3 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Politics Archive

Archives for October 2026

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Florida can enforce social media ban for kids, appeals court rules.

The law prevents kids under 14 from creating an account on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, while requiring parental permission for teens aged 14 or 15. The tech trade group NetChoice won an injunction blocking the law in 2025, but a judge later paused the injunction during the appeals process, as reported by NBC 6 South Florida.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“I greatly value my grudges. They’re very important to me.”

In a deep-dive profile of Marc Andreessen’s petty grievance bullshit, Bloomberg Businessweek gently points out that he is not exactly a member of the reality-based community. Since covid, that’s gotten worse, as he and his wife have cocooned themselves away from ever encountering a normal person.

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
“If you know where reality is heading, you can win a lot of money from people who don’t.”

The London Review of Books surveys the gambling landscape: how “prediction markets” have been handed the CFTC, market manipulation, and the blurring of reality. To state the obvious: “Prediction markets don’t produce truth. They are high-stakes wait-and-see machines, that’s all.” Do stay to read the very end.

Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
A computer glitch delayed nearly 600,000 voter registrations in Texas.

County election officials claim they largely cleared the backlog by Wednesday, but the incident still raised alarms and prompted a lawsuit from voting rights groups. According to the New York Times:

The lawsuit, which named Mr. Howden and Freeman F. Martin, director of the Department of Public Safety, among its defendants, said the backlog had resulted from a programming error on a website for driver’s license applications that was also supposed to allow applicants to register to vote.

Because of the error, voters who checked “yes” to register to vote between December 2025 and February 2026 received a receipt confirming their choice, but their data was never recorded, the lawsuit said.

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Ukraine says its Starshield services have been restored.

A Ukranian official tells Axios that Starshield — SpaceX’s government-focused internet service that runs on Starlink satellites — has been “restored to full capacity.” Sudden restrictions on Ukraine’s Starshield services disrupted the military’s drone operations, officials said on Wednesday.

Benn Jordan on Flock, privacy, and the new surveillance backlash
Play

The musician and YouTuber on investigating the surveillance state and becoming the face of the anti-Flock movement.

Nilay Patel
Jay Peters
Jay Peters
This week in the big AI data center buildout.

AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:

Dominic Preston
Dominic Preston
Banned journalists get to keep their press passes while they sue the White House.

District Judge Timothy Kelly extended his 14-day restraining order to last the duration of the lawsuit filed by CNN, MS Now, and Politico against Donald Trump’s White House after their press access was revoked. Kelly said the publications are “likely to succeed not only on their due process claim, but also on their two First Amendment claims.”

Memorandum Opinion

[UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA]

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
The US government launched a “Super Intelligence” website.

Following Trump’s attempt to rename AI, which Silicon Valley is falling in line with, si.gov is the “official home of America’s work to lead the world in Super Intelligence.” It has a lot of Fancy Web Design animations that are honestly really distracting.

Also, ai.gov now redirects to the new site.

Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Are military hackers watching you through insecure cameras?

Hackers are increasingly using vulnerable civilian cameras to track, surveil, and aid attacks on opposing military operations, with an estimated 1.2 billion internet-connected cameras impacted globally. That ranges from Iran watching through chicken coop cameras in Israel, Ukraine monitoring Russian submarines via external building surveillance, and corporate teleconferencing devices being hacked through unsecured apps.