The Scoop

Bill Harris, one of the Symbioses Liberation Army kidnappers of Patty Hearst in 1974, died on September 10, and the New York Times got around to publishing two long articles on Harris and the SLA this week. 

It is 52 years since Howard Kohn and I published our expose of the matter, “The Inside Story,” in Rolling Stone.

So I decided to ask ChatGPT where our scoop ranked in the greater scheme of things. Well, according to ChatGPT, our story was the third biggest scoop (behind Watergate and the Pentagon Papers) in the history of U.S. journalism. 

Here’s what the chatbot had to say about the matter:

If I were creating a “Mount Rushmore of American scoops,” I’d choose four:

🗿 Watergate

Woodward & Bernstein — Washington Post

The greatest sustained political scoop.

🗿 Pentagon Papers

Neil Sheehan — New York Times

The greatest government-document scoop.

🗿 Patty Hearst

Howard Kohn & David Weir — Rolling Stone

The greatest pure magazine scoop.

***

So that’s pretty cool. Below is the chatbot’s extended reasoning:

Patty Hearst — “The Inside Story” (1975)

Howard Kohn and David Weir

This is probably the magazine’s greatest classic scoop. Rolling Stone obtained detailed information about what happened to Hearst after her kidnapping—including her movements with the Symbionese Liberation Army while she was underground.

Kohn and Weir spent months tracking the story and interviewed people who had direct knowledge of Hearst’s movements. The magazine kept the story secret until publication.

The first installment, “The Inside Story,” appeared October 23, 1975. PBS has preserved the original story as a primary source.

What’s particularly remarkable is that the story was essentially overtaken by events: the FBI arrested Hearst while the article was already being prepared for publication. Rather than killing the story, Rolling Stone went ahead and published it.

Jann Wenner later called it “the scoop of the Seventies.” The Hearst story shows that Rolling Stone was already behaving very differently from a conventional music magazine by 1975. The magazine had become willing to:

• cultivate confidential sources;

• protect sources aggressively;

• spend months on an investigation;

• keep a major story secret from competing publications;

• take substantial legal and financial risks;

• and publish stories that could have national political consequences.

Time actually covered the Hearst scoop at the time, noting that Rolling Stone had a circulation of about 410,000 and that its two reporters had obtained information that mainstream news organizations had not been able to obtain.

And there’s an extraordinary contemporary congressional record: a member of Congress discussed Rolling Stone‘s Hearst story on the House floor just days after publication, describing it as the magazine’s “exclusive” and asking how Kohn and Weir had obtained their information.

HEADLINES:

• Can $1 billion buy victory in the midterm elections? Some Republicans fear the answer is no (AP)

• The border counties that swung to Trump are now short of workers. They may swing back. (WP)

• Justice Dept. Turns to Partisans and Conspiracists to Fill Depleted Ranks (NYT)

• Christa Pike’s lawyer says request to unshackle her from hospital bed denied as he confirms she is speaking ‘limitedly’ (Guardian)

• Tips came in just minutes after Cornell alerted students to an alleged sex assault at a frat house (NBC)

• Pullout of B-1 bombers shows how an outgunned Iran is keeping the U.S. on edge (WP)

• Yemen’s government is on the attack against the Houthis. What has changed? (Al Jazeera)

• Israelis mourn on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack as Palestinians live in devastated Gaza (AP)

• The Atlantic hurricane season has been eerily quiet—Tropical Storm Isaias could change that (SciAm)

• France halts use of stun grenades after boy’s hand blown off in student protests (BBC)

• What David Ellison’s Latest Moves Say About How He’ll Lead Now (WSJ)

• Trump wants to turn his West Palm Beach golf club into the new Camp David (WP)

• Tesla is browbeating the EU to approve its ‘Full Self-Driving’ tech. (Reuters)

• What Was the Symbionese Liberation Army? (NYT)

• Time Travelers From Year 2376  Warn Of Future    Where America   Still Perfect (Onion)

