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Google DeepMind announced the global availability of SynthID Detector, a tool designed to help identify AI-generated content, including media created using AI tools from SynthID partners such as OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Kakao, with Apple support expected soon.

Heading into the final two weeks before Election Day on November 3, Republicans are pursuing two conflicting campaign strategies that could send voters mixed messages. One is all about President Donald Trump and the other pretends he doesn’t exist.

While Trump has returned to the campaign trail promoting his record and asking voters to pretend he’s on the ballot, actual Republican candidates have increasingly tried to keep Trump out of the picture. Just look at their advertising.

Less than $1 of every $100 spent on television ads for Republican congressional candidates from September 9 to October 17 mentions Trump, according to a New York Times review of data from the advertisement tracking firm AdImpact. By contrast, $20 of every $100 spent on Democratic ads mention Trump.

Over that same period, Trump hosted and spoke at both nights of a rare midterm convention nicknamed “Trumpapalooza,” held 15 rallies, and aired nearly $22 million in government-funded commercials promoting himself before facing bipartisan backlash (he later said his PAC would pay for them in the future). For Republican congressional candidates who don’t want to talk about Trump, he’s made it very hard.

It’s not unusual for candidates of the party in power to distance themselves from the president in the midterms since modern presidential approval ratings tend to only go down after taking office. Trump, however, has never been more unpopular. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday found just 31% of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing, lower than at any point of his two terms.

Earlier in the campaign cycle, Republicans were eager to reference Trump, since many were touting his endorsement or signaling their allegiance to him to win the primaries. More than 70% of broadcast ads for Republican congressional candidates mentioned Trump from January 1, 2025, to June 14, 2026, before mentions of him dropped off dramatically after Labor Day, according to data from the nonpartisan Wesleyan Media Project.

The Trump-free Republican ads are just one example of how Trump’s unpopularity is shaping the midterm race, and Republicans are distancing themselves from him in other ways too.

Republican candidates have scrubbed images and references to Trump from their campaign websites, even in deep Republican states, like Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Representative Byron Donalds, a Florida gubernatorial candidate. Some Republicans have skipped rallies or administration events in their states when Trump or Vice President JD Vance came to town, denying nightly newscasts and Democratic attack ads fresh footage showing them chummy with the unpopular president or vice president.

Other Republicans have come out against specific and unpopular policies in ads or social media videos, like Maria Elvira Salazar, a Florida congresswoman who said Trump’s immigration enforcement had gone too far, or Mike Rogers, a former congressman and U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan, who said the Iran war needs to end.

With a president this unpopular, there’s always a chance Trump’s efforts to help his party could backfire. While Trump tells rally attendees to vote like he’s on the ballot, Republicans at large are showing that they’d rather you not.

A block and a half away from a bleak-looking concrete jail in downtown Los Angeles, a former parking lot is being transformed into a new vision of what rehabilitation can look like.

The project, called the Robert K. Ross Center for Hope and Healing just broke ground. It will include affordable apartments for low-income residents, including people reentering society after incarceration. It will have a center for learning and job training, a hub focused on mental and physical health, and another hub for community meetings. The whole project carefully considers trauma-informed design—how spaces can support people’s well-being, reduce stress, and foster a sense of safety.

“For the people who are served and touched by this, we think it creates a different road to reduce recidivism and a much healthier pathway for these folks,” says Brenda Solorzano, CEO of The California Endowment, which is leading the project. The foundation, which focuses on health and racial equity in the state, gives out around $250 million in grants each year. But the organization realized that it could also make use of another asset: an empty lot next to its own offices in L.A.

The team decided to use the property to pilot a new model for how society can help people impacted by the justice system. The project is based on the “care first” approach, the idea that by investing in ways to keep people housed and help them heal, it can help them avoid the criminal justice system. The housing intended not only for people returning from incarceration, but also for formerly unhoused people and other low-income residents facing barriers to stability. (The fact that the organization’s offices, and the vacant lot, were near the jail wasn’t a coincidence; the foundation wants to work as close as it can to the people that it serves.)

Each aspect of the design considers how to make the physical space supportive. “There’s a lot of neuroscience that’s actually pointing out that the built environment significantly influences individuals and communities, not only aesthetically, but their physical and mental wellbeing,” says Alan Pullman, a partner at Studio One Eleven, the architecture and urban design firm that partnered with Linc Housing, an affordable housing developer, on the project.

The former parking lot will feature 120 trees, and residents will have access to a community garden and other outdoor spaces. The architects softened the lines of the buildings, using a curved, more natural shape for one of the hubs. “Our brains have not caught up evolutionarily to living in urban settings, so anything you could do to bring in a more natural environment would be beneficial to healing and to stress reduction,” Pullman says.

The team worked with an acoustical engineer to design the space to minimize noise. The windows have an enhanced sound tranmission rating to block out sound as much as possible. The buildings are also laid out to help limit noise from the adjacent busy streets, with the apartments and their terraces facing a quieter central courtyard.

To make the apartments feel homey rather than institutional, the designers used natural materials and avoided exposed concrete. They chose soft colors for paint and tactile surfaces, and designed the rooms to fill with natural light. The placement of the buildings allows for windows on two sides in many of the apartments, so they have more ventilation and light and feel less like hotel rooms. The corridors are also filled with natural light.

“I think we often don’t stop and think about how design can impact a person’s sense of being—that’s color, that’s lighting, that’s whatever other kinds of design elements you built into the space—and create a place that is calming,” says Solorzano. “We knew that the folks that we would be serving in the center don’t have a lot of access to those kinds of spaces, and there was the opportunity to create that and change kind of what [they think] they deserve in their mind, and what society thinks they deserve.”

Cleo Valentine, an architectural neurophysiology researcher and systems designer at Harvard University, has been studying the design and making recommendations using a tool that analyzes visual stress. After the project is complete in 2028, the team wants to run a post-occupancy study on how the design has impacted residents.

“There’s so much data that we should be getting out of this project of what worked and what we do differently that we can inform future projects like this,” Pullman says.

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