This week, President Donald Trump approved the military’s first execution by firing squad since 1945. The Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced, will livestream it.

The execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, who opened fire on dozens of people at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, is now scheduled for December 3. Hasan, at the time an active-duty major in the Army, was shot in the back by police during the massacre and now, paralyzed from the waist down, uses a wheelchair. When Hegseth spoke about the execution livestream with far-right streamer Jack Posobiec on Thursday, he hardly seemed able to contain his excitement.

“They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context.”

“He’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be,” Hegseth said. The execution, as Hegseth envisions it, would be first and foremost a mass spectacle. “We’re going to make sure people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” he said.

That is to say, Hegseth wants to make a snuff film.

Jim Craig, a veteran Mississippi death penalty lawyer, spoke with me in April, after Trump announced his plan to bring back the federal firing squad. The obscenity of the violence, Craig said, is the whole idea.

This proposal by the Trump Justice Department is characterized by their attraction to brutality. It’s characterized by their affection for causing visible harm to people. You see it in their foreign policy. You see it in their policing. The firing squad is very physical and visceral in the damage that it does to the person being executed. That’s why they like it. We should not mince words about this. It has nothing to do with the Eighth Amendment. It has nothing to do with the supply of drugs, or anything else. They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context of this administration’s barbarism.

A firing squad execution, when the executioners aim well, “essentially vaporizes” a person’s heart, Craig explained. When they don’t, the victim bleeds out and dies slowly.

The last time the US military executed a man by firing squad was in 1945—it was called “musketry” at the time.

“Well, I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II, which was win,” Hegseth said. “Which was, understand when the enemy attacks you, you stand your ground.”

Hasan’s killing would be the United States’ first livestreamed execution. The closest equivalent in recent memory, by anything approaching a state, is the graphic series of public execution tapes that galvanized the world against ISIS in 2014; before that, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya telecast an execution at a basketball stadium in 1984.

But it would hardly be Hegseth’s first encounter with disseminating death on video. Over the past year, the military has released at least 46 different clips of US attacks on noncombatant vessels—the extrajudicial slaughter of people on alleged “drug boats,” including at least one “double-tap” strike on clinging survivors—in the Caribbean Sea. Sometimes, the clips are posted on their own, in grainy gray and green. Other times, the official White House X account posts footage of human death interspersed with video-game and Hollywood action film footage.

In their interview, Posobiec asked Hegseth whether Hasan had any final requests.

“Don’t care,” Hegseth said. “See him on December 3.”

When Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign announced that Barack Obama would join him on the campaign trail later this month, media outlets and prominent online voices quickly sounded the alarm—the Michigan Senate candidate, it turned out, had voiced strong criticisms of the former president. 

On Wednesday, CNN traced El-Sayed’s comments from the time of Obama’s 2012 reelection through the 2020 presidential campaign, zeroing in on a 2012 HuffPost piece where El-Sayed wrote that the former president did not deliver on the promise of “hope and substantial change” during his first term but instead “perpetuated war, violated our civil liberties, deported more people from our shores than any other president before him.” “The list of his failures,” El-Sayed wrote, “goes on.” 

It’s not that people are calling El-Sayed’s criticisms wrong. They’re pointing out that they exist.

NEW: Footage and interviews reviewed by CNN repeatedly show Abdul El-Sayed — who is set to campaign with Barack Obama — calling Obama’s presidency a failure and that the country was no better off after eight years of his presidency. https://t.co/saLMgrldVY

— Andrew Kaczynski (@KFILE) October 7, 2026

In a statement to CNN, El-Sayed praised Obama: “He changed what was possible for someone like me, with a name like mine.” 

“Despite all he did, there remains so much left to do,” he added. “That’s where the next generation, inspired by him and his leadership, picks up.”

The New York Post extended the supposed concerns to other Democrats, pointing again to El-Sayed campaigning with former Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday, despite El-Sayed publicly endorsing the Uncommitted movement in 2024, supporting calls for Democrats to withhold their primary votes from Joe Biden in protest of US military aid to Israel in its ongoing genocide in Gaza. While the movement declined to endorse Harris ahead of the national election—instead urging supporters to “vote against” Trump—El-Sayed actually did endorse her, in a marked break.

El-Sayed, the implication runs, is not such a good friend to his fellow Democrats after all. But intense critiques of Obama are something he has in common with both wings of his party. Countless Democrats and progressives have previously criticized Obama, in private and in public, from the former president’s left and right flanks, and supported him afterward (or, for some of those who actually held national office at the time, during). In party politics, done right, political alliances cut across ideological and policy disagreements. That’s just strategic campaigning—which Obama still plans to do alongside El-Sayed in October.

Martin Soto, a Peruvian man thrown into solitary confinement after organizing a hunger and labor strike inside the notorious for-profit ICE detention facility Delaney Hall, was released from New Jersey’s Elizabeth Detention Center with an ankle monitor Tuesday night.

Soto came to the United States in 2024 and was pursuing asylum. He was detained by federal agents in February while buying diapers for his two young children. Though he has no criminal record, he spent eight consecutive months in ICE detention, including several months in solitary confinement—retribution, his wife Gabriela said, for his role as an organizer.

Gabriela Soto organized a series of protests outside Delaney Hall in May, as her husband worked to improve conditions inside. On May 22, a group of over 300 detained immigrants, including Martin, announced a two-week hunger and labor strike inside the for-profit detention facility, demanding freedom and due process, as well as a meeting with the governor and an end to coercive pressure to self-deport. The state of New Jersey sued to close Delaney Hall as reports of inedible food, violent guards, and inadequate medical care continued to emerge from the facility. The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, claimed the hunger strike never happened.

