By Erica Orden
10/22/2026
A shareholder of a crypto company on Thursday sued President Donald Trump and the crypto venture co-founded by his family in federal court, alleging Trump violated the Constitution by profiting off his office through a pair of deals linked to the United Arab Emirates.
Hebron lockdown, threatened mass evacuations and home demolitions raise fears of another cycle of collective punishment just days before Israel’s election.
Two Israeli soldiers were killed and three others lightly wounded Friday when two Palestinian gunmen opened fire at an Israeli military checkpoint near Hebron in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli military said both attackers were shot dead. The attack was serious, and the loss of life is real. Still, it does not match the scale of what occurred in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, during 2025 and 26, when the UN humanitarian office recorded 286 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces or settlers, as well as repeated settler attacks, displacement, and restrictions on Palestinian communities. The question now is what follows—and whether an attack by two gunmen will become the justification for a much broader campaign against Palestinian communities.
Measurements from NASA’s GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) and GRACE-FO (GRACE Follow-On) missions reveal trends in terrestrial water storage from April 2002 to November 2025. Areas outlined in black indicate where trends showed strong associations with human activities. Trends are depicted in terms of average annual change in equivalent water depth.
Illustration by Claudine Hellmuth/POLITICO (iStock)Marcia Brown is a food and agriculture reporter for POLITICO.Steve Volk has written for Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer and more.
When you see the cost of an everyday item — the kind you’re going to buy regardless of price — more than double in a year, do you get suspicious?
A political advertisement can mislead voters without having to fabricate every word it contains. It can use a real person, a genuine statement, and an authentic family conflict to construct an impression that the evidence does not justify.
That is the ethical question at the heart of Vivek Ramaswamy's advertisement against Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. The ad features Acton's estranged mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter a liar. But a mother's accusation is not proof of a daughter's dishonesty, and the circumstances of a decades-long estrangement have an immediate impact when voters are asked to judge the credibility of either person.
By Mars Strangelove Jr.
October 22, 2026
U.S. President Donald Trump called Elon Musk and asked him to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Starlink, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing U.S. officials. The satellite communications system, operated by Musk’s SpaceX, is used by Ukrainian forces for battlefield communications and drone operations against Russian forces.
Everybody knows that Donald Trump has a problem with The Atlantic, the magazine whose reporting has repeatedly put his presidency under scrutiny. He can hardly bear to hear the name mentioned around him. It is enough to turn the president into a man of constant sorrows. Well, the 80-year-old-plus president apparently thought he had found a place big enough to drown those sorrows: the Atlantic Ocean itself. There was just one little problem. According to Trump's own account, Google's boss wasn't buying it, sending the president back to the drawing board.
The Pentagon is looking to build a more robust deep-cover spying program to conduct economic warfare against China and other U.S. competitors, according to half a dozen people familiar with the initiative.
By Natalie HausmannOctober 20, 2026
Thousands of North Carolina midterm ballots are set to be rejected over minor technical issues after a federal court upheld strict new Republican-backed rules for mail voters, according to data shared exclusively with Democracy Docket.
Some Democratic strongholds are seeing rejection rates as high as 7-8%, the data show.
Three out of four Americans point the finger at Donald Trump for a problem that hits their wallets directly. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted September 30 through October 5 found that 78% of Americans blame Trump's policies for rising prices that are outpacing their earnings. Even among Republicans, 57% said their costs were growing faster than their paychecks. The president who promised to bring prices down has reached the final stretch before the November 3 midterms, facing a revolt over the cost of living—and the discontent extends well beyond his political opponents.
Dense fog and haze hindered visibility in the Ohio city of about 265,000 people, and local news stations reported a plastic-like odor
By Rebecca Cohen
A chemical tank explosion at a north Toledo company released a chemical into the air overnight and prompted an evacuation of nearby residents, Ohio officials said Wednesday.
October 20, 2026Yiannis Damellos and Mars Strangelove Jr. on Duty
The Kremlin welcomes American economic concessions, Trump demands Ukrainian compromise, and Europe is still fighting for a place at the table. Who exactly is this peace deal designed to protect?
A government that encourages citizens to report fraud must also be prepared to have its own conduct investigated. Otherwise, the pursuit of accountability risks becoming an exercise in political loyalty.
Donald Trump wants Americans to snitch on each other and report all fraudulent activity against the federal government, especially voter fraud, promising financial rewards to those who expose it. Fighting fraud is a legitimate public responsibility. But the president added an extraordinary personal condition to his announcement: “I will be the arbitrator of all of these decisions.” He, the omnipotent One, says he will determine who deserves payment and what constitutes fraud, even as the government's published program describes different eligibility requirements and a limit of up to $30,000. When public rewards depend on rules that appear to differ from the president's own promises, transparency becomes essential.
Now brought to light by physics historian Flavio Del Santo of the University of Geneva, the three-page document is the very soul of brevity – but on it is scrawled a long-lost contribution to one of the most contentious debates in quantum mechanics.
And it offers a surprising insight into what Erwin Schrödinger himself believed about the nature of reality.
The historic streets of Lille, France, transformed into a powerful arena of civic expression on October 20, 2026, as thousands of demonstrators marched under the watchful eye of a heavy police presence. This mobilization forms part of a broader, cross-generational wave of nationwide protests uniting students, major trade unions, and grassroots activists. While recent media coverage has heavily spotlighted the friction in major urban centres, the core of the gathering in Lille remained firmly anchored in a deeply felt economic struggle shared by everyday citizens.
Elon Musk personally ordered a slowdown of his military-grade version of Starlink that is used by Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was blindsided by the sudden slowdown in the country's connection to the satellite-based network, which rendered some drones virtually useless. President Donald Trump previously said neither he nor Musk were involved in the decision.
.jpg)
Los Angeles, California. October 2026. Fourteen days before the midterm elections.
FADE IN.
