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North Texas voters raise concerns about healthcare, Medicare and insurance costs ahead of midterms
North Texans say rising medical costs, insurance premiums and gaps in care for seniors are among the health care concerns they want elected officials to address ahead of the midterm elections.
A campaign season of surprises peaks with Tuesday's midterms
The campaign has been defined by affordability and economic issues that have spurred an expected turn toward Democrats by voters and created headwinds for Republicans.
How Democrats Are Reclaiming the Politics of Populism
In the midterms’ most competitive races, Democratic candidates are reviving an old party message: that the Republicans are selling out to the highest bidder.
Gen Z can’t afford the culture war
Economic anxiety is reshaping young voters’ politics this midterms.
Senate Control After the Midterms: Party Switches, Ties and Wild Cards
The likelihood of a slim majority leaves room for several hard-to-predict scenarios that could affect the balance of power.
Midterm Elections: Who Is Winning the Race for Congress?
We’re one day away from the midterms. Here’s the state of play.
Analysis: Corruption allegations in political ads flood Virginia’s midterms
“The difference here is that in the 2026 election cycle, there is a narrative of affordability."
Here’s where Trump’s housing agenda stands before midterms
America’s housing market is paralyzed, with buyers pulling back and builders growing more pessimistic ahead of the midterms.
Ripple's Chris Larsen is spending tens of millions in the midterms
Even though he says there is far too much money in politics, Larsen has spent tens of millions in the midterm elections.
The final House battleground map looks great for Democrats. Watch these races.
In the final week of the midterms, the field of competitive House races has expanded and shifted even more in Democrats’ favor.
Many Americans are worried about healthcare costs as midterms approach. Why do they keep rising?
As many U.S. voters worry about healthcare costs, experts tell ABC News there are many reasons why costs may be rising.
What Happens When an Otter, a Crab, and a Damselfly Get a Vote?
As Americans prepare to vote in the midterms, an interspecies council in Europe is exploring a more inclusive form of democracy.
The top 11 Senate seats most likely to flip, the day before the midterms
On the eve of the election, Democrats appear within striking distance of winning the Senate majority, but many seats in play are in toss-up territory in deep-red states that could still break in either party’s direction.
These midterms could effectively end the Trump era – but neither side is yet ready for what comes next
Despite the US president’s ratings being at rock bottom, undoing his legacy will be difficult, not least because the Democrats are in disarray, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik
Democrats have high hopes for midterms, but polls have let them down before
Polls have been predicting a Democratic surge, but last-minute deciders and sampling issues mean there's no guarantee.
High-ranking US Democratic senator suffers stroke
Senator Chris Murphy, a fierce Trump critic who is not up for re-election in the midterms, is 'alert' after a stroke.
How to think about the midterms — and the political moment the country is in
Polls show Democrats with an advantage in the midterm election but there are potential limitations and results may take a while to roll in.
The midterms will test the nation's political direction and confidence
At least some portion of the nation is likely to have its political confidence — and perhaps even its sense of security — tested in the days and weeks ahead. That test could also continue for some time to come.
Reporters' roundtable: Political coverage of Florida's key races in the 2026 midterms
Democratic leaders enter the midterms ‘confident and paranoid’
No part of a rolling, decadelong existential crisis is ever easy, even when things seem on the cusp of going well — and especially when Democrats have had their hopes raised and dashed so many times.
Trump's Republicans scramble to stop Democratic midterms wave
Republicans made a final push Sunday to prevent a predicted thumping in US midterm elections where Democrats are gunning to win Congress and impose a first political check on President Donald Trump's ...
Trump hosts lavish Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago days before midterms
The president said he “came as Donald Trump.”
Trump to appear at rallies in battlegrounds Iowa and Kansas two days before midterms
He had originally canceled the in-person appearances in favor of tele-rallies, only to reverse course
Colorado has become a hotbed of democracy innovation
We’re just two days from the midterms and a very consequential vote for both Colorado and the country. But don’t expect the midterms to fix everything that is roiling Colorado politics and democracy in general. No matter how the vote turns out Tuesday, there are deep structural issues that still need to be addressed, said […]
Trump administration promises US farmers $15 billion in weeks before the midterms
President Donald Trump’s administration has made $15 billion worth of promises to agriculture producers in the last few weeks of the midterm elections.
Top Trump Officials Are Hitting the Campaign Trail Ahead of the Midterms. Are They Allowed To?
Legal experts and advocacy groups contend that in seeking to boost Republicans ahead of the midterms, members of the Administration have violated a decades-old law.
A potential Democratic wave looms over Trump. Where does MAGA go after the midterms?
The Republican reckoning tests a party infrastructure reshaped around President Trump since his insurgent rise in 2015 transformed the GOP.
Election officials brace for foreign threats
With the midterms just days away, the channels for federal officials to communicate foreign threats to election officials are at their weakest since the 2016 vote, numerous sources who work in elections told CNN.
Democrats are used to heartbreak in Texas - will Talarico turn the tide?
The state's $500m Senate race may be the most closely watched in the US midterms, and is about far more than control of Congress.
Trump’s next Iran move? Strikes loom after Netanyahu’s win and US midterms
Analysts expect an escalation in the nine-month war even as political dynamics in both Israel and the US evolve.
