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Vega said she still doesn’t know why she was fired from the show, which has experienced a slump in ratings.
Cecilia Vega, the 60 Minutes correspondent fired as part of a dramatic overhaul of the CBS News show this spring, said it “hurts” to see what has happened to the storied newsmagazine and other segments of the network, and repeated allegations that she was told to insert “factually untrue” information into her work.
“It pains me. It hurts to watch, from afar. It hurts to talk to my colleagues who are still there. It hurts to see the ratings slump that is happening right now,” Vega said during a Thursday evening talk for students at American University in Washington DC.
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© Photograph: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Voto Latino
© Photograph: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Voto Latino
Copies of popular cosmetics and skincare products more likely to contain toxic substances, Trading Standards warns
Mercury, lead and methanol have been found in counterfeit beauty products seized across the UK, Trading Standards has said.
There is a rising problem with fake beauty products, with scammers selling copies of popular and expensive brands. Cosmetics, skincare and perfumes are now among the watchdog’s most commonly investigated fakes.
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© Photograph: IPO/PA
© Photograph: IPO/PA
Destinus has completed 1,750 Ruta B1 cruise missiles and reached monthly output of nearly 300, the company said on 29 October, telling Reuters this exceeds Europe’s annual cruise-missile production before Russia’s full-scale invasion.
That gives a date for easing a shortage. A looming shortage of mini jet engines threatened to hold back Ukraine’s deep-strike drones, Reuters reported in April. Czech maker ZofiTech was then producing about 200 a month, nearly all for Ukraine, and expected demand to reach thousands within months. Both Ruta versions use the 1.5-kN engines Destinus is promising. Ukraine plans to build more jet drones and cruise missiles, so engine output next year will have to keep up, Defense Express notes.
Destinus CEO Mikhail Kokorich said the company already produces turbojets in the roughly 1.5-kilonewton class in series, supplying them both for its own missiles and to other manufacturers. The Ruta B1 runs on the company’s own T150 engine. In June, Destinus announced its 1,000th T150 and said the line was designed to sustain production of thousands of missile systems a year. The company has not disclosed its current engine output.
Meanwhile, Destinus said it has begun production of the larger Ruta Block 2, designed to carry a 250-kg payload more than 700 km. Unlike the roughly 300-km Block 1, Block 2 is designed to be stored, transported, and launched from the same container. A third version, Block 3, is planned with a 2,000-km range, with flight tests scheduled for 2027.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy acknowledged the Ruta’s combat use in October 2025. Days later, he said Ukraine expected mass production of Ruta and Flamingo missiles by the end of that year. In June 2026, then-Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said the Netherlands was ready to finance about 700 Rutas for Ukraine, without specifying the version.
At the same time, Kokorich said Europe’s problem is shifting from production to integration.
“To have sufficient deterrence, you need to have tens of thousands of missiles,” he said.
European customers, he added, still need to build the military units and logistics to operate missiles in such numbers. Those arsenals would also need storage, transport, maintenance, and targeting infrastructure, he said, and European militaries would need to rethink how they stockpile and deploy precision-strike weapons.
Kokorich said Destinus uses no Chinese components, unlike wartime production in Ukraine, and said access to Chinese suppliers would make manufacturing cheaper, faster, and easier.
Kokorich also argued that cheaper missiles with ranges under 1,000 km would make up most future demand. Separately, Destinus is working with Rheinmetall on cruise missiles and ammunition for multiple-launch rocket systems, including a planned European equivalent of the GMLRS rockets fired by HIMARS.
Russian analysts can locate Ukrainian weapons plants from details in published photos and TV footage, Ukrainian defense outlet Oboronka reported on 29 October. Open-source researchers told the outlet how to hide those details.
Ukraine plans to build 7 million drones this year, and Russia is hunting the plants that make them. In June, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said Russia’s GRU military intelligence was gathering data to prepare air strikes on defense plants and attacks on their engineers.
