* In France: “French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday voiced the public’s ‘anger’ and ‘shame’ over rioting and looting during nationwide protests against rising living costs and poor conditions in schools. At least 1,800 people have been arrested.”
* On a related note: “French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu says he has instructed prefects to impose ‘very limited’ and ‘localized’ curfews in cities to prevent more rioting and looting, after this weekend’s violence targeted city halls, other public buildings and hundreds of businesses across the country.”
* In Ukraine: “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged supporters Saturday to speak out in defense of new U.S. sanctions against Russia, hours after President Donald Trump signed an executive order pausing a sweeping package of restrictions targeting the Russian economy.”
* On a related note: “Zelenskyy also said Saturday that Moscow had carried out a massive strike on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, targeting more than 15 sites across the country. ‘The sheer scale and unrelenting pace of Russia’s strikes, specifically against our energy sector, are unfortunately having severe consequences,’ he said.”
* The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo “has reached an eighth province in the country’s north, authorities said on Sunday as the spread of the world’s fastest-growing outbreak of the disease on record continues to outpace response efforts.”
* Weather forecasting matters: “The Trump administration’s cuts to weather satellites will set the country back nearly a decade, experts say. The loss of data used to observe, forecast and research extreme weather could prevent the country from making major advances in weather prediction in the coming years. This finding comes from a new report released Friday from the Government Accountability Office, and a letter sent to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Monday from Democratic lawmakers.”
* A committee of judicial investigators found there’s a “reasonable basis” to believe U.S. District Judge Ada Brown suffers from a mental condition: “A committee of judicial investigators said that a federal judge in Dallas abandoned her role and recommended she be temporarily stripped of her docket, according to internal court documents shared with Bloomberg Law. US District Judge Ada Brown of the Northern District of Texas is facing a judicial misconduct proceeding over several allegations, including the mishandling of her docket and treating other judges and court staff ‘in a demonstrably egregious and hostile manner,’ those documents state.”
* Dan Scavino discloses a windfall: “President Donald Trump’s longtime White House social media guru scored a seven-figure payday last year from the president’s social media company, according to a new federal financial disclosure.”
The brief statement from the office of Attorney General Lynn Fitch said the officer was “justified” in his “use of force” when he shot the baby, Kohen Wiley, in a Walmart parking lot on June 14. The statement did not mention Kohen by name or identify the officer involved in the shooting.
Local media outlet Action News 5 identified the officer as Hunter Foster based on a records request of officer-involved shootings.
The shooting occurred in Senatobia, a city of about 8,000 people in the northern part of the state, about 40 miles south of Memphis, after police responded to a shoplifting call. According to the statement initially released by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, two adults — later identified as Kohen’s mother and a family friend — and a “juvenile child,” referring to Kohen, fled the store and then drove toward officers at the scene, at which point one of the officers fired his gun.
But an independent autopsy released by the family’s legal team and reviewed by MS NOW found that the baby was shot through the side of his body, throwing into question the authorities’ claim that the car was driving toward police. At a press conference this summer, the family’s legal team displayed a photo of the passenger-side window of the vehicle almost entirely blown out.
Kohen’s mother, Vellesiya Wiley, said at a press conference earlier this year that the officer fired three to four shots — even after she held Kohen up to show them there was a baby in the car — and that one hit her son’s ribcage as she held him in the passenger seat. MS NOW could not reach Wiley for comment on Monday.
Ben Crump, the civil rights attorney who represents the family, slammed the news from Fitch’s office on Monday, asking, “How can anyone accept that conclusion when Kohen’s family and the public still have not been allowed to see the body-camera footage?”
“If the footage supports the state’s decision, release it,” Crump continued. “We will not stop fighting until this family gets the truth.”
Mississippi Today and The New York Times previously reported that Foster allegedly made racist remarks toward two co-workers, one of whom is Black and the other of whom is white and has a child with a Black partner.
When MS NOW reached out to Martin Zummach, a lawyer the Times identified as representing Foster, he would not answer MS NOW’s questions about the case and hung up the phone.
Spokespeople for the attorney general’s office, the Senatobia Police Department and Senatobia Mayor Greg Graves did not respond to MS NOW’s requests for comment. Graves acknowledged the community’s “tremendous pain” in a video statement a few days after the killing.
At his funeral, Kohen was remembered as “goofy,” a fan of the cartoon character Bluey and a beloved baby with a family excited for his future, NBC News reported.
After two decades of defeats in rural America, Democrats are suddenly putting up a fight in farm country. The party is running competitive Senate races in Iowa, Kansas and other farm states, as well as House races in heavily rural districts that could help it regain control of Congress in January.
Credit (or blame, depending on your party) for this reversal of fortune lies with President Donald Trump’s tariffs and his war with Iran, which have battered farmers and pushed the rural economy into crisis. The Department of Agriculture’s analysts expect farmers’ net incomes to decline by 5.5% this year, as costs rise and receipts fall. The National Agricultural Law Center’s tally of farm bankruptcies jumped 45% last year, and is on pace to rise another 11% in 2026.
Higher costs for processed-food companies also have punishing consequences in rural communities more broadly.
Three different impacts have simultaneously hammered farmers and the agriculture industry.
First, the Trump administration’s tariff hikes raised costs. The president slapped import taxes as high as 50% on a range of products including hoes and plows, barbed wire, screws, wood, pesticides, irrigation equipment and harvesters. As a result, just about everything farmers do — from putting up a fence to spraying for weeds and bugs to harvesting crops — costs more. That has helped dent sales of farm equipment, according to Creighton University’s September Rural Mainstreet Index, meaning less business for local John Deere and Bobcat dealers this year and lower farm productivity in the years ahead.
Higher costs for processed-food companies also have punishing consequences in rural communities more broadly. Last year, after the Commerce Department put tariffs of 50% on tin cans, Del Monte closed its cannery in Modesta, California. Opened over a century ago, the cannery had been the main buyer of California peaches and pears. Its collapse cost 600 jobs at the cannery, vaporized $500 million in annual Central Valley farm sales and forced local farmers to uproot 420,000 peach trees this summer.
Second, U.S. farm exports have struggled as trade partners punch back. America is the world’s top agricultural exporter — 20% of farm receipts come from sales abroad. Last year’s $176 billion in exports included 156 tons of California grapes shipped to sunny Fiji in the South Pacific, and $10,000 worth of biscuits sent to the North Atlantic’s stormy Faroe Islands. This success has helped rural America prosper, but it also makes our farmers uniquely vulnerable targets for retaliation.
Three countries — China, Canada and Mexico — buy half of America’s annual farm exports. Sales to China fell 66% in 2025, with soybean shipments alone collapsing, from $12.6 billion to $3.0 billion, and have only somewhat rebounded during this year’s tariff “truce” with Beijing. Thanks to Trump’s mystifying economic assault on Canada, fresh produce sales to our second-biggest ag market are down 10% this year, while wines, beer and liquor have fallen by two-thirds.
The Republican Party’s hold on politics in rural America has shaped policy, government and law for 20 years. Trump’s decision to upend the farm economy has shaken it.
Third, this spring came Trump’s decision to launch a war with Iran. The consequent halt to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz first spiked global fertilizer prices — up 20% from when the president was inaugurated — and then hit diesel fuel even harder. Farmers need diesel to run tractors, harvesters and irrigation equipment; the trucking firms that move their grain and produce to market use it too. Diesel now costs $6.32 per gallon, up $2.50 from a year ago. The surge in normal gasoline prices hasn’t helped either: As Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook recently noted, transport accounts for a quarter of rural household expenses.
