WATCH: How Tampa's zoo and aquarium are preparing for Hurricane Milton's arrival

It's time to talk shop.

Former President Donald Trump’s sprawling Florida mansion and club Mar-a-Lago will be just fine as Hurricane Milton sweeps over the area — because it’s tethered to coral reef. Trump’s official home in Palm Beach was designed to be storm-proof — made with concrete, three-foot-thick walls and steel anchors holding the structure to the coral reef...

Images from space show the progress of Hurricane Milton towards the western coast of Florida.

“He messed it all up, Gene, goddammit,” the dancer teased.

Fox NewsLara Trump is confident Donald Trump will win in November thanks to unconventional new polling data: beverage napkins on airplanes.Appearing on The Ingraham Angle on Fox News on Tuesday, the Republican National Committee co-chair was asked about a new New York Times/ Siena poll finding that on the question of which candidate most represents change, Vice President Kamala Harris had a slight edge over her father-in-law among likely voters.“Polls like that, I think, are absolutely ridiculous,” Lara Trump told host Laura Ingraham. “I get slipped beverage napkins every time I get on an airplane saying, ‘We can’t wait to vote for Trump,’ ‘Go Trump,’ ‘Trump 2024.’”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Co-chairs for this year's ball include actor Colman Domingo, race car driver Lewis Hamilton, rappers A$AP Rocky and Pharrell Williams and more.

Piers Morgan Uncensored/YouTubeLawyer and law professor Alan Dershowitz, 86, threatened to sue a debate opponent who called him an “old pervert” over his ties to the notorious sex trafficker and financier Jeffrey Epstein.During a combative appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored on Tuesday, YouTuber and author Mohammed Hijab interrupted a debate about Israel’s war on Gaza to ask the show’s host, British broadcaster Piers Morgan, if Dershowitz, formerly Epstein’s lawyer, had “leverage” on him.“There’s no leverage on me, no,” a confused Morgan replied. Hijab noted Morgan “has got a picture with [Ghislaine] Maxwell,” referring to a photo of him taken with the late sex criminal’s socialite co-conspirator at a book launch in 2013.Read more at The Daily Beast.

He’s now one with nature. Storm hunters sprinkled the ashes of a beloved longtime meteorologist into the eye of Hurricane Milton by plane Tuesday night to pay tribute to his life’s work. Peter Dodge worked as a weatherman for 44 years, specializing in radar and tropical cyclones, and was honored by NOAA Hurricane Hunters, according to...

Palestinians say a large-scale Israeli operation in northern Gaza has killed dozens of people and threatens to shut down three hospitals.

The former Dallas Cowboys star mistakingly referred to Swift as Kelce's "missus" during the "Monday Night Football" broadcast earlier in the week.

