Move comes after criticism of remarks in support of football club’s owners following financial regulations breach ruling
Andy Burnham has said he will publish all details of his dealings with Manchester City in his previous mayoral role after his intervention in support of the football club’s owners raised eyebrows.
Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative party leader, had urged the prime minister to publish everything related to his work with the club as Greater Manchester mayor and the Liberal Democrats wrote to him asking him to release minutes of meetings and declare all hospitality gifts received from owners of Manchester City.
Alvaro Pulido was indicted in Miami federal court in 2019 and again in 2021 as part of an investigation into his longtime business partner, Alex Saab, a one-time ally of ousted President Nicolás Maduro.
Basically the title. Is the answer just Ebay? Or here? Any shops that do Onewheel repair that are always looking for used original control and BMS circuit boards?
Kyrie Irving waited nearly 600 days for his return to the NBA. The Dallas Mavericks didn’t keep him waiting any longer for his welcome-back basket.
Irving scored a reverse layup on the game’s opening possession on Sunday night, setting the tone for a team-high 17 points in the Mavericks’ 132-115 pre-season win over the Houston Rockets in Macau.
After Saudi Arabia said Iran's Houthi allies carried out another strike at Riyadh's airport, Iran called the U.S. effort to negotiate toward ending the war "insufficient."
BOZEMAN, Mont. - It’s a big weekend for Montana politics, with absentee ballots heading to voters and Montana’s U.S. Senate Candidates squaring off in their first debate.
There was some Blade Runner news at New York Comic-Con this weekend — and also some news about Godzilla. Ars Technica reports:
We got our first look at Prime Video's new sci-fi series Blade Runner 2099 in July at San Diego Comic-Con. With the show's premiere roughly six weeks away, the streamer unveiled the full trailer this weekend at New York Comic-Con... Prime Video will drop all eight episodes of Blade Runner 2099 on November 25, 2026. [It's already earned 2.1 million views in the last 17 hours].
We also got a new trailer for Godzilla Minus Zero, the sequel to director Takashi Yamazaki's gloriously grounded kaiju epic, Godzilla Minus One, which became a major international hit and snagged an Oscar for best visual effects. [1.2 million views in its first five hours]
And StarWars.com brings news from the Star Wars universe:
Kevin Smith has already announced his Star Wars/Marvel: Hope Assembles crossover comic, interweaving the Marvel universe and the Star Wars galaxy like never before. Now, you're cordially invited to add your own creative ideas to the mix through a LEGO Ideas challenge celebrating the milestone 50th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope.
Using physical or virtual LEGO bricks, fans are challenged to build "their own epic mash-ups," according to Lego's web site, "in three categories: Character Fusion, Vehicle Fusion, and Scene Fusion." ("Write an engaging description and upload great images of your creation without using AI tools...")
Meanwhile, Star Trek fan site TrekMovie.com covered the major Star Trek announcements:
There were an interview with 95-year-old William Shatner by Star Trek super-fan Ben Stiller, which ended "with Stiller surprising Shatner by revealing the original Gorn head from his personal Star Trek memorabilia collection."Also announced was a new documentary about the disastrous fan-organized convention in 1982 that tried reuniting cast members from the original series. (Its title? The Con of Wrath: The Craziest Convention Ever!)Gates McFadden (who played Dr. Beverly Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation) will write a new comic book to "bridge the 20 year in-universe gap in Crusher's story between the events of the film Star Trek Nemesis and the television series Star Trek: Picard."Paramount+ offered a panel about their series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (which returns for a second season in 2027).Nacelle Toys even announced new action figures of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and Lucile Ball, owner of Desilu Productions.
Reuters also has photos of costumed attendees.
But there was also some excitement when an unruly fan shouted over a panel for the Prime Video animated series Helluva Boss. Entertainment Weekly reports it culminated with series star Brandon Rogers shouting "You need to shut the f--- up right now. I'm going to jump over this fence and end you. It's not cute."
The president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has expressed her “full support for President Zelenskyy” amid calls for a ceasefire.
In a telephone call with the Ukrainian leader, von der Leyen posted on X that she “fully supported the call of President Zelenskyy for a ceasefire that would protect global food supplies and energy infrastructure in Ukraine and Russia.
“Ukraine supports the ceasefire, and it’s important for Russia to support it as well. We are awaiting details from the American side. From our Ukrainian side, there is always FULL support for de-escalation steps, protection of lives, and the necessary decisions to end the war and ensure lasting peace.”
Senior official says president and US secretary of state are ‘extremely pissed off’ by conduct of US envoy to Greece
Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, are considering firing US ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle after a series of reports alleging she has engaged in improper and possibly illegal conduct before and during her tenure in Athens.
A senior US official said Sunday that Trump and Rubio are “extremely pissed off” by Guilfoyle’s reported conduct and would likely decide on what action to take this week after Monday’s federal holiday.
Several Republican lawmakers objected to the deal and expressed support for Ukraine's president in his fight with Russia. U.S. allies also called him and underscored their backing for him.
Some more Gulf reaction to Houthi’s deadly airport attack and continued threats to target Saudi airspace.
In a significant message, the United Arab Emirates has issued a statement in solidarity with Saudi Arabia – expressing support for “all measures aimed at safeguarding the kingdom’s security and stability”.
The UAE message is improtant given the major rupture in relations this year between the two oil-rich kingdoms, first sparked by lingering divisions in Yemen, and made worse by the Iran War and arguments over oil prices which led to the UAE quitting OPEC (currently led by the Saudis) after six decades of membership.
Saturday’s incident comes amid an escalation of missile strikes by Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis on the kingdom. The airport has already been attacked twice this week, leaving four people dead and others wounded, and badly damaging an aircraft.
The Houthis have repeatedly attacked Saudi airports, oil facilities and tankers after a truce in their long-running war with Yemen’s Riyadh-backed government unravelled in July.
Abdullah’s 53-yard return sets up winning field goal
Eagles lose third straight as Jaguars improve to 4-1
Cam Little made the second of two field goals in the final eight seconds, giving the Jacksonville Jaguars a dramatic 19-17 win over the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday in London.
After Jake Elliott’s 48-yard field goal handed Philadelphia a 17-16 lead with eight seconds left, Jacksonville’s Ameer Abdullah returned the ensuing kickoff 53 yards to the Eagles’ 39 before he was tackled with one second left.
On this "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" broadcast, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso join Margaret Brennan.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin defended the Pentagon's plan to livestream the execution of an ex-Army major who was convicted of the 2009 killing of 13 people at Fort Hood.
Democratic Senate candidate’s remarks come as Trump has long baselessly claimed his 2020 election loss was stolen
Democrats must “win by massive numbers” during November’s federal midterm elections because Donald Trump and his Republican allies are bound to try to sow doubt about the integrity of the results, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan said on Sunday.
El-Sayed’s comments on NBC’s Meet the Press came with the Democrats favored to win control of the House of Representatives during the 3 November midterms – and polls show that the party could also win Senate seats in states that traditionally elect Republicans and gain a majority there, too.
Ukrainian president earlier rejected US call for Kyiv to stop bombing oil refineries, saying Moscow must first end attacks on energy infrastructure
Donald Trump has announced an energy ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, apparently without consulting Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said the deal to stop long-range attacks was “news to me”.
In a social media post, the US president claimed the two sides had reached an agreement. “Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!” he wrote on Truth Social.
Oliver Blume says ‘Made in Europe’ rules to counter rapid rise of lower-price Chinese brands ‘must reward real value creation’
The boss of Volkswagen has backed EU proposals to boost its domestic industry, arguing European carmakers need to be able to “compete under comparable conditions” with Chinese rivals.
Oliver Blume said “Made in Europe” rules from the EU “must reward real value creation in Europe”, speaking in Paris before the motor show this week.
A projectile hit a passenger terminal at the airport in Riyadh on Sunday, the day after a deadly missile attack on the facility carried out by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebel group killed 13 people.
An unidentified projectile hit terminal 4 at King Khalid international airport, starting a fire and causing injuries, according to Saudi authorities. Air defences also intercepted a cruise missile in the vicinity of the airport. It was the latest of several attacks on the airport in the past week.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Sen. Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Oct. 11, 2026.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports:
When Elgin Community College hired Flock Safety to install six surveillance cameras in April 2025, President Peggy Heinrich thought they would "enhance the safety and security of students...." They were supposed to help locate stolen cars and missing people. But Heinrich started to wonder if the cameras were actually making students less safe after seeing news reports that data captured by Flock cameras in Illinois had been shared with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Then in September 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained an Elgin Community College student in a campus parking lot. More than half of students at the far west suburban Chicago campus identify as Latino. Heinrich said enrollment dipped. Students were afraid to come to class. College officials decided the cameras had to go...
College officials asked Flock to remove the surveillance cameras "out of an abundance of caution for our students," Heinrich said. But getting the cameras taken down was not as simple as it sounds, especially because Flock retains ownership of the company's equipment.... Surveillance experts say the company is financially incentivized to have as many cameras gathering data as possible even in places that no longer want them, because potential clients are looking for the surveillance network with the greatest reach.... Elgin Community College staff notified Flock in October 2025 that they wanted to cancel their contract and have the cameras taken down. Within a day, Heinrich said, Flock rejected the request and refused to uninstall the equipment on the basis that the company had not breached their agreement.
College officials reached out again in December 2025 and said they would pay for the remaining five months of the contract — they just wanted the cameras taken down. "We never received a response back from Flock," Heinrich said.
That's when things got weird. Heinrich said Elgin Community College staff began to cover the cameras using black trash bags and zip ties so that they would not be able to capture footage. But workers in an unmarked vehicle, which Heinrich assumed belonged to Flock, repeatedly removed the coverings... This strange dance continued, Heinrich said, until Elgin Community College's contract with Flock expired in April this year and the company uninstalled the cameras for good.
A fuel deal with Vladimir Putin, and sanctions against the legal institution, ram home the president’s belief that might is right
On Friday, Donald Trump drove home his belief that might is right and the rule of law is an obstacle rather than an essential foundation stone of international order. First came the escalated assault on the international criminal court (ICC), sanctioning the body itself. Then he announced a deal with Russia to buy diesel.
The US has long chafed at the notion of being bound by the rule of law that it espoused publicly. That hypocrisy now appears as a lesser vice. The president has declared that “my own morality” is all that constrains him. His brazen flouting of the law, embrace of dictators and rhetorical attacks all undermine global standards.
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) – The buildings that house thousands of computer servers powering cloud computing and artificial intelligence have increasingly caught heat over environmental and energy concerns.
Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas, who's running to represent New Hampshire in the Senate, said that "we're taking nothing for granted" as Election Day approaches, amid a "tough race" in the Granite State.
The strike on King Khalid International Airport, the deadliest on Saudi soil in more than a decade, marked a major escalation in the war between Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis and the kingdom.
The U.S. has stopped short of direct military support against the Houthis in Yemen, but President Donald Trump is weighing joining strikes on the Iranian-backed rebels.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Oct. 11, 2026.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration is reportedly considering removing U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle as new allegations emerge that wealthy Greek businessmen financed luxury travel while she promoted their business interests.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Guilfoyle traveled to the World Economic Forum in Davos aboard a private jet owned by Greek businessman Alexandros Exarchou and planned additional travel on a jet belonging to shipping magnate Nikolas Tsakos. Tsakos also reportedly paid for her stay at the Four Seasons George V in Paris.
Audio reviewed by the Journal allegedly captured Guilfoyle boasting about her connections to the businessmen while seeking access to an event honoring Eric Trump. She was also reportedly recorded telling one businessman, “I’m going to make you a lot of f—ing money.”
The allegations raise questions about whether Guilfoyle improperly accepted gifts or used her diplomatic position to advance private commercial interests. She has denied wrongdoing and maintains that she followed applicable ethics rules.
President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are now weighing whether she should remain in the post, according to reporting cited by The Hill and the Associated Press.
The controversy follows separate allegations that Guilfoyle previously sought a $100,000 payment from a Republican donor while offering access to senior Trump administration officials, an accusation her attorney disputes.
The annual Met Gala was held on Monday, May 4, and it’s safe to say it is the ultimate fashion Super Bowl. The Met Gala (or Met Ball), formally called the Costume Institute Benefit, is an annual, invitation-only fundraising event held in New York City for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. The main purpose of the gala is to raise money for the Costume Institute, the museum’s only curatorial department that must raise its own operating funds.
The Met Gala has been culturally relevant for decades, but it caught social media’s attention in 2015 with the theme “China: Through the Looking Glass.” The theme celebrated China’s influence on western fashion with nods to the Silk Road, imperial couture and jewel tones galore. Celebrities such as Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga and many more were in attendance and set a high standard for what invitees should wear.
This year’s theme was costume art, with the dress code “fashion is art.” I turned on the Vogue live stream with a few expectations. I wanted to see references to various art styles and cult-classic pieces, lots of color and bold fashion choices. With that, these are my personal highlights from the 2026 Met Gala that still stick with me.
Emma Chamberlain was one of the first to arrive on the carpet in Thierry Mugler by Miguel Castro Freitas. This was a very clear reference to a legendary archival piece from Mugler’s fall 1997 haute couture collection, the “La Chimère” gown. This piece has been reinvented countless times by other designers. It was a bold move for the fashion house to attempt a modern version and they executed it excellently.
It’s worth noting that the dress appears to draw inspiration from Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting “The Scream,” as its colors closely match those of the painting. I loved the dress itself, but with an iconic reference like “The Scream,” it was ten times better.
Next, the rapper Skepta, dressed by Thom Browne, was a creative risk that I believe paid off. The artist is known not just for his music but also for his tattoos, which cover him from head to toe. Browne married a sleek, timeless vision with references to Skepta as an artist.
Tattoos are an amazing way for people to express themselves through art and this garment represents that. From the London Bridge on his stomach, to a giant eagle on his chest, these permanent artworks on the body were shown on the fabric using thread. Why cover up such a large part of someone’s identity when you can put it on top in a meaningful, tasteful way?
Out of the Kardashian/Jenner clan, I think Kendall took the cake. Wearing GapStudio by Zac Posen, the garment looks like a well-worn white tee, soaking wet on her body. With half of Jenner’s bust out, this piece looks simple at first glance. Once she got into the gala, Jenner lifted the gown’s train to reveal an intricate winged pattern that made her look like a real-life angel.
This garment seems to be inspired by the sculpture “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” which is known for its role in the design of the Nike swoosh. It is such a detailed sculpture that Posen excellently translated into a jaw-dropping dress. This blend of creativity and the sculpture and functionality of the white tee makes this piece a standout on the gala’s carpet.
Jeremy Pope hit the carpet in archival Vivienne Westwood, leaning into the fashion-as-body-as-art theme. The best way to describe his statement piece, the jacket, is by imagining a pearl-encrusted jacket that uses a Greek god’s body and muscles for placement. It’s a statement piece that not only connects to the theme but also references the gala’s 2018 “Heavenly Bodies” theme.
I think this was a very smart look to pull, especially since it really leans on the theme. It nods not only to the use of gems and minerals to enhance an outfit, but also to making Pope look like an ancient sculpture. Men’s outfits for the gala can be hit or miss, but I definitely think this garment made him a standout amongst the endless plain suits and blazers.
Lastly, Sabrina Carpenter had a unique yet captivating take on this year’s theme, partnering with Dior by Jonathan Anderson. From afar, the look is not very dimensional and looks like a simple vinyl dress. The details, however, get revealed once you step closer. The dress is made from film strips from the 1954 film “Sabrina,” featuring stills of Audrey Hepburn.
With a hefty dose of bedazzling, the garment truly is a work of art. It is delicate, unique and smart. Given that Dior dressed a handful of other stars for the event, this piece doesn’t scream Dior. I was quite impressed that the fashion house decided to create such a distinctive garment for this event, completely steering away from what we know as the Dior brand.
I want to give some honorable mentions since many stars followed the theme and made an impression on the carpet. Audrey Nuna in Robert Wun, Rachel Sennott in Marc Jacobs, Joe Burrow in Bode, Chase Infiniti in Thom Browne and Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo in Jean Paul Gaultier.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the gala has had a dramatic shift, with celebrities playing it safe with their outfits. I think this year really brought back some of the event’s original essence and many stars met the theme’s criteria. Overall, I was impressed with the looks that hit the carpet and I am patiently waiting for next year’s Met Gala.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Oct. 11, 2026.
Analysts say fuel will take weeks to ship and quantity is too small to affect prices, while full deal is unlikely to be met given damage to Russian refineries
Donald Trump’s deal with Vladimir Putin to temporarily lift sanctions on US imports of Russian diesel will have little “meaningful” effect on motorists and businesses in the US and overseas, energy and foreign policy analysts have predicted.
The US president infuriated Volodymyr Zelenskyy when he announced the deal on Friday, writing on Truth Social that the agreement with his Russia counterpart to supply millions of tonnes of diesel was essential to reduce fuel prices in the US, which have soared after his decision to go to war against Iran.
Just bought a Hoosier for my xr+ because the stock one was smoked, but when I put the tire on it rubs on the battery side and almost touches the other side if I put in more than 10lbs of air. Any tips?
Long-time Slashdot reader badger.foo writes: As some of you may remember, in 2001 RFC1149 (TCP/IP over carrier pigeon) was implemented.
Now one of the packets preserved from that event is up for auction at Christies. Direct link to the auction (current bid: USD 2600) is here.
This is a unique chance to own a piece of Internet history!
PM says he asked question upon entering No 10 but does not reveal who gave him ‘clear answer’ that Russia meddled
Andy Burnham has said it is clear Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum, after seeking answers on the Kremlin’s involvement in the 2016 vote when he entered Downing Street.
Burnham said he had asked whether Moscow had attempted to influence the referendum and received a confirmation that it had.
The following is the transcript of the interview with Democratic New Hampshire Senate candidate Rep. Chris Pappas that aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Oct. 11, 2026.
Zack Polanski has signalled a potential overhaul of the Green party’s cherished grassroots democracy, calling for leaders to have greater control over strategic direction after a divisive vote equating Zionism with racism.
The Green party leader has also questioned whether political parties should seek to define what members believe, in his strongest criticism yet of a motion that has provoked bitter divisions, international condemnation and calls for his resignation.
Parra-Hernandez suffered a broken leg and taken to a hospital after being hit by car during an ICE operation
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent driving a vehicle struck a man on Saturday while trying to pursue him and someone else in the Houston area, according to authorities.
The federal agency had been trying to pull over and arrest Jose Mendoza-Cervantes in north-west Harris county, Texas, when he and the victim, Miguel Parra-Hernandez, exited the vehicle, officials said.
Knibb overtakes Norwegian rival in final kilometer
Defending champion Løvseth collapses while leading
France’s Vincent Luis wins men’s title on Kona debut
American triathlete Taylor Knibb has won her first Hawaiian Ironman world title after one of the most dramatic finishes in race history.
With a mile left, Norwegian defending champion Solveig Løvseth led Knibb by more than a minute and looked rock-solid, having taken the lead from her inside the final 10km of the 42.2km marathon run.
America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration "said on Tuesday that it will rewrite its vehicle lighting standards," reports Reuters, "to address concerns about headlight glare and allow for the latest safety-improving lighting technologies."
NHTSA said it plans to improve rules for LEDs, dusk sensors, automatic high beams and replaceable light sources. The agency will also evaluate headlamp height and aim and how they impact driver visibility and address headlight glare and make appropriate changes.
Complaints about glare from headlights have increased and some lawmakers have urged the government to set a maximum headlight brightness standard. A growing number of taller trucks and SUVs on roads has also led to more complaints about glare. LEDs, which now account for most headlights in new cars, are much brighter than traditional halogen headlights... The issue still accounts for a small number of nighttime crashes, according to a study last year from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). The study noted that headlight glare contributes to far fewer crashes than insufficient visibility...
Federal headlight standards for minimum and maximum brightness have not changed since 1997, IIHS noted. The study found that drivers older than 70 appear to be most affected by headlight glare. In 2022, NHTSA said it would allow automakers to install adaptive driving beam headlights on new vehicles. The devices adjust the headlight beam pattern to dim portions directed at other vehicles.
Thanks to Slashdot reader technology_dude for sharing the news.
The following is the full transcript of the interview with Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer of Palantir, a portion of which aired on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" on Oct. 11, 2026.
In January 2025, the Pacific Palisades wildfire burned more than 5,000 homes, including Billy Crystal's. From the smoldering ruins of what was once his family home, Crystal found inspiration for his latest one-man Broadway show, "860."
Exclusive: As William ‘Rob’ Gilfillan was about to go on trial for sex offences against two schoolgirls, his barrister told a judge his client’s history was easily discoverable online
The Australian’s podcast Shadow of Doubt led to a delay of 10 months for the sex offence trial of a “sadistic” paedophile already serving a 48-year jail term for abusing his daughter, court documents have revealed.
William “Rob” Gilfillan, a former physical education teacher, was to stand trial in Victoria in February last year on five counts of indecent assault and sexual penetration of a person under 16, relating to two schoolgirls in his care in Gippsland in the 1980s.
A key figure in President Trump's 2016 campaign and a former White House adviser, Steve Bannon remains an outspoken champion of the MAGA movement, who believes a Republican victory in the midterms is imperative.
A man, who has not yet been named, was seen entering a tiger enclosure at the Yorkshire Wildlife Park, located near Doncaster, before police were called at 1.35pm on Saturday.
At least four deaths linked to storm amid warnings of flash flooding that could stretch into Appalachians
As what was left of Hurricane Isaias moved north on Sunday, bringing moderate to heavy rainfall across the central Appalachians and the mid-Atlantic region, nearly 396,000 customers across the Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama remained without power.
Heavy rainfall associated with the storm could bring isolated flash flooding and strong wind gusts and remain a threat across the south-eastern US, especially near the southern Appalachians, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). That could bring scattered power outages and downed trees and power lines. Life-threatening surf and rip current conditions were expected to continue along the Gulf and south-eastern Atlantic coasts.
"Stick Season" propelled the singer-songwriter from Vermont into a multi-platinum, two-time Grammy-nominated artist. Now, Noah Kahan's "The Great Divide," with lyrics describing friendships lost and bouts of depression and anxiety, has topped the Billboard chart.
UK Health Security Agency notes above-average activity and urges at-risk groups to get vaccinated
Flu is striking earlier than usual in England, experts have said, insisting that vaccination is the best way to blunt its impact.
According to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), flu is at low levels, but various metrics, such as the proportion of positive tests and GP consultations for influenza-like illness, suggest it is on the rise, with the number of emergency-department attendances for influenza-like illness above seasonally expected levels.
Comments were among the most direct overtures by Trump to woo Democratic senator into his Republican party
Donald Trump on Saturday openly encouraged Democratic US senator John Fetterman to switch parties and become a Republican just weeks before the federal midterm elections could reshape control of Congress.
“I’d love to see him as a Republican,” the presidents told reporters at Joint Base Andrews as he returned to Washington DC from a rally in Tennessee. “He does better as a Republican than he does as a Democrat.”
The reckless missile attack on King Khalid international airport in Riyadh on Saturday did not just export the death and misery inside Yemen to Saudi Arabia, it also left Donald Trump forced to reconsider his diplomatic and political strategy designed to take him into the midterm elections next month.
The US president’s plan had only been unveiled on Friday. He said it was the result of “a world problem” – spiralling diesel prices – which he blamed on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s attacks on Russian oil refineries. He was going to keep the political temperature down on his war of choice in Iran and its spillover in Yemen until after the midterms.
In her new book, "Ethel Kennedy: The Extraordinary Life and Bold Legacy," daughter Kerry Kennedy writes about a woman who maintained positivity and resilience despite numerous public and private tragedies.
Part of site of First Hampden in Glasgow is up for rent and campaigners want to turn it into a community hub
Fans of Scotland’s national football team may not have had many reasons to celebrate in recent years, but that hasn’t always been the case. Almost 150 years ago, in 1878, the team moved into their first home in a Glasgow ground known as First Hampden and promptly won every game they played there.
As well as being celebrated as Scotland’s “tartan fortress”, First Hampden, about half a mile from where Hampden Park sits today in south Glasgow, is widely considered the world’s first purpose-built international football stadium. Many features now commonplace in grounds around the world – including season tickets, turnstiles and pavilions – have long been thought to have originated there.
A packed fall week gets easier when meals are already handled. These 15 make-ahead recipes cover casseroles, pasta, chicken, breakfast bakes, sliders, and brownies that store or reheat well.The post 15 make-ahead recipes to take the pressure off another packed…
It’s been a year and a half since I first started working on resolving the IMU issues that plague VESC Onewheels. After many weekends spent over the code and testing, plenty of setbacks and several nosedives, I’ve now mostly finished the cleanup of the low-level IMU data signal path. That is, with the elephant in the room still kind of looming…
The main roadblock all along was me getting random controller resets, for which I still don’t have an explanation. The only conclusive trigger condition I observed was raising IMU Sample Rate to levels which fully saturated the CPU (close to 100% load). The resets also only ever happened to me on one board, although it was on two different controllers (Tronic 250R and JetFleet F6 32S v1). One tester (Kleym on discord, thanks!) recently dared to reproduce this by going to the same or higher frequencies than me and reported no issues. I’ll call this one data point not enough and declare Sample Rates above 900 Hz not safe on controllers where the CPU has to do the IMU comms (all of them except Thor301, Thor400 and Z400 as of writing this).
After my initial excursion into IMU sampling fixes, I went on to rewrite the IMU hardware device layer in the VESC firmware to unify and deduplicate the codebase, make it modular and overall clean up the code. This allowed me to apply the same fixes I did for the LSM6DS3 IMU to all the other IMUs, make further speedups and timing improvements to the data signal, and also make it much easier to add new IMUs, which will now also use the shared, cleaned up infrastructure.
The main practical impacts of this work are removing some cases of nose hunting (mainly nose up/down bias at higher speeds on rough terrain, which produces vibrations) and better vibration rejection as demonstrated in the linked post. On controllers that support it, higher IMU Sample Rates can now be reached, which may improve some aspects of board control (not widely explored yet).
It also serves as reassurance that the signal path is now clean (barring any potential stupid mistakes) on this level and the package is being served healthy data.
All the changes have been submitted to the VESC firmware and will be part of the 7.01 release. Until then, I am also providing my own 7.00 Refloat Extras release.
Release stage: testing
The release is moderately tested, the only known issue is the potential controller resets described above, which have never happened (over thousands of kilometers) at IMU Sample Rate 900 Hz. My release does have the Sample Rate limit lifted to allow anyone to experiment if they so wish, so please take care to stay at or below 900 Hz (the 7.01 final will keep the limit in place for the risky software-comms case).
Please make yourself familiar with what to do in case you get a nosedive. If it happens, try to gather as much information as possible and send it to me, it’ll help to diagnose the issue and can save others from the same fate.
Getting this far has cost a tremendous amount of time, some hardware, ruined clothes and a few bruises. If you would like to support the development, here’s a few options to do so.
Most Onewheel VESC controllers nowadays use software I2C for IMU comms (the CPU manually toggles bits on the wire with precise timing). I2C is slow (each sample takes hundreds of microseconds) and in the software-driven case gets interrupted by higher priority workloads (mainly motor control). I’ve done what I could to get the most out of this setup.
On select controllers (Thor301, Thor400, Z400), thanks to the good work of David Molony / mxlemming, the IMU is connected in a better way (it needs to be on the right MCU pins) which also allows hardware comms (the CPU doesn’t do the work, a specialized hardware peripheral does) using the SPI bus protocol instead of I2C. Until now these controllers shared the code with the rest, so they also used software I2C; now they use hardware SPI. SPI can go up to 10 MHz clock speed compared to 700 kHz of I2C, so it’s much faster.
Here’s how the two compare. dt is the time between consecutive samples (ideally a flat line) and sample latency is how long a sample is delayed before the firmware actually gets to use it:
Hardware SPI fixes the transfer, but there’s a second problem: the firmware polls the IMU on its own schedule, while the IMU takes samples on its own internal clock. The two clocks inevitably drift against each other (even setting the same 832 Hz on both IMU Sample Rate and Package Loop Hertz doesn’t make them line up at all), so the firmware sometimes reads a sample that’s already stale and the effective timing wobbles.
The fix is to let the IMU drive the timing: it has an interrupt pin that fires the moment a new sample is ready, and the firmware can use the signal to read the sample at that exact moment. With this, the sample timing is much more precise:
The data-ready interrupt requires the IMU interrupt pin to be wired to the controller, so it’s only available where the hardware allows it: currently only the Z400 onboard IMU has it, and some external IMUs support it (described below).
There is now a new, unified imu_status terminal command which can be used to find out the model of the IMU, its communication bus (I2C/SPI), whether it’s hardware or software driven, and some more data:
The overhaul comes with a number of smaller improvements across the board, also for the controllers staying on software I2C (some have already been mentioned in the previous post):
The I2C bus speed is raised to 700 kHz on all supported controllers
More accurate sample timestamping in all modes
On hardware SPI controllers, the IMU processing priority is raised to avoid arbitrary delays caused by other tasks
The board orientation is now seeded at startup, shortening the IMU startup time and overall bootup
If the IMU freezes and stops producing fresh data, the firmware detects it and stops feeding the stale readings to the package, letting it detect the sensor loss instead of staying engaged on data that are wrong just the right way
Support for the ST LSM6DSV32X, a modern IMU with much better on-paper noise and temperature-drift characteristics and twice the measurement range on both accel and gyro
A few select controllers expose full hardware SPI on a connector. An external IMU can be connected to this interface and it works much better than an I2C-connected one. SPI is much more resilient to noise and interference due to its electrical design, while running at 10 MHz clock speed compared to 700 kHz of I2C. For this reason, I’ve changed the external IMU support from I2C on the external UART connector (which will no longer work) to this new connector. Additionally, the data-ready interrupt is supported on this interface as well — wiring the INT1 pin is required for the LSM6DS3 and LSM6DSV32X (the older IMUs don’t support it and stay polled, the pin is then unused).
If you’ve been running an external IMU on one of these controllers, it will break and you’ll need to re-wire it for the new connection. I’ve made this breaking change because I believe the new one is so superior to the old one, it’s worth it, and it’s a niche setup which very few people are running, if anyone. If you are running this, please stay on the old firmware until you’re ready to rewire your IMU.
Supported controllers:
Thor301
Thor400 / Thor400v2
JetFleet F6 v1 (not v2)
Note: Even if you don’t wire anything to the external UART connector, the new connection shares the controller’s internal pins with it, so the two can’t run simultaneously. The external UART is disabled while an external IMU is configured.
Note on JetFleet F6 v1: I wasn’t able to test the support properly before my controller burnt (unrelated to the IMU), so it is not included upstream. If you can test this and confirm, reach out and I’ll submit it for inclusion.
Either the LSM6DS3 or the BMI160, wired correctly, is supported (the other, older IMUs should work as well but aren’t recommended). Once 7.01 is out, LSM6DSV32X will be available for selection in the config as well.
You can verify the IMU is running with the imu_status VESC Terminal command.
As ‘one in, one out’ scheme ends, refugees still want to cross the Channel despite French police aggression and hostile welcomes
The smuggler works quickly. Using a small shovel, he digs up a dinghy buried in a sand dune on a beach not far from Boulogne-sur-Mer, assembles it and affixes a motor in record time.
“I never saw anyone work like this,” says Amad, from Iraq, one of a group of about 30 asylum seekers waiting to cross the Channel. “The UK government wants to stop the smugglers, but they are smart. They have plan A, plan B and plan C, so there is always a way for them to get people across this sea. For as long as asylum seekers will pay them, there is too much money involved for them to give up.”
As raw milk industry experiences record growth, experts say it might contain pathogens that can sicken people
As raw milk becomes increasingly popular among Americans, there have been several recent disease outbreaks tied to the product, alarming public health officials.
Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics called for a ban on sales of unpasteurized milk in the United States.
The Michigan candidate for US Senate seat is running without directly acknowledging specific constituent groups
Abdul El-Sayed has an impressive résumé: Rhodes scholar, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, executive director of the Detroit health department. And, at 41, the Michigan Democratic senatorial candidate represents a new generation of politicians, a shift that he also embodies sartorially. Whereas casual dress for many politicians is a tieless dress shirt with rolled up sleeves, El-Sayed has embraced a post-corporate, digital nomad-ish uniform: fitted black T-shirt, slim jeans and sneakers.
His progressive politics are having a moment among liberals, and he remains unswervingly disciplined about his message: “Money Out of Politics, Money in Your Pocket, Medicare for All.” On paper he appears well-aligned to Democratic sensibilities in this moment, and he is competitive in the polls. But his support is softer than overall Democratic sentiment would dictate, especially among Black voters.
Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ spending cuts will be fully felt next year, but hospitals are already feeling the squeeze
Maternity wards across the United States are facing a wave of closures as cuts to federal Medicaid funding take effect, experts have warned.
According to analysis by the non-profit Protect Our Care, 52 maternity wards have closed since the HR1 bill was announced in July 2025, with a further eight having announced their upcoming closure.
Sunday cooking does not need a sink full of dishes. These 17 one-pot recipes cover soups, chili, casseroles, tacos, fried rice, hash, chowder, and skillet dinners that keep the process manageable.The post 17 one-pot recipes even a reluctant cook can…
Pontiff says it was detected at an early stage and procedure will take place in the coming days
Pope Leo XIV has said he will undergo surgery in the coming days to remove a nodular lesion on his lung that was recently discovered during medical checks.
The 71-year-old said the nodule was found at an early stage and was “circumscribed” or well localised. The Vatican later said Leo would undergo surgery in the first days of this week, with an expected recovery time of a week.
"What did four astronauts see, notice, and document as they traveled around the Moon during NASA's Artemis II mission?" asks a new NASA web page, offering some fascinating pictures and video:
Through photographs, spoken observations, drawings, and annotations, the Artemis II crew created a unique scientific record — one that is now available to the science community and the public for further study... As part of the mission science plan, lunar scientists asked the Artemis II crew to watch for tiny flashes sparked by rocky fragments hitting the Moon. Even so, some scientists were astonished when astronauts reported seeing five extremely faint "pinprick" bursts of light from 46,000 miles away. After ruling out other sources — cosmic rays or reflections from the spacecraft — the science team confirmed the sightings... The impact flash observations happened during a planned loss of communications while the Artemis II crew was on the far side of the Moon... Apollo astronauts saw similar flashes from lunar orbit, but the Artemis crew likely caught the faintest ever seen with the unaided eye.
From the brightness of the flashes, scientists estimated that incoming rocks were each no more than a couple of inches wide. Despite their size, they were traveling thousands of miles per hour, producing just enough light upon impact to be visible. The nearly hour-long total solar eclipse that the crew experienced while passing by the Moon's far side created ideal dark conditions for spotting such subtle bursts. With no atmosphere to slow or burn up incoming debris, projectiles slam freely into the lunar surface. The crew's direct observations of this process on the Moon's far side provided a rare dataset that will help us understand how often these small impacts occur, which is essential for assessing long-term risks to future lunar habitats and infrastructure...
The crew reported seeing subtle hues of gray, black, brown, tan, white, green, and blue across the Moon's surface. This muted rainbow offers clues to the rocks and minerals that make up different lunar regions, helping scientists piece together how the Moon — and, by extension, Earth — evolved over time.
"Amazing news," Mission Control responded when they heard about the flashes. Space.com reports that when a Mission Control operator looked over at the Science Evaluation Room, "they were jumping up and down, literally."
NASA blogged this week that more than 800 gigabytes of Artemis II lunar science data — some previously unreleased — "have been uploaded to NASA's Planetary Data System, the public archive for NASA's planetary missions."
This data release includes more than 11,000 full-resolution images and video of the Moon from the crew's handheld cameras and the Orion spacecraft's cameras, 8.5 hours of audio recordings of the crew's scientific observations of the lunar surface, and crew-annotated images... Along with this data, NASA has released the Artemis II Preliminary Lunar Science Report, the Artemis II Lunar Science Operations Report, and the Artemis II Lunar Science Data User Guide.
Once sweater season is fully underway, these 13 soup and stew picks bring sausage, seafood, turkey, pumpkin, vegetables, tortellini, and creamy chowders to the table.The post 13 comforting fall soup and stew picks worth making once you’ve fully committed to…
Ministers reportedly seeking to halve time for Lords scrutiny of voting and donations changes amid election speculation
Andy Burnham is facing questions over plans to speed up sweeping changes to Britain’s electoral system amid speculation that some of his closest advisers are pressing for an early general election.
Ministers reportedly want to at least halve the time available for peers to scrutinise legislation that would make it possible to vote without photographic identification, lower the voting age to 16 and tighten restrictions on political donations.
Three leaders of India's Cockroach Janata Party, a youth movement, were released Sunday, a day after they were detained ahead of protests against a contentious revision of voter lists.
They’re the latest technological innovation no one asked for – now with added consent issues!
I went to a party recently. A fancy one, filled with expensive people and interesting clothes.
You might find this surprising, as I expend hundreds of words a week in this publication bemoaning human interaction, but I love parties. I like free champagne, passed appetizers and forced, go-nowhere small talk.
Heat and humidity have led to one of the worst mosquito years in recent history, with West Nile virus at a decade high
Los Angeles might be best known for blue skies, beaches and film premiers — but for the last several years it’s held another, unenviable distinction: the most mosquito-infested city in America.
And this year has been especially nightmarish, thanks to a series of heatwaves and an extra-powerful El Niño. Locals have called it a summer of “living hell” as clouds of mosquitoes swarm backyards and leave diners at open air patios scratching their ankles.
Food producers are adding their voices to the chorus of warnings about the vulnerability of British supply chains
“There are so many decent, capable, productive, efficient arable farmers out there, asking how they are supposed to finance the crop they are meant to be putting in the ground,” Jamie Burrows says.
Sitting in his tractor at his arable farm in Norfolk, Burrows is listing the multiple challenges facing him and other food producers.
‘Even if AI supercharged the economy, its impact on the government’s finances would be muted’
Back through political history to the age of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have repeatedly promised the US public that tax cuts would pay for themselves, firing up economic growth and filling the government’s coffers.
The promise never really panned out. From the Gipper’s day on, the Republicans’ tax cuts inevitably increased the budget deficit. Despite its failure, though, the promise is back, coated in a fine new layer of artificial intelligence pixie dust. It will fail again.
Darializa Avila Chevalier criticizes NYPD’s ‘inaction’ in protecting Marble Hill protesters after ICE shot a man
Democratic congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier believes that the New York police departments’ conduct towards protesters after an ICE agent shot and wounded a man in the district she is running to represent violated “the spirit, if not the letter” of the city’s sanctuary laws.
These rules ban local police from helping federal immigration authorities in civil immigration enforcement operations.
Clarksville, TN — President Donald Trump said Saturday that he wants to rename either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean before leaving office, floating “Trump Ocean” and “Ocean of the Americas” as possibilities.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, Trump linked the idea to previous geographic name changes ordered by his administration.
“We need a river and we need an ocean,” Trump told the crowd before suggesting that either the Atlantic or Pacific could receive a new name. He did not announce a formal proposal or specify which ocean he preferred.
Trump also said he would like a major river renamed but ruled out changing the Hudson River, praising explorer Henry Hudson, and said he would leave the Mississippi River untouched.
The remarks follow Trump’s 2025 order directing federal agencies to use “Gulf of America” instead of Gulf of Mexico. In August, he also ordered federal agencies to refer to Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”
Those actions determine terminology used by the U.S. federal government but do not compel other countries or international geographic organizations to adopt the names.
Trump additionally floated calling the Strait of Hormuz the “Trump Strait.” No formal executive action involving the oceans, a river or the strait had been announced as of Saturday.
Wes Streeting said Ukrainians alone should be able to decide who leads their country as he indicated Trump was facing domestic political pressure over fuel prices before next month’s midterm elections.
Rev Dr Frederick Douglass Haynes III is reclaiming a faith-based politics to counter Trump-allied white evangelicals
It was that point in the evening: dinner plates were cleared; speeches had run long; people were chatting, milling or eyeing the exit. But then the Rev Dr Frederick Douglass Haynes III took the stage. Bald, bearded, bespectacled and dressed in black, he delivered a mix of fiery sermon and performance poetry. Soon the guests were back in their seats – rapt, listening, clapping and whooping.
Haynes’s rolling cadence was evocative of the pulpit but the political message was far from kumbaya. Aiming to succeed Democratic star Jasmine Crockett in Texas’s 30th congressional district, he danced like a butterfly with references to the boxer Muhammad Ali and rapper Tupac Shakur. But he also stung like a bee, branding Donald Trump as “President Pickpocket” and Republicans as the authors of racist gerrymandering and voter suppression.
Kyiv’s drone operators are targeting critical components that are hard to repair because of international sanctions. The attacks are damaging Russia’s economy.
The Trump administration paints AI development as a winner-take-all contest, but U.S. data centers are full of made-in-China equipment and many U.S. companies rely on Chinese AI.
Church experts say Dan McClellan, a scholar known for examining misinformation about the Bible, is the first practicing member of the Church of Latter-day Saints to go on Rogan’s massive platform.
Gibney, 77, will face justice for abusing athletes in the 1970s and 80s after decades of effort to track and extradite him
More than half a century after he started sexually abusing children, and enjoyed prestige as Ireland’s Olympic swimming coach before fleeing to the United States, George Gibney is to face justice.
The 77-year-old will be sentenced at the central criminal court in Dublin on Monday for abusing four young female athletes in the 1970s and 1980s.
Toxicology helplines report 42% increase in calls involving animals poisoned by drugs and nicotine
A record number of pets are ingesting recreational drugs and requiring veterinary care in the UK, figures shared with the Guardian reveal.
Last year, the UK’s only emergency poison centre for animals received its highest ever number of calls involving animals poisoned by cannabis, cocaine, magic mushrooms and nicotine, and it is on course to do so again this year.
Elizabeth, LA — A Republican candidate for police chief in the small Louisiana village of Elizabeth is positioned to win the Nov. 3 election without opposition despite facing two pending child rape charges.
Christopher Paul, 46, was arrested Sept. 8 after authorities accused him of raping two girls in 2005 and 2006. He remains out on $60,000 bail and has not been convicted of a crime.
Paul originally faced one opponent, Zachary LaCaze, but LaCaze withdrew Sept. 23 after learning that his federal employment made him ineligible to run. Because the candidate filing deadline had already passed, Paul is now the only remaining candidate.
Under Louisiana law, Paul would remain eligible to take office unless he is convicted of a felony before his term begins Jan. 1.
Mayor Mandy Leo Green said village officials cannot remove Paul from the ballot, emphasizing that criminal charges are allegations and that Paul is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
The situation has prompted local officials to consider changing how the police chief is selected. The village council scheduled a Dec. 12 special election asking voters whether the position should become an appointed office subject to board approval.
A child-safety advocacy group has called on Paul to withdraw from the race while the criminal case is pending.
Although there is scepticism about Tehran’s capabilities, it has become clear it wants Britain to feel it poses a risk
Britain may have been only peripherally involved in the bombing of Iran that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu started, but in the past fortnight it has become clear that Tehran wants to pose a threat inside the UK in response.
In the aftermath of the confused incident near RAF Fairford, western officials are weighing up whether to warn publicly that Iran now has US military targets in Europe on its mind, such as the air force base in Gloucestershire.
UK classifies Syria as safe to return to despite UN refugee body’s advice
A Syrian plastic surgeon is facing deportation from the UK after the Home Office revoked his refugee status, declaring it is now safe for him and his family to return to their home country.
Despite Foreign Office guidance advising against all travel to Syria because of the “volatile” security situation, the government has classified it as a safe place for refugees to return to.
This is no scoffing matter. The accelerating proliferation of advanced nuclear weapons is bringing ‘end times’ closer by the day
Humankind has fearfully and sometimes joyfully anticipated the end of the world ever since it began. The Bible’s Book of Revelation speaks of “end times”, a period of tribulation, war, famine, plague, floods and environmental catastrophe that may seem a less absurd prospect today than perhaps it once did. Islam, too, posits a fateful day of judgment or day of reckoning. Christian evangelicals believe that, in the final rapture, a chosen few – the righteous or the “elect” – will be saved while sinners burn. It’s a minority view. Matthew’s gospel predicts most people will defy, ignore or ridicule warnings of imminent Armageddon. Peter, another of Jesus’s disciples, agreed: “In the last days, scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.” Yet such worldly scepticism does not mean a universal cataclysm is less likely. It may make it more probable.
Donald Trump’s blanket denials of the dangers ostensibly posed by artificial intelligence, whose uncontrolled development is seen by some as the latest harbinger of apocalypse, could be interpreted as fulfilling Peter’s prophecy. This US president, the nearest thing the world has to a one-man doomsday machine, is a great one for scoffing and evil desires. In Robert Harris’s 2019 novel, The Second Sleep, a worried scientist lists half a dozen ways the world might end. They include devastating climate change, pandemic disease, a giant asteroid collision with Earth, or some other overwhelming calamity. Few heed the fictional scientist’s fears. In the event, what destroys him and almost everybody else is a disturbingly plausible cyber crash – a global digital and internet meltdown.
Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator
Republican Christopher Paul is running unopposed for seat despite allegations he raped two girls 20 years ago
A candidate for police chief in a small Louisiana town candidate is on course to be elected unopposed despite two charges of child rape pending against him, leaving his community to weigh whether to convert the position into an appointed office rather than one determined at the ballot box.
Christopher Paul, a Republican who on 6 August signed up to run for chief of police in the south-western Louisiana village of Elizabeth, was arrested on 8 September on allegations that he raped two girls in 2005 and 2006.
David McCloskey’s new book depicts a calamitous collapse of the ‘special relationship’ – could things get darker still?
The “special relationship”, the time-honored emotional bond between the US and Britain that has sustained through war and peace, is in trouble.
The ties of history, culture and language that have bridged an ocean and bound the two countries politically for generations are fraying as perhaps never before – strained relentlessly by Donald Trump, who has gleefully sacrificed traditional alliances and diplomatic niceties on the altar of his “America first” agenda.
CNN reports:
The FBI arrested a Canadian cybersecurity executive and ransomware expert as part of the investigation of a damaging hack that exposed the sensitive data of current and former FBI employees, according to court documents and people familiar the investigation. Edward Dubrovsky was arrested in the Philadelphia area in recent days... Dubrovsky is facing charges related to extortion and making threats. He has been transferred to Texas's Eastern District for a scheduled detention hearing, according to court records and a law enforcement official.
FBI Director Kash Patel announced the arrest on Friday but did not disclose where it occurred or what role the man is suspected of playing in the hack. Patel also didn't name Dubrovsky, but CNN confirmed the defendant is believed to be tied to the FBI hack through multiple people familiar with the investigation... A LinkedIn profile under Dubrovsky's name lists years of experience in the Canadian cybersecurity industry and describes Dubrovsky as a 'globally recognized cybersecurity expert.' An Ed Dubrovsky is also the author of a book on handling ransomware negotiations with cybercriminals...
There has also been an inquest at the FBI over how such a critical security lapse happened. The FBI determined that a contractor managing the bureau's jobs portal failed to update software "explicitly issued to secure the platform," [senior FBI cyber official, Brett Leatherman said last week]. The FBI has "removed the contractor," he said. The software in question is a human-resources platform made by Oracle, ShinyHunters has said. The hackers previously used a flaw in the software to attack targets in the education sector in May and June, according to Google's Threat Intelligence Group. But months later, the FBI contractor apparently still had not applied a security patch that was available for the software.
"The inmate locator at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons website reports that a 54-year-old Edward Dubrovsky is currently being held at a federal facility in Philadelphia," reports security researcher Brian Krebs.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.
More than 100 aftershocks as high as magnitude-5.8 recorded after two quakes toppled buildings and prompted evacuations
Panama’s government has declared a state of emergency on Saturday as the aftershocks of two powerful earthquakes that roiled the country shook communities for hours.
Officials did not attribute any deaths to Friday’s 7.7- and 6.6-magnitude earthquakes, but reported damages in all 10 of Panama’s provinces and two Indigenous territories.
Appointment or renewal reminder appears in victims’ calendar to lure them into logging in to fake Google, Microsoft or PayPal page
You’re preparing for the week ahead and take a look at your Google calendar. There’s an entry for a meeting that you must have completely forgotten. The note that pops up when you click on it says you’ll be reviewing a project and includes a link to more details. Confused, you follow it to find out more; the website you land on asks for logon details, and you provide them.
Unfortunately, this was not a failure of your memory but a calendar phishing scam. You have handed your name and password to fraudsters who will sell it on in a batch with other people’s details, use it to break into your work email, or to persuade you that they are contacting you from your bank, or another institution.
Club issues brief statement about Lachie Cowan and Will Hayward, saying latter suffered minor cut to head after a fall
An off-season night out for Carlton football club teammates ended with two players admitted to hospital for treatment on Sunday morning, in what the club says are “separate circumstances”.
The club released a statement on Sunday confirming that AFL players Lachie Cowan, 21, and Will Hayward, 27, had been treated and discharged, after reports in several media outlets about the aftermath of an off-season night out.
Guardian Australia understands both players were both part of a larger group that had been socialising on Saturday evening.
Trump has used the full might of the presidency to supercharge executions, but an avalanche of mishaps has put the system’s flaws in the spotlight
It took more than an hour to establish the two intravenous lines through which Christa Pike would be injected with a giant and normally lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital, and in that time she did everything she could to assist those who were attempting to kill her.
“Please try here,” she said over and over again to Tennessee’s execution team, pointing to specific parts of her body where she thought they might find a vein as they repeatedly stabbed her with needles. “Please try here, I think it will be OK. Please try up on my shoulder, higher.”
On Thursday those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources on Thursday found the site "inoperable," reports Phoronix, with the disruption confirmed as a distributed denial of service attack.
"Our team is working diligently to resolve the incident," according to a Thursday post on Ubuntu Discourse — followed by a later announcement. "At this time our team continues to work on restoring affected services, most of them are now available. We appreciate your patience and understanding." Ubuntu's status page shows the Ubuntu.com outage lasting for 2 hours and 27 minutes on Friday — though with four-hour outages Wednesday (and other outages affecting other Ubuntu sites).
Today "All components are Operational," the status page reports.
Investigation launched after five broadcasters last month ceased presidential coverage after CNN, MS Now and Politico were barred from White House
The US Department of Justice is investigating whether the decision of the White House television press pool to halt coverage of the US president, Donald Trump, last month violated antitrust law, an agency spokesperson said Saturday.
A spokesperson for the department said group boycotts among business competitors might violate US law. “The Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws,” they said.
Clarksville, TN — President Donald Trump told supporters Saturday that he expects to be blamed if Republicans lose control of Congress, while again promising $5,000 payments to every U.S. adult citizen if the GOP keeps both chambers.
“If we don’t win the midterms, they’re going to blame me,” Trump said during a rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, adding that he was working aggressively to turn out Republican voters.
Trump repeated his proposed “Trump dividend,” saying every adult citizen would receive $5,000 after a Republican victory. The proposal would cost roughly $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion, depending on eligibility, and would require congressional authorization. Trump has said tariff revenue would help finance the payments, but no detailed legislative plan has been released.
Independent budget analysts have questioned whether tariff collections could come close to covering the cost. Current tariff revenue is far below the amount required for nationwide $5,000 checks.
Trump also warned that a Democratic victory would produce severe economic consequences, while touting income gains and poverty reductions under his administration.
The rally was part of a broader push to energize Republican voters ahead of the Nov. 3 elections. Trump acknowledged that the results will likely be viewed as a referendum on his presidency, saying he expects responsibility if Republicans fall short.
Gavin Williams struck out 12, José Ramírez homered on a pitch just above home plate and the Cleveland Guardians beat the Chicago White Sox 2-0 on Saturday night to complete a comeback from a 2-0 deficit in their best-of-five American League Division Series.
Cleveland open the American League Championship Series at Tampa Bay on Monday night, seeking their first World Series appearance since 2016. The Guardians/Indians franchise have not won the title since 1948, the longest drought among MLB teams.
Kenyan breaks Melbourne Marathon record by two seconds
‘I’m happy to run with the gen Zs,’ 41-year-old says
Marathon’s greatest competitor, Eliud Kipchoge, has sent a message to the next generation declaring that he’s not done yet.
The 41-year-old Kenyan revelled in his Melbourne Marathon debut on Sunday, breaking the race record and delighting thousands of fans at the MCG finish.
The Justice Department is investigating whether the major TV networks violated antitrust laws after they briefly suspended the TV press pool system in response to President Trump's decision to ban three news organizations from the White House.
The Telegraph reports that the nutritional value of fruit and vegetables has fallen by up to 50% since the Sixties, according a new study from researchers at startup studio Deep Science Ventures.
The study "found that humans needed to consume twice the number of vegetables to get the same level of minerals such as potassium, magnesium or copper as would have been present in their food 60 years ago."
The study found that many crops had lost 20% to 50% of several key nutrients... The decrease in nutrient and vitamin value is thought to be down to declining soil quality and crops being selectively bred for their ability to grow quickly, rather than there being any focus on their health benefits... It raises the prospect that the advice to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, introduced in the UK in 2003, may need to be updated. The report added that people on weight-loss drugs could be most at risk from the lack of nutrients, as the treatments could cause them to consume less food...
Nature-friendly farming techniques, such as planting crops that restore nutrients to the soil, could help improve the health benefits of vegetables, according to the researchers.
In short, according to
Will Summers, a senior associate at the firm, "we've been quietly hollowing out what's inside our food."
Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.
Eight people, including two children, were killed Friday in a mass shooting in a residential area of Erie, Pennsylvania, authorities said. The suspected gunman is also dead.
Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies "are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event," reports Axios, one that turns "an already wary public further against the technology and its leaders..."
These AI company executives "anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water..." the article points out.
"Many top AI researchers and executives believe a major incident is inevitable.
"OpenAI conducts preparedness exercises where teams discuss and work through a range of potential scenarios," a company spokesperson said. "These scenarios are not treated as inevitable, but are meant to help us prepare for a variety of circumstances." Anthropic declined to comment...
Top AI planners assume Democrats, ascendant after the midterms, will move fast to shut down AI but will face significant challenges... The planning involves red-teaming for worst-case scenarios. It focuses mainly on racing to educate members of Congress. Company executives know regulation has no chance of passing right now, but still want to shape the legislation and policies U.S. leaders will turn to after a first catastrophic event....
Many AI industry insiders told Axios they believe a major event will occur in the next six to 12 months.
"Even with Democrats in control of the House and Senate, the companies see fractured politics as the norm, including within the Democratic Party."
Sandell’s 47-yard kick seals 27-24 upset in Dallas
Sooners overcome offensive struggles to stun Texas
Manning throws three TDs but two costly picks
Tate Sandell kicked a 47-yard field goal on the final play and Oklahoma overcame their continued offensive ineptness with touchdowns on special teams and defense in a 27-24 win over No 1 Texas in the Red River rivalry game on Saturday.
The Sooners (3-2, 1-1 Southeastern Conference) beat a No 1 team for the first time since a 38-17 win over Missouri in 2007. They had been 0-4-1 when facing a top-ranked Texas team.
Donald Trump evaluating whether US should join Saudi strikes against the Iran-backed Yemeni rebels
The latest attack on the international airport in Saudi Arabia’s capital of Riyadh killed 12 people and injured more than 300 others, civil aviation authorities said early on Sunday, with some in a critical condition. A Saudi-led coalition blamed Iran-backed Houthi rebels in neighbouring Yemen.
A missile struck a King Khalid international airport complex housing terminals 3 and 4 for domestic flights, a regional official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorised to speak to the media.
Some of deaths came from falling trees as half a million people without power and rain and flooding still a concern
At least four people were reported dead on Saturday amid Isaias after it made landfall late on Friday on Florida’s panhandle as a category 2 hurricane, according to authorities.
The storm also took down trees, knocked out electricity for hundreds of thousands and flooded highways – but as Saturday evening approached, the region was reopening.
ATLANTA, Oct. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Southern Company teams are restoring power across Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi following Hurricane Isaias, leveraging the scale of the company's system and experienced teams while utilizing advanced storm intelligence technologies, including AI, to help…
Newly established commission identifies 17 catastrophic threats to human health but says ‘realistic route to act’ on each exists
Humans could become extinct by the year 2100 due to malicious use of AI or nuclear conflict, according to a new global risk assessment.
They top a list of 17 major threats to human health over the next 75 years, which also includes cuts to aid spending by wealthy countries, the climate crisis and childhood malnutrition.
"Nicolas Cage is speaking out against Amazon," reports Variety. Amazon developed the series Spider-Noir for Prime Video, but then allegedly asked Cage to sign an AI waiver:
"Amazon is a very AI-friendly company, to the tune of $50 billion invested in OpenAI," Cage said Saturday during a panel on the Empire Stage at New York Comic Con. "I am not an AI-friendly actor, so it's like, connect those dots! I'm not a member of their club. I didn't sign the waiver to let him use AI on 'Spider-Noir.' I'm probably not going to be working with that studio again, but that's okay."
Last month Amazon canceled Spider-Man Noir after just one season, Variety reports. And the cancellation was just days before the Emmy Awards, where it then earned 11 nominations (the most of any Prime Video program this year).
ScreenRant reports:
Spider-Noir was the actor's first TV role and was praised globally, with season 1 earning a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics of 92% and a 90% rating from audiences. Critics stated that "This sharply written homage to classic film noir — which includes a standout Nicolas Cage performance — is the novel superhero project fans need," and "Spider-Noir is one of the standout shows of the year...." The cancellation was certainly a huge shock as it had earned 11 Emmy nominations and reached 2.6 billion minutes viewed within its first six weeks on Prime Video.
More from Variety:
Cage went on to tell the Comic-Con audience that he hopes to work with the rising class of Gen-Z filmmakers, praising Backrooms director Kane Parsons, who parlayed his YouTube fame into a Hollywood career... "I got to get with these young directors who are Gen Z, and they're going at it their own way, whether it's through the YouTube culture or whatever it is," Cage said. "They're doing it from scratch and by hand. I want to get with that."
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, said no requests for search and rescue assistance had been received following Isaias, which he described as “cautiously, a good sign”.
Speaking to Fox News, he said:
I think that may be a sign that people heeded the warnings, took proper precautions. We sure would love to say we have not gotten a report of a fatality yet, and we’ll see what happens.
There’s also a lot of hazards post-storm that people should be careful of, but so far we’ve had a lot of assets in place that have not been called on, which is a good sign. I’d rather be over-prepared, and not have to use them, than not have what you need.”
Hurricane Isaias has weakened to a post-tropical cyclone early Saturday, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said, after it made landfall in Florida and lashed the US Gulf coast with heavy rain and fierce winds.
The category 2 hurricane hit the coast near Destin, Florida, late on Friday, with maximum sustained winds of 105mph.
The storm is expected to move across Alabama and into the Tennessee Valley, the NHC added, with maximum sustained winds decreased to near 35mph.
The blog It's FOSS reports:
You already know that Canonical has been selectively replacing Ubuntu's C-based system components with Rust-written equivalents that don't compromise in terms of functionality, most of the time. Now it looks like the distro's OpenPGP implementation is next, with Sequoia PGP coming preinstalled in Ubuntu 26.10. Canonical wants it to eventually replace GnuPG [the dominant Linux implementation of PGP, written in C] as the default toolchain, though that switch has not happened yet... [The Ubuntu 26.10 release notes say Sequoia PGP's default status will be a future goal...]
[Sequoia PGP] was started in 2017 by three former GnuPG developers who chose to build a new OpenPGP implementation in Rust rather than keep evolving GnuPG's existing codebase. Sequoia PGP is designed as a library that other software can use directly, rather than a standalone command-line tool. sq sits on top of that for encryption, decryption, signing, and key management, and sqv handles signature verification, filling in for gpg and gpgv in GnuPG.
Sequoia also implements RFC 9580, the 2024 revision of the OpenPGP standard, whereas GnuPG has continued from the RFC 4880 branch, pursuing its own newer extensions and the LibrePGP specification rather than adopting RFC 9580 as its primary standard.
From the It's FOSS Weekly newsletter, which also notes that the founder of the It's FOSS blog has also created a Linux-themed game called TUXDLE — a variation on Wordle where all the answers are Linux terms.
In the days since U.S. House candidate Bernadette Greene-Placentia publicly came forward alleging she was raped over the summer while repairing a campaign sign, she says women have been reaching out to her to share their own stories.
Paige Bumgardner on WVU Dance Team cheers on the Mountaineers during the game against the University of Arizona at Milan Puskar Stadium in Morgantown on Saturday, October 10, 2026.
The West Virginia offense prepares to throw back the ball during the game against the University of Arizona at Milan Puskar Stadium in Morgantown on Saturday, October 10, 2026.
A Mountaineer fan claps for the West Virginia football team during the game against the University of Arizona at Milan Puskar Stadium in Morgantown on Saturday, October 10, 2026.
Protesters spent months occupying an ancient cottonwood. Then a tense standoff with US border patrol came to a head
A 200-year-old cottonwood tree near the US-Mexico border, known as the “grandmother”, has been destroyed to make way for the construction of Donald Trump’s border wall, despite a months-long effort by protesters trying to save it.
In late July, land defenders began a tree-sit in the ghost town of Lochiel, Arizona, taking turns occupying a platform high in the tree’s canopy. The group remained there for more than 70 days.
Yohannes misses penalty as US fightback falls short
In less than a year’s time, the United States and Spain will almost certainly arrive in Brazil as the top two contenders to win the Women’s World Cup. Spain, holders of the top spot in Fifa’s rankings for the past 60 weeks, are the defending champions; the second-ranked US won gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
This month’s pair of friendlies between the two sides are taking place with caveats. Both sides are missing several of their most important players to injuries. The opening match in Brazil is 258 days away. Spain have booked their place, but the US still have to actually qualify for the World Cup, through a regional tournament that begins next month.
President Trump's criticism of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy comes after Russian strikes killed at least 20 people, including three children, in Ukraine.
AFP reports that an AI model from Anthropic "submitted a fabricated tip about an unsolved homicide to Philadelphia police, authorities said Friday."
Claude "was instructed never to log in, create accounts, enter personal data, make purchases, or submit anything destructive, but the instructions did not rule out form submissions," Anthropic said Friday in a blog post.
Authorities are now criticizing Anthropic "for taking two months to report the incident."
The Philadelphia Police Department said the false submission was made in July through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com, a public website where people can share information about unsolved killings. According to Anthropic's account, as relayed by police, the model was running a test that involved interacting with randomly selected websites when it reached the site and filed false information about an unsolved murder. The AI model presented itself as someone who might have knowledge of the case.
Anthropic's breaches have prompted the White House to mandate that AI companies notify and correct security incidents, news outlet Axios reported [yesterday], citing administration officials. "This notification and remediation process is not optional... It is a critical national security obligation," White House Super Intelligence Force leaders said in a statement to Axios.
"I may have information regarding this case," Claude told the police. "I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant." Anthropic notes that Claude "left the name and contact fields empty, which the form allowed, and submitted it. The submission was flagged as spam and was never forwarded for investigation."
But Anthropic also admits they saw "this behavior" three times — "on OSWorld (a public computer use evaluation), on Odysseys (a long-horizon task evaluation), and during internal usage." Submitting forms when it shouldn't have generally occurred "when an evaluation's instructions were ambiguous, or when a misconfiguration within the environment prevented Claude from working with dummy forms."
Anthropic's blog post acknowledges three other categories of behaviors:
Exploiting software flaws. Like when Claude received an error when trying to run a public tool on a university's web site, it located an injection flaw in a script on the university's server that let it run commands — including that public tool.
Working around restrictions to reach gated data. For example, Claude Mythos 5 needed public data that was only available from a state agency for a fee. "Claude learned from an archived copy of the agency's website that its public dashboard issues an access token to any visitor," Anthropic explains. "It requested one and used it to query the database without paying the fee."
Using URL shortening services. "Some of our fetch tools, which let Claude read webpages, limit the length of the URLs Claude can request. This is to prevent Claude from using long URLs to take certain unwanted actions, such as SQL or command injections... We saw several models, including Claude Opus 5 and Claude Mythos 5, get around this limitation by using free URL shortening services."
"We have built tooling to automatically detect and block the kinds of behaviors described above," Anthropic says, saying it's already running no on most of their evaluations. "When we tested it against the cases described in this post, it blocked all of them."
And they've already taken several other new preventive measures:
They've stopped running some public evaluations
Other public evaluations were moved to offline versions or rebuilt so their tasks don't reach live websites.
They've updated the guardrails on some internet access tools (including web fetch) "to heavily restrict what the model can do."
They're continuing "to fix or remove training environments that reward Claude for working around tool restrictions or other blockers, so that they do not incentivize these behaviors or permit reward hacking."
They've moved internal agents to "centrally managed infrastructure with strong containment," that minimizes internet access while monitoring "far more of what agents do through techniques like safety classifiers and hierarchical summarization."
In the past they'd focused reviews on cybersecurity testing, but they've broadened their transcript reviewing to other tasks which include internet access. "Because language models are non-deterministic — that is, their responses always involve some element of randomness, and they may carry out the same task slightly differently each time — we have Claude complete each evaluation task hundreds or thousands of times... If training rewards something we didn't intend — such as finding loopholes or working around a restriction — the model learns that the workaround pays off and may then apply it elsewhere."
Anthropic's blog post also acknowledged they'd seen multiple misalignment incidents involving federal, state, and local U.S. government agencies. "We have briefed the White House on these cases and notified each agency involved," Anthropic wrote, adding that "While we have not completed a full alignment assessment of these cases, we consider them to be less severe than the cybersecurity incidents from this summer." (And they are "modifying training to reduce the likelihood of further misbehavior.")
ICE official, who was sleeping on man’s lawn and appeared ‘intoxicated’, faces felony charges, California police say
A 72-year-old man shot an off-duty Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official in California early on Friday morning after the “intoxicated and agitated” official assaulted him and his daughter on their property, local authorities allege.
The Fresno police department said that the ICE official was receiving medical care after being shot in the midsection. The official, identified as David Gonzalez, is facing felony charges for assaulting the father-daughter duo, Fresno police said.
As streamers poach viral creators to appeal to children, digital whack-a-mole has become a new kind of family challenge
Exasperated dad Simon Hooper shakes his fist at the camera in a viral video. “We managed to get rid of YouTube in our household six months ago and the kids are finally OK with it,” he says – but Netflix is “now commissioning YouTubers to make their brain rot and putting it back in front of my kids’ faces”.
The precise “brain rot” he’s referring to is the arrival of a polarising show that’s lighting up parent chats around the globe. And while Salish and Jordan Matter might be new to Netflix Kids users, the father-daughter content creators are familiar to anyone who’s spent any time on the internet.
OpenAI announced it's recently banned two "influence operations" — one from Russia and one from Iran — that were using its models "to launder geopolitical, conflict-related messaging" in sophisticated "false front" propaganda campaigns:
The Iranian operation included a stable of seven "journalist" personas which it used to pitch long-form articles to small and medium online outlets around the world... As well as long-form articles, the Iranian operation generated batches of social media comments, generally on topics related to the US-Iran war... [The Russian operation "appears to have co-opted unwitting people in Latin America to run a 'think tank'.... Since we do not allow access to our models from Russia, they used VPNs to connect to our services."] The Russian operation created fake "leaked" documents and audio scripts, some of which we identified being spread online... Both managed to land their content (not all of which was generated from our models) in mainstream media outlets, rather than simply posting it on social media.
OpenAI says they've exposed 30 covert influence operations using its tools over the last two and a half years. But ironically, in this case both operations "also made heavy use of AI to draft internal reports (the Russian operation did this more than anything else)." And "in both cases, the actors used questionable or outright deceitful methodologies to exaggerate the operators' effectiveness."
[The Russian operators] claimed that in May 2026, they created a fake email address purporting to come from the Regional Directorate of Education in Lima, Peru. They used this to instruct schools in the district to hold events dedicated to Ukraine on the national Day of Cultural and Linguistic Diversity (May 21)... According to the operators, some schools replied to the fake email address, confirming that they had held such events and even providing pictures. The operators then claimed to have planted stories about the events in the media in both Peru and Poland, alongside allegations that Ukraine was "exporting" ultra-nationalist ideologies, triggering outrage. Open-source searches identified stories that matched this claim in the Peruvianâ andâ Polish pressâ, and an English-language publication in Hungary (some of the articles have since been deleted)...
Similarly, in June, the operators claimed they used a different fake email address to trick schools in Ecuador into holding a ceremony pledging allegiance to President Daniel Noboa and to Erik Prince, former head of private military contractor Blackwater. The operators claimed that the incident provoked outrage in Ecuador and put pressure on the government to deny the fake, thus amplifying it to a nationwide audience. Again, open-source research identified mediaâ coverageâ in the Ecuadorianâ pressâ that closely resembled this claim, and even a detailed rebuttalâ by Ecuador's Minister for Education.
The operators used a range of techniques to underpin their false stories. According to their internal reporting, they spread two different fakes targeting Ecuador in March. One used fake audio attributed to Ukraine's consul in Ecuador, in which he was alleged to have made disparaging comments about Ecuadorians.
OpenAI's report "is the latest illustration of how state actors can easily exploit widely available AI tools to peddle sophisticated propaganda against adversaries on a mass scale," argues the Economic Times:
"We identified almost 100 articles published or syndicated under the [Iranian] operation's bylines across roughly a dozen online outlets around the world," OpenAI said. "These were small to medium outlets, generally focused on international affairs, geopolitics, and events in the Middle East." The earliest article identified by OpenAI was published in July 2025, and the latest in October 2026, with the frequency of reports increasing after the US-Iran war broke out earlier this year. The operation also generated social media comments on topics related to the US-Iran war, it added.
