Trump commercials paid for by the US government continued airing on TV the day after a judge blocked the ads because they likely violate a US law against government-funded publicity or propaganda.

In the most widely aired commercial, Trump railed against his perceived enemies and said he would "liberate America from these villains once and for all.” The campaign also included a commercial praising Trump's record as president, another in which Trump calls the US the "most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history," and commercials related to the Iran war and the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

US District Judge Jennifer Rochon issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking the ads on Sunday, October 11, which took effect at 6:45 pm that night. The order said the government must cancel the ads, "including those placements for the evening of October 11, 2026."

The Trump administration had told the court on October 10 that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) advertising purchases were set to expire on October 11 and would not be renewed. Despite that, the ads continued airing the night of October 11 and on part of October 12. This was also a week after Trump's October 5 statement that he would start paying for the ads "myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc."

A US attorney yesterday filed a status report saying that the government is now complying with the order and issued an apology. "As Your Honor is aware, the Court emailed the TRO to the parties yesterday at 6:46 p.m.," US Attorney Jamie McDonald wrote in a filing. "Counsel for the Government emailed the TRO to agency counsel at 7:58 p.m. Agency counsel did not become aware of Government counsel’s email until this morning. The undersigned apologizes to the Court and the plaintiffs."

The ads aired as part of a $20 million purchase order that US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) made on September 20 with LMD Agency, an ad firm. The DHS told the court that the ad placements through October 11 cost $19 million.

Trump admin said ads would stop Sunday

In the previous Trump administration filing opposing the motion for a temporary restraining order, one of the government's arguments was that a court order was unnecessary because the ads would not run past October 11. It said:

DHS issued a purchase order to obtain media services from a vendor in support of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for placing national media buys. The vendor has currently purchased media buys under the terms of the purchase order through tomorrow, October 11, 2026. DHS has directed the vendor not to make any additional media buys past October 11, and DHS has no plans to make any additional media buys under the purchase order or otherwise use appropriated funds on any similar contracts for the creation or distribution of the media that is the subject of this lawsuit. Accordingly, the alleged offending conduct will end tomorrow, and Plaintiffs therefore will suffer no harm, let alone irreparable harm, absent an injunction.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the ads kept running after the restraining order took effect. Nonprofit advocacy group Common Cause and other groups that sued the government submitted a filing later in the day notifying the court of the government's noncompliance.

The Trump ads continued airing on programs including 60 Minutes, ABC World News Tonight, and America’s Funniest Home Videos. They ran nearly 400 times after the restraining order took effect, including 32 times on Monday, according to AdImpact data cited in the plaintiffs' court filing.

"Plaintiffs do not presently seek contempt sanctions," the groups said. "But given that the ads have continued to run on October 12—the day after Defendants insisted the ad-buy was no longer effective—Plaintiffs request a status conference to determine Defendants’ compliance."

Judge: Ads "are purely partisan"

After the government filed its status report, Rochon scheduled a hearing for Wednesday "to discuss this and next steps in this action." The lawsuit is in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The plaintiffs are Common Cause; Robert Hunter, a Democratic candidate for a state legislature seat in Alabama; Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ; and Empire State 32BJ SEIU PAC. Defendants include DHS, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Executive Office of the President.

Rochon found that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their claim that the Trump administration violated the 2026 Consolidated Appropriations Act requirement that no funding may be used "for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by Congress."

"Defendants do not contest that the at-issue advertisements are purely partisan and unconnected to DHS’s official functions," Rochon wrote. "Thus, the Court finds that Moving Plaintiffs are likely to succeed in showing that the advertisements are impermissible 'publicity or propaganda' under Section 718 [of the Consolidated Appropriations Act]."