By the end of May, Martin Soto was transferred to the nearby Elizabeth Detention Center, where he was held for another four months. “They don’t want him associating with more people because they’re afraid that he might start another hunger and labor strike inside a facility,” Gabriela Soto told journalist Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg in early September. “So they keep him away from life in general.”

In August, Soto began pursuing a U-Visa, a specialized visa “reserved for victims of certain crimes…who are aiding law enforcement investigations.” In September, Gabriela Soto sent a handwritten letter to New Jersey Attorney General Davenport asking Davenport to sign Martin’s U-Visa certification as her office investigates alleged human rights abuses against Soto and others inside Delaney Hall.

“I know that my advocacy, Martin’s bravery, has placed this case in the spotlight & therefore your decisions in this are under that same spotlight,” Gabriela wrote. “But I ask you to please consider providing us with this documentation so we can continue our fight.”

That visa certification was approved this week, according to independent journalist Kevin Ortega-Rojas. Soto’s October 6 release was first reported by Radio Jornalera NJ, a local community radio station. New Jersey Democrats, including Representatives Rob Menendez (D-NJ) and Analilia Mejía (D-NJ), joined the Soto family and about two dozen supporters at the gates of the Elizabeth Detention Center Tuesday night.

In a video posted that evening by Radio Jornalera, Gabriela runs, sobbing, into Martin’s arms.

A newly released military study paints a frightening picture of the electric shock gloves ICE recently purchased by the thousands—and which the agency and its acting head David Venturella seem eager to deploy regardless of the potential consequences.

Records unearthed by the watchdog group American Oversight and first shared with the Associated Press show that in one set of trials carried out by the US Army in 2024, the electric shock gloves caused “overwhelmingly immediate” pain to soldiers playing the role of combative inmates in a mock forced cell extraction scenario, who then reported that “just seeing the glove” frightened them into obedience.

GLOVEs, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are taser-like devices that look like standard work gloves, but deliver a painful electric charge when the wearer touches a person’s skin. As I’ve previously reported, they’ve been described as “low optics”—police language for a weapon that causes harm but doesn’t leave marks, making it harder for victims to sue or for public outrage to stem from visible harm.

Two weeks ago, the shock gloves’ manufacturer, Jeff Niklaus, called the devices the “safest, most humane deescalatory product probably ever to come along.”

The Army study found that the gloves caused “intense pain,” but didn’t significantly change the amount of time it took to control a combative prisoner, or transfer someone from one unit to another. In one trial, a participant accidentally turned the shock gloves on; in another, “inmates” were able to fight off “guards” wearing the gloves for longer than they were able to hold off unarmed ones. People with water or oil on their skin felt more pain when shocked, and one participant reported lingering pain for 30 minutes afterward.

Soldiers, once shocked, were terrified to be shocked again. Army investigators reported “fatigue, soreness, and excessive apprehensiveness to being shocked again” in the soldiers playing inmates—and noted that the shock gloves gave a confidence boost to those who were playing guards, especially “smaller or less trained members.” The gloves, the study concluded, should be deployed in military prisons.

In September, ICE finalized its purchase of 6,650 pairs of the shock gloves for $16.7 million from Kentucky-based Compliant Technologies. White House border czar Tom Homan said in August that it could “be a while” before the gloves are in use in the field. But ICE, according to the Associated Press, was already well aware of the Army study when it chose to purchase the gloves.

The world premiere of Artificial, the new movie centered around the rise of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as he led an unstable company down a dangerous path, was packed. The recent wave of high-profile “rogue AI” security incidents, disputes over tech industry-led safeguards and regulation, and continued multibillion-dollar investments to advance development has clearly piqued public interest.

The movie, directed by Challengers filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, contains scenes derived from real reporting on OpenAI and the industry: discussions on ensuring their products “align” with human values while racing competitors such as Google, and undertaking corporate restructuring to draw investment from the likes of Microsoft. It also hinges on wide public sentiment that major tech companies and their leaders hold too much power and developers should pause development of their most advanced models to mitigate risks to humanity. 

The people behind Artificial appear to agree. “The deeper responsibility we all felt is to try to do some interrogation of who we are giving all of our autonomy, power, and data to,” Andrew Garfield, who plays Altman, said on Monday night during the post-screening Q&A at the New York Film Festival, “that felt like the service to the greater thing.” The actor said the filmmakers were adding new scenes while shooting to create a “living document” of how the AI industry was progressing.

The moral center of the film is Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist played by Yura Borisov, who sees in AI technology potential to solve humanity’s problems, but realizes too late that his idealism doesn’t fit within the constraints of the market. A former AI researcher played by Jason Schwartzman, presented as a prophet who sees the future of the tech with clarity, tells Sutskever that it could lead, if not to total human extinction, at least to life under AI subjugation.

But the filmmakers also portray the tech leaders who don’t recognize this—or simply don’t care—as goofy megalomaniacs. While Garfield portrays Altman as constantly dodging confrontation to get people to be as forgiving toward him as possible, he also plays him with a cartoonish quality—with his frantic shifts in posture played as a joke, and the post-production team changing the actor’s brown eyes to a bright, inhuman blue. Even more so for others like Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, whose facial expressions and demeanor seem to lean far more silly than threatening. 

