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Chief Bernie Escalante is retiring from the Santa Cruz Police Department after more than 30 years of service with the organization, the city announced on Thursday morning.

Escalante assumed the role of acting police chief in October 2021 following the departure of former police chief Andy Mills earlier that year. Escalante was officially appointed as the new police chief in April 2022.

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Inside Washington

The issue pitting Senate Dems against some Democratic candidates

Senate Democrats lost a battle on Tuesday when the Senate Ag Committee voted to advance the GOP’s proposed Farm Bill without the SNAP protections Democrats have been pushing for. But while sitting Dems might be frustrated, a different group might be breathing a sigh of relief: For Democratic and independent candidates in agriculture-heavy states, this means their Republican opponents might stop hitting them over the Farm Bill.

Wednesday’s committee meeting came after the committee failed to advance the legislation to the Senate in August. Democrats have been withholding votes from the once-bipartisan bill in an effort to delay rollbacks to SNAP that were set in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA.

OBBBA’s policy forcing states to pay more for the administrative costs of SNAP takes effect October 1 of this year. Another measure, which forces states to pay for more of the cost of SNAP benefits based on their error rates, will take effect on October 1, 2027.

Experts say these policies are already hurting states and SNAP recipients. Five million Americans have lost access to SNAP since OBBBA was signed last July, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP. “We’ve been seeing some states taking some pretty extreme steps to try to lower their error rates very quickly,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the CBPP, “and those steps are making it much harder for eligible families to access the help they need to afford groceries.”

Senate Democrats have pushed for an extension, to allow states to take more time to fix their error rates and prepare to pay more for the program. In August, committee Chairman Senator John Boozman gave Democrats part of what they wanted—a one-year extension of the error-rate change. But Dems say that’s not enough and that it comes with a poisonous addition that would actually raise some states’ SNAP costs in 2031.

Jonathan Coppess, a professor of ag policy at the University of Illinois and former federal agriculture official, said that Boozman’s concession on the error rate shows that even some Republicans think the SNAP cuts are bad policy. “It certainly is some recognition by the committee that there’s a problem with what they enacted last year” in the OBBBA, he said.

While Democrats on the Senate Ag Committee are united in their opposition to this version of the Farm Bill, not every Democrat wants to see them blocking the legislation. In Iowa, for example, Republican House and Senate candidates have been hitting Democrats on their resistance to the Farm Bill. GOP Representative Zach Nunn, who is running against State Senator Sarah Trone Garriott in Iowa’s 3rd congressional district, complained about “partisan games” this week and said that “it is completely unacceptable to hold the Farm Bill hostage.”

After the bill failed to pass committee in August, Josh Turek, the Democratic Senate candidate in Iowa, posted on X that “Democrats in the Senate failed [Iowa farmers] by letting perfect be the enemy of the good.” He promised that, if elected, he would pass the Farm Bill. Dan Osborn, an independent running for Senate in Nebraska, told The New Republic in a statement that he would vote for the bill if elected. “Senate Democrats are hurting everyone, especially our farmers, by holding up the Farm Bill,” he said. “As always, they’re looking past the middle of the country, working only for the coasts, and using Nebraskans’ lives as a political football.”

Bergh, however, pushed back against the common trope of farmers versus SNAP recipients. “We hear a lot from farm state lawmakers about how a Farm Bill needs to deliver for rural America, but SNAP is how about one in seven rural households put food on the table,” she said. “Their needs should really be front and center in a Farm Bill conversation.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Most of the backlash against data centers has focused on energy and water consumption, as well as noise and water pollution. But now there’s another reason to worry: The data center boom “will create a ‘tsunami’ of discarded electronics, putting the world on a course to triple its annual generation of toxic e-waste in the next 25 years,” and could “fill enough shipping containers to encircle the globe six times,” The Guardian reports. E-waste “typically contains toxics like lead, mercury, cadmium and forever chemicals, as well as valuable metals that are challenging to reclaim,” the paper’s Erin McCormick writes. The predictions about data centers turbocharging the e-waste problem come from a new report by environmental group Basel Action Network.

