Daily Brief
2026-10-17
Top Story
A single White House order carried out the new Graham Russia sanctions law, set a 500% tariff on Russian goods and a conditional 100% tariff on goods from the five largest importers of Russian oil and gas, then waived all the new tariffs and most of the law's sanctions
The 100% tariff was to apply only if one of those countries knowingly made new purchases on or after October 18th, and the order waiving it is dated October 16th.
United States
Conduent has agreed to fund $80 million to settle its January 2025 breach class action, and if the court approves, the same deal also releases its corporate clients and those clients' customers from claims over the incident
If your company was a Conduent client whose data was affected, this settlement ends the claims your own affected customers could bring over the incident.
US and Western officials say the White House ordered limits on Starshield, the military satellite service Ukraine's drones rely on for guidance, and a senior US official says the president made no such request
Ukrainian officials say military-grade Starlink receivers stopped working on fast-moving objects such as drones, and a person in Ukraine's Defence Ministry says they now work in motion only up to about 100 miles per hour.
Around the World
Romania banned public bodies from buying software from Russian antivirus maker Kaspersky in March 2023, and 83 of them, including a state physics institute that works under defense and NATO contracts, have bought it 131 times since
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative newsroom, found the purchases in procurement records through September 2026. The National Institute for Laser, Plasma and Radiation Physics, which bought licenses less than two months after the ban, says it never installed or used the software. Sebastian Burduja, Romania's former research and digitalization minister, attributes the purchases to too few staff to enforce a ban that carries fines of $10,500 to $42,000.
Ethiopia's federal government has installed an interim administration in Tigray for six months, headed by five appointed officials, after pushing the Tigray People's Liberation Front out of the region's main cities
The interim administration's stated tasks are to restore public services, consolidate peace, rehabilitate former soldiers and create a stable political situation for elections, and federal authorities say it will not decide long-term strategic questions.