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Greg Gutfeld covers the final push to election day.

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Democrats are poised to retain and expand their House majority, The Cook Political Report predicts just a day ahead of the 2020 election.Cook issued its final House race predictions for the 2020 election on Monday, and all eight of its ratings changes moved in Democrats' favor. That leaves Democrats safely in expansion territory, with Republicans at high risk of losing twice as many seats as Democrats.> New @CookPolitical: our FINAL House ratings feature eight late-breaking changes, all towards Democrats (including three in TX). Read full analysis here ($): https://t.co/OUqiTVVs9j pic.twitter.com/UUWa9cQFfN> > — Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 2, 2020In all, Cook predicts Democrats will add between 10–15 seats to their 34-seat majority, though as few as 5 and as many as 20 could swing. Just eight Democratic House seats are considered tossups with a 50/50 chance of being lost, while 17 Republican and one Independent (formerly Republican) seats are considered tossups. > New @CookPolitical: our FINAL House outlook is a Dem net gain of 10-15 seats, with anything from 5-20 seats well within the range of possibility. View our final ratings: https://t.co/wcfAZ8REga> > Solid/Likely/Lean D: 229 > Solid/Likely/Lean R: 179 > Toss Up: 27 pic.twitter.com/WcdnWJLG16> > — Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 2, 2020Cook also predicts Democratic nominee Joe Biden will capture the 270 electoral votes he needs to win the election, while nine Republican Senate seats either lean Democratic or are considered tossups. More stories from theweek.com COVID-19 keeps proving everyone wrong Is this the year the New South turns blue? Democrats' first priority

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This really was a fluke. The driver of a metro train escaped injury when the front carriage rammed through the end of an elevated section of rails and was caught by a sculpture of a whale's tail near the Dutch port city of Rotterdam. The train was left perched upon one of two tail fins known as "flukes" several meters (yards) above the ground. It created such a stir locally that authorities urged sightseers to stay away, adding that coronavirus restrictions were in force.

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Final polls of the presidential race before election day give Joe Biden a commanding lead nationwide, but with gaps narrowing in some key battleground states.With two days remaining until the elections, some pollsters are still urging caution about certainty of a Democratic win despite Biden's lead over President Trump. The president's shock victory in 2016 has contributed to unease about current survey results."This election is probably the most competitive 10-point race I’ve seen," Republican pollster Bill McInturff told the Wall Street Journal.McInturff and Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt conducted the final election poll for the Journal and NBC News, in which respondents broke for Biden 52-42. A Fox News survey released on Saturday showed a similar result, with Biden leading 52-44.Polls of battleground states are more varied in their findings, however. Biden leads Trump by 47-44 in Florida and 49-43 in Pennsylvania and Arizona, according to a final pre-election New York Times/Siena College poll. (The same survey gave Biden an eleven-point lead in Wisconsin.)However, Trump holds a 50-48 lead over Biden in Florida according to a different survey by the Washington Post and ABC News, with pollsters calling the Florida election a "toss-up." The Post and ABC poll also found that Biden leads Trump 49-45 among all registered voters in Pennsylvania.Biden was scheduled to campaign in Pennsylvania on Sunday in an attempt to win over that state's 20 electoral votes. Biden, who has stopped in Michigan and Wisconsin during the final stretch of his campaign, appears to be attempting to win back Democratic strongholds that flipped to support Trump in the 2016 elections.The president, campaigning in Michigan on Sunday, has countered by portraying himself as better for American manufacturing industries. Trump has also highlighted Biden's comments on ending fracking in an attempt to appeal to Pennsylvania voters.

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Cities across the United States were battening down the hatches as they prepared for potential riots in the wake of the election on Tuesday. With the country more bitterly divided than at any time since the Vietnam War in the 1970s it was feared a disputed result could set off nationwide clashes. In Washington businesses near the White House, including hotels, banks and restaurants, boarded up their windows, as did those in iconic New York locations including Times Square and Fifth Avenue. Alex Provenzano, who owns a nail salon two blocks from the White House, said it was "pretty scary," adding: "I hope for the best, but the people are very stressed out." Officials were removing bins and bicycle stands so they couldn't be used as projectiles. Students at George Washington University in the capital were told to hunker down. An email sent to students by the university said: "We suggest preparing for the Election Day period as you would for a hurricane or a snowstorm that would prevent you from going outside for several days to grab food or order takeout."

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Foreign Minister Javad Zarif hints at an Iranian preference in American leaders for the first time in an interview with CBS News' Elizabeth Palmer.

