Wall Street sees warning signs of an AI bubble, but valuations tell different story
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Renoir art heist suspects were planning ‘imminent’ second robbery, prosecutors say.
Published On 12 Oct 202612 Oct 2026
Two paintings by the impressionist master Renoir which were stolen from a French museum last month have been found damaged behind a false wall in a private home after police made several arrests ahead of what prosecutors say was an imminent second heist.
Marseille prosecutor Nicolas Bessone said six suspects were arrested on Wednesday after authorities discovered they were planning to target the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, home to one of Europe’s largest collections of modern art.
Bessone said the arrests were prompted by the “very strong suspicion that another heist was imminent”.
“We were very clearly looking at the repetition of a criminal scheme”, said Eric Antonetti, the head of the Alpes-Maritimes judicial police.
On September 8, thieves used an electric saw to cut through a fence to enter the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, according to investigators.
An alarm sounded and police officers arrived four minutes later, a swift response that “apparently caused the perpetrators to panic,” Bessone said.
The stolen works, “Madame Colonna Romano” and “Young Woman at the Well” by impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, were valued at about 4.2m euros ($4.7m), Bessone said.
The thieves also attempted to steal two other Renoir paintings, “Madame Pichon” and “Coco Reading”, which depicts Renoir’s young son Claude. They abandoned them in the museum gardens while fleeing police.
“As they fled, they were unable to take all four paintings and abandoned two of them, which were later found in a protective sleeve,” he said.
The paintings were found hidden behind a false wall in a house on Friday. Both works were damaged and will need restoration. One of the paintings, “Madame Colonna Romano”, had been torn.
“These two paintings are not simply works of art. They are part of our city’s history,” Bryan Masson, the mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Nice, said on Friday. “Knowing they have been recovered is an immense relief.”
The recovery came almost exactly one month after the theft, following an investigation that used DNA evidence, mobile phone geolocation data and surveillance video.
The two key suspects include a 29-year-old, who was charged after investigators recovered DNA from a bag left behind during the getaway.
They were charged with organised theft and other offences. A third man, accused of hiding the paintings, was charged with organised handling of stolen goods.
A fourth suspect, who investigators say was approached about buying the artworks, was charged with handling stolen goods and taking part in a criminal conspiracy.
Bessone said the suspects had denied planning a second museum raid, but he added that he did “not believe the principal suspect visited that museum simply out of a love of art”.
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Asian equity markets traded mixed on Monday following an overnight gains on Wall Street driven by expectations of a robust corporate earnings season.
U.S. stock futures edged higher during Asian trading hours, with Dow futures up 0.36%, S&P 500 futures gaining 0.31%, and Nasdaq
A 200-year-old cottonwood tree has been cut down to make way for an expansion of a US-Mexico double border wall. Activists staged protests for months and camped at the tree to prevent it from being cut down.
Published On 7 Oct 20267 Oct 2026
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Layering AI migration on top of their day jobs has tired workers worried about thier jobs.
Artificial intelligence has not only transformed the financial services industry but has also created massive change fatigue among its workforce.
According to the authors of PwC’s 2026 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, published on the second day of Sibos, 40% of respondents reported feeling were overwhelmed by the pace of change.
“They have been through a lot over the past six or seven years,” said Bhushan Sethi, a partner at PwC, who moderated a Sibos panel on AI-led workforce strategy. “We’ve gone from the Great Recession to quiet quitting. We’re now in the ‘no hire, no fire’ job market in the US and beyond.”
Through it all, companies continue to ask their employees to move faster, reimagine their businesses end-to-end, and standardize their documented processes globally, while their leadership eyes the performance of small AI-enabled startups unencumbered by technology debt, he added. “That’s a challenge.”
Especially when 80% of those polled expect their organization to reduce headcount by 20% in the next few years.
Nonetheless, AI use has left the station.
“We don’t have a choice of going back and saying ‘No, we are not going to move with the industry and trends that are leading the next generation of the financial services industry,’” said Anna Domino, global head of client services at BNY.
“BNY has more than 300 AI-enabled offerings currently in production,” she added. “We also have almost 150 digital employees deployed across the organization, including operations and other functions. Over half our employee population are AI super-users on a daily basis.”
In comparison, only 22% of respondents in PwC’s survey reported using generative AI daily for their jobs, up 8% from the previous year.
Allaying a workforce’s anxiety about AI won’t be easy, as 44% of respondents in a PwC survey said they did not trust their senior management.
“That’s a hard environment to bring your best self to work and to optimize and leverage the investments that many, many firms have made and will continue to make in AI-led transformation,” said PwC’s Sethi.
Applying human skills such as empathy and kindness would help leadership manage its workforce’s anxiety, he added. “Let’s face it, we could all do with a little more of that.”
When BNY deploys a new solution, Domino’s team works with the people who currently do the job and lets them lead the bank’s redesign of the process to create more value for the client.
“If you include people in the conversation and give them transparency about how their role will change because of the redesign and what skills they need to learn over time to support the new process, it makes buy-in much easier,” she said.
