—Americans vote today for a new president, as well as for members of Congress, and for dozens of statewide legislative initiatives. Our election live blog here
—Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi says that starting Wednesday his government is scrapping the two largest currency denominations in circulation in order to fight corruption. More here
—German authorities have reportedly arrested five suspected ISIS members in coordinated raids across the country. One of those arrested is believed to be an ISIS recruiter. More here
—We’re live-blogging the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).
At least one person was killed and two critically wounded in a shooting that occurred near a polling station Tuesday afternoon in Azusa, California.
The suspect was later found dead after a standoff with police. He was identified as a Hispanic male. Police said the shooting was not related to the election.
We are following the ongoing situation closely and are updating a live-blog.
While the United States waits for the results of the presidential election, here are some of the other big stories from around the country and the world:
The civilian cost of the battle for Mosul: Iraqi security forces moved closer to retaking Mosul, the ISIS stronghold in northern Iraq. The operation has gone so well for Iraqi forces, Kurdish peshmerga, and the Shia Popular Mobilization Forces that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader, made an almost-frantic appeal for insurgents to stay, fight, and die. More than 10,000 civilians live in Mosul, where oil fires set by ISIS has contaminated water sources. Iraqi troops found a mass grave this week while advancing toward Mosul. —J. Weston Phippen
The muddy state of Brexit: The U.K. High Court ruled last week that the government must seek Parliament’s approval before invoking Article 50 of the EU charter to begin talks on the country’s departure from the bloc. The decision was a setback for the government, which had hoped the results of the June referendum would be enough to invoke Article 50. The government said it would appeal to the Supreme Court, but on Tuesday, Scotland—which overwhelmingly voted to stay in the EU, but will have to follow the rest of the U.K. out—said it would seek to intervene in the case. The Supreme Court will hear the government’s appeal on December 5. A ruling is expected early next year. —Krishnadev Calamur
The abuse of Boko Haram’s victims: Nigeria will deploy 100 female police officers to protect women in displaced-persons camps after a report by Human Rights Watch revealed abuses of dozens of women by Nigerian officials, according to local media. The report, released last week, documented 43 cases of rape and sexual exploitation since July in camps designated for those internally displaced by the conflict with Boko Haram throughout Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state. Damian Chukwu, the Borno state police commissioner, said the female officers “will ensure the protection of women and girls” in the camps and that male officers’ roles would be limited within the camps. —Yasmeen Serhan
The Russia-Ukraine conflict hits radio: At least 25 percent of playlists on Ukrainian radio must include Ukrainian songs, according to a new law that aims to discourage pro-Russian sentiment in the country, the BBC reported Tuesday. Right now, less than 4 percent of the songs played on radio in Ukraine is in Ukrainian. President Petro Poroshenko, who favors closer ties with the West, wrote a Facebook post Tuesday encouraging users to share their favorite Ukrainian songs. A memo explaining the change said speaking Ukrainian in public is related to “the level of separatist moods among people and their vulnerability to Russia's information attacks and manipulations.” —Marina Koren
After the Cubs won the World Series: Five million people flooded the streets of Chicago last Friday, from Wrigley Field to Grant Park, to celebrate the first World Series win for the Cubs in 108 years. That crowd estimate, which came from city officials at the Office of Emergency Management and Communications, would put that celebration as the most widely attended event in U.S. history and the seventh-largest gathering in world history. But is that number actually possible? While Cubs fans from all over the country came to celebrate the long-awaited championship, Chicago has just 2.7 million residents. The Ringer, in an article Tuesday, investigates the whopping estimate. They say it couldn’t have been that large. Cubs fans, elated from lifting the billy goat curse, likely don’t care though. —Matt Vasilogambros
Walgreens is suing lab-testing company and former business partner Theranos for $140 million for an alleged breach of contract.
That amount, The Wall Street Journal reports, is how much Walgreens originally invested in the once-lauded Silicon Valley startup before federal regulators discovered major failings in the lab-testing techniques. The civil suit was filed in a Delaware federal court. The Journal has more:
Walgreens is alleging Theranos misled it about the state of its technology when the two firms initially forged their agreement, the people familiar with the matter said.
One of the people said the action also alleges Theranos continued to mislead Walgreens, as questions about its technology and operations arose over the past year and put Walgreens and its customers at risk.
