“Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University demonstrator who became a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian foreign students, asked the Supreme Court on Monday to take up his case, his lawyers said. … The Supreme Court turns away the vast majority of petitions to hear cases and will consider Khalil’s at a closed-door meeting in the coming months. His lawyers expressed hope it will be on track to be heard this term. Until the justices decide how to proceed, Khalil will remain free. The green-card holder has emerged as a face of the Trump administration’s [abductions] of noncitizen college students and faculty who’ve expressed pro-Palestinian support. Immigration authorities [abducted] Khalil in March 2025, and he was jailed until a federal judge ordered his release a few months later.” (10/19/26)
“Gangs in Haiti have opened fire on an armored vehicle, leaving four [gang members] from El Salvador unaccounted for in the first major attack since an international gang suppression [gang] began operations in the violence-wracked country. The attack occurred Sunday in Croix-des-Bouquets, a once peaceful community in Port-au-Prince now controlled by violent gangs. The Armed Forces of El Salvador said in a statement Monday that the four [gang members] were returning to camp when the armored vehicle was attacked with explosives and set on fire. It noted that the four men managed to flee the burning vehicle and it is working with international forces to ‘establish contact and determine the location of our [gang members].'” (10/19/26)
“In my previous post, we asked whether AIs could improve themselves all the way to absurdly high levels of superintelligence. My conclusion: today’s feedback loop is probably too weak, because improving AI faces diminishing returns at every step. Even fully autonomous AIs doing all the research and coding don’t make those diminishing returns disappear. We should keep updating that conclusion as real-world parameters and data change. But we didn’t look closely at another possibility: running millions or billions of AI minds in parallel. How much do they help? That’s what we’ll look at here.” (10/19/26)
“What if people care only about the quality of the words, not the production mechanism? What if they are very happy to read AI-generated novels? Then two points would be worth noting. First, although one of my conclusions falls (humanity doesn’t stop reading), human writing does cease with profound consequences. Second, the doubt over watermarks should in theory go away—if readers care only about the quality of the output, AI watermarks would not be detrimental to those who publish AI-generated content. But that scenario suggests a weakness in the position of those who most strenuously advocate for AI writing. The vehemence with which they oppose watermarks (or the use of Pangram) suggests that they do not believe this. They know that what they sell depends on the readers not knowing the source. They are fighting to prevent people from acting on their preferences.” (10/19/26)
“For many obvious reasons, America needs an aggressive Congress to emerge from the November elections ready to restore the government’s balance of power. If the Iran War is still underway, one of the new Congress’s first jobs should be to end it. President Trump says he won’t resume strikes against Iran before the elections. It is not clear what he plans for afterward. But in addition to usurping Congress’s war powers, hurting the economy and costing U.S. and Iranian lives, this war of choice violates a sacred contract between commanders-in-chief and American families: the assurance that our sons and daughters will be sent to war only when there is a clear and present danger to national security and no other option but the military. Instead, Trump’s greed, personal grievances, ego and failure to learn from history all appear to play a role in this war.” (10/19/26)
“Israeli police on Monday said they arrested 10 [squatters] accused of attacking a group of Palestinian olive pickers and journalists in the West Bank last week, including Washington Post photographer Heidi Levine. Some of the Israelis arrested were accused of also attacking a group of European diplomats visiting the Palestinian town of Taybeh on Saturday, CNN reported. The diplomats represented Belgium, France, Poland and the Catholic Church, the BBC reported. … On Friday, video captured the incident as dozens of masked Israeli [squatters] attacked the Palestinians gathering the harvest in Abu Falah. The attackers set the olive tree groves on fire and hurled rocks, Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, a blogger who recorded the incident, told The Washington Post.” (10/19/26)
“Robby Soave gives his radar on Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin saying she wants young people to be deterred from working in the Trump administration.” (10/19/26)
“Should this be seen as the Hans Christian Andersen story, in which the narcissistic emperor is finally exposed as a naked fool by a truth-telling child? Donald Trump is certainly all of these things: narcissistic, naked in his support for Putin and a fool. But the parallel doesn’t quite work because it hasn’t taken a child to reveal this. He has done it himself, in plain sight …. a better literary parallel might be Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel Goldfinger, in which the evil Auric Goldfinger attempts to stage his theft from Fort Knox with the help of a group of American mafia bosses, one of whom is the gloriously named Pussy Galore.” (10/19/26)
“The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal brought by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other alleged 9/11 plotters seeking to hold the government to a plea deal it later withdrew. The court action removes one barrier to Mohammed standing trial before a military commission in 2028, where the death penalty is a possible punishment. He has been held at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2006. Mohammed is accused of being the ringleader of the plot to crash hijacked planes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. A fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The other two men who appealed to the Supreme Court were Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi and Walid bin Attash, who are also held at Guantanamo and set to face trial.” (10/19/26)