Another option for employers is to wait a few years and hire those born around 2010, who won’t remember a world without AI.
“We have people in their 20s, mid-20s, and late 20s who are digital natives, but [employers] want those people who came out of their cribs and started playing on tablets and iPhones,” said panelist Darmesh Sethi, a managing director at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. (SMBC), sharing his personal opinion.
They will enter entry-level jobs after working on their high school newspapers and using AI throughout college, he added. “They are comfortable; they’re confident, and that is what we need. We need a confident workforce that can actually harness the power and potential of what these technologies provide.”
However, the same technologies are eliminating the menial work that once taught entry-level employees the business.
“When we were hiring people out of college 20 years ago, they would be creating spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations,” said BNY’s Domino. “None of that is happening anymore. So, we have to focus on apprenticeships, coaching, shadowing, and bringing that talent in front of clients way sooner than it used to happen 20 or 30 years ago.”
The process would require an investment of time and energy from senior leaders who possess the business knowledge, she added.
SMBC’s Sethi sees entry-level employees moving from grunt work to decision-making. “That is where they are going to have to step up,” he said. “And that is what we are really seeing in our employee training and the intentional hiring of young talent.”
WASHINGTON — A federal court in Texas on Friday issued a ruling temporarily blocking the Trump administration from building a border wall and other infrastructure across the state’s Big Bend region.
The news marks a major win for landowners, businesses and environmentalists in the region who have united to oppose the planned infrastructure projects, which are part of a $46-billion effort by the Trump administration to line the southern border with a mix of 30-foot steel walls, vehicle barriers, roads and surveillance technology.
Judge Kathleen Cardone said in her ruling that the plaintiffs were “likely to succeed on the merits of at least one of the claims in suit, that there is a likelihood that they will suffer serious, irreparable harm without an injunction, and that the balance of the equities and the public interest weigh in their favor.”
Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Opponents of the border wall project have argued that the Big Bend region is so remote and the landscape so rugged that it serves as its own deterrent to illegal immigration, and that the administration violated the law when it issued a swath of waivers allowing it to bypass numerous regulations in order to speed up border wall infrastructure projects.
Laiken Jordahl, with the Center of Biological Diversity that brought the suit, called Cardone’s ruling a “total victory.”
“The bulldozers are going to be sent packing until she rules on the merits,” Jordahl said. “This is such a historic day for Big Bend and for Texas and the Constitution.”
The court’s decision comes just weeks after the administration erected the first border wall panels in the Big Bend sector in the middle of September.
Santana writes for the Associated Press.
Trending stocks on Wall Street this week amid geopolitical developments
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Leclerc was somewhat taken aback by Mercedes’ superiority, saying that the position was what he expected but the gap most definitely was not.
At the bottom of the top 10, there was finally some good news for Williams, for whom Carlos Sainz achieved the team’s first top 10 qualifying performance of the year.
Williams have introduced a new chassis this weekend which has brought them down to the weight limit for the first time this season, after being as much as 25kg over at the start of the year.
Along with some additional developments, it appears to have produced a big step forwards, although the caveat is that Baku is a track that suits the characteristics of the Williams car and does not expose its weaknesses.
Team-mate Alex Albon did not manage to secure a tow in the second part of qualifying, and was “anyway struggling with straight-line speed all session”, and was 13th, just under 0.4secs behind the Spaniard.
Antonelli’s error came on his second lap of the first session.
He turned into the first corner too early, and the left front wheel clouted the inside wall, breaking the suspension.
He initially tried to get the car back to the pits but was told by engineer Peter Bonnington to park up.
“Let me try,” Antonelli pleaded, before Bonnington told him that either the track rod or upright was broken and there was no way Mercedes could fix that in the time they had to turn the car around before the next session.
Antonelli had been on the back foot all Friday trying to catch up time lost to a hydraulic problem that had stopped his car on track halfway through first practice, and was not repaired until halfway into the second.
It was Antonelli’s first major mistake of the season since he crashed heavily in final practice at the first race of the season in Australia.
Wall Street rises as focus remains on Treasuries and U.S.-Iran relations
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Investors shrug off AI safety concerns and Iran war, sending market to a new peak.
Published On 23 Sep 202623 Sep 2026
Wall Street’s Nasdaq stock exchange has hit an all-time high, shrugging off concerns about AI safety risks, sky-high tech valuations and the energy shock caused by the United States’ war on Iran.
The Nasdaq Composite index, which is dominated by US tech giants such as Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft, rose 0.45 percent on Tuesday, taking its gains to date this year to more than 17 percent.
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The Nasdaq 100, a narrower index that tracks 100 top companies, jumped 0.82 percent.
The S&P 500, the most popular measure of the overall US stock market, closed essentially flat.
Monolithic Power Systems, a Florida-based manufacturer of power circuits, and Canadian e-commerce company Shopify led the gains, surging 8.1 percent and 7.1 percent, respectively.
Micron Technology, one of the world’s top three memory chip makers along with South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, rose 5 percent.
