Feed aggregator

The shift comes after a UNICEF test found leading AI models struggled to accurately retrieve global development statistics.

Quick Take

• The musician behind the racy talking pumpkin song that has some parents upset wants you to know a real human wrote it (but not for kids).
• Peter McEvilley wrote “Wicked For One Night” in 2019, but the racy track was never intended for children.
• Nerdist’s Take: Everything about the inappropriate, sexy Jabberin’ Jack song is funny, minus the part where people think a computer could write it.

A few years ago a friend gave me a talking jack-o-lantern. It was new but didn’t have its box. So I did not know it was officially a Jabberin’ Jack Talking Animated Pumpkin from Mindscope. I only learned that today for maybe the funniest reason possible. We usually just put it on one specific setting where it says silly things. I never noticed ole Jabberin’ Jack also sings a surprisingly sexy pumpkin song. But now that one upset mom has it’s all anyone wants to talk about. That includes the musician who wrote it. And to those upset a talking pumpkin, something seemingly meant for children, belts a bawdy ballad about nighttime pleasure, he has an important message: AI did not write this sexy pumpkin song, a human did. He just didn’t write it for kids.

@glow.up.between.naps

Parents listen carefully to this before buying the viral Jabberin’ Jack pumpkin for your kids 😳 I was shocked when this song started playing. Just want everyone to be informed before they make this purchase? They tried to sneak that song in there. #JabberinJack #HalloweenDecor #MomTok #ParentTok#becareful

♬ original sound – Styled Between Naps

No one ever seemed to care or even notice Jabberin’ Jack’s song might be slightly inappropriate for kids until it went viral on social media. (It wouldn’t earn an R-rating. It’s definitely PG-13, though). Musician Peter McEvilley agrees because he wrote it in 2019. He told Business Insider he knew exactly what he was doing when he composed the song “Wicked For One Night” for the pumpkin to sing. In fairness, he says one the singer added the word “my” to one lyric. That extra word makes a certain pumpkin seed double entendre even racier than intended.

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LEGO Celebrates Halloween With New Jack-O-Lantern Set

The Pumpkin song is pretty funny, especially coming from a talking decoration. McEvilley says that was the point. The idea was to show that, “behind the villainous facade,” there is “a lonely pumpkin who wants to be loved.” Beautiful. He says he forgot about the song for years until the sudden controversy, which is also causing Mindscope to pull it from next year’s model of Jabberin’ Jack. “I was crying laughing at some of the comments,” he told Business Insider while stressing the track was never intended for kids.

Mindscope

Maybe someone, even just, like, one person at Mindscope should have considered this might be a product for kids? I don’t know, I don’t sell talking pumpkins who sing songs for a living. I just write about them.

Jokes aside, what McEvilley doesn’t find funny is that some people think the sexy pumpkin song is AI when it was all him. “It’s crazy sad that creativity, one of the greatest gifts we have as humans, has kind of been taken away in a way,” said the musician.

Yeah, we didn’t expect this story to turn so philosophical, but he’s right. If a computer did “write” a song like “Wicked For One Night,” it wouldn’t be as meaningful. It also wouldn’t be as funny. Both unto itself and as the way I found out the name of my talking jack-o’-lantern.

P.S. Here are the lyrics to Jabberin’ Jack’s sexy pumpkin song, “Wicked For One Night”:

I’ve made a life of scaring trick or treaters
It’s rewarding but I must say in the end
It tends to leave me feeling kind of empty
‘Cause even scary pumpkins need a friend

[Bridge]
Who wants to be wicked for one night?
Do I look mesmerizing in this light?
This villainous facade is just because I’m shy
Come closer, I have a kiss for you
And it tastes like pumpkin pie

[Chorus]
We’ll be wicked for one night
Morbid and nefarious
And when the sun goes down
‘Till morning it will just be us

[Bridge]
How would you like to scream all night?
I’ll fill you full of fright
Guide you in the darkest deeds
And spoil you with my roasted pumpkin seeds

[Chorus]
We’ll be wicked for one night
Morbid and nefarious
And when the sun goes down
‘Till morning it will just be us

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 Sexy Talking Pumpkin Song Controversy Turns Poignant appeared first on Nerdist.

Newly unsealed court filings show Microsoft privately called OpenAI's data practices "theft" while both companies scraped paywalled Times content, built datasets from it, and warned internally it would gut publishers.

