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With 13 days to Election Day, President Trump rallied in Pendleton, South Carolina for appointed Senate candidate Darline Graham, who is seeking a full six-year term for the seat once held by her late brother, Lindsey Graham. Trump says he'll spend upward of $400 million to hold the GOP's majorities. Democrats are counter-programming with a five-state Kamala Harris swing and a $1.2 million ad buy in deep-red Mississippi.
A New York Times/Siena survey puts likely voters behind Democratic House candidates 52 to 41 percent — an 11-point gap that would threaten Republican control of the chamber. A separate trend line shows GOP support among rural voters off by 14 points amid diesel and cost-of-living complaints. Republicans argue early-vote turnout and candidate-specific races tell a friendlier story than the national generic number.
Consumer prices rose 0.6 percent in September and 3.7 percent year over year, with gasoline up 9.1 percent for the month, electricity up 4.4 percent annually, and piped natural gas up 5 percent. Unemployment held steady at 4.1 percent. The affordability fight has widened past the pump and the grocery aisle into childcare — now topping 13,000 dollars a year — plus housing and the raw cost of raising a family.
Rep. Ilhan Omar is facing dual federal investigations into her financial disclosures and her immigration history, with agents having searched her Washington home on October 12 and seized her phone. House Oversight Chairman James Comer says a winery owned by Omar's husband has been shut down amid fraud claims, and border czar Tom Homan says denaturalization is on the table if fraud is proven. Omar denies wrongdoing and calls it political persecution.
U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff sat down with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg Wednesday, pressing to restart trilateral U.S.–Russia–Ukraine technical talks toward a settlement. Trump has been publicly leaning on Volodymyr Zelenskyy to cut a deal, warning of consequences if he refuses to negotiate. Nearly two years of administration effort has yielded no breakthrough, and both armies are still trading daily long-range strikes.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that Witkoff's session with Zelenskyy went well and that the resulting ideas would be carried to Moscow. It's the clearest signal yet of a shuttle-diplomacy sequence rather than a single summit. Even so, Rubio's own read is that Kyiv and Moscow remain far apart on terms.
Trump said the U.S. must decide whether to lock in victory over Iran the nice way or the not nice way, as his team weighs further strikes to stop Tehran rebuilding nuclear weapons capability. War Secretary Pete Hegseth, back from an unannounced Israel trip and a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, confirmed American forces are ready if ordered. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian countered with red lines: lift sanctions, drop the threats, and "not a gram" of uranium leaves the country.
Trump announced a 1.5 billion dollar federal investment in semiconductor production in North Carolina, paired with a separate Commerce Department-backed project. Sibelco, which supplies the high-purity quartz that underpins chipmaking, plans to sink hundreds of millions into its North Carolina operations. The goal is pulling foundational chip supply off Taiwan and onto American soil.
The Defense Department unveiled roughly 350 million dollars in quantum computing initiatives, building on executive orders that pulled IBM and Google into a national quantum and post-quantum cryptography effort. The security logic is blunt: whoever gets a useful quantum machine first can read everyone else's encrypted traffic. Critics note the hard part isn't the funding announcement — it's proving the hardware actually works at scale.
A Canadian visitor, Mitchell Fairbarn, was found guilty Monday of animal cruelty after grabbing a flamingo out of the wildlife habitat at the Flamingo Las Vegas at five in the morning and hauling it up to his 14th-floor hotel room. Prosecutors argued the bird was injured in the drunken encounter, which was captured on video. The hotel is, in fact, named after the bird.
