Morning Brief, Thursday 12 November

Nvidia's board is reportedly preparing to remove Jensen Huang as chief executive, a remarkable turn for the boss of the company that dominates chips for large artificial-intelligence projects. The Wall Street Journal said directors were moving toward removal, while The New York Times reported that the board was expected to meet on Wednesday to discuss his future. Nvidia had not immediately commented. The company controls an estimated 90 percent of the market for chips used in large AI projects, so a leadership rupture would land well beyond Silicon Valley.

The fresh pressure follows a New York Times report that Huang had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's 48-year-old vice-president of healthcare, who reports directly to him. The company's code of conduct tells employees to avoid conflicts of interest, including personal relationships that could create them. The report describes a video from a March company conference in San Jose in which Huang and Powell exchanged affectionate gestures at a hotel.

That is the second relationship now before the board. Huang acknowledged on Sunday that he had been unfaithful to his wife, after which directors opened an independent investigation into a relationship with Alice Huang, whom US intelligence has identified as a Chinese spy, according to the Times. She is not related to him. The board asked Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to examine the espionage allegation, and Nvidia has said it has no indication that key business data leaked.

Investors reacted fast. Shares fell more than 8% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the Times report, and were down 7% for the week, on course for a sixth consecutive weekly decline. President Donald Trump said he thought Huang would come out of the affair in good shape after speaking with him, but directors now face a narrower question: whether a 63-year-old founder-figure can still run one of the world's most valuable public companies.

Italy found no explosive device after bomb-threat emails reached about 6,000 schools on Wednesday, but the scare still emptied classrooms from Rome to Milan and Perugia. Students were evacuated while officers searched rooms one by one, and parents hurried to collect children. ANSA reported that the message came from a compromised Taiwanese profile, threatened to annihilate Italians and carried the signature of a self-styled leader of the 'Vilayat of Misoginistan'.

Giorgia Meloni said in a video posted on social media that the first checks showed no element pointing to a concrete danger. Police postal officers and Digos investigators are collecting IP addresses and email headers from schools, with material to be passed to prosecutors in Umbria. Investigators are weighing a single author, copycats or a false-flag operation, while the offence under review could be causing a false alarm.

Meloni held a meeting at Palazzo Chigi with ministers, intelligence chiefs and cybersecurity officials after receiving Guido Crosetto and Giancarlo Giorgetti. She also invited opposition leaders to a briefing at 8:30 on Thursday, and centre-left leaders accepted while asking her to report to Parliament. She framed the emails as intimidation, not an attack.

The threats follow earlier cyberattacks on supermarket refrigeration systems and fake bomb alerts for flights in several European countries, including Italy. No school in Trentino-Alto Adige received the email, a gap Bolzano's education councillor Philipp Achammer linked to the province's separate email system. Schools are set to open as usual on Thursday, 12 November.

Scott Colom, a 43-year-old district attorney from Columbus, Mississippi, was projected by the Associated Press on Wednesday to have defeated Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith. The race stayed too close to call after the 3 November midterm election while officials worked through more than 100,000 mail-in ballots and checked provisional ballots cast by residents who could not confirm their registration at polling sites.

The result gives Mississippi its first Black senator since Reconstruction and its first Democratic winner in a Senate race since John Stennis beat Haley Barbour in 1982. Colom campaigned in all 82 counties and argued that Hyde-Smith had taken the seat for granted. He backed the Second Amendment and praised Donald Trump for ending taxes on tips, positions aimed at reassuring voters who doubted his progressive label.

Hyde-Smith was outspent on television by left-leaning PACs and super PACs that attacked her vote not to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein. Her campaign also suffered after a WLOX-TV interview in which she told Mississippians they had 'so many other proteins to choose from' when asked about beef prices. Colom's team turned that into a viral ad telling voters to 'choose another senator'.

Colom also pressed Hyde-Smith to explain her path to victory while she stayed largely out of public view. Speaking to reporters in Jackson, he put the challenge plainly.

