DETROIT — Michigan Democrats had planned a show of unity for Sunday morning. Abdul El-Sayed, their Senate nominee, was supposed to attend church with Rep. Haley Stevens, the congresswoman he beat in the August primary, and with Rep. Jim Clyburn. It was two days before an election that could decide control of the Senate.

Instead, the day produced two competing scenes. Stevens swayed to gospel music at Perfecting Church beside Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee backed by President Trump. El-Sayed campaigned with Clyburn at another church a few miles away, according to the Associated Press, which attended both services. By afternoon, Stevens had posted a video lasting less than two minutes.

“Our Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, Abdul, said that I was no longer welcome in his campaign and that I should stay away,” she said. “And he’s right, and that’s why I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today.”

Who withdrew the invitation

Accounts differ on who withdrew Stevens’s invitation. NBC News reported Saturday that El-Sayed’s campaign had asked Stevens to stop attending campaign events. Rep. Debbie Dingell, who helped organize the joint appearance, told the AP that the decision was hers: “I’m the one who pulled it, because it had become way too distracting.” Dingell said Stevens had agreed to stay away. The reports do not make clear whether El-Sayed personally excluded Stevens or how much each side contributed to the decision.

The quarrel had been building for days. Last week Stevens’s fiancé, Jason Turkish, told The Detroit News he would vote for Rogers. Stevens then went on CNN to restate her support for El-Sayed. On Friday, after the AP reported the planned joint appearance, she issued a long statement demanding that El-Sayed condemn an ad by an independent left-wing group that tied U.S. support for Israel to grocery prices. Stevens called the ad antisemitic. “Abdul promises to get money out of politics,” she wrote. “He can begin by getting Israel out of his explanation for everything Michigan cannot afford.”

El-Sayed said his campaign did not make the ad and that “I do not agree with the contents of that ad.” He also accused Stevens of “relitigating a primary that ended three months ago.” In her video, Stevens cited El-Sayed’s campaign appearances with the streamer Hasan Piker. In August, after Piker implied that Jewish support for Israel put Jews at risk of personal violence, El-Sayed said Piker did not speak for his campaign but stopped short of disavowing him, NPR reported.

The fallout, by the hour

Stevens’s longtime chief of staff resigned, and more staff members were expected to follow, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke to the AP. “We are shocked and heartbroken,” the aide said. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who backed Stevens in the primary, called the endorsement “a despicable betrayal.” Curtis Hertel, chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, wrote that Stevens “is not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future.” Trump praised her “bravery” on Truth Social.

Outside the church, Stevens told reporters: “I’m not turning my back on Democrats. It is this one vote.” On CNN on Sunday night, she called the decision “a weight off my shoulders” and blamed “Abdul getting angrier and angrier.”

Outside a “Souls to the Polls” event, El-Sayed told reporters he does not think about Stevens. “None of this matters,” he said, before turning to schools and medical bills.

What it might change

The seat is open because Democratic Sen. Gary Peters is retiring, and the race was already close. A YouGov survey conducted Oct. 29 showed El-Sayed leading Rogers by 51 percent to 47 percent among likely voters. The CallTheMap polling average showed a 3.6-point Democratic lead as of Nov. 1. Neither measure reflects the endorsement.

The endorsement could matter most among specific groups of voters. In August, Stevens won Wayne County, which includes Detroit, and neighboring Oakland County, with support from Black and Jewish voters, according to the AP. Democrats had already worried about enthusiasm among both groups, which is why they had planned the joint church appearance.

The endorsement also came late in the campaign. Michigan began early voting on Oct. 24, and more than 1.8 million ballots had been cast by Friday, the AP reported. No poll yet shows how much a defeated primary rival’s endorsement matters with less than forty-eight hours left. Tuesday’s vote count will provide the first evidence.

At 8:31 a.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 28, the LZB signaling system failed on part of Spain’s Madrid–Seville high-speed line, according to AITAT, the independent authority investigating the crash. Transport Minister Óscar Puente said the computer failure halted six moving trains. Two of them were in the same 29-kilometer signal block, El País reported. The one in front, Iryo 6076, tried twice to restart and could not.

