Lindsey Hall’s boyfriend was asleep on her shoulder when she accidentally discovered what he’d been telling ChatGPT about her.

Her phone had died, so she picked up his to look up something for work. Then she noticed a chat titled “Relationship Issues and Uncertainty.” Inside, she says, were complaints about her appearance, doubts about his attraction to her, and a sentence she still remembers verbatim: “I’m just not proud of her.”

While he peacefully snoozed beside her, she learned that ChatGPT had issued a verdict on the state of their relationship: Her boyfriend needed to end it.

When she first saw the chat title, Hall figured it was about a familiar disagreement: She loved her three cats; he wasn’t an animal person. “This is probably about the cats,” she remembers thinking. She hadn’t expected a list of complaints about her. “Nothing was positive,” she says. “Not one thing.”

Hall got up, collected her toothbrush and charger, and slipped out the front door. “I just had nothing to say,” she says. “I had nothing but rage at that point.”

Couples have long had ways to discover things they weren’t supposed to know about each other: rifling through a journal, stealing a glance at incoming texts, poking around in Instagram or Snapchat DMs. Now, there’s another place to look—and plenty to wish you hadn’t seen. Therapists say they’re working with couples who have discovered their partners asking AI whether they should break up, sharing sexual fantasies, or contemplating how to bring up something they were too nervous to say out loud.

Why a partner’s AI chats can feel like a betrayal

Reading the chats doesn’t necessarily tell you what the other person meant. Was your partner venting after a fight or seriously considering leaving you? Were they asking for help talking to you—or finding a way to avoid it? And who owes whom an apology: the person who read the chats, or the one who shared intimate details about their partner with a chatbot?

When Ilana Grines, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles, works with couples, her first question is now: “What have you told AI?” She wants to know if and how both people are using it, what they’re sharing, and whether they’ve discussed any of that with each other. Most haven’t, she says.

“We don’t have a language around our conversations with AI,” Grines says. Couples may understand that a journal is private without having discussed whether the same goes for a chatbot conversation. When someone discovers their partner’s chats, “it creates this huge rupture where one person accessed the other person’s history,” Grines says. “And then it’s nuclear.”

One couple Grines worked with paid for a single AI subscription. The wife, a teacher, used it to grade papers. Her husband used it to explore sexual fantasies, apparently without realizing that conversations from his computer would be visible through their shared account, Grines says. His wife discovered the topic in the platform’s sidebar.

“We know about a third person entering our relationship,” Grines says. “But we don’t know about this third space that we’re creating.”

Sometimes, one partner doesn’t even know that space exists. They might be aware their partner asks AI for help with work or vacation planning—not that they’re also discussing their sex life or wondering whether to stay together. Hall used chatbots herself, but discussing her relationship with one hadn’t occurred to her. “I just didn’t think of it as a tool for that,” she says.

Part of what stings is realizing your partner talked to a chatbot about something they felt like they couldn’t bring up with you, says Shemiah Derrick, a relationship therapist in Chicago. You might also wonder how long they’ve been feeling this way—and whether you would have known if you hadn’t read the chats.

Derrick has seen couples finally talk through a problem—only to start fighting when one person admits they used AI to figure out what to say. The other person’s reaction, as she describes it: “You had to go to chat for us to do that?”

In those cases, Derrick points out that the person turned to AI because their usual way of bringing up problems wasn’t working. They wanted to get through a tough conversation without having the same old fight. “They were trying to do something different,” she says.

What AI chats can reveal about relationships 

Giulia P. Davis, a licensed marriage and family therapist in San Francisco, recalls working with a couple after one partner read the other’s AI chats without permission and found complaints and doubts about their relationship. The person who wrote them was still sorting out how they felt. Their partner assumed they’d already made up their mind.

“The partner didn’t find a straightforward confession or plan to leave the relationship,” Davis says.

Davis helped them distinguish “what you really think” from “what you might think about.” Someone might complain to a chatbot after a fight or ask what would happen if they broke up, for example, but not feel that way once they’ve cooled down.

If you find these types of messages, you should ask your partner how they’re feeling, Davis suggests—not assume everything they typed is something they’ve been hiding from you. “A person can have private thoughts without being deceptive,” she says. “Couples need boundaries around private digital spaces just as they do around journals, therapy, or conversations with trusted friends.”

A chatbot also does something a journal doesn’t: It answers. But remember that it’s getting only one side of the story, says Shayce Johnston, a licensed mental health counselor in Gainesville, Fla., and the founder of Human AI Dynamics, which explores how people form emotional and relational bonds with AI. If your partner complains about you and the chatbot agrees, they may feel that someone else has confirmed you’re in the wrong. Johnston describes the reaction this way: “Even the AI agrees with me.” That doesn’t make it true.

How to set boundaries around AI in a relationship

Don’t assume you and your partner agree on what should stay private, says Tammy Nelson, a psychotherapist in Los Angeles and author of Open Monogamy: A Guide to Co-Creating Your Ideal Relationship Agreement. You might think nothing of opening their ChatGPT account; they might consider it the equivalent of reading their journal. Talk about that before you’re staring at something you wish you hadn’t seen.

“What parts are private?” Nelson asks. Keeping a password to yourself, for example, doesn’t automatically mean you’re concealing something that would hurt your partner. “I really do think that it’s important to revisit that conversation pretty often,” she says.

Reading the chats is only part of the issue. What’s OK to put into them? Johnston works with couples in which one person uses AI enthusiastically while the other has privacy, ethical, or environmental concerns. Your partner might be fine with you asking for date-night ideas but uncomfortable with you pasting in their texts or describing your sex life.

Grines suggests starting with a question: “Can you share something you’ve asked AI about our relationship?” You can also ask whether there are subjects they find easier to discuss with a chatbot than with you. The answers can help you get specific about what you’re both comfortable with: using AI to prepare for a difficult conversation, for example, or talking through an argument afterward. Discuss whether those exchanges will stay private or whether you’d like to share what came out of them.

If you’re tempted to skip the conversation and start scrolling through your partner’s chat history, Nelson suggests asking yourself why. Has something happened that makes you distrust them, or are you feeling anxious and hoping what you find will reassure you?

As Davis puts it: “What gets in the way of asking your partner directly?”

What to do after reading your partner’s AI chats

If you’ve read something upsetting, ask your partner what it meant before assuming you know. Davis encourages couples to wait until they’re calm enough to have that conversation. The person who used AI can explain what they were working through; the person who read the chats can explain what hurt.

Johnston wants couples to stop treating the chat history as a verdict on their relationship. Instead, she helps them understand “what the need was, what the fear is, and where the disconnection was that led to the conversation in the first place.” That means making room for both people’s feelings: You can be hurt by what your partner wrote, and they can be upset that you read it without permission.

There may still be a useful role for AI in the relationship. Grines has worked with couples who use their therapy notes to ask a chatbot for questions they can discuss together at home, for example. Johnston sometimes encourages clients to rehearse a difficult conversation with AI before having it with their partner.

“I don’t think AI is inherently anti-relationship,” Grines says. But she wants couples to consider whether it’s helping them talk to each other—or becoming the only place they’re willing to be honest. “AI can be a bridge into communication,” she says, “or it can be a place where communication goes to die.”

For Hall, finding out how her boyfriend used AI made her question conversations she’d once felt good about. Before meeting in person, they’d spent months messaging. He’d seemed warm over text, she says, but could be colder face-to-face. She’d wondered: “What am I doing wrong?”

His chat history offered a possible explanation. When they’d discussed serious or emotional subjects, she says, he’d pasted her messages into ChatGPT and asked it to help him respond. She remembers his instruction: “Placate her.”

“It’s horrifying,” she says now.

She still wonders whether he would have spoken so harshly about her to another person, or whether something about talking to AI encouraged him. “Would you have said all those things to a person in that way?” she asks.

After she left his house, he began texting her. She turned off her phone. When he later came to her home, she told him she’d read the chats. By then, she says, she felt there was little left to discuss: “I just read exactly how you feel.”

In the winter of 2015, Dr. Tom Chiller received a call from public-health officials in Britain.

They were panicking. A new fungus was causing devastating infections at a large London hospital. “They weren’t able to get rid of it,” says Chiller, who was then chief of the fungal-diseases branch at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “They didn’t know what to do.”

The British officials said the fungus—a kind of yeast called Candida auris—appeared to be spreading from patient to patient. The officials said they were going to shut down parts of the hospital to curb its transmission. “That was just mind-boggling,” Chiller says.

At first he was more confused than alarmed. Candida is a kind of yeast that causes some of the most common fungal conditions, including thrush and vaginal yeast infections. Some species can cause severe illnesses, including bloodstream infections. But Chiller knew of no Candida species—indeed, no life-threatening fungus of any kind—that could spread so easily among people.

“I’ll never forget that call,” he says. “At first, I didn’t really believe it. Suddenly we have a yeast acting like a bacteria? It was weird.”

First discovered by doctors in 2009 in the ear of a patient in Japan, Candida auris behaves differently from most other fungi. It can survive at higher temperatures and in saltier environments, making nooks like a human ear, armpit, and groin ideal places to grow. It is exceptionally sticky and clings doggedly to people’s skin and hair follicles, and to surfaces—including slick ones, like hospital floors and beds, that are designed to repel germs. It is highly resistant to antifungal drugs, hard to kill with standard disinfectants, and can cause terrible, often deadly illnesses. Also, as British officials were starting to notice in 2015, it spreads easily through physical contact between people and via contaminated surfaces.

At the time of the call, though, much about Candida auris remained unknown. A few countries had reported a smattering of infections, but it hadn’t seemed like a big deal. No cases had yet been reported in the U.S. “It was a wake-up call,” Chiller says now. “We realized that, huh, maybe this little ear fungus isn’t just a little ear fungus anymore.”

In the decade since that phone call, that realization has cemented. When about 200 people—mostly doctors and researchers—attended a three-day conference about fungal diseases near Denver in September, Candida auris was the first topic on the agenda. To a nonscientist, the talks were dry, technical presentations on the pathogenesis and epidemiology of the disease, but to the attendees—and “almost everyone who works in mycology is here,” said Dr. Luis Ostrosky-Zeichner, an infectious-disease specialist at UTHealth Houston—they were red flags we should all be taking seriously.

Candida auris has rapidly gained ground since 2015. It has sickened tens of thousands of people in over 80 countries and six continents. The World Health Organization (WHO) has designated it one of the world’s highest-priority fungal threats. The CDC on Oct. 27 listed Candida auris as one of four top-priority drug-resistant pathogens that require "urgent and aggressive action." Thousands of cases are now reported in the U.S. every year. The CDC said this summer that the fungus had already infected more than 3,000 people this year in 27 states. Up to 60% of people who are infected die.

“In some U.S. states, it’s just endemic now. It’s there to stay,” Chiller says. 

Deadly fungal diseases were once considered very rare, but the proliferation of Candida auris points to a troubling trend: dangerous fungi are increasingly finding new opportunities to infect us, and human activity is spurring them on.

From the climate we’re warming to the medical treatments we use, we are creating conditions that allow fungal pathogens to thrive, infectious-disease experts say. Rising global temperatures, they say, likely led to the emergence of Candida auris and are driving the evolution of other fungal pathogens never seen before. Changing weather patterns are pushing some fungi to expand their geographic range, and the overuse of antifungals in medicine, agriculture, and livestock farming has driven them to develop resistance to these drugs.

“We are creating an environment that is favoring pathogenic fungi and drug resistance,” says Dr. Andrej Spec, a fungal-disease specialist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “That means they are likely becoming better at infecting us, and also at evading our treatments. That’s a bad combination.”

Fungi are ubiquitous organisms. They live in, on, and all around us. Every day, we inhale thousands—if not millions—of fungal spores. There are an estimated 6 million species of fungi on the planet, but only about 300 of them cause diseases in people. “We are protected by our temperature and our immunity,” says Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. The human body is too hot for most fungi to thrive, but as the earth warms, fungi are adapting.

Researchers think Candida auris, which likely originated in marine ecosystems, evolved a tolerance to salty conditions and high temperatures over time. The yeast can now survive at 107°F. 

Candida auris is not the only threat finding hot new hosts. A new fungal pathogen is disfiguring cats and people in South America, and certain molds, which once infected only plants, are now sickening people too. Spec published a report in 2021 describing the first case of a person infected by a mold that had previously been known to damage only trees. Since then, two more people in the U.S. have been infected, Spec says. “It’s gone from never causing human disease in the history of medicine to three new cases of it in the last five years,” he says.

In October, the CDC said that cases of a different mold—a brain-attacking variety—have jumped fourfold in the past two years. “This is a nasty pathogen,” Spec says. It infects even healthy people and causes brain abscesses that in up to 70% of cases are fatal.

“We’re seeing a lot of these molds that were once rare pathogens becoming more common,” Spec says. “A lot of us are leaning toward the idea that this is probably being driven by climate change.”

Spec and other doctors are working with public-health officials, patient advocates, and drug developers to try to stem the rise of threatening fungi. They’ve made some progress in recent years: raising awareness, doing more surveillance, and developing new drugs and tests, but the challenge is formidable.

As fungi develop mechanisms to better infect us, more people are becoming vulnerable to serious fungal diseases—because of advancements in medicine. Today, to fight autoimmune conditions and diseases like cancer, millions of people take drugs that suppress their immune systems. But immunocompromised people are at higher risk of contracting severe fungal infections. Thanks in part to those therapies, the growing population of immunocompromised people in the U.S. is now estimated to number at least 7 million.

“We have people who have immune conditions like multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, and rheumatoid arthritis who might have died from these diseases in the past but aren’t dead thanks to these therapies. But they’re also immunosuppressed, so we have a bigger pool of people who are at risk,” Spec says.

More people are also being kept alive by invasive medical devices, such as heart-lung machines and ventilators, which can create pathways for germs including fungi to enter the body. “We’re making all this medical progress,” Casadevall says, “but that progress comes at a cost.” 

Ryan Zwick, a healthy 22-year-old, had just graduated from nursing school when COVID nearly struck him dead in December 2023. The virus, which research shows increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, severely damaged his heart.

Zwick spent a week in an intensive-care unit in Las Vegas before he was airlifted to a hospital in San Diego to receive more advanced care. He was intubated and sedated; his lungs, kidneys, and heart had all started to fail.

He was attached to a heart-lung machine, a life-support device that pumps a patient’s blood outside the body, via tubes placed into his sternum. “His chest was basically open for like a week,” his wife Emmy remembers.

Candida auris took advantage.

When Zwick finally woke up more than a month after being admitted to the hospital, doctors told him he had a severe Candida auris infection. The yeast, they said, likely sneaked into his body through the tubes in his chest. “It got into my bloodstream and kept causing a lot of issues throughout my body,” he says.

He was treated aggressively with antifungal drugs, which kept the infection under control. But the fungus lingered.

Zwick was discharged from the hospital in April 2024, but he returned to the emergency room a couple of weeks later because blisters had appeared at the incision site on his chest. He soon learned that the Candida auris infection was causing osteomyelitis, a serious and painful condition in which bone tissue becomes inflamed. “They took out a bunch of bone and stuff, and put me on more antifungals,” he says.

More than two years later, Zwick, who works as a nurse in New Hampshire, continues to receive weekly infusions of a potent antifungal drug to manage his infection. His doctors have warned him that he will likely have to take them for life. “It’s basically chronic now,” says Zwick, who still sometimes has swelling and blistering at the incision site.

Zwick worries that available antifungal drugs could one day lose their sting. Candida auris is highly resistant to many antifungals; a growing number of infections are “pan-resistant,” which means no medicines are effective against them. “I just hope these drugs keep working for me,” Zwick says.

When Candida auris first emerged in the U.S. a decade ago, it was a very rare and often severe disease whose victims were usually sick, elderly, and immunocompromised people in hospitals and nursing homes. But the yeast has been expanding its reach: not just infecting more people, but a broader range of them, and causing a wider variety of illnesses too.

“Ten years ago, we’d maybe see one Candida auris patient every few months,” says UTHealth’s Ostrosky-Zeichner. “Now, we have several cases per day in Houston.” Texas, New York, Nevada, Florida, and California are among the U.S. states with the highest number of cases.

More young people, like Zwick, and people who aren’t immunocompromised are getting infected, doctors say. The yeast is also starting to cause new types of hard-to-treat infections. Spec says that this year, for the first time, he treated a woman with a vaginal yeast infection caused by Candida auris. She had diabetes that was well-controlled and was otherwise healthy, says Spec.

The woman had come to see him after getting recurrent yeast infections that hadn’t responded to standard treatments, he says. She recovered only after being treated for several days with an IV antifungal drug more powerful than what is usually used to treat such infections, Spec says.

Vaginal yeast infections are very common, with an estimated 3 in 4 women having at least one in their lifetime. A class of antifungals known as azoles are typically used to treat such infections, either as a cream, suppository, or oral pill, but Candida auris is more than 90% resistant to azole drugs. “It’s no joke when you have to tell a woman that she has a vaginal yeast infection for which you usually take one pill and move on, but in her case, she needs to get on IV medication,” Spec says.

Doctors say Candida auris is also emerging as the cause of another common disease: urinary tract infections (UTIs), which roughly half of women will experience at least once. Doctors have known that Candida auris can cause UTIs in people with catheters, but they are now seeing cases of people with tough-to-treat infections who don’t have any medical devices or major health complications.

Public-health experts worry that the fungus could become as widespread as pathogens like MRSA: methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a superbug bacteria.

“Initially, we tried to stomp it out, but we realized early on that Candida auris was here to stay. It was going to be more like MRSA,” says Chiller. “MRSA used to be hospital-only, and now it’s on every skin boil on the high school wrestling team.”

After Chiller got off the phone with his British counterparts in 2015, he went on a quest to better understand the fungus that he suspected would soon invade the U.S. He first wanted to know if Candida auris was already on U.S. soil but doctors had just missed it. Under his direction, the CDC sent out an alert to hospitals and researchers, asking them to test samples of unidentified fungal pathogens in their repositories going back decades. “We didn’t find Candida auris historically,” he says.

The CDC also collaborated with public-health officials in parts of Asia, Africa, and South America, where Candida auris cases had been detected. Together, they studied samples of the fungus in an attempt to understand how it emerged. They discovered something remarkable: at least three distinct strains of Candida auris appeared nearly simultaneously, over the course of a few years, but separately—in different corners of the globe. 

Many fungal-disease specialists and researchers now think climate change likely drove the yeast’s transformation from non-threatening environmental fungus to deadly pathogen. “It’s hard to explain the emergence of Candida auris simultaneously on all these continents and not include climate change as part of it. It just has to be. There’s no other good explanation,” says Dr. Peter Pappas, an infectious-disease doctor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Fungi are sensitive to heat, but they are also very adaptable to rising temperatures. In laboratory experiments, researchers have put different fungi in incubators and, by steadily raising the temperature, have spawned fungi that are more tolerant to higher heat.

“It’s actually not that hard,” says Casadevall, who studies how fungi cause disease and was the first to publish the theory that global warming spurred Candida auris’ rise. “The slower you raise the temperature, the more the fungi can tolerate it. It doesn’t take a lot of mutations,” he says.

A study he published with colleagues last year showed how different microclimates within the same city can trigger changes in fungi. “We went to Baltimore and looked for fungi on the sidewalk in a cool part of town, where they had nice trees and it’s shaded, and then the same fungus in a warm part of town,” Casadevall says. “We found that even within one city, just two miles away, the fungi from the warm neighborhood grow at higher temperatures. So, it’s happening.”

Fungi are already a major threat to many plants, insects, and cold-blooded animals. Frogs everywhere are being wiped out by a fungal disease; rice and banana crops have been decimated by fungi; and millions of bats, which drop their body temperature when they hibernate, have recently died in North America because of a deadly fungus. Until now, however, most mammals have been protected by our high body temperatures.

