Judge permanently bars Trump from deploying National Guard troops to Portland

Trump bans visas for fat people

New Republic- The Trump administration has ordered visa officers to deny immigrants who are obese or have certain health issues, in yet another instance of the president’s strange obsession with fat people.

A Thursday directive from the State Department, sent to embassies and consulates around the world, indicates that people applying for visas to the United States may be rejected if they have certain medical conditions, on the grounds that they could take up domestic health care resources.

Food shortage issue

NBC News -The Department of Agriculture will fully fund SNAP benefits while the Trump administration's appeal of a federal judge's order to do so makes its way through the courts. In a memo obtained by NBC News, the deputy undersecretary of the Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services informed states the federal government "will complete the processes necessary" to fully issue those benefits as soon as today. NY Times - A federal appeals court has denied a last-minute bid by the Trump administration to halt some food stamp funding during the government shutdown. The Trump administration said it then filed an emergency application at the Supreme Court.  Read more  Bowers News Media -  Numerous states, including California, Kentucky, Nevada, West Virginia, and more, have deployed their national guard to help restock food banks and assist with food distribution as a result of the partial disruption of food stamp benefits. This is a reminder that the National Guard is needed, and often employed, in useful ways. There is more to it than just theatrically demonstrating dominance over your political opponents.

Meanwhile. . .

Emily's List -  In 2019, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger were roommates in Washington, D.C. as freshmen congresswomen. Now, they're both the governor-elect in New Jersey and Virginia.

Mean temperatures 1850-2025

 Image: Courtesy of the World Meteorological Association

SORRY FOR THE INTERRUPTION

 We were invaded today by an unknown operation, including the automatic closing of our computer  a few minutes after we opened it. Thanks to a couple of hours of work by our wonderful long term technical service (we can't reveal them out of fear they might also be hit) we are back in business, but our service may be a little short given that your editor's wife is giving a speech early this evening. Will try to bring things up to date by tomorrow. 

Polls

Study Finds 

• 63% of young adults (ages 18-34) and 53% of parents have considered leaving the U.S. due to the state of the nation
• Half of all adults report signs of loneliness, while 69% say they needed more emotional support this year than they received
• AI anxiety nearly doubled among students (78%, up from 45%) and surged across all age groups in just one year
• 75% of Americans are more stressed about the country’s future than before, with political division tied to isolation, physical symptoms, and daily struggles

 Newsweek - California Governor Gavin Newsom holds an early edge over Vice President JD Vance among young male voters for the 2028 presidency, according to new polling from a Republican-affiliated firm.  The latest League of American Workers/TIPP survey, conducted October 22-28, shows that among young men, 38 percent would vote for Newsom compared to 33 percent for Vance.

Newsweek -  A new poll points to potential trouble for Republicans heading into the 2026 midterm elections, with Democrats holding a commanding lead in the race for control of the House. A new YouGov survey, conducted on November 5 among 5,066 adults, shows that 41 percent think the Democrats are more likely to win majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2026, while only 30 percent said the same about the Republicans. However, 29 percent said they are not sure.

Axios -  48 vs. 50 - That's the latest split in public opinion on whether Democrats should keep fighting to extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies or whether they should vote to end the government shutdown, according to a new KFF poll out this morning.

. 48% want the Democrats to keep fighting, 50% want to end the shutdown without addressing the subsidies...

• What is still lopsided is the public support for extending the subsidies so they don't expire: 74% of Americans say Congress should renew them

Judge bans use of force for Trump’s Chicago blitz

 Independent, UK - A federal judge is banning immigration authorities from firing tear gas and using other riot weapons during protests in Chicago after video evidence and courtroom testimony from protesters, reporters and faith leaders revealed agents acting as “professional agitators.”

District Judge Sara Ellis also accused Greg Bovino — the top border patrol official for Trump’s mass deportation operations in Chicago — of lying in court about his officers’ use of force and his claim that protesters hit him in the head with a rock.

The government’s evidence in the case is “simply not credible,” Ellis said during a Thursday hearing, according to the Chicago Tribune.

“Describing neighborhood moms as professional agitators shows just how out of touch these agents are,” Ellis said of descriptions of protests in one Chicago neighborhood.

A lawsuit from protesters, press groups and faith leaders accused agents of indiscriminately firing tear gas and pepper balls into crowds and at close range, without warning, as volatile scenes emerged from protests against immigration raids across Chicago’s neighborhoods.

