Climate change

Inside Climate News  - Since January, wildfires have burned more than 1.7 million acres across Europe and more than 8.5 million acres in the U.S. “The risk is growing more severe. We’re seeing phenomena that are more violent, more intense and more brutal,” said Christine Bouisset, a wildfire researcher at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research.

 As the threat grows, researchers are also questioning whether the way communities prepare for fire needs to change.  In June, the CNRS published a scientific report on wildfires in which experts argued that climate change is challenging France’s current approach and its lack of community organizations. They pointed to Montecito, California, as an example of successful collaborative wildfire governance. “The question of sharing responsibility between institutions and citizens is a crucial governance issue,” the report said….

 Across the U.S., a range of community organizations work alongside public agencies to help residents prepare for wildfires and reduce risks at the local level.

 The Wildfire Adapted Partnership in Colorado was one of the first organizations to “develop the idea of volunteer neighborhood ambassadors, with community members who serve as examples to their neighbors on what fire-adapted living means,” said Bill Trimarco, Archuleta County program manager at WAP.

 Different states have different programs. “These are tools,” said Kris King, a wildfire mitigation specialist at Lake Wenatchee Fire and Rescue in Washington state. “They’re all trying to do the same thing: to encourage residents to do something.”

Time - According to a new report published Oct. 14 in the journal BioScience, “Earth’s climate system is moving deeper into uncharted territory.”

The State of the Climate, an annual report that tracks the Earth’s “vital signs,” monitors several climate-related indicators—ranging from greenhouse gas concentrations and temperature changes to tree cover loss due to wildfire. The researchers found that, of the 16 planetary vital signs, seven are currently at record extremes. This includes sea levels and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, several others, such as areas burned during wildfires and ocean heat levels, show evidence of acceleration or abrupt shifts. 

The State of the Climate, an annual report that tracks the Earth’s “vital signs,” monitors several climate-related indicators—ranging from greenhouse gas concentrations and temperature changes to tree cover loss due to wildfire. The researchers found that, of the 16 planetary vital signs, seven are currently at record extremes. This includes sea levels and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, several others, such as areas burned during wildfires and ocean heat levels, show evidence of acceleration or abrupt shifts. 

The researchers warn that the rate of global warming appears to have accelerated, from about 0.05°C per decade between 1880 and 1970 to roughly 0.36°C per decade between 2010 and 2024—and that the 2°C threshold meant to limit planetary damage could be reached before 2050. These accelerating and intensifying changes could raise the risk of reinforcing feedback loops and crossing tipping points—critical thresholds that, when crossed, can lead to accelerating and often irreversible environmental changes.

"Earth’s life-support systems are being pushed beyond stable limits," the report states, "with changes unfolding faster than our ability to respond." —Simmone Shah Read the full story here.

Donald Trump

The Guardian  - Donald Trump has shelved a widely condemned plan to livestream the execution of a disabled man by firing squad. The US president confirmed the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at a military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, would not be public.

His administration had faced sweeping criticism, and comparisons to dictatorships in Iran and Afghanistan, after Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, said last week it would “make sure” people were able to watch.

A College-by-College Guide to Which Majors Pay Off — or Don’t

https://freeportfunfacts.blogspot.com/

Polls

The Guardian -  With the midterm elections less than three weeks away, key voting groups including independents, rural voters and even some Republicans are increasingly disenchanted with Donald Trump’s economy, according to an exclusive Harris poll for the Guardian.

The majority of those surveyed were pessimistic about the economy, with three quarters of Americans saying they are concerned about a recession while 61% wrongly believe that the US is already experiencing one. By its typical definition, the US is not currently experiencing a recession.

The poll shows growing weariness across the political spectrum over high prices.

Republicans, fighting to keep control of Congress, are losing support with independent voters, who are expected to be the deciding factor in key swing races. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of independents said the economy is worse, up from 48% who said the same in September 2024 in the heat of the 2024 presidential election.

Even within the Republican ranks, optimism has waned. In February 2025, just a few weeks after Trump was inaugurated, 39% of Republicans said the economy was getting better. By February 2026, just before the US launched attacks against Iran, that optimism was up to 49%. In the latest poll, just 28% of Republicans said the economy is getting better.

Voter purge

 Hartmann Report - With virtually no mention or reporting in the corporate press, Republican-run states are again running the voter purge of millions that gave Donald Trump the White House in 2024.

Yesterday morning, Reuters published a special report on the ways the Trump administration could "interfere" with the midterms, noting that a lawyer in Idaho's Republican attorney general's office bragged that his state had "taken a leading role in ensuring its voter registration list is purged…."