The emergence of Candida auris is a “shot across the bow of humanity that these things can happen,” Casadevall says. “We can have an organism come out of nowhere, and begin causing disease.”

Many other fungi are changing in ways that are worrying and, in some cases, dumbfounding doctors. As temperatures rise and rainfall patterns shift, some are spreading to new places. The soil-dwelling fungus Histoplasma, which had historically been confined in the U.S. to central and southern regions, has been steadily moving northward, eastward, and westward. U.S. cases have increased twofold in the past decade. 

Valley fever, caused by inhaling microscopic fungal spores, is estimated to sicken up to 360,000 people in the U.S. yearly. The fungus was primarily found in the arid American Southwest until about a decade or two ago, when it began spreading to states like Washington, once considered too wet or cold for it.

Even fungal diseases considered mundane and easily treated, like ringworm, are evolving in alarming ways, doctors say. A new species of ringworm that can be resistant to all antifungal drugs has been spreading from the Indian subcontinent to the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. in recent years. This new ringworm, which is highly contagious, causes chronic, inflamed, and itchy skin plaques all over the body.

“Think of athlete’s foot, but it’s now athlete’s body, and it’s untreatable,” Chiller says. He predicts this new disease, which experts think evolved in response to the overuse of over-the-counter antifungal medications, will become the predominant ringworm found globally in the next decade. 

In Brazil and South America, outbreaks of a fungus that causes a disfiguring and sometimes fatal skin disease have been sickening cats, dogs, and people. Like Candida auris, the pathogen has mysterious origins. The fungus was first identified as a threat in 1998 after an outbreak in Rio de Janeiro. First, cats started showing up to the city’s clinics very sick and covered with lesions. Then, people and dogs did too. Infectious-disease doctors identified the culprit of these illnesses as a type of Sporothrix fungus. Infected cats were spreading the disease to dogs and humans through scratches, bites, and even sneezes.

That explanation didn’t seem to make any sense at first, says Dallas Smith, a fungal-diseases scientist at CDC who tracks emerging pathogens including Sporothrix.

A species of Sporothrix fungus called Sporothrix schenckii had long been known to doctors and scientists. The pathogen causes what is often referred to as “rose gardener’s disease” because the fungus, which lives in the environment, typically infects people who work with dirt and plants. “Gardeners would get pricked by a rose thorn, and that would provide the opening for the fungus to enter,” Smith says.

The fungus was known to infect cats, but that was exceedingly uncommon. The disease itself was also very rare. At the largest hospital for infectious diseases in Rio de Janeiro, the Evandro Chagas National Institute of Infectious Diseases, doctors typically saw two to three cases a year before 1998, says Dr. Dayvison Freitas, an infectious-dermatology researcher at the hospital.

But seemingly out of nowhere, something incited the emergence of a more virulent Sporothrix species spread by cats and not plants. It isn’t clear what pushed it to evolve to so effectively infect cats. “Is it because of climate change or environmental change or some other pressures that we don’t understand?” Smith says.

Sporothrix brasiliensis was named as a separate species in 2007. Infections caused by the fungus can result in multiple lesions in people, sometimes all over the body and face. It almost always leaves lasting scars, which are often dark and raised, says Freitas.

In up to 10% of cases, usually involving elderly or immunocompromised people, the fungus can enter the bloodstream and cause destructive illnesses. “The fungus can affect any organ or system, including the bones, joints, lungs, throat, brain. It can cause a kind of meningitis,” Freitas says. “If this happens, it is very, very severe, and the death rate is high.”

Brazil has seen an explosion of the fungus in recent years. “Cats are spreading this disease among themselves, but also to humans at an alarmingly high rate,” Smith says.

From 1998 to 2001, fewer than 180 people, concentrated around Rio de Janeiro, fell sick with the disease. In recent years, thousands of people across the country are infected annually, Smith says.

The disease is now even infecting people in remote villages in the Amazon, Freitas says, and has emerged in other countries too. Cases of Sporothrix brasiliensis have been steadily sprouting up across South America in countries including Argentina, Paraguay, and Chile. Uruguay experienced its first outbreak of the disease in 2025, and Peru reported its first case this year, Smith says. “It’s just a matter of time before it ends up in the United States” and beyond, he says.

Sporothrix, says Chiller, is one of a growing number of fungi that are “dramatically changing our understanding of how we think fungi are supposed to act.”

At the Denver conference, a line of scientists followed Chiller wherever he went. Everyone there wanted to bend his ear. Chiller was decked out in his usual professional attire: a well-cut jacket with a colorful, bespoke fungi-print lining and a matching pocket square. (Chiller, whose grandfather was a tailor, has about 15 fungi-themed custom jackets.)

“In every generation, there tends to be a few people who are a force multiplier,” says Spec. “They change the field. In the case of mycology, the success that exists is often due to Tom Chiller.”

Chiller has been working for decades to draw the world’s attention to fungi’s gathering threat. He was the deputy director of the CDC’s fungal-diseases branch for about 10 years and its chief for another decade. Under his leadership, the department doubled in size to about 45 people and expanded its work to include surveillance of priority fungal diseases, including Candida auris, and research into emerging pathogens, as well as new treatments and diagnostic tools. 

He was instrumental in the development and widespread use of a cheap, simple, and accurate test, using just a pinprick of blood, for Cryptococcus—an environmental fungus that can cause meningitis. “It’s definitely saved tens of thousands of lives,” Chiller says. “I’m very proud of that.”

Chiller left the CDC last year after 25 years at the agency, months after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was named head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Chiller says he had been growing increasingly disenchanted at the agency since COVID. “During the pandemic, it was turmoil for everybody. CDC took a big hit reputationally,” he says. Then Kennedy took the helm, and Chiller’s team was cut by about a quarter, he says. “We had to prioritize what we could do.” 

Chiller says he felt “handcuffed” by restrictions imposed on CDC staff in the spring of 2025. “They cut all our travel, they canceled all meetings. We didn’t really have budgets,” he recalls. “I thought to myself, If this is the future, it’s not for me.” Chiller is now chief medical officer at IMMY, a company that develops tests for fungal diseases. He’s also a board member of the nonprofit Global Action Fund for Fungal Infections and of MyCARE, a fungal-disease patient-advocacy organization. Now, he gets to do what he loves most: advocating for fungal-disease awareness.

In September, he attended a roundtable discussion about fungal diseases with Kennedy and other U.S. health officials. Chiller, who helped coordinate the meeting, says it was the first time in his career that he had been in a room with a U.S. Health Secretary to talk only about fungus. That felt like progress, he says.

Chiller knows just how critical it is for health leaders and professionals to be familiar with fungi. “Think Fungus” was the catchphrase of the CDC’s first Fungal Disease Awareness Week, which Chiller helped launch in 2017.  Doctors often miss fungal diseases because they fail to think of them, research shows.

Though the spread of fungi in a warming world may seem like an impossible foe, there is hope in the fact that diagnosing fungal infections early makes it much more likely that a patient will survive—and researchers, including Chiller, are working to help patients take advantage of that edge.

They’ve got a long way to go: a 2019 paper showed that almost half of some 270 patients in Arizona with valley fever—a fungal disease Chiller studied as a young doctor—weren’t diagnosed correctly for a month or more.

Justin John lived that nightmare. The 27-year-old software engineer from Arizona was wrongly diagnosed with COVID, the common cold, and irritable bowel syndrome before doctors realized—more than six months later—that he was sick with valley fever.

There were “lesions literally everywhere inside my body,” he says. After lumps caused by the fungus started appearing on his forehead and neck, doctors discovered that the fungus had eaten holes through parts of his spine and skull. He underwent two surgeries to insert a metal plate into his forehead, and replace a part of his vertebrae with a metal disc. “The vertebra was so dissolved, they couldn’t save any of it,” he says.

John says he was healthy, active, and had no underlying medical conditions before he got sick. “It’s in the dirt. You can get it anywhere at any time,” he says. “I could have gotten it when I was walking to Walmart.”

Blood tests are currently used to diagnose valley fever, but false negative results are common, causing many missed diagnoses. IMMY is developing a new rapid urine test for the disease that it says will be easier to administer and more accurate. “So many patients, even here in Arizona where this disease is endemic, get missed,” says Dr. Fariba Donovan, a valley fever specialist at the University of Arizona who treated John. “This test could really decrease that delay in diagnosis.”

These are steps in the right direction, but Chiller says we need to take greater strides if we want to win in the race against fungi. Many decades ago, after encountering very sick and dying valley fever patients, Chiller says he “learned a lot about how devastating and complex fungal diseases can be.” He’s still waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

Standing on your own two feet might be no problem. Lift one up to balance, though, and you might have a few concerns.

Fortunately, there are ways to get a leg up on better balance. “Balance is not a trait—it’s a skill,” says Dr. Cory Calendine, an orthopedic surgeon at the Bone and Joint Institute of Tennessee. One way to practice: Stand beside a sturdy counter, lift one foot, and work toward holding the position for 30 seconds before switching sides.

Staying upright can be surprisingly humbling. “It’s free, it’s simple, but it’s also honest, brutally honest,” Calendine says. “It’s a good assessment of where you are.”

Here’s why it’s worth practicing, plus how to get started.

The benefits of standing on one leg

You might not give your balance much thought, but it helps get you through the day—from stepping into the shower to climbing upstairs when you get home from work. Even walking down the sidewalk involves briefly supporting yourself on one foot with every step.

There’s a lot going on to keep you from tipping over: Your brain processes information from your eyes, inner ear, and sensory nerves, while your muscles help keep you steady. When you lift one foot, for example, the muscles along the outside of your standing hip help keep your pelvis level. “All of these things are being coordinated for you to stand in one position without falling,” Calendine says.

Your balance can improve with practice: A review of 13 studies found that single-leg balance training improved balance performance in healthy adults. Calendine suggests working toward 30 seconds on each side, starting with however long you can safely manage.

Still, preventing falls takes more than good balance—you also need strong muscles to support you. A large Cochrane review found that exercise programs that focused on balance in addition to everyday movements, like getting up from a chair, reduced the rate of falls in older adults by about a quarter. While standing on one leg is a good start, it shouldn’t be the only exercise you do. “Balance is the front door, but strength is the whole house,” Calendine says.

How to stand on one leg to improve your balance

Find a sturdy counter you can hold onto, says Kevin Pozzi, an assistant professor in the doctor of physical therapy program at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I. Check that the floor isn’t slippery, and give your footwear some thought: “Sneakers would be ideal,” he says, as long as “they’re tied well and they fit.”

If you’ve fallen before or had a significant injury or surgery involving your legs, hips, or spine, talk to a health professional before getting started. Pozzi also recommends getting help if you can’t hold the position for 10 seconds. A physical therapist can assess your balance and suggest a routine that’s safe for you.

Otherwise, start with your hands on the counter, stand tall, and lift one foot off the floor. Keep your core engaged and avoid slumping over, Pozzi advises. Bending your lifted knee so your foot is slightly behind you often feels most comfortable, though you can also lift it in front if there’s room. “See how long you can hold first while holding on,” he says. 

If that feels easy, you can start easing up on your hands. “Maybe you go down to one hand,” he says. “Then lighten your grip even with that one hand so that you’re really not relying on it quite so much.” Keep it close enough to grab the counter if you need to.

Work toward 30 seconds, then switch legs. One side might feel easier than the other, especially if you’ve had an injury. “They’re not always the same,” Pozzi says. Once you can comfortably manage 30 seconds on each side, try repeating it a few times throughout the day.

And don’t expect to be perfectly still. “It’s normal to have a little bit of wobbling,” he says. You might feel your ankle moving or notice small shifts at your knee and hip as you try to stay upright. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. But if you’re wobbling so much that you keep grabbing the counter or putting your foot down, hold on and make it easier.

Don’t expect immediate results; this balance exercise takes time to work. Pozzi says people may start noticing changes after four to six weeks of consistent practice, including being able to hold the position longer. “Getting their socks and shoes on might be a little easier,” he says.

How to make balance exercises a daily habit

Calendine works on his balance while his coffee brews, both at home and at work, giving each leg a turn. “Nobody even knows I’m doing it,” he says. “They’re standing beside me, but you can kind of hide it, which is nice.”

Dr. Vonda Wright, an orthopedic surgeon in Orlando, practices so often that she sometimes catches herself standing on one leg while giving a speech. She also asks rooms full of executives to try it—and watches them struggle. “It may be one of the only things they fail at,” she says.

To make practicing easier to remember, she suggests pairing it with something you already do. Once you feel steady enough, try standing on one leg while brushing your teeth or taking a phone call beside your desk, with a sturdy surface nearby. “You’ve got to brush your teeth anyway,” she says. “Do it on one leg.”

When holding the position for 30 seconds feels easy, you can gradually increase the challenge. Wright suggests placing a folded towel under your standing foot, which makes the surface less stable. Another option is moving your arms while you balance. Change one thing at a time, with support within reach.

Think you’ve gotten pretty good at the whole thing? Try briefly closing your eyes; without being able to see, staying upright gets trickier. “Always be near something you can grab onto,” Wright says. If you lose your balance, put your foot down and start again. “We’re trying to make this a lifestyle,” she says, “not a workout regimen.”

President Donald Trump’s conflict with Iran has become a political liability for his administration. Since the last U.S. strikes on Iran fell on Sept. 8, Trump has publicly ruled out attacking Iran before the November midterm elections—and promised to end the conflict after them.

Then, rumblings grew that U.S. and Israeli military planners had reportedly drawn up new strike options against Iran, including the possible use of the largest non-nuclear weapon in the American arsenal: the GBU-43/B, also dubbed “the Mother of All Bombs”. 

The targets purportedly would be Iran’s nuclear facilities and energy infrastructure, though there are doubts about whether the bomb could penetrate Iran’s most deeply buried sites. According to these reports, Trump apparently is seeking a strike he could present as a military victory and then end the war without appearing to back down. 

But such an approach risks triggering a far wider war than Washington intends. Tehran remains unlikely to let Washington end the conflict quickly and, fearing a potential attack from the U.S., could itself strike first. Either scenario could lead to a new round of fighting far more destructive than the last.

Before the mother of all bombs

Reports of military plans involving “the mother of all bombs” came against the backdrop of two other worrying developments. First, Iran has been escalating its naval attacks, likely in response to increased flows through the Strait of Hormuz. Notably, two UAE-owned cargo ships, the GFS Pride and the Cape Dao, were struck in the Strait as part of this sharp uptick.

Secondly, diplomatic efforts appear to have hit a wall. In late September, Trump rejected the proposal Tehran had put forward on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly: an end to fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon; the lifting of the U.S. naval blockade and oil sanctions; the release of some of Iran’s frozen assets; and the reopening of Hormuz within seven days. Instead, Washington insists that Iran must take steps regarding its nuclear program as part of the package, something Iranian leaders say they will only do at a later stage. 

The timing of any U.S.-Israeli attack remains uncertain. While Trump has said he will not resume attacks before the midterms, Israel held its election on Oct. 27, a week earlier, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had reportedly sought renewed fighting before both elections.

American and Israeli objectives may differ, of course. Trump appears to want something he can portray as a spectacular military victory without having to undergo another prolonged war, while Netanyahu’s rhetoric about “finishing the job” suggests more ambitious goals, potentially including toppling the Islamic Republic. Tehran seems to be preparing for either scenario with its own response: a prolonged, region-wide war designed to impose devastating economic costs.

Denying Trump a short war

The dominant perspective in Tehran is that the next war must be fought in a way that makes it so costly that a future U.S. president would not contemplate another. Hossein Mohebbi, a spokesperson for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said in late September that Iran “will not stop until we have driven the United States out of the region, punished the aggressor, and established permanent deterrence so that no one will dare attack Iran.”

That logic, should it prevail, rules out a symbolic, tit-for-tat exchange. In Tehran’s view, a limited American strike on Pickaxe Mountain, the fortified nuclear site near Natanz that Trump has repeatedly evoked, followed by a limited Iranian response, would send Washington precisely the wrong message: that it can attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, register domestic political gain, and pay a limited, acceptable cost. Iranian officials have therefore warned that even a symbolic, non-lethal strike would trigger a broad response, denying Trump the quick exit he may have asked of his war planners.

Under this scenario, Iran would target regional energy and economic infrastructure. “In a region where we cannot sell oil, no one will sell oil,” Ghalibaf has warned. The UAE is particularly exposed: Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, has accused it of oil “smuggling” in cahoots with U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). Rezaei also identified new potential targets: undersea cables, data centers, and AI infrastructure in the region, which he claims are worth “more than $2 trillion.” Ghalibaf subsequently extended the threat to regional governments and investors, threatening that anyone providing “funding, equity, land, or energy” to AI companies that “facilitate military aggression” against Iran “will face coercive action.”

If raising the cost of war is the first instrument in Iran’s calculus, duration is the second. Ali Balali, an adviser to the IRGC’s Aerospace Force commander, suggested Iran would conserve its arsenal in preparation for a prolonged confrontation, rather than expend it early. Two days later, Iranian Army spokesperson Mohammad Akraminia argued that the enemy’s weak point is a prolonged war.

Timing is a third dimension in Iranian thinking. Iranian military officials have increasingly mentioned the possibility of striking first, preemptively. Akraminia stated that if Iran were to conclude that an attack by the U.S. and/or Israel is imminent, “we will certainly engage in preemptive warfare.” Mehdi Mohammadi, strategic affairs adviser to Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, went further, arguing that a successful strategy requires not only striking first but also delivering a decisive blow capable of “changing the balance.” There is thus at least the possibility that Iran might move early, and then fight long.

That could occur due to miscalculation resulting from ambiguous American and Israeli signals: leaked strike plans, carrier and amphibious deployments, and aircraft approaching but not entering Iranian airspace. Military experts in Iran see this pattern as an effort to normalize military activity and regain the element of surprise. Tehran could thus mistake military signaling for an imminent attack and strike preemptively, even though it may not want another round of war.

The fourth element concerns the range of those Tehran would hold responsible in the event of an attack. On Oct. 5 Ali Abdollahi, chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, declared that if the United States acted against Iran “directly or indirectly through Israel,” Iranian forces would retaliate against the United States. The warning carries more weight in the wake of Trump’s decision to openly back Netanyahu ahead of Israel’s election. Indeed, some in Tehran interpreted this as a signal that Washington would allow Israel to strike Iran after the midterms. As a result, Tehran has made clear that even were Israel to carry out the attack on its own, U.S. forces and assets in the region would face retaliation. 

Widening the map

This interpretation suggests that the scope of Iran’s response to a U.S. strike likely would be far wider. Its conduct in Hormuz since late September offers a preview of how it could broaden the conflict. When the UAE, backed by CENTCOM, kept oil moving through a southern corridor along the Omani coast, the IRGC shifted its attacks from small shuttle tankers to supertankers and stated that vessels using the “illegal corridor” would be “pursued and interdicted across the region.” Strikes followed off the UAE coast and near Qatar. An escalation in the region could drive Iran to go after vital energy and other infrastructure across the Gulf. 

Iran’s regional partners also could widen the conflict, although Tehran does not fully control their actions. In Yemen, the Houthis have already opened a second maritime front in the Red Sea, threatening shipping and increasing pressure on Saudi Arabia. In Iraq, Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, an Iran-backed militia, has threatened to fight if Iran faced an existential threat. The conflict could also extend to Europe through indirect operations. 

There may already have been attempts in this vein: British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said a suspected September plot near RAF Fairford, a base used by U.S. bombers, was “almost certainly” directed by the IRGC. Tehran denies involvement, but the incident raises the prospect of covert operations against American military assets beyond the Middle East.