Trump recycled ad from 2024 campaign

One of the ads "is almost identical to one used during President Trump’s 2024 campaign, other than the fact that its funding disclaimer now identifies the United States government rather than his presidential campaign," Rochon wrote. "It depicts President Trump walking down a hallway while delivering a series of statements about his political adversaries. Among other things, he promises to 'demolish the deep state,' 'drive out the globalists,' 'cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists,' 'throw off the sick political class that hates our country,' and 'rout the fake news media.' This advertisement provides no information about DHS’s official functions."

As of October 8, the ad "had aired approximately 9,679 times, generating an estimated 972 million impressions at an estimated cost exceeding $9.09 million," Rochon wrote. Another $6.3 million was estimated to have been spent on four other government-funded ads challenged in the lawsuit. That's about $15.4 million as of October 8, and more was spent over the next few days.

Rochon found "a clear and substantial likelihood" that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act "because Congress did not appropriate funds for DHS to spend on disseminating the challenged advertisements." Rochon said a restraining order was necessary despite the DHS claim that it had "no plans" to continue running the ads.

"Defendants also have not provided reasonable assurances that OMB will not reapportion funds from another source to continue running similar advertisements," she wrote.

The temporary restraining order is in place for only two weeks, but it can be converted into a preliminary injunction that would keep the ads off the air while litigation continues. Trump, the White House, OMB, and DHS are facing a similar lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee in the federal court in the District of Columbia. A hearing on a motion for a temporary restraining order in that case is scheduled for Thursday.

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The Chicago Sun-Times reports: When Elgin Community College hired Flock Safety to install six surveillance cameras in April 2025, President Peggy Heinrich thought they would "enhance the safety and security of students...." They were supposed to help locate stolen cars and missing people. But Heinrich started to wonder if the cameras were actually making students less safe after seeing news reports that data captured by Flock cameras in Illinois had been shared with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Then in September 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained an Elgin Community College student in a campus parking lot. More than half of students at the far west suburban Chicago campus identify as Latino. Heinrich said enrollment dipped. Students were afraid to come to class. College officials decided the cameras had to go... College officials asked Flock to remove the surveillance cameras "out of an abundance of caution for our students," Heinrich said. But getting the cameras taken down was not as simple as it sounds, especially because Flock retains ownership of the company's equipment.... Surveillance experts say the company is financially incentivized to have as many cameras gathering data as possible even in places that no longer want them, because potential clients are looking for the surveillance network with the greatest reach.... Elgin Community College staff notified Flock in October 2025 that they wanted to cancel their contract and have the cameras taken down. Within a day, Heinrich said, Flock rejected the request and refused to uninstall the equipment on the basis that the company had not breached their agreement. College officials reached out again in December 2025 and said they would pay for the remaining five months of the contract — they just wanted the cameras taken down. "We never received a response back from Flock," Heinrich said. That's when things got weird. Heinrich said Elgin Community College staff began to cover the cameras using black trash bags and zip ties so that they would not be able to capture footage. But workers in an unmarked vehicle, which Heinrich assumed belonged to Flock, repeatedly removed the coverings... This strange dance continued, Heinrich said, until Elgin Community College's contract with Flock expired in April this year and the company uninstalled the cameras for good.

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The Telegraph reports that the nutritional value of fruit and vegetables has fallen by up to 50% since the Sixties, according a new study from researchers at startup studio Deep Science Ventures. The study "found that humans needed to consume twice the number of vegetables to get the same level of minerals such as potassium, magnesium or copper as would have been present in their food 60 years ago." The study found that many crops had lost 20% to 50% of several key nutrients... The decrease in nutrient and vitamin value is thought to be down to declining soil quality and crops being selectively bred for their ability to grow quickly, rather than there being any focus on their health benefits... It raises the prospect that the advice to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, introduced in the UK in 2003, may need to be updated. The report added that people on weight-loss drugs could be most at risk from the lack of nutrients, as the treatments could cause them to consume less food... Nature-friendly farming techniques, such as planting crops that restore nutrients to the soil, could help improve the health benefits of vegetables, according to the researchers. In short, according to Will Summers, a senior associate at the firm, "we've been quietly hollowing out what's inside our food." Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

