Evening Brief, Saturday 7 November

Police said a gunman drove a car into Krakow’s Main Square shortly after 15:00 on Saturday and began shooting at random people at one of Poland’s busiest tourist sites. The latest police count puts the dead at six and the wounded at at least 15, including police officers, after earlier updates gave five dead and about a dozen wounded. Officers cordoned off the square and told residents and tourists to leave the area and move to safety.

Polish radio RMF FM, citing its reporter, said the suspect was a 25-year-old Polish citizen who arrived in a black Subaru without number plates and fired an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle while wearing military-style fatigues. Krakow police spokesperson Katarzyna Cisło said officers found many other weapons and ammunition in his car. Police shot the gunman during a firefight a short distance from the square, and Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek said he had been wounded and detained while his motive remained unknown.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk urged politicians of every party not to exploit the attack.

President Karol Nawrocki sent condolences to the victims, the wounded and their families, and United States ambassador Tom Rose called it a savage and murderous attack that had shattered Poland’s peace. Krakow’s transport company said a tram driver reported that his vehicle had been fired on near the square and that his cabin window had shattered. Police have not established a motive.

Russia fired 36 ballistic missiles and 172 strike drones at Ukraine overnight, according to Ukraine’s air force and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Kyiv officials said blasts damaged residential buildings, a kindergarten and a non-residential structure in the Solomianskyi district, while local casualty accounts differed. Mayor Vitali Klitschko reported at least five injured, including a 14-year-old, and Zelenskyy put the number of injured at nine.

Klitschko said the Northern Bridge over the Dnipro was hit and closed in both directions. He also described the city’s power supply as extremely difficult, with heating and water affected as overnight temperatures fell to 0 degrees Celsius. Ukrainian officials said energy facilities were hit in three districts of the Kyiv region, and Zelenskyy said 12 other regions were targeted. Russia’s Defense Ministry said the Northern Bridge carries Ukrainian military transport and named energy and industrial sites among its targets.

The strike lands just before another round of talks. Russia named Vladimir Medinsky to lead its delegation for trilateral negotiations with the United States and Ukraine in Abu Dhabi, with deputy foreign ministers Sergei Ryabkov and Mikhail Galuzin also joining. Igor Kostyukov, head of Russian military intelligence, is listed on the military side, and Vladimir Putin met the delegation at a Security Council session on Friday.

The talks are scheduled for 10 and 11 November and are the first of this kind since February. Ukraine and the United States have not yet published their delegations, and no results have been announced because the meetings have not started.

New Zealand’s general election produced no clear winner after 98.8% of votes were counted. The National Party of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and the Labour Party of Chris Hipkins both stood at 29.3%, with Labour ahead by 976 ballots, 705,172 to 704,196. The final result is not expected until 27 November, when special votes are counted.

Preliminary seat figures gave National 42 seats, ACT 13 and New Zealand First 12, a combined 67 seats that would clear the 66-seat threshold by one. Labour was reported at 35 or 36 seats, while the Greens won 16, Te Pāti Māori five and Opportunity seven. Special votes include ballots from non-resident voters, estimated by one report at around 300,000, and they have tended to favour the left in recent elections.

Opportunity now becomes hard to ignore. The party is set to enter parliament for the first time with about 6% of the vote, but Luxon has repeatedly ruled out a coalition over its land-tax and basic-income ideas. Its leader, Raf Manji’s successor Wong, says she will negotiate first with the party that wins the most seats and treat stability as her main test. She has also said the property tax is not an unavoidable condition for a deal.

Hipkins told supporters that the country had spoken, though it might take a while to know what it had said.

Luxon will lead a caretaker government until the final count is declared on 27 November.

European security and intelligence agencies are trying to establish whether anonymous bomb threats against passenger flights came from Russia. Eurocontrol counted 35 affected flights on 3, 5 and 6 November, including aircraft that were diverted or escorted, but said the incidents had no measurable effect on delays across European air traffic as a whole.

