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A Democratic congressional candidate in Arizona says she was sexually assaulted while trying to repair one of her campaign signs.

The Phoenix New Times reports that Bernadette Greene-Placentia, the Democratic nominee in Arizona’s 8th congressional district challenging incumbent Republican Representative Abe Hamadeh, reported being hit over the head this summer in a dark parking lot in Sun City, Arizona, just after 2 a.m. on a Friday as she walked to the damaged sign. She awoke to her rapist pulling his penis out of her, she told the publication.

He said, “—ic bitch, not a very good fuck,” Greene-Placentia said to the New Times, which she filled in her head as “Democratic bitch.” She’s not clear on what exactly he said.

One leg was out of her jeans, and she remembers swinging her leg after another man approached. She heard him say, “Not even worth it,” before he left the scene. She was left face-down in the parking lot, her SUV still running with the trunk open. Greene-Placentia doesn’t remember putting her jeans back on, closing the SUV’s trunk, or leaving the scene to return home.

“It’s just these little tiny flashes of things that I do remember,” she said to the newspaper. “As much as I don’t want to remember, I’ve tried very, very hard to remember more stuff. But that’s where I’m at.”

Greene-Placentia said she had stopped to fix her campaign signs late at night numerous times previously, sometimes with her husband, Alex Placentia, or a campaign staffer. She hasn’t done so since she was raped. She thinks she suffered a concussion, and reported being covered in bruises after the attack.

Initially, Greene-Placentia tried to forget about being attacked, but said she decided to report her assault because she campaigns on fighting for the people of Arizona, “and I didn’t feel like I could keep saying that if I weren’t also fighting for women that are victims of sexual assault.” She told her campaign staff about it the following Sunday, and her husband on Monday. Two weeks later, she reported the rape to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, according to a police report.

For two days after the assault, Greene-Placentia was “missing in action,” her campaign manager Isaiah Lopez and her husband told the New Times. She vaginally bled for three days after the rape, according to the police report. She said she was a “very angry person” for days and weeks afterward.

“I want a fucking rematch. I want to call them out. I want to like, go on TV and say ‘Let’s go again and don’t come at me from behind,’” she told Lopez and her husband. Her campaign held a staff meeting at a gun range because she felt so angry.

Hamadeh has yet to comment on the alleged rape, but in July, he defended right-wing influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate, who are accused of strangling women unconscious and raping them and face charges of sexual assault, sexual exploitation, and child pornography in Europe.

Greene-Placentia is vowing to press ahead with her campaign.

“I need to let women know that it’s okay to talk about it,” Greene-Placentia told the New Times. “We’re asking people to stand up and donate or volunteer. We’re asking those folks to be uncomfortable, as [Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes] says; then I have to be willing to be uncomfortable too.”

Colorado minister and Republican gubernatorial nominee Victor Marx has declared that he shoved his wife in the past—and he’d do it again.

The admission came by way of a campaign video call with his supporters Tuesday evening, during which Marx shamelessly confessed that he pushed his wife against a door supposedly to teach her a lesson about self-defense.

“Show the before and after, they don’t want the full truth—that my wife was fake crying, suckered me in,” Marx told his donors. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh are you okay?’ and she does a spinning back kick into my [groin].”

“I was like, ‘Okay, you actually can protect yourself,’” Marx recalled.

Marx’s wife Eileen then appeared on camera, placing her arms around his neck while claiming that she did a “rear choke” defense.

Both Marx and his wife have black belts in karate.

“People have called us the real Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” Marx claimed, referring to the 2005 blockbuster starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. “How many wives actually grab a backpack and put a tomahawk, nightvision, put a grenade in their coat pocket—we’re not normal.”

“I’d do it again,” he proclaimed. “I’d do everything again except get close to her to let her kick me, because she’s sneaky.”

Marx similarly admitted to the allegations during a local radio interview on Friday, claiming that he had shoved his wife “just to startle her” and reiterated that she was “fake crying.” In the same interview, Eileen Marx said she did not believe the rough encounters with her husband constituted domestic abuse, but that they had instead reminded her that she does “need to train.”

“What he did—eight years after that, I got my first degree black belt,” Eileen Marx said, noting in other portions of the interview that she grew up in an abusive home, and that the incident with her own husband had inspired her to start teaching women’s self defense classes.

“This was nothing like domestic abuse. This was a karate lesson in our house,” Eileen Marx told the radio show.

Marx has repeatedly claimed that the media has unfairly pegged him as a domestic abuser—but in truth, Marx has been telling variations of this story for years, some much more disturbing than the latest iteration. In 2021, the former Marine-turned-priest laughed while recalling “grabbing her and slamming” his wife after she suggested that he could protect her.

“It was a decent push,” he said at the time, beaming. “She hit that and started crying, bent over, facing the opposite way.”

Still, that’s not the only abuse allegation facing the Republican gubernatorial hopeful: Marx has also been accused of throwing his toddler across a room and pulling a knife on a psychiatrist attempting to treat him.

On the radio, Marx said both stories were true.

Recalling the incident with his small son, Marx said he “grabbed” his son because the child was “hurting his sister.”

“I picked him up, launched him, onto his bed,” Marx said. “That’s when he started crying.”

Marx said he initially shared the story as a warning for young fathers who are struggling to parent and do things “they don’t want to do,” urging people to get psychiatric help.

“I did not hurt my son,” Marx insisted.

The couple are the co-founders of All Things Possible ministry, an entity that critics have derided as a “potentially dangerous” operation, according to a September report by The Guardian. In the last year, the group has funded out-of-state surveillance projects and hired private security contractors. It is also connected to a “network of other self-appointed sex-trafficking rescue groups whose leading figures have attracted significant controversy,” according to The Guardian.

Marx was the chair and president of All Things Possible until his bid to become Colorado’s next governor commenced last October.

In June, Marx claimed during a local TV interview that he was forced to kill someone when he was seven years old. When pressed if he had killed more people, Marx responded: “Does it matter?”