One of the personas named Ervin B. Hoskins, whose bio claimed to be "an American freelance writer," had social media accounts across tech platforms including Elon Musk's X and Meta-owned Instagram.
X's transparency information showed the account was connected via a "West Asia android app" and Instagram's transparency information showed the account was based in Iran, according to screenshots provided by OpenAI. Both accounts appeared to be suspended.
Last week a Florida woman sued Flock over its role in police officer accusing her of a crime she didn't commit But she's not the only one suing Flock over mistaken accusations, reports Gizmodo:
.
A Ring video of a Colorado woman being handed a criminal summons for a porch-package theft she did not commit recently went viral after the accusation rested on a Flock Safety automated license plate reader hit. Now, the woman involved in that case, Chrisanna Elser, is suing Flock Group, the towns of Columbine Valley and Bow Mar, Sergeant Jamie Milliman, and Chief Bret Cottrell in federal court on behalf of herself and other Coloradans whose plates the company has logged...
The package in question was worth $25... The claims aimed at the company are intrusion upon seclusion, plus negligence and negligent design, on the theory that Flock sold a searchable archive and refused to require a warrant, a case number, or a supervisor's sign-off before an officer could run a plate... Elser is asking the court to make Columbine Valley, Bow Mar, Cottrell, and Flock delete the retained location data, to bar them from keeping it unless it is tied to an open case number, and to make Flock require a warrant, a case number, and a supervisor's approval before a Colorado agency can search the system.
The Colorado Sun has more details. "Elser did not steal anything, but spent the following two weeks proving her own evidence to a department that did not return her calls, she said.
[P]olice Sgt. Jamie Milliman told her the town of Bow Mar's surveillance cameras captured her forest green Rivian driving through town the same day a package disappeared from a thief... When Elser offered to show her own evidence to prove her innocence, including footage from her Rivian's onboard cameras, Milliman said she could bring it to court. Now, she is suing the officers and Flock Safety in U.S. District Court in Denver, alleging that the warrantless tracking violated her constitutional rights and that Flock's surveillance system unlawfully documents Coloradans' movements... "The scariest part is what happened to me can happen to anyone. I had no idea the Flock cameras existed and no idea a private company was keeping a record of every time I drove past my own neighborhood, or that any officer could pull it up without asking anyone or giving a reason for doing so," Elser said in a statement Tuesday. "If it can happen to me, it can happen to you...."
"As noted in the complaint, the Flock system accurately identified the location of Ms. Elser's vehicle, while law enforcement retained responsibility for interpreting and weighing that information as part of the broader investigation," Paris Lewbel, Flock's public relations manager said. "Flock stands by the accuracy and integrity of its technology and intends to vigorously defend itself in this litigation."
The article includes this statement from the woman's attorney. "Coloradans pass Flock's cameras on the way to work, church, the doctor, a protest, and a friend's house, and Flock keeps a detailed record of their every movement. It knows where you went, when you went there, and how often you go back, and it gives that information to a police officer with no limits.
"We are asking a federal court to say what should be obvious: Flock's surveillance is straight-up creepy and the government does not get to follow everyone, all the time, without any reason for doing so."
Pike’s lawyers said she is back in same prison she’s lived in for last 30 years and will continue to receive medical care
Christa Pike has been discharged from the hospital after surviving Tennessee’s botched 30 September attempt to execute her by lethal injection and is back in prison, her lawyers said on Saturday.
Pike, 50, returned to the Deborah K Johnson rehabilitation center, where she has been imprisoned for the last three decades, her attorneys, Stephen Ferrell, Luke Ihnen, Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason, said in a statement.
Twenty arrested in first march since Ed Miliband declared UK’s position was that Israel’s occupation of West Bank was unlawful
Thousands of people have gathered in central London to express their support for Palestinians after three years of “genocide” carried out against them by Israel.
The demonstrators, many wearing keffiyehs and holding Palestine flags, gathered on the Embankment at midday on Saturday. Some carried placards reading “End the genocide” and “Free Palestine” as they marched towards parliament. A bride and groom appeared to be among those in attendance and a two-minute silence was held to reflect on the lives lost in Gaza.
First off, I know there's going to be a lot of recommendations to vesc, and or buy a vesced board, but economically speaking, it's still expensive and there is not a large resale market for vesced boards where I live. I would consider vesc in the future, but I saw this board in my price range and figured I would check it out.
The listing says the board has about 1700 miles on it but a "new battery". I will update this post when I receive a response back from the seller as to what this means. Also comes with the accessories in the first photo ("fangs, bumpers, chargers, stand, fenders, tire, light up footpad"), but I don't care as much about accessories as much as the board itself.
Given the asking price is $1750:
Is this a good deal? If not, what price would make it a good deal?
If something were to fail later on, how good of a base is the gts for mods/vesc?
I have a stock pint x (500 miles) and a stock XR (1000 miles) currently, would it be better to dish out $1200+ on a full xrv/battery build on the XR?
Edit: The board sold this morning unfortunately. I guess I have to hop on these quickly.
Pope Leo XIV called the death penalty “an attack” on human dignity a day after senior Church officials condemned the Pentagon’s plans to live-stream an execution of Nidal Malik Hasan.
The scale of the crackdown underscored the authorities' determination to disrupt a fast-growing protest campaign that has mobilized thousands of young people.
Vincent Chan went on to abuse children after being cleared of ‘significant concerns’ following council-overseen inquiry
A paedophile nursery worker was cleared by an investigation overseen by a local authority three years before he was arrested.
In February, Vincent Chan was jailed after pleading guilty to 56 offences, including assault by penetration on three-year-old girls in his care at a Bright Horizons nursery on Finchley Road in north-west London. After his conviction, prosecutors described him as a “prolific sexual predator”.
The tourist attraction just unveiled an elaborate, full-scale overhaul to match Trump’s second-term aesthetic
Sitting behind a replica Resolute Desk, nine-year-old Sydney Wright posed for the camera like a future US president. “I love it,” she smiled. And what about the dazzling gold appliqués, gold leaf and gold trim surrounding her? “It’s cool.”
Sydney was among a steady stream of visitors on Thursday to The People’s House: A White House Experience, an interactive museum – with an orientation film narrated by The West Wing star Martin Sheen – at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue, just 150 yards from the real thing.
The Justice Department has loosened the guidelines for the attorney general and other senior political appointees, allowing them to participate in political activities.
Educators can confront AI head on by distinguishing its pattern-recognition skills from its inability to daydream, embody other people and authentically express itself.
EMS workers, who make life-or-death decisions in emergencies, are the lowest paid first responders
After 31 years in New York City’s emergency medical services, Oren Barzilay has started giving young New Yorkers advice he never imagined giving when he began his EMS career. “Don’t come here,” he tells them. “You are only going to hurt yourself.”
It is a striking reversal for Barzilay, the recently retired president of FDNY EMS Local 2507. What changed for Barzilay was not his view of work or the value of service. It was what he believes is the New York City failure to pay the people who put their lives at risk to save the lives of others.
As someone who has been a fan of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man since his debut in “Captain America: Civil War,” I am so glad that he was able to get a fourth film and prove all of his haters wrong. For years, I had to hear how he is the worst Spider-Man among the three who have played the character, and now, people have begun to change their opinions based on this new movie.
Following the massive success of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” which was released on July 17, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” came out on July 31, just two weeks later. With Holland starring in the two most highly anticipated films of the summer, many eyes were on him to see how he would do in both roles, since there has been much controversy online about whether or not he is a good enough actor to be in these blockbusters.
As a fan of Holland’s for many years, maybe I am a bit biased, but I think he performed phenomenally in both films, especially as Peter Parker in “Brand New Day.” Parker is no longer a teenager in this film and must deal with the aftermath of “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which ended with everyone in the world forgetting who he is, including his girlfriend, Michelle Jones-Watson, played by Zendaya, and his best friend, Ned Leeds, played by Jacob Batalon. Grappling with this and the death of his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), Holland delivers an especially melancholy version of Parker that we haven’t seen much of in his past films.
The scenes that hit the hardest in this film are when Holland’s scene partners are either Zendaya, who is his wife in real life, Sadie Sink, who is newly introduced as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU’s) Jean Grey, or Jon Bernthal, who returns as Frank Castle, aka The Punisher. The chemistry — romantic and platonic — he has with all three actors is palpable and will leave you on the verge of tears in some scenes.
Holland’s scenes with Batalon in this movie also hit hard when you remember the pair played best friends for years, only now for Batalon’s character to completely forget who Parker is. However, that doesn’t stop Leeds from being completely obsessed with Spider-Man and trying to figure out who is behind the mask so he can thank him for saving his life so many years ago. Adding this into the movie provides some bittersweet scenes between Parker and Leeds that will leave you nostalgic.
Aside from the acting in this film, the plot is very entertaining and introduces a new obstacle in Parker’s life, which is his evolution from man to spider. As he deals with traumatic situations in the movie, it causes his arachnid genes from the spider bite to mutate and make him more “spider” than “man.” Although audiences have seen something similar before in Tobey Maguire’s movies, with his organic webs, “Brand New Day” provides a new spin on it by showcasing how our hero must balance being Peter Parker and Spider-Man.
This is how the theme of the movie is expressed, which is that “the bravest thing you can do in life is ask for help.” It is important to remember the community around you and not to isolate yourself, which can only make your mental health worse. Audiences see how Parker neglecting his human side and only focusing on being Spider-Man has taken a toll on his body and mind. Balancing your private life and your social life is one of the key things to motivate yourself to keep going forward.
Watching Holland convey the difficulties of mental health while also having the responsibility of helping people as Spider-Man was very sad, and he really made you feel for the character of Peter Parker, who thought he had no one to turn to except for himself. I believe that Holland’s live-action portrayal of Peter Parker/Spider-Man is the strongest the world has had, and the box office numbers support that.
In only a few weeks — 17 days to be exact — of the movie hitting theaters, it crossed two billion dollars globally. Although this doesn’t necessarily mean that the movie is good, it goes to show how many people took the time to go out and see the movie — maybe even more than once. I know that I did!
After leaving the theater on July 31, I had a newfound sense of hope. I was reminded that tomorrow is always a brand new day and there are always great things ahead despite bumps in the road.
Fain was dogged by investigation but still decisively beat challenger Rich Boyer, who received just 13% of vote
The president of the United Auto Workers, Shawn Fain, has easily won his re-election bid after an campaign period marred by accusations of corruption and election interference.
The union’s election of leadership for a four-year term began with mail-in ballots being sent out in late August 2026, with vote tabulating commencing on 6 October.
Koos Bekker’s Newt estate encompasses luxury hotels, pubs and high street business, with local concerns including flooding
When South African billionaire Koos Bekker bought an old country estate in a sleepy corner of Somerset to turn it into a luxury hotel, residents thought it was a sign their area was on the up.
Walking through his peaceful manicured gardens, which feature a maze of apple trees twisted into perfect shapes using the espalier method, it’s easy to feel that all is well in this quiet, picturesque pocket of England.
The sports-mad city has embraced its new superstar, even as he choppers in from Manhattan and makes no secret of the fact that Philly was never his first choice
Philadelphia has always had an instinctive affinity with athletes who embrace the grind over the glamour. In a place where sports mean a little too much, commitment has traditionally counted for more than celebrity. What it demands above all, sometimes unreasonably, is the sense that they have bought in, that the city and its fortunes matter to them as much as they do to the people who devote their lives to backing its teams.
Few embodied that ethic more completely than Lane Johnson, the Eagles’ revered right tackle and best player for more than a decade, who abruptly announced his retirement Tuesday after 14 seasons, two Super Bowl titles and a career spent neutralizing some of the most freakish physical specimens to walk the earth. Johnson’s quotidian greatness on the offensive line was almost perversely workmanlike. According to Pro Football Focus, he allowed just 10 sacks across close to 7,000 pass-blocking snaps in the last 13 years, going entire seasons without letting his man bring down the quarterback. The Eagles won nearly two-thirds of their games when he played and lost nearly two-thirds when he didn’t.
Every time a story about a woman being raped becomes headline news, the same pattern repeats without fail
If she really was raped, why didn’t she speak up earlier? Why did she get drunk? Why was she wearing such a short skirt? Why did she walk home by herself?
God, it’s exhausting, isn’t it? Every time a story about a woman being raped becomes headline news, the same pattern repeats without fail. People accuse the woman of asking for it. They question her motives; they scrutinize her looks; they attack her character. And without fail, she is punished for speaking up.
i am riding my Onewheel, but after longer rides my feet start feeling pretty beat up especially on rough pavement. I tried a couple of different shoes, but I am wondering if better insoles might help with cushioning and impact absorption. I don’t want anything so thick or soft that it messes with my board feel or control
Phoronix reports on a presentation this week by Meta engineer Gregory Price at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague:
With today's memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM ("CRAM") for Linux.
This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with CRAM... For end-users that may already be relying on the likes of Zswap or ZRAM, CRAM is offering near-native DRAM speeds. Read-only data is shown to be as fast as the raw DRAM performance. And for memory writes, CRAM is much faster than ZRAM or Zswap or plain swap.
"Most of the individual pieces needed to support CRAM are already mainline," the article points out.
Tom's Hardware writes that "It uses a private NUMA node (essentially, a ghost CPU) instead of pretending to be a block device, and this lets Linux continue using all of its memory semantics, including migration and ballooning, to manage CRAM."
Because CRAM is stored in RAM and treated as RAM, with full cacheline/byte access, it can be accessed in a read-only fashion with little delay; just the cost of hardware-offloaded compression...
Even when you enable writes, CRAM is still much faster than ZRAM; 5.4x in the worst tested case of 20% writes. That's a huge drop from the 452x read-only case, but keep your context; a 5.4x speedup is still titanic. The massive performance cliff when writes are involved comes down to the need to page fault and migrate folios back to the original NUMA domain, as you can't write directly to compressed data; you'd corrupt everything...
While the obvious target of the work here (given its origin at Meta Platforms) is big Linux servers, ZRAM and Zswap are used all over the Linux ecosystem, even on machines as constrained as the Steam Deck. Many distributions enable one or the other by default. CRAM seems like it could offer a considerable speed-up for some of these machines, so hopefully it finds its way into the kernel once the remaining implementation questions are answered.
Syracuse, NY — President Donald Trump erupted over the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, attacking the committee that denied him the award and warning that the United States would “not forget” Norway.
Speaking at a rally in Syracuse, Trump called the decision “disgraceful” and “embarrassing” and said it left an “indelible stain” on Norway. He also described members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee as “radical ideologues” and “enemies of civilization.”
The 2026 prize went instead to South African jurist Navi Pillay, a former U.N. human rights chief and international judge recognized for decades of work involving human rights, war crimes and genocide. Trump dismissed Pillay as a “mystery person” and claimed that “nobody” had heard of her. Pillay previously defended anti-apartheid activists, served as U.N. human rights chief and worked on international tribunals.
Trump again argued that he deserved the prize, citing several international conflicts he says he helped resolve. Some of those claims remain disputed, while fighting has resumed in several regions he has cited and the wars involving Ukraine and Iran remain unresolved.
The president has complained repeatedly about not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize during both of his terms.
His latest tirade came at a political rally intended to support Republican candidates, but Trump devoted significant time to attacking the Nobel Committee and questioning Pillay’s selection.
Leftwing Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores beats far-right candidate in election in remote district of Andes
A businessman called Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores has been elected the mayor of a remote district in the Peruvian Andes, according to local election data.
The 45-year-old, who shares two of his names with the notorious European dictators, won the race for mayor of Queropalca, in Peru’s central Huánuco region, and will take office on 1 January.
Global Threads research project reveals how slavery hung ‘like a spectre’ over the Peterloo massacre and other Mancunian struggles for equality
They were the killings that changed Britain, paving the way for working-class people’s right to vote, as well as leading to the founding of the Manchester Guardian. In the Peterloo massacre of 1819, peaceful protesters were shot and trampled to death by the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry at St Peter’s Field in the city.
A study by Global Threads, a public history project, has examined how the exploitation of Africans enslaved in the Caribbean was linked with the struggles of cotton workers at Peterloo. Though these workers were divided by thousands of miles and led different lives, they were exploited by the same forces – as Robert Wedderburn, a Black abolitionist in London, said at the time.
Regulator looks to expand loophole to allow dangerous compounds in food as long as they’re not carcinogenic
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is proposing to expand a controversial loophole to allow some of the world’s most toxic chemicals to be added directly to food without a safety review.
The “threshold of regulation” (TOR) exemption currently allows dangerous compounds to be used without review in food contact materials, such as packaging or processing equipment, if they are not carcinogenic, and are added at levels below 0.5 parts per billion (ppb).
While most of the crowd at a Stop Sexual Violence rally in New York City was mostly women, men of all ages were in attendance too
Tens of thousands of protesters gathered at city halls and college campuses across the country on Thursday to demand an end to sexual violence. The nationwide rallies followed weeks of public outcry over the mishandling of campus sexual assault cases at Cornell University and Louisiana State University.
The protest organizers – including Women’s March, Feminist Generation and Me Too International – demanded justice for Jane Doe, who said she was drugged and gang-raped by seven students at a Cornell frat party; Kendall Francis, who said she was raped by an LSU football player; and all survivors harmed “from the frat house to the White House”. They also called for reform of Title IX, a set of protections for sexual misconduct victims and LGBTQ+ students that the Trump administration has slowly stripped away.
Ellie Chowns says vote for ‘Zionism is racism’ policy by 0.4% of members shows party processes are not working
A Green Party MP has said she wants to make sure her party is not “vulnerable to capture by extremists and racists” amid the continuing fallout from the “Zionism is racism” vote.
The party faces a political maelstrom over its policy decision last week to treat Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, as any other form of racism, and to back a single Palestinian state over a two-state solution. The motion was passed at the annual party conference with just over 1,000 votes, approximately 0.4% of the total membership.
These 15 fall soup and stew dishes bring pumpkin, beef, sausage, seafood, pasta, and vegetables to the table for cooler days when a hot bowl sounds especially good.The post 15 fall soup and stew dishes that made my Aunt request…
Authorities impose strict lockdown in capital to try to stop rally against removal of 130m names from electoral roll
Indian authorities have placed Delhi under a severe lockdown and detained tens of thousands of people, including the leader of the youth-led “Cockroach” movement, in an attempt to stop an anti-government protest.
Thousands of people from across India were blocked from attending the demonstration, which had been called by the “Cockroach Janata party” (CJP) to protest against an exercise that has stripped 130m names from India’s electoral roll.
October days feel warmer with something bubbling in the oven. These 17 casserole recipes bring chicken, potatoes, vegetables, rice, pasta, breakfast bakes, and cheesy dinners to the table.The post 17 casserole recipes with the kind of warmth a house needs…
Marsala on island’s west coast badly affected after powerful storm approached from Mediterranean
Two tornadoes have struck the coastal town of Marsala in western Sicily, injuring dozens of people, damaging buildings including a school, and overturning cars.
A series of videos began to circulate on Friday morning showing two waterspouts approaching the Sicilian town from the sea as people braced for their arrival.
Democrat in Congress since 1983 rebuked over ‘dangerous’ campaign ad – will it harm her chances in tight Ohio race?
Last month, Marcy Kaptur, the longest-serving woman in congressional history, released a video advertisement in which she looks directly at the camera and says exactly what she thinks about one of the most divisive issues facing Democrats today.
“Here’s the truth: I voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools because parents know what’s best for their kids,” Kaptur says, “and boys should not play in girls’ sports.”
Halloween parties need real food before the candy bowls take over. These 13 recipes cover nachos, pulled pork, soups, chowder, spaghetti, goulash, dips, puffs, and hearty mains for a table people can actually eat from.The post 13 tasty Halloween recipes…
Order for workers to remain standing to ‘reinforce professionalism’ draws rebuke amid plunging morale
Union officials have launched a campaign to allow airport security staff to sit once more after the Trump administration unilaterally removed all the chairs for Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staff at checkpoints.
“People are pissed,” said Johnny Jones, secretary-treasurer of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) TSA council 100 and president of AFGE local 1040, which represents TSA workers in Dallas-Fort Worth.
US president says agreement needed to lower fuel prices, but move likely to create fresh crisis with Ukraine and Nato allies
Donald Trump is on a fresh collision course with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European allies after his stunning agreement to buy Russian diesel upended years of US and western pressure on the Kremlin to end its war against Ukraine.
Zelenskyy reacted furiously to Trump’s announcement of the deal with Vladimir Putin on Friday, calling it “absolutely terrible” and “not fair and not honest”.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration imposed sweeping sanctions Friday on the International Criminal Court, escalating a campaign against the tribunal by targeting the institution itself rather than only individual judges and prosecutors.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the sanctions will prohibit transactions with the ICC and eventually cut the court off from U.S. financial services, technology providers and the dollar-based banking system. American companies will receive a six-month period to end affected business relationships.
The United States is not a member of the ICC and has long disputed the court’s authority over Americans. The Trump administration has also objected to ICC investigations involving Israel, including its arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as investigations involving alleged wrongdoing by U.S. personnel in Afghanistan.
Rubio said the measures are intended to protect American sovereignty and warned that the administration would continue escalating pressure unless the court changes course.
The ICC, which has 125 member states, called the sanctions an unprecedented effort to obstruct justice and interfere with investigations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The move drew criticism from numerous U.S. allies, including European governments and Japan, which argued that the court must remain capable of operating independently. Israel welcomed the sanctions.
George Williamson says ‘national resilience’ is key focus of ATI amid US and China’s runaway leadership in field
The UK must not become dependent on foreign AI systems that can be switched off at short notice and must develop its own versions of the technology, according to the head of the Alan Turing Institute.
The country needs a stronger domestic position in AI in response to the US and China’s runaway leadership in the field, with “national resilience” a key focus for ATI said George Williamson.
The first league of its kind in 70 years brought players from all around the world to Illinois for eight weeks, writing a new chapter in the history of women’s sports
On the morning of 14 September, Rocky Henley sat at her rental home’s dining room table amid scattered rulebooks, colorful markers and graph paper. The New York Heights manager drew a chart on a large poster – her method of sketching plays for the evening’s playoff game. Her assistant manager, Jackson, trudged in from the kitchen in flannel pajama pants and a Heights hoodie and watched her work. He also happens to be her son.
First US memorial for suicide victims dedicated by Chicago archdiocese earlier this year at Queen of Heaven cemetery
The Chicago archdiocese has recognized the Rev Charles Rubey’s work supporting families whose loved ones died by suicide this year by dedicating in his honor a memorial to the lives lost to suicide and the victims’ surviving families.
In 1979 Rubey founded the Loving Outreach to Survivors of Suicide, a counseling and support program run by Catholic Charities of the archdiocese of Chicago.
A border patrol vehicle drives past the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on the Tohono O’odham nation on Sept. 5. Cam Mackey
At 4:59 a.m. on Aug. 25, Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Southern Arizona, received an email from the head of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. Government contractors were en route to conduct soil tests for construction of a 62-mile wall along the Nation’s southern boundary, wrote acting chief patrol agent Henry N. Laxdal.
If the tribe wished to have cultural monitors observe the work, they were welcome to, but they could not interfere with the government’s operations.
The work would begin in exactly one minute.
Jose, 59, was already aware of the contractors’ arrival. An hour earlier, a tribal member had called to report a caravan heading south through the reservation, and Facebook was lighting up with similar accounts. The convoy included not only work trucks and drilling rigs, but Border Patrol vehicles as well.
Dozens of border wall contractor and Border Patrol vehicles pass the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on the morning of Aug. 27.Nate Sosa
For months, the O’odham had maneuvered to avoid such a scene, taking their case to federal court. Their homeland straddles the border, and thousands of tribal members live in Mexico. A wall would disrupt routine border crossings for ceremonies and family visits and destroy landscapes they consider their duty to protect, members and leaders say. Their lawsuit argued that the Trump administration’s efforts to build it despite their opposition constituted an historic attack on tribal sovereignty.
But administration attorneys gave assurances that the government was engaging with the O’odham in good faith, and a judge in Washington, D.C., denied the tribe’s request for a preliminary injunction. In his Aug. 25 email providing Jose a 60-second heads up, the Border Patrol chief said his agency’s willingness to accommodate cultural monitors underscored its “commitment to ongoing coordination” with the Nation.
As daylight broke, Jose learned the contractors were guarded by federal agents in masks and tactical gear, drawn from a special operations cadre that participated in citywide sweeps in Minneapolis and Chicago the previous year, which left three people dead, including two U.S. citizens. When the tribe’s chief of police tried to reach the worksite, he was stopped at a roadblock set up by the agents.
Merrian FelixDavy Cross
Border Patrol tactical team members amass around the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on Aug. 26.
Jose issued a statement on the Nation’s website declaring the incursion illegal and revealing that the Department of Homeland Security had deployed a surveillance blimp and enlisted Mexican security forces to help protect the work crews.
For a quarter-century, Tohono O’odham leaders have staved off a border wall by allowing DHS to use the reservation as a testing ground for some of the government’s most aggressive homeland security measures — from vehicle barriers on the reservation’s southern boundary, to state-of-the-art surveillance towers, to law enforcement partnerships with the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Despite the collaborations, and assurances from the Trump administration, ProPublica found that DHS has turned its vast apparatus on tribal members, with 24-hour surveillance directed at an ongoing border prayer ceremony and tribal members being questioned outside the reservation about their ceremonial activities. ProPublica’s account is based on photos, videos, court filings, interviews with tribal leadership, firsthand observations and more than 1,000 contemporaneously written observations compiled by tribal members.
The battle over a border wall on the Nation has broken along familiar partisan lines in Arizona. While GOP legislative leaders have filed briefs in support of the project, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has done the same in support of the tribe.
Progressive U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva, whose district includes the reservation, has said she is crafting legislation to rein in the Department of Homeland Security’s sweeping powers to waive federal laws in order to expedite wall construction. The Trump administration has used those authorities to circumvent environmental and cultural preservation statutes on 60 occasions across its two terms.
For Deshane Gregg, whose vehicle was forced off the road by a convoy of contractors and federal agents, the recent show of force on the reservation has felt like a government siege, not cooperation.
“You just feel helpless. You see these people, and they’re just so aggressive. They want you to react. They want you to show them that we could be ugly too,” she said. “We’re just here doing prayer. We’re just here, not trying to bother them, but it gets to you when it’s constantly being like that.”
“The drones flying over us all day,” she added, “it’s a lot.”
A drone hovers over the Tadai Me:i camp during morning prayer songs on Aug. 27.Ryan Devereaux/ProPublica
ProPublica sent DHS, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Border Patrol nearly 30 questions about the government’s surveillance and interactions with tribal members and leaders. The agencies answered none of those questions. Instead, CBP pointed to a statement Commissioner Rodney Scott made in August, in which he described the reservation’s southern boundary as “one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border” and a “remote desert that has facilitated decades of drug loads, migrant deaths, and cartel activity.”
Regarding construction of a wall, Scott said, “Congress funded this work, a Federal court has affirmed it, and CBP is carrying it out under the legal authorities that apply. Under President Trump’s leadership, we are securing the border and giving our agents the tools and support they need to protect the American people.”
A post on X from James Percival, general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, celebrates the denial of a request for an emergency injunction against border wall construction filed by Tohono O’odham leadership in August.Screenshot of X
With no sign the White House or the O’odham government is backing down, DHS has cast off any pretense that the agency will work cooperatively with the Nation. Within hours of the judge’s denial of the emergency injunction, on Aug. 14, the department’s general counsel, James Percival, posted a celebratory meme depicting one of the cybernetic Star Trek supervillains known as “the Borg.”
“RESISTANCE IS FUTILE,” it read.
“We respect tribal sovereignty but not to the detriment of border security,” he wrote. “This wall is getting built. Our authority is beyond dispute.”
The O’odham have inhabited the Sonoran Desert, from what is now Southern Arizona to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, for thousands of years. According to the tribe, roughly 14,000 of its 37,000 enrolled members live on tribal land west of Tucson. Approximately 3,000 more reside in Mexico. At 2.8 million acres, their reservation is the largest on the southern border by a long shot.
During President Donald Trump’s first term, Arizona saw 226 miles of border wall built, but the Nation maintained its status as the longest unwalled section in the state. Confirmation that things would be different this time came in February, when CBP informed the tribe that it planned to seal off the reservation entirely, tapping nearly $52 billion from Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
A vehicle barrier marks the U.S. border with Mexico in the Chukut Kuk District of the Tohono O’odham Nation.Cam Mackey
The tribe’s elected leaders met with DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin in hopes of changing the administration’s mind. As an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Mullin is the first Native American to head the department. “Maybe we can work with this guy,” Jose recalled thinking.
But Mullin’s message was clear: We want to work with you, but we’re building the wall. Justice Department attorneys were prepared to defend the project to the Supreme Court. O’odham council member Vivian Juan-Saunders, who also attended the April 21 meeting, recalls the secretary saying, “Don’t mess with me.” Mullin’s office did not respond to questions from ProPublica, including about the exchange.
The message was more direct the following month, when tribal leaders met with Scott. According to Jose, the CBP commissioner told the delegation that if they filed a lawsuit opposing the wall, the Nation could lose access to three border gates members use to travel to and from Mexico. Accessible only to tribal members, the gates are maintained at the discretion of CBP.
Juan-Saunders confirmed that CBP threatened to close the gates, as did another council member, Jesse Navarro. CBP declined to comment on the alleged threat.
In June, a $1.3 billion contract to build the wall, known as the “Tucson 5” project, was awarded to Sullivan Land Services Co., also known as SLS and SLSCO. The Texas firm has a long history of Republican political donations and was a major recipient of border wall contracts during Trump’s first term.
The O’odham filed a lawsuit to stop the project on June 16 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The tribe contended it would reduce the size of its reservation, which can only be done by Congress — and that the wall would mark an enduring act of trespass on sovereign lands and destroy sacred cultural sites.
The administration’s plans cast aside decades of tribal cooperation with DHS, the Nation’s lawyers argued, and came at a time of record-low border crossings.
Trump and his administration have repeatedly claimed that the border is safer than ever, with CBP reporting border apprehensions 94% lower than they were during the Biden presidency, and Border Patrol “encounters” hitting their lowest levels in more than 50 years. The Nation underscored these figures as evidence that a wall is unnecessary.
The tribe’s interim chief of police, James Cook, claimed there had been a 90% drop in reports of illegal entry over the preceding year, saying in a sworn declaration that smuggling and other border-related crimes had “almost disappeared.”
Benjamin S. Hollinder, a senior Border Patrol official, argued in a sworn declaration opposing the tribe’s lawsuit that the absence of a wall on the Nation has produced a funneling effect, channeling smugglers onto the reservation, and saying that dynamic would intensify once the rest of Arizona was walled off.
“Not having a border barrier system in this particular area makes it a vulnerable and a desirable area for [transnational criminal organizations] to operate,” wrote Hollinder. “If encounters of aliens entering illegally between ports of entry increase, vulnerabilities in the area will become particularly problematic.”
The Nation sought the preliminary injunction to bar border wall activity until the litigation was resolved.
On the eve of a July 22 hearing, DHS filed a notice affirming that to accelerate the project, it was waiving, in whole or in part, more than 30 laws, including several that mandate tribal consultation.
In court filings, the government acknowledged its long history of working “cooperatively” with the tribal government while also arguing that the Nation “does not hold veto power over the United States’ sovereign duty to secure its borders.”
Trump administration attorneys contended that an injunction was premature; planning was ongoing, thus problems the Nation envisioned could still be addressed.
The government insisted construction would be limited to the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide zone that runs across California, Arizona and New Mexico on the U.S. side of the border, where CBP was authorized to construct barriers as it saw fit.
Riyaz Kanji, the tribe’s lead attorney, argued the Roosevelt Reservation doesn’t extend onto tribal land, and even if it did the rugged landscape would force construction to diverge far from the 60-foot boundary.
Sweeping as its powers were, Kanji contended, DHS could not override a sovereign government. The administration’s plans, he argued, constituted a “blatant and unprecedented disregard for the tribe’s rights.”
Adam R.F. Gustafson, a Justice Department attorney, countered that the tribe had already approved a barrier on its land many years ago. The question now was what kind of barrier it should be. That was for DHS to decide, he argued. The department was “committed” to consultation, he continued. “We take very seriously the tribe’s views on this,” he told the court.
The judge appeared swayed by DHS’ assurances but needed time to consider. “I don’t think the government is trying to go outside of that 60-foot strip,” he said.
Signs placed by Tohono O’odham tribal leaders warn contractors that their presence on the reservation would be considered trespassing.Cam Mackey
The O’odham suspected the government would not be as mindful as it claimed.
Two days after the meeting with Mullin, the DHS secretary, a border wall contractor had “inadvertently disturbed a cultural site” west of the reservation. The crew had bulldozed a 70-foot swath through the Las Playas Intaglio, a 200-foot long earthen etching in the shape of a fish that was at least 6,500 years old. The site was well marked and well known to area archaeologists.
Wynona P. Larson Yazzie, an O’odham tribal elder, Marine Corps veteran and former tribal police officer, had organized prayer runs that included stops at the intaglio. She’d visited the site the day before its destruction. Since then, she’d closely followed the Nation’s lawsuit.
On Aug. 6, Larson Yazzie saw a disturbing filing from the tribe’s attorneys. They’d received word that in four days government contractors would enter the reservation to conduct tests. DHS, the tribe argued, was “exploiting” the judge’s reflection period to “move forward with highly disputed actions.”
Tribal leaders erected dozens of 8-foot-wide “no trespassing” signs along the three main access roads leading through the reservation to the border.
Larson Yazzie, meanwhile, began making plans of her own.
She was joined by Amy Juan, a longtime O’odham activist. Juan, 40, had grown up riding in her grandfather’s truck over the clanking cattle guard at Ko:li Ki:jig, a traditional crossing on the U.S.-Mexico line. After 9/11, a locking gate was placed over the cattle guard. The Border Patrol built a “forward operating base” near her grandparents’ home that would eventually feature a helipad, a detention space and an endless cycle of agents. Around the reservation’s perimeter, CBP established some of the largest Border Patrol stations in the country. Checkpoints went up on roads leading north.
O’odham tribal members Daniel Oriol Figueroa Cervantes, left, from Mexico, and Amy Juan, from Arizona, visit over the border barrier at the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on Aug. 29.Ryan Devereaux/ProPublica
Human rights groups documented U.S.-born tribal members being arrested and deported, and verbal and physical abuse by Border Patrol agents. CBP did not respond when asked about the report’s allegations.
For Juan, the Nation’s collaboration with DHS had sacrificed safety and civil liberties for elusive gains. Virtually everyone on the reservation had been touched by the dark side of border smuggling. During the mid-2000s, some tribal members, enticed by a chance at life-changing money, got involved in moving people and drugs, fueling cycles of arrest and incarceration that exacerbated challenges the community was already facing.
At the same time, virtually everyone also had a story about negative interactions with the Border Patrol — a child traumatized at a checkpoint, an unlawful traffic stop or a loved one assaulted by an agent.
“We want safety and the same respect as the next person,” Juan said. “We’ve never been against keeping people safe, but at what cost?”
Larson Yazzie was similarly concerned. She worried that in the face of DHS pressure the Nation would fold and, like the intaglio, the borderlands would be lost.
A tribal member stands near the fire burning in the Tadai Me:i prayer camp in early September.Cam Mackey
Prayer fires are an important O’odham tradition, often convened in moments of communal struggle. To Larson Yazzie, the coming of a wall was such a time.
The chosen site was symbolic: the border gate at Ko:li Ki:jig. The camp had limited amenities — cots and chairs that encircled the fire, a cooler for ice, a weathered canopy for relief from the sun. They called it Tadai Me:i — roadrunner on fire.
Someone was always awake to watch the flame, which was lit on Aug. 9, as the Trump administration’s contractors were preparing to enter the reservation. The first drone sighting in the area was recorded the following night, at 11:43 p.m., documented in the first of two activity logs. Kept in spiral notebooks, the logs offered a minute-by-minute account of what participants in the ceremony saw and heard.
The handwritten observations, shared with ProPublica, span 13 days and chart a steady escalation by DHS, culminating in an elite tactical team that blocked tribal authorities from issuing trespassing citations to contractors or removing them.
The camp wasn’t a protest site like those seen in Minneapolis, Chicago or other cities over the past year. Participants didn’t shout at passing Border Patrol agents. They focused on the fire, making sure there was enough sugai — creosote bush, a fragrant desert plant — to keep it burning. They were in ceremony, concentrating on morning prayers and nightly cleanses. The atmosphere was that of a family gathering in a moment of crisis. There were jokes and levity amid the uncertainty.
Larson Yazzie knew at least one legislative council member who opposed the gathering. They feared it could lead to large groups converging on the reservation to physically block the border wall, in an occupation similar to the 10-month protest on Standing Rock Sioux land that halted construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. The idea terrified tribal leaders. With its lethal heat and unforgiving terrain, the desert was dangerous enough without outsiders squaring off against Border Patrol.
A ceremonial fire burns on Aug. 27 at a prayer camp near the traditional Ko:li Ki:jig border crossing on the Tohono O’odham Nation.Nate Sosa
Supporters of the ceremonial fire were themselves uneasy. They knew the story of Ray Mattia, the 58-year-old who was shot and killed by the Border Patrol in 2023 while unarmed on the doorstep of his home on the reservation. Agents, who were backing tribal police on the call, claimed to have mistaken a cellphone he was holding for a gun.
“My fear is that they gonna start shooting us,” said 24-year-old camp visitor Collin Quasule. Quasule had videos on his phone of recent interactions he’d had with federal agents, including agents trailing him as he drove around the reservation, following him to his home, pulling him over without explaining why, refusing to accept his legal name and birthdate, and winking at him when he protested his detention.
Across the reservation, community members were on the lookout for large trucks traveling together with out-of-state plates. On Aug. 12, Juan received a call about a caravan: six trucks with Texas plates, following an unmarked SUV with government plates. She called the tribe’s police department. The caravan was intercepted and escorted off the land by tribal authorities. The driver of the unmarked vehicle was confirmed to be a Border Patrol agent. The interception was one of nearly a dozen tribal police recorded over a three-day period.
During the camp’s first seven days, the activity log filled with nearly 665 observations, mostly federal agents buzzing around their location.
An activity log kept by tribal members documents border wall construction and law enforcement activity on the Tohono O’odham Nation.Ryan Devereaux/ProPublica
While many would drive by without stopping, other agents would park and watch. At least one was reported snapping photos of the campers. ProPublica later obtained video of an agent doing exactly that. Mexican security forces, both military and police, were also observed conversing with Border Patrol agents over the international boundary. “It appeared that the 2 BPs were showing the Mexicans pictures on their phones,” read an Aug. 11 entry.
“Surveillance has heightened,” Juan said, days after the prayer fire was lit. “Drones, helicopters, a lot of air activity.” The choppers included both marked CBP and what appeared to be military Black Hawks. The drones were of the handheld quadcopter variety, let loose directly over the camp, at times during prayer song ceremonies.
On the fourth night, a gathering was held. Upwards of 100 people turned up, including members of distant sister tribes.
The evening was peaceful until Juan received a text from an elder couple who’d left early to return to their home near Tucson. The Border Patrol had stopped them at a checkpoint a half-mile outside the reservation, they reported. The officers said they were conducting an “immigration check” and asked to see tribal ID.
“Where you guys coming from?” the agent asked.
“Ceremony,” the couple replied.
“Oh,” the agent said, “is that the one going on down south?”
The encounter was unusual, said Juan. The checkpoint is rarely staffed. When agents are on hand, she said, “they never ask us for a tribal ID.”
When Juan shared the information with the gathering, people immediately began packing up, afraid, she surmised, of a late-night encounter with Border Patrol.
A Border Patrol agent stops to film the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on Sept. 30.Davy Cross
On Aug. 14, Judge Richard J. Leon declined the Nation’s injunction request. “I fully expect the government in the months ahead to follow through on its guarantees of consultation and cooperation with the Nation to address the Nation’s concerns regarding border wall construction!” he wrote.
Eleven days later, on Aug. 25, the Border Patrol sent the Nation its one-minute notice that the contractors were coming. Larson Yazzie jumped in her truck and raced for the border to document what was happening. An agent on foot stopped her. He’d laid a spike strip in the road ahead, he warned. Larson Yazzie filmed the contractors in the distance.
When the tribal police department’s interim chief arrived, he too was stopped at a Border Patrol roadblock. A trio of Border Patrol supervisors approached, including two from a nearby station and a third representing BORTAC, the agency’s special operations wing. The SWAT-style agents wore desert camo, masks and patterned scarves favored by U.S. military units in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was only after promising not to interfere that the tribal police chief was permitted to record. He observed three drilling rigs manned by a handful of operators. An equal number of agents stood guard. The contractors’ heavy vehicles were all beyond the 60-foot zone that government attorneys assured the judge they would not leave.
The chief also encountered a trio of Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, who claimed to have been sent on orders from Washington, D.C. Their mission, they said, was to “preserve the peace and monitor activities.”
A Border Patrol vehicle is parked near the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on the Tohono O’odham Nation.Cam Mackey
For the prayer camp’s participants, the need to relight the flame, which they had extinguished after a seven-day ceremony, was self-evident. They began that night.
Davy Cross, a stocky 57-year-old with an intricate tattoo running down the left side of his face, was tending the fire when, at 4:33 a.m., he noticed buzzing above his head.
At first, the machines were visible. There were at least five. “I seen all the red lights,” Cross recalled. But as they got lower, the drones went dark. Cross could still hear them and feel the draft of the rotors against his skin. Then, he said, “they disappeared.”
The drones were soon replaced by an airplane and a helicopter. Shortly after 9 a.m., a caravan of Border Patrol and construction vehicles trundled into view. The work trucks continued on, but much of the Border Patrol force remained, forming a semicircle around the camp with Mexican state police closing the loop on the other side of the line.
“We got surround[ed] by over 30 vehicles,” Cross wrote in the activity log. A video of the moment spread across social media in the borderlands.
The tribe’s attorneys filed an appeal of the judge’s order allowing construction to proceed and pleaded for a halt to the government’s activities. They argued that the Trump administration was making “a mockery” of the court’s expectation of “consultation and cooperation.”
A convoy of Border Patrol and construction vehicles pass the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on Aug. 29.Ryan Devereaux/ProPublica
That night at the camp, Larson Yazzie was singing prayer songs when Juan pulled in. It was near midnight. Border Patrol agents were coming and going constantly. Some passed without stopping. Others idled at the edge of the firelight while the red lights of a surveillance blimp blinked over the mountains to the east.
Tadai Me:i wasn’t the only pocket of resistance on the border. In Texas, the Trump administration’s plans to run a wall through Big Bend National Park had brought together an unusual coalition that saw environmental nonprofits and river guides standing with hunters, ranchers and local sheriffs in opposition to the project. One week before the armed convoy rolled onto the Tohono O’odham reservation, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced that after speaking with the secretary of DHS, he’d secured a pause on the controversial project.
“There are technology tools that don’t include barriers,” the governor said at a press conference. “Think of drones, think of fiber optics.”
Last week, a judge granted a preliminary injunction halting construction in the Big Bend area while a lawsuit against the project proceeds.
To Juan, it was darkly ironic. For two and a half decades, the Nation had been a laboratory for the technology Abbott described. Yet when tribal leaders made that case, they were told to stand down; the wall was coming whether they accepted it or not. “What makes Texas the exception to us is very clear,” Juan said. “It’s good old boy conversations that are happening between the politicians and the CBP commissioners and Markwayne Mullin.”
Sunrise at Tadai Me:i prayer camp on Sept. 26Ryan Devereaux/ProPublica
The early fire watch that morning fell to a young Pascua Yaqui member named Nate Sosa.
At 3:28 a.m., Sosa heard a noise — a round being chambered in a weapon. A Border Patrol agent had exited his vehicle. With a long gun slung low across his back, he shined a light into Mexico. He then walked within feet of the campers asleep on their cots.
A half an hour later, a drone flew in from the north, followed by a helicopter. After that came a convoy dozens of vehicles long. At 6:02, while Larson Yazzie was leading the camp in prayer, a helicopter passed overhead. An hour later, a drone ascended above the fire.
Liz Quiroga, a 28-year-old tribal member and regular at the prayer site, sat with the camp’s logbook open in her lap. Over the next five days, the book would fill with 379 observations. Nearly two-thirds involved Border Patrol units near the fire. The arrival of Mexican authorities was documented six times. An additional 39 entries referenced unmarked vehicles and suspected “undercovers.” Whether those individuals were Border Patrol, contractors or tribal police was unclear. The logbook cataloged a dozen instances of aircraft flying over the camp, including four helicopters, three planes and five drones.
“Nobody has any idea what’s actually happening out here,” Quiroga said. “This is true dystopia.”
While its legal challenge continues, the Nation has ceased attempting to remove border wall contractors from its lands.
The camp and the surveillance that’s come with it remain.
Dana Joudeh was in shackles when she found out she was pregnant.
The 35-year-old from the West Bank city of Nablus was newly married and had just spent her first night in an Israeli prison. Israeli forces had arrested her without charges and put her under administrative detention, an arbitrary condition for holding Palestinians hostage. She lost consciousness in front of Israeli soldiers at Sharon Prison, a temporary detention facility in the city of Netanya, and they took her to a hospital blindfolded. There, with her hands and feet bound in chains, she was given a pregnancy test that came back positive.
Joudeh would never get to experience the joys and travails of pregnancy outside of prison. She was in Israeli custody from the moment she found out, until she gave birth.
Like Joudeh, pregnant Palestinian women arrested by Israeli security forces since October 7, 2023, are forced to endure a physically and medically complex process in conditions characterized by inadequate access to food, family visits, and medicine, as well as frequent reports of violence.
The total number of pregnancies in custody among the hundreds of women seized since October 7 is unknown, but Joudeh is only the second documented example of a woman who gave birth while under Israeli detention in nearly 17 years, according to Palestinian prisoners’ rights advocates. Many cases, advocates say, may have gone unreported.
The Intercept spoke to Joudeh through her sister, Maram, who sat with Joudeh by her side while sharing a detailed account of her sister’s six-month pregnancy, which ended in a premature cesarean section.
Corroborated by statements and reports published by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society and the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, among others, Joudeh’s story offers a glimpse into what it’s like to go through pregnancy while locked in Israel’s prison system, where she struggled to obtain basic prenatal care and relied on other prisoners to share their already limited food.
“She went through every kind of suffering in there,” Maram said.
Israeli forces used sound grenades inside the prison, according to Joudeh’s family and her lawyer, Hassan Abbadi, who provides volunteer legal support for detained Palestinians. They said soldiers would force the women to lie face down on the floor.
“Female prisoners are subjected to all forms of violence and are deprived of the most basic rights,” said Abbadi, who regularly visits Palestinian women in Israeli prisons. He described shortages of underwear, attacks by police dogs, and strip searches, among other forms of mistreatment.
Joudeh’s pregnancy unfolded against a broader surge in Israeli arrests and violence across the occupied Palestinian territories. As of September, Israel was holding roughly 9,350 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, including 90 women and more than 350 children, according to Palestinian prisoners’ organizations. More than 3,100 of them are being held under administrative detention, without charge or trial.
For Joudeh, who was transferred to Damon Prison in Haifa soon after discovering she was pregnant, there was little effort to make accommodations for her pregnancy. According to Maram and Abbadi, the food was scarce and of poor quality, consisting usually of a slice of toast and lentils, chickpeas, or hummus. Sometimes, the prisoners received a few olives, and the other women incarcerated with Joudeh would offer a part of their own meager portions and give it to her.
In a small cell she shared with 13 other women, she discussed baby names with Manar Karaja, another detainee who was pregnant at the same time. According to Amany Sarahneh, the media director of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, Karaja was still pregnant and still in Israeli detention as of October 6.
As her pregnancy progressed, Joudeh grew increasingly worried about her baby. She repeatedly asked for medical tests to make sure that both she and the fetus were healthy, Maram said, but her requests were refused.
“I would reassure myself by the baby’s heartbeat, and later, when I started feeling her move,” Maram relayed on behalf of her sister, who sat next to her at Maram’s home in Ramallah. “I needed vitamins and folic acid, but they refused to give them to me.”
In response to outreach from The Intercept, a spokesperson for the Israeli military directed queries to the Israel Prison Service. An Israel Prison Service spokesperson said the agency could not comment on individual detainees’ cases, but described a detailed list of Joudeh’s experiences as “false.”
Palestinian women have faced pregnancy and childbirth inside Israeli prisons for decades, often under harsh conditions and with limited medical care. The first documented Palestinian woman to give birth in Israeli custody was Zakia Shammout, who delivered her daughter Nadia in 1972 at Neve Tirza prison in Ramla, assisted by fellow prisoners. The last documented case before the start of Israel’s ongoing genocide was Fatima al-Zaq, who gave birth to her son Youssef in prison in 2008; the 17-year-old was killed in July 2025 after an Israeli drone hit his family’s apartment on Al-Thawra Street, in central Gaza City.
In September 2025, Tahani Abu Samhan gave birth to her son Yahya while in Israeli custody. Then, a year later, there was Joudeh.
Joudeh suffered from debilitating headaches while pregnant, but basic pain relief was difficult to obtain. Prison authorities refused to give her Acamol, a common brand of acetaminophen, which is generally considered safe for use during pregnancy despite recent guidance to the contrary from health officials in the U.S.
The other women found ways to help. One prisoner would sometimes pretend that she had a headache herself, ask for a painkiller, and secretly give the tablet to Joudeh.
“She was crying most of the time,” Maram said.
By July, Joudeh had contracted scabies, a rash caused by highly contagious mites that results in severe itching and pain. The women were given single container of a topical treatment to share among the entire cell, and it wasn’t enough for everyone who was infected. They resorted to mixing the treatment with chlorine to make it stretch further, Maram said.
Months into the pregnancy, Joudeh began suffering severe pain and bleeding. She was taken to the prison clinic, where she was told that her condition was stable and that there was no need to send her to a hospital. She learned she was carrying a girl.
By then six months pregnant, Joudeh was having her first medical examination since her positive test, Maram said. World Health Organization guidelines recommend that a pregnant person would have had at least three prenatal appointments by that point, though many doctors recommend more frequent visits to monitor the development of the fetus and identify potential complications. Joudeh had received none.
In response to detailed questions from The Intercept, an Israeli Prison Service spokesperson wrote in a statement, “The allegations described are false, entirely without factual basis, and form part of a broader campaign to defame the State of Israel and its lawful institutions.”
“All prisoners and detainees held by the Israel Prison Service are held in accordance with the law and receive the rights and care to which they are entitled,” the spokesperson added, including medical care in accordance with Israeli standards. They wrote that the prison agency would not provide medical information specific to any particular detainee.
Israeli officials have shown an interest in following the most limited interpretation of the law. In an interview last week, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said prisoners “will not receive a single grain more than the legal minimum.” He recalled making a monitoring visit to Ketziot prison because, he claimed, he’d heard prisoners had received two extra olives on their plates.
Outside the prisons, access to prenatal and other medical care has been pulled further out of reach for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. By the end of 2025, the United Nations had documented 925 Israeli checkpoints, road gates, and other movement obstacles across the territory, restricting the movement of 3.4 million Palestinians and making it harder to reach health services. And in Gaza, where Israel keeps bombing despite the ceasefire announced last October, the health system has been destroyed, with severe shortages of basic necessities and a lack of functioning medical facilities making pregnancy particularly dangerous.
Around 50,000 women are pregnant in Gaza, according to UNFPA. One in 3 pregnancies are considered high-risk. Nearly 4,000 pregnancy losses were reported in the first half of 2026, three times the number recorded in the previous six months.
In the prison, Joudeh’s bleeding would not stop.
It continued for two weeks, Maram said, and Joudeh’s hemoglobin level eventually fell to 9 grams per deciliter, which the WHO classifies as anemic during pregnancy. As her condition deteriorated, she was taken to Rambam Hospital, again blindfolded and with her hands and feet shackled. There, doctors decided that the baby needed to be delivered prematurely.
“The terrorist has arrived,” she remembered the Israeli doctor saying about the fragile newborn.
On September 12, Joudeh gave birth by C-section under local anesthesia, watching the operation as it was happening. Maram said that Joudeh’s hands and feet were shackled while she was cut open, and female Israeli soldiers surrounded her with guns in the operating room, standing guard.
She saw her daughter only briefly in the first 72 hours after giving birth, Maram said, because the baby, born prematurely at around six months, needed to be cared for in a neonatal intensive care unit.
Joudeh’s doctor was Israeli, and she recalled him speaking to her in cruel, degrading terms, according to Maram. “The terrorist has arrived,” she remembered him saying about the fragile newborn. Joudeh named her Lia.
Some of the nurses caring for Joudeh were Palestinian citizens of the 1948 occupied territories, Maram said. They looked for small ways to help her, like secretly bringing the baby to Joudeh’s bedside while she remained handcuffed to the hospital bed. They dressed Lia in a pink onesie. And they asked the Israeli soldiers guarding Joudeh to remove her handcuffs so she could walk around, but the soldiers refused, Maram said.
Officials at Rambam Hospital did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
Joudeh and Lia were supposed to be released on September 15, according to Maram, but on September 14, just two days after the birth, Israeli authorities took Joudeh and her newborn daughter from the hospital back to the prison to process Joudeh’s release. An ambulance was waiting outside with Joudeh’s husband, Maram said, and as soon as Joudeh and Lia were released, the baby was taken by ambulance to Hclinic Specialty hospital in Ramallah. Before they left, Lia’s pink onesie was replaced with a gray outfit.
Maram believes her sister was released a day early to prevent the family from preparing a celebration to welcome them home.
When Joudeh’s sisters were finally able to hug her, they were shocked by how frail she seemed. “She was exhausted. She had lost so much weight,” Maram said. “She was physically and psychologically devastated.”
She was still suffering from scabies, but her family embraced her anyway. “I didn’t care about anything except hugging her,” Maram said. “I had missed her so much, and I had been so worried about her.”
Joudeh is now staying with Maram at her home in Ramallah, where she’s recovering from her pregnancy and incarceration. Lia remains in the neonatal unit at Istishari Arab Hospital in Ramallah.
Sometimes, Maram said, Joudeh breaks down when she remembers the trauma of giving birth in detention. But when the mother and baby are both well, Joudeh wants to hold a small celebration, bringing relatives and loved ones together to welcome Lia. She’s already begun thinking about the food and sweets she wants to serve. Despite all she’s been through, Maram said, when the family talks about the celebration, Joudeh smiles.
All-star pitcher Sam McDowell has died at 84. In retirement, he became a sobriety counselor and drew comparisons to Ted Danson's character on “Cheers.”
MORGANTOWN -- West Virginia University football coach Rich Rodriguez spent six seasons coaching at the University of Arizona between his first and current stints leading the Mountaineers.
Students say they are desperate to get back to class but conditions are so bad that the protests must continue
On a normal school day, Mohammed, 17, wakes at 6am, cares for his younger siblings to help his single mother who works as a security guard, then takes two crowded buses and a local train to get to his high school in Sevran, a low-income banlieue town in the suburbs north-east of Paris.
“There aren’t enough chairs or desks to go round, so some students have to stand up,” Mohammed said. “Classes can be so packed you can’t interact with the teacher. In this year’s heatwaves, it felt like 40 degrees in overcrowded classrooms with no shade or curtains. It was so hot my brain couldn’t function.”
Illustration by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons/ProPublica. Source images by Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images.
Earlier this year, we heard that reporter Jake Pearson planned to ask our editors at ProPublica for more than $20,000 so he could spend the NBA playoffs betting like a problem gambler.
We told him we wanted in on the action.
For 10 weeks, our documentary team at ProPublica filmed Jake as he dove ball-cap-first into DraftKings and FanDuel, the country’s largest online sportsbooks. Jake bet early, late and often, ramping up the amounts and frequency of his wagers, chasing his losses with even bigger bets. He wanted to flagrantly wave the red flags of a gambler descending into addiction. Would the apps serve up speed bumps as he careened into the red, or would they push him to keep betting?
Since 2018, the year the Supreme Court opened the door for states to legalize sports betting, the number of people staking money on games has exploded. It’s now legal in 39 states and Washington, D.C. The apps don’t just offer straight action on the outcome of a “Sunday Night Football” game — you can put money on myriad sports events and outcomes, including who will score the next point in a tense contest of Czech table tennis. Every month, millions do.
More than $600 billion has sloshed through the legal sportsbooks in wagers — and brought billions in state tax revenue — in the last eight years. But between the ever-present ads featuring celebrities from LeBron James and Charles Barkley to Kevin Hart and Kendall Jenner, cracks in the system have started to show.
About a quarter of active sportsbook account holders surveyed by the Siena Research Institute this year said that they’d lost enough on a bet that they’d have trouble meeting their financial obligations. Other studies and public health experts warn of rising cases of bankruptcy, addiction and self-harm.
ProPublica reporter Jake Pearson at a Manhattan bar this spring, testing DraftKings’ and FanDuel’s guardrails. More than a quarter of people in the U.S. say they have an active account with an online sportsbook, according to a poll by the Siena Research Institute.Gerardo del Valle/ProPublica
DraftKings and FanDuel say that they don’t want to profit off bettors who can’t control themselves, and they provide a range of what the industry calls “responsible gaming” tools to help users stay in check.
Jake received pop-up notices, reminders and emails noting his time on the app and nudging him to “take a beat” after a loss. He opted into some of the tools DraftKings makes available. But he was struck by user design choices and promotions that encouraged him to keep betting, some of which he was served right after setting limits on his play.
In a statement, DraftKings told ProPublica that it trains its more than 5,000 employees on responsible gaming and has more than 50 full-time staff dedicated to its “responsible engagement” program. A FanDuel spokesperson wrote that the company’s program is “designed to identify potential risk early and empower customers with real-time information about their play.”
Even so, regulators and lawmakers from Colorado to Massachusetts have begun to question whether sportsbooks have sufficient protections in place. Those concerns have risen with the popularization of prediction markets, which are even less regulated than sports betting apps like DraftKings.
We were behind the camera back in April when Jake opened his DraftKings account to place his first bet, a $100 Hail Mary wager for the New York Knicks to win the chip. We had no idea what a ride it would be.
Watch our new documentary that follows Jake as he intentionally descends into problem gambling — and see how the apps react.
Have you used apps like DraftKings or FanDuel to place sports bets? ProPublica is looking for at least 250 people who use these apps to share their data with us. Your transaction history will help us better understand how the apps respond to user behavior. You can also reach Jake Pearson and the reporting team at 917-512-0276 or sportsbetting@propublica.org.
Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu has described the film, which got a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, as part of “global antisemitic incitement.”
Before you turn up the heat this fall, take a moment to look, listen and smell. Your HVAC system may be giving you useful information, and an inspection can help you understand what it means.
Tom Watson, of Worcester, alleged to be behind Big Time Charlie X account that created so-called Traitorbase
The owner of a recruitment firm has been accused of being at the centre of a so-called “doxxing” campaign against the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), anti-racism activists and business executives who recruit black, Asian and minority ethnic workers.
Tom Watson, from Worcester, is alleged to be behind an X account calling itself “Big Time Charlie”, which was deactivated shortly after he was named by the campaign group Hope Not Hate.
After years of mockery and doubts about her game, Reese has helped carry Atlanta to the WNBA’s biggest stage. Her critics might want to start forming an apology queue
A lot of folks owe Angel Reese an apology after Friday night. They should probably form an orderly queue.
Not that the bad-faith take merchants who have spent three years gleefully circulating her missed layups, likening her occasionally awkward footwork to “Bambi on ice” and marveling at the supposed comic genius of “mebounds” are likely to join it. The right-wing culture warriors who turned one of the WNBA’s most naturally gifted rebounders into a joke were never particularly interested in an honest assessment of her basketball abilities. But after Friday the punchline has never worn thinner.
Only ‘very small number’ of people already in Lebanon or Jordan will be referred, says organisation running scheme
The Home Office is facing claims it gave false hope to the people of Gaza after it emerged that a new safe route for Palestinian refugees will only be open to those who have already escaped to Lebanon or Jordan.
Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, announced the reopening of a resettlement scheme for refugees at Labour’s annual conference last month. A statement from her department said: “Around one in four referrals will be for Afghan women and girls and Palestinian refugees, fleeing war and persecution.”
Some say party risks ‘looking twee’ by focusing on small fixes amid growing nervousness that budget lacks ambition
In the days since Labour’s annual conference, party insiders have been sharing a word cloud produced by the pollsters More in Common, which shows the phrases voters most associate with Andy Burnham.
Such polling is rarely flattering for politicians, and the prime minister’s version had its fair share of negatives. But one of the most prominent words in the cloud – and the one that has caught the imagination of Labour strategists – was “trying”.
Dozens of CIA officers have been afflicted by debilitating symptoms over the past decade. Are they the result of ‘mass hysteria’? Or are they from attacks with an energy weapon and, if so, who is responsible? And has there been a cover-up?
Shortly after 1am one night in April 2019, a CIA officer on a work trip to London was jolted awake in his hotel room by the most intense head pain he had ever experienced. His body was soaked with sweat and he felt like his eyes were spinning in their sockets. He manoeuvred his way out of bed, hoping to make it to the bathroom to vomit, but found his sense of balance had deserted him. Eventually, he fell back into a fitful, shallow sleep.
The next day, arriving at the work meeting he had travelled for, the officer found he could not remember the names of colleagues in the room, people he knew well. As the meeting got under way, he could barely follow the discussion. Initially, he chalked it up to a terrible – if rather odd – case of food poisoning. But over subsequent weeks, worrying symptoms persisted: brain fog, loss of balance and increasingly harsh tinnitus.
Hurricane Isaias crashed into the US Gulf coast on Friday as a dangerous category 2 storm, hammering communities in Alabama and the Florida panhandle with damaging winds, heavy rain, flooding and life-threatening storm surges.
The first hurricane of the Atlantic season made landfall near Destin, Florida, the National Hurricane Center said. It had maximum sustained winds of 105 mph (169 kph). The storm weakened to just below major hurricane status before it came ashore.
Which would you choose? I’m struggling to decide myself, but definitely going with one or the other. Upgrading from a GT, the power of the adv2 and range seems appealing, but a pint size powerhouse seems equally as awesome for how nimble it would be. Weaker range though, and not sure how well it would do on trails. Lmk what ya think!
Reuters reports:
Flock plans to let go of about 18% of its employees, people with direct knowledge of the plans said on Thursday, as the maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras and license-plate readers faces mounting opposition to its products from communities and lawmakers....
The company has about 1,500 employees [with job cuts hitting 270 employees]. Flock faces growing scrutiny from regulators, lawmakers, and privacy advocates, despite drawing strong investor interest among venture capitalists. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Americans are divided on whether Flock cameras are a good idea. Some 38% of the country supports the use of Flock cameras in their community, compared to 47% who oppose their use.
A related story... In Texas this week a county commissioner decommissioned all 61 of their Flock surveillance cameras and license plate readers, according to a local news report. County residents "have raised serious questions about who can access this data, what vendors can disclose, improper searches, and records being kept after data expires," the precinct's Chief Public Affairs Officer said.
In a statement to the Guardian, Robin M Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said that her group is “not aware of any regulation or precedent for a military execution to be livestreamed on the internet or otherwise made widely available to the public”.
She added that “public executions are typically held in authoritarian countries to instil fear in the population, and to show the power and control of the government.”
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump announced a deal Friday to purchase large quantities of Russian diesel, reversing years of U.S. efforts to restrict Moscow’s energy revenue over its war in Ukraine.
Trump said Russia will immediately supply more than 300,000 metric tons of diesel, followed by 500,000 tons in November, another 1 million tons afterward and eventually an additional 3 million tons. The agreement comes as U.S. diesel prices remain above $6 per gallon and less than a month before the midterm elections.
The move is particularly notable because Trump signed legislation last month expanding sanctions intended to restrict Russian energy income. Shortly after Friday’s announcement, the Treasury Department issued a six-month license easing sanctions on Russian diesel shipments.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy criticized the agreement, arguing that additional energy revenue could help Moscow continue financing its invasion of Ukraine. Trump said lowering fuel costs for American farmers, truckers and consumers was his priority.
The deal follows supply disruptions linked to the Iran war and Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries. Analysts cautioned that simply redirecting Russian diesel from existing customers to the United States may have limited impact on global prices.
The White House has not disclosed payment terms or clarified when the first Russian shipments will reach U.S. markets.
At what was supposed to be a rally for other Republican candidates in Syracuse, New York, the US president devoted a long portion of his speech to airing his grievances with the Nobel committee.
My halls died, gonna replace the full harness and pcb for them but for now i need to run hfi sensorless. Its my pintx running a ubox 100. Anyone have a good setup?
Christine Quaiff has found dozens of dogs over the last few years. She's part of a growing national network of lost pet recovery specialists who offer this service, often for free.
The parents of Australian surfing brothers murdered in Mexico have said “no outcome can ever undo this tragedy” after three men were convicted of the 2024 killings.
Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson, aged 30 and 33 respectively, and their friend Carter Rhoad, 30, were on a surfing trip to Mexico’s Pacific coast when they were shot dead in Baja California state in a suspected robbery.
The quake caused buildings and roads to collapse but the country appeared to escape widespread destruction or deaths
A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck southern Panama on Friday, damaging buildings and sending thousands into the streets, but the country appeared to escape widespread destruction or deaths.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) said the earthquake hit at a depth of 12.6km (7.8 miles), with an epicenter in a sparsely populated area about 200km (124 miles) from the capital, Panama City. It lasted about a minute.
Boise, ID — The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has contributed $1 million to a political action committee seeking to defeat Idaho’s Proposition 1, a November ballot measure that would expand reproductive rights and repeal the state’s current abortion restrictions.
The donation went to the Too Extreme for Idaho PAC and is the largest reported contribution from a church-affiliated organization in the campaign. The LDS Church said it remains neutral toward candidates but participates in ballot campaigns involving what it considers significant moral issues.
Proposition 1 would repeal Idaho’s existing abortion laws, establish protections for reproductive healthcare decisions and provide liability protections for providers offering abortion and related services.
The church had already announced its opposition in September and encouraged members to oppose the measure. Its abortion policy generally opposes elective abortion while allowing possible exceptions involving rape, incest, serious threats to a pregnant woman’s health or fatal fetal abnormalities.
Religious organizations are active on both sides. Catholic groups have contributed to the opposition campaign, while the Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship donated $5,000 to the pro-Proposition 1 PAC.
Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador previously concluded that churches may legally contribute to ballot campaigns without disclosing their individual donors under certain conditions.
Hey everyone! I usually take the ferry into Manhattan just to enjoy the ride around the city, and I've never had any issues before. But today on my return trip home, a ferry employee came up to me and said I had to find an alternative way back because Onewheels are illegal and banned from the ferry.
For context, I wasn't even riding it—I was just carrying it with me. Since I didn't want to argue, I just walked out and waited for a bit. Then, I wrapped my board up in my jacket, walked right back into the terminal, and managed to get on the ferry with no issues this time.
Has anyone else run into this? Are they strictly banning them even when they're powered off and carried?
Unions tell government to fix ‘overbearing mess’ of inspection regime and its impact on staff wellbeing – or risk industrial action
Tensions between England’s headteachers and Ofsted are developing into a crisis after school leadership unions said they had no confidence in the watchdog and would hold strike ballots unless “significant wellbeing issues” caused by Ofsted’s inspections regime were fixed.
The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), which includes senior leaders in many secondary schools, described Ofsted’s inspection system as “an overbearing mess” and urged the government to pause inspections to stop teachers leaving the profession.
A federal judge has struck down the Trump administration's plan to check state voter rolls against federal immigration databases and press states to remove voters it determines are registered illegally.
(The Center Square) – A prominent labor union announced this week that its taxpayer-paid members voted to go on a one-day strike after negotiations with California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office stalled.
Motorist, reportedly trying to beat a traffic light, barrels through busy intersection and slams into pedestrians
At least one person was killed and nine injured in New York City’s eastern Bronx when a motorist barreled through a busy intersection, slammed into pedestrians and triggered a chain-reaction crash involving several vehicles, according to authorities and media reports.
The horrifying collision happened shortly after 2pm in the Bronx’s Allerton neighborhood, with the driver at the center of the crash reportedly saying he was trying to beat a traffic light.
Zacharia will replace Karoline Leavitt, who left the role at the end of August after giving birth to her second child
Donald Trump on Friday announced that he had picked Katie Zacharia to be the next White House press secretary, lining up a conservative commentator he called a “devoted fan” to be his most prominent spokesperson.
Recommended dose of hepatitis B vaccine will be withheld from thousands of newborns by Danish researchers
A controversial research trial that will withhold hepatitis B vaccines from some African newborns was given approval to move forward this week.
It is a central part of the vaccine vision for Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a longtime vaccine opponent.
Who will replace Republican Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick? Here’s where Kira Alejandro and Melissa Brayman stand
This story is part of Delaware LIVE’s continuing coverage of the 2026 New Castle County Council races.
WILMINGTON, Del. — In August, Delaware LIVE introduced the two Democrats running to replace Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick. Kira Alejandro won that Sept. 15 primary over Kyle Grantham. Now she faces Republican Melissa Brayman, and on Wednesday, Oct. 7, the two answered questions side by side at an in-person candidate forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of New Castle County at Limestone Presbyterian Church.
Kilpatrick, a Republican who has represented Hockessin, Yorklyn, North Star, Pike Creek and part of Newark for 16 years, is not seeking reelection. She was in the audience.
The seat is known as New Castle County Council District 3. County council votes on the county budget, property taxes and requests to rezone land for new development. According to the League of Women Voters of New Castle County, questions were submitted online before the forum and on note cards at the event.
The general election is Nov. 3. Six county council seats are on this year’s ballot, but only three have candidates from both parties, and this is one of them, according to the Delaware Department of Elections. A Delaware LIVE look at all six races is coming next.