“The average Maine household has paid an average of $4,300 more for goods and services since President Donald Trump began his second term,” the Maine Morning Star announces, based on recent analysis from the Maine Center for Economic Policy. Susan Collins probably isn’t thrilled with this headline. The long-standing GOP senator, currently polling a couple points behind Democrat Troy Jackson, has been trying to distance herself from the president in recent weeks.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

At the Center for American Progress, Weadé James, Paige Shoemaker DeMio, and Olivia O’Connell release a report on “5 Evidence-Based Strategies to Improve U.S. K-12 Math Achievement,” following news that international tests show America’s 2025 average math score at an “all-time low,” significantly lagging behind those of other rich countries. The report emphasizes standard-setting, “high-quality instructional materials,” and investments in “teacher preparation,” alongside other recommendations. The authors also point to Massachusetts and Alabama as examples of states that have implemented policies significantly boosting average test scores.

As home insurance costs continue to rise, Public Citizen releases the results of a survey sent to state and territorial insurance commissioners: “Only 28 percent of responding offices said they support publication of homeowners insurance data at the ZIP-code level,” the watchdog reports. The reason this data is important, Public Citizen’s press release suggests, is in part to be able to figure out how much of the increase in prices is being driven by the climate crisis, and how much is being driven by profiteering and “regulatory capture.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Political Trivia Question of the Day

On the subject of stupid things said by vice presidents: What fairly recent vice president once said, “If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure,” and famously misspelled potato on a school visit? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

ALT

China’s Salt Typhoon gang has developed a new backdoor and dropped it in networks belonging to high-profile organizations in several countries across Central and South America since at least August 2025, according to researchers. The PRC-backed espionage crew shifted its focus to Latin America a month prior, and from mid-2025 into 2026, the vast majority - 90 percent - of Salt Typhoon’s targets were located in that region, ESET, which tracks the group as FamousSparrow, said in a Thursday report. Salt Typhoon is the cyber-spy gang that hacked telecommunications and government agencies to gain stealthy, long-term access to victim organizations going back as far as 2019. These hacks, however, weren’t discovered until late 2023. In August 2025, ESET’s malware hunters found the group’s new backdoor, called SparroWocky, deployed against government agencies in Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. While targeting entities in these countries “represents a rare occurrence among the China-aligned APT groups,” ESET believes the focus likely reflects China’s reaction to recent US President Donald Trump’s initiatives in the region, malware researchers Alexandre Côté Cyr and Romain Dumont said. “Donald Trump’s second presidential term has brought about an aggressive reaffirmation of US interests in Latin America, which threatens various long-term investments that China has cultivated throughout the continent in the last decade, in domains such as energy, mining, and telecommunications,” they wrote. “We suspect that FamousSparrow’s activities are intended to help China better monitor and anticipate the reaction of local governments to current US pressures.” SparroWocky is a modular C++ backdoor that appeared soon after the Beijing snoops started focusing on Latin America. The new backdoor integrates open source tools and uses techniques designed to evade antivirus and other security software. The name comes from Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky poem - the researchers found the first stanza in several collected samples. (’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:/All mimsy were the borogoves,/And the mome raths outgrabe.) ESET based its analysis on a malware sample compiled on November 17, and said it contained the following open source projects: Mbed TLS, a C library it uses to establish a secure communication channel with its command-and-control (C2) server. MinHook, a Windows API hooking library that hides the start address of newly created threads from security products. COFF Loader (or a similar project) to enable dynamic loading and execution of in-memory plugins in the form of COFF objects. Plus, the backdoor incorporates a variant of the SilentMoonwalk technique to spoof the call stacks originating from MinHook routines, and thus escape the watchful eyes of monitoring tools, along with a custom API-hashing algorithm to dynamically resolve Windows API functions. The gang deploys the backdoor in its usual way: a trident loader scheme consisting of a legitimate executable, a malicious DLL, and a file containing the encrypted malware. The loader resides in the malicious DLL and executes via DLL side-loading. After establishing communication with its C2 server, the backdoor starts receiving commands handled by a custom class named WinHandler (derived from a ServerHandler custom class), according to the runtime type information in the malware. The nearly 30 commands include scooping up system details and sending them to the C2, starting and/or terminating a new session and removing persistence, stealing and deleting files, taking periodic screenshots, collecting session IDs and usernames of enumerated remote sessions on the system via WTSEnumerateSessionsW, and spawning new SparrowWocky instances. It uses TLS encryption to communicate with its C2 servers, connecting directly to their IP addresses, generally on port 443, although ESET also spotted the malware using port 8080 in some cases. The malware researchers also published a full indicators-of-compromise list and samples in ESET’s GitHub repository, so give those a read, too. ®

