Fox News Digital Sports' college football winners and losers: Week 4

Submit your questions for Jennifer Rubin’s mail bag newsletter and live chat.

The bill, sponsored by upstate Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY) and shared exclusively with The Post would distribute some federal law enforcement funding directly to localities if they have laws on the books like New York’s Clean Slate Act and loose bail laws.

Civics education is already a graduation requirement in California. The problem is a lack of accountability for teachers and students.

With 'Will & Harper,' the 'SNL' star and his friend Harper Steele face a new twist on an old challenge in LGBTQ+ representation: How to educate cis viewers without alienating trans ones.

Since its heyday, the network's viewership has plummeted. Not even the Mouse House has come up with a similarly lucrative strategy to capture Generation Alpha.

The Council of UC Faculty Associations, along with faculty associations from seven UC campuses, filed a 581-page unfair labor practice charge Thursday with California’s Public Employment Relations Board.

JD Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, used to say he deplored Donald Trump. Now they both foment hate for nonwhite people. But Usha Vance knows better.

"Wonder Woman" actress Lynda Carter snubbed her sister Pamela last weekend when she endorsed the two Democrats in the state house race for Arizona's Legislative District 4.

The coronavirus subvariant XEC is drawing more attention as a potential threat heading into late autumn and winter — prompting doctors to urge residents to get an updated COVID vaccine.

If California expects to see record voter turnout, campaigns and civic groups need to do a better job reaching out to Latinos.

Kamala Harris needs to expand her majority among Black voters to match President Biden’s winning formula from 2020.

"Universal Monsters: Eternal Bloodlines," a maze at Halloween Horror Nights, highlights villains and heroines such as Saskia Van Helsing, the Bride of Frankenstein and Countess Marya Zaleska.

The violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua trickled into the Big Apple hidden among the thousands of migrants flocking to the city. They've used the shelter system to establish a criminal foothold.

U.S. to crack down on Chinese tech in driverless and connected vehicles

A Times investigation of California's underground puppy resale market "raises serious alarms about the inhumane treatment of pets," Gov. Newsom's office said.

Calls to tone down the rhetoric about Trump ignore that he's actually done and said so many things that threaten democracy.

A judge tossed ex-Sheriff Alex Villanueva's lawsuit over a 'Do Not Rehire' designation, but his lawyers say they plan to refile.

San Diego Symphony used its pandemic closure as an opportunity to gut parts of Jacobs Music Center, built in 1929 as a movie palace. The goal: improve sound and sight lines, replace seats and otherwise entice the audience to return.

Plus, the White Sox go for a record (low).

Gov. Gavin Newsom is asking Californians to take actions in their daily lives to help combat climate change — from composting to taking public transit to avoid driving.

Members of the L.A. Times Food team weigh in on their Langer's orders — and owner Norm Langer shares some of his customers' strangest requests through the years.

Trump wants the right to fire civil servants he sees as disloyal: Cue IRS audits for Trump enemies, anti-vaxxers in the FDA, revenge prosecutions.

Jane Fonda spoke with CBS News about why she joined the fight: "This isn't just about the environment. This is about the whole planet."

UC Irvine professor Bruce Blumberg returned to campus in the spring after a university sexual harassment investigation.

The Rams were on the verge of staying winless, but Sean McVay's team never gave up hope and managed to pull off a season-saving comeback against the 49ers.

