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Whether you’re looking for a gift for the tech lover in your life or just looking to upgrade your own gadgets, Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale offers great prices on everything from TVs to smart home tech and travel hardware.

That includes discounts on Apple AirPods, iPads, and MacBooks, sales on wireless headphones from Sony and Bose, and deals on computers, and gaming hardware. Amazon tech like Kindle, Echo smart speakers, and Fire TV streaming sticks are also available at some of the lowest prices we’ve ever seen.

We’ve rounded up the best deals on tech and electronics we’ve found so far during Amazon’s October Prime Day. Be sure to check out our guides to the best overall deals and the best TVs too.

The Prime Early Access Sale, Amazon’s second Prime Day of 2022, is here to jumpstart the holiday shopping season, and if you’re looking for the best deals, you’ve come to the right place. 

As with Prime Day earlier this year, the Prime Early Access Sale is a members-only event that promises “hundreds of thousands” of deals. Translation? Truly good deals are difficult to find. 

Throughout the two-day sales extravaganza running October 11 to October 12, we’ll be surfacing the very best discounts as they come, so bookmark this page and check back often. Insider Reviews’ team of expert reporters and editors have vetted each of the deals below — because a great discount doesn’t mean much if the product isn’t any good.

When you buy through our links, Insider may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more.

• Trump said former President George H.W. Bush kept secret government files at a Chinese restaurant.
• He also called for the late president to be investigated, despite Bush having died in 2018.
• Former prosecutor Joyce Vance said Trump’s claims resembled those made by guilty people.

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance said that Donald Trump’s wild claims about classified documents during his rallies make him look guilty and scared. 

Vance, now a law professor at the University of Alabama, weighed in on Trump’s speech at a GOP campaign rally in Nevada on Saturday. Trump baselessly claimed that the late former President George H.W. Bush kept secret government documents in a “bowling alley slash Chinese restaurant.” 

“George H.W. Bush took millions of documents to a former bowling alley and a former Chinese restaurant where they combined them,” Trump said. “So they’re in a bowling alley slash Chinese restaurant.” 

“By contrast, I had a small number of boxes and storage at Mar-A-Lago — very small, relatively — guarded by the great Secret Service, we love the Secret Service. And yet the FBI, with many people, raided my house,” he added.

Commenting on Trump’s claims, Vance tweeted: “In my experience as a prosecutor, people say stuff like this when they’re guilty & scared.” 

—Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) October 9, 2022

During a rally in Arizona on Sunday, Trump made the same claim, alleging that Bush “took millions and millions of documents to a former bowling alley pieced together with what was then an old and broken Chinese restaurant.” 

“And it had a broken front door and broken windows. Other than that, it was quite secure,” Trump said, questioning why Bush was not being investigated and prosecuted. Bush died in Houston in 2018. 

Trump’s claims about Bush sparked scorn from Bush’s son, Jeb Bush, who tweeted his response to Trump on Saturday. 

 “I am so confused,” Jeb Bush wrote. “My dad enjoyed a good Chinese meal and enjoyed the challenge of 7 10 split. What the heck is up with you?”

—Jeb Bush (@JebBush) October 10, 2022

It is unclear how Trump arrived at his claims about the elder Bush. A spokesperson at Trump’s post-presidential press office did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment. 

During its search of Mar-a-Lago on August 8, the FBI seized classified documents, including some marked “top secret.” Trump is under investigation by the DOJ for whether Trump broke three federal laws — including the Espionage Act — by keeping the files at his Florida residence. 

• A blast on a crucial bridge caused celebrations in Ukraine and calls for revenge among Putin allies.
• The Kerch bridge is an important supply route between Russia and the Ukrainian peninsula.
• Putin allies, blaming Ukraine, have called it a “terrorist attack” and demanded a response.

Allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin are calling for a swift response after an explosion on a crucial bridge linking the Crimean peninsula to mainland Russia.

The Kerch bridge collapsed Saturday at around 6 a.m. local time after a truck explosion set off fuel tankers while a train was crossing, Russian officials said.

Putin immediately ordered the source of the explosion to be investigated, but some in Russia quickly blamed Ukraine. Some Ukrainian officials offered subtle hints that they may have been behind the blast, which occurred the morning after the Russian president’s 70th birthday, but Ukraine has not formally taken responsibility.

The bridge provides a road and rail connection between Russia and Crimea, the Ukrainian territory that Russia illegally annexed in 2014. It serves as a key supply route for transporting essential goods like fuel and equipment to Russian forces, which are already said to be struggling as they try to ward off more Ukrainian counteroffensives. 

The bridge also held personal significance to Putin, who oversaw its opening in 2018 by driving a truck across it in a symbolic show of the connection between Crimea and Russia.

—Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) October 8, 2022

 

The explosion on Saturday has been called a humiliation for Putin due to both the strategic and symbolic significance of the bridge, and has opened him up to additional public criticism over his handling of the war in Ukraine.

Some of his allies have publicly demanded retaliation, certain that Ukraine was behind the blast.

Sergei Markov, a politician and former adviser to Putin, called the explosion of the bridge a “terrorist attack” in a Telegram post and said it showed “the US and its Ukrainian proxy regime will move the red line further and further,” Politico Europe reported.

“No response from Russia? Even further. And again? Even further,” he wrote, urging Moscow to respond.

The explosion was also called a “terrorist attack” by Konstantin Dolgov, a member of Russia’s parliament, according to Politico Europe. He called it “another sinister manifestation of the terrorist nature of the puppet Kyiv regime,” adding: “Terrorists must be treated unequivocally!”

The calls for revenge come as Putin and the Russian military have faced increasing criticism in recent weeks, including from members of his inner circle, according to reports.

Though Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the attack, the explosion of the bridge was celebrated by Ukrainians. 

• Former Trump aide Sarah Matthews said Mark Meadows’ behavior on January 6 was the most disappointing.
• She told Politico that Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, was often seen as an enabler. 
• Matthews was one of several aides to resign on January 6.

A former White House deputy press secretary said besides former President Donald Trump, the behavior of Mark Meadows — the former chief of staff — was the most disappointing during the Capitol riot.

On Friday’s episode of Politico’s podcast “Playbook Deep Dive,” Sarah Matthews, one of several aides who resigned on January 6, said Meadows was often seen as an enabler. 

“He wouldn’t speak up and say what we all knew and would kind of sometimes just sit back and I heard that from multiple people in general at my tenure at The White House,” she told Politico’s Ryan Lizza. “He was always kind of looking out for his own best interests it felt like.”

Matthews said Meadows’ text messages from that day made it clear he was getting bombarded by people telling him to get the situation under control.

Meadows turned over thousands of texts to the January 6 committee, which ranged from Donald Trump Jr. advising Meadows to tell Trump to “condemn this shit Asap” to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene saying the rioters were antifa “dressed like Trump supporters.”

On September 15, CNN reported Meadows complied with the Justice Department’s subpoena for its January 6 investigation.

A lawyer for Meadows did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

• Elon Musk is feuding on Twitter with China’s top propagandist.
• Hu Xijin, a Chinese commentator, said Musk would be “taught a lesson” over his views on Ukraine.
• Musk fired back at Hu with what appeared to be a meme of a translation of a fake Confucius quote.

Billionaire Elon Musk has been embroiled in a Twitter brawl over the Ukraine war with China’s top propagandist, Hu Xijin. 

Hu, a former editor-in-chief of Chinese state media outlet Global Times who has been described as China’s “troll king” by The Guardian, called Musk out in a Wednesday tweet responding to Musk’s Twitter poll on how to end the Ukraine war.

In the poll, Musk asked his followers to vote on whether his list of conditions — which included re-doing the sham referendums in the four Ukrainian regions annexed by Russia and ensuring Ukraine’s neutrality in the region — would work to bring an end to the conflict.

In his scathing response to the poll on Wednesday, Hu wrote: “Elon Musk has released his personality too much, and he believes too much in the US and West’s ‘freedom of speech.’ He will be taught a lesson.” 

Musk fired back at Hu on Thursday with a phrase in Chinese that read: “手整体插在口袋里的人过分自信.” 

The Chinese phrase posted by Musk did not appear to be entirely coherent but translated to: “A man with his whole hands in his pockets is overly confident.”

—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 6, 2022

It is unclear what Musk meant by the tweet. However, some Twitter users commented that it might have been a Google-translated version of a meme involving an innuendo-laden fake Confucius quote that states: “Man with hand in pocket feel cocky all day.”

Users on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform appeared none the wiser about the meaning of Musk’s post but speculated that Musk meant to say that Hu was idle and powerless.

For his part, Hu responded to Musk on Friday with a tweet that read: “Man with hands in Twitter feels confident.”

—Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) October 7, 2022

Musk has sparred with several figures over Twitter in the last week, including South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. 

In response to Musk’s proposed peace plan, Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, blasted Musk in a tweet on Tuesday that stated: “Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also took a swipe at Musk, posting his own poll that asked if people like a Musk who supports Russia or a Musk who supports Ukraine more. 

Musk also got into a contentious Twitter exchange with the Kyiv Post, a Ukrainian media outlet that called Musk out for his “pride and vanity.”

“Look, @elonmusk, like we said before we are grateful to you for the Starlinks. We naturally disagree with your peace plan and make no secret of it — but we do invite you to give us an interview and explain why your stance is like that. We are keen to know. DM?” the outlet wrote on its Twitter page on Thursday. 