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When the coronavirus first erupted in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in the spring, Mayor Paul TenHaken arrived at work each morning with a clear mission: Stop the outbreak at the pork plant. Hundreds of employees, chopping meat shoulder to shoulder, had gotten sick in what was then the largest U.S. virus cluster.That outbreak was extinguished months ago, and these days, when he heads into City Hall, the situation is far more nebulous. The virus has spread all over town."You can swing a cat and hit someone who has got it," said TenHaken, who had to reschedule his own meetings to Zoom this past week after his assistant tested positive for the virus.As the coronavirus soars across the country, charting a single-day record of 99,155 new cases on Friday and surpassing 9 million cases nationwide, tracing the path of the pandemic in the United States is no longer simply challenging. It has become nearly impossible.Gone are the days when Americans could easily understand the virus by tracking rising case numbers back to discrete sources -- the crowded factory, the troubled nursing home, the rowdy bar. Now, there are so many cases, in so many places, that many people are coming to a frightening conclusion: They have no idea where the virus is spreading."It's just kind of everywhere," said Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who estimated that tracing coronavirus cases becomes difficult once the virus spreads to more than 10 cases per 100,000 people.In some of the hardest-hit spots in the United States, the virus is spreading at 10 to 20 times that rate, and even health officials have all but given up trying to figure out who is giving the virus to whom.There have been periods earlier in the pandemic when infections spread beyond large, well-understood clusters in prisons, business meetings and dinner parties, tearing through communities in ways that were nearly impossible to keep track of. But for the most part, that experience was isolated to hard-hit places like New York City in the spring and portions of the Sun Belt in the summer.This time, the diffuse, chaotic spread is happening in many places at once. Infections are rising in 41 states, the country is recording an average of more than 79,000 new cases each day, and more Americans say they feel left to do their own lonely detective work."I was so careful," said Denny Taylor, 45, who said he had taken exacting precautions -- wearing a mask, getting groceries delivered -- before he became the first in his family and among his co-workers to test positive for the virus.Lying in a hospital bed in Omaha, Nebraska, this past week, he said he still had no idea where he caught it.Uncovering the path of transmission from person to person, known as contact tracing, is seen as a key tool for containing the spread of the coronavirus. Within a day or two of testing positive, residents in many communities can expect to get a phone call from a trained contact tracer, who conducts a detailed interview before beginning the painstaking process of tracking down each new person who may have been exposed."We were pretty successful, and we were very proud of how the case numbers went down," said Dr. Sehyo Yune, who supervised a team of contact tracers in Massachusetts this spring.It was one of several strategies that helped tamp down earlier outbreaks in places like Massachusetts, New York and Washington, D.C.But as cases skyrocket again in many states, many health officials have conceded that interviewing patients and dutifully calling each contact will not be enough to slow the outbreak."Contact tracing is not going to save us," said Dr. Ogechika Alozie, chief medical officer at Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, Texas, where hospitalizations in the county have soared by more than 400% and officials issued a new order for residents to stay at home.The problem, of course, is that failing to fully track the virus makes it much harder to get a sense of where the virus is flourishing and how to get ahead of new outbreaks. But once an area spins out of control, trying to trace back each chain of transmission can feel like scooping cupfuls of water from a flood.In some places, overwhelmed health officials have abandoned any pretense of keeping up.In North Dakota, state officials announced they could no longer have one-on-one conversations with everyone who may have been exposed. Aside from situations involving schools and health care facilities, people who test positive were advised to notify their own contacts, leaving residents largely on their own to follow the trail of the outbreak.In Philadelphia, where cases recently spiked to more than 300 per day, city officials acknowledged that they now must leave some cases untracked. Most people, they said, are catching the virus through family and friends."We weren't supposed to get to this point," said Dr. Arnold Monto, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan, who said the process of tracking cases and notifying people who may have been exposed is a gold standard of disease prevention but impractical after a certain level of infection."If you have five clusters going on at the same time," he said, "it's hard to say where it came from."When a first major outbreak hit Grand Forks, North Dakota, in April, the problem was clear: More than 150 employees of a wind turbine blade factory were infected. The factory shut its doors for several weeks, and public health officials tested and contact traced each case.For the rest of the summer, Grand Forks, a college town of 56,000 on the border with Minnesota, saw almost no new infections. An uptick in August was quickly tied to students at the University of North Dakota and largely contained.Now, though, any sense of control has vanished. Active cases of COVID-19 have quadrupled since the beginning of October to 912 in Grand Forks County, and about half the people contacted by the health department say they are not sure how they became infected."People are realizing that you can get it anywhere," said Kailee Leingang, a 21-year-old nursing student who also works for the state as a contact tracer in Grand Forks.Even Leingang has fallen ill, along with several of her colleagues. She traces her case to her parents, who first started showing symptoms. Beyond that, the trail goes cold."They have no idea," she said of where her parents came in contact with the virus.Leingang, isolating at her home with her cat, feels sicker by the day. Dishes have piled up in the sink -- she is too weak to stand long enough to wash them. But she is still working, calling at least 50 people a day to notify them that their tests came back positive, although her job is no longer to track who else they may have infected."With the high number of cases right now," she said, "our team can't afford to have somebody not work."In earlier, quieter periods of the pandemic, the virus spread with some degree of certainty. In all but the hardest-hit cities, people could ask a common question -- "Where did you get it?" -- and often find tangible answers.A popular college bar in East Lansing, Michigan, Harper's Restaurant and Brewpub, became a hot spot this summer after dozens of people piled into the bar, drinking and dancing in close quarters. At least 192 people -- 146 people at the bar and 46 people with ties to those at the bar -- were infected. Afterward, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer shut down indoor dining in bars in parts of the state.In Ingham County, which includes much of East Lansing, it is far harder to tell where the virus is spreading now. Of the county's 4,700 reported cases over the course of the pandemic, more than 2,700 have come since the beginning of September.Much of the new spread may be tied to students at Michigan State University, where students are living off campus and taking classes online. But every day, employers and residents call the Health Department to report random cases that defy easy explanation."It's just a hodgepodge," said Linda Vail, the Ingham County health officer.Heidi Stevens is among the newly infected who considers her case a mystery. As a columnist at The Chicago Tribune, Stevens works from home. Her children attend school online. She wears a mask when she goes for a run, and she has not had a haircut since January.So when she got a precautionary test a few weeks ago, with the hopes of inviting friends over to have cake for her daughter's 15th birthday, Stevens was shocked to learn she was positive."I would drive myself crazy if I tried to really nail it down," said Stevens, 46, who was hospitalized for three days and still wakes up with headaches.Did she pick up an infected apple at the grocery store and somehow touch her eye? Should she have been wearing a face shield, in addition to her mask? The possibilities feel endless."It's just out there," she said.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

