An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Former Yahoo CEO and early Google engineer Marissa Mayer is catching a lot of flak for how she uses AI. In an interview about her new app Dazzle, an AI assistant that learns from your camera roll, Mayer poses what she believes is an impressive flex for the product: It helped her come up with three bullet points about her 10-year-old daughter for a birthday presentation at school, describing her as "empathetic, creative, and an animal lover."
It's a vague description, like a generic horoscope -- it could probably describe a lot of 10-year-olds. Some onlookers, like progressive activist Leah Greenberg, marveled that "the fact that Marissa Mayer would voluntarily disclose this to a reporter is a pretty good demonstration of how deeply the culture of Silicon Valley has diverged from the rest of humanity." [...] After publication, Mayer defended herself in a long X post. She claims she was not relying on Dazzle to explain her child to her, but rather, she was testing what her prototype could do -- it resurfaced photos of "forgotten kindergarten projects," like a "snake devenomer" or "sandcat playground," illustrating her daughter's creativity and care for animals.
Fair enough. But Mayer remarks in the same interview that people could also use her AI to outsource the mental load of "figuring out the theme for your child's birthday party." She says she's used her app to plan a playdate for her daughter, book family activities on vacation, and decide what to be for Halloween. She even proposes that her AI assistant could coordinate plans with her husband's AI assistant. When the reporter asks her if it's depressing to imagine this "frictionless future planned by AI," Mayer replies, "I haven't really thought that through." The bigger question is: What should we outsource to AI? "What feels like grunt work to someone might be a meaningful part of parenthood for someone else," says Fortune's Emma Hinchliffe.
Michael Tasner, Founder and CEO of No Joke Marketing, adds: "Customers are drowning in AI slop, and they can spot it. Use AI for the low-stakes work behind the scenes. Keep the moments that matter to your customers human. Human connection is becoming the new premium."
At least 30 people are believed to have died after two high-speed trains collided in the province of Toledo in Spain, with concerns the death toll could be much higher.
The number of people affected is expected to rise (10:46), local authorities said, with growing concerns about a “major tragedy” (11:03).
The affected trains are understood to be Iryo 7076 with 146 passengers plus one baby on board, and AVE 2080 with 397 passengers on board, making it 544 people in total on board of both train (11:00).
The incident comes less than a year after a similar crash in Adamuz, the province of Córdoba, which killed 46 and injured 152 in January this year (11:00).
Spain’s high-speed railway network ranks as the largest in Europe and the second biggest in the world after China, carrying 25 million passengers in 2024.
Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez said he was “shocked” by the accident (11:05), with transport minister Óscar Puente working at the emergency control centre to “obtain all possible information about what happened” (11:16).
Updated at 10:50am UK to reflect the new death toll
“In the [emergency] control center since 9:40 trying to obtain all possible information about what happened.”
Nigel Farage skipped the chancellor’s first budget because he was worried he would get in a “physical altercation” with another MP in a row over seating arrangements.
The Reform UK leader was not present in the House of Commons but gave a press conference afterwards in which he said he was “shocked” by the £10bn going to support Ukraine and doubled down on his party’s policies on cutting tax for crypto investors.
Trump, citing New York Times report, says Mary Peltola’s actions to recruit a second Dan Sullivan ‘illegal’ and calls for her disqualification from US Senate race
For months, Mary Peltola’s campaign for Alaska’s Senate seat has denied any connection to a separate campaign launched by a man who, coincidentally, shares the exact same name as Peltola’s Republican opponent, Dan Sullivan.
New reporting from the New York Times undercuts that claim. The outlet reported, based on interviews, obtained text messages and legal filings, that the Peltola campaign had not only recruited Mr Sullivan (not the Republican), but had sought out a number of Dan Sullivans across the state for potential candidacy, as well as others who could peel votes away from Peltola’s main opponent.
Circumstances are ripe for change in this onetime Republican stronghold given the current dissatisfaction with Trump agenda, experts say
Donald Trump has repeatedly asked voters to pretend that he is on the ballot in November’s crucial midterm elections. And in the comfortable confines of Arizona’s most affluent and fiercely contested congressional district, Trump is definitely on voters’ minds.
But whether that helps or hurts the warring congressional candidates in this sun-drenched swath of suburbia, where Teslas and walled-in luxury homes dominate, depends on who you ask.
Fed chair Kevin Warsh said politics played no role in pause of interest rate hikes, despite inflation remaining above 3%
The US Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged on Wednesday during its last board meeting before the midterm elections, keeping rates at one of the highest pre-election levels seen in over 20 years.
Two out of 12 board members voted against the pause, preferring to raise rates by a quarter point this meeting, the Fed board said in a statement.
Republicans have condemned the presence of two Dan Sullivans on the ballot, calling it a ploy to split votes
Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign was behind an effort to recruit a challenger with almost the exact same name as Republican US senator Dan Sullivan, both of whom will appear on the ballot in next week’s midterm elections, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
Republicans have condemned the presence in the race of two candidates named Dan Sullivan – one the two-term US senator, the second a retiree living in south-eastern Alaska with scant political experience – calling the newcomer a ploy by Democrats to cost the incumbent re-election by splitting his supporters.
One apparent loser from Tuesday’s election was far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was expected to better his party’s result of six seats from the 2022 elections.
But instead there was stunned silence at the watch party for Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) in central Israel as results from the exit polls flashed across the screen, with most channels suggesting the party would remain on just six seats.
Israel’s future hung in the balance on Wednesday as it became clear that Benjamin Netanyahu had lost his governing majority. His political fate now depends on whether opposition Jewish parties are prepared to forge a common front with Palestinian parties, whose support surged in Tuesday’s elections.
The leader of the Jewish opposition bloc, the retired general Gadi Eisenkot, appeared to rule out such a broad coalition in a premature declaration of victory overnight for what he called a “Zionist majority”.
Photo – Researchers at UD, including Willett Kempton and Rodney McGee, helped make this technology more affordable and practical.
University of Delaware professor Willett Kempton helped pioneer vehicle-to-grid technology nearly 30 years ago. Now Ford says a UD-developed communications standard is part of its new affordable electric truck platform.
NEWARK, Del. — Technology developed at the University of Delaware is playing a role in Ford Motor Co.’s effort to bring bidirectional power — the ability for an electric vehicle to send electricity back to a home or the electric grid — to a new generation of lower-cost electric trucks.
Ford said Tuesday, Oct. 27, that its 2027 Fathom electric truck will use SAE J3068 with LIN-CP, a communications technology standard developed at the University of Delaware, as part of an electrical architecture intended to make bidirectional charging less expensive.
The connection puts decades of Delaware research led in part by University of Delaware professor Willett Kempton into a vehicle Ford expects to sell for a starting manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $28,350.
Ford says the truck will be capable of supplying a projected 10 kilowatts or more of alternating-current power to a home without requiring the separate wall-mounted inverter used by some earlier systems.
Delaware professor helped pioneer the technology
Kempton and University of Delaware colleagues pioneered vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, technology nearly three decades ago. The idea is relatively simple: Instead of an electric vehicle battery only drawing power from the grid, a properly equipped vehicle can also return power when electricity is needed.
The technology could turn millions of parked vehicles into distributed energy-storage resources.
“Whether it could scale cost-effectively was an open question, and we’ve proven that it can — with the right combination of policies, standards and technology,” Kempton said earlier this year after completion of a Delaware V2G pilot project.
Kempton is a professor of marine science and policy and electrical and computer engineering at UD and is nationally recognized for his work on electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid systems.
Ford’s announcement provides one of the clearest indications yet that some of the technology developed in Delaware could move beyond research projects and limited demonstrations toward mass-market vehicles.
Ford develops lower-cost system
Ford said cost has been one of the primary barriers preventing bidirectional power from becoming widely available.
Electric vehicle batteries store electricity as direct current, while homes typically use alternating current. Earlier systems often depended on additional external equipment to convert and manage that electricity.
Ford says the Fathom will instead incorporate its inverter into the vehicle’s electrical system, allowing the truck to produce AC power without a separate wall-mounted inverter.
The company said the approach uses fewer multifunctional components and is designed to lower the cost of the vehicle and supporting home equipment.
The truck’s communications architecture is where Delaware enters the picture directly.
Ford said Fathom uses SAE J3068 with LIN-CP, describing it as an existing communications technology developed at the University of Delaware that also helps reduce the cost of the vehicle’s charger.
That distinction is important: UD did not design Ford’s new truck or its entire bidirectional electrical system. Ford says it developed the Fathom hardware and software architecture after acquiring startup Auto Motive Power in 2023.
But the automaker is incorporating a communications approach developed through UD’s work into a production vehicle designed specifically around lower cost.
Delaware research moves from laboratory to electric grid
The Ford announcement follows years of cooperation involving UD, Ford, Delmarva Power and PJM Interconnection.
In 2024, the partners demonstrated vehicle-to-grid technology in Newark using Ford Mustang Mach-E vehicles from Delmarva Power’s fleet.
The vehicles could continue performing their normal utility work while also providing grid services when they were parked and plugged in. Multiple vehicle batteries could be connected electronically and managed as a single resource known as a virtual power plant.
UD researchers also helped develop standards needed for vehicles, chargers and utilities to communicate safely and inexpensively.
Rodney McGee, director of UD’s Center for Transportation Electrification, previously led an SAE committee working on standards that incorporate LIN-CP signaling for low-cost AC charging, V2G operation and vehicle backup power.
Research suggests financial benefits for vehicle owners
The research reached another milestone this year.
A University of Delaware and Exelon/Delmarva Power report released in April found that the V2G-equipped vehicles used in the pilot successfully provided services in actual electricity markets.
Researchers calculated that, based on electricity-market prices from 2021 through 2025, a V2G-enabled passenger electric vehicle could potentially earn as much as $3,359 annually by providing grid services.
Heavier vehicles such as delivery trucks, fleet vehicles and school buses could potentially earn more than $9,000 per year because of their larger batteries.
Those figures are research estimates based on historical market conditions, not guaranteed payments for consumers.
The pilot also found no measured reduction in battery health after a year of market operation, according to UD.
The potential financial benefits are particularly significant for commercial fleet operators, school districts and utilities that could eventually use parked electric trucks and buses to generate revenue while helping stabilize the electrical grid.
A truck becomes more than transportation
For consumers, Ford is initially emphasizing two applications.
Its Home Power Management system is intended to allow customers to charge a truck when electricity is less expensive and then use some of the battery’s energy to power their homes when rates are higher.
The truck can also provide backup electricity during an outage.
Both applications require additional Ford home equipment, although Ford says its new Home Power Station is expected to cost roughly half as much as the company’s first-generation bidirectional charger. Backup operation will require an additional Home Backup Power Panel.
For Delaware homeowners concerned about rising electricity costs and reliability, the technology could eventually offer another way to manage household energy expenses.
However, actual savings will depend on electricity rates, equipment costs, vehicle usage and the availability of utility programs.
Delaware could play a role in national expansion
The larger opportunity — sending power into the electric grid and being compensated for grid services — remains more complicated.
Utilities and regulators must establish interconnection rules governing how vehicles operating as power resources connect safely to the grid.
Ford formed a working group in July with five major utilities, including Exelon, the parent company of Delmarva Power, to develop more standardized interconnection procedures before Fathom reaches customers in 2027.
That puts Delaware in an unusual position.
UD researchers helped pioneer V2G technology. Delaware was the first state to change its laws to permit electric vehicles to provide services to the electric grid. Ford vehicles have already been used in a Delmarva Power V2G demonstration, and Exelon is now participating in Ford’s effort to prepare utilities for broader deployment.
The next question: When will Delaware drivers benefit?
What remains uncertain is how soon ordinary Delaware customers will be able to use a vehicle such as the Fathom not only to power their homes but also to sell services into the electric grid.
Although Delaware has helped lead the research, broader consumer participation will depend on utility interconnection requirements, regulatory approvals, available compensation programs and the cost of compatible equipment.
Ford says Fathom arrives in 2027.
For Kempton and the University of Delaware, the launch could mark an important transition for an idea that began as university research decades ago: from proving that electric vehicles could support the electric grid to helping make the technology affordable enough to reach everyday drivers
TO GO BOX
What: Ford Fathom electric truck with bidirectional power capability.
When: Expected to launch in 2027.
Starting price: $28,350 MSRP, according to Ford.
Delaware connection: Ford says the truck uses SAE J3068 with LIN-CP, a communications technology developed at the University of Delaware.
What it can do: Supply electricity to a home, provide backup power during outages and potentially support electric grid services where utility programs allow.
Why it matters: UD researchers, Delmarva Power, Ford and PJM have demonstrated V2G technology in Delaware. Ford’s new truck could help bring some of that technology into broader consumer use.
AUGUSTA, MAINE — Maine election officials are preparing for an unusually large federal presence ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm election, updating law-enforcement training and emphasizing restrictions designed to prevent voter intimidation or interference at polling places.
The Justice Department plans to send election monitors to Portland, Lewiston and South Portland as part of a nationwide deployment of roughly 1,000 monitors. DOJ officials say the monitors will observe for potential violations of federal law, take notes and report concerns, but will not interact with voters or interfere with voting.
Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said Maine will enforce state rules governing observers. Training materials distributed to law enforcement also cite federal statutes restricting armed federal civil or military officers from polling locations.
Concerns intensified after complaints that individuals were aggressively filming and questioning voters near an early-voting location in Lewiston. Bellows said voters should be able to cast ballots without being watched, questioned or harassed because of their race or ethnicity.
Federal election monitoring itself is not unprecedented. Bellows noted that monitors were present during Maine’s 2024 congressional elections and said similar observers will be deployed across all 50 states this year. She said properly conducted monitoring should not affect voters’ experience.
The heightened preparations come as Maine hosts competitive U.S. Senate and House races that could affect control of Congress.
Ancient Slashdot reader Gilmoure shares a report from Tom's Hardware, adding: "Huh. Looks like consuming one's own slop does not turn the wheels of industry." From the report: Amazon wants its engineers to quit chasing token counts, warning that heavy AI usage does not automatically mean better work. In updated engineering guidelines published on October 27, the company laid out how developers and managers should gauge AI's real impact -- and the takeaway is blunt: consuming more tokens is not the same as delivering more value. [...]
According to the memo, metrics such as AI adoption rates, token consumption, code changes, and code reviews become "deeply flawed" when they are disconnected from actual results. Turning them into targets, Amazon says, encourages wasteful behavior that clashes with its emphasis on "frugality and simplicity" and can raise both compute bills and software complexity.
The company's preferred yardstick is long-term results. "We believe that it is best to measure, and be measured by, long-term outcomes," Amazon wrote. That does not mean managers should ignore usage data altogether, as input metrics remain useful when examined "with care and judgment" alongside other indicators. Amazon suggests looking at both the teams using AI the least and those using it the most to determine whether adoption is translating into better delivery.
[...] The memo also pushes back on the idea that every task needs an AI tool. If current tooling does not benefit someone's work, Amazon says, that is "a finding, not a failing." Engineers who can explain where today's tools fall short are demonstrating judgment rather than reluctance to adopt AI.
Hours before the final results from Israel’s elections were in, several things were clear. Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition had lost its mandate, and the opposition had a firm majority.
But most of Israel’s Jewish opposition ruled out governing with Palestinian-led parties, in the course of a racist election campaign in which Netanyahu painted Palestinian citizens as an enemy inside the state.
We’re using our custom-made robot to open and close the iPhone Duo hundreds of thousands of times. Watch along and get your questions answered by CNET editors live.
With voters set to cast ballots in two critical races that could help determine control of both chambers of the U.S. Congress, fears of potential voter suppression are running high in Maine.
Officials in the state have prepared for months against the possibility of election interference from federal officials, and the state remains on high alert in the run-up to the general election on November 3.
Training materials were updated this year to include references to federal statutes barring armed federal agents from polling sites.
Training materials for law enforcement officials in the state, obtained by The Intercept through a public records request, were updated this year for the elections to include explicit references to federal statutes barring armed federal agents from polling sites.
In an interview with the New York Times this week, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said the inclusion of such references was a direct defense in response to the fearmongering around election integrity from President Donald Trump and his administration.
“This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections,” Bellows said. “It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the states.”
Bellows’s office offered up the training slideshow, which cites a U.S. law that bars armed civil or military officers from posting at voting sites, to law enforcement personnel in the run-up to Maine’s primary election in June and again in the lead-up to the general election on November 5.
Nationwide, Democratic officials have expressed fears that the Trump Administration might weaponize U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other federal agencies to undermine the rights of voters. In New York, state Attorney General Letitia James issued a reminder to voters that federal officials may not “police the polls,” and the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP called out the assignment of federal election monitors to two counties in the state as potential intimidation.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has sounded the alarm about the alleged scourge of non-citizens on the voter rolls, sending agents from the FBI and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division to probe alleged fraud. A handful of people in California, New York, and North Carolina have been indicted for allegedly voting as non-citizens, but a review of similar cases by the Washington Post found that such cases were often the result of honest mistakes.
In Maine, worries about federal interventions at polling places flared when — following a slew of social media videos from Trump allies suggesting that fraud is already taking place among the state’s Somali American community — a local outlet reported that the Department of Justice would be sending election monitors to the state.
Jon Fetherston, a journalist with the far-right Maine Wire, which is funded by conservative megadonor Leonard Leo, was seen following people in and around an early voting site at Lewiston City Hall and aggressively questioning them. (The Maine Wire did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Critics said the moves were tantamount to voter harassment, but Maine Wire editor-in-chief Steve Robinson later defended them as an act of election transparency. Robinson, who has led a crusade against what he alleges to be a network of fraud in the state’s Somali American community, questioned the role of interpreters tasked with helping “jobless Somali bums” cast their ballots.
In the wake of the Maine Wire controversy in Lewiston, Bellows confirmed to the Maine Morning Star that a wave of federal election monitors would be headed to polling sites in Lewiston and Portland.
The Department of Justice on Tuesday confirmed to The Intercept that it intends to send election monitors to Maine for Election Day, but did not elaborate or respond to specific questions about where the monitors were to be sent.
“We will have around 1,000 monitors in counties throughout the United States, but we will not share the full list until Election Day,” a Justice Department spokesperson told The Intercept in an email Tuesday. “All monitors must meet the same legal and ethical requirements, including that they not interfere with the voting process. Every monitor has the same role: observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department, which the Department will review after Election Day and act where appropriate.”
Robinson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Collins Takes Right-Wing Bait
With Maine a key battleground state for control of Congress — Democratic challenger Troy Jackson is seeking to topple long-serving GOP Sen. Susan Collins, and the Democratic House candidate Matt Dunlap is seeking to best former Gov. Paul LePage in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District — temperatures are running high in the state.
Progressives in Maine worry that even without a robust federal presence at voting places — whether monitors are armed or not — activist campaigns like the one undertaken by the Maine Wire journalists could pose a potential threat to voters’ rights.
“Basically, if you were walking into City Hall and you were Black, you could expect to have this guy come up to you with his phone and ask you all sorts of rude and obviously racist questions,” said Ben Chin, co-director of the progressive Maine People’s Alliance. “We’re trying to encourage everyone to come out to vote, but it makes sense why that might give people pause. You hear a guy like that is outside a polling location, it’s reasonable to wonder, ‘Should I go down there right now?’”
“We have received complaints about the intrusive filming, photography, and harassment of voters in the City of Lewiston by political operatives.”
In a statement to The Intercept, Bellows said the state and the city of Lewiston were taking steps to ensure that voters could cast a ballot free of harassment.
“We have received complaints about the intrusive filming, photography, and harassment of voters in the City of Lewiston by political operatives,” Bellows told The Intercept in a statement. “All voters should be able to exercise their right to vote without feeling watched, questioned, or harassed, and we take these allegations seriously, particularly when it appears that voters were targeted for no other reason than their race or ethnicity. We understand the City of Lewiston has taken steps to address the problem, and we will continue to monitor the situation.”
Collins, meanwhile, took the Maine Wire’s reporting seriously after Fetherston asked the senator at a campaign event about the role of interpreters, which he and the Maine Wire cast as “electioneering.”
“I’m unaware of those allegations, but certainly only Americans should be voting in American elections,” Collins said. “And it is troubling to me if people are being accompanied into voting booths and handling ballots in a way that is not sanctioned by law.”
Effort to loosen rules on unproven peptide drugs, favored by RFK Jr, faced fierce pushback from agency scientists
A plan to give people in the United States easier access to unproven peptide drugs favored by the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, was opposed by most Food and Drug Administration scientific staff members, who had limited input in drafting the policy, according to six people familiar with its development.
The document posted online on Wednesday by Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) covers a handful of injectable peptides promoted within the wellness industry for building muscle, healing injuries and boosting energy.
Russia plans to build own version of US billionaire’s satellite communications to help attack Ukraine
Vladimir Putin praised Elon Musk’s genius and said he was in touch with Starlink’s controlling shareholder as Russia develops its own satellite communications for its military to use against Ukraine.
The Russian president, speaking at a summit with African leaders in Moscow, was comparing the Earth-orbiting network built by Musk’s SpaceX with Russia’s gradual efforts to build its own Rassvet constellation.
Martin Lewissaid that, when he met John Healey this morning, the chancellor said that, having removed standing charges from gas bills, he would also like to get rid of them from electricity bills. Lewis said:
The chancellor said he will be talking to Ofgem about how they get rid of the charge on electricity as well, but that is ‘trickier’ apparently and will take longer.
Jury at Winchester crown court sees video evidence by Joanne Young in trial of four men accused of sexual assault
A woman who was allegedly sexually assaulted by men invited by her ex-husband into their family home described how she would wake in the middle of the night restrained and blindfolded and feeling “hazy”.
Joanne Young said that on one occasion she managed to remove her blindfold and was shocked to glimpse a stranger in her bedroom whom her then husband, Philip Young, had allegedly arranged to have sex with her.
Q: Are voting machines changing Democratic votes to Republican votes? Several posts on Facebook are making that claim.
A: There is no evidence that touchscreen voting machines are deliberately switching voter selections. Rather, elections experts and state election officials have said that reported issues of machines initially not recording votes correctly are a result of familiar machine calibration issues or voter error. Also, nearly the entire country votes in a manner where voters review a paper ballot before having their votes officially cast.
FULL ANSWER
Several readers have asked us about social media claims that electronic voting machines have changed votes in multiple states. The claims started spreading last week.
Various social media posts have mentioned the issue in Texas, South Carolina and Tennessee, among other states, with some posts linking to news stories about voters complaining of this happening. All of the social media posts we reviewed cited incidents in which voters said their intended Democratic votes had been changed to Republican votes on the touchscreen, or didn’t specify how the votes had been changed.
On Oct. 21, WSMV-TV in Nashville reported that multiple early voters were experiencing problems with electronic voting machines incorrectly marking their intended choice.
The issue saw a surge in popularity after Stella Parton, sister of the late Dolly Parton, took to Facebook on Oct. 21 to complain that she “had to go back three times and correct my vote because it kept defaulting to Marsha Blackburn.” Blackburn, a Republican senator from Tennessee, is running for governor of the state against Democrat Jerri Green. The Cook Political Report rates the race as solid Republican.
While several social media posts we reviewed didn’t say machines were deliberately switching votes, that’s the impression some of our readers got, or the suggestion others on social media have made. However, elections experts and state election commissions have disputed that, saying the problem is likely a common touchscreen calibration issue or a result of human error.
David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, portrayed the issue as a familiar one during a press briefing on Oct. 22: “2022, 2020, 2018, 2016, 2008. I mean, every election we get these smattering of vote-flipping claims,” he said.
Becker explained that for some jurisdictions – including some in Tennessee – ballots are still processed using a direct recording electronic machine, an older version of touchscreen, which “can sometimes have a little bit of calibration problems.”
However, he said, for more common modern touchscreens on ballot marking devices, “almost all of the claims of vote-flipping are understandable human error.”
We reached out to the Tennesssee secretary of state’s office about these claims, but we haven’t received a response.
However, in a statement to WSMV-TV in Nashville, State Coordinator of Elections Mark Goins explained: “It’s not a vote-flipping situation. It’s normally like an unintended touch that they may not even realize.”
Goins said that there are multiple safeguards between the candidate being selected on the machine and the ballot being processed. Voters see a review screen of their selections before printing out their ballots. After the machine prints the filled-out ballot, it can be reviewed before it is deposited into the scanner and counted.
“The votes aren’t being counted on the screen. … They’re actually being counted on that paper ballot that’s going in the scanner,” Goins told WSMV-TV. “For you to vote for a candidate that’s not supposed to be voted for, every one of those checks and balances along the way are going to have to fail.”
Becker also voiced Goins’ reassurances about safeguards, explaining that if your printed ballot doesn’t match your intended selections, you can “spoil it and vote a regular ballot again.”
A polling place in Washington, D.C., ahead of the midterms. Photo by Anne Pollmann/picture alliance via Getty Images.
Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and an election law expert who served during the Biden administration as the White House’s senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights, told us that he had “heard a few reports of a few instances in which touchscreen machines were apparently having difficulty registering individuals’ choices, and registering other choices instead,” citing a news report from Tennessee about voters raising such concerns.
Levitt explained that this issue isn’t unfamiliar, and “these stories always end up showing that the touchscreens aren’t quite precisely calibrated.” He suggested that if a voter encounters an issue, “the fix is easy: pay attention when the system asks you to verify that your choices are correct, and if you’re having difficulty, bring it to the pollworker or precinct inspector’s attention.”
Andrew Appel, a professor emeritus of computer science at Princeton University and an electronic voting security expert, echoed Levitt’s remarks. “This happens, in a few places, every couple of years,” he said. “It is typically a touchscreen calibration issue. It is unlikely to be malicious hacking, because a hacker who wanted to steal an election would use a method that voters couldn’t notice.”
Appel explained that a more plausible cheating attempt would be to hack the voting machine to display the chosen selection but print an incorrect ballot, since “93% of [voters] don’t look at the paper closely enough to notice an error if one would occur there.”
Election officials in South Carolina and Texas, two states that also have been mentioned in social media posts, told us that there was no “systematic issue with the touchscreens” or that they hadn’t received reports of supposed vote-switching.
The South Carolina Election Commission told us in a statement: “It is common to receive reports of unintended selections on touchscreens, particularly during statewide elections with high turnout. As with any touchscreen, unintended selections can occur for a variety of reasons. At this time, there is no indication of a systematic issue with the touchscreens. We encourage voters to make their selections carefully and review their choices throughout the voting process. … The voting process includes multiple safeguards to help ensure voter intent is accurately captured, including on-screen indicators of selections, opportunities to review and correct choices before printing, and a final review of the printed paper ballot before it is cast.”
Alicia Pierce, assistant secretary of state for communications in Texas, told us: “I am not aware of anyone reporting this experience to our office. As a note, as of this election Texas does not use direct recording electronic voting machines, with the rare exception if a machine is needed to accommodate a voter with disabilities. Instead, any machines must produce a human-readable paper ballot that a voter can review before casting. We encourage all voters to review their choices before finally casting their ballot.”
“It’s not mysterious, or nefarious,” Levitt said, “it’s just a question of a pressure-sensitive screen being over- or under-sensitive for particular users. And it can be readily addressed if voters just let the officials in charge of the polling place know about it.”
According to Verified Voting, a nonprofit that researches election technology, only 1.3% of registered voters — those who live in Louisiana — use electronic voting machines to record votes without ever seeing a paper ballot. A slightly larger percentage of voters, including those residing in certain counties in Tennessee, among other states, are given a Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail, where they can review a paper ballot before confirming their selections on the machine. VVPAT’s can also be used for recounts.
However, the vast majority of the nation votes directly with a paper ballot, or uses a voting machine to print out a ballot, which voters can then review before depositing into a scanner that actually counts the votes.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.
Josimar Medina woke a little before 9am on Wednesday to find himself airborne and hurtling through his carriage on the fast train from Madrid to Seville.
“I remember flying through the air and looking for my girlfriend, who was also shooting through the air,” said Medina, a 37-year-old tourist from the northern Peruvian city of Chiclayo.
Companies to combine commercial quantum computing technology with enterprise optimization expertise to accelerate quantum use case identification, development and deployment in Asia
SEOUL, South Korea and PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 28, 2026 — D-Wave Quantum Inc. and LG CNS Co., Ltd., a leading AI transformation company in South Korea, today announced that the companies have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (“MOU”) to advance the adoption of quantum computing for enterprise optimization in South Korea and international markets. The collaboration will focus on applying D-Wave’s annealing quantum computing technology to complex optimization challenges, with the goal of moving applications from proof of concept into production.
D-Wave CEO Dr. Alan Baratz and LG CNS President and CEO Hyun Shin-Gyoon announced the MOU onstage at D-Wave’s Qubits Asia conference in Seoul today. The companies intend to combine D-Wave’s annealing quantum computing technologies with LG CNS’s industry expertise, mathematical optimization capabilities and systems integration experience to develop applications for customers in manufacturing, telecommunications, finance and retail. The companies also intend to pursue joint go-to-market opportunities.
LG CNS brings extensive mathematical optimization expertise across industries, including manufacturing and the public sector, with end-to-end capabilities spanning problem definition, mathematical modeling, algorithm validation and real-world implementation. LG CNS has also been conducting research on applying mathematical optimization and quantum computing to real-world industrial challenges, including image reconstruction and inspection and the detection of underground anomalies.
“To generate meaningful results from quantum computing in industrial settings, quantum technology must be supported by a deep understanding of industries and strong optimization capabilities,” said Hyun Shin-Gyoon, CEO of LG CNS. “Through our collaboration with D-Wave Quantum, we will connect quantum computing to real-world customer problems and new business opportunities, accelerating the commercialization of related services.”
“D-Wave’s commercial-grade annealing quantum computing technology is driving positive business outcomes for customers today,” said Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave. “LG CNS understands both the optimization problems enterprises need to solve and the systems those solutions must work within. By combining that expertise with our technology, we intend to help enterprises in South Korea and beyond move from evaluating quantum computing to deploying applications that deliver measurable business value.”
Optimization underpins critical business decisions, from scheduling factory production and routing deliveries to allocating resources. As the number of variables and constraints grows, finding high-quality solutions within operational time limits becomes increasingly difficult. D-Wave’s annealing quantum computing technology is designed to address these challenges, with customers already running hybrid-quantum applications in production. The collaboration aims to bring that capability to LG CNS clients seeking to reduce costs, improve efficiency and respond faster to changing conditions.
Learn more about D-Wave’s quantum optimization technology here.
About D-Wave Quantum Inc.
D-Wave (NASDAQ: QBTS) is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software and services. It is the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers, and the first and only to offer dual-platform quantum computing products and services, spanning both annealing and gate-model quantum computing technologies. D-Wave’s mission is to help customers realize the value of quantum today through enterprise-grade systems available on-premises and via its Leap quantum cloud service, which offers 99.9% availability and uptime. More than 100 organizations across commercial, government and research sectors trust D-Wave to address complex computational challenges using quantum computing. Learn more about realizing the value of quantum computing today and how D-Wave is shaping the quantum-driven industrial and societal advancements of tomorrow: www.dwavequantum.com.
About LG CNS
LG CNS is a leading Korean AX (AI Transformation) company that continues to pioneer various emerging technologies, including AI, robotics, cloud computing, data center, and smart engineering, encompassing smart factories and smart logistics, as well as digital marketing. The company also leads the market through innovative system integration (SI) and system management (SM) capabilities across finance, manufacturing, the public sector, and various other industries. For more information, please visit https://www.lgcns.com.
James O’Keefe and Cam Higby were trying to show vulnerabilities in allowing a voter to vouch for another
Two rightwing influencers have been charged with felonies in Minneapolis over attempts in the state’s election primary to disguise themselves in what they called “Muslim garb” and claim they were local voters.
James O’Keefe and Cam Higby went to polling places in Minnesota during the state’s August primary in an attempt to show vulnerabilities in the practice of “vouching”, where a registered voter from the same precinct can vouch for another voter’s eligibility.
Activists who call themselves the Citizen Justice League said they were testing Minnesota's 53-year-old voter voucher law. Videos from the August primary showed them claiming to be registered voters.
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND — The Justice Department sued Anne Arundel County Public Schools on Tuesday, alleging the district violated federal parental-rights and student-record laws through policies governing transgender students.
The complaint alleges the district allowed students to use different names, pronouns and gender identities at school without automatically notifying their parents. Federal officials argue those practices violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, or PPRA.
The lawsuit highlights one anonymous family whose daughter allegedly began using a male name at school. According to the complaint, her parents discovered the change after receiving emails using that name and later encountered difficulty obtaining related education records. Those claims have not been proven in court.
Anne Arundel County Public Schools disputes the allegations and says it complies with both FERPA and PPRA. The district said it had been communicating with federal officials in good faith and called the decision to pursue litigation regrettable.
The district also revised its gender-identity policies before the current school year. Under the revised rules, parental wishes regarding a student’s preferred name, pronouns and bathroom use take precedence when parents and students disagree.
The lawsuit is part of a broader Trump administration effort to challenge school policies involving transgender students and parental notification.
Research looked at prevalence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in 2,362 players who died in 2008-2023
A new study published on Wednesday estimates that about 75% of former NFL players who died over a 15-year period had evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
The research, published in Jama Network Open and conducted by a Boston-based team, examined the estimated prevalence of the degenerative brain disease among NFL players who died from 2008 through 2023. Researchers found that the estimated rate of CTE among these players was substantially higher than the rates observed in brain samples collected from the general population.
Joint project will combine superconducting quantum hardware and AI-native digital twins to accelerate catalyst discovery
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 28, 2026 — Quantum Elements and Qarakal Quantum today announced they have been selected by the Israel-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation to jointly develop a quantum simulation platform for understanding and designing the chemical reactions that occur on material surfaces.
The project, one of seven approved by the BIRD Foundation, has a budget of $2.4 million.
The project will combine Qarakal Quantum’s modular superconducting quantum hardware and hardware-software co-design approach with Quantum Elements’ software for advancing fault-tolerant quantum computing, using AI-driven co-design, error suppression, error correction and decoders.
Together, the companies will work toward a validated prototype capable of taking industrially relevant catalyst problems and turning them into quantum-ready computational workflows. Heterogeneous catalysis is essential to industries ranging from energy and chemicals to advanced materials, with catalytic processes involved in the manufacture of an estimated 80–90% of chemical products. The scale of these industries is significant — according to a MarketLine study, the global chemical processing industry generates between $5 and $6 trillion annually. Reactions occurring on the surface of catalysts play a central role in processes such as clean hydrogen production, CO₂ conversion, nitrogen-fixation chemistry, hydrocarbon processing, and the performance and degradation of advanced coatings.
Today, these systems are studied extensively using high-performance computing and methods such as density functional theory. These techniques are powerful, but problems involving strong electronic correlation, surface defects, transition-metal active sites, and complex bond-breaking pathways can necessitate significant computational approximation. The Qarakal–Quantum Elements project will investigate how quantum computing can complement existing tools.
“Our architecture is modular by design and tailorable for real-world workloads — that’s what makes this collaboration work,” said Dr. Nissan Maskil, CEO and co-founder of Qarakal Quantum. “Quantum Elements’ digital twins can model each module in detail, so we can make smart design decisions before we optimize the hardware. As our systems scale, their tools scale with them. Catalyst chemistry gives us meaningful problems to solve, and an opportunity to help industry with advanced reactions that are very hard to simulate today.”
Rather than treating quantum chemistry as an algorithm that runs independently of the underlying machine, the project will jointly optimize multiple layers of the computing stack. Quantum Elements’ digital-twin technology will model the behavior and noise environment of Qarakal’s superconducting system, supporting decisions around compilation, calibration, pulse-level execution, error suppression, and algorithm design before limited quantum hardware time is used.
“Useful quantum applications cannot be developed in isolation from the hardware that has to run them,” said Izhar Medalsy, Co-Founder and CEO of Quantum Elements. “Catalyst discovery gives us an opportunity to apply our quantum digital-twins and physics AI capabilities across the full path from physical device behavior to an industrial chemistry workflow.”
The collaboration is designed to produce benchmark chemistry models and quantum algorithms with demonstrations and API outputs intended for chemists and materials engineers. The companies ultimately envision the work supporting a broader quantum-enabled simulation platform for industrial catalyst and materials development.
Potential future users include catalyst manufacturers, specialty-materials companies, chemical suppliers and industrial R&D organizations that already rely on computational screening, HPC and laboratory experimentation.
About Qarakal Quantum
Qarakal Quantum is redefining superconducting quantum computing with an architecture-first approach built for quantum computing’s next inflection point as the field shifts from laboratory progress to practical industry-scale use. While much of the industry remains focused on adding more qubits, Qarakal Quantum is focused on what comes next: quantum computers that scale as integrated systems and perform on real-world workloads. Its modular, full-stack platform combines proprietary superconducting qubit design, quantum software and application-level adaptation with an architecture that assigns dedicated physical resources to distinct computational roles – the same principle that enabled classical computing to scale. Qarakal Quantum’s modular three-dimensional Pangaea architecture connects specialized quantum modules through an IP-protected quantum bus and routing motherboard, enabling hardware specialization at system scale. The result is fewer qubits for fewer operations and less noise, faster quantum algorithm execution and a deployable platform built for scientific, industrial and dual-use applications. For more information, follow Qarakal Quantum on LinkedIn or visit qarakal.ai.
About Quantum Elements
Quantum Elements develops AI-native software and hardware-faithful digital twins for quantum computing. Its technology models the behavior of real quantum systems to support quantum hardware development, co-design, error suppression, quantum error correction and application optimization.
About the BIRD Foundation
The BIRD Foundation was established by the U.S. and Israeli governments in 1977 to generate mutually beneficial cooperation between U.S. and Israeli companies, including start-ups and established organizations. BIRD provides both matchmaking support between U.S. and Israeli companies, as well as funding covering up to 50 percent of project development costs, up to $1.5M per project. BIRD takes no equity in the companies.
(The Center Square) - Texas' highest appellate court has ruled in favor of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in a lawsuit brought by his Democratic challenger over access to public records days before the Nov. 3 election.
Apple has unveiled its first touchscreen MacBook Pro, reversing a position the company held for more than 15 years that touchscreens were poorly suited for laptops. 9to5Mac reports: The new machine features a light-up Apple logo, tandem OLED, and touch input on the display. It runs on the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, like the existing MacBook Pro models without OLED touch displays. John Ternus, who is rocking a new profile picture with the new Mac, shared the first look at the new machine on X. Pricing for the new laptop starts at $2899 for the 14-inch model. The 16-inch version starts at $3399.
Pre-orders are available starting today with deliveries starting November 6.
Columnist’s relations with some senior editorial figures said to be strained over subjects she raised in her columns
The controversial Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson is understood to be in negotiations about leaving the broadsheet as the newspaper’s new owner makes significant newsroom cuts.
Sources told the Guardian that Pearson – firmly on the right of the Telegraph’s roster – is preparing to announce her exit imminently and is crafting a statement about her future plans.
Obama has been accused of ‘snobbery’ over his Trump diss, as people rush to defend the restaurant chain’s ‘affordable opulence’
Around lunchtime on Tuesday, a Rolls-Royce stopped at the intersection of Beverly Drive and Dayton Way in Beverly Hills, California. Local people in athleisure walked past Balenciaga, Dior and Prada boutiques, as visitors on Hollywood bus tours ogled nearby Rodeo Drive, where Burberry and Louis Vuitton shops meet at a celebrated street corner.
Up the street, across from the upmarket Erewhon grocery store – home to $21 smoothies – a few diners sat outside an American landmark: the Cheesecake Factory.
How the Burnham government’s first attempt to ease cost of living pressure pans out for key stakeholders Budget 2026: key points at a glance
Every budget has its winners and losers, and John Healey’s first as chancellor was no exception. While some gained from tax breaks and rule tweaks, others will either pay more, or had their hopes of reforms dashed. Here are some of those with reason to cheer, or sigh:
Barack Obama versus Donald Trump. It is the presidential election that never happened but has come to define an era of US politics.
Obama is back on the campaign trail for the midterms, still electrifying crowds, earning shouts of “We love you!” and skewering his successor. “What’s up with the gold?” he asked a crowd in Detroit. “I mean, he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” This has, predictably, set off a mini culture war involving questions of elitism and the tastefulness of chain restaurants.
The failure of Tel Aviv and Washington to achieve their war aims in Iran has resulted in the most dramatic American retreat from a region since the U.S. flight from Vietnam in 1975. This startling American defeat — after a generation of forever war failures and stalemates — has been thrown into broad relief by the resumption of another regional conflict that has received far less attention than the Trump administration’s sputtering war with Tehran. This fall, the forces that most Americans know as “the Houthis” have conducted a blitzkrieg in their native Yemen and have been pummeling Saudi Arabia’s aviation and energy infrastructure with missiles and drones. In doing so, they have put a spotlight on the limits of American power, and the shrinking U.S. military footprint, in the Middle East.
The long-standing conflict between Saudi Arabia and northern Yemen’s Ansarullah, or “Helpers of God,” led by the Houthi clan, heated up again in July 2026, when Saudi Arabia struck Sanaa International Airport to prevent a Houthi delegation from landing on its return from the funeral in Iran for slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Ansarullah government launched its own attacks and, in October, managed briefly to close Saudi Arabia’s own airport. The renewed war has now expanded into a regional conflict, with Pakistan, Türkiye, and, recently, Egypt pledging to defend the kingdom from attack, though none of these regional powers appear eager to conduct operations in Yemen itself. Notably absent from the current conflict is Saudi Arabia’s most powerful ally, the United States, since President Donald Trump has repeatedly declined to intervene on behalf of his Saudi allies.
The typical U.S. press framing of Ansarullah as an “Iran-backed militia” is inaccurate, since the movement has local, Arab nationalist reasons for its actions and is a full-scale government that rules some 80 percent of Yemen’s population. Still, it does receive surreptitious technical and military support from Iran, though nothing like the hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech armaments — from kits turning 2,000-pound “dumb” bombs into precision munitions to advanced air-to-air missiles — that the U.S. provides the Saudis. Ironically, Trump’s war on Iran, fought in conjunction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, weakened the Saudis and exposed their vulnerabilities to military attack by Iranian drones and missiles, impelling them to seek a symbolic win over a less formidable enemy in neighboring Yemen. But the weaknesses exposed by Iran’s drones helped encourage a vigorous Ansarullah rejoinder.
The Incredible Shrinking Superpower
The American refusal to join Saudi Arabia’s war signals a profound degradation in U.S. capabilities and standing in the Middle East. The U.S. military had, for decades, dominated the region from a network of about 20 major bases. The U.S. Navy operated out of the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet in Manama, Bahrain. The U.S. Air Force flew missions from the massive al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which housed 10,000 U.S. personnel. Thousands of ground troops were barracked in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. The Pentagon admitted that “Iranian strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict. In addition, dozens of U.S. aircraft were destroyed or damaged during OEF.”
The naval base at Manama, one of America’s most important naval facilities and headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, was destroyed by Iranian strikes. (Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao admitted last month that Iran “blew the hell out of Bahrain.”) The loss of Manama led to supply shortages and poor morale aboard the USS Lincoln and other ships patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, bedeviling Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
The CIA offices at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh were annihilated. Iran struck al-Udeid’s evacuated Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar, from which the Pentagon had directed its strikes on enemies as diverse as the Taliban and ISIL over recent decades, and rendered this facility inoperable. All U.S. troops were also withdrawn from Iraq, a process accelerated by the inability of U.S. missile interceptors to protect them from attacks by Iran and allied Shiite militias there.
Iran’s deployment of swarms of Shahed drones caused the United States and Israel to use up much of their stock of interceptors, which are time-consuming and expensive to replace. A basic Shahed costs as little as $20,000, though new hardened versions are more expensive — whereas a Patriot interceptor costs $4 million. One reason the Trump administration may be reluctant to intervene in Yemen is that if the U.S. cannot fly missions from al-Udeid, and cannot be sure any new fighter-jet fleets stationed in the region will be safe from Iran, given the paucity of interceptors, the Pentagon will have a limited ability to rescue any U.S. pilots shot down over Yemen.
America’s Profound Weakness in the Middle East
Saudi Arabia launched a war against the ascendant Ansarullah in 2015 when the latter staged a coup in the capital of Sanaa. The Ansarullah movement is rooted in Yemen’s Zaidi Shiism, though it is more radical than traditional Zaidism. (Zaidi Shiism differs substantially from Iranian Shiism, having no ayatollahs and having relatively good relations with Sunnis.)
About a third of Yemenis are Zaidis, who predominate in the north of the country, and many have long resented the dominance of their politics and culture by neighboring, oil-rich, Sunni Saudi Arabia, whose official ideology is hard-line Wahhabism, a puritanical form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of the Quran. Wahhabi proselytizing among the Shia enraged the Houthi clan and their followers began rebelling against the government of military dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2004. But when he was deposed by popular demonstrations during the Arab Spring in 2012, Saleh gradually allied with the Houthis, and by 2015 about half the Yemeni military rallied to their side, along with some major Sunni tribes.
In response to the Houthis’ rise, a Saudi-led coalition that included the United Arab Emirates began bombing Yemen in 2015. Until 2022, the U.S, then militarily dominant in the region, provided the Saudis with strategic advice, weaponry, and in-air refueling for their fighter jets in the Yemen war, though Riyadh’s tendency to bomb civilian infrastructure rather than confining themselves to military targets caused tension between the two allies. While the Saudis and their coalition pushed the Houthis out of much of the south of the country, including Aden, they were unable to dislodge them from the north. The Saudis implicitly acknowledged their failure with a United Nations-brokered truce in April 2022, which largely held until this past summer.
The Forever Wars Effect
America’s forever wars against Middle Eastern countries that decline to accept the Israel project or American corporate neocolonialism helped reignite the Saudi–Yemeni conflict. Iran is the last major state in the region that rejects Israel and is off-limits to U.S. corporate investment, a stance that inspires much of Washington’s animus. Netanyahu was therefore easily able to persuade Trump, as a privileged visitor to the White House Situation Room, to attack Iran in February.
The glib expectation of Netanyahu and of his Mossad chief at that time, David Barnea, that the Islamic Republic would crumble if Israel murdered Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and around 50 other high-ranking regime figures proved wishful thinking. The notion that Iran was vulnerable to a tightened petroleum blockade was turned on its head by the hard-liners who ascended to power after Khamenei’s death. Largely veterans of the grueling eight-year Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s, the country’s new leaders pursued a policy of “de-basing” toward the United States, taking out its main regional military facilities.
By successfully striking Saudi Arabia, Iran demonstrated that the kingdom’s ability to protect itself is imperfect and its infrastructure is vulnerable.
In addition, Iran launched precision strikes at the energy facilities of their Arab Gulf neighbors who had hosted those American bases. They struck Kuwait’s national petroleum company and its fields and refineries. They took out 17 percent of the production of Qatar’s Ras Laffan natural gas facility, even though Doha had good relations with Tehran and had mediated for Iran. Tehran also struck ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, using missiles and drones, scaring the major shipping insurers into withdrawing their contracts. Few shipping magnates would risk cargoes worth billions of dollars without insurance.
Iran threw the world into an energy crisis reminiscent of the 1970s, which would have been even more devastating had China not released oil from its vast private and public petroleum reserves and cut its oil imports from 11.5 million barrels a day to under 9 million barrels a day, a move partially enabled by its turn to electric vehicles, which saved it 1.5 million barrels a day. High gasoline and diesel prices hurt Asia more than the United States, but prices rose globally. A third of the world’s helium, essential for cooling computer chips in the production process, comes from the Gulf, and that supply was also interrupted, increasing the price of electronics.
By successfully striking Saudi Arabia, Iran demonstrated that the kingdom’s ability to protect itself is imperfect and its infrastructure is vulnerable. By blockading the Strait of Hormuz in a way that the United States had difficulty undoing, Iran demonstrated the vulnerability of key world maritime arteries, something Ansarullah had already highlighted by striking at shipping in the Red Sea to protest the Gaza genocide.
Blockade for Blockade
When the Saudis bombed Sanaa’s airport in July 2026, Ansarullah’s leadership appears to have decided that Riyadh posed an ongoing existential danger to their state and sought to strangle the Yemeni economy, just as Israel had done to Gaza. Moreover, they sensed that the kingdom could be rolled back in the wake of the failure of the Israeli–U.S. war on Iran. Just as Iran had weakened the Gulf Arab states with its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the Houthis believed they could seriously degrade the Saudi economy by blocking Riyadh’s shipping through the Bab al-Mandab, “the Strait of Tears,” between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
Saudi exports through the Strait of Hormuz had fallen substantially. The kingdom did, however, have an escape valve: its East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Ships loading at Yanbu then headed for Saudi Arabia’s major Asian markets through the Bab al-Mandab. If Ansarullah could make the tanker captains fearful of this transit, they could reduce Saudi Arabia’s income even further. The Houthi spokesperson, Muhammad Abd al-Salam, warned that the prohibition of Saudi shipping was only the first step in a tit-for-tat strategy of “blockade for blockade.” The idea wasn’t original. The Saudis and the U.S. had often attempted to blockade petroleum imports to northern Yemen during the seven-year Saudi–Yemeni War.
In the subsequent three months, Ansarullah deployed missiles and drones constructed from Iranian models by military engineers trained by the old nationalist government of Ali Abdullah Saleh, many of whom had joined the Ansarullah military, in what has been called a Yemeni “military industrial complex.”
Just as the kingdom’s interceptors had proven unable to prevent Iranian strikes on targets such as the CIA section of the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, they sometimes failed to halt the barrage of Yemeni missiles and drones. Refineries and oil installations, even the headquarters of the state oil giant, Saudi Aramco, in Dhahran, were hit. In October, Ansarullah closed Riyadh’s International Airport, just as the Saudis had attempted to close that of Sanaa in July. Ansarullah also surged out of their mountain strongholds and made a major push to Yemen’s southwest coast, taking the strategic port of Mocha overlooking the Bab al-Mandab. They also moved on Taiz, an inland industrial city of nearly 1 million inhabitants, one of the last major population centers not already under their control, in a campaign that tested the ability of the small Saudi-backed government of Rashad al-Alimi in Aden to resist it.
Highlanders and Oil Sheikhs
Just as the Vietnam War was one conflict among many fought in the Third World during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so the Saudi–Yemeni War of 2026 is part of the larger struggle between the U.S. and Israel and Iran. Still, just as Vietnam was more about Vietnamese anticolonialism, nationalism, and sovereignty than about Communism and the ownership of the means of production, so the Saudi–Yemeni War is about Yemeni autonomy more than it is about the loose Houthi alliance with Iran. The conflict is not primarily between Zaidism and Wahhabism, though religious tensions are part of the story, but is far more rooted in a struggle between desperately poor Yemeni highlanders and fabulously wealthy Saudi sheikhs.
The plutocratic Saudi ruling elite is closely tied to Washington and has secret dealings with the Israelis, with whom it shares a distrust of the poverty-stricken Palestinian resistance, and views Ansarullah as cat’s paws of Iran in the Arabian Peninsula and as radical republicans trying to overthrow the region’s oil monarchies in favor of populism. For its part, Ansarullah are Arab nationalists, anti-American, and seek to use oil resources for populist purposes. And they have been willing to attack Israel to defend the Palestinians of Gaza from genocide.
Last week, Ansarullah battered targets across Saudi Arabia, prompting a further pullback from the region by Washington. The Yemeni forces attacked King Fahd International Airport in Dammam. An Ansarullah spokesperson said the group also targeted the Saudi defense ministry in the capital, Riyadh, along with an Aramco site in Yanbu, and an airport in the southern city of Abha. Reports also emerged of an attack on another Aramco oil field.
“Houthis have increasingly engaged in hostilities against Saudi Arabia, including attacks on civilian airports and other critical infrastructure,” wrote State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott in an October 21 post on X, after the wave of attacks, ordering “non-emergency U.S. government employees and their family members” out of Saudi Arabia.
It’s just the latest evidence of the most significant regional retreat by the U.S. in half a century and evidence of profound American military decline. The outcome of their war with the Saudis will not determine the issue of the U.S.–Israeli contest with Iran, but the very ability of Ansarullah to prosecute it points to the profound weakening of the American posture in the Middle East.
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — Republican investor and former Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback announced Tuesday that he is running for president in 2028, launching a national campaign just months after losing the Republican primary for governor.
Fishback, 31, founded the investment firm Azoria and previously worked as a consultant for the Department of Government Efficiency during President Donald Trump’s second administration. He entered Florida’s 2026 governor’s race as a challenger to Trump-backed Rep. Byron Donalds but lost the Aug. 18 Republican primary.
His political profile rose during the governor’s race through a nationalist and anti-immigration platform. Fishback called for restrictions on H-1B visas, limits on institutional investors buying homes, opposition to large artificial-intelligence data centers and elimination of property taxes.
Fishback has also attracted controversy over statements made during the campaign. A political group aligned with Sen. Ted Cruz criticized him over remarks it characterized as antisemitic, including Fishback’s assertion that “White genocide is real.” Fishback disputed accusations that he was promoting antisemitism.
PolitiFact has separately fact-checked several of Fishback’s claims in 2026, rating two False and one Half True, including statements involving Congress and Israel, college-graduate underemployment and the effects of AI data centers.
Fishback’s entry adds another declared Republican to the early maneuvering for the 2028 presidential contest, which remains more than two years away.
"EMACS, the mother of all editors, turns 50!" writes Slashdot reader dr_jerry, sharing a report from MIT Technology Review: Programming used to be a very different experience from the one we know today. In fact, the first programmers didn't write code at all; the six women who worked on the ENIAC, one of the world's first computers, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946 did it by physically configuring switches, cables, and plugboards.
A few years later, MIT engineers programmed the Whirlwind by punching code onto paper tape that was then loaded into the computer's memory -- making it among the first "stored-program" machines. Later, they and others moved on to punch cards, one for each line of code.
By the early 1960s, programmers with interactive computers could use a "line editor" to type their code on teletypes -- large, noisy keyboard-and-printer machines. They'd type one line of code at a time, and their work would be saved on a spinning hard disk the size of a modern washing machine. But there was still no such thing as the now-familiar full-screen text editors that allow programmers to see and modify many lines at a time on a display.
One of the first such tools, EMACS, turns 50 this year, and it is still widely used. EMACS first ran on the early video terminals at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1976, but its core concepts were so powerful that it was rewritten for many operating systems in the decades that followed. Apple even distributed it with Mac OS X. Beyond that, the software-sharing community that started around EMACS helped give rise to the modern-day free software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system.
Twin brothers, 22, from Ghana and a 53-year-old American woman targeted older adults in 25 US states, officials say
Three people have pleaded guilty in a $9m romance fraud scam that targeted elderly Americans.
On Monday, the US attorney’s office in the northern district of Ohio announced that twin brothers from Ghana and an American woman pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Charges against him are unclear after return to Iran despite being sentenced last year for ‘propaganda activities’
An Iranian court has handed the award-winning film director Jafar Panahi a new prison sentence of five years and one month and ordered the seizure of all his assets.
The 66-year-old, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year for It Was Just an Accident, was sentenced in absentia, his lawyer, Mostafa Nili, told the Iranian news outlet Emtedad. The court also imposed a two-year travel ban and barred him from using social media for two years, Nili said.
Spain’s high-speed rail network, the most extensive in Europe and the second largest in the world after China, has long been a point of pride in the country. But Wednesday’s deadly crash – the second in nine months – has recast the spotlight on questions about safety.
Officials said at least 68 people were killed on Wednesday morning after a high-speed train slammed into another that had stopped on the tracks, leading to the derailment of several carriages. The two trains were believed to be carrying 544 passengers.
Tonight’s Board Matters discussion will examine the Science of Reading, student data and how school boards can turn research into action
WILMINGTON, Del. — Improving Delaware students’ reading skills will require more than changes inside individual classrooms, according to First State Educate, which is putting a spotlight Wednesday night on the role school boards can play in strengthening literacy outcomes.
First State Educate will host its October Board Matters webinar at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 28, bringing together state and local education leaders for a discussion about literacy, evidence-based reading instruction and the governance decisions that can influence student achievement.
The online event will feature Kathy Kelly, associate secretary of academic excellence at the Delaware Department of Education, and Dr. Amy Trauth, a member of the Christina School District Board of Education.
The discussion comes as Delaware schools continue working to improve reading proficiency and expand the use of instructional approaches grounded in the Science of Reading.
School boards have an important role in that effort because they approve budgets, establish district priorities, monitor academic performance and help determine how resources are directed toward classroom instruction.
From research to boardroom decisions
First State Educate said the webinar will focus on how board members can better understand literacy challenges and use student data and academic research when evaluating district programs and investments.
Topics are expected to include the Science of Reading, evidence-based instructional practices and ways boards can hold school systems accountable for improving student outcomes.
The Science of Reading generally refers to a large body of research examining how children learn to read and which instructional practices are most effective. Delaware has increasingly emphasized evidence-based reading instruction as part of broader efforts to improve literacy performance.
For school boards, that can translate into decisions about curriculum, professional development, staffing, intervention programs and how districts measure whether students are making progress.
Building stronger education governance
The webinar is part of First State Educate’s Board Matters series, which is designed to give Delaware school board members access to information, research and experts that can help them make more informed governance decisions.
The organization has increasingly focused on strengthening school board leadership as one component of improving Delaware’s public education system.
First State Educate also is developing a broader statewide literacy initiative focused on expanding evidence-based reading instruction and helping school leaders translate research into classroom practice.
The organization argues that improving literacy requires cooperation among educators, administrators, school boards, families and community leaders — with governing boards playing an important role in establishing priorities and tracking results.
Wednesday’s discussion is open not only to school board members but also to educators, parents and community members interested in Delaware’s literacy efforts.
TO GO
What: First State Educate Board Matters webinar, “Improving Literacy Starts With Leadership”
When: 6 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 28
Where: Online via Zoom
Featured speakers: Kathy Kelly, associate secretary of academic excellence at the Delaware Department of Education, and Dr. Amy Trauth, Christina School District Board of Education
Topics: Science of Reading, evidence-based literacy instruction, student performance data and the role of school boards in improving academic outcomes
TSA officers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport found sharp "mutant blades" in a carry-on bag that resembled something out of a comic book or horror film.
Prime minister warns cabinet not to express opinions about future relationship with Brussels before review of options
Andy Burnham has warned ministers not to express their opinions about how the government should approach Brexit, as he argued that the Conservatives’ deal with Brussels had been more extreme than that promised in the 2016 referendum.
In another series of announcements connected to his plan to seek closer links with the EU, Burnham told ministers at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the current deal was a bad one, before writing to frontbenchers setting out his hopes to address this.
ULM, Germany, Oct. 28, 2026 — NVision today announced the publication of landmark peer-reviewed research in Nature and a strategic partnership with HyperLight Corporation, an industry leader in thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonics. The companies will integrate NVision’s thin-film molecular qubits directly onto advanced photonic integrated circuits (PICs). Together, these milestones establish a practical path to quantum computing at scale, using photonic connectivity to link quantum resources within and across processors. This opens a path toward millions of qubits on chips compatible with standard foundry manufacturing.
The Nature publication, A Single-Molecule Spin-Photon Interface, confirms the first ever individually addressable organic molecular spin-photon interface, which is the key ingredient for connecting stationary qubits with photons. Until now, molecular spins could not be individually and coherently controlled, preventing them from serving as true qubits. That barrier has now been broken: the core building block can be controlled at the single-molecule level. This opens a new path to scale, where molecular qubits can be deposited as thin films, much like OLED materials, directly on top of PICs, turning established photonic chip technology into a platform for scaling quantum computers.
“This proves what we’ve long believed: that organic chemistry offers a fundamentally better building block for quantum,” said Dr. Sella Brosh, CEO of NVision. “For years, the industry has been locked in a hardware race using modalities that would require decades and multi-billion-dollar proprietary fabrication facilities to achieve scale. With the creation of the world’s first manufacturable organic qubit, we now enter quantum’s molecular era, establishing a new architecture based on photonic connectivity from the get-go, with a clear path to scale through existing foundry infrastructure.”
Alongside the Nature publication, NVision announced a strategic partnership with HyperLight, a global leader in TFLN electro-optic PICs for high-bandwidth environments such as AI data centers, telecom and metro networks. The collaboration will integrate NVision’s molecular qubits as a thin film that can be deposited directly onto photonic chips, extending HyperLight’s TFLN Chiplet technology further into quantum applications.
“Integrating NVision’s breakthrough molecular qubits onto our PICs unlocks a compelling path for scalable quantum hardware while showcasing the capabilities and versatility of HyperLight’s TFLN technology,” said Kevin Luke, co-founder and Head of Custom Development at HyperLight. “Photonic interconnectivity is essential for scaling quantum processors, and combining our optical chip infrastructure with manufacturable molecular thin films allows us to deliver high-density, chip-scale quantum connectivity that leverages decades of investment in semiconductor fabrication.”
The milestone directly advances NVision’s Photonic Integrated Quantum Circuits (PIQC) platform from foundational physics into commercial hardware development. Following initial chip deliveries from foundry partners, NVision is targeting a live demonstration of on-chip performance on PICs by the end of 2026. The company’s long-term commercial roadmap targets scaling to 1,000 physical qubits, progressing toward 1,000 logical, fault-tolerant qubits on chip by 2030 housed within a deployable data-center form factor.
Unlike monolithic quantum architectures that force qubits into tight physical proximity, which creates severe crosstalk, control complexity and thermal bottlenecks, NVision’s Photonic Integrated Quantum Circuit (PIQC) architecture uses optical links to decouple qubits from local spatial constraints. The engineered carbene molecules function at accessible cryogenic temperatures (2K – 4K) and emit photons natively at precise optical frequencies, enabling direct intra-chip and inter-chip quantum entanglement.
“Chemistry gives us a design freedom that semiconductor-based qubits, such as in silicon, simply do not have. By addressing quantum design at the molecular level, we can tune the performance that matters most, including quantum memory, gate speed and photon emission, within a single molecule,” said Dr. Ilai Schwartz, CTO of NVision. “Because our qubits interact directly with light from the start, we achieve connectivity without proximity, making photonic networking a foundational capability of our platform rather than something we have to add later.”
To achieve this milestone, NVision combined large-scale computational screening with targeted synthesis, evaluating more than 150 candidate molecules, out of which 40 were synthesized in the laboratory. The resulting carbene system is engineered to interface directly with photons, making photonic connectivity a practical building block for scalable architectures. Crucially, the platform tolerates up to 70% photon loss, enabling reliable operation with standard silicon photonics rather than requiring ultra-low-loss, specialized optical infrastructure.
First prototype integrated chips resulting from the collaboration are expected in Q4 2026. For detailed technical specifications, architectural white papers, and access to the peer-reviewed Nature study (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-11147-6), read Designed, not Discovered: A Molecule Built to Be a Qubit.
“At DCVC, we’re excited to back NVision because we believe its molecular qubit platform has the potential to accelerate the roadmap for quantum computing as a whole,” said Prineha Narang, Partner, DCVC. “Using molecules as the building blocks of quantum hardware is a visionary approach, one that could make qubits easier to manufacture, scale, and industrialize. This is the kind of innovation that could bring us closer to realizing quantum computing’s promise, including the discovery of new materials and molecules.”
“NVision’s achievement introduces an exciting new building block for quantum computing, bringing together molecular qubits and photonic connectivity with a vision for scale,” said said Quantum Machines Co-Founder and CEO Itamar Sivan. “Quantum Machines’ control platform brings these elements together, helping turn pioneering science into working quantum systems. We’re delighted to contribute to this milestone and to work alongside NVision as they build toward scalable quantum computers.”
About NVision Quantum Technologies
NVision is a full stack quantum technology company focused on healthcare, with deep expertise in engineering and controlling the quantum properties of organic molecules. This approach underpins both its POLARIS platform, which enables real-time measurement of metabolism on standard MRI systems, and its quantum computing platform, Photonic Integrated Quantum Circuits (PIQC, pronounced “Pixie”). Together, these capabilities are helping bridge the gap between understanding disease and delivering effective therapies. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Ulm, Germany, NVision is backed by Playground Global, DCVC, Entrée Capital, Matterwave/b2venture, Lauder Partners, Pathena Investments, The European Investment Bank and others. Learn more at nvision-quantum.com.
About HyperLight
HyperLight delivers high-performance integrated photonics solutions based on thin-film lithium niobate technology. The company combines the electro-optic advantages of TFLN with scalable manufacturing, test, and integration to enable next-generation optical engines for AI data centers, telecom and metro networks, and emerging photonics markets.
The FCC has approved (PDF) Amazon Leo's $11.5 billion acquisition of satellite operator Globalstar, giving the Starlink rival additional infrastructure and spectrum to expand into direct-to-device satellite connectivity. Engadget reports: You may not know Globalstar but have possibly used its services, as the company provides Apple's emergency satellite connectivity for compatible iPhones and Watches. Interestingly, Apple also held a 20 percent stake in Globalstar prior to its takeover. As part of the deal, Leo will power satellite services for supported iPhone and Apple Watch models.
Leo, a rival to SpaceX's Starlink, has been active of late. The company recently announced that it has 400 satellites in orbit and revealed last month that it had launched high-quality satellite internet service in Uzbekistan. It's teaming up with Delta to eventually bring satellite internet to flights, as well. Amazon recently added six new Arianespace launches and aims to have more than 3,000 low-earth orbit satellites up in the near future, still well short of SpaceX's 11,000 satellites.
Brand, 51, who has been charged with three counts of rape says he acted ‘consensually’
Content warning: this article contains references to allegations of sexual abuse which some readers might find distressing
Winter moved on to count 5, in which a woman alleged Brand sexually assaulted her when she was in her 20s and working at a radio station in 2004 or 2005.
Winter asked Brand whether he “sloppily kissed her”.
In April of last year, dozens of students set off from Serbia, intent on making it to Strasbourg, France on bicycles. The aim of the arduous, 13-day transcontinental journey was simple: to make their voices heard in Europe and beyond.
In their home city of Novi Sad, students had been holding near-daily protests after a deadly roof collapse at the city’s main railway station. As their push for accountability and justice spread across the country, it was met with baton-wielding police, teargas and a political class that branded these young people as traitors.
ProPublica’s Emerging Reporters Program provides support and mentorships to college students who are pursuing careers in investigative journalism and need additional training and financial support to help advance their goals.
Participants receive a $9,000 stipend, a trip to the annual NICAR investigative journalism conference, occasional training and presentations by speakers. They’ll also be paired one-on-one with ProPublica journalists who can help counsel them on stories, build their connections in the industry and expose them to the varied paths that careers in investigative journalism can take. Past Emerging Reporters have gone on to work at The New York Times, The Associated Press, Fresnoland, Capital B, The Tributary and other outlets.
Our goal is to encourage the next generation of journalists who seek to shine a light on abuses of power and produce stories with moral force that provoke change. In choosing the class, we look for students who demonstrate an early dedication to journalism as a career, through internships, work at local news outlets or work at campus publications. And where those opportunities — which are often unpaid — aren’t accessible, we look for other ways the student has shown an eagerness and a drive to learn the craft.
This year’s class of exceptional student journalists are from schools in Illinois, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa and New York.
Meet our 2026 class:
Annisyn Krebs-Carr (she/her)
Courtesy of Annisyn Krebs-Carr
Annisyn Krebs-Carr is a senior at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign studying journalism and animal sciences. She is a reporter for Illinois Public Media Student Newsroom, where she reports on the ongoing housing crisis in Champaign-Urbana. Previously, she served as the arts and entertainment editor at The Daily Illini, the independent newspaper at the university. She is now the managing editor and oversees content produced by the entire newsroom. In 2026, she interned for St. Louis Public Radio and formed relationships with the investigative reporters at NPR’s Midwest Newsroom. This is where she developed a deeper appreciation for investigative journalism. As she continues her journalism career, she wants to focus on how the criminal justice system has failed, and continues to fail, Black people. She also wants to explore how environmental racism has impacted lower-income communities. After graduation, she hopes to work in a public media newsroom and report on local stories while honing her investigative journalism skills. Long term, Annisyn hopes to build a dedicated career as an investigative journalist in public media.
Jessica Meza (she/her)
Courtesy of Jessica Meza
Jessica Meza is a senior at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln studying journalism, advertising and public relations. Jessica works across mediums, including in data visualizations, video, print and social media, with an emphasis on audio reporting. Jessica hopes to begin her career in investigative, in-depth reporting, focusing on marginalized communities. She hopes to use her reporting to amplify the voice of people facing hidden injustices in her community. Other interests include housing, immigration and food reporting. Jessica currently works at Nebraska Public Media as a reporting intern. She previously interned at NPR’s Midwest Newsroom and, as the Hortencia Zavala Foundation intern, wrote for The Fulcrum and the Latino News Network. In 2025, she was part of the team at Nebraska News Service that was awarded a regional Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for its investigative project on missing and murdered marginalized women.
Lajward Zahra (she/her)
Courtesy of Lajward Zahra
Lajward Zahra is a senior English major at Rice University in Houston, originally from El Paso, Texas. Her reporting focuses on politics, immigration and the environment, particularly in Texas. She is a 2025 writing fellow at The Nation and has written for the magazine since 2023. She previously interned with the Houston Chronicle editorial board in summer 2025, reporting and writing on local and state politics, including the Texas Republican Party convention, among other issues. Lajward’s freelance work has also appeared in publications including The American Prospect, Teen Vogue, Business Insider, Rewire News Group and Scalawag. She was a 2024 Asian American Journalists Association Voices fellow.
Thai Theodoro (she/her)
Courtesy of Thai Theodoro
Originally from Brazil, Thai Theodoro studies political science with a concentration in Latin American studies at Grinnell College in Iowa. Now in her senior year, she is the managing editor of The Scarlet & Black, Grinnell’s independent student newspaper. Thai has interned at The Boston Globe, the Des Moines Register and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and her reporting has been published in dozens of newspapers across the country. She is a member of the New York Times Corps and a former participant in the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Student Project. Thai is passionate about telling untold stories, pursuing investigative reporting with the power to challenge the status quo, using the three languages she speaks to reach underrepresented communities, and, of course, writing the occasional quirky story.
Tsehai Alfred (she/her)
Courtesy of Tsehai Alfred
Tsehai Alfred is a senior at Columbia University studying English. She is the 150th editor-in-chief and president of the Columbia Daily Spectator, the campus newspaper, and is also an intern on CNN’s criminal justice team. Over the summer, she was a Dow Jones News Fund intern at VTDigger, an accountability-focused newsroom in Vermont, investigating the troubled integration of AI into healthcare, a struggling dairy farming industry, and soaring police use-of-force payouts. Previously, she has interned at City & State New York, covering the 2025 mayoral race and city council; at PBS News as a Gwen Ifill Journalism Fellow; and at her local news outlet, the Virgin Islands Consortium. Her reporting interests include local government, economic inequality, and political and corporate accountability.
British households face a “pretty grim picture” for living standards as the war in the Middle East drags down growth and triggers a fresh cost of living crisis, the government’s independent forecaster has said.
In a report as John Healey announced his first budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) issued a sharp downgrade for growth in 2027, household disposable incomes and the public finances despite the measures taken by the chancellor.
Shares in GSK slid on Wednesday despite the UK drugmaker reporting better than expected financial results, as investors were unnerved by weaker sales of its respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and shingles vaccines, and recently launched medications.
Britain’s second-biggest pharmaceutical company reported a 19% decline in pre-tax profit to £1.9bn in the July to September quarter and £318m of restructuring charges, with more to come. Core operating profit and core earnings per share rose 5% and 1% respectively, however, beating analysts’ expectations.
Several Mississippi homes have been purchased near datacenters and one resident said realtor outlined target to buy more than 400
People in a Mississippi neighborhood, many of whom dislike a nearby power plant central to Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence ambitions, have received a stark offer – to sell their houses to his company and make way.
Real estate agents have been going door to door in Southaven, Mississippi, on behalf of xAI, touting a deal to purchase houses as long as the owners agree to not join a lawsuit against the company over the power plant’s noise. (Musk’s AI company officially became SpaceXAI in July and has lately been rebranded as SpaceXSI but to neighbors of the datacenter in Mississippi, it remains xAI.)
The luxury MV Odyssey ship slated for a years-long voyage around the world suspends operations amid high fuel prices
A luxury cruise ship that had embarked on a years-long voyage around the world was forced to suspend its operations and leave passengers stranded in Cambodia because of high fuel prices.
The ship, known as the MV Odyssey, had been carrying 203 passengers, mostly Americans, along with 156 crew members, Cambodian officials told the Associated Press. The ship has a 650-passenger capacity.
Democrats urge FTC to tackle ‘systemic failure’ of biggest convenience and dollar stores over pricing practices after Guardian investigations
Thirty-four members of Congress are calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate reports of widespread overcharging by some of America’s most-recognized brand-name retailers.
The 28 October letter to the FTC comes in direct response to Guardian investigations of four of the nation’s largest dollar-store and convenience-store chains. Both investigations revealed pervasive mismatches between shelf labels and register prices.
With nearly all votes counted, Netanyahu’s coalition government has lost its majority, but main opponents also fail to gain outright majority; marked gains by Palestinian parties
With almost all votes counted, Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government has lost its majority, but his main opponents, an alliance of Jewish Israeli parties unofficially led by Gadi Eisenkot, have also failed to gain an outright majority.
Israeli media report that Netanyahu’s bloc is ahead, with projections he could take 53 seats under the current vote share, but this could change further. The projections put Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition bloc on 48 seats and the Palestinian parties on 19 seats. Sixty-one seats are needed to form a majority to govern in the Knesset.
The remainder of votes to be counted come from absentee ballots, according to Israeli media. We can expect absentee ballots to be counted on Wednesday night, with final results by Thursday.
The Palestinian Israeli parties have received a historically strong vote. The Joint List, a new ticket of several Arab-majority parties, triumphed with at least 12 seats, while Ra’am, the other Islamic party, won seven.
The key question is whether the Eisenkot-led “Change” bloc (consisting of the rightwinger Naftali Bennett’s Together party, the centre-left Yair Golan’s Democrats and the rightwing Yisrael Beiteinu party) will partner with Palestinian Israeli parties or if they will resort to a new election, or even working with Netanyahu.
Netanyahu took the stage at a post-election rally in Jerusalem just after 3am, telling his supporters that official results will show that “Likud is the largest party in Israel”. He told his supporters that the country must “establish a strong, rightwing national government” – adding that a government that relied on the support of Palestinian parties must not be formed.
Eisenkot told cheering supporters in Tel Aviv that the “Israeli public has voted against Netanyahu’s service as Israel’s prime minister … a worthy leader would have accepted the people’s non-confidence and announced today his retirement from politics”. In his speech, he also warned Netanyahu not to “use Israel’s security” for political ends, playing on fears that the prime minister could use this period of uncertainty to launch a new attack on Iran.
The Palestinian Israeli vote, which represents about 20% of the population, had long been seen as a decisive factor for who will be able to form government, and the high turnout of this election was driven by the community experiencing increased racism and discrimination under Netanyahu’s government.
This is the most voted-for election in Israel’s political history, with many Israelis flying back into the country to cast their vote, and nearly 80% of IDF soldiers voting.
Donald Trump said his endorsement had helped Netanyahu perform better than polling estimates.
AI tools are making it easier to modify and recreate games, raising questions about piracy, copyright and how far the technology could disrupt the industry
If your social media algorithms have clocked that you’re into video games, something strange will have happened in the past few weeks. Your feed, like mine, will have been full of clips of streamers playing bizarre mashups of popular video games. Skyrim in Minecraft. Halo, except the main character is Mario. Skate 2 in Call of Duty maps. A flood of professional-looking fan-coded game mods that are mildly interesting to look at for 30 seconds, but ultimately inconsequential. Would I download a mod that lets me play Wii Bowling inside a zombie shooter? No, but I am very interested in where they came from.
Of course, the answer – or at least, most of the answer – is AI. After a week of researching this (thanks especially to Replay Mode on YouTube for this informative video, which set me down this track) I now understand that these mashup mods are not just AI-generated videos, but AI-assisted coding. Basically, as of a few weeks ago, Anthropic’s Claude has become extremely good at decompiling video game code. Games are written by humans in readable code and then compiled into binary 1s and 0s that the PC or console running it can read; decompiling is the reversal of that process, revealing a game’s source code, which humans can then edit and mess around with for fun. This used to be an extremely laborious process. But now it is not, because humans aren’t doing much of it any more.
They claim to reduce fine lines, blemishes and redness – but which stand up to scrutiny? After consulting dermatologists and putting them to the test, we have crowned a brand new number one
LED face masks are booming in popularity – despite being one of the most expensive at-home beauty products to hit the market. They claim to reduce the appearance of fine lines, stop spots and calm redness, with some even combining different types of light to enhance the benefits.
However, it’s wise to be sceptical about new treatments that are costly and non-invasive, and to do your research before you buy. With this in mind, I interviewed doctors and dermatologists to find out whether these light therapy devices work.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Running an app ecosystem has gotten a lot more complex for Google after its loss in the Epic Games antitrust case. While U.S. users can access app stores in Google Play by court order, international users will use Google's voluntary Registered App Stores program. Google has announced that stores wishing to be part of that program are now free to apply, and support will roll out to some Android devices later this year. App stores accepted into the program will enjoy preferential treatment on the Android platform. Users of approved stores will be able to install apps with a single click, similar to the experience in the Play Store. These stores will also be allowed to update apps silently in the background like Google's store does.
[...] Registered App Stores are still happening on Android, but they won't be supported in the U.S. -- you can go to Google Play for alternative stores stateside, but so far, Aptoide remains the only one listed. Those operating Android app storefronts who want to be included in the international program can now review the program and begin the enrollment process. Any store hoping to get approval will have to adhere to a number of requirements, including protecting intellectual property, removing illegal content, and publishing a privacy policy for both users and developers. Google also requires several ongoing security measures to ensure the stores do not give malware easier access to Android devices. As part of the application process, store operators must provide documentation for all these points (in English) and upload copies of all their apps.
It costs $10,000 per year to participate in the Android Registered App Stores program, and that fee must be paid before Google will review the application. Google says this fee covers the additional support necessary to run the program. There may also be additional review fees if Google detects a store has a problem with malware. Google plans to roll out support in dozens of nations, which includes most of the world outside of the U.S. and Europe. The program goes live on December 1, but it will only work on Android devices running the latest builds of Android 17. Google says support will start with Android 17 QPR2, which is expected to arrive on Pixel phones in the coming weeks.
atTAcK addiction presented atTAcK addiction’s highest honor, the Medal of Honor, to Joanna Champney, director of the Delaware Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health, at the organization’s Oct. 22 Be a Hero Gala. Image created on 10/28 and was edited with AI.
Joanna Champney receives organization’s highest award as Delaware records sharp decline in overdose deaths
NEWARK, Del. — Delaware’s progress in reducing fatal drug overdoses — and the people working on the front lines of addiction treatment, recovery and prevention — took center stage as atTAcK addiction honored community leaders at its 11th annual Be a Hero Gala.
About 240 people attended the Oct. 22 event at the Executive Banquet Center near Newark, where Joanna Champney, director of the Delaware Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health, received the organization’s Medal of Honor, its highest recognition.
Champney was recognized for her work expanding access to addiction treatment and recovery services, increasing the availability of naloxone and helping lead Delaware’s response to the opioid epidemic.
The recognition comes as Delaware has recorded a significant reduction in overdose deaths. State figures show accidental drug intoxication deaths declined from 527 in 2023 to 314 in 2025, a decrease of more than 40%.
“Recovery doesn’t end when treatment ends,” Champney said while accepting the award on behalf of her DSAMH colleagues and the Delawareans they serve.
Champney has led DSAMH since 2021, overseeing the state-supported system of substance use disorder treatment, services for people with serious mental health needs and the Delaware Psychiatric Center. The division also manages federal funding, including a $38 million State Opioid Response grant.
She also co-chairs Delaware’s Overdose System of Care, which brings hospitals, emergency medical services, treatment providers and state agencies together to coordinate care for people experiencing overdoses or opioid use disorder.
Champney was appointed by Gov. Matt Meyer in 2025 to co-chair the Delaware Prescription Opioid Settlement Distribution Commission with Attorney General Kathy Jennings. The commission recommends and awards funding for treatment, prevention, recovery and other programs addressing the opioid crisis.
The gala also recognized Delawareans whose work ranges from direct outreach and recovery support to theater, volunteerism and efforts to reduce the stigma surrounding substance use disorder.
Corey Ryan, senior outreach coordinator with Oxford House Delaware, received the Medal of Valor for his work serving people in recovery, building collaborations and advocating for policy changes while maintaining his own recovery.
New Light Theatre received the Persistence Award for its production of “The White Chip,” a biographical play about one man’s experience with alcohol use disorder and recovery. The company staged nine performances in Wilmington in March with atTAcK addiction as its community partner and plans free performances in New Castle, Dover, Georgetown and Lewes in November.
Dana Timmons of Springboard Delaware received the Blue Heart Award for work with atTAcK addiction’s Sussex County Chapter connecting people in Kent and Sussex counties with treatment and recovery services.
Michael Clemons and Jesse Valeri, both affiliated with Impact Life, received Courage Awards. Clemons, a former intern at atTAcK addiction’s Glasgow Resource Center and a person in long-term recovery, was recognized for turning his recovery experience into service. Valeri, a treatment engagement specialist, was honored for leadership in helping people affected by substance use disorder.
Shayla Beaulieu of Oxford House Delaware received the Unsung Hero Award, while longtime atTAcK addiction volunteer Karen Godfrey received the Distinguished Service Award.
Timothy’s of Newark received special recognition for its annual We Are Stronger Together fundraiser, which supports atTAcK addiction while raising awareness and working to reduce stigma associated with substance use disorder.
Alyssa Hayes and Carolyn Thompson received Outstanding Volunteer Awards for their work at the organization’s Resource Center and community activities.
Scholarships were presented to Jennifer Calton, Chase Garrison, Samantha Jenkins, Brian Lawson, Lindsey Ogden and Francine Muti.
“So many people across our state are giving their all to help individuals access treatment and recovery services for substance use disorder and to fight the stigma associated with the disease of addiction,” said Dawn Hess-Fischer, president of atTAcK addiction. “We are proud to honor this group of leaders who are making a difference.”
The Be a Hero Gala is one of several annual events atTAcK addiction uses to recognize people working in addiction prevention and recovery and to raise awareness about substance use disorder. The organization also operates community programs and a Resource Center and provides naloxone, drug-testing supplies and connections to treatment and recovery resources.
Previous recipients of the Medal of Honor include former Gov. Jack Markell and former first lady Carla Markell, former Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long, Jennings, former Attorney General Matt Denn, state Sen. Stephanie Hansen, former state health officials Rita Landgraf and Dr. Karyl Rattay, and former ChristianaCare President and CEO Dr. Janice Nevin.
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What: Learn more about atTAcK addiction, addiction treatment and recovery resources, volunteer opportunities and upcoming events
Critics warn of climate danger as president in Texas claims change will save companies and consumers billions
Donald Trump said his administration is “terminating” Biden-era regulations holding oil and gas companies accountable for large leaks of planet-warming methane during a rally in Lubbock, Texas, on Tuesday evening.
“Tonight, I’m officially terminating Biden’s expensive and unnecessary methane regulations to save consumers and energy producers,” Trump said, lifting what he called “crippling regulations on methane that caused prices to skyrocket” for small oil and gas operators. The change would save consumers and energy producers $45bn and unlock 210m barrels of oil, he said, which is equivalent to about 10 days of US petroleum consumption.
Butker has missed five of 16 FG attempts this season
The Kansas City Chiefs have signed the former Baltimore Ravens kicker Justin Tucker to their practice squad after Harrison Butker’s poor start to the season.
Tucker was widely considered one of the best kickers in NFL history until the Ravens released him in May 2025. The Ravens said his departure was a “football decision” after a slump in form, but the move came months after he was accused of inappropriate sexual behavior by massage therapists. Tucker denied the allegations and never faced criminal charges but he served a 10-game NFL ban for violating the league’s personal conduct policy.
Warnings of escalating clampdown on press freedom come after Cairo court convicts Attalah of managing an unlicensed website
Lina Attalah, a prominent Egyptian journalist and the editor-in-chief of the news outlet Mada Masr, has been released from detention by Egypt’s authorities and had her website ordered to be shut down by a court amid an intensifying crackdown on independent media in the country.
Attalah was taken briefly into custody after a Cairo court convicted her of managing an unlicensed website, prompting fresh international concerns over press freedom in Egypt.
Flávio Bolsonaro, who lost Brazil's presidential election, left the country with his family and State Department official told CBS News they would receive U.S. visas.
From redrawing electoral maps to installing a sense of uncertainty around the electoral process ahead of the midterms elections on 3 November, Republicans have deployed several tactics to try to skew the vote in their favor. As the president's popularity continues to drop, it is crucial for him and his administration to retain a majority in Congress or they could face investigations and even impeachment. Guardian political reporter Shrai Popat looks at the ways the Republicans have tried and are still trying to influence the election
The fatal police shooting of 19-year-old Kadir Skinner in Wilmington has intensified calls for police accountability and transparency among members of the Delaware community.
Skinner was shot on June 24 near 24th and Carter streets in Wilmington. According to a joint statement from Wilmington Mayor John Carney and Police Chief Wilfredo Campos, a forensic examination determined that Skinner sustained a single gunshot wound to his upper left buttocks area.
Police officers on patrol in the area were monitoring a large gathering and claimed to have observed Skinner exiting a residence and pointing a gun at the crowd. Bodycam footage from the incident shows the officer exiting his vehicle and engaging in a foot chase with Skinner immediately preceding the shooting.
According to body-camera footage, officers called for medical assistance approximately two minutes and 40 seconds after shots were fired, then almost a minute later transported Skinner to the hospital in a police cruiser rather than waiting for an ambulance.
Authorities have stated that a gun was recovered from the scene of the shooting, though the circumstances surrounding the encounter remain under investigation by the Wilmington Police Department and Delaware Department of Justice, and could take months to close.
Protests in response to the incident have highlighted concern over medical response time, police injustice and accountability.
For some Delaware residents, the shooting has brought a topic of national discussion very close to home.
“These kinds of things happening so close to you, and to people that you love, is a very scary feeling,” Eleanor Malgiero, a junior actuarial sciences major raised in Wilmington, said. “In Wilmington specifically, it’s predominantly people of color, and I think making sure that these people feel protected rather than like they are a threat or anything like that would be very helpful.”
Malgiero, who learned of Skinner’s death through Facebook posts in local Delaware groups, said the incident reinforced concerns she already had about law enforcement.
“I’ve always been kind of skeptical about law enforcement in general,” Malgiero said. “And so just hearing about it kind of solidified that worry.”
For Icyss Hitchens, a senior criminal justice major at the university and president of the university’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Skinner’s death raised concerns about the relationship between law enforcement and the communities officers serve.
“It was very disheartening to find out that something as horrific as that could happen in the city of Wilmington,” Hitchens said. “Just being a Black person and having interaction with the police, you don’t necessarily have to be doing something wrong for you to feel uncomfortable or frightened.”
Hitchens said the shooting prompted discussions within the university’s NAACP chapter about police-community relations and how officers interact with residents.
“It’s very upsetting that someone in our community — someone’s life had to be taken because of the circumstances of the entire situation,” Hitchens said.
She said the incident also raised questions about police transparency, especially as more information became available following the release of body camera footage.
“There’s been a lot of uncertainty as to if what is put in the articles is actually true,” Hitchens said. “They’re kind of trained to walk into situations with their guard up rather than walking into a situation to help a certain person or to relieve the conflict.”
Hitchens believes that justice requires transparency throughout the investigation and accountability for officers whose actions are found to be improper.
“Honestly, what I want to see from that is officers facing repercussions,” Hitchens said.
As the investigation continues, students’ reactions reflect broader concerns about public trust and police accountability in the wider Delaware community. With potential litigation also on the horizon, the case raises questions about how authorities will address the shooting and what accountability, if any, will follow.
Far-right senator and family land in US after crossing from Brazil into Argentina and then flying via Ecuador
A private jet carrying the Brazilian far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro has landed in Miami, Florida, where the losing candidate in Sunday’s presidential election runoff left the airport under police escort without speaking to the press.
After losing Sunday’s election to the incumbent president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro disappeared for more than 24 hours, until Argentina’s migration authorities said he had entered the country by land on Tuesday night.
DRESDEN, Germany, Oct. 28, 2026 — Sparxity (formerly SpiNNcloud), a leader in sparse-native computing, today announced the deployment of its sparse-native computing rack system at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), one of Europe’s largest supercomputing research centers and an institute of Forschungszentrum Jülich. The multi-million-dollar installation at JSC is built on Sparxity’s sparse-native systems for HPC and AI and will be utilized for running sparse machine learning models and large-scale HPC simulations. This implementation validates Sparxity’s vision to only compute what matters and coincides with the launch of its new brand identity, opening a new world of compute built on sparsity.
Credit: Sparxity
JSC is the home of Europe’s first exascale supercomputer and is a leader in AI with the JUPITER AI Factory, one of 19 AI factories in Europe and the only one built around an exascale machine. The new Sparxity system at JSC is event-based and computes only when something happens, a form of sparsity in practice. The system installed at JSC, named JUBIS, is designed to deliver 10X faster sparse solver execution, 18X lower energy consumption for event-based ML workloads and 20X shorter time to an acceptable solution in optimization problems. The system is intended to become available for wider HPC and AI applications and the installation at JSC is another proof point that sparse-native computing works in real infrastructure.
“Sparse machine learning represents one of the biggest opportunities to fundamentally improve the efficiency of AI,” said Dr. Guido Trensch, Simulation and Data Lab Neuroscience, Jülich Supercomputing Centre. “By adopting Sparxity, we’re able to complement our globally unique HPC infrastructure with a fundamentally new approach, opening up new research opportunities so that we can further develop advancements in neuroscience.”
As AI infrastructure faces challenges around energy consumption and cost, sparsity is one of the biggest untapped routes for AI infrastructure. Research has shown that AI models can be sparser than they are today, but hardware built for dense computation has held them back. Sparse computation takes an approach of reducing the amount of computing needed and the amount of data that needs to be moved to reduce bottlenecks.
“Model builders have spent years designing around the limits of dense hardware,” said Sparxity co-founder and CEO Hector Gonzalez. “Sparxity exists to unlock what they would build without those limits, by computing only what matters. Our rebrand focuses entirely on the sparse-native approach as a practical foundation for the next generation of AI infrastructure. Our current systems bring sparsity to both HPC and AI, and our collaboration with Jülich Supercomputing Centre, one of the largest supercomputing facilities in Europe, shows the value of that approach at supercomputer scale.”
Sparxity builds full-stack systems around this principle, from silicon to software, rather than a chip alone. Its current systems serve HPC and AI, and its next generation commits fully to sparsity for AI inference. For model builders, that means freedom from the constraints of dense hardware and access to finer, more dynamic sparsity. For AI inference operators, such as datacenters and neoclouds, sparsity means more tokens at higher speed and lower cost, without trade-offs.
To learn more about Sparxity and its sparse-native computing systems, please visit sparxity.ai.
The Sparxity system at JSC is supported by the European Regional Development Fund (EFRE) and the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) under the ‘EFRE/JTF-Programm NRW 2021–2027’ program.
About Sparxity
Sparxity builds sparse-native compute for AI. Our principle is simple: compute only what matters. For years, models have been shaped by the dense hardware they run on. Sparxity builds the hardware that lets them go further: full-stack systems, from custom chips to software, built for fine-grained, dynamic sparsity, where intelligence scales without trading off speed or efficiency. Deployed in rack- and supercomputer-scale systems across Europe and the US, Sparxity opens a new world of compute for the builders shaping what comes next. Learn more at sparxity.ai.
‘You try to leave, it is death,’ Halima Salman testified. Her mother and defense attorneys wept after the verdict
A New York woman whose father took her to Syria as a teenager and arranged her marriage to an Islamic State fighter was convicted on Tuesday of receiving weapons training from the militant group.
Prosecutors said Halima Salman, a US citizen, pledged loyalty to the extremist group and willingly participated in its activities. Jurors were shown a video of her holding an assault rifle, a photo of her with the group’s flag and loving text messages she sent her husband.
At least 64 people have been killed after two high-speed trains collided in Toledo province in central Spain, in the country’s second major train accident this year.
The trains were travelling in the same direction on the line from the Spanish capital, Madrid, to Seville in the south-west of the country. One ran into the tail of the other that had stopped, knocking two of its cars off the track. Authorities said the cause of the crash was not yet known.
US health secretary falsely claims at Mike Rogers rally that Arabs have never won major prizes in science or literature
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, faced backlash on Wednesday for a “wildly racist tirade” during a campaign stop in Michigan in which he falsely asserted that Arabs never won leading awards in science or literature.
Kennedy was speaking at the Monday night event in Grand Rapids in support of Mike Rogers, the Republican US Senate candidate trailing his Democratic midterms opponent Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim, in polling.
When Stiggers’ father died, he dropped out of college to help his mother and 12 siblings. He thought his football dream had ended but made it in the end
Qwan’tez Stiggers had only been in college for a few days when his world fell apart. Seven months after the car crash that put him in a coma, Stiggers’ father died. Stiggers quit college and returned home to support his mother, Kwanna, and 12 siblings. It was a huge blow to the 18-year-old. His partner, Cheyenne, was also processing a tragedy after her teenage sister had been killed by a stray bullet. Over the last six years, Cheyenne and Qwan’tez have helped each other off the bottom of an emotional well.
Working as a delivery driver and washing trucks while his old teammates progressed in their football careers could have driven him off the rails. “I wouldn’t necessarily say I was envious but I wanted better for myself,” says Stiggers. “I had a child, was living with my wife – my girlfriend at the time – and got those late-night delivery jobs to pay the bills.
The Canadian prime minister’s reckoning with Trumpism in Davos clashes with his attacks on environmental, Indigenous and labour rights
The Canadian prime minister is a hero around the world for his Davos speech that reckoned with a reconfiguration of power in the shadow of Donald Trump.
But at home, Mark Carney is mirroring the US president by radically centralizing power within his office and cabinet and taking a hatchet to dozens of laws protecting environmental, Indigenous and labour rights, all in order to enact his economic agenda.
Shiri Pasternak is an associate professor in criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University and a member of the Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism research team, a collaboration between critical scholars and Indigenous land defenders across North America
Australia faces an uphill battle to recruit and train enough naval personnel to serve on submarines planned for the future fleet of nuclear-powered vessels under the controversial $368bn Aukus deal, a retired admiral has warned.
As the Virginia-class submarine USS Colorado arrived at HMAS Stirling south of Perth on Tuesday for a month of routine maintenance and to help build Australian expertise, retired admiral Peter Briggs said more people needed to be enrolled in the navy’s submarine program.
The report describes the timelines and migration activities for federal agencies, and it can serve as a key resource for technology providers and organizations that are developing their quantum-readiness road maps.
Oct. 28, 2026 — In August 2024, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards made to withstand the assault of a future quantum computer. Now, the agency has released its high-level road map to help organizations switch to these standards.
Credit: J. Wang/NIST and Shutterstock
The report, Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards (NISTIR 8547), outlines NIST’s official approach and timelines for transitioning away from quantum-vulnerable algorithms to quantum-resistant standards. It is the core technical document meant to inform federal agencies, industry partners and standards organizations about what needs to change and when during the migration to PQC standards — a cryptographic modernization with details that will vary by organization but timelines that apply broadly.
“The report describes different use cases and says why one migration might take longer than another,” said NIST mathematician Dustin Moody, who heads the PQC standardization project. “We understand there’s not one strategy that fits all use cases, and we want to help people handle their migration while staying abreast of what’s changing.”
While quantum computers are still in development, a sufficiently powerful device — known as a cryptanalytically relevant quantum computer — would threaten the encryption methods that protect our confidential electronic information, from email messages to financial statements. Even though the transition to PQC is beginning before such a device appears, today’s encrypted data is already at risk from the “harvest now, decrypt later” threat, where adversaries collect sensitive data now with the intention of decrypting it when quantum technology matures. This threat is one of the main reasons why the transition to PQC is urgent, driving the need to make changes on a well-considered schedule.
National Security Memorandum 10 established the year 2035 as the primary target for completing the migration to PQC across federal systems. Executive Order 14412 accelerated this timeline, requiring federal high-value assets and high-impact systems to migrate by 2030 for key establishment and 2031 for digital signatures. NISTIR 8547 supports these migration timelines. While the memorandum applies specifically to federal systems, many organizations that work with the federal government will be affected as well.
The NIST report identifies quantum-vulnerable algorithms among NIST’s existing cryptographic standards. The report then provides the transition plan for the quantum-vulnerable algorithms in these standards, referencing the post-quantum algorithm standards NIST published in 2024.
“We lay out how certain encryption algorithms people are using today will get phased out,” Moody said. “It’s important to know how a given algorithm might be disallowed in federal systems after a certain date, for instance, or whether it will be allowed but at the user’s own risk. Factors like this can help an organization plan.”
Because migration is a logistically complex undertaking, the report also helps delineate the numerous factors that organizations should consider to complete the process. Not only are an organization’s own system components important, but also its entire cryptographic supply chain.
Some actions may take priority over others, Moody said. For example, because of the “harvest now, decrypt later” threat, organizations might prioritize migrating to the PQC key establishment standard (FIPS 203) for data that is particularly sensitive or needs to be kept secure for a long time.
The report also discusses the option of taking a hybrid approach, in which an organization hedges its bets by combining conventional encryption with PQC, akin to using two padlocks on a door instead of one. NIST accommodates this option, which has the advantage of being more conservative from a security standpoint but also demands more computational resources.
The publication’s contents complement the migration to PQC guidelines project at NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE). The project has established a cross-sector collaboration focused on the use of the NIST PQC standards — working on demonstrations of cryptographic visibility and risk management practices to prioritize migration to PQC. The project aims to highlight considerations of cryptographic agility and demonstrations of PQC implementations to support migration timelines.
“The new report can help you understand the standards and requirements of the migration,” Moody said, “while the NCCoE project can show you the practical tools and blueprints to get the job done.”
Crucial Game 6 will take place on Thursday afternoon
Game moved to larger State Farm Arena in Atlanta
Hawks’ NBA game on same day could not be moved
The Atlanta Dream say their concerns about finding a suitable home venue for the WNBA finals went unheeded as they prepare to play the Golden State Valkyries in a crucial Game 6 on Thursday.
The Dream’s normal home, Gateway Center Arena, has a capacity of about 3,500 people. To accommodate the increased interest in the team during the finals, the Dream have played their two home games so far at the Atlanta Hawks’ State Farm Arena, which can seat more than 17,000 fans.
Built using the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint, the Immersive Twin pilot connects Schneider Electric, AVEVA, and ETAP technology in one digital platform
BERLIN, Oct. 28, 2026 — Global energy technology leader Schneider Electric, industrial software leader AVEVA, full-stack AI cloud platform Nscale, and data center developer and operator Start Campus, have announced the successful pilot of an end-to-end digital twin developed using the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint, part of NVIDIA DSX Sim.
The Immersive Twin pilot marks a significant step toward bringing Schneider Electric’s digital twin technology, powered by AVEVA software, into real-world AI infrastructure, allowing Nscale to accelerate token production and optimize token efficiency.