The intermittent comic relief scenes give the movie’s satirical side the energy of Saturday Night Live sketches—the screenwriter, Simon Rich, previously wrote for the comedy show—immediate, but largely short on depth and nuance. The filmmakers could pull their humor, and their wider sense of what’s laughable about these characters, from deeper, and darker, places. (There are vague gestures at a misogynistic Silicon Valley culture, but nothing political or deeply personal.)

With the characters operating more as caricatures, the movie doesn’t meet what Garfield called on Monday “the deeper responsibility” to interrogate the people it depicts or the culture behind them the countless expository conversations on the potential harms of generative AI—between real-life characters who unleashed said harms through global-scale business relationships—don’t feel grounded in any reality. The mentions of existential risks stop at just that: Altman says “Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse.” The only specific harm addressed is AI’s contribution to a person’s suicide.

As I wrote on Monday, it’s good that Hollywood might finally be catching up to tech companies’ negative impacts on our world. Many Silicon Valley films before Artificial did not. But only being able to giggle at our tech overlords is not enough.

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.

A federal court struck down a California rule that required voters to sign and return vote-by-mail ballots on paper, rather than doing so electronically. The ruling in California Council of the Blind v. Weber, announced October 3, is a victory for disabled voters—but it probably won’t change things much until the next election cycle.

Since 2021, California has mailed ballots to all registered voters for all statewide and local elections. Voters with print disabilities—those who are blind or low-vision, or whose physical disabilities prevent them from marking a paper ballot—can request a link to vote electronically. After filling out their ballot on a computer, they must print it, put it in an envelope, seal the envelope, and return it “through non-electronic means.”

This is complicated by the fact that many blind people don’t own printers, because they have no use for them. And that’s only one of the obstacles they might face under the current vote-by-mail rules.

Christopher Gray, a resident of San Francisco County and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, is blind. Under the current system, as he wrote in a 2024 court declaration, he is unable to vote without assistance.

He could theoretically vote using a virtual vote-by-mail ballot, which he can fill out unassisted using his own assistive technology, including a Braille-equipped computer.

But printing the ballot, finding where to sign it, signing it, putting it in an envelope, sealing it, and returning it without assistance is not possible for him. “Because of the lack of an accessible method of returning my ballot by mail, when I vote I must forgo my right to vote confidentially and privately,” Gray wrote.

During the 2022 general elections, Gray ended up paying an assistant to help him fill out his ballot—but in doing so, he was forced to give up that privacy and independence. He also gave up his certainty that his ballot had been submitted at all. “Though I trusted my reader, I could not independently confirm they accurately marked my ballot and mailed it on my behalf,” he said.

The vote-by-mail program, as it stands, discriminates against voters who cannot return their ballots without assistance, he and the other plaintiffs argued. “I want to vote in a private and independent manner just as voters without print disabilities are able to do in my state,” Gray wrote. “I will be able to do so only if alternative accessible options for returning a vote-by-mail ballot are available to me.”

The court ruled that the current vote-by-mail system does exclude some disabled voters, and “denies them meaningful access to the vote by mail program,” as Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim wrote. The court, however, did not specify a resolution. The state of California now has until October 19 to propose a new vote-by-mail protocol, and since California ballots have already been mailed out, any changes made likely will not take effect until the next election cycle.

As Democracy Docket has reported, “32 states allow for electronic absentee ballot return for certain voters, with 13 of these states providing a specific carveout for voters with disabilities.”

Only 17 percent of Americans approve of how President Donald Trump is handling the cost of living, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

This is a record low for both of Trump’s presidential terms—notable as he spent much of his 2024 campaign criticizing Democrats on the issue. About 70 percent, including about half of Republicans, said the president’s cost-of-living policies have been “worse than expected.”

The Associated Press reported that Trump’s economic approval mirrors Biden’s 28 percent in June 2022 during the initial years of the Covid-19 pandemic. A few months later, 55 percent of Americans said that affordability struggles were outside his control. But now, Americans are blaming Trump, with 65 percent reporting that the high cost of living is a result of Trump’s policies. 

The survey was based on 2,140 US adults and was conducted from September 24-28 with a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points. 

Big Tech is back on the big screen—but its bosses might not be thrilled.

This fall, Hollywood will release four movies on tech executives: Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, on CEO Sam Altman’s tumultuous time as the head of OpenAI; Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, on the investigation into Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissing its platforms’ negative impacts on young users and inciting violence and hate speech; the all-encompassing Musk, by documentarian Alex Gibney, on the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s family life, corporate controversies, and engagement in right-wing politics; and You Can See Everything, an unsettling documentary in which directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim follow Elizabeth Holmes, who invited them to film her in the weeks before she began serving her federal prison sentence for defrauding investors at the now-defunct health tech company Theranos.

If the 2010s brought the first major wave of examining Silicon Valley leaders, such as relatively human depictions of Zuckerberg with The Social Network and multiple movies on longtime Apple CEO Steve Jobs—they largely paint pictures of difficult, ambitious individuals who may have burned a few bridges to achieve the remarkable—this recent group represents an opportunity, as I wrote in September, to rethink that perspective. 

Since the 2010s, public opinion about Big Tech companies has tanked. My colleagues and I have extensively covered the increasingly apparent harms that tech CEOs have overseen, including using AI in wars overseas and the continuing development of a mass surveillance state at home. 

In a July poll reported by Axios, about seven in ten Americans said they believe tech companies and their CEOs hold too much power. 

On Politico’s Decoded podcast this week, Altman asserted that “the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this [AI] technology” as people will do “tremendously—orders of magnitude more—good stuff than bad stuff” with it.