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Trump are trying to bring down Cuba’s government, and their friends and allies are looking to profit from it. 

The Guardian reports that Republican donors, Cuban exiles, and even Trump Organization executives are all eyeing business opportunities from the U.S. pressure campaign against Cuba. Many are charging high sums to help business clients work around the Trump administration’s new sanctions and set themselves up to make even more money if the communist regime falls. 

Among them are Ray Washburne, who organized the Republican midterm convention in Dallas last week and was the vice chair of Trump’s 2016 Victory Committee, and Albert Huddleston, an oil executive with his own ties to Trump. Both are trying to take over a nickel and cobalt mining joint venture with the Cuban government after a Canadian firm, Sherritt International, was driven out by a Trump executive order in May.  

An Australian firm, Antilles Gold Ltd., also had to end its Cuba operations in June thanks to the Trump administration’s sanctions. That company just received approval from the White House to transfer its stake in a copper-gold mine in Cuba to New York–based investment fund Global Emerging Markets, according to the newspaper. 

Executives in the Trump Organization have recently traveled to the island as well, sources told The Guardian. They did so under a new moniker, Dominari Holdings, and met with people like Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the grandson of former Cuban President Raúl Castro, to discuss business opportunities. Two major Spanish hotels, Meliá and Iberostar, recently left the island, and these executives, who have visited the country before and even registered the Trump trademark there in 2008, now may be looking to fill the void.

A shipping line based in Florida, Crowley Maritime, is also benefiting from the Trump administration’s sanctions, with all of Cuba’s imports now being routed through Florida. The company is a major donor to Florida Republican Representatives Mario Díaz-Balart and María Elvira-Salazar, both Cuban Americans. 

“If I had done during the Biden administration what Trump’s friends have done now, I’d have been put in jail,” one expert in Cuba policy told The Guardian.

Meanwhile, the Cuban people are increasingly suffering under the U.S. sanctions and fuel blockade. So far, Trump’s efforts have only benefited wealthy interests outside of Cuba—the very reason behind the island’s political revolution in the 1950s. It seems that Trump, Rubio, and their wealthy friends want to control Cuba so they can profit from it at the expense of its people. 

When assessing the midterm election landscape, many people primarily look at polling to make their predictions. But how a party’s candidates are acting is another good barometer, and an ad released Thursday by a House Republican tells us that the GOP is in deep trouble. In the new ad, Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar—whose Miami-area, majority-Hispanic district voted for President Donald…

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Trump says he’s the only one smart enough to regulate AI…

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King Charles hosted a private summit Thursday with some of the most prominent names in AI and UK government.

Base Labs, the research group Baseten spun up earlier this year, will develop and publish methods for training and monitoring open models.

Pinterest is testing Restyle, a new AI-powered feature that lets users visualize furniture, decor, lighting and other changes in photos of their own rooms — potentially helping turn saved inspiration into purchases.

An ICE agent long wanted in Minnesota for allegedly shooting a Venezuelan immigrant was finally captured by local authorities.

Christian Castro was booked in the Hennepin County Jail on Wednesday. He faces four second-degree assault charges, and another charge for false reporting of a crime, according to the jail’s inmate records. He is being held on $200,000 bail.

Castro will appear in a downtown Minneapolis courtroom on Thursday at 1:30 p.m. CT. He has not yet entered a plea.