The deployment is focused on Nscale’s operations within the SIN01 data center on the 1.2 GW SINES Data Campus in Portugal, developed by Start Campus. As one of Europe’s largest and most sustainable AI factories, the SINES Data Campus is designed to support successive generations of AI infrastructure. It will soon become home to more than 66,000 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs, representing one of the largest AI deployments in the region. By combining engineering and operational data with advanced power and cooling simulations and workload requirements, the new Schneider Electric and AVEVA Immersive Twin provides a unified view of data center performance to help identify opportunities to optimize infrastructure before changes are implemented on-site.
Using the digital twin, Nscale expects to achieve faster time to token, greater token efficiency, enhanced operations, increased flexibility, and reduced risk when updating or modifying its technology stack.
“Working with Start Campus, Schneider Electric and NVIDIA, we’re using digital twins to model how AI data centers operate in the real world — from power and cooling to token delivery,” said David Power, Chief Technology Officer at Nscale. “This gives us a clearer view of where full-stack optimizations can be realized before changes are made on the ground. It’s about using intelligence and simulation to build and operate AI infrastructure more efficiently, and sustainably at scale.”
Complete End-to-End Experience and Collaboration
The successful pilot reflects the strength of a collaborative, end-to-end approach, bringing together complementary expertise from across the AI ecosystem, including energy management, engineering, simulation and AI infrastructure operations to create a more complete view of data center performance.
The Immersive Twin pilot supports the full lifecycle of AI factories—from design through operations—by building an OpenUSD-based digital twin that connects Schneider Electric, ETAP, AVEVA, and third-party technologies. It enables rapid “what-if” scenario testing across power, cooling, and process behavior to validate design decisions, assess upgrade impacts, reduce procurement risk, and continuously optimize performance by linking IT and OT data. In parallel, it advances interoperability through simulation-ready asset files, accelerating seamless integration into digital twins.
Start Campus provides the real-world infrastructure, engineering expertise and operational environment to demonstrate how digital twin technology can transform the design, development and operation of AI data centers. Bringing this data, technology and expertise together enables Nscale to use the digital twin to model and test “what-if scenarios” for new configurations or technologies before implementation, speeding up deployment times while significantly reducing risk.
“Building a credible, end-to-end digital twin requires collaboration across the AI ecosystem,” said Pankaj Sharma, Executive Vice President, Software & Service with Schneider Electric. “By advancing energy tech, and connecting Nscale’s workload and IT infrastructure requirements with Start Campus’s physical facility and infrastructure data, while pairing it with Schneider’s digital twin technology, we’re bringing together critical perspectives needed to model AI factories more holistically and identify opportunities to optimize performance, efficiency and token production.”
“AI infrastructure needs to evolve as quickly as the technology it supports,” added Robert Dunn, Chief Executive Officer at Start Campus. “Our collaboration with Schneider Electric, Nscale and NVIDIA has taught us that operators and customers design, develop and operate data centers best when they work from the same model. By using digital twin technology to simulate how a jump in rack density moves through the power train and the liquid cooling loop before it becomes a physical reality, we can test new hardware generations, agree the configuration with our customer and build it once. That accelerates deployment, improves efficiency and maximizes the value of every megawatt. This is an important step towards delivering resilient AI infrastructure at scale.”
Building on Existing Collaboration
This latest pilot expands Schneider Electric, AVEVA and ETAP’s work with NVIDIA. Last year, the three companies joined the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) to accelerate digital twin and AI factory development through the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint.
Additionally, the companies continue to collaborate on reference architectures, integrated infrastructure and software solutions that will power and cool the next generation of AI factories, and use NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to simulate and improve energy efficiency in real-world environments.
About Schneider Electric
Schneider Electric is a global energy technology leader, driving efficiency and sustainability by electrifying, automating, and digitalizing industries, businesses, and homes. Its technologies enable buildings, data centers, factories, infrastructure, and grids to operate as open, interconnected ecosystems, enhancing performance, resilience, and sustainability. The portfolio includes intelligent devices, software-defined architectures, AI-powered systems, digital services, and expert advisory. With 160,000 employees and 1 million partners in over 100 countries, Schneider Electric is consistently ranked among the world’s most sustainable companies.
Preferred Networks and Tenstorrent to begin R&D of High-Performance and Energy-Efficient AI Processors Incorporating Photonics-Electronics Integration Technology
TOKYO, Oct. 28, 2026 — Preferred Networks, Inc. (PFN) and Tenstorrent USA, Inc. (Tenstorrent) have announced that their joint proposal has been selected by Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) for the theme “xPU Design and Development Incorporating Photonics-Electronics Integration Technology” under the NEDO-sponsored “Research and Development Project of the Enhanced Infrastructures for Post-5G Information and Communication Systems / Development of manufacturing technologies for advanced semiconductors.”
AI models and workloads continue to increase in size and computational complexity, and are being adopted across a wide range of industries. This rapid growth has further increased the compute needed for model training and inference, driving demand for more scalable and efficient AI infrastructure.
Through a joint research and development project, PFN and Tenstorrent aim to develop a system-level integration of AI processors that delivers high performance and high efficiency for both training and inference. The project targets the next wave of AI deployment across diverse industrial and academic fields, including agentic AI, physical AI, and scientific AI.
As part of the project, PFN and Tenstorrent will conduct a research and development program for five years based on the division of responsibilities outlined below. The companies will subsequently work to commercialize the research outcomes for applications including AI agents.
Development of system integration technologies for AI processors leveraging photonics-electronics integration and advanced packaging technologies (PFN and Tenstorrent)
Development of AI chiplets with ultra-high memory bandwidth enabled by 3D memory stacking technologies based on leading-edge semiconductor process technologies (PFN)
Development of CPU chiplets built on an open architecture, which support confidential computing (Tenstorrent)
The following activities will be carried out in collaboration with subcontractors:
Research and development of domain-specific applications toward the realization of scientific AI and physical AI (The University of Tokyo, Kobe University, Toyo University, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, and Japan Atomic Energy Agency)
Design of CPU chiplets and development of software which enable confidential computing (Tenstorrent Japan)
About Preferred Networks
Guided by its mission to “Make the real world computable and create the future together,” Preferred Networks, Inc. (PFN) develops advanced software and hardware technologies through a vertically integrated approach spanning the entire AI value chain-from AI chips and computing infrastructure to generative AI foundation models and solutions across a wide range of industries. Founded in 2014 in Tokyo, PFN currently develops and delivers the MN-Core series of AI processors, the PFCP cloud platform for AI computing, and the Japan-developed generative AI foundation model PLaMo.
About Tenstorrent
Tenstorrent is an AI compute company led by CEO Jim Keller – architect of Apple A4/A5, AMD Zen, and Tesla’s Full Self-Driving chip. The company builds RISC-V-based AI processors and systems for developers, enterprises, and sovereign infrastructure worldwide. In addition to servers and workstations, Tenstorrent licenses its TT-Ascalon RISC-V CPU and Tensix AI cores to chip designers including Samsung and LG. Backed by Bezos Expeditions, Samsung, LG Electronics, Hyundai Motor Group, Fidelity, and others, Tenstorrent has raised over $1B+ and operates from Santa Clara, Austin, Toronto, Belgrade, Tokyo, and Bangalore.
Why Should Delaware Care? The University of Delaware is the largest higher education institution in the state, enrolling more than 20,000 students and employing more than 9,000. It has weathered several years of operating budget deficits coming out of COVID that present risks to its operations though.
The University of Delaware has launched a voluntary retirement incentive program for staff who are eligible for retirement next year as it seeks to slim its budget “to strengthen long-term financial sustainability.”
The program is entirely voluntary, according to the school’s announcement, but comes amid turbulent financial times for the university. Employees who are eligible for the program are being notified by the school’s human resources staff and informational meetings will be held in the coming weeks.
The specific incentive package being offered to employees is not clear. One of the letters sent by the university and shared with Spotlight Delaware states that eligible employees have until Nov. 11 to notify the university of their decision.
If they choose the retirement option, the university holds the final decision to accept the employee’s choice or delay their retirement date “depending upon the operational needs of [their] unit.” If accepted without changes, the employee is then presented with a retirement agreement that is due back signed to the university by Jan. 4, 2027, with their retirement starting Jan. 1, 2027.
After a weeklong revocation period, the new retirees are eligible to receive their program payment, according to the letter, though the amount was not specified in the letter shared with Spotlight.
It is unclear how many workers were offered the voluntary retirement option. The university had roughly 3,000 non-faculty staff members as of 2025.
The public announcement came two days after a separate letter was distributed detailing the difficult financial status the university says it is facing — part of an overall downturn in the fiscal health of higher education institutions across the nation.
Last month, university officials reported that the 2026 fiscal year that ended in June with a roughly $19 million operating budget deficit, extending a pattern of losses in its day-to-day operations that have to be subsidized by investment income and distributions from its nearly $2 billion endowment.
“Over the last decade, we have managed these pressures and preserved our overall financial strength,” reads the letter from President Laura Carlson, Interim Provost Bill Farquhar and Ellen Herbst, head of finance and administration. “However, our core operating expenses have grown faster than our core revenues, and reliance on other revenue sources and reserves is not a long-term solution; our current trajectory is not sustainable.”
The letter promised an analysis of current structures at the school to determine opportunities to make them more efficient and develop better practices, if necessary.
“Acting now lets us be strategic, work together, and be intentional and proactive about the changes we make, identifying approaches of our choosing,” the officials wrote. “But we must start now.”
Top leaders detail financial challenges
Ellen Herbst, executive vice president for finance and administration, delivered a presentation on Sept. 30 during the Board of Trustees’ annual retreat detailing the overall financial landscape in higher education and how it has impacted UD specifically.
Herbst said after an unusually high enrollment last year, the school fell short of its projections for new students this year.
In May, when UD’s budget was passed, the school anticipated 4,510 new full-time students starting at the school, but ended up with 3,889 — or about 14% fewer than expected. Herbst attributed this to increased competition for students in and out of the state, as well as universities making additional financial aid offers to students later than in previous years.
Total student enrollment at the university is 17,623, according to Herbst, compared to a projection of 18,104. The school’s enrollment has grown 7% since 2017. Rising employee costs, particularly healthcare benefits, have largely fueled the university’s growing expenses over the last few years though.
Herbst concluded with a 30-point plan of strategies the university should employ moving forward to stabilize its finances, divided into categories of growth in enrollment and research, reallocation of resources to higher-value uses and optimization and improvement, the latter of which will deal with the goal of “increase productivity and reduce the cost of delivering existing activity.”
“We are a relatively healthy, wealthy university compared to our peers,” Herbst said. “That buys us time to make the changes we need to make, which will take time, if we start today.”
Staffing trims just last personnel move
Over the summer, the university initiated a return-to-work program that will become a campus-wide mandate in June 2027, which will require significantly more in-person work from staff members.
Some employees interviewed by Spotlight Delaware worried at the time that the decision was one way the university could cut expenses by shedding employees who chose to leave their jobs instead of working more frequently on campus after six years of a heavier emphasis on hybrid and remote work for non-student-facing staff jobs.
One of those employees, contacted after the voluntary retirement program was announced, said it only amplified staff’s fears of further job cuts despite reassurances from the school’s leadership that no layoffs are currently planned.
When asked if the university wanted to address employees who interpreted the voluntary retirement offer as another potential signal of impending layoffs, given the recent talk of the university’s current financial position, a university spokesperson said the school had nothing to add beyond the content of its announcement at this time.
UD is also facing federal lawsuits over its in-state tuition policy for undocumented immigrants who reside in the state, cuts to federal research grants and an ongoing contract renegotiation with unionized faculty.
The union, the American Association of University Professors, is seeking a new multi-year contract after its last contract expired earlier this summer. University and union leaders have been at loggerheads for months over the proposed scale of salary increases, benefit protections and academic freedom statements.
The university is reportedly seeking a four-year contract, while union leaders only want a three-year agreement, as has been the norm.
Union negotiators said the university has sought to not honor any raises retroactively that would have occurred in the months following the last contract’s expiration – something the Assanis administration agreed to three years ago when negotiations dragged on.
“The AAUP-UD bargaining team believes that the current administration has taken this unusual position in an attempt to gain concessions from us, and we will steadfastly resist their attempts to do so and insist that raises be retroactive,” leaders wrote in a September update letter.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — Police departments across California are rapidly expanding drone programs, prompting growing opposition from residents and privacy advocates concerned about warrantless surveillance, data retention and increasingly automated policing.
Nearly 60 California law enforcement agencies now operate drone programs, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Cities including San Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Ana and Stockton are considering or expanding “Drone as First Responder” programs that allow unmanned aircraft to reach incidents before officers arrive.
California law requires local approval for police acquisition of certain “military equipment,” including drones, but the state does not have a comprehensive law specifically governing law-enforcement drone surveillance. That has left cities developing their own policies while navigating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
The privacy concerns are not hypothetical. The ACLU sued Sonoma County after documenting hundreds of warrantless drone flights over private property during code-enforcement investigations. The county settled the lawsuit last month and agreed to require warrants or consent for many residential inspections and impose tighter restrictions on retained footage.
Meanwhile, Santa Ana approved $682,900 for a drone program, while Stockton expanded a contract with surveillance company Flock Safety by $3.15 million. San Francisco police received a $9.4 million private donation last year to expand drone and surveillance technology.
Police officials argue drones can shorten response times and help officers assess dangerous situations before arriving. However, a 2026 UC Berkeley study found improved response times but no evidence that first-responder drones reduce police shootings, overall use of force or increase case-clearance rates.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have won fewer votes than his main challenger, according to early exit polls, but both sides will likely struggle to cobble together a coalition.
Both of these threats have the same roots: private entities seeking to cash in. We have the power to stand against them
A summer of extreme heat, entire villages obliterated in Nepal, a super El Niño breaking records, Exxon publicly saying we may reach 3C by 2050 – could it possibly be any worse?
Increase will add strain on healthcare system already struggling amid cuts by Trump administration, experts say
The number of people with dementia in the United States is projected to increase dramatically over the next 25 years, which will place increasing strain on a healthcare system already struggling to help them amid cuts by the Trump administration, experts say.
According to a new study in Jama Neurology, the annual incidence of new dementia cases globally will more than double, from 11.4m in 2023 to 24.7m in 2050. In the United States, the number of adults diagnosed with dementia each year will increase from 514,000 in 2020 to 1m by 2060, according to a Jama study published in 2024.
New initiative will offer accelerated deployment of software releases, updates
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 28, 2026 — The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) will introduce an early access program on Tuesday, Nov. 3, for Open OnDemand Support Program subscribers to facilitate immediate deployment of software releases that can benefit research computing users across the globe.
Open OnDemand is an open-source web portal developed and run by OSC and supported by contributors. The portal has enabled 2,100 locations to provide easy, browser-based access to their high performance computing (HPC) resources, giving students, researchers, and industry professionals new opportunities for working and learning.
Benefits of the Open OnDemand Support Program Subscription
The Open OnDemand Support Program is a subscription program that gives organizations access to expert consulting and technical support along with dedicated resources designed to help institutions implement, customize, and maintain their deployment of Open OnDemand.
Support Program subscribers have access to special office hours to directly consult with the Open OnDemand team and submit technical issues to receive fast, expert responses. Additionally, subscribers receive invitations to special events at major conferences such as Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) and SC. They also can join the Open OnDemand advisory group meeting to help shape the future of the platform.
Subscribing to the Support Program also helps maintain the long-term viability of Open OnDemand. The financial support from subscribers will help ensure that Open OnDemand will remain an effective resource for making HPC accessible to students, educators, and researchers around the world.
What Does the New Early Access Program Provide for Subscribers?
During the forthcoming early access period, Support Program subscribers will be able to download new releases through a password protected webpage before Open OnDemand makes them available to the larger user community. Subscribers can access staging and nightly repositories of the software packages built by the OSC and Open OnDemand team.
New releases will be available to the user community three to five weeks after the early access window. As part of this change, packages will no longer be uploaded to the “latest” or “build” repository.
Open OnDemand will provide updates about new release availability through its user community channels such as Discourse.
How to Gain a Support Subscription for Your Organization
Open OnDemand encourages organizations that want early access to platform updates, one-on-one support, special office hours, access to experts, and conference support to sign up for the Support Program.
The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) addresses the rising computational demands of academic and industrial research communities by providing a robust shared infrastructure and proven expertise in advanced modeling, simulation, and analysis. OSC empowers scientists with the services essential to making extraordinary discoveries and innovations, partners with businesses and industry to leverage computational science as a competitive force in the global knowledge economy, and leads efforts to equip the workforce with the key technology skills required for 21st-century jobs.
The U.S. cruise ship MV Odyssey suspended its three-year, around-the-world voyage in Cambodia due to fuel costs, forcing hundreds of passengers to disembark.
Chair of membership council says legal advice obtained at own expense suggests offences could have been committed
Bafta trustees may have breached charity and company law by accepting free tickets for guests at the organisation’s awards ceremonies, the chair of its membership council has claimed.
Michael Pritchett told members at Bafta’s annual general meeting that legal advice obtained at his own expense suggested offences could have been committed by trustees who approved the charity’s accounts, which stated that no trustees had received remuneration or benefits.
Benjamin Netanyahu vows to form new coalition while opposition bloc leader says result shows prime minister should step down. Plus, a scathing review of Elon Musk’s AI-generated version of The Odyssey
Good morning. Israel could be in for weeks of political haggling after exit polls and partial official results showed neither Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition nor the opposition bloc led by the former general Gadi Eisenkot had won enough seats to form a government.
With 70% of the vote, or 4m ballots, counted so far, the Netanyahu bloc had 54 seats, the Eisenkot-led Change bloc 47 seats, and the Palestinian parties 19 seats. Sixty-one seats are needed for a majority.
What have the two leaders said so far? Israel’s longest-serving prime minister vowed to assemble a coalition through agreements between his Likud party, far-right factions and Jewish religious parties. Eisenkot had said earlier in the evening that “people decided in favour of change” and Netanyahu should have “announced today his retirement from politics”.
What does the increase in the Palestinian bloc mean? The election was marked by a record participation by Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin, a discriminated minority that makes up about 20% of the country’s population. Julian Borger explains from Nazareth that Eisenkot will have to work with Arab-Israeli leaders to have a hope of governing. Millions of other Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank and Gaza cannot vote.
What else has Trump been saying about fossil fuels? Trump suggested on Tuesday that Venezuela would become the 51st US state as the president showed off a tanker he claimed had “1m barrels of oil on it” from the country, nine months after deposing its president.
What next for Palestinian democracy and politics?
17
November 2026 — 14:00 TO 15:00 GMT
Anonymous (not verified)
Online
With elections postponed to 2027, experts assess the future of Palestinian democracy, governance and political representation.
With elections postponed to 2027, experts assess the future of Palestinian democracy, governance and political representation.
The postponement of Palestine’s first legislative elections in two decades has revived debate on what avenues exist for political renewal under occupation. Critical questions of political representation, institutional legitimacy and reform and public participation will need to be addressed to avoid greater erosion of trust in the democratic process and further delays.
This webinar discusses:
- Why were the Palestinian elections postponed? - How can political representation and public participation be strengthened over the coming year? - What reforms are needed to improve the legitimacy and effectiveness of Palestinian institutions? - What impact might the Israeli election have on prospects for Palestinian democracy? - What can recent opinion polls tell us about Palestinian attitudes towards representation and democratic governance?
These 13 Halloween dinners include pumpkin soup, stuffed shells, pizza, steak, shepherd’s pie, and slow cooker chicken. Pick a quick meal or a longer cook before the doorbell rings.The post 13 tasty halloween dinners that keep everyone at the table…
When the kitchen becomes the warmest room in the house, make it count with these 17 casserole recipes. Choose from cheesy pasta, hearty vegetables, chicken bakes, breakfast casseroles, and more.The post 17 casserole recipes for evenings when the kitchen is…
Astronomers using the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have discovered 2026 ED138, a large object beyond Neptune that could become the solar system's sixth recognized dwarf planet if further observations confirm it is massive enough to be round. Located about 46 times farther from the Sun than Earth, the object is estimated to be 600 to 1,500 kilometers wide and had remained hidden because it lies against a particularly crowded field of Milky Way stars. Scientific American reports: The discovery was made by running billions of pieces of data collected by the Rubin Observatory through a search code developed by Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian astronomers Matthew Holman and Kevin Napier. "My first reaction was one of excited disbelief," Holman said in a statement. "Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong."
When Holman and his colleague Mario Juric of the University of Washington went to double-check, they found 30 more observations of the object by Rubin that dated to between March and July 2026. Looking at other observation tools, the pair found even more sightings going back to 2016. Together, these data allowed the astronomers to begin mapping out 2026 ED138's orbit. The suspected dwarf planet is about 46 times as far from the sun as Earth, making it even more remote than Pluto, which is just 40 times as far. The object is also tilted off the solar system's plane by around 25 degrees, an arrangement that could be linked to disruptions caused by Neptune's gravitational pull.
Initial measurements indicate that 2026 ED138 has a diameter between 600 and 1,500 kilometers (373 and 932 miles), which makes it one of the largest dwarf planet candidates yet detected. But size isn't all that matters: further observations are required to determine if the object has enough mass to be pulled into a round shape, which is a key requirement for a dwarf planet. Despite its size, 2026 ED138 was able to avoid detection for all these years because it's located in a part of the night sky that's crowded with stars whose light drowned it out.
Psychopatriarchy is jet fuel to racism, colonialism, imperialism and capitalism
For those of us who have spent our lives trying to dismantle this endlessly destructive paradigm of patriarchy, it has become increasingly clear in recent months that something more terrifying is afoot.
The wheels are off the cart. We are in the midst of a chaotic, demented acceleration of the most violent and cruel aspects of this system which has evolved into what I am calling Psychopatriarchy.
V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls
In social media posts, president has said network is ‘doing little to help’ Republican party in midterm elections
Donald Trump has always viewed conservative media as a tool to help him and his party achieve political victory and stay in power. But with polls flashing red for his party ahead of next week’s midterm elections, the president and his allies have trained their fire on the most prominent player in the space: Fox News.
For years, the president has criticized Fox’s non-partisan polling operation, and in recent weeks he has called out the network for not sufficiently airing his midterm rallies – even when they are not particularly newsworthy.
Alabama attorney Larry Grissett was checking Facebook in late September when he saw a news story about a man he represented in a murder trial more than 40 years ago. According to the article, a federal judge had just vacated the conviction of that client, Charles McCrory.
Grissett was stunned. He later summed up his reaction: “Vindication.”
McCrory was 26 years old when he was accused of brutally killing his wife in the small town of Andalusia. He insisted he was innocent — and Grissett believed him. There was no evidence connecting McCrory to the crime; prosecutors seized on a supposed bite mark found on his wife’s body, which a state expert claimed to match to McCrory’s teeth.
Grissett was never convinced by the so-called bite mark. At McCrory’s 1985 trial, he said, Grissett’s own dentist sat through the expert testimony and found it preposterous. “He says, ‘There’s no way that guy can say that,’ Grissett recalled. “I mean, anybody with common sense would know that.”
In a September 21 ruling describing the case against McCrory as “thin,” Trump-appointed Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr., zeroed in on this junk forensic science. Not only would the alleged bite mark not be allowed into evidence today, Huffaker wrote, bite-mark analysis itself “is grossly unreliable and unsupported by relevant scientific bodies. It amounts to nothing more than rank speculation.”
Unless the state moves to retry him within the next six months, Huffaker concluded, McCrory must be released from prison.
The ruling was not only momentous for McCrory, who has insisted on his innocence for more than four decades, but it also marked a new victory in the long legal battle against junk forensics — and the discredited discipline of bite-mark analysis specifically.
“Everybody sees this was junk science. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that.”
Yet more than a month after the decision, McCrory remains behind bars with no sense of when he might walk out. Although his lawyers asked the court to free him on bond pending the state’s decision to release or retry him, the Alabama attorney general’s office filed a motion last week asking Huffaker to reconsider his order overturning the conviction. The state’s appeals will likely drag out McCrory’s ordeal through the holidays and into next year.
In a statement, McCrory’s current legal team praised Huffaker’s “explicit acknowledgment that criminal convictions based on discredited bitemark evidence cannot stand.” Mark Loudon-Brown, senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, and Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project, said they are “grateful for the decision and look forward to continuing our fight to bring Mr. McCrory home.”
In 2022, The Intercept published a lengthy investigation into McCrory’s case, detailing the flaws in the state’s conviction. The case attracted additional media coverage, highlighting the problem of junk forensic science. Despite the glaring problems with the evidence against McCrory, Alabama courts have routinely rejected his appeals and in 2023, the state’s parole board denied McCrory release.
Julie Bond McCrory’s body was found inside her home in Andalusia on May 31, 1985. Her head was bashed in, and she’d been repeatedly stabbed in the chest. The couple’s son Chad, then 3 years old, was found unharmed in his bed. Police quickly pointed to McCrory as their only suspect: He and Julie were separated, and McCrory had been having an affair. At trial, the theory seemed to be that he’d savagely murdered Julie to be free from her.
The police investigation was cursory at best. Detectives found no physical evidence to connect McCrory to the bloody crime. Meanwhile, they ignored some evidence altogether, including two windows in Julie’s bedroom that were found open, but which investigators failed to dust for fingerprints. Police also failed to consider an alternate suspect, a man who worked at an excavating company bordering the McCrorys’ backyard and who, just weeks after Julie’s murder, committed a home invasion rape of another local woman. He was convicted and sent to prison for that crime.
Ultimately, the state latched onto a single piece of physical evidence against McCrory: a pair of small indentations on the back of Julie’s right arm, which prosecutors concluded was a bite mark made by McCrory’s teeth.
To sell this theory, the state employed famed forensic dentist Richard Souviron, a star prosecution witness in the recent and sensational trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Although Souviron initially said he couldn’t definitively link the two marks on Julie’s arm to McCrory’s teeth, at trial he was unequivocal that they matched.
Skin, with its malleability, is a terrible medium for accurately recording any injury.
Bite-mark analysis is based on a two-pronged foundation. First, that the shape and arrangement of our teeth are unique, like DNA, and second, that skin is a suitable substrate for recording this uniqueness. As it turns out, there’s no science backing either assertion. In fact, research into the discipline has routinely found the opposite — that human dentition is not unique and that skin, with its malleability, is a terrible medium for accurately recording any injury. This makes bite-mark analysis a random and entirely speculative practice.
Still, after taking center stage at the Bundy trial, bite-mark analysis took off in the 1980s and ’90s and, despite not having any basis in actual science, made its way into courtrooms around the country, turning forensic dentists like Souviron into newsmaking, swashbuckling crime fighters.
In the years that followed, however, bite-mark analysis was increasingly called into question and ultimately exposed as junk science, a subjective pattern-matching practice that has led to dozens of wrongful convictions. At least four of those, including McCrory’s, are cases in which Souviron served as the prosecution’s expert.
In 2019, Souviron recanted his testimony in McCrory’s case, providing an affidavit to Fabricant and Loudon-Brown, who presented it at a 2021 evidentiary hearing in Andalusia. “As a forensic odontologist I no longer believe the individualized teeth marks comparison testimony I offered in his case was reliable or proper,” Souviron wrote. “I no longer believe, as I did at the time of trial, that there is a valid scientific basis for concluding that the injury found on the skin of the victim in this case, assuming that the injury is in fact teeth marks, could be ‘matched’ or otherwise connected to a specific individual, such as Mr. McCrory.”
Despite the fact that their key witness had disavowed the evidence they used to send McCrory to prison for life, prosecutors fought to preserve their conviction. At the 2021 hearing, they insisted that McCrory was guilty, based on the same evidence they presented at trial. They recast the supposed bite mark as “teeth marks,” implying that, while bite-mark analysis may be discredited, the study of “teeth marks” is a separate and valid discipline. Even if Souviron had not testified for the state, they argued, jurors could have looked at photos of the marks on Julie’s body and the dental molds taken from McCrory and decided for themselves that McCrory inflicted the wounds.
Covington County Circuit Court Judge Lex Short, who presided over the hearing, agreed with the prosecutor. So did the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, which upheld his ruling in favor of the state. But Huffaker did not.
Huffaker took exception to the notion that analyzing “teeth marks” is somehow separate from bite-mark analysis. It is clear, he wrote, “that bitemark identification is based on analysis of individual teeth markings.”
But “most importantly, the state court unreasonably determined that, even without Dr. Souviron’s expert testimony, a reasonable jury could compare the bitemark evidence with McCrory’s dentition themselves and find that it belonged to McCrory,” Huffaker wrote. “This finding blinks reality in light of the evidence presented by McCrory at the postconviction evidentiary hearing.” In a footnote, he added that “if an expert could not testify about bitemark identification because it is junk science, a jury should not have been allowed to consider it either.”
McCrory is not the only person who is still fighting for his freedom decades after being convicted based on discredited junk science. Last year, Chris Duncan was declared innocent nearly 30 years after being sent to Louisiana’s death row based on bogus bite-mark evidence. He was released one day before Thanksgiving. In his case, a video showed the state’s supposed bite-mark expert manufacturing the evidence that was used to convict Duncan.
As in McCrory’s case, Louisiana prosecutors have nevertheless continued to insist their case against Duncan is solid. And as in McCrory’s case, this has not gone over well with some judges. Earlier this year, Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Judge John Weimer wrote that bite-mark evidence “should be discarded and no longer have a place in the realm of forensic science.”
“Long ago, some who were thought to have the best and brightest minds of that time endorsed ‘trial by water’ as a means of determining a person’s guilt or innocence. We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd, since those who fell victim to those practices often did not survive, regardless of whether they were found guilty or innocent,” Weimer wrote. “Thankfully, as scientific knowledge evolved, there was a realization that these practices had no basis whatsoever in logic, reason, or the search for truth, and the practices were discarded.”
As the holidays approach, McCrory’s family remains hopeful that he will soon walk out of prison. His son Chad, who is now in his 40s, has attended a dozen parole hearings with the hope of one day seeing his father released.
Grissett, McCrory’s former lawyer, reached out to Chad to share his hope that McCrory will finally come home. While memories have faded in the tight-knit community of Andalusia, many people remember McCrory’s case, he said.
“Everybody sees this was junk science,” Grissett said. “You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that.”
It’s “sad that it’s taken this long,” Grissett said. It haunts him that “somebody’s still out there who murdered this lady. And I’m afraid that they’re not gonna look into that.”
The Vibe Check: Dominican Cafe Concept: Dominican and other Caribbean staples, desserts and drinks for any meal of the day Average entrée price: $13, ranging from $8 to $22 Kid’s Menu? No Alcohol? No Vegetarian-Friendly: Yes, but most vegetarian options are not entrées Gluten-Friendly: Yes Live music? No Hours: Sun. 8 a.m.-4 p.m., Mon.-Sat. 7 a.m.-10 p.m. Address: 1223 W 4th St., Wilmington, DE 19805 Website:https://dominicancafe.net/en-US
Entering Dominican Cafe in Wilmington’s Hilltop neighborhood, the first thing that hits you is the smell of freshly-roasted pork shoulder — its texture crisp and fatty, its taste salty and rich.
The pernil’s aroma is impossible to escape in the small restaurant. On one side of the counter are the cooks, who have developed an unspoken understanding of how to avoid bumping into each other. On the other side are customers standing shoulder-to-shoulder, ordering in a mixture of Spanish and English.
Owner Rebeca Gόmez has no problem weaving through the crowd, and it’s no wonder why — she lives upstairs.
Her father, Andrés, is equally at home in the restaurant. His wedding photo is hung in pride of place behind the counter.
Andrés bought Dominican Cafe from his brother and sister-in-law in 2000. Andrés and his daughter have passed ownership back and forth several times over the years. Since 2021, Rebeca has taken the reins as Andrés has enjoyed retirement with his wife.
Andrés spends half of the year in the Dominican Republic, where he hangs out with a group of hip, healthy people over 70 who call themselves “the people of the future” instead of senior citizens. The remainder of his time he spends in Wilmington, reading voraciously or pitching in at Dominican Cafe by taking orders or making batches of sofrito.
Andrés has been working since he was 4. He got his start on his family’s farm in the Dominican Republic, where they sold milk and his mother’s homemade coconut candies.
Rebeca Gόmez prepares a plate of pernil with rice and beans. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
Dominican Cafe’s offerings include pernil plates and homemade parcha (passion fruit) juice. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
Andrés opened his first corner store in the Dominican Republic at 21 and immigrated with his family to the United States in 1994. When he couldn’t find a job in New York, he moved to Delaware to work at his brother’s corner store.
Andrés didn’t let his daughter begin working as early as he did. Rebeca began pitching in at Dominican Cafe when she was 19.
Today, Rebeca still turns to her father for advice, whether it’s about family recipes, finances or personal struggles.
“He’s my library,” she said.
Rebeca plays a similar role for the kids and teens who enter Dominican Cafe. She’s always offering advice and telling them to stay out of trouble, and has made a habit of giving $10 or $20 out of her own pocket to those placed on their school’s honor roll.
She also lends books to local kids. Last November, she lent 19-year-old Ryan Evans the personal finance book “The Richest Man of Babylon.” Evans never finished it. He was killed in a quadruple shooting in March.
The shooting, which is still unsolved, took place just a block away from Dominican Cafe Mini Market & Food, Rebeca’s corner store in the West Center City neighborhood.
“It messed me up. For a little bit, I couldn’t even go to the corner store,” Rebeca said, tearing up. “It happens. It can happen to anybody. But it hurts when it’s close.”
Though Rebeca has observed positive change in her decades living in Hilltop, the neighborhood’s reputation often causes outsiders to ignore its positive aspects.
Get Involved West Side Grows Together’s Taste of the West Side event takes place Saturday, Nov. 7, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Twenty-four restaurants along and near Union Street, Lincoln Street and 4th Street in Wilmington are participating, with many offering specials. Dominican Cafe will offer small meals with desserts and a drink for under $20.
That’s why Dominican Cafe is participating in West Side Grows Together’s Taste of the West Side event on Saturday, Nov. 7.
“As soon as somebody says Wilmington, you can see (them make) a different face,” Rebeca said. “People don’t see the good part of it as much as they should.”
Because the Hilltop neighborhood is a hub for Delaware’s immigrants, there is a vast diversity in the cuisine served at local restaurants.
“We have a little bit of everything,” Rebeca said.
That’s exemplified at Dominican Cafe, which serves a blend of Dominican and Puerto Rican recipes, like sancocho, pastelitos and stew chicken, plus a few classic American dishes for good measure.
Another oft-overlooked aspect of Hilltop is how much residents like the Gόmez family look after their neighbors.
For example, during the COVID pandemic, Rebeca’s mother passed out plates of food to community members. Like a moonlighting superhero, she did so behind her husband and daughter’s backs.
“We closed for a month and a half. But in that time, my mom used to cook big pans of rice and stuff. We were like, ‘What is she doing with all that food?’ She was just waiting for us to go upstairs and sneak out,” Rebeca said.
Rebeca clearly inherited her mother’s heroic genes.
For example, Rebeca is the “backup mom” of the 6-year-old daughter of one of her customers. That customer formerly had no one to watch her daughter when she was busy. Two years ago, when that customer first came into Dominican Cafe, her daughter, 4, was still in diapers and rarely talked to anyone.
Andrés Gόmez, right, bought Dominican Cafe in 2000. His daughter, Rebeca Gόmez, left, is now the owner and operator of the Wilmington restaurant. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
“Her first picture and the last picture (are two) very different kids. She talks now. She’s very polite,” Rebeca said. “I take her to school three days a week. … Last time, she said she wanted to be a doctor. Today, she said she wanted to be a teacher.”
Rebeca also has aspirations. She hopes to eventually open a senior living facility where she can hire youth as cooks.
“The youth need to learn from the elderly,” she said, “Those little conversations can help. I think that’s the issue with the youth. We just put them in a box, like, ‘Oh, they’re bad,’ and that’s it. But what are we doing to make them better?”
Rebeca hopes her and her family’s efforts to serve Wilmingtonians will continue to make a positive impact.
“I think we can change, one person at a time,” she said. “We cannot change the whole community, but we have to take the time to (help) at least one child.”
Why Should Delaware Care? Delaware’s opioid settlement program is responsible for supporting organizations battling addiction across the state. Following years of turbulence within the program, it is now more regularly awarding millions of dollars to dozens of organizations.
Millions of dollars will soon flow to Delaware’s anti-addiction organizations, as they look to build out the state’s support systems.
A Delaware body responsible for approving grants from the state’s quarter-billion-dollar program to combat the opioid epidemic approved $12.75 million in grants to more than 40 organizations last week.
It is the second major award doled out by the Delaware Opioid Settlement Commission since the group worked to rebound from mismanagement concerns that clouded over dozens of early grants.
The commission approved the allocations at its meeting on Oct. 19, and it will soon fund many already established addiction organizations like Brandywine Counseling & Community Services and atTAcK addiction.
But the grants will also fund dozens of smaller organizations across the state with varying tiers of funding boosts.
Brad Owens, the executive director of the Delaware Opioid Settlement Commission, said his office wanted to reduce the amount of grantees while maximizing the amount of dollars awarded this grant cycle.
Part of his reasoning was a desire to effectively manage new grantees while also juggling projects from prior cycles, he said. The state awarded money to 63 different projects during its last grant cycle, following what had been a yearlong freeze on spending. Owens said the commission is now adding another 42 projects.
“I have to consider grant management quality control as well as maximizing dollars,” Owens said.
What did the commission fund?
Delaware’s opioid commission funded dozens of organizations with micro, mini and general grants, representing less than $10,000, less than $30,000, and greater than $30,000, respectively.
Many of last week’s awards were general grants, meaning those organizations received more than $30,000.
The largest grant went to atTAcK addiction, a nonprofit recovery organization founded more than a decade ago by parents who lost their son to an accidental overdose. It will spend $1.35 million on expanding its “Recovery Housing Scholarship Program” for more than 2,000 Delawareans with addiction, according to a commission presentation.
The program would provide “direct financial assistance” to those in need of recovery housing, as well as provide those in the program with access to peer support.
This, the presentation said, would help to prevent homelessness and reduce the risk of relapse for those seeking treatment.
Another $1.3 million award for CORAS Wellness and Behavioral Health would go toward paying for a “rapid-response program,” which would be open 24/7. The program would offer 24-hour transportation statewide, as well as care coordination for those at “critical transitions” like leaving prison or a psychiatric facility.
The program would link people with addiction to recovery housing, medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) appointments, as well as stabilization services.
Owens said the CORAS pitch had been something the commission wanted to implement in the state. He said the 24/7 component of the project would help to fill a gap where someone may be ready for treatment but unable to immediately receive services.
“If you’re a street worker or an outreach worker, and you’re engaging with someone on Friday evening at 9 p.m. and they’re saying, ‘I’m ready to go to treatment,’ good luck getting in somewhere,” Owens said.
Having somewhere that person could stay temporarily while they await treatment would help to fill a “big gap,” Owens said.
Delaware’s opioid commission also funded other programs like a new 50-bed treatment facility in Wilmington, screening for pregnant mothers for opioid use disorder, as well as re-entry support for those leaving prison.
History of the opioid commission
After the depths of the nation’s addiction crisis stemming from prescription opioids became apparent in the 2010s, governments began suing the supply chain of opioid manufacturers, distributors and retailers that contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths nationwide.
Delaware entered the fray in 2018 after former Attorney General Matt Denn sued nine companies, including Purdue Pharma, McKesson, Cardinal Health, Amerisource Bergen, CVS and Walgreens, among others.
The suit claimed opioid manufacturers knowingly downplayed the risks of using opioids to treat chronic pain, and used an “aggressive marketing campaign” to push that narrative forward. This led to an overprescription of opioids across the U.S., leading to a nationwide spike in overdose deaths.
By 2022, a national $26 billion settlement was reached with the “big three” pharmaceutical opioid distributors — McKesson, AmerisourceBergen, and Cardinal Health — and one manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson.
The settlement led to an expected $250 million entering Delaware to reduce overdose deaths and abate the effects of opioids in Delaware.
Shortly after the state received its money, it formed a commission to dole out awards to substance abuse nonprofits. But a Spotlight Delaware investigation found the commission had rushed applications through the approval process, as well as failed to monitor its grantee progress.
Recipients also spent most of their time on prevention education efforts like community events, pamphleting, swag, youth sports, student presentations and TikTok videos rather than offering direct treatment services.
Mexican police had said they found Shayna Feinman in Tijuana, raising the hopes of missing Arizonan’s family
Arizona authorities say their Mexican counterparts were resoundingly mistaken when they publicly claimed recently that they found alive a woman who was feared slain after disappearing in 2024 – a turn of events that her sister has called “turmoil” and “heartbreaking”.
The case in question centers on Shayna Feinman, who was reported missing in rural Yavapai county, Arizona, in March 2024 at age 38.
Fightin’ Blue Hen quarterback, Nick Minicucci, warming up before UD’s game against Missouri State on October 20. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
The University of Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens (4-4, 2-2 CUSA) defeated the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers (3-5, 2-2 CUSA), 35-21, on October 27, ending their seven game road losing streak.
The University of Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens and Western Kentucky Hilltoppers combined for 631 yards of total offense and 49 total points in the first half of their game, Tuesday night. The offensive totals would suggest the half’s most impactful plays were orchestrated by the offensive players, yet the most significant play came from Delaware defensive lineman Trace Scott III.
Hilltopper quarterback Brock Glenn dropped back to pass from the UD 32 yard line, following a Blue Hen touchdown that tied the game a possession earlier. Glenn surveyed the field on second and eight, looking to his right for a receiver to come open. Glenn never saw Scott coming from the left side. Scott sacked the redshirt junior for a loss of eight yards and followed that with another sack on the next play, forcing the Hilltoppers into the first punt of the game with just under three minutes remaining in the first half.
Scott’s defensive play broke a back and forth offensive flow and helped the Blue Hens defeat the Hilltoppers, 35-21, in Bowling Green, Kentucky. It’s Delaware’s first win in Bowling Green since 1981.
The Blue Hen offense took over from their own ten yard line after the Scott defensive effort and embarked on the half’s final scoring drive.
Minicucci started the drive with a 12-yard completion to receiver Donovan Lewis and followed that with a pair of completions to running back Kaderris Roberts that put Minicucci atop the Delaware record book. Minicucci completed 18 straight passes to begin the game breaking UD’s former single game high of 16 set by former quarterback Zach Marker in 2023.
Minicucci’s first incompletion came on the next play on a throw to Lewis, but the senior signal caller didn’t let the incompletion bother him. He followed his only incompletion of the first half with two deep passes to junior receiver Sean Wilson totaling a combined 59 yards. The final play of the drive was a Minicucci shovel pass to running back Jo Silver who ran it eight-yards into the endzone for the go-ahead score.
“I was seeing everything very clear,” Minicucci said in a postgame interview with CBS Sports Network following the game. “I watched a ton of film, so I knew exactly what they were running and I mean we just executed. Shout out to the o-line, to all the boys for just doing their jobs because that’s what we preach everyday. Do your job.”
Minicucci finished the first half with 301 passing yards, three touchdown passes, and a completion percentage over 95 percent. Wilson led the Blue Hens in receiving at the half with six catches for 113 yards and one of the Blue Hens’ three receiving touchdowns in the frame. Roberts hauled in the first touchdown on UD’s first offensive possession and Silver grabbed the go-ahead score that put UD ahead, 28-21, at halftime. Fellow backfield member Viron Ellison Jr. scored Delaware’s only rushing touchdown on a five-yard rush that tied the score with a little over seven minutes remaining in the second quarter.
The offensive fireworks gave way to the defenses in the second half.
The Western Kentucky defense stopped Delaware on its opening drive of the third quarter forcing the Blue Hens to punt for the first time in six quarters. The Blue Hen defense forced the Hilltopper offense off the field after three plays and WKU’s defense did the same to the Blue Hens on their ensuing possession.
The Hilltoppers drove into Blue Hen territory, but were held out of the red zone and attempted a 42-yard field goal which was no good.
The Blue Hen offense took over at their own 24 yard line after the missed field goal and moved the ball to the Western Kentucky 40 yard line in five plays. On the sixth play of the drive, Minicucci threw a deep pass down the right numbers to Wilson who was a step ahead of the Hilltopper defender. Wilson secured the catch and his momentum took him into the endzone for a 40-yard score.
Those were the only points scored in the second half.
The Hilltoppers had chances to cut into the Delaware lead, but failed to overcome the Blue Hen defense.
WKU drove into the red zone for the first time since the first half after Glenn completed a 29-yard pass to freshman receiver Jonathan Stafford Jr. to end the third quarter. On the first play of the fourth quarter, defensive end Brandon Gorham pressured Glenn forcing him out of the pocket. Gorham continued to pressure as Glenn ran toward the sideline and in an attempt to make a play for his team Glenn threw the ball toward his receiver. Sophomore safety AJ Graham saw the throw, jumped the pass and caught the first interception of his collegiate career, ending the Hilltopper threat.
Delaware’s defense finished the second half allowing 187 yards of total offense and one conversion on third down rebounding from a first half in which they allowed 290 yards of total offense.
The Blue Hens also recorded three sacks for the first time since losing to Virginia on September 26. Scott set a career-high with his pair in the second quarter and fifth-year defensive lineman Dominick Brogna did the same with his sack. It’s the first time this season Delaware earned three sacks against a conference opponent.
The offense finished the game with 495 yards of total offense, 414 of which came from the right arm of Nick Minicucci. Minicucci’s 414 passing yards moved him into fourth place on Delaware’s career passing yards list and his four passing touchdowns put him only four away from becoming UD’s all-time career passing touchdowns leader. Wilson paced the receiver room with his nine catches, totaling 183 yards and two touchdowns. Silver led the Blue Hens with 49 rushing yards.
“Everyone on our team is just, we’re just fully bought in,” Minicucci said in the CBS Sports Network interview. “You love your culture and the people who lead and the people who talk and it’s just it’s an honor to play for this team and to play for coach Carty and to do it with my best friends, with my brothers. It’s the best feeling in the world.”
Delaware’s win breaks a seven game road losing streak that lasted over a calendar year — the Blue Hens last road win was against FIU on September 20, 2025 — and increases their conference record to 2-2.
The Blue Hens have four more Conference USA (CUSA) games remaining on their schedule and sit a game and a half behind Liberty and Jacksonville State in the CUSA standings. Delaware’s next two conference opponents — Kennesaw State and FIU — have a combined conference record of 1-5, meaning UD could pick-up a pair of crucial conference victories before facing New Mexico State (3-4 overall, 2-1 CUSA) and Jacksonville State (5-2 overall, 3-0 CUSA) to end their season.
UD’s game against Kennesaw State will be a road matchup on Saturday, November 7, at 3:00 p.m.
John Healey is to use his first budget to ditch plans to slash the annual cash Isa allowance, the Guardian understands, preferring a carrot rather than a stick to encourage people to invest more in shares.
City experts welcomed news that the chancellor will overturn a decision by his predecessor, Rachel Reeves, to cut the allowance from £20,000 to £12,000 a year from April to get more money flowing into UK company stocks.
Jean Kaseya, of the Africa CDC, warns of the illness spreading like Covid unless more funding is secured to increase preparedness and possible treatment
The “unprecedented” spread of the Ebola outbreak means it could reach the UK and other countries, according to one of Africa’s top health officials.
As the current outbreak reached 10,000 cases, with almost 5,000 deaths, Dr Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), compared the outbreak to the Covid pandemic, which first took hold in China before spreading to countries across the world, claiming millions of lives, and ravaging health systems and economies.
Division between Iraq’s Kurdish parties risks undermining Kurdistan region’s autonomyExpert commentjon.wallace
The KDP and PUK largely agree on Kurdish issues in Turkey, Iran and Syria. But division on how to govern at home could invite outside interference and undermine hard-won self-governance.
Two years after Iraq’s Kurdistan Region went to the polls to elect a new government, the KDP and the PUK – the region’s two largest parties – have still failed to reach an agreement to form the new government. A caretaker government, originally elected in September 2018, remains in charge.
This situation is taking the Kurdistan Region down a path of profound and possibly permanent division. Its longstanding partners in Europe and the US have grown frustrated with its latent dysfunction and are no longer willing to play referee. This leaves it more vulnerable to interference from regional powers who are better placed to adapt and can play a longer game.
The main impediment to moving forward is not petty disagreements between the two parties over ministerial positions, as is sometimes claimed. Instead, the impasse stems from the collapse of the 2006 Strategic Agreement between the KDP and the PUK. The parties no longer share the same basic vision for how the Kurdistan Region should operate. The formal and informal frameworks that bound the two parties together for the last two decades are no longer functioning.
Instead, the Kurdistan Region has effectively divided into two geographic areas that are controlled by one party or the other. The KDP is in charge in Erbil and Duhok governorates. The PUK is dominant in Sulaymaniyah and Halabja.
The two zones are not fully separate, as they were during the era of divided administrations between 1998 and 2005. But it is a cumbersome arrangement. State institutions and the security forces look to unelected party leaders for guidance, not Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) ministries. Reports indicate that rents are extracted from truckers and traders at checkpoints on the border between KDP and PUK areas.
Until now, the parties have maintained that the Kurdistan Region remains a cohesive entity despite the partisan divide. On 6 October, KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani called on the parties to reactivate Kurdistan’s Parliament, which has not had a substantive meeting in more than four years saying: ‘I don’t know what they are afraid of’.
Below the surface, however, bigger changes may be afoot.
Political leaders from the PUK have a more radical proposal: to devolve administrative and fiscal authority to governorates, mayors, and district directors. Some powers would be retained by the KRG and the Kurdistan Parliament. But most important decisions over everyday matters would be shifted to lower levels of governance. Proponents of the plan cite Switzerland’s cantons and the UAE’s emirates as inspiration. Better to get out of each other’s way, the argument goes, and disaggregate executive authority.
Given the outsized power wielded – exclusively and separately – by the two parties at the governorate and local levels, this change would formalize partisan control over governance within the Kurdistan Region’s two zones, representing the biggest constitutional change in a generation.
And it would repudiate the key peacebuilding assumption following the Kurdish civil war: that strong, unitary, and shared institutions are needed to reinforce Kurdish self-government and autonomy. That it is even being considered reflects the depths to which relations between the KDP and the PUK have deteriorated.
Many parts of the plan are vague. How would it change the relationship between local authorities, the federal government, and the KRG? How will revenues be shared, if at all? How will decisions be made about key sectors like oil, gas, electricity, and trade?
For the moment this remains a PUK proposal, its prospects uncertain. The KDP opposes the plan – part of the reason there has been little progress in negotiations to form a government. Many Kurdish voters will oppose reinforcing the power of the ruling parties without any meaningful checks. And, while they are certainly disillusioned by their present circumstances, they are keenly aware of the risks the PUK plan would pose to the Kurdistan Region’s fragile constitutional position in Iraq.
Over the past five years, Iraq’s federal government has gradually eroded the KRG’s ability to manage its own political and economic affairs, enabled by the KDP and the PUK disunity.
A bad time for division
The potential for a fracture inside the Kurdistan Region comes at an inopportune time geopolitically. The US–Iran War has created significant instability. Foreign partners are preoccupied with problems at home. And changing regional dynamics are seeing sovereign states reassert influence over non-state actors.
The US presence in the Kurdistan Region is less potent than in years past. It completed a military withdrawal at the end of September after twelve years as part of the international coalition fighting Islamic State. Diplomatic activity in Erbil – where the KRG is based – has been hampered for much of this year due to security concerns stemming from the US–Iran war.
American and European diplomats are discouraged by their inability to bring the KDP and the PUK together, despite restlessly encouraging them to form a government. This inability is a signal of the West’s flagging influence over top Kurdish leaders. That will only worsen if diplomats have to contend with empowered local officials that answer primarily to the KDP and the PUK leadership.
The Kurdistan Region’s immediate neighbours like Turkey and Iran are much better placed to adapt to a Kurdistan Region that is divided and disaggregated. They can play the long game, and act at the local level through economic, social, and religious ties, rather than the top-down military and political approach of the US and Europe. Unity between the KDP and the PUK matters far less in their calculations.
Turkey’s immediate aim in the Kurdistan Region is to ensure that its own Kurdish political process, which is seeing the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) disarm, continues. The KDP and the PUK have strongly supported this process and provided important interventions to facilitate it. They have also supported the integration process of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) into the new Syrian state.
Iran’s first goal is to ensure that Kurdish groups do not enter its war with the US.
In the near-term, the KDP and the PUK are unlikely to diverge much from this path. But the risk is that greater division at home could fragment their positions on issues beyond the Kurdistan Region’s borders. If that happens, Ankara might side with one of the parties, which would result in further instability.
Iran’s first goal is to ensure that Kurdish groups do not enter its war with the US. So far, the KDP and the PUK are in lockstep about the importance of avoiding any impression that they might intervene against Iran. Tehran’s second goal is to curtail the activities of its own Kurdish armed groups, even to the point of demanding they be expelled from Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. Weak and divided state institutions in the KRG make this difficult to achieve. That, in turn, makes it more likely that Iran will take matters into its own hands.
In the absence of a US security presence, interference from regional neighbours could also lead Iraqi leaders in Baghdad to become more hands-on in dealing with matters in the Kurdistan Region. This would be a bad outcome for Kurdish self-governance and would likely inflame political tensions between the KDP and the PUK.
The sour mood that prevailed in the Kurdistan Region during the election two years ago has only deepened. Pushing governance decisions to the local level in an effort to avoid intractable partisan impasse at the top is one proposal. But it could have significant knock-on effects.
A continued impasse between the KDP and the PUK risks setting off an irreversible decline for the frameworks that have enabled Kurdish self-governance for the past two decades. To get beyond this blockage, leaders from the KDP and the PUK must entertain imaginative solutions, but not ones that further divide, weaken its shared institutions or undermine democratic principles. Otherwise, it risks becoming a place that other actors pick apart at the expense of Kurdish autonomy.
The rapper lends the NFL a veneer of credibility but is unlikely to push back on the establishment figures who run the league
On Monday the NFL named Jay-Z as the headliner for this season’s Super Bowl half-time show. His company, Roc Nation, produces the show under a 2019 deal reportedly worth $5m a year, and the agreement was extended for another five years in 2024. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said his one request when the partnership began was that Jay-Z “take the stage himself one day“.
Goodell’s wish makes total sense: Jay-Z is the perfect choice for the half-time show, and that’s not a compliment. The NFL wants a shill who can still pass for a rebel, and nobody in American music plays that part better than Jay-Z.
Exclusive: Health secretary to extend role of watchdog, which backers say helps hold service in England to account
Yvette Cooper has abandoned plans to abolish the NHS’s independent patient champion after an outcry from MPs across the political spectrum.
The health secretary has decided to keep and extend the role of Healthwatch England, which was due to be axed as part of the government’s reorganisation of the health service in England.
axe the Health Services Safety Investigations Body.
end councils’ automatic representation on the boards of ICBs.
remove the requirement for a nurse on every NHS foundation trust board.
Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica. Source images: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images; Win McNamee/Getty Images.
In July, not long before President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address questioning the legitimacy of American elections, the pioneering conservative election lawyer Cleta Mitchell and about two dozen of her associates logged onto a private video briefing with the White House.
Mitchell, who holds no formal position in the Trump administration, had been pivotal to Trump’s bid to challenge his loss in 2020, spearheading efforts to prove his claims of fraud and reverse his defeat in court.
After Joe Biden took office, when others abandoned the fight or scoffed as Trump clung to conspiracy theories, Mitchell doubled down, founding a grassroots organization devoted to rewriting election laws and rules to be more restrictive. Members of her group, the Election Integrity Network, were named to vital election-related positions in swing states and, later, in the second Trump administration.
The pre-speech briefing was an acknowledgment of just how consequential Mitchell and her organization had become. The White House had held similar sessions for key political players, such as governors, members of Congress and major press outlets.
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At the appointed time, the screen filled with the faces of EIN leaders and supporters, some sitting in front of digital backgrounds with the group’s logo on them. Mitchell shushed those who’d forgotten to mute and introduced John Solomon, an ally of hers who was helping prepare the speech.
Mitchell and her network hardly needed the run-through, though: Much of the speech was a compendium of allegations and conspiracy theories they had originated or spread.
Her lieutenants were thrilled to hear that the president would assert there were more than 275,000 noncitizens on state voter rolls — a since-debunked claim based on work led by one of her proteges, who occupied a top post at the Department of Homeland Security.
The speech would end with an exhortation for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a bill requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register, which Mitchell had helped draft.
To Seth Keshel, an EIN adviser on the call, none of it was surprising — Mitchell was in and out of the White House all the time. He’d joined her for one such meeting.
“She’s got an open door with the president,” he said.
Cleta Mitchell founded a grassroots organization, the Election Integrity Network, devoted to rewriting election laws and rules to be more restrictive.Travis Dove/The New York Times/Redux
“Opposed to Honest Elections”
Obtained by ProPublica
No one besides Trump himself has done more than Mitchell, 76, to turn the mundane processes of how ballots are cast and counted in American elections into mortal combat.
Since Trump returned to the White House, Mitchell and her acolytes have been deeply entwined in his unprecedented bid to assert federal control over voting, an effort that has increasingly defined his second term.
Friends and enemies alike credit her with providing much of the administration’s election road map. The White House has turned to those close to her to enact the plan, appointing her associates to help lead the hunt for noncitizens on voter rolls and to reinvestigate 2020 voting irregularities.
“She has the president’s ear,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and a close ally of Mitchell’s, said in a July interview. “A lot of the momentum things we’ve seen over the last six months or so come directly from Cleta’s involvement.”
To understand how Mitchell became the hand behind this transformational push, ProPublica traced her obsession with politics and elections back to its roots.
From the start, those who knew her told us, she stood out for her willingness to embrace options others wouldn’t and to do whatever it took to win.
Her relentlessness and long-term strategic vision have enabled her to outflank or outlast not only her liberal opponents, but her conservative rivals.
Much of Mitchell’s influence derives from years of groundwork she’s done to put a foundation under the so-called election-integrity movement, once dismissed as a collection of oddballs and fringe actors.
Beyond building the EIN and raising millions of dollars to fund its activities, she’s helped direct tens of millions more to like-minded policy shops, researchers, law firms and advocacy groups.
The net effect has been to make an agreed-upon set of beliefs about elections — that the 2020 presidential vote was stolen, that U.S. voting systems are rigged, that there’s rampant voting by noncitizens — a core part of conservatism.
Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist who collaborated with Mitchell before Trump’s election and now heads the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said she had been crucial in building the institutional infrastructure that has sustained Trump’s “big lie.”
“What she found in Trump was less of a client and more of a movement,” he said.
Mitchell declined multiple requests to speak with ProPublica for this article but occasionally answered emails. “Hahahaha!!!” she wrote in response to one email asking for an interview. To another, she replied: “You’re my opponent. … You’re never going to write in any objective, non-judgmental way about the election integrity movement.”
She responded in writing to about a quarter of our detailed questions, disputing that her efforts were designed to undermine elections or upend their results.
“Nothing that we do is designed or intended to ‘sway’ any election outcomes,” she wrote. “What we focus on is making sure the election process is accurate, transparent, and honest. The ONLY steps I’ve urged the Administration to take are those that will give the voters — ALL voters — confidence that the outcomes are correct.”
A White House spokesperson didn’t answer specific questions about Mitchell, saying she has no official role in election policy but is an effective private advocate.
To tell Mitchell’s story, ProPublica interviewed more than 35 people who have worked with her or know her personally, including participants in her network, Republican election lawyers, current and former Trump administration officials, family members and friends. Many, especially conservatives who’ve fallen out with her, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.
We examined thousands of emails related to her work obtained from public records requests and sources, as well as court filings and an oral history she gave in 2007.
We also reviewed hundreds of hours of recordings of her network’s organizing calls spanning a four-year period, many of which were shared exclusively with ProPublica, as well as numerous speeches she’s given at private events for conservatives.
On a call earlier this year, she emphasized that Democrats “only win when they cheat” and that people who resist EIN’s agenda are “opposed to honest elections” and “depraved.”
As much as Mitchell has been able to achieve with Trump in the White House, several people we spoke with noted she hasn’t been able to push important parts of her agenda over the finish line.
Her signature legislation — the SAVE Act and its successor, the SAVE America Act — have been blocked by moderate Republicans in the Senate. Election changes she’d hoped the president could push through before the midterms, such as compelling states to turn over confidential voter information to the Justice Department, have been blocked by the courts. And Trump’s mid-July address on elections drew shrugs even from some conservative media.
Critics, including some inside the election-integrity movement, told ProPublica they are worried that Mitchell’s growing frustration is prompting her to press Trump and his allies toward ever more extreme actions. Her lifelong pattern, ProPublica’s reporting shows, has been to escalate conflicts into winner-take-all battles — a pattern playing out now as she tries to shape the midterms.
Hours after Trump’s speech, Mitchell appeared on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, sounding openly exasperated at the dismissive coverage, her lips pressed into a thin line.
Bannon suggested the evidence of election fraud cited by the president justified declaring a national emergency, which he argued would enable Trump to immediately force states to implement parts of the SAVE America Act.
Mitchell went even further, one-upping the right-wing provocateur. Trump needn’t bother with this step, she said, which would inevitably be met with court challenges. He already had authority under a law empowering the government to protect critical infrastructure to unilaterally enforce the bill’s requirements, she insisted.
“We’ve got the blueprint. We’ll help,” she said. “We just need someone in authority to say, ‘Let’s do it.’”
Mitchell in 1978 speaking at a gathering for the Equal Rights Amendment, the proposed constitutional change to guarantee women the same legal rights as men. The ERA, her signature issue, failed to pass in her home state of Oklahoma and nationally.Oscar Abolafia/TPLP/Getty Images
“I Was Always Interested in Politics”
Via Oklahoma State University Library
Mitchell’s fascination with politics and voting began at an early age.
One of her first memories, she would recount in the 2007 oral history, was begging her mother “please not to go vote” until she got home from school and could accompany her. Later, she recalled, “I would study all the voter guides and tell my mother who I thought she ought to vote for.”
Mitchell grew up poor in Oklahoma City, the third of six children born to Jack Deatherage and Modean Lane. She’s often credited her mother, a secretary, for pushing her relentlessly to excel. About her father, she’s said much less, telling The Wall Street Journal only that he was “kind of a no-account.”
She hid the family’s struggles behind a peppy disposition, piling up accolades at school. At 15, she was runner-up in the Oklahoma City Junior Miss pageant. (Asked about these events, Mitchell replied: “I am peppy. I was also named Miss Congeniality in that pageant.”)
At the University of Oklahoma, which she attended on a journalism scholarship, Cleta was known as a “good girl, sorority girl, untouched by the sexual revolution,” one contemporary said.
Before long, she found a seemingly perfect consort: Duane Draper, who’d been the university’s student body president. While friends believed their shared interest in politics brought them together, they had another bond: He, too, had grown up with an abusive father.
“They were mirror images,” said Conrad Draper, Duane’s brother. “They both felt powerless in their childhood, so in their adulthood they constantly pursued power.”
They married in 1971, when Cleta was a junior. When she ran to be student body president, he served as her unofficial campaign manager.
She lost, a setback she blamed mostly on misogyny. Still, she emerged as ambitious as ever. She spearheaded voter drives to defeat Republicans, worked to expand students’ access to voting and helped launch the Oklahoma chapter of the National Women’s Political Caucus. She served as a delegate at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.
As soon as she graduated from law school, Cleta ran for a seat in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, taking on an incumbent Republican. She knocked on every door in her district, prospecting for votes at bowling alleys, beauty shops and high school football games. When she won, Duane had the campaigning shoes she’d worn to near-shreds bronzed.
At 26, she joined a Legislature that was literally smoke-filled (it hadn’t banned cigars) and full of men uneasy at the arrival of “this young, pretty, opinionated blond,” she said in the oral history. She was undaunted, swiftly moving up the ranks by cultivating wealthy donors and building a fundraising machine.
Less than two years later, when Cal Hobson, a small-town mayor contemplating a House run, asked whose backing he should seek, he was sent to Cleta. She had only one question when he sought her endorsement, he recalled: Did he back the Equal Rights Amendment, the proposed constitutional change to guarantee women the same legal rights as men? Hobson said yes and became her ally in the Legislature, watching as she made “some friends and a lot of enemies.”
With Democrats in control of the Oklahoma House, she exploited a battle between candidates for speaker to win a top post on the powerful Appropriations and Budget Committee, then became its chair.
Once in leadership, she backed a slate of liberal initiatives, from expanding open records laws to creating training centers to help divorced women improve their career prospects.
But her idealism coexisted with a ruthless pragmatism, said David Walters, who came up in Democratic politics in the same era and would eventually become the state’s governor. He remembered his shock when she promised him she’d oppose a powerful state development official in a battle over a new building on the University of Oklahoma campus, then switched sides behind the scenes.
“It was quite remarkable,” Walters said. “This was an example of Cleta saying one thing publicly and doing in private something entirely different.”
In 1982, with her political fortunes on the rise, Cleta’s marriage to Duane ended. The filings offered little explanation, citing only “incompatibility,” but those close to her knew Duane had come out as gay. The heartbreak was “devastating,” Hobson said.
Duane left Oklahoma for Boston, where he became a gay-rights activist. He died of AIDS in 1991.
After the divorce, Cleta did what she’d always done: She “put her nose to the grindstone,” Hobson said, “writing the budget and getting her way at the Capitol.”
She found a new partner in Dale Mitchell, a former college baseball player, registered Republican and bank executive. In 1984, when they married, they agreed that Dale would change his party affiliation if Cleta would take his last name.
Later that year, Time magazine named the newly minted Cleta Mitchell as one of a group of star Democratic state legislators, all female, who might one day “set their sights on a higher prize: the presidency itself.” About a year after they got married, they welcomed a baby girl.
Then, over two years, their life collapsed.
Her political fortunes waned after the ERA, her signature issue, failed to pass in Oklahoma and nationally. Her main political patron, the speaker of the House, had become entangled in a voting-fraud scandal, costing her her position in leadership. She chose not to defend her House seat, then two years later ran for lieutenant governor. When she lost, she found herself out of office completely.
Dale’s troubles dwarfed hers. When oil prices sank, his overleveraged bank collapsed and federal regulators shut it down. He was banned from the banking industry and later convicted on multiple counts of bank fraud, for which he was put on five years’ probation and ordered to pay $3 million in restitution. The crisis ruined them financially.
Cleta emerged from the ordeal infuriated by what she viewed as federal government’s overreach in prosecuting her husband, whom she has defended as “the most honest person I’ve ever known.”
Once out of Democratic politics, Mitchell gravitated toward conservatives, who were gaining ground in much of the country. She explained the shift as a way to realign her politics to match her personal philosophy of self-sufficiency (and no government handouts). Others say she saw a route back to power and took it.
Hobson, who rose to lead Oklahoma’s senate, was gobsmacked by her transformation.
“No one,” he said, “has changed more politically in my lifetime than Cleta Deatherage Mitchell.”
Mitchell and President Donald Trump in August 2020 at an event marking the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Mitchell, once involved in Democratic politics, switched her party affiliation to the Republicans in 1996.Tia Dufour/White House/Planet Pix via ZUMA Wire/Reuters
“Consigliere to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy”
Hillsdale College, via YouTube
Starting in the early 1990s, Mitchell embarked upon a three-and-a-half decade climb up the conservative power ladder.
She and Dale moved to Washington, D.C., so she could help lead a mostly Republican campaign for congressional term limits. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the fight endeared Mitchell, brought in as the token Democrat, to the conservative elite. She switched her party affiliation in 1996 and, within the next few years, had recovered enough financially to buy a home in an upscale gated community and a luxury vacation getaway in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
After the 2000 election, as George W. Bush fought to hold onto a narrow lead over Al Gore in Florida, Mitchell became one of the Bush campaign’s high-profile media surrogates and defenders. In TV appearances, she argued that Democrats’ demands for recounts were an attempt to manipulate the election system.
She emerged determined to focus more of her legal practice on countering what she saw as an assault by progressive groups on election integrity. If “Republicans don’t commit themselves to learning and practicing the art of political war,” she wrote in a Wall Street Journal column, “there may not be much of a GOP to kick around anymore in the future.”
Over the next eight years, she became a go-to election lawyer for Republican politicians and a partner at a powerful D.C. law firm. Later, when the Tea Party emerged, Mitchell embraced hard-right candidates and causes that some other GOP attorneys would not.
As an attorney, Mitchell didn’t particularly shine in the courtroom, those who worked with her said, but she was a masterful and aggressive backroom negotiator and strategist.
No longer a candidate herself, she was free not to be “Miss Congeniality,” she acknowledged in a mentorship speech to conservative women titled “It’s Better to Be Respected Than Liked.” She won over allies with Southern warmth but could be a dangerous enemy if crossed. She’d do anything — within the law — to win, a dynamic one fellow election lawyer called “part of her brand.” (Mitchell didn’t respond to the questions about these assessments.)
Mitchell was one of the first Republican lawyers to support Trump’s presidential ambitions.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer, who helped launch the exploratory bid, said Mitchell had come recommended as the most aggressive lawyer in the field and first met the future president when she came to Trump Tower to discuss the case. Cohen said Trump subsequently retained Mitchell several more times.
“Each matter was resolved to our benefit, something both Trump and I appreciated,” Cohen said in a brief phone interview. When ProPublica asked what the other matters were, Cohen responded, “I can’t disclose those,” then hung up.
When Trump ran for real in 2016, Mitchell transferred her support to him once he’d knocked out her longtime client Marco Rubio. Some of her allies were shocked she’d back an insurgent candidate who often chafed at constitutional limits on executive power and violated conservative principles she’d long espoused.
During Trump’s first term, Reuters reported, Mitchell teamed with other prominent GOP lawyers on efforts to tighten election laws and rules, focusing on those related to mail-in voting and voter ID. Mitchell helped steer millions of dollars into these initiatives, as well as backing lawsuits against Democratic-leaning cities and counties aimed at compelling them to purge voters from their rolls.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, Mitchell was among the first GOP lawyers to urge the Trump campaign to develop plans to dispute the contest’s results, focusing on six to eight battleground states.
Mitchell’s subsequent role in helping Trump try to challenge his loss has been much chronicled in news articles and examined in multiple investigations. Over time, experts said, it’s become clear she helped originate several of the most aggressive actions taken by the president and his allies.
Police and rioters clash during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
“She had her finger in just about every pie the select committee looked at,” said Marc Harris, senior investigative counsel to the House congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the capitol.
Mitchell led litigation on the president’s behalf in Georgia, accumulating 1,800 pages of election fraud allegations. She maintains events moved too fast for this material to be properly evaluated by a judge. “President Trump NEVER got his day in court in GA,” she wrote in response to ProPublica’s questions.
These claims figured prominently in the infamous phone call on which she joined Trump as he pressed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes to overcome Biden’s slim margin in the state.
As Trump poured on the pressure, Mitchell fed him details of election irregularities from her case and demanded that Raffensperger share his findings from investigations into them.
Mitchell insisted to ProPublica they merely wanted to provide Raffensperger with evidence, not to push him “to take any official action to ‘overturn the election.’”
In her emailed responses to ProPublica, Mitchell called the idea an outgrowth of work she’d done early that year advising the American Legislative Exchange Council about steps state lawmakers could take to help Trump in a contested election.
“A movement is stirring,” Mitchell wrote to Eastman in an email two days after the election released by the House Jan. 6 Committee. “But needs constitutional support.”
Ultimately, what congressional investigators came to call the “Trump-Eastman scheme” culminated with a plan for Vice President Mike Pence to certify the fake electors’ votes, flipping the Electoral College in Trump’s favor. But Pence rejected the idea, becoming the target of enraged Trump supporters when they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Experts said Mitchell helped set the day’s events in motion though she was not at the riot.
“She worked closely with John Eastman in developing and seeking to implement dubious legal strategies to overturn the election result,” Harris said. “She encouraged the selection of fake electors.”
Mitchell denied any responsibility for Eastman’s work or what ensued.
“I was completely uninvolved in the Jan 6 rally at the Capitol,” she wrote in response to ProPublica’s questions. “I had nothing to do with the issues and advice from Dr. Eastman to the President, the Vice-President, or anyone else involved in that. None whatsoever.”
In an email responding to ProPublica’s questions, Eastman acknowledged Mitchell had solicited the memo but disputed his strategy was aimed at upending the election.
Mitchell resigned from her law firm after the Raffensperger call sparked backlash, blaming her exit on pressure from anti-Trump groups.
But unlike many who’d fought alongside her, Mitchell wasn’t dispirited once Biden entered the White House. She was just getting started.
Mitchell speaks about election integrity at a South Carolina Republican Party conference in Myrtle Beach.Gerard Albert III/Myrtle Beach Sun News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
“Hand-to-Hand Combat With the Left, Starting at the Local Level”
Obtained by ProPublica
In 2022, behind the closed doors of hotel ballrooms and conference suites, Mitchell appealed to crowds of conservatives in seven swing states, asking them to help her overhaul U.S. elections.
“Welcome, fellow deplorables!” she said to open the proceedings in Michigan, after a welcome video from Trump urging the crowd to get behind her. “As an old Southern Baptist, I like evangelizing. So, this is your Bible!”
Brandishing the 20-page manual provided to each participant, Mitchell implored attendees to master the arcane rules of American elections, work the polls and cozy up to — or, better yet, serve on — local election boards.
The tour was part of the nationwide launch of the Election Integrity Network. In the aftermath of losing the fight over 2020, Mitchell decided she needed an army — a popular movement large and loud enough to tear down what she saw as an election system dominated by Democrats.
“My sole focus has been for the last year and a half, how we as conservatives could build an infrastructure to do hand-to-hand combat with the Left, starting at the local level,” she said on a September 2022 EIN organizing call.
The network served as the centerpiece, providing the boots on the ground, but Mitchell also created an ecosystem to support it, spreading money to allied researchers, law firms and policy shops.
A ProPublica analysis of data from the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog nonprofit, shows that between 2021 and 2025, Mitchell helped put more than $70 million into this work. According to tax filings, at least $11 million of that total came from nonprofits she oversaw. Tens of millions more came from the Bradley Foundation, where she served on the board, and the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank where she was a senior legal fellow.
Roughly 30 conservative election-integrity nonprofits were started after 2020. Well over half have received money from Mitchell or have close ties with her, the data shows.
“She occupies a unique position,” connecting donors, activists and political leaders, said Brendan Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center’s director of strategic investigations. She’s leveraged this spot, he said, “to turn election denial from a fringe position into an organized national movement.”
In assembling the EIN, Mitchell built chapters from scratch in some states; in others, she absorbed long-standing groups that did similar work.
Much of the network’s organizing takes place on the regular video calls held by each state chapter and about half a dozen national working groups, which focus on subjects such as reshaping voter rolls and scrutinizing voting machines.
In reviewing hundreds of hours of these meetings, ProPublica found a mixture of mind-numbing technical discussions, wild speculation and hyperpartisan vitriol.
On a July 2025 call to honor Eastman, heurged network leaders to assault the Left as the Romans attacked the ancient city of Carthage. “They will never stop until not only are they defeated, but the land from which they came is salted over so they can’t grow up again,” he said.
Mitchell disputed that EIN was partisan. “I defy you to show me hyperpartisan vitriol on any EIN related call,” she wrote to ProPublica. “That is not what we do. Mind-numbing technical discussions, yes.”
Local calls often fixate on micro-efforts aimed at a single county or election office. Members — who sometimes call themselves “election believers,” a counter to the “election denier” label used by critics — discuss lobbying particular politicians or combing voting records for evidence of fraud. If, as often happens, they find no widespread problems, the meetings serve as echo chambers in which supporters are urged to keep the faith and see conspiracies behind small bureaucratic mistakes.
Current and former members said being in the network made them feel like part of a special strike force saving America. Mitchell’s charm could be irresistible.
“It’s like she’s the sun and you’re the sunflower,” a former EIN leader said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. But Mitchell’s wrath could be volcanic if members disagreed with her or explored working with other election-integrity groups.
“Vindictive is not a strong enough word,” the former EIN leader said. “She treats you like a heretic.”
(Mitchell didn’t respond to these observations.)
Mitchell joins rank-and-file calls every month or so, on which she’s praised effusively and given titles like “the world’s leading expert on election integrity” and “our patron saint.” She also chairs a Friday morning leadership meeting that draws high-profile guests like Lisa Nelson, the head of the American Legislative Exchange Council, state election officials and luminaries from conservative think tanks. “It’s a who’s-who of who matters in the movement,” the former member said.
Since Trump retook the White House, officials from his administration have occasionally attended, discussing how they can coordinate with the network’s activists.
In summer 2025, a DHS official joined a network call to discuss an effort to persuade states to use an agency tool to search their voter rolls for noncitizens. Many states had resisted, uneasy about sharing confidential data with the federal government. The official wanted network members to encourage state and local officials to cooperate.
“This is your team,” an EIN leader said. “These are the people that are going to do the work in the states that you need to make this magic happen.”
Early on, many EIN branches weren’t particularly effective and several had notable stumbles. A then-participant in North Carolina’s chapter accompanied a group that unsuccessfully tried to force its way into a voting office. The chapter’s leader was accused of following election workers in his car and other disruptive behavior. (He denied his actions were problematic.)
But by 2023, the network started getting significant wins.
Mitchell and EIN were instrumental in spurring Republican states to pull out of a program to cross-check voter rolls for duplicate registrations. Mitchell claimed the program aided Democrats by requiring states to encourage unregistered residents to sign up to vote.
EIN members also helped persuade numerous states to pass laws banning “Zuckerbucks” — private donations from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others aimed at bolstering underfunded local election offices. Mitchell had claimed the donations helped Democratic turnout, paying for things like Spanish translators in election offices.
EIN continued to grow, expanding from seven chapters in 2022 to at least 26 today.
In Georgia, the network came close to realizing the goals Mitchell sketched out when she first pitched the group.
As her state-level plans advanced, Mitchell readied an even bigger swing, one aimed at changing elections across the country and setting the agenda for a second Trump administration.
Mitchell speaks during a news conference in May 2024 to introduce the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
“God Made Me Do This”
Obtained by ProPublica
In January 2024, Mitchell met with a small group of Republican lawyers and election-integrity leaders to discuss how best to prevent fraud in the November presidential election.
Arizona had passed a law compelling residents to provide proof of citizenship when they registered, rather than just swearing they were citizens under penalty of perjury, as is typical in most states.
Mitchell suddenly had an inspiration, she later recounted in a private speech to Virginia’s EIN chapter: She’d lead a push for a similar federal law. “I didn’t think of this,” she told those at the event. “God made me do this.”
When Mitchell returned from Arizona, she was, indeed, a woman on a mission. She convened her closest congressional allies, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas. Their staffers met with her to help draft the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.
The bill set a high bar for proving citizenship, demanding that would-be voters produce documents like certified birth certificates and passports that many Americans don’t have. It also required states to use the DHS’ databases to purge noncitizens from their voter rolls.
The ideas in the measure would presage some of the second Trump administration’s most norm-breaking actions. “When we look back to the original SAVE Act in 2024 to the administration’s actions today, the through line is clear,” said Michael McNulty, a director for the watchdog nonprofit Issue One.
Mitchell knew the initial version of the act wouldn’t pass. When it was introduced in May 2024, Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House.
Rather, people in the election-integrity world said, she saw the measure as a strategic opportunity — both to cement her position atop the movement and to reignite the fervor for voting restrictions among the Trump faithful. For years, she’d fought behind the scenes for Trump’s ear on election issues, vying with more moderate Republican election experts as well as fringe activists.
To make sure her rivals had no choice but to support the SAVE Act, she brought on a backer too powerful to ignore: Stephen Miller, senior adviser to Trump in his first term and architect of his immigration policy. (Miller didn’t respond to questions about his relationship to Mitchell or the SAVE Act.)
Mitchell denied Miller had a hand in the measure. “Stephen is someone I greatly admire but we never worked together on the SAVE Act,” she wrote to ProPublica.
Stephen Miller, center, senior adviser to Trump in his first term and architect of his immigration policy, attends the May 2024 news conference for the SAVE Act.Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
But Roy, the bill’s House sponsor, said in a podcast interview that Miller helped draft it. Mitchell sought to dovetail her election agenda with Miller’s immigration agenda, those who’ve worked with them said. They stood side by side at an event at the Capitol to launch the bill, warning that Democrats were letting people into the country illegally in part to swing elections.
In a coup for Mitchell — anointed the Mother of the SAVE Act — pretty much every significant player in the election-integrity space joined the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, a group she launched to back the bill.
Mitchell directed more than $6 million to groups that bought ads, put out research and took other actions supporting SAVE, tax filings show. Some $800,000 went to the nonprofit arm of the conservative media organization The Federalist, which provided glowing coverage of the legislation.
Sean Davis, The Federalist’s CEO, didn’t answer questions about whether the donation affected coverage. “Cleta Mitchell is a saint,” he said in an email.
The measure sailed through the House in July 2024, then predictably died in the Senate. The bill had drawn fire from voting advocacy groups, which said the measure could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, particularly women, the poor and minorities, all critical Democratic voting blocs.
That November, Trump won back the presidency and Republicans secured majorities in both chambers of Congress.
Mitchell saw the chance not only to pass an even tougher federal version of SAVE — a “SAVE Act on steroids” as she called it in a November organizing call — but to make even more far-reaching changes to American elections.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” she told attendees on the call. “I don’t want us to miss this.”
President Donald Trump in March 2025. When Trump won back the presidency and Republicans secured majorities in both chambers of Congress, Mitchell saw the chance to make even more far-reaching changes to American elections.Win McNamee/Getty Images
“If Plan A Doesn’t Work, I Have a Plan B”
Obtained by ProPublica
Two months after Trump took the oath of office, America got its first glimpse of how he planned to overhaul the nation’s election system.
His March 25, 2025, executive order — titled Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections — looked a lot like the SAVE Act. It required voters to prove their citizenship when they registered, mirroring the types of identification listed in the bill.
It also expanded on the notion of using DHS data to verify voters’ eligibility, saying that all of the federal government’s relevant troves of sensitive information should be made available for this use. Further, it directed the Justice Department to prioritize the prosecution of election crimes and noncitizen voting.
Mitchell was close to a pair of White House lawyers involved in drafting the order and was among a small group of outside attorneys who provided suggestions for it, according to several people who helped write it.
The order was the first in a string of behind-the-scenes victories that have not only allowed Mitchell to shape the Trump administration’s election blueprint, but have given her substantial influence over who’s been chosen to carry it out.
At least 25 administration appointees have close ties to Mitchell, ProPublica’s reporting shows, with several holding key posts directly related to elections.
“She’s had a lot to do with even White House hires in this regard,” Bannon said. (The White House denied Mitchell had swayed its hiring decisions.)
Heather Honey, a senior counselor to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, has a portfolio that touches on almost everything the administration does on elections. She’s figured centrally in the government’s efforts to find and prosecute noncitizen voters.
Before joining DHS, Honey was a Mitchell protege and led EIN’s Pennsylvania chapter. A high-ranking federal official knowledgeable about the hiring process told ProPublica that the agency hired Honey over more experienced candidates. Her “sole qualification was who she worked with,” the former official said. “She worked with Cleta.”
A DHS spokesperson called this “false,” saying Honey had been recommended by senior government leaders for her election expertise.
Mitchell also has had a hand in shaping the administration’s reinvestigation of fraud allegations involving the 2020 election, beginning with the FBI’s seizure of election records from Fulton County, Georgia.
As ProPublica has reported, the affidavit justifying the raid included material compiled by an EIN-affiliated researcher and cited network participants as witnesses.
When the case bogged down as the prosecutor overseeing it began to doubt its strength, Mitchell was among those who recommended a replacement: Dan Bishop, a former North Carolina congressman whom she’s praised on social media and supported with campaign donations.
At a May meeting, a Georgia EIN leader said Bishop was tapped “thanks in large part to Cleta Mitchell,” an account echoed by an administration official familiar with the matter.
A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency “has no knowledge of any role Cleta Mitchell played” in Bishop’s appointment.
Mitchell told ProPublica she didn’t believe she’d affected this decision. “I was very worried about the direction of the case earlier this year and made known my displeasure quite strongly,” she said. “The decision to appoint Dan was made by the President and I applaud it, but I cannot claim credit for that brilliant idea.”
Soon after stepping in, Bishop tried to subpoena personal information for thousands of Fulton County poll workers, a move the county and election experts denounced as politically motivated intimidation. A court quashed the subpoena. Bishop has appealed.
As she’d envisioned in her call with EIN members just after the 2024 election, Mitchell has gotten the president to sink enormous political capital into passing even tougher versions of the bill, now known as the SAVE America Act.
The 2026 measure would require voters nationwide to present photo ID to vote and compel states to turn over their voter rolls to DHS, which would scour them for noncitizens. Trump has repeatedly called the measure his top legislative priority, threatening not to sign other bills until it passes.
Lee, the Utah senator who sponsored the bill, said Mitchell was central to the updated version, especially the strict voter ID provisions. Trump, he added, gave it the new name.
Former officials and people in the election-integrity movement told ProPublica that Mitchell has had to overcome naysayers within the administration, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
On an EIN call in early 2025, Mitchell complained that Wiles had responded frostily to plans she offered for the incoming administration, “saying, ‘Thank you, I’ll take a look as soon as I come up for air.’”
At the time, Mitchell said she’d wanted to reply that wouldn’t happen for four years. When ProPublica followed up about the incident, she wrote: “Susie is remarkable and a great chief of staff. She doesn’t have time to read all the things that people like me send her.”
Mitchell has surmounted these obstacles, in part, by continuing to build out her array of alliances.
By the middle of this year, when the White House brought on Solomon — a longtime Mitchell supporter who vetted material for Trump’s prime-time elections address — it was clear she had found another way in. (A White House spokesperson said that Solomon, who also runs a conservative news site, interacted with Mitchell as a journalist would speak to a subject-matter expert.)
A former administration official who said he’d tried to stymie Mitchell acknowledged she’d won out. “The White House listens to her,” he said.
Mitchell had told her EIN disciples not to worry after Wiles’ brush off. She had more cards to play, she assured them.
“I always know if plan A doesn’t work, I have a plan B,” she said. “If plan B doesn’t work, I have a plan C. And so forth.”
Mitchell in January 2026. “Even if she fails, she always finds another point of attack,” said Max Flugrath, a director at the voting advocacy group Fair Fight. “She’s relentless.”Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
“Today”
Steve Bannon’s “War Room” Podcast
By the time the first mail-in ballots of the midterms were cast in September, Mitchell had shaped and staffed the Trump administration’s election efforts to an astonishing extent. And yet, the knockout blow had eluded her.
Courts had blocked large parts of Trump’s executive orders. The hunt for noncitizen voters and the reinvestigation of 2020 voting irregularities had produced little of consequence, despite the considerable resources poured into them.
Mitchell’s critics and even her allies, including some in the election-integrity movement, say frustration has prompted her to push for more drastic steps.
Mitchell has taken a similarly all-or-nothing approach in pressing states to pass laws modeled on the SAVE America Act, sometimes with similarly self-defeating results.
Earlier this year, she waded into a battle over an Ohio bill despite being warned that the governor would veto the tougher version she preferred. The final bill contained the provision Mitchell sought. The governor promptly vetoed it.
Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, an election-integrity movement leader who’s worked with Mitchell for decades, said Mitchell sometimes runs the risk of making elections less secure by torpedoing practical solutions.
“It was her way or the highway,” he said. “We need to focus on getting concrete wins.”
(Mitchell didn’t respond to Blackwell’s broader criticism but called the more moderate election measure he’s backed in Ohio “not nearly as good as it should be.”)
As the midterms near, she has become increasingly vocal — in media appearances, online and with her network members — in calling for the president to exert unprecedented powers to sway the vote.
“Even if she fails, she always finds another point of attack,” said Max Flugrath, a director at the voting advocacy group Fair Fight. “She’s relentless.”
On the Oct. 6 episode of “War Room,” Mitchell angrily pounded home that several agencies, particularly the Commerce Department, could intervene “today” to shore up purported vulnerabilities in voting machines. She repeated the word “today” seven times during the appearance, like a drumbeat.
Some of those who’ve known Mitchell the longest say her urgency has crescendoed as, at 76, she’s confronted the possibility that this administration is her last chance to realize her goals.
“In her mind, in her timeline, it’s existential,” the former network leader said. “She’s got to do it all, and she’s got to do it now. … The election integrity movement, c’est moi.”
CARY, NORTH CAROLINA — Jonathan Miller, the Libertarian nominee for North Carolina Senate District 16, was arrested Monday after an hours-long standoff with Cary police that began when officers attempted to conduct a welfare check following alarming social media posts.
Police said officers went to Miller’s home around 8:26 a.m. after posts from his X account referenced suicide and a possible confrontation with law enforcement. Cary Police Chief Terry Sult said Miller was armed with a holstered revolver when officers approached and fled into nearby woods after being ordered to keep his hands away from the weapon.
Miller continued posting during the pursuit, at one point saying he had “six shots and the high ground.” He also called WRAL during the standoff and acknowledged that he had been depressed and suicidal the previous night. Police eventually surrounded Miller and took him into custody shortly after 3 p.m. No shots were fired and no injuries were reported.
Miller, 46, faces charges including communicating threats, resisting an officer, going armed to the terror of the people and felony possession of a firearm by a felon.
He remains on the Nov. 3 ballot against Democratic incumbent Sen. Gale Adcock and Republican Philip Hensley. The North Carolina Libertarian Party thanked Cary police for resolving the situation without violence.
The CDC estimates that 19 drug-resistant pathogens cause 9.7 million infections and more than 50,000 deaths annually in the U.S., with resistance continuing to outpace development of new treatments. "The agency considers this problem to be one of our most urgent public health threats," reports NBC News. From the report: The report is the CDC's first comprehensive assessment of these drug-resistant pathogens in seven years. [...] The new report offers a detailed picture of these threats in the U.S., including a ranking of which are the most urgent concerns, based on the number and severity of infections they cause and how easily preventable or transmissible they are. The ranking also factors in how many treatment options exist and their costs. [...] The report estimates that 19 drug-resistant germs cause 9.7 million infections annually in the U.S. Of these, four pathogens are ranked as most worrisome, including the fungus Candida auris and the bacteria that causes gonorrhea, which has become resistant to all but one class of antibiotics used to treat it.
The other two urgent threats, according to the CDC, are the bacteria Acinetobacter and Enterobacterales, both of which are resistant to a class of antibiotics widely considered a "last resort" for patients. In addition, the report adds a new bacteria to the list of "concerning" threats, which are considered less worrisome but still warrant monitoring: neisseria meningitidis, which causes meningococcal disease. The rare but life-threatening illness can be prevented through childhood vaccinations, but the bacteria that causes it is slowly developing a resistance to penicillin and another antibiotic called ciprofloxacin.
The report also offers some good news: The CDC determined that the bacteria Clostridioides difficile, or "C. diff," which causes diarrhea and inflammation of the colon and can be deadly, is causing fewer cases year over year. The agency downgraded it to a serious threat, whereas it was categorized as urgent in the prior version of the report, which came out in 2019.
Royal tour of Caribbean comes as poll suggests majority support among younger Britons for dialogue on slavery reparations
King Charles has confirmed he will discuss the legacy of slavery at a summit with Commonwealth leaders as he begins his Caribbean tour.
The king arrived in the Bahamas on Tuesday to a ceremonial welcome and attended a youth rally at Clifford Park, the site where the country officially gained its independence from British colonial rule in 1973.
Far-right senator and his family boarded private plane to Ecuador after crossing border to Argentina, Argentina’s government confirms
The far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro has reportedly fled Brazil and is on his way to the United States after losing Sunday’s presidential election to the leftwing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who called the act “shameful”.
A report by the news website Metrópoles, citing people close to the politician’s family, said he was en route to the US. “The plane is in flight,” Metrópoles reported, without making clear where it had departed from.
Once the midterms are over, Trump will be free to pursue vendetta politics. But with will and diplomacy, he can be reined in
As another Iran catastrophe looms, one question matters more than any other: how to stop it before it’s too late? Whatever the eventual outcome of Israel’s election and next week’s US midterm polls, Donald Trump, playing the Lone Ranger, and Benjamin Netanyahu, his badass Tonto, appear hell-bent on resuming the illegal war of choice they began in June last year and expanded in February. Like a Shakespearean tragedy moving inexorably to a bloody denouement, the worst is yet to come. And yet three things seem certain: the US and Israel will again fail to totally destroy Iran’s largely hypothetical nuclear capabilities; its regime will survive; and millions of ordinary people, there and around the world, will pay the price for this unjustified, reckless aggression.
Ducking and weaving, Trump is desperate to dodge the blame for the Republicans’ anticipated midterm meltdown, largely triggered by war-related fuel and consumer price inflation. He claimed Ukraine’s attacks on Russian refineries were responsible, but that didn’t wash. He cut a treacherous diesel deal with Vladimir Putin but, as usual, Russia’s smirking mafioso conned him. He urged US allies to tap their strategic reserves but, unsurprisingly, vilified and sidelined European leaders, who view his war as an unmitigated disaster and declined to bail him out. Trump also reportedly rebuffed last-gasp, electorally driven pressure from Netanyahu to hit Iran this month, fearful it would unleash a Democratic tsunami.
Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator
In this episode of Guardian Australia’s US politics podcast, co-hosts Reged Ahmad and Jonathan Yerushalmy talk about Barack Obama’s war of words with Donald Trump, after the former president spoke at a campaign rally in Ohio and compared Trump’s White House changes to the Cheesecake Factory. But how effective is Obama on the Democratic party campaign trail? What are the risks around personal attacks? And how much does Obama’s legacy help or hinder when it comes to the midterms?
Reged and Jonathan also look at the backlash over an attack ad from the campaign of Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, and why some are saying it’s a new low for US politics. Finally, how has the perception of corruption in government become such a key issue for voters on both sides of the aisle?
Talks are aimed at reopening strait of Hormuz and lifting sanctions on Iran, and for Houthis to withdraw in Yemen
A multipronged peace deal to reopen the strait of Hormuz within four days of sanctions being lifted and for the Houthis to withdraw substantial forces inside Yemen are at the heart of Gulf states’ plans to avert what they regard as a disastrous renewal of war between Iran and the US.
The US is aware of the talks’ progress but is holding out for a concession that European powers suggest could involve Iran allowing UN weapons inspectors back into the country.
Events in Ireland explore origins of Gulliver’s Travels, the Dublin clergyman’s book that became an instant hit in 1726
In March 1726, an Irish clergyman visited London and arranged for a courier to deliver a manuscript to a publisher under cover of night. The dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin knew his novel would cause trouble and wanted to publish it anonymously.
His name was Jonathan Swift and the story was called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. The satirical work was published that October and is better known 300 years on as Gulliver’s Travels.
Brewers still hold 3-1 lead in best-of-seven series
Jonny DeLuca and pinch-hitter Ben Williamson hits RBIs in a stunning 12th-inning rally, and the Tampa Bay Rays staved off World Series elimination with a 4-3 win over the Milwaukee Brewers on Tuesday night that forced Game 5.
Cooper Pratt hit a tiebreaking home run off Ian Seymour in the top of the 12th for his fourth hit of the game to make it 3-2 to the Brewers as Milwaukee neared a sweep and their first World Series title.
Across Israel, voting is now under way. Here are some of the latest images being sent to us over the newswires:
Tens of thousands of Israelis living abroad have flown in for the elections, according to Aid Coalition, a US-based nonprofit focused on strengthening Israel’s democracy. Israeli law generally requires citizens to vote in person in the country, with narrow exceptions for diplomats and certain official emissaries abroad.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere rose to record highs in 2025, locking in climate impacts that will persist for centuries, the United Nations said on Tuesday. Levels of the three main greenhouse gases -- the climate-warming carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide -- all rose to unprecedented figures in 2025, the U.N.'s weather and climate agency said. The World Meteorological Organization said the rise would lead to more long-term temperature increases for the planet.
The bulletin looks at greenhouse gas concentrations -- the amount of those gases in the atmosphere -- rather than new annual emissions amounts as the world burns more coal, oil and gas. In 2025, carbon dioxide concentrations were at 426.8 parts per million (ppm); methane at 1,948 parts per billion, and nitrous oxide at 339.1 parts per billion. That takes them, respectively, to 153%, 267% and 126% of the pre-industrial levels witnessed before 1750. Of the three major greenhouse gases, CO2 accounts for about 66% of the warming effect on the climate.
Around half of the total CO2 emitted each year remains in the atmosphere; the rest is absorbed by the land and oceans. From 2024 to 2025, the global average concentration of CO2 rose by 2.8 ppm -- smaller than the record surge from 2023 to 2024 of 3.6 ppm. WMO senior scientific officer Oksana Tarasova said this reflected the "recovery of the land carbon sinks and reduced fire carbon emissions in 2025 after the strong 2023/2024 El Nino," the naturally occurring, climate-warming weather phenomenon. "However, a 2.8 ppm annual increase is still a substantial addition of carbon to the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning." It is also above the average growth rate for the past decade of 2.6 ppm -- a figure that stood at 0.8 ppm in the 1960s. "Another year, another new record," said WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett. "Greenhouse gases are trapping an unprecedented amount of heat in the atmosphere, providing energy for more extreme weather and associated risks to our economies and societies.
Further reading: UN Says Breaching 1.5C Warming Limit Is 'Imminent and Unavoidable'
The war with Iran has cost the U.S. military at least $47.1 billion as of mid-October, according to a new estimate from U.S. Central Command obtained by CBS News.
Brazilian right-wing presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro holds a picture of his father, convicted former President Jair Bolsonaro, during a motorcade with supporters in Goiania, Brazil, on Sept. 27, 2026.Photo: Sergio Lima/AFP via Getty Images
“I never thought about leaving the country,” Flávio Bolsonaro, a Brazilian senator and son of the deposed, disgraced leader, told his 16 million Instagram followers on Monday. It was the day after he lost the presidential election to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by a margin of more than 4 million votes.
Flávio promised to stay in Brazil to “organize the opposition” during Lula’s next term.
“I’m the last obstacle to the Workers’ Party’s plan to destroy the country,” Flávio warned, referring to the party of Lula, who defeated his father four years earlier.
A few hours later, he left his mansion in Brasilia and sought asylum in the U.S. The Trump State Department told The Associated Press that it will grant him and his family visas.
The affinities become obvious when you watch Bolsonaro’s failsons end up in Trump’s America.
“I didn’t take sides, but it looked like another rigged election,” President Donald Trump told reporters on Monday, echoing Flávio’s election night talking points without providing any credible evidence that casts doubt on Lula’s come-from-behind victory — even as Flávio’s own party put out a statement acknowledging the results later that day.
It is no coincidence that the Trumps and the Bolsonaros are so fond of each other. Their modus operandi is nearly identical.
Both wrap themselves in the rhetoric of patriotism and moral righteousness, while treating their political offices as personal get-rich-quick schemes. And, when their lies finally catch up with them, you can be sure that they will jump ship to save themselves first and abandon their followers.
The affinities become obvious when you watch Bolsonaro, his failsons, and co-conspirators all end up in Trump’s America, where Flávio is about to join his brother, and in the denialism and violence that follow their failures.