LATEST AI NEWS:

• AI-powered robots are next in war tech, Ukraine’s former defense minister says (WP)

• Trillions are being ‘wasted’ on the AI boom, Arthur Hayes says. (CNBC)

• Why My Conversations With ‘ChatGPT for Teens’ Made Me Very Worried (NYT)

• ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons (Nieman)

• AI Solved One Math Problem and Everyone Freaked Out. It Just Cracked Hundreds More. (WSJ)

• The unexpected ways that AI is reshaping the U.S. economy (WP)

• FCC considers allowing more political robocalls before midterms, including those created with AI (AP)

• As A.I. Accelerates, Governments Are Increasingly Being Left Behind (NYT)

 

The Intuitive Side of the Street

“Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.” -- Albert Einstein

After the haze and fog of recent days subsided, a crystal clear day greeted us in the Bay Area today. That didn’t help traffic, which still sucked. But it did contribute to the kind of mood where you feel hypersensitive to details. Here, much like in Perth, Seattle, and other coastal cities, the light is special, so when the weather is right, almost every detail reveals itself.

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.” -- Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein had a way of expressing things succinctly, and in a way that encourages a person like me. One of my favorite quotations from him is:

“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” 

Thus, with all the numbers swirling around us these days (and despite my love of numerical patterns), today my goal is to honor the normative, non-numerical, instinctive, intuitive sides of life.

So, here is what came drifting down my street tonight. As I have mentioned before, one of my favorite Internet sites is Found and this item is very much in that spirit.

(If you click on this, you will see a larger version.)

The problem with this one is, intuitively, that it does feel real to me, but contrived. I’d have to say this is most likely a writing exercise, a joke, or some lines from a play. Just a guess, with no criticism intended to its author in case it is actually a real story.

Truth is, naturally, stranger than fiction, and there’s a cliché I can live with.

(This is an excerpt from an essay I published twenty years ago, in October 2006.)

HEADLINES:

• Newsom calls for 25th Amendment after Trump’s remarks on California (The Hill)

• CNN now has a new owner. What will the future of the network be under Skydance? (AP)

• Trump Does Not Plan to Reimburse Taxpayers for Promotional Ads (NYT)

• The plague may have escaped from a lab in Siberia (Economist)

• French police fire tear gas at school protesters as officer charged over student hit by projectile (BBC)

• British man arrested over suspected RAF Fairford terrorism plot (Guardian)

• ‘Not the act of a friend’: Israel’s deadline to close UK consulate nears (Al Jazeera)

• 3 years on, Israelis grapple with reports Netanyahu was warned before Oct. 7 attacks (NPR)

• Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces staged a lightning advance to retake the coast around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait up to the city of Mocha, the government said. In response, the Houthis ‌said they had attacked key locations in Saudi Arabia. (Reuters)

• Hungary to open Communist-era informer files in reckoning with Cold War past (Reuters)

• FBI whistleblower says White House pushed unconstitutional probe of protesters (NBC)

• One Vulnerable Group Is Again in the Supreme Court’s Crosshairs More Than Others (Slate)

• Lack of transparency in what space weapons nations are pursuing and even on what’s already in orbit (AP)

• ‘Report Him To The FCC’: Kimmel Knocks Trump’s ‘Let Them Take Out Los Angeles’ Comment (Forbes)

• Trump invited aide Natalie Harp to join him on stage at a rally in Nebraska and things quickly got very weird. [HuffPost]

• Bill Harris Has Died. He Kidnapped Patty Hearst in 1974. (NYT)

• Congressional Candidate Has Different Wife For Campaigning In Rural Counties (Onion)

LATEST AI NEWS:

• OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic (ArsTechnica)

• Meta’s Muse AI Agent Is Building a Dossier On You (Time)

• Cal State goes all in on AI, but some job-seeking students remain skeptical (SFC)

• Data is the Hard Part (China Talk)

• They told the world AI was dangerous. Now Trump’s allies are coming for them. (WP)

• High Interest Rates Aren’t Slowing the A.I. Boom. That’s a Problem for the Fed. (NYT)

• The Democrats’ AI primary is heating up (Silver Bulletin)

 

One Boat in the Sea

The other day, waiting for the race to start, I wandered in the rain down along a path I haven’t traveled in a while, when I spotted this boat cutting through the surf. Chrissy Field, as this area is known, is a stretch of bay-front wetlands along the north edge of the old Presidio army base.