Theranos once had 40 blood-testing devices in Walgreens stores in Arizona and California before the startup’s problems were reported. Both companies had plans to expand the blood-testing operations to thousands of stores nationwide.
In October, Theranos shut down its blood-testing facilities and laid off 40 percent of its workforce. The company’s CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, was already banned by regulators from blood-testing for two years because of the scandal.
The U.K.’s royal family has issued a sharp rebuke of British media coverage of Prince Harry’s new girlfriend, criticizing the “racial undertones” of some reports.
Harry’s spokesperson said Monday that recent reporting of the prince’s new relationship with Meghan Markle, the American actress, whose father is white and mother is black, had crossed a line. The statement decried “the smear on the front page of a national newspaper; the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments.”
The Guardian reports the front-page “smear” to which the statement refers is a Sun cover from last week that bore a photo of Markle with the headline “Harry’s girl on Pornhub.” On Sunday, the Daily Mail’s Rachel Johnson addressed Markle’s background directly. “If there is issue from her alleged union with Prince Harry, the Windsors will thicken their watery, thin blue blood and Spencer pale skin and ginger hair with some rich and exotic DNA,” she wrote.
The statement also confirmed Harry’s rumored relationship with Markle, who starred in the TV show Suits.
“Prince Harry is worried about Ms. Markle’s safety and is deeply disappointed that he has not been able to protect her,” Harry’s spokesperson said. “It is not right that a few months into a relationship with him that Ms. Markle should be subjected to such a storm.”
Harry, the younger son of Prince Charles and Diana, the princess of Wales, is fifth in line to the throne.
Park Geun-hye, the South Korean leader, withdrew her nominee for prime minister Tuesday and asked parliament to choose a replacement in a move many have interpreted as an attempt to quell the political scandal that’s consuming her presidency.
Park’s decision to relinquish some of her decision-making powers to the legislature follows weeks of corruption allegations that have sent her presidency into disarray since it was revealed she received private counsel from her longtime friend Choi Soon-sil, who critics say may have wielded undue influence on state affairs. Choi was arrested last week on charges of attempted fraud and abuse of authority. Meanwhile, Park’s approval rating has plummeted to 5 percent, with many calling for her to step down.
Tens of thousands of protesters rallied in Seoul over the weekend calling for Park’s resignation. Here’s what the protests looked like:
Young and old are out to protest against #ParkGeunHye in a big turnout in #Seoul, chanting for her to resign #southkorea pic.twitter.com/gZyOfXIcmz
— Preeti Jha (@PreetiJha) November 5, 2016
Mayor Buddy Dyer says the city of Orlando will buy the Pulse nightclub, the scene of the June 12 shooting that killed 49 people, and turn it into a memorial.
Dyer said the city would keep the site as is for about 12 to 18 months while it hears from the community about the type of memorial the city should build.
It's important that our community is a part of determining the future of the Pulse site, which has significance to us all.#OrlandoUnited pic.twitter.com/exgVwSIegi
— Mayor Buddy Dyer (@orlandomayor) November 8, 2016
The Orlando Sentinel reported the city will pay the club’s owners about $2.25 million, more than the $1.65 million appraised value of the 4,500-square-foot building. The City Council, which must approve the purchase, will vote on the deal next week.
The nightclub, empty since a gunman who pledged allegiance to ISIS, opened fire during a dance party, has become a makeshift memorial to the 49 people who were killed in the shooting.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in an unscheduled address to the nation Tuesday night, announced that starting Wednesday his government was scrapping 500-rupee and 1,000-rupee notes, the two largest denominations in circulation, in order to fight corruption.
The move is perhaps the boldest move undertaken by Modi to fight widespread graft and undeclared incomes in the country of 1.2 billion people where less than 2 percent of the population pays taxes, and where cash is used for most transactions from buying bread to purchasing million-dollar apartments.
Those 500-rupee (about $7.50) and 1,000-rupee ($15.05) notes still in circulation must be deposited in banks by the end of this year, Modi announced. The Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank, will issue a new 2,000-rupee note (about $30) as well as a fresh 500-rupee note, Modi added.
Corruption is rampant in India, which is the world’s fastest-growing major economy. It ranks 76 in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. Previous attempt to clamp down on corruption and undeclared incomes—known locally as “black money”—have had limited impact.
Is nothing sacred? Toblerone has replaced its mountain-like ridges in the U.K. with wider spaces between the triangular pieces. What’s next? Some sort of new Coke?
