Video shows Hurricane Helene ripping into Florida as a dangerous Category 4 storm

REUTERSThe formidable dowager Violet Crawley, Maggie Smith’s scene-stealing character in Downton Abbey, made Smith a bona fide celebrity. “It’s ridiculous. I led a perfectly normal life until Downton Abbey,” said Smith, who has died at 89. “I’m not kidding. I’d go to theaters. I’d go to galleries. Things like that, on my own, and now I can’t. And that’s—you know—awful. It’s all… It’s truly television. I mean, I’ve been working around for a very long time before Downton Abbey. And life was fine. Nobody knew who the hell I was. Now, it’s all—it has changed.”Downton Abbey climaxed her unlikely climb to household name that had begun with her appearances in the Harry Potter movies (she was author J. K. Rowling’s choice for the role of Minerva McGonagall). And though fame came late to the two-time Academy Award-winner, it hit like a hammer when it did arrive, exposing her to the bald glare of celebrity and all the nuisances that entails, including one woman who approached her and insisted she parrot one of Violet’s most memorably clueless lines, “What is a weekend?”Read more at The Daily Beast.

LONDON — Maggie Smith, who won an Oscar for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” in 1969 and won new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey,” has died, her publicist said Friday. She was 89. She was frequently rated the preeminent British actress of a generation which...

British actress Dame Maggie Smith had an extensive career in theater and movies, gaining international acclaim later in her career in roles in "Harry Potter" and "Downton Abbey."

“She’s getting all the right support and focus that she needs. And like anything, it takes time to process," said James Middleton.

Tony Dokoupil and Adriana Diaz co-host "CBS Mornings Plus," airing weekdays on CBS-owned stations in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit and Miami, and streaming on CBS News 24/7.

On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris will be in Arizona to visit the U.S.-Mexico border. She plans to criticize former President Donald Trump for his role in blocking a bipartisan border security and immigration bill earlier this year. Meanwhile Trump will be in New York, meeting with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy before heading to Michigan.

Rescue crews pulled three people and a dog from floodwaters in Hillsborough County, Florida, on Thursday, as Hurricane Helene hit the region.

"This is why we were all bloated and we asked for laxatives."

Hurricane Helene raked the coast of the Carolinas on September 27, 1958, but did not actually make landfall, according to the National Hurricane Center.

New York Mayor Eric Adams arrived to voluntarily surrender to authorities after federal prosecutors announced an indictment against him on corruption charges.

Helene roared ashore in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, trapping residents in floodwaters, peeling side off buildings, knocking out power to millions.

Devine admitted to Page Six in an exclusive interview that he was "a little ashamed" of the weight he put on, so he "grew a bad beard to cover [his] neck fat."

El LA Galaxy Unified y el LAFC Unified jugaron la primera versión del clásico angelino en una de las canchas del Dignity Health Sports Park.

FOX Weather meteorologist Bob Van Dillen is being praised as a hero after rescuing a woman from her car during a live shot as Hurricane Helene floodwaters rapidly rose.

Everyone, it seems, has made a movie with Eric Roberts, including Times columnist Glenn Whipp. Also: Saoirse Ronan talks about her new film, "The Outrun."

Hizzoner -- who is the first sitting New York City mayor to be indictment on federal charges -- was slated to go before a judge for an initial hearing at the Manhattan federal courthouse at noon.

