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Samsung's AI boom is delivering staggering profits, while Tennessee faces difficult questions after a death row inmate survived an execution attempt. Overseas, deadly attacks in Ukraine and Saudi Arabia underscore ongoing conflicts, and baseball's postseason brings major upsets. Plus, an unexpected wildlife comeback, a literary prize worth $50,000, and a remarkable airport incident round out today's edition.

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Isaias surged toward the Gulf Coast on Thursday as the first hurricane of the Atlantic season, and parts of Florida ordered mandatory evacuations and closed schools. Forecasters expect it to intensify rapidly and bring a life-threatening storm surge to the Florida Panhandle, southern Alabama and southern Mississippi.

Landfall on the northern Gulf Coast is expected late Friday or early Saturday. The hurricane had maximum sustained winds near 75 mph early Thursday and sat about 445 miles south-southwest of the mouth of the Mississippi River. Some Gulf oil wells have paused production, and flooding is possible as far inland as the Tennessee Valley.

Christa Pike's attorneys were told on Monday that she was brain-dead and would likely be taken off life support. She woke the next day and began talking. She has pneumonia, a blood clot in one arm, and hands so swollen she cannot move them, a week after Tennessee's failed attempt to execute her.

Governor Bill Lee has canceled the state's one remaining execution this year and ordered an investigation. A judge ordered the state to preserve the drugs, needles, and records from September 30. Pike's lawyers want her sentence commuted to life without parole, and say the state has promised nothing about a second attempt.

President Trump worked a packed Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio on Wednesday night for Senate candidate Ken Paxton, part of an effort to stave off sweeping Democratic wins in the country's most populous red state. Protesters interrupted him, and his remarks ranged well beyond the race he came for.

He pledged the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Roger Clemens, restated his support for the death penalty for drug dealers, and returned to the remark about Iran and American cities that California's governor condemned this week. "You want to see problems? Let them hit San Diego, let them hit Los Angeles," he said.

Russia's missile barrage killed 22 people in Pryluky, five of them children, and rescuers were still pulling bodies from the wrecked apartment building on Thursday.

Houthi rebels claimed two attacks on Saudi Arabian airports, which killed three people and wounded 36 as fighting in Yemen spilled across the border into the kingdom.

Part of a seven-story building in Istanbul collapsed, trapping at least seven people inside, including a 6-year-old, as rescue teams worked and investigators sought the cause.

The USS Abraham Lincoln returns to San Diego Thursday after a record 265 days at sea supporting the Iran war, a deployment marked by reports of deteriorating crew conditions.

The FDA's review of the abortion pill will run into next year, a court filing said late Wednesday. Anti-abortion groups hoping to see mifepristone curtailed condemned the timeline.

Texas put Jamaal Howard to death on Wednesday evening, after judges refused the stay his lawyers had sought on the grounds that Pike received the same drug.

Samsung expects record quarterly operating profit of 107.4 trillion won, or $80 billion, a nine-fold jump driven by data-center demand for memory chips, its fourth straight record quarter.

Apple and Nvidia supplier TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, posted September revenue of $16.03 billion, up 54.6% from a year earlier, though sales dipped 0.6% from August.

Elon Musk accused Indian vested interests of blocking Starlink's satellite internet launch there, calling it "a crime against the people of India" in a market dominated by Jio and Airtel.

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Margaret Hamilton, whose code guided Apollo 11 to the Moon, has died at 90, MIT confirmed, noting she died Sept. 30 after a career that helped define software engineering.

A Canadian start-up called PermaC is developing insulating blankets of woody material for thawing Arctic permafrost, aiming to keep carbon buried in the soil as the region heats.

Bluefin tuna have returned in huge numbers off the British coast, WWF says, though its Living Planet Report finds monitored wildlife populations worldwide have fallen 73% on average since 1970.

The Tampa Bay Rays swept the Yankees, winning 4-3 to clinch the ALDS, and Aaron Judge urged the front office to "go all-in" before a likely winter lockout.

The Dodgers finished Atlanta in Game 4 when Andy Pages drove in two runs with a bases-loaded single in the seventh of a 4-1 road win.

Cleveland forced a fourth game in Chicago, where the Guardians piled up 11 hits to beat the White Sox 9-3 and cut the series lead to 2-1.

Garrett Mitchell robbed Manny Machado of a tying homer as Milwaukee clinched 3-1, setting up an NLCS rematch with the Dodgers, who swept the Brewers last October.

Alex Ovechkin's two kids introduced him before his final NHL home opener, and the Capitals then held off the Pittsburgh Penguins 5-3 behind Tom Wilson's goal and two assists.

Mia Goth has filed for divorce from Shia LaBeouf after nearly ten years of marriage, and she is seeking primary custody of their four-year-old daughter with no spousal support.

Tayari Jones' novel "Kin" won the Kirkus Prize for fiction, beating a finalist field that included Colson Whitehead, while each of the three category winners takes home $50,000.

The Nobel Prize in literature will be awarded Thursday in Stockholm, a year after Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai won for work judges said upholds art's power amid "apocalyptic terror."

What it is: American households pay 62% more for water than they did a decade ago, according to Food and Water Watch, which collected 2025 rates from the 500 largest community water systems in the country. Those systems serve 155 million people between them, and the average bill came to $531 a year for a typical household's 60,000 gallons. That figure covers drinking water alone; sewer and stormwater charges arrive on separate lines.

The detail: Who owns the pipes matters. For-profit systems averaged $823 a year, about $329 more than publicly owned ones. San Jose Water, a private company, charged an average of $1,416 in 2025, up 163% in a decade. West Virginia posted the highest state average at $1,383 across its two largest systems, both owned by American Water. The cheap end is mostly public: Hempstead, New York, which runs its own system, averaged $133, and Idaho's largest systems averaged $286, roughly a fifth of the San Jose bill for the same 60,000 gallons.

Why it matters: This is one of the few household bills nobody can shop for, because a single utility serves each address. The pipes underneath most American cities are old enough to need replacing, and the Environmental Protection Agency has put the national cost of that work at about $625 billion. Washington has covered less of it: Congress has appropriated at least $1 billion less than it authorized since 2022 for the fund that helps states rebuild water systems. Whatever the fund does not cover is collected from ratepayers, which is why two households using identical amounts of water can pay ten times apart.

What to watch: Whether Congress closes that gap, and what the same 500 systems charge when the rates are counted again next year.

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A passenger booked to Seattle instead wandered onto John Wayne Airport's airfield, allegedly stole an Alaska Airlines baggage tug, crashed it, then tried commandeering an American Airlines lavatory truck.

A North Carolina animal shelter is asking Hoke County residents to watch for a 6- to 7-foot boa constrictor that its owner reported missing from the neighborhood.

Workers at a Chattanooga Goodwill heard whimpers from deep inside the building, and city crews eventually broke through concrete so rescuers could free a dog stuck in a drainage pipe.

The Great Chicago Fire breaks out (1871) · Don Larsen throws the only perfect game in World Series history (1956) · Che Guevara is captured in Bolivia (1967) · Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is awarded the Nobel Prize in literature (1970) · A magnitude 7.6 earthquake strikes Kashmir (2005)

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart." — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago"

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