Coups and Flight Risks
Flávio Bolsonaro’s election denial and hasty escape are his version of Trump’s infamous January 6 speech: Rile up the troops to do your dirty work and get the hell out of the way.
It’s not the first time a Bolsonaro ran this playbook. After Jair Bolsonaro became the first modern Brazilian president to lose a reelection bid, he refused to attend the January 2023 inauguration ceremony. Instead, he also fled to the U.S., staying in a Minions-themed children’s bedroom in the Orlando, Florida, home of retired UFC fighter José Aldo.
A week later, on January 8, the ex-president’s allies laid siege to the capital, Brasília, vandalizing Congress, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court, as foot soldiers in a larger coup plotted to overthrow the Lula government. Nearly four decades of Brazilian democracy was only spared when key military leaders blinked before they could finish the job.
Jair Bolsonaro eventually returned to Brazil and was sentenced to 27 years in prison for leading the plot, which included a plan to assassinate Lula, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Allies, including top military brass, were also convicted. Jair remains under house arrest — widely thought to be pinning his hopes for freedom on a Flávio presidency that wasn’t to be.
Flávio, however, will not be lonely in the States. His brother, former Brazilian Congress member Eduardo Bolsonaro, just received green cards for his family and is living in a $1.2 million McMansion in Southlake, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as we revealed in The Intercept Brasil earlier this year. Eduardo, who is a regular on the Trumpworld circuit, was sentenced in absentia to four years and two months in prison for lobbying the U.S. government to interfere in his father’s trial.
Flávio, too, seems poised to receive news of his own prison sentence while sitting on a couch in a Texas suburb. In May, our reporting at The Intercept Brasil put the first nail in the coffin of his presidential campaign when we published chat logs and audio recordings of the senator negotiating $24 million — and being wired $10 million — from disgraced billionaire banker Daniel Vorcaro, who is a sort of Brazilian cross between Charles Ponzi and Jeffrey Epstein.
The payments, wired to a U.S. account, were supposedly meant to finance “Dark Horse,” a biopic about Jair Bolsonaro starring Jim Caviezel. Brazilian Federal Police, though, have already poked holes in Flávio’s story as they investigate whether the money was actually used to bankroll Eduardo’s treasonous lobbying of the Trump administration to sanction Brazil and help his brother’s electoral chances.
Flávio is also being investigated for his alleged ties to a billion-dollar money-laundering scheme through an online betting company run by Willer Tomaz. The two are not only close friends but also business partners. Flávio even had unfettered access to one of Tomaz’s offshore bank accounts. You will not be surprised to learn that Tomaz left Brazil in August and is now living in Miami.
Police argued that, after losing the election, Flávio would pose a flight risk, especially in light of his closest associates’ recent actions. They asked the Brazilian Supreme Court to order Flávio to turn over his passport, which is permitted under Brazilian law. A top justice granted the request and, when the deadline passed, canceled the senator’s travel documents.
By then, Flávio was already on his way to the U.S.
Four-time All-Star needs arthroscopic procedure on knee
Edwards averaging 33.3 points through first four games
Absence could rule Wolves star out of awards contention
Minnesota guard Anthony Edwards needs an arthroscopic procedure to alleviate issues with his right knee and will miss several weeks, a person with knowledge of the matter said Tuesday.
The person spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the Timberwolves had yet to make any public announcements of Edwards’ plan to have the operation. A more precise timetable for Edwards’ return will be known after surgery, the person said.
A team of AI agents helps create microchips ready for an onslaught of radiation
RICHLAND, Wash., Oct. 27, 2026 — Today’s sophisticated microchips are a wonder, designed by engineers squeezing ever-more detail onto ever-smaller chips, then built in ultraclean billion-dollar fabrication facilities. Just one speck of dust or an errant signal from a device like a cell phone can spell ruin.
Galactic cosmic rays, heavy ions, electrons and other highly energetic particles pose challenges for computer chips and other electronics destined for extreme environments like space. Illustration credit: Jeff London, PNNL.
Some of those chips will take their place aboard satellites that will be blasted upward hundreds or thousands of miles into Earth’s orbit, enduring tremendous pressures, temperature changes and vibrations along the way.
Only then comes the real danger: bombardment by galactic cosmic rays, heavy ions, electrons and other highly energetic particles zipping near the speed of light. While stargazers might think of space as mostly empty except for the occasional pinprick of light, every square inch is filled with a riot of molecular action. Ill-fated encounters between microchips and microparticles can silence a satellite, corrupt its memory, send it off course or worse.
Enter the practice of “radiation hardening”: creating and testing materials able to withstand the onslaught of radiation in space, in nuclear power plants and in other extreme environments. These “rad-hard” materials make possible phenomena like accurate weather forecasts, the global reach of cell phones and nuclear energy to heat and cool our homes.
Scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to dramatically speed up the process to toughen up materials for their future in space or in nuclear reactors.
In the world of space electronics, where it can take years to design devices and get them into space, and more years to fix any flaws and launch the new designs into space, “faster” is a must. AI and automation are at the core of the effort.
“Space is a highly energetic environment, with heavy ions and other particles bombarding our devices,” said scientist Erin Barker. “We need to better understand how much radiation a chip can handle. But many of today’s best testing capabilities are designed for systems that are 25 years old or more. They simply don’t give us the information we need to understand the latest technology. Agentic workflows come at a time when there is need for better rad-hard testing techniques.”
At a recent northwest regional meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boise, PNNL scientist Jenna Pope discussed her team’s work testing rad-hard materials. The team drew upon data from experiments at the University of Tennessee, where scientists used an ion beam to deliver a tremendous amount of energy into precise spots on microchips. The laboratory research mimicked in just a few hours the damage that ion strikes do to microchips over years in space.
Then the PNNL researchers deployed AI — specifically, a suite of agents working together as a team through a system called SciLink that was created by PNNL colleague Maxim Ziatdinov and others at the Laboratory.
SciLink organizes the AI agents into a hierarchy, with three “project leads” heading experimental analysis, planning and computational simulation. Those three leads delegate tasks to more specialized agents, which report back to the project leads the results and analyses of data from specific research methods, such as atom probe tomography and scanning transmission electron microscopy.
Those instruments look in detail at the carefully placed atoms that make the chips work, then kick out a tremendous amount of data — independent pools of information that can be hard to bring together into one coherent view.
In the experiment, the three lead agents came together in an interactive session to analyze the data, exchanging questions and answers and hypotheses about what the data showed. The three leads interpreted the data, drew conclusions and then proposed new experiments to learn more.
“The system allows us to take into account all the measurements to piece together what has happened, to understand the damage that has occurred and why it happened,” said Pope. “It’s like having several people who did different forms of testing come together and discuss the results — only it’s an agent pulling together the information instantly.”
It’s as if three human project leads were gathered in a conference room, discussing the results of their teams. One difference is that the AI agents did the analyses much faster, in hours instead of days or weeks. Another difference is that most conclusions were accompanied by a numerical confidence score, a measure of how confident the AI system is in a given conclusion. For example, the system was 90% confident that ions dominated the damage detected in the experiments but only 60% confident in its conclusions about damage caused by protons.
Scientists were involved all the way — bringing decades of experience, knowing what questions to ask, designing experiments and actually doing the laboratory work. Finally, they studied the AI results, looking for “hallucinations,” performing calculations to make sure the results made sense and looking for areas of concern. As laboratory experiments become more automated, with AI agents directing research efforts, human oversight is critical.
“Intelligent agents are a tremendous help but you can’t just turn your brain off,” said Barker.
The team studied chips made of layers of aluminum gallium nitride and gallium nitride. Such chips are used for critical operations in satellites, communications, power systems and radar systems. Getting those chips ready for launch and beyond is critical. An unplanned delay because electronic components cannot stand up to space radiation can translate to a mission being postponed or even scrubbed entirely.
“Radiation hardening is critical for satellites that will be up for a decade or more, such as large communications satellites,” said nuclear engineer Ben Kowash, who leads PNNL’s radiation-hardening efforts. “You can protect your electronics by adding shielding, but that adds weight. You can add backup systems in case one fails. But for every bit of weight, power capacity and complexity that you add, you are adding costs and reducing the efficiency of the mission. Making sure the electronics can stand up to the radiation they will be facing can be much more effective.”
Contributors to the results presented by Pope include Kowash, Bethany Matthews, Kayla Yano, Mike Holden, Skye Supakul, Xin Zhang, Kathy Nwe and Alex Mantilla. The work was funded by PNNL.
ANCHORAGE, ALASKA — Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski endorsed Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins for governor Tuesday, crossing party lines in Alaska’s four-way race to replace term-limited Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy.
Murkowski said Kreiss-Tomkins, a former state legislator commonly known as JKT, has demonstrated a willingness to work across political divisions. “Our future is too important to be hamstrung by partisan divisions,” she said, adding that Alaska needs cooperation on energy costs, economic growth and the state’s fiscal challenges.
Kreiss-Tomkins is running with independent lieutenant governor candidate Zac Johnson against Republicans Dave Bronson, Treg Taylor and Bernadette Wilson. President Donald Trump endorsed Wilson earlier this month. Alaska’s general election is scheduled for Nov. 3.
Murkowski also criticized the Dunleavy administration, telling KTUU that state officials had left federal funding opportunities unused. Her endorsement follows similar support for Kreiss-Tomkins from several current and former Republicans, including Murkowski’s father, former Republican Gov. Frank Murkowski.
The endorsement continues Murkowski’s history of occasionally supporting candidates outside her party. She backed Democrat Mary Peltola in the 2024 U.S. House race, though this year she has endorsed Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan over Peltola in Alaska’s Senate contest.
Alaska uses a top-four election system in which voters may rank candidates in order of preference.
Speaking to reporters on the tarmac before departing for a campaign event in Michigan, JD Vance responded to a question about President Trump’s remarks branding Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as a “jihadist.”
Vance, who has sparred with the progressive El-Sayed repeatedly on the campaign trail, took a somewhat softer tone. But he didn’t walk away from Trump’s remarks.
Bill Essayli, a former GOP lawmaker and ally of president, has not been confirmed by the Senate in his role
A US judge ruled on Tuesday that Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in southern California, was “unlawfully serving” as the head of the US attorney’s office and was disqualified from overseeing two criminal prosecutions.
The order, however, will not immediately go into effect, and the Department of Justice has said it intends to appeal.
Alon, Oren and Tal Alexander have been sentenced to 30 years in prison for sex trafficking after the trio was convicted of drugging and raping dozens of women.
NEWNAN, GEORGIA — Prominent Georgia Republican donor Edwin Brant Frost IV was sentenced Monday to 15 years in federal prison for operating a Ponzi scheme that caused more than $76 million in losses to more than 300 investors.
Frost, 69, pleaded guilty in May to wire fraud after the collapse of his company, First Liberty Building and Loan. Prosecutors said Frost promoted the business as a conservative, Christian lender offering short-term “bridge loans” to small businesses and promised investors returns ranging from 8% to 18%. As loans increasingly defaulted, Frost used money from new investors to make payments to earlier investors.
Federal investigators said Frost diverted at least $5 million for personal use, including more than $2 million in credit-card payments, a $230,000 Maine vacation-home rental, jewelry, rare coins and a $20,800 Patek Philippe watch. More than $570,000 in investor money also went toward political contributions.
Victims described losing retirement savings and suffering severe financial hardship. Chief U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May imposed a sentence one year longer than prosecutors requested and ordered Frost to pay $76.45 million in restitution, followed by three years of supervised release.
Frost apologized at sentencing and said he accepted responsibility for his actions. Questions remain over whether political organizations and candidates that received contributions funded with investor money will return those funds.
The public accounts committee has said the risk to billpayers is ‘extraordinary’
The government’s plan to fund a multibillion-pound nuclear plant at the Sizewell site in Suffolk represents a “terrible deal” for the UK taxpayer over the rest of the century, according to the government’s spending watchdog.
MPs on the public accounts committee (PAC) have warned the government that the cost of the Sizewell C nuclear reactor could spiral to almost £48bn, leaving bill payers on the hook to provide an extra £9.8bn to construct the plant before 2040 and a further £12bn over its 60-year operating life.
The big gains made by Palestinian parties in Israel’s general election pose an urgent and fundamental challenge to the country’s mainstream opposition: either cooperate with Arab Israelis or hand Benjamin Netanyahu a roadmap to political survival.
In the wake of Tuesday’s exit polls, the leader of the opposition bloc, Gadi Eisenkot, declared them a victory for “Israel’s Zionist national majority” but the real outcome looks as if it will be far more complex than that.
Discovery comes months after Utah county detectives confirmed that Bundy had killed another Utah girl that year
The notorious serial killer Ted Bundy has been found responsible, through DNA evidence, for the murder of a 17-year-old Utah girl who went missing in 1974 before her nude body was found days later, state authorities announced at a Tuesday news conference.
The breakthrough in the investigation of Melissa Ann Smith’s death comes months after Utah county detectives confirmed in April that Bundy had killed another Utah girl, 17-year-old Laura Ann Aime, in 1974.
Hazardous storm conditions delayed recovery efforts on mountain that has proved to be a perilous hiking spot
The body of a missing California hiker, blanketed in a layer of snow, was recovered on Mount Whitney on Sunday after a blustery storm delayed retrieval operations for five days.
The Inyo county sheriff’s office extended its condolences to the loved ones and family of the hiker, who has not been publicly identified, in a Monday statement.
Susan and Michael Pretti say they have been ‘ignored and misled’ in quest for justice over son’s killing by US agents
The parents of Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old nurse killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis earlier this year, accused federal officials of stonewalling them and shielding their son’s killers.
During a press conference on Tuesday, Michael and Susan Pretti made their first public remarks since their son’s death in January, calling for the Department of Justice to hold those involved in their son’s death accountable. The federal government has not provided them with meaningful information about the case, they said.
President at Texas campaign rally hails deal struck with post-Maduro government as ‘greatest oil victory in history’
Donald Trump suggested Venezuela would become the 51st state of the United States on Tuesday as the president showed off a tanker he claimed had “one million barrels of oil on it” from the country, nine months after deposing its president.
At a campaign rally in Corpus Christ, Texas, Trump touted a US oil deal with Venezuela, which the US attacked in January, capturing its long-serving leader Nicolás Maduro.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal grand jury declined Tuesday to indict former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson after Justice Department prosecutors sought criminal charges related to her testimony before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
The proposed charges were not immediately disclosed publicly. However, the Justice Department had been investigating whether Hutchinson lied to Congress during her 2022 testimony, allegations she has denied. Republican lawmakers have challenged portions of her account, particularly testimony that she was told Trump tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential SUV after being told he could not go to the Capitol. A Secret Service driver later disputed that specific account while confirming Trump strongly wanted to travel to the Capitol.
Hutchinson, who served as an aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, also testified that Trump wanted armed supporters allowed closer to his Jan. 6 rally and resisted calls to intervene as violence unfolded at the Capitol. Trump denied key portions of her testimony and repeatedly attacked her credibility.
The failed indictment adds to a series of setbacks for the Justice Department in politically sensitive cases involving people Trump has publicly criticized. Reuters reported that political experts have raised concerns about the administration’s use of federal law enforcement against perceived opponents, while the administration has defended its prosecutions as legitimate enforcement actions.
Hutchinson has maintained that her congressional testimony was truthful.
Ford's upcoming $28,350 Fathom electric truck will include a built-in inverter capable of supplying up to 10 kW of AC power to a home, bringing bidirectional charging to a significantly cheaper EV. Owners will still need additional Ford home hardware for features like outage backup and peak-rate energy management, but the company expects the necessary equipment to cost substantially less than its previous-generation system. CNET reports: The upcoming Fathom will be based on what Ford calls its Universal EV Platform, designed with the aid of its 2023 acquisition, startup Auto Motive Power, with bidirectional power on the plate from the start. The hardware required to invert the battery's DC energy to an estimated 10 kW of AC home power will be built into the truck, so it won't require a separate wall-mounted inverter box. Ford says the Fathom's system will meet all applicable UL 1741 requirements and IEEE 1547 standards to ensure the vehicle is safely connected to the grid. As for the actual hardware you plug into your car, all signs point to the Fathom using the NACS plug type pioneered by Tesla and now widely adopted by new EVs in North America. In terms of the communication standard -- the one that governs how AC power is routed from the slim wall box to the car's onboard charger -- that'll be via SAE J3068, a software protocol developed for high-power, heavy-duty AC charging.
[...] However, while Fathom's Universal EV Platform eliminates the need for a wall inverter box, it doesn't completely bypass the need for additional hardware to make your home ready to accept bidirectional power. Say you wanted to take advantage of the Home Power Management feature to draw energy into the Fathom's battery when power is cheapest, and then use that energy to offset peak-hour usage when power is most expensive. You'll have to install at least the Ford Home Power Station in your home, at an additional cost. The automaker hasn't specified pricing, but says that it's working to reduce costs and expects this component alone to cost half as much as the first-generation Ford Home Energy system, which debuted at around $1,300. That could put the new system at roughly $650.
Cassidy Hutchinson had implicated Donald Trump in US Capitol attack during testimony before House committee
The justice department on Tuesday failed to secure a grand jury indictment against a former White House staffer who provided dramatic but disputed testimony against Donald Trump before a House committee investigating the 6 January 2021 US Capitol insurrection, according to two people familiar with the matter.
A grand jury in Washington rejected prosecutors’ request to return an indictment charging Cassidy Hutchinson, said the people, who spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the case. It’s the latest setback in the justice department’s efforts to charge perceived adversaries of the Republican president.
Federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., failed to secure an indictment against Cassidy Hutchinson over her testimony about the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Healey hopes to give ‘hope for the future’ but only modest policies are expected with important decisions deferred
John Healey has acknowledged the UK faces a “difficult moment” but insisted he would put the country on a better path as he delivers his first budget on Wednesday against a turbulent global economic backdrop.
But despite the international uncertainty, the chancellor will signal “fresh hope for the future” as he attempts to sound a more optimistic note, by providing households with breathing space from rising cost of living pressures.
Three-quarters of all responses were machine-generated in failed attempt to stop bill from passing into law, research finds
AI bots flooded a government consultation with tens of thousands of fake responses in a failed attempt to stop the UK’s ban on disposable vapes.
Three-quarters of all the responses to the 2023 consultation on the tobacco and vapes bill were machine-generated, in what is thought to be the first coordinated attempt to use AI to derail health policymaking in the UK.
(The Center Square) – Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has ordered the Pentagon to stand up a new four-star command for drones and autonomous weapons by Oct. 1, 2027. The department has not said what the command will cost.
King City football went through a challenging regular season, but a new season awaits the WildKats as they get a second shot at Stanberry to open district play.
Intel, Oracle, IBM and IonQ have joined a growing list of companies objecting to having tokenized versions of their shares traded through OKX and Intercontinental Exchange's blockchain venture, bringing the total number of objections to 26. About 37% of the companies on OKXICE's original list have now opted out, according to CoinDesk. From the report: The four companies were named in an updated public notice (PDF) dated Monday, Oct. 26, from OKXICE, the two firms' joint venture. They join earlier objectors including Microsoft, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, Cisco and Wells Fargo. The growing list underscores a hurdle for OKXICE and the SEC's new framework for tokenized stock trading: building a market that issuers are willing to join. The agency's five-year "Innovation Exemption" gives qualifying venues room to test round-the-clock blockchain-based trading of stocks, and it also gives public companies an option to block their shares from being offered.
OKXICE issued its initial public notice on Oct. 4, outlining plans to use Uniswap v4 liquidity pools on OKX's XLayer blockchain, with transactions settled in stablecoins. The venue would use automated market makers -- software that executes trades through pools of assets rather than matching buyers and sellers through a conventional order book. Under the framework, venues must notify issuers and give them 30 days to object before offering tokenized versions of their shares.
Coastal communities across California were preparing for days of flooding amid potentially 'record-breaking tides' this week, as water levels began rising on Monday.
Sale makes ‘Jodi’, a smaller relative of T rex, the ‘second most valuable dinosaur ever sold at auction’, Sotheby’s says
A rare skeleton of a Nanotyrannus, a smaller relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex, sold at auction in New York this week for $47.3m, making it one of the world’s most expensive fossils.
The skeleton, named “Jodi” after the person who found the remains in 2019, sold at Sotheby’s on Tuesday for $47.3m, “after a twelve-minute bidding battle that saw six bidders compete online and over the phones, before ultimately selling on the phone”, Sotheby’s said in a statement.
Throughout October, President Donald Trump has traveled across the country, holding campaign rallies supporting Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms. He has several more rallies scheduled before Election Day on Nov. 3.
In his remarks, which tend to last more than an hour, he has mostly boasted about his and Republican policies, while attacking some Democrats running for office and others who are not. Along the way, the president has made a number of false, misleading or exaggerated claims, many of which will be familiar to our readers.
Here are more than a dozen of his rally claims that we flagged, including statements about the economy, crime and immigration. He repeated nearly all of these claims during multiple campaign stops.
Economy
Inflation: In Syracuse on Oct. 9, Trump falsely claimed that he “inherited the worst inflation in American history,” then added, “Now we have it down to 1.8%.” The worst inflation occurred after World War I, when the 12-month increase in prices was 23.7% from June 1919 to June 1920. The annualized inflation rate during the Biden administration peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, and was down to 3.0% when Trump took office in January 2025. It was most recently up to 3.7% for the 12 months ending in September.
It’s unclear how Trump calculated 1.8% inflation. He said it referred to “core inflation,” and in otherinstances used 1.7% and said this was over three months. That’s also wrong. Core inflation, which refers to the rise in prices excluding food and energy items, was 2.6% for the 12 months ending in September. That is down from the 3.3% annual core inflation rate Trump inherited, but the annual rate hasn’t been 1.7% or lower since 2021.
Oil prices: While talking about the Iran war during his Syracuse rally, Trump said: “As soon as the war is over, oil is tumbling down like you’ve never seen. It’s already coming way down. We control the strait. Oil is coming down.” The price of crude oil is not “way down.” West Texas Intermediate crude, which is the U.S. oil benchmark, was $98.73 a barrel on Oct. 9, and was up to $105.25 as of Oct. 26, according to Energy Information Administration data. The price was $66.96 a barrel on Feb. 27, the day before the war with Iran began. Meanwhile, the price of Brent crude, the international oil standard, was $130.03 on Oct. 9, up from $71.32 just before the war. It was $128.12 as of Oct. 26. It’s unknown how fast oil prices will fall when the war ends. Analysts told us in May that it could take many months before the price of gasoline, which is influenced by oil prices, is back to the pre-war national average of $2.94 per gallon.
Trump speaks during a campaign rally on Oct. 26 in Corinth, Mississippi. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
Poverty: Trump said in San Antonio on Oct. 7: “The poverty rate has just reached its lowest level, so the best poverty numbers, lowest level in American history. Think of that. African American poverty, Hispanic American poverty, and Native American poverty rates are all at their lowest levels ever recorded.” Trump is right about the official poverty rate, but an alternative measure isn’t at its lowest level.
The official U.S. poverty rate was 10.2% in 2025, the lowest on record, according to estimates the Census Bureau released in September. The official poverty rates for Hispanics and Native Americans also reached record lows last year. The lowest rate for African Americans was 17.1% in 2022 (see Table 3).
But 2025 was not a record year based on the supplemental poverty measure, which factors in government assistance programs that help low-income households, such as food and housing assistance, and accounts for geography and additional expenses not covered in the official poverty measure. By that measure, 13.1% of the U.S. population was living in poverty in 2025, which was higher than the low of 7.7% in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the pre-pandemic low of 11.7% in 2019. Poverty for African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans was also lower in previous years using the SPM (see Table 8).
More people working. “More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country,” Trump said in Port Huron, Michigan, on Oct. 25. This has been a staple of Trump’s speeches for more than a year, and, while accurate, there’s less to it than it may appear. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 159,044,000 people working in the U.S. in September. That’s more than ever before. But the U.S. also has its largest population now. The employment-to-population ratio, which was 59.2% in September, is down from 60.1% when Trump took office for his second term in January 2025.
Economic growth: In Youngstown, Ohio, on Oct. 12, Trump said, “Our first term was phenomenal. You know, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country. We’re blowing it away now.” But neither of Trump’s terms were the “greatest” in terms of growth of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product, the measure favored by economists. During Trump’s first term, annual real GDP growth peaked at 3% in 2018, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Since he has been back in office, real GDP growth was just 2.3% in 2025 and was also less than 3% in the first and second quarters of 2026. Dating back to the Reagan administration, real economic growth has exceeded 3% annually 16 times.
Investing in America: In Clarksville, Tennessee, on Oct. 10, Trump exaggerated when he said, “We have $21 trillion being invested in our country, more than at any time, for any country anywhere in the world.” Trump has never provided a full accounting for this inflated claim. The White House website only claims $11.2 trillion “in new investment in America, and counting,” as of Oct. 22. As we’vewritten, much of that “investment” is based on announcements from companies and countries that experts told us are speculative and may never happen. And many of the announcements are routine expansion plans and have nothing to do with Trump’s policies.
Factories. In San Antonio, the president said, “We have more factories being built right now than at any time in the history of our country,” a claim he has made repeatedly. There’s not one source of information showing how many factories have been under construction at any given time over U.S. history. But U.S. Census Bureau data on manufacturing construction spending contradict Trump’s claim. Spending to build or rehabilitate manufacturing sites has declined since late 2024. The quarterly and monthly figures continue to show this trend since we wrote about the issue in February. The decline is expected to continue in 2027, according to a biannual survey conducted by the American Institute of Architects.
Benefits
Medicare checks. Trump claimed in Syracuse that his administration “has also located billions and billions of dollars that were supposed to be spent on improving Medicare, but they never spent it. So instead, they wanted to hide it.” He added that more than 20 million seniors would “receive a check for a minimum of $100 each because I found all that money.” But that money was never hidden. Trump is referring to a fund Congress created in 2008 to pay for improvements to Medicare. The size of the fund has varied over the years as Congress has added to it or taken money out, but the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has never spent any of it. CMS says the payments to beneficiaries are $90 each, not “a minimum of $100,” as Trump said. Those payments will deplete most of the roughly $2 billion that had been in the fund, according to the health policy research organization KFF.
$5,000 checks: In Park City, Kansas, on Oct. 19, Trump said, “If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, I am going to give all adult citizens in the United States of America $5,000.” He said this would be possible because “we’re taking in massive amounts of money through tariffs and many other record-setting economic things.” Paying that much to the more than 245 million U.S. citizens 18 and older would cost around $1.2 trillion. Tariff revenue has increased under Trump, but is still less than $200 billion a year. “It would take 6+ years of tariffs to fund one year of these checks,” Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told us.
Tax cuts. In Greenville, North Carolina, on Oct. 20, Trump boasted that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that he signed on July 4, 2025, “gave you no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.” As we have written, the law did not eliminate all taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security. The exclusion on tips, for example, is limited to qualified tips up to $25,000 and begins to phase out when modified adjusted gross income exceeds $150,000 for a single filer. The overtime exclusion also hits income limits. And the Social Security provision — actually a tax deduction of $6,000 for those age 65 and older whether they get Social Security benefits or not — phases out for those earning $75,000 or $150,000 for couples filing jointly. Moreover, all three provisions expireafter 2028.
He misleadingly added that “every single Dumocrat in Congress” voted against all three provisions. As we have written, however, while no Democrat voted for the OBBBA, many said they supported the tax cuts on tips, overtime and for seniors — and would work to make them permanent — but opposed the larger bill for other reasons — chiefly that overall tax cuts were skewed to the wealthy, and that the legislation cut funding to Medicaid and reduced spending on federal food benefits.
Prescription drug prices. Also in North Carolina, Trump said, “And under my most favored nation agreement on drug prices, we went from paying the highest drug prices anywhere in the world just a few months ago … to the lowest drug prices anywhere in the world — with price differences of 300 percent, 400 percent, 500 percent, 600 and even 700 percent.” Setting aside the mathematical ridiculousness of drug prices dropping by 300% to 700% (in which drug companies would be paying customers instead of the other way around), the claim about Americans paying the lowest drug prices in the world is exaggerated. As we have written, Trump’s efforts may have lowered prices for some consumers buying certain drugs. But there isn’t evidence the deals so far have led to broad decreases in drug prices, and experts told us there’s no guarantee of substantial savings for Americans in general in the future.
Crime
Violent crime: In San Antonio, Trump said, “Together we achieved the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded, despite the people coming in that we didn’t want.” Then he added, “And remember, we got most of those hardcore criminals out.” As we’ve written, FBI data show the 2024-to-2025 decreases in both the violent crime rate (9.7%) and the murder rate (18.5%) were the largest one-year declines going back to 1936. That’s not all due to Trump, as violent crime has been falling for the past several years since a spike during the 2020 pandemic. Also, in a September report written by the University of Wisconsin’s Michael T. Light for the Council on Criminal Justice, Light said it was difficult to link a decline in homicide to immigration enforcement, since homicide began decreasing before the 2025 surge in enforcement, which “disproportionately targeted nonviolent immigrants.” Light said that “homicides declined across states regardless of their cooperation with federal immigration authorities.”
Drug smuggling: In Sioux City, Iowa, on Oct. 22, Trump made the unsupported claim that “we brought the flow of deadly drugs coming in by ocean … down by 97%.” As we wrote in June, it’s not possible to know if his claim is accurate because there is no comprehensive data on all drugs trafficked to the U.S., including the amount not seized by officers. Administration officials told otherfact-checkers that the president’s claim is based on seizure data comparing the amount of drugs seized by CBP’s Air and Marine Operations in July 2025 to November 2025. That’s cherry-picking. The amount of seized drugs is used by some as a proxy for how much enters the country in total. But using July — which saw a huge one-month spike in drugs seized — as a starting point made the change in drug seizures during Trump’s second term look like a much larger decline.
Immigration
Illegal immigration: When criticizing the Biden administration in his Youngstown remarks, Trump said: “They allowed 25 million people to pour across our borders from all over the world. They came from prisons. They were drug dealers. They were rapists. They were murderers, 11,888 murderers, half of whom committed more than one murder. And they poured in here totally unchecked, totally unvetted.”
As we’ve written, Trump’s inflated 25 million figure is more than double the number of people caught crossing the border illegally (7.3 million, which includes repeat offenders), people who showed up at legal entry ports without authorization (1.2 million), and people estimated to have evaded capture (2 million) under the Biden administration. And after those initial encounters, 2.9 million were removed by CBP, and 3.2 million were released with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement or given parole or other classifications.
Also, immigration experts told us there’s no evidence that other countries released large numbers of inmates and then sent them to illegally immigrate to the U.S., as Trump has repeatedly claimed since 2024 without substantiating it. As for 11,888 murderers, that refers to the number of noncitizens in the U.S. — including those with legal status — who had been convicted of murder but were not in ICE custody as of September 2024. DHS previously told us that the “vast majority” entered and had their custody status determined prior to the Biden administration and that many were in prison.
Zero admissions. In Perry, Georgia, on Oct. 24, Trump said, “In the past 17 months, zero illegal aliens have been admitted to the United States.” What Trump likely means, as U.S. Customs and Border Protection highlighted in an Oct. 16 press release, is that there have been no releases at the southern border, meaning no one caught crossing the border illegally was temporarily released into the U.S., for example, to apply for asylum. On his first day in office, Trump enacted a policy effectively barring asylum applications. It does not mean that no migrants are attempting to cross the border illegally, or that none of them are successful in doing so. Over the last 17 months, about 5,000 to 10,000 migrants have been apprehended attempting to illegally cross into the U.S. every month by Border Patrol agents (far fewer than were apprehended each month under President Joe Biden). As we have written, while CBP does not regularly report on the number of so-called gotaways, immigrants who are detected via electronic surveillance crossing the border but evade apprehension, CBP has acknowledged thousands have occurred.
Other Claims
Climate change. Trump wrongly suggested that climate change isn’t real and that the world is getting cooler, as he hasbefore. In Youngstown, he referred to a 2018 climate report and said that “we had a lot of cooling and the ice is now bigger than it’s ever been, for some reason. It grew a lot.” He went on to falsely claim that “the word ‘warming’ didn’t work” so the term “climate change” is now used instead. Global average temperatures have been rising for decades, with all 10 of the warmest years on record occurring since 2015. It’s unclear which ice Trump is referencing, but Arctic sea ice and ice sheets such as Greenland and Antarctica have all been losing ice over time, as data collected by NASA show.
Ending wars: In Michigan, Trump claimed, “I settled eight wars. No other president settled a war.” We’ve writtenbefore that experts in international relations have credited Trump with playing a key role in ending fighting in four conflicts. Trump also counts some international disagreements that weren’t wars, as well as some battles that haven’t officially ended. In addition, it’s not accurate that no other U.S. president helped end a war. As CNN has noted, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton each helped broker peace agreements between nations at war.
2020 election: When talking about the 2020 presidential election in Iowa, Trump falsely claimed: “They cheated us on the second one because we won it three times. … They cheated. They rigged the election.” Trump has never proved his baseless allegation that Democrats cheated to win in 2020. Biden received more than 81.2 million popular votes to Trump’s 74.2 million, and Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. In referring to Republicans’ SAVE America Act, Trump went on to say that Democrats “voted against voter ID because they want to cheat” and “voted against proof of citizenship because they want to cheat.” But opposing the legislation doesn’t mean that Democrats want to cheat during elections. Some Democratic lawmakers have opposed the voter registration and identification bill, which includes several other provisions, because they say it could make it much harder for millions of citizens to vote.
Clarification, Oct. 28: In our item about violent crime, we clarified that a September report we cited was written for the Council on Criminal Justice by the University of Wisconsin’s Michael T. Light.
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As Ohio voter polls show Democrat Dr. Amy Acton narrowly pulling ahead in the gubernatorial race, President Donald Trump urged his supporters to cast their ballots for her Republican opponent Vivek Ramaswamy.
Acton, Trump said at a Oct. 12 rally in Youngstown, closed schools and businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she was the state’s chief health officer. Now, Trump warned, she would make Ohioans’ lives more expensive.
“Amy Acton is trying to double your state income tax,” he said.
Ramawamy’s platform includes eliminating the state income tax, and his campaign and the Ohio Republican Party have repeated the accusation during what has become a contentious race to replace Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who is term-limited. The claim has appeared in pro-Ramaswamy ads, a Ramaswamy campaign-funded website, social media posts and a state GOP press release.
When PolitiFact asked the White House for evidence that Acton supports doubling Ohio income taxes, a spokesperson pointed us to the Republican National Committee, which in turn directed us to the Ramaswamy campaign’s website, “Can’t Afford Amy Acton.”
The website’s calculations estimate that Acton’s proposals would cost more than $21 billion annually and says paying for them would require Ohio to double its state income tax. But that total is based on math that makes broad and unsupported assumptions about Acton’s policy proposals and how widely they would apply to Ohioans.
Ohio Department of Taxation figures show that the state collected about $11 billion in individual income taxes in fiscal 2025. We found no evidence that Acton supports doubling those proceeds by raising income taxes.
Her campaign has proposed tax credits for working families and changes to tax policies affecting wealthy Ohioans and businesses, but it has provided no comprehensive explanation of how much this plan would cost or how she would fund it. Still, one expert we spoke to said $21 billion is an exaggeration.
What are Acton’s policy proposals?
Acton’s platform includes a working families tax cut that would provide an additional $1,778 to married couples that have two children and are earning $60,000 annually.
The plan includes an earned income tax credit for up to 775,000 working families and a child tax credit of $1,000 annually per child ages 0 through 6 and $500 per child ages 7 through 18 in families earning up to $85,000. The campaign said the child tax credit would benefit more than 1.4 million children and their families.
What Acton calls her “affordability plan” includes lowering prescription drug prices, relieving medical debt, reducing health insurance premiums and addressing energy costs. Her campaign said increasing state support for public schools could ease pressure on local property taxpayers.
Acton’s campaign also proposes closing tax loopholes for wealthy Ohioans and reducing tax exemptions for data centers.
Examining Ramaswamy’s estimates
Ramaswamy’s website cites several of Acton’s proposals, including medical debt relief and child care assistance, to support its estimate that her agenda would cost more than $21 billion annually. But PolitiFact found that’s based on unrealistic estimates that don’t align with the details Acton has released about her plans.
For example, Ramaswamy’s campaign estimated that Acton’s medical debt forgiveness proposal would cost taxpayers $15.1 billion annually. The website says it arrived at that figure by multiplying an estimated 810,000 Ohioans who have medical debt by $18,660, the national average of medical debt in the United States from 2021.
Daniel Skinner, an expert in health policy from Ohio University, said the $15.1 billion figure lacks credibility in part because it “assumes every person with medical debt would be eligible.” It also calls the cost “annual” even though buying and retiring existing debt would be largely a one-time expense, he said.
Ramaswamy’s website also criticizes what it says is Acton’s plan to provide childcare subsidies. After Acton said in March that childcare for two children costs $25,000 annually, Republicans interpreted that to mean she was calling for universal paid childcare. They said that would cost the state $5.6 billion annually.
The campaign arrived at that number by multiplying all 520,000 Ohio households with a child younger than 6 by $13,000 in what it said are annual per-child child care costs, then subtracting the $1.1 billion that the state already spends on childcare through the Department of Children and Youth.
Acton has said she wants to expand access to safe, affordable child care and preschool, but she has not specifically called for universal, government-funded child care.
Ohio’s program already subsidizes child care for eligible families, with the state paying a portion of the cost and the families responsible for a co-payment. Heather Smith, a child care policy expert at the nonprofit research think tank Policy Matters Ohio, said those family contributions matter when estimating how much the state would spend to expand access to child care.
“Only families making under the federal poverty level are not required to pay a co-pay for child care, meaning the state government would not be shouldering the full cost of child care for all families if it were to expand eligibility,” Smith said.
Our ruling
Trump said Acton “is trying to double your state income tax.”
That’s based on an estimate from Ramaswamy’s campaign that Acton’s proposals would cost more than $21 billion in additional annual spending.
But that figure is based on broad and poorly sourced estimates that assume more people would benefit from Acton’s proposals than her proposals themselves outline. Ramaswamy’s estimate also makes false assumptions about Acton’s platform, including that she supports universal paid childcare, when she has not said that.
Acton’s platform includes providing tax cuts to working families and child tax credits, and although she has not provided detailed information about how she would pay for these proposals, her campaign said she would not raise the state income tax to fund them.
Vice-president tries to link El-Sayed to Paris protests and claims he would lead rioters in ‘burning down’ Detroit
JD Vance has escalated his inflammatory attacks on Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for US Senate in Michigan who has faced an onslaught of Islamophobia, claiming he would lead rioters in “burning down” Detroit.
El-Sayed, who would become the country’s first Muslim senator if he wins next week’s election, has been branded a “jihadist” by Donald Trump, the US president.
Ars Technica's Dan Goodin reports: Defenders across the world face the burden of responding to yet another botched code-execution vulnerability, this time in boot-time firmware used by most of the world's server vendors and data centers. The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 9.5 out of 10, resides in the TianoCore EDK II, an open source codebase that hardware makers and cloud providers use to create the UEFI firmware that runs during the boot-up sequence. Last year, a representative of the UEFI Forum called (PDF) EDK2 the "preeminent solution / implementation of the UEFI specifications." Virtually all UEFI suppliers (sometimes still called IBVs or independent BIOS vendors), including AMI, Insyde, and Phoenix, use the reference code extensively. Project Mu, Microsoft's hardened EDK2 fork, used the code containing the vulnerable component as well.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-97631, is a memory-corruption flaw in an ICMP component that attackers can exploit to execute malicious code that runs before the operating system and firmware can implement defenses like Secure Boot, which establishes a chain of trust for all code, including the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), loaded during boot. While final payloads delivered by CVE-2026-97631 have no persistence -- meaning they run only once -- they can give attackers a wide opening to install other payloads that also run each time early in the boot process.
The parties that discovered CVE-2026-97631 -- Alex Matrosov of Anthropic and Dan Holmes of Google -- had arranged for it to stay under wraps until a coordinated disclosure that was scheduled for January. AMI, a maker of motherboards and other hardware, published this pull request last month that detailed the vulnerability and included a code fix. Once the post came to the attention of the discovering parties, TianoCore Project members published a public advisory last week. With publicly available patch code, it will be trivial for advanced hackers to learn how the vulnerability is triggered and to build working exploits. Further compounding the urgency, patching UEFI code vulnerabilities in millions of end devices sold and used by thousands of hardware makers and cloud providers is cumbersome and time-consuming.
DDN EXAScaler and Arcitecta Mediaflux will replace 11 legacy storage systems, simplifying access to research data while balancing performance and cost
SYDNEY, Oct. 27, 2026 — DDN has announced that UNSW Sydney has selected DDN to deliver a new research data storage environment as part of the university’s Research Data Experience (RDE) program. Working with Australian software company Arcitecta, DDN will combine its EXAScaler parallel file system with Arcitecta’s Mediaflux data management platform to help researchers spend less time managing data and more time using it.
Following an extensive 18-month evaluation, UNSW selected an integrated approach that will replace 11 legacy storage systems with a coordinated environment for high-performance storage and enterprise data management. The decision reflects a broader challenge facing research-intensive institutions: how to support rapidly expanding scientific datasets while simplifying infrastructure, improving data accessibility and managing long-term costs.
Built for data-intensive research, high-performance computing and AI workloads, DDN EXAScaler is a parallel file system designed to deliver high-throughput access to large and complex datasets at scale. Its ability to support both flash and hard disk storage enables organizations to balance performance requirements with infrastructure costs. For research institutions such as UNSW, this provides a foundation for supporting demanding scientific workloads without requiring every dataset to reside on premium storage media.
“World-class research deserves world-class data infrastructure. Our partnership with UNSW is about empowering researchers to spend less time managing data and more time making discoveries,” said Kevin Delane – President & CRO of DDN Inc. “By bringing EXAScaler together with Arcitecta’s data management capabilities, we are helping UNSW build a simpler foundation for data-intensive research, one designed to reduce storage fragmentation and give researchers more time to focus on discovery.”
The architecture is designed to automatically move data between high-speed on-campus storage caches and a central off-campus system. Researchers will benefit from fast access where needed, while the university can use lower-cost hard disk drives for data that doesn’t require flash-level performance. The on-premises solution will also support cloud environments.
DDN is the project’s prime contractor, with Arcitecta supplying the data management layer. Arcitecta developed an EXAScaler connector that captures file-system metadata changes for Mediaflux to use, linking high-performance storage with richer tools for organizing and managing data.
“Research data is only valuable when people can find it, understand it and put it to work,” said Jason Lohrey, CEO of Arcitecta. “Integrating Mediaflux with EXAScaler brings data and metadata management closer to the underlying storage infrastructure. The goal is to make complex research data environments easier to manage without compromising the performance demanding workloads require.”
The project began September 1, 2026. Equipment delivery is planned for early 2027, with the system expected to go live later in 2027.
About DDN
DDN is the world’s leading provider of AI data storage and data management platforms, powering over 20 years of innovation across HPC, enterprise, and the largest AI deployments on Earth. With its EXA, Infinia, and intelligent data management platforms, DDN delivers unmatched performance, scale, and business value for customers building next-generation AI factories, hyperscale clouds, and Sovereign AI initiatives. DDN is the trusted partner for thousands of the world’s most data-intensive organizations, including the leading national labs, research institutions, enterprises, hyperscalers, financial firms, and autonomous vehicle innovators. For more information, visit www.ddn.com.
About Arcitecta
Arcitecta has been building the industry’s best data management platforms since the dawn of the data age. Today, Arcitecta is transforming data management and backup with Mediaflux, a rich end-to-end data fabric that simplifies data-intensive workflows in petabyte-scale environments to improve business and research outcomes. Mediaflux unifies data management processes into a single platform, simplifying the administration of massive data sets and allowing world leaders to solve some of the most challenging problems on the planet. For more, visit www.arcitecta.com.
(The Center Square) – With energy prices at record highs the week before election day, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that the U.S. will receive one million barrels of free Venezuelan oil, promising that gas and diesel prices “will soon…
Israel’s election appeared to have delivered no clear winner on Tuesday night after a historic turnout by voters for an election described by some as the most consequential in the country’s history, and marked by a record participation by Israeli Arab voters.
Exit polls published on Tuesday evening suggested that the opposition bloc of parties led by the former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Gadi Eisenkot, would win most seats in the Knesset by a slight margin, edging out Benjamin Netanyahu’s right and far-right coalition despite the prime minister’s Likud emerging as the largest party.
A DSA-backed California prosecutor who helped force Meta to pay a historic $17 billion settlement this year is on a glide path to become the top lawyer for Los Angeles — unless a tech investor cozy with Elon Musk can spend enough to stop her.
San Francisco resident John Hering has sunk more than $1.25 million into an effort to defeat Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general at the California Department of Justice endorsed by the LA chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and to support John McKinney, a county prosecutor running an uphill general election campaign. It’s a heavy injection of cash from a single individual in a local race for a little-known office, but it pales in comparison to Hering’s private-sector spending: In 2022, his investment firm Vy Capital pumped $700 million into Musk’s takeover of the company then known as Twitter and $300 million into his tunnel-construction Boring Company.
A co-founder of the cybersecurity company Lookout, Hering is spending in line with the tech industry in which he’s long been invested. While the city attorney’s office is commonly used as the city’s defense against litigious residents, the office also carries the power to mold legislation, enforce state law, such as labor protections, and take on corporations and the federal government in court. Roy has vowed to wield the office’s regulatory muscle against corporations — including Big Tech.
“Monopolies and Big Tech are things that [Roy] sees as an opportunity to wage battle against,” said former LA City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who has not endorsed either candidate. “If I were Big Tech, I would certainly think, ‘OK, well, this is someone who is a potential threat.’”
Hering, who did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, is part of a group of tech titans backing McKinney. Others include the founders of Ring, Tinder, and Boingo, and investors in Anthropic, Anduril, and SpaceX, who have collectively put more than $1.9 million into pro-McKinney committees. A group called “Committee to Expand the Middle Class Candidate” — backed by the property rental tech giant Airbnb — donated an additional $4.2 million to a committee supporting McKinney.
To help get McKinney through the June primary election, Hering and fellow tech investor Diego Berdakin poured more than $1 million into another committee. Over the past month, Hering’s general-election spending group, Neighbors for John McKinney, has been paying for TV and online ads and mailers that play up McKinney as “a lifelong Democrat” and “100% anti-MAGA.”
The same can hardly be said for the group’s top funder.
After giving to Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid and Democratic candidates like Beto O’Rourke, Hering donated $41,300 to the Republican National Committee and $500,000 to Musk’s America PAC in 2024 to support Donald Trump’s run for president. He has publicly praised Musk’s chaotic purge of the federal government through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency program and called the world’s richest man an “American hero” for offering to pay TSA salaries during the spring government shutdown. In 2025, Hering and Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who has also donated to Neighbors for John McKinney, attended a White House dinner where Trump hosted dozens of high-profile Silicon Valley figures. The pro-McKinney group is also funded by billionaires Rick Caruso, a failed LA mayoral candidate, and Ron Burkle, a Democratic megadonor.
Earlier this cycle, Hering, who listed San Francisco as his residence in campaign finance documents, also waded into the LA mayoral election — boosting right-wing reality star Spencer Pratt.
Tech industry spending in LA’s elections arrives amid a midterm cycle where Big Tech and artificial intelligence have doled out millionsof dollars to exert influence in congressional and state races across the U.S. as lawmakers grapple with how to regulate the industries. Musk, for example, has dropped more than $442 million into the midterms, including more than $70 million in his political action committee, America PAC, in October alone. And in state Assembly and Senate races across California, tech and AI executives have spent more than $29 million, according to Tech Equity Action, a political nonprofit that lobbies to craft tech-related legislation while advocating for workers’ rights.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom gave big AI companies a scare last month, when he signed a slate of bills protecting workers from AI overreach, like limiting its use to terminate or discipline workers, banning employers from using AI to surveil employees in bathrooms, and assuring that human healthcare workers will have the final say on patient care decisions.
The tech industry had fought hard to kill the bills, and while Newsom did offer the industry some concessions, labor organizers say the new laws offer them an opportunity to expand local worker protections, too.
In LA, Roy has said she would use the city attorney’s office to fight for workers against losses in potential wages, promising that she would go after “large corporations and big tech companies” that “misclassify workers as independent contractors to avoid paying them minimum wage and providing benefits,” according to her campaign website. She also spoke against companies who are increasingly using automation “to evade regulations and eliminate jobs.”
Tech leaders may view a city attorney with an appetite for regulation as “existential to their business model,” said Brian Justie, a researcher at the UCLA Labor Center who was part of the coalition that pushed for the bills.
“What happens in California sets a precedent and serves as a blueprint for the rest of the country,” Justie said. “And so if you’re a Big Tech, you really need to have a certain outcome come to pass here to avoid ripple effects elsewhere.”
For his part, McKinney has blasted Roy for her desire to “turn the city attorney’s office into the country’s largest public interest law firm” as out of touch with what LA voters want. However, voters across the U.S. have increasingly expressed opposition to the expansion of artificial intelligence and the construction of data centers. Roy’s campaign has shown a willingness to lend an ear to growing AI anxieties.
“Billionaires don’t want to answer to the working people, consumers, and communities they exploit,” Roy said in a statement to The Intercept. “But as Los Angeles’ City Attorney, I intend to hold them, their corporations, and the MAGA Republicans that permit their behavior accountable — that’s why they’re spending on someone who won’t.”
McKinney did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
Ads put out by Neighbors for John McKinney assert that McKinney would “take on crooked landlords.” The committee’s website said he would fight for tenant’s “legal protections” against things like “illegal eviction.” But among the committee’s biggest funders is the Santa Monica-based real estate firm, Douglas Emmett Properties, which attempted to carry out one of the largest mass evictions in LA history until it was overruled by a judge. Douglas Emmett donated $250,000 to Neighbors for John McKinney in late September.
Neighbors for John McKinney has also funded attack ads against Roy that paint her as an inexperienced attorney who is weak on crime and has “extreme DSA” positions. The ads cite an article by the conservative California Post, a West Coast spinoff of the New York tabloid, that claimed she had supported a freeze on prosecuting misdemeanors, which she denies.
McKinney campaigns in the mold of law-and-order candidates, pledging to address homelessness and public safety by prosecuting misdemeanors, touting closer relationships with police, and promising to revive a neighborhood prosecutor program. Other California tech-supported efforts have echoed the same — like when tech leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area fueled a successful effort to oust progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
But the LA city attorney’s office holds limited criminal enforcement power, Bonin pointed out. He suspects the tech investment in the LA race is more concerned with potential civil litigation, and he thinks that if voters make that connection, it could spell an issue for the campaign.
“Voters are concerned about Big Tech, they’re certainly concerned about AI, they’re concerned about the influence of — I don’t think you can describe it any other way — 21st-century robber barons,” said Bonin, who now runs the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. “Income inequality is a big issue in Los Angeles, so if they make the connection that this funding is symbolic of the agenda that McKinney will pursue … then it becomes more of an issue.”
Roxana Tynan, executive director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, called the amount of Big Tech money being spent in the race “outrageous.” As she and other labor rights groups gear up for a fight for more worker AI protections in LA — like expanding safeguards to include temporary and gig workers, and banning employers from using AI software to collect sensitive worker information — she said she hoped people would follow the money being poured into the race and the influence that a few figures look to exert on the city.
“These are people who really believe that not only can they buy elections,” Tynan said, “but that they deserve to buy elections.”
Oren, Alon and Tal Alexander sentenced to prison in New York after being convicted in sex trafficking case
Three Florida brothers who exploited the wealth and influence of their family’s luxury real estate business to drug and rape dozens of women were each sentenced to 30 years in prisonin New York on Tuesday for sex trafficking.
Twins Oren and Alon Alexander, 39, and Tal Alexander, 40, were convicted in March on multiple charges after a five-week trial heard details of years of sexual assaults committed in Miami, New York and other high-end locations including the Hamptons; Aspen, Colorado; and on a Caribbean cruise.
Mark Tyrrell, who was in same unit as Sarah Everard’s killer, also guilty on three counts of sexual assault
A former Metropolitan police officer who served in the same unit as Sarah Everard’s killer, Wayne Couzens, has been found guilty of sexual offences against a woman he met through his work as an officer.
A court heard that Mark Tyrrell raped the woman – who cannot be identified for legal reasons – by having sex with her after she repeatedly said no.
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
In Cook County, Illinois, a woman in a viral video said a voting machine displayed a message about her chosen candidate’s popularity.
“One of the questions was about the judges, and I picked the Republican judges,” the woman said in a TikTok post that is no longer public but is still visible on other posts that reshared it. “And once I selected one of the judges, I got a notification on the bar that said, ‘People are not typically choosing this person!’”
She said when she made three selections in that race, the message disappeared: “Why is my ballot telling me that who I’m picking isn’t the more popular choice? I have a problem with that.”
Popular X accounts such as Wall Street Apes and Catturd reshared her video and garnered more than a million views. The accounts reposting it said it’s evidence of election fraud.
“According to the Illinois State Board of Elections’ Voting Systems Equipment Log, Dominion is listed as both the equipment vendor and support vendor for their voting machines and has their contract,” read the caption of the Wall Street Apes’ X post with 1.4 million views. “It’s RIGGED.”
A Cook County election official responded to fraud claims, saying voting machines don’t give information about a candidate’s popularity with voters. Instead, voting machines give alerts when people don’t make all available selections in a race, known as an undervote.
Machines notify voters when they don’t make all available selections
The woman in the video said she lives in Streamwood and that she voted early in Cook County.
Although she said she “picked the Republican judges,” Sally Daly, deputy clerk of communications at the Cook County Clerk’s Office, told PolitiFact in an email that there are no Republican judicial candidates on the ballot.
The woman in the video appeared to concede that and later uploaded another video saying she initially and unintentionally mentioned the wrong race. But she maintained she had received the notification she had described.
“Voting equipment does not tell voters which candidates are more popular, nor does it discourage voters from selecting any particular candidate,” she wrote. “The equipment may display a notification if a voter leaves a contest blank or does not make all available selections (an undervote).”
The clerk’s office shared an image showing such a notification, which reads, “This contest is undervoted!” when a voter makes fewer selections than those available.
Gordon said the feature allows voters to review their ballots and voters are free to leave any contest blank.
A notification on voting equipment reads, “This contest is undervoted!” (Image shared by Sally Daly)
“This is the only report of this type that has been brought to the Clerk’s Office attention in a jurisdiction with nearly 1.8 million registered voters,” Daly said.
Aris Garcia, Streamwood Village Clerk and a Republican, addressed the claim in a statement posted on Facebook: “We have attempted to recreate the reported message and were unable to reproduce the experience described.”
‘Undervoting’ notifications are required by federal certification standards
Cook County uses the ballot marking device ImageCast X made by Dominion Voting Systems, which was acquired by Liberty Vote, a company founded by Scott Leiendecker, a former Republican election official. President Donald Trump and his supporters have long targeted Dominion with baseless claims about election fraud.
Liberty Vote referred PolitiFact to Gordon’s statement.
When a voter selects too few or too many candidates than is allowed, voting equipment gives undervote or overvote warnings.
“This is generally referred to as ‘second chance voting’ because it provides a voter a second chance to correct a potential mistake before casting and counting the ballot,” said Ryan Macias, an election technology and cybersecurity expert who held federal government roles in both Trump administrations and the Biden and Obama administrations.
The 2002 Help America Vote Act mandated that voting systems used in federal elections allow voters to correct any errors before casting their ballots, and notify voters if they selected more than one candidate for a single office, known as an overvote.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s voluntary guidelines for testing and certifying voting systems issued in 2005 required certain systems to “indicate to the voter when no selection, or an insufficient number of selections, has been made for a contest (e.g., undervotes)” and to “notify the voter if he or she has made more than the allowable number of selections for any contest (e.g., overvotes).”
Macias said the requirements apply to devices such as the ImageCast X.
Dozens of states and the District of Columbia use aspects of the Election Assistance Commission’s guidelines, so election technology vendors typically follow those standards.
Our ruling
Viral social media posts said a woman’s account of a message displayed on a Cook County, Illinois, voting machine proves the election is “rigged.”
A Cook County election official disputed the woman’s account of a voting machine notification about a candidate’s popularity. But machines are programmed to alert voters when they don’t make all available selections in a race, known as an undervote. Federal law requires voting systems allow voters to correct any potential errors on a ballot before voting.
Tightly fought election saw record turnout as incumbent mayor ran against her rival Brad Bradford
The mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, promised more rental housing, free school lunches and reduce fares for frequent transit riders after she was elected to a decisive second term as mayor in a wave of support for progressive councillors.
The tightly fought election saw record turnout but Chow ultimately turned in a dominant 13-percentage-point win over her rival, Brad Bradford, receiving 54% of the vote compared with his 41%. Many had been expecting a far closer race, given weeks of polling that suggested a dead heat between the pair who presented differing visions for Canada’s largest city.
Eight-bedroom mansion listed at $18.5m sold for $28.5m and has a private garden and three-car garage
A San Francisco estate sold for $10m above its listing price this month in a new record for the city as the artificial intelligence boom continues to drive up real estate prices.
Located in the city’s tony Presidio Heights neighborhood, the eight-bedroom mansion was listed at $18.5m on 2 October and ultimately sold for $28.5m on 22 October, according to the property’s listing.
The unsigned and unsworn superseding complaint comes just hours before the defendants were due to appear in federal court in Washington, D.C. for a preliminary hearing.
President Donald Trump ramped up anti-Muslim rhetoric against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in a Michigan rally, calling the U.S. Senate candidate a “jihadist” and baselessly associating him with violent extremism.
“I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator,” Trump said Oct. 25. He made clear who he was referring to moments later. “The people of Michigan are going to defeat Abdul Mohamed … El-Sayed.”
Trump tried to tie El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political movement that started in Egypt in 1928, and accused him and his family members of supporting extremism. Even for a race in which Republicans haveregularly accusedEl-Sayed ofaligning with extremists, Trump was particularly brazen in his remarks, at one point comparing El-Sayed to the terrorists who hijacked planes on 9/11.
During the rally, Trump introduced the father of Todd Beamer, a Michigan man who died on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought the hijackers on Sept. 11.
“Twenty-five years later, Michigan needs to stand up and fight—just like Todd did—to stop a jihadist from walking into the Capitol,” Trump said.
El-Sayed is running against Republican former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, who joined Trump at the Port Huron rally, for the Senate seat held by outgoing Democratic Sen. Gary Peters.
He added that El-Sayed couldn’t be trusted with state secrets and said he’d “be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector” to enter the Senate. Trump said El-Sayed wants the United States to “go to Shariah law,” something we’ve ratedPants on Fire.
A jihadist is someone who believes in using military means to promote Islam in society and government. El-Sayed has never done that, and he’s not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which primarily operates in the Middle East.
The White House did not respond to our request for evidence for Trump’s claim. At an Oct. 26Detroit news conference, El-Sayed called Trump’s attacks “deflections and deceptions based on no evidence.”
President Donald Trump watches a video showing Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed during a campaign rally at McMorran Place Sports and Entertainment Center, Sunday, Oct. 25, 2026, in Port Huron, Mich. (AP)
What is a jihadist?
Jihadism is generally understood as an ideology that believes in using military means to promote Islam both socially and in government. It’s often used to describe violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida and ISIS.
“There is absolutely no credible reason to apply the term to El-Sayed,” said Mohammad Hassan Khalil, a religious studies professor who directs the Muslim studies program at Michigan State University.
El-Sayed has repeatedly said he agrees with the protections forreligious freedom in the U.S. Constitution, and he’s not campaigning to impose Islamic religious rules in the United States. He has never called for violence to promote Islam.
“To my mind, this is a clear example of anti-Muslim bigotry and fearmongering,” Khalil told PolitiFact.
El-Sayed isn’t a Muslim Brotherhood member
TheMuslim Brotherhood has branches in several Middle Eastern countries. The various branches aren’t under a common leadership, and there’s a variety of ideologies among its national organizations.
Broadly, the groups are religiously conservative and call for aligning government and daily life with the laws of Islam, or Shariah. Some offshoots have engaged in violence, but the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has rejected violence since the 1970s.
Each branch is a formal organization with member rolls and recruiting processes, said Nathan Brown, a George Washington University professor who studies Middle Eastern politics.
“If he had been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood they would have kicked him out because of his various stances,” said Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who studies Islamic and Middle Eastern history. “He supports LGBTQ rights. That’s not a Muslim Brotherhood position … The whole thing is just made up out of whole cloth.”
The Trump administration hasdesignated some branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. This includes the Egyptian and Jordanian branches for providing material support to Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza.
What El-Sayed said during Egyptian revolution
During the Michigan rally, Trump said El-Sayed’s “writings of the past” were extreme, and he said El-Sayed signed a letter of support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
“Mohamed El-Sayed himself signed a letter supporting the Muslim Brotherhood urging them to—quote—purge the journalists and the police,” Trump said, referring to El-Sayed by his middle name, which he does often.
In November 2012, El-Sayed signed a statement with 45 other Egyptian Americans, identified in the letter as Egyptian community leaders, defending President Mohamed Morsi, who was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. (PolitiFact used Google Translate to translate the statement from its original Arabic to English.) Morsi had won Egypt’s first democratic electionafter a popular uprising ousted authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak.
“He was the only democratically elected president in Egyptian history,” Cole said. “The fact that El-Sayed supported Morsi in 2012 means nothing about his more specific politics. It means he promoted democracy.”
At the time, Morsi had issued a decreeshielding his decisions from judicial review as a new constitution was being developed. The statement El-Sayed signed supported that decision, but said Morsi should give up those expanded powers after a new constitution was in place. It also included a call to “purge the media and police.” Cole said some of the elements of the government at the time were still loyal to Mubarak. Brown, at George Washington, said Morsi’s supporters claimed the incoming president’s opponents were using the courts to overturn his election. But while the statement El-Sayed signed “is certainly pro-Morsi and partisan,” Brown said, it’s not an expression of support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
In an earlier essay published by The Huffington Post, El-Sayed wrote in support of the protests that led to the uprising, saying concerns about a Muslim Brotherhood takeover shouldn’t dissuade the U.S. from supporting the pro-democracy demonstrations. That essay supported the democratic movement generally, not the Muslim Brotherhood.
Our ruling
Trump said El-Sayed is a “jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member.”
El-Sayed, a Muslim, has never advocated for jihadism and he’s disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood. His stated political beliefs don’t align with the group’s.
The baseless statement plays on anti-Muslim tropes. We rate it Pants on Fire!
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google DeepMind released its newest world model, Genie 4, in research preview on Tuesday. The latest model generates the most photorealistic and interactive worlds yet, allowing users to type prompts mid-simulation to change the scene. The model also generates real-time audio that matches the simulated world, including music, ambient noises, and interactive dialogue.
[...] Google released its predecessor, Genie 3, as a research preview a little over a year ago. Aside from being far more photorealistic and featuring audio, Genie 4 allows for freeform edits, like changing the weather or camera angle in real time or adding new people or objects. It can maintain a consistent scene for up to two minutes, double its predecessor's limit, and offers better physics and more human-like characters. Gemini, Google's AI model, is also mo "What we'll increasingly see in the future are these hybrid world models, where you have a combination of Gemini writing code and text, and Genie ingesting that in real time and simulating reality at different levels of abstraction," Tejas Kulkarni, research director at Google, said during a briefing.
Genie 4 is now available to select testers, with a broader rollout planned in the coming weeks for Google AI Ultra subscribers.
You can watch a demo of Genie 4 on YouTube.
But Shahar is angry that most carers hit with unjust overpayments in the past will still have to repay them, for all the promise of a different future. And he notes that the cliff edge remains in place for four more years, potentially catching out more carers.
Bereaved families tell voters to remember the victims while others have flown thousands of miles to cast their ballots
Election day in Israel began with a protest by some of the voters with most at stake. Bereaved families of those killed in the 7 October attacks held a minute of silence at 6.29am, the moment when Hamas launched its onslaught just over three years ago.
They gathered in a Tel Aviv plaza that has become known as “hostages square” because it was the centre of demonstrations demanding the return of more than 200 captives from Gaza. Holding pictures of their loved ones, they stood in silence then called on voters to remember the losses and betrayals of that day when deciding on the next government.
Two men charged under National Security Act were directed by handler believed to have been working for Iranian intelligence, court told
A group of men were directed to drive vans loaded with petrol to Fairford RAF base by a handler known as Ali, who police believe was working on behalf of Iran, a court heard on Tuesday.
One of the five men tasked with driving to the base called police in the early hours of 27 September after the handler warned the group about a bomb in the vans, prosecutors told Westminster magistrates court.
The Indianapolis Colts have traded All-Pro guard Quenton Nelson to the Seattle Seahawks, a person with knowledge of the deal told the Associated Press on Tuesday.
The person requested anonymity because the deal had not been announced by either team and said the Colts would receive a third-round draft pick and a fifth-round pick in return for the eight-time Pro Bowler.
Emissions from exported oil would not count against carbon budget, insiders say – reasoning likely to draw dismay from climate campaigners
The giant Rosebank oilfield can be approved without breaching the UK’s emission targets, according to government insiders, in a boost to those in the cabinet who are pushing for it to be given the go-ahead.
Photo: Among the evening’s featured speakers was Dashaun Howell, an alumnus of UrbanPromise’s after-school camps and StreetLeader program. Image created on 10/27 using AI.
Annual gathering draws 440 supporters as alumni and volunteers demonstrate how mentoring, education and faith-based programs can shape lives beyond the classroom.
WILMINGTON, Del. — UrbanPromise Wilmington used its annual banquet last week to celebrate not only the young people it serves today, but also the lasting impact its programs have on students, families and the broader Wilmington community.
About 440 community members, supporters and local leaders attended the Oct. 22 event at the Chase Center, where students, alumni, volunteers and board members shared stories about the organization’s work with Wilmington children and teens.
Among the evening’s featured speakers was Dashaun Howell, an alumnus of UrbanPromise’s after-school camps and StreetLeader program.
Howell told attendees that his experience with UrbanPromise helped shape the direction of his life. Today, he works as a union bricklayer and leads a nonprofit that mentors young men.
His work focuses on helping young men explore their identity and faith, set goals, manage money, care for their health and build respectful relationships.
For UrbanPromise, Howell’s story offered an example of what the organization hopes happens when young people receive sustained academic support, mentoring and leadership opportunities.
UrbanPromise Wilmington describes its mission as equipping children and young adults through Christ with skills for academic achievement, life management, personal growth and servant leadership.
The organization serves more than 300 young people each year, ranging in age from 4 to 18, through educational programs, enrichment activities, mentoring and Christian discipleship.
Board member and volunteer Justine Kinnaird also spoke about the educational challenges facing many Wilmington students.
Before retiring, Kinnaird spent 15 years as a special education teacher. She said her experience exposed disparities between urban and suburban schools and strengthened her desire to make sure UrbanPromise students have access to strong academic support.
At UrbanPromise, Kinnaird works on literacy instruction, student assessment and improvement planning.
“My partner teachers are very committed to helping their students achieve academic success,” Kinnaird said.
UrbanPromise cited a 2024 survey showing a 19% English language arts proficiency rate among Wilmington students, underscoring what the organization views as the continued need for intensive literacy support and mentoring.
The banquet also featured a student celebration program, giving supporters a chance to see some of the young people participating in UrbanPromise programs.
The organization works with families, volunteers, donors and community partners in an effort to provide students with academic support while also building leadership skills and personal confidence.
The annual banquet serves as an opportunity for UrbanPromise Wilmington to bring those groups together and demonstrate how its programs extend beyond after-school activities.
For Howell, that impact is now being passed to another generation through the young men he mentors.
UrbanPromise said stories like his illustrate the organization’s broader goal: helping young people develop the skills and relationships they need to build stable, productive futures and eventually invest in others.
To Go Box
Organization: UrbanPromise Wilmington
Mission: Provides educational programs, mentoring, enrichment activities, leadership development and Christian discipleship for Wilmington children and teens.
Who it serves: More than 300 young people annually, ages 4 to 18.
How to participate: Volunteer, donate or learn more about the organization’s programs.
Michal Stasiak and Kinga Wydrzynska pleaded not guilty to 11 counts relating to death of 13-month-old Isabella Stasiak
A 13-month-old girl was subjected to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her parents before she was fatally injured by her mother, a court has heard.
Michal Stasiak, 28, and Kinga Wydrzynska, 26, appeared at Warwick crown court on Tuesday, where they pleaded not guilty to 11 counts related to the death of Isabella Stasiak.
A reconstruction of the iguanodontian dinosaur Paludohadros proudlovii walking through mud along the edge of a shallow body of water. In the distance, the large predatory dinosaur Baryonyx can be seen. (Guilherme Gehr via SWNS)
Longtime Slashdot reader fadethepolice writes: Anduril, arguing that its manufacturing capabilities are directly applicable to laptop manufacturing, is starting a project for a fully 100% U.S.-sourced laptop. The computer will use a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. I did not see any information about the OS, but I'm assuming that, given the type of processor, this will be Linux-based? "Other companies might design their computers in the U.S., Anduril makes them here,â the Anduril founder Palmer Luckey said in a YouTube video. "We're making parts out of metals that the U.S. knows how to extract, knows how to refine, knows how to process, and knows how to mill at scale at a reasonable price; and that goes for the entire laptop. The same thing goes for the battery technology."
The project, called BlueChip, "will take a phased approach, beginning with expanding domestic sourcing and manufacturing, progressing toward eliminating reliance on foreign suppliers, and ultimately establishing an end-to-end American supply chain." The first device is expected in April 2027.
A press release with additional information is available here.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Josh Turek said President Donald Trump’s policies are putting Iowa farms into financial distress and forcing foreclosures in the state.
Turek has blamed actions by the Trump administration, specifically the war in Iran and the tariff policies, for hurting farmers. He made the claim in a debate with his Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, on Oct. 7.
“We lead the nation in farm foreclosures now here in Iowa,” Turek said during the debate on Iowa PBS.
Turek’s comment was about foreclosures, but Turek’s campaign pointed PolitiFact to the number of farm bankruptcies. Farm bankruptcies are a sign of financial distress, but they’re not the same as foreclosures, because farmers can restructure their debt and keep their assets in bankruptcy. Farm foreclosure data is not publicly accessible.
Farm bankruptcies in Iowa have risen in recent years.
When PolitiFact asked for more information to support the claim of farm foreclosures, the Turek campaign pointed to a Farm Bureau report that indexed Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies in 2025.
Chapter 12 bankruptcies are designed for “family farmers” or “family fishermen” with regular annual income. These bankruptcies are meant to enable financially distressed family farmers to “propose and carry out a plan to repay all or part of their debts,” as defined by the U.S. courts.
Iowa was among the leading states for Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies in the report, but it was not No. 1. Iowa was third, with 18 Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies, after Arkansas at 33 and Georgia at 27. Iowa’s count was up from seven in 2024.
Iowa’s 2025 number was comparable with Nebraska at 17, and Wisconsin and Missouri at 16 each.
Of the 315 Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies filed across the country in 2025, the Midwest region recorded 121, marking it the leading region, with a 70% year-over-year change.
Chapter 12 bankruptcies aren’t a measure of farm foreclosures. An individual can keep the farm in a Chapter 12 bankruptcy. After filing for a Chapter 12 bankruptcy, a farmer can propose a repayment plan to make installments to creditors over three to five years.
Rabail Chandio, an agriculture economist at Iowa State University, said there is no clear data on national farm foreclosures.
“We don’t necessarily have public data that covers all of the farm foreclosures,” she said. “What is generally used as a good proxy to cover farm-related bankruptcy are Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings.”
Chandio said Iowa agriculture has seen rising financial stress within the past five years, and that it has only just begun to improve. However, based on Chapter 12 filings, she noted Iowa is not leading the nation.
“If you look at the Midwest, then yes, compared to some of our neighbors we were on the higher end recently,” Chandio said. “You could include Chapter 7, Chapter 11 and Chapter 13s bankruptcies there as well, and some individual farmers also classified as businesses. But we can’t be sure that that is representative or that it is reflecting all the farming operations.”
Chandio said global disruptions, such as the Russia-Ukraine war and the Iran war, affect supply chains and raise the price of inputs.
Silvia Secchi, a University of Iowa environmental policy professor, told PolitiFact Iowa the Farm Bureau data the campaign highlighted doesn’t prove Turek’s claim.
“This is from the Farm Bureau and it indicates that if one believes the Farm Bureau 1) he is incorrect and 2) the numbers are not very high in absolute terms (though they were lower in 2024),” Secchi said in the statement.
Chapter 12 isn’t the only kind of bankruptcy for farmers. Chapter 11 bankruptcy is for businesses and it allows farms to continue operating while they restructure debt, so it’s also not a measure of foreclosures. According to Farm Journal, 26 Iowa farms filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings from January 2021 to June 2026, leading the nation.
While Iowa led the nation in Chapter 11 filings during that time period, it tied for third in Farm Journal’s combined ranking of Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 after California and Arkansas.
Our ruling
Turek said, “We lead the nation in farm foreclosures now here in Iowa.”
Turek refers to foreclosures, but his campaign’s evidence cites bankruptcies. There is not necessarily public data that records farm foreclosures, so while the bankruptcy data indicates financial distress, the farmers did not necessarily have to forfeit their properties.
Iowa is among the leading states for farms that filed for bankruptcy, but it is not the top state by measures we found. In 2025, Iowa recorded 18 Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies, third among the 50 states, up from seven the previous year. The Midwest region recorded 121 total filings in 2025, the most of any region in the country.
The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate this statement Mostly False.
Comedian accused of sexual offences against six women said consensual encounters were ‘unfavourably reframed decades later’
Russell Brand told police he had led a “very promiscuous” life and consensual sexual encounters had been “unfavourably reframed decades later”, his trial has heard.
The 51-year-old comedian blamed the allegations on “defamatory and fictitious” media reports. He said in a statement that he had had sexual encounters in countless locations and scenarios and kissed hundreds of people in public while trying to be “friendly, consensual and warm”.
(The Center Square) — Incumbent Sen. Susan Collins and Democratic challenger Troy Jackson are locked in a tight race for U.S. Senate in Maine ahead of next week's midterm election.
If ever enacted, proposals by Marine Le Pen and the AfD leader, Alice Weidel, to hollow out EU institutions would be a continental act of self-harm
Following the Brexit referendum in 2016, Marine Le Pen was in a predictably celebratory mood. Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, she told one interviewer, was the first breach in the “Brussels Wall”. Ms Le Pen’s Front National party was at that point committed to taking France down the same path, given the chance. But as the UK’s self-inflicted economic wounds became a cautionary tale for the rest of Europe, the notion of Frexit was put on ice.
Instead, Ms Le Pen now hopes to lead far-right allies in hollowing out the EU from within. This month, both she and the leader of Alternative für Deutschland, Alice Weidel, outlined their visions of a “Europe of nations” in which EU institutions would be stripped of both cash and power. Ms Weidel’s “new deal for Europe” would abolish elections to the European parliament, and seek German opt-outs in areas such as migration, defence and common borrowing. Ms Le Pen’s party, now called National Rally, proposes slashing French contributions to the EU budget by 60% over a five-year presidential term, and ending the role of Brussels in proposing common policies for the 27 member states.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
(The Center Square) – Billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who lost to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in the 2022 general election, says he's going to vote for Bass this year.
(The Center Square) – High diesel prices have increased farmers’ costs, and agricultural groups are debating whether a proposed railroad merger would cut shipping costs or reduce producers’ choices.
Apple has acknowledged an inner-display defect affecting a small number of its new $1,999 iPhone Duo foldables after customers reported hearing a crunch while unfolding the device before cracks, lines and other display failures appeared along the crease. Apple is replacing affected phones and investigating the problem.
iFixit believes a failing hinge component may be pressing into and cracking the display rather than the panel itself being defective. Bloomberg reports: Reports of the problem first surfaced on Reddit and other social media sites. Bloomberg News has since independently verified the issue with more than half a dozen customers, who provided photos showing damage to their devices or evidence of their support conversations with Apple. Apple acknowledged the issue in a statement, saying it was "aware of an issue impacting the inner display on a small number of iPhone Duo units."
"If users experience issues with their iPhone Duo display, they should contact AppleCare for a replacement," the Cupertino, California-based company said. Most Duos aren't affected by the problem, and the units that are impacted exhibit the defect quickly, Apple said.
As medical advances help more Americans survive cancer and heart disease, Delaware Alzheimer’s advocates call for greater attention to a disease that remains incurable.
By George D. Rotsch, Delaware LIVE News
WILMINGTON, Del. — As medical advances help more Americans survive cancer and heart disease, another major health challenge continues to confront families across Delaware: Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive and ultimately fatal illness for which there is still no cure.
That growing concern will bring families, caregivers, volunteers and supporters together Saturday, Oct. 31, for Wilmington’s annual Walk to End Alzheimer’s at Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park.
Organized by the Alzheimer’s Association Delaware Chapter, the event is part of the world’s largest fundraising effort dedicated to Alzheimer’s care, support and research. But organizers say the walk also serves another important purpose: reminding the community that progress against other major diseases should be matched by a greater commitment to fighting Alzheimer’s.
For Glen Gray, board chair of the Alzheimer’s Association Delaware Chapter, the contrast between medical progress against other major diseases and the continuing challenge of Alzheimer’s underscores the importance of the annual walk.
“We have made tremendous progress in the fight against cancer and heart disease, and more Americans are surviving illnesses that once claimed so many lives,” Gray said. “But there is a heartbreaking reality. Too many people who have survived cancer or heart disease may be later diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. They have fought and won one battle, only to face a disease for which there is still no cure. That’s why this walk is becoming more important every year. We need to bring the same urgency, commitment and resources to Alzheimer’s that have helped us make such extraordinary progress against other major diseases.”
Medical progress highlights the Alzheimer’s challenge
There is evidence supporting the broader concern.
According to the American Cancer Society, the nation’s overall cancer death rate has declined dramatically since 1991, reflecting improvements in prevention, early detection and treatment. Five-year relative survival for cancer patients has reached approximately 70% for those diagnosed between 2015 and 2021.
Heart disease mortality has also declined over the longer term as advances in treatment, medications and prevention have helped more patients live longer.
Alzheimer’s presents a different challenge.
According to the Alzheimer’s Association’s 2026 Facts and Figures report, approximately 7.4 million Americans ages 65 and older are living with Alzheimer’s dementia. Between 2000 and 2024, reported Alzheimer’s deaths increased 134%, while deaths from heart disease and stroke declined.
New Alzheimer’s treatments offer hope by slowing disease progression in some patients, particularly in the earlier stages. However, there is still no treatment that cures the disease.
As more Americans live into their 70s, 80s and beyond, Alzheimer’s and other dementias present an increasingly significant challenge for families and the nation’s health care system.
More than 22,000 Delawareans living with Alzheimer’s
The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that approximately 22,300 Delaware residents are living with Alzheimer’s, while another 37,000 residents provide unpaid care for people with Alzheimer’s or other dementias.
The disease affects far more than memory. As Alzheimer’s progresses, patients can lose their ability to manage finances, drive, communicate, recognize loved ones and eventually perform basic daily activities.
For family caregivers, the responsibilities can last years and often require major changes to employment, household finances and personal schedules.
According to the association, Delaware dementia caregivers provide approximately 67 million hours of unpaid care annually, representing an estimated $1.7 billion in economic value.
Those figures underscore the importance of community resources, family education, respite services and continued medical research.
The Alzheimer’s Association provides educational programs, caregiver support and a 24-hour helpline to assist families confronting these challenges.
Promise Garden honors those affected by the disease
One of Saturday’s most meaningful traditions will be the Promise Garden ceremony, during which participants carry colorful flowers representing their personal connections to Alzheimer’s.
Blue flowers represent people living with Alzheimer’s or another dementia. Purple flowers honor individuals who have died from the disease. Yellow flowers recognize those caring for someone with Alzheimer’s, while orange flowers represent supporters of the cause.
Together, the flowers symbolize the different ways Alzheimer’s touches families and the shared determination to find effective treatments and ultimately a cure.
For participants who have lost loved ones, the ceremony offers an opportunity for remembrance. For those currently caring for someone with dementia, it provides a sense of community and reassurance that they are not facing the disease alone.
The event also brings together businesses, civic organizations, health care professionals and individuals who raise funds through teams and personal contributions.
Supporting research, treatment and families
Since its beginnings as Memory Walk in 1989, the Alzheimer’s Association’s nationwide walking initiative has mobilized millions of Americans in support of its mission.
Money raised helps advance research while supporting education, advocacy and assistance for patients and caregivers.
With an aging population and an increasing number of families affected by dementia, the work has taken on greater importance.
The association is encouraging Delaware residents to participate in Saturday’s Wilmington event by walking, forming a team, volunteering or contributing financially.
Residents who cannot participate in Wilmington will have another opportunity Saturday, Nov. 14, when the Southern Delaware Walk to End Alzheimer’s takes place. That event was rescheduled from its original fall date.
The two Delaware walks are part of the association’s broader national effort to turn public awareness into meaningful progress against the disease.
For families confronting Alzheimer’s today, that progress cannot come soon enough.
TO GO: Walk to End Alzheimer’s
Wilmington Walk to End Alzheimer’s
Saturday, Oct. 31, 2026
Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park, Rosa Parks Drive, Wilmington
Registration and ceremony times should be confirmed with the organizer.
Frontline near Russian-occupied city in southern Ukraine quiet for first time in years ahead of planned evacuation
A local ceasefire in a southern Ukrainian city under Russian occupation appeared to be holding on Tuesday, with both sides ceasing drone attacks ahead of an apparent evacuation of about 2,000 trapped and desperate civilians.
The temporary truce began at 3am in Russian-controlled Oleshky. The city sits on the Dnipro River and is about 3 miles (5km) from Kherson, a larger city on the opposite bank. Ukrainian troops recaptured Kherson in autumn 2022.
US military says it carried out an airstrike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat in latest attack in region
The US military said on Tuesday it killed five people after an airstrike on a suspected drug-trafficking vessel in the eastern Pacific.
Tuesday’s strike was among more than 70 such attacks since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second presidency, according to media tallies. Collectively, they have killed more than 240 people.
A 63-year-old Felton man was killed early Tuesday morning in a single-vehicle crash on Spectrum Farms Road, according to Delaware State Police.
Police said the crash occurred at approximately 3:45 a.m. on October 27, 2026, as a Chevrolet Silverado was traveling westbound on Spectrum Farms Road, east of Spider Web Road. Investigators said the truck left the south side of the roadway, entered a deep ditch and struck a tree.
The driver, who police said was not properly restrained, was pronounced dead at the scene. His name is being withheld pending notification of his family.
Spectrum Farms Road was closed for approximately three hours while investigators examined and cleared the scene.
The Delaware State Police Troop 3 Collision Reconstruction Unit continues to investigate the crash. Anyone with information is asked to contact Master Corporal W. Booth at 302-698-8451 or Delaware Crime Stoppers at 800-847-3333.
Extreme heat accelerated disappearance of Triglav glacier from mountain revered as a symbol of Slovenian identity
The final ice patch has vanished from Slovenia’s Triglav glacier, the latest Alpine casualty of Europe’s scorching summer.
The once mighty ice mass lost 93% of its surface area between 1983 and 2003, shrinking to cover less than a hectare of overheated rock, but went on to surprise researchers who feared its imminent demise, clinging on to the mountain for two more decades.
In the world in which we live today, comparison is an unfortunate but inevitable problem that we all face every day. The dawn of social media places us into a digital world where each and every caption, image and post is analyzed under the microscope of everyone who sees it.
While it’s not the sole contributor to appearance-based comparison, social media plays a significant role in the modern mental health crisis. To us, it seems like the people we see online are living effortless lives, where failure is impossible and perfection is the norm.
It’s a sad realization to find that there will always be someone better looking, someone smarter or cooler with a better social life. However, this awareness can also be freeing if you allow it to be.
Since starting my second year of college, all of my own failures have found themselves bathed in a new and frightening light. Every single person I talked to, every class I skipped and every choice I made have all come home to roost.
In times of trouble and overthinking, sometimes it helps to stop and take a look around. The people who you think have it all together may have just failed a test, ended a relationship or lost a loved one.
It’s easy to think that we are all our own main characters. The world revolves around us, and we are the only people who have ever struggled with anything. The simple fact is that this is not true. Someone at some point has gone through everything we are experiencing now.
To be human is to struggle. It’s a harsh reality, but what ails us is what binds us together as a society. In the wise words of George Harrison, “all things must pass,” and the pains of today strengthen the fortitude of tomorrow.
When I failed my driver’s test for the first time, I thought that I would be relegated to a life of public transportation forever. However, after passing the second time I took the test, I realized that failing the first time only made me appreciate passing even more.
What at once seemed like such a huge and devastating shortcoming turned out to be relatively irrelevant in the grand scheme of my life. I thought that falling short meant that I was a failure as a person, when in reality, I had just made one mistake that could be easily remedied.
How do we live like this? Sometimes it feels like everything we do or say is wrong. It’s a shame that reality is not like the movies, and that things do not always work out the way that we want them to.
Failure is not demise. It only serves as a stepping stone to a final result. Failing a test or even a class does not spell the end of days; it only acts as a signal to try again.
It’s an ugly and painful fact of life, as many things are. However, if there were no setbacks, how could there be any accomplishments?
The promise of a better future ahead is not only a positive mindset, but also a true one. Nothing can stay the same forever, not even the hard times. Much like study methods and math formulas, college also teaches students how to recover from failure.
While sometimes deemed a cliché phrase, taking joy in the little things is actually a very valuable motto. We often only see the large negatives instead of the small positives. Small fragments piece together the puzzle, just as small accomplishments form who we are as people.
In all of my numerous failures (and trust me, there have been a lot of them), I took solace in the fact that, firstly, I would succeed eventually, and secondly, that my successes were not the only thing propelling me through my life.
It’s vital to our survival and growth to take in everything that makes us who we are as people, even if that includes mistakes that we have made. By observing all of the things that make us human, we are able to make the most out of what comes our way.
Our lot in life is ours alone. Being a part of this place we call Earth is not only a privilege, but also an individual gift. No one possesses the life you lead, and what we choose to do with our shortcomings and achievements is our decision alone.
Eamon Bonsall is an opinion columnist at The Review. His opinions are his own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review Staff. He may be reached at ebons@udel.edu.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: A Florida man who was the subject of a 2019 investigation by ProPublica was indicted last month on federal charges that he defrauded clients of his ransomware data recovery firm. According to the Justice Department, the man, Zohar Pinhasi, told customers he could recover their encrypted files without having to pay hackers, when, in reality, he paid the ransom and charged victims a hefty fee on top. The indictment mirrors the findings from ProPublica's 2019 article "The Trade Secret," which centered on Pinhasi and his scheme.
The outlet found that the ransomware victims were being harmed twice: once by the hackers, who locked their targets' files and demanded ransom, and a second time by MonsterCloud, Pinhasi's Florida-based data recovery firm, which misled its clients about not paying ransoms. "By falsely claiming to decrypt ransomware without paying off the ransomers, the defendant re-victimized his clients while extracting a hefty profit for himself," U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said in an Oct. 7 press release. "Our Office will vigorously prosecute ransomware attackers who prey on Americans from across the world and those who cynically profit from their criminal activity." [...] Pinhasi, who went by the alias Zack Green, told ProPublica in 2019 that MonsterCloud never promised clients that their data will be recovered by any particular method. "How we do it, it's our problem," he told ProPublica. "You will get your data back. Sit back, relax and enjoy the ride." He called MonsterCloud's data recovery methods a "trade secret."
[...] Federal investigators found that, over the course of the scheme, Pinhasi allegedly charged clients more than $19 million and paid more than $8 million in ransom payments. In one example, Pinhasi made a ransom payment of about $8,200 but charged the client about $150,000. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison. [...] In 2019, Pinhasi touted MonsterCloud's ties to law enforcement as evidence of its integrity. Pistole, who also headed the Transportation Security Administration under President Barack Obama, was listed on MonsterCloud's website as the only member of its "Cyber Security Advisory Council."
The patient was at a facility in Minneola, Florida, while the surgeon operated remotely from another facility
A Florida surgeon has performed the first telerobotic operation between two US hospitals, removing the prostate of a man with cancer from 35 miles away, according to officials.
Dr Vipul Patel, founder and medical director of the Global Robotics Institute at AdventHealth Celebration in suburban Orlando, on Sunday performed an investigational robotic prostatectomy on a 66-year-old prostate cancer patient who volunteered for a clinical study evaluating a robotic telesurgery system.
Home of wealthy developer Stephen Cloobeck searched in connection to sexual misconduct inquiry into Swalwell
Federal law enforcement agents searched a home in suburban Los Angeles early on Tuesday as part of an investigation into Eric Swalwell, who resigned from Congress amid a wave of sexual misconduct allegations, a law enforcement official and two people familiar with the investigation told the Associated Press.
Agents searched the Beverly Hills home of the wealthy developer and Swalwell donor Stephen Cloobeck, where the Democratic ex-congressman spent time before resigning from office in April, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation.
Having lost the first round of Brazil’s presidential election to far right rival Flávio Bolsonaro, incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva spectacularly triumphed in the second. The Guardian’s Latin America corrrespondent Tom Phillips answered your questions on what’s next for Brazil.
Jeremy Hurley asks: Why did the Brazil stock market tank after the election result, and will it recover?
Tom: Basically, because the markets had been convinced that Flávio Bolsonaro was going to win and that after taking power he would implement a “chainsaw” style austerity programme inspired by Javier Milei’s government in Argentina, deal with Brazil’s budget deficit, and bring down interest rates. Lula’s victory came as a shock to investors who believe his fourth presidency will see increased and unsustainable public spending.
Yes, I’m sure things will stabilise at some point soon after the initial panic – during Lula’s previous administrations investors made a lot of money, particularly during his first two terms. There is talk of Lula naming his vice-president, the centre-right politician Geraldo Alckmin, as finance minister in order to calm markets down. Another possible name is Rafael Fonteles, a mathematician who is the governor of Piauí and used to run that state’s finances.
Tom: That’s a really good question and, as someone who lives in Rio de Janeiro, it is one that has been on my mind a lot. The far right has been very good at blaming “soft” left wing policies and federal government incompetence for the failure to control armed violence. It was a huge part of the campaign against Lula in the run up to this election.
But public security is a state matter and Rio state has largely been governed by the right for years now. Their hard-line, shoot first ask questions later approach has not worked - in fact many believe it has made the violence even worse and led to massacres such as the one I covered in the Complexo da Penha almost exactly one year ago. It must be said that similar tactics have been used in Bahia state, which has a huge problem with violence and is governed by the Worker’s party (PT). My colleague Tiago Rogero has written about this.
Newark Symphony’s Oct. 25 concert at The Independence School marked the beginning of a milestone season for an orchestra that started as a small community ensemble in Newark in 1966 and has grown into a roughly 60-member volunteer orchestra. Image by Photographer Eric Dunford.
Anniversary season celebrates six decades of community music with collaborations connecting the orchestra to musicians, students and audiences across Delaware
NEWARK, Del. — The Newark Symphony Orchestra opened its 60th-anniversary season Sunday with a program that paired some of classical music’s best-known composers with musicians from the University of Delaware and a nationally recognized guest oboist.
The Oct. 25 concert at The Independence School marked the beginning of a milestone season for an orchestra that started as a small community ensemble in Newark in 1966 and has grown into a roughly 60-member volunteer orchestra.
Music Director Simeone Tartaglione led Sunday’s program, which ranged from brass-heavy contemporary and ceremonial works to Mozart and Tchaikovsky.
The concert opened with the national anthem before moving to Anthony DiLorenzo’s “Aura” and Richard Strauss’ “Vienna Fanfare.”
A strong University of Delaware connection helped distinguish the anniversary opener.
UD trombone professor Bruce Tychinski performed alongside fellow university music faculty members Heidi Lucas on horn and Brianne Borden on trumpet, along with the University of Delaware Trombone Choir and Newark Symphony brass musicians.
The collaboration was appropriate for a season the orchestra is using not only to look back at its history, but also to highlight its relationships with other musicians and music organizations throughout the region.
Daniel Bates, principal oboist of the National Philharmonic Orchestra, was the featured soloist for Mozart’s “Oboe Concerto in C Major.”
The afternoon concluded with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, one of the Russian composer’s most recognizable large orchestral works.
The orchestra is documenting its anniversary season visually as well. Photographer Eric Dunford captured Sunday’s performance, with the Newark Symphony posting a 51-photo album from the concert.
Six decades in Newark
The Newark Symphony traces its history to 1966, when the orchestra says musicians first rehearsed as a community ensemble in the living room of founding director Harley Hastings.
Hastings led the orchestra until 1982. Roman Pawlowski served as music director from 1983 through 2009, and Tartaglione has led the orchestra since 2010.
Today, the nonprofit organization describes its mission as enriching the community through live orchestral and chamber music and music education while keeping performances economically accessible.
The orchestra presents seven concerts during its 2026-27 season.
Rather than making its 60th anniversary solely a retrospective, the organization is building collaborations into the season. Planned participants include musicians from the University of Delaware, the Delaware Youth Symphony Orchestra, the Newark Symphony Orchestra Chorus, other community choruses, professional soloists and composers.
Students will share the stage with the orchestra during four of the season’s seven concerts.
The season is scheduled to conclude in May with Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” and the Chesapeake Silver Cornet Brass Band.
The Newark Symphony also maintains programs beyond its regular concert schedule. Its Betsy L. Kent Youth Concerto Competition gives young musicians an opportunity to perform with a full orchestra, while its Instruments in the Attic program collects, refurbishes, and provides instruments to middle and high school students seeking to continue their music education.
Those efforts reinforce a theme that will run through the orchestra’s 60th season: celebrating its own history while helping develop the musicians and audiences who could shape its next generation.
Sunday’s opening concert provided an early example — combining longtime community musicians, university faculty and students, a professional guest soloist and an audience gathered in Newark to begin the orchestra’s seventh decade together.
TO GO
What: Newark Symphony Orchestra 60th-anniversary season
Next concert: Chamber Concert featuring “Requiem for 9/11”
When: Sunday, Nov. 8, 3 p.m.
Where: The Independence School, 1300 Paper Mill Road, Newark
Season: Seven concerts, including four symphony concerts, two chamber concerts and a free family concert
Alexander Stubb and Jonas Gahr Støre held ‘substantive’ talk with Russian president on peace negotiations, but faced sceptical reactions from some European leaders
Meanwhile, Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, has warned that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is “testing us and testing Nato’s resolve” as he condemned hybrid threats and “state-sponsored terrorism” from Russia.
Streeting repeated his recent warnings that “we have to be ready for a scenario in which the United Kingdom and the Nato alliance finds itself at war with Russia”. He went on:
Not because we want war – we have no quarrel with the Russian people, and we have no desire for war with Russia; Nato is a defensive alliance – but when Putin gives assurances that he has no intentions to provoke a war with Nato, we are reminded of what he said about Ukraine only days before the invasion.
The more ready we are to face against Russia, to defend every inch of Nato territory, the less likely we are to find ourselves in that scenario.
Poland is one of our greatest and certainly our most reliable friend in Europe, and we value and treasure this friendship very much.
Tens of thousands of Israelis living abroad have flown in just to cast their ballots in an election many voters see as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu.
After Orbán, Vučić falls: can Serbia’s students herald a new dawn for the Balkans?Expert commentsfarrell.drupa…
The consequences of President Aleksandar Vučić’s departure are hard to predict. But the victory of the Student List in Serbia is a promise of change in a country that could be a driver of economic growth and political integration in the Balkans.
Six months after Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary, another European strongman has fallen, conceding an election he expected to win, in a consequential turning point for the country and for Europe.
President Aleksandar Vučić, in power since 2012, called Serbia’s snap parliamentary vote after nearly two years of student protests, and admitted defeat on Sunday.
With almost all ballots counted, the Student List secured more than 53 per cent of the vote and around 140 seats in the 250-member parliament. Turnout approached a historic 70 per cent, the highest since Yugoslavia’s break-up in 1992.
For the second time this year, a European populist with what looked to many like an unassailable grip on power has recognised electoral defeat, paving the way for a peaceful transition. The consequences of Vučić’s departure, however, particularly with regard to Serbia’s relations with Europe and Russia, remain difficult to predict.
History was born in a railway station
How could the seemingly unshakable rule of Vučić be brought to a sudden end by a movement that barely existed two years ago?
History is sometimes born in what looks politically unremarkable.
In 2024, the canopy of a recently renovated railway station collapsed in Novi Sad in northern Serbia, killing 16 people. Rather quickly what at first looked like a tragic accident became, for many, a case study in perceived corruption during the Vučić era - no matter how much the government denied accusations of favouritism and lack of transparency over contracts issued for earlier renovations.
The tragedy ignited a protest from students across Serbia. It did not take long for teachers, then farmers and ultimately ordinary citizens to join them. What began as a leaderless protest movement gradually developed into a formidable political organisation, becoming a pole of attraction for anti-government voters.
The Studenti u blokadi (‘Student Blockade’) movement quickly combined mass demonstrations with grassroots campaigning, including in provincial communities long dominated by Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS).
The movement’s electoral list ‘Studentska lista-Studenti pobeđuju’ (‘Students’ List - Students Win’) brought together 250 candidates, including academics, doctors and artists, with cardiologist Ilija Srđanović at its helm.
Their defeat of Vučić brings an end to twelve years of his personal dominance as prime minister (2014-2017) and president (2017-2026).
European leaders who for years had more or less treated Vučić as a guarantor of stability in the Balkans – even as Serbian democratic institutions deteriorated – will monitor the next developments very carefully. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos have already welcomed the result and offered support.
Moscow loses a political partner, but ties will remain
For the Kremlin, the result comes as another setback after Orbán. The circle of pro-Russians amongst European leaders is growing increasingly thin – Slovakia’s Fico the last man standing.
Vučić had cultivated close relations with Moscow for years, refused to join EU sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and benefited from Russian diplomatic support over Kosovo.
But his position was more ambiguous than Moscow’s public praise suggested. Under his rule, Serbia defended Ukraine’s territorial integrity, including Crimea, and provided Ukrainian forces with Serbian ammunition.
A change in that balancing-act policy appears unlikely. The Student List has explicitly ruled out sanctions against Moscow, pledged to preserve military neutrality and rejected NATO membership. On Monday, its representative Jovo Bakić reaffirmed that Serbia’s foreign policy towards Russia would remain unchanged. The Kremlin has also adopted a careful tone, signalling a wish to retain good relations with Belgrade.
Such caution from the student movement reflects political realism at a time when the geopolitics around the war in Ukraine is more uncertain than ever.
Russia supplies around 2.2 billion cubic metres of gas to Serbia annually at favourable prices. A renewal of the existing Russian gas agreement, which expires in December, cannot be excluded at this stage. Russian companies also hold a majority stake in NIS, which operates Serbia’s only oil refinery and plays a key role in securing the country’s petrol and diesel supplies.
It is also unlikely that the next government will ignore Moscow’s continued diplomatic backing over Kosovo. Moscow can also veto Kosovo’s admission to the United Nations, or abstain.