A launderette in West Kensington, London. | Will Ireland/Classic Rock Magazine/Future Publishing via Getty Images I write reasonably often about degrowth, the movement to save the world by shrinking the economy. Why? After all, it’s an extremely niche ideology, one basically confined to European socialist academics, with absolutely no chance of ever becoming law or policy anywhere. Is it even worth continuing to rebut?  I think so, and the reason is that while the actual proposals of degrowthers are unserious, laughable, and stand no chance at becoming law, the underlying antigrowth attitude is far more widely held — and that attitude does shape our policy priorities. I often get replies to this newsletter pushing back on our degrowth skepticism, repeating the line “we can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet” or similar ones.  So the degrowth conversation isn’t so easily dodged and is worth having. Much ado about washing machines The most recent round of degrowth arguments was kicked off by a Dutch PhD candidate who wrote that we shouldn’t have washing machines — yes, washing machines.  This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. “Washing clothes by hand is a chore, oftentimes a lonely one. But it needn’t be. We could have communal washing facilities in each neighborhood where people can plan to come in groups to do their laundry together,” he proposed on Twitter. “Washing clothes by hand is also tiring work if you have a load, but it’s still physical activity & exercise. We spend time in the gym & running outside to keep fit; would it be so bad to devote some of that time & energy to washing clothes by hand?” The take caught fire because it captures so much of what animates the modern degrowth movement: ignorance about the realities of life, and absurd priorities. Doing laundry by hand is exhausting, miserable, deeply unpleasant work which has absorbed much of women’s time for as long as we’ve worn clothes. Comparing the backbreaking work of scrubbing all clothes by hand every week to going to the gym is fundamentally unserious. Dozens of historians of women’s labor jumped in to try to explain just how bad doing laundry by hand was and all the reasons a washing machine represents a big leap forward in quality of life, freedom, and human well-being.  The other thing that makes this opinion so absurd is that washing machines are not actually a significant contributor to any of the environmental problems degrowthers claim to care about. It costs only a few dollars to run your washing machine for the full year. We’ve dramatically improved them since the 1980s — they’re 50 percent larger and use about a quarter as much water and electricity. The proposal to scrub all your clothes by hand is a proposal to replace fairly low-energy machine work with a part-time job’s worth of unpaid miserable labor for approximately no real environmental benefit. More reasonable degrowthers often focus on worries about short device lifespans and ask that devices be long-lasting and easy to repair — but it’s an intellectual subculture in which you can always win attention by having the most radical opinion, which is how we ended up arguing over whether everyone should scrub their clothes by hand.  Why the washing machine debate matters One of my takeaways when I delved deeply into the degrowth movement was that it was substantially a lifestyle fantasy masquerading as a political movement. People drawn to it find something appealing about an imagined past where people did work by hand and were in touch with the land. So they propose policies that meet this aesthetic criteria, with no consideration at all for whether this improves the environment in any way let alone whether it’s a good tradeoff.  There’s nothing wrong with personally choosing an anti-consumerist life. But there is something wrong with dramatically lowering the quality of life for everyone else without any real benefits. But one good thing came of the washing machines discourse — an opportunity to be reminded of how much better the world is than it used to be, and how much heartbreaking, backbreaking labor our grandmothers and great-grandmothers did that we can now appreciate being free of.  For the washing machine in particular, there’s a famous TED talk by the late Swedish academic Hans Rosling, which amounts to a beautiful articulation of how much good this humble appliance brought the world: I was only 4 years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life. That was a great day for my mother. My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine. And the first day it was going to be used, even Grandma was invited to see the machine. And Grandma was even more excited. Throughout her life she had been heating water with firewood, and she had handwashed laundry for seven children. And now she was going to watch electricity do that work. My mother carefully opened the door, and she loaded the laundry into the machine, like this. And then, when she closed the door, Grandma said, “No, no, no, no. Let me, let me push the button.” And Grandma pushed the button, and she said, “Oh, fantastic. I want to see this. Give me a chair. Give me a chair. I want to see it.” And she sat down in front of the machine, and she watched the entire washing program. She was mesmerized. To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle. … If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines. They love them. And what’s the magic with them? My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. She said, “Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry; the machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.” Because this is the magic: You load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children’s books. And mother got time to read for me. My favorite part about Rosling’s speech is his reminder to his audience that people want laundry machines very badly and will vote for them. The UN estimates that only two billion people have washing machines; for the other six billion, a life of washing clothes by hand is not a relic of the distant past but an exhausting chore that consumes a significant fraction of women’s time and energy worldwide.  And that’s ultimately why I don’t want to leave the washing machine discourse alone. “Should, or should not, human beings have access to labor-saving technologies?” is not a hypothetical question. It doesn’t just get written up in PhD theses. It isn’t just for Twitter dunks. As you read this, billions of people still don’t have washing machines, nor access to the electricity to run them. But we can make political choices — about how we encourage the development of cheaper and better technologies, about how we support basic electrical infrastructure, about which inventions we consider a societal priority — which can change that.  In this week’s UN General Assembly, the international body is deciding what to do about the slowdown of improvements for the global poor. If we think of washing machines as a silly modern luxury, our policy will reflect that. If we think of them as a powerful tool of women’s liberation, our policy will reflect that.  Degrowthers are toothless, in that their advocacy will absolutely never lead to an end to washing machines in the rich world. But our ambivalence toward material improvements in standards of living is not toothless, because those improvements in standards of living are desperately needed, and we have to decide as a policy community if we’re willing to prioritize them or not.