Nation’s busiest airports face FAA’s cut in flights, initial list shows

• Washington Post 

Jeffrey Epstein

National Memo - Several House Republicans have reportedly heard from the Department of Justice (DOJ) that the unreleased Jeffrey Epstein documents are especially compromising for President Donald Trump.

That's according to reporting from former MSNBC, CNN and Fox News reporter David Shuster, who posted to his X account on Wednesday that there is "speculation/rumors sweeping through [the] GOP caucus" about the details of the Epstein files.

"A few GOP house members say they’ve heard from FBI/DOJ contacts that the Epstein files (with copies in different agencies) are worse than Michael Wolff’s description of Epstein photos showing Trump with half naked teenage girls," Shuster wrote.

Shuster is likely referring to an October interview in which Trump biographer Michael Wolff told the Daily Beast that he had personally seen "about a dozen Polaroid snapshots" of Trump and Epstein, in which Trump was photographed with several topless young women on his lap. Wolff said Epstein pulled the photos out of a safe and spread them out "like a deck of cards" on his dining room table. The author told the Beast he saw the photos while visiting Epstein's home at the convicted sex offender's invitation, as Epstein wanted Wolff to write a book about him.

Veteran journalist Shuster further reported that Republicans were "spooked" by Attorney General Pam Bondi's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, after she refused to answer a question from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) about whether she had personally seen the photos after the contents of Epstein's safe were confiscated. After Whitehouse asked her about the photos, Bondi then questioned him about receiving campaign donations from LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who was associated with Epstein.

"She didn’t give a denial," Shuster wrote.

Trump has record number of layoffs

New Republic -  It’s month 10 of President Trump’s second term, and layoffs are the highest they’ve been in more than 20 years.

A Thursday report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas shows job cuts last month increased by more than 153,000, up 175 percent from October of last year. In total, companies have announced more than one million job cuts in 2025, up 65 percent from the same time period last year. This was the worst October since 2003.

“This is the highest total for October in over 20 years, and the highest total for a single month in the fourth quarter since 2008. Like in 2003, a disruptive technology is changing the landscape,” the report said. “Technology continues to lead in private-sector job cuts as companies restructure amid AI integration, slower demand, and efficiency pressures.” Retail, warehousing, media, and nonprofits have also been impacted sectors.

Friday protest planned for over 100 college campuses

 Portside -  Aiming to “organize millions of students to disrupt business as usual and force our schools and our political system to finally work for us,” progressive groups and labor unions are planning a nationwide day of coordinated protests at over 100 US campuses on Friday, November 7.

Planned by Students Rise Up, in coordination with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and Higher Education Labor United (HELU), the upcoming demonstrations “will be the first in a series of nationwide days of protests leading up to student strikes and worker actions on May Day 2026,” according to organizers.

In addition to the unions, groups backing the effort include Campus Climate Network, College Democrats of America, Gen-Z for Change, Indivisible, Jewish Voice for Peace, March for Our Lives, and Sunrise Movement, whose executive director, Aru Shiney-Ajay, stressed in a Tuesday statement that “everyone deserves an accessible, affordable, and quality education.”

Record turnout in NYC

Via ABC News

 

YouTube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations

The Intercept -  A documentary featuring mothers surviving Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A video investigation uncovering Israel’s role in the killing of a Palestinian American journalist. Another video revealing Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.

YouTube surreptitiously deleted all these videos in early October by wiping the accounts that posted them from its website, along with their channels’ archives. The accounts belonged to three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Palestinian groups’ YouTube channels hosted hours of footage documenting and highlighting alleged Israeli government violations of international law in both Gaza and the West Bank, including the killing of Palestinian civilians.

Nancy Pelosi isn't running again

NBC News - Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who made history as the nation’s first female speaker of the House and twice served in that top job, will not seek re-election to Congress in 2026. The powerful California Democrat, now 85, led her party in the House for two decades — from 2002 to 2022. Her decision will spark a fierce contest for her liberal, deep-blue San Francisco seat at a moment when Democrats across the country are embracing a new generation of leaders.

Meanwhile. .

