Prices rising, squares filling up

We lead with the budget bill because today everything converges on the same point: Istat certifies inflation at 5.4 percent while the government brings a 157-article text to the Chamber of Deputies and the clash with the banks over the 5.8 billion contribution remains open. This is not just an economic figure, it is the framework within which the squares filling up across Europe today must also be measured.

We chose to report the youth protest sweeping through Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland as a story in its own right, not as a corollary to Italian domestic news: the numbers — hundreds of thousands of people in more than thirty German cities, a general strike announced in France for November 5th — deserve continental coverage. On the same day, in Rome, the national strike produced clashes near the Colosseum: coverage is limited to verifiable facts — identifications, complaints filed — without entering the realm of judicial reporting, which this newspaper does not cover.

On the international front, the non-stop negotiations between Doha and Tehran to avert a resumption of the conflict between the United States and Iran remain the story with the greatest geopolitical weight: the American military redeployment alongside the diplomatic talks signals that the truce remains fragile.

We also gave space to a story that intersects technology and healthcare without overstepping its boundaries: a Japanese-American study on nearly 900,000 chatbot responses shows a tendency to suggest brand-name drugs rather than cheaper equivalents. This is a behavior of the models, not an effect measured on real patients, and we state this clearly: the distinction is not a detail.

For culture and entertainment we favored an extra-European perspective: the two exhibitions in São Paulo on Tarsila do Amaral and Joan Miró, and the opening of the Tokyo festival with Godzilla as the centerpiece film. Sport takes us to Paris for the Masters semifinals without Sinner, out with an injury, and to Africa for the opening of the first Youth Games in Senegal.

Today’s Blind Spot follows a story that rarely finds space here: the Congolese constitutional referendum and the opposition contesting it from Rome, a geographic detail that makes the news less distant than it may seem.

No section is uncovered today. Two pieces did not make it into the pages — one on the Ebola epidemic in Congo, one on the award to Majid Majidi in Busan — but in both cases the relevant section, Health and Cinema & Entertainment, was covered by another article: this is not a gap, it is an editorial choice.

The doubt that remains open concerns the FBI and the attribution of the Binance attack to North Korea: Trump has publicly distanced himself from his own agency’s conclusions, and the available sources do not, for now, allow that gap to be reconciled.