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Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies "are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event," reports Axios, one that turns "an already wary public further against the technology and its leaders..." These AI company executives "anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water..." the article points out. "Many top AI researchers and executives believe a major incident is inevitable. "OpenAI conducts preparedness exercises where teams discuss and work through a range of potential scenarios," a company spokesperson said. "These scenarios are not treated as inevitable, but are meant to help us prepare for a variety of circumstances." Anthropic declined to comment... Top AI planners assume Democrats, ascendant after the midterms, will move fast to shut down AI but will face significant challenges... The planning involves red-teaming for worst-case scenarios. It focuses mainly on racing to educate members of Congress. Company executives know regulation has no chance of passing right now, but still want to shape the legislation and policies U.S. leaders will turn to after a first catastrophic event.... Many AI industry insiders told Axios they believe a major event will occur in the next six to 12 months. "Even with Democrats in control of the House and Senate, the companies see fractured politics as the norm, including within the Democratic Party."

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For about a decade, the mainstream understanding has been that psychedelics cause chaos in the brain. Brain networks—the stable patterns of communication that handle vision, attention, or our sense of self, and more—loosen and start talking to each other all at once. EEG traces get noisier and more complex. “Think of the networks of the brain as highways,” says Devon Stoliker, a neuroscientist at Monash University. “Under psychedelics, these highways break down into many different directions.”

In a recent Nature study, Stoliker’s team designed an experiment to test whether these directions are truly chaotic and random. Researchers gathered 62 people who had never taken a psychedelic before, gave them 19 milligrams of psilocybin, a common psychedelic found in certain fungi, and scanned their brains. Then, they used AI to analyze the drugged and sober brain scans. What emerged was not exactly chaos.

An uninterrupted trip

Stoliker thinks chaos is not a satisfactory explanation for psychedelics’ effect on the brain. “It never really explained why an individual would have a meaningful experience, why they might have insight, why they might experience clarity, and why these might translate into positive psychological changes,” Stoliker says. To investigate if there are other explanations, he and his colleagues designed a study called PsiConnect.

Volunteers went through the same four-part sequence twice, once sober and once on psilocybin. The sequence included putting participants in four different settings or contexts: eight minutes of lying at rest, a guided meditation, an 11-minute curated music playlist, and finally six minutes of eyes-open video of clouds moving across a sky. Each participant did all four inside an MRI scanner about 80 minutes after dosing, and again on EEG about 150 minutes after.

There were no cognitive tasks researchers routinely go for in brain studies, but there was a purpose behind this omission.

“We wanted ecological validity,” Stoliker says. “We wanted to know what the brain was like when somebody was having an authentic, uninterrupted psychedelic experience. If somebody took a psychedelic in a therapeutic setting, you wouldn't have them completing tasks.” Stoliker also points out that there's evidence that giving someone a task mid-trip pulls them out of the state—a phenomenon researchers sometimes call grounding. “Once you introduce these sorts of tasks, you're actually interrupting the very phenomena you are seeking to measure.” And it worked.

Half of the participants ranked their session among the most meaningful experiences of their lives, and 24 put it in their personal top five. Stolkier and his colleagues started analyzing their brain scan data to find out why.

Blurred boundaries

Measuring global functional connectivity—how much influence each patch of cortex exerts over the rest—the team found that, when participants had their eyes closed, sensory regions lost sway while associative regions gained. “It seems like the brain's ability to construct reality, or imagination, or our associations, our beliefs, our sense of self—these faculties had more dominance over sensory areas,” Stoliker says, stressing that the interpretation is a hypothetical. “This could help explain why people have meaningful, complex imagery experiences, why they have mystical experiences with imagery that is personally relevant to them.”

Another observation the team made was that connections within each brain network weakened, connections between networks strengthened. The brain's modularity, a parameter that describes how cleanly neurons stay sorted into specialist teams, dropped across all four parts of the experimental sequence.

