Oct. 31, 2022 — Today’s Biggest News Stories

South Korea is in a period of national mourning as the country reels from a horrific crowd crush in Seoul on Saturday night, in which at least 154 people were killed and dozens of others injured.

The deadly crowd surge happened as an estimated 100,000 people came out to celebrate Halloween in Itaewon, a party district in downtown Seoul popular with young people and foreigners. Late Saturday night, many of the dead were sent to hospitals while the bodies of dozens of others were being transported to a nearby gym to be identified, according to the chief of Seoul’s Yongsan fire department.

The Ministry of the Interior and Safety said that 98 women and 56 men were killed. Most of the people who died were in their 20s. A survivor who got stuck in the crush of people told Hankyoreh, a South Korean newspaper, that he waited over an hour to be rescued. “I heard voices asking for help here and there, and I saw people who couldn’t breathe,” he said.

It’s unclear what caused the crowd surge. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has called for an investigation and declared a national mourning period through Nov. 5.

Water and power outages in Kyiv

• Eighty percent of Kyiv residents are without water after Russian missiles severely damaged city infrastructure, the Los Angeles Times reports. Power outages also swept parts of the city, as Moscow repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s capital on Monday morning.

• Russia halted the UN-brokered grain deal after accusing Ukraine of attacking one of its ships, AP reports. Ukraine denied responsibility for this attack. “This is a transparent attempt by Russia to return to the threat of large-scale famine in Africa and Asia,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday.

SNAPSHOTS

Kanye West destroyed his billion-dollar empire in just three weeks. Here’s how he did it. Ye has targeted minority communities with hate speech and dangerous rhetoric, and now the Yeezy empire has unraveled.

Six children ages 1 to 13 and two adults were killed in an apparent murder-suicide in Oklahoma. “It did become obvious to all the fire personnel on the scene that this was a crime scene,” Broken Arrow Fire Chief Jeremy Moore told reporters on Friday. “To arrive on scene yesterday and see the looks on our first responders, my firefighters’ faces, it absolutely broke my heart.”

Tom Brady announced he had finalized his divorce from Gisele Bündchen “amicably and with gratitude.” In her own statement, Bündchen wrote, “The decision to end a marriage is never easy but we have grown apart and while it is, of course, difficult to go through something like this, I feel blessed for the time we had together and only wish the best for Tom always.”