Justice Department says it now seeks only to segregate Alaska ballots

Milton A. Smith, assistant general counsel of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, coined the word in 1952 in the Chamber's weekly Washington Report. He was criticizing the bureaucratic language of an Office of Price Stabilization price order. He had first tried legalfusion, legalprate, gabalia and burobabble. A plaque was presented to him, and the word reached newspapers on 19 January 1952. ²

Justice Department calls Alaska's second Dan Sullivan a sham

The Justice Department alleges that a second Senate candidate named Dan Sullivan is a sham, an allegation it builds on a New York Times report. Its 30 October filing argues that the resulting voter confusion makes Alaska's conduct preempted by the National Voter Registration Act, and it says the only immediate relief it seeks is preserving and segregating ballots. Judge Sharon Gleason has the case, and Election Day is 3 November. ³

DC and Virginia ask a judge to stop the 250-foot arch

The District of Columbia and Virginia sue the National Park Service and the Interior Department on 31 October to stop a triumphal arch planned for Memorial Circle, near Arlington National Cemetery. They ask Judge Tanya Chutkan to halt the project, arguing that Congress never authorized it and that it would violate the Height Act, which caps D.C. buildings at 130 feet. Construction could begin 5 November if the National Capital Planning Commission approves the arch at its meeting that day. ⁴

Economist William Nordhaus, who put climate change into growth models, dies at 85

William Nordhaus, the Yale economist who won the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis, died on 30 October, Yale announced. He died of glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. He built the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, known as DICE. ⁵

VOLTA infostealer asks an LLM what a victim's data is worth

Cisco Talos reports that the VOLTA infostealer, a self-deleting Windows program, sends stolen data to a language model through OpenRouter with a prompt casting it as a forensic intelligence analyst drafting a target assessment. The model ranks the victim's own assets by monetization value. The default is Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, with Moonshot's Kimi K2 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash as fallbacks, and VOLTA moves to the next model when a reply contains refusal phrases. ⁶

Cursor pulls two tampered Claude Code extension builds

Cursor reports that versions 2.1.312 and 2.1.313 of the Anthropic.claude-code extension in its marketplace were maliciously modified on 29 October and stayed live for about 11 hours. The code tries to add an attacker-controlled SSH key to authorized_keys, tries to open a reverse SSH tunnel, and reports host and user details. Cursor says Anthropic did not develop the modified versions and that uninstalling the extension may not be sufficient, because the payload drops persistence scripts that keep running. ⁷