Business Owners Have a Window. Most Aren't Ready to Use It. by Tully Ryan
I spend my working life on both sides of a business sale. As an M&A advisor based in Wilmington, I help lower middle market owners across North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia sell what they've built. As the founder and CEO of IQExit, I work with the bankers, wealth advisors, CPAs and attorneys who sit beside those owners for years before a sale ever comes up. From both seats, I keep seeing the same thing. The market is ready for our owners. Too many of our owners aren't ready for the market. Start with our own backyard. Wilmington's metro area added more than 12,000 residents between July 2024 and July 2025, a 2.6% jump that ranked seventh in the country. It also posted the highest job growth rate of any metro in North Carolina. I see the same pattern in the growth markets I work in across the Southeast. New residents mean new customers and new workers. They also mean new buyers: people who moved here from corporate jobs and want to own something, private equity groups looking for add-ons in HVAC, electrical, landscaping and other trade services, and younger entrepreneurs who would rather buy a running business than start one from scratch. The ownership numbers are hard to ignore. About half of North Carolina's small businesses have an owner who is 55 or older, and roughly 85% of those owners have no succession plan, according to the North Carolina Employee Ownership Center. Nationally, more than half of Baby Boomer business owners have no documented transition plan. That isn't a crisis yet. It's a timing problem. A lot of businesses will change hands over the next decade, and the prepared ones will get the better buyers and the better terms. Buyers have money and they're using it. But an active market doesn't mean a fast one. The IBBA's latest Market Pulse survey found that Main Street deals took six to 10 months from engagement to close in the second quarter, and lower middle market deals took 11 to 12 months. That clock starts after the owner decides to sell. In my experience, the real preparation has to start years before. Two clocks, two playbooks When I sit down with an owner or their advisor, my first question isn't “What's it worth?” It's “When?” The answer puts the owner in one of two groups. If the owner wants out within 24 months, we're in execution mode. There's no time to rebuild the business. The work is cleaning up what a buyer will test: three years of financials that tie to the tax returns, an add-back schedule you can prove, customer and vendor contracts in writing, a lease that can be assigned, and a price the market will actually pay. The goal is certainty to close. If the exit is two to five years away, the owner has something worth more than time. They have choices. That window is where most value gets built, and most owners waste it by waiting. What kills deals In the lower middle market, deals rarely die over the headline price. They die in diligence, or they get retraded late in the process. I see the same causes again and again. The owner is the business. If every key customer relationship runs through the owner's cell phone, a buyer sees risk and a lender sees more of it. The books don't hold up. Buyers spot weak accounting fast. Statements that get revised mid-process, a revolving door in the bookkeeper's chair, revenue tracked on a side spreadsheet, and margins that slip while sales climb with no clear reason all make a buyer nervous. So does an owner who pushes back when asked for documents. And plenty of private owners run personal expenses through the company. Add-backs are normal. Add-backs you can't document turn into a lower offer. The real estate isn't sorted out. Many owners hold their building in a separate LLC. That's fine, but the lease terms or the property sale should be settled before a buyer shows up, not halfway through diligence. Revenue sits in too few hands. Picture a contractor with 40% of its work coming from one builder, or a service company running on handshake deals. Buyers will still look, but the terms shift toward more seller financing, an earnout, or less cash at closing. Owners and advisors: if your exit is three to five years out • Get a baseline now. Find out where the business really stands today: what a buyer would pay, who that buyer is likely to be, and which gaps would hurt you in diligence. You can't fix what you haven't measured, and the answer is often different from what the owner expects. • Make yourself less necessary. Spend the next few years building a manager or small team that can run daily operations and own customer relationships. Put handshake deals into written contracts. A business that runs without its owner is worth more and is far easier to finance. • Clean the books for three straight years. Buyers and lenders look back at least three years. Separate personal expenses, keep the financials tied to the tax returns, track every add-back as you go, and settle the real estate plan early. A word to CPAs CPAs often see a sale coming before anyone else, and you're usually the most trusted voice an owner has. Year-end meetings are the right time to start this conversation. Here's what I'd ask every CPA to do this season with business owner clients over 55: • Ask the timing question. “Do you see yourself owning this business in five years? If not, who takes it over?” Write down the answer and bring it up again at next year's meeting. • Run a proof of cash and review revenue recognition. Make sure the cash in the bank ties to the revenue on the books. Pay close attention to contractors with work in progress and to companies selling memberships or service plans. These issues are easy to fix with years of lead time and painful to fix a month before closing. • Pair the tax return with an exit readiness review. Invite clients to complete IQExit's Exit Readiness Intelligence (ERI) process as part of year-end planning. It gives you and the client a shared picture of readiness gaps and an indicative value range, and the results come back to you as the advisor. That turns a tax meeting into a planning relationship, and it puts you in position to bring in tax and M&A help early, when choices like purchase price allocation can still save the client real money. Changing the conversation For bankers, wealth advisors and attorneys, the hard part is raising the subject without seeming to nudge a client toward the door. I understand that. Nobody wants to tell a 60-year-old owner it's time to sell. So don't. Ask a different question: “If a buyer called tomorrow, what would they find?” That's a planning question, not a pitch, and it's useful whether the exit is two years out or 15. It's the question we built IQExit to help advisors answer. Whether you're in Wilmington, Raleigh, Charleston, Richmond or anywhere else, owners have a real opening right now. The buyers are out there and so is the capital. The owners who come out ahead will be the ones who start getting ready before they're ready to sell.
