Brunette Ellen DeGeneres nearly unrecognizable at UK pub alongside Portia de Rossi after fleeing the US post-election

A rival sued the Georgia sheriff for allegedly removing comments criticizing him for calling deputies to a Burger King that botched his order.

The best cleaning method depends on whether the stains are from algae or mildew, or from asphalt residue from the roof shingles.

The only emperor penguin known to have swum from Antarctica to Australia was released at sea 20 days after he waddled ashore on a popular tourist beach.

I met my dream guy at a climbing gym and tried hard to get his attention. I eventually told him that I was into him. His response? 'It’s weird you have so many guy friends.'

The COP29 climate summit ending Friday was dispiriting in many respects, as is the broader picture. But there's hope and good reason to persist in this effort.

With a new label and a new album on the way, D.C. rapper Wale returned home to celebrate what he’s done so far.

The Giants’ future at quarterback is uncertain, but Malik Nabers’ wishes are crystal clear.

Actress Cynthia Erivo didn’t just become Elphaba in “Wicked.” She already knew her.

Francis, a 6-foot-2 guard from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., averaged 5.5 points on 42.4 percent shooting spanning six games this season for the Rams.

Columbia hasn’t won an Ivy League title since 1961. That could change this weekend.

AAA is predicting a record number of travelers on the roads and in the skies over the holiday week.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says "the Trump-Vance transition team has not yet entered into the agreements with the White House and the General Service Administration."

McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown is trying to keep things in perspective ahead of a crucial race weekend in Las Vegas while maintaining the constructors' lead.

The Lakers miss crucial free throws down the stretch and watch their six-game winning streak get ended by Orlando.

The 'Wicked' movie expands on the lore surrounding the mysterious book of enchantments known as the Grimmerie.

Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks has called a Democrat-backed recount of her 2024 House race a waste of taxpayer money while she leads Christina Bohannan by fewer than 1,000 votes.

Sen. Mitch McConnell announced that he will chair the Senate Rules Committee as well as the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense during the 119th Congress.

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A potent winter storm system over the Northeast is bringing snow, beneficial rain and strong winds as millions of people prepare to travel ahead of the busy Thanksgiving holiday.

Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Bob Casey conceded the race to Republican Dave McCormick more than two weeks after Election Day.

Georgia's top health official dismissed all members of a state committee that investigates pregnancy-related maternal deaths after the leak, presumably by a committee member, of information about two such deaths.

The 30-year-old's family filed a missing persons report the next day -- but say they hadn't heard anything from officials until they formed a rally in the streets of LA on Thursday.

Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver George Pickens had to be held back by stadium security after getting tangled up with a Browns player on the final play of Thursday's game.

D'Anton Lynn has improved USC's defense in his first year with the Trojans, but his successor at UCLA also has had success ahead of their rivalry game.

The estranged couple tied the knot in June 2022 and welcomed a baby boy the following year. Rotten has filed for divorce multiple times.

The Cleveland Browns, with blizzard conditions swirling all around their home stadium, upset the Pittsburgh Steelers behind Nick Chubb's two-touchdown night, including the game-winner.

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Common Sense Media also reviews “Dune: Prophecy” and “Spellbound.”

LAFC was forced to make changes to its roster during the offseason, but that didn't stop them from putting together another championship-caliber squad.

The match between the two rival New York soccer clubs comes with a chance to advance to the Eastern Conference Final in the MLS playoffs.

