State-News
Bend mourns, Santa Anas scorch the coast, and midterm money floods the states
World & Security
Bend, Oregon spent Saturday doing the work that now has a grimly familiar choreography: stuffed animals against a fence, a candlelight vigil already in the rearview, and a police chief still hunting a motive he admitted he might never get. On Thursday, shortly before 1 p.m., a 16-year-old former student, Griffin J. John II, tossed a 12-gauge pump shotgun over a fence at Silver Rail Elementary, the school he once attended as a special-needs pupil, and blasted through locked glass. Inside a special-needs classroom he fired as many as 15 rounds. Three boys — ages 5, 8 and 11 — and 25-year-old teacher Megan Lambert died at the scene. A 7-year-old girl and 54-year-old teacher Becky Drury were wounded. Officers arrived at 1:02 p.m.; civilians were already stopping the shooting.
The first 911 call came from a driver whose red truck took three hits after he yelled at the boy climbing the fence. Nearby, 36-year-old carpenter Kaylub Giamanco — a lifelong Bend resident with two daughters at the school and a concealed-carry permit — followed the teen inside with a .40-caliber pistol legally stored in his vehicle. A teacher in the classroom threw her phone at the gunman, then tackled him and fought for the shotgun. Giamanco shot the boy several times, killing him; investigators found about 44 unused shells. Governor Tina Kotek ordered flags to half-staff. How a 16-year-old got the pump-action shotgun remains under investigation, as does a motive.
Santa Ana winds shoved the Norte Fire from San Clemente into San Juan Capistrano on Friday, damaging or destroying at least six coastal homes, sending two firefighters to hospital with heat injuries, and putting about 16,000 residents under evacuation orders while the blaze sat at zero percent contained. Separate fires closed Interstate 5 at Camp Pendleton and threatened Malibu; more than 118,000 California customers were without power. On the other coast, AccuWeather warned of a developing coastal storm that could linger off the Carolinas and Mid-Atlantic after Florida’s Atlantic beaches take onshore winds this weekend — a sequel to September’s nor’easter, whose preliminary damage estimate ran $10 billion to $13 billion. In Wichita, a 34-year-old Garden City woman drove a truck through a youth soccer game at Stryker Sports Complex, killing a 6-year-old boy and a 35-year-old man, both from McPherson and unrelated, and injuring 10 others; police said she was cooperative and it was not immediately clear whether the crash was intentional. In Aurora, Illinois, authorities detained 19-year-old Alexandros Paporakis over an alleged plot against the Sri Venkateswara Swami Temple; India asked Washington to protect its nationals. And in Midtown Manhattan, a man died after a non-random shooting on the northbound E platform at West 53rd Street and Seventh Avenue; the gunman was still at large.
Markets & Economy
Philadelphia-area buyers looking for a rate-cut miracle got a colder Redfin memo: even if mortgages fall to 6 percent, housing costs in the metro and in Montgomery County could take at least another decade to return to their August 2018 payment-to-income ratio, a definition of “normal” that still left the median mortgage at 30 percent of income nationally. The brokerage put Philly among slower Northeast and Midwest markets where relatively strong price growth is expected to outrun any cheapening of debt. Nationally, Redfin’s most-cited scenario has the country back to 2018 affordability by November 2031 if rates hit 6 percent and prices rise 2.1 percent a year; the firm stressed these are hypotheticals, not forecasts, which is the economist’s way of saying do not refinance your life on a spreadsheet. Michigan, meanwhile, posted a seasonally adjusted 5.0 percent jobless rate in September, unchanged, even as employment fell 27,000 and payrolls slipped 6,000 to 4,487,000 — a cooled labor market sitting 0.8 points above the U.S. rate of 4.2 percent.
Health costs are running their own midterm campaign. New Jersey’s Department of Banking and Insurance posted a 19.8 percent weighted average increase for 2027 individual-market premiums, including Get Covered New Jersey plans, with open enrollment from November 1. United Healthcare’s average is 35.7 percent; Oscar’s 29.3; Horizon’s relatively modest 15.3. Officials blamed medical and drug inflation plus the expiration of enhanced federal premium tax credits, and noted the department cannot reject the filings. Governor Mikie Sherrill called it an affordability crisis Washington made worse. Ohio took the opposite tack on the ledger: Governor Mike DeWine and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz announced $92 million in Rural Health Transformation awards — $31.4 million for clinically integrated networks, $30.3 million for maternal care, and $30.3 million in one-time grants to 22 rural hospitals — on top of more than $200 million Ohio already received in the federal program.
And then there is the fashion billionaire buying the office tower that American landlords could not quite quit. Amancio Ortega’s Pontegadea paid about $550 million for Chicago’s 51-storey One North Wacker, 94 percent leased to PwC, UBS and Fitch, assuming a $353 million 2021 CMBS loan. It is the city’s largest outright office sale since the Aon Center’s $712 million deal in 2015, a vote of confidence in a market that has spent years being told nobody needs a desk.
Technology & Industry
California tenants who cannot put a rooftop array on someone else’s building got a smaller, legally tidier option. Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 868, the Plug and Play Solar Act, on September 30; from January 1, 2027, certified portable solar devices up to 1,200 watts of AC output per dwelling can plug into a wall without utility interconnection approval. California becomes the 10th state to legalize balcony systems after Utah in 2025. Utilities may demand a simple online registration, not a permission slip, and the interconnection holiday sunsets January 1, 2030 unless the Legislature extends it. Environmental Working Group, a sponsor, says a 400-watt kit might cover about 14 percent of a typical apartment’s use and save about $250 a year — estimates, not California field data, which the law itself does not yet have.
