Talarico casts himself as a moderate who would put Texans’ needs over party allegiances amid close contest against Republican Ken Paxton

James Talarico, the Texas Democratic nominee for Senate, sat face to face with skeptical Republicans and independents voters who grilled him on a slew of contentious issues including Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, abortion and foreign aid, during a CNN town hall co-hosted by the Jubilee Media digital platform on Wednesday.

One voter, a young Republican activist who volunteered at the party’s midterm convention in Dallas last month and recently appeared on Fox News as a supporter of Talarico’s opponent, questioned the authenticity of Talarico’s faith, referencing a past remark where he described God as nonbinary.

Exclusive: Israel has not permitted US-led project to house 150 international troops to move forward

Israel is refusing to allow a key military outpost project for Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to proceed in Gaza, the Guardian has learned.

In early August, the Board of Peace, the international organization authorized in 2025 by the UN and chaired by the US president, issued its first construction contract for Gaza: Louisiana-based Arkel International would construct a military outpost for 150 international troops that would be the vanguard of an international stabilization force.

Washington is pressing the victim, not the aggressor, a Ukrainian diplomat says. President Donald Trump is using the threat of cutting military aid and intelligence as a tool to pressure Ukraine, while failing to apply enough pressure on Russia to stop the war, says Oleksandr Khara, executive director of the Center for Defense Strategies, Espreso reports.

Ukraine’s drones and air defense still lean on US satellite intelligence and weapons, which gives Trump room to squeeze Kyiv rather than Moscow. Khara argues Trump wants to end the war on Ukraine’s and Europe’s account to restore normal relations with Russian ruler Vladimir Putin, treating Ukraine as the weak link to be pushed.

“Trump wants to use restrictions, levers of influence on Ukraine to achieve his goal. To end or stop this war at any cost, at the expense of Ukraine and Europe, to restore normal relations with Putin,” Khara said.

Using American aid as leverage over Kyiv is not new for Trump, the diplomat noted, recalling earlier instances in which support was blocked or suspended.

The pressure points Trump picks, and the ones he leaves alone

Trump wants a visible success in ending the war, Khara says, partly against the backdrop of US domestic politics. He has economic tools to press Moscow but is in no hurry to use them, and his administration is instead gradually loosening sanctions on Russia.

“He doesn’t want to pressure Russia. He thinks Ukraine is the weak link and that it needs to be pushed,” Khara stressed.

Ukraine’s dependence on US support has fallen thanks to European partners, he added, so Kyiv has more room to keep fighting even as European states keep buying American weapons for it.

The one trade Kyiv might accept, and the pressure until then

An energy ceasefire is possible only on strict terms, Khara believes. Kyiv could agree to stop striking Russian refineries only if Moscow halts attacks on Ukraine’s power generation and transmission, heating, and the Black Sea ports and the ships heading to them.

Until such a deal exists, Ukraine must hit harder, he argued, because steadily draining Russia’s economic resources is what could force the Kremlin to reconsider.

“As long as there is no such agreement, and no desire from Russia, we must increase this pressure and destroy as much of their energy infrastructure as possible,” Khara said.

One of Ukraine’s most prominent drone volunteers, Serhii Sternenko, says that Starlink terminals have been restricted overnight, with connectivity beginning to drop out at speeds exceeding 160 km/h. As a result, several critical missions were disrupted.

Sternenko heads a charitable foundation that has purchased 291,502 FPV drones, which have helped the Ukrainian military shoot down more than 12,954 aerial targets. He has also served as an adviser within the team of former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

Sternenko suggests that SpaceX may have introduced the restrictions at the request of the Trump administration. He adds that Ukraine had refrained from striking Russian oil refineries and energy infrastructure in recent days, as Trump had requested.

“But Trump was looking for any opportunity to undermine our defense capabilities, and he did so despite the fact that we had complied with his demands,” Sternenko says.

The limit landed the same night Russian ballistic missiles struck Kyiv’s Desnianskyi district, killing three women and injuring 24, including a seven-year-old girl.