What they have in common
Whoever wins, the seat will stay with a woman. Neither Democrat Kira Alejandro nor Republican Melissa Brayman has held elected office. Both attended the University of Delaware, both left Delaware for a time before coming back, and both bring an environmental background to the race: Alejandro through her work saving land from development, and Brayman through her University of Delaware studies in wildlife conservation.
Both named affordability as the county’s most urgent problem. Both said the state passes costs to the county without paying for them, and both said many residents don’t know what county council does.
Several questions asked about specific development proposals, including a McDonald’s on Limestone Road and a car wash in Hockessin. Delaware LIVE will report separately on the status of those projects.
The table below compares the two candidates in 10 areas, from their backgrounds to where they stand on taxes, development and data centers. The forum covered more ground than we could fit here. You can watch the full discussion on the League’s website.
Where they differ
Kira Alejandro, Democrat
Melissa Brayman, Republican
Lives in
Yorklyn
Pike Creek
Education
Attended the University of Delaware
Bachelor’s degree in entomology (the study of insects) with a concentration in wildlife conservation, University of Delaware
Work
A decade in specialty coffee and small local businesses; says she worked with neighbors to save nearly 30 acres from development
Director of administration and finance, Delaware State Chamber of Commerce; board member, Citizens for Delaware Schools
In her own words
“The only people politicians should ever be beholden to are the voters who elect them.”
“I’m not an influencer. I’m not an activist.” Describes herself as a working mom.
Taxes
Wants to protect people on fixed incomes from county tax increases
Pledged to oppose any new tax increase: “I will vote no on that tax increase.”
Spending
Would preserve the public library “first and foremost”; would stop buying more automated license plate readers
Supports public safety, law enforcement and libraries; would scale back administrative costs
New development
Errs “on the side of not supporting anything that the people who live in the immediate area do not want when their concerns are legitimate”
“Each project should be treated as an individual project and should be heard on its merits.”
Housing costs
Would require more lower-priced homes in new developments and build more in areas that already have roads, sewer and power
Would allow more kinds of homes, including small starter homes and in-law suites
Data centers
Wants a pause on approving new data centers: “We don’t totally understand everything about data centers yet.”
Would not support a pause if defending it costs taxpayers money, but would “pump the brakes a little bit”; opposes data centers in any residential area
Money from developers
Takes none from developers, land use attorneys, corporations or corporate political action committees; will refund any developer donation she learns of
Has not accepted any from developers; did not say directly whether she would commit to refusing them
Delaware LIVE’s 2026 Voter’s Guide
Who’s on your ballot? Delaware Live’s 2026 Voters Guide shows every candidate in your county and district, updated daily, with a countdown to Election Day. Check it out=>Delaware LIVE 2026 Voters Guide.
(Author’s note: Quotes from both candidates are taken from a transcript of the League of Women Voters of New Castle County’s video recording of the Oct. 7 forum.)
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing a firestorm over how his administration handles policing and responds to federal immigration raids after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot 28-year-old father Oscar Belgal in front of his 5-year-old child in Manhattan on Thursday.
Outraged New Yorkers poured into the streets Thursday night and soon clashed with the New York City Police Department, inflaming a perennial point of tension for the city’s socialist mayor. Mamdani has faced criticism from his left for neglecting to pursue aggressive reforms of the NYPD and distrust from his right for having vowed to rein in the department. Now, as residents recover from the latest in a string of violent episodes in President Donald Trump’s war on immigrants, Mamdani is tasked with shielding his city from ICE and controlling his local police.
“We know that ICE is rotten to its core,” Mamdani said Thursday night, standing side-by-side with NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a holdover from the Adams administration known for pushing to expand the department’s sweeping surveillance apparatus. While Mamdani has made his disdain for ICE clear, his detractors argue the mayor must do more than deliver harsh words.
Mamdani’s rhetoric marks “a great first step,” said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “But what is the city going to do other than deliver that? What are the actionable ideas that they’re planning? That’s the piece that we need to be pushing more on hearing about, because we’re gonna keep being in the same situation.”
Legally, there isn’t much Mamdani can do to keep federal immigration agents out of the city. Despite the steps he’s taken to curtail their access to city property or stop the federal government from illegally accessing New Yorkers’ private data, Trump and the federal agencies sending ICE to New York are the only ones who could actually stop them from coming.
But Mamdani’s administration could make it harder for ICE to operate in New York by exerting more control over the NYPD, immigration advocates argue. The department later showed up at the protests on Thursday night, and rapid response activists at the scene alleged its officers were speaking with agents from Homeland Security Investigations, which they viewed as evidence of coordination.
Pete Gizas, director of the White House National Security Council and Homeland Security Investigations New York Acting Special Agent in Charge, was at the scene liaising directly with NYPD personnel, according to two rapid responders who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation from law enforcement agencies.
One rapid responder said Gizas was there for hours, “speaking directly to both NYPD and federal personnel. He had HSI officers in his immediate area going door to door, getting into apartment buildings.” Another witness confirmed that they’d seen Gizas interacting with the police.
“Why is a crime scene, a shooting scene, being presided over by Homeland Security Investigations?”
“If NYPD is in fact an agency that is controlled by the mayor of New York and by the people of New York, then why is a crime scene, a shooting scene, being presided over by Homeland Security Investigations?” said the first rapid responder, who added that they’d seen members of the ICE investigative unit going in and out of the local NYPD precinct.
The NYPD doesn’t have an official partnership with ICE, which would be prohibited by sanctuary city laws and a state law passed in August. But the department has been notified of ICE activity in the city and shares information like fingerprints with federal agencies, which in turn shares that information with ICE.
Awawdeh said even if the police aren’t helping ICE detain people, they’re still helping them move freely around the city and carry out their operations.
“They’ll not cooperate or work with ICE on immigration enforcement, but then when they do crowd control, it does end up becoming collusion because then you’re still helping them do the thing you’re not supposed to be doing,” he said.
ICE directed questions about Gizas being at the scene to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement, an NYPD spokesperson said, “The NYPD does not conduct civil immigration enforcement.”
Mamdani has already faced a barrage of criticism for his abandonment of several police reform promises he made on the campaign trail. Advocates want him to get rid of Tisch, who is widely associated with the “tough-on-crime” tenure of former Mayor Eric Adams, and disband a controversial unit often deployed to protests known as the Strategic Response Group. (Mamdani has said he still wants to disband the unit but has not provided a plan or a timeline to do so. His office and an NYPD spokesperson told The Intercept that the unit was not deployed on Thursday.)
According to eyewitness accounts and footage of the protests shared on social media, NYPD officers pushed demonstrators, including knocking down Democratic congressional nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier. But there don’t appear to have been mass arrests. In a statement to The Intercept, an NYPD spokesperson said the agency arrested five people at the protests and issued them tickets to appear at the precinct.
“We’re seeing both the shock of ICE’s violence, but we’re also seeing this aggressive treatment of the protesters and of the response to people who are speaking out,” said Yasmine Farhang, executive director of the Immigrant Defense Project.
In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for Mamdani’s office called the ICE shooting “heinous” and said it “underscores the dangers that ICE operations create in our communities.”
“The Mayor and the NYPD will review all of the events of the last 24 hours,” the spokesperson said, “including ICE’s shooting; the Police Department’s response to that incident and the ensuing protest; the staging of ICE operations in privately-owned parking lots; and every action the City can take to protect New Yorkers from ICE’s terror.”
The Socialist Stance
Mamdani’s strongest political base of support has directed its ire at Tisch, not the mayor. In a statement from the NYC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose organizing operation helped one of its own get elected mayor, the group called for Tisch’s firing and condemned the NYPD without mentioning Mamdani by name.
Asked why Mamdani didn’t just direct the NYPD not to respond to protests, NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo said the group hadn’t yet been in touch with City Hall but that the police response fell on Tisch, who read out Belgal’s criminal record at her appearance with Mamdani Thursday night. Gordillo also said it was time for the mayor to move forward on campaign promises like disbanding the Strategic Response Group, although the unit wasn’t at Thursday’s protests.
“The mayor and we all agree that ICE is not making New Yorkers safer. Democratic socialists have to defeat Trump if we want to abolish ICE,” Gordillo said, pointing to the seven DSA members likely heading to Congress next session, including Avila Chevalier. “The mayor helped us elect several of those people. That’s really the top priority. Because until the federal government changes, the tools that we have in New York City are pretty limited.”
In an interview about Mamdani’s policing policies earlier this month, Gordillo’s co-chair, Grace Mausser, said the group was being careful about how it was approaching pushing Mamdani to do more on police reform while balancing the political risks. In light of the shooting, Gordillo said, there may be an opportunity to up the pressure.
“There’s an opening among the public right now that means we can harness public anger and public support to make changes for the better in the NYPD in a way that maybe felt harder a few weeks ago,” Gordillo said.
Farhang said she welcomed Mamdani’s pledge to demand that Trump end all ICE enforcement operations in New York City, but there are other, less obvious ways to end local collaboration with ICE.
“People justifiably are focused on the role of the NYPD at the site of a protest, and those are important conversations,” Farhang said. “But every single day, we know that the Department of Corrections, the Department of Probation, and also yes, the NYPD, they are continuing to communicate and collaborate with ICE.”
City Council officials recently reintroduced two bills that would limit that sort of cooperation. They’d been sitting “for years,” Farhang said. Now, she added, with so many people “unequivocally saying that ICE is an agency whose mission is squarely to terrorize communities, and that there’s no bounds to their violence, we ask people to take that next step and say, if that’s the case, there is no justification for collaboration at all.”
ICE has surged operations in cities around the country, particularly targeting blue cities with so-called sanctuary city laws that strengthen protections for immigrants.
“This surge that’s happening in New York City is happening all across the country. In California, in Illinois, in anti-sanctuary states as well,” said Naureen Shah, who leads immigration policy and advocacy at the American Civil Liberties Union. “So for any community that’s bracing for or experiencing a law enforcement surge, it is really vital that police departments are not providing cooperation to the street arrests, either formally or informally.”
Cities and states can’t stop ICE from doing federal law enforcement, Shah added. But, she said, “they can hold officials accountable for the abuses they commit.”
Alabama, Florida and Mississippi declare emergencies, as residents prepare for ‘long-duration power outages’
Isaias strengthened into a category 3 hurricane on Friday as it barreled toward the US Gulf coast, where states of emergency have been declared in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi.
The hurricane, the first in the Atlantic in what has turned into a very late 2026 season, is expected to cause a “life-threatening storm surge”, officials said. Isaias is forecast to make landfall on Friday night, somewhere along the western Florida Panhandle, with surging seas up to about 7ft (2.1 meters) and waves as high as 30ft (9.1 meters).
Hamam al-Hammami, a 29-year-old Omani national, intended to cause “the greatest possible number of human casualties,” the Emirati attorney general said.
Locals also express fear after man shot in the neck while his child was in the back of his car
Residents of Manhattan’s Marble Hill neighborhood were furious at federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Friday but also scared after an officer shot their neighbor who had his child in the back of his car.
Orlando Perez had parked his car on the corner of 225th St and Marble Hill Avenue on Thursday night and witnessed ICE arresting Oscar Belgal, 28, after he had been shot in the neck, apparently with an assault-style rifle.
The Pentagon's decision to livestream the firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan could put the spotlight on whether social media companies will allow videos on their platforms.
The sanctions are aimed at cutting the ICC off from the global financial system and include threats of punishment for countries that do business with the court.
Prospect of contentious Orange Order march through Garvaghy Road in Portadown has led to a nearly two-week standoff
The Northern Ireland secretary of state has banned the Drumcree parade after a 13-day impasse between the Orange Order and nationalists.
Chris Bryant announced on Friday night that it was “not in the public interest” for Orangemen to march the contested route through Garvaghy Road in Portadown, which Catholic residents had blocked.
Immigration officer shot man in car where five-year-old child was sitting, sparking fierce protests
Leading New York Democrats expressed anger and demanded curbs on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violence after a federal officer shot a man driving a car in which his five-year-old son was sitting, sparking fierce protests.
At least seven shots were reportedly fired and the man was hit in the neck late on Thursday afternoon as children were coming home from school in the busy Marble Hill neighborhood of New York City. Marble Hill is considered part of Manhattan, but is physically located in the Bronx.
Hammam al-Hammami is believed to have been targeting the passenger terminal at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv
The co-pilot who tried to seize control of a passenger jet flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv last week was planning to launch a suicide attack targeting the passenger terminal at Israel’s international airport, prosecutors in the United Arab Emirates said on Friday.
Hammam al-Hammami attacked the plane’s Indian pilot with an emergency axe, but failed to prevent his badly injured colleague from opening the cockpit’s security door to allow passengers to overpower his assailant.
From Apple-Scrapple in Bridgeville to international films in Wilmington, the Oct. 9-11 weekend offers so many activities that a Top 10 list isn’t nearly enough.
BRIDGEVILLE, Del. — Delawareans looking for something to do this weekend have a good problem: There may be more festivals, sporting events, concerts and family activities than anyone can fit into three days.
The weekend of Oct. 9-11 brings together some of the First State’s favorite fall traditions, with activities stretching from Wilmington to Sussex County.
From scrapple slinging and pumpkin picking to independent films and college football, the calendar offers something for nearly every age and interest.
Here are Delaware LIVE’s top weekend picks, followed by an expanded guide because there are simply too many events to leave out.
Delaware LIVE’s Top Weekend Picks
Apple-Scrapple Festival — Bridgeville
One of Sussex County’s biggest fall traditions returns Friday and Saturday, bringing food, crafts, live entertainment, carnival rides and the popular Scrapple Sling competition to downtown Bridgeville. Saturday’s activities run from 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Wilmington International Film Festival — Wilmington
Independent films, international productions, documentaries and filmmaker events fill downtown Wilmington venues through Sunday. The festival offers audiences an opportunity to discover films outside the traditional commercial theater circuit.
Delaware State University Homecoming — Dover
Delaware State University welcomes Franklin Pierce for its homecoming football game Saturday at 1 p.m. at Alumni Stadium, adding to a weekend of alumni and campus activities.
Fifer’s Fall Festival — Camden-Wyoming
Pumpkins, farm attractions, seasonal treats and family activities make Fifer Orchards a popular autumn destination. Saturday’s festival runs from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Amish Country Bike Tour — Dover
Cyclists will travel scenic roads throughout central Delaware Saturday during the 40th annual Amish Country Bike Tour. Multiple routes accommodate riders of different abilities, with activities centered around Legislative Mall.
Nature and Outdoor Adventures — New Castle County
Families can watch migrating hawks at Ashland Nature Center near Hockessin or explore Wilmington’s wetlands through Delaware Nature Society programs. Both offer opportunities to experience Delaware’s natural environment during the fall migration season.
Live Music — Wilmington and Smyrna
Vinyl Shockley performs Saturday evening at The Queen in Wilmington, while Van Halen Nation brings classic rock to the Smyrna Opera House.
Too Much Fun to Leave Out: More Delaware Weekend Events
Putting together a Top 10 list presented an unusual problem this weekend: There are simply too many worthwhile events to fit into one short list.
From farmers markets and nature programs to concerts, cycling, films and community activities, organizations across Delaware have planned activities for nearly every interest.
Here’s a longer look at what’s happening across the First State this weekend.
The secretary of state, in a meeting with Venezuelan opposition figure Dinorah Figuera, expressed U.S. support for talks meant to set the stage for elections.
The Justice Department said it will no longer enforce certain provisions of a law regulating firearms often used by mobsters, after a federal judge declared large parts of it unconstitutional.
Manhattan prosecutors say murder case over 2024 killing can proceed under ‘exception’ to state double jeopardy law
Manhattan prosecutors filed paperwork on Friday opposing Luigi Mangione’s arguments for dismissing his state-level case in the killing of the UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson.
Mangione on 14 August pleaded guilty to federal charges in Thompson’s 4 December 2024 killing outside a Midtown hotel – weeks before his scheduled 8 September New York state murder and weapons trial. The killing prompted an intense manhunt but also sparked an outpouring of rage against the practices of the for-profit US healthcare industry.
DraftKings sent extensive promotional offers to ProPublica reporter Jake Pearson while he was testing the company’s safety guardrails for problem gamblers. Recreation of notifications by Chris Alcantara/ProPublica
Gambling regulators in New York on Friday formally proposed two rules that they say will help curb gambling addiction in the state.
The move adds the country’s largest sports betting market to a growing list of places that are seeking online gambling reforms as states that have legalized wagering on sports in recent years deal with the harmful side effects, including rising addiction diagnoses there.
While the drafts have been months in the making, their official introduction follows mounting media scrutiny, including a ProPublica investigation last month that showed weaknesses in the guardrails that companies like DraftKings have erected to address problem gamblers on their platforms. That system is called “responsible gaming.”
The commission’s chair, Brian O’Dwyer, said that the proposed rules “provide an opportunity for the industry to illustrate its commitment” to protecting its customers.
“The industry is on notice by me and this commission that they need to solve this problem,” O’Dwyer said. “If the industry does not address it, then we will address it and they may not like the solution that we come up with.”
One of the new rules would effectively adopt guidelines that New Jersey already uses, requiring sportsbooks to follow specific thresholds to identify at-risk bettors. The company would then be mandated to check in with those users. Another rule would bar companies from using artificial intelligence to customize bonuses or wagers.
DraftKings, one of the country’s largest sports betting companies, has said it already follows the New Jersey trigger thresholds. Among them: depositing more than $10,000 in a 24-hour period or wagering more than $1 million in a 90-day period.
If you’ve bet on sports with FanDuel or DraftKings, you can help ProPublica understand how these apps work. Use our browser extension to download your betting history, then upload your files.
But as ProPublica recently reported, problem gambling can manifest in much smaller amounts. With the advice of recovering addicts, addiction specialists and professional sports bettors, a reporter deposited $21,600 into his DraftKings account in less than eight weeks and purposefully bet compulsively, exhibiting the hallmark signs of problem gambling throughout that time. The behavior didn’t qualify for a company review or interventions beyond responsible gaming notices, including in-app pop-ups.
Some advocates for gambling reforms said that’s one big reason why the proposed rules don’t go far enough.
New York and New Jersey “are clearly complacent in the status quo by endorsing and prescribing regulations that are nothing more than giving the appearance of reform and not effectuating actual change,” said Brianne Doura-Schawohl, a gambling reform advocate who lobbies for consumer and public health protections.
After the commission advanced the rules unanimously on Friday, O’Dwyer said he recognized “the limitations of this proposal” and urged the state’s nine licensed mobile sports betting companies to share data so that problem gamblers can’t elude intervention by bouncing between them.
The introduction of the rules is a key step toward formal adoption. There will be a 60-day comment period for the public to weigh in on them. Barring major changes, the rules will then go back before the commission.
Though the plans were first published in March and received dozens of public comments, their official introduction at the gaming commission comes on the heels of reporting by The New York Times, which found that DraftKings used artificial intelligence and data scientists to target its promotions to losing bettors, and ProPublica, which found that promotions far outweighed the responsible gaming notices sent to a reporter exhibiting problematic behavior.
DraftKings made that journalist a VIP after he displayed red flags of problem gambling.
Since those articles were published last month, regulators in Maine and Michigan have also said that they are reviewing some of the issues raised in the stories.
A spokesperson for Maine’s Public Safety Department said the Gambling Control Unit is “monitoring the use of AI locally and nationally” but has no rules or laws addressing the issue and declined to provide any additional information “regarding the scope of that monitoring or specific operations.” A spokesperson for Michigan regulators hasn’t responded to requests for comment.
Massachusetts regulators, who have been looking into the use of AI by gambling companies, said they were also taking a look. The governor of Maryland has separately said he’d like to limit gambling companies’ use of AI to “identify and target users showing problem-gambling patterns.”
Asked for comment on the New York regulations, a FanDuel spokesperson said the company “welcomes the opportunity to engage with regulators and work collaboratively to establish best practices for the industry.”
A spokesperson for DraftKings referred ProPublica to its prior comments.
In statements and interviews, the company has defended its responsible gaming program and disputed any characterization that it targets addicts or those prone to addiction with inducements.
In an interview with ProPublica, Lori Kalani, DraftKings’ chief responsible gaming officer, said that, overall, “the system worked the way it was supposed to” during our gambling investigation, citing the more than 30 messages it sent our reporter. She added that “as a business, as an industry, we’re doing a good job of educating people, of raising awareness, of making tools and resources available, of monitoring accounts.”
DraftKings told the Times it “rejects any implication that its marketing practices are unfair or improperly targets customers” and said its perks were delivered to “customers who demonstrated sustained, engaged use on our platform, not toward customers based on their losses.”
The rules presented on Friday were made in response to a call by Gov. Kathy Hochul this year to address problem gambling. The Democrat, who is running for reelection, has announced a 10-year survey of residents’ gambling behavior to help “guide smart, targeted investments that protect New Yorkers and strengthen access to care.”
But the commission’s proposed rules are a relatively moderate step in that direction.
The measures would require a sports betting company to do more due diligence into a user’s “financial vulnerability” under certain conditions. Those triggers include a range of behaviors, including, for example, if a user’s time on the app jumps by 50% or more in a week compared with the immediately preceding two-week period.
In a comment letter this May, the Responsible Online Gaming Association, a trade group that includes DraftKings, FanDuel and three other major sportsbook operators, said the rules “establish a strong framework for responsible gaming” but offered some “targeted recommendations.”
Those included ensuring the triggers “avoid displacing or disrupting the mature, data-driven behavioral risk assessment systems already in use” and don’t confuse the company’s “responsible gaming role and the role of qualified clinicians.” It said any interventions should be “proportionate, operationally scalable, and effective.”
Judge says justice department policy of checking state voter rolls against a federal immigration database is unlawful
A federal judge ruled on Friday that the US justice department’s policy of collecting states’ unredacted voter rolls to check them against a federal immigration database is unlawful.
The ruling, by the US district judge Sparkle Sooknanan, was a setback for Donald Trump, who has pushed his administration to ramp up investigations into non-citizen voting ahead of the November midterm elections, with control of Congress at stake.
The U.S. imposed fresh sanctions targeting the International Criminal Court, taking action against the court itself after previously penalizing more than a dozen of its judges and prosecutors.
Vice President JD Vance cast doubt on whether the Pentagon will go ahead with livestreaming the execution of the Fort Hood shooter and said he would not tune in if it happens.
Actor was robbed of his watch after being struck in the head by two attackers wielding a gun and a knife
Pretty Little Liars actor Keegan Allen was battered and robbed by attackers wielding a knife and gun in West Hollywood, he said on Thursday in a social media video showing him bloodied and alarmed.
The Los Angeles county sheriff’s department confirmed in a statement shared with news outlets that it was investigating a violent robbery matching the weapons, block and time described by Allen on social media, where users responded with shock and supportive comments.
Just weeks before the midterm elections, 90% of Americans say prices in the U.S. are the main factor shaping their view of the economy. These charts show why.
The weather may look sunny now, but snow is projected in the forecast for the weekend. That pushed the City of Helena Street Division to getready for the first significant snowfall expected this weekend as city crews prepare to keep…
Company, which grown rapidly in recent years, has been under scrutiny as privacy concerns grow
Flock Safety plans to shed about 18% of its employees, people with direct knowledge of the plans said on Thursday, as the maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras and license-plate readers faces mounting opposition to its products from communities and lawmakers.
The people said the job cuts came after a voluntary buyout program and were expected to affect roughly 270 employees at Flock, a surveillance technology startup that has seen rapid growth in recent years. Employees will leave the company at the end of the month.
I was recently invited to attend the 2026 Teaching Personal Finance Conference at Stanford University. I spent a full day listening to educators from across the country and the world grapple with an important question: How do you teach people…
Harrisburg, Pa. — The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Friday rejected two last-minute attempts, including one led by local state Sen. Gene Yaw, to keep skill games running past next week.
It is odd for the US defense secretary to be laying the groundwork for an event that could be organized by Tehran
Pete Hegseth’s plans to stage a public execution resemble a grotesque Iran-imitation game.
Having failed over the past seven months to defeat the Tehran regime on the battlefield, the self-styled “secretary of war” now proposes to mirror its notorious practice of enforcing the death penalty as a grand public spectacle.
Sen. Dick Durbin asked the DOJ's watchdog to investigate why the FBI lowered its hiring standards for candidates who may have engaged in bestiality, prostitution or employment theft.
(The Center Square) - U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Arizona, is framing his campaign for governor around economic affordability, water management and border security, drawing a sharp contrast with the Democratic incumbent, Gov. Katie Hobbs.
(The Center Square) – Polling deficit, disapproval of the president, and recent shifts in campaign strategy by super PACs are evolving a dynamic that further favors Democrat Roy Cooper over Republican Michael Whatley in North Carolina’s election for a seat…
Former Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat now campaigning to return to the chamber, is pushing back on attacks over transgender policy with a healthcare data point of his own.
In a Brown campaign ad, a series of voters say they’re befuddled that ads against Brown focus on transgender issues when there are more urgent matters at stake, like higher prices for groceries and electricity.
One of the voters said Husted voted “to kick 490,000 Ohioans off their healthcare.”
This is broadly in line with credible, independent estimates, but lots remains to be seen about how these changes will play out, and how many people will be affected.
The 2025 law that Husted supported cuts healthcare spending
Brown’s campaign referred PolitiFact to Husted’s 2025 vote in favor of President Donald Trump’s signature tax and spending legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That measure passed the Senate, 51-50, with Vice President JD Vance breaking a tie.
The bill did many things — including extending expiring tax rates and lightening taxation of tips and overtime — but the part relevant to the ad’s claim is its healthcare provisions.
One section of the legislation concerned Medicaid, the federal-state program that offers health insurance to lower-income and disabled Americans. The legislation added a requirement that recipients show that they are working. Supporters said this would encourage recipients to work; critics said most Medicaid recipients were already working and the law’s burdensome paperwork requirements could end up pushing them off the rolls.
The legislation also tightens the definition of immigrants with lawful status who may qualify for coverage.
The Congressional Budget Office, Congress’ nonpartisan number-crunching arm, projected that the law would reduce federal healthcare spending by more than $1 trillion over 10 years and leave 10 million additional Americans uninsured.
Husted’s campaign said he supported the One Big Beautiful Bill Act because it focused Medicaid spending on core groups of recipients who need the program.
The bill included “modest work requirements targeted at able-bodied adults,” Husted spokesperson Amy Natoce told PolitiFact. Making that change prioritizes “Ohioans living with disabilities, kids living in poverty and the elderly,” she said.
Republicans who drafted the law rejected Democrats’ proposal to extend pandemic-era enhanced subsidies to buy insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act.
Democrats warned that without subsidies, more people would lose healthcare coverage because they wouldn’t afford their premiums.
Husted’s role in the enhanced subsidy expiration is more nuanced than his role in passing the Medicaid changes. Husted voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act without an extension, but he later sponsored a bill to extend the subsidies for two years, along with some other provisions, including blocking subsidies for lawfully present immigrants. Husted’s bill had no cosponsors and did not advance.
A separate effort to extend the enhanced subsidies passed the House but died in the Senate.
How many people stand to lose insurance because of these policy changes?
Brown’s campaign pointed us to Congressional Budget Office datacollected by the Democratic staff of the Joint Economic Committee. This data, which was released before the vote on the bill, found that 489,815 Ohioans over 10 years would lose coverage after the act’s passage and if the enhanced subsidies were not extended.
That Democratic analysis was published in June 2025, before the bill passed in July.
KFF, a nonpartisan health policy think tank, analyzed CBO data in August 2025 and estimated a range of potential state-by-state insurance losses from these policy changes.
KFF allowed for uncertainty in how the law would be implemented in each state. The group said the number of Ohioans losing insurance from a combination of the Medicaid changes and the expiration of ACA subsidies could be 350,000 to 580,000.
Accounting only for the Medicaid changes, KFF projected a smaller number of Ohioans losing insurance — 250,000 to 420,000, with a midpoint of 340,000.
A June 2026 study by another nonpartisan think tank, RAND, examined only the Medicaid losses, not the impact of the subsidy expiration. It projected that roughly 254,000 Ohioans would lose Medicaid coverage, which is in the same range as KFF, though on the lower end.
Christine Eibner, a RAND senior economist, told PolitiFact that adding in the losses from disappearing insurance subsidies should “get the RAND numbers into the range” of KFF’s numbers.
Eibner said it’s too soon to settle on hard figures. Not only do the projected losses cover a 10-year period, but the work requirements don’t take effect until Dec. 1, 2027, “and they are expected to have the biggest impact on coverage of all the provisions” in the law.
Joseph R. Antos, an emeritus senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, agreed. “The KFF number is something of a shot in the dark,” he said. But it’s also the only state-by-state assessment of both Medicaid and Affordable Care Act insurance losses that analysts have to work with today, he said.
Our ruling
Brown’s ad said Husted voted “to kick 490,000 Ohioans off their healthcare.”
Husted in 2025 voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which reduced Medicaid spending; his campaign said the changes allow the program to focus on core coverage groups, such as children and people with disabilities. The law did not renew the enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act coverage, and they expired in 2025.
KFF estimated that 350,000 to 580,000 Ohioans could lose coverage. Brown’s 490,000 is slightly above that midpoint. A more recent study by RAND found results broadly in line with KFF, though on the lower end of that range.
These 10-year projections come from credible organizations, and Brown chose the middle of the range. But the number of people affected could be different based on several factors, including how states implement the changes.
The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details, so we rate it Half True.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump has offered conservative commentator and former Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Katie Zacharia the job of White House press secretary, according to multiple reports Friday.
Zacharia would replace Karoline Leavitt, who left the administration in August. The White House has confirmed that Zacharia received the offer but had not publicly confirmed whether she had formally accepted it as of Thursday afternoon.
Zacharia currently serves as a senior communications adviser for Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social. Earlier this year, she briefly worked at DHS as a deputy assistant secretary for public affairs.
She is also an attorney and previously worked with Fix California, a conservative organization founded by longtime Trump ally Richard Grenell. Her background includes frequent appearances in conservative media defending Trump administration policies.
If she accepts, Zacharia would take over one of the administration’s most visible communications roles less than a month before the midterm elections.
The appointment would also move a communications official directly from Trump’s private media company into the White House briefing room, further tightening the connection between the president’s political operation and his official administration messaging.
Have you been recently scolded by an older peacenik about the good old days of street protests? I have!
Has an older beloved activist — a mentor, even — bemoaned “kids these days” and criticized their lack of political engagement? Have you heard the dreaded preamble: “In my day, we…” — fill in the blank — marched, struck, organized?
I have been on the receiving end of some of these rebukes recently, even though I am not much of a kid anymore. These aging activists aren’t seeing the outrage. They aren’t seeing the opposition. They aren’t seeing the resistance. But it might just mean they aren’t looking in the right place. Because there is plenty of resistance if you know where to look.
But more on that later.
The war against Iran is hugely unpopular. And it is not just a faraway, abstract wrong. It is having a demonstrable impact on the daily lives of Americans. Gas and heating fuel are and will continue to be more expensive. The Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, a project of Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab, estimates a nearly $1,000 war tax paid by each U.S. household. That is on top of the actual and massive price tag of military operations so far: nearly $40 billion and rising at a rate of $2 to 3 billion a month, with the projected final price tag in the trillions.
At the end of February, Trump’s war opened in typical Trumpian fashion with a massive bombardment that not only targeted Iranian leaders but also the smallest and most innocent Iranians: Operation Epic Fury had an elementary school in its sights, and the result was obliteration. Raytheon-manufactured Tomahawk missiles slammed into the school in Minab, Iran, killing 156 civilians, most of them children. A U.N. panel now asserts that the U.S. attack was a war crime.
As the war ground on, the resistance continued. In March, Green Party candidate for Senate in North Carolina, former Marine, and member of Veterans for Peace, Brian McGinnis, disrupted a Senate hearing, shouting: “Americans do not want to fight this war for Israel.” (He suffered a broken arm at the hands of Capitol Police.) That same month, a top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, resigned from the Trump administration, citing his opposition to the Iran war. More than 65 veterans and military family members were arrested inside a congressional building in April, protesting the illegal use of military force against Iran. The list goes on and on and on.
But we have not seen a reprise of the massive protests that marked the lead-up to the Iraq War 23 years ago. Maybe it’s understandable. And maybe it’s OK.
Demonstrators gather near Central Park for te third No Kings protest in New York City on March 28, 2026.Photo: Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images
March Where? To Stop What?
I love a good protest march. I love the signs, the energy, the chanting, the music, coordinated outfits, mass-printed placards, and creative, handmade signs, a veritable rainbow of puns and alliteration and outrage glittered to cardboard and foamcore. I love the collection of newsletters and radical tracts and stickers and flyers for the next get-together that fill my backpack by the end. I love the chance encounters with friends. (“OMG, I didn’t know you’d be here.”) For a time, long ago, I served on the United for Peace and Justice steering committee and played a very small role in organizing such big and beautiful anti-war marches.
But I have a friend in her 70s who recently announced: I will not march in an empty city on a weekend ever again. And I agree. Her point was that big protest marches are often planned to be convenient for working people, so they are scheduled on weekends. But the leaders we want to confront with our people power don’t work on the weekends. In Connecticut, where I live, that means we end up marching in circles around a deserted downtown Hartford, our chants lost in the caverns of empty office buildings.
That happens in Washington, D.C., too. The weekend that 200,000 people reportedly marched at a “No Kings” rally in the capital last fall, Trump was holding a $1 million-per-plate fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. That is not disrupting business as usual. It is not creating some alternative. So it ends up feeling performative and like a numbers game. We show up to be counted. And now, the counting is itself a battleground. In D.C., the U.S. Park Police used to count crowds at protests. But they stopped in the 1990s, after the Million Man March challenged their count as a low-ball figure.
What is the political utility of marching one day and then returning to business as usual the next?
Personally, I would march on a Monday, down the middle of the highway, stop traffic, and sit in to demand that the world stop business as usual until there is justice for the children of the Minab school, or an end to Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, or an end to the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
But I agree with my friend. I am not going to a performative protest that’s easy to ignore. What is the political utility of marching one day and then returning to business as usual the next?
Our History Is Inspiration, Not Fodder for Scolds
I am white-haired and I can no longer say it is premature. When people assume I am a grandma, I am learning to accept it gracefully. At 52, I could be a grandmother. But I am too young to have lived through the so-called heyday of protest marches that required months or years of organizing work and political finesse. These marches — like the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or the huge November 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, or the April 1971 protest made famous by Vietnam veterans throwing their medals — demonstrated the movements’ organization, economic, and cultural power.
The March on Washington was the culmination of decades of vision, years of work, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. It brought upward of 250,000 mostly Black Americans to the nation’s capital to demand a civil rights act, desegregation, jobs, the right to vote, and more. The march is credited with helping pass both the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights acts.
During my lifetime, there have been major mass mobilizations of varying utility. The June 12, 1982, March and Rally for Nuclear Disarmament in New York City was the largest single protest in U.S. history (so far), with more than 1 million people calling for an end to the nuclear weapons threat. There were so many people lined up in the streets that tens of thousands of marchers never even arrived at the rally in Central Park!
Organized to coincide with the United Nations meetings on nuclear disarmament, the event was the culmination of 18 months of work. Coordinator Leslie Cagan, who eventually helped found UFPJ, recalled that the march was “a tremendous success.” Historians like Vincent Intondi credit it as a cultural turning point that created the conditions for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons nearly four decades later. Intersectional, joyful, and woman-led, the rally also encouraged participants to bring the spirit of the march home with them, seeding countless anti-nuclear community efforts around the nation.
In February 2003, the world said no to the impending U.S. war on Iraq with rallies and marches in almost 800 cities around the globe, demonstrating both the power of the people and the limitations of this form of resistance. All over the world, as many as 30 million people participated in an unprecedented coordinated series of actions, with marches from Athens, Greece, to Zagreb, Croatia. The pages of the New York Times called the global movement against the Bush war the “Other Superpower,” but the muscle flexed in the streets did not translate into the political, economic, or cultural might needed to stave off a war built on a web of lies.
Historian Jeremy Varon writes vividly about the impact of the marches and rallies in his recent study of the movement against the war on terror, “Our Grief is Not a Cry for War,” concluding that while they didn’t keep the Iraq war from happening, they bolstered and built a peace movement that is still active in creative resistance today. Our past is inspiring. We need to learn this history and apply the lessons that make strategic sense for this context.
We shouldn’t look at the past and beat ourselves up by saying, “Wow, they got a million people to turn out for nuclear disarmament in 1982, and I can’t even get 10 people to come to a street corner protest.” The saying goes, “We learn our history so we don’t repeat it,” and I think that goes for movement history, too. We don’t want to repeat history to keep it precious and amber-encased. We want to learn from it and apply what is useful to our own very different moment right here in 2026, where we are flooded with social media’s steady stream of bad news, fake news, infotainment, and rage-bait.
Today, people are exhausted, stretched thin, worried about their own bottom lines. Or maybe I should just speak for myself. I am exhausted. Stretched thin. Supremely worried. It is easy to despair. Everything in modern life seems geared toward our individual hopelessness and isolation. We are better consumers when we feel alone and powerless.
Like many, I was inspired by political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s 2010s research on nonviolent civil resistance and regime change, which established the 3.5 percent rule. It states that no government can withstand a challenge where 3.5 percent of its population is mobilized for a “peak event” like a mass protest. It seemed simple and achievable. That is, until I did the math. Three and a half percent of the U.S. population is approximately 12 million people. Only 10 million people bought tickets to Taylor Swift’s entire Eras Tour — 149 sold-out shows in 51 cities and 21 countries. If we got all those Swifties out in the streets here in the U.S., we’d still come up short for a regime-changing General Strike.
Mobilizing, Not Marching
Everything feels existential. Everything feels like an emergency. Trump floods the zone with rage-bait every single day. Do I have to stay mad to be a good leftist? That does not seem healthy to me. So, what can we do instead?
Activists today are marching less and instead mobilizing for community power over the long haul. This means relationship building, visible and decentralized resistance, and crisis response that transforms into solidarity after the acute crisis subsides. For example, you may have seen visibility brigades, the grassroots activist groups that display large signs and wave to drivers from highway overpasses and pedestrian bridges. Then there are the rapid-response networks that turn out trained community witnesses and protection squads whenever ICE is active in a neighborhood or town, or the calls to show up and support people being held at detention facilities like Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey.
Dissent is once again being labeled as terrorism. Critique is labeled as terrorism. Questions are labeled as terrorism.
The past teaches us that the tactics must keep changing. Most of what worked in 1963 in Washington wasn’t applicable to organizers in 1982 and was outdated by 2003. And that is OK; we don’t still use mimeographs or fax machines, either. There might not be millions of people in the street to oppose the war on Iran but that doesn’t mean people are not resisting. It just looks different. It is also landing differently, and more heavily, on the people arrested for resistance. Those who protest and are arrested are looking at serious charges, hostile court environments, and a Justice Department high on its own supply of anti-terrorist, anti-antifa fearmongering.
People are struggling and afraid, and I can’t blame them for that. Dissent is once again being labeled as terrorism. Critique is labeled as terrorism. Questions are labeled as terrorism. Anything that is not lockstep, grinning compliance is terrorism.
Still, people are stepping up. Not the way their parents or grandparents did. Not in a way that gets front-page news. Not in a way that penetrates the white noise of the corporate media. Here is a Harper’s Index entry from June 2026: “Estimated number of protests that took place in the United States in the first year of Trump’s first term: 10,873. In the first year of his second term: 39,154.” That is you and me and everyone we love. We need to keep doing it, smart, hopeful, inviting, and full of righteous rage.
I’ll admit that I am still struggling with how to make my opposition to the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran evident and public. I had a “No War on Iran” sign in my weedy front yard. It lasted a few weeks before it disappeared. I have talked to friends about a regular peace vigil downtown or at the nearby plant of weapons-making giant General Dynamics. But I have a time conundrum. The best time to be most visible is 2 or 3 p.m., right when my kids are coming home from school and most people are still at work. The most convenient time for more people to gather is 6 p.m., but by then our downtown is a ghost town and the mosquitos are fierce. So should we be strategic or inclusive? The debate continues.
In the meantime, I just put up a new sign in my yard yesterday. I painted the message: The U.S. War on Iran Kills Civilians, Wastes Money, Destroys the Environment. Let’s Stop It!
A ICE officer shot and injured a man in New York during an enforcement operation, federal officials said. The man was conscious and hospitalized, authorities said, and the shooting quickly sparked angry protests from local residents and elected officials in the neighborhood. Early reports indicated that agents had surrounded the man and a five-year-old child in his car on a busy street before firing multiple rounds, the city’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, said in a statement.
(The Center Square) – Republican candidates in several key Minnesota races are raising concerns about immigrant gang activity as the state struggles with a series of shootings linked to Somali youth gangs in the Twin Cities.
Nobel Peace Prize 2026 was awarded to Navanethem "Navi" Pillay, a former judge on the International Criminal Court, drawing a quick, angry rebuke from Israel.
US president renews his efforts to oust Cook despite supreme court ruling that her firing was unconstitutional
Donald Trump announced on Friday that he is establishing a committee to investigate Lisa Cook, the US Federal Reserve governor, over allegations that she committed mortgage fraud, renewing his efforts to oust her despite a June supreme court ruling that her earlier firing was unconstitutional.
Trump said a committee will consult with justice department officials to decide whether there is “cause” for her removal. The White House will hold an in-person hearing on 5 November to consider the allegations against Cook, which will be closed to the public but transcribed and published. Cook will be able to submit a written statement to present her own evidence and will be subject to examination from White House and her own legal counsel.
The FBI this week arrested another individual suspected of being connected to ShinyHunters, the cybercriminal group that hacked the bureau's job website, FBI Director Kash Patel said.
Democratic lawmakers are pressing HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to explain what role they may have played in pardons granted by President Trump.
Freshman year, living in a dorm either feels like a fairytale or a nightmare. It all comes down to location, cleanliness, size and community. A living situation can make or break your college experience.
For the most part, I had it really good. I lived in a newly built dorm on campus, South Academy. I had air conditioning, clean communal spaces, a nice-sized room and a perfect location. I really couldn’t complain.
The one downside, though, was the community aspect. For the majority of my freshman year, I didn’t have a roommate. Although this sounds nice, I did get quite lonely.
Although our rooms were so nice, it made people not want to ever come out of them. There was definitely a distinct difference in the level of closeness on floors between the air-conditioned and non-air-conditioned buildings. People without air conditioning tended to keep their doors open and hang out in the hallway, making it easier for people to make friends.
In early September. I signed a lease for an apartment for the upcoming year. I was very nervous because I was scared I’d have an experience similar to my freshman year. I had so many concerns. What if it’s too long of a walk to my classes? Was the area safe? Would I stay close with my new roommates?
Little did I know that my future apartment would be the place that made this large university feel like home.
Renting an apartment with my two best friends was the best decision I made throughout my college years. We each have our own room, yet we find ourselves always together in the kitchen, either baking cookies or singing our hearts out in karaoke!
This apartment gave me a sense of belonging that I craved when living in the dorms.
Living in an apartment also gave me a sense of freedom. I didn’t have anyone watching over me or supervising every move I made like in a dorm with resident assistants (RAs) and resident hall coordinators (RHCs). Although they meant no harm, their absence was a change that taught me responsibility. I no longer had a custodian cleaning my bathroom or the hallways. I had to do it myself.
I quickly learned that even a small apartment could get messy. A lot of people fear moving off campus because it puts so much responsibility on the renters, but I’d take cleaning a messy apartment every day if it means I get to live with my best friends and have our own space that feels like home.
To those out there who are renting an apartment or house for the upcoming year and are scared, I get it. It’s a big change and a step forward in growing up. It’s easy to focus on all the things that could go wrong. But while you’re at it, also think of just how much could go right.
Who knew an apartment would be the thing that made me fall in love with college?
Cayla Mutchnick is an opinion columnist at The Review. Her opinions are her own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff. She may be reached atcaylamut@udel.edu.
Tories said to be ready to fight in Clacton, with standards investigation rumoured to be nearing its end
Nigel Farage’s rivals are gearing up for a byelection in Clacton in the months ahead, amid speculation that the standards inquiry into his £5m gift is nearing a conclusion.
Conservative sources said the party was ready to fight in Farage’s seat, although senior figures in the shadow cabinet are divided about whether it would be winnable, given Farage’s victory in a byelection over the summer.
Oct. 9, 2026 — Margaret Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died on Sep. 30. She was 90.
A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO.
“Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world,” Margaret Hamilton said of her time as an MIT software engineer working with NASA’s Apollo program, which aimed to land the first humans on the moon. “There was no choice but to be pioneers.” Image credit: Toan Trinh, MIT Technology Review.
Her life’s work was recognized with many awards and honors, including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, whose citation noted: “Hamilton defined new forms of software engineering and helped launch an industry that would forever change human history. Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon.”
“To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer — to say she was ahead of her time — would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved,” says Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim head of the MIT Department Aeronautics and Astronautics.
“The Apollo program still stands as one of our greatest testaments to the power of collaboration, ingenuity, and engineering, and Margaret Hamilton was a fundamental contributor to that program’s success. And for her that was just the beginning! She went on to become an entrepreneur and remained on the cutting edge of systems software throughout an extraordinary career, while acting as an advocate, mentor, and inspiration to millions.”
Early Life and Projects at MIT
Born in Paoli, Indiana, in 1936, Hamilton began studying mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955 before transferring to Earlham College, where she earned a BA in mathematics with a minor in philosophy in 1958. She moved to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1959 with her husband while he pursued a law degree.
Hamilton soon found a temporary position in the meteorology department at MIT, working with professor of meteorology Edward N. Lorenz SM ’43, ScD ’48 on weather prediction software. This was her first entry point into computer programming, and her work would go on to inform Lorenz’s future publications on chaos theory.
From there, Hamilton took a role as a programmer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1961, working on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) project, the United States’ first air defense system. Hamilton wrote software for the prototype AN/FSQ-7 computer (XD-1), used by the U.S. Air Force to search for potentially unfriendly aircraft. During this time, Hamilton began to take an interest in software reliability — a new and largely unexplored concept at the time.
In 1965 Hamilton was preparing to pursue graduate studies when her husband saw an advertisement in the newspaper: The Instrumentation Lab at MIT was seeking people to develop software to “send man to the moon.” The lab had won the contract from NASA to build the onboard flight software for the Apollo program. Intrigued by the challenge, Hamilton applied, and was hired as the first programmer for the Apollo project at MIT, as well as the first female programmer in the project.
Hamilton worked first on the software for the uncrewed Apollo missions and then was promoted into leading the team developing the on-board flight software for the crewed missions. By 1968 she was assistant director in charge of the Command and Service Module team, and more than 400 people were working on Apollo’s software.
“From my own perspective, the software experience itself (designing it, developing it, evolving it, watching it perform and learning from it for future systems) was at least as exciting as the events surrounding the mission,” Hamilton told MIT News in 2009. “There was no second chance. We knew that. We took our work seriously, many of us beginning this journey while still in our 20s. Coming up with solutions and new ideas was an adventure. Dedication and commitment were a given. Mutual respect was across the board. Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way, and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers.”
‘Defensive’ Programming and Priority-Driven Software Take Humans to the Moon
Hamilton discovered a talent for leadership, as well as a keen instinct for problem-solving and critical thinking that would prove to save Project Apollo several times over.
There was the incident that became known as “the Lauren error”: One day, her daughter Lauren, then four years old, was playing with the command module simulator at the Instrumentation Lab when she somehow activated a pre-launch program, called P01, while the simulator was in midflight — which crashed the simulator altogether. Hamilton created a program add-on in the technical documentation warning users not to launch P01 during flight.
She also proposed a software fix to prevent the error happening during a real mission, but she was overruled on the grounds that the highly trained astronauts were never going to make that same mistake. Yet during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, that’s exactly what happened: Jim Lovell inadvertently launched P01 during the flight, causing the on-flight navigational data to vanish. Hamilton and her team were called in to solve the error, and after that her proposed changes were integrated into the program. This was an early example of “defensive” programming, the practice of building software that could anticipate or fix errors on its own.
Hamilton’s most famous contribution to the Apollo program came during the pivotal Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon in July of 1969. Moments before the Eagle module was set to land on the lunar surface, the onboard computer raised the alarm. It had detected a 1202 error: The computer was overloaded due to a fault in a hardware switch, and it was possible the system would not be able to handle the complex landing procedure.
But Hamilton and her team had engineered priority-driven software, able to shut down unnecessary background tasks in order to prioritize mission-critical tasks. Houston trusted Hamilton’s software and allowed the mission to proceed, and two men walked on the moon for the first time.
Later Career and Legacy
Hamilton continued to work at the Instrumentation Lab into the 1970s. As the Apollo program wound down, the Instrumentation Lab spun out of MIT to become the independent Draper Laboratory.
“Margaret left an indelible mark on Draper, and we will be forever grateful,” says Jerry M. Wohletz SM ’97, PhD ’00, president and CEO at Draper. “Through her leadership and contributions to the development of the onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo Guidance Computer, she helped ensure that Apollo astronauts landed safely on the lunar surface and safely returned home. We will honor her legacy at Draper forever.”
Hamilton went on to create her first software company, Higher Order Software, in 1976. The firm was based on Hamilton’s software engineering approach of error prevention and fault tolerance.
A decade later, Hamilton founded another software company, Hamilton Technologies, “to provide products and services to modernize the planning, system engineering and software development process in order to maximize reliability, lower cost and accelerate time to market.”
Hamilton Technologies’ flagship product is the Universal Systems Language (USL), a systems modeling language and methodology for engineering complex software systems that prioritize error prevention and defensive programming.
Throughout her career, Hamilton worked to achieve recognition for software engineering as a dedicated discipline.
“I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it — and those building it — would be given its due respect, and thus I began to use the term ‘software engineering’ to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process,” Hamilton told El Pais in 2018. “When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.”
Among her many awards and honors, Hamilton was recognized with the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award for scientific and technical contributions in 2003; the Computer History Museum Fellow Award in 2017; the Intrepid Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019; and induction into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2022.
Later in life, Hamilton become an icon for women in science and technology, especially after a now-famous photo, showing her next to a printout of her MIT team’s Apollo code, began circulating online. In 2015, the Apollo software she helped to develop was added in its entirety to the code-sharing site GitHub. And in 2017, she became an official Lego Minifigure after a set originally designed by MIT science communicator Maia Weinstock, honoring her and several other women of NASA history, became available worldwide.
“Margaret Hamilton has been an inspiration to generations of computer scientists and engineers. Hers was a career dedicated to preventing errors and what she called ‘handling the unknown,’” says de Weck. “She personified leadership by example, and established a practice of software engineering based on problem-solving and systems engineering that we all benefit from.”
Hamilton is survived by her daughter, Lauren Hamilton; her son-in-law, Richard Selesnick; two grandsons; four great grandchildren; and her siblings John, David, and Kathryn. A memorial service will take place in the spring in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Source: Janine Liberty, MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Oct. 9, 2026 — The Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has been selected by DOE to lead an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven autonomous catalysis discovery project and partner on eight others through DOE’s Genesis Mission, which invests in AI approaches to tackling the nation’s complex science and technology challenges.
The SLAC-led project will connect AI reasoning directly with experiments to speed the scientific understanding of catalytic processes important for energy and chemical production. The eight partner projects include major multi-year collaborations and address needs in areas ranging from biosciences to quantum materials, microelectronics and fusion energy.
“SLAC is proud to lend our leadership and expertise across these new projects that illustrate DOE’s commitment to bringing together laboratories, universities and the private sector to address critical energy challenges,” said SLAC Laboratory Director John Sarrao. “Together, these nine new projects will leverage [AI] combined with SLAC expertise to accelerate our scientific and technological impact.”
The awarded projects were announced by the DOE yesterday.
The Genesis Mission is a national initiative to mobilize government, industry, academia, nonprofits and international partners to advance AI for science and technology. Using the DOE-built American Science and Security Platform, partners work together on shared infrastructure that connects researchers with data, compute and AI tools to accelerate scientific discovery. Partners are focusing on the most critical challenges facing our nation in energy, national security, scientific discovery, health, space and more.
SLAC has deep expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence for autonomous diagnostics, control and high-speed data processing for critical systems. SLAC’s premier facilities produce datasets that illuminate our world through research in physics, biology, energy and other fields, making discoveries from the grand scale of the cosmos to the smallest and fastest scales of the motions of electrons, atoms and molecules.
SLAC has a long-standing catalysis program that combines theory, catalyst testing and X-ray measurements of working catalysts. SLAC also leads the DOE Basic Energy Sciences ISAAC AI Pathfinder, a Genesis Mission project that brings together measurements from DOE user facilities across the country, theoretical calculations run on DOE supercomputers, and the scientific literature so AI can weigh evidence and rank competing scientific hypotheses.
The SLAC-led catalysis project is a Phase I award from the Genesis Mission: Transforming Science and Energy with AI Request for Application (RFA). Of the eight new partner awards, one is a Phase I RFA award and seven are Phase II RFA awards.
The goal of the Phase I RFA awards is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation or generate new scientific insights.
The SLAC-led project, “Closed-Loop Autonomous Discovery of Mechanistic Activity-Selectivity-Stability Rules in Catalysis,” will build a closed-loop system in which an AI agent compares competing ideas about how catalysts work, identifies what evidence is missing and chooses the next experiment that can best test them.
The project’s principal investigator is Dimosthenis Sokaras, director of the Chemistry & Catalysis Division at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL). The project is a collaboration with the California Institute of Technology led by Harry Atwater, professor of engineering and applied science, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory led by Junko Yano, division director of Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging. The collaboration includes researchers at the DOE-funded Liquid Sunlight Alliance, a multi-institution consortium that includes SLAC and is led by Atwater, and the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis, a joint venture between SLAC and the School of Engineering at Stanford University.
At SSRL, a DOE Office of Science user facility, the system will combine real-time X-ray measurements with electrochemistry, computer models and published knowledge. Each result will feed back into the reasoning and guide the next measurement. Phase I will test whether this approach can reach scientific understanding with fewer experiments than standard approaches. Faster insight into how catalysts work can help researchers develop more efficient and durable processes for energy and chemical production while advancing the broader vision of autonomous laboratories.
“The [AI] weighs the scientific evidence, decides which measurement would tell us the most, and that decision becomes a real experiment at SSRL,” Sokaras said. “The result comes straight back into the reasoning process. That closed loop is a key step toward autonomous laboratories, where scientists can test ideas and learn much faster.”
SLAC will partner on another Phase I project to advance accelerator facilities, and seven Phase II projects in areas spanning the fields of biology, microelectronics, quantum materials, fusion energy and accelerator science.
The goal of the Phase II RFA awards is to scale up and expand the impact of projects that have already shown potential for AI advantage and demonstrated a trajectory toward a transformative scientific capability. The selected projects are multi-year and use interdisciplinary teams to address national science and technology challenges across key DOE mission areas.
SLAC will collaborate on the following eight projects:
Phase I
From Beam Loss to Beam Intelligence: Adaptive Generative AI for Autonomous Accelerator Facilities. Lead institution: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Phase II
Overcoming Barriers in Computational Enzyme Design Through Improved Sequence-Structure Ensemble Modeling. Lead institution: University of Washington
AI4HPC: An Iterative Framework for AI-Assisted Scientific Software Development and Optimization. Lead institution: Argonne National Laboratory
AI-Empowered Design of Functional Quantum Magnets. Lead institution: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
The Multi-Office Accelerator Team Core (MOAT-Core) Project. Lead institution: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
AXESS: Accelerating eXtreme Environment Specs-to-Silicon. Lead institution: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Accelerating the Path to Commercial Fusion Energy via an AI-enabled Digital Twin Platform for SPARC. Lead institution: Commonwealth Fusion Systems LLC
Decoding the RNA Structurome to Secure AI Advantage for the Bioeconomy. Lead institution: The Regents of the University of California, UC San Diego
These investments follow an earlier award that DOE announced in July selecting SLAC to lead a Phase I project to help secure the nation’s critical mineral supply by developing AI tools to improve extraction of metals from spent lithium-ion batteries, a collaboration that includes researchers at the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center and the University of Southern California.
RENO, Nev., Oct. 9, 2026 — CIQ, the company behind Rocky Linux and the open infrastructure provider the world’s leading enterprises companies trust in production, has announced Apptainer Pro, an upcoming commercially supported edition of Apptainer, the container system built for high-performance computing. Apptainer Pro will add long-term maintenance, workload compatibility validation, execution records and efficient image distribution so organizations can run AI training and HPC applications reliably at scale.
Containers now package most AI and HPC applications, yet they were never a sufficient privilege boundary on shared infrastructure. CIQ founder Gregory Kurtzer created Singularity, now Apptainer, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to solve that problem. Apptainer runs containers as the user who launches them, with no privileged daemon, and has become the standard at national laboratories and supercomputing centers. As AI-assisted research exposes kernel flaws at record pace and AI workloads scale across shared GPU clusters, platform teams need more than the runtime. They need a maintained release lifecycle, confidence that a container will run on the target hardware, a record of what ran where, and a way to deliver images efficiently across thousands of nodes. Apptainer Pro will deliver that operational layer with an accountable support relationship from CIQ.
“Apptainer was built on the premise that users on a shared system should get the full benefit of containers without gaining privileges they shouldn’t have,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and founder of Rocky Linux, Apptainer (formerly Singularity), and Warewulf. “That premise matters more today than ever. Apptainer Pro will give organizations the lifecycle, validation and traceability to run Apptainer in production, and extend CIQ’s support from the operating system with RLC Pro to the application environment.”
Apptainer Pro will deliver designated long-term support releases with backported security and critical bug fixes, signed packages and tested upgrade paths on a predictable schedule. It will also check container requirements against the intended deployment target (GPU type, CUDA or ROCm, and MPI configuration) before a full workload launch, to reduce avoidable job failures and wasted compute. Execution records will connect each workload to its image digest, user, job, runtime and host environment, so teams can identify which images ran on affected hosts when an advisory lands and can produce audit evidence on demand. Reusable OCI-to-SIF conversions, image pre-staging and managed node-local caching will reduce repeated transfers across the cluster. Local mirrors and signed offline updates will support air-gapped and sovereign environments.
CIQ is now accepting early customers for Apptainer Pro, with priority given to organizations moving from Singularity. Wider availability is expected soon, as a standalone subscription or alongside RLC Pro, Warewulf Pro, Ascender Pro and Fuzzball. Because Apptainer Pro builds on open source Apptainer, Singularity users will keep their existing containers and workflows: Apptainer runs the same SIF images and still provides the singularity command. To join the early customer program, visit ciq.com/products/apptainer.
About CIQ
CIQ is the founding support and services partner for Rocky Linux and a leading provider of Enterprise Linux infrastructure. CIQ delivers secure, performant software infrastructure for the full range of modern workloads. Global enterprises, government agencies, research institutions and supercomputing centers trust CIQ to run their most advanced workloads in production, from mission-critical environments to the systems behind major scientific and AI breakthroughs. CIQ’s products include the Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC Pro) family of operating systems, Ascender Pro for IT automation, Fuzzball job-based container orchestration, Warewulf Pro cluster provisioning, and Apptainer, the container system built for high-performance computing, with Apptainer Pro coming soon. Learn more at ciq.com.
Men found inside RAF Molesworth, used by US and Nato for intelligence, freed on strict conditions as police continue investigation
Two Latvian men have been released on bail after being arrested at an RAF base in Cambridgeshire used by the US military and Nato.
The two men, aged 32 and 26, were arrested at 2am on Thursday after they were discovered inside RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, which is used by the US military and Nato for intelligence operations.
Governor halts execution of William Lee Thompson, after Christa Pike survived failed lethal injections
Ron DeSantis cancelled a planned execution in the state on Friday, days before a 74-year-old man was due to be killed by lethal injection.
The move – the first time Florida’s governor has withdrawn a death warrant in his nearly eight years in office – comes just over a week after the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee.
Party now polling 15 points above Greens, who had been ahead of Labour before Keir Starmer resigned as PM
Labour is starting to win back voters on the left who became disillusioned under Keir Starmer’s leadership, the party’s deputy leader has claimed after it saw off Zack Polanski and the Greens to win the Holborn and St Pancras byelection.
Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali took 45% of a relatively low turnout to keep Starmer’s old north London seat for the party, pushing Polanski, who had stood for the party he leads, into second place on 33%.
As she courted South Florida voters, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Angie Nixon said Cubans had been a target of the Trump administration’s deportation efforts. Cuban-Americans largely supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
“Donald Trump is the deporter in chief and we have witnessed him deporting over 13,000 Cubans since he has been in office, his first term and his second term,” Nixon told Jim DeFede, host of CBS News Miami’s “Facing South Florida” Oct. 4.
Nixon, a state House member, is running to unseat Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, who was appointed to fill the seat Marco Rubio vacated when he became secretary of state.
The Trump administration is seeking to deport immigrants, including Cubans, during his second term as he continues to push his mass deportation promise.
During Trump’s first term, the government deported about 3,400 Cubans, according to Office of Homeland Security Statistics data. PolitiFact asked the Department of Homeland Security how many Cubans it has deported during Trump’s second term, but it did not say. Neither DHS nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s websites report the data.
But Human Rights Watch, an international nongovernmental organization that tracks and investigates human rights abuses, provided data that shows Nixon’s figure is close. As of Aug. 5, the U.S. has deported about 8,500 Cubans during Trump’s second term, the group’s senior adviser Brian Root said. It’s possible more Cubans have been deported since August.
The organization based its figure on ICE data released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request made by the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy’s Deportation Data Project.
We reached out to Nixon’s campaign for comment, but we didn’t receive a response.
Human Rights Watch estimates of Cubans deported to Mexico
In May, Human Rights Watch reported that from Jan. 20, 2025, to March 9, 2026, U.S. authorities deported more than 18,000 people to countries they aren’t from; nearly 13,000 were sent to Mexico. Of the 13,000, about 4,400 were Cubans.
The report saysmany of the Cubans Human Rights Watch interviewed were 60 years old and older who had lived in the U.S. for decades, mainly in Florida. Some had arrived during the 1980 Mariel boatlift or in the 1990s, fleeing the Cuban government or for economic reasons.
Part of the number tracks back to third-country deportation agreements the Trump administration has signed with over 35 countries.
Historically, Cubans haven’t been a primary target of U.S. deportation policy.
The Trump administration ended a Biden administration parole program that let Cubans and other immigrants vetted by the U.S. government enter the country if they were sponsored by someone living in the U.S. As the program ended, so did immigrants’ parole-based employment authorizations, leading the administration to deport some of them.
The Cuban government generally has refused to accept deportees who previously committed crimes in Cuba or in the U.S., said Michael J. Bustamante, associate professor of history and the Emilio Bacardí Moreau Chair in Cuban and Cuban-American studies at the University of Miami. He said this group of people has been in limbo, and the Trump administration has particularly targeted them for deportation to countries they aren’t from.
“It wasn’t a protection on paper. In theory, they always had pending orders of deportation, but there was kind of an inertia there,” Bustamante said. “We’re talking people who’ve been in the country for 30-plus years or 40-plus years who never thought that they would be sent anywhere. And this administration is finding ways to ship them out of the country.”
Even though deportations of Cubans aren’t new, what’s different is the Trump administration’s pace in arresting and deporting them, said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an immigration studies expert at George Mason University. She said people with pending cases and at immigration check-ins have been arrested. The end of parole and the deportations to other countries such as Mexico has also changed things for Cubans.
Our ruling
Nixon said Trump has deported “over 13,000 Cubans since he has been in office, his first term and his second term.”
Trump deported about 3,400 Cubans during his first term, government data shows. DHS did not confirm to PolitiFact how many Cubans have been deported during Trump’s second term. But Human Rights Watch estimated about 8,500 Cubans have been deported. That brings the figure close to 12,000, based on the best estimates up to Aug. 5. It’s possible more have been deported since then.
The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. We rate it Mostly True.
PolitiFact Staff Writer Samantha Putterman contributed to this report.
Oct. 9, 2026 — RIKEN and SoftBank Corp. have conducted the third open call for the Test User Program under the jointly promoted JHPC-quantum project and selected 20 proposals.
The project is intended to research and develop system software for linking quantum computers (QC) and supercomputers (HPC), to use this software to build a quantum-HPC hybrid platform, and to construct quantum-HPC hybrid applications using the platform, thereby expanding the range of computationally feasible problems.
The program solicits proposals for the research and development of hybrid applications on the platform, with the aim of obtaining feedback on the platform under development, discovering promising hybrid applications, and promoting their practical application; 21 proposals had been selected as of the previous fiscal year.
The third open call was conducted from May 10 to June 30, 2026, and received applications from a wide range of industries and fields—including materials, chemicals, manufacturing, information and communications, and healthcare—from industry, academia, and institutions in Japan and overseas. Applications were reviewed mainly from the perspectives of the specific utilization of the platform, the centrality of HPC use, and the schedule for obtaining results, and 20 new proposals were selected.
Regarding those selected proposals that can be made public, the affiliations and proposal fields of the lead proposers are as follows, in order of application:
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (Design & Manufacturing / Natural Sciences)
Chugai Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (Medical Care & Drug Discovery)
Panasonic System Networks R&D Lab. Co., Ltd. (Design & Manufacturing)
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Natural Sciences)
Q-HEALTH TECHNOLOGIES PTE. LTD. (Medical Care & Drug Discovery)
IHI Corporation (Design & Manufacturing)
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (Finance)
DIC Corporation (Materials)
Graduate School of Science, The University of Osaka (Natural Sciences)
Graduate School of Science, Tohoku University (Natural Sciences)
German Aerospace Center (DLR) (Natural Sciences)
TISI Inc. (N/A)
RIKEN Center for Computational Science (Natural Sciences)
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo (Natural Sciences)
Algorithmiq SRL (Materials & Drug Discovery)
The selected institutions will conclude a Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation Regarding the Test User Program for the Quantum-HPC hybrid platform and, accordingly, will be granted accounts for the two different quantum computers used in the project: Quantum Computer “Reimei” and IBM Quantum System Two “ibm_kobe”, supercomputer “Fugaku”, and JHPC-quantum GPU supercomputer “ROQUO”, so that they can begin developing hybrid applications using the platform.
An overview of the selected proposals will be presented by the lead proposers at the “JHPC-quantum Symposium 2026,” to be held on Nov. 9, 2026.
The next open call for the program is planned to be conducted in early fiscal year 2027 and will be the final call. In addition, for selected projects where innovative outcomes are expected through large-scale experiments—based on results achieved by the end of fiscal year 2026—the program plans to provide support so that such large-scale experiments can be conducted in early fiscal year 2027.
RIKEN and SoftBank will continue to promote the project in cooperation with The University of Tokyo and The University of Osaka, working on the construction of the platform and the exploration of hybrid applications. In addition, through the program, they will promote the practical application of hybrid applications and contribute to the social implementation of quantum technology.
Multiple hospitalized after Avianca flight from Medellín to New York had to divert to Miami due to strong turbulence
At least eight people were injured when an Avianca flight encountered severe turbulence and had to make an emergency landing in Miami early on Friday.
Miami-Dade fire rescue said one person was rushed to a trauma center with severe injuries while seven others were taken to area hospitals in ambulances.
(The Center Square) – As public education remains a concern for taxpayers, supporters of school choice programs argue that giving families more educational options can improve student outcomes at a lower cost.
Treasury spokesperson Charlie Maynard reportedly resigned in attempt to unseat leader as party slips in polls
Ed Davey is facing a growing revolt against his leadership of the Liberal Democrats, after the resignation of a senior frontbench figure on Friday.
Charlie Maynard, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson, has resigned in an attempt to unseat Davey after months of frustration over concerns that the party is failing to cut through with voters, the Guardian understands.
Photo illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images: Danny Johnston/AP, Douglas Rissing via iStock, Air Force Maj. David Brown and Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Isaac Garza.
Among a cadre of Wall Street executives brought into the Pentagon during President Donald Trump’s second term, George K. Kollitides II has emerged as a powerbroker with a broad mandate to improve procurement of weapons and critical minerals.
The longtime partner at the private equity firm Alvarez & Marsal Capital has framed his tour of duty in government as a service to the country. But the work he’s leading has also been a boon to his old friends in the private sector, government procurement records show.
In April, months after Kollitides had started work at the Pentagon, he was listed on a securities filing as continuing to work for his old company as a senior adviser. Two months later, the Defense Department finalized a $281 million no-bid consulting contract with an affiliate firm, Alvarez & Marsal Federal, to advise Kollitides’ new Pentagon office, the records show.
That contract, large for consulting work even by Defense Department standards, is the second in a pair of deals that since December have awarded almost $350 million in military spending to the firm — about five times more than Alvarez & Marsal entities had received from all U.S. agencies combined in the two decades before Trump returned to office, according to federal spending data. Both of those contracts have been for work connected to Pentagon offices where Kollitides is the head or has a senior role.
The deals remain shrouded in secrecy, records show, because they were signed under an unusual contracting method the Defense Department uses to fund experimental weapons — work A&M has never claimed to do. They have begun to send unprecedented sums of taxpayer money to a company that boasts helping government agencies create a “customer-centric culture” and that is deeply intertwined with the private equity firm where Kollitides was a partner for almost 10 years. The two partner firms tag-team investment deals and share back-office support, company documents and federal filings show.
Kollitides was still working with A&M Capital when the deals were signed. It’s unclear if he will benefit financially from the windfall of military spending on A&M consulting. His employment at the Pentagon is under a special classification that allows him to keep his financial disclosures confidential.
Ethics experts said it’s generally illegal for executive branch officials to play a role in awarding contracts that would have a direct impact on their own finances, unless they were granted a waiver.