Data centers, the other solar of this decade, are meeting a less welcoming reception. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sent letters to 156 developments in 32 counties, including Dallas-Fort Worth, demanding water-use figures that some operators never returned to the Texas Water Development Board; failing the survey is a Class C misdemeanor and can kill board funding and certain water-right permits. Governor Greg Abbott had already told the board on September 14 to enforce the law. In Virginia, lawmakers are stacking moratorium bills ahead of the January 13 session, including a three-year statewide freeze from July 2027 to July 2030, while Dominion Energy reports about 25,000 megawatts already assigned to queued projects and another 75,000 without energization dates. The Data Center Coalition counters that the industry has invested $80.56 billion in Virginia and generated $5.34 billion in state and local taxes — the sort of round numbers that sound like a jobs program until the electric bill arrives.
The week’s other technology stories were less about kilowatts than about who holds the data. Florida’s highway department said an international cybercriminal used compromised credentials on September 4 to reach driver-license records, vehicle data and document images; the agency said it has no evidence of misuse and will offer a year of credit monitoring. Temu, sued by Texas over data flowing to China and products with harmful chemicals, agreed on October 16 to a $3 million settlement, U.S.-owned servers for Texas customers, annual safety testing, and potential $8 million yearly fines for failed audits. Florida, meanwhile, won a 3-0 11th Circuit ruling that its 2024 ban on social-media accounts for children under 14 — parental consent at 14 and 15 — is likely content-neutral enough to survive, sending the fight back to Tallahassee. In Round Rock, Zipline’s delivery drones now hover more than 300 feet up and lower cinnamon rolls on a tether, with Austin promised later this year. The future, it turns out, still smells like a mall food court.
Politics & Policy
Chicago is about to elect all 20 members of its school board plus a citywide president on November 3, the first fully elected board, and the money is arriving from the suburbs with the subtlety of a snowplow. A Sun-Times/WBEZ analysis of filings from October 1, 2025, through October 15, 2026, found wealthy, often suburban donors’ groups have outraised the Chicago Teachers Union 5 to 1 and outspent it nearly 3 to 1. Super PACs and PACs have spent about $8.1 million; more than a quarter has gone to opposing Hilario Dominguez, the CTU’s choice for president. Common Ground Collective, fueled by billionaire Michael Sacks’s $5.5 million, has spent the most. Candidates themselves have raised $5.9 million. Dominguez’s line, delivered with the weariness of a man watching ad buys he cannot match: “we didn’t go from mayoral control to go to billionaire control.”
Nationally, the same midterm arithmetic is being written in even larger checks. Elon Musk injected $158 million into the Texas U.S. Senate race via two donations to the Senate Leadership Fund, the GOP’s main super PAC, after Republican Ken Paxton had been outspent for months by Democrat James Talarico; campaign-finance reports filed October 15 showed Musk as the force behind nearly $190 million into the contest in his adopted state. In California, independent groups have already poured more than $100 million into legislative races, eclipsing 2024, with new tech-backed PACs Grow California (more than $20 million) and California Leads, funded by Meta and Google (close to $14 million), dominating. Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies, including in Evanston and Chicago’s Edgewater, tried a different currency: early votes. Illinois early voting is underway for the November 3 election; a White House spokeswoman suggested the organizers should change their name.
Puerto Rico’s government took a more formal route. Governor Jenniffer González signed House Joint Resolution 391 on Friday, an official application to President Trump and Congress for admission as a state — a different mechanism, she said, from reporting non-binding plebiscites. Her New Progressive Party backs annexation; the Popular Democratic Party and Independence Party do not. Congress, as ever, gets to decide whether the 51st star is a midterm talking point or an actual flag.
Human Stories / Social Trends
The Bend memorial kept growing Saturday: balloons, flowers, and parents who could not answer the question a first-grader put to Savannah Patton — “Mommy, why would someone want to take a gun and kill us at school?” The 7-year-old survivor, Saylor Graham, who has a CASK-related genetic disorder, uses a wheelchair and is largely nonverbal, was in a Portland hospital; a GoFundMe for her family had raised almost $400,000. Teacher Becky Drury hoped to go home soon with wounds to her arm and hand. Lambert, 25, had been a volleyball coach who declined her first-year coaching pay so it could fund scholarships. Heidi Wood, her club director, said the shooter “didn’t give her a chance.” Giamanco’s family said he is not seeking recognition and regrets not saving more lives. Courage, in this telling, is a carpenter with a legal pistol and a teacher willing to throw a phone.
Minnesota’s Department of Human Rights found probable cause that two businesses discriminated by refusing valid Tribal identification: Wings Financial Credit Union in Coon Rapids, which would not let a Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate customer fully access her account, and The Office Pub and Grill in Minneapolis, which three times refused a Red Lake Nation card as proof of age. Commissioner Rebecca Lucero noted that if a Minnesota ID is acceptable, a Tribal ID is too — a sentence that should not require a civil-rights investigation, and yet.
Two quieter stories closed the week. Oakland’s White Horse Inn, widely called the oldest continuously operating gay bar in the United States since 1933, sits in a building listed for $2.5 million; owner Patty Dingle’s lease runs through 2029, which is both a reprieve and a countdown. And a PNAS study of 10,317 members of Wisconsin’s high school class of 1957 found childhood exposure to fluoridated water was not linked to lower IQ at 16 or weaker thinking skills from ages 53 to 80, once family background was accounted for. Utah and Florida ended community fluoridation in 2025. The authors and outside scientists stressed the limits: exposure was inferred from addresses, prenatal doses were largely missed, and one cohort is not a closing argument. It is, however, a reminder that some of the loudest public-health fights are being litigated with data collected when those 1957 graduates were still buying soda at the hop.
This daily edition uses stored reporting scoped by publication date, or arrival when publication was absent. Source collection can lag publication.