The Labor Department's September report landed this morning well under the roughly 90,000 jobs economists expected, with the unemployment rate ticking up from 4.1 to 4.2 percent. Revisions did the real damage: July flipped from a 21,000-job gain to a 10,000-job loss, and August was marked down from 162,000 to 133,000, erasing about 60,000 previously reported gains. It's the softest labor print of the year heading into the final stretch before the midterms.
Republican outside groups, including the Senate Leadership Fund, are scaling back spending in North Carolina and Georgia and redirecting cash toward defending seats that were supposed to be safe. Democrat Jon Ossoff has been averaging an eight-point lead in Georgia, and former Governor Roy Cooper is up around nine in North Carolina. Meanwhile a new Fox News poll has Democrats leading the generic congressional ballot 52 to 46.
Federal agents arrested Ashton Hamed Ellaboudy, a 51-year-old electrical engineer from Richland, Washington, on charges of attempting to provide material support to the Iran-backed Houthis. Prosecutors say he was buying materials associated with explosives and drones. The Houthis are a designated foreign terrorist organization, and the arrest lands in the middle of an already white-knuckle standoff with Tehran.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says it canceled roughly 315,000 unauthorized enrollments covering more than 760,000 individuals. The clawback returns about 2.2 billion dollars in subsidies to the federal government, and the agency is also moving against the brokers who facilitated the sign-ups. Expect this to become a talking point in the health care fight both parties are already running on.
The Pentagon is sending seven additional warships and roughly 9,000 more troops to the Middle East, pushing regional force levels to about 50,000. Trump says Iran will be hit "very hard" if Tehran is tied to this week's suspected hijacking attempt aboard a FlyDubai flight bound for Israel, though no link has been established. The Navy's blockade of Iranian ports holds while the administration's counterterrorism chief insists the standoff will be resolved "imminently."
Riot police clashed with teenagers across France again today, with roughly 400 high schools shuttered and arrests since the unrest began approaching 2,000. At least 305 police and gendarmes have been injured amid tear gas in Strasbourg, fireworks fired at police lines in Marseille, and burning garbage bins in Rennes. The government is openly blaming the hard-left La France Insoumise for inciting the violence.
Kyiv sent more than a thousand drones into Russia, damaging a key oil facility near Moscow in what's being described as the largest strike on the capital region of the war. At least two people were killed. The timing is pointed: it comes right after Trump announced both sides had agreed to stop hitting each other's energy infrastructure.
A Falcon 9 lifted Crew-13 off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral on October 1, carrying NASA's Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canada's Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. They'll spend six months aboard the ISS, extending a 25-year unbroken human presence in low Earth orbit. Crew-12 heads home within the week after nearly eight months up there.
Unauthorized users got into unencrypted files at the Defense Manpower Data Center between October 2025 and July 2026, exposing Social Security numbers and employment details for 2.76 million living military and civilian personnel plus 294,000 deceased. The vulnerability was found July 16; notifications went out September 18 by postal mail. The Pentagon says it has no evidence yet that the data has been misused.
Brazil's general election has drawn more than 20,000 candidates, and the ballot reads like a comedy roster: "Plinio Trump," a 59-year-old pilot who drives a flag-covered car shouting "Make Brazil Great Again," plus a Pernambuco cabbie campaigning as the "Samurai Taxi Driver" off a viral karate video. There are also contenders running as Mick Jagger and Henrique Barack Obama. Brazilian election law is permissive about nicknames on ballots, and voters have embraced the tradition for decades.
