At this Hollywood clubhouse, people with mental illness find purpose and belonging

A shark bit a 61-year-old surfer in the waters near Waiehu Beach Park in Hawaii on Friday morning and severed his leg, Maui County officials said.

Iran's regime warned of its capacity to build a nuclear weapon and threatened to change its policies on using one this weekend.

So far, 205 bodies have been recovered after the floods in Spain. Volunteers are helping clean up thick mud that is covering streets and businesses.

It's not just the presidency that will be decided on Election Day. Voters will also decide which party controls the Senate. Right now, Democrats hold a one-seat edge, but the party is defending 23 seats. The seat most at-risk is that of Montana Democrat Jon Tester, who is facing a stiff challenge from Republican Tim Sheehy. Here's what to know about the race.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are both campaigning in battleground states as the 2024 presidential election approaches. Both will head south today, with Harris holding events in Georgia and North Carolina and Trump holding events in Virginia and North Carolina.

CBS News senior White House correspondent Ed O'Keefe and CBS News Congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane have covered some of the biggest stories of this election cycle. Now, with just three days before Election Day, both give their opinions on the state of the race.

Rescue operations are continuing in Spain after flash flooding killed over 200 people. Meanwhile, the 2024 race for the presidential election is coming to a close. All that and all that matters in today's Eye Opener.

Forty-seven states and the District of Columbia allow voters to track the status of their ballot. Find out how to check yours.

Tanner McGrath is taking host SMU over Pitt and favored Minnesota over host Illinois in Saturday's college football action.

It's the second game in this year's Commander-in-Chief's Trophy series.

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The iconic soap opera will stream exclusively on the platform for its third consecutive season.

Starbucks announced this week that starting November 7, its US and Canada stores will drop extra charges for plant-based milks — including oat, soy, almond, and coconut — that add 70 to 80 cents to a drink’s cost. It’s a change that plant-based food advocates have long campaigned for, citing the dairy industry’s grave animal welfare and climate impacts. In 2022, Succession actor James Cromwell — in partnership with PETA — superglued himself to a Starbucks counter in New York City in protest of the upcharge. The news comes as the coffee giant tries to win customers back after a marked drop in sales over the last year. Some customers are leaving due to inflation, “balking at $8 lattes, while others are boycotting the chain for a variety of reasons,” according to the New York Times (including the war in Gaza and union busting, though it’s unclear how much impact that’s had on Starbucks’s business). The plant milk fee hasn’t helped. In the US, around one quarter of Starbucks’ drinks that include milk are ordered with plant-based milk, according to data from 2021, and the upcharge adds much more to the cost of a drink for the customer than the actual cost of the plant-based milk to Starbucks.  According to Switch4Good, a nonprofit that advocates for shifting away from dairy and has long agitated against the plant milk surcharge, it costs Starbucks between 9 and 28 cents extra to make a drink with soy, almond, or oat milk. That means the extra 70- to 80-cent charge could amount to a markup of more than 700 percent, depending on the milk alternative. A Starbucks spokesperson told Vox that the decision to drop the surcharge was made to benefit customers but didn’t answer questions about Switch4Good’s analysis. The company has also been sued for the upcharge on discrimination grounds because around one-third of Americans — disproportionately people of color — have difficulty digesting lactose, a sugar found in milk.  While changing course on the plant milk upcharge was, above all, a business decision, it could also be a milestone in the food industry’s stalled efforts to combat climate change, given milk’s big carbon footprint. The switch will also help to further mainstream dairy-free milk, a more humane and sustainable alternative to conventional dairy, during what has otherwise been a turbulent year for the plant-based food market.  Starbucks’s new policy is a big deal for the climate  Producing cow’s milk has outsize social and environmental costs compared to plant-based milks — costs that aren’t priced into what consumers pay for dairy, which benefits from a range of government subsidies designed to make animal products cheap and plentiful.  For one, there’s the animal cruelty. The dairy business model depends on artificially inseminating cows and separating them from their calves at birth so humans can take their milk. The calves are typically forced to live alone in small enclosures while dairy cows are kept in large, industrial sheds, spending little to no time in pasture. After multiple cycles of pregnancy and birth, when a dairy cow’s milk productivity wanes, she’s typically sent to slaughter.  