Evening Brief, Friday 13 November

Nvidia moved Colette Kress into the chief executive's chair on an interim basis after Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday, ending a 33-year run at the top of the AI-chip group. Kress has run the company's finances for 13 years, and the board is now weighing internal and external candidates for a permanent successor. Huang, 63, remains Nvidia's largest individual shareholder with a 3.6% stake, so his departure removes the public face of the company without removing his financial interest in it. Nvidia shares fell more than 4% after the announcement.

The Megaspeed thread is now a Washington problem too. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Treasury and other agencies had supported putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months, but that Commerce held the pen. US authorities have investigated whether the Singapore company smuggled Nvidia chips into China, and Senate and House Republicans are pressing Huang, Nvidia's lawyers and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for testimony. Export licences for blacklisted firms would sit with Commerce, which makes the delay more than a personnel quarrel.

Donald Trump floated former Apple chief executive Tim Cook as a replacement, but Nvidia has not endorsed that idea and Apple has not commented. Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffè of SDA Bocconi turned the succession problem into a governance problem.

That is a hard structure to hand over in a hurry, especially at a company whose chips sit inside American export-control policy and Chinese AI ambitions.

Two days of Ukrainian, Russian and American talks in Abu Dhabi ended without a peace breakthrough, but the sides agreed on a large exchange of prisoners of war. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner then met Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Dublin. Jared Kushner said the next round would widen to include European partners, and Witkoff told reporters that Europeans would be present at the next session. Kyiv says the talks with Moscow have been unblocked, with thousands of soldiers potentially covered by the prisoner exchange.

Moscow is already setting the price of that extra chair. Dmitry Peskov said Russia would decide on an expanded format only after it understood Europe's intentions and its willingness to contribute to the peace process. He accused European governments of talking peace while preparing a peacekeeping contingent for Ukraine. Kaja Kallas said in Dublin that she was ready to represent the European Union in talks with Russia, though Peskov declined to comment on names and said they changed by the hour.

Bild reported a Russian proposal that reaches well beyond Ukraine. It would require Finland to leave NATO, remove NATO forces from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, make Ukraine non-aligned, hand Russia all of Donbas and demilitarise Odesa and Mykolaiv. Russia would in return withdraw nuclear weapons from Belarus and pull troops from Transnistria, according to the report. Finnish Defence Minister Antti Hakkanen called the demands outrageous, and Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen said NATO membership belongs to Finland and the alliance. Finland joined NATO in April 2023, after Russia's full-scale invasion had begun.

Microsoft's 365 outage hit Exchange Online first, then spread through calendars, applications and collaboration tools. Teams, SharePoint and Copilot also misfired in places, though many video meetings kept running. Microsoft flagged trouble with Power Automate, Microsoft Graph APIs and business applications, which explains why a broken mailbox can now jam payroll, approvals and invoices that look, on paper, like separate systems.

Belgium felt the failure in public administration and universities. The federal body coordinating data exchange between social-security institutions said it could not send or receive email from 18:00 on 12 November, and universities in Brussels, Louvain and Liege reported disrupted mail, calendars or Microsoft apps. Dutch municipalities, provincial administrations, courts, universities, broadcasters and medical organisations also reported problems. Courts could still be reached by telephone, which suddenly looked like a useful old technology.

The sharpest consequence came in British healthcare. Rachel Harrison of the GMB union said staff answering NHS 111 and 999 calls could not pass patient information as usual, creating a backlog of pending cases. The National Pharmacy Association said communication between pharmacies, GP surgeries and some patients was also hampered. Microsoft said it had ruled out malicious action and had seen early signs of recovery, but it warned that email delays could last up to 48 hours. Its shares fell 1.48% to $515.27 at the start of Nasdaq trading.

The International Energy Agency said world oil supply overtook demand in October for the first time since the Iran war began at the end of February. Supply rose by 2.3m barrels a day to 105.4m, helped by stronger Gulf exports despite attacks on energy infrastructure and tankers. The agency called the market's improvement tentative, which is central-bank language applied to barrels: better, but not yet comfortable.

Gulf exports excluding Oman reached 18.4m barrels a day in October, still 26% below pre-war levels. Observed global inventories rose by 52m barrels, or 1.7m barrels a day, the first build since June after three months of drawdowns. The IEA also raised its supply outlook, saying output from the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Guyana would add 1.6m barrels a day this year and offset part of the Middle East and Russian losses.

Prices tell the less cheerful part of the story. Dated Brent has fallen to about $95 a barrel from $136 in early October, but jet fuel and diesel remain expensive because crude does not become usable product without enough refining capacity. Russian diesel supply has been cut by attacks on energy infrastructure, and Middle Eastern refined-product exports remain disrupted. The IEA says it will accelerate the release of diesel emergency reserves in the coming months, while it forecasts demand at 102.3m barrels a day in 2026 before a 2027 rebound.

A three-storey building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn collapsed into a hole beside a neighbouring construction site, killing eight people and injuring 18. City records describe four apartments above commercial space, and officials said the dead included six adults and two children. Firefighters reached the scene within a minute and searched through rain, mattresses, a broken sink and household debris before ending the rescue phase on 12 November.

Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez opened a criminal inquiry to determine whether misconduct contributed to the collapse. The Buildings Department said the adjacent site had an active permit for excavation and foundation work, and engineers began checking nearby structures. A detailed 311 complaint filed after the collapse suggested that construction work next door may have played a part, and law-enforcement officials said that complaint would be one focus of the inquiry. The cause remains unclear.

Surveillance video verified by The New York Times showed a third-floor apartment as walls caved in, windows blew out and floors shook while a toddler played nearby. The family in that flat survived. Dervie Mapp, a 67-year-old woman and retiree, watched from her kitchen window as the building fell and sent bricks and metal across the street.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said possible misconduct by construction companies should be investigated, and police and buildings officials now control the site.