🗳 🇺🇸 📊 Senate poll - Texas

🔵 James Talarico 48%
🔴 Ken Paxton 43%

Pollfinity - RV - 10/18

https://politixplus.com/race/2026-texas-senate-paxton-vs-talarico

📎 Political Polls

🗳 🇺🇸 📊 Governor poll - Texas

🔵 Gina Hinojosa 46％
🔴 Greg Abbott (Inc) 45%

Pollfinity (C-) - RV - 10/18

📎 Political Polls

🇪🇺🇧🇾🇷🇺 EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, in the wake of the race riots in France, blamed Belarus and Russia for the rioting and for the migrant crisis holding the two countries as "solely responsible" ignoring the migrant-friendly policies her Commission continues to implement and the policies of her predecessors.

She did not mention Morocco as one of the state actors using migrants to destabilise Europe even though Morocco shipped over 80k Moroccans and other African migrants into the tiny Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla just 2 months ago, while Russia and Belarus shipped a couple of thousand migrants over to the Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian borders the course of the last 5 years and Morocco's actions caused more friction within the EU (see the Spain-Italy border dispute) than Russia and Belarus' actions did.

VDL went to the European Parliament to announce she is preparing a European Emergency Response framework that would give national states more powers to deal with sudden influxes of migrants only to say a couple of seconds later that the EU will continue to be a safe haven for "refugees fleeing war and persecution".

@CIG_telegram

🇵🇱🇺🇦🇪🇺 Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on X/Twitter:

We want to make our Ukrainian friends aware that the kind of patriotism or nationalism represented by the UPA – that is, the desire to create an ethnically pure country, without minorities, without Jews, without Poles, without Czechs, without Roma – is unacceptable in modern Europe. And by espousing such an ideology, one cannot join the European Union. — Radosław Sikorski

🔗 Poland MFA

🇮🇹 Italy Experiences Food and Fuel Shortages After Truckers on Strike Block Roads. 90% of gas stations in Campania are out of fuel

Truckers protesting high gas prices have prevented deliveries to parts of southern Italy, leading to empty shelves and dry pumps.

On Wednesday night in Naples, Italy, a 72-year-old retiree walked into a supermarket to buy himself a snack and found it nearly bare.

It was out of milk, yogurt and eggs. Its shelves of pasta, oils and canned tomatoes were almost empty. The vast produce section was empty save for red onions, chestnuts, two melons and a case of ornamental gourds.

“It’s worse than I expected,” said Giuseppe Crisci, the retiree, who walked out with a bag of biscuits. “And what I expected was exceptional.”

Experiences like Mr. Crisci’s played out repeatedly this week across Naples, a sprawling port city in Italy’s south where residents faced widespread shortages at their gas pumps and grocery stores.

It is the fallout from a week of strikes and road blockades by southern Italian truckers who have slowed traffic on the region’s main highways, making it harder to distribute goods. The truckers are protesting spikes in fuel costs since the start of the war in Iran. The price of gasoline in Italy has risen 27 percent and diesel 32 percent since February, according to government data.

Naples risks “being paralyzed,” wrote Gaetano Manfredi, the city’s mayor, in a statement issued with the mayor of another southern city affected by the truckers’ strikes. The blockades were responsible, he added, for “supermarket shelves growing emptier and emptier.”

The truckers say they have no choice, blaming the government for failing to shield them from the price hikes. “We don’t want to create inconveniences,” said Salvatore Esposito, a trucker who has protested at the city port since Sunday. “But it’s necessary. At the end of the month, with our costs, we can’t live like this; we can’t work like this.”

About 90 percent of gas stations in Campania, the region where Naples is the capital, have run dry, said Gaetano La Rocca, president of a federation representing gas station operators there. In addition to snarling highways, he said, truckers have blocked access to fuel where tankers fill up.

🔗 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/22/world/europe/italy-protests-shortages-truckers.html

🇮🇱🗳 Billionaire and Chairman of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald "Ron" Lauder, turned against his longtime friend, Benjamin Netanyahu, fearing that Netanyahu's terrible global reputation will drag down Israel along with him.

Lauder says he saw 30 years ago how Netanyahu put his own political future ahead of the country’s, and is now determined to wake up the Israeli public before it is too late.

He has cut his ties with Israel over the past year, telling Haaretz “I sold my house in Tel Aviv” and saying he gave his Beersheba property to the Jewish National Fund, which he chairs.

Addressing Israelis, he said:

“Your fathers fought for the country, and you’re losing everything because of stupidity.”

"What you have is a dictator, a one-person show. Israel is a democracy, but Netanyahu is not playing by the rules of democracy," Lauder says, adding, "I spoke with the king of Jordan a few weeks ago. Jordan has been one of the most loyal countries to Israel that we have out there, and we turned the most loyal country into a hater of Israel because of what Ben-Gvir has done. And when [his supporters] beat up a photographer for The Washington Post – how stupid can you be? The Washington Post will hate Israel because of this! Hate! For what purpose?"

🔗 https://unwall.app/www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/2026-10-22/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/what-he-did-was-outrageous-netanyahus-former-confidant-ron-lauder-speaks-out/000001a1-636c-da9a-a7e5-f77f4bae0000