Evening Brief, Thursday 12 November

Nvidia's board accepted Jensen Huang's resignation on 12 November, ending a 33-year run for the co-founder who turned the Santa Clara chipmaker into the central supplier of artificial-intelligence hardware. The board named Colette Kress, chief financial officer since 2013, as interim chief executive. The announcement followed a week of reports about Jensen Huang's personal relationships, first with Alice Huang, a former executive at Megaspeed in Singapore, then with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice-president for healthcare and a direct report to him.

Shares fell more than 7% in after-hours trading on 11 November and were down 6.8% before the open the next day. The company lost about $400bn in market value during the first sessions of the week, and investors filed a US class action accusing Nvidia and Jensen Huang of concealing material information. Nvidia has also hired former federal prosecutor Joon H. Kim and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to examine the Alice Huang relationship.

The affair scandal is awkward enough. The intelligence angle makes it worse. Nvidia said over the weekend that it was investigating whether Jensen Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort, while US officials reportedly described Alice Huang as working for Chinese intelligence services. China rejected the spying allegation and warned Washington not to use it to restrict chip sales again. Kress inherits no public succession plan, a flatter-than-usual management structure and an AI boom that investors had priced for perfection.

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Vladimir Putin in Moscow for almost two and a half hours after two days of US-mediated Russia-Ukraine talks in Abu Dhabi. The earlier round produced an agreement in principle on a large prisoner exchange, with Russian officials discussing more than 1,000 prisoners on each side, but it did not settle territory, security guarantees or a ceasefire. Witkoff called the Kremlin visit his tenth in-person meeting with Putin.

Putin used the meeting to reject demilitarised zones between Russian and Ukrainian positions. He said Russia recognised only the state border as a dividing line, and TASS reported that he warned foreign troops deployed in Ukraine after a peace settlement would become legitimate targets. Kyiv rejects ceding territory, including in Donetsk and Luhansk, and says Russian forces have not advanced as far as Moscow claims.

The humanitarian track is more concrete. Putin proposed a five-day operation in Kostiantynivka to clear mines and evacuate 400 to 500 civilians, modelled on the recent Oleshky pause. Kyiv rejected the offer. Dmytro Lytwyn, Volodymyr Zelensky's spokesman, said Russia had used the Oleshky pause to move equipment and rotate troops, a claim also made by Ukrainian regional officials and journalists who reported from the area.

War continued around the diplomacy. Russia's Defence Ministry said it hit Ukrainian military and energy facilities, including a munitions warehouse in Kyiv, while Ukrainian and local Russian officials reported drones shot down near Moscow and in several Russian regions. The US envoys were due to fly on to Dublin, where Zelensky was meeting about 50 European leaders.

A three-storey building in Flatbush collapsed into an adjoining excavation at about 16:00 local time on 11 November, tearing open a shared wall and exposing apartments above ground-floor businesses. Firefighters dug by hand and with electric saws while a drone and search dogs scanned the debris. The building stood beside a lot where a single-storey structure had been demolished for a construction project.

By 12 November the confirmed death toll had risen to eight after crews recovered two more bodies. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at least 10 people had gone to hospital, four in critical condition, while reports put the injured count between 17 and 19. Fire Department chief John Esposito said officials still did not know how many people were missing. Rescuers pulled one dust-covered person out alive late on 11 November, and a pregnant woman was also brought out after crews opened a passage through the wreckage.

The records look ugly. The affected building dated from 1930 and held four apartments. New York's Department of Buildings had ordered a halt to demolition work on the adjacent lot in March and fined the owner $10,000 after finding that the existing structure had been torn down without required permits. The architect, owner and general contractor listed in city records had not answered requests for comment in the reports reviewed.

Rain now complicates the work. Forecasts call for heavier rain through 12 November and much of 13 November, with gusts of 40 to 48 km/h possible overnight. Rescue teams warned that the operation remains extremely dangerous because another collapse could follow, and searches are expected to continue for several days.

