A demand for action came after Meta apologized for temporarily suspending the No Kings Instagram account and disabling access for four hours at the peak of an early voting push from the group. In a post on X, Meta’s Andy Stone said the account had been using a Claude AI tool in a way that made it appear to be a bot. But even though automated review detected the error within an hour, Stone acknowledged that additional hurdles kept admins locked out. State and federal lawmakers—as well as a coalition of 14 attorneys general—have asked Meta to further explain its actions.

In a letter to No Kings, Meta offered to arrange a meeting with a technical expert who could better explain the mistake. But No Kings rejected the response, saying it failed to address any of the group’s ongoing concerns and requesting a meeting with Meta senior leadership instead. The group stressed that the issue goes beyond its Instagram account, saying that Americans who rely on Meta’s platforms need assurance that voting content won’t be suppressed ahead of or on election day. Among eight questions, the coalition asked Meta to publicly disclose any communications with the Trump administration about the No Kings account or the historic early voting day event.

Maybe think about that first next time, buckaroo

Key context, emphasis mine

Speaking as US voters headed to the polls for midterm elections that will decide who controls Congress, Trump did not provide details and it was not immediately clear which funding he meant. He also did not explain how the funding would be stopped at the end of the year, given that the Memorandum of Understanding that provides $3.8 billion in US military aid to Israel each year does not expire until September 2028.

Trump told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program that Israel no longer needed the funding and that some Democrats and left-wing politicians were using the US financial support to Israel as a talking point ⁠to criticize his fellow Republicans.

"Now, as far as paying Israel, Bibi Netanyahu and I have made a deal that we give Israel $4 billion a year, and we made a deal months ago that we're stopping," Trump said. "We've already agreed that by the end of this year we won't be paying Israel. Now we'll help Israel if they need it," he said.

It was unclear why Trump chose to announce on Tuesday a deal he said he made months ago.

Immigrants who have been granted release from detention after winning habeas corpus petitions in court are being re-arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The Guardian has identified at least 20 cases nationwide relating to people who were detained after being released on habeas corpus petition in the last year, according to court records, attorneys and media reports.

Increasing arrests and detentions have led to immigrants filing more than 91,000 habeas petitions as they seek to challenge their detentions, according to research by ProPublica. More petitions have been filed since 25 January than during the past three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term, combined, the outlet found.

Cryptocurrency, online betting, and Big Tech interests have contributed $391 million, while just Trump’s MAGA Inc super PAC alone has received 19% of reported corporate giving

Corporate political spending in the 2026 midterm elections has reached approximately $737 million, a 60 percent increase from what was spent on the 2024 presidential election, according to newly filed federal campaign finance data analyzed by Public Citizen. Spending this cycle accounts for 40 percent of the $1.8 billion corporations have spent on federal elections since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

Cryptocurrency, online betting, and Big Tech interests — including companies involved in AI and data centers — have collectively contributed $391 million toward the 2026 elections. This accounts for more than half of corporate political spending reported this cycle.

Corporate political spending has grown substantially since Citizens United. Corporations contributed $12.8 million during the 2010 election cycle, $84.9 million in 2012, and $117.9 million in 2016. The current cycle’s $737.3 million total underscores the scale of corporate spending in federal elections.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/69357909

A group of anti-transgender protestors showed up at a women’s soccer game between the Seattle Reign and the Orlando Pride at Seattle’s Lumen Field on Sunday following several local news reports that Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank had been encouraging a demonstration.

But many attendees at the game only saw a “fortress” of trans Pride flags surrounding the protesters that largely blocked them from view, as one fan described it on social media. Some of the flags bore the slogan “Trans Rights Are Human Rights.” Per social media posts, the protesters wore apparel from the XX-XY brand, a women’s athletic gear brand that often contains lightly coded anti-trans messaging such as “Refuse to Pretend,” and that advertises its mission as restricting participation in women’s sports only to those with XX chromosomes.

Prior to the Sunday match, the Tacoma-based News Tribune reported that the sheriff for Pierce County, which contains Tacoma and the surrounding area, had allegedly been organizing an anti-trans demonstration through email.