The Guardian -  Zohran Mamdani announces all-female transition team as he prepares for New York mayoralty

NPR - A federal judge has ordered the White House to immediately start providing American Sign Language interpretation at its briefings held by the press secretary or the president

Shutdown

NPR  - Most Republicans are not in favor of ditching the filibuster, as Trump has sought, but some bipartisan talks appear to have picked up steam this week, NPR’s Sam Gringlas tells Up First. The solution that Senate Democrats and Republicans could be discussing is a short-term funding measure until December or later, along with votes on a small package of regular appropriations bills. Republicans would need eight Democrats to sign onto a deal to reopen the government. However, the expiring health care subsidies remain a sticking point during these talks

The government shutdown is now in its 37th day, and President Trump has been urging Republicans to end it by eliminating the Senate filibuster. Earlier this week, some Democrats expressed their interest in finding a way to resolve the shutdown, but their victories at the ballot box on Tuesday have emboldened many to hold firm. Meanwhile, the president acknowledged that the shutdown hurt Republicans on election night.

Donald Trump

Steve Benen, MSNBC  - When it comes to groceries, Donald Trump doesn’t have just one problem; he has three related problems.

The first and most obvious is their cost. The president has spent months insisting that he’s somehow succeeded in lowering the prices American consumers pay at supermarkets, but his claims are obviously untrue, no matter how many times he repeats them. (This led to an especially contentious exchange on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” when Trump became agitated after being confronted with reality.)

The second problem is that he considers “groceries” to be an exotic word. “It’s such an old-fashioned term, but a beautiful term: ‘groceries,’” Trump said in April, as if he were introducing the public to foreign terminology. “It says ‘a bag with different things in it.’”

But as weird as it’s been to see the president lie about grocery costs, while lecturing the public on the definition of a word we’re all familiar with, there’s also a third problem: Trump still doesn’t know how people buy products at grocery stores.

This came up quite a bit during his first term. In 2018, for example, the Republican insisted that consumers had to show ID to purchase breakfast cereals (they do not). He later added that it was also necessary to present identification to buy bread (also wrong).

At a Tuesday-morning event at the White House, Trump went even further down the same path.

As part of a pitch on proposed election restrictions, the president told Senate Republicans, “All we want is voter ID. You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID. But for voting, they want no voter ID.”

For now, let’s put aside the fact that in-person voter fraud is extraordinarily rare, making voter ID laws an unnecessary solution to an imaginary problem. Let’s instead consider the simple fact that the incumbent American president, 10 years into his political career and five years into his White House tenure, is so detached from the lives of everyday Americans that he has no idea that people buy groceries all the time without presenting identification.

A student answers the theocratic right

Jim Higtower -  An essential part of our children’s education is learning proper moral behavior. And who better to deliver that ethical guidance than politicians?

Huh? Bizarre, yet this is the conclusion of the GOP’s theocratic Christian Nationalist faction. They are demanding that legislatures across the country must intervene in local educational policy to require that all public schools plaster every classroom with Christianity’s Ten Commandments. It’s in-your-face religiosity, forcing one religious dogma on students of every faith. It’s also ludicrously hypocritical – after all, legislators are notorious for committing adultery, stealing from the poor, killing in the name of the state, bearing false witness against immigrants, bowing down to false gods… and otherwise mocking the Christian religion’s own commandments. Who do these nationalists and their politicians think they’re fooling?

Certainly not America’s free-thinking students. If you wonder whether young people will just go along, take heart in the uplifting thoughts of Arjun Sharda, a high-school freshman in Round Rock, Texas. In a recent op-ed piece, he went right at the humbuggery of the state’s Republican leaders: “The same lawmakers who preach about freedom and limited government,” he wrote, “are now legislating what we must hang on our classroom walls... But faith loses its power when it’s forced. True belief comes from conviction, not compulsion… Texas prides itself in independence, yet this law enforces conformity.”

The Christian Nationalist autocrats are not only trying to turn public classrooms into their exclusive pulpits, but to establish their repressive theology as America’s official religion. As Sharda warns, “Texas should stop confusing religion with righteousness – before the wall between church and state becomes just another thing we’ve torn down.”

Household debt

WalletHub -  With household debt reaching $18.59 trillion in Q3 2025, the personal-finance company WalletHub today released its rankings of the States With the Largest & Smallest Debt Increases, based on new data from TransUnion and the Federal Reserve, to highlight where people may be in financial danger.
 

Largest Average Household Debt Increase	Smallest Average Household Debt Increase
1. Hawaii	41. Michigan
2. California	42. Indiana
3. Colorado	43. Ohio
4. Utah	44. Alabama
5. Washington	45. Louisiana
6. Massachusetts	46. Arkansas
7. Maryland	47. Kentucky
8. Virginia	48. Oklahoma
9. Idaho	49. West Virginia
10. Oregon	50. Mississippi

 
For the full report

National Stats

• Q3 Results: Total household debt increased by $69 billion during Q3 2025. That is 19% less than the increase in Q3 2024.
   
