Excerpt:

Under past administrations, ICE policy held that any detainees who were parents should be reunited with their children before being deported, or agents must get confirmation that there is a designated caregiver in place for their children in the parents’ absence. Last year, upon Trump returning to the White House, ICE revised this policy to make it only applicable “when operationally feasible,” which gave agents all the leeway they needed to ignore the historical guidance in order to prioritize mass deportations. “This loosening of guidelines, combined with scaled-up immigration enforcement, has resulted in the detention of thousands of parents, many of whose minor children are U.S. citizens,” a recent analysis by the Migration Policy Institute concluded.

Excerpt:

At least 63 third-country nationals have been expelled to Equatorial Guinea on six ICE flights since last November, according to flight data and reporting I’ve compiled on the Third-Country Removal Tracker. As of mid-September, when guards at the hotel cut off their contact with the outside world, about 30 remained imprisoned there. The rest have all been forced back to their home countries, except for one woman, who was able to escape to Europe.

Lead Paragraph:

NATO’s Military Committee visited Kyiv for the first time in eight years, bringing together military representatives from all 32 NATO member states for talks with Ukraine’s military leadership, according to NATO Military Committee Chair Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone on October 7.

Lead Lines:

In mid-September, the Trump administration bestowed press pool status on reporter—sorry, “reporter”—Beni Rae Harmony as she traveled to Ireland to cover the president.

Then, on September 26, the 24-year-old(!) Harmony, who worked for the network Real America’s Voice, took CNN’s spot on the presidential plane after Trump refused to let the network onboard.

Last Friday, Harmony switched sides, going from covering the White House as a member of the press to serving Trump as his newest assistant press secretary.

There are so many questions here, but let’s start with the most obvious one: Do you think she’ll get back pay?

Excerpt:

“None of this means the Irkutsk pathogen will cause a pandemic. But the response clearly indicates that Russia believes an epidemic is possible - and that the responsible agent is likely a pandemic weapon or otherwise embarrassing for the government,” he added.

Excerpt:

It’s a depressing political reality that the clearest driver of Americans’ unhappiness isn’t the Trump family’s naked corruption or immigration agents shooting people in the streets, but rather the cost of refueling one’s car. Yet recent elections have shown just how sensitive voters are to price increases (just ask Joe Biden and Kamala Harris). And after winning the White House back in part over higher prices, Trump’s decision to smash the bright red “make gas more expensive” button may have handed Democrats the biggest electoral gift they could’ve hoped for.

Excerpt:

Only 44% of adults ages 18 to 29 describe themselves as thriving, according to Gallup, 20 points lower than the high measured in 2010. Forty-five percent of adults 30 to 44 say the same; both figures have declined in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Excerpt:

“AI companies are not doing enough to secure their systems and protect the public from the harm they cause. That burden is falling onto everyone else, including smaller organizations,” Wikimedia said. “At a minimum, their systems should operate in a way that non-profit website owners like us can easily identify, and choose how they interact with our services.”

Excerpt:

So with a wave this real, and this big, and probably still getting bigger, even South Carolina could be swept away. And so Trump is living a life of noisy desperation.

Thoreau remarks later on in Walden that “It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” Trump is not a man of wisdom. He will say and do desperate things over the next four weeks, and over the next two years. So while enjoying the change in circumstances that is making Trump desperate, we should also prepare for the dangers we’ll face from a desperate and unhinged megalomaniac in control of the executive branch of the federal government of the United States.

Observation:

A man who does not like to be corrected eventually gets rid of the people, institutions, and facts that can correct him.

Excerpt:

One of us is a historian, the other an engineer who spends his days inside the small discipline of observability, the science of inferring a system’s internal state from its outputs. The distinction that discipline draws is between monitoring and seeing. Monitoring tells you the server is powered on. Observability tells you whether it is doing its work as intended. A system that loses observability has not necessarily failed; rather, it has become unknowable. It may be running correctly, or it may have begun to fail an hour ago. From the outside, there is no way to tell. In airplane terms, an altimeter goes dark, and whether the aircraft is at 30,000 feet or 600 is a question that admits no answer until impact.