Spain's general strike over housing access and wages ended with 53 arrests and 1,044 incidents across the country, according to Interior Ministry data collected until 20:00. The national count excludes Catalonia and the Basque Country, whose regional police report separately. The Basque Ertzaintza reported 13 detainees, three people under investigation and more than 150 identified.

Barcelona saw one arrest after groups broke shop windows on Passeig de Gràcia, set bins alight and threw fireworks at officers. In Madrid, the march that began at Atocha at 18:00 in heavy rain ended with police charges and two people detained for attacking authority and public disorder. The government delegation put attendance in Madrid at 120,000, while the Sindicato de Inquilinas claimed 750,000.

Clashes continued near Plaza España and Gran Vía shortly before 21:00, where officers used pepper spray. Unions also complained that police used pepper spray against pickets earlier in the day at Mercamadrid. Frente Amplio and Podemos demanded the resignation of Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, turning a social protest into another fight over policing.

The political split was immediate. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the PP leader, called the strike a failure and urged parties and unions to condemn the violence. Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz called it a success. Alicia del Río, spokesperson for the Sindicato de Inquilinas, denounced what she called an escalation of police violence and said the union would wait for all the figures before demanding accountability. The government expressed 'maximum respect' for those who joined the strike.

Paraguay's Senate unanimously removed President Santiago Peña after the collapse of Ueno Bank, a digital lender that had about three million customers when the central bank intervened on 3 November. Peña, 47, submitted his resignation as support inside the Colorado Party ebbed, but Congress rejected it because resignation would have let him become a life senator with parliamentary immunity. He was detained and is now under house arrest.

Prosecutors accuse Peña of mismanagement and of administering funds for his own benefit. They say he took part in or influenced decisions that kept large public funds at Ueno despite alleged conflicts of interest, because he had been a partner and shareholder in the company that created the bank. Peña kept a stake in that company until a year before the crisis, after earlier serving as a central-bank economist and finance minister.

The immediate job is to get cash back to savers. On Wednesday the central bank said it had partially repaid 1,812,348 depositors, totalling about $643m out of roughly $2.8bn held by the bank when it was intervened. Pedro Acosta, a central-bank board member, said the advance-payment process was nearly complete for eligible depositors.

Fitch Ratings placed Paraguay's credit rating on watch for a possible downgrade, citing risks to public finances and the economy from the banking crisis. The Deposit Guarantee Fund protects up to about $37,000 per saver and bank, so depositors with larger balances must wait for the transfer of Ueno's assets and liabilities to other institutions. Acosta said that process starts next week and could bring news by the end of November.

Europe is starting winter with less gas in storage and higher prices on the screen. Gas Infrastructure Europe data for 8 November put EU underground storage at about 820 TWh, or 72.4% full, against 82.6% at the same point in 2025 and a five-year average 17 percentage points higher. Germany, the bloc's largest storage holder, stood at 58.95%, while Italy was at 88.9% and Poland at 97.6%.

Bloomberg reports that withdrawals accelerated in the previous week as temperatures fell, with net withdrawals almost six times higher than in the week before. European gas prices have risen nearly 200% since February, passing €100 per megawatt-hour in late October for the first time since December 2022. Diesel prices have reached record levels, kerosene has almost doubled, and German power prices have moved above the average for the corresponding period of 2022.

The squeeze is tied to the war in Iran and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for oil and LNG. The European Commission says Europe's energy import bill has risen by more than €127bn since the war began. Energy-intensive sectors such as construction, chemicals, fertilisers, agriculture and air transport are most exposed. In Thuringia, a porcelain factory with 182 years behind it is preparing to stop production and shut its kilns.

Bloomberg cites an ENTSOG scenario in which a colder than expected winter and limited global LNG supply could leave EU storage only 10% full at the end of winter. Avoiding that outcome would require a 15% cut in energy consumption. Weather models generally point to a mild winter, but cold spells in December and later months remain possible.