What’s more, researchers found that, when sober, activity in a brain with its eyes shut looked very different from a brain watching a movie. Under psilocybin, that difference nearly evaporated. In the visual network, the gap between eyes-open and eyes-closed connectivity shrank by 85 percent. The results from the EEG session independently confirmed that, with alpha-band activity (normally a marker of the brain gating visual input) reduced by nearly half.

“When somebody takes a psychedelic and they're able to close their eyes and see complex imagery, there seems to be less boundary between the internal and external world than we ordinarily experience,” Stoliker says.

Regardless of these details, the results rather accurately reproduced the chaos in the brain so many researchers claimed psychedelics caused. This chaos, though, turned into order when the team processed their data in a slightly unorthodox way.

Hidden order

Scientists usually do two acts of averaging in a standard brain imaging study. The first is averaging over time. An eight-minute brain scan comprises a few hundred successive images of the whole brain. To understand how two specific regions work together, researchers conventionally average all these images down to a single number describing how well the two regions' activity matched up across the whole eight minutes.

The problem with this analysis is that it runs the risk of missing ordered structures that appear for a brief period and then disappear into chaos.

The second analysis is averaging over people. Having produced one such number per participant, the standard approach then pools all of them into a group average, on the assumption that individual differences are noise that will be canceled out. Stoliker’s study was focused on individual experiences, so he wanted to avoid that.

Instead, the team fed the moment-by-moment activity of 332 brain regions into CEBRA, a machine-learning tool that compressed the data down to its essential structure while preserving the order of events. For each individual, it produced a trajectory—a path traced through a three-dimensional space, one point for each moment of the scan.

“When they're not under psilocybin, the brain activity is less differentiated by context,” Stoliker says. "But under psilocybin, we see that the activity becomes organized across time and more clearly differentiated by context.” The trajectories separated into four distinct clusters corresponding to rest, meditation, music, and the movie. A classifier could read a moment of brain activity and say which one the person was in.

It turned out the performance of that classifier scaled with how profound the participants described their experience as being.

One with the world

To find out which parts of the brain were doing the work, the team replaced one network's psilocybin activity with its sober version and checked how badly the classifier degraded. The default mode network and the visual network each accounted for over 20 percent of the effect. “The default mode network is strongly associated with the sense of self: daydreaming, mind wandering, thinking about yourself. It's often been called the narrative self,” Stoliker explains. “On the other end of this gradient, more externally oriented, is the visual system.”

Under psilocybin, the two became less differentiated, which the team thinks explains why participants reported a subjective experience of the self and the external world becoming less separate, a state Stoliker calls “embeddedness.”

“Theoretically, we could suggest that psychedelics are temporarily altering the organization of brain networks that ordinarily help maintain this separation that we experience,” he says. "It really challenges the idea of whether the internal world and external world are separate and highlights the idea that the brain may be responsible for constructing both.”

Tuning the room

The day after the session, participants rated whether various things had shifted, like sense of connection to themselves, to others, to nature, along with peace, acceptance, and creativity, all on a scale running from –100 to 100. “For the vast majority of our participants, we found they had positive psychological changes the next day,” Stoliker says. The data from the brain reading classifier the team used for discriminating among meditation, rest, the movie, and the music tracked with the size of that shift.

In the future, Stolkier hopes to use this for therapeutic purposes. If context isn't just mood-setting but is mechanically shaping brain organization, Stolkier argues, then the room, the playlist, and the instructions start to look like clinical variables a clinician could deliberately tune to improve therapeutic outcomes. But there are details the team must work out first.

As of now, the researchers admit that when two people report identical “embeddedness” scores, they can potentially have very different subjective experiences. Also, all the volunteers in Stoliker’s study were healthy individuals, not patients suffering from psychological or psychiatric disorders that potential therapies using psychedelics could be aimed at.

