The Midnight File — The Desk’s Report
A Fourth Tanker Is Claimed in Hormuz, Khor Mor Goes Dark, and the Count Still Waits
The last entry of the day, filed before the log turns: Sunday settled the toll at Al-Ayyat at seven dead, settled the hurt in central Japan at 22 in the prefectures’ own division, named the six of the Kraków square and reopened it, and put a price on Monday—oil down at the open. It left open everything with a deadline: a fourth tanker claimed in Hormuz and none confirmed, a gas field dark in Iraqi Kurdistan with no one claiming the drone, a mandate in Jerusalem exercised in conditions and not yet in a coalition, a Senate count frozen since Friday, and the Abu Dhabi table, enlarged on Sunday, still two days from sitting.
The Midnight in Brief: What Sunday Settled, What It Left Open
Sunday settled counts, names and a price, and it left causes, claims and coalitions open, and the desk files the day in that order. At Al-Ayyat the dead settled at seven in every later account, and the injured reached their last Sunday figure late in the day, when the chief prosecutor’s office put them at at least 125, in the updated running account filed below; no authority has stated a cause. In Kraków the six killed in the Main Market Square stand named by age and nationality, the square reopened late Sunday, and the joining of the square to the three dead at the suspect’s home stands at a prosecutor’s spokesman’s “highly likely,” in Reuters’ evening account filed below. In the Strait of Hormuz the claims grew after the evening edition closed: an Iranian Navy statement raised the day’s tally of tankers said to have struck mines to four, in the Navy’s account filed below, and no tanker fire of Sunday has been confirmed by a party that did not claim it. In Iraq a drone halted the Khor Mor gas field and took 2,500 to 2,800 megawatts off the Kurdistan grid, with no casualties in the first assessment and no claim of responsibility. In Jerusalem Mr. Eisenkot’s mandate produced four conditions and the week’s meetings, and no coalition. In the United States the Senate count posted nothing new for a second day. And at Monday’s open in Perth, oil fell, in Reuters’ market file filed below. Monday holds the handovers and the meetings; Tuesday holds the talks and the deadlines. That is the day whole, as it stands at midnight.
Al-Ayyat at Midnight: Seven Dead, 125 Injured in the Late Count, and No Cause
The railway file closed Sunday with its numbers at their highest and its central question unanswered. The Health Ministry’s staircase ran four dead and 88 injured, then seven dead and 112 injured, and late Sunday the chief prosecutor’s office put the injured at at least 125, with more than 70 of them discharged after treatment, in the Associated Press account filed below. Prosecutors who inspected the site said the Giza-to-Fayoum train, No. 134, hit the last carriage of the Cairo-to-Aswan train, No. 2010, which was stationary on the same track between Kafr Ammar and Raqqa stations; a conductor was among the dead, and the dead have not been named. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ordered a prompt investigation and accountability for anyone found negligent. No cause has been stated by the railway authority, the prosecutors or the ministry. Settled: the place, the two trains, the seven dead. Open: the 125 against the 112 and 114 also printed under official names during the day, and the cause, which the investigation now owns.
Kraków at Midnight: The Square Reopened, the Six Named, the Joining Still a Spokesman’s Word
Poland’s second day of mourning is Monday, and Sunday ended with the case in its legal shape and its human shape both on the record. The six of the square are counted by age and nationality: a 51-year-old Austrian woman, a 32-year-old British man, three Polish women aged 47, 53 and 61, and a Polish man of about 50. Prosecutors have opened the investigation as a terrorist offence covering two acts, the six murders in the square and the three murders at the home in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, and are preparing six murder charges that could rise to nine. The spokesman Daniel Prokopowicz said it was “highly likely” the same person carried out both; highly likely remains an assessment, not a finding, and the suspect, in critical condition and not yet formally arrested or questioned, has answered nothing. The wounded stand at 16 in Reuters’ evening count, including the two officers and the gunman, and at 15 in other accounts; the three at home stand at 52, 51 and 21 in the evening brief and at 53, 52 and 20 in the prosecutors’ account, and the desk prints both triangles. Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński declined on Sunday to withdraw his Saturday reading of the attacker’s views, and the opposition’s demand that he produce its basis stands unanswered. The square reopened late Sunday. National mourning runs through Monday.