Trump’s policies have crunched agriculture in less direct ways, too. Both the tariffs and the Iran war have pushed up inflation, forcing the Fed to keep interest rates high — a major burden on farmers who borrow heavily to finance their supplies every year.
The administration’s response has been a series of Band-Aids, with improvised emergency aid packages culminating in $12 billion in transfers to farmers at the end of last year. But as rising bankruptcies show, these measures haven’t healed the wounds the administration’s policies have inflicted.
I don’t want to exaggerate the rural pickup opportunities for Democrats this year. Republicans control the vast majority of House districts dependent on agriculture, and will likely continue to do so after this midterm. The same goes for Senate seats for heavily rural states in the Great Plains and the South.
Still, to hazard an agriculture metaphor, some seeds of change might be sprouting. The Republican Party’s hold on politics in rural America has shaped policy, government and law for 20 years. Trump’s decision to upend the farm economy has shaken it. This doesn’t mean Democrats have yet won the affection of farm country voters. But they have their best opening in decades to win a hearing and, once in government, to act on the rural crisis. That means repealing Mr. Trump’s tariffs, stabilizing relations with Canada and Mexico, and passing the farm bill this administration has abandoned, which could have helped modernize rural infrastructure and restore nutrition programs that benefit low-income families and farmers alike. That might begin changing the political landscape for years to come.
Samuel Alito was the only Supreme Court justice on Monday to signal that he wanted to help Missouri revive a restriction for sex offenders on Halloween.
The high court rejected review of that case and others on its order list announcing the latest actions in pending appeals. It takes four justices to grant review of a petition, and most denials pass without comment from any of the justices, which makes even an unexplained notation like Alito’s significant. The list only said that he “would grant” the state’s petition, without explaining why.
Although justices sometimes explain their disagreements, they don’t always do so. In any event, that Alito stood alone here is unsurprising. He generally backs law enforcement and has split from his colleagues in other First Amendment disputes.
The state sought Supreme Court review after a lower court struck down a law that required registered offenders to post signs that say: “No candy or treats at this residence.”
In the petition the justices denied Monday, Missouri asked them to take the case to settle what it said is a nationwide divide over whether sex-offender notifications unconstitutionally compel speech under the First Amendment.
The state called the rule crucial to enforcing its prohibition on sex-offender participation in Halloween “because it helps prevent children from approaching sex offenders’ doors and assists police in detecting sex offenders who (like Respondent) unlawfully participate in Halloween.”
The respondent to the petition in this case is Thomas Sanderson. Before he was convicted of a sex offense in 2006, he and his family had consistently put on elaborate Halloween displays. Missouri passed the law in question while he was incarcerated. When he was released in 2008, he was told that he was “grandfathered in” and could continue the annual displays. Apparently it was not an issue until 2022, when he was reported to the police and charged with violating the law.
Upholding a lower court ruling favoring Sanderson’s constitutional challenge, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit said there was “insufficient evidence to support the State’s assertion that the sign mandate is the least restrictive means of achieving its goals.”
Successfully opposing review at the Supreme Court, Sanderson said there was no real division to resolve among the lower courts. He said that the appeals court in his case “applied settled First Amendment doctrine to strike down an unusual speech compulsion,” and that “no court of appeals or state high court disagrees with that ruling.”
A top election official in Arizona’s most populous county appears dead-set on having the federal government intervene in the upcoming midterms.
County Recorder Justin Heap’s shameless support for pro-Trump election denialism, and his encouragement of President Donald Trump’s allies to meddle with the upcoming midterms, have been well documented. Media outlet VoteBeat obtained emails to the Department of Justice in which Heap egged on a bogus probe of his own county’s elections. And his efforts to wield control over Maricopa County’s election system have drawn condemnation from local Republicans including the GOP-controlled board of supervisors and the county’s top attorney, who has accused Heap of handing over control of his office to far-right idealogues.
Last week, NBC affiliate 12 News in Arizona reported on Heap’s attempt to sic the FBI on the board of supervisors using bogus accusations of wrongdoing promoted by a known election denier.
Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap’s top staffers called in the FBI to investigate an election tampering claim leveled at Heap’s partner in overseeing the midterm vote, the Maricopa County Board. The investigator’s report, obtained by 12News through a public records request, says a prominent election denier and the Republican National Committee brought the claim to Heap’s office. The social media post alleging the wrongdoing in Maricopa County’s ballot tabulation center got 1 million views. Other feverish posts claimed there was “evidence of computer tampering.” But the investigator the FBI asked to look into the allegation concluded there was nothing to see there. There was no wrongdoing.
Right-wing influencers shared video of county officials working in an office and falsely suggested they had no authorization to be there. The Maricopa County Elections Department responded by explaining on social media that elections personnel were there working late.
The context here is that for years Trump and allies like Kari Lake have promoted baseless claims of fraud in Arizona’s ballot tabulation systems. The 12 News investigation identified far-right activist Shelby Busch as the person who joined the Republican National Committee in raising the false claims to Heap’s office. Busch talked in 2024 about how she would “lynch” Heap’s predecessor, fellow Republican Stephen Richer, who was targeted by Trump allies for his refusal to promote pro-Trump election lies. (Busch subsequently said “the statement was a joke” and was “political hyperbole and no way meant as a threat of violence,” the Washington Post reported.)
Last week’s wild goose chase is typical of how MAGA election denial works: Right-wing influencers promote a lie, then right-wing officials pass it along to federal investigators, who can use the lie as a pretext for federal intervention in elections. It’s similar to what the Trump-friendly board of elections is doing in Georgia. And it’s something voters and officials who are interested in defending democracy need to beware of and on defense against in the weeks ahead.
On that note, late last week, Heap told Arizona radio host Mike Broomhead that his office “did exactly what we should have done” in taking the bogus claims to the FBI.
In a planning document released last month, the National Park Service conceded that the “triumphal arch” that President Donald Trump is desperate to build would cause “adverse effects” to nearby historic properties and monuments if construction advances as planned.
But, the administration added, the wildly unnecessary and legally dubious project is moving forward anyway.
A week later, the campaign to build one of the president’s many vanity projects took a rather farcical turn when Trump said, in apparent seriousness, that he planned to convert the 250-foot project into a “top grade military complex” to house drones. In case that wasn’t quite laughable enough, the Republican — who claimed to be acting in response to a “strong request” from unnamed Armed Forces personnel — added that the arch would also feature snipers on the roof, along with “large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”
Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia, whose congressional district includes the area in question, called the president’s latest argument “stupid” and “idiotic,” adding, “Trump clearly expects to lose a lawsuit and therefore wants to set up a pretext to argue that the arch is tied to national security.”
And therein lay the point. When Trump was worried about the litigation surrounding the White House ballroom vanity project, he shifted his rhetorical focus to pretend the project had a national security component. It wasn’t the case, but someone apparently explained to him that federal courts have traditionally given presidents wide latitude to pursue national security priorities, giving him the apparent idea of trying to pull the same trick twice.
The Trump administration on Friday released final plans for President Donald Trump’s 250-foot-tall triumphal arch that do not include drones, snipers or other features of the “military complex” that Trump said he would add to the project.