Given the popularity that Russia retains among parts of the Serbian electorate, it is easy to understand why the student movement has thus far shown reluctant to break with Moscow. That same realism could complicate Serbia’s prospects of joining the EU.
A new opening for Serbia’s EU accession talks?
Serbia’s EU accession process has been effectively stalled for almost five years. In July, eight member states blocked the opening of another negotiating cluster, citing democratic backsliding and insufficient alignment with European foreign policy.
In a process that could be compared with that in Hungary, the new government could restore the EU momentum through reforms of the judiciary, public procurement and media freedom.
The stumbling stone, however, would remain Belgrade’s refusal to join European sanctions against Russia. Kosovo would be another obstacle: the Student List firmly rejects its independence, while Brussels requires Belgrade to normalise relations with Pristina.
The movement’s caution doesn’t just reflect its political realism. It also stems from the diversity of its supporters. It is, after all, the nature of big-tent political movements to adopt a cautiously conservative stance on foreign policy, given the heterogeneity of their electorate. In the case of the students’ supporters: a mix of pro-European liberals and conservative nationalists united against Vučić, with little in common on foreign policy. However, surveys suggest that three-quarters of Student List supporters favour closer relations with the EU rather than Russia.
The most direct implications of a political renewal in Belgrade will be for the Balkan neighbourhood. In Bosnia we can foresee a withdrawal of the political support Vučić provided to the nationalist Milorad Dodik, former president of Republika Srpska. Relations with Montenegro could also improve.
None of those changes is guaranteed. But Serbia now has a historic opportunity to rebuild its standing in the region, provided its new leaders can agree on the direction of travel.
The harder test is yet to come: to govern
The Student List now faces an immediate paradox: what got them so far will only get them so far. Its decentralised organisation helped it grow from a local protest mobilisation into a massive national movement in only two years. Governing will demand something different: clearer leadership and collective discipline.
Yet most of the movement’s representatives have little experience of government and parliament - if any. The identity of the next prime minister is still unknown, although names have been circulating, such as former central bank governor Dejan Šoškić.
The parallel with Hungary is, again, interesting: the new government will have to confront entrenched networks of the outgoing ruling party within public institutions. The next few months will be crucial to sustain the political momentum, as presidential elections are due before the end of this year.
The next test, once a government has been formed, will be to maintain a stable parliamentary majority as the first difficult policy decisions arise.
Addressing student protesters against Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade in March 1991, Serbian literary giant Borislav Pekić reminded them that ‘the essential thing is not to watch the clock. Victories are not won in a second, or a day, or a year’.
Thirty-five years later, their successors have achieved what few thought possible: ending Vučić’s rule overnight. The challenge now will be to turn this electoral victory into lasting democratic change. Watching the clock will be essential.
Authorities say a man serving a life sentence for murder escaped from a prison in northwest Tennessee, stole a truck and remained at large early Tuesday.
Ahead of the touchscreen MacBook Pro expected to debut tomorrow, Apple has refreshed its standard 14-inch MacBook Pro with the new M6 processor, promising up to 20% faster multithreaded performance, improved power efficiency, and more powerful on-device AI capabilities. The Verge reports: Announced this morning through a press release, the new 14-inch MacBook Pro features three Thunder 4 USB-C ports that all support charging and DisplayPort connectivity, a MagSafe 3 charging port, full-size HDMI, and an SDXC memory card slot accommodating photographers. Pricing for the new M6 version of the 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,999 with 16GB of memory, the same as last year's M5 model. Preorders start on October 28th and shipping is expected to begin on November 6th.
The new M6 processor is Apple's first 2nm chip with a bump to a 12-core CPU, up from 10 cores in the M5, and the company says it offers up to 1.2x faster multithreaded performance when compared to its predecessor. The M6 also features a Dual 16-core Neural Engine to handle heavy on-device AI tasks, plus an upgraded 12-core GPU with a Neural Accelerator in each core. In addition to performance improvements, Apple says its M6 processor is more power efficient.
Retailers also report jump in purchases of wind-up radios and torches to deal with extreme weather and cyber-attacks
Sales of tinned foods, bottled water, wind-up radios and torches have surged after the UK government advised households to prepare for emergencies.
Retailers have reported a jump in sales of items linked to preparation for emergencies such as extreme weather or cyber-attacks. The Be Ready campaign was launched last week with the aim of persuading households to lay in supplies to last 72 hours.
Jennifer Shuford is expected to leave her post after midterm elections ‘to spend more time with my family’
The deputy director and chief medical officer of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will resign after six months on the job, according to an agency email obtained by the Guardian.
Dr Jennifer Shuford was appointed by Donald Trump in April as part of a four-person senior leadership team.
Greens say Labour has ‘no respect for young people’ amid reports chancellor will pause equalisation of minimum wage for under-21s with that paid to older workers
Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, has not contested reports saying that, in the budget tomorrow, John Healey, the chancellor, will pause the process of equalising the lower national minimum wage paid to people under the age of 21 with the more generous national living wage that applies to older workers.
In an interview on the BBC this morning, Reynolds was asked to respond to a story suggesting the equalisation process has been put on hold because of concerns about youth unemployment.
John Healey will announce plans to increase the minimum wage by nearly 4% but slow the rise for young people after warnings that they are being priced out of jobs.
The Times has been told that the national living wage, which applies to those aged 21 and over, is expected to rise from £12.71 to around £13.20 – an increase of 3.9%.
The manifesto pledge on equalisation still applies, but it was always clear it would happen over time and we would take into account, as the minimum wage uprating each year always does, the relative strength of the labour market and other pressures …
Of course, you want not just good wages, but good work. And the way this has always been done – it is a balance of making sure the pressures on the labour market are taken into account. That is the approach you will see confirmed [in the budget].
Anyone doing a day’s work, needs to be paid the same rate for the same job. A young person’s rent and food bill is no less because they are young, so they need to receive the same wage.
Healey and Burnham are now breaking a manifesto pledge to young people that even Starmer managed to keep. Labour have no respect for young people, who appear to just be there for cheap labour for the wealthy and their corporate donors.
[It] wouldn’t be my cup of tea, but I wouldn’t ban anybody from doing so … I don’t want us to get into a world of cancel culture.
I’m not going to have run a party where we say you can’t talk about that person or that person. We have to be sensible about vetting. And we are.
Four men on trial charged with sexually assaulting Joanne Young while she was sedated, restrained and blindfolded
A woman’s world was “tilted on its axis” when she discovered that for years her former husband had been drugging her and inviting men into their family home to sexually assault her while she was restrained and blindfolded, a court has been told.
Businessman Philip Young advertised his then wife, Joanne Young, on dating and swinging websites, presenting it as a “kink” for both of them, Winchester crown court heard.
Russia–Africa Summit: Moscow is engaging more with Africa, but its delivery is limitedExpert commentthilton.drupal
Russia’s footprint in Africa has expanded in recent years, but engagement beyond security remains uneven. The summit alone is unlikely to change this.
The third Russia–Africa Summit, which was initially announced to take place in Libya, will now take place in Moscow on 28–29 October. The summit is being portrayed as a test of Russia’s growing influence across Africa.
Once again, considerable emphasis is being placed on how many African leaders will be attending the gathering. The Kremlin says 22 African heads of state are attending, a slight increase on the 17 that attended the summit’s second edition in St Petersburg in 2023. That marked a significant decrease from the 43 leaders that were present at the inaugural summit in Sochi in 2019. Then, the Kremlin attributed the lower turnout to ‘outrageous’ Western pressure.
Attendance at the summit, however, is a poor measure of durable partnerships. This is particularly the case as the constraints of Russia’s partnership have become harder for African governments to overlook.
While Russian engagement with Africa has expanded in recent years, its economic delivery remains limited and the outcomes of its security role in the Sahel have been uneven. The summit may therefore lead to new agreements, but with the war in Ukraine still constraining Russia’s resources, it is unlikely to change these fundamental dynamics.
Summit priorities
Russia’s interest in Africa reflects its own priorities. These include countering Western influence, building non-aligned partnerships and advancing multilateral reform. Expanding defence sales, securing minerals access and mitigating the impact of sanctions are also priorities.
Moscow has pursued these objectives partly by using the BRICS grouping, which includes South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia. It has also maintained its own bilateral political, security and economic relationships.
African governments see Moscow as one of several partners.
The summit, which will be accompanied by an economic and humanitarian forum, speaks directly to Moscow’s interests while also responding to African priorities. It is expected to promote new payment systems, reform of global financial institutions, stronger African representation at international organizations and opposition to unilateral sanctions. It will also discuss trade and investment, food and energy security, nuclear energy, technology and security cooperation.
The summit is expected to produce a joint declaration, a separate declaration on AI cooperation, and an action plan for 2027–2029.
Russia’s deepening footprint
Security has been one of Russia’s main focuses in Africa. Since 2023, Africa Corps – the Russian state-controlled paramilitary force that replaced the Wagner Group – has expanded its presence. It has deployed beyond Mali, the Central African Republic and Libya to Burkina Faso and Niger. There are also reports pointing at possible deployments in Togo, which signed a military cooperation agreement with Moscow in 2025.
As insurgent attacks persist in the Sahel, Russia has deepened its ties with the Alliance of Sahel States (Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger), pledging military and technical support. The three states have increasingly turned to Russia for security and diplomatic support following their break from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and amid deteriorating relations with Western partners. Russia is also pursuing a parallel security cooperation agreement with ECOWAS, which will cover the broader region.
Diplomatically, Moscow has expanded its network of embassies on the continent, with planned missions bringing the total to 49. Russia has also sought to extend its diplomatic reach to the Horn of Africa amid rising tensions there, offering to mediate between Ethiopia and Eritrea on the margins of the summit in Moscow. The proposal signals Moscow’s ambition to position itself as a security interlocutor beyond the Sahel, although it remains an offer rather than a confirmed mediation effort.
Russia has also sought to deepen its economic footprint in Africa. Russian agricultural exports to Africa grew 35 percent in value in the first half of 2026, to $2.9 billion, with wheat shipments reaching record volumes.
It has signed intergovernmental nuclear cooperation agreements with at least 15 African states. For example, Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear corporation, signed an agreement to build a nuclear power plant in Ethiopia.
Russia is also working with the African Union. At a July 2026 consultation in Addis Ababa, both sides committed to annual high-level political consultations and to launch sectoral dialogues.
Limited returns
However, despite Russia’s deepening involvement in sectors such as energy and agricultural exports, trade between Africa and Russia is estimated at $27 billion in 2025, well below the $40 billion target announced by Putin in 2019. It also pales in comparison to the EU’s €355 billion ($395 billon) and China’s $348 billion of recorded trade with Africa in 2025.
In June, Russia’s foreign ministry acknowledged at a forum in St Petersburg that previous summits had produced more declaration than deals. It promised this third summit will be different.
Agreements on nuclear power are yet to translate into completed projects. Egypt’s El Dabaa plant is still under construction. Ethiopia’s nuclear power plant is still at a prospective stage.
Even in defence, the picture is not favourable. Russian global arms exports declined by 64 percent in 2021-2025. Russia ranked third, behind the US and China, in major arms supply to Africa during the same period.
Russia’s increased security role in the Sahel has also failed to deliver reliable security guarantees. Annual deaths linked to violent extremism in the Sahel have increased from an average of 927 in 2016–2019 to an average of 10,470 in 2022–2025.
In April 2026, a coalition of Tuareg separatists and al-Qaeda-linked jihadists killed Mali’s defence Minister and forced Africa Corps personnel to withdraw from the northern city of Kidal. Russian-backed forces subsequently regained control of Kidal in October, but the episode has exposed the limits of their security model.
Even in defence, the picture is not favourable.
Russian-linked actors have sought to offset the costs of the war through security-for-resources arrangements, including control of and revenue from African gold mines; the US Treasury reports that gold and other African resources have helped Russia evade sanctions and fund its military efforts in Ukraine.
There is also the question of the extent to which Russia can sustain its security commitments in Africa while its resources and attention remain stretched by the war in Ukraine.
Recruiting for the Ukraine war
Russia’s recruitment of African citizens to fight in Ukraine has become a reputational liability. A recent investigation cited by African media outlets estimated that more than 3,000 African citizens from 40 countries were recruited into Russia’s armed forces between October 2022 and June 2026, often through deception and promises of civilian jobs. Bloomberg reported this week that Moscow has been widening its recruitment drive in countries including Zimbabwe, Burundi and Sierra Leone.
African countries including Kenya and South Africa have sought to stop the recruitment of their citizens. During a visit to Moscow in April, Kenya’s foreign minister Musalia Mudavadi said that Moscow and Nairobi had agreed that Kenyan nationals would no longer be enlisted by Russia’s ministry of defence. Russia’s embassy in Nairobi had denied any involvement in recruitment.
An Afrobarometer survey of citizens across 38 African countries in 2024–2025 found that the perception of Russian influence was far less positive than that of China, the US, the EU and others, and 72 per cent of those who had heard of the Ukraine war wanted their country to remain neutral in it.
From rhetoric to delivery
The pattern of African engagement with Russia is best understood as diversified non-alignment. African governments see Moscow as one of several partners with whom they can pursue their interests in trade, security and greater representation in international forums.
With Russia’s capacity constrained by the war in Ukraine, which continues to drain resources and diplomatic bandwidth, the real test is whether Moscow can convert political declarations and security interests into concrete, deliverable commitments in other fields.
Ultimately, Russia’s standing as a partner will depend on its ability to provide sustained economic benefits, reliable security partnerships and tangible outcomes for African countries. The summit will indicate the scale of Moscow’s ambitions; the years that follow will reveal how far it can realistically meet them.
Since a CBS California Investigates report first aired in August, Bee & Co. stores at Westfield Topanga in Canoga Park and Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance have closed their doors permanently.
The AI industry is still defined by a careening intensity that’s taking the world’s finances along for the ride
This was originally published in TechScape, a newsletter about how technology shapes our lives. Sign up to receive it here.
Today in tech, we’re discussing Anthropic’s astronomic growth, how a settlement over social media safety dented Meta’s revenue, and Lula’s accusations of interference against Meta.
Gasoline prices are among the top issues for midterm voters, but President Donald Trump tried to paint today’s prices at the pump as not so bad compared with under his Democratic predecessors.
The national average price of gasoline was $4.42 per gallon when Trump made the remark at a rally in Perry, Georgia. That price is “gonna come way down,” Trump said Oct. 24.
“But what we’ve done for this country — we’re making money like this country has never made before,” he continued. “So I said, ‘Let me say it very gingerly, very softly,’ because somebody would say the fake news (will say), ‘He’s bragging about making money while people are suffering.’ … You know, you’re still paying lower than (under) Biden and Obama.”
Both Trump and his critics have oversimplified this talking point. We examined it three ways: looking at nominal and peak prices; how long the price spikes lasted; and as a portion of disposable household income.
For many Americans, the most familiar way to look at this is through the price at the pump that isn’t adjusted for inflation, known as “nominal” dollars. By that metric, Trump’s statement is flawed.
Today’s $4.42 price per gallon national average is higher than it was any day during Obama’s presidency. Gasoline reached a record $5 a gallon under Biden, but it didn’t stay high very long. For all but 12 weeks of Biden’s tenure, or 94% of his time in office, gasoline cost less than today’s level of $4.42.
However, when comparing a product’s price over a decade and a half, inflation inevitably becomes a factor. One measurement that seeks to standardize comparisons across time finds that Americans are paying less of their disposable income on gasoline now than they were most of the time under Obama and Biden.
Looking at peak gasoline prices
One way to look at this question is to look only at the highest price of gasoline under each president. Under Obama, the peak was $4.17 a gallon — which, if not adjusted for inflation, is less than the current $4.42 under Trump. That would make Trump’s statement in relation to Obama wrong.
Under Trump, the price peaked at $4.50 in mid May.
The peak under Biden was $5, following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which roiled world energy markets. So just comparing Biden’s peak to today, gasoline cost more under Biden than Trump.
How long did high gasoline prices last?
Using only the peak price doesn’t tell the full story. Higher prices matter more if they last for a long time, and they have been high for longer under Trump.
In Trump’s second term, average national gasoline prices haven’t been below $3.78 a gallon since the beginning of April, one month after Trump launched the Iraq war. The national average has been below $4 for only three out of the 29 weeks since the beginning of April.
Gasoline’s national average exceeded $4 a gallon in 7% of Obama’s weeks in office, compared with more than 30% of Trump’s second-term tenure.
While Biden presided over the all-time national-average high of $5 a gallon, average prices didn’t stay that high for very long. Gasoline exceeded $4 a gallon for five months, or about 11% of Biden’s tenure.
&&
On the other end of the scale, gasoline cost less than $2.50 for roughly a quarter of the time under Obama and about 1% of the time under Biden. It’s never been that low during Trump’s second term. (It did hit that level during Trump’s first term, especially in a period during the pandemic when travel and commuting declined significantly, dampening demand.)
Inflation changes the equation
When contacted for comment, the White House pointed to inflation adjustments to the peak prices under each president. These show that, using the consumer price index, gasoline cost more in inflation-adjusted dollars under both Obama and Biden.
It’s reasonable to use adjustments to compare prices from 17 years ago to today, because inflation impacts prices over long periods of time. The question is how to do it.
Adjusting gasoline prices with the consumer price index, as the White House did, is an imperfect measurement, because gasoline is one of the drivers of higher overall inflation. A rise in the price of gasoline affects both the numerator and the denominator, making it difficult to untangle inflation from gasoline price inflation.
So we used a different metric that looks at the economic burden of buying a standard amount of gasoline every week.
First, we calculated the average cost of 10 gallons of gas, which is close to the average consumer’s weekly purchase, according to GasBuddy.com. Then we used data for per capita personal disposable income from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. This figure reflects not just salaries and wages but also government payments, then adjusts that amount for taxes paid. We divided this personal disposable income figure by 52, to approximate weekly income. Then we divided the cost of 10 gallons of gas by the weekly income figure to determine what percentage of weekly income was devoted to paying for a typical amount of gasoline on a weekly basis.
This isn’t perfect, either, because it’s based on an average of all U.S. income, which can be skewed by faster income growth among the richest Americans. But this metric shows much the same pattern as a simple adjustment by the consumer price index does.
Compared with data from the second quarter of 2026 — the most recent available — weekly gasoline purchases accounted for a higher share of disposable income than now during seven of eight years Obama was in office. It was also higher than now during three of Biden’s four years in office.
Trump’s talking point also ignores that the second-quarter 2026 share under Trump is higher than it was during Biden’s final year in office, 2024.
&&
Our ruling
Trump said for gasoline prices, “You’re still paying lower than (under) Biden and Obama.”
Using the current weekly national average — $4.42 per gallon — and ignoring inflation, Trump is wrong that gasoline cost more under Obama. Under Obama, a gallon of gasoline never rose above $4.17.
Under Biden, average gasoline prices peaked at $5 a gallon, a level it has not reached under Trump. Under Biden, gasoline was above $4 a gallon for about five months, or 11% of his tenure. Under Trump, it’s been above $4 most of the time during the past seven months.
However, a metric of how burdensome gasoline prices are for a household budget gives a different impression. Today, 10 gallons of gasoline a week accounts for a smaller share of income than it did in seven of eight years under Obama, and than in three of Biden’s four years in office.
The statement is partially accurate but ignores important information, so we rate it Half True.
Voters have a chance to break America’s two-tiered system of justice and hold powerful people accountable
Welcome back to How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Last week, Guardian US columnist Rebecca Solnit wrote about the GOP’s alignment with the tech overlords. Today’s edition was written by Katie Phang, an independent journalist, trial lawyer and political analyst. Sign up for future editions here.
When Americans go to the polls a week from now, accountability will be front and center.
Instead of enforcing the law, the attorney general of the United States has been busy subverting it
Student supporters of Reform UK at Oxford college have organised evening with Nathan Cofnas discussing DEI
The University of Oxford’s Oriel College has been urged to cancel an event featuring Jason Arday’s accuser Nathan Cofnas that has been organised by student supporters of Reform UK.
Arday, 41, was found dead in August after resigning from his University of Cambridge professorship. He had faced intense media scrutiny after Cofnas made unproven accusations of plagiarism against him and said there were “serious questions” about his biographical claims.
Top defense officials are expressing increasing worry about the vulnerability of U.S. bases around the world and even within the United States as cheap drone technology upends long-standing defense strategies.
The fear is mounting after a series recent attacks and threats against ground targets, including the destruction of key bases in the Middle East by Iran, plots against mega-bases in Europe, including to U.S. bombers at a British air base, and a Russian campaign that damaged European military facilities, according to two government officials.
While the Pentagon is notorious for inflating threats to press for additional funding, the officials stressed that the anxiety is real, not invented. Despite the U.S. military’s enormous budget, they say, the United States now finds itself scrambling strengthen its fortifications, protect its costly equipment, and recall personnel from some locations.
“Now all the world knows what the SecDef should have,” said one of the officials.
Foreign adversaries have taken notice of Iran’s ability to defeat U.S. air defenses using missiles and drones, they said. The officials drew specific attention to Tehran’s ability to damage or destroy bases that have been the key to U.S. power-projection and war-making for decades in the Middle East.
An Iranian missile and drone attack on February 28 destroyed Navy facilities in Manama, Bahrain, the region’s most critical logistics hub. The Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, was severely damaged by Iranian missiles early in the war, rendering it inoperable. Both were recently attacked again, raising questions about whether either will ever be rebuilt. The destruction of these bases has fundamentally altered America’s future force posture in the region, according to the officials. One of them called it a “seismic shift.”
On Friday, the Trump administration leaked highly classified intelligence to Fox News and Axios suggesting Iran has “substantially increased” efforts to target U.S. diplomats and other officials in the Middle East and beyond. The October 23 memo claimed that “the lethal plotting efforts by the Iranians against U.S. citizens have reached advanced stages.” A U.S. official confirmed the accuracy of the intelligence but questioned the motives of the “official leak,” suggesting it’s part of a case being built to justify renewing the failed war.
The leak came as the State Department ordered a further reduction in staff at multiple diplomatic posts across the Middle East, including in Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. One of the officials said the move “definitely” spoke to America’s inability to defend its assets overseas. Those fears now extend to the United States, according to the officials.
Last month, buried in an unhinged address to troops in which he attacked the press and those within the military he calls beardos, weirdos, and wimps, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth tacitly acknowledged the vulnerability of U.S. domestic bases, noting that the Pentagon was now “hardening every installation on American soil” against “sabotage and drones.” And last week, the Pentagon quietly began seeking advice on new ways to protect bases by using innovative advanced materials, camouflaging facilities, obscuring their thermal and electromagnetic signatures, hiding them underground, and making them more resilient in the face of successful attack by adversaries, according to a special notice issued by a top Pentagon official.
As the Pentagon refines this “base of the future” concept, Iran is teasing a “war of the future” effort that builds on its successes in throttling the Strait of Hormuz, regionalizing the war, and battering U.S. bases, according to Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the lead negotiator and speaker of Parliament. “The second generation of surprises will be on their way; at the time and place of our choosing, in the manner we have devised, and with the creativity that only our unparalleled fighters can muster,” he wrote on X, teasing how Iran would respond if America ramps up the war.
Iran’s successful attacks on U.S. bases have added to the growing realization that foreign adversaries, proxies, terror groups, and lone wolf actors can use low-cost, easily obtained drones to attack the military bases, aircraft, and military personnel of the U.S. and its allies.
While Iran dominated the headlines for months, officials became increasingly worried about danger from Russian attacks. “When do we stop calling it gray zone?” asked a third official briefed on the intelligence, referring to a Russian drone attack on a massive air freighter, used to carry military assistance to Ukraine, at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany in August. One drone hit the cargo plane but failed to explode, another struck a different aircraft, and a third was found near the airport. “That’s what Putin always does. He keeps testing us, pushing us, to see how far he can go,” said the official. That official and another said that the intelligence proved there was “no question” that Russia was behind the operations. Russia has denied responsibility.
The August drone attack was part of a monthslong campaign of nonstop sabotage, cyberattacks, and psychological operations against NATO nations. “These were happening in sequence from earlier in the year, through August, through September and they didn’t show any signs of stopping,” said the third official. But the attacks slowed or stopped after President Donald Trump announced earlier this month that the United States would buy Russian diesel in an effort to bring down fuel prices before the midterm elections and called on Ukraine to stop striking oil Russian refineries.
The officials noted that Pentagon leadership has been slow to respond to the changing nature of warfare, specifically drawing attention to tactics honed by Ukraine in its war with Russia. Earlier this month, for example, intelligence suggested that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was planning a complex drone attack on U.S. B-1 bombers used to attack Iran, and U.S. personnel at Royal Air Force Fairford air base. The plot, they said, was to launch small drones from just beyond the bases’ fenceline, attacking the supersonic bombers, which were not in hardened shelters but in the open on the tarmac. They noted that the plot appeared to be patterned on a Ukrainian attack, dubbed Operation Spider’s Web, against Russia last year. The plot so unnerved top military officials that the bombers were flown out while some aerial refueling aircraft were still being deployed to support their panicked flights back to the U.S. In addition to RAF Fairford, U.S. officials referenced additional threats against other bases in Europe, including Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
Last August, Hegseth established Joint Interagency Task Force 401 to deliver “C-sUAS” or counter-small unmanned aircraft system “capabilities to America’s warfighters, [to] defeat adversary threats, and promote sovereignty over national airspace.” But an inspector general report from January said “immediate attention” was required to protect the most critical bases in the U.S. against drones and noted that Pentagon “documents contradict one another and do not speak to certain aspects of C-UAS authorities and capabilities.” The IG found also that key “military installations, government-owned, contractor-operated facilities, and contractor-owned, contractor-operated facilities conducting critical missions” were not even designated for protection.
In March, small drones flew over Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base, the home of Global Strike Command which oversees America’s bomber fleet and its intercontinental-ballistic missiles. And the IG report mentions “10 DoD installations and activities where Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) incursions have occurred.”
Late last month, the Air Force awarded a contract for counter-drone systems for Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey. The military has also been looking into drone-killing technologies to defend Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, Japan; Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota; Battle Creek Air National Guard Base in Michigan; and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, among other facilities.
Two of the officials suggested that new Pentagon plans for military base modernization are rooted in an uneasy acknowledgment that U.S. outposts around the world — including within the continental United States — are increasingly vulnerable to complex and asymmetric attacks. A recent Pentagon inspector general report revealed Iranian strikes “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict.”
Hegseth’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment by The Intercept.
One U.S. official told The Intercept that the cost of repairing and rebuilding these Middle East outposts could be “upwards of $50 million,” but said the “real cost” might be “far higher.” The Pentagon, however, refuses to disclose the price tag of the damage, which has only been shared in a classified briefing.
“The American people deserve to know the full cost of the Trump administration’s unauthorized war against Iran. Even if DoD has not yet determined which facilities it is planning to rebuild, disclosing these costs represents the bare minimum transparency DoD owes the public,” wrote Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumentha, Mazie Hirono, Tammy Duckworth, and Gary Peters in a recent letter to Adm. Brad Cooper, the chief of Central Command. CENTCOM did not reply to a request from The Intercept for the total cost.
Last week, the Pentagon quietly began seeking information for “near-term” procurement and long-term modernization strategies to “move past traditional ‘pour-concrete-and-hope’ hardening” of its facilities and increase the “survivability of these installations under kinetic and multi-domain threats,” according to a special notice from the office of Dale R. Marks, the assistant secretary of war for energy, installations, and environment.
Following the destruction of NSA Manama and Al Udeid Air Base, the Pentagon is seeking ways to promote “operational capability and survivability under kinetic impact,” by employing decentralized energy grids, “autonomous backup utility systems,” innovative base layouts, and modular structures. Recognizing the need to “protect assets and personnel from kinetic impacts, thermal effects, and blast overpressures,” the military is looking at ways to harden facilities. This means employing advanced construction methods involving metamaterials designed for surviving air attack, energy-dissipating composites, self-healing materials, and “novel concrete formulations.”
The U.S. is also seeking ways to lower the profile or conceal the location of its bases through technological means. This includes camouflaging facilities and integrating them into the natural environment to make them more difficult to spot, masking their thermal and electromagnetic signatures, and creating decoy structures to draw fire.
Beyond the use of “terrain-integrated facility design,” the U.S. is also seeking to take its most sensitive facilities deep below ground. Increased vulnerabilities to aerial attack have led to a reemergence and increased reliance on subterranean warfare in the Russia–Ukraine war, harkening back to World War I trench warfare and the use of massive underground tunnel networks and bases by Vietnamese forces in the American war.
Iran, for its part, uses underground facilities to shield its missile and nuclear programs. The Pentagon, according to the documents, is interested in new methods of “high-speed tunneling,” the rapid creation of protected caverns, and “shock-isolated underground structural design[s].”
Last week’s quiet plea from the Pentagon follows an announcement by Hegseth of a FORTRESS America initiative that he calls a “national insurance policy for the American homeland.” One former Pentagon analyst, however, said it sounded more like “cutting America and Americans loose” in the event of a major conflagration, tying it to Hegseth’s belief that the military is a warrior elite superior to civilians.
“Every major military installation in America is going to generate its own power. Independent of the civilian grid. If an adversary takes down the grid by cyberattack, by sabotage, by any means, our bases stay lit. Our aircraft keep flying. Our command centers never go dark,” said Hegseth, explaining the FORTRESS concept. “We are building long overdue strategic reserves deep enough to fight through disruption. Think munitions. Fuel. Medicine. Blood. Deep enough that if the world’s supply lines break, and in a real war, they are going to break — America keeps fighting anyway.”
The former advisor said that Hegseth’s plan appeared to send a message to 99 percent of the American public: “It sounds as if he is saying to people ‘fuck off and you’re on your own.’”
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: While global tech stocks teeter, in China they have already crashed as lofty valuations collapse under worries about AI demand and curbs on Chinese exports. The meltdown, tanking the mainland STAR50 index of AI and semiconductor leaders by 40% in less than four months and vaporizing some $480 billion in market value, is an ill omen for wobbly world markets and a dampener on China's efforts at encouraging its savers into stocks to fund the AI boom. It has also slammed the brakes on a rally running two years, since economic stimulus promises sent shares soaring, and has stalled Beijing's push to break with a long boom-bust pattern and drive a "slow bull" market that delivers reliable performance. China's broad blue-chip index has dropped about 20% from highs made in June. "The stock market later evolved into a speculative crazy bull," said Beijing-based fund manager Dong Baozhen. "And now we see the bubble bursting." There was no clear trigger for the selloff in China, though traders pointed to high valuations, tax bills, and the threat of foreign bans on Chinese data center equipment. According to Goldman Sachs, AI stocks account for 42% of China's market capitalization and 57% of trading turnover, leaving investors widely exposed to the downturn.
"What's happening is now going to put a stop for many of the companies trying to get themselves listed," said Hong Hao, managing partner and chief investment officer at Lotus Asset Management in Hong Kong.
"Overemphasising the 'technology content' -- that is, the weighting of tech companies by market value in major indexes -- leads to a deviation, even a distortion, in capital behavior," said Leo Wang, partner at Beijing-based Qianchuang Capital. "This created a severe bubble in certain sectors and a serious drain on others."
"Just like all other Chinese manufacturers, (chipmakers and AI suppliers) will eventually end up in a price war," said fund manager Wang Zhuo, partner at Shanghai Zhuozhu Investment Management. "There's no exception," he said. "All bubbles inevitably burst."
Home Office refused entry to Judith Clark, 77, invited by RSC to speak about restorative justice after her time in prison
Human rights activists and celebrities including the lawyer Helena Kennedy, the actor Harriet Walter and the theatre director Phyllida Lloyd have urged the Home Office to overturn its decision to refuse a visa to a former member of the radical US group the Weather Underground, saying her decades of rehabilitation should count in her favour.
Judith Clark, 77, was the inspiration for Walter’s portrayal of prisoners in the Donmar Warehouse all-female Shakespeare trilogy, including Brutus in Julius Caesar and Prospero in The Tempest.
We want to hear from gen Z voters about the issues that will decide your vote in the midterm elections
The US midterm elections that will decide control of the House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the governorships in 36 states, are just one week away. The results could have a huge impact on Donald Trump’s final two years in office.
Nearly 50 million people aged 18 to 29 are eligible to vote in the midterms but nearly half are either not registered or civically engaged, according to US Census Bureau data.
Matthew Unglesbee admitted to sending the letters to four unidentified politicians, officials say
An Illinois man accused of sending letters containing suspicious white powder to four members of Congress has been arrested after he allegedly wrote his own name and return address on the envelopes, according to authorities.
Matthew Unglesbee, 36, of Quincy, remained in the custody of US marshals on Tuesday on federal charges of perpetrating a hoax and sending threatening communications through the mail.
Photos obtained by CBS News show Ukraine's vital connection to Starlink was throttled on Oct. 19, inhibiting its interception capacity when a deadly Russian strike hit a park.
We’d like to hear from Americans across the political spectrum about voting priorities in the midterm elections
On 3 November, millions of Americans will vote in the midterm elections to decide control of the House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the governorships in 36 states.
In an October poll by the New York Times/Siena College, Donald Trump’s approval rating sank to 36%, with most respondents expressing frustration over his handling of the US economy, the cost of living and the Iran war.
Tennessee authorities on Tuesday were still searching for a convicted murderer who, investigators say, escaped a state prison by slipping through a fence and fleeing in a stolen truck.
The state department of correction (TDOC) said in a statement that officials realized Jacob Morley, 28, was unaccounted for at about 11.30pm on Sunday at the Northwest correctional complex in Tiptonville, Tennessee.
US president in unprecedented offer of $1m reward for reports of voter fraud as DoJ acts against states. Plus, everything you need to know about Israel’s crucial election
Good morning. The Trump administration’s assault on the legitimacy of the midterm elections has continued, with the US president announcing a $1m reward for reports of voter fraud, amid several legal actions by the Department of Justice to limit voting.
Donald Trump said the bounty payment was contingent on the arrest and conviction of those responsible. He did not disclose how he would pay for the rewards. Trump’s comments follow his repeated and unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud.
What action is the administration trying to take against Washington state? The administration has asked Washington state to set aside any ballots received from more than 400 people it alleges are registered to vote without US citizenship. The request marks the third time this month that the justice department has brought a direct state challenge even as voting is under way.
What is the latest in the battle over California voters? A US federal appeals court has rejected the Trump administration’s move to block California from counting the ballots of 20,000 registered voters that the justice department claims are non-citizens.
Why is Vivek Ramaswamy facing criticism over an advert? The Republican nominee to be the governor of Ohio ran an ad featuring his opponent’s mother, who said she would not vote for her daughter. As Moira Donegan explains in this excoriating opinion piece, the estrangement between Amy Acton is decades long and stems from the sexual abuse Acton survived as a child.
What are the key takeaways from the investor prospectus? The document reveals the AI research lab’s financials and the risks – more than 90 pages of them – that might negatively impact its business. Johana Bhuiyan has identified these four key takeaways.
What has Anthropic’s model recently been accused of? Anthropic’s Claude model accessed voter data in the US state of Georgia, the AI company has confirmed, in the latest example of unauthorised behavior by the technology. The AI model managed to bypass a paywall to reach data that is publicly available but is typically accessible only after paying a fee.
It is hardly a shock that Grok AI’s interpretation of Homer is as meaningless as a laptop screensaver. The only surprise would be if Musk accepted defeat graciously. Which he won’t
Think back. Do you remember when Elon Musk, in a weird online tantrum, and without having seen the film, condemned the supposed wokery in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, for getting Elliot Page to play Sinon and Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen of Troy? As the plaudits and the box-office receipts for Nolan’s Odyssey piled stratospherically up, Musk showed that being a good loser is not among his qualities. He petulantly exclaimed that he could do his own better and more authentic Odyssey on Grok AI. And now he has released the first online seven-minute “episode” to a world that has long since forgotten about this claim and didn’t care in the first place.
In Musk’s version, as the tale begins Odysseus is – off screen – pretending to be mad to avoid fighting in the Trojan war. Grim-faced Palamedes and Agamemnon are shown testing this ruse by taking his baby boy Telemachus and placing him in the harm’s way of a plough in a field; Odysseus instantly rushes to save his child, showing that he isn’t mad, and agrees to fight. We see him join the armada, with Penelope and Telemachus (soon to grow to a little boy) left behind. This, effectively, is a prologue sequence that is not in Nolan. The expeditionary force arrives at Troy, and an intertitle tells us we have cut to a 10-years-later flashforward; the siege is about to escalate into the fake-horse attack.
Through thoughtful conversations and dynamic images, Quil Lemons’s new book Quiladelphia explores how Black men navigate desire and masculinity as well as the stereotypes placed on them. With a foreword by Brontez Purnell and including Lemons in dialogue with musician Santigold and artist Lyle Ashton Harris, Lemons asks the audience to consider who can embody the American dream
Music with a Mission is a Wilmington-based nonprofit established to support the creative work of Somers, a Delaware native, composer, conductor and performer whose career has combined classical music, jazz, sacred compositions and charitable service.
Music with a Mission continues its tradition of combining musical performances with charitable giving as Newark Symphony Orchestra marks the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11.
NEWARK, Del. — Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a Delaware composer and a nonprofit organization built around the power of music are bringing the community together to remember those lost, honor those who served and support a lasting memorial in Claymont.
The Newark Symphony Orchestra will perform Wilson Gault Somers’ “Requiem for 9/11” at 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 8, at The Independence School in Newark.
The anniversary performance, presented in partnership with Music with a Mission, will benefit the Guardian of Defenders Memorial in Claymont, which honors those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks and the military service and sacrifices that followed.
For Music with a Mission, the performance continues a decades-long Delaware tradition of using music not simply for entertainment, but as a way to bring attention and financial support to important community causes.
A Delaware organization where music serves a greater purpose
Music with a Mission is a Wilmington-based nonprofit established to support the creative work of Somers, a Delaware native, composer, conductor and performer whose career has combined classical music, jazz, sacred compositions and charitable service.
The organization operates on the belief that artistic expression can do more than entertain audiences. Through concerts and collaborations with other musicians, it seeks to connect the emotional impact of music with the needs of people and organizations serving the community.
Music with a Mission helps organize performances, raise financial support, develop partnerships and promote original compositions. A portion of proceeds from its events is directed to charitable causes.
According to the organization’s website, it operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit governed by a volunteer board of directors, with no paid employees. Pete Booker serves as interim president.
Its charitable work has touched numerous Delaware organizations over the years, including the Ministry of Caring, Salvation Army, Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Wilmington, Family Promise of Northern New Castle County and Sojourners’ Place.
The organization reports contributing $14,000 to the Ministry of Caring, $11,000 to the Salvation Army, $11,000 to Sojourners’ Place and $2,500 to Catholic Charities through its musical activities over the years.
Other concerts have supported Lutheran Community Services, Friendship House and organizations working to address homelessness and hunger.
Those contributions reflect a central theme of Music with a Mission: Audiences can enjoy outstanding musical performances while knowing that their attendance helps support people facing difficult circumstances.
From helping the homeless to honoring 9/11 victims
The organization’s roots are closely connected to one of Somers’ most significant compositions, “Mass for the Homeless,” created with his wife, Joan.
The work, developed over several years, was inspired by the need to recognize the dignity of people experiencing poverty and homelessness.
Its 1997 premiere at Wilmington’s Grand Opera House featured the Delaware Symphony Orchestra and sold out before the performance. All proceeds from that premiere benefited five Delaware organizations serving people experiencing homelessness.
An encore performance followed in 1999, further establishing the connection between Somers’ music and community service.
Somers, who began his musical education at the former Wilmington Music School in 1962, has also composed film scores, jazz works and music exploring historical and spiritual themes.
He spent 30 years as choral director at The Tatnall School and has maintained a career as a church musician, conductor and jazz pianist.
His work on a documentary about Delaware artist Edward Loper earned him an Emmy Award for his original jazz score.
The same philosophy that inspired “Mass for the Homeless” also shaped “Requiem for 9/11.”
The composition premiered in 2012 at the Grand Opera House, bringing together orchestra, chorus, soloists and spoken text drawn from the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions.
Rather than focusing exclusively on the tragedy, Somers designed the work to explore grief, remembrance and the eventual restoration of hope.
A smaller chamber orchestra arrangement was subsequently developed to make the composition accessible to more community and school ensembles.
That version was performed at St. Helena’s Roman Catholic Church in Wilmington in September 2021, marking the 20th anniversary of the attacks.
The upcoming performance by the Newark Symphony Orchestra will bring the work to audiences again during the 25th anniversary year, under the direction of conductor Simeone Tartaglione.
Supporting a memorial born from military service
This year’s beneficiary, the Guardian of Defenders Memorial, provides a direct connection between the musical tribute and the sacrifices made by Americans following Sept. 11, 2001.
Located at 1300 Philadelphia Pike in Claymont, the memorial was envisioned by two retired military chaplains, the Rev. John Gayton, a Navy commander, and the Rev. Donald Van Alstyne, an Army major.
Both served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and each received a Bronze Star for his military service.
Their experiences counseling service members and families affected by combat helped inspire a permanent place dedicated to remembrance, reflection and healing.
The memorial features an angel carrying a fallen service member above a battlefield cross, symbolizing sacrifice and the spiritual care of those who served.
According to the organizers, Gayton mortgaged his home to help begin financing the project. Donations continue to support the memorial and its long-term maintenance through the Guardian of Defenders Foundation.
The site has become a place for public remembrance, including a Veterans Day visit by then-President Joe Biden in 2024, when a plaque honoring his late son, Beau Biden, was unveiled.
For Somers and Music with a Mission, the connection between the concert and the memorial is especially meaningful.
“I can’t think of a more fitting beneficiary to join us in remembering the sacrifices, the heroes and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit that arose from that terrible, momentous day,” Somers said. “We are so very honored to offer support to this effort.”
Continuing a tradition of music and giving
Music with a Mission’s work extends beyond its major orchestral compositions.
The organization has presented jazz concerts, holiday programs and smaller performances that bring together local musicians while supporting charitable organizations.
Its annual “A Jazz Christmas” performances have supported Delaware nonprofits, including those providing food, shelter and assistance to struggling families.
The organization has also presented Jazz Vespers programs combining sacred themes, original music and jazz performances.
In March 2026, Somers introduced “The Lincoln Legacy,” a composition examining President Abraham Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War and the continuing relevance of his words during periods of national division.
A performance of “A Jazz Christmas” is scheduled for Dec. 6 at The Tatnall School in Wilmington.
These events reflect the organization’s continuing efforts to make music a vehicle for community engagement, charitable giving and reflection on issues that extend beyond the concert hall.
For the upcoming “Requiem for 9/11,” those goals come together in a particularly meaningful way.
The performance will offer an opportunity to remember the thousands of Americans killed on Sept. 11, honor those who responded and served in the years that followed, and support a Delaware memorial dedicated to ensuring those sacrifices are not forgotten.
Twenty-five years later, Music with a Mission is continuing its commitment to using the power of music to connect remembrance with hope and charitable service.
TO GO: Requiem for 9/11 — 25th anniversary performance
What: Newark Symphony Orchestra performance of Wilson Gault Somers’ “Requiem for 9/11”
When: Sunday, Nov. 8, 2026, at 3 p.m.
Where: The Independence School, 1300 Paper Mill Road, Newark
Conductor: Simeone Tartaglione
Beneficiary: A portion of the proceeds will support the Guardian of Defenders Memorial in Claymont.
Police were called after a dispute involving the parents of a three-year-old player at a soccer game in Florida over the weekend.
The boy’s parents can be heard on police body cameras saying their son, Nevada, had been kicked out because he was too good at soccer and was embarrassing the other children. However, an organizer at the game said Nevada had pushed other children and his parents had become argumentative when their son was taken out of the game.
"The Court earlier stated, 'I am not the Lorax. I do not speak for the trees,'" U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes wrote. "The Court still does not speak for the trees. It speaks only for the rule of law."
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has tried to balance passing the president's agenda and preserving the independence of the Senate. The midterms are his biggest test yet.
Twenty-two states and Washington DC let voters register on election day. Why aren’t politicians doing more to reach young people?
With election day just a week away, candidates are ignoring millions of young Americans who could still cast a decisive ballot but have not yet registered to vote.
By contrast, my mailbox has been full of political flyers: the various campaigns gleaned my name from the voter file, recognized that I am a regular voter who hadn’t cast a ballot yet, and assessed through their targeted analysis that it’s worth spending on printing and postage to get their message to me.
Last year, the state’s board of elections removed several polling sites from local colleges – and students have taken it upon themselves to organize voting
On 15 October, the first day of early voting in North Carolina, mostly Black students from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (NC A&T), Bennett College and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) marched from their college campuses to their nearest polling sites for the first day of early voting.
Previously, students were able to vote on their respective campuses; however, late last year, with Republicans at the helm, the North Carolina board of elections removed several polling sites from local colleges: UNCG, NC A&T, Western Carolina University (WCU) and Elon University. As a result, students have taken it upon themselves to organize voting. The marches – two, so far – took about two hours round trip, but protecting their right to vote, the students say, is worth it.
Both private and public schools in tech regions are limiting the use of tech in classrooms. But will low-income districts be able to follow suit?
German Gil spends most of his waking hours looking at screens. Since moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2015, the software engineer has bounced between startups and giants including Netflix, Facebook and GitHub.
But when it came to the education of his daughter, Victoria, he wanted her to have a different experience, one in which his “kid could be a kid”.
Boiler upgrade scheme, which provides grants of up to £9,000 for sustainable alternatives, expected to be slashed in budget
When Bill Tuck first started installing air source heat pumps six years ago, other heating engineers were skeptical the green technology would take off. “Now, the conversation is completely different,” he said.
“I’m getting approached by them saying: ‘Mrs Jones, my customer for 15 years, she’s enquiring about a heat pump. What can you tell me?’ The whole narrative has changed.”
Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere rose to record highs in 2025, locking in climate impacts that will persist for centuries, the U.N. says.
President has taken an axe to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, stalling climate research on and response to extreme weather events
Sweeping cuts to the premier US climate agency under Donald Trump have severely hampered the country’s capacity to forecast, research and respond to extreme weather events, former government officials and scientists have warned, as the US faces a cascade of hazards fueled by a potentially historic El Niño this winter.
From the start of his second term, the president has taken aim at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), slashing staff levels, canceling contracts and grants, and shutting down databases and research laboratories. The agency that has long been considered a global crown jewel in climate science and forecasting, has lost roughly 20% of its staff since January 2025.
In New Mexico, where a shortage is acute, Casa de Salud trains college and high-school health apprentices who understand the communities they serve
“I’ll be getting a little bit closer to you to put the cuff on,” Gisselle Martinez said, demonstrating how to take a manual blood pressure in a trauma-informed manner. “It might be a little tight. Let me know if you feel any discomfort and I can take it off.”
She’s not a doctor or a nurse – at least, not yet – but a 21-year-old college student. Between classes, Martinez works as a bilingual health apprentice at Casa de Salud, a primary care clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. On top of taking vitals, Martinezis certified in harm reduction – she can run a needle exchange and give out fentanyl test strips. And she understands how a patient’s trauma and past neglect can show up in an exam room.
Denmark's Ministry of Digitization reportedly abandoned a pilot to replace Microsoft Office with the open-source Collabora suite less than six months after it began. Tom's Hardware reports: According to Danish publication Computerworld, the pilot project was launched in 2025 and involved 38 employees, all of whom would start using the British open-source Collabora office suite instead of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The experiment was initiated by the then Digitization Minister Caroline Stage, who wanted to reduce the country's dependence on American technology. Denmark isn't alone in moving away from U.S. software, with France and the Netherlands both taking steps to replace Microsoft Windows. However, it seemed that the experiment fizzled out less than six months after it started. It had reportedly ended by the time the Danish government called for an early election in February 2026, with some employees complaining about issues with style, paragraph formatting, blank pages, and challenges with tracking changes.
But even though it's been months since the experiment reportedly ended, Prof. Mikkel Flyberbom of the Copenhagen Business School complains that the project hasn't been properly evaluated. "It's a good idea to test alternatives in a pilot project," the professor said in an email. "However, I wish that the ministry would take the opportunity to learn from the pilot project and share those experiences with other parts of the public sector."
It is essential not just to fund the public goods the nation needs, it is indispensable to restore a sense of fairness
Money doesn’t buy happiness, we’re told. Even some economists agree. The Nobel prize-winning economists Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton once proposed that rising income increased people’s emotional wellbeing only up to a ceiling of about $115,000 in today’s money.
They probably hadn’t met many billionaires. The ultra-rich may not pursue happiness in the joyful sense of the word. But they will try every trick in the book to hang on to their stash and woe betide the tax authority that tries to lay a finger on their treasure.
The musician and outspoken critic of the president is suing for $10m in reputational damages – six years after a settlement in which Trump agreed not to use the song again
Neil Young is suing Donald Trump’s political action committee Trump 47 Committee Inc for $10m (£7.47m) over alleged copyright infringement of his song Rockin’ in the Free World after the US president used it as walk-up music in recent midterm election rallies.
It is the second time that Young has filed against one of Trump’s organisations over his unlicenced use of the song. He first did so in 2020, against the corporation Donald J Trump for President Inc. Trump settled, promising, according to Young’s suit, that his organisation “would never again use Rockin’ in the Free World without a license and permission from Young”.
Two men arrested in connection with the alleged Iran-linked terror plot targeting RAF Fairford in England have been charged with national security offenses.
A top executive at HSBC has tried to quash speculation that the bank could move its headquarters out of the UK over tax increases expected to be announced in Wednesday’s budget.
HSBC’s chief financial officer, Pam Kaur, said there was “no pressure”, particularly from shareholders in its cornerstone Hong Kong market, to shift out of London despite lobbyists warning higher tax bills could drive big banks’ business abroad.
President Carter lies in state. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
What I’m Discussing Today
Kareem’s Quote of the Day: When you judge a leader’s strength, do you look for the loudest boast or the willingness to lend a hand?
A Brief History of Political Promises: Trump’s election-contingent generosity wants our money to buy our obedience.
Quick Takes: Sherrod Brown fights for workers while Donald Trump obsesses over backsides. Plus, a bonus clip from Seinfeld.
Bulworth, directed by Warren Beatty: This biting political satire earns plenty of laughs, thanks to great performances from its director and a young Halle Berry.
Dave Alvin, “Ashgrove”: With David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, Alvin honors musical elders while remembering that a life in music comes with losses—and rent.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It’s a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.”
― Jimmy Carter
(Bettmann/Getty Images)
When Jimmy Carter spoke those words on October 14, 1976, he was on the verge of completing one of the greatest come-from-nowhere ascendancies in the history of American politics. He was a peanut farmer and single-term Georgia governor (the state constitution forbade holding the office for consecutive terms), and he had almost no national profile before throwing his hat into the ring for the Democratic presidential nomination. That ended up working to his advantage. The country was still recovering from Vietnam and Watergate, which left many voters disillusioned with Washington politics. Running as an outsider, Carter built up momentum through the primary season and ended up decisively winning the nomination. The general election was closer, but President Gerald Ford couldn’t shake off the stigma of having pardoned President Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandal, and Carter became president.
His presidency, however, was doomed by events that seem, in retrospect, to have been beyond his control, namely an Iranian revolution that led to fuel shortages, inflation, and finally a hostage crisis that made America feel weaker than at any time in recent history. No question, he made some mistakes. In the summer of 1979, as energy prices soared, he gave a televised feel-bad speech describing “a crisis of confidence that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” He asked Americans “to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense—I tell you it is an act of patriotism.” The speech became known as the “malaise” speech, although Carter never used that word, and he was widely criticized for projecting weakness and blaming the American people.
Things only got worse from there. The deposed Shah of Iran was terminally ill and in desperate need of medical care. His long-time allies in the American government, in particular former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Carter’s own National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, shamed Carter into admitting the Shah for treatment, despite the potential consequences. Carter even asked Brzezinski, “What are you going to advise me to do if they [Iranian militants] overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?” That’s exactly what happened, and the 444-day hostage crisis that followed, along with a failed rescue attempt that cost eight American lives, ended Carter’s chances of reelection.
Yet, Jimmy Carter’s legacy was far from finished. He became the only modern American president to overcome the flaws of his presidency and earn almost universal admiration through his post-presidential work. In the more than four decades after he left the White House, he worked tirelessly, advocating for international health, monitoring more than 100 elections in over 40 countries, leading nuclear freeze talks in North Korea and peace missions to other troubled countries, building houses by hand with Habitat for Humanity, and teaching Sunday school at his local church well past the age of 90. He was an icon of modest frugality and profound moral integrity. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” (Someone should point out those qualifications to anyone currently interested in winning the prize.) In short, he used all the capital he had earned as president for the good of others, rather than for personal glory or enrichment.
I like the quote above because it describes both personal and national aspirations, and a code of honor that seems in short supply today. Carter was clearly a “strong person,” and proved it throughout his 44 years after the presidency by being “gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained,” always offering “a helping hand to others.” The possibility he warned against, of “a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity,” perfectly predicted the Washington of today, and the current occupant of the White House. Come 2028, I’ll be looking for a candidate with aspirations like Carter’s to take over the presidency. May the best woman or man win.
Whether you favour spooky fairtales, satanic card games or infernal hijinks at the chip shop there are all manner of fresh top scarers at large this witching season
Tis almost All Hallows’ Eve and naturally, the thoughts of all good video game players are turning to horror. 2026 has already been a bloody good year for the genre with Resident Evil Requiem and Silent Hill: Townfall leading the rabble. But this autumn sees a festering surge of indie horror releases, featuring everything from cursed card games to Nazi-hunting penguins. Here are eight terrifying titles we think you should sample while jack-o-lanterns burn and spirits walk the moonlit streets.
CurrentBody’s LED masks have long been my favourite. They’re comfortable, simple to use and effective. My previous favourite, the now-discontinued CurrentBody Multi Light Therapy LED mask, offered five treatments that used different light wavelengths to address multiple skin concerns. The company’s latest mask, the new Series 3, has the most detailed customisable treatments I’ve ever seen.
This isn’t the first LED mask I’ve tried that allows its user to select different treatments for different areas of the face. The Lustre Renew Pro Facewear allows you to choose from two treatments across four different zones, with 16 possible combinations. The Series 3 takes this much further, allowing you to choose between six light wavelengths across 125 light points on the mask. If you stick to one wavelength per light point, that’s 6125 combinations available. That number is longer than I can reasonably comprehend, so allow me to call its level of customisation endless.
Benjamin Netanyahu is in the fight of his political life. Voters in Israel are heading to the polls on Tuesday to decide an election that could determine whether Netanyahu will remain the country's prime minister (and affect the outcome of the corruption charges against him). But the Israeli election also arrives at a time when voters around the world seem to be rejecting authoritarianism. A student-run movement stunned the world on Sunday when its candidates routed Serbia's long-serving leader, Aleksandar Vučić. That same day, Brazilians beat back a campaign by Flávio Bolsonaro – the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the disgraced former president – in a historic upset. Carter Sherman speaks to Julian Borger, the Guardian’s senior international correspondent, about how these four elections could reshape the political world order in just 10 days, and why the upcoming US midterm elections are the biggest test for global democracy.
Republican attacks on the candidate for governor are contradictory and hinge on a warped understanding of sexual abuse
I’ve heard people say that the Ramaswamy team must have been scared.
Last week, the campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech billionaire and onetime Republican presidential candidate who is currently the Republican nominee to be the governor of Ohio, ran an ad featuring the long-estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, the physician and former public health official Amy Acton.
No private individual should have the power to determine US foreign policy, as Musk has attempted to do in Ukraine
He’s Exhibit A on why billionaire wealth should be taxed, why we must get big money out of politics, why billionaires shouldn’t be allowed to buy up major media, and why our government shouldn’t give them huge military contracts.
Get Involved Treinta Y Tres Delaware Rueda hosts its “Dance & Dine”event at Belvedere Fire Hall (1000 Liberty Road, Wilmington, DE 19804) on Sunday, Nov. 1, 5-9 p.m., with a dance class for beginners 5-6 p.m. The event is free, but please bring an appetizer, main dish, dessert, drink or side to share.
When some people say they “can’t dance,” they refer to their lack of grace or embarrassing moves. When I say that I can’t dance, I am saying that I do not dance.
I generally refuse to out of an inflated sense of self-consciousness that’s prevented me from losing myself to the music at live concerts and even in the privacy of my own home.
Despite knowing this about myself, I showed up to Kicks Academy of Dance in Glen Mills, Pa., on a recent Sunday morning to participate in a Cuban dance class with Treinta Y Tres Delaware Rueda, an organization based in Claymont.
I came in with an open mind and my dancing shoes on (though mine paled in comparison to the shiny, red ballroom shoes of a classmate).
When Treinta Y Tres founder and instructor Mike Payne asked me whether I had ever taken a dance class, I explained that I didn’t have much dancing experience — at all.
“Throw you in the trenches. Grab the grenades,” he said with a laugh.
Then, boot camp began.
Mike Payne founded Treinta Y Tres Delaware Rueda in 2019. | PHOTO BY BRYAN GONZALO OLVERA, GATO MALO MEDIA LLC
Casino is a partnered dance that developed in ballrooms in Havana in the 1950s.
In Rueda de Casino — Treinta Y Tres’ speciality — couples dance in a circle, hence the “rueda” in the name. A caller shouts out moves in Spanish that dancers must execute while constantly changing partners.
Luckily for me, we started with a much more linear son cubano dance — the style that served as the foundation for casino.
Mike divided the class into “leaders” and “followers.” I was, to my dismay, a leader.
In pairs, we began with back-and-forth footwork as Mike counted out the beat. My eyes were glued to my feet as I mimicked Mike’s movements. But after a few repetitions, I’d memorized where to step.
Things became more complex as Mike added moves like the entrada, which requires the leader to create a gate with their arm for their follower to pass through in a twirl.
We switched partners every few minutes. Some of my more experienced partners guided me as they repositioned my arms and told me to lead with my chest rather than staring at my feet.
Though I apologized to all my partners, each met me with encouragement and reminders to enjoy myself — which, to my surprise, I did. Though I didn’t nail every step of the dance by the end of the hour, I’d made an exciting amount of progress.
‘Heartbeat of the community’
Treinta Y Tres Delaware Rueda dances are often high-energy. | PHOTO BY BRYAN GONZALO OLVERA, GATO MALO MEDIA LLC
Afterward was the Rueda de Casino class, during which couples gathered in a ring and executed moves at Mike’s command.
“I love the beauty of it. If you ever see it from an aerial perspective, the shapes that are formed almost look like a kaleidoscope, like flowers opening and closing,” longtime Treinta Y Tres participant Drew Chambers said. “It’s supposed to resemble the heartbeat of the community.”
It’s clear from watching that Rueda de Casino can be much more chaotic than son cubano.
“Rueda is a call-and-respond dance, meaning that on a certain count of a song, you call the next move,” explained Susan Payne, Treinta Y Tres co-director and Mike’s wife. “You can make it really boring … or you can make it very dynamic from these hundreds of different calls you’re mixing in this soup of fun and changes of directions and trying to trick people.”
In fact, making mistakes and scrambling to fix them is often the most fun part of a class, Mike said. Not all Rueda de Casino instructors have that mindset.
“I came from another Rueda group about a year ago,” participant Ayesha Stable said. “They were often very punitive when I got it wrong. I didn’t feel that way when I got here.”
Treinta Y Tres is so welcoming of beginners that Ayesha felt comfortable inviting her head-over-heels fiance, Arturo Stable, a few months ago.
Arturo is originally from Cuba and has always been a wallflower.
“Dancing is such a big part of Cuban culture. When I hear the music, my heart starts pumping. I want to do it, but I just never had the opportunity to learn and to practice, especially with someone as awesome as my fiancée,” Arturo said.
Arturo instantly connected with the Spanish-language music and, after a few months, can dance to the flow of the music rather than rigidly repeating patterns “like a robot.”
“It feels like I can connect with my culture in ways that I never could before,” he said.
Flash mobs and potlucks
Rueda de Casino is danced in pairs of leaders and followers. | PHOTO BY BRYAN GONZALO OLVERA, GATO MALO MEDIA LLC
Participants dance at a Treinta Y Tres Delaware Rueda event. | PHOTO BY BRYAN GONZALO OLVERA, GATO MALO MEDIA LLC
Creating cross-cultural connection is one reason Mike and Susan founded Treinta Y Tres Delaware Rueda in 2019.
It all began when Mike and Susan saw a group dancing Rueda de Casino at a Philadelphia club called The Eighth Floor. They were entranced.
They approached one of the dancers, Darlin Garcia, who is the founder of Art in Motion Latin Dancers. Garcia explained that he didn’t teach Rueda de Casino but could start a class if the Paynes gathered a group. So, the Paynes called up some friends and learned from Garcia for the next six months.
The group dwindled as the members became busy with kids and careers. But several years later, in 2019, the Paynes began hosting Rueda de Casino dances with friends in basements, living rooms and backyards.
That led to more adventures, including organizing a Rueda de Casino flash mob in Concord Mall and going on a week-long trip to Cuba in January 2020 to learn from dance instructors.
Just as the group gained momentum, the COVID pandemic hit. The one upside was that it gave Mike the opportunity to learn from Cuban dance instructors from across the world who had moved their lessons online.
“For two years straight, it was just studying, studying and studying and learning about Cuban culture, the whole development of the dance and how to dance it properly,” Mike said.
Contagious synchronicity
Treinta Y Tres Delaware Rueda classes and workshops are often packed with participants. | PHOTO BY BRYAN GONZALO OLVERA, GATO MALO MEDIA LLC
After the pandemic, Treinta Y Tres hit the ground running.
The Paynes’ get-togethers evolved into a free “Dance & Dine” event held a few times a year, which includes a Rueda de Casino beginners’ class, a dance and a potluck.
“People from all different ethnic groups come here. So, when we have our “Dance & Dines,” people bring food from all over the world,” Susan said. “You’re getting influences from everywhere. People are really proud of their culture, so they want to share it with you.”
The event is an excellent way to combat xenophobia and social isolation, she added.
“(Dancing) really makes you open to having a conversation with someone or getting to know people on a deeper level, taking away those barriers that normally would exist when you’re out walking around or at the store,” she said.
Mike and Susan also started hosting drop-in Sunday classes for all levels, which start at a mere $5 per person.
Mike Payne, right, dances with a Treinta Y Tres Delaware Rueda student. | PHOTO BY BRYAN GONZALO OLVERA, GATO MALO MEDIA LLC
“We’ve always wanted to make sure it was accessible to people, so that (money) wasn’t a barrier for anybody who wanted to come in,” Susan said.
Treinta Y Tres also hosts international trips to learn from instructors from across the world. (The group currently doesn’t have plans to return to Cuba, given the ongoing humanitarian crisis.) The group also features international instructors during its annual RuedX event in January.
Treinta Y Tres’ growth from a gathering of friends to an organization with an international reach wouldn’t have been possible without grant funding. Most recently, the organization received a $50,000 “Walking Together” grant from the U.S. Regional Arts Organizations in June.
Treinta Y Tres has used the funds on its regular operations and events but also wants to use the funding to hire instructors and train additional callers (those who call out commands during Rueda de Casino).
“We can’t be everywhere. We want people to be doing (Rueda de Casino) when we’re not around,” Susan said. “Say, some people live in Middletown or down further, and they drive up here for classes, or they get trained. … They’re going to spread it in their area. Eventually, it’ll spread throughout the whole state.”
The Paynes believe growing Rueda de Casino in Delaware is important not only because it expands cultural offerings for the Cuban community, but also because the dance form brings people together, regardless of culture.
“Everyone is dancing. We’re in sync. We’re in unison. And there’s something about the synchronicity that’s contagious,” Mike said. “It really does fill you and make you want to do more and connect with people.”
Social media companies including Meta have pulled back on efforts to protect voters from election-meddling lies
Social media feeds are awash with an unprecedented flood of AI-driven disinformation ahead of November’s US midterm elections, according to experts, who warn many posts are probably “slipping through the cracks”.
As tens of millions of Americans prepare to cast their vote, social media companies have scaled back their efforts to protect voters from lies meant to manipulate elections.
Why Should Delaware Care? School has been canceled this week for Lulu M. Ross Elementary School students after their Milford school caught fire Sunday, causing extensive damage to classrooms and the general building.
An early morning fire at a Milford elementary school on Sunday severely damaged several classrooms and the library, among other sections of the school.
It also has disrupted the lives of many in the local community, leaving parents searching for childcare, a food bank mobilizing to provide lunches, and district officials wondering what could be salvaged from the scene.
The Delaware State Fire Marshal’s office said in a statement that the cause of the blaze at Lulu M. Ross Elementary remains under investigation, but so far investigators have found no evidence of criminal activity.
Brad Schad, chief deputy state fire marshal, also told Spotlight Delaware that it is reasonable to assume students would not return to the school building this academic year.
“That decision will be made by the school district about whether they are going to repair the building or demolish it,” Schad said.
In a separate statement, Milford Superintendent Travis Moorman said district officials are assessing their facilities to find “extra space that can be provided across the district.”
He said the goal is to return students to a school next week but said there are logistical challenges the district must work through before making a final decision.
The fire also left the adjacent Mispillion Elementary School without internet or working phone systems, causing school there to be canceled on Monday. The two schools share a campus, and both lost fiber-optic connectivity following the fire, according to the district.
Firefighters were first notified of the blaze at 4:15 a.m. Sunday when a fire alarm was going off at Ross Elementary. When they arrived, they could see fire coming out of the roof of the school, according to the fire marshal. The crews then entered the building, “but deteriorating conditions forced them to evacuate the structure,” the fire marshal said.
By Sunday afternoon, officials announced that school would be canceled for students the upcoming week.
A spokesperson for the Milford School District also said it was unclear whether officials could salvage any “materials or contents of the building.” Officials also said a district crisis team would meet regularly throughout the week, discussing short- and long-term responses and how education will look for students and staff.
Firefighters breached the roof of Lulu Ross Elementary School on Sunday in an effort to control the blaze that appeared to gut much of the building. | PHOTO COURTESY OF GEORGETOWN FIRE CO.
The district spokesperson said several daycare centers, such as Kids Inc. at the Reformation Lutheran Church and the Boys and Girls Club, have opened their doors and offered space for kids whose parents work and need assistance with childcare for the week.
The district is also working with its own nutrition department and the Food Bank of Delaware to provide breakfast and lunch for its students. The district established hub spots for families to pick up meals while school is closed, Moorman said. The meal bags will include lunch for each day and breakfast for the next morning.
In a statement posted on social media, Delaware Secretary of Education Cindy Marten said her department is working directly with district leaders to “help meet immediate needs, remove barriers, and support plans for students to continue learning.”
What will happen if the school can’t be rebuilt?
It is unclear how long it may take for the Milford community to see a new Lulu M. Ross Elementary School building.
If a district wants to build a new school, add an expansion, or complete a substantial renovation, its officials must seek state funding approvals from the Delaware Department of Education through a process known as a certificate of necessity, commonly referred to as a CN.
If the Department of Education approves a request, the state will fund a percentage of the project cost. The district would need to secure its local contribution through a referendum.
Nearly all CN requests have been rejected in recent years.
This past summer, the Milford School District requested $80 million to complete major renovations and expansions to its high school. It was the fourth time the school district has submitted the request.
Delaware Department of Education spokesperson Alison May said the department understands the “emergency nature” of the situation for the Milford School District.
She also said there are emergency protocols and provisions to expedite construction needs under the insurance process. May also pointed to an “emergency process” when the Capital School District’s William Henry Middle School was impacted by a tornado in 2020.
More than $9 million was needed to repair William Henry Middle, as reported by Bay to Bay News. At the time, Capital School District officials credited legislators, the Delaware Department of Education and the state insurance office with securing the funding for repairs.
An old building
The campus of Ross Elementary was mostly quiet on Monday afternoon. A few contractors wandered around the back of the school, while the nearby Mispillion Elementary also sat closed.
The air still smelled slightly smoky, depending on how the wind was blowing.
Contractor vehicles were parked outside Ross Elementary in Milford Monday, a day after a fire erupted in the school. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY MADDY LAURIA
Jessica Smith, who lives along nearby Lovers Lane and attended Lulu Ross, said she worried about what will happen with the school’s roughly 700 students. She also noted she has family and friends who work at the school
She said her boyfriend told her about the fire on Sunday but she didn’t believe him at first. But when she left for church that morning, there were about a dozen fire trucks lining the whole street. Some have returned several times over the past 24 hours, she said.
Smith also mentioned that other fire alarms had gone off at the school recently prior the blaze, citing two specific times within the last week. One last weekend and another during the middle of the week.
Why Should Delaware Care? After Wilmington City Councilman James Spadola switched his political affiliation from Republican to Democrat last year, some on the City Council argued it disenfranchised non-Democratic Party voters. Those councilmembers then passed a resolution declaring his seat vacant. Spadola challenged the resolution in a lawsuit that now is headed to the Delaware Supreme Court.
The Wilmington City Council isn’t done trying to oust Councilman James Spadola, the Republican-turned-Democrat who kept his seat last month after a Chancery Court judge sided with him in a dispute over his party switch.
This month, Council President Ernest “Trippi” Congo appealed the Chancery Court ruling on behalf of the full City Council. His attorney, Jane Brady, has until Nov. 30 to file an opening brief with the Delaware Supreme Court.
In the initial appeal filing, Brady said the council’s decision to continue the case followed internal discussions that demonstrated council members remained “firmly convinced” that the city charter bars a minority-party member from switching to the majority party.
Rather than welcome him to the party, many of Spadola’s city council colleagues claimed he had exploited a loophole in the law that requires one member of the City Council to be elected from a minority party.
In April, Councilman Alexander Hackett introduced a resolution seeking to close that perceived loophole. The measure, which overwhelmingly passed council, asked the state legislature to bar future at-large, minority-party members from switching their political affiliation during the middle of a term.
But that resolution didn’t impact Spadola’s current position on the council. And in May, Council President Ernest “Trippi” Congo sponsored a resolution to declare Spadola’s seat vacant, arguing he “made the choice to disenfranchise the approximately 15% of non-majority voters” in the city.
The council approved the resolution. In response Spadola filed a lawsuit to block it, arguing the council had no legal power to remove him.
Following the announcement of the appeal this month, Spadola expressed surprise by what he described as a “lack of transparency” surrounding the process. He argued that the “council essentially decided to appeal in a back room,” rather than voting or discussing the issue publicly.
He also claimed that some of his fellow council members were unaware that an appeal was planned.
“I don’t know if this is President Congo doing it unilaterally. Of course, it’s their right to appeal, but I don’t know who made the decision. And now, taxpayers are on the hook for additional money,” Spadola said.
The city has spent more than $207,000 on the case as of Oct. 23, according to City Council staff. Of that, a little over $130,000 went to Spadola’s attorneys and about $75,000 to Congo’s attorneys.
At the center of the yearlong dispute was the provision in the city charter that bars the majority party, currently Democrats, from nominating more than three candidates for the city’s four at-large council seats. The rule effectively reserves one of those seats for someone outside that party at the start of the council term.
The charter doesn’t address what happens when that person changes parties after taking office.
Asked if he believes the Supreme Court will uphold McCormick’s decision, Spadola said he has “confidence the rule of law will prevail.”
In the appeal, Brady also asked the Supreme Court to fast-track the case, arguing that Spadola continues to vote on legislative matters despite being disqualified from doing so.
The Supreme Court denied Brady’s request to expedite the court proceedings on Oct. 14.
The case is expected to stretch into the new year. The court gave Brady until Nov. 30 to file an opening brief. Spadola’s attorneys will then have 30 days to respond.
Congo did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.
Why Should Delaware Care? Battles over gun control legislation often play out in the courts. As the number of converted machineguns has risen rapidly in recent years, a lawsuit over Glock handguns that can be made into automatic weapons has the potential to impact the prevalence of both Glock firearms and illegal automatic weapons in Delaware.
Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings is suing gun manufacturer Glock for allowing the handguns it sells to easily be converted into automatic weapons, an unprecedented move for the state.
Jennings’ office filed the lawsuit against the international firearms manufacturer on Oct. 22, alleging the company has designed its handguns such that adding an inexpensive piece called a Glock switch — sold by third-party dealers — turns the weapon into an automatic machinegun.
“The result is a flood of Glocks equipped with Glock switches on American streets,” the complaint states. “These weapons are notoriously difficult to control, increasing the risk of catching bystanders in a bullet spray, and multiplying the devastation caused by gunfire.”
Semi-automatic firearms, which are sold by Glock and other firearms manufacturers and are legal in most places, fire one bullet per pull of the trigger by the gun handler. Automatic handguns, however, which are much more heavily regulated in the United States, are able to fire continuously with one pull of the trigger.
The suit is being brought by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of Impact Litigation, which is part of the department’s Fraud Division, in the Court of Chancery.
It calls for the court to stop Glock from selling handguns to civilians — not military and law enforcement professionals who also use Glock weapons — based on multiple public nuisance charges.
The 82-page complaint describes a number of ways that Glock has allowed consumers to turn handguns into automatic machine guns, including failing to redesign the handguns so they cannot be turned into illegal guns and allowing third-party sellers to put the Glock logo on the attachment pieces.
The Glock switch, according to the complaint, is a small metal or plastic device the size of a lego piece that can be purchased for under $20 and can be placed on the back of a Glock handgun to make it fire as an automatic machine gun.
The DOJ and gun violence prevention advocates are lauding the lawsuit as another step toward better gun safety in Delaware, while Second Amendment advocates say it is a misplaced attempt to punish manufacturers for the behavior of criminals.
Representatives from Glock did not respond to Spotlight Delaware’s request for comment on the lawsuit.
Traci Manza Murphy, executive director of the Delaware Coalition Against Gun Violence, said the lawsuit follows up on a Delaware law passed in 2022, often referred to as KeKe’s law, which holds firearm manufacturers and dealers accountable for what the law describes as “knowingly or recklessly” endangering the safety of Delawareans.
Most notably, KeKe’s law resulted in an ongoing Superior Court lawsuit against the Christiana Mall location of Cabela’s gun shop for what the DOJ described as the store taking a “hands-off” approach to individuals who shoplifted 500,000 rounds of ammo.
“We’ve long recognized that gun manufacturers have a role to play in preventing gun violence,” Manza Murphy said. “And when a company knows that its product can be easily converted into an illegal machinegun, we should expect to address that.”
However, Jeff Hague, president of the Delaware State Sportsmens’ Association, the state’s National Rifle Association affiliate, said his group views the lawsuit as merely “another means of trying to keep people from owning firearms.”
The federal and state governments already prohibit individuals from making a handgun into an automatic rifle, so the litigation is an unnecessary attack on law-abiding citizens’ right to bear arms, Hague said.
The Delaware DOJ is the sole plaintiff on the Glock lawsuit, but similar legal challenges have been filed in New Jersey, Minnesota and Maryland, a spokesperson for the DOJ told Spotlight Delaware.
Chancery Court Judge Nathan Cook has been assigned to the case. A preliminary hearing had not been scheduled as of Monday afternoon.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
Business secretary says focus for November summit will be trade and youth mobility, but talks will also include ‘future options for relationship’
British officials have begun discussions with the EU about a long-term relationship that could include a return to free movement, the business secretary has said while promising the British people “are the boss” when it comes to what the UK will accept.
Jonathan Reynolds said the focus for British negotiations was the EU summit in November to seal an agreement to ease some trading restrictions and a youth mobility deal. But he said the prime minister, Andy Burnham, had made it clear he wanted to see a long-term and stable relationship with the bloc.
The founder of Tiktok parent ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, reclaimed the top spot on a list of China's richest people, driven by his company's push into AI.
Two sportspeople have been executed in the past month and at least six more face the same fate, says activist group
Fears are growing for more Iranian athletes facing execution after mountain climber Ali-Sina Mostafavi became the latest in a string to be killed by the regime.
Mostafavi – who documented his ascents of some of the world’s highest peaks, including Mount Everest – was executed on 14 October having been arrested in April after the anti-government protests a few months earlier. His death followed the killing of Siavash Jamshidi Kheirabadi, a taekwondo athlete, at the start of October, and the mixed martial arts fighter Gholamreza Khani Shakarab, who was hanged in May.
Rubio’s decision not to meet Narendra Modi last week was seen by some as a snub – but by focusing on business leaders and oil, the secretary of state made American priorities clear. Plus: the artist bringing a female perspective to men’s clothing
When the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, visited India for the second time this year, headlines concentrated on who he met and where he went.
The fact that Rubio bypassed New Delhi and did not meet the prime minister, Narendra Modi, during his trip last week, and instead traveled to the financial capital, Mumbai, where he met India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar (pictured top with Rubio), and business leaders, did not go unnoticed. Nor did his decision to travel to Jamnagar, the small Gujarati town that is home to Reliance Industries’ colossal oil refinery complex.
Head of Australia’s national broadcaster says depiction of globally beloved character ramming politicians with a car breaches intellectual property
Australia’s national broadcaster will send a cease and desist letter to the rightwing populist party One Nation for using Bluey in a “shocking and disrespectful” cartoon which sees the beloved character repeatedly ramming politicians with an SUV.
The ABC’s managing director, Hugh Marks, told Senate estimates on Tuesday he became aware of One Nation’s potential breach of intellectual property last week and sought legal advice. “We will be taking further action, I can assure you,” he said.
The number of UK businesses in financial distress has hit its highest level in more than two decades, as pressure grows on the chancellor to provide more support to the private sector in Wednesday’s budget.
There were 738,144 businesses in “significant” financial distress in the third quarter of this year, up 1.6% compared with the same period last year, according to BTG. That is the highest level since the administrator’s closely watched “red flag” report began in 2004.
Casey Sparks inadvertently ended up in Lyerly, Georgia, where he noticed burning home and helped to save family
An Alabama driver’s unintended, GPS-directed detour in Georgia positioned him to help save a couple and a dozen children in their care from a fire that enveloped their home while they slept recently, according to the family and their rescuer.
As he recounted in an interview with television station WRCB that quickly went viral among internet circles dedicated to uplifting news stories, James Burke had fallen asleep in his recliner while his wife, 12 adopted children and one grandchild slept in their beds on the night of 17 October in the community of Lyerly, Georgia.
Photo illustration by Jovelle Tamayo/ProPublica. Source images: Nick Oxford for ProPublica, courtesy of Mike Faulkner, and obtained in an open records request from the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.
In June 2023, staff at an Oklahoma regulatory agency were fed up. The state isn’t known for cracking down on oil and gas companies for polluting the environment, but for over a year, the staff had been building a case to punish Citation Oil & Gas, one of the nation’s largest privately owned oil companies.
About 30 miles north of the Texas border, toxic wastewater was gushing from the ground outside the small city of Ardmore. In the mile-wide oil field known as the Bayou, an oily sheen glistened on creeks and long streaks of salt scarred the land. The so-called purges, bubbling up among stands of oak and walnut trees, also threatened drinking water sources, drawing attention from the Environmental Protection Agency, according to a federal report.
State investigators pinned the blame on Citation’s injection wells, which pump wastewater from oil production back underground at high pressures and volumes in order to produce more oil. But this injection came with risks.
Days earlier, the agency had asked Citation to cut injection pressures in half. The company refused, prompting staff at the oil division of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, to recommend an official punishment through the agency’s court system.
“This will be an important case to get some of these purges stopped and particularly concerning Citation’s operations,” Danny Ray, an agency manager at the time, emailed his colleagues.
He restated the urgency three days later in an email to oil division leaders and Citation officials: “We consider this an emergency situation that needs to be addressed promptly.”
A salt scar in a southern Oklahoma oil field known as the Bayou in 2022Obtained in an open records request from the Oklahoma Corporation CommissionAn old well releases a stream of wastewater in the Bayou in 2022.Obtained in an open records request from the Oklahoma Corporation Commission
To stop the flow of wastewater, the agency temporarily shut down the Bayou’s 22 injection wells — all but three of which were owned by Citation — kicking off a yearlong fight over the terms under which injection could restart.
Under state rules, companies must not pollute, and oil and gas regulators at the Corporation Commission can revoke injection permits and issue fines to those that violate regulations.
But agency leadership ultimately did not follow staff guidance to punish Citation through the commission’s administrative law court. Instead, in April 2024, state officials, including the oil division’s then-Director Robyn Strickland, would allow Citation to restart injection at higher-than-recommended pressures.
In fact the commission has no record of ever fining or completing an enforcement case against Citation, the company named more than any other in the agency’s database of pollution reports and other rule violations, listed more than 1,000 times over the past decade. That’s hundreds more incidents than any other operator, including comparably sized companies. In recent years, purges linked to Citation include some of Oklahoma’s longest, most damaging oil field pollution events.
Current and former employees at the Oklahoma Corporation Commission describe top agency officials as wary of going after habitual violators like Citation. Citation has become Oklahoma’s second-largest well owner after taking over collections of aging, low-producing wells from oil giants that have largely left the state for more lucrative oil fields in Texas and elsewhere; the company acquired its Bayou wells in 2010. Regulators treat Citation gently, current and former agency employees say, because the company holds onto aging wells that are worth little — wells that could easily become a financial liability for the state if Citation were to sell or walk away from them.
A spokesperson for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission declined to answer questions about the regulatory agency’s handling of Citation’s record, noting the possibility of future enforcement actions or litigation involving the company.
“The OCC Oil and Gas Conservation Division must remain mindful of its regulatory and adjudicatory responsibilities and avoid making public statements that could potentially affect future proceedings or legal considerations,” spokesperson Jack Damrill said in an email.
Strickland has since left the agency for a job as chief projects officer for the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, a quasi-governmental organization that often advocates for industry interests. She did not respond to requests for comment.
A Citation executive declined to comment in response to written questions.
Regulators in other jurisdictions have at times come down hard on Citation, which owns wells in 11 other states. In 2017, the company settled with the U.S. Department of Justice for $2.25 million over allegations of underpaid royalties from drilling on federal land in Wyoming, though the settlement did not rule that the company was liable in the case. And in 2025, Utah reached a $700,000 settlement with the company after a crude oil and wastewater spill. Texas and Colorado have also fined Citation in recent years for violations.
“Citation has been the thorn in my side for a long time,” said a current manager at the Oklahoma agency who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job. “They just operate however they want. They’ve had major pollution issues, and you can’t really touch them.”
A Citation Oil & Gas oil well in the Bayou. The company is named more often than any other in Oklahoma’s database of oil field pollution incidents and other rule violations.Nick Oxford for ProPublica
Preparing a Case for Punishment
In November 2023, five months into the wells’ shutdown, Citation was getting antsy. Its officials had repeatedly demanded permission to restart their wells and had even challenged the state through the commission’s court to prove the connection between the Bayou purges and its operations. Regulators and company officials packed into a small conference room in the Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s Oklahoma City headquarters to discuss how that might happen. More than a dozen others joined via video.
On the state’s side, a team of consultants took the lead, displaying a report with evidence that tied Citation’s injection to the wastewater that gushed to the surface in the Bayou. The state had hired the environmental engineering firm Halff earlier that year on a $550,000 contract to investigate the fast-growing number of oil field wastewater eruptions around Oklahoma. The consultants and agency staff presented a unified front in identifying the problem: Citation’s nearly two dozen Bayou injection wells were operating at unsafely high pressures, according to a video recording of the meeting obtained by The Frontier and ProPublica. Over the years, the injected wastewater had shattered underground rock layers, allowing the toxic fluid to spread uncontrollably.
“You definitely have overpressurization,” Carolyn May, Halff’s director of environmental remediation, told Citation officials as she presented her team’s calculations, which were based on well records, field data collected by agency staff and a standard set by the federal government. “It’s allowing that rock to fracture.”
The consultants were meant to serve as independent experts to mediate any disagreements within the agency over what to do about the wastewater eruptions, according to current and former commission officials.
In the meeting, May and agency staffers ticked off a number of problems with Citation’s wells that regulators had overlooked for years. Not only had they allowed the company to inject wastewater at excessive pressures, regulators had also given out more than a dozen exemptions to testing and well-construction standards that endangered groundwater. Several wells had checkered compliance records; agency documents noted that one had been in “perpetual violation” of its permit for “nine years running,” injecting tens of millions of gallons of wastewater beyond the legal limit.
Citation’s active wells weren’t the only issue, they said. Nearby were dozens of abandoned, unplugged wells that offered the pressurized wastewater open pathways to reach shallow freshwater sources and the surface. May singled out a handful of those wells that especially troubled her team, and oil division deputy director Mike McGinnis suggested that Citation permanently plug them.
May noted that imaging below the surface by agency staff showed a distinct plume of highly polluted wastewater rising from deep underground, where injection took place. This posed a threat to the freshwater sources beneath the Bayou, she said — water that some residents rely on for drinking and cooking. “That’s our primary concern here.”
The consultants were not alone in this fear. Earlier in 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency had warned of “potential endangerment to underground sources of drinking water” in the Bayou from oil field injection. Groundwater tests taken near the purge sites showed evidence of oil field wastewater pollution, including high levels of salt, bromide and the carcinogen benzene, which exceeded the EPA drinking water standard by five times.
For its part, Citation came to the meeting armed with a very different argument: the pollution was caused by a combination of historic oil drilling and recent rainfall — not by the company.
It was a claim the company had repeatedly made, especially in the months since the agency had shut down its wells. To bolster its case, the company’s consultants had produced a series of detailed reports citing the area’s history of oil production, along with Citation’s own water testing data. Oil drilling began in the Bayou in the 1920s, a time of lawless extraction, and for decades, companies would simply dump their wastewater into large, unlined pits, allowing the fluid to seep into the ground. Old pollution that saturated the land was being flushed to the surface by rainfall, the reports argued. Each one concluded that there was no link between Citation’s injection and the Bayou pollution.
At the meeting with regulators, company representatives reiterated these arguments. Jeff Lewis, a Citation engineering manager, assured the agency that the company’s data indicated that its wells were not behind the Bayou purges and that it could safely inject at pressures higher than Halff had recommended. He proposed that the company restart injection on its deeper wells because they were separated by layers of rock from the abandoned wells that Halff identified as likely pathways for the wastewater to surface.
Agency staff did not buy this. In prior internal meetings and emails, staff and consultants had criticized Citation’s water sampling practices as biased in favor of the company’s conclusion that rainfall was causing old pollution to resurface. There was no question that old pollution covered the Bayou, but in recent purges, wastewater had pushed to the surface in significant volumes, covering creek beds in layers of snow-white salt. Old pollution would not be this forceful, according to internal documents written by agency staff.
“A purge is created by pressure and is not due to old pits,” Ray, the agency manager, wrote in a memo distributed months earlier within the oil division that urged agency leaders not to allow Citation to restart injection.
May, the agency’s consultant, echoed these rebuttals during the meeting and said the state’s evidence pointed to an injection problem. She concluded her presentation with a warning: Citation must change its injection practices in the Bayou.
“If y’all want to start injecting again,” she told company representatives, “I think we’re going to have to look at those pressures and the volumes very carefully.”
The meeting ended without a resolution.
An injection well in the BayouNick Oxford for ProPublica
“They Wore Us Out”
Over the next four months, Citation and state regulators would continue to debate the terms of restarting the Bayou. Neither side budged. By the time they gathered for another face-off in March 2024, oil division leaders appeared weary of fighting.
May and the Halff geologists from the consulting firm began by again insisting that Citation substantially reduce pressures in order to be allowed to restart a handful of wells. But even as they presented their case, Citation representatives including Lewis, the engineer, and Bob Redweik, a company vice president, repeatedly spoke over them. After more than two hours of disagreement, Redweik and Citation’s attorney ended the meeting abruptly. “We’re not going anywhere,” Redweik said.
Several top oil division officials attended, including Strickland, McGinnis and commission attorney Tyler Trout. They remained largely silent throughout.
The next week, Trout tried to end the impasse by passing along a memo from Citation.
“In an effort to reach an agreement and move this situation forward,” Trout wrote to top oil division officials and May, “would we consider meeting Citation in the middle as far as recommended injection pressures are concerned?”
May stood firm. “From Halff’s standpoint, our recommendations aren’t going to change,” she responded, adding that it would ultimately be up to agency leaders.
In early April, the agency went with a compromise, approving a plan to bring seven of Citation’s 19 Bayou injection wells back online. The company would be able to inject at pressures higher than Halff had recommended, though less than Citation had requested.
Current and former employees say that the decision to restart injection came from the top of the oil division, including Strickland and McGinnis, among others — bypassing staff who objected to the plan. Like Strickland, McGinnis did not respond to requests for comment.
“They wore us out,” said an agency manager who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job.
Before injection restarted, three oil division officials chosen by Strickland conducted a walkthrough of the Bayou with Halff and Citation, according to an email from Strickland. The rest of the division was left in the dark. That same day, a pollution abatement manager noted in an email to the commission’s general counsel that agency critics of the plan had not been invited.
Around the time agency leaders allowed Citation to restart injection in the Bayou, staff were drafting an extensive contempt case against the company for rule violations in other parts of the state, according to public records obtained by The Frontier and ProPublica. Field staff and consultants were still turning up considerable problems related to Citation’s injection, including excessive pressures at the sites of destructive eruptions of wastewater. The staff complaint called for the agency to issue fines and to terminate well permits. But oil division leaders never signed the paperwork for the case.
There was ongoing trouble in the Bayou as well. Weeks after Citation restarted injection, field staff discovered a “severely contaminated” private water well nearby that had been polluted by oil field waste. Testing showed high levels of salt as well as the “highest levels of bromide that we have ever sampled,” according to internal emails, referring to another chemical constituent of oil and gas waste that poses a public health risk. (The landowners declined to comment because of an ongoing lawsuit against Citation, but according to court records, they do not drink from the well. The company, which has fought the family’s claims, says in a court filing that it has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars addressing the pollution on their land as part of a plan approved by the commission.)
By the end of 2024, oil division leaders had allowed six more Citation wells back online, bringing the total to 13. And the next spring, the agency closed the Bayou investigation, along with several others related to Citation, without taking further action.
Collection of New Complaints
In the year and a half since the Bayou case closed, several of the oil division staff who had pushed agency leaders to punish Citation have left the agency, as have a handful of senior leaders. Staffers told The Frontier and ProPublica they grew frustrated with the agency’s unwillingness to crack down on repeat corporate offenders that agency staff had spent months — at times, years — investigating.
Tracy Case, an attorney for the oil and gas division, admitted as much at a national conference for oil regulators in Oklahoma City in May. “I’ve been there 11 years doing this and we’ve never pursued what we call our ‘bad actors,’” she said, according to a recording of a meeting obtained by the news outlets. She explained that the oil division is extremely short-staffed while dealing with hundreds of potential enforcement cases at any one time. An agency spokesperson declined to comment on behalf of Case.
Less than a third of the roughly 750 enforcement cases filed by the oil division in the agency’s administrative law courts since 2023 have resulted in punishment so far, according to a review by The Frontier and ProPublica. The average fine given out by the agency was about $1,700. The most common punishment was a $500 fine, combined with using company insurance money to plug unused wells.
Neither the Oklahoma Corporation Commission nor Halff responded to questions about whether the consulting firm still has a role at the state agency.
At the Bayou, nearly all of Citation’s wastewater injection wells are back on, many operating at pressures beyond Halff’s recommendations. And industry data indicates that Citation has ramped up oil production to pre-shutdown levels even as evidence of new purges continues to emerge. In September, fresh layers of salt — residue of the wastewater — covered the dirt near yellowish puddles of standing water. Nearby, streaks of oil shone on the ground. The preceding weeks had been hot and dry, with hardly any rain.
In early October, an agency field staffer requested that Citation install a specialized well in the Bayou to pump out polluted groundwater, according to a report in the agency’s incident database.
A slew of new pollution complaints against Citation have continued to appear in that state database, including more than 60 spills and leaks at well sites over the past year. Among the complaints were three purges that blew out in southern Oklahoma over the last three months. All those investigations remain active, according to state records.
Another ongoing complaint against Citation originated about 10 miles east of the Bayou, where a rancher named Mike Faulkner noticed an unusual amount of salt water gurgling to the surface and flowing down a creek on his land in April. Nearby, dozens of Citation wells pump wastewater underground.
Rancher Mike Faulkner measures the water quality on his property in June.Nick Bowlin/The Frontier
In response, Citation once again blamed the pollution on old drilling practices, according to an email from one of the company’s engineers to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.
Nevertheless, the agency told the company to temporarily shut down some of its nearby injection wells, and, according to Faulkner, the purge on his land dried up for the first time in years.
“That tells me that they know the why and the how of that saltwater purging,” he said in July.
The agency also instructed Citation to install monitoring wells to test for pollution and to build a pit with a rock dam on Faulkner’s land to catch the polluted water, along with a fence to keep the cattle out.
Faulkner’s land was scarred by salt water and contaminated by oil after a Citation well blew out in June.Courtesy of Mike Faulkner
But in the months since, the agency has given Citation multiple extensions on the deadline to build the dam and the fencing. In September, Faulkner learned that the agency granted Citation yet another extension — until December, seven months after his initial pollution report.
As of October, he said, the wells where the state had asked Citation to pause operations are injecting — at reduced pressure.
Faulkner said he is fed up with Citation’s yearslong pattern of degrading his pastures. But he blames state officials for their unwillingness to rein in the company.
“They’re like a spoiled kid,” he said. “They’ve just gotten away with it for a long time.”
DENVER, COLORADO — Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters is preparing to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn her criminal convictions stemming from a 2021 breach of Colorado election equipment, continuing a legal fight that has drawn national attention from President Donald Trump and his allies.
Peters’ attorney, Peter Ticktin, said her legal team is working toward a December deadline to petition the Supreme Court. The move follows the Colorado Supreme Court’s Sept. 21 decision declining to hear her appeal, leaving intact seven convictions related to unauthorized access to Mesa County voting systems.
A jury convicted Peters in 2024 after prosecutors said she used another person’s security credentials to allow an unauthorized individual access to election equipment during a software update. Peters maintained she was attempting to preserve election records while investigating unsupported claims of voting-machine manipulation following the 2020 election.
The Colorado Court of Appeals upheld her convictions earlier this year but overturned her nearly nine-year prison sentence, finding that the sentencing judge improperly considered some of Peters’ protected political speech. Democratic Gov. Jared Polis subsequently commuted her sentence, and Peters was released June 1 after serving roughly 600 days.
Trump has repeatedly defended Peters and previously attempted to pardon her, although presidential pardon authority does not extend to state criminal convictions. Peters continues to dispute the legitimacy of her prosecution.
I've had my GT for just over a year and I still love it. I've recently gotten busy and only ride for 1-2 miles a day a few times a week but up until a few months ago I would often go on 5-10 mile rides at a time almost daily.
Aside from bumpers, rail guards, and a fender all from FM direct site.....my board is stock.
I really am interested in maybe some new foot pads or even the FSTs for some jumps from float life as well maybe different grip tape styles like the hexagon with patterns in between.
What upgrades would the more experienced community recommend to me?
Italian army removes and defuses 250 explosives encased in ice for more than 100 years after hikers’ sightings
A significant cache of unexploded bombs from the first world war emerged this summer from rapidly retreating glaciers in the Dolomites, the Italian army has said.
The devices, which included Italian artillery shells and French mortar bombs, were removed and defused by the army’s Julia Alpine brigade, according to a statement.
Investigation finds dozens of ministers and civil servants moved into AI roles as government developed datacentre expansion plans
The UK’s policy on datacentres and AI was developed without any meetings with environmental groups, an investigation has found.
The nonprofit organisation Spotlight on Corruption said a “considerable revolving door” shaped the government’s development of “AI growth zones”, a central plank of the former prime minister Keir Starmer’s AI and economic policy, with 38 ministers, senior civil servants and special advisers hired to positions in AI companies between July 2024 and September 2026.
Susanne Rust of the Los Angeles Times reports (paywalled) that industry executives knew for decades that microplastics were infiltrating the human body. Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Scientists today say we're just beginning to understand the harm that the tiny bits of plastic we drink, eat and breathe are doing to the human body. Internal memos among company scientists and executives obtained by The Times reveal that for at least half a century, the plastics industry has been aware of and concerned about the potential for microplastic contamination in the human body. But recently discovered chemical company documents dating back several decades show that industry scientists have long been aware of -- and concerned about -- the way microplastic particles migrate beyond the gut in animals and humans, depositing in important organs. And the potential for that knowledge to affect the plastic food packaging industry.
Their concern goes back to 1974 and a scientific meeting at a New York City hotel, where a German gastroenterologist presented a scientific paper that showed for the first time that ingested particles like microplastics could infiltrate the rest of the body. His presentation was largely overlooked by the government scientists in attendance but became a point of worried discussion among company scientists. Tracey Woodruff, professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University, who reviewed the documents, said they indicate scientists and executives at major chemical companies have known and remained silent even as microplastics accumulated in tissues. She likened it to other industries that knew about pollutants -- greenhouse gases, asbestos and tobacco -- but did not take action to make them safer.
A spokesperson with the chemical industry's largest trade group took issue with that characterization. "Scientific debate over what the evidence shows is not silence. It is how sound science and effective policy advance," said Craig Davis, senior director of plastics chemistry at the American Chemistry Council. "Our industry is committed to advancing microplastics science by supporting independent research and policies that would do so."
Binbag-wielding volunteers clear encampment used by thugs to intimidate opponents of deposed government
Student List cleaned up at Serbia’s parliamentary elections. So it was only fitting that the morning after a night of raucous celebrations, the movement’s supporters were gathering, bin bags in hand, at Pioneers Park, opposite the national assembly building in Belgrade.
For the previous 18 months, this small patch of greenery – with its established trees and playground – had been a no-go zone. A pro-government camp known as Ćaciland had taken over the space with convicted criminals living there in white tents, happy to attack journalists, or anyone else who came too close. Police stood by but did nothing to prevent the violence.
The AI company’s first public financial disclosures reveal explosive growth, huge costs and risks ranging from cyber-attacks to the limits of safeguards
Anthropic has filed to go public on the US stock market, revealing for the first time the AI research lab’s financials and all the risks – more than 90 pages of them – that might negatively affect its business.
The company’s investor prospectus, released on Monday, veers from hyperbolic predictions about AI’s “incredible potential” to existential risks of the technology to the reality of its current business: explosive but incredibly expensive growth. The filing to US financial regulators, known as an S-1, provides the public’s first look at an audited version of Anthropic’s finances.
Lack of profits and the threat posed by western countries are raising concern about the sustainability of Beijing’s AI boom
Trillions of dollars have been wiped from China’s stock markets in recent months amid increasing anxiety about the future of artificial intelligence, as Beijing races against the United States for dominance in the sector.
The STAR 50 Index, which tracks technology and innovation companies on the Shanghai stock exchange, has plunged 40% since June. Other indexes of major companies dropped by about 20% over the same time period.
Prescott throws three touchdowns in Dallas victory
Javonte Williams rushes for career-high 155 yards
Eagles fall to 2-5 amid Jalen Hurts injury absence
Dak Prescott threw for 212 yards and three touchdowns, two to CeeDee Lamb, and the Dallas Cowboys beat Philadelphia 38-21 on Monday night to hand the Eagles their fifth straight loss.