On 7 April 2022, Ukrainian channel 1+1 aired a report from a workshop at the Kyiv Armored Plant converting captured Russian military equipment for Ukraine’s forces. On 14 April, Rybar, an anonymous pro-Russian Telegram channel, posted the factory’s location. Russian missiles hit the workshop on 16 April, killing at least three civilians, the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) found.
Retracing the likely method, CIR wrote that wall colors, window size, and ceiling height could single out the plant, and Google Earth imagery the workshop. InformNapalm researcher Andrii Lisitsyn told Oboronka that matching a frame with old photos, satellite images, job ads, or staff profiles quickly narrows the search.
A Gaussian blur smears pixels but keeps part of the information, Oboronka wrote. In a 2020 blog post, aerospace engineering student Gonçalo Raposo showed it can be fully reversed if the exact filter and edge handling are known. Pixelation fails too: a 2022 neural network reconstructs plausible faces from pixelated images. Lisitsyn advises cropping or fully opaque masking instead, plus checking file metadata.
Some Ukrainian defense enterprises still keep accounts and procurement records in Russian 1C software, Oboronka wrote. Since 6 January 2026, 1C products have been on the State Special Communications Service’s list of banned software. The ban covers systems with state information resources and critical information infrastructure owned or managed by state bodies, state enterprises, and local governments, the service said.
Oboronka also wrote that days before the full-scale invasion, Spanish journalist Pablo González photographed production lines at engine maker Motor Sich. Poland held him from February 2022 until a prisoner swap sent him to Russia in August 2024. Prosecutors then indicted him under both his names, Pablo González and Pavel Rubtsov, for spying for Russian military intelligence.
Ex-energy secretary Ed Miliband’s agenda appears undermined as money is diverted from renewables to defence
Britain is unlikely to hit its targets on green heating after the cuts announced by John Healey this week, experts have warned, as critics of Ed Miliband claim the former energy secretary’s green agenda is being dismantled.
The chancellor unveiled more than £3bn worth of cuts to the energy department’s budget this week, much of which will pay for higher defence spending.
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© Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images
© Laura Boushnak for The New York Times
© Antonio Masiello/Getty Images
Ukraine's Defense Forces hit the Novokuibyshevsk oil refinery in Russia's Samara Oblast with FP-1 drones early on 30 October, Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point said, adding that one of the units hit hydrotreats diesel fuel. The strike came hours after WSJ reported that Ukraine had paused strikes on Russian refineries under pressure from US President Donald Trump until after the US midterm elections on 3 November.
Russia is pounding Ukraine's power grid and cities ahead of winter, with a mounting civilian toll, including 14 people killed on a Dnipro railway platform on 29 October. Ukraine's long-range drone strikes on Russian refineries, one of its most effective operations against Moscow, target the oil money that pays for that war. Trump has pressed Kyiv for weeks to stop them, blaming them for high global fuel prices, and Ukraine went quiet without saying so and without getting what it asked for in return, WSJ reported. The Samara strike is the first on Russian oil since then. Kyiv has not said whether the pause is over.
Residents of Novokuibyshevsk reported drones, explosions, and a fire before dawn. Ukrainian Telegram channel Exilenova+ posted the first photos on Telegram at 05:24 Kyiv time, and Russian Telegram channel Astra geolocated the fire to the refinery, citing its open-source analysis of residents' photos.
Novokuybyshevsk, Samara region: locals report an attack and a fire. pic.twitter.com/9UEgqmkAOU
— Exilenova+ (@Exilenova_plus) October 30, 2026
By morning, Exilenova+ counted at least 11 separate fires at the refinery. Samara Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev said air defense and mobile fire groups were repelling an attack, Astra reported. The region had declared a drone alert and closed its airport.
Fire Point said its FP-1 drones scored numerous hits on the refinery grounds, and that one of the units hit hydrotreats diesel fuel. The footage published so far shows several smoke columns over the plant but does not show which units burned. The Rosneft-owned refinery has a design capacity of 8.8 million tons of oil a year and is one of the main producers of jet fuel, according to its website. Astra says it supplies jet fuel to Russia's military. The plant lies about 910 km from the front line. Ukraine's General Staff has not commented.