AWS has offered multiple open-source strategies for holding AI agents accountable, and now it’s adding a full-on sandbox to this stack. Dubbed Strands Box, the new solution uses OS-level isolation and some of AWS’ other recent open-source AI control tools to, ostensibly, retain greater control over autonomous AI agents’ behavior. “Agents increasingly run in ‘YOLO mode,’ approving every action without human review,” the AWS team explained in its announcement. “The usual solution to this problem is a sandbox … but access is only part of what we want to control.” The problem with containers and microVMs typically used to isolate AI agents, as AWS explains it, is that their strong isolation doesn’t come with contextual rule enforcement. In other words, when a containerized or virtualized agent gets hold of a tool, there may be no stopping it from doing whatever it wants - like deleting a production database, or gaining access to the internet and doing dog knows what. That’s where the other open-source tools inside Strands Box come in: It uses the Dogwood Local Engine to give the policy engine in Box temporal awareness, so tool calls can be checked against not only what the agent wants to do, but what it’s already done. As one example, AWS noted that an agent could be allowed to post status updates to Slack, but no more than three times every ten minutes to prevent it from spamming its human operators. An AWS spokesperson further explained that Box could be used to control when an agent can perform a Git push, or it could be used to put a cap on API calls that could end up costing a small fortune. Additionally, Strands Box includes Strands Shell and Monty for Python, which expose shell and Python operations to the same Dogwood policy engine and event history, making agentic actions clearer to developers and allowing policies to account for what an agent is trying to do. AWS VP and distinguished engineer Marc Brooker, one of the folks behind Dogwood and Strands Box, explained to The Register that the interpreters are a key part of making agentic behavior more intelligible, which allows for devs to write more precise policies to prevent agents from taking bad actions. “Box’s Shell and Python interpreters expose operations such as file deletions, while its gateways expose API requests and tool calls,” Brooker told us in an email. “Policies can then account for the action being attempted and earlier activity.” Box, Brooker added, enforces those rules without trusting or relying on agents to actually follow instructions, which should ideally prevent them from running roughshod over their operators’ wishes. As for the reason behind AWS’ push to develop open-source tools like Dogwood, the Dogwood Local Engine, and Strands Box, Brooker said that AWS wants to find the right balance between boundaries and policies that prevent agentic AI disasters of the kind we regularly report. “Box enforces the policies developers configure, deterministically, and the agent can't talk its way around these rules,” Brooker explained, though he added that, even with properly configured permissions, an agentic action can still produce an unwanted result. “Developers remain responsible for deciding what access to grant and where human review is needed,” Brooker added - in other words, don’t let your YOLO mode go too YOLO. A bit of human oversight is still necessary. “Agent safety is an area where the industry still has significant work to do, and we're committed to continuing to invest in it, both inside the AWS cloud and in open source,” Brooker said. Strands Box supports any agent or harness one wants to confine within its walls and is available on GitHub now, though only for macOS for the time being. Linux support is in development, and AWS told us a Windows client is “on our radar,” but neither has a planned release date. Deployment to platforms like AgentCore, ECS, and Kubernetes is also planned. ®

The attorneys general of Florida, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska have sued ubiquitous networking and smart home tech maker TP-Link, alleging its security claims were misleading and it hadn't properly disclosed ties to China. The company has a large presence in US retail and the tech channel, especially in consumer routers, with stats from Circana asserting it had around 36.6 percent US market share by units and 31 percent by dollars in 2024. The complaint [PDF] accuses California-based TP-Link Systems, whose brand originated in Shenzhen, of deceptive and unfair marketing practices concerning its routers' security and its connections to China. It cites exploitation of TP-Link devices by Chinese and Russian state-backed hackers. The suit also claims TP-Link allegedly concealed facts about its "past and ongoing ties to the People's Republic of China," accuses it of having a supply chain that's reliant on PRC players, repeated firmware vulnerabilities, and being subject to Chinese laws that force companies to cooperate with state intelligence. According to the states' attorneys general, the hardware vendor still relies on Chinese companies for research and development and manufacturing operations, despite previously claiming to have moved into Vietnam after severing ties with China. The complaint alleges that only 0.5 percent of components used at TP-Link's Vietnamese plant, measured by value, are bought in Vietnam, with "all other inputs" imported "from or through China." The complaint also claims that a US-designated Chinese military company carried out construction work at the Vietnamese factory, challenging TP-Link's assurances about its supply chain's security. The complaint cites 2025 testimony [PDF] from former NSA cybersecurity director Rob Joyce that TP-Link's share of the US retail market for Wi-Fi systems and small-office/home-office (SoHo) routers at at least 60 percent. Lawyers pointed to various snippets from TP-Link's marketing materials. These included claims that its HomeShield product "covers all security scenarios" and, on a version of its website available in November 2025, provides a "100 percent safeguard" for network security. The complaint argues that TP-Link's security assurances were misleading because its routers contained critical vulnerabilities. It further cites Joyce's that TP-Link routers were among the brands exploited in the China-linked Volt Typhoon and Flax Typhoon campaigns. The complaint also alleges that TP-Link's privacy policies permit it to collect customer data and share it with affiliates without disclosing how its Chinese connections and China's intelligence laws could expose that information to Chinese intelligence agencies. "Iowans' sensitive data and our national security is at risk because of TP-Link and their connection to the communist Chinese government," said Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird. "TP-Link tells Iowans its routers are safe, our personal data is secure, and that they have no ties to China. They are not telling the truth. It's time to hold China and China-backed companies accountable." "TP-Link's false statements and deceptive advertising are a violation of Montana law," said Attorney General Austin Knudsen. "As a result of their nefarious practices, millions of Americans have unknowingly invited a foreign adversary into their living rooms and put their personal information at risk. "I will do everything I can as Attorney General to hold TP-Link accountable and protect our privacy and security." Steve Kovsky, corporate affairs officer for TP-Link Systems Inc., said the lawsuits were based on false premises, did nothing to advance national security, and unfairly penalized a US company. Kovsky added that the company has spent months providing officials with clear documentation showing that it is not owned or controlled by any foreign government and that its devices sold in the US are manufactured in Vietnam. "Any claims that our products present a threat to user security or grant unauthorized network access to foreign governments are baseless," he said. "TP-Link Systems is a US company that complies with US privacy and data protection laws. We perform comprehensive security testing and rely on trusted third-party security labs for additional scrutiny to ensure our products meet the highest security standards and are recognized as among the most secure on the market. "We meet or exceed all industry best practices for monitoring and preventing vulnerabilities and actively support our customers to mitigate any issues that occur as they are identified. We do not, and will not, share customer network data with foreign governments or unauthorized third parties. "We stand fully behind the security of our products, the integrity of our company and our people, and our commitment to serving the best interests of our customers in the United States and globally. We look forward to refuting these baseless allegations in court." The allegations echo those made by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office sued TP-Link earlier this year over its Chinese connections and router security. US officials began weighing restrictions on TP-Link router sales in 2024. In March 2026, the FCC imposed broader restrictions [PDF] on new foreign-produced router models, barring new equipment authorizations unless an exemption is granted. Previously authorized models were not automatically banned. ®

As it turns out, the cure for stuffy, chemical-infused office air might be a tower of leafy greenery.

