aside the 20,000 ballots, requesting proof that the names on the list were indeed foreign nationals. According to the California government, no such evidence has been provided.

The Trump administration last week charged 28 foreign nationals in California with election-related infractions, but some of the accused told the Los Angeles Times they had never registered to vote.

The newspaper’s reporting suggested some of the non-citizen defendants shared the same name as eligible voters.

As the October 15 lawsuit navigated the court system earlier this month, the Trump administration sought an emergency ruling from the 9th Circuit Court to suspend the 20,000 ballots.

But the appeals court rejected the petition on Monday, saying the Trump administration had not given lower courts adequate time to weigh the matter.

A lower court ultimately ruled against the Trump administration on Wednesday, and the administration again appealed to the 9th Circuit Court.

In its majority decision, the appeals court framed the Trump administration’s lawsuit as an attempt to violate the Constitution’s Elections Clause.

“We decline the United States’s invitation to contravene the Elections Clause by undermining the Constitution’s plain text,” the majority wrote.

The majority also wrote that it had “major concerns” that granting the Trump administration’s request would “harm the public interest by risking the disenfranchisement of eligible voters and putting the entire tabulation process in jeopardy”.

Alieu Kosiah killed civilians and unarmed soldiers, and ordered lootings and other crimes against humanity.

Switzerland’s supreme court upheld a 20-year jail sentence for former Liberian rebel commander Alieu Kosiah on Friday, but overturned a conviction for crimes against humanity.

In 2021, Switzerland’s Federal Criminal Court found Kosiah, now 51, guilty of multiple atrocities committed during the first of Liberia’s back-to-back civil wars, in which about 250,000 people died between 1989 and 2003.

In 2023, the court’s appeals chamber upheld his 20-year sentence for war crimes and, for the first time in Swiss history, also made a new ruling that Kosiah was guilty of crimes against humanity.

The Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland was asked to review the case, and its verdict, dated September 28, was published on Friday.

The court “rejected the appeal filed by a high-ranking Liberian military official challenging his conviction for violations of the laws of war committed between 1993 and 1995 during the first Liberian civil war”, it said in a statement.

“However, the court has acquitted the individual of the charge of crimes against humanity, based on a strict application of the principle of non-retroactivity.”

Switzerland recognises the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows it to prosecute individuals suspected of international crimes, regardless of where those crimes were committed.

The court said the offence of crimes against humanity – introduced into Swiss law in 2011 – could not be applied to acts committed before then.

Kosiah’s conviction for violating the law of war was upheld, as was the maximum 20-year custodial sentence imposed.

“The decision makes final the first war crimes conviction ever handed down by a Swiss civilian court, and the first conviction anywhere of a Liberian for war crimes committed during the country’s civil wars,” said the Swiss organisation Civitas Maxima, which works to bring perpetrators of international crimes to justice.

Kosiah settled in Switzerland in the late 1990s and was arrested in 2014.

“Today the survivors of Alieu Kosiah’s crimes have final justice,” said Civitas Maxima director Alain Werner, who represents victims in the case.

“We are, however, deeply disappointed by the acquittal on crimes against humanity. What happened in Lofa between 1993 and 1995 is the very definition of a crime against humanity.”

Like war crimes, crimes against humanity refer to atrocities, including murder, torture and rape. However, instead of isolated or sporadic events, the charge is used for incidents carried out in a widespread or systematic way.

In the 2021 verdict, Kosiah was found guilty of a slew of war crimes committed as commander of the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy rebel group.

He ordered or participated in the killing of 17 civilians and two unarmed soldiers, as well as rape and the deployment of a child soldier, the court ruled.

He had also ordered looting and repeatedly ordered, or had himself inflicted, cruel and humiliating treatment of civilians and mishandled corpses, according to the verdict.

Both sides signed a digital trade deal, as Trump’s trade threats push Washington’s allies to seek closer ties elsewhere.

The European Union and Canada have launched what they described as an Alliance for the Future, as Ottawa prepares to become the bloc’s first so-called “associate member”.

Prime Minister Mark Carney hosted the Canada-EU summit in Montreal and signed a digital trade deal, alongside other agreements. Also at the Friday summit were European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa.

The term “associate member” has no legal basis and is contested by some EU states. However, its use underscores the desire of Canada and the EU to forge closer relations, as United States President Donald Trump continues to threaten Washington’s traditional allies with trade tariffs if they do not play by his rules.

“Canada and the EU are working to establish the closest possible partnership, which will be far from full membership, but which will make Canada the first associate member of the European Union,” Carney posted on X.

“Today in Montreal, we have taken a major step forward by establishing more than twenty measures that will increase affordability, create opportunities and ensure our sovereignty on both sides of the Atlantic.”