Researchers based in China have devised a way to eavesdrop on signals handled by analog components in devices such as headphones, landline handsets, and smart devices by injecting electromagnetic (EM) signals. The technique, referred to as InjectEave, is not simply listening in on a low-frequency analog signal. It's an EM side-channel attack that overcomes one of the longstanding barriers to exploiting EM leakage: the faintness of RF signals in devices like headphones makes it difficult for adversarial listeners to separate signal from noise. Many different RF side-channel attacks have been explored, such as reading screen display emissions to reconstruct on-screen text or detecting the RF signals emitted by keys on a keyboard. But these techniques often prove impractical for passive EM capture because of the low signal-to-noise ratio. InjectEave trades passive signal capture for active signal manipulation. By transmitting a signal in the 0-9 MHz range – specifics have been withheld – an attacker can potentially modulate an otherwise difficult-to-detect audio signal so it can be captured by nearby equipment. "Our new project, InjectEave, shows that RF [radio frequency] signals can induce information leakage from everyday headphones, allowing an attacker to recover headphone audio from up to 30 meters away, including through walls," said Yan Long, assistant professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in Guangzhou, in an email to The Register. "We have verified the new vulnerability on multiple commercial devices including devices from Sony, HP, Philips, etc." Long and HKUST co-authors Haoran Yan, Ziyu Shao, and Shuhao Zhang, along with Qinhong Jiang of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, describe their work in a paper [PDF] titled "Injected and Leaked: Actively Inducing Side-Channel Leakage Using Electromagnetic Injection and Hardware Nonlinearity," which was presented at USENIX Security 2026. The attack targets non-linear components found in computer systems, such as amplifiers, analog-to-digital converters, power converters, and switching MOSFETs. The interplay of the injected signals, the hardware, and the target audio signals essentially modulates the target signal so that it leaks and is detectable by the adversary. Conducting an InjectEave attack requires commodity RF equipment: a USRP B210 software-defined radio; antennas for injection and reception; a Siglent SSA3075X Plus spectrum analyzer; a laptop for controlling the SDR; and optionally an RF power amplifier to increase attack range. The researchers tested the technique with 11 off-the-shelf devices. One obvious application would be espionage, allowing an attacker to listen in on conversations carried over headphones or a landline phone. It could also be used to infer personal activities in households with smart fans or lamps through the monitoring and analysis of control signals and power consumption. Tested devices include: Sony ZX110AP (2014, wired headphones); Apple Earbuds (2016, wired earbuds); UGreen MAX2, Philips TAH2020, HP H231R (2024, 2025, 2023 wireless headphones); Flyingvoice P23GW (2023, VoIP landline); OIDIRE ODI-MF10A and Xiaomi BPLDS10DM (2023, 2025 smart fans); and JINGZAO JDO-06 and Xiaomi 1S (2024, 2019 smart lamps). "Our tests show that injection-induced side-channel attacks could eavesdrop on the majority of these devices from over 2m away and through walls, with a maximum distance of 30m for recovering intelligible headphone audio," the researchers state in their paper, noting that their tests indicate these scenarios are plausible in the wild. For the devices listed by the researchers, the maximum demonstrated attack range was generally between 1 and 6 meters, although they separately demonstrated headphone eavesdropping at up to 30 meters using an RF amplifier. Even so, the researchers documented various scenarios where eavesdropping could be done through hotel room walls and using attack hardware concealed in a nearby suitcase or within office furniture. The researchers note that non-linear components are common in computer systems and that any device with parts that handle signal stepping (e.g. power converters) may be vulnerable to InjectEave. "InjectEave is immune to digital defenses such as encryption, masking, and randomization, because the leakage comes from the analog path," the researchers conclude. "Hardware-aware mitigations such as twisted-pair wiring, shielding, and filtering can lower the energy that the injected carrier couples into the device, reducing the exposure. These mitigations raise the bar, but they do not guarantee immunity." ®

Quick Take

• The Vampire Lestat is now available to pre-order on Blu-ray. The Blu-ray will have a variety of Special Features.
• The Vampire Lestat will also receive a limited-edition Collector’s Box Set Blu-ray release dedicated to the Beautiful Unwell.
• You can stream The Vampire Lestat on AMC+ today, as we get ready for season four Queen of the Damned.
• Dive Deeper: Relive all the magic of The Vampire Lestat‘s final season with our cast and creator interviews.