Early reports around Artificial, directed by Challengers’ Luca Guadagnino, starring Andrew Garfield as Altman, and covering his firing and reinstatement as OpenAI CEO in under a week in 2023, suggest that the film will have a more critical view on the executive—the Altman of Artificial says “yes” to everyone, Vulture wrote in a piece interviewing Guadagnino on Friday.

“The narcissist has the ability to understand the terrain and adapt to it, shape-shift,” Guadagnino told Vulture—which he sees as having larger ramifications: “People that have a lot of power should be very much aware that you must be responsible for the community.”

“I think anyone who takes on that level of responsibility for a company or a technology that you know is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity [must have] a certain ability to dissociate,” Garfield told Esquire in August.

Amazon MGM Studios dropped the movie in June, shortly after Amazon announced a $50 billion investment into OpenAI. Big Tech and the wealthy elite are now more closely tied to culture, art, and media. In a Vanity Fair cover story released Monday, Altman said that he did not speak to anyone at Amazon about Artificial and that, based on the movie trailer, he didn’t feel the filmmakers were “going for accuracy.” 

“Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse,” Garfield says in that trailer. “And we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world.”

Artificial, which independent film company Neon acquired later that month, premieres Monday at the New York Film Festival.

On Thursday, a group of men dressed like extras from Les Misérables erected a giant statue outside Elon Musk’s company town of Starbase, Texas: a 50-foot bronze rendition of the Titan Prometheus. Building a godlike figure in honor of the world’s richest man reportedly cost the sculptors, of the French outfit Atelier Missor, $1 million of their own funds.

The statue of Prometheus is finally finished.

It was cast in Paris, crossed the Atlantic, and was assembled at Starbase. It took us 100 days to go from nothing to this.

People of the West, we have lived through an era devoid of dreams, devoid of destiny.

But the time has come… pic.twitter.com/JkQbTGV1My

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) October 2, 2026

Atelier Missor, active since 2021, describes itself on X as a “classical foundry in Paris, on its way to building a new Rome.” Its founder, Missor Movahed Ghaleh Nouri, has claimed he was drawn to pursue classical sculpture after receiving a vision of Napoleon I while wandering the Place Vendôme in Paris. His staff wear identical tan suspenders, billowy shirts, and unkempt facial hair, and—per previous versions of their website—spent much of the first half of the 2020s producing bronze and clay busts of such figures as (of course) Napoleon, Nietzsche, and Jordan Peterson.

In a now-deleted mission statement, Movahed appears to allude to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests as one of the reasons he started his foundry.

“I was shocked to see ignorant people tearing down statues,” he wrote. “These fools who weren’t even in the same league as those they were trying to destroy. These ungrateful people who had never done anything in their lives.”

Across their social media channels, the foundry now posts about bringing back the West and bemoans modern artistic sensibilities. “Make art so epic it will raise the birthrate,” they say. Nor have they forgotten their particular commitment to white, European manhood.

For one statue destroyed, we will craft ten more. https://t.co/SZN6ELrwfe

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) March 18, 2026

After first arriving in the United States last year with help from the Peter Thiel–linked 1517 venture capital fund, the men of Atelier Missor wasted no time ingratiating themselves with the American right. They welded an 11-foot bronze George Washington for Trump’s “Freedom 250” celebrations. (They also, judging by their posts, appear to have acquired cowboy hats.)

“You cannot just imagine a view of the world and impose it,” Movahed reportedly said in June of 2025. “You have to submit to the dream that unites us—the dream of Western civilization.”

To that end, his foundry has spent the past year flirting hard with Elon Musk.

Dear @elonmusk

We want to build a statue of Prometheus in titanium and offer it to Starbase — a gift from the people, in gratitude for pushing humanity forward.

Let's make Starbase the most spectacular city, as it will be depicted as a true milestone in history books. pic.twitter.com/jtRnDjIi3j

— Atelier Missor (@AtelierMissor_) June 18, 2025

But the statue—which now hoists its torch into the sky and teeters, plinthless, on the ground—is not on Starbase property. Nor is it made of titanium, as its sculptors initially planned. Instead, it sits by the side of a Texas road about ten miles away.

Neither SpaceX nor Atelier Missor immediately responded to a request for comment.

Rewarding their months of desperate posting—and real, actual statue construction—Atelier Missor recieved curt recognition from their idol on October 1st.

“Nice work,” Elon posted.

After 23 years of war and occupation, the last US soldiers officially left Iraq on Wednesday, Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced in a statement on the “successful conclusion” of operations against the Islamic State organization in Iraq.

The war, launched on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and cost, conservatively, more than a trillion dollars (though tallying government war funding, like counting the dead, can be difficult).

In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confidently predicted that the war would be short: “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days or five weeks or five months. But it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”

US troops have withdrawn from Iraq at least twice before. After the Bush administration launched the war in 2003, US troops formally withdrew from Iraq in 2011. George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner was, reportedly, packed up and sent to his presidential library. At the time, one military analyst called the whole thing the “least-effective war for oil in American history.”

But it wasn’t over yet: The US military ramped up its presence in 2014 under “Operation Inherent Resolve” to combat ISIS. Mother Jones maintained a “We’re Still At War” daily series between roughly 2009 and 2014. US soldiers stayed in the country for the rest of the decade, and beyond, until their “combat role” in the country ended in 2021.

Even then, about 2,500 US soldiers remained stationed in Iraq as “military advisers.” Today, all those troops, too, are gone.

