Judge bars DOJ from threatening California election officials days before the vote

On 23 September 2003 the linguist Mark Liberman wrote on Language Log about a woman who had typed “egg corns” for “acorns.” Geoffrey K. Pullum then suggested a name for such slips, following the pattern of “mondegreen,” and Liberman’s update of 30 September carried it; the Oxford English Dictionary cites that update as its first evidence. The coinage is an instance of its own meaning, since “eggcorn” is an eggcorn for “acorn.” ¹²

Two federal courts rule against DOJ’s California ballot challenge in a single day

U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson ordered on 30 October that Justice Department and Homeland Security officials may not threaten, intimidate or coerce election officials into halting a voter’s ballot solely because the administration calls the voter ineligible. The order runs through 16 November. ³ The Ninth Circuit ruled 2-1 the same day against the department’s request that California set aside ballots from more than 20,000 people it alleges are noncitizens. ⁴ CBS reported that the department also issued grand-jury subpoenas to Los Angeles County election officials between 21 and 24 October. ⁵

Third-quarter growth hits 3.4% as September prices run 3.6% above last year

The Bureau of Economic Analysis put third-quarter real GDP growth at a 3.4 percent annual rate on 29 October, up from 2.2 percent in the second quarter. ⁶ Its release the same day showed the PCE price index for September 3.6 percent above a year earlier. ⁷ The GDP figure is an advance estimate that BEA will revise, and both numbers came five days before the midterm elections.

Veterans pay $150 more a month after VA ends loan-modification program, NPR finds

NPR’s analysis of VA data finds that more than 15,000 veterans with modified loans now pay at least $150 more a month since the department ended its VA Servicing Purchase program on 1 May 2025. ⁸ NPR reports that 63 percent of VA modifications raised the payment, against 2 percent of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac modifications. Congress has since passed a replacement, which lenders have until 28 November to implement.

Anthropic engineer’s draft would let robots.txt opt a site out of AI training

Kevin Kelley of Anthropic submitted an Internet-Draft on 30 October proposing a __usage_ai-training token that sites name in a robots.txt User-Agent line, where Disallow expresses a preference against training use. ⁹ It is an individual draft with no IETF standing, and a wildcard User-Agent: * group does not count as an opt-out. Google says it aims to support such a shared control in 2027. ¹⁰

Mistral publishes weights for a trillion-parameter Large 4

Mistral released the open weights of Large 4, a model of about 1 trillion parameters, on 29 October. ¹¹ The license is a modified MIT license, and businesses running it as a hosted service need a separate commercial license from Mistral. Its reported 41 percent on Terminal-Bench 4.0 is Mistral’s own figure. ¹²