More important to Starbucks, however, is milk’s greenhouse gas emissions, which comprise more than one-fifth of the company’s global carbon footprint. Dairy production devours dramatically more land and water, and contributes far more greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution, than plant-based alternatives. Climate scientists agree that reducing dairy and meat consumption in wealthy countries is a necessary part of climate mitigation. Starbucks has committed to halving its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and expanding its plant-based menu options is a key component of that goal. Removing the plant milk upcharge, a Starbucks spokesperson said in a statement, also contributes to the company’s sustainability plans.  As of 2023, the coffee chain had made minimal progress toward reducing its carbon footprint; its overall emissions had increased from its 2019 baseline, in part because its emissions from cow’s milk were up 8 percent over that period. Starbucks is such a large buyer of milk that dairy emissions across its global operations is equivalent to around 2 percent of emissions from all US dairy production. Food companies are struggling to cut their emissions because most of their menus revolve around meat and dairy, the most carbon-intensive foods. Starbucks’s decision to drop its dairy-free surcharge should help. Substituting nondairy milks is already Starbucks’s second most requested drink customization, according to the company, so the change could push even more of its customers to go dairy-free. It could also push other chains to follow.  What the Starbucks change could mean for the future of plant-based dairy The move represents a rare win in recent years for the US plant-based food industry. After a meteoric rise in the late 2010s — as Beyond Meat and Impossible burgers went mainstream and Oatly became the it-milk of baristas and consumers alike — the sector has since faltered. A number of fast food chains have dropped plant-based burgers from their menus, while the incumbent livestock sector has attacked plant-based startups. Shoppers have opted for cheaper animal products amid high inflation.  Plant-based milk, though, has managed to weather the plant-based backlash better than most; from 2021 to 2023, revenues were up 9 percent, accounting for almost 15 percent of total milk sales (though the number of nondairy milk units fell). Meanwhile, plant-based meat sales fell by an estimated 13 percent during that same period.  Given Starbucks’s size and influence, dairy-free milk’s market share may continue to grow — and cow’s milk sales, which have been dropping for decades, may decline further. Starbucks’s policy change, however, is more than just a sign of plant-based milk’s staying power; it also demonstrates the potential for the plant-based and anti-factory farming movements to apply sustained pressure to corporations and get results.  PETA and Switch4Good have called on the company to drop the surcharge for years. While Starbucks says the change was a business decision, the protests, celebrity endorsements, and petitions likely helped, creating the very idea that charging more for plant-based options was unjust. And while the protests have at times been ridiculed as the work of whiny vegans angry about a 70-cent charge, the successful campaign will now primarily benefit Starbucks’s millions of nonvegan customers who just enjoy plant-based milks or require them due to lactose intolerance (and, of course, factory-farmed cows and the climate).     “The move follows a vigorous five-year campaign, letters from more than 160,000 PETA supporters, protests at Starbucks around the country, and help from actor James Cromwell… as well as an appeal from Sir Paul McCartney,” a PETA statement reads. PETA paused its campaign in September to give the new Starbucks CEO, Brian Niccol, time to “make the right decision,” the organization said. “And he delivered.”  If Starbucks wanted to, it could go even further by making plant-based milk the default option for its milky drinks. In 2022, Blue Bottle, a Nestlé-owned upscale coffee chain with some 100 locations around the world, announced it was making oat milk the default milk in beverage orders in US locations as part of a larger effort to cut carbon emissions. Now, if a Blue Bottle customer wants cow’s milk, they have to request it, but most don’t; a few months after making the switch, Blue Bottle reported that 63 percent of customers were sticking with oat milk.Blue Bottle’s approach, which other food companies have also embraced, shows how heavily our food choices are influenced by our food environments. Small changes — from dropping surcharges to changing default options — can nudge us toward a more climate-friendly future. Starbucks is the latest, and largest, company to put conventional dairy and plant-based milk on a level playing field. Others should follow.