Hormuz at Midnight: A Fourth Tanker Claimed, One Tentative Name, and Qeshm Unsettled
The strait’s tally grew by one after the evening edition closed, and its confirmation count did not grow at all. The Iranian Navy said a further tanker struck a mine in the eastern strait before noon on Sunday, its identification systems off in a prohibited area, and called it the fourth tanker to hit mines on Sunday; the Guards’ Navy’s own statement of the day counts three, exploded and on fire along an unauthorized route. The two statements are both Iranian, they differ by one ship, and the desk prints both. Against the claims stand the day’s firmer items, none joined to the tally by any authority: the Emirates’ rescue of 22 crew from a burning cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman, and the American disabling of the M/V Huda on Saturday, explained by Central Command. One name has been offered for one ship, and it is offered as tentative: open-source analysts identify the tanker that caught fire off Khasab, its crew evacuated and firefighting tugs alongside, as the Navig8 Messi, in the maritime account filed below. No owner, flag authority or coast guard has confirmed that identification. On Qeshm the record also disagrees with itself: the Tasnim agency reported two missiles struck the island, Iranian state television said officials had not confirmed any missile strikes and suggested the explosions might be related to Iranian military activity, and Reuters, in its Sunday file filed below, said it was not able to confirm any of the reported strikes. Three projectiles reported launched from Sirik toward vessels stand likewise unconfirmed, with no hit established.
Khor Mor at Midnight: 2,800 Megawatts Gone, and No Claim
The evening’s one confirmed interruption became, by midnight, the region’s largest measured fact. A single drone hit a liquefied petroleum gas storage tank at the Khor Mor gas field in Sulaymaniyah province on Sunday night; production halted, the fire was still raging in the first reports, and crews were ordered into shelters. The Kurdistan electricity ministry put the generation lost at 2,500 to 2,800 megawatts, gas supply was suspended to power plants in Erbil, Sulaimaniyah, Bazian, Chamchamal and Duhok, and accounts put more than 70 percent of the region without power, with hospitals and water stations given priority and hydroelectric stations called on. Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said an initial assessment found no casualties, and Baghdad directed a joint investigative committee, in the accounts filed below. The region’s ministries called the attack a terrorist attack in a joint statement. No group has claimed it, one reporter at the scene could not say whether the projectile was a drone or a rocket, and a security source’s claim about its launch place is unconfirmed. Settled: the field is stopped and the megawatts are counted. Open: the hand, the damage, and the restart.
Riyadh and Sanaa at Midnight: The Launchers Destroyed, the Toll Standing at 33
The Saudi–Yemen ledger did not move in its figures on Sunday night, and its two sides stand as far apart at midnight as at noon. The coalition said it destroyed two ballistic-missile launchers in Saada that it said were used in Sunday’s attack on Riyadh, after intercepting three ballistic missiles and two cruise missiles. The Energy Ministry’s account of the Aramco Tower stands: damage from falling debris, no casualties. The Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree’s claims stand against it: the financial district and King Khalid International Airport targeted, in operations the movement counts at four in one account and six in another, and a tally of coalition attacks over 24 hours that stands at 91 in one file and 105 in another. The Sanaa figure did not move: at least 33 killed, among them eight women and thirteen children, and 39 wounded, in the Houthi-run health ministry’s count for Saturday’s strikes on homes at al-Shariyah, east of the capital, which Saudi Arabia’s Center for International Communication said it was investigating. Every figure in this paragraph has its owner attached; none has been verified by a party that did not issue it.
Komyshuvakha at Midnight: 55 Dead, and the Missing at 45 or About 50
Ukraine’s file closed Sunday on a disagreement of five names. The toll of Monday’s bombing of the former school and the shelter at Komyshuvakha stands at at least 55 dead in every Sunday account, and Sunday’s drone strike on the rescue crews there injured no one and damaged specialized equipment, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said. The missing do not agree: the military intelligence agency HUR lists around 50 people still missing, and the acting head of the regional military administration, Mykhailo Semikin, put the figure at 45 on Sunday afternoon, in the Associated Press account filed below. Many bodies recovered have not been identified and DNA analysis continues. HUR said Saturday it had identified some of the Russian service members it says took part in the first strike; Russia’s differing account of its operations around Komyshuvakha stands in the earlier files, and no Russian statement on Sunday’s drone strike was taken in. The accounts of both attacks rest on Ukrainian officials and the Associated Press’s reporting; no party that did not issue them has verified the toll.