• Household Average: The average household owed a total of $154,152 at the end of Q3 2025, which is $13,466 below the all-time high.
   
• Total Debt-to-Deposits Ratio: The ratio of total household debt to deposits indicates consumers are in a stable position. It's still below pre-Covid levels and roughly 46% lower than the early-2000s peak.
   
• Total Debt-to-Assets: The ratio between total household debt and assets, at 9.36%, continues to be at a very healthy level.

The election

 Republicans filed a lawsuit on Wednesday morning challenging California’s newly approved House maps, hours after voters signed off on a ballot measure that would redraw them.

President Trump on Wednesday said the government shutdown was to blame for the Democratic victories in Tuesday’s elections, calling it a “big factor, negative for the Republicans.” Democrats dug in further.

 

Meanwhile. . .

NY Times - Trump Officials to Cut Air Traffic in 40 Major Markets if Shutdown Continues. The plan, which officials said was intended to help air traffic controllers, would force the cancellation of thousands of flights as the administration seeks to pressure Democrats to end the shutdown. 

Numerous Ways Trump’s Power is Being Constrained

Donald Trump

Via 

REPUBLICANS AGAINST MAGA

 

The Election

Via Annie     Laura Barrón-López & Jake Traylor, MSNBC - President Donald Trump’s name may not have been on the ballot Tuesday, but he suffered a resounding defeat anyway as voters rejected Republican candidates and registered their strong disapproval of the way the president is doing his job.    From gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, to the mayoral race in Trump’s hometown, to a redistricting measure in California, Americans opposed Trump’s endorsed candidates and expressed deep dissatisfaction with the direction of the country while signaling their dismay with the cost of living and their personal financial situations.   In that sense, Tuesday’s results — a Democratic rout — served as a warning sign for the president and Republicans headed into the 2026 midterms when the party out of power historically makes significant gains.    NBC News -  Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill won the New Jersey governor’s race, NBC News projects, defeating Republican Jack Ciattarelli after a hard-fought contest in which President Donald Trump loomed over voters’ choice. Sherrill worked to make the race a referendum on the president, casting Ciattarelli as a Trump acolyte who will not stand up to the president. “He’ll do whatever Trump tells him to do, and I will fight anybody to work for you,” Sherrill said in their first debate in October.  NPR -  Here are five takeaways from the 2025 off-year elections:    1️⃣ It’s still the cost of living, stupid. Prices, prices, prices. Affordability was a through line in most of the races Tuesday. President Trump’s lack of focus on it likely hurt his party, as voters overwhelmingly sided with Democrats on the economy. 2️⃣ Republicans still have a Trump problem — in two different ways. Republican candidates are in a quandary — Trump is unpopular and a drag with independents, but without him on the ballot, they continue to have problems turning out base voters. 3️⃣ The Trump slump with Latinos appears to be real. Trump made inroads with Latinos in 2024, but that has slid backward. Latinos chose Democrats in the governors’ races by 2-to-1 margins. 4️⃣ The redistricting arms race is on, and Democrats got a boost Tuesday on that front. Yes on Prop 50 won big, giving Democrats a chance to counterbalance GOP efforts to squeeze out more Republican House seats. It was a big win for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, too. 5️⃣ The Democratic Party will have to wrestle with its identity over the next year. From Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York to Abigail Spanberger for Virginia governor, there’s going to be a real debate on how best for Democrats to present themselves to win in next year’s midterm elections.    Roll Call - Democratic former Rep. Abigail Spanberger won Tuesday’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, ending four years of Republican control of the governor’s mansion. Spanberger was leading GOP Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears 55 percent to 45 percent, when The Associated Press called the race roughly an hour after polls closed. She will be Virginia’s first female governor.  “Tonight we sent a message,” Spanberger said in her victory speech in Richmond, flanked by her husband and three daughters. “We chose our commonwealth over chaos. You all chose leadership that will focus relentlessly on what matters most: lowering costs, keeping our communities safe and strengthening our economy for every Virginian.” Spanberger will succeed term-limited Republican incumbent Glenn Youngkin, who in 2021 capitalized on parental frustrations over education policy to score an upset victory. Virginia governors are not eligible to run for a second consecutive term. Her victory comes on the same night that Democrats retained the governorship in New Jersey, with Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s victory.  Democracy Docket -  Maine voters rejected a Republican-backed ballot initiative Tuesday that would have imposed new photo ID rules and severely limited mail-in voting — a decisive win for voting rights advocates who said the measure threatened to upend the state’s long-standing tradition of accessible elections. The measure, appearing on the ballot as Question 1, would have created a new photo ID requirement for both in-person and mail-in voting and eliminated programs that expanded access to absentee ballots. It also would have ended Maine’s permanent absentee voter list — requiring voters to apply for a mail ballot each election — banned ballot requests on behalf of family members and limited every town to a single drop box.