Javonte Williams ran for a career-high 155 yards and a touchdown, and the Cowboys (3-4) remained in contention for the NFC East title. The New York Giants lead the division at 4-2-1.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The U.S. designated helium as a critical material on Friday because it's indispensable for making semiconductors that are essential to energy generation, and the global supply is at risk of disruption, according to the Energy Department. The designation by the Energy Department means that more federal financing will be available for helium producers and that the government will monitor it more closely. Helium is primarily produced as a byproduct of natural gas processing. The United States is the world's largest producer of natural gas and of helium. Qatar and Russia are the other top helium producers.
[...] Helium makes balloons rise, but that's not why the DOE is interested in it. Helium plays an important role in wind, solar and nuclear energy production, space exploration, medical imaging and research. Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson said helium's unique properties make it irreplaceable, such as the fact that it's non-combustible and has the lowest boiling point of any gas. The nation needs an ample supply for semiconductors, quantum and super computing, and superconducting magnets, added Robertson, who oversees the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.
[...] Despite environmental concerns with recovering helium from natural gas, there are also opportunities, said Greeshma Gadikota, director of the Lenfast Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University. "If we burn the natural gas, there are a lot of CO2 emissions associated with that," Gadikota said. "But if you just extract the helium and use it, the uses of it don't contribute necessarily to greenhouse gas emissions. "So from a climate standpoint, if we are going to continue down the line of extracting natural gas and recovering helium," she added, "I would prefer to see natural gas being used in a form where we directly produce hydrogen and we produce solid carbon." Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel, and solid carbon can provide permanent carbon sequestration and can be used widely in industrial applications, including rubber and pigments.
Brewers lead series 3-0 after resounding win in Tampa
Jackson Chourio and Brice Turang sparked Milwaukee’s eight-run fifth inning, and the Brewers routed the Tampa Bay Rays 10-1 on Monday night to move within one victory of their first World Series title.
“The guys play hard,” Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy said after the game. “They don’t give in. They make every pitch count, and that’s what it takes to win. That’s the same thing that Tampa did all year. That team is very, very capable. This is a best-of-seven series. It looks like we’re in the driver’s seat, but it’s baseball. Anything can happen.”
The NFL, Apple Music and Roc Nation announced Monday night that Jay-Z will be the featured performer for the halftime festivities on Feb. 14 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.
US military says the restrictions on the electric vehicles at Kadena airbase also apply to delivery drivers and taxis
One of America’s biggest overseas military bases has banned vehicles made by the Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD over security concerns, the US military in Japan said on Tuesday.
The ban, which went into effect this week at Kadena airbase on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, has fueled speculation that similar measures could be taken at other US military facilities as part of Washington’s crackdown on Chinese technology it suspects of being used to collect sensitive information.
Kiah Stokes kept swatting shots on the interior, while Veronica Burton disrupted the Dream with her own quick hands to alter shots.
And that crazed, violet-clad “Ballhalla” home crowd roared at every chance – watching the Golden State Valkyries move one win away from a championship in their second season with a 64-55 victory against Atlanta in Game 5 of the WNBA finals on Monday night.
Rapper who has helped produce the Super Bowl show for years is stepping up to perform himself, at SoFi Stadium in California
After years of producing the Super Bowl half-time show, Jay-Z has announced that the 2027 headline act will be none other than himself.
After days of speculation, the NFL, Apple Music and Jay-Z’s company Roc Nation announced on Monday night that the rapper will be the featured performer for the half-time festivities at the Super Bowl LXI on 14 February at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Justice Department is attempting for the third time in little more than a year to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, this time over an alleged disclosure of national defense information dating to 2016.
Court documents unsealed Monday accuse Comey of transmitting and conspiring to transmit sensitive information to a New York Times reporter. Prosecutors filed a criminal information rather than obtaining a grand jury indictment as the 10-year statute of limitations approached. The Justice Department says the procedure can preserve the government’s ability to prosecute while it continues seeking an indictment.
Comey’s attorneys argue the maneuver is legally invalid because the applicable law requires an indictment within 10 years. They have asked a federal judge to dismiss the case. The alleged disclosure was investigated twice previously, including by prosecutor John Durham, and both investigations ended without charges.
Comey maintains his innocence and described the latest case as an abuse of the Justice Department. President Donald Trump, who fired Comey in 2017 and has repeatedly attacked him publicly, called the former FBI director a “dirty cop” while saying he knew little about the new prosecution.
An earlier case accusing Comey of lying to Congress was dismissed after a judge determined the prosecutor who brought it was unlawfully appointed. A separate prosecution alleging Comey threatened Trump through a social-media post remains pending.
In a post to social media on Monday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine was facing dwindling stocks of Patriot interceptor missiles after Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary, had delayed authorizing new supplies.
“We have been waiting for nearly a month for Mr. Hegseth to sign off on missiles for Patriots and NASAMS,” Zelenskyy wrote. “I instructed our team to raise this with the American side once again. Conversations with other countries are also ongoing.”
Move is latest attempt to challenge states with competitive midterm races that could determine control of Congress
The Trump administration on Monday asked Washington state to set aside any ballots received from more than 400 people it alleges are registered to vote without US citizenship, less than two weeks after making a similar demand in California.
The announcement is the latest sign of the administration’s attempts to sow doubts about the election or its outcome in states with races that will help determine control of the US Senate and House.
One of the league's directors said the parents were being disruptive, but 3-year-old Nevada's mother said, "They're literally kicking him out of this place because he's good at soccer."
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump announced Monday that he will offer a $1 million reward to anyone whose information about voter fraud leads to an arrest and conviction, extending the offer to both past elections and the upcoming 2026 midterms.
Trump unveiled the proposal on Truth Social, saying anyone reporting fraud would receive the payment after those responsible are convicted. The White House has not explained where the money would come from, who would administer the reward program or whether congressional authorization would be required.
The announcement comes one week before the Nov. 3 midterm elections and amid a broader administration focus on election-related offenses. Trump has repeatedly argued that fraud poses a significant threat to U.S. elections and continues to claim widespread fraud affected the 2020 presidential contest.
Documented cases of illegal voting and registration fraud do occur, but research and election investigations have not found evidence of widespread voter fraud capable of changing national election outcomes. NBC News noted that the conservative Heritage Foundation has documented more than 1,600 voter-fraud cases over roughly four decades, representing a small fraction of the billions of ballots cast during that period.
The reward also follows increased federal scrutiny of voter rolls and election procedures. The administration has pursued investigations involving potential noncitizen voting and challenged state election practices in court.
Trump has not said when the reward program would formally begin or provided a process for submitting claims.
Newsom accuses Trump of ‘assault on democracy’ as DoJ claims 20,000 registered voters in state are non-citizens
A US federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s move to block California from counting the ballots of 20,000 registered voters that the justice department claims are non-citizens.
The court on Monday ruled 2-1 against Donald Trump’s justice department in the dispute, denying the administration’s demand that election officials segregate the thousands of ballots until people on the list could verify their citizenship. The justice department had given the California secretary of state 48 hours to carry out the order, which state election officials refused – leading to the lawsuit.
My Heyo! Does anyone know about parasitic drain on a OW XR? I have one cell that drop on my new battery. Not sure if I need a new BMS. Thoughts? Ty folks!
What’s the oldest Windows GUI application you can still run on Windows 11 today, without any modifications? For now, the best answer Boris Popik can come up with is an innocuous application from build 347 of Windows NT 3.1, an early prerelease: CDPLAYER.EXE. You can’t go any older than that, because earlier prerelease builds had not yet finalised its PE format and calling convention. Neat find.
Popik also mentions a few other contenders, but I won’t spoil those here.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Venezuela's interim government told the U.S. "weeks and weeks" earlier that opposition leader Maria Corina Machado could return to the country without interference.
Another month has crumbled to dust under the oppressive boots of time, so it’s time for another month of Redox improvements. This past month, Redox’ build system gained support for Clang, SDL2 saw performance improvements, and WebKitGTK3’s HTML layout rendering was fixed. Users of Intel Tiger Lake processors can now enjoy external display hot-plugging, and overall system performance has been improved in a variety of ways. And as always, there’s the long lists of kernel, relibc, and driver improvements and fixes as well.
Redox keeps making big strides every month, and it’s definitely one of the few alternative operating systems that actually feels like it might, one day, be an actual contender for general purpose use.
The DOJ took steps to charge James Comey with leaking information earlier this month, in its third attempt to bring criminal charges against the former FBI director and Trump foe.
Tasks from determining asylum seekers’ ages to border surveillance now involve AI, says Open Rights Group
AI has been embedded across the Home Office in near-total secrecy, reinforcing the so-called hostile environment for immigration, according to research.
Tasks from the detection of potential sham marriages to determining the age of asylum seekers and checking through the contents of phones of new arrivals now involve use of the technology, according to a report by Open Rights Group (ORG).
Thew day ends in a Y, so Microsoft is launching a new way to build Windows applications. Get excited, Windows application developers!
If you caught our session at Microsoft Build 2026 or you’ve been watching the repo, you’ve seen this one taking shape in public for a while now, and a lot has changed since Build. Here’s the longer tour: Microsoft.UI.Reactor, an experimental C# framework that brings the MVU (Model-View-Update) pattern to WinUI desktop apps. No XAML files, no code-behind, no ViewModels.
Two things before the fun part. Reactor is experimental: no support policy, no API guarantees, published this early on purpose because we’d rather hear we got the design wrong now than once people have shipped on it. And it is not a replacement for XAML or MVVM, which we’ll come back to.
At multiple points in the linked blog post, Microsoft underlines that no, Reactor is not going to replace XAML. I’m sure Windows developers who learned Win32, Silverlight, WinRT XAML, WPF, UWP, WinUI 2 and 3, and all the others, over the past two decades will feel deeply comforted by Microsoft’s insistence that Reactor will not replace XAML.
Microsoft repeats: this won’t replace XAML. They swear.
We’ve been following along with Carmen Kaiser’s Apple Network Server exploits, and by now things are really starting to come together for owners of this machine. When we last left off, the ROM to allow Mac OS to run on the machine which normally runs IBM’s AIX, but there were still a number of bugs, limitations, and issues to be worked out. A lot of progress on that front has been made.
The good news is, many of the issues with the preproduction ROM in Mac OS can be fixed or worked around in software. So I’ve fixed or worked around many of them in software: the MACE Ethernet is fixed, the on-board video is now supported, and the ANS can restart properly back into Mac OS. Plus, because it’s the preproduction ROM, you can still boot AIX, thus preserving the entire historical reason for Shiner’s existence. Here’s the first cut of that software and how it was developed.
There’s still two issues Kaiser wishes to address – the internal SCSI bays don’t work, and the ROM doesn’t properly register parity RAM – but the progress here is amazing.
A federal appeals court on Monday dismissed the DOJ's effort to force California election officials to set aside thousands of ballots that the Trump administration claims may have been cast by alleged noncitizens.
Tech firm announces two-part fundraising after Elon Musk warns hundreds of AI startups face collapse
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has announced plans for $95bn (£71bn) of fundraising to cover its AI expenditure, even as Elon Musk warned that funding for smaller players in the sector was drying up.
The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is a leading investor in AI and is ploughing multibillion-dollar sums into datacentres, the central nervous systems of the technology.
Suit that cites 2025 Guardian investigation alleges ‘pattern of inaccurate pricing’ that ‘affects millions of purchases’
The Federal Trade Commission and 20 states have sued Dollar General, the nation’s largest dollar-store chain, for persistently overcharging customers at its more than 20,000 stores across the United States.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Nashville, cites a Guardian investigation published last December.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) says he plans to renew his impeachment effort against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when Congress returns after the November midterm elections, if Hegseth is still in office.
Massie said Monday that the impeachment resolution will be a “week one” issue when lawmakers return for the lame-duck session beginning the week of Nov. 9. The Kentucky Republican plans to invoke a privileged resolution, a procedure that could force House leaders to address the matter within two legislative days.
The resolution contains eight articles accusing Hegseth of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Among the allegations are violations of the 1973 War Powers Resolution involving military operations against Iran, as well as alleged unlawful actions connected to Venezuela, Yemen, the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Massie has also accused Hegseth of failing to sufficiently protect civilians during wartime and retaliating against Sen. Mark Kelly over protected speech.
Massie originally introduced the articles in September. Speaker Mike Johnson later canceled scheduled House votes before lawmakers left Washington, pushing consideration until after the election. Johnson denied the schedule change was intended to avoid the impeachment vote and called Massie’s effort a “publicity stunt.”
Massie, who lost his Republican primary this year to a Trump-backed challenger, will leave Congress when his term ends. He said he believes the lame-duck session could provide enough Democratic support and Republican defections for the resolution to advance.
Far-right senator banned from leaving country as supreme court judge’s ruling cites money-laundering case
The far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro was banned from leaving Brazil and ordered to surrender his passports just hours after his dramatic loss in the presidential election to the leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The ruling was issued by Alexandre de Moraes, the same supreme court justice who oversaw the trial of the senator’s father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro, for attempting a coup.
The critical PHP2Shell vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) have now been successfully exploited in the wild, just days after patches were released and initial exploitation attempts failed. BleepingComputer reports: The malicious activity was caught by Adel Karimi, detection and response lead at Perplexity, whose honeypots recorded evidence of confirmed remote code execution against an Apache mod_php installation running PHP 8.4.26. "This is now confirmed RCE with usable memory disclosure, not just a crash followed by a suspicious process. The response delivered an 800 KiB decoded cookie dump, and a function address derived from that dump using the public exploit's offsets appears in the subsequent execution payload," Karimi shared.
"The evidence demonstrates this chain on the intentionally favorable single-worker mod_php profile; it is not a measurement of exploit reliability on other worker counts, PHP builds, or applications," he added. Karimi's findings were also confirmed by Expel threat researcher Marcus Hutchins, who has been tracking a stream of alleged successful PHP2Shell exploitation reports.
"This is by far the highest quality confirmation of in-the-wild php2shell exploitation I've seen so far. Deep technical breakdown of a successful exploitation attempt against an Apache mod_php installation running PHP 8.4.26," Hutchins said.
The explosion of discontent that led to major protests and violence in France and across Europe is a “warning signal” that Australia could follow the same path without an “honest conversation” about the budget, economists say.
Hundreds of thousands marched in cities across France on Saturday to protest against school underfunding, as complaints of insufficient teacher numbers and dilapidated infrastructure mingled with broader discontent about cost-of-living pressures.
In New Hampshire’s open-seat U.S. Senate race, Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas has been accusing his Republican opponent, former Sen. John E. Sununu, of getting rich off pharmaceutical industry money.
In an Oct. 13 debate, Pappas said, “Now, Sen. Sununu voted with Big Pharma when he was in office. He voted to keep prescription drug prices high, and then, after he was defeated, he went and cashed in, working for these same corporate special interests, earning up to $35 million dollars.”
Financial disclosure forms show that Sununu has a net worth of between $7.9 million and $36.3 million, far higher than it was when he left the Senate in January 2009. About $5 million of that came from a major medical technology company, documents show. But even if one counts medical tech as “Big Pharma,” Pappas’ statement that Sununu made “up to $35 million” from the industry is based on a cherry-picked figure.
Sununu’s campaign did not respond to inquiries for this article.
How did Pappas arrive at $35 million?
Sununu released two financial disclosure statements as part of his Senate candidacy, one in 2025 and one in 2026.
The forms show a total net worth up to $35 million, but Pappas’ description of what the figure means omits context.
The form asks for information on income received for work, stocks and bonds, and ownership of real estate, minus outstanding loans. Candidates are asked to provide estimates of their holdings within broad ranges.
In its analysis of the forms, PolitiFact partner WMUR-TV reported that the sum of Sununu’s assets fell somewhere in the range of $7.9 million to $36.3 million. So Pappas cherry-picked the highest number in the range, which is more than four times the lowest number.
In 2009, before departing the Senate, Sununu declared assets between $297,000 and $855,000. Pappas arrived at the $35 million figure by subtracting the 2009 high-end figure ($855,000) from the 2026 high-end figure ($36.3 million).
This growth since 2009 shows that Sununu has fared well financially since leaving the Senate; he’s served as a corporate board member, in a job at a prominent law firm (he is not a lawyer) and as a consultant in lucrative fields.
It’s not unusual for lawmakers to benefit from their congressional experience after leaving office. As a former senator, Sununu would have had value to a law firm with a lot of clients interested in understanding how Congress and the executive branch works.
He also served as a longtime board member of Boston Scientific, a medical device company, and had consulting relationships with financial firms such as TAP Advisors since 2016.
What did Sununu earn from pharmaceutical companies?
From 2009 to 2024, Sununu served on the board of Boston Scientific, a major producer of medical devices. Regulatory filings show that he earned about $1.8 million in fees over those 15 years, plus almost $3 million in stock grants. Together, that equals nearly $4.8 million.
Some may consider a medical technology company to be distinct from the pharmaceutical sector. However one counts the $4.8 million gain, it underlines the risks of relying on the high end of the range in financial disclosure forms to say that Sununu earned $35 million.
The Senate disclosure form lists Sununu’s Boston Scientific stock holdings as falling within the range of $5 million to $25 million. Sununu may have purchased additional Boston Scientific stock on his own, boosting his holdings from the $3 million disclosed on the regulatory forms to the minimum $5 million cited in the Senate disclosure range.
But Pappas’ $35 million figure relies on the high end of the Senate disclosure form’s range — $25 million — not the $5 million on the lower end. Boston Scientific is the largest single asset disclosed on that form; the $25 million estimate is the cornerstone of Pappas’ $35 million figure. But the figures disclosed in the regulatory filings suggest that Sununu’s Boston Scientific stock holdings could be closer to the lower end of that scale.
Separately, the disclosure forms show that Sununu held between $110,012 and $425,000 in stocks and bonds of pharmaceutical companies, including positions in Pfizer, Merck, AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson, Astrazeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb.
How does Sununu’s work at the law firm factor in?
In 2010, the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP announced it had hired Sununu as an adjunct senior policy adviser. He does not appear to have been a registered lobbyist either; we didn’t find any lobbying disclosure filings for him, which would be required if he were formally lobbying members of Congress or their staff. It’s not uncommon for law firms to hire nonlawyers and nonlobbyists to consult with clients or to provide advice. Sununu spent about a decade with the firm.
The liberal online outlet Meidas Touch reported that from 2010 to 2019, Akin Gump received lobbying fees worth $10.3 million from “big pharma clients,” including Pfizer, Gilead Sciences, Bayer and the trade group PhRMA.” Without context, that might sound like a lot, but the firm has many other clients outside of pharmaceuticals.
The firm’s other recent lobbying clients have included the older Americans advocacy group AARP, the consulting firm Accenture, software publisher Adobe, AES Wind Generation, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, Alabama Shipyard, the grocer Albertson’s, aluminum producer Alcoa, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, Amazon, and American Airlines. That’s just a sampling of the firm’s clients whose names begin with the letter “a.”
Our ruling
Pappas said Sununu “cashed in” with “Big Pharma,” earning “up to $35 million.”
Sununu’s experience as a senator opened doors for him in lucrative positions at law firms, corporate boards and consulting firms, and records show he made at least $5 million from Boston Scientific after leaving Congress.
But Pappas draws on the high end of the range on Sununu’s financial disclosure form to assert he made up to $35 million. Pappas ignores that the low end of the range was $7.9 million. Although $5 million is not close to the $35 million Pappas cited, it accounts for a substantial portion of Sununu’s post-Senate wealth. The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.
Last Ditch bar announced it would ‘soft close’ after it went viral following a story on its attempt to relax Covid rules
A Massachusetts lesbian bar that went viral for loosening its Covid mask policy last month announced plans to “soft close” on Monday as it seeks new ownership.
The Last Ditch bar, in the small city of Greenfield, said in an Instagram post that it was searching for co-owners, new owners or a full sale, and that it would “soft close effective immediately”, with “only booked events” continuing while it closes this winter. It had opened just last year as a bar for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends”.
Controversial mechanism that hit unpaid carers with huge penalties to be scrapped following Guardian investigation
The controversial rule that led to unpaid carers being punished with penalties amounting to thousands of pounds is to be abolished, the Guardian can reveal.
The chancellor, John Healey, is to announce a new digital taper system for carer’s allowance in Wednesday’s budget, effectively ending what is regarded as one of the UK benefit system’s most feared and unfair administrative practices.
President’s comments come ahead of November midterm elections and follow his claims of widespread voter fraud
Donald Trump has announced a $1m reward for reports of voter fraud in past elections and the upcoming midterm elections, with payment contingent on the arrest and conviction of those responsible.
In a Truth Social post on Monday, the president wrote: “Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election, will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
Comey, an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, accused of leaking information related to US national defense
The justice department charged former FBI director James Comey on Monday with two counts of leaking information related to national defense, the third time the Trump administration has filed criminal charges against one of Donald Trump’s most despised foes.
The charges, filed in federal court in Washington DC, provide few details about what Comey is alleged to have leaked. The government alleges that the former FBI director leaked the information in 2016 and conspired with an unnamed person to give the information to a national news outlet.
Residents of coastal towns told to avoid beaches during high tides and keep further away from the ocean than usual
Coastal communities across California were preparing for days of flooding amid potentially “record-breaking tides” this week, as water levels began rising on Monday.
The National Weather Service warned that significant coastal flooding was expected in San Diego and Orange counties through Thursday that could close roads and inundate homes, businesses and critical infrastructure. A wide swath of the coast from San Luis Obispo county to Los Angeles county could see “minor to moderate” coastal flooding with tides as high as 8ft. Further north in the Bay Area, officials advised there could be as much as 2.1ft of inundation, primarily in low-lying coastal areas.
(The Center Square) — A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit appears skeptical of the U.S. Department of Justice’s attempt to force California election officials to segregate ballots cast by 20,000 voters suspected of…
Jordanian air force says it carried out strikes against ‘terrorist groups’ tied to killing of nine during funeral
Jordan has carried out airstrikes against armed groups in Syria in retaliation for Friday’s attack on a Greek Orthodox church in the southern Jordanian governorate of Karak that killed nine people, the Jordanian air force has said in a statement.
It said the operation “resulted in the killing and wounding of many members of these terrorist groups and the destruction of a number of their vehicles”. It did not specify who the groups were or the precise location of the strikes.
Skydance, as it begins integrating Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, is offering voluntary buyouts to some employees and imposing a five-day-a-week office requirement. Layoffs are also expected as the company targets more than $6 billion in annualized cost savings within three years. Variety reports: The new program was outlined by chairman and CEO David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz in a memo to staffers Monday. "As we bring our teams together, we recognize that not everyone will see their future here, and we respect that. To give eligible employees the option to move on in a way that works for them, we are introducing a Voluntary Buyout (VBO) Program," the execs wrote. "Those who qualify will receive an individual communication with their personalized details and terms, and a window to decide whether to accept this one-time offer."
They added, "Please know we don't take any of this lightly. We are clear about what we're building: a company that tells the stories people around the world love, embraces new ways to connect with audiences, and leads the next era of media and entertainment. We have the talent, the creative firepower and the ambition to do it, and we will get there together."
[...] In the Oct. 26 memo, Ellison and Kreiz also said the new Skydance is moving to a mandatory five-days-per-week in-office policy across the company. "We believe in-person collaboration is vital to our culture and to the success of our business. Especially in a creative company like ours, the best ideas come from people in the same room, sharing perspectives, challenging one another and solving problems," the execs said. "We truly believe this is in the best interest of our company and our people. We've seen the benefits firsthand at Paramount, and we want every part of Skydance to share in them."
Group was on visit to meet Palestinian children, farmers and civil leaders facing escalating violence from Israeli forces
An international delegation including British politicians has been barred from entering the West Bank on a trip to meet Palestinian children, farmers and society leaders facing escalating violence from Israeli forces during olive harvest season.
The delegation of 23 people, including four elected representatives, was drawn from countries including France, Spain, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Greece, Holland, Ireland and the US. It included the Labour MP Clive Lewis, the Scottish National party MP Lara Bird, the Scottish Greens MSP Kate Nevens and the former Labour MP Sam Tarry.
Republican and Democrat come together for a rare joint endorsement of candidate in unexpected competitive race
Two South Carolina former governors, David Beasley and Jim Hodges, a Republican and Democrat respectively, have come together for a rare joint endorsement for Democrat Annie Andrews’s Senate bid.
Andrews, a pediatrician, is looking to flip the seat, currently held by Darline Graham, the Trump-endorsed sister of the late senator Lindsey Graham, in what has become an unexpectedly competitive race for the usually reliably red state.
During a campaign stop with former President Bill Clinton, Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly said the state needs to stop whitewashing American history.
Speaking at Koinonia Worship Center on Oct. 20, a historically Black, non-denominational church in Hollywood, Florida, Jolly said his Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, once spoke positively about the Jim Crow era — a period from the late 1800s to the mid-1960s when Black people in the South were subject to state-sponsored discrimination.
“If the test is our goodness, we are failing right now. We are failing right now…When we’re a state that actually suggested years ago that we might want to teach our kids the ‘good parts’ of slavery,” Jolly said. “Or, when my opponent suggests there were good parts of Jim Crow.”
Jolly’s statement, that Donalds’ suggested there were good parts of Jim Crow, is missing context. Donalds didn’t praise the era’s discriminatory policies; his 2024 remarks centered on Black people’s conservative leanings and Black families staying together.
At an event in Philadelphia that year, Donalds, seeking Black voters’ support for President Donald Trump’s reelection, said he was starting to see the “reinvigoration of Black family,” which he described as younger people forming families and “helping to breathe the revival of a Black middle class in America,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
That’s when he turned to the past.
“During Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” Donalds said at the event. “During Jim Crow, more Black people were not just conservative — Black people have always been conservative-minded — but more Black people voted conservatively.”
Donalds pointed to President Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to fight poverty after Jim Crow, which some conservatives say incentivized family separations.
Jim Crow laws were enacted over several decades following the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction and formally ended when the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act passed.
After backlash for his comments, Donalds said on MSNBC in 2024 that he wasn’t being “nostalgic” about Jim Crow, but was focusing on how “the marriage rates of Black Americans were significantly higher than any other time since then in American history” and have “plummeted” since.
Donalds’ campaign did not respond to our questions about his 2024 comments. Jolly’s campaign pointed us to more recent remarks in which Donalds reaffirmed his point.
In the Florida episode of her documentary series about voter dynamics, former Obama White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri asked Donalds about what he said in 2024.
“I said exactly what I meant … I was talking about marriage rates for Black families,” Donalds said. “The data is clear. Marriage rates were higher in the Black community during that period of time. When Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society came in, that’s when we saw marriage rates in the Black family plummet.”
Donalds said President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign twisted his meaning in 2024. “They decided to make it political, saying I was somehow supportive of Jim Crow — that’s crazy,” he told Palmieri.
Donalds’ comment was primarily about Black families staying together during Jim Crow
When PolitiFact reported on Donalds’ comments in 2024, we cited research showing that from 1940 to 1980, both white and Black women divorced from their partners more than they previously did, but it happened sooner and more steeply for Black women. The percentage of Black women ages 40 to 44 who said they have ever been married fell from 94% in 1930 to 63% in 2012.
Some conservative commentators argue that government policies, including safety net programs that help women parent alone, are responsible for family separations. But researchers say it’s difficult to point to a single cause. Other factors, including Black men losing manufacturing jobs in the ‘70s and ‘80s and more Black women getting jobs, have also been influential.
Whether Black people voted more conservatively during the Jim Crow era is difficult to prove, experts have told PolitiFact, because Black people couldn’t vote in the South and “conservatism,” as a defined ideological movement, largely emerged in the 1950s.
Our ruling
Jolly said Donalds “suggested there were good parts of Jim Crow.”
In 2024, Donalds spoke favorably about some aspects of Black families during that era, saying “during Jim Crow, the Black family was together” and that Black Americans voted more conservatively then. He wasn’t praising the racist policies of the era, as Jolly’s statement implies.
Jolly’s statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. We rate it Half True.
Lower Costs Now is a Democratic super PAC that was established in early September, according to a filing submitted to the Federal Election Commission. It is affiliated with FF PAC, formerly known as Future Forward USA PAC, a hybrid committee that was the main outside PAC supporting Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ presidential campaigns in 2024.
One of the few things on Lower Costs Now’s minimal website is a message that reads: “Americans can’t keep up with the soaring cost of everyday life. Nobody should be priced out of a decent living.”
FEC records show the group has received more than $50 million as of Oct. 14, with nearly all of its donations coming via transfers from two other political committees — SMP, which contributed $30 million, and FF PAC, which gave $20 million. SMP, more commonly known as Senate Majority PAC, is a well-funded super PAC that aims to help Democrats win Senate races.
Lower Costs Now has reported spending nearly $33 million since September on independent expenditures, which are communications expressly for or against candidates. As a super PAC, it is allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money trying to influence federal elections. Its independent expenditures cannot be coordinated with candidates or political parties.
As of Oct. 26, Lower Costs Now has aired more than 340 unique TV and online ads either for or against Senate candidates, according to the database of AdImpact, a service that tracks political advertising. The AdImpact data show the group has spent more money in Iowa, more than $13 million, than in any other Senate race. It has also spent millions of dollars on the Kansas, Ohio, Texas, Georgia, Michigan and Alaska Senate races, which are all close election contests, according to the Cook Political Report’s Senate ratings.
Notably, the super PAC’s ads have not exclusively focused on affordability and cost-of-living issues, as its name may suggest. As an example, AdImpact says the group has spent more than $2.8 million airing an ad that claims Republican Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio “voted to cover up the Epstein files,” a misleading charge that we wrote about in June.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.
Safety and Affordability PAC Inc. is a super PAC that was established in early September. It is another Republican political action committee affiliated with President Donald Trump.
Its Federal Election Commission filings show that the super PAC has the same treasurer, Charles Gantt, as No Going Back PAC Inc., another Trump-aligned super PAC that was created in September. And both No Going Back PAC and Safety and Affordability PAC have received almost all of their funding from MAGA Inc., a super PAC originally formed during the 2022 midterm elections to support Trump-approved candidates.
As of Oct. 14, Safety and Affordability PAC, which can raise unlimited funds from individuals and other donors, reported receiving nearly $25.1 million for the 2026 midterms, with $25 million of that coming from MAGA Inc. By that same date, according to its pre-general election FEC filing, it had spent $16.2 million on ads and other communications that are formally called independent expenditures. Those expenditures can be for or against candidates for federal office.
But its ad spending appears to have increased, as AdImpact’s political advertising database shows that Safety and Affordability PAC spent or reserved close to $57 million in ads, as of Oct. 26. The group is focusing on House races across the country, as Republicans need to hold onto at least 218 seats to retain majority control.
Several of the races on which the group has reportedly spent the most money – such as in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District and Michigan’s 7th Congressional District – are for seats currently held by Republicans. But those races have been rated by the Cook Political Report as toss-ups or contests leaning toward Democrats.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.
(The Center Square) – Eight days out from election day, Vice President J.D. Vance attempted to soothe voters’ cost of living concerns, which multiple polls show are currently top of mind for Americans.
Mozilla launched a new ad campaign for Firefox that leverages early internet nostalgia in a bid to win back users who switched browsers. "Today's internet tracks you, interrupts you, and asks for permissions it already took. But it wasn't always that way, and it's not how it's supposed to work," writes Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo in a post on LinkedIn. "It's how a few companies decided it should work, because it pays."
"We're making a different bet at Firefox. Remember us? Well, we're still here, and we don't think the internet should be like this..." The ad features viral internet stars from yesteryear, including Tay Zonday of "Chocolate Rain" fame, Gary Brolsma of "Numa Numa", Noah Ritter, better known as the "Apparently Kid", and Laina Morris, the face of the "Overly Attached Girlfriend" meme, among others.
Photo is Courtesy of the Georgetown Fire Department on 10/25
More than 600 Milford students face an uncertain return after Sunday’s three-alarm fire, while investigators work to determine the cause and the district develops a longer-term education plan.
MILFORD — The fallout from a major fire at Lulu M. Ross Elementary School expanded Monday, with classes canceled for the entire week, neighboring Mispillion Elementary temporarily affected and election officials moving a polling place ahead of the Nov. 3 general election.
The developments come one day after a three-alarm fire heavily damaged portions of Lulu Ross, a Milford School District elementary school serving more than 600 students.
Students at Lulu Ross will have no in-person or remote instruction from Monday, Oct. 26, through Friday, Oct. 30, while district officials assess the building and determine how and where instruction can resume.
The Milford School District has not yet announced whether students will eventually return to portions of the building, be temporarily relocated to other facilities or use another arrangement.
The uncertainty represents one of the most significant immediate challenges facing the district following the fire.
Fire began in Kent wing
The Delaware State Fire Marshal’s Office said investigators determined the fire originated in the Kent wing of the school.
The cause remains under investigation, but officials said they have found no evidence at this point that criminal activity was involved.
Firefighters were dispatched shortly after 4 a.m. Sunday after an automatic fire alarm activated at the school on Lovers Lane.
When crews arrived, fire was coming through the roof.
Firefighters initially attempted to attack the fire from inside the building, but deteriorating conditions forced crews to evacuate and shift their response. The blaze eventually grew to three alarms, bringing firefighters and equipment from departments throughout the area.
It took crews about three hours to bring the fire under control.
No students or employees were inside the school when the fire started, and no injuries were reported.
The fire caused extensive damage to the Kent wing and spread into central portions of the school, including the front lobby, administrative offices and library. Classrooms in the Kent and New Castle hallways were also heavily damaged.
The State Fire Marshal’s Office has not released a damage estimate.
Fire crews returned to Lulu Ross Monday morning, according to Carlisle Fire Company response records, as investigators and emergency personnel continued work at the property.
Neighboring school also affected
The fire also disrupted operations at nearby Mispillion Elementary School, which shares the campus area and infrastructure with Lulu Ross.
Mispillion was closed Monday because the fire damaged fiber-optic infrastructure serving the schools, leaving the building without working internet and telephone service.
District officials said operating without those communication systems presented a safety concern.
State agencies and repair crews were working to restore the service.
The district initially announced the Mispillion closure for Monday only. Other Milford School District schools were operating on their normal schedules.
Polling place moved
The effects of the fire will also reach beyond the school district.
The Delaware Department of Elections announced Monday that voters in Sussex County Election District 36-01 who normally vote at Lulu Ross will instead vote at Mispillion Elementary School for the Nov. 3 general election.
Mispillion Elementary is located at 311 Lovers Lane in Milford, adjacent to the Lulu Ross campus.
The Department of Elections said notification letters were mailed to voters affected by the change.
Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Election Day.
Early voting is already underway and continues through Sunday, Nov. 1.
Focus turns to students
Beyond the physical damage, district leaders now face the challenge of determining how to continue educating hundreds of elementary students if Lulu Ross cannot reopen quickly.
The school enrolled 614 students during the 2025-26 school year, according to Delaware Department of Education enrollment figures.
The district’s crisis response team has been working on both short-term and longer-term plans for students and employees.
District officials are also coordinating with state agencies to provide resources for families and staff members affected by the fire and its aftermath.
Community organizations and school systems around Delaware have begun offering assistance.
For parents, however, the immediate question remains what happens after Friday.
District officials have not yet announced plans for the week beginning Nov. 2 or provided a timetable for determining how much of Lulu Ross can eventually be returned to service.
Officials are asking members of the public to stay away from the Lulu Ross property while investigators, emergency crews and district personnel continue their work.
The fire investigation remains active, and additional announcements are expected as the district evaluates the condition of the school and develops a plan for returning Lulu Ross students to instruction.
TO GO BOX: Lulu M. Ross Elementary School fire
What happened: A three-alarm fire heavily damaged Lulu Ross Elementary School early Sunday, Oct. 25.
School closure: Lulu Ross students will have no in-person or remote classes through Friday, Oct. 30.
Students affected: More than 600.
Cause: Under investigation by the Delaware State Fire Marshal’s Office. Investigators have reported no evidence of criminal activity at this time.
Mispillion Elementary: Closed Monday because fire damage interrupted internet and telephone service. Families should monitor Milford School District updates for additional schedule information.
Election change: Sussex County Election District 36-01 voters will vote Nov. 3 at Mispillion Elementary School, 311 Lovers Lane, Milford, instead of Lulu Ross.
Where to follow updates: Milford School District, Delaware Department of Elections and Delaware LIVE/Milford LIVE.
Activists say struggle must go on until their ‘maximum’ demands are met over teacher shortages and building repairs
French children should continue to barricade their schools and take part in street protests, a student union said on Monday after the government announced a package of education measures to try to stem the crisis.
“Today we’re at the negotiating table, we’re able to negotiate with the government,” Pierre Sourzat of Les Lycéens told France Info television. “We’re in a power struggle and we still need to call for continued mobilisation to meet a maximum of our demands.”
Public Advocate Jameson Tweedie says rising regional demand, higher grid costs, and uncertainty over new generation are pressuring Delaware consumers.
By Delaware LIVE Staff
DOVER, Del. — Delaware faces a growing challenge: finding enough affordable electricity to meet future demand while protecting residents and businesses from rising utility bills.
Delaware Energy Advocate, Jameson Tweddie, spoke with Jane Brady, from A Better Delaware this morning on her weekly podcast.
New power plants, including natural-gas facilities, could be part of the answer. But uncertainty surrounding proposed projects, increasing regional electricity costs and a pending Delmarva Power rate increase leave consumers facing continued financial pressure.
That was the central message from Delaware Public Advocate Jameson Tweedie, who joined Jane Brady on Monday’s A Better Discussion, a public policy podcast presented by A Better Delaware.
Tweedie said Delaware needs additional electricity generation, but the problem extends well beyond the state’s borders. The regional power system is struggling to keep new generation in line with growing demand, particularly from large data centers.
At the same time, the three major components of consumers’ electric bills — generation, transmission and distribution — have been increasing.
New generation could help meet demand
One of the more significant developments discussed was the potential expansion of electricity generation in Delaware.
Tweedie cited a PJM Interconnection study showing nearly 1.8 gigawatts of proposed generating capacity under review in Delaware, most of it natural gas.
PJM’s August 2026 information identified nine proposed projects, including three natural-gas facilities, four solar projects and two energy-storage projects.
However, the proposed projects are not guaranteed to be built.
An independent review of PJM’s interconnection queue reported that a proposed natural-gas project of approximately 1.5 gigawatts in Sussex County had been withdrawn. The withdrawal raises questions about how much of the generation identified in earlier PJM reports remains under active consideration.
A project entering PJM’s study process must undergo technical and financial review before it can move toward construction.
The uncertainty makes it difficult to predict how much additional electricity Delaware will produce in the coming years.
Delaware produces less electricity than it consumes
Although Delaware has substantial installed generating capacity, the state continues to rely heavily on electricity produced elsewhere.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Delaware had approximately 3,303 megawatts of net summer generating capacity in 2024.
The state generated approximately 4.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity that year, while retail customers purchased approximately 11.4 million megawatt-hours.
Those figures illustrate Delaware’s dependence on electricity supplied through the regional power system.
During Monday’s discussion, Brady questioned whether Delaware could better utilize existing generating facilities before encouraging the construction of additional plants.
Tweedie explained that installed capacity does not necessarily translate into actual electricity production.
Power plants operate according to demand, operating costs, transmission limitations and conditions within the regional electricity market. Some facilities generate power continuously, while others operate primarily during periods of high demand.
Delaware is part of PJM Interconnection, which coordinates electricity markets and transmission across 13 states and Washington, D.C.
That means Delaware policymakers can influence which generating facilities are developed in the state, but they cannot independently determine the price or availability of electricity throughout the regional market.
Electric bills have increased dramatically
The financial consequences are already evident in Delaware households.
An April 2026 report from the Delaware Division of the Public Advocate examined 20 years of Delmarva Power electric rates and documented substantial increases.
Among the findings:
Residential distribution rates have more than doubled since 2006.
Transmission rates increased 93.5% between 2020 and 2025.
Residential summer electricity supply rates increased 114.1% between 2021 and 2026.
For years, declining electricity supply costs helped offset increases in transmission and distribution charges.
That trend has reversed.
Tweedie explained that all three components are now rising, putting additional pressure on household budgets.
One particularly troubling development involves PJM’s capacity market, which pays electricity generators to ensure enough power will be available in future years.
Tweedie said capacity-market prices have increased approximately 1,000% over three years.
Although those charges account for only part of a typical electric bill, the increases reflect growing concern that electricity demand is rising faster than new generating capacity can be brought online.
Delmarva seeks another major rate increase
Delaware consumers also face a significant rate case involving Delmarva Power.
The utility initially requested a $67.8 million annual increase in base-rate revenue in December 2025. That amount included approximately $23.2 million already being collected through a separate infrastructure charge.
Delmarva subsequently updated its request to approximately $75.8 million.
The Delaware Public Service Commission allowed an interim increase of approximately $34.3 million to take effect in July while the full request remains under review.
Delmarva appealed the interim decision, arguing that the commission improperly accounted for an existing infrastructure charge and that the company must recover investments necessary to maintain reliable electric service.
Company officials have pointed to improvements in system reliability resulting from infrastructure spending.
Tweedie said his office is reviewing the proposed increase and will challenge expenses it determines are unjust or unreasonable.
The Public Advocate represents residential and small-business customers of regulated utilities before the Public Service Commission and in regional and federal proceedings.
Data centers could substantially increase demand
Another major concern is the rapid growth of large data centers, particularly facilities supporting artificial intelligence.
Tweedie said Delmarva previously examined several potential data-center projects that, if developed together, could have roughly doubled Delaware’s peak electricity demand.
These facilities can require enormous amounts of electricity, creating potential costs for new generation, transmission lines and other infrastructure.
In August, Gov. Matt Meyer signed legislation designed to prevent large electricity users from shifting those costs onto existing consumers.
House Bill 233 established a separate utility rate classification for major electricity users, including data centers, while House Bill 445 requires qualifying large energy facilities to produce or secure enough new generation to meet their power needs.
The legislation also contains provisions intended to prevent additional infrastructure costs from being passed along to residential and small-business customers.
Tweedie acknowledged that data centers can bring significant construction investment and employment opportunities, although permanent employment may be more limited.
His primary concern is ensuring that existing utility customers are not required to subsidize those developments.
Natural gas, nuclear and batteries offer different possibilities
The discussion also examined which energy technologies could help Delaware meet future electricity needs.
Natural gas remains an important part of the regional electricity system and has attracted substantial interest from developers proposing new generation.
However, Tweedie noted that a large natural-gas generating facility could take five to seven years or longer to develop.
Solar generation can generally be developed more quickly, although its output depends on available sunlight.
Nuclear power offers another possibility.
Tweedie served on Delaware’s Nuclear Energy Task Force, which recommended continued examination of nuclear generation.
He emphasized nuclear power’s ability to produce large quantities of dependable, carbon-free electricity around the clock.
But the substantial construction costs and lengthy development process remain obstacles.
Small modular reactors could eventually provide additional options, although Tweedie said their projected costs remain high and the technology has not yet achieved widespread commercial deployment.
Battery storage could offer benefits by capturing electricity when supplies are plentiful and releasing it during periods of peak demand.
Tweedie pointed to large-scale battery deployment in other states as evidence of the technology’s potential to reduce peak electricity costs and avoid some additional infrastructure investments.
The challenge: reliable power at a price consumers can afford
The discussion highlighted two related challenges for Delaware policymakers.
The first is ensuring that sufficient electricity will be available to serve existing customers and support economic growth.
The second is determining how that electricity and the infrastructure needed to deliver it will be paid for.
Generating more electricity within Delaware could improve the state’s available supply, but additional in-state capacity would not automatically lower electric bills because wholesale electricity prices are determined through regional markets.
Tweedie said his office is continuing to advocate for consumers before the Public Service Commission, PJM and federal regulators.
For Delaware households and small businesses, the larger question remains whether policymakers, regulators and energy providers can expand reliable electricity supplies without placing an even greater financial burden on customers.
TO GO: Delaware electricity costs and consumer assistance
Public Advocate: Jameson Tweedie, Delaware Division of the Public Advocate.
What the office does: Represents residential and small-business customers of regulated utilities, challenges unreasonable rate requests and helps resolve utility complaints.
Consumer assistance: Customers experiencing billing disputes, threatened disconnections or other utility problems can contact the office.
Website: publicadvocate.delaware.gov
Phone: 302-241-2555
Related research:Historical Review of Delmarva Power Electric Residential Rates, April 6, 2026, available through the Public Advocate’s website.
Podcast:A Better Discussion, hosted by Jane Brady, chair of A Better Delaware.
Brand, charged with rape and sexual assault, was ‘sleeping with people day and night’, former assistant alleges
Russell Brand had an “insane sexual appetite” and his bad behaviour was “normalised and dismissed” by those around him, his former personal assistant has told a court.
Helen Berger alleged she had seen Brand treat women badly and that she once had to stop his mother and girlfriend walking in on him having sex with someone in his dressing room.
The discount retailer routinely charges customers more at checkout than the prices it displays on shelves, price tags and ads, according to federal and state authorities.
Cleveland, OH — Ohio’s largest newspaper has reversed its recently adopted policy against endorsing candidates for major statewide offices, backing Democrat Amy Acton for governor after concluding that Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign had “crossed a line.”
The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com editorial board said Ramaswamy’s decision to air an advertisement featuring Acton’s estranged mother was a major factor in its decision.
Acton has said she was raped by her stepfather as a child and that her mother remained with him after he was charged. The Ramaswamy campaign’s ad features her mother calling Acton a liar and attacking her character.
“A candidate who uses childhood sexual abuse as a weapon against the person who endured it has crossed a line that Ohioans should defend, whatever their party,” the editorial board wrote.
The newspaper had previously decided to stop endorsing candidates for governor, U.S. Senate and president, focusing instead on less-covered down-ballot contests. It said the circumstances compelled it to reconsider.
The endorsement also cited Acton’s government experience and participation in an extensive newspaper questionnaire about Ohio issues, which Ramaswamy declined to complete.
Ramaswamy’s campaign dismissed the endorsement as predictable liberal support.
Democrats and Republicans, including GOP Gov. Mike DeWine, have criticized the original advertisement, with DeWine calling it “a new low” and urging Ramaswamy to remove it. His campaign then began airing a shortened version that removes some of the mother’s most controversial claims but still uses her to attack Acton’s credibility.
Instagram is testing a new longform, horizontal video format called "Features" as it pushes further into YouTube territory and expands its presence on TVs. The Verge reports: Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has been against doing longform video on the platform "for a long time," he says in a six-and-a-half-minute video (here's the widescreen version) with VP of product Tessa Lyons, saying that "one of my concerns has been, how do we make sure that we keep Instagram not just about entertainment, but about connecting with friends." If you watch a longform video, "it's a lot of Reels, photos, and carousels that you might not have sent to a friend," meaning less likes and shares. Now, though, the team is working on making shortform and longform video "symbiotic," according to Mosseri, like podcasts or comedy specials that can be both long videos and broken up into shorter ones.
The announcement of this widescreen video push also follows the launch of Instagram's TV app late last year. That app launched first as a Reels-focused experience and as a pilot for Amazon Fire TV devices in the US, but it's since expanded to Google TVs, Samsung TVs and Apple TV, and Instagram launched new features like the ability to watch Stories earlier this year.
It’s one thing to consider running for your local school board. It’s another to understand the responsibilities that come with the position.
School board members make decisions that shape students’ educational experiences, from establishing district priorities and approving budgets to adopting policies and holding district leadership accountable for results. Yet many people who consider running have limited opportunities to learn what the role involves before making that commitment.
“Most people thinking about running have a reason why they are running. But what they usually don’t have is a clear picture of the job,” said Y.F. Lou of the Christina School Board. “First State Educate’s training lets you look before you leap.”
As Delaware prepares for its 2027 school board elections, First State Educate (FSE) is helping prospective candidates and community members learn more about school board governance through its Knowledge Hub, an online learning platform offering free educational resources, practical tools, and opportunities for more structured learning.
Joining takes about 30 seconds, and membership is free.
Understanding the role before you run
School boards have an important responsibility: ensuring that public schools are organized, supported, and held accountable for providing students with a quality education.
But school board members do not manage the daily operations of their districts. Instead, they establish expectations, approve policies, allocate resources, monitor performance, and oversee the superintendent. Understanding where governance ends and management begins is one of the most important lessons for anyone considering school board service.
“Effective board service requires more than simply caring about students,” said Dr. Jeffrey T. Benson Jr., President of the Seaford School Board. “You have to understand governance, policy, finance, accountability, community engagement, and the difference between governing and managing day-to-day operations.”
These responsibilities require board members to consider competing priorities, understand financial and academic information, ask meaningful questions, and make decisions that serve the interests of students and the broader community.
For prospective candidates, learning about these responsibilities before running can help them determine whether the role aligns with their interests, skills, and expectations. For voters, understanding the role can help them evaluate candidates and recognize what effective board leadership looks like.
A free place to begin learning
FSE’s Knowledge Hub gives Delawareans a place to explore school board governance without having to commit to running for office or enrolling in a course.
Its free resource library includes downloadable guides, templates, and practical materials addressing topics such as public comment, district budgets, and school board governance. Members can also explore discussion groups and summaries of Delaware school board meetings to better understand the issues and decisions affecting local districts.
The resources are designed to be useful at different stages of involvement. Someone considering running can learn about the responsibilities of the position. A parent or community member can better understand how to engage with their local school board. A current school board member can return to the library when facing an unfamiliar issue or preparing for an important decision.
For those interested in more structured learning, FSE also offers self-paced courses for a fee. Topics include transparent governance and the Freedom of Information Act, strategic planning, resource allocation, effective governance, and Delaware’s new school funding formula.
Successful completion of designated courses or learning pathways can lead to verified digital credentials issued through Credly. These credentials provide a shareable record of completed learning that can be displayed on LinkedIn, professional profiles, and other digital platforms.
The goal is not simply to complete training, but to develop knowledge that can be applied to real decisions.
“I came into this role with limited K-12 experience and quickly realized how much I had to learn,” said Yanelle Powell of the Milford School Board. “I consider myself a professional learner, and the Knowledge Hub has given me the confidence to ask better questions, understand the issues before me, and become a more thoughtful and prepared board member.”
Learning doesn’t end after the election
Winning a school board election is the beginning of a new set of responsibilities. Newly elected members must quickly become familiar with district finances, academic performance, state requirements, board policies, and the procedures that govern public meetings and decision-making.
Even experienced members encounter new challenges as educational priorities, funding conditions, and community expectations change.
FSE works with school board members at different stages of their service, helping them develop the knowledge and skills needed to govern effectively. From 2023 through 2026, the organization trained or supported nearly one-third of Delaware’s school board members across the state’s 16 school districts.
Through its workshops, learning resources, and ongoing educational opportunities, FSE helps school board members connect governance principles to the decisions they face in their own districts.
That continuing support is important because effective governance is not simply about understanding the rules. It is about using information, asking the right questions, making informed decisions, and monitoring whether those decisions are producing better results for students.
Explore service before the 2027 elections
For Delawareans who are curious about serving, the coming months offer an opportunity to learn before deciding whether to run.
From October through December 2026, FSE is hosting a free, three-part webinar series for prospective candidates and community members interested in school board service.
Participants will learn about the responsibilities of school boards, the distinction between governance and daily management, and how board decisions affect students, families, and communities. They will also have an opportunity to ask questions and consider whether serving on a school board is right for them.
You do not need to have decided to run to participate. The series is open to anyone who wants to learn more about public school governance, including those who may wish to support a prospective candidate or become more informed about their local district.
“School boards make decisions that shape the future of our schools and the opportunities available to students. We need people who care about their communities, bring different perspectives, and are willing to learn what it takes to govern effectively,” said Julia Keleher, Executive Director of First State Educate. “You don’t need to have all the answers before deciding to run. That’s what First State Educate is here for: to help you understand the role, build your confidence, and develop the knowledge and skills to make a meaningful difference for students.”
School board service offers community members an opportunity to help shape the future of public education. Understanding the responsibilities, opportunities, and expectations of the role is an important first step toward deciding whether to serve. If you are interested in running for school board, complete a letter of interest to get more information.
Join the Knowledge Hub to explore free resources and begin learning at your own pace. Then, register for the October 27 webinar to ask questions, learn more about the role, and consider how you might contribute to Delaware’s public schools.
Militaries that take on a greater share of civilian responsibilities can redefine their place in society – and their relationship with citizens and the government.
Benjamin Netanyahu has resorted to increasingly alarmist rhetoric and reportedly put pressure on Israel’s military to take action against Iran as his far-right coalition narrowly trails in the polls ahead of Tuesday’s close-run elections.
The Israeli prime minister posted an AI-generated image of a nuclear mushroom cloud destroying Tel Aviv, telling Israeli voters to choose him or risk nuclear annihilation.
Company says small number of devices affected by display glitch after posts appear on Reddit and social media
Owners of the new foldable iPhone are reporting cracks in the device’s screen, as Apple confirmed an issue with a “small number” of units.
Reports of cracks have emerged on Reddit and social media platforms since the handset went on general sale globally on Friday. Experts said there had been too few examples to determine whether there was a more serious problem with Apple’s first foldable device, which retails from $1,999 (£1,499).
Badr Albusaidi calls for security pact involving Gulf states, Iraq and Iran with US no longer primary provider of security
The Middle East’s ability to solve its problems has been held back by America’s 50-year insistence that the Gulf states should view Iran as a security threat, Oman’s foreign minister said on Monday in a significant speech designed to break the deadlock over the region’s future.
Badr Albusaidi called for a non-aggression security pact involving all six Gulf states as well as Iran and Iraq. The US would in future no longer be the primary provider of security, he said.
Washington, DC — A nonprofit that helped independent presidential candidate Cornel West qualify for state ballots in 2024 received all of its reported funding that year from a conservative political network with ties to Elon Musk, according to tax records reviewed by Sludge.
People Over Party received a $7.7 million grant from Interstate Priorities, accounting for all of the organization’s reported 2024 revenue. Interstate Priorities, meanwhile, reported receiving $10.1 million from Building America’s Future, exactly matching its total revenue for the year.
Building America’s Future has previously received tens of millions of dollars from Musk, according to Wall Street Journal reporting, and has worked with political consultants connected to his broader Republican spending operation.
However, the records do not establish that Musk personally supplied the money ultimately used to support West’s ballot access. Building America’s Future received $74.5 million from a single anonymous donor in 2024, whose identity remains undisclosed.
People Over Party paid for petitioning efforts designed to place West on state ballots during an election in which Democrats warned that his left-wing candidacy could siphon votes from Kamala Harris and indirectly benefit Donald Trump.
The financial links add detail to longstanding questions about conservative groups assisting third-party candidates whose presence could potentially hurt Democrats.
West ultimately appeared on ballots in multiple states. Federal Election Commission records identify him as an independent presidential candidate and show his own campaign raised about $1.4 million during the 2024 cycle.
Doylestown, Pa. — Today, Governor Josh Shapiro signed Senate Bill 1014 into law, requiring all Pennsylvania public, charter, cyber charter, and private schools to adopt policies prohibiting students from using personal cell phones throughout the school day, including during lunch,…
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: Walter Koenig, the actor who played Pavel Chekov in the original "Star Trek" series and several movies, has died, his rep confirmed to CBS News. He was 90. Koenig died Sunday night at his home in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, talent rep Zachery McGinnis said in a statement. He died surrounded by his daughter and niece, McGinnis said.
In 'Star Trek,' Ensign Chekov was the sole member of the spaceship Enterprise bridge staff from what was the Communist bloc. His friendly, supportive presence showed how the rival nations (in the far-off future in which the show was set) were capable of working together. Speaking heavily Russian-accented English, Chekov embodied stereotypical Russian personality traits, including fierce pride, love of poetry and blind loyalty. "Through countless convention appearances and interactions with fans, he shared his kindness, wit, and appreciation with everyone fortunate enough to meet him. He understood what Star Trek meant to people and embraced the community that grew around it," McGinnis said. "Thank you, Walter, for the memories, the inspiration, and for boldly going where few have gone before."
Watch some of the Chekov's best moments on YouTube.
Triple lightning strike hits the World Trade Center and two other tall buildings in the Manhattan skyline of New York City. (Dan Martland / RMetS via SWNS)
Valkyries-Dream Game 6 to tip at 9.30am on west coast
Game moved to larger State Farm Arena in Atlanta
Hawks’ NBA game on same day could not be moved
Game 6 of the WNBA finals between the Atlanta Dream and the Golden State Valkyries will be played at State Farm Arena on Thursday at 12.30pm ET, the league has announced. That means Valkyries fans in California will be watching the game at 9.30am local time.
Dream guard Allisha Gray said it didn’t matter what time the game was played.
Tech company offers buyouts in an effort to reduce costs amid the rising use of AI, according to reports
Microsoft announced that it would offer buyouts to 60,000 employees in an effort to reduce costs amid the rising use of artificial intelligence, according to reports, the latest example of how AI is reshaping tech companies and the greater workforce.
This is the latest of several trimmings Microsoft has made to its workforce this year. The company announced in April that it was offering voluntary retirement to about 7% of its US workforce, which consisted of about 125,000 employees at the time. Its global workforce is made up of about 223,000 workers globally.
The actor appeared in the cult 1960s show as well as many of the films but also worked as a writer
Walter Koenig, the actor known for playing Pavel Chekov throughout the Star Trek franchise, has died, his representative confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter. He was 90.
Koenig died at his home in North Hollywood surrounded by his daughter and niece, according to a Facebook post by Zachery McGinnis, the founder of Galactic Productions, an appearance agency that counted the actor as one of its clients. His death was attributed to “old age”, with no other details provided.
This article was amended on 26 October, 2026 to correct details on Koenig’s cameo on Star Trek: Picard.
A major clean-up operation was under way on Monday after weekend storms caused havoc, with forecasters warning of more strong winds to come.
Two men were killed by falling trees after two named storms, Austen and Boelo, struck parts of the UK, and there was widespread travel disruption, flooding, power cuts and event cancellations.
Industrial action by senior doctors to begin on 25 November with only emergency cover provided, BMA says
England’s most senior hospital doctors will strike next month in a dispute over their pay and hours, prompting NHS bosses to warn that patients will suffer “pain, discomfort and inconvenience”.
Consultant doctors, who earn an average of £152,000 a year inclusive of overtime and merit awards, will stage a two-day walkout on 25 and 26 November, as hospitals gear up for the extra pressures winter brings.
Clarification comes after PM fuelled speculation about EU-UK relationship in series of interviews at weekend
Downing Street has been forced to clarify Andy Burnham’s stance on whether the UK would return to having freedom of movement with the EU after the prime minister said an “honest discussion” was needed on the issue.
Burnham fuelled speculation about a return to freedom of movement in an interview at the weekend, prompting questions about how close the UK could become to Brussels.
All but one of the victims sustained gunshot wounds as boy faces 11 charges of attempted second-degree murder
A 15-year-old boy was remanded into secure detention in Florida on Monday charged with 11 counts of attempted murder following a mass shooting at a college homecoming party on Saturday.
Six adults and six minors were injured, all but one with gunshot wounds, in the gunfire near the Florida Agricultural + Mechanical University campus in Tallahassee.
Highway thieves have stolen more than $100 million in data center equipment since June, employing increasingly sophisticated tactics such as forging driver IDs and spoofing GPS tracking systems. NBC News (paywalled) reports that thieves have "made away with more than $100 million in data center freight." Ars Technica reports: Here's how they said thieves get away with it: First, thieves hack freight brokers' accounts on shipment-listing websites and post fake shipments to lure real bids, then send a malicious link to any trucking companies that respond. Once victims click, thieves install software to take control of their accounts and start bidding on real shipments. Sometimes, a real delivery driver is hired to collect the cargo, unaware of the scam, and other times fake driver's licenses are used to get accomplices hired. Either way, the goods are eventually transferred to a driver working with the thieves to resell the gear, and, in one of the largest thefts, tracking coordinates were spoofed to prevent digital monitoring. Equipment commonly targeted includes "servers, fiber-optic cables, computer memory chips, copper wires, and bitcoin mining machines," NBC News reported.
Some trailers hit seem to be carrying only data center equipment, like two stolen freights found in Illinois. The Cook County Sheriff's Office estimated those contained $300,000 worth of copper wire spools and about $1 million in "custom-made data center modular power solutions equipment," NBC News reported. Other trucks impacted were carrying additional freight, like a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department case where "data center cooling equipment" bound for Deepcool AI was recovered among nicotine pouches, televisions, shoes, printers, speakers, and skin care cosmetics. Experts worry that means Americans may be broadly harmed by the thefts, not just the AI industry.
While some stolen goods have been recovered, in two of the largest thefts that NBC News found, none of the equipment was found, and off-duty cops hired to escort the shipments were targeted in hit-and-runs. [...] Broadly, cargo thieves are infiltrating email accounts to find lucrative shipments, misdirecting shipments, disrupting GPS tracking, and using AI to create fake driver's licenses to get accomplices hired as delivery drivers. LASD's Sgt. David Pantoja told NBC News "that's how most of it is being done," which is a big shift from the past when highway thefts were largely opportunistic.
A viral WhatsApp channel and student-led protests played a key role in the veteran Brazilian leftist’s election victory
After the first round of the Brazilian presidential election three weeks ago, the leftist incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reportedly told allies he could not understand how he finished second after a government he considered the best of his three terms.
A mood of dismay swept Brazil’s left, and because 9 million voters for the other candidates, all of them on the right, were expected to mostly transfer to senator Flávio Bolsonaro, analysts widely saw the far-right senator’s victory as certain.
Mr Justice Saini tells the eight men and six women at Winchester crown court the case is likely to be upsetting
Jurors being selected for the trial of four men accused of sexually assaulting the ex-wife of a former Conservative councillor, who has admitted repeatedly drugging and raping her, have been warned the case is likely to be upsetting.
Philip Young, 50, has pleaded guilty to multiple charges of abuse against his former wife, Joanne Young, who has waived her right to anonymity.
At funeral service Chris Adrian remembers son Cole as ‘capturing the heart’ of everyone, after tragedy killing two
The father of Cole Adrian, a six-year-old boy killed when a woman drove through a soccer game at a park in Wichita, Kansas, on 17 October, paid an emotional tribute to his son at his funeral service on Monday.
Chris Adrian, of McPherson, Kansas, spoke through tears while he remembered Cole as an energetic, fun-loving child who loved life and “captured the heart” of everyone he met.
Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won a historic fourth term as president, defeating the far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro in a dramatic comeback.
Lula is the first candidate to win a runoff election after losing in the first round, taking victory with 51.79% of the vote to his rival’s 48.21%. His win bucks a regional trend, after the son of the former president Jair Bolsonaro had spearheaded a radical populist movement.
But with Flávio Bolsonaro refusing to concede defeat, what’s next for Brazil? Michael Safi speaks to Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips – watch on YouTube
Move comes after claims that killer had history of using threatening behaviour and an obsession with weapons
Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, has launched a review to examine whether opportunities were missed to prevent the murder of the student Henry Nowak.
It follows claims that there were several warning signs that the perpetrator, Vickrum Digwa, had a history of threatening behaviour and an obsession with weapons.
The prime minister previously said that he wanted a debate on how Britain can establish a closer relationship
Speaking at his rough sleeping summit in Downing Street this morning, Andy Burnham expanded on the claim he made on Good Morning Britain about tackling rough sleeping being cheaper than ignoring the problem. (See 11.13am.)
He said:
We’ve also got to be conscious when we speak to the rest of the country, the taxpayers of this country, that actually to leave people sleeping rough has financial consequences. It doesn’t work for anybody and it doesn’t work for the public purse, because if you leave people in a position where they are in and out of A&E, and in and out of a hospital bed, that doesn’t make sense for anybody.
There is a rock-solid business case to do something to end homelessness, to put people on a path to recovery, so that they can contribute once again. And that should be the thinking that we take to this conversation.
Burnham is throwing another £432m at a problem he failed to solve in Greater Manchester. Under Labour, rough sleeping has hit record highs – yet their answer is always more taxpayers’ money and more empty promises.
[John] Healey must use his budget this week to cut taxes for working people, get the ballooning benefits bill under control, and stop pushing up energy prices.
John Healey is expected to confirm on Wednesday that the full state pension will rise by £489 to £13,036 – equivalent to 3.9%.
However, the rise will push about one million people on low incomes who rely on the state pension above the £12,570 personal allowance threshold, meaning they would be dragged into paying income tax.
Non-hierarchical movement is seeking to ‘rebuild society’ in Balkan country after years of authoritarian rule
Serbia’s triumphant but untested Student List movement is preparing to start talks on forming a government capable of reversing 14 years of increasingly authoritarian nationalist rule, after a seismic weekend election win.
Supporters of the movement, which has no experience of government, took to the streets in the west Balkan country on Monday after the strongman former president, Aleksandar Vučić, was defeated in a historic landslide.
The local electoral court ordered the immediate restoration of 100% of the bus fleet and ordered the arrest of the municipal transport secretary, Pablo Souza, on suspicion of an electoral offence and disobeying court orders. The arrest warrant could not be carried out, however, because he is in Paris on what the city government described as an “official mission”, and is not expected to return to Brazil until Monday.
Late in the afternoon, Flávio Bolsonaro also filed requests for voting to be extended by two hours in cities in the states of São Paulo, Paraná and Santa Catarina, but because of heavy rain that he said had prevented voters from turning out.
New York, NY — A federal judge ruled Monday that the Trump administration unlawfully fired career federal prosecutor Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, and ordered her retroactively reinstated so she can receive back pay and retirement benefits.
U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman found that Comey’s July 2025 dismissal violated federal civil service protections, due-process requirements and the constitutional separation of powers.
Comey had served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan for a decade, working on high-profile prosecutions including those of Ghislaine Maxwell and Sean “Diddy” Combs.
She argued that she was fired because of her relationship to her father, a longtime political adversary of President Donald Trump, or because officials perceived her as politically opposed to the administration. The judge did not need to resolve that allegation to find the termination unlawful.
The Justice Department argued that federal prosecutors exercise significant executive authority and therefore can be dismissed without the employment protections imposed by Congress.
Furman rejected that argument, writing that it conflicted with nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent limiting presidential removal power in some circumstances.
The ruling grants Comey retroactive reinstatement through December 2025, allowing her to recover lost compensation and preserve retirement benefits. She has since joined a private law firm and is not seeking to return to the Justice Department.
The DOJ did not immediately comment on the decision.
Apple has unveiled a redesigned iPad Mini with a larger 8.5-inch OLED display, an A20 Pro chip, twice the peak brightness and slimmer bezels while maintaining roughly the same footprint. It starts at $699 ($200 more than its predecessor) and will be available November 6. The Verge reports: Despite having a slightly bigger display than the 8.3-inch screen on its predecessor, Apple says the device maintains the same small footprint thanks to bezels that are 24 percent slimmer. The iPad Mini is 5.4mm thick as well, making it thinner and lighter than the previous generation, according to Apple. It also comes with an IP67 rating for protection against water and dust.
Aside from an OLED display, the new iPad Mini features an upgraded A20 Pro chip. This enables support for some of Apple's new Siri AI features, including the ability to tweak the expressiveness and pace of the assistant's voice. Apple says the upgraded iPad Mini also comes with two times the peak brightness than the previous generation. iPad Mini's 12MP front-facing camera is now on the long edge of the device, making it easier for video calls in landscape orientation.
Maurene Comey was abruptly fired in July 2025 from her job as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. She sued the DOJ over her firing, claiming it was unlawful.
Officials say Jacob Morley, who is serving a life sentence for a 2022 murder, escaped from a facility in Tiptonville
Tennessee officials have mounted a manhunt after a convicted murderer’s escape from prison on Sunday evening.
The Tennessee department or correction (TDOC) on Monday announced that Jacob Morley, 28, escaped from the Northwest correctional complex in the community of Tiptonville. Local outlets reported that staff noticed Morley was unaccounted for at about 11.30pm on Sunday.
Back to Serbia, we are expecting to hear from two groups of election monitors in the coming hours: first, very shortly, from Serbia’s Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA), and then a bit later from a group of international observers, including from the OSCE, the ODIHR, and the European parliament.
I will keep an eye on their findings and bring you the key lines.
Daughter of ex-FBI director James Comey, a Trump foe, was dismissed in 2025 despite her work being widely praised
Maurene Comey, the daughter of the former FBI director James Comey, was unlawfully fired from her job as a federal prosecutor in New York last year, a federal judge ruled on Monday.
Judge Jesse Furman said that Comey, who was an assistant US attorney for a decade, was illegally fired in July 2025 despite her work on some of the nation’s highest-profile cases and consistently receiving “the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike”.
Market debut of firm behind Claude chatbot will be one of largest in US history, a test of AI boom’s financial viability
Anthropic has publicly filed for a stock market listing in what is slated to be one of the largest debuts in history. The company’s float on the US market will serve as a test of the financial viability of the multitrillion-dollar AI boom.
Analysts and investors have valued the San Francisco-based company, founded in 2021, at more than $1.5tn. The company, which will will list under the symbol ANT, confidentially filed with US financial regulators for an initial public offering in June.
Trump lashes out on Maher after the host interviewed former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt
Donald Trump launched a 1,300-word social media rant against the late-night US TV host Bill Maher on Sunday evening, calling him a “TOTAL LOSER” in a fresh assault on the media.
“Let’s talk about this COMPLETE AND TOTAL LOSER, Bill Maher,” the US president wrote. “He’s got a Low Rated Show on equally Low Rated HBO, which was once, long ago, a Network of Quality and Excitement – But that’s all gone.”
Two Catholic bishops have expressed regret about agreeing to a White House meeting that produced a publicly distributed photo of them praying with President Trump.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Seattle Times: Microsoft is offering buyouts to about 60,000 employees, or roughly a quarter of its workforce, as the company tries to control its head count while avoiding layoffs. The Redmond-based tech giant announced Monday morning that eligible employees at the vice president level and below in the U.S., Canada, India and the United Kingdom would receive a "voluntary exit offer" of a standard severance package, based on their location.
In a memo to employees, Microsoft Chief People Officer Amy Coleman said the move was building off the voluntary retirement program earlier this year, which was available to more than 8,700 U.S.-based employees, roughly one-third of whom took the offer. Since May 2025, Microsoft has been trying to reduce its corporate workforce, first through waves of mass layoffs and now through more creative buyout programs. The company laid off about 15,000 employees last year over the course of several months, affecting about 3,200 Washington-based workers. The report notes that the layoffs have continued this year, though on a smaller scale and largely concentrated in the company's gaming division.
Washington, DC — House Judiciary Committee Democrats released a sweeping staff report Monday detailing allegations from 11 women about President Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and calling for an independent investigation into possible criminal conduct and the Justice Department’s handling of Epstein-related evidence.
The report includes a new account from former pageant contestant Beatrice Keul, who told committee investigators that Trump raped her during a 1993 pageant event at the Plaza Hotel. Keul previously described the encounter differently, and the report acknowledges that her latest account rests primarily on her interviews with committee staff.
Other allegations cited in the report involve women who say Trump assaulted or behaved inappropriately toward them while Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell was present. The report also cites FBI records and documents Democrats say remain improperly redacted or withheld.
No court has established that Trump participated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking crimes, and law enforcement has not charged him in connection with Epstein. Trump and the White House deny the allegations and accuse Democrats of making politically motivated claims.
The report further alleges that Justice Department officials improperly limited investigations and withheld material from Congress. Those accusations have not been adjudicated.
House Judiciary Democrats are asking for an independent special counsel and additional disclosure of Epstein-related records.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president, has vowed that dictatorship and fascism will never return to Brazil after winning a historic fourth term in power by defeating his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro.
“This is God’s work – and it’s thanks to all of you,” Lula told tens of thousands of supporters who had gathered in central São Paulo in the early hours of Monday to celebrate his dramatic election comeback.
UK government borrowing costs are dropping this morning, a welcome sign ahead of Wednesday’s budget.
The yield (or interest rate) on 10 and 30-year UK gilts have both dropped by around three basis points (0.03 of a percentage point) this morning.
Issuing loans to public financial institutions creates a financial asset that offsets the increase in outstanding government debt. If the investments that the PuFins make generate sufficient returns for the PuFins to repay their government loans, then long term debt sustainability is little affected.
Limited transparency and the risk that the PuFins may suffer impairments on their investments will probably make bond market investors skeptical of the extra gilt issuance. Chancellor Healey should avoid a big increase in gilt issuance to fund such intra-public sector lending.
Nebius, CoreWeave and Iren were slammed in premarket trading on Monday after SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said more than 200 neoclouds are “going to see guppy-level death and consolidation.”
That’s the guppy fish – prone to suddenly dying in household fisk tanks – not the GBPJPY FX cross...In a post on X Musk said “debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn’t have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers”.
Visa and Mastercard are being threatened with a potential £5bn lawsuit for allegedly stifling competition and charging UK businesses excessive fees.
The law firms Harcus Parker and Hausfeld have lodged an application at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in hopes of pursuing a group claim that would compensate companies who, they claim, have been overcharged on customer card payments since October 2020.
After the rejoicing, it will be vital to learn the lessons. The rightward shift is neither inevitable nor irreversible, but progressives cannot rest for a moment
The impossible happened. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term in Sunday’s runoff election in Brazil, overturning Flávio Bolsonaro’s first-round lead in a historic comeback. No candidate has ever lost the first round and won the second, until now. Grassroots mobilisation, alongside social welfare policies, helped turn the contest into a referendum on Brazilian democracy, rallying voters against a candidate seeking to restore the legacy of his father, Jair Bolsonaro, imprisoned for plotting a coup after his 2022 defeat. Lula’s victory suggests that defending democracy can still be a powerful electoral argument against the ascendant right.
Having already consolidated most of the leftwing vote, Lula had limited room to attract supporters of other candidates after his first-round defeat. His best chance lay in mobilising abstainers and reconnecting with working-class voters. The Workers’ party intensified its grassroots and digital campaigns, using social media influencers and messaging networks to reach supporters. Nearly 3 million more Brazilians voted in the runoff, and Lula gained ground across the country, particularly in major cities and his north-eastern strongholds. He also appealed to voters’ immediate economic concerns, drawing on a record of reducing poverty and inequality, and increasing benefits under Bolsa Família, the landmark welfare programme he launched in 2003. Lula framed the election as a choice between protecting social gains and democratic institutions, or returning to the Bolsonaro family’s attacks on both, warning that his opponent would compromise Brazil’s sovereignty by aligning himself with Donald Trump.
Jordana Timerman is a journalist based in Buenos Aires. She is the managing editor of The Ideas Letter and compiles the Latin America Daily Briefing
The Guardian’s Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips will be answering your questions about the election and the future of Brazil from 1500 GMT on Tuesday 27 October as part of our Conversations series. Email questions to conversations@theguardian.com.
Commanders suspected of sexual violence during the largest and fastest slaughter of civilians in more than 30 years have been subjected to travel ban and asset freeze
Senior Sudanese commanders implicated in a “campaign of rape” have been targeted by the UK on the first anniversary of a mass atrocity that saw tens of thousands of civilians killed over several days.
A year after the fall of El Fasher, the British government said it had sanctioned military leaders from both sides in the country’s ongoing conflict whom it suspected of sexual violence during the siege of the city.
Anthropic has filed to go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, setting the stage for a potentially record-setting IPO that could value the Claude developer at more than $2 trillion. Alongside the extraordinary cost of its AI expansion, Anthropic warned that it "may not generate sufficient revenue to achieve or sustain profitability in the future."
"While we have experienced significant revenue growth in recent periods, our business is highly capital intensive," the company said. "Our revenue growth may not be sustainable, and our rate of growth may decrease." NBC News reports: The filing did not include a potential share price, the number of shares to be offered or a valuation for the whole company, all of which will be determined after Anthropic holds a "road show" with investors, prospective investors and its bankers. [...] The company plans to spend at least $110 billion with Amazon for cloud services through April 2036 and another $120 billion with SpaceX through 2029. Anthropic also said it planned to spend $115 billion with Google and $45 billion with Microsoft, both through 2033, for computing infrastructure.
The filing said that the company recorded revenue growth of "1,368% year over year for the three months ended June 30, 2026." The cost of renting servers and chips grew by 300% over the same period. Anthropic's net loss for the first six months of 2026 was $80.7 billion. For the entirety of 2025, the company reported a $42 billion net loss.
Anthropic added that it expects its current cash and sales to be sufficient for the next 12 months but warned that future revenue growth depends on a number of important factors, including the cost of infrastructure. As a result, it said, "we may be required to seek additional financing sooner than we currently anticipate." The company said it has raised about $141 billion of capital through the end of June and is sitting on $112.4 billion of cash.
Two bishops express regret after the White House posts photos and video of a prayer with them in the Oval Office
Two Catholic bishops who bowed their heads with Donald Trump in the Oval Office now say they regret it, accusing the White House of turning a private prayer into a campaign photo opportunity before next week’s US elections.
Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee and Bishop William Joensen of Des Moines, who were among the 12 bishops who met administration officials last Thursday, issued separate statements of regret over the weekend.
After its inaugural season last year, the university’s women’s ice hockey team is ready for round two as the 2026-2027 season begins. The Division I team joined the school’s athletic program last year and went 2-31, playing multiple schools across the Atlantic Hockey America (AHA).
After a tough first season, the Blue Hens are ready to skate into the new year.
“So I would say that’s a big thing; it’s our competitive level,” Head Coach Allison Coomey said. “You will see that we never give up regardless of the score, but I think that’s a really special quality, especially with a young team. A really tight-knit group can go very far.”
As summer break ended and students and staff returned to campus, players started working hard and training for the season ahead.
“Building on last year is probably my biggest excitement,” Coomey said. “I think that people will be excited to watch. We had a ton of growth from the spring until now.”
A learning curve comes with the start of a new season; players graduate and new players are recruited, starting their time at a new school and on a new team.
“We have eight new players,” Coomey said. “We lost four, so there are definitely some new faces, and with so many new faces, some roles that people were used to last year may change this year. Using the growth we’ve had over the spring and now into this season, we can adapt.”
With one year of experience under their belt, the attention on the Blue Hens has grown. A long season that stretches into February and possibly beyond for playoffs takes hard work and teamwork.
“The roster size is probably the biggest challenge,” Coomey said. “Last year we had just enough players to play, so everyone dressed, everyone played. This year will be slightly different. I think, depending on injuries, it might work out the same, but in reality it’ll be different to a certain extent.
“So, to me, that’s probably the biggest challenge, and second is continuing to understand the process. While we will be more talented and we have another year of experience under our belt, other teams are doing the same thing, and so I think for us it’s just important for us to remember that we’re still building.”
The team will continue to build over the next few years, showcasing the players’ strengths and the resilience they show every game.
“I think the resilience piece is not getting too high or too low,” Coomey said. “We did a really good job of just kind of being steady in terms of there were games we, you know, we came back and won, or we came back and pushed to overtime, and so having that resilience to do that, I think, is really important, especially with a young group. It’s been great to see, and hopefully something we can take into this year again.”
Despite new additions to the team, they remain a close-knit group that always builds each other up.
“They all get along really well, which is special in terms of just having such a big class,” Coomey said. “They celebrate each other, you know. I think that’s really important, especially with a young team. Last year we didn’t score a ton of goals, but I would say, like, every goal it felt like we won a championship or scored the winning goal in overtime; like that’s just how much they support each other and celebrate each other.”
The Blue Hens opened their season with two games against College of the Holy Cross on Sept. 25 and 26. The girls tied 2-2 against Holy Cross on Friday, then lost 0-4 in Saturday’s game. They returned to Newark for two home openers at Fred Rust Ice Arena on Saturday, Oct. 3 and Sunday Oct. 4, against Lindenwood University. The Blue Hens then pulled out their first win of the season against Lindenwood, winning 4-1 in the first game and losing 1-3 in the second game on Sunday. The girls went on to lose both games against Rochester Institute of Technology on Oct. 9 and 10.
And so here we are again, at that point as the nights draw in and Manchester United prepare to sack a manager. Autumn: season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and a crisis at Old Trafford. Sunday’s 3-0 home defeat to Bournemouth, coming on the back of last week’s 4-1 reverse against Como, made clear what many had feared from the moment Michael Carrick was given the job on a permanent basis: that he isn’t up to it.
But then, who could be? When you’ve burned through a long list of managers in 13 years, it’s perhaps worth considering whether the manager is really the problem. Could some blame perhaps go to the director of football, Jason Wilcox, or the chief executive, Omar Berrada, the people making the appointments? Or perhaps to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the cost-cutting tax exile and minority shareholder with responsibility for sporting operations? Or to the Glazer family, who plunged the club into debt with a leveraged buyout in 2005 and have since made calamitous decision after calamitous decision, reducing the most successful club in English league history to a mid-table laughing stock with a roof that leaks symbolically?
This is an extract from Soccer Desk, a newsletter from the Guardian US. Subscribe for free here.
Gernot Döllner criticised for in-person announcement of major investment in US days before midterm elections
The head of the luxury carmaker Audi is under fire in Germany for appearing at a rally with Donald Trump just days before the US midterm elections, to announce billions of dollars of investment in battleground state Georgia.
Gernot Döllner joined Trump on stage after the US president gave a speech criticised by the head of an elected body of employees at Audi’s parent company, Volkswagen, as being full of “racism, sexism, transphobia [and] contempt for democracy”.
Chocolate costs much more than it did a year ago, yet shoppers still fill their carts. National Chocolate Day falls on Oct. 28, in the ... Read moreThe post Even candy makers admit pricier chocolate hasn’t scared off shoppers appeared…
London sites to remain open as Prospect and PCS agree to ‘Acas-facilitated talks’ with museum management
A planned strike at the V&A over half-term has been suspended after an improved offer from its management.
Museum staff who were members of the Prospect and Public and Commercial Services (PCS) unions had voted to strike on Thursday and Friday in a dispute over pay and working conditions including inadequate toilet and hydration breaks. The strike would have closed the V&A’s main galleries in south Kensington, as well as V&A East, V&A Storehouse and Young V&A in east London.
Baton Rouge, LA — The Justice Department plans to send federal election monitors to Louisiana for the Nov. 3 midterms as part of a nationwide deployment that Attorney General Todd Blanche has said could involve roughly 1,000 monitors.
Louisiana officials said they were indirectly informed of the plan but had not received formal notice identifying which parishes would receive monitors. DOJ told the Louisiana Illuminator that personnel would be present in all 50 states.
The department said monitors are expected to observe for possible violations of federal election law and report concerns after Election Day. They are not authorized to interfere with voting.
Federal election monitoring itself is longstanding. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has for decades sent attorneys and other personnel to polling places to assess compliance with laws including the Voting Rights Act and protections for voters with disabilities.
What distinguishes 2026 is the scale. DOJ said more than 75 monitors had already been deployed across five states during this year’s primary season, compared with nine states monitored during the 2022 midterms.
The expansion comes amid broader disputes between the Trump administration and state election officials over voter rolls, noncitizen voting and federal authority over elections.
President Trump continues to claim without evidence that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and has warned that Democrats could cheat in the midterms.
Louisiana has generally cooperated with federal voter-data requests, including supplying information to DOJ and using federal data to review voters’ citizenship status.
Leftwing incumbent becomes first candidate to reverse first-round defeat, but far-right son of former president rejects result. Plus, interviews with two legendary songwriters
Good morning. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has staged a dramatic election fightback, defeating his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, to claim a historic fourth term as Brazil’s president. Bolsonaro has refused to concede defeat and asked for the results to be annulled.
Following in the footsteps of his father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro, who four years ago also refused to acknowledge his defeat to Lula – before attempting a coup and being convicted for it – Flávio Bolsonaro cited a supreme court justice’s decision to extend voting hours as the alleged reason for wanting to cancel the result.
What does this result mean for Brazil now? My colleagues Libby Brooks in London and Tom Phillips and São Paulo spoke overnight. Phillips said: “The Bolsonaro response is exactly as I feared, but I don’t think it will mean very much. All these world leaders are now recognising Lula’s win, and I don’t think Bolsonaro has a hope of overturning this result. [For Lula] this is the crescendo of an incredible, if sometimes controversial, 50-year political career. The first elected working-class leader of Brazil, who has helped millions of people escape poverty.”
You can find the full results of the election here, and our ongoing live coverage here.
What has Hebron’s mayor said? Yousef al-Jabari accused the Israeli state of “collective punishment”, saying: “They have dragged people from their houses, and they have prevented the media from getting into the district … Netanyahu and his gang are using Palestinian land to displace Palestinian people, closing the city, closing the mosque, in order to achieve their political goals.”
How has a 21-year-old photographer described being the target of an Israeli attack? Zeinab Faraj found herself buried under rubble beside a dying colleague while reporting in Lebanon. “My heart stopped” as she heard a drone descending towards them, she said. “I’ve never heard anything like it in my life … It was terrifying.” The Israeli military later justified their attack, saying they had identified saboteurs violating the ceasefire. Human rights groups called it a war crime.
The Justice Department has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia in an effort to force them to hand over their unredacted voter rolls containing voters' sensitive information.
Law would open two-year window for child sexual abuse victims to file lawsuits beyond statute of limitations
Child sexual assault survivors in Pennsylvania are on the verge of being denied the opportunity to sue their attackers after a bill to temporarily waive filing deadlines stalled again in the state’s legislature.
Democrats have accused the Republican senate majority of playing politics with the bipartisan move to amend the state constitution and open a two-year window for victims to file molestation claims from years ago.
A new preliminary survey finds that the rate of violent crime victimization in 2025 fell by about 25%, compared with 2024. The DOJ called it the largest decline since 1973.
Devin Jacob Ballard, 20, denies charges that he fatally strangled Anna Yagi, 39, in a hotel on the island of Okinawa
Prosecutors in Japan have filed formal charges against a US marine suspected of murdering and robbing a woman while stationed on the country’s island of Okinawa, according to Japanese media.
Devin Jacob Ballard, a 20-year-old lance corporal assigned to Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa, is charged with fatally strangling Anna Yagi, 39, at a hotel in the city and stealing from her a backpack containing a wallet, the public broadcaster NHK reported.
In his private notebooks, Hawthorne didn’t have to worry about being called unconventional, depressive or mad. The result is a glimpse of his macabre mind at work.
A fighter jet intercepted a plane over Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday afternoon, as President Trump cast an early ballot in Florida's midterm election.
Former New Zealand prime minister will focus on leadership, social cohesion and public health in new role
The former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern will lecture and mentor at the University of Sydney after moving to Australia earlier this year.
Ardern begins this month and her work will focus on empathetic leadership, social cohesion and civic trust. The University of Sydney said Ardern would be based in its school of public health, exploring ways to address global health challenges and focusing on equity, inclusion and wellbeing.
Democrats in the midterms are finally backing Medicare for All as a campaign issue amid a rising tide of voter support
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic US Senate candidate, starts this day on the campaign trail in Escanaba, Michigan, where nearby Wisconsin dairy country spills into dense forests and the sandy shores of Green Bay.
This is the upper peninsula – the “UP” – a rural slash of land north of Michigan’s mitt. Electorally, it’s crimson. Donald Trump won some districts near Escanaba by more than 41%. But at the county fairgrounds, past sheds labeled “Beef” and “Swine”, hundreds of locals on the political left have gathered in the hangar-size 4H Club meeting hall to hear El-Sayed speak.
Last month, a lawsuit was filed by a woman identified as Jane Doe, alleging that seven men drugged and raped her at a party held at a Cornell University fraternity house in 2024.
Across the nation, people have been outraged by the case and by Cornell’s response. Protests and walkouts have taken place at many college campuses, including the university.
On Oct. 8, more than 100 students at the university joined a campus walkout and rally. The demonstration on campus was one of many held in support of #StopSexualViolence: From the Frat House to the White House National Day of Action, organized by the Women’s March, the MeToo Movement, Feminist Magazine, and Feminist Generation.
At noon, students congregated on the lawn in front of Old College, proudly sporting green, the traditional color of social justice movements. They chanted, “What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now. Who do we believe? Survivors.”
There were signs with various messages, including “Don’t Hate the Victim, Hate the Crime,” “If your voice held NO power, they wouldn’t silence you” and “Real MEN Don’t Rape”
Jessica Brady, a senior political science and history major, organized the protest.
“Last year, several friends of mine were victims of sexual assault on campus, and I saw how it impacted them firsthand, and sat with them through a lot of that,” Brady said. “And while I’m not a victim myself, I’ve seen how many women on campus are affected, and so I’m doing this for them.”
Brady said the walkout was for solidarity among students, but it also aimed to pressure the university to do more.
“We demand the university to acknowledge the fact that there is a deeply ingrained rape culture on campus,” Brady said. “We demand that the university be more transparent about how they handle sexual assault misconduct. We demand the university expand its victim advocacy services. We demand the university respond immediately to reports of violence. We demand the university be consistent with its policy enforcement and prevention education.”
The atmosphere at Old College reflected a growing demand from students for stronger institutional accountability. Students, professors, Newark locals and the university’s vice president and president gathered to hear stories from survivors, both anonymous and present.
As these stories unfolded, tears, outrage and pride circulated through the crowd each time a woman stepped up to the front, megaphone in hand, to share her story.
Sarah Petrie, a senior criminal justice major, is a survivor of sexual assault and spoke about her story.
“I am here today to be the voice for every person who does not feel safe to speak out, has never told anyone what happened to them or is not in the position to use their voice,” Petrie said.
She not only spoke about the importance of awareness and proper protocols on the university campus, but also encouraged awareness of all forms of sexual violence.
“We are all Jane Doe until sexual violence in the institutions that rationalize, normalize and protect it are dismantled,” Petrie said.
This sentiment was widespread across the walkout. As Chris Malinowski, a local filmmaker, musician and student at the university in the early 90s, agreed with Petrie.
“I think sexual abuse is way worse than it was when I was younger,” Malinowski said. “I feel like guys in general have become violent and nasty and increasingly sexist to the point where I can barely talk to some of them.”
When asked if he was formerly in a fraternity, Malinowski passionately said, “Absolutely not, I would never be in a fraternity.”
The university’s Chi Phi associate chapter released a statement on Sept. 28, after the story broke, saying the chapter’s brothers formally condemn the actions of the former XI Cornell chapter.
“I think the worst part was seeing how much complacency there was,” Andrew Weissman, Chi Phi’s vice president and a junior chemical engineering student, said.
These recent events have sparked widespread discussion about fraternity culture. Many are questioning the values organizations teach brothers and the norms they cultivate.
“We are acknowledging that there are issues with Greek life, and we’re not trying to deny that,” Max Stanton, Chi Phi’s Treasurer and a sophomore kinesiology major, said. “We want to do what we can to kind of change the narrative as much as we can as a smaller fraternity on campus and do our part to make the University of Delaware campus and just the Newark community as a whole a safer place for all.
“I feel like there is a lack of education [for fraternities], and it’s surrounding yourself with a group of people that just accepts that,” Stanton said. “And if you’re surrounding yourself with these types of people, you’re gonna become that type of person.”
These developments have raised questions not only about fraternity conduct but also about how effective universities’ policies are.
According to the 2025 Annual Report by the Delaware Attorney General’s Office, there were 51 total incidents of campus sexual assault in Delaware. Only three penalties were enforced.
As of the 2025-26 academic year, the university has 24,412 students and according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, roughly one in five women and one in 16 men are sexually assaulted in college. For the university, that means roughly 3,000 women and roughly 600 men.
The university has only one full-time victim advocate on staff.
When asked to comment on the walkout and the university’s lack of staff, Rick Deadwyler, vice president of public affairs, said the following.
“We are proud of our students who came together today to support survivors of sexual violence. Their voices were powerful and were heard. Sexual violence has no place at UD. Ending it is a commitment our whole community must embrace.”
As online sports betting companies offer extravagant perks to customers who are losing large sums of money, there are also questions about how they treat their biggest winners.
Wilmington reporter Brianna Hill joins “Beyond the Headlines” to discuss the community’s response to a recent increase in violence in Wilmington, though an increase that is happening in the midst of an overall decrease of violent crime in Delaware’s biggest city.
She gives insight into her process reporting on this issue, how the death of Kadir Skinner connects to the community tension around police activity, and a new city office that aims to assist residents with safety-related concerns.
The podcast was hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s begin by recognizing that in September there were three deaths in Wilmington caused by shootings. Two of those deaths were teens. There has already been another death in October. You quote John Cook, the city’s Director of Community Safety, as saying, “One shooting is way too many,” and I think that is something we can all agree on.
Our hearts go out to the recent victims of violence in the city. We’re going to be talking about your reporting process surrounding these shootings, and I don’t want to appear callous by talking about process and theory in the midst of these life and death issues.
Some outlets reported on that meeting the very next day. As Spotlight tends to do, you took your time. Why didn’t you just write an article the very next day?
The meeting happened as a result of the spike in shootings and violence in the city, and the city’s goal, in addition to some dialogue between residents and city officials, was to lay out their strategies for dealing with crime and public safety during this time.
The meeting kind of got derailed in a few ways, but I think that it was clear at the end of the meeting that there were still questions that needed to be answered about what the city was doing. It mostly sounded like the strategies that the city was already doing before the spike in violence were staying the same.
So I think after that, we kind of had the question of, okay, so is there something else that they’re doing or are they implementing any new strategies? And let’s kind of try to talk to them [city officials] after this meeting to figure out what exactly they are doing, because a lot of residents did have concerns.
I think it would have been maybe a little bit different if most of the residents didn’t have concerns or were relatively calm or happy with the way things were going in the city. But a lot of them did express issues.
We had the goal after the meeting to do, in a way, some service journalism to kind of tell people, “Okay, here’s what they’re doing, and here’s who you can reach out to.” Just to kind of get to the meat of actually what the city’s doing.
Because your sense when that meeting ended was that people came there with a lot of questions and weren’t really leaving with a lot of answers.
Yes. That was definitely my impression of the meeting, in particular with the new Office of Community Safety.
Again, there was a moment early in the meeting, the father of Kadir Skinner actually came in to voice his frustrations about his son’s case and the lack of transparency that he felt was happening between his family and police officers.
I’m sure most listeners are probably aware of Kadir Skinner, but can you just briefly remind people.
Kadir Skinner was a 19-year-old resident who was shot by WPD [and later died] back in June. Near 24th and Jessup. Since that shooting, there has been an internal investigation that’s ongoing by WPD as well as the Attorney General’s office.
So since then there have been many protests, and we are currently waiting for the result of that investigation to come out. He was running away from officers while he was shot, so that has become a big point of contention in the city.
So yes, his father attended the meeting. He was voicing his frustrations while public officials were talking, and John Cook, the new director of the Office of Community Safety, kind of took the initiative to talk to him and not only calm him down, but to show him, in public in front of everyone, that he was acknowledging his grief and apologize to him.
We kind of got to see a little bit of John Cook’s personality, but we didn’t really get to get to, “What is his office going to do?”
So I thought that was important to get out to readers because he scheduled the meeting. Even after that moment that he and Dullard had, the community members were still voicing frustrations about things that they had experienced in the city. The public didn’t get the answers to them.
Spotlight Delaware aspires to be a community responsive newsroom, so you were getting the sense that the community wasn’t getting the answers they needed. So you took the time, instead of just writing a 500-word article, this meeting happened, this emotional thing happened, to say, “Hey, let’s go out there, and find out what the community really is wanting to know.” You detailed what the WPD is doing, what this new office is supposed to do, and took the time to figure that out.
Yeah. That was the goal.
So you figured that stuff out, you put it in the article. You came to an editorial meeting and said, “I think this article’s done, everyone.” And, your editors said, “Maybe not quite.” What did they say was still missing?
They wanted the voices of residents.
Mind you, we had a few from the meeting because there were plenty of people who spoke., But, I think they wanted everyday folks that maybe weren’t at the meeting and getting their perspective. Also, the meeting happened about a month ago, so it was a good idea, they thought, to get some updated, some fresher responses from people about how they felt about public safety in the city.
Where did you go to try to get those voices?
The weather was not so great that day, and I was coming from another press conference, but I did end up going to downtown Wilmington, Market Street.
I wanted to get some diverse perspectives. I didn’t really want to go to one particular neighborhood. I’m assuming if I, you know, maybe go to somewhere like Hilltop, I would get a different response as going to Little Italy. It would just be different.
I wanted to get a diverse response. So I went to Market Street, spoke in total to maybe, like, 20-ish people, but 10 people on the record. I was able to get some good perspectives.
How did what you hear shift or influence the reporting?
There has been a slight decline in crime [in recent weeks], so getting the perspective from residents that people were still afraid and people were still concerned about public safety and violent crime in the city was important to still understand where people’s heads were at, and they haven’t changed much since the meeting.
That was an interesting perspective to get. All of them essentially said, “We believe that crime has worsened.”
I think that I was maybe pleasantly surprised by the optimism that people had with the new Office of Community Safety. Cook’s job is essentially to direct people to resources that already exist. So I think when some people hear that, there could be some skepticism there. I did see that in talking to people.
But I also saw some optimism in terms of people saying, “Well, why don’t we try it? We won’t know if it works unless we try it.” There was one young woman who said, like, “At least he wants to help.”
So I thought that was a nice perspective to have, just knowing that people were open to the idea and seeing what results it may bring.
One of those voices also talked about, “If this office is really out to help us, there should be signs on every store letting us know about it.”
That was definitely an important perspective to get. People want people to know that the resource is out there. This office is being created to direct people to resources, but if people don’t know about the office, then it’s not doing much of its goal.
I hope that that maybe resonates a little bit.
Overall, there has been a great reduction in violent crime in Wilmington, over the last six years or so. You noted that, in 2025, Wilmington recorded its lowest number of shooting incidents and victims in 20 years.
The clearance rate for murder was 100%. I was like, “Really? 100%? They solved every murder in the city in 2025?”
But, as you were finding on the street and from people in the community, the community’s not necessarily feeling that decrease. And in September and October, of course, there has been an uptick.
As you were talking to people or doing your reporting on this, where is your sense of where that disconnect is happening?
I think that a lot of it comes from the timing because we are in October now, but the uptick happened last month. There were 10 shootings in September. There were three deaths in September, and even late August we kind of saw shootings picking up.
In your reporting you noted that was a 75% increase from the year before of that time period.
Yeah. So, I think that people are still kind of coming down from that or, or maybe it hasn’t been that long since the uptick, I guess.
People’s perception of the city not being safe is still there, and I think that it shows that city officials are going to have to do a lot in order to change that perception because of the history with crime in Wilmington.
There have been upticks.There have been years of upticks and at one point the city was known as Murder Town USA. I think that people are not gonna kind of get over that perception as easily as others would like to, but I think that it is important to acknowledge the changes that have been made and the huge decrease in crime that has happened over the years because that plays into the strategies that we’re seeing now.
According to city officials, they say that upticks like this during this time of year are normal. If we’re just having a moment, then we kind of have to see that play out in the city and see what the statistics look like down the line into winter.
But if not, then there are still things that then need to be addressed.
And someone who has just lost a loved one doesn’t want to hear from the city official that this is normal.
Right.
Earlier you talked about the death of Kadir Skinner. I have to imagine that is in the atmosphere of these responses as well. There was so much tension early in the summer from Wilmington residents talking about their lack of trust with police. Now all this increased violence happens – what are the police doing to help with this?
Have you heard people connecting those two things? The tension over the Skinner shooting and the community’s response to this recent uptick in violence?
I haven’t heard any particular person reference it directly into what’s happening currently.
I think that it is important to note that during the meeting when Skinner’s father was speaking and voicing his frustrations, the crowd did at one point start saying, “Justice for Kadir.”