Some Florida homes were seen floating away in floodwaters as Hurricane Helene lashed the state.

Video shows a Coast Guard member descending into the choppy ocean from a helicopter to reach the man and dog.

Todd Owyoung/NBC via GettyPrince Harry used language seriously unbecoming of a British royal during a terrifying trip through a haunted maze with Jimmy Fallon on Thursday night’s episode of The Tonight Show.The Duke of Sussex accompanied Fallon in the attraction—“Jimmy Fallon’s Tonightmares”—at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Harry blasphemed during the ordeal and had some of his words bleeped altogether, suggesting he probably wasn’t speaking in a way that would pass muster with Debrett’s.“Are you easily scared?” Fallon asked Harry before they headed into the maze. “Not normally,” the prince and combat veteran replied, “But today might be different.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

It’s hard to say Steve Cohen didn't make the right call in allowing David Stearns to pick his own manager.

Data through the week points to a still-resilient economy overall, leaving traders uncertain about the Fed's next move.

Democratic lawmakers on the House task force investigating the attempted assassinations of former President Donald Trump skipped the final portion of the panel’s first hearing Thursday.

Giants fans can breathe a little bit easier Friday morning.

The new comments come after the Kelce matriarch shared why her son is a good match for the “Cruel Summer” singer in an interview with Page Six.

The NRA is taking aim at Meta after its posts slamming Vice President Kamala Harris were censored with "false information" labels on Facebook and Instagram.

The Czech Republic, which sits in the middle of Europe as the continent's "crossroads," has a unique position to weigh in on immigration and regional conflict issues.

"I really put him on a pedestal and it was disappointing to see some of what happened. I couldn’t believe it. And I didn’t like that feeling," he said.

The Wizards are doing the hard work. Cooper Flagg would make it easier.

Aaron Boone was still freshly soaked from the champagne showers of his players when he stepped outside the visiting clubhouse at T-Mobile Park last week. The Yankees had just clinched a playoff berth with a win over the Mariners, and Boone was asked whether this was the best team he’s had entering the playoffs during...

Investigators say the suspicious timing of doing a load of laundry and a call to 911 focused their attention on a former state trooper and his potential role in his wife's death.

The birth defects were more likely, but still very uncommon, in infants conceived through certain fertility treatments, a large study found.

Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida on Thursday as a Category 4 storm. Follow the Post’s live updates for the latest news on tracking the storm’s path, reactions and photos.

Stomach-churning video shows the moment human sewage erupted on a busy Chinese motorway, drenching cars, pedestrians, and bikers in what has been dubbed a "poo-cano."

Parents living in Switzerland say they are in the fight of their lives after a court removed their trans teenager to government custody following their objection to placing her on puberty blockers.

Micah Parsons didn't seem concerned about his left ankle after being carted off the field with 3:30 left to play in the Cowboys' 20-15 win over the Giants on Thursday night.

California is among 16 states that allow prisoners to be used for forced labor. That's wrong. Proposition 6 will get rid of the repugnant practice.

