Recently in Politics
October Election Outcomes: Can Authoritarianism Compete with High Voter Turnout?
Serbia’s Students for the Win!
A new era in Serbian politics began this month as the ‘Student List’ campaign ousted authoritarian president Aleksandar Vučić after 12 years. Pollsters and the election commission put turnout close to 70%, the highest since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992. The student list won 140 seats in parliament while Vučić’s party won only 103. The student list will now hold a majority of seats in the Serbian parliament.
The Serbian student movement began in November 2024 shortly after a concrete canopy collapsed at the Novi Sad railway station, killing 16 people. Protests over evidence of slipshod construction, fraud, and corruption behind the roof collapse eventually turned into a broad, anti-government, student-run movement that spread across the country.
Student-led protests grew bigger and bigger, taking over the capital city of Belgrade, until Vučić finally agreed to resign the presidency last month and gamble on snap elections. The students then took their movement to the ballot box, enlisting 250 candidates to run in this month’s election, one for each seat in parliament. The candidates came from all walks of life and included athletes, academics, and farmers who campaigned in every province.
Together with the students, the candidates campaigned on rebuilding Serbia’s economy and restoring its democracy after twelve years of authoritarian rule. They faced an uphill battle, however, against an SNS that controlled nearly every broadcast channel and wielded ministries and other state institutions as political tools.
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Recently in Business
Twenty Minutes, One Laptop, $6.3 Billion
Shortly after 8pm UK time on Thursday 29 October, someone began emptying the wallets of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. About twenty minutes later, roughly $6.3 billion had left Binance. That is more than four times the previous record, which was the $1.5 billion taken from Bybit in 2025. Blockchain analysts at Elliptic called it “almost certainly the single largest known theft of any kind.”
According to Binance’s initial investigation, it started with a single compromised laptop belonging to one of its engineers.
Within hours, Binance had frozen all deposits and withdrawals. Bitcoin fell to a six-week low below $77,000, ether dropped to a two-month low, and Binance’s own token, BNB, slid more than 5%. The exchange that holds more than $160 billion of other people’s money was suddenly asking its 335 million users to trust that it could cover a loss larger than many countries’ annual defence budgets.
How it happened
Blockchain intelligence firms TRM Labs, Chainalysis and Elliptic all point the same way. They attribute the attack “with high confidence” to TraderTraitor, the North Korean hacking unit linked to the Lazarus Group, which was also behind the Bybit theft. TRM’s Ari Redbord called it “a watershed” and said theft at this scale is “a global security issue, not just a crypto theft.” North Korea routinely denies such accusations.
The method matters more than the headline figure. Binance has been at pains to say this was not “a single one-click action.”
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