From Havana to Bend, states face old scores, new power and a midterm sprint

World & Security

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier used a Miami press conference to do what three decades of federal caution never quite managed: put Raúl Castro on a state arrest warrant. The charge is conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in the February 24, 1996, shootdown of two unarmed Brothers to the Rescue aircraft over the Straits of Florida, killing Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre Jr., Mario de la Peña and Pablo Morales. Uthmeier, joined by U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones and Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz, called it murder rather than accident and said spies had infiltrated the Miami humanitarian group. Castro, 95 and retired in Havana, was already under a federal indictment from May. A Florida warrant will not collect him from Vedado, but it is a pointed gift to families who have waited since the Clinton years.

Mexico demanded a full investigation after Emiliano Andrade-Covarrubias, a 56-year-old Mexican lawful permanent resident from Dallas, was found unconscious in his bed at the Rio Grande Processing Center in Laredo and declared dead about 20 minutes later. He had been in ICE detention since June; the agency said the cause was still unknown, while his daughter said he had been denied medicine. Mexico City has already taken U.S. legal action over at least 17 Mexican nationals who died in ICE custody or during enforcement. In Long Beach, videos showed Ricardo Gonzalez, a U.S. citizen and former city employee, handcuffed and bleeding as agents knelt on his back. Rep. Robert Garcia said agents broke Gonzalez’s arm after, according to his daughter, an unmarked vehicle struck him on an e-bike and he was tased twice. ICE and DHS did not immediately comment.

In Bend, Oregon, 16-year-old former student Griffin J. John II scaled a fence at Silver Rail Elementary with a pump-action shotgun, shattered locked glass doors and fired as many as 15 rounds in a special-education classroom, killing teacher Megan Lambert, 25, and three children aged 5, 8 and 11. A driver in a red truck was shot at and called 911; a teacher threw her phone at the gunman and tackled him; carpenter Kaylub Giamanco, 36, whose daughters attend the school, crawled through the glass with a legally stored pistol and killed the attacker. Police Chief Mike Krantz called that civilian courage “incredible.” In Maricopa County, prosecutors charged Matthew Bjornholt, 27, with making a terrorist threat, alleging a plot against a Jewish or Muslim house of worship; his lawyer said the FBI had already searched, found no bomb-making materials, and declined federal charges. The judge set bond at $100,000 anyway.

Markets & Economy

Amazon is shopping for electrons the old-fashioned way, if “old-fashioned” now means 12 small modular reactors that have never run commercially. With American Electric Power and X-energy, it is evaluating a 960-megawatt plant of twelve 80-MW Xe-100 units at the former Breed Generating Station in Sullivan County, Indiana—a development commitment, not a groundbreaking, with no public construction date, budget or commercial-operation target. Amazon would fund development and buy the power; AEP would operate; the plant would feed both the grid and Amazon data centers. X-energy’s first planned U.S. deployment, at Dow’s Seadrift site in Texas, has not broken ground. In Texas itself, Governor Greg Abbott’s September 21 call to “halt all permits sought by data centers” is looking leaky: Public Citizen and FracTracker Alliance say TCEQ has kept working permits, including expedited October filings for gas plants, while Abbott’s office insists “no permits have been approved.” Three hundred data centers already operate in the state, with 100 under construction and 200 more planned.

Pennsylvanians are being offered cash to smile through the server farms. At Eagle Rock Resort in Hazle Township, NorthPoint Development’s letters promise $10,000 to each of about 4,500 households once the first building opens, part of a $165 million package. Retiree Ed Negra calls it a bribe; a court-ordered halt and municipal moratorium have idled the machines on more than 500 hectares of cleared forest. Local opposition blocked or delayed at least 75 U.S. data-center projects in the first quarter of 2026, according to Data Center Watch. Philadelphia is taking a different bet: Hyundai Glovis signed an MOU with PhilaPort to expand finished-vehicle terminals, extend a site contract through 2056, and grow storage toward 37,600 vehicles. GSK is separately putting more than $800 million into a biopharma hub in Upper Merion Township, with construction planned for 2027 and more than 300 jobs—its second $800 million Pennsylvania expansion since 2024.

Wisconsin closed fiscal 2026 with a $3.3 billion General Fund balance, about $350 million above estimates, and a record $2.1 billion rainy-day fund, Governor Tony Evers announced, claiming seven straight years of record checking-account balances. Tax collections rose 3.4 percent. Maine’s heating-oil story is less festive: the average gallon sits at $5.97, 80 percent above $3.31 a year earlier, or an extra $731.50 to fill a 275-gallon tank. Washington released about $37 million in low-income heating aid, plus $1.4 million for Maine’s four federally recognized tribes. The Midwest can bank a surplus. New England is still writing checks to the oil truck.

Technology & Industry

A single compromised login did what years of classroom testing never quite intended: copy the files of millions of California public-school students. Educational Testing Service, the state’s assessment contractor, says an unauthorized party used stolen credentials to reach an ETS-operated SFTP site between May 22 and September 18. The California Department of Education says the breach covers all students enrolled in the previous three school years (and is not limited to that group); more than 5.7 million were enrolled in 2025–26 alone. Files may include names, statewide student IDs, birth dates, home addresses, demographics, disability and program data, and test scores. Social Security numbers, financial accounts, passwords and parent information were not involved, officials say, and ETS reports no evidence the files have been posted publicly. Notifications began October 16 with two years of identity-protection coverage. Families are being told, in 27 languages, not to take the phishing bait that always follows a school-records dump.

