Thursday, October 29, 2026 · Morning Edition

Today

By StaffNews Desk

Good morning. The fight for the Senate runs through hostile ground: Democrats must flip four Republican-held seats, some in states Trump carried by double digits in 2024. In South Carolina a Wednesday poll put Sen. Darline Graham in a dead heat with Democrat Annie Andrews, panicking Republicans and sending Trump back to rally Thursday. The GOP's money machine is spending heavily to play defense even as Democrats open up the map. And the administration is already working the courts: a federal judge denied the feds' bid to block 20,000 California ballots, calling the allegations "not credible".

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the military's top planner, Army Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia, over alleged leaks — ousted from the Joint Chiefs with no explanation given, a purge by an administration that treats the officer corps as a loyalty test.

In France, the Senate advanced a bill that could make protesters pay $11,000 fines for the cost of damage — a frank attempt to price working people out of the streets. The same impunity runs through Minneapolis, where Michael and Susan Pretti denounced a federal cover-up over the Border Patrol killing of their son Alex.

At home the squeeze runs downward: a new lawsuit says the Education Department isn't erasing the loans of borrowers whose colleges closed suddenly. On Long Island, a couple is suing a now-former Douglas Elliman broker over a text reading "Ugh they are black". Two bills in Congress would endorse the plastics industry's misleading recycling claims. Abroad, NATO is handing Ukrainian commanders an AI model that forecasts Russian drone strikes, even as some argue the global Trump era is already dying.