Daily Brief
2026-10-20
Top Story
Mexico removed more than 1,000 Asian steel suppliers from its supplier register after a team it sent to check plants named on importers' certificates found the plants did not exist
Economy Secretary Marcelo Ebrard, who named no countries or companies, said some importers filed certificates with plant names and addresses on the assumption no one would check; he also denied that Mexican steel exports are rerouted Asian steel, an argument he said cannot justify the US 50% tariff.
UK Maritime Trade Operations says most attacks on ships around the Strait of Hormuz go unreported
The maritime security body says it knows of further incidents through other sources but cannot verify them well enough to publish.
Brent crude briefly topped $110 as oil leaving the Persian Gulf fell to 8.5 million barrels a day
Brent was trading at $109.68 after the spike, its highest in five months.
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright says the government is working to let investors buy sanctioned tankers and return them to trade
Chris Wright, speaking Monday at a Citadel Securities event, said the administration is running an approval process so investors can buy and refurbish vessels from what he estimated at about 1,600 sanctioned ships, and that they will not carry sanctioned oil anymore.
United States
California settled with 23andMe's successor for $6 million over a 2023 breach that hit nearly 7 million customers, more than 855,000 of them Californians
The settlement with Chrome Holding Co., formerly 23andMe, is filed in the US Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of Missouri and pending approval, and affected customers keep the right to request deletion of their information and destruction of their samples.
The US Department of Homeland Security has barred federal civilian agencies from buying any IT products or services from DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company, and ordered them to remove versions already in place
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin ordered the exclusion in a June 26th letter that is set to be published Tuesday in the Federal Register, the US government's official journal, saying DeepSeek's models store data on servers in China and that sensitive data sent in prompts may be transferred to the Chinese government and could produce actionable intelligence on US persons and government programs.
Around the World
The US Treasury sanctioned eleven Mexican companies and four people tied to the Cartel del Noreste, a drug cartel, most of them through businessman Gamaliel Garza Garcia
Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control acted on October 13th under both its illicit-drugs order and its terrorism order.
South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa tells the country to prepare for possibly losing duty-free access to the US market, warning the consequences would be "devastating"
The access comes from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a US program letting eligible African countries export certain goods duty-free, which Congress has renewed to the end of 2028 pending President Trump's signature; any exclusion taking effect January 1st would have to be announced by November 2nd, and industry estimates link about 86,000 car-maker jobs to it.
Ahold Delhaize, the Dutch owner of Food Lion, Giant Food and Stop & Shop, says a cyberattack led it to take the websites and apps of most of its brands offline in Europe and the US
Stores stayed open and the company says it has no evidence so far that sensitive customer, employee or partner data was taken; Albert Heijn, its Dutch supermarket chain, expects home deliveries from Friday, October 23rd, with US online services due back in the coming days.
NEC, the Japanese technology company, says intruders used logins stolen from one of its contractors to encrypt files on multiple customers' servers, and customers' personal data leaked from a shared cloud folder
Intruders who attacked the contractor that builds and maintains NEC's systems in late September then used its legitimate accounts to log in to customers' systems, and NEC confirmed that files holding customers' personal and system information leaked from cloud storage it created for sharing among customers, NEC and the contractor.
Mexico suspended Brazilian chicken meat and other poultry imports after an outbreak of Newcastle disease, a poultry illness, on one Brazilian turkey farm
Brazil's Agriculture Ministry confirmed the outbreak at a turkey farm of about 6,000 birds in Nova Itaberaba, western Santa Catarina, and the property was sealed off.
France imposed curfews in central Paris and restricted movement and gatherings in Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Nice and Lille after a weekend of rioting
The protests began last month with students demanding better school conditions and have since escalated to take in a broader range of concerns, and more than 2,500 people have been arrested and about 1,000 police officers injured since the disorder broke out.
The UN's Libya envoy told the Security Council that smuggling networks divert 30% to 50% of the fuel Libya imports
Hanna Tetteh said the state carries a growing budget burden for subsidized fuel the population never receives, with pump prices of about 20 euro cents leaving a wide margin for networks moving it to Sudan, Chad, Niger, Italy and Turkey by clandestine pipeline, ship and tanker truck.
Japan plans to certify data centers and cloud providers on security, and to steer banks and hospitals toward only certified suppliers, Nikkei reports
The scheme would start after fiscal 2027 and cover data center operators in Japan and cloud providers keeping servers in the country, weighing ownership structure, data-leak risk procedures and equipment suppliers.