So it’s definitely still fresh on people’s minds, and I think it definitely plays into the tension that we’re kind of seeing now because there are residents who are saying that there is mistrust and that there is a lack of transparency between police officers and residents. So there’s a lot of work that needs to be done with that.
I think obviously there’s a difference in terms of what we’re talking about. Skinner was a police-involved shooting, while the other things that are happening could be related to gang violence or just individuals. But I think that there is also a connection in terms of the types of victims that we’re seeing.
They’re very young. One of the, most recent shootings that happened, there was a 15-year-old victim.
People are still concerned obviously with youth programming, and that’s one of the things we mentioned in the story because it came up so much. People are worried about teenagers and young kids and trying to figure out what else is there for them to do. We don’t want them to think that being in the streets is cool, and things like that.
So I think that Skinner’s death and how it happened plays into what we’re seeing now, and there is definitely some work to do when it comes to trust and some community building between residents and police officers, despite the kind of rundown of what we know that police officers or WPD in particular is doing with residents and staying in their neighborhoods and going to community meetings.
Obviously, there’s still more work that needs to be done.
You noted that if you had written this article right after this meeting back in September introducing the Community Safety Office, that it probably would’ve entirely focused on Durrell Dollard, Kadir Skinner’s father, appearing. Not entirely focused, but that it was the most noteworthy thing about the meeting.
As a reporter, what do you do when something like that happens? It wasn’t what you were there to report, but it is this thing that you can’t ignore. How do you balance all of that?
I think it could have been a story on its own. But honestly, there were so many different ways to go with this story, and the problem that I had with this story in reporting it was that there were so many layers.
This meeting is happening. There’s an uptick in violence. That’s why the meeting is happening. At the end of the meeting, we still don’t really know what city officials are doing about this current spike in violence. There’s a new office that hosted the meeting. What does that office actually do?
We didn’t really get those answers during the meeting. What do residents think?
So it was kind of like this story lasagna, and I was trying to figure out how to layer everything in.
And I definitely think that I’m glad that we were able to put Dollard’s experience in the story because I do think it was important to put in there.
And honestly, it did show a little bit of Cook’s personality because this was essentially his introduction to the community with this big meeting, that they say they’re supposed to have more of. It was an interesting moment to see and also kind of like a callback to, “Hey, that shooting investigation is still going on and we don’t know what’s happening with it right now.”
Let’s finish up talking a little bit about John Cook, the new director of community safety for the city of Wilmington. The language you quote him as using in the article is very different from kind of city official language.
At one point you reference him talking about “love, reciprocity, peace, and joy” is what the youth are missing.
That’s very different from how some bureaucratic officers are talking about the issue.
You also shared with me – this didn’t make it into your article – but that just visually Mr.Cook appeared differently at the meeting from city officials.
He did. He was wearing a tracksuit, and he had a Wilmington pin on his chest, and I thought it was very different from his peers who were all wearing suits or something maybe a little bit more of a business attire.
Again, I don’t know what would have happened if Dollard did not come in the room. But I think that he has a very different personality from what we’re used to seeing from public officials. And I think in a way it may be one that’s easier for residents to resonate with.
There were times during the meeting where he did get a little preachy, but people were very receptive to it. Talking about his personal experiences and kind of in a way showing emotion to the audience is not something that we’re used to seeing public officials do.
I think that it was interesting to kind of see how this new person of this new office that is supposed to have a really important role in how residents connect to resources is going to act.
His job, again, is to connect residents to already existing resources. So if people have issues with housing or housing insecurity, or domestic violence, or utility problems, or they’re concerned about things that are going on in the neighborhood with public safety or anything, they’re supposed to call him and he’s supposed to direct them to where they need to go.
So seeing that John Cook carries himself in a way a little bit different than other public servants in Wilmington, as you continue reporting on safety issues in the city of Wilmington, what will you be looking for from his office and how it interacts with the community?
Essentially this office is going to be very centered around community. So I think just keeping track, keeping an eye out for how many meetings they do, how many meetings or listening sessions occur, how familiar people get with him would be important. If he’s supposed to be someone that residents are directly getting in touch with, I think it’s very important to know if residents begin to actually know who he is because outreach is gonna be a very important part of his role.
In addition, one of the other things he does is assess scenes of violent crimes and figure out what resources that already exist need to be deployed to those scenes. So they could be social services to talk to people in the area, or if an area is too dark and a crime happened there, maybe he would suggest more lighting come in.
At the end of the day, this is supposed to help reduce crime. So if he’s being active in the community, that’s something I’m going to pay attention to – but [ultimately] looking at the statistics that come out over time to see if there’s actually been a reduction and what those stats look like.
Thank you, Brianna, for joining us today, and thank you for your thorough reporting as the people of Wilmington work to make it a safer place.
Eric Bauza, the Emmy-winning actor who voiced iconic "Looney Tunes" characters Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, died on Sunday, according to his manager. He was 46.
Records show that the infant monkeys, some just two days old, were used in research on domoic acid, a toxin produced by marine algae that accumulates in shellfish and can cause illness in humans. The experiments were part of a project that ran for six years until 2020.
Company imitates reflection of sun from mirrors, prompting pushback from some scientists, environmentalists and California locals
Locals in a rural area of California were recently startled to see dazzlingly bright light shining down from nearby mountains at night, illuminating a swathe of the desert below.
Unbeknown to them, the strange nocturnal illumination was the latest step in a company’s plan to erect thousands of giant mirrors in space to reflect sunlight on to the Earth during night-time.
The president’s policies have taken such a toll on farmers that Republicans face trouble in deep-red states
Donald Trump’s policies have been a disaster for the nation’s farmers, so much so that a near electoral miracle may soon happen: Kansas, one of the deepest red, most rural states, may elect its first Democratic senator in nearly a century.
Since Trump won farm country handily in 2024, many rural voters in Kansas, Iowa and elsewhere have soured on him because the price of diesel fuel, a key input for farming, has soared by nearly 70%, because farm bankruptcies have surged and because Trump’s trade wars have significantly reduced agricultural exports.
Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues
Kotaku reports:
r/opensource, Reddit's primary "subreddit for everything open source related," has banned all AI-assisted and AI-related projects.... As reported by The Verge, the subreddit's October 24 post, titled "Your tokens aren't valuable: No more AI," features four new main rules: all projects must now be at least "1 year old," have "multiple contributors," be posted by someone who must "speak English," and cannot be "made by" or "intended for" AI... [T]he ban on AI is simple; as the subreddit's moderators explain, "AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community." Unsurprisingly, this is the part that's upset the majority of the users in the thread....
[T]he moderator who posted the new guidelines stated in a separate comment that the overwhelmingly negative response is due to "some guy on twitter claiming to be alternative news" who posted an "opinionated editorial pointing hundreds of people to the thread." Given the timing of when the thread was posted, alongside the fact that the X post in question mentions "the Linux kernel," they are presumably referring to this post by The Lunduke Journal. The moderator may be correct, as almost all of the top comments on the post are from users who have never posted in r/opensource before.
The use of AI "doesn't change whether something is open source or not," complained one commenter, who added "I guess Linux is no longer allowed here? Linus uses AI for kernel development now."
The moderator has since updated their post to acknowledge that Redditors have now already created a rival community called r/OpenSourceAIAllowed — plus three more alternatives:
r/TrueOpenSource r/OpenSourceWare r/ActuallyOpenSource
UPDATE (10/26): Monday saw a new comment from the moderator stressing that "Adjustments will be made."
"Linux is not, nor could conceivably ever be banned. Interpreting any set of rules as such is simply bad faith. Someone's pet project pumped out in two claude code session limits will not be welcome. The line is somewhere between those, and it will likely move over time from continuous feedback.
"We will cater to humans, and as many and as inclusively as possible. No rule will ever target or favor any ethnicity or social strata."
Australians should prepare for more basic and important online services to go offline unexpectedly, the nation’s signals intelligence agency has warned, urging that “system security must be prioritised over system availability”.
The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) also says businesses and critical infrastructure must use cutting-edge AI models to defend against digital threats, raising alarm that artificial intelligence is enabling more dangerous threats than ever.
Need another dinner everyone will ask for again? These 17 homestyle recipes range from quick casseroles and pasta to soups and slow cooker mains, with hearty portions and familiar flavors for next week.The post 17 homestyle dinners everyone at the…
Anthropic’s Claude model accessed voter data in the US state of Georgia, the AI company has confirmed, in the latest example of unauthorised behaviour by the technology.
The AI model managed to bypass a paywall to reach data that is publicly available but is typically accessible only after paying a fee. Claude accessed aggregate vote counts as part of a statistics project at Anthropic, which is preparing for a $1.5tn (£1.1tn) flotation.
Exclusive: Coordinated airstrikes on territory held by al-Shabaab are driving the civilian population to find refuge alongside a river where rising water levels are a threat to safety. Is it a deliberate military strategy?
The water was rising rapidly. It had already reached Cayni Ali’s waist. Her home, five metres from the flooded River Juba in southern Somalia, never stood a chance. There was nowhere to go. Ali’s city of Jilib was under attack. Repeated airstrikes, said the mother of six, were pinning its population beside the rising river.
“The drones come all the time,” said the 27-year-old. “We hear them constantly. They kill animals, civilians. The town is big but destruction is everywhere.”
Health secretary’s effort to alter makeup of ACIP panel means no new recommendations coming – even as new vaccines are approved
US vaccine recommendations are in limbo, access to vaccines is suffering, and some of the uncertainty may continue for years following major blows to vaccination by the Trump administration, experts say.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has made sweeping changes to vaccination policy, cutting childhood immunization recommendations by a third and replacing experts on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) with his own handpicked allies.
US voters are exhausted by years of higher prices. Donald Trump won the presidency in 2024 on promises to lower inflation and undo the damage he said the Biden administration had inflicted on the economy.
In a reliably red state, candidates say dissatisfied voters tell them they’re planning to vote Democrat for the first time
Democrat Kim McCarthy is canvassing in a middle-class Ohio neighborhood of four-bedroom, three-bathroom homes. There are $70,000 trucks in the driveways and robot lawnmowers at work.
“This is a neighborhood of two incomes and young families; people working hard,” says McCarthy, who is running against a three-time Republican incumbent for a seat in Ohio’s house of representatives.
The first cool weekend is a good time to turn on the oven again. These 13 casserole recipes include cheesy chicken, savory beef bakes, breakfast casseroles, and classic corn pudding for easy meals around the table.The post 13 casserole recipes…
During the Cold War, the Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines was a key enabler of U.S. military operations in the Pacific and beyond. It served as a critical support facility for the U.S. war in Vietnam and a transit point for U.S. weapons destined for American military personnel in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. That all changed in June of that year, when the Philippine Congress, under pressure from a grassroots anti-bases movement, refused to renew the lease for Subic Bay and other U.S. outposts in that nation.
After the closing of U.S. bases, military relations between the U.S. and the Philippines were conducted indirectly through arms transfers, joint training exercises, and deployments of Special Operations forces to aid Philippine counterinsurgency efforts, rather than by the permanent presence of tens of thousands of troops. The relationship was codified in 1999, when Washington and Manila entered into a Visiting Forces Agreement, which eased the movement of U.S. troops and equipment in and out of the Philippines and put U.S. personnel in the country under the jurisdiction of U.S. rather than Philippine authorities.
But now Subic Bay is back in play as part of a new expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Philippines. And this time around, private capital is financing these empire games.
Military Might Versus Human Rights
The long-standing U.S. military ties with the Philippines have come at a high price for the residents of that nation. Washington’s military and economic interests there have prompted it to look the other way as repressive leaders like Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte engaged in systematic human rights abuses against their own people.
To its credit, the Reagan administration eventually cut ties with Marcos — who was overthrown through peaceful protests known as the “People Power” revolt in 1986 — throwing its support behind his democratically elected opponent, Corazon Aquino. But there was no such shift with respect to Duterte, whose regime ruled the Philippines from 2016 to 2022, and engaged in extrajudicial killings of thousands of Filipinos, including journalists and land reform activists, all under the guise of a “war on drugs.” Duterte is now under indictment by the International Criminal Court, which has cited him for “the crimes against humanity of murder and attempted murder.”
While Marcos and his family fled the Philippines in the 1980s, his son — Ferdinand Marcos Jr. — returned and, in 2022, won the presidency in a landslide, in part by promising to continue some of the strongman policies introduced by Duterte. According to Human Rights Watch, since the younger Marcos took office:
Serious human rights violations have continued in the country largely unabated, including arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances by security forces. The murderous ‘war on drugs’ has continued, though with fewer killings. Leftist civil society activists, journalists, environmentalists, Indigenous leaders, trade unionists, and left-wing politicians remain under serious, at times deadly, threat.
During the Biden presidency, the U.S. expanded a 2014 pact — the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement — which gave the U.S. military access to five major sites in the Philippines. In 2023, the number of bases was expanded to nine. The State Department has described the scope of the EDCA as authorizing “U.S. forces access to agreed locations in the Philippines on a rotational basis, for security cooperation exercises, joint and combined military training activities, and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief activities.” That official summary fails to admit the real reason for the signing of the EDCA: to give the U.S. access to territory that can be used in a future war with China.
The Privatization of Subic Bay
Building on his predecessor’s enhanced cooperation with the Philippines, President Donald Trump, who had been a staunch Duterte supporter, has pursued even tighter ties with Marcos’s government. This has been driven, in significant part, by the desire to use the Philippines as a platform for potential U.S. military interventions in the Pacific region and further economic penetration of Asia.
As part of the accelerating security partnership between the U.S. and the Philippines, military activities at Subic Bay have resumed. But this time, formal access has been secured by a private investment firm, Cerberus Capital Management, which controls the area through a 50-year lease granted through collaboration with a Philippine company, Agila.
A report by the New York Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines, a member of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, summarized current activities at Subic Bay:
In mid-2025, the U.S. Congress approved a plan to build a forward operating base and ammunition production facility in Subic Bay. It is projected to be the world’s largest weapons hub. … The shipyard [is home to] HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, deep sea fiber optic data cables manufacturer Sub Com, defense contractor V2X and the Philippine Navy, which operates a portion of the facility.
Cerberus has strong ties to the Trump administration, first and foremost through its founder, Stephen Feinberg, who is deputy secretary of the Department of War, second in command at the Pentagon behind Pete Hegseth. In that role, Feinberg oversees the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, which makes loans to military tech companies, many of which are current or former Cerberus clients.
Feinberg “earned” his position the old-fashioned way — by giving millions to Rebuilding America Now, a super PAC devoted to supporting Trump, and hosting a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser, the proceeds of which also went to support candidate Trump in 2016.
Bloomberg News has identified four other former Cerberus executives now in key positions at the Pentagon: David Lorch, director of the OSC; George Kollitides, a special government employee who is simultaneously a director of D. Boral Acquisition, a company that brokers mergers and acquisitions in the weapons sector; and senior Pentagon advisers John Gallagher and Tom Rakusan.
On the other side of the revolving door, Cerberus has hired major Republican figures like former Treasury Secretary John Snow and former Vice President Dan Quayle, who serves as chair of the company’s global investment unit. Given these connections, the Pentagon is all-in behind Cerberus’s activities in the Philippines. But this has prompted a backlash. Activists in the Philippines and beyond are speaking out against the role of Cerberus, calling for public pension funds to withdraw their investments in the company for underwriting the militarization of the Philippines.
Another important avenue of increased cooperation between the U.S. and the Marcos government is the Philippines’ participation in Pax Silica, a U.S.-initiated cartel that the State Department describes as its “flagship effort on AI and supply chain security, advancing new economic security consensus among allies and trusted partners.” And by “supply chain security,” the declaration primarily means “reducing dependence on China” for critical minerals needed to feed and sustain the computing power now central to the Pentagon and the U.S. arms industry.
In addition to the Philippines, there are 24 other participants in Pax Silica, including two other key Asian partners, India and Japan, as well as Taiwan, which is an associate member of the cartel. Jacob Helberg, a former adviser to military tech giant Palantir who now serves as the State Department’s point person on Pax Silica, has stressed that the initiative goes well beyond just securing the supply of specific critical resources. “If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on [computing power] and the minerals that feed it,” he said. “This declaration [announcing Pax Silica] hails a new economic security consensus ensuring aligned partners build the AI ecosystem of tomorrow — from energy and critical minerals to high-end manufacturing models.”
The China Syndrome
Although it supplies many other benefits to U.S. corporations and America’s national security state, the enhanced effort to bring the Philippines more securely into the U.S. military, political and economic orbit is all rationalized as moves toward reining in China’s economic and military power and garnering Manila’s support in a possible war between China and the U.S.
The policy of economic warfare and aggressively preparing for a military conflict with China could not be more misguided. The oft-cited “need” to posture U.S. forces to do battle with China over Taiwan ignores the fact that there are diplomatic means of preventing such a conflict.
What is needed is a joint understanding on the status of Taiwan. For over 40 years, peace in the Taiwan Strait has been maintained through the U.S.–China agreement that Washington will not take steps toward recognizing Taiwan as an independent state and China would agree not to resolve the issue of Taiwan by force — the so-called “One China” policy. That agreement has been weakened by actions taken during both the Biden and Trump administrations. The simplest and best way for Washington and Beijing to avoid a war over Taiwan would be to revert to the “One China” policy.
Using trade wars and military buildups as the primary U.S. tool for influencing China simply will not work.
China does not pose a direct military threat to the United States. Its last major war was its invasion of Vietnam in 1979, a conflict in which its troops were badly beaten by battle-hardened Vietnamese forces. The U.S. also spends almost three times as much on its military as China does, and is far ahead of Beijing in numbers of advanced combat aircraft, naval firepower, and nuclear weapons.
“The Trillion Dollar War Machine,” by William D. Hartung and Ben FreemanAvailable on Bookshop.org
In areas where China might be a peer competitor with the U.S. military, like AI-driven weapons, there need to be some rules of the road on how such systems can be used. Using trade wars and military buildups as the primary U.S. tool for influencing China simply will not work. The likely result of persisting in such an approach will be a dangerous arms race and an increased risk of outright war.
A more productive approach to U.S.–China relations would be to seriously explore cooperation on central issues like arms control, addressing the climate crisis, and stabilizing the global economy. There would still be a U.S. military strategy for the Asia–Pacific region, but it should be genuinely defensive in nature, a posture that could save hundreds of billions of dollars in the years to come.
Pursuing a more balanced policy toward China would open the way to developing more equal, less exploitative relations with the Philippines and other nations in the Pacific, and it would allow Washington to finally take a genuine interest in promoting human rights and opposing repression as central pillars of U.S. international relations.
At a time when armed conflict and threats of war are the bedrock of U.S. policy, from the Western Hemisphere to the Middle East, a shift toward diplomacy seems daunting. But it is the only way forward if we want to move toward a more peaceful world where no one nation or group of nations dominates, and where corporations aren’t bending foreign and domestic policies to their will.
Adding gratuity doesn’t always make sense, but the obligation to has been entrenched as a societal norm
You arrive at a pizza place to pick up your order. The credit-card screen asks if you would like to tip and gives some choices. It seems strange to tip the cashier, who did nothing but hand over the pizza. But it also seems a little harsh to select “no tip” instead of one of those more generous options.
The Orlando City product scored his first goal in La Liga, playing three positions in a comeback win over Valencia
While most of La Liga’s oxygen was consumed by the first el clásico since José Mourinho’s return to Real Madrid this weekend, another rivalry put Alex Freeman in the spotlight position.
Jump fuelled by fears of further Middle East supply disruptions amid reports of US-Israeli plans to strike Iran
European gas prices have jumped to levels not seen since 2022 as fears continue to grow around the continent’s supply this winter and the conflict in the Middle East.
Wholesale gas prices hit €97 (£81) a megawatt-hour on Monday, as temperatures across Europe fell and traders priced in stronger demand for heating.
A 93-year-old woman in western Japan outsmarted a suspected scammer by pretending to fall for the scheme and helping police arrest him at her home, an officer said.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration is reportedly encouraging former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to seek the United Nations secretary general position, believing he could win support from Russia, China, and the United States.
The Jerusalem Post reported that U.S. officials approached Orbán about entering the race and described him as a potentially strong candidate for conservatives because of his opposition to large-scale immigration, liberal nongovernmental organizations and traditional institutional power centers.
Orbán has expressed interest but has not formally entered the contest, according to the report. The United Nations’ official candidate list does not currently include him.
Washington reportedly believes Moscow and Beijing could also support Orbán, which would be significant because the secretary-general must first be recommended by the U.N. Security Council before appointment by the General Assembly.
Orbán’s potential candidacy would likely attract scrutiny over his longstanding relationships with Russian President Vladimir Putin and China, as well as controversies surrounding democratic institutions, media independence and judicial power during his years leading Hungary.
The report comes as the Security Council continues informal straw polls among declared candidates. Emirati diplomat Lana Nusseibeh entered the race last week.
Any Orbán candidacy remains speculative. Neither Orbán nor the United States has formally announced his nomination, and there is no public confirmation that Russia or China have committed to supporting him.
The next secretary-general is expected to take office after António Guterres’ term ends Dec. 31.
No election outcome ever interprets itself. So how will Democrats interpret these results once they are known?
Whichever metaphor one prefers – landslide, earthquake, wave – it seems increasingly like the Democrats can expect a significant victory in the midterms.
As the joke goes, every gas station display of prices has become an ad for Democrats; what’s more, some of them have managed to connect the relatively abstract issue of corruption to the daily misery of many Americans.
State Sen. Brent Taylor, R-Memphis, interacts with protesters as he leaves the Senate chamber after a special session of the state legislature to redraw the U.S. congressional voting map in Nashville, Tennessee, in May. George Walker IV/AP
Not two weeks after the Tennessee legislature carved Memphis into three congressional districts this spring, in a move designed to eliminate Democratic representation, Republican state Sen. Brent Taylor made his electoral expectations clear in a photo posted on social media.
Taylor and U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, a fellow Republican, sat side by side on the U.S. Capitol steps. “My friend Tim Burchett showing me the dadgum ropes,” Taylor wrote in a Facebook post.
On May 7, the same day that the new districts were approved, Taylor had announced his bid to represent the redrawn Congressional District 9, which for more than four decades had stood as the state’s sole majority Black district. During that time, it covered mostly the Memphis area; it now stretches across half the state and is majority white.
Taylor, 58, already has a track record with many of the voters he is now seeking to represent in Washington, D. C.: In his nearly four years as a state senator, he has taken steps to strip authority from local officials elected by many of those same voters. With the backing of a Republican supermajority, Taylor, who is white, pushed through half a dozen laws that superseded the power and priorities of local politicians.
Around the country, state legislatures from both parties have used preemption laws to control local governments. That tactic has been embraced by Republican-dominated statehouses in recent years as a way to restrict the ability of Democratic-led cities to enact policies state leaders disagree with, including protections for civil rights, public health and workers.
Memphis has long struggled with high rates of violent crime that have begun to fall only in the last couple of years. This is where Taylor focused his legislative efforts. He led the charge to prohibit judges from considering a defendant’s ability to pay when making bail decisions. He has tried to oust Steve Mulroy, the first Democrat elected as Shelby County district attorney in 25 years, and pushed through legislation authorizing the state to review every decision made by his office. And he co-sponsored a law that voided the Memphis City Council’s ban on police stops for minor traffic infractions, which had been passed after the 2023 beating death of Black motorist Tyré Nichols.
The question of how to keep communities safe has drawn divergent political approaches in Memphis — from Mulroy’s focus on rehabilitation as part of his effort to lower violent crime, to Taylor’s emphasis on aggressive prosecution and incarceration. Those approaches can mean very different experiences for the people of Memphis, which makes up most of Shelby County. Some elected officials and criminal justice experts warn that the laws Taylor has championed will embolden police to detain drivers without justification and the criminal justice system to lock up more people for longer periods in the already overcrowded county jail, where more than 65 people have died since 2018.
“I think he’s very dangerous for Shelby County, and he’s going to be very dangerous for the Ninth District if he gets elected,” said former Shelby County General Sessions Court Judge Bill Anderson, referring to how Taylor’s policies could especially harm Black men. Anderson retired in May 2025 after clashing publicly with Taylor over bail reform measures. (Anderson supported them; Taylor opposed them.)
Taylor is favored to win because of redistricting by Tennessee Republicans after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in April made it harder to challenge gerrymandering that dilutes the Black vote. The Mississippi native, who lives in an antebellum-style mansion in a tiny and heavily white community east of Memphis, has loaned his congressional campaign $1.5 million. The candidate made millions after selling his funeral home businesses to a private equity firm.
Taylor’s opponent is state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a 31-year-old Black Democrat who has taken a very different approach to what the district needs. Pearson has called for addressing the root causes of crime by improving schools and economic opportunities instead of a singular focus on incarceration. He first made national headlines for his role in stopping the construction of an oil pipeline in a Black Memphis neighborhood. He is also one of two Democratic legislators expelled by the Republican supermajority after leading a protest calling for gun control following a 2023 school shooting. With deep family roots in southwest Memphis, Pearson has positioned himself as the better fit for the historically Democratic Ninth Congressional District. He has also received support from national Democrats and has outraised Taylor in campaign donations.
Democratic congressional candidate state Rep. Justin J. Pearson speaks to supporters after an election night watch party for the state’s primaries in Memphis, Tennessee, in August.Kevin Wurm/MLK50/CatchLight Local/Report for America
Taylor, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has said that the laws he has championed prioritize public safety. He did not respond to detailed questions.
But John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham School of Law who has studied how state preemption laws impact prosecutors, said tough-on-crime laws like the ones Taylor helped pass have historically been “a form of social control against disliked minority groups” under the guise of public safety. Non-urban voters, Pfaff said, “do feel, however incorrectly, sort of victimized by expanding civil rights” that urban voters choose. While these voters cannot cast ballots in city elections, he said, they have another path by which to exert power: “If the suburbs and rural areas control the governor’s mansion and the state legislature, they then can use their power there through preemption laws that finally tell Memphis what they want Memphis to do.”
Prohibiting Limits on Police Traffic Stops
In January 2023, the month Taylor took office, the nation was shaken by video of violent policing in Memphis.
A street surveillance camera and police body cameras captured what happened after undercover Memphis police officers pulled over 29-year-old Nichols just a few blocks from his mother’s home. For three minutes, officers repeatedly punched the unarmed man in the face, hit him with a baton and kicked him as he screamed for his mom. Nichols would die from his injuries in the hospital three days later.
After pressure from Nichols’ family and community organizers, the Memphis City Council unanimously passed an ordinance in April of that year barring police from pulling motorists over for minor traffic violations, such as a broken tail light, as a pretext for investigating an unrelated, more serious crime. Research shows that these stops are disproportionately used to detain Black drivers, undermine the public’s trust in police and create unnecessary police encounters that can turn deadly.
RowVaughn Wells, center, with family, friends and supporters during a community rally and celebration of what would have been Tyré Nichols’ 32nd birthday outside of the I Am a Man Plaza in Memphis in June 2025.Brad Vest for MLK50
Taylor, who had been in the state Senate for a few months when the city ordinance passed, said it made the public less safe by limiting the potential for police to investigate more serious crimes. The next year, he and state Rep. John Gillespie, a Shelby County Republican, sponsored legislation that prohibited local government from curbing law enforcement’s ability to conduct traffic stops, effectively undoing Memphis’ ordinance.
Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, pleaded with lawmakers to drop the bill. Speaking on the Senate floor, Taylor responded, saying that as a funeral home director, he empathized with the Nichols’ family, but “we can’t let that empathy, Mr. Speaker, cloud our judgment in protecting 7 million Tennesseans.”
Taylor’s intervention suggests “that Memphis voters don’t know what their best interests are,” said Martavius Jones, who was chair of the Memphis City Council when the city ordinance passed. “What we were trying to do would not jeopardize the safety of anyone — not even in Memphis, but much less the rest of the population of Tennessee.”
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, told reporters before signing the law that no one should limit police in their enforcement methods and officers should be held accountable for their actions.
“I think what’s most important for us to remember is that we can give law enforcement tools,” Lee said, “but we’ve got to hold law enforcement to a standard of using those tools appropriately, where there’s an appropriate interaction with the public.”
Eight months after Tennessee lawmakers passed Taylor’s preemption bill, the U.S. Department of Justice released its investigation of the Memphis Police Department, finding that its aggressive traffic enforcement had harmed Memphians. The Justice Department recommended that the city limit the use of pretextual stops. Such police activity enabled the “regular use of excessive force with impunity” and unlawfully discriminated against Black residents, the Biden administration’s report said. When President Donald Trump took office in 2025, his Justice Department retracted those findings.
Over the last year, law enforcement has ramped up the use of such stops, especially in immigration enforcement, as Trump’s Memphis Safe Task Force — a collection of more than two dozen state and federal law enforcement agencies, including the National Guard — descended upon the city. Taylor supported the effort, testifying before the U.S. Senate days before it began that the task force would “succeed in doing the hard work to infiltrate gangs and arrest more routine criminals.”
Unprecedented Scrutiny of a District Attorney
Since his first year in the state Senate, Taylor had also been working to displace the decision-making authority of another locally elected office: district attorneys, especially Mulroy, one of Tennessee’s two Democratic county prosecutors. Taylor called him a “far-left zealot” who “has the potential to make the scourge of violent crime even worse.”
Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy speaks at a vigil for the third anniversary of Nichols’ death in Memphis in January.Andrea Morales/MLK50
In 2023, Taylor sponsored a law that transferred the power to review certain death penalty cases from county prosecutors, who are elected, to the state attorney general, who is appointed by the state Supreme Court. While the law applied statewide, it disproportionately impacted Shelby County, where half of the state’s 40 death row prisoners were prosecuted. The law, Mulroy said at the time, “effectively disenfranchises the voters” who chose their district attorney.
Taylor would go on to further weaken Mulroy’s office following Trump’s 2025 deployment of his crime task force to Memphis. As arrests soared, Taylor worked to place the district attorney’s decisions under unprecedented scrutiny, saying he wanted to ensure that the prosecution of task force cases was as aggressive as the task force itself.
One new law, co-sponsored by Taylor, authorized the state attorney general to review every case that comes through Mulroy’s office, including those that stem from arrests made by Trump’s task force, “to ensure the proper administration of justice necessary to protect the safety of the community.” The dispositions of each case, along with bail recommendations, would be reported to legislative leaders.
Republican state Rep. Andrew Farmer, who introduced the bill in the House, noted that it is designed to ensure that “all crimes that deserve to be prosecuted are prosecuted.”
Mulroy is “just going to have to work harder and ensure that people are continuing to stay safe,” Farmer said on the House floor. “We want Memphis to continue on the path that it’s going — up.”
The state’s district attorneys general conference, led by Republican former District Attorney Stephen Crump, opposed an early version of the bill, which would have applied to district attorneys across the state, because it could lead prosecutors to second-guess their decisions. He dropped his objections after the bill was narrowed to apply to only Mulroy.
That law has another provision aimed at Mulroy as well: If he declines to prosecute specific categories of crime, the state attorney general can ask the state Supreme Court to intervene by installing a temporary district attorney who would then decide whether to prosecute. Taylor has long sought to limit Mulroy’s authority, and the provision would be a way to do so. Mulroy said the effect would be “an unelected shadow DA operating in parallel to the duly elected DA.”
“Prosecutorial discretion and prosecutorial independence is a key fundamental part of our criminal justice system,” Mulroy said. “It’s clear under both the text of the Tennessee constitution and Tennessee Supreme Court case law, and this bill does great violence to those principles.”
Taylor co-sponsored a second law, passed in May, that requires Mulroy’s office to report to the state and the U.S. Department of Justice within 10 business days every time it has entered into a plea deal, or dismissed or lowered the charges on a felony offense that resulted from a task force arrest.
“Memphis residents deserve confidence that the significant investments being made to combat violent crime are matched with accountability at every level of the justice system,” Gillespie, who co-sponsored the bill in the House, said at the time.
Mulroy has sued to stop both laws, claiming they are unconstitutional because they unfairly single out Shelby County and create an administrative burden. The lawsuit is pending in state court. Meanwhile, Mulroy has objected to his staff spending time on the reporting requirements, which he called “pointless busywork.”
Mulroy’s election in 2022 as the county’s first Democratic district attorney in more than two decades came on the heels of a year with a record number of homicides. But Republicans’ tough-on-crime approach had grown unpopular with voters, and Mulroy vowed to be an alternative. He promised to deprioritize the prosecution of low-level offenses such as marijuana possession and shoplifting; emphasize rehabilitation such as drug treatment, mental health counseling and job training; and establish a unit to examine the validity of convictions.
One of the people who campaigned for him was William Arnold, who had spent nearly seven years in state prison before his conviction was dismissed following examination by a Davidson County conviction review unit. The community organizer said he saw Mulroy’s candidacy as a way to “support someone who could help Memphians in a different way.”
To see Mulroy’s power being muted by Taylor is disheartening, Arnold said. But that is not surprising to him, given how the state legislature has long treated the predominantly Black city, including replacing the Memphis Shelby County Schools’ elected board with a state-appointed one.
William Arnold, who spent nearly seven years incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, is now a community organizer and a supporter of Mulroy.Brandon Dill for MLK50
Bail Calculator Scrapped
Among the preemptive legislation Taylor has sponsored, a 2023 effort stood out: the dismantling of a bipartisan effort to ensure Shelby County’s bail practices did not discriminate against poor people, who are disproportionately Black.
Under state law, magistrates are to “impose the least onerous conditions” when deciding bail and should set bail “as low as the court determines is necessary” to assure the defendant returns to court.
But in practice, hundreds of people were being detained at the Shelby County Jail simply because they couldn’t afford bail, according to Just City, a Memphis criminal justice reform organization, which along with the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue the county in 2021 for violating existing state law. Being jailed while awaiting trial can cause arrestees to lose jobs and child custody, the organizations argued.
In August 2022, the organizations and county officials — including Mulroy’s predecessor, Republican District Attorney Amy Weirich — agreed on a new bail order that included an “ability to pay” calculator.
That tool quickly drew Taylor’s ire, and by the following January he had co-sponsored a bill to kill it, characterizing the calculator in a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting as a way of “essentially asking defendants how much money they happen to have in their pocket so that they can make bail.”
The bill’s supporters said judges should prioritize public safety when deciding whether to release defendants. “There is blood running in the streets of Memphis today because they’re letting people out,” state Rep. William Lamberth, a Republican, said on the House floor.
State law requires judges, when setting bail, to consider several factors, including a defendant’s financial condition. And Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, said that’s exactly what the tool helped judges do.
Under Taylor’s law, however, “the defendant’s ability to pay shall not be considered.”
“That tied our hands as judges,” Anderson, the former Shelby County judge, said in an interview.
A 2025 University of Memphis study found that the median bail amount increased after Taylor’s law took effect. And the law’s impact falls hardest on Black residents, Anderson said, because they are more likely to be low-income and make up a disproportionate share of Shelby County jail occupants.
“To those of us in the system, it’s obvious what he’s doing,” said Anderson, who resigned in 2025 with six years left of his eight-year term. “He called them reform acts, but they’re not reform.”
Angelina Resendiz’s voice on the phone was frantic. She was calling a friend from the barracks room of Jermiah Copeland, a fellow sailor at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia. They had spent the evening together, kissing and drinking, and now Resendiz, 21, needed to leave.
It was the last time anyone would hear from her. When Resendiz’s friend arrived at the barracks 15 minutes later, the pair was nowhere to be found.
“The Navy failed her,” Resendiz’s mother, Esmerelda Castle, told The Intercept. After her daughter’s disappearance, friends and family spent a week scrambling to find Resendiz. Castle found the Navy’s reports in that time unclear, delayed, or downright false.
A first-of-its-kind Intercept investigation has found critical shortcomings in the U.S. military’s procedures for documenting and preserving records of homicides that result from domestic abuse, including intimate partner violence. The Pentagon’s mandated reports to Congress appear to substantially undercount these killings, omitting nearly half of cases.
In the six years before Copeland’s murder of Resendiz, the Pentagon recorded 41 domestic abuse-related homicides committed by service members. The Intercept identified nearly twice as many: at least 73 potential cases involving 79 victims — almost all of them women — during the same period. Reports for fiscal year 2025, when Resendiz was murdered, are due in November.
A killing qualified for the dataset if it occurred in fiscal years 2019 to 2024; if the perpetrator was a member of the military at the time of the crime; and if the case involved a homicide. The database only includes cases where a victim of the violence had dated or was in a romantic relationship with the suspected perpetrator, and it includes multiple women living abroad who were foreign citizens dating American troops.
In the fiscal years since the second Trump administration took power, The Intercept found at least 10 service women or women working for the Defense Department have died from intimate partner and domestic violence, six of them killed by male co-workers. An additional 10 civilian women have been killed by male military personnel in intimate partner violence-related homicides during the same period.
A Pentagon spokesperson acknowledged The Intercept’s queries about the discrepancy in homicide rates but did not respond to detailed questions before publication.
“At this moment in our country’s history, I am afraid these numbers are going to increase even further,” said Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Nursing who has been studying domestic violence in the military for decades. “We need primary prevention for everyone in the military and their partners.”
The findings come in the wake of President Donald Trump’s August announcement of a Military Spouse Commission, led by Jennifer Hegseth, the wife of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other high-level military leaders. The commission’s mandate is to guide policy around issues affecting military families. Though intimate partner violence and spousal abuse have concerned military family advocates for decades and thousands of new cases are reported each year, the commission does not mention the issue as one of its areas of focus.
The Navy and DoD have said in public statements and communication with members of Congress and Castle that while “proper procedures were followed” following the death of Resendiz, they have identified several processes that require further review.
“What Are the Statistics?”
Copeland killed Resendiz on May 29, 2025. In the days after Resendiz’s disappearance, her friends filed missing person reports and called Castle in Texas, who in turn called the Navy. None of them knew that Resendiz was dead.
The Navy’s official timeline of events says it did not start investigating her disappearance as a crime until a missing person’s report was filed on the 31st, and that Castle did not reach out until that day. Phone records she shared with The Intercept and members of Congress show she started calling on the 29th.
“I was told she was found, and that the original missing person’s report was exaggerated,” Castle recalled. “I didn’t think for a second that the Navy would lie to me.
“I was told she was found, and that the original missing person’s report was exaggerated.”
Technically, Resendiz had been found — a Navy chief searching for her had seen Resendiz’s body packed under the covers in Copeland’s bed around 10 a.m. on the day of her disappearance. They assumed she was asleep, according to evidence later revealed during trial. But as Castle tells it — including in a congressional inquiry she wrote requesting a deeper investigation— a Navy chief claimed on the phone to have spoken to her daughter in Copeland’s room.
She had been dead for hours.
“He had Angie wrapped up in a blanket on his bed,” said Castle. “It was against policy for her to be in the barracks. And they just turned their backs and left.”
Intimate partner violence in the military has long been a problem with unclear signs of progress. Killings in the 1990s on bases such as Fort Campbell made national headlines, leading Congress to establish the https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-06-540.pdfDefense Task Force on Domestic Violence in 2000.
Campbell, the nursing professor, was part of the effort, which issued over 200 suggestions for improvement by 2003. “Most of the recommendations we made a long time ago were never implemented,” she said. For one, she’d repeatedly requested better recordkeeping.
“One of the things I kept asking was, ‘What are the statistics on intimate partner homicide in the military?’ We could never get them,” Campbell said. “And in the military’s suicide reports, you cannot determine how many suicides were part of homicide–suicides, where a service member killed a civilian wife or partner before killing himself.”
This lack of clarity sounded familiar to Priscilla Rodriguez, who spent 10 years in the Marine Corps before working in strategic communications for the Navy.
“The command chose not to pursue military legal action.”
Rodriguez experienced domestic violence that met the Defense Department’s criteria from her husband, an active-duty Marine at the time, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. Her husband pleaded guilty to misdemeanor child abuse in civilian courts, and military legal authorities recommended domestic violence charges. “The command chose not to pursue military legal action,” Rodriguez said.
The Intercept’s analysis of the rates of domestic abuse reported in Pentagon data found intimate partner violence among married military couples was at least four times higher than the civilian rate. The Pentagon does not report the rate of abuse involving unmarried intimate partners, like Resendiz and Copeland.
Gaps like these make it difficult to have a thorough reckoning of the problem’s scale. “When accountability is inconsistent,” Rodriguez said, “it sends a message that abuse can and will remain hidden.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth serves Thanksgiving meals to service members in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 28, 2025. He was joined by his wife, Jennifer Hegseth.Photo: Master Sgt. William Blankenship/U.S. Air Force photo Joint Task Force DC
“I Knew My Kid Was Not Coming Back”
Copeland kept Resendiz’s corpse hidden in his barracks room for four days, until June 2, 2025, when he put her body into a duffel bag and dumped it in a wooded area behind a nearby elementary school.
By then, he was being questioned by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service on her whereabouts, and Castle was still wondering about her daughter’s safety. She’d asked naval authorities to have her daughter give her a call, and when it never came, she contacted the base again.
A Navy official suggested her daughter may have gone AWOL.
“I didn’t believe that,” Castle said. “My kid is scared to miss work. She won’t take off.”
Castle flew to Virginia herself.
Resendiz had been dead for a week. Castle felt she wasn’t getting the information she needed after the Navy and local authorities had put out a statewide missing person’s alert. She requested that she be let into her daughter’s barracks room.
“I didn’t want anyone else touching her stuff,” Castle said. “It was how she left it. There was still paint out; she had started painting again. Her yoga mat was still out. She had planned on returning. I knew my kid was not coming back.”
She spent two more days in Virginia searching for her daughter, talking to local news, and asking naval authorities to give more updates.
“They didn’t declare her AWOL or dead,” Castle said. “They said she was duty status unknown. I was worried they were going to wash their hands of her.”
On June 7, Castle flew back to Texas. Police found Resendiz’s body in the duffel bag two days later.
A History of Violence
Jermiah Copeland was convicted of Resendiz’s murder on June 8, 2026. According to evidence entered into court records in his murder trial, he had also been accused of two instances of domestic violence, three sexual assaults, indecent recordings, and other crimes from during and before his Navy service.
“He had a history of violence against women starting in high school,” Castle said. “And was still allowed to join with the charges against him. Then he was accused of raping another service member, and he was transferred. There were no safeguards in place at the new command.”
The absence of safeguards against intimate partner violence in the military is part of a broader set of structural and cultural failings, experts told The Intercept.
“There are many disincentives for a couple, particularly when one or both partners are on active duty, to seek help,” Campbell said. “Active-duty women who were being abused told us: ‘If my commanding officer knew, I would never get the next promotion.’ There is considerable stigma, even for the victim. That makes the violence much more likely to escalate and makes it more likely that we eventually end up with homicides.”
A previous Intercept investigation found active-duty Army women were more likely to be killed by fellow service members than by enemy combatants and had a higher per capita risk of homicide than their fellow male soldiers between the years 2011 and 2025.
More than 70 percent of the victims had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator at some point. Army women faced an intimate partner homicide rate at least three times higher than women nationally; controlling for those killed by service men and male veterans alone, it was double.
The military’s systems for identifying and responding to abuse, meanwhile, have come under repeated scrutiny. A 2021 Government Accountability Office report found the department “has not collected and reported accurate data for all domestic abuse allegations received,” leaving it unable to assess the scope of alleged abuse.
The same can be said for homicides.
Almost a third of the 79 victims The Intercept found were killed in murder–suicides. Firearms were used in over two-thirds of the fatalities. Twenty-five of the victims were service members. Multiple homicides involved corollary victims who were not partners, including children, who research shows make up a sizable amount of intimate partner violence-related deaths.
In response to The Intercept’s questions, the Department of Defense stated that data in its domestic abuse reports does not constitute estimates, as it is only using aggregated data from the Family Advocacy Program Central Registry, a database run by the DoD. It further stated it did not have any more information to share on the matter.
“Right now, unless an incident is reported to the Family Advocacy Program,” said Campbell, “nobody knows about it. Those reports are only the tip of the iceberg.”
Data tracking failures have had deadly consequences. The Air Force failed to submit the criminal history of a former service member convicted of assaulting his wife and stepson to a federal database that could have prevented him from purchasing firearms. In 2017, he killed 26 people in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
When Rodriguez reported her own abuse to the DoD, she felt that they didn’t consider the previous information they had available. Installation-level committees review reported allegations and determine whether they meet criteria to be input into the central registry. But the process is plagued with issues, experts who spoke to the Intercept revealed, from investigation procedures to data tracking.
“I was terrified to disclose the full extent of the abuse I was experiencing,” Rodriguez said. “What stands out to me now is that the Family Advocacy Program already had access to my husband’s history. Given that history, I believe the conversation should have been much broader than simply asking whether I wanted to report anything. I left that initial interaction without understanding what support existed or how I could safely leave.”
While navigating her own case, Rodriguez was also watching the same problem surface through her communications work for the Navy.
“It felt completely disconnected from the reality my family and so many others were living.”
“Headlines I monitored involved active duty and Marine veterans accused of intimate partner homicide,” Rodriguez said. “At the same time, I reviewed serious incident reports that were elevated to senior leadership. … The narrative often indicated that intimate partner violence or domestic violence was a contributing or co-occurring factor.”
Navy criminal investigative data showed domestic violence-related deathsincreasing as Rodriguez was trying to raise the issue in 2022. She tried to compile domestic violence awareness resources, but she recalled being told the need wasn’t there.
“I was told there was ‘no demand signal,’” Rodriguez said. “It felt completely disconnected from the reality my family and so many others were living.”
Castle feels that the knowledge of Copeland’s history of abuse could have saved her daughter’s life.
“No one knew anything about him,” Castle said. “The leadership created an environment that allowed him to harm women.”
Winnable Cases
Since her daughter’s murder, Castle has been at work pushing the Navy and Defense Department to strengthen their responses to intimate partner violence. Her work led to the Navy changing its policies in July on how it transfers sailors with allegations of sexual violence.
Her wins, including potential plans by the Navy to change how it classifies missing sailors, are the latest in a long string of limited efforts toward progress.
“Records are important,” said Castle. “With my daughter, they didn’t want to classify her case properly at first. For the military, if something isn’t in a database, it doesn’t exist.”
Following the high-profile 2020 murder of Army Spc. Vanessa Guillén at Fort Hood — and two years after domestic violence became classified as a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice — Congress gave independent military prosecutors the power to decide which cases to bring to trial.
And while domestic violence prosecutions increased, military prosecutions of sexual assault — often related to intimate partner violence — fell by almost 60 percent in the past five years, based on data from its annual sexual assault prevention reports. A 20 percent drop occurred from 2024–2025 alone, and The Intercept’s analysis of military court data shows the trend is continuing into 2026.
“In the Pete Hegseth era, sexual assault prosecutions have dropped significantly. Domestic violence is essentially filling that gap,” said Paul Newell, an Army veteran and activist who tracks military suicide, sexual assault, and domestic violence while engaging with members of Congress on the issue.
“In the Pete Hegseth era, sexual assault prosecutions have dropped significantly.”
Newell thinks the trial counsel’s office is “going for what they feel are stronger, more winnable cases,” he said. “They’ll tell you that their conviction rates at trial are still high, which shows that really, they’re just getting rid of the bad cases,” he said. “But we’re not down 60 percent in sexual assaults happening.”
The Pentagon stated in response to The Intercept’s questions that it does not have any additional information to share on why prosecution rates for certain crimes are dropping.
The Intercept also discovered preferential treatment in trial outcomes: Analyzing over 650 military court cases with guilty verdicts from 2021 on, reporters found less senior Navy, Marine, and Army service members had higher chances of losing their benefits and received more jail time after being convicted for domestic violence. Senior ranks closest to retirement received the best conviction outcomes, even compared to those of the same rank as them who had fewer years in service.
Newell feels that these discrepancies give perpetrators increased power over their victims. “The justice system should not take time in service into consideration since that’s prioritizing the perpetrator. If the punishment for domestic violence is a discharge where you lose benefits, it should be applied equally.”
In April, Hegseth directed installation commanders to allow service members to request permission to carry privately owned firearms on bases while off duty. He framed the change as a way to protect service members from attacks on military installations.
Campbell disagrees.
“I have reviewed far too many domestic violence homicide records,” Campbell said. “It is clear to me that, in many cases, there might have been a fight, and somebody might have been hit, but nobody would have died if there had not been a gun right there.”
Rodriguez, who is now studying public health, is calling for recurring anonymous surveys using specific questions to measure the prevalence of intimate partner violence, standardized tracking, independent evaluation, and public reporting.
Castle is still mourning her daughter and still pushing the Navy to reveal the full details about the investigation into her death. To add to the insult, she remembered the shock she felt late last June, when the Navy sent Resendiz home to Texas in a casket. Naval officials had told Castle that everything was taken care of, she recalled, including cleaning the body.
The Navy acknowledges that it failed to clearly inform Castle of her daughter’s true state. She was returned to Texas in decay, her body crawling with maggots.
“There’s nothing that can be done for her,” said Castle. “That’s injustice, and that’s what drives me. None of these women volunteered to be violated in this way.”
How we analyzed the data
Reporters searched through multiple databases to identify the number of potential victims of intimate partner violence, using definitions provided byhealthandpolicy researchalongsidegovernment organizations, comparing it to the last six years of available DoD reporting from 2019 through 2024.The case of a U.S. Air Force airman whokidnapped and murdered a Mennonite womanin 2020 didn’t meet criteria because evidence revealed no previous or current relationship. The case of a soldierwho was convicted a year laterof the murder of a woman in Texas did,as evidence indicated they had a relationship before the woman’s death.
Cases were broken down by the year of the offense, gender of the alleged perpetrator and victim, and branch of the perpetrator and victim, if applicable.
To analyze court data, reporters from The Intercept pulled all court cases pertaining to domestic violence from the years 2021 to 2026 from the websitesof the Air Force,Navy/Marines, andU.S. Army. Navy/Marine data was only available starting in 2021.
Data included the offense type, rank of the accused, and whether the cases ended in acquittal, dismissal, or conviction. For those convicted, the analysis included the amount of jail time given and whether offenders received a punitive discharge, which costs them military retirement and other benefits.
Retirement eligibilitywascalculatedbased on pay information provided in court documents, which in the militaryis based on years served. Air Force data could not be used for this analysis due to a lack of documentation and apparent discrepancies between thenumber of cases reported to Congressand those available on the Air Force portal.
To obtain the number of cases the DoD is prosecuting for sexual assault, reportersutilized Annex Bof the DoD’s Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military to calculate the number of unrestricted reports made to military authorities and the amount sent to the military justice system to begin the judicial process.
The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing suicidal thoughts or for those close to them, by chat, text, or telephone. Service members can dial 988 and press 1 to reach the Military and Veterans Crisis Line. Support is free and confidential.
Why Should Delaware Care? As development and population booms in Sussex County, residents must often look to the county government for key land use decisions. The results of two competitive county council races this November will determine who is voting on growth and development in the county for the next four years.
Two closely-watched races for seats on the Sussex County Council have drawn outsized sums of money and could become referendums on the future of land use policy in Delaware’s booming southernmost region.
While long-serving Republican incumbents seek to retain their seats and defend their approach to balancing landowners’ rights with community calls to slow development, Democratic challengers are looking to elevate their smart growth agenda — and flip the council’s balance of power for the first time in recent memory.
Republican County Council President Doug Hudson and Vice President John Rieley are defending their experience as vital to guiding Sussex into the future, while Democratic challengers Justine Cuccia and Jill Hicks say they aim to prioritize expanding infrastructure and affordable housing opportunities.
And in a county that is largely made up of unincorporated land, meaning it does not fall within any town or city limits, decisions about development projects often begin and end at the county council’s gavel.
All four candidates are laser-focused on having a seat at the table when county leaders begin work this winter on the all-important 2028 Comprehensive Plan, which will determine where developers can build over the next decade.
“Land use is not a red or blue issue,” Hicks said. “No matter who I’m talking to, everybody is equally upset and dissatisfied with the direction of the county when it comes to land use.”
Hudson, a retired state police officer seeking his third term, will face former New York City-based attorney Justine Cuccia to represent their Bethany Beach- and Selbyville-area council district.
Rieley, a farmer and retired financial planner, is also running for his third term to represent a district encompassing Millsboro and Georgetown against Hicks, founder of the influential land conservation advocacy group Sussex Preservation Coalition.
Beyond differing land use policies, some have framed the election as a reflection of the “come here versus from here” debate in Delaware’s southernmost county, juxtaposing longtime residents Hudson and Rieley as embodiments of a more traditionally conservative Sussex County culture, against Cuccia and Hicks as part of the new, more liberal wave of residents who have brought different perspectives and pushed for new approaches to county politics.
The election also comes just two years after a consequential 2024 race, in which three new, self-proclaimed “slow-the-growth” candidates took seats on the council, and the first Democrat was elected to the body in nearly a decade.
How should Sussex develop?
All four candidates have spent the majority of their campaigns discussing the type of development they would prioritize, if elected. The fundamental difference between the incumbents’ and challengers’ strategies lies in how much authority they believe the county has to impose restrictions on developers.
Rieley and Hudson said they are proud of how the county has balanced developers’ rights to build with preserving farmland and open space through programs like the Sussex County Land Trust.
“We’ve been careful over the last eight years,” Rieley said. “I know a lot of people think we have a tendency to rubber stamp. We’ve taken steps to tap the brakes on growth.”
Both pointed to examples of proposed projects they voted against in recent years, like the controversial Atlantic Fields commercial project on Route 24, which would have included a Target and Costco.
Developers behind Atlantic Fields, a proposed shopping center anchored by a Costco, Target and Whole Foods, filed a lawsuit against Sussex County over a zoning change denial. | RENDERING COURTESY OF SOUTHSIDE INVESTMENT PARTNERS
Hudson said the upcoming comprehensive plan is a chance to revisit where the county’s growth zone — the area where development is encouraged — boundaries are drawn. It also would be a time to consider implementing more affordable housing requirements as a part of all project proposals, he said.
Rieley described similar priorities heading into the comprehensive plan design. He also said he would like to consider creating a zoning code for tiny homes, which have been a hotly debated affordable housing option in towns like Georgetown.
Cuccia and Hicks, however, said the farmland and open space preservation programs their opponents touted do not go far enough in preserving land and imposing stipulations on developers.
Hicks said she would adopt a combination of tightening land use codes to limit the types of properties on which developers could build, mandating affordable housing within all projects and charging developers higher fees to go toward forest preservation.
Cuccia, too, described a plan of imposing higher environmental impact fees on developers and encouraging the building of cluster subdivisions, where a project includes homes grouped together and a portion of the land is retained as open space for the community.
“We need to build as many requirements into the plan as possible to give us the authority when the need arises,” Cuccia said. “It doesn’t mean we’re saying ‘no’ to development. It means, ‘Yes, but …’”
One thing the candidates agree on is a shared concern for how the county will implement Senate Bill 23, which aims to increase affordable housing production in the state while prohibiting formal public hearings for some development projects.
All four candidates expressed varying degrees of opposition for the law, which has become a political flashpoint in recent months.
Infrastructure pressures
If development is the most commonly discussed topic in Sussex County, the lack of adequate road infrastructure to support it is a close second. Residents and tourists alike are frequently backed up year round on coastal thoroughfares like Route 1 and Route 24.
Despite the fact that none of the roads in Delaware are county-owned, all of the candidates argued they have the best working knowledge of the state’s road improvement initiatives to apply toward county decision-making .
Cuccia and Hicks both suggest allowing development only in areas where the Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT) has plans to expand roads in the coming years.
Hicks said this means doing some “serious master planning” with the state about what roads are intended for fast traffic, like Route 1, and what routes are appropriate for a mix of housing and commercial properties, like Route 9 between Lewes and Georgetown.
Rieley and Hudson both acknowledged the county has not always ensured that development occurs where there is adequate infrastructure to support it. But the pair said they have made serious progress over the past eight years toward a closer working relationship with DelDOT, allowing for more efficient coordination moving forward.
In addition to road strains from population growth, Sussex County has struggled to keep pace in recent years with enough emergency medical services, healthcare providers and teachers to serve the population.
Rieley and Hudson both cited recently adopted programs to buy new ambulances for fire companies and levy a fee on new home construction to go toward school improvement projects as examples of their work in this area.
They said they are committed to keeping property taxes consistent while finding innovative strategies to meet increasing infrastructure demands.
Hicks pointed toward increasing the affordable housing inventory as a way for the county to close the healthcare worker and teacher gap.
Cuccia added that building affordable housing closer to where essential jobs exist would also limit wear and tear on Sussex County roads.
Hicks and Cuccia both said they would not raise property taxes. The county’s property tax rate has remained steady at 2.14 cents per $100 of assessed value for more than three decades.
Money pours into races
Particularly high spending from individual donors, political action committees (PACs) and third-party advertisers has only fueled the messaging from candidates that this election will determine the future of development in Sussex County.
Third-party spending from developers and a “common sense growth” focused PAC has dominated the race’s campaign finance conversation.
The Sussex County Association of Realtors has spent roughly $10,000 and $9,000, respectively, in third-party advertising supporting Hudson and Rieley’s campaigns.
Stephanie Moody, CEO of the Realtors association, said the group supports Hudson because he is an “advocate of private property rights,” and Rieley because of his focus on “infrastructure-first growth.”
When asked about the third-party advertising money flowing in his support, Rieley said he is “blown away” that anybody would spend that kind of money on a county council race. He added that this will be his last county council race, so he will not be beholden to campaign contributions, if reelected.
Hudson said he had no knowledge of the Realtors association donating to his campaign.
Hudson and Rieley had received $4,301 and $2,400, respectively, in direct campaign contributions as of the Oct. 6 reporting deadline, mostly from individual donors and the local Republican Party.
Cuccia and Hicks, however, have raked in whopping $34,811 and $42,920 sums of individual donations, respectively, surpassing the amount raised in many statehouse races. Both candidates’ donations have come from a combination of individual donors and Democratic-associated PACs.
Hicks described the large amount of funding she received as evidence that “people want change, and they’re putting their money behind it.”
The two Democrats have also been tied to more than $10,000 each in third-party advertising from Save Our Sussex, a PAC focused on “common-sense growth policies,” according to its website.
John Atkins, a former state representative now running for office again as a Republican in the Millsboro-area 41st House District, submitted a complaint in early October to the Department of Elections alleging the PAC was inappropriately collaborating with Hicks, Cuccia and Atkins’ Democratic opponent for state representative, Ryan Stuckey.
Under state statute, such spending cannot be coordinated with an candidate’s campaign, and in exchange, the advertisers have no limits on the amount of money that can be raised for individual sources. Countywide candidates’ official campaign accounts are limited to $600 from an individual source.
Atkins told Spotlight Delaware his campaign team initiated the complaint because the other candidates “broke the law and accepted illegal campaign donations.”
Hicks and Cuccia both denied having collaborated with the PAC, as alleged in Atkins’ complaint.
A spokesperson for the Department of Elections confirmed the department had received the complaint and has since closed an investigation into it. The Department of Elections worked with the PAC to “correct its campaign finance reporting,” but the PAC’s operations were never halted, the spokesperson said.
According to the state’s campaign finance website, that investigation resulted in Save Our Sussex receiving fines totaling $900.
A spokesperson for the PAC said it had misreported certain dates in a recent campaign finance report, resulting in the fines. The spokesperson said the organization had been in communication with the Department of Elections about the errors and planned to appeal the penalties.
As the final week before the election approaches, all four candidates said they are spending virtually every day knocking on doors in their district, in hopes that personal interactions with voters will propel them to victory.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
Why Should Delaware Care? Government works best when its citizens are knowledgeable and engaged. Delaware’s government has scores of commissions, working groups, agencies and legislative committees. All must hold meetings that are open to the public. Below we highlight a few of those meetings that are happening this week.
Below are some of the most important or interesting public meetings happening around the state this week.
Georgetown reneges on tiny homes
Early voting continues this week
State bonds for Lewes housing development?
Sussex leaders talk future growth
Georgetown leaders to repeal tiny home rules
Less than one year after they were first implemented, tiny home regulations could be removed from Georgetown’s town code.
Members of the Georgetown Town Council will formally begin the process of repealing rules and regulations surrounding the building of tiny homes within town limits during their meeting on Monday night.
The proposal would remove tiny homes as a permitted land use within the town’s code, potentially ending months of controversy between residents, town leaders, and local nonprofits that have sought to build tiny home communities within the Sussex County seat.
Currently, up to 12 tiny homes can be built on a single acre of property zoned for urban residential use in Georgetown. But that could soon change.
One tiny housing project, developed by the nonprofit Little Living, was already approved by the town council in February. It will be able to move forward with construction regardless of whether the town chooses to repeal the cottage housing ordinance.
While the Little Living project, which will include 20 tiny homes on a roughly 2-acre property on East Market Street, will not be impacted by changing development rules, another cottage housing community proposed by Springboard Delaware would be left dead in the water should the town repeal its ordinance.
Judson Malone, executive director of Springboard Delaware, which also operates the pallet village transitional housing community in Georgetown, said the organization has plans to build 122 tiny homes on a 14-acre property near Sussex Academy.
Repealing Georgetown’s tiny homes ordinance represents a continued point of friction between town council and residents over how government leaders should respond to the demand for more affordable housing and a split over how best to provide homelessness resources in town.
It also follows the May election of two new members of the five-member town council, both of whom campaigned, in part, on a platform of repealing the ordinance and were backed by a vocal Facebook group of Sussex County residents opposed to Georgetown’s handling of its growing homeless population.
📍 The Georgetown Town Council will meet at 6 p.m. Monday inside Council Chambers, located at 39 The Circle in Georgetown. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
Early voting continues this week
More than 61,000 Delawareans have already casted their ballot for the 2026 midterm elections, where U.S. Senate, U.S. House, attorney general and the balance of the statehouse are on the line.
Early voting locations will be open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. through Tuesday, Oct. 27.
From Wednesday, Oct. 28, through Sunday, Nov. 1, they will be open between 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Not all polling locations in the state will be open for early voting. Instead, there will be six designated locations in New Castle County, four in Kent County, and nine in Sussex County.
Delawareans can vote at any early voting location within their county.
📍 Early voting runs through Sunday, Nov. 1. For more information, click here.
State bonds for Lewes housing development?
While Georgetown considers repealing its tiny home regulations, state leaders will consider whether to dole out $100 million in bonds to build, among other things, tiny homes near Lewes.
The bonds would not immediately impact taxpayers, but do trade on the assurances of state finances and would leave taxpayers on the hook if the project fails. Such bond requests are typically made by schools and other public institutions, but not housing projects. The current high interest-rate environment would make issuing state debt for the project advantageous for the builder though.
The Council on Development Finance, a state board that considers applications for taxpayer-backed grants for economic development projects, will meet on Monday to hear from a developer seeking to build apartments and tiny homes near the Moorings at Lewes senior living community.
The project would include 43 new apartments, 21 new tiny homes and amenity space that could be used for dining venues, wellness and fitness facilities, and outdoor recreation areas.
📍 The Council on Development Finance will meet at 10 a.m. Monday inside the Delaware Public Archives, located at 121 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Dover. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
Sussex leaders discuss comp plan, SB 23
Sussex County leaders on Tuesday will discuss their next comprehensive plan, a 10-year document that guides the future of land use policy, along with how to implement much-discussed affordable housing legislation.
During Tuesday’s County Council meeting, County Administrator Todd Lawson will give a presentation on the upcoming comprehensive land use plan, a document that has become a centerpiece of this year’s county council elections.
All four candidates in those races are laser-focused on having a seat at the table when county leaders begin work this winter on writing the new comprehensive plan, which will determine where developers can build over the next decade.
Along with discussing the comprehensive plan, Lawson will also give a presentation about how the county plans to implement Senate Bill 23 and House Bill 450, two new housing policies that created a stir in Delaware’s southernmost county earlier this year.
At the heart of the controversy surrounding the legislation is how best to balance the need to create more affordable housing units across the state while also ensuring residents feel like their voice is heard during the development process.
📍 The Sussex County Council will meet at 10 a.m. Tuesday inside the County Administrative Building, located at 2 The Circle in Georgetown. For more information, including on virtual attendance, click here.
Editor’s Note: This story contains photographic depictions of adult and fetal human skeletal remainsand may be upsetting to some readers.
Smyrna couple Sonya Cobb and Justin Capps have always been collectors.
Capps has shelves full of thousands of green-tinted uranium glasses. Cobb, a registered nurse, owns several antique medical tools: a bloodletting knife, an orbitoclast used for “ice pick lobotomies” and several (unused) rectal dilators, which were sold in the 1930s as a snake oil cure for headaches, acne, anxiety and more.
The couple’s collection of human remains is a recent development.
It all began with Tyler, a genuine human skull. Cobb stumbled upon Tyler six years ago in Oddporium, a curiosity shop in Arden. It didn’t take much for Cobb to fall in love with the geriatric skull’s “little, one-toothed smile.”
Sonya Cobb and Justin Capps’ collection of human remains began with Tyler, a one-toothed, geriatric skull. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
“I was working in hospice, and I dealt with the geriatric population,” Cobb said. “Every time I walked in, I’d stop and say hello to him. It made me sad that he was sitting in a store. I just felt like he needed to be in somebody’s home. He needed to be loved.”
Tyler wasn’t for sale, but when the owners temporarily closed Oddporium during the COVID pandemic, they gifted him to Cobb and Capps.
Get Involved The Ossuary is hosting a free open house at 30 Dilworthtown Drive, Smyrna, DE 19977 on Saturday, Oct. 31, 5 p.m. to midnight. The event is 21+ after 10 p.m. The Ossuary is also open to visitors by appointment.
Not long after, Capps — who happens to be a licensed minister — had a dream about a passage from The Bible. In Ezekiel, Chapter 39, human bones on a battlefield are marked with signage so they can be retrieved and given a final resting place.
It was a revelation for Capps. He awoke with a mission: to “rescue” human skeletons and give them a new home.
Capps promptly quit his job as a public safety officer and, with Cobb, founded The Ossuary, a 501(c)(3) and free “mom and pop museum” of human bones inside their home in Smyrna.
Skeletons in the closet
Justin Capps gives a demonstration of an antique bloodletting tool in front of three human skeletons: one artificial, left, and two genuine, right. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
Today, Tyler sits behind a glass case in Cobb and Capps’ living room, surrounded by other human skulls and nine complete skeletons.
Enter the couple’s home, and you’re immediately greeted with a cabinet holding a more than 6-foot-tall skeleton towering next to a 36-week fetal skeleton.
Enter the living room, and you’ll find “Morticia” in a mink stole standing side by side with “Gomez” in a shared cabinet.
And if you make the mistake of setting your mug down on the coffee table, you’ll quickly find that its coffin shape isn’t just for show. Underneath the lid is a bone-dry specimen probably thirsty for a sip of your drink.
These skeletons are aged between the late 1700s and the 1960s or ’70s, according to Capps. Each was originally purchased from a medical supply company. Some buyers used them in doctor’s offices and hospitals. Other buyers included centuries-old fraternal organizations, which use skeletons as “memento mori” — reminders of one’s mortality — in initiation rituals.
There is often a question of what to do with a skeleton when a fraternal lodge, hospital or doctor’s office closes. That’s how they end up on Facebook Marketplace, inside curiosity shops or as an heirloom gathering dust in an attic.
Sonya Cobb and Justin Capps collect uranium glasses, antique medical equipment, taxidermy and both human and animal bones. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
Justin Capps often transports human skulls to events he works security for, like Weedstock, the cannibis festival in Kent County. He said he uses the skulls to tell passers-by about The Ossuary’s mission. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
Justin Capps shows off an antique syringe. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
Justin Capps shows the label on a vintage box of rectal dialators. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
That’s where The Ossuary comes in. Capps and Cobb have traveled throughout the northeastern United States connecting with donors more than happy to get rid of a skeleton in their closet.
There are few or no legal restrictions on this practice in most states, in large part because Capps and Cobb have never purchased nor sold human skeletal remains.
“These were someone’s mothers, brothers, fathers, cousins, that gave themselves for the advancement of science and education. They weren’t meant to be put on a shelf with a price tag on them,” Capps said.
Delaware has no legal restrictions on the sale of human skeletal remains originally acquired through medical means. It is, however, a misdemeanor to buy or sell remains that were unlawfully removed.
Knowingly exhibiting human skeletal remains is also generally illegal in Delaware. The Ossuary’s exhibition is an exception because its bones were originally acquired from commercial biological supply houses or through medical means.
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Skeletons
Justin Capps touches a genuine, 36-week fetal skeleton. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
Whether it is ethical for The Ossuary to place these bones on display for the public to view, take pictures of and even touch is another question entirely, and one largely up to individual discretion.
The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia offers an alternative approach to exhibiting human remains.
In August 2025, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which operates the museum, announced several changes to its collection of 6,500 remains following a two-year review.
Namely, photography and videography is prohibited without express permission by the museum, and only if the material is used for educational purposes.
In a press release, the museum also acknowledged the “scientific racism” historically involved in the production of genuine human skeletal models.
As an example, India was the primary supplier of medical skeletons throughout the world until the country’s 1985 ban on the exportation of human bones, which first began under British colonial rule and intensified after a crackdown on grave robbing in the United Kingdom in 1832.
Not all medical skeletons throughout history have come from willing donors. Many came from the red market, grave robbing and unclaimed bodies.
“Human beings have a unique status in our collection,” said Erin McLeary, senior director of collections and research at the Philadelphia college, in a press release. “These were once living people, or parts of living people, and they deserve the very highest level of respect and sensitivity in telling their stories.”
In line with that goal, the museum announced an initiative to identify the individual remains in its collection to integrate into guided tours, in-gallery resources and object labels.
Justin Capps reveals a genuine human skeleton under the lid of what first appears to be a coffee table. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
The Ossuary has not identified the remains in its collection. Capps said he has tried to connect with one anthropologist without success.
“One of the things we always wanted to do is return these folks to their families if possible,” he added.
However, Capps also expressed concern that said families or descendants would try to sell the bones instead of laying them to rest or keeping them as an heirloom.
When it comes to ethics, Capps and Cobb believe they’re doing the right thing.
“We rescue them like the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) does puppies and kittens,” Capps said.
Church of bones
This skeleton stands in a cabinet at the entrance of The Ossuary. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
Some of The Ossuary’s “rescues” come in rough shape, like “Vanessa Cardui,” named after the painted lady butterfly because an artist had painted her sometime before she was donated to Capps and Cobb. Other skeletons have come in trash bags with many of their bones missing. Whenever possible, the couple tries to restore or rewire the skeletons.
Cobb uses a soothing tone whenever she welcomes a new skeleton into her home, much like one would with a new pet from the animal shelter.
“I basically have a talk with them and let them know, ‘You’re part of our family. You are welcome here in our home. However, you’re not going to haunt me, because you could have very well been still stuck in a closet somewhere,’” she said with a laugh.
Capps and Cobb said they haven’t experienced any paranormal activity, though they have had self-proclaimed psychic visitors who would disagree with that assessment.
One of Cobb’s two daughters has heard things in the dead of night, but Capps insisted that it was only mice.
“Vanessa Cardui” is a medical skeleton that was painted by an artist some time before she was donated to The Ossuary. Sonya Cobb and Justin Capps have dressed her as Santa Muerte. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY CANNON TAYLOR
The other daughter is currently in college and hopes to become a museum curator. Cobb and Capps hope she’ll take over the family business when they die.
The couple spends a lot of time pondering mortality — more so than ever after Capps was in a motorcycle accident in Dover last year. He temporarily lost the use of the right side of his body, broke both his hands and scapula and split his head open.
“I almost became part of my own collection,” he said.
When Capps and Cobb do eventually perish, they want their skeletons arranged like the Lovers of Valdaro, the 6,000-year-old skeletons locked in an embrace.
But in the meantime, Capps and Cobb will continue working toward their long-term objective.
“Our goal is to one day get a church, and we want to line the inside of the church with the bones,” Capps said.
The idea is ripped straight from ossuaries like the Sedlec Ossuary, a Roman Catholic chapel in the Czech Republic made from the bones of around 40,000 human skeletons. (A lucky few got to be part of the bone chandelier in the entryway.)
Capps hopes for 20 or 30 acres on the Nanticoke River in Sussex County. But that’ll require quite a bit of funding that The Ossuary doesn’t have.
“I’m trying to get established to the point that when I go to the federal government and say, ‘Hey, I’m doing one of the most unique things in the world. Give me grant money,’ they will,” Capps said.
Cobb is on board with the vision.
“I’d like my house back,” she said with a laugh.
Capps believes the church would be a valuable community resource and tourist attraction.
“A place people can come reflect, pay homage to life and death, get married, have a funeral,” he described. “I’d like to be open seven days a week and do church service on Sundays with all my skeletons around me.”
Solid Earth Studio at 225 N. Market St. in downtown Wilmington offers pottery classes, workshops, and memberships for independent makers. Photo courtesy of Solid Earth Studio.
New Market Street Ceramics Studio Invites Community to Log Off and Get Muddy
WILMINGTON, Del. – A new ceramics studio in downtown Wilmington is inviting people to trade screen time for clay time, offering a place to learn a craft, meet neighbors, and embrace the occasional imperfect bowl.
Solid Earth Studio has opened at 225 N. Market St., bringing pottery classes, workshops, and independent studio space to the downtown arts community. An opening celebration and ribbon cutting were scheduled for Oct. 23.
Led by architectural designer and artist Samara Weaver and her partner, photographer and videographer Dave MacNeill, the 1,200-square-foot space welcomes beginners and experienced makers alike.
Its invitation is simple: “Log off. Get muddy.”
The studio features 10 pottery wheels and an area for hand-building, giving participants different ways to explore clay. Offerings include individual classes, couples’ experiences, and eight-week courses for people interested in developing their skills over time.
For Weaver, the value of pottery begins well before a finished piece comes out of the kiln.
“Pottery is all about process,” Weaver said.
She encourages students to enjoy working with the material and accept the mistakes that come with learning. A successful cup or plate, in her view, grows from a willingness to practice, experiment, and try again.
“The love of the process directly leads to the creation of beautiful things, rather than the other way around,” Weaver said.
That approach shapes the studio’s emphasis on slowing down and paying attention to what is happening at the wheel or worktable. Working with clay offers a tactile break from scrolling, with opportunities to focus on a task and connect with the people nearby.
Weaver brings experience as both an artist and an instructor. Her work has previously been exhibited at The Delaware Contemporary, Delaware Art Museum, Winterthur, and Philadelphia’s Clay Studio, according to the studio’s announcement.
Christine Fischer, former board vice chair of The Delaware Contemporary and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Delaware, praised Weaver’s combination of artistic ability and community focus.
“Samara Weaver is a rare find: a ceramic artist whose work is creatively significant and whose entrepreneurial energy makes it accessible to everyone,” Fischer said.
“For Wilmington, a studio of this caliber is a true gift.”
For those seeking more time to practice, the studio offers memberships for experienced ceramic makers who can work independently. Membership provides access to the workspace, studio glazes, and kiln firings during open studio hours.
With the holidays approaching, classes also offer an option for people interested in giving an experience or making something personal. Finished mugs, bowls, and other pieces can become gifts, household favorites, or reminders of a new skill.
Whether visitors arrive for a creative date, a first attempt at pottery, or regular studio practice, Solid Earth Studio aims to make room for both learning and connection, one handful of clay at a time.
For class schedules, memberships, and more information, visit Solid Earth Studio.
Rapid Support Forces strike five power stations in three states controlled by Sudanese army
Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have launched a coordinated drone attack against five power stations, causing mass power outages across the country’s east, a government official said.
The drones hit two power stations each in the states of Al-Jazira and Gedaref and one in White Nile state, “resulting in power outages across large parts of these three states”, the official said on condition of anonymity.
Faced with a stagnant jobs market, many are spurning children or pets in favour of ‘raising bricks’
Young adults in China looking for a cheaper, low-maintenance alternative to having children or pets have found an answer: raising bricks.
Bricks may not be as cuddly as cats or as life-affirming as human offspring, but they also cost next to nothing. “No cats, no dating, I started raising a brick,” wrote one brick parent on social media.
Andy Burnham’s pledge to reindustrialise Britain is doomed to fail unless it is driven decisively from his new No 10 North outpost in Manchester, a group of more than 90 backbench Labour MPs have said.
The PM has suggested that rebuilding the UK’s industrial capacity will be central to meeting his pledge to bring “good growth in every postcode”.
Burnham’s first budget should take a global approach to deliver for the UKExpert commentthilton.drupal
The cost of living, growth and jobs are all impacted by global geoeconomics. To pass the ‘Makerfield Test’ and deliver for ordinary people, the budget should recognize this and build resilience to external shocks.
This week’s budget, the first of Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government, will aim to reduce the cost of living and deliver growth and jobs. It faces a major challenge: much of what impacts both these objectives is set abroad.
I have previously argued for an international form of Burnham’s ‘Manchesterism.’ This ‘International Manchesterism’ should recognize that global forces are inseparable from local outcomes. Therefore, domestic priorities will be achieved only if the government recognizes and puts to use the two-way link between the domestic and the international.
The budget needs to put geoeconomics at its centre.
Its success can be measured by applying the ‘Makerfield Test’ (a reference to Burnham’s constituency in northern England) to foreign policy, which provides a framework for assessing whether the government’s international choices tangibly improve life in Britain’s communities. The test has several key pillars including economic security, energy resilience and rebalancing investment towards underserved regions.
The budget is where those pillars meet the public finances. Burnham has promised better public services and lower bills. But these rest on global gas markets, food and fertiliser supply chains, and investor confidence.
In this budget, Chancellor John Healey should therefore treat geoeconomics not just as context, but as a key fiscal variable. The budget cannot deliver on the cost of living, growth or jobs through domestic tax and spend alone.
Cost of living: energy and food
Energy resilience is central to the Makerfield Test, and household energy is where the exposure is most visible. Currently, electricity prices in the UK are set mainly by gas prices, leaving the UK more vulnerable to global price spikes than many comparable countries.
Ofgem, the UK energy regulator, lifted the price cap by about £60 a year to £1,723 in October as the Iran war drove up wholesale gas. Analysts now forecast a further 16 per cent rise in energy bills from January.
The prime minister wants to break the link between energy bills and international gas prices. That will take years, which is why the budget must start the work now.
Food has received far less attention. The Food and Drink Federation expects food inflation to pass 6 per cent by mid-2027. It cites energy costs driven by the conflict in the Middle East, drought and El Niño. Fertiliser, which is made using gas, adds to this pressure.
Food and energy also shape how households perceive inflation, foods prices especially, as Bank of England research shows. A spike in either can keep interest rates higher for longer.
Growth and jobs: capital and barriers
Growth needs investment, and long-overlooked British regions in particular could benefit from international investment.
But this depends on the cost of borrowing. A global bond sell-off pushed the 30-year gilt yield briefly above 6 per cent this month and ate into the chancellor’s fiscal headroom, which may yet shrink further. This raises borrowing costs and squeezes the room for the public investment on which growth plans rely.
The budget is also being set out in a period of global economic insecurity. Britain’s largest partners are raising economic barriers and deploying economic leverage. The US has embraced tariffs. The EU is strengthening its economic and trade defence mechanisms. China has leveraged its dominance of rare earths while also pushing its exports aggressively.
Each of these moves changes the terms on which UK firms invest, trade and hire. Achieving economic security, the Makerfield Test’s first pillar, now requires factoring in these partners’ choices as well as market volatility. This applies to the budget too.
Recognizing the link
The Treasury tends to treat all this as background to the forecast. Traditionally, the Office for Budget Responsibility models the sensitivities, the numbers are adjusted, and policy carries on.
That worked when global markets were calm, and cooperation with traditional allies could be taken for granted. Neither holds now.
A budget that recognizes and reduces the UK’s exposure to global forces is sound economics and good politics.
The Iran war has shown how global developments rapidly impact UK households and the national debt via inflation and interest rates. Costlier energy and food push up inflation, inflation pushes up rates, and higher rates raise the cost of capital that growth depends on.
The budget therefore needs to put geoeconomics at its centre. It must build resilience against shocks Britain cannot prevent while also signalling a path to growth that investors can price.
Five recommendations for the budget
This week’s budget should seek to measure, reduce, share and capitalize on Britain’s international exposure. Five measures will help achieve this.
1. Set targets to reduce exposure
The budget should measure Britain’s international exposure and set targets to reduce it. It should publish a short statement alongside the budget that details how finances and household budgets are sensitive to global borrowing costs, gas prices and food import prices.
This should include measurable targets to bring that sensitivity down over this parliament. This becomes the yardstick against which the other measures outlined here are judged.
2. Cut energy bills by reducing gas dependence
The budget should take three measures to cut household energy bills by reducing gas dependence.
It should move the remaining quarter of the Renewables Obligation’s cost to general taxation and also review other policy costs still levied on electricity bills, making electricity cheaper relative to gas.
It should also bring forward spending under the £15 billion Warm Homes Plan, prioritizing insulation in the least efficient homes.
And it should secure gas storage. By one estimate, Britain holds around 12 days of gas storage, compared with 89 in Germany. Its largest site, Rough, could close next spring without a deal. This should be prevented.
Crucially, all of this should be classed as investment that reduces risk, protected within the capital budget (rather than treated as short-term relief), and co-financed through the National Wealth Fund wherever possible.
3. Protect food supply against the next fertiliser shock
Britain’s last large ammonia plant, at Billingham, closed in 2023 because UK gas prices made it uncompetitive. Fertiliser is now made from imported ammonia sourced at global prices.
The budget should fund a strategic fertiliser reserve large enough to see farmers through a season of disruption. It should also use the National Wealth Fund to support low-carbon ammonia production linked to the UK’s hydrogen projects.
4. Build economic security
The budget should scale up the £50 million critical minerals fund announced last year to fund a stockpile of minerals most exposed to supply chain disruption of export controls.
This could be done via expanding UK Export Finance guarantees to diversify minerals supply for British manufacturers across more countries. And it should set UK carbon border levy to protect British industry while exempting partners that do price carbon comparably, starting with the EU.
5. Treat UK credibility as an asset
Multi-year spending plans are already standard for government departments, but there is a gap in specific commitments that generates uncertainty for investors. Defence is the clearest case.
The chancellor has deferred a path to higher defence spending to next year’s spending review. Setting out that trajectory, and how it will be funded, will remove a major source of uncertainty.
Beyond the budget
The budget cannot achieve these objectives alone. Some of the most important and complementary steps fall to diplomacy in the following months.
The UK-EU summit on 20 November is a chance to secure the linking of emissions trading systems, strengthening British exporters and putting the focus on energy and food supply.
Canada’s proposed Defence, Security and Resilience Bank offers a way to share defence costs.
And the UK’s upcoming G20 presidency offers the ideal platform to strengthen shared resilience on energy markets, food and fertiliser security, and sovereign debt.
None of this is a distraction from the cost of living or from growth. It is how both are delivered. A budget that recognizes and reduces the UK’s exposure to global forces is sound economics and good politics. This way, the Treasury can pass the Makerfield Test and deliver for British people.
Brexit has not “played out” like it was promised to the public, has weakened the economy and the current deal is not good enough, Andy Burnham has said, while ruling out any major changes in the current parliament.
The prime minister said Britain had ended up with a “harder Brexit than was proposed in the referendum campaign” and it had not helped to control the small boats crisis. Backing the home secretary’s tougher immigration rules, he said Brexit had weakened the UK’s ability to control its borders as it could no longer send people back to Europe.
With industrial action over job cuts heading into its 21st week, students at famed London college are unhappy
Students arriving at Goldsmiths, University of London this autumn found a campus embroiled in a bitter industrial dispute that has upended timetables and disrupted courses.
“I was really excited to start my studies at Goldsmiths,” one international student told the Guardian at a gathering of unhappy students on Friday. “But when I first arrived, I was quite shocked because almost all the induction sessions seemed to turn into discussions about strikes.”
On 3 November, US citizens will decide whether Republicans will retain control of Congress or whether Democrats will come to power to stymie Trump’s agenda
Donald Trump will still be US president on the morning of 4 November. But he could be facing a very different political landscape, depending on the results of the US midterm elections held the previous day.
As the name implies, midterm elections fall nearly halfway through a president’s term. They are often a telling referendum on the sitting president’s performance, something Trump is actively encouraging by telling voters “pretend I’m on the ballot”. In this case, voters will decide whether Trump’s Republican party can retain its grip on Congress.
All 435 seats in the House of Representatives. Republicans are defending a narrow majority, with Democrats needing a net gain of four seats to take control.
35 seats in the Senate. Thirty-three seats are up in regular elections, along with two special elections in Florida and Ohio to fill the remainder of terms that were vacated early. Republicans currently hold 53 seats, against 47 held by Democrats and independents who caucus with them. Democrats need to gain four seats to secure a majority.
39 governorships. Voters will choose governors in 36 states and three US territories.
Thousands of state legislative seats, as well as local offices, judicial contests and ballot measures on issues including taxes, abortion rights and voting rules.
A federal grand jury indicted Zohar Pinhasi last month for allegedly defrauding clients of his ransomware data recovery business, MonsterCloud. Jeffery Salter, special to ProPublica
A Florida man who was the subject of a 2019 investigation by ProPublica was indicted last month on federal charges that he defrauded clients of his ransomware data recovery firm.
According to the Justice Department, the man, Zohar Pinhasi, told customers he could recover their encrypted files without having to pay hackers, when, in reality, he paid the ransom and charged victims a hefty fee on top.
The indictment mirrors the findings from ProPublica’s 2019 article “The Trade Secret,” which centered on Pinhasi and his scheme. The outlet found that the ransomware victims were being harmed twice: once by the hackers, who locked their targets’ files and demanded ransom, and a second time by MonsterCloud, Pinhasi’s Florida-based data recovery firm, which misled its clients about not paying ransoms.
“By falsely claiming to decrypt ransomware without paying off the ransomers, the defendant re-victimized his clients while extracting a hefty profit for himself,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said in an Oct. 7 press release. “Our Office will vigorously prosecute ransomware attackers who prey on Americans from across the world and those who cynically profit from their criminal activity.”
When ProPublica published its story in 2019, ransomware was growing into one of the world’s most pervasive cyberthreats. Hackers locked the data of governments, schools and businesses, holding the decryption key for a ransom payment, which they usually demanded in bitcoin and other types of difficult-to-trace cryptocurrency.
ProPublica’s reporting focused on how U.S. industries, from data recovery firms like MonsterCloud to insurance giants that cover ransom payments, all fueled the extortion economy. Ransomware remains a widespread threat today, and the threat to national security has grown as hackers linked to hostile foreign governments are believed to use ransomware as a cover for espionage. The prevalence of AI tools is also making it easier for attackers to spread ransomware.
Pinhasi, who went by the alias Zack Green, told ProPublica in 2019 that MonsterCloud never promised clients that their data will be recovered by any particular method. “How we do it, it’s our problem,” he told ProPublica. “You will get your data back. Sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.” He called MonsterCloud’s data recovery methods a “trade secret.”
Pinhasi hung up when reached on his cellphone this month. A message left with a representative at MonsterCloud’s office phone number and a message left with his attorney were not returned. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Pinhasi pleaded not guilty to the federal charges.
In its 2019 investigation, ProPublica interviewed MonsterCloud’s clients and ransomware experts and found that in certain cases the firm must have paid ransoms on behalf of clients. MonsterCloud’s services were particularly popular with local law enforcement agencies, who are loath to engage with or pay criminal hackers. Several interviewed by ProPublica at the time said they chose MonsterCloud to help them recover from ransomware because they believed the firm would never pay a ransom.
Pinhasi, who described himself to ProPublica as a former IT security intelligence officer for the Israeli military, said in 2019 that MonsterCloud handled up to 30 calls a day and had about 20 employees in South Florida as well as extensive global contacts.
Federal investigators found that, over the course of the scheme, Pinhasi allegedly charged clients more than $19 million and paid more than $8 million in ransom payments. In one example, Pinhasi made a ransom payment of about $8,200 but charged the client about $150,000. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.
In the Justice Department’s October press release, an FBI official said Pinhasi had “turned the victim’s crisis into his own profit center. This deception is unacceptable, and the FBI is committed to ensuring accountability for those who choose to victimize the very people who trusted them for help.”
The Justice Department did not address ProPublica’s 2019 finding that one of the FBI’s own was among Pinhasi’s associates at MonsterCloud. John Pistole, a former deputy director of the FBI under Robert Mueller, was prominently featured in a promotional video on MonsterCloud’s homepage. “Police departments, government agencies, hospitals, small business and Fortune 500 firms trust MonsterCloud to help recover from attacks and protect against new ones,” Pistole said in the video. “MonsterCloud’s proprietary technology and expertise protects their professional reputations and organizational integrity.”
Pistole was not mentioned by name in the Pinhasi indictment.
In 2019, Pinhasi touted MonsterCloud’s ties to law enforcement as evidence of its integrity. Pistole, who also headed the Transportation Security Administration under President Barack Obama, was listed on MonsterCloud’s website as the only member of its “Cyber Security Advisory Council.”
Pistole did not respond to a request for comment for this story. In a 2019 interview, he said he became acquainted with Pinhasi after MonsterCloud reached him through a speaker’s bureau and that MonsterCloud paid him indirectly through that group. He said Pinhasi scripted his testimonial and that he was well aware that in most cases — including MonsterCloud’s — the only way to decrypt data locked by ransomware is to pay the hackers. “That’s the business model as I understood it,” Pistole told ProPublica at the time. “Based on my experience and knowledge, ransom is paid and they facilitate the best practices moving forward.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment on Pistole’s connection to MonsterCloud.
John Pistole, a former deputy director of the FBI under Robert Mueller, was prominently featured in a promotional video on MonsterCloud’s homepage.Screenshot by ProPublica
President Trump is making his case for Republican candidates in Michigan; he spoke at a rally in Port Huron on Sunday ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
The 42-year-old remains a polarizing figure. But the Steelers have a formidable defense and a quarterback who has seen it all before
Aaron Rodgers is nowhere near this NFL season’s MVP conversation. At times in his second season with the Pittsburgh Steelers, the almost-43-year-old has shown glimpses of the player he was in his prime, slinging the ball with zest and precision, able to suss out any coverage. Other times he has looked like, well, a guy in his 40s playing a young man’s game.
Rodgers looked more like prime Rodgers in the Steelers’ gritty 16-10 win over the New Orleans Saints in Paris. He wasn’t satisfied with his side of the ball, telling reporter Molly McGrath, “I don’t think we played very good on offense today.” But Rodgers did enough to secure the win, including a 51-yard strike to DK Metcalf in the second quarter. He later scrambled for a first down on third-and-six to secure the win.
Brazil's 80-year-old president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was re-elected Sunday, reports the Guardian, "defeating his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, to claim a historic fourth term in power."
And the results could impact the climate, suggests the Associated Press, since under da Silva the annual deforestation rate in the Amazon fell to its lowest level since records began in 1988:
Official satellite data showed the rainforest lost 3,335 square kilometers (1,300 square miles) from Aug. 2025 through July 2026, the period used to calculate the annual rate...
During Jair Bolsonaro's presidency, from 2019 to 2022, Amazon deforestation surged by about 60%, with more than 45,000 square kilometers (17,400 square miles) cleared, according to official data. Under Lula, deforestation has fallen 71% since 2023, the government said. One of Lula's first moves after taking office in January 2023 for a third, non-consecutive term was to revive the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon, known by its Portuguese acronym, PPCDAm. Launched in 2004 during his first administration, the plan had been shelved under Bolsonaro....
The plan has four pillars: strengthening monitoring and enforcement; promoting a sustainable economy; managing protected areas and determining how undesignated public forests should be used; and using regulations and financial incentives to curb deforestation. Measures included restoring sanctions for illegal forest clearing detected by satellites, a practice seen as the most effective tool to curb deforestation that was halted under Bolsonaro. The government also proposed barring properties with illegal deforestation from receiving bank loans and allocated more funding to priority Amazon municipalities that demonstrated reductions in forest loss. It also funded efforts to fight environmental crime and develop subsidized credit for sustainable businesses in the Amazon...
Deforestation and other land-use changes are Brazil's largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, which drive global warming. The stakes are especially high in the Amazon, which stores vast amounts of carbon dioxide and generates atmospheric moisture that helps regulate weather far beyond South America... Degradation from wildfires, logging and drought affects about 40% of the Amazon and has outpaced clear-cutting in recent years. A strong El Niño, a periodic warming of the equatorial Pacific, could intensify those threats in 2026 and 2027 by bringing hotter, drier conditions that fuel wildfires.
The article notes that Lula's reelection campaign promised zero net deforestation by 2030, plus restoration to offset all forest loss, legal or illegal.
Jordan says its security forces arrested three men Monday for an attack on a Greek Orthodox church that killed nine people and wounded more than two dozen.
Atlanta, GA — Anthropic says its Claude artificial intelligence model autonomously bypassed a paywall and accessed Georgia election data during an internal training exercise, highlighting growing concerns over how AI agents interact with government systems.
The incident involved aggregate vote counts available through Georgia’s state data hub, not individual voter records or the state’s voter-registration system. Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said the information was publicly available through the hub and that no secure election infrastructure was breached.
According to Anthropic, Claude was working on an internal statistics project involving an archived government website when it independently requested an access token and worked around a restriction to obtain the data.
The company said no human specifically instructed the model to circumvent the paywall, and Claude did not alter election data or retrieve sensitive voter information.
Anthropic later notified government agencies and briefed the White House. The company has since added safeguards designed to limit unauthorized actions involving election systems and other sensitive government websites.
The episode is notable less for the sensitivity of the information than for the model’s behavior. An AI agent independently found a way around an access restriction while pursuing its assigned task.
That raises broader questions about whether increasingly autonomous AI systems can reliably distinguish between completing a task and respecting boundaries imposed by websites, governments and other institutions.
Families forced to flee as Netanyahu tries to prove security credentials after two Israeli soldiers killed days before election
Hebron, the biggest city in the West Bank, had paid little attention to Israel’s looming elections until it found itself suddenly in the midst of them, a proving ground for Benjamin Netanyahu’s security credentials in the run-up to Tuesday’s vote.
A gun attack on an Israeli military checkpoint on Friday in which two soldiers were killed brought immediate televised visits from Netanyahu and his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, whose ruling coalition is narrowly trailing with two days of campaigning left.
Calculations from the Center for Global Development say spending next year is likely to be £410m less than anticipated
The UK is on course to miss its target of spending 0.3% of national income on international aid by an estimated £400m by the end of next year.
Calculations from the Center for Global Development (CGD) found the UK was on course for a large shortfall in promised official development assistance at the end of 2027.
In today’s newsletter: As Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva secured victory in the presidential race, we look the implications for democracy, the environment and international relations
Good morning. Chances are you woke this morning to news of two momentous election results. In Serbia, a student-led movement has ousted the country’s long-serving leader, Aleksandar Vučić (which you can read more about here). And just hours ago, Brazil’s president staged a sensational turnaround against his far-right opponent after a nail-biting vote.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, won a forth nonconsecutive term as president, seeing off far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who spearheaded the radical populist movement built by his father and former president, Jair. Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year prison sentence for plotting a coup after he lost the 2022 election.
UK news | Two people have been killed and more than 160,000 properties have been left without power as Storm Boelo continues to batter the UK.
Crime | British police are recording a growing number of crimes linked to cocaine, including assaults, domestic abuse and dangerous driving, as figures show consumption has surged across England.
France | Hundreds of thousands marched in cities across France on Saturday in largely peaceful protests to support schoolchildren’s demands for more teachers and repairs to dilapidated buildings, as Emmanuel Macron faces a social and political crisis in his final months as president.
UK politics | Prime minister Andy Burnham’s call for the UK to consider a return to free movement with Europe has been backed by senior cabinet ministers including Angela Rayner but risks causing concern among fellow red wall MPs.
Aviation | Three in four European airline pilots have taken microsleeps in the cockpit, while almost a quarter routinely fly despite being too fatigued to work, according to a report.
Tuesday | Israel goes to the polls on Tuesday, amid orders from prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a full lockdown of the occupied West Bank after recent checkpoint attacks. His government will be fighting for its survival.
Wednesday | On Wednesday Chancellor John Healey will deliver his first budget statement in the House of Commons, which is expected to give local authorities more spending powers, as a means to promote growth
Thursday and Friday | European and Canadian leaders will meet in Montreal for the 21st EU-Canada summit, to discuss security and strategic cooperation. It will be the first opportunity for leaders to iron out details over a proposed invitation for Canada to become the EU’s first ever “associate member”
With 100% of the vote counted, Brazil's electoral court announced that the soon-to-be 81-year-old Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva held an insurmountable lead, but Flávio Bolsonaro rejected the results.
Nobel peace prize winner’s return after almost a year in exile is unlikely to please interim president Delcy Rodríguez
The Venezuelan opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has announced she has returned to Venezuela almost a year after she left the country to receive the Nobel peace prize.
“I’m here. With you,” she wrote on X on Sunday lunchtime.
GANZHOU, China, Oct. 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- A report from Jiangxi International Communication Center (JXICC): 2026 marks the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Long March. 92 years ago, the Central Red Army assembled and set off from the…
The problem? Understanding how AI coding agents interact with the software you build. "Whether you're maintaining an SDK, building a command-line interface, or publishing an MCP server or skills... you need to understand whether agents can discover and use what you ship, and what your team can change."
Results can vary, and configurations keep changing, with behaviors influenced by everything from custom instructions and MCP servers to skills and plugins. So after a year of development Microsoft has created Scope, "an open-source platform built on Kubernetes for turning those interactions into evidence product teams can act on."
Details are available on... the Microsoft open source blog:
Available under the MIT License, Scope supports a continuous Developer Agent Experience (DevAx) learning loop grounded in repeatable experiments.
The Azure Cosmos DB team's experience shows what that loop can deliver... "The evaluations led to 20 Agent Kit issues and 27 documentation issues resolved," [says Jay Gordon, Senior Program Manager, Azure Cosmos DB]... These results connect evaluation to decisions a product team can make: which documentation needs clarification, where tooling needs a fix, and whether an update changes agent behavior.... [The gains] demonstrate how targeted changes, informed by observed behavior, can improve the way agents use a product.
For more on the shift from building for human developers to supporting agents, watch Your Product Was Built for Humans. Is It Ready for Agents? or join us at AI DevCon NYC conference in November.
Scope surfaces everything from incorrect assumptions in documentation (or recurring missed instructions) to whether agents select the intended SDK, initialize it correctly, and use its APIs, leading to clearer descriptions for command-line tool and more actionable errors.
Microsoft's open source blog also explains why AI agent evaluation needs an open-source foundation:
The challenges behind agent experience aren't unique to one product or organization. SDK maintainers, tool authors, researchers, and agent developers are all asking how agents behave and what helps them succeed. No single team can represent every language, workflow, or integration. An open project can bring more scenarios, more failure cases, and more viewpoints into the evaluation process... Opening Scope's execution and evaluation code gives contributors a way to question the methods, investigate unexpected results, and improve the evaluation itself. A shared foundation also reduces duplicated infrastructure. Agent integrations, reusable criteria, and trace-analysis improvements can help other teams study their own products without rebuilding the same machinery. The goal isn't one universal benchmark or definition of success. It's a common starting point that teams can adapt to their needs.
