Tuesday morning, the National Hurricane Center named the 13th tropical storm or hurricane of the season in Tropical Storm Melissa. In the next week, the storm is forecast to slowly meander in the Caribbean due to the lack of steering currents.

Tropical Storm Melissa has formed several hundred miles south of Haiti in the southern Caribbean Sea. The storm's core remains over open water, with only peripheral showers affecting parts of the Dominican Republic and possibly Puerto Rico. 

Melissa is experiencing westerly wind shear, which is limiting its intensification for now. Forecast models indicate the storm will slow down and remain nearly stationary in the Caribbean over the next several days, with no significant land impacts expected at this time.

Tropical Storm Melissa forms, forecast to remain in Caribbean

As expected, we have now a tropical storm in the Caribbean, several hundred miles south of Haiti, and we're watching it really over the core of it anyway, over the water, not impacting land right now. Certainly some of the peripheral showers here scraping nearby areas of the Dominican Republic and perhaps even Puerto Rico, but the main action, the business district of Melissa is way down here over the Southern Caribbean Sea at 50 miles per hour. If it indeed is right that the center is somewhere out over here on the very far Western edge of that area of red and thunderstorm activity, suggesting that this is still a sheared tropical cyclone, meaning the low-level circulation center is probably somewhere around there, and a lot of the thunderstorms are tilted off on toward the east. There's some westerly shear impacting the system right now, probably limiting the intensification rate in the near term until it gets somewhat free of that shear, we think, over the coming days, but we'll see. But look at this, this is the cone, gotta show you this, it doesn't look like a cone, does it? It looks like a circle, and that's because the system really slows down, it collapses, stalls out almost in the region, as expected, this is not anything that we didn't expect, and we think it's gonna kinda lollygag its way around here following the European center's track in the near term and still finding itself here over the Caribbean in the next five days.

Colombia’s top court overturned former President Alvaro Uribe’s convictions for fraud and bribery, citing “structural deficiencies” and insufficient evidence. The decision opens the door for further appeals in the high-profile case.

Bogotá

Colombia court quashes former president Uribe’s conviction

AccuWeather forecasters are warning that the western Caribbean could face extreme impacts from Tropical Storm Melissa as the storm will barely move for nearly a week.

Santo Domingo

Tropical Storm Melissa expected to stall, potentially deadly

A planned summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin was put on hold on Tuesday, as Moscow's rejection of an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine cast a cloud over attempts at negotiation.

Moscow

Ukraine Invasion

Russian demands on Ukraine jeopardize Putin-Trump summit

A posthumous memoir by Virginia Giuffre, who accused Britain's Prince Andrew of sexually abusing her as a teenager, went on sale in London on Tuesday (October 21, 2025), days after the disgraced prince gave up his Duke of York title.

London

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Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy began his five-year prison sentence in Paris on Tuesday (October 21) for conspiring to raise campaign funds from Libya, in a stunning downfall for a man who led the country between 2007 and 2012.

Paris

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Jerusalem

Middle East Conflict

U.S. Vice-President Vance visits Israel as Gaza ceasefire falters

Amazon.com cloud service returned to normal operations on Monday (October 20) afternoon, the company said, after an internet outage that caused global turmoil among thousands of sites.

Amazon says AWS cloud service back to normal after outage

Japan's parliament has elected the country's first female leader. Sanae Takaichi, 64, of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), is seen as a hardline conservative who supports traditional gender roles and hawkish foreign policy.

Tokyo

Sanae Takaichi elected Japan's first female prime minister

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Washington

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Portland

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Washington County

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Centrist Rodrigo Paz won Bolivia's presidential runoff, defeating conservative rival Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga, as the country's worst economic crisis in a generation helped propel the end of nearly two decades of leftist rule.

La Paz

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Beirut

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A cargo aircraft skidded off a Hong Kong runway and collided with a security patrol car before both fell into the sea early Monday, killing the two people in the car, authorities said.

Kowloon

Two killed after cargo plane veers off runway in Hong Kong

Thieves wielding power tools have struck at the famed Louvre Museum in Paris, stealing priceless jewels in a brazen heist that took just four minutes, according to the government. The thieves struck after the museum had already opened its doors to the public, with a major investigation now underway.

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Tel Aviv-Yafo

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Chicago

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China's second-highest ranking general and eight other senior officials have been expelled from the ruling Communist Party and the military on suspicion of serious misconduct linked to corruption.

Beijing

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The two sides have agreed to hold follow-up talks in Qatar to establish conditions and a framework for lasting peace, bringing an end to a week of deadly cross border skirmishes, which have killed dozens of people.

Doha

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France's world-famous Louvre museum in Paris was forced to close on Sunday after thieves broke into Apollo Gallery and stole valuable crown jewels.

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U.S. President Donald Trump's critics took to the streets Saturday, with millions nationwide participating in "No Kings" rallies, protesting Trump's demonstrations of power.

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The U.S. State Department issued a warning that Hamas appeared to be planning an attack 'against Palestinian civilians,' warning that such an attack would 'constitute a direct and grave violation of the ceasefire agreement'.

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Britain's Prince Andrew said on Friday he would give up using his title of Duke of York following years of criticism about his behavior and connections to the late U.S. sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Windsor

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy came to the White House on Friday looking for weapons to keep fighting his country's war with Russia, but met an American president who appears more intent on brokering a peace deal than upgrading Kyiv’s arsenal.

Breakdown