Why Mamdani won - “He brought the working, middle and upper-middle classes together in what I called back in July an ‘emergent coalition of the precariat’ — united in part by a growing affordability crisis and in part by simple rage about income inequality, corruption and the entitlement and impunity of the very rich.”   — David Wallace-Wells, Opinion writer, NY Times

 NY Times - More than 2 million New Yorkers had voted even before the polls closed at 9 p.m., the first time that total had been surpassed since 1969, when John V. Lindsay won re-election.

Can Mamdani fulfill his promises? 

Time - New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani built his platform around a simple premise: The city is far too expensive, and he’s going to make it more affordable.

From freezing rents and making buses free to boosting the minimum wage and increasing taxes for New York’s wealthiest residents, nearly all of the major actions Mamdani has pledged to take as mayor are aimed at lowering costs for New Yorkers and shrinking the wealth gap in the country’s biggest city.

“I think that the Democratic Party must always remember what made so many proud to be Democrats, which is a focus on the struggles of working-class Americans across this country,” he said in an interview on ABC.

Those ambitious, affordability-focused proposals have been key to Mamdani’s unlikely rise from a lesser-known Queens assemblymember who came into the crowded Democratic primary as a heavy underdog to New York City’s next mayor. Now, as he leaves the campaign trail and turns toward governing the city, the question looms large: Will he be able to make his plans work in practice?   Dealing with the issues he boosted 

NY Times - Mr. Mamdani’s political rise may be remembered for what came first: the buoyant, flamboyant, rule-breaking primary run that united a new coalition of Brooklyn gentrifiers and Queens cabbies around the city’s growing affordability crisis and the birth of a megawatt talent.

But his election on Tuesday as the 111th mayor of New York owes as much to the equally improbable backroom campaign that followed. In Midtown C-suites and intimate phone calls, a left-wing populist who had built his brand on taxing the rich wooed, charmed and delicately disarmed some of the most powerful people in America.

The arc of his success is nothing short of staggering. At the start of the year, Mr. Mamdani was polling at 1 percent, tied, as he likes to say, with the candidate known as “someone else.” Few New Yorkers recognized his name, and his own political team put the odds of winning as low as 3 percent.

Now, at age 34, he will be New York City’s youngest leader in more than a century, amid a pile of historic firsts: the first Muslim mayor, the first South Asian and arguably the most influential democratic socialist in the country.

California’s congressional maps will be redrawn to create more blue-leaning districts after voters approved a measure to amend the state’s constitution on Tuesday, delivering a victory for Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in a contentious redistricting battle that has broken out around the country.  will be redrawn to create more blue-leaning districts after voters approved a measure to amend the state’s constitution on Tuesday, delivering a victory for Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in a contentious redistricting battle that has broken out around the country. 

Time - Democrats will hold onto the governorship of New Jersey as Rep. Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli in the most closely watched gubernatorial race of the year, offering her party a much-needed boost after months of political uncertainty under the Trump Administration. The Associated Press called the race for Sherrill shortly after the polls closed on Tuesday night.

Sherrill, 53, a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who was elected to Congress in the Democratic wave of 2018, emerged victorious after a bruising campaign that tested her reputation as a moderate in a state that has shifted towards Republicans in recent years. Her win extends Democratic control of the governor’s mansion to a third consecutive term and cements her status as one of the party’s rising national figures.

NBC - Texas voters approved two state constitutional amendments in statewide votes, NBC News projected. The ballot measures amend the state's constitution to clarify that only U.S. citizens can vote and to enshrine parental rights. 

NBC -  Virginia state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi became the first Muslim-American woman elected to statewide office in the U.S. with her victory in the state's lieutenant governor's race, NBC News projected.

NBC -  Pennsylvania voters are projected to approve the retention of three state Supreme Court justices, preserving Democrats' 5-2 majority on the battleground state's high court.