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The state has three electoral votes and is not expected to be competitive.

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At the first rally during his final three days of campaigning against the one he calls “Sleepy Joe,” President Donald Trump couldn’t help but sound tired.During his campaign stop in Newtown, Bucks County, the president was conspicuously subdued, delivering one of his laziest, most bored-sounding rally speeches in recent memory. Lacking his standard energy and lib-owning peppiness, Trump sleepwalked his way through his prepared and ad-libbed remarks about how the Hunter Biden emails and foreign-dealings story was somehow the “biggest” story in the country, a country ravaged by Trump’s own mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis and an economic implosion.He mocked The New York Times for having “apologized” to its readers for something or other. He accused his enemies during his self-described “little special speech” of trying to “silence his voice.” He spoke of “the riots,” the politicians who “let Minneapolis burn,” and the progressives and left-wing educators who wanted American schoolkids “indoctrinated” with history that put greater emphasis on matters such as the horrors of slavery. (His solution? “Patriotic education,” whatever that means.) He sneered at the crowd sizes former President Barack Obama was attracting recently, in support of the current Democratic nominee. And he, of course, mocked “Joe Biden, who’s not all there,” to the crowd’s giddy laughter.He promised that a second term of his presidency would see more “tough on crime” policy and appointments, and in the same breath trashed Biden for championing the 1994 “crime bill” and for being too tough on crime and Black communities.But it was all perfunctory and listless, exhibiting none of the hunger or drive that Trump has used to sell his MAGA rallies as rock concerts for cultural conservatives, maskless Fox Business fans, and zealous immigration restrictionists. “He’s been doing so many of these [recently]. You’d be tired, too,” one senior Trump 2020 aide told The Daily Beast near the end of this first rally. “The president hates [media] coverage of him sounding low-energy, though, so I expect this to change fast.”By the time the second Pennsylvania event of the day rolled around, the president apparently got the memo and the aide was vindicated—but only somewhat.Trump’s Inner Circle Braces for DisasterAt his second visit to the state on Saturday, Trump pulled himself out of his early-afternoon lethargy just in time for his swing through Reading, though his energy levels and rally flamboyance were still at best a facsimile of the wildest, most red-meat stops in his campaign.And it was primarily just whining, and then some more whining.The leader of the free world again groused, as is standard fare, about “corrupt news” and “fake news,” and about how the supposedly lefty “Big Tech” and Democrats and “RINOs” (Republicans In Name Only) “play dirty” to fight him and conservatives. Despite a newly minted 6-3 conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, Trump complained about how he’s recently had to deal with “many, many disappointing decisions” from the highest court in the land, and that conservatives “don’t control the Supreme Court,” despite the fact that they do. He baselessly warned that liberals would “cheat” with the “ballots” to defeat him in the 2020 election.Trump insisted he was “running against the left-wing media, the big tech giants… [and] some RINOs… RINOs are worse than the… sicko Democrats.”And he went on yet another extended riff on “father and son” Joe and Hunter Biden, inspiring a round of “LOCK HIM UP” chants from the crowd. The president also referenced the elder Biden’s 2018 comments during which the former VP discussed a hypothetical about beating up Trump in school, and complained about an alleged double standard that’s applied when Trump discusses or encourages violent acts.The president also made time for jokes, saying that his wife’s coronavirus infection put to bed long-running gossip that he and first lady Melania Trump don’t sleep in the same bed or live together. “Our great first lady tested positive,” the president reminded his audience. “At least those rumors that we don’t live together turned out to be false,” he said. “That’s the only good thing about her testing positive.”For his third stop of the day, it was more of the same.As the night fell on Butler, Pennsylvania, the president claimed there’s no better or more fun place to be “than a Trump rally,” to which the crowd of fans cheered. The president bashed the “nasty deep state,” and once again jeered at Biden for his “aviator glasses” and those “new eyes” of his.When he wasn’t talking about how “the plague [had] come in from China” and wrecked the U.S. economy, he was accusing Biden and running mate Kamala Harris of wanting to “destroy Pennsylvania.”And at the fourth Pennsylvania rally, in Montoursville, the president who has so often claimed all things MAGA are censored on social media, marveled at the news that Trump supporters had surrounded a Team Biden bus on a highway and were now “trending.”“Anybody see the picture of their crazy bus driving down the highway? They are surrounded by like, hundreds of cars, and they’re all Trump flags all over the place,” the president celebrated.“What a group… It's like a hot thing. See, that’s really No. 1 trending,” Trump added.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Demand for food aid surges in state and across country, with 54m potentially facing hunger by year’s endCharles Bennicoff hasn’t worked since last winter. He’s an experienced landscape gardener but the mom-and-pop business he worked for in Allentown, Pennsylvania, cut its staff after losing most of their contracts during the pandemic.Bennicoff, 50, now relies on a food pantry for a few bags of groceries every couple of weeks to supplement the food stamps and social security his mentally ill wife receives. He still picks up the occasional odd job but doesn’t qualify for unemployment benefits because the landscaping job was cash in hand.It’s the first time the couple have needed food aid since recovering from drug addiction and homelessness about 20 years ago, and Bennicoff is struggling to stay positive.