Zelensky told the Financial Times today that Trump’s energy ceasefire is over: “The block is out. We’re done.”

Ukraine struck a Russian oil refinery. Zelensky said Trump’s energy ceasefire is over. A school roof killed children in Pakistan. A climate study confirmed Hurricane Polo was the longest-lasting Category 5 Pacific storm on record. Here is Thursday.

Ukraine struck a Russian oil refinery today and Zelensky told the Financial Times that Trump’s energy ceasefire is over. “The block is out. We’re done.” He said he felt betrayed.

Ukrainian drones struck an oil refinery in Russia’s Ryazan region Thursday, causing a fire, as Ukrainian President Zelensky confirmed that Ukraine had resumed energy strikes after a three-day pause. In an interview with the Financial Times, Zelensky said Ukraine paused strikes to comply with Trump’s unilateral “energy ceasefire” announcement but that Russia continued bombing Ukraine’s energy infrastructure throughout the pause. “The block is out. We’re done,” he said. Zelensky said he felt “betrayed” by Trump and described a “dangerous” withdrawal of US intelligence and the simultaneous weakening of Starlink services as Ukraine faced intense Russian attacks. Both Russia and Ukraine had denied agreeing to the ceasefire when Trump announced it on Sunday.

The sequence of the past week describes a specific kind of diplomatic failure: Trump announced a ceasefire neither party confirmed. Russia struck Ukrainian power infrastructure during the announced pause, knocking out power for 600,000 people. SpaceX restricted Ukraine’s Starlink drones on Tuesday night. Ukraine struck a Russian refinery Thursday morning. Zelensky gave an interview calling it over. The gap between Trump’s announcement of a peace framework and the reality of what happened in those same days is now documented in the public record by both the attacking country and the defending one. The diesel deal, the Starlink restrictions, the intelligence withdrawal: Zelensky named all three as part of the same pattern. He paused. Russia did not. He is done pausing.

A school roof collapsed in Peshawar, Pakistan on Thursday. At least 28 children and a teacher were killed. All the children were 13 or younger. The school owner was arrested.

The roof of the Al-Khair Education Center, a private school in Peshawar, Pakistan, collapsed during classes on Thursday, killing at least 28 children and a female teacher and injuring more than 50 other people. All the children killed or injured were age 13 or younger. Six girls were among the dead. Lady Reading Hospital declared an emergency as medical staff treated the wounded. The school’s owner was arrested. A district emergency officer said rescuers had pulled out at least 45 children by evening, as 110 students had been in three classrooms when the roof gave way. An official said: “The building was not suitable for use as a school at all. Its roof was overweight with construction on a weak structure that caused the collapse.”

The school was in a small residential building on a narrow street in Peshawar’s Dir district and served mainly children from low-income families. A teacher who was injured, Mahwish Zaman, told AP she was in her class when the roof came down, saying: “The lesson had barely begun.” Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in northwestern Pakistan, has experienced catastrophic school-related violence before: the 2014 Peshawar school massacre by the Pakistani Taliban killed 132 students. Thursday’s collapse is different in cause but not in the specific weight of what a school in that city means to the families sending children there. A building unsuitable for use as a school, registered and operating as one, serving families who had no other option: that is the infrastructure failure underneath the structural one.

A climate science study published today confirmed that Hurricane Polo was the longest-lasting Category 5 storm ever recorded in the Pacific. Climate change made the conditions 23 times more likely.

A joint study by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central, published Thursday, found that climate change and El Niño combined to create Hurricane Polo, which became the longest-lasting Category 5 storm ever recorded in the Pacific Ocean. World Weather Attribution is an international scientific collaboration that assesses whether specific weather events were made more likely by human-caused climate change. El Niño is the periodic warming of Pacific Ocean surface temperatures that intensifies weather systems globally. The study found that climate change made the conditions that fueled Hurricane Polo 23 times more likely, while El Niño made them 14 times more likely.

This brief covered Hurricane Polo in September when it formed, and Hurricane Isaias making landfall on the Gulf Coast on October 8. The study published Thursday provides the retrospective scientific accounting for what Polo was: the most sustained Category 5 hurricane the Pacific has ever recorded, supercharged by two forces operating simultaneously. The specific multiplication factors in the study are worth sitting with. The conditions that produced Polo were 23 times more probable because of climate change than they would have been without it. That means in a world without human greenhouse gas emissions, that specific storm had roughly a 4% chance of occurring where it had a near-certainty in the world that exists. The storm is over. The conditions that made it possible are not.