An Israeli airstrike hit the surgical wing of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis at about 12.30am on 12 November, according to surgeon Ayman Abu Ubaid, who was wounded. Gaza's Health Ministry said six people were killed, including general surgeon Rizk Abu Shaira, and reports put the number wounded between about 20 and more than 30. Parts of several floors were badly damaged, with debris on beds and medical equipment.

British surgeon Goher Rahbour was on the fourth floor of the surgical department when the strike hit. He had operated alongside Abu Shaira only hours earlier, and said the recovery area was reduced to rubble. Hospital officials said around 800 patients were admitted when the building was struck, and that no evacuation order reached the hospital before the blast.

The Israeli military said it struck Muhammad Abu Ismail, whom it described as a senior Hamas member, along with other militants operating inside the hospital. It said the hospital served as a command centre for weapons storage, interrogations and sheltering fighters, but the reports reviewed say it presented no evidence for those claims. A list of the dead identified at the hospital morgue did not include Abu Ismail, according to La Razón. Hamas called the strike a war crime and said Israel was spreading false narratives to justify it.

The practical result is immediate. Surgeries have been suspended, and radiology and laboratory work have stopped because of the damage. Ahmed al-Farra, the hospital's general director, said nearby facilities cannot perform the specialised surgeries Nasser provided. The strike came despite a ceasefire that took effect on 10 October, and Nasser remains one of the last functioning healthcare facilities in Gaza.

Indonesia's vice-president, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, submitted his resignation letter to the MPR leadership in Jakarta on 12 November after the Constitutional Court and Supreme Court rejected the school documents he used to qualify for the 2024 election. The courts ruled in October that his Singapore school-completion certificate did not prove education equivalent to Indonesian secondary schooling, a legal requirement for the vice-presidency.

Gibran, 39, is the eldest son of former president Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi. He first offered to resign on 10 November in a meeting with President Prabowo Subianto, saying he wanted to avoid a prolonged political controversy. A cabinet minister said Prabowo urged him to defend himself, while Bloomberg reported that the president had accepted the letter. BBC Indonesia said formal acceptance was still unclear when it reported the case.

Parliament was already moving. On 11 November, 120 lawmakers from eight factions filed a petition to start an impeachment process. Saan Mustofa, a DPR leader from the NasDem faction, confirmed the signatures. Constitutional law expert Titi Anggraini said resignation takes a shorter route than impeachment, which would involve the DPR, the Constitutional Court and the MPR.

The constitution now gives Prabowo the initiative. Once the MPR confirms the resignation as valid, it must declare the vice-presidential post vacant. No acting vice-president automatically steps in. Prabowo must propose two candidates with documents at least 14 days before an MPR plenary session, and the MPR must choose one by majority vote within 60 days of the vacancy. The succession starts while protests over living costs, corruption and forest fires continue across Indonesia.

Threatening emails reached 1,803 Italian schools on 12 November, the second day of a mass scare that forced some evacuations and tested how calmly principals could hold the line. The messages, signed Mikhail Andropov, varied in wording but claimed explosives had been placed in schools and at Palazzo Chigi, the prime minister's office. Palazzo Chigi called its own threat a fake alarm.

The first wave hit on 11 November, with evacuations in Fano and Pesaro and an earlier message reaching 280 school principals. A later report put about 100 schools receiving an email around 9.50 on 12 November, with a sender address tied to a university domain in Taiwan. By the broader Adnkronos count, 1,803 schools had received threatening emails that day.

Giorgia Meloni said the government had judged the threat not concrete and had not ordered a general evacuation. She spoke during the European Political Community summit in Dublin, while a technical session of the Interministerial Committee for the Security of the Republic was due to draft protocols. In Sicily, regional education assessor Mimmo Turano said very few schools had evacuated and checks had found no concrete danger.

Rome's anti-terrorism prosecutors, led by Francesco Lo Voi, are investigating false alarm and aggravated threats. Investigators say the emails were sent from servers abroad and that the sender has not been identified. Lucia Azzolina, a former education minister who now runs a school in Biella, said her school evacuated on neither day and called for a serious investigation.