Democrats win back the House and the Senate

Nuffield College, Oxford, says the word “started out as an academic joke suggested to R.B. McCallum,” and it caught on.² McCallum printed it in the Oxford Magazine in 1951, reviewing the college’s study of the 1950 British election, and David Butler put it in a book the next year.² Touring the United States in 1952, Butler “found himself overwhelmed by journalists asking about the new word.”²

AP calls both chambers of Congress for Democrats

The Associated Press called the Senate for Democrats before midnight Eastern, after James Talarico beat Ken Paxton in Texas and Sherrod Brown unseated Sen. Jon Husted in Ohio.³ It had called the House for them by 1:27 a.m.⁴ At 1:35, AP’s tally on Fox News’s results page gave Democrats 220 House seats, two past the 218 for a majority, and a net gain of 25 where they needed three. Republicans had 127, and 88 races were uncalled.⁵³ In the Senate the same tally gave Democrats 53 seats and a net gain of seven, with six races uncalled.⁵

Missouri voters strike down the map drawn to unseat Emanuel Cleaver

Proposition A, the referendum on the 2025 map Missouri’s legislature drew at Trump’s request to unseat Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, was losing 62% to 38% when AP called it at 9:59 p.m. Central, so those lines will not be used in 2028.⁶ Voters also rejected Amendment 3, which would have banned most abortions again two years after they ended the ban.⁷

Trump says US aid to Israel stops at the end of 2026

“We were giving them $4 billion – we are – but it gets cut off at the end of the year,” Trump said on Fox & Friends, and he said Benjamin Netanyahu had approached him about it.⁸ No Israeli or White House official is quoted confirming the cutoff.⁸ The aid runs at $3.8 billion a year under a memorandum of understanding that expires in 2028, and Congress appropriates it.⁹

Hugging Face finds UMT5’s decoder saw future tokens for almost two months

A Transformers change of 30 July that enabled PyTorch SDPA for T5 let UMT5’s decoder attend to future tokens in training, and nothing crashed before the 28 September fix, Hugging Face disclosed.¹⁰ Its proposed Model Integration Contracts, a shrunk fixture plus a runnable usage path and reviewed baselines, flagged the bug on every replayed commit with a 66 MB UMT5 fixture, where eager-attention tests missed it.¹⁰ A UMT5 fine-tune on main in that window, with default SDPA attention, trained a decoder that could see its targets.¹⁰

StateBench finds state tracking that Gated DeltaNet learns and transformers miss

Allen Institute for AI researchers sort state-tracking problems into four Krohn-Rhodes levels (r-trivial, aperiodic, soluble, general finite) and prove that Gated DeltaNet with positive eigenvalues expresses every aperiodic problem.¹¹ Ai2 reports that 275M-parameter Gated DeltaNet and hybrid models trained on up to 256 assignments generalized almost perfectly to 64,000 on the first three levels, while transformers never learned general finite problems.¹² Four frontier models, among them Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol, fall to chance on the two hardest levels at 10K to 64K tokens.¹¹