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The Israeli military said Sahar Baruch (L) and Amiram Cooper (R) were killed by their captors
Israel has confirmed the identities of two deceased hostages whose bodies it received from Hamas via the Red Cross in Gaza on Thursday.
Forensic tests showed the remains were those of Amiram Cooper, 84, and Sahar Baruch, 25, the Israeli prime minister’s office said.
“The government of Israel shares in the deep sorrow of the Cooper and [Baruch] families and all the families of the fallen hostages,” it said in a statement.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum in Israel demanded that all 11 Israeli and foreign deceased hostages still in Gaza be returned immediately by Hamas in line with the US-brokered ceasefire agreement.
Amiram Cooper was abducted along with his wife, Nurit, from Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, which sparked the war. Hamas released Nurit after 17 days, but it continued to hold Amiram.
The Israeli military said it estimated Amiram was murdered in captivity in February 2024, but that final conclusions will be made upon completion of a post-mortem.
It had previously said he was killed along with three other hostages – Nadav Popplewell, Chaim Peri and Yoram Metzger – in Khan Younis while troops were operating in the area. Hamas had claimed they were killed by an Israeli strike.
Sahar Baruch was kidnapped during the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri by Hamas gunmen, who also killed his brother, Edan, and grandmother, Geula Bachar.
The Israeli military said it estimated that he was murdered in captivity on 8 December 2023, and that it was awaiting the results of a post-mortem.
It had previously announced that he was killed during a rescue attempt by Israeli forces.
The military expressed its deep condolences to the two men’s families and stressed that Hamas was “required to fulfil its part of the agreement and make the necessary efforts to return all the hostages to their families and to a dignified burial”.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents many hostages’ families, said: “There are no words to express the depth of this pain.”
“The hostages have no time. We must bring them all home, now!”
Israeli prime minister’s office
Israeli soldiers salute the coffins, which were handed over by Hamas via the Red Cross in Gaza
On Tuesday, the Israeli government accused Hamas of violating the Gaza ceasefire deal after the group handed over a coffin containing human remains that did not belong to one of the 13 deceased Israeli and foreign hostages then still in Gaza.
It said forensic tests showed they belonged to Ofir Tzarfati, a hostage whose body had been recovered by Israeli forces in Gaza in late 2023.
The Israeli military also released footage filmed by a drone that showed Hamas members removing a body bag containing the remains from a building in Gaza City, reburying it, and then staging the discovery in front of Red Cross staff.
The Red Cross said its staff were unaware that the body bag had been moved before their arrival and that the staged recovery was “unacceptable”.
Hamas rejected what it called the “baseless allegations” and accused Israel of “seeking to fabricate false pretexts in preparation for taking new aggressive steps”.
Hours later, the Israeli government accused Hamas of another ceasefire violation, saying the group’s fighters had killed an Israeli soldier in an attack in an area of southern Gaza.
Hamas claimed it was not involved in the incident in the Rafah area, but Israel’s prime minister ordered a wave of air strikes across Gaza on Tuesday night in response. The Israeli military said it attacked “dozens of terror targets and terrorists”.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said 104 Palestinians were killed, including 46 children and 20 women, making it the deadliest day since the ceasefire took effect on 10 October.
US President Donald Trump maintained “nothing” would jeopardise the ceasefire agreement, which his administration brokered along with Qatar, Egypt and Turkey, but he added that Israel should “hit back” when its soldiers were targeted.
EPA
On Tuesday, Hamas fighters removed a body bag from a tunnel in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis
Under the deal, Hamas agreed to return the 20 living and 28 dead hostages it was holding within 72 hours.
All the living Israeli hostages were released on 13 October in exchange for 250 Palestinian prisoners and 1,718 detainees from Gaza.
Israel has so far handed over the bodies of 195 Palestinians in exchange for the bodies of the 15 Israeli hostages so far returned by Hamas, along with those of two foreign hostages – one of them Thai and the other Nepalese.