Castro was one of thousands of agents that descended upon Minnesota during Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge. On January 14, Castro allegedly chased Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, a DoorDash driver, to the entryway of his home. Upon arriving at the residence, Castro shot Aljorna’s roommate, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, in the leg. Castro claimed at the time that he shot Sosa-Celis in self-defense, purporting that the Venezuelan national had attacked him with a snow shovel.

But even Trump’s Justice Department had a difficult time proving that one. In a rare reversal, the DOJ moved to dismiss charges relating to the assault against Sosa-Celis and Aljorna, and Castro was the one left facing criminal consequences. Surveillance footage of the encounter released in April showed Sosa-Celis tossing the shovel early into his exchange with the ICE agent, and Castro firing shots into the home.

Extraditing the 52-year-old federal officer back to Minnesota proved to be a difficult task, however. Castro was initially arrested in Texas, days after a state court issued a nationwide warrant for his arrest in May. But Texas Governor Greg Abbott refused to hand Castro over to Minnesota, questioning whether Castro qualified as a fugitive since he had not technically fled Minnesota but had rather been transferred to work in Texas by the Department of Homeland Security.

Castro’s fate was stuck in limbo for months as the two states duked it out. He was released from jail in August after the 90-day limit on his detention had expired, and after a federal judge declined to intervene in the cross-country matter.

Yet the complications surrounding Castro’s case don’t end there. Earlier this month, a federal grand jury indicted Castro in a separate case, charging him with six counts of making false statements pertaining to the shooting.

The change was a stunning downgrade from the aggressive civil rights violations initially sought by the assistant U.S. attorney in Minnesota, Matthew Evans, who was in charge of prosecuting the case. It was also the result of Washington’s direct intervention.

On September 2, Evans told his staff that Castro would be charged “only with False Statements.” The shift would carry far less severe consequences if Castro is found guilty, but would also allow the DOJ to prosecute the case without having to debate whether the shooting was justified.

“This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney,” Evans wrote in an internal e-mail obtained by ProPublica. “I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.”

The next day, Evans was fired. Castro turned himself in later that week while making his initial appearance in a District Court ​in McAllen, Texas. He was then released on bond.

Castro reappeared in Minneapolis this week under an agreement with Minnesota law enforcement, voluntarily driving himself across state lines in order to turn himself in. But state agents got him first, arresting Castro around 2:15 p.m. on Wednesday in Minneapolis, the department shared in a statement.

By now, it’s no longer in doubt that Donald Trump’s towering unpopularity—driven by a Trumpian trifecta of failure comprised of inflation, tariffs, and war—is allowing Democrats to contest some pretty red territory this fall. So how wide is the battleground map actually getting as we enter the final stretch of the 2026 midterms?

One simple way to answer this question: Follow the money. Trump’s super PAC, which is called MAGA Inc., has just unleashed well over $100 million in spending via two smaller organizations its operatives have created. We obtained data on TV ad spending by those groups from a Democratic source that shows which districts they’re targeting.

Here’s the big topline finding: Trump’s super PAC and its cutout organizations are spending big money in at least 17 districts that Trump carried in 2024 by over five points. That includes six districts that Trump won by over 10 points.

Here it is in chart form:

That’s a very broad battlefield. The list we obtained—compiled by a source who relied on Democratic Party ad-tracking data—comprises House districts that MAGA Inc. is already spending in or has reserved time in via two cutout organizations, “No Going Back PAC” and “Safety and Affordability PAC.” Our list roughly tracks (but isn’t precisely the same as) the districts obtained by Teddy Schleifer of The New York Times and other reporters.

But what really makes this list of districts significant and eye-opening is ranking them by Trump’s 2024 totals, as we did above. Of the 27 House districts this MAGA Inc. spending is targeting, 19 are GOP districts, and 26 were carried by Trump. That he won most by more than five points sheds more light on what this expanding battlefield really looks like, with areas that Trump won solidly two years ago suddenly in peril for the GOP.

“It’s an acknowledgment that things have shifted in a huge way since 2024,” David Wasserman, who analyzes House races for the Cook Political Report, told me. “Republicans have hemorrhaged support among independent voters, they’ve got a real enthusiasm problem, and as a result, districts that ordinarily would vote handily for Trump and Republicans are now in play.”