Emails obtained by Defend Washington, a political action group opposed to a current Washington State ballot initiative seeking to ban trans girls from playing in girls’ school sports, showed that Swank allegedly planned to disrupt the match with anti-trans messaging. According to the leaked emails, he was looking for a group of people — up to about 90 — to purchase tickets in the same section of the field where Reign fans often wave Pride flags and other regalia.

An October 26 email from Swank, with the subject line “stand up for women and girls,” asked people to “Go into the stadium with your shirt covered, and at half time, put it on full display.”

Swank did not respond to a request from The News Tribune for its October 30 story about the planned demonstration. However, after the reporter attempted to contact Swank, he reportedlysent another email to the group of demonstrators claiming there was an "infiltrator" in the group who had leaked the protest to the media.

While the alleged emails between Swank and protesters were obtained by Defend Washington, Swank also posted about his plans on his official social media page. On October 24, Swank posted that he was looking for “a few (actually a lot) good men and women to join me. We will go to a sporting event where these radical leftists are (soccer or wnba), and we will wear xx-xyathletics.com.” He continued, “We will stand up for free speech. It will be a lot of fun. If you want to join just email me at: boysareboysandgirlsaregirls@gmail.com.”

Google announced Tuesday that early next year it would turn off artificial intelligence tools in its popular software for K-12 students, unless school administrators explicitly choose to make such tools available. Executives at the tech giant said they wanted to be responsive to educators and parents who have asked for more control in how children interact with A.I. But there is a catch: Schools that choose to restrict A.I. entirely will also lose access to Google search.

A.I. features are now a standard part of Google’s commercially available search engine. “Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.” Google is by far the dominant technology player in K-12 classrooms. Google’s suite of education apps — including Gmail, Docs and an assignment platform called Classroom — is ubiquitous. Google Chromebooks, low-cost laptops, are the most widely issued student devices in U.S. schools. And Google is synonymous with internet search, a crucial tool for students across the globe.

The company’s new strategy underscores Google’s powerful role in American education. If school leaders want continued student access to search within the company’s ecosystem, they will be forced to embrace Google’s A.I. In recent months, Google has been promoting its Gemini chatbot as a valuable educational tool, saying it can aid teachers in planning lessons and serve as a personalized tutor for students. A new student version of Gemini, Guided Learning, is supposed to make it harder for students to use A.I. to cheat.

“We’re evolving our approach,” said Mr. Phillips. He promised tools that would “support the productive struggle” of learning and tamp down on students turning to A.I. for easy answers. In August, Google turned on A.I. features as the default option inside its Classroom app for K-12 schools that had allowed students separate access to the company’s Gemini chatbot. The move upset some school leaders, who felt schools should be able to decide how and when students used Google’s A.I.

Google’s August change will now be reversed.

A parent movement has been pushing back against the use of A.I. in schools, and against screen time more generally. While A.I. chatbots can be useful tools for research and coding, they can also easily be used to cheat on school assignments and can provide false information. Research shows chatbots can also hinder critical thinking and ensnare adolescents in emotional dependency.

Last week, New York State passed a chatbot safety law that would prohibit companies from providing a variety of A.I. features for minors. And in September, the nation’s two largest school districts, in New York City and Los Angeles — both Google clients — broadly restricted student access to generative artificial intelligence on school devices. Officials in the Los Angeles Unified School District said at the time that they were hoping students would be able to conduct Google searches with A.I. overviews turned off. The overviews are A.I.-generated summaries that appear at the top of searches. They can dissuade students from seeking out multiple sources of information. On Monday, Google executives said that for districts that choose to allow A.I., there will be two options for search inside school-issued accounts, beginning in early 2027. One option will be search with A.I. overviews and A.I. chats turned on, similar to the current consumer experience. The other will be search using Guided Learning, the student version of Google’s Gemini chatbot.

Guided Learning is intended to guide students through a topic step-by-step without providing them with answers that could short-circuit learning. It is supposed to offer an experience modeled on one-to-one tutoring.

The consumer version of Guided Learning is already available within Gemini, and can enable cheating. In a reporter’s test, it produced a detailed essay in response to an Advanced Placement history prompt.