Child-free wedding invitation sparks debate on Reddit as bride and groom struggle with unruly guest. Etiquette and wedding experts weigh in on the subject.

A New Jersey woman voted in her bra last week after being told she couldn't wear a Make America Great Again hat or shirt bearing former President Donald Trump on it.

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An abandoned dog, left behind ahead of Hurricane Milton, is rescued by a trooper and given a second chance at life. Ukrainian ballet dancers use their strength and grace on and off the stage. Plus, a school custodian receives a big honor from the community.

In 2016, a researcher on authoritarianism told us to write down our values before the Trump presidency began. Is it time to start defining our limits again?

Thousands are expected for the Women’s March on Saturday in Washington and across the country in support of Vice President Kamala Harris.

The warm and dry weather that prevailed in October is forecast to continue in November.

Opportunity appears to be the word of the year in the Middle East. War has brought death and devastation to Gaza and Lebanon, but various players still see within it a big chance worth seizing: to end the fighting, capitalize on tactical successes, crush their foes, or (more grandiosely) remake the region. If history is any guide to the Middle East, the player with the greatest chance of success is called chaos.Last month, Israel struck the southern suburbs of Beirut and killed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of the militant group Hezbollah, then followed up with a military campaign against Hezbollah’s infrastructure in southern Lebanon and the capital. (This had been preceded by the detonation of hundreds of pagers in the hands of Hezbollah operatives.) From a tactical perspective, Israel pulled off a stunning feat: The four-decades-old Lebanese group was the most powerful nonstate military actor in the world, and Israel decimated its top three tiers of leadership, severely weakening it and throwing it into disarray.White House officials and American journalists suggested that Israel’s military success presented an opportunity. Hezbollah has had a chokehold on Lebanese politics for two decades. For the past two years, Lebanon’s Parliament has been unable to elect a president, because Hezbollah has vetoed all candidates but its own. Maybe now Hezbollah would pull back (it had pledged not to stop firing on northern Israel until Israel ceased its war in Gaza), while Western pressure could help unlock Lebanese politics and prop up the army at Hezbollah’s expense.[Read: A future without Hezbollah]Regional and local players saw openings too. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had shunned Lebanon since 2021 because of Iranian interference in the country’s politics and Hezbollah’s powerful role. Now those countries sent Lebanon humanitarian aid, perhaps hoping to reclaim some influence over the country’s politics and populace. Inside Lebanon, the politicians who, together with Hezbollah, had driven the country into an economic ravine now began jockeying for power: Could Amal, the other main Shiite party, seize the advantage? Was this the right moment for opposition parties to ram through a parliamentary vote and elect a president?“For two or three days, everything seemed possible,” one European diplomat in Beirut told me.But the reality of war set in as Israel’s fifth military campaign in Lebanon continued apace. A quarter of Lebanon’s population has been displaced; a quarter of its territory is under Israeli evacuation orders. Lebanese institutions, barely functional to begin with, are overwhelmed. Israeli strikes may be targeting Hezbollah, but they have also flattened whole villages in southern Lebanon, as well as buildings in Beirut, killing women and children. Hundreds of civilians have died. Meanwhile, Hezbollah is regrouping, putting up a stiff fight in southern Lebanon, and even sent a drone to target Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s beach residence in Caesarea, Israel.Hezbollah as we knew it a couple of months ago has ceased to exist. But the organization remains capable of drawing the Israeli army into a ground war of attrition and sending thousands of Israelis into shelters every day. At least 37 Israeli soldiers have been killed in southern Lebanon so far, including five in a single battle. And some reports indicate that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has made up for the loss of so many Hezbollah leaders by getting more directly involved in running the group’s ground operations.One American official, speaking with me on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the government, wondered why Israel hadn’t claimed victory within a week or two of killing Nasrallah. Then, in mid-October, Israeli forces also killed Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s military commander in Gaza. “Maybe now they claim victory?” the same official asked. The Biden administration did take the opportunity to press Netanyahu for a deal that would end the war in Gaza and allow for the return of Israeli hostages. Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Israel last week to deliver that message in person: “Now is the time to turn those successes into an enduring strategic success,” he said.But that’s not what happened. Iran launched a missile barrage at Israel at the beginning of October, and last weekend, Israel attacked military sites in Iran. Afterwards, President Joe Biden again called for an end to the escalation—in other words, for Israel to take the win and focus on wrapping up its wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Iranian officials chimed in to say that Tehran had the right to respond, but would prioritize the pursuit of a lasting cease-fire in Gaza and Lebanon instead.The Israeli government seems to see a very different moment of opportunity—a chance to defeat its regional adversaries without actually addressing the Palestinian issue that lies at the root of the conflict. The strikes on Iran were limited, but they took aim at Iran’s air defenses, potentially clearing the way for further, deeper strikes. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir described the assault as an “opening blow.” In a statement reported in Haaretz, he said, “We have a historic duty to remove the Iranian threat to destroy Israel.” Netanyahu has taken the fight to the Iranians in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran itself. He called the killing of Nasrallah just the first step toward “changing the balance of power in the region for years,” and said after Sinwar’s killing, “I call on you, people of the region: We have a great opportunity to halt the axis of evil and create a different future.”Israel has had similar notions before and been mistaken. In 1982, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon also saw an opportunity to remake the Middle East. They invaded Lebanon with the intention of evicting the Palestinian Liberation Organization, installing an Israel-friendly president, and forcing Lebanon and perhaps even Syria into a peace agreement. Tactically, this project succeeded: The PLO and its armed militants departed for Tunisia. Strategically, it failed: A Christian president was elected, only to be assassinated, and Syria and Iran launched a bloody campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and hijackings against Israel and the United States. Iran sent its Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon, where they helped establish Hezbollah. Israel occupied south Lebanon for 18 years before withdrawing unilaterally in 2000.That was not even the most recent effort to remake the Middle East by way of Lebanon. In 2006, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged to destroy Hezbollah, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared the resulting Israeli onslaught against Lebanon the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Instead, the war ended in a stalemate, with Hezbollah further entrenched in the Lebanese political system, where it grew into the regional paramilitary force it was until mid-September.Of course, few efforts to remake the Middle East by force have been more disastrous than the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Netanyahu was a big proponent of that adventure. He testified as follows before the U.S. Congress in 2002: “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”Instead, the U.S. invasion of Iraq removed Iran’s key foe from power and emboldened the Islamic Republic to build proxy militias in Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, even while further strengthening Hezbollah in Lebanon. Whoever wins the White House on November 5 should remember this history when Netanyahu tries to sell his latest vision for remaking the Middle East.