Yep, they used the word "purged." They're not even bothering with the polite terms anymore.

… The GOP-aligned, billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation spent over a decade doing a deep dive into every state looking for voter fraud and noncitizen voters, examining every American vote since 2000 - more than a billion ballots cast nationwide - and found just 89 cases of non-citizen voters. In more than twenty years!

The libertarian Cato Institute did a similar analysis specifically on the 2020 election looking for any evidence that Trump's claims were right that the election was "stolen" from him by "Mexicans" voting in the US election. They concluded the same thing:

“There are likely many problems with America’s voting system and there is no doubt that a non-zero number of non-citizens illegally voted, but there is no good evidence that noncitizens voted illegally in large enough numbers to actually shift the outcome of elections or even change the number of electoral votes.”

Trump’s press secretary claims she misunderstood question about being a lawyer

The Hill:  White House press secretary Katie Zacharia said that she misheard a shouted question about where she passed the bar exam from a reporter earlier this week, leading her to say that she passed the exam when she moved to China.

“I assumed the question was, ‘Where were you after law school?’” Zacharia said in a phone call with The New York Times on Wednesday.

The president was originally asked a question about which state Zacharia passed the bar exam in, before he turned back to her to ask “which state?” The interaction took place on the White House South Lawn as Trump and Zacharia prepared to leave for a campaign trip to Alaska just after Zacharia’s first turn in the White House briefing room.

“That’s all I could hear over the sound of Marine One,” Zacharia told the publication. “And, wanting to respect protocol, the distance behind the president, kept me from moving closer to hear the question.”

The development comes as Zacharia’s legal credentials have come under intense scrutiny after the left-leaning newsletter Popular Information reported that Zacharia is not licensed to practice law in the U.S. or Washington, D.C.

The Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday that Zacharia sat for the California bar exam after she received her law degree from Pepperdine University, but she did not pass. The Journal reported that Zacharia moved to China shortly after and took a job as an associate at the Zhong Lun Law Firm.

The watchdog group Campaign for Accountability filed a complaint with the State Bar of California on Wednesday over her claims that she is a lawyer.

ICE

The Six Pac - Fifty-eight human beings have died in ICE custody since Trump returned to office… And his Border Czar, Tom Homan, said, “We’re not gonna apologize. You can hate all you want, we’re not going anywhere."

This isn't enforcement - it's a regime of death created by Trump and his Republican enablers. They are ripping people from their lives and throwing them into horrifying conditions. We are talking about severe overcrowding, zero sanitation, freezing cells, and rotten, inedible food.

Trump Humiliated With Half-Empty Rally in Middle of Rust Belt

Polling

EMILYs List of women running in battleground races across the country are surging ahead in the polls.

ARIZONA GOVERNOR

Katie Hobbs (D) - 49%
Andy Biggs (R) - 43%

OHIO GOVERNOR

Dr. Amy Acton (D) - 47%
Vivek Ramaswamy (R) - 46%

TEXAS GOVERNOR

Gina Hinojosa (D) - 49%
Greg Abbott (R) - 45%

ARIZONA’S 6TH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT

JoAnna Mendoza (D) - 47%
Juan Ciscomani (R) - 45%

IOWA’S 2ND CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT

Lindsay James (D) - 46%
Joe Mitchell (R) - 45%

Secret Service reports record number of threats

Republican Informer - The Secret Service says threat cases jumped about 40 percent this year to roughly 10,000, underscoring the most dangerous environment its protectees have ever faced.  A senior official called the threat environment the highest the agency has ever seen. Most threats now begin online, with lone actors and mental-health crises driving cases. Mental-health interventions tied to suspected threat-makers rose about tenfold versus 2025.

Bank of America hit with third largest fine in Treasury Dept. history

NBC News - Bank of America was ordered to pay $1.2 billion, the third-largest penalty in Treasury Department history, for violating anti-money laundering and sanctions laws, the department said. As part of that total, the bank was ordered to pay $750 million to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the largest fine it has ever levied. 

The Treasury Department said the bank didn’t report “over $5 billion dollars in suspicious transactions,” including suspicious transactions “indicative of Chinese Money Laundering Networks, fraud, and potential trade-based money laundering.” The bank is also settling “its potential civil liability for 475 apparent violations of multiple sanctions programs,” the Treasury Department said.  How Bank of America responded to the penalties.

Voting

The Hill - President Trump is breaking a more than two-decade-long tradition of welcoming a key group of international election observers to monitor the midterm contest, drawing criticism for discouraging democratic transparency. The U.S. has routinely invited election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to observe and report on midterm and presidential contests since 2002. Election observations are carried out by the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).

