CNN, MS NOW and Politico Escalate Legal Battle for White House Access  (Erik Wemple, New York Times)
The news outlets argued in an updated lawsuit that they should be granted access to the White House reporting pools.

read more

After Landing in Miami, Flávio Bolsonaro Heads into Uncertain Political Future  (Alex DeLuca, Terrence McCoy, Sammy Westfall and Marina Dias, Washington Post)
The defeated Brazilian presidential candidate arrived in the U.S. after defying a judicial order to surrender his passports.

read more

The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)—the president’s in-house think tank—released a reportthis month that purported to find that the average illegal immigrant imposes a lifetime cost on taxpayers of $166,716—or up to $1.9 trillion in total—and that “amnesty” would add to these costs, while deportation spending would cut the deficit.

read more

Reporting Highlights

●  Hidden Hand:Conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell has shaped virtually every aspect of the Trump administration’s norm-busting agenda on American elections. 

●  Movement Builder:After working to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat, Mitchell forged a national grassroots movement to overhaul voting. Some of her allies now hold top administration jobs. 

read more

The U.S. Department of Justice plans to send election monitors to every state ahead of Election Day, expanding a long-standing practice that’s spurred concern this year among Democrats and voting rights advocates because of President Donald Trump’s push to influence elections.

read more

Swiss ambassador Sabrina Dallafior, the newly elected director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), traveled to Damascusin mid-October. As the head of the international organization charged with implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) that bans chemical weapons, her visit marked Syria’s progress in closing the book on the nation’s decades-long chemical weapons program.

read more

As artificial intelligence technologies grow ever more powerful, so do the risks they pose and with them the urgency of regulating AI.

read more

Parents of young children, or elementary school teachers, often run into difficulties when trying to explain complex, abstract terms or concepts to the children. Fortunately, the Trump administration offers many examples parents and teachers may use to demonstrate the meaning of the term “hypocrisy.”

Here is one of these many examples on offer:

read more

Why the ‘Odds of Mischief Are High’ in These Midterms  (Michael Hirsh, Foreign Policy)
Is the United States destined for a repeat of Jan. 6 every election now?

read more

Why Putin’s Defenders Are Increasingly American  (Adrian Karatnycky, Foreign Policy)
Like Joseph Stalin’s Western fans, they use a vicious foreign regime to grind their axe at home.

read more

Editor’s Note: Ten years on, Russia’s 2016 interference operation on behalf of Trump, and the Trump administration’s dismantlement of all the U.S. federal government organs dedicated to tracking and analyzing state-sponsored efforts to interfere in U.S. institutions, elections, and society,* offer two lessons, Julia Cutler writes. First, a foreign intervention pays off most durably and reliably when its beneficiary has every incentive to hide the intervention sponsor’s hand.

read more

On Monday, October 19, the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense hosted the virtual event “Russia’s Bioweapons Legacy and the Plague Scare.” The panel examined the death of a laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia a

read more

Details have been published of a critical flaw in the programming language PHP, which is the backbone of more than 70% of all websites. Left unfixed, the flaw would allow hackers to easily take over and compromise millions of websites and the information held on their servers.

read more

This year’s statewide ballot measures are written, on average, at a graduate-school reading level, according to a new report.

The readability of 2026’s ballot questions — which ask voters to weigh in on issues as varied as abortion, property taxes, voter ID and firearms — varies by state, political data tracking nonprofit Ballotpedia found in its newest Ballot Measure Readability Report.

read more

Editor’s Note: Ten years on, Russia’s 2016 interference operation on behalf of Trump, and the Trump administration’s dismantlement of all the U.S. federal government organs dedicated to tracking and analyzing state-sponsored efforts to interfere in U.S. institutions, elections, and society, offer two lessons, Julia Cutler writes. First, a foreign intervention pays off most durably and reliably when its beneficiary has every incentive to hide the intervention sponsor’s hand.

read more

Russian hostile activity costs the UK at least £2 billion annually, according to a recent report by Scottish MP Graeme Downie, who has called on the government to measure what these actions cost Britain. But this figure is just the baseline. In reality, a profound shift in Moscow’s approach to sabotage means the true cost is set to climb higher.

read more

Under the sea’s surface, a potential battle is brewing. This battle, centered on sabotage and deception, involves energy and telecommunication infrastructure being held at risk by a mixture of adversarial, opportunistic geopolitical strategies for expansive influence and control of critical resources, trade, and core industries. The ability to observe this conflict is also more constrained. Operating below the ocean’s surface is not like operating in other domains: Maneuvering is complex, and the terrain is highly dynamic.

read more

Trump Wants an Inaccurate Census. The Consequences Would Be Pernicious.  (León Krauze, Washington Post)
A proposed rule change and aggressive ICE sweeps threaten to erase millions from the count.

read more

Trump Is Still Chasing His Yalta. Here’s What He Doesn’t Get.  (Michael Kimmage, New York Times)
Though at times Mr. Trump’s nonlinear foreign policy has favored Ukraine, when it comes to negotiating an end to the war, Mr. Trump has done almost nothing to empower or include Ukraine and its European partners.

read more

The current Trump administration claims its mass deportation efforts have expelled nearly a million people through July of this year, but those include both voluntary returns and people turned around at the border, according to a new analysis by the former chief statistician for the Department of Homeland Security.

read more