The Oleshky ceasefire has held for more than a day without incident.
That sentence wouldn’t have been worth writing two weeks ago, because no corridor agreement had been reached. Wednesday brought different news. Ukraine’s outlet 112.ua confirmed that no violations of the local ceasefire had been recorded during the first thirty hours of the humanitarian window, according to ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets. Evacuation buses were scheduled to begin moving residents Thursday morning. The choice is theirs: Ukrainian-controlled territory or Russian-held. Both governments have honored the arrangement since it went into effect at approximately 3 a.m. Kyiv time on October 27, two days ahead of the schedule the White House originally announced.
The population estimates vary. The White House put the remaining residents at roughly 1,700 to 2,000, most of them elderly, with about 50 children. Other estimates run considerably higher. Oleshky sits across the Dnieper River from Kherson, which Ukraine retook in November 2022. The city has been under Russian occupation since February 2022. It has had no reliable electricity for months. The corridor includes aid delivery, not just evacuation.
In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine agreed multiple times to open evacuation corridors from Mariupol. Those corridors repeatedly failed before civilians could move safely through them. Russian forces fired on convoys. Buses turned back. The International Committee of the Red Cross suspended its attempts. What finally got people out of Mariupol wasn’t a corridor agreement but a military collapse. That history is why a clean thirty-hour hold in Oleshky counts for something. It isn’t peace. It isn’t the end of anything. It’s one corridor, one city, and a few days to move people out. Whether it holds is what Thursday will tell us. (Ukraine’s 112.ua confirmed no violations in the first 30 hours, with buses scheduled for Thursday morning.)
With about 95 percent of Israeli ballots counted, Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition bloc stood at 53 seats and Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc at 48. Arab-led parties were tracking toward 19. Nobody has 61.
The Jerusalem Post and Ynet both reported the near-final count on Wednesday. Double-envelope ballots, cast by voters outside their registered districts, haven’t been fully tabulated. The official certified result isn’t due until November 4. Both outlets noted the remaining ballots could shift the totals by a seat or two in either direction, but not enough to give either side a majority.
The arithmetic is harder than the seat counts suggest. Eisenkot has ruled out serving under Netanyahu, including in a rotation arrangement. Democrats chairman Yair Golan said Wednesday that the only viable path to a government is an opposition coalition backed by Arab-led parties. On paper, that combination reaches 67 seats. Whether the Arab-led parties join, and whether every seat in Eisenkot’s bloc holds against defection pressure, are open questions that coalition negotiators have just started asking. Israel has been to this arithmetic before. Between April 2019 and March 2021, the country held four elections in twenty-three months. Three of them produced results this close and didn’t produce a stable government. The fourth finally did, less than three months after the vote. The difference this time is that the election followed a war, followed October 7, and followed eight months of conflict with Iran. Whether any of that makes coalition formation easier or harder isn’t yet clear. (The Jerusalem Post reported the near-final count Wednesday with Netanyahu bloc at 53 and Eisenkot bloc at 48.)
Five days to November 3.
Decision Desk HQ’s model, updated through Wednesday, gave Democrats an 80 percent probability in the House and 58 percent in the Senate. Silver Bulletin held Democrats’ Senate edge near 60 percent but flagged four races in Texas, Ohio, Alaska, and Maine where current leads are within what the model called a normal-sized polling error. Those four races aren’t predicted to flip. They’re identified as the places where the outcome depends on whether the polls are right, and polls are sometimes wrong.
The generic congressional ballot isn’t the Senate map. A party can lead the national average by 8 points and still lose the Senate if competitive seats fall in states where the national trend doesn’t land. That’s what Silver Bulletin’s four-race caveat is describing. Not a prediction of Republican wins. A reminder that in four states at once, the margin is small enough that the uncertainty matters.
Every midterm since World War II has cost the president’s party seats in the House, with two exceptions: 1998 and 2002. In 2022, Democrats lost 9 seats. In 2018, Republicans lost 40. In 2010, Democrats lost 63. The question for Tuesday isn’t whether the historical pattern holds. It almost always does. The question is whether it holds by 3 seats or 30. (Decision Desk HQ’s House and Senate forecast models update continuously through Election Day.)
El Salvador now has approximately 2,000 soldiers in Haiti.