Special education teacher Karla Griego is the best choice for LAUSD District 5.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas gave the most revealing interview of his career recently, providing a fascinating look inside the mind of the anti-borders ideologue running the agency charged with protecting America’s borders. The post Exclusive–Wilcox: The Mayorkas Doctrine Will Lead to America’s Ruin appeared first on Breitbart.

The War & Treaty worked with Jon Bon Jovi shortly before the moment he saved a woman's life on a bridge in Nashville, and told Fox News Digital he originally wasn't supposed to still be in the area when it happened.

Love was waiting in line for me. Yes, it was — at Los Angeles International Airport. I was catching a flight to New Jersey when I met Mr. Right. Could I make the connection last?

Mookie Betts took about 300-400 swings before he faced the Padres Thursday night at Dodger Stadium, helping him finally break through at the plate.

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"Fridgescaping," the viral trend of decorating the inside of a fridge with pictures, plants and other items mingled among food, could be dangerous and spread bacteria. Here's why.

One might think that an intelligence failure can be benign: The good guys do far better than expected, the bad guys far worse. In fact, erring on the side of pessimism can be as big a problem as being too bullish. The period just before and after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, is a good example of this. At the West’s most influential research organizations, prominent analysts—many of them political scientists who follow Russian military affairs—confidently predicted that Russia would defeat its smaller neighbor within weeks. American military leaders believed this consensus, to the point that the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair reportedly told members of Congress that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of a Russian attack. Although those analysts’ gloomy assessments turned out to be wrong, they’ve nevertheless made the United States and its allies overly cautious in assisting Ukraine in its self-defense.Both of us are military historians who have a keen interest in contemporary strategic issues—and who, at the outset of the war, harbored grave doubts about the prevailing analysis of Russian and Ukrainian capabilities. One of us, Eliot, has served in senior positions in the U.S. government; the other, Phillips, has advised the British Ministry of Defense on Ukraine and other matters. In a report published this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, we sought to understand how prominent military analysts had been so badly wrong. Why did they assume that Russia could successfully conduct an exceedingly complex lightning offensive and win a major war in considerably less time than the Wehrmacht needed to overrun France, a smaller country, in 1940? Why did they persistently take the most negative possible view of Ukraine’s abilities and prospects?[Anne Applebaum: Is Congress really going to abandon Ukraine now?]As we reread scores of articles and reports, listened to podcasts, and reviewed op-eds and interviews, we noticed how little uncertainty had been expressed. Russia, prominent analysts had insisted, had completely modernized its military. Its soldiers were no longer chiefly conscripts but professionals. Its military doctrine—particularly its organization of units into so-called battalion tactical groups, which are small infantry battalions reinforced with tanks and artillery—was a stroke of organizational genius. Its soldiers and airmen had been battle-tested in Syria and earlier operations in Ukraine. The two of us pored over the maps, reprinted widely, that showed half a dozen or more red arrows effortlessly piercing Ukraine up to its western border.To the extent that analysts discussed Ukraine in any detail, its citizens were depicted as the demoralized and atomized victims of a corrupt government. The country’s substantial Russophone population was portrayed as largely indifferent to rule from Moscow or Kyiv. Ukraine’s equipment was no match for advanced Russian systems. They had experienced only static warfare in the Donbas and would have no chance against a Russian blitzkrieg. Volodymyr Zelensky was portrayed as an ineffective president. He was a comedy performer, not a wartime leader; his government, intelligence services, and armed forces had been penetrated by Russian spies and saboteurs. Ukrainians might not even put up much of a guerrilla resistance. On top of it all came consistent policy advocacy: assertions that Ukraine was not worth arming or that well-intentioned efforts to do so would merely increase suffering.Two and a half years later, the Russians have taken as many as 600,000 casualties; Ukrainian cities have been shattered but still stand, while Ukrainian drones have hit Moscow. Ukrainians have driven the Black Sea Fleet from its anchorages around Crimea, sunk a third of its ships, and freed up sea lanes for the vital export of Ukrainian agricultural products. Ukrainian forces have in the past few weeks seized an area larger than Los Angeles inside the borders of Russia itself.The same expert analytic community that erred early in the war continues to dominate much of the public and governmental