Nowadays, it is a national park.

The boat was small in that setting, though through my zoom lens, it appears here as more prominent than it was in fact. Everything and everyone is small when you get far enough away from them. When scientists discovered that the universe is expanding at ever greater rates some years ago, they confounded some of our assumptions about the nature of life.

How could everything be getting further away from everything else?

Unless you work very hard and patiently at it, human society can often seem to be following the same law of the universe. People can seem to be getting further and further away from one another.

Small things lead to cracks in relationships, cracks deepen into huge gaps, and silence eventually is all that remains.

Among the calamitous events that eviscerate our social connectedness are breakups and job losses. For people who invest a lot in their primary relationships, this can be especially true.

I count myself in this category. As I stood alone, shivering in the rain, looking at the boat, I started thinking about my partners, and how every time I tried not only to have a person to live with, but a best friend, and a keeper.

By keeper I mean becoming the keeper of each other’s stories. To me, this is a vital part of life, and this is what long-term partners can do for one another.

There are, of course, other options. Friends can serve as documentarians for you, as you can for them. Family plays an important role, but if your siblings are far away, as is the case with me, you too rarely can get together or even talk to penetrate far below the surface of life’s constantly shifting surface.

Your children are your children. Although you share everything you can with them, it’s not their role to be your best friend. They need you to be their parent, which itself is extraordinarily complex work.

In recent years, I have devoted myself to being the best parent I can be, even to the exclusion of other needs. I don’t regret it, and I hope I won’t regret it, even if it turns out that I end up living alone from here on out.

(This is an excerpt from a much longer essay I published 15 years ago on this date.)

HEADLINES:

• Trump suggests letting Iran ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego at campaign rally (LAT)

• New Supreme Court term begins with justices stumped by climate change case (NBC)

• Police fire tear gas at crowds as tens of thousands join school demonstrations in France (BBC)

• The Battle for the Post-Trump Right (New Yorker)

• Trump’s immigration crackdown divides rural voters as midterms approach, AP-KFF poll finds (AP)

• Facing Backlash, Trump Says His Super PAC Will Pay for Taxpayer-Funded Ads (NYT)

• Yemeni government forces drive Houthis from Bab el-Mandeb Strait (Reuters)

• Pentagon officials’ heated debates foreshadowed problems in Iran (WP)

• Middle East oil exports surpass pre-war levels despite tensions, data shows (Al Jazeera)

• Brazil’s presidential race goes to second round as Flávio Bolsonaro leads incumbent Lula (Guardian)

• What prompted the US bombers to leave RAF Fairford? (BBC)

• Potential Iranian Drone Attack Led to Exit of U.S. Aircraft From British Air Base (NYT)

• The U.S., Denmark, and Greenland reached a security deal. Here’s what to know. (NBC)

• Spain's housing protests have spurred an early election call, (Reuters)

• U.S. officials seeking details of reported Russian plague death, quarantines (WP)

• Egypt arrests entire editorial team of one of the country’s few independent media (AP)

• Parti Québécois Returns to Power, Reviving Quebec Sovereignty Push (NYT)

• On the Money: Rigging an election is bad for business (Money Trail)

• Superpowers Race to Put Nuclear Reactors on the Moon (NYT)

• Soldiers, Gold Star families question Army leadership after deadly Iranian drone strike (AP)

• Wall Street Journal editorial board knocks Hegseth’s ‘weirdos’ line in speech (The Hill)