The Vampire Lestat came in like a wrecking ball when it first aired on our screens. The season was unlike anything we’d ever seen on TV: a chaotic, beautiful, intense, and wild ride through Lestat’s psyche. We loved every minute of the fantastical vampiric adventures and were delighted to sit down with several of the series’ stars throughout its run to break down character motivations, romance arcs, and the show’s many complex plots. But since the show’s finale aired in July of 2026, we’ve really been missing it. And although Lestat always likes to leave his fans wanting more, he never wants them to go hungry. The Vampire Lestat will soon be released on Blu-ray, giving us a whole new way to enjoy the majesty of the vampire diva. And YES, there will be a limited-edition collector’s box set edition of The Vampire Lestat available for sale—so that all the Beautiful Unwell can feast. Here’s what Lestat has on offer for his most loyal of followers.

Is The Vampire Lestat Available on Blu-Ray? AMC

Yes, you can now officially pre-order The Vampire Lestat on Blu-ray. This gorgeous physical media version of The Vampire Lestat will arrive on November 3, 2026. (And you might recognize a familiar name being quoted on the cover. 😉 )

In addition to the complete first season of The Vampire Lestat, the Blu-ray will feature a bonus array of Special Features. These delicious additions will let you delve further into the story of The Vampire Lestat by spotlighting the series’ actors, music, and, of course, devoted community of fans.

These include:

• The Vampire Lestat After Dark Companion Series 
• Go Behind the Scenes with “Backstage Pass”
• Laying Down the Tracks
• Panel at Comic-Con 2025
• Karaoke and Lyric Videos
• The Vampire Lestat: One Night Only Live Highlights

AMC

You can snag The Vampire Lestat Blu-ray for $24.99.

Will There Be a Limited-Edition Collector’s Box Set Celebrating The Vampire Lestat? AMC

Also YES! The Vampire Lestat: The Beautiful Unwell (Limited Edition Blu-ray) is the show’s limited-edition Collector’s Box Set release. This limited-edition run probably won’t get another restock after it sells out, so if you’re one of the Beautifully Unwell, you’d better vampire run over to this page and order it today.

But what’s the difference between the normal The Vampire Lestat Blu-ray and the Limited-Edition Box Set? Well, they both feature all the episodes and the special features. But the Limited-Edition The Vampire Lestat Blu-ray has something that’s very important to Lestat… Style, darling. The Collector’s Edition will come “with exclusive keepsakes celebrating the music, spectacle, and legend of Lestat.”

These include:

• Official Beautiful Unwell Membership Card: Receive a premium metal membership card featuring a unique member number, making every card a one-of-a-kind limited-edition collectible. 
• Exclusive Soundtrack CD: Featuring 11 songs from the show, this exclusive physical CD is available only in The Beautiful Unwell Limited Edition Box Set. 
• Blu-ray with Exclusive Artwork: Add a unique collector’s piece to your shelf with a Blu-ray featuring exclusive artwork available only in this edition. 
• Exclusive Tour Book: Relive the tour through an exclusive photo book filled with unforgettable images from the stage and behind the scenes.

AMC

Okay, the Exclusive Tour Book really got us; what a fun addition. Plus the Exclusive Soundtrack CD is very enticing. We always want MORE physical media, and, for now, this The Vampire Lestat CD is ONLY available in The Beautiful Unwell Limited Edition Box Set. Not to mention, all of it is just so beautiful!!! Ugh, we are the Beautiful Unwell, and we want this.

The Vampire Lestat: The Beautiful Unwell (Limited Edition Blu-ray) Box Set is slightly more expensive than the normal Blu-ray. It costs $79.99. Lestat would tell you he’s worth it.

Stream The Vampire Lestat Today and Get Ready for Queen of the Damned

If you’re too impatient to wait for the Blu-ray in any form, you CAN stream The Vampire Lestat right now on AMC+. (Although we always must recommend physical media.) You can also rewatch the first two seasons of the series under the name Interview with the Vampire.

Happily, the series has already been renewed for season four. It will return under yet another new name, Queen of the Damned. The show will take on adapting Anne Rice’s book of the same name, and we already have a laundry list of things we’d like to see happen in the season. And yes, by that we mean a Devil’s Minion kiss.

Rotem Rusak is the Editor-in-Chief at Nerdist. She is a great lover of the anti-hero and is always ready for a new ship to set sail. In her work, she likes to combine fandom passion with journalistic sensibilities. Follow her on Instagram.