The National Capital Planning Commission, a federal panel that reviews major construction projects, posted new renderings and accompanying documents provided by the Interior Department, which is overseeing the controversial project. None of the new documents mentions a military purpose for the arch, with officials instead offering information on planned tourist visits and other ceremonial functions.
So, is that it? If the final plan excludes the absurd “military complex” elements, is it safe to say that even the Trump administration has moved on from this nonsense?
Alas, no. The White House told the Post that Trump’s plans hadn’t changed, and information related to a national security component for the arch may yet be released at a later date.
Whether that’s true is unclear, although in the meantime, a group of U.S. military veterans is moving forward with legal efforts to prevent work on the project from getting started in earnest. Watch this space.
PHOENIX — Of the litany of campaign promises President Donald Trump made on the trail, few caught on with his supporters the way his promises about immigration did. But when it comes to the president’s targeting of undocumented immigrants, the Latino voters who helped catapult the president to victory in 2024 have noticed that the Department of Homeland Security is not only targeting “the worst of the worst.”
Jesús Cardiel, 73, from Surprise, Arizona, said he typically votes Republican because the party most aligns with his beliefs on abortion. Cardiel believes Trump’s immigration crackdown will cost him with Latino voters in these midterm elections.
“Instead of the promise he made to deport only those who were a threat to the people, he’s even deporting people who are completely innocent, and that’s going to affect us at the polls,” he added.
Many Latinos aren’t inclined to vote for him now that the elections are coming up.”
—Jesús Cardiel
Cardiel’s instinct that the president’s immigration crackdown is far from focused on the “worst of the worst,” as the administration likes to describe those it’s rounding up, is borne out by the numbers.
The Deportation Data Project, a joint research venture from UCLA and UC Berkeley, found that as of July 2026, 73.5% of those arrested and booked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement had no criminal convictions. Of the others, 24.8% had been convicted of a nonviolent crime, while only 1.6% of those arrests involved undocumented immigrants convicted of a violent crime, according to the analysis.
But talk to Trump’s MAGA base — like those who waited hours for him to speak at a rally in Bullhead City, Arizona, last Wednesday — and many of them remain smitten with the way ICE raids have been going.
Trump rally in Arizona.MS NOW
“They’re doing what they need to do,” said Deanne McCarter, 64, a three-time Trump voter from Lake Havasu City, who attended Trump’s rally in Arizona last week. Asked whether she believes ICE has been too aggressive after shooting undocumented immigrants in Austin, Texas, and New York City in recent months, McCarter was convinced they weren’t.
FAFO”
—Deanne McCarter
“FAFO,” said the Trump superfan, using an abbreviation with an expletive that means “[mess] around, find out.” “I mean, I’m sorry, but that’s the way that it is.”
Peggy Miller, a retired nurse and three-time Trump voter from Bullhead City, also expressed no qualms about ICE shooting people in the streets.
It is unfortunate that people are in the wrong place where they should not be.”
—Peggy Miller
“It is unfortunate that people are in the wrong place where they should not be,” said Miller, 67.
“They should not have been doing what they were doing,” she added.
Miller and McCarter’s approval of Trump’s approach to immigration reflects broader trends.
But that enthusiasm has disappeared when it comes to the president’s support among the Latino community, which went for the president in historic numbers in 2024.
According to a new NBC News/Telemundo poll from earlier this month, Trump has a 27% approval rate among Latino voters. And 69% of those surveyed disapprove of his handling of immigration.
Unai Cutino is a 45-year-old HVAC employee who voted for Trump in each of the last three presidential elections. Now, he’s got buyer’s remorse.
“I regret it. I had so much hope that he promised so many things, and there’s nothing to show for it,” said Cutino, who is from Phoenix. He said the immigration crackdown, which has swept through Arizona’s capital in recent months, has been “very aggressive.”
This presidency always benefits the powerful, and the poor are left behind.”
—Unai Cutino
“This presidency always benefits the powerful, and the poor are left behind,” Cutino said.
“Many Latinos aren’t inclined to vote for him now that the elections are coming up,” Cardiel warned.
And yet, when asking Trump’s MAGA whether the president is making good on his promise to deport the “worst of the worst,” the MAGA faithful are convinced.
“We see that they’re criminals. I don’t see any other innocent people getting [deported] contrary to what the media, the mainstream media, is trying to make it look like,” McCarter said.
“The left are screaming and kicking, so he must be doing something right,” she added.
Christiane Amanpour announced Monday that she will leave CNN in June after more than 43 years at the news network.
“After many months of thought and a few sleepless nights, I have decided to separate from CNN, my partner of 43 fantastic years!” the network’s award-winning chief international anchor said in a statement. She did not say why she was stepping down.
Amanpour hosts the network’s flagship global affairs interview program, “Amanpour.” She has interviewed numerous world leaders, including former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. She was set to interview former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in New York in 2022 before he abruptly canceled after Amanpour refused to wear a head scarf, in support of women’s rights.
Beginning in January, Amanpour will reduce hosting her show to once a week. Its final episode will air in May. Amanpour’s decision comes amid major shake-ups at the network’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, which was recently acquired by Skydance, the company run by billionaire David Ellison. Skydance is financially backed by Ellison’s father, Larry, the co-founder of Oracle and a major Trump donor.
“From my very first big exciting assignment covering the First Gulf War, to the horrors of the Bosnian War, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Iran and all the points in between, it’s the teams and the camaraderie that counted so much,” Amanpour told CNN. “As we together battled to seek the facts, the evidence and the humanity, so that CNN could always broadcast the truth about the world and to the world, without fear nor favor.”
CNN Chair Mark Thompson called Amanpour “one of the most trusted and beloved journalists anywhere.”
“Christiane has thought carefully about this decision, and she and I have been discussing it for some months,” Thompson wrote in a memo to the staff Monday morning, according to CNN. “Like so many CNNers who will hear the news today, I’m very sorry to see her go, but I’ve come to accept that this is the right time for her, both personally and professionally.”
In January 2017, with only a couple of days remaining in Barack Obama’s presidency, the Democrat held a White House press conference in which he explained his vision of occasional political intervention.
“There’s a difference,” the outgoing president explained, “between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake.”
In other words, Obama was sending a signal to the public: If people were looking to him to condemn everything Donald Trump did on a near-daily basis, they were likely to be disappointed. Once in a great while, however, the former president might feel the need to step up and defend fundamental American principles.
Obama has largely kept that pledge, steering clear of the day-to-day political arena, but over the weekend, he made the latest in a series of exceptions. MS NOW reported:
Former President Barack Obama issued a rare statement Sunday rebuking the Trump administration for targeting the president’s political enemies, namely for launching a federal investigation into Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
“It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say,” Obama said in a lengthy statement shared on social media. “But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.”
Obama’s online statement went on to characterize the Republican administration’s crusade against Omar as “appalling.” He added, “The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president. And it’s not the first time this has happened. Under President Trump, the Justice Department has repeatedly gone after those he considers his political enemies — from the Attorney General of New York, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve.
“In those cases, the prosecutions either stalled or were dismissed for having no basis in law, and the same is likely to happen in this case. But not before Congresswoman Omar’s life has been turned upside down, her legal bills have piled up, and she’s been forced to spend time fighting unsubstantiated charges instead of serving the people of Minnesota.
“The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views. Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.”
Or put another way, Team Trump’s radical offensive against the congresswoman represents a clear example in which “our core values may be at stake.”
There’s overwhelming evidence to bolster the former president’s case.