At 8:36, the control center run by the rail-infrastructure manager Adif at Madrid’s Atocha station sent the Renfe AVE behind it an LZB4 safety message. The message authorized normal running, known as “marcha normal,” with a 200 km/h limit. The Iryo was stopped about 25 kilometers ahead, near Urda station in Toledo province, and the AVE reached up to 200 km/h. At 8:53, seventeen minutes after the order, it hit the stationary Iryo from behind at kilometer 118+800. AITAT estimates the impact speed at between 160 and 200 km/h. The exact figure must come from the train’s onboard recorder.

AITAT’s provisional count is 69 dead and more than 200 injured, and it says the figures are not final. Among the dead was Marta Shahbazi, a University of Cambridge developmental biologist who was traveling to collect a scientific prize, Euronews reported.

A failure with no backup

In its first note, AITAT said a “chain of breakdowns, instructions and actions” would eventually have caused the collision, “without the necessary mitigating barriers having acted.” El País explained what that meant in practice. When the LZB system failed with two trains in one block, the only remaining protections were the control center’s orders and the driver’s line of sight. The order for normal running removed the first protection, and there is no record that another system replaced it.

On Monday, El País reported that AITAT and judicial police will also review earlier LZB failures on the same line. The newspaper put the number of other failures at 169. Investigators will examine what caused each failure and what messages Adif sent drivers to resume traffic. They also want to know whether the fatal LZB4 order came from a one-off error or from “the force of habit,” because nothing had happened before when trains were far enough apart. Hitachi Rail maintains the LZB system, and investigators also want to know why it failed that morning.

Who is being blamed

Puente has called the order “inexplicable” and blamed the controller’s judgment. Rail unions told the AP that too few controllers are handling growing workloads. Euronews reported that the Adif employee on duty at the Atocha control center declined to give a statement to the Guardia Civil.

This was the second deadly crash this year involving Iryo and Renfe trains on the same line. In January, a collision near Adamuz in Córdoba province killed 46 people, ABC News reported.

AITAT has up to twelve months to publish its final report. If the earlier failures show that controllers routinely authorized normal running after LZB failures without harm, investigators will have to ask why a risky practice became routine, not only what one controller did wrong.

On Saturday, Oct. 31, young people marched through 34 German cities. Many wore Halloween costumes, and many carried signs about schools. Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that tens of thousands took part. The organizing movement, “Gen Z regelt” (“Gen Z takes charge”), put the number at about 120,000. The marchers demanded more investment in education and health, relief from living costs and greater social justice. Many also opposed sharply higher military spending and a new voluntary service model, which they fear could lead back to conscription, AFP reported.

Police said the main protests had been “very peaceful.” The trouble came after dark.

In Frankfurt, police counted about 8,000 marchers at the peak. Organizers said about 9,000 took part. Police dissolved the march after stones, bottles and fireworks were thrown at officers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported. Masked groups then moved along the Zeil, one of Germany’s busiest shopping streets. They smashed windows, stole sneakers and perfume and attacked a gun shop. Police arrested a suspect there and seized two weapons. Molotov cocktails were thrown at emergency crews, police said. Hesse’s interior ministry counted 17 damaged shops, more than 100 injured officers and 54 arrests of people aged 13 to 29, most of them German citizens. Police also used water cannon in Hamburg and Cologne, and pepper spray in Leipzig.

Roman Poseck, Hesse’s interior minister, said “around 100 clearly identified left-wing extremists” had infiltrated the Frankfurt march, and called the ending “shameful.” The FAZ reported that the chants changed as the evening went on, from jokes about Chancellor Friedrich Merz to “Break the power of the rich and the corporations” and “Death to the IDF.”

The organizers distanced themselves overnight from “any form of violence” by groups or individuals they said were not part of the demonstrations. “Extremist groups, anti-constitutional symbols, racism and hate speech have no place with us — no matter from which side,” the movement said.

The German marches were modeled on youth movements in France and Italy. France has held a third straight weekend of protests, and its Oct. 17 demonstrations turned into some of the worst rioting the country had seen in years. Berlin has been in contact with French and Italian officials because of concerns that radical activists from abroad could join German protests.

In Berlin, AFP spoke to Milla, a 20-year-old student. She said she had been “waiting for a long time for something to finally really happen.” Marius, a 23-year-old care worker, told AFP that the situation was “slowly reaching boiling point.”

On Nov. 20, Gen Z regelt plans to join Europe-wide protests. Poseck has already said he opposes holding that assembly in Frankfurt.