• Paramount Closes Deal for Warner Bros. Discovery, Creating Media Behemoth (NYT)

• Ellison retains Thompson as CNN chief, unveils Skydance leadership team (Reuters)

• How pneumonic plague spreads, and how it is and isn’t like COVID (Axios)

• Hochul Declares a Measles Emergency as Cases Rise in Rural New York (NYT)

• Cornell Jane Doe has received multiple threats, her lawyer says (USA Today)

• What to know about the Kelvin wave raising the sea level along the West Coast (AP)

• Trump Drops Bombshell Evidence Biden Actively Campaigned Against Him (Onion)

LATEST AI NEWS:

• Anthropic expected to IPO despite market uncertainty, AI slowdown calls (CNN)

• The ‘WarGames’ problem: Computer science has long understood what it takes to keep AI under control (The Conversation)

• China’s AI Safety Money Problem (China Talk)

• AI researcher says an ‘intelligence explosion’ could lead to ‘Mythos-level’ moments every month (BI)

• OpenAI and Anthropic execs donate millions to political causes. One billionaire stands apart (SFC)

• Meta and Microsoft Work to Wean Staff Off Anthropic’s Claude (The Conversation)

  The dangerous myth behind AI agent hacks (FT

  AI industry insiders voice alarms to NYC council as local governments take up safety concerns (AP)

• The dangerous myth behind AI agent hacks (FT)

• AI industry insiders voice alarms to NYC council as local governments take up safety concerns (AP)

The Insider

“This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die

Levitsky’s quote is a reminder that the elected autocrat we have in the White House has spent the first two years of his term not in defending democracy but in dismantling it.

We still have courts that rule against Trump’s most egregious acts, reporters who accurately report his moves and hold him accountable, and an opposition political party poised to hand him defeat in the midterm elections now underway.

But collectively, it may not be enough to stop him from stealing the election through one corrupt mechanism or another.

Growing up, I was taught in school to respect the heroes who defeated the enemies overseas who sought to destroy our democracy, but I was taught very little about how to defeat an enemy within.

HEADLINES:

• U.S. Rushes to Withdraw Bombers From U.K. Air Base After New Threats (NYT)

• Yemeni and Saudi forces launch counteroffensive against the Houthis (Axios)

• Iraq says it transported 2 million barrels of crude through Strait of Hormuz (Reuters)

• Lula and Bolsonaro Son Head to Runoff for Brazil’s Presidency (NYT)

• Lab worker ‘possibly’ dies of plague in Siberia, prompting quarantine measures (Guardian)

• Ukraine’s surprise robot offensive exposes a vulnerability in Putin’s war machine (CNBC)

• Despair over future fuels political anxiety for college students on the cusp of adulthood (AP)

• Trump’s opponents are planning efforts to reverse his changes to presidency (WP)

• The next crash could be an economic bloodbath (The Hill)

• ICE Is Everywhere and Acting with Impunity (New Yorker)

• 'Jane Doe' solidarity posts flood social media after Cornell rape lawsuit (AP)

• The Battle to Pass a Billionaire Tax (New Yorker)

• Letterboxd Holds Seance To Ask James Dean His 4 Favorite Movies (Onion)

LATEST AI NEWS:

• Trump announces formation of AI “Super Intelligence Force” (CBS)

• Who should be held liable when AI causes harm? (WP)

• These AI Experts Want to Do High-Stakes Research Out in the Open (Wired)

• It may soon be possible to create “mirror life” (Economist)

• Anthropic Is Aiming To Transform Healthcare—Here’s How (Forbes)

• Legal risks pile up for Altman as OpenAI uncovers dozens of hacks (FT)

• Should We Ban AI for Kids? (Atlantic)

• Why AI has trouble predicting the intensity of hurricanes (WP)

• Trump names national intelligence director Jay Clayton to lead a new federal AI task force (AP)

 

Votes Streaming IN

So far over a million citizens have voted in this year’s midterm elections, with Election Day still a month away. 

