"Mornings Memory": Revisiting the 2000 election and Florida recount

Elon Musk’s involvement in the conversation between Trump and Zelensky is the latest sign he intends to play a prominent role in the next U.S. administration.

Another take on Barbara Robinson's beloved 1972 novel, this one comes swaddled in period nostalgia and, beyond its high jinks, some sincere family messaging.

Mount Lewotobi erupted multiple times on Thursday, forcing over 6,000 residents to evacuate after an earlier eruption killed nine.

Here’s what will become of the Trump trials now.

On Wednesday, Argentina's National Criminal and Correctional Prosecutor’s Office announced in a press release that Payne did not die by suicide.

Swift has won the illustrious category four times, becoming the first artist to do so at the 2024 Grammys with her album "Midnights."

Hurricane Rafael is swirling over the Gulf of Mexico, where it’s expected to break apart after plowing through Cuba, knocking out its power grid and collapsing homes.

Chinese hackers breached Trump attorney Todd Blanche's phone, obtaining some voice recordings and texts, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Eduardo Diaz, 42, of Queens, was picked up on a warrant and charged with attempted murder, assault and weapon possession in connection to the Thursday morning shooting that wounded Boris Shapiro, 47, at West 69th Street and Columbus Avenue, the sources said. 

CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten broke down just how historically significant President-elect Donald Trump's Election Day victory was for the Republican Party.

The Southern Section will crown its first champions in flag football in five divisions on Saturday at El Modena High's Fred Kelly Stadium.

Videos of the incident showed shocked residents gathering down the block to get a look at the chaos.

Billionaire Elon Musk joined Donald Trump in the president-elect's phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this week, a new report says.

Jew-hating agitators violently assaulted supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Dutch city with more than 60 people arrested on Thursday night.