The post Is THE VAMPIRE LESTAT Available on Blu-Ray? Is There a Collector’s Edition? appeared first on Nerdist.

More than 60 percent of Americans believe it’s at least moderately likely that artificial intelligence will kill us all, according to a Politico survey released Wednesday.

It’s easy to see why. Arguments that AI companies are “gambling with our lives” have dominated the news this week. But despite our fear that AI might kill us en masse, another new poll shows that very few Americans know our government is already using AI to do just that abroad. 

The US-Israel war on Iran is not only the least popular war the United States has ever waged, but also represents an unprecedented application of AI in warfare. New data from the Institute for Global Affairs and YouGov shows that the present weaponization of AI has flown under the radar, with most Americans largely unaware of our own military’s AI use. 

“People would be pretty shocked that what they’re using for their homework or to summarize emails is also being used by intelligence officers.”

Only 8 percent of Americans have heard “a lot” about the military’s use of AI in the war with Iran. The majority, almost two thirds, have heard “only a little,” and four in ten have heard “nothing at all.”  

“We wanted to get a gut check on, do Americans know this is happening?” survey co-author Jonathan Guyer said in an interview. Despite a long history of US military development eventually boomeranging back home, the answer to that question might be “no”—notwithstanding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s relentless messaging about the “AI-first Department of War.” 

“People would be pretty shocked that what they’re using for their homework or to summarize emails is also being used by intelligence officers,” Guyer said. 

Cameron Stanley, the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, wrote in June that xAI’s Grok “enabled U.S. forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.” 

That admission, part of the administration’s case for the national security importance of Elon Musk’s data centers, is just the tip of the iceberg. The Pentagon’s Maven Smart System, built by Palantir, also uses Anthropic’s Claude AI—the same program that people use to create AI boyfriends for themselves or draft awkward texts to their roommates—to “semi-autonomously rank targets by strategic importance, drafting automated legal justifications for each strike along the way,” according to Katie Livingstone of Military Times. 

Claude’s target selection is reportedly only about 60 percent accurate in good conditions, 30 percent accurate in bad weather. So Pentagon officials claim there’s always a human in the loop when selecting who to bomb.

“We follow the law and humans make decisions,” Hegseth told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May. “AI is not making lethal decisions.”

But it’s making lethal recommendations, which don’t appear to receive enough human oversight to prevent atrocities. In February, the US military fired Tomahawk missiles directly at a girls’ school in Minab, Iran and killed over 150 people—most of them young children. Seven months later, UN experts called the strike a crime against humanity. 

As AI companies enter the battlefield, “the scale of atrocities committed…is rising correspondingly.”

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, much of the US news coverage focused on whether Claude was used to select the school as a target. But the fact that a human was at some point involved does not lessen the harm done.

At a congressional human rights hearing September 16, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Steven Feldstein explained how AI has facilitated a massive ramp-up in the speed of missile target selection. 

“In the Iran war, during the first week of hostilities alone, the Pentagon reported it had struck more than 3,000 targets,” Feldstein said. By the time a ceasefire was announced 38 days later, that number of targets had risen to 13,000. 

“In Israel, AI targeting systems have played a crucial role in supporting its military campaign against Gaza,” Feldstein added. One system, known as Lavender, identified 37,000 individuals as potential airstrike targets in the initial weeks of the war. As AI companies make their way onto the battlefield, Feldstein said, “the scale of atrocities committed by warring parties is rising correspondingly.” 

In January of this year, Pete Hegseth released a memo directing the United States to embed AI in every part of the “kill chain.” As it moves to comply, the Department of Defense is placing relatively few checks on what technology companies can or cannot do when the United States is waging war. “We’re in a situation where the companies are essentially regulating themselves,” Guyer, of the Institute for Global Affairs, said. 

Ethical principles for AI use that the Department of Defense adopted in 2020 require only that military AI be “governable” by humans. And the additional safeguards AI policy groups tend to propose revolve around stopping fully automated technology—not regulating the semi-autonomous technology that is already being used to kill at scale. 

As American policymakers debate potential future AI threats, it seems as though the immediate threat of AI—the ongoing expansion of those “kill chains”—is not even making it into the AI safety discussion. Nor are the victims of AI-assisted warmaking.