Rescuers evacuated people covered in blood

The strike on a nine-story residential building set it ablaze, burning out apartments from the first floor to the ninth, with rescuers pulling bloodied residents from the flames and leaving survivors without power, water, or gas, according to Suspilne.

During the night’s first ballistic launches, partners did not alert Ukraine, but for the three later waves the warnings did come through, Air Force communications chief Yurii Ihnat says. The cause of the first lapse is still being established, per Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

The early warnings help Ukrainian civilians quickly find a place to hide from such strikes, leaving up to 3 minutes to do so. Without it, people are left entirely helpless in the face of the aggression.

Further Starlink restrictions have reportedly been introduced

Later, Sternenko wrote that reports were "coming in from military personnel that restrictions on the use of Starlink satellite communications terminals for our operations have just been tightened.

"The speed at which the connection starts dropping out is now 60–70 km/h,” he added.

Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine’s president from 2005 to 2010, has written an open letter to US President Donald Trump and posted it on Facebook on 14 October. Without naming it, the letter takes aim at the green light Washington gave Russian diesel trade five days earlier, after a call between Trump and Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.

Russia banned its diesel exports in July amid a fuel crisis at home, after Ukrainian strikes on refineries had already cut those exports, and last week’s US waiver and the supply deal Trump announced with Moscow would put that fuel back on world markets while Russian strikes still kill Ukrainian civilians.

What Yushchenko says Russian fuel buys

Yushchenko wrote that Russian ballistic missiles, Iranian Shahed drones, and aerial bombs strike homes every day and night in Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, Dnipro, and Kharkiv. Whenever there is talk of “concessions” or deals with Putin, he wrote, the Kremlin answers with more missiles, more drones, and more bloodshed.

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Trump’s Russian diesel deal, which drew fury in Ukraine, is unlikely to lower prices, experts say

Yushchenko rejected calls for Ukraine to “restrain its strikes against the infrastructure that finances and sustains Russia’s war.”

“Money paid for Russian fuel is not an abstraction called ‘commerce.’ It finances an economy geared toward total war,” he wrote.

Nuclear arms, Pearl Harbor, and Iwo Jima

Yushchenko wrote that Ukraine inherited “one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world” and agreed to give it up, trusting the words and signatures of great powers. In his view, by signing the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, America took on a moral responsibility toward Ukraine.

He compared trade in Russian energy to America’s trade with Imperial Japan, which included strategically important materials, before the US entered World War II. Washington hoped for years to avoid a wider war in the Pacific, he wrote, but economic pressure and diplomacy could not prevent catastrophe.

Explore further

Ukraine warns of “a new type of humanitarian crisis” as Russia aims at its biggest cities

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. America knows how dangerous it is to believe that trade can tame an aggressor, Yushchenko wrote, adding: “History taught us that lesson at a terrible price.”

He also named two men he called Ukrainian. One was Sergeant Michael Strank, whose family, Yushchenko wrote, came from Lemkivshchyna. The son of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, Strank took part in the famous raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima, according to the Marine Corps. The other was Oleksandr Silvashko, “a Ukrainian boy from the Cherkasy region,” who, Yushchenko wrote, was the first to embrace US Lieutenant William Robertson when American and Soviet forces met at the Elbe in April 1945.

“One does not negotiate with tyrants—one stops them,” Yushchenko concluded.

Tom Cruise’s latest film could lose $250m (£190m) – could one reason be that audiences are tired of Hollywood telling them what they already know about the super-rich?

It seems as if nobody can decide who should shoulder most of the blame for the recent box office flop of Digger.

Was it the ousted Warner Bros film executives Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, whose love of big-budget auteur cinema usually came with a hefty price tag? Or was it the marketing team, who were responsible for hiding the movie’s biggest swing from all trailers, ensuring many viewers would be left alienated from its early meta-reveal onwards?

Final inflation report before voters go to polls comes amid widespread anger over cost of living under Trump

• Send us your questions on how the US economy is shaping the midterm elections

Republicans are entering the midterm elections with the highest rate of inflation since the spring, according to a government report released on Wednesday.