Tehran is also preparing for the possibility of a ground operation inside Iran. According to Iranian Army Ground Forces commander Ali Jahanshahi, more than 50 units are deployed along the borders, from the northwest to the Makran coast, and abandoned airfields have been identified as potential enemy landing sites. Iranian security forces have also conducted preemptive operations against Baluch armed groups in the southeast and launched drone and artillery strikes in Kurdish border areas amid concerns that they could open an internal front during an external attack.

A war meant to be the last

Both the U.S. and Iran run the risk of serious misjudgment. The U.S. may believe it can be master of the scope and duration of a war, only to find that Iran holds the key. This power means Iran need not let the conflict end quickly or painlessly.  

For its part, Tehran—which survived the fierce exchanges that began in late February, continued through April, and have since become more regionalized—may be convinced that a wider conflict this time again would establish lasting deterrence. But conditions that made this strategy relatively effective in the past have changed, partly because of Iran’s own actions.  The more Tehran expands its targets, the more it risks turning neighbors that sought to stay out of the conflict into supporters of its defeat. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have reportedly agreed to coordinate their military support on behalf of anti-Houthi forces in Yemen, while Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has offered to help defend Saudi Arabia against Houthi attacks. For the Gulf monarchies, the stakes are becoming existential: either Iran’s leverage is broken, or their access to world markets will remain dependent on Iranian restraint. 

In this way, a war intended to deter future American attacks could instead strengthen a regional consensus that Iran must be dealt a serious blow rather than accommodated or bargained with.

Ultimately, diplomacy remains the only way to prevent the gap between American and Iranian perceptions and risk calculus from triggering another, potentially even more costly round of confrontation. Without it, Washington could launch a limited strike expecting a quick exit, or Tehran could strike first fearing an imminent attack. Either scenario could trigger a prolonged regional war that the U.S. wishes to avoid and a growing alliance against the Islamic Republic for which Iran would pay a price.

Nocturne is everything you would expect from a 21st century prestige crime drama. Adapted from a series of best-selling Scandinavian mystery novels, the Apple TV thriller, premiering with two episodes on Oct. 30, casts a genuine movie star (Liev Schreiber) as a brilliant yet broken detective immersed in a case that has become an all-consuming obsession. The large ensemble represents multiple law-enforcement agencies, victims, bystanders, and a singular alleged serial killer played by an actor on a hot streak (Stephen Graham). Children’s lives are at stake. A risky undercover operation is undertaken. Relationships simmer, until suddenly they’re at a full boil. Collateral damage piles up. Progress is glacial, with essential bits of backstory meted out in stingy flashbacks. Underlying every scene is an atmosphere heavy with dread, as though this sordid scenario has arisen not merely from the brain of one twisted villain, but out of a rot at the heart of society.

It’s a prototypical slow burn. This format, in which one complex investigation spans a season or more, wasn’t new to American TV when AMC’s Nordic noir adaptation The Killing became a sensation in 2011. (In this respect and many others, Twin Peaks, for one, was ahead of its time.) But the convergence of streaming, an ideal venue for binge-friendly serialized storytelling, and an audience for ambitious television that had been growing for more than a decade facilitated its proliferation as a cinematic alternative to the formulaic procedurals that still predominate on broadcast networks. The most acclaimed and discussed mystery shows of the past 15 years—True Detective, Mare of Easttown, Fargo, even Only Murders in the Building—have been, with few exceptions, slow burns. Yet, as Nocturne’s mixed success suggests, the tropes and limitations of the style become more apparent with each new title.

In one welcome deviation from the norm, whodunit seems clear from the beginning. Confined in the bowels of a Pennsylvania psychiatric hospital, the serial killer Jurek Walter (Graham) calmly coaxes an inmate in the adjacent solitary cell into suicide. When a boy thought to be one of his victims, Michael (Landon Valentin), turns up, filthy and feeble but alive, years after he and his sister went missing, a new hunt for the girl begins. Schreiber’s Jonah Lynn, a Philly cop and military veteran who is now retired and a bit reclusive, was instrumental in the original investigation. Michael’s return draws him back in, along with an FBI agent, Saga (Zazie Beetz), who is a surrogate daughter to Jonah. As Quinn, a rigorous colleague from the bureau (Poorna Jagannathan), and the weary local police chief (Bill Camp) lead the search, Saga goes undercover as a patient at the hospital and Jonah goes rogue, to the surprise of no one who has ever worked with him. They don’t just want to find the sister; they want to catch Jurek masterminding violent crimes from his cell, thereby proving he’s coherent enough to rot in a real prison.

A slow burn can only be as compelling as the personalities and ideas its pace affords it time to explore. Creator Rowan Joffé and his cast, adapting the Joona Linna novels by Lars Kepler (a pen name of Swedish husband-andwife team Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril), do craft a few fascinating characters. Beetz’s Saga is a spookily canny mix of actor, detective, and daredevil, inhabiting her cutesy-until-she’s-not patient persona so fully, you might start to doubt she’s fully faking it. Graham weaponizes the soft masculinity that he wielded so movingly as the horrified father of a homicidal teen incel in Adolescence. It’s his cunning performances of compassion that set Jurek apart from the typical thriller psycho and make us believe he has the capacity to pull off logistically inconceivable feats of cruelty. Rory Culkin adds tension as Karl, a sensitive hospital worker whose anger at the way superiors use him as a pawn leaves him vulnerable to Jurek’s manipulation.

What happens outside the institution isn’t nearly as gripping. Strong actors like Camp, Jagannathan, and Chrissy Metz, who plays Michael’s mother Ida, are saddled with underwritten characters. Everything we know about Jonah—that he’s brooding, single-minded, and willing to break rules in pursuit of justice—is a cliché of the genre, as is his odd-couple partnership with the stiff but well-intentioned Quinn. I got the sense, around the season’s midpoint (seven out of 10 episodes were provided for review), that Joffé was holding some of these characters at arm’s length in order to shock us with revelations about them later. But the extended delay in supplying basic context about Jonah, in particular, comes off as too much of a contrivance. It also distances us from the show’s implicit questions about whether laws and protocols enable (or prevent) justice, and how people like Jonah and Saga should weigh the rewards of dangerous, personal missions against the threat of harm these crusades pose.

Nocturne’s small-town Pennsylvania setting is guaranteed to earn it comparisons to Mare of Easttown and its spiritual sequel, Task. Beyond the dutifully adopted (and, to my ears, pretty accurate) accents, though, it lacks the specificity of those shows, both created by area native Brad Ingelsby, with regard to the region and its people. It doesn’t have the same curiosity about or patience in depicting the characters’ lives outside the Jurek case, either. Viewers got invested in Kate Winslet’s Mare because we got to watch her try to keep up with her precocious teenage daughter and endure the harsh words of her judgmental mom. (It didn’t hurt that said mom was played by Jean Smart.) As Robbie in Task, Tom Pelphrey had space to show us a criminal who was also a lonely, newly single father desperate to provide for his beloved children.

As any connoisseur of the hundreds of crime serials TV has produced since The Killing can tell you, there are only so many murder plots. But there are as many unique characters as there are human beings on planet earth. A slow burn that doesn’t make use of such a rich source of fuel is apt to fizzle out.

Talk to Republicans around Washington and battleground states about the midterms and their talking points are all but in chorus: the polls are wrong and undercounting GOP voters. 

Talk to Democrats, and it’s giddy optimism mixed with an equal measure of trepidation, but for a whole other reason: all those predictions of a blue wave could give thousands of their voters permission to stay home. 

“We’ve all been burned,” says one former staffer on Democratic campaigns.

The polls currently show Democrats may be on the verge of an historic blowout. President Donald Trump has the lowest approval ratings of his two terms in office and threatens to be a drag on most Republicans on the ballot. Democrats are in a strong position to snag a majority in the House and the Senate is still in play, but ideological fractures and a party brand that’s in the gutter stand to undermine their showing. Republicans, meanwhile, are on track to outspend Democrats in some pivotal races. 

A particularly messy election season could mean the polls are way off—or mostly on target.

Why the polls might be wrong

"I'm telling you, these polls are off. All of them. They use faulty analysis," said House Speaker Mike Johnson over the weekend, as he fights to save the House and his job.

It’s been the drumbeat of the GOP talking-head circuit in recent weeks, as party leaders try to buck up a decidedly unenthusiastic base with talk of rigged surveys that overcount Democratic voters. That enthusiasm gap is quantifiable; about three-quarters of Democratic voters say voting this year is “extremely” important while roughly 6 in 10 Republicans say the same, according to Associated Press polling.

And yet, there is some truth to the notion that pollsters have trouble with Republicans, who are more likely to ignore pollsters’ calls or even mislead them. Past pre-election surveys have repeatedly over-hyped Democrats’ chances of winning. In the last three presidential races, the election results underestimated Trump’s strength heading into Election Day. Republicans are emphasizing that trend, even though similar errors don’t usually occur in midterm election years.
“Let’s ask Hillary Clinton how fake the fake polls are. We don’t pay those polls any mind,” rapper Nicki Minaj recently said aboard Air Force One in a video clip posted by a senior White House official. “Obviously, they are to deter our voters from going out and casting their vote.”

More recently, some polls have been off, but not in a way that necessarily helps the Republicans’ argument. Last year’s polling in New Jersey’s and Virginia’s gubernatorial races actually underestimated Democrats’ chances; both went blue. 

Read more: Your Questions About Voting in the 2026 Midterm Elections, Answered

Why the polls might be right

No matter how loudly Republican talking heads say the polls are overcounting Democrats, that historically is just not the case in years when a presidential race is not on the ballot.

The polls have been pretty accurate in recent midterm elections, and when they’ve been off, it hasn’t always been in Democrats’ favor. In 2022, Democrats narrowly outperformed expectations, leading to a Red Wave that proved smaller than Republicans had hoped. While that was portrayed as a big polling miss by some, in reality, the polls were largely on track, despite some regional exceptions.

A big reason why polls are more accurate in midterm elections is because figuring out who is most likely to make it to the polls is less of a challenge for pollsters. In off-year, low-turnout elections, politics doesn't dominate the zeitgeist. “SNL isn’t opening with a skit on the Nebraska Senate race,” another Democratic strategist says. In other words, it’s easier to pinpoint those voters who are dialed into an election when the White House isn’t in play. After all, many people can’t even name their member of Congress, let alone have a strong opinion on them. As much as Trump keeps saying he’s on the ballot this fall, he objectively is not.

Both sides are acting like the polls are accurate

While Republicans insist polls are underestimating their support, their allocation of resources suggests they believe what the polls in key battlegrounds are telling them. For instance, as polls showed Democrat Roy Cooper well ahead of Republican Michael Whatley in North Carolina’s Senate race, Republicans largely pulled their funding, a clear sign they believed that Cooper’s victory is all but assured.

But the current environment remains unsettled at best. How else to explain that red states like Texas, Iowa, and even Kansas may actually elect a Democrat to the U.S. Senate? Even so, Republicans are dismissing polling trends in many battlegrounds, and instead citing selected polls that show them still in contention or at least within the margin of sampling error.

Nationally, the generic ballot certainly favors Democrats and Trump is undeniably a drag on Republicans who have to stand with their party’s leader or face his wrath. Some Republican nominees have turned out to be lackluster and underperforming national party leaders’ expectations. Others, such as Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio’s race for Governor, have stepped in it and seem unable to clean their shoes. (So badly did a Ramaswamy attack ad backfire, the non-partisan Cook Political Report last week moved that race from a “Toss Up” to “Lean Democrat.”)

We’re on the verge of taking back control of the House,” Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said over the weekend. But first, Democrats understand, they have to show up and not take the polling as permission to stay home on Election Day.

That’s not to say Democrats are fielding an immaculate set of candidates. A misfire in Maine’s Senate race forced the party to swap candidates after the nomination had seemingly been settled. National Democrats didn’t get their favored candidate in Michigan’s Senate race either. The polling in both states shows tighter contests than Democrats had hoped for.

Still, there’s no bigger megaphone in politics right now than Trump, and he is barnstorming the map trying to turn out his people, the folks who are widely understood to eschew pollsters’ calls. While Trump appears to be a drag on the national ticket, he still is popular with his base. A CNBC poll released Monday shows the President with an 82% approval rating among Republicans and at 90% among those who identify with the MAGA movement. Those are numbers that has Republicans praying at least that poll is correct.

During the presidential election of 1863, at the height of the Civil War, federal troops reportedly descended on polling places in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri and prevented people they deemed disloyal from voting. This prompted a fierce national debate that culminated in Congress passing an 1865 law barring federal “troops or armed men” from “any place” where an election is being held. The central goal of this law, according to its proponents, was “to prevent the President and his officers from interfering in elections,” which are run by the states. Keeping armed federal officers away from the polls, they argued, was necessary to preserve democracy, even in the midst of civil war. 

This has been the clear law, and the respected policy of every presidential administration, for over a century.

Until now. 

Ahead of the midterms, top Trump Administration officials have publicly refused to rule out the possibility of sending federal agents to the polls. In September, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed that immigration officers could be sent to polling places to “serve a warrant” as part of immigration enforcement operations or if “there is a threat” to those polling places, adding “we’ll be where we need to be.” 

“ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places,” hedged Mullin. “We’re there to enforce specific threats.”

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel similarly said, “If there’s a reason to go there because there’s been a violation, we will, otherwise we won’t.”

It is clear to us, and to legal experts, that barring extreme circumstances, sending ICE or FBI agents to the polls would be flatly illegal under the 1865 law, and several others. As Daniel Caine, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointedly said this August, any request to send military troops to election sites would be an “unlawful order.” The same holds true for any other armed federal agents.

The only exception to the prohibition is to “repel armed enemies of the United States.” The Congress of 1865 originally included a second exception, allowing armed federal agents to “keep the peace at the polls.” But Congress repealed that exception in 1909 because lawmakers feared that federal authorities could point to any kind of disturbance as a pretext to deploy federal forces. 

In other words, unless a hostile foreign power attacks voting sites using weapons, it is a crime for any armed federal agents to go to those sites, even to quell a disruption. And they are certainly not allowed to show up for routine policing or immigration actions. 

If sending ICE to the polls is so plainly illegal, then why do top administration officials keep refusing to rule it out? Context is important. The federal government has been conducting indiscriminate and often violent immigration enforcement actions in communities across the country. At the same time, the administration has been peddling conspiracy theories about widespread illegal voting, often targeting communities of color. The administration has redirected thousands of homeland security agents away from critical transnational security threats to hunt for elusive noncitizen voters. 

These efforts are not uncovering any significant problems. Federal and state law already bar noncitizens from voting in federal and state elections, and our election system does a terrific job of ensuring that only eligible citizens vote, with vanishingly rare exceptions—as dozens of studies, election reviews, and painstaking investigations have already confirmed. 

This intimidation campaign is taking a toll. According to a University of California, San Diego poll conducted last month, a staggering 40% of voting-age American citizens expect ICE agents to be at the polls this November. Black, Hispanic, and Asian American voters are three to four times more likely than white voters to worry that they will be questioned by ICE at polls or that members of their racial or ethnic groups will face intimidation at the polls. This fear is real.

But despite all the administration’s threats, voters should not be intimidated. The law protecting election sites from federal forces is ironclad. Anyone who violates that would be committing a federal crime. Federal and state laws also prohibit any effort to intimidate voters, wherever it occurs. A broad array of civil rights groups and labor unions have already filed lawsuits to hold the federal government accountable for its intimidation efforts—including The Brennan Center, where we work. Other lawyers across the country are poised to run to court to protect elections if federal agents do unlawfully show up to polls.

Outside court, election officials, state government officials, law enforcement, and voter protection organizations are prepared to respond to any instance of voter intimidation. That includes de-escalation and backup plans, including changing voting sites if needed, to ensure that all Americans can continue to vote safely. Voters are determined and undeterred, as millions so far have already cast their ballots by voting early and by mail.

Our advice to concerned voters: make a plan to vote as early as you can. Voters have multiple options to vote with confidence. In addition to voting at the polls on election day, they can vote early in person or vote by mail ballot, dropping it off in secure ballot drop boxes, at an election office, or by mail. You can also go vote with a trusted group of loved ones or neighbors. 

It is an outrage that the federal government has refused to rule out the idea of federal agents at the polls. In our view, it is part of a campaign to intimidate voters and undermine our elections. 

The only way it will succeed is if voters don’t show up.

Recently, one of us learned that her five-year-old was forgotten at school. The teenage neighbor who usually walks him home got distracted and forgot to collect him. Luckily, it was easy enough while working from home to dash out, stop at school, and then return to the laptop as he constructed a “dino-chicken-car” with some Legos. The crisis became a non-issue thanks to remote work.

Juggling parenthood and work is tough, and it shows up in our stress levels. The American Psychological Association reports that 48% of parents say that on most days their stress is completely overwhelming—around twice as many as other adults.

Remote work seems to offer a solution. Parents can put dinner in the oven between meetings so that food is ready before kids’ hangry tantrums arrive. A youngster with a virus can sleep through it while Dad takes calls over Zoom, so what would have been a sick day turns into a mostly-productive day. The time-bind that made it feel impossible to show up for one’s kids and for one’s career can seem less, well, binding.

But, weirdly, the rise of remote work hasn’t necessarily improved parents’ mental health, and may have even harmed it. In research published in Science, we considered the mental distress of over half a million Americans, measured by taking medication for depression or anxiety, seeing a mental health professional, and other factors. We compared people in jobs that could be done from home, like software engineers and customer service representatives, to those whose jobs necessitate in-person work, like mechanical engineers and cashiers. 

If remote work were a panacea for parents, we would expect the mental health of parents in remote-capable jobs to improve a lot with the rise of remote work. But we didn’t see that result. Instead, parents in remote-capable jobs saw bigger increases in reported depression and antidepressant use than those working in-person jobs.

How can remote work, something that so many parents feel eases their days, be potentially harmful to their mental health? Two factors contribute to this phenomenon.

First, remote work blurs boundaries. When people work remotely, they are much more likely to work at odd hours, answering emails in the wee hours of the morning and returning to tinker with presentation slides late at night. It’s as though once work could be completed at home, any home-time became fair game for work-time. Being always on for work can make the time-bind pinch in new ways. Parents can struggle to feel fully present for either their kids or their work.

Multi-tasking isn’t limited to odd hours outside the workday. Recent research documents that parents who work at companies that allow remote work tend to use less paid childcare. Using less paid childcare can be great for parents’ pocketbooks and their ability to see their kids more frequently. But it also increases stress if it means that parents are trying to work while also encouraging their toddler to take a nap or their middle schooler to do their homework. 

A recent Pew Research Center survey of 2,242 working parents found that doing work-related tasks while spending time with kids was more common among those who worked remotely than those who rarely or never did. But these interruptions undermine our ability to do work, and research has traced these family interruptions to lower wages among mothers working while doing “passive” childcare. 

Multitasking is painful when it feels as though we’re failing our colleagues and our kids. Something has to give.

The second flaw with remote work is that it deepens isolation that parents already experience all too frequently. Parenting can be lonely. Much of the time that Americans spend with their families is quite nuclear, just with kids and perhaps a partner, but without many other adults around. 

Remote work is also lonely. In our study, we found that the rise in remote work in the wake of the pandemic increased time spent alone by an hour a day for people in remote-capable jobs. The combination of both working and parenting outside a communal context can translate into a shortage of adult connection. Parents toggle between kids demanding attention and work demanding attention. The small interactions with peers and colleagues that nourish us disappear. And that ends up draining us in the long run.

As a result, remote work is not yet shoring up parents’ well-being. Yet carefully constructed remote work can be a boon for parents. Several strategies would help.