The Trump administration is trying to strip Ilhan Omar’s citizenship. The investigation is focused on how she obtained citizenship as a child refugee. Her phone, passport, notebooks, and computers were seized.

The Trump administration’s investigation of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is aimed at building a case to strip her of her US citizenship, with the effort focused at least in part on how Omar obtained citizenship after she was brought to the United States as a child refugee from Somalia. Among items seized from Omar’s Washington home in the Monday raid were her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers, and passport. Homeland Security investigators have issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas including to some of her relatives.

Ilhan Omar came to the United States as a 12-year-old refugee in 1995. She became a citizen through a process her office describes as entirely lawful. She was elected to Congress in 2018 as one of the first two Muslim women in the House. The investigation’s reported goal, stripping citizenship from a sitting member of Congress 22 days before an election in which she is on the ballot, is a specific use of federal law enforcement power with no recent precedent. The seizure of her passport is particularly significant: a US citizen’s passport is both a travel document and evidence of citizenship status. Seizing it is a step in the legal architecture of denaturalization. Omar’s office said: “President Trump would love to eliminate one of the most effective progressive voices in Congress.” The DOJ confirmed the investigation but provided no details. The specific legal theory that would allow a citizen who obtained citizenship as a child refugee to be stripped of it would require a court to find fraud or misrepresentation in the original application, filed by her father when she was 12. That is the government’s reported theory. The courts will decide it.

800,000 people in Yemen have been cut off from food aid as the fighting intensifies. The World Food Programme is sounding an alarm.

The United Nations World Food Programme warned Thursday that approximately 800,000 people in Yemen have been cut off from lifesaving food assistance as heavy fighting between Houthi militias and Saudi-backed forces has blocked aid delivery routes. The WFP said shifting frontlines, blocked roads, and growing insecurity have severely hampered access to the city of Taiz, which Houthi forces have encircled.

Yemen was already the world’s worst humanitarian crisis before the Houthi conflict with Saudi Arabia escalated this year. The country has been at war in some form since 2015, producing a generation of children who have known nothing else and a food insecurity situation that aid organizations have described as among the most severe in modern history. The Houthi seizure of the Yemeni Red Sea coastline, the island inside the Bab al-Mandab Strait, and the ongoing strikes on Saudi airports and oil facilities have all escalated from a conflict that was already at catastrophic levels. The 800,000 people cut off from WFP deliveries on Thursday are not statistics about a distant war. They are people who were receiving food last week and are not receiving it this week because the roads changed hands. The Houthis have vowed to continue attacking Saudi airports and oil infrastructure. The World Food Programme is asking for access to routes that run through an active battlefield.

A Memphis congressional candidate is running his midterm race against Elon Musk’s xAI data center. The fight is about who gets to decide what gets built in a community.

Tennessee state representative and Memphis congressional candidate Justin Pearson is running his midterm campaign partly against Elon Musk’s xAI data center, which is being built in Memphis, making the race a specific case study in the 2026 midterm debate over what it means for a tech company to build data center infrastructure in a community and what role residents have in deciding whether it belongs there.

The xAI data center in Memphis is one of a wave of massive AI infrastructure projects being sited in communities across the country, often in areas with cheap land, available water, and tax incentives that local governments offer to attract tech investment. The communities receiving these data centers get jobs and tax revenue. They also get enormous electricity demand, water consumption, noise, and the particular environmental footprint of facilities that run 24 hours a day at enormous scale. The midterm fight over data centers connects two of 2026’s defining threads: the AI buildout this brief has tracked since August, and the election where control of both chambers is in play. Pearson opposing the xAI data center while running against a Republican in a competitive district is a candidate making a calculation that in his community, the costs of the data center are more politically salient than the jobs. That calculation, made district by district across the country, will shape where AI infrastructure is built and what accountability it faces.

Russia has nearly finished building a new drone launch base from scratch in just six weeks. Satellite imagery confirmed it.

Russia has nearly completed a new base for launching jet-powered drones in approximately six weeks, according to defense experts and analysis of satellite imagery reviewed by Reuters. The base, which uses jet-powered drones rather than the slower electric drones that have dominated the conflict, represents a significant escalation in Russian long-range strike capability.