Throughout history, there have been countless clashes between presidents and members of Congress, but there is no modern precedent for an incumbent chief executive trying to misuse the levers of federal power in the hopes of kicking a sitting elected lawmaker out of the country.
The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg added in her latest column, “This is more than just another persecution of one of Trump’s political enemies. Rather, his government is tacitly declaring the citizenship of all foreign-born people provisional, their Americanness something that can be revoked. It’s a frontal attack on the idea of constitutional equality. As Hannah Arendt wrote — a quote that the writer John Ganz reminded me of — ‘One is almost tempted to measure the degree of totalitarian infection by the extent to which the concerned governments use their sovereign right of denationalization.’”
Hours after Goldberg’s column ran, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin appeared on conservative media outlet Real America’s Voice and said the Republican administration is considering a possible “RICO case” against Omar, referring to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which has traditionally been used against organized crime figures.
For what it’s worth, The Washington Post reported last week that in 2019, Team Trump also ordered an investigation into Omar’s immigration records, though the “investigation was eventually abandoned” for lack of evidence.
Seven years later, the sequel to this abuse is ongoing — and significantly worse.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said Tuesday that a man whose arm was reportedly broken during an arrest in Long Beach, California, on Saturday had smashed a mirror on a government vehicle and that ICE did not hit him while he was on a bike.
Ricardo Gonzalez, a former Long Beach city employee, was found handcuffed, bleeding and being detained by several ICE officers when local authorities arrived at the scene at ICE’s request on Saturday, according to a statement from the Long Beach Police Department.
Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., said Sunday that masked ICE agents had broken Gonzalez’s arm during a detention attempt and that Gonzalez is a U.S. citizen.
Videos of the encounter taken by bystanders appeared to show Gonzalez lying face down in a gutter while several ICE agents kneeled on his back. In several videos, Gonzalez is heard yelling repeatedly, “Help me, my arm is broken,” and “Call a paramedic.”
Gonzalez’s daughter, Leslie Gonzalez, said her father was “struck by an unmarked vehicle of federal agents while riding his E-Bike.” He was then tased twice and pinned to the ground, according to her description on a GoFundMe page created to help with her father’s medical expenses.
“ICE agents brutally attacked and broke the arm of a North Long Beach resident and U.S. citizen,” Garcia, whose district includes Long Beach and parts of Orange County, wrote in a statement Sunday posted to X. “The videos are horrific and should concern not just our community but the country.”
In its statement Tuesday, ICE said that it had targeted an undocumented person during an enforcement operation. It said “agitators” tried to stop the operation, “threaten officers and damage government vehicles.” It said that “ICE did NOT hit an individual on a bike” and that the agency is determining whether to charge the person with damage to a government vehicle.
Long Beach police said in a statement Monday to MS NOW that officers arrived after receiving a request for emergency assistance from the ICE officers due to “vehicle vandalism taking place and a subject in need of medical aid.”
According to police, officers saw “a large group disturbance involving the ICE agents” and a man in handcuffs who was bleeding.
“First responders from the Long Beach Fire Department took the man to a nearby fire station,” according to the statement. There, Gonzalez’s handcuffs were removed, and he was taken to a hospital.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment Monday.
Police officers cleared a crowd of protesters who had gathered near the scene Sunday.
Gonzalez is believed to have been one of several community members who called 911 when he “saw a circumstance escalating,” Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson told CNN in a statement Sunday.
“When the police arrived, we know that he was detained. He was on a curb. He was injured,” Richardson said.
The incident drew outcry over the federal agency’s frequent use of force, which has often turned violent.
In a statement released on social media, Richardson said, “ICE doesn’t belong in our city and this activity undermines community safety and public trust.”
The situation involving Gonzalez is among the latest in a series of violent incidents and high-profile killings that have roiled the federal immigration agency. An ICE agent was placed on leave earlier this month after striking an undocumented immigrant with his vehicle in Houston.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit on Oct. 15 alleging ICE agents were unconstitutionally taking people into custody near state courthouses. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani demanded ICE end its operations in the city after an agent shot and wounded a Dominican man earlier this month while trying to arrest him as his 5-year-old child sat in the backseat.
Scores of high-profile national Democrats have demanded that the immigration agency be abolished in the wake of the deadly shootings of two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis earlier this year.
“I’m proud of the neighbors who documented and stood up for the family being terrorized by ICE,” Garcia wrote in his statement Sunday. “Donald Trump and his inhumane and illegal deportation machine must be stopped. Long Beach stands with our community and our immigrant families. ICE is not welcome in Long Beach. Abolish ICE.”
For six years, Marina Lacerda was known publicly only as “Minor Victim 1,” the name federal prosecutors gave her in their 2019 sex-trafficking indictment of Jeffrey Epstein. Last year, she stepped out from behind it on Capitol Hill, joining fellow survivors in demanding that the government release the Epstein files.
Now, just over a year later, Lacerda is the central figure in a new political ad against Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who once voted against forcing the files into public view. It launches online Monday and hits Kansas TV on Tuesday.
Hers is one of three new ads featuring Epstein survivors. In another, Jena-Lisa Jones takes aim at Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss. Lacerda also appears in the third, which targets Sen. Ashley Moody, R-Fla., which is expected to air Wednesday.
The ads mark the first time Epstein survivors themselves have campaigned in a congressional race. The family of one survivor got there first: Sky and Amanda Roberts, the brother and sister-in-law of the late Virginia Giuffre, recently appeared in an ad opposing their own congressman, Colorado Republican Rep. Jeff Crank, who they say refused to meet with them.
The new ads are sponsored by New Deal for All, a political action committee registered just this month and launched by Steve Pajcic, a Florida lawyer and former Democratic state legislator. Pajcic and his children “are spending at least $7 million for a blitz of ads in Florida, Kansas, Mississippi and South Carolina,” The New York Times reported last week in a profile of him.
To date, the PAC has spent roughly $4.55 million on ads and ad reservations through Election Day, according to AdImpact data reviewed by MS NOW. A Democratic strategist close to the project who was granted anonymity to discuss internal plans told MS NOW that the group had put roughly $2 million behind the Epstein-related ads targeting Marshall, Hyde-Smith and Moody, at least to start.
In the Kansas ad, Lacerda says she was 13 when she first met Epstein and was abused by him. “I expected our leaders to listen to our stories and hold our abusers accountable,” she says as a photo of Marshall appears alongside text faulting him for voting to block the release of the Epstein files.
The ad also features audio of Marshall saying, “It’s just not of much interest to me right now.” MS NOW was not able to independently verify the origin of the audio or whether he was referring to the Epstein files, but it appeared to come from footage by KSN, a Kansas NBC affiliate.
In the Mississippi spot, Jones, who says she was also in her early teens when Epstein first abused her, accuses Hyde-Smith of “voting to protect the sex trafficker who abused me.”
Looking directly into the camera, she says, “I want true change. I want our children to be safe.” Then, as a photo of Hyde-Smith appears: “If you vote for pedophiles, it’s time for Mississippi to pick a new senator.”
Both ads center on the same vote. In September 2025, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tried to attach the Epstein Files Transparency Act, legislation requiring the Justice Department to release its files on Epstein, to the annual defense policy bill. Marshall and Hyde-Smith were among 51 Republicans who voted to table the amendment, effectively killing it. Two months later, after the bill passed the House nearly unanimously, the Senate approved it by unanimous consent. That means no senator objected, but also that there was no recorded vote.