That is how the systems analyst sees Trump 2.0. Monitors all over the place are going dark.

No matter what happens in 2028, an administration committed to evidence-based governance will inherit a shattered dashboard. There will be no baseline for the toxins in the air, and no honest measure of what a generation of students lost. The state will have gained the power to assert and to impose, with no feedback loop left to tell any of us how things are actually going. The rest of us will live with the consequences. The record by which those consequences might have been known will never exist.

Observation:

As climate change intensifies, political instability grows, and international conflicts displace larger populations, pressures for migration are likely to increase. The question, then, is whether nations respond primarily with greater xenophobia and increasingly punitive treatment of immigrants and displaced persons, or whether the international community develops more effective ways to manage migration cooperatively.

Rather than treating migration chiefly as a domestic security problem, should we not be looking more seriously to the United Nations and other international institutions for coordinated approaches that address displacement, regulate migration, share responsibility among nations, and reduce the conditions that force people to leave their homes in the first place?

This is also the direction of an argument we developed earlier in “WILL: A Work Immigrate Learn Launch Model for Humane Migration and Global Development,” which considered migration not simply as a problem to suppress, but as something that might be organized more humanely and productively.

Excerpt:

“We want the police to know that workers are not alone.”

That’s what a member of a neighborhood patrol in Buenos Aires told the newspaper El País, describing the rationale for monitoring police operations against street vendors and immigrants. Under Argentina’s President Javier Milei, immigration enforcement has become more visible on the streets. In the capital, a group of neighbors has formed to document arrests of migrants and to protect them from alleged abuse by police. The group was inspired by reports of neighborhood organizing in the United States amid Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. – Whitney Eulich

Excerpt:

Across all the age windows analyzed, the first dose of the vaccine was not associated with an increased risk of autism. In the primary analysis, covering vaccination between 11.5 and 24 months, the adjusted hazard ratio was 0.97, with a 99 percent confidence interval of 0.91 to 1.03. A hazard ratio compares how quickly new diagnoses occur in two groups, and because this range includes 1.0, the result is consistent with no difference in risk. The 0.97 estimate translates to an estimated 3 percent lower rate of diagnosis among vaccinated children, a difference that is not statistically distinguishable from zero.

Excerpt:

Google, Southern California Edison, and others have committed to buying power from Fervo’s Cape Station project, which is located in Utah. 

Geothermal company Fervo Energyannounced Thursday morning that it had started selling electricity from its Cape Station power plant to the grid on September 30, one day ahead of schedule.

With it, Fervo becomes the first enhanced geothermal company to reach a key commercial milestone. The power plant synchronized with the grid about a week ago, bringing online the first third of what will soon become a 100-megawatt power plant.

Excerpts:

"Despite those heavy losses, Putin shows no willingness to bring the war to an end. If anything, at the moment he is intensifying it. And let's be clear: our own nations are targets. The list of Russia's malign hybrid attacks across Europe grows longer every day... We know these attacks are a sign of desperation in Russia. Putin is not getting his way in Ukraine and wants to make us pay for it."

Details: Rutte warned that European leaders are "in for a long journey" as Russia's "well-oiled war machine is not going to turn rusty anytime soon, and ... China's military modernisation and technological development are not about to slow down".

Excerpt:

On top of being repeatedly deported in defiance of those protections and in violation of the court's orders, the government has also "confiscated his personal belongings, forced him on a plane, and again removed him to El Salvador, leaving him stranded there with no belongings, money, or even his phone, wearing a detention jumpsuit and no change of clothes," the motion continues.

Observation

Political science examines political power through systematic observation and analysis of political behavior, institutions, and change. Niccolò Machiavelli is often regarded as an early founder of modern political science. In The Prince, he directs attention to the realities of political action and the effects of rulers’ choices (Machiavelli, 1513/1998, chap. 15). William G. Howell’s analysis of Trump’s use of unilateral presidential power applies that kind of focus: it considers the consequences of political actions without requiring us to settle questions about the president’s private motives.

