Giants on wrong end of strange calls in loss to Cowboys

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.

After being fired by the Arizona Cardinals, Kingsbury was uneasy during a football hiatus. As the Commanders’ offensive coordinator, he’s rejuvenated.

"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.

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!

We brought Utah to New York City when Barlow visited our studio.