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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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State Officials Offered to Store Nuclear Waste. Then Residents Found Out.  (Evan Halper, Washington Post)
West Virginia officials didn’t consult anyone on their proposal to host a “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus” for the Trump administration.

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Fire at Starlink Center in Lithuania Was Sabotage, Officials Say  (Lara Jakes, New York Times)
The fire, which did not seriously damage the network, came after similar incidents in Bulgaria and Poland involving the satellite internet provider, a key defense tool for Ukraine’s armed forces.

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The United States has spent decades searching for somewhere to put the most enduring by-product of its nuclear industry: nuclear waste. It has built reactors, developed sophisticated systems for handling their spent fuel, and established an underground repository for certain wastes from nuclear weapons production. Commercial spent fuel, however, remains at operating and shuttered reactor sites across the country. A network of temporary storage installations has become the foundation of a disposal policy whose promised destination has never opened.

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The British government’s search for a way to stop migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats has become a test of its ability to control the country’s borders.

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What if one answer to the supply crisis isn’t buried in a mine shaft, but growing quietly in a field?

For too long, the United States has relied on foreign sources for most of the raw materials powering its technological future, the essential minerals in every smartphone, battery pack and semiconductor.

What if one answer to the supply crisis isn’t buried in a mine shaft, but growing quietly in a field?

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For the first time, researchers from the Idaho National Laboratory tested a full-scale 230-kilovolt three-phase power transformer, a keystone of the U.S. grid, under simulated earthquake conditions.

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University of British Columbia researchers have uncovered a vulnerability that could allow hackers to target and disrupt critical infrastructure such as water treatment plants and energy grids without needing to break into a facility’s own systems or crack its encryption.

The technique targets facilities that communicate with cloud-based monitoring and control systems over encrypted connections. An attacker would first need to compromise a router carrying traffic between the facility and the cloud.

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Russia Appears to Step Up Efforts to Influence U.S. Voters  (Julian E. Barnes, Dustin Volz, and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times)
One campaign has created social media posts focusing on U.S. support for Israel to sow discord ahead of the midterm elections.

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Hardly His Finest Hour  (Economist)
Donald Trump’s scheme to secure Russian diesel is scandalous

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This is the first part of a two-part article. You may read Part 1 of the article here.

Monitor Trajectories, Not Merely Answers
Traditional content moderation is concerned with a discrete output: did the model provide harmful instructions? Agent safety requires attention to sequences.

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Trump’s Attacks on Voting Raise Fears He Will Try to Challenge Midterm Results  (Zolan Kanno-Youngs, New York Times)
Election officials say they worry the administration could use its own unsubstantiated claims to contest the vote in November.

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Why Does Saudi Arabia Struggle to Stop Houthi Attacks?  (Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times)
The Saudi military has expensive equipment, but the missiles and drones used by the Yemeni militia are difficult to detect and stop.

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