There are greater restrictions in the school version that is currently being piloted, according to Brit Mennuti, product lead for Google Classroom. She said teachers would be able to review students’ chatbot transcripts, among other capabilities.

New YorkAP — A onetime West Point cadet drugged his then-girlfriend in her barracks room, administered abortion pills to her against her will and caused a miscarriage. Then he went on to study at two Ivy League universities, starting at one of them after he pleaded guilty to assault, according to court records and a new lawsuit.
The man, Caleb Suh, graduated from Cornell University this year and was a public health graduate student at Columbia University as of October 28, when the woman sued in a New York court. His current status at Columbia is unclear.

The suit drew attention to a case that had played out quietly at West Point and in federal court, where Suh pleaded guilty this past June to the March 2022 assault on a cadet in the class below him. She was 19 and in her second year at the US Military Academy, according to prosecutors.

She wanted to have the baby. Suh didn’t. Instead, he told the judge, he impersonated the woman to open an online pharmacy account, ordered abortion medications, got Xanax from a friend to use as a sedative, and duped his girlfriend into drinking what she thought was just a prenatal protein shake. After waiting until she fell asleep, he administered the abortion pills orally and vaginally.

Progressive author Naomi Klein and comedian Ilana Glazer on Monday warned that America's billionaire class is taking "unprecedented risks with our future," and said US policymakers must block further Big Tech initial public offerings and mergers to prevent even more damage from occurring.

In an op-ed published by The Guardian, Klein and Glazer outlined how US billionaires have used tax loopholes, corporate mergers, and IPOs to enrich themselves at an unprecedented scale, as their wealth has grown by an estimated 40% over just the last two years.

Klein and Glazer argued that the upcoming IPOs of artificial intelligence giants OpenAI and Anthropic could be particularly risky to the economy given questions about their ability to be consistently profitable.

"It’s no secret that the AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI are intending to go public in the near future," they wrote. "Both of these players also had major security flaws exposed recently, and openly acknowledge mind-bogglingly huge amounts of debt."

The risk will only grow, they added, if Nasdaq grants OpenAI and Anthropic the same exception it granted to Elon Musk's SpaceX earlier this year by allowing their shares to be immediately included in index funds without having to wait through the one-year "seasoning" period.

"June’s highly contentious SpaceX IPO already carries great risk for regular investors," they explained. "If more speculative tech companies with staggering risk profiles are allowed to follow suit, the results will become too much for the market to bear."

Klein and Glazer said that policymakers need to intervene to put a halt to new Big Tech IPOs, and also pass a wealth tax to take away billionaires' power to spend cavalierly even as they leave working people potentially holding the bag for their failed investments.

"We cannot let the billionaire class take these kinds of risks with our future," they emphasized. "To stop these reckless IPOs we must stand together, take collective action, and push for real change."

Economist Jeffrey D. Sachs last month similarly called for AI IPOs to be halted until Congress "has enacted a public system of licensing, independent safety evaluation, liability, and financial backstops for frontier AI."

Sachs noted that Anthropic executives and employees, including CEO Dario Amodei, have warned that AI could pose a threat to all human life, and he questioned why the creators of such technology should become unfathomably wealthy before such risks are understood and eliminated.

"A company should not disclose a risk of catastrophe to humanity and then sell its shares to the public before any public authority has the power to evaluate that risk or to stop deployment," argued Sachs. "In fact, to proceed rapidly in the face of such dire warnings is beyond folly."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

60 Minutes // El Sayed Interview

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Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, has long been a vocal ally to transgender people. In the 2026 midterms, he has not wavered in that support, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in attack ads, much of which has been focused on transgender people, that have poured into this year’s elections from the Republican Party and, even at times, from the Democratic Party as well. Rather than capitulate to those ads, as some Democrats have done, El-Sayed has defended transgender people outright, on sports, on education and on health care. That was certainly true in his 60 Minutes interview released Sunday, in which Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist Bari Weiss brought to the program this summer, pressed him multiple times on his support for transgender people.

