Watch AI Safety Concerns Put Congress on the Spot - Bloomberg.com

Why a marketing summit matters for Spotify Technology investors Spotify Technology (NYSE:SPOT) stepped onto the stage at the 2026 North American Marketing Leadership Summit in Phoenix, outlining fresh branding and engagement plans as investors weigh earnings pressure along with a larger share repurchase program. Recent trading tells a cautious story. Spotify Technology’s share price is down 3.77% over the past day and 12.82% over the past month, while the 1 year total shareholder return has declined 30.49% even as the 3 year total shareholder return has risen more than 3x. This suggests long term holders still sit on sizeable gains despite fading near term momentum around the summit headlines and the expanded buyback. Compare Spotify Technology’s marketing driven story with other media and entertainment plays by checking curated lists of 19 high quality undiscovered gems that may be flying under the radar. The recent slide in Spotify Technology shares raises a simple fork in the road. Are you seeing business fundamentals reset, or sentiment swinging harder than the underlying earnings picture justifies, as the valuation section makes clear?

Here’s your NYT Strands hint for today, plus the spangram and all of today’s Strands answers for puzzle No. 959 on Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026. Today’s Strands theme was tricky. It helps to be a runner. Read on for all the answers.

A supply-chain attack involving ConnectWise’s cloud services has exposed Microsoft 365 customers to unauthorized application access, with researchers reporting successful sign-ins across 173 partner and customer tenants. The incident centres on credentials associated with ConnectWise Cloud Backup, formerly SkyKick, and raises concerns about attackers exploiting permissions already entrusted to business software. ConnectWise has confirmed unauthorized access to application identities within its Cloud Backup environment. In an October 17 update on its service-status page, the company said it was shutting off application access, interrupting customer backups while investigation and remediation continued.

You once played Basil Fawlty in an amateur student production of Fawlty Towers at Queen’s College in Melbourne. How amateur was your Basil Fawlty moustache? It was terrible. It was real but it was definitely coloured in – I still have holes in my beard. I’d also shaved my head, so if you look at the early promo posters, you can clearly see I’m wearing a wig. Our theatre was closed so we had to perform in a circus tent in the middle of winter, on an oval in the university grounds, which was all very Fawlty Towers. I’ve always loved comedy. I didn’t really do anything serious until drama school. I always thought there might be a good spin-off with Sauron and Celebrimbor as an odd-couple situation. You play Sauron in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Tolkien wrote that Sauron “represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible”. What do you consider wholly evil? A complete disregard for the feelings and wellbeing of other people, to put it simply. It’s the intention, I think. I have horrible flashbacks to playing Aussie rules when I was about 17. I thought people were being quite evil to me at the time.