Quick Take

• One of the executive producers and writers on HBO Max’s Lanterns is trying to get fan-favorite alien Green Lantern Kilowog into a second season.
• Lanterns showrunner Chris Mundy revealed in an interview that executive producer and series writer Vanessa Baden Kelly is pushing for the large, alien Green Lantern Kilowog to appear in season two.
• Nerdist’s take: Given the more grounded take of the Green Lantern mythology in Lanterns, we’d be surprised if we get more than a Kilowog cameo, although we hope for more than that.

The first season of Lanterns wrapped up recently, and in our opinion, in a pretty satisfactory fashion. Despite all odds, this grounded take on DC’s Green Lantern mythology worked, anchored by two incredible performances by Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre. But we’d be lying if we said we weren’t hoping for a bit more cosmic elements. This is, after all, a show about “space cops.” Now we’ve learned that Lanterns writer and executive producer/writer Vanessa Baden Kelly hopes to bring the alien Lantern Kilowog to the screen in season two. This came from an interview with Lanterns showrunner Chris Mundy with The Playlist. Here’s what he had to say:

Vanessa [Baden Kelly]’s been talking a big Kilowog game for a long time. We’ve tossed out a lot of different things.

DC Comics

For those unfamiliar with the Green Lantern comics mythology, Kilowog is a very large, pig-like alien from the planet Bolovax Vik. He was originally introduced during the Crisis on Infinite Earths event, and later became a key member of the Green Lantern Corps series once his planet was destroyed. Eventually, he was retconned into being Hal Jordan’s drill instructor when he first joined the Corps as a rookie member. He has appeared in animation and even live-action. Michael Clarke Duncan played the character in the 2011 Green Lantern movie.

Nerdist’s Take: If Kilowog Appears in Lanterns Season 2, We Really Only Expect a Cameo

As much as we hope to see Kilowog in Lanterns season two, we’re not holding our breath here. Lanterns barely showed the principal heroes lighting up their rings except for a few key scenes. So our jaws would drop if John Stewart actually spent much time with a giant CGI alien Lantern. Although, we could get a cameo of some sort. That is something we might see happen. Although the potential next season will take place largely on Earth again, just not in Rushville, Nebraska. Maybe Guy Gardner was right in the finale of season one, and the Guardians send some Green Lanterns after John Stewart’s ring and battery. We’re excited about the story potential here. And if Kilowog pops up, hey, why not the squirrel Lantern, Ch’p?

Eric Diaz is a staff writer at Nerdist and a Swiss Army knife of fandoms. Eric loves DC, Marvel, horror movies, and even Star Wars and Star Trek equally.

The post LANTERNS Season 2 Might Feature Alien Green Lantern Kilowog appeared first on Nerdist.

CIA officer David Rush, who worked on highly sensitive intelligence programs, reached a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors after he was caught siphoning money and gold with a fake government contract.

Daily Kos Opinions is a forum for sharp commentary and shrewd conversations. These pieces reflect guest contributor views and don’t represent an official endorsement by Daily Kos. There is a congressional election underway. You might miss that if you spend too much time following the argument about the Democratic Socialists of America and the future of the Democratic Party.

Source

Meta launches new AI tools after discovering ads on its platforms that may look normal but direct users to harmful content elsewhere online.

Quick Take

• Are you ready for streaming football? Next year’s NFL championship, Super Bowl LXI on ABC, will also simulcast on Disney+.
• The game will be available to Disney+ subscribers in both English and Spanish.
• Disney+ will simulcast two regular season Monday Night Football games ahead of its Super Bowl stream.

Mickey Mouse and the NFL, two ubiquitous American institutions, are teaming up for next year’s Big Game. Super Bowl LXI was already set to air on Disney-owned ABC, and now the championship game will also live stream on Disney+.

Disney/ESPN/NFL

Disney, ESPN, and the NFL have announced the Mouse House’s streaming service will offer football yet another way to watch next year’s NFL title game. Super Bowl LXI on Sunday, February 14, 2027 is set to serve as ESPN’s first-ever Super Bowl production, which will now air on both ABC and Disney+. The streaming site will air the same ESPN on ABC production that will air on the network. (What do we mean ESPN on ABC? Disney owns both networks and, twenty years ago, brought its sports coverage under a single combined banner.)

Joe Buck, Troy Aikman, Lisa Salters, and Laura Rutledge will handle the game’s English broadcast. ESPN Deportes will air the game in Spanish. Disney+ subscribers will be able to choose their language preference.

Disney+ won’t be trying to pull off its football simulcast for the first time during the league’s championship game, though. It will have a couple test runs during the regular season when it live streams two ESPN Monday Night Football games. The first will take place during Week 7 in the NFL when the Dallas Cowboys head to Philadelphia to play the Eagles on Monday, Oct. 26. Disney, ESPN, and the NFL has not yet announced the second Disney+ broadcast.

This news probably won’t matter much to North American football fans, but it could help grow the audience outside of it. Disney+ will stream ESPN’s Super Bowl in more than 55 international markets. That includes Latin America, Brazil, the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

That’s right world, we’re sending you both the NFL and Mickey Mouse together. Because those two American institutions apparently weren’t ubiquitous enough.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow Mikey on Bluesky at @‌burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

The post Super Bowl LXI Will Live Stream on Disney+ appeared first on Nerdist.

The Department of Justice’s civil rights division is combing the bottom of the barrel to fill prosecutor vacancies.

The New York Times reports that the office has resorted to hiring lawyers with criminal records, misconduct allegations, and a love of conspiracy theories to fill the void left by the departure of nearly 300 career, nonpartisan employees following the start of President Trump’s second term and his hiring of conservative activist Harmeet Dhillon to lead the bureau.