The MIT License lets teams use and extend Scope, while self-managed deployments let them evaluate private workloads without publishing their code or run data.... Scope streams activity as the agent works and retains interactions and workspace snapshots for later review. Your team can follow tool calls, inspect generated files, and connect a failed requirement to the steps that preceded it. Those traces provide observable evidence of what the agent did, helping turn a failure into a concrete documentation, SDK, or tooling improvement.
Guard stretchered off court after apparent serious injury
Team will learn more about status on Monday
Shai-Gilgeous Alexander scored 34 points and the Oklahoma City Thunder stayed undefeated but they lost All-Star guard Jalen Williams to what appeared to be a serious leg injury during their 108-101 victory over the Los Angeles Clippers on Sunday night.
Oklahoma City won their third straight game to start the season but lost three players to injury, including Williams, who went down hard on a drive to the basket with 1:14 left. The guard’s left leg gave way as he landed and his foot bent at an unnatural angle. The 25-year-old left the court on a stretcher with towels covering his injured leg. He covered his mouth with his hands when he looked down at the injury while Gilgeous-Alexander and players on both teams appeared to be in shock.
From every 911 call to every arrest and trial: protection order violations are at an all time high in Chicago, and the system designed to protect domestic violence victims is failing them at every turn.
"59% of maintainers report growing contribution volume since the rise of GenAI," according to a new study published by Linux Foundation Research. But 25% of their incoming pull requests "are estimated to be low-quality, also known as 'AI slop'." And on large projects, 69% see growing contributions — and estimate that 31% are low-quality/AI slop.
So what do these results show us? "Generative AI is fundamentally changing how people participate in open source," says the head of Open Source Ecosystem Development at Huawei's R&D subsidiary Futurewei, which helped support the study. Specifically GenAI is "lowering barriers to contribution" but also "creating new challenges" for maintainers and communities. Their recommendation? "Build the governance, transparency and trust mechanisms that allow AI-assisted contributions to strengthen, but not overwhelm, the open source ecosystem."
"Open source projects need to design for a growing AI-generated contributor base, not simply react to it," said Hilary Carter, SVP of Research at the Linux Foundation. "That means setting clear expectations for GenAI, putting responsibility for testing and disclosure on contributors and giving maintainers better tools to manage incoming pull requests. If we get those fundamentals right, AI can expand participation without overburdening and increasing costs for maintainers."
More from the blog It's FOSS:
LF Research is the Linux Foundation's research arm. It was set up in 2021 and publishes studies on how open source is built and used, drawing on surveys and project data. Its latest report, Navigating Open Source Software Development in the Generative AI Era, surveyed 234 contributors and maintainers on how generative AI is affecting the way open source gets made...
64% say reviews now take longer. Burnout is their top concern at 63%, narrowly ahead of contribution quality at 60%.
You will also find that policies have not caught up to the AI-assisted coding and vulnerability reporting trend. Of the 119 respondents who answered the question, 35% said their project has a formal policy permitting AI use. Another 32% have none and no plans for one, 23% plan to write one, and 10% ban AI contributions outright....
Most maintainers (71%) say AI makes it easier for newcomers to start contributing.
Other interesting findings:
"Respondents estimate average time reductions across all six OSS development activities measured, including proposal discussions (19%) and code authoring (52%). For high-complexity tasks, however, 21% of respondents report taking more time when using GenAI."
"71% of maintainers agree GenAI reduces barriers to entry for OSS, but 53% of maintainers disagree that GenAI has improved community trust."
Developers are reinvesting the time they save back into open source: 66% report using productivity gains to address technical debt, 63% to develop new features and 58% for learning and upskilling.
Continued investment in human mentorship remains important: 46% of maintainers say GenAI increases the need for mentorship of new contributors, compared with 32% who say it decreases that need.
OpenSSF and LF AI & Data also helped support the study.
Hello, Im looking for some Information regarding smart glasses and onewheels. I own a Onewheel gts and a X7 supercharged. Are they're smart glasses that are able to display my speed and duty cycle/tourge headroom while im riding?. And if so, what are they?. I can't seem to find a pair that had a display but that also is completely see through. Obviously i want to see this information as I ride. I know this technology exists in motorcycle helmet visors so it has to be out there for glasses id hope.
Thomas Adam, one of the core developers of FVWM, has been working on CoW for a while now. CoW can best be described as “FVWM for Wayland”, which uniquely uses the River compositor. River, in turn, is unique in that it does not combine the compositor and window manager into a single program, allowing for a more traditional X11-like approach.
Adam released version 0.4 today, which comes with a load of fixes, changes, and minor improvements, as well as one bigger-ticket item: container windows.
This PR introduces the concept of a top-level container window.
This means a window can be subdivided into columns and rows (called panes) and can be resized independently of one another.
The idea for this has been unashamedly stolen from shod.
I’ve been keeping an eye on CoW ever since I learned about it when it was first released, and at some point soon I want to build a desktop around it for myself.
Denver, CO — A Republican election official in Colorado sharply criticized President Donald Trump for spreading false claims about U.S. elections and for continuing to defend former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who was convicted of crimes tied to a breach of voting equipment.
Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, told CBS’s 60 Minutes that Trump’s enormous public platform allows him to spread election misinformation far more widely than election officials can counter it.
“This is not a partisan issue,” Crane said after confirming that he is a Republican.
Peters was convicted by a Colorado jury of four felonies and three misdemeanors after allowing an unauthorized person access to secure election equipment while pursuing unsupported claims that voting machines had cost Trump the 2020 election.
Trump repeatedly called Peters a political “hostage” and even issued her a federal pardon, though it had no legal effect because her convictions were under state law.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis later commuted Peters’ nearly nine-year prison sentence after she had served less than two years. Crane called that decision a “complete betrayal of the election community” and accused Polis of yielding to pressure from Trump.
Polis denies that characterization, saying Peters deserved punishment but that her original sentence was excessive.
Peters has remained unapologetic and continues promoting election-fraud claims despite multiple investigations finding no evidence that voting-machine fraud changed the 2020 result.
State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat running for governor in Texas, said there's "deep disappointment in both political parties" in the Lone Star State.
The fifth plenum comes against a backdrop of years of purges that have had some analysts wondering if the issue is corruption or a lack of loyalty
When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he pledged to stamp out corruption all through the ranks of the Communist party. More than a decade later, the pace of investigations has not slowed. Last year, China’s disciplinary authorities opened investigations into more than 1 million people, including more than 100 officials at or above ministerial or provincial level.
As Chinese Communist party (CCP) officials kick off an important meeting this week, discipline – and party loyalty – is high on the agenda. For those who try to read the tea leaves of elite Chinese politics, concern about the apparent lack of discipline is dominating CCP discussions.
Speaking of games, if you’ve ever heard anything about or even played Sonic ’06, you know this wasn’t the most polished entry in the hedgehog’s franchise. In fact, it’s probably one of the worst, and considering the average quality of Sonic games, that’s quite an achievement. The team that’s working on decompiling the game to make it run on the PC obviously had to dive deep into the game’s inner workings, and the process learned a lot about why, exactly, the game is so notoriously bad.
It really makes you wonder what exactly went wrong? If you look at what limited footage we have of beta content, we can see many effects that aren’t present in the final game. Kingdom Valley had full bump maps, Castle Town had more complex geometry and plants, and New City’s collision implies a very different building layout at some point in development.
It turns out, much of the cut content is actually still in the game, but is simply not enabled for performance reasons in vanilla. Even with the cut-back visuals, the game struggles to reach target FPS on real hardware. It’s not surprising that given the crunch Sonic Team were under to get the game out the door, these features were among the first to go.
The article details what, exactly, was turned off for the final release, and it’s quite an interesting read. Of course, the team intends to try and address many of these issues, and they think they can push the game and its engine to much greater heights.
When thinking about impressive technical achievements in retro games, most people will first point to graphical milestones set by action games like Doom or Quake. Rightfully so, but at least I am personally far more impressed by the early examples of the city builder genre. Simulating whole economies on a large scale with a fraction of today’s power seems impossible if modern builder games even struggle on modern machines.
Of course this didn’t stop developers in the past to develop and run city builder games on significantly weaker hardware. The original SimCity for example lists Intel’s 386SX as the CPU in it’s system requirements. A CPU which at the time of it’s launch ran at magnificent 16 MHz.
What’s even more impressive are some of the other systems the origin al SimCity was ported to, which had even more limited hardware than a 386SX. The Super Nintendo got a SimCity port, which even included fun extras like a Mario statue and Bowser taking up the mantle of the Godzilla disaster, and additional systems the PC version didn’t have. Hell, they even worked on a port to the NES, but it was cancelled and thought lost, until a relatively complete and working copy was discovered in 2017. Even this NES version contained features not available in the PC version.
Hardware limitations really did breed a lot of innovation back in those days, and sometimes I wonder if programmers and developers could benefit from tasking themselves with working within such limitations today, if only to become a bit more prudent with resources.
With 100% of votes counted the 80-year-old leftist received 4.4m votes more than Bolsonaro, with a 51.79% share to his 45-year-old rival’s 48.21%. However, soon after Brazil’s electoral authority confirmed Lula’s victory, Bolsonaro refused to concede defeat and asked for the results to be annulled.
After a shock defeat in the first round, the incumbent Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,has turned the election around to win the runoff.
Brazil’s president is elected purely by the popular vote. A winning candidate needs one more vote than 50% of votes cast; there is no role for the parliament and no electoral college.
"As of today in systemd Git it's now possible for the systemd programs to be written in the Rust programming language as an alternative to C," reports Phoronix:
Core systemd code like the systemd library doesn't yet support Rust code, but for the various systemd programs / leaf components there is now support for using Rust... The new systemd-keyring-setup utility in Rust is used for provisioning keyrings and enrolling X.509 certificates into the kernel's dm-verity / fs-verity / BPF keyrings during the boot process while dealing them afterward. This systemd-keyring-setup code hasn't been merged yet but is expected soon now that the Rust infrastructure has landed. Originally it was all part of a single big commit before being split-up for the Rust enablement, systemd-keyring-setup, and other preparations for this new component.
Systemd developers aren't planning on porting existing C code to Rust, all the Rust code is built with Meson [no Cargo usage], and C linkage only is mandated.
Systemd Rust components come out slightly larger than C with a test program being 32KB compared to 20KB for its C twin. For now at least the systemd Rust support is optional and toggled by the -Drust= Meson option with it being auto by default.
Vučić’s 12-year reign looks to have been ended by record turnout of voters in election provoked by student-led protests
The long-serving leader of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, has conceded defeat, ushering in a seismic political shift after a historic election that saw the increasingly authoritarian leader pitted against a student-led movement that had spent two years protesting against his government.
Vučić pointed to preliminary results that suggested voters had overwhelmingly backed the students, potentially giving them a majority in the country’s 250-seat parliament.
The latest turnout projection by Ipsos/Cesid suggests a turnout of 60.8% by 5pm local time (4pm UK), with three hours still to go until the polling stations close.
That’s more than 13 percentage points higher than in 2023, and would be the highest turnout since mid-2000s.
“What hasn’t motivated me? There isn’t a single reason I could give that would keep me from showing upat my polling station at 6:20 in the morning.”
From the student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley:
Richard Borcherds, a UC Berkeley professor and Fields medalist, no longer grades his students' homework. After seeing how many of his students used AI to consistently receive top scores, he felt there was "no point" in paying readers to grade for correctness in homework, as AI use is now unavoidable.
Borcherds revealed this in a sit-down interview Tuesday, following OpenAI's announcement that AI agents apparently solved one of mathematics' most difficult unsolved problems, the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. "If AI continues to improve at present rate, then, in a few years, there'll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can't do better," Borcherds said.
Borcherds said he currently grades on completion if a student hands in their homework. He admitted that it is "not a very good system," but at the moment, he has no alternative... Campus has tried several AI detection tools, including Turnitin and Rumi, but have determined that these tools aren't adequate enough to be standardized on campus.
The article points out that at the university, each class's AI policy "is up to the discretion of faculty."
President Trump went to extraordinary lengths for Tina Peters, a former election official convicted of helping to breach the very voting system she swore to protect.
Australia placed restrictions on social media for under-16s. But the government says Big Tech is dragging its feet on compliance — and many teens are still on the platforms.
When immigrants can't be deported to their home countries, the U.S. sometimes sends them to other countries. But some deportees end up in places where U.S. judges have ruled they will likely be persecuted.
A Texas dad was deported to Ghana, where he says local officials forced him onto a flight to Mali. The problem? A U.S. judge had ruled he couldn't be sent to Mali because the country is unsafe for him.
Tina Peters, an election conspiracy theorist who supported President Trump's voting fraud claims, had her Colorado prison sentence commuted by Gov. Jared Polis after a White House pressure campaign.
Australia, concerned over social media's impact on kids, placed restrictions for children under 16 on many major platforms. It's too soon to say if the law's working, but it's now a global test case.
Trump again congratulated Ohio senator’s rear end before his cheeky comment about rapper being ‘hard to miss’
Donald Trump reiterated his apparent love for buxom bums during a rally in Michigan on Sunday where he encouraged the crowd to compliment rapper Nicki Minaj’s behind.
Trump’s cheeky comments about Minaj’s derriere came as he explained his recent observation on the Republican Ohio senator Jon Husted’s rear end. Earlier in October, Trump said of the former college football player: “I don’t do this with men very often. I started examining his body, because I didn’t know he was a great athlete. And I looked and I watched up and down. I looked at his ass and I looked at the whole – and then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands. He’s got these, like, claws.
Downing Street will allocate a further £432m in this week’s budget, bringing total funding for finding a ‘lasting solution’ to nearly £900m
Andy Burnham is to double spending on ending rough sleeping to almost £900m by the end of the current parliament, as he steps up efforts to get people off the streets by Christmas.
The prime minister has pledged to offer every rough sleeper in England a safe route off the streets or wider support as a central part of his premiership.
Man aged 60 and another in his 20s killed by falling trees in Scotland and London as Met Office reports gusts of up to 84mph
Two people have been killed and more than 160,000 properties have been left without power as Storm Boelo continues to batter the UK.
Two men, one aged 60 and the other in his 20s, were killed by falling trees on Sunday, police said. The 60-year-old died in south-west Scotland while the man in his 20s was killed in London.
BeamFS creator Aurelien Desbrieres is not calling for a merge, but is requesting feedback on an 18-patch proposal that takes the place of FTRFS, an earlier filesystem he proposed in April.
The Linux/Open Source blog It's FOSS reports:
Filesystems that can repair damage, like Btrfs and ZFS, usually do it by falling back on a spare copy of the data. BeamFS skips that and stores Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes inside every block. Every read gets checked against those codes, and small amounts of damage are corrected before the data reaches the application. If the filesystem can tell the damage is beyond repair, the read fails with an error instead of returning the wrong bytes...
In his technical report, ext4 and ext3 returned wrong data without any error, while Btrfs refused to read the file. BeamFS returned the correct file every time except once, when a flip hit a pointer to the file's data and it refused the read.
"Aurelien says he used Anthropic's Claude to write the code, the tool that checks the patches, and the cover letter..."
Jaxon Smith-Njigba caught nine passes for 150 yards and a touchdown, and the Seattle Seahawks handed the Kansas City Chiefs their first loss of the season.
"Despite massive investments and widespread hype around AI , the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech," writes the chief economist at U.S. asset management firm Apollo Global.
He adds that "there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth... [M]ainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins."
VC-backed companies are spending more and more on tokens, but mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it. As long as agentic AI and token spending are confined to a small part of the economy, the macroeconomic effects of AI will be very limited...
The question looking ahead is whether, even as models become commoditized, mainstream corporate America can turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins. That may be harder than it sounds. AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment. Judgment depends on context, and the answer varies with which human or which model you ask. Perhaps most importantly, AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins.
The bottom line is that the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector.
More details from TechCrunch:
Apollo's Torsten Slok focuses on what he calls the S&P 493 — the S&P 500, minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — finding that profit margins and revenue per worker appear to be flat, with no evidence that AI is improving productivity...
Recent studies have also found that AI has yet to deliver significant productivity gains.
Lula wins Brazil’s presidential election; Trump says vote looks ‘rigged’: Early analysis from Chatham House expertsExpert commentjon.wallace
What does Lula’s unexpected victory mean for Brazil’s democracy and economy? How will foreign policy develop on the US and China? And what does this mean for the Bolsonaro family and Brazil? Chatham House experts provide insights.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, has been re-elected president of Brazil for a fourth term. Lula secured 51.79 per cent of the vote against Bolsonaro’s 48.21 per cent.
The victory was a surprise: Lula’s opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, led in the first round of the election held on 4 October. The result was announced after an unusual decision on Sunday by the country’s Supreme Court, which allowed polling centres to remain open longer than planned.
‘This, my fourth term, will be the best of any president in the history of this country’.
Defeated candidate Bolsonaro initially refused to accept the result, saying:
‘It is impossible to recognize the election results, given the circumstances under which things unfolded.’
A spokesman for Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party later said they accepted the result, but still had concerns about the election process. On Monday President Donald Trump said the election looked ‘rigged’.
Below, Chatham House experts provide analysis of the meaning of the result for Brazilians, the region and the world.
Eduardo Vasconcelos on Brazil’s Supreme Court Dr Christopher Sabatini on what next for US relations? Dr Bruno Binetti on Brazil’s China policy Vanessa Rubio Marquez on the left and right in Latin America Luis Miguel Castilla Rubio on Lula’s policies and Brazil’s economy
Lula’s victory and reform of the Supreme Court
Eduardo Vasconcelos, Academy Fellow, Latin America Programme
About 35,000 Brazilians voted after polls were due to close at 5PM on Sunday, most in the first five minutes as queues cleared. Only some 5,300 votes came after 5.05PM, when the Supreme Court’s two-hour extension could have made a difference.
Those few thousand votes may not have decided the election – Lula won by 4.4 million votes – but the extension of voting cost Brazil, as it gave Flávio Bolsonaro his pretext to question the result. Bolsonaro’s party has conceded defeat and Bolsonaro has refrained from disputing Lula’s victory. But he has still cast doubt on the process, saying ‘It was not me who lost, it was the system which won’.
On polling day, Lula’s campaign complained that buses had stopped running in several cities; Flávio’s team also asked for extra time in towns hit by heavy rain. The Superior Electoral Court was still weighing both requests when Lula’s campaign went to the Supreme Court. A single justice, Cristiano Zanin, extended voting nationwide minutes after polls had closed. Closed machines could not be reopened. In the same neighbourhood, one voter might still cast a ballot while another was turned away.
Zanin’s decision was the final act of a campaign season in which judges were called upon more than ever to set the terms of competition. By 21 October the electoral court had received 804 legal challenges over the presidential race, against 325 at the same point in 2022.
This has come at a time when the Supreme Court’s reputation is badly tarnished, after it failed to decide whether to investigate one of its own justices. Three in four Brazilians say its members have too much power. A record 48 per cent distrust it.
Brazil’s courts used extraordinary powers to protect the 2022 election from an authoritarian threat. After this election, the country now faces a new task. It must constrain the Court’s powers within ordinary limits, so that no single judge can change the rules on election day again.
Three reforms would help improve the Court’s reputation. Decisions that alter electoral rules or suspend laws passed by Congress should require the full Court. Justices should serve fixed terms. And misconduct cases against justices should be decided within set deadlines. Majorities of both Lula’s and Flávio’s voters back full-court decisions and fixed terms.
Lula may fill four seats on the Court by 2030. Each will need 41 Senate votes, giving senators leverage to demand reform. They must put aside squabbling to cohere behind voters’ wishes and compel reform of the system. Without it, trust in Brazil’s institutions may suffer even more.
While President Donald Trump claimed Brazil’s second round presidential election looked ‘rigged’ on Monday, other heads of state rushed to recognize President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s unexpected second-round presidential victory over conservative Flávio Bolsonaro.
French President Emmanuel Macron, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney all publicly congratulated Lula on his victory. Even Brazil’s more conservative neighbours joined the chorus, including Peruvian President Keiko Fujimori, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, Chilean President José Antonio Kast, and Paraguayan President Santiago Peña.
The White House’s response is not surprising. It had been counting on the election of Bolsonaro to complete its bingo card of right-wing presidents in the Western Hemisphere, following a period of sustained electoral success for right-wing candidates stretching from Honduras to Argentina. But Latin American regional solidarity and respect for democratic institutions and the popular will trumped ideology and alignment with the US.
Adding Latin America’s largest democracy and economy would have represented a major victory for the self-proclaimed ‘Donroe Doctrine’. Instead, public support for Lula’s re-election may demonstrate that the bloc of Trump-aligned and Trump-adjacent presidents may not be as strong and ideological as many thought. (Only Argentine President Javier Milei has withheld congratulations for Lula.)
After initially calling for an annulment, members of the defeated candidate’s team said the party accepted the results but questioned the conditions of the election process. Unlike his father, Jair, did in 2022 when he lost to Lula, Flávio seems to be walking back an outright rejection of the election, while still undermining public confidence in the election results.
Their questions over how the situation unfolded hinges on a Supreme Court justice who supported Lula’s Workers’ Party request to extend voting by two hours on Sunday. That request was made originally by both parties to Brazil’s electoral court – in order to accommodate voters who struggled to make it to the booths due to heavy rains, and others allegedly affected by limited public transportation. But the decision to kick the request up to the Supreme Court after the electoral court failed to respond casts a pall over the results – and further threatens the reputation of a Supreme Court already under suspicion for being politicized.
Brazil’s modern, transparent voting system will be able to demonstrate the results – for those who want to believe them. But for core Bolsonaro supporters, trusting the results may be difficult. Flávio’s father also claimed unproven fraud in 2022. And father and son have baked distrust of the judicial and electoral system into their political DNA, polarizing politics and society in Brazil.
In the end, how far Flávio’s team decides to take its claims of fraud may depend on the White House and the US State Department. Both had a lot riding on a Bolsonaro victory. For Trump it would have been the crowning achievement for his support in the region, during this heavy year of presidential elections across the hemisphere.
For others the issue is more ideological and personal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, like many Cuban-Americans, saw Lula’s Workers’ Party as complicit in upholding the communist regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua. Creating a ring of conservative, anti-communist governments across the hemisphere to stand with the US against those regimes has long been a dream of Republican administrations and Cuban-Americans in Florida. Their perspective will likely also help decide whether and when the Trump administration accepts a Lula victory.
With conservative majorities in both houses of Congress, Lula will have a difficult time attempting to tackle the economic and fiscal reforms necessary to keep the government solvent and address its looming sovereign debt. But the biggest loser in the election is social trust. The country’s voters are now almost evenly split between Bolsonaro and Lula (only 3.6 per cent separated the two leaders). And popular confidence in the Supreme Court may decline even more.
Will Lula change Brazil’s approach to China?
Bruno Binetti, Associate Fellow, Latin America Programme
Lula’s re-election, following a campaign in which he declared that Brazil was ‘nobody’s backyard’ and denounced foreign interference, will be welcomed in Beijing.
China retains a close partner in Latin America’s largest economy, at a time when most countries in the region have moved closer to the Trump administration. Lula shares China’s commitment to a multipolar international order with a stronger role for the Global South. That includes efforts within BRICS to reduce reliance on the US dollar in international trade, reform global financial institutions and expand climate finance for developing countries.
This partnership is underpinned by strong economic ties – ties so important they would have endured a Bolsonaro victory. China has been Brazil’s largest trading partner since 2009, driven by Brazilian exports of soybeans, iron ore and crude oil. In 2025, Brazilian exports to China reached $100 billion, compared with $38 billion to the US. This makes continued engagement with Beijing a priority for the powerful agribusiness sector, which is well represented in Congress and traditionally aligned with Bolsonaro and the political right.
Brazil was…the world’s largest recipient of Chinese investment in 2025.
Brazil was also the world’s largest recipient of Chinese investment in 2025, with Chinese firms expanding their presence in electricity infrastructure, manufacturing and mining. In the automotive sector, BYD and Great Wall Motor have established electric vehicle production facilities in Brazil, and Lula is pushing Chinese manufacturers to use more local suppliers and create jobs.
Brazil-China relations are likely to deepen during Lula’s fourth term, especially if the Trump administration continues to impose tariffs and other trade restrictions on Brazil.
Yet Lula is the ultimate pragmatist. He has always sought to maintain good relations with competing powers. Brazil and the US are already discussing a potential trade agreement that could include cooperation on critical minerals, a top priority for Washington as it tries to reduce dependence on China.
With the world’s second-largest rare-earth reserves, Lula is open to investment from both China and the US, provided it helps Brazil develop its own processing industries and move up the value chain,
What does this result mean for the left and right in Latin America?
Vanessa Rubio Marquez, Associate Fellow, Latin America Programme
With Lula’s clear victory in the presidential run-off on 25 October, the two largest Latin American economies, Brazil and Mexico, will be perceived as the remaining guardians of the left, in a region that has largely flipped to the right of the political spectrum in recent years. However, the more relevant question is whether being left or right in the Western Hemisphere – and the world – still means what it once did.
Traditionally, the distinction between left and right was relatively clear. The left favoured a stronger role for the state in reducing inequality and redistributing wealth. The right, by contrast, placed greater emphasis on individual responsibility, private enterprise and preserving existing economic and social structures, accepting inequalities as a natural feature of society.
Today, these boundaries are being blurred. For instance, under Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil increased minimum monthly welfare transfers by 50 per cent (R$400 to R$600), reaching over 20 million families ahead of the 2022 election. And the reduction of the working week from 44 to 40 hours also took place under his mandate. Similar measures to protect specific sectors in society were implemented in Ecuador, where right-wing Daniel Noboa introduced financial assistance for vulnerable entrepreneurs.
However, the left -wing Mexican government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador limited pandemic spending and direct budget support to 0.7 per cent of GDP, compared with over 3 per cent across G20 emerging economies. And Chile’s left-wing president, Gabriel Boric, oversaw a 23.1 per cent real reduction in government spending in 2022.
Ever more, the extremes of left and right converge in pragmatic, immediate and populist policies. The more important divide is how governments exercise power, respect democratic institutions and protect individual freedoms while they deliver for the people.
A very interesting case of a tension between democracy and tangible results in matters that people prioritise is seen in El Salvador. President Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on gangs has brought major security gains, but at a cost to civil liberties. Emergency powers have been extended 55 times since 2022, with over 93,000 arrests and restrictions on due process.
Being the ‘remaining two of the left’ matters less than how the countries that jointly produce more than 88 per cent of Latin America’s GDP are governed.
Lula’s victory reminds us of a broader, more concerning regional trend: the defining divide is increasingly between governments that preserve democratic institutions and individual freedoms and those willing to weaken them for ideological, political and electoral reasons.
Can Brazil afford Lula’s promised spending?
Luis Miguel Castilla, Associate Fellow, Latin America Programme
Lula returns for a fourth term to a Congress where the right and the Centrão hold the larger share of seats, and where the Centrão is expected to hold over 170. The agenda he promised, which includes a university stipend, a new round of household debt relief and a larger housing programme, will be hard to achieve: the president must negotiate with a majority whose incentives lie in protecting its own share of the budget.
Fiscal rigidities leave little room for any of Lula’s agenda. Barely 10 per cent of the budget is discretionary. Congress will resist new taxes. That will leave cutting expenditure. But that will also not be easy, when legislators will defend parliamentary amendments and indexed mandatory items.
Interest payments neared 7.7 per cent of GDP in 2024 and 8.05 per cent in 2025, claiming resources that might otherwise have been spent on Lula’s social agenda. On the authorities’ definition, Brazil’s gross debt will reach 86.6 per cent of GDP this year and 94.1 per cent by 2030. By the IMF’s broader measure it already exceeds 97 per cent. Moving the central government primary balance from a deficit of 0.2 per cent of GDP in 2026 to a surplus of 0.1 per cent in 2027 – as Lula has projected – will be unlikely without an understanding with the Centrão on those amendments and on indexation.
Lula will argue that voters have endorsed his expansionary course, and that well-targeted social programmes can support growth.
Brazil’s credit ratings are in the BB range, below investment grade, reflecting this picture. Agencies will judge the new government by its early decisions on the spending rule and the amendments: a rigid budget and heavy interest costs will limit any improvement in risk perception. A downgrade would raise borrowing costs and enlarge the interest bill, further shrinking the space for social programmes.
Growth would offer a route that will not depend on legislators’ preferences. Yet forecasts of about 2 per cent this year, slowing in 2027, fall short of what the debt requires when real interest rates are near 9.5 per cent. Higher potential growth depends on implementing VAT reform and raising productivity. Both take years to materialize.
Lula will argue that voters have endorsed his expansionary course, and that well-targeted social programmes can support growth. A mandate, however, leaves the interest bill and the preferences of Congress unchanged.
A workable course will need to pair a credible spending rule with a medium-term debt anchor, with transparent rules on amendments that give the Centrão predictable influence in return for restraint. Room for Lula’s social agenda will then lie in the quality of spending and in faster growth, within the limits that Congress and debt impose.
Chancellor is in favour of North Sea project, but energy secretary has said she is leaning towards rejecting it
A cabinet split has emerged over whether to approve drilling at the Rosebank oilfield, with the chancellor, John Healey, in favour of the controversial North Sea project.
Peltola and her family sustained minor injuries after a driver struck the car transporting group to campaign stop
Mary Peltola, a Democrat who is running for US Senate in Alaska, and her family suffered minor injuries in a car crash while driving to a campaign stop on Saturday, her campaign said.
The family was on its way to the Alaska Federation of Natives annual banquet when another vehicle crashed into the one transporting Peltola and her family, her campaign said in a statement on Sunday. Peltola required medical attention after the collision.
(The Center Square) – Treasury screened $3.7 trillion in federal payments through its Do Not Pay system last fiscal year, across nearly every federal program. For all but 11, the law would not let it check a Social Security number.
Making innocent protesters liable for damage would be bad for rule of law and play into far-right hands, say opponents
Emmanuel Macron has been accused by trade unions of trying to curb the fundamental French right to protest as the government fast-tracks a bill to make protesters pay for damage caused by vandalism at street demonstrations even if they did not directly cause it themselves.
The French president, who leaves office next spring, has faced more than a month of protests in which high-school students have blockaded schools demanding a response to teacher absences, repairs to decrepit buildings and changes to the university applications platform.
Im looking at the cell voltage on floaty and under BMS IC I’m seeing T5 at -508. Idk what that means. Is that normal for X7s. Any insight in appreciated.
The blog Android Authority offers this TLDR:
Google updated its privacy policy to clarify that it could use information shared through Personal Intelligence to personalize ads. Gmail, Drive, and Photos content isn't used for targeted ads by default, but connecting them to eligible Google services could change that.
Digital Trends explains:
Google has long promised that your Gmail, Drive, and Google Photos content never helps it personalize ads. However, since October 16, 2026, its privacy policy adds a catch. The promise lapses if you let other ad-showing Google services use that content. That means using Personal Intelligence, an opt-in tool that lets Google's AI search read your connected apps, does exactly that (via Google).
If you ask Google's AI Mode where to eat near your hotel, and it can identify your hotel from the booking confirmation in Gmail, find the location in Maps, and then suggest a few places you might like. That's the helpful half. The twist, however, is that AI Mode can also show sponsored results. Google mentions that the personalized ads follow what the question and answer are about. So, while your inbox never goes to an advertiser, it can quietly shape the answer, which, in turn, shapes the ads.
Google's defense is elaborate. First, it says connecting the apps is optional. Second, advertisers can't see the information or content Google accesses in your Workspace apps (including your inbox and photos). Finally, sensitive topics like health are off-limits.
Ars Technica shares the response they got from a Google spokesperson: that Google isn't scanning your entire inbox to feed their advertising profiles, but if you choose to pipe your personal data into an AI search tool — then the ads Google shows you could be based on that information.
If you want to ensure ads never use your personal data in this way, you'll need to make sure Personal Intelligence is turned off. The easiest way is to access the Gemini settings for Personal Intelligence and disable the connected apps. These settings are also a few levels deep in your main Google account settings under Data & privacy > Personalization settings > Manage Personalized Recommendations in Search Services > Connected Content Apps. From there, you can disable connections to Workspace and Google Photos.
Authentic Brands Group says AI company infringed on rights of songs by the King such as Can’t Help Falling in Love
The owners of Elvis Presley’s music catalogue are suing the artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic for allegedly using Presley’s songs to train their models without permission.
Authentic Brands Group, the licensing organization that has ownership of both Presley’s music and likeness, is accusing Anthropic of infringing on the rights of 274 songs by Presley. The lawsuit, first reported by Billboard, was filed on Friday.
Roll-controlled acceleration and nose lift with FlightFins. What I haven’t replicated on VESC is how Apex responds to roll—heel-to-toe tilt toward either rail, not nose-to-tail pitch. With a little forward input, rolling either way feels like a gas pedal: strong acceleration without hanging my body over the nose. Alternating toe-side and heel-side lets me zigzag almost in place with incredible low-speed control. FlightFins are key to my technique. They let me lift one edge while pressing the other down, actively moving the board beneath me while keeping my body relatively centered. That control also helps with obstacles. Approaching a log, I can press my rear toes down, unload the front, and pop the nose up while maintaining momentum, rather than braking hard first. It feels like I can control nose height and forward drive together. I’m describing the combined feel of Apex, the fins, and my technique—not claiming to know the firmware’s logic. Can VESC reproduce that intuitive response through foot movements alone. I have a X7 supercharged I have spent a lot of time and miles… the torque and speed are unmatched but at this point it still sits because Apex is next level control and maneuverability and with the XL tire size I can’t even come close with the x7 off road despite the increased power.
YouTube's @vinievizzlevlog commented in a recent video that his og XR had been very reliable. Got me thinking about this GT. I ordered this when it came out, took possession in early 2022. I've had some issues after letting FM muck around with the firmware** early on but after weaning my boards off the connected OW app the electronics have performed flawlessly. Making some physical modifications has made the GT my hands down favorite of my boards.
**Admittedly riding in the firmest ride modes & cranking up all the sliders in Custom Shaping has helped them become rock solid rides.
The FBI is examining a controversial job offer made by longtime New Castle County Recorder of Deeds Michael Kozikowski to County Councilman David Tackett shortly before Tackett entered the Democratic primary against him, according to a report Friday by WHYY News. image created on 10/24 using AI.
Karen Hartley-Nagle’s earlier investigation raised questions about whether the $76,295 position offered to David Tackett existed in county budgets, pay plans or legislation.
WILMINGTON — The FBI is examining a controversial job offer made by longtime New Castle County Recorder of Deeds Michael Kozikowski to County Councilman David Tackett shortly before Tackett entered the Democratic primary against him, according to a report Friday by WHYY News.
The federal inquiry brings renewed attention to a June 24 meeting between the two men and to questions previously raised by former New Castle County Council President Karen Hartley-Nagle about the county position Kozikowski offered Tackett.
WHYY reported that an FBI special agent in the bureau’s Wilmington office requested and received an audio recording Tackett made of the approximately 90-minute meeting. Emails reviewed by WHYY show the agent requested the recording Oct. 1 and that it was provided Oct. 8.
Federal authorities have not publicly described the scope of their review, and no criminal charges have been filed.
U.S. Attorney for Delaware Benjamin Wallace told WHYY that Justice Department policy prevented him from confirming the existence of an investigation. The Delaware Attorney General’s Office also declined to comment. Kozikowski did not respond to WHYY’s latest requests for comment about the FBI’s involvement.
The federal interest follows months of questions about exactly what Kozikowski offered Tackett and whether the proposed county job could legally or administratively have existed as described.
The lunch meeting
According to WHYY, Kozikowski invited Tackett to lunch June 24 at Cosmos Restaurant near Newport while Tackett was considering whether to challenge him for recorder of deeds.
Tackett recorded the conversation.
During the meeting, Kozikowski repeatedly discussed a position paying $76,295 annually and suggested Tackett would be well-suited for it because of his experience dealing with the public as a councilman.
WHYY reported in September that Kozikowski described the job as a constituent service outreach position that he said he created by upgrading a vacant legal aide position. Kozikowski acknowledged making the offer but disputed that he had done anything improper.
His position was that Tackett had not yet filed as a candidate and therefore remained free either to consider the job or enter the race.
“He still had that choice,” Kozikowski told WHYY in September.
Tackett ultimately did not accept the offer. Instead, he went to the county elections office after the meeting and filed to challenge Kozikowski.
He later submitted a complaint to the Delaware Department of Justice’s Division of Civil Rights and Public Trust, accompanied by the recording and a transcript. Copies were also provided to the Department of Elections and New Castle County Ethics Commission.
The Department of Elections said the issues raised were outside its jurisdiction.
What Hartley-Nagle found
While WHYY’s reporting revealed the recorded conversation and the complaint, Hartley-Nagle subsequently examined county budgets, pay schedules, vacancy records and legislation to determine whether the position described during the lunch could be found in the county’s official records.
Her Sept. 15 report, “The Job That Was Not There,” raised several questions about the offer.
Hartley-Nagle reported that the Recorder of Deeds Office had identified five vacancies in a May 4 presentation to County Council. Three were funded positions carrying salaries of $37,593, $38,533 and $47,979.
None carried a salary of $76,295.
The position Kozikowski later told WHYY had been upgraded was identified in county records as Position Control Number 102453, a Row Office Legal Aide position carrying an anticipated salary of $38,533.
According to Hartley-Nagle’s review of the county documents, that position had been vacant since May 2022 and the Recorder of Deeds Office told council in May that it planned to fill it during the second quarter of fiscal 2027 — beginning Oct. 1, months after the June lunch and after the September primary.
Hartley-Nagle also highlighted the unusually precise salary Kozikowski quoted.
The $76,295 figure did appear on a New Castle County pay schedule, she reported, but that schedule did not take effect until July 1 — seven days after the meeting.
On June 24, according to her review, the corresponding salary on the pay schedule then in effect was $74,434.
Hartley-Nagle also reported that she could find no county classification carrying the title Kozikowski described and no ordinance creating that position.
Those findings do not, by themselves, establish that a crime occurred. They do provide additional context for investigators examining what was offered, whether there was an authorized position behind the offer and whether the proposal complied with county and state law.
A legal complication
There was another significant issue with the proposal: Tackett was already an elected New Castle County councilman.
Delaware law prohibits a County Council member from simultaneously holding another county office. WHYY reported that Kozikowski was aware lawyers would have to examine whether Tackett could hold both positions.
Hartley-Nagle’s review went further, pointing to Delaware law providing for forfeiture of a council seat when a member accepts another county office.
That means the questions surrounding the meeting extend beyond whether Kozikowski verbally offered Tackett a job. The recording and public records raise questions about what job was actually being offered, how it would have been created and funded, and whether Tackett could legally have accepted it while remaining on County Council.
From complaint to FBI review
Tackett and his campaign did not ask prosecutors to assume a crime had occurred. The complaint requested that authorities determine whether Kozikowski’s actions violated Delaware criminal law, election law or county ethics rules.
Kozikowski has consistently defended his conduct.
He told WHYY in September that because Tackett had not yet filed as a candidate, he believed there was nothing improper about offering him employment. After Tackett filed, Kozikowski said, the decision had been made.
The political question was subsequently settled by voters.
Tackett defeated Kozikowski in the Sept. 15 Democratic primary with 52.2% of the vote, ending Kozikowski’s 24 years as recorder of deeds. No Republican filed for the office, leaving Tackett unopposed in the Nov. 3 general election.
The legal questions remain unresolved.
WHYY reported that an FBI agent specifically requested the recording after reviewing information concerning the complaint. Tackett’s campaign provided it.
Neither Tackett nor his campaign manager said they know how far the FBI review has progressed, and WHYY reported that the agent has not subsequently requested an interview or additional information from them.
The involvement of the FBI does not establish that Kozikowski committed a crime. It does mean federal law enforcement has obtained evidence concerning a matter that began as an unusual conversation between two Delaware elected officials and subsequently became the subject of complaints, investigative reporting and questions about how a public job could be created and offered.
For Delaware taxpayers, the broader issue is also one of government accountability: Public positions, salaries and hiring authority generally leave a paper trail.
Hartley-Nagle’s investigation sought to find that trail.
The FBI is now examining the recording at the center of the dispute.
To Go Box
WHAT: FBI review of a June 24 job offer by then-New Castle County Recorder of Deeds Michael Kozikowski to County Councilman David Tackett.
LATEST DEVELOPMENT: WHYY News reported Oct. 24 that an FBI agent requested and received Tackett’s recording of the meeting.
BACKGROUND: Karen Hartley-Nagle’s Sept. 15 report, “The Job That Was Not There,” examines county budgets, vacancy records, pay schedules and legislation related to the position Kozikowski described.
STATUS: No criminal charges have been filed. Federal authorities have not publicly disclosed the scope or status of their review.
The Free Software Foundation's "EncryptFest" today covers both encryption and privacy. The free two-hour event runs from 13:00-15:00 Eastern Daylight Time (17:00-19:00 UTC), and includes:
— A discussion on "bulk surveillance, and how encryption protects personal privacy"
— A short video from renowned cryptographer Bruce Schneier.
— A discussion with Henry Fisher, the founder of Techlore and a digital rights activist
— A hands-on workshop on how you can encrypt your email using the FSF's Email Self-Defense guide "as a concrete step to enhance your data privacy"
You may join us virtually, or if you are in Boston, Massachusetts, United States (the FSF's home base), you can join us in-person at the Boston Public Library's Copley Square branch. You may also join us in-person at MakeHaven in New Haven, Connecticut, US, and meet our deputy director Sean O'Brien. Whether attending our event online or in-person, please register. It will help us plan ahead and enable us to contact you about other important details before the workshop, like what to expect and what to bring...
Bulk surveillance violates our fundamental rights and makes free speech dangerous. Email encryption is an excellent tool you can use to shield yourself from bulk surveillance. Encrypting your email is also a concrete step towards protecting your data from others whose intentions may not be honorable.
"As of 2026, the company has issued more than 60 million digital certificates," notes Wikipedia. But now, InfoWorld reports:
A certificate authority's decision to abandon the global SSL/TLS market is exposing a weakness many organizations rarely examine: their dependence on complex PKI trust chains. Following the compromise of private keys behind eight of its intermediate certificate authorities, eMudhra is exiting the global SSL/TLS certificate business and is offering customers Sectigo-issued replacements... [In a press note the company added] that data sovereignty and compliance requirements had increased the business's complexity and cost... The company said it will contact affected customers to replace certificates free of cost. It also said it will keep revocation and certificate status services running until every issued certificate has expired or been replaced...
Yash Kadakia, co-founder and CTO of Security Brigade, said that moving to another root operated by the same company does not necessarily address concerns over trust and governance. "The last thing organisations need is to migrate twice," Kadakia said.
But there's another concern, the article points out. "Analysts warn that enterprises may discover they have only limited visibility into the certificate hierarchies underpinning critical services."
Replacing a website's certificate may not address every dependency in an enterprise environment, according to Sakshi Grover, research director at IDC. She said residual exposure lies in systems that maintain their own trust stores and do not update on the same schedule as browsers. These include Java keystores, language runtimes, container images, mutual TLS configurations, proxies, load balancers, VPN and security appliances, and embedded devices. "The harder finding for many organizations will be that they can't answer these questions at all," Grover said, referring to where certificate trust decisions are made outside browsers and operating systems...
Grover recommended that security teams first identify where trust decisions occur outside browsers and operating systems, prioritising systems that accept connections from external parties and mutual TLS endpoints. Teams should then determine which systems can be updated to distrust a specific intermediate certificate or public key, she said.
Reuters reports:
Last week, Getty announced plans to file for bankruptcy, marking a major reset after its planned merger with rival Shutterstock collapsed under the weight of heavy debt and growing competition from AI-generated imagery. Getty said the affiliates of the Getty family and Koch Equity Development, which committed to provide up to $533 million in new equity, will own 100% of the company after the restructuring It's hard to compete against things like the DALL-E image generator.
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 quips that maybe "It's hard to compete against things like the DALL-E image generator..."
Actor’s storylines in the famous soap will be recut into vertical micro-episodes to be watched on phones – but her fellow cast members say they haven’t been consulted
The long-running Australian soap opera Neighbours is being recut with AI into a microdrama designed to be watched on phones, sparking a debate among the show’s actors and the industry over the wider implications of television archives being mined for new content.
RoseBerry Media, which specialises in making “vertical television” for phones, has repurposed original episodes of Neighbours for distribution on its Epis platform, using an AI-assisted production tool called RedSnapper.
"Scientists have transformed old blood cells into young brain stem cells, which continued to grow younger as they grew older," reports ScienceAlert:
Cellular transformations can be done in two main ways. The first, more circuitous route turns a specific cell back into a pluripotent stem cell, or an embryonic "blank slate," and then into a different cell type. The second method involves a "direct conversion," which skips the middle stage and directly transforms a cell into a different type.
"Using this method, we have directly converted red blood cell precursors into neural stem cells," summarizes Oliver Brüstle, the director of the Institute of Reconstructive Neurobiology at the University Hospital of Bonn...
The researchers used a virus to deliver two transcription factors, or proteins that attach to DNA to regulate gene activity, to get the cells to change their types. Then they used two genome-bloodhounding methods — DNA methylation measures and RNA sequencing — to track the resultant anti-aging effects and genetic behavior. By the 12th day after the viral "infection," the cells started showing their new identity, ditching their blood-like proteins and replacing them with the expression of neural-like proteins instead. Initially, the epigenetic age (the DNA changes accumulated over time) of the EPCs was highly correlated with the chronological age of their donors [but] the neuronal stem cells kept getting younger as they got older... Over the following 50 to 100 days, they kept de-aging, eventually reaching about 5 percent of the donor age, with the majority of epigenetic age-related traits resetting by around 50 days of the conversion process...
In effect, the converted cells became 60 years younger in 50 days, the researchers note in their official statement.
The researchers, from the University Hospital of Bonn and the University of Bonn, in Germany, described their methods in the journal Aging Cell.
Newark Charter football improved to 7-0 this season with its win over the Seaford Blue Jays, 20-0, on October 23.
The rematch of last seasons’ Class 1A championship game drew a big crowd to see Newark Charter football take on Seaford, Friday night.
Freshman Liam Eruncak gets the game started with the opening kick-off.
Patriot senior Alexander Burrows celebrates after recording a sack.
Patriot senior Austin Gbadegbe looks on as his blocks get set.
Gbadegbe is brought down by Blue Jay junior Sincere Harris after a gain of 17 yards.
Newark Charter junior Austin Ledoschuk hauls in a nine-yard touchdown pass near the front pylon. This was Newark Charter’s first score of the game.
Junior Lucas Eruncak (No. 21) celebrates with his teammates after recovering a fumble and returning possession back to the Patriot offense.
Gbadegbe scores on a one-yard touchdown run to give Newark Charter a two possession lead.
Patriot senior Chase Lednum dives on the football to recover the fumble for Newark Charter. The Patriots forced two turnovers in the first quarter of the game.
Gbadegbe breaks a tackle during his 43-yard touchdown run following the fumble recovery. The Patriots led, 20-0, late in the first quarter.
To read about the game’s action click here for the full game story.
Seaford sophomore Nasir Serpa looks for running room as the Blue Jays drive down the field in the second quarter.
Blue Jay senior Jahari Ross leaps into the air to bring in the 10-yard catch.
Patriot quarterback Chase Kennedy throws a pass out wide during Newark Charter’s first possession of the second half.
Blue Jay junior Devon Crawford brings down Kennedy in the backfield for a sack, stalling the Patriot drive.
Seaford quarterback Everette Burton moves around in the pocket looking for an open receiver.
Blue Jay senior Leshaun Allen navigates through the Patriot defense for a gain of 33-yards on a pass from Burton.
Newark Charter senior Cayden Anderson leaps over the defender to make the catch on the Patriots’ final drive of the game. Newark Charter’s final offensive possession in the fourth quarter consumed over six minutes of time. Newark Charter won the game, 20-0.
All photos courtesy of Dave Reeder. To see more of Dave’s work follow him on Instagram @bfr_photo
Note: please do not ask for any files here, these files can only be retrieved from one owns bms.
I had big issues this week going between sources to recover my xr bms fw. Well i finally got it fixed and will show you how to do it so you can recover things.
Whats needed:
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-Pickit 3 works fine, no need to buy the newer 100 dollar models.
- a bms for your xr (duh)
- mplab ipe 6.20 (anything higher will not work since the pickit 3 is obsolete)
-a computer with a stong enough usb port to power low voltage signals, 5v should be it. If your pc cannot handle 5v a cheap 5v data usb hub will do.
--------------------------
Lets go!!!
Download mplab suite from the main website. Look back into older editions till you find 6.20. (Grab a seat, its a big boy of a downlaod and install).
Once its installed open the mplab ipe (usually creates a shortcut... the yellow one)
When everything is up time to setup the suite, first photo is what settings are needed for the xr since its running a 1788 chip. Also, we need to enable vcc voltage in mplab. Go up top bar to tools- advanced- enter "microchip" for the password- power- enable power from picket at 5v.
After all this its time to wire up the bms. Using the 5 through holes on the bms start with the farthest right, the white arrow on the pickit should be on that far right pin (picture 2). Port 6 on the pickit is floating so dont panic. Do not cross any wires, One after another like in the photo.
Hit connect, you should see what i have in picture 3. If not here are some errors i ran into.
No vcc voltage- TURN ON POWER ENABLE IN STEP 3
power overcurrent- make sure your pinned out correctly, if no unplug and reset.
Connection failed- if you have pickit 3 tool installed this will overwrite mplabs fw on the picket. Go into the pickit 3 app, top bar-advanced- reset pickit 3 to mplab fw.
Undervoltage error- you will need a 5v powered hub or a seperate source for the vcc and ground pins on the bms (second from right is positive, third from right is negative).
Could not connect to target- could be multiple things...
Not pinned proerly or no voltage.
If its a newer bms its locked.
Your microchip has failed entirely and the data is good as lost sadly.
Do what you need to do, then write it. This part can be a bastard due too the old tool. Make sure you hit read before doing anything else, for some reason molab would never "blank check" properly and show a clean erase. It might need to be done multiple times to actually work. Testing a flash on the old bms eventually worked. Took me time but it got there. Just the downside of legacy tools.
Test and dance with happiness
I have not recieved my new bms and if i hit any new errors ill report back. Overall easy process if you understand stm chips. Let me know if you have any issues and i will try to help and remeber, i fail here allot wich means you don't have to 😂
Computer Weekly reports:
A Censuswide survey of 2,018 CIOs and senior IT decision-makers at large organisations in the US and UK for independent software maintenance provider Origina has found that organisations spend almost $13m on upgrades pushed by IT providers. On average, 28% of enterprise software budgets go on upgrades, migrations and licensing changes driven by their IT suppliers. IT leaders who took part in the study reported that their organisation would not have actively chosen to upgrade...
The research published in Origina's The Software Tax report, in partnership with Thinkers50, suggests these costs have shifted the balance of power between buyers and sellers. Customers exercise choice once, at the point of purchase. After that, control over the timing and terms of change passes largely to the IT supplier. Out of those surveyed, 78% agree their primary provider of enterprise software, rather than their own organisation, sets the timing and terms of change. A similar proportion said they would have no meaningful choice but to accept if a major enterprise IT provider changed its commercial terms. Some 76% said their organisation has very little real leverage in negotiations, and 80% said moving away from major IT suppliers would cause significant disruption...
Marshall Van Alstyne, professor at Boston University and co-author of The Software Tax, said: "Economists have studied this problem for decades: once a customer makes relationship-specific investments, the vendor gains leverage that no contract can fully anticipate. For CIOs, the lesson is simple: negotiate the exit before the entry. You don't have to leave a vendor to benefit from being able to."
The problem can be summarized succinctly, says Tomás O'Leary, CEO/founder of Origina and co-author of The Software Tax.
"The market has left some of the most experienced technology leaders in the world with little room to refuse, and that cost shows up in budgets, in engineering time and in innovation that never gets funded. We want to make that cost visible so customers can start to take back control of it."
When Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s long-ruling dictator, was toppled from power in the Arab spring protests of 2011, his downfall sent shock waves across the Middle East. It also helped change the face of modern Manchester.
Mubarak’s successor, the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, was a sworn enemy of the United Arab Emirates, whose rulers feared the advance of Morsi’s Islamism.
I’ve been riding for 3 years and had always hoped to have my daughter experience riding the beach one day with me. This summer she got hooked on riding and today was her first beach rip with me. There’s just nothing like it.
New York, NY — A former inmate who spent time with Jeffrey Epstein shortly before his 2019 death is recounting unverified stories the disgraced financier allegedly told him about President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton.
William Mersey says he spent more than two dozen hours with Epstein at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center while participating in a companion program for inmates considered at risk of suicide.
In a new TMZ documentary, Mersey says he asked Epstein for a story that captured Trump’s personality. According to Mersey, Epstein responded with an anecdote involving Trump, a private jet, a French woman and Atlantic City, claiming Trump once described himself as “white-trash adjacent.”
Mersey said Epstein then volunteered a separate sexually explicit story involving Clinton during a trip to China.
Neither account has been independently verified, and Mersey’s recollections constitute hearsay rather than evidence that Trump or Clinton committed wrongdoing connected to Epstein.
The White House rejected the implications of the report and reiterated its position that Trump eventually barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. Clinton’s representatives did not respond to TMZ’s request for comment.
Trump and Clinton were both socially acquainted with Epstein before his 2019 arrest, but neither has been charged with participating in Epstein’s sex-trafficking crimes.
America's Defense Department "has spent months quietly building an elite new tech agency," reports Politico, "to help covertly disrupt and sabotage foreign technology programs considered threats to American military superiority."
Information on the Technology Support Office, or TSO as it is called internally, is nearly impossible to find on Pentagon websites, and the agency is mentioned by name only in several previously unreported Defense Department historical records and memoranda. While the specifics of its work are highly classified, POLITICO spoke with 12 current and former U.S. national security officials with varying degrees of knowledge about TSO to understand how the agency came to be, the broad contours of its mission and why its operations are shrouded in secrecy...
[The Pentagon's Defense Secretary and Deputy Defense Secretary] established TSO quickly and without attracting outside scrutiny because they largely built the agency by reorganizing two classified Pentagon intelligence programs that have conducted similar clandestine tech-sabotage efforts at a smaller scale since 2023. But by creating an agency dedicated to expanding that work, the Defense Department is signaling its intent to ramp up a range of aggressive covert activities abroad — potentially including cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions and disinformation operations. Many of the people who spoke to POLITICO argued that the aggressive new initiative is needed to help the Pentagon counter foreign adversaries they say are harnessing artificial intelligence and advanced commercial technologies, such as drones, in creative ways that could erode America's military advantage...
While TSO lacks the legal authority to conduct clandestine operations directly, it works closely with senior U.S. military and intelligence officers to develop cutting-edge tools and strategies to disrupt adversaries' access to critical defense technologies — or subvert them from afar. TSO is staffed with engineers, special operators and intelligence officers, and its work spans everything from building bespoke hacking tools to planning elaborate deception operations that trick adversaries into installing faulty components — likely designed by TSO — in key foreign weapons platforms. TSO's overarching goal is to "buy time or stop adversaries from developing technologies" that would most threaten the U.S. military in a major conflict, said a former U.S. intelligence official who worked closely with the agency... A second former Pentagon official and a former U.S. national security official said the agency has told some defense contractors it's interested in offensive hacking capabilities. The former senior Pentagon intelligence official estimated that its budget for classified contracts alone is likely north of $1.5 billion.
They are seeking contractors on "the leading edge of technology," that official said, and hope to procure "a whole host of tools wherever your imagination can go."
Pentagon staff had been exploring the need for a new agency for over a year, the article explains. Creating a new agency with its own budget and procurement powers "would empower the agency to more quickly integrate cutting-edge tech from the private sector," Pentagon staff concluded, "and think more strategically about which foreign defense technologies pose the biggest threats across U.S. military organizations."
"Several people who spoke to POLITICO support TSO's mission but worry that the secrecy surrounding its work could embolden current Pentagon leadership to carry out missions that flout international law or funnel coveted classified contracts to political allies."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.
Los Angeles, CA — California officials are pushing back against the Trump administration’s attempt to scrutinize roughly 20,000 voters suspected of being noncitizens after preliminary reviews found significant problems with the federal government’s data.
The Justice Department has ordered counties to verify flagged voters within 48 hours and set aside ballots when citizenship cannot be confirmed. Federal officials say the effort is necessary to prevent illegal voting.
But Los Angeles County’s examination of about 200 names exposed substantial inaccuracies. Nearly 40% were born in the United States, more than 70% had no voting history, and more than 40% had already canceled registrations.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said federal officials initially provided names without explaining the evidence supposedly showing the voters were ineligible. Gov. Gavin Newsom accused the administration of trying to manufacture evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Federal prosecutors recently charged 28 lawful permanent residents with election-related offenses, but those cases represent a tiny fraction of California’s electorate. Available evidence continues to show noncitizen voting is exceptionally rare and has not been demonstrated to alter major election outcomes.
The dispute is now before the courts, with federal officials seeking authority to prevent flagged ballots from being counted while California argues that unreliable data could disenfranchise lawful American voters days before the Nov. 3 midterms.
Washington, DC — Elon Musk personally ordered restrictions on a military-grade version of Starlink used by Ukraine, reportedly disrupting battlefield communications, drone operations and air-defense missions during the war with Russia.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk directed the slowdown of SpaceX’s Starshield service last week. The restrictions reportedly prevented terminals mounted on fast-moving platforms from functioning normally, creating immediate problems for Ukrainian forces.
The episode has added to growing concerns in Ukraine and Europe about relying on privately controlled American technology for critical military operations.
President Donald Trump denied responsibility for the restrictions. Musk has said decisions affecting Ukraine’s access are determined by the U.S. government or military, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has insisted Washington has not completely withdrawn Ukraine’s access.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he discussed restoring full service with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and has publicly complained that the restrictions are hampering Ukraine’s defense against Russia.
The reported slowdown comes amid worsening tensions between Washington and Kyiv over Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure and Trump’s recent moves to ease some economic pressure on Moscow.
European officials have increasingly cited the Starlink dispute as evidence of the risks of depending heavily on U.S.-controlled military technology that can potentially be restricted during a conflict.
Fort Myers, FL — Republican candidate Byron Donalds repeatedly misgendered a transgender military veteran during a campaign event Friday, prompting an angry confrontation and criticism from people nearby.
The exchange occurred at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Alico Arena, where Donalds was campaigning ahead of the Nov. 3 election with support from President Donald Trump.
After the woman challenged Donalds, he referred to her as “sir.” When she corrected him and said, “I am not a sir, I am a ma’am,” Donalds continued, saying he was listening to her voice and still heard “a sir.”
The woman eventually walked away after responding with profanity, while other bystanders also criticized Donalds’ remarks.
The confrontation comes as transgender issues remain a prominent part of Republican campaigning in Florida. Donalds and Gov. Ron DeSantis have criticized drag events and gender-affirming medical care, while Donalds has attacked Democratic opponent David Jolly over his positions on transgender health policy.
Trump appeared at the same venue Friday to support Donalds.
The incident highlights the increasingly personal rhetoric surrounding transgender Americans in the closing weeks of the campaign, with Republican candidates frequently making gender identity a political issue while LGBTQ advocates argue such rhetoric contributes to hostility toward transgender people.
Syracuse, NY — A 66-year-old New York woman has been charged with illegally voting after telling federal investigators she only recently discovered that she was not a U.S. citizen.
Marva Cook, who was adopted as a toddler and grew up in Syracuse, said she had always believed she was American. While recently searching for her biological mother, she discovered a German birth certificate indicating she had been born outside the United States.
Federal prosecutors say Cook, a lawful permanent resident, nevertheless voted in the 2022 midterm election. She faces one misdemeanor count of voting as a noncitizen, punishable by up to one year in prison and a $100,000 fine.
Cook voluntarily surrendered but said she was shackled during her court appearance. Her attorney says no deportation proceedings are currently pending.
The Trump administration highlighted the arrest as evidence of election fraud. First Assistant U.S. Attorney John Sarcone declared that “voter fraud is rampant” in New York.
That sweeping characterization contrasts sharply with available evidence, including the administration’s own investigations, which have found noncitizen voting to be exceptionally rare and not remotely widespread enough to affect election outcomes.
Cook’s friends and community members said there was no intent to deceive anyone, describing her as a longtime community volunteer who genuinely believed she was a citizen.
Newark Charter senior Austin Gbadegbe breaks a tackle during his 43-yard touchdown run against Seaford. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
The Newark Charter Patriots defeated the Seaford Blue Jays, 20-0, on Friday, October 23, earning the program’s fourth shutout win this season.
NEWARK, DE — Newark Charter’s offense jogged out of the huddle and lined up in the pistol formation. The ball was spotted at the Seaford 43-yard line and the Patriots needed to gain 17 yards for a first down.
Quarterback Chase Kennedy received the snap, immediately turned to his left and stretched his right arm out to hand the ball off to senior running back Austin Gbadegbe. Gbadegbe took the handoff and ran to his left behind the blocking of junior tight end Austin Ledoschuk and sophomore left tackle Donovan Pray. Gbadegbe ran about five yards down field before being touched by a Blue Jay defender.
The abundance of space allowed the senior runner to evade a couple hopeful tacklers and rush the full 43 yards into the endzone, giving the Patriots a three score lead with a little over a minute remaining in the first quarter.
Gbadegbe finished the game with over 100 yards rushing and two touchdowns helping the Newark Charter Patriots defeat the Seaford Blue Jays, 20-0, Friday night.
“He’s a special player,” Patriot head coach Jody Russell said postgame. “He’s a really powerful, low to the ground guy and explosive when he gets the chance.”
Gbadegbe’s game-high 43-yard touchdown run not only showcased his talent as a runner, but the prowess of the offensive line he ran behind. The Patriots’ offensive line played a strong game creating running lanes for their offense — which ran for over 150 yards — and holding the Blue Jays’ defensive pass rush to two sacks.
Newark Charter’s defensive line created a similar impact on the other side of the ball.
Patriot defenders Alexander Burrows (No. 9) and Jayden Roberts (No. 58) combine for a sack. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder
The Patriots’ defensive line generated multiple pressures throughout the night and earned four sacks as a result of that pressure. Two of those sacks came on Seaford’s second drive of the game and the success of the Patriots’ defensive lineman allowed the rest of the Newark Charter defense to swarm to the ball for quick tackles.
“They just have a motor. They don’t stop,” Russell said about Newark Charter’s offensive and defensive lines. “They play together. They’re not the biggest guys in the world, but they’re fast, they’re quick, their speed really, you know, sets them apart from other teams.”
Newark Charter’s aggressive defense also generated a pair of turnovers that resulted in Gbadegbe’s two touchdowns. Both scores came on runs. The first was a one-yard run up the middle and the second was his 43-yard dash down the left sideline. Newark Charter’s first touchdown was a nine-yard pass from Kennedy to Ledoschuk on the Patriots’ second offensive possession of the game. Ledoschuk leaped over the Blue Jay defender to make the touchdown grab near the front right pylon.
“I’m on the backside and this week they said I was gonna get the ball and I definitely did get the ball,” Ledoschuk said with a smile postgame.
Newark Charter junior Austin Ledoschuk hauls in a nine-yard touchdown pass near the front pylon. Photo Credit: Dave Reeder.
Neither offense could get rolling in the second half, but the Blue Jays moved the ball well with quick throws from senior quarterback Everette Burton. Burton completed six passes in the half for 66 yards through the air. The Patriots run game continued to play well and helped the offense put together time consuming drives that limited the number of possessions the Blue Jays’ offense had.
Newark Charter’s win improves their record to 7-0 this season and completes an unresolved mission from a year ago.
The Patriots lost three games in their inaugural varsity season last year. One came against the Odessa Ducks whom the Patriots beat this season, 13-0. The other two were at the hands of the Blue Jays. Seaford defeated Newark Charter, 33-7, during the 2025 regular season and 21-20 in an overtime victory to claim the Class 1A championship title.
“We’ve been preparing for this game, we’ve had this game marked for like a year now and it just feels great to come out and beat these guys,” Ledoschuk said.
The Patriots seem poised to return to the Class 1A championship game and will try to continue their strong season against Early College School on October 30. The game will be played at Early College and start at 6:00 p.m.
Seaford’s next matchup will be against an out of state opponent — Washington High School from Maryland — and begin at 6:00 p.m. on October 30. The game will be played at Seaford High School.
This story was updated with pictures from the game courtesy of Dave Reeder.
I did not expect how much stability fins on the board give you, insane! Topped my top speed (which is still only 28 kmh 😄). By the way, I mounted those directly on top of what was there before, just needed longer bolts.
Washington, DC — Early voting is surging across several battleground states ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms, with Democrats showing particularly strong participation as both parties fight for control of Congress.
More than 23 million Americans had already voted by Friday, with turnout running substantially ahead of the 2022 midterm pace in several competitive states.
North Carolina has recorded more than 1.2 million early ballots, with registered Democrats accounting for a considerably larger share than Republicans. Democratic participation has also been notably strong in states including Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska, while battlegrounds such as Georgia, Texas and Ohio are experiencing heavy overall turnout.
The numbers offer Democrats another encouraging indicator alongside national polling that has recently shown the party leading Republicans on the generic congressional ballot.
However, early-voting data cannot determine the ultimately winner. Party registration identifies who voted, not which candidate they voted for, and Republicans have historically been more likely to vote on Election Day.
The unusually strong participation nevertheless suggests an energized electorate. Analysts point to concerns about affordability, tariffs, the Iran war, and President Donald Trump’s approval ratings as factors driving voter interest.
With voting continuing for more than another week, both parties are intensifying efforts to turn early enthusiasm into actual electoral gains.
Hey everybody, just wanted to inform you that my new board that I just put $3500 into which is my dream board ghosted on me and totaled itself. I just bought new rails and battery and put all the stuff on and my first ride on Wednesday. I got off of it and it ghosted on me and went into a dumpster and totaled it I I’ve had a horrible day I wanna die.(not actually I would never do anything to hurt myself)
Also, if anyone has any WTF rails that they’re wanting to get rid of or any rails in general, that would be very helpful
Phoenix, AZ — Arizona officials have ended a lawsuit after Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap restored voting rights to 25 U.S. citizens who had been incorrectly flagged as potential noncitizens.
The dispute centered on the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, known as SAVE, which the Trump administration has expanded for use in checking voter citizenship status. The system has previously produced false matches involving U.S. citizens.
Heap initially identified 207 voters he believed might be noncitizens and referred their information to prosecutors. Of 60 who had actually voted, a review by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office found that 52 were citizens and only eight were noncitizens.
Twenty-five citizens nevertheless had their registrations moved to “non eligible” status, preventing them from voting unless they produced additional citizenship documentation.
After a judge ordered mediation Friday, the necessary documents were provided and Heap restored all 25 voters to active status. Ballots were also issued to those enrolled in the county’s early-voting list.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said litigation should not have been necessary to restore their rights. Heap countered that his office acted once legally sufficient documentation was provided.
Republican Maricopa County Supervisor Tom Galvin also criticized Heap, accusing him of wrongly branding citizens as noncitizens before reversing course months later.
Weird noise when I deaccelerate quickly and speed up again, started noticing a month ago, has gotten worse. Is this normal or should I be concerned? Any ideas on why?
Pintv kit from float wheel on my pint x still going strong after 2301 miles , only issue I ran into was the XT connector came loose on the battery , that’s it !
i’ve been trying to find a tire replacement for my Onewheel+ XR that I bought in 2021. I have about 1200 miles on the stock Vega tire and it’s not holding air anymore. I have to inflate it back to 20 psi every time I wanna ride it.
I’ve been checking the float life website for stock on the Onewheel+ XR compatible Enduro mid compound tire but it never seems to be in stock. I’ve already emailed the team with support team is not helpful. They keep telling me to use the notify one available button, even though I’ve already relayed to them that the notifications do not work. I emailed them a second time and got the same CSR giving me the same canned email response to use the notifications that I’ve told him three weeks prior don’t work so I’ve given up.
is there a different recommendation now on a replacement tire that has the same versatility as the Enduro tire does?
e: let me also preface that i live in inner city chicago. i use my onewheel to ride my dogs around at 5 mph on the streets, sidewalks and paved trails. i don’t do dirt and im not doing speed. don’t give me your recs for trail riding.
i’m just looking for a durable tire that can ride through a wet sidewalk without slipping and can grip a bit of dirt when i have to take the grass because of a fucked up sidewalk.
Washington, DC — Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly created and posted an unauthorized State Department press release announcing her new role as a senior adviser, raising fresh questions about how her transition inside the Trump administration was handled.
Politico reported Friday that two people familiar with Noem’s State Department role said the statement she posted on X was never approved by the department. One source said Noem “went rogue and created a fake letterhead to post on X.” Noem and the State Department did not respond to Politico’s requests for comment.
The statement said Noem’s six-month appointment as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas had ended and that she remained at the department as a senior adviser.
The underlying job change itself appears to be real. A State Department official told CBS News a day earlier that Noem’s envoy status had expired and that she was now advising Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau while continuing work on the same regional security portfolio.
Noem was moved to the envoy role in March after President Donald Trump replaced her as homeland security secretary with Markwayne Mullin.
The dispute therefore centers not on whether Noem remains employed by the administration, but on whether she improperly presented an unofficial statement as an authorized State Department release.
Hey folks, I did a battery module swap on my GT S Series. Everything went fine except for this plastic retention nut that locks the wire in place on the controller side. I never even got a wrench on it, but when hand tightening, on the last 2-3 threads it cross threads and starts to go to a diagonal. I tried applying inward pressure while tightening to no avail. I can’t see any issues with the male threads so assuming it’s inside the nut on the female side.
Any ideas on how to get it to tighten correctly? Alternatively, I could replace it with the piece off the bad battery module but I wasn’t sure if the connectors on the controller side were easily removable to slide them through the nut. Looks like there is a locking assembly on the two prong power wire but looked like it would be easy to damage in the process.
Austin, TX — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, accusing the company of misleading consumers about ChatGPT’s safety and failing to adequately protect users from potentially harmful outputs.
The lawsuit, announced Friday, alleges that OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as a safe and reliable product while failing to sufficiently disclose risks associated with inaccurate or harmful responses. Paxton’s office says those risks are particularly serious for children and other vulnerable users.
Paxton is bringing the case under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices–Consumer Protection Act. His office argues that OpenAI’s safeguards have not kept pace with the rapid expansion of its products and that consumers were not adequately warned about possible harms.
The attorney general’s allegations include concerns about inaccurate information, emotionally manipulative interactions and chatbot responses that could reinforce dangerous behavior. OpenAI has introduced multiple safety systems and parental protections over time, but the lawsuit contends those measures remain insufficient.
“With the rapid advancement of AI technology, OpenAI has the responsibility to protect users and warn them of the many dangers of its platform,” Paxton said.
The lawsuit is the latest effort by Texas to apply existing consumer-protection laws to rapidly developing artificial-intelligence products.
The allegations have not been proven in court, and OpenAI will have an opportunity to respond to the state’s claims.
An ad from the campaign of Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan in Alaska features a mother whose 22-year-old son died from fentanyl and who claims Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola took contributions from “liberals [who] opened our borders to the drug cartels” and then “voted with them against securing our border.”
But the ad leaves out several important points of context.
After saying that her son died from fentanyl, the mother, Sandy Snodgrass, says that “lower 48 liberals opened our borders to the drug cartels.” While the ad suggests a link between illegal immigration and her son’s death, experts — including government officials — say the vast majority of fentanyl coming into the U.S. is smuggled through legal ports of entry, mostly by American citizens.
As for Peltola voting with Democrats “against securing our border,” Peltola voted against a Republican bill in 2023 called the Secure the Border Act, which sought a return to many of the hardline border policies enacted by President Donald Trump during his first term. But the following year, Peltola was among a handful of Democrats who joined Republicans in support of a nearly identical bill. Setting aside the impact of either party’s border policies, Peltola often bucked her party when voting on immigration bills.
Peltola, a former U.S. House member, is attempting to unseat Sullivan, the Republican incumbent. The Cook Political Report lists the race as one of seven toss-ups that will decide control of the Senate.
The ad features a direct-to-camera message from Snodgrass, whose son, Bruce, died from fentanyl in 2021. Since her son’s death, Snodgrass has become a dogged advocate for legislative policies aimed at fentanyl prevention and raising awareness of the dangers of fentanyl.
Sullivan was a co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill Snodgrass fought for called “Bruce’s Law” — named in honor of her son — which seeks to enhance fentanyl education and prevention strategies, including an interagency work group to improve the federal response to the fentanyl epidemic. Peltola, who came to the House the year after Bruce Snodgrass’ death, was a co-sponsor of that same legislation in the House. The law was folded into a bill that ultimately passed into law in 2025.
“My only child Bruce was killed by fentanyl,” Snodgrass says in the Sullivan campaign ad. “Lower 48 liberals opened our borders to the drug cartels. Now the same people want Mary Peltola to be our senator. Peltola’s taken their money and voted with them against securing our border. That is disgraceful and dangerous. Mary Peltola is liberal and weak. We cannot leave our children’s safety in her hands.”
As we said, the ad is missing important context.
When we asked the Sullivan campaign for backup for the ad, a spokesperson pointed us to Peltola’s 2023 vote against the Secure the Border Act, a Republican bill that aimed to implement many of the same border policies from Trump’s first term, such as restarting construction of border wall, increasing the number of Border Patrol agents, enhancing technology at the border to slow illegal immigration and ending the so-called “catch-and-release” policy whereby some immigrants caught in the U.S. without proper documentation were released back into the U.S. while they awaited an immigration court hearing (often to determine whether they qualified for asylum).
To be clear, while the bill sought to crack down on illegal immigration, opposition was not a vote for “open borders,” as text in the ad states.
The Secure the Border Act passed the House almost entirely along party lines (of those who voted, all but two Republicans voted for it; every Democrat, including Peltola, voted against it). But victory in the Republican-majority House was largely symbolic, as the bill never came up in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
However, through the remainder of her term in the House, Peltola proved to be anything but a reliable Democratic vote on border security and immigration issues.
Indeed, the following year, on April 20, 2024, when Republican leadership again attempted a similar bill to the Secure the Border Act, Peltola was among five Democrats — and every Republican present — who voted in favor of it. The End the Border Catastrophe Act was proposed through a fast-track procedure that required a two-thirds majority to pass. It failed, 215-199.
“No one can deny we face an ongoing crisis at our Southern border,” Peltola said in a press release at the time. “Currently, fentanyl flows across it and all the way up to Alaska, where it continues to tear families and communities apart. We must take real action to address our ongoing border crisis – that’s why I voted to pass this measure and stop cartels in their tracks.”
That same day, Peltola voted along with majorities of both parties in support of the 21st Century Peace through Strength Act, which, among other things, declared the international trafficking of fentanyl a national emergency and took measures to prevent its transport into the U.S.
Peltola also broke ranks with a majority of Democrats on border/immigration issues when she:
Voted on Jan. 17, 2024, along with 13 other House Democrats and every Republican, in favor of a nonbinding resolution denouncing the Biden administration’s border enforcement efforts, and “urg[ing] President Biden to end his administration’s open-borders policies.”
Voted on March 7, 2024, in favor of the Laken Riley Act — which required the federal detention of immigrants in the country illegally who are accused of theft, burglary, larceny or shoplifting.
Voted on May 15, 2024, with 53 other Democrats in support of a bill that would mandate the Department of Homeland Security to take custody of and deport any immigrant in the country illegally charged with assaulting a law enforcement officer or other first responder.
Voted on May 15, 2024, along with just 14 other Democrats in favor of a nonbinding resolution condemning the Biden administration’s border policies.
Voted on Sept. 20, 2024, in support of the No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities Act, which sought to cut off some federal funds for so-called sanctuary cities that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
“Time and time again, Mary was one of few members in her party to call out Joe Biden for his failures at the southern border,” a spokesperson for the Peltola campaign told us.
As we have written, illegal immigration surged to historic highs during Biden’s presidency. In June 2024, Biden announced a series of emergency policies designed to curb “substantial levels of migration” due to “global conditions.” Illegal immigration dropped dramatically for the remainder of Biden’s presidency.
At the time of Biden’s announced crackdown on illegal immigration, Peltola and three other Democrats in the House released a statement calling Biden’s orders “an overdue step,” and urging the president to do more.
“We’ve long demanded President Biden change course and empower the Border Patrol, and he’s finally acting and listening to the law enforcement agents in the field, like we’ve been telling him to do,” the statement reads.
The four Democrats implored Biden to return to the Trump policy of requiring immigrants to wait in another country while their immigration cases are pending in the U.S. And they called on Congress to pass legislation to reinstate the use of Title 42, a public health law invoked by Trump during the pandemic that allowed border officials to immediately return many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally, even those who sought asylum.
Fentanyl Smuggling
The ad ties Bruce Snodgrass’ death to the issue of migrants smuggling fentanyl across the border — it says “liberals … opened our borders to the drug cartels.” But experts say the vast majority of fentanyl coming into the U.S. is smuggled through legal ports of entry, mostly by American citizens.
In testimony presented to the Senate on Nov. 17, 2021, Diane Sabatino, deputy executive assistant commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations, said, “Most illicit fentanyl is synthesized in Mexico and like other illicit drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamine, large volumes are encountered and seized at our southwest border ports of entry. It is brought in by privately owned vehicles, concealed within commercial vehicles, and even on pedestrian travelers. Although much less frequently now, we also encounter fentanyl and other synthetic opioids in international mail and express consignment shipments.”
“Our investigations do tell us that the vast majority of fentanyl is coming in the ports of entry,” Anne Milgram, then administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said in Senate testimony on Feb. 15, 2023. (At the 1:25:35 mark.)
According to a Government Accountability Office report on Sept. 4, 2025, “[M]ost of the fentanyl, chemicals, and equipment used to make it are coming in from Mexico or China. About 80% of fentanyl was seized in the southwest border region. Most of the illicit drug is coming across U.S. borders in passenger vehicles. The chemicals used to make fentanyl are largely being transported via commercial vehicles like cargo trucks, ships, and planes. And nearly half of the equipment used to make fentanyl pills is being sent by mail. “
According to an analysis by the American Immigration Council, “There is little evidence to suggest migrants are bringing fentanyl across the border on foot—or that migration is linked to fentanyl at all. While some have speculated that high levels of irregular migration provide an opportunity for drug smuggling (on the logic that border agents are distracted), the data provides no support for this theory. Migration has risen and fallen with no correlation between drug seizures.”
Citing data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the report states that “the majority of fentanyl smuggled across the southern border enters not on the backs of migrants crossing the border on foot, but in the vehicles and on the bodies of U.S. citizens and other lawful entrants seeking admission at land ports of entry.”
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Tel Aviv, Israel — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made an unannounced visit to Israel this week and met privately with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just days before Israel’s Oct. 27 election, as Washington and Jerusalem continue discussing their military posture toward Iran.
Israeli officials confirmed that Hegseth met Netanyahu at Ovda Air Force Base in southern Israel, where U.S. aircraft and personnel are stationed. A Netanyahu spokesperson said the two discussed “threats in the region” and U.S.-Israeli cooperation in both offensive and defensive operations.
The timing drew attention because President Donald Trump had endorsed Netanyahu one day earlier, calling him a key partner against Iran and warning that the United States could otherwise be left to confront Tehran alone.
Hegseth said only that he was in the region visiting American troops and declined to describe his conversation with Netanyahu.
The meeting also comes amid renewed debate over whether the U.S. and Israel could escalate operations against Iran after the elections. Israeli officials said the discussion included regional threats, but neither government publicly announced any new military action.
Netanyahu has made his relationship with Trump a central part of his reelection campaign, while his opponents have criticized direct U.S. involvement in Israel’s vote.
Beyond Halloween, Delaware’s Oct. 23-25 weekend features live music, comic books, fall festivals, history, cycling, charity races and family adventures across all three counties.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Halloween may dominate the calendar, but Delaware residents looking for something different this weekend have plenty of options.
From the streets of Rehoboth Beach to historic New Castle, the Delaware State Fairgrounds and the farms of Kent County, communities are celebrating the final full weekend of October with festivals, performances, outdoor activities and family entertainment.
Runners and walkers also have several opportunities to support local causes, including breast cancer awareness, education and community organizations.
Here are Delaware LIVE’s top picks for Oct. 23-25.
Sea Witch brings three days of fun to Rehoboth Beach
One of Delaware’s biggest fall traditions returns this weekend as the 36th annual Sea Witch Festival fills downtown Rehoboth Beach with parades, live entertainment, shopping and family activities.
Running Friday through Sunday, the festival draws visitors from across the Mid-Atlantic for a combination of Halloween celebrations and traditional beach-town festivities.
The centerpiece is Saturday’s costume parade, beginning at 11 a.m. along Rehoboth Avenue. Elaborate costumes, decorated floats, community organizations and families are expected to fill the downtown streets.
Beyond the costumes, visitors can enjoy artisan vendors, live entertainment, seasonal shopping and local restaurants.
The festival also includes Sunday’s Sea Witch 5K Classic and one-mile Fright Walk, giving visitors an opportunity to participate in the celebration.
Blue Hen Comic Con brings pop culture to Harrington
Comic books, anime, gaming, cosplay and pop culture take center stage Saturday and Sunday as Blue Hen Comic Con returns to the Delaware State Fairgrounds in Harrington.
The two-day convention brings together comic creators, artists, vendors, celebrity guests and fans for a celebration of entertainment and creativity.
Activities include cosplay competitions, Artist Alley, interactive gaming, panels and workshops.
Families with teenagers, comic enthusiasts and anyone interested in movies, superheroes or gaming will find an alternative to the traditional fall festival.
Admission: $15 Saturday, $13 Sunday or $21 for the weekend.
William Penn Day celebrates Delaware’s beginnings
History takes center stage Saturday in Old New Castle as the New Castle Court House Museum commemorates the arrival of William Penn in 1682.
William Penn Day offers a glimpse into Delaware’s colonial history through educational presentations, historical interpretation and live music.
The day begins with a presentation by the Iron Hill Science Center about the Indigenous people and natural environment encountered by early European settlers.
At 2 p.m., musicians from the Suzuki Academy of the Delaware Music School will perform Baroque music reflecting the colonial era.
Visitors also can explore the museum and historic streets of Old New Castle.
Music lovers can spend Saturday afternoon in Lewes as internationally acclaimed pianist Awadagin Pratt opens the Coastal Concerts 2026-27 season.
Pratt has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center and with major orchestras across the United States.
His program, “America 250,” features works by American composers Florence Price, George Walker, Nathaniel Dett and Julius Eastman.
The concert offers a cultural alternative to the weekend’s crowded festivals and an opportunity to experience internationally recognized musical talent in coastal Delaware.
When: Saturday, 2 p.m.
Where: Bethel Fellowship Hall, 129 W. Fourth St., Lewes
Families looking for a traditional fall outing can visit Fifer Orchards near Wyoming, where Fall Fest continues Saturday.
The farm offers pumpkin and apple picking, a five-acre corn maze, outdoor attractions and seasonal favorites such as apple cider, cider doughnuts, kettle corn and ice cream.
This year’s attractions include an interactive Minion Maze and expanded children’s play area.
Fall Fest runs from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with visitors asked to leave by 5 p.m. Admission is $18 online or $24 at the gate for ages 3 and older.
Cyclists will take to the roads of western Sussex County Saturday for the second annual Broad Creek Bash in Laurel.
Organized by the Western Sussex Chamber of Commerce, the event offers 25-, 50- and 65-mile routes through scenic countryside, historic communities, and waterways.
Riders will pass through a region known for its rural landscapes, historic sites and outdoor recreation opportunities.
An after-party at Janosik Park will feature live music and food trucks, giving friends and supporters a chance to join the celebration even if they are not cycling.
Online ride registration has closed, but visitors can still check with organizers about the community festivities.
When: Saturday, with cycling beginning at 7:30 a.m.
Runners and walkers take to Delaware streets for weekend 5Ks
Delaware runners and walkers have several opportunities to get active this weekend, with races supporting breast cancer awareness, education and other community causes.
On Saturday, Wilmington Friends School hosts the 30th annual Smith McMillan 5K, beginning at 8:30 a.m. The event benefits a financial aid endowment honoring two former students. A free children’s dash begins at 8:10 a.m.
Other Saturday events include the Boo & Brew 5K and Eternal Rest 5K Run/Walk in Wilmington and the Boo-K It! 5K in Odessa.
Sunday brings two notable races.
The 10th annual Deer Park Goes Pink 5K begins at 9 a.m. at Deer Park Tavern, 108 W. Main St. in Newark. The event supports the Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition and includes a one-mile fun walk and post-race celebration. Organizers say all race proceeds benefit the coalition.
At the beaches, the Sea Witch 5K Classic begins at 9 a.m. Sunday at Grove Park in Rehoboth Beach. The event also includes a one-mile Fright Walk, providing another way to participate in the festival.
Whether running for a personal best, walking with family or supporting a cause, the weekend’s races offer an opportunity to combine fitness and community involvement.
When: Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 24-25
Where: Wilmington, Odessa, Newark and Rehoboth Beach
Learn more:RunSignup or individual race organizers’ websites.
Seaford celebrates the harvest season
Downtown Seaford will host its Fall Harvest Festival Saturday, offering an afternoon of food, shopping, vendors and community activities.
Organized by the Downtown Seaford Association, the festival brings residents and visitors to High Street to enjoy the autumn season while supporting local merchants and small businesses.
The family-friendly event is a good choice for people interested in a traditional small-town celebration rather than a Halloween attraction.
Explore the stars at Delaware Museum of Nature and Science
Families can travel through the universe without leaving Wilmington this weekend.
The Delaware Museum of Nature and Science will offer Star Lab programs Saturday and Sunday, allowing visitors to explore the night sky inside an inflatable, 360-degree planetarium.
This weekend’s presentations focus on myths, constellations and star lore from cultures around the world.
Programs are scheduled at 10:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. An additional ticket is required beyond regular museum admission.
For adults seeking something more adventurous, the museum also hosts Museum of the Macabre Saturday evening from 6 to 9 p.m., combining science and natural history with a Halloween atmosphere.
When: Saturday and Sunday for Star Lab; Saturday, 6-9 p.m., for Museum of the Macabre
Where: Delaware Museum of Nature and Science, Wilmington
Not every weekend adventure requires tickets or a scheduled event.
Delaware’s state parks, nature preserves and public trails offer opportunities to enjoy the cooler weather and changing fall colors.
Brandywine Creek State Park in northern Delaware offers wooded trails and views along the creek. In Kent County, Killens Pond State Park provides lakeside walks and wooded paths.
Farther south, Trap Pond State Park near Laurel offers trails around one of Delaware’s best-known natural areas, with its distinctive bald cypress trees.
Visitors also can explore the Wilmington Riverfront, where walking paths follow the Christina River and connect to restaurants, parks and other attractions.
Delaware LIVE’s best bets for the weekend
Whether looking for a full-day festival, live music, a community race or a quiet afternoon, Delaware has something happening in every corner of the state.
Best for pop culture fans: Blue Hen Comic Con, Harrington
Best for history lovers: William Penn Day, New Castle
Best for music: Awadagin Pratt, Lewes
Best for families: Fifer Orchards Fall Fest, Wyoming
Best for community involvement: Deer Park Goes Pink 5K, Newark
Best for science lovers: Star Lab, Wilmington
Best for outdoor adventure: Broad Creek Bash, Laurel
Best small-town festival: Seaford Fall Harvest Festival
With Halloween celebrations sharing the calendar with concerts, community races, harvest festivals, history and outdoor recreation, this weekend offers a reminder that Delaware’s fall season has something for just about everyone.
TO GO: Delaware weekend roundup
When: Friday through Sunday, Oct. 23-25, 2026
Where: Locations throughout New Castle, Kent and Sussex counties
Highlights: Sea Witch Festival, Blue Hen Comic Con, William Penn Day, Coastal Concerts, Fifer Orchards Fall Fest, Broad Creek Bash, community 5Ks, Seaford Fall Harvest Festival and Delaware Museum of Nature and Science programs.
Admission: Varies by event. Some activities are free; others require tickets or advance registration.
Planning tip: Sea Witch visitors should expect traffic congestion and parking restrictions in downtown Rehoboth Beach. The Saturday costume parade begins at 11 a.m.
More information: Visit individual event websites for schedules, tickets, parking information and last-minute changes.
Republican challenger proposes sweeping debt relief and economic reforms, while Democratic incumbent Sarah McBride emphasizes targeted assistance for working families. No debates, forums, or town meetings between the candidates have been announced.
WILMINGTON — Delaware voters looking for answers to rising living costs will have an opportunity Wednesday, Oct. 28, to hear a different approach to economic growth as Republican congressional candidate Dr. Joe Arminio presents his proposals just days before the Nov. 3 general election. As of Friday afternoon, the McBride Campaign has no similar public event on her calendar.
Arminio, who is challenging Democratic U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride for Delaware’s only seat in the House of Representatives, argues that reducing America’s enormous debt burden is essential to restoring economic growth and making life more affordable.
McBride, seeking a second term, has made affordability a central campaign priority, emphasizing lower housing, health care, child care and energy costs, along with tax relief for working families.
Both candidates recognize the financial pressures facing Delaware households. Their differences lie largely in how they believe Washington should respond.
Arminio proposes a different economic direction
Arminio, a Wilmington native and political scientist with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has built his campaign around what he calls the American Prosperity Plan.
He argues that excessive personal, business and government debt has weakened the economy, leaving families with less money to spend and businesses with fewer opportunities to grow.
His proposals include:
Debt relief: A proposed “debt jubilee” providing $92,400 per adult to reduce private debt, with government-backed bonds compensating creditors.
Monetary reform: Changes to the federal monetary system, including government-created currency intended to reduce dependence on borrowing.
Infrastructure investment: Establishing a federal infrastructure bank to finance transportation improvements, public infrastructure and affordable housing.
Economic growth: Pursuing policies he believes could restore the stronger growth rates associated with the 1950s.
Arminio contends that reducing debt would free household income, encourage business investment and expand economic opportunities.
His campaign message, “Relieve Debts, Stop the Wars,” also connects economic prosperity to reduced American involvement in overseas conflicts, which he argues contribute to government borrowing, instability and inflation.
The proposals depart significantly from conventional economic policy. Important questions remain about how the debt relief would be financed, its effects on taxpayers and financial institutions, and whether the changes could produce the growth Arminio predicts without increasing inflation.
Some of Arminio’s economic assertions also differ substantially from official federal statistics. He contends that the United States has experienced little or no meaningful inflation-adjusted economic growth since 2008, although Bureau of Economic Analysis data show substantial real economic growth during that period.
McBride emphasizes targeted relief for families
McBride has approached affordability through legislation intended to reduce specific household expenses while expanding economic opportunities.
She has co-sponsored the American Affordability Act, which includes provisions intended to increase affordable housing, provide tax assistance for first-time homebuyers and renters, reduce health care and child care expenses, and lower energy costs.
McBride has also supported expanded paid family and medical leave, more affordable child care and greater access to home-based services for seniors and people with disabilities.
Her campaign argues that reducing these expenses would allow working families to keep more of their earnings while helping more people enter or remain in the workforce.
McBride has criticized federal tariffs, arguing that they increase prices for consumers and businesses.
Her approach relies primarily on targeted federal programs, tax incentives and investments rather than the broad restructuring of the financial system proposed by Arminio.
Those policies also raise questions about federal spending, financing and how quickly Delaware households might experience meaningful relief.
Two approaches to a shared concern
For Delaware residents facing high electricity bills, expensive housing, grocery costs and growing financial obligations, the candidates offer contrasting economic strategies.
McBride emphasizes reducing specific household expenses, expanding access to essential services and using federal legislation to provide relief.
Arminio argues that reducing debt and changing the nation’s financial structure would create stronger, sustained economic growth, ultimately benefiting families and businesses.
Neither approach guarantees immediate results, and both would require congressional support to become law.
The candidates also differ in their foreign-policy priorities. Arminio has made opposition to continued overseas military conflicts a central campaign theme. McBride has also called for ending prolonged conflicts and has criticized the Trump administration’s handling of foreign affairs, although the candidates differ on American policy toward Israel and Iran.
Few opportunities to compare the candidates directly
While both campaigns have published their priorities and participated in public campaign activities, opportunities for voters to hear the candidates directly compare and defend their proposals have been limited.
Arminio issued a public challenge Oct. 5 for a Lincoln-Douglas-style debate with McBride, proposing an extended discussion in which both candidates could explain their positions and respond to each other’s arguments.
The candidates previously appeared at a Sept. 17 forum hosted by the Jewish Federation of Delaware. Arminio was removed from that event after misgendering McBride.
McBride also participated in an extended candidate interview with Delaware Public Media, discussing her priorities and record in Congress.
As of Oct. 23, Delaware LIVE could not identify an additional publicly announced debate or comparable candidate forum involving McBride scheduled before the Nov. 3 election.
That does not mean voters have lacked opportunities to hear from the incumbent. McBride has campaigned throughout Delaware, participated in interviews and outlined her positions through public statements and her campaign website.
However, a forum allowing both candidates to respond directly to the same questions would offer voters an additional way to compare their economic proposals.
Oct. 28 offers a chance to hear another perspective
Arminio’s Oct. 28 campaign event comes during Delaware’s early voting period, less than a week before voters decide who will represent the state in Congress.
The event offers an opportunity to examine proposals that have received less attention than traditional debates over taxes, federal spending and government programs.
It also raises practical questions: Would broad debt relief help younger families purchase homes? Could changes in monetary policy strengthen small businesses? How would Arminio’s proposals affect inflation and federal finances? And how do those ideas compare with McBride’s plans to reduce household expenses?
For Delaware voters, the congressional race presents competing ideas about how government can help families afford everyday life while encouraging economic growth.
Although Arminio’s campaign event is not a substitute for a debate between both candidates, it offers voters another opportunity to hear an alternative perspective, examine its potential benefits and risks, and make a more informed choice before Election Day.
TO GO: Dr. Joe Arminio campaign event
What: Campaign event featuring Republican U.S. House candidate Dr. Joe Arminio and his proposals for debt relief, lower living costs and economic growth.
When: Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026
Time: Not confirmed
Location: Not confirmed
Public admission: Not confirmed
Why it matters: The event offers an opportunity to learn about Arminio’s economic proposals and consider how they compare with Democratic incumbent Sarah McBride’s priorities.
Democrats may be ahead in the polls. But can they withstand billions in campaign spending by Elon Musk and other MAGA oligarchs? Will the election be safe from intimidation and interference? And even if they do prevail, what would a Democratic Congress actually do to obstruct Trump’s attacks on democracy?
For decades, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been sounding the alarm about rising inequality and the concentration of power in America. Having served in three presidential administrations, he’s become one of the loudest and clearest voices challenging Democrats for their failures in the Trump era.
Reich joins Intercept Briefing host Akela Lacy for a live conversation about the most pressing issues this midterm season. He is the author of numerous books, including his memoir “Coming Up Short,” out in paperback now. His media company, Inequality Media, has also made a timely new documentary, called “The Work in Progress,” exploring how everyday Americans across the country are navigating our democracy in these times.
Pictured L-R: from Dover Little League: Baseball Director Videll Slade, City Liaison Director Ed Coker, President Bill Kinsey, Concessions Director Mary Pritchett, Equipment Director Ralph Pann, & Del-One’s President & CEO Dan McCarthy
Credit union’s contribution will support repairs at Schutte Park after August storm damaged fields, fencing, lights and dugouts
DOVER, Del. — Dover Little League’s effort to recover from tornado damage received a boost from Del-One Federal Credit Union, which donated $3,300 to help restore the organization’s fields at Schutte Park.
The contribution, made in partnership with Visa as part of a community reinvestment initiative, comes after an EF-1 tornado swept through Dover in late August with winds exceeding 100 mph.
The storm caused significant damage to the Little League complex, including fencing, light poles, scoreboards and dugout roofs.
For Dover Little League, the damage affected more than a collection of baseball fields. The complex has served generations of area children, coaches, volunteers and families.
“The devastation caused by the tornado was felt across the entire community, and we know how much this Little League field means to local families,” Del-One President and CEO Dan McCarthy said. “We are proud to help restore a place where children can play, grow and make memories.”
McCarthy said the donation reflects the credit union’s emphasis on supporting the communities it serves.
“Community is built on neighbors helping neighbors, and we are honored to be part of that effort,” he said.
Dover Little League officials receiving the donation included President Bill Kinsey, Baseball Director Videll Slade, City Liaison Director Ed Coker, Concessions Director Mary Pritchett and Equipment Director Ralph Pann.
Del-One Federal Credit Union has more than $984 million in assets and more than 106,000 members, with full-service branches throughout Delaware.
To Go Box
What: Dover Little League tornado recovery effort
Where: Dover Little League fields at Schutte Park in Dover
Why: An EF-1 tornado in August damaged fencing, light poles, scoreboards, dugout roofs and other parts of the baseball complex.
Support: Del-One Federal Credit Union and Visa contributed $3,300 toward the recovery effort.
Learn more: Visit del-one.org for information about Del-One Federal Credit Union and its community programs.
Both projects remain under county review, and September emails identify an unresolved groundwater cleanup question at the car wash site.
HOCKESSIN, Del. — No new plans have been posted in more than a year for a proposed McDonald’s near Limestone and Paper Mill roads, while a proposed car wash at Yorklyn Road and Lancaster Pike has new filings this year. Both remain in the first stage of county review, and the county still lists both applications as “Active Plans,” according to county land-use records.
Both projects came up at the Oct. 7 League of Women Voters of New Castle County forum for the New Castle County Council District 3 seat. Delaware LIVE said in its coverage of the forum that it would report on their status.
Table 1 below lists the details for each project. Neither project has completed the county’s initial review. The McDonald’s proposal needs rezoning and a full traffic study, while the car wash still faces zoning, environmental and planning reviews.
TABLE 1: Proposed McDonald’s and Spotless Car Wash
Yes, from residential to neighborhood commercial; requires a public hearing and County Council vote (no date listed)
No rezoning proposed
Traffic study
Full study required by the Delaware Department of Transportation; none posted
Preliminary traffic analysis conditionally approved by the county; no full study listed
Current status
First stage of county review
Latest county review report:none posted
Still incomplete: 11 of 13 reviews, including traffic and zoning
First stage of county review
Latest county review report:Aug. 6, 2026
Still incomplete: zoning, environmental and planning reviews
(Source: New Castle County Department of Land Use project records and site plans for the McDonald’s and car wash, accessed Oct. 22, 2026. Table: Delaware LIVE.)
Requested exceptions to county rules
McDonald’s
Fewer parking spaces (32 vs. 50 required)
No landscaping in the required buffer along Limestone Road and the Route 72 connector
A narrower buffer by the trash enclosure (15 vs. 25 feet)
Spotless Car Wash
Fewer parking spaces (13 vs. 21 required)
Paving 2 to 7 feet from the roads instead of 25 feet
No landscaping in the required buffer along Yorklyn Road and Lancaster Pike
No street trees along West Lancaster Pike
Clearing or grading all of the wetland on the site
Clearing or grading all of the land in a county groundwater protection area
The car wash’s environmental review
In 2018, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) added about 32 acres of land along Lancaster Pike (Route 41) in Hockessin to its national cleanup list because of contaminated groundwater, according to its May 15, 2018, announcement. The same announcement said Artesian Water Company drew drinking water from wells in that area and treated it, and that the treated water met all drinking water standards.