“It looks way too cozy to be legitimate. I think taxpayers should be appalled,” said Virginia Canter, a former federal government ethics lawyer. “There are a million consulting firms in D.C. and New York. Why would you sole source this contract? They’re not sending replacement parts for a ship that is sinking.”
After ProPublica sent questions to the Pentagon, Kollitides and both A&M entities early this week, A&M Capital said Kollitides had just stopped working there days earlier.
In a statement, A&M Capital said it is a “separately capitalized and separately managed firm from the Alvarez & Marsal consulting business” and its “management and employees have no involvement in the day-to-day operations of the consulting business, and vice versa.” The firm said that none of Kollitides’ work for it related to the “defense industry, the Department of War or Mr. Kollitides’ government service.”
The Alvarez & Marsal consulting business did not answer any of ProPublica’s questions, including how it became aware of the possibility that it could seek the $281 million no-bid contract and what services it is providing to Kollitides’ Pentagon team. The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported the existence of some of the Alvarez & Marsal contracting.
“We are proud to serve clients across all industries, and all levels of government,” the company said in a statement. “The common denominator is always the same: we help solve difficult problems.”
“It looks way too cozy to be legitimate. I think taxpayers should be appalled.”
Virginia Canter, former federal government ethics lawyer
Kollitides did not respond to questions about whether he played a role in A&M securing contracts to work for his office, but a Pentagon spokesperson replied for the department and on Kollitides’ behalf saying they both followed all applicable rules.
“The Department of War maintains a rigorous, multi-layered ethics framework that includes financial disclosure reviews, divestitures where appropriate, and screening to prevent conflicts of interest,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Jacob Bliss wrote in an email. Kollitides, he added, “is in full compliance with all ethical laws and regulations. Any claims otherwise are false.”
There is widespread bipartisan agreement that the Pentagon’s procurement systems are in need of radical reform and private-sector know-how could help the country better secure supply lines and accelerate the development of new weapons to ensure the military is prepared to fight future wars.
But current and former defense officials say the massive spending for connected consultants is a reflection of a changed Defense Department under Trump. They say a clubby and politicized culture has taken hold in a wing of the Pentagon controlled by Kollitides and other former Wall Street executives recruited by Steve Feinberg, the billionaire private-equity titan who is now the deputy defense secretary. It’s an operation, they say, that favors people and companies that have close ties to the administration.
This year, ProPublica reported that the Office of Strategic Capital, a unit at the Pentagon that Kollitides helps lead, granted a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr. a $620 million loan after a top aide to the president intervened on the company’s behalf. A group of Democratic lawmakers accused the office of “a staggering level of corruption and influence peddling.”
ProPublica also reported that the same Pentagon unit was considering a loan to Unusual Machines, a second company connected to the president’s son. A defense official told ProPublica recently that the unit is now in the late stages of a $220 million loan for the Florida drone parts maker, where Trump Jr. sits on the advisory board and was granted a stake.
The Pentagon did not respond to a question about the advancing loan process for Unusual Machines and if Trump Jr.’s connections were playing a part. After the earlier loan to a Trump-connected company, the Pentagon said “no company receives preferential treatment” and “political connections play absolutely no role in the Department’s funding decisions.” Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson pushed back on criticism, saying the Defense Department is conducting extensive due diligence on potential lending.
That Pentagon lending unit was launched during the Biden administration with an open application process for interested companies. Current and former officials and people who have interacted with the office say Kollitides and other leaders now rely more on their own personal networks to choose companies to fund — as well as the consultants to vet those deals.
Multiple Pentagon Hats
That reliance on personal networks is how Kollitides got to the Pentagon.
Feinberg first hired Kollitides more than two decades ago.
Then a rising private-equity star who had graduated from Columbia Business School, Kollitides moved up the ranks at Cerberus, Feinberg’s firm, taking the reins of its aerospace, defense and government groups. In 2012, Kollitides took on an especially sensitive and more public job for the private-equity giant. Kollitides was named chief executive of a Cerberus company combining Remington, the nation’s oldest gun maker, with more than a dozen other firearms and parts companies, eliminating hundreds of jobs from New York to Georgia to Montana.
After three years with the Cerberus-owned gunmaker, Kollitides left and became a partner at Alvarez & Marsal Capital, an offshoot of A&M consulting, whose co-founder also had long-standing business ties to Feinberg.
George K. Kollitides II, left, attends a philanthropic gala held to honor him in 2010, when he was managing director at Cerberus.Amber De Vos/Patrick McMullan Archive via Getty Images
Some former business associates said they were not surprised that Kollitides jumped at the chance to rejoin Feinberg at the Pentagon. The two share a love for firearms and defense industry investments. They have also both described their work addressing the military’s most vexing supply chain issues as a patriotic calling.
“Americans need us at the Pentagon and our civilians and our contractors to do better,” Feinberg said last year. “We can’t fail, we can’t make excuses, we must succeed.”
On social media, Kollitides has shown the kind of partisanship long taboo in the Pentagon but now fostered in its ranks by Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Kollitides has decried the “Democrat Party,” warned of the ills of socialism and posted that “the government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.”
Over the last year, Feinberg has continued to heap responsibility on Kollitides: naming him his co-chief of staff and senior adviser; vice chairman of the Office of Strategic Capital’s investment committee; and director of two other new offices, the Economic Defense Unit and the Business Operators for National Defense, or BOND — the office with the $281 million no-bid contract.
His employment status allowing him to hold any of those roles at the Pentagon is somewhat of a mystery.
Unlike Feinberg, who was confirmed to his post by the Senate, Kollitides was reportedly first brought onto the federal government last year as a special government employee, or SGE, a designation that allows someone to work in government for no more than 130 days a year. Kollitides seemingly exceeded that cap several months ago.
Steve Feinberg, right, confers with an aide prior to testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee at his 2025 confirmation hearing for the role of deputy defense secretary.Win McNamee/Getty Images
But in the Pentagon’s email system, Kollitides’ name now carries an abbreviation signifying he has been designated an HQE, or highly qualified expert. His employment classification, which the Pentagon confirmed, is designed to hire people who bring “enlightened thinking and innovation” to Defense Department roles that can last up to six years.
That distinction brings a unique benefit for Kollitides. Financial disclosures filed by HQEs are generally confidential, while those of high-ranking SGEs are often subject to release once a person fills a government role for more than 60 days. It’s unclear if Pentagon ethics officials granted Kollitides a waiver to keep any disclosures confidential.
(ProPublica requested Kollitides’ financial disclosure forms in August, but the Pentagon has not yet responded.)
Kollitides’ continued tie to Alvarez & Marsal Capital surfaced in April in a securities filing by a second company with which the defense official was taking a leadership post.
Days after Feinberg named him the head of BOND, granting Kollitides deep visibility into weapons production rates of U.S. military contractors, Kollitides took a seat on the board of D. Boral Acquisition I, an offshore shell company whose affiliate D. Boral Capital has partnered with defense-related businesses. Bloomberg Government first reported the filing in July, and that Kollitides stepped down from the position at the end of September.
Kollitides’ biography in the filing described his current roles at the Pentagon, then added that “he is also a Senior Advisor” to Alvarez & Marsal Capital and that he previously was a partner and co-head of one the firm’s funds.
A securities filing reveals that Kollitides continued working for Alvarez & Marsal Capital even after starting work at the Defense Department.Screenshot and highlighting by ProPublica
The A&M entity that Kollitides is described as still advising in the filing is essentially the private-equity partner of the sprawling Alvarez & Marsal firm that includes A&M Federal, which is now providing consulting services for his offices at the Pentagon.
Though the private-equity and consulting businesses are distinct, they work together, share back-office staff for human resources and tech support, and have overlapping ownership, according to company documents. The private-equity arm describes itself as having a “strategic relationship” with the consulting side of A&M. The firm boosts its investment decision-making by working with the consulting firm’s thousands of employees around the globe to assess particular companies. And after the fund takes a stake in a company, it deploys the consulting arm’s employees to improve that firm’s operations and make the company more valuable.
In other words, the fund’s success hinges on the consulting firm’s.
Whether Kollitides violated government ethics rules hinges on details that he and the Pentagon have declined to provide.
A Defense Department official told ProPublica that Kollitides “does not and has never had” any investments or financial relations with A&M consulting. The official said Kollitides is also “recused on any conflicted matters related to A&M Capital,” which could be referring to Defense Department decisions related to companies A&M Capital has a financial stake in.
Ethics experts said that without a written waiver, executive branch officials are generally barred from participating in decisions, such as the awarding of a contract, that would have a direct impact on their financial interests. That law, the experts said, could apply even if the official doesn’t have a stake in a company but just draws a salary — the rationale being that they’ve improved the odds that the company will be able to continue paying them.
The Pentagon official did not answer specific questions about whether Kollitides was being compensated by A&M Capital when the contracts were signed, if he played any role in the contract decision-making process or if he sought or received an exemption to do so.
A “Blank Sheet of Paper” Contract
A&M’s first contract with the Pentagon was signed in December, months after Kollitides joined the government. That $67.6 million deal was awarded to Alvarez & Marsal Federal through a Defense Department entity focused on efforts to strengthen the nation’s industrial base.
The full scope of work that A&M provided is unclear. But documents reviewed by ProPublica show that by late last year, the firm had begun helping to vet possible loan deals for the Office of Strategic Capital, the lending unit then run in part by Kollitides.
Like that first contract, the larger, $281 million deal that followed to advise Kollitides’ BOND office came in the form of what is called an OTA, or other transaction agreement, which allows agencies to bypass regular federal contracting rules on public disclosure and oversight.
Congress first authorized the Defense Department to use the contracting method in the 1980s to fund breakthrough technologies without publicly disclosing much about the work. The Pentagon has increasingly turned to OTA contracts over the last decade to quickly fund a broader range of one-time costs, including prototype weapons and urgent production needs, even as government auditors have lamented OTAs as a “blank sheet of paper” arrangement with little oversight or accountability.
Still, experts said an OTA contract for consulting work was extraordinary. That’s because consulting is one of the simplest services the military can buy, and it has a long history of doing so through competitive bidding. Firms often publish the hourly costs for their associates, managers and other work before solicitations are posted.
But like black-box OTA contracts for secret weapons systems, the funding mechanism has hidden from public view details of what taxpayers are getting for the money.
The sheer size of the A&M contract stunned experts.
At $281,089,206.65, the consulting contract is among the largest OTAs funded through the Defense Department’s main support division in the last decade, including for top secret semiconductor projects and underwater drones, records show.
The Pentagon has said little about the impact of BOND since Hegseth claimed in February that the new entity would revolutionize military purchasing.
The defense secretary said that under the program, the military would embed former corporate executives, or, as he put it, “elite, private-sector patriots” to help optimize and accelerate the manufacturing of critical munitions. Hegseth said he thought the exercise would help the Pentagon increase resiliency in supply chains. The “era of managed decline is over,” he said.
In private recruitment materials for those executives, as well as for candidates to fill posts in other Kollitides-run units, the stakes and the mission for BOND were described in even starker terms: Neoliberalism and trade deals have left the U.S. as a country that “can no longer manufacture ships, munitions or planes in a timely manner.”
The recruiting materials cast the job of fixing that systemic problem as part-time work: “Recently retired Fortune 100 executives spend five days per month solving public- and private-sector operational challenges,” read pages viewed by ProPublica.
Two people familiar with A&M’s work for BOND said the firm’s consultants have accompanied former executives on trips to review work at major defense contractors such as Lockheed, Boeing, RTX and BAE Systems. BAE acknowledged a visit by BOND representatives but declined to comment further. Lockheed, Boeing, RTX and other companies contacted by ProPublica did not respond to requests for comment.
Contracting experts said that A&M is likely not guaranteed the full amount, and that contracts like these typically span several years, but records show A&M has already been paid about $31 million.
Not everyone, however, is welcome to participate.
One former military officer who worked in the defense industry told ProPublica he was contacted by an outside recruiter for Kollitides’ new BOND office. The recruiter, he said, told him that all applicants would be asked who they voted for.
The former military officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, said he expressed discomfort with that line of questioning. He received an email shortly after from the recruiter telling him he was no longer under consideration. The Pentagon did not respond to a question about the officer’s account.
“Getting more effective and efficient is not a political question,” the former officer said.
(The Center Square) – Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers clashed in a heated first debate Thursday night, trading personal attacks as the two run in the 2026 U.S. Senate race.
Mike Ditka, the fiery former NFL player and coach who led the Chicago Bears to their lone Super Bowl title and became one of the most recognizable figures in American sports, has died aged 86
Pressure is building on the party leader after byelection defeat, a damaging row over Zionism and polls that show him less popular than Nigel Farage
When Zack Polanski addressed his campaigners flush with victory after the Gorton and Denton byelection in February, he declared: “Labour’s electoral stranglehold is over.” The election of Hannah Spencer as the new Green MP for the Greater Manchester seat was a seismic victory, he continued: “I said we were here to replace Labour and this is what replacing looks like.”
But in the wake of Polanski’s defeat in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection on Thursday, and a calamitous row over the party’s stance on Zionism, the debate around what, or who, could be replaced has shifted to Polanski himself.
The US is facing worldwide condemnation over a “barbaric” plan to execute a disabled man by firing squad and livestream it to the public, with critics comparing the Trump administration to dictatorships in Iran and Afghanistan.
The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at a military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, would be livestreamed on 3 December.
CBS News has been tracking a record number of measles cases and outbreaks around the country in 2026. The majority of cases are among those who haven't been vaccinated.
Trump administration says US ‘doesn’t need’ ICC after accusing court of unfairly targeting Americans for war crime charges
The United States was accused of launching “an assault” on the world’s legal order after imposing more sanctions on the international criminal court (ICC).
Unveiling the Trump administration’s latest escalation against the court, which it has accused of politicization and unfairly targeting Americans for war crime charges, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, declared: “Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC.”
Boarding up windows and filling sandbags and fuel tanks are part of routine hurricane preparation for residents of the Gulf coast. Isaias strengthened into a category 3 hurricane on Friday morning as it barreled toward the US Gulf coast, and states of emergency have been declared in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi. Isaias is forecast to make landfall on Friday night, somewhere along the Alabama-Florida line, with surging seas up to 7ft (2.1 meters) and waves as high as 30ft
Founder of influential Rybar blog detained after warnings of attempts to destabilise Balkan country, officials say
A leading pro-Kremlin Russian military blogger with reported ties to Russia’s intelligence services has been arrested in Montenegro, after warnings of attempts to destabilise the Balkan country, officials have said.
Mikhail Zvinchuk, the founder of the influential Rybar war blog, was detained on Friday alongside his wife and three other Russians by police and security agents in the Adriatic resort town of Risan, on suspicion of spreading Russian influence, local media reported.
The Norwegian Nobel committee said Pillay, who is serving as a judge at the international court of justice (ICJ), has “shown that legal measures can help prevent acts of war and violence”.
Raised in a blue-collar Pennsylvania town, Mike Ditka earned a scholarship to Pitt and became "Da Coach" in Chicago. His family called him "the heart of our family" in announcing his death at 86.
CBS California Investigates obtained receipts behind the watchdog's findings of wasteful spending, revealing previously undisclosed connections to the high-speed rail CEO.
President Trump established a committee to look into allegations that Fed Governor Lisa Cook made false statements on mortgage documents, the latest step in his renewed effort to fire her.
The trailblazing South African human rights lawyer and International Criminal Court judge was recognized for her work “ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”
Nigeria’s economic outlook: Progress on reform and prospects for inclusive growth
22
October 2026 — 13:00 TO 14:00 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Hear from Nigeria’s Minister of Finance Hon. Taiwo Oyedele about reform, growth and the path to economic inclusion.
Hear from Nigeria’s Minister of Finance Hon. Taiwo Oyedele about reform, growth and the path to economic inclusion.
Shortly after taking office in 2023 President Bola Tinubu introduced Nigeria’s most significant economic reforms since 2007, including the removal of fuel subsidies and the decision to float the naira. While many economists argued that subsidy reform was overdue, the pace of change contributed to rising inflation and deeper pressure on household living standards. Although these measures are now credited with improving macroeconomic stability and investor confidence - Moody’s has revised Nigeria’s outlook to ‘positive’ from ‘stable’ citing its improved ability to withstand external shocks - the government faces growing questions about how reform can translate into more inclusive growth.
This event discusses:
How will Nigeria ensure the benefits of reform reach a broader share of society?
How might security challenges affect Nigeria’s economic trajectory?
What progress has been made since the removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of the naira?
How can the government address concerns over poverty, livelihoods and living costs?
How will Nigeria maintain investor confidence amid global uncertainty?
How is Nigeria preparing for the economic debate ahead of the 2027 presidential election?
Two new awards will expand Fermilab’s critical role in the Genesis Mission by developing custom microelectronics and advancing quantum information science.
Oct. 9, 2026 — Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory received two new awards as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, a national effort to double the productivity and overall impact of American science by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and the combined strengths of the agency’s 17 national laboratories. The Fermilab-led awards were announced yesterday as part of a second phase of recognitions that will expand the lab’s critical role in the Genesis Mission by developing custom microelectronics and advancing quantum information science.
A custom circuit board is designed to measure chip performance in cryogenic environments. Credit: JJ Starr, Fermilab
“Fermilab is proud to receive the additional awards as part of the Genesis Mission, and we look to start work with our collaborators as soon as possible,” said Fermilab Director Norbert Holtkamp. “Each award strengthens our ability to push the boundaries of discovery science — one by advancing our development of [AI]-driven microelectronics that will enhance next generation instrumentation, and the other by using [AI] to enable large, entangled quantum systems to detect and interpret extremely faint signals across fundamental physics and other areas of discovery.”
The first is the Genesis Mission Phase II award “Accelerating eXtreme Environment Specs-to-Silicon,” known as AXESS, which aims to revolutionize custom microelectronics design by using artificial intelligence to accelerate development of chips that can function in extreme environments. The project will boost innovation and national competitiveness, with potential impacts in quantum, fusion energy and particle physics.
“Our AXESS researchers are using [AI] to shorten microelectronics design processes from months to minutes,” said Anna Grassellino, Fermilab’s chief technology officer. “This will significantly boost national competitiveness and accelerate the pace of innovation. Fermilab has deep experience creating chips that can function in extreme environments, like cryogenic temperatures or intense radiation, that can be used in specialized applications.”
Partners for AXESS include Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Arizona State University, Dataerai, Georgia Institute of Technology, IBM, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Purdue University, Sandia National Laboratories, Siemens EDA, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, University of California San Diego, University of Southern California and other industry collaborators.
The goal of the Phase II RFA awards is to scale up and expand the impact of projects that have already shown potential for AI advantage and demonstrated a trajectory toward a transformative scientific capability. The selected projects are multi-year and use interdisciplinary teams to address national science and technology challenges across key DOE mission areas.
The second new Fermilab-led award is a Phase I project titled “AI-Guided Sparse Characterization of Quantum Sensing States and Entanglement Structures,” also known as QCVV.
Quantum sensors exploit uniquely quantum phenomena such as superposition and entanglement to search for extraordinarily weak signals — including signals relevant to fundamental physics. But as quantum systems grow larger and more complex, fully measuring and understanding their quantum states becomes increasingly difficult, requiring enormous amounts of data and experimental time.
The QCVV project will use AI to overcome this challenge by identifying the most informative features of a complex quantum state, creating a digital twin of the quantum system and identifying the most useful measurements. Working in a closed loop with the experiment, AI will use each round of data to choose what to measure next. This approach could enable the characterization of much larger quantum systems and help scientists separate faint signals from noise and experimental imperfections.
Led by Fermilab, the project brings together IBM, NVIDIA, Purdue University, Quantum Machines and University of Chicago. Together, they combine expertise in quantum sensing, quantum computing, artificial intelligence and experimental control.
“This project brings [AI] directly into the experimental loop, allowing us to learn more about complex quantum systems with fewer measurements and an intelligent guide to what the experiment does next,” said Grassellino. “It builds on Fermilab’s strengths of quantum computing and sensing, [AI] and advanced controls, while bringing together complementary capabilities from across the quantum ecosystem. Ultimately, this work could help us build larger, more powerful quantum sensors and accelerate searches for some of the faintest signals in fundamental science.”
In addition, Fermilab is a recipient of two more Phase II awards as a collaborating institution, including “Lattice QCD at the Intelligence Frontier.” Led by MIT, the project draws on Fermilab’s decades of theory expertise in critical slowing down in lattice gauge theory, while applying AI agents and large language models.
The other Phase II award is the “Multi-Office Accelerator Team Core” project, known as MOAT-Core. Led by Berkeley Lab, the project will rely on Fermilab to deploy integrated AI systems across entire accelerator facilities. By using Fermilab’s large-scale R&D accelerators, MOAT-Core aims to prove AI systems can be deployed at flagship facilities to accelerate core science programs.
“Combined, these investments accelerate Fermilab’s momentum at the frontiers of technology and deepen our contributions to a mission designed to transform how the nation approaches scientific discovery, while advancing the laboratory’s commitment to developing innovations that benefit both science and society,” added Holtkamp.
More information about Fermilab research is available at www.fnal.gov.
More than two dozen lightsaber props are up for auction, including ones wielded by Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi and Hayden Christensen's Anakin Skywalker in "Revenge of the Sith."
Mike Ditka, who won NFL titles as a player and coach with the Chicago Bears, has died at 86, his family announced Friday.
“It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved husband, father, grandfather, and friend, Mike Ditka,” the family said. “While the world knew Mike as a Hall of Fame football player, legendary coach, and leader of the Chicago Bears’ Super Bowl XX championship team, we knew him as the heart of our family. Mike will be missed beyond measure and remembered forever.”
Took a spill on my pint. In the grass. After my spill the wheel continued to accelerate. I turned it off when I went to turn it back on I got the yellow flashing lights for a few minutes then I was able to get it turned back on but the left blue light remained on. This morning the left light did not remain on. Anyone deal with this. Does it mean new front pad ? Or can I fix it ?
Activists in Camden have suggested the Greens’ decision to back the anti-Zionism motion has cost them votes in the byelection.
Councillors for both Labour the Liberal Democrats told the Press Association that voters had informed them they would not be backing the Green party after it passed the motion last weekend calling Zionism racism.
It is clear now we will come a close second in this by-election. Taking the fight to Labour in one of its safest seats shows just how far the Greens have come.
Voters want us to keep Labour’s feet to the fire on affordable housing, public ownership of water and the climate crisis. Greens will be there every single day, holding Labour to account and demanding the change people voted for.
Brussels says Beijing’s shipments could fall by more than half over four years, cutting millions of vehicles amid fears for European jobs
The EU said it has reached a landmark deal with China to “halve” its sales of hybrid cars in the bloc amid fears surging sales could kill off parts of the European car industry.
Trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič said the deal was the first of its kind and the result of “intense” negotiations with China since June to curb a trade deficit of €1.18bn (£1bn) a day, which has caused mounting tensions between the two economic powers.
WASHINGTON and SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 9, 2026 — The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Biohub signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to advance the frontier of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in biology, deepen our understanding of human health and disease, and accelerate breakthroughs in medicine and biotechnology.
The partnership brings together the computational powerhouse and biological expertise of DOE’s National Laboratories, Biohub’s AI technologies and biomedical research infrastructure, and NIH’s extensive health data, imaging resources, and research enterprise to build an open biological data foundation for predictive models of living systems and accurately predict how cells respond to various interventions.
“Advancing [Artificial] Intelligence in biology represents a critical step forward in leveraging new technologies for public benefit,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. “By uniting the capabilities and expertise of DOE’s National Laboratories with philanthropic and scientific leadership, we are setting a new standard for open, data-driven science, accelerating discoveries, and solidifying American leadership in [AI]-driven biotechnology.”
DOE is investing more than $500 million over five years in fundamental cell research spanning data collection, AI analytics, laboratory measurement and imaging, modeling, and computation. Complementing this effort, Biohub is investing $500 million over five years in the Virtual Biology Initiative (VBI), a global effort to develop technologies and multi-modal datasets for predictive models of life.
“An accurate predictive model of biology could dramatically accelerate scientific discovery by enabling scientists to perform experiments digitally. The insights that come from this could unlock a far greater understanding of disease and open up completely new paths for cures,” said Biohub Head of Science, Alex Rives. “Because of this potential, the creation of a virtual cell is one of the most important challenges for the next era of science. It will require coordinated data generation efforts at a national and international scale, which is why these partners are coming together. We invite the worldwide scientific community to join us in this project.”
The partnership delivers for the Genesis Mission by leveraging AI-ready biological data, automated laboratory experiments, advanced modeling approaches, and state-of-the-art resources across DOE’s National Laboratory system, including:
Exascale Compute Power: Utilizing the nation’s premier supercomputing clusters to model complex, multi-modal biological systems and run frontier cell simulations.
Advanced Experimental Facilities: Employing world-class User Facilities, including the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) for genome annotation and research, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) for microbial and molecular scale research, and other measurement and imaging capabilities, including X-ray and neutron scattering, and cryo-electron microscopy and cryo-electron tomography at the DOE; to resolve atomic, molecular, and cellular structures.
Autonomous Laboratories: Deploying AI-driven advanced robotic and automated experimental systems to rapidly and securely generate and validate biological data at the User Facilities and the Genesis Mission Orchestrated Platforms for Autonomous Laboratories (OPAL) project.
Biological Data Systems: Integrated biological data capabilities within DOE’s BioDataNexus Biological and environmental Infrastructure for Data manaGement and Exploration (BRIDGE) and Genesis Mission Lakehouse-enabled AI-ready multi-modal bioimaging data architecture (LAMBDA) projects.
The Italian sausage crumble on American pizza descends from an Italian-American culinary tradition far richer than most might think. This year, some pizzerias reach back ... Read moreThe post Pepperoni gets all the credit, but sausage is doing the more…
Harrisburg, Pa. — The state Attorney General’s Office is asking the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to reject a last-minute bid to delay its skill games ruling, which takes effect Tuesday.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Cloudflare doesn't block pirate sports streaming sites through its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver in France, only through its CDN. The Paris Judicial Court has now accepted that stance, rejecting [French pay-TV provider] Canal+'s request for penalties of 50,000 euros per site, per day. Interestingly, the court's conclusion relies on statistics provided by Canal+ itself. [...] As a result, Cloudflare will not be penalized under these orders, even though its public DNS resolver is not blocking the sites in question. That is in line with the company's long-standing claim that it doesn't interfere with its DNS.
In its recent transparency reports, Cloudflare repeatedly stated that it hasn't blocked any content through 1.1.1.1, despite orders from French and Italian courts. "To date, Cloudflare has not blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver," the company's latest report reads. [...] Blocking through the CDN is another matter. According to the same report, Cloudflare geoblocked 1,238 domains in France in the second half of 2025, all under a single court order. In the first half of the year, it geoblocked 662 domains under seven orders. Cloudflare recently explained its position to the European Commission, in a submission (PDF) to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, stressing that global public DNS resolvers should not be used to block or restrict access.
Instead, it highlights its real-time pirate stream blocking program, which allows vetted rightsholders to flag pirate streams that run through its network. These streams are disrupted "within seconds," Cloudflare says, without any DNS or IP address blocking. "For live content, where speed is crucial, Cloudflare has built real-time mitigation mechanisms that allow vetted rightsholder partners to flag infringing streams. When those streams are running through our network, we act on them in seconds," Cloudflare informed the Commission. For now, Cloudflare can continue to block pirate sites through its CDN only, while its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver remains untouched. Canal+ can still appeal the rulings, so it may not be the last we hear of it.
Just passed 1000 miles and am starting to see the wire bead coming through my tire (rode on low psi for too long) and figured now is a good time for a tire and refresh.
Looking for recommendations for replacement tires any sort of rebuild kits that yall would recommend for replacing seals/gaskets or doing whatever preventative maintenance I can do while I have the board apart. As for tires i do mostly street riding / commuting and avoid going off road if i can.
COLLEGE PARK, Md., Oct. 9, 2026 — IonQ today announced the achievement of entanglement rates above 1,000 per second (1 kHz) between a trapped ion qubit and a solid-state memory, through a photonic interconnect. Entanglement is the quantum connection that lets separate systems work together, and it is the essential ingredient for networking quantum computers. While the trapped ion qubit sets the standard for qubit coherence, the solid-state quantum memory has unmatched efficiency coupling to light. Their juxtaposition is the best of both worlds, demonstrating the fastest quantum interconnect rate between qubits of any platform.
“IonQ has crossed a pivotal milestone for memory enhanced quantum interconnects, achieving more than 1,000 entanglement events per second,” said Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ. “Classical data centers achieved massive scale by connecting specialized processors, memory, and networks. Quantum systems will scale in much the same way. This breakthrough addresses a critical interconnect bottleneck and advances IonQ’s roadmap to build the networked quantum data centers of the future.”
A technical paper presents results from real-world hardware testing of an end-to-end link between a trapped ion system and a silicon vacancy (SiV) qubit, building on IonQ’s SiV quantum memory platform. IonQ’s demonstration achieves rates more than four times faster than the previous record1 for trapped ions, held by IonQ co-founder Chris Monroe’s research group at Duke University, also a collaborator on the paper.
“IonQ’s efforts in quantum interconnects go back over a decade, to the founding of the company. Moving qubits through photons will be necessary in any large-scale quantum computer, and this demonstration sets the foundation for some amazing work to come,” said Monroe, Chief Scientist at IonQ and Gilhuly Family Presidential Distinguished Professor at Duke University.
“This work shows that a photonic quantum interconnect need not be a bottleneck for distributed quantum computing,” said Mihir Bhaskar, IonQ SVP and GM of Quantum Technologies at SkyWater. “Our technology can interface with almost any qubit type, so we see this unlocking a wide range of opportunities across multiple hardware modalities, from modular computing to networked sensing and beyond.”
This quantum memory and interconnect approach is also driving IonQ’s work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) HARQ program, which seeks to develop high-speed quantum interconnects compatible with multiple computing qubit types. While this latest demonstration used trapped ion systems, the underlying architecture is expected to be compatible with multiple qubit approaches. This may include neutral atoms and superconducting systems with transducers (devices that convert microwave signals into light).
IonQ’s memory and interconnect platform is likewise ramping up commercially, with the first commercial sale to the University of Maryland announced in April, and a second system sale to SDT in South Korea, announced in September.
Additional technical details can be found in the arXiv preprint.
About IonQ
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) is the world’s leading quantum platform and foundry – delivering integrated quantum solutions across computing, networking, sensing, and security. IonQ’s newest generation of quantum computers, the Superion, is the latest in a line of cutting-edge systems. Earlier systems have helped customers and partners including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve a 20x performance increase over previous quantum solutions and accelerate innovation in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, logistics, cybersecurity, and defense. In 2025, the company achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, setting a world record in quantum computing performance.
Illinois State Police closed all westbound lanes of the Eisenhower Expressway near Austin Avenue for about three hours early Friday while investigating a reported shooting. No injuries were reported.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said a 5-year-old child was in the car when Oscar Belgal, 28, was shot. DHS said that an immigration officer fired his weapon during a “targeted enforcement operation.”
The Filter is turning two! To celebrate, we asked our contributors for their favourite products from the past year, and rounded up the team’s picks too.
From handbag-sized umbrellas and stylish yet practical wellies to reading lights and luxurious duvets, these are the products that stood out.
If the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, goes ahead with plans to livestream the execution of a soldier radicalised to extremist Islam who killed 13 people at a military base in Texas, his country will join a motley assembly of lesser powers and rogue actors who have conducted public executions in recent years.
Only two countries currently systematically carry out capital sentences in public: Iran and Afghanistan. In 2025, the Taliban authorities carried out six such killings and the regime in Tehran 11, according to Amnesty International.
Dr Annie Andrews voices opposition to ‘biological men … in women’s sports’ in response to Republican attacks
Dr Annie Andrews, a Democratic Senate candidate in South Carolina, has responded to persistent efforts by Republicans to make trans athletes in women’s sports a wedge issue in the race.
In a restrained direct-to-camera statement, Andrews – a pediatrician – outlined her opposition to “biological men playing in women’s sports”, as her party pushes back against Republican attacks.
Commissioner Stéphane Séjourné says bloc will support 46 strategic projects including lithium and rare earths plants
The EU is “pulling out all the stops” to fend off an imminent potential trade crisis with China, the industry commissioner, Stéphane Séjourné, has said, as the bloc announced its backing for a string of critical materials projects.
Séjourné said on Friday that the EU would support 46 new strategic projects to accelerate supplies of critical raw materials by 2030 across the bloc.
Livestreaming an execution could cause post-traumatic stress disorder in the viewing public, mental health experts have said, after the US confirmed plans to broadcast the death by firing squad of a man who shot dead 13 unarmed soldiers.
The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, said on Thursday that Nidal Hasan, a former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be executed by firing squad on 3 December. Officials later confirmed it would be livestreamed. It is believed it will be the first public execution in the US in almost a century.
Robert Jenrick has launched an extended attack on Kemi Badenoch, calling her part of a metropolitan elite and saying a coalition deal with the Tories would be like being “handcuffed to a zombie”.
Reform UK’s economics spokesperson repeatedly called the Tory leader “Kensington Kemi” and claimed her party was for people who moaned about the decline of Mayfair clubs and complained that they could not find Ottolenghi recipe ingredients in the shops.
Tax cuts for big banks have deprived the UK government of £6bn in revenues, according to campaigners, who are calling on the chancellor, John Healey, to increase taxes and force lenders to pay their “fair share” in the budget.
Calculations by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), which represents unions with more than 5.3 million members across England and Wales, shows that the public purse is billions of pounds worse off as a result of tax cuts introduced under the Tory chancellor Rishi Sunak in 2023.
Vivien Lichtenstein urges party leader to quit over ‘Zionism is racism’ policy – but could face no-confidence motion herself
The chair of the Jewish Greens has called for Zack Polanski to step down as pressure increases on the Green leader to acknowledge anger within the party over a new policy that equates Zionism with racism and calls for the state of Israel to be abolished.
The comments by Vivien Lichtenstein come after Caroline Lucas, the Greens’ former leader and first MP, criticised Polanski for a lack of leadership in missing the debate and vote at the weekend that resulted in the policy being passed.
Ex-prince was granted £302,000 in compensation for early end of lease and king has reportedly contributed to costs
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor faced a £1.8m bill to cover repair and restoration of his former Royal Lodge home in Windsor after the lease was officially surrendered.
But the former prince was granted £302,000 in compensation for giving up the lease early on the 98-acre property, meaning his total costs came to £1.5m.
Tucson, AZ — A 46-year-old Arizona man has been arrested and federally charged after investigators say he threatened to carry out bomb attacks against the White House and other locations in Washington, D.C.
Jacob Aaron Hicks of Tucson is charged with making an interstate threat to injure. The investigation began after Tucson television station KGUN9 received an email on Sept. 23 warning of an imminent attack and forwarded the message to law enforcement.
The FBI confirmed that the station’s report prompted an investigation. Authorities subsequently identified Hicks as the alleged sender, according to a criminal complaint.
Investigators also searched an email account allegedly linked to Hicks and discovered additional unsent draft messages containing similar threats. Those drafts, also dated Sept. 23, were addressed to other news organizations and referenced attacks against the White House and locations elsewhere in the nation’s capital.
Authorities have not publicly disclosed a motive or indicated that explosives were recovered. No attack occurred, and investigators have not announced evidence that another person participated in the alleged plot.
Hicks faces a federal criminal charge, but the allegations remain unproven. He is presumed innocent unless convicted in court.
The FBI investigation remains ongoing as authorities review the threatening communications and circumstances surrounding them.
Political parties vie for Jewish support based on false assumptions about a single issue: Israel
Everybody wants the Jewish vote. As if there were one. Jews are educated, generally liberal. Although they comprise only about 2% of the electorate, they vote in high numbers, overwhelmingly for Democrats. In 2024, 79% chose Kamala Harris. They are also assumed to be steadfast friends of Israel, no matter what it does. Republicans, waging a fake war on antisemitism while courting white supremacists, consider Jews increasingly up for grabs.
Nationally, Jewish Americans are concentrated in a few bright blue spots. A 2020 map from the Jewish Electorate Institute showed a third of Jews living in 20 congressional districts – out of 435 – most of them in New York, New Jersey, California and (purple) Florida. Of these, only one sent a Republican to Washington.
Control of Congress after the 2026 midterm elections would give Democrats power to subpoena documents and testimony
In August, Jamie Raskin renewed his demand that Jared Kushner hand over documents about the overlap between his informal role advising Donald Trump on foreign policy and the private equity firm he runs after an earlier request was ignored.
Five of the 11 companies that Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer and Ron Wyden wrote to about Donald Trump’s IRS settlement – including the Trump Organization and World Liberty Financial – never answered at all.
Fight in East Fishkill, New York, part of a growing divide over whether AI benefits outweigh enormous downsides
For decades, East Fishkill helped build New York’s tech industry.
The hamlet, located 70 miles north of New York City, was home to a 460-acre campus where IBM researched and manufactured semiconductor chips for nearly 50 years.
I'm looking for someone who has the female motor port for the Onewheel GT.
I know it's not a standard you can find, or at least that's what my research turned up, but really a custom product by Future Motion.
Power isn't getting from the board to the motor, and the cable had the chance to melt on the female port, after it (the cable) apparently hadn't been plugged back in properly (by myself), damn plastic.
If I'm not in the best place, would anyone know where I could find this product?
I'm not against the idea of paying for a service so someone can fix it directly on my GT.
I know there are some hardcore riders equipped around here.
Researchers in Vienna and Beijing have independently built the first nuclear clocks based on oscillations inside thorium nuclei, marking a major milestone for a field that could eventually produce highly portable, ultra-precise timekeepers. The clocks are already precise enough to lose only about a second over millions of years. The New York Times reports: The first nuclear clocks are not going to immediately supplant the worldwide network of atomic clocks, whose steady ticking we rely on for GPS and the definition of a second. Nor have they captured the record for most precise timepiece; the best atomic clocks are about 10,000 times more reliable and would take more than 100 billion years to lose one second.
But nuclear clocks hold a bevy of potential advantages over existing atomic clocks. One day, they could be more reliable than the leading atomic versions, and nuclear clocks could be made more portable. They even hold the ability to search for certain kinds of dark matter -- the invisible stuff whose clumps make up 83 percent of the matter in the universe. If a particle of dark matter passed through the thorium nuclei, it could register as a wobble in the nuclear clock's otherwise steady ticktock. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.
‘The climate issue is the security issue,’ says Turkish minister at Pacific pre-Cop summit in Fiji
Wealthy countries should spend far more on dealing with the climate crisis than the 5% of GDP promised by Nato members for defence because “the climate issue is the security issue”, the host of the next UN summit has said.
But, in comments that are likely to prove contentious, the Cop31 president-designate, Murat Kurum, hedged on whether countries should try to repeat a previous agreement to “transition away from fossil fuels” – the primary cause of the climate crisis – when they meet in Turkey next month.
The most valuable education I received for becoming a political editor was growing up in Florida. During the entirety of the 18 years I lived there, it was a purple state that voted for Barack Obama twice, and while I would not say my community was diverse, the spectrum of political ideology was vast. I had a close friend who kept a life-sized cutout of George W Bush in her bedroom, and another who helped organize Amnesty International fundraisers against landmines. When the state turned deeply Republican in 2016, and remained that way, I continued to harbor a suspicion that it wasn’t the whole story.
Even so, nothing could prepare me for the sheer surprise when Angie Nixon – the state legislator who joined the Democratic Socialists of America running against Alex Vindman, a centrist with national name recognition – won the Democratic primary for Senate in Florida. That shock has continued in the months after, as we see the Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly running neck-and-neck with Republican Byron Donalds, who seemed like a shoo-in just weeks ago. And while Nixon is polling behind her Republican opponent, Ashley Moody, the race is much closer than anyone following Florida politics expected. So much so that the senior progressive senator Bernie Sanders has newly poured millions of dollars from his campaign funds into the state, and the popular congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to campaign with Nixon last month.
Here in Michigan, we know that Canada is not our enemy. We need to end this tariff war now.
New report on economic cost of anti-immigration campaign projects 8.6% reduction in retirement payments by 2034
Elderly Americans can expect to lose an average of $2,152 in annual social security benefits each, a projected 8.6% reduction in their retirement payments, by 2034 and every year after as a direct consequence of the economic fallout from the Trump administration’s anti-immigration campaign, if that carries on, according to a new report shared exclusively with the Guardian.
Already, US food prices are up, housing permits to build new homes are down – and even native-born Americans are losing out on potential jobs after the sudden exodus of 1.2 million foreign-born workers over the last two years as a result of Donald Trump’s policies, the report finds.
Gang breaks into cellar of Marchesi Antinori in Cortona and loads two trucks with 30,000 bottles before getaway
Thousands of bottles of wine worth €5m (£4.2m) have been stolen from a prestigious winery in Tuscany in what is thought to be the biggest heist of its kind in Italy.
A gang of at least seven masked individuals broke into the cellar of Marchesi Antinori, a family-owned winery dating back to the late 1300s, in Cortona after shutting off the alarms and surveillance cameras before using company forklifts to load two large trucks with 30,000 bottles of wine and making off.
In this analysis, journalist Mark Sherman breaks down arguments in the first case of the Supreme Court’s current term. Sherman joins Constitution Daily as a regular contributor after covering the Court for the Associated Press.
In my 20 years covering the Supreme Court for the Associated Press, I tried very hard to predict how cases would come out based on the argument I had just watched, or more recently, listened to. I thought it was my duty as a reporter to tell my readers where the justices appeared to stand after questioning the lawyers. After all, the written briefs already provide extensive elaboration of each side’s arguments. The one new thing to be gleaned from an hour or two in the courtroom was what the justices thought.
Most of the time, that worked fine. Justices who appear to be on one side or another usually are, though I can recall a few cases where my predictions didn’t reflect the ultimate outcome. Then, too, sometimes I just couldn’t identify five votes for any particular outcome.
Alas, that was the situation in the first argument of the new term in a major environmental case. Clocking in at 1 hour and 47 minutes, the arguments just did not provide the clarity I look for.
In Suncor Energy (U.S.A.) Inc. v. Commissioners of Boulder County (25-170), the court is weighing whether local governments can pursue lawsuits against energy companies for harms associated with climate change. Potentially billions of dollars and dozens of lawsuits hang on the outcome.
Energy giants Suncor Energy, which operates the only two refineries in Colorado, and Exxon Mobil Corporation are appealing a divided ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court in favor of the City of Boulder and Boulder County, Colorado that has allowed the suit to go forward for now.
The state court rejected the companies’ claim that federal law prohibits Boulder’s suit. The energy industry is hoping that the high court will shut down the Boulder case as well as other lawsuits that have popped up around the country. The companies are facing around three dozen lawsuits brought by more than 60 municipalities, lawyer Kannon Shanmugam told the court.
Boulder argues that its lawsuit fits well within the tradition of state court claims that the court has allowed to proceed, including those involving tobacco and opioids.
The Arguments at the Court
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan suggested that there was nothing unusual about the Boulder lawsuit, in questions to Shanmugam and Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris.
“I guess I'm not quite sure what makes this situation different from those, all those other ones, where we've allowed them to proceed in state court,” Roberts said.
Kagan likened the Boulder case to the third chapter of a book, in which tobacco and opioid litigation were the first two chapters.
“Mr. Shanmugam, in multiple respects, this suit appears to be based on the old 1990s tobacco suits that were brought by states and local governments basically saying that big tobacco had made representations, misrepresentations, which had caused people to use the product in —to overuse the product, causing harm to those governments. I suppose the opioid litigation more recently follows the same model,” Kagan said.
Yet later in the argument, in questions to Kevin Russell, representing Boulder, Roberts and Kagan raised doubts about the viability of the lawsuit, referring to prior Supreme Court decisions that have precluded state action over interstate air and water pollution unless Congress says otherwise. “I'm sorry to interrupt but isn't your suit an attempt to evade those decisions?” Roberts said, “It's really—it's an effort to reduce emissions.”
Kagan said one way to resolve the case might be to say that the Clean Air Act sets up a complicated scheme to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that does not include the kind of suit at issue in the Supreme Court. “And so why not just say: This really does just get in the way of how the—of how Congress decided to regulate greenhouse gases or any other air quality standards?” Kagan said.
The toughest questions Russell faced came from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who signaled support for the companies’ arguments. “It’s going to bankrupt—you know, if there are enough of these, bankrupt these—these various defendants and certainly other defendants out there,” Kavanaugh said.
There is a second question in the case that could be an off-ramp for the justices, whether the court should even be hearing the case now. But it appeared to interest just two of the court’s justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Clarence Thomas also asked about the court’s jurisdiction to hear the case, but his questions seemed intended to give lawyers for the companies and the Trump administration the chance to explain why the matter is properly before the court.
Only eight justices heard the case, after Justice Samuel Alito recently recused himself. Alito didn’t provide an explanation at the time, but he has since told multiple media outlets that he was influenced by the arguments made by the companies and their supporters that devastating consequences would follow a decision to allow the lawsuit to proceed. Alito and his wife own stock in energy companies, though not ones that are parties in this case.
Alito’s decision to step aside means that Boulder, which won in the Colorado state court, can prevail with just four votes. A 4-4 tie would affirm the Colorado high court ruling without setting a national precedent. From the Supreme Court’s perspective, it would be a huge waste of time, after having solicited and ingested dozens of briefs, and set aside precious time on its calendar only to fail to set the nationwide rule it presumably took the case to establish.
We’re not likely to know the outcome for several months.
Mark Sherman is a regular contributor to Constitution Daily. Sherman covered the Supreme Court for the Associated Press for 20 years, and he has previously written about the Justice Department, health care, and national politics.
Editor’s Note: Blog posts written by contributors reflect the analysis and opinions of the authors, and do not represent the opinions or positions of the National Constitution Center.
Online retailer’s 26% jump sharpens focus on exemption letting cheap parcels into the country duty-free
Shein, the online fast-fashion retailer founded in China, increased sales in the UK by just over a quarter last year, overtaking British rival Asos.
The company, whose global parent group listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange and valued at just over $26bn (£19.6bn) last month, increased sales at its UK division by 26% to £2.58bn, according to accounts filed at Companies House.
Game day snacking moves fast when the dip bowl is within reach. These 13 dips cover hot, cheesy picks, cool creamy scoops, guacamole, pico de gallo, and layered favorites for chips, crackers, and vegetables.The post 13 game day dips that…
Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning shows how public opinion has changed around billionaire CEOs since The Social Network’s release
When The Social Network came out, Mark Zuckerberg organised a staff viewing of a film he described as “fun”.
A group corporate outing to the sequel is unlikely.
New York, NY — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave the city after a federal agent fired seven rounds into a vehicle, wounding a 28-year-old man while his 5-year-old son was inside.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch identified the wounded man as Oscar Belgal and said he was struck in the neck below his left ear. His son was physically unharmed and later placed with a family member.
Belgal was taken to a hospital, but Mamdani said ICE agents removed him shortly before city officials held a Thursday night press conference. The mayor said negotiations with President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin seeking Belgal’s release were unsuccessful.
DHS said ICE agents were conducting a “targeted enforcement operation” when an officer fired. The department described Belgal as an unauthorized immigrant from the Dominican Republic. Tisch said Belgal has two previous New York arrests, including a 2023 robbery case resulting in probation and a pending drug-sale case.
Rep. Adriano Espaillat said federal agents prevented both him and Belgal’s family from entering the hospital room.
Gov. Kathy Hochul called for federal authorities to provide a full and transparent account of the shooting, while Espaillat demanded that all available video evidence be preserved.
Liability lawsuits have held tobacco, oil and pharma companies to account in the past. AI investors won’t ignore this threat
The most basic function of government is to protect people from harm. Two growing phenomena – the climate crisis and AI – pose escalating risks of extraordinary harm.
The climate crisis is already causing floods, wildfires, drought and record heat. AI agents are already escaping super-secure environments to hack into systems they’re supposed to avoid.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK
On Kaua‘i, neighbors repair each other’s roofs, teens deliver meals and locals use their own equipment to clear roads
It was a few hours after the sun rose over the verdant valleys and clear waters of Hā‘ena on Kaua‘i’s North Shore. Michael Olanolan was already in his excavator, clearing the main highway where a wall of fallen trees had blocked access. Other neighbors joined him, moving debris so electric crews could reach utility poles downed by Hurricane Lowell.
The 76-year-old father of nine and grandfather of 26 did this every day for weeks after Lowell hit the Hawaiian islands of Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau on 7 September. His generational home lost part of its roof to Lowell’s winds, but family and friends helped him repair it, freeing him up to also help his community. Clearing out roadways became his full-time job while residents were getting back on their feet.
Recent death of the student in Mississippi is just the latest in a long string of unsettling deaths of young Black people
On Wednesday afternoon, hundreds of students gathered on the Jackson State University (JSU) campus for a rally to call for transparency in the mysterious death of young Black people and to encourage student engagement in politics and the fight for voting rights.
As the sun began to set, the students, many of whom wore black, marched through the historically Black university’s plaza chanting: “Nolan Wells, Trey Reed, Tasia Fortune, Kohen Wiley, Jaylen Lewis – Black Lives Matter!” All five were young Black Mississippians – the youngest, Wiley, was one-year-old while the eldest, Fortune, was 29 – who either died under suspicious circumstances or were killed by police.
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A physicist has put a definite date on Doomsday," The New York Times wrote on November 4, 1960. "He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D. On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself." The newspaper was right -- but the prediction was wrong. That week, Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues published a paper in Science with the stunningly succinct title "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026."
The work was based on a simple observation: The time it took for the human population to double in size kept getting shorter. Using population estimates from about 400 B.C.E. until 1958 C.E., the authors -- all from the department of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign -- came up with an equation that best described the trend. If things continued the way they were going, the number of humans on Earth would rise faster and faster, reaching more than 25 billion by 2020. The researchers didn't calculate when humanity would run out of food, land, or energy. They just concluded that at some point this year, the equation ceased to give meaningful results because the predicted population shot toward infinity. That was their doomsday. "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve," they wrote. "They will be squeezed to death."
The exact date was somewhat arbitrary, however. The formula solved to 2026.87 plus or minus 5.5 years, and The New York Times reported that von Foerster "searched the center of this doom-time span for an appropriate date and found that a Friday the Thirteenth would fall conveniently in November of 2026." (November 13 also happened to be his birthday.) [...] [D]emographers, annoyed by what they saw as a provocation by outsiders, pointed out obvious flaws. For example, the time it takes for the number of humans to double could get a lot shorter, but certainly not shorter than the 9 months it takes for a baby to develop. "In view of the comments that subsequently were published in this journal, an extensive discussion of this article does not seem to be required," public health expert Harold Dorn drily noted in Science 2 years after von Foerster's article was published. The forecast would set a record, he predicted, "for the short length of time required to demonstrate its unreliability." "The failure of the Doomsday equation is ultimately a cautionary tale about the dangers of extrapolating from historically exceptional circumstances," writes economist Javier Birchenall of the University of California, Santa Barbara writes in a Perspective published in Science today.
Skits and parodies making fun of the trillion-dollar industry have taken over social media, racking up millions of views
Johnny Hilbrant Partridge kept getting stuck next to the same kind of finance guy at weddings – the one bragging about his family’s full-time nanny and lavish vacations whilename-dropping elite club memberships and private schools.
To Partridge, a former fitness instructor, their shameless knack for self-promotion felt ripe for comedy. Using a filter that puts an exaggerated sneer on his face, Partridge donned a puffer vest and created “The PE Guy”, a caricature of the men who work in the private equity industry.
US president says US will not attack Iran before midterms, while defense secretary says Nidal Hasan will face a firing squad next month. Plus, Sofia Coppola looks back on her glittering directorial career
Good morning. The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said the execution of Nidal Hasan by firing squad will be livestreamed next month, in a radical departure from the previous norm. Hegseth said: “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”
Hasan opened fire at a medical processing center at Fort Hood, Texas, on 5 November 2009, killing 13 people and wounding dozens more. A military jury sentenced him to death in 2013 and he has been held at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas ever since. The last known case of a military firing squad in the US was in November 1945.
Why is Hegseth being criticised over the Iran war? The Democratic senator Chris Murphy said Hegseth was “determined to hide the cost and the consequences of this war from the American public”. Murphy claimed the Pentagon blocked him from visiting a military base in Qatar and that an Iranian strike on the US embassy in Riyadh was far worse than the public were led to believe.
What has Donald Trump said about the US war on Iran? The US president has promised not to attack Iran before November’s US midterm elections, outlining a pause on the protracted war he has struggled to end after almost eight months. A Reuters/Ipsos survey from late September found that only about a third of Americans approved of the strikes on Iran.
Why are some voters calling Missouri’s elections ‘dizzying and embarrassing’? Thanks to a protracted legal battle over an effort by Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional map, some voters are no longer sure which congressional district they live in or who will be on their ballot paper for the midterms.
What happened in last night’s crucial midterm debates? Rachel Leingang, George Chidi and Auzzy Byrdsell have rounded up the key takeaways from debates in the battleground states of Michigan, Georgia and Maine.
Why Should Delaware Care? Sanfilippo Syndrome is a genetic condition that impacts 1 in every 70,000 children. Last month, federal regulators approved a gene therapy treatment to prevent complications for those children born. One Delaware family’s 5-year-old son had access to the gene therapy through an experimental trial, and his family called it a miracle.
Five years ago, doctors in Ohio injected an experimental gene therapy treatment into an infant boy from Delaware that they hoped would keep him from suffering from a rare degenerative disease that his older sister had already developed.
Five years later, his mother, Molly Merrill, called the treatment a “miracle.”
Today the boy, Declan Merrill, attends kindergarten in the Christina School District and is fluent in sign language, his mother said. It stands in unfortunate contrast with his older sister Mickey, who lost her ability to speak and has not been able to attend a mainstream school.
Last month, federal regulators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the gene therapy treatment for use outside of experimental settings. Prior to the approval, treatment was limited to just managing symptoms of the degenerative and fatal disease, called Sanfilippo syndrome.
Molly and Don Merrill credit their son’s success to his older sister Mickey.
“It’s only because of Mickey that we knew there was a chance of him having it,” Molly Merrill said.
Even before Declan was born, doctors diagnosed him with the ailment. And because of the early diagnosis, Declan’s treatments and services were ready. As soon as he entered the world, he immediately began receiving occupational and speech therapy.
Still, Molly Merrill said her son is not “cured” of Sanfilippo, and he is still in the mild-to-moderate range of the disease. While Declan is able to walk and talk, he does deal with speech delays. When he is unable to articulate with his voice, he switches to sign language.
Dr. Ricki Carroll, a complex care and palliative care pediatrician at Nemours Children’s Hospital, said doctors do not know whether Declan’s treatment will last long term, or whether it is effective for every part of the body that could be affected by the disease.
The syndrome is a genetic condition caused by a gene change that affects the body’s ability to make an important enzyme. Without the functioning enzyme, a buildup of waste material can collect in the body and brain, leading to progressive damage over time.
Carroll said that if a child receives the gene therapy and is still experiencing hearing impairment, it could be because the child developed that before the treatment, or gene therapy may not have an effect on all parts of the body.
“But the longer we watch and children continue to do well, the more optimistic we are,” she said.
Therapy not approved for older kids
In Mickey’s early years, she only knew one speed for life — running.
Molly Merrill said Mickey was extremely hyperactive, often knocking household items off of surfaces as she raced through the house.
But she never fully developed an ability to speak, and by age five she started losing her ability to hear.
Declan, Mickey and Maya Merrill pose for a photo. | PHOTO COURTESY OF THE MERRILL FAMILY
Mickey was ultimately diagnosed with Sanfilippo syndrome when she was 3 years old, just a few months after the birth of Molly and Don Merrill’s second daughter, Maya, who does not have syndrome.
But Mickey was not eligible for the gene therapy that her younger brother received because of her age, Molly Merrill said.
Carroll said the gene therapy was not approved for older children because it was not tested for older age groups, and doctors do not believe the therapy would be helpful for older children because the disease is progressive.
“The longer you have harmful buildup, the more harm it’s going to do to the body and specifically the brain,” Carroll said.
Now, Mickey takes six vials of medicine every morning at 5:45 a.m. She must eat through a feeding tube. She has necrosis in her hips, and her bones are falling apart. Still, Mickey is a happy child who especially enjoys frozen yogurt, her mother says.
Molly Merrill said the approval of the gene therapy has marked a “strange time” for the Sanfilippo community and her family.
While there is finally an answer for young children who, like Declan, may receive gene therapy as an infant, there is no option for older children like Mickey.
“It’s all of the joy and grief you could possibly imagine in the exact same moment,” Molly Merrill said.
Continuing the fight for Mickey
Molly and Don Merrill were stunned when they were told that Mickey would likely die at 12 years old because of the disease.
“We pretty much said, ‘Today we cry, tomorrow we fight,’” Don Merrill said.
Don Merrill said he felt “useless” when they received their daughter’s diagnosis, but he knew they had to take action and help their daughter fight.
Together, the Merrill family and their friends came together to create different fundraising opportunities for Sanfilippo Syndrome. The family also created their own nonprofit organization, The Save Mickey Association, to help raise money and awareness.
Don Merrill said they have held events like motorcycle rides and chili contests. Today, the family focuses on their larger events like “Mickey Fest,” which features live music and games for families, and “Chefs Unite,” which connects Delawareans with executive chefs and lets them eat food that is prepared and plated in front of them.
The money the Merrill family raised has gone toward national organizations studying Sanfilippo Syndrome.
While Declan’s gene therapy is not available to older children like Mickey, the Merrill family is not giving up any efforts to raise money for Sanfilippo research.
‘We’re not done because we don’t have a treatment for Mickey,” Molly Merrill said.
Get Involved On Nov. 2, the Merrill family will host the fundraiser, Chef’s Unite, at Deerfield Gold Club in Newark. The event will give attendees the opportunity to meet regional executive chefs and taste food that is prepared live. For more details, click here.
Former President Barack Obama, who ran on "hope and change," is resurrecting his signature campaign slogan in a new series of digital ads for the Democratic National Committee that were viewed exclusively by CBS News.
(Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)
What I’m Discussing Today
Kareem’s Quote of the Day: What happens to a democracy when campaigning in poetry gives way to governing through grievance and greed?
A Campaign Without Poetry in Ohio: A gubernatorial race shows how public debate collapses when a candidate’s allies substitute blatant lies for persuasion.
Megyn with a “Why?”: Megyn Kelly’s attack on a woman alleging rape is a reminder that cruelty becomes easier when empathy is seen as weakness.
Quick Takes: A gold-plated statue in the European Parliament, and taxpayer-funded ads, offer two views of a man who can never get enough of himself.
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, by Gilbert King: This essential history follows Thurgood Marshall’s fight for justice after four young Black men were accused of rape.
Nat King Cole, “’Tis Autumn”: A second look at autumn from Cole and his trio makes the fading of summer sound less like a loss than a graceful fact of life.
Kareem’s Quote of the Day
“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”
Mario Cuomo (1932-2015), New York governor, in The New Republic
(Photo by Diana Walker/Getty Images)
When you get to be a certain age, forty years can seem like a blip in time. For those of us who were alive and interested in politics in the 1980s, Mario Cuomo can seem like the key to an alternate, better reality than the one we’ve been living in for the past four decades. Could his election have had a butterfly effect that would have prevented the Bush dynasty, the coarsening of our society, and even the ascendancy of our current Philistine-in-Chief? Those aren’t questions you’d ask if you remember the Reagan years as the fulfillment of his “shining city on a hill” speech. But if you saw what was happening on the outskirts of that shining city, or in the shadows down below, you’d have to wonder.
Mario Cuomo was the poet laureate of that more honest and inclusive America, and he gave a rebuke to Reagan’s vision in his keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention: “A shining city is perhaps all the President sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining city; the part where some people can’t pay their mortgages, and most young people can’t afford one; where students can’t afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate. In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can’t find it.”
After that speech, Cuomo was considered the most promising Democratic politician in the country. Unfortunately, he wasn’t running against Reagan, Walter Mondale was, and Reagan won in a landslide. In 1986, Cuomo was reelected governor in a landslide of his own, winning almost 65 percent of the vote, and by 1988 the White House looked like it was his for the taking. But he decided not to run, and Michael Dukakis lost to George Herbert Walker Bush. Surely, the thinking went, Cuomo would take up the mantle in 1992. It certainly looked that way: he had a private jet waiting to take him to New Hampshire to file for the primary there, but he hemmed and hawed until it was too late, his indecision earning him the nickname “Hamlet on the Hudson.” As it happened, another politically talented governor and orator, albeit more homespun than poetic, took advantage of Cuomo’s absence, as Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination and eventually the presidency.
Just like that, Cuomo’s career had peaked. The man who could have been president was defeated when he ran for a fourth term as New York governor in 1994, and he never ran for office again. When his son Andrew—who had a cutthroat reputation from his work on his father’s campaigns, but was a thoughtful and expressive speaker—took office in 2011, Mario was beaming with pride. “What we admire about him most is he has gifts,” Mario said, his wife Matilda by his side. “God gave him the gifts, we didn’t. How he’s using them is what we like.” Andrew did some good things with those gifts, including leading the state through the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic with relative calm and clarity. Mario didn’t get to see that: he died in 2015. But it was just as well he wasn’t around to see his son resign in disgrace in 2021, after being accused of sexual harassment by at least eleven women.
As for campaigning in poetry and governing in prose, that’s a relic of a past that seems more distant than it really is. Now it’s all campaigning in profanity and governing in grievance and greed. Was Barack Obama really president just a decade ago? When Cuomo died, President Obama praised him as “a determined champion of progressive values, and an unflinching voice for tolerance, inclusiveness, fairness, dignity, and opportunity. His own story taught him that as Americans, we are bound together as one people, and our country’s success rests on the success of all of us, not just a fortunate few.” With his rare eloquence, Obama proved himself Cuomo’s true political heir. May we see their like again soon.
Lethal injection was a way for us to deny the reality of capital punishment. Pike’s experience shows us what it is
Christa Pike had asked to be hanged. In the weeks before her botched execution by lethal injection on 30 September, in which she survived two lethal doses of barbiturate pentobarbital and had to be hospitalized, Pike and her legal team had challenged Tennessee’s execution protocol.
The state’s lethal injection regimen had failed before. In May, Tony Carruthers was also sent to Tennessee’s death chamber, only to leave alive after prison officials struggled to find a vein.
From cost of living to the Iran war, these are the issues that matter most to US voters across the political spectrum
US voters are about to deliver their first national verdict on the second presidency of Donald Trump. On 3 November, millions of Americans will vote in midterm elections to decide control of the House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the governorships in 36 states. The results could have a huge impact on Trump’s final two years in office.
Today, the Guardian launches its 2026 midterm voter panel. Our reporters have interviewed nine voters across the country and the political spectrum about the issues that matter to them, from the cost of living, immigration and healthcare to the war in Iran and whether they trust their political leaders.
Illustration by Joel Kimmel for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Reference image: ZUMA Press Wire/Reuters Connect.
In the summer of 2023, after he was impeached on charges of abusing his office for personal gain, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was suspended and barred from conducting any official business for more than three months while awaiting trial in the state Senate.
So, he traveled.
Paxton, a Republican who is now running for U.S. Senate, took at least 17 trips over three months, including to resort destinations Park City, Utah, and Vail, Colorado. He visited the Oklahoma town where he owns a vacation lodge and a Utah community with a golf resort, where he later bought four condominiums.
State police joined him each time, costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars for trips unrelated to his job as attorney general. The Texas Senate ultimately acquitted him on the impeachment charges.
But Paxton’s use of the taxpayer-funded detail did not begin or end there. In fact, it stands out compared with his predecessor, fellow elected officials in Texas and other state attorneys general, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.
Paxton has traveled frequently out of state while listing little on his official calendar, The Associated Press reported last week. ProPublica and the Tribune’s analysis, which included reviewing every publicly available document Paxton’s office says it possesses about his travel, discloses for the first time how few of his trips had a listed business purpose: just 1 in 6.
It also found Paxton’s security has cost taxpayers far more than has previously been reported.
Since assuming office in 2015, Paxton has taken nearly 1,000 trips with a state-funded security detail, costing $3.3 million. The newsrooms’ review of Paxton’s travel records, obtained through the state’s Public Information Act, could only connect 138 of those trips and $553,000 in security costs to state business.
Records detailing the purpose of Paxton’s visits to 36 states and 19 countries do not appear to exist in most cases. These include a trip to a small town in Hawaii months before his family’s blind trust bought land there; 24 trips to Utah, where the trust owns five properties; and 53 trips to Florida, where Paxton and the trust have two houses and a townhome.
“If you’ve got all these extra trips, it becomes ethically and morally problematic,” said Chris Toth, former executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General, who has also criticized Paxton’s conduct on other issues. “The ethical question is whether a legitimate security function has effectively become a taxpayer-funded subsidy.”
Texas law allows the Department of Public Safety to provide security for key state leaders, including the attorney general, but does not require officials to use it. In fact, Paxton himself hasn’t used it in at least two dozen cases while traveling on official business.
Paxton has dismissed opponents’ attacks that he has used the perks of office to benefit himself and has not answered questions about how he vastly increased his wealth as a public servant.
He also did not answer detailed questions for this story. ProPublica and the Tribune sent Paxton a spreadsheet detailing travel for which there was no record that he was on state business and asked him to provide additional information if the trips were not personal. Neither Paxton nor his office provided such records. Instead, his office provided a general statement.
“Throughout his career, Ken Paxton has faced numerous security threats stemming from his courageous work as Attorney General fighting on behalf of the people of Texas,” his office said in the statement. “Those threats are a direct result of him taking on the cartels terrorizing Texans and some of the nation’s most dangerous violent criminals.”
Paxton’s office directed additional questions to DPS.
A DPS spokesperson declined to answer the newsrooms’ questions, saying the agency does not comment on its security arrangements.
Logs from the Texas Department of Public Safety security detail assigned to Attorney General Ken Paxton show multiple out-of-state trips while he was suspended from office in 2023.Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune
An Outlier Among Peers
To analyze Paxton’s travel, ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed DPS logs for his security detail and records from the attorney general’s office, including airfare and lodging receipts, per diems and his daily calendars.
The records available for his predecessor, Greg Abbott, show a stark difference: Abbott traveled mostly within the state as attorney general, and his security cost $203,000 during his last three years in the office. Adjusted for inflation, Abbott’s security detail cost $7,400 per month. Paxton’s has averaged $24,300.
Because the state keeps records only for a limited time, Abbott’s travel expenses and his daily calendars as attorney general no longer exist, so the news organizations could not determine how many of his trips were for business.
Records are available, however, for Abbott’s security costs as governor and for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Both are also offered state police security and have been in their current roles as long as Paxton.
When compared, the records show Paxton has taken 82 more out-of-state trips with a security detail than Abbott and nearly as many as the governor and lieutenant governor combined.
Though DPS security detail records are available for state leaders’ full tenure, Abbott’s office only provided calendars that document business-related activity for his first six years in office. More than two-thirds of the governor’s international trips during those years had a listed business purpose, compared with just two of 25 for Paxton during his full tenure. The governor’s office said it planned to release the remaining five years on Tuesday but only provided five months, saying it needed more time.
The attorney general’s records do not show a business purpose for travel to Albania, Aruba, Australia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, England, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Mexico, Poland, South Africa or Taiwan.
The share of Paxton’s travel with a documented business purpose peaked early in his tenure, in 2018 and 2019, at 30%, the newsrooms’ analysis found. That aligns with the governor’s share of business travel during that period.
Since then, Paxton has taken fewer trips that are documented as state business while increasingly traveling out of state. Last year, just five of Paxton’s 91 trips with the security detail had a listed business purpose. Forty-one were outside Texas.
In some cases, Paxton has taken business trips without a DPS detail, an analysis of records from the department and the attorney general’s office shows. They include a 2019 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, with that state’s attorney general to discuss opioid litigation and a 2021 visit with unnamed U.S. senators in North Carolina. There is also no record of Paxton taking the detail on political fundraising trips to Florida and the Bahamas.
But Paxton has traveled with security to other campaign-related activities, including one that came just two days after he was acquitted in the impeachment trial. Paxton boarded a Maine-bound private plane owned by a North Texas businessman to tape an episode of Tucker Carlson’s show, according to campaign finance records. During the interview, he hinted that he’d challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in the 2026 Republican primary.
“Everything is on the table for me,” Paxton said when Carlson suggested he should run.
In his interview with Carlson, Paxton said it was unfair that he was automatically suspended before he could clear his name. He said he was eager to get back to work and that he was “reenergized to do the things the voters sent me to do.”
Paxton should pay for his own security on trips where there is no benefit for Texans, like vacations and campaign events, said Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia Law School who has written about government ethics.
“There’s no reason for the taxpayers to be paying for things that they would not be paying for if he had stayed home,” Briffault said. “That’s a misuse of public funds.”
State officials said there are no records of Paxton or his campaign reimbursing Texas for security costs.
Of the 10 most populous states, Texas and New York confirmed that they provide security for their attorneys general, while Florida law allows its top lawyer to receive a detail upon request. North Carolina does not. Attorneys general offices for the remaining six states did not respond to requests for comment.
Former Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said she never used a security detail during her 12 years in office, which ended in 2024. The Democrat said that Paxton’s higher profile might create a greater need for protection, but his extensive out-of-state travel without a documented business purpose raises questions about his workload.
“Was he minding the store? There’s a lot of work to be done at the office,” Rosenblum said.
Travel and Real Estate
Some of Paxton’s travel to four states with a security detail has overlapped with locations where he or his family’s trust has purchased 10 properties since 2021. A recent ProPublica and Tribune analysis found he owns or co-owns 15 properties with a market value of about $11 million.