“I’m a big fan of Ukraine, but not of WW3,” Musk fired back the same day.

Hu and Musk did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

• Michael Cohen said SCOTUS would reveal its corruption if it took up Trump’s case.
• Trump asked SCOTUS to intervene in his dispute with the FBI over documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.
• Cohen added that if the Supreme Court intervenes, the justices on the bench would “have to go.” 

Michael Cohen, who was once Donald Trump’s lawyer and fixer, believes the Supreme Court would reveal its corruption if it gets involved in the former president’s legal tussle with the FBI over top-secret documents found at Mar-a-Lago. 

Cohen commented in a TikTok video on Tuesday about Trump’s request for the Supreme Court to intervene in his dispute with the FBI over the seizure of more than 11,000 records from Mar-a-Lago. The remarks came after the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit overturned Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to include around 100 classified documents in the special master’s review, pausing their use in the criminal investigation.

Trump is now attempting to get the Supreme Court to keep these documents under the purview of the special master. 

“Delay, delay, delay, that’s what he’s gonna do,” said Cohen, referring to Trump. “This is exactly what he does in every single case. He will drag it now as far as he possibly could.”

In September, Cohen admitted that he had helped Trump create a “playbook” for dealing with legal troubles, which included delaying lawsuits as a tactic for avoiding prosecution.

Cohen said that Trump’s request to the Supreme Court was his “only move” but also weighed in on what could happen with the court’s decision.

 

“If the Supreme Court ends up listening to this bullshit, the fact that this fucking asshole can have top-secret documents, which is in violation of the Presidential Records Act, as well as the National Archives with their multiple subpoenas, requests, and so on for the return of the documents, we’ll know that the fucking Supreme Court is corrupt,” Cohen said on Tuesday.

He added that if the Supreme Court intervened and took Trump’s side, all the justices on the bench would “have to go.” 

A spokesperson for Trump’s post-presidential office did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

The Department of Justice has been looking into whether Trump broke any of three federal laws — including the Espionage Act — by keeping classified documents at his Florida residence.

In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to felonies, including tax evasion, campaign finance violations, and bank fraud. He was sentenced in December that year to three years in prison and was disbarred in February 2019 by the New York Supreme Court. 

Since his release, Cohen has become an outspoken Trump critic and has gleefully weighed in on the former president’s many legal troubles. In September, he also announced that he would be selling t-shirts that depicted Trump behind bars to “celebrate the fall of the mango Mussolini.”

• In the Philippines, 433 people won a $4 million lottery jackpot.
• Officials are calling for a probe into the draw, as all the winning numbers are multiples of nine.
• Lottery officials told Bloomberg nothing about the results is irregular.

Government officials in the Philippines are calling for a probe into a Grand Lotto outcome that saw hundreds of people win a jackpot worth 236 million peso, or around $4 million.

Participants in the Grand Lotto select six numbers ranging from one to 55, and all six numbers have to match those drawn by the lottery operator, the BBC reported.

The Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, the lottery organizers, announced that 433 people had won the lottery held on October 1. Each of the winners is set to win nearly $10,000. 

That’s the highest number of people to have ever won the Philippines’ Grand Lotto top prize, the BBC reported, citing local media.

—Philstar.com (@PhilstarNews) October 3, 2022

 

The kicker? All winning numbers were multiples of nine: nine, 18, 27, 36, 45, and 54, Bloomberg reported.

“I’ve always been betting on the pattern 9, pattern 8, pattern 7 and pattern 6 for many years, and I am thankful that this time, I won,” one unnamed winner who was interviewed by the lottery agency said, per the Star.

But Terence Tao, a math professor from the University of California, Los Angeles, told the BBC that this pattern of winning numbers is rare “for any single lottery.”

The outcome also drew skepticism from government officials. Aquilino Pimentel III, the Philippines’ senate minority leader, asked for a probe into the draw and described the event as “strange and unusual” to Bloomberg.  

“These lotto games are authorized by the Republic of the Philippines. Therefore, we need to maintain and protect the integrity of these gambling games,” he told Bloomberg. 

Lottery officials were quick to defend the results. Melquiades Robles, the general manager of the sweepstakes office, told Bloomberg there was nothing irregular with the results. People tend to cling to their chosen numbers and bet on the same combinations over and over, he added.

In a Facebook post congratulating the winners on October 3, Robles wrote: “Lottery is a game of chance, nothing is definite and it is uncontrollable. To the 433 new jackpot winners, it pays to be loyal.”

The Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office declined Insider’s request for comment.

The news also caused a stir on social media. One person took to Twitter to comment on the odds: “1 bettor has a 1-in-40 million chance of winning. 433 bettors just beat those odds.”