Alaska Sen. Sullivan accuses Democrats of same-name voter deceit
CNN’s Jake Tapper sits down with Republican Senator Dan Sullivan ahead of the midterms where he’s seeking a third term. He discusses the “double Dan Sullivan” controversy, involving two candidates with the same name running for the same seat. Watch the full interview on CNN at 9a ET.
Rising health costs and coverage changes are big concerns for older adults as Election Day nears
A reliable voting bloc, 83% of voters over age 50 say they’re extremely motivated to vote in the midterms.
The AI boom's political reckoning
Technology has become a defining issue in the 2026 midterms — and AI data centers are the punching bag.
Kamala Harris urges a 'too big to rig' turnout for the midterms and tees off on Trump
Kamala Harris has been campaigning for Democratic candidates across multiple states during the final stretch of the midterm elections.
Kamala Harris urges a 'too big to rig' turnout for the midterms and tees off on Trump
Kamala Harris has been campaigning for Democratic candidates across multiple states during the final stretch of the midterm elections.
The Iran War Might Soon Get Catastrophically Worse
It looks increasingly likely Donald Trump may try a reckless escalatory bombing campaign against Iran after the midterms. And it looks increasingly likely it will backfire terribly.
Harris rallies Democrats in Georgia in final push before midterms
Kamala Harris appeared in Georgia for Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) and Keisha Lance Bottoms, who could be the first Black female governor.
Top healthcare worries weigh on older US adults before the midterms
Rising healthcare costs are a major concern for older Americans, and it's affecting their finances and political priorities.
What are the health stakes of the midterms? Policymakers, lobbyists, and experts weigh in
No matter what happens on Election Day, the midterms will have sweeping implications for American health care. More than two dozen experts on what could come next.
Trump is setting the stage to contest the midterms. Here’s how
With days to Election Day, time is running out for some of the more extreme pre-election doomsday scenarios that have percolated as a result of President Donald Trump’s chronic and unfounded rhetoric about widespread fraudulent voting.
Racism and bigotry: The hallmark of the 2022 midterms
Bigotry is all Republican politicians have to offer in these closing days of the midterm campaigns. In fact, it’s all they’ve had for years.
Trump and GOP Close Midterms With Ugly Personal Attacks
Facing backlash over inflation and anger with the president, Republicans have turned to an onslaught of baseless claims about Democratic candidates.
As Midterms Near, Top Law Firms That Capitulated to Trump Are on the Sidelines
None of the firms that struck deals to avoid crippling executive orders are publicly involved in the major legal efforts to check the Trump administration’s attempts to meddle in the midterm elections, a review by The New York Times shows.
Can I trust the polls? And other questions from listeners about the 2026 midterms
Ahead of Election Day, listeners send in questions about whether debates are dead, if polls are reliable for election coverage and how Trump might work with Democrats if they win control of Congress.
Trump insists Republicans ‘have a shot’ in midterms as rallies resume
Trump revived cancelled swing-state rallies as early midterm voting set records, with Pope Leo casting a historic US ballot from Chicago.
Vikings-Lions Final Injury Report
The Minnesota Vikings and Detroit Lions released their final injury reports with injury designations in advance of their Sunday afternoon matchup at Ford Field. Here they are. Minnesota Vikings Detroit Lions Injury Report Terms and Glossary Injury designation definitions: Probable = the league defines a Probable injury designation as a 75% or greater chance of […]
2 Trump attempts to change the D.C. landscape play out in the courts as midterms near
The cases involved are an impending shutdown and reconfiguration of a historic public golf course and the construction of the monumental arch that, at 250 feet, would be 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty is from its base to the top of the torch.
With Midterms Looming, Americans Feel Priced Out of Healthcare
Get our weekly newsletter, The Week in Brief, featuring a roundup of our original coverage, Fridays at 2 p.m. ET.
Political controversies roil key races in final days before midterms
A series of last-minute controversies have roiled races in the final days before the midterm elections, injecting new uncertainty into tight races.
Political controversies roil key races in final days before midterms
A series of last-minute controversies have roiled races in the final days before the midterm elections, injecting new uncertainty into tight races.
Political controversies roil key races in final days before midterms
A series of last-minute controversies have roiled races in the final days before the midterm elections, injecting new uncertainty into tight races.
Political controversies roil key races in final days before midterms
A series of last-minute controversies have roiled races in the final days before the midterm elections, injecting new uncertainty into tight races.
Could Texas Turn Blue? What to Watch in the 2026 Midterms
Co-hosts Brandon Rottinghaus and Jeronimo Cortina delve into the latest news in politics
Pope Leo votes in US midterms in first known political ballot for any pontiff
US citizen Leo, who has clashed with Donald Trump over several issues, submitted his vote by post in Chicago
Cook Political Report shifts 14 races toward Dems ahead of midterms
Democrats need at least 218 seats to win the House. The latest projections from a noted election forecaster should give them a reason for optimism.
A midterm crossroads for both parties eyeing the beginning of the end of the Trump era
The nation’s major political parties are at a crossroads. Win or lose Tuesday, the end of the 2026 midterms marks the beginning of a high-stakes fight over the direction of the Republican and Democratic parties as the Trump era nears its end.
