3 Americans held for years in China released, White House says

If the bill becomes law on Thursday, social media platforms would have one year to work out how to implement the age restrictions.

People should be aware of certain products they may have in their pantry or refrigerator amid the ongoing recalls.

The president-elect and Kai Trump, 17, attended the sixth Starship test flight this month.

The latest inflation data will likely reinforce the central bank's cautious approach when it meets to decide on cutting interest rates next month.

Scientists now have a clearer picture of Camp Century, an abandoned U.S. military base long hidden under the ice in Greenland, thanks to a NASA research team's good luck.

Mike DeWine signed a bill Wednesday to restrict transgender students from using multiperson bathrooms that match their gender identities.

New York City's new trash reforms require residential buildings with fewer than 10 units to use lidded bins.

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The high aspirations with which the tribunal was founded should not shield it from the consequences of its decision to pursue other agendas.

International law has always been aspirational. The decision on Israel brings it closer.

Nearly 80 million people traveling for Thanksgiving; Over 3,000 fake Gibson guitars seized in California.

The US is IKEA's second-biggest market globally, accounting for 13.2% of sales in its 2024 financial year.

Manhattan is merry and bright!

Donald Trump taps health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, critic of COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates, to the nation's top medical research agency.

Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing is accused of crimes against humanity for the deportation and persecution of the Rohingya.

Yenn Stanley asked her 15-year-old to watch his siblings, then "freaked out" over what little Cailey had done.

The ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah has taken effect and appears to be holding as people return to their homes in Lebanon. CBS News national security contributor Samantha Vinograd has a look at the implementation of the agreement.

Is she out-of-pocket for these out-of-office emails?

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Colorado and Utah will see the deepest bouts of fresh snow this Thanksgiving.

How Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's romance led to Hallmark and Lifetime's two new Christmas movies

Dog owners in Todmorden, UK, claim their French bulldog can solve complex math problems. Watch as the 3-year-old pooch named Timmy is given a series of mathematics problems, then uses his paw to count out the correct answer. Hannah Shipperbottom called her clever canine “Einstein reincarnated.”

Michael Sullivan was wrongfully imprisoned and awarded $13 million, but state law cut that award down to a maximum of $1 million.

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Teri Hatcher, best known for her role in "Desperate Housewives," shared why she prefers being alone but is not closed off to dating.

There are reports that the United Nations is evacuating a small number of staff in Haiti as gang violence escalates in Port-au-Prince. More than 40,000 people have been displaced from the capital in the last ten days according to U.N. data. Jacqueline Charles, Haiti/Caribbean correspondent for the Miami Herald, joined CBS News to discuss the situation.

The reality star raised eyebrows with a futuristic photoshoot she recently did with the Tesla Optimus Robot.

There are limits to the amount of equity you can tap into. Here's how much you can access with a HELOC.

Hilton has never skimped on expenses when it comes to parties. Earlier this month, she threw a lavish bash for her daughter London's 1st birthday.

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WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump is considering naming retired Gen. Keith Kellogg as his Ukraine envoy charged with ending the nearly three-year Russian invasion, The Post has confirmed. Kellogg, 80, was at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound in Palm Beach, Fla., on Tuesday and last week as the incoming president picks key administration aides after rapidly fleshing...

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Nearly a dozen of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees and other appointees tapped for the incoming administration were targeted Tuesday night with “violent, unAmerican threats to their lives and those who live with them," prompting a “swift" law enforcement response, Fox News Digital has learned.

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Leaked photos reveal the first look at Valve's upcoming VR headset and Steam controller.

