The last two years have been, she says, “an emotional roller coaster.” She voted for Donald Trump for president, immigration authorities took away her husband, she was left alone to run the freight trucking business and care for their three children, and she watched her life plans slowly slip through her fingers. Now there are exactly 20 days left until the U.S. midterm elections and no campaign promise—neither from the Republicans nor the Democrats—has convinced Jessica Ruiz about the need to get up on November 3, drive through the streets of Miami and go to the polling place for Florida’s 28th District.

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A woman in her 70s holds a sign against the World Health Organization (WHO) in the rain outside the World Health Summit in Berlin, one of the main international forums on global health. The image catches the eye of Gevorg Tamamyan, an Armenian physician and candidate to lead the agency. “When I was a child, the WHO meant trust. Why has that trust become so fragile?” he asks hours later during the first debate among several of the seven contenders to succeed Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

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Despite years of political defeats in Texas, Democrats are hoping that the 2026 midterm elections will finally turn a Senate seat in the staunchly red state purple. James Talarico, a rising star within the party, is seen as one of the keys to achieving that new shade. For Republicans, he has become one of the biggest challenges in this closely contested campaign. So much so that a substantial share of the money being spent in the race has gone not toward promoting their controversial Senate candidate, Attorney General Ken Paxton, but toward attacking his opponent.

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Artificial intelligence is also making its way into the world of books. EL PAÍS examined the use of AI in a sample of 119 popular books published in 2025 and 2026, analyzing titles that appeared on the bestseller lists at Amazon.es and the Spanish bookstore chain Casa del Libro, as well as the winners of a major literary prize.

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The latest economic forecasts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) do not bring good news on inflation for Donald Trump, who, less than a month before the midterm elections, is facing his lowest approval ratings, largely because of his handling of the economy.

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There are three versions of Saint John’s Book of the Apocalypse, a text that never loses relevance and now seems to presage the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI).

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This past summer has been, for Europe, “the summer of truth,” as Ursula von der Leyen said a couple of weeks ago in her State of the Union debate speech. The president of the European Commission was warning about the consequences of global warming, which has again struck the continent hard. And the Copernicus Climate Change Service quantifies this sweltering summer in its seasonal assessment, published on October 2. The season in Europe was marked by heatwaves that were unusually intense and early (the first arrived in May). Across the continent this was the third-warmest summer on record. But focusing on western Europe, the summer of 2026 was the worst on record. It surpassed 2003, which shocked many EU countries with tens of thousands of deaths linked to extreme heat.

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Digital surveillance and data leaks may seem far removed from everyday life, but they are becoming increasingly common. In Venezuela, for example, authorities blocked messaging apps and social media platforms including Signal, X, TikTok and Telegram, as well as YouTube, VPN services and websites. In Nicaragua, independent media outlets had their domains blocked. In Paraguay, a leak from the electoral authorities exposed the data of nearly seven million people. And in Argentina, more than 665,000 medical records were put up for sale.

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The Colombian city of Medellín woke up on October 1 to good news. According to official figures from the city administration, September recorded the lowest number of murders in 50 years: just five homicides in the city of 2.5 million inhabitants, 22 fewer than in September 2025.

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A man was shot and wounded during an arrest operation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in New York on Thursday. The shooting occurred in the Marble Hill neighborhood of the Bronx at about 4.00 p.m. local time, the police said. Besides the wounded man, there was a five-year-old child inside the vehicle who was reportedly unharmed.

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The leader of the Venezuelan opposition in exile, María Corina Machado, has decided to intervene in the United States midterm elections. She did so by publicly endorsing Republican congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, who is seeking a fourth term in the House of Representatives for Florida’s 27th District. The statement, released Wednesday via video, comes at a particularly sensitive moment for the Cuban-American lawmaker, who has clashed with Donald Trump over her criticism of the White House’s immigration policy and who faces an increasingly tight race in Miami.

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The inauguration in Brazil includes a moment of enormous symbolism that comes courtesy of the architect Óscar Niemeyer. The elected head of state arrives at the Praça dos Três Poderes and ascends to power on foot, walking up the ramp that leads into Planalto Palace. “In 2027, I will climb the ramp with my father,” Flávio Bolsonaro repeatedly promised during the presidential campaign; he is now the favorite to win the October 25 runoff after attracting 47% of the vote last Sunday over incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s 45%. Flávio knows that his supporters prefer the original Bolsonaro to the copy. He has also declared that, if he defeats President Lula on October 25, his first move will be to pardon Jair Messias Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for attempting a coup.

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Canadian poet Anne Carson wins the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”

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When Republican Greg Abbott was re-elected governor of Texas in 2022, his margin over opponent Beto O’Rourke was nearly 11 percentage points. Less than a month before the midterm elections, however, polls no longer show him with a comfortable lead. Survey averages put Democratic candidate Gina Hinojosa just over two points behind and rapidly closing the gap, raising alarm among Democrats over the need to boost campaign funding in the final stretch.

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Maricarmen Abascal faced four eviction attempts, and the last one succeeded. It happened two weeks ago. The 87-year-old woman left her Retiro home in a wheelchair; she had lived there for almost her entire life. Once outside, she was helped onto a stretcher and taken to Gregorio Marañón Hospital. She died there on Wednesday.

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For decades, one of the best-known stories in science was told like a movie. In 1953, at the age of 23, James Watson visited Maurice Wilkins’s laboratory at King’s College London. There, Wilkins showed him a photograph of DNA taken by Rosalind Franklin, and Watson had an epiphany. “The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” Watson wrote in The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, the book in which he recounted, 15 years later, how he and Francis Crick unraveled the structure of DNA.

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Right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, who hopes to win Brazil’s presidential election before the end of the month, announced Tuesday that he intends to leverage the large parliamentary bloc won by his party, the Liberal Party (PL), in Sunday’s vote to push through deep changes. The son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup against President Lula’s government, said at a campaign event in Goiânia, near Brasília, that he wants to use the PL’s legislative strength to appoint the presidents of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate and to “reform the Constitution, to redemocratize the country, so that institutions once again respect the Constitution.”

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John Roberts, the discreet justice who has presided over the United States Supreme Court for two decades, was upset some time ago that people believed the nation’s highest court was making “political decisions.” In several polls, Americans said they were worried not only about how much power the court had amassed but also about all the rulings that have ended up bolstering Donald Trump and his control over the federal government.

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When attorney Vanessa Potkin learned about the botched execution of inmate Christa Pike, she worried that her client, Melissa Lucio, would hear what had happened in Tennessee and think about what might happen to her. The Latina has spent nearly 18 years on death row in a Texas prison trying to prove she is innocent of causing her two-year-old daughter’s death.

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