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President Trump rallied voters in Dayton, Ohio, stumping for Sen. Jon Husted and insisting public polling hasn't accounted for the fact that he's personally on the trail this cycle. He leaned hard on AI data-center investment as an Ohio jobs story and pledged to "defeat the communists once and for all." With the midterms a month out, the Ohio swing is part of a broader push into states where the economy is cutting against the GOP.
Half a year after Operation Epic Fury began, the national average for gasoline remains above four dollars a gallon, with diesel well north of six. Inflation is running at 3.4 percent and gas is up more than 27 percent year over year, which is why 31 percent of adults now name inflation as the nation's top problem — more than double the next answer. Real per capita disposable income has barely budged since January 2025, historically a very bad sign for the party in power.
Corrections Commissioner Frank Strada has resigned after Wednesday's botched lethal injection of Christa Pike, who survived two doses of pentobarbital and roughly seven needle attempts and remains hospitalized in critical condition. Gov. Bill Lee has retained former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton for an independent third-party review and called off the state's remaining execution this year. Sen. Marsha Blackburn has responded by calling for Tennessee to bring back the electric chair.
Attorney General Todd Blanche pushed back Sunday on reports that Justice Department election monitors deployed for the midterms would be armed, calling the idea "completely false." He argued federal election monitoring is a long-standing practice, not a new Trump-era initiative, and said Congress ought to credit the administration for working to guarantee fair elections. The denial lands amid rising friction over federal presence at polling places next month.
Tehran says there's no military solution while refusing to accept the Trump administration's nuclear terms, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi floating a plan he claims could reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days. A 60-day preliminary ceasefire extension agreed over the weekend includes winding down the US naval blockade. Trump predicts the war wraps "very soon" — most likely, he says, right after the midterms — and that oil prices will come "tumbling down."
UAE Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi confirmed that co-pilot Hamam al-Hammami attacked the captain of Tel Aviv-bound Flight FZ1073 with a cockpit crash axe and tried to seize the controls in an attempted terrorist act. Captain Smit Machchhar says the 29-year-old Omani asked to pray minutes before striking him from behind; Israeli passengers stormed the cockpit and off-duty pilots landed the jet in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Reports say Oman Air had grounded Hammami back in 2024 over visits to radical Islamist websites.
Spanish National Police began dismantling a sprawling beach encampment in the North African exclave of Ceuta on Sunday, deploying roughly 350 officers. The camp grew after more than 70,000 migrants stormed the border from Morocco in July, overwhelming the enclave's capacity. The operation is Madrid's most forceful response yet to a crisis that has become a flashpoint in European migration politics.
US District Judge Sara E. Hill ruled that a Tulsa County deputy violated the Fourth Amendment by using Flock license-plate-reader data to reconstruct a month of a driver's travel — more than 50 logged sightings across multiple states — without a warrant or probable cause. Hill wrote that the technology is "approaching the dragnet type law enforcement practice" the Supreme Court warned about in 1983, and suppressed the resulting evidence. Flock says it expects the ruling to be overturned on appeal; roughly 119,000 of its cameras are now deployed nationwide.
A Drexel University study of more than 833,000 people found that people with voice disorders were 58 percent more likely to develop dementia or cognitive impairment. When hearing loss was present alongside vocal problems, the risk roughly doubled. The findings, published in the Journal of Voice, point toward speech as a cheap, noninvasive early screening signal.
New Gallup numbers show faith in college education has collapsed: just 31 percent now call a degree "very important," down from 70 percent in 2013. Twenty-nine percent say it's "not too important" — up from six percent — and a mere 12 percent believe college is actually affordable. A 39-point slide in thirteen years is one of the fastest reversals of public opinion on any American institution.