In response to a request for comment, a representative for Hyde-Smith pushed back on the ad’s depiction of the senator.
“Sen. Hyde-Smith has consistently stood with victims of human trafficking. As the lead co-sponsor of the bipartisan Trafficking Survivors Relief Act, signed into law in January 2026, she helped ensure survivors can clear nonviolent federal offenses they were forced to commit by their traffickers and have a real opportunity to rebuild their lives,” said Jake Monssen, Hyde-Smith’s campaign manager. “This ad is nothing more than partisan propaganda paid for by people aligned with George Soros and national Democrats.”
Representatives for Marshall and Moody did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A representative for Crank previously told The New York Times that “it is deeply unfortunate that Washington lobbyist Jessica Killin is preying on a grieving family with the help of the Washington Democrats.” (Killin is Crank’s opponent in the Colorado race.)
Lacerda, who became a U.S. citizen in her 20s, and Jones both told MS NOW that they are registered to vote in Florida. Both also said that until the past year, neither was particularly invested in, or knowledgeable about, national politics or Congress. Jones said she is a registered Republican.
Asked earlier this month whether they too would be getting involved in upcoming congressional races, several other Epstein survivors demurred.
One, Shauntae Smith, said that for her, “It’s not a political issue; it’s a human rights issue. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. It matters whether or not you agree with child rape and child trafficking, that’s the problem.”
Yet when pressed on why they decided their voices were needed in Kansas and Mississippi, Lacerda and Jones gave reasons for entering the fray that echoed Smith’s rationale for staying out of it.
“If you can’t stand with us, then you are not willing to protect us or our future kids,” Lacerda said.
Jones agreed, stating that no matter which side of the aisle a member sits on, “Anyone who isn’t behind protecting our children or future generations I want no part of.”
CORRECTION (OCt. 19, 2026 at 2:33 p.m.): An earlier version of this newsletter misidentified the state Rep. Crank is from. He represents Colorado, not Texas.
Ads launching this week feature survivors taking aim at Republican senators in Kansas and Mississippi, part of a multimillion-dollar red-state blitz by a newly formed PAC.
This is the Oct. 19, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter.Subscribe hereto get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
“If the United States will officially take the side of Russia … we will not prevail and we will not be able to stand.”
—
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on “Meet the Press” after President Donald Trump waived sanctions on Russia
In 1983, Ronald Reagan stood before a room of evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, and denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”
Donald Trump has obviously taken the former KGB agent’s side over Reagan’s.
On Friday, the president waived bipartisan sanctions against Russia that he signed into law last month. He called it a “very simple” decision.
It’s an easy choice if you want America’s enemies to win.
Trump then approved the Russian diesel deal. Then the slowing of Starlink over Ukraine. That’s been followed by a week of non-denial denials from a president who bizarrely insists that no one is responsible.
The Keystone Cops routine would be funny if the consequences weren’t so deadly. Russia is moving closer to winning in Ukraine and setting their sights on the rest of Europe.
Even The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page now calls Trump “Mr. Putin’s best friend in the world.”
What an October surprise, and what bad news for Republicans.
GOP candidates are scrambling to distance themselves from the Trump-Putin alliance while losing support over the high cost of living and the low approval ratings haunting Trump.
Yet through it all, the president can’t quit Putin — one of the most ruthless war criminals on the planet. Left behind are those freedom fighters who continue to defend Western democracy on the front lines in Ukraine.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy warns that they cannot continue fighting if America takes Russia’s side.
Tragically, Donald Trump already has.
CHARTS OF THE DAY
Source: Economist/YouGov poll of 1,403 registered U.S. voters conducted Oct. 10-12, 2026. Margin of error: ± 3.5%
ON THIS DATE
On Oct. 19, 2025, thieves broke into the Louvre and made off with more than $100 million in 19th century-era jewels, setting the stage for a year seemingly rife with art heists.
Kiran Ridley/Getty Images A French forensics officer examines a cut window and balcony at the Louvre Museum in Paris following a robbery on Oct. 19, 2025.
WHAT THEY SAID
Jonathan Lemire on the midterms
“The fact that we’re talking about the Senate at all is instructive. The House has always been favored to lean Democratic, but the Senate is a true toss-up. Eight months ago, those seats weren’t even in play, but now they feel tantalizingly within Democrats’ grasp.”
David Ignatius on Trump’s decision to import Russian diesel fuel
“It’s a betrayal of Ukraine — courageous allied people facing the worst winter of their lives — for the frailest of political reasons. There’s no evidence to support the idea that this diesel deal will make a difference in the prices people pay. If anything, it’s making Trump more vulnerable politically, as Republicans pull back from him.”
Eugene Robinson on tech billionaires
“A handful of absurdly wealthy men have ridiculous control over a democracy, and we’re pretending that that’s OK. That’s not the way this is supposed to work, but there you have it: You go to Elon Musk for our national security concerns and to Mark Zuckerberg for our First Amendment rights. We’ve dug a hole for ourselves as a country that it’s going to take a while to get out of.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta castigated the Trump administration for threatening local election officials, telling MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff that the federal government is “trying to bully and frighten and intimidate” public servants ahead of the midterm elections.
Late last week, the Justice Department warned Los Angeles County officials that they could face prosecution if they process or tabulate a ballot from someone the federal government suspects is a noncitizen, according to a letter obtained by MS NOW.
The warning came after the administration sued California, seeking to block the state from counting mail ballots from people it has identified as “likely” noncitizens until their citizenship can be verified. The lawsuit alleges that more than 20,000 people who may be noncitizens are registered to vote in California.
Bonta said the officials targeted by the administration are public servants working to count votes accurately and protect Californians’ right to vote.
“Here you have the federal government, with bluster and intimidation and bullying, trying to scare them into disenfranchising voters, and it’s wrong,” he said Sunday.
The attorney general called the administration’s claims about widespread voter fraud baseless, saying audits, recounts and court cases have found no evidence of it. While ineligible voting should be prosecuted, he said, the administration is using isolated cases to attack states and disenfranchise voters.
“There are one-offs, at times, when some human beings try to or have violated the election laws, like a Republican in Orange County who tried to register her dog,” he said. “And should that person get prosecuted? Yes, they should, and we do not think any ineligible voter should vote. But what is happening here is the Trump administration is attacking states, usually blue states or swing states, that they want to pick a fight with.”
Bonta said the attacks on California are part of a wider effort by the administration to sow doubt about the country’s elections before the midterms.
“They’re desperate. It’s embarrassing for them. They’re in the death throes of this election cycle, staring down a blue wave where they’re going to get thrashed, and they are planning for what they do after they get thrashed,” he told MS NOW. “This is their contingency plan.”
Bonta said California would stand firm in its “commitment to accurate, fair, reliable, secure elections” and keep fighting the administration.
“We will meet the federal government in court,” he said.
You can watch Bonta’s full interview in the clip at the top of the page.
About a month ago, JD Vance appeared on a conservative podcast and assured the hosts and their listeners that the Trump administration is “serious” about reducing the budget deficit.
Like so much of what the vice president tells the public, his rhetoric was discredited by reality. The New York Times reported:
The United States budget deficit approached $2 trillion in the 2026 fiscal year, its highest level since the pandemic, as spending on the military, safety net programs and interest on the debt dwarfed the Trump administration’s cost cuts, Treasury Department figures showed on Friday.
