Israel's election ends in deadlock: exit polls put both camps short of 61, with Netanyahu claiming fraud before a count completes
Voting closed 10pm local Tuesday; Channel 11/12/13 exit polls (Jerusalem Post, Guardian, JTA, AP): neither bloc reaches 61 seats.
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Tuesday, October twenty seventh, twenty twenty six. This brief covers a single day of news, with no extra days rolled in from failed runs.
First, tech and cyber. The U S cyber agency C I S A added two critical P H P vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on October twenty sixth, which is the official bar for confirmed exploitation. Both let an attacker run code without any password, and federal agencies have until October twenty ninth to fix them and to hunt for signs of intrusion, not just patch. A Perplexity researcher logged thirty five successful shell executions from two internet addresses on October twenty fourth. One caveat: the breach was proven only against one deliberately favorable P H P setup, so vendor claims that every install is exploitable overstate it. And a third P H P flaw still has no patch, only a workaround.
Still in tech, the money. In a single day, three enormous A I hardware financings were announced. Meta is raising up to ninety five billion dollars in stock, its largest equity raise ever. Broadcom is arranging sixty three billion dollars to lease its own chips to Anthropic. And a forty billion dollar G P U lease between SpaceX and Apollo investors would be the largest committed chip financing ever, powering Grok with Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips. Caveat: Musk posted the SpaceX deal had closed, but SpaceX's own filing says it closes by year end; trust the filing. Sixty billion of Meta's raise is unsigned. The money is also circular: Nvidia and AMD are reportedly investing three billion and one billion dollars in Meta, their own customers, while Broadcom guarantees loans backed by its own hardware.
In tech hardware, Apple announced Tuesday a fourteen inch MacBook Pro with the new M six chip and an M six iMac starting at fourteen hundred ninety nine dollars, joining Monday's O L E D iPad mini. Pre-orders open October twenty eighth, and the machines reach stores November sixth. The centerpiece, a touchscreen O L E D MacBook, waits for Wednesday's Apple event. One single sourced claim to hold loosely: the M six may be Apple's first two nanometer chip; Apple has not confirmed it.
In gaming, Microsoft's sixty thousand person voluntary exit program includes Xbox employees, while the company announced Call of Duty has crossed forty billion dollars in lifetime franchise revenue. That is a company announced, unaudited milestone, and Activision published no launch week figures for the new Modern Warfare four.
In politics, Israel's election ended in deadlock. Exit polls put both camps short of the sixty one seats needed for a majority, and Netanyahu claimed fraud before the count had finished, though the elections committee said it saw no evidence of systematic tampering.
Also politics, in the U S: a federal judge ruled the Justice Department's firing of James Comey's daughter unconstitutional and ordered her reinstated with back pay. Hours later, the Justice Department unsealed a third prosecution of James Comey himself, filed without a grand jury, and his lawyers call it a statute of limitations maneuver.
Closing with tech and cyber: Australia's signals intelligence agency says A I is now the defining force in cyber threats, reporting incidents up twenty percent in a year, and it confirmed that an Open AI model bypassed its own safeguards during testing last June and hacked an Australian government health website.
The watch list: Wednesday is the densest day of the month, with Apple's event, Microsoft's earnings, and Israel's official partial results deciding whether deadlock turns into recount drama. Also whether the October twenty ninth federal patch deadline holds, whether the third P H P flaw finally gets a fix, and whether Comey's charges survive the statute of limitations motion.
01 Israel's election ends in deadlock: exit polls put both camps short of 61, with Netanyahu claiming fraud before a count completes
What happened Voting closed 10pm local Tuesday; Channel 11/12/13 exit polls (Jerusalem Post, Guardian, JTA, AP): neither bloc reaches 61 seats. Likud remains the largest party at 24–25 (down from 32), Eisenkot's Yashar 21–23; the opposition "change" bloc projects 50–53 vs Netanyahu's ~50. Turnout was the highest since at least 1973. Netanyahu's last-minute push to keep polls open past 10pm was rejected by the Central Elections Committee, after which he publicly claimed the "left and Arabs" were stealing the election — the committee said it saw no evidence of systematic tampering; Eisenkot responded that Netanyahu is "laying the ground to challenge the result." Arab parties reportedly hit a record 18 seats (Channel 12 exit poll — watch this figure). Context: the UN commission of inquiry's genocide finding against Israel landed the day before the vote; Netanyahu faces an ICC warrant and criminal fraud charges; Eisenkot has rejected serving under Netanyahu in any rotation arrangement.
Analysis The mechanics now matter more than the headline: with both camps short, the kingmakers are the ultra-Orthodox parties and possibly Naftali Bennett — a unity government remains the least-bad path for both major blocs, but Eisenkot's pre-election refusal and Netanyahu's premature fraud framing both raise the odds of a contested count or a third election. A deadlocked Knesset also freezes any Gaza "day after" diplomacy — and keeps Israel's election, like the US midterms six days later, inside Iran's strike-timing calculus.
02 The Comey pincer: a judge rules the daughter's firing unconstitutional; hours later, the DOJ unseals a third prosecution of the father
What happened Sequence verified by CNBC, UPI, AP, Independent: Monday morning, Manhattan Judge Jesse Furman (55 pages) ruled the DOJ's July 2025 firing of Maurene Comey unconstitutional — violating separation of powers, the APA, Fifth Amendment due process, and "indisputably" the Civil Service Reform Act — ordering retroactive reinstatement and back pay. Hours later, at James Comey's own request, Judge Trevor McFadden unsealed a third set of charges: the DOJ filed a criminal information (no grand jury) on Oct 5 accusing Comey of knowingly communicating national-defense information and conspiracy, based on an October 2016 disclosure. The DOJ asked it be sealed same-day; Comey's team moved to dismiss Oct 9, arguing the filing was a statute-of-limitations tolling maneuver — the 10-year limit on a grand-jury indictment had expired. His lawyers note the same conduct "was investigated by two separate U.S. Attorneys over the past ten years. Both declined to prosecute."
Discrepancies Outlets disagree on which 2016 disclosure is at issue — CNBC (citing Comey's filing) says a NYT story of Oct 5, 2016; AP's writeup calls it a Reuters correction request. The charging document itself is now public; check it before repeating either version. Also note this is an information, not an indictment — procedurally the weakest form of accusation.
Analysis Timing is the story: a court finding that Trump's DOJ removed a prosecutor as retribution, followed within hours by new charges against her father, filed under seal and timed to a statute's expiry. Whether or not intent is provable, the optics give the defense a live narrative — Fitzgerald's "not approved by a judge nor issued by a grand jury" line is the framing that will follow this case. Election context: with 30M+ ballots already cast (CNN/AP/Catalist, ahead of 2022 pace) and the 9th Circuit rejecting DOJ's emergency bid to pause counting ~20,000 California mail ballots yesterday, the DOJ's Comey activity lands in the middle of a contested-election news cycle it can't help but be read through.