The oil price on trading screens leaves out a major cost. On Monday morning in Asia, Brent fell about $2 a barrel after Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Qatari mediators had helped shorten Tehran’s plan for reopening the Strait of Hormuz to two days, Reuters reported. Under the plan, the United States would take agreed steps on the first day and shipping would return to normal on the second. Washington has not publicly accepted the plan. Iran’s conditions include sanctions relief and recognition of shipping routes designated by Iran and Oman, and those demands go to the heart of the dispute.

Shipping costs are rising even as Brent falls. In the five years before the war began in late February, chartering a very large crude carrier from the U.S. Gulf Coast to China cost less than $8 million on average, according to Baltic Exchange figures reported by Bloomberg. In October, the rate reached $79.6 million. Argus Media later recorded a provisional $81 million lump-sum fixture, marked “on subjects,” on the U.S. Gulf Coast-to-Asia route for a cargo loading in late November. That was the highest provisional rate Argus has recorded since it began assessing the route in 2017, compared with a pre-war high of $22.5 million. If finalized at that rate, a 30-day voyage would cost about half as much as building the ship.

Per barrel, the International Energy Agency said that by mid-October, shipping Middle East crude to Asia on a large tanker cost more than $37, over five times the pre-war level. A Valero executive told Bloomberg that refiners were paying $30 to $35 a barrel to move U.S. Gulf Coast crude to Asia, up to seven times last year’s cost, with crude itself near $100.

The tankers still exist, but more of them are tied up

The problem is not a shortage of hulls. The IEA says rerouted cargoes, congestion and ship-to-ship transfers keep tankers occupied for longer. Smaller vessels carry crude through the strait and transfer it to larger tankers waiting in the Gulf of Oman. As a result, a shipment that once needed one tanker now needs several. Shipowners are also moving product tankers into crude trades. By mid-October, that had pushed rates on some Gulf-to-Japan product routes to almost $27 a barrel, five times their pre-war level.

The cost is changing where oil goes. Traders told Bloomberg that Asian refiners’ orders for U.S. crude for November delivery fell about 50 percent to between 24 million and 26 million barrels. If that pace holds through the end of the month, it would be a seven-year low. Vortexa said it saw no evidence of an imminent recovery.

Why freight may not follow Brent

Even if the two-day plan works, it would reopen the strait, not instantly restore normal tanker operations. Ships would still be in the wrong places, and insurance would still reflect recent attacks. On Sunday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said two tankers had hit mines while crossing Hormuz without Iranian permission, a claim that has not been independently verified. Freight rates tend to adjust as voyages are completed, which takes weeks. Anyone celebrating a $2 drop in Brent should also watch charter rates, because those costs still feed into pump prices.

On Saturday, DeepSeek’s Harness team published a design essay titled “Exploring Super-agent Design: Towards a More Autonomous Agent System.” It also released code on GitHub as dsh-superagent-prototype under the MIT license. Bloomberg described the release as a challenge to Anthropic’s Claude Code, according to The Next Web. Many headlines said the agent can watch developers’ group chats for coding problems and propose solutions without being asked. By Sunday morning, the repository had more than 4,000 stars.

The README describes a narrower tool. It is “a proactive coding agent for one GitHub repository” that listens to GitHub and, optionally, Feishu, ByteDance’s workplace chat app. When an authorized person asks for work, it opens a work item and handles the task in its own session and directory. It then replies in the original conversation, for example with a pull request. A web panel shows which tasks need a person.

The repository states the design philosophy in one line: “take as little human attention as possible, and give as much value as possible.” It also includes a warning: “An agent that can act for a whole team can also waste a whole team’s attention, so it acts only when asked or when a rule the team wrote allows it.”

What the defaults do

The authorization document defines three modes for work nobody explicitly requested. In “off” mode, the agent does not turn inferred requests into candidate tasks. The default is “observe”: if the agent decides it could help with an inferred request, it records the case as “would accept” but takes no action. In “auto” mode, the agent can accept inferred work, but only if at least one rule written by the team matches. Explicit requests work in every mode. A developer’s review of the code on DEV Community argues that the agent’s worker sessions run with the full access of the operator’s account. If that review is right, the default limits when the agent takes initiative, not what it can access once it acts.

What the evidence shows

The essay’s strongest number comes from a preliminary scheduling test. Four designs received streams of about 300 group-chat and CI messages, roughly 20 of which were real work requests. Each design ran five times. According to an independent explainer of the paper, DeepSeek’s design finished the simulated tasks faster than two single-session setups while using more cached tokens. The test measured how the agents scheduled work, not whether they wrote good code.