On the Money is a monthly advice column. If you want advice on spending, saving, or investing — or any of the complicated emotions that may come up as you prepare to make big financial decisions — you can submit your question on this form. Here, we answer two questions asked by Vox readers, which have been edited and condensed. I’m debating whether to pay off a personal loan with a savings account or keep the savings and keep paying the loan. I have no other debts but that personal loan of $25K. I’m 42 years old with two jobs in Hawai’i, and it’s been frustrating. My thought is to pay it off and start all over with no savings. Please help. Dear Personal Loan, I followed up with you to get some more information about your finances, including the interest rate on your loan, and here are the numbers worth considering: Personal loan interest: 5.75% Monthly minimum payment: $738 Monthly income from both jobs: $1,500 Monthly discretionary income: $200 The original balance on your 60-month loan was $35,000 when you took it out in August 2023. In a year, you’ve taken the balance down to $24,800, which you accomplished by pulling back on discretionary purchases and putting more money toward your loan. Well done, especially on a budget as tight as yours. I also learned that your savings account has $5,000 in it and that you’re considering pulling $20,000 out of your life insurance mutual fund. This would leave you with no money in your savings account and no money in your life insurance account — but you’d have no debt. Is the trade worth it?  From my perspective, you’ve successfully paid off 30 percent of your personal loan in a single year. If you stick it out for the next two or three years, you could get the personal loan paid off entirely. Yes, that means a few more years of careful budgeting and limited discretionary purchases. It also means putting more than half of your monthly income toward your debt. If you took the other option — paying off the loan with savings and life insurance — your first priority after paying off your personal loan would be to replenish your savings account. If you save every penny that would have gone toward personal loan payments, you should have the $5,000 taken care of in about six months.  The trouble is that you won’t have much of an emergency fund if something should happen to you in those six months. Your budget doesn’t give you much extra cash at the end of the month, and the last thing you want to do is turn an unexpected expense into unexpected debt. Yes, there are scenarios in which a family member could help out, or you could get a 0 percent APR credit card to cover the cost and pay it off before the regular interest rate kicks in. That said, I’d avoid dipping into your savings to pay your loan if at all possible. The life insurance, on the other hand, has possibilities. If you have a permanent life policy that allows you to withdraw the cash value without any penalty, there’s an argument to be made for paying down $20,000 of your debt right away and paying off the remainder of your personal loan out of your carefully budgeted income. You’d save a lot of money in interest that way, and you’d get to keep your $5,000 emergency fund. Which means the real question is whether you need the money in your life insurance policy. Do you have dependents who could benefit from the $20,000 if something were to happen to you? The budget you showed me didn’t appear to include expenses related to a partner or children, but I don’t want to assume. The other question is why you took out the personal loan in the first place. The answer may be personal, but it’s worth considering. In 2023, you borrowed $30,000, and I’d hate to see you find yourself in a situation where you needed to take out another five-figure loan a year from now. That’s why I’d still recommend paying off the loan the way you’ve been doing. At 5.75 percent APR and $800 in monthly payments, you’ll clear out your debt in two years and 10 months. It’ll cost you $2,112.11 in interest, which may seem like more than you want to pay, but during that time your $5,000 in savings could accumulate as much as $625 in interest (if you have a high-yield savings account with 4.25 percent APY, for example) and your life insurance mutual fund might be earning a 6 percent return.   You get to decide what’s best for you, but at least you understand your options. Read more from On the Money Should you combine finances with your partner? How to cope with inflation and lifestyle creep How are you supposed to start investing? Do you have questions related to personal finance? Submit them here. Is it prudent to have a variety of mutual funds, like a work-provided 401(k)/403(b) and a personal IRA, as well as one or two additional investment accounts? Or is it more efficient to have just one account like the work-provided 403(b)? Dear Prudent, Employer-sponsored retirement plans are great. I always recommend signing up for them, especially if you get a company match. These plans allow you to save pre-tax dollars, which allows you to put more of your earnings directly into your retirement fund while simultaneously reducing your tax burden. Yes, you will pay taxes on your withdrawals later on, but many people are in a lower tax bracket by then. More importantly, many employers automatically match your 401(k) or 403(b) contributions up to a certain percentage. As the financial advisers like to say, that’s “free money.”  That said, these kinds of investment accounts are not at all what you’d consider “efficient.” 401(k) accounts, which are designed to help private-sector employees save for their own retirements, and 403(b) accounts, which are often available to nonprofit employees, teachers, and people who work for the government, can help you set aside money for the future — but in many cases, the types of investments you can make through employer-sponsored accounts are relatively limited. Not only are you tied to the investment provider associated with your employer’s plan, but you may only get to choose from a small number of investment options. If I recall correctly, I didn’t even get to pick my investments the last time I had a 403(b). The onboarding program asked me to select my risk level — low, medium, or high — and then created a portfolio for me.   Which is all fine and good, and I still recommend signing up for these kinds of things, but the odds are that you’re going to be invested in funds that may offer lower returns and higher expense ratios than what you might get if you opened your own IRA and created your own portfolio after comparing the options available at various top brokerages. You can’t do anything about returns, of course — not even if you choose the extremely popular total-market funds that people tend to recommend on investing forums — but you can do something about expense ratios. Basically, investment providers determine in advance how much it’s going to cost you for them to manage the fund; they provide that number in the form of an expense ratio, and you can compare expense ratios before you make investments. Lower expense ratios are generally better, since you get to keep more of the money you invest.  However, employer-sponsored retirement plan providers don’t really have an incentive to keep expense ratios low because they know you don’t have any other choice. If your employer’s 403(b) is with a certain provider, you can’t just switch your 403(b) investments to a different provider, so you’re stuck paying whatever the provider decides to charge. This isn’t to suggest that investing in an employer-sponsored account is a waste of money. Employer-sponsored accounts are great, especially for people who might not otherwise be incentivized to save for retirement. It’s just to hint that putting everything into the employer-sponsored retirement account may not be the most efficient use of your money. I can’t give you investment advice because I’m not an investment adviser, but I can suggest that you contribute as much as is required into your 403(b) to get the tax break and the company match, and put the rest of your retirement savings into an IRA that you can control. Traditional IRAs allow you to contribute pre-tax dollars and reduce your taxable income during your prime earning years, and Roth IRAs allow you to contribute post-tax dollars and withdraw your contributions (but not your returns) ahead of schedule if you need to. Since IRAs max out at a certain dollar amount per year, you may also want to consider opening a brokerage account that isn’t necessarily tied to retirement and continue your investing journey that way. It’ll take a little extra time to compare all of the possibilities and make the best choices for your financial situation, but it could be worth it.