In June 2021, Paxton attended an attorneys general conference in Maui. The security detail listed the destination as Lahaina, a small community on the Hawaiian island’s west coast. Four months later, Paxton’s family trust purchased an oceanview lot in a residential neighborhood there for $410,000, land records show.
The 7,000-square-foot lot remains vacant but has proved to be a savvy investment, now assessed at $1.2 million by Maui County.
Paxton set up the trust with his estranged wife, State Sen. Angela Paxton, who declined to be interviewed but said through a spokesperson that she has not been involved in her husband’s business dealings since 2024, when she filed for divorce. The Paxtons’ friend, Chip Loper, runs the trust. He did not respond to requests for comment.
Paxton has also gone to the Salt Lake City area 19 times, twice for listed business purposes. He visited three times — once on business — in the months leading up to his family trust’s July 2021 purchase of a plot in the ski town of Eden. The trust bought a mountainside lot on about two-thirds of an acre for $315,000 in cash, the seller told the newsrooms. It also remains undeveloped.
During his suspension in August 2023, Paxton visited St. George, Utah, a small city in the state’s southwest corner. Nearby is the Black Desert Resort, which hosts an annual PGA Tour golf tournament. Paxton purchased one condo at the resort in 2025 and three more in February. Paxton took out mortgages totaling $1.9 million for them, according to legal documents filed with the local county.
Paxton has visited Florida more than any other state, 53 times. Two of those trips have a documented business purpose. Between 2021 and 2022, Paxton purchased two homes in Ocala, known for its horse breeding industry, and a townhome in Dunedin, on the Gulf of Mexico near Tampa.
Paxton also traveled with the detail twice to Broken Bow, Oklahoma, where he purchased a $1.5 million vacation lodge in 2022. He visited in June 2023, during his suspension. Then again the following December. He traveled to the neighboring town of Idabel in 2023 and 2024. None of the trips had a listed business purpose.
Records that show travel with a security detail do not list the attorney general’s name but rather the position. State officials familiar with the travel records said the two temporary attorneys general appointed during Paxton’s suspension did not take the trips listed on the state police travel logs.
The attorney general’s office has said that Paxton’s work to secure large legal settlements with drugmakers and tech companies requires routine travel. Such travel is noted in calendars reviewed by ProPublica and the Tribune. Even so, more than 800 trips lack a documented business purpose.
Paul Nolette, a Marquette University political science professor who studies attorneys general, said that the role has become more expansive in recent years as states increasingly collaborate on big lawsuits. That could lead to more travel, he said. Nolette added these officials deserve occasional vacations like everyday Americans.
But given repeated accusations from Democrats and Republicans alike about Paxton’s ethics, Nolette said it is difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s constantly working while leaving the state so frequently.
“It just raises more red flags about how he’s using the office to do things that may not give the best bang for the buck for Texans,” Nolette said.
Paxton has not commented publicly about his use of the taxpayer-funded detail. During a podcast interview in November, Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee, who led his impeachment defense, asked the attorney general where he liked to travel.
“I love Jackson Hole. I like Park City. I like the mountains. I also like beaches,” Paxton responded. “I like places in Florida, places in California, even though I don’t like to admit I go to California. But it’s beautiful to see them.”
As so-called prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket embed themselves in every aspect of our daily lives, from elections to sports and entertainment, concerns have grown about what the explosion of these poorly understood, loosely regulated platforms could mean for regular people and democracy writ large.
Celebrities from LeBron James to Sydney Sweeney have inked lucrative deals with prediction platforms. Legacy news outlets have even begun including prediction market data in their coverage. And the Trump family is deeply embedded in these platforms’ success; Donald Trump Jr.’s VC firm just became a lead investor in Polymarket, and he is a paid adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi.
But what actually is a prediction market, and what separates it from online sports betting platforms like DraftKings or FanDuel?
This week on The Intercept Briefing, Kate Knibbs — a senior writer at Wired who covers prediction markets, the future of media, and how AI is changing the internet — breaks down the battles to define prediction markets; what they’re getting away with in the meantime, while existing in this “weird” regulatory gray zone; and their potential to be a “disruptive force” in next month’s midterm elections.
States have been looking to regulate these platforms like they do sports gambling. But the companies are pushing back: The founders of Kalshi donated $200,000 to a new Texas-focused political action committee, a week after state lawmakers held hearings to investigate whether prediction markets constitute sports betting, which is illegal in Texas.
“Both Kalshi and Polymarket are tech unicorns at this point. They have a lot of money to spend, and they realize that this is an existential fight,” says Knibbs. “Donald Trump Jr. is very involved in this industry, and stands to gain a lot from prediction markets being able to operate as they desire and not be beholden to various state regulations that they’re currently not beholden to. … I am very interested in what is going to happen in this space when we have a different administration. Kalshi is seeming to hedge its bets by aggressively hiring former Biden administration stars.”
In addition to spending heavily on lobbying, their survival strategy includes inking deals with mainstream media companies like CNN, CNBC, and even Substack to establish credibility.
“I have been following the enmeshment between prediction markets and the media very closely because I think it’s flown under the radar a little bit, while all of these regulatory fights have been going on, just how quickly the prediction markets managed to establish themselves as another source of truth about what’s potentially happening in the world,” says Knibbs. “They are still so new, and the way that they are operating is still in this murky regulatory gray area. It just boggles my mind that they’ve managed to just become part of the financial news establishment in the way that they have.”
For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Jessica Washington: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.
Akela Lacy: And I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept.
JW: So Akela, we completely missed a major milestone for the Intercept Briefing.
JW: I actually can’t believe how fast the time has flown. Thank you all so much for sticking with us every week. We genuinely and literally could not do this without you. Akela, what are you watching this week?
AL: The story that was all over my feed on Thursday morning was this bombshell report from the New York Times about how a senior adviser to U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, suppressed and distorted internal reports that were critical of Israel, including a report describing the dozens of Palestinians who were killed near food distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation last summer. This reporting comes after the anniversary this week of the October 7 attacks in 2023.
There was also a lot of news in New York City where protesters met Mayor Zohran Mamdani at an October 7 vigil and were shouting him down, basically criticizing him over his administration’s inaction on different policies that are within his purview in terms of sticking to some of his campaign promises on Israel policy, including the sale of occupied land in the West Bank that occurs across New York City.
JW: Online, what I had really seen was a lot of misconstruing of what the protesters were actually doing there. A lot of people saying they were just upset about Mamdani’s October 7 post, where he both spoke about the loss of life in Israel and the people who were killed on October 7, but then also talked about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and about the long history that led to the point of October 7. So there were some who were saying that the protesters felt that he wasn’t deferential enough to Gaza protesters in that post. But obviously the reality, as you’ve pointed out, is that while there are, I’m sure, a myriad of reasons that people showed up that day, a lot of it had to do with actual policy disagreements.
Speaking of protest movements, in France, hundreds of thousands of protesters — including students, teachers, and union leaders — have taken to the streets to protest widespread education inequality. The protests began in the suburbs outside of Paris, which are plagued by deep racial and socioeconomic inequality.
Students say they’ve suffered significant neglect, from teacher shortages to crumbling infrastructure. As the protests continued, they’ve really been bolstered by union leaders and left-leaning politicians. Now, there have been accounts of violence from the police towards protesters, and thousands have been arrested. Another mass demonstration was held on Thursday as well.
It really made me think back to that Nikole Hannah-Jones essay in The New York Times from a few weeks ago, where she wrote about her own experience navigating our unequal education system in the U.S. as a parent. It’s been really interesting to read about the parallels in France to our domestic system, where we’re also currently seeing massive cuts to the education system, particularly for vulnerable communities in programs like Head Start, but also in college programs throughout the country that are seeing cuts in high schools.
So it’s interesting to see both those parallels and the anger we’re witnessing in France toward not just cuts, but the long-standing inequality that’s been present.
AL: That’s one of many issues that will be top of mind for voters as we get closer and closer to the midterm elections next month.
JW: We’re less than a month away from the midterms, and among this long, long, and growing list of concerns around election integrity, prediction markets have somehow made their way into the conversation. So while these markets are best known for users betting on sports, Kalshi and Polymarket users — and by the way, these are prediction market platforms — are also betting on election outcomes.
So a number of controversies have come up in the primaries related to these platforms. Both of these platforms have had to ask their paid influencers to remove misleading information on social media. I get into all of that and much, much more with Kate Knibbs, senior writer at WIRED. She covers prediction markets, the future of media, and how AI is changing the internet.
Kate, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Kate Knibbs: Thanks so much for having me.
JW: Kate, we wanted to speak to you today because prediction and betting markets appear to be everywhere these days. You can’t walk down a busy street without seeing an ad for one, or on TV, watching your favorite sport’s team. Celebrities are cashing in. NBA player, LeBron James has a major deal with Polymarket, the prediction platform. Actress Sydney Sweeney made waves with her ad promoting Novig, a sports prediction site. Prediction markets have become ubiquitous.
So to start, how are prediction markets being defined? How do they differ or not from sports betting and gambling, and how are they similar?
KK: OK, you’re starting off with a very hard question because—
JW: It’s a big question. [Laughter.]
KK: There’s this huge, ongoing, multifaceted legal battle happening in the United States right now to define prediction markets. So what the federal government and the prediction markets think is these are regulated financial instruments that are traded on regulated financial exchanges. This view of prediction markets perceives them as a cousin to traditional commodities exchanges — except instead of trading corn futures, you’re trading futures on who’s going to win the Super Bowl, who’s going to win the presidential election, whether Iran is going to nuke anyone.
“They want to commodify absolutely everything in the world.”
It’s just this idea that these are financial markets for anything. Kalshi actually means, I believe, “everything” in Arabic. And the idea behind the platform is that they want to commodify absolutely everything in the world.
Now, a lot of states have seen this and gone, “OK, wait, but you’re also allowing people to trade futures on the outcome of sports events. That’s just sports gambling, and we want the tax money. And we don’t think that the federal government should be able to just give you carte blanche to operate in our states without our permission, without you having to abide by state gambling laws.”
There’s honestly dozens and dozens of lawsuits to the point where I don’t have the exact figure. It’s upwards of 50. So at the moment, the status quo is that they’re “financial exchanges.” Whether that will change and they’ll be reclassified as gambling platforms remains to be seen and will likely go to the Supreme Court.
To make matters even more confusing — there are two main prediction markets right now, Kalshi and Polymarket. Kalshi is a federally regulated exchange in the United States. Polymarket has Polymarket U.S., which is a federally regulated exchange with the United States.
But Polymarket’s flagship product, like what you’re probably thinking of — the website polymarket.com — that people go on and trade about the Iran war? That is an offshore, unregulated exchange that Americans are actually banned from using, even though it’s headquartered in America and heavily promoted in America.
So it’s actually in its own weird regulatory gray zone right now, and I think there are intentions to bring the entire exchange back into the U.S., but right now, the main Polymarket is not supposed to be accessed by people in the U.S. It doesn’t have the “Know Your Customer” regulations that something like Kalshi does, so people can trade anonymously, and it’s just sort of a different beast. So there’s that layer that makes things even more confusing.
JW: From your perspective, what is the difference between placing a bet on who wins the Super Bowl on something like DraftKings, and making a prediction on something like the Super Bowl? Understanding that, yeah, this is complicated, but what is the difference between those two things?
KK: It’s complicated on a technical level in that when you’re placing a bet on something like DraftKings — DraftKings has a house, so you are giving money to the platform.
And with prediction markets, you’re supposed to be trading with another person. It’s supposed to be peer to peer, and that’s why it’s allegedly more like a financial exchange.
In practice, though, if I’m betting that the Bears win, and they win, I make money either way. Functionally, for most regular people who are using these platforms, there’s not much of a difference at all.
JW: I want to get into some of the impacts and some of the potential harm, but first, you alluded to some of these state fights, and so I wanted to get into one of them in Texas and how these prediction markets are responding.
On Monday, the New York Times reported that the founders of Kalshi, the prediction market platform, dropped $200,000 into a new Texas-focused PAC.
The state has some of the strictest gambling laws in the country, where it’s pretty much illegal outside of the state lottery and some animal races. Kalshi’s founders’ contributions come one week after Texas lawmakers held a hearing to investigate whether prediction platforms like Kalshi are actually just gambling sites.
What is known about how these companies are trying to influence lawmakers and shape policies that are going to affect their bottom line?
KK: Kalshi in particular is making an extremely concentrated push into political lobbying. It has a murderers’ row of lawyers — many of whom come from the Biden administration — fighting to ensure that it stays a federally regulated financial exchange and doesn’t get reclassified as gambling. It is basically continually hiring different comms people and lobbyists who come from D.C. and know how to get things done.
There are a few different organizations that it’s associated with, in addition to the PACs that it’s giving money to. One is called the Coalition for Prediction Markets, and that does a lot of advocacy work on behalf of regulated exchanges, really trying to ensure there’s a bipartisan coalition that approves of these markets being regulated like financial exchanges.
It’s also worth mentioning, right now, the company has pretty deep pockets. Both Kalshi and Polymarket are tech unicorns at this point. They have a lot of money to spend, and they realize that this is an existential fight. They are willing to put everything on the line and as much money as necessary on the line to ensure that they have the right people in Washington advocating on their behalf.
JW: I want to get into who they have in Washington a little bit more and what’s going on with the federal government in this regard. But I also want to talk about their potential impact on the midterms.
You reported in August that “election officials are preparing for prediction markets to sow chaos in the midterms.” You spoke to election officials across the country for that story. What did you hear from them? What are their major concerns?
KK: There’s a lot of concern about this. One of the main concerns is actually not directly tied to how the markets are resolved. So it wouldn’t be tied to how, for example, Kalshi or Polymarket called an election — but it’s tied to how these platforms currently use social media.
Both of the prediction markets have very popular X accounts and social media accounts, and they really use them like they are more traditional media companies. There’s a lot of breaking, scoop. There’s all of these news summaries blasted out to millions of followers. There have already been some cases where the way that these prediction markets have been updating their followers has been confusing or misleading for voters. They’ve made social media posts that implied that a race was over when it wasn’t.
“A lot of people are more distrustful about election integrity than ever.”
There’s concern that their social media presences will be a disruptive force. Right now, when we’re in a moment where a lot of people are more distrustful about election integrity than ever. If a candidate that someone has put money on them winning ends up losing, but then one of these prediction markets sent out a tweet two hours before the polls closed, implied that it was a sure thing — that that could anger the electorate to the point where poll workers would be in jeopardy, or there would just be even more rancor and discord and distrust of the election process. That’s one of their concerns.
Another major concern is that there could be market manipulation in some of the markets that are directly tied to elections. We’ve already seen — Kalshi has caught politicians trading on their races. None of them were really successful in moving the odds for a long period of time or anything. But there’s still a risk, especially on Polymarket offshore where people can trade semi-anonymously, that there could be bad actors coming in deliberately trying to manipulate the markets in a way that, again, would make the wagering electorate very angry when they ended up losing money on races that they thought they would win, in part because the markets were manipulated to make them think they would win.
There are a few different reasons why people are really concerned. Then there’s the overarching concern that encouraging people to gamble on the elections is going to change their relationship with the electoral process in a very detrimental way to society. It’s not tied to any one specific race, but more of a general, “This is degrading our democracy just by commodifying electoral races in this way.” I honestly think that that’s the one that I’m the most on board with as a real threat.
“There’s the overarching concern that … ‘This is degrading our democracy just by commodifying electoral races in this way.’”
JW: These platforms are partnering with traditional media as well. Your reporting has shown, and other reporting as well, that we’re seeing these partnerships between Polymarket and Dow Jones and Substack; Kalshi has deals with CNN, CNBC, and Fox.
What is known about how these partnerships and how the data from Polymarket and Kalshi are being integrated into news coverage? Does this give them an air of legitimacy that maybe is unearned?
KK: I think that striking these deals was such a huge coup for these companies, and it really did a lot to establish credibility that they might otherwise not have at all with the general population.
“Striking these [media] deals was such a huge coup for these companies, and it really did a lot to establish credibility.”
If you flip around, I’ve been waking up super early with my baby and turning on [CNBC’s] “Squawk Box” — because I hate myself, I guess [laughs]. And I’m always amazed: They are constantly bringing up Kalshi. The Kalshi odds are another part of the program in the same way that like the stock market ticker is. It’s really just considered another signal to tell people about what’s going on with the world, what’s going on with different markets — and they’re not being treated as experimental things at all at this point by very mainstream organizations like CNBC, CNN, Dow Jones.
I’m sure there’s going to be more partnerships inked by the time the year is up, too. I have been following the enmeshment between prediction markets and the media very closely because I think it’s flown under the radar a little bit while all of these regulatory fights have been going on, just how quickly the prediction markets managed to establish themselves as another source of truth about what’s potentially happening in the world.
They’re not inaccurate; they’re not more inaccurate than polling in many cases. I think there are many reasonable arguments to be made that these can be sources of information that have use cases. That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in writing about them, to be honest, is because I do think that they’re fascinating signals about public sentiment.
That said, they are still so new, and the way that they are operating is still in this murky regulatory gray area. It just boggles my mind that they’ve managed to just become part of the financial news establishment in the way that they have.
“They’re not being treated as experimental things at all at this point by very mainstream organizations like CNBC, CNN.”
JW: In that vein, I wanted to talk about a really interesting story you published on Monday, about a new prediction market — Verifact Markets — which allows users to essentially place predictions on facts, like where the Covid-19 virus originated from, and whether the moon landing was staged.
You spoke to tech investor, Peter Wokwicz, whose family office Positron Capital Management, is funding and incubating the start-up, writing that Wokwicz, “envisions the startup as a way to settle debates over hot-button issues like the amount of energy consumed by AI data centers.”
How does predicting on a fact even work, and should prediction markets be in the business of adjudicating reality?
KK: Such an interesting question, and it’s just such a bonkers startup. I get a lot of pitches from startups in the prediction market space in my inbox at this point, and most of them I just ignore for my own sanity. This one was so off-the-wall that I had to speak to them, and I had to know more about how this would actually play out, because it’s such a zany concept.
I still have a lot of questions because, as I laid out in the piece, they’re pretty unwilling to give potential users or the media any specifics about how they’ll ultimately resolve the markets.
My first question was, “OK, well, if somebody wanted to prove a point, they could just put a bunch of money on whatever their desired outcome would be, and then point to that and say, ‘See, I was right.’”
And the Verifacts team was quick to assure me that they weren’t actually going to resolve the markets based on the outcome of the markets alone. It was going to be how people were trading on them and the odds. Then they were going to use some sort of proprietary, AI-flavored system to adjudicate the truth.
JW: Of course.
KK: There was a lot of hand-waving going on. The market just opened, so we’ll see, first of all, if anyone’s going to use it, and second of all, whether they’re actually going to be able to clear up any of the long-standing mysteries or debates about conspiracy theories that are ongoing, because it seems like an extremely tall order.
A friend of mine texted me after I published that article and was like, “I think we just had our Pets.com moment for the prediction market space.” This specific startup is really indicative of how frothy the bubble is right now. You’re just rolling out a prediction market for the past, and people are seemingly OK with it.
We’ll see if they actually manage to do that. I definitely don’t think that a world in which Verifact markets will be able to adjudicate contentious specifics about reality would be good, but I also am very skeptical that that will actually happen.
JW: That’s a fair point. Reading the article, which is really well-written and interesting by the way, I thought it was a very good catch when you pointed out that it would be a very big deal if they could figure out what actually caused the Covid-19 virus, if they could give a definitive answer, and you’re like, “Well, major news outlets are really interested in some of these questions.”
I did want to get into some of the possible harms here though. Prediction markets obviously want to distinguish themselves from sports betting, but people suffering from gambling addictions and the clinicians who treat them have said both produce the same results. That’s according to reporting from The Associated Press earlier this year.
“There may be real differences in how these products are defined or regulated, but in the therapy room, we are often seeing the same cycle of anticipation, action and reaction play out again and again.” That’s what Dr. Cynthia Grant told the AP. She’s the vice president of clinical for Birches Health, which operates a national network of providers for treating gambling addiction.
Kate, what have you found in your reporting? Do they really differ in terms of promoting addictive tendencies?
KK: No, I don’t think so. I’ve talked to some people who are working in the addiction space to try to get some clarification about whether there’s a big difference, for example, in demographics of people who are coming in with problematic behaviors in prediction markets versus traditional sportsbooks.
I haven’t actually written anything about it yet because I’ve been still gathering thread, but what I’ve found so far is that there’s a ton of overlap. One therapist I spoke to noted that they anecdotally have seen more women who have been coming in with problematic behaviors tied to prediction markets versus traditional sportsbooks.
It’s still really something that predominantly affects young men. The prediction markets, even while they’re having these battles and insisting that they’re financial instruments, have at least nodded towards the reality that the way that people use their products has a lot in common with gambling and wagering.
They’ve come up with different guardrails. Both sportsbooks and prediction markets now offer people an opportunity to self-exclude. So if you basically want to ban yourself from something like DraftKings, you can, and now from something like Kalshi, you can. Which obviously is a good start, but it doesn’t resolve the baseline fact that what they’re offering is something that is speculative, and you’re putting money on the line.
For many people, it can be fun and entertaining in the same way that people wagering small sums of money on football games in traditional sportsbooks can be fun and entertaining. But there’s inevitably always going to be a portion of the population that struggles with addictive behaviors, and the way that these platforms incentivize risky financial choices.
As they grow even more and more mainstream, inevitably that’s going to mean that there’s going to be more and more people who struggle with that kind of behavior. I don’t know if there’s any version of these products that’s going to exist that can do away with that kind of harm altogether.
I really perceive these platforms, both sportsbooks and prediction markets, they’re vice platforms at heart — in the same way that alcohol can be fun for a lot of people, but then drinking is deeply addictive behavior for others, and there’s no inventing a healthy alcohol. There’s no inventing a type of prediction market or sportsbook or stock exchange that doesn’t have some portion of the people using it displaying really problematic behaviors.
“Alcohol can be fun for a lot of people, but then drinking is deeply addictive behavior for others, and there’s no inventing a healthy alcohol.”
JW: It sounds like what you’re saying is that these are almost like the flavored vapes of the online world, in some way, where it’s like, “Oh, it’s so safe,” and now all of the kids are smoking these vapes.
KK: Yes.
JW: There’s something similar about it. And there’s a ubiquitousness about it that feels really different, too. What you just said about women being more pulled in, potentially — obviously, we don’t know that research yet — that makes sense to me, only because I see the ads in a way that I never would get ads for sports betting.
Do you want to place a bet on “Dancing With the Stars”? Do you want to place a bet on whether or not Donald Trump’s tie is going to be this color that day? Things that are outside of the sports world that kind of appeal to a larger audience. That clearly seems to be the goal, like you said earlier.
KK: “Love Island” was a big one for a while, and “Survivor.” There are certain reality shows that have really robust markets, and I think that the people on them skew more female than they would versus a football market or basically anything happening on the sportsbook. So yeah, the ubiquity is crazy.
It’ll be interesting to see how long these platforms are able to cater to the 18-to-24[-year-old] crowd. There are some, Novig, for example, like the prediction market startup that Sydney Sweeney’s involved with, they are only 21+ and are positioning themselves as a more virtuous option because of that.
I could see regulators really pushing to raise the participation floor to 21. I don’t think that the other major players are going to do it voluntarily. But, yeah, just how rampant this seems on college campuses doesn’t seem great.
JW: It’s hard to argue that. And when we’re also talking about the harm of these platforms, I think it’s important to also talk about who is propping them up.
I know earlier we got a little bit into who was behind these real attempts to limit regulation. Of course, the elephant in the room here is that these industries have exploded in an environment where a 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the floodgate to legalized sports betting, and you also have a president and his family fully invested in the prediction market industry succeeding.
When it comes to the legal battles to regulate companies like Polymarket and Kalshi, the Trump administration is backing the prediction market operators, fighting the states who are at minimum trying to enforce some regulations or outright ban them where sports betting and gambling is illegal.
Can you talk more about this tension and the stakeholders who in particular have a lot to gain by limiting regulations on these industries?
“Any conversation about what’s going on with prediction markets in the U.S. right now needs to have a big disclaimer: Donald Trump Jr. is a huge investor in Polymarket.”
KK: I think that any conversation about what’s going on with prediction markets in the U.S. right now needs to have a big disclaimer: Donald Trump Jr. is a huge investor in Polymarket. His VC firm, 1789 Capital, just became the lead investor for Polymarket’s latest fundraising round. He’s, in addition to that, also a paid adviser to Kalshi.
In addition to that, Trump Media was planning on launching its own prediction market. It walked that back a little, and now it just has this weird partnership with crypto.com. But Donald Trump Jr. is very involved in this industry, and stands to gain a lot from prediction markets being able to operate as they desire and not be beholden to various state regulations that they’re currently not beholden to. It’s the fact that it’s coloring everything that’s going on here.
I am very interested in what is going to happen in this space when we have a different administration. Kalshi is seeming to hedge its bets by aggressively hiring former Biden administration stars, or people affiliated with the Biden administration, or Democratic politicians.
Will that be enough? I don’t know. But yeah, at the moment, the very explicit financial ties that the Trump family has to the leading players in this world seem to be directing how easily it’s been for them to explode in popularity.
JW: With all of that said, with the Trump family’s interest, with the fact that these companies know that they need to get in good with Democrats as things go forward, where is this going to go?
Where do these platforms go from here? Do you see them massively expanding? Do you really see any kind of effort at regulation? I frankly, five years ago, could not have predicted that I would be interviewing people about prediction markets and sports betting as this kind of major force. Where do we go from here?
KK: Right now, almost everyone I talk to who is a legal expert paying attention to the regulatory battles is expecting the Supreme Court to end up taking one of these cases — and most of the cases are specifically about whether the sports markets are gambling or not.
“Prediction markets are here to stay as part of the fabric of the speculative economy. They are the inheritors to the commodities trade.”
It’s really unclear how they will land on that, so there is a world in which the sports markets end up getting reclassified as gambling. I definitely don’t think that these markets are going away, by any means. Prediction markets are here to stay as part of the fabric of the speculative economy. They are the inheritors to the commodities trade.
Kalshi and Polymarket are often described as arch-rivals, and they are, but they’re also gunning for CME Group and more traditional financial institutions. So, we’ll see. I do think that we will probably get more guardrails at some point, I hope, but not until a new administration comes in.
If the Supreme Court ends up siding with state regulators and reclassifying the sports markets, that will have a pretty big impact on the bottom lines of these companies, because right now the war markets and some of the more controversial geopolitical markets get a lot of attention, but most retail traders are using these to bet on sports. So yeah, I think they’re not going away. They might be reined in, but not in the near term.
JW: Sounds like we have a lot to watch out for. We’re going to leave it there. Kate, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. You can find more of Kate Knibbs’s reporting at Wired.
KK: Thanks so much for having me.
JW: That does it for this episode.
We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com, or leave us a voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.
This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow. Slip Stream provided our theme music.
This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join.
And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners find our reporting.
Why Should Delaware Care? Electricity costs have risen sharply across the country and in Delaware in recent years, primarily because of the growing demand for power from data centers. Gov. Matt Meyer’s veto of a bill regulating third-party electric suppliers shows a split in how Delaware officials think about spiking prices in one corner of the market.
Last year, outgoing Rep. Debra Heffernan (D-Bellefonte) heard from constituents whose electric bills had skyrocketed after signing up to buy power from companies other than Delmarva Power.
The stories were all similar, she said. Salespeople from third-party electricity suppliers promised a discounted rate, but her constituents did not know it was just temporary. So they signed on for a gift card or a rebate on their power bill, without realizing it locked them into a contract with another supplier.
When they figured it out, they then faced cancellation fees and other barriers to ending the contract.
“And now they were being taken advantage of. Their power bill was more expensive than it had been before,” Heffernan said.
Other lawmakers heard similar stories, and in response Delaware legislators last spring overwhelmingly passed Heffernan’s House Bill 393.
The bill would have required third-party suppliers to charge the same or less than Delmarva Power had over the preceding year, unless they were offering all renewable energy. Delmarva Power operates as the regulated monopoly in much of Delaware.
The bill also would have prohibited cancellation fees, required customer signatures for rate changes and mandated monthly reports showing how much the companies charged.
But last week Gov. Matt Meyer vetoed that legislation. He said he supports the consumer protection elements of it, but argued that the price cap would have squashed competition, which could ultimately raise electricity prices.
Delaware Gov. Matt Meyer said he wanted to keep competition in the state’s energy market. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY TIM CARLIN
He pointed to a recent bill in Maryland as a cautionary tale. Third-party electric suppliers left the state after it passed.
“Delaware families are already being squeezed by rising electric bills, and the last thing we should do is take away their choices and strengthen Delmarva’s monopoly,” Meyer said in a statement.
The veto of HB 393 highlights a larger national debate about the role of third-party electricity suppliers in states with highly regulated electricity markets. While those suppliers say they provide alternatives to monopoly utilities, critics argue that third-party providers generally charge higher rates and should be prevented from doing so.
Limiting consumer choice or lowering prices?
Proponents argue that third-party electric suppliers often charge a higher rate because regulated utilities, such as Delmarva Power, can’t profit off of supplying energy.
Instead, Delmarva Power earns a legally guaranteed profit from upgrades to the infrastructure needed to get electricity from power plants to homes and businesses. What the utility charges its customers for electricity is the same amount as its cost to purchase it from power generators.
Third-party suppliers can purchase and sell electricity differently than Delmarva Power. Sometimes they generate their own electricity, which Delmarva can’t do. Sometimes they offer long-term contracts that lock in a price for months or even years, while Delmarva’s rate changes based on current market conditions.
Laurel Peltier, chair of the Maryland Energy Advocates Coalition, pointed to her analysis showing that Delaware residents using third-party suppliers paid on average 34% more for electricity.
Peltier said the companies often attract customers with low upfront rates, then raise them later and make it difficult to cancel. Sometimes, they target low-income families who don’t have time or the resources to research the contracts, she said.
“It’s knowingly taking advantage of an uninformed marketplace and monetizing inattention,” Peltier said.
The price cap in House Bill 393 was meant to address that by forcing third-party suppliers to charge the same or a lower price as Delmarva Power had over the preceeding year.
But Frank Caliva, spokesperson for the advocacy group Retail Energy Supply Association, which advocates on behalf of third-party suppliers, said the price cap is unfair to companies whose business models work differently.
The cost of electricity has risen throughout the country in recent years. | PHOTO COURTESY OF UNSPLASH
Prices from third-party suppliers are forward-looking, making it impossible to compete if they are limited to price levels from the previous year, he said. And some customers may want the peace of mind that a fixed rate brings, even if it is higher than the current average price.
“We’re talking about different products, and we’re trying to compare them as if they’re the same product,” he said.
Meyer wrote a two-page letter to the Delaware General Assembly explaining his veto of HB 393. He raised similar points about third-party suppliers being unable to compete and the value of a fixed rate.
Malcolm Augustine, Maryland’s Senate President Pro Tem and prime sponsor of his state’s bill, said he heard stories similar to those told to Heffernan about constituents unwittingly signing up for higher electric bills. So he shepherded legislation through Maryland’s General Assembly that had a similar price cap.
Many third-party electric suppliers stopped offering services to households in Maryland almost immediately after it took effect. And that sparked anger among some residents about losing their choice of where to buy electricity.
Maryland’s legislature recently raised the price cap, allowing third-party suppliers to charge 10% more than regulated utilities, to account for the different price structure.
The suppliers have not yet returned, although the change only took effect at the beginning of this month.
Caliva, the industry spokesperson, said he doesn’t think any price cap can work because the third-party suppliers are taking on the risk of losing profits if the price of energy goes higher than anticipated.
“There’s not really a number at which it [a price cap] makes sense because we don’t know what the market is going to do,” he said.
Rep. Debra Heffernan (D-Bellefonte) said she wouldn’t care if third-party suppliers left because of the legislation, saying their practices take advantage of the unwitting public. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JACOB OWENS
Asked if he thinks his bill was a success, Augustine said yes, even if the third-party suppliers don’t come back to the state.
Heffernan said she also would not mind if third-party electric suppliers decided to leave the state entirely because of the price cap.
“If they don’t want to be here because we’re trying to make them follow rules, then I don’t think we want them in Delaware,” she said.
Augustine also warned against relying on consumer protection measures to resolve the issue, as Meyer suggested. He said he tried to make similar reforms for six years before deciding to add the price cap to his bill.
“I got nothing but lip service after lip service after lip service,” he said.
Samuel A. Alito Jr., who has often been in the shadow of other conservative justices, has taken on new prominence as a champion for the president’s policies.
Storm expected to make landfall on US’s northern Gulf coast with risk of flash floods and isolated river flooding
Isaias has become the first Atlantic hurricane of the 2026 season, with wind speeds of 80mph and a minimum pressure of 975mb. It is expected to strengthen to a category 2 hurricane as it approaches the US’s northern Gulf coast on Friday, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
As a result of the strong El Niño, it has been a notably quiet Atlantic hurricane season. The first hurricane of the season has not formed this late since 8 October 1905, which pre-dates the satellite era (1960s) for tracking hurricanes that has allowed for more non-landfall hurricanes to be discovered.
Europe, Brazil and beyond: Is the populist wave gathering momentum?Audiosseth.drupal@c…
In this week’s episode of Independent Thinking, our experts discuss the expected shift to the right in Spain, France, Germany and Brazil’s upcoming elections.
The rightward movement in democracies in Europe and beyond shows little sign of slowing. Germany has elected its first far-right regional government in Saxony-Anhalt. In France, voter anger with Emmanuel Macron puts the Rassemblement National’s Marine Le Pen in pole position for the presidency. In Spain, Pedro Sánchez called a snap election in an attempt to mobilise the beleaguered left around Spain’s housing crisis. And Flávio Bolsonaro’s success in the first round of Brazil’s presidential elections suggests a second round of anti-woke, pro-Trump bolsonarismo is on the cards. What is driving politics to the populist right? And what does it mean for global security, stability and efforts to preserve what’s left of the rules-based order?
Bronwen Maddox is joined by Grégoire Roos, director of our Europe and Russia and Eurasia Programmes; Nic Lawley, special adviser to the director of Chatham House; and Dr Christopher Sabatini, director of our Latin America Programme.
About Independent Thinking
Independent Thinking is a weekly international affairs podcast hosted by our director Bronwen Maddox, in conversation with leading policymakers, journalists and Chatham House experts providing insight on the latest international issues.
Attack is deadliest in kingdom since it launched major military offensive with allies against Houthis in Yemen
Three Saudi citizens have been killed and several other people were wounded in attacks targeting Riyadh airport for which Yemen’s Houthis claimed responsibility, Saudi officials have said.
The attack late on Thursday was the deadliest in Saudi Arabia since the kingdom and allied forces in neighbouring Yemen launched a major military offensive last weekend against the Iran-backed Houthis.
Pete Hegseth has said the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, will be a public event when the sentence is carried out later this year. A defence department official later confirmed the execution would be livestreamed. In an interview with the rightwing channel Real America’s Voice, the defence secretary said the firing squad would carry out the sentence at Fort Hood, Texas on 3 December. It would be the first US military execution in more than 60 years
A 12-year-old child opens the curtains of a hotel room in Tempe, Arizona, where she, her mother and four siblings were staying earlier this year while experiencing homelessness. The room was funded in part by AZ Hugs, which helps families with emergency shelter.
A decade ago, nonprofit leaders in Arizona’s most populous county boasted that they had created the Amazon of homeless service systems. Families in crisis would no longer have to contact a dozen agencies in search of shelter or housing. A single system could point them to help.
But for all the hype, this system has become a dead end for many families. A 2023 evaluation found 94% of people who were assessed for housing help by the system didn’t receive it. And that didn’t account for parents who were unable to connect with a worker to see if they qualified for assistance.
Families say it hasn’t improved.
In interviews, 30 families that are homeless told ProPublica that calling the hotline, meeting with outreach workers or showing up at shelters rarely results in offers of help. Some families said they called 211 multiple times without being connected to the homeless response system for families, known as the Family Housing Hub. Others, who said they were sleeping in cars or outdoors, said they couldn’t get a spot on the waitlist for shelter.
The system has returned to what it was a decade ago, with families calling as many shelters as they can, repeating the very situation the hub was intended to fix.
Those who did make it onto the hub’s waitlist said they were left guessing how long it would take to get help. Some said operators told them to sleep in their cars.
Vanessa Lopez said she experienced this frustration after leaving a hostile relationship in the spring. While she and her two children stayed with a friend, Lopez said she repeatedly contacted 211, which functions as a referral service for the hub, hoping it would lead to shelter for her family.
Her friend eventually asked them to leave. Overwhelmed by the stress of not knowing where to take her family, Lopez took a leave from her job. By then, she said, she’d called 211 at least five times.
Yet no matter how dire her situation became, it still took months to get on the waitlist for shelter. During one call she said she broke down in tears, frustrated that others seemed to get help but she could not. She wondered if she needed to be addicted to drugs to receive assistance.
“It’s not me telling you no,” she said the operator told her. “It’s the system.”
Monique Lopez, the CEO of United Methodist Outreach Ministries, known as UMOM, which runs the Family Housing Hub and the shelter waitlist, acknowledged the frustrations of people like Vanessa Lopez (no relation). But before UMOM offers callers shelter or a spot on the waitlist, the organization first tries to help them find other options.
“We don’t start the conversation with, ‘Hey, do you want to get on the shelter waitlist?’” Monique Lopez said. “It really is ‘Let’s try to figure your situation out first.’”
Lopez attributed some frustrations to the number of organizations offering assistance through the hub. Each shelter has its own rules, and some families may not meet the requirements of every program.
To address the confusion, UMOM updated its website to provide more information about the homeless response system for families, she said. The federally funded system, known as Coordinated Entry, mandates that providers use an assessment to prioritize scarce housing.
“It’s not me telling you no. It’s the system.”
211 operator
But families told ProPublica that the process in Maricopa County often leaves them confused and hopeless. Family homelessness in the county has risen to its highest level in more than a decade, while every shelter is full and housing vouchers are scarce. In 2025, there were 630 units of shelter and transitional housing for families in the county, down from 769 the year before, according to the most recent federal data.
Monique Lopez acknowledged that family shelters are full, leaving few good options. “People are living in unsafe and unstable situations while waiting just to get into emergency shelter,” she said.
The process, experts said, shouldn’t leave people wondering if there is help and what it takes to get it.
“You have to have some kind of method for setting priorities when there aren’t enough resources to go around,” said Marybeth Shinn, an expert on family homelessness at Vanderbilt University. “The process should be transparent. People should know if they’re on a waitlist.”
UMOM and other Maricopa County nonprofits launched the Family Housing Hub in 2014, after years of planning and strategizing over how to end family homelessness in the county that is home to Phoenix. As they envisioned it, families would meet with a worker at UMOM who could match them with the best solution for their situation.
At the time, there was a national push to create these local systems. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2012 asked communities to establish a Coordinated Entry system. By 2018, the agency required it in order to receive housing and homelessness grants. The mandates coincided with a Barack Obama-era plan to end family homelessness by 2020. (That did not happen.)
Experts said the systems were set up without evidence they would be effective. When researchers did look at Coordinated Entry — in a 2021 study of single adults — they found issues similar to those now faced by families in Maricopa County, including concerns about fairness and a lack of transparency. People didn’t understand the screening process and generally received vague explanations about how their information would be used to decide if they would get help.
As Maricopa County nonprofit leaders developed their system for families, they also pledged to provide a “rapid response without waiting lists” to immediately meet the needs of any family asking for help.
People line up at what is known as “The Hill” in Tempe, Arizona, to receive food from volunteers with the organization AZ Hugs, which serves unhoused residents throughout the city.
The county saw a decline in family homelessness from 2015 to 2019. But then the numbers began to rise, even as the stock of emergency shelter increased. During the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts to address the problem began to fray. The group of nonprofit leaders, which called itself “Standing Strong for Families,” stopped meeting regularly. Arizona, along with other Sun Belt states, also saw an increase in housing prices. With one of the lowest supplies of housing for low-income people in the country, eviction filings began to soar.
By 2023, only 6% of families that were assessed by Maricopa County’s homeless response system received help with permanent housing, according to an analysis of three years of enrollment data from the system and interviews with providers and people who had sought housing assistance.
The evaluation, by Homebase, a nonprofit consulting group, was requested and paid for by the Maricopa Association of Governments, which provides staffing for the regional response to homelessness.
Homebase concluded the system for single adults who are homeless was accessible, but the family system was not. Across the system, auditors said, families encountered a “breakdown in communication” and a “lack of transparency.”
Ashley Oakley, UMOM’s chief development officer, said in a statement that the evaluation reflects a gap between the need in the community and the housing that’s available. Oakley called it “one of the biggest challenges” facing those who are working on family homelessness in Maricopa County.
To decide who gets onto the housing list, workers with the Family Housing Hub conduct an assessment of vulnerability, which assigns a score based on how long a person has been homeless and whether they have a disability. That score helps determine eligibility and priority for housing programs, Oakley said.
Nonprofit leaders recently developed a new evaluation. Before it was implemented over the summer, testing had showed it didn’t fully account for the vulnerabilities of families and needed more changes. Now, for example, households with children under 6 receive a higher score, making it more likely they can get help.
Any family sleeping in a place not meant for “habitation” or in a dangerous situation is eligible for shelter, said UMOM’s Oakley. To remain on the shelter waitlist, families must check in weekly and say where they slept the previous night. Staying in a hotel for a night should not “by itself” remove a family from the waitlist, Oakley said.
But families told ProPublica that they had been removed from the waitlist because they stayed in a hotel. (UMOM said it is reviewing its process to make sure check-ins are handled “consistently.”)
Families in dire situations may not get help, said Richard Southee, a regional executive director at Central Arizona Shelter Services, the largest shelter provider in Arizona. Southee also works on a committee that oversees Maricopa County’s response to homelessness.
That’s in part because the federal government has focused funding on more noticeable forms of homelessness, such as people living in encampments. Homeless families are typically less visible and move more frequently. They couch surf, stay in hotels or do other things to avoid drawing the attention of the Arizona Department of Child Safety. Child welfare officials sometimes consider a lack of shelter to be evidence of child neglect, along with other factors.
“We’re deciding who’s going to be at the back of the line, and we as a nation really have said people who are not chronically homeless are going to be at the back of the line,” Southee said. “You have to stay homeless to get to the front, and that’s a design choice.”
Felicia Vela and her two children were kicked out of a guest house they were renting in February, text messages from that time show. She said she searched online for help and was repeatedly directed to 211 for “emergency shelter,” which she called at least twice and explained her situation: She had stashed her belongings in a storage unit, text messages show, and was staying at a hotel that she couldn’t afford for much longer.
There was nothing immediately available, she said operators told her, with one saying the waitlist was closed and the other telling her it could take six months to a year to get shelter. (UMOM said to protect the privacy of clients, it does not comment on individual families. The organization also said that the waitlist does not close.)
When Vela didn’t have anywhere to go, she slept in her car while her children stayed with a friend. She tried to make extra money by donating plasma, but her blood pressure was too high.
Vela, who works a warehouse job, moved into an apartment with the help of a local nonprofit that is not associated with the hub, but she’s now fallen behind on rent and is facing eviction. Her car broke down, and she can’t get to work. She started calling 211 again, seeking rental assistance.
“It’s like I can’t get a break,” she said.
Every January, volunteers in cities across the country spend one night trying to count people who are homeless. In Maricopa County, the 2026 count showed the number of people in homeless families, at 2,103, was the highest it had been since 2015. The survey is considered an undercount, especially for families.
Over the summer, the waitlist for shelter ballooned to more than 200 families. It takes about seven weeks for those on the list to get shelter, according to UMOM.
Some families interviewed by ProPublica said they waited longer. And more people are entering the system than leaving it, delaying help for newly homeless families.
In Maricopa County, 139 units of shelter for families closed from 2024 to 2025, after COVID-19 pandemic relief funds expired. The state also cut $867,000 in funding to help families get into housing quickly. It had helped about 40 families.
As families wait, they have searched for other ways to access the homeless service system.
Some go to one of the city of Phoenix’s heat relief centers, inside a 21,000-square-foot former charter school. City officials said the number of families seeking help has doubled from a year ago. Some families said they were able to immediately get shelter through the workers there.
After city officials learned a local advocate, Austin Davis, was sending families to the center to receive shelter, he said they asked him to stop sending families.
Davis runs a local nonprofit that helps families like Vela’s find emergency shelter. He said his interactions with hundreds of families over the past year have shown the official channels to shelter are “too complicated.” Calling weekly to stay on the waitlist is time-consuming. The families are already managing day-to-day responsibilities while trying to resolve an overwhelming personal crisis, he said.
“The system is really designed to run people in circles until they either give up or hit enough roadblocks where they can’t continue,” Davis said.
Davis crowdsources donations to put the families in hotel rooms on and off for days, weeks or sometimes months.
Ebony embraces her daughter inside the hotel room where she was staying with five of her kids.
Ebony, a single mother of six who has breast cancer, needed longer-term help. She lost her job as a security guard this year after a chemotherapy treatment caused her to faint as she was about to begin her shift, she said.
In April, she lost her apartment. Ebony, who asked that her last name not be used to protect future job opportunities, said she called every number she could find looking for help, including 211. Eventually she was placed on the waitlist, but that didn’t solve her immediate problem of where to sleep.
She and her children stayed in hotel rooms until she ran out of cash. Then, she said, the family slept in an alley.
If a mother with breast cancer and young children sleeping outside was not vulnerable enough to get help, she wondered, who was?
The next day, she connected with Davis, who helped her pay for weeks of shelter. Then one morning she texted Davis with some good news.
She had met a pastor who helped her get into a local housing program. But she needed help for a few more days, until she could move into her new apartment.
To wake each day in darkness is a plight you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, yet that’s what many of us do routinely throughout winter. Getting up in the dark decouples our life from our circadian rhythm (our body clock), with bodily processes such as cognition and metabolism put to work before they’re fully prepped.
Thank heavens, then, for sunrise alarm clocks. These “dawn simulation” devices glow with gradually intensifying brightness as your wake-up time approaches, kickstarting your circadian rhythm before you get out of bed. For many users, this results in a happier, healthier start to the day.
Exclusive: Abena Oppong-Asare urges chancellor to unlock billions of pounds, as housing associations say they could build 41,000 homes in 10 years
The Labour chair of the Commons housing committee is urging John Healey to bring forward billions of pounds of planned spending on social and affordable homes in England, after housing associations said they were ready to build tens of thousands more.
Abena Oppong-Asare called for the chancellor to allocate money from the £39bn Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) as soon as possible, rather than after the election as planned.
PlayStation 5 (version played), Xbox, PC; Epic Games Publishing This fetchingly presented horror game brings style and scares, but overextends itself with repetition
A small band of soldiers enters an abandoned facility, where puckered flesh sprouts from cold steel. It’s a promising but familiar start to a sci-fi horror story, with heavy overtones of Alien and The Thing. Neither of those, though, were so … dinky.
End of Abyss’s facility is presented as a kind of a model-village recreation of The Thing’s Outpost 31 that you peer into from above. Your little bobble-headed hero takes up a tiny fraction of the screen, with most of the remainder drenched in foggy darkness, or even blanked out entirely. This is a world of Usborne-style cutaways, where anything outside the walls is total blackness.
Gulf officials say they are ready for storm but concerns raised about restructured agency’s ability to respond effectively
Gulf state officials say they are prepared for Hurricane Isaias, but the storm could be the first major test of Fema’s ability to deploy a large surge workforce after the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts and restructuring of the agency, emergency management experts say.
The Trump administration has said it wants to eliminate, or drastically downsize, Fema, putting more burden on states. More than 4,300 employees left the agency in fiscal year 2025, about 17% of the workforce, according to a recent US government accountability office (GAO) report. The agency’s staffing reductions were not carried out systematically to ensure Fema could still meet its statutory obligations, said Chris Currie, director of homeland security and justice at the GAO.
Last year, many of America’s largest health insurers vowed to reduce their use of prior authorization — the extra layer of approval insurers require before covering a medical expense. The industry’s pledge came after massive backlash to the process from patients, providers and politicians. ProPublica’s reporting has found it can delay or outright deny patients’ critical medical care.
Data as of last year shows the industry is still relying heavily on the approval process. Now, ProPublica is looking into the ways that insurers’ continued use of prior authorization is impacting patients. We need your help to figure out if prior authorization is still leading to delayed or missed treatments, tests, medical equipment or medication.
If you are covered by a plan through Medicaid, Medicare, Children’s Health Insurance Program, or the Affordable Care Act marketplace — and have had a prior authorization request delayed or denied — we want to hear from you. Your experiences help us better understand the real-life stakes of prior authorization. (For this investigation, we’re not seeking responses from people with insurance through their employer at this time.)
We’re also interested in hearing from people whose jobs provide insight into the inner workings of prior authorization, including medical providers and their staff, along with insurance company employees and regulators.
Our team may not be able to respond to everyone personally, but we will read everything you submit. We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story. We will not publish anything you send us without asking for additional consent.
A Slack workspace has served as a war room for AI industry insiders and Trump administration officials to launch a rapid campaign aimed at persuading Americans to manage their healthcare and medical records on apps.
Crystal Palace’s American import had never lived anywhere but Utah before moving to London. Now, he’s aiming for more Premier League minutes
Much has changed in Zavier Gozo’s life since May.
Back then, Gozo was a day removed from learning he wasn’t among Mauricio Pochettino’s 26 selections for the World Cup, having just made what proved to be his third-to-last appearance with boyhood club Real Salt Lake.
OpenAI has revealed that it is making about $20bn less in projected revenue than it had recently indicated to investors, raising questions about the break-neck growth rate in demand for AI.
The ChatGPT-maker company has told investors that its revenues for this year would reach $50bn (£37bn), a projection based on sales up to the end of September.
Robert Zoellick, an expert on the global economy who served as U.S. trade representative and World Bank president, makes the authoritative case that President Donald Trump’s antagonism toward Canada and Mexico is destroying an economic and security partnership that that enables the United States to project power globally.
Former President Barack Obama is throwing his support behind Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro's reelection campaign, as Obama steps up his involvement in key races ahead of the midterms.
Former Labour deputy leader says tech firm would work with a Reform UK government on immigration crackdowns
Tom Watson, the former Labour deputy leader who recently joined Palantir, has warned against “mob rule” when it comes to awarding public contracts.
Lord Watson, now a senior vice-president at the US tech corporation, said UK ministers could get themselves “in a lot of trouble” as he was questioned about concerns raised about the government working with his new employer.
"Margaret Hamilton, the groundbreaking researcher who helped create the field of software engineering and whose code helped land NASA's Apollo astronauts on the moon to win the 20th century space race, has died," writes longtime Slashdot reader Veeru. "She was 90." MIT News reports: A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO. Her life's work was recognized with many awards and honors, including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, whose citation noted: "Hamilton defined new forms of software engineering and helped launch an industry that would forever change human history. Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon." "To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer -- to say she was ahead of her time -- would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved," says Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim head of the MIT Department Aeronautics and Astronautics.
"The Apollo program still stands as one of our greatest testaments to the power of collaboration, ingenuity, and engineering, and Margaret Hamilton was a fundamental contributor to that program's success. And for her that was just the beginning! She went on to become an entrepreneur and remained on the cutting edge of systems software throughout an extraordinary career, while acting as an advocate, mentor, and inspiration to millions."
Global sportswear brand Adidas claims Australian label White Fox is trying to trade off its reputation by infringing its distinctive three-stripe trademark.
Adidas is suing the online fast-fashion retailer in the Federal Court for selling clothes with a four-stripe design, which it argues is deceptively similar to its classic design.
KAWASAKI, Japan, Oct. 8, 2026 — Fujitsu today announced a collaboration with New Mexico to establish a quantum computing research center in New Mexico.
The center will conduct advanced research spanning quantum computing hardware, software, algorithms, and theory, while supporting education and workforce-development initiatives designed to expand the quantum talent pipeline and strengthen collaboration across industry, academia, government, and the research community.
Left to right: Senator Michael Padilla, Cabinet Secretary New Mexico Economic Development Rob Black, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, Fujitsu CTO Vivek Mahajan and Senator George Muñoz
The initiative will bring together Fujitsu’s expertise in advanced computing and quantum technologies with New Mexico’s scientific and research ecosystem. Through research collaboration, internships, academic engagement, and other workforce-development programs, the center will help create new pathways for students, researchers, and engineers to participate in the emerging quantum economy. The collaboration also supports the State of New Mexico’s broader vision of building a more interconnected, innovative, and sustainable future through investments in advanced technologies and high-skilled industries.
New Mexico has emerged as an important center for quantum research and technology development. The State has committed US$150 million to support investments alongside companies seeking to establish or expand quantum computing operations and develop the broader quantum ecosystem in New Mexico. These efforts are intended to attract private-sector investment, create high-skilled jobs, strengthen workforce-development opportunities, and draw leading quantum talent to the state. Fujitsu and the State of New Mexico will explore opportunities to participate in and support these initiatives. As part of the collaboration, Fujitsu and the State will explore opportunities for joint research that leverage New Mexico’s concentration of scientific and academic institutions, including Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of New Mexico, and New Mexico State University.
Fujitsu and New Mexico State University (NMSU) already collaborate on research and development activities related to the FUJITSU-MONAKA CPU and associated high-performance computing solutions. Building on this existing relationship, Fujitsu and the State of New Mexico will explore opportunities to extend their collaboration into quantum computing and advanced hybrid computing infrastructure.
Fujitsu will also collaborate with the Quantum New Mexico Institute (QNMI) to explore mechanisms for expanding research partnerships and developing a center of activity focused on quantum algorithms and applications, quantum systems, and other areas of advanced quantum computing research.
The parties will examine the role of FUJITSU-MONAKA-based high-performance computing within a hybrid environment combining quantum computing, quantum simulation, AI, and classical high-performance computing. Hybrid computing is essential because practical quantum workloads require tight integration with classical systems for data preparation, large-scale simulation, optimization, control, error mitigation, and validation, while quantum processors are applied to computational tasks where they can provide unique advantages. This integrated approach can accelerate applications in materials and drug discovery, manufacturing, energy, financial services, and logistics as quantum systems progress toward fault-tolerant operation.
“Fujitsu’s decision to partner with New Mexico is more proof that our bet on quantum is paying off,” said Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. “By pairing Fujitsu’s global expertise with the strength of our universities, national laboratories, and research community, we’re building an ecosystem where quantum innovation can thrive.
“When I traveled to Japan to meet with business leaders and top government officials, I intended for those conversations to turn into partnerships, research and jobs back here at home,” Lujan Grisham added. “Today is a direct result of that work.”
“Fujitsu is uniquely positioned with technology and solution capabilities spanning microprocessors, high-performance computing, and quantum computing,” said Vivek Mahajan, Corporate Executive Officer, Corporate Vice President, CTO, in charge of System Platform, Fujitsu Limited. “The establishment of a quantum computing research center in New Mexico represents an important opportunity to expand our research activities and accelerate the development of next-generation quantum technologies. By bringing together hardware, software, and applications research, the center can advance critical work in quantum system design, engineering, and validation, while developing innovative algorithms for high-impact applications in areas such as chemistry, materials science, advanced energy, and other strategically important fields.”
Through the collaboration, Fujitsu aims to create a strong foundation for long-term quantum research and innovation, connecting fundamental science with technology development, workforce creation, and future commercial applications.
About Fujitsu
Fujitsu’s purpose is to make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation. As the digital transformation partner of choice for customers around the globe, our 100,000 employees work to resolve some of the greatest challenges facing humanity. Our range of services and solutions draw on five key technologies: AI, Computing, Networks, Data & Security, and Converging Technologies, which we bring together to deliver sustainability transformation. Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) reported consolidated revenues of 3.5 trillion yen (US$23 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2026 and remains the top digital services company in Japan by market share.
Candidates traded personal attacks and clashed over a range of issues in closely watched US Senate debates on Thursday, with control of Congress at stake
With just weeks left in the contentious midterm election campaign, candidates in a trio of highly-competitive Senate races debated Thursday night, clashing over the economy, tariffs, the Iran war and abortion rights, with control of the upper chamber at stake.
In Georgia, incumbent Democratic senator Jon Ossoff faced GOP representative Mike Collins. In Michigan, Democrat Abdul Al-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers debated over the state’s open Senate seat. And in Maine, longtime senator Susan Collins met Democratic challenger Troy Jackson. Democrats need to flip four Republican-held Senate seats to win the majority.
Species with leaves large enough to be seen from space is already critically endangered – and plans are afoot to protect it
A chance social media encounter has led to the race-against-time discovery of a new species of giant waterlily that has until now been hidden in the depths of Colombia’s jungle.
But the plant, which is so huge it is visible from space, is already considered critically endangered.
Last week, Egyptian authorities arrested the journalists, from the independent factchecking and investigative platform Matsadaash, accusing them in a statement of being unlicensed and producing false news on behalf of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.
A two-alarm fire damaged a cocoa processing plant near Glasgow on Thursday, marking at least the sixth time in 11 years that the factory has caught fire.
Irving rushes for career-high 165 yards and two TDs
Rookie Daniels impresses in second NFL start
Prescott throws two picks as Dallas fall to 2-3
Bucky Irving already had his first 100-yard game since his rookie year in 2024 when the Tampa Bay running back finished off the Dallas Cowboys with a run that gave him a career high.
Jalon Daniels, the undrafted rookie filling in for franchise quarterback Baker Mayfield, enjoyed the view while doing plenty himself to get the Buccaneers their first win of the season in just his second start.
Nets pull away in third quarter for 114-108 victory
NBA superstar LeBron James delivered a solid first-half performance in his first pre-season game for Philadelphia on Thursday, but the new-look 76ers fell 114-108 to the Brooklyn Nets.
James, the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, announced in July that he had signed a two-year, $8m deal with the 76ers, ending weeks of speculation over where the four-time NBA champion would land as a free agent after eight seasons and one title with the Los Angeles Lakers.
In Thursday's Michigan Senate debate, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers sparred over the Iran war and cost-of-living issues — and flung insults across the stage in nearly every exchange.
Minneapolis, MN — President Donald Trump escalated his rhetoric toward Minnesota’s Somali community Thursday, telling residents to “fight back” while broadly linking Somali immigrants to “Violence, Murder, and Mayhem.”
Trump claimed on Truth Social that Minnesota was being “taken over” and told Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to request federal assistance, promising the government would “come to your rescue.”
The remarks followed several high-profile criminal cases involving individual Somali Americans, including fraud prosecutions, gang-related violence and an alleged Mall of America terrorist plot. Trump, however, extended his criticism to an entire ethnic community rather than limiting it to those accused of crimes.
That distinction is significant: most Somali Minnesotans are U.S. citizens, and roughly 40% were born in the United States.
Walz responded by telling Somali residents they are valued and belong in Minnesota. The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations went further, describing Trump’s statement as “blatant racism” and an implicit invitation to violence against the community.
Trump has repeatedly singled out Somali Americans. In December, he called Somalis “garbage” and said they should return to where they came from.
His latest language comes after thousands of federal immigration agents were previously deployed to Minnesota as part of the administration’s immigration crackdown.
The project, led by Commonwealth Fusion Systems, brings together four U.S. Department of Energy National Labs, key industry players and university researchers
Oct. 8, 2026 — As part of the Genesis Mission, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) will partner on a national effort to build a digital twin platform for commercial fusion energy. The Phase II Genesis Mission award was announced Oct. 8, 2026.
PPPL scientists Robert Hager, Nate Ferraro, Michael Churchill and Álvaro Sánchez Villar will partner on a national effort to create a digital twin of the SPARC fusion system. (Photo credit: Michael Livingston / PPPL Communications Department
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) will integrate efforts across America to deliver a Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled digital twin that mimics a real physical system. In this case, the digital twin will model the CFS’ fusion demonstrator device known as SPARC, currently under construction. Unlike a traditional computer simulation, the digital twin will be connected to the real fusion experimental device, which will be continually updated and provide increasingly improving predictions of device operation. Leveraging an integrated workflow between the digital twin and physical device, the scientists plan to optimize and accelerate the development of the ARC power plant, CFS’ commercial fusion machine to follow SPARC.
“PPPL will play a central role in this project, contributing foundational software engineering and [AI] models, core physics models, historical tokamak data and high-performance compute resources,” said Michael Churchill, head of PPPL’s AI for Science Group. Churchill will lead the Lab’s efforts on the project working with PPPL scientists Álvaro Sánchez Villar, Nate Ferraro and Robert Hager.
Physics simulation codes made and maintained by PPPL (including M3D-C1, TRANSP and XGC) will be used along with many other codes to establish full pulse predictions, including using AI surrogates trained from large simulation datasets. This will enable predictions in less than 20 minutes, fast enough to provide results between plasma pulses in a tokamak fusion system such as SPARC, which confines plasma using magnetic fields. Digital twin workflows for PPPL’s primary fusion experiment, the National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U), will act as a critical test bed platform to verify and validate approaches before they are used on SPARC. Some of the data from NSTX-U and past PPPL experiments will also be made available to the fusion community at large.
“PPPL has extensive breadth of measured plasma data across multiple fusion devices, which is coupled to leading edge theory and computational knowledge and tools,” said Laura Berzak Hopkins, PPPL’s deputy director for research and chief research officer. “Building curated sets of that experimental data plus advancing the tools that utilize it will lead to the delivery of new capabilities for the fusion community to accelerate fusion energy research as a whole.”
Private Industry, Academia and National Labs Will All Play a Role
Three other U.S. national laboratories will also take part in the project — Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory — as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, General Atomics, NVIDIA, Google DeepMind and Synopsis.
The Genesis Mission is a national initiative to mobilize government, industry, academia, nonprofits and international partners to advance AI for science and technology. Using the DOE-built American Science and Security Platform, partners work together on shared infrastructure that connects researchers with data, compute and AI tools to accelerate scientific discovery. Partners are focusing on the most critical challenges facing our nation in energy, national security, scientific discovery, health, space and more.
The goal of the Phase II request for application awards is to scale up and expand the impact of projects that have already shown potential for AI advantage and demonstrated a trajectory toward a transformative scientific capability. The selected projects are multiyear and use interdisciplinary teams to address national science and technology challenges across key DOE mission areas.
Oct. 8, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced significant funding to scale up promising projects that use Artificial Intelligence (AI), commonly referred to as artificial intelligence, to accelerate discovery. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will lead the Multi-Office Accelerator Team Core Project (MOAT-Core), which applies AI to better design and run the particle accelerators that advance research in physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science.
The AI accelerator assistant Osprey was first deployed at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source. MOAT transformed Osprey into a multi-facility platform and expanded it to eight facilities at seven National Labs. Photo credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab.
MOAT-Core is part of the Genesis Mission, a national initiative to mobilize government, industry, academia, nonprofits, and international partners to advance AI for science and technology. Using the DOE-built American Science and Security Platform, partners work together on shared infrastructure that connects researchers with data, compute, and AI tools to accelerate breakthroughs. Partners are focusing on critical challenges in scientific discovery, energy, national security, health, space, and more.
“The Genesis Mission offers a unique opportunity to leverage the rapidly expanding power of agentic assistants and revolutionize the way that we design and operate particle accelerators,” said Jean-Luc Vay, lead of MOAT-Core and head of the Advanced Modeling Program in Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics (ATAP) Division.
The goal of the Phase II Genesis Mission awards is to expand the impact of projects that have already shown potential for AI advantage and demonstrated a trajectory toward a transformative scientific capability. MOAT’s award grows the project to 16 collaborating institutions and will span multiple years.
As a prototype, MOAT showed that their AI “accelerator assistant,” Osprey, could adapt to work at different facilities and optimize how particle accelerators run. Accelerator operators can use natural language to set up experiments, fine-tune settings for the particle beam, troubleshoot equipment issues, and record and synthesize incredible amounts of data.
“It’s a big software engineering task to develop a platform that works at multiple facilities, where there are different constraints and different instruments,” said Thorsten Hellert, an ATAP staff scientist and part of the Accelerator Physics Program at the Advanced Light Source (ALS), where Osprey was first deployed. “Because accelerators are custom machines, sharing software is not the default in our community. But this project got us focused on building one thing together at a scale that has never happened before, and there are a lot of benefits from it. You can plug Osprey into a new facility and it works. I think Osprey will eventually be a platform that we use at dozens of facilities worldwide.”
In the next phase, MOAT-Core will deploy Osprey’s capabilities at additional accelerators across the DOE complex and expand the tool to connect to digital twins and assist in accelerator design. By applying all of the information the AI learns at real machines, researchers will be able to quickly run more accurate simulations, plan future experiments, and design the next generation of particle accelerators — a process that currently takes years of computations and testing.
“You’re choosing from magnets and components of different types, and strengths, and lengths, and positions,” Hellert said. “There are an infinite number of possibilities, and only a handful of those are actually good solutions. The question of how to find them is a mathematically very challenging problem, but these coding agents and agentic assistants are made for speedrunning these kinds of workflows.”
Osprey is designed to improve the performance of large accelerators and light sources, which account for half of DOE’s User Facilities and cover a broad range of science. For example, the AI tool will help run and optimize the ALS-U, the state-of-the-art upgrade underway at the Advanced Light Source. Researchers will use the enhanced ALS to study molecules and materials with atomic precision and to develop new technologies in microelectronics, energy storage, pharmaceuticals, quantum computing, and more.
AI tools like Osprey could also be important for running smaller accelerators with growing uses in industry, such as making microchips with EUV lithography. “There’s a lot of benefit to industry from these kinds of tools that are developed at the National Labs,” Hellert said.
The MOAT-Core collaboration includes: Argonne, Berkeley, Brookhaven, Fermi, Thomas Jefferson, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, and SLAC National Laboratories; Cornell University; Michigan State University, Facility for Rare Isotope Beams; Old Dominion University; the University of Chicago; and industry partners.
Berkeley Lab researchers are partners on five additional projects, pending final agreements, that received Phase II Genesis Mission funding awards today: Accelerating eXtreme Environment Specs-to-Silicon (AXESS), Artificial Intelligence for High Performance Computing (AI4HPC), Application-Aware Error Correction Codesign for Scientific Quantum Computing (ASQC), Lattice QCD at the Intelligence Frontier, and MAESTRO (Multi-agent AI Expert for Subsurface Reasoning and Optimization).
DOE also announced additional Phase I Genesis Mission awards. Berkeley Lab researchers will partner on two projects, pending final agreements: From Beam Loss to Beam Intelligence: Adaptive Generative AI for Autonomous Accelerator Facilities, and Closed-Loop Autonomous Discovery of Mechanistic Activity-Selectivity-Stability Rules in Catalysis. Berkeley Lab continues to lead 13 previously announced Phase I Genesis Mission projects and collaborates as a partner on more than 30 others.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 8, 2026 — Crusoe today announced a $50 million commitment in high-performance AI compute credits over three years to support the Genesis Mission Consortium.
Crusoe Co-Founder and CEO Chase Lochmiller announced the pledge at the White House Science: A New Golden Age Summit alongside federal science leaders and industry peers. The contribution will provide capacity for high-performance compute and inference workloads via Crusoe Cloud, the company’s AI cloud platform, as well as technical support to researchers across more than 15 federal agencies, including the DOE, NASA, NIH, and NSF.
“AI-driven computation is fast becoming the foundational engine of modern scientific discovery,” said Lochmiller. “By committing $50 million in AI compute and inference credits to the Genesis Mission, Crusoe is putting powerful AI infrastructure directly into the hands of federal researchers tackling the nation’s biggest challenges in energy and health. We’re proud to make Crusoe Cloud more accessible to more innovators.”
The Genesis Mission (EO 14363) is the Administration’s flagship initiative to harness AI for scientific breakthroughs. Crusoe’s three-year pledge helps deliver on OSTP Director Michael Kratsios’s vision for modernizing U.S. science through bold public-private partnerships.
Today’s commitment builds on Crusoe’s role as a launch partner for the newly unveiled National Compute Grid, a separate initiative aimed at pooling advanced AI infrastructure to expand public sector and educational access for researchers nationwide.
About Crusoe
As the AI factory company, Crusoe is on a mission to accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence. The company provides a reliable, scalable, cost-effective, energy-first solution for AI infrastructure. By harnessing large-scale energy sources, building AI-optimized data centers, and delivering a powerful AI cloud platform, Crusoe empowers its customers and partners to build the future faster. For more information, visit crusoe.ai.
Oct. 8, 2026 — The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been selected for six Phase II awards under the DOE’s Genesis Mission. The six multi-year projects will advance Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled research in materials science, microelectronics, quantum computing, accelerator operations, HPC software development and fusion energy, building on work initiated during Genesis Mission Phase I.
“These selections align with ORNL priorities in [Artificial] Intelligence, quantum, fusion energy, critical materials and user facilities, underscoring ORNL’s focus on transforming discovery into national impact,” said ORNL Director Stephen Streiffer. “The goal is straightforward — faster, more reliable science that delivers practical results where they matter most.”
The Genesis Mission is a national initiative to mobilize government, industry, academia, nonprofits, and international partners to advance AI for science and technology. Using the DOE-built American Science and Security Platform, partners work together on shared infrastructure that connects researchers with data, computing, and AI tools to advance scientific discovery. Partners focus on the most critical challenges facing our nation in energy, national security, scientific discovery, health, space and more.
ORNL is one of five DOE national laboratories anchoring the computing side of the Genesis Mission.
The goal of the Phase II Request for Application (RFA) awards is to scale up and expand the impact of projects that have already shown potential for AI advantage and demonstrated a trajectory toward a transformative scientific capability. The selected projects are multi-year and use interdisciplinary teams to address national science and technology challenges across key DOE mission areas.
