How a Kansas megachurch pastor might win Democrats a Senate majority

How a Kansas megachurch pastor might win Democrats a Senate majority

Emma Green writes: One recent Sunday, Adam Hamilton, the Kansas pastor who has been running an unexpectedly competitive Democratic bid for U.S. senator, was scheduled to visit four churches around Kansas City. As he settled into a pew at Oak Ridge Baptist Church, he was fretting. “I want to stay for the entire worship service,” he said. People milled around the sanctuary, greeting one another warmly. Nearly everyone there was Black; all the churches in the day’s lineup were Missionary…

Read More Read More

Irreparable harm? A defense contractor gave their personal AI agent access to a secure Pentagon system

Irreparable harm? A defense contractor gave their personal AI agent access to a secure Pentagon system

Wired reports: Earlier this year, sources tell WIRED, a contractor caused a security incident at the Department of Defense by connecting a secure centralized system used by multiple intelligence agencies to their personal account for Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding agent. It appears that the agent used by the contractor, who is employed by the global consulting firm Accenture, then sent information about the DOD system, including login credentials, to a high-risk, third-party website. The centralized system contains controlled unclassified…

Read More Read More

Massive leak exposes 41,000 DHS workers — including undercover ICE agents

Massive leak exposes 41,000 DHS workers — including undercover ICE agents

Wired reports: An unprecedented leak of Department of Homeland Security records has exposed details of more than 41,000 employees or contractors who work for the department and its constituent agencies. The records include email addresses, phone numbers, and office addresses, but also references to internal systems and sensitive information on undercover and surveillance programs. In all, the leak provides a map of how DHS is organized and how it operates. The records, which span DHS itself as well as seven…

Read More Read More

Can American democracy survive the next financial crash?

Can American democracy survive the next financial crash?

Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Federal Reserve governor and former deputy secretary of the Treasury, writes: The bailout clock is ticking. In September, Oracle invoked “force majeure” to delay paying debt on a data center, which led to a drop in the corporation’s stock price. This month, OpenAI significantly cut its revenue projections; CoreWeave, a heavily leveraged data-center company, saw its share price plunge; and investors began racing to buy credit-default swaps to protect their portfolios. These are all signs…

Read More Read More

White House arranged a private jet for Bolsonaro to flee Brazil for the U.S.

White House arranged a private jet for Bolsonaro to flee Brazil for the U.S.

The New York Times reports: Flávio Bolsonaro, the Brazilian presidential candidate who faces multiple criminal investigations, is staying in Florida on a temporary status that was given following orders by President Trump, and will likely be granted permanent residency later, U.S. officials said. Mr. Bolsonaro fled Brazil after losing an election this week. U.S. border agents allowed him and his family to enter the United States on what is called parole, usually given for humanitarian reasons, after they landed in…

Read More Read More

Israel has voted, but what comes next? Dissecting a messy ballot and coalition‑building process

Israel has voted, but what comes next? Dissecting a messy ballot and coalition‑building process

Gadi Eisenkot or Benjamin Netanyahu – under whose direction will Israel head? Erik Marmor/picture alliance via Getty Images By Dov Waxman, University of California, Los Angeles The Israeli election of Oct. 27, 2026, was among the most highly anticipated votes in the country’s history. It was consequential, if not yet conclusive. With nearly all the votes counted, it is still unclear who will lead the country following the first national ballot since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack, and the…

Read More Read More

100,000 simulations of comets striking Earth suggest the ingredients of life were not extraterrestrial

100,000 simulations of comets striking Earth suggest the ingredients of life were not extraterrestrial

Science Alert reports: Where did we come from? The answer, many scientists have proposed, is space. One longstanding theory, hypothesized for over a century, is that life on Earth emerged from fragments of prebiotic chemistry that arrived from the cosmic unknowns, possibly delivered by far-flung comets. The idea is supported by a growing body of evidence, with scientists detecting signs of organic molecules in comets soaring through space, which hypothetically could seed the ingredients of life on worlds they come…

