The United States cancelled the group photograph at the G20 foreign ministers meeting in Atlanta on Friday after more than a third of attending delegations threatened to walk out rather than be photographed alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The meeting ended without a joint communiqué. A chair’s summary will be published in its place.
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul confirmed Germany’s withdrawal from the photo: “There will be no family photo featuring our European partners together with Mr. Lavrov.” Poland’s Radosław Sikorski called the cancellation “the right decision.” The United States, as host nation and chair, said it chose to forgo the photo “rather than allow a ceremonial photo opportunity to become a diplomatic distraction.” Lavrov held a press conference of his own and said: “If what matters most to them is how they look in the family photo and who is standing next to them, well, that says it all.”
No government confirmed whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Lavrov held a bilateral meeting on the sidelines.
The G20 was established in 1999, in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, when the world’s major economies decided they needed a standing forum for coordinating economic policy. The working assumption was that economic integration would bind these countries together in ways that made the discussions both possible and useful. That assumption took its first serious hit in 2014, at the Brisbane summit, when Western leaders confronted Putin over the annexation of Crimea and he left early. It took another hit Friday in Atlanta. A chair’s summary instead of a joint communiqué means no shared commitments, no consensus language, no binding framework. The G20 has operated without consensus before. It hasn’t operated without the pretense of consensus quite like this, and the pretense is what makes the meetings useful even in the years when nothing gets resolved. (CNN, The Hill, Euronews, and Al Jazeera reported the Atlanta photo cancellation.)
Russia’s human rights commissioner announced Friday that the humanitarian mission in Oleshky had been completed. Ukraine’s ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets confirmed the ceasefire had held for 87 hours without a recorded violation. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the Oleshky situation as “an isolated case that should not be extrapolated to the broader peace process in Ukraine.”
Melania Trump had mediated the arrangement. The White House said she described Oleshky as “on the brink of disaster.” The mission involved 25 buses and ambulances, with some 1,700 to 2,000 residents still in the city when the corridor opened.
The ceasefire had been announced to run through Sunday evening. Its declared completion suggests it ended ahead of that window. Peskov’s “isolated case” framing was immediate and deliberate. The Kremlin has its own interest in controlling what this means, and so does the White House. Those interests don’t always point in the same direction, which is usually when facts get hardest to read. The full count of residents moved out before the mission ended hasn’t been confirmed. Whether the mission was completed because the work was finished, or because the window closed, is something the evacuation numbers will eventually tell. (The Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, Al Jazeera, and Anadolu Agency reported the Oleshky mission conclusion.)
Wall Street closed its worst session since June on Friday. The S&P 500 fell 1.82 percent to 7,580.07. The Nasdaq fell 2.9 percent. Intel led the decline, dropping about 29 percent after the company forecast adjusted earnings of 25 cents per share in the current quarter, roughly half of what analysts had expected. Amazon fell 5.6 percent after missing third-quarter revenue estimates and reporting a jump in negative free cash flow.
The worry driving both declines is the same. Technology companies have been spending on AI infrastructure at a pace that makes current revenue projections look thin. Alphabet’s results earlier in the week showed strong AI-driven growth alongside capital expenditure that’s difficult to sustain indefinitely. Intel’s results showed a company that isn’t winning the contracts the AI buildout was supposed to generate. Investors don’t need a position on which company comes out ahead to conclude that the current ratio of spending to return isn’t where most of them expected.
Third-quarter earnings for the S&P 500 are up 31.6 percent year over year, according to LSEG. That aggregate will matter more on a day when the session results aren’t this concentrated in the losing column. The last time the Nasdaq fell this sharply in the final week before a midterm election was November 2022. The S&P dropped more than 3 percent that week. The party holding the White House lost 9 House seats that November. The correlation is real. Whether it’s causal is something nobody could answer then and nobody can answer now. (Yahoo Finance, Forbes, the Associated Press, and Cook Political Report reported the October 30 session and the 2022 midterm results.)
Three days.
Early voting is underway in most states. Prediction markets have moved toward Senate control being a closer call than it was a week ago. Kalshi and Polymarket both show Democrats with a meaningful advantage in the House and a tighter margin in the Senate.
The five races carrying most of the Senate uncertainty remain Texas, Maine, Michigan, Florida, and South Carolina. The ground rules for what Tuesday means haven’t changed either. Every midterm since 1946 has cost the president’s party seats in the House, with two exceptions: 1998, during the Clinton impeachment, and 2002, fourteen months after September 11. Whether Tuesday fits the pattern or the exception is what you find out on the night. (RealClearPolling and Newsweek reported the latest midterm polling.)
Spain’s judicial district in Orgaz, Toledo, has opened a formal investigation into Wednesday’s crash, which killed 68 people. Investigators are examining both a possible failure of the LZB automatic braking system and possible human error by train operators. Renfe hasn’t commented publicly on the specific technical questions. The Spanish government has said it will publish any findings of negligence.
Renfe drivers carried out their scheduled one-day strike on Thursday. The union said the strike addressed safety concerns that predate the collision. The government said the timing was wrong. Both things can be true simultaneously, and they don’t cancel each other out.
Spain has now had two fatal high-speed rail collisions in 2026. The January crash near Adamuz killed 46 people. The combined death toll this year is above 110. The European Union’s railway safety agency hasn’t announced a cross-border review. Whether the two crashes represent a systemic pattern or two separate failures is what the investigations will need to establish. (The Local Spain, WION, and the Centre for Fire and Rescue International reported the investigation and death tolls.)
Something good.
A trial published this month in The Lancet Regional Health Americas enrolled 96 adults aged 18 to 45 who had obesity and early-onset type 2 diabetes and assigned half of them to an intensive program: an 800-to-900-calorie daily diet plus twice-weekly supervised exercise for 12 weeks, followed by 12 weeks of weight maintenance. The other half received standard care. At the end of the trial, 54 percent of the intervention group had reached complete remission, compared with 4 percent in the standard-care group. Participants in the program had about 21 times the odds of no longer being considered diabetic at six months.
Type 2 diabetes affects more than 500 million people globally, according to the International Diabetes Federation’s 2024 count. The adult prevalence was about 4.7 percent in 1980. It’s now above 9 percent. Most of what has changed about the disease in those 46 years has gone in the wrong direction.
The RESET for Remission trial is small: 96 patients at three centers in Canada and the United Kingdom. Researchers are clear that remission isn’t a permanent cure. What the trial establishes is that for younger adults with early-stage disease, the window for reversal through lifestyle intervention is real and measurable at a level that a peer-reviewed journal is willing to attach its name to. Doctors have been saying something like this for years. A randomised efficacy trial in The Lancet Regional Health Americas says it differently. (The University of Leicester and Healio reported the trial results; the IDF Diabetes Atlas provided the global prevalence figures.)
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.