Once she became the nominee, I expected Vice President Kamala Harris to win the 2024 presidential election.More exactly, I expected ex-President Donald Trump to lose.What did I get wrong?My expectation was based on three observations and one belief.Observation one: Inflation was coming under control in 2024. Personal incomes rose faster than prices over the year. As interest rates peaked and began to subside, consumer confidence climbed. When asked about their personal finances, Americans expressed qualms, yes, but the number who rated their personal finances as excellent or good was a solid 46 percent, higher than in the year President Barack Obama won reelection. The same voters who complained about the national economy rated their local economy much more favorably.None of this was great news for the incumbent party, and yet …Observation two: All through the 2024 cycle, a majority of Americans expressed an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Almost one-third of Republicans were either unenthusiastic about his candidacy or outright hostile. Harris was not hugely popular, either. But if the polls were correct, she was just sufficiently less unpopular than Trump.Arguably undergirding Harris’s popularity advantage was … Observation three: In the 2022 midterm elections, abortion proved a powerful anti-Republican voting issue. That year in Michigan, a campaign based on abortion rights helped reelect Governor Gretchen Whitmer and flipped both chambers of the state legislature to the Democrats. That same year, almost a million Kansans voted 59 percent to 41 percent to reaffirm state-constitutional protections for abortion. Democrats posted strong results in many other states as well. They recovered a majority in the U.S. Senate, while Republicans won only the narrowest majority in the House of Representatives. In 2024, abortion-rights measures appeared on the ballot in 10 states, including must-win Arizona and Nevada. These initiatives seemed likely to energize many Americans who would likely also cast an anti-Trump vote for president.If that was not enough—and maybe it was not—I held onto this belief:Human beings are good at seeing through frauds. Not perfectly good at it. Not always as fast as might be. And not everybody. But a just-sufficient number of us, sooner or later, spot the con.The Trump campaign was trafficking in frauds. Haitians are eating cats and dogs. Foreigners will pay for the tariffs. The Trump years were the good old days if you just forget about the coronavirus pandemic and the crime wave that happened on his watch. The lying might work up to a point. I believed that the point would be found just on the right side of the line between election and defeat—and not, as happened instead, on the other side.My mistake.[Read: Donald Trump’s most dangerous cabinet pick]In one of the closest elections in modern American history, Trump eked out the first Republican popular-vote victory in 20 years. His margin was about a third the size of President Joe Biden’s margin over him in 2020. For that matter, on the votes counted, Trump’s popular-vote margin over Harris was smaller than Hillary Clinton’s over him in 2016.Yet narrow as it is, a win it is—and a much different win from 2016. That time, Trump won by the rules, but against the expressed preference of the American people. This time, he won both by the rules and with a plurality of the votes. Trump’s popular win challenges many beliefs and preconceptions, starting with my own.Through the first Trump administration, critics like me could reassure ourselves that his presidency was some kind of aberration. The repudiation of Trump’s party in the elections of 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022 appeared to confirm this comforting assessment. The 2024 outcome upends it. Trump is no detour or deviation, no glitch or goof.When future generations of Americans tell the story of the nation, they will have to fit Trump into the main line of the story. And that means the story itself must be rethought.Trump diverted millions of public dollars to his own businesses, and was returned to office anyway.He was proved in court to have committed sexual assault, and was returned to office anyway.He was twice impeached, and was returned to office anyway.He was convicted of felonies, and was returned to office anyway.He tried to overthrow an election, and was returned to office anyway.For millions of Americans, this record was disqualifying. For slightly more Americans, however, it was not. The latter group prevailed, and the United States will be a different country because of them.American politics has never lacked for scoundrels, cheats, and outright criminals. But their numbers have been thinned, and their misdeeds policed, by strong public institutions. Trump waged a relentless campaign against any and all rules that restrained him. He did not always prevail, but he did score three all-important successes. First, he frightened the Biden administration’s Justice Department away from holding him to account in courts of law in any timely way. Second, he persuaded the courts themselves—including, ultimately, the Supreme Court—to invent new doctrines of presidential immunity to shield him. Third, he broke all internal resistance within the Republican Party to his lawless actions. Republican officeholders, donors, and influencers who had once decried the January 6 attempted coup as utterly and permanently debarring—one by one, Trump brought them to heel.Americans who cherished constitutional democracy were left to rely on the outcome of the 2024 election to protect their institutions against Trump. It was not enough. Elections are always about many different issues—first and foremost usually, economic well-being. In comparison, the health of U.S. democracy will always seem remote and abstract to most voters.[Read: Trump’s first defeat]Early in the American Revolution, a young Alexander Hamilton wrote to his friend John Jay to condemn an act of vigilante violence against the publisher of a pro-British newspaper. Hamilton sympathized with the feelings of the vigilantes, but even in revolutionary times, he insisted, feelings must be guided by rules. Otherwise, people are left to their own impulses, a formula for trouble. “It is not safe,” Hamilton warned, “to trust to the virtue of any people.”The outcome of an election must be respected, but its wisdom can be questioned. If any divine entity orders human affairs, it may be that providence sent Trump to the United States to teach Americans humility. It Can’t Happen Here is the title of a famous 1930s novel about an imagined future in which the United States follows the path to authoritarianism. Because it didn’t happen then, many Americans have taken for granted that it could not happen now.Perhaps Americans require, every once in a while, to be jolted out of the complacency learned from their mostly fortunate history. The nation that ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 was, in important ways, the same one that enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850; the nation that generously sent Marshall Plan aid after the Second World War was compensating for the myopic selfishness of the Neutrality Acts before the war. Americans can take pride in their national story because they have chosen rightly more often than they have chosen wrongly—but the wrong choices are part of the story too, and the wrong choice has been made again now.“There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause,” T. S. Eliot observed in a 1927 essay (here he was writing about the arguments between philosophical Utilitarians and their critics, but his words apply so much more generally). “We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”So the ancient struggle resumes again: progress against reaction, dignity against domination, commerce against predation, stewardship against spoliation, global responsibility against national chauvinism. No quitting.