Last week, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted a map on X to show Hurricane Helene’s path overlapping with majority-Republican areas in the South. She followed it up with an explanation: “Yes they can control the weather.”Greene was using they as a choose-your-own-adventure word, allowing her followers to replace the pronoun with their own despised group: the federal government, perhaps, or liberal elites, or Democrats. All of the above? Whoever they are, Greene appeared to be saying, they sent a hurricane roaring toward Trump country.The claim may be laughable, but Greene wasn’t trying to be funny. Donald Trump and his allies, including Greene, are working hard to politicize the weather—to harness Helene and soon-to-make-landfall Milton as a kind of October surprise against the Democrats before next month’s election. Such false claims have real-world implications, not least impeding recovery efforts. But they also offer a foretaste of the grievance-fueled disinformation mayhem that we’ll see on and after Election Day. In what will almost certainly be another nail-biter of an election—decided once again by tens of thousands of votes in a few states—conspiracy-mongering about the validity of the results could lead to very real political unrest.Over the next few weeks, “we’re going to see this disinformation get worse,” Graham Brookie, a disinformation expert at the Atlantic Council, an international-affairs think tank, told me. “We’re going to be coming back to this again and again and again.”While Greene was making her strange foray into cloud-seeding and weather modification last week, Trump was spreading his own set of more terrestrial lies. At a rally in Georgia, the GOP nominee claimed that the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, couldn’t reach Joe Biden, even though Kemp had spoken with the president about relief efforts the day before. On Truth Social, Trump falsely alleged that government officials in hurricane-battered North Carolina were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.” Later, Trump repeatedly accused Vice President Kamala Harris of spending FEMA money on “illegal migrants.” (She didn’t; FEMA administers a program that helps state and local governments house migrants, but those resources are separate from disaster-relief funds.) Over the weekend, Trump argued that Americans who lost their homes in Helene were receiving only $750 from FEMA—in fact, that amount is just emergency aid for essentials; survivors can apply for up to $42,500 in additional assistance.Online, rumors swirled. Right-wing activists shared texts from unnamed acquaintances in unidentified places complaining about the government response. Elon Musk, a recent convert to the Church of Trump, told his 200 million followers on X that FEMA had been “ferrying illegals” into the country instead of “saving American lives.” Later, when he accused the Federal Aviation Administration of blocking aid to parts of North Carolina, Musk was talked down by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who apparently assured him in a phone call that this was not happening.The practical effect of these falsehoods is that local officials have to spend precious time and energy combatting misinformation, rather than recovery efforts. FEMA’s response has, inevitably, aroused frustrations about delays and bureaucracy, but the intensity of this hurricane season is creating unprecedented challenges. And the propagation of lies could demoralize people in affected areas, “reducing the likelihood that survivors will come to FEMA” for help, one agency official said earlier this week. Government officials have spent the past week engaged in the crisis-comms operation of a lifetime: FEMA has a dedicated webpage for debunking rumors being spread by the leader of the Republican Party and his allies; the state of North Carolina does, too. And at least one GOP member of Congress has broken ranks to send out a press release clarifying that, in fact, “Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock.”The problem is that their efforts aren’t making much of an impact, Nina Jankowicz, the author of How to Lose the Information War, told me. “That is in part because we have seen the complete kind of buy-in from the Republican Party establishment into these falsehoods.” Hurricane Milton, currently a Category 4 storm, will hit Florida’s west coast tonight, and already the same Helene-style conspiracy theories have begun to circulate. “WEATHER MODIFICATION WEAPONIZED AGAINST POLITICAL OPPONENTS,” one Trump-aligned account with 155,000 followers wrote on X: “It’s being done to protect pedophiles and child traffickers from prosecution and so much more.” A self-described “decentralized tech maverick” is telling Floridians that FEMA won’t let them return to their homes if they evacuate. (The post, which received 1.1 million views, is a lie.)[Read: Milton is the hurricane that scientists were dreading]Rumor and distortion typically abound during and after storms, mass shootings, and other “crisis-information environments,” as the academic parlance labels them. And elections, especially ones with narrow margins, have very similar dynamics, Brookie, from the Atlantic Council, told me. “There’s a lot of new information, high levels of engagement, and a lot of really sustained focus on every single update.”The 2024 election may not be called on November 5 and could easily remain unresolved for a few days afterward. In that fuzzy interregnum, a very familiar series of events could unfold. Just replace Trump’s hurricane-related conspiracy theories with some wild allegation about Sharpies at polling sites or secret bins full of uncounted ballots. Instead of being blamed for hogging FEMA resources, undocumented immigrants will be accused of voting en masse. It’s easy to imagine, because we already saw it play out in 2020: the suitcases of ballots and a burst pipe, the tainted Dominion voting machines, the hordes of zombie voters. The MAGA loyalists in Congress and the pro-Trump media ecosystem will amplify these claims. Musk, never one to stay calm on the sidelines, will leap into the fray with his proprietary algorithm-boosted commentary.Local election officials will try to clear things up, but it could be too late. Millions of Americans across the country, primed to distrust government and institutions, will be sure that something sinister has taken place.The hurricanes’ aftermath will already have created new opportunities for conspiracy-mongers, even before the election. After Helene, the North Carolina Elections Board passed emergency measures that will allow some voters to request and receive absentee ballots up until the day before the election. Depending on the damage caused by Milton, Florida may make some of its own election changes. “That will clearly come under attack,” Elaine Kamarck, a co-author of Lies That Kill: A Citizen’s Guide to Disinformation, told me. As we saw with procedural changes made to accommodate voters during the coronavirus pandemic, “change in the voting process can always be used to make people paranoid.”Right now, Americans in the Southeast are preparing to weather a very dangerous storm. This time next month, all of us will be facing a storm of a different kind.

A controversial Manhattan nonprofit — which was suspended in May from receiving any more federal funds after funneling more than half a million in taxpayer dollars to the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology before the COVID-19 pandemic — was asking for millions more in July to study dangerous viruses, The Post can exclusively reveal. EcoHealth...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Joe Biden spoke Wednesday as the Jewish state prepares for its retaliatory strike on Iran – with the Islamic republic warning of greater escalation if attacked.

The “Real Housewives of Atlanta” star and her pro partner, Val Chmerkovskiy, exclusively spoke to Page Six following Tuesday’s rock ’n’ roll-themed episode of the dance competition series.