AI‑Empowered Design of Functional Quantum Magnets
This project, led by ORNL’s Yongqiang Cheng, integrates theoretical modeling, high-fidelity computation, and closed-loop experimentation to develop a physics-informed AI framework. Building on this framework, generative AI will identify candidate materials and operating conditions designed to realize targeted quantum phases of matter. Agent-assisted synthesis and AI-enabled laboratories will fabricate and characterize these candidates, with experimental feedback continuously refining the underlying models and guiding subsequent design cycles. The goal is to shift quantum-materials discovery toward predictive, function-driven design and to enable fundamental advances that could transform sensing, energy-efficient computing and emerging quantum technologies.
AI‑Assisted Scientific Software Development (AI4HPC)
AI4HPC, led at ORNL by Jeffrey Vetter in partnership with Argonne National Laboratory, envisions Artificial Intelligence becoming an active partner in scientific computing — not simply generating code, but helping scientists understand, transform, validate, optimize and continuously evolve the complex software that underpins discovery. By combining AI with the compilers, performance tools, numerical validation methods and leadership-class computing environments used in real scientific workflows, the project aims to dramatically reduce the time and specialized effort required to move new ideas into production. Ultimately, AI4HPC could change the economics and speed to deployment of computational science, allowing researchers to explore new algorithms, models and computing architectures that today are often impractical because of the enormous software engineering effort required to realize them.
AI‑eXtended Interfacial Separations (AXIS)
Rare‑earth elements are difficult to separate because they have nearly identical chemical properties. AXIS, led at ORNL by Jim Browning in partnership with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, will create a closed-loop discovery process that tightly integrates AI, machine learning, and experiment. Chemical language models will propose redox‑active ligands — molecules that bind target selected rare-earth ions and release them when switched electrically — while machine‑learned molecular simulations predict how promising candidates will behave. Laboratory experiments and operando neutron measurements will then test those predictions by revealing how the ligands bind ions, organize and transport materials across liquid interfaces. The team will then feed experimental results into the AI and simulation models to improve subsequent designs. AI-assisted thermodynamic and process modeling will then connect molecular and interfacial behavior to continuous separation performance, accelerating the development of selective, reversible and more resource-efficient rare-earth recovery processes.
Multi‑Office Accelerator Team Core (MOAT-Core)
Modern particle accelerators depend on complex software, expert knowledge, and years of operating experience. MOAT‑Core, led at ORNL by Alexander Zhukov in partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will grow a cross‑facility AI platform that organizes control‑system data, logbooks, simulations, manuals and procedures into SA‑ready formats. Using agentic workflows, the platform will help staff diagnose issues faster, plan machine setups and improve beam quality and uptime. The shared approach lets gains at one facility benefit many others.
Designing electronics for extreme environments, such as cryogenic temperatures or intense radiation, can require years of specialized work across disconnected layers of materials, devices, circuits and architectures. AXESS, led at ORNL by Jeffrey Vetter in partnership with Fermilab, will create an AI-driven, specs-to-silicon capability that links those layers, using experimental materials data, physics-based models and intelligent design agents to rapidly explore and validate complete hardware solutions. That capability could enable faster and more capable readout and control systems for quantum computers, fusion experiments, particle detectors, accelerators and other scientific instruments, shrinking the timeline from a new scientific idea to the specialized electronics needed to make an experiment possible.
AI‑enabled Digital Twin Platform for SPARC
Fusion experiments run in pulses, and operators need to plan the next pulse quickly. This project, led by Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) and conducted at ORNL by Jeremy Lore, will build an orchestration layer between the Commonwealth Fusion Systems ecosystem and DOE computing, generate large datasets using trusted community codes, and train surrogate models that can run in control‑room timescales. Agentic AI will prepare and execute code runs, adapt to new data between pulses and help operators design scenarios — demonstrated on SPARC and informed by the U.S. tokamak fleet.
CBS California Investigates looked at the LAPD's Use of Force reports over the past 10 years and found the LAPD had 19 cases in which officers shot at dogs in 2016. So far in 2026, there have been four incidents, resulting in three deaths.
CBS California Investigates looked at the LAPD's Use of Force reports over the past 10 years and found the LAPD had 19 cases in which officers shot at dogs in 2016. So far in 2026, there have been four incidents, resulting in three deaths.
Arm-based E1L delivers full DPU offload from 25 watts, on the same open software as the 800G E1
SAN JOSE, Calif. and TEL AVIV, Israel, Oct. 8, 2026 — Xsight Labs today announced the E1L, the newest member of its E-Series data processing unit (DPU) portfolio. The E1L brings fully programmable DPU capability, at up to 200G, to as little as 25 watts TDP (15 watts typical) in its eight-core, 100G configuration, powered by Arm Neoverse N2 cores and designed for edge, embedded and other power-constrained infrastructure. Like the E1, it is built on open standards and runs standard software without proprietary licensing, and with full cross platform compatibility, software written for one, runs on the other.
For operators, bringing DPU offload into a power-constrained site has meant a proprietary software stack sized for one chip, or leaving offload out. The E1L changes that: full DPU offload from 25 watts, on the same architecture and software as the 800G E1, so an offload written once runs from a 25-watt DPU at the edge to an 800G DPU in the data center, on standard Linux tools and with no proprietary licensing.
AI is shifting from models that answer questions to agents that take action. Every agent query, lookup and tool call becomes traffic to databases, storage and the network, and that infrastructure work lands on the same host CPUs meant for the AI workload. Agents touching critical systems also raise the bar for isolation. The E1L takes that infrastructure work off the host, fully or in part, and runs it in a separate, isolated domain, at a power envelope that fits sites outside the data center.
The E1L is scheduled to begin sampling in the second quarter of 2027.
Open, programmable silicon for the modern data center Unlike conventional network interfaces, DPUs offload networking, security and storage tasks from the main server CPU. A network interface card moves data; a DPU also carries its own processors and memory and runs the infrastructure software itself. By building on open standards, Xsight Labs provides a fully programmable, merchant-silicon alternative to proprietary DPUs, one that accelerates software-defined infrastructure without proprietary architectures or licensing.
The E1L: low-power DPU for edge and embedded systems Engineered for space- and power-constrained environments and for embedded applications, where specialized data center cooling is limited or absent, the E1L brings fully programmable DPU capability, at up to 200 Gbps, with TDP from 25 W to 40 W and typical draw of 15 to 25 W. The power figure starts with the silicon: the E1L is built on TSMC’s N5 process, the same node as the E1, so it does the same work in a smaller form factor, with less energy and less heat.
Built on Arm Neoverse CSS N2 and designed for Arm SystemReady compatibility, the E1L runs standard Linux and familiar software frameworks including XDP, DPDK and SPDK, so infrastructure teams can develop and deploy programmable networking, storage and security services without a proprietary software environment. The E1L is offered as a discrete device, a COM Express module and a 1RU server, all sharing the same software and feature set. Alongside the 800G E1, which draws under 75 W, the E1L completes an E-Series that runs one software stack from 100G at the edge to 800G in the core.
E1L Key Specifications
Compute: 8, 16 or 22 Arm Neoverse N2 cores
Networking: up to 200 Gbps over 4 SerDes lanes
Memory: up to 2 DDR5-5200 interfaces with inline encryption
Security: line-rate AES-GCM for IPsec offload
Host interface: 20 PCIe Gen5 lanes across 6 dual-mode controllers with SR-IOV support
Power: configurable 25 W, 30 W and 40 W TDP (typical draw 15 W, 18 W and 25 W)
Software: off-the-shelf Linux distributions; XDP, DPDK and SPDK integration
“The E-Series now scales from 100 gigabits at the edge to 800 gigabits in the core on a unified architecture and software stack. Operators told us they needed DPU capability within the power envelopes they already rely on. The E1L delivers that,” said Yossi Meyouhas, CEO of Xsight Labs.
“AI infrastructure is expanding across a broader range of environments, making performance per watt and software flexibility critical for deployment. By building on Arm Neoverse CSS N2, Xsight Labs is bringing programmable, efficient compute from the edge to the data center while giving developers the benefits of a common software ecosystem,” said Eddie Ramirez, Vice President of Go-To-Market, Cloud AI, Arm.
Availability
The E1L is scheduled to begin sampling in the second quarter of 2027. Xsight Labs will present the E1L at the 2026 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit, October 12 to 15, in San Jose, as an OCP Bronze member.
About Xsight Labs
Xsight Labs is a leading fabless semiconductor company providing intelligent connectivity solutions for next-generation hyperscale, edge and AI data center networks. Xsight Labs’ technology delivers exponential bandwidth growth and unmatched versatility while lowering power and total cost of ownership. Founded in 2017, Xsight Labs is headquartered in Tel-Aviv, Israel, with additional offices in Kiryat Gat and Haifa, and international offices in Boston, Raleigh, and San Jose in the United States, as well as in Yerevan, Armenia. For additional information, visit www.xsightlabs.com.
Argonne and collaborators will use AI to speed discovery in software, materials, physics and more
Oct. 8, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has won a new round of Genesis Mission funding to take on major scientific challenges with artificial intelligence (AI).
With these new Phase II awards, Argonne and its partners will transform scientific software development, design new materials and enzymes, reveal more about the building blocks of the universe, and improve the way particle accelerators operate. The awards build on Argonne’s earlier Phase I Genesis Mission projects and expand that work through larger, multiyear investments.
The Genesis Mission is a national initiative to mobilize government, industry, academia, nonprofits and international partners to advance AI for science and technology. Using the DOE-built American Science and Security Platform, collaborators work together on shared infrastructure that connects researchers with data, compute and AI tools to accelerate scientific discovery. Partners are focusing on the most critical challenges facing our nation in energy, national security, scientific discovery, health, space and more.
Argonne will lead a major project, AI4HPC: An Iterative Framework for AI-Assisted Scientific Software Development and Optimization. This effort will make it easier and faster for scientists to update and improve the complex software that powers discovery on high performance computing systems, including Aurora. By using AI to help translate, modernize and optimize these codes, the project will help researchers adapt to new technologies, test new ideas and ensure their results are accurate — saving time and resources across DOE’s scientific community.
Argonne is also a partner on four additional Phase II Genesis Mission projects:
Overcoming Barriers in Computational Enzyme Design (led by University of Washington): Using AI and advanced X-ray tools to design new enzymes that could help create cleaner chemicals and materials.
AI-Empowered Design of Functional Quantum Magnets (led by DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory): Applying AI to discover and design new magnetic materials for future electronics and quantum devices.
Lattice QCD at the Intelligence Frontier (led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology): Combining AI and supercomputing to help scientists better understand the building blocks of matter and the universe.
The Multi-Office Accelerator Team Core Project (led by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory): Building smarter AI tools to improve the performance and reliability of particle accelerators used for scientific research and industry.
Together, these projects will help scientists test ideas sooner, solve harder problems and open new paths to discovery across chemistry, materials science, accelerator science and fundamental physics.
“[AI]-enabled science is expanding and accelerating what we are able to explore and achieve,” said Argonne Director Paul Kearns. “These Genesis Mission investments give researchers an opportunity to match scientific ambition with the scale needed to drive progress.”
The goal of the Phase II awards is to scale up and expand the impact of projects that have already shown potential for AI advantage and demonstrated a trajectory toward a transformative scientific capability. The selected projects are multiyear and use interdisciplinary teams to address national science challenges.
Additional details about Argonne’s Genesis Mission projects are available here.
The projects are funded by DOE’s Office of Science Advanced Scientific Computing Research, Basic Energy Science, Biological and Environmental Research, and Nuclear Physics programs.
Donald Trump has urged James Talarico, the Democratic nominee in the US Senate race in Texas, to debate Ken Paxton – Republican attorney general that the president has endorsed in the election.
On Truth Social, Trump described Paxton as “ready, willing, and able” to take on Talarico – the 37-year-old state representative who has been leading in several polls.
In Georgia, Jon Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent will face off against Mike Collins – a congressman and the Trump-backed Republican nominee at 7pm ET.
At the same time in Michigan, progressive insurgent Abdul El-Sayed, will debate Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee also endorsed by the president.
Finally, it’s the second debate in Maine in as many days. Susan Collins, the five-term Republican incumbent will spar (again) with the Democratic nominee, Troy Jackson, at 8pm ET.
Thousands expected to march in Delhi on Saturday, as anger mounts over controversial changes to voter lists in world’s largest democracy
India’s Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), which began as a satirical movement but is now emerging as a political force among gen Z’s, says authorities have begun detaining its members en masse days before a major anti-government protest in Delhi.
As the title says, I’m new to VESC and so far the experience has been positive. I’m am truly amazed at how superior a VESC board rides compared to any thing I’ve ridden from FM (+XR, GT-S, and XRC) and the range on my build is ridiculous.
As far as the tunes go VESCmann Flow and VESCmann Vibin’ are the chefs kiss! (Allround is great two, but so far these two are my favorite) Well rounded tunes that feel powerful and responsive, without feeling nervous or twitchy, while still maintaining a fluid and flowy feel.
Two newly funded multi-year projects will address national science and technology challenges across key DOE mission areas
NEWPORT NEWS, Va., Oct. 8, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the Phase II Request for Application (RFA) multi-year funding awards for interdisciplinary teams to address national science and technology challenges across key DOE mission areas. DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is a partner on two projects receiving new funding.
The goal of the Phase II RFA awards is to scale up and expand the impact of projects that have already shown potential for Artificial Intelligence (AI) advantage and demonstrated a trajectory toward a transformative scientific capability. Jefferson Lab is a partner on these projects:
The Lattice QCD at the Intelligence Frontier project will aid in the interpretation of a new generation of experiments and theory in high-energy and nuclear physics, increasing our understanding of the basic structure of the universe.
The Multi-Office Accelerator Team Core (MOAT-Core) project will greatly expand AI-enabled capabilities for particle accelerator operations, connecting advanced AI-powered reasoning models with conventional accelerator tools through a shared platform to help optimize performance for accelerators and the experiments, industrial uses, manufacturing, and medical applications they enable.
“I am proud of the work that Jefferson Lab staff members have completed on these projects and am happy to see them move forward with additional funding,” said Jefferson Lab Director Jens Dilling. “We continue to appreciate opportunities for our staff to apply their unique skillsets toward addressing national science and technology challenges, and we are very excited for the important work being carried out under the auspices of the Genesis Mission.”
The Genesis Mission is a national initiative to mobilize government, industry, academia, nonprofits, and international partners to advance AI for science and technology. Using the DOE-built American Science and Security Platform, partners work together on shared infrastructure that connects researchers with data, compute and AI tools to accelerate scientific discovery. Partners are focusing on the most critical challenges facing our nation in energy, national security, scientific discovery, health, space, and more.
Police say man taken to hospital and mayor says child physically unharmed as he demands Trump stop ICE enforcement in city
A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and wounded a man in New York City on Thursday afternoon during an enforcement operation, federal officials said.
The man was conscious and hospitalized, authorities said, and the shooting quickly sparked angry protests from local residents and elected officials in the neighborhood.
A spokesperson for the tech company did not specify what kind of behavior would be considered abusive
Anthropic has barred users from exhibiting “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward its models, as the company’s leaders continue to ponder machine consciousness.
A proposal to livestream the killing of Nidal Hasan by firing squad opens a window ever wider to the Trump administration’s complete moral vacuity
More fool me! Here I was thinking nothing that America’s Trump administration could do or say, no matter how politically and morally bankrupt, no matter how venal or violent, was capable of shocking me any longer.
Then I woke to today’s news that one of the Trump cabinet’s bigger boofheads – the uber Christian nationalist, crusader-fantasist and “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth had announced that America would have a public firing squad execution of murderer Nidal Hasan.
About 1 hour of wheel time total and I’m starting to feel the confidence that everyone says to watch out for so I decided to slow down. Got pushback for the first time and went over my first speed bump. Overall good day👍🏽 Riding tips and feedback welcome
Making its southern hemisphere debut, Dance Reflections will feature collaborators of Rosalía, Madonna and Beyoncé – and a high-wire takeover of the Cutaway
A “once-in-a-lifetime” program of dance works of scale will be coming to Sydney in January, including 11 international works from France, Belgium, South Africa and beyond making their Australian premiere.
The program, which triples the scale of the dance offering at the last Sydney festival, will bring 174 performers and crew to Sydney, with the crowning jewel being the acclaimed French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane’s Outsider. The 2024 work features 21 dancers from the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève and four elite athletes, navigating a “cat’s cradle” of high wires and slack lines, to the mesmerising, minimalist music of the avant garde composer Julius Eastman.
Sexual assaults are reported thousands of times a year on the biggest university campuses in the U.S., data shows. Experts say the data undercounts the number of incidents.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 30%, the lowest level of his second term in Pew Research Center polling, as dissatisfaction grows across several major issues ahead of the midterm elections.
Pew found that 68% of U.S. adults disapprove of Trump’s job performance. His current standing is close to the 29% approval rating Pew recorded near the end of his first term following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
The decline is also visible among people who voted for Trump in 2024. Pew found that 67% of those voters now approve of his performance, down sharply from 95% early in his second term. Among Trump voters ages 18 to 34, approval falls below half.
Confidence in Trump’s handling of the economy, immigration and foreign policy has also declined. Pew additionally found that 69% of Americans have little confidence that Trump will keep his business interests separate from presidential decision-making.
The survey was conducted Sept. 28 through Oct. 4 among 5,062 adults and has a margin of error of 1.6 percentage points.
The findings arrive less than a month before the midterms, when control of Congress will be decided.
New York, NY — A federal immigration agent shot and wounded a man Thursday afternoon in the Marble Hill section of the Bronx while a 5-year-old child was reportedly inside the vehicle.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said early reports indicated federal agents surrounded the man’s vehicle before multiple shots were fired. The child was physically unharmed, while the wounded man remained conscious and was taken to a hospital.
The NYPD said its officers were not present when the shooting occurred. Video from the scene showed several federal agents in the roadway and visible bullet holes in the windshield of a silver SUV.
Mamdani called the incident “unconscionable” and said he planned to demand that President Donald Trump end ICE enforcement operations in the city. Gov. Kathy Hochul separately called for a “full and transparent accounting” of what happened.
The Department of Homeland Security later alleged that the 28-year-old man was an undocumented immigrant from the Dominican Republic with gang ties and prior criminal cases. Those assertions had not been independently substantiated in the immediate aftermath.
The shooting comes amid growing scrutiny of federal immigration agents’ use of firearms during enforcement operations under the Trump administration.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the public will be able to watch the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the ex-Army major who was convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009.
The grieving father of a woman who was killed during a break-in pressed Attorney General Todd Blanche and GOP Sen. Darline Graham to pass a bill that would create a national database of repeat violent offenders.
U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents shot a person in New York City on Thursday afternoon, according to police.
The shooting took place around 4 p.m. in Manhattan’s Marble Hill neighborhood, according to a statement from the New York Police Department. The NYPD said the victim was taken to a local hospital and was conscious, but provided no further information about the victim.
Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., told The Intercept that there was a child in the car and that the child is OK, which New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani later confirmed in a statement.
“This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds,” Mamdani said. “We believe the child was physically unharmed.”
At a press conference, Espaillat said that he attempted to visit the shooting victim in the hospital, but was prevented from doing so by federal authorities.
“I went to the hospital to see the victim,” Espaillat said, “but we were not allowed by ICE agents to go in the room.”
A neighbor, Iris Rosa, said the shooting happened just as a nearby school was being let out. After hiding in a store for a few minutes, she said she went to look at the scene and said it looked like agents had shot into a car.
The victim, Rosa said, was on the ground bleeding and being held down by the agents. A baby, she said, was in the car and was held by ICE agents until someone picked the child up.
Photos of the aftermath of the shooting, taken by a neighbor and obtained by The Intercept, show apparent government agents in plain clothes and tactical vests pinning a man on the asphalt. Another man in a high-visibility vest is clutching an assault rifle while holding a phone between his cheek and shoulder.
The aftermath of a shooting, reportedly by ICE agents, of a vehicle in New York City on Oct. 8, 2026.Obtained by The Intercept
Rosa, the neighbor, said a man with a high-visibility vest appeared to be posing as a construction worker, but as she watched, Rosa told The Intercept, the man took the vest and put it in a nearby vehicle.
Representatives of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and ICE did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said the shooting occurred during “a targeted enforcement operation.”
“During the incident, an ICE officer discharged his weapon and the criminal illegal alien was injured,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement. “ICE officers immediately rendered aid. The individual is alive and at a local hospital. The FBI and HSI are on the scene. The incident remains under investigation.”
The victim is the latest of at least 25 people to be shot by federal immigration agents this year. In July, after two fatal ICE shootings and a botched arrest in Las Vegas by plainclothes agents wearing hooded sweatshirts, the agency mandated a new dress code for field operations.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she had been briefed on the shooting. “We expect federal authorities to provide a full and transparent accounting of the circumstances surrounding this incident,” she said on X.
“ICE’s violent tactics are a clear danger to all New Yorkers, as today’s shooting in a residential neighborhood demonstrates,” said Murad Awawdeh, the head of the advocacy group New York Immigration Coalition, in a statement. “This incident is another reminder of the unchecked, rampant violence ICE has been spreading throughout our communities.”
Persephone Berger, 16, was pronounced dead after a deputy who was responding to a call about an unresponsive person lying in the road hit her with his vehicle.
Nine in 10 school heads who responded say inspections still ‘negatively affected’ staff mental health
School inspections in England continue to damage the mental wellbeing of teachers and senior leaders, according to a survey commissioned by Ofsted that casts doubt on efforts to reduce the stress caused by inspectors’ visits.
The independent survey of school leaders who had undergone the revised inspections since last year found that 88% said it had “negatively affected” the mental wellbeing of school staff, including 29% who said it affected them “a lot”.
The NHS in England is heading into a “world of system failures” as it struggles to cope with relentlessly rising demand for mental health, ADHD and autism care, leaving those affected desperate for support, a government-commissioned inquiry has found.
The stark warning was made in a review led by Prof Peter Fonagy into the sharp rise in demand over recent decades for help with mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions.
The Fonagy review of NHS England’s mental health, ADHD and autism services was commissioned in 2025 by Wes Streeting, then the health secretary, in response to growing concerns that spiralling waiting lists for assessment, diagnosis and care threatened the NHS’s ability to meet the demand.
The 607-page report, published on Friday, says that without a radical overhaul, mental health and neurodiversity services will be overwhelmed. Here are some of its key findings and recommendations.
Eighteen months ago, in an off-the-cuff remark during a discussion on disability benefit cuts, Wes Streeting said mental health conditions were being “overdiagnosed”, riding headlong into another culture war.
He later apologised for the comment, but at the time it seemed the then health secretary had endorsed a populist view that ordinary stresses and disappointments had become too often medicalised, resulting in a surge of bogus clinical diagnoses and creating a “snowflake generation” of fragile, avoidant and workshy young people.
I am in awe of their courage. Young people are contending with more powerful forces than I ever faced
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Trump administration is suspending Microsoft, Adobe, and several other technology companies from a program that helps skilled foreign workers obtain permanent residency in the United States, accusing the companies of fraud. "Our message to Microsoft is: You're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers," U.S. Vice President JD Vance said in a news conference on Thursday, Reuters reported.
The other firms being suspended from the program include Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Tata, and Wipro. Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling said the government would not accept any new or pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies. H-1B visas are designed for highly skilled positions that employers may struggle to fill with qualified U.S. workers. Tech companies are among the largest users of the program, with nearly three-quarters of approved visas going to workers from India, according to The Associated Press.
Vance also said during the news conference that the administration would investigate nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, over allegations they're abusing a program that allows international students to come to the U.S. and were using the program to undermine wages for American workers. "We believe in the strength and talent of the American workforce," a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. "That is why the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans. We look forward to providing the Administration with additional information. For example, of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% percent were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees."
"These were not to hire new people. The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country."
Contest seen as test of Andy Burnham’s ability to unite Labour voters amid threat from Green party’s Zack Polanski
Polls have closed in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, a contest seen as a test of whether Andy Burnham can unite Labour’s voters or whether Zack Polanski can peel off support from the party’s progressive flank.
Labour is seeking to retain Keir Starmer’s former north London seat, where he won a majority of more than 11,000 votes in the 2024 general election.
Flowers, tried six times over 1996 murders of four people, faced execution before supreme court tossed his conviction
Curtis Flowers, a Black man who spent more than 22 years in prison and was on death row in Mississippi before the US supreme courtthrew out his conviction and death sentence, has died. He was 56.
Flowers’ family confirmed that he died on Wednesday at his home in Mississippi, attorney Rob McDuff told the Associated Press on Thursday.
Amid a cost-of-living crisis, with US midterms a month away, the president held a ceremony to celebrate our tech overlords – again
He stands accused of being out of touch, enriching himself and his family, building a lavish White House ballroom and, with elections looming, neglecting the hardships of the voters who brought him to power.
Time for Donald Trump to show he still has the common touch? Nope.
By 4am on Thursday, the sky still pitch black, 19-year-old Pvt Grayden Monroe and his mom had already arrived to the naval base in San Diego, California. As the very first military family members to get there, they huddled on a set of metal bleachers overlooking the dark water. The duo were waiting for Monroe’s 21-year-old sister to step off the USS Abraham Lincoln, the embattled aircraft carrier that’s been at sea for the better part of a year.
Monroe, a soldier stationed at Fort Campbell, was wearing his army uniform for the occasion. “I hope she’s proud of me,” he said of his sister, “and I hope she knows damn well that I’m just as proud of her.”
Production of Pawn Shop allowed to go on despite concern about disruption and portrayal of immigration crackdown
A Daily Wire film production that appears to re-enact elements of Renee Good’s killing has been allowed to continue filming in a rural Montana town.
Production of Pawn Shop, the conservative media company’s upcoming movie, was temporarily halted earlier this month after residents of Livingston complained about inconvenient road closures, as well as the film’s portrayal of the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown.
Hutchinson, a former aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, drew the ire of Trump's base when she testified in 2022 before the House Jan. 6 committee about Trump's actions that day.
In this article. I am going to explain the different steps the I/O manager follows when initializing an I/O operation starting from determining the right target, choosing the right path and finally sending the request to be processed by the right drivers. To make it easier I choose to focus on read requests only since the major steps are common by all types of requests.
At OSNews, we love us a hobby operating system project.
I started a small experiment: writing a very basic kernel in Swift, and running on QEMU.
The goal is obviously not to replace Linux or any other popular kernel, but just to have fun and understand what is required to make a program run without an operating system underneath it. Actually I made a similar experiment years before with arOS 10 years ago.
For the moment, the kernel does only one thing: it prints a message through QEMU and then waits forever, which is enough for a first deep dive.
This is effectively a “hello world” kernel, as it doesn’t actually do much else at this point. Still, there’s a ton of details in the article for the aspiring kernel developers among you.
Education minister promises 3,000 substitute teachers by Tuesday with schools still blockaded across France
High school students have again blockaded schools and marched through cities across France, promising to continue their campaign against the poor state of the national education systemin the 10th day of protests that have left hundreds injured.
Large crowds took to the streets on Thursday for mainly peaceful demonstrations in cities including Lille, Rennes, Nantes, Lyon, Toulon and Marseille, while in Paris a large procession marched through the city centre to the Place de la Bastille.
In recognition of her role advancing computing at AMD, the company’s leader is honored with the nation’s highest recognition for scientists and engineers.
Oct. 8, 2026 — AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su was awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest recognition the nation bestows on scientists and engineers, by President Donald Trump today at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO of AMD
Presented during the “New Golden Age of Science” summit, the recognition highlights Su’s career as an electrical engineer and technology leader, as well as her contributions to advancing high-performance and adaptive computing through her leadership at AMD.
Established by Congress in 1959, the National Medal of Science is the highest recognition the nation bestows on scientists and engineers. The presidential award is given to individuals deserving of special recognition for their outstanding contributions to the physical, biological, mathematical, engineering, or social and behavioral sciences. A committee of scientists and engineers evaluates nominees for the award, which has been presented to 529 scientists and engineers.
As chair and chief executive officer at AMD, Su has led the company’s transformation into the industry’s high-performance and adaptive computing leader. The company’s offerings across silicon and software help solve the world’s most important challenges by delivering next-generation computing and AI solutions.
Su has bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has published more than 40 technical articles. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), from whom she received the Robert N. Noyce Medal, and chairs the board of directors for the Semiconductor Industry Association.
Past winners of the National Medal of Science include Richard Feynman, physicist who helped explain how light and matter interact; Linus Pauling, chemist whose work transformed understanding of chemical bonds; and Barbara McClintock, geneticist who discovered genetic elements that can change position within chromosomes.
About AMD
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) drives innovation in high-performance and AI computing to solve the world’s most important challenges. Today, AMD technology powers billions of experiences across cloud and AI infrastructure, embedded systems, AI PCs and gaming. With a broad portfolio of AI-optimised CPUs, GPUs, networking and software, AMD delivers full-stack AI solutions that provide the performance and scalability needed for a new era of intelligent computing. Learn more at www.amd.com.
Chris Murphy says Pentagon blocked him from military base in Qatar and Iran strike on US embassy in Riyadh far worse than public led to believe
Senator Chris Murphy said the Pentagon blocked him from a major US base in Qatar, yet saw enough damage on the US embassy in Saudi Arabia to conclude that an Iranian strike would have been deadly had it happened during the day.
The Connecticut Democrat, who sits on the Senate foreign relations and appropriations committees, described the destruction he witnessed in Riyadh as “extraordinary” and much more damaging than the public has been led to believe.
Oct. 8, 2026 — Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a commitment of up to $50 million in credits over three years to support the expansion of the Genesis Mission, unveiled at the White House Science Summit. As the Genesis Mission expands to an additional 14 federal agencies, AWS is excited to meet the moment with the AWS Golden Age of Science Accelerator, which will provide credits for scientific research and AI-for-science workloads across U.S. federal science agencies and their research partners — helping to remove financial barriers and compress innovation timelines to accelerate breakthroughs critical to American scientific leadership.
“American scientists are on the cusp of breakthroughs that will define the next century — from accelerating biomedical research and improving health outcomes, to AI-driven drug discovery — but they need computing power at scale” said David Appel, Interim Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS. “The AWS Golden Age of Science Accelerator is about making sure that researchers can move from idea to running at scale on AWS in days, not years from now. We’re proud to support the White House’s vision and the researchers working to keep America at the forefront of scientific discovery.”
AWS Golden Age of Science Accelerator
The AWS Golden Age of Science Accelerator provides eligible participants up to $50 million in AWS cloud computing credits for scientific research and AI-for-science workloads across U.S. federal science agencies, their research partners, and other participating federal agencies.
Participants interested in receiving credits can visit the Government Accelerator Initiative Portal and complete the interest form. AWS will schedule a consultation and work with eligible participants to develop project proposals aligned with the government’s scientific research priorities. If the project is selected, post-award credits will be applied to existing contracts, and participants can begin building.
Commitment to Government Customers
AWS is unwaveringly committed to public sector customers in the federal, defense, and intelligence communities, and today supports more than 15,000 government customers across the globe. AWS brings nearly a decade of experience supporting some of the U.S. government’s most sensitive workloads and breaking barriers for our customers. AWS was the first cloud provider to build infrastructure specifically for government security standards (2011), support classified workloads (2014), and achieve accreditation across all U.S. government data classifications (2017).
Here is a look at the most recent investments AWS has made for its government customers:
In August 2025, the U.S. General Services Administration announced a OneGov Agreement with AWS to provide up to $1 billion in savings for cloud adoption, modernization, and training for federal agencies through 2028.
In November 2025, Amazon announced it will invest up to $50 billion to expand AI and supercomputing infrastructure for U.S. government agencies –- the largest federal technology commitment in the company’s history.
In February 2026, AWS launched two federal credit programs — the AWS Warfighter Capability Accelerator and the AWS Genesis Accelerator — providing up to $100 million in credits across the two programs over three years to accelerate innovation for national security and scientific missions across the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, national laboratories, and the defense industrial base.
In June 2026, AWS announced the Intelligence Community Accelerated Modernization Framework (ICAMF), committing up to $1 billion in cloud credits through October 2030 to accelerate cloud migration and modernization across the U.S. Intelligence Community — helping remove the financial barriers that have kept critical workloads locked in on-premises systems.
Learn more about AWS’s Federal Accelerator Programs and how to participate here.
About Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is guided by customer obsession, pace of innovation, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. By democratizing technology for nearly two decades and making cloud computing and generative AI accessible to organizations of every size and industry, AWS has built one of the fastest-growing enterprise technology businesses in history. Millions of customers trust AWS to accelerate innovation, transform their businesses, and shape the future. With the most comprehensive AI capabilities and global infrastructure footprint, AWS empowers builders to turn big ideas into reality.
(The Center Square) – The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a record near $14 billion payout through two farmer safety net programs – not the first time the Trump administration has announced record amounts of taxpayer funding to America’s farmers.
(The Center Square) – The USS Abraham Lincoln returned Thursday to San Diego and the cheers of an enthusiastic crowd after the aircraft carrier's extended deployment in the Middle East.
Multiple ads airing in Michigan attack Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for past statements he made, or positions he held, about policing and prisons. But the ads either omit context or exaggerate his past policy proposals.
El-Sayed and his campaign have said he is not pushing to “defund the police,” as the ads claim or suggest. He spoke and posted in 2020 about wanting to reallocate some police funding to other community services, but has campaigned in the 2026 midterms on investing in “recruitment and retention and retirement” for law enforcement.
In addition, he never “called for abolishing prisons,” as one ad says. The claim is based on his participation in a 2020 webinar in which he said there was a need to reduce Michigan’s prison population during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Another ad that claims El-Sayed has a “plan” to “commute sentences for murderers and rapists” refers to a proposal from his unsuccessful 2018 campaign for governor of Michigan. His plan was to consider commuting prison sentences for individuals convicted as minors who were “deemed low risk” or who had served more than 25 years of “lengthy or life sentences.” He has not proposed doing that during his 2026 Senate run.
The ads, all from Republican-aligned groups, began airing in late September and claim or suggest that El-Sayed, a former Detroit public health official, is “dangerous” or would not “keep us safe.” He is running for the open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan against former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, an Army veteran who also worked for the FBI.
In the ad above, paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, a woman says, “I’m raising four children, and I don’t trust Abdul El-Sayed with their safety.” She adds, “El-Sayed supported defunding our police. Then he called for abolishing prisons and releasing criminals into our neighborhoods.” That’s followed by a video of him saying in August 2020, “Any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons.”
That same El-Sayed clip about releasing people from jails and prisons is shown in an SLF PAC ad that includes audio of him saying in June 2020, “I believe that we do need to defund the police.” In between those two snippets, a man in a police uniform says, “El-Sayed said it himself. He wants to defund the police and let criminals out of jail early.” “Defunding the police. Releasing prisoners. That’s just crazy,” another man in police gear says.
A third ad, from No Going Back PAC Inc., a super PAC linked to President Donald Trump, plays the same audio of El-Sayed talking about defunding the police. Then the narrator says, “It gets worse. El-Sayed’s plan calls for reducing sentence length. And not just reduce. El-Sayed’s plan says he’d commute sentences for murderers and rapists, letting violent criminals free.”
We’ll explain what the ads leave out about what El-Sayed has said on the topics of funding for police and reducing the prison population.
No More ‘Defund the Police’
El-Sayed did previously embrace elements of the progressive “defund the police” movement that began after George Floyd was killed in May 2020 by a police officer in Minneapolis. The featured audio clip of El-Sayed saying “we do need to defund” law enforcement is from a June 2020 radio interview with Jake Neher for Detroit’s NPR station. (Jump to 7:45 in the recording.)
El-Sayed’s fuller statement from the interview was: “I believe that we do need to defund the police insofar as defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets, and investing more in the means of educating and empowering, engaging communities.” He went on to say, “I like to talk about it as re-funding, right? I want to re-fund on the taxpayer dollars that I pay to police who use that to buy war materiel to wage war in our streets, and I want to re-fund public health and public libraries and public schools and the means of uprooting poverty.”
Earlier he said that investing more in social services, public schools and public libraries “means investing less in police.”
In July, CNN’s KFile, which reviewed El-Sayed’s past comments, said, “Throughout 2020, he repeatedly endorsed some of the movement’s goals in interviews, speeches and writings, often describing them as shifting government resources away from policing and incarceration and toward public health, education and anti-poverty programs.” The KFile analysis also found that he had deleted several of his old social media posts about defunding the police, which he later said he did because he “didn’t want them to be taken out of context.”
But while campaigning for the Senate this year, El-Sayed has talked about wanting to invest in – not defund – law enforcement.
“No, Abdul El-Sayed does not support defunding the police,” his campaign spokesperson Cole Wozniak told us in a statement. Wozniak added, “As he’s consistently said, Abdul believes we absolutely need to fund law enforcement to identify, prosecute, and protect communities from violent crime.”
In a July 2 CNN interview in which he addressed his deleted posts, El-Sayed explained his position this way: “Too often the conversation we have is fund or defund. The question that we don’t ask is, ‘What kind of system do we really want?’ I want us to be investing in the kinds of interventions that actually protect people, whether you’re talking about people on the streets or people in law enforcement. That means investing in recruitment and retirement for law enforcement. It also means investing in community violence intervention, investing in behavioral health response, investing in public health and anti-poverty measures. Those are things that are not mutually exclusive.”
And later that month, in a conversation with Politico, he said, “If we want really good law enforcement, we have to increase the amount of funds that we put into things like recruitment and retention and retirement, so that folks in local communities might want to actually work in law enforcement in their local communities.”
It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of funding for policing comes from local and state governments — not the federal government.
Not ‘Abolishing Prisons’
El-Sayed has not “called for abolishing prisons” or the blanket release of “violent criminals,” as some of the ads claim or suggest.
The clip of him saying “any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons” is from August 2020, when he participated in a webinar hosted by the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan. He and the other two panelists, who were previously inmates, were discussing the Carceral State Project’s July 2020 joint report with the American Friends Service Committee, titled “‘I Don’t Want To Die in Prison’: Prison Conditions, Decarceration, and Mutual Aid in the Age of COVID-19.”
El-Sayed’s fuller comment was: “Any and all efforts to get people out of jails and prisons and to keep people out of jails and prisons is policy that we need to be investing in, particularly right now. But this doesn’t end when the pandemic’s over, right? We shouldn’t have to have a global pandemic to force us to find our humanity. This should just be what we do because it’s the right thing.”
He had been responding to a question about recommendations in the report that needed to be “enacted immediately” during the pandemic. He started his answer by agreeing with another panelist that the infirm and elderly should be considered for release from prisons because of the spread of COVID-19. But he went on to say “decarceration generally is really, really critical” because “there are so many ways that society has failed to deal with real problems and has used policing and jails as a stopgap for all of these failures.”
As we’ve written, President Donald Trump released more than 13,000 federal prisoners during the pandemic as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act that he signed in late March 2020. That legislation excluded releases for any prisoners convicted of violent crimes, sex offenses or terrorism-related crimes.
El-Sayed also made a point in the webinar about people “languishing in prison facilities who don’t need to be there” because of laws that keep them there for longer than necessary. He gave the example of people who remain in prison because they can’t afford to post bail while awaiting trial, and he mentioned the state’s “Truth in Sentencing” law that he said makes it hard to reduce minimum sentences for felony convictions.
“We’ve got to think about them all systematically,” he said.
But El-Sayed — who is against for-profit prisons — never said he favored “abolishing prisons.”
An Old Commutation Plan
The claim that El-Sayed’s “plan” is to “commute sentences for murderers and rapists” is another misrepresentation. It doesn’t reflect something he proposed during his current Senate run. According to a citation in the No Going Back PAC ad, it’s based on a proposal from El-Sayed’s failed 2018 campaign to be Michigan’s governor.
In a section on “Criminal Justice Reform,” the 2018 plan (on page 26) proposed repealing the state’s law that requires convicted felons to serve their entire minimum sentence before becoming eligible for parole. Repealing the law “would allow for more flexibility in sentence length based on the rehabilitation that occurs in prison,” it said.
“Additionally,” the plan said, “within the first term, the El-Sayed Administration would review the sentences of all prisoners sentenced before age 18 (nearly 4,000 as of March 2013) with the aim of commuting sentences for all prisoners deemed low risk, with credit for time served.” (A commutation doesn’t automatically mean an immediate release from prison. It could be a reduced sentence.)
Finally, the plan said El-Sayed’s administration would “explore commutation options” for individuals convicted as juveniles and serving more than 25 years, “in order to allow them a chance at freedom after serving more than their fair share of time.”
However, El-Sayed is not campaigning on that now.
In a Sept. 19 town hall, El-Sayed said that his 2018 plan was making the point that for a minor convicted of a petty crime instead of a violent crime, “that crime shouldn’t follow them the rest of their lives. That’s it.” Then he said, “The problem that we often have is that we police petty crime, but we don’t actually take on violent crime. And I’m just saying that if you put your hands on somebody else, if you violate their body, then you deserve to be held accountable for what you’ve done.”
Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of U.S. inmates are in jails or prisons run by state and local governments. While the federal government, including the Senate, can influence state and local policy, it has no direct control over state and local facilities, as the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative noted in a 2025 report.
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.
Fort Hood, TX — The Pentagon plans to livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army major convicted of killing 13 people and wounding 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday that the execution should be publicly viewable because people should understand there are “serious consequences” for such attacks. Pentagon officials subsequently clarified that public access will come through a livestream rather than spectators gathering at the execution site.
The Army has scheduled Hasan’s execution for 1 p.m. Central Time on Dec. 3 at Fort Hood, nearly 17 years after the attack. President Donald Trump approved Hasan’s death sentence Oct. 2 following Hegseth’s recommendation.
Hasan was convicted by a military jury in 2013. The Supreme Court declined to review his court-martial conviction in March 2025, although he may still pursue challenges in civilian federal court that could delay the execution.
If carried out, Hasan would become the first U.S. military prisoner executed since 1961 and the first Army prisoner killed by firing squad since Pvt. Eddie Slovik in 1945.
The decision to livestream is historically unusual. America’s last generally recognized public execution occurred in Kentucky in 1936, when thousands gathered to watch the hanging of Rainey Bethea.
Democrat Bernadette Greene-Placentia, who is running to represent Arizona's 8th Congressional District, has filed a police report about the August incident.
Key scientific utility problems will guide Quantum Genesis’s goal of developing fault-tolerant scientifically relevant quantum computers.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 8, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the release of Quantum Genesis Priority Applications (QGPAs), a set of eight key scientific utility problems that will guide the Quantum Genesis’s goal of developing fault-tolerant scientifically relevant quantum computers. This effort builds on the recommendations made in the Blueprint for DOE Quantum Supercomputing and the Office of Science Advisory Committee’s Quantum Report.
The QGPAs will serve as beacons for the quantum applications community, provide a concrete basis for judging the “scientific relevance” of fault-tolerant quantum computers, and coordinate the hardware, software, and domain science R&D needed to realize new scientific advances not otherwise possible today. These Priority Applications, along with the other elements of Quantum Genesis, will bring domain scientists from across disciplines into direct partnership with quantum researchers. Together, they will integrate quantum computing into real-world scientific workflows and benchmark performance against today’s most advanced supercomputing methods.
“The Quantum Genesis Priority Applications are a bold declaration of how quantum computing capabilities will open up new scientific frontiers,” said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. “DOE has long been committed to this field, and this is both about realizing fault-tolerant quantum computing as a scientific instrument and unleashing the discoveries it will enable.”
The QGPAs are organized into four domains, each reflecting a key aspect of DOE’s mission:
Chemistry, modeling the reaction mechanisms and dynamics in complicated chemical systems such as light-sensitive processes.
Materials, understanding ground state and dynamics of quantum materials and materials in extreme environments, like topological or superconducting systems.
Subatomic physics, simulating the interactions that create protons and neutrons, the structure of atomic nuclei, and matter at high densities such as fusion reactions.
Applied mathematics, solving the systems of linear and differential equations that underpin large portions of science.
Within these domains, the QGPAs identify eight applications and provide examples of target computations in each application. Additionally, DOE is monitoring a range of emerging applications, where fault-tolerant quantum computing literature is still early but where future impact is possible, such as in plasma physics, biochemistry, and optimization.
DOE will use the Quantum Genesis Priority Applications to inform the execution of the three pillars of the Quantum Genesis: the Q Competition, a National Quantum Computing User Facility, and focused research on applications of fault-tolerant quantum computers. In parallel, DOE is working in collaboration with interagency partners, including Department of Defense, the Laboratory of Physical Sciences, and NASA on broader efforts to advance quantum applications.
SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 8, 2026 — Astera Labs, Inc., a leader in semiconductor-based connectivity solutions for rack-scale AI infrastructure, today announced the industry’s broadest PCIe 7 signal conditioning portfolio spanning smart retimers, redrivers, cable modules, optical drivers, and optical TIAs. The expanded Aries 7 portfolio offers hyperscalers, neoclouds, OEMs and ODMs a comprehensive connectivity platform that now extends reach from centimeters of PCB trace to 50+ meters over optical cables spanning multiple racks.
Multi-rack AI clusters are demanding more bandwidth between every accelerator, memory pool, and networking port. Yet doubling PCIe data rates shrinks signal margins, where a single unstable link can idle costly accelerators that reduce token-per-watt performance. And getting these platforms to production has meant stitching together fragmented multi-vendor solutions with different firmware and software, then re-spinning board designs and validation—resulting in delays in deploying AI infrastructure.
Aries has long been the gold standard for reliable PCIe links resulting in high accelerators’ utilization. The Aries PCIe 7 expansion carries that same philosophy across every channel a modern cluster needs: use copper where it is the most efficient choice and move to optical where reach demands it—all optimized and monitored through Astera Labs’ unified COSMOS software suite. Aries 7 Smart Retimers and Smart Redrivers support the OCP Signal Conditioner Standard Footprint, allowing customers to design once and decide later: as design requirements change, customers can pick different signal conditioners without redesigning the board—optimizing for power and accelerating time-to-market. Aries 7 Smart Optical Drivers and Optical TIAs enable that same intelligence in low power, high density NPO and LPO, designed to deliver optimum performance across multi-rack AI fabrics.
Platform partners have put Aries link reliability to the test across multiple generations: AMD and Intel have each validated Aries Smart Retimers in production across their platforms from PCIe 4 through 6. Both companies are now collaborating with Astera Labs to lead the industry’s transition to PCIe 7.
“The real question for architects isn’t retimer vs redriver, or copper vs optical: it’s whether they have one comprehensive toolbox with the optionality to pick the right tool for their evolving reach, density and power requirements,” said Adit Narasimha, senior vice president, Signal Connectivity Group at Astera Labs. “That is what we built with Aries: the same intelligence and the same software, for the solution the link needs.”
Aries 7 Smart Retimers, Smart Redrivers, Smart Cable Modules, and Smart Optical Driver and TIAs are expected to begin sampling in Q4 2026 to select hyperscale, OEM, and NPO customers, with broader availability anticipated as platforms complete qualification. Astera Labs will showcase PCIe 7 copper and optical demonstrations next week at the 2026 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit, Oct. 12-15 in San Jose.
About Astera Labs
Astera Labs (Nasdaq: ALAB) provides rack-scale AI infrastructure through purpose-built connectivity solutions. By collaborating with hyperscalers and ecosystem partners, Astera Labs enables organizations to unlock the full potential of modern AI. Astera Labs’ Intelligent Connectivity Platform integrates CXL, Ethernet, NVLink Fusion, PCIe, and UALink semiconductor-based technologies with the company’s COSMOS software suite to unify diverse components into cohesive, flexible systems that deliver end-to-end scale-up and scale-out connectivity. The company’s custom connectivity solutions business complements its standards-based portfolio, enabling customers to deploy tailored architectures to meet their unique infrastructure requirements. Discover more at www.asteralabs.com.
The pensioner, whose flat had been bought by an investment firm that sought to increase her rent by 230%, had become the public face of the crisis before her death in hospital on Wednesday night.
The administration signed a $1.5 billion agreement with Zambia, but only after being forced to abandon controversial data-sharing and resource-access provisions.
Eric Deters says US ambassador to Greece asked him to pay off American Express credit card bill in return for access
A Trump donor accused Kimberly Guilfoyle, the US ambassador to Greece and Trump family ally, of engaging in a “quid pro quo” by asking him to pay off her $100,000 debt in exchange for access to administration officials.
Eric Deters, a former congressional candidate and lawyer, told MS Now on Thursday that Guilfoyle had “ambushed” him last year with an offer to provide access to government officials if he paid her American Express credit card bill, before her US Senate confirmation hearing as ambassador to Greece.
Open models deploy from a catalog with validated presets, and in-cluster agents discover them automatically, across heterogeneous GPU fleets on premises and in major clouds.
RENO, Nev., Oct. 8, 2026 — CIQ, the enterprise software company behind Rocky Linux, today announced the general availability of Fuzzball 4.3, which brings ready-to-run AI models and agents to its sovereign AI orchestration platform. The release helps enterprises operationalize open-weight models and agentic AI on infrastructure they already run, with the control and governance required for AI in production. Fuzzball 4.3 deploys validated models from a catalog, connects agents to them automatically, and scales inference across heterogeneous GPU fleets, on premises and in the cloud.
Enterprises are shifting from AI pilots to production inference and repatriating workloads to private infrastructure for cost savings, security, and sovereignty. Meeting these goals often means standing up a new infrastructure stack before the first model serves a token, then integrating models, gateways, and agents by hand. Fuzzball 4.3 gives teams a faster path to productivity without rearchitecting their environment.
“Enterprises have already made their infrastructure decisions, and private AI should fit into them. With Fuzzball 4.3, a team starts a model, starts an agent, and the two find each other, on the GPUs, clusters, and clouds the organization already runs. That is what turnkey should mean,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and founder of Rocky Linux.
Models start with one command from the self-service model catalog. Eleven presets cover open-weight models from the GPT-OSS, Llama 4, Gemma 4, Qwen3-Coder, Mistral, and Nemotron 3 families, and a vLLM-based inference entry serves any other compatible Hugging Face model.
Models autoscale behind a single, stable endpoint and can scale down to zero running instances when idle, returning GPU capacity to other workloads, ready to spin back up for additional requests. And large models can scale across multiple nodes for additional resources.
Fuzzball 4.3 connects agents to models automatically. OpenCode and hermes-agent, two coding agents in the workflow catalog, run inside the cluster and discover running models through gateways, with no manual integration. Each model ships behind a built-in LiteLLM gateway with an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Or, run one central gateway that fronts every model a user is authorized to reach. Another entry in the catalog provides a retrieval service to connect your private agents to enterprise documents.
Governance is built into the platform. Idle pools wake only for authenticated requests. Administrators control which organizations and groups can use which resources, and every workload runs unprivileged and rootless. Fuzzball 4.3 supports heterogeneous GPU fleets across NVIDIA and AMD for serving and health-aware scheduling, all under one operating model.
Availability
Fuzzball 4.3 is generally available now. Fuzzball deploys to AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, CoreWeave, and Azure, as well as on-premises clusters built with Warewulf, VMware, or bare metal. To get started, contact CIQ at ciq.com/products/fuzzball.
About CIQ
CIQ is the founding support and services partner for Rocky Linux and a leading provider of Enterprise Linux infrastructure. CIQ delivers secure, performant software infrastructure for the full range of modern workloads. Global enterprises, government agencies, research institutions and supercomputing centers trust CIQ to run their most advanced workloads in production, from mission-critical environments to the systems behind major scientific and AI breakthroughs. CIQ’s products include the Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC Pro) family of operating systems, Ascender Pro for IT automation, Fuzzball job-based container orchestration, Warewulf Pro cluster provisioning, and Apptainer, the container system built for high-performance computing, with Apptainer Pro coming soon. Learn more at ciq.com.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 8, 2026 — Upscale, Inc. today introduced Upscale Token Fabric for AI factories. Upscale’s open, purpose-built architecture unifies scale-up and scale-out networking through common software and operations, accelerating deployment with XPU partners and enabling heterogeneous AI infrastructure. Designed for hyperscalers, XPU partners, neoclouds, and enterprises, the architecture is gaining traction across customer wins and active engagements.
AI infrastructure is shifting to AI factories in which compute, networking, storage, and software must operate as one system. Yet networking vendors today offer either discrete components that customers must integrate, or systems assembled from legacy networking components not purpose-built for AI. As heterogeneous XPUs, rack-scale architectures, and inference workloads drive unprecedented demands, the market needs a purpose-built, full-stack, open and standards-based AI networking solution. It must unify scale-up, scale-out, and orchestration to improve utilization, simplify operations, and optimize tokens per dollar.
The opportunity is massive: Dell’Oro forecasts nearly $1 trillion in AI back-end switch spending through 2030, with Ethernet becoming the leading scale-up technology. 650 Group projects AI networking will surpass $200 billion by 2030 as heterogeneous, full-stack solutions scale.
Upscale Token Fabric is an industry-first open architecture designed to:
Connect any accelerator
Scale accelerators inside the pod
Scale accelerators across the data center
Together, these capabilities provide the networking foundation that enables AI factories.
Upscale Token Fabric brings together:
Scale-up: SkyFabriX silicon and switch trays
Scale-out: Upscale-engineered systems powered by NVIDIA Spectrum-X
Operate as one: SkyOS and SkyCMD unify software and operations across GPUs and heterogeneous XPUs
“The industry has spent decades connecting computers. AI demands something different: one computer, built at data-center scale. Upscale Token Fabric brings heterogeneous accelerators, scale-up, scale-out and software together as one coherent AI system, built on open standards, so the network never gets in the way. Operators focus on delivering the best AI compute for their workloads; the integrated stack delivers the performance and time to market,” said Barun Kar, CEO, Upscale.
Upscale Token Fabric: Building blocks for AI factories
Scale Up
SkyFabriX: Industry’s first purpose-built scale-up switch silicon based on previously announced SkyHammer architecture, supporting ESUN, UALoE, SUE-T, standard Ethernet/IP, and evolving protocols including UALink, connecting any GPU or XPU over one open fabric. Engineered for deterministic, ultra-low-latency and native memory-semantic communication with a multi-Pb/s roadmap, including copper and optical variants (pluggable, NPO, CPO).
Scale-up switch-tray systems: Custom, ORV3 and standard rack form factors that pool GPUs and heterogeneous XPUs into large, standards-based domains.
Scale Out
Scale-out switch systems: NVIDIA Spectrum-X-powered scale-out systems, 400G and 800G to 1.6T, ready for future Spectrum-X generations. With SkyOS, standard and custom system form-factor variants integrate seamlessly into NVIDIA and heterogeneous XPU clusters.
Operate as One
SkyOS: An AI-native network operating system that provides one software foundation across scale-up and scale-out fabrics. Built from the ground up for AI factories, it delivers unrivaled advantages in performance, resiliency, and analytics.
SkyCMD: Agent-native orchestration and observability that enables thousands of network elements to observe, reason, and act as one, creating a unified operational model across scale-up and scale-out fabrics.
Consume It Your Way
Customers can adopt the solution through flexible consumption models. For scale-up, Upscale systems are built on Upscale’s own SkyFabriX silicon. For scale-out, Upscale-engineered systems are built on NVIDIA Spectrum-X silicon. Customers can choose to adopt silicon, systems, software, or the full stack.
Full stack—maximum simplicity: Standard form factors for scale-up switch trays and scale-out systems with SkyOS and SkyCMD managing the complete rack: one full-stack operating model, from deployment through day-two operations. Built for neoclouds and enterprises without hyperscaler-size network teams.
Integrated systems—flexible integration: Standard form factors for scale-up switch trays and scale-out systems, with SkyOS and SkyCMD optionally managing the complete rack. Built for XPU partners that want validated hardware without building a network stack.
Silicon, systems, your software—maximum control: SkyFabriX scale-up silicon, custom scale-up switch trays, or custom scale-out switch systems with a compatible SDK and open SAI from Upscale, and the customer’s own NOS integrated on top. Built for hyperscalers that design their own systems and operations.
Availability
General availability is planned for early 2027, with early-access and joint-validation programs underway today. Customers and ecosystem partners can learn more at upscale.com and get a first look at Upscale’s Token Fabric and systems at OCP 2026, booth Sapphire F5.
About Upscale
Upscale is a pure-play AI networking infrastructure company delivering an open, high-performance, standards-based networking portfolio for heterogeneous AI compute. Its purpose-built, integrated portfolio spans AI scale-up, scale-out and AI-native software and orchestration, enabling hyperscalers, XPU providers, neoclouds, and enterprises to optimally deploy and operate AI infrastructure as one cohesive system. For more information, visit upscale.com.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump escalated his campaign to rename artificial intelligence Thursday, declaring that anyone who continues using the term “Artificial Intelligence” instead of his preferred “Super Intelligence” is “THE ENEMY!”
Trump’s statement follows a September executive order directing executive-branch agencies to replace “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in official communications.
The terminology differs from its conventional use in technology. Artificial intelligence broadly describes computer systems capable of performing tasks associated with human intelligence, while “superintelligence” traditionally refers to a hypothetical system whose capabilities exceed humans across most cognitive tasks.
Trump’s executive order effectively applies “Super Intelligence” to technologies already covered by the government’s existing definition of AI, rather than limiting the term to hypothetical human-surpassing systems.
The administration itself has yet to fully comply with the rebranding. Axios reported Thursday that White House webpages still contained references to artificial intelligence. AI.gov was changed visually to display “SI.gov,” but its web address remained AI.gov, while attempting to visit SI.gov produced an error.
Trump’s executive order directs agencies to adopt the new terminology but establishes no punishment for Americans, companies or news organizations that continue using the universally recognized term AI.
Republican says Delaware needs an independent watchdog in Dover; Democrat argues investment experience and fiduciary responsibility are essential to safeguarding taxpayer money.
WILMINGTON, Del. — Delaware’s candidates for state treasurer offered competing arguments Thursday over what voters should value most in the office: an independent voice willing to challenge state government or an experienced financial professional qualified to manage billions of dollars in public funds.
Republican Mike Ramone and Democrat Ted Lauzen faced questions during an Oct. 8 luncheon hosted by the Wilmington Rotary Club at the Hotel du Pont.
The forum was moderated by Jake Owens, editor of Spotlight Delaware. Questions were submitted by Rotary Club members and were not provided to the candidates in advance.
Although both candidates pledged transparency, independence and responsible financial management, they differed over the experience and leadership needed to serve as Delaware’s next treasurer.
Ramone, a longtime business owner and former House minority leader, argued that Delaware needs an independently elected official willing to challenge financial decisions in a state where Democrats control the governor’s office and both chambers of the General Assembly.
Lauzen, an investment adviser and wealth management professional, argued that the treasurer’s primary responsibility is to safeguard public money through professional investment management and a fiduciary obligation to taxpayers.
Editor’s Note: The quotes from both candidates were provided from the transcript of the event on October 8th and are unedited.
Ramone: Independence provides accountability
Ramone repeatedly emphasized the importance of political independence, arguing that the treasurer should provide additional oversight of financial decisions made in Dover.
“The most important reason to have a treasurer who’s maybe not from the party in power of the state of Delaware would be transparency,” Ramone said.
He argued that the treasurer’s participation on state financial boards and committees provides an opportunity to question spending decisions, financial policies and the use of taxpayer money.
“We’re the people, and it’s our money, and we have the opportunity to participate in knowing what is being done with it and where it’s going,” Ramone said.
Ramone pointed to his 16 years in the General Assembly, legislative leadership experience and decades of operating businesses as qualifications that would allow him to work across party lines while challenging decisions when necessary.
“I have the independence to be able to say no, and I have the experience to know when to say yes,” he said.
Ramone argued that Delaware would benefit from a treasurer who is not politically dependent on the governor or legislative leadership and who can raise difficult questions without fearing political consequences.
Lauzen: Financial skills protect public money
Lauzen presented a different case, emphasizing his professional investment management experience and his responsibilities as a fiduciary.
A former Marine helicopter pilot who earned graduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Lauzen is a co-founder of Great Fox Wealth Advisors.
He said the treasurer’s responsibilities require technical financial knowledge and experience managing investments.
“The state treasurer also has that responsibility of acting as your elected fiduciary in the management of our cash reserves and our long-term investments,” Lauzen said.
He explained that a fiduciary has a responsibility to act in the financial interests of those whose money is being managed.
“That mandate prioritizes stability, liquidity, and then long-term growth,” Lauzen said.
He identified investment allocation and management fees as two important factors the treasurer can influence when protecting public funds and generating returns.
Lauzen also pledged independence and transparency, supporting public disclosure of the criteria used to select financial institutions and evaluate investment partners.
For Lauzen, independence means exercising professional judgment based on the state’s financial interests, even when that judgment differs from the preferences of other government officials.
Two approaches to managing the Treasury
The differences became particularly clear when the candidates discussed the state’s investment portfolio.
Lauzen emphasized that investment management is already his profession.
“I don’t sing very well, I don’t dance very well, but I do invest money really well,” he said in his opening statement.
Ramone acknowledged that he does not have Lauzen’s investment management background but argued that the office requires leadership, judgment and the ability to assemble qualified financial professionals.
“I’m not the guy who’s going to have all the answers,” Ramone said. “I’m the person who’s going to build the team around me.”
He said he would rely on experienced financial advisers and professionals while providing leadership, independent oversight and accountability.
Ramone argued that the treasurer should know when to question recommendations, challenge assumptions and bring together people with different expertise.
Lauzen countered that professional investment experience provides an important foundation for making those decisions and evaluating the performance of the state’s financial managers.
State finances and AAA rating raise concerns
Both candidates addressed Delaware’s AAA bond rating, the state’s reliance on corporate franchise revenue and the growing cost of employee benefits.
Ramone warned that Delaware depends heavily on corporate revenue and must protect the state’s competitive position while examining opportunities to control government spending.
He questioned the practice of routinely seeking additional revenue to offset rising annual expenses rather than looking for ways to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
Lauzen identified three major risks to the state’s financial position: concentrated revenue sources, outdated debt policies and growing unfunded retiree health care obligations.
He suggested modernizing debt management practices and considering opportunities to reduce long-term liabilities.
Both candidates agreed that protecting Delaware’s corporate franchise business is important to maintaining state revenue and financial stability.
Retirement programs offer common ground
The candidates found agreement on Delaware Earns, the state-facilitated retirement savings program intended to help workers whose employers do not offer qualifying retirement plans.
Lauzen called the program an important first step but suggested reducing administrative responsibilities for small businesses and expanding retirement savings options.
Ramone said lawmakers had worked on the program through a bipartisan process and emphasized the importance of employer input, stability and transparency as it develops.
Both supported financial literacy programs and efforts to help Delaware residents prepare for retirement.
Independence becomes a defining issue
In one of the final questions, the candidates were asked how they would exercise independence while serving alongside a governor and legislature responsible for most state fiscal policy.
Ramone described his opposition to a proposed gasoline tax increase during Gov. Jack Markell’s administration.
He said he challenged the proposal because he believed Delaware could benefit economically by maintaining lower fuel taxes than neighboring states, encouraging motorists and commercial vehicles to purchase fuel in Delaware.
Lauzen pointed to his work in investment management and nonprofit financial oversight, where he said independent judgment sometimes requires disagreeing with organizational leadership.
He argued that independence should be exercised constructively while working with other officials to protect the state’s financial interests.
The exchange reinforced the central difference between the candidates.
Ramone portrayed the independently elected treasurer as an additional check on decisions made by state government, particularly under one-party control.
Lauzen emphasized the treasurer’s independent fiduciary responsibility to make sound financial decisions and protect taxpayer investments.
A respectful exchange before Election Day
Despite their differences, the candidates avoided personal attacks and acknowledged areas of agreement.
Ramone praised Lauzen’s financial expertise and said knowledgeable investment professionals would play an important role in his administration.
Lauzen recognized the importance of independence and emphasized cooperation among state leaders.
In his closing statement, Ramone returned to the themes of independence, transparency and leadership.
“There’s no one that’s going to be enabled to enhance transparency more than me because I have nothing to lose,” Ramone said.
Lauzen closed by encouraging Delawareans to participate in the election and emphasizing the importance of public service.
The debate offered voters two different approaches to the office: one emphasizing independent government oversight and experienced leadership, the other emphasizing professional financial expertise and fiduciary responsibility.
Voters will choose Delaware’s next state treasurer in the Nov. 3 general election. Early voting begins Oct. 22.
GO BOX | How to Vote Early in Delaware
Election Day: Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026
Early voting begins: Thursday, Oct. 22.
Early voting hours:
Oct. 22-24: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Oct. 25: No early voting.
Oct. 26-27: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Oct. 28-Nov. 1: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Where to vote: Registered Delaware voters may vote at any designated early voting center in their county of residence.
Vice-president also says Adobe is barred from visa program that allows high-skilled workers to apply for US residency
Microsoft is suspended from applying for permanent residency for workers employed through a US visa program for high-skilled workers, JD Vance announced on Thursday.
The US vice-president accused the tech company of abusing the H-1B system, which allows those on the visa to work while they apply for and are in the process of obtaining a green card.
PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 8, 2026 — PsiQuantum announced today that the company has received a conditional commitment for a loan of up to $150 million from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital (OSC), which would expand the company’s advanced manufacturing and prototyping capabilities in the United States.
The financing would support PsiQuantum’s 140,000-square-foot hub in Milpitas, California, for scaling the company’s state-of-the-art technologies and developing and validating the prototype systems that underpin its fault-tolerant quantum computing architecture. Combined with co-investment from PsiQuantum, which anchors its supply chain in the United States, this new financing would strengthen the company’s domestic capacity for design, testing, and system integration as PsiQuantum advances toward building utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers in the United States.
“Today’s announcement shows the U.S. government’s bold leadership and continued commitment to quantum computing as a critical technology for America’s economic prosperity and national security,” said Victor Peng, Chief Executive Officer of PsiQuantum. “Delivering on the full promise of this technology in the United States will require world-class manufacturing and engineering ecosystems, and this potential financing underscores the vital role Washington can play.”
Financing from the Office of Strategic Capital would support PsiQuantum’s acquisition of critical infrastructure and equipment required for constructing, testing, and validating prototype quantum systems, including:
Test equipment for the fabrication and validation of components, subassemblies, and system-level assemblies
Critical infrastructure for system assembly, integration, and testing
Advanced cryogenic systems for prototype systems
PsiQuantum’s potential financing from the Department of Defense would be deployed by the company to expand and strengthen domestic quantum computing capacity.
Today’s announcement follows a twelve-month period of strong momentum for PsiQuantum as the company continues to develop its quantum infrastructure globally. This June, PsiQuantum broke ground and started construction on its facility at Moreton Bay Central in Queensland, Australia. In September 2025, the company broke ground on its site at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park in Chicago.
The proposed financing remains strictly conditional and is not guaranteed. A final loan commitment will only be executed if PsiQuantum satisfies all applicable financial, legal, technical, and regulatory conditions outlined in the conditional commitment.
About PsiQuantum
PsiQuantum was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company’s mission is to build and deploy the world’s first useful quantum computers. PsiQuantum’s photonic approach enables it to leverage high-volume semiconductor manufacturing, existing cryogenic infrastructure, and architectural flexibility to rapidly scale its systems. Learn more at www.psiquantum.com.
Ousted Venezuelan president and Cilia Flores have been in jail in New York since early January
The deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, have been indicted for alleged conspiracy to commit torture, according to Manhattan federal court papers unsealed on Thursday.
The superseding indictment was unsealed shortly before Flores appeared at court in her ongoing push for pretrial release – which was denied by Judge Alvin Hellerstein. Maduro and Flores have been jailed in New York City since early January.
Intense flash of radio waves is more than 10bn years old and has travelled through ‘approximately 80% of cosmic history’
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a mysterious flash of energy was released into the universe.
Astronomers have now detected that flash – a burst of radio waves which travelled for more than 10bn years before reaching Earth – what they believe to be the most distant fast radio burst (FRB) ever recorded.
When I first heard “The Lost Boys” was becoming a musical on Broadway, I was very skeptical. Never having seen the movie, I assumed it would be about Peter Pan. I never expected it would have anything to do with vampires! Still, as a long-time Broadway fan with low expectations, I bought tickets.
The story follows a family of three who leave an abusive family situation in Arizona to start a new life in Santa Carla, California.
Opening with the number, “No More Monsters,” the audience is introduced to the main characters. Lucy, who is played by the iconic Shoshana Bean, is a struggling mother trying to provide a better life for her two sons.
Michael, the oldest son played by LJ Benet, deals with baggage from his past life in Arizona while also getting mixed up with the wrong crowd in California.
Lastly, Sam, who is the youngest brother played by Benjamin Pajak, is hoping this new town will be a fresh start after years of being bullied.
Each character has far more depth and complexity to them than what meets the eye. It was refreshing to see a musical that doesn’t just focus on one character the whole time. I enjoyed how we got to see the journey and raw emotions of each of them as their stories overlap.
When Michael joins this new group of friends, he is initiated by drinking a cup of blood. What he doesn’t realize is that his new “friends” are actually vampires, and by drinking the blood, he becomes a half-vampire. To officially become a vampire, he needs to make his first kill.
When Michael starts acting strange, sleeping all day and wearing shades in the light, his younger brother Sam, and Sam’s new friends, speculate that he is a vampire. His friends who hunt vampires want to kill him to save the town. Protecting his brother, Sam finds out that in order to reverse the curse, they must find and kill the “head” vampire. The only problem is — they don’t know who that is.
All while this is happening, Lucy (the mother) starts dating the town’s unofficial mayor, who makes her feel young again. For the first time in years, she lets her guard down. She sings a song that truly had everyone in the audience captivated, titled “Wild.” She sings about how becoming a mother was the best gift in her life, yet she longs for the fearless girl she once was.