First, we must re-establish boundaries. It needs to be socially acceptable to truly sign off from work. This is unlikely to stick unless leaders and managers consistently encourage and enforce it. The desire to prove commitment will be too much of a lure for many to fully disengage without explicit support from higher-ups. Instead, managers need to ensure that those who were offline during a conversation still have an opportunity to contribute. By looping them in, leaders can make it okay to be fully present with work, and at other times, with family.

Second, we must structure in-person work so that it includes parents. When parents must pick up their kids from school daily, a hybrid schedule with full days in the office and full days remote may not be especially helpful. Instead, a shorter in-person workday, where you can sign off at 3 or 4 p.m., do pickup, dinner, and bedtime, and then sign back on might work better. In-person work doesn't need to happen every moment of every day, but scheduling it during school hours can help include parents more fully. 

For dispersed teams, off-site gatherings can be a valuable way to form connections. But to be inclusive, these meetings should be scheduled far in advance, since parents most likely need to secure additional support at home.

Finally, orienting doses of in-person work around connection can help alleviate loneliness. Make time for a social lunch with coworkers, even if it’s a brief one. For in-person meetings, book a meeting room rather than defaulting to the convenience of Zoom. Advocate for a team off-site gathering. A recent experiment shows that when remote workers at a call center came together in-person just once a month, they felt more connected to one another and were also more productive given what they learned from one another.

Remote work holds the potential to improve the lives of working parents. But to do this, remote work cannot just devolve into multitasking work and parenting. And it ought not deepen the isolation of modern parenthood. Instead, we need remote work with boundaries and human-to-human connection with colleagues—including colleagues who might happen to be parents.

The Justice Department has brought charges against former FBI Director James Comey for the third time in 13 months, this time related to alleged leaks of national security information to the media.

According to court documents filed earlier this month and unsealed on Monday, federal prosecutors are accusing Comey of “willfully” mishandling information related to national defense in October 2016, resulting in the information appearing in media reports.

“Having reason to believe such information could be used to injure the United States and to the advantage of any foreign nation,” the court document said Comey “knowingly and willfully communicated, delivered, transmitted, and caused that information to be communicated, delivered, and transmitted to a person not entitled to receive it.”

The inquiry is the latest attempt to prosecute Comey, who is a prominent critic of President Donald Trump. Trump fired Comey in 2017 while Comey was leading the FBI investigation into potential ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. The first Trump Administration cited a memo related to Comey’s handling of the FBI investigation into Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails. Since then, Trump has publicly called for criminal investigations into Comey and celebrated the indictments he’s faced.

In a video posted on Monday, Comey said the latest investigation was an attempt to politically persecute him.

“They’re back, again,” Comey said. “It would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice, one that we cannot become numb to.”

“I’m still innocent. I’m still not afraid of these people,” he added.

Comey’s attorneys argued in court filings that the alleged leaks had already been investigated twice during the first Trump Administration in 2017 and 2019, and neither had resulted in charges.

The Justice Department has pursued a number of investigations and indictments against prominent Democrats in recent weeks, appearing to break with the unofficial “unwritten 60-day rule” of avoiding filing new charges or taking public investigatory action that could influence an approaching election. Earlier this month, the Department secured a search warrant for the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D, Minn.), who called the effort “the latest escalation in [Trump’s] campaign of political intimidation.” The DOJ also secured an indictment against Virginia Senate Leader Louise Lucas, who led the Democrats’ counter-effort against Republican gerrymandering, on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. Lucas denied the allegations and said she would fight back against an attempt by “people in power … to silence those who stand up to them.”

What to know about the new Comey charges

According to court documents, prosecutors allege that around Oct. 4 and 5, 2016, Comey directed FBI staff to speak with the New York Times “about specific accuracy concerns” related to “misinformation which had appeared” in a Reuters report about Yahoo’s cooperation with U.S. surveillance.

In doing so, prosecutors contend, Comey “illegally transferred classified information.”

The Times article had described how Yahoo had adapted its existing email filtering system, used to detect spam, malware, and child sexual abuse material, to comply with a secret surveillance order to search messages for a computer “signature” associated with communications by a foreign, state-sponsored terrorist organization. The article said the Justice Department had obtained the order from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge in 2015 and that Yahoo was barred from disclosing it.

A spokesperson for the Times said the newspaper “does not comment on the sourcing behind our reporting, but we know from experience that prosecutions like this one are designed to discourage sources from providing journalists with the kind of valuable and illuminating information that the public needs to know.”

Comey’s lawyers argued in a motion to dismiss the case that the Trump Administration did not file an indictment within the 10-year statute of limitations. On Oct. 5, prosecutors filed the charges in a criminal information under seal in Federal District Court in Washington, which does not require approval from a grand jury or a judicial finding of probable cause, but have not obtained an indictment.

Previous charges against Comey

The Justice Department has brought multiple charges against Comey during Trump’s second term. It secured an indictment against him in September 2025 over allegations that he made false statements to Congress in 2020 related to alleged leaks to the media. The charges were thrown out by a federal judge in November, concluding that the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully appointed.

Comey was also indicted in April over allegedly making a threat against Trump by posting on Instagram a photograph of seashells on a North Carolina beach arranged to spell “86 47.” Prosecutors argued that the arrangement was intended as a threat “to kill” Trump, who is the 47th President. Comey, who deleted the post after initial backlash, said he did not intend the photograph to be a threat against Trump, and that he understood the numbers to be a “political message.” The numbers “86” have commonly been used to mean “to throw out” or “to refuse service to,” according to Merriam-Webster, but have also been used in some instances to mean “to kill.”

That case is set to go to trial in North Carolina in February 2027.

Earlier on Monday, a federal judge in New York ruled that the Justice Department had unlawfully fired Comey’s daughter, Maurene Comey, in July 2025. The judge ordered her retroactive reinstatement with back pay, concluding that the Trump Administration had violated the Constitution and federal law by claiming the President had executive authority to fire civil servants.

Right-wing Brazilian Senator Flávio Bolsonaro has reportedly left Brazil to travel to the U.S. after failing to comply with a Supreme Court order to surrender his passports as part of a criminal investigation into an alleged money laundering operation. 

A senior State Department official, speaking under condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the department “will issue visas to Flavio Bolsanaro and his family and allow them entry into the United States.”

Bolsonaro, who lost the country’s presidential election on Sunday, initially said that he would comply with the Supreme Court’s order and not flee Brazil.

"I have never thought ‌about leaving ⁠the country," he said on Monday. "I will hand over my passports and defend myself against this travesty, which is a clear attempt to intimidate me."

But Bolsonaro did not comply with the order to hand over his passport by the end of the court’s 24-hour deadline on Tuesday morning, and multiple outlets have reported that he departed the country with the intent of heading to the U.S. Outlets in Argentina and Brazil have reported that he crossed the border into Argentina, though the Argentinian government has said it has no record of him entering the country. 

It is not yet clear where Bolsonaro’s specific destination in the U.S. is or whether he plans to seek asylum.

Bolsonaro is being investigated for alleged links to a Brazilian lawyer, Willer Tomaz, who is accused of laundering more than $1 billion through a fraud scheme, the New York Times reported.

In a ruling that became public on Monday, a day after Bolsonaro, the son of jailed former President Jair Bolsonaro, lost the presidential election to incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered police to confiscate the senator’s passports as part of the probe.

Bolsonaro, who has cast the investigation as political persecution, said in a social media video on Monday afternoon that the seizure of his travel documents was an attempt at intimidating him after he lost the election.

The situation could inflame political tensions amid claims from Brazil’s right wing and abroad that the election was unfair. Bolsonaro initially said he would seek to annul the vote, although his Liberal Party later conceded defeat. In the video posted Monday, the right-wing senator said he would now seek to have Lula’s ticket disqualified, citing alleged disinformation and “vote buying.” He also said he would organize the opposition in Congress to Lula’s government.

“I wasn’t the one who lost,” he said. “The system won.”

Donald Trump, an ally of the Bolsonaros, said on Monday that the election appeared “rigged.” The U.S. President did not provide evidence for his claim.

“I didn’t take ​sides, but it looked like another rigged election,” Trump said.

“I just think it had a very bad look, the election, the ​way it was tabulated,” he added. “The extension given was very strange.”

Brazil’s Supreme Court had granted a two-hour extension to voting on Sunday, citing transport issues raised by Lula’s campaign. Bolsonaro’s campaign had separately requested a two-hour extension due to heavy rainfall in certain areas. Lula won the election by more than 4 million votes. Roughly 0.03% of the total votes—or less than 35,000 votes—were recorded in the extra two hours. Vice President Geraldo Alckmin told Rede Vanguarda that Trump’s claims were “completely wrong.”

Read More: Why the Trump Administration Is Being Accused of Interfering in Brazil’s Election

Bolsonaro is also being investigated over alleged links to a disgraced banker connected to a corruption scheme. Bolsonaro allegedly raised millions of dollars from the banker to fund a biopic about his father.

Here’s what to know about the investigation.

What to know about the money laundering inquiry

The inquiry into Bolsonaro stems from a federal probe into unauthorized deductions from pension payments made by Brazil’s social security agency. The broader operation, launched in April 2025, investigated associations suspected of collecting unauthorized membership fees from pension benefits.

Evidence from the probe led investigators to examine suspected money laundering involving betting platforms and financial transactions linked to Tomaz, who denies wrongdoing.

Police reportedly discovered that Bolsonaro had “master user” access to bank accounts belonging to Alcazar Holdings, a company owned by Tomaz. In May 2025, a person working for Tomaz asked the bank to remove Bolsonaro’s access to the accounts, local media outlets BPMoney and Times Brasil reported earlier this month, citing police findings. Both Bolsonaro and Tomaz deny having a joint account or financial ties.

The order required Bolsonaro to surrender his passports and barred him from contacting Tomaz. Bolsonaro said he would comply with the order and that he had “never considered” leaving Brazil. He said that the ruling came after his brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, had said on a podcast last week that he should leave the country if he lost the election.

Criticisms of Brazil’s justice system

Bolsonaro has repeatedly criticized Brazil’s judiciary and described the investigations into him as politically motivated. The country’s Supreme Court generally assigns cases through a lottery system, and the money laundering investigation was assigned to de Moraes on Oct. 16.

De Moraes was the lead justice in last year’s trial of Jair Bolsonaro, who refused to accept his election loss in 2022. A five-member panel of Supreme Court justices convicted Jair Bolsonaro, by a 4-1 vote, of attempting to overturn his election defeat and sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison, which he is serving under house arrest due to poor health. Prosecutors alleged that the plot included plans to assassinate Lula. Jair Bolsonaro denies wrongdoing.

In June, a Supreme Court panel unanimously convicted Eduardo Bolsonaro of coercion in judicial proceedings. Prosecutors alleged he had attempted to lobby the Trump Administration to use tariffs and sanctions, including on de Moraes, to pressure judicial authorities to drop its prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro. He was sentenced to four years and two months in prison, but remains in Texas, where has lived since 2025.

De Moraes has also faced scrutiny over reported ties to Daniel Vorcaro, the former owner of Banco Master, whose financing of a film about Jair Bolsonaro is the subject of a separate inquiry into Bolsonaro. The New York Times reported, citing a police dossier, that Vorcaro sent text messages to de Moraes asking for help to avoid arrest. In messages to other associates, Vorcaro reportedly mentioned paying millions to the law firm of de Moraes’s wife. De Moraes has denied wrongdoing and said he never acted to favor Vorcaro or Banco Master.

De Moraes also clashed with tech billionaire Elon Musk in 2024 over court orders to block accounts on Musk’s social media platform X. De Moraes temporarily suspended the platform in Brazil after it failed to comply with judicial requirements, which Musk had described as “the most draconian demands of any country on Earth.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his main rival, former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, appear short of an outright victory, initial exit polls indicate.

Israelis flocked to polling stations Tuesday to decide the political fate of Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving Prime Minister who is facing one of the most consequential tests of his political career.

From 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. local time (1 a.m. to 4 p.m. EDT), Israelis were able to cast votes for representatives in the Knesset. Numbers from Israel's Central Elections ​Committee reflected a strong turnout, with 66.7% of eligible voters reported to have cast their ballots by 6 p.m., local time—the highest turnout logged at that time since 1973.

Netanyahu was joined by his wife Sara as he cast his own ballot just after midday, at a polling station in a Jerusalem school. “This is a very moving and fateful moment. My wife and I are truly overwhelmed,” Netanyahu told reporters after voting. “We know what is at stake, and since I am not allowed to say things explicitly, I will say: Vote correctly.”

Not long after, Netanyahu told his supporters that "buses are heading to the polling stations and huge lines are being reported in the Arab settlements." Complaining that "the right-wing strongholds are not waking up," he again urged people to go out and vote.

Netanyahu’s Likud party said in a statement that it had submitted a request to the Central Elections Committee to extend voting hours past 10 p.m. The committee later announced it would not be extending voting hours past the scheduled closing time.

This is the first election in the country since the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks by Palestinian militant group Hamas and the subsequent Israeli war in the Gaza Strip. Since then, Israel under Netanyahu has pursued an aggressive military campaign across the Middle East—going to war with Iran, backing settler attacks and displacement in the West Bank, and carrying out strikes against militant groups in Lebanon and Yemen.

The election was widely seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership and Israelis’ willingness to change course amid uncertainty.

Read More: Israel's Choice

“I hope this will be a true holiday for democracy,” Isaac Herzog, the Israeli head of state, told reporters from a polling station in Rehavia, where he and his wife voted. “No one can be allowed to spoil or undermine it.”

Here’s what to know:

Who is in the running?

Two main political blocs are contending to form Israel’s next government. The first is the pro-Netanyahu coalition led by Netanyahu’s Likud party. The coalition includes far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, such as Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) led by national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Religious Zionism-Zehut led by finance minister Bezalel Smotrich. Their ultranationalist policies have found an audience in younger right-wing Israelis.

On the other side are the Jewish-led opposition movements—with Eisenkot and the centrist Yashar (Straight) party at the forefront. Eisenkot, who entered politics in 2022, joined Netanyahu’s emergency war cabinet after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. But after having lost a son in combat in Israel’s wars, Eisenkot left his post in 2024. Two of his nephews also died fighting in Gaza, a prominent campaign talking point.

The opposition also includes a joint ticket led by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Knesset opposition leader Yair Lapid, the secular nationalist party Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) led by former finance minister Avigdor Lieberman, and the Democrats led by former IDF deputy chief of staff Yair Golan.

The Democrats party on Tuesday said Golan had been “approached in a threatening manner” by a man who was found to be carrying a knife. The lawmaker was attending a voting-day mobilization tour in Tel Aviv's HaMesila Park at the time of the incident.

"Golan’s security guards blocked the man, and as they moved toward him, a large knife slipped from beneath his clothing and fell to the ground," the party said in a statement shared with the Guardian. "Police were called to the scene and arrested the suspect." Golan, in his own statement, vowed that "incitement and violence will not deter us" and encouraged people to go out and vote.

Meanwhile, some polls had suggested that Eisenkot’s Yashar party may garner slightly more support than Netanyahu’s Likud, but they also projected that neither the Prime Minister’s right-wing bloc nor the opposition were likely to win the 61 Knesset seats needed to form a government.

Including Arab parties such as United Arab List (Ra’am) and the Joint List, or fringe parties, could be necessary to form a government. Both pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu coalitions have so far ruled out teaming up with the Arab-led parties. Arab citizens of Israel make up about 20% of the population, though they receive fewer government services and endure higher poverty and unemployment rates. Discrimination and disappointment have historically depressed Arab-Israeli voter turnout. However, on Tuesday, there appeared to be strong turnout in some of Israel’s largest Arab-majority towns.

Netanyahu touts Trump endorsement

Netanyahu has brought attention to the support he received from his longstanding ally, U.S. President Donald Trump, who only announced his endorsement days before the election as conflict in the Middle East has tested their friendship.

In a late-night TV appearance on Oct. 25, Netanyahu boasted of Trump’s endorsement and said that Trump was willing to take action “that would finally, finally, remove the Iranian threat” so long as Netanyahu stayed in power. Netanyahu added that he has already instructed Israel’s national intelligence agency Mossad as well as the IDF to “bring down” the Iranian regime. Trump remains very popular in Israel.

By contrast, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance declined to endorse Netanyahu for re-election, just a day after Trump put his “complete and total” support behind the Israeli leader.

“The President has the most effective endorsement in American, or international, political history,” said Vance, when asked in an interview if he would also be extending an endorsement of his own. “I endorse American candidates and that’s where I'm focused on, is the midterms, so I'm not getting involved in the Israeli elections.”

When pushed for an answer, Vance added: “I'm not anti-endorsing [Netanyahu], I'm not pro-endorsing him.”

A high-stakes election for Netanyahu

At stake for Netanyahu could be more than his continued leadership. The premier faces an international arrest warrant for alleged crimes related to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. And even domestically, critics have demanded an inquiry into Netanyahu’s decision-making around Oct. 7. The attack, which resulted in over 1,200 people in Israel killed and around 250 hostages taken, is considered by many to be indicative of a major security failure.

The Gaza health ministry reports that since Oct. 7, 2023, more than 74,000 individuals have been killed. In the absence of independent monitoring on the ground, Gaza’s health ministry is the primary source for casualty data relied upon by humanitarian groups, journalists, and international bodies. Its figures do not differentiate between civilians and combatants and cannot be independently verified by TIME.

Another issue driving the election is public fury over ultra-Orthodox communities’ exemption from military conscription for men engaged in religious studies. Despite a shortage of soldiers, less than 10% of eligible ultra-Orthodox men enlist, amid demands from Netanyahu’s allies to exempt them. Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s main rival, has promised to end the de facto exemptions. 

Netanyahu’s repeated attempts to reform the judiciary have also factored into this election, with critics slamming his undermining of democratic institutions and connecting it to his legal interests. Netanyahu is in the middle of a yearslong corruption trial, which he and his allies—including Trump—have claimed is politically motivated. He sought, but didn’t receive, a presidential pardon from Herzog.

When will we know the results?

About 7.3 million Israeli citizens were eligible to vote on Tuesday. The election fills the Knesset’s 120 seats through proportional representation—which means parties, not personalities, are on these voters’ ballots. 

After polling stations closed at 10 p.m. (4 p.m. EDT), local media broadcasted initial exit polls. The final vote tally is expected by Oct. 30, with official results published on Nov. 4. 

But getting a clear picture of the Israeli government is likely to take longer.

No single party has ever claimed 61 seats to form a government, meaning Israel has always been governed by coalitions. Such alliances can take weeks or months to form, and what those coalitions may look like will depend on the election outcomes for smaller parties, which each need 3.25% of the votes to secure a seat in the Knesset.

Once the election winners are determined, President Herzog ⁠will refer to party leaders to choose a preferred Prime Minister and will ask the strongest candidate to form a government within 42 days. If a coalition cannot be formed after multiple attempts, the current Likud-led coalition government will continue to serve as caretaker before another round of elections is held in the coming months.

When it comes to representing the famous and addicted, Hollywood seems to know only two stories. Both begin with a passionate talent who longs to make an impact on the world. Then, as no less an expert on this subject than Courtney Love memorably put it, they get what they want and they never want it again. Afflicted by affluenza or impostor syndrome or the newfound knowledge that success can’t heal their internal wounds, they escape into substance abuse. It’s only in their final chapters that the two narratives diverge. Some lucky souls hit rock bottom, get clean, and live happily ever after. The rest die young.