Nine of the 11 dead hostages still in Gaza are Israelis, one is Tanzanian, and one is Thai.
All but one of the dead hostages still in Gaza were among the 251 people abducted during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, during which about 1,200 other people were killed.
Israel responded by launching a military campaign in Gaza, in which more than 68,600 people have been killed, including more than 200 since the ceasefire took effect, according to the territory’s health ministry.
new video loaded: How the Trump-Xi Meeting Eased a Major Trade War
President Trump and China’s leader Xi Jinping just had a highly anticipated meeting in South Korea. David Pierson, a New York Times foreign correspondent covering China, breaks down what they accomplished and how they de-escalated a major trade war.
By David Pierson, Christina Thornell, Nikolay Nikolov and Chang W. Lee
Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…Nvidia becomes the first $5 trillion market cap company…Anthropic finds AI models have ‘introspection,’ of a kind…and Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft tell investors just how much they’ve been spending on AI data centers.
Hello, it’s Jeremy here. I’m just back from Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh, where AI was very much a central feature in many of the discussions. I will provide a few insights from what I learned there.
Of course, there was a lot of discussion at the event about whether there’s an “AI bubble”—and that was before we got the latest earnings and cap ex numbers from Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet. Wall Street’s disparate reactions to the companies’ quarterly report cards show the market’s growing impatience to see tangible results from hefty AI investments. They will only support companies who can show they are seeing notable revenue impact today.
Why the market reacted so differently to Meta’s, Microsoft’s, and Alphabet’s capex numbers
Consider Alphabet, which saw its shares climb after its earnings report. With its quarterly search revenues growing 14.5% year-over-year, and cloud revenues up 32%, Alphabet continues to defy concerns that AI poses an existential innovator’s dilemma to its core advertising-based business model. By contrast, Meta said capital expenses on AI data centers next year would be even larger than the already whopping $70 billion to $72 billion it’s spending this year as CEO Mark Zuckerberg races to build “super-intelligence,” an incredibly ambitious effort with limited immediate revenue impact. Investors weren’t having it, and Meta’s shares got hammered, dropping 9% in pre-market trading.
Investor reaction to Microsoft’s earnings fell somewhere between these two extremes. Like Alphabet, it reported revenue numbers that exceeded consensus analyst forecasts, but not by much, and it also said capital expenditures would climb more than analysts had anticipated. So it saw its shares slide about in line with investors’ disappointment in the size of the gap between revenue acceleration and capital expense growth, even though Microsoft’s cloud computing sales were up an impressive 40% from last year, a figure it largely attributed to AI spending.
What was striking at Fortune Global Forum, however, was how little global executives seemed to care about these financial market dynamics. If there was any consensus from the discussions in Riyadh, it was that the current moment is a lot like the early days of the internet or the roll out of cloud computing in the mid-2000s and early-2010s. In other words, a real technological transformation is underway. Yes, it might involve some companies becoming overvalued—as did happen with the internet boom. But almost all agreed that AI is going to have a transformative and lasting impact on their companies, and on the world economy, even if there is a market correction.
Executives are finding value in AI
At an IBM-sponsored dinner at FGF that Fortune hosted, Ana Paula Assis, IBM’s senior vice president and chair for EMEA and growth markets, said that, in her experience, it wasn’t the fear of an AI bubble—the concern that AI might just be a flash in the pan that doesn’t live up to the hype—that held companies back from investing in the technology. Instead, it was the speed of AI innovation that was actually the problem. Some companies, she said, seemed worried they would build systems around one set of models and capabilities, only to have those eclipsed in just a few months or a year, requiring them to change those workflows and swap models again. She described some potential customers as “like deer in the headlights” dazzled and frozen in place by the pace of change.
On stage at the conference, Ruth Porat, the president and chief investment officer at Alphabet, echoed Assis’s view to some degree. She noted that there was a big disparity between the speed of AI advances and the speed at which companies were adopting the technology. She said this disparity was largely the result of how difficult it is for large enterprises to change internal processes in general. And to get the most out of AI requires companies to rethink every process, she said, so it is perhaps not surprising that this is happening much more slowly than the rate at which AI companies, including Google, are rolling out new AI models and capabilities.