In June, Ivan Raiklin, a retired Green Beret and pro–Donald Trump activist, sat down for a chat with Cliven Bundy, a Nevada cattle rancher who instigated an armed standoff with federal authorities in 2014 over his refusal to pay grazing fees.In the video—posted on the America Happens Network, which has aired documentaries such as Bundy vs. Deep State and the series Conspiracy Truths—Raiklin explained that tens of thousands of service members had refused to comply with a Defense Department mandate that all personnel receive a vaccine for COVID-19, because they did not want to be “experimented on with an unsafe and ineffective, what I call ‘DNA-mutilation injection.’” He told Bundy that the “illegal” mandate, since rescinded, was to blame for the “total destruction of our constitutional order.”“There must be consequences,” Raiklin said, for the “unlawful, immoral, unethical, illegal” vaccination program, which he also asserted, with no evidence, “ended up killing lots of people.” In fact, tens of thousands of service members did refuse the vaccine, and about 8,000 were discharged for failing to comply with the policy. But Raiklin speculated that as many as 1 million more still in uniform might “want to participate in retribution” against Pentagon leadership. (Depending on where in the world they serve, military personnel are required to receive about a dozen other vaccinations, including for polio, influenza, and typhoid.)Retribution is Raiklin’s watchword these days. He calls himself Trump’s “secretary of retribution,” settling scores from the first term and ready to do the same in a potential second. His battles aren’t only with military leaders. After Trump lost the presidency in 2020, Raiklin suggested that Vice President Mike Pence could reject electors from the states that Joe Biden had won, on the grounds that they might be fraudulent. Those ideas were later taken up by John Eastman, a lawyer who has been indicted in Arizona for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results there. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Raiklin may be one of the intellectual founders of Trump’s election denialism.[From the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]More recently, Raiklin, who left the Army Reserve in 2022 at the rank of lieutenant colonel, according to an Army spokesperson, has promoted the potentially illegal idea that state legislatures could withhold their electors in the event that Trump loses. He has shown up in swing states, including North Carolina, where he pushed for lawmakers to award the electors to Trump ahead of time, on the theory that Hurricane Helene had disrupted the casting of ballots in the state.Raiklin’s ideas for ensuring a Trump victory dovetail with the plans he has hinted at for exacting retributive justice on government officials. In his conversation with Bundy, Raiklin said that he would like to “coordinate” with those members of the armed forces supposedly still aggrieved over mandatory vaccinations, “to channel those skills, training, passion, in a positive way, to kind of autocorrect the lawlessness and to create consequences for those who created that lawlessness.”Raiklin did not explicitly call for violence, even though he praised Bundy as “quite the legend” for his aggressive opposition to federal authority. Rather, he said he wanted “appropriate lawful justice”—but archly suggested that this should come from outside the court system. Raiklin chooses his words carefully, even when they are freighted with menace. Bundy asked how the ex-soldier would treat the federal prosecutors in his own case, and Raiklin replied calmly, “I would conduct the most peaceful and patriotic legal and moral and ethical actions that they’ve ever experienced in their life.”A New York native with a degree from the Touro Law Center, in Central Islip, Raiklin describes himself as a constitutional lawyer. He served as an intelligence officer in the National Guard in several states as well as in the regular Army, deploying to Jordan and Afghanistan. Among his numerous commendations and awards is the Bronze Star Medal, given for meritorious service or acts of valor in a combat zone. He has suggested that military personnel could be “deputized by sheriffs,” as he told Bundy in their conversation. This idea is rooted in the fringe theory that local sheriffs possess law-enforcement authority superseding that of any elected official or officer, at any level of government. Proponents of the so-called constitutional sheriffs’ movement urged sheriffs to investigate disproven claims of election fraud in 2020 and to get involved this year in election administration.Bundy seemed a bit daunted by the scale of resistance that Raiklin described to him. The federal bureaucracy is “so broad,” he said, that it’s practically immovable. Raiklin reassured him: “That’s where people like me come into play, that know the system very well and in detail, to create priorities. You start with the top, and you work your way through the system.” To guide that work, Raiklin has created a “deep-state target list,” with the names of more than 300 current and former government officials, members of Congress, journalists, and others who he thinks deserve some of that “lawful justice.” The names of some of their family members are also included.The list, which is helpfully color-coded, reads like a greatest hits of all the supposedly corrupt plotters who Trump and his supporters allege have targeted them. Among others, it includes FBI officials who worked on the investigation into potential links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia; lawmakers and congressional staff who managed both Trump impeachments; members of the Capitol Police who defended Congress from pro-Trump rioters on January 6, 2021; witnesses who later testified to Congress about the attack; and the senior public-health officials who led the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. As if to demonstrate that even the closest of Trump’s allies can still be in league with the forces of government