“Covid has taken a toll, emotionally and financially. There’s a thousand people dying every day because of the president’s lies, and I can’t just shrug that off. I have tears in my eyes every night,” said Bennicoff.Hunger is rising in Pennsylvania, with the demand for food aid at its highest level since the start of the pandemic, according to new figures obtained by the Guardian.Food banks distributed almost 1.17m aid boxes in the first three weeks of October, providing fresh produce and staples like rice, pasta and peanut butter to 2.75 million people. October will almost certainly beat the previous record monthly distribution from July, when 1.38m households received food boxes across the state.“These numbers have floored me,” said Sheila Christopher, executive director of Pennsylvania Food Banks. “Demand is going up across the state and the country. We’ve never seen anything like this before, it gives me goosebumps.”And it’s not just here: nationwide the demand for aid at food banks and pantries has soared during the pandemic amid unprecedented job losses and the worst unemployment rate in modern times.A recent census bureau survey found 12% of American households with children did not have enough food sometimes or often during the previous week – compared with 10% before the pandemic.A staggering 54 million people in the US – ostensibly the richest country in the world – may have faced hunger by the end of 2020, according to Feeding America, the national food bank network. This would represent a 54% increase since last year, according to food insecurity figures recently released by the Department of Agriculture (USDA).“We’re already stretched trying to keep up with demand and now we’re preparing for an even worse second wave,” said Katarah Jordan, director of the Second Harvest Food Bank of Lehigh Valley and Northeast Pennsylvania, which supplies 200 pantries.Allentown is the biggest city in the Lehigh Valley, a metropolitan region comprising three eastern Pennsylvania counties (Northampton, Carbon and Lehigh) and one in western New Jersey. It’s the third-most populous area in Pennsylvania after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and one where Joe Biden must claw back votes Democrats lost in 2016 in order to win the White House.In this region, demand for food aid is up 45%.Trump, whose path to victory was guaranteed in 2016 after beating Hillary Clinton by just over 44,200 votes to collect Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college votes, has held campaign events across the state in recent weeks amid polls that show Biden has a narrow lead.At a rally in Allentown last Monday, Trump repeated the false claim that the gravity of the pandemic is being exaggerated by his political enemies, including the state’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf.Last week, the White House claimed that Trump had ended the pandemic despite new cases and deaths rising sharply across much of the country. More than 230,000 Americans have died so far, and public health experts warn that the worst is yet to come as the country moves into a second wave.“You cannot believe anything Trump says. He’s put his financial gains above our safety … At the very least, we need a president with a conscience,” said Bennicoff.On Tuesday, Bennicoff, his wife and their three children will vote for the first time. He registered to vote after the veteran investigative journalist Bob Woodward revealed that Trump purposefully played down the seriousness of the coronavirus.Another first-time voter collecting groceries from the Allentown Ecumenical pantry is Kathleen Beatty, 59, who lost her cleaning job at the start of the pandemic.Beatty has relied on food aid since the federal unemployment benefit was cut amid a political stalemate in Washington. “I don’t know what I’d do without this help. I haven’t needed a food bank since the 1980s,” she said.Beatty qualifies for Medicaid to cover the cost of treating chronic conditions – a benefit which could be cut if the supreme court overturns the Affordable Care Act, as desired by the Republicans.Still, Beatty wants four more years of Trump. “He did a great job putting the wall up, to keep out people who shouldn’t be here illegally from taking our money. He’s done a good job on the pandemic, too.”The numbers tell a different story. In Pennsylvania, daily coronavirus cases are up 54% compared with two weeks ago, according to the New York Times database. The state unemployment rate was 8.1% in September, slightly higher than the national average and twice the pre-pandemic rate, according to Bureau of Labor statistics.The Covid public health crisis triggered the worst economic crisis in almost a century and exposed the precarious state of millions of working Americans thanks to weak labor rights, eroded government safety nets and low wages. Low-wage workers, especially people of colour, have been the hardest hit.Janette Ortiz, 30, moved to Allentown from Puerto Rico in 2015 in search of a better life. She contracted Covid in March while working at a food distribution warehouse - not long after becoming pregnant.Ortiz was briefly hospitalized, but then went back to work. But she says she was fired a couple of months later after missing a few days due to morning sickness. Ortiz and her mother were forced to move to a smaller apartment and depend on the monthly food pantry run by the Grace Episcopal church.Even before the pandemic, half of American adults had either no emergency savings or not enough to cover three months of living expenses, according to Bankrate’s 2019 financial security index.“I hope to find a job after the baby is born … I’ll vote on Tuesday because healthcare is very important,’ said Ortiz. Her baby is due in three weeks.