The widening gap between what the government spends and what it collects in taxes and other revenue comes at a critical moment. Investors are nervous about America’s surging debt load, along with stubborn inflation, and have driven up borrowing costs.
Roughly three weeks after the end of the 2025-2026 fiscal year, the Treasury Department reported that the government spent $1.99 trillion more than it took in. That massive deficit reflected an increase of roughly $217 billion from a year earlier.
There’s no great mystery as to why this happened — among other things, Republicans approved massive tax breaks last year and began financing the war with Iran in late February — and there’s no reason to believe the nation’s fiscal health will improve anytime soon.
As the public considers the implications of this, here are a handful of things to keep in mind:
The economic circumstances suggest deficits this enormous shouldn’t happen. When the nation is facing a crisis, such as responding to a pandemic or an economic crash, it makes sense for the government to take on more debt. But there was no actual crisis during the last fiscal year, making the roughly $2 trillion annual deficit that much more difficult to defend.
The problem is getting worse faster than anyone expected. When the nation’s overall debt reached $40 trillion a couple of months ago, The Washington Post reported that we’re racking up debt faster than earlier independent analyses thanks almost entirely to the cost of GOP tax breaks, the war with Iran and the White House’s failed tariffs agenda. The article added, “The faster accumulation of debt comes at a perilous moment. An array of concerns, including inflation, the war in Iran and rising debt levels around the world, are driving investors to dump government bonds.”
Trump promised voters a very different outcome. As a candidate in 2016, the Republican told voters he had unique expertise in budgetary issues that would enable him to eliminate the deficit and start paying down the debt. Trump delivered the opposite results, adding nearly $7.8 trillion to the national debt in just one term, and most of that total was racked up before the Covid-19 crisis. As a candidate in 2024, he repeated his earlier promises, before again delivering the opposite results: Trump has added nearly $4 trillion in debt since returning to the White House early last year.
Eight years ago, Trump appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio show and reflected on the nation’s fiscal health. “We have $21 trillion in debt … a number that is unthinkable,” the president said in July 2018. “But that will go down very quickly.” Eight years later, the debt has nearly doubled.
Trump and congressional Republicans are to blame. For those concerned about the deficit and the debt, there’s no point in seeing this as a “both sides” issue. Republican policies made this happen.
Trump and congressional Republicans don’t seem to care. For decades, Republican officials have expressed hysterical concerns about “fiscal responsibility” every time there’s been a Democratic president. Indeed, younger readers might find this difficult to believe, but in the not-too-distant past, Republicans treated the budget deficit as one of the single-most important crises facing the country. The gap between what the government spends and what it takes in, GOP officials said, threatened to bankrupt the nation, crash the economy and ruin the lives of our children and grandchildren.
But as last year’s deficit nearly reached the $2 trillion mark, and the debt passes the $40 trillion mark, those same Republicans are silent on the issue.
Trump and congressional Republicans aren’t even pretending to have a plan to address this. It’s not as if the GOP has a bad plan to get the nation’s fiscal house in order; it’s that the party isn’t even trying to address the issue at all.
Earlier Republican warnings suddenly look ridiculous. Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, GOP officials said that if the national debt eclipsed the size of the overall economy, it would spell immediate doom. For the first time since World War II, the national debt has now eclipsed the size of the overall economy as Republicans pretend that the economy has reached its “golden age.”
Remember 1998? Around this time 28 years ago, Bill Clinton proudly declared that the deficit was officially gone, and record surpluses soon followed. At the time, the United States was on track to do the unthinkable: to pay off its national debt. Republican governance soon followed, which set us on a path to $40 trillion in debt.
The historical pattern is worth remembering. Despite the conventional wisdom about which party has credibility on fiscal issues, budget deficits have grown by massive amounts under every Republican administration (Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2 and Trump), while shrinking under every Democratic administration (Clinton, Obama and Biden).
The next Democratic president needs to be prepared. Time will tell who prevails in the 2028 presidential election, but if it’s a Democrat, they need to understand that they’re inheriting a severe budgetary mess, which will be met by a new round of GOP hysterics about the mess that Republicans themselves created.
Last week, it was double jeopardy in Oklahoma. This week, it’s car seizures in Chicago. The through-line is Justice Neil Gorsuch joining Justice Sonia Sotomayor for the second week in a row to call out what they see as government abuses.
It’s not a new phenomenon for the Obama and Trump appointees to team up in a certain type of case that lends itself to bipartisan agreement.
But early in the new court term, they continue to distinguish themselves from their colleagues on the nine-member bench who haven’t shown the same interest in drawing attention to these appeals the court refuses to hear.
“I again encourage courts considering this issue to take care that due deference to state police powers does not eclipse constitutional rights,” Sotomayor wrote Monday in the case of O’Donnell v. Chicago, joined by Gorsuch. The issue, in their view, is that the city’s vehicle forfeiture scheme offends the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on taking private property for public use without “just compensation.”
Per Sotomayor’s statement, the city takes vehicles when drivers fail to pay as few as two parking tickets — after that, she wrote, the city “can do as it pleases with the vehicle, with no obligation to pay compensation, offset the unpaid ticket debt, or return any surplus to the owner if the vehicle is sold for a profit.”
Her statement appeared on the court’s latest order list, which is a routine scheduled document that announces the latest action on pending petitions. It takes four justices to grant review of a petition, and most of them are denied without comment from any of the justices. That’s what makes it notable when justices speak out in connection with denials.
To be sure, Sotomayor and Gorsuch didn’t dissent from the O’Donnell denial, as justices sometimes do in their separate writings. As was the case with her statement that Gorsuch joined last week on a double jeopardy issue, the duo agreed with their colleagues that the Chicago case didn’t warrant review. Sotomayor noted that the nation’s lower courts are divided on the constitutional issue, and that the split would “benefit from further percolation” before the high court steps in.
So, the subject could return to the justices in a future case, where petitioners can count on at least two justices showing interest. They would need two more to win review.
School admissions, home distilling
The denial in the O’Donnell case (and many others that went unremarked upon by any justices) came as the court granted review in two new appeals that will both be closely watched this term.
In Association for Education Fairness v. Montgomery County Board of Education, the court that struck down race conscious university admissions in 2023 agreed to consider a challenge to the Maryland district’s magnet middle schools.
Challengers argue that the district’s lottery system is too hard to access for Asian American students who are packed in “high-performing, low-poverty elementary schools.” Unsuccessfully opposing review, the district stressed that the ultimate admissions decisions are random, adding that it’s “difficult to even conceptualize” how a lottery-based system could be intentionally racially discriminatory.
The legal question that the court will consider in the Maryland case involves what plaintiffs must prove to show that a facially neutral admissions policy is racially discriminatory. The answer carries nationwide implications.
The other new case taken up by the court on Monday asks whether the government can ban people from making liquor at home.
That’s been the case for more than a century, but a federal appeals court struck down the restriction, which led the Justice Department to ask the high court to step in. Notably, the opposing parties — people who want to distill at home and the Hobby Distillers Association — agreed that the justices should review the issue so that the court can provide a nationwide resolution on the matter, which has divided lower courts.
The legal question in that case, DOJ v. McNutt, is whether the federal prohibition on producing distilled spirits in certain locations, including homes, exceeds congressional power.
The court will hear arguments in both appeals later in the term, with rulings expected by July.
It was about a month ago when MS NOW reported on a Russian disinformation campaign targeting the U.S. midterm elections, featuring doctored selfie videos of Hollywood celebrities. The project — one of the first documented Kremlin-backed operations of this year’s election cycle — was specifically designed to undermine support for Democrats and to boost Republicans.