One of the lyrics especially stood out to me: “What if the mother in me could be messy and free. And hold it together at the same time. What if my boys can mean the world to me, and I can matter too? And that fearless girl in me can live in everything I do.”
After the show, my mom told me that that scene had her tearing up because she saw herself in Lucy. This show explores everything from teenage struggles to the realities of adulthood, making it relatable for everyone.
The scene that had me in tears was when Sam sang about saving his brother from being a vampire. Part of his story arc was being called names like being a “dweeb” and being called “gay.” In his song “Superpower,” he sings that his inner weirdness and quirks may actually be the thing that can save the day and save his brother from becoming a vampire for eternity.
I got goosebumps when he sang: “Mom smiles but doesn’t get me. Michael can’t protect me. But maybe I could be a hero here. And make it cool to be queer.”
The whole audience erupted into applause. It was truly a moving moment.
Without giving too much away, this show is one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. I’ll admit, I didn’t think Broadway had that many hits anymore. I’ve seen more than 30 shows in my life and needless to say, this one has become one of my all-time favorites.
“The Lost Boys” isn’t just a musical about vampires. It’s a show about love, brotherhood and family. It explores deep themes of sexuality, physical abuse, aging and death. If you’re thinking about skipping this show because it’s been reviewed as “cheesy,” I’d definitely reconsider.
The music, the set and the actors will have you captivated. My mom and I are already buying tickets to go back!
Cayla Mutchnick is an opinion columnist at The Review. Her opinions are her own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff. She may be reached at caylamut@udel.edu.
In congressional races around the country, Democrats find themselves under attack in political ads for allegedly opposing the popular tax cuts for tips, overtime and older Americans that were part of Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
While the ads warn that the Democratic candidates opposed or would do away with those tax cuts, many of the candidates themselves say they support those particular provisions.
Not a single Democrat in either the House or Senate voted in favor of the OBBBA, which was signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4, 2025. And the law did cut — though didn’t completely eliminate — taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security through 2028.
But many of the candidates facing these attacks say they voted against the OBBBA for other reasons — chiefly that overall tax cuts were skewed to the wealthy, and that it cut funding to Medicaid and reduced spending on federal food benefits. Many Democrats say they aren’t opposed to the bill’s tax cuts for tips, overtime and older Americans. Some have even said they would work to make them permanent.
Even before the OBBBA was being considered, then Vice President Kamala Harris said in August 2024 that she supported the elimination of taxes on tips for hospitality and service workers.
The No Tax on Tips legislation that was ultimately folded into the OBBBA enjoyed bipartisan support, and was passed by the Senate 100-0. When introducing another bill to clarify that no tax on tips would also apply to automatic gratuities, such as those added by restaurants when serving large parties, Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego called the no tax on tips provision in the OBBBA “shamefully short term.”
And Democrats have proposed legislation — the You Earned It, You Keep It Act — that would permanently eliminate federal taxes on Social Security, and pay for it by expanding the Social Security payroll tax to earnings above $250,000 a year.
In other words, opposition to the OBBBA doesn’t necessarily translate to an opposition to the bill’s tax cuts related to tips, overtime pay or Social Security.
These provisions — which all expireafter 2028 — provide tax deductions up to certain limits; a deduction reduces the total income subject to taxes. The overtime measure applies to the extra 50% income earned on time-and-a-half overtime, up to a limit. The Tax Policy Center estimated that “3 percent of taxpayers benefit from the tips deduction, with an average tax reduction of about $1,480 among those who benefit, and that 10 percent of taxpayers benefit from the overtime deduction, with an average tax reduction of about $1,200.”
The provision aimed at Social Security is a tax deduction, too — $6,000 for those age 65 and older, whether they get Social Security benefits or not, and it phases out for those earning $75,000 or $150,000 for couples filing jointly. The Tax Policy Center found that the deduction “would benefit fewer than half of older adults,” with seniors earning $80,000 to $130,000 benefiting the most. They get an average tax cut of about $1,100, TPC said, in 2025.
Texas Senate Race
One example of this midterm messaging is an ad in Texas from the campaign of Republican Ken Paxton that claims his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, “backs higher taxes on working families, $3,000 a year. Taxes on your tips, your overtime, even Social Security.” Talarico, a state legislator, was not in Congress when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in July 2025. But he opposed it — saying its tax cuts disproportionately benefited billionaires.
Regarding the claim that Talarico “backs higher taxes on working families, $3,000 a year,” that’s a reference — according to the ad’s footnotes — to a Tax Foundation estimate in February that taxpayers would see a nearly $2,300 average tax cut due to the OBBBA in 2026, while business tax cuts would save $1,541 on average.
The lion’s share of the tax cuts in the OBBBA were the result of permanently extending individual tax cuts first passed in the 2017 Trump-backed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Those provisions were set to expire at the end of 2025.
But the ad assumes Talarico opposes all of the tax cuts in the OBBBA. He does not.
In a campaign event in Arlington in August, Talarico said, “It’s time to repeal the big ugly bill’s tax breaks for the top 1% and give that $1 trillion to the middle class in the form of a cost of living tax cut.” He often frames the OBBBA as a boon for billionaires.
That’s in line with the mainstream Democratic position. As a presidential candidate in 2024, Harris proposed an economic plan that focused on cutting costs and “cutting taxes for more than 100 million working and middle-class Americans.” Specifically, Harris promised that “no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes,” which would have required her to extend the Trump tax cuts to at least that level.
As we’vewritten, each party has misleadingly emphasized only certain aspects of the law, and Talarico’s emphasis on its benefits to billionaires ignores that the OBBBA benefited all income groups on average. According to the Tax Foundation, the extension avoided a tax hike on an estimated 62% of tax filers in 2026.
But it’s also true that the biggest tax gains went to the top earners.
Estimates from the Tax Policy Center last year showed that the average tax cuts by income group in 2026 ranged from $150 for households earning less than about $35,000 to $21,000 for households earning nearly $500,000 to a little more than $1 million.
Factoring in the bill’s spending cuts lowers the benefits for low-income households. In a July 8, 2025, report on the “total value of the legislation,” the Penn Wharton Budget Model found that the OBBBA largely benefits wealthy taxpayers.
“On a conventional basis, households in the first income quintile lose about $885 in 2030, reflecting net reductions in taxes and transfers, including cuts to Medicaid and SNAP,” the report said, referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which was formerly known as food stamps.
“As spending cuts deepen over time, lower income households come out worse off,” the Penn Wharton Budget Model report said. We wrote more about that report in fact-checking an ad that attacked Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff over his vote against the OBBBA.
As for the ad’s claim that Talarico supports higher taxes on “tips, your overtime, even Social Security,” Talarico’s campaign said he specifically supports provisions of the OBBBA that cut taxes for the middle class, including taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security.
Of the estimated $3,813 overall average tax savings in 2026, about $450 is attributed to the “no tax on” tips, overtime and Social Security provisions, Garrett Watson, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, told us.
“This ad is a lie,” Talarico campaign spokesperson JT Ennis told us via email. “James was proud to vote for the largest property tax cut in Texas history and has consistently voted to cut taxes for working Texans.”
North Carolina Senate Race
In North Carolina, an ad from No Going Pack PAC Inc. says, “North Carolina seniors earned their Social Security and Medicare, but Roy Cooper supported higher taxes on Social Security, hitting seniors earning under $75,000.” If Cooper is elected, the ad says, “he’ll tax your Social Security.”
No Going Back PAC is a newly formed super PAC with ties to another super PAC, MAGA Inc., which is affiliated with President Donald Trump. Cooper, the former Democratic governor of North Carolina, faces former Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley in a race to fill the Senate seat occupied by outgoing Republican Sen. Thom Tillis.
An ad from the Whatley campaign — being run on streaming services — similarly claims that “Cooper backs higher taxes on tips and overtime, and even higher taxes on Social Security.”
Although the No Going Back PAC ad specifically warns a repeal of the Social Security tax cuts in the OBBBA would specifically hurt “seniors earning under $75,000,” as we’ve written before, many seniors below that income level already do not pay federal income taxes.
According to the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, 64% of seniors age 65 and over who receive Social Security income already receive exemptions and deductions that exceed their taxable Social Security income. As the Bipartisan Policy Center noted in an article last year, “The increased standard deduction in OBBB means that many older Americans with low income will not receive any benefit from the additional deduction.”
Cooper never served in Congress, so he didn’t vote on the OBBBA. But he has said he opposed it. “It is amazing to me that people like my opponent, Michael Whatley, cheer on this One Big Beautiful Bill when what it did was to take away people’s healthcare in order to fund tax breaks for billionaires,” Cooper said at a press conference on Oct. 5.
But importantly, he has repeatedly said he doesn’toppose the provision aimed to cut Social Security taxes.
“These attacks are false,” a spokesperson for the Cooper campaign told us via email. “Roy Cooper supports eliminating taxes on Social Security, voted to protect the Social Security tax exemption in North Carolina and cut taxes for working families and seniors.”
According to his campaign, Cooper also supports eliminating taxes on tips and overtime pay.
New Hampshire Senate Race
In New Hampshire, another ad from No Going Back PAC attacks Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas — who is now vying for a Senate seat — as a tax-raiser, saying, “Pappas voted against cutting taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security. $4,600 in higher taxes on New Hampshire families.”
Pappas voted against the OBBBA in the House. He said he voted against the legislation because the cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid were too extreme and risked causing the closure of health centers.
At the time, Pappas told Fox News, “I support targeted tax cuts for working people, for our small businesses and to make sure we are targeting that relief to the people that need it, not to billionaires, to the biggest corporations.”
Pappas’ campaign said he supports cutting taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security. Indeed, he co-sponsored bipartisan legislation that sought to permanently cut most taxes on tips. As we said, the tax cuts on tips in the OBBBA are set to expire in about two years.
Pennsylvania’s 7th House District
Numerous Democratic candidates for the House are facing the same type of attack ads. For example, in Pennsylvania, an ad from Safety and Affordability PAC claims Democrat Bob Brooks “wants to keep higher taxes on overtime pay and Social Security benefits. Families, firefighters, nurses, and seniors would see their taxes go up.”
Brooks, president of the Pennsylvania Professional Fire Fighters Association, is running in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District against Republican incumbent Rep. Ryan Mackenzie.
Brooks’ campaign pointed us to a Fox News story in June in which a spokesperson for his campaign said the Democrat “ran into burning buildings for 20 years [and] knows what hard work is, and he knows that first responders deserve to keep more of their hard-earned money.”
That Fox News story cites a May interview in which Brooks claimed that most firefighters didn’t benefit from the overtime tax cut. In that story, a Brooks campaign spokesperson said Brooks supports “no tax on overtime” and “no tax on tips.”
Brooks hasn’t served in Congress, so he couldn’t vote on the OBBBA.
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.
UK and Israel back away from full diplomatic confrontation, though British presence in Palestine will be much reduced
Israel and the UK have backed away from a full-scale diplomatic confrontation, with Britain announcing it is rebranding its consulate general building in East Jerusalem as a UK mission, a move that will result in UK diplomats leaving Israel, with only seven to remain in the building. Among those leaving is the consul general, Helen Winterton.
The change was forced on the UK by the Israeli government as punishment for the decision by the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, last month to ban trade with illegal settlements and introduce a tougher sanctions regime against those who aided the building of settlements. The UK is seeking to protect the two-state solution as the best means of ending the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Aminata Seck released on $2,500 bond after two months
Chinese player Qingfang Pang detained since September
Mississippi Valley State express concern for player
A Kentucky State University women’s basketball player from Senegal who was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been released after spending two months in custody.
At a hearing on Tuesday, a judge granted Aminata Seck a $2,500 bond, which was posted on Wednesday after ICE declined to appeal, according to Hishem Alsalman, managing attorney of Alsalman Law Office.
The Justice Department filed a new indictment against deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, who have been in federal prison since January.
At Jessop’s, New Castle’s past remains part of everyday hospitality, inviting diners to pull up a chair and discover history one course at a time.
By John Riddle, Contributing Journalist, Delaware LIVE
At Jessop’s Tavern in historic New Castle, a meal comes with a generous helping of history. English pub favorites, Dutch comfort food, Swedish influences and Belgian beers share the spotlight inside a building whose story began more than three centuries ago.
Located at 114 Delaware Street, the tavern connects its dining experience to the cultures that helped shape the region. For visitors exploring Olde New Castle or residents gathering over dinner, that connection offers a way to experience the past beyond historic markers and museum displays.
“Since the time we opened Jessop’s Tavern, our purpose has been to create a memorable experience while serving history in Olde City New Castle,” the Day family states on the tavern’s website.
According to the website, the building was constructed in 1674. Abraham Jessop, a cooper who made barrels, lived and operated his business there in 1724. His name now identifies a restaurant that has become another chapter in the property’s long history.
Over the years, the address served as residential housing and housed several businesses. During the 1950s, it was known as the Captain’s Log Restaurant. In 1974, it was The Green Frog Tavern. The Day family opened Jessop’s Tavern in November 1996, naming it for the barrel maker who once called the building home.
That history carries into the kitchen, where the menu draws on English, Dutch, Belgian, Swedish and early American food traditions. The approach combines those influences with the tastes and expectations of today’s diners.
The tavern’s website notes that sauces and dressings are made in-house, along with much of the baking. It also says the chef selects seafood for freshness.
Among the menu’s colonial offerings is New Sweden Meatloaf, a Swedish-inspired version of the familiar dish served with vodka cream sauce and lingonberry preserves. Dutch influences appear in “Hutspot” pot roast, a slow-cooked meal accompanied by mashed potatoes, garden vegetables and beef gravy.
For those drawn to English pub fare, fish and chips features beer-battered cod, deep-fried cottage potatoes, a colonial side and traditional sauces.
Another substantial option is shepherd’s pie. The tavern describes its version as a 2½-pound meal, layering seasoned beef, root vegetables and tavern-made mashed potatoes with rich beef gravy.
Oven-baked pot pies offer additional choices, including chicken, beef and ale, crab and lobster. Root vegetables and herb cream sit beneath a crust served piping hot.
Dessert continues the mix of traditions. “Oli Bolen” Dutch apple cakes are deep-fried apple donut holes served with Woodside Farm ice cream and cinnamon whipped cream. Other selections include peach cobbler, bread pudding with butterscotch bourbon sauce and Belgian chocolate mousse cake.
Ice cream made at Historic Woodside Farm Creamery adds a Delaware connection to the dessert menu, with servings available in a bowl or Belgian waffle cone.
Beer is another major part of the tavern’s identity. Its website lists more than 300 Belgian bottled beers and 30 draft offerings, with 20 drafts dedicated to Belgian selections. The broader collection includes beers from the United States and other countries.
Jessop’s also offers an intimate historic dining room for private gatherings of up to 26 guests. Suggested occasions include luncheons, business events, holiday parties, bridal showers, and family celebrations. An inquiry form on the website allows customers to discuss menus and dates.
For the Day family, bringing history to the table also means keeping it relevant to each generation. The result is a restaurant where an old building’s story continues through the meals and gatherings taking place inside it.
At Jessop’s, New Castle’s past remains part of everyday hospitality, inviting diners to pull up a chair and discover history one course at a time.
Topeka, KS — Republican secretary of state nominee Pat Proctor is facing scrutiny over federal labor violations at his restaurant businesses after acknowledging that employees were denied legally required overtime pay.
The U.S. Department of Labor determined in 2016 that Baan Thai Restaurant Inc., co-owned by Proctor and his wife, owed 31 employees $93,008 for violations committed between 2014 and 2016. The amount included $79,133 in unpaid overtime and $13,875 connected to minimum-wage violations, according to Kansas Reflector. Federal law requires covered workers to receive overtime compensation when applicable.
Proctor recently told KMAN radio that he had not understood the applicable labor rules despite having operated restaurants for about a decade. He blamed the episode partly on government bureaucracy, saying a Labor Department official arrived with regulations his business “didn’t know about.”
Proctor acknowledged that he failed to track hours for salaried kitchen employees, meaning workers who exceeded 40 hours were not properly compensated.
Democratic opponent Jennifer Day criticized the record, arguing that someone seeking to oversee Kansas elections and business filings should demonstrate accountability for following laws.
Proctor said the experience inspired his proposal for a state website using artificial intelligence to help businesses understand government regulations.
Why Should Delaware Care? As part of a nationwide legal effort, the Trump administration is suing the University of Delaware to end a long-standing policy that allows undocumented students who meet the school’s residency requirements to pay in-state tuition rates to attend UD.
The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit against the University of Delaware over the school’s policy that allows undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates.
The lawsuit, one of dozens of similar suits the federal government has filed against universities throughout the country, seeks to prevent the university from offering its lower, in-state tuition rates to undocumented students.
The federal Department of Justice has successfully sued to stop the practice in six states – including Republican-led states like Texas and Oklahoma and Democrat-led ones like Illinois – and has filed pending lawsuits on the matter in an additional 19 states.
The federal government’s case appears to rest on the fact that in-state tuition is only available to Delaware residents, meaning not all Americans have access to the benefit.
Since the benefit is not universally accessible to all American students, it should not be available for undocumented students, regardless of where they reside, because it is discriminatory against students in other states, the U.S. Department of Justice argues.
“The University of Delaware maintains a policy […] that makes resident illegal aliens eligible for in-state tuition while denying that same benefit to U.S. citizens from other states,” the suit states. “That constitutes blatant unequal treatment favoring illegal aliens over U.S. citizens.”
The policy, the government argues, violates a 1996 federal law that forbids undocumented or illegal immigrants from receiving “any postsecondary education benefit unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit […] without regard to whether the citizen or national is such a resident” of a certain state. President Donald Trump has also issued a series of related executive orders regarding undocumented students during his second term in office.
The school currently allows undocumented students to access in-state tuition if they meet the requirements of the school’s Student Residency Classification policy. The policy already excludes “alien[s] in this country on a student or other temporary visa” and those with “the intention or legal requirement to return to the country of former residence.” This, though, does not technically exclude people without official citizenship documentation.
For a full-time student, the university lists its in-state tuition as $15,740 for the 2026-2027 academic year. Out-of-state students attending the university full-time will pay $42,470 in tuition this year.
According to the Higher Ed Immigration Portal, there are 6,651 first-generation immigrant students enrolled in higher education throughout Delaware, a figure that includes undocumented students. The organization does not have definitive statistics about the University of Delaware specifically, and the school does not disclose citizenship status of its students per privacy laws.
The state legislature considered a law in 2012 that would have required Delaware’s public higher education institutions to charge undocumented students in-state tuition, and would have made them eligible for in-state scholarships. The bill was not passed before the General Assembly concluded though.
At the time, there were just 11 undocumented students who would have qualified for in-state tuition between UD and Delaware State University.
In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, a university spokesperson said the institution was “reviewing [the lawsuit] carefully.” He declined further comment because it is a pending legal matter.
In a press release announcing the lawsuit, U.S. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said that the federal government is seeking to enforce federal law because Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings is not.
“This Department of Justice’s efforts will not cease until we have challenged every state law or university policy that gives preferential treatment to illegal aliens over our nation’s own citizens,” he said. “Congress long ago made clear that states cannot give reduced tuition to illegal aliens not available to all Americans.”
The University of Delaware was previously impacted by Trump administration cuts to the National Institutes of Health grant programs by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), losing millions in research funding.
Correction: This story originally reported that the 2012 state law on in-state tuition passed the state legislature, but that is incorrect. The General Assembly concluded before it could be approved and was not brought back.
Global bond market sell-off continues and stocks fall amid reports White House has asked to see options for more strikes against Iran
Oil prices have risen sharply amid fears about escalating tensions in the Middle East and a squeeze on production from the threat of a hurricane off the US coast.
Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose by 5% to $105.3 a barrel on Thursday, triggering a wave of selling in the global bond and stock markets.
Washington, DC — The FBI is facing a Hatch Act complaint after using an official government social media account to post a video attacking prominent Democrats, including Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, weeks before the midterm elections.
The video, posted Tuesday by the FBI’s rapid-response account, described Democrats as the “DEFUND THE POLICE crowd” and accused them of allowing criminals to “run wild.” It contrasted those claims with footage praising FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Todd Blanche for arrests and drug seizures.
The video included images of former Vice President Kamala Harris, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, former Rep. Cori Bush and El-Sayed. El-Sayed was specifically identified on screen as a “Progressive Democrat, Senate Nominee.”
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, arguing that highlighting a current candidate while attacking his political party amounted to government-supported partisan activity.
The Hatch Act generally prohibits federal employees from using their official authority to interfere with or influence partisan elections.
The complaint follows separate scrutiny of Patel over political appearances. In September, another watchdog asked federal investigators to review whether Patel violated the Hatch Act by appearing alongside Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin.
The FBI has not publicly responded to the latest complaint.
Lenora Thaker wins $30,000 prize for ‘a work of state significance’ for The Pearl of Tagai Town, which draws on her family’s history in Cairns-Malay Town
A “stunning” debut novel described as “unambiguously and distinctively Queensland” has won the $30,000 top prize at the Queensland literary awards (QLAs).
Meriam and Wagedagam author Lenora Thaker won the Queensland premier’s award for a work of state significance for her historical novel The Pearl of Tagai Town, which was inspired by her ancestors’ lives in an unmapped shantytown known as Cairns-Malay Town. The town once housed Indigenous Australians, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Malaysian and Sri Lankan residents who had been segregated from the white population; it existed from the late 1800s until the late 1950s.
Why should Delaware care? After years of efforts to create an office to investigate abuse in government, the Delaware Office of Inspector General has launched operations and is fielding tips from whistleblowers. The launch follows several high-profile incidents of embezzlement and questionable spending.
After months of building up an office, Delaware’s new government watchdog charged with investigating fraud, waste, mismanagement and corruption is formally seeking out whistleblowers.
On a website launched Tuesday, the Delaware Office of Inspector General lists a hotline where users can anonymously submit reports of government malfeasance by phone or email.
The website also provides a clickable orange button that directs users to an online form to make such reports.
The form notes that the new inspector general’s office is charged with investigating the operations of Delaware’s state government, including its school districts. Also within its investigative purview are claims of retaliation against whistleblowers.
The office does not investigate the operations of cities, counties, or the Delaware courts.
The website’s rollout follows lawmakers’ passage last year of legislation formally creating the Delaware Office of Inspector General. It was the culmination of nearly two decades of attempts to create such an office in a state where officials have often celebrated their ability to quietly strike deals outside of a noisy public sphere.
Last year, Gov. Matt Meyer signed the bill into law, and in April nominated Robert P. Storch, a longtime federal government watchdog, to become Delaware’s first inspector general.
At the time Meyer called Storch a “seasoned leader” who could ensure that government actions are transparent and accountable. Prior to his nomination, Storch served for years as an inspector general at the federal level, most recently at the Department of Defense. In early 2025, he was among several inspectors general fired by President Donald Trump, who cited “changing priorities” for the dismissals.
Storch subsequently sued the Trump administration alongside seven other inspectors general.
In an interview Wednesday, Storch said he does not intend to return to the federal government even if his ongoing lawsuit is successful. He expressed excitement at the prospect of investigating within a state government setting where the public can see the results more immediately.
Storch said has been hiring staffers in recent months and his office now has filled six of its 10 allotted positions. He said he launched the website on Tuesday because his team is now big enough to handle reports submitted through the portal.
“And we’re still staffing, so that’s going to continue to be a work in progress,” he said.
Storch also said his office had already recieved tips about government waste, even before the launch of the website.
Asked about his priorities, he cited accountability and transparency. Pressed for details, he said the legislature has given him a “broad mandate” to independently scrutinize operations across government.
He also said he will try to direct his office’s investigations to those that have the biggest impact as measured by several factors, including dollars recovered, policy improvements recommended, or criminal charges filed.
AI is already implicated in violent deaths and nearly started world war three. Those bad things? They only happen to other people
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has some words for you about his company and the future of artificial intelligence.
“One of the differences between us and some of the stricter AI safety people is that we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency [to use it],” Altman told Politico’s new technology podcast and newsletter Decoded.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a Guardian US columnist
Washington, DC — The Democratic National Committee sued the Trump administration Wednesday, alleging that millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded television advertisements promoting President Donald Trump amount to illegal government propaganda.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, asks a judge to stop federal money from financing the campaign and declare the advertisements unlawful. The spots began airing in September and have cost more than $12 million to broadcast, according to AdImpact. The broader campaign was funded through $20 million allocated by the Department of Homeland Security.
The advertisements feature Trump praising his administration’s accomplishments and closely echo themes from his political campaigns. They have aired less than a month before the midterm elections and carry disclaimers stating they were “paid for by the U.S. Government.”
Trump recently said future advertisements would instead be financed by MAGA Inc., the super PAC aligned with him. However, another taxpayer-funded spot aired afterward, and the administration has not committed to reimbursing money already spent.
The White House maintains the spots are legitimate public-service announcements similar to messaging used by previous administrations. Critics from both parties have questioned whether the campaign violates federal restrictions on using appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda. A separate lawsuit challenging the advertisements has also been filed by a coalition led by Common Cause.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration is proposing a $70,000 fee for international students seeking work experience in the United States through the Optional Practical Training program, a change universities say could sharply reduce foreign enrollment.
Under the proposed Department of Homeland Security rule, schools would have to pay $70,000 for each student’s initial OPT recommendation and $30,000 for subsequent recommendations. OPT allows international students to work in jobs related to their field of study, generally for one year and up to three years for qualifying STEM graduates.
DHS says the fee would address fraud and what it calls the program’s use as a source of inexpensive foreign labor.
Higher education groups strongly disagree. NAFSA, an association representing international educators, says OPT helps U.S. employers fill high-demand positions and gives graduates practical experience that contributes to innovation and economic growth.
The proposal arrives as international enrollment is already declining. New international student enrollment fell 17% last fall, according to higher education groups, with some institutions reporting substantially larger drops.
The public will have 60 days to comment before DHS can finalize the rule. Universities and immigration attorneys have also signaled that any final version could face legal challenges.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump is set to award the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su during a White House science and technology summit Thursday.
The awards will be presented during the administration’s “Science: A New Golden Age Summit,” which is focused on artificial intelligence, technological innovation and U.S. competitiveness. The ceremony marks the first time Trump has presented the National Medal of Science during either of his presidencies.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell are also expected to receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. The White House said the honorees have made major contributions to American science and technology and are helping maintain U.S. leadership in innovation.
The selection also reunites Trump publicly with Musk after their high-profile political split in 2025. Musk had been one of Trump’s most prominent political allies and financial backers before the relationship deteriorated, but the two have moved closer again in recent months.
The medals are among the federal government’s highest honors for scientific and technological achievement and have historically recognized researchers, inventors and innovators whose work has had major national impact.
Washington, DC — U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle asked a political donor to pay $100,000 toward her American Express debt while communicating with him about access to Trump administration officials, according to messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal reported that Guilfoyle contacted Kentucky businessman and former congressional candidate Eric Deters in July 2025, shortly before her Senate confirmation hearing. In Signal messages, she allegedly urged Deters to wire money directly to American Express, writing that the payment “won’t show up anywhere.”
Deters had previously discussed paying Guilfoyle as much as $1 million if she successfully helped him obtain assistance with tax and legal matters. The Journal reported that Guilfoyle forwarded Deters messages she sent to senior government officials and updated him on her efforts. Deters ultimately did not make the $100,000 payment.
Guilfoyle’s attorney, Jesse Binnall, disputes the authenticity of the messages and says she has acted properly. Deters said earlier payments to Guilfoyle were connected to patriotic events and appearances.
Democratic lawmakers have asked the State Department to investigate Guilfoyle’s conduct following separate reporting about her activities as ambassador. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declined to address the newest allegations Wednesday but said Guilfoyle has been a “strong ambassador.”
Phoenix, AZ — Democratic congressional candidate Bernadette Greene-Placentia says she was attacked and raped in August while attempting to repair a damaged campaign sign in the Phoenix area.
Greene-Placentia told the Phoenix New Times that she was crossing a parking lot shortly after 2 a.m. on Aug. 14 when someone struck her in the head, causing her to lose consciousness. She said she later awoke to find a man sexually assaulting her while another man stood nearby.
Greene-Placentia said she suffered bruising and believes she may also have sustained a concussion. She initially did not report the assault, describing feelings of embarrassment and difficulty recalling portions of what happened.
She later told her husband and campaign staff and reported the incident to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office about two weeks afterward. A sheriff’s spokesperson told reporters the investigation remains active and declined to provide additional details.
Greene-Placentia said she ultimately decided to discuss the alleged assault publicly because she wanted other survivors to feel able to speak about their experiences.
Her campaign emphasized that the disclosure was intended to support survivors rather than advance a political message. Greene-Placentia is challenging Republican Rep. Abraham Hamadeh for a congressional seat representing portions of the Phoenix area.
Bloomington, MN — Federal authorities say they disrupted a planned terrorist attack at the Mall of America after arresting an 18-year-old accused of trying to buy an AK-47 and ammunition from an undercover FBI employee.
Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud was arrested Tuesday after allegedly paying $600 for the rifle, four magazines and 200 rounds of ammunition. Prosecutors say he believed the seller was affiliated with ISIS.
According to federal investigators, Mohamud had been under scrutiny for nearly two years and initially discussed traveling overseas to join militant groups. When those plans failed, authorities say he shifted toward planning an attack in Minnesota.
Investigators allege Mohamud discussed killing dozens of people and identified the Mall of America as a target. Court documents say he planned to strike on Oct. 24 during a Hmong arts event and had pledged allegiance to ISIS.
U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen said agents were able to identify and interrupt the alleged plot before anyone was harmed.
Mohamud has been charged with obtaining a firearm to commit an act of terrorism. The allegations have not been proven in court, and he is presumed innocent unless convicted.
Authorities have not publicly detailed what first prompted the FBI investigation.
Harrisburg, PA — Democratic Sen. John Fetterman has become dramatically more popular with Pennsylvania Republicans than members of his own party, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.
The survey found 72% of Republican likely voters view Fetterman favorably, compared with only 13% of Democrats. Among all likely voters, 37% hold a favorable view while 46% view him unfavorably. Independents were also negative, with 27% favorable and 49% unfavorable.
The reversal follows Fetterman’s increasingly frequent criticism of Democrats and cooperation with President Donald Trump. He appeared by video at the Republican Party’s September midterm convention, where he praised working across party lines and received an enthusiastic response from GOP attendees.
Earlier polling showed the shift developing rapidly. In July, 77% of Pennsylvania Republicans approved of Fetterman’s job performance while 69% of Democrats disapproved. By August, nearly four-fifths of Republican likely voters viewed him favorably.
Fetterman has repeatedly rejected speculation that he plans to become a Republican and continues to identify as a Democrat. However, Pennsylvania voters increasingly perceive him differently: a September survey found a majority considered him more Republican than Democratic.
Delaware inspector general launches website, hotline for fraud and abuse complaints
New public portal gives Delawareans a direct way to report fraud, waste, corruption and misuse of state resources
DOVER, Del. — Delaware’s Office of the Inspector General has launched a public website and complaint hotline, giving residents, state employees and others a direct way to report suspected fraud, waste, mismanagement, corruption and misuse of state government resources.
The launch marks another step in establishing the independent watchdog office created by the General Assembly in 2025 and now led by Delaware’s first inspector general, Robert P. Storch.
The new website provides information about the office, its responsibilities and how it operates. It also includes an online form for submitting complaints and concerns to the inspector general.
Complaints and inquiries are kept confidential to the greatest extent possible, according to the office, and people filing reports may choose to remain anonymous.
“The public launch of the new OIG website and Hotline mark an important milestone in the development of our office,” Storch said in an announcement reported by Delaware news organizations.
Storch said the office is continuing to hire staff while giving the public more information about the agency and how concerns can be reported.
New avenue for government complaints
The Office of the Inspector General was established as an independent, nonpartisan state agency responsible for detecting and deterring fraud, waste, mismanagement, corruption and other abuses of government resources that harm the public interest.
State law allows the inspector general to investigate the management and operations of state agencies and to begin investigations either on the office’s own initiative or after receiving a complaint.
Complaints may be submitted by individuals or organizations.
The law also requires the office to maintain a telephone number, website, email address and mailing address for complaints and inquiries.
The inspector general is required to remain neutral and impartial and is not intended to serve as an advocate either for the person filing a complaint or for the state agency involved.
Delaware’s first inspector general
Gov. Matt Meyer signed Senate Bill 4 in August 2025, creating the Office of the Inspector General following years of discussion about establishing an independent statewide government watchdog.
Storch was sworn in May 8 as Delaware’s first inspector general.
At the time, state officials said the office was intended to strengthen accountability, transparency and public confidence in state government.
Storch previously served as inspector general for the U.S. Department of Defense and as the first Senate-confirmed inspector general of the National Security Agency. He also held senior positions in the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General.
One of Storch’s early priorities was establishing a public website and complaint hotline so Delawareans would have a direct way to bring concerns to the new office.
What the office can investigate
The inspector general’s jurisdiction includes allegations involving fraud, waste, mismanagement, corruption and other abuses of government resources.
The office may examine the management and operations of state agencies and investigate complaints involving the public interest.
The law also limits the office’s role in routine employment disputes involving state workers unless those complaints are connected to fraud, waste, mismanagement, corruption or another abuse of government resources.
The inspector general also is expected to coordinate with the Delaware Department of Justice, auditor of accounts, Public Integrity Commission and other investigative or law enforcement agencies when appropriate.
State law generally requires the inspector general to issue public findings and recommendations following completed investigations.
The office also must issue an annual report outlining complaints received, investigations opened and completed, significant investigations and unresolved recommendations or concerns.
The launch of the website and hotline gives Delawareans a direct point of access to an office created specifically to investigate concerns about how state government operates and how taxpayer resources are used.
Mailing address:
60 Loockerman Plaza
Dover, DE 19901
Confidentiality: Complaints and inquiries are kept confidential to the greatest extent possible. People filing complaints may also choose to report anonymously.
What it does: Investigates allegations of fraud, waste, mismanagement, corruption and other abuse of Delaware government resources.
Who can file a complaint: Individuals and organizations may submit complaints.
What can be reported: Suspected fraud, corruption, misuse of taxpayer resources, serious mismanagement or other government conduct that may harm the public interest.
What it generally does not handle: Routine state employee workplace disputes unless they involve fraud, waste, mismanagement, corruption or misuse of government resources.
Photo: The ranking evaluates clinical quality, professional reputation, specialized accreditation and patient experience. More than half of the score is based on quality measures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. image provided by ChrisitanaCare.
Newsweek again ranks Wilmington Hospital program among nation’s best as ChristianaCare expands rehabilitation capacity in Delaware
WILMINGTON, Del. — ChristianaCare’s Center for Rehabilitation at Wilmington Hospital has been named one of the nation’s best inpatient rehabilitation facilities for the fourth consecutive year.
Newsweek included the center among its Best Physical Rehabilitation Centers in the United States and ranked it among the leading rehabilitation facilities in Delaware.
The ranking evaluates clinical quality, professional reputation, specialized accreditation and patient experience. More than half of the score is based on quality measures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
“We care for each patient like they are a member of our own family,” said Dr. John Cheng, medical director of the Center for Rehabilitation.
“Each patient, their family, their home situation, how they were before and how they want to be in the future, their goals and what they want to achieve in life — that’s what we focus on.”
Growing demand for rehabilitation
The Wilmington center treats patients recovering from strokes, brain and spinal cord injuries, amputations, extended hospitalizations and serious orthopedic conditions.
In fiscal year 2026, the center discharged 890 patients with an average stay of 11.6 days.
ChristianaCare also reported that 95% of patients were living back in the community 90 days after discharge, compared with a national average of 93%.
“Many medical specialties aim to add years to a patient’s life,” Cheng said. “Our aim is to add life to their years.”
Jennifer Thomas, vice president of Rehabilitation Services, said patients are increasingly arriving with complex medical needs.
“The patient always comes first,” Thomas said. “Our expert team is dedicated to providing the best rehabilitation care with compassion and respect for every patient’s unique journey.”
Preparing patients for home
Rehabilitation includes physical, occupational and speech therapy, with patients practicing everyday activities such as climbing stairs, cooking and shopping.
Families and caregivers are also encouraged to participate in therapy and receive training before patients return home.
“Since I’ve been here, it changed my life for the better,” said patient Anthony Dobrosielski, who received occupational therapy following a fall.
Major Newark expansion coming
ChristianaCare recently expanded the Wilmington center to 36 beds, allowing it to serve about 216 additional patients annually.
A much larger expansion is planned for Newark.
ChristianaCare expects to open a $75 million freestanding inpatient rehabilitation hospital at 140 Red Mill Road in 2028.
The 92,000-square-foot hospital will have 73 beds and is expected to serve about 1,000 additional patients each year.
“This transformative investment will significantly expand access to specialized rehabilitation care across Delaware,” Thomas said.
The project is part of ChristianaCare’s broader $865 million investment in Delaware and is expected to nearly double the health system’s current rehabilitation capacity.
TO GO
What: ChristianaCare Center for Rehabilitation
Where: Wilmington Hospital, 501 W. 14th St., Wilmington
Services: Inpatient rehabilitation for stroke, brain and spinal cord injuries, amputations, orthopedic injuries and other complex conditions.
Recognition: Named by Newsweek among the nation’s Best Physical Rehabilitation Centers for the fourth consecutive year.
Coming next: A new 73-bed ChristianaCare rehabilitation hospital is scheduled to open in Newark in 2028.
Learn more: Visit ChristianaCare.org and search for “Center for Rehabilitation.”
Washington, DC — Companies backed by President Donald Trump’s sons have received or been promised more than $6 billion in federal contracts since those investments were made, according to an ABC News analysis of government contracting records.
The largest example involves Anduril Industries, in which 1789 Capital — a venture firm listing Donald Trump Jr. as a partner — holds a major stake. The Trump administration announced this week that the Navy will support $2.9 billion of a $6.6 billion submarine-manufacturing project at Sparrows Point, Maryland. Since 1789 Capital’s investment, Anduril has also received about $1.8 billion through other federal contracts, ABC reported.
Other Trump-linked investments include drone manufacturers, rare-earth companies, quantum-computing firms and automated defense manufacturers. Hadrian, backed by 1789 Capital, later secured a $900 million Navy agreement, while Vulcan Elements received a $620 million government loan.
Congressional Democrats have asked the Pentagon inspector general to investigate whether conflicts of interest influenced contracting decisions.
The Pentagon says no company receives preferential treatment and that political connections play no role in awards. A spokesperson for Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump likewise denied wrongdoing, saying their investment decisions are independent and that neither brother participates in government procurement decisions.
Washington, DC — Federal immigration investigators reviewed nearly 100 million voter-related records and considered undercover operations against voter-registration groups as part of a nationwide search for noncitizens suspected of voting illegally.
Documents obtained by Democracy Forward show Homeland Security Investigations analyzed roughly 50.6 million voter-roll records supplied by the Justice Department and another 48.4 million records provided through DHS adviser Heather Honey’s “independent sources.” The records also identify several battleground states as priorities.
Investigators additionally reviewed nonprofit organizations involved in voter registration and discussed using undercover agents where groups were suspected of helping noncitizens register. Some state election data may also have been considered for entry into Palantir software used by ICE for immigration enforcement.
The effort comes as ICE has separately begun asking detainees whether they have ever voted illegally and, if so, whether they voted by mail or in person. The Washington Post reported that the questioning was added to ICE’s booking system in August.
The records document an unusually expansive federal effort to uncover election fraud, though several inquiries described in the files reportedly closed without producing evidence of wrongdoing.
Democracy Forward argues the operation risks intimidating eligible voters. DHS maintains that it investigates credible allegations of criminal activity, including election-related offenses.
Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is at risk if Bolsonaro wins – but its low-carbon economy is here to stayExpert commentLToremark
If Flávio Bolsonaro wins Brazil’s presidential run-off, he will likely roll back Lula’s deforestation regulations. But the country’s low-carbon transition will be harder to reverse.
The outcome of the first round of Brazil’s presidential election has put President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his main challenger Flávio Bolsonaro – son of former president Jair Bolsonaro – into a run-off at the end of October. The result itself is not surprising. But Bolsonaro’s stronger-than-expected advantage over Lula and the consolidation of a right-leaning Congress – particularly the Senate – is. If Bolsonaro becomes president, Brazil will join the right-wing wave sweeping across Latin America.
This shift to the right will impact Brazil’s climate transition plans. A Bolsonaro presidency backed by a sympathetic Congress will have considerable power to weaken existing environmental protections. But that does not mean that Brazil’s entire climate transition would go into reverse.
Brazil’s climate agenda is often presented as a contest between environmental protection and economic development. The reality is more complicated. The important question is which parts of Brazil’s climate policy a president can change, which require congressional support, and where trade, investment and private-sector interests constrain political choices.
Brazil’s president has considerable executive power over environmental outcomes. The president appoints the leadership of environmental protection agencies such as the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), determines enforcement priorities and allocates budgets that can either strengthen or weaken environmental protection within months.
But economic forces also set boundaries. Brazil is deeply dependent on agricultural and natural-resource exports, and increasingly on oil. At the same time, large flows of private and foreign investment are reinforcing renewable power, electricity transmission and distribution, electric vehicles and other low-carbon industries.
This distinction reflects Brazil’s unusual emissions profile. Unlike many large emerging economies, two thirds of the country’s greenhouse emissions are linked to land-use change. Brazil’s energy system is relatively clean; renewables already provide around 87 per cent of its electricity.
The Amazon is at risk if Bolsonaro wins
The greatest risk from a Bolsonaro victory is therefore likely to be land use and deforestation.
When Lula returned to office in 2023, his government restored environmental enforcement, agency capacity and satellite monitoring. Under environment minister Marina Silva, Amazon deforestation fell substantially. The latest annual PRODES, an official satellite monitoring system estimate put Amazon deforestation at 5,731 square kilometres in 2025, around half the 2022 level.
However, enforcement regulations are reversible by executive power if they are not complemented by policy packages that structurally change land-use practices. Transforming Brazil’s underlying land-use model requires cooperation with the country’s powerful agribusiness sector, which Marina Silva did not secure. Policy packages would have to move beyond policing towards land-tenure reform, traceability, rural-credit conditions, restoration of degraded land and incentives that make productivity gains more profitable than land clearing and expansion.
If Flávio Bolsonaro follows his father’s approach, he will likely reduce the enforcement capability and, with congressional support, further loosen environmental licensing and forest protection regulations like Brazil’s forest code.
Renewable energy transformation is harder to reverse
A Bolsonaro government would have much less room to change Brazil’s renewable-energy trajectory. Brazil has structural advantages in hydropower, wind, solar and biofuels. These sectors are supported not only by climate policies but by competitive costs, growing electricity demand, existing infrastructure, private investment and powerful domestic industries.
Biofuels, a sector that is broadly supported by Brazilian civil society and agribusiness, will continue to have a strategic role. Unlike in many European economies, Brazil’s ethanol and biodiesel industries combine climate objectives with agricultural, industrial and energy-security interests. Given the existing renewable assets, investments and private sector contracts in place – and Bolsonaro’s strong alignment with private sector interests – it would be harder for him to change policy direction in this area.
The importance of oil
Alongside its renewable energy transformation, Brazil has also become a major oil producer. The discovery and development of the offshore pre-salt oil reserves has made Brazil the 9th largest oil producer in the world and the largest in Latin America. It has attracted significant investment and is expanding production capability. In addition, the state-controlled oil company Petrobras is central in public finances at both federal and state level. In 2025, it paid R$277.6 billion in taxes, 7 per cent of Brazil’s total tax revenues.
The continuing disruption around the Strait of Hormuz strengthens the strategic value of Atlantic Basin producers like Brazil, Guyana, Canada and the US. Bolsonaro’s alignment with Washington and other right-leaning Latin American producers could reinforce the formation a new axis of oil production in the Americas. This could lock Brazil further into the position of becoming a strategic producer globally.
Although both Lula and Bolsonaro would continue to enhance Brazil’s production capability, Bolsonaro would likely push harder for faster licensing, private investment and offshore exploration. In 2025, Petrobras was granted a highly controversial exploration licence in the Equatorial Margin, along the Foz do Amazonas River basin and have since discovered oil. There are concerns Bolsonaro would accelerate the licensing for further exploratory drilling in the Amazon region.
The China factor and impact of Brazil’s trade relationships
Brazil’s trade and investment relationships will limit both Lula and Bolsonaro’s manoeuvrability on climate actions. Even if Bolsonaro is politically aligned with Trump, there are economic interests that will limit his ability to track too closely with the US administration – particularly on China.
China is Brazil’s largest export market, accounting for roughly 28 per cent of Brazil’s exports. It bought almost 80 per cent of Brazilian soybean export volumes in 2025, 45 per cent of exported crude oil and is also a major buyer of Brazilian beef and iron ore. This gives Chinese demand considerable influence over the economics of Brazilian land use and resource production.
China’s dominance limits the effectiveness of other trade partners’ environmental regulations, such as the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). Although the EUDR can impose stringent traceability requirements on commodities entering the European market, it cannot by itself determine production practices across Brazilian supply chains. The regulation will only affect the portion of large Brazilian exporters, commodity traders and banks that operate across multiple markets and therefore have commercial reasons to maintain traceability even if federal enforcement weakens.
China’s importance also extends beyond trade. There are strong economic and investment interests between the two countries. The private sector in Brazil is not as suspicious of Chinese investment and technology as their American or European counterparts. In 2025, Brazil was the largest recipient of Chinese investment, with $6.1 billion invested primarily in renewable energy, clean technology and mining, further consolidating their strategic global positioning in renewable supply.
Although Brazil’s current climate ambitions would be undermined if Bolsonaro wins October’s run-off, not all would be lost. The future of the Amazon rainforest is most at risk and the most vulnerable part of the country’s climate agenda. Brazil’s energy transition, however, is likely to progress regardless of who wins.
Department of Elections urges residents who still need to register to review state requirements as election season enters its final weeks
DOVER, Del. — The Delaware Department of Elections is urging residents who are not yet registered to vote to review the state’s registration requirements as Delaware moves closer to the 2026 General Election.
The department issued a voter alert this week directing eligible Delaware residents who want to participate in the General Election to make sure their registration is completed within the state’s required timeframe.
The alert comes as Delaware enters the final weeks of an election season that will decide federal, state and local races across the state.
The Department of Elections maintains the state’s official voter information, including registration requirements, voter status information, election calendars and other resources.
Residents who are unsure whether they are registered, believe their information may need to be updated or need to register for the first time should use the Department of Elections’ official website for the current requirements and available options.
The department also encourages voters to rely on official state election information as Election Day approaches.
Delaware LIVE will continue its 2026 election coverage with candidate profiles, issue stories and information about races throughout the state.
To Go Box
What: Delaware 2026 General Election voter information
Who: Delaware residents who want to confirm their registration status or need information about registering
Official information: Delaware Department of Elections
Website: elections.delaware.gov
Voter information portal: www.ivote.delaware.gov
More information: The Department of Elections website includes official registration, election calendar, candidate and voter information.
Austin Davis, center, a 26-year-old poet and advocate for homeless people, has become a point of last resort for families who are experiencing homelessness in the Phoenix area.
For about a year, Austin Davis’ phone has been flooded with hundreds of pleas for help from across the Phoenix metropolitan area.
A school employee wanted to help a homeless family but couldn’t find space at a shelter. Could Davis pay for a hotel room?
A mother of five living in a storage unit contacted a homeless services organization for help. They told her to call Davis.
A mother panhandling with her six children said passersby gave her Davis’ phone number, telling her he might be able to provide shelter. “I feel like the worst mother in the world,” she texted him.
Nearly every person who’s reached out to Davis, a 26-year-old poet and advocate for homeless people, says they’d first called 211, seeking help through the official channel, only to learn it could be months before they’d get shelter or a housing placement. His phone has become the unofficial hotline for emergency shelter.
Caseworkers, teachers, social workers, police and hospital workers have called and texted to see if Davis can help people without a place to go. Even workers from the official channel — 211 and the Family Housing Hub — have sent people to him.
Davis’ path to becoming the de facto advocate of last resort illustrates how the system set up to care for families who are homeless in Maricopa County is failing them. ProPublica found that calling and visiting the official channel to address family homelessness rarely leads to offers of help, leaving families feeling hopeless.
Davis’ nonprofit, AZ Hugs, holds daily food distributions at “The Hill” for homeless people in Phoenix.
In January, I started coming to Tempe’s Moeur Park, known as “The Hill,” to meet the families Davis was assisting. I was struck by the scene of desperate parents, some of whom had recently been evicted, lost a job or fled domestic violence, surrounding Davis to tell him about their situation. As he listened, he played with their children, always with an energy drink in hand.
The scene was both heartening and disconcerting. Davis was helping families stay off the street, which was good. But why, I wondered, in a county of nearly 5 million people, was a man in a park their best chance at getting help? And why were government agencies and multimillion-dollar nonprofits, some tasked with helping the very same homeless families, sending people to him?
Davis, who runs a small nonprofit called AZ Hugs, is known for working outside the system. With the help of volunteers, he hosts a nightly meal for homeless people at a suburban Phoenix park. This has drawn the ire of Tempe officials and led to 35 citations against him for trespassing and holding picnics without permits. (In 2024, he reached a deal to plead guilty to one permit violation, and the city dismissed the other citations, according to court documents. He’s spent three nights in jail.) In 2025, Davis and two other advocates for homeless people filed a lawsuit against Tempe, alleging it had violated their free speech protections by citing them for feeding people in parks. The city revised its permit ordinance, and Davis withdrew the lawsuit.
In recent months, he has tried to draw attention to what he calls the “family homelessness crisis,” raising money on social media to pay for hotel rooms for families, many with young children, who would otherwise sleep on the street or in their cars. Davis said he cannot assist everyone who asks for help. A much bigger effort is needed, he added, involving nonprofits and local and state officials, but he sees little evidence that it’s happening.
The number of people in homeless families in Maricopa County reached 2,103 this year, its highest level since 2015, according to the latest figures that are compiled locally and reported to the federal government. And those numbers are considered an undercount because the tally is taken on a single night by volunteers who can miss people who are trying to stay out of sight. In late September, nearly 200 families were on the waitlist for shelter in the county. It doesn’t include those who couldn’t get on; were kicked off because they weren’t considered homeless; or those who called 211, found it unhelpful and never called back. (Solari, a nonprofit that runs the statewide 211 line, said that the Family Housing Hub, which is run by UMOM, a nonprofit, sets the eligibility criteria for placement on the shelter waitlist.)
I spoke to more than 30 families searching for shelter. Parents told me they worried how their situation was affecting their children. Research shows homelessness harms children, disrupting brain development and growth and leading to permanent changes in the brain and body.
Davis’ phone is flooded daily with pleas for help from people who are homeless across Maricopa County.Blurred for privacy by ProPublica
Candice Ortiz had tried since spring to find stable shelter and housing. As the months dragged on, she noticed the toll on her 8-year-old son. He was hospitalized for heat exhaustion after spending the day outside, and she worried about the school he missed.
Davis helped Ortiz as she hit dead ends in her search for a place to stay, according to text messages reviewed by ProPublica.
She said she had called 211 over and over, answering the same questions about her living situation, only to receive information she could have found through a simple internet search. She said a worker with the Family Housing Hub told her that since she and her children were sleeping in her car, she wasn’t actually homeless. Another told her the waitlist was full.
In June, she spent the day at a Phoenix cooling center to escape the heat. A representative told her to go to UMOM, which runs an emergency shelter for families. She said she used her last $20 on a rideshare to the shelter. They took her information again and told her she wasn’t “in the system.” Nothing was available. UMOM said to protect the privacy of clients, it does not comment on individual families.
At the end of August, she connected with the Phoenix Rescue Mission, a nonprofit that offers programs for homeless people. The group sent Ortiz to a local apartment complex where she viewed an apartment. Later, a worker with the Phoenix Rescue Mission told her that it ran out of funding to pay for it, text messages reviewed by ProPublica show. Phoenix Rescue Mission did not respond to requests for comment.
UMOM, which during the last fiscal year received more than $7 million in government grants, set aside 23 units of shelter and about a dozen tents for families this summer, as temperatures reached 117 degrees. The program, which is part of the city of Phoenix’s heat relief effort, has helped nearly 300 households so far but is winding down this month.
In early April, Davis had tried to force a broader effort to address the crisis by launching an online petition. It called on Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, to declare a state of emergency to address family homelessness. The petition has more than 5,000 signatures.
In June, a volunteer with Davis’ organization attended a fundraiser for Hobbs, who is running for reelection, to hand her a letter about the petition. The letter suggested such a declaration could unlock funding for emergency shelter and recommended making it easier to access the Family Housing Hub.
“I implore you to consider the children who endure extreme heat without safe shelter,” the letter stated. “No parent should be told to wait months for assistance while temperatures reach life-threatening levels.”
Davis said he wishes that the leaders of nonprofits and government agencies would do more to address the difficulties faced by families in need of shelter.
Davis told me he hasn’t heard from the governor’s office or from other nonprofit leaders about joining his effort — only from caseworkers hoping he might help them find shelter for families. He wished that other organizations would at least acknowledge the problem and called their silence “frustrating” and a “disservice” to those in crisis.
The governor’s press secretary, Liliana Soto, told me emergency declarations are reserved for natural disasters, and using one to address homelessness might not be appropriate. Soto added that the governor is “deeply aware” of these challenges. Since taking office in 2023, Hobbs has allocated at least $245 million statewide on efforts such as eviction prevention, affordable housing, emergency shelter and rapidly rehousing people experiencing housing insecurity. “The governor believes no family, especially families with infants or young children, should be left without a safe place to go during the summer heat,” Soto said in a statement.
Davis sees families in that situation daily. And he spends most nights pleading for money on social media to put them in hotel rooms. Some nights he has raised thousands of dollars, posting updates at 2 a.m.
In September, Davis’ organization started hosting an overnight shelter at the First United Methodist Church of Mesa. It has space for at least six families. Davis said he knows it’s a Band-Aid on a much bigger problem.
At the church on a recent evening, some families arrived in vehicles packed with their belongings. Inside a large air-conditioned room, a volunteer had set up canopy tents with cots, pillows and blankets. She offered them a dinner of chicken penne pasta.
A mother and her two children showered, then got in their tent and zipped it up. Gradually, others, some with toddlers, settled in, and the room became quiet.
They’d need to be gone by 6 a.m.
In Maricopa County, the number of people with children who are homeless is at its highest point since 2015, according to a regional count.
Los Angeles, CA — President Donald Trump is facing bipartisan criticism after suggesting during a Nebraska rally that Iran could “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego and calling that possibility “a small price to pay” in the broader U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump made the remarks while arguing that the conflict was necessary to prevent Iran from becoming a greater threat. California Gov. Gavin Newsom called the president’s comments “deranged and dangerous,” while Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said such rhetoric could threaten public safety. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said the city was “not collateral damage.”
Republican criticism followed as well. Rep. Kevin Kiley and congressional candidate Jim Desmond both rejected the idea that American cities should be treated as expendable.
The White House pushed back Tuesday, saying Trump was not endorsing attacks on U.S. cities and was instead arguing that his Iran policy was designed to prevent such threats. Communications Director Steven Cheung dismissed the reaction as a media “freakout.”
Trump declined to further clarify the remarks when questioned Tuesday. His comments came during a campaign swing ahead of the November midterms, as the war and its economic effects remain prominent political issues.
Alexandria, VA — A former CIA official pleaded guilty Tuesday to wire fraud after admitting he fabricated highly sensitive government programs to divert nearly $200 million in public funds.
Federal prosecutors said David Rush created fictitious classified programs and used them to steer about $145 million into a holding company he controlled. He then used government money to acquire gold bars, luxury real estate and other high-value assets.
As part of his plea agreement, Rush agreed to forfeit at least $194 million. FBI agents recovered 298 gold bars and roughly $2 million in cash during a search of his home, according to prosecutors.
Rush had previously been fired after authorities discovered he falsified portions of his academic and military background. Investigators are still examining whether additional money or property tied to the scheme remains undiscovered.
The case has also prompted scrutiny of the CIA’s internal vetting procedures. The intelligence community inspector general is investigating how false information on Rush’s background allegedly went undetected.
Authorities have separately examined Rush’s professional relationship with Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg. The FBI ultimately found no evidence of wrongdoing by Feinberg, according to reporting cited by the Associated Press.
Rush has not yet been sentenced. The plea represents one of the largest fraud cases involving a former U.S. intelligence official in recent years.
The Smyrna Eagles defeated the Middletown Cavaliers, 32-21, on October 2, in the 2026 iteration of the Harvest Bowl. It’s Smyrna’s first win against Middletown since 2022.
Senior Boe Evans carries the Smyrna flag and leads the Eagles onto the field before the 2026 Harvest Bowl against the Middletown Cavaliers.
Smyrna junior Mikiah Jackson starts his route against the Cavalier defense.
Smyrna senior, Chrystian Carroll, breaks through a Middletown tackle to score.
Middletown senior, Hanif Miller, breaks a Smyrna tackle and runs downfield.
Sophomore running back, Terrell Ingram, is tackled by Middletown sophomore Riley Robinson.
Middletown junior, Kyle McCaffery, avoids the Smyrna tacklers and takes off downfield.
Middletown senior, Hanif Miller, is brought down by Smyrna defensive lineman, Wendell Smallwood.
Ingram breaks away from the defense and runs down the right sideline.
McCaffery finds an open receiver and fires, moving Middletown down the field.
Middletown junior, Max Phipps, surveys the field as the Smyrna pass rush attempts to get passed the Middletown offensive line.
Middletown players signal for a touchdown after their teammate broke the goal line.
Smyrna junior, Hameed Lonon-Chase, runs downfield after a catch. Lonon-Chase scored Smyrna’s first two touchdowns.
Smyrna’s offensive line and Middletown’s defensive line battle it out at the line of scrimmage.
unior Tysir Young takes off toward the endzone after intercepting the ball.
Ingram and assistant coach Marquis Johnson hug it out after the sophomore runner carried the ball over 20 times in the game.
Eagles’ head coach Mike Judy lifts the Harvest Bowl trophy during the teams’ postgame huddle.
All photos courtesy of Dave Reeder. To see more of Dave’s work follow him on Instagram @bfr_photo
This story was updated on October 7 to correct the caption in the first picture.
Miami, FL — A man was arrested after authorities say he impersonated an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent and intimidated voters at a Miami polling location during Brazil’s presidential election.
Danilo Alves Silva, 46, allegedly arrived Sunday at Miami Dade College’s Kendall Campus wearing an ICE-branded jacket and hat, tactical-style boots, sunglasses and a face covering. Brazilian nationals were using the campus as an overseas polling location.
According to the arrest report, voters appeared frightened that an actual federal immigration agent was monitoring the election and could potentially detain or deport people.
Sheriff’s deputies intervened after Silva became involved in an argument. Investigators said he admitted he was not an ICE agent and could not provide law-enforcement identification. Silva allegedly said he purchased the clothing online and wore it to the polling location to “see people’s reactions.”
Authorities charged Silva with voter intimidation or suppression, unlawful use of police insignia, threatening a public servant and conspiracy to commit bribery. Police allege that after his arrest, Silva offered to get an officer “paid” if he were released.
Miami-Dade elections officials subsequently emphasized that ICE agents will not be stationed inside county polling places and urged voters not to let fear or misinformation prevent them from participating.
Washington, DC — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agreed to buy 6,000 pairs of electric shock gloves for $16.7 million after an Army study found the devices caused intense pain, immediate compliance and fear of being shocked again.
The 2024 Army study, conducted at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, found participants quickly stopped resisting after exposure to the gloves. Some later reported fatigue, soreness and significant apprehension about receiving another shock. ICE officials were aware of the findings before signing the contract in August.
ICE describes the devices as nonlethal “distraction and de-escalation” tools intended to help officers control resisting detainees without resorting to more dangerous force. The manufacturer’s guidance says the gloves should not be used as punishment or merely for verbal defiance and warns against use on some vulnerable populations.
Sixteen senators led by Catherine Cortez Masto previously urged ICE to cancel the purchase or provide detailed safeguards covering training, medical risks and accountability. The senators said the agency had not answered their August letter as of this week.
White House border czar Tom Homan has said deployment could still take time while ICE develops training and use policies. The contract requires delivery within six months.
The Cape Henlopen Vikings defeated the Hodgson Silver Eagles, 35-28, on October 3, starting the season, 4-0, for the first time since 2014.
Hodgson running back, Keytwan Sabur, finds a gap and takes advantage of the running room on the Silver Eagles’ first drive of the game.
Hodgson junior Ronald Brown reaches for the goal-line to convert on the two-point conversion, giving the Silver Eagles a 8-0 lead.
Sabur is lifted into the air by senior Braden Collins after scoring his second touchdown of the first quarter.
Senior receiver, Stephen Sivels, hauls in his second catch of the game for the Vikings.
Hodgson senior, Jayden Yancey, follows his blockers through the Cape Henlopen defense.
Yancey is brought down by the Viking defense just before the goal line.
Silver Eagle quarterback, Kevin Browning, celebrates after running in the endzone for a touchdown. The run gave Hodgson a, 22-14, lead in the second quarter.
Viking senior Geordan Downing looks for more running room during his 22-yard reception in the second quarter.
Cape Henlopen seniors Jameson Tingle and Aidan Lehmuth celebrate after connecting on a 26-yard passing touchdown. The score cut the Silver Eagle lead to two with three minutes remaining before halftime.
Browning keeps the snap and runs up the middle for a Silver Eagle touchdown. Hodgson led, 28-20, at halftime.
Cape Henlopen quarterback Jameson Tingle runs down the field during the Vikings’ second drive of the second half.
Sivels breaks away from the Silver Eagle defense for a 29-yard gain. Sivels ended the game with over 100 receiving yards.
Tingle runs the ball after getting into the redzone and scores on a three-yard run. Tingle’s score gave Cape Henlopen a seven-point lead.
Browning runs for a first down on Hodgson’s final drive of the game, trailing by seven.
Tingle recovers a fumble for the Vikings securing their win over Hodgson.
All photos courtesy of Dave Reeder. To see more of Dave’s work follow him on Instagram @bfr_photo
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump will not reimburse the federal government for taxpayer money already spent on television advertisements promoting his administration, despite saying he would “pay for them myself,” the White House confirmed Tuesday.
A White House spokesperson told The Washington Sun that Trump’s statement referred only to future advertising, not repayment of money already spent. The administration says future spots will instead be financed by MAGA Inc., the super PAC aligned with Trump.
The ads have drawn bipartisan criticism because they prominently feature Trump, praise his policies and resemble campaign advertising while carrying disclaimers saying they were paid for by the U.S. government. At least $20 million in Homeland Security funds was allocated for the broader media campaign.
Independent tracking also suggests millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded ads have already aired. The administration has defended the spots as presidential public-service announcements similar to communications used by previous administrations.
Lawmakers and ethics experts have questioned whether the ads violate restrictions on using federal funds for partisan propaganda or political purposes.
Trump’s wording also raises campaign-finance questions because presidents and candidates cannot legally direct the spending of independent super PACs. The White House has not explained how MAGA Inc. will fund future advertisements while maintaining legally required independence.
Photo: closure adds to a wider trend of restaurants losses across New Castle County
Newark sports bar joins a growing list of familiar names lost as operators confront higher labor, food, insurance and occupancy costs
NEWARK, Del. — The Greene Turtle in Newark has closed after more than a decade in business, becoming the latest familiar restaurant to disappear from New Castle County as an industry known for thin profit margins confronts persistent increases in the cost of doing business.
The restaurant closed Saturday, Oct. 3, during the University of Delaware’s Parents and Family Weekend, traditionally one of the stronger traffic weekends for Newark businesses.
The Newark location had operated since December 2012, first on South Main Street before relocating to the Park N Shop Shopping Center.
The closing also continues a reduction in The Greene Turtle’s Delaware footprint. Locations in Brandywine Hundred, Lewes, Rehoboth Beach and Middletown previously closed, leaving restaurants at Churchmans Crossing and in Dover.
But the Newark closing is about more than one sports bar.
Across New Castle County, a series of well-known restaurants have closed in recent years, including names that survived recessions, changing consumer tastes and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Recent high-profile closings
Among the more visible losses across New Castle County:
The Greene Turtle, Newark — Closed in early October 2026 after more than a decade in Newark.
Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant, Newark — The company’s original brewpub, which opened in 1996, closed in September 2025 after nearly three decades.
Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant, Wilmington Riverfront — Closed as part of the company’s broader shutdown before later reopening under new ownership.
Gallucio’s Italian Restaurant, Wilmington — Closed in August 2025 after more than 50 years in business, ending a long run as a neighborhood institution.
Stoney’s British Pub — The longtime New Castle County pub was among the prominent local restaurant closings reported during 2025.
Cromwell’s Tavern — Another established New Castle County restaurant lost during the recent wave of closings.
The Greene Turtle, Middletown — Closed in late 2025 after roughly eight years in operation.
Food and business reporting identified roughly 20 restaurant closings in New Castle County during 2025 alone, including independent restaurants, pubs and brewery locations. The losses included several businesses that had become neighborhood gathering places rather than simply dining options.
A tough business gets tougher
There is no single explanation for the closures.
Some restaurants close because owners retire, leases expire, concepts lose popularity or individual businesses encounter financial problems.
But Delaware restaurant operators are also confronting several pressures at the same time: higher food prices, wages, insurance, utilities, rent and other occupancy expenses.
Those increases are especially significant in an industry that traditionally operates with relatively small profit margins.
Restaurants can also raise menu prices only so far before customers respond by dining out less frequently, choosing less-expensive options or ordering takeout instead of sitting down for a full-service meal.
That creates an increasingly difficult equation.
A restaurant can have a full dining room on Friday and Saturday night and still struggle to generate enough revenue during the rest of the week to cover payroll, food, rent, insurance and other fixed costs.
Labor presents another challenge.
Restaurants in New Castle County compete for workers not just with other restaurants but with warehouses and logistics operations along the Interstate 95 corridor, health care employers, retailers and other service businesses.
Full-service restaurants generally require a comparatively large workforce that can include cooks, servers, bartenders, hosts, dishwashers and managers.
The combination of labor, food and occupancy costs has become particularly difficult for traditional full-service restaurants, where a busy dining room does not necessarily translate into a healthy bottom line.
Newark has seen the change firsthand
Few communities illustrate the shift better than Newark.
The original Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant opened there in 1996 and became one of the anchors of Delaware’s early craft beer industry.
The Newark restaurant closed in September 2025 after nearly three decades. Iron Hill later shut down its remaining restaurants amid broader financial problems, although its Wilmington Riverfront location has since reopened under new ownership.
The circumstances surrounding Iron Hill and The Greene Turtle are different, and there has been no public indication that the two closings were caused by the same factors.
Still, the loss of another established restaurant is notable in a market that benefits from University of Delaware students, parents, alumni, residents and sporting events.
The Greene Turtle survived more than a decade in that environment, including the pandemic and significant changes in consumer dining habits.
Its closing during Parents and Family Weekend underscores an important reality for the restaurant industry: Strong customer traffic does not necessarily guarantee that a full-service restaurant remains financially sustainable.
Restaurant association works to strengthen operators
The Delaware Restaurant Association has repeatedly identified workforce shortages, inflation and rising operating expenses among the industry’s major challenges.
Rather than treating those pressures as temporary, the association has increasingly focused on helping restaurants adapt.
Its priorities include workforce development, advocacy, leadership training and programs aimed at strengthening independent restaurant operators.
The organization also works with state policymakers on laws and regulations affecting restaurant costs and provides members with information on employment rules, wages, paid leave, workplace safety and other operating requirements.
Workforce development has become a particularly important part of the effort.
Through industry training and educational programs, the association and its foundation work to create a stronger pipeline of restaurant employees while helping existing workers move into management and other higher-level positions.
The association has also emphasized that appearances can be misleading in the restaurant business. A busy restaurant may still be operating on a narrow margin once labor, food and occupancy expenses are paid.
That makes controlling costs and maintaining customer traffic critical.
A changing industry, not a disappearing one
The succession of closings does not mean Delawareans have stopped eating out.
New restaurants continue to open across New Castle County, and some closed locations are being replaced by new operators or concepts.
Instead, the market appears to be changing.
Smaller restaurants, takeout-oriented concepts and businesses requiring fewer employees can operate with different cost structures than traditional full-service restaurants with large dining rooms, bars and extensive staffs.
Specialty restaurants and locally owned concepts also continue to enter the market.
But the recent losses demonstrate that longevity and name recognition alone are no guarantee of survival.
The Greene Turtle made it through more than a decade in Newark, including the pandemic and changing dining habits.
Its closing now adds another familiar name to New Castle County’s restaurant turnover — and another example of the increasingly narrow financial line many Delaware restaurant operators are trying to navigate.
TO GO: Greene Turtle Newark
What happened: The Greene Turtle’s Newark restaurant closed permanently Saturday, Oct. 3.
How long was it open? The restaurant had operated in Newark since December 2012.
Where was it? The restaurant operated most recently in the Park N Shop Shopping Center after originally opening on South Main Street.
What locations remain? The Greene Turtle continues to operate Delaware locations at Churchmans Crossing and in Dover.
Why it matters: The closing follows several other high-profile restaurant departures across New Castle County as operators contend with rising labor, food, insurance, utility and occupancy costs.
Industry response: The Delaware Restaurant Association is focusing on workforce development, business advocacy, training and programs designed to help restaurants manage rising costs and remain sustainable.
The Order of the First State Awarded was presented Friday to 8 people, including Ivan Thomas of DETV, pictured here.