Chip giant Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, gained 0.7 percent, while Apple edged up 0.2 percent.
Meta Platforms, which soared 11.4 percent on Monday on excitement surrounding its new AI assistant Muse, dropped 0.63 percent.
Major Asian stock markets opened higher on Wednesday, with Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 and South Korea’s Kospi up about 1.4 percent and 0.1 percent, respectively, in morning trading.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index opened lower, falling more than 0.7 percent during the morning trade.
Oil prices were largely flat on Tuesday, after falling more than 3 percent the previous day amid improving oil flows out of the Gulf and hopes of renewed diplomacy between Washington and Tehran.
Futures for Brent crude, the international benchmark, were trading at $99.18 a barrel as of 01:00 GMT.
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday told reporters that US officials held a “very good” meeting with their Iranian counterparts on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, hours after using his address to the session to warn that he could “annihilate” Iran if Tehran did not agree to a deal on the war.
Trump, whose war on Iran is nearing the seven-month mark, said US and Iranian officials would hold another round of talks in the “very near future”.
Jay Goldberg, a senior analyst at Seaport Research Partners in San Francisco, said signs of diplomatic progress between the US and Iran had refocused investor attention on the potential of AI to generate profits after years of multibillion-dollar investments.
“We have been searching for a clear consumer use case to justify the AI spend, and many see Muse as just that product,” Goldberg told Al Jazeera.
“Personally, I think Muse is just a step in the right direction; there will be better products – probably soon – but Muse is one of those things that are so useful they get investors excited about AI prospects again,” Goldberg said.
COMSTOCK, Texas — The Trump administration has started building a border wall through a west Texas section of the Big Bend region, marking the first major construction in an area of the U.S.-Mexico border where the administration’s plans have met heavy, bipartisan opposition.
The start of construction marks a milestone in the administration’s $46-billion efforts to line the border with walls, barriers, roads and technology as it seeks to make good on a campaign promise by President Trump to finish the wall. And it comes as Customs and Border Protection says it has doubled the pace at which it is building the wall across the border.
Customs and Border Protection said in a statement to the Associated Press that “border wall panel installation is underway” in a 47-mile stretch of Hudspeth County in west Texas known as Big Bend 1. There are five project areas that make up the roughly 500-mile Big Bend region stretching from an area of Hudspeth County south of El Paso to Lake Amistad.
CBP said the first panels were erected Wednesday. On a map on the agency’s website where it posts updates of wall construction along the southern border, a photo showed a crane lifting one of the 30-foot-tall steel wall panels into place as construction workers looked on.
The new activity was separate from a border infrastructure project in the nearby Big Bend National Park, where the administration has suspended construction in an attempt to reach out to opponents.
In the broader Big Bend region of Texas, CBP has run up against concerted opposition from landowners, environmental groups, business owners and ranchers who say the remote region isn’t a high-traffic area for illegal immigration. Political leaders from both parties, including U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), have joined the opposition.
Activists said Friday they would continue opposing the border infrastructure projects in the rest of the Big Bend region, even as the panels were being installed.
Clara Benson, one of the founders of the No Big Bend Wall Coalition, which has been fighting against CBP’s plans, said in an interview Friday that the organization had been receiving reports of trucks moving supplies into the remote area along the Rio Grande and that contractors had been clearing yards to stage supplies.
Speaking from Washington, D.C., where she and others in the coalition were meeting with lawmakers, she said that the organization and others would continue to fight the wall-building plans across the region.
“We will continue to fight for this land no matter what the outcome is. We will continue fighting to the end,” said Benson. “You talk to people in west Texas and they say even if they put it up, we’ll fight for them to take it down. So this fight is not over.”
The news comes as the administration is speeding forward with a plan to line the entire border with a combination of 30-foot-tall steel bollard walls, barriers designed to stop vehicles from crossing the border, new patrol roads, and various technologies to deter and detect migrants or smugglers from crossing the border.
Customs and Border Protection said it is building an average of 12 miles of barriers per week along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico and recently reached a milestone of 200 miles of new barriers built since the second Trump administration took office. The 12-miles-a-week average is double the pace that the agency’s head, Rodney Scott, cited earlier this year.
The agency has faced opposition from environmental groups, a small town that worries the wall will cause flooding in its area, Native Americans who say the construction is disturbing sacred sites and landowners who say the construction will infringe on their land.
In Texas, much of the opposition has centered on the agency’s plans for Big Bend National Park, in the state’s southwest on the Rio Grande that is a draw for tourists from around the world. But up- and downriver outside the park, much of the land is owned by private landowners, many of whom have organized against the government’s efforts.
Earlier this week, landowners, ranchers and business owners in the Big Bend region along with a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the region’s landscape and heritage sued to stop the administration’s plans.
Activists and landowners have also shown up at county meetings to push their elected officials not to cooperate with contractors hired by CBP to build the wall, and many landowners have refused to allow government officials or contractors onto their land to survey it.
Santana writes for the Associated Press.