Evening Brief, Wednesday 11 November

Russia and Ukraine used two days of US-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi to agree the exchange of more than 1,000 prisoners on each side, the only firm result announced from the first such round in about nine months. Rustem Umerov led the Ukrainian team, Vladimir Medinsky led Russia's delegation, and Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff acted for Washington. Volodymyr Zelensky called the opening session constructive and said it dealt mainly with humanitarian questions, including prisoners, civilians in captivity and children taken from Ukraine.

David Arakhamia, one of Ukraine's negotiators, said the Russian side arrived with hard instructions, but that the American framing of a postwar settlement had opened space for discussion.

“The Russians came with very, very strict instructions, and it was hard to soften the discussion.”

Territory still blocks the larger bargain. Kushner said talks had made progress on security guarantees for Ukraine, but added that no deal could close until the territorial dispute was settled. Vladimir Putin still wants Ukraine to withdraw from the rest of Donbas it controls and from two other regions partly occupied by Russia. Medinsky said further talks would follow, but he gave no date. European officials, the EU and NATO consulted Ukraine in Abu Dhabi but stayed outside the Russian-American channel, and Kushner urged Europeans to name a single representative for future talks.

Italian schools received a bomb-threat email on 11 November that reached about 6,000 institutions, though not all evacuated. The message, signed by a man calling himself Mikhail Antropov, threatened a powerful device in a plastic bag with a remote trigger. Police found no device. Schools in Sardinia evacuated pupils and staff from Cagliari to Sassari, while two institutes in Fabriano activated emergency protocols and said they would reopen as normal the next day.

Some headteachers kept lessons running after police advised them that the message looked false. Massimo Nunzio Barrella, headteacher of Milan's Liceo Parini, chose not to evacuate after police reassured him and a tour found nothing irregular.

“I would make the same choice again.”

Giorgia Meloni said the government was following the matter closely but that no concrete danger had emerged. Palazzo Chigi scheduled a 16:00 meeting with intelligence chiefs and the National Cybersecurity Agency, while Defence Minister Guido Crosetto arrived for talks with Meloni. Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara described the episode as closer to a cyberattack than a physical threat, and postal police began collecting IP addresses and email headers at each school for prosecutors. Genoa prosecutors opened an inquiry into alarms affecting dozens of schools in the city and province.

Portugal declared a state of alert across the mainland as Storm Charles moved in, and the government ordered schools and non-essential public services to close. About 8,000 schools suspended classes, the first such nationwide weather closure reported for the country. Lisbon shut municipal tunnels from midnight, closed parks and gardens, and kept seven shelters for homeless people open around the clock. The city's operations centre had logged more than 300 incidents, and some streets flooded after drains clogged.

Red wind warnings were scaled back in several districts after the depression lost strength crossing Madeira, but Faro remained under a red wind warning until 18:00, with gusts forecast at up to 120 km/h and 140 km/h in exposed places. Red rain warnings covered Lisbon, Setúbal, Beja and Faro until 18:00, while Leiria, Santarém, Castelo Branco and Portalegre were red between 12:00 and 18:00. The government crisis cabinet, coordinated by Prime Minister Luís Montenegro, warned that the hardest window still ran from noon to 18:00.

The disruption reached airports and business events. Reports put cancelled flights at Lisbon and Faro in the hundreds, and an international technology conference expected to draw 70,000 people was cancelled. The US embassy and consulate advised residents and travellers to avoid coastal areas, stay indoors unless necessary and keep away from trees and power lines.

Anthropic set terms for a Nasdaq listing that could still rank among the largest technology flotations ever, even after valuation hopes cooled. The company plans to sell 825m shares at $70 to $78 each, raising between $57.75bn and $64.35bn before any overallotment option. The shares will trade under the ticker ANT, and underwriters can buy up to 123.75m more shares. A separate $26bn private share sale to strategic investors, including Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and Alphabet, could push the broader financing package toward $100bn.

• Low end57.75
• High end64.35
• With overallotment74

Demand appears strong, but the mood is jumpier than it was a few months ago. Bloomberg reported that orders were running at multiple times the shares available, helped by anchor-size expressions of interest. Yet valuation talk has slipped from earlier investor hopes of as much as $2tn to a range around $1.2tn to $1.4tn in several reports. Anthropic's annualised revenue reached $81bn in October, while long-term commitments for chips, data centres and computing infrastructure approach $901bn.

The listing comes just as public markets argue over whether the AI trade can carry its own weight. Nvidia has lost more than $1tn in market value since 29 October, and the Nasdaq suffered its worst one-day fall since April 2025 before recovering. Final pricing will show how much investors still pay for growth when the bills for compute arrive first.

The COP31 leaders' summit opened in Antalya with António Guterres telling heads of state that fossil fuels must disappear like dinosaurs. Recep Tayyip Erdogan opened the two-day leaders' segment, and Turkey hosts the wider UN climate conference while Australia leads the negotiations. Dozens of leaders attended, with 77 more on the speaker list, including Ursula von der Leyen, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Han Zheng and Masoud Pezeshkian. The conference runs until 20 November.

Guterres aimed his warning at the fossil-fuel lobby, which he accused of distorting science, delaying decisions and putting off responsibility. Lula said the climate agenda had faded from speeches and documents at the G7 and G20 this year, where he said weapons and tariffs had taken more attention than the survival of future generations. The two speeches put pressure on rich and large-emitting countries before negotiators turn from stagecraft to text.

The money gap is already visible. The Fund for Loss and Damage has received 176 funding requests worth $2.8bn, while $350m is available. Italy is the largest contributor at $112.57m, according to the Italian climate think-tank Ecco. The EU, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand do not want to signal fresh contributions this year, while developing countries want work now on a 2027 replenishment. Turkish finance minister Mehmet Şimşek said Turkey needs $300bn in investment to transform its energy system and cut emissions.

Representative John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House China committee, said Congress is prepared to subpoena Jensen Huang over his relationship with Alice Huang, whom US intelligence reportedly identifies as a Chinese spy. The New York Times reported that Donald Trump was briefed on the matter in May aboard Air Force One during a trip to China, at least the second such briefing in seven months. Marco Rubio, serving as secretary of state and national security adviser, passed the information on shortly before the Nvidia chief executive joined the presidential trip to Beijing.

The case centres on Megaspeed, a Singapore-based cloud provider where Alice Huang was once an executive and which describes itself as an Nvidia cloud partner. Reports say Megaspeed is under US investigation on suspicion of smuggling Nvidia chips into China, a sensitive charge because Washington restricts exports of high-performance chips while allowing Chinese companies to rent computing power from data centres built on Nvidia hardware. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly pressed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick earlier this month on why advanced AI chip sales to Megaspeed had not already been banned.

Jensen Huang has acknowledged that he was unfaithful to his wife, but the espionage allegations have not been proven. Nvidia has opened its own investigation, and its board says it has no reason to believe that national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised. Beijing called the allegations groundless speculation and dismissed the story as a smear campaign. Nvidia lost $400bn in market value over two days, turning a private scandal into a public test of Washington's trust in a company at the centre of the AI supply chain.