It would be easy to slot Matthew Perry, the Friends star who died from ketamine and drowning in October 2023, into the latter category. But in the intimate three-part Netflix documentary The One About Matthew Perry, director Mary Robertson (Quiet on the Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV) honors his memory by resisting that simplistic binary. Yes, addiction (and a cadre of enablers who are now serving time for their roles in his death) killed Perry at 54. It’s also true that he spent more than 25 years surviving it, fighting to act and write and enjoy his friendships and make his family proud and fall in love. Instead of hiding that struggle, he used his fortune to aid others in their recoveries and his platform to advocate for a broader understanding of addiction as the illness that it is.

Robertson captures all of this in straightforward, chronological order, through emotional interviews with family and longtime friends, as well as Perry’s own startlingly frank reflections in media appearances and his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. The absence of major celebrities, whether by design or otherwise, limits the fond platitudes. In their place are vivid behind-the-scenes anecdotes and candid memories of who he was offscreen—the ambition, charm, humor, and magnanimity, but also the pain he was capable of inflicting on those who loved and needed him. His sister Mia Perry Bowick, a psychotherapist, is the most insightful presence, embracing grief and ambivalence as she ties her big brother’s highs and lows to early family dynamics.

With all due respect to Chandler Bing, Perry’s greatest contribution was his vulnerability, even when the image of him it exposed wasn’t flattering. In its honesty, this documentary continues that work.

Correction, Oct. 27

The original version of this story misstated the last name of the series' director. She is Mary Robertson, not Mary Robinson.

The ultrawealthy are responsible for more carbon pollution than more than half of humanity, according to a new report published Monday by Oxfam, a global organization fighting against inequality. 

“​​We are seeing the ways that the ultra rich in the U.S. and around the world contribute disproportionately to creating the climate crisis,” says Rachel Carle, senior advisor on climate justice at Oxfam America. “They are also insulated from the impacts of the climate crisis, and are profiting off of the disasters that they have created.”

Billionaires and the ultra-rich are burning more carbon than than most of the world. The world’s richest 1%—just 8 million people who make, on average, $442,000 a year—produce far more emissions than the poorest 3.5 billion, states the report. Someone in the richest 0.1% emits 48 times more CO2 than the average person in the U.S. over the course of a year. 

Oxfam used climate attribution models and a consumption-based emissions dataset developed by the Stockholm Environment Institute to calculate emissions by income group. Keeping emissions in check is a key part of addressing the climate crisis. This month, the United Nations warned that, in order to keep warming below 2°C, urgent action must be taken to drastically reduce global emissions by 18% by 2030.

Research has long shown that wealthier countries drive a disproportionate share of global emissions. But emissions disparities exist within countries as well. The U.S., for example, is the second largest carbon emitter behind China—but not everyone is responsible for the same share of emissions. The report finds that, in just under four months (118.3 days), someone in the richest 0.1% living in the U.S., those making an average of $1.98 million a year, emits more CO2 than what someone in the poorest half of the country (those making an average of $25,600 a year), has emitted over the last 30 years. 

One of the biggest sources of emissions? Private jets—which, in 2025, were responsible for 16 million metric tons of CO2, the emissions equivalent of the annual energy use of over 2 million homes. The U.S. has the highest concentration of private jet use—with the majority of all private jets (68%) taking off from the U.S. Combined, all of the world’s private jets emit more in 2 seconds than someone in the world’s poorest 50%, those annually making an average of $1,500, would emit in a year. According to the report, last year private jets spent more than 6.5 million hours in the air. 

“We see that the ultrarich consume differently than everyday people,” says Carle, who adds that the ultrarich are also far more likely to invest in polluting companies. A list of 217 companies that “profit from either creating climate disasters, preparing for them, or recovering from them,” analyzed in the report shows they made $1.8 billion on average in 2025, and paid out more than $1 billion to shareholders.

This has a direct impact on the climate, the report finds. The researchers constructed emissions pathway models to attribute the emissions of different income groups, and found that the richest 1% are responsible for 20% of global warming since 1990—20 times more than their share of the world’s population. Someone from the richest 1% contributed 34 times more than the average person to extreme heat events, the report states, and one year's worth of emissions from the richest 1% will cause an estimated 1.9 million excess heat deaths. 

Yet, the ultrawealthy are less likely to face the impacts of their emissions. Those with lower incomes are significantly more likely to suffer from the impacts of climate disasters and extreme weather events—and often lack the funds to recover from disasters. Wealthy individuals, on the other hand, are more likely to live in safer locations or have the funds to ride out a disaster—purchasing private resources, like firefighters and generators, or paying a premium for emergency shelter. 

The authors suggest taxing the emissions of the super-rich. This could be done through taxes on high-emitting luxury items and activities, like private jet use, to disincentivize their use, suggests the report, or via windfall taxes on profits from fossil fuel companies. The report envisions that these taxes could be used to help level the playing field when it comes to climate adaptation, like increasing climate financing in the Global South, or investing in adaptation measures around the world.

“We hope that people take away that there are  a lot of opportunities to  address inequality in ways that protect the planet and protect communities,” says Carle. “Polluters need to pay for the harm that they’ve caused.” 

When shipping through the Strait of Hormuz ground to a halt in March, energy importers relearned an old lesson: a country that buys its energy as fuel, cargo by cargo, also imports every price shock. The consequences of how governments respond to this truth will soon reverberate beyond energy markets. 

Decisions made today to secure more reliable energy may help determine where factories are built, which countries manufacture the technologies powering the global economy, and how vulnerable nations remain to the next disruption in oil and gas supplies. These decisions will define which countries emerge as electrostates, with the power to shape and control future economies.

New analysis by We Mean Business Coalition published today looking at electrification across 16 countries reveals how unevenly this transformation is progressing. The United States is doubling down on domestic oil and gas production, while China is rapidly electrifying its economy and consolidating its lead in electric technology manufacturing. Others are now moving in China's direction. France plans to lift electricity's share of final energy from 27% to 38% by 2035, Canada to double its electricity supply by 2050, and Europe wants to become the world's first “electro-continent.”

Rather than simply ranking countries, the Electrification Competitiveness Index maps two dimensions: the deployment and market uptake of electric technologies, and the policies and conditions supporting further progress.

Across the 16 economies, the median score for enabling conditions is 67%, compared with 45% for deployment and market conditions. In other words, in most countries, policy is running ahead of the market. Part of that gap is a time lag, but it also shows the distance between preparing for electrification and achieving it at scale. Successful electrification requires not simply more policies, but better-aligned policies that reinforce one another and give businesses the confidence to invest.

China scores highest on deployment, with extensive electric vehicle adoption and an industrial base producing much of the equipment the world needs to electrify. It already manufactures more than 80% of global battery cells. But its transition extends well beyond transport: electricity's share of China’s final energy consumption has doubled since 2005, with electrification spreading across industry, buildings, and transport. Although much of its electricity (54%) is still generated from coal, the plan is to replace that with clean power. What’s more, given China’s manufacturing dominance, as other countries electrify, they must make a choice: where to compete in electric technology manufacturing and where they might gain more from cheaper imported equipment.

Europe is one region trying to revive industrial competitiveness while reducing its exposure to imported fossil fuels, a vulnerability the Hormuz crisis has brought sharply back into focus. Electrification is central to both ambitions. Brussels wants to double electricity's share of final energy to 46% by 2040, yet that share has been stuck at around 23% for a decade, and the economics of switching remain difficult for many businesses. In Britain, industrial electricity costs over five times as much as gas per unit of energy, while factories in Germany and the U.K. face significant grid-connection constraints. France and Spain are better positioned in several respects, with more favourable electricity prices and stronger deployment, but across Europe the challenge is increasingly one of turning established policy frameworks into commercially viable investment.

Businesses deciding where to build factories, expand production, or replace equipment must also weigh electricity costs and grid access alongside skills, suppliers, and markets. If electrification remains difficult or expensive, businesses may postpone modernisation, continue investing in fossil-fuel equipment or direct new investment towards locations offering better conditions. Over time, this could reshape Europe's industrial geography, influencing where manufacturing capacity, jobs, and technological expertise develop.

In the U.S., existing deployment provides a foundation for further electrification, but policy reversals and infrastructure constraints raise questions about momentum. More than two terawatts of generation and storage are waiting in interconnection queues. Washington's focus on expanding fossil-fuel production risks leaving American manufacturers competing in a global market whose growth is increasingly driven by demand elsewhere.

For developing economies, electrification offers a different prospect: the opportunity to build modern energy and transport systems without first replicating the fossil-fuel infrastructure that wealthier countries are now spending heavily to replace. Ethiopia is already showing what is possible, with rapid electric vehicle adoption despite electricity reaching only around 60% of its population. Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Africa face greater barriers, including limited grid investment and electricity systems still dominated by fossil fuels.

Seizing those opportunities will depend on access to finance, reliable grids, and policies suited to each country's circumstances. Without them, emerging economies risk investing scarce capital in infrastructure that may become increasingly expensive to operate or eventually replace.

As this global shift evolves, economies powered increasingly by domestically generated electricity become less exposed to global fuel markets, but more dependent on access to batteries, electrical equipment, minerals, and the technologies needed to build and maintain their infrastructure. The concentration of manufacturing capacity in a handful of countries creates vulnerabilities of its own. Yet a dependency on equipment you buy once is very different from a dependency on fuel you buy every month. When a shipping lane closes, a fuel-importing economy feels it within days. If solar panel exports stopped tomorrow, the panels already installed would keep generating for decades.

Electrified economies also need far less energy in the first place. Burning fuel in engines, boilers, and power stations wastes around two-thirds of the energy that goes in, mostly as heat. Electric motors and heat pumps do the same work with a fraction of the input. So electrification does not simply swap one import for another; it can shrink the energy bill. The European Commission estimates that meeting its 2040 target could cut E.U. spending on fossil fuels by up to €260 billion a year.

This presents governments with a different industrial and energy-security challenge: not simply how quickly they can replace fossil fuels, but whether they can build the electricity systems, industrial capabilities, and trading relationships that make the transition economically resilient. Climate policy and industrial strategy are becoming impossible to separate, as the technologies needed to cut emissions also become central to economic competitiveness.

When governments meet in Antalya, Turkey, for COP31 in November, the U.N. climate conference president will push for a global goal to raise electricity's share of final energy from around 20% today to 35% by 2035. That shift deserves greater attention than it is getting. The transition from fossil fuels to electricity will not end competition over energy resources and technologies. It will change what countries compete for, what they need to import, and where economic power is concentrated. The electrostates of 2035 are being built now.

The clocks in most of the U.S. will fall back an hour this weekend as Daylight Saving Time once again comes to an end.

Early Sunday morning, most of the country will switch back to observing Standard Time, resulting in earlier sunrises and earlier sunsets. The looming clock change comes as some lawmakers, with the backing of President Donald Trump, have been trying to push a bill through Congress that would make Daylight Saving Time permanent and end the biannual time change. But the bill has been met with pushback from other lawmakers and sleep experts.

Here’s everything you need to know about the clock change this fall, and the state of the bill that’s trying to put a stop to the cycle of changing the clocks twice a year.

When do the clocks fall back in 2026?

Daylight Saving Time will end on Nov. 1 at 2 a.m. local time. At that time, the clocks will fall back an hour, to 1 a.m. local time.

How can I prepare for the clock change?

Dr. Alex Dimitriu, a psychiatrist and sleep medicine physician, likens the practice of changing the clocks twice a year to “an hour of jet lag,” adding that it can be an adjustment for many people. But the transition to Standard Time also means that people will gain an extra hour of sleep.

“Typically, moving to Standard Time is actually in sync with our circadian rhythm,” says Dr. Andrea Matsumura, a sleep medicine physician and spokesperson for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. “Most people have a fairly easy transition into Standard Time; it’s the Daylight Saving Time that you have to do a lot more work to adjust [to] losing an hour of sleep.”

In the days leading up to the start of Daylight Saving Time—which will happen next March—Matsumura typically advises that people start going to bed a little earlier to help make the time change “a little less painful.” But there’s less preparation needed in the days leading up to Standard Time; in fact, Matsumura recommends that people simply stick to their regular sleep schedule ahead of Nov. 1. 

Matsumura does suggest that people continue to take steps that normally help improve sleep, such as getting some daylight when they wake up in the morning and not drinking caffeine too late in the afternoon. Similarly, Dimitriu recommends that people do some physical movement in the morning, such as going for a walk, and avoid eating food too late in the evening.

What’s the status of the bill that would make Daylight Saving Time permanent?

Most states in the U.S. change their clocks twice a year: once in March as Daylight Saving Time begins, and again in November for Standard Time. Under the current federal law, states are permitted to opt out of Daylight Saving Time and remain in Standard Time year-round. Hawaii and most of Arizona have chosen that option, and so observe Standard Time throughout the year. Federal law does not, though, allow states to remain in Daylight Saving Time year-round.

A bill known as the Sunshine Protection Act, if passed by Congress and signed into law by the President, would change that. The measure would result in the country observing Daylight Saving Time year-round, though individual states could choose to forgo that path and instead stay in Standard Time permanently.

The Sunshine Protection Act passed the House with bipartisan support in July. But the measure is facing an uncertain fate in the Senate. Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told POLITICO that “there’s no clear path forward or consensus” on the bill yet.

Some lawmakers in the upper chamber, such as Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, have criticized the proposal. Critics have argued that permanent Daylight Saving Time would mean much later sunrises in some parts of the country, resulting in people going to school and work in the dark.

Sleep experts, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, have also objected to the bill because they say that Standard Time aligns better with people’s circadian rhythms.

Still, Trump has slammed critics of the Sunshine Protection Act and continued to push for the bill. At the beginning of October, he accused Cotton of “holding up” the bill, and urged his followers on Truth Social to “call Tom on his cellphone” to express support for the Sunshine Protection Act.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claimed over the weekend that the Ukrainian military had “violated” the terms of service for Starlink, the company’s commercial satellite internet network, which has become central to the country’s defense against Russia. Musk said SpaceX had restricted Starlink to prevent that alleged misuse. Ukrainian officials disputed his claim. His allegation came after over a week of uncertainty about why the services had been restricted. 

Ukrainian officials reported on Oct. 14 that restrictions affecting SpaceX’s satellite communications were disrupting drone operations, blocking a key line of defense amid daily Russian air attacks. Ukraine relies heavily on Starlink for frontline communications, drone capabilities, and reconnaissance; the throttled connection ultimately led to the cancellation of several missions, officials said. 

The restrictions also affected Starshield, a military-grade satellite communications service that uses Starlink technology but is supplied through U.S. government contracts. 

Read More: What Is Starshield and Why Is It So Important to Ukraine?

Over a week after the disruption began, Ukraine's Defense Ministry said on Oct. 24 that both services had been fully restored. It reported that connections remained stable even when terminals were moving at speeds above 400 km/h.

At the time, the cause for the interruption had not yet been clarified, but Defense Minister Yevheniy Khmara emphasized the importance of a strong and stable connection, calling it “vital for our front line, for our military personnel, for the operation of drones, and for logistics and communications.”

Musk maintains that the United States government controls changes to Starshield, leaving questions about who authorized its restrictions—and why. 

U.S. President Donald Trump declined to identify those involved in the decision, while a Reuters report from Oct. 15 cited multiple officials who said the order came from inside the White House. The sources did not identify who authorized or implemented the restrictions, but a senior U.S. official denied that it was Trump, the report said.

Experts say that the disruptions expose a growing vulnerability in modern warfare: military reliance on a single private technology supplier. 

The company that controls the technology can ultimately wield significant influence over military operations, leaving governments dependent on decisions made by executives and billionaire owners outside traditional diplomatic channels, experts warn.

Why U.S. control of Starshield matters for Ukraine

Ukraine’s access to satellite communications depends on decisions made in Washington as well as at SpaceX. That leaves Kyiv navigating both a private supplier’s restrictions and a fraught relationship with the Trump Administration.

In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly blamed Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries for rising global fuel prices and called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop those attacks—despite the fact that experts have primarily attributed the price surge to the U.S. war with Iran. 

Trump said on Oct. 15 that Zelensky was “more difficult to deal with” than Russian President Vladimir Putin and on Oct. 19 suggested that it was “time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine.”

Alex Crowther, an adjunct professor at Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy, says the Starshield dispute goes beyond Trump’s souring relationship with Zelensky to a more basic question: Who has the authority to restrict Ukraine’s access?

“Usually when [a foreign entity] signs a contract with an American company, it says who has the capability to turn this stuff on and off, and the circumstances under which they can turn it on and off,” Crowther says, questioning who has that authority over the services Ukraine relies upon. “Is it Starlink, which is private, or is it Starshield, which is an American government contract? Is it Musk? Is it Hegseth? Is it Trump?”

“Nobody knows the rules right now,” he says.

Lance Hunter, a professor of political science at Augusta University, tells TIME that this dispute exposes the potential issues of having three different actors—the Trump Administration, SpaceX, and Ukraine—with potentially incompatible priorities.

How dependence on SpaceX limits Ukraine’s military autonomy

Hunter says that what is unfolding in Ukraine underscores warfare’s growing dependence on digital technology. Beyond traditional “tanks, bombs, planes,” he says that includes factors like artificial intelligence, drones, and navigation jamming.

Reliance on ongoing technology services creates a different relationship from a traditional arms purchase, Hunter says.

He points to traditional arms deals in which a private company sells a government a set amount of missiles or interceptors.

“Let's say you purchase a piece of weaponry or vehicle or any type of object that helps you in the conflict: You own it at that point. You have control over it,” Hunter tells TIME. 

The relationship between Ukraine and SpaceX, however, is different; purchasing the technology does not guarantee operational sovereignty. 

“Ukraine has a lot of transmitters which interface with Starshield and Starlink, and they're very much dependent on SpaceX as far as allowing them to use those when they need to,” Hunter continues. “There's not just a one-time dependence buying the technology; it's continual now.”

That gives the company more “influence and leverage” over conflicts than it has before, he adds.

It shifts the way that countries like Ukraine need to think about who they are willing to work with and how they weigh the potential costs.  

Why Ukraine cannot easily replace Starlink and Starshield

In a perfect world, Hunter says, Ukraine would diversify its technology suppliers to decrease reliance on Starlink. 

The country has already been expanding its domestic weapons production, including interceptor drones. But it remains dependent on foreign suppliers for critical air-defense weapons like the U.S.-made Patriot interceptor missiles.

That dependence has left it vulnerable to shortages and delays. On Oct. 26, Zelensky said Ukraine had been waiting nearly a month for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to approve supplies of missiles for its Patriot and NASAMS air-defense systems.

But replicating satellite communications networks presents a different challenge. Starlink technology is not something a government can easily reproduce domestically, Hunter says, and few providers worldwide offer comparable capabilities.

“Starlink has a monopoly on that technology to a degree, as far as the speed, the availability, the flexibility,” he says. “It's not like they can just flip a switch and diversify that technology. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of resources. It takes a lot of effort, and also in Europe we don't see that same level of technology with some of the European countries and also with some of the private companies.” 

In the end, he says that Ukraine is stuck between “a rock and a hard place” as the country tries to negotiate its relationships with the Trump Administration and, separately, with Musk.

“You're reliant on the politics of those bodies all matching up,” he says of Ukraine. “All of a sudden, you kind of lose that autonomy.”

“If they really push back against the U.S. government or SpaceX, they have the potential of receiving less of the technology and being cut off to a greater extent,” he adds. “But if they don't really push at all and advocate for their interest as well, then they could be in a weaker position as far as having leverage exerted over them.”

Why Ukraine disputes Musk’s Starlink claims

In a social media post on Oct. 24, Musk said that SpaceX had restricted Starlink access deliberately because Ukraine's military violated Starlink's terms of service by using the civilian satellite network for offensive drone strikes.

“Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week,” Musk said in one post. “Using Starlink, a civilian commercial service, for offensive drone strikes to kill people has never been allowed, nor should it be.”