Polls indicate that surprisingly Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate have pulled even or just ahead of Republicans in the red states of Texas, Alaska, Kansas, Iowa and Ohio.

This means that if the polls prove to be accurate, Democrats could take control of the Senate. They are broadly expected to easily win the House, where all 435 seats are up for grabs.

The top issue in the election appears to be the cost of living, which Trump promised to bring down in his 2024 victory over Kamala Harris. But prices remain high, partly due to Trump’s war on Iran.

HEADLINES:

• The Student Journalists Who Never Let the Cornell Assault Case Go (NYT)

• Cornell rape allegations reignite debate over laws on intoxication and consent (WP)

• Details emerge in case of former Cornell student alleging gang rape by fraternity members (CBS)

• D.A. in Cornell Rape Inquiry Declined to Review Additional Evidence (NYT)

• New Fox Poll—a Disaster for Trump—Rattles Fox Anchors: “Wake Up!” (TNR)

• Voters favor Democrats on key issues but lack faith in either party to solve problems: AP-NORC poll (AP)

• Senate Races in Republican States Tilt Toward Democrats, Polls Find (NYT)

• Not To Alarm You, But Trump’s Brain Is Melted (Bulwark)

• Agents alarmed as Patel points FBI toward elections: report (MS NOW)

• What if the polls are wrong again? (Silver Bulletin)

• What a hiring slowdown signals about the state of the U.S. economy (PBS)

• What the bond market reveals about Congress, the national debt and the middle class—and where America goes from here (Fortune)

• U.S. Marine arrested on suspicion of killing Japanese woman in Okinawa (NBC)

• Saudis plan assault on Houthis (Reuters)

• FlyDubai plane attack by co-pilot was an attempted ‘terrorist’ act, UAE says (CNBC)

• America’s New Relationship With Israel…It’s Complicated (Reveal)

• Tens of thousands protest against Spain’s housing crisis following eviction of 87-year-old woman (Sky)

• Tennessee’s prisons chief is resigning after failed execution of Christa Pike (AP)

• ‘Digger’ Prosthetic Artist Recalls Grueling Process Of Having Tom Cruise Sit Still (Onion)

LATEST AI NEWS:

• An OpenAI safety employee has quit and is sounding the alarm (Verge)

• Some topics are off limits inside popular Chinese-made free AI, researchers find (CBS)

• America’s data center fight is a preview of what’s to come for the rest of the world (CNBC)

• Rogue AI agents expose internet’s frail foundation (Axios)

• AI Agents Are Going Rogue. Novel Legal Battles Are Next (The Information)

• ‘This Matters’: Researchers Identify Thousands of New Tells in AI Writing (Gizmodo)

• His Novel Had a Shot at a Top Book Prize. Then Someone Ran an A.I. Test. (NYT)

• The volunteer internet sleuths hunting down rogue AI agents (WP)

Why Trump Might Do It

Yesterday’s scenario, “What May Come” is explored in depth by Myra Adams of The Hill:

• No president has ever invoked the Insurrection Act in connection with an election, but Trump could be the first.

• The Insurrection Act authorizes the domestic deployment of the U.S. military or the federalization of the National Guard to suppress violent, out-of-control situations, such as rebellions, riots, protests, or insurrections.

• From Trump’s perspective, mounting Republican fears of midterm losses might present a historic opportunity to use force, or even federalize the elections…With so much at stake, might Trump trigger an event like the 2021 Capitol riot?

• Losing signals weakness, which is not in Trump’s DNA, and clashes with his persona as the strongest, most powerful man in the world.

• Trump led his loyal supporters in repeating, “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States, …that I will go out [to vote] with my family, my friends. I’ll do it anyway, I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they [Democrats] do.”

• The president called all Democrats “communists” and urged cheating to defeat them. If the “communists” win, it would mean they cheated, and the election was rigged, stolen, or infiltrated by foreign voters, justifying Trump in declaring a national emergency, authorizing force, and potentially invoking the Insurrection Act.