The Financial Times, citing intelligence officials, reported that a cross-border investigation is under way. Officials stressed that a conclusion could take a long time, or might never come, yet some European intelligence services consider Russia the most likely source based on motive, method, earlier cases and first forensic clues. The working hypothesis among services that discussed the attacks is that pro-Kremlin activists or hacker groups organised the threats, though that would not prove Russian intelligence directed them.

The threats arrived from different anonymous email accounts and from several countries. One could be traced to Colombia, and others were written in the recipients’ own languages. No explosives were found on the targeted aircraft, and the pattern of disruption remains unclear. In Portugal, radio Observador reported that the FBI had passed threats to Portuguese police involving a Ryanair flight from Lisbon to Rome and two TAP flights, one to Paris and one to Copenhagen.

Andrea Giuricin, a transport economist at the University of Milano Bicocca, put the direct cost to airlines in the low millions of euros.

He said the bill would be much larger if fear cut demand for flying, and Joris Melkert of TU Delft said bombings of commercial aircraft are now very rare.

Paraguay’s Senate voted unanimously to remove Santiago Peña from the presidency on Friday, three days after the central bank took control of Ueno Bank. Peña had offered his resignation on Thursday, but Congress continued the impeachment process because opposition lawmakers wanted him out before he could retain immunity. Prosecutors ordered his arrest, along with former central bank chief Carlos Carvallo, in a criminal probe tied to the bank’s collapse. Peña denies wrongdoing.

Ueno Bank was a fast-growing digital lender used by more than half of Paraguayan adults. The central bank identified a severe capital shortfall and breaches of financial solvency rules, and lawmakers accuse Peña of using political influence to steer public money into the lender while regulators overlooked risky insider lending. Reports put public funds managed by Ueno at about $850m, including money from pension and public health funds. Nearly 3m customers lost access to savings.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside Peña’s house on Friday night and demanded that he be jailed rather than held at home. Some broke through a security cordon, threw eggs and stones and clashed with police. Late on Friday, Peña was moved from his home in Asunción to the Presidential Escort Regiment, a military unit near the presidential palace, for security reasons.

Vice President Pedro Alliana, 52, was sworn in shortly after the removal and began naming a new Cabinet on Saturday. He pledged that depositors affected by the collapse would be fully compensated. The central bank said on Saturday that 1.2m Ueno customers had been paid back, in full or in part, their insured deposits.

Heavy rain flooded about 70,000 tents in Gaza over 12 hours on Saturday morning, according to the press office of the Hamas-run government. Al Jazeera reported water levels of 30 to 40cm in several camps, and Gaza’s civil defence agency received hundreds of calls for help. In al-Mina camp in northern Gaza, where about 1,700 Palestinian families live, the ground turned into pools of muddy water.

The Hamas-run press office put damage at about $3m and said walls had fallen in several parts of the Strip, injuring people. Europa Press reported that two Palestinians were hurt in northern Gaza when a wall collapsed in the rain, after an earlier Israeli bombing had already damaged the structure. It also said about 270,000 tents house displaced families, and more than 400,000 people live in flood-prone or coastal areas.

Hamas accuses Israel of blocking shelters and equipment needed to cope with the rain. Israel says it restricts materials that could be used as weapons, and it accuses Hamas of looting humanitarian aid. Hamas spokesman Hazem Qasem called on Israel to meet its obligations under existing agreements and allow shelter materials in, while Palestinian Authority health minister Majed Abu Ramadan urged the United Nations and humanitarian organisations to intervene immediately.

Eyad Amawi, coordinator of the Gaza Relief Committee, appealed to anyone in Gaza with covered space to take in displaced families, especially women, children and older people. Reports say a US-mediated ceasefire in 2025 foresees reconstruction, but negotiators have not agreed on conditions for Hamas disarmament or the withdrawal of Israeli troops, who control about two-thirds of the territory.