Jerusalem at Midnight: Four Conditions Published, the Meetings Set, No Coalition
The mandate’s first day ended where it began: 48 seats in hand, 61 required, 28 days running. Mr. Eisenkot’s four conditions for joining his government stand as he published them: acceptance of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, the values of the Declaration of Independence upheld, universal military, national or civilian service supported, and Hamas recognised as a terrorist organisation. His challenge to Likud and Religious Zionism, to back a government under him if they stand by their calls for unity, drew no answer taken in on Sunday. The contest underneath the arithmetic is the conscription question, and its positions are all on the record: Mr. Liberman prepared to make painful compromises, including on the conscription law, to build 61 without the Arab lists; the commentator Amit Segal’s assessment that the price of such an arrangement is that the ultra-Orthodox would not be drafted; the Democrats’ chairman Yair Golan’s position that the ultra-Orthodox must be drafted; and Mr. Bennett’s party’s statement that its silence is not consent. Mr. Eisenkot was expected to meet Mr. Bennett on Sunday evening and Mr. Liberman on Monday; no outcome of the Bennett meeting was taken in by midnight. The Joint List said it was willing to help end Mr. Netanyahu’s tenure without demanding a place in the government, and had not yet been asked to commit its votes. On Tuesday the new Knesset is scheduled to convene.
Abu Dhabi at Midnight: Europe’s Chairs Claimed, the G7 in Paris on Monday, the Table on Tuesday
The talks have not begun, and everything about them that changed on Sunday was shape, not substance. France’s foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Europeans will be well represented in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday and Wednesday and that France will take part, that he will not personally sit at the table, and that Paris has not yet named its representative, in Reuters’ Paris file filed below. Russia’s delegation is reported led by presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky; the accounts of Ukraine’s delegation differ among themselves in the files taken in, and the desk prints no lead name as settled. Russia has suggested there would be no place for European representatives at the table; France says this time they will participate; both statements stand. The G7 foreign ministers meet in Paris on Monday and Tuesday, with air defence and energy support for Ukraine on the agenda in the accounts taken in. The American president predicted a “very big” deal extending beyond Ukraine; Mr. Barrot said he did not know what the president had in mind. No agenda, draft or text has been published by any side.
Washington at Midnight: Miller Takes the Office on Monday, and the Answers Are In
The handover announced Friday takes effect at the start of the new day, and Sunday supplied the last of the considered answers to it. Stephen Miller, 41, deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, becomes chief of staff on Monday, November 9; Susie Wiles, whose resignation the president received Thursday night and whose last day was Friday, moves to the Trump Political Operation. The president’s words stand in the record: “Stephen’s been with me since the beginning. He gets it.” The opposition’s answers now stand in two voices: Senator Chuck Schumer’s, that the president “has learned nothing from his historic defeat,” and, on Sunday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s, on ABC’s “This Week,” that his party will not work with Mr. Miller, in the Sunday account filed below. From the president’s own party, Representative Marlin Stutzman’s dissent stands as filed at evening. The Federal Register published nothing on Saturday or Sunday. Settled: the sequence and the date. Open: what the new chief of staff does with the office, which no statement yet describes.
Asunción at Midnight: 27 Charged, the Repayments Counted Two Ways, and No Ruling
Paraguay’s file ended its first weekend with the detention standing, the charges widened, and the money counted in two currencies of account. At least 27 people face charges in the Ueno case, including the bank’s lead shareholder Miguel Vazquez; former President Santiago Peña and former central bank chief Carlos Carvallo are held in pretrial detention, Mr. Peña at the Presidential Escort Regiment, each of his two charges carrying up to ten years on the prosecutor’s statement. He declined to testify Saturday, maintains a plea of not guilty through his lawyer Ricardo Preda, and is presumed innocent; no court has ruled on any part of the case. On the repayments, the figures differ in their basis and the desk prints both: the central bank’s reporting, carried in the accounts filed below, puts about $160 million paid to nearly 1.2 million savers, while a second accounting of the guarantee fund puts the same 1.2 million savers at 994.6 billion guaraníes, equivalent to $153.5 million, as of November 6. Ueno administered around $850 million in public money, including state pension funds; how much of it can be recovered is not established. President Pedro Alliana is naming a new cabinet to serve through 2028.
