Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America. Please take a moment to click the ❤️ and restack this post. The oligarchs’ platforms are trying to keep stories like the ones below from hitting your feeds, and this helps us break through.
Trump told a rally crowd in Ohio that he could be the last Republican president if Democrats win the next two elections. His administration is moving to exclude millions of legal noncitizens from the 2030 census. CVS has agreed to pay $315 million to resolve a federal lawsuit alleging it filled opioid prescriptions it knew were not legitimate. And a government watchdog found that federal agencies sold lab equipment to resellers without evaluating whether it could be used to create biological weapons.
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Donald Trump said at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, that he would be the last Republican president if Democrats took Congress and the White House in 2026 and 2028. He said Democrats would use their power to add new states, expand the Supreme Court, and permanently restructure the electoral map to their advantage.
“I will be the last Republican president because they will add about 12 more electoral votes,” Trump said. “They’ll add four more senators. They’ll add 10 more congresspeople, approximately.”
Trump also claimed that Democrats want to expand the Supreme Court to 23 justices, although no Democratic leader has proposed more than 13. Several Democratic leaders, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, have sought court expansion and Electoral College reform in response to Trump’s appointment of three conservative justices during his first term.
Trump was in Ohio to campaign for Sen. Jon Husted and gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who are in surprisingly tight races in a state the president has won three times. Recent polls show both candidates either trailing or in a dead heat with their Democratic opponents.
Trump also endorsed Rep. Max Miller at the same event, who has been accused of abusing his ex-wife and their young daughter. Trump’s only response to the matter was to thank him for coming.
The Trump administration has found a way to make America’s population smaller without actually deporting anyone.
Officials are finalizing a rule that would exclude millions of people without green cards from the 2030 census. The change would impact even those here legally, including those on student visas, people with Temporary Protected Status, asylum seekers, and refugees.
The proposed rule would also eliminate all questions on race and ethnicity from the census questionnaire. That data is used to enforce the Voting Rights Act, to draw majority-minority districts for Congress and to determine eligibility for federal health and education programs.
The census determines how congressional districts are drawn and how federal money for education, health care, and food assistance is distributed. States with the largest noncitizen populations could lose congressional seats and billions in federal funding.
The rule is certainly in violation of the 14th Amendment, which requires that everyone in the United States be counted, regardless of whether they are a citizen or not. Trump tried a similar scheme in his first term for the 2020 census, and it was blocked by federal courts.
The proposed rule was posted to the Federal Register last month and the public comment period closes on November 2, one day before Election Day.
If you ever wanted to build a bioweapon, the federal government is practically giving away the supplies.
Federal agencies sold off more than 1,300 pieces of lab equipment without determining if any could be used to make biological weapons, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. Nine of the sold items, including freeze dryers and mass spectrometers, are subject to federal export controls.
Freeze dryers can be used to preserve dangerous pathogens like anthrax in a stable, powdered form that is easier to store and spread as a weapon. Mass spectrometers can be used to identify and analyze biological agents, giving someone the tools to test and refine them.
HHS and the USDA didn’t inform anyone that the items were export controlled before putting them up for sale, violating federal regulations. The GAO found that no one had a system to flag them because no one had ever written a rule requiring one.
GAO investigators then created false identities and a false nonprofit and used them to buy four pieces of lab equipment that experts said could pose a biosecurity risk. Neither agency asked who they were or what they were going to do with the equipment.
Experts told the committee that 16 other items sold by the agencies could have been biosecurity risks, but were not classified on the Commerce Control List. Rep. Brett Guthrie, the committee’s chair, said AI and synthetic biology have already made it easier for hostile actors to access dangerous research, and selling them the equipment to go with it makes the problem worse.
The pharmacy that locks shampoo in a glass case apparently had no questions about opioid prescriptions.
CVS Pharmacy will pay $315 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit for dispensing medically unnecessary prescriptions of highly addictive opioids. The lawsuit, filed in 2024 during the Biden administration, alleged that CVS distributed huge amounts of controlled substances to boost its own profits at the expense of public health.
Federal officials said CVS pharmacists dispensed prescriptions from known pill mills without establishing the legitimacy of the prescriptions. Understaffing and performance-based compensation incentives led pharmacists to rush through prescriptions, many of which were billed to Medicaid and other federal health programs, according to the lawsuit.
CVS will also need to take further steps to ensure that opioid prescriptions are dispensed only when medically appropriate. The company has denied any wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
Drugmakers, wholesalers, and pharmacies have agreed to pay over $50 billion in opioid-related settlements to U.S. governments over the past decade. The crisis has been associated with more than 100,000 deaths in some years, although numbers have fallen recently.
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Democratic Congresswoman Introduces Bill to Dismantle the DHS. Rep. Delia Ramirez of Illinois introduced legislation Tuesday that would do away with DHS altogether, including ICE and Customs and Border Protection. The bill, named the Reimagining Safety Act, would abolish immigration detention, require congressional approval for all deportations, and replace DHS with a new Department of Community Safety. It comes a day after DHS agents raided the home of her colleague, Rep. Ilhan Omar, in what critics have called political intimidation as part of an investigation. At least 58 people have died in immigration custody since Trump returned to office, the ACLU said.
New York City Reaches Deal to Ban Horse-Drawn Carriages in Central Park. Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin on Tuesday announced a deal to eliminate the city’s horse-drawn carriage business, starting in June 2028. The bill already has the support of more than half the Council’s 51 members, and Menin said a full vote is scheduled for Oct. 22. More than a decade of efforts to ban the carriages have failed, mostly due to opposition from the Transport Workers Union, which represents hundreds of carriage drivers. The deal gained momentum over the summer after 18-year-old tourist Romanch Mahajan died when he jumped from a carriage to save his mother as a horse broke into an uncontrolled gallop.
Character.AI Files for Bankruptcy After Lawsuits Alleging It Pushed Children to Suicide. Character.AI, the AI chatbot platform with about 12 million users, filed for bankruptcy Monday and agreed to sell some of its intellectual property to Walt Disney for $20 million. The company said it hopes to use the bankruptcy to settle all legal claims against it. It has been losing more than $8 million a month. Pennsylvania has alleged that its chatbots pretended to be doctors, while Kentucky accused its chatbots of encouraging users to cut, starve or kill themselves. The platform will remain operational during the bankruptcy but may be permanently closed if no buyer is found for the entire business.
Colorado Mountain Honoring Architect of 1864 Massacre Renamed Mount Blue Sky. A prominent Colorado peak that had honored the territorial governor who ordered the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre has been renamed by the U.S. Board of Geographic Names. The mountain will now be known as Mount Blue Sky, a name that honors the cultures of local Indigenous peoples and the ancestors who were killed in the massacre. In that attack, U.S. soldiers killed more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho people, most of them women, children and elders. The push to rename has been led by the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes for several years, who have garnered the support of local officials, including Gov. Jared Polis. An act of Congress is still required to change the name of the surrounding wilderness area, which still carries the old name.