Steve Witkoff, the White House special envoy, landed in St. Petersburg on Wednesday to present Vladimir Putin with an updated framework proposal to end the war in Ukraine. The meeting follows talks Witkoff held with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Oslo on Tuesday, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio described as “positive.” Jared Kushner joined the St. Petersburg session remotely. A U.S. official described the proposal as designed to “create a pathway toward direct trilateral and broader multilateral negotiations,” which is diplomatic language for: the two sides haven’t agreed to sit in the same room yet, but someone needs to propose what the room looks like. (Axios reported Tuesday on Witkoff’s plans, the Oslo meeting with Zelensky, and the terms of the proposal he carried to St. Petersburg.)
The Kremlin said before the meeting that Russia’s position hasn’t changed: “We need peace, not a ceasefire,” a formulation that rejects the interim arrangements Ukraine and European leaders have been pushing. The White House has moved to make the environment more favorable to Moscow, including by lifting sanctions on Russian diesel sales earlier this month, a step Zelensky condemned as “a weak decision.” Trump said Tuesday it would be “very bad” for Ukraine if it doesn’t reach a deal.
Thirty-one years ago, Richard Holbrooke made multiple trips among Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Zagreb before the Dayton Accords were reached in November 1995. The breakthrough that ended the Bosnian War came not from a new proposal but from a shift in the military situation on the ground that made the parties willing to accept terms they’d previously refused. Whether the situation on the ground in Ukraine is doing something similar to the parties’ calculations is a question Wednesday’s session may begin to answer.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Tuesday that reaching a peace agreement with Iran is “extremely difficult” while Iran continues targeting commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, met with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran the same day to deliver a new mediation proposal. Qatar said separately it’s keeping lines of communication open between Washington and Tehran, though neither side has confirmed active negotiations are underway. (Al Jazeera’s live coverage Wednesday tracked Rubio’s statement, the Pakistan mediation effort, and the Hormuz situation.)
Iran set its own terms the same day. Pezeshkian told reporters that the United States must lift sanctions and end what he called “threats” before negotiations can begin, adding that “not a gram” of uranium would leave Iranian soil. The Houthi movement launched a ballistic missile at Riyadh’s main airport on Tuesday, causing flight cancellations. U.S. oil prices jumped more than 5 percent on the day, reaching their highest point in five months. Iraq said Tuesday it has lost approximately $60 billion in oil export revenue since the war began. The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. Both figures are the kind of arithmetic that tends to eventually produce a deal. The question is when the parties decide the damage to themselves has exceeded whatever else they’re calculating.
Four members of the Canadian Armed Forces were killed and 39 others were injured, 19 of them critically, in a grass fire that swept through a training exercise at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright in Alberta on Saturday. The four killed were Sergeant Morgan Wong and Privates Shaun Farrell, Aidan Goulding, and Hayden Lykkemark, all from 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. The fire started at about 4 p.m. local time during a live-fire exercise involving 84 soldiers. Wind gusts reached approximately 69 kilometers per hour at the time. A preliminary finding, reported by Global News and attributed to unnamed military sources, indicates a munition from the exercise sparked the grass fire, though the official investigation is ongoing. (Canada’s Department of National Defence released the names of the four soldiers and the preliminary timeline on its website.)
Prime Minister Mark Carney appeared before cameras Sunday afternoon, said the government’s first priority was care for the injured, and confirmed that a full investigation would follow. He corrected early media reports that had put the death toll at seven. CFB Wainwright is one of Canada’s main training ranges and runs live-fire exercises throughout the year. A grass fire in that region in October, during a dry autumn, isn’t inherently unusual. What the investigation will determine is whether this was weather and bad luck, or something in how the exercise was run.
The French government said Tuesday it will maintain overnight curfews in Paris, Lyon, and other cities “for as long as necessary,” making permanent what began as temporary measures after protests turned violent last Saturday. Paris authorities said the zones around Place de la République and Les Halles had held quiet overnight, and Lyon renewed its city-center curfew. A “massive” police presence is planned for protests expected again this Saturday. The U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory Monday warning Americans to avoid demonstration areas in French cities. (NPR reported Tuesday on the government’s decision to extend the curfews with no end date, the expansion to Lyon, and the weekend security plans.)
More than 500,000 people took to the streets across France last Saturday. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has scheduled union meetings this week but hasn’t indicated any changes to the budget proposal that started the demonstrations. In the spring of 2023, France went through months of sustained protests over pension reform. The government held the legislation then. The phrase “for as long as necessary” doesn’t signal a different approach.
Thirteen days remain before the November 3 midterm elections. A forecast model updated Monday, running 100,000 simulations of the Senate map, gives Democrats a 61 percent chance of winning Senate control. Republicans hold 53 seats to Democrats’ 47, and Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take the majority, which is a difficult arithmetic in most election years. Competitive races are now running in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas. (NBC News has been tracking Senate polling and midterm developments throughout October.)
In Kansas, where Republican Senator Roger Marshall faces Democrat Adam Hamilton, the race remains a toss-up despite Kansas not having sent a Democrat to the Senate since the 1930s. A Texas poll released this week showed Republican Ken Paxton leading Democrat James Talarico by a single point, inside the margin of error. Since the Second World War, the party holding the White House has lost Senate seats in 13 of the 20 midterm elections. The exceptions have come either in times of national crisis or when the opposing party ran candidates who made the map work against them. In 2002, Republicans gained two Senate seats in the first election after September 11. In 1998, Democrats gained five House seats at the peak of the Clinton impeachment. What the pattern means for 2026 depends on which exception the current environment most resembles.
A study published earlier this month in Science Advances found that severely bleached corals can recover fully when placed in direct contact with healthy corals from the same genetic individual. Researchers tested the method with cauliflower coral pairs in laboratory tanks. After about two days of physical contact, the corals’ tissues began fusing. Three days of contact was the minimum required for a bleached coral to begin recovering; five days was enough for full recovery. In several pairs, the bleached coral continued to recover even after the healthy piece was removed, as long as the initial contact period had been completed. The method didn’t work between corals from different genetic individuals; mixed pairings triggered the corals’ stinging cells, a defensive response. (CTV News reported October 14 on the study findings, the tissue-fusion mechanism, and the questions remaining about scaling the method beyond the lab.)
Coral bleaching happens when ocean temperatures rise enough that corals expel the algae living in their tissue, the same algae that give them most of their color and energy. Without the algae, corals can die within weeks. The Great Barrier Reef had its seventh mass bleaching event in 2024. Applying a lab technique to a reef at scale involves conditions that a tank can control and an ocean can’t, and the researchers were careful to say so. What they reported is that it works in the tank: tissue contact, five days, same genetic individual, full recovery. That’s the result. It’s worth knowing.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.