DeepSeek is careful in its own description. The README calls the release a “research prototype for reference only, not an official DeepSeek product.” It says coding agents did much of the engineering and that the public code differs from DeepSeek’s internal version. It also says some ideas in the essay have not been built yet.

The main idea is that human attention is the scarce resource and should be spent sparingly. That makes setup a management decision before it is a software decision. Before switching on auto mode, a team must decide who can write the rule that lets the agent act without being asked.

On Friday, Oct. 30, a federal judge in Mississippi refused to dismiss the NAACP’s Clean Air Act lawsuit against xAI, the artificial-intelligence company now owned by SpaceX, and its subsidiary MZX Tech. The suit is about gas turbines that power the company’s Colossus 2 data center in Southaven, just across the state line from Memphis.

The complaint says xAI and MZX Tech installed turbines at the Southaven site between August and December 2025 without air permits. The NAACP and its Mississippi State Conference filed the suit in April. According to the complaint, at least 27 turbines were on site by then, capable of generating at least 495 megawatts. The Southern Environmental Law Center, which represents the plaintiffs, says at least 35 combustion turbines and other pollution sources have operated there without the required permits.

xAI argued that the turbines were exempt as “mobile sources.” U.S. District Judge Debra M. Brown rejected that argument. “Because the plaintiffs have statutory standing under the Clean Air Act, because the combustion turbines are not ‘mobile sources’ under Mississippi’s [State Implementation Plan], and because the citizen suit provision does not violate Article II of the Constitution or the private nondelegation doctrine, the plaintiffs’ claims will proceed,” she wrote.

The federal government has also entered the case. Court records show that on Oct. 19, Brown allowed the United States to intervene while denying its bid to dismiss. Four days later, the United States filed an intervenor complaint seeking declaratory relief against the NAACP plaintiffs. The government also has a related appeal pending at the Fifth Circuit. Earthjustice said Friday’s ruling “comes shortly after the Court denied a similar motion from the U.S. Department of Justice.”

The ruling allows the case to move forward. It does not find that xAI violated the law. The merits, any remedy and the government’s appeal are still unresolved.

The immediate question is narrow: whether the Southaven turbines qualify as exempt mobile sources under the applicable air rules. If the court ultimately requires permits, that would change what xAI must disclose and obtain for this site. The ruling does not establish a rule for other data centers.

Every Sunday, Hollywood publishes an estimate and calls it the box office. This week the estimate fits the subject a little too well.

According to studio estimates compiled by Deadline, A24’s *You Can See Everything* earned about $10.6 million in the United States and Canada from Friday, Oct. 30, through Sunday, Nov. 1. The documentary, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, follows Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before she reported to prison. Warner Bros. and DC’s *Clayface* earned about $10.4 million. Deadline reported that some rival studios have *Clayface* ahead for the weekend. Actual figures arrive Monday. So a film about a woman convicted of defrauding investors over what her blood-testing machines could do is No. 1 for now only on an estimate.

The numbers it can claim are still unusual. This was the film’s third weekend and its first at No. 1, a rare climb for a wide release. It expanded by 588 theaters to 3,243, fell only 43 percent from the previous weekend and has earned about $63.9 million in North America, against a reported production budget of $7 million. Box Office Mojo lists a running time of 2 hours and 54 minutes. *Clayface*, a Batman villain spinoff, fell 57 percent in its second weekend. It won Halloween night itself, with about $4.2 million to the documentary’s $3.6 million, and led the worldwide box office with $22.8 million.

The competition was weak. The weekend took in about $55.7 million, one of 2026’s weakest. Halloween fell on a Saturday, the night that usually drives moviegoing, and studios mostly stayed away. Laika’s stop-motion *Wildwood* finished third with $7.5 million.

The documentary’s performance still matters, and the key figure is its 43 percent drop. Audiences are recommending a three-hour nonfiction film after superhero spectacle failed to hold its audience. Fielder’s comedy has long focused on the gap between performance and life. Holmes became famous for presenting a performance as a working product. The title promises what Theranos promised: a complete view from a small sample. People are paying to look at the person for three hours instead of the machine for a second.

