Morning Brief, Wednesday 11 November

House Republicans voted 211 to 204 to refer Thomas Massie's eight impeachment articles against Pete Hegseth to the judiciary committee, a move that in practice blocks a floor vote for now. Every vote for referral came from Republicans, while 203 Democrats and Massie, the Kentucky Republican who filed the articles, voted against it. Had the motion advanced, the House would have voted on removal on Wednesday.

Pete Hegseth used a Pentagon press conference hours before the vote, his first since May, to cast the impeachment push as politics rather than oversight. He defended the operations named in the articles as lawful, ordered by Donald Trump, notified to Congress and carried out by service members. He also argued the articles put American troops in the line of political fire.

Massie's case accuses Pete Hegseth of illegal acts in Iran, Venezuela and Yemen, retaliation against a Democratic senator and waging war against Iran without congressional approval. Donald Trump has publicly backed Hegseth and attacked Massie, which helps explain the neat Republican line behind the referral. The articles now sit with a Republican-led committee, while Democrats take control of the House in January and could restart the process.

Delegations from Ukraine, Russia and the United States met in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday in the first trilateral format since February. The talks covered humanitarian steps that could come before a truce, including prisoner releases, and then moved into security guarantees for Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the meeting constructive and significant, and said his team had clear tasks for talks with US envoys and European partners in the coming days.

Europe helped prepare the ground but did not enter the negotiating room. Before the session, the EU, the United States, Ukraine, NATO and representatives of France, Germany, Italy and Britain issued a joint statement saying NATO must remain the core of collective defence after the war. The statement also called for mechanisms to manage escalation risks with Moscow after any peace deal.

Marco Rubio said the road ahead remained long but that direct dialogue was better than none. Vladimir Medinsky, who leads the Russian delegation, pointed to a larger and more professional Russian team. General Grynkewich, the US European Command chief and NATO supreme commander, joined as Washington's senior military representative, while Rubio also met Ukraine's foreign minister Andrii Sybiha in Paris to discuss energy resilience, air defence and drone production.

Giorgia Meloni wants Europe to settle a single mandate because sanctions, reconstruction, security guarantees and Ukraine's EU path all require European choices. She asked Antonio Costa to put the issue to leaders in Dublin, with a decision at the December European Council.

Nvidia's board has opened an investigation after reports that Jensen Huang, its 63-year-old chief executive, was targeted by a foreign intelligence effort. Huang told directors he had an intimate relationship with a business executive and apologised in a letter to employees. The board said it had no reason to believe national security or company secrets had been compromised, but it will review the available information while Huang remains chief executive.

The political danger sharpened when Kevin Cramer, a senior Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, called for Huang to leave. The concern is simple enough for Washington: Nvidia makes the chips at the centre of America's AI export controls, and Alice Huang, the woman named in reports, works for Megaspeed, a Singapore company under investigation over suspected technology exports to China.

The White House story is messy. The New York Times reported that Donald Trump was briefed aboard Air Force One in May about intelligence suggesting the relationship, shortly before Jensen Huang joined a presidential trip to Beijing. Trump has said the FBI is looking at the matter and that he believes Huang will come out of it well. Nvidia shares fell 4.3% on Monday, wiping out about $190bn in market value, and a shareholder complaint in San Jose accuses Nvidia and Huang of misleading investors about national security concerns. Mercedes-Benz said its Nvidia partnership continues.

Dense fog triggered a chain of crashes on Bulgaria's A1 motorway near Yambol, closing the road in both directions between Sofia and the Black Sea port of Burgas. Officials gave differing counts of the vehicles involved, from about 50 to more than 80, and local images showed cars and trucks across all six lanes. Interior ministry secretary general Lyubomir Nikolov said the first collision involved a bus and a truck about 75km west of Burgas.

The health ministry's later toll stood at 12 dead and 51 injured, 13 of them in critical condition. Rescue crews had to remove sections of guardrail to reach trapped people, and fog stopped helicopters from evacuating the injured. The government sent aircraft with stretchers and medical teams, while President Rumen Radev cancelled official events with Ursula von der Leyen and went to the scene.

The crash quickly turned into a road-safety argument. Bulgaria recorded 71 road deaths per million inhabitants in 2025, the highest rate in the EU. Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev said visibility fell from about 70 or 80 metres to about 10 metres in a very short time, and said toll-gantry signs should carry warnings. The Institute for Road Safety said cameras had recorded heavy fog on the stretch at 5:00 that morning and that the motorway should have been closed.

Investigators will begin work only after rescue operations end. Bulgaria has set Wednesday, 11 November, as a national day of mourning, and Radev said he would visit the affected areas.

France formally accused Iran of an overnight cyberattack that disabled refrigeration systems in supermarkets across the country. Jean-Noël Barrot, the foreign minister, named the Shahid Kaveh cyber unit, which Paris links to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and cited Iranian IP addresses found by investigators. The attack on the night of 11 to 12 October reached about 700 retail sites, including chains such as Carrefour, Monoprix, Intermarché and U.

The hackers reached the software that controls fridge temperatures and pushed some systems as high as 50C. Supermarkets dumped fresh food on a large scale, fires broke out, and Paris summoned Iran's ambassador. Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, had already announced an investigation into the leader of the Shahid Kaveh group and two deputies.

Iran denied the accusation and called it baseless, one-sided and ridiculous. Abbas Araghchi, Iran's foreign minister, said France could not manage fridge temperatures at home and was trying to shift blame abroad. Tehran also said it would take all necessary measures to protect its national interests and security.

The European Commission backed France and said the EU was ready for a quick and united response once member states had discussed the case. Brussels had already sanctioned the Iranian company Emennet Pasargad in March, and officials said further cyber sanctions are being prepared. Germany, Belgium, Ireland, Sweden, Estonia and the Netherlands have also seen supermarket fridge hacks, but their intelligence services have not named culprits.

Anthropic told regulators it plans to sell 825m shares at $70 to $78 each, setting up one of the largest technology listings on record. At the midpoint the sale would raise more than $61bn, and reports put the target valuation between about $1.3trn and $1.4trn. The shares are expected to trade on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, with the debut anticipated in November and one report pointing to 19 November.

The filing lets the seven co-founders sell 3,378,378 shares each, worth just under $250m apiece at the midpoint. They would still hold about 51.1% of the votes through supervoting shares, while Amazon and Google remain the largest outside backers. Nvidia plans to invest about $10bn immediately after the listing, roughly a tenth of the new cash Anthropic expects to raise in November.

The listing pitch arrives with growth and awkward questions in the same envelope. An earlier filing showed revenue above $16bn in the first half of the year, 14 times the same period a year earlier, while operating expenses also surged and the company still loses money. Anthropic also unveiled Claude Sheets, Claude Whiteboards and Claude Data, workplace tools that pushed Microsoft shares down about 3% during Tuesday trading because they move Claude closer to Office-like tasks.