The proposed Spotless Car Wash in Hockessin would sit in that same cleanup area. In a Sept. 16, 2026, email, the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) passed along the EPA’s statement that it could not yet tell whether letting rain soak into the ground at the site would affect the cleanup of the contaminated groundwater. The EPA said it was still mapping how far the contamination goes.
The developer’s engineer had written in August that the plan did not then call for letting rain soak into the ground. That option would depend on testing and the EPA’s confirmation that it would not affect the cleanup.
On a separate issue, the car wash site is also in a county groundwater protection area, where county rules limit how much land can be cleared or graded. The developer is asking for an exception to clear or grade all of the protected land on the site, according to the site plan. That request, like the developer’s other requested exceptions, would be decided by the county’s Board of Adjustment at a public hearing.
Learn more
For residents following the proposals, future public hearings will be important milestones. Both developers are requesting exceptions to county rules.
The county’s guide to the land development process explains how a project moves through review, from the first plan to construction. To see other projects under review, visit the county’s Active Plans page.
Minneapolis, MN — Minnesota officials say the Trump administration has stopped sharing critical evidence in state investigations into the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration officers earlier this year.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said the federal government is “obstructing our investigations” after cooperation that began in July was halted indefinitely.
State investigators are still seeking key evidence, including cellphones belonging to officers involved in the shootings, recorded interviews, firearms, bullets and shell casings, Good’s clothing and a gun taken from Pretti before he was shot.
Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was fatally shot by an ICE officer on Jan. 7 during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, was killed by a Border Patrol agent weeks later.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Moriarty and state investigators have sued the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security seeking access to the remaining evidence.
Federal officials argue the Justice Department has discretion under federal regulations to decide what information it provides to state investigators. Minnesota officials counter that they need the material to independently determine whether criminal charges are warranted.
Some evidence, including body-camera footage and officer statements, was turned over in July before cooperation stopped.
No criminal charges have been filed in either shooting.
Washington, DC — The Supreme Court has cleared the way for New Hampshire to fully prohibit voters from using student identification cards to establish their identity in the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
The justices granted an emergency request backed by Republican state officials and blocked a lower-court order that had allowed student IDs to remain available as a backup form of identification.
New Hampshire enacted a law this year removing student IDs from the list of expressly accepted identification documents. The secretary of state later issued guidance barring their use even as a secondary method of proving identity.
A lower-court judge allowed the law itself to stand but blocked that additional guidance earlier this month. The Supreme Court reversed that portion of the ruling, citing the principle that courts generally should avoid changing election procedures shortly before voting.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only justice to publicly dissent.
Republican state Rep. Donald McFarlane, who sponsored the law, argues that college-issued identification lacks the verification safeguards used for government IDs and said the restriction strengthens confidence in elections.
Opponents contend the rule unnecessarily complicates voting for college students who are otherwise eligible New Hampshire voters.
The ruling comes less than two weeks before Election Day and amid a closely watched Senate contest in the state.
The decision does not determine whether student IDs are inherently unreliable; it allows New Hampshire’s existing restriction to remain in effect for this election.
Iconic music legend, Suzanne Vega, whose hits include “Luka,” “Tom’s Diner” and “Marlene on the Wall,” will perform at the Queen Theatre and is touring behind her 2025 album, “Flying With Angels,” blending new material with the thoughtful storytelling that helped define the contemporary folk revival of the 1980s.
Singer-songwriter behind “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner” returns to the stage with a career-spanning Wilmington performance that proves her music remains relevant four decades after her breakthrough.
WILMINGTON — For music fans who came of age in the 1980s, Suzanne Vega’s songs were part of the soundtrack of a generation. But when the acclaimed singer-songwriter takes the stage at The Queen in downtown Wilmington on Sunday, Nov. 1, she will bring more than memories.
Vega, whose hits include “Luka,” “Tom’s Diner” and “Marlene on the Wall,” is touring behind her 2025 album, “Flying With Angels,” blending new material with the thoughtful storytelling that helped define the contemporary folk revival of the 1980s.
The 7:30 p.m. performance, presented by WXPN, will feature Vega alongside longtime guitarist Gerry Leonard, known for his work with David Bowie, and cellist Stephanie Winters. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
For Delaware music fans, the concert offers an opportunity to revisit some familiar favorites while discovering why Vega continues to attract audiences more than 40 years after releasing her debut album.
More than a voice from the 1980s
Vega emerged from New York City’s Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1980s, building a following with songs that favored observation, character and storytelling over conventional pop formulas.
Her self-titled debut album arrived in 1985, followed by her commercial breakthrough, “Solitude Standing,” in 1987.
“Luka,” one of her best-known songs, addressed child abuse through the perspective of a young boy. Its understated delivery contrasted with the seriousness of its subject, demonstrating how Vega could address difficult social issues without losing the accessibility of popular music.
“Tom’s Diner,” another signature recording, took an entirely different approach. Built around the ordinary observations of someone sitting in a New York diner, the song became internationally recognizable, particularly after a dance remix by British producers DNA.
The original a cappella recording also became part of music technology history when it was used in the development and testing of MP3 audio compression.
That unusual connection helped introduce Vega’s music to listeners who might never have experienced the folk revival that first made her famous.
New music, familiar storytelling
Rather than relying exclusively on her early hits, Vega continues to record new music.
Her latest studio album, “Flying With Angels,” released in May 2025, explores contemporary themes through the same restrained vocals and carefully constructed lyrics that have characterized her career
The album earned positive attention from music critics, including Rolling Stone and Stereogum, which praised Vega’s continued creativity.
The Wilmington concert is being promoted as a career-spanning performance, with the new album sharing the program with familiar songs including “Luka,” “Tom’s Diner” and “Marlene on the Wall.”
The accompanying musicians should add another dimension to the performance. Leonard has worked with Vega for years and brings experience from his collaborations with Bowie, while Winters’ cello adds texture to the singer’s understated arrangements.
Why Vega still connects with audiences
Part of Vega’s appeal is that her music has never depended entirely on the trends that shaped the pop charts.
Her songs tell stories about relationships, vulnerability, city life and ordinary experiences — themes that remain recognizable regardless of when listeners first encountered her work.
That approach also fits the strong singer-songwriter tradition supported by audiences throughout the Wilmington region, where intimate live performances and thoughtful musicianship remain important parts of the local arts scene.
Longtime fans can expect an evening of familiar songs, while younger listeners may recognize “Tom’s Diner” from its later remixes and reinterpretations.
The result is a concert that bridges generations without depending exclusively on nostalgia.
For downtown Wilmington, Vega’s appearance is another opportunity to see a nationally recognized recording artist in the more intimate setting of The Queen, where the focus can remain on the songs and the stories behind them.
To Go Box
Event: Suzanne Vega — Flying With Angels Tour
Date: Sunday, Nov. 1, 2026
Time: 7:30 p.m.; doors open at 6:30 p.m.
Location: The Queen, 500 N. Market St., Wilmington
Performers: Suzanne Vega, guitarist Gerry Leonard and cellist Stephanie Winters
What to expect: A career-spanning concert featuring “Luka,” “Tom’s Diner,” “Marlene on the Wall” and selections from Vega’s latest album, “Flying With Angels.”
Photo illustration by Emily Scherer for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Source images: The Texas Tribune, documents obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and YouTube.
Four years after North Texas home builder Scott Sherman completed a federal prison sentence for mortgage fraud, his new construction materials business received a $600,000 cash infusion.
The financial boost came from a blind trust set up to prevent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, from any overlap in their personal investments and their actions as elected officials. But previously unreleased records from the attorney general’s 2023 impeachment investigation show the trust was far from blind and did not shield the Paxtons from its business dealings, including the investment in Sherman’s business.
Before long, Wildcatter Sand Services and Grayson County Sand and Gravel, which Sherman built with his father, grew into a vast enterprise with various locations and subsidiaries. And along the way, some of those businesses stopped paying taxes to local governments, including school districts.
But as their tax debts stacked up, Wildcatter companies wired the Paxtons tens of thousands of dollars in the months leading up to and during the attorney general’s impeachment on charges of corruption and bribery. Paxton was eventually acquitted by the Legislature and is now in an expensive and tight race for a U.S. Senate seat against Democrat James Talarico, a state lawmaker.
While Paxton has been in public office for more than two decades, the blind trust he established upon becoming attorney general has largely obscured his business dealings. The Paxtons’ investment in Wildcatter through that trust offers a new, previously unreported look at both the limits of that trust and the attorney general’s financial association with the very type of business executives whose prosecutions he typically celebrates.
“In Texas, we fight fraud head-on and will not rest until every last corrupt actor is brought to justice,” Paxton said in a news release last year. In a recent social media post linking to a newly released campaign ad, he wrote, “As Attorney General, I’ve made big pharma and fraudsters pay billions.”
Doing business with a recently convicted felon undermines that narrative and erodes public trust in his role as the state’s top anti-fraud watchdog, ethics experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, said he would have thought “the attorney general of Texas would have the good sense not to be dealing with a convicted felon.”
“They’ll pay out their friends while they’re not paying their taxes, run up debt,” said Painter, who has been critical of staunch Paxton ally President Donald Trump. “But the question is, why is the attorney general of Texas dealing with those kinds of people?”
Wildcatter Sand Services had a tax warrant issued against it for back taxes after facing a lawsuit by local governments.Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune
Ken Paxton did not answer detailed questions from the news organizations about the Wildcatter investment or whether he knew of Sherman’s conviction. He has previously defended his business dealings, saying he follows ethics laws. A spokesperson for Angela Paxton, who filed for divorce last year, said that she was not aware of Sherman’s criminal history.
Sherman ran a homebuilding firm, Artisan Operating LP, when he pleaded guilty in 2014 for his role in a mortgage fraud conspiracy. The scheme involved artificially inflating home prices to obtain larger loans for more than two dozen properties in cities across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Sherman did not respond to calls made to his cellphone and company or to emailed questions.
Paxton’s connection to Sherman is the second revelation in recent weeks of the attorney general engaging with people charged with federal crimes. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Paxton celebrated New Year’s Eve 2024 in Dubai with two Americans who failed to return to the U.S. after being indicted months before on federal healthcare-fraud charges. A spokesperson for Paxton didn’t address his association with the defendants but said in a statement to the Journal that the attorney general has been “politically persecuted for years.”
ProPublica and the Tribune found the Paxtons’ investment in Wildcatter by reviewing records collected by impeachment investigators.
The records show that Ken Paxton had at least some knowledge of the blind trust’s investments, which could violate terms the Paxtons set when establishing the trust.
It would also run afoul of U.S. Senate rules, which Paxton would be bound by if elected, said Donald Kettl, an ethics expert and former dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. Those rules, Kettl said, require senators with a blind trust to have no knowledge of its investments.
“It’s reasonable to ask whether a candidate for the U.S. Senate has followed the ethics rules for financial reporting of blind trusts that would be required if the candidate became a senator,” he said.
In setting up the blind trust, the Paxtons agreed that their friend Chip Loper would manage the assets without consulting with them or taking “any instructions regarding investment matters,” according to incorporation documents. Loper did not respond to a request for an interview and did not answer questions about the Paxtons’ involvement in selecting investments.
Text messages that emerged during the impeachment probe, however, showed he and Ken Paxton discussed certain investments. Mortgage and deed records show that Paxton purchased eight properties between 2015 and 2026 and then transferred them into the trust.
The Wildcatter investment also appears to have slipped past the required firewall.
Angela Paxton served for years on a Wildcatter advisory board beginning in 2022. ProPublica and the Tribune could not find any documents describing her responsibilities in the role, which she described as “non-governing” on her personal financial disclosures. While on the board, she voted for legislation that shielded a subsidiary from certain environmental complaints.
The Paxtons also claimed more than $93,000 in itemized losses from Wildcatter Sand Services and Grayson County Sand and Gravel on their 2020 federal joint income tax return.
“That is proof positive that there’s nothing blind about this trust,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in legal and government ethics. If Ken Paxton “can report on his tax return a transaction, then he is not blind to the transaction.”
A Board Seat and a Vote
After Wildcatter received the cash injection from the Paxtons’ blind trust, Sherman went on a shopping spree.
He purchased a sand mine in the North Texas town of Denison and a concrete plant 40 miles down the road in Gunter, a city of about 2,000 residents. Both are in Grayson County near the Oklahoma border.
Neighbors complained to Texas environmental regulators about clouds of dust from Wildcatter and other companies located at the Gunter site that they said coated their properties for up to 12 hours a day.
In 2021 and 2022, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issued violation notices to Wildcatter Redi-Mix, the company that runs the Gunter plant. At least one dust-related violation was resolved when a road leading to the plant was paved in 2022, according to TCEQ documents. TCEQ did not respond to a request for comment.
Neighbors continued to raise concerns about the plant.
Angela Paxton joined the advisory board of Wildcatter Materials, which owns Wildcatter Redi-Mix, a year later. The IRS defines advisory boards as lacking legal and financial authority over companies. She was still serving on the board in 2025 as of her last financial disclosure.
Complaints against the company continued. At one point, Gunter resident Deirdre Diamond, a respiratory therapist and lead advocate for a local group created to fight pollution from concrete batch plants, reached out to her representative in the Legislature, then state Sen. Drew Springer.
Despite the TCEQ’s previous violation notices, Springer concluded that the neighbors’ complaints were “abusive” and filed a bill that he said at the time would prevent efforts to “weaponize the system.” He made similar comments in a recent interview with the news organizations. Springer’s bill allowed the TCEQ to ignore residents after more than five unsubstantiated complaints in seven years.
Diamond and other opponents believed the bill was an attempt to keep residents from exercising their rights and argued that the language was too vague. They said the legislation did not make clear what would constitute an unsubstantiated complaint and that some complaints may be repeated over the years because of TCEQ inaction.
When the bill reached the Senate floor, Angela Paxton voted for its passage.
Matt Welch, a spokesperson for Angela Paxton, pointed to the measure’s bipartisan support in the Senate, saying it was needed “to stop a small group of environmental activists from wasting taxpayer dollars by weaponizing the complaint process.”
He said that between 2019 and 2023, the group filed more than 100 complaints against Dallas-area industrial sites that did not result in findings by the state environmental agency. “These frivolous complaints divert state resources from legitimate violations.”
Angela Paxton did not recuse herself from voting on the bill because it did not relate to any specific company, Welch said. He added that Paxton’s role on the advisory board “carried no decision-making authority” and that she was unaware of any complaints or violations against Wildcatter.
Ethics experts said she should have disclosed her relationship with the company and recused herself. State law bars lawmakers from voting on bills that benefit them or their businesses. The prohibition does not, however, apply to legislation that regulates an entire industry, Senate Secretary Patsy Spaw said.
Because lawmakers write the laws governing what they must disclose and when they should recuse themselves, “a good amount of the time, the guardrails that they create for themselves are not enough,” according to Andrew Cates, a San Antonio ethics lawyer, who said this is one such instance.
Meanwhile, neighbors of Wildcatter’s Gunter plant said the new law left them demoralized and convinced that lawmakers were not interested in protecting them or their land. Diamond moved away after the bill passed. She said she feared the plants’ impact on her children’s health and believed the regulators were on the side of the company.
She was stunned to learn about the Paxtons’ investment in the company.
“You can’t pretend to be about protecting the people when you directly profit from it,” Diamond said in an interview.
A bank statement from the Paxtons’ blind trust checking account shows various deposits from Wildcatter in early 2023.Obtained, highlighted and redacted for privacy by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune
Wildcatter Helps Paxton in Difficult Times
In the months leading up to the bill passing the Legislature, four Wildcatter companies wired more than $73,000 to the Paxtons, according to bank statements reviewed by the news organizations that were part of the previously unreported impeachment documents.
About $10,000 arrived in the two weeks before Angela Paxton voted on the environmental bill. An additional $12,000 was wired the week after the legislation passed in the Senate.
Because the records ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed are limited, the news organizations cannot say with certainty why the payments were made and how they were accounted for on the companies’ books.
The payments came as some Wildcatter companies were failing to pay local property taxes.
At the time, Wildcatter Sand Services, the company the Paxtons’ trust had invested in, already owed more than $31,000 in back taxes, according to Grayson County public records.
Several Wildcatter companies also owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in local taxes in 2023 that soon became delinquent.
That year, Ken Paxton was facing his own troubles as allegations of bribery and corruption reached a fever pitch.
Early in 2023, the U.S. Justice Department’s public integrity unit, known for handling high-stakes political corruption cases, took over an investigation into allegations by Paxton’s senior advisers that he abused his office. (It was later dropped in 2025.)
Paxton also reached a tentative $3.3 million settlement with some of those employees. They had accused him of firing them after they went to authorities with allegations that he had used his office to go after the enemies of an Austin real estate investor and donor. The proposed payout required legislative approval, drawing the ire of lawmakers who questioned why taxpayers should be on the hook. After the Legislature took no action, a judge awarded the whistleblowers $6.6 million in 2025. Paxton called the ruling a “bogus judgment in support of baseless claims by rogue employees.”
Some of the Wildcatter payments came while a House committee was investigating the whistleblowers’ claims about the attorney general’s conduct.
On May 19, a week before Paxton was formally impeached, the blind trust wired $9,000 to attorney Mitch Little’s firm. Little later represented both the trust and Paxton in his impeachment trial. It’s unclear whether the money from Wildcatter was used to pay for the legal representation. The trust’s checking account would not have had enough money for that payment without deposits from the companies earlier in the month, records show. At the time, the trust also had an investment account with $9,300 in cash and just under $1 million in securities, but records do not show any distribution from that account to the checking account in that period.
Neither Loper nor Little, now a state representative, responded to questions about the transaction. Angela Paxton’s spokesperson said she has no knowledge of any payments for impeachment lawyers.
Craig Holman, ethics lobbyist for consumer-advocacy group Public Citizen in Washington, D.C., said it would be particularly problematic if any of the money was used as a “passthrough” for Paxton’s legal fees.
All told, Wildcatter companies wired the Paxtons’ trust 15 payments between January and June 2023 totaling more than $83,000. It is unclear whether payments continued after that date because the records collected by impeachment investigators ended in June.
The following year, two of those companies became delinquent on nearly $200,000 in 2023 property taxes to local schools, cities and counties.
The governments had to sue to recover what they were owed.
Caption: A new report from commercial real estate firm Newmark shows the Wilmington area’s office vacancy rate fell to 15.9% during the third quarter of 2026, its lowest level in two decades. Image created on 10/23 using AI.
Newmark report shows stronger leasing, business expansion, and renewed investor confidence, signaling a potential turning point after years of uncertainty.
WILMINGTON — After six difficult years for Delaware’s office market, commercial real estate professionals are seeing something they have been waiting for: measurable signs of recovery.
A new report from commercial real estate firm Newmark shows the Wilmington area’s office vacancy rate fell to 15.9% during the third quarter of 2026, its lowest level in two decades.
The improvement reflects businesses occupying more office space, stronger leasing activity and growing demand from expanding companies. Investors are also beginning to return to a market that has struggled since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“For six years, when someone asked, ‘How is the office market in Delaware?’ I said ‘challenging,'” said Wills Elliman, senior managing director at Newmark. “I meant terrible but didn’t want to say it out loud. That’s changing, and we saw it this quarter.”
Businesses are keeping and expanding their space
According to Newmark’s third-quarter Delaware Office Market Overview, businesses occupied a net additional 139,842 square feet during the quarter.
That brought net absorption for the first nine months of 2026 to 208,458 square feet, already exceeding the full-year totals recorded in every year since 2012.
Net absorption measures the change in occupied office space. Positive absorption means businesses are collectively occupying more space than they are vacating.
Wilmington’s overall vacancy rate declined from 16.8% in the second quarter to 15.9% in the third quarter, well below the market’s 20-year average of 18%.
Leasing activity also improved, with nearly 195,000 square feet leased during the quarter.
Elliman said the improvement reflects an important shift in how businesses are making decisions about their offices.
“Tenants took less space when they moved or renewed. Now, more are keeping their space or expanding. We’re seeing that especially with law firms.”
Among the largest transactions was Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell’s renewal of an 82,549-square-foot lease at 1201 N. Market St.
Financial technology company Fiserv also signed a lease at 800 Delaware Ave., while Gordon, Fournaris & Mammarella leased 9,540 square feet along Lancaster Pike.
Those transactions demonstrate the continuing importance of Delaware’s legal, financial and professional services industries to Wilmington’s commercial real estate market.
Growing businesses offer reason for optimism
Perhaps the most encouraging finding involves companies currently searching for office space.
Newmark identified approximately 603,000 square feet of active tenant demand in the Wilmington market.
Nearly 370,000 square feet of that demand comes from businesses seeking to expand or enter the market.
That distinction is important. Companies renewing existing leases help maintain occupancy, but expanding businesses and new employers can create opportunities for additional jobs and economic activity.
The broader regional economy is also supporting demand.
Unemployment across the Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington metropolitan area stood at 3.8% in August, compared with the national rate of 4.1%.
Employment in office-oriented industries remains approximately 4% above pre-pandemic levels.
Investors are returning to the office market
Beyond improving occupancy, Elliman sees another encouraging development: Investors are purchasing office properties again.
“Investors are buying office buildings again. Good buildings in good locations are trading at prices that make sense,” Elliman said. “Add renewed confidence in Wilmington’s business climate, and there’s reason to feel better about the office market than we have in years.”
The return of buyers is significant because office buildings have faced uncertainty over tenant demand, operating expenses and property values since the pandemic.
Elliman said Newmark is involved in another transaction that could further demonstrate improving investor confidence.
“We just put a large office building under contract, and we’ll have more to say about it in our Q4 2026 review,” he said. “It’s the kind of building tenants will love, at a price that makes sense for the buyer. That deal is one more reason to have confidence in this market.”
The property and terms of the pending transaction have not been disclosed.
While Elliman’s observations suggest renewed investment activity, Newmark’s quarterly report focuses primarily on leasing, occupancy and asking rents rather than broader commercial property sales trends.
Downtown is improving, but challenges remain
The recovery is not occurring evenly across Wilmington’s office market.
Downtown Wilmington recorded particularly strong activity during the third quarter, with positive net absorption of 148,681 square feet.
However, downtown’s vacancy rate remains at 18.2%, higher than the overall market average.
Other Wilmington-area office markets present a mixed picture.
Office market
Vacancy rate
Wilmington North
11.3%
Wilmington West
13.5%
Wilmington South
16.2%
Downtown Wilmington
18.2%
Overall market
15.9%
Wilmington South experienced negative absorption during the quarter, meaning more space was vacated than occupied.
Older buildings also face competition from newer properties offering modern layouts, amenities and updated technology.
Office buildings constructed since 2000 have a vacancy rate of 14.4%, compared with 15.9% across the overall market.
Still, Newmark reports that the gap between newer buildings and older properties has narrowed, suggesting demand is improving beyond just the newest office towers.
Limited construction is helping the market
One significant factor behind Wilmington’s improving vacancy rate is the absence of new office construction.
Newmark reports that no office buildings are currently under construction in the Wilmington market.
The most recent major delivery was the 100,000-square-foot Avenue North office building completed in 2024, which is now 88% leased.
With few new buildings entering the market, businesses looking for office space are increasingly choosing from existing properties.
Another factor is the conversion of older commercial properties to residential or other uses.
Such conversions can reduce excess office inventory while bringing additional residents into business districts, potentially supporting restaurants, retail businesses and other downtown services.
However, declining vacancy does not automatically mean every building is becoming more financially successful. Removing vacant buildings from the office inventory can improve marketwide statistics even without equivalent growth in occupied space.
In Wilmington’s case, the report identifies both positive net absorption and constrained supply as contributors to the improvement.
Office rents remain relatively stable
Despite stronger demand, office rents have not increased dramatically.
Average asking rents reached $26.14 per square foot during the third quarter, up 1% from the previous quarter but down 3.3% compared with a year earlier.
Newmark attributes much of the annual decline to Wilmington University’s purchase of a large vacant building at 3 Beaver Valley Road in 2025, which removed higher-priced space from the available inventory.
That change affected the marketwide average rather than necessarily reflecting widespread rent reductions.
For businesses considering expansion or relocation, relatively stable rents and a substantial selection of available properties could present opportunities.
For property owners, the challenge remains attracting tenants while managing operating costs, property improvements and financing.
A potential turning point for Wilmington
The latest report offers reasons for optimism after several years in which remote work and changing workplace habits raised questions about the future of traditional office districts.
Vacancy is declining, office employment has stabilized and businesses are actively searching for additional space.
Perhaps more importantly, according to Elliman, tenants and investors appear increasingly willing to make longer-term commitments to Wilmington office properties.
Still, the market has nearly 3 million square feet listed as available, including space occupied by existing tenants but being marketed for lease.
That leaves significant room for improvement.
The long-term question is whether Wilmington can build on its advantages as a center for banking, law, financial services and other professional industries while continuing to attract new businesses.
The next phase of recovery may depend not only on filling traditional office buildings but also on creating an environment where employers, residents, restaurants and retail businesses can grow together.
For now, Newmark’s findings and Elliman’s observations point in the same direction: After years of difficult conditions, Wilmington’s office market is showing renewed momentum.
Whether that momentum becomes sustained growth will depend on continued tenant expansion, successful property investments and the strength of Delaware’s business climate
TO GO: Wilmington office market at a glance
Third quarter 2026
15.9%: Overall office vacancy, the lowest in 20 years.
208,458 square feet: Net office space absorbed during the first nine months of 2026.
603,000 square feet: Office space being sought by prospective tenants.
370,000 square feet: Demand from expanding businesses or companies new to the market.
$26.14: Average annual asking rent per square foot.
Zero: New office projects currently under construction.
18.2%: Downtown Wilmington office vacancy rate.
Source: Newmark, Delaware Office Market Overview, Third Quarter 2026.
Why Should Delaware Care? Each year, Delaware’s school districts vote to approve a school tax rate and typically collect revenues in the fall. But the fallout from Delaware’s first property reassessment in 40 years delayed school districts’ ability to set a tax rate in July, causing New Castle County districts to vote on their tax rates this month.
All five New Castle County school districts announced in recent weeks that they will raise local taxes later this year.
During October board meetings, the Appoquinimink, Brandywine, Christina, and Colonial school districts all said tax hikes are necessary because of an increasing number of special education students in their schools, and the higher costs associated with meeting their needs.
Red Clay said its increase results from the final phase of a tax referendum passed in 2024.
For property owners, it can mean more than a hundred dollars more in annual tax payments.
At the Brandywine School District, the average property owner will pay $150 more. And at Christina, it will be a nearly $270 bump for the average property owner.
The tax rate announcements come three months after several districts publicly stated they would need to increase school taxes. At the time they did not announce the exact amounts because of delays caused by the county’s recent property reassessment controversy.
Members of the Christina school board meet in October 2025. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JULIA MEROLA
Before calculating new tax bills, the districts had to wait for New Castle County to complete a quality control review of commercial property assessments in northern Delaware. On Thursday, the county announced that the review was complete and published a report that found numerous errors in the assessment of a sample of commercial properties.
In recent weeks, the county sent school districts updated information about their tax bases, allowing school boards to vote on new rates during October meetings.
New property tax bills will be issued in November, and residents will have until Dec. 31 to pay. In typical years, school districts collect taxes in September.
Increased student needs, inflation driving costs
During a school board meeting earlier this month, Brandywine Chief Financial Officer Daniel McCoy told members that the district struggled to find staff for special education classrooms.
McCoy said the district has used contractors to fill vacancies in special education classrooms at a cost of upward of $100,000 per student, each year.
At the same time, McCoy said the district this year gained 93 special education students, more than half of which had transferred from other states. Those students will need 10 additional classrooms, and each classroom will need — at minimum — a special education teacher and paraprofessional.
The component of property taxes that pay for special education — called the tuition tax — is set by local school boards, and does not require approval by residents, like a broader tax referendum would. That has been a longstanding reality in Delaware, but fluctuations in the tuition tax have been so small in typical years that residents never noticed them.
The three other categories that make up a district’s property tax are operating costs that are not covered by the state, debt services that pay for building construction and renovations, and local funding to match state-funded programs such as technology or extracurriculars.
How much will school taxes go up?
The Appoquinimink School District announced during its October meeting that an average homeowner can expect to see an increase of $109 in the school district portion of their property tax bill this year.
Appoquinimink Superintendent Matthew Burrows told board members that the bulk of the new money is needed for internal program costs for special education students, such as teachers, paraprofessionals, and other related service professionals.
The Colonial School District cited similar costs for its increase, amounting to roughly 5.8 cents per $100 of assessed value. District officials did not disclose the amount the average homeowner would pay — but a home worth $400,000 would pay roughly $232 more under that framework.
And the Red Clay Consolidated district officials announced that its previously passed tax referendum would boost school property taxes by 1.31%
Residents in Christina will likely see the highest average annual increase at $268.95.
During the district’s recent board meeting, Christina Chief Financial Officer Bob Vacca said many residents do not realize the district’s taxes are higher because of the amount it pays to charter and choice schools.
Christina School District CFO Bob Vacca sits next to Brandywine Superintendent Lisa Lawson during a meeting of the state’s Redding Consortium. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JULIA MEROLA
Delaware’s public education funding currently follows what officials call a unit-count system, which distributes money to districts based on the number of students enrolled.
When students attend charter schools rather than their local district school, school district leaders are obligated to pass tax revenues on to the charter school to cover their costs. That allocation is based on the number of students enrolled in the charter school.
Vacca also said the Christina School District has more students using school choice to go to other schools than it takes students in.
“We are using a methodology where we raise taxes for 7,000 students in nine other schools,” he said.
Sioux City, IA — President Donald Trump said Thursday that he believes he has the right to seek a third term in office, despite the Constitution explicitly prohibiting anyone from being elected president more than twice.
Speaking at a Republican campaign rally in Sioux City, Trump acknowledged that the law restricts him but argued that his continued false claim that the 2020 election was stolen should effectively entitle him to another run.
“I think I have the right to run again,” Trump said, adding, “They cheated us on the second one, because we won it three times.”
Trump did not win the 2020 election. Joe Biden defeated him in both the Electoral College and popular vote, and Trump’s campaign and allies failed to produce evidence of fraud sufficient to overturn the result despite dozens of lawsuits, recounts and audits.
The 22nd Amendment is unusually direct: no person may be elected president more than twice. It contains no exception for a president who believes an earlier election was stolen.
Trump’s latest comments continue months of public flirtation with remaining in power beyond January 2029. Supporters have promoted “Trump 2028” merchandise, while some allies have publicly discussed hypothetical ways he might attempt to remain president.
Changing the two-term limit would require a constitutional amendment, not a declaration that a previous election was unfair.
Trump made the remarks while campaigning for Republican Senate candidate Ashley Hinson and other GOP candidates ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms.
Washington, DC — Sen. Ted Cruz escalated Republican attacks on Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed this week, claiming without evidence that El-Sayed could share classified intelligence with Muslim Brotherhood terrorists if elected.
Appearing on Fox News, Cruz said he believes El-Sayed is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and argued that placing him on the Senate Intelligence Committee would create an “unacceptably high risk” to U.S. service members and intelligence assets.
No evidence has established that El-Sayed belongs to or supports the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed has repeatedly denied any affiliation and explicitly disavowed the organization when asked at an October town hall.
PolitiFact recently rated Republican Mike Rogers’s claim that El-Sayed refused to disavow the Brotherhood False, noting that video shows El-Sayed answering, “Sure, yeah, absolutely.” The Associated Press has likewise described allegations of El-Sayed’s Brotherhood ties as unsubstantiated.
Republicans have cited old social media posts from El-Sayed’s half-sister about their biological mother’s alleged activism and a 2012 statement El-Sayed signed supporting Egypt’s democratically elected government. Neither establishes membership in the Brotherhood.
Cruz has also accused El-Sayed of hating Jews, another serious allegation for which he has not presented evidence.
El-Sayed has compared the recurring loyalty accusations to questions once directed at John F. Kennedy over whether his Catholic faith would make him beholden to the Vatican.
Washington, DC — Rep. Ilhan Omar says she plans to move out of her Washington home after federal agents searched it last week, saying the attention generated by the raid has left her feeling unsafe.
Federal authorities are investigating possible fraud involving immigration paperwork connected to Omar’s family. Grand jury subpoenas have also been issued to some relatives, according to a person briefed on the investigation.
Omar, a naturalized U.S. citizen who arrived in the United States with her family at age 12, said she is confident she did nothing wrong. She became a citizen in 2000.
The Minnesota Democrat said Homeland Security investigators arrived around 6 a.m. and spent four to five hours searching the residence. Agents seized 17 items, including phones, notebooks, a Somali-language children’s book and a vintage camera.
The Justice Department has released few details beyond describing the matter as an ongoing criminal investigation.
The timing has drawn criticism from Democrats because the search occurred only weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms. Omar has frequently been targeted by President Donald Trump, while administration officials had publicly raised allegations about her immigration history before the search.
Omar described the agents themselves as “intrusive but polite” and said they documented what they removed and returned other items to their places.
With four Democrats and four Republicans receiving support, Delaware’s leading business organization offers a reminder that a candidate’s record and willingness to work across party lines can matter more than political affiliation.
WILMINGTON, Del. —At a time when national politics increasingly encourages voters to choose sides, the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce is offering a reminder of an older First State tradition: Judge the person, not just the party.
The Chamber announced endorsements Thursday, Oct. 22, of eight candidates in the Nov. 3 general election — four Democrats and four Republicans.
The selections reflect a longstanding Delaware political culture in which personal relationships, individual records and a willingness to work together have often mattered more than party loyalty.
Known as the Delaware Way, that tradition has come under increasing pressure as national political divisions influence state and local elections.
But the Chamber’s endorsements suggest that, at least within Delaware’s business community, there remains value in evaluating candidates individually.
Eight candidates, two parties
The Chamber endorsed the following candidates:
Office
Candidate
Party
Attorney general
Kathleen Jennings
Democrat
Senate District 7
Spiros Mantzavinos
Democrat
Senate District 14
Kyra Hoffner
Democrat
House District 8
Gary Taylor
Republican
House District 11
Jeffery Spiegelman
Republican
House District 20
Alonna Berry
Democrat
House District 34
Lyndon Yearick
Republican
House District 38
Carlie Carey
Republican
In its announcement, the Chamber said the candidates have demonstrated a willingness to engage with employers and consider how government decisions affect jobs, economic growth and Delaware’s competitiveness.
The organization said its endorsement process considers voting records, past engagement with the business community and positions on issues affecting employers and employees.
That approach does not require candidates to agree on every issue. It places greater emphasis on their records and willingness to consider different perspectives.
A reminder of the Delaware Way
Delaware’s small size has historically encouraged a political culture different from the increasingly partisan environment in Washington.
Republicans and Democrats frequently worked together, and voters were often familiar with candidates as neighbors, business owners, community volunteers or local officials.
Former Republican Gov. Mike Castle defended that tradition in 2012, arguing that Delaware’s size made cooperation essential to competing with larger states for jobs and economic opportunities. Castle described bipartisan cooperation as central to Delaware’s past success.
But that tradition has become more complicated.
Critics argue that the Delaware Way can also protect established political relationships and discourage challenges to those in power. Gov. Matt Meyer campaigned in 2024 as an outsider willing to challenge that political culture.
The Chamber’s endorsements suggest another way of looking at the tradition: Cooperation across party lines does not necessarily mean protecting the political establishment. It can also mean evaluating individual candidates on their willingness to listen, compromise and be accountable for their decisions.
Business interests cross party lines
For Delaware employers, many of the issues facing state government are not easily divided into Republican and Democratic priorities.
Energy costs, taxes, workforce development, education, regulations and government spending affect businesses regardless of their owners’ political affiliations.
The Chamber has consistently advocated policies intended to improve Delaware’s economic competitiveness while working with lawmakers from both parties.
Its bipartisan approach is not new. In 2024, the organization endorsed 14 General Assembly candidates in the general election, including Democrats and Republicans.
This year’s smaller list of eight endorsements suggests a selective approach, although the Chamber has not publicly explained why it endorsed fewer candidates.
The choices also raise questions about what constitutes a business-friendly candidate in a state where Democrats control the governor’s office and both legislative chambers.
For the Chamber, maintaining relationships with members of both parties may be as important as supporting candidates who agree with every position on its legislative agenda.
A different question for voters
The Chamber’s announcement comes as voters begin early voting ahead of the Nov. 3 general election.
Its endorsements are not evidence that Delaware voters are abandoning party loyalty. Nor do they establish that the Delaware Way is returning.
But they provide a timely example of an organization evaluating candidates through a different lens.
Rather than asking only whether a candidate is a Republican or Democrat, the Chamber’s approach focuses attention on other questions: Has the candidate listened to constituents and employers? What does the candidate’s record demonstrate? And is the candidate willing to consider solutions that cross party lines?
In an election season dominated by national political divisions, the endorsements offer a reminder of a tradition that has long shaped Delaware politics.
In a state small enough for voters to know many of their elected officials personally, party labels may tell only part of the story.
Whether more Delaware voters embrace that approach in 2026 remains to be seen.
TO GO: Chamber endorsements and the Nov. 3 election
What’s new:The Delaware State Chamber of Commerce endorsed eight candidates Oct. 22 — four Democrats and four Republicans.
How candidates were selected:The Chamber cites voting records, engagement with the business community and positions affecting employers and employees.
Historical context:The Chamber has supported candidates from both parties in previous election cycles.
Photo taken by Delaware LIVE. Graphics added by on 10/22 using AI.
Federal spending, health care costs and foreign policy highlight differences as Delaware voters begin casting ballots.
By George D. Rotsch, Delaware LIVE News
WILMINGTON, Del. — Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Coons and Republican challenger Dr. Mike Katz presented different approaches to controlling federal spending, reducing health care costs and addressing America’s foreign policy challenges Thursday during a U.S. Senate candidate forum at the Hotel du Pont.
The hour-long discussion, hosted by the Rotary Club of Wilmington and moderated by Jake Owens of Spotlight Delaware, gave voters an opportunity to compare the candidates as early voting began for the Nov. 3 general election.
Coons emphasized his 16 years in the Senate, bipartisan legislative experience and willingness to challenge President Donald Trump’s policies. He said his campaign is focused on three priorities, in this order: opportunity, security and justice. Coons described opportunity as helping Americans build better lives, security as protecting families and their futures, and justice as addressing political divisions and abuses of power.
Katz, a physician, former state senator and business executive, argued that after 16 years of Coons representing Delaware in Washington, it is time for a change. He characterized the election as a performance review of the incumbent and a job interview for the challenger, calling for new leadership focused on financial responsibility, government efficiency and solutions to longstanding problems.
While both candidates promised to work across party lines, their differences were evident in how they would address some of the nation’s most pressing challenges.
Photo: The Gold Ballroom at the Hotel duPont, the stie of the Candidate Forum on Thursday October 22,2026.
Federal spending and debt
With the national debt approaching $40 trillion, both candidates acknowledged that federal spending and borrowing have become serious problems.
Coons said Republicans and Democrats share responsibility for growing deficits. He advocated increasing taxes on wealthy Americans and highly profitable corporations while providing relief to working families.
Katz argued that Washington cannot continue increasing taxes without addressing the underlying cost of government.
He called for restructuring federal operations, eliminating waste, establishing balanced budgets and developing a plan to reduce the national debt.
Moderator Owens challenged both candidates to identify specific budget decisions they would make, including which constituencies they would be willing to disappoint.
Neither presented a comprehensive deficit-reduction plan identifying specific spending cuts and revenue increases.
Social Security and health care
The candidates also offered different approaches to preserving Social Security and controlling health care costs.
Coons supported raising the income cap subject to Social Security payroll taxes and working through a bipartisan process to consider additional changes necessary to strengthen the program.
Katz said Social Security represents a commitment to Americans who have contributed throughout their working lives. He advocated reviewing how the program operates before considering changes to benefits or retirement requirements.
On health care, Coons defended the Affordable Care Act as a means of expanding access to insurance and preventive treatment.
He argued that improving access to primary care could reduce expensive emergency treatment and improve long-term outcomes.
Katz, drawing on four decades in medicine and health care management, said the system requires more fundamental reform.
He argued that government subsidies and insurance changes primarily determine who pays rising medical bills without adequately addressing why care costs so much.
Katz acknowledged beneficial provisions of the Affordable Care Act, including protections for people with pre-existing conditions, but described the overall law as a failed approach to controlling health care costs.
Neither candidate provided a detailed legislative plan showing how his proposals would reduce costs for Delaware patients and employers.
Tariffs, energy and family expenses
The cost of living was another area of disagreement.
Coons criticized the Trump administration’s broad tariffs, arguing they increase prices for consumers and businesses, particularly those importing construction materials or exporting products to Canada.
He pointed to Delaware industries, including chemicals, agriculture and port operations, as examples of businesses affected by international trade policies.
Katz described tariffs as a legitimate economic tool when used selectively to protect American workers and businesses from unfair foreign competition.
He said tariffs should have clearly defined objectives, measurable results and congressional oversight.
Both recognized the importance of maintaining American competitiveness, but Coons placed greater emphasis on removing trade barriers while Katz focused on targeting unfair trade practices.
Iran war divides candidates
Foreign policy produced some of the forum’s clearest differences.
Coons strongly criticized the administration’s war with Iran, arguing that inadequate planning and insufficient consultation with Congress and American allies contributed to higher gasoline prices and instability in the Middle East.
He called for ending the conflict and restoring shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
Katz said preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons remains essential to American and international security.
He criticized decades of foreign policy decisions, including the 2015 nuclear agreement supported by Coons, which Katz argued failed to resolve Iran’s long-term nuclear threat.
Both expressed concern about presidential military actions without sufficient congressional involvement, although they emphasized different responsibilities and policy failures.
On Ukraine, Coons strongly defended continued support for the country against Russia’s invasion. Katz criticized failures of American and international leadership but did not outline a detailed alternative strategy for ending the conflict.
Katz questions political process
One of the forum’s more pointed moments came when Katz departed from a question about Ukraine to raise concerns about the conduct of Delaware’s Senate campaign.
He alleged that campaign communications had been hacked, staff members had been threatened and supporters had experienced intimidation.
Katz also criticized the absence of a traditional public debate and what he described as insufficient scrutiny of the incumbent.
The allegations were not substantiated during the forum, and no evidence was presented establishing who might have been responsible.
The campaign has previously criticized Coons for declining other proposed debates, including a student-organized event at the University of Delaware. Thursday’s forum brought both candidates together, although the format did not allow direct exchanges or audience questions.
Bipartisanship and congressional accountability
Despite their disagreements, both candidates supported maintaining the Senate filibuster, which generally requires 60 votes to advance major legislation.
Katz said the rule protects minority-party interests and discourages either party from imposing sweeping changes without broader support.
Coons also defended the filibuster while expressing openness to certain reforms, particularly involving voting rights.
Asked when they would oppose their own parties, Katz pledged to evaluate legislation based on Delaware’s interests rather than party loyalty.
Coons cited examples of bipartisan legislation he had worked on with Republican colleagues, arguing that his record demonstrates an ability to deliver results even when party leaders disagree.
The discussion also touched on artificial intelligence, immigration and U.S. military assistance to Israel.
Both candidates supported responsible AI development, although Katz emphasized innovation and competitiveness while Coons stressed safeguards and the potential impacts of data centers on communities.
On immigration, Katz emphasized stronger border enforcement and legal immigration reform. Coons called for border security combined with greater accountability for federal immigration enforcement and legal pathways for qualifying immigrants.
Different approaches, shared challenges
Throughout the forum, Katz returned to his central argument that longstanding federal problems require changes in management, priorities and accountability.
Coons pointed to his relationships in Congress and legislative experience as reasons he could continue delivering results for Delaware.
Both identified rising costs, federal debt and political division as major concerns. Their disagreement centered largely on whether those problems are better addressed through changes to existing federal policies or more extensive restructuring of government programs.
The forum also left questions about specific spending reductions, long-term Social Security financing and measurable health care savings.
With early voting underway, Delaware voters now have a clearer comparison of the candidates’ priorities — and the decisions each would face in Washington.
TO GO: Delaware U.S. Senate election
Candidates: U.S. Sen. Chris Coons (D) and Dr. Mike Katz (R)
Forum: Thursday, Oct. 22, Hotel du Pont, Wilmington
Host: Rotary Club of Wilmington
Moderator: Jake Owens, Spotlight Delaware
Early voting: Oct. 22-Nov. 1, on designated voting days
Washington, DC — Several people pardoned by President Donald Trump for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol are now seeking financial compensation from the federal government, including individuals convicted of assaulting police officers.
The claims argue that the prosecutions, convictions and imprisonment stemming from the Capitol attack caused financial and personal harm. Some of the plaintiffs are seeking millions of dollars in damages.
Trump issued sweeping clemency after returning to office, pardoning or commuting the sentences of nearly all Jan. 6 defendants, including people convicted of violent offenses against law enforcement.
The new compensation claims go beyond asking for criminal records to be cleared. They seek taxpayer-funded damages for actions taken by federal prosecutors, investigators and prison officials during cases that had previously resulted in guilty pleas or convictions.
Critics argue the demands effectively seek to turn presidential pardons into financial rewards for people who participated in an attack that injured police officers and disrupted the certification of the 2020 election.
A presidential pardon eliminates or reduces criminal consequences, but it does not establish that the prosecution was unlawful or that the person was wrongfully convicted.
Whether the claims succeed will depend on courts determining whether the plaintiffs can overcome legal protections that generally shield the federal government and its officials from damages arising from lawful prosecutions.
Salt Lake City, UT — The Justice Department will deploy federal election monitors to Utah for the Nov. 3 midterms, part of a nationwide Trump administration effort expected to place roughly 1,000 monitors across all 50 states. Washington Examiner
Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson said Utah officials were notified of the deployment and emphasized that federal monitors will be required to follow state laws governing poll watchers.
According to Henderson, monitors must identify themselves to election workers, remain separate from voters, avoid conversations with people casting ballots and refrain from interfering with election operations. They also will not carry weapons or wear badges or other insignia visible to voters.
The Justice Department says the monitors are intended to observe compliance with federal voting laws rather than intervene in the process. DOJ has long deployed attorneys and other personnel to monitor elections, including during Democratic and Republican administrations. Department of Justice
What is unusual this year is the planned scale. The Trump administration has said it intends to send about 1,000 monitors nationwide, describing it as potentially historic for a Republican administration. Washington Examiner
The expanded federal presence comes amid heightened tensions over election administration, including recent disputes involving voter rolls, alleged noncitizen voting and federal agents appearing near polling locations.
Utah officials said the monitors will be subject to the same restrictions designed to protect ballot secrecy and prevent interference with voters.
Tallahassee, FL — Federal immigration agents have been spotted near early voting locations in two Florida counties, prompting complaints from election officials who say the presence risks intimidating voters during an already tense midterm election.
In Leon County, Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley said two Customs and Border Protection vehicles parked outside the county’s busiest early voting location Monday morning for about 10 minutes. Earley filed a formal complaint with the FBI, saying voters should never feel intimidated by law enforcement or other government officials while casting ballots.
A separate incident occurred in Monroe County, where video showed masked federal agents conducting an arrest near an early voting location in Key Largo. Election Supervisor Sherri Hodies said frightened voters contacted her office afterward.
“I’m not happy about it. Frankly, I was stunned,” Hodies said. She contacted CBP and provided the locations of polling sites while asking agents to conduct enforcement activities elsewhere.
Federal law sharply restricts the use of military or federal authority to interfere with elections or intimidate voters.
The incidents come amid heightened concerns about the Trump administration’s use of immigration enforcement around election-related activities. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin previously declined to categorically rule out federal agents appearing near polling places, saying officers could respond to specific threats.
Neither incident has been shown to involve an attempt to interfere with voting, but local election officials say even the appearance of armed immigration agents near polling locations can discourage eligible voters from participating.
Who is responsible for the increases? There is no single cause behind Delaware’s rising electric bills. Several organizations, market conditions and government policies influence what customers ultimately pay. Image created on 10/22 using AI.
Delmarva Power seeks $67.8 million more in annual revenue as regulators weigh grid investments, rising energy costs and what Delaware can do to protect consumers.
By George D. Rotsch, Delaware LIVE
WILMINGTON, Del. — Delaware families already paying substantially more for electricity face another potential increase as state regulators consider Delmarva Power’s request for $67.8 million in additional annual revenue.
The proposal would increase the utility’s distribution base rates by 21.7%, although that does not mean customers’ total electric bills would rise by that percentage.
The request comes after a separate increase in electricity supply costs took effect June 1, adding an estimated $14.64 per month, or about $176 annually, to the average residential customer’s bill.
For households struggling with higher prices for food, insurance, housing and other necessities, the latest rate case raises a broader question: Why does electricity keep getting more expensive, and what can Delaware officials do about it?
Electric bills keep climbing
The cost of electricity has increased substantially in recent years, adding pressure to household budgets.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Delaware’s average residential electricity price reached 17.15 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025. Preliminary monthly data show prices climbing further in 2026.
Unlike groceries or gasoline, electricity is difficult for consumers to avoid. Families can reduce consumption, but heating, cooling, refrigeration and other essential household needs place limits on how much they can cut.
The June increase was particularly significant.
Delmarva’s standard electricity supply rate increased approximately 19%, largely because of higher regional power costs. Changes in renewable-energy compliance charges slightly offset the impact, resulting in an estimated 9% increase in the overall bill for a typical residential customer using 811 kilowatt-hours per month.
The pending distribution-rate case represents a separate cost pressure.
Delmarva implemented temporary higher distribution rates July 9 while the Delaware Public Service Commission reviews its request for a permanent increase. The final decision will determine how much additional revenue the utility can collect, with the interim rates subject to adjustment.
Who is responsible for the increases?
There is no single cause behind Delaware’s rising electric bills. Several organizations, market conditions and government policies influence what customers ultimately pay.
The major cost drivers include:
PJM Interconnection — Regional electricity costs: PJM manages the wholesale electricity market serving Delaware, 12 other states and Washington, D.C. Rising demand, limited generation capacity and higher prices for ensuring adequate electricity supplies have contributed significantly to recent increases.
Delmarva Power — Local delivery costs: Delmarva maintains the poles, wires, substations and other equipment delivering electricity to homes and businesses. Its pending rate request would increase revenue collected from customers for distribution services and infrastructure investments.
Delaware Public Service Commission — Rate oversight: The PSC reviews Delmarva’s proposed distribution rates and determines which expenses are reasonable for customers to pay. The commission does not directly control regional wholesale electricity prices.
Delaware lawmakers — Renewable-energy requirements: State law requires utilities to obtain 40% of electricity from renewable sources by 2035, including a 10% solar requirement. Renewable-energy credits and other compliance expenses can add costs, although supporters argue the requirements deliver environmental benefits and reduce long-term exposure to fossil-fuel price volatility.
Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — Carbon compliance costs: Delaware participates in this regional emissions-reduction program. Power generators must purchase allowances for certain carbon emissions. Some expenses can be reflected in wholesale electricity prices, while program revenues support energy-efficiency and environmental initiatives.
Growing electricity demand — Pressure on the regional grid: Data centers, economic development and increasing electrification are expected to place additional demands on the power system. Meeting that demand could require more generation, transmission capacity and local infrastructure.
The distinction matters.
Regional wholesale electricity costs have been a major driver of recent increases, but Delaware regulators and lawmakers have greater control over utility distribution spending, renewable-energy requirements and other state policies.
That leaves Delaware officials with an important responsibility: ensuring the costs they can control are necessary, transparent and affordable for the families and businesses paying the bills.
Delaware’s energy policies also carry costs
The debate over electricity affordability increasingly includes questions about the state’s environmental and renewable-energy policies.
Delaware’s Renewable Portfolio Standard requires utilities to obtain an increasing share of electricity from renewable sources, reaching 40% by 2035.
Supporters say the requirements encourage cleaner energy, diversify supplies and reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
Critics question whether the mandates are achieving those goals at the lowest possible cost, particularly as regional electricity prices rise.
The state also participates in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which requires participating power generators to purchase carbon-emission allowances.
Revenue from those allowances supports energy and environmental programs, but the compliance costs can also influence electricity prices.
Neither program accounts for the entire increase in household bills, and renewable-energy compliance charges actually decreased slightly during Delmarva’s June supply-rate adjustment.
Still, the programs raise a legitimate policy question: Should Delaware review the cost and timing of its energy mandates as consumers face higher electricity bills?
Does Delaware really need more grid investment?
Delmarva’s distribution-rate request centers on the cost of maintaining and upgrading the electrical system.
The company must maintain infrastructure, respond to outages, replace aging equipment and prepare for future electricity demand.
Additional investments can improve reliability, reduce outages and strengthen the system against severe weather.
But those benefits come at a price.
The question for regulators is not simply whether improvements are needed, but whether the proposed spending is justified, appropriately timed and fairly allocated among customers.
The Public Service Commission has authority to examine the utility’s expenses, investment plans and requested financial returns before approving permanent distribution rates.
That oversight becomes increasingly important when customers are already absorbing higher supply and transmission costs that state regulators have less power to control.
What can Delaware do to lower electric bills?
Although Delaware cannot independently control the regional electricity market, policymakers have several opportunities to address affordability.
Push for PJM reforms. Regional leaders, including Gov. Matt Meyer, have called for changes intended to address rising electricity costs. Increasing available generation, reducing delays for new energy projects and improving market rules could help stabilize prices.
Review renewable-energy compliance costs. Lawmakers could examine whether current requirements are delivering their intended benefits at reasonable costs and whether adjustments to compliance mechanisms or timelines are warranted.
Expand energy-efficiency programs. Weatherization, insulation, efficient appliances and other improvements can help consumers reduce electricity consumption without sacrificing reliability.
Scrutinize utility investments. Regulators can require Delmarva to demonstrate that proposed projects are necessary, cost-effective and beneficial to customers before authorizing additional rate revenue.
Improve transparency. Consumers could benefit from clearer information showing exactly how much they pay for electricity supply, capacity, transmission, distribution and state energy-policy requirements.
Target financial assistance. Existing assistance programs and payment arrangements can provide relief to households with limited incomes, including seniors and residents living on fixed incomes.
Some of those actions could reduce long-term costs. Others would provide more immediate relief without necessarily changing the underlying price of electricity.
The question is affordability
The growing cost of electricity is not the result of one utility decision or one government policy.
It reflects multiple pressures, including regional electricity markets, rising demand, infrastructure investments and state energy requirements.
Some expenses are necessary to maintain a reliable electrical system. Others reflect policy choices that can be examined and adjusted.
The challenge for Delaware’s elected officials and regulators is determining whether the benefits justify the costs and whether enough attention is being paid to the financial impact on consumers.
For families watching their electric bills rise, that question is becoming harder to ignore.
The Public Service Commission is accepting written public comments on Delmarva’s pending rate case through Nov. 4.
TO GO BOX
What: Delmarva Power electric distribution rate case
Proposed increase: $67.8 million in additional annual revenue, representing 21.7% of existing distribution base rates
Status: Temporary higher rates took effect July 9. The permanent rate request remains under review.
Consumer assistance: Residents struggling with electric bills can contact Delmarva Power about payment arrangements or the Delaware Division of the Public Advocate for assistance.
How will AI affect the global economy?
4
November 2026 — 12:00 TO 13:00 GMT
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Hear from leading economists and market experts on whether the AI boom is built to last, and how it is reshaping global competitiveness.
Hear from leading economists and market experts on whether the AI boom is built to last, and how it is reshaping global competitiveness.
AI-driven growth is rapidly taking on a more prominent role in the global economy, with investment in the technology increasingly shaping financial markets and expectations about future growth. Yet concerns over a potential market bubble, uncertainty around productivity gains and the uneven distribution of digital technologies raise questions about the macroeconomic impact of the current boom. Whether today’s investment will translate into sustained economic returns remains an open question.
This event discusses:
Is the AI boom a bubble, a justified re-rating of the economy, or a mix of both?
What do current valuations and levels of investment assume about AI’s economic returns?
How is the AI buildout being financed, and where are the risks concentrated?
Beyond the US and China, who has a meaningful stake in the AI economy, and on what terms?
What would a sharp correction mean for growth, financial stability and the wider global economy?
How are governments using policy, trade and industrial strategy to shape the outcome?
Jacque Laird, elections administrator for Adams County, Washington, prepares ballot envelopes for delivery to voters at a third-party processing center that sorts mail, Direct Mail Enterprises, in Spokane. Adams County was one of the eastern Washington counties that saw a spike in the number of mailed ballots being rejected for arriving too late after U.S. Postal Service changes. Rajah Bose for ProPublica
In early August, election workers north of Spokane, Washington, went across the street to the post office to check for late mail-in ballots. It was three days after the primary and they were expecting no more than a few dozen.
Instead, their mailbox was brimming with envelopes — more than 500 of them, each a vote that wouldn’t count. The sight was “jarring,” said Auditor Lori Larsen, a Republican who oversees voting in Stevens County.
Across the region, other election officials were getting similar jolts. In the 11 predominately rural counties in eastern Washington, nearly 2,000 ballots came in late, compared to about 600 in 2022, the previous midterm primary.
But a ProPublica data analysis shows that delays resulting from the U.S. Postal Service’s cost-cutting measures have endangered the validity of ballots cast in rural areas, not only in Washington, but across the country.
Over the past three years, as mail volume continued to plummet and annual deficits ballooned, the Postal Service started consolidating the processing of first-class mail at larger regional plants instead of at smaller hubs closer to local post offices. Then, in a little-noted switch that mostly took effect after the 2024 election, the agency cut the frequency of mail pickups in half at many post offices 50 miles or more from these processing plants, from twice daily to once.
The changes often added a day or more to delivery time and, most importantly for ballots, pushed back postmarking, which doesn’t happen until mail reaches the regional centers.
In this year’s primary, the effects of the cuts were clearest in five states that make detailed data on mail-in ballots available: Washington, California, Ohio, North Carolina and Oregon. All have or recently had grace periods allowing ballots to count if they come in after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by the deadline.
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In these states, the number of ballots rejected for arriving late soared in counties affected by the service changes compared to 2022, ProPublica’s analysis showed.
Rejection rates in counties where services were cut doubled or tripled from what they were four years ago, dwarfing any increases in counties where postal pickups remained as they were, our analysis showed. In urban Spokane, for example, the number of ballots rejected for being late actually dropped this year.
Across the five states, the delays have had the most substantial effect in areas that voted for Trump in 2024, ProPublica’s analysis shows. In Washington, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, said he sees the service changes directed by Republican appointees leading the Postal Service as a way to undermine mail-in voting.
“I don’t think they realized how much it was going to affect their voter base,” he said, adding that Washington has “a lot of rural Republican voters.”
Rates of Rejection Due to Late Ballots Were Higher in Counties with Reduced Mail Service
Note: The chart shows the four states where data on all returned absentee ballots was available. Data from North Carolina and Washington tracked absentee ballots returned by mail. Data from California and Ohio tracked absentee ballots returned by any method, including drop boxes. Sources: California secretary of state, North Carolina State Board of Elections, Ohio secretary of state, Washington secretary of state.Ken B. Morales/ProPublica
Postal Service leaders say such delays are less likely in the Nov. 3 general election because of “extraordinary measures” the agency puts into place for these votes, when there’s typically far more turnout. They have circulated a memo to the nation’s more than 30,000 post offices saying that for the 10 days before the election, managers should separate completed ballots from other first-class mail and deliver those intended for local election offices the day they come in.
At an Oct. 15 news conference, Postal Service leaders emphasized the agency’s longstanding recommendation that voters mail ballots back at least a week before their states’ deadlines, while defending the agency’s ability to fast-track ballots through the system.
“We work to identify and address issues quickly,” said Amber McReynolds, chair of the Postal Service board of governors, “so ballots can continue to move swiftly from election offices to voters and from voters back to election offices.”
Election consultants, researchers and former Postal Service officials told ProPublica that the guidance for the upcoming vote gave more detailed directions on how to expedite ballots. They said they hoped the agency’s special measures would limit delays, but some said mistakes were likely.
“I don’t think we can say with any kind of conviction that there will be no ballots rejected,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. “It isn’t a question of ‘if,’ but a question of ‘how many.'”
A pilot program instituting the delivery changes in 18 regions before the 2024 election ran into problems. An audit by the Postal Service’s inspector general found that agency staff in these areas sometimes didn’t handle ballots correctly, mainly because instructions weren’t clearly communicated. (A Postal Service spokesperson said “learnings from the pilot” have been applied as the program has expanded.)
After this year’s primary, reports by media outlets noted that mail-in ballot rejection rates were higher than in the past, but ProPublica’s analysis shows these increases were directly connected to Postal Service changes. Research published in September by the Brookings Institution also found this connection, projecting that if the pattern held in the general election, tens of thousands of mail-in ballots could be rejected.
At least seven closely contested congressional districts — including Washington’s 3rd, California’s 22nd and North Carolina’s 11th — are in areas that were affected by service changes in the primary, ProPublica found.
Elena Patel, who conducted the Brookings analysis, said service changes may still imperil mail-in votes in the general election.
“I think there remain risks to ballots,” she said, adding that the Postal Service’s plan for the general election “depends on flawless execution.”
Mail-in voting has become more popular over the last decade, with many states broadening access to it during the COVID-19 pandemic.
When Louis DeJoy was appointed postmaster general in spring 2020, he inherited an $81 billion operating deficit and rapidly took steps such as eliminating overtime to reduce costs, under pressure from Trump and others in his administration. (DeJoy did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)
The NAACP sued that August, alleging the measures could affect mail-in votes in that year’s general election. Courts ordered DeJoy to reverse some of the cuts and the Postal Service agreed to implement special procedures to ensure ballots weren’t delayed. The Postal Service has continued following those procedures since.
Still, DeJoy went forward with a 10-year restructuring plan designed to save the agency billions. It ended evening pickups from some post offices, often in rural areas. Trucks serving these places travel long distances and at times were mostly empty. This part of the plan — called regional transportation optimization, or RTO — was projected to eventually save the Postal Service $4 billion a year.
The agency announced the national rollout of the RTO plan in 2024, but DeJoy agreed to pause it leading up to that year’s November election, leaving only about 4,000 ZIP codes in the pilot project affected by the service changes.
Mail Services Have Been Cut in 16,000 More ZIP Codes Since the 2024 Election
A pilot program that reduced mail pickups to save money was paused in the lead-up to the 2024 election. The rollout has since resumed, and the changes have been made in five times as many ZIP codes for the 2026 midterms.
Source: ProPublica analysis of Postal Regulatory Commission filingsKen B. Morales/ProPublica
In January 2025, the Postal Regulatory Commission, which oversees the Postal Service, warned that moving forward with the plan would be disruptive to rural communities and might not save as much money as expected. The Postal Service rolled out the reductions anyway, extending the changes to almost 20,000 ZIP codes to date. Officials said they expect the system to be fully implemented within two years.
This January, the agency put out a statement saying the transportation cuts would mean it took longer for mail, including ballots, to be postmarked and delivered. But the Postal Service didn’t specify which voters would be affected by the slowdowns and which wouldn’t.
Mail Service Has Been Cut in Large Swaths of Rural America
A plan to reduce mail pickup frequency is being rolled out in ZIP codes that are more than 50 miles from a sorting facility. Areas not subject to the plan are mostly in or near large cities.
Source: ProPublica analysis of Postal Regulatory Commission filingsChris Alcantara/ProPublica
Though the delay from RTO is often only a day, mail can be delayed longer if it’s deposited in a mailbox after the daily pickup time, or just before Sunday or a holiday.
A Postal Service spokesperson said the agency told election officials that RTO would change schedules and reemphasized the need for voters to get their ballots in the mail at least a week ahead of time. Election officials in Washington said the Postal Service wasn’t direct enough about the fact that the changes would lead to delays in delivering and postmarking ballots.
“What they said was, ‘We are going to change the way we do postmarks,'” said Hobbs, Washington’s secretary of state. “That was it.”
Patel, the Brookings analyst and a former Postal Regulatory Commission employee, said that more direct communication to voters could have helped change their behavior. “That’s the part that I think has not been super transparent about the whole process,” she said.
Many of the areas that saw a spike in late ballots were in Western states, which were the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of expanded mail-in voting.
In 2004, Washington became the second state to start conducting all-mail elections, in which every eligible voter automatically receives a mail-in ballot. Most residents vote by putting their ballots in drop boxes. Still, in 2024, about 33% put them in the mail.
In the 30 mostly rural Washington counties most affected by RTO, the percentage of ballots postmarked late more than tripled compared to the 2022 primary, ProPublica found.
Is your ZIP code subject to reduced mail service? Use our lookup tool to find out.
In Garfield County, in southeastern Washington, 19 ballots — nearly 1 in 10 cast — had late postmarks this year. In 2022, only a single ballot was postmarked late. In Pend Oreille County, in northeast Washington along the Idaho panhandle, 6% of ballots were rejected for arriving late, compared to 1% in the 2022 primary.
“It was pretty awful telling people we couldn’t count their votes,” said Marianne Nichols, Pend Oreille’s longtime auditor. “They were quite upset because they felt like, ‘Why? This was in the mailbox on election day, the post office picked it up and had it.’ They felt like it should have counted.”
In Stevens County, the percentage of ballots rejected for having a late postmark jumped to 8%, from 1% in 2022.
Steve Hutkins, a retired professor who analyzes the effect of Postal Service changes on Savethepostoffice.com, also found that places in Washington with RTO had more ballot rejections during local elections earlier this year for school board and other measures. The patterns “set off the alarm bells,” he said.
Stuart Holmes, the state’s director of elections, said he reached out to Postal Service officials to find out what had happened, but got few answers and no specifics on delays related to RTO, which were a “total surprise,” he said.
Election officials in California and Oregon also reported thousands more ballots rejected for arriving late during their primaries. Counties affected by RTO, including Kern County, California, had substantially higher rates of ballots rejected for mail-related reasons, ProPublica found.
Kern County’s assistant registrar of voters, Laura Cantu, said election officials are urging rural voters to use drop boxes to cast their ballots in the general election.
The expansion of RTO had a similar effect in North Carolina and Ohio, where the rates of late ballots were about twice as high in counties affected by the restructuring as rates in counties that weren’t. Since 2022, these states have also eliminated grace periods in which ballots postmarked by Election Day could count even if they arrived later. Voters unused to the tighter deadlines also could have contributed to an increase in late ballots.
ProPublica didn’t find any association between RTO and higher rates of late ballots in Wisconsin, even though clerks reported delays involving mail-in ballots cast in its state election, held this spring. (Other Postal Service changes may have contributed to the delays.)
Wisconsin’s data does not distinguish ballots sent by mail from those cast in drop boxes or in person, making it impossible to definitively measure rejection rates just for ballots returned by mail. Election researchers said Wisconsin’s deadline for mail ballots, which must come into election offices by 8 p.m. on Election Day, also probably had an effect.
“If you know that you don’t have a grace period, it probably affects voter behavior,” said Patel, the Brookings researcher.
Mail ballot envelopes are prepared for Adams County, Washington, midterm voters at a third-party processing center for mail, Direct Mail Enterprises, in Spokane.Rajah Bose for ProPublica
Recent Postal Service audits have found that RTO-related changes had saved the agency about $2.8 billion by the end of fiscal year 2025 — less money than expected — and are slowing down all first-class mail, not just ballots. Residents of rural areas are waiting longer for everything from prescriptions to bills, a report published in September by the Postal Service’s inspector general said.
A Postal Service spokesperson still defended the plan, both for financial reasons and to adjust to the changing marketplace. “These savings are both significant and necessary,” he said.
In the lead-up to Nov. 3, the agency’s plan is to route ballots meant for local election offices to a nearby postal facility or directly to their destination. They shouldn’t go to regional plants, which the Postal Service says should minimize delays.
Larsen, the Stevens County auditor, is encouraging Washington voters to deposit their ballots in drop boxes rather than relying on the mail. Since the primary, she’s increased the number of red, white and blue drop boxes that sit outside government buildings from seven to 12. Near each box, there’s a large sign encouraging people to take selfies when they vote and send the photos to Larsen.
In prior years, Larsen said, she avoided telling voters how or when to vote, concerned they might regret choices they made if critical information later emerged about the candidates. That’s no longer uppermost in her mind.
“Now we are more concerned that we get your ballot,” she said.
Will the US midterms change Washington’s policy on Israel and Palestine?Expert commentjon.wallace
Not immediately. But a Democratic victory could set the terms for a new approach by the next president.
Whatever the results, November’s midterm elections will not immediately transform US policy toward Israel and Palestine. In any outcome, the separation of powers means that President Donald Trump will still control American foreign policy. Even a Democrat-controlled Congress could not compel his administration to pursue a fundamentally different approach.
But the midterms may accelerate a transformation that is already underway in the Democratic Party and among the US electorate, where the political centre of gravity on Israel and Palestine is shifting rapidly.
If Democrats win a majority in either or both houses, they will gain new congressional tools to act on Israel–Palestine issues. Most importantly, the legislation they put forward would establish the policy baseline from which a future Democratic administration would govern.
The shift
Among dozens of others, Democrats like Abdul El-Sayed, running for the US Senate in Michigan, and Angela Gonzales-Torres, running in the general against another Democrat in California, have drawn considerable attention for their criticism of Israeli government actions – and US support for them. The race in Michigan, which could be decisive for Democratic hopes to retake the senate, looks tight.
But even if progressive candidates don’t do as well as expected in these elections, a shift is underway. Developments in Washington over just the past month illustrate how much has already changed.
On 29 September, 46 of 47 Senate Democrats voted for a resolution led by Senators Chris Van Hollen, Tim Kaine and Bernie Sanders. This would ‘require the Department of State to provide information and assessments related to investigations of the killing of United States citizens by violent Israeli settlers or Israeli security forces in the West Bank’. The resolution did not pass the Republican majority. But the vote was remarkable for its unanimity. Such Democratic unity on a resolution critical of Israel would have been almost unimaginable only a few years ago.
The vote follows a distinct trajectory in Democratic politics. When Senator Bernie Sanders forced the Senate to vote on blocking weapon sales to Israel in November 2024, only 18 Democrat senators supported him. This April, 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted against a sale of bulldozers to Israel. And 36 opposed the sale of 1,000-pound bombs. Now, with the September resolution, virtually the entire Senate Democratic caucus has voted to demand accountability from Israel.
Then came the House of Representatives. On 1 October, Rep. Joaquin Castro and other members introduced the Stop the Settlements Act. This builds on the Biden administration’s 2024 sanctions on violent Israeli extremists in the West Bank, which saw a major power set up a process to sanction those undermining peace and threatening violence in the West Bank.
It also builds on the subsequent 2026 sanctions by European countries and Canada against products originating in Israeli settlements. The Act would impose sanctions on individuals and entities responsible for building or expanding Israeli settlements and outposts in the West Bank or Gaza and prohibit settlement goods from entering the US market.
These developments point toward an emerging Democratic Party position: one that more actively defends the rights of the Palestinian people and is more willing to seek to compel Israel and the White House to move in that direction. Notably, Barack Obama’s planned 24 October event with El-Sayed on the campaign trail shows a greater willingness by the party’s elite to accommodate criticism of Israeli policies.
That shift matters. Israel and Palestine remain secondary issues for most US voters, compared to the economy, healthcare, education and other domestic concerns. But firm convictions on Israel–Palestine have become important attributes for some candidates in Democratic party politics. And the midterms will, in some ways, be a referendum on how criticism of Israeli policies affects voter intentions – with candidates like El-Sayed calling Israeli actions in Gaza a genocide, a claim the Netanyahu government strenuously denies.
But one thing looks certain: US views on the Israeli government have become less favourable across age groups and political parties. Even among American Jews, 61 per cent believe Israel is guilty of war crimes and 39 per cent call it genocide, according to a 2025 Washington Post poll. The tide may already have decisively shifted, regardless of whether or not candidates like El-Sayed win their races.
A Democratic Congress
Democratic takeover of the House and the Senate would make the shift more consequential immediately. Much of Congress’s influence over foreign policy occurs not through dramatic floor votes, but through the accumulation of hearings, letters, reporting requirements, funding restrictions and private pressure on administrations.
Democratic-controlled committees could hold hearings on settlement expansion in the West Bank and settler violence, scrutinize US arms sales to Israel, demand administration briefings, investigate the treatment of American citizens, mark-up legislation and use appropriations and oversight to press the executive branch.
House and Senate Democrats should begin laying the groundwork to create an affirmative American Palestine policy. That is, a policy not only defined by a move to restrict Israeli settlement-building and the sale of weapons to Israel, but one that advocates for Palestinian self-determination and an architecture for advancing it.
Congress…needs far greater exposure to Palestinian political, economic and civil-society leaders.
Over the decades, Congress has constructed a dense web of laws that restrict American relations with the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. A Democratic Congress could therefore begin to map those restrictions and decide how to address them. Which can be addressed administratively? Which need Congressional amendment or repeal? What policy changes will the US seek from the Palestinian leadership?
This will not be straightforward: Democrats are still debating these policies, and unanimity will not always be possible: there remains a diversity of views and priorities within the party.
Congress also needs far greater exposure to Palestinian political, economic and civil-society leaders. While many US politicians routinely engage with every dimension of Israeli politics, few have sustained relationships with Palestinians who can explain Palestinian institutions, aspirations and internal debates.
Two time horizons
Were candidates like El-Sayed to lose their races, and were midterms results to be disappointing for the Democrats, it is possible that some in the party might hesitate about the trajectory on Israel and Palestine policy.
But, assuming Democrats gain control of Congress, they could use 2027 and 2028 to constrain, oversee and prepare. A Democratic Congress could press Israel for accountability for violence against Palestinians and Americans, challenge settlement expansion, scrutinize US military assistance, support viable elements of Gaza reconstruction, strengthen Palestinian institutions and begin removing legal obstacles to normal US-Palestinian relations.
These preparations will be significant if a Democrat returns to the White House in 2029. A new administration will be best able to move forward a markedly different policy if significant progress is made in the previous two years.
In this respect, though the midterms will not be the moment US policy toward Israel and Palestine changes, they can set the context for any Democrat running in the presidential primaries – which essentially begin as soon as the new Congress is seated.
Those who have been advocating for Palestinian rights for decades now see that not only their elected representatives, but the next US president may align with them as well.
That will not fix anything today for the relatives of the more than 70,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, the millions that continue to suffer in the occupied territories, or Israelis dealing with the aftermath of the Hamas cross-border attacks of 7 October 2023. But it does provide a modicum of hope that there is a pathway to freedom and liberty for all. What we’ll learn from the US midterms is how quickly that change is likely to come.
Washington, DC — Congressional Democrats are demanding an investigation into Elon Musk after reports that he personally ordered restrictions on satellite service used by Ukraine’s military, a decision with potentially life-or-death consequences on the battlefield.
Sen. Adam Schiff called for Musk to testify before Congress under oath, saying either President Donald Trump or Musk has given a misleading account of who was responsible for slowing Ukraine’s access to the Starlink-linked Starshield network.
The restrictions reportedly affected Ukrainian drones, aircraft and helicopters traveling above certain speeds, disrupting military operations during Russia’s continuing invasion.
Musk initially said Starshield is owned and controlled by the U.S. government and that any restrictions ultimately come from the military and president. The Wall Street Journal later reported that Musk personally directed the slowdown after consulting administration officials, creating conflicting accounts about who authorized it.
Sen. Ruben Gallego publicly invited Musk to testify voluntarily, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Congress needs to determine whether a private billionaire was effectively “dictating our foreign policy.”
The scrutiny has become bipartisan. Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick also called for witnesses to be brought before Congress under oath, describing the matter as “very, very serious.”
The controversy raises broader questions about allowing a private company and its owner to wield extraordinary influence over military communications used by a U.S. ally during wartime.
The Road to 2028: What will be America’s global role?
27
January 2027 — 18:00 TO 19:00 GMT
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
As the US looks ahead to the 2028 presidential election, join Chatham House for The Road to 2028 series exploring the future of American foreign policy, its global role, and the competing visions shaping what comes next.
As the US looks ahead to the 2028 presidential election, join Chatham House for a new The Road to 2028 series exploring the future of American foreign policy, its global role, and the competing visions shaping what comes next
The 2028 presidential election will mark a pivotal moment for America’s role in the world as President Trump’s second term comes to an end. As debate grows over the future of US global leadership, competing visions are emerging over how Washington should approach its alliances, security commitments, and how it defines itself in the international order.
The Road to 2028 series examines the ideas and political forces shaping the next era of American foreign policy. Bringing together leading policymakers, practitioners and experts, it will explore what might change after the current administration and what those choices could mean for allies, adversaries and the wider international order.
This first session discusses:
What will define US foreign policy beyond the current administration?
What competing visions of America’s global role are emerging ahead of 2028?
How could the election reshape US alliances and security commitments?
What role should the US play in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific?
How will Washington navigate strategic competition with China and Russia?
What should allies prepare for as America approaches its next political transition?
San Francisco, CA — A federal judge has blocked the Department of Homeland Security from conducting door-to-door and other field operations targeting suspected noncitizen voters in nine states, finding the administration’s effort relies on unreliable data that could intimidate lawful voters.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a preliminary injunction covering California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin through Election Day.
The Trump administration’s “surge initiative” sent armed federal agents to homes to question residents about immigration status and voting history. CBS News reported that hundreds of Homeland Security investigators were reassigned from traditional criminal cases to the voter operation.
Martínez-Olguín found DHS’s lists of suspected illegal voters were “widely known” to contain U.S. citizens and said the operation could create a reasonable fear that lawful voters might be wrongly investigated.
Agents were reportedly expected to complete at least 40 reviews per day, leaving roughly 12 minutes for each case.
The ruling is another setback for the administration’s aggressive campaign around alleged noncitizen voting. Earlier court decisions have also criticized federal voter databases for relying on inaccurate citizenship information and potentially placing eligible Americans at risk.
Documented noncitizen voting remains rare, despite repeated claims from Trump that it is widespread.
The injunction was temporarily stayed until Friday evening to give the administration time to appeal.
Austin, TX — Texas schools have referred children ages 10 to 13 for prosecution more than 47,000 times since 2014, often for misconduct that previously might have been handled by teachers or principals.
A joint investigation by The New York Times and San Antonio Express-News found the referrals increasingly involved relatively minor behavior, including classroom disruptions, threats, vaping and confrontations with school staff. Few cases involved serious physical harm.
A referral does not necessarily result in criminal charges, but it can mean a child is handcuffed, taken into police custody and processed through the juvenile justice system.
In one case, a 12-year-old girl who refused to go to the principal’s office was arrested and taken to school police headquarters. Body-camera footage reportedly showed officers twisting her arm behind her back until she complied with fingerprinting.
The rise coincides with Texas dramatically expanding police presence in schools following the 2022 Uvalde massacre. The state now has nearly 400 school district police departments and about 11,000 officers trained to work in schools. A separate investigation found officers using Tasers, pepper spray and physical force against students, including young children.
Texas law says school police should not handle routine student discipline, but critics argue the expanding law-enforcement presence has increasingly criminalized behavior better addressed through school discipline or mental-health services.
Washington, DC — Republican Rep. Nancy Mace delivered one of the harshest conservative condemnations yet of Vivek Ramaswamy’s attack ad featuring the estranged mother of Democratic Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton.
“This ad is going to go down as the most shameful, disgusting, offensive ad this election season,” Mace told CNN. She said Ramaswamy had managed to “limbo under the lowest bar of decency” by attacking a woman who has publicly described being sexually abused by her stepfather as a child.
Acton and her brother have said their mother failed to protect her from the abuse and remained married to the man after he was charged. Acton was removed from her mother’s custody at age 12 and has been estranged from her since.
Ramaswamy’s campaign produced the ad and is spending $4 million to air it despite bipartisan criticism. The spot features Acton’s mother calling her daughter a “liar” and disputing portions of her childhood story.
Mace, who has publicly discussed surviving sexual assault herself, said she previously considered herself a major Ramaswamy supporter but was “stunned” by the campaign’s decision.
She also criticized Vice President JD Vance for defending the ad and warned that the controversy could further damage Republicans with women voters.
Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted and several conservative commentators have also distanced themselves from the advertisement.
Washington, DC — The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected the Trump administration’s emergency request to immediately enforce restrictions on medical care for transgender people in federal prisons, leaving a lower-court injunction in place while litigation continues.
The policy, issued by the Bureau of Prisons in February, would halt hormone therapy, surgeries and certain accommodations intended to align an inmate’s appearance with their gender identity. Federal prisons have provided hormone treatment for gender dysphoria since at least 1992.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth blocked the restrictions in June, finding the Bureau of Prisons likely acted unlawfully by disregarding its own prior evidence and experience. He wrote that officials appeared to have “reverse engineered” the policy to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting federal recognition of transgender identity.
The Supreme Court gave no explanation for denying the administration’s request, which is common in emergency cases. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito publicly dissented.
The lawsuit was brought by three transgender prisoners and is proceeding as a class action. Reuters reported that the ruling affects roughly 1,000 inmates covered by the litigation.
The decision is a notable setback for Trump’s broader effort to restrict transgender rights. The court has previously allowed his transgender military ban to take effect and upheld several state-level restrictions affecting transgender people.
Miami, FL — Families and immigration advocates say severely ill detainees held at two Florida ICE facilities are being prepared for deportation to African countries where they have no ties, despite serious medical conditions that have already complicated efforts to remove them elsewhere.
Among them is 41-year-old Cuban national Noslén Sendra, who suffers from uncontrolled diabetes and acute pancreatitis and has reportedly lost more than 50 pounds while detained. His wife says Mexico refused to accept him because of his medical needs, after which immigration officials told him he could instead be sent to Africa.
Advocates say deportation flights to the Central African Republic and Burundi could leave as early as this week. They warn that detainees with diabetes, heart conditions and other illnesses face heightened risks during flights lasting up to 24 hours, particularly if access to medication, food or medical treatment is limited.
Conditions at Miami’s Krome North Processing Center have already drawn federal scrutiny. An unannounced government inspection found 1,102 detainees packed into a facility designed for 882, along with insufficient toilets, showers and sinks.
The Trump administration has increasingly deported migrants to third countries when their home nations will not accept them. Human Rights Watch recently documented cases in which people transferred to African nations subsequently faced arbitrary detention, persecution or abuse.
DHS did not provide a substantive response about Sendra’s case.
Las Vegas, NV — A new analysis of Nevada elections offers a stark reality check to years of claims from President Donald Trump and other Republicans that widespread voter fraud threatens American elections.
Researchers at UNLV’s Brookings Mountain West and Lincy Institute found just 11 documented election-fraud cases in Nevada between 2012 and 2021, a period covering 14 elections and approximately 8.5 million votes.
That works out to roughly one documented case for every 773,000 votes cast.
Ten of the 11 cases resulted in criminal convictions, demonstrating that isolated fraud does occur and can be prosecuted. But the numbers bear little resemblance to claims of systemic or election-changing fraud.
The findings are especially notable because researchers relied on data compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has spent years documenting election-fraud cases nationwide.
Only two Nevada cases over nearly three decades involved noncitizens. Four involved duplicate voting and five involved false registrations.
One of the most striking cases involved Donald Kirk Hartle, whose claim that someone had voted in his deceased wife’s name was promoted by Nevada Republicans after the 2020 election. Investigators ultimately determined Hartle himself had cast the ballot using his wife’s identity. He later pleaded guilty.
A separate Brookings analysis of Heritage’s nationwide database similarly found only tiny numbers of fraudulent votes across hundreds of millions of ballots, with none changing an election outcome.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump said Wednesday that companies building massive data centers should provide financial “dividends” to surrounding communities as opposition grows over the projects’ electricity use, water consumption and potential impact on utility bills.
Trump said on Truth Social that companies have discovered financial payments can turn unpopular projects into locally supported developments. His administration has aggressively promoted new data center construction as part of its effort to expand U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure and compete with China.
The president also said new facilities should generate their own electricity and either sell or provide excess power to local grids, an effort aimed at preventing households from absorbing the massive new energy demand created by AI computing.
Data centers have increasingly encountered bipartisan resistance in communities concerned that taxpayers and utility customers could subsidize infrastructure benefiting some of the world’s wealthiest technology companies.
Congress has responded as well. The House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act 417-3 in September, which would require regulators to consider whether large electricity users should bear the costs of new generation and transmission infrastructure. A subsequent Senate vote received 57 votes but failed to reach the 60 needed to advance.
The debate is likely to intensify as Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and other companies spend billions expanding AI-related infrastructure nationwide.
A Ruidoso Fire Department station less than a half mile from the Riverview RV Park. The fire chief had for weeks declined requests from off-duty swiftwater technicians who wanted to be stationed in flood-prone areas, including one close to the RV park, before the waters hit.
The man was nearly to his waist in a flooded river and couldn’t get out. A firefighter and a police officer didn’t have enough rope or manpower to lift him onto the temporary flood barrier that separated them from the debris-strewn water. The man, Jere Stark, had just been carried a quarter mile by a torrential flood and was covered in mud and extremely cold.
It was around 3:30 p.m. on July 8, 2025, and a flood in Ruidoso, New Mexico, had unleashed chaos at Paradise Canyon Drive, just a couple hundred yards from the headquarters of the village fire department.
Not far from Stark, a woman huddled on the ground, shielded from the floodwaters by the temporary barrier. It was Stephanie Trotter, a tourist from El Paso, Texas, who had been washed away with her young daughter. A civilian tended to her while a second firefighter hauled in a rope he had used to rescue her. “Is somebody coming for her?” asked the civilian.
By that time, at least eight other firefighters were trying to save people upstream at the Riverview RV Park, where Trotter and Stark had been staying. But at the barrier where Stark was waiting for help, the two firefighters and one police officer were the only first responders. One of the firefighters wasn’t even wearing a personal flotation device — a basic safety measure for flood rescues.
They soon got help from civilians, including a property owner in shorts and flip-flops and a second passerby who both helped one of the firefighters haul Stark from the water with another rope.
Body-camera footage from a Ruidoso Police Department officer shows the moment that a civilian, Corey Sexton, and others pulled Jere Stark from the flood.Obtained by ProPublica
Trotter and two civilians told the police officer, Jimmy Hernandez, that her family was missing. Lost in the flood were her 4-year-old daughter, her 7-year-old son and her husband.
Hearing this, Hernandez radioed, “We need swiftwater rescue here.” But no additional swiftwater teams arrived for at least 25 minutes. Both children died, along with an adult man. Trotter’s husband, Sebastian, survived.
The shortage of firefighters at Paradise Canyon Drive illustrates larger problems with Ruidoso’s emergency response that day. Five rescuers involved in the effort said the village’s leadership had not given them enough training or dispatched enough of them in advance of the flooding to protect the community. Because of the flood’s strength, rescuers said, the best chance to save the Trotters’ children was before the water arrived, when they could have evacuated the area where the family was camping.
But they said the fire chief, Cade Hall, had for weeks resisted calls to station additional flood experts in low-lying areas when there was a threat of storms. Doing so would have required paying firefighters overtime. “The village’s mentality is, ‘We’ll have to pay for that, and what if nothing happens?’” said one rescuer in an interview earlier this year.
ProPublica reported that village leaders knew dangerous floods were likely because two intense 2024 wildfires had scarred the hillsides above town. Even moderate rain on severe burn scars can trigger post-fire floods and debris flows. But leaders seeking to encourage tourism scolded residents who warned of the danger on social media. We also examined what went wrong with the rescue itself, consulting with seven experts outside Ruidoso who have experience in emergency response including floods.
The Village of Ruidoso did not respond to detailed written questions about its emergency response, and it has not publicly released a report on rescue efforts during the flood. Reached by phone, Hall disputed ProPublica’s reporting but declined to provide specifics. Mayor Lynn Crawford has said protecting the village includes balancing public safety with tourism, the lifeblood of its economy.
The fire department employed nine swiftwater technicians trained to perform rescues in floodwater. But when forecasters issued a flash flood warning due to heavy rain, only a handful were working, along with four New Mexico National Guard technicians in vehicles capable of navigating floods. According to a spokesperson for the Guard, its members helped rescue nine people from the flood.
Two additional swiftwater teams had recently been in Ruidoso. But when the weather forecast for the area showed a slightly decreased chance of flash flooding in late June, the state’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management issued an order to send home the team from Las Cruces. One member of that team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their employment, said, “We didn’t understand why we were being sent home.” The other swiftwater team, which was from Texas, left after deadly flooding hit Kerr County and surrounding regions in its home state.
A former incident commander for Cal Fire, California’s fire agency, said that the state shared responsibility for the inadequate emergency response on July 8 because of its decision to send home the Las Cruces team. “This should be a clarion call as to reevaluating their resource availability.”
Asked about the decision, a DHSEM spokesperson said in an email, “New Mexico was experiencing multiple flooding threats,” adding that the team needed to be available to respond elsewhere. According to the spokesperson, there are only about eight swiftwater teams in the state.
But the Las Cruces team was not deployed to another flood. Rather, it went home. “I could understand if we were sent somewhere else,” said the frustrated swiftwater technician.
This left Ruidoso’s firefighters to lead rescue operations in the village. But Hall had for weeks declined requests from off-duty swiftwater technicians who wanted to be stationed in flood-prone areas before the waters hit. One of those areas was close to the Riverview RV Park, where Stark and the Trotter family were staying.
Stephanie and Sebastian Trotter’s trailer was destroyed during the flooding at the Riverview RV Park.
Forty-five minutes before the downpour started, Crawford had stated in a council meeting that whenever the village was alerted to flooding, firefighters and public works employees would be at the ready: “Everybody is in position.”
Over the coming two hours, these words would prove false.
At 2:12 p.m. the National Weather Service sent out a flash flood warning. About 20 minutes later, Hall summoned all off-duty swiftwater technicians. At 2:38 p.m., a weather service hydrologist wrote in a message to emergency managers, “Water is Out of the Banks in the Rio Ruidoso at the County Line.” At 2:47 p.m., the warning was upgraded to a flash flood emergency. Still, internal fire department records show that Hall didn’t call in his full department until 3:10 p.m., 45 minutes after Ruidoso dispatchers recorded the first call for rescue related to the flood. It was too late for some: Before any firefighters could access the Riverview RV Park, Stephanie Trotter and her daughter were swept downstream.
Trotter and her husband, Sebastian, said they had no idea the town was in danger and didn’t receive the automated alerts sent by the National Weather Service. (They said they had not known about, or signed up for, text-message alerts created by the village.) During the hour before the flood reached them, first responders with loudspeakers drove through other parts of the community, telling people to seek high ground. But no officials with loudspeakers went to the Riverview RV Park, even though the area was known to flood and even though it sat just down the road from the primary fire station.
The village had another warning tool it did not use that day: sirens. During the 2024 fires, Ruidoso’s emergency manager, Eric Queller, had overseen the evacuation of thousands using the siren system. Since the flood, the village has claimed that using it could have put people in harm’s way by sending them onto roads covered with water.
The village had long planned to install additional sirens, including three that could instruct people to seek high ground during flooding, allowing a more orderly evacuation. But the new sirens were not yet operational by July 8. In an interview last year, Queller said that the disasters the community faced since 2024 had delayed the project.
Eric Queller, Ruidoso’s emergency manager, helped coordinate the area’s fire and flood response.
According to firefighters, the department’s flood response was also limited by an antiquated dispatch system. Fire departments typically use computer-aided dispatch systems. Ruidoso’s department didn’t have one. Firefighters say this shortfall preceded Hall, and that he had been in favor of acquiring a computer-aided dispatch system.
Experts say that without computer-aided dispatch, chiefs often rely on memory or notes. Radio channels can become clogged, adding to confusion. According to Ruidoso firefighters, the effect was acutely felt during chaotic situations.
Following Stark’s rescue, the first responders at Paradise Canyon Drive were overwhelmed, according to two civilians who were present and Hernandez’s body-camera footage. Trotter told Hernandez that her daughter was in the water, and that they had been in an RV. According to the property owner, Corey Sexton, he saw a child float past and alerted first responders. Hernandez told crews downstream to look for a child, but he also radioed that he thought the children were in an upstream trailer. (Hernandez and the police department did not respond to emailed questions. Reached by phone, the department’s deputy chief did not answer questions about the response.)
The two firefighters, listening to their radios, hustled to the upstream bridge, prepared rope and watched the water. Minutes later, a call came on the radio: two children were trapped in a house at the upstream RV park. Swiftwater technicians at the park waded in and saved them.
Swiftwater technicians at the Riverview RV Park saved two children trapped in this house.
During the crucial minutes immediately after the Trotters’ children were swept downstream, no one had clear information. According to multiple firefighters, the department briefly thought it had found all the missing children. Experts told ProPublica that such chaos and misinformation is common during disaster response. But the experts also said it can be mitigated by having good dispatch systems and adequate staffing.
Records show that Ruidoso firefighters fielded 34 emergency calls on July 8 once flooding started, and the department has stated it made more than 60 rescues.
Despite the deaths, first responders say the village’s leadership has not learned needed lessons and has continued to prioritize tourism at the expense of public safety.
By this summer the village had finally installed its voice-activated sirens and reversed its position on the standard ones: The village would now use them during floods.
Hall had planned for all firefighters to be trained as swiftwater technicians. But in February, the firefighters, many of whom worked second jobs to make ends meet, unionized. The department’s plans changed, with Hall sending firefighters to get a lower-level certification that limited their ability to perform rescues in rushing water.
In April, senior Ruidoso Fire Department officers held a meeting during which they discussed Hall’s leadership. ProPublica reviewed a recording of the gathering. An officer said Hall, who did not attend the meeting, still wouldn’t pre-position extra firefighters. “How many people are going to die?” the officer wondered aloud during the meeting.
Hall declined to respond to questions about the meeting and the allegation that he hadn’t pre-positioned enough firefighters to avoid paying overtime.
Once monsoons arrived this year, multiple rescuers say, Hall rarely stationed off-duty firefighters in vulnerable areas. Sometimes in the afternoons, when it was most likely to rain, multiple firefighters weren’t in town. To promote tourism, Ruidoso had signed a contract with Contour Airlines to provide flights between Denver and the village. During takeoffs and landings emergency medical workers had to be present at the airport, 17 miles from where Trotter and Stark were rescued.
Stephanie Trotter holds a bracelet on her husband’s wrist displaying their children’s initials. Their 4-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son died in the flooding.
Columbus, OH — Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is doubling down on a deeply personal attack against Democrat Amy Acton, spending $4 million to air an advertisement featuring her estranged mother despite widespread criticism from both Republicans and Democrats.
The ad features Donna Arthur calling her daughter a “liar” and disputing Acton’s longstanding account of a childhood marked by instability, homelessness and sexual abuse.
Acton has said she was sexually abused by her stepfather when she was around 12 and that her mother failed to protect her. Her brother, Philip Stearns, said their mother remained married to the man accused of abusing Acton even after the children were removed from the home.
Ramaswamy initially did not identify his campaign as the source of the viral video, but later acknowledged producing it. His campaign told Axios that internal testing showed the ad performing well with “persuadable” voters and is moving ahead with the multimillion-dollar buy despite the backlash.
Even conservative commentators have condemned the tactic. Mary Katharine Ham questioned how the campaign could expect the ad not to backfire, while Meghan McCain and other Republicans criticized the use of an estranged parent against a candidate.
A mid-October Marist poll showed Acton leading Ramaswamy 50% to 43% among likely Ohio voters.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump’s clemency operation is facing renewed ethics scrutiny after a Venezuelan billionaire received a full pardon weeks after his family provided former Trump attorney Alina Habba with a contract guaranteeing her more than $50 million.
Julio Herrera Velutini had faced felony bribery charges before reaching an unusually lenient 2025 plea agreement for a misdemeanor campaign-finance violation. His family then pursued a pardon through Christopher Kise, another former Trump attorney.
Meanwhile, Herrera’s daughter, Isabela Herrera, donated $3.5 million to a Trump-aligned super PAC and pledged another $2.5 million toward Trump’s White House ballroom project.
Then came the Habba deal. The Herrera family offered Habba $10 million annually for four years plus bonuses through Concord Partners, a newly created company whose business activities remain unclear. Habba began working there Jan. 1 while also serving as an adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi. Trump pardoned Herrera weeks later.
Habba denies participating in the pardon effort and says her employment arrangement was disclosed and vetted by the Justice Department. The White House has also denied that political donations influenced the clemency decision.
The sequence nevertheless adds to broader scrutiny of Trump pardons involving wealthy defendants, political donors and individuals represented by lawyers or lobbyists with close ties to the president.
Park City, KS — President Donald Trump used the antisemitic term “Shylock” during a Kansas campaign rally Monday while defending Republican Sen. Roger Marshall against criticism over his past practice of suing patients for unpaid medical bills.
Trump complained that Democratic ads had portrayed Marshall as “some kind of a Shylock-type guy,” invoking the Jewish moneylender from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The term has long been used as an antisemitic stereotype associating Jewish people with greed and predatory lending.
The Anti-Defamation League responded Tuesday by saying the term is “rooted in a longstanding antisemitic stereotype” and can reinforce harmful tropes. Notably, its statement did not identify Trump by name.
Critics accused the organization of applying a softer standard to Trump than it has to other politicians. When Joe Biden used the same term in 2014, the ADL publicly addressed him by name and welcomed his apology.
Trump also falsely claimed Marshall had been legally required to pursue patients over unpaid bills. Kansas reporting found Marshall’s former medical practice sued more than 700 patients, with some ultimately arrested after failing to appear in court.
Trump used the same slur at an Iowa rally in 2025. At the time, he said he was unaware of its antisemitic meaning.
The Kansas appearance came as Marshall faces an unexpectedly competitive reelection challenge from Democrat Adam Hamilton.
Washington, DC — Elon Musk personally ordered restrictions on a military-grade satellite network used by Ukraine, disrupting battlefield operations and setting off confusion inside the Trump administration over who authorized the move, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The slowdown capped connection speeds for Ukrainian equipment using SpaceX satellite technology, leaving numerous reconnaissance and combat drones unable to operate normally. Ukrainian officials said the restrictions endangered troops and weakened their ability to intercept Russian drones and conduct other battlefield missions.
The restrictions came amid escalating pressure from both Musk and President Donald Trump on Ukraine to stop striking Russian oil and diesel facilities. Trump has simultaneously eased economic pressure on Moscow, including waiving recently enacted sanctions and supporting increased Russian diesel sales.
Questions remain over who ultimately authorized the satellite restrictions. Musk publicly said the military-grade Starshield system is controlled by the U.S. government and that limitations are decided by the military and ultimately the president. Trump, however, later told reporters that neither he nor his administration ordered the disruption.
The Journal reported that SpaceX subsequently contacted White House officials seeking a coordinated explanation for the decision.
Ukraine continues to report restrictions on the system, underscoring its vulnerability to decisions made thousands of miles from the battlefield.
: CBSSN 
AJ GRAHAM FIRST CAREER INTERCEPTION 
Photo: Among the evening’s featured speakers was Dashaun Howell, an alumnus of UrbanPromise’s after-school camps and StreetLeader program. Image created on 10/27 using AI.
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