Pope Leo makes history by voting in US midterms
(CNN) — Pope Leo XIV has submitted a mail-in ballot for the US midterms, becoming the first pope to vote in a US election and likely the first to vote
Pope Leo makes history by voting in US midterms
(CNN) — Pope Leo XIV has submitted a mail-in ballot for the US midterms, becoming the first pope to vote in a US election and likely the first to vote
Trump will rally in Kansas and Iowa after initially canceling weekend trips before midterms
President Donald Trump has rescheduled campaign rallies in a pair of critical Midwestern states that he had previously canceled.
Jeff Raikes: the midterms’ real business risk are not which party wins, but whether the rules hold
Companies can plan around either party’s agenda. What they can’t plan around is rules that might change overnight, or don’t get enforced fairly.
Slimantics: Medicare for All could bridge gap between mental health breakthroughs and accessibility
Tuesday is Election Day across the country, and although it is not always the leading headline in this year’s midterms, health care remains an issue that is fiercely debated on the campaign trail.
Why healthcare has become such a big problem for Republicans
The GOP hoped to keep Medicaid cuts out of the midterms. It’s not working.
US midterms: With deep-red states now in play, could blue wave redraw America's political landscape?
The midterms could open a new chapter for Republicans and an old fight for Democrats
The midterm elections might be the final nail in the coffin of the Trump era of the Republican Party, while Democrats will likely continue battling under roughly the same Hillary Clinton-versus-Bernie Sanders construct they have been operating under for the past 11 years.
The politics of war
Israel went to the polls last Tuesday and it is the turn of the United States next Tuesday. The differences in the two elections are self-evident. Compared with the US, which has favourable geography and does everything at scale, Israel is tiny and part of an unstable region. For its elections, it has adopted an almost pure form of proportional representation based on lists. This encourages multiple parties and can make it almost impossible to form a government, as we can now see. The US system is complex in its own way but discourages third parties. Yet for all the differences in size, geography, and political systems, the fates of the two countries are closely connected. Israel has come to depend on the US to sustain its military strength, and over the past few tumultuous years that dependence has created resentment in the United States. The Biden administration was punished for appearing to give Netanyahu a blank check after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, and not holding Israel back as it employed ruthless tactics in Gaza. Because of the treatment of Palestinians, American views of Israel have grown progressively more negative over the past few years. Only a third now support the Israeli government. While on the left, this is largely because of how Israeli forces have operated in Gaza and, more recently, how the settler movement has behaved in the West Bank, for the American right the issue has been about how Benjamin Netanyahu persuaded Donald Trump to forget his wariness about more Middle Eastern wars and agree to a joint attack on Iran, which has gone badly wrong. The Palestine question was not a big issue for the two large Jewish blocs in last Tuesday’s election. Both supported a tough response to Hamas after October 2023 and neither accepts a two-state solution. It was, however, the threat posed by the ethno-nationalist policies of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the two extreme members of Netanyahu’s coalition, and their tolerance, even encouragement, of settler violence, that brought out the Arab voters. (In principle this should strengthen their position though to turn into real power would require the ‘Change Bloc’ overcoming their opposition to involving Arab parties. The alternatives are a National Unity government, defection from the Change Bloc to Netanyahu, or deadlock and another round of elections in the new year.) There was also broad support for the war against Iran among the Jewish parties. The difficulty here is that the objectives behind the war have yet to be met, and that continuing with military operations depends on the United States. In this way the two elections have come together at a crucial moment. If Netanyahu hoped that a victory over Iran would help him retain his majority, cementing his legacy as an Israeli war leader, it did not work out that way. Trump also expected a great victory about which he could boast. He promised at most the end of a hateful and aggressive regime, with a record of hostility to both the United States and Israel, or at least the elimination of Iran’s military capabilities and the end of its nuclear programme. Eight months on, there is not much to boast about; vital objectives remain elusive: the Iranian regime is even more hardline than before; the international economy is barely coping with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz; and Saudi Arabia is struggling with an unwanted conflict with the Yemeni Houthis. For all these reasons, the Iran War has been a dark cloud hanging over both elections. Yet the issue has been approached in different ways. Netanyahu sought to push the issue before the election while Trump has been more cautious. Trump’s essential claim is that there is nothing to worry about and he’s still working out what final steps need to be taken to provide a definitive conclusion to the conflict. Netanyahu’s final pitch was that there was lots to worry about. He focused on Israel’s dire security situation, with the Iran War unfinished and the prospect of imminent economic isolation because of international sanctions. For him it is imperative to defeat Iran decisively, and without delay. Why this different response to the same war? Part of the answer lies in how public opinion in the two countries responded to the war. In this post, I show how this came about. We await the outcome of the US midterms but know the result, at least in terms of the share of the vote if not yet the shape of the new government, of the Israeli election. With the elections out of the way Netanyahu is pressing for another round in the war. Trump is less sure. I conclude with thoughts on the importance of how he decides.
The health care issues STAT reporters are watching in the midterms
In this week's "STATus Report," STAT reporters break down how the midterms could shape federal health and science policy, and an El-Sayed interview.
