Man impersonating as officer forces way into Orlando hotel room, robs woman at gunpoint: police

Mitzi Gaynor, the effervescent dancer and actor who starred as Nellie Forbush in the 1958 film “South Pacific” and appeared in other musicals with Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, has died. She was 93.

The Dodgers really don't want the NLCS to go any longer than it has to, so it makes sense for Game 1 star Jack Flaherty to start Game 5 against the Mets.

Super PACs funded by the cryptocurrency industry have spent more than $130 million in one of the largest — and least obvious — efforts to influence the 2024 race.

The idea that criminal activity is in one's genes has been largely discredited. But it thrived under Hitler and the Nazis whose courts sent lawbreakers to concentration camps or sentenced them to death.

The Rams made the playoffs last season after a 3-6 start, so they know it can be done despite a 1-4 start and the Raiders up next, but 1-5 teams rarely make the playoffs.

The Biden administration calls government data showing a significant drop in overdose drug deaths “a major, major change.”

I moved to the U.K. because American problems like gun violence and healthcare access seemed intractable. Turns out the problems still matter to me, wherever I live.

A proposal championed by Vice President Kamala Harris would remove unpaid medical bills from credit reports. Debt collectors and banks object.

Families of people killed by Vallejo police officers have asked the California Commission on Police Officer Standards and Training to investigate whether to take their badges away.

The $1-million donation by the Prop. 36 campaign to the California GOP obliterates any claim of bipartisanship behind the "tough on crime" measure.

Everything you need to know about the Rams facing the Las Vegas Raiders at SoFi Stadium on Sunday, including start time, TV channel and betting odds.

The actor is every bit as family-oriented as her "Modern Family" character, Claire Dunphy. An ideal day includes antiquing, pickleball and time outdoors with her kids near Laurel Canyon.

Soaring housing and stock prices make it look like younger Americans are finally getting ahead financially. But could it all be a mirage?

The busiest NCAA running back at Troy sat out his first four games with the Chargers, but rookie Kimani Vidal made an impact in first NFL touch and game.

At a 3,200-acre facility in rural Virginia, the zoo harvests over 13,000 bamboo stalks a year. The process is ramping up for the new pandas, Bao Li and Qing Bao.

The decision by Phillips 66 this week to shutter its refinery in Wilmington next year will wipe out more than 8% of the state's crude oil processing capacity.

A reader complains about media coverage that focuses on petty conflict instead of Kamala Harris' policies and accomplishments.

Those who worked with Kamala Harris when she was San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general say her approach to being a prosecutor was nuanced and defies labels.

More than 2,000 unionized psychologists, therapists and other mental health professionals at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California plan to launch an indefinite strike Monday amid complaints that the massive system has failed to address problems with how it provides mental health care.

The rapper and artist is redefining the beauty standards that she grew up with.

The aggregate data about Native identity is baffling. The real answers are found in conversations with individuals.

As my colleague and I entered the security lanes armed with UN-issued VIP passes and accompanied by a U.N. intern, I was stopped as I sent my purse through the X-ray machine.

A carne asada surprise, McDonald's plant-based nuggets and a new NASA probe are just a few of the topics to test your recall in this week's News Quiz.

Los Angeles police said the victims were homeless people caught in the crossfire of a gang shootout, and that two suspects had already been arrested for allegedly participating in a flash mob-style robbery.

Hackers struck the Internet Archive, leaking millions of users’s data and causing founder Brewster Kahle to take a sprawling library of online history offline.

Progress has been made on pretrial release in Los Angeles, but too many inmates are in local jails simply because they cannot afford bail.

Pamela Ferreyra, 60, of Monterey County was arrested Thursday in the 1994 death of an infant in Las Lomas, Calif., authorities said.

Measure TC on the Torrance ballot asks voters to approve a full-time salary for the mayor and City Council members, who are paid a small stipend.

Within three hours of L.A., there are locales to satisfy every type of autumn yearning, whether it’s for the desert, beach or mountains.

At least three beachgoers were swept into the ocean by strong waves on Oahu’s North Shore this week, leaving an Oklahoma woman and California man dead.

Since 2003 the California Department of Health Services has paid a vendor $96 million to oversee the release of 56 sexually violent predators — an average cost of about $1.6 million per predator, according to a recently released audit.

The Dodgers enter Game 5 with Mookie Betts finally playing like Mookie Betts again. But in order for him to break out of his funk, Shohei Ohtani needed to break out of his.

The Salton Sea exists because floodwaters breached a Colorado River canal in 1905. Understanding that is crucial in efforts to save the drying lake.

Crime has become a key issue in the race between Republican Scott Baugh and Democratic Sen. Dave Min. The 47th Congressional District, which includes Irvine, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Laguna Beach and Huntington Beach, is one of several close races that could determine control of Congress.

Another potential conflict of interest between Hogan’s authority over housing funds and family real estate business

Montgomery County officials want to allow denser housing in single-family zones. Opponents call it a “betrayal.” Both sides say they’re the true progressives.

To support The Atlantic’s journalism, please consider subscribing today.Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”[Peter Wehner: Have you listened lately to what Trump is saying?]Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.”This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots, so that Cambodia would be “purified.”In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal part of American presidential politics. Even George Wallace’s notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963 speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided such language. Wallace called for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But he did not speak of his political opponents as “vermin” or talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps following the outbreak of World War II, spoke of “alien enemies” but not parasites.[Read: Trump isn’t bluffing]In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right.These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics. Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not.

As companies fall short on methane emission reductions, a top trade group has crafted a road map for dismantling key rules.

The Maine State Police announced that an independent review of the Lewiston mass shooting after-action report was completed by the New England State Police Administrators Conference.

Ready for some wordplay? Sharpen your skills with Slate’s puzzle for Oct. 18, 2024.

Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder fielded several questions from reporters on Thursday.

It’s a cautionary tale for both artists and fans.

Take a (comfy) step in the right direction!

"In my heart of hearts, I feel that I'm doing the right thing—but then why does doing the right thing come with such a heavy price?"

Biden, who dropped out of the race in July in favor of Harris, is due before lunch to hold closed-door talks with Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the late morning on security, trade and other economic issues.

State election officials in political battleground states say they are bracing for the unpredictable and emergent threat posed by artificial intelligence, or AI.

Police in the Philippines say they've launched a search after gunmen reportedly abducted an American national who was shot in the leg as he tried to resist.

Celebrity chef Robert Irvine shared no-nonsense ways to buy, prepare and eat healthy foods at home — and why it's important to make time for meal prep on weekends no matter what.