Russia launched 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 attack drones against Ukraine overnight Tuesday into Wednesday, killing six people and knocking out electricity for roughly 600,000 people, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported Wednesday morning. Zelenskyy said Ukraine received no advance warning from Western partners about the attack. CBS News, citing sources familiar with the matter, reported that a specific warning had been withheld, though U.S. officials said broader intelligence sharing with Ukraine had not been suspended. (CBS News reported the overnight strikes and the question of withheld warnings Wednesday.)
Earlier this week, Trump said an energy-infrastructure ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine was holding. Zelenskyy said Wednesday it isn’t. Ukraine’s military recorded 229 front-line combat engagements on Tuesday, with the Pokrovsk sector in eastern Donetsk seeing the heaviest fighting of the year. Separately, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry accused SpaceX of throttling Starlink satellite connections for front-line units. The ministry said bandwidth dropped at critical moments in combat operations and asked SpaceX to fix the problem. SpaceX hadn’t responded publicly by Thursday morning.
Today is the 1,695th day of Russia’s full-scale invasion, which began February 24, 2022. The Siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege of a capital in modern European warfare, lasted 1,425 days. The Ukraine war is now 270 days past that mark. Kyiv hasn’t been besieged in quite the same way; the comparison has limits. But the number has no limits.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released September consumer prices Wednesday morning: headline inflation rose to 3.7 percent year over year, up from 3.4 percent in August and slightly above what forecasters expected. Gasoline, elevated by the Iran war’s ongoing pressure on Gulf output, drove most of the increase. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, came in at 2.6 percent, up from 2.4 in August. Employers added 29,000 jobs in September, against a revised 133,000 in August. The S&P 500 fell 1.1 percent on the report. (ABC News reported the September CPI release Wednesday morning.)
The Fed meets October 27 and 28. Before Wednesday’s numbers, futures markets had priced roughly a 35 percent chance of a rate hike at that meeting. Those odds moved after the report. The last time headline inflation reached this level during a period of rising oil prices, in 2022, the Fed raised rates eleven times between March 2022 and July 2023, from near zero to a range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent. That cycle ended in 2023 and the Fed began cutting in September 2024. Rates are lower now. Whether inflation driven primarily by a Middle East war responds to higher interest rates the way demand-driven inflation does is a different question. The Fed will raise them anyway if the numbers keep moving.
The Trump administration has said it is weighing direct U.S. military participation alongside Saudi forces against Houthi targets, following three separate Houthi attacks on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport in the past week. The most lethal came Saturday, October 10, when a missile strike killed 12 people, including one American citizen, and wounded more than 300, Saudi authorities said. Airport operations were suspended and had not resumed as of Wednesday. (CBS News’s live coverage tracked the administration’s statements and the Saudi exchange.)
Iran called the U.S. response to its Hormuz reopening proposal “insufficient” on Sunday, and negotiations between Washington and Tehran on ending the broader war remained stalled. The IRGC reported tankers striking mines in the Strait of Hormuz since Saturday; none of those claims were independently confirmed. Iran’s foreign minister urged Saudi Arabia to pursue a diplomatic solution.
The United States last struck the Houthis directly in 2024 and 2025; before that, from 2015 through 2018, U.S. forces provided the Saudi-led coalition with targeting assistance and aerial refueling. Congress moved three separate times to restrict that support under the War Powers Act. One resolution, in 2019, passed both chambers and Trump vetoed it. The question of whether a president can commit American forces to offensive operations in Yemen without a congressional authorization isn’t new. The scale of the war he’d be entering now is.
Students in Tirana threw bricks and concrete blocks at Albania’s Education Ministry on Tuesday, and police responded with tear gas and water cannons. A number of protesters were detained. The demonstrations, building for weeks over tuition costs, deteriorating university conditions, financial support, and limited job prospects after graduation, have spread to cities across the country. (Reuters reported the escalation Wednesday, covering events from October 13 and 14.)
Albanian Deputy Prime Minister Albana Koçiu condemned the violence, writing that throwing stones at institutions and attacking state police “are not how youth should express themselves.” Prime Minister Edi Rama, who has governed since 2013, had not commented publicly by Wednesday evening. Some protesters voiced broader grievances about economic inequality and corruption beyond the education system.
Albania’s last significant student movement was “Student December” in 2018, when nationwide protests over tuition and university reform pressured Rama’s government into real concessions. That movement was organized, largely peaceful, and achieved most of what it demanded. The current protests are less organized and more volatile. Whether they reach the same result depends on what Rama does in the next few days, and how fast.
Two teams of physicists, working independently, one at the Vienna University of Technology and one at Tsinghua University in Beijing, both published papers in the journal Nature describing the construction of the world’s first functioning nuclear clocks. Both papers appeared the same week in early October. (Nature announced both results when they published.)
Nuclear clocks work differently from the atomic clocks that have been the world’s timekeeping standard since the 1950s. Instead of tracking the oscillation of electrons in cesium atoms, they track transitions inside the nucleus of thorium-229. The nucleus is smaller and more isolated, which means it’s less sensitive to external electromagnetic fields. The physics suggests it should keep better time. Neither team’s clock yet outperforms the best existing atomic clocks, which now measure time to the 19th decimal place, and both teams believe it will. The navigation satellites overhead depend on atomic clocks. So does the internet. So do financial markets. A nuclear clock that outperforms what we have would owe its existence to two groups of people on different continents who had the same idea, tested it independently, and published the same week.
They didn’t plan to. They just both got there.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.