Among the new hires is David Michael Levin, a conservative lawyer who was convicted of hacking into the Lee County, Florida election system in 2015 and 2016 as a political stunt. Levin later served a 20-day jail sentence with two years of probation. DOJ policy allows for people with misdemeanor convictions to be hired after a seven year gap, but apparently interfering with elections was still not a red flag.

Last month, another court ordered Levin to pay more than $200,000 in damages after finding he had engaged in fraudulent misrepresentation and civil conspiracy in a case involving insurance fraud.

Another prosecutor hired by the office, David Vandenberg, had a history of complaints of volatile and angry behavior towards his colleagues as an assistant district attorney in El Paso, Texas. A local judge even barred him from a courtroom for dressing down a court official. He is now facing animal neglect charges.

Former gambling executive James Breslo, who used to host the podcast Hidden Truth, also joined the DOJ under Dhillon’s leadership. His podcast attacked Alcoholics Anonymous in an episode titled “AA Kills,” examined UFOs, and hosted bigot Laura Loomer, who pushed unproven claims that the 2017 Las Vegas strip mass shooting was a plot by the government or religious terrorists.

Another hire, Daniel Flickinger, lost his job at a Birmingham, Alabama, law firm in 2020 for saying in a Facebook post that it was good that George Floyd died in a “fentanyl- and methamphetamine-numbed strangulation” because “it meant being worshiped in a nationwide funeral.”

Dhillon has defended these people and the other 130 new hires during her tenure, saying in a statement that “For years, the civil rights division recruited from a narrow pipeline of progressive activists and called it excellence.”

“We are hiring trial lawyers,” Dhillon said. “The attorneys The Times singled out have collectively tried hundreds of cases, prosecuted those who prey on trafficked children, won at the Supreme Court and practiced law for decades. That is the experience this division needs to enforce civil rights laws for every American.”

Meanwhile, Dhillon has willingly joined the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, even dropping multiple school desegregation cases.

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Inside Washington

Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has made quite the reputation for herself in Congress. She wanders the halls in outfits noticeably more stylish than those of her colleagues and crusades for issues like removing Red Delicious apples from school lunches, allowing pictures to be used in legislation, and culling sea lions. She’s also drawn the ire of Democratic leaders for siding with Republicans on key votes.

Now, Gluesenkamp Perez is facing a tight race in one of the most important districts for Democrats to hold this year, Washington’s 3rd congressional district. She was just one point behind her Republican opponent, state Senator John Braun, in a recent poll of 500 likely voters—well within the poll’s margin of error. Five percent of those surveyed remain undecided. The swing district voted for President Donald Trump in all three of his elections, while also voting for Gluesenkamp Perez in two of those elections. A plurality of voters surveyed, 35 percent, consider themselves more independent than aligned with either party. 

In the state’s open primary in late August, Braun received 39.7 percent of the vote to Gluesenkamp Perez’s 36.4 percent. Gluesenkamp Perez’s progressive challenger, Brent Hennrich, garnered 16.7 percent of the vote. Experts say that Hennrich voters are likely to vote for Gluesenkamp Perez, though some could stay home if they strongly oppose some of her more controversial votes—like her support for Israel or her “yes” vote on the Trump-backed SAVE Act.

“In some ways, I would call her a throwback,” said Mark Stephan, an associate professor of political science at Washington State University, about Gluesenkamp Perez. “It used to be that representatives around the country, going back 30, 40, 50 years, were Democrat, Republican, but they were also really tuned into their district.” 

Braun, he said, reflects this same district-focused governance. “In some respects, he is the slightly conservative reflection of MGP,” Stephan said. If elected, “I think he would do basically what she’s done but be slightly more conservative about it.” 

Before facing Braun, Gluesenkamp Perez twice beat Republican Joe Kent, who served as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 2025 to 2026. But, said John Horvick, a senior vice president at DHM Research, “John Braun is not Joe Kent.” Stephan echoed that. Kent, he explained, “tried to run what I would call a national Republican campaign, meaning that he just tried to appeal to Republicans as Trump voters, as Republicans writ large, and didn’t focus as much on the local stuff.” Braun’s focus on local issues makes him a more competitive opponent for Gluesenkamp Perez.

The local issues that Braun and Gluesenkamp Perez focus on are as varied as the district itself. The district covers the southwest corner of the state, just across the river from Portland, Oregon. Its biggest city is Vancouver, which is surrounded by the Clark County suburbs. But the district also includes rural apple orchards and industrial communities. One such community, Longview, suffered a major industrial disaster in May, when a chemical tank at a paper mill imploded during a shift change. Eleven workers died. In the aftermath of the disaster, Gluesenkamp Perez was present in the community at press conferences and conversations with local leaders. She also spearheaded a bill to restore funding for the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, which is the agency in charge of identifying the cause of the deadly implosion. It’s unclear how the disaster and its aftermath will affect the race, Stephan said; it depends on whether Longview residents think Gluesenkamp Perez did enough to support their community. 

Another example of Gluesenkamp Perez’s focus on local issues is her crusade against sea lions. Killing these animals, she says, is necessary to protect endangered salmon and steelhead runs in the area. She has pushed for the district’s Native American residents to kill sea lions directly, rather than relying on expensive federal removal programs. She’s also focused on supporting right to repair policies and played up her work in an auto shop.

Experts stressed that the district could swing either way, particularly with a strong Republican candidate like Braun. But Gluesenkamp Perez’s ability to buck the party when necessary could be a major boon to her reelection. “She is willing to throw some mud and poke her finger in the eyes of the Democratic Party,” Horvick said. So far, that’s been a winning strategy in southwest Washington.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

A KFF poll released on Tuesday finds voter trust of Democrats over Republicans when it comes to managing health care costs has grown since its last survey in April. Back then, 37 percent said they trusted Democrats and 26 percent said they trusted Republicans. Now those numbers are 42 percent and 22 percent. It’s reasonable to assume that the effects of the Obamacare subsidies that Republican lawmakers opted to let expire, as well as projected premium increases next year, are affecting those numbers. Also interesting is that 66 percent of respondents said they support Medicare for All, although that number can change depending on whether they’re presented with arguments for or against this type of policy. 