Trump’s decision puts the U.S. in the same basket as the isolated, autocratic regimes of Belarus and Russia. Those countries have also rejected international observers, and their most recent elections were widely condemned as a sham.  

The U.S. is one of the 57 members of the OSCE, an international body created after the Cold War to promote democracy and human rights in post-Soviet states. The U.S. hosting OSCE election observers is viewed as an important signal of transparency that encourages countries with more vulnerable democracies to open up their elections to observation and monitoring. 

“The Trump Administration’s decision not to invite international observers to the United States is deeply antithetical to the spirit of freedom, democracy and transparency that defines our elections,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), the outgoing ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. 

Donald Trump

President Trump’s administration has filed 42 emergency pleas to the Supreme Court since retaking the White House, surpassing the count from his entire first term. Just last week, the Justice Department asked the justices to stop a ruling favoring Democrats in a fight over TV advertising rates ahead of the midterms.  As the count ticks higher, we’re taking a look at Trump’s scorecard. 

The TV ad rate case and another one concerning transgender inmates remain pending. Four others were withdrawn, leaving 36 emergency cases with an actual decision on the books. 

Trump has effectively won 28 and lost eight, according to The Gavel’s analysis. That’s a nearly 80 percent success rate. 

Read the full scorecard here.

None of those wins was unanimous, however. 

The Supreme Court justices often publicly highlight that the majority of decisions on their regular docket, called the “merits docket,” are unanimous. The court frequently acts unanimously in low-profile emergency disputes, too.  

But when it comes to the president’s emergency requests, the justices’ ideological lines are clear.

Democratic Conservation Alliance

TRUMP SAID: “It’s been getting cooler, not warmer.”

FACT CHECK: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that the summer of 2026 (June through August) was the hottest summer on record for the contiguous United States.

TRUMP SAID: “The ice caps are bigger than they’ve ever been.”

FACT CHECK: Though sea ice naturally fluctuates on a seasonal schedule, yearly minimum and maximum measurements show that it’s declining overall and becoming thinner. This year’s maximum was the lowest on record.

Meanwhile. . .

Maryland Comptroller Brooke Liermann - The Trump administration has proposed stripping away more than 1,400 federal regulations that guide Head Start, which for more than 60 years has opened doors to early education, health screenings, and meals for children from low-income families. Trump’s changes would remove many of the standards that make it work. They would impose an English-only requirement, excluding children whose primary language at home isn’t English, and eliminate standards on class sizes, teacher-child ratios, and services for children with disabilities. In 2024 and 2025, the program served more than 7,000 Maryland children.

Maryland Comptroller Brooke Liermann - The Trump administration has proposed stripping away more than 1,400 federal regulations that guide Head Start, which for more than 60 years has opened doors to early education, health screenings, and meals for children from low-income families. Trump’s changes would remove many of the standards that make it work. They would impose an English-only requirement, excluding children whose primary language at home isn’t English, and eliminate standards on class sizes, teacher-child ratios, and services for children with disabilities. In 2024 and 2025, the program served more than 7,000 Maryland children.

Maryland Comptroller Brooke Liermann - The Trump administration has proposed stripping away more than 1,400 federal regulations that guide Head Start, which for more than 60 years has opened doors to early education, health screenings, and meals for children from low-income families. Trump's changes would remove many of the standards that make it work. They would impose an English-only requirement, excluding children whose primary language at home isn't English, and eliminate standards on class sizes, teacher-child ratios, and services for children with disabilities. In 2024 and 2025, the program served more than 7,000 Maryland children.

The Washington Post: Reflecting pool liner failed in 85 places after flawed renovation, inspection found

Increase in Social Security

NY Times  - Retirees and other beneficiaries will receive the largest annual cost-of-living adjustment since 2023 in their Social Security checks next year, driven mainly by persistently high inflation.  The Social Security Administration announced a 3.6 percent annual cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, on Wednesday after the release of government inflation data for September. The COLA is determined using the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, or CPI-W. The index values for July, August and September are averaged to produce the official adjustment figure.

For the average Social Security beneficiary, the COLA will translate to a $75 monthly increase, the government said. However, the actual amount for any retiree enrolled in Medicare will vary. The Part B premium, which covers outpatient care, is usually deducted from Social Security benefits, changing net COLAs. Separately, Social Security said the maximum amount of earnings subject to the Social Security payroll tax would rise to $192,300, up from $184,500 this year.

The Medicare board of trustees has projected that the monthly Part B premium will rise $6.60 in 2027 to $209.50. The final figure will be released this fall, but if the projection holds, most beneficiaries will receive net COLAs of at least 3 percent.