Musk explained that Starlink continues to be “critical to the defense of Ukraine,” but that it could not be used for offensive military operations.

Ukrainian officials promptly disputed Musk’s claims.

Defense technology adviser Serhii Beskrestnov wrote in a Telegram post that operational and speed restrictions are in place that make it “physically impossible” for the military to use Starlink for medium- or deep-range offensive strikes.

“It is very strange that Elon Musk is unaware of the operational limitations of Starlink in Ukraine,” he wrote. “Starlink does not function over the territory of Russia.” 

A video of Catholic bishops praying around President Donald Trump during a meeting at the White House last week has sparked debate, with some bishops claiming their attendance was “exploited” for political purposes less than two weeks before the midterm elections.

The 12 clergymen joined Trump on Thursday in the Oval Office, for what Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee has said was intended to be a private meeting to discuss matters such as immigration enforcement, religious worker visas, and human dignity. But in a “public apology” issued Sunday, Grob expressed deep regret over the meeting that he suggested was used as a "political photo opportunity” after White House officials shared images and footage of a moment of prayer. The video, which Grob claims was posted without the bishops’ consent, has been viewed over 1.8 million times on X alone.

Grob said he had received “many questions” over the encounter and wanted to emphasize that the meeting “was in no way an endorsement of the President, his policies, or his party.” He said his invite to the meeting had been extended by Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the conservative policy playbook Project 2025, and that he had been informed ahead of time there may be an opportunity to pray privately with the President. “Several photos were taken and we were ushered out [after the prayer]. Unbeknownst to the group of bishops, a video was also taken. But permission for the public distribution or posting of either the video or photos was not given by the bishops,” he claimed, insisting the bishops “should never have been put in that position by the White House.”

The White House did not directly respond to questions over whether permission was obtained from the bishops prior to the video and photos being shared. Spokesperson Taylor Rogers told TIME “there has never been a greater President for Catholic Americans than President Trump, and his strong record proves it,” citing the pardoning of “pro-life activists” as one such example.

https://x.com/MargoMartin47/status/2113343568823894180

Bishop William Joensen of Des Moines also issued a statement suggesting that the meeting had been ”exploited.” Acknowledging that “there are many things tied to this present [Trump] Administration that are blatantly at odds with our Catholic faith,” Joensen said he attended the gathering as the advance communication he had received “indicated that we were to have a conversation and that key officials would be interested in hearing our perspective.”

“None of us bishops were unaware that our meeting was on the cusp of a national election,” he said. “Yet in no way did any of us intend by our involvement to endorse any political party or any individual candidate.”

He added: “I wish I had been more shrewd and less simple, like those who exploited our meeting for partisan political purposes. I pray I am more prudent and wise going forward, even as I remain resolute in my openness to engaging and praying for political leaders at all levels.”

Archbishop James Golka of Denver, who led the prayer in the Oval Office, has also addressed the matter after people raised questions over the timing of the video.

“I understand that many people saw the video, posted by the Administration twelve days before an election, as an endorsement. That was never my intention,” Golka told Denver Catholic magazine. “The bishops of the United States teach that the Church cannot champion any candidate or party. I hold to that.” 

He continued: “I’ve had a lot of people, really good friends, ask me, ‘What were you doing?’ ‘Why did you do that?’ I just answer: ‘I was being a Catholic priest. We pray for people.'”

Other clergymen in attendance included the former Archbishop of Kansas City Joseph Naumann. In a statement to TIME, his successor, Archbishop Shawn McKnight, said Naumann’s presence at the White House “was in his own individual capacity” and that “his actions and presence at that event were not on behalf of, or representative of, myself or the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas.”

A separate statement from Archbishop Emeritus Naumann’s office said of the event: “The bishops were assured that no photographs would be made public. They came to have a discussion on important policy matters. As Catholic bishops, they pray with everyone, but do not endorse candidates or political parties.”

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), meanwhile, has distanced itself from the gathering. A spokesperson for the group told TIME that “the meeting was not organized by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops” and emphasized it was “not affiliated” in any way. 

Trump described the meeting as “really good” when speaking with reporters Friday, calling the bishops a “nice group of people” who “mostly prayed” in the Oval Office. Amid the online discourse, White House Faith Office director Jenny Korn defended the gathering, describing it as “not politics,” but “policy in action ending with meaningful prayer with, and for, the President. 

The controversy comes as the Trump Administration seeks to maintain support among Catholic voters ahead of the midterms. According to data circulated by the Pew Research Center in 2025, 20% of U.S. adults describe themselves as Catholic. Trump's approval rating among Catholics has fallen to 30% as of October 2026, compared to the 47% he held when he returned to the White House in January 2025, per the D.C.-based think tank.

When asked about the drop in support from Catholic voters in an Oct. 22 interview, Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert, said that while he believes Catholics, and Americans in general, are not “displeased with the direction” of the country, he acknowledges that “a lot more work needs to happen.” 

“The Catholic vote is absolutely critical in electoral politics in the United States, and particularly in the midterms,” says David Gibson, director of the Center of Religion and Culture at Fordham University. He adds that while certain religious groups may stick more with a particular political party, the “Catholic vote can shift between Republicans and Democrats much more easily than any other religious bloc.”

Trump won a majority of Catholic voters in the 2024 Presidential election, taking 55% of the Catholic vote to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 43%, according to the Pew Research Center. With Republicans attempting to retain control of both chambers of Congress amid tight races, Catholic voters could prove an important voting bloc.

Yet the Administration has also faced growing tensions with Pope Leo XIV in recent months. Trump and the first American-born Pope have repeatedly clashed over policy disagreements, particularly Leo's opposition to the Administration's immigration crackdown and the Iran war.

“The dynamics are shifting. For the past few years, the white Catholic vote was very solidly with the Republicans and with Trump, but Catholics are growing disaffected with him,” says Gibson. “Now you have an American Pope, from Chicago, the Midwest, and he is widely popular. American Catholics identify with him, and Trump has not ceased picking fights with the Pope, and American Catholics [could be] getting kind of fed up with it.”

American Catholic leaders have raised concerns over Trump's policies

In January, three Catholic Cardinals issued a “rare joint statement on the morality of U.S. foreign policy.”

Archbishop of Chicago Blase Cupich, Archbishop of Washington Robert McElroy, and Archbishop of Newark Joseph Tobin said the “events in Venezuela, Ukraine, and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace.” They argued that the “building of just and sustainable peace” is being “reduced to partisan categories that encourage polarization and destructive policies.” The statement bolstered remarks Pope Leo had made earlier that month, in which he warned against a “diplomacy based on force.”

Trump’s war with Iran has prompted further warnings from American Catholic leaders.

Archbishop of Oklahoma City Paul Coakley, who serves as president of the USCCB, earlier this year joined Pope Leo in urging Trump to pursue a negotiated settlement to the war.

The Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement practices have also prompted debate. Upon returning to the White House, Trump rescinded previous government guidance that restricted immigration arrests in sensitive locations, including schools, churches, and hospitals. Immigration enforcement efforts subsequently intensified, with arrests reported outside churches, drawing backlash from religious leaders.

In November 2025, the USCCB approved a special message opposing indiscriminate mass deportations by an overwhelming vote of 216 in favor and five against. The bishops also raised concerns about detention conditions, family separation, the loss of legal status, and “the lack of access to pastoral care.”

The message was later echoed by other Catholic leaders across the country. In December 2025, the Catholic bishops of Wisconsin issued a statement that expressed “strong concern” over what they referred to as “the indiscriminate nature of the current federal immigration enforcement.” 

Gibson says that although the USCCB used to have a somewhat friendly relationship with the Republican party, particularly on the pursuit to overturn Roe v. Wade, relations have grown increasingly frayed during Trump’s return to the White House. He points to the USCCB’s argument that the Administration has denied visas for priests and bishops, and the announced cuts to the resettlement of refugees for Catholic charities.

However, Catholic bishops have diverse views on politics and the Trump Administration.

Last year, Bishop Robert Barron was among those selected to serve on Trump's Religious Liberty Commission.

The 2025 National Study of Catholic Priests found that from a sample of 1,164 priests, 30% identified as somewhat to very liberal, 36% as moderate, and 34% as somewhat to very conservative.

The first tanker carrying Russian diesel to the United States since 2022 is expected to arrive in New York within the next few weeks, but its 40,000-ton cargo amounts to less than two hours of American consumption. The shipment will barely register at the pump—and it answers the wrong question, since what drove American diesel past $6 a gallon was never a shortage of Russian supply, but historic bottlenecks from the war in the Middle East.

Recall what happened between May and July of this year, when Ukraine launched one of the most destructive phases of its energy war against Moscow, sending waves of drones attacking massive Russian refineries at Kirishi, Ryazan, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, and Omsk one after another. If Russian refining capacity governed American fuel costs, prices at U.S. truck stops should have exploded. Instead, American diesel fell by $1.06 a gallon.

With the midterms days away and September’s consumer price index showing fuel oil up a staggering 74% on the year, President Donald Trump has cast Kyiv as the architect of American inflation. “What’s happened in Russia with Ukraine has been really the biggest problem for diesel,” he said in the Oval Office on September 30 before naming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the culprit, telling reporters that Zelenskyy “wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel.”

The charge is politically convenient but economically backward. Until this month’s waiver, Russian fuel had been barred from American ports since 2022, meaning Ukrainian strikes have reached U.S. pumps only through the gradual tightening of global supply. The real shockwave runs through the Strait of Hormuz, where Tehran can choke off a fifth of the world’s seaborne crude overnight. Diesel was $3.48 a gallon in January and still under $4 the week American and Israeli bombs fell on Iran. When Tehran closed the Strait, the price jumped 96 cents in a single week. 

From that moment, the U.S. price line has moved in lockstep with the Iran war—cresting at the April ceasefire, dipping only after the June truce, climbing after the pause in hostilities collapsed in July. By September, the tanker war had driven diesel to a record $6.53. 

Ukraine’s unceasing drone campaign has at most modestly nudged up the global floor, while the Iran war has steered every spike and plunge.

By authorizing the sale of Russian diesel, Washington provided Moscow the relief that sanctions are meant to withhold. And when Zelenskyy refused to halt strikes on Russian refineries, Americans throttled the Starlink defenses only they can supply. 

Now, Ukraine and its European backers are left with a narrowing set of options. Pulled with discipline, however, the levers they hold can still keep Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on a tightening clock.

A cure that feeds the disease

After an Oct. 9 phone call with Putin, President Trump directed the Treasury to reopen American ports to Russian diesel through April 2027. On paper, the deal promises 4.8 million tons of fuel. In reality, the promise amounts to roughly 10 days of U.S. demand, and analysts doubt that Moscow can ship even that much after months of Ukrainian strikes on the refineries that would fill the tankers.

Carnegie’s Sergey Vakulenko calls the arrangement “largely for show,” yet for a Kremlin watching its September oil and gas tax revenues plunge 22% year-over-year, the spectacle is the prize. What former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul condemned as “absolutely deplorable,” and Zelenskyy called “a gift to Putin,” was followed a week later by a concession of far greater strategic weight. Two days before the Russia provisions of the Graham sanctions act were scheduled to bite, an executive order waived them. In a single stroke, the White House neutralized both the 100 and 500% tariffs and stripped out the clause locking existing sanctions in place.

While Moscow collected waivers, Kyiv got the vise. Washington announced an “energy ceasefire” the Kremlin never bothered to acknowledge. After Zelenskyy held his fire for three days, Russia pounded Ukrainian energy infrastructure 76 times in the week that followed. By the Ukrainian president’s account—one Secretary of State Marco Rubio denies—the American satellite alerts that warn Ukraine when a Russian missile is in the air went dark for a period of time. Procurement contracts required for the transfer of an allied-funded batch of Patriot interceptors reportedly sat unsigned on the desk of U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.

Meanwhile, the speed of Starshield datalinks, the military-grade Starlink network that Ukraine’s drone units rely on, was throttled. Starshield datalinks need to operate at speeds up to 550 km/h (342 mph) to effectively intercept Russian jet-powered Shahed and Geran drones. 

The 160 km/h (100 mph) cap was apparently instituted—simply insufficient to protect Ukrainian civilians from Russian ballistic missiles. 

Trump and Elon Musk finger-pointed at each other for the restriction. Trump has reportedly since called Musk to lift the cap. U.S. officials say service is running more normally. Kyiv says the limit remained in place into this weekend, with President Zelenskyy tweeting on October 24 that service has now been restored.

The Trump Administration should also allow Ukraine to use the system in Russia, targeting ballistic missile launchers. Take out the archer, not the arrows.

What Ukraine can still do

Washington’s squeeze rests on the premise that Kyiv is losing and must be forced to settle, but the front-line situation does not support that notion. Russian forces have made virtually no net territorial gains in 2026 despite suffering more than 40,000 casualties a month since July. At this year’s rate of advance, we estimate that Moscow would need 60 years to capture the rest of Donetsk Oblast.

In fact, the momentum has tilted the other way, with Ukrainian counteroffensives, such as the exceptionally innovative Operation Vivaldi. For months, Kyiv’s forces have killed or seriously wounded more Russian soldiers than the Kremlin can recruit. Closing that gap would require a mass mobilization Putin has been afraid to order, wary of unrest in a country reeling from the fuel shortages created by Ukraine’s refinery strikes. The myth of an inevitable Russian victory amounts to a Kremlin sales pitch aimed at Washington, and the very energy campaign the White House wants to shut down is what keeps Putin boxed in.

Nor can the White House physically switch that campaign off. For all the damage the administration’s freeze inflicted on Ukraine’s air shield, enough Ukrainian drones and missiles were able to reach their targets. Washington’s leverage is entirely defensive, whereas Ukraine’s offensive reach is built at home and in Europe. The 1,000-strong armada that struck St. Petersburg in mid-October was built around FP-1 drones, 90% of which are Ukrainian-made, flying into Russian airspace where Starlink does not function, and Starshield caps do not apply. The E.U.’s Kaja Kallas has rightly defended Ukraine’s actions as legitimate self-defense. 

By Putin’s estimate, the wider Ukrainian campaign has cost Russia about 1% of GDP, more than a year of Russian growth, as the central bank’s fight against punishing inflation pushed interest rates to their highest level since the early 2000s. The true toll is almost certainly worse. As we have previously argued, even after Moscow blacked out mandatory economic data, the IMF continues to recycle unverified Kremlin figures to dub Russia the world’s fourth-largest economy at peak output, despite ranking just 51st in GDP per capita. 

In 2022, hundreds of billions of dollars abandoned the Russian economy after our team helped spur the withdrawal of more than 1,000 major corporations following the invasion. Firms that curtailed operations outperformed those that did not, in terms of market performance. 

Even where Kyiv chooses to look beyond oil, its domestic weapons require no American permission and offend no American farmer. Homegrown Long Neptune missiles have already crippled four of the Black Sea Fleet’s Kalibr missile carriers and recently destroyed four Russian Su-34 bombers, proving that Ukraine can systematically hunt the launchers, airfields, and factories that fire on its cities. The same freedom of action applies to striking Russian data centers, an asymmetric campaign that an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute judges lopsidedly in Kyiv’s favor because Ukraine’s critical data is already safely hosted abroad.

Holding an offensive campaign that Washington wants to stop but cannot physically block changes the terms of diplomacy. Toward the White House, Kyiv should act as a customer rather than a supplicant. Any pause in energy strikes should be treated strictly as an opportunity to make a deal—offered only in exchange for verified Russian reciprocity and binding, written guarantees from Washington on Patriot interceptors, satellite-based missile launch warnings, and uncapped Starshield access, a bargain of the kind legislators like Senator Roger Wicker and organizations like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have urged.

What Europe must now do

Kyiv’s balancing act rests on a hard truth in Brussels. Europe can replace most of America’s financial support and much of its weaponry within two years, but it cannot replace Patriot-class interceptors, space-based ballistic-missile warning, or Starlink-scale connectivity this winter. The vulnerability is partly of Europe’s own making after three decades of over-reliance on American dominance, and it now collides with an American arsenal running dry.

The on-again, off-again war with Iran that drove U.S. diesel to $6.53 is also the conflict that emptied the Pentagon’s magazines. According to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Gulf conflict consumed roughly two-thirds of America’s Patriot inventory and more than a third of its THAAD interceptors, leaving a rebuild measured in years at the exact moment Ukraine’s Patriot stockpiles are reportedly exhausted. Europe’s scramble to build sovereign air defenses—four SAMP/T NG batteries currently on order, a 10-nation FREYJA program aiming for a first intercept in mid-2027, and the diplomatic courtship of Japan, the sole non-American producer of PAC-3 interceptors—is real and necessary, but slow. Every euro spent on European interceptors is one less dollar earned in Washington, and one fewer armament President Trump can delay.

A similar bottleneck applies to space. While Europe’s radar and optical satellites could potentially replace American targeting imagery within weeks, OneWeb and the E.U.’s GovSatcom offer only a partial hedge against a Starlink slowdown. And a European satellite constellation capable of warning of a ballistic launch probably will not exist before the 2030s.

Because Europe cannot buy its way out of those technical bottlenecks overnight, it must lean aggressively into the financial and maritime levers it controls today. The E.U.’s €90 billion loan covers 2026 and much of 2027, and when the remaining €70 billion gap comes to a head at the December European Council, moving the €202 billion in frozen Russian assets out of Belgium offers the clearest route around Belgium’s objections. Better still, a full ban on shipping services for Russian crude, along with expanding the shadow-fleet boardings that European navies have already begun, could squeeze Moscow’s war chest at almost no cost to European taxpayers.

Ukraine’s most decisive advantage, though, is found on the factory floor. Domestic drone production has surged 370% this year, and the Ukrainian-made Flamingo cruise missile costs just under $600,000, less than a fifth of an American Tomahawk’s $3.5 million price tag. By guaranteeing a loan to the Flamingo’s manufacturer, Denmark has laid out a blueprint for surviving an erratic Washington: European capital behind Ukrainian weapons.

The lesson of the lever

A bitter paradox governs the current battlefield. The offensive campaign squeezing Moscow is the one Washington objects to, while the defenses faltering over Ukrainian cities are the ones only the U.S. can supply. By blaming Kyiv for an energy shock originating in the Persian Gulf, the White House has struck a bargain that lowers no prices at home, replenishes the aggressor’s coffers abroad, and teaches the Kremlin that American sanctions expire if Putin simply waits them out. Such a posture delivers neither peace nor strength. 

Ukraine is akin to the Biblical hero David, who, through cunning, triumphed over the lumbering giant Goliath. Moscow's “card hand” is neither the colossus Trump believes it to be nor the colossus its propaganda advertises. Russia is not remotely an economic superpower. Beneath its vast map lies a concentrated population—over 80% of the population lives in the 20% not plagued by extreme cold, permafrost, and poor soil—and a brittle economy dependent on raw materials the world can increasingly buy elsewhere, backed by a military with a long history of failing to subdue smaller, more determined foes, from Japan in 1905 and Poland in 1920 to Finland in 1940 and the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s. Sheer land mass has never guaranteed victory when the smaller side is fighting for its existence.

The silver lining is that Washington’s attempted coercion is forging the European autonomy it assumed would never materialize. If European leaders withstand Russian pressure over the next 18 months and resist the political disarray stoked by Kremlin disinformation, the continent will emerge a far more formidable power—proving the quip circulating in allied capitals that Europe has found no better unifier since Charlemagne than Donald Trump. Europe, Ukraine, and the world now know what an American guarantee is worth when the guarantor changes its mind, and Washington is about to learn that leverage, like interceptors, is a stock that depletes with every use.