discourse. Many of them persist in downplaying Ukrainian chances and counseling against giving the Ukrainians weapons that they have repeatedly shown themselves able to use with great effect. Some of them still warn of Russian escalation, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons, even as one Russian red line after another has faded to pink and vanished.One reason for such larger errors rests on what our friend and colleague Hew Strachan, a British military historian, describes in his foreword to our report as Military Balance analysis. A thick volume produced every year by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Military Balance is an invaluable resource. It documents important statistics such as the size of each nation’s armed forces, the amount and type of equipment it has available, and the number of men and women it has actively deployed. But those metrics are often far less important in war than immeasurable factors such as organization, discipline, fighting spirit, and quality of command at all levels.The standard analysis of Russia and Ukraine paid almost no attention to the documented corruption of the Russian military, the rote nature of its exercises, and the failure of attempts to professionalize it. Far from having an abundance of well-trained personnel akin to American and British soldiers, Russian forces consisted for the most part of conscripts who had been bribed or coerced into signing up for a second year of duty in the same old abusive system. Many commentators wrongly compared Vladimir Putin’s forces to their Western counterparts, yielding predictions that Russia would employ “shock and awe” against the Ukrainians—as if its air force had experience and organization similar to that of the United States. But the Russian military was not a somewhat smaller and less effective version of America’s. It was a brutal, deeply flawed, and altogether inferior armed force.Many observers also paid scant attention to all that had changed in Ukraine since 2014. This point is crucial: Many Western analysts had been trained as Russia specialists. Implicitly, perhaps subconsciously, they viewed Ukraine the way Russian imperialists did: as adjunct to Russia. In many cases ignorant of Ukrainian history, and even dismissive of its claims to national identity and political cohesion, authors of nearly a quarter of the reports we read did not even attempt to describe Ukraine as anything more than a target set for Russia. Many had never visited Ukraine, or spoken with Westerners—including members of allied training missions who had served there—who might have had different and better-informed views.[Read: Ukraine was biding its time]Possibly most disturbing, the two of us discovered just how small and insular the world of Russian-military analysis was. Think-tank political scientists with narrow specialties had enormous influence in a community whose incentives, unlike those in more vibrant academic disciplines, were for consensus rather than vigorous debate. Many authors made oracular pronouncements and seemed to resent serious questioning by outsiders, even including retired senior military.We do not doubt prominent analysts’ smarts or honest intentions. But we were reminded of how some public-health experts acted in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic: confidently rendering judgments, dismissing doubts about them, excluding other experts—such as child psychologists, on the question of closing or opening schools—with relevant expertise different from their own.Many in the public-health community have since engaged in some introspection. Russia experts have shown little such self-awareness, let alone self-criticism. The same experts continue to appear in the same forums, visit the White House, and brief an intelligence community that largely shares its views.What is troubling is that analytic failures can happen again in any setting where small groups of experts in a particular country exercise outsize influence. Let’s hope analysts of the People’s Liberation Army will take a different approach if tensions with China continue to escalate.“You should never trust experts,” the late-19th-century British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury famously wrote. “If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.”The correctives for recent intelligence failures do not include, obviously, chucking expertise altogether. But our report shows why, especially in moments of crisis, governments and the public need to hear from a wide variety of experts, demand relentless commonsense questioning, and, above all, create incentives for open, sharply expressed disagreement on fundamental issues. Expertise is not a form of occult knowledge, and those of us who consume expert opinion should always do so with a strong dose of skepticism. The analytic failure in Ukraine makes a strong case for something so often lacking in military analysis and the academic world more generally: intellectual humility.

Sean Manaea will lead the visiting Mets past Frankie Montas and the host Brewers on Friday night, Stitches predicts.

All night, you knew it was going to come back to haunt the Giants, and it did. Failed opportunities on offense. Time after time after time after time.

...plus Will & Harper on Netflix, Apartment 7A on Paramount+ and more!