Speaking of health care, sort of: A New York City aesthetician recently pleaded guilty to a series of federal charges related to her importing “bootleg Botox” and administering it to clients, one of whom was subsequently hospitalized. It’s illegal for aestheticians to administer Botox in New York, but this is not the first aesthetician to be accused of shooting people up with a counterfeit. Incidentally, in 2025, a Republican-sponsored bill to prevent aestheticians from administering Botox without medical supervision passed the Texas House by an over three-to-one margin with bipartisan support and unanimously passed the Texas Senate, only for Republican Governor Greg Abbott to veto it, calling it “unnecessary and overly burdensome” for businesses. The most recent poll of the Texas gubernatorial race shows Abbott and Democrat Gina Hinojosa neck and neck: Hinojosa’s three-point lead was within the margin of error.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

At 5 p.m. on Wednesday, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace will hold a virtual event discussing the implications of Israel’s upcoming elections. From the event summary: “What will the Israeli election reveal about the country’s changing political landscape? Might a new government represent a change in Israel’s approach to Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and the broader region, or largely continue the trajectory of recent years? And what might the outcome mean for Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, its neighbors, and the United States?” Speakers will include Maha Yahya, Aaron David Miller, Nathan J. Brown, Amjad Iraqi, and Tahani Mustafa.

On Thursday at 8 a.m., Center for Strategic and International Studies writer Jasmine Sun will join Wadhwani AI Center director Aalok Mehta for a webcast discussion about the backlash to data centers, in which the two “unpack what’s driving the opposition movement, where Washington and Silicon Valley diverge from the rest of the country, and how the AI infrastructure buildout might influence voters in November.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Book of the Week: Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State

By Michael Lewis

THE GIST: A spiritual sequel to The Fifth Risk, which explored the disruptions to the federal bureaucracy that accompanied Trump’s first term, Blockers is Michael Lewis’s look at the second Trump presidency, focusing particularly on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

PRAISE: “Blockers,” writes Tim Wu, a Columbia professor and author of The Attention Merchants and The Curse of Bigness in The New York Times, “is a warning that our politicization of everything is a tremendous curse and a reminder that, especially in a country of the size and complexity and power of the United States, there is much that government does, or should do, that ought to be quietly nonpartisan.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: “God knows the efficiency of that particular effort,” Lewis writes about DOGE’s gutting of a program that assisted refugees. “No one inside DOGE seems ever to have bothered to ask.” This is a common refrain as Lewis reports the gutting of USAID, the destruction of much of the U.S. government’s science and environmental funding (including much of its wildfire prevention capacity), and more. Everywhere you look in Blockers, there is destruction. More often than not, it is being done by people with no knowledge or curiosity about what government does, on the orders of people (specifically Musk, Trump, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick) with even less knowledge or curiosity about what government does.

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: This is perhaps Lewis’s angriest book—no small accomplishment given his long history of detailing the arrogance and stupidity of the U.S. financial system—and also maybe his most tragic. It’s a story about horrific damage to the U.S. government. That story is not over.

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

A rare multiple choice question! Journalist Jacob Weisberg has just published Profiles in Cowardice, which looks at eight prominent Americans who’ve failed to stand up to Donald Trump. The book is a twist on John F. Kennedy’s 1956 Profiles in Courage, which profiled eight senators for courageous moves across history. Which of these senators is not included in JFK’s book? 

A. John Quincy Adams

B. Daniel Webster

C. Nelson Aldrich

D. Robert Taft

(Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

SpaceX has acknowledged the need for satellite operators to collaborate to avoid collisions and has taken the unusual step of sharing imagery showing how close spacecraft are coming to each other. The company has called on other operators to share their satellites' ephemeris (a set of parameters describing the position and velocity of a spacecraft over time) to facilitate timely avoidance maneuvers. "In 2026," the company wrote, "Starlink encountered conjunctions with about 650 unique maneuvering third-party satellites, with only about half of them actually sharing ephemeris. "Some operators don't share ephemeris out of a concern that sharing upcoming maneuvers gives away proprietary information. In other circumstances, operators are willing to share data, but are unable to receive permission from the government to do so. "Such policies are counterproductive, and largely only serve to create preventable collision risk between satellites." "Over six months," the company went on, "Starlink observed ~164,000 conjunctions where time of closest approach (TCA) was within four hours after an unannounced manoeuvre. "While not all of these conjunctions were high-risk, they represent cases where Starlink would not have sufficient information to reliably avoid the other vehicle if the other operator’s action created a high-risk conjunction. "In many cases, the lack of high-accuracy post-manoeuvre trajectory information can cause such conjunctions to go unnoticed, giving operators a false sense of confidence and not realising how much risk their actions are creating." How many sats is that again? It's all worthy stuff, until you consider that SpaceX has applied for permission to operate 100,000 Starlink satellites and up to 1 million Starmind AI satellites. Arguably that is a substantial contribution to orbital overcrowding. Not to worry though – space isn't really getting crowded, according to SpaceX. "A good analogy is air travel," the company wrote. "Airspace around the world has grown more congested since aviation began. Yet air travel is the safest form of transport on Earth in part because every aircraft publishes a flight plan and then continuously broadcasts its position during flight." Er, kind of. Although if aircraft collide, the debris falls rapidly to Earth, rather than lingering in the sky and potentially striking more aircraft weeks or months later. Plus, SpaceX is helpfully not counting other debris, from spent rocket casings to flakes of paint, that also pose a hazard in orbit. The company noted its successes, where Starlink satellites successfully dodged other vehicles. One in October 2025 occurred when the other satellite made an unexpected maneuver, reducing the predicted miss distance from 9 km to a bottom-clenching 57 meters. Another example happened in August 2026, when the risk was identified too late for the Starlink satellite to move out of the way, and the satellite had to "duck" instead, slewing to present a narrower profile. "The vehicles ultimately passed within 134 metres of each other," the company said. "This approach could have been prevented if the other object shared its manoeuvre ahead of time." SpaceX was keen for operators to connect to sites such as space-safety.com and talked up its Stargaze service, which uses star trackers on the Starlink fleet to observe nearby objects in orbit. A far cry from 2019, when a Starlink satellite failed to move out of the way of the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Aeolus Earth-observation satellite due to a bug in SpaceX's on-call paging system. There is no shortage of companies with capabilities to monitor and advise on traffic in orbit. Neuraspace, for example, springs to mind. As the company's CEO Chiara Manfletti observed, humanity has not done a particularly good job of looking after the space above the planet. While the technology used to prevent satellite collisions is impressive, and data sharing should be encouraged, we can't help but wonder whether another solution might be to not launch tens of thousands more satellites into orbit in the first place. Manfletti told The Register that the problem was very real. She said, "As the number of satellites increases, knowing where an object is today is no longer sufficient. Manoeuvrability is becoming essential, and operators increasingly need timely, accurate information about where other spacecraft intend to be, including planned manoeuvres." "Initiatives such as SpaceX's space-safety platform are certainly welcome. But the long-term solution cannot depend on every operator joining a single company's system. What we ultimately need is a federated and interoperable space-traffic ecosystem in which operators can securely exchange trusted trajectory and intent information across different platforms, organisations and national systems. "Neuraspace has reached out to SpaceX to enable such coordination on behalf of our customers. We have extended an open hand, and it would be a strong sign of leadership for SpaceX to take it — demonstrating that improving safety in orbit ultimately requires cooperation not only within individual platforms, but across them." ®