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Tropical Storm Eta is the 28th named storm of a historic Atlantic hurricane season, which has tied 2005 for most storms on record.

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Moldova's pro-Moscow President Igor Dodon won the most votes in Sunday's presidential election, according to partial results, but looks set to face his longtime pro-Western rival Maia Sandu in a second round later this month.

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The FBI is investigating an incident that took place Friday when more than a dozen vehicles donning Trump flags and slogans surrounded a Biden-Harris campaign bus on a Texas interstate. The Biden campaign was forced to cancel multiple events while in Texas due to “safety concerns.” The confrontation was captured on video on I-35 in Hays County and lead to a minor collision, according to the Texas Tribune.

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In a police report obtained by Insider, the 17-year-old told police he "shot two white kids" and "ended a man's life" when he turned himself in.

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Dodging army border patrols, fording rivers and braving low Andean temperatures, thousands of Venezuelan migrants are making arduous journeys into Colombia in search of a better life, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Colombia, which slammed its border shut in March to protect against the spread of the coronavirus, has long been the top destination for migrants fleeing economic and social collapse in neighboring Venezuela. At the beginning of the pandemic, Venezuelan migrants flocked homeward, unable to find work when Colombia entered a strict lockdown.

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The US reported almost 100,000 new Covid-19 cases in a day on Friday

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The former vice president remains strong in much of the Midwest, while Trump appears to have made some notable gains in Florida and Iowa.

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Greg Gutfeld covers the final push to election day.

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Before heading out to the stage at the rally at Northwestern High School in Flint, Obama set up a shot on the basketball court and nailed it.