“A new phase has begun, characterized by Iraq’s sovereignty, the strength of its institutions, the readiness of its forces, the unity of its decision-making, and balanced partnerships with its friends,” Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said in a statement.

A new poll from the Associated Press and KFF shows that while half of rural voters support the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again policies, most also say those policies have not benefited their communities.

About 7 out of 10 rural voters went for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. But now, about 8 out of 10 rural voters polled say the administration’s healthcare platform—which includes abandoning long-standing vaccine policies, researching ultraprocessed foods, criticizing Big Ag, and promoting a red-meat-heavy diet—has “had a negative effect or no impact on the health of people where they live,” according to the AP/KFF poll of 2,241 rural voters, released today. 68 percent of those who self-identified as MAHA supporters agreed: while they support Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his MAHA platform, it isn’t making them healthier.

At Mother Jones, we’ve been tracking the fractures in the Make America Healthy Again movement in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Read more below.

On Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill banning law enforcement officers in the state from using electrical shock gloves, a “pain compliance” tool and recent hit with ICE officers that function similarly to tasers at a lower voltage. ICE recently purchased about 6,000 pairs of the gloves, which have been roundly condemned by human rights groups as “inherently abusive equipment that facilitates torture”—for $16.7 million dollars.

“This is about stepping up where the federal government has failed.”

“Trump has put his political interests above the health, safety and livelihood of American families. California is taking action to strengthen transparency, accountability, and oversight around immigration enforcement in our state,” Newsom said in a statement that accompanied the bill’s signing. “This is about stepping up where the federal government has failed our communities.”

The ban will go into effect in 2027 as part of a suite of bills Newsom signed in response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in California, including a 25 percent tax on companies that operate immigration detention facilities in the state, a ban on face coverings by federal agents—a previous version of which was blocked by a judge—and a law expanding oversight requirements for federal immigration detention centers in California.

As I have previously reported, the shock gloves ICE purchased have been the subject of several lawsuits, including a wrongful death suit:

A pending wrongful death lawsuit alleges that a 43-year-old man named Jonathan Mansfield died because corrections officers shocked him 27 times with the gloves and 13 times with a Taser. Two of the glove shocks lasted 45 and 99 seconds. The manufacturer’s recommended limit is 15 seconds. A man with heart problems sued over allegations that he was shocked at a Las Vegas trade show, as the Associated Press reported.

And in 2023, a man who was incarcerated in Kentucky’s Bullitt County Jail sued an employee of that jail for shocking him repeatedly with the gloves. “The gloves feel just like a taser,” Josh Elswick, who was in handcuffs and shackles when he was shocked, said. Bullitt County Jail representatives told local media they would stop using electric shock gloves shortly thereafter. 

California’s ban on shock gloves is likely to be challenged in court—and the Department of Homeland Security has already promised that it will flout any such law. As a DHS spokesperson told me earlier this month, “Sanctuary politicians attempting to ban our federal law enforcement from any safety equipment is despicable and a deliberate attempt to undermine and endanger our officers. To be crystal clear: we will not abide by unconstitutional bans. The Supremacy Clause makes it clear that California’s sanctuary politicians do not control federal law enforcement.”

Jeff Niklaus, CEO of Compliant Technologies, the firm that manufactures the gloves, blamed “political bias” and lack of understanding of his product for the ban in a September 22 YouTube video.

“We were never contacted by any legislator or agency within California,” Niklaus said, calling the firm’s gloves the “safest, most humane deescalatory product probably ever to come along.”

“First of all, the polls are fake.”

When asked about competitive congressional races in Iowa, Donald Trump predictably dismissed Iowa Republicans’ lackluster polling numbers as “fake” and blamed Democrats for the high prices squeezing farmers and other businessmen across the state—even as the war in Iran has sparked soaring energy and fertilizer costs. 

“I don’t know, I love Iowa,” Trump said during an Oval Office address announcing a new $15 billion steel plant in the state. “I’ve always been very strong with Iowa. There’s been some things that the Democrats have done that are very bad for our country.”

Meanwhile, one Iowa farmer stressed just how difficult the economy has become for small-business owners.

“Folks that have trucking businesses, they’re just bleeding money right now like crazy,” he said during an appearance on MSNOW. “Farmers are bleeding money like crazy. We need to get this problem resolved, and we need to get it resolved right away.”

Still, Trump appears unmoved by the economic warning signs, as prices climb and his poll numbers continue to slide.

“I got more votes than anybody in history during the last election,” said Trump. “I’m more popular now than I was then.”

OpenAI called off plans to launch its latest GPT-6.1 Astra model on Tuesday, after the system failed to meet the company’s safety standards. 

The model was scheduled to release sometime in October, but OpenAI’s head of safety systems, Saachi Jain, told The Wall Street Journal that GPT-6.1 Astra, as compared to the previous GPT-6 Astra, was less honest about notifying users of the steps it did or did not take to achieve a task.

Jain described to the Journal that the models needed to strike a balance between proceeding with tasks on their own and taking shortcuts to provide an easy answer instead of doing a thorough job—a behavior Jain and others in the industry call “laziness.” Astra is OpenAI’s top-tier model. 

The startup’s cancellation comes amid a series of security threat incidents—tens of thousands of which it is reportedly investigating, according to a Saturday Axios report. OpenAI apologized on Monday for how it hacked Australian government websites in June, accessing non-public data and adding files onto the server: “We are sorry and working to do better in the future,” the startup in part wrote in a statement. 

