Conservative-run Hillingdon aims to save £100,000 but local people fear dog poo will ‘be dumped everywhere’
People in a west London borough fear it will become covered in dog poo after their cash-strapped council decided to remove 700 dog-waste bins to save money.
“People are worried there’s going to be dog shit everywhere,” said Daniel O’Neill, the chief road steward at Ruislip Residents’ Association.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party and its allies won 53 seats in Parliament, falling short of the outright majority needed to form a government. The main opposition bloc, led by Gadi Eisenkot, won 48.
Angry about the scale of a contract signed by one of his former lawyers with the family of a wealthy pardon seeker, the president told allies he wanted some of the money to go to his future presidential library.
Alina Habba Mildon, while working as an adviser at the Justice Department, had signed on last year to serve as a general counsel for a company started by the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, who was seeking a pardon.
A federal judge gave the government until noon on Friday to share which states had received letters trying to enlist them in an effort to find evidence of voter fraud.
The department has issued grand jury subpoenas to local election officials as part of a widening effort to prove unsubstantiated claims about large numbers of illegal voters in the state.
Voters casting their ballots in Los Angeles in June. At least two employees of Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office received grand jury subpoenas last week.
The midterm elections are just days away, and while anything can happen, the broad consensus among pollsters suggests a bad night for Republicans.
Hoping to shore up a victory for his party, President Donald Trump seized upon an idea: bribe the voters.
"If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them," Trump pledged in September, "I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000."
According to Vice President J.D. Vance, this "dividend"—which would cost more than $1.3 trillion—would come from the "extraordinary amount of revenue" generated by Trump's tariffs. Of course, that math doesn't work: According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the U.S. took in just under $300 billion in tariff revenue between January 2025 and July 2026, not counting the amount it has had to refund after the Supreme Court found they were illegally imposed.
At that rate, it would take years of tariffs just to pay for Trump's dividend. Adding insult to injury, of course, is the fact that tariffs are paid by Americans, meaning we would be taxing ourselves to pay for our own disbursement.
But in the campaign season's closing days, Trump has made a number of other threats and offers, contingent on his party's success—a completely risible use of government power.
In September, three Ohio Republicans—Rep. Mike Turner and Sens. Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted—petitioned the president to build a planned Space Force training academy in their state.
"Every other state wants it," Trump said this month at an Ohio campaign rally. "If we win the midterms, Ohio will be very, very strongly considered."
Some of his pledges have been much more explicitly transactional.
On October 17, the Department of Defense—which Trump calls by its original name, the Department of War—announced a conditional $80 billion loan to pharmaceutical manufacturer Antheia. That same day, at a campaign rally in Kentucky, Trump made a pledge to the state's voters.
"If the Republicans win, the Department of War will be investing $100 million in the pharmaceutical company Antheia to revitalize a gigantic drug manufacturing facility in Winchester, Kentucky," he said. But he prefaced it by telling Rep. Andy Barr, the Republican running for the state's open Senate seat, "you have to win, Andy. Otherwise, forget it."
Days later in both Kansas and Iowa, Trump brought up E15, a gasoline blend that contains up to 15 percent ethanol derived from corn. It has advantages and disadvantages as an alternative to traditional gasoline, but it's a boon for corn-growing states.
"Normally, E15 is not allowed during the summer because warmer temperatures increase fuel evaporation and thus the formulation of ground ozone ('smog')," writes Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute.
The government can waive that restriction to address disruptions in the fuel supply, which it did in March amid gas price shocks related to Trump's war in Iran. The House passed a bill in May to make the waiver permanent and allow E15 to be sold year-round, which Trump backed in June; the Senate version of the Farm Bill includes a year-round E15 amendment, but Democrats have held up its passage.
"With Roger Marshall in the Senate," Trump told Kansans last week, "we will make year-round E15 permanent. But if [Democratic candidate] Adam Hamilton is in, I'm not doing it."
He then made the same pledge in Iowa, where Rep. Ashley Hinson is the Republican Senate nominee. "With Ashley in the Senate, we will make it year-round E15," Trump said. "We'll make it permanent."
Of course, it's nothing new for politicians to make big promises in exchange for your votes. Typically, they're all hollow to at least some degree.
And Trump's pledges do reflect some version of reality: Keeping the Senate in Republican hands will make it easier for him to do certain things. But some of his others have been downright indefensible, less like typical political bribery than outright extortion.
At a rally in North Carolina last month, he tied hurricane disaster aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to Senate candidate Michael Whatley's election.
"We spent more than $2 billion [in] FEMA funding," he told attendees. "You're waiting for some additional money…and I'm gonna get that to you, Michael. Now if Michael loses, I'm not sending it." He added right after, "I'm only kidding, you're gonna get it."
Other times, he didn't take it back: Trump appeared at a campaign rally in Georgia this week, stumping for Rep. Mike Collins to unseat Sen. Jon Ossoff, and part of his sales pitch was that if Ossoff wins, he may just ignore the state.
"President has a lot of power," he said, and there's "a big difference when he likes the people representing a state. Collins could call me anytime he wants." But if Ossoff wins, he added, he won't take the call, and he even narrated a hypothetical conversation to make his point: "'Tell him I'm not in.' 'But he needs money for Georgia.' 'I don't give a damn what he wants!'"
Also this week, Trump railed about the Senate race in Alaska, where Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan faces not only former Rep. Mary Peltola but a retired teacher also named Dan Sullivan. The New York Times reported this week that the Peltola campaign actively recruited the second Sullivan to run explicitly as a spoiler, to siphon votes away from the senator.
"I have delivered for Alaska at Historic Levels," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "The Democrats are trying to steal this important Republican Seat and, if that happens, everything we've done for Alaska will come to an immediate hault [sic]."