“Get What’s Yours for Medicare” by Philip Moeller is impotant reading for Medicare enrollees and this month’s Color of Money Book Club selection.

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The Israeli leader blasted the arrest warrant as being driven "by biased judges driven by antisemitic hatred toward Israel.'

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Commuters step out in a foggy winter morning amid rising air pollution, on November 19, 2024 on the outskirts of Delhi in India. India and Pakistan are losing ground to a common deadly enemy. Vast clouds of dense, toxic smog have once again shrouded metropolises in South Asia. Air pollution regularly spikes in November in the subcontinent, but this year’s dirty air has still been breathtaking in its scale and severity. The gray, smoky pollution is even visible to satellites, and it’s fueling a public health crisis. Last week, officials in the Punjab province in Pakistan imposed lockdowns on the cities of Multan, population 2.1 million, and Lahore, population 13.7 million, after reaching record-high pollution levels. “Smog is currently a national disaster,” senior Punjab provincial minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said during a press conference last week. Schools shut down, restaurants closed, construction halted, highways sat empty, and medical staff were recalled to hospitals and clinics.  Across the border in India, the 33 million residents of Delhi this week are breathing air pollution that’s 50 times higher than the safe limit outlined by the World Health Organization (WHO). The choking haze caused 15 aircraft to divert to nearby airports and caused hundreds of delays. Students and workers were told to stay home. Despite all the disruption, air pollution continues to spike year after year after year.  Why? The dirty air arises from a confluence of human and natural factors. Construction, cooking fires, brick kilns, vehicles, and burning leftovers from crop harvests are all feeding into the toxic clouds. The Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountains to the north of lower-lying areas like Lahore and Delhi hold the smog in place. In the winter, the region experiences thermal inversions, where a layer of warm air pushes down on cool winter air, holding the pollution closer to the ground. As populations grow in South Asia, so will the need for food, energy, housing, and transportation. Without a course correction, that will mean even more pollution. Yet history shows that air pollution is a solvable problem. Cities like Los Angeles and Beijing that were once notorious for dirty air have managed to clean it up. The process took years, drawing on economic development and new technologies. But it also required good governance and incentives to cut pollution, something local officials in India and Pakistan have already demonstrated can clear the air. The task now is to scale it up to higher levels of government.   We’re still not getting the full picture of the dangers of air pollution There’s no shortage of science showing how terrible air pollution is for you. It aggravates asthma, worsens heart disease, triggers inflammation, and increases infection risk. It hampers brain development in children and can contribute to dementia in adults. On average, air pollution has reduced life expectancies around the world by 2.3 years, more than tobacco. It contributes to almost 7 million deaths per year, according to WHO, about one in nine deaths annually. It sucks trillions of dollars out of the global economy.  The toll is especially acute in South Asia. Air pollution drains 3.9 years of life in Pakistan. In India, it steals 5.3 years. For workers who spend their days outdoors — delivery drivers, construction crews, farm laborers — the damage is even higher. Many residents report constant fevers, coughs, and headaches.  Despite the well-known dangers and the mounting threat, it remains a persistent problem.  Part of the challenge of improving air quality is that air pollution isn’t just one thing; it’s a combination of hazardous chemicals and particles that arise in teeming metropolises in developing countries.  One of the most popular metrics around the world for tracking pollution is the Air Quality Index, developed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The index is not a measurement of any one pollutant, but rather the risk from a combination of pollutants based on US air quality standards. The main villains are ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particles. The particles are subcategorized into those smaller than 10 microns (PM10) and smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5). (Earlier this year, the EPA modified the way it calculates the AQI, so numbers from this year are not an apples-to-apples comparison to levels from previous years.) The tiny particles are pernicious because they penetrate deep into the lungs and trigger breathing problems. An AQI below 50 is considered safe to breathe. Above 200, the air is considered a health threat for everyone. At 300, it’s an emergency. In Delhi, the AQI this week reached 1,185. Lahore reached 1,900 this month. If a person breathes this air for over 24 hours, the exposure is roughly equivalent to smoking 90 cigarettes in a day.  However, air pollution poses a threat long before it’s visible. “Your eye is not a good detector of air pollution in general,” said Christi Chester Schroeder, the air quality science manager at IQAir, a company that builds air quality monitoring instruments and collects pollution data. “The pollutant that you have to be really careful about in terms of not being able to see it but experiencing it is ozone. Ozone levels can be extremely high on sunny days.” IQAir has a network of air quality sensors across South Asia, including regions like Lahore and Delhi. The company tracks pollution in real time using its own sensors as well as monitors bought by schools, businesses, and ordinary people. Their professional-grade air monitors can cost more than $20,000 but they also sell consumer air quality trackers that cost $300. Both sources help paint a picture of pollution.  