Reuters reported Wednesday that El Salvador’s foreign ministry said forces were arriving in two capacities: a rescue mission for the four aviation technicians missing since October 18, and expanded anti-gang operations. The original contingent of roughly 100 special forces arrived on October 22. The expanded force brings the Salvadoran presence in Haiti to a scale no other contributing nation in the Gang Suppression Force has reached. The four men still haven’t been found. They were traveling in an armored vehicle in Croix-des-Bouquets when an ambush struck on October 18. No group has claimed the attack. No bodies have been recovered.
The same day Reuters reported the troop expansion, Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council postponed the country’s first presidential election in a decade. The original date was December 13, 2026. The new date is July 18, 2027. The council cited security conditions. Haiti hasn’t held a national election since 2016. Its last president was assassinated in 2021. Executive authority since February has rested with a Council of Ministers. The postponement moves a vote that was already a decade overdue by another seven months, into a security environment that a 2,000-soldier foreign rescue operation suggests remains unsettled. (Reuters reported El Salvador’s expanded deployment on October 28; the Haiti electoral council announced the postponement the same day.)
Flávio Bolsonaro isn’t pursuing his legal challenge to Brazil’s election.
The Washington Post reported Monday that Bolsonaro effectively conceded after President Trump declined to intervene on his behalf. He had lost the October 25 runoff by approximately 4.4 million votes. His stated legal basis was a Supreme Court justice’s last-minute extension of voting hours on election day, which his camp argued was made without proper authority. No Brazilian court accepted the challenge. No recount was ordered. Bolsonaro’s legal team and political allies told Folha de S.Paulo that the margin and the electoral court’s swift certification made the challenge untenable.
There is a separate legal matter unrelated to the election. A Brazilian judge seized Bolsonaro’s passport this week amid an ongoing corruption investigation. That proceeding is at a different level than the election challenge and has different implications. Lula’s certification is set for December 18. He takes office January 5, 2027. In 2022, Jair Bolsonaro eventually authorized his chief of staff to begin the transition rather than conceding directly, and left for the United States before the inauguration. His son didn’t contest that long. (The Washington Post reported Bolsonaro’s effective concession on October 26, 2026.)
Iran’s foreign ministry said Monday that the United States isn’t serious about negotiations.
Spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said Washington had repeatedly confused diplomacy with issuing demands. Pakistan and Qatar remain the active intermediaries. Iran’s stated conditions haven’t moved: sanctions lifted before negotiations proceed, and, in one official’s words, “not a single gram of enriched uranium will be removed from Iran.” A Qatari outlet reported last week that both sides had responded positively to a compromise proposal and that Iran had agreed in principle to an IAEA visit to nuclear sites. Neither government has confirmed that report on the record.
The war is now in its eighth month. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in mid-September that each additional month of the conflict would cost the Pentagon roughly $2 to $3 billion, on top of a supplemental request that stood at $67.1 billion in June. Brent crude closed above $100 per barrel again Tuesday. In November 2013, the major powers and Iran reached an interim agreement in Geneva that started the formal nuclear negotiating process. The JCPOA came twenty months later. The current situation isn’t an interim agreement. It’s intermediary messages through third parties. What changes in the diplomatic calculus after November 3 is something neither government has said on the record. (Iran’s foreign ministry statement on October 26 was reported by The Star.)
Something good.
In June of this year, the FDA cleared a new drug-free treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. A clinical trial reported its findings on October 22. The trial enrolled 158 participants. The treatment, developed by Wave Neuroscience, uses personalized brain mapping to identify each patient’s abnormal neural patterns and then targets those patterns with magnetic stimulation. The trial reported a 52 percent reduction in symptom severity and a 68 percent remission rate.
Post-traumatic stress disorder was added to the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual in 1980, which is late for a condition that appears in military and medical records going back centuries. “Shell shock” was the term after World War I. “Combat fatigue” after World War II. The naming kept changing because the understanding kept struggling to catch up with the reality. Since the 1980 diagnosis, treatment options have mostly meant medication, psychotherapy, or both, with real but incomplete remission rates. A device-based treatment that cleared FDA review and reported 68 percent remission in a trial of 158 people isn’t the final word. It will need replication. But it’s available now, not at the end of another decade of review.
A second device, Neurovalens’ Modius Spero, received FDA de novo authorization in May. Its pivotal trial enrolled 383 adults over twelve weeks. About two-thirds of treated participants reached clinically meaningful improvement. Two non-invasive, cleared, drug-free options for PTSD treatment didn’t exist at the start of this year. They do now. (ScienceDaily reported the Wave Neuroscience trial findings on October 22, 2026; Psychiatric Times reported the FDA’s Modius Spero clearance.)
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.
