Daily Brief
2026-10-31
Top Story
Fitch moved France's credit outlook to negative while keeping its A+ rating
Fitch expects French government debt to rise from nearly 115.7% of economic output in 2025 to 124% in 2028.
United States
General Motors will pay $220 million to settle a 36-attorney-general case over selling drivers' behavior and location data
The attorneys general said General Motors sold driver behavior and location data to third parties including data brokers, who resold it to insurance companies that, for many consumers, used it in part to set rates.
More than 20 US states sued the federal government after the US Treasury Department stopped requiring US companies to report who really owns them
Treasury dropped the requirement in August, calling it a burdensome reporting rule. The states argue that a law Congress passed in 2021 to stop criminals hiding money behind anonymous shell companies cannot be undone by an agency rule.
A tampered copy of Anthropic's Claude Code, an AI coding assistant, tried to plant a backdoor on developers' machines after appearing for a few hours in the marketplace of the Cursor code editor
Cursor says versions 2.1.312 and 2.1.313 were served on October 29th; Microsoft says they never reached its Visual Studio Marketplace or the npm package @antropic-ai/claude-code. The loader tries to write a remote-login key and startup entries outside its folder, which Microsoft says to remove separately. Anthropic told Microsoft it did not make the package.
Polymarket, the prediction-market betting site, says it will repay users after a compromised outside vendor; blockchain security firms say an account allegedly took more than $2.1 million
Hudson Rock, a security company, names the vendor as DebugBear, a website-performance service that urged customers to remove its code from their sites. Neither Polymarket nor Hudson Rock names an attacker.
A strike by about 250 maritime security watchmen at Los Angeles and Long Beach terminals is postponed until at least November 4th as their union and the terminal employers extend talks
The employers' group, the Pacific Maritime Association, says the watchmen work at terminals handling about 85% of Long Beach cargo and a third of Los Angeles cargo, and that other dockworkers are unlikely to cross the watchmen's picket lines. Talks continue with federal mediators; the last contract expired in July 2025.
The Federal Reserve's inspector general scored the central bank's information security program 2 out of 5, down from 3 in fiscal 2025
FedScoop, a government technology news site, describes a 2 as ineffective. The score was 4 in fiscal 2024, and the inspector general gave the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau the same 2 this week.
Around the World
FATF, the global anti-money-laundering standard-setter, took Bulgaria, Cote d'Ivoire, DR Congo and Monaco off its increased-monitoring list
FATF's separate call-for-action statement kept Iran, North Korea and Myanmar on its high-risk list, urging countermeasures against Iran and North Korea and extra checks for Myanmar.
Two cryptocurrency-tracing firms, Chainalysis and TRM Labs, say North Korea's Lazarus Group is the likely culprit in the $6.3 billion theft from crypto exchange Binance
Binance first pointed to a compromised engineer's laptop, then said its investigation had found more points of breach.
Russia's deputy prime minister says the country will export 2.15 million metric tons of diesel in November, up from a planned 510,000 in October
Alexander Novak says an order covering diesel supplies through the end of January is being prepared. Kommersant, a Russian business daily, reports Russia's ban on diesel exports by producers stays through year-end, but several oil companies already hold permits to export set amounts.
Copper concentrate exports from Rio Tinto's Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia fell about 70% after Chinese border restrictions
Daily truck convoys at the Mongolia-China border crossing fell to about four from 12 or 13, the mine operator told the Associated Press.
Italian inflation hit 5.4% in October, with energy prices up 31.4%, while truckers and farmers blockaded roads, ports and fuel depots over diesel costs
A temporary diesel tax discount expired earlier in October. The blockades began in mid-October and have since ended.
China's commerce ministry opposed a US ban on device testing in Chinese labs and warned of supply chain disruption
The US Federal Communications Commission's decision bars device testing in China by 2028, and the SCMP describes it as barring Chinese labs from certifying smartphones and computers.
Andy Yen, chief executive of privacy-focused email provider Proton, dismissed an employee's request to security-test new code before release as 'loser thinking'
He wrote it in the company's security Slack channel at the end of August and told the employee to 'stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.' On Friday he called off AI 're-interviews' planned for nearly all staff, 404 Media reports. Many users say they are canceling paid plans.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard says three tankers, one a supertanker, hit mines and caught fire in the Strait of Hormuz, the supertanker on a route Tehran calls unauthorized
Iran names no ship or operator, and the claim is unverified. US Central Command, the US military's Middle East command, says all internationally recognized primary shipping routes are clear of mines. Separately, Oman says it evacuated 25 crew from a Panama-flagged ship set on fire in an attack off its Musandam coast.
The Kremlin says about 150 documents were signed on the sidelines of the Russia-Africa summit
Sputnik reports as many as 53 of them were government-to-government or agency-to-agency documents. The Kremlin said the Russian and South Sudanese defense ministries signed a military cooperation agreement.