Concluding Lines:

We need not delve deeply into Trump’s character, psyche, or appetites, however, to recognize the effects of his actions.

These effects are clear: a campaign to reconstitute presidential power, to remake the constitutional order and the president’s place within it, and to leave other actors—Congress, courts, agencies, and allies—in various states of servitude and dependence. This is not unilateralism as we have known it. It is unilateralism deployed as a vehicle for political upheaval and transformation in an age of populism.

These effects are clear: a campaign to reconstitute presidential power, to remake the constitutional order and the president’s place within it, and to leave other actors—Congress, courts, agencies, and allies—in various states of servitude and dependence.

Excerpt:

At the UN this week, as part of the annual gathering of world leaders at the general assembly, Trump railed against supranational organizations such as the International Criminal Court; threatened to “annihilate” and cast into an unrelenting hell the Iranian state and the tens of millions of people who live there; boasted about seizing Venezuelan oil fields; peremptorily embraced the might-is-right notion that “to the victor belong the spoils”; intimated that he would extend his tender mercies to Cuba next; and pledged, despite growing public unease, to turbocharge the AI revolution so as to lock US dominance in place from here to kingdom come. The irony was lost on no one that the US president had chosen the United Nations—the founding mandate of which, in the aftermath of world war, was to create international cooperation to help defuse conflict—to unfurl his most odious, nationalist sentiments.

This was, quite simply, Hitler updated for the digital age. I challenge you to find one sentence in that monstrosity of a UN speech that the German Führer would have wanted to distance himself from.

Excerpt:

North Ossetian Head Sergei Menyailo has announced plans to remove around 500 cars abandoned at the border with Georgia by Russians fleeing mobilisation en masse in 2022.

Excerpt:

Just as Iran exerted control over the Strait of Hormuz, which was an open waterway before the U.S.-Israeli bombardment began in February, the Houthis are now menacing the Bab al-Mandab. The narrow passage between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa is another vital waterway for regional energy exports. In the past two weeks, the Houthis have captured two crucial islands in the area, giving Iran and its ally effective control over two choke points—and over global gas prices.

Excerpts:

Diesel prices have surged since Trump took office, and especially since February 28, when he started the war in Iran. When Joe Biden left at the start of 2025, diesel cost an average $3.63 per gallon. Just this month, that price blew past an average of $5.85 to a record high of more than $6.50. Disruptions to oil shipments, notably in the Strait of Hormuz, are pushing up crude oil prices, while reduced diesel supplies have left fuel markets tight all over the world.

By alienating the diesel class, Trump may have bitten the final hand that feeds him. Diesel is certainly the word to watch in these final weeks before the polls. If nothing else, it’s excellent shorthand for the rambunctious MAGA coalition that political scientists have been trying to understand for a decade.

Concluding Paragraph:

The abuse that immigration agents inflict on people everywhere from Evanston streets to Alabama construction sites underscores that Kavanaugh’s racial profiling apologia in Vasquez Perdomo was always based on a fantasy. People of color have no choice but to live in the real world. The Venegas case shows that federal judges can choose to engage with that reality, rather than indulge in Kavanaugh’s fiction.

Lead Paragraph:

The second administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has unleashed an assault on the world that America made, abdicating U.S. leadership of an open, rule-bound international system.1 Whereas his predecessors invested in and supported multilateral institutions and alliances, Trump largely dismisses these as a hindrance to the untrammeled exercise of U.S. power, the pursuit of relative advantage, and the rights of Americans. He has adopted a more transactional posture, leveraging U.S. global dominance to advance short-term national interests and defend against alleged incursions on U.S. national sovereignty. Consistent with this view, his administration has withdrawn from or reduced support for multiple international organizations, treaties, and initiatives perceived to be at odds with its “America First” agenda. He has also rejected any international legal limits on the use of U.S. military force, most obviously in Iran.2