Ryan Routh is expected to appear in federal court for a detention hearing. Authorities say he pointed a rifle through a fence at Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach.

The cryptocurrency industry is pouring money into the Ohio Senate race to support Bernie Moreno against Sherrod Brown.

One WNBA MVP voter selected Angel Reese for fourth place during the 2024 season, and it miffed social media on Sunday as the award winner was announced.

Test your wits on the Slate Quiz for Sept. 23, 2024.

As Travis Kelce struggled to get involved in the Kansas City Chiefs' offense on Sunday against the Atlanta Falcons, Taylor Swift fans were worried.

The strikes come as the Israeli army issued evacuation orders, the first of its kind in nearly a year of a steadily escalating conflict.

Israel has launched a new wave of airstrikes targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon, with residents in some areas being warned to evacuate.

Ready for some wordplay? Sharpen your skills with Slate’s puzzle for Sept. 23, 2024.

It's my money!

A Tennessee woman will spend more than eight years behind bars after attempting to hire an online hitman to kill the wife of a man she met on the dating website Match.com.

Teachers say it only takes one parental complaint for school administrators to get nervous.

KTVU FOX 2 San Francisco YouTubeA 6-year-old California boy who was kidnapped from an Oakland park by a woman offering to buy him candy has been found more than 70 years later.Luis Armando Albino, who was abducted on Feb. 21, 1951, is now a retired grandfather and Vietnam veteran. He was reunited with his family in June thanks to the persistence of his now 63-year-old niece Alida Alequin—who found her uncle on the East Coast after using an online DNA test, old newspaper records, and family photos, The Mercury News reported.Alequin’s first tip was the result of the online DNA test in 2020, which revealed her uncle as a 22 percent match—not enough to be sure, but enough to investigate. Her initial attempts to contact him did not receive a reply.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Omar Marques/Getty ImagesEven among the most unhinged X users, few can boast of having had an online meltdown on such an interplanetary scale.But on Sunday, Elon Musk took to his own social media platform to post an unusually lengthy commentary on how SpaceX’s flagship Mars program is being “smothered by a mountain of government bureaucracy” under the Biden administration. It’s that red tape, he maintains, that threatens to scupper his ambitions of one day colonizing the Red Planet.Read more at The Daily Beast.

I’ve fine-tuned the art of keeping in touch as people come and go.

A lot of us are lonely. Slate's Advice Week can help.

Jackson’s representatives denied an apology purported to be made on her behalf after she echoed misinformation about Harris’ race.

Plus: healthy snacks, friendship necklaces, and the beauty of phones.

A hearing on Monday in the state’s Supreme Court could determine whether Marcellus Williams is executed on Tuesday for a 1998 murder conviction.

The Mark Robinson story is yet another case of self-declared morality being at variance with actual behavior.

In a shift from a Times/Siena survey last month, he leads in three Sun Belt battleground states.

A ballot measure codifying “the fundamental right to an abortion” is supported by 58 percent of the state’s likely voters, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.

Finland’s president and NATO’s departing secretary general are urging Mr. Biden to allow Ukraine to use weapons to hit bases deeper inside Russia.