Trump's new press secretary

NY Times  -  President Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, made her debut behind the White House lectern Tuesday morning. It was a bumpy one.

“Good morning!” she began. “I want to thank President Trump for his trust that he has placed in me. I have wanted to work for him for a very long time.”

She spent the next eight minutes reading nervously from a script, looking up at the cameras every couple of lines. Then she said she was ready to take some questions. She called on only three reporters, dropped one wild piece of news, made a slip mixing up her husband and her president, then darted out of there after just five and a half minutes, leaving the White House press corps to scratch its collective head.

Wedding traditions that are slowly being forgotten

America's most mysterious off-limits places

White House press ban

The Guardian -  A federal judge ordered the White House on Tuesday to continue allowing journalists from CNN, MS Now and Politico to access the building as the media coalition’s lawsuit against the Trump administration plays out.

Timothy Kelly, a district court judge, had on 24 September granted a 14-day reprieve for the news organizations, which six days earlier had been banned by the president in an extraordinary move from entering the White House grounds “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS”.

….The organizations filed a lawsuit on 21 September seeking to overturn the ban as a violation of their rights under the US constitution. But that temporary restraining order expired on Tuesday, bringing the media companies into court late last week to ask for a preliminary injunction that would lift the ban during the duration of the lawsuit, which could take months.

During arguments at the E Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington, Kelly seemed inclined to lift the ban indefinitely, telling a lawyer for the federal government that his side had “a notice problem” that was “probably the biggest hurdle” they had to overcome.

The Trump White House gave no advance notice to the media companies affected to say that they were at risk of losing their press badges, which the news organizations have said are essential to their ability to cover the administration. While the White House sent letters to the media companies informing them of the ban, they did so post-hoc, after building access had already been cut off, in violation of binding court precedent.

Artificial Intelligence

 The Guardian - The Guardian exclusively reviewed more than 80 documents and memos that were distributed among a nationwide network of federal, state and local law enforcement offices – including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the FBI and the New York City police department (NYPD) – between 2021 and 2026. They were obtained by government transparency non-profit Property of the People and shared with the Guardian.

In these documents, officers discussed:

• How extremists could use AI to devise attacks and recruit new members
• How AI could be used to disseminate and produce everything from deepfakes to election misinformation and child sexual abuse material (CSAM)
• How people seeking information on how to make weaponry or bombs could use AI to circumvent police detection
• How to ensure that officers could take advantage of AI tools in policing, for things like social media monitoring, while managing public concern over the use of these tools
• Monitoring social media for opposition to AI and potential extremist attacks on datacenters

The FBI did not respond to detailed questions on its monitoring of anti-AI sentiment and use of AI, but pointed to a general fact sheet on the agency’s use of the technology.

The NYPD stated that its threat analysis report on artificial intelligence was related to the “AI 2027” project – an influential forecast from several AI researchers that speculated about the technology’s rapid growth and the threats it could present. In one of the project’s possible futures, it predicted bioweapon-armed drones wiping out humanity.

TV Giants Accused Of Illegal Boycott

Congressional Insider - The Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into five major television networks after they briefly halted pooled White House coverage, raising fresh questions about power, access, and who really controls the public’s view of the presidency.

Most and least envergy efficient states

Wallet Hub- With October being National Energy Awareness Month and the average U.S. family spending at least $2,000 per year on utilities, the personal-finance company WalletHub today released its report on 2026’s Most & Least Energy-Efficient States, to see which states save people the most money while also saving the environment.

WalletHub compared the energy efficiency of residents’ homes and automobiles in 48 U.S. states. Due to data limitations, Alaska and Hawaii were excluded from our analysis.
 

Most Energy-Efficient States	Least Energy-Efficient States
1. California	39. Louisiana
2. Vermont	40. Georgia
3. New York	41. Kentucky
4. Washington	42. Tennessee
5. Massachusetts	43. Wyoming
6. Oregon	44. Mississippi
7. Colorado	45. Arkansas
8. Utah	46. West Virginia
9. Minnesota	47. Alabama
10. Nevada	48. South Carolina

 
To view the full report and your state’s ranking,

Americans support Medicare for all

Axios-  Supporters of "Medicare for All" now outnumber opponents by nearly 2-to-1, according to a new survey of U.S. adults from the Axios-Ipsos American Health Index.

Two-thirds of all survey respondents — and half of Republicans — said the federal government should be willing to spend more tax dollars to lower health care costs for Americans.

With three weeks to go before the midterm elections, and private health insurance premiums and prescription prices crushing voters, these findings suggest a path for swing-state candidates who embrace socialized medicine.