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* Friday incident involving ‘Trump train’ trucks goes viral * Scholars warn of collapse of democracy as election looms * US politics – live coverageA caravan of Trump supporters in pickup trucks that delighted Donald Trump by swarming a Democratic campaign bus on a Texas highway came armed, according to a state representative and a witness.“Armed Trump trolls harassing Biden Bus on I35, ramming volunteer vehicles & blocking traffic for 40 mins,” Texas state representative Rafael Anchía wrote on Twitter.The historian Eric Cervini, who had flown to Texas to help with get-out-the-vote efforts, posted a video on Instagram that showed a long line of cars with Trump paraphernalia stalled along the highway, waiting for the Biden-Harris bus.“These Trump supporters, many of whom were armed, surrounded the bus on the interstate and attempted to drive it off the road,” he wrote, adding: “As a historian who studied the rise of the Third Reich, I can tell you: this is how a democracy dies.”The ambush, which took place on Friday as the bus traveled from San Antonio to Austin to conclude a three-day tour, included a crash between a white SUV and a black truck, police in San Marcos confirmed, though it was still unclear who caused the collision. Officers there had tried to provide a police escort for the Biden-Harris bus but were not able to catch up because of traffic.Even as dramatic footage from the scene caused widespread alarm, President Donald Trump threw his support behind the so-called Trump train, tweeting “I LOVE TEXAS!” On Sunday, he asked supporters at a rally in Michigan: “Did you see the way our people … were… protecting this bus ... because they’re nice. They had hundreds of cars. Trump! Trump! Trump and the American flag.”Trump also said Biden supporters lacked such spirit and enthusiasm.One Texas Republican official, Naomi Narvaiz, applauded the caravan’s tactics to force the bus to leave: “Your kind aren’t welcome here!”“Funniest thing I’ve ever seen, man!” a Facebook user recording from New Braunfels guffawed in a video posted on Friday. “They’re, like, literally escorting him out of town.”A spokeswoman for Living Blue in Comal county, a local progressive group, told the Guardian the incident was a reflection of larger problems in the area, where “racist” locals “just kind of run this town, like the Klan did”.The spokeswoman, who asked to remain anonymous because she feared being targeted, added: “They’ve dragged the BLM flag. They’ve called people the N-word from their truck. So it’s straight up harassment and intimidation. And then, to see President Trump validate them by retweeting their video and saying he loves Texas, he’s basically endorsing domestic terrorism.”Amid safety concerns, Democrats in Texas cancelled multiple events. According to the Texas Tribune, the FBI was investigating.The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, had previously encouraged members of the Trump train in Texas to “get out there” and “have some fun” at the expense of vice- presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who was campaigning in the state but was not on the bus when the incident occurred.Two days out from election day, Texas is close, Trump leading Biden by 1.5 points, according to the FiveThirtyEight.com polling average.Tariq Thowfeek, Texas communications director for the Biden campaign, said in a statement: “Rather than engage in productive conversation about the drastically different visions that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have for our country, Trump supporters in Texas instead decided to put our staff, surrogates, supporters, and others in harm’s way.”US representative Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat who represents constituents from San Antonio to Austin, said: “This aggressive, abusive conduct by his supporters results from Trump continuing to incite acts of intimidation and violence. We have to stand up to these bullies just as we seek to protect the right of every last Texan to vote out the Bully-in-Chief.”