For nearly two years, the world’s biggest tech companies have said that AI will transform the web, your life, and the world. But first, they are remaking the humble search engine.Chatbots and search, in theory, are a perfect match. A standard Google search interprets a query and pulls up relevant results; tech companies have spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars engineering chatbots that interpret human inputs, synthesize information, and provide fluent, useful responses. No more keyword refining or scouring Wikipedia—ChatGPT will do it all. Search is an appealing target, too: Shaping how people navigate the internet is tantamount to shaping the internet itself.Months of prophesying about generative AI have now culminated, almost all at once, in what may be the clearest glimpse yet into the internet’s future. After a series of limited releases and product demos, mired with various setbacks and embarrassing errors, tech companies are debuting AI-powered search engines as fully realized, all-inclusive products. Last Monday, Google announced that it would launch its AI Overviews in more than 100 new countries; that feature will now reach more than 1 billion users a month. Days later, OpenAI announced a new search function in ChatGPT, available to paid users for now and soon opening to the public. The same afternoon, the AI-search start-up Perplexity shared instructions for making its “answer engine” the default search tool in your web browser.[Read: The AI search war has begun]For the past week, I have been using these products in a variety of ways: to research articles, follow the election, and run everyday search queries. In turn I have scried, as best I can, into the future of how billions of people will access, relate to, and synthesize information. What I’ve learned is that these products are at once unexpectedly convenient, frustrating, and weird. These tools’ current iterations surprised and, at times, impressed me, yet even when they work perfectly, I’m not convinced that AI search is a wise endeavor.For decades, the search bar has been a known entity. People around the world are accustomed to it; several generations implicitly regard Google as the first and best way to learn about basically anything. Enter a query, sift through a list of links, type a follow-up query, get more links, and so on until your question is answered or inquiry satisfied. That indirectness and wide aperture—all that clicking and scrolling—are in some ways the defining qualities of a traditional Google search, allowing (even forcing) you to traverse the depth and breadth of connections that justify the term world-wide web. The hyperlink, in this sense, is the building block of the modern internet.That sprawl is lovely when you are going down a rabbit hole about Lucrezia de Medici, as I did when traveling in Florence last year, or when diving deep into a scientific dilemma. It is perfect for stumbling across delightful video clips and magazine features and social-media posts. And it is infuriating when you just need a simple biographical answer, or a brunch recommendation without the backstory of three different chefs, or a quick gloss of a complex research area without having to wade through obscure papers.In recent years, more and more Google Search users have noted that the frustrations outweigh the delight—describing a growing number of paid advertisements, speciously relevant links engineered to top the search algorithm, and erroneous results. Generative AI promises to address those moments of frustration by providing a very different experience. Asking ChatGPT to search the web for the reasons Kamala Harris lost the presidential election yielded a short list with four factors: “economic concerns,” “demographic shifts,” “swing state dynamics,” and “campaign strategies.” It was an easy and digestible response, but not a particularly insightful one; in response to a follow-up question about voter demographics, ChatGPT provided a stream of statistics without context or analysis. A similar Google search, meanwhile, pulls up a wide range of news analyses that you have to read through. If you do follow Google’s links, you will develop a much deeper understanding of the American economy and politics.Another example: Recently, I’ve been reading about a controversial proposed infrastructure project in Maryland. Google searches sent me through a labyrinth of public documents, corporate pitches, and hours-long recordings of city-council meetings, which took ages to review but sparked curiosity and left me deeply informed. ChatGPT, when asked, whipped up an accurate summary and timeline of events, and cited its sources—which was an extremely useful way to organize the reading I’d already done, but on its own might have been the end of my explorations.I have long been a critic of AI-powered search. The technology has repeatedly fabricated information and struggled to accurately attribute its sources. Its creators have been accused of plagiarizing and violating the intellectual-property rights of major news organizations. None of these concerns has been fully allayed: The new ChatGPT search function, in my own use and other reports, has made some errors, mixing up dates, misreporting sports scores, and telling me that Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is bigger than Manhattan’s (much larger) Central Park. The links offered by traditional search engines are filled with errors too—but searchbots implicitly ask for your trust without verification. The citations don’t particularly invite you to click on them. And while OpenAI and Perplexity have entered into partnerships with any number of media organizations, including The Atlantic—perhaps competing for the high-quality, human-made content that their searchbots depend on—exactly how websites that once relied on ad revenue and subscriptions will fare on an AI-filtered web eludes me. (The editorial division of The Atlantic operates independently from the business division, which announced its corporate partnership with OpenAI in May.)[Read: AI search is turning into the problem everyone worried about]Although ChatGPT and Perplexity and Google AI Overviews cite their sources with (small) footnotes or bars to click on, not clicking on those links is the entire point. OpenAI, in its announcement of its new search feature, wrote that “getting useful answers on the web can take a lot of effort. It often requires multiple searches and digging through links to find quality sources and the right information for you. Now, chat can get you to a better answer.” Google’s pitch is that its AI “will do the Googling for you.” Perplexity’s chief business officer told me this summer that “people don’t come to Perplexity to consume journalism,” and that the AI tool will provide less traffic than traditional search. For curious users, Perplexity suggests follow-up questions so that, instead of opening a footnote, you keep reading in Perplexity.The change will be the equivalent of going from navigating a library with the Dewey decimal system, and thus encountering related books on adjacent shelves, to requesting books for pickup through a digital catalog. It could completely reorient our relationship to knowledge, prioritizing rapid, detailed, abridged answers over a deep understanding and the consideration of varied sources and viewpoints. Much of what’s beautiful about searching the internet is jumping into ridiculous Reddit debates and developing unforeseen obsessions on the way to mastering a topic you’d first heard of six hours ago, via a different search; falling into clutter and treasure, all the time, without ever intending to. AI search may close off these avenues to not only discovery but its impetus, curiosity.The issues with factuality and attribution may well be resolved—but even if they aren’t, tech companies show no signs of relenting. Controlling search means controlling how most people access every other digital thing—it’s an incredible platform to gain trust and visibility, advertise, or influence public opinion.The internet is changing, and nobody outside these corporations has any say in it. And the biggest, most useful, and most frightening change may come from AI search engines working flawlessly. With AI, the goal is to keep you in one tech company’s ecosystem—to keep you using the AI interface, and getting the information that the AI deems relevant and necessary. The best searches are goal-oriented; the best responses are brief. Which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising coming from Silicon Valley behemoths that care, above all, about optimizing their businesses, products, and users’ lives.A little, or even a lot, of inefficiency in search has long been the norm; AI will snuff it out. Our lives will be more convenient and streamlined, but perhaps a bit less wonderful and wonder-filled, a bit less illuminated. A process once geared toward exploration will shift to extraction. Less meandering, more hunting. No more unknown unknowns. If these companies really have their way, no more hyperlinks—and thus, no actual web.