— Exilenova+ (@Exilenova_plus) October 30, 2026
Ukrainian drones have hit the plant before. Ukraine's military said its forces hit it in August and caused a fire.
It is the first fire at a Russian refinery since 15 October, when Ryazan's governor reported one at the city's refinery. It is also the first reported strike on Russia's oil industry since 20 October, when Ukrainian drones hit a Druzhba pipeline pumping station in Tambov Oblast. WSJ called that strike the last before the pause.
Ukraine's military paused its strikes on Russian refineries after weeks of pressure from Trump shook Kyiv's confidence in US support, people with knowledge of the operations told WSJ. The unofficial pause began early last week and is expected to last until after the midterms, and possibly deeper into November. Units carrying out long-range strikes were told in mid-October that the refinery campaign was effectively on hold once missions already under way were completed, two military officials said. Hours after the report, the Novokuibyshevsk strike called that account into question.
Ukraine's government has not announced a pause. Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv on 27 October that “our guys tried to be a little more careful during these days. But they do not have an order” not to hit refineries, according to WSJ. He said drone units were hitting other kinds of targets in Russia.
Trump's envoy Jared Kushner repeated the demand to stop the strikes at a meeting with Zelenskyy in Oslo on 20 October, two US officials told WSJ. One of them called the conversation “very tough.” Kushner, who joined remotely, said he and envoy Steve Witkoff were spending a lot of time, energy, and jet fuel on mediating with Moscow, and that a 30-day pause on refineries would be a way for Ukraine to show gratitude, the official said.
Zelenskyy had asked for something in return, WSJ reported: a mutual energy ceasefire with Russia, Patriot missiles for Ukraine's grid, or permission to use Starlink inside Russia so drones could destroy Russian missile launchers. None of those ideas got far. Some of Kyiv's European backers also nudged Zelenskyy to pause until after the midterms, a senior European official said.
The pause showed in Russia's oil industry. Russian refinery utilization at the end of October was 25% higher than at the start of the month as drone attacks subsided, Reuters reported, according to The Moscow Times.
Russia's Defense Ministry said it downed 1,043 Ukrainian drones overnight over 19 regions, including Samara Oblast, the Moscow region, and Tatarstan. The night before, it claimed 1,214.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin stated that 862 drones flew toward the Moscow region between 20:30 on 29 October and 07:30 on 30 October, that most were downed on the far approaches, and that 170 were downed on approach to the capital. Russia's aviation agency restricted flights at all four Moscow airports, Astra reported. A day earlier, more than 460 flights were delayed or canceled at Moscow and St. Petersburg airports, Astra counted.
In Starodub, in Russia's Bryansk Oblast, about 35 km from the Ukrainian border, a building of the Konservsushprod plant, which makes canned food for the Russian army, appeared to be on fire in readers' photos and videos, Astra reported, saying the plant was presumably attacked and that its open-source analyst had not verified the footage. The Atesh partisan movement reported a blast in Aleksandrovka in Rostov Oblast, and air defense fire and an explosion in Orel.
Oil giant comes under fire from climate campaigners, as its earnings reach $8.46bn while ‘innocent civilians suffer’
BP’s quarterly profits have been labelled “obscene” after they hit an 18-year high of $8.46bn (£6.3bn), as the war in the Middle East drove up oil and gas prices.
The energy company hailed a “banner quarter” on Friday, with its underlying replacement cost profit – a key measure of its income – almost quadrupling in the three months to the end of September, from $2.2bn in the same period a year ago. The jump meant BP’s quarterly profits hit their highest level since the $8.9bn recorded in 2008.
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© Photograph: Luke MacGregor/Reuters
© Photograph: Luke MacGregor/Reuters
© Photograph: Luke MacGregor/Reuters
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