Notably, six districts that Trump carried by double digits are also being targeted by MAGA Inc.’s cutouts. It’s telling that GOP-held districts like Texas’s 15th and Kentucky’s 6th (which went for Trump by very large margins) now require major reinforcements.

“If those are in danger, then a lot of other seats that are considered similarly safe for Republicans must be on the chopping block,” Larry Sabato, the founder of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told me.

The targeting of Texas seats that Trump won by double digits captures another big story: Trump’s dramatic slippage among Latinos. Texas’s infamous redistricting this year was supposed to make Democratic-held seats (the 36th district and the 35th, the latter of which has been redrawn to transform it from a previously Democratic to a safe Republican district) easy GOP pickups.

But Trump’s deep unpopularity and the potential for a blue wave mean Republicans must spend heavily to try to flip them anyway. As Wasserman told me, when Republicans redrew the Texas map, they assumed that “if they just made these seats redder to turn them into double-digit Trump seats, they would win them.” Now, he said, the erosion of Latino support for Trump in places like the Rio Grande Valley means “these races are very close.”

In short, Trump’s super PAC empire now sees an urgent need to spend big on districts that Texas Republicans just heavily gerrymandered to the GOP’s benefit, after Trump corruptly commanded them to do so. Oops.

None of this, of course, guarantees that Republicans will lose the elections. Overall, Republican spending is now projected to swamp Democratic spending from today to Election Day by a significant margin. That is going to hit hard. We’re talking about a GOP edge that could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yet there are other signs that the map is now expanding in Democrats’ favor. This week’s Times poll found Democrats ahead in the generic House ballot matchup by nearly nine points. A new Fox survey finds that lead at seven points, and a YouGov poll has Democrats up 12 points. That last one is probably too high, but the polling averages also show the Democratic position slowly continuing to improve. That suggests the Times’s finding of a nearly nine-point spread—comparable to the party’s 2018 House popular vote victory, which was a blue wave—could very well be right on the money.

Meanwhile, some forecasters have Democratic odds of winning the Senate at their highest point yet. Democrats must flip four GOP-held seats—at least three in states Trump won and at least two he carried by double digits. Given all this, while the Senate is on a knife’s edge, those improving Democratic odds themselves hint at a battlefield that’s now reaching deep into Trump country.

Republicans never counted on Trump being quite this toxic. Trump himself probably still can’t accept what a massive drag he’s become on his party. But whatever data they’re feeding him to keep the Audience of One’s spirits high, his super PAC operatives certainly have.