Also on Monday, the company said it would continue training only after it has improved safeguards—including making its internal testing security strong enough to contain models and establishing live monitoring of models. 

Lawmakers and officials across the political spectrum are outraged. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, filed a temporary injunction to a June lawsuit, which claimed the company knowingly released unsafe products to the public, that OpenAI should stop developing new products without safety standards approved by a third party. 

Despite suggesting they would “do better in the future” to ensure safe AI development, as I wrote on Sunday, OpenAI has a history of aligning with the Trump administration to expand development. Many companies, such as OpenAI, Google, SpaceX, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle, have military agreements with the Defense Department. 

On Tuesday, several of their leaders, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, are set to meet with President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson for lunch to discuss AI. 

On Monday, Nvidia, the multinational tech company—which has become one of the most valuable companies in the world in significant part thanks to its role in developing chips for AI processing and model training—announced the launch of a new safety platform that will monitor and contain AI agents, amid recent reports of “rogue AI” incidents like OpenAI’s Hugging Face hacking fiasco.

As my colleagues and I have previously reported, accounts of autonomous hacks by AI models belonging to OpenAI and its rivals have exacerbated concerns about the minimally regulated AI sector, even as leading figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argue that AI oversight is an “engineering problem” that the industry can largely handle without government involvement—echoing statements by President Donald Trump, who has lashed out at demands to legislate guardrails around what he now calls “superintelligence.”

Nvidia says its Open Agent Safety Platform, which it launched Monday with a number of leading tech and AI firms, can quarantine agents that attempt to escape containment within “milliseconds.” Among company’s collaborators on some of its new safety measures are Microsoft, Palantir, SpaceXAI, JPMorganChase, and Hugging Face—the online forum where users can share and build AI systems that was the subject of the hacking incident involving OpenAI.

But in the context of Huang’s remarks, the company’s proposals for developing safe AI are in effect being presented as an alternative to regulatory action. The idea that AI safety isn’t a problem for state agencies, or that the recent spate of rogue AI incidents don’t call for swift political action, amount to an argument that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic can police themselves. It’s often AI firms’ own conduct, and the words and actions of their leaders, that have made self-regulation a hard sell—especially as public opinion sours towards the technology’s sprawling infrastructure demands and footprint in daily life.

Disclosure: The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.

After a week of intensifying public pressure and reporting from Cornell’s independent daily newspaper, prosecutors in New York have reopened a criminal investigation into the alleged 2024 gang rape of a former student at the campus’s Chi Phi fraternity house.

The student, identified as Jane Doe, filed a civil complaint earlier this month accusing Cornell of failing to protect her and choosing instead to level minimal punishment against the seven fraternity members who allegedly “plied [her] with alcohol and drugs to the point of intoxication” before raping her. Those actions, the complaint alleged, included temporary suspensions and opportunities for some of the fraternity members to mitigate those suspensions by submitting essays.

“We want to reexamine whether there’s additional evidence that we were not aware of in November of 2024,” Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten told ABC News, “that exists now that would change our assessment of the case and would result in the grand jury finding that there was criminal conduct.” 

The complaint also included an image from a Snapchat text thread wherein one of the men appeared to encourage others to take advantage of the “free pussy” upstairs, referring to Doe. An attorney for one of the defendants denied the allegations. Speaking through the same attorney, the defendant claimed that he had nothing more than “thoughtlessly” engage in a text thread.

“Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us.”

Cornell on Monday said that it welcomed the new investigation but vehemently defended the school’s handling of the case.

“Any suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false,” a university relations official wrote in a statement. “A continuation of the false narrative that there were minimal consequences in this case is irresponsible, will make survivors feel less safe and supported, and will perpetuate the underreporting of sexual assault.”

In a searing op-ed published last week, editors of the Cornell Daily Sun took the university to task for failing to protect its students, while condemning administrators for creating an academic environment where “enough ambiguity, enough he-said-she-said, enough familial connections, enough money will allow you to get off scot-free.”

“We refuse for this victim to be reduced to just another story,” the op-ed read, adding that “Cornell has failed [Doe]. Cornell has failed us.”

“We removed this label upon further review after we determined that it qualified for a newsworthy allowance,” a Meta spokesperson confirmed. “The post is now fully visible for adults.”

Details from the civil complaint have since ricocheted across social media and ignited intense public outrage.

“After reading about the young woman who was gang raped at her college by her friend and school peers, I’m feeling uneasy and sick and anxious,” the actor Florence Pugh wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday. “I’m processing quietly and watching everything and everyone and every man.”

Soon after, Pugh accused Meta of suppressing her post.

“A label was initially applied to the post, warning people that the content may be sensitive before they click through,” Meta confirmed to Mother Jones. “We removed this label upon further review after we determined that it qualified for a newsworthy allowance. The post is now fully visible for adults.”

On the same day that the Tompkins County district attorney announced it was revisiting the investigation, the Trump administration finalized its plan to repeal Title IX, the Biden-era rule that mandated a formal process for schools to respond to sexual misconduct claims.

President Donald Trump has become the subject of bipartisan pushback after another taxpayer-funded television ad aired during at least two Sunday NFL games.

“We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country,” Trump says in the ad. “We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

“Don’t worry, using taxpayer dollars to run ominous campaign ads of the President has been done before and is completely legal…in banana republics,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) posted on X on Sunday night in reaction to the latest ad. 

