Tuesday, October 27, 2026
The Numbers
China's economy grew 4.5 per cent from a year earlier in the third quarter, up from 4.3 per cent in the second, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday. Growth over the first nine months was 4.6 per cent. Fixed-asset investment fell 7.2 per cent over the same period and retail sales of consumer goods rose 1.1 per cent.
AT&T said on Tuesday 13 October that it will sell AT&T Mexico to a consortium owned equally by Grupo Televisa and Fintech Holdings for $2 billion in cash at closing, subject to adjustments. A Televisa filing shows the buyers plan to borrow up to $1.4 billion and that Televisa will put in $400 million. Closing is expected in the first quarter of 2027, subject to Mexican regulatory approvals.
Surgeons at Rome's Gemelli hospital removed the lower lobe of Pope Leo XIV's right lung on Tuesday 13 October, and a test during the operation confirmed lung adenocarcinoma, the Holy See Press Office said. The Vatican said the operation was successful with no complications. It has not said whether further treatment will follow.
The IMF will publish its full October World Economic Outlook on Tuesday 13 October at the Annual Meetings in Bangkok. In July it forecast global growth of 3.0 per cent and assumed oil would average $89 a barrel in 2026. Brent traded between about $104 and $107 on Monday. The new figures have not been released.
After two days of talks in Beijing, the EU's trade chief said China had agreed to "moderate" exports of hybrid and plug-in hybrid cars, with the prospect of cutting them by more than half over four years. China's own list of 16 outcomes mentions an "understanding" and no number.
Pakistan's privatisation board has prequalified nine bidders, three of them Turkish, for a controlling stake in the Gujranwala Electric Power Company, one of nine state electricity distributors the government has told the IMF it will sell by December 2027. Under the plan as reported, the national uniform tariff stays, so customers of efficient distributors will keep paying for the losses of weak ones.
Teikoku Databank counted 10,118 Japanese companies with a presence in mainland China in June, down 22 per cent in two years and 30 per cent from the 2012 peak. A record 4,137 left or could no longer be traced. Among those that remain, China's standing as a production base has slipped only a little since 2019. Its standing as a market has collapsed.
The Group of Seven agreed on Friday to release 100 million barrels of diesel and crude from emergency stocks over four months, coordinated by the International Energy Agency. The statement gives no split between diesel and crude, names no countries, and describes the release as implementing existing commitments. US diesel stocks are at their lowest for late September in four decades of weekly records.
From January to July, China reported $258.1 billion of exports to the United States. The US Census Bureau recorded $158.3 billion of imports from China and Hong Kong. The difference, almost $100 billion, is five times its usual size, and a Peterson Institute analysis says tariff evasion is the most likely reason. Vietnam's figures run the other way.
China's official manufacturing index rose to 50.1 in September, back above the line after two months of contraction. Production picked up and the services and construction gauge recovered. But the index of raw material prices jumped to 60.8, the steepest reading since the spring, while the index of prices factories charge rose to 54.0. The gap between what manufacturers pay and what they get is widening again.
The five London men arrested near RAF Fairford were released on police bail on Monday afternoon, about a day and a half after their arrest, without charge and under what police called stringent conditions. Britain's head of counter-terrorism policing said he was keeping an open mind about a foreign state. Marco Rubio said the plot "clearly involves the hands of a foreign actor".
Counter Terrorism Policing said on Monday that the five men arrested near RAF Fairford are UK nationals living in London, aged 23 to 25. They are held under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, not the Terrorism Act's 14-day regime, and a custody extension runs only until later on Monday.
President Trump said on Saturday he had rejected Iran's seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and Brent crude rose more than 3 per cent in Asian trading on Monday to about $107. IMF PortWatch recorded 78 transits of the strait between 1 and 20 September, 19 of them tankers. In the same 20 days of 2025 it recorded 1,731.
Gloucestershire police were called to three suspicious vehicles near Whelford at about 12.45am on Sunday. Five men were arrested, first on suspicion of offences under the Explosives Act and then on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act. A major incident was declared, about 85 homes were evacuated, and an Army ordnance disposal team worked inside a cordon reported at 440 yards. Nothing detonated. Nobody has been charged.
Riyadh is the world's eighth-largest military spender and carries the heaviest defence burden of any major spender outside an active warzone. Its East-West pipeline has been struck, the Houthis hold the Bab al-Mandab, and it has said it will hold off on retaliation. The paperwork behind the spending explains the pause better than the spending does.
In her State of the European Union address in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen invited Canada to become the EU's first associate member. The treaties make full membership impossible, because Canada is not a European state. What she is offering is a new category, to be negotiated, with a summit in Montreal next month.
The Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague convicted former president Hashim Thaci of four counts of war crimes on Wednesday and sentenced him to 25 years. Three other former Kosovo Liberation Army commanders were also convicted. The court is Kosovo's own creation, staffed by international judges, sitting in another country, and it exists because Kosovo's allies required it.
Russian drones struck a Warsaw-bound train near the Ukraine-Poland border on Sunday, minutes after a delegation including Boris Johnson and Carl Bildt had passed through the station. A second strike hit near another crossing point, and Poland recovered a suspected Russian drone from the Baltic. NATO's secretary general says the alliance will increase its support for Kyiv.
With nearly all votes counted in Bangsamoro's first parliamentary election, the Bangsamoro Federalist Party leads on 35.2 percent against 32.4 percent for the United Bangsamoro Justice Party, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front's own party. The leader in front is the region's chief minister, himself a former MILF commander. Turnout passed 82 percent. Proclamations are delayed.
Austria revoked the visa of Mohammad Eslami, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, before the IAEA's General Conference opened in Vienna on Monday. The United States objected to a UN sanctions waiver for his travel, and under the committee's rules one objection was enough. Iran says the host country broke its obligations. The conference it cannot attend is the one that debates its nuclear programme.
More than 2.3 million voters in the Muslim-majority Bangsamoro region of the southern Philippines were eligible on Monday to elect the region's first parliament, the step that ends the transition set up by the 2014 peace agreement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. A shooting near a polling station killed three people the day before. Results are still to come.