Good morning and happy National Cinnamon Roll Day to all who celebrate! In related news, we successfully avoided a rerun of the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020. East Coast ports are running again this morning after the dockworkers’ union — the International Longeshoremen’s Association — and the port companies came to a tentative agreement on pay and automation details. The three-day strike will be suspended until January 15 to allow time to negotiate the finer details.

WORLD

🌴 The sun sets again on the British Empire

And then there were 13. The British government on Thursday relinquished its claim to the Chagos Islands — one of its 14 overseas territories — after a long dispute with the nearby island nation of Mauritius. Otherwise known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, this little slice of paradise is primarily known for housing an American military base, Diego Garcia.

• There is no permanent population and the whole chain only has about 23 square miles of land. Diego Garcia, the largest island, makes up about 12 of that.

• The British Indian Ocean Territory is also the namesake of the country-code .io domain popular with that weird app you downloaded that one time.

You can probably imagine how the Brits got control of the islands in the first place. That’s right. They took ‘em from France. The Chagos Islands were uninhabited until European explorers came to town in the 1700s to build a coconut plantation run primarily by enslaved Africans.

• Yadda yadda yadda, Napoleon lost a war, and the Brits took over in 1814. At the same time, they won control of the nearby-ish colony of Mauritius about 1,300 miles to the southwest.

Having a bunch of territories had become ick by the 1960s, so Mauritius was granted independence. But the Brits held onto the Chagos Islands to build a military base. Since then, the territory has been closed to all but military personnel and official visitors. Sadly, that meant expelling the almost 2,000 people who called the islands home.

Mauritius has always claimed the Chagos Islands and has pursued the case on the international stage for decades. After years of negotiations, the United Kingdom agreed yesterday to cede control and provide financial support and infrastructure investments. Mauritius will soon begin resettling the islands… with one exception: Diego Garcia.

Diego Garcia is home to an important joint U.S.-U.K. military base and about 2,500 personnel, all but a few dozen of whom are American. Long viewed as one of the best places to be stationed (for obvious reasons), Diego Garcia is smack dab in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

• So it’s a critical resupply stop for U.S. Navy ships operating in the Middle East or South Asia. It was also a critical launch pad for long-range bombers during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Part of the reason for making a deal? According to the U.K. government, securing the base in the long-term, free from international legal challenges. As part of the agreement, the Brits will rent Diego Garcia from Mauritius for “an initial period” of 99 years.

GOVERNMENT

🇮🇱 President Biden is on board with an Israeli response to Iran's recent missile attacks but believes "they should respond in proportion." Oil prices spiked yesterday on the news that Israel is debating a huge strike on Iran's burgeoning nuclear weapons program, its energy sector, and more. The U.S. and its G7 allies wrote a strongly worded letter condemning Iran’s attack shortly after the U.N.’s boss refused to do the same — a decision that just got him banned from Israel.

💰️ Finance reports from federal campaigns to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) have been coming in hot since Q3 ended on Monday. The Trump campaign raised $160 million in September and has $283 million on hand and ready to blow this month. Harris figures aren’t out yet, but she’s won the fundraising game consistently since taking over for Biden in July. But it’s not just Harris. That Democratic funding edge has trickled down to Senate and House races, too,

🚫 The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is banning imports from two more Chinese companies under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Passed in 2021, the law aims to ensure Americans aren’t funding forced labor in Northwest China’s Xinjiang region. China claims everything is toootally fine. But international observers report an ongoing, yearslong persecution of China’s Uyghur minority (a primarily Muslim ethnic group). Allegations include mass arrests, torture, sterilizations, reeducation camps, forced labor, and more.

POLITICS

📓 Special counsel’s Trump report released

It’s spooky season of a presidential election year. That means it’s October Surprise time. Unexpected bad news about candidates tends to drop in the home stretch for maximum impact. A decent candidate so far this year — it’s only the 4th — is the report from the Department of Justice’s prosecutor, Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Unsealed by a judge on Wednesday, the heavily redacted report on the ongoing case lays out Smith’s arguments against Trump for his alleged criminal effort to overturn the results in 2020. Some interesting tidbits:

• Trump reportedly thought some fraud claims made by supporters were “crazy” and called one Trump-aligned lawyer “unhinged.”

• The report claims he told his daughter Ivanka that, “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”

• After the election, VP Mike Pence allegedly tried to get Trump to go with the “face-saving” option: Take the L and run again in four years. Then-President Trump’s response? “I don’t know, 2024 is so far off.”

Will we get a bigger surprise soon? Hillary Clinton sure thinks so. She's expecting a "concerted" anti-Harris effort any day now.

Elsewhere in Trumpworld, the former president will make nice with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to tour storm damage today. The two have been feuding for ages over the fallout from Trump's loss of the state in 2020. A unified Republican front in Georgia could help in the must-win state.

Kamala Harris campaigned yesterday in Wisconsin with Republican Heir Force General Liz Cheney. The former congresswoman and daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney endorsed Harris last month. In little Ripon, Wisconsin — not coincidentally, the birthplace of the Republican Party — Cheney admitted that she'd "never voted for a Democrat" but would "proudly" change that soon.

• In a blow to Harris, the massive firefighters union (the IAFF) broke with tradition and declined to endorse a presidential candidate. After the Teamsters, this is the second traditionally Democratic labor union that Harris has lost in the past two weeks.

• VP nominee Tim Walz’s growing trail of “misstatements” is frustrating some on the Harris team. Despite their in-depth vetting process, her aides were not aware of some of his flubs, such as his inaccurate story about visiting Hong Kong that was covered in Tuesday’s debate.

TRIVIA

We mentioned above that the Trump campaign raised a cool $160 million last month. Unless your name rhymes with Lark Duckerberg, that’s obviously a monstrous sum of cash. Think of all the extra guac! But it’s substantially less than he raised in September 2020. To that point, we’ve got a two-parter today. How much cash did Donald Trump and Joe Biden each raise in 2020?

Hint: Biden beat Trump in 2020 by about $250 million.

BRIEFS

• Federal district judge pauses Biden student loan forgiveness plan one day after different judge clears it

• Miami Dolphins set to sell 10% of team to private equity firm in NFL first under new league rule

• Two Harvard students prove Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses can unveil names, addresses of strangers via facial recognition

• New NATO boss says Ukraine’s right to self-defense ‘does not end at the border,’ backs strikes deep in Russian territory

• SS United States, a 50s-era ocean liner bigger than the Titanic, to be sunk in Florida to create world’s largest artificial reef

• Federal appeals court legalizes betting on politics, rules federal regulators failed to show ‘irreparable harm’ in quest for ban — for now

• Chinese Coast Guard teams with Russia, sails into Arctic Ocean for first time as the battle for control heats up

QUOTE

ANSWER

During the 2020 election cycle, the Trump campaign raised $811,898,514.36 while team Biden brought in $1,074,179,976.03. Just 20 years prior, George W. Bush’s winning 2000 campaign pulled in “just” $196 million.