treachery, the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who helped speed development of the COVID vaccine as a member of Operation Warp Speed, also made Raiklin’s list.Several former intelligence officials Raiklin has singled out told me they are well acquainted with his threats. They presume that if Trump is reelected, the Justice Department, the IRS, and other federal agencies will conduct capricious audits and frivolous investigations, all designed, if not to put them in prison, then to spend large sums of money on legal fees. A few told me they worried that Raiklin would publish their addresses or details about their families. They were less concerned about him showing up at their home than about some unhinged deep-state hunter he might inspire. In interviews with right-wing podcasters, Raiklin has said he would conduct “livestreamed swatting raids” against his targets. Swatting is the illegal practice of falsely reporting an emergency in order to summon armed law enforcement to someone’s home.Raiklin’s future in a Trump administration is uncertain. But he is close to major figures in Trump’s orbit, particularly Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who was indicted for lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned him in November 2020.Raikiln is also a board member of America’s Future, a nonprofit organization that has pursued conservative causes for decades, of which Flynn is the chair. Other board members have amplified the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory—promoted by the QAnon movement, of which Flynn is an ally—that some Democratic politicians kidnap, torture, and eat children.Like Raiklin, Flynn has long railed against suspected deep-state actors, whom he has accused of torpedoing his career in intelligence. Flynn was regarded as a brilliant tactical intelligence officer when he served in Afghanistan and Iraq. But after he became the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, senior intelligence officials worried that his erratic management style and conspiratorial attitudes made him unfit for the job. Top intelligence officials pushed Flynn out in 2014, after an unhappy and sometimes-tumultuous two-year tenure. James Clapper, who was the director of national intelligence at the time, is on Raiklin’s list.A few years later, Trump named Flynn to be his national security adviser, a position he held for just 24 days. Flynn resigned in February 2017, following revelations that he’d had contact with Russia’s ambassador to the United States and given misleading statements to senior administration officials.A Trump-campaign official told me that Raiklin has “no role or affiliation with the campaign.” Raiklin seems to like to suggest a relationship by promoting his physical proximity to Trump. In a post on X, he shared a photo of himself standing feet from Trump while he spoke from the lectern at an unidentified rally. Also standing nearby was Kash Patel, a fierce Trump loyalist said to be on a shortlist for a senior national-security position in a second Trump administration, possibly director of the CIA.[From the October 2024 issue: The man who will do anything for Trump]Raiklin is not shy about his aspirations. I sent him an email, requesting an interview about his deep-state list. Rather than reply, he posted a screenshot of my message on X and said he would “much rather discuss” the subject, as well as the direct appointment of electors through state legislatures, “with Americans operating in good faith.” He suggested a number of conservative podcasters he thought fit the bill.Raiklin invited me to post my questions on X, “in the interest of public transparency and exposure and [to] show the world you are operating in good faith.” So I did. “What is the purpose of this list?” I asked. “Why did you select these people? Do you intend to do anything to the people on this list?”Raiklin replied with links to videos of interviews he had already done with conservative media figures, including the former television star Roseanne Barr. On her show, Raiklin explained that although the deep state went by many other names—“permanent Washington,” “the Uniparty,” “the duopoly”—“I just simply call them war-criminal scum.”“I happen to be the guy that said, You know what? I’ve had enough,” he said. “Let me expose them by name, date, place, transgression, category. And let’s start educating the country on who they are, so that they’re not able to walk anywhere, whether it’s in the digital space or physical space, without them feeling the, let’s just say, wrath of their neighbors, friends, relatives, family.”Barr then sang to Raiklin lyrics from “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” to his obvious delight.It’s hard to know whether Raiklin is a true believer—and potentially dangerous—or just a profiteering troll. His unwillingness to respond to direct questions from a journalist suggests the latter.After I pressed Raiklin to answer me, rather than post interviews he’d done with friendly hosts inclined to agree with him, he invited me to direct further questions through Minnect, an app that lets you solicit advice from self-professed experts. According to his Minnect profile, Raiklin’s current rate for answering a question via text is $50. For $100, he’ll provide a recorded video response. A video call, “for the most personalized advice,” will run you $20 a minute, with a 15-minute minimum.“Are you asking me to book you for a fee?” I wrote in his X thread. I wanted to be sure I correctly understood Raiklin’s proposal. He replied, “And 50% of the revenue created from the article you write. Send the contract to [his email] for my team to review.”I declined.A few days later, he was back to campaign work, exhorting state officials to intervene in the presidential election.“Republican State Legislatures just need to hand their States’ electors to Trump, just like the Democrat elites handed the primary ‘win’ to Kamala Harris,” he wrote Wednesday on X, adding, “276 electors on Nov 5 ... CheckMate! Then we can Castrate the Deep State and Crush the Commies immediately on January 20, 2025.”