Ariana Grande as Glinda in Wicked. | Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures Wicked, the movie musical based on the beloved Broadway show of the same name, is one of the biggest hits of the year, opening at No. 1 in North America over the weekend and already generating some early Oscars buzz. Audiences came in prepared to love Wicked’s famous power ballads and girl power core, but one aspect of the story seems to have caught people by surprise: its somewhat clunky yet remarkably durable political allegory. “I noticed that Elphaba is like Kamala Harris and the Wizard is like Donald Trump,” one fan posted on Reddit. “A charismatic leader who gaslights a community that this woman is wicked just because she’s standing up for a marginalized group of people in the society, how could that be [political]?” director John M. Chu joked. For a silly, spectacular show about friendship and talking animals, Wicked actually does invite political interpretations. Its allegory can both elicit eye rolls and still feel eerily prescient more than 20 years after its stage debut.  Wicked the musical is based on a 1995 novel of the same title by Gregory Maguire, an anti-fascist treatise in which the Wizard becomes a Hitler-like despot. The musical wouldn’t go quite so far when it debuted on Broadway in 2003, but it did get in a number of hits at the George W. Bush administration, which had ordered the invasion of Iraq only months earlier.  In Wicked, the Wizard is revealed to be disenfranchising the talking animals of Oz, on the grounds that to unify the rest of the country, he has to give them a common enemy. Yet the Wizard’s persecution of animals — and, later, of Elphaba — is rooted in a lie, in the same way that Bush falsely claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before invading.  Some of the references are glaringly obvious: When Dorothy’s house falls on the Wicked Witch of the East, Glinda echoes the Bush administration’s favorite Iraq War euphemism in describing it as a “regime change.” “Is one a crusader or ruthless invader?” sings the Wizard, referencing Bush’s infamous description of the invasion of Iraq as a crusade. “It’s all in which label is able to persist!”  Critics’ responses were mixed. “As a parable of fascism and freedom, Wicked so overplays its hand that it seriously dilutes its power to disturb,” Ben Brantley declared in 2003 at the New York Times, adding that the show “wears its political heart as if it were a slogan button.” Meanwhile, author Daniel Handler, though taken aback by such a dark interpretation of sunny and magical Oz, found himself drawn to the idea. “It is hard not to wonder if the witch, a difficult figure transformed by difficult times, isn’t precisely what our stage needs,” Handler also wrote in the New York Times that same year. “And perhaps, the show suggests, ‘wicked’ is what the W stands for” in George W. Bush.” Singing the same lyrics today, the Wizard suggests not Bush but Trump: a leader consolidating his power by scapegoating marginalized groups and slowly but surely denying them their rights. Meanwhile, the difference in strategy between rabble-rousing progressive Elphaba and conciliatory liberal Glinda might hit home particularly hard for Democrats in the midst of their post-election recrimination.  Both Elphaba and Glinda idolize the Wizard and dream of working at his right hand. When Elphaba learns of the plight of Oz’s animals, she heads straight to the Emerald City to seek his help, certain that if he learns that the animals are being targeted, he’ll rush to their aid. The Wizard suggests he might do so if Elphaba uses her magic as part of his administration, but when she learns that it’s the Wizard behind the attacks, she disowns him, much to the dismay of practical-minded Glinda. Wicked was born to be an allegory of American politics. It can’t quite be anything else. “I hope you’re happy how you’ve hurt your cause forever,” Glinda sings. Elphaba, after all, is alienating a potential powerful ally. “I hope you’re proud, how you would grovel in submission to feed your own ambition,” replies Elphaba, who has decided she will not work with anyone who is using his power to hurt Oz’s talking animal citizens. Could you read this moment as an allegory over how Democrats should handle trans issues going forward? Sure, it sounds like a stretch, but it’s not as far-fetched as you might imagine.  In a way it’s odd to think that Wicked’s political messaging feels so prescient, since most Wicked fans would agree that the political subplot is the weakest part of the musical. Wicked lives and breathes by the fraught friendship between its two leads, not by its duelling visions of activism. Still, in another sense, Wicked was born to be an allegory of American politics. It can’t quite be anything else. That’s what Oz stories are for. Most of the most children’s fantasy classics of the Anglophone world are English: think of Peter Pan, Narnia, The Sword in the Stone, and Harry Potter. They tend to think about what it means to be a good king, about wild magical beasts lurking in the forest, about being an island nation. The Wizard of Oz, though, is an American fantasy. A map of Oz, which is shaped like a rectangle with its long side horizontal, is a simplified map of America, as though drawn by a child: unimaginably vast, spanning the inhabitable entirety of a continent from east to west. (Oz is bordered by poisonous deserts rather than oceans.) It is a country where farmers cultivate fields of corn and wheat and orchards of apples; where industrialists build vast, glittering cities; where the west is full of rough and unsettled land. And it is a country governed by a con man who is lying to the people he rules. When L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, he imagined the Wizard of Oz as someone who was well-meaning if ineffectual and a touch dishonest. “I’m a very good man — just a bad wizard,” the Wizard explains to Dorothy in the 1939 film. Still, the Wizard can work as a remarkably cynical metaphor for all the broken promises of the American dream. The Wizard is a man who will promise you everything but give you nothing, and then he will tell you the answer was inside of yourself all along.  It’s this metaphor that gives The Wiz, the all-Black reimagining of The Wizard of Oz from the 1970s, its surprisingly sharp bite. In The Wiz, Dorothy and her friends are Black people who are promised certain fundamental rights by a government that never plans to pay up. (Wicked gestures at a similar critique by casting the Black actress Cynthia Erivo as the racially othered green-skinned Elphaba.) “Public office is the last refuge of the incompetent,” the Scarecrow scoffs in The Wiz, after learning that the Wizard is a washed-up politician from Atlantic City. “Incompetent!” the Wiz crows. “That’s me!”  Wicked, meanwhile, is not a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz so much as it is a revisionist history. As such, it is fundamentally skeptical of figures in authority — much more so than Baum, who eventually replaced the Wizard with the virtuous and nearly infallible fairy queen Ozma.  The premise of any story that tells you that the villains of your childhood are misunderstood is that the storytellers were lying to you. In Wicked, the Wizard isn’t just a very bad wizard, but a very bad man, too. He lies maliciously and with strategic purpose.  The Wizard can work as a remarkably cynical metaphor for all the broken promises of the American dream. Elphaba and Glinda, here, become just two more dreamers who travel to the Emerald City like Dorothy and her friends, because they want the Wizard to give them their hearts’ desire: protection for the talking animals of Oz as they become steadily more persecuted.  Yet the Wizard they encounter is not only incapable of granting them such a request, but in fact plans to pervert it, using their innocent wishes to enact more violence. He plans to take Elphaba under his wing and have her do magic on his behalf so he can more thoroughly persecute the sentient animals he plans to round up and more efficiently spy on the rest of his citizens.  In the end, the Wizard names Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch of the North because he can trust Glinda to maintain friendly relations with his administration, while Elphaba refuses. He is America governed not by a con man but by a strong man — an authoritarian dictator. This is the kind of metaphor a revisionist history can offer you, and part of why Wicked feels so bizarrely urgent at this moment. In a subversion of a childhood classic, no authority figure can be trusted — which is what makes these stories so attractive when people you don’t trust have found their way into positions of power. 

Donald Trump is set to take office in January with a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives that offers Republicans barely any margin of error.