With only about two weeks remaining before Election Day, the efforts are apparently intensifying. Bloomberg News reported:
Russian disinformation operators are deploying an army of bots to inflate view counts of fictitious posts about celebrities and Democratic candidates ahead of the US midterm elections.
AI-fabricated video clips of well-known actors and musicians — including Robert De Niro, Julia Roberts and Cher — attacking Democrats began appearing on X in early September, some urging people to join a campaign dubbed #AllDemocratsAreCriminals. Scores of other clips have made false allegations of corruption and improprieties by Democratic candidates.
A related report in The New York Times noted that “an online influence operation backed by the Russian government has been stepping up its attempts to sow division in the United States.” The report added that the project has targeted Democrats “with negative content,” becoming “the latest effort by Russia to harm the party and support President Trump.”
It’s an important detail, not just because Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime appears desperate to help Republicans, but also because of the familiarity of the circumstances.
In 2020, Russia targeted U.S. elections. In fact, intelligence officials told Congress about evidence that showed Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign for the express purpose of trying to secure a second term for Trump.
In 2022, Russia targeted U.S. elections. In fact, The Wall Street Journal reported a few years ago, “The Russian government and its proxies attempted to denigrate the Democratic Party and undermine voter confidence ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.”
In 2024, Russia again targeted U.S. elections, specifically in the hopes of electing Republicans who would oppose American military aid to Ukraine.
And in 2026, it’s happening once again.
In each instance, Moscow wasn’t simply trying to sow chaos. As this unsubtle pattern unfolded, Russian operations specifically tried to help one party (Republicans) and hurt the other (Democrats).
Two year ago, Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, appeared on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and said that there’s “plenty of reason to be concerned” about Russia trying to interfere in another American election.
Sullivan added, “[T]his is not about politics. This is about national security. It is about a foreign country — a foreign adversary — seeking to manipulate the politics and democracy of the United States of America.”
Two years later, the current White House national security adviser, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has invested far less time and effort into denouncing the Kremlin’s operations, and congressional Republicans tend to have effectively nothing to say about Russian intervention.
For its latest report, the Times spoke to a senior researcher at Graphika, a threat analysis company, who said the Russian tactics “give us a glimpse of what their objectives are,” adding, “They’re not targeting Republican candidates in the same way.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned that the United States must rebuild trust with its allies to restore its global leadership, arguing that international relationships have been damaged by a lack of trustworthiness and understanding.
“We have to restore our trustworthiness in order to restore our leadership,” Clinton said during a conversation with a senior United Arab Emirates official at Forbes and Know Your Value’s 30/50 Summit in New York City on Friday.
Clinton spoke alongside Her Excellency Noura Al Kaabi, Minister of State at the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs, during a panel titled “Across Borders and Generations: Women Redefining Global Leadership.”
The discussion explored the challenges facing international diplomacy, the importance of maintaining dialogue during conflict and the role of trust in navigating an increasingly uncertain world.
The conversation capped the fifth annual 30/50 Summit, a gathering founded by Brzezinski’s Know Your Value initiative and Forbes. The event brings together influential women across generations to advance women’s leadership and economic empowerment. The summit typically takes place in Abu Dhabi, but it was moved to New York this year amid regional instability. Organizers expressed their hope to return to the UAE next year.
Moderated by Brzezinski, founder of Know Your Value and co-host of “Morning Joe” and Huma Abedin, vice chair of the 30/50 Summit and MS NOW contributor, the discussion opened with a question about what gives the panelists hope—and what keeps them up at night.
For Clinton, the answer was a constant tension between optimism and concern.
From left to right: “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Her Excellency Noura Al Kaabi, Minister of State at the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and MS NOW contributor Huma Abedin at Forbes and Know Your Value’s 30/50 summit on Friday.Taylor Dieng for Morning Joe
“I get hopeful and think, OK, we’re gonna figure this out, and then something happens which you know really disturbs me and concerns my thinking about whether we’re going to be able to manage what’s going on in the world,” she said.
Clinton pointed to conflicts in the Middle East and the challenges of governing artificial intelligence as examples of issues requiring greater international cooperation.
“This is a time for people to actually begin to work together and do the hard thinking about how we’re going to manage our future,” she said.
Al Kaabi reflected on the recent attacks on the UAE, describing a conflict her country did not choose and the fear experienced by families living there. She said the country’s diverse population, representing approximately 200 nationalities, remained united through the crisis.
“Our skies were, you know, filled with missiles. More than 3000 missiles. Families were scared,” she said.
For Al Kaabi, the experience reinforced the importance of trust, solidarity and keeping diplomatic channels open, even when countries disagree.
“I hope that we continue the dialog. We keep our diplomatic channels open. That we remain in the room when there is someone that we disagree with, no matter what,” she said.
Clinton agreed, emphasizing the importance of understanding the experiences of people facing conflict around the world and drawing lessons from the UAE’s response.
“We need to have that sense of solidarity again in order to deal with all of this,” she said.
The conversation then turned to America’s role in international affairs. Asked by Abedin what responsible American leadership should look like today, Clinton said the United States under President Donald Trump was not demonstrating the trustworthiness or understanding necessary to sustain its relationships with allies and other nations.
She argued that restoring America’s standing would require leaders to put the public interest ahead of personal financial and partisan political interests.
“We’ve got to get back to a mindset about what national security, national interests, and national values actually means, and how we begin once again to live better,” Clinton said.
Clinton also connected America’s international influence to the strength of its democracy at home, pointing to political divisions and affordability concerns ahead of the midterm elections.
“We need to elect leaders again who are going to call the best from us, not the worst from us. Who are going to bring people together, not continually divide us. Because if you’re talking about America’s position in the world, it starts at home,” she said.
She acknowledged that economic pressures remain a major concern for Americans, particularly those struggling to afford everyday necessities.
“If you can’t afford groceries or rent or you know pay for your health care, I mean that that has you in the grip, and you need leadership that can begin to make life once again, you know, more affordable and more livable for you,” she said.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Forbes and Know Your Value’s 30/50 Summit in New York City on Friday.Taylor Dieng for Morning Joe
But Clinton argued that the stakes extend beyond the economy to the future of American democracy and the country’s role in the world. She expressed hope that the midterm elections could mark the beginning of a broader effort to restore accountability and rebuild America’s international standing.
Brzezinski asked Clinton if she believed American democracy is resilient enough to withstand this moment.
“Yes, if we begin to turn it around,” said Clinton. “But you got to stop the damage before you can reverse it, and we need to stop the damage in the midterm elections and begin to try to reverse it, and I’m very confident.”
Al Kaabi, meanwhile, urged the United States to recognize the UAE as a partner in shaping decisions about the region’s future, rather than viewing the Middle East solely through the lens of conflict. She highlighted the region’s ambitions in artificial intelligence, technology, culture and the arts.
“We’re a strong partner, and what we hope from any partner is to be part of the decision making,” she said.
The panelists also discussed the challenges posed by artificial intelligence and disinformation. Al Kaabi said leaders must communicate quickly, truthfully and consistently, even when they do not have all the answers.
“Trust takes decades, and trust doesn’t take a comms manager to come. It takes a leader who is consistent and trustworthy to be transparent with their people and to speak based on their values and universal values that we all recognize,” she said.