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The Twitch streaming platform, at any given moment, is being watched by more people than any TV news network. Annually, 21.4 billion hours of content are consumed on Twitch. And this includes the antisemitism the platform is increasingly broadcasting into viewers’ heads. Despite claims by Twitch to the contrary, users in Israel and Palestine were...

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The biggest risk our democracy faces this election is whether the votes cast will even matter. Any number of scenarios could play out. Ballots could be (and in fact have already been) lit on fire, or the courts could intervene to throw out votes. But the possibility we should fear the most is the one we still have a chance to prevent: the United States Congress overturning the election.Donald Trump in 2020 and early 2021 tried to use Congress to do just this, but he also tried so much else that remembering the details is hard. The details, however, are important. Trump’s desperation after losing the election led him to push to disallow votes everywhere he could—browbeating state legislatures, local election boards, state courts, federal courts, and ultimately the U.S. Congress on January 6. It all failed spectacularly, but that was an amateur effort, and one that would have required near-perfect execution to succeed. Joe Biden had won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, meaning that Trump would have had to overturn the results in several states to become president.This time, the election results might be closer. A tight margin would allow Trump to play in all of the same fora as last time, and now with people who have spent years developing the art of the steal. Even if Trump loses every court case, every attempt to persuade a state governor or state legislature to toss out the popular vote, and every maneuver to try to pressure state and local officials, he may yet use Congress as a backup plan.[Tyler Austin Harper: Of course Black men are drifting toward Trump]This is, I suspect, the “big secret” Trump mentioned this week, with a grin, to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. It’s a secret only because Trump wants to keep it in his back pocket, but it may be quite similar to what he attempted last time. Under laws passed by Congress, including the Electoral Count Act and the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act, here’s what is supposed to happen: On January 6, 2025, the House and Senate are to assemble to watch as electoral votes from each state are opened and counted. If a member of Congress has an objection to the vote from any particular state, the objection must be signed by at least 20 percent of the members of both chambers for it to be taken up. Only two categories of objections are permissible: if a state’s electors were not “lawfully certified” (such as if a state certified a fake slate of electors), or if an elector’s vote for a candidate was not “regularly given” (such as if the electors were bribed, voted for an ineligible candidate, or voted in the wrong manner). Otherwise, Congress is to treat a governor’s certification of a slate as “conclusive.” If the 20 percent threshold is met in both chambers, the issue will be debated for up to two hours. Afterward, both the House and the Senate must vote. The objection is sustained if a simple majority supports it in both chambers. If a simple majority in both chambers agrees with an objection to the appointment of a state’s electors as not “lawfully certified,” then that state is excluded from the Electoral College, altering the denominator in the College. (If a particular elector is struck under the “regularly given” provision, by contrast, the denominator does not change.) This means that the number of votes needed to win in the Electoral College drops accordingly when a state’s electors are struck for not being “lawfully certified.” For example, if an objection to Pennsylvania’s slate were sustained, the state’s 19 electoral votes would be eliminated, and winning the presidency would take 260 electoral votes instead of 270. Congress’s 2022 Reform Act was intended to reduce opportunities for mischief, but even so, mischief may yet emerge. For example, what does “lawfully certified” mean? If Trump claims that undocumented immigrants voted in a state, does that mean the state’s vote was not “lawfully certified”? What about claims that absentee ballots were wrongly counted? Or that ballots arrived late?The answer to all of these is an unequivocal no. Lawfully certified has long had a much more precise and technical meaning about procedure—simply whether the state’s governor has certified the vote. That narrowness has led some to say that there is nothing to fear, especially because Congress has tightened the rules in the 2022 act and made it harder for Congress to second-guess election results. I very much hope that’s right. It should be right. It is right. But we are living in a world where the whole enterprise and meaning of law is contested, and where politicians stretch laws past their breaking point. James Madison warned us about this in The Federalist Papers, calling law a mere “parchment barrier.” This time, the parchment may not hold.Here’s how the nightmare scenario could play out. Imagine the election puts Kamala Harris in the lead, with 277 to Trump’s 261 votes. Further imagine that part of that lead comes from Pennsylvania. And then imagine that Pennsylvania decides to count mail-in ballots that are missing the required handwritten date on the envelope. Trump then challenges that practice, claiming that the Pennsylvania legislature has set rules that forbid counting those ballots. He goes through the Pennsylvania courts, all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which rejects his challenge and allows the ballots to be counted. Trump then goes to the U.S. Supreme Court, which also rejects his challenge.Although that should be the end of the madness, it may not be. On January 6, one-fifth of the House and one-fifth of the Senate can claim that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court acted improperly by counting these ballots, in defiance of state law. They can assert that they have the right to interpret the law independently, and that Pennsylvania has acted lawlessly. The good news here is that Congress in 2022 foreclosed that independent congressional-determination route, and said that court decisions are binding on Congress when it acts on January 6. But there is room for tendentious arguments about what Congress actually legislated, and some (including Senator Ted Cruz) have already said they believe that the 2022 act is unconstitutional. So despite Congress’s very strong 2022 efforts in this regard, an unprincipled House and Senate could try to assert these powers. The assertion of such powers would be bogus, but a debate on the floor would then ensue, and if a raw majority of the House and Senate sustain the objection—no matter how specious it is—Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes would be struck, leaving 258 electoral votes for Harris and 260 for Trump. Trump would then be declared the president.Such a decision could and should be contested in court, and challenged all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the challenge should win. Congress would be defying the parts of the 2022 law that tightly restricted the types of objections, as well as provisions in the law that make court determinations conclusive on Congress. The question is, if Congress acts lawlessly, what will the Supreme Court do about it? Some are pointing to the Court’s recent decision to permit Virginia to strike 1,600 individuals from the voting rolls as evidence of its politicization, but defenders of the Court can point to the fact that it stayed out of the mischief in 2020, with hopes that it will act responsibly again in this go-round. The situations are, however, different. The 2020 request was on the part of the mischief makers, asking for the Court to affirmatively intervene in Trump’s favor—something the Court was apparently loath to do. This time, nonintervention favors Trump. The Court can say it is acting neutrally by not hearing the case and, by doing so, effectively hand the presidency to Trump in defiance of the will of the people.[Read: The Democratic theory of winning with less]The Supreme Court, of course, is fully capable of realizing the difference between affirmatively intervening in 2020 (where it was being asked to facilitate Trump’s theft of the election) and 2024 (where it would be asked to prevent such a thing). A decision to stay out in the face of congressional lawlessness should be unthinkable. And let us hope that it is (recall the Court just last year in Moore v. Harper rejected, by a 6–3 vote, a Republican Party theory that would have given it an immense advantage in federal elections). But just in case, one important thing must be done to prevent this nightmare from unfolding: vote.If as a result of the vote on November 5, Harris claims a decisive victory in the Electoral College, then there is little to fear, much as Trump might try to fight it. And even if the Electoral College is close, remember that Americans also vote for the House and the Senate on November 5. And the new House and Senate, not the existing ones, will make all of the decisions outlined above on January 6, 2025. If the Democrats control the House, or hold the Senate, this divided government will prevent the nightmare scenario from coming to fruition. And even if the Republicans control both houses in 2025, electing people who will honor the language and purpose of the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act—which, again, was written to prevent this scenario—will put an end to the madness.So when you vote, vote for candidates who will ensure that the will of the people will govern. James Madison in “Federalist No. 55” reminds us that the “degree of depravity in mankind … requires a certain degree of … distrust,” but “there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” Republican government, Madison went on, depends on the latter. Let us pray that those qualities lead Americans to the polls on Tuesday and, once there, that they vote to protect our democracy.