That means tech companies are still the ones making the rules: “Their terms of service are defining how AI systems are being used for war to a greater extent than any laws that have been written, or to a greater extent than even executive branch guidelines,” Guyer said. 

A few days into our weeklong stay in Zacatecas, Mexico, my wife Sarah and I had already taken in several live performances around the hilly cobblestone city of the Festival Zacatecas Del Folclor Internacional, and sampled several of the colorful eateries. 

One favorite dining spot we stumbled on, and then frequented, was Gordita Doña Julia. A gordita is a traditional Mexican street food made from corn masa dough. The name translates to chubby, which describes its shape—a thick, plump tortilla that is cooked and then slit open and filled with various ingredients. They made for a great breakfast with an egg, salsa and cheese filling which ran for about $1.25 each. We also went into Sanborns, a popular department store in the center of town for lunch now and again.

STREET FOOD  This street vendor was a common sight around the city, from early morning to the evening hours, with his tray of donuts carried on his head.

A little research and a couple tips from people on the street led us to a city bus for a short ride out to the town of Guadalupe. It’s about 30 minutes away and is known for its beautiful church, convent and museum.

Zacatecas was first settled by the Spanish in 1546. In the mid-17th century, Christian missionaries developed a significant presence and in 1678, construction began on the Convento de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe—the first major church in Guadalupe. In the 18th century, Franciscans built a hospital and college, along with more churches and chapels. 

HISTORY The 18th century Convento de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe near Zacatecas is the centerpiece of the small town of Guadalupe, Mexico.

Noteworthy—especially in California—is that the college was a training center for monks who were sent north to evangelize in territories of Mexico and what is now the southwest United States, including the 21 missions that dot the map of California.

We roamed the ancient hallways of the church and convent to check out the giant paintings and other artwork from its past. 

Robed monks and other religious figures, many in stages of sacrifice and struggle, fill framed canvas paintings, many embellished with floating cupids and glowing celestial rays. 

FROM ABOVE The view from the Teleférico de Zacatecas offers outstanding views of the city of Zacatecas, Mexico.

The next day, after sharing a Cubano sandwich at Sanborns, we filtered our way through town, up a few hills to the Teliforica station. 

The Zacatecas Cable Car connects La Bufa Hill with Grillo HIll that overlooks the city. It was opened in 1979 and now transports around 300,000 people a year on a 650-meter journey at a height of about 85 meters. The views from the dangling gondolas are incredible. Many of the homes below have created giant paintings, some copies of world masterpieces, for the sake of cable car riders.

In the next part of this series we continue our visits to the folkdance festival and dig deeper into the historic silver mining city.

“It’s a milestone deal in making the Western Hemisphere the center of the global energy system,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Wednesday.

He was talking about a fellow Trump ally’s oil deal with Venezuela: oil tycoon Harold Hamm of Continental Resources, a US petroleum and natural gas production company, who announced a preliminary deal with PDVSA, Venezuela’s national oil company, that same day. The agreement, which allows Continental Resources to develop and operate 126,000 acres of oil fields—an estimated 30 billion barrels of oil—was presented by Hamm, with Wright beside him, at this week’s G20 energy summit in Houston.

Hamm is in Trump’s inner circle and has advised the president on energy issues to benefit his business ventures, including fracking, and personally contributed $4.3 million to Trump-aligned PACs for his 2024 election campaign. 

The deal comes after Chevron became the first known major US oil company earlier this month to expand production in Venezuela since the Trump administration seized President Nicolás Maduro in January, investing $7 billion over five years to more than double its production to 600,000 barrels a day. 

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that ExxonMobil is close to signing its own deal with Venezuela, which could be completed as early as the end of this month and include more than 50 billion barrels in oil reserves (Venezuela says it has about 300 billion barrels in total reserves). The potential Exxon deal is notable as the company has repeatedly tried to win more money in restitution after former Venezuela President Hugo Chávez nationalized major foreign oil operations in 2007, forcing Exxon to abandon its Venezuela projects. 

While some oil executives remain hesitant to invest in Venezuelan oil due to the uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s August deal with the country, the challenges of scaling up production, and the chaotic relationship between the US and Venezuela, it’s become more clear that it has opened the door for his friends and other wealthy companies to invest in the country’s massive oil reserves.

Since the Trump administration captured Maduro, acting President Delcy Rodríguez has overhauled regulations on oil to encourage outside investment, including lowering tax rates on production. Continental Resources cited these changes as a major reason to pursue its oil deal.