The Count at Midnight: Frozen at Friday’s Figures, and the Estimates Still Apart
For a second day the count posted nothing, and midnight is the hour to say plainly what that means: the last votes counted in either Senate race were counted by Friday evening. Mississippi stands at Scott Colom 467,930 to Cindy Hyde-Smith 465,356, a margin of 2,574 on 953,314 counted, the tally stamped 5:02 p.m. Friday. Alaska stands at Mary Peltola ahead of Dan Sullivan by 637 first-choice votes, 48.2 percent to 47.9, on a count posted Wednesday. The estimates of what remains in Mississippi run from about 3,139 mail ballots outstanding on Friday’s count to the state Republican chairman’s 23,000 to 25,000 affidavit or mail ballots, with a tracker’s roughly 30,498 ballots left in its own model; the desk prints the three with their owners. The calendar is the settled part: in Mississippi, mail ballots postmarked by Election Day must arrive, and affidavit voters must cure missing identification, by 5 p.m. Tuesday, November 10; counties certify by November 13; state law provides no recount for this race, and a plurality wins. In Alaska the next count is expected Monday or Tuesday, absentee ballots arrive through November 18, and the ranked-choice tabulation is set for that day if no candidate clears 50 percent. The Associated Press ledgers stand at 54 Democrats to 44 Republicans in the Senate and 252 to 161 in the House, with 22 House races uncalled, Colorado’s 4th among them. Neither Senate race has been called, on the sixth day after the election.
Shizuoka at Midnight: The Hurt Settled at 22, and the Agency Meets on Monday
Central Japan’s file is the day’s one clean settling. The afternoon official division stood at midnight: 19 injured in Aichi Prefecture, one of them serious, and three minor injuries in Shizuoka, 22 in all, between a morning figure of 15 and a printed 24 that no later official account carried forward. The earthquake stands as filed: magnitude 5.7 by the Japan Meteorological Agency and 5.5 by the United States Geological Survey, at 1:04 a.m. local time Sunday beneath western Shizuoka at about 40 kilometres’ depth, upper 5 on the Japanese scale in Chita, no tsunami threat and no deaths. One later account gives 21 injured in an updated Jiji Press count against the Associated Press’s 22, and the desk notes it without moving its figure, in the correction file filed below. The agency lowered its landslide-warning thresholds for the hardest-shaken municipalities of Aichi, kept its guidance of caution for about a week with the risk highest in the next two to three days, and is to investigate the quake further at a meeting on Monday, the television accounts report. A separate magnitude 4.3 tremor in the Kumamoto area on Sunday produced no reports of serious damage.
The Markets’ Reading: Oil Fell at Monday’s Open
The weekend’s claims met their first price in the small hours, and the price went down. Oil fell at Monday’s open in Perth after the president said fresh American attacks on Iran were “highly unlikely” if negotiations continued to advance, Reuters reported: Brent down 64 cents, or 0.64 percent, to $97.67 a barrel, briefly down more than a dollar, and West Texas Intermediate down 35 cents to $90.51, against Friday’s settlements of $98.32 and $90.83. An earlier print in the same opening, at 0138 GMT, carried Brent at $97.48, down 84 cents; the two prints are an hour’s movement, not a disagreement. Asian shares opened higher in the early accounts, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 up about 3 percent in the first Monday trading after its 5.96 percent fall on Friday. The reading the desk files is narrow: at the first price after a weekend of claimed tanker fires, a halted gas field and debris in Riyadh, the market paid more weight to a president’s sentence about talks than to any claim out of the strait. What the American and European sessions do with the same file on Monday is not yet in the record.
The Cocked Hat
Three bearings, honestly plotted, give a triangle and not a point, and Sunday’s triangles are these. On Al-Ayyat, the dead agree at seven and the injured stand at 125 in the prosecutor’s late count against 112 and 114 printed under official names during the day; the cause is stated by no one. On Kraków, the wounded stand at 15 or 16, the three at home at two sets of ages, the joining of the two scenes at a spokesman’s “highly likely,” and the minister’s reading as a hypothesis defended and challenged, with the man who could answer it silent in hospital. On Hormuz, the Guards count three burning tankers and the Navy counts a fourth, Reuters confirms none, one name is offered tentatively by analysts and by no authority, and Qeshm is a missile strike in one Iranian account and unconfirmed military activity in another. On Khor Mor, the halt and the megawatts are confirmed by the ministries that lost them, and the hand is claimed by no one. On the missing at Komyshuvakha, the agencies of the same government stand at 45 and about 50. On Jerusalem, a mandate has conditions and meetings and no coalition. On Asunción, the repayments are $160 million in one accounting and $153.5 million in another, on the same 1.2 million savers. On the count, the margins are Friday’s and Wednesday’s, and the estimates of what remains run tenfold apart. The log turns with Monday’s handovers in Washington and meetings in Jerusalem and Paris, and Tuesday’s talks in Abu Dhabi and deadlines in Mississippi and Alaska. The desk files the day settled where it settled, and open where it stands open.