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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Documents obtained by Cato via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal that more than a year before the 2026 midterms, the FBI was quietly building two election-related capabilities at once. The first was a set of internal “triggers” that told field agents when they could investigate AI-generated or “synthetic” political content — rules the Bureau is still keeping secret.

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Reporting Highlights

●  An Unusual Request:Political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security wanted the agency that protects election systems to get and hack a voting machine, which shocked staffers.

●  Undermining Election Security: President Donald Trump has said voting is vulnerable even as his administration has undermined the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is supposed to protect it.

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Reporting Highlights

●  Corporate Firewall:The oil deal is designed to prevent future U.S. presidents and Venezuelan leaders from changing or dismantling the enterprise.

●  Hidden Investors:Some of the Trump administration’s partners could remain anonymous, hidden behind a parent company based in Barbados.

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Building a nuclear power plant is one of the world’s most complex construction projects. It requires thousands of trucks to ship parts, often to remote regions, where huge teams of skilled workers like electricians and welders come together to assemble everything over many years.

Financing such projects is difficult, in part because no one wants to risk loaning money to a project that might never generate power and revenue, whether that’s due to technical failures, the inability to recruit enough talent, or regulatory hurdles.

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On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump declared that the United States was experiencing a “national energy emergency.” The “harmful and shortsighted policies of the previous administration,” he wrote in an executive order, had left the nation’s energy resources “far too inadequate,” a situation that “causes and makes worse the high energy prices that devastate Americans.” Since then, Trump has attempted to use the emergency declaration to speed up

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This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

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In the day-to-day of the Iran war, it’s natural to feel a touch of whiplash. Are we on the verge of agreement or at the dawn of escalation? Is Iran on the edge of collapse, or is it expanding the conflict? Will the Strait of Hormuz return to the status quo ante, or will tolling and periodic attacks on shipping be the new normal? These are important issues but there are larger, more fundamental strategic shifts underway as well. Not since 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq has the Middle East been in this degree of strategic flux.

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In October 2025, Beijing imposed sweeping controls on its rare earth exports. Since then, those controls have been suspended one short reprieve at a time, in the latest instance until Nov.

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Since September 2025, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to demand their unredacted voter rolls.

The rolls contain confidential information on millions of Americans and have historically been managed by states. Now these lists are a major focus of President Donald Trump’s push to take federal control over elections and prosecute alleged noncitizen voters.

To date, there have been final rulings in 26 of the DOJ lawsuits.

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More than three years after its COVID-19 disaster period ended, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is still closing the books on pandemic spending, including millions of dollars for the Los Angeles Opera Company that pays its top executive $1 million a year.

FEMA’s latest statement was provided in response to an investigation by The Center Square exposing $27 million worth of government grants and $33 million in executive compensation at the opera. 

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