Nearly 1,000 armed guards have descended on the United States Postal Service, deploying to at least 55 facilities across the country ahead of Election Day.

The security officers were contracted through multinational private security company Prosegur, according to a Raw Story investigation.

Prosegur has a history of alleged human rights violations, including an incident as recent as 2024 in which the company’s Brazilian subsidiary reportedly prevented indigenous people from accessing food and medical care at a nearby town, per an assessment by the Ethics Council of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund.

Prosegur’s guards are currently located at USPS facilities in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Indianapolis, Phoenix, San Diego, and Tampa, according to internal memos obtained by Raw Story.

One postal contractor that spoke with the digital outlet said she was “alarmed” that the armed security guards were predominantly confined to “deep blue states or swing states.”

Frank Albergo, the executive director of the Postal Police Officers Association union, said that the armed guards were deployed at facilities with more than 1,000 employees.

“No one from the postal service will be supervising these armed guards. It will be completely a private contractor who controls these armed guards, so you basically have private contractors in and around ballots without any federal control. To me, that’s crazy,” Albergo told Raw Story.

“It just could be a red flag. Will it have an impact on the election? Who knows? But you certainly could argue that it has an effect,” Albergo continued. “It might give Trump an excuse to call into question the integrity of the election. That’s the problem. It’s the perception of it.”

Mark Ungar, a political science professor at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York who has researched private security firms such as Prosegur, suggested to Raw Story that the company’s presence could afford the Trump administration a retroactive alibi.

“The Trump administration is clearly taking every step they can to control voting, and they’re going to use the Postal Service to do that,” Ungar said. “Any contract with Prosegur, any way that removes accountability from the American people of the Postal Service, which they’re already doing, I think, is concerning at the very least.”

In a statement to Raw Story, a spokesperson for USPS’s law enforcement branch, the United States Postal Inspection Service, said that the snail mail carrier had introduced armed guards to “provide security and act as a deterrent to criminals or employees who may wish to compromise the mailstream or potentially harm the people inside.”

Since the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump has repeatedly argued that the Postal Service should be dismantled to prevent mail-in voting—a practice that he has repeatedly accused of fraud despite zero evidence and his own apparent preference to vote by mail.

The Supreme Court buoyed one of Trump’s more aggressive voter suppression efforts in August, permitting the White House to move forward with new mail-in voting requirements and an executive order that transferred control of the mail-in voting process to “Trump lackey” (according to Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold) Postmaster General David Steiner.

The judiciary decided the following month, however, that the new requirements would not affect the 2026 midterm cycle, effectively thwarting Trump’s eleventh-hour attempt to create a conservative edge in the race to control Washington.

Yet Steiner has already attempted to flex the power of his position. On Wednesday, Steiner informed the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that, under a new rule, the USPS would not offer ballot services to states that refused to hand over their voter rolls to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, the president promoted mail-in voting to his supporters on Monday, urging them to cast their ballot however possible, briefly reversing course on his performative opposition to mail-in voting in the face of what looks like it will be a blue tsunami next month.