Order of the First State recipients include educators, former lawmakers, community leaders and advocates whose work has shaped Delaware
DOVER, Del. — Ten Delawareans whose careers span education, public service, health care, media, animal welfare and community advocacy have received the Order of the First State, Delaware’s highest civilian honor.
Gov. Matt Meyer presented the award to eight recipients during an Oct. 2 ceremony at Woodburn, the governor’s residence. Jane Pierantozzi and Leroy A. Tice were also selected for the honor but were unable to attend the ceremony.
The Order of the First State recognizes people whose service, leadership or achievements have had a profound and lasting impact on Delaware. The award can recognize contributions in public service, philanthropy, education, business, the arts, and community building.
“Delaware is a small state where one person can make a big difference,” Meyer said. “These ten Delawareans have spent their lives opening doors, serving their neighbors and making our state a better place to call home.”
This year’s recipients represent a broad cross-section of Delaware institutions and communities:
Aaron Bass — The Eastside Charter School educator was recognized for leadership focused on students, families, and the surrounding community. His work has included efforts to address the bus-driver shortage, creation of the statewide “Suit Up, Show Up” tradition and development of the Chemours STEM Hub.
Yvette Santiago — Santiago was honored for years of community leadership, developing programs, building partnerships and supporting initiatives designed to improve the lives of Delawareans.
Steven Yeatman — Yeatman was recognized for 30 years of service to Delaware children and families. He worked at nearly every level of the Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families and also served in the U.S. Army Reserve and Pennsylvania National Guard before recently retiring from state government.
Richard Garrett — As executive director of Children’s Beach House, Garrett has spent more than two decades developing and expanding programs serving children with special needs and their families.
Ivan Thomas — Thomas built DETV into a Delaware-focused media network and was recognized for his work in communications, youth programming and community service. His organization also played a role in communicating information to Delawareans during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Marihelen “Midge” Barrett — Barrett has spent decades working to expand student access to health care. She helped establish Delaware’s first school-based health center in 1985 and continued that work through public health service and leadership with the Delaware School Based Health Alliance.
Former Sen. Harris McDowell — McDowell served 44 years in the Delaware Senate, making him the longest-serving member of the General Assembly. His legislative work included creation of the Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families, expansion of college access through the SEED Scholarship and initiatives involving energy efficiency and clean energy.
Former Sen. Ernesto “Ernie” López — López represented Delaware’s 6th Senate District for a decade. His legislative work included education, transportation, finance and government affairs, with an emphasis on constituent service and bipartisan cooperation.
Jane Pierantozzi — The founder and executive director of Faithful Friends Animal Society was recognized for 25 years of work in animal welfare. Her organization has expanded veterinary care, adoption, foster care and pet food assistance programs across Delaware.
Leroy A. Tice — The attorney and founder of Team Tice was honored for his legal and community work. His practice represents people and families in automobile accident, catastrophic injury and medical negligence cases, while his community involvement has included charitable and service efforts.
The governor’s office said the award recognizes not simply professional accomplishment but the lasting effect recipients have had on the state and its residents.
“The Order of the First State is our highest civilian honor because it recognizes something we value deeply in Delaware: building a legacy measured by the lives you touch and the people you lift up around you,” Meyer said.
TO GO BOX
What: 2026 Order of the First State recipients
Award: Delaware’s highest civilian honor
Presented by: Gov. Matt Meyer
Ceremony: Oct. 2 at Woodburn in Dover
Recipients: Aaron Bass, Yvette Santiago, Steven Yeatman, Richard Garrett, Ivan Thomas, Marihelen “Midge” Barrett, Harris McDowell, Ernesto “Ernie” López, Jane Pierantozzi and Leroy A. Tice
Learn more: Information about the Order of the First State and other gubernatorial awards is available through the Office of the Governor.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump reportedly met in the Oval Office with former Colorado election official Tina Peters to discuss election security, according to former Trump administration official Ed Martin.
Martin said during a Monday appearance on Real America’s Voice that Peters had met with Trump “just hours” earlier and that the two discussed election-related plans. The White House declined to confirm whether the meeting occurred, saying it does not comment on private meetings.
Peters, a former Mesa County clerk, was convicted in 2024 for her role in breaching county election equipment while pursuing false claims that voting machines had manipulated the 2020 election. She was sentenced to nine years in prison before Colorado Gov. Jared Polis commuted her sentence in May 2026, ordering her release on parole.
Her reported White House visit comes as Trump continues to question U.S. election systems despite repeated investigations failing to uncover evidence of widespread vote manipulation. A Reuters investigation published last week found that federal agencies examining voting-machine allegations had not produced evidence that foreign actors altered election results.
Martin portrayed Peters as someone advising the president on election security ahead of the November midterms, though neither Trump nor the White House has publicly described what, if anything, was discussed.
Albany, NY — Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state disaster emergency Monday as New York confronts a sharp rise in measles cases, particularly in underimmunized rural communities.
New York has confirmed 108 cases in 2026, including 101 outside New York City. Ninety-two cases have been reported in rural communities since July 15. The state recorded just one case in 2023, 15 in 2024 and 48 last year.
The emergency order expands the number of healthcare professionals authorized to administer measles vaccinations and allows additional providers to order diagnostic testing.
New York’s outbreak comes as neighboring Pennsylvania has surpassed 1,000 cases, with five deaths and 198 hospitalizations reported by state officials. Ohio is also experiencing increased transmission.
Nationally, the CDC reported 3,887 confirmed cases as of Oct. 1, making 2026 the worst year for measles since 1991. Federal data show kindergarten MMR vaccination coverage has fallen from 95.2% in 2019-2020 to 92.4% in 2025-2026.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who spent years promoting anti-vaccine claims before joining the Trump administration, has faced criticism over federal vaccine policy during the resurgence. Kennedy appeared at an anti-vaccine conference in September, while state officials continue emphasizing vaccination as the primary defense against measles.
Tabor City, NC — At least 10 people were arrested or detained during a late-September checkpoint in Columbus County, according to immigrant-rights group Siembra NC, which says Latino drivers and passengers were questioned about their immigration status.
The checkpoint operated near N.C. Highway 904 and Pireway Road between roughly 5:30 and 7 p.m. Witnesses told Siembra NC that some drivers were asked where they were born and that passengers were also asked to provide documentation.
Javier Carbajal, an electrician traveling home with coworkers, said he showed his driver’s license but was ordered out of his vehicle and searched. He said a passenger was arrested after being unable to produce documents. Other witnesses reported seeing men restrained with zip ties and several people placed in a van.
Families later told advocates they had difficulty determining where some detainees had been taken. The Columbus County Sheriff’s Office declined to confirm the arrests, citing an ongoing investigation.
The sheriff’s office participates in ICE’s 287(g) Task Force program, which authorizes designated local officers to perform certain federal immigration-enforcement functions under ICE supervision.
The incident has prompted civil-liberties concerns from advocates, who argue that questioning passengers about immigration status and detaining people without clear public information warrants closer scrutiny. Similar enforcement practices elsewhere in North Carolina are already being challenged in federal court.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration is closely monitoring a suspected case of pneumonic plague in Russia after a 28-year-old laboratory worker died and roughly 200 people were placed under medical observation.
The woman worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia. Russian media reported that she may have been exposed to Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, after a laboratory accident. Russian health authorities have not confirmed that account and say she died from pneumonia of unknown origin.
The State Department said U.S. officials are monitoring developments with the CDC and other agencies and urged Russia to provide accurate information quickly. The World Health Organization has assessed the public-health risk as low while the investigation continues.
President Donald Trump said the U.S. is prepared to assist Russia if needed. So far, officials have reported no additional deaths or confirmed plague infections connected to the incident.
Pneumonic plague is rare but can be fatal if untreated. Unlike many emerging diseases, however, it is well understood and can generally be treated successfully with antibiotics when caught early.
Experts have long warned that immigration dragnets and the erosion of civil rights for immigrants will inevitably result in the erosion of rights for citizens.
Since the start of this Trump administration, we’ve watched those warnings come true.
The Trump administration says none of this is happening.
“DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake.” “There are no ‘indiscriminate’ stops.” Allegations of “racial profiling are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE.” “The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force.” “ICE does not zip tie or restrain children.”
But that is precisely what is happening, and at a far larger scale than previously reported.
We know because we have once again done what the government hasn’t:
We have tallied and cataloged every case we can find of an immigration agent holding a citizen during the current administration.
More than 500 cases. That includes:
More than a hundred Americans held after agents questioned their citizenship. Nearly all were people of color.
At least 70 American children and teens detained, some of whom were handcuffed.
Of the more than 300 Americans we tracked as detained for allegedly assaulting or obstructing agents, we found fewer than half were actually charged in federal court, and many of those cases were dropped or dismissed.
At least 63 Americans detained while recording.
36 Americans held for at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or their family.
Roughly a dozen citizens deported, mostly children.
Collectively, these cases show that as the administration has relentlessly pursued immigrants, federal agents have run roughshod over the constitutional rights of citizens too.
We’re showing you every case — the reality that the administration denies — along with the receipts.
In January 2025, agents held a 21-year-old citizen at gunpoint and put him in handcuffs during a raid at the Philadelphia car wash where he worked.
In April, a 20-year-old was held in a Florida jail for more than 24 hours, despite having proof of his citizenship.
In June, a dual citizen of Mexico and the U.S. was detained while working in California. He was held for four days without access to a lawyer or his family.
During the enforcement surge in Chicago last fall, known as Operation Midway Blitz, there were “no administrative arrests of U.S. citizens,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. “ICE has significant protections in place to ensure U.S. citizens are not arrested, detained, or mistakenly removed.” But we found that federal agents detained more than 120 citizens in Illinois during the height of the surge.
In November, agents took an 18-year-old citizen off the street, eventually dumping him in the woods.
In December, an American in Baltimore was picked up and held for 25 days, unable to see her 5-year-old son over Christmas.
In January, hours after Renee Good’s killing, agents tackled and handcuffed a school staffer in Minneapolis. He was terrified, he recalled: “I feel lucky to be alive.”
In April, when agents stopped a man in Texas, he told them, “I’m a citizen, it’s fine.” He was deported four days later.
In May, a New York teen was thrown to the ground, bloodied and then dumped in an unfamiliar neighborhood. “He just grabbed me and threw me on the floor,” the teen recalled.
In September, agents detained and injured an Illinois man they thought was someone else.
We shared details and footage of many of the incidents with former immigration officials. They reacted with anger and disbelief.
“This is just terrible,” said Eric Balliet, who spent more than two decades at Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, both agencies under DHS, including in President Donald Trump’s first administration.
“I’ve never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years,” said Darius Reeves, who oversaw the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Baltimore office before retiring last year. “It’s an embarrassment.”
In tallying these detentions, we included anyone who authorities held against their will for any period of time — whether they were handcuffed, held at gunpoint or otherwise prevented from leaving by immigration agents. The courts consider someone detained if they aren’t free to leave.
Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances: if they can reasonably suspect they are in the country illegally, or if they allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers.
ProPublica shared its findings and information on each case with DHS.
The department defended agents’ conduct. “DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted. We do our due diligence,” the agency said in a statement. It added that anyone who obstructs agents “will of course face consequences which include arrest.”
We compiled our list by scouring social media, court records and local media to confirm and compile incidents.
Our work doesn’t include all of agents’ problematic interactions with citizens. We didn’t count incidents where, say, an agent shot but didn’t detain a citizen. And as with the tally we did last year, the new list is an undercount. For instance, witnesses estimate that more than 200 citizens were detained in an Idaho raid last fall, but we only included the 30 citizens who we were able to identify.
Willy Wender Aceituno, a naturalized citizen who voted for Trump twice, said he never imagined that the immigration crackdown he supported would entangle him.
Then, last November, Border Patrol agents broke his truck window, yanked Aceituno out and threw him onto the pavement of a parking lot, where one agent knelt on his back. (DHS says he “refused to comply” with agents’ commands.)
“ICE isn’t looking for criminals,” Aceituno said. “They’re looking for Latinos. Having papers in this country does not protect you.”
“Upon Probable Cause”
Under the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement generally must have probable cause to arrest someone. But there’s a lower bar, reasonable suspicion, for stopping someone to question them.
The Trump administration has repeatedly said its agents are just questioning citizens, not detaining them — even when they’re in handcuffs or held for hours. DHS also cites a concurring opinion issued last year by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh stating that agents can consider factors like “apparent ethnicity” when making stops. Citizens around the country have been detained because, they’ve said, of their skin color, accents or jobs.
Willy Wender Aceituno was stopped twice by federal agents who broke his window, pulled him from the car and detained him, even as he and bystanders protested that he had already proved he was a citizen to other agents.The Charlotte Observer
Ever since his arrest in November, Aceituno said his U.S.-born daughter carries her passport at college. “She has a Latino face,” he said, adding, “My daughter’s white friends aren’t carrying their passports.”
“Secure in Their Persons, Houses, Papers and Effects”
The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution also prohibits officers from entering homes without a judge’s warrant.
An ICE memo revealed by a whistleblower this year showed that agents had been doing it anyway. The agency asserted that administrative warrants that didn’t involve a judge gave agents the ostensible authority to force their way into homes looking for someone with a final deportation order. Some of those incidents have also resulted in Americans being detained.
Jeyli Salguero, 20, said in a lawsuit that agents broke into her family’s home in a Minnesota suburb without a judicial warrant to arrest her brother, who didn’t live there. In a video, an agent can be heard saying, “It’s OK, it’s OK,” as a woman screams.Provided to ProPublica
In January, Jeyli Salguero, her parents and her sister were asleep at home when armed federal agents broke through the front door and rushed inside.
“The first thing I yelled when I stepped out of my room was that I was a U.S. citizen and I had the right to record,” Salguero recalled. “That’s when they snatched my phone.”
The agents told Salguero’s family they were looking for her brother, who does not live there. After half an hour, the agents released Salguero and her mother, but detained her father, who had temporary protected status, and her sister, who was undocumented. The sister was eventually deported to El Salvador, and her father was later released from detention.
Salguero told us that agents left her and her mom alone in their wrecked house with the Minneapolis winter air coming in through a broken door.
Salguero is one of several plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against the government for going into homes without a judicial warrant. DHS has moved to dismiss the lawsuit, saying it has “paused” the policy.
“Against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures”
The Fourth Amendment is also intended to protect people from “unreasonable” use of force during arrests. Previously, we’ve documented how agents have used chokeholds that DHS banned other than when deadly force is authorized. We’ve also documented how immigration agents have broken car windows while pursuing people they believe are in the country illegally. But they’ve been doing it to citizens, too. Many of those citizens have filed lawsuits.
During the enforcement surge in Chicago in October 2025, workers at a Christian cemetery in Illinois filmed agents cutting open the cemetery gate. The agents then shot pepper balls at the workers and detained them.WGN TV
Darren Eichler was working at a Christian cemetery in a Chicago suburb last October when he and his coworkers moved to help a man who was wading in the nearby river. They soon realized — too late — that the man was running from immigration agents, who emerged from the brush near the river and demanded access to a gated area of the cemetery. When the men refused and started filming, agents used bolt cutters to cut open the gate, then fired pepper balls and tackled the men.
Eichler said his face felt like it was on fire and he had trouble breathing. “I pleaded with them for an hour to please call an ambulance.” Eichler told ProPublica. He was eventually brought to a hospital, still handcuffed, while the agents stood over his bed. Eichler’s co-workers were held for several hours at a nearby federal office. No one was charged.
DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment about the incident.
“The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble”
The First Amendment protects protesters and those documenting agents’ conduct. The amendment guarantees the freedom to assemble — in other words, to protest peacefully — and the freedom of speech, which courts have interpreted to include recording in public.
The Trump administration has, however, aggressively pursued the arrest and prosecution of citizens who were protesting, often claiming the protesters were assaulting officers or interfering with enforcement activities. We counted more than 300 people accused of assaulting or obstructing officers, about 130 of them at protests.
Top DHS officials, including former Secretary Kristi Noem, went further, claiming that filming ICE agents was interfering with arrests. Last summer, three siblings driving in Texas were detained after they stopped to film an immigration arrest. One of the siblings was a young teen. “They tackled me down and an agent put one knee behind my knee, where I felt a sharp pain,” he told ProPublica. He was separated from his mother, who has a green card. “They were saying my mom wasn’t a U.S. citizen, and I was scared they were gonna take her away.”
The siblings have filed claims for damages with the government. Asked about the incident, DHS said it respects “the First Amendment rights of individuals to observe and express themselves. However, if such actions interfere with or obstruct our operations, ICE will take necessary steps to address the situation.”
Three siblings in Brownsville, Texas, had stopped to film an immigration arrest when agents tried to take their phones, then detained all three citizens, including a 14-year-old. In the video, an agent can be heard saying that the phones are evidence in an investigation. “I’m taking that phone and I’m taking that phone,” he says while pointing to two devices before grabbing at one of them. The agent’s face was already blurred in this video when ProPublica received it.Provided to ProPublica
Our review did uncover instances that appear to show some protesters or other civilians assaulting officers. One person pleaded guilty to throwing pieces of cinder block at an agent. A woman in California pleaded guilty to pulling off an officer’s mask.
Many protesters were accused of crimes but never actually charged. We found 137 instances of citizens who were charged with federal crimes, most of whom were charged with assaulting or obstructing federal agents. In nearly half of those instances, the charges were dropped or dismissed. Three dozen citizens have been sentenced to prison or probation, and another three dozen cases are pending, as of September 15.
Some of those arrested, like clarinet player Oriana Korol, were initially charged with felony assault before pleading guilty to a misdemeanor — in Korol’s case, for trying to kick an officer. She said she did so after officers shoved her and pepper-sprayed her twice in the face. Just moments before, the band had been playing the “Ghostbusters” theme song as part of a peaceful protest.
Video footage shows agents leading Korol away, handcuffed, while one pulls her tear-gas-soaked mask over her mouth. “Please pull it down,” Korol tells the agents in the video. “I’m going to have an asthma attack. I have asthma. Why are you doing this to me? Please.”
The Rights of Children
Unlike earlier administrations, Trump has detained significant numbers of immigrant children living far from the border. Citizen kids have been swept up too — at least 70 of them. We’ve found about 20 kids who were handcuffed or zip-tied.
DHS said that ICE doesn’t zip-tie or restrain children, or separate families. But agents handcuffed a 15-year-old with disabilities outside a school in Los Angeles in 2025. The agents said they mistook the teen for an alleged gang member. A few months later, officers detained more than a dozen American children during a raid on an Idaho horse track. Anabel Romero said her children are still deeply shaken by their detention.
Romero told us how her 7-year-old son warned his older sister about going to another race this month: “He said, ‘Watch out for ICE, make sure you have your phone to film — I’ll come save you.’”
A 17-year-old was on his lunch break in Oregon when agents broke his car window and detained him. DHS said he was obstructing officers. In the video, the teen is heard saying, “I’m a U.S. citizen,” as an agent responds, “I don’t care.”The Oregonian
“Without Due Process of Law”
As the government has rushed to deport people as quickly as possible, Americans have also been swept up and removed from the country too. About a dozen American kids have been deported with their parents, allegedly over their parents’ objections.
DHS said: “Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”
One American adult in Texas was also deported this spring.
The car Brian Morales Garcia was in was pulled over earlier this year in central Texas. Officers didn’t believe him when he said he was a citizen. And they wouldn’t let him get his birth certificate. Morales Garcia was held for four days without being able to call his lawyer or anyone else. Then he was deported to Mexico.
After suing, Morales Garcia was allowed back into the country just last month using his birth certificate.
DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Morales Garcia’s deportation. In earlier court filings, officials disputed Morales Garcia’s citizenship and claimed he had admitted to being born in Mexico.
“I couldn’t process what they were doing to me.” Morales Garcia told ProPublica. When he was first stopped in Texas, he had told officers, “I’m a citizen, it’s fine.”
We found and vetted cases from a number of sources, including English- and Spanish-language social media, DHS statements, court records and local news reports, in addition to our own reporting. We included an incident in our dataset only if we could find at least two sources for it. For additional details about the incident, like whether crowd control weapons were used, we accepted one source in some cases.
When DHS provided a response specific to an incident — including about whether it happened or the circumstances under which it happened — we noted that response in cases in our full list for which we offered detail beyond a simple count of detained citizens. DHS responses that generically denied ever detaining citizens or that are proven inaccurate by our reporting were not included.
As with our count a year ago, most of the detained Americans on our list fell into two broad categories. The first is Americans who were held because agents questioned their citizenship. This time, we found more than a hundred such cases. The second category is Americans arrested by immigration agents after being accused of assaulting or impeding officers at protests or during immigration arrests of others. In that category, we tallied roughly 300 Americans.
In many of these cases, the government accused but never charged these individuals with assault. Sometimes agents detained people because of questions about their citizenship but later accused them of crimes. While public attention often focuses on ICE, the immigration dragnet often relied on officers from agencies across the government.
Since the government itself does not track these cases, our list is almost certainly an undercount. Except in a few cases in which DHS itself confirmed detentions, we only counted citizens we were able to individually identify. So, for example, while witnesses estimate as many as 200 citizens were detained in an Idaho raid last fall, we were only able to identify 30 individuals by time of publication. We encountered the same issues for many smaller raids and protests, such as a raid of a food plant in Cato, New York; protesters detained by ICE at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey; and a raid of a Hyundai-LG plant in Ellabell, Georgia.
ICE itself occasionally has stated higher numbers than we were able to confirm: It told Congress that 131 citizens were arrested for assaulting, obstructing or interfering this year in Minnesota’s Metro Surge. It didn’t name them. We cataloged fewer than a hundred.
We tagged each case with details like whether a minor was detained or a citizen was held after filming. Another trend we tracked was citizens held for more than a day without access to a lawyer or their family. When multiple citizens were detained in one incident or sometimes on the same day and city, we grouped them together.
Because we focused on the expanded presence of immigration agents in American communities, we restricted our count to warrantless arrests that took place outside of airports and away from the borders, where immigration agents have long had more authority. We also excluded cases of Americans who were arrested after a judicial warrant.
We did not include incidents where an agent shot, tackled or pepper-sprayed a citizen but didn’t detain them.
We also did not include immigration protesters arrested by police who were only enforcing local laws. We did, however, include some cases involving police working with immigration agents. We still have little visibility into how many citizens have been detained by police deputized to act as immigration agents.
We also found reports of more than 30 Americans who felt racially profiled by immigration agents, but we did not include them in our database because it was not clear they were held against their will.
How We Counted and Reviewed Court Cases
We searched every named adult in our list to see if they were charged with a federal crime in relation to their detention. We conducted searches, using several name combinations for people with double names or compound names, in federal district courts through the online platform PACER. We looked for a criminal case filed within two months of the noted date of a person’s detention in the judicial district in which the detention happened. We then noted whether we found charges, what the charges were, and whether the person involved was sentenced or had their case dismissed or discharged.
How We Chose the Videos in This Report
We reviewed hundreds of videos of federal agents detaining American citizens across the country. While that included body camera footage, news clippings and helicopter footage, the vast majority of videos were made by bystanders and shared over social media. Many of the videos went viral and were recirculated across the internet by a range of third-party accounts. They touch on everyday American life in a range of settings, including workplaces, homes, protests, car washes, suburban sidewalks and the interiors of vehicles.
We tagged each video with how clearly it shows the incident and whether the citizen detained was clearly visible. We then categorized the videos by the kind of conduct they show, such as citizens being detained after recording. We provided DHS an opportunity to respond to each of the videos we included.
We did not alter videos, nor did we add watermarks, blur faces or overlay captions on videos unless otherwise noted. Videos that include captions or watermarks are shown as they were obtained.
Philadelphia, PA — The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear former Pennsylvania Judge Mark B. Cohen’s challenge to a suspension imposed over dozens of partisan Facebook posts, leaving intact a state ruling that judges can face discipline for political advocacy that undermines the appearance of impartiality.
Cohen, a former Democratic state legislator who later served on the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, was suspended in 2024 after Pennsylvania’s judicial disciplinary authorities reviewed more than 60 posts. They included praise for President Joe Biden and Gov. Josh Shapiro, support for Democratic-backed policies and criticism of conservative positions.
Cohen argued that the posts addressed matters of public concern and were protected by the First Amendment. Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court disagreed in January, holding that sitting judges are subject to stricter limits than ordinary political speakers because courts have a compelling interest in preserving public confidence in judicial independence and impartiality.
The state court concluded that Cohen’s volume and tone of partisan posts made him appear to be an advocate for the Democratic Party rather than a neutral judge.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to review the case leaves Cohen’s suspension and the Pennsylvania court’s First Amendment analysis in place without issuing a separate opinion.
Sovereignty is not solitude: Canada’s strategy for democratic technology leadership
13
October 2026 — 12:00 TO 13:00 BST
Anonymous (not verified)
Chatham House and Online
Hear from Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, Evan Solomon, on how trust, opportunity and sovereign control are shaping Canada’s approach to artificial intelligence, economic growth and international partnership.
Hear from Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, Evan Solomon, on how trust, opportunity and sovereign control are shaping Canada’s approach to artificial intelligence, economic growth and international partnership.
This event will explore how Canada is translating its AI strengths into greater productivity, prosperity and better public services, and how deeper cooperation with partners such as the UK can strengthen AI safety, resilience and shared economic opportunity.
This event discusses:
What does sovereign control mean in an interconnected AI economy? And why does sovereignty not mean isolation?
What are Canada’s strengths as AI transforms economies, public services and national security?
How can countries build trust in AI while accelerating innovation and adoption?
How can investment in talent, literacy, research and key industries create new economic opportunities and better public services?
How can Canada and the UK work together work together to strengthen AI safety, resilience and democratic technology leadership?
Bankrolled by ProPublica, reporter Jake Pearson tested online gambling guardrails by mimicking the betting patterns of a problem gambler for 10 weeks. Photo illustration by ProPublica. Source images: Jake Pearson/ProPublica, Chris Alcantara/ProPublica.
Online gambling has surged in the U.S. since the Supreme Court allowed states to legalize sports betting in 2018, prompting public health concerns about gambling addiction and calls for stricter consumer protections. Online sportsbooks such as DraftKings and FanDuel have touted “responsible gaming” features as evidence that they are taking appropriate steps to protect consumers from spiraling out of control.
Reporter Jake Pearson put these safeguards to the test. Bankrolled by ProPublica, he mimicked the betting patterns of a problem gambler for 10 weeks, consulting a panel of addiction specialists, recovering gambling addicts and professional sports bettors for advice.
He found that the safety features were overpowered by the app’s product design and promotions that pushed him to continue gambling.
Pearson detailed his entire journey, which you can read here. Here are five takeaways from his investigation.
1. Sports betting is ubiquitous. The industry relies on very active losers.
Today, nearly a quarter of all Americans, and half of men ages 18 to 49, say they have an active sportsbook account, according to the Siena Research Institute. But that rapid growth has come with consequences: About a quarter of active sportsbook account holders surveyed by the organization this year said that they’d lost enough on a bet that they’d have trouble meeting their financial obligations.
Gamblers who lose frequently are the bettors sportsbooks are most interested in, Matthew Gaskell, a British psychologist and expert on gambling addiction, said. Gaskell noted that a relatively small number of active losers account for a substantial amount of sportsbooks’ revenue.
If you’ve bet on sports with FanDuel or DraftKings, you can help ProPublica understand how these apps work. Use our browser extension to download your betting history, then upload your files.
DraftKings says its responsible gaming system provides adequate safeguards to protect customers from spiraling out of control. “I think as a business, as an industry, we’re doing a good job of educating people, of raising awareness, of making tools and resources available, of monitoring accounts,” Lori Kalani, DraftKings’ chief responsible gaming officer, told Pearson.
But policymakers aren’t so sure. Lawmakers from Colorado to Massachusetts are now proposing stricter consumer protections.
2. DraftKings has adopted responsible gaming tools. They require users to opt in, limiting their effectiveness.
DraftKings’ responsible gambling safeguards include in-app notifications that encourage gamblers to take a break after they’ve lost money and “time reminders” that tell users how long they’ve been on the app. The app also features a responsible gaming center that allows users to set a budget, track their spending or opt into tools like those that allow them to limit the amount of time and money they spend in a 24-hour period or enact more severe restrictions such as a multiday “cool off.”
But this system largely relies on users to have the wherewithal to opt into the tools — something that experts say can be difficult for someone struggling with gambling addiction.
DraftKings told Pearson that if a customer’s behavior raises too many red flags, the company will proactively close an account. Yet it wouldn’t specify how often this actually happens.
Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica
Pearson’s experiment mimicked the behavior of a problem gambler to see when — and if — the company’s safeguards would stop him. The first in-app responsible gaming prompt Pearson received came more than a week after he began gambling on the NBA playoffs, when he’d already lost roughly what a minimum-wage worker in New York City earns in a month. It told him that he’d hit $2,500 or more in deposits and said to “visit our Responsible Gaming Center anytime to set limits for yourself and access tools for safer play.”
But the app’s warning wasn’t triggered by Pearson’s reckless betting. It was legally required. When New York legalized mobile sports betting in 2023, lawmakers required the apps to notify users when they hit $2,500 in total deposits. The pop-up gave Pearson two options: set limits or “I understand.” He clicked the latter and was back in action.
Even as Pearson exhibited red flag after red flag, according to our panel of experts, his subsequent warnings from the app followed the same pattern.
DraftKings says millions of customers have visited its responsible gaming center, but the little data available publicly suggests only a small percentage opt into these tools. Just over 8% of active DraftKings users in Massachusetts were using them as of April, a company official told state regulators this summer. The official added the number was trending up.
Kalani says her 51-person team manually reviews user accounts suspected of problem gambling. Yet even after Pearson deposited $21,600 into his account in less than eight weeks and exhibited just about every sign of compulsive gambling, he didn’t register for a manual review under the company’s criteria.
3. The design of online sports betting platforms can encourage users to gamble more.
Online gambling companies have created sophisticated technology products designed to squeeze maximum engagement out of users, just as social media companies like Meta did years earlier with users of Facebook and Instagram, according to Darragh McGee, a researcher at the University of Bath.
Indeed, Pearson found that the app’s design encouraged him to keep betting.
Pearson found the app’s quick-tap deposit buttons increased automatically.Screenshot by Jake Pearson/ProPublica. Debit card number redacted by ProPublica.
As he gambled more, he found that the app’s quick-tap deposit buttons increased automatically, making it even easier to mindlessly transfer large sums from his bank into his DraftKings account. And while DraftKings’ safety warnings were sporadic, he was getting up to six push notifications a day notifying him of rewards and betting opportunities.
DraftKings told Pearson it sent him 32 responsible gambling prompts over 10 weeks of gambling, including emails that every DraftKings customer gets. Pearson counted in-app notifications about his betting 14 out of the 71 days he gambled on the app.
4. Perks can also help encourage users to bet more.
DraftKings, like many other sportsbooks, also offers VIP programs that give users perks, including free bets and concert tickets. After Pearson lost $1,800 betting on basketball in one night, chasing his losses with increasingly long-shot bets, he was invited to audition to become a DraftKings VIP. After only three weeks and $5,800 in deposits on the app, Pearson was formally accepted into DraftKings’ VIP program, which assigned him a personal concierge.
That VIP host told Pearson that he would be “keeping an eye out for opportunities and perks tailored specifically” to his account, plus “reminders about Responsible Gaming.” Company representatives offer VIPs special incentives to continue gambling, such as “bonus bets” (free one-time bets using house money) and “deposit matches” (extra house money called DK Dollars that come along with new deposits).
Pearson found that the program rewarded riskier bets. The more money users spend on long-odds wagers, the quicker they accumulate credits needed to “advance” to higher tiers that offer better perks.
Less than a week after Pearson opted into a three-day “cool-off” period — after losing several thousand dollars betting on tennis — Pearson contacted his VIP representative, who helped facilitate his largest deposit match to date: juicing a $5,000 deposit with an extra $1,250 in free DK Dollars.
5. Online gamblers are left to regulate themselves. Experts say more limits are needed.
Lawmakers face a public policy dilemma: While online gambling generates billions of dollars in tax revenue, research shows that gambling disorder diagnoses are rising in states that have legalized.
In New York, sportsbooks like DraftKings have to submit a “problem-gaming plan” to the state regulator but the law leaves the specifics of it up to the companies. The plan must include, among other things, procedures “for identifying users with suspected or known problem-gaming behavior” and for “providing information to users concerning problem-gaming identification and resources.” The exact details are unclear because such plans are not publicly available. (A DraftKings spokesperson wouldn’t provide a copy, and Pearson’s request for it under the state’s open records law with the gaming commission is under review.)
Other countries have already taken aggressive steps to regulate online sportsbooks’ marketing practices and advertisements. But in the U.S., the industry has actively opposed proposed reforms on the federal and state levels — and even seeded a political action committee with $41 million to influence elections this year.
Rob Minnick, a recovering gambling addict and one of the experts we consulted, said that the framework for protecting consumers shouldn’t be entrusted to a publicly traded company that’s driven to grow revenue.
DraftKings told Pearson that all 5,000-plus of its employees are trained on responsible gaming every year and that it’s “not a side initiative. It is embedded across our business and essential to DraftKings’ long-term sustainability.”
“The system worked the way it was supposed to,” Kalani told Pearson.
Critics say that’s the problem.
If you’ve bet on sports with FanDuel or DraftKings, we want to hear from you. You can help us understand how these apps respond to their users’ betting behavior. Use our browser extension to download your betting history, then drop the files here.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump has approved Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recommendation to execute former Army Maj. Nidal Hasan by firing squad for the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting that killed 13 people and wounded 32 others.
Hasan, an Army psychiatrist at the time, opened fire inside Fort Hood’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center as troops prepared for deployment. A military jury convicted him and sentenced him to death in 2013.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced Monday that the Army secretary will determine the time and location of the execution. Hasan still has avenues to challenge the execution through the federal courts, meaning the approval does not necessarily mean it will occur immediately.
If carried out, Hasan would become the first U.S. military prisoner executed since 1961. He would also be the first Army prisoner executed by firing squad since Pvt. Eddie Slovik was shot for desertion in France in 1945.
The decision comes as the Trump administration expands its use of capital punishment and broadens available execution methods. Hasan’s case is governed by military law rather than the civilian federal death penalty system.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump says his political operation will begin paying for television advertisements promoting his administration after the use of taxpayer money for the campaign-style spots triggered criticism from Democrats and Republicans.
Trump defended the advertisements Monday as a “positive promotion” of the United States and called government-funded promotional campaigns standard practice. He nevertheless said future spots would be paid for with money raised by MAGA Inc., his well-funded political organization.
The announcement leaves unanswered whether taxpayers will be reimbursed for advertisements that have already aired. At least $1.4 million had been spent by the end of September, according to advertising tracker AdImpact, although the total could be substantially higher.
The ads prominently featured Trump, promoted his political accomplishments and, in one case, closely resembled a commercial from his 2024 presidential campaign. Each concluded with the disclaimer “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
Lawmakers have asked federal watchdogs to investigate whether the spending violated restrictions on using congressionally appropriated money for propaganda or partisan political activity.
The White House had previously defended the taxpayer-funded campaign. It now says MAGA Inc. will finance similar advertising going forward, but has not detailed how those payments will be documented or whether previously spent public funds will be repaid.
Topeka, KS — A Kansas nonprofit camp is demanding Republican Sen. Roger Marshall stop airing a campaign advertisement after it used an unauthorized photograph of children while discussing sexual-abuse allegations involving Democratic Senate candidate Adam Hamilton’s church.
Tall Oaks Camp and Conference Center said it never approved political use of the photograph, which shows roughly two dozen people seated inside its chapel. Board president Lea Ann Combs said the image creates a misleading association between Tall Oaks, the children pictured and events that did not occur at the camp.
Marshall’s campaign said it believed the photograph was a stock image and claimed the advertisement had been corrected. However, Kansas Reflector reported that a version still containing the Tall Oaks image remained available on social media hours later.
The ad attacks Hamilton over his handling of allegations involving a Church of the Resurrection volunteer in 2005. Hamilton has acknowledged that he should have referred the initial allegations directly to law enforcement rather than relying on an internal church investigation. Police were contacted after additional allegations surfaced in 2006.
The dispute comes during a competitive Kansas Senate campaign in which outside Republican groups are committing millions of dollars to support Marshall. Tall Oaks emphasized that its objection concerns unauthorized use of its children’s image and does not represent an endorsement of either candidate.
Harrisburg, PA — Pennsylvania has surpassed 1,000 measles cases in 2026, marking the state’s largest outbreak in more than three decades and adding to the worst U.S. measles year since 1991.
State health officials reported 1,004 confirmed cases, 198 hospitalizations and five measles-associated deaths. Lancaster County remains the hardest-hit area, and Pennsylvania officials say the outbreak has been driven largely by low vaccination rates. Only four of the state’s first 943 cases involved vaccinated people.
The outbreak has also exposed a sharp dispute between Gov. Josh Shapiro and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Pennsylvania has counted five measles-associated deaths, while the CDC has reported fewer federally confirmed deaths after changing how it verifies mortality data. Kennedy has publicly questioned whether all of Pennsylvania’s reported deaths were actually caused by measles.
That skepticism comes during a national resurgence tied in part to declining vaccination rates and persistent vaccine misinformation. Two doses of the MMR vaccine are about 97% effective at preventing measles, according to Pennsylvania health officials.
New York has meanwhile declared a disaster emergency, while Ohio and several other states are also reporting sizable outbreaks. International health officials are expected to review whether the U.S. has lost its measles-elimination status later this year.
Bridge to Practice grants emphasize phonics, teacher coaching and classroom instruction as Delaware tries to turn science-of-reading policy into measurable gains for students.
DOVER, Del – Delaware is investing another $7.1 million in early literacy instruction, expanding a statewide effort aimed at moving science-of-reading training from policy manuals and professional development sessions into everyday classroom practice.
The Delaware Department of Education announced Monday that 28 school districts and charter schools will receive Bridge to Practice grants for the 2026-27 school year.
The grants support Delaware’s Birth through Grade 3 Early Literacy Plan through teacher training, instructional materials, classroom coaching and school leadership development.
It is the second round of Bridge to Practice funding. A first round announced in March awarded $6.1 million to 25 districts and charter schools, bringing the two-round investment to about $13.2 million.
The approach addresses one of public education’s persistent challenges: Passing a law, adopting a curriculum or training teachers does not necessarily improve student achievement unless those changes reach the classroom.
“We know how to teach children to read, and we believe every Delaware student can become a strong reader,” Education Secretary Cindy Marten said.
Marten said policy, resources, training and coaching are important, but none should be confused with the ultimate goal.
“The work is making sure what we know reaches students through strong instruction every day and then showing our progress in ways we can reliably measure, see and report,” she said.
Phonics returns to a central role
The science of reading reemphasizes phonics as a key part of early reading instruction while placing it within a broader research-based approach to literacy.
Phonics explicitly teaches children how letters and combinations of letters correspond to sounds in spoken language, giving beginning readers the tools to decode unfamiliar words rather than relying primarily on context, pictures, or guessing.
The broader science-of-reading approach also includes phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, oral language, background knowledge and comprehension.
The goal is not simply to help children sound out words, but to build the foundational decoding skills they need to read accurately, understand what they read and continue building knowledge over time.
The new grants support science-of-reading professional development programs including LETRS and AIM Pathways, curriculum-based professional learning, Student-Centered Coaching and leadership development through the Early Literacy Leadership Academy.
Local flexibility brings local responsibility
Districts and charter schools can use the funding differently based on local needs.
Appoquinimink School District used earlier funding to strengthen literacy leadership and relationships between principals and instructional coaches. Capital School District connected LETRS training with classroom reflections, student work and coaching. Indian River School District focused on greater consistency among elementary schools through instructional frameworks, classroom learning walks and science-of-reading training for pre-K through third-grade educators.
That flexibility gives local school leaders room to determine how best to implement the state’s literacy goals rather than requiring every district to follow exactly the same model.
But greater discretion also places more responsibility on local school boards to determine whether those investments are working.
Julia Keleher, executive director of First State Educate, has repeatedly argued that local boards are where state education policy becomes action.
“State strategy becomes real for students when local leadership brings it to life,” Keleher said. “Boards will the grant money to deliver results as measured by improved reading proficiency and then use data to guide decisions, monitor implementation and hold school the school leaders accountable.
Keleher has also emphasized that this new grant adds to the responsibility already resting with local boards to get results.
That responsibility becomes particularly important in early literacy and grants structured like this one. School boards help determine whether interventions succeed by approving staffing, budgets, and accountability structures. In practical terms, boards are being asked not only to approve literacy programs and spending, but also to establish measurements, examine whether those investments are producing results, and hold district leaders accountable for increasing the number of students reading at grade level.
Spending must translate into readers
Delaware’s reading performance remains a significant challenge.
About 40% of Delaware third-graders reached proficiency in English language arts in 2026, leaving a majority of students below grade-level proficiency.
That makes the next stage of the literacy initiative as much an accountability test as an instructional one.
DDOE said it will examine classroom walkthroughs, coaching cycles, implementation measures and student literacy data throughout the school year.
Those measures can help determine whether schools are implementing the program as intended.
But training sessions, coaching visits, new materials and completed professional-development programs are inputs.
The ultimate outcome is whether more children learn to read proficiently.
Guarding against another permanent program
The increased emphasis on evidence and classroom results is encouraging, but the state will also need to guard against allowing Bridge to Practice to become another permanent education funding stream regardless of performance.
Government programs created to address urgent problems can become difficult to unwind after districts build staffing, contracts and budgets around them.
That makes measurable results especially important.
If districts receiving the grants show meaningful improvements in reading, the state will have evidence that continued investment is producing value.
If student performance remains stagnant after repeated rounds of funding, Delaware should be willing to reconsider the strategy, redirect resources or require changes in how the money is being used.
The program should not be judged successful simply because it continues to operate.
Largest grants approach $1 million
The largest award this year is $877,624 for Red Clay Consolidated School District.
Capital School District will receive $763,856, Christina School District will receive $652,691, Appoquinimink School District will receive $556,457 and Colonial School District will receive $556,167.
Milford School District will receive $248,238.
Awards range from $9,528 for Gateway Charter School to nearly $878,000 for Red Clay.
Those differences reflect the size and needs of participating school systems, but the larger grants also create a reasonable expectation that taxpayers should eventually be able to see what changed as a result of the investment.
That does not mean every district should produce identical results. Student populations, staffing and local circumstances vary considerably.
But the state and local boards should be able to demonstrate a connection between taxpayer investment, improved classroom instruction and student academic growth.
An accountability clock starts ticking
Delaware’s early literacy strategy rests on a reasonable premise: Children who become strong readers during the earliest grades have a much better foundation for success throughout school.
The decision to emphasize evidence-based reading instruction, restore phonics to a central role and help teachers translate their training into daily classroom practice is a defensible use of education funding.
But after approximately $13.2 million in two rounds of Bridge to Practice grants, Delaware is moving beyond the stage where implementation alone can define success.
Marten’s own standard provides the appropriate test: Progress should be something Delawareans can measure, see and report.
Keleher’s argument adds another layer to that standard: As boards gain greater responsibility for directing resources, they also assume greater responsibility for measuring results and holding their own district leadership accountable.
The state has identified the problem, adopted an approach and committed significant resources.
Now the test is whether those decisions produce more students reading at grade level.
TO GO BOX
What: Delaware awarded $7.1 million in Bridge to Practice early literacy grants.
Who: 28 school districts and charter schools will receive funding for the 2026-27 school year.
Why: The money supports science-of-reading instruction, including a renewed emphasis on phonics, teacher coaching, instructional materials and school leadership.
Total investment: The latest grants follow $6.1 million awarded in March, bringing the two rounds to about $13.2 million.
What to watch: Whether teacher training and classroom changes produce measurable increases in student reading proficiency — and whether funding remains tied to results rather than becoming a permanent program.
Chicago, IL — A Chicago woman shot multiple times by a Border Patrol agent during last year’s immigration crackdown has sued the federal government, alleging the agent fired from behind her vehicle and later gave a false account of what happened.
Marimar Martinez filed the lawsuit Monday under the Federal Tort Claims Act. She accuses the government of negligence, battery, assault, false arrest, malicious prosecution and emotional distress stemming from the Oct. 4, 2025, shooting during Operation Midway Blitz.
Federal prosecutors initially accused Martinez of using her vehicle to strike and box in Border Patrol agent Charles Exum’s SUV. Exum then opened fire, leaving Martinez with seven gunshot wounds. Prosecutors later dropped the charges against her after body-camera footage and other evidence raised questions about the government’s original account.
Martinez’s attorneys commissioned a forensic reconstruction they say shows Exum was beside or behind her vehicle rather than directly in its path when he fired. The analysis has not been tested in court, and the federal government has not admitted wrongdoing.
Exum remains on administrative leave, while Chicago police are separately investigating the shooting.
Meyer, Working Families Party favor higher rates on upper incomes; Ramone says Delaware should rein in spending before asking taxpayers for more
DOVER, Del. — Delaware’s debate over taxes and spending is sharpening after progressive candidates scored major victories in the Democratic primary, giving greater influence to a political movement that openly supports higher income-tax rates on the state’s highest earners. Gov. Matt Meyer has also continued to support adding new upper-income tax brackets, arguing Delaware can ask higher earners to contribute more while reducing taxes farther down the income scale.
Republican state treasurer candidate Mike Ramone is making the counterargument: Before Delaware aims at implementing a sales tax, state leaders should first determine whether the state government’s spending is correctly targeted and delivering real results for taxpayers.
Ramone said there have been behind-the-scenes discussions in Dover for the implementation of a sales tax for over a decade (years), and a new, more radical legislature in January might finally pull the trigger on it to keep the tax and spending express going.
Progressives gain influence
The Sept. 15 primary strengthened the Working Families Party’s position within Democratic politics.
Working Families Party-backed candidates won one state Senate and five state House primaries. Five Democratic incumbents were among those defeated.
The results matter because the organization has a detailed economic agenda.
Its platform explicitly calls for making Delaware’s personal income tax “more progressive” by adding additional high-income brackets at increased rates.
The party also supported legislation last year that would have added tax brackets at $125,000, $250,000 and $500,000.
Meyer wants higher brackets
Meyer has made a similar argument. Delaware’s highest personal income-tax rate of 6.6% currently begins at $60,000 of taxable income.
Meyer proposed adding three higher brackets at $125,000, $250,000 and $500,000 as part of his fiscal 2026 budget proposal.
His administration argued that the change would make the system more progressive while reducing taxes for 92% of Delaware taxpayers. Under that proposal, taxpayers with taxable income below $134,667 would have faced no overall increase.
The proposal did not become law, but Meyer has continued to argue that taxpayers at substantially different income levels should not face the same top marginal rate.
The progressive argument is straightforward: If Delaware requires additional revenue to finance education, health care and other services, higher-income residents have a greater ability to absorb an increase than working- and middle-income families.
Ramone: Look at spending first
Ramone approaches Delaware’s fiscal problem from the opposite direction.
The former House minority leader and longtime small-business owner has made fiscal accountability and independent analysis of state finances central themes of his campaign for treasurer.
Ramone has said the treasurer should help taxpayers understand the economic impact of proposed taxes, fees and major spending decisions and provide an independent voice on state finances.
His broader argument is that a projected budget shortfall does not necessarily mean Delawareans are paying too little. It can also mean spending is growing too quickly.
“Every time Delaware faces a budget problem, the answer cannot simply be to go back to the people who are already paying the most and ask them for more,” Ramone said. “At some point, we have to ask why spending continues to grow, whether every program is delivering results and whether taxpayers are getting value for the money they already send to Dover.”
Ramone has previously supported directing surplus revenue toward long-term state liabilities instead of using it to support continuing expansions of government spending.
Could a sales tax be next?
Ramone said there have been behind the scenes discussions in Dover for the implementation of a sales tax for over a decade (years) and a new more radical legislature in January might finally pull the trigger on it to keep the tax and spending express going.
He has stated publicly that officials within the Meyer administration have discussed a statewide sales tax and that such a tax could be considered if Delaware needs additional revenue.
Meyer has not publicly proposed a general sales tax, and Delaware LIVE has not independently verified that one is being developed.
That distinction is important: Higher income-tax brackets are a documented Meyer policy position. A sales tax is an option Ramone says has been discussed internally.
The Working Families Party’s published platform does not call for a general sales tax. Its tax agenda instead emphasizes collecting more revenue through higher rates on upper-income taxpayers.
A statewide sales tax would represent a much broader approach because it would reach consumers across the income spectrum.
Who should pay?
That leaves Delaware with a basic fiscal debate.
Meyer and the Working Families Party argue the state can protect most taxpayers while asking those with the greatest ability to pay to shoulder more of the cost of government.
Opponents question whether Delaware should increase its dependence on higher earners — including entrepreneurs, business owners and professionals — without first confronting the growth of state spending.
Ramone says that is the larger issue voters should consider. “Delaware families should not have to wonder which tax comes next every time state spending outgrows revenue,” Ramone said. “My approach is to promote transparency. Help the voters understand the issues from a business and family perspective. Let’s make government live within its means, demand accountability for the money we already collect and protect taxpayers before asking them to pay more. ”
TO GO BOX
THE DEBATE: Delaware progressives are pushing for a more progressive income-tax structure as the state faces growing spending commitments.
MEYER: The governor has proposed additional income-tax brackets at $125,000, $250,000 and $500,000 while lowering taxes for most taxpayers.
WORKING FAMILIES PARTY: Its platform explicitly supports additional high-income brackets at higher rates.
PRIMARY IMPACT: WFP-backed candidates won one Senate and five House Democratic primaries, including victories over five incumbents.
RAMONE: The Republican candidate for state treasurer argues Delaware should address spending growth, accountability and efficiency before seeking additional revenue.
SALES TAX: Ramone says Meyer administration officials have discussed a possible statewide sales tax if more revenue is needed. Meyer has not publicly proposed one, and Delaware LIVE has not independently verified those discussions.
Tampa, FL — Florida is experiencing what appears to be the largest dengue outbreak in the continental United States in decades, with more than 250 locally acquired cases reported so far this year.
Most cases have occurred in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa. Florida’s previous high was just under 200 locally transmitted cases in 2023. One death has been reported this year, involving an elderly Tampa woman in September.
Dengue is a mosquito-borne viral illness that often causes fever, severe body aches and other flu-like symptoms. Serious infections can lead to bleeding, shock and death. Many infected people, however, develop few or no symptoms.
Local officials have declared emergencies in Hillsborough and neighboring counties while mosquito-control crews conduct spraying and inspect properties for standing water where mosquitoes can breed.
Experts say Florida’s warm climate and heavy international travel contribute to dengue transmission. Mosquito species capable of spreading the virus have also expanded their range as temperatures rise, increasing concern that locally transmitted dengue could become more common.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has provided Florida with $800,000 in assistance, although state officials have not requested CDC investigators.
Residents are being urged to use EPA-registered repellents, wear long clothing and eliminate standing water around their homes.
Bridgeville’s signature fall festival celebrates apples, scrapple and the agricultural traditions of western Sussex County as hometown producer RAPA marks its centennial.
By George D. Rotsch, Delaware LIVE
BRIDGEVILLE — Apples, scrapple and a century of local food history will come together this week as Bridgeville welcomes thousands of visitors for the 34th annual Apple-Scrapple Festival.
The festival officially opens Friday, Oct. 9, and continues Saturday, Oct. 10, filling downtown Bridgeville with food, carnival rides, music, hundreds of crafters and vendors, contests and some traditions that are difficult to find anywhere else — including a ladies’ skillet toss and an invitational scrapple sling.
This year also brings a milestone particularly appropriate for a festival with “scrapple” in its name: Bridgeville-based RAPA Scrapple is celebrating its 100th anniversary.
Ralph and Paul Adams started the company in Bridgeville in 1926, combining their first names to create RAPA. The company continues to operate from its Bridgeville production facility and says it is the leading-selling scrapple producer in the United States.
At 11 a.m. Saturday, RAPA will hold a special Scrapple Centennial Serving at its gate entrance on Cannon Street. The ticketed event is scheduled to include scrapple smash burgers, scrapple tacos, a scrapple breakfast bake and even scrapple cinnamon buns.
What exactly is scrapple?
For people who didn’t grow up in Delaware, Maryland or southeastern Pennsylvania, the festival’s second namesake may require some explanation.
Scrapple is traditionally made by cooking pork trimmings and other edible parts of the hog, grinding the meat and combining it with broth, cornmeal or buckwheat and seasonings. The mixture is formed into a loaf, chilled, sliced and fried — ideally, devotees will argue, until crisp on the outside while remaining soft inside.
The food’s roots go back much farther than Bridgeville.
Scrapple developed from German pork dishes brought to Pennsylvania by German-speaking settlers commonly known as the Pennsylvania Dutch. The German predecessor, called panhas or by similar names, dates to at least the 16th century. In America, ingredients such as cornmeal were incorporated into the recipe, creating the food that became known as scrapple by the early 1800s.
Like many traditional farm foods, scrapple was born from practicality. Families who butchered a hog wanted to use every edible part rather than waste food. Meat remaining after cuts such as ham, bacon and sausage were prepared could be combined with inexpensive grain to produce another food capable of feeding a family.
The tradition eventually became deeply associated with the Mid-Atlantic, particularly Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland.
Bridgeville makes a festival of it
The Apple-Scrapple Festival itself dates to 1992, when Bridgeville residents began looking for a way to promote their town and western Sussex County’s agricultural industry.
They found their theme almost literally in their backyard.
Apples were grown nearby at T.S. Smith and Sons, a Delaware Century Farm, while RAPA had been producing scrapple in Bridgeville since 1926.
Apples plus scrapple became Apple-Scrapple.
The first festival attracted about 2,500 visitors. Festival organizers say attendance has since grown to more than 20,000, turning the event into a major fundraiser for community organizations and one of western Sussex County’s largest annual celebrations. The festival remains organized largely by volunteers.
The food court reflects both the festival’s agricultural roots and the philosophy that a fall festival should not send anyone home hungry. Offerings include scrapple sandwiches, apple dumplings, pies, barbecue, cheesesteaks, funnel cakes and other festival foods. Organizers say apple dumplings served with ice cream remain among the most popular items.
Then there are the competitions.
Children can compete in the Kids Apple Toss Friday evening. On Saturday, competitors take over the Union Methodist Church lot for the Ladies Skillet Toss before the action returns to the bandstand for the Invitational Scrapple Sling.
Visitors who prefer eating rather than throwing their food can browse craft and vendor areas, visit the Bridgeville Historical Society Museum, attend the St. Mary’s luncheon and quilt display, see the car show or spend the day at the carnival.
Friday is a more limited festival night centered around the carnival, food court, entertainment, Little Miss Apple Scrapple Pageant and street dance. The full complement of crafters and vendors arrives Saturday.
And for anyone still debating the proper way to eat scrapple, there may never be agreement.
Some slice it thick. Others insist it should be thin. Some want it extremely crisp, while others prefer a softer center.
Then comes the most dangerous question of all: syrup, ketchup or apple butter?
In Bridgeville this weekend, there should be plenty of opportunities to conduct your own research.
TO GO
What: 34th annual Bridgeville Apple-Scrapple Festival
Admission: Festival activities are generally open to the public. Some individual events or activities may require tickets or fees.
Parking: On Saturday, traffic will be directed to festival parking areas. Free shuttle bus service is available Saturday. Organizers suggest using 7350 Federalsburg Road, Bridgeville, as a GPS reference point for the Red Lot and following traffic-control personnel once approaching town.
Accessibility: Bus service and handicap-accessible accommodations are available.
Restrictions: Pets and unauthorized motor vehicles are not permitted in the festival area.
Information: applescrapple.com
COMPLETE 2026 APPLE-SCRAPPLE SCHEDULE
Friday, Oct. 9
4 p.m. — Bandstand, carnival and food court open
5 p.m. — The Life Center Worship Team, bandstand
5-6 p.m. — Kids Apple Toss registration, bandstand
6 p.m. — Opening ceremony, bandstand
6:15 p.m. — Little Miss Apple Scrapple Pageant, bandstand
7 p.m. — Kids Apple Toss, bandstand
8:30-10 p.m. — Friday Night Street Dance, bandstand
10 p.m. — Bandstand, carnival and food court close
Saturday, Oct. 10
9 a.m. — Festival opens
9-9:30 a.m. — Lifeway Worship, bandstand
10-11:30 a.m. — Star Spangled Sweethearts, bandstand
10 a.m.-3 p.m. — Bridgeville Historical Society Museum open, Williams Street
10 a.m.-3 p.m. — Library Lane open, Williams Street
11 a.m. — RAPA Scrapple Centennial Serving, RAPA gate entrance on Cannon Street
11 a.m.-3 p.m. — St. Mary’s Luncheon and Quilt Display, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Williams Street
Noon-1:30 p.m. — New Direction, bandstand
12:40-12:55 p.m. — Ladies Skillet Toss registration, Union Methodist Church lot
1 p.m. — Ladies Skillet Toss, Union Methodist Church lot
2 p.m. — Health and Safety Fair closes, firehouse
2 p.m. — Car Show closes, Railroad Avenue
2 p.m. — Kids Zone closes, Union Methodist Church lot
2-3 p.m. — Invitational Scrapple Sling, bandstand
3-4 p.m. — Mariano Mallia, bandstand
4 p.m. — Schoolhouse Craft Show closes, Woodbridge Middle School
4:30 p.m. — Senior Center Vendor Show and Trade Show closes, Delaware, Walnut and Laws streets
4:30 p.m. — Invited Guests, Political and Sponsorship Rows close, Williams and South Cannon streets
5-7:30 p.m. — High Noon, bandstand
8-9:30 p.m. — DJ MIX, bandstand
9:30 p.m. — Bandstand, carnival and food court close
Schedule is subject to change. Festival schedule and event information are from the Bridgeville Apple-Scrapple Festival.
First-of-its-kind event inspired by Delaware-filmed mockumentary “The Conspiracists” will feature Bigfoot calls, tin foil hats, games, vendors and a movie screening
WILMINGTON — Bigfoot believers, UFO skeptics, comic fans and anyone willing to ask “what if?” will have a place to gather in Wilmington later this month.
ConCon, a conspiracy-themed convention inspired by the Delaware-filmed comedy mockumentary “The Conspiracists,” will be held Sunday, Oct. 18, at the Siegel Jewish Community Center.
Organizers describe the event as a lighthearted celebration of the fascination surrounding conspiracy theories rather than an effort to prove or disprove them.
“ConCon isn’t about whether conspiracy theories are true. It’s about why they’ve captured our imagination for generations,” said Christopher Bruce of Wilmington-based King Creative. “Through comedy, games, pop culture, interactive exhibits, unique vendors, and a movie that brings it all together, ConCon transforms curiosity into a shared adventure that everyone can enjoy.”
The convention runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., followed by a screening of “The Conspiracists” and a cast and creator question-and-answer session from 5 to 7 p.m. Ticketing information lists the overall event through 7:30 p.m. Ticket Tailor
Among the scheduled attractions are a tin foil hat-building station, Bigfoot Calling Championship, kids foil fashion show and “Real or Fake?” interactive game show.
A vendor hall will feature comics, collectibles, independent artists and other attractions. Attendees also will have opportunities to meet artists, puppeteers and creators connected to the movie.
From movie screen to real convention
ConCon essentially brings to life the fictional convention at the center of “The Conspiracists.”
The comedy follows siblings trying to create an all-inclusive conspiracy convention as their plans begin falling apart and an even larger conspiracy may be developing around them.
The movie was filmed almost entirely in Delaware and prominently features local locations, including the Hotel du Pont, The Grand and the Siegel JCC itself. The Conspiracists
Directed by Michael Perrie Jr. and produced by Uncultured Swine and King Creative, the film had its world premiere Jan. 8 at The Grand in Wilmington. BroadwayWorld
The production also relied heavily on Delaware cast members, crew members, businesses and locations, an approach filmmakers have said was intended to make Delaware part of the story rather than simply a stand-in for somewhere else. Town Square Delaware LIVE
Three ticket options
Organizers are offering three levels of admission.
The $10 Civilian Pass includes access to the vendor hall and daytime programming, including contests, the tin foil hat station, photo opportunities and scavenger hunt.
The $15 Conspiracist Pass adds reserved seating for the evening movie screening, access to the cast Q&A and additional raffle entries.
The $25 Classified Access ticket includes the daytime and movie activities, early entry, VIP movie seating, a post-panel group photo with the cast and a giveaway that organizers say will be revealed at the event.
The official ticket listing confirms that ConCon will be held Sunday, Oct. 18 — correcting a reference to Saturday contained later in the event announcement. Ticket Tailor
To Go Box
What: ConCon 2026
When: Sunday, Oct. 18
Expo: 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Movie screening and cast Q&A: 5-7 p.m.
Where: Siegel Jewish Community Center, 101 Garden of Eden Road, Wilmington
Detroit, MI — Former President Barack Obama is set to campaign in Detroit later this month for Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed as Democrats intensify their midterm push in Michigan.
Obama is scheduled to appear with El-Sayed on Oct. 24, the first day of in-person early voting in Michigan. The rally will also feature other Democratic candidates, including gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson, as the party works to consolidate support after a competitive primary.
El-Sayed, a physician and former Detroit health director, defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary after running with support from progressive figures including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. His campaign now turns to a general election that could help determine control of the Senate.
Obama’s appearance is notable because El-Sayed underperformed in Detroit during the primary, making turnout in the heavily Democratic city an important focus for the fall campaign. The former president has become increasingly active in the 2026 midterms, recording advertisements and appearing with candidates in several states.
The Michigan stop comes as both parties pour resources into competitive races nationwide, with the Senate balance among the biggest stakes heading into November.
Washington, DC — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a Michigan mother’s challenge to a school district’s ban on “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts, leaving in place a lower-court ruling that schools may prohibit the slogan as veiled profanity.
The dispute began in 2022 after two boys were told to remove sweatshirts bearing the phrase, which became a conservative political slogan during Joe Biden’s presidency and is widely understood as a substitute for an obscene insult directed at Biden.
Their mother argued that the students’ First Amendment rights were violated because the shirts contained no actual profanity or sexual language. Her attorneys warned that allowing schools to classify coded political messages as vulgar could give administrators broad discretion to suppress political expression they dislike.
The school district countered that messages with lewd or vulgar implications can be restricted in classrooms even when they contain political content. It also pointed to evidence that students had been permitted to wear “Make America Great Again” apparel and other messages supporting Donald Trump.
A lower court sided with the district, concluding that the slogan’s widely understood meaning allowed officials to treat it as vulgar expression.
By refusing to review the case, the Supreme Court left that ruling intact without issuing an opinion on the broader First Amendment question.
Washington, DC — U.S. public schools recorded nearly 12,000 book bans during the 2025-2026 school year, the highest annual total documented since PEN America began tracking removals in 2021.
The free-expression organization counted 11,982 bans involving 7,370 individual titles across 114 school districts. Since 2021, PEN America has documented roughly 34,000 instances of books being removed or restricted from student access.
Texas accounted for more than 8,100 bans, overtaking Florida after three years in which Florida led the country. PEN America attributes much of the Texas increase to SB 13, a state law restricting broad categories of school-library materials. Researchers also found that some districts are increasingly using artificial intelligence tools to identify large numbers of books for review or removal.
Patricia McCormick’s Sold, a novel about a Nepalese teenager trafficked into sexual slavery, was the year’s most frequently banned title. Stephen King was the most frequently banned author for a second consecutive year.
Supporters of book restrictions generally argue that parents and school boards should have greater control over sexually explicit or age-inappropriate material. Free-expression advocates counter that increasingly broad restrictions remove legitimate literature dealing with subjects including racism, LGBTQ issues and sexual violence.
The figures come as parents, educators and activists continue battling over what students should be allowed to read in public schools.
Montgomery, AL — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s appeal seeking to restore an $8.2 million defamation verdict tied to a 2017 Senate campaign advertisement.
The decision leaves intact an 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that overturned a federal jury’s finding in Moore’s favor. The original case involved an advertisement funded by the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC during Moore’s unsuccessful 2017 Senate campaign.
Moore argued that the ad combined excerpts from separate news reports in a way that falsely suggested he had been accused of soliciting sex from young girls at a shopping mall. A federal jury agreed with him in 2022 and awarded $8.2 million in damages.
The appeals court later vacated that verdict, concluding Moore had failed to prove the PAC acted with “actual malice,” the heightened legal standard public figures generally must meet in defamation cases. The Supreme Court’s refusal to take the case means that ruling remains in effect.
Moore’s 2017 campaign was dominated by sexual misconduct allegations. Leigh Corfman said Moore sexually touched her in 1979 when she was 14 and he was 32. Moore has denied that allegation and other accusations made against him.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump is again claiming that American elections are “corrupt,” this time pointing to Brazil’s rapid presidential vote count as supposed evidence that slower U.S. results are suspicious.
Trump praised Brazil for reporting results shortly after polls closed and contrasted that with places such as Detroit, Philadelphia and California, which can take longer to finish counting ballots. He offered no evidence that those delays indicate fraud. He also initially wrote that the election occurred in India before correcting the post to Brazil.
The comparison leaves out a basic difference between the two systems. Brazil uses a centralized national electronic voting system, while U.S. elections are administered separately by states and local jurisdictions with different rules for mail ballots, verification and processing.
Some states legally count properly postmarked ballots that arrive after Election Day, a practice the Supreme Court upheld this year. Longer counting times therefore do not demonstrate corruption; they often reflect state law and the volume of absentee ballots.
Trump has repeatedly alleged widespread election fraud despite failing to produce evidence supporting those claims. Reuters reported this year that investigations promoted by his administration have likewise failed to uncover proof of widespread manipulation.
Brazil’s first round ended with Flávio Bolsonaro at about 47% and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva near 45%, sending them to an Oct. 25 runoff.
Washington, DC — The Trump administration is proposing to eliminate federal restrictions that sharply limit suspensions and prohibit expulsions in Head Start, potentially leaving hundreds of thousands of low-income preschool children subject to widely varying state discipline rules.
Head Start currently requires programs to use interventions such as mental-health consultation, parent engagement and individualized support before excluding a child. Expulsion is prohibited, while temporary suspension is allowed only in exceptional circumstances. The program serves nearly 700,000 children nationwide.
Under the proposed rule, those federal protections would disappear and states or local programs would set their own discipline policies. The administration describes the change as part of an effort to reduce federal bureaucracy and give communities greater control.
The practical effect could be significant. A Children’s Equity Project analysis found only 14 states have policies resembling Head Start’s current safeguards, and just seven clearly extend those protections across the full birth-to-five age range. Black children, children with disabilities and boys already experience disproportionately high rates of exclusionary preschool discipline.
Critics warn that removing federal standards could make it easier for overstretched programs to remove children with behavioral or developmental needs rather than provide additional support.
Public comments on the proposed rule remain open through October 6.
Washington, DC — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is ordering another major reduction in the Pentagon’s senior leadership ranks, directing the military to cut roughly 20% of its general and admiral positions by early 2027.
The new target doubles the 10% reduction Hegseth announced last year and could eliminate or downgrade scores of positions across the services. The Pentagon argues that fewer senior officers will reduce bureaucracy, accelerate decision-making and return greater authority to commanders closer to operational units.
Critics, however, question whether rapidly stripping experienced leadership from the armed forces during active global conflicts is prudent military reform or simply another sweeping restructuring undertaken with limited congressional input. Senate Armed Services Committee ranking Democrat Jack Reed has warned that indiscriminate cuts could weaken readiness and remove expertise the military may need during crises.
The reductions follow Hegseth’s earlier removal or forced retirement of more than two dozen senior officers, including several of the military’s highest-ranking women. His broader Pentagon overhaul has also targeted diversity programs, military-academy faculty policies and organizational structures he considers bloated or distracted from warfighting.
Hegseth maintains the changes are about accountability and combat effectiveness. The central question is whether cutting leadership this aggressively actually produces a leaner military — or creates unnecessary disruption at a particularly unstable moment.
Washington, DC — President Donald Trump’s political operation is deploying tens of millions of dollars into competitive congressional races as Republicans try to maintain control of Congress in the final month before the midterms.
Trump’s main super PAC, MAGA Inc., and affiliated groups No Going Back PAC and Safety & Affordability PAC have reserved well over $100 million in advertising across Senate and House contests. Trump previously said his political network could ultimately spend between $400 million and $500 million helping Republican candidates.
No Going Back has concentrated heavily on Senate races, including Michigan, Ohio, Alaska, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Georgia. Safety & Affordability has focused primarily on House districts, while MAGA Inc. itself has invested heavily in Texas to support Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton.
The spending comes as Republicans face an increasingly competitive political environment. The Hill and Decision Desk HQ’s latest polling averages show Trump with a 37.7% approval rating, while several Senate and House races remain closely contested.
The money gives Republicans significant late-campaign resources, although super PACs generally pay higher advertising rates than candidates themselves, meaning the delayed spending buys less airtime than earlier reservations would have.
Who will replace Republican Councilwoman Janet Kilpatrick? Here’s where Kira Alejandro and Melissa Brayman stand
In my 20 years covering the Supreme Court for the Associated Press, I tried very hard to predict how cases would come out based on the argument I had just watched, or more recently, listened to. I thought it was my duty as a reporter to tell my readers where the justices appeared to stand after questioning the lawyers. After all, the written briefs already provide extensive elaboration of each side’s arguments. The one new thing to be gleaned from an hour or two in the courtroom was what the justices thought.
From movie screen to real convention![[link]](https://i.redd.it/eep2t1yj4wuh1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/44pqzqmefvuh1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/v19ahlc5dpuh1.png){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/51z2g0zodjuh1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/4cl1idzn0iuh1.jpeg){kind=link}