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IDF says Hezbollah commanders Mousa Izz al-Din and Hassan Majid Daib were responsible for the strikes against Israel in October, which prompted the attacks.

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In Massachusetts, we learn how artificial intelligence is making medicine more accurate and improving patients' lives. And in California, we meet an acclaimed Disney Imagineer and lifelong inventor who has over 100 patents to his name. Watch these stories and more on "Eye on America" with host Michelle Miller.

Martha Stewart in Martha. | Courtesy of Netflix Halfway through the run of Martha, the new Netflix documentary about the former domestic goddess-turned-Sports Illustrated cover star, Martha Stewart lingers over the moment in 2004 when she received a guilty verdict at the end of her high-profile insider trading trial. Stewart’s lips purse viciously with disgust. She rolls her eyes. “Guilty guilty guilty on all these charges,” she says. “The New York Post lady was there, just looking so smug.”  Stewart, now 83, pauses reflectively. “She’s dead now,” she adds. “Thank goodness. Nobody has to put up with all that crap that she was writing all the time.” The past few years have seen a small boom in documentaries about the many wronged women of the ’90s and 2000s: Framing Britney Spears; Pamela, a Love Story; Lorena. Martha, directed by R.J. Cutler, is a different animal. It is not an apologia for its subject. It does not suggest that the public and its obsession with her foibles and legal troubles ruined her life. Martha Stewart does not admit to ever having her life ruined. Martha Stewart disdains self-pity. Martha Stewart refuses to be a victim. “Some people revel in this self-pity, etc., etc.,” Stewart remarks to the camera, when asked to reminisce about her divorce from the husband she describes as “a piece of shit” for having cheated. (Her own affairs, she explains to the camera in a now-viral clip, don’t count because her husband didn’t know about them.) She herself is different, she continues: “I just don’t.” She wouldn’t know how to wallow. @philstarlife American businesswoman Martha Stewart revealed that she cheated on her now ex-husband Andy in the trailer of Netflix documentary Martha. She said he “never knew” about it during their marriage that lasted for almost 30 years. #entertainmentnewsph #celebritynewsph ♬ original sound – philstarlife – philstarlife Martha Stewart is, in other words, exactly as much of a hardass as you always thought she was. She is exactly the mean perfectionist control freak all the tabloids used to claim she was.  What a perfectionist, what a control freak, what a mean lady. Cutler, who conducts the documentary’s single talking-head interview with its subject, interlaces it with plenty of archival footage. (In a neat touch, all the other interviews for the film are audio-only, so that Stewart’s face is the only one we see in the present.) As the interview evolves, Cutler seems to revel in needling Stewart. He repeatedly asks her the kinds of questions she clearly finds annoying — personal questions on subjects that deal with moments where she perceives herself as having failed. He pauses mid-interview, leaving her to sigh heavily as she waits for the questions to keep going. He brings out her Martha-ness, her irritability, her impatience, her dislike at being at someone else’s mercy, under circumstances that are not precisely under her control.  Those are all the things that used to make people hate Martha Stewart. What a perfectionist, what a control freak, what a mean lady. In Martha, they become the thing that makes her the most likable. They are human flaws, messy and endearing, in a woman who has worked for decades to try to make herself appear perfect. Stewart traces her perfectionism back to her upbringing. She was born in 1941, just on the far side of the Depression, to parents who couldn’t afford to feed their family. They set their six children to work tending the garden and beat them when they made mistakes.  Her father was exacting, an alcoholic whose fine tweed suits and leather shoes had to be pressed and shined just so. Stewart’s face lights up when she says she was the only one he trusted to tend to them, but she allows that the man himself was “mean, mean, mean.” She got out of that house every chance she saw: first by modeling as a teenager, then by going to college, then by marrying publishing executive Andrew Stewart. Characteristically, once she was married, Stewart tackled every ambition with ferocious discipline and took each failure as a personal crisis. She spent years as a successful stockbroker until one of her recommendations tanked, at which point she quit finance and moved her family to the farthest suburbs of Connecticut so she could remodel a house that was falling apart.  Eventually, Stewart parlayed her highly refined skills at homemaking and party-hosting into a career as an upscale caterer for her well-heeled friends. From catering came the lifestyle guide Entertaining in 1982, and then more books, and then a magazine, and then a TV show. By the 1990s, Stewart was the center of a multimedia empire, the embodiment of a massively lucrative brand that was all centered on a lifestyle so elevated that no one besides Stewart herself could ever possibly achieve it.  Martha Stewart thought snow peas individually stuffed with cream cheese made an elegant dinner party side. Martha Stewart modeled her fruit bowl displays off the paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Martha Stewart, like the cleaning influencers of today, wanted to store her laundry detergent in an aesthetically pleasing container.  All this could be a lot to swallow, both when Stewart was coming up and now. It’s easy to roll your eyes and wonder who has the time and energy to think that much about their laundry room.  “She got under men’s hair,” Paglia says, “this idea that you could be a homemaking expert who’s a bitch.” But Martha Stewart is a lot more interesting, it turns out, when she is presented to you not as someone you should aspire to be like but as a very strange and specific psychological case study.  