In a joint statement following the summit, the two sides announced an agreement under which the European Investment Bank will invest in critical Canadian resources, particularly raw minerals. They also said they would advance cooperation on artificial intelligence security and safety.

“A more dangerous and divided world has fundamentally changed the requirements of sovereignty. It is no longer enough for nations to feed, fuel and defend ourselves,” the statement said.

It added that “true sovereignty” requires secure access to critical minerals, semiconductors, payment systems, energy, vaccines, space-based communications and AI.

Ukraine was also on the meeting agenda, with Carney announcing Canada’s participation in the EU’s 90 billion euro ($103bn) support loan for Kyiv. Carney said Canada would make an initial contribution of 500 million euros ($558m).

Opportunities for students in Canada and the EU were also discussed. Both sides said they would launch negotiations aimed at deepening Ottawa’s participation in Erasmus+, the EU’s flagship student exchange programme.

Carney and Trump are currently engaged in a trade dispute, with talks under way to reach a deal between the two countries.

The officer faces charges after allegedly striking a fleeing construction worker with an SUV during an immigration raid.

A grand jury in Texas has indicted a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer accused of deliberately running over a Mexican construction worker during an operation in Houston this month.

ICE officer Mario Alberto Morales faces charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for the October 10 incident, Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare announced on Friday.

Criminal charges against federal immigration officers have been rare during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, although several encounters involving officers have prompted investigations.

Morales is accused of striking 48-year-old Miguel Parra-Hernandez, an immigrant who has lived in Harris County for more than 30 years. Teare said that Parra-Hernandez had no criminal record.

Parra-Hernandez was running away from federal agents when an unmarked black Jeep Cherokee struck him in a car park near Clay Road and Highway 6, according to investigators. He suffered multiple fractures to his right leg and an ankle injury which required surgery.

The indictment follows a dispute between local prosecutors and federal authorities over what happened. ICE has maintained that Parra-Hernandez ran in front of the vehicle, dismissing the allegations that the officer intentionally struck him as “reckless and false.”

But Teare has said surveillance video contradicts the agency’s account.

It shows the SUV crossing a median and pursuing Parra-Hernandez as he runs away. Although another vehicle obscures the moment of impact, the video shows the man on the ground moments later.

Authorities also released body-camera footage on Friday. In the recording, Morales can be heard acknowledging that he struck Parra-Hernandez with his vehicle.

Teare also accused federal authorities of failing to cooperate with the investigation, including by removing the Jeep before local investigators could examine it for potential evidence.

A search warrant obtained by local media shows investigators had not been granted access to the vehicle as of October 23.

The case has also raised questions about the operation’s intended target. ICE said agents were searching for a man identified as Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, whom they believed to be travelling with Parra-Hernandez.

But Mendoza-Cervantes’s daughter told The New York Times that her father died in 2017. Parra-Hernandez’s family has disputed that the two men knew each other.

The Morales indictment comes as the Harris County District Attorney’s Office continues investigating the fatal shooting of another Mexican, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, on July 7.

An ICE officer, Gregory Feathers, has been accused of firing at the vehicle Salgado Araujo was driving on his way to work in Houston.

Federal authorities said the officer acted in self-defence, a claim the surviving passengers in the vehicle dispute.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee paused all executions for the remainder of the year and ordered an independent review to “determine exactly what occurred”.

Lee was asked by reporters this week about a potential second execution attempt. “I suspect her sentence will be the same as before unless determined otherwise by the courts,” he responded.

Speaking about the state’s response to what happened to Pike, Mann said: “I find it deeply troubling that, even after what Christa endured, Governor Lee has shown little public willingness to reconsider the death penalty itself, rather than simply the procedures used to carry it out.”

She added: “What happened to Christa is not an isolated tragedy, nor should this conversation begin and end with her.”

The Tennessee Department of Correction has not explained why the execution did not go as planned, though it has defended the method it used.

It declined comment on Pike’s statement when contacted by the BBC.

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, was among those pushing for Pike to be put to death and attended the botched execution, later calling it a “mess”.

She told a local ABC News affiliate in Florida, where she lives, that she thinks the state owes her an apology.

“All I wanted was justice,” Martinez said.

Pike was the first woman scheduled to be executed in the state of Tennessee in over 200 years.

Her lawyers have spent decades appealing her case. In the days leading up to her scheduled execution, both the US Supreme Court and Lee declined to block the execution.

The attempted execution of Pike was not the first in Tennessee in 2026 that did not go to plan.

The execution of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, was postponed in May after staff were unable to find a vein for a lethal injection. He was granted a year’s reprieve by the governor.

In 2022, more than a third of executions across the US were botched or highly problematic, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which does not take an ethical stance on the penalty.