The US midterms dominate the hour, and the clearest signal is the final NBC poll: voters favor a Democratic-controlled Congress 52% to 45%, Trump's approval sits at 40%, and 73% are dissatisfied with the economy ¹. Trump is struggling to convince voters the economy is strong ². He said he might become "Mr. Veto" if Democrats win a majority ³ and is rallying in Iowa and Kansas to hold the Senate ⁴. Election-integrity friction runs through several items. In Alaska, Sen. Dan Sullivan said he would accept a loss to Mary Peltola even as a DOJ lawsuit seeks to invalidate the results should she win ⁵, while he also accused her of "still lying" about a ballot controversy ⁶. Data analysts flagged mismatches in a Trump administration list of California voters' eligibility and citizenship status ⁷. Separately, voter-roll purges are driving mass protest in India: Congress-led opposition supporters rallied in Delhi over a revision that erased 130 million names ⁸, marching with a banner of deleted voters' names ⁹. The biggest single non-election story is security: the FBI attributes the $6.3 billion Binance theft, the largest crypto hack in history, to North Korea, citing an entity known as TraderTraitor ¹⁰. Binance has resumed withdrawals ¹¹ but is seeing a spike in customers pulling funds after covering the bulk of the losses ¹². Markets are uneasy on two fronts. Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon shares fell after strong earnings as investors fixated on AI infrastructure spending ¹³, and Wall Street is bracing for more volatile sessions ¹⁴. Separately, Fitch data puts trailing-12-month US private credit defaults at a record 6.3%, with 27 default events in the third quarter versus 20 in the second ¹⁵. On Ukraine, Kyiv's drones reportedly hit the Kstovo refinery, the third Russian refinery in three days after Ukraine ended a pause on energy-site attacks, though Jared Kushner had reportedly asked Kyiv to observe a 30-day halt ¹⁶. Ukrainian strikes also reportedly targeted the Kamensky missile propellant plant in Rostov and destroyed air defense assets . Meanwhile, Marco Rubio privately doubted a settlement is possible in the coming months and called near-term NATO membership for Kyiv unrealistic ¹⁷. Elsewhere, anti-Netanyahu parties hold 67 of the Knesset's 120 seats but face hard compromises to form even a minority government ¹⁸, and a federal judge dismissed Trump's defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal over the Epstein letter article for a second time ¹⁹.