OchtendKrant: news for Saturday 31 October 2026
No breakthrough on Friday as senior ministers take the ten-billion-euro talks into the weekend
The inner cabinet again went through the notes attached to the budget table without a major step forward; a deal is needed by Tuesday to avoid an emergency budget.
Tankers burn and sit idle near Hormuz as Trump is briefed on military options against Iran
7 sources · La Libre, De Morgen, RTBF +International arm beats fears and investors send Proximus almost 12 percent higher
7 sources · Trends, La Libre, De Tijd +Army turns to Imec: Leuven chip centre gets ten million euros a year for defence research
3 sources · VRT NWS, imec, The Brussels TimesFour goals before the break put Club Brugge top in Waregem, with Tresoldi decisive again
3 sources · Sporza, DH, HLNBelgium
All of BelgiumFinance inspectors said no, yet the justice ministry helped pay for Verlinden's costly UN trip
A business-class flight from New York to Abu Dhabi cost 11,500 euros; her office calls her attendance essential, while the opposition is asking questions.
4 sources · VRT NWS, La Libre, De MorgenProsecutor sees Nainggolan as a money launderer rather than a drug dealer and seeks two years
At the trial of a cocaine ring in Brussels, prosecutors also want a 105,000-euro fine for the former Red Devil; his lawyers will plead for acquittal on 13 November.
4 sources · VRT NWS, Bruzz, La Libre +Welfare centres give a cool reception to Van Bossuyt's circular on benefit claimants' readiness to work
The minister lists when someone is insufficiently willing to work and says the approach has been too lax for too long; the federations of welfare centres see no added value and regret the lack of consultation.
4 sources · Bruzz, La LibreBirth grant for the eldest child only? Council of State sees a possible clash with the constitution
Its opinion on Flemish cuts to the Groeipakket child benefit is sharp; the opposition and the Gezinsbond family organisation are urging the Diependaele government to rethink its plans.
4 sources · VRT NWS, De Morgen, GezinsbondWorld
All of WorldPoland's fight over its constitutional judges boils over as the court's president is sidelined and Nawrocki cuts short a trip
A judge appointed under the Tusk government suspended court president Swieczkowski; the court calls it a coup and the president went to the building himself overnight.
7 sources · VRT NWS, La Libre, HLN +No group photo with Lavrov at the G20 in Atlanta, but a green light for 500 Patriots for Ukraine
Kaja Kallas saw no concession at all from the Russian minister; on Saturday Zelensky meets Erdogan in Istanbul to discuss the war and the Black Sea.
9 sources · La Libre, HLN, De Morgen +Final weekend before the midterms: nearly 48 million votes already cast as Trump heads to Iowa and Kansas
Democrats are aiming for the House and possibly the Senate; the president still sees a chance for his party but admits history is against him.
8 sources · La DH, De Morgen, RTBF +Economy
All of EconomyIreland props up eurozone growth while France shrinks and gets a warning from Fitch
The eurozone grew 0.4 percent in the third quarter, but only half that without Ireland; French inflation climbs to 3.4 percent.
9 sources · Trends, Business AM, HLN +Intel loses almost 30 percent in a single day as the Nasdaq slides nearly 3 percent
Weak guidance from the chipmaker and costly AI investment at Amazon fuel investor doubts; the Brussels market holds up.
9 sources · La Libre, De Tijd, De Morgen +Europe opens its strategic oil stocks as a barrel of Brent stays stuck above 110 dollars
The oil market ends October up around 15 percent; Brussels itself doubts the released barrels will do much to bring prices down.
6 sources · Trends, Business AM, La LibreTech
All of TechAI & LLMs
One robots.txt line is meant to shield websites from training by four big AI developers
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic will honour a shared signal that lets publishers refuse in one go to have their content feed models.
3 sources · The Verge, Search Engine RoundtableNvidia under double scrutiny: questions over Hugging Face and a spy report involving Jensen Huang
The US Justice Department is probing competition concerns around the acquisition of the AI platform, while a newspaper investigation sheds light on the chief executive's contacts with a suspected Chinese asset.
4 sources · Heise, VRT NWS, CNBC +Google's computing satellite runs Gemma 4 in orbit and delivers a haiku
The Project Suncatcher prototype is meant to show whether AI chips in space can cope with heat and radiation, on the road to data centres in orbit.
2 sources · TechCrunch, The VergeApple
Chinese iPhone users will get Apple's AI features in December, without the revamped Siri
Apple confirms that testing starts on 4 November with an iOS 27.3 beta, and is working with Alibaba in China on the Qwen chatbot.
3 sources · MacRumors, The Verge, 9to5MacCracks in the folding screen: Apple issues store guidance for the iPhone Duo, Samsung pokes fun
Apple speaks of a small number of affected units and replaces them, while iFixit points to the hinge as the cause.
5 sources · MacRumors, CNBC, EngadgetProgramming languages
Fake Claude Code extension in Cursor's store plants a backdoor on up to 5,000 developers' machines
For eleven hours an infected version of the extension sat in the AI code editor's marketplace; how it got there is still unclear.
4 sources · Ars Technica, Wired, The Register +GitHub and Google turn their developer tools into control rooms for swarms of AI agents
Copilot spreads work across parallel agents in several repositories, while Android Studio now lets developers choose from more than forty agents by other makers.
4 sources · InfoWorld, GitHub Blog, Android Developers Blog +Science
All of ScienceYerevan biodiversity summit ends with a plan to change course, but funding stays largely unresolved
After two weeks of difficult talks, nearly 200 countries agreed overnight from Friday to Saturday on a midterm review and on finance, but thorny issues have been pushed to the next summit.
5 sources · La Libre, BBC, RFI +Leuven sewage flagged a parvovirus wave a year before the official alert, thanks to a broad virus scan
KU Leuven researchers found 339 virus species in two and a half years of wastewater with a single technique, and now want to test it at other treatment plants.
3 sources · VRT NWS, KU Leuven, Nature WaterShearwaters drift slightly off course when their internal clock falls behind the sun
Twenty years of GPS data from more than a thousand seabirds show that rapid flights across lines of longitude throw off their sun compass, according to a University of Oxford study.
3 sources · The Guardian, NPR, EurekAlertSport
All of SportNinth place in Mexico would be enough to crown Antonelli, as Leclerc sets the fastest time twice on Friday
The 20-year-old Italian can become the youngest world champion ever on Sunday, while Verstappen and Lawson each drop a place after colliding in practice.
5 sources · Sporza, DH, Formula 1 +Thibau Nys starts his winter on the Koppenberg, where in-form Vanthourenhout has an unhappy history
On Sunday, 1 November, the Koppenbergcross in Oudenaarde opens the X2O Trofee. In the women's race, world champion Lucinda Brand defends her title and Fem van Empel makes an emotional return.
4 sources · Wielerflits, Sporza, HLN