"Tech CEO Elon Musk reportedly approached President Trump on slowing down his Starlink communications service in Ukraine earlier this week, contradicting both Musk’s statement that it was Trump’s idea and Trump’s statement that he has no idea who did it."

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Musk, it turns out, has not spent “a lot less” on politics—if we’re talking dollars. He has now spent more on the midterms than he spent to help elect Donald Trump in 2024. He’s just done it more quietly, without attaching the force of his weird personality as a condition. He is not skipping around onstage behind Ken Paxton in Texas. He’s just funding his candidacy. In full. He has taken the most expensive race of the cycle off of Trump, the Senate GOP’s, and the candidate’s plate.

"...Trump has “turned merit on its head” and replaced it with “affirmative actions for chuds and dunces.”

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OpenAI has seen another case of its AI agents going rogue—and this time, crypto is involved. In a recent report, the company detailed how an internal research model used a crypto wallet without permission to pay the fees needed to test an app on Ethereum’s Sepolia test network. Although the tokens had little real-world value, the model had no authorization to collect or spend them.

"Telemetro reported that Isla Cañas, in Los Santos, has been physically divided by a water channel following the earthquake. The report adds to earlier accounts of flooding and displacement, although the extent and permanence of the geographical change require scientific assessment (Telemetro Reporta, 2026a). "

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Once a zone of promise and connection, the web has not only rotted and enshittified, it’s turned into a literal warzone. There really are algorithms out there, unleashed by governments actively dropping bombs on one another, that are designed to infect our minds and prejudice our ability to perceive the truth. It’s one of the many ways modern warfare has become invisible, pervasive and endless. No wonder social media is making so many people depressed — it can be a form of assault.

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The future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a few Big Tech oligarchs who are obsessed with money and power. The American people and people throughout the world must determine that future. Human beings, not machines, must come first.

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The earthquake has revealed weaknesses in buildings, transportation, communications, emergency procedures, and the coordination of assistance. These observations can inform improvements that might otherwise have received little attention.

The Bella Vista initiative is particularly instructive because it began before the earthquake and can now incorporate lessons from an actual emergency.

The most valuable legacy of this disaster would be not simply the replacement of damaged infrastructure, but improvements in the physical and social arrangements through which Panamanians protect and assist one another.

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement is fast-tracking a $100 million domestic surveillance program to put 142 intelligence agents in more than two dozen cities and the District of Columbia, in what contracting and surveillance experts said would be a significant expansion of the agency’s ability to reach into private lives.

The new program is called the Enforcement and Removal Operations Overwatch and National Security Enforcement, or ERO ONE, described in documents posted last month on federal procurement websites.

Introduction to transcript:

Piers Morgan sits down for an exclusive, in-person interview with President Volodymyr Zelensky in his London studios.

In this hard-hitting discussion, the Ukrainian leader addresses his feelings on Trump’s energy ceasefire and diesel deal with Putin, admitting he feels ‘betrayed’ and warning that stepping away from Ukraine is "the wrong side of history."

He also delivers a direct message to Elon Musk, breaks down the staggering reality of Russian casualties on the battlefield, discusses ongoing energy attacks, and tackles the tough questions surrounding peace negotiations and territorial integrity.

The latest government figures report 11,460 people affected, 2,841 people in emergency shelters, and 27 injuries, with no confirmed deaths or missing persons.

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...the president is operating in a world where the conditions that once made annexation attractive and feasible have largely disappeared.

The Greenland security agreement demonstrates another way forward. Rather than annexing the island, the United States appears poised to secure many of its strategic objectives without changing any borders.

Earlier presidents acquired territory because sovereignty itself delivered things they wanted: minerals, ports, military positions and control over trade routes. The modern United States can gain those advantages through military bases, defense agreements, trade relationships and alliances, without assuming responsibility for governing another population.

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The president has implied that the point of his new policy is to lower fuel prices for Americans. Perhaps he wants to convince voters that the cause of high prices is Ukraine and not his own war of choice in Iran. But this is not a sufficient explanation or justification for these dramatic actions. The amount of fuel that Russia could export is too small, the impact on pricing too slight, the narrative too late to shape electoral outcomes.

This looks, instead, like something very different: an abrupt, Hail Mary attempt to force Ukraine to surrender and to save the Russian economy, perhaps in order to finally complete the multiple business deals that the Russians are known to have discussed with American negotiators and others in Trump’s orbit. These include deals involving the Nord Stream gas pipelines, mineral mining in the Arctic, the Russian assets frozen in European banks, and more.