Douthat, the interviewer, started with a question as to whether El-Sayed’s faith puts him in conflict with “a very socially liberal and culturally liberal party,” listing “abortion, same-sex marriage, transgenderism [sic]” as issues on which “a lot of Muslims, like a lot of Christians,” hold conservative positions. Notably, “transgenderism” is a far-right term used to frame transgender people as an ideology rather than a class of people. In doing so, those who use it seek to paint transgender people’s existence as a matter of faith or belief rather than a fundamental characteristic of a person. In its most extreme form, the claim is that gender itself does not exist.

El-Sayed then rejected the premise that his faith puts him in conflict with the values of a secular liberal society, pointing instead to the importance of standing for all people’s rights: “I believe in rights. And even though somebody might use rights that you don’t understand, you never mean to use yourself, you still got to show up and fight for those rights. And that’s the thing about this moment. I think it is a responsibility for us to stand up against the risk of government making incursions on any of our rights, to build the kind of continuum, the kind of coalition where any of us and all of us who have our rights at risk are standing up and fighting for all of our rights. And I think this is an important responsibility. So in conversations with folks in the Muslim community, conversations with folks in the LGBTQ community, the point I always make is to say, listen, I don’t care whether or not you will ever use a right that you were fighting for, understand that a failure to show up and fight for that right is a failure to show up and fight for your own.”

Douthat attempted to pin El-Sayed down on transgender people, asking: “What about the rights of parents to control over their children’s education? Because a lot of places where there’s tension between Islam and Muslim voters and what I’m calling cultural liberalism are around issues like what is taught in school, what happens with transgender kids on sports teams, and so on, right? Like these are places where rights are in conflict, right? What do you think happens there?”

El-Sayed forcefully rejected it, pointing out that it is unrealistic to expect that kids will not learn about transgender people in the age of the internet: “The notion somehow that you are going to prevent your child from being exposed to something that you may find disagreeable, and that that is going to be because of school, is so profoundly outdated, because of course you have all the information and they have all the information. So here’s the thing about it. I think it’s really important for us to recognize that the free flow of information is actually a beautiful thing. It’s really important, and the most important thing you can do is not try to protect a person from seeing a thing. It’s about trying to make sure that as you coach your kid through the world, that you are engaging with them and saying, here’s what I believe, here’s what you may see in the world, you get to make your choices about who you’re going to be in the world.”

He then pivoted, as many other Democrats have, to the argument that Republicans are trying to make the issue into a cultural flash point to distract voters from the cost of gas, groceries and medical care.

Watch the entire exchange here (Start at 41:16):

This is far from the only time that El-Sayed has stood up for transgender people. In August, Fox News’ Jesse Watters asked El-Sayed whether he supported “sex changes for minors,” and he responded that “the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of health care you should have, and if you’re a minor, that’s between you and your doctor and your parents.” Then, a few weeks later, a Michigan State student asked his position on gender-affirming care, and he replied, “I don’t think the government gets to have a say about what health care is provided in what circumstances and why.” Despite running in a state like Michigan, which voted for Trump in 2024, El-Sayed has refused to sacrifice transgender people in his attempt to win a Senate seat for Democrats, and it appears to be working: El-Sayed is surging ahead in the polls, with the New York Times/Siena poll released Sunday finding him ahead of Republican Mike Rogers, 53 percent to 42 percent.

El-Sayed’s answer has set off a firestorm on the right. Katie Pavlich of NewsNation posted on Twitter that El-Sayed wants your child to see photos of male genitalia. Nancy Mace, whose claim to fame is her push to ban the first transgender member of Congress from the Capitol’s bathrooms, simply posted “OH MY GOD!” Riley Gaines went on Fox News to denounce El-Sayed, and Rogers himself posted the clip. None of it has led El-Sayed to retract his answers or soften his support for transgender people.

El-Sayed’s race will be one of the most important to watch on election night. If he can win a highly contested seat despite the anti-transgender Republican money spent against him and the attacks from the right-leaning wing of his own party, it will be a clear case that embracing anti-trans views is not required to win swing states and swing districts across the United States. His approach stands in sharp contrast to that of Josh Turek in Iowa, who has called for a federal funding ban on gender-affirming care, or Marcy Kaptur in Ohio, who said in an ad that she “voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools.” EITM will be tracking every race with transgender implications on election night, and you can follow our election guide here.

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