🇺🇸🇮🇱🇵🇸⚡️ — An investigation by The Telegraph has uncovered potential conflicts of interest involving members of the Board of Peace, the Trump-led organization responsible for overseeing Gaza's reconstruction and postwar governance.

Five board members have financial connections to Israeli defense manufacturer Smart Shooter, which recently secured a U.S. military contract worth up to $150 million. The company produces AI-assisted rifle sights, robotic weapon systems and armed drones that have been used by Israeli forces in Gaza.

Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, a leading figure on the board, runs Affinity Partners, an investment firm backed by billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. The firm holds a 7.4% stake in Israel's Phoenix Financial, which invests in companies linked to the Israeli military, including Smart Shooter.

The investigation also identified business interests connected to Israeli settlement development in the occupied West Bank, a company facing U.S. litigation over allegations involving Hamas tunnels, a multibillion-dollar Trump golf resort project in Qatar, and a cybersecurity company linked to the creator of Pegasus spyware.

Officials involved in the initiative rejected the allegations of conflicts of interest.

🇾🇪⚔️🇸🇦 The Wall Street Journal reports Saudi king, Mohammed bin Salman al Saud (MBS) is changing palaces and bunkers every night to avoid assassination

The WSJ also reports that the Houthi missile campaign against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia may erase any GDP growth the country was forecasted to have this year and send it into recession

Not only did Ansarallah harm the KSA's oil industry by targeting its refineries, oil export terminals and more recently, its oil fields, the recent attacks on the Riyadh Airport are "jeopardizing Saudi efforts to build travel and tourism into a pillar of the economy".

The Future Investment Initiative, an investment summit hosted by the KSA each year is scheduled to take place in a few weeks with big U.S. CEOs like Larry Fink, Jamie Dimon and Ray Dalio invited to speak but its unlikely that they will show up in person due to the threats of missile attacks.

The costs of repairing infrastructure, funding for the KSA military and the Yemeni Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) are widening the KSA's budget deficit threatening the country's financial stability. This could cause ripple effects in the U.S. as the KSA is a major investor and financier of tech industry and artificial intelligence projects and MBS may be forced to cut back some of these investments to fund the war against the Houthis.

President Trump told reporters over the weekend that the U.S. was in communication with the Houthis but might join Saudi strikes on the militant group. “What they did was very bad,” the president said Saturday night.

Foreign investment fell in the first two quarters of the year and is running well behind the crown prince’s 2030 target. Rising defense and infrastructure costs threaten to siphon away money needed for the economic diversification drive. Even the kingdom’s push to become an AI hub now carries new risks, with data centers emerging as targets.

Many of the enormous projects spearheaded by Prince Mohammed are stalled or under review. In January, Saudi Arabia gave up on plans to host the 2029 Asian Winter Games. It still has to find a way to fund the World Expo in 2030 and the soccer World Cup four years later.

The non-oil side of the country’s economy was smaller in the second quarter than in the first, according to Capital Economics. The Saudi Finance Ministry now expects GDP to shrink by 3.6% in 2026.

🔗 https://archive.ph/a9uet

🇮🇱🇵🇸 How Israel made it impossible for most Palestinians in Gaza to reclaim their properties

A collateral casualty of Israel indiscriminate carpet bombing of the settlements in Gaza are the property deeds of millions of Gazans who got burned or buried under the rubble

Retrieving these deeds is vital for Palestinians to preserve their properties and rights to their lands as Israel and U.S. president Donald Trump Board of Peace plan to redraw the administrative makeup of Gaza and rebuild it with no regard for the previous land owners.

Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has gone on record, previously, lamenting the lack of interest of European countries to take in Palestinians from Gaza and clear the land for his real-estate companies to build luxury resorts and other facilities. Kushner is a leading figure in Trump's Board of Peace.

The IDF also wants to keep all the bases it has built in Gaza on top of the ruined neighbourhoods.

A US military engineering map used at the CMCC in late 2025 seen by the FT showed a “UAE Temporary Emirates Housing Complex” planned on an area marked as public land. “US Planned Community Area” covered public land, private land and unlabelled land. Both areas were marked as “Rafah Clearance Zone”. 

Such claims are driving Palestinian legal aid attorneys on a mission to prove to whom the land belongs. They work with local organisations, aid groups and as independent lawyers, using standards of proof agreed by an international working group.

With nearly all of Gaza’s physical archives having been destroyed, the retrieval effort has concentrated on the enclave’s many bureaucracies that digitised records before the war.

🔗 https://archive.ph/jGJZX

🇧🇪🌍 ‘Belgian students’ when asked what they’re protesting against: “we don’t know, we’re here to destroy everything”.

European people can’t comprehend this because we’re simply not the same. They destroy. It’s what they do. It’s who they are.

Politicians now come up with all sorts of fake ‘solutions’: more money for education, more youth detention centres, military conscription, … but it’s all nonsense.

There is only one real solution: they have to go back.

🔗 Dries Van Langenhove (@DVanLangenhove)

🚢 Aframax TCE hit $325,000/day on the US Gulf–UK Continent route. That’s an increase of $84,750/day in one week.

The tanker rally is no longer just a VLCC story. Tight availability is pushing earnings higher across multiple crude-carrier sizes.

🔗 Marhelm Data

For Lloyd's List recap for the first week of October on tanker rates see below

📎 https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1158620/Tanker-rates-already-higher-than-most-imagined-possible-just-spiked-again

🚢 DHT Holdings Reports Q3 Fleet Earnings of $141,300 Per Day as Fourth-Quarter Tanker Rates Rise

In a business update released on 12 October 2026, the crude oil tanker operator said its Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) operating in the spot market generated estimated TCE earnings of $167,100 per day during the third quarter.

VLCCs operating under time-charter agreements earned an estimated $114,200 per day over the same period.

The quarterly estimates were based on 2,055 revenue days, including 1,054 days attributable to vessels operating in the spot market.

Looking ahead, DHT reported that approximately 50% of its available spot-market days for the fourth quarter had already been booked at an average rate of $509,100 per day, calculated on a discharge-to-discharge basis.

Including both spot-market and time-charter operations, the company said approximately 78% of available fourth-quarter revenue days had been secured at an estimated average rate of $225,200 per day.

🔗 https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/dht-holdings-reports-q3-fleet-110506405.html

🇫🇷🗳 France, Toluna-Harris poll:

Scenario: Glucksmann (PS/PP-S&D) and Attal (RE-RE) run

Presidential election

Le Pen (RN-PfE): 36%
Mélenchon (LFI-LEFT): 18%
Attal (RE-RE): 12%
Glucksmann (PS/PP-S&D): 11%
Retailleau (LR-EPP): 10%
Zemmour (REC-ESN): 5%
Tondelier (LÉ-Greens/EFA): 3%
Dupont-Aignan (DLF→ECR): 2%
Roussel (PCF-LEFT): 2%
Arthaud (*): 1%

Fieldwork: 05-08 October 2026
Sample size: 2,004

📝: Glucksmann was elected by the social-dems with the hopes of taking away voters from Jean-Luc Mélenchon but only succeeded in dividing the center even further.

🔗 Europe Elects