Jet-powered drones are powered by small turbine engines rather than electric motors, giving them substantially greater range, higher speed, and larger payload capacity than the Shahed-series electric drones Russia has been deploying since 2022. A new dedicated base for them, built in six weeks, describes a military conducting rapid infrastructure development specifically to expand its ability to strike at range. The speed of construction is as significant as the facility itself: six weeks from empty ground to operational drone base means Russia has both the materials and the organizational capacity to build military infrastructure faster than Western intelligence assessments might assume. This is the same week Ukraine struck a Russian refinery, Zelensky ended the energy ceasefire, and Starlink was restricted on Ukraine’s drones. The new Russian drone base is the infrastructure context in which all of those events are unfolding.

Pope Leo’s post-operative tests came back normal Thursday. His lung is recovering well. The Vatican offered rare transparency about his condition.

Doctors said Thursday that Pope Leo XIV’s lung has recovered well following Tuesday’s surgery and that his post-operative tests are normal. The Vatican continued its unusually transparent approach to communicating about the pontiff’s health, providing regular updates in contrast to the historical opacity of papal medical disclosures.

Pope Leo is 71 years old and is recovering at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital, with all audiences cancelled through October 20. His lung adenocarcinoma diagnosis, confirmed during surgery on October 13 when the lower lobe of his right lung was removed, was the first major publicly disclosed health crisis of his 17-month papacy. The cancer stage, which determines whether surgery was the complete treatment or the first step, has not yet been confirmed. Thursday’s normal post-operative tests are the first good news in a story that opened earlier this week with a surgery and a cancer diagnosis. They do not resolve the outstanding question about stage and future treatment. They confirm that the 71-year-old who leads 1.3 billion Catholics is recovering from major thoracic surgery without complications in the first 48 hours. That is the medical baseline. What comes next depends on what the full pathology shows.

The thread underneath Thursday

Ukraine struck an oil refinery in Russia’s Ryazan region, Zelensky telling the Financial Times the energy ceasefire is over because Russia kept bombing throughout Ukraine’s pause, that he felt betrayed by Trump, and that the combined withdrawal of US intelligence and the Starlink restrictions made him feel like he was losing two allies simultaneously. A school roof collapsed in Peshawar, Pakistan, at a private school serving low-income families, killing at least 28 children and their teacher, all 13 or younger, the building described as not suitable for use as a school. A World Weather Attribution and Climate Central study confirmed Hurricane Polo was the longest-lasting Category 5 Pacific storm on record, made 23 times more likely by climate change and 14 times more likely by El Niño. The Trump administration is trying to strip Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s citizenship, her phone, passport, notebooks, and computers seized, more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas issued, the investigation focused on documentation filed by her father when she was 12. The World Food Programme warned 800,000 people in Yemen have been cut off from food deliveries as fighting blocks aid routes to Taiz. Memphis candidate Justin Pearson is running his midterm race against Elon Musk’s xAI data center, the fight about who decides what gets built in a community. Russia built a new jet-powered drone launch base in six weeks, satellite imagery confirmed. Pope Leo’s post-operative tests came back normal and his lung is recovering well. Trump reversed his decision to livestream the Fort Hood execution after bipartisan backlash. Saudi airlines are evacuating up to $4 billion in aircraft from Riyadh Airport in anticipation of Houthi strikes. Oil slipped to $105. Doctor Katie Zacharia’s claim to be a lawyer came under scrutiny. Russia detained a Japanese journalist whose identity was confirmed as Shohei Hayashi.

Eight sections, 34 days until the midterms. The ceasefire lasted four days. See you tomorrow.

What to watch tomorrow: Watch whether Russia responds to Ukraine’s refinery strike with another major attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, because the pattern since the announced ceasefire has been escalation on both sides and the next Russian strike will confirm whether the pause was ever real. Watch whether any court files a challenge to the citizenship-stripping investigation of Ilhan Omar, because the legal theory required to denaturalize a citizen for documentation filed by a parent when she was 12 is novel and will face immediate judicial scrutiny. Watch whether the World Food Programme’s Yemen warning produces any diplomatic response from the parties controlling access to Taiz, because 800,000 people being cut off from food is the kind of number that the UN Security Council typically responds to formally. And watch the climate attribution study for any policy response, because a study finding that climate change made a record-breaking Pacific hurricane 23 times more likely, published 34 days before a midterm election, is a finding with direct electoral resonance in coastal and disaster-affected communities. See you tomorrow.

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