Boston sports political donations: How team owners gave ahead of midterms
A Globe analysis found substantial political giving, in particular, by the owners of the Patriots and Bruins and their families, both at the state and national levels.
"Put Yourself In Shape": Trump Body-Shames Reporter Over Health Question
In a similar instance in Kentucky, he boasted of Republican candidates' handsomeness to further their cause in the US midterms.
Pope Leo requested an absentee ballot in Illinois to vote in the midterms
It’s not clear whether Leo, who has been critical of the Trump administration, has mailed off his ballot yet.
Ventura County students host community candidate forum ahead of midterms
Santa Paula High School students questioned local candidates for city council, school board of trustees, and California State Assembly
2026 midterms set new record for political ad spending
With less than a week until Election Day, midterm political ad spending and ad reservations have topped a record $11.21 billion.
Political analyst says affordability and President Donald Trump will define the midterms
With the midterm elections just days away, we are breaking down what issues will define key races in Virginia.
Advocates call on Michiganders to vote yes on political donation proposal
LANSING, Mich. (WLNS) — Advocacy group Michiganders for Money Out of Politics held a virtual press conference on Thursday, encouraging voters to approve Proposal 2, which would limit who can donate…
Political analyst says affordability and President Donald Trump will define the midterms
With the midterm elections just days away, we are breaking down what issues will define key races in Virginia.
On the campaign trail, Trump delivers his greatest political hits and mourns end of rallies
President Trump is campaigning hard in the midterms. Supporters are showing up, in part because this could be the last chance to see him holding the large rallies that have been his trademark.
Health Care: A Sleeper Issue for the 2026 Midterms and Beyond
Message from Karthick Ramakrishnan, Founder and Executive Director
Health Care: A Sleeper Issue for the 2026 Midterms and Beyond
Message from Karthick Ramakrishnan, Founder and Executive Director
On Facebook and Instagram, Political Ads Are Increasingly Critical of Data Centers
Political ads about data centers on Facebook and Instagram have turned increasingly critical, with 57% opposed and just 3% supportive ahead of the midterms.
After voting Trump, an RGV official mulls moving to the left
Dr. Ivan Melendez aligned with Democrats for years before moving to the right in recent elections. Ahead of the midterms, he’s weighing his options.
The Politics Hour: What's at stake locally in the 2026 midterms
UVA's Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato on Virginia possibly being the key to a blue wave, WAMU's Jenny Abamu breaks down the redistricting constitutional amendment, and Washington Sun's Martin Austermuhle explains the controversy around at-large D.C. Councilmember Robert White's bid for D.C. Delegate.
Kennedy’s closing arguments for the 2026 midterms: Fraud, vaccines, and MAHA
RFK Jr. is making his pitch ahead of a midterm election that could shape the fate of his MAHA movement.
Your Health, Their Platforms
The issue of healthcare could decide this year’s midterms. Here are the plans of six potentially history-making candidates.
The Israel debate reshaping Jewish American politics
“There are plenty of people who believe, as I do, that Israel has a right to protect itself,” says David to Lauren, both pictured below, over the dinner table. Subscribe “How does starving children protect Israel?” she replies. “I don’t think Israel is intentionally starving children.” “It’s a little bit absurd to be sitting here talking about all of these very specific things,” Lauren says, “as opposed to looking at the totality of him as a candidate, and the 90% of things that you agree with him on.” This is a snapshot from a conversation between a Jewish father and daughter in Michigan ahead of the crucial Senate race. Lauren supports the Democratic candidate, Abdul El-Sayed. Her father is undecided. That is mainly because of El-Sayed’s stance on Israel, one that mirrors a growing wing of the party that has become critical of the US-Israel relationship following the war in Gaza. You’re reading FourSight, a newsletter from Channel 4 News’ expert journalists explaining the complexities of the biggest global stories Could that alienate Jewish American voters who have a strong connection to Israel - and the majority of whom have voted Democratic? A shifting stance on Israel “An ally that takes your money to push you into wars you shouldn’t be fighting is not an ally,” El-Sayed recently told ABC News, referring to the Iran war and how some Americans believe that Israel pushed President Trump into the conflict. Foreign policy has become an economic issue that’s hitting Americans’ pockets, with the soaring cost of petrol and diesel. El-Sayed, pictured below, has opposed military aid for Israel and accused the nation of genocide in Gaza. That led to the pro-Israel lobby group, AIPAC, funding his opponent, Hayley Stevens, to the tune of $30m during the Democratic primary here. “I frequently criticise AIPAC because I think the way that they are pouring dollars into defeating Abdul and others around the country… is really corrosive to American democracy,” Brad Lander says at a canvassing event in Detroit. Lander, a Jewish Democratic congressional candidate in New York, is an ally of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and has come to campaign for El-Sayed. “Democrats and Americans don’t want to keep paying for