For American politicians, this is a golden age of lying. Social media allows them to spread mendacity with speed and efficiency, while supporters amplify any falsehood that serves their cause. When I launched PolitiFact in 2007, I thought we were going to raise the cost of lying. I didn’t expect to change people’s votes just by calling out candidates, but I was hopeful that our journalism would at least nudge them to be more truthful.I was wrong. More than 15 years of fact-checking has done little or nothing to stem the flow of lies. I underestimated the strength of the partisan media on both sides, particularly conservative outlets, which relentlessly smeared our work. (A typical insult: “The fact-checkers are basically just a P.R. arm of the Democrats at this point.”) PolitiFact and other media organizations published thousands of checks, but as time went on, Republican representatives and voters alike ignored our journalism more and more, or dismissed it. Democrats sometimes did too, of course, but they were more often mindful of our work and occasionally issued corrections when they were caught in a falsehood. This essay has been excerpted from Adair’s new book. Lying is ubiquitous, yet politicians are rarely asked why they do it. Maybe journalists think the reason is obvious; many are reluctant to even use the word lie, because it invites confrontation and demands proof. But the answer could help us address the problem. So I spent the past four years asking members of Congress, political operatives, local officials, congressional staffers, White House aides, and campaign consultants this simple question: Why do politicians lie?In a way, these conversations made me hopeful that officials from both parties might curtail their lying if we find ways to change their incentives. The decision to lie can be reduced to something like a point system: If I tell this lie, will I score enough support and attention from my voters, my party leaders, and my corner of the media to outweigh any negative consequences? “There is a base to play to, a narrative to uphold or reinforce,” said Cal Cunningham, a Democrat who lost a Senate race in North Carolina in 2020 after acknowledging that he had been in an extramarital relationship. “There is an advantage that comes from willfully misstating the truth that is judged to be greater than the disadvantage that may come from telling the truth. I think there’s a lot of calculus in it.” Jim Kolbe, a former Republican member of Congress from Arizona who has since left the party, described the advantage more vividly: A lie “arouses and stimulates their base.”[Tyler Austin Harper: Fact-checking is not a political strategy]Politicians have always played to their base, but polarization has encouraged them to do little else. Now that many politicians speak primarily to their supporters, lying has become both less dangerous and more rewarding. “They gain political favor or, ultimately, they gain election,” said Mike McCurry, who served as White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton. As former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey told me, “It’s human nature to want to get a standing ovation.” Lies also provide easy ammunition for attacking opponents—no opposition research required. They “take points off the board for other candidates,” said Damon Circosta, a Democrat who recently served as the chair of North Carolina’s Board of Elections.Anthony Fauci was often caught in the crossfire. Roger Marshall, a Republican senator from Kansas, once suggested that the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases would not give people access to his financial statements when, in fact, they were available to anyone who requested them. Republican politicians repeatedly—and falsely—accused Fauci of lying and even used his face in fundraising appeals. He brought one of the mailings to a congressional hearing: “It said ‘Fire Fauci,’” he told me, “and then, on the bottom, ‘Donate even $10, $20, $50, $100, $200.’ So there wasn’t any ambiguity.”In the old days, “if someone would say something outlandish, they would be shamed,” Fauci said. That deterrent has disappeared. “There is no shame in lying now.”For my study of political lying, I took a particular interest in Mike Pence. We had been friends and neighbors when he was a member of Congress, and I saw him as a typical politician who would occasionally shade the truth. When he won the race for governor in Indiana, I watched his lies grow. By the time he became Donald Trump’s vice president, he was almost unrecognizable to me.Olivia Troye, who worked as a homeland-security adviser in Pence’s office from 2018 to 2020, saw two versions of him. “It was like watching Jekyll and Hyde sometimes,” she told me. As a boss, he was concerned about details and wanted the facts. But he would compromise all of that when he was asked to recite the Trump administration’s talking points.“At the beginning of the COVID pandemic was probably the most honest I saw Mike Pence ever be,” she said. He addressed the nation frankly and more responsibly than Trump. But Troye cited an op-ed that he wrote for The Wall Street Journal as a turning point. Under the headline “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave,’” he claimed, in June 2020, that “we are winning the fight against the invisible enemy.” Critics rightly accused him of cherry-picking stats and ignoring reality.But appeals to “reality” have lost their potency. Several people I interviewed described how partisan media, especially on the right, has fostered lying by degrading our shared sense of what’s real. Jeff Jackson, a Democratic representative from Charlotte, North Carolina, told me that outlets expect politicians to repeat falsehoods as the price of admission. “If you’re not willing to treat certain lies as fact, then you simply won’t be invited to address the echo chamber.” Tim Miller, a former Republican operative who left the party in 2020, pointed out that gerrymandering, particularly in red states, has made it so “most of the voters in your district are getting their information from Fox, conservative talk radio … and so you just have this whole bubble of protection around your lies in a way that wouldn’t have been true before, 15 years ago.”[Listen: When fact-checks backfire]The hollowing-out of local news outlets has also made lying easier. “There’s no local reporters following these races,” Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, told me. “All of these local bureaus have been just wiped out, and so there’s nobody following this shit on a day-to-day basis and keeping people accountable.”Experimental studies have found that fact-checking really can convince people. Often, however, the academic findings don’t reflect the real world. Voters rarely seek out fact-checking aimed at their party, and conservatives in particular hear constant criticism of the enterprise, which makes them doubt its validity. (According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of Republicans believe that fact-checkers favor one side, while only 29 percent of Democrats do.)If politicians lie because they believe they’ll score more points than they’ll lose, we have to change the calculus. Tech and media companies need to create incentives for truth-telling and deterrents for lying. Platforms of all kinds could charge higher ad rates to candidates who have the worst records among fact-checkers. Television networks could take away candidates’ talking time during debates if they’re caught lying.But these reforms will demand more than just benign corporate intervention. They’ll need broad, sustained public support. Voters may not be willing to place truthfulness over partisan preference in every case. But more will have to start caring about lies, even when their candidate is the culprit.This essay has been excerpted from Bill Adair’s new book, Beyond the Big Lie.

