Morning Brief, Tuesday 13 October

Houthi-claimed strikes against Saudi airports turned Riyadh from host city into warning light. Reuters put the death toll from Saturday's missile strike on King Khalid International Airport at 13, while Saudi authorities said a second strike on Sunday killed one person and injured 11. Riyadh airport will stay closed until 2100 GMT on 17 October, and Saudi Arabia said on Monday that it faced a fresh barrage of incoming drones and missiles.

The disruption spread fast. Delta delayed its first planned nonstop Atlanta-Riyadh route until March 2027, Lufthansa cancelled Riyadh flights until 16 October, and Air France-KLM extended its suspension until the end of October. The football world got the same message in miniature when Al Nassr's Asian Champions League match was delayed by about an hour after Saudi civil defence issued a security alert for a potential danger in Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia had hoped the World Petroleum Council energy congress would sell confidence. Instead, the heads of ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Shell and BP were expected but withdrew, according to people cited by the Financial Times. Riyadh is trying to push the Houthis back from the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, but the airport closure shows how a war fought across Yemen can reach directly into aviation, investment and the kingdom's carefully polished growth story. Saudi Arabia can buy prestige, but it cannot fly investors through a missile warning.

Hackers forced supermarket refrigeration systems across France into defrost mode overnight from Sunday into Monday, turning a quiet back-office device into a national food-waste problem. Les Mousquetaires said around 150 of its stores were hit at first, while later reports put the number of Intermarché and Netto stores targeted at at least 300. The chain said fridges had been heated to 50 degrees Celsius for six hours, and affected retailers said fresh and frozen goods would have to be thrown away.

Dominique Schelcher, head of Cooperative U, called the attack unprecedented.

Investigators focused on refrigeration controllers made by Danfoss. The company said most affected units were older products that had reached the end of life and no longer received software or security updates. France's cybersecurity agency urged operators to disconnect such controllers from the internet or put them behind strict filters, while Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu ordered ANSSI to investigate and coordinate with European counterparts. A fridge once looked like plumbing with a plug; this week it looked like critical infrastructure with a sell-by date.

The IMF said the world economy has absorbed shocks better than many expected, but it did not sound relaxed. Its new World Economic Outlook projects global growth of 3.1% in 2026 and 3.4% in 2027, with inflation at 4.7% this year before easing to 4.1% next year. Chief economist Silvana Tenreyro pointed to rerouted energy supplies and AI investment as supports, while warning that depleted energy reserves, high public debt and geopolitical shocks leave less room for error.

Tenreyro put the warning plainly.

AI cuts both ways in the fund's telling. Kristalina Georgieva said AI infrastructure spending is helping keep world growth around 3%, but she described the technology as a slow-moving tsunami for labour markets. The IMF estimates that 40% of jobs worldwide will be changed by AI, rising to 60% in advanced economies and falling to 23% in lower-income economies, where the technology is still farther away.

The fund's worry is not simply that growth slows. It is that growth now leans heavily on a narrow set of firms, sectors and countries, while households pay more for energy and governments carry less fiscal padding. The expansion has not broken, but it is starting to look like a bridge taking more weight than its engineers promised.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's plan to livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan has moved from spectacle to institutional quarrel. Hasan, sentenced for the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, is scheduled to be executed on 3 December 2026. Donald Trump approved execution by firing squad but has not decided whether to allow the broadcast, while the Pentagon has confirmed that the execution would be livestreamed if the plan proceeds.

Timothy Broglio, the Catholic archbishop responsible for spiritual care of US service members, told Catholic soldiers assigned to the firing squad to seek an exemption.

Supporters framed the proposal as deterrence and justice for mass murder. Critics, including some Republicans and Democrats, warned that a public execution could fuel radicalisation or supply propaganda to terrorist groups. The UN human-rights office said a livestream would amount to a public execution and violate the absolute ban on torture. The United States is testing whether punishment can be made into political theatre without teaching its enemies the staging.

Pennsylvania reported a sixth measles-associated death on Monday, after the Franklin County coroner said a 39-year-old unvaccinated woman with underlying health conditions had died with a recent positive measles test. The state has confirmed 1,136 measles cases this year across 41 of its 67 counties, with 1,124 linked to the current outbreak and 218 people hospitalised. The outbreak is the first in the United States to pass 1,000 cases in 35 years, according to reporting cited in the event file.

The death count has become a fight over definitions and credibility. The CDC's national tally lists only two measles deaths, while Pennsylvania has reported six. Former officials called the federal approach unusual after the agency shifted toward mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Governor Josh Shapiro accused Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of sowing confusion over vaccines, while Kennedy accused Shapiro of political opportunism and earlier disputed Pennsylvania's deaths.

State officials said they would review the latest case before updating the public.

Meta tried to regain ground in the frontier-model race by unveiling Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, systems it says compete with the best models from Anthropic and OpenAI. The company said Muse Wonder nearly matched Anthropic's strongest models on aggregated reasoning, writing and coding tests, while also beating rivals on some legal-document and software-building benchmarks. Meta did not disclose much about training, beyond saying the models used its gigawatt-scale Prometheus data centre.

Alexandr Wang, who leads Meta Superintelligence Labs, made the sales pitch directly.

Microsoft attacked the same cost problem from below. It unveiled Maia 300, its third-generation custom AI chip, and said it could deploy more than a million of them in 2027 for its own AI services. The chip targets inference and long-context agent tasks, and Microsoft says it will deliver 40% more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems. The AI race is no longer only about clever answers; it is about who owns the power bill, the memory stack and the silicon beneath the chat box.