Florida’s version of the same lesson arrived via a Plant City Police Department employee who stored FLHSMV login credentials on a personal device. A criminal actor used them on September 4 to reach driver-license and motor-vehicle records, including document images. The department says it has found no evidence of misuse, reset the credentials, and is offering a year of Sontiq monitoring; former residents may never get a letter. Outside analysts have linked the intrusion to ShinyHunters; FLHSMV will only say an “international cybercriminal organization.” One police laptop, statewide identity file: the ratio is not comforting. Over San Francisco Bay, Archer Aviation flew its Midnight prototype three times from Oakland International, about 20 minutes a hop, as part of a “No Roads” tour covering more than 200 miles at up to 131 mph. The preproduction aircraft cannot yet transition from vertical to wingborne flight—the trick that makes an air taxi more than a noisy helicopter with a press kit—but Archer still wants passenger service around the 2028 Olympics. In Missouri, Attorney General Catherine Hanaway told prediction-market firms to stop offering sports event contracts or get a gambling license; Novig and Crypto.com sued in federal court, arguing CFTC exclusive jurisdiction. Missouri voters legalized sports betting in 2024 and tax it at 10 percent. Other circuits have split. The Supreme Court has not yet picked a side.

Politics & Policy

Texas opened early voting Monday, running through October 30 toward a November 3 Election Day, with no excuse required for in-person ballots. The Senate race is the one national consultants keep refreshing: Democrat James Talarico, a former seminarian and state representative, has been reported narrowly ahead of Attorney General Ken Paxton—a CBS News poll put it at 51 percent to 49 percent—after Elon Musk’s orbit poured $158 million into what one outlet called a “Texas rescue mission,” on top of a $10 million August gift. Talarico’s campaign said it raised $64 million in three months and $134 million overall; Paxton raised $18 million in the latest quarter. Trump endorsed Paxton over incumbent John Cornyn; Paxton was impeached by the Republican Texas House in 2023 and acquitted in the Senate. Early voting is the first real test of whether a seminary cadence beats a super PAC.

California became the other federal election laboratory. Justice Department officials announced a statewide sweep, Operation Protect the Vote, arresting more than two dozen lawful permanent residents charged with illegally registering and voting. Before Monday the department had charged about 90 people this year for election misconduct, including 50 alleged noncitizen voters, against more than 227 million registered voters in 2024. Washington also sued California over mail ballots and, after the state did not meet a 48-hour deadline to review a thumb drive of 20,000 names, warned election workers that knowingly tabulating ballots from people federal agencies flag as noncitizens could mean aiding a federal crime. Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan said the assertions should be tested in court, with Election Day 18 days away.

Elsewhere the tickets themselves wobbled. In Massachusetts, Republican lieutenant governor nominee Shawn Oliver, a 42-year-old New Bedford city councilor, suspended his campaign after a Saturday night rollover that struck five parked cars; police charged him with OUI, negligent operation, a marked-lanes violation and speeding. Gubernatorial nominee Mike Minogue asked him to stand down and later said that if elected he would govern without a lieutenant governor. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy—cleared of a crowded primary by a same-day Trump endorsement—is polling behind Democrat Amy Acton, a former state health director. Ramaswamy and allies have run $101 million in ads, $36 million of it his own; Acton’s side has spent about a third as much. In Georgia, Barack Obama will headline an October 28 Atlanta rally for Senator Jon Ossoff and gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms, who would be the first Black woman governor in U.S. history if she beats Republican Rick Jackson. The midterms are no longer a vibe. They are a calendar.

Human Stories / Social Trends

The Bend attack lasted a few minutes and will last much longer for the people inside it. Linda Sanchez’s first-grader was in the bathroom with a teacher when the shotgun started; they hid under a table in a nearby office. Giamanco called his mother afterward. Lambert, a 2023 Boise State graduate who had just landed a permanent job, had waived her volleyball-coach salary so lower-income children could play. The district cancelled classes for grief counseling. Armed civilians who stop an attack remain uncommon in the research Bend police cited; uncommon is not the same as theoretical when the classroom is on the left of the main doors.

Pennsylvania’s health department issued an alert on congenital measles—infection in pregnancy or newborns—that the state says had not been seen for decades. As of October 19, Pennsylvania had 1,286 measles cases in 42 counties, 247 hospitalizations, and six reported deaths, with the latest still under investigation before it is added to the official tally. Many clinicians have never managed measles in pregnancy. Vaccination rates have slipped; the virus has not. Chicago’s weekend was quieter only if you were not a thrush. More than five million migratory birds passed through Cook County on Friday night; volunteers with Chicago Bird Collision Monitors collected over 1,000 dead or injured birds on Saturday, and the DuPage Wildlife Conservation Center took in more than 250. Advocates want a bird-safe-glass ordinance of the sort New York, San Francisco and Washington already have. In Maine, Haley and Michael Walcott of Bucksport found a “for sale” sign on the nearly three-acre Bar Harbor lot where they were married. A scammer impersonating Michael had emailed brokers; two agents listed it and later paid $4,000 fines each for failing to confirm the owner. A legislative commission called deed fraud a growing national problem; a bill to require identity checks died in March. The Walcotts still have the land. They also have a new appreciation for how lightly a home can sit on a piece of paper.