The buses came home
By Caspar Lindqvist · Saturday, October 31, 2026
In The News
Binance, Day Two. Binance has replaced 90 percent of the 6.3 billion dollars stolen from it on Thursday night. The exchange said today that ten of the stolen cryptocurrencies — bitcoin, ether, and the rest of the big ones — are now fully backed again: for every dollar a customer holds in them, a dollar of the real asset stands behind it.
The last tenth is the small, thinly traded tokens. Binance is still buying those back on the open market.
The money came from the company itself. Binance set aside more than 6.34 billion dollars of its own funds, and it says, in plain words, that its users will not bear the loss. Withdrawals are still frozen. The company says they reopen, in phases, on Sunday.
About 3 billion dollars of the stolen money stays frozen where the issuers locked it. Frozen is still not returned — that part waits on courts and police, in several countries at once.
And one thing has not changed since Thursday night: Binance still has not said who did it. Two analysis firms, TRM Labs and Chainalysis, point to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group. The exchange itself has found no sign that its wallet keys were leaked, and its own account still begins with one engineer’s laptop.
The War, Together
Ukraine. Hundreds of civilians have been evacuated from the Russian-occupied frontline city of Oleshky, in southern Ukraine, during a rare, localized humanitarian ceasefire.
A husband got his wife back today, after 1,711 days apart. He had counted them. Dmytro waited at the border crossing in Ukraine’s Chernihiv region, watching the road from Belarus. Larisa, his wife, was on one of the buses — evacuated from Oleshky, the occupied town on the Dnipro River, under the local ceasefire that First Lady Melania Trump helped broker.
Her road home was longer than the war’s front line. Buses carried the evacuees through occupied Crimea to Anapa, in Russia. Planes flew them to Gomel, in Belarus. Buses brought them the last stretch, into Ukraine.
Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, rode with them the whole way — the first senior Ukrainian official to openly enter occupied territory since the war began. The youngest evacuee was just over one year old. The oldest was 94.
How many came home, exactly, no one will say. Ukrainian officials are withholding the number, to protect the people who stayed behind and the missions still to come. Mrs. Trump said Friday that the convoy could carry more than 750 people.
Not everyone chose Ukraine. Some residents rode buses to Russian-held territory. Some stayed in Oleshky, where the ceasefire delivered food and medicine instead. The ceasefire has held since Tuesday, without a violation either side has reported. It ends Sunday evening.
500 Patriot missiles, paid for by allies. The United States has approved the sale of 500 Patriot interceptor missiles to Ukraine, at about 2.1 billion dollars. Not one dollar of it is American. Canada, Germany, Norway, and European Union loans pay the whole bill.
The missiles are the PAC-3 MSE — the kind built to knock ballistic missiles out of the sky, the threat Ukraine’s power grid faces every week. Approval is not delivery. Congress was notified today and can still object, and even a smooth sale delivers years from now. Ukraine’s need is this winter. The help is real, and it is not soon.
Sudan. United Nations investigators named the supply line this week. A network of individuals and companies in Chad, in Puntland in Somalia, in south-eastern Libya, and in the United Arab Emirates is backing the Rapid Support Forces — the paramilitary group besieging El Obeid and fighting Sudan’s army across the country. The investigators were careful: they found the network, and they have not tied it to those countries’ governments. But the guns, the drones, and the money move through it.
Their count stands: October saw the highest number of drone attacks on civilians since the war began in April 2023. In El Obeid, the prison holds about 2,000 people in space built for 450, and about 30 percent of the city’s hospitals still work. The mission’s ask was plain: an arms embargo on all of Sudan.
Gaza. A strike killed Diaa Abu al-Rous on Saturday morning, on his way to work. He was a teacher at the Malaysian School in the Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza. Al-Awda Hospital confirmed his death; Gaza’s education ministry named him. Another man, Arafat al-Arair, died Saturday of wounds from an earlier strike on a vehicle in Tel al-Hawa, in Gaza City.
Shelling was reported the same day in Beit Lahia, Gaza City, Khan Younis, and Deir al-Balah. Gaza’s Health Ministry counts six people killed in the past 48 hours, and 26 wounded. Since the ceasefire of October 2025 — a ceasefire under which the firing never fully stopped — 1,580 people have been killed. On Friday, the United Nations human rights office warned that Israeli forces are still displacing Palestinians across Gaza, and that the pattern raises concerns it named plainly.
The Strait. The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow strip of sea between Iran and Oman. It is the only way out to the open ocean for the oil ports of the Persian Gulf. About a fifth of all the oil the world uses passes through it on ships. If the strait closes, oil prices everywhere feel it within days.
On Thursday, a small boat pulled up beside an oil tanker in the strait, 25 nautical miles northeast of the Omani port of Khasab. People from the boat attached two mines to the ship’s hull. Mines like these are called limpet mines — explosives made to stick to a ship and blow a hole in it below the waterline. The mines went off and set the tanker’s engine room on fire. The crew put the fire out. Nobody was hurt, and the ship kept sailing. Shipping authorities say it is the first time in this war that an attack of this kind has worked.
On Friday, a second tanker was hit by something — nobody has said exactly what — as it sailed out of the strait. October was the worst month of the war for ships in the strait: more than 30 attacks on commercial vessels. Since the war began in February, the count is 145.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard — Iran’s most powerful military force — says three tankers, and then a fourth, hit naval mines after sailing a route Iran says ships must have its permission to use. That claim could not be checked. Iran named no ships. The American military command in the region says the main shipping routes are clear of mines.
President Trump said on Friday that the war with Iran will end “very soon.” He gave no date and no terms. What is certain is this: someone is attaching explosives to oil tankers in the world’s most important oil waterway, and doing it successfully.
The Editorial
Today was a day of doors.
One door was forced on Thursday night, through a laptop, and 6.3 billion dollars walked out of it. Binance is now buying that door shut with its own money — nine-tenths shut, by its count, with the last tenth still open and the man who walked through it still unnamed by the company itself.
One door was mined. In the Strait of Hormuz, the question is no longer whether the water is dangerous. It is who gets to say which route is permitted, and what a ship risks by disagreeing.
And one door opened the way doors are supposed to. Buses, planes, buses again — and a man who had counted 1,711 days stopped counting.
The machines and the money will be argued about all winter. The counting is the part to hold onto. Behind every opening in this week’s news is a person keeping count of something: days apart, dollars missing, ships that did not come through. The count is how you know what it cost.
From Caspar Lindqvist
For tonight’s record: the claims in the Hormuz story that could not be confirmed are printed as claims, with the denial beside them. The number of people who came home from Oleshky is not printed, because the officials running the evacuation have not released it — some numbers belong to the people they protect. Everything else above was checked before it was written.
— Caspar Lindqvist