Evening Brief, Friday 30 October

Pedro Sánchez refused Óscar Puente's offer to resign after the collision near Urda in Toledo province killed 69 people and injured about 40. The crash involved an Iryo train that had left Madrid-Puerta de Atocha with 147 passengers and a Renfe AVE high-speed train carrying 397 passengers towards Seville. The toll makes it Spain's second-worst rail disaster since the 2013 Angrois derailment, and Emiliano García-Page warned it could still pass 70 as remains are identified.

Óscar Puente said a computer problem knocked out the LZB signalling and safety system across a 63-km stretch at 8.31am, stopping six trains automatically. Five minutes later, he said, the Atocha control centre told the AVE driver to resume at normal speed despite knowing another train occupied the same section. He added that the LZB system had failed 170 times this year on the Madrid-Seville line, including 13 failures on that section.

Pedro Sánchez called a resignation at this stage unjust, so Óscar Puente stays in office and carries the investigation politically as well as operationally. Ada Colau, the Frente Amplio candidate for prime minister, demanded that he leave quickly.

Binance said its first investigation points to a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, which let an attacker reach a service container and submit unauthorised withdrawal requests. The crypto exchange put the total estimated impact at about $6.3bn, a figure that would dwarf February's $1.5bn theft from Bybit. Binance said it found no evidence that wallet private keys leaked, and founder Changpeng Zhao wrote that he expected users' funds to be covered.

The damage was partly contained because issuers and investigators moved fast. Binance first verified $2.54bn in frozen funds, then said about $3bn had been frozen on the blockchain and that the figure could rise. Tether froze more than $1.5bn in currency tied to the suspected hack, while Circle froze more than $800m in coordination with law enforcement.

TRM Labs attributed the attack with high confidence to TraderTraitor, a group it links to North Korea and to the wider Lazarus network. The firm cited on-chain and off-chain evidence and said the attack resembled earlier thefts attributed to North Korean actors. Bitcoin fell on the evening of 29 October, with reports putting the drop between about 2% and 3.2%, as traders tried to price both the loss and the speed of the freeze.

Binance kept deposits running but suspended withdrawals during a security review. The company said it hoped withdrawals could resume within 48 hours, a timetable that now matters for confidence as much as for liquidity.

Russia and Ukraine began moving civilians out of Oleshky, a Russian-held town on the left bank of the Dnipro opposite Kherson. The local truce started at 03:00 on 27 October and runs until 22:59 on 1 November. The White House announced the arrangement and said Melania Trump mediated it. A convoy of 25 buses and trucks carried food, medicines, hygiene products and fuel towards the town.

Ukrainian MP David Arakhamia said the Ukrainian delegation had left for Anapa in southern Russia with evacuees from Oleshky. From there, the evacuees are due to fly to Belarus and then travel by bus back to Ukraine. Prime minister Sergii Koretskyi said 527 residents were expected to return to Ukrainian-controlled territory, while estimates of the remaining population run from about 1,000 to 2,000, far below the pre-war figure of roughly 24,000.

Kyrylo Budanov published photographs of the operation and urged both sides to keep it going.

The evacuees are due to receive medical checks, clothes and hygiene items in Chernihiv and in the Kyiv region before being housed in several Ukrainian regions.

China's Communist Party confirmed the expulsion of 33 senior officials and officers at the close of its fifth plenum in Beijing. Sixteen came from the military, including Zhang Youxia, once the first vice chairman of the Central Military Commission and a Politburo member. The communiqué cited serious violations of discipline and law but did not publish detailed charges against the individuals.

Only 279 of the 376 full and alternate Central Committee members elected in 2022 attended the meeting, leaving more than a quarter of the original body absent. Attendance has fallen from 364 at the third plenum in July 2024 to 315 at the fourth in October 2025, then to 279 this week. Neil Thomas of the Asia Society linked the empty seats to the discipline drive.

The purge has cut deeply into the People's Liberation Army's top command. Of the seven Central Military Commission members appointed in 2022, five have since been removed, leaving Xi Jinping and Zhang Shengmin, the military anti-graft chief. The plenum promoted Zhang Shengmin to the Politburo, making him its only military member and giving the army's disciplinary supervisor a more visible political seat.

Xi Jinping has made anti-corruption work central to his rule since 2012. State discipline figures cited in the reporting say 983,000 people were punished last year, while more than two million have been disciplined since 2012 for formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagant living.

The United States is preparing for either renewed strikes on Iran or a pause in the eight-month war. Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of US Central Command, briefed Donald Trump on 29 October on options for renewed attacks and on whether the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is working. The New York Times has reported that the United States and Israel have plans for attacks after the 3 November midterm elections.

The diplomacy runs through Qatar. A letter from Vice President JD Vance reached Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, on 25 October, proposing face-to-face negotiations with Iran's nuclear programme on the table from the start. Reuters reported that Qatari mediators returned to Tehran on 30 October for talks coordinated with Washington.

Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey, said the sides were close to a pause.

The military signs point the other way. Reports counted American military cargo aircraft landing in Israel, while Washington has strengthened air defences and munitions in the region and moved some troops away from bases exposed to Iranian retaliation.

The United States cancelled the traditional family photo at the G20 foreign ministers' meeting in Atlanta after several European representatives said they did not want to stand beside Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Marco Rubio judged that the row could distract from the two-day meeting, so the State Department dropped the photo and sent ministers straight into the plenary session.

The compromise failed late. Until the previous morning, diplomats had expected two pictures, one with Sergey Lavrov and one without him. No arrangement satisfied everyone, and some European delegations reportedly threatened to walk out if asked to pose beside him. German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said he would not avoid a photo because dialogue is part of his job, but added that relations with Russia could not return to normal while the war in Ukraine continues.

Ukraine, which had joined some earlier G20 meetings during the war, was not invited because Washington limited participation to formal members. Spain was also excluded because it attends as an invited observer, while Italy sent Vice Minister Maria Tripodi rather than a foreign minister. Ian Kelly, a former US ambassador to Georgia, said the invitation to Sergey Lavrov was a political mistake.

Donald Trump has invited Vladimir Putin to the G20 leaders' summit in Florida on 14-15 December, though Vladimir Putin has not confirmed he will attend. A face-to-face meeting between Sergey Lavrov and Marco Rubio is expected on the sidelines in Atlanta.