Kevin McCarthy unexpectedly ended his bid to become Speaker of America’s House of Representatives on the day his party had expected to elect him as nominee for the job. He had faced strong opposition from an increasingly assertive group of ardent conservatives who forced John Boehner to quit in frustration two weeks ago. They had sworn to block Mr McCarthy from winning the official Speaker election on the House floor on October 29th. That vote that may now be delayed.
America is planning to send warships close to China’s newly built artificial islands in the South China Sea in the next two weeks, signalling to the authorities in Beijing that it does not recognise their claims to a 12-nautical-mile zone around the reefs. America says the installations are being militarised, which China denies.
American officials said four cruise missiles fired by Russia from the Caspian sea had crashed in a remote part of Iran en route to their targets in Syria. Russia said all 26 missiles hit their targets. But Iran's official IRNA news agency said an unidentified object crashed in Ghozghapan, a village in a northern province, under the missiles' likely flight path.
Narendra Modi spoke about Hindu-Muslim relations yesterday, having stayed silent since the lynching last month of a Muslim man accused of eating beef, which his government says it wants to ban. The Indian prime minister told a rally that Hindus and Muslims should fight poverty, not each other. Meanwhile members of his Hindu-nationalist party beat a Muslim politician on the floor of Kashmir’s state assembly for having served beef at a private party.
Bill Gross, the “bond king” who ran Pimco’s Total Return Fund between 1987 and 2014, sued his former employer and its parent, Allianz, a big German insurer, for at least $200m, claiming he had been wrongfully pushed out. The fund has shrunk by about two-thirds, to $95 billion, since Mr Gross’s departure. He promises to give any legal winnings to charity.
Volkswagen’s boss in America offered a congressional hearing a “sincere apology” for the company’s use of “defeat devices” which helped diesel engines cheat in emissions tests. Stressing that he was not an engineer, Michael Horn blamed “a couple of software engineers” for the modification, of which he said he had no prior knowledge. German prosecutors searched the carmaker’s headquarters.
Svetlana Alexievich, an author from Belarus, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in a rare award to a writer of non-fiction. The Swedish prize-givers praised her “polyphonic writing” as a “monument to suffering and courage in our time”. Her hallmark is the use of individual voices recounting the traumas of war and of upheavals such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Her books are not published in Belarus.