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When Joe Biden finally answered, after several weeks of hemming and hawing, whether he would indulge the recently revived left-wing fantasy of adding justices to the Supreme Court, it was revealing. And not simply in the way that his response -- “to put together a national . . . bipartisan commission” some months after Election Day -- betrayed his decades as a political creature. (Have a problem? Form a “commission.”) For although this response has come to be seen as a kind of demurral, Biden still maintained that the Supreme Court was “out of whack.”This is, in essence, the same belief held by others on the left, amplified during the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Here as in other things, Biden seems to differ from the left primarily tactically, sharing many of its ends but aware that some of them -- and some of its preferred means, such as Court-packing -- are unpopular. But there remains the shared contention that what President Trump and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell have accomplished in placing three “conservative” appointees on the Supreme Court in one presidential term remains somehow illegitimate.Superficially, this almost certainly proceeds from a sense on the left that they got played. Ignoring arguments of precedent, and the fact that, while McConnell undoubtedly played hardball, he did so well within his constitutional powers, many liberals are simply aggrieved at conservative political victories. And it is their right to be so aggrieved; goodness knows the Right has felt the same way under different circumstances. But that many on the left prefer to respond by seeking to dramatically alter the century-and-a-half-old configuration of the Supreme Court -- something not even FDR could do as president -- suggests something deeper is at play.The fundamental source of this agitation is that the Left was convinced the Court would always be on its side, becoming its personal tool for achieving desired outcomes outside the electoral process.A fuller understanding requires looking back at recent history. And it requires looking at it more honestly than do the recent laments that, for example, Republican presidents over the past several decades have disproportionately appointed more justices to the Supreme Court than they deserve. For conservatives of a few decades’ past -- and still, even, to some extent now -- this is not a sign of success but of a particularly cruel kind of failure, if not even their preferred appointees could be trusted once on the Court. The modern conservative legal movement, animated primarily by a renewed commitment to understanding the Constitution as it was understood by those who drafted it (known as originalism), didn’t just come out of nowhere with the 1982 birth of the Federalist Society or the 1985 originalist stirrings of Reagan attorney general Edwin Meese. These and other stirrings came in response to a recognition on the right that the Left had either welcomed or been actively complicit in the transformation of the Supreme Court into a super-legislature, a way for liberals to achieve judicially what they could not electorally.To conservatives, this fact alone comported ill with the Constitution, never mind that many of the decisions achieved by the Court -- most notoriously Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973 -- proceeded to do further violence to the constitutional order. Their response was not merely to capitulate to this state of affairs, but to work, slowly yet surely, to change it. The Federalist Society helped these efforts greatly, bringing originalist-inclined law students together, connecting them to like-minded professors, helping to seed law schools and courts nationwide with trustworthy exponents of its philosophy, broadly speaking, and more. And this was done despite significant resistance from the left, which treasured the Court and wished to keep it under its control. Liberals aghast at McConnell’s hardball today shouldn’t just look back at the 2018 treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, but also to the infamous Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, the treatment of lower-court nominee Miguel Estrada, and more.And yet, for all of the Right’s successes on the Court, it must still witness what it views as fairly spectacular failures. The first Court with majority Republican appointees essentially affirmed Roe; in 2012 a Republican-appointed chief justice rewrote the Affordable Care Act to uphold it as constitutional; in 2015 the Court found a right to same-sex marriage in the 14th Amendment; and just this past summer, Neil Gorsuch, an apparent textualist, divined protection from transgender discrimination in legislation penned within living memory that originally contained no such protections. To be sure, the Right has had its triumphs -- often though not always corresponding to defeats for the Left, only inasmuch as the Left was defying or hoping to defy the Constitution -- such that it remains interested in the game. And so it is likely to remain, while still wary of the Court’s ability to uphold the Constitution, even with an ostensible 6–3 majority.Yet this complicated history, full of the kind of back-and-forth one would expect from the political process, helps to explain the depth of the Left’s anger about the Court’s current status. They are mad that conservatives discovered their thinly veiled attempts at transforming the judiciary and decided to try to recapture it with the help of a philosophy that emphasized a renewed commitment to the Constitution. Now that, after decades of patience and persistence, conservatives have established a beachhead on a Court liberals thought would always be theirs, they are infuriated. Some, such as Sheldon Whitehouse, see evidence of a nefarious conspiracy in what has been accomplished openly yet at great difficulty. But the true root of this remains a frustration that, in at least one area, the Right has refused to go along with the Left’s capture of an institution, that it has not consented to the triumphalist narrative the Left imagines culminates with it forever in charge of everything, never dealing with anything more than token opposition.With Joe Biden perhaps days away from securing the presidency, however, it is worth keeping in mind that the Right’s approach is not infallible. As it’s suffered in the past, it may in the future as well. Besides even Republican appointees’ having an uneven record of constitutional fidelity, there is also a risk that conservatives abandon such fidelity outright in favor of simply turning the institution into a rightward version of what it once was for the Left. Of course that is not, and has never been, the point of originalism, even as the Right may face this calumny regularly if the Court appears antagonistic to unconstitutional overtures from an empowered Left during a Biden administration.There is also a reality, one that has genuinely harmed conservatism, that many of its exponents have devoted so much intellectual and political energy to law generally and to the Supreme Court in particular that they have abdicated responsibilities in other areas, particularly legislative. It was worth doing, of course; the nature of the courts and Congress had changed to make it desirable. But if done in isolation it will also have been done in vain. For it will do little good if an originalist-dominated Supreme Court returns power to a legislature that fears exercising these powers and accepting their concomitant responsibilities. Even so, there are still many lessons in the recent political history of the Supreme Court, for both Left and Right. But at the moment, it is the Left that seems unwilling to learn the lesson that the pendulum swings, and instead hopes to hold the pendulum permanently in one place.Perhaps a certain commission will do the trick . . .

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The team also uncovered the radio tag that led them to the nest in the first place — which appeared to have been chewed off.

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As a law student, Aaron Parnas says, he witnessed many of his father's encounters with President Trump and his inner circle.

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EVANSTON, Ill. — After leaving campus, protesters from Northwestern University who were demonstrating Saturday night clashed with Evanston authorities, and a school spokesman said both students and officers reported dangerous conditions from attacks by the other side. Jon Yates, a spokesman with the university, said he had been in contact with the department and was told officers used pepper ...