Read More Read More

Trump claims Iran war will end ‘when I want it to’ as costs reportedly balloon to $47 billion

Trump claims Iran war will end ‘when I want it to’ as costs reportedly balloon to $47 billion

CNBC reports: U.S. President Donald Trump has reiterated his claim that the Iran war will end “whenever I want it to,” but insists that Tehran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Speaking at a rally in Lubbock, Texas, Trump said “Somebody asked me before, ‘When will the war in Iran end?’ I said, ‘Whenever I want it to end.’” Trump said it “would be very quick, but we have to have an end properly,” with a “total statement” that Iran would…

Read More Read More

ICE is running one of the largest anti-left surveillance operations in U.S. history

ICE is running one of the largest anti-left surveillance operations in U.S. history

Wired reports: Attorneys for 15 Minnesota residents facing federal conspiracy charges have obtained evidence of a sweeping, possibly unconstitutional spying operation carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement against left-wing social movements in Minnesota and beyond. The high-profile Minnesota 15 prosecution makes clear that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), flush with federal funds and newly hired personnel, is now President Donald Trump’s primary tool against dissent, with a powerful array of post-9/11 investigative authorities brought to bear against everyday…

Read More Read More

Brazilian judge orders investigation into JD Vance donor network

Brazilian judge orders investigation into JD Vance donor network

The Washington Post reports: A Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Tuesday ordered a police investigation into alleged ties between a donor network co-founded by Vice President JD Vance and the presidential campaign of Flávio Bolsonaro in the run-up to Sunday’s election. Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino directed the Brazilian federal police to investigate the “nature” of the contacts between the Rockbridge Network, which was founded in 2019, and any Brazilian companies or political operatives to aid or finance Bolsonaro’s run….

Read More Read More

There’s not enough money in the world to pay for the AI boom

There’s not enough money in the world to pay for the AI boom

The Washington Post reports: The biggest bet in the history of the United States keeps getting bigger and we’re all hanging on for the ride. Technology companies recently launched a record scramble for cash to pay for data centers, computer chips and technology and equipment to power artificial intelligence. This boom is so expensive that even Silicon Valley giants are bleeding cash and companies are now racing one another to collect or borrow other people’s money for the estimated $10…

Read More Read More

We are seeing the rise of psychopatriarchy everywhere

We are seeing the rise of psychopatriarchy everywhere

V (formerly Eve Ensler) writes: For those of us who have spent our lives trying to dismantle this endlessly destructive paradigm of patriarchy, it has become increasingly clear in recent months that something more terrifying is afoot. The wheels are off the cart. We are in the midst of a chaotic, demented acceleration of the most violent and cruel aspects of this system which has evolved into what I am calling Psychopatriarchy. Psychopatriarchy is a reaction, a backlash against the…

Read More Read More

‘Israel is always going to be at war’

‘Israel is always going to be at war’

Tamara Davison writes: In Tel Aviv, one of Israel’s more liberal hubs, Ben Friedhaim sits with his young daughter in HaKnesset Square as waves gently lap onto the nearby beach just days before the election. Even during Shabbat, the boardwalk here is full of families basking in the sunshine, electric scooters whizzing past, and bars blasting American hits. Ice cream melts down his daughter’s hand as he tells me about his family’s recent return to the country. He came to…

Read More Read More

A neglected particle from the dawn of time might explain why everything in the universe exists

A neglected particle from the dawn of time might explain why everything in the universe exists

Live Science reports: A neglected “ghost particle” may have dominated the universe right after the Big Bang ‪—‬ changing how the cosmos expanded in its first moments and reshaping the conditions under which matter won out over antimatter, a new study suggests. In other words, it may explain why anything exists at all. The particle, a hypothetical “right-handed” neutrino, briefly could have held more energy than everything else in the infant universe combined, which would have sped up cosmic expansion…

Read More Read More