• But the public's openness is driven more by desperation than by confidence in government. Affordability is foremost on most Americans' minds, and health care brings almost daily reminders of economic pressure.

Middle East

NBC News - Oil and gas prices rose yesterday after President Donald Trump’s “energy ceasefire,” announced Sunday, failed to gain traction. Brent crude had jumped 2% to almost $108 per barrel, and U.S. crude oil had risen more than 2% to about $94. By Tuesday morning, Brent fell to around $105 per barrel and U.S. crude oil to around $92. 

Meanwhile, Russia has continued to strike Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, including an attack on a power plant in Kharkiv.

Trump indicated that he knew neither Ukraine nor Russia had committed to a ceasefire when he made the announcement on Truth Social. “They agreed, you know why? Because I said, ‘You agree,’” Trump told reporters yesterday. 

The “energy ceasefire” came two days after another surprise Trump announcement — that Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed to supply 300,000 tons of diesel fuel “to the American and Global Marketplace,” requiring a six-month suspension of the fuel sanctions imposed on the Kremlin in 2022 for its illegal invasion of Ukraine. The suspension of sanctions angered Ukrainian officials, European allies and some U.S. lawmakers.

Trump yesterday defended the deal with Russia, calling it “the right choice for the American people.” Still, experts are highly skeptical that there will be any significant resumption of Russian diesel exports in the near term because of Ukrainian strikes on refiners deep inside Russia.

Mamdani says ICE agents who shot man in New York looked like ‘mass shooters’

The Guardian - The New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, compared US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s recent shooting of a man in Manhattan to a mass shooting scene – and called for an end to the agency’s operations in his city. Oscar Belgal, 28, was struck in the neck during an enforcement operation while he was in his car with his five-year-old child also inside. Describing his perspective on videos of the shooting scene that have emerged since, Mamdani told MS NOW it was unclear even to the mayor that the agents in the footage are law enforcement personnel based on their being in plainclothes.

Elon Musk

NY Times - Mr. Musk has already given far more money, about $366 million, to federal committees during the 2025-26 election cycle than he did during the 2024 election, when he laid out roughly $290 million to help return President Trump and Republicans to power. He has given even more in undisclosed donations during both elections, according to people briefed on the giving.

The latest torrent of spending has helped give the Republican Party a financial advantage in the midterms, as well-funded outside groups like Mr. Trump’s powerful super PAC flood the airwaves with advertising in the final weeks. No Democratic billionaire is spending nearly as much as Mr. Musk, and money remains a central worry for the party in an otherwise favorable political environment.

Artificial intelligence

'This Is Nuts.’ An OpenAI Insider Explains Why He Quit.

The Guardian  - Donald Trump is a “corrupt, senile felon” whose fixation on the term superintelligence proves he knows nothing about AI, said Geoffrey Hinton, “godfather” of the technology, in a wide-ranging interview where he doubled down on recent warnings that AI models pose an existential threat to humanity and scoffed at claims the industry could regulate itself.

The pioneering computer scientist, whose work helped lay the foundations of modern AI, has since become one of the technology’s most vocal critics. His latest remarks come after a tumultuous month during which a growing list of senior AI scientists and researchers have joined Hinton in ringing the alarm about how the technology he helped create could ultimately escape human control, sparking an industry crisis, the hasty assembly of congressional meetings and a rare global consensus that something must be done.

NY Times  -  Below is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts. Last week, news broke that David Robinson, who had been leading safety transparency efforts at OpenAI, had quit his job at the company because he believes its technology is not safe.

Robinson is an interesting figure. He didn’t come out of the Silicon Valley Bay Area hothouse — he’s more of a recognizable Washington, D.C., figure. He’s a Rhodes scholar. He formed a civil rights nonprofit. He got a law degree at Yale. He worked in policy. He advised the Biden White House. He was interested in the intersection of technology and justice.

When he joined OpenAI, he thought this whole set of worries about safety risk and extinction was kind of nuts. But three years later, he’s not so sure. What he is sure about is that OpenAI does not have the culture of safety necessary to protect the world from what it is building. And it’s not just OpenAI — he thinks this is a problem endemic to the A.I. industry. The interview

Hannaford website offline as company addresses security issue

Press Herald  - Hannaford’s website and mobile app have been temporarily shut down as the supermarket chain’s parent company addresses a cybersecurity issue. Ahold Delhaize, the Dutch company that owns the Scarborough-based grocer, said in a brief news release Monday that it was experiencing an internal network issue and had taken some systems offline to protect them. That includes the Hannaford app and website, both of which carried messages Tuesday morning that they were currently unavailable.m/