IBM put out some survey results this week for EMEA enterprises that show companies are indeed moving ahead with deploying AI at scale. Its survey of 3,500 senior executives in 10 countries found that two-thirds reported “significant productivity gains” from deploying AI. In some sectors, such as finance, the figure was 72%. Adoption in Saudi Arabia was even higher still—84%. What’s more, across EMEA, 92% of those surveyed were confident that AI agents would deliver ROI within the next two years. (Which may prove the point about the tech capabilities running far ahead of adoption. You might remember how many top tech execs declared 2025 to be “the year of AI agents.” I guess the real year of AI agents might be 2027!)
Nvidia becomes world’s first $5 trillion company as it reveals $500 million order backlog. The AI chip company became the first business ever to reach a $5 trillion market capitalization, after its shares rose earlier in the week following several announcements by its CEO and founder, Jensen Huang, at a developer conference in Washington, D.C. Huang revealed that the company has a $500 billion order backlog for its latest Blackwell GPUs and its upcoming Rubin GPUs. The company has also recently announced deeper partnerships and investments with OpenAI, Oracle, and Eli Lilly. Nvidia has seen its market cap add $3 trillion in value since early 2024. Read more from The Wall Street Journal here.
Fed Chair Powell says AI boom not comparable to dot com bubble. U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the current artificial intelligence boom differs from the dot-com bubble because today’s leading companies—and here he seems to have been referring to the likes of Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta, as opposed to the AI model makers such as OpenAI and Anthropic—actually generate profits. He also noted that the AI boom is driving tangible economic growth through investments in data centers and chips. (Although it should be said that the dot com bubble also fueled capital investment in fiber optics and networking equipment.) He contrasted this with the 1990s internet frenzy, when many high-valued firms collapsed after failing to turn a profit. You can read more from CNBC here.
Anthropic says cutting-edge AI models may have a kind of introspection. The AI company said its Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 models exhibit early signs of introspection—the ability to detect and describe aspects of their own internal states rather than just generate plausible text. In experiments, Anthropic researchers “injected” specific neural activation patterns that they knew were associated with particular concepts into the model at times when it was not considering topics related to those concepts. It then asked the model whether it noticed anything different about its thinking in these instances. The models were able to correctly identify some of these “thoughts” as not their own some of the time, indicating a limited form of self-monitoring, according to the Anthropic researchers. This introspective behavior, however, was highly inconsistent—occurring only about 20% of the time—and its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Anthropic cautions that while intriguing, these findings do not imply human-like self-awareness but could help advance future work on model transparency and interpretability. You can read more in Anthropic’s blog post on the research here. Study finds top AI models can’t construct predictive “world models.” A group of researchers from the non-profit AI lab the Basis Research Institute and affiliated with MIT, Harvard University, the University of Montreal, the University of Cambridge and Cornell University, built a new benchmark to test how leading LLMs perform at tasks that require understanding a virtual world, including discovering links between cause and effect and the “rules” by which the world operates. Their new “AutumnBench” involves a suite of 43 grid-world environments with 129 tasks, including predicting which objects are behind an obstruction, planning, and detecting what’s changed in a scene and the likely cause. They looked at how three state-of-the-art reasoning models— Anthropic’s Claude 4 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s o3—compared against 517 human participants. They allowed the test subjects to spend some time exploring each virtual world and deploying strategies to figure out the rules of the world before testing them on the tasks. The results show that humans significantly outperform the AI models across all task types and environments. What’s more, they found that the models fail to adopt human-like strategies for determining the rules of the virtual worlds and how to perform the tasks, such as hypothesis-testing and updating their beliefs to account for new evidence. You can read the research paper here.
AI CALENDAR
Nov. 10-13: Web Summit, Lisbon.
Nov. 26-27: World AI Congress, London.
