There is less than a month left until the midterm elections on November 3. The outcome will determine which party controls both houses of Congress and begin shaping the post-Donald Trump era.
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Édgar Vázquez Silva’s worst fears came true. His boss at the Stone County sheriff’s office in Mississippi called him and asked him to turn in his badge and uniform. The order was clear: all department officers had to be U.S. citizens or, at minimum, permanent residents.
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In early 2025, Donald Trump became the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl. He had just returned to the White House and his approval ratings were higher than ever. A few months earlier, he had won the election with a 12-point lead among male voters, which encouraged him to embark on something of a tour of some of the principal cathedrals of American men’s sport: on December 14, he attended the traditional Army-Navy college football game; on February 9, he was at the Super Bowl; on February 16, he attended the NASCAR Daytona 500; and on June 8, he was present at UFC 316, shortly after which he announced that he would stage a UFC fight at the White House to celebrate his 80th birthday.
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Between global warming, a rampant inequality whose clearest expression is the housing crisis, and artificial intelligence (AI), much of the world lives with a sword of Damocles hanging over its head. No wonder. The era we live in is seasoned with forest fires that make even the most stubborn believe in a climate hell, professionals who fear imminent replacement by server farms that neither get sick nor protest, young people moving back in with their parents because they cannot afford their own homes, billionaires talking about sending us to Mars, and a global south of 3.5 billion poor people who increasingly have less to lose.
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As Mary Beard writes in her highly entertaining book on the Parthenon, it is the monument that has moved more people to tears than any other, perhaps second only to the Taj Mahal.
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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Zhong Zihao, 20, has heard that the area around Chijian Lake, in southeast China, was farmland before the rice paddies gave way to factories. It is hard to imagine that landscape among the industrial sheds, bridges, roads and buildings that now rise on the reservoir’s shores. Zhong knows his hometown used to be one of the poorest and least industrialized corners of Fujian province, but now, he says with pride, “when I introduce myself, I only have to say I’m from Ningde, the CATL place.” “For a small town to be remembered because of a company is a huge boost to local confidence,” he says.
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Yumi Nu is one of the world’s most sought-after models. An American citizen of Dutch and Japanese descent, and the niece of DJ Steve Aoki, she has appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated and walked for L’Oréal and Victoria’s Secret. On September 22, at Vogue World in Milan, Nu shared the runway with a group of inexperienced intruders: four humanoid robots built by the Chinese company Unitree Robotics.
© Valentina S. Frugiuele (Getty Images for Vogue)
The music phenomenon of the moment is called Choosin’ Texas, an apparently innocuous country-pop song performed by Ella Langley, a 27-year-old artist from Alabama. The track, which tells the story of a love triangle in which someone inevitably gets hurt, has spent 24 weeks as the best-selling song in the United States. No song has stayed that long at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the country’s official chart, which is calculated using a formula that incorporates streaming, download sales, and radio airplay.
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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.
White Nights, a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky first published in 1848, is the latest literary discovery of Generation Z. TikTok users seem to be talking about little else.
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Ten years ago, a 92-foot banner hung from the rooftop of an Art Deco building in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro’s iconic beachfront neighborhood. “Fora Cunha” (“Cunha Out”), it read in white letters against a black background.
The music industry has once again been forced to dance to a tune set by drug trafficking. Ismael Zambada Sicairos, the subject of several narcocorridos (a subgenre of corrido, a type of Mexican ballad, that glorifies or narrates the lives of drug traffickers and organized crime), is now accused of being the head of a sophisticated criminal network that, through organizing concerts in Baja California and other front-business activities, allegedly served to launder money generated illicitly across the border by Los Mayos, the Sinaloa Cartel faction he has led for two years.
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The Japanese apparel group Fast Retailing, owner of the Uniqlo chain, continues to grow at a rapid pace and could finish 2026 as the world’s second-largest fashion retailer. On Thursday, the company reported record annual results, with double-digit increases in both revenue and profit.
© Manami Yamada (REUTERS)
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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When the U.S. tabloid The New York Post published images showing Democratic congressional candidate Christopher Gallant wearing various bondage accessories, his lawyer, Sara Azari, rushed to clarify that the photos “were taken during a private, consensual photo session involving Chris and his then-partner, with whom he was in a committed four-year relationship.” The accessories included a leather face mask and a collar fastened with a padlock. In some shots he was also pictured inside a cage, participating in an intimate encounter on all fours. Azari said that because Gallant was friends with the owner of the bondage apparel shop Mr. S Leather, he took part in a session intended to be “fun and personal, with the understanding that Mr. S could use select images in connection with certain products.”
© Patrick McMullan (Patrick McMullan via Getty Image)
A powerful explosion shook Colonita, a small village in the municipality of Chișinău, at 4.20 a.m. on September 18. Residents saw a blinding flash and heard a terrifying blast that made houses tremble. Six hours later, emergency teams found the remains of a Russian drone — including its engine — scattered across agricultural land. The device had fallen about four miles from the center of the Moldovan capital, which is home to more than 700,000 people. It had not been detected by surveillance systems, which the Defense Ministry attributed to the speed and low altitude at which it was flying.
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Eliminate the death penalty for 563 inmates in California and replace it with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The proposal now being considered by Governor Gavin Newsom has been put to a statewide vote twice and came very close to passing.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay for her efforts to promote peace and international law. The award recognizes “a person who with exceptional courage and integrity has led the way towards a more comprehensive global legal order,” the committee stated. The laureate, the committee continued, “has been instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”
© Martial Trezzini (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP)
At an emergency shelter in central Nepal, Chhiring Mhendo Tamang stares at a photograph of her six-year-old daughter. She fears she will never see her again after the school bus she was on was swept away by a flash flood. A glacier collapsed on August 26, causing an avalanche of mud, rocks and water to rush into a river on the border between Nepal and Tibet. The flood has so far caused 1,451 deaths with 5,745 people missing, mainly in the districts of Rasuwa, Nuwakot, and Dhading, where homes, schools, electrical infrastructure and roads have been decimated, according to Nepal’s National Authority for Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (NDRRMA).
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