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a motion in court Friday to vacate the 2020 election interference case against President-elect Trump.

The 14-time Grammy winner is headed to the Great North for the first time since August 2018.

An ex-City Hall official accused of namedropping Eric Adams while encouraging a campaign donor to lie to the FBI is mulling a potential plea deal — raising the specter that he could end up cooperating in the federal corruption case against the mayor. Court papers filed this week state that attorneys for Mohamed Bahi, 40,...

Parts of the East Coast are under drought conditions and red flag warnings, from Massachusetts to the northern edge of Virginia and West Virginia.

Dating rumors involving Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Japanese model Niki Niwa have started after the two were spotted together at a mall in Beverly Hills. TikTokker Jack Banana approached the two and asked, “Are you Yoshinobu?,” to which the pitcher replied in the affirmative. He then asked Niwa how she was doing and what...

Prosecutors said they ruled out "the possibility of a conscious or voluntary act on the part of the victim" given the "state he was in" when he died.

Elon Musk was with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago when the president-elect spoke with Ukraine’s leader. It is not clear if they discussed any change in U.S. policy toward Ukraine.

An Iranian operative told investigators that he was tasked in September with assassinating Trump, according to court records unsealed Friday.

The New York Liberty isn’t done painting the town seafoam green just yet. The newly-minted WNBA champs’ home borough of Brooklyn received a much-needed upgrade to a delipidated basketball court in East New York last month, all thanks to an assist from the team’s co-owners Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Tsai. The renovation is part...

These turkey day deals will hurt your wallet less.

The Justice Department has unsealed criminal charges in a thwarted Iranian plot to kill President-elect Trump before the presidential election.

Senator-elect David McCormick, R-Pa., spoke to supporters at a victory speech at the Heinz Center in Pittsburgh on Friday morning.

Rashida Jones commemorated her late father, music producer and composer Quincy Jones, by saying that his legacy is making everyone he ever met 'feel loved and seen.'

Prosecutors said they need time to assess “the appropriate course going forward."