Trump is now using taxpayer money to run his 2024 campaign ad, but changes his campaign logo at the end to “PAID FOR BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT”

— Headquarters (@headquartersnews.bsky.social) 2026-09-28T14:45:17.182Z

The ad is nearly identical to one Trump posted on Truth Social in January 2024, which included Trump’s presidential campaign logo. In place of the logo is now the message: “Paid for by the US government.” The audio of both ads strongly resembles part of a campaign speech he delivered in Claremont, New Hampshire, in November 2023 in which he used autocratic language, referring to himself as “a very proud election denier.”

“It’s not like they need a GoFundMe page to have the dollars to do that sort of ad and they could do it,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said about the first ad that aired Wednesday. “But using taxpayer dollars, it feels like [former far-right prime minister of Hungary] Viktor Orbán.” 

Both Republican lawmakers have a history of criticizing Trump. 

On Thursday, congressional Democrats on appropriations committees wrote a letter to White House chief of staff Susan Wiles, calling the first ad “the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea.” 

“We write to demand that you immediately take this ad off the air and discipline the Federal employees who knowingly violated Federal law in working on and paying for this advertisement,” they continued, asserting the ad violated anti-propaganda law. “In addition, we demand a full account and breakdown of all Federal funds used to create and air this ad.”

On Friday, the White House called the ads “public service announcements” that are “very clearly not campaign ads” as Trump isn’t on the ballot and the president does not request any action. The White House pointed to other administrations that have run public service announcements to “explain policy and make the case for the nation’s direction,” including President George W. Bush’s anti-drug ads that played during the Super Bowl and President Barack Obama’s ads on the Affordable Care Act. 

But as my colleague Sophie Hurwitz noted Friday: “Trump’s supposed PSA says and does very little beyond extolling Trump. Usually, a public service announcement announces something. This one announces pure right-wing vibes.”

OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly investigating tens of thousands of incidents where their advanced models bypassed monitors and guardrails, behavior that the startups facilitate for internal safety testing. 

According to a Saturday Axios report, sources said that most of the results of these tests are not public and are not known to have caused tangible harm. 

In recent weeks, OpenAI has disclosed six instances of “unexpected or concerning behavior” where its models—without permission—covered up mistakes, made up data, and transferred files onto the open internet. In the same September 16 announcement, the startup said it would now report and investigate “misalignment,” meaning when the actions of AI systems go against human intentions. OpenAI shared on Friday that its autonomous AI agents interacted with several US government websites—including two operated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and data from the Census Bureau—in unanticipated ways. The startup said it did not consider any of the actions breaches. 

These disclosures fall in line with previous announcements by frontier AI labs that their technology engaged with “misalignment,” and they should therefore slow down and be more careful and all the cries by current and former researchers in the industry that AI could lead to human extinction by 2030. 

What OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs Sam Altman and Dario Amodei don’t mention is that the industry has long aligned with the Trump administration and its campaign to expand AI development. OpenAI has a military contract with the Defense Department worth up to $200 million. How AI is involved is unclear—the Intercept reported earlier this month that the Pentagon asked OpenAI to provide a custom AI tool with “minimal refusal rates.” Google, SpaceX, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle also have deals with the Defense Department.

While the Pentagon canceled its military contract with Anthropic over the startup’s concern about how its tools may be used for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, the White House has promoted Anthropic’s $50 billion investment in data center construction and the two reportedly have a much improved relationship as of September.

The relationship between the AI industry and Trump remains as the administration cut the Cyber Safety Review Board in January 2025, a body that investigates major cybersecurity threats, and has proposed further cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which secures infrastructure against cyber and physical threats. Trump previously eliminated one-third of CISA’s workforce due in significant part to its election security work. 

As Miranda Bogen, the founding director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s AI Governance Lab, told me in July, actually addressing the “deeply insufficient” system to protect the public from AI threats involves reducing the incentives of AI companies to continuously develop within a framework of profit and geopolitical competition. Without that, we are relying on AI to regulate itself.

Since Wednesday, the federal government has been airing a taxpayer-funded political advertisement on channels like Fox News promoting the virtues of President Donald Trump, as Republicans ramp up advertising in the lead-up to November’s midterm elections.

The ad, soundtracked with the chorus of the singer JMSN’s “Love Me,” is structured like a TikTok hype reel for Trump and against communism. It’s captioned “Paid for by the US Government.”

So I was just watching Fox News and this commercial played during Jesse Watters show. It says “Paid for by the US Government.”
This is clearly a campaign ad. And the singers are just singing over and over again, “Love me” – over images of Trump. @CBSMiami @CBSNews pic.twitter.com/eCkEZpipWx

— Jim DeFede (@DeFede) September 24, 2026

“The ad’s cost has jumped from $14,000 to $430,000 as it runs on a variety of network TV channels in markets across the country, according to AdImpact, which tracks media spending,” the Associated Press reported Friday. “The actual amount spent could be significantly more, depending on whether networks classified the ad as a political ad.”

The White House characterizes the ad as a “public service announcement” that reminds Americans “to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.”

“The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country,” a White House spokesperson wrote in a statement to news organizations.

JMSN, the singer whose “love me, love me, love me” chorus backgrounds the ad, has condemned the White House’s use of his song. A growing number of politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, have written strongly-worded letters objecting to the advertisement as a misuse of public funds.

To be fair to Trump, this isn’t the first time a president has run a public service announcement: Former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter got together in 2021 to tape a PSA asking people to get COVID vaccines. Under George H.W. Bush, national TV networks ran presidentially-approved PSAs featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger telling children to work out more. And in 2014, the Obama White House ran a PSA on 20,000 television stations in which a bunch of male celebrities, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama all exhorted American men to put an end to sexual assault.