The Associated Press - Colorado voters approved a ballot measure that would raise state income taxes on higher-earning households to fund free meals for all public school students.

 

Half Of Young Adults Admit To Faking Wealth

 Study Finds 

• Half of Gen Z and millennials admit to lying about their wealth or financial success, with 37% willing to overdraft their accounts or go into debt just to impress a date
• Credit scores have become dating credentials: Over 50% say a high credit score makes someone more attractive, and 1 in 5 want dating apps to display credit scores upfront
• Men take bigger financial risks for romance: 46% of men would overdraft to impress a date compared to 28% of women, and men are nearly twice as likely to overlook a partner’s bad credit
• Money talk remains taboo among friends: 70% of women and 60% of men almost never discuss finances with friend groups, despite widespread financial anxiety

... A new Credit One Bank survey of 1,000 young adults reveals that 51% admit to faking their wealth or exaggerating their financial success. Gen Z leads the pack at 54%, compared to 48% of millennials. And it gets worse. A staggering 37% say they’d be willing to overdraft their account or plunge into debt just to impress someone on a date.

Voting Behavior Has ‘Strong’ Link To Risk of Death

 Newsweek -  Voting behavior in elections and an individual’s future risk of death have a "strong association." In fact, it’s a stronger determinant of mortality than education, according to researchers from the University of Helsinki in Finland. 

While voting in national and local elections has already been recognized as a social determinant of health—with voters generally thought to have better health profiles than non-voters—the link between electoral participation and death has not been established.

With this in mind, the researchers analysed data on participation in the 1999 Finnish parliamentary elections and associated registers by Statistics Finland containing sociodemographic and mortality information....

The study included more than 3,185,500 people (with voter turnout of 71.5 percent among men and 72.5 percent among women), tracking their survival from election day on March 21, 1999 to the day of death or the end of 2020, whichever came first. 

In total, 1,053,483 people died; 95,350 deaths from external causes (accidents, violent and alcohol-attributable causes), and 955,723 from other underlying causes. 2,410 people whose cause of death was not known were excluded from the final analysis.

Not voting was consistently associated with a 73 percent heightened risk of death from any cause among men and a 63 percent heightened risk of death among women, the researchers discovered.

After adjusting for their education level, this was reduced to a 64 percent heightened risk among men and a 59 percent heightened risk among women.

The difference in mortality between non-voters and voters was stronger than between those with basic and higher education. These differences were strongest for external causes of death and for younger age groups.

When adjusting for age, the risk of death was twice as high among both men and women who did not vote than it was among those who did. 

Utah building forced labor camp for homeless

 Common Dreams - In an effort to fulfill President Donald Trump’s executive order on homelessness, Utah is building a massive facility that housing advocates warn will function as an “internment camp” where the unhoused will be subject to forced labor.

Last month, Utah’s homeless services agencies came to an agreement for the state to acquire a nearly 16-acre parcel of rural land in the Northpoint area of northwest Salt Lake City to construct the first-of-its-kind facility, which is slated to have 1,300 beds.

The genesis of the project began in July, following Trump’s “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” executive order, which threatened to withhold funding from states and cities unless they criminalized homeless people camping on streets and ordered the attorney general to expand the use of involuntary civil commitment for adults experiencing homelessness.

More corporate funding of Trump

 Axios - President Trump has raised about $1.9 billion from an array of corporate donors to help finance his political committees, White House construction projects and celebrations of the nation's upcoming 250th anniversary....

•  No president has raised so much money, so quickly, for so many different reasons. And there's more to come, aides say.

"The midterms are paid for," a source briefed on Trump's fundraising operations told Axios. MORE

Credit card delinquency

WalletHub -  With the rate of credit card delinquency increasing in all 50 states over the first two quarters of 2025, the personal-finance company WalletHub today released its updated report on the States Where Credit Card Delinquency Is Increasing the Most, to identify where people’s credit scores are most in danger.
 

Increasing the Most	Increasing the Least
1. Minnesota	41. Illinois
2. Iowa	42. South Carolina
3. Kansas	43. Utah
4. South Dakota	44. Hawaii
5. Ohio	45. North Dakota
6. Colorado	46. California
7. Mississippi	47. Alaska
8. New Hampshire	48. Wyoming
9. Arkansas	49. Vermont
10. Michigan	50. Florida

 
For the full report and to see where your state ranks