Morning Brief, Saturday 31 October

Binance's update sharpened the picture of the largest crypto breach in years. The exchange put the impact at about $6.3 billion, said deposits were unaffected and kept withdrawals paused while it reviewed the affected service and related addresses. It said it had frozen about $3 billion with partners, and promised to cover all losses with its Secure Asset Fund for Users and company funds.

The company first described a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer, then co-chief executive Richard Teng said the attack involved a more complex process than simple misuse of individual permissions. Binance said it found no evidence that wallet private keys had leaked. TRM Labs, a blockchain analysis firm, assigned the attack with high confidence to TraderTraitor, a North Korea-sponsored hacking group based in Pyongyang.

The freeze spread beyond Binance. Paolo Ardoino at Tether said Tether had blocked more than $1.5 billion in stablecoins, and Jeremy Allaire at Circle Internet Group said Circle had blocked $800 million. Crypto shares fell after the news, with Coinbase down 13.5% from the previous close and Bitcoin reported more than 4% lower near $78,000. The blunt commercial fact is that Binance can promise compensation only because it says it has already set aside more than $6.34 billion of its own funds for the incident.

Spanish investigators have put the Atocha control centre's instruction under the closest scrutiny after the Urda crash that killed 69 people and injured about 40. The preliminary report says a computer fault shut down the LZB signalling and safety system on a 63 km stretch at 8.31, forcing six trains to stop automatically. Transport minister Óscar Puente said LZB had failed 170 times this year on the line and 13 times on that section.

The dangerous step came five minutes later. Controllers told the driver of Renfe AVE 2080 to resume at normal speed, even though they knew another train occupied the same ASFA section, a fact the driver had reported to them. Both the Renfe AVE and the Iryo train had left Madrid-Puerta de Atocha within six minutes of each other, carrying 397 and 147 passengers respectively.

The political argument has not waited for the technical one. Óscar Puente rejected calls for his resignation and said his duty was to solve the problem and give explanations, while the accident investigation continues. Families are still receiving confirmations: the dead include a woman from Figueres who worked for Mango and the manager of bullfighter Pablo Aguado, and two passengers were still listed as missing on 30 October.

Police in anti-riot gear surrounded Poland's Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw after Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska alerted officers to possible threats to judges and staff. A notice on the court website then announced a one-month break in the duties of president Bogdan Święczkowski and deputy president Bartłomiej Sochański. The Polish Press Agency reported that both judges were suspended for one month.

Anna Korwin-Piotrowska said she had taken over as acting head of the court, although President Karol Nawrocki has not sworn her in after her election by the Sejm. The tribunal rejected the move on X, called it a coup d'état and said Bogdan Święczkowski remained in office. Justice minister and prosecutor general Waldemar Żurek said prosecutors had requested the lifting of immunities for both senior judges.

Karol Nawrocki cut short a flight linked to an official trip and landed in Warsaw shortly before 22.00. His office said he entered the tribunal building in the early hours of 31 October with Zbigniew Kapiński, First President of the Supreme Court. Videos posted by both camps showed the president forcing his way past people at the entrance, with each side accusing the other of unlawful conduct.

Jarosław Kaczyński, the Law and Justice leader, thanked protesters gathered near the tribunal and accused Donald Tusk's government of a police assault. Donald Tusk wrote that restoring the rule of law was difficult and painful after years of illegality under PiS. The European Union already regards the tribunal as too dependent on political power, which makes this Warsaw fight a Brussels problem too.

The US State Department approved the sale of 500 Patriot PAC-3 interceptor missiles to Ukraine, with an estimated value of $2.1 billion. Lockheed Martin is the main contractor, but the approval does not complete the transaction because Ukraine still has to negotiate the purchase agreement with the company. The sale gives Kyiv a formal route to weapons it has been short of since summer.

The payment route shows how Donald Trump's second administration has changed the mechanics of arming Ukraine. Canada, Germany and Norway will contribute through the US JUMPSTART programme, and Ukraine will also use national funds financed through a European Union loan. Washington is selling the missiles instead of donating them directly.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy had complained that Ukraine received on average only twelve Patriot interceptors a month this year, which he said left cities more exposed to Russian ballistic missile attacks. In the week of 26 October, he said Kyiv had waited nearly a month for US approval of deliveries for Patriot and NASAMS systems, and he blamed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for the signature delay.

The bottleneck does not end at the sale notice. Lockheed Martin has a US Army contract worth up to $58.6 billion to raise Patriot production, and the company says it plans to triple PAC-3 MSE capacity by the end of 2030. That timetable leaves Ukraine looking for missiles from partners' existing stocks as winter attacks approach.

Russian and Ukrainian officials said the evacuation of Oleshky had ended under a local ceasefire that both sides say has held since 27 October. The town, on the Russian-held left bank of the Dnipro opposite Kherson, had been cut off for months with shortages of food, medicine, water and power. Reports credit Melania Trump with mediating the truce, and one also names Pope Leo XIV.

A convoy of 25 buses and trucks carried food, hygiene products, medicine and fuel, and nine ambulances joined the column for bedridden residents. Russian ombudsman Yana Lantratova said the convoy stopped first at Armiansk in annexed Crimea and then split between people heading to Ukrainian-held territory and people going to Russia. Ukrainian MP David Arakhamia said evacuees bound for Ukraine would travel through Anapa, Belarus and then by bus back home.

The headcount remains muddled. Kyiv put the number still in Oleshky at about 2,000, other reports gave 1,700 to 2,000 or about 1,000, and Ukrainian premier Sergii Koretskyi said 527 residents were expected to return to Ukrainian territory. Melania Trump wrote that 25 buses had evacuated 750 people, but neither Moscow nor Kyiv confirmed a final total in the reports.

The ceasefire is narrow. Lantratova said her office will keep contact with people who stayed in Oleshky, and Ukrainian human rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said similar missions should continue along the front. Fighting continues beyond the local ceasefire zone.

France's economy shrank 0.1% in the third quarter, missing forecasts for slight growth and extending a year with no quarter-on-quarter expansion. Insee had already recorded a 0.2% contraction in the first quarter and no growth in the second. If the second-quarter figure is revised down, France would enter a technical recession, the first since 2009.

Households still spent more, with consumption rising 0.4%, but investment fell 0.6% and exports dropped 1.7%. Foreign trade subtracted six tenths of a point from growth, with weakness reported in aerospace, transport equipment and farm exports after poor summer harvests. The PMI fell to 48.4 in October, a reading that signals contraction in private-sector activity.

Prices and politics now squeeze the budget. Consumer prices rose 3.4% year on year in October, and the harmonised EU measure rose 3.8%. The government of Sébastien Lecornu is trying to cut the deficit, and the original 2027 budget draft already contained €43 billion of measures and a deficit target of 5% of GDP.

Economy minister Roland Lescure said France was not in crisis but would crash without planned budget cuts. Eurostat put eurozone growth at 0.4% for the quarter, which left France second from the bottom among countries with reported figures, just above Lithuania at minus 1%.