Dec. 2-7: NeurIPS, San Diego.
Dec. 8-9: Fortune Brainstorm AI San Francisco. Apply to attend here.
EYE ON AI NUMBERS
$78.2 billion
That’s the amount that just Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet collectively spent building new AI data centers and buying AI hardware in the three months between the end of June and the end of September. And all three companies signaled they plan to continue to ramp up that spending further over the next quarter and throughout 2026. You can read more here from the Financial Times.
Announcing the move, staff at the outlet said ‘authoritarian regimes are already celebrating’ its potential demise.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) will shut down its news operations on Friday, citing the government-funded news outlet’s dire financial situation caused by funding cuts under President Donald Trump’s administration and the ongoing US government shutdown.
Bay Fang, RFA’s president and CEO, said in a statement that “uncertainty about our budgetary future” means that the outlet has been “forced to suspend all remaining news content production”.
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“In an effort to conserve limited resources on hand and preserve the possibility of restarting operations should consistent funding become available, RFA is taking further steps to responsibly shrink its already reduced footprint,” she said on Wednesday.
Fang added that RFA would begin closing its overseas bureaus and would formally lay off and pay severance to furloughed staff. She said many staff members have been on unpaid leave since March, “when the US Agency for Global Media [USAGM] unlawfully terminated RFA’s Congressionally appropriated grant”.
On March 14, Trump signed an executive order effectively eliminating USAGM, an independent US government agency created in the mid-1990s to broadcast news and information to regions with poor press freedom records.
Alongside RFA, USAGM also hosts sister publications Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE) and Voice of America (VOA).
Following March’s executive order, RFA was forced to put three-quarters of its US-based employees on unpaid leave and terminate most of its overseas contractors.
Another round of mass layoffs followed in May, along with the termination of several RFA language services, including Tibetan, Burmese and Uighur.
Mass layoffs also took place at VOA in March when Trump signed another executive order placing nearly all 1,400 staff at the outlet – which he described as a “total left-wing disaster” – on paid leave. It has operated on a limited basis since then.
Trump has said operations like RFA, RFE/Radio Liberty and VOA are a waste of government resources and accused them of being biased against his administration.
Since its founding in 1996, RFA has reported on Asia’s most repressive regimes, providing English- and local-language online and broadcast services to citizens of authoritarian governments across the region.
Its flagship projects include its Uighur service – the world’s only independent Uyghur-language outlet, covering the repressed ethnic group in western China – as well as its North Korea service, which reports on events inside the hermit state.
An announcement penned by RFA executive editor Rosa Hwang, published on the outlet’s website on Wednesday, said, “Make no mistake, authoritarian regimes are already celebrating RFA’s potential demise.”
“Independent journalism is at the core of RFA. For the first time since RFA’s inception almost 30 years ago, that voice is at risk,” Hwang said.
“We still believe in the urgency of that mission – and in the resilience of our extraordinary journalists. Once our funding returns, so will we,” she added.
RFE/Radio Liberty, which went through its own round of furloughs earlier this year, said this week that it received its last round of federal funding in September and its news services are continuing for now.
“We plan to continue reaching our audiences for the foreseeable future,” it said.
It’s not immediately clear why RFA and RFE/Radio Liberty – which share the same governing and funding structure, but are based in the US and Europe, respectively – are taking different approaches.
We’ve already reported on a couple of big deals from Universal Music Group in the past 24 hours.
First came the company’s licensing deal and copyright lawsuit settlement with AI music generator Udio. Next up was a strategic alliance with Stability AI to develop “next-generation professional music creation tools.”
The major music company announced another significant agreement during its Q3 earnings call today (October 30): a new licensing deal with YouTube.
UMG Chairman & CEOSir Lucian Grainge outlined several strategic developments during the call, including the AI partnerships that he says will create “new and significant sources of future revenue.”
He also revealed in his opening remarks that UMG has completed a comprehensive new deal with YouTube, marking the company’s third major “Streaming 2.0 agreement” following a deal with Spotify in January and with Amazon in late December 2024.
