Wednesday, October 21, 2026 · Evening Edition

Today

By StaffNews Desk

Good morning. The gravest story is a push for war: Semafor, citing the Financial Times, reports that Benjamin Netanyahu is pressuring Trump to resume strikes against Iran, with both leaders contending with poor polling ahead of critical elections. Manufacturing a foreign crisis to shore up weak numbers at home is an old play, and the bodies would not be theirs.

At home, the state killed an old man. Florida executed William Reaves Jr., 77, a Vietnam combat veteran with PTSD, sentenced to death by a non-unanimous jury that never heard about his psychological injuries. Capital punishment reached for the weakest person it could find.

In Washington, Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove said she would back Thomas Massie's resolution to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when lawmakers return after the midterms. Trump keeps branding the government as his own: Amazon settlement checks arrive credited to "President Trump's Federal Trade Commission," drawing a rebuke from the agency's own veterans. He agreed to a January 11-22 deposition in his $10 billion defamation suit against the BBC, and, after insisting the US "gave nothing" to Russia, admitted it gave something to free Stephen Hubbard — while his envoy called Putin a "humanitarian."

The campaign's spine is the crackdown on migrants, with ICE arrests and detentions at their highest levels less than two weeks from election day, while Democrats have sued Trump for intimidating state election officials over demands for their voter rolls. The attacks turn vicious: Ramaswamy's camp ran an ad using Amy Acton's estranged mother against her, which even Republicans admit has backfired. As El-Sayed and Rogers debate in Michigan, California's one-time tax on the super wealthy is being fought by the likes of Ken Salazar — a tax that would cost someone on his former salary an extra $111,000 a year.