Afternoon edition··Coverage: since this morning’s brief (~08:00 → 13:10 CEST)
What matters
The chemistry Nobel goes to Kagan and Soai for mirror-image chemistry; Russia’s strike toll climbs to 20 and a ship sinks off Bulgaria; Berlin blocks Cosco’s Hamburg logistics deal.
Kagan (b. 1930, Université Paris-Sud, France) and Soai (b. 1950, Tokyo University of Science, Japan) share the prize “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis”.
The puzzle: life is homochiral — proteins use only one of the two mirror-image forms of amino acids — yet ordinary reactions make both forms in equal amounts.
Kagan, 1986: a new way of steering reactions that produced a bigger excess of one mirror image than was thought possible (the “non-linear effect”).
Why it matters —A prize for a century-old origin-of-life question that also feeds straight into how single-mirror-image drugs are made today.
Material update to this morning’s card: Kyiv Post now counts 20 dead across Ukraine from the overnight and morning missile and drone assault.
In Pryluky (Chernihiv region, ~150 km east of Kyiv) a missile hit a five-storey apartment block; the regional governor put the toll there at 14, including four children, with 50 injured.
Why it matters —A sunk ship in a NATO member’s waters takes the war at sea closer to the alliance, on the same day as one of the deadliest strikes on Ukrainian cities this autumn.
Cabinet decision on Wednesday; the Economy Ministry will now issue the ban under the Foreign Trade and Payments Act.
Ministry spokesman: the purchase “would have deepened dependencies and endangered the resilience of Germany’s and the EU’s supply chains”.
Why it matters —After the 2022 Tollerort compromise, Berlin now says no outright to Chinese control of port logistics, in line with its tougher line on China.
New since yesterday’s arrest: per the Telegraph, MI6, GCHQ and several US services are reviewing all sensitive intel shared with European allies in the period, to protect agents and informants.
The accusation: after leaving office, the 80-year-old allegedly got ~2,000 secret documents via his former office head and wrote an analysis for a foreign intelligence apparatus; some came from partner services.
Why it matters —The damage could reach beyond Germany: if allied sources were exposed, intelligence sharing with Berlin may cool for a while.
The Finnish Supervisory Agency (LVV) says work at one site went ahead without a mandatory environmental impact assessment; anything that would “significantly alter the environment” must stop by 23 October.
The order covers preparatory work at Muhos and Kajaani: removing trees and topsoil, building site roads and storage areas, and changing ditches.
Why it matters —The AI data-centre boom is running into Europe’s environmental rules on the ground — here less than a month after the investment was announced.
The Japan Fair Trade Commission opened compulsory, warrant-backed investigations on Wednesday on suspicion of violating the Antimonopoly Act.
The four control more than 90% of a beer market worth over ¥1tn a year and are suspected of coordinating the timing and size of price rises for beer, low-malt beer and beer-like drinks over several years.
Thuringia’s premier Mario Voigt (CDU) withdrew his lawsuit against TU Chemnitz revoking his doctorate over plagiarism; he says the fight costs time he owes the state.DER SPIEGEL
Next Bun ships `bun check`, a built-in TypeScript type checker written in Rust; a merged PR aligns it with `tsc --noEmit`. Jarred Sumner’s goal: ahead-of-time compiled JS/TS that rivals Go.Jarred Sumner on XGitHub — oven-sh/bun #44665