As Mark Twain advised, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

A woman who had accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in 1993 described it to congressional staff as rape and said the interaction left her bleeding and bruised, according to a report released Monday by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee examining Trump's ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Beatrice Keul, a model and former Miss Switzerland, alleged to Judiciary Committee staff that she was raped by Trump in a Plaza Hotel suite in Manhattan when she was 24. Keul said that while attending the American Dream Pageant, which had a partnership with Trump, she met with Trump at a press luncheon at the event.

Trump, according to Keul, promised to arrange her visa in the U.S. and ensure her acceptance into New York University through his friend Paolo Zampolli, a close Trump ally who was, until earlier this month, part of his Administration. At the same event, she also spent at least 10 minutes talking to Epstein who she said claimed to have organized “many parties with Don.”

Later that day, Keul alleges, Trump invited her to a hotel suite where Trump “grabbed Keul from behind and forcibly raped her,” causing “bleeding and bruising on multiple parts of her body,” the report says. Following the incident, Keul alleges Trump made her promise she would keep quiet and repeated his promise for visa and college admission.

Because Keul’s passport had been taken from her on her arrival, she was not able to leave the contest following the incident, she alleges, according to the report. After she returned to Switzerland, she declined to participate in an additional Trump-sponsored pageant in Hawaii several weeks later.

TIME has been unable to independently verify details of Keul’s account.

In a statement, the White House denies the allegations and says that President Trump has been “fully exonerated of anything related to Epstein.” “This ‘report’ is nothing more than a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans from the surging Republican momentum driven by President Trump’s historic achievements,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis says. 

Keul has previously spoken in public about her sexual assault allegations against Trump, but the report provided new details of the alleged rape—as well as reviewing similar accounts of other Trump accusers. 

Read more: Trump Said He Banned Epstein From Mar-a-Lago. A Lawmaker Who Reviewed Unredacted Files Says They Tell a Different Story

In addition to Keul’s account, the report also compiled allegations from four other women who have directly accused Trump of rape or sexual assault in connection with the Epstein investigation. The allegations, spanning from the mid-1980s to the 1990s, had all been previously made public either through media interviews or FBI testimony released as part of the Epstein files. 

The report’s release, just over a week before Election Day, comes as Democrats are working to signal to voters how they will make use of their power if they gain control of one or both chambers of Congress.

On Monday, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat of the House Judiciary Committee, called on the Department of Justice to appoint an independent special counsel to oversee the investigation of allegations mentioned in the report. So far, Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime Epstein confidant, is the only person to have been convicted of sex trafficking of minors in connection with the Epstein case. 

“An independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up and ensure that state and foreign prosecutors have the evidence they need to pursue justice,” Raskin said in a statement.

Allegations made against Paolo Zampolli

The report also alleges that Zampolli, a former Trump administration official and a close Trump ally, was “an active participant” in the Epstein sex trafficking allegations. 

According to the report, which cites multiple FBI reports included in the Epstein files, Zampolli arranged U.S. visas for young female models before they met Epstein. One FBI report mentioned that Zampolli arranged an 18-year-old model’s visa before she was recruited to give a massage at Epstein’s house, where Epstein allegedly raped her.

Zampolli himself has also been accused of rape and sexual assault in a separate case brought by model Victoria Drake, who alleges in an ongoing civil lawsuit that Zampolli drugged and raped her in 2023. 

TIME has reached out to Zampolli for comment. 

Previously, Zampolli has claimed that he had introduced First Lady Melania Trump to the President in 1998, but the report disputes that claim, citing two accounts—one from an unnamed Epstein associate and the other from Amanda Ungaro, a Brazilian model—saying that Epstein had introduced Melania Trump to Donald Trump. 

The New York Times reported in March that Zampolli had asked a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement  last year to detain and deport Ungaro, whom Zampolli had previously dated, amid a custody battle over their son. Zampolli denied making such requests. 

Until earlier this month, Zampolli held a diplomatic role under the State Department as Special Representative for Global Partnerships. He was fired two weeks ago over a months-long dispute with the department’s deputy secretary, according to Politico.

On Oct. 25, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won an unprecedented fourth term, defeating the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro with 51.79 % of the vote, a margin of nearly 4.4 million votes. For the 80-year-old Lula, who had trailed his opponent by 2.2 million votes in the first round of elections just three weeks earlier, the victory was a remarkable comeback.

Brazil is the largest country and economy in Latin America, and the contest had become a test of whether the region’s rightward shift could be stopped. Lula’s victory interrupted that drift and dealt a setback to President Donald Trump’s ambition to build a hemisphere of governments aligned with his politics. Yet interpreting the result as a triumph for the left would be a mistake.

Consider the first round of the elections in Brazil: more than 33 million Brazilians did not vote in the first round, an abstention rate of 21.08 %, the highest for a presidential election first round since 1998. Millions more cast blank or invalid ballots. Voting is optional for Brazilians aged 16 and 17 and for those 70 or older, but the scale of abstention points to a broader problem of political alienation. The high rejection rates for both candidates suggest that, for many voters, the election was not about electing a president but to ensure his opponent is not elected.

Flávio, whose father and former president Jair Bolsonaro is serving 27 years in prison for crimes against democracy, won the first round, with 2 million more votes than Lula, and his Liberal Party’s formidable showing in Congress in early October shocked the liberal world. He ran as his father’s proxy. He promised to pardon his father and his accomplices and to carry forward his political legacy.

The new expectations of Lula’s children

It seemed puzzling that Lula needed such a dramatic comeback to win re-election when unemployment in Brazil stood at 5.3 %, near a historic low. The International Monetary Fund projected that Brazil would become the world’s eighth-largest economy in 2027. Poverty in the country had fallen substantially during Lula’s third term, while real wages rose and food insecurity declined. Violent deaths had fallen to their lowest level in over a decade. Deforestation of the Amazon had fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1988. Incumbents have been re-elected in Brazil with far less to show for their time in office.

The children of Lula’s social policies came of age in a rapidly changing world, and in a country where formal employment, labor unions, and traditional social protections have struggled to serve an increasingly informal workforce. Some turned toward market-oriented politics. Others found a sense of belonging in conservatism, part of a broader rightward turn among young men around the world.

Brazil’s left governed for much of their formative years. Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached in 2016 amid a bitter political crisis and corruption scandals that implicated political figures across party lines. For many Brazilians, the political establishment became synonymous with impunity and self-preservation. They saw Lula’s Workers’ Party as the establishment. And while Lula’s earlier corruption convictions had been annulled, the allegations continued to shadow him.

Meanwhile, lethal violence had become a defining feature of everyday life. Brazil had urbanized rapidly without addressing deep inequality or reforming a public-security system inherited from the military dictatorship. Overcrowded prisons became recruiting grounds for criminal factions.

In Rio de Janeiro, militias made up largely of serving and former police officers and other security personnel initially claimed to protect residents from drug traffickers. They evolved into criminal enterprises that extorted communities, struck deals with drug factions, and infiltrated local governments. Yet responsibility for confronting them remained fragmented. State governments control most policing, leaving the federal government with limited direct authority over local law enforcement.

Flávio understood how to exploit voters’ distrust and frustration. His promises of tougher security resonated with Brazilians desperate for protection. His campaign drew comparisons to the hardline model of President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Yet Bolsonaro Jr. also faced questions about his own associations with criminal figures in Rio, undermining his claim to offer a solution to the country’s security crisis. During the campaign, new revelations about his ties to Daniel Vorcaro, the disgraced banker and owner of Banco Master at the center of a vast financial scandal, added to those doubts, even as he denies wrongdoing.

Flávio's brother, Eduardo, had lobbied the Trump Administration to punish Brazil over the prosecution of their father. Washington imposed tariffs on Brazilian exports, explicitly linking the measures to the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro. The tariffs threatened Brazilian businesses and proved deeply unpopular, leaving Flávio defending a political alliance whose costs would be borne by Brazil.

How Lula fought back

Lula’s campaign had expected these vulnerabilities to suffice. When Flávio entered the presidential race in Dec. 2025, early polls placed Lula comfortably ahead. His first-round defeat jolted the progressive camp out of its complacency. Lula’s campaign returned to the streets of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and intensified its presence on social media, seeking to mobilize the voters who had stayed home in the first round. Lula’s people reorganized their digital outreach to speak more directly to younger Brazilians and informal workers.

Lula, who had initially seemed detached from younger voters’ digital habits, embraced viral content and selfies. His coalition expanded beyond the traditional left, drawing in moderates and voters who feared another Bolsonaro presidency. His campaign also challenged what it described as algorithmic bias on platforms such as Instagram, securing an electoral court ruling requiring equal treatment of candidates’ content.

The most potent opening for the Lula campaign came from Washington. Trump praised Flávio’s first-round performance as a “very, very big victory,” helping Lula recast the runoff as a contest over national sovereignty. The tariffs had already alienated Brazilian exporters and moderate voters.

In televised debates and rallies, Lula accused the Bolsonaro family of serving American interests and warned that Flávio would surrender control of Brazil’s natural resources to foreign interests. He also attacked his rival’s support for sweeping cuts inspired by President Javier Milei of Argentina. For voters outside the left, defending national sovereignty offered a reason to support Lula despite their reservations about his government.

On São Paulo’s Paulista Avenue, Brazil’s main stage for political protests, a protester wore a Trump mask and carried a Flávio puppet. The image captured the choice Lula wanted the voters to see. This was no longer simply a referendum on his record. It was also a choice about whether Brazil would let an American president shape its politics.

Lula’s campaign turned a contest he had been losing into a choice between an imperfect incumbent and a candidate whose victory threatened democratic institutions and national autonomy. Abstention fell from 21.08 % in the first round to 19.22 % in the runoff. On election day, severe weather and heavy rainfall in southern Brazil kept some voters from reaching the polling booths. Transportation disruptions also hampered voting in cities including Salvador and São Paulo. A last-minute Supreme Court ruling extended voting hours by two hours, allowing more voters in working-class strongholds to cast their ballots.

Lula’s victory is both a reprieve and a warning. It shows that a broad democratic coalition, mobilizing in the streets and online, can defeat a far-right candidate even amid a regional shift to the right and pressure from Washington. But the victory has not resolved Brazil’s divisions. Lula must govern a country where about half of those who cast valid ballots chose his opponent. He has won four years. He has not won back the country.

Flávio has challenged the result and demanded that the runoff be annulled. His party holds a powerful position in Congress, where conservative and center-right forces can obstruct Lula’s agenda. The election has given Brazilian democracy breathing room, but the battle for Brazil’s democracy has only begun. What Lula does with his mandate will determine whether he can make it count.

In 2027, TIME will publish its third annual ranking of the World's Top GreenTech Companies in partnership with Statista, a leading international provider of market and consumer data and rankings. This list will recognize the most innovative, impactful, and successful companies working to reduce humanity’s impact on the environment.

Because many companies in this space are young, TIME and Statista are accepting applications as part of the research phase. An application guarantees consideration for the list, but does not guarantee a spot on either list. Companies that do not apply may also be included in the ranking.

To apply, click here.

More information visit: www.statista.com/page/top-greentech-companies. The winners will be announced on TIME.com in June 2027.

Japanese lawmakers are reforming the country’s more-than-a-millennia-old continuous hereditary monarchy in an effort to keep it alive amid a shrinking imperial family.

Amendments to Japan’s Imperial House Law that passed in July took effect on Saturday. One allows Japanese princesses to keep their royal status even if they marry non-royals, though their future children are not considered royals. The other amendment is an apparent roundabout way to preserve patrilineal succession: members of the royal family may adopt a male from former imperial branch families, and those adoptees’ future male offspring can be considered legitimate successors to the throne.

The revisions aim to expand the future pool of eligible heirs to the throne while reinforcing the shutting out of women from leading the Japanese monarchy, which staunch conservatives including the country’s first female Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, have repeatedly advocated against upending.

Before the revisions took effect, Emperor Naruhito only had a few viable successors: his younger brother Akishino, followed by his 20-year-old nephew Prince Hisahito, then his 90-year-old uncle Prince Hitachi. 

The small pool had raised concerns about the future of the Japanese imperial family. The Japanese public has shown support for female monarchs, signaling a preference to keep the renowned family on the throne. Fans of Princess Aiko, the emperor’s sole daughter, have marched in Japan’s streets in recent weeks in support of her eligibility to become empress.

But extreme right-wing factions in Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party have insisted that maintaining only males from the male imperial line as eligible to become emperor preserves the authority of the Chrysanthemum Throne. The revisions were ultimately borne out of the coalition agreement signed in October last year by the LDP and its junior partner, the Japan Innovation Party.

While the Imperial Household Agency has said it will study how to implement the measures, critics are already studying how to turn the policy over, arguing that it violates the country’s anti-discrimination law. Manga artist Yoshinori Kobayashi filed a lawsuit against the government that called the amendment “unconstitutional.”

Experts say the amendments could affect how the Japanese public views the imperial family. 

“It could dilute the feeling of closeness or the feeling of holiness that some people might feel towards the royal family,” Jeffrey J. Hall, a lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies, tells TIME, “because they're more used to the royals that they already know.”

Welcoming back the former imperial family branches

The amendments allow members of the imperial family to adopt a male who is 15 years of age or older and is also a legitimate descendant of a male member of the imperial family before it was trimmed down after World War II. That adoptee should not be married or have children.

Several branches of the Japanese imperial family renounced their royal status in 1947 to cut down on costs the monarchy incurred after the war. Government officials previously said that these 11 families split from a common male-line ancestor some 600 years ago, and are now at least 36 degrees of kinship from Naruhito.

However, the adopted males would not be eligible for the throne—only their eligible male offspring would be. The law would be reviewed every 30 years.

Jeff Kingston, a professor of Asian history at Temple University’s Japan campus in Tokyo, tells TIME the government’s offered solution to the dwindling pool raises questions about the legitimacy of the potential heirs. “Would these people be taken as legitimate by the public?” he says remains an open question, especially as reports surface about who those potential additional successors to the throne might be. “The problem of a monarchy is it’s sort of based on—I don't know—a collectively held myth, belief, faith; and a sausage maker probably isn't going to have that magic.”

Hall, from the Kanda University of International Studies, echoes that the Japanese government will find it difficult to convince the public, especially since the move would introduce unfamiliar faces. “It will be a very difficult problem for the Japanese government to try to basically build up an ideology or a PR program that convinces people that the new royal adoptees are just as royal as the other ones that we all know.”

Snubbing the nation’s popular princess

Kingston says that conservatives proposed the amendments to ensure that a female-led monarchy wouldn’t happen in Japan, even when many Japanese people appear fine with it and some even seem to prefer it. Past media surveys have shown that more than 80% of Japanese respondents favored a female emperor.

Protesters took to central Tokyo’s streets on Oct. 10 to call for further debates on the Imperial House Law, claiming that Princess Aiko, who is 24, should be eligible for the throne.

The other amendment that took effect allows Aiko and the four other single princesses to retain royal status if they get married to people outside the imperial family. Before, princesses who did so lost their royal status, meaning their children are ineligible for the line of succession; the most recent being Mako, one of Naruhito’s nieces. Mako married her college boyfriend in 2021 and has since moved to the U.S.

Hall describes the recent amendments as “very strange” and suspects “many Japanese people won't really fully grasp” them. An August poll from the Social Survey Research Center came to a similar conclusion that the revisions to the Imperial House Law “have not gained the understanding of the Japanese public.”

While Naruhito and the royal family have largely ceremonial duties and do not weigh in on the country’s politics, they have even hinted at what they think should be done. In June, the emperor said he hopes any decision to expand the imperial family should have public support: “I hope it will be something that gains the understanding of the people.”

Each new release of a frontier AI model, such as Anthropic’s Mythos or OpenAI’s Astra, brings a new wave of speculation over how much closer this takes us to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and how much further that lofty goal remains. 

But what if we’re overlooking something more important than an individual model’s supposed IQ?

OpenAI recently announced that an internal model, claimed to be “significantly more capable than GPT‑6 Astra,” solved Navier-Stokes, one of a handful of legendary math problems each carrying a million-dollar bounty. While mathematicians unpack what this means for the profession, and investors unpack what it means for OpenAI’s upcoming IPO, to me the biggest takeaway is that capability emerges from the collective. Just as it does in nature.

OpenAI didn’t crack Navier-Stokes by pointing its internal model at the problem. It pointed a swarm of 10,000 AI bots at it. These agents were encouraged to explore different directions and communicate promising leads with each other. 

Think of what a lone honeybee or termite can accomplish compared to a colony of them. What a single person can accomplish compared to a nation of them.  

In biology, a bacterial colony is a group of identical cells derived from the same mother cell. This, I would argue, is the most suitable analogy for the collective of agents that solved Navier-Stokes. It is many from one. Or, to paraphrase Walt Whitman: an AI that contains multitudes. 

While OpenAI deployed its AI colony to solve a math problem that no human or individual AI agent could, Google DeepMind recently set an AI colony loose on math problems for a different purpose. It wanted to see what behaviors would arise within the colony. What it found was remarkable. 

One agent discovered a way to cheat, convincing the examination software that it had solved math problems when it hadn’t. Rather than resting content with this small victory, it messaged other agents, telling them how to cheat. Some agents joined the unscrupulous agent and formed a sub-colony of cheaters. Others resisted and even formed a sub-colony of whistleblowers trying to out the cheaters. 

As a math professor, I thought it was hard enough to keep students from using AI to cheat on exams. Now we have to worry about the AIs themselves cheating on math exams!

Which brings us to perhaps the most striking example of AI hive intelligence: the Hugging Face hack. OpenAI’s agents broke out of a sandbox environment and hacked into another company. Arguably, it was a felony offense—or rather, it would have been if a human were in charge. OpenAI’s agents coordinated their behavior in ingenious ways, including writing secret messages in a file system so that even when one AI colony was erased, a future colony could pick up the hack where the previous one left off.

Researchers have long known that complex behavior can emerge from simple computer systems. For instance, in 1970 the mathematician John Conway introduced the Game of Life, where an elementary set of rules governing the movement of pixels on a screen leads to remarkably rich ecosystems.

With today’s AI agents, we are going far beyond this by letting extremely sophisticated entities interact in sophisticated ways—using language, often hidden and coded. 

This is why we must adopt a new mindset regarding AI capability. Testing a new AI model to see what it can do and how dangerous it might be by directly prompting it is like deciding how safe it would be to stick your head in a wasp nest by letting a single insect sting you. 

Some developers and red-team activities do focus on AI colonies. The Hugging Face attack resulted from OpenAI trying to evaluate the cybersecurity capabilities of an AI colony. But the AI arms race between the U.S. and China, and between the competing companies within each country, has dangerously pushed our attention to what each individual model can do. 

One model might top the leaderboards, but a thousand weaker models could wreak far more havoc. As calls to pace the frontier abound, let us not lose sight of the fact that the AI frontier isn’t what each model can do in isolation—it is what a colony of them can accomplish together. 

The Israeli settlement of Neve Daniel sits south of Jerusalem, atop one of the highest ridges in the West Bank, nearly 1,000 meters above sea level. The view to the east stretches to the mountains of Jordan, and to the west across the Mediterranean coastal plain—where most Israelis live. But the tranquility of the landscape belies the political fervor animating the Oct. 27 election, a contest with stakes as great as any in the 78-year history of the world’s only Jewish state. When I ask three residents what will ultimately determine their votes, one responds with particular ferocity.

“Seven hundred trucks were delivered to Hamas today by Israel,” says Barak Moore, who has lived in Neve Daniel for 14 years. He’s referring to commercial goods and international aid entering the Gaza Strip. “We’re paying a terrorist organization that committed the greatest atrocity against the Jewish people since Auschwitz.”