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz departs after the appointment of a new finance minister and dismissal of the old one, on November 7, 2024, in Berlin, Germany. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images Germany appears headed toward an unexpected election — and complete political upheaval — after its deeply unpopular ruling coalition collapsed this week. Until Wednesday, Germany, which operates under a parliamentary system in which multiple parties compete for power, was governed by a fragile coalition of three parties with very different aims. That arrangement changed after Chancellor Olaf Scholz (who belongs to the party that led the coalition, the center-left Social Democratic Party) fired his finance minister, who belongs to the fiscally conservative Free Democratic Party, over a budget dispute.  In response, the Free Democratic Party pulled out of the coalition, leaving the Social Democratic Party and its other coalition partner, the climate change-focused Green Party, without a majority in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. For the time being, the two parties will still govern the country, but it will be difficult to pass legislation.  As a result, Germany faces political gridlock. Scholz has said he will call a vote of confidence in his government in January. He and the Greens are expected to lose, which would trigger an early election and likely elevate different parties and politicians to leadership positions, significantly shifting the course of German politics. How did things get so chaotic in Germany? The three-party coalition was troubled nearly from the beginning. Scholz has never been particularly popular, and his party has been steadily losing ground to the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), as well as to other minority parties in both European Parliament and state elections. The other issue the coalition faced was that German economic growth has been slow for years, struggling to rebound from the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s primarily because the German auto industry is threatened by Chinese electric imports and decreased demand. German energy costs have skyrocketed following sanctions on the cheap Russian fuel the country relied on prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After no party won a majority back in 2021, the coalition members — each with a very different approach to spending — agreed to work together “based on the assumption that they had a pretty generous budget from leftover coronavirus funds,” credit secured to finance the country’s pandemic response, Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Vox.  The plan was for “Social Democrats to give social welfare to their constituencies, for the Liberals to reduce taxes for business owners, and for the Greens to do climate projects,” in line with their parties’ priorities, said Fix. But the German constitutional court ruled earlier this year that the emergency Covid-19 funds couldn’t be used for other priorities, leaving a multibillion-euro hole in Germany’s budget.  Adding to this problem is that Germany has a constitutionally set level of debt it isn’t supposed to exceed. Scholz wanted to raise that debt level, in part, to surge aid to Ukraine during its war with Russia. Christian Lindner, the fired finance minister, said that to do so would be tantamount to “violating my oath of office.”  Opposition parties have called for rapid action to form a new government, particularly given that US President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. He has threatened tariffs that could further damage Germany’s economy. Scholz’s proposed timetable for elections wouldn’t allow a new government to be formed before June. Once it is formed, he and the Social Democratic Party will likely find themselves voted out of power. 

US Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at Howard University in Washington, DC, on November 6, 2024 | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images As leaders scramble to assign blame for Donald Trump’s decisive win on Tuesday, this round of post-election finger-pointing differs markedly from recent cycles. Unlike past elections with narrow margins, Trump’s likely popular vote victory and his uniform swing across states and counties defy simple explanations like a racist electorate or discontent over Biden’s foreign policy. Even chalking the election entirely up to inflation seems rather convenient and incomplete. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who earned about 6,000 fewer votes in his reelection bid than Kamala Harris did in Vermont, came out on Wednesday with a statement blasting the Democratic Party for abandoning working-class people, who appeared to break overwhelmingly for Trump. This critique quickly gained traction, with commentators arguing that Harris and the Democrats had lost touch with working people’s needs, prioritizing issues like democracy and abortion rights too much. “If voters did not believe that Harris had a real plan to make their lives better, materially, it is hard to fault them,” wrote Matt Karp in Jacobin on Wednesday. “I wish we had enacted the housing, care, and child tax credit elements in Build Back Better so we would have had concrete cost-of-living benefits to run on,” lamented former Biden administration official Bharat Ramamurti on Thursday. I’m not here to prescribe what politicians should or should not run on next time around, and I do desperately hope that elected officials use their time in office to pass good, well-designed legislation that improves people’s lives. But it seems like the discourse is barreling toward a well-trodden yet dubious place.  The (appealing) contention is that Democrats could have turned their electoral fortunes around if they had passed the right policies and then campaigned more effectively on those programs. In recent years this philosophy has been dubbed “deliverism” — coined to suggest that voters will elect politicians who deliver on their promises to solve problems. “Deliverism means governing well and establishing a record that the electorate needed to win actually feels,” wrote American Prospect editor David Dayen in 2021. While “deliverism” as a term is recent, this thinking has long pervaded Democratic leadership. After the 2022 midterms, Sen. Elizabeth Warren argued in the New York Times that voters had rewarded Democrats specifically for programs like pandemic relief and infrastructure modernization. Other policies, like allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices and capping insulin costs for older Americans, Warren argued, were what motivated voters to cast their ballots for Democrats.  Party leaders particularly favor a more sophisticated version of this theory: that policies will create “positive feedback loops,” building loyal constituencies who enable further policy victories through their continued electoral support. It’s no secret, for example, that Democrats believe making it easier for workers to join unions will not only improve their standard of living but improve Democrats’ electoral position by increasing the number of union members in the US.  Deliverism’s appeal lies in its intuitive logic, especially for college-educated rationalists drawn to clear cause-and-effect relationships: Good policies will lead to subsequent electoral victories. But there’s not a lot of evidence that policymaking actually works like this. Decades of scholarship have shown that most people don’t understand how policies work, what policy benefits they’re getting, and which party is responsible for enacting specific policies. And even when a politician designs a program so that it’s easier for them to take credit, that still doesn’t always work out to their benefit. Those who received health insurance through Obamacare Medicaid expansion, for example, showed very little change in voter turnout or party loyalty.  As Northwestern political scientists Daniel Galvin and Chloe Thurston outline in their essential research on these questions, history should fundamentally challenge the premise that good policy success will most likely lead to political rewards for the party that passes it.  “Upon inspection, the intellectual basis for thinking that policies are good vehicles for building electoral majorities — or good substitutes for the more tedious work of organizational party-building — is quite thin,” they write. This isn’t to say that Democrats shouldn’t try to pass good policy. The expanded child tax credit during the pandemic was demonstrably good policy, even if most voters showed only muted enthusiasm for it.   And it’s of course not the case that politicians are never rewarded for good policy. Many voters even now still credit Trump for the stimulus checks they received in the mail during the pandemic, checks that prominently featured the president’s name. Doing good things and taking credit for those things can be helpful sometimes.  But as Democratic leaders move to refocus on working-class priorities, they face two sobering realities: Policies alone rarely drive electoral outcomes, and an increasingly stark divide separates non-college voters from the college-educated liberals and socialists who lead the party and its allied progressive groups. Navigating these tensions will be necessary for charting future strategy, and the research suggests that Harris’s loss this week could not have been avoided if she had just emphasized Biden administration accomplishments more clearly. Such thinking oversimplifies a much more complex political reality.