Many schools and businesses across South Asia have installed their own pollution monitors. The US maintains its own air quality instruments at its consulates and embassies in India and Pakistan as well.  Happy Air Quality Week! Did you know that U.S. Consulate Lahore has an air quality monitor? Follow us on Twitter @Lahore_Air for hourly AQI readings! pic.twitter.com/nRAKAPbOph— U.S. Consulate General Lahore (@USCGLahore) May 4, 2023 Schroeder noted however that IQAir’s instruments are geared toward monitoring particles like PM2.5 and don’t easily allow a user to make inferences about concentrations of other pollutants like sulfur oxides and where they’re coming from. “When you’re looking at places that have a really big mixture of sources — like you have a mixture of transportation and fires and climate inversion conditions — then it gets to be much murkier and you can’t really sort of pull it apart that way,” Schroeder said. Politics lies at the core of the air pollution problem Air quality monitors in India and Pakistan show that air pollution can vary over short distances — between neighborhoods or even street by street — and that it can change rapidly through the day. Nearby bus terminals, power plants, or cooking fires contribute a lot to local pollution, but without tracking systems in the vicinity, it can be hard to realize how bad the situation has become. “I think the most surprising, interesting, and scary thing, honestly, is seeing the levels of pollution in areas that haven’t been monitored before,” Schroeder said.  Another complication is that people also experience pollution far away from where it’s produced. “This automatically creates a big governance challenge because the administrator who is responsible for providing you clean air in your jurisdiction is not actually the administrator who is governing over the polluting action,” said Saad Gulzar, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.  Take crop stubble burning, which accounts for up to 60 percent of the air pollution in the region this time of year. In late fall, farmers in northern India and Pakistan harvest rice and plant wheat. With little time between the reaping and sowing, the fastest and cheapest way for many farmers to clear their fields of leftover stems, leaves, and roots is to burn it. The resulting smoke then wafts from rural areas into urban centers. The challenge is that farmers and urbanites are different political constituencies, and it’s hard to demand concessions from the former to benefit the latter. It has led to bitter political fights in both countries and between them. Farmers also point out that the reason they have so little time between crops is because of water conservation laws: To cope with groundwater depletion, officials in India imposed regulations to limit rice planting until after monsoon rains arrive in the early summer to top up reservoirs. Delaying planting means delaying harvest, hence the rush to clear their fields.  Both India and Pakistan have even gone as far as to arrest farmers who burn crop stubble, but there are millions of farmers spread out over a vast area, stretching enforcement thin. However, local efforts to control smoke from crop burning have proven effective when local officials are motivated to act.   Gulzar co-authored a study published in October in the journal Nature, looking at air pollution and its impacts across India and Pakistan. Examining satellite data and health records over the past decade, the paper found that who is in charge of a jurisdiction plays a key role in air pollution — and could also be the key to solving it.  When a district is likely to experience pollution from a fire within its own boundaries, bureaucrats and local officials take more aggressive action to mitigate it, whether that’s paying farmers not to burn stubble, providing them with tools to clear fields without fires, or threatening them with fines and arrest. That led fires within a district to drop by 14.5 percent and future burning to decline by 13 percent. These air pollution reductions led to measurable drops in childhood mortality. On the other hand, if the wind is poised to push pollution from crop burning over an adjacent district, fires increase by 15 percent.  The results show that simply motivating officials to act at local, regional, and national levels is a key step in reducing air pollution and that progress can begin right away.  But further air quality improvements will require a transition toward cleaner energy. Besides crop burning, the other major source of air pollution across India and Pakistan is fossil fuel combustion, whether that’s coal in furnaces, gas in factories, or diesel in trucks. These fuels also contribute to climate change, which is already contributing to devastating heat waves and flooding from torrential monsoons in the region. Both countries have made major investments in renewable energy, but they are also poised to burn more coal to feed their growing economies.  At the COP29 climate change conference this week in Baku, Azerbaijan, India is asking wealthier nations to contribute more money to finance clean energy within its borders and to share technologies that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance air quality.  Solving the air pollution crisis in India and Pakistan will take years, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. But there are lifesaving measures both countries can take now.

The Army star quarterback will stand under the lights of Yankee Stadium on Saturday night, in prime time on NBC, leading the No. 19 Black Knights (9-0) into their biggest non-Navy matchup in 66 years, against No. 6 Notre Dame (9-1).

Dear Abby gives advice to a mother on what to do after her son was gifted a new bicycle after his previous one got destroyed after he was involved in an accident.