Netanyahu’s wars,” he says. “They want a reset in the US relationship with Israel.” The 2026 election has clearly been a bruising one for AIPAC; the Wall Street Journal reported that, in an unpublished letter, the group described the cycle as one of the “most challenging environments in recent memory”. Share And significantly, after the midterms, the group will stop direct contributions to candidates through one of its political action committees. Voters’ concerns We followed a group of Jewish canvassers around one suburb in Detroit. They think that among the 130,000 Jewish voters in Michigan, between 20 and 30,000 are undecided. In a swing state where El-Sayed beat his primary rival by just 13,000, that could prove pivotal. We meet one voter, Jen Friedman, pictured below, who has a “Democrats for Rogers” sign, referring to the Republican candidate. The issue of Israel is very important to her because “having a safe haven is crucial”, she tells me. “What I see is one candidate, Mike Rogers, who is associating himself with people who are very proudly American,” says Jen. “Abdul, on the other hand, is associating with people who say they are anti-American.” Friedman raises two issues. Firstly, Hasan Piker, a left-wing streamer who has campaigned alongside El-Sayed and has been criticised for his comments on the US and Israel. [ ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/who-is-hasan-piker-the-socialist) [ Why Hasan Piker thinks the US needs a socialist Trump ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/who-is-hasan-piker-the-socialist) Anushka Asthana · Aug 19 [ Read full story ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/who-is-hasan-piker-the-socialist) The other concern regards an attack on a Michigan synagogue back in March. The FBI said the man was inspired by Hezbollah and had lost relatives in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon. El-Sayed condemned the antisemitic attack, but also said “hurt people hurt people”. That upset many here, with El-Sayed apologising numerous times for his choice of language. Jews for Abdul As we follow the canvassers, there are still plenty of lawn signs supporting El-Sayed. Elissa Driker, pictured below, runs out of her house wearing a “Jews for Abdul” t-shirt. “I feel like the values that Abdul has align with how I live my Judaism,” she tells me. She says “Abdul is not Hasan Piker, so I don’t conflate them”. I ask why Piker keeps coming up. “It gets weaponised. I don’t know if you watched the debate the other night, but talk about… weaponising fear and weaponising anxiety and all that Islamophobic dog-whistling that was coming towards Abdul.” I also talk to Elissa about how Americans more broadly appear to be questioning the US-Israel relationship and whether American Jews were ready to do that too. “A lot of American Jews are. My experience is absolutely the tide is turning.” For the first time, Gallup found this year that Americans now sympathise more with the Palestinians than the Israelis. In another poll of Jewish American voters, 65% said they were pro-Israel but also critical of Israeli government policies, 52% support cutting or eliminating aid to Israel. Father and daughter Back at the dinner table, I bring up those polls with David Fink. Why does he think Americans sympathise less with Israelis? [ ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/how-support-for-israel-in-us-is-declining) [ How support for Israel in US is declining ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/how-support-for-israel-in-us-is-declining) Kiran Moodley · May 4 [ Read full story ](https://channel4news.substack.com/p/how-support-for-israel-in-us-is-declining) “Because the news media and the extremes of both parties are so willing to tell what I think is a false narrative.” Lauren chimes in: “Do you really think the actions of Israel have nothing to do with the shift in the sympathies?” “I think that’s very relevant,” he replies. “I just don’t think that people really have a full understanding.” Lauren again: “It sounds like you’re saying that the shift is due to how the atrocities are being described, as opposed to what the actual atrocities are.” “There have been some things that shouldn’t have happened,” David says. “I think the polling is being driven by politicians who are taking advantage of this issue.” Lauren then asks, “I’m curious what your response would be if my children were killed in an Israeli airstrike and someone said there have been some things that shouldn’t have happened?” A long pause from her father. “Any reference to my grandchildren has a very deep emotional impact on me. Well done,” he says. “I have an empathy for any civilian in war and I don’t mean to belittle those losses. The loss of any one life is a horrible thing. But it doesn’t make it a war crime and it doesn’t make it genocide.” Lauren and David cannot agree but tell me how proud they are of one another for sticking to their convictions and for agreeing to let me sit in on their conversation. I cannot thank them enough for their time, and hope their honesty informs and educates many people during such a fraught election. Abdul El-Sayed: The candidate testing the US - Israel relationship Thanks for reading our latest FourSight newsletter. Subscribe to receive free weekly newsletters from Channel 4 News. Subscribe Share Channel 4 News Leave a comment
Iraqi court hands down prison terms to 2 politicians and an oil official in graft case
BAGHDAD (AP) — An Iraqi court sentenced two prominent politicians and the head of a state-run enterprise responsible for distributing oil products to prison sentences in a corruption case, officials announced Thursday.