A suspected Italian attacker armed with a malware-controlling poem has infected more than 3,000 servers since April, breaking into enterprise AI infrastructure to mine cryptocurrency and add compromised systems to its growing botnet. This is the first case of “adversarial poetry” - an AI jailbreak technique that turns harmful prompts into poems to trick LLMs into bypassing safety guardrails - that Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, which has been tracking the PoeLLM malware, has seen in real-world attacks. “This is a first for us,” the researchers told The Register via email. “While we can't get inside the threat actor's head, we think the attacker might have used a poem because it serves as a perfect vehicle for hiding an important message,” they added. “To anyone who comes across it, this is simply a poem on GitHub. It has no links, no files to download, no encrypted text that could easily be flagged as malicious, even by advanced models. There would be no reason for any security researcher to identify this poem as malicious - or know about the IP address hidden within it - unless they had access to the malware referencing it.” PoeLLM malware has been active since at least April, impacting more than 3,000 servers primarily located in the US and Western Europe, and it continues to infect new victims. At its peak, the malware infected more than 800 active servers per day. The malware abuses - and scans for - open source AI systems and services. Most of the victims were running vulnerable, internet-facing versions of LiteLLM and Ollama. Additionally, hundreds of victims were running Gotenberg, a PDF converter, and software development platform Gitea. In addition to these open source tools, the attacker may have targeted commercial software including Ivanti Sentry. The threat hunters first spotted the PoeLLM malware while investigating an Ivanti Sentry vulnerability, CVE-2026-10520. “In early June 2026, a compromised Ivanti Sentry victim contacted a dedicated server at 5.78.73[.]122,” according to a Wednesday report shared with The Register. “Shortly after contacting this C2, the Ivanti Sentry victim began scanning for other vulnerable devices.” How adversarial poetry works Black Lotus Labs attributed the PoeLLM malware to an Italian-speaking criminal, and named the financially motivated campaign Canto Incognito because it hides the malicious commands in a poem posted to a GitHub repository. “Comments within the malware and on the attacker’s GitHub pages are in Italian, and netflow analyzed by Black Lotus Labs suggests that the attacker is located in Italy,” the threat-hunters told us, adding that they believe the campaign targets AI systems and that the poem itself was written by AI. The malware deploys XMRig and Iron miners, and connects victims to Kryptex mining infrastructure. In addition to using compromised GPU hardware powering AI workloads to mine cryptocurrency, PoeLLM also turns victims' machines into vulnerability scanners and exploit servers, which allows the attacker to compromise even more vulnerable systems. The researchers’ investigation indicates that the cryptojacking miscreant - aka GitHub user “ejejejdfbbebe” - made the first GitHub commit with the adversarial poem on April 13. The repo is a fork of the nodejs.org website source code, and the file is called “dash.css.” Inside the file, there’s a poem titled “On the Nature of Connection,” which has been updated 11 times since its initial commit. Here’s the most current version, as of September: In the silent hum of driver, the machines begin to speak, Each pulse of diode threading light through copper veins. we taught the dark to carry meaning, byte by byte — A language built from lightning, cold and clean. Beyond the wall of encryption, a signal finds its way, the tick of distant servers answering back. Data moves like water through the cracks of ordered thought, and somewhere in the code, the world stays on track. Here’s the adversarial piece: the malware finds its current command-and-control (C2) server from keywords in the poem, and when the operator changes the poem, the infected systems find the new C2 location. It does this by parsing the poem, extracting certain words and phrases, and then converting them to numbers using a hard-coded dictionary in the body of the malware. Black Lotus Labs says the logic for C2 discovery works like this: The function “extract_poem_phrase_field” extracts three words/phrases from the body of the poem, case-insensitively: Word 1: text between "In the silent hum of " and "," Word 2: text between "each pulse of " and " threading" Word 3: text between "Beyond the wall of " and "," 0x44a8db–0x44a99b extracts the fourth word differently: Find " of distant servers" Walk backward to the previous whitespace Require the 4 bytes before the word to be "the " Use the word after "the " as Word 4 The four words are then matched to corresponding numbers, which combine to form the IPv4 address hosting the server. Here’s what the C2 conversion looks like with the key: Black Lotus Labs’ write-up lists all the C2 IP addresses, plus when they were first and last seen, so be sure to check that out. More AI infrastructure = larger attack surface As enterprises increasingly use AI in their operations, they also expand their attack surface. And, as we have repeatedly seen, security remains an afterthought in AI deployments. “The Canto Incognito campaign appears to be relatively unique in its targeting of multiple AI-related services,” the researchers told The Register. “Other notable campaigns this year, including the LiteLLM supply chain compromise, focused on a single service and impacted roughly 2,500 victims, according to open sources. The collection of more than 3,000 PoeLLM victims appears to exhibit multiple vulnerable services at any given time.” For comparison: The LiteLLM supply chain attack, which began with a compromised Trivy build, potentially exposed more than 2,500 companies and 434,000 CI/CD pipelines worldwide, according to CloudSEK security researchers. The PoeLLM malware developer “has been extremely successful in identifying vulnerable servers, deploying exploits, and conscripting victims to continue expanding the campaign,” Black Lotus Labs said. “If the actor had only focused on one or two vulnerabilities, the potential victim pool might have quickly dried up, but the expanding scope allowed for a bigger, more powerful (and more profitable) botnet.” They told us they expect to see more of these types of attacks in the near future. “AI makes it easier to deploy tools like LiteLLM, Ollama, or Gotenberg, but AI isn't always checking to make sure those services are patched and protected from attackers,” the researchers said. “As more AI-enabled servers come online, malware like PoeLLM will continue to spread.”®

During a debate on Tuesday night, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine demonstrated why she and other Republicans are facing the very real prospect of losing power in this year’s midterm elections—thanks to her support for President Donald Trump and his unpopular agenda. Troy Jackson, Collins’ Democratic challenger, repeatedly pointed out during the debate that despite her ad campaign and political…

Source

Quick Take

• We have an exclusive clip of season 22, episode 6 of Taskmaster.
• In it, the contestants have been asked to “Do a Whoopsie,” without knowing exactly what that means.
• Isy Suttie dresses up as a clown and interrupts Alex Horne’s funeral.
• Nerdist take: Isy is the latest in a long line of contestants whose brain works in such a weird and wonderful way. Behind her constant smile is a peculiarly devilish sense of humor.

Every season of Taskmaster has at least one contestant whose brain works in such weird and wonderful ways. For the current season, Series 22, at the halfway point, that person tends to be Isy Suttie. The musical comedian always seems to come at tasks from a very left field direction. Behind her constant smile is a peculiarly devilish sense of humor. Nowhere is that more evident than in a task from this week’s episode six. In our exclusive clip (below), we get to see the contestants read the task at hand plus watch Isy offer a macabre version of a “Whoopsie.”

I always love the tasks which require interpreting the specific wording in your own unique style. “Do a Whoopsie” is such an open-ended and unclear direction. Isy’s interpretation is to dress like a nightmare clown who comes in hot with the wackiness without realizing she’s actually entering a funeral for Taskmaster’s assistant Alex Horne. That in and of itself would be a pretty good whoopsie, but Isy makes a further mockery of it by dropping a massive cake on the corpse’s face.

This clip made me really want to see what the other four contestants have to offer. Along with Isy this year are Chloe Petts, Matt Lucas, Nina Conti, and Richard Ayoade. It’s already been a hilarious season with Taskmaster Greg Davies in equally top form. There’s a reason Thursdays are my favorite days of the week.

Taskmaster

New episodes of Taskmaster drop on YouTube Thursdays. Episode six, “To void an oblong” And catch up with the first five episodes of season 22 here.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.

The post TASKMASTER’s Isy Suttie Has a Terrifying Whoopsie (Exclusive Episode 6 Clip) appeared first on Nerdist.

Quick Take

• Iconic Star Wars: Heir to the Empire author and Grand Admiral Thrawn creator Timothy Zahn will write his first Star Trek story for IDW Publishing in October, 2027.
• Next year sees the release of Star Trek: Roc’s Egg, which takes place on space station Deep Space Nine.
• Artist Ángel Hernández, known for Spider-Man and Star Trek: Voyager, will handle the art.
• Nerdist’s take: We think Timothy Zahn could do for the Star Trek expanded universe what he did for Star Wars many years ago.