It's one thing to say the federal government shouldn't provide aid to states—and since taking office, the administration has cut or paused such disbursements by $177 billion. Last week, the FEMA administrator indicated that going forward, states should expect to shoulder more of their own disaster aid.
But this goes much further, with the president explicitly conditioning aid on whether or not the state's voters have displeased him.
Perhaps, as in North Carolina, Trump was simply joking; the White House did not respond to Reason's request for clarification.
But there's certainly precedent to suggest he was serious.
"Last September, the Department of Energy (DOE) recommended cancellation of 624 grants for clean energy projects that had been approved by the Biden administration," Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote in July. The government then "winnowed it down to 284 grants, all but one of which had been awarded to projects in states that were represented by Democrats in the U.S. Senate and had voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election."
In March, Politicoreported that Trump had approved 89 percent of disaster aid requests from states with a Republican governor and two Republican senators but only 23 percent of requests from states with Democrats in those offices.
According to the Idle RamblingSubstack, the trend continues: Trump has rejected nearly half of aid requests from Democrat-led states in this term while only rejecting 18 percent from Republican-led states.
But perhaps worst of all, he threatened not to pay out damages to people who suffered harm.
Between 1953 and 1987, the water at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina was contaminated by leaks of fuel and dry cleaning chemicals. The government estimates that as many as 1 million people, both service members and their families, were exposed to toxic chemicals. The Department of Veterans Affairs officially recognizes eight diseases stemming from exposure, including multiple cancers and Parkinson's disease.
In 2022, Congress passed the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, which waived any federal government claims of immunity and allowed veterans to sue over exposure to tainted water. As of September 2026, the Department of Justice says it has paid out more than $879 million, out of more than $1.1 billion in settlement offers.
"We're also fighting for our great veterans, and taking care of those veterans who brought claims related to water contamination at Camp Lejeune," Trump told North Carolina rallygoers last week. "And if we win the House and the Senate, I am directing the Department of Justice to settle all remaining legitimate claims as soon as possible." But "if we don't win, there's no money. If we do win, you're getting it."
It should be clear by now that Trump values personal loyalty over all else. To that end, there is nothing he finds more disreputable than failing to do what he says.
In the closing days of this campaign season, he is making that more explicit than ever, tying his party's success in a state to whether the state is entitled to equal treatment under the law.
Trump was right that presidents have "a lot of power." He's also a living example of why they shouldn't.
President Trump ensured Flávio Bolsonaro, who lost a presidential election in Brazil and faces multiple criminal investigations there, could enter the United States, U.S. officials said.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was the author of acclaimed works about subjects including the education of children, political philosophy, and human liberty. She is perhaps best remembered for her great pioneering book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a key text in the rise and development of both feminism and liberal theory.
What is perhaps less remembered today is the fact that her landmark case for women's rights owed an important intellectual debt to the work of the political philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), who argued that the proper role of government was to protect humanity's preexisting natural rights.
Locke is sometimes mislabeled as a conservative by certain modern academics and pundits. But his ideas were deemed to be quite radical in their own day. And for the teenaged Mary Wollstonecraft, that Lockean radicalism was as welcome as the first taste of food after a grueling starvation.
The year was 1775 and Wollstonecraft was 15 years old. She was a brilliant and independent-minded young woman, increasingly outraged by the vile behavior of her drunk, domineering father. He abused Wollstonecraft's mother and maintained a strict, sexist hierarchy at home, favoring her brother while she was made to suffer.
It was at this low point in her life when Wollstonecraft first read Locke. Certain passages from his greatest work, The Second Treatise of Government (1689), caught hold of her mind and never really let go. A properly constituted social order "gives the husband no more power over [his wife's] life than she has over his," Locke wrote. "The power of the husband being so far from that of an absolute monarch that the wife has, in many cases, a liberty to separate from him, where natural right or their contract allows it, whether that contract be made by themselves in the state of nature, or by the customs or laws of the country they live in."
She had always felt that her father had no right to tyrannize her family and that the preferential treatment he and her mother bestowed on [brother] Ned was unjust. Now, after reading Locke, she had an ethical foundation for her feelings. Not only was it her right to shape her own future; it was everyone's right. In fact, Locke's social contract made protest seem the only rational response to injustice; it was humanity's obligation to overthrow tyranny.
One of the reasons why Locke is sometimes mislabeled as a conservative today is because of his writings in favor of property rights, an issue that we now associate with conservative and libertarian thinkers. But it is worth remembering that Locke's whole case for property rights began with the idea that "every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself."
Is it any wonder that Locke's radical case for self-ownership would appeal to a young woman like Wollstonecraft, who longed to break free from the sexist laws and cultural strictures that held her back? Nobody was going to convince her that she did not have a right to her own body.
We might say something similar about the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), who also drank deep from the principles of Lockean liberalism. "You are a man and so am I," Douglass wrote in his famous open letter to his former enslaver. "In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means for obtaining an honest living. Your faculties remained yours, and mine became useful to their rightful owner." That is about as clear and effective a restatement of Lockean self-ownership principles as you are going to find.
Locke's influence on the American Revolution, particularly on Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, is well-known. That Locke also had a key influence on both the women's rights and abolitionist movements is perhaps worthy of further remark.
The other Dan Sullivan in Alaska has drawn the most attention, but both parties are quietly trying to use little-known candidates in other battlegrounds to siphon votes, too.
Dan J. Sullivan, a retired teacher in Alaska, was recruited by Democratic operatives to join the race against Senator Dan S. Sullivan, a Republican, whose allies have been left worrying that voters will be confused.
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