Houthi forces struck an administrative building belonging to Saudi Aramco in Dhahran on Tuesday, hours after the Saudi-led coalition bombed Houthi fuel depots and energy terminals in Sanaa. Authorities responded to a fire at the Dhahran site; no casualties were reported. On Wednesday, the Houthis announced additional attacks on Aramco facilities in both Dhahran and Riyadh, along with King Khalid International Airport. The Saudi-led coalition said it intercepted a ballistic missile over Al-Kharj governorate in Riyadh province before it reached its target. The Houthis declared Saudi oil facilities legitimate military targets and told civilians near them to evacuate. (Al Jazeera’s live blog covered the exchange through Wednesday morning.)
The escalation follows a pattern that has been building across the theater for weeks. The Saudi-led coalition has framed its strikes on Houthi energy infrastructure as targeting fuel reserves used to sustain the group’s weapons program. Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said his forces would respond to coalition strikes on civilian oil facilities in kind. The two sides are now running parallel campaigns against each other’s energy and transportation infrastructure, and neither has indicated any interest in stopping.
In September 2019, a drone and cruise missile strike on Aramco’s Abqaiq processing facility and Khurais oil field briefly removed roughly five percent of global oil production from the market. The United States attributed that attack to Iran. It produced a short spike in crude prices and a longer argument about whether Gulf oil infrastructure could be defended against aerial assault. That was a single strike against a single company in a period when the broader conflict was still officially undeclared. What is happening now is different in character: an ongoing exchange between parties who have declared each other’s economic infrastructure to be military targets. The 2019 attack was a demonstration. The current campaign is what happens when the demonstration goes unaddressed.
The Treasury Department announced Tuesday that Bank of America will pay $1.21 billion in penalties for willfully violating the Bank Secrecy Act, the 1970 law that requires financial institutions to maintain anti-money-laundering programs and file reports on suspicious transactions. Treasury called it the third-largest penalty in the department’s history. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network imposed a $1.2 billion assessment. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency imposed a separate, record-setting $750 million fine, which will be credited against the FinCEN amount. The bank must also hire an independent third party to conduct a lookback review for transactions it failed to flag. Bank of America expects a $1.2 billion non-tax-deductible charge in its third-quarter results. (CNBC reported the settlement Tuesday, including the bank’s admission of willful violation.)
The violations involved more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions the bank didn’t report. Treasury said more than $1 billion of that activity involved national security risks, including what the department described as Chinese money laundering networks and fraud connected to the southwest border. Bank of America admitted it had known for years it was failing to refer potentially suspicious transactions for investigation and didn’t correct the problem.
The Bank Secrecy Act has been amended multiple times in the fifty-six years since its passage, most significantly after September 11, when the PATRIOT Act expanded its requirements across a broader range of institutions and transaction types. In that span, banks have paid billions for violating it. The Bank of America penalty is the third-largest in Treasury’s history. The institution has more than 69 million consumer and small business clients.
Federal agents searched the Washington, D.C., home of Representative Ilhan Omar on Monday as part of a criminal investigation. Homeland Security Investigations agents conducted the search using a judicially authorized warrant, the Justice Department confirmed in a statement. “This enforcement action is part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation,” the department said. It declined to provide further details. DHS referred questions to the Justice Department. (The Associated Press reported the search Monday, citing two people familiar with the matter.)
Omar, a Democrat representing Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District, said the search was the “latest escalation in Trump’s intimidation campaign” against her and said she wouldn’t be silenced. Democrats in House leadership issued statements questioning the timing, which came less than a month before the midterm elections and appeared to conflict with longstanding Justice Department guidance against overt investigative steps near elections involving political candidates. Vice President JD Vance has previously accused Omar of immigration fraud, an allegation she has denied. No charges have been filed. The investigation’s scope hasn’t been publicly described.
The search of a sitting member of Congress’s home is not common but isn’t unprecedented. In 2006, FBI agents searched the Capitol Hill office of Representative William Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat, during a bribery investigation. Jefferson was later convicted on eleven counts. That search produced a rare bipartisan statement from House leadership: Speaker Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi jointly called it a breach of the Constitution’s speech or debate clause. Whether the Omar search raises the same constitutional question depends on what investigators were looking for. The Justice Department hasn’t said.
Kimberly Guilfoyle resigned as United States ambassador to Greece on Tuesday, after the White House asked her to step down. Press secretary Katie Zacharia confirmed the resignation at a briefing, saying the White House had received Guilfoyle’s formal letter. “I didn’t like what I read,” President Trump told reporters, referring to accounts of her conduct. The State Department’s inspector general is reviewing the matter, according to an unnamed U.S. official cited by the Associated Press. (The Washington Post reported Tuesday on the resignation and the allegations behind it.)
The allegations, reported by The Wall Street Journal and others, include that Guilfoyle solicited $100,000 from a political donor to cover a personal American Express bill, and that wealthy Greek businessmen helped fund her luxury travel while she used her role at the embassy to promote their commercial interests. Guilfoyle denied the reports. “These allegations are false, and I intend to vigorously defend my name, my reputation, and my integrity,” she said in a statement. She was confirmed by the Senate in September 2025 and served about a year.
Elon Musk has donated approximately $366 million to federal political committees during the 2025-26 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings reported by CNBC and others on Monday. The figure covers only disclosed contributions. It is the largest known total for any individual donor in the current midterm cycle, and it exceeds the approximately $290 million Musk spent during the 2024 presidential race. The Senate Leadership Fund received approximately $158 million. America PAC received more than $76 million. The Congressional Leadership Fund received $20 million. (CNBC reported the FEC filings Monday.)
In May 2025, Musk said publicly that he planned to spend “a lot less” on politics going forward. An America PAC spokesman told reporters that roughly $90 million of the cycle total covered work done in the prior election or supported issues unrelated to 2026 races. The PAC is running a canvassing operation in competitive congressional districts.
The Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo held that spending money on a political campaign is a form of protected speech and struck down limits on independent expenditures. Citizens United, in 2010, extended that holding to corporations and independent groups. The $366 million in disclosed giving flows through structures those two decisions created. The word “disclosed” is doing work there. By definition it isn’t the full number.
NASA’s Perseverance rover set the all-time record for distance driven beyond Earth on October 11, the agency reported Monday on its science blog. The rover’s odometer reached 28.10 miles, clearing the 28.06-mile mark that Opportunity accumulated between 2004 and 2018. The record-setting drive covered 299.6 feet. (NASA’s Perseverance mission blog announced the milestone Monday.)
Opportunity was designed for a 90-day mission. It operated for nearly fifteen years before a planetary dust storm ended communications in June 2018. Perseverance launched in July 2020 with a design specification of no more than 12.4 miles of driving. Its odometer now reads 28.10. The mission team has approved a first extension that runs through the end of 2028. The project manager said the team expects the rover to keep adding to the record. There is quite a lot of Mars left.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.
