The World

BELGRADE — Serbians vote on Sunday in an early parliamentary election that will decide whether the student-led movement behind nearly two years of protests can end Aleksandar Vučić's 14-year hold on power, according to the Washington Post. Vučić, whom the Post describes as a Russia-backed populist, leads his party's list. The students are running their own slate, and the race is widely described as tight. Election-day access has itself become a dispute: Serbia's election commission rejected all complaints over the siting of overseas polling stations, according to the Associated Press. The final list abroad has 93 stations, 12 more than in 2023, and nine of the new ones are in neighboring Bosnia, where ethnic Serbs have mostly backed Vučić's party. Opposition groups and independent monitors are expected to scrutinize the count closely. A new government would take shape in the weeks after the vote.

AMMAN — Gunmen opened fire at a church in Jordan, killing seven people, in an attack that authorities have labeled terrorism. King Abdullah has promised the harshest retaliation, according to Times of Israel reporting on Friday. Church attacks of this kind are rare in Jordan, a U.S.-aligned monarchy with a small Christian minority that borders Israel, the West Bank, Syria and Iraq. The attack comes as the region is on edge. Israel has launched a major operation in Hebron after a deadly shooting, a Houthi missile aimed at Riyadh was intercepted overnight, and U.S. intelligence is warning of Iranian plots against American officials. No group had been reported as claiming responsibility in the coverage available, and the identities and motives of the attackers have not been established. Crisis Group had already listed Jordan among the countries it was tracking closely this month.

CARACAS — Thousands of Venezuelans marched on Thursday, the first national protest in nearly two years according to Al Jazeera. They demanded that the interim government of Delcy Rodríguez set a date for a presidential election. The marches came a day after the third round of U.S.-backed talks closed with no timetable. Protesters back July 24, 2027, a date no authority has adopted. The Rio Times reports that negotiator Dinorah Figuera has said a vote could fall between late 2027 and early 2028 if credible guarantees exist. The State Department called the round productive, citing a review of repressive laws, more than 70 unblocked websites and progress toward a new Supreme Court. A joint commission is to manage Venezuelan gold held in London for earthquake victims. The fourth round is reported for Nov. 11 to 15. Turnout figures are unverified, and opposition leader María Corina Machado is not at the table.

SEOUL — South Korea's military estimates that North Korea has planted about 960,000 landmines in the Demilitarized Zone since 2024, SBS News reported on Saturday. Seoul has proposed military talks with Pyongyang on issues around the Military Demarcation Line that splits the zone. No response from the North has been reported. The estimate underscores how far the border has hardened. The Diplomat has been running analysis on a renewed loudspeaker standoff along the frontier, which it says differs from earlier rounds, and on strains in the U.S.-South Korea alliance. It has also covered Pyongyang's efforts to balance its ties with Russia and China. South Korea's ruling Democratic Party is meanwhile sliding in the polls, according to The Diplomat. The landmine figure is a South Korean military estimate and has not been independently verified.

Researchers at the cybersecurity firm ESET reported Thursday that the Russian state-sponsored group Sandworm worked with another actor, tracked as UAC-0099, in a destructive attack on a Ukrainian grain logistics company last year. The intruders used a previously undocumented backdoor, MythicRatatoskr, which communicated with a command server hosted inside the volunteer-run Yggdrasil mesh network. Using such a peer-to-peer network makes the attacker's infrastructure harder to trace and take down. The operation ended with a data-wiping step that used the SDelete utility, pushed out through Active Directory Group Policy. ESET says it knows of no earlier case of a state-aligned group abusing Yggdrasil this way, and suggests other adversaries may adopt similar experimental networks. The findings come from the vendor's own analysis and attribution, not from a government statement.

REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft said Wednesday that a China-linked group it tracks as Storm-0940 was behind the recent compromise of the ConnectWise Cloud Backup application. According to Microsoft's account, as reported by SecurityWeek and The Hacker News, the group has used an AI-driven penetration-testing framework called Artex since early September to speed up scanning, password spraying and abuse of OAuth applications at downstream victims. Hundreds of organizations were targeted, and the attackers obtained privileged access in some environments. Storm-0940 has been active since at least 2021 and is known for password spraying and exploiting exposed internet-facing applications. The attribution rests on Microsoft's own telemetry and has not been confirmed by a government agency. Beijing has routinely denied such allegations. ConnectWise customers are mostly managed service providers, which can give an intruder a path into many client networks.

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday it has blocked two devices, a dashboard camera and a wireless video transmitter, because they contain chips made by HiSilicon, a Huawei subsidiary. It is the first enforcement under rules that took effect October 13. Those rules bar authorization of devices containing smart components made by companies on the FCC's Covered List, closing a gap that let a different manufacturer's product carry such parts. The FCC quoted HiSilicon's own marketing, which describes the chip as designed for surveillance and equipped with face detection. Chairman Brendan Carr called such products an unacceptable risk. Neither device had yet been authorized, and the FCC did not name the manufacturers, models or how the chips were found. The agency said more enforcement will follow. The FCC has not claimed the devices were used for spying.