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Lawyers for the Illinois teen have said he was acting in self-defense during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

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Kelly, a gun violence prevention advocate and former astronaut, is challenging McSally to serve out the rest of Sen. John McCain's term until 2022.

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Trump 2020 campaign senior adviser gives hostage rescue update on 'Fox & Friends Weekend.'

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Medical groups such as the American Medical Association denounced President Trump's claim that doctors inflate COVID-19 deaths, calling it "malicious."

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Chris Looney helped dismantle the first nest of Asian giant hornets in the US. Now he’s preparing for the next stepThe eradication of the first nest of Asian giant hornets on US soil somewhat resembled a science fiction depiction of an alien landing site. A crew of government specialists in white, astronaut-like protective suits descended upon the hornet nexus to vanquish it with a futuristic-looking vacuum cleaner, to the relief of onlookers.The nest of the fearsome invasive insects, notoriously known as “murder hornets”, was found in a tree crevice near Blaine, in Washington state, via a tracking device attached to a previously captured worker hornet. The Washington state department of agriculture (WSDA) confirmed the nest had been successfully removed, with dozens of live captives taken back for inspection.“It was cold so they were docile, so between their slowness and the protective gear no one was hurt,” said Chris Looney, a WSDA entomologist who was tasked with vacuuming up the hornets.Wielding a lengthy, toxic stinger, the hornets can cause renal failure and death in people, as dozens of people in Japan have found out to their cost. One entomologist in Canada described the feeling of being stung as like “having hot tacks pushed into my flesh”.They can also squirt venom, as Looney saw first-hand when his lab workbench was sprayed by hornets as they roused themselves following capture. “I was more worried about getting permanent nerve damage in the eye from the squirted venom than being stung,” said Looney, who wore goggles for the capture. “They are pretty intimidating, even for an inch-and-a-half insect. They are big and loud and I know it would hurt very badly if I get stung. They give me the willies.”Murder hornets do not earn their moniker from killing people, however, with honeybees far more likely to be targeted. A honeybee colony can be decimated within a few hours, with the hornets decapitating their victims and feeding severed body parts to their young. This poses a gnawing concern for hobbyist beekeepers and even farmers in the US north-west, where managed honeybees are crucial for the pollination of crops such as blueberries and raspberries.Asian giant hornets were first discovered in North America last year, popping up in British Columbia, Canada, before a handful of specimens made it south of the border to Washington state. The hornets, native to east Asia, most likely arrived on the continent clinging to imported goods sent via sea or air. A close relative of the hornet has already made separate inroads into France and the UK.A key, and unnerving, question is how far they will manage to spread across America. Looney said the removal of the first nest found in the US was just a “small victory” in a battle likely to rage for several years to contain the insects. Thousands of sightings have been reported in Washington, and while many are false or mistaken, Looney said it was likely the hornets had spread, potentially establishing dozens more nests.“It’s hard to say how they will behave here compared to their native range, but the fear is that there are large apiaries of bees that could be sitting ducks, while as the hornets move south to warmer weather their colonies could grow larger,” he said. “The object of our work is to avoid finding this out.”Scientists who have modeled the potential spread of the hornets predict they will be able to extend down the west coast into California. The Rocky Mountains and drier interior of the US pose major barriers to an eastward push but environs on the east coast such as New York would be ideal homes for the murder hornets should they inadvertently be transported there.Looney said he was “troubled” by evidence that overwintering hornet queens like to bury themselves in straw and hay, commodities that are regularly shifted around the US by train or truck. A hornet queen that hitched a ride would still face challenges establishing a nest even if moved to the east coast – it could immediately be crushed underfoot, after all – but the potential pathway is there.“I’m more worried about human transportation of these hornets than I initially was,” Looney conceded.The Asian giant hornet is just the latest invasive species to make its mark on North America. Burmese pythons are now legion in southern Florida, while Asian carp are common in the Mississippi river system. In the insect world, the spotted lanternfly is a growing agricultural pest and emerald ash borers have arrived to lay waste to stands of trees.These arrivals are symptoms of the growth in international trade and tourism, while climate change is making many parts of the US more hospitable for certain invasive species. The Asian giant hornet, for example, is thought to favor the sort of elevated temperatures that the US is experiencing as the planet heats up. This could help it spread at the rate of its cousin species in France, which has been able to advance up to 78km a year. If it is not controlled, the murder hornet could fundamentally change ecosystems across the US.Still, even in a fraught year racked by a pandemic, social unrest and economic disaster, Looney said any fears of being assailed by a murder hornet should be “low on the anxiety meter”.He added: “We should be concerned about it but we will do our best until the money runs out or the battle is won or lost. If we fail, it will be unpleasant. But there are other things to be much more worried about right now.”

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