Casa Encantada in Bel-Air is now available at a slight discount, but still has a stratospheric asking price.

The principal of Beverly Hills High School told students they could no longer 'congregate, circle up, shout, jump, etc.,' according to a message sent out to parents and students.

If your credit card debt goes unpaid for long enough, you could face legal consequences. Here's when it may happen.

The group of Salisbury University students -- who are members of, or associated with, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity -- are accused of creating a fake profile on the dating app so they could target the victim because of his "sexual orientation," the Salisbury Police Department said.

Newly elected GOP congressman Abe Hamadeh spoke to Fox News Digital about what his first 100 days in Congress will look like after former President Trump's electoral landslide.

Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump last year with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Donald Trump has beefed up his security detail at Mar-a-Lago with a Secret Service robot dog -- with photos showing the four-legged sentry patrolling the sprawling Florida property.

Issues like the economy and immigration helped elevate President-elect Trump to a win over Vice President Kamala Harris. Take a look at some highlights of his first term.

The immensely popular series is finally about to return with new episodes!

Donald Trump made Susie Wiles the first female chief of staff in U.S. history. Her even-keeled demeanor mirrors that of her father, former NFL star and broadcaster Pat Summerall.

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The Justice Department unsealed criminal charges Friday in a thwarted Iranian plot to kill Trump before this week's presidential election.

They have tried to do a zillion different things and done them badly at great expense.

Trump, who campaigned on a pledge to loosen the reigns of the regulatory state, won a resounding election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.

Casey Clausen steps down as football coach at Bishop Alemany. The Warriors lost their first-round Southern Section Division 9 playoff game to Sonora on Thursday night.

The move is the latest sign that Jack Smith is seeking to wind down federal prosecutions of the president-elect.

Trump, 78, plans to “isolate Iran diplomatically and weaken them economically so they can’t fund all of the violence” in the region.