“I’m pleased to report that we have successfully concluded our third major Streaming 2.0 agreement, this one with YouTube, covering both recorded music and music publishing,” Grainge told investors.
“The agreement includes all aspects of YouTube’s various music services and platforms, embodies our artist-centric principles and drives greater monetization for artists and songwriters.”
The YouTube partnership represents more than just another renewal. According to Grainge, UMG secured “really important guardrails and protection for our artists and writers around gen AI content” as part of the agreement.
“I’m pleased to report that we have successfully concluded our third major Streaming 2.0 agreement, this one with YouTube, covering both recorded music and music publishing.”
Sir Lucian Grainge
Chief Digital Officer Michael Nash elaborated later in the call, that the deal addresses multiple aspects of YouTube’s platform: “We’re advancing important components of our core objectives here, taking into account these unique and multifaceted components of their platform and the foundational principles that we’re carrying across in all of our negotiations with our partners.
“As Lucian said, we secured key protections in the agreement on AI, which is a critical achievement in promoting interest of our artists on their platform.”
Nash also confirmed that improved monetization of short-form video – a key challenge for the industry – is “certainly an objective that we’re actively advancing across multiple deal renewal discussions, including this one.”
The execs’ comments arrived after UMG posted revenues of €3.021 billion ($3.53bn) across all of its divisions (including recorded music, publishing, and more) for Q3, up 10.2% YoY at constant currency.
Here are three other key takeaways from UMG’s latest quarterly earnings presentation…
Credit: Shutterstock
1. UMG sees AI as the next major revenue driver, comparing it to the streaming revolution
Grainge expressed confidence in AI’s potential to transform the music industry, drawing parallels to the streaming revolution that reshaped the business 15 years ago.
“I have exactly the same feeling about this progress that I did 15 to 16 years ago when we were looking at what was the transaction business and the really early fledgling what was perceived at the time of the disruption of the album into something called ad-funded streaming,” Grainge revealed.
“We are at the vanguard of a new era. And it’s one of the reasons why we’re positive, we’re confident, and why we continue to invest right across the board in all aspects of what we anticipate will be the growth.”
“We are at the vanguard of a new era.”
Sir Lucian Grainge
Beyond the Udio partnership, UMG announced a strategic alliance with Stability AI to “codevelop professional AI music creation tools for creators of video, images and now music.”
Nash explained the significance: “UMG joins that group of significant players in their categories as the leader in the music vertical, and that puts us in a position to directly engage in a very artist-centric way the conversation with our creative community around the evolution of these tools.”
Looking ahead, Grainge envisions “Agentic AI will dynamically employ complex reasoning and adaptation, has the power to revolutionize the manner in which fans interact with and discover music. Imagine interacting with your favorite music through a sophisticated, highly personalized chatbot.”
When asked about the timeline and financial impact, Nash said these partnerships “could constitute an important source of incremental additional new future revenue for artists and songwriters,” though specific financial projections weren’t provided given that product launches are scheduled for 2026.
As Grainge concluded: “This is happening. It’s on. And we’re on”.
2. Japanese artists are breaking through globally, with BABYMETAL making history
UMG is “shattering the misconception” that Japanese artists have limited opportunities outside their home market, with several breakthrough successes in 2025.
“I’m extremely proud to report that UMG is shattering that misconception in several ways,” Grainge said of Japan, the world’s second-largest recorded music market.
“BABYMETAL released its first album after signing with Capitol in the US in August. The album debuted No.9 on the Billboard 200, making them the first Japanese group ever, ever to reach the Top 10 in the U.S.”
Superstar Ado’s recent tour attracted 500,000 fans across 33 cities in Asia, Europe, the US and Latin America, which Grainge called “a historic first for a Japanese artist purely outside of Japan.”
Additionally, Fujii Kaze saw “enormous success with his third album, released in September by Republic Records and next year, he set to perform [internationally].”