There's no need to actually read a whole research paper when you can ask a bot to explain it to you. Scientific papers can transform into AI agents that, according to the Stanford team behind the project, should speed up the dissemination of new scientific discoveries. Paper2Agent, the team's new framework described in a paper published in Nature on Wednesday, converts scientific papers and their associated research outputs into agents that can discuss a paper’s findings, reproduce analyses and results, apply its methods to new data, and even collaborate with other paper agents on new research problems. “Papers have been static documents for centuries,” James Zou, a Stanford computer scientist and biomedical data science professor and one of the paper’s authors, said in a LinkedIn post announcing P2A’s publication. “Paper2Agent turns them into active AI agents that can answer questions, apply their methods, and collaborate with other papers to make new discoveries.” Giving a large language model access to a scientific paper is unpredictable, Zou added. What his team wanted was an agent that could act as a “virtual author” that had hands-on experience with a paper’s work, not just reading it and attempting to understand it. What that means in practice, as explained in the paper, is a workflow that uses a paper and its associated data, repository, and codebase to create a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server exposing the research's tools, resources, and workflows. An LLM agent can then connect to the server and use natural-language requests to autonomously run demonstrations, reproduce analyses, apply a paper's methods to new data, and the like. “Paper2Agent agentifies the full research outputs, including manuscripts, supplementary materials, code, datasets, executable examples and analysis workflows,” the researchers explained in their writeup. According to the paper, the MCP server itself can be hosted remotely, but Zou explained to The Register in an email that it can also be run locally to protect sensitive information, though such info will still be sent to whichever LLM backend P2A is connected to. “If the user has sensitive data (e.g. protected health information) that they don't want to send to an LLM then they should exclude that data from P2A,” Zou told us, adding that P2A should be compatible with any AI coding agent, but that not all have been tested. AI hallucinations are an obvious concern, and the paper notes that researchers should always evaluate anything P2A presents to be sure it’s correct. “We … view Paper2Agent as a tool for augmenting scientific discovery and improving access, reproducibility and reuse of papers, rather than as an autonomous or authoritative source of scientific conclusions,” the paper notes. That said, P2A still does its best to prevent such errors from cropping up. The paper explains that each tool used by a paper agent is validated against the paper’s results and figures and “locked to ensure reproducibility.” This decreases hallucination risk and minimizes randomness, but still - best to double-check its work. Tests to see how well P2A scales appear to have gone well, with the researchers evaluating it across 136 papers in three groups, including 100 computational-biology papers. Of those 100 papers, 74 were successfully turned into agents, with the researchers attributing failures largely to incomplete codebases, missing documentation, or unresolvable environment configurations. Still, it’s a massive leap in what could be possible when it comes to getting new scientific discoveries into the hands of more researchers. P2A is open source, and is available on GitHub for those who want to take a stab at it. There’s also a live version online that can explain the P2A paper in more detail and reproduce its results, and Zou tells us it can also ingest other papers to see how it works on their projects. Zou explained to us that he hopes the open source community will help improve P2A, but notes that his team isn’t done with it either. Next up, they hope to create an online platform for paper agents to collaborate and discuss various “agentified” scientific discoveries. Let’s just hope those boffin bots behave a bit better than their counterparts. ®

The FBI believes women pretending to be “tradwives” are targeting Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in order to dox them, The Guardian reported Thursday.

In February, the FBI in Chicago disseminated a brief memo warning that a “small group of women allegedly were creating fictitious online dating profiles with the purpose of attracting and then doxxing law enforcement participating in immigration enforcement.”

“These profiles were incorporating imagery of a ‘traditional wife’ aesthetic and listing specific interests in an attempt to appeal to … individuals in law enforcement,” the memo continued. “The objective was to lure affiliated law enforcement personnel into an online or in-person interaction under the guise of a date, after which the individuals would be publicly exposed and doxed online. The tactic is intended to generate public embarrassment and deter immigration enforcement activity.”

The memo was obtained through a public records request by Property of the People, a government transparency non-profit. The memo came shortly after Chaya Raichik, the conservative influencer behind LibsOfTikTok, sounded the alarm about groups of TikTokers who were organizing to lure federal agents onto dates and expose their personal information. Her post did not include any mention of “tradwives.” It is unclear if Raichik’s claims were true.

Ryan Shapiro, executive director of Property of the People, slammed the FBI for issuing such a humiliating memo in the first place.

“It’s absurd the FBI issued a thinly-sourced security alert about ICE agents’ online dating troubles,” he said in a statement. “It’s equally ludicrous the FBI is spending taxpayer dollars to protect ICE agents from possible ‘embarrassment’ at the hands of a supposed ‘small group of women’ who might name and ridicule them online.”

Recently, ICE reportedly began quietly firing new officers hired during the agency’s chaotic push to recruit thousands of “Homeland Defenders,” citing poor performance and red flags that should have been identified in the vetting process.

A Republican congresswoman running for reelection in Florida’s 27th congressional district has come out with an ad criticizing President Trump.

“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, whose district voted for Trump by 15 percentage points in 2024, said in the ad. She cited statistics pointing out that 50 percent of ICE’s 50,000 detainees in July had no criminal record.

A Message to President Trump on Immigration | María Elvira Salazar pic.twitter.com/memcf4jags

— María Elvira Salazar 🇺🇸 (@MaElviraSalazar) September 17, 2026

“Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy. The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” Elvira Salazar said. “You can be for immigration what Lincoln was for slavery and Reagan was for communism.”