Unlike its predecessors, Trump’s supposed PSA says and does very little beyond extolling Trump. Usually, a public service announcement announces something. This one announces pure right-wing vibes.

By 6 p.m. Sunday, the union had already run out of the colorful pins representing each bargaining unit—all 7,000 of them—as people kept coming up to congratulate them. When members had already packed up, people were still on the convention floor, talking and trading the pins.

View this post on Instagram

“Folks were asking us questions like ‘How do I get involved in unions? Is there anything I can do to help?’,” said Paul Cox, a senior designer on World of Warcraft, recounting the excitement at BlizzCon, the video game developer Blizzard Entertainment’s annual Southern California gaming convention, which took place just over a week ago and drew tens of thousands of attendees, as well as 12.5 million online viewers. 

Since 2024, Blizzard Entertainment workers—first those working on quality assurance in Albany, New York, and Austin, Texas, then the team behind World of Warcraft, unionized one after another, including staff working on story development, technology, and ultra-high-profile games like Overwatch and Diablo.

Blizzard—and Microsoft, now its owner—eventually recognized some 1,900 unionized workers, striking a 2022 labor neutrality agreement with the Communications Workers of America.

Despite the extraordinary popularity of Blizzard’s games, and the anticipation with which landmark releases like World of Warcraft: Forever—and high-profile games from other studios, like Grand Theft Auto VI—are received, game developers work in a notoriously demanding and insecure sector, regularly putting in 100-hour work weeks in the crunch periods leading up to release only to face sweeping layoffs after games hit the market. Franchises like World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto can earn billions for the studios and parent companies behind them, but the teams who make the games are often painfully aware of how little trickles down to them—executive salaries in the gaming world can be several hundred times greater than those of the median staff member.

Blizzard workers are among those having a rough ride. In July, Microsoft laid off 1,600 workers from its Xbox division. While these cuts didn’t have a major impact on workers at Blizzard Entertainment, it was yet another example of budget cuts amid the struggles that came with several massive mergers on the heels of revenue growth early in the Covid pandemic. 1,600 more staff are expected to be laid off throughout the rest of the fiscal year—cuts, according to the company’s July announcement, that would likely affect Blizzard. On Tuesday, Xbox laid off 268 staff as part of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s “reset” campaign.

The 1,900 workers who have now ratified a contract with Blizzard won protections around job security, remote work, wage increases, and the right to continuously bargain over AI usage in the workplace, a point of serious urgency in an industry eager to incorporate the technology, often with an eye to cost-cutting.

Such contracts look vital to many workers in an industry where—in another recent example—Electronic Arts, the company behind game series like Madden NFL and The Sims, has eliminated more than a thousand positions over the past three years, touting AI as a path to quicken development timelines; Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and investment firms including Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners completed their acquisition of the company last month, highlighting both the value of the industry to global investors and the likelihood of a even more severe private equity squeeze. A coalition of six European video games unions collectively protested AI, toxic workplaces, and mass layoffs in December.

But the two years it took to get to that point were difficult, in part because Blizzard changed its bargaining chair multiple times.

“It felt like nine months, maybe even a year, where we didn’t really get much done,” Cox said. One of those chairs, Crystal Carey, was later sworn in as President Trump’s NLRB general counsel in January.

Mobilizers in each union ramped up their activity with on-campus rallies and union events. “There were seven units who were actively bargaining at the same time. There were seven different bargaining tables, and we were all trying to get bargaining dates,” said Alison Veneto, a senior editor in story and franchise development at Blizzard. “We all started to work together, show up at each other’s rallies.” 

View this post on Instagram

On the week of August 9, the seven unions bargaining at the time merged for what Veneto called an “in-person mega bargaining session” consisting of “70 hours of bargaining over five days.” 

Mahreen Fatima, a senior environment artist on Diablo who has been part of mobilization and organizing committees of the game’s staff, described that week of negotiations as “emotionally charged.”

“Throughout the entire process of unionizing and bargaining for this contract, we’ve always stayed conscious of the fact that we are doing precedent-setting,” Fatima said. “Because the people who come after us, they’re just going to build off of this.”

While workers don’t know for sure why bargaining moved so quickly in August, Fatima, Cox, and Veneto said they think the looming September date of BlizzCon was a factor. The event garnered positive coverage for the company, reportedly the top-performing studio at Microsoft’s Xbox division—rather than coverage of unions holding rallies outside the convention.

The workers at Blizzard didn’t win everything they demanded, but among their most valuable victories was a guarantee of impact bargaining, allowing workers to bargain with the company on AI use as the technology evolves for the duration of the contract—at least four years. 

“Maybe StarCraft [another Blizzard franchise] will be unionizing very soon,” said Fatima, with clear enthusiasm for being able to discuss potential new members. “If they unionize, they’ll get to join us in our contract. They don’t have to go through this two-year-long bargaining process by themselves.”

During BlizzCon weekend, Cox said attendees asked union members how to get involved and help other workers. Members pointed people toward fellow workers at Bethesda, where at least 62 staff were reportedly cut during Microsoft’s July layoffs, and Grand Theft Auto publishers Rockstar Games, which is in an ongoing trial with 23 former workers who allege that they were fired last October in retaliation for engaging in union activity (Rockstar claims that the former employees were dismissed over publicly discussing confidential company information online, and denies that the union drive figured in).

“We would really like to see this contract extended throughout the video game industry and for other studios to look at what Blizzard has done and follow suit,” Veneto said.