Cutler presents Stewart to the audience as a portrait of a perfectionist scrabbling madly for something, anything, to mold in her own image, and then lashing out furiously at anyone she perceives as getting in her way. You don’t necessarily want to be her, but there’s something so compelling about watching her twist herself around to become this impossible-to-please empress of all she beholds.  One piece of archival footage shows Stewart lambasting an employee behind the scenes for using a paring knife to cut an orange for Easter brunch. “Well, isn’t that a stupid knife?” Stewart says impatiently, her tone sharp enough to cut the orange with voice alone.  In voiceover, the critic Camille Paglia explains the phenomenon that we’re watching. “She got under men’s hair,” Paglia says, “this idea that you could be a homemaking expert who’s a bitch.” In the 2000s, at the height of her empire, Stewart made an odd fit for the era. She was a woman with power in a moment misogynistic enough to humiliate powerful woman; a woman who made art and business out of home life in a moment just feminist enough to understand a focus on the home as regressive; a woman viciously committed to perfection in a moment that craved tabloid-friendly mess.  That was the fundamental paradox of Martha Stewart. On the one hand, she built her brand on presenting a vision of the home so exactingly idealized it was impossible for anyone to live up to it. She romanticized the domestic sphere that women had spent so many decades trying to escape. She was regressive, surely, a ’50s throwback who deserved to be mocked and ignored. On the other hand, Stewart used all that domestic acumen to make herself the first female self-made billionaire in the world. She took homemaking seriously as an aesthetic pursuit when the rest of the culture was minimizing it as unimportant women’s work. She had power and she had swagger and she knew it, and it put a target on her back. When Joan Didion wrote about Martha Stewart for the New Yorker in 2000, she noted that there was something telling about the way all those Martha Stewart parody books that flourished in the era were so bizarrely sexualized. The parodies, Didion wrote, were “too broad, misogynistic in a cartoon way (stripping Martha to her underwear has been a reliable motif of countless on-line parodies), curiously nervous (‘Keeping Razors Circumcision-Sharp’ is one feature in ‘Martha Stuart’s Better Than You at Entertaining’), oddly uncomfortable, a little too intent on marginalizing a rather considerable number of women by making light of their situations and their aspirations.” There was a vengeful, humiliating edge to all of it.  All that power, however, took quite a beating when Stewart was arrested for insider trading in 2002.  In 2004, Stewart was found “guilty guilty guilty,” not of fraud but of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and lying to federal investigators. She allegedly took an illicit tip from her stockbroker, perhaps in the same spirit with which she decided that her affairs didn’t count as infidelity. (The chief prosecutor against her was James Comey, of whom Stewart says in Martha, “Those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high.”) In Martha, Cutler lingers in detail on Stewart’s trial and her time in jail. In his hands, the media circus around her conviction becomes a portrait of what it is like for a woman who built her whole identity on her sense of control to find herself rendered completely powerless.  In archival footage of the period between her trial and her sentencing, Stewart explained her preparations for her sentencing to an interviewer in a chipper Snow White voice, as though explaining how to fold a fitted sheet. “Well, you know, you go to the dentist. You go to the gynecologist,” she said. “You just make sure you’re in as best shape as you possibly can to let your body and your mind take whatever comes!” In the diary she kept in prison, she instructed herself sternly to learn something new every day: the control freak doing her best to reap something of value from even the worst of experiences.  Stewart served five months in prison, and today, she insists it wasn’t a major inflection point in her life. The scandal that came with it, though, forced her to rebuild everything. She lost control of her fiercely guarded brand, lost her TV show, and lost what she estimates to be about $1 billion. Her first project after her release, the flashy NBC talk show The Martha Stewart Show, she dismisses now as a failure despite its seven seasons on the air: She wasn’t, she says, able to control it the way she wanted to.  Eventually, Stewart managed to rebuild herself as a sort of ironic celebrity. She’s built a clever brand for herself now as the nice grandma who knows everything there is to know about rose gardens but also has done hard time and is friends with Snoop. (Endearingly, their relationship appears to be both authentic and organic — they were seated next to each other on Comedy Central’s roast of Justin Bieber and apparently hit it off.) She’s not a billionaire anymore, but she’s made herself relevant to the public again while apparently refusing to change her own behavior or personality in any meaningful way. She still wants power, and she is still grabbing for it.  Stewart managed to rebuild herself as a sort of ironic celebrity. In Didion’s essay, she suggests, in a passage Stewart describes as “very insightful” in the documentary, that it’s Stewart’s power that is attractive to her audience, not her unreachable exactitude. “The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity,” Didion writes, “but of female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”  What Martha suggests is different from Didion’s idea. It offers us a Martha Stewart who is attractive not because she played and won, but because she played so hard each and every time, even when she lost. She’s a control freak, a perfectionist, unreasonably demanding, and vicious when crossed — and what’s more touchingly, imperfectly human than that?

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