There is also a lesson for studios. They keep treating attention as something to manufacture with intellectual property. The audience this weekend gave its attention to the gap between a claim and what can be verified. If Monday’s actual figures put *Clayface* in first place, the documentary will lose the title it never quite had. That outcome would fit the film’s subject.

Calls for party unity after primaries are often overstated. A defeated candidate does not have to campaign for the winner, smile for the cameras or pretend to like a rival after a bitter race with tens of millions of dollars in outside spending. Haley Stevens lost Michigan’s Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed in August. If she had spent the fall in Washington, said nothing nice about him and declined every invitation, nobody could reasonably have complained.

She also had real grievances. She considered an outside ad linking U.S. support for Israel to grocery prices antisemitic. El-Sayed said he did not agree with it, but he never quite disavowed Hasan Piker, the streamer who campaigned with him. Those are legitimate objections, and she could have made them in her own voice, in an op-ed or in an interview. Debbie Dingell withdrew her from Sunday’s church event because the dispute had become distracting. That was defensible, and some candidates would have accepted it gratefully.

Instead, Stevens sat in a pew beside the Republican nominee and posted a video endorsing him. That was not dissent from the sidelines. It used standing she had earned as a Democrat against her party’s nominee. Stevens beat El-Sayed in Wayne and Oakland counties in August with support from Black and Jewish voters, and she earned that support as a Democrat. With less than forty-eight hours left, she gave that support to the other side when the other campaign had almost no time to respond.

“It is this one vote,” she told reporters. In a Senate where control may be at stake, a vote for one senator can also help decide which party controls the chamber. Every Senate seat matters to the majority, and a congresswoman with Stevens’s experience knows it.

Most defeated candidates follow an unwritten rule: if they cannot help the winner, they stay quiet. Following it costs little, but breaking it can do serious damage. It allows primaries to be fought hard because voters can trust the fight will end. Without that rule, every close primary invites the loser to undermine the nominee in the general election.

The Democrats also share some blame. A nominee who wants a defeated rival to stay quiet should give her less to criticize, and El-Sayed’s campaign gave Stevens material for months. Party chair Curtis Hertel was entitled to his anger, but his post saying Stevens would never be a member again treated her as expelled, which only made the Republicans’ case for them.

Whatever happens Tuesday, future candidates will learn from this. If Rogers wins narrowly, defeated candidates may conclude that public defection can work. If El-Sayed wins, they may conclude it carries no cost. Either lesson is bad. Stevens did not owe El-Sayed love. She owed the voters who chose him the courtesy of not campaigning for his opponent in the final hours.

Tens of thousands of young Germans marched on Saturday with a coherent complaint. Their schools are poorly maintained, living costs are rising and spending is being cut. Meanwhile, the state is sharply increasing military spending and has introduced a voluntary service model that many fear could lead back to conscription. In effect, they are being asked to pay for their elders’ pensions and Europe’s rearmament while their own services deteriorate. That argument deserves a serious answer, not just water cannon.

Now it may not get one. By midnight, the main image of the day was Frankfurt’s Zeil: smashed windows, looted shoe stores, a damaged gun shop, more than 100 injured police officers and 54 arrests. Hesse’s interior minister blamed about 100 left-wing extremists. The movement says the rioters were not part of it. The FAZ reported that the chants changed after dark, and police dissolved the march.

Attacking a gun shop is not a political demand. Neither is a Molotov cocktail. Anyone in a costume who threw stones at police on Saturday did more for the case against the marchers than any opponent could have.

Governments should still not use the night to ignore the day. The pattern is familiar: the worst ten minutes on video replace hours of peaceful protest, and officials then debate the ten minutes. Hesse’s minister already opposes allowing the Nov. 20 Europe-wide protest in Frankfurt. That is a mistake. Banning a march does not end the grievance, and it can make the next crowd smaller, angrier and easier for the people who caused Saturday’s violence to lead.

The movement has responsibilities too. Distancing itself on Instagram after the fact is not enough. If Gen Z regelt wants to march on Nov. 20, it should provide visible stewards and end its marches before dark. It should also publish a short list of demands specific enough that ministers must respond to them. A movement that cannot say who marches under its banner after dark will let those people define its message.

Marius, a 23-year-old care worker, told AFP the situation was “slowly reaching boiling point.” Berlin should take him seriously. The fastest way to separate peaceful marchers from looters is for a minister to meet the marchers’ representatives before Nov. 20. That would show that peaceful protest gets a hearing.