That point makes no sense, as slavery ended with Lincoln and Reagan presided while the Soviet Union fell, and Elvira Salazar is not proposing an end to immigration. But the Cuban-American representative’s main point with the ad appears to be saving face with her Hispanic constituency. The district she represents is 54.2 percent foreign-born and more than 70 percent Hispanic, many of whom are of Cuban descent like her.

If a member of Congress in a solidly Republican district is afraid of being associated with Trump, that doesn’t bode well for November’s midterms. Trump and Republicans keep polling lower and lower, and among the many reasons why are ICE’s violent mass deportation tactics, paid for by billions of dollars in government funding.

Elvira Salazar herself voted for that funding, and now she’s trying to run away from it. Meanwhile, ICE’s arrests of Cuban nationals have gone up by a staggering 463 percent since December 2024. One political ad might not be enough for her to survive at the polls in November.

TechCrunch Disrupt is where the tech community comes together to build, debate, and connect. And while the main event takes over Moscone West from October 13-15, the conversation doesn’t stop when the Expo Hall closes.

Apple is changing its App Tracking Transparency prompts in parts of Europe after competition regulators said the system favored Apple over third-party apps, giving developers more flexibility over how they ask users for tracking consent.

Republicans are in major political peril after President Donald Trump’s massive failures on the economy, and now even a poll from the conservative Fox News is confirming the data. Fox’s poll, released Wednesday night, shows that 63% of voters say that Trump has made the economy worse than the recovering economy he inherited from former President Joe Biden. Overwhelming numbers of Democrats…

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Roku’s latest OS update introduces Roku Labs, a new hub for experimental apps, alongside personalized home screens in more markets, streaming subscription bundles, and more.

Senator Mitch McConnell’s handlers would like the American public to believe that he’s still physically and mentally fit to be in office, but that no longer seems to be the case.

The longtime Kentucky Republican suddenly reappeared in Congress this week after an unexplained three-month absence, apparently ready to vote on Senate proceedings. But when tasked to do so during Wednesday’s Senate Agriculture Committee meeting on the Farm Bill, McConnell hazily sided with the Democrats.

The “no” vote was clearly a mistake, and visibly concerned North Dakota Senator John Hoeven, who was seated on McConnell’s left. Hoeven leaned over to the Kentuckian and said something quietly, as did committee chairman and Arkansas Senator John Boozman, seated on McConnell’s right. Senator Amy Klobuchar, the committee’s top Democrat, smiled and nodded along encouragingly as the trio struggled to address the lapse.

Nonetheless, the momentary error spurred murmurs from the table and the surrounding crowd of congressional aides.

“Aye,” McConnell quickly corrected.

Here is McConnell voting in the Farm Bill markup. He votes 'aye' after a little prompting from fellow Senators and aides. https://t.co/WH3rmU006K pic.twitter.com/mjhE1Ozeep

— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) September 16, 2026

McConnell’s office issued a statement on the senator’s X account shortly after the vote. The statement was written in the first-person, suggesting that despite McConnell’s vacant expression hours earlier, he was suddenly well enough to articulate via the written word that he was “proud to vote yes on the Farm Bill on behalf of the hardworking farm families across Kentucky.”

“America’s farmers are the cornerstone of our nation and the backbone of Kentucky’s economy and I wish our Democrat colleagues would have joined Republicans supporting the many important provisions in this Farm Bill,” the post continued. “My hope is the bill receives robust bipartisan support on the Senate floor and demonstrates our commitment to our Nation’s farmers and rural communities.”

McConnell was found unconscious and rushed to the hospital on June 14. For weeks, his office refused to explain his extended hospitalization or elaborate on his eventual return to Capitol Hill. But the 84-year-old is clearly not the same: since returning to Congress this week, McConnell has been repeatedly photographed with a blank gaze and his mouth hanging open, including just after his Farm Bill vote. He does not seem lucid or aware—save for the occasional wave towards the camera—and has refused to speak with reporters trying to assess his current health condition.

Sen. Mitch McConnell leaves the Senate after casting his vote in the Senate Agriculture Committee this afternoon. pic.twitter.com/htdrqaG25w

— Desirée Townsend (@DesireeReports) September 16, 2026