Morning Brief, Friday 13 November

Nvidia made Jensen Huang's exit immediate on Thursday and put Colette Kress, its finance chief since 2013, in interim control. The board also appointed Harvey C. Jones as its first chairman and opened a search for a permanent chief executive, including internal and external candidates.

Kress tried to steady staff and investors by pointing to the company's engineering base.

The resignation followed reports about Huang's affairs, including one with a businesswoman whom US intelligence suspects of being a Chinese spy, a claim Beijing denies. Reuters also reported a second relationship with an Nvidia employee, and the accounts have pulled Congress into the company's China exposure.

Chuck Schumer demanded that the Trump administration explain the alleged espionage case and asked what Donald Trump knew when he invited Huang aboard Air Force One. Hakeem Jeffries said the incoming Democratic-led Congress would review every Trump administration approval for Nvidia chip sales to China. Nvidia shares closed down 4.34% at $166.19 on Thursday, after falling 9.3% shortly after the resignation was announced in Madrid trading, and prediction markets put Ian Buck ahead of Kress for the permanent job.

Volodymyr Zelensky said in Dublin that the Ukraine-Russia-US negotiating track had been unblocked after he met Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who had returned from Moscow. The Ukrainian president said all parties accepted that Europe would join the next round as part of the negotiating team, rather than sit in a separate lane.

That matters in practical terms because security guarantees and reconstruction money sit mostly with Europe. Zelensky met sherpas from Britain, France, Germany and Italy, along with representatives of the European Commission and European Council, before the US envoys held their own talks with the same European grouping and Poland.

Antonio Costa said the EU was ready to take part and argued that Ukraine alone can negotiate territory, while the EU can discuss Ukraine's economy and European integration. He also put a figure on the bill: the IMF and European Commission estimate Ukraine's extra financing need for 2027 at €70bn, which the EU has already committed to cover.

The talks also produced movement on prisoners. Kushner said the agreement would repatriate thousands of captured soldiers, and Zelensky called it the largest exchange since the start of the invasion. Kyiv still wants an all-for-all swap, so the agreed deal leaves the wider prisoner question open.

Microsoft users lost access to Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365 and Copilot on Thursday, with North American reports arriving first before complaints spread to Italy, France, Canada and the United Kingdom. Downdetector logged more than 129,000 Outlook problem reports in one count and about 46,000 to 50,000 for the wider Microsoft 365 suite.

Microsoft first pointed to elevated infrastructure load, then narrowed the cause to a large number of servers that became unavailable without warning. The company paused deployments and configuration changes, restarted affected servers and began testing a configuration change after some servers failed automated health checks and dropped offline.

The failure spread beyond email. Microsoft's affected-services list included Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Defender XDR, and the company said users in any region could see connectivity problems. Italian reports said mail was returning gradually, but Microsoft had not given a timetable for full restoration in the latest updates.

AI firms felt the snag too. OpenAI said it was investigating trouble with Microsoft connectors, where new connections could be interrupted and tools might not work as expected, while Anthropic identified an upstream-provider problem affecting its Microsoft 365 connector. The outage landed on the same day that CISA issued an alert about an unknown Outlook flaw, which Italian reports said Microsoft had fixed two days earlier.

An Israeli airstrike hit the surgical department of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis shortly after midnight on Thursday. Gaza's Health Ministry said six people were killed, including a 52-year-old doctor and a 13-year-old boy, and hospital officials suspended surgeries, radiology work and laboratory services after several floors were damaged.

The Israeli military said it targeted Muhammad Abu Ismail, whom it described as the commander of Hamas's Khan Younis Brigade, and other militants hiding inside the hospital. It did not provide public evidence for the claim, and Hamas rejected the accusation as a war crime against a protected facility.

Doctors described smoke, rubble and the loss of one of their own colleagues. Goher Rahbour, a British surgeon volunteering at the hospital, said the recovery area was reduced to rubble and that he had operated alongside the dead surgeon only hours earlier. Ahmed al-Farra, the hospital's general director, said no warning came before the attack and that nearby facilities cannot provide the specialised operations Nasser had carried out.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus condemned the strike and said the operating theatres, recovery unit and intensive care unit were damaged. The WHO said it had documented 1,056 attacks on health facilities in Gaza since the offensive that followed 7 October 2023, and the Peace Council created by Donald Trump called for immediate implementation of his Gaza peace plan.

New York firefighters ended their search on Thursday after deciding no more victims were trapped in the rubble of a three-storey building that collapsed into a neighbouring construction excavation in Flatbush. Officials counted eight dead, including two children aged 9 and 10, and 18 injured, among them four firefighters.

The building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue held a medical-uniform shop on the ground floor and four apartments above. Witnesses said bricks began falling after loud hammering from the adjacent site, then the structure dropped into the excavation and tore away a shared wall with the neighbouring building.

A nearby resident, Dervie Mapp, watched the collapse from her kitchen window.

Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani said excavation work was under way next door, though the cause has not been established. Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised a thorough investigation and said he was concerned that work continued after an inspection report had found cracks in the north facade of the collapsed building.

The victims included immigrants from Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Trinidad and other places, and relatives waited near the site through the night for news. The Department of Buildings has begun inspecting about 100 other sites linked to five entities with ties to the collapsed building.

The Dutch House of Representatives approved the 2027 tax package by 76 votes to 74 on Thursday, but the narrow win split Prime Minister Rob Jetten's three-party minority coalition. The VVD, his right-wing partner, voted against the package after D66 and CDA struck a deal with PRO and Volt to raise about €1bn more from wealth and lower taxes on labour.

The bill now goes to the Eerste Kamer, where the parties backing it hold 34 seats and need 38 for a majority. That makes the arithmetic harder than the lower-house vote, where the Party for the Animals and Denk helped carry the package after a left-backed wealth-tax amendment passed first.

VVD leader Dilan Yesilgöz called the deal bad for the Netherlands and said it broke the coalition agreement. After the vote, VVD parliamentary leader Ruben Brekelmans said he had not expected the other coalition parties to move so far left.

Jetten skipped an EU leaders' summit in Ireland to attend the debate and told lawmakers the coalition needed a serious fresh start. Geert Wilders said the minority cabinet was effectively dead, while CDA leader Henri Bontenbal argued that rejecting the tax plan would have been disastrous for the Netherlands. A VVD finance minister must now carry out an amended plan that his own party opposed.