YEMEN - Saudi-backed government forces stand at a desert checkpoint, their rifles slung over their shoulders, oblivious to the drone hovering above as it drops a small blue grenade. It falls from a clear sky with no roar of jets, before exploding with devastating effect. In another corner of Yemen’s contested front lines, videos show the Houthis using another first-person-view (FPV) drone to target tanks in the sand. Drones have become the Houthi fighters’ most lethal weapon in their efforts to control the Bab al-Mandeb strait, one of the world’s most important shipping lanes. Since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz on February 28 in retaliation for Donald Trump’s war, the Bab al-Mandeb, on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, has taken on an outsized importance. However, FPV drones – cheap, precise and nearly impossible to stop – are now reshaping a conflict that has been rumbling for 12 years.

IRAN - Iranian officials took to social media on Tuesday and Wednesday to gloat over the Democrat Party’s big win in the US midterm elections, taking it as a sign of the American public accepting Iranian victory and turning against President Donald Trump over his military action against Tehran. “Conscience or the cost of living, Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message,” Iranian parliamentary speaker and chief negotiator Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf said on social media platform X. Khamenei said “the Great Satan” still “seeks the unconditional surrender of the Iranian nation,” but “the situation in the Persian Gulf, particularly the Strait of Hormuz, has exposed the myth of an invincible America.” Khamenei adviser Mohammad Mokhber said Trump was “slapped in the face by his own people” on Tuesday night. “The true winner in this arena was Iran, which transferred the cost of the war into the United States,” he said.

UK - In his 2020 book Apocalypse How?, Oliver Letwin, the former Tory minister, imagines a doomsday scenario where Britain’s electricity grid collapses, taking down everything that relies on an internet connection. His chilling message was straightforward. The system that controls the electricity grid and the internet cannot be divorced, and in racing towards a low-carbon system for power generation, we have lost the capacity to quickly bring the grid – and our Wi-Fi systems – back online after a blackout. It was reading his book as light relief in the first wave of the Covid pandemic that made me “dumb down” our smart home. But it doesn’t take an apocalyptic book to see the future. The electricity grid is already creaking without anyone hacking it. The vulnerabilities of our internet-powered economy are already top of mind after the widespread supermarket-fridge hacks across Europe. Hackers turned off the cooling on fridges at more than 700 French supermarkets last month. On Monday, it happened again. The French supermarkets lost their yoghurt. If Britain gets this wrong, we lose the lights. And, as Letwin warned, we may struggle to turn them back on.

FRANCE - Hackers have targeted France’s national blood bank, raising the temperature of its cold storage rooms to boiling point. Facilities at Coolworld, a service provider for the country’s national service, were heated to 110C overnight on Sunday after hackers gained access to the temperature settings remotely, French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné reported. The rooms are normally kept at -30C to preserve donor blood samples. The French Blood Establishment (EFS) said an on-duty technician had detected the unusual rise in temperatures at the facilities on Sunday night. The worker then notified the EFS of the rising temperatures, helping to prevent wider disruption. The Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region was the worst affected, but France’s health ministry said there had been no consequences for patients and no plasma had been destroyed.

UK - The ‘smart home’ crammed with pointless gadgetry is the monstrous child of the ‘Internet of Things’ fad. Commercial refrigerators are being hacked across Europe, putting our food supply in peril. The latest incident this week is even affecting businesses in Britain, with firms in the meat industry saying their fridges defrosted as temperatures ballooned. How can hackers do this? It’s because the equipment is connected to the internet, allowing the device to be controlled remotely, including by nefarious third parties. For this we can thank one of the biggest business fads of the Noughties: the “Internet of Things”, or IoT. Don’t knock it on principle, or blame the supermarkets or the cold supply chains for the crisis. Every day they perform miracles, and can hardly be blamed for striving to become more efficient. It’s a competitive market, and internet connectivity makes it easy to know whether a fridge has failed, and when stock is getting low. Today, our cars are “smart” too. They, like supermarket fridges, can be controlled remotely – which means they are potentially drones that just haven’t been given a target yet. The bill for globalisation has arrived, and the damage could get worse.

UK - The power in my house died, with a faint groan, like the ghost of electricity trying to tell me something. Was it the boiler, the fridge, or the freezer that made that sad, alarming, desolate sound? Or was it the desktop computer, or the laptop? Or the kitchen fan? It was early morning and just about light, so at least we were not groping for a torch. But almost everything I rely on to live as I do – especially, nowadays, computers – depends utterly on a reliable power supply. I thought the moment I had long feared had arrived. Britain’s power system trembles all the time on the edge of a disastrous blackout which could take days to repair and could send our economy stumbling over the precipice.

UK - With cavalier foolishness, how I laughed when Wes Streeting suggested that we should prepare for catastrophe by stocking up with tins of baked beans, bottled water and wind-up radios. But around 10pm on Saturday, October 24 in Kent, Storm Boelo brought the realisation that maybe he had a point. When a tree outside our house came down in the high winds and took out power lines and broadband cables, our comfortable digitally connected existence came crashing down with it. Now, 12 days on, I am still without internet, landline telephone, Alexa, Netflix et al — and it feels like we are living in deprived isolation from the rest of the civilised world. “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone,” Joni Mitchell sang in Big Yellow Taxi — and it’s true.

IRAN - The playbook of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards is neither a secret nor a bluff. If Donald Trump launches a second round of Operation Fury and persists in trying to bomb their regime to its knees, they will retaliate with a scorched-earth policy across the Middle East. They will escalate from attacks on individual vessels to wholesale attacks on the Gulf’s energy and transport infrastructure, drastically tightening a global energy market that has already drawn down a billion barrels of oil inventory and has no margin left for further shocks. “Simply put, the world has eroded its supply buffers,” says Sultan Al Jaber, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. The guards will hit ports, terminals, refineries, pipelines, pumping stations, storage tanks, offshore rigs and logistics hubs. They may well hit electricity systems, which are needed to run the region’s desalination plants and provide almost all the drinking water for the coastal cities on the Gulf shore. The Pentagon is still angling for one last big publicity victory, something Ayatollah Khamenei is determined to deny the enemy that maimed him and killed his father, wife, son and sister.

IRAN - Iran's Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a key negotiator in US-Iran talks, has commented on the US midterm election results. "Conscience or the cost of living, Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message," he writes on X. "If the US [government] betrays their public will to serve international paymasters and blackmailers, it will learn our NO comes with a nightmare." Speaking to Fox News earlier, Trump said "we have to do something large" when asked about reports the US was planning further strikes on Iran - adding it could involve a "heavy hit".

USA - Donald Trump lost control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in a disastrous midterm election that threatens to derail the final years of his presidency. Democrats carved deep inroads into Republican heartlands in a blue wave that rolled across the country on Tuesday, winning both chambers and breaking long-standing records along the way. Washington is now set for political deadlock as Mr Trump will struggle to pass legislation against a considerable Democratic majority. He told The New York Times that he was “absolutely willing to accept those results”. Mr Trump did, however, post a picture of a red hat with the word “veto” written on it, and pledged to spike any Democratic legislation using his executive power.