A golden age of science is coming
It’s almost hard to remember, but just a few years ago, a lot of very smart people thought that science was in terminal decline. Respected researchers were writing papers with titles like “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time”, and “Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science”. In 1996, science writer John Horgan even published a book called The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. The fundamental idea was that the Universe only has so many insights to discover, and that we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit. It was the idea that Joseph-Louis Lagrange expressed when he said that “we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.” As the big ideas and the simple ideas get mined out, we’re forced to throw ever more brains at the mysteries of nature just to keep scientific progress going at a fraction of its old pace: It looked like science was hitting a wall. Then along came AI. It’s far too early to tell how much AI will eventually speed up the growth of total factor productivity. But already we can see signs of a speedup in science. Anthropic Founder Jack Clark assembled some of the hopeful data points in a recent lecture: [ Dror Poleg@drorpoleg "If you pick different parts of science, you see the same pattern show up: Progress is accelerating, and it has started to accelerate in the last two years." Jack Clark @jackclarkSF I’m speaking at the IMF in an hour about the singularity and why I believe it has begun and the choices we'll need to make. Watch live here: https://t.co/Hj9HzcXx5h 6:08 PM · Oct 18, 2026 · 21.2K Views 2 Replies · 10 Reposts · 123 Likes ](https://x.com/drorpoleg/status/2111882070376980529) Anthropic is accelerating its investment into drug discovery, and is already announcing some impressive preliminary results: [ BioTender@Junioryu136689 BREAKING: Anthropic unveils early results from six Claude-powered drug development collaborations. • 70% shorter CAR-T signaling domain • ~35,000 antibody designs • >10× tighter antibody binding • 89% less batch-record review time Still largely preclinical. Anthropic @AnthropicAI Over the past few months, Anthropic scientists have engaged in deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines. We've also begun drug discovery efforts of our own. In doing so, we’ve learned much more about how Claude can support the many stages of 9:43 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 11.2K Views 3 Replies · 24 Reposts · 205 Likes ](https://x.com/Junioryu136689/status/2115197821150495150) Claude also appears to be enabling rapid progress toward a treatment for food allergies. OpenAI, meanwhile, announced a possible breakthrough treatment for neurodegenerative disease. Meanwhile, Google Cloud Chief Scientist Pushmeet Kohli has a list of recent scientific advances that have been enabled by its new Gemini model, including breakthroughs in nuclear fusion reactor design, rare disease research, and quantum computing: [ Pushmeet Kohli@pushmeet Gemini 4 Argon is a step change in model performance. In recent weeks, it has had a transformative impact on the Science projects in our team at @GoogleDeepMind and our external collaborators, and helped make a number of remarkable advances across scientific disciplines. 🧵👇 4:47 PM · Oct 13, 2026 · 36.5K Views 8 Replies · 41 Reposts · 497 Likes ](https://x.com/pushmeet/status/2110049807385702623) But as cool as these stories sound, they’re just very minor, preliminary efforts. There are a number of reasons to think that AI is going to propel us into a golden age of scientific discovery. That age might not last forever — AI might still run into diminishing returns eventually. But the next few decades are probably going to be an absolutely amazing time for human science. The number of “effective researchers” is no longer limited The most important input into science is scientists themselves. Until this year, that meant human brains — talented, highly trained human brains. The number of trained human brains could be increased by sending more people to grad school, but only to a point — the smartest people tend to be sent into the hardest research fields first, and if you 10x the number of researchers, the average quality will go down. This constraint was already starting to bite, as Ekerdt and Wu argued in 2024: We argue that a substantial portion of the downward historical trend in U.S. research productivity is a composition effect resulting from self-selection in researcher ability and the dramatic expansion of the research sector…[W]e find that this composition effect has lowered average researcher ability by between 37% and 53%[.] And of course, low fertility was making the problem worse, because fewer children meant fewer people who were able to become future scientists. AI just blows up this constraint completely. If an AI agent can function as an autonomous researcher, there’s no constraint on the number of researchers in the world — you can just build more of them, by building more computer chips and data centers that enable the running of more AI agents. Whether or not massive hordes of agents can collaborate to solve individual problems much faster, increasing the number of agents allows them to tackle many different research questions in parallel. What’s more, these AI “researchers” can be trained incredibly quickly compared to human beings. A human scientist takes decades to train, and more years to reach the frontier of their research field by diligent reading and conversation. This is the “burden of knowledge”, and it’s commonly believed to be one reason ideas have been getting harder to find — by the time human scientists can get up to speed, they’re often so old that their ideas are no longer novel. AI just annihilates this constraint — it can assimilate the entire literature and reach the frontier of research extremely quickly, and it can also tell human scientists where the frontier lies without forcing them to discover that for themselves. It can also pivot to new research directions more easily than humans can. And there’s also a self-reinforcing economic cycle here. Because scientific advances enable higher GDP, they enable more resources to be invested into the creation of yet more electronic “scientists”. Now that doesn’t mean the amount of scientific research goes to infinity — there may still be some essential bottleneck task that human researchers are still needed to perform. There are some indications that AI’s progress on open-ended conceptual research tasks is slower than in other dimensions, and it may be that humans are still needed to provide some of this long-term conceptual thinking. I’d bet against this being true for much longer, but it might be true for a long time. Even in this most “pessimistic” case, though, the amount of effective capital that scientists can use to leverage their work just went up by a lot. AI eliminates the theory bottleneck Science proceeds by an iterative process of theory and experiment. The theory part of that cycle is typically short, but non-trivial — it took a couple of years after the blackbody radiation spectrum was observed for Max Planck to come up with the quantum hypothesis to explain it, and decades longer before quantum theory as we now know it was created. It took about a year for Watson and Crick to figure out the shape of DNA after the requisite data was gathered. AI will basically eliminate the theory bottleneck entirely — or at least shorten the turnaround time between experiment and theory by an order of magnitude. AI is an absolute beast at math. Recently, an