—Alan S. German (@PersuasionAI) October 2, 2022

Others weighed in with disbelief. An op-ed columnist at the Phil Biz News tweeted on the matter, saying: “What a joke—just like the jokes running the organization.”

—Francis Baraan IV (@MrFrankBaraan) October 2, 2022

“Was it just CHANCE or INTENTIONAL?” questioned one person in a series of tweets on October 4. 

—Leo S. Fule 🇵🇭 Man plans. And God laughs. (@IamLeoFule) October 4, 2022

 

• “Obviously, we are pro Ukraine,” he tweeted, hours after being blasted by Ukraine diplomats on Twitter.
• Musk polled a peace plan for the Russia-Ukraine war, which seemingly parroted Putin’s propaganda.

Elon Musk is embroiled in a new Twitter spat, this time with Ukrainian government officials. 

It started on Monday, when Musk posted a poll on Twitter about a peace plan for the war in Ukraine. The poll triggered backlash, with Ukrainian diplomats lambasting Musk over the poll, which seemingly parroted the Kremlin’s talking points.

Late on Monday night, Musk said he is “obviously” pro-Ukraine, writing on Twitter that SpaceX has spent $80 million running Starlink in Ukraine.

“SpaceX’s out of pocket cost to enable & support Starlink in Ukraine is ~$80M so far. Our support for Russia is $0. Obviously, we are pro Ukraine,” he wrote.

Starlink is SpaceX’s satellite communication system, which is being used by Ukrainian soldiers to communicate on the battlefield. Voice and internet services have been rendered useless by power outages, Russian shells, and jamming. 

—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2022

 

Musk’s initial Twitter poll had called for a vote on a list of conditions he seemed to imply could lead to peace between Ukraine and Russia, including redoing the elections in regions recently annexed by Russia and recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Ukrainian government officials, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, responded to the poll quickly and critically. Zelenskyy tweeted out his own poll, asking people which Musk they liked better: The one who supports Russia, or the one who supports Ukraine. 

—Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) October 3, 2022

While the Twitterverse was polling on peace plans and Musk’s likeability, Musk’s Starlink has been helping Ukrainian war efforts on the ground.

“Thank you, Elon Musk,” Oleksiy, a soldier in the Ukrainian army, told Politico in June, crediting Musk’s Starlink for aiding communication of the war efforts.

Musk has sent thousands of Starlink satellite kits into Ukraine since the outbreak of the war. This serves both ways, as he’s using the opportunity to test these satellite services, which he’s also trying to sell to other countries, per the Wall Street Journal.

“Without Starlink, we would have been losing the war already,” one platoon commander on the Izyum front in Ukraine told the Journal. 

• Conservative pundit Scott Jennings said Trump had sent “assassination instructions” about McConnell.
• Jennings said “every Republican ought to be able to say” that Trump’s post was “beyond the pale.”
• “This is bad for the party,” Jennings said.

Conservative pundit Scott Jennings said “every Republican” should be able to disavow former President Donald Trump’s “assassination instructions” against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Jennings, a former GOP advisor and McConnell aide, was referring to a Truth Social post from October 1, in which Trump escalated his long-standing feud with the Kentucky senator. Trump accused McConnell of opposing him because he has a “death wish.” Trump also leveled a racially charged insult at McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, the transportation secretary for the Trump administration, calling her McConnell’s “China loving wife, Coco Chow.”

Trump’s salvo came after McConnell voiced support for changing the way Congress counts electoral votes.

In an appearance on CNN on Sunday, Jennings said Trump’s post contained “assassination instructions” directed at McConnell and “blatant racism” against Chao.

“I mean, if you read that whole thing out loud, if you were on the street, and you heard someone muttering that on a street corner, you wouldn’t say, ‘Hmm, let’s hand this person the presidency or the Republican nomination for president,’” Jennings said. “You would say, ‘Call 911.’ Because it sounds like an unhinged, deranged person has gotten loose and is out on the street and may be a danger to themselves and others.”

He added that the insults against McConnell were “beyond the pale” and that “every Republican ought to be able to say so.”

“This is not good for the party. It’s not good for him,” Jennings said, referring to Trump.

Jennings also weighed in on Sen. Rick Scott’s hesitation to condemn Trump for writing the post, saying Scott was likely “unprepared” for the question. During an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, host Dana Bash asked Scott if Trump’s comments were acceptable — to which Scott said it is “never, ever okay to be a racist,” but stopped short of slamming Trump.

“But there’s something very easy about this. And what’s easy is to say: ‘This is not good. It’s not helpful. It’s not good politically. It’s not good personally. This is bad for the party, bad for the country,’” Jennings said. “And it’s not becoming of a former president and somebody who wants to have the job again.”

Representatives for McConnell and a spokesman at Trump’s post-presidential press office did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.