Chapter 1: What is the latest development in Sudan's civil war?
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Two judges are ordering the Trump administration to pay for federal food benefits amid the government shutdown. Plus, what's driving a rise in scrapped home purchases?
Buyers are feeling anxious about their job security.
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Chapter 2: How is the Rapid Support Forces impacting Darfur's population?
And when that happens, they may want to back out of that contract last minute if they feel like their job prospects are a little shaky.
And inside the escalating violence in Sudan, where a rebel group is dominating the population in the region of Darfur. It's Friday, October 31st. I'm Alex Osola for The Wall Street Journal. This is the p.m. edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. We begin this evening in Sudan, where the civil war is taking a jarring turn in Darfur.
There, an Arab-led militia is now using state-of-the-art drones and execution squads to dominate the region's Black population. The conflict, which began more than two years ago, is between the Sudanese government and the Rapid Support Forces, a well-armed rebel force.
Chapter 3: What role do drones play in the conflict in Sudan?
Humanitarian groups say the violence has been escalating since the militia seized control of El Fasher, the largest city in the region where 70 percent of the population, largely Black Sudanese, have fled their homes. These human rights groups are warning that the killings have the potential to surpass the genocide that played out in Rwanda just over 30 years ago.
For more, WSJ reporter Nicholas Barrio joins us now from Kampala, Uganda. Nicholas, what exactly is going on in Darfur?
At the moment, what's happening is that the rebel group known as the Rapid Support Forces has taken over the last holdout city in this region of Darfur, El Fasha, from the regular army. So the entire area, which is roughly the size of Spain, is under rebel control.
Chapter 4: What humanitarian concerns are arising from the violence in Sudan?
This is an ethnic conflict between the Arab-dominated tribes versus the indigenous Black African tribes in the same region. These are competing for a lot of things, including land, resources, and governance. And most of these Black African communities are allied with Africa. Sudan's army. So after the takeover of this city, most of them are fleeing westward towards the border with Chad.
The Chadian border, it's like the sanctuary, already hosting around half a million people, and the city is rapidly emptying.
I mentioned drones in my intro. How are drones being used here?
They give the rebels an edge over the military. They have these drones armed with bombs. They are able to target where the military positions are, where the populated areas are, where the displaced are sheltering. So you have a very experienced army being facilitated by drones for surveillance and for picking out targets with bombs.
That was WSJ reporter Nicholas Barillo.
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Chapter 5: What legal actions are being taken regarding federal food assistance?
We're exclusively reporting that JPMorgan Chase's investment bank is leading a group investing roughly $90 million in the Texas Stock Exchange. It's the latest Wall Street heavyweight to back the upstart trading venue, which has billed itself as more CEO-friendly. Previous investors include Citadel Securities, BlackRock, and Charles Schwab.
The exchange said that the new investment brings its total fundraising to date above $250 million. Major U.S. stock indexes rose today after yesterday's strong earnings from Amazon and Apple reassured investors about the trajectory of big tech.
Chapter 6: Why are home purchase agreements being increasingly canceled?
The Nasdaq added 0.6 percent, the S&P 500 advanced about 0.3 percent, and the Dow rose roughly 0.1 percent. Indexes also ended the week and month solidly higher. The Dow and the Nasdaq set their longest streaks of monthly gains since January 2018.
Inside Microsoft's quarterly earnings that came out earlier this week was a charge that caught analysts by surprise, a $4.1 billion hit on its investment in OpenAI. The figure was up 490 percent from a year earlier.
A Bernstein analyst said that this implies a more than $12 billion quarterly loss at OpenAI, which, if true, would mark one of the largest single-quarter losses for a tech company in history. The specifics behind the red ink are unclear as OpenAI doesn't report results publicly.
Chapter 7: What factors are contributing to buyer anxiety in the housing market?
But CEO Sam Altman has told investors to expect years of heavy losses as OpenAI invests to be a leader in a technology that he believes will transform the economy. And the biggest names in AI, including OpenAI and competitors DeepMind and XAI, are working on big, large language models like the one that powers ChatGPT.
Eventually, these AI megabrains will get sophisticated enough to, supposedly, take all our jobs. But for most tasks in the corporate world, it's actually the most simplistic AI models that are winning the day. Small models are made up of billions or a few hundred million parameters, which is tiny compared to the more than one trillion parameters needed to power those big models.
Chapter 8: What does the rise in canceled home purchases indicate about the housing market?
As Christopher Mims, who writes a technology column for the journal and also hosts our Bold Names podcast, told us, that small size can come with some advantages.
It turns out that the world runs on small models. We just don't hear about it because it's not as flashy or exciting and it's not a place where companies can make zillions of dollars. Small models have taken over for translating text and documents into machine-readable text. Small models are what allow voice transcription on your phone or in any app that does that for you. Small models are fast.
fast. Speed is often of the utmost importance. We still tap on buttons and type on things and ask the cloud to do things for us and expect immediate responses, right? So a smaller model is what's powering the generative summaries that you're getting on Google these days. Obviously, they cost less to access and to run.
And then finally, because they can be specialized to individual tasks, they can actually be more capable than large models at things for which they've been fine-tuned.
Coming up, the legal move that may keep federal food assistance funded as the government shutdown continues. That's after the break. Today, President Trump said that he isn't considering ordering military attacks in Venezuela, two weeks after suggesting ground strikes were possible.
Asked by reporters on Air Force One about reports that he's weighing airstrikes against Venezuela, Trump responded, quote, As we mentioned on this morning's show, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the U.S. military has identified targets in Venezuela that include military facilities used to smuggle drugs.
Two federal judges have ordered the Trump administration to tap emergency funds to pay for food assistance benefits a day before they were set to be suspended because of the government shutdown. Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order during a hearing today, saying he was directing the U.S.
Department of Agriculture to use contingency funds to pay benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. In a related case, a Massachusetts judge said today that the move to suspend SNAP benefits was likely unlawful and that the government was required to use emergency funds as needed to make payments.
The two orders may help temporarily alleviate one looming crisis for millions of Americans, resulting from the impasse between Republicans and Democrats on a bill to fund the government and end the shutdown. And the Trump administration is facing a separate lawsuit, this one over the conditions at the immigration facility in Broadview, Illinois.
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