Clinton called for global cooperation to establish safeguards for AI, comparing the need for international coordination to earlier efforts to address nuclear weapons.
“I have a very, very strong conviction that we have got to act on a global level to govern AI … If the minister and I were weaving a magic wand, we would be meeting right now at the UN or somewhere in the world with representatives from all the major countries to come up with a global governance scheme for AI before it governs us,” she said.
Clinton stressed the importance of voting in the upcoming midterm elections and not sitting this one out.
“We have to prove that America is stepping up again and we want to elect the kind of government that we need at this point in our history,” she said.
From left to right: "Morning Joe" co-host Mika Brzezinski, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Her Excellency Noura Al Kaabi, Minister of State at the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and MS NOW contributor Huma Abedin at Forbes and Know Your Value's 30/50 summit on Friday.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Forbes and Know Your Value's 30/50 Summit in New York City on Friday.
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* With just two weeks remaining in the election cycle and early voting underway in much of the country, the latest Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos survey offered Donald Trump another round of bad news: The president’s approval rating has reached a record low of 33% in this poll. But for Republicans, that’s not necessarily the worst part.
The same results included a generic congressional ballot and found Democrats with an eight-point advantage over the GOP, 52% to 44%. As recently as July, the same outlet showed Democrats with a three-point edge.
This dovetailed with the latest NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, which showed Democrats with a 10-point lead over Republicans on the generic ballot, 55% to 45%.
* Artificial intelligence-generated campaign advertising has become an intensifying problem in this year’s election cycle, but it’s not altogether a bipartisan problem: A New York Times analysis found that more than 80% of the ads created by AI “were produced by Republican campaigns or Republican-aligned political action committees.”
* In Ohio’s closely watched statewide races, the latest Bowling Green State University poll found former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown leading incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted, 48% to 42%. A month ago, the same pollster showed Brown ahead by three points.
As for the state’s gubernatorial race, the same survey data found Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee, leading Vivek Ramaswamy by the same six-point margin, 50% to 44%.
* In Nevada, retiring Republican Rep. Mark Amodei continues to tear into his own party’s would-be successor. The outgoing congressman reiterated over the weekend that he would “absolutely not” vote for David Flippo in Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District, adding that, as far as Amodei is concerned, his seat is “at risk” for flipping from red to blue.
* In Massachusetts, Shawn Oliver, the Republicans’ lieutenant governor nominee, suspended his candidacy over the weekend. One day earlier, he was arrested for allegedly driving under the influence and striking five parked cars. According to local police, Oliver also allegedly flipped his own car during the incident.
* House Speaker Mike Johnson said during an interview over the weekend that independent news organizations are secretly conspiring with independent polling firms to release deceptive survey data as part of a plot to “discourage” GOP voters. The Louisiana Republican did not appear to be kidding.
* The president held a campaign rally in Georgia late last week, where he insisted that Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff was “never elected” despite his 2020 victory. Trump added that the results were fraudulent, an absurd claim for which he offered no evidence.
* Though the U.S. Senate race in Mississippi continues to look like a real reach for Democrats, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock is doing his best to rally support for local prosecutor Scott Colom in his race against incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.
* And in Maryland, where Republican Rep. Andy Harris threatened to have a student journalist arrested last week for recording him at a public Q&A, the far-right congressman was offered an opportunity late last week to apologize for his bizarre antics. Harris refused.
Israel had come under heavy international criticism for the attacks. Israeli police did not identify the suspects or specify their potential roles in the attacks, which came during a spike in settler violence during the annual Palestinian olive harvest season.
Masked people are seen at the site where Belgium’s foreign minister says masked settlers attacked Palestinians, Catholic representatives and Western diplomats and officials, in Taybeh on Oct. 17, 2026, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Amit Orfali/via Reuters
On Friday, Washington Post photographer Heidi Levine was beaten by a crowd of young male settlers, leaving her with several broken ribs and vertebrae in the village of Abu Falah. She also underwent surgery on a finger that was nearly severed and is recovering from what appeared to be stab wounds to her lower body, which required stitches.
Settler violence has surged in recent years, and rights groups say that attackers are rarely arrested or punished for attacks on Palestinians.
From her hospital bed Sunday, Levine said she was “shocked and insulted” that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had cast doubt on the attack, which was witnessed by a crowd of people, by calling it “alleged.”
The attackers targeted Palestinian villagers, setting fire to the olive trees they were harvesting
U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee condemned the attack as a “despicable act of terror carried out by masked cowards” and said they should spend years in prison. Israel’s president and several opposition politicians also spoke out against the attack.
The attack on diplomats targeted Belgium’s consul general, French and Polish diplomats and Catholic representatives. “Impunity for violent settlers must end,” Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prevot said afterward.
Israeli police said they have been collecting evidence and witness statements since the weekend attacks. The suspects were transferred for questioning. They said the Shin Bet internal security agency, the paramilitary border police force and the Israeli military had all participated in the investigation.
Police said Monday’s operation also targeted people suspected of violating military orders declaring a closed military zone and offenses involving illegal construction. They said they seized several vehicles and items linking suspects to alleged offenses.
Masked people are seen at the site where Belgium's foreign minister says masked settlers attacked Palestinians, Catholic representatives and Western diplomats and officials, in Taybeh on Oct. 17, 2026, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
PARIS (AP) — French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu says he has instructed prefects to impose “very limited” and “localized” curfews in cities to prevent more rioting and looting, after this weekend’s violence targeted city halls, other public buildings and hundreds of businesses across the country.
Speaking after an emergency meeting with top government officials, Lecornu said that “on Saturday, despite scenes of severe violence and extensive property damage, no one was killed, and that is a miracle” as he defended the work of police officers faced with violent groups of people.
Lecornu said details of the areas to be placed under curfew will be provided later Monday.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez offered his resignation on Sunday, but President Emmanuel Macron refused the resignation, “given the need for continued command of law enforcement in the current context,” Macron’s office said in a statement Monday.
Macron instructed Nuñez “to take all necessary steps to ensure full transparency about the failures in planning and intelligence-gathering that led to the violence,” the statement said.
Macron also asked for “new policing tactics on the ground as quickly as possible” to put an end to violent events.
On Sunday evening, groups of people set fires to trash bins, bicycles and other objects in the streets and looted businesses in Paris, Lyon, Marseille and other cities. Major violence erupted Saturday during nationwide protests against rising living costs and poor conditions in schools. At least 2,400 people were arrested across the country, authorities said.
“I submitted my resignation because I am responsible for everything that is happening,” Nuñez said, speaking on France Inter radio. “Now, the real issue is ensuring that this doesn’t happen again. … We obviously need to be better at anticipating the kind of mobilization that is unfolding.”
Nuñez blamed violence on “hordes of troublemakers and looters” and “far-left activists” and acknowledged that police strategy needs to be adapted “in the face of extremely mobile groups.” Authorities said groups of hundreds of people sought confrontations with police and targeted public buildings, including city halls and other public offices.
Nuñez acknowledged that authorities had “lost control” in some major cities on Saturday, with hundreds of businesses looted.
“You can’t look shopkeepers in the eye when hundreds of businesses have been looted and say we haven’t lost control in some of these major cities. Obviously,” Nuñez said.
Flames engulfed the 19th-century City Hall in Limoges, in central France, causing its roof to collapse and nearly destroying the building.
In Marseille, the prefect banned any protest or other gathering from noon to 8 p.m. Monday.
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