While much of the world has come to define Israel by its military actions in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, Moore’s views reflect the passions coursing through a society still traumatized by that day. Israelis tend to be less preoccupied by the nearly 75,000 Palestinian fatalities in Gaza since the war began, than by the 1,200 people killed in Israel and 251 hostages taken by Hamas—the women subjected to sexual violence, the children shot at point-blank range, the families burned alive in their homes. In a country so small and intimately connected, scarcely anyone was untouched by events that shattered the assumptions of a people whose nation was founded to give Jews a safe haven in their ancestral homeland. 

Both the Hamas massacre and the wars that followed loom over a vote shaping up not only as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, but also the nature of the country that, as Israel’s longest serving prime minister, he has done so much to shape. 

Arrayed against Netanyahu is a fractured field of challengers. There is Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief whose reputation for honesty, sobriety, and competence contrasts with Netanyahu’s polarizing leadership; Naftali Bennett, the right-wing former prime minister seeking a comeback; Yair Lapid, the centrist former premier who has spent years trying to dislodge Netanyahu; and Avigdor Lieberman, the hawkish secular nationalist who has become one of Netanyahu’s fiercest adversaries.

Also on the ballot: Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, far-right extremists whose parties made possible Netanyahu’s current coalition, and whose ambitions to annex the West Bank and resettle Gaza constrain his room to maneuver while damaging Israel’s standing abroad. The next government will either push Israel further down the path of religious nationalism, permanent conflict, and international isolation—or toward a new generation of leadership.

According to the polls, Netanyahu’s strongest challenger is Eisenkot, a soft-spoken, heavyset career soldier running as a centrist. His son, Gal, was killed fighting Hamas in Gaza, and one of his nephews also died in the war. Eisenkot is campaigning on a promise to restore public trust in government, rebuild Israel’s security, and heal the divisions that have fractured the country. “This election is about the identity of Israel,” Eisenkot told TIME in an interview on Oct. 20. “What will be Israel two weeks from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? This is the main question.”

Three years after Netanyahu’s political obituary was being written, pre-election polls show him running in a dead heat. On the eve of the vote, the nation is suffused with a sense of uncertainty; political analysts say almost anything can happen. Netanyahu and Eisenkot could form a unity government. Netanyahu could cobble together another right-wing coalition, dragging Israel further right. Eisenkot could join forces with Bennett, Lapid, and the Arab parties (20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinian) to oust Netanyahu, producing the closest thing Israel could muster to a center-left government. Or perhaps no bloc will manage to pull together the 61 Knesset seats needed for a majority, plunging Israel into another round of elections and a reprise of the paralysis that produced five contests between 2019 and 2022.

“The most probable scenarios currently are either there will be some sort of unity government, which again is very complicated politically because all of the opposition parties swear they don’t want it under Netanyahu, and I don’t see how Netanyahu is going to sit under them,” says Nimrod Nor, an expert on Israeli politics at Hebrew University. “The other is we’re going to have another election after this one.”

According to two sources familiar with Netanyahu’s thinking, he would prefer to form a unity government with Eisenkot. One reason is legacy. He believes such an alliance offers his best chance to transcend the worst security failure in the nation’s history, and to be remembered not only as the leader who emerged from the slaughter of Oct. 7 to decimate Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and persuade an American president to wage war against Iran, but also as the statesman who helped to reconcile a divided nation.

The other reason, the sources say, is personal. Netanyahu has little desire to form another right-wing coalition that would leave him beholden to the radical and uncompromising parties led by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, both of which he brought into government four years ago to reclaim power. “He thought that he could control Ben-Gvir,” one Netanyahu aide says. “Now he knows that he can’t.”

That is precisely what the Israeli right fears he’s thinking, and what brought me to Neve Daniel. The settlement of capacious red-tiled homes is just across the Green Line that defined Israel’s borders before the Six-Day War of 1967. It was built on land that was a Jewish farm even before Israel was founded in the crucible of the 1948 war. Settler violence against Palestinians has risen sharply during Netanyahu’s tenure, but the militant settlers who make headlines by terrorizing their Palestinian neighbors tend to live on hilltops deeper into the West Bank than this.

But few, if any, of the 700,000 Israelis who live in settlements are leftist. Many regard Netanyahu as a cynical opportunist—a political chameleon who parrots their convictions but will do whatever it takes to survive. Among his many heresies, they say, is a long history of accommodating American presidents: signing the Wye River Memorandum under Bill Clinton to advance the Oslo peace process that aimed to create a Palestinian state; voting for the disengagement from Gaza under Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush; endorsing, at least rhetorically, a two-state solution and imposing a moratorium on settlement construction under Barack Obama; and, under Donald Trump, accepting a ceasefire and hostage-exchange agreement to end the war in Gaza.

Three people in Neve Daniel offer a revealing glimpse of the forces pulling Netanyahu rightward. Each plans to vote for a different party, but they all share an overriding objective: a right-wing government with Netanyahu at its center, constrained by allies who will keep him from drifting toward the middle. 

Barak Moore is supporting Zehut, a libertarian nationalist party founded in 2015, whose eclectic platform combines tax cuts, the dismantling of monopolies, and cannabis legalization with an uncompromising vision of Israeli sovereignty and the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. It is something of a right-wing hipster party, blending free-market economics with religious nationalism.  

Avi Abelow, 52, an activist who runs the website Pulse of Israel, is voting for Netanyahu’s Likud Party. His complaint is not that the prime minister has gone too far in Gaza, but rather that he has not gone far enough, hamstrung by a security establishment and governing coalition insufficiently committed to the nationalist cause. “We should have conquered all of Gaza and made sure it’s Jewish again,” he says.

The youngest of the three, Hershey Kellner, is a 19-year-old Orthodox Jew who moved to Israel from New Jersey just months before Oct. 7. He is supporting Otzma Yehudit, the far-right party led by Ben-Gvir, whose confrontational politics and open contempt for established norms have made him a hero to some of Israel’s most fervent ideologues. Helner admires Ben-Gvir’s push to expand civilian gun ownership, permit Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, and introduce the death penalty for terrorists. 

To explain his thinking, Kellner invokes one of the most consequential decisions in recent Israeli history: the 2011 deal that freed the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Among them was Yahya Sinwar, who would go on to mastermind the Oct. 7 massacre. Helner believes that sparing Sinwar’s life was a catastrophic mistake. “If you hanged him or put a bullet in the back of his head, not sure how the world would be now,” he says, “but it would definitely be better.”

For three years, Israel has been a nation at war, not only with its enemies but with itself. The extraordinary solidarity that followed Oct. 7 has given way to recriminations and ideological divisions, intensified by the trauma of war, the anguish of the hostage crisis, the pain of deepening antisemitism worldwide, and the unresolved question of who bears responsibility for such a stunning security lapse. Though Israel rejects the charge, critics accuse the country of committing a genocide in Gaza, where the dead include both uncounted Hamas fighters and 20,000 children—and of countenancing a thuggish brand of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. On Oct. 16, masked settlers were filmed attacking Palestinians and European diplomats in the West Bank, and injuring a Washington Post photojournalist.

The fault lines run through nearly every aspect of Israeli life. Secular and religious. Liberals and nationalists. Those obliged to serve in the military and the ultra-Orthodox who are not. Those who believe Israel must reach an accommodation with the Palestinians and those who want permanent Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza. And, not least, those who regard Netanyahu as the indispensable guarantor of Jewish security and those who see him as the principal threat to the country’s democratic character and reputation abroad.

The fear increasingly voiced across Israel’s political and cultural establishment is that another Netanyahu victory could push those divisions toward a societal rupture. After Netanyahu’s coalition moved in early 2023 to restrict the power of the Supreme Court, the prospect of another government dependent on religious and ultra-nationalist parties has raised the specter of an exodus of young Israelis, who see the country’s liberal and democratic traditions slipping away. In a recent survey by the Agam Institute, an Israeli research firm, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 59% of Israelis said they believe internal threats are greater than external ones, while 64% said they were considering leaving Israel, citing insecurity, living costs, and political instability. In a nation of roughly 10 million, even the departure of tens of thousands of highly educated citizens could have consequences far beyond their numbers, draining the country of the talent and investment on which its economic and military strength depends.

There is a deeper irony. Israel was founded as a refuge, a place where a people long subjected to persecution and exile could finally determine their own destiny. Some Israelis now contemplate leaving, not because they have lost faith in the necessity of a Jewish state, but because they fear the political direction of the state created to provide one.

For those contemplating a future abroad, there is an unsettling question: Where, exactly, would they go? Antisemitism has surged across much of the world, with 2025 marking the deadliest year for Jews in the diaspora in more than three decades, according to Tel Aviv University.  Israel has become increasingly isolated, condemned in international forums, denounced in the streets of European capitals, and regarded by many critics as a pariah state. The result is a profound paradox: Israelis who fear for their country’s future wonder whether they would be any safer, or more welcome, anywhere else. 

It is this siege mentality, the sense of a small nation standing alone against a hostile world, that Netanyahu is counting on to sustain his political survival. He has spent much of his career presenting himself as a leader hardened by history, experienced in diplomacy, and ruthless in the exercise of power. His message: Whatever Israelis think of him personally, whatever blame they assign him for Oct. 7, the world is too dangerous to entrust their security to anyone else.

The chasm between how Israelis see themselves and how much of the outside world sees them has rarely seemed wider. In the new documentary NAZA, Israeli filmmakers draw on the anonymous testimony of 24 soldiers and intelligence officers to expose what they describe as the military’s systematic use of artificial intelligence to identify Hamas targets in Gaza, even when commanders knew that bombing them would kill women and children. Inside Israel, meanwhile, the fifth season of Fauda, the country’s enormously popular television thriller, recreates the atrocities of Oct. 7 in harrowing detail, immersing viewers once again in the terror, grief, and vulnerability of that day.

One production focuses on the suffering Israel inflicted, the other on the suffering Israelis endured. Together, they illuminate the competing narratives of a war that has left Israel increasingly estranged from the world, and many Israelis feeling more besieged than ever. Indications from polls and analysts are that even after voters have their say, no one bloc will have mustered a legislative majority. At that point the leading vote-getter will have weeks to try to gather a coalition, a test of the kind of political leadership at which Netanyahu has long excelled.

For nearly three decades, Netanyahu has been the dominant figure in Israeli public life, his political fortunes rising and falling with the country’s anxieties and ambitions. He has survived scandals, indictments, electoral defeats, and repeated attempts to engineer his ouster. The question is whether a political system he has spent so long mastering can produce a future that no longer revolves around him.

In a country not yet 80 years old, many are ready to chart a new era. “I think that Eisenkot is the one,” says Livna Savir, 72, at a rally for the challenger on a basketball court in Kibbutz Netzer Sereni, outside of Tel Aviv. “It’s a change of direction.” With her children living in the U.S., she laments the impacts of the last three years on a once unified group: “What happened now in our country—it’s not good for the family.”

Susan Collins had just laid out her receipts.

The five-term Republican senator was standing on a debate stage in Portland earlier this month, explaining how she deserved credit for ensuring concrete and road salt were exempted from President Trump’s Canadian import levies. The move saved one small town in northern Maine $10,000, Collins said. It helped a concrete business owner avoid a $150,000 hike.

It was an updated version of the same argument Collins has been making for decades to win re-election in a state that hasn’t backed a Republican President since George H. W. Bush.

When it was her opponent’s turn to respond, Troy Jackson shrugged. What about everything else going up in price, he asked her, before adding, “We can’t eat road salt.”

For Jackson, the comeback was a hit. It sparked “let them eat road salt” memes of Collins depicted as Marie Antoinette and assuaged some fears among Democrats about how the last-minute replacement candidate would fare in the spotlight. The viral moment also brought into focus the race’s defining issue: Collins herself. Amid a handful of Senate races that will decide which party controls the upper chamber for the last two years of the Trump era, the race in Maine has emerged as the one most decisively about voters’ view of the incumbent.

“He’s got a unique challenge because this race really isn’t about him,” says Emily Cain, a former Maine legislator and Democratic political strategist in the state. “This race is about Susan Collins and asking the people of Maine whether or not it's time for change. He just happens to be the alternative.”

Given the candidate they ended up with, some Democrats are thrilled with this dynamic. Jackson became the nominee after a tumultuous summer in which the state’s Democratic primary winner, Graham Platner, withdrew from the race int he wake of being accused of sexual assault, which Platner has denied. While Platner and Jackson have nearly identical progressive, populist policy platforms, there’s a clear contrast between them in style. Platner is a charismatic, at times gripping, campaigner. Jackson is not. His speeches tend to be more subdued and matter of fact, and he often wears an expression of utter boredom despite being at the center of one of the highest-stakes contests in the country. His affect matches his typical attire on the trail—a Red Sox cap, a fleece vest, his cell phone on a belt clip.

“Troy’s a salt of the earth guy. His biggest strength is his authenticity,” says Toby McGrath, who ran President Barack Obama’s campaign in Maine in 2008 and 2012.

With polls showing Jackson ahead but within the margin of error, both sides have sharpened their attacks. Jackson has repeatedly highlighted a recent report that the FBI and Justice Department had previously sought to open a pay-to-play bribery probe into Collins, allegations, which she denied. And a super PAC aligned with Senate Republicans released an ad calling Jackson a “freak” and a “creep” over his relationship with his second cousin, with whom he has two sons. Last week, Collins distanced herself from the ad and called for it to be taken down.

Yet it’s unclear if any of that is breaking through with voters in a race that could ultimately come down to how Collins ensures Maine isn’t forgotten by Washington. On the stump, she warns voters all that could all disappear if Jackson replaces her.

"He'll be 100 in seniority,” she told Fox News digital earlier this month, “And all of that essential federal funding targeted for the state of Maine, virtually all of it will go away."

Collins’ hold on Maine

For years, Collins has been the immovable stateswoman. She is both Maine’s longest-serving member of Congress and the longest-serving Republican woman in Senate history. Astoundingly, she’s never missed a roll-call vote since taking office in 1997. 

A self-described centrist, she has cultivated a deep connection with Maine’s independent-minded electorate. In 2020, she was reelected by 9 points as Joe Biden carried the state by the same margin.

Collins, 73, has increasingly found herself on the defensive over years of controversial votes, including those confirming Trump cabinet members like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She also cast votes elevating Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Her 2018 vote on Kavanaugh, in which she said she trusted he wouldn’t endanger the right to abortion access, became a flashpoint after the court overturned Roe v. Wade in in 2022. (Collins is also the only Republican senator to vote for all three Democratic-appointed justices currently on the court.)

Most towns in Maine have felt the benefit of Collins’ role as chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, with which she has steered funding for community centers, railroad improvement projects and shipyards. Her campaign puts the total at $1.5 billion in congressionally directed spending and targeted investments since 2021. 

“Even Democrats acknowledge her work to bring funding and support back to the state is just off the charts,” says Lance Dutson, a Republican strategist in Maine. “So people are going to have to make a decision, ‘Do I hate Trump more than I appreciate and need the support Susan Collins has brought to the state over the years?’”

That argument faces more pushback this year given wider dissatisfaction with Republicans and the state of the economy. Jackson has capitalized on those economic anxieties. One of his final ads references high heating oil costs. It’s hitting airwaves just as residents fill their tanks for winter in the nation’s fourth-coldest state. He repeatedly points to Collins' votes related to the conflict in Iran for driving up fuel costs and her vote to advance the Big, Beautiful Bill, a major Republican budget and tax package, for slashing Medicaid in the state.

Last month introduced another chink in Collins’ armor, as a ProPublica investigation revealed that FBI and Justice Department agents sought to open a pay-to-play bribery probe into Collins related to allegations she’d rewarded a campaign donor with millions of dollars in federal naval defense contracts. Collins has denied the allegations, and no charges were ever filed against her or her campaign.

Several Republican and Democratic strategists told TIME they question how effective the corruption argument is landing in tight-knit Maine. “Susan goes to the grocery store, does her own shopping, doesn't live in a lavish house,” Dutson, the GOP strategist said. “People may disagree with her, but I think it’s a big stretch for almost everybody up here to get their head around her being corrupt.”

But the investigation cuts at the core of Collins’ Maine-first brand, McGrath argued, so even a small erosion of support could be the difference in a close race.

‘Troy is not a smooth talker’

As Jackson’s campaign keeps the spotlight on Collins, it’s kept its own candidate somewhat hidden away. Up until recently, Jackson had done very few on-camera interviews, and it was rare for him to take many unscreened questions at campaign events. Local and national campaign staff have feuded over how to showcase Jackson from the early days of the campaign, infighting detailed in an August New York magazine story.

“He has a nationalized campaign team, and these are folks who are generally only comfortable with smooth talkers, and Troy is not a smooth talker,” says a Maine Democrat who worked with Jackson in the state legislature. The Democrat, who supports Jackson, thinks there’s wisdom in trying to avoid gaffes that distract from Collins. Jackson has struggled at times to talk about foreign affairs or federal policy issues, like detailing how to pay for Medicare for All in a conversation with CNN’s Dana Bash in mid-October. 

But other allies of Jackson say an overcautious campaign is impeding the Bernie Sanders progressive and stalwart labor champion from connecting with voters. “A lot of folks don’t know anything about him except that he’s a logger. He has a charming and funny side, and you don't get to see it,” says Betsy Sweet, an activist and political organizer who ran for U.S. Senate in 2020. “The D.C. folks are sure they know everything, and I feel like in so many of our national races they don’t listen to us and they screw it up.”

Jackson has a compelling working-class backstory. His mom was 16 when she had him in Aroostook County, on the rural northern tip of Maine. He grew up poor in Allagash, a frontier town near the Canadian border where he started logging at age 19, taking after his dad, his grandfather and his great-grandfather.

When Canadian loggers started crossing into Maine and taking work away from locals, he helped lead a blockade, driving his truck to the border to halt temporary workers from coming into the state. The protest made headlines but did little to change the situation, and a frustrated Jackson turned his attention to the state legislature. He first ran unsuccessfully as a Republican and eventually got elected in 2002 as an independent. He became a Democrat two years later and rose through the ranks to become Senate president. 

Over decades in state politics, Jackson’s opinions on abortion and LGBTQ rights have evolved. Sweet, who lobbied for women’s groups, recalled pushing him to back abortion-rights legislation in the state. “I think it finally clicked for him after us telling him abortion is health care. It’s not whether women are gonna have one, it’s whether low-income women have the same access as rich women.”

His reputation for having a gruff demeanor, Sweet says, is accurate, but attack ads that portray him as antagonistic toward women go too far. “He will go toe to toe with you. He’s not genteel. You know where you stand with him, but you work it out.”

A shade of that temper came out in the final debate before the election. Jackson told Collins to “shut up” after she accused a protester of being one of his supporters. “It was a stupid thing for him to say,” the Democrat who worked with Jackson in the state legislature says of the debate moment. “Collins is known for her decorum, her civility. He’s courting 55- to 65-year-old women who are all about not being talked down to.”

Maine’s population is the oldest in America and the race will likely come down to older, moderate voters who have split their ticket in past elections. Collins' campaign has argued Jackson has run to the left of the electorate, drawing liberal figures like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to rally with him.

“That they are all campaigning in Maine for Troy Jackson tells voters exactly how he would govern,” Collins campaign spokesperson Blake Kernen said.

For all the debate about whether Jackson’s makeshift campaign has positioned him for victory, it will largely be Collins’ race to win or lose. A September CNN poll of voters backing Jackson found 29% said theirs was a vote for Jackson, while 71% said it was a vote against Collins. Her future in the Senate may not come down to Jackson at all but whether she gives voters enough confidence in what the next six years would look like.

“She’s got an amazing record in the past, but people need to hear from her what she’s gonna do in the future and what the game plan is,” Dutson, the GOP adviser, says. “They need to know, if we send Susan Collins back to Washington, how is that gonna help alleviate the anxiety this administration has been causing me right now?”