Australian MP Helen Haines Critically Injured in Apparent Deliberate Car Attack

This is the morning edition of the One News Page Global Briefing, for Tuesday, the twentieth of October, twenty twenty-six. Here is what matters now.

Australian independent M P Helen Haines, sixty-five, is in critical condition after being struck by an S U V outside her electoral office in Wangaratta, Victoria, on Monday afternoon. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the incident as an apparent deliberate attack. Police said a forty-three-year-old male driver was detained by civilians and then arrested, and officers found a knife in his vehicle. Victoria police said there is no ongoing threat to the community and nothing so far indicates the suspect and Haines knew each other. The country’s counterterrorism team has been activated as the investigation continues.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians harvesting olives across the occupied West Bank on Friday, part of a surge of violence timed to disrupt the annual olive harvest. Masked settlers wielding clubs and stones set fire to cars and trees, beat residents and severely injured Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine. A day later, Belgium reported that masked settlers had also allegedly attacked European diplomats and a French mayor in the West Bank, drawing international condemnation.

At the Vatican, Pope Leo X I V is returning to public duties after surgery for lung cancer. He was discharged from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital on Saturday, four days after doctors removed the lower lobe of his right lung to extract a cancerous tumour. On Sunday he appeared unaided in St Peter’s Square to recite the Angelus prayer, telling the crowd that the delicate phase had passed and that he would gradually resume his activities. He is scheduled to hold a general audience with pilgrims at the Vatican on twenty October and still plans to travel to Latin America in November.

In Kenya, a court has convicted self-proclaimed pastor Paul Mackenzie, his wife Rhoda Maweu and twenty-nine co-accused of the murders of one hundred and ninety children and one adult in one of the world’s worst recent cult-related disasters. Mackenzie led the Good News International Church, a Christian doomsday cult whose followers were told to starve themselves and their children to death to meet Jesus. He had denied ordering the starvation. The verdict follows his arrest in twenty twenty-three after police received a tip-off.

In space exploration, Japan has launched an uncrewed spacecraft on a five-year mission to explore Mars’s moons Phobos and Deimos and return the first samples from the Martian system to Earth. The five hundred and seventy-eight million dollars mission, involving five space agencies, aims to land a robotic prospector and rover on Phobos and deliver dust, soil and rocks in twenty thirty-one. Scientists hope the material will shed light on how the moons formed and on the origins of life.

In Gaza, the United Nations World Food Programme is drastically reducing food assistance because of funding shortages, leaving about five hundred thousand people without monthly support. The agency said it will cut the number of beneficiaries from one point six million to one point one million at a time when two-thirds of Gaza’s population remains acutely food insecure and two hundred thousand are at risk of famine. The reduction comes more than a year after a U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect.

In Israeli politics, U S President Donald Trump has endorsed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nine days before Israel’s twenty-seven October election, calling him a strong, brave and brilliant leader and a great warrior prime minister. Trump said any other candidate would be the wrong leader and warned that the United States might not continue its current work if Israel changes leaders. Recent polls suggest Netanyahu and his far-right partners currently lack the parliamentary majority needed to secure a new term.

In U S sport, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts will miss the rest of the season after further testing revealed blood clots had travelled from his leg to his lungs. The team said the twenty-eight-year-old has deep vein thrombosis and bilateral pulmonary emboli but is in stable condition with no significant functional limitations. He is taking blood thinners and will not play while on the medication; backup Tanner McKee has taken over as starter.

In Canada, four soldiers were killed and dozens more seriously injured when a fast-moving grass fire swept through C F B Wainwright, a military training base in Alberta, during a weekend exercise. Officials said the blaze spread roughly one kilometre in thirty-six seconds. Prime Minister Mark Carney called the incident one of the worst peacetime tragedies for the Canadian forces on Canadian soil. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.

In business news, Elon Musk has pledged to give one share of his SpaceX company to every child in the United States next year, writing on social media that the gift would be the first of many. The announcement came a day after artificial intelligence company Anthropic said it would commit five percent of its shares to a new public benefit fund.

In U S legal affairs, Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student leader who became a prominent face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, has asked the U S Supreme Court to halt his deportation. His lawyers are seeking to overturn an appeals court decision that would allow his removal and want to sue the administration for allegedly violating his First Amendment rights.

In media news, veteran journalist Christiane Amanpour is leaving C N N after forty-three years, she announced on Monday. Amanpour joined the network as an assistant on the international assignment desk in one thousand nine hundred and eighty-three and is now its chief international anchor. Her departure coincides with C N N’s new ownership under Skydance following an eighty-one billion dollar merger that brings C N N and C B S under one roof, though it is not thought to be linked to the takeover.

That was the morning edition of the One News Page Global Briefing. Read the complete briefing and explore its supporting coverage at one news page dot com.