Timothy Zahn remains one of the most famous creators associated with the galaxy far, far away. In 1991, he took Star Wars past Return of the Jedi in the first Expanded Universe novel, Heir to the Empire. This novel famously introduced the iconic Grand Admiral Thrawn. Now, Zahn is entering our galaxy, only hundreds of years into the future, with his first Star Trek work ever. We’re honored to exclusively reveal that Zahn joins the final frontier with a new original graphic novel from , Star Trek: Roc’s Egg, coming in October 2027. This story, illustrated by Ángel Hernández (Star Trek: Voyager), will take place on board Deep Space Nine. You can read the official description from IDW Publishing below:

Star Trek: Roc’s Egg Synopsis

We’re excited to share the official synopsis for Zahn’s exciting first foray into the world of Star Trek. Here’s what you can expect from Star Trek: Roc’s Egg.

Something is rotten on Deep Space 9. When a mysterious artifact known as a Roc’s Egg arrives on the station—and is seemingly destroyed in transit—a Federation JAG investigation is called in to uncover what really happened. But the deeper the team digs, the stranger the mystery becomes: a secret auction, a station full of wealthy collectors and dangerous criminals, a priceless artifact that may not be what it seems, and a murder waiting to happen. From acclaimed author Timothy Zahn and artist Ángel Hernández comes Star Trek: Roc’s Egg, a twisty new mystery set aboard Deep Space 9 where everyone has something to hide—and the truth may be more valuable than the treasure itself.

IDW Publishing Timothy Zahn Is a True Trekker

Despite his long association with Star Wars, Timothy Zahn has been a true Trekker for decades. He’s been a Federation fanboy ever since the original series was on TV, in fact. Here’s what Zahn had to say about trading in the Rebel Alliance for Starfleet as he heads into the world of Star Trek:

My association with Star Trek goes all the way back to 1966 and the original TV series. Now, after sixty years, I’ve been given the chance to add my own small grace note to that rich and vibrant symphony. This is a huge honor and privilege, and one which I will always cherish.

Jay Fisher

In a statement, IDW’s Heather Antos further shared, “Timothy Zahn’s work defines fandoms. His reputation for shaping some of the most high-profile franchises in space speaks for itself. But for me, this collaboration is especially personal. I’ve been a lifelong fan of his work, so getting to bring his voice to Star Trek is genuinely a dream come true. His incredible gift for intricate plotting, unforgettable characters, and mysteries that keep you guessing makes him the perfect storyteller to take us back to Deep Space Nine—a station where everyone has a secret, everyone has an agenda, and the truth is rarely as simple as it first appears. I can’t wait to see what Timothy does with this corner of the Star Trek universe. And I think fans are going to have an absolute blast trying to solve the mystery alongside him.”

Paramount Television Nerdist’s Take: We Believe Zahn Can Add as Many New Cool Elements to Star Trek as He Did for Star Wars

Countless Star Wars elements that Zahn introduced in his work decades ago have served as inspiration for modern-day Star Wars stories. And as fans of Deep Space Nine, we’re thrilled he’s choosing that series for his Star Trek debut. DS9 is one of the best Star Trek series in the franchise’s sixty-year history. And as huge fans, we’re glad it’s getting this honor. We can only imagine a Timothy Zahn version of the villainous Gul Dukat and the other Cardassians. The sky’s the limit. And hey, maybe some of the elements Zahn shares in the Star Trek: Roc’s Egg will come into play as Star Trek enters new eras in graphic novels, TV shows, and movies.

Eric Diaz is a staff writer at Nerdist and a Swiss Army knife of fandoms. Eric loves DC, Marvel, horror movies, and even Star Wars and Star Trek equally.

The post STAR WARS Author Timothy Zahn to Write First STAR TREK Graphic Novel (Exclusive) appeared first on Nerdist.

President Trump is still using your money to pay for his propaganda hype video commercials ahead of the midterms.

On Wednesday morning, another “Final Battle” commercial for the president aired on Fox & Friends, featuring a black and white clip of Trump walking while he references a “final battle.” It’s the same one that aired on September 27.

“This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and fascists,” he says in the ad. “We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

“Paid for by the U.S. Government” flashes at the bottom of the screen as the commercial concludes. The advertisement is virtually identical to a 2024 Trump campaign ad.

Trump announced Monday that his super PAC would pay for future ads, but it appears that’s not the case.

This commercial is the second installment of Trump’s effort to sway voters his way ahead of midterms. The administration is spending $20 million from the Department of Homeland Security budget to pay for them, claiming they’re necessary public service announcements. The first was that strange “Love Me” ad, which debuted late September on Fox News during Jesse Watters Primetime.

And these commercials aren’t convincing anyone. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, 86 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s use of taxpayer funds on the commercials. Even Republican Senators John Thune and Mike Rounds were critical, while Vice President JD Vance insisted that the ads were somehow “not partisan” and that they were “trying to tell a story.”

Whatever story that is doesn’t seem to matter ahead of midterms, as Americans struggling with rising prices need more than cool videos to assuage them.

The Department of Homeland Security radically reduced training requirements for local law enforcement officers whose departments had agreed to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In an email obtained by American Oversight, an ICE official whose name was redacted explained that the training had been reduced from four weeks of in-person instruction to just 40 hours of virtual courses, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. Additionally, training on real-world scenarios that officers might encounter in the field was eliminated entirely.

The email addressed to former ICE Director Todd Lyons and adviser David Venturella explained how the training had been “truncated” to meet demands that the course be shortened. Lyons resigned in May, and Venturella now leads the agency.

Since President Donald Trump reentered office, the number of local police departments collaborating with ICE has increased exponentially. Under the Biden administration, there were 135 active 287(g) agreements across 16 states. Now, more than 2,600 agencies are receiving compensation to assist in Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts, according to the Post. White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller demanded last year that ICE arrest 3,000 immigrants a day.

Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, told the Post that some of the materials cut from the training would have helped officers understand whether they had a lawful basis to arrest someone in the first place.

“So for example, who is actually a citizen, what is their immigration status, what grounds could possibly justify seeking their removal?” Chukwu said.

The dangerous consequences of these changes seem obvious: less training will only sow more confusion and chaos during arrests, which will inevitably lead to violent encounters between civilians and law enforcement.