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At least 40 jurisdictions across the United States are voting Tuesday on measures related to data centers. The bulk of the measures are in Ohio, where 18 cities and towns will weigh in on whether to restrict or permit data centers in some way.
Significant majorities of Americans oppose the construction of new data centers, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.
Ohio has been one of the states at the focus of the United States’ rapid data center build-out, receiving billions of dollars in investment touted by President Donald Trump during campaign rallies. Data centers have also dominated advertising in the Senate race between Republican incumbent Sen. Jon Husted and Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown.
The jurisdictions voting on data centers range significantly in size, from Joliet Township, Illinois, a city of 85,000, to 624-person Monroe Township in Ohio’s Adams County. A half-dozen municipalities in Maine and Illinois will also weigh in on data centers.
Many of the ballot measures are temporary or permanent bans on data centers. Voters moving en masse Tuesday to enact those bans would be another signal of Americans’ wider discontent against the artificial intelligence industry.
Additional Coverage
- October 21, 2026
Most Americans want to halt all data center construction
Lachlan Murdoch, the CEO of Fox Corporation, acknowledged Monday that Fox News is suffering from a dip in its ratings but chalked it up to “viewer fatigue” after a year of tumultuous news events.
Murdoch on a quarterly earnings call said that declining year-over-year ratings are in part due to a monumental 2025: the presidential inauguration, the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, the actions of the U.S. DOGE Service under Elon Musk and deadly flooding.
Fox News, known for its news and conservative opinion programming, is a cable TV juggernaut, regularly outperforming rival networks.
Murdoch told investors and Wall Street analysts that viewers are watching less TV, not defecting to competitors. “Those viewers are not going to any other news channel,” he said. “They’re not switching to MS NOW or to CNN.”
For the week of Oct. 19, Fox News brought in 1.7 million prime-time viewers, walloping MS NOW (954,000) and CNN (632,000). Still, Fox’s prime-time audience was down 23 percent from the same week a year prior.
Meanwhile, MS NOW and CNN grew 30 percent and 28 percent, respectively, according to Nielsen data published by Adweek.
In a Tuesday earnings call, Mark Lazarus — the CEO of Versant, MS NOW and CNBC’s parent company — said he’s not seeing news fatigue among the networks’ viewers.
A British man has returned home after a 31,000-mile walk around the world that lasted 28 years.
Karl Bushby, a former paratrooper, was greeted by crowds his hometown of Hull in northern England on Monday, before arriving at his final destination: the home of his mother, Angela.
The idea for the journey was born in a bar, when Bushby, then in his 20s, made a bet that he could walk from the southern end of South America back to England. “Suddenly, it became a challenge,” he told The Washington Post last year.
His only rules: He would not use transport to propel himself forward, and he wouldn’t go home until he got there by foot.
Bushby set off from Chile in 1998 and walked across the Americas, Asia and Europe — navigating the perils of the Darién Gap and the frozen Bering Strait. He swam across the Caspian Sea and the English Channel.
On the penultimate day of his journey, he reunited with family members — including his son Adam, 36 — and met his granddaughter, 12, for the first time, according to the BBC.
A documentary is under production, and Bushby says he plans to write a book.
But, for now, he told a news conference Monday: “I think I’m hanging my boots up.”
A district court judge on Monday dismissed a Trump administration case against Harvard University related to admissions data, saying the government had not satisfied the requirements for a court order for the records.
The administration sued Harvard in February, claiming the university had failed to provide records to ensure it was complying with a Supreme Court ruling banning affirmative action in college admissions. Harvard was a defendant in the Supreme Court case.
The Justice and Education departments have launched numerous investigations into whether universities continue to consider race in admissions despite the 2023 ruling.
Harvard has said it followed civil rights laws and provided data. The university argued the agencies did not comply with regulations in pushing the school to supply documents.
Judge Myong J. Joun’s ruling was limited to whether the government had demonstrated it could not get the school to comply voluntarily. It did not determine whether Harvard had discriminated, whether the agencies could seek applicant-level data, or whether Harvard might be required to provide such data.
The case was dismissed without prejudice, meaning it may be refiled, and a spokesperson for the Justice Department said, “The United States will file an amended complaint and continue to hold Harvard to its obligations.”
Spokespeople for Harvard did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
An Education Department spokesperson said, “Students should be judged on their merit and accomplishments, not the color of their skin.”
Officials in Florida scrambled Tuesday to move more than 20 polling places that had been impacted by extreme flooding in parts of the state.
About half a year’s worth of rain — up to 28 inches — fell along portions of Florida’s Space Coast in just a day and a half, from Sunday afternoon to Monday evening, according to radar estimates.
That deluge led to widespread flooding and serious damage in some places, and prompted Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to declare a state of emergency for seven counties in the eastern and central part of the state.
Early Tuesday, the Florida secretary of state’s office published a list of polling locations it said would be moved to “ensure that residents in those areas in affected counties still have the ability to vote.” The sites are spread across Brevard, Broward, Highlands, Indian River, Martin, Okeechobee, Palm Beach and St. Lucie counties.
The flooding has left roads impassible, inundated vehicles and homes, and led to dozens of rescues.
In hard-hit Brevard County, where multiple voting locations were relocated, supervisor of elections Tim Bobanic saidthe “unprecedented circumstances” made the changes necessary “for the safety and security of our election workers and the voters of Brevard.”
A Satanic Temple group in Iowa must be allowed to host its holiday event at the state’s Capitol next month, a federal judge ordered Monday.
The Satanic Temple has applied to host the one-day gathering in the building’s rotunda for the past three years but has been denied each time, according to court documents.
The Iowa Department of Administrative Services objected to the event’s costume contest, which it said featured Krampus, the folkloric Christmas demon, saying it would harm children.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa filed a lawsuit in August on behalf of the religious organization, arguing that the decision violated its rights to free speech, free exercise and equal protection.
Chief U.S. District Judge Stephanie Rose granted a preliminary injunction Monday, saying the Satanic Temple was likely to succeed on its free-speech claim. She ordered the department to approve the event application within seven days.
Matt Kezhaya, general counsel for the Satanic Temple, said it was “always going to be a family-friendly event.”
“None of this became ‘harmful’ just because state officials disapproved of our chosen expression,” he said in a statement.
The Administrative Services Department did not immediately respond to an overnight request for comment.
Tempted to use artificial intelligence to navigate your midterm ballot? You’re not alone — but you should be careful.
Two in five Americans said they used AI to look up election information in a recent survey by the National Conference on Citizenship.
To see how well that works, The Washington Post challenged six of the most popular chatbots to make voter guides for addresses in every county in the United States. The results were not great.
Chatbots invented races that don’t exist, mixed up candidates and cited nascent websites with incorrect information that also appear to have been produced with help from AI.
Many of the companies behind the chatbots tested said they made changes after The Post contacted them, but experts recommend avoiding them in favor of checking trusted sources directly.
Click here to see which AI chatbots were most accurate for voting information.
Additional Coverage
- October 28, 2026
We asked AI chatbots to make voter guides. They invented races and misidentified candidates.
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