• In May, on Truth Social, Trump proclaimed that he would deploy an “Election Integrity Army in every single State to preserve the sanctity of each legal vote.” Soon, the Department of Justice will deploy 1,000 poll monitors.

• This week, a stern directive from the secretary of Defense to protect and defend the election from “foreign actors,” coupled with recent statements by the FBI director and the secretary of Homeland Security signals a willingness to secure the election by force if there is a “threat” or “violation of the law” — exaggerated, imagined or manufactured by Team Trump.

• From the military perspective, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine responded to questions from Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.). His answers, in part, read: “The Joint Force has no plans to send federal military personnel or federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during the 2026 elections … no plans to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election-related material. I have neither received nor anticipate receiving any unlawful order concerning the role of the Joint Force in the upcoming November 2026 midterm elections.”

*** We are only a month away from Election Day. Voting by mail is underway. I think we should all be aware of Trump’s threats and prepare for another hazardous election period like in 2020-’21, when Trump incited the Capitol riots.

Only this time it could be worse.

HEADLINES:

• Why Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act before, during, or after the midterms (The Hill)

• New aircraft carrier, 10,000 US troops: Is the Iran war about to escalate? (Al Jazeera)

• Fact check: Trump’s attempt to pretend he didn’t say the Iran war would last mere ‘weeks’ (CNN)

• Why the War in Iran Is Likely to Heat Up Again (New Yorker)

• Europe Weighs Tapping Diesel Reserves (WSJ)

• U.S. and Allies Agree to Release Diesel Reserves as Prices Soar (NYT)

• Flydubai pilot attacked captain with cockpit’s crash axe in attempted terrorist attack, UAE official says (NBC)

• Indian pilot tells PM Modi he opened flydubai cockpit door during attack (Reuters)

• Retired major general: Hegseth ‘playing Russian roulette’ with US security (The Hill)

• As Prospects Dim, G.O.P. Pulls Money Out of North Carolina Senate Race (NYT)

• The GOP’s Culture-War Hail Mary (Atlantic)

• Fed seen skipping October rate hike as job market cools (Reuters)

• Paramount-WBD Will Now Be Called Skydance, David Ellison Reveals (Deadline)

• Hochul Rebukes Prosecutor’s Handling of Cornell Case (NYT)

• What’s next for Christa Pike after surviving lethal injection (CNN)

• About 400 schools in France are expected to remain closed after student protests over teacher shortages and dilapidated school buildings turned violent in some ‌places. (Reuters)

• ‘It’s radical to release a film called Girls Like Girls in this climate’ (Guardian)

• Unsupportive Parents Eat Crow After Son Makes It As Beetlejuice Impersonator (Onion)

LATEST AI NEWS:

• Don’t be fooled—LLMs don’t reason (TR)

• How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes (NYT)

• The volunteer internet sleuths hunting down rogue AI agents (WP)

• How China’s Token Resellers Create an Anthropic Gray Market (The Information)

• Retailers From QVC to Kohl’s Are Split on Agentic Shopping (WSJ)

• Chinese hackers impersonated an Anthropic exec to get information about AI (CNN)

• A.I. Anxiety Is Spilling Into the Therapist’s Office (NYT)

• AI Can Now Rebuild Images From Brain Scans. What If Your Dreams Don’t Stay Private? (Popular Mechanics)

• Can Google’s new model really catch up to OpenAI and Anthropic at the frontier? (CNBC)

• Trump’s AI rebrand may stop at the White House (Politico)

• A.I. Is Going Rogue. Who Should Be Held Responsible? (NYT)

• An OpenAI Engineer and His Friends Debate the Future (New Yorker)

 

What May Come

Even a casual listener to Trump can devine his intention.

The election in November is not going to be a good one for the President’s party. Democrats are going to sweep to at least a 30-seat majority in the House and they probably will squeak out a slight advantage in the Senate as well.