US price increases reached an annual rate of 3.7% in September, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 3.4% in August. This final inflation report before the pivotal midterm elections comes amid polls showing widespread dissatisfaction with the Trump administration over the cost of living.

Texas AG and US Senate hopeful announced inquiry into alleged conspiracy between pediatricians, vaccine makers and insurance firms

Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas and the Republican candidate for the US Senate, is aligning himself with the Make America Healthy Again (Maha) movement by investigating pediatricians for giving vaccines – actions that could further restrict access to vaccines as deadly outbreaks unfold.

Paxton announced he would investigate an alleged conspiracy between pediatricians, vaccine makers and insurance companies in January, and at least one Texas pediatrician now says she is under investigation. Paxton linked his efforts to a campaign against vaccines from Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and directly referenced the Maha movement in his announcement. The president endorsed Paxton’s Senate run in May.

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Donald Trump has yet to weigh in on the late night ruling from a federal judge that blocks him from barring CNN, MS Now and Politico access to the White House grounds.

Previously, the president had blasted Judge Timothy Kelly – a Trump appointee – for issuing a temporary pause on his media ban. That expired on Tuesday, and Kelly handed down a preliminary injunction that stops the administration from blocking the outlets while the litigation plays out.

The raid is meant to cast an air of suspicion and criminality over Democratic candidates who, like Omar, are facing the voters in a matter of weeks

On Monday, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided the Washington DC area home of Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota congresswoman and a progressive Democrat, in the latest instance of Donald Trump’s effort to weaponize the national security state to harass, punish and embarrass his political opponents.

The raid, which was approved by a judge after a reportedly extensive back-and-forth with federal security officials, was nominally carried out in connection with a spurious criminal investigation into Omar’s childhood immigration to the US.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

Sabrina German, a poll official in Chatham county, details a typical election day, the pressure election workers face, and fallout from 2020 disputes

It’s not that Sabrina German doesn’t have political views. But as the director of voter registration for Chatham county, Georgia, talking politics is like breakdancing in traffic. “I don’t talk politics with anyone,” says German; she knows better.

America’s partisan minefield has trained much of the country – aside from that one uncle you avoid at weddings and funerals – to get pretty good at the art of political diplomacy in polite company.

In this episode of Guardian Australia’s US politics podcast, co-hosts Reged Ahmad and Jonathan Yerushalmy take a look at the midterms, which are coming up in early November. All 435 house seats are up in this election as representatives only serve fixed two-year terms. In the Senate, 35 of 100 seats are up for grabs too, as senators serve six-year terms.

There are many predictions of a blue wave – a big win for the Democrats, who are tipped to take back the House and Senate. But are pollsters being too optimistic? What are the factors that could instead allow the Republican party and the Trump administration to hold onto power in Congress? They also look at why the US ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, has been ousted from her job – and whether criticism of the new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, is fair

• Abdul El-Sayed: Democrats must ‘win by massive numbers’ to fend off Trump election denial

• Federal judge orders temporary halt to taxpayer-funded pro-Trump TV ads

Republican senator Dan S Sullivan is vying for re-election against Democrat Mary Peltola – and another candidate called Dan J Sullivan

Donald Trump has encouraged Alaskans to vote for the “real” Dan Sullivan, as he sought a breakthrough for the Republican incumbent senator in a tightly fought Senate race complicated by a rival candidate with a near-identical name.

Sullivan’s re-election campaign this year against Democrat Mary Peltola, a former US House lawmaker, has turned into one of the most hotly contested battles of the midterm elections, in which Democrats are hoping to seize back control of Congress and hamper Trump for the final two years of his presidency.

District court judge Timothy Kelly was ruling after Trump administration blocked access to three outlets last month

A federal judge ordered the White House on Tuesday to continue allowing journalists from CNN, MS Now and Politico to access the building as the media coalition’s lawsuit against the Trump administration plays out.

Timothy Kelly, a district court judge, had on 24 September granted a 14-day reprieve for the news organizations, which six days earlier had been banned by the president in an extraordinary move from entering the White House grounds “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS”.