Apple's new mobile operating system could help iPhone users stay in touch if Hurricane Milton knocks out cell service.

Clejuan Williams, 36, was allegedly intoxicated while giving his young son a driving lesson.

Robert Fitzpatrick, former president of the California Institute of the Arts and later Disneyland Paris, also led the acclaimed 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles.

It seems eating isn't the only thing Cookie Monster does too quickly.

Negotiations between Boeing and 33,000 striking machinists have broken down as the walkout that has put the company’s financial future at risk enters its fourth week.

"It feels like this place is haunted," she told viewers.

Even where medication abortion is legal, state restrictions make it difficult to access care.

"Dude, it was so funny," American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez star Josh Riviera told Decider.

School is back, baby!

Taylor Tomlinson opens up about her new comedy tour, "Save Me," which tackles personal topics like growing up in church.

Time for these trees to take a bough. Dozens of leafy legends across the five boroughs have been added to the city’s tree hall of fame this week — which is the first time the Big Apple’s official roll call of top timber has been updated since 1985. One of the impressive additions to the...

Tesla is expected to announce a timeline for the launch of the vehicle and details on how it plans to bring customers on to a potential ride-hail app during the event.

"If we have another pandemic he'll probably send the stuff to North Korea!" Joy Behar quipped.

White was inactive all four games this season and his release came after the team's bye week.

The property at 3 E. 52nd St. that housed the fabled La Grenouille, which announced its closure in September, has sold to a new owner.

Weekends and holidays, which are the highest volume days, will be hiked 6.2% from $194 to $206 a day effective immediately.

If you're between 18-24 or enrolled in a two-year or four-year college, you have to take advantage of Prime Student deals!

Hurricane hunters from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Aircraft Operations Center experienced massive turbulence while collecting data on Hurricane Milton. The view from the passenger side window of Miss Piggy, the Lockheed WP-3D Orion aircraft, shows the plane flying through an impenetrable gray sky as it is pounded by blistering rain. “Bumpy ride into...

Ashlyn Harris and Sophia Bush keep close, Harrison Ford gets silly and more snaps...

Oil prices have surged in recent weeks as the Israel-Gaza-Lebanon war escalates.

Trash cans beware. 

Don’t look now, but the Denver Broncos have won three games in a row. 

President Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are expected to speak on Wednesday, according to a source familiar. It would be their first conversation in months.

She's targeting varied audiences from Howard Stern to '60 Minutes."

North Korea is now sending troops to fight and die in Ukraine alongside Russian soldiers, according to Seoul’s defense minister, Kim Yong-hyun.

As an official says 115 people were killed in one small town, rights advocates warn Haiti's criminal gangs are luring more children into crime and sexual abuse.

Justin Timberlake postponed a Tuesday night concert a mere hour before it was set to begin. He blamed an injury for preventing him from performing.

The Justice Department said it is considering whether to ask a federal judge to order a breakup of Google’s online search monopoly – a move that could upend the Big Tech firm’s entire business model. The feds pointed to a forced divestment of Google’s Chrome browser, its Google Play app store or its Android operating...

Britain’s opposition Conservative Party will choose either Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch to be its next leader.

The standard barometer for spotting a "bro" is no longer about their video gaming stats or beer-chugging abilities.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper.

"This is a classic case of a politician using entitlements to try and attract votes," one expert said.

"He said he was going to teach me what was going to happen when I got older," she writes.