As Jeff Colgan, a political science professor at Brown University, told me earlier this month, the winners of Trump’s oil agreement won’t lower gas prices for American consumers or help everyday Venezuela residents—it will just “line the pockets of some American companies.”

A federal judge ordered the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to give at least 30-days notice before beginning any construction on the prestigious national theater—including its demolition.

In a brief order Thursday, Judge Christopher Cooper said the Donald Trump-appointed Board of Trustees needed to provide written notice to Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty, the plaintiff in the court case against the venue’s closure, more than 30 days before “any changes to the scope of the project plans … including but not limited to any ‘demolition’ of the Center’s main building.”

The order comes after Trump was spotted through the window of Air Force One looking at a large posterboard emblazoned with the words “KENNEDY CENTER DEMOLISH,” and a legal observer said in court filings Wednesday night that she had seen a “forklift run into and hit the pillars on the building several times.”

Speaking to reporters on the tarmac earlier that evening, Trump made it clear that he couldn’t be bothered to renovate a former president’s memorial because he hadn’t been allowed to plaster his name on it.

“I’d like to be able to save it but it’s going to take a lot of subsidy into the future and for us as an administration to want to do that, I think the Trump administration should be recognized,” he said.

It’s not clear what the legal recourse would be for the president’s handpicked board if they skirt the judge’s order—and it wouldn’t be the first time Trump or one of his allies tried to ignore a court decision.

The board voted Tuesday to immediately close the famed venue for renovations, shortly after a federal court blocked Trump’s attempt to put his name on the building. Two days later, Matt Floca, the Kennedy Center’s executive director and chief operating officer, announced the center would close immediately for at least seven days due to “acute risks to public safety resulting from continued structural deterioration.”

In his order Thursday, Cooper denied Beatty’s request for an emergency hearing to challenge the sudden closure.

As it turns out, it’s not legally sound for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to intimidate people who send strongly worded emails. In a recent court ruling, Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sided with David Streever’s First Amendment case stating that the Department of Homeland Security had overstepped its bounds by tracking him down to…

Source

Lend a hand to care for and beautify county beaches at the Annual Coastal Cleanup Day. On Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon, more than 50 cleanup efforts will be held at beaches, rivers and waterways throughout the Monterey Bay area. The effort aims to remove litter from natural areas en masse. Registration is required. – Lily Belli

Here are more upcoming local events you might be interested in:

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, which has sent observers to monitor every U.S. federal election for the past two decades, has yet to receive an invitation from the Trump administration, the group told Democracy Docket Thursday.

The group typically plans a “needs assessment mission” in order to evaluate the environment, preparations, and electoral processes ahead of an upcoming federal election in the United States. With less than a month before early voting begins in some states, the organization says it’s still waiting for a call.

“The Office sends a needs assessment mission upon receiving an invitation from the OSCE participating State where the elections are occurring,” a spokesperson for the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights said in a statement. “We are currently waiting on that invitation from the United States.”

The group’s website indicates that it has no current plans to send a mission ahead of the November midterms. While the size and scope of its missions have varied over the years, the United States has consistently extended an invitation to OSCE observers since 2002.

The exclusion of election watchdogs is a troubling escalation of the Trump administration’s continued efforts to undermine the credibility of our nation’s elections.

Eric Bjornlund, president of Democracy International, told Democracy Docket that the exclusion of the election watchdogs was par for the course when it came to the Trump administration.

“It seems to be just another data point in this mess where the executive branch of our national government seems to be trying to sow confusion about whether elections are going to be well-run and credible or not,” he said. “And it just seems to be more evidence that they don’t have the commitment to fair elections that past U.S. governments have shown.”

For years, President Donald Trump has pushed conspiracy theories that undermine the safety and security of federal elections—theories he’s attempted to turn into policy since entering office for the second time. Earlier this week, the president threw a massive temper tantrum because the Supreme Court curbed his last-minute effort to gut mail-in voting.

The company suspended service in the city in April after one of its robotaxis got swept away.

President Donald Trump made it very clear this week that he’s holding the future of the Kennedy Center ransom, telling reporters that only his benevolence—and his name emblazoned on the building—can save the institution from bankruptcy. “I’m the one capable of fixing it—and then have to subsidize it for years to come—because you will lose with the Kennedy Center,” Trump rambled.

Source

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. 

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