“I’ve also believed that we can break more local talent from Japan around the world. I’m really thrilled to see this progress. It’s what sets us out and defines us as a creative company,” Grainge said.
3. Physical music sales surged 23% as superfans seek deeper connections with artists
Contrary to industry expectations about physical music’s decline, UMG’s physical revenues soared in Q3.
Within Universal’s recorded music business, Physical revenue grew23.1% YoY at constant currency to €341 million ($398.31m), driven, according to UMG, “by initial shipments of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl and strength in new releases, particularly in Japan”.
CFO Matt Ellis challenged conventional wisdom about the format: “What our fans are showing us is when they have opportunities to engage in many different ways with our artists, they want to do that and they will spend money doing that.”
Chief Operating Officer Boyd Muir explained that this isn’t about traditional format transformation: “This business is morphing into how we connect the fan together with the artists through a physical product, the two most significant examples of that so far is the growth in vinyl and the collectible aspect of that.”
“Vinyl that is sold is sold to people who do not own record players. So this is about a collectible,” Muir noted.
He revealed that a “very significant part of this is now coming through” direct-to-fan channels.
He explained: “Around that new release of these album products, we are seeing somewhere in the region of two thirds to 75% of the total volume actually coming through our own managed stores in relation to this product.”
Grainge added: “It’s the fans telling us that the belief that we have in the superfan and how we’re able to provide products and services, both physically as well as what they look like digitally in the future. They’re telling us about behavior and about connection.”
Five people have been charged in connection with the 2023 overdose death of Robert De Niro’s grandson and two other 19 year olds.
New York authorities accuse the suspects, Bruce Epperson, Eddie Barreto, Grant McIver, John Nicolas, and Roy Nicolas, of running a fentanyl distribution network that sold counterfeit prescription opioid pills through social media to teenagers and young adults in the city.
Authorities link the network to the overdose deaths of Leandro De Niro-Rodriguez, Akira Stein – daughter of Blondie co-founder Chris Stein – and a third unnamed victim.
The five are each charged with conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute.
“Through their alleged actions, these defendants left behind a trail of irreversible loss that cut short the lives of three teenagers who held boundless potential and who had already made profound, immeasurable impacts on those who knew them,” said Homeland Security Investigations New York special agent in charge Ricky Patel in a statement on Thursday.
Prosecutors allege the five used social media and encrypted messaging apps to sell thousands fentanyl-laced pills in New York between January and July 2023.
They allege that over that summer, the drugs they sold led to at least three deaths.
Stein was found dead 30 May after taking fentanyl-laced pills she allegedly purchased from John and Roy Nicolas. The unnamed victim, who died 13 June, allegedly purchased pills through an intermediary from Mr McIver.
Authorities say De Niro-Rodriguez, who died 2 July, got pills from a dealer who allegedly obtained them from Mr McIver, Mr Epperson, and Mr Barreto.
Separatedly in 2023, a woman was arrested for allegedly selling De Niro-Rodriguez three counterfeit oxycodone pills containing fentanyl – the drugs believed to have led to his death – and tablets of Xanax.
In a statement after the death of his grandson, Academy-Award winner De Niro said he was “deeply distressed” by the passing of his “beloved grandson”, who was the only child of his daughter Drena.
In a statement on Instagram on Thursday, Chris Stein noted the arrests in his daughter’s case and thanked officials “for this hope of some justice for her”.
If found guilty, the charges carry a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison and a maximum sentence of life in prison, officials said.
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10/15 vs Sacred Heart Greenwich- 3-2 W, 10/17 vs School of the Holy Child- 6-0 W, 10/22 @ Loomis Chaffee School- 4-2 W, 10/25 vs Westminster School- 6-0 W
10/13 vs Greenwich- 1-0 W, 10/16 vs Fairfield Warde- 5-2 W, 10/18 @ Sacred Heart Greenwich- 1-0 W, 10/20 vs New Canaan- 4-0 W, 10/22 vs Greenwich- 2-3 L OT SO
Reuters
Israeli prime minister’s office
EPA