Finally, we still don’t know how exactly variables like music or visuals should be tuned. “That's a future avenue where we need more research to determine exactly what conditions should be optimized, and for who. It's quite possible we would want to take different approaches for each individual, or depending on what their diagnosis is,” Stoliker says. “Still, finding this level of organization hidden underneath that disorder and chaos has some really good explanatory value.”

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10910-z

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A federal jury in Texas recently ruled in favor of a man who sued Bexar County and its sheriff over allegations that the agency ran what the plaintiff’s attorneys called an “unconstitutional traffic stop scheme” enabled by “AI-powered” license plate readers.

Late last month, plaintiff Alek Schott of Houston was awarded $76, one dollar for each minute that he was detained. (Schott asked for this exact amount as symbolic compensation.)

“After the stop, I filed a complaint with the Sheriff’s Office because I knew what happened to me was wrong,” Schott said in a statement after his win. “The department reviewed it, told me they didn’t see any violation, and said if I had a problem with it, I should sue them. So I did.”

Suspicion

In his civil complaint, Schott outlined a wild tale.

Schott had been driving his pickup truck home from a work trip to Carrizo Springs, in the southwestern part of the state, in March 2022. While in Bexar County, which covers the area around San Antonio, a police officer pulled Schott over for “lane drifting."

The father of two was questioned by deputy Joel Babb, who admitted later that the stated reason for the traffic stop was bogus.

The real reason for the stop was that Babb had received a tip via a law enforcement WhatsApp group. It came from someone named “Kiki,” who allegedly worked with a federal fusion center in Laredo. Kiki apparently had near real-time access to automated license plate reader data.

According to Babb’s deposition, Kiki told him that Schott's truck had made a potentially suspicious “one-day turnaround.” That is, Schott drove all the way from Houston, stopped in Carrizo Springs for one night, and then returned home to Houston the next day. (Schott sells oilfield supplies.) To authorities, this was apparently enough to make one look like a smuggling suspect.

After seeing the WhatsApp message, Babb waited for Schott's vehicle and pulled it over once it passed his location. During the traffic stop, Babb said that he was on the “Criminal Interdiction Unit” looking for “human smuggling, drug smuggling, and all those things like that.”

According to the Institute for Justice, which helped Schott with his lawsuit, the entire stop was a travesty. "Footage from Alek’s own dashcam shows he never drifted lanes," the group said. "Bodycam footage from the deputy shows Alek gave the officer calm, mundane answers about a run-of-the-mill work trip. Nothing about what he said was suspicious, but the deputy called a drug dog anyway. And moments before the dog alerted by jumping on the truck, the handler’s bodycam shows that he signaled the dog."

Schott was detained for 76 minutes while his truck was thoroughly searched. Cops found nothing, despite the drug dog's alert.

Schott eventually sued Bexar County. In late September, he won—the jury gave him the token $76 he requested.

"Money was never what mattered," his lawyers said. "This was and has always been about the Constitution. IJ will now ask the court to enjoin Bexar County from using baseless traffic stops as a tool for warrantless searches, and will work to enforce the precedent across the state."

“This is what mass surveillance looks like when it reaches the shoulder of the highway,” Josh Windham, one of Schott’s attorneys, said in a statement. “An AI-powered camera flagged Alek’s plate. An anonymous law enforcement agent decided his completely ordinary trip looked suspicious. And a deputy went out and found a violation that never happened.”

The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, which touts its use of Flock Safety cameras, declined Ars’ request for comment.

Who watches the watchers?

Longtime critics of license plate readers generally, and Flock in particular, told Ars that scrutiny of this technology is increasing.

“I think this case seems like a pretty quintessential example of what we're seeing more and more as the public digs into ALPR surveillance: AI tech that vendors sell with pie-in-the-sky promises to improve public safety often face a tough reality check,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center of Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project, wrote in an email to Ars.

“The truth is that ALPRs create serious dangers for Americans' civil liberties, and if there aren't sensible guardrails and checks on how these powerful tools are used, they also create serious risks to public safety with drivers being improperly pulled over or stalked by officers abusing the tech.”

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