THE WAR ROOM: A surviving deputy to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar says Sinwar’s death will not alter the course of the war in Gaza, putting a damper on hopes for a cease-fire deal.

  President Biden told reporters that Sinwar’s death was “an opportunity to seek a path to peace — a better future in Gaza without Hamas.” But Khalil al-Hayya, a Sinwar deputy, said the fighting will continue and that the hostages held in Gaza will not be returned until Israel fully withdraws from the territory.

  Contrary to initial reports that Sinwar was killed by an explosion, he was shot in the head. The Israeli military is holding the body, possibly as a bargaining chip. But as the fighting goes on, as many as 50 people were killed earlier today in an Israeli strike.

  Israel also says a drone coming out of Lebanon was targeted at the home of Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He and his wife were said to be away from home at the time. 

ORANGE ALERT!!: Donald Trump is making immigration and the southern border his closing argument for election to president. During a rally appearance this week he said that immigration“beats out the economy. That beats it all out to me, it’s not even close.” He said, “The United States is now an occupied country. But on Nov. 5, 2024, that will be liberation day in America.”

  While the economy and the cost of living are the number one issues with voters, Trump is going with fear of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants out of all proportion to the number they actually commit.

  He is still pushing the story that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating the household pets of neighbors. “I was just saying what was reported… And eating other things too that they’re not supposed to be. All I do is report,” Trump said during a town hall on Univision. What was “reported” was that there was an unfounded internet rumor and that the pet eating never happened.

  Trump even claims that talking about immigration saved his life. In Butler, Pennsylvania he had just turned to refer to a chart about illegal immigration when a bullet nicked his ear rather than hitting him square in the side of the head. “If you think about it, illegal immigration saved my life — I’m the only one,” Trump told his crowd in Aurora, Colorado. “Usually, it’s the opposite.”

BY THE NUMBERS: The Real Clear Politics average of polls now has Kamala Harris leading the national vote by just 1.4 percent over Donald Trump but behind in all seven of the battleground states that usually determine the winner. Harris was leading in the battlegrounds a month ago.

AT THE BAR: Donald Trump called US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan “the most evil person” after she released nearly 1,900 pages of heavily redacted evidence in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election conspiracy case against the former president. Trump said releasing the documents so close to the national vote amounts to “election interference”. But in her ruling, Chutkan argued that if she had kept the files sealed, that would have denied the public valuable information in a way that could itself have been construed as election interference.

  There appears to be little new evidence in the filing. The indictment focuses on the January 6^thinsurrection and Trump’s efforts to his 2020 election defeat. 

THE OBIT PAGE: Nicholas Daniloff, a veteran foreign correspondent who in 1986 was set up by Russia’s KGB to be arrested for espionage triggering an international crisis during the late stages of the Cold War, died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 89.

  Daniloff was betrayed by a trusted friend and source who handed him what was supposed to be a packet of news clippings that turned out to be military information he was not expecting. A van pulled up and he was immediately arrested then whisked away to the notorious Lefortovo prison.

  The crisis nearly wrecked a summit meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but Daniloff was exchanged for a KGB agent captured in New York.

THE SPIN RACK: Cuba’s entire electrical system collapsed last night when a thermoelectric power plant in the city of Matanzas suddenly shut down. Authorities closed schools, government offices, and nightclubs in an effort to conserve what little electricity is still in the grid. — A camper found dead in his tent outside Bozeman, Montana last Saturday was at first thought to have been killed by a bear because of the nature of his wounds. But investigators now say 35-year-old Dustin Kjersem was the victim of a particularly brutal murder. At the moment, there are no suspects. — The NY Times and ProPublica are accusing prolific author John Grisham of lifting their reporting on a Texas murder case for his new true-crime book. Grisham says the book is properly sourced to reporting by others. 

BELOW THE FOLD: After a pedestrian was killed by a self-driving Tesla, The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating whether Tesla’s driverless mode still works under windshield glare, fog, and dust clouds.

  This begs the question of whether you’d rather risk encountering a driverless Tesla or one with Elon Musk at the wheel.

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