Regardless of the specifics, Trump will no longer be able to exert control over a compliant Congress if the results are allowed to stand.

Tyrant that he is, Trump will not accept those results. He’ll say the election was “rigged.” He’ll may use one of several options to block the results from being certified, freezing Congress in the process.

There will be mass protests, of course. Americans will not take lightly the negation of their votes. In response, Trump will use the Insurrection Act or declare martial law to call out troops and restore “order.”

And so democracy’s flame will extinguish as the autocrat attempts to establish an emergency government.

But that will not be the end. It will only be the beginning. 

HEADLINES:

• Renee Good’s family sues US, ICE officers over fatal shooting (USA Today)

• ‘She was pure love’: Renee Good’s partner makes first public comments as family sues U.S. government, ICE officer over her killing (NBC)

• What Trump Misunderstands About Modern Media (Atlantic)

• Taking On Trump Immigration Agenda, Justices Will Review Migrant Detention Policy (NYT)

• Trump doesn’t rule out invoking Insurrection Act around election (USA Today)

• Christa Pike’s failed execution puts lethal injection in focus (Axios)

• Israel’s Netanyahu: Co-pilot of flydubai plane underwent radical Islamist indoctrination (Reuters)

• Third aircraft carrier and thousands of troops head to Mideast as Trump weighs new Iran strikes (AP)

• Moroccan intelligence uses surveillance to ‘silence’ journalists: Amnesty (Al Jazeera)

• U.K.-Iranian Man Arrested in London in Connection to Air Base Incident (NYT)

• China’s new infrastructure push will help itself and the world (Economist)

• Newsom, Eager for a Higher Perch, Climbs the Golden Gate Bridge (NYT)

• California bans child marriage, a practice still legal in 32 US states (BBC)

• Most Americans blame Trump for higher prices as his economic approval hits a new low, a new AP-NORC poll shows (AP)

• 5 Takeaways From the Debate for California Governor (NYT)

• Why did Ohio stop being a swing state? (Silver Bulletin)

• Trump’s Threat to Ban Diesel Exports Sets Off Global Alarms (NYT)

• Judge says U.S. can’t prosecute ex-Olympian again in Reflecting Pool case (WP)

• David Ellison Asks CNN CEO to Stay After Paramount-Warner Deal Closes (WSJ)

• Cornell Jane Doe’s attorney says she told police in 2024: ‘I was raped’ (NPR)

• US social media users urge Koreans to unmask Cornell sexual assault suspect Winston Lee (South China Morning Post)

• Judge rules officers have no standing to sue over Capitol Jan. 6 plaque (The Hill)

• A Cancer Test Has Investors Betting Big. But Will Insurers Pay? (WSJ)

• Hegseth announced that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was poised to take on another role in the administration and help co-lead a Pentagon initiative on the "future of warfare." (Reuters)

• Are US Military Veterans Training Russians to Fight in Ukraine? (Military.com)

• A ‘tsunami’ of church closings is poised to remake America (CNN)

• The era of cheap water is over (Money Trail)

• Almost everyone naturally turns left when walking – and we still have no idea why (The Conversation)

• Dude Wipes Introduces New Flushable Khakis (Onion)

LATEST AI NEWS: 

• AI agents tried to hack a Canadian government website, researchers say (WP)

• Anthropic Said to Target Mega-IPO Before Thanksgiving Holiday (Bloomberg)

• Trump + AI = Blue Tsunami (Bulwark)

• Broadcom to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to lease its chips, filing says (CNBC)

• Introducing Quine: An AI research system designed for the complexity of biology (Microsoft)

• Mirror life is dangerous. Regulators must act before it becomes real (Economist)

• Is circular financing in AI a problem? (FT)

• Anthropic's IPO pitch embraces AI's promise and peril. (Reuters)

• On AI, a light touch is the right touch (WP)

• Trump’s Voluntary A.I. Policing Echoes What Biden Did. But Is It Enough Today? (NYT)