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On October 25, Brazilians will vote in the second round of their presidential elections. The matter might not be all that suspenseful. The far right-wing candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, is widely favored to defeat the incumbent, President Lula da Silva, especially after Bolsonaro’s unexpectedly strong showing in the first round, which found both him and the members of his far-right movement broadly in the ascendance. His victory will be a catastrophe for many reasons, but there’s one looming disaster that will extend far beyond Brazil’s borders: The fate of the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest, hangs in the balance. Its stepped-up destruction will likely dramatically accelerate global warming.

"But livestreaming Hasan’s execution will not be about transparency or a desire to help the American public better understand what the government does in our name. Instead, it will be the kind of spectacle of cruelty that has become a staple in the administration’s use of power, like having masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents roaming American streets or proudly posting videos of the American military killing people in boats off the coast of Venezuela."

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Getting a new privacy law through Congress is hard. Preventing its passage or watering down its provisions is easy. As a result, the intrusions on privacy just keep growing. But if people who favor and even profit from mass surveillance confronted state and local bans until adequate federal protections were in place, they would suddenly have a powerful reason to push for the speedy passage of new privacy rules. That change in incentives may be the best hope for Americans who see how quickly technology is changing and want to stand athwart the surveillance state, yelling Stop.

“I’ve never really seen such a grassroots uprising against surveillance technology,” Jay Stanley, an ACLU senior policy analyst, told The Guardian. “On the left, there’s a historical memory of law enforcement spying on and interfering with advocates for social change … On the right, there’s a long tradition of ‘don’t tread on me’—keep the government out of my life, keep it from looking over my shoulder.”

China, Russia, and others have real incentives for gaining access to data collected by license-plate readers. Doing so could assist hostile actors in recruiting assets, blackmail, intimidation, and more. Breaching Flock would be the biggest prize––and the public is in no position to evaluate how competently the company or its competitors secure their data.

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It appears that what he wants is for the Iran war to spread to the United States, so that he can then live through a 9/11 himself and enjoy a burst of popularity. What else, after all, can he hope to gain from the war? All that is left is weakness brought by weakness, which in the setting of a disaster that he himself provokes he can hope to pantomime for a domestic audience as strength. In his speech at the UN, he kept connecting Iran to the elections. In two recent campaign appearances, he fantasized about Iran destroying American cities. I do not believe that anything of the sort will happen, since Iran has no reason to give Trump a gift. But it does show where Trump’s mind is: the weakness of a lost war can translate into the weakness of failing to prevent terror, and he can then hope to somehow be the man of the hour again.

"A nation does not survive because its most fortunate individuals succeed in protecting themselves. It survives because enough of its people and institutions preserve the cooperative arrangements upon which the nation depends."

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While the sale or donation of such equipment can increase access to resources needed to conduct scientific research, the authors said neither HHS nor the USDA has evaluated the biosecurity risks associated with selling this equipment or taken steps to keep it from people with nefarious intent.

The principal findings, based on reports available October 10, are:

At least 27 people sustained injuries, mostly minor or moderate. No deaths had been confirmed in the available official assessments.

The Ministry of Education initially identified 188 damaged schools nationwide, including 35 in Veraguas.

Homes, health facilities, churches, and government buildings suffered structural damage.

Road collapses and damaged bridges isolated communities in Veraguas, Los Santos, and surrounding provinces.

Electricity, drinking-water services, and communications were disrupted in several regions.

The earthquake generated numerous aftershocks, including a second major event estimated at magnitude 6.6.

Tsunami alerts were issued for portions of the Pacific coast and subsequently lifted.

The Panama Canal continued operating without reported earthquake-related interruption.

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PANAMA CITY (AP) — A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck Panama on Friday morning, shaking buildings as far away as the capital and prompting evacuations, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

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At least 63 third-country nationals have been expelled to Equatorial Guinea on six ICE flights since last November, according to flight data and reporting I’ve compiled on the Third-Country Removal Tracker. As of mid-September, when guards at the hotel cut off their contact with the outside world, about 30 remained imprisoned there. The rest have all been forced back to their home countries, except for one woman, who was able to escape to Europe.

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Under past administrations, ICE policy held that any detainees who were parents should be reunited with their children before being deported, or agents must get confirmation that there is a designated caregiver in place for their children in the parents’ absence. Last year, upon Trump returning to the White House, ICE revised this policy to make it only applicable “when operationally feasible,” which gave agents all the leeway they needed to ignore the historical guidance in order to prioritize mass deportations. “This loosening of guidelines, combined with scaled-up immigration enforcement, has resulted in the detention of thousands of parents, many of whose minor children are U.S. citizens,” a recent analysis by the Migration Policy Institute concluded.

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NATO’s Military Committee visited Kyiv for the first time in eight years, bringing together military representatives from all 32 NATO member states for talks with Ukraine’s military leadership, according to NATO Military Committee Chair Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone on October 7.