OpenAI model solved some of the most important open problems in computer science, math, and theoretical physics, and no one even batted an eyebrow because that sort of triumph is becoming increasingly commonplace. One of those solutions was a proof that the Standard Model of Particle Physics could be mathematically well-defined — a problem that human theorists had so far been unable to tackle. Not all research relies equally on theory, but understanding novel experimental results almost always involves some important component of either mathematical or spatial reasoning. That part of the task has now been made much, much faster. And on top of that, science is now open to a greater number of humans who aren’t naturally good at theorizing. AI can read the whole literature Much of the work of human scientists involves reading and understanding endless amounts of papers and going to endless conferences and seminars. The purpose of that work is to understand the existing scientific literature. Understanding the literature allows scientists to do the following things: Come up with new ideas for hypotheses to test Avoid doing research that someone else has already done Synthesize approaches from different areas or fields AI can reduce this effort to almost zero. Consider this excerpt from OpenAI’s blog post about their new research into neurodegenerative disease: The team divided the analysis among thousands of AI agents powered by GPT‑Rosalind, an approach we call distributed biological reasoning. The agents examined a whole-brain CRISPR atlas…a dataset showing how gene disruptions affect different types of cells across the mouse brain. Each agent investigated a gene disruption, analyzed cellular responses, searched scientific literature, and proposed explanations for the results. Their reports were combined into a reasoning atlas linking genes, cellular effects, relevant publications, and possible biological mechanisms. The research team estimated that comparable human analysis and literature review, conducted one perturbation at a time, would take months to a year. The agents reproduced findings from human analyses while uncovering additional leads. Their assessments of novelty and scientific value also aligned with judgments from blinded human experts. These findings help prioritize further experiments needed to test the proposed biological mechanisms. Some of these insights point to new leads for understanding brain disease. [emphasis mine] This is one case in which parallel work by a large number of agents really does make a huge difference: [ Haider.@haider1 this is actually insane openai deployed thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents to analyze millions of mouse brain cells in 32 minutes, work that could take human researchers months to a year also the agents uncovered new leads for brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's OpenAI @OpenAI GPT-Rosalind surfaced a new lead for drug discovery: could restoring cholesterol transport protect neurons from degeneration? DCTN1 is a gene linked to Perry syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder. In mouse-brain data, disrupting it increased expression of genes involved in 2:41 PM · Oct 21, 2026 · 51.5K Views 26 Replies · 95 Reposts · 1.26K Likes ](https://x.com/haider1/status/2112917197903540516) Not only does instantaneous literature review vastly speed up the research process, but it allows AI to make novel conceptual leaps from combining approaches from wildly different fields of research. AI regularly does this in math research, combining results, approaches, and theorems from far-flung places that no human mathematician would have thought to combine. It can do it in science, too. Much of scientific innovation, historically, has been “recombinant” innovation — scientists applying insights from one field to another. With AI, essentially all research is now cross-disciplinary — AI can read not just the literature on a particular subject, but the literature on a million other subjects that might have produced useful techniques or insights for the problem at hand. Superscience So far, all of the factors I’ve listed are ways that AI can speed up science as it’s already done. I’ve basically described how AI can send gigantic hordes of superhumanly fast, superhumanly well-read, superhumanly mathematically gifted researchers to re-accelerate scientific discovery. But it’s also possible that AI will enable types of discovery — and ways of understanding the natural world — that no network of humans, no matter how large or how brilliant it was or how long it had to work, would ever be able to discover. In a post back in July, I wrote about how that might work: What if there are lots of…aspects of the Universe that [are] too complex to understand in terms of simple laws, but not so complex that they just dissolve into unknowable chaos? It’s possible that we can reliably control these complex phenomena with AI, even if we never reduce them to the kind of principles that we can teach a grad student in a textbook… Another way of saying this is that there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can. I call these “cloud laws” — causal regularities that can be exploited by technology, but which are too diffuse and complex for an individual human being to either intuit or communicate… Perhaps social sciences like economics, sociology, and political science obey similarly complex regularities, and AI can help us find them. Perhaps there are physical processes — plasma, or topological materials, or aerial turbulence, etc. — that obey cloud laws instead of chaos?… [H]uman collaboration is bottlenecked — it’s limited by our ability to intuit patterns at an individual level, and to communicate these patterns from one individual to another. AI, being a computer, just doesn’t have this sort of limitation; it can work with vast, diffuse patterns without having to break them into pieces or simplify them in order to compress them into the tiny pipelines of person-to-person explanation… If much of the Universe turns out to be ruled by cloud laws, we could be on the precipice of a scientific renaissance. In order to discover cloud laws, AI will need huge amounts of data about the natural world. AI figured out human speech by assimilating essentially all of the text humans have ever written. If it’s going to figure out hidden patterns in biology, neuroscience, materials science, etc., it’s going to need similarly massive amounts of data from physical instruments. That data will be far, far more than humans — individually or collectively — would be able to parse, label, characterize, or model. But AI was built to do this. If scientists simply build huge arrays of sensors to measure complex phenomena like the brain, the cell, the economy, etc., they may be able to feed this flood of data to AI directly and bypass human cognitive intermediation entirely. AI would then learn about the world directly, and it might learn things that humans never could. This “superscience”, if you want to call it that, would actually go beyond the kind of science humans have done heretofore. Many of the technologies it yielded would be beyond human comprehension — indistinguishable from magic. But to the AIs, they would make perfect scientific sense. In any case, it seems clear that the scientific slowdown that threatened human progress will now be delayed — at least for a while. Unless humans have somehow found most of the actual exploitable regularities in our Universe, we’re about to enter a new golden age of science. Subscribe Share
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