Consumers on social media were none too pleased with Toblerone’s debut of its new, more lightweight chocolate-bar design. The overall goal is to make Toblerone weigh less, reducing its 400-gram (14.1 ounces) bars to 360 grams (12.7 ounces) and its 170-gram (6 ounces) bars to 150 grams (5.3 ounces). The company warned last month the change was coming, attributing it to “higher [ingredient] costs” and its goal of ensuring “Toblerone remains on-shelf, … affordable, and … triangular.”
But that didn’t stop users from expressing their outrage over social media. While some criticized the aesthetics of the design, others blamed the move on Brexit—which has prompted other major brands to announce they would raise their prices to match the weakening of the British pound. Toberlone’s U.S.-based product maker Mondelez International, however, told the BBC the change “wasn’t done as a result of Brexit.”
Though many Toblerone fans were vocally upset by the news, others saw the silver lining.
While everyone else is complaining about new Toberlone I'm over here like...... #Toblerone @98FM @radionova100 @RTE2fm @FM104 @rte @rtenews pic.twitter.com/VQlgqYx3a9
— Evil C (@ValentinoEvilC) November 8, 2016
The Philippines Supreme Court, ignoring petitions from leftist activists and the victims of human-rights abuses, voted 9-to-5 to give Ferdinand Marcos, the longtime U.S-backed dictator, a hero’s burial in a cemetery south of Manila.
In August, President Rodrigo Duterte, fulfilling a campaign promise, ordered Marcos to be buried at the cemetery. Those who suffered at the longtime president’s hands appealed to the Supreme Court, which sided with Duterte.
Marcos’s 1965-1986 presidency became a byword for corruption, nepotism, and abuses. He was staunchly anti-communist, making him an important U.S. ally during the Cold War when Washington was worried about Moscow’s influence in Asia. Marcos cracked down on leftist students and groups, who formed the bulk of the opposition against him. But he and his wife, Imelda Marcos, now a prominent lawmaker, were also loved by their supporters.
Marcos was deposed in 1986 in a popular uprising against his rule. He died in exile in Honolulu three years later at the age of 72. Successive Philippines government have refused to allow Marcos to be buried at the cemetery outside Manila. His body is on display in a mausoleum in Ilocos Norte, in the north of the country.
The father of an officer killed in the shootings in Dallas this July is suing Black Lives Matter (BLM), saying the group influenced the shooter with anti-police rhetoric, and that it has convinced supporters there is a “civil war between blacks and law enforcement.”
The dead officer’s father, Enrique Zamarripa, is also suing President Obama, a leader with the Nation of Islam, former Attorney General Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Deray McKesson, as well as several other leaders in the BLM movement. Zamarripa is represented by Larry Klayman, a prominent lawyer who has filed lawsuits against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her role in the attacks in Benghazi. Also listed as plaintiffs in the suit are all “U.S. police officers, Jews, and Caucasians.” More here
Iraqi troops advancing from the south toward the Islamic State-held city of Mosul on Monday stopped their march in the town of Hamam al-Alil after the smell of decomposing bodies led them to a mass grave. Investigators found nearly 100 decapitated corpses; soldiers found at least one child’s stuffed animal among the dead.
The operation to retake the ISIS stronghold is now in its fourth week, and as Iraqi security forces have made a quick advance into the city from the east, ISIS has rounded up civilians to use as humans shields. About 41,000 people have been displaced. Preventing civilian losses has been a major concern, because more than a million people live in Mosul, and ISIS has proven it is capable of atrocities when in retreat.
This mass grave in Hamam al-Alil, about 19 miles southeast of Mosul, was located on the grounds of an agricultural college. Iraqi investigators used a bulldozer to uncover the earth, and found headless corpses with rotting flesh. The UN human rights office in Geneva said it was investigating reports some of the dead were police officers executed just weeks ago. There were reports ISIS killed some 50 officers in a building outside Mosul, and the agricultural college now seems to be the building cited by these reports of the mass execution.
Hungary’s government fell two votes short of the two-thirds of Parliament needed to stop the EU’s plan to resettle migrants in the country. Prime Minister Viktor Orban needed 133 votes in the 199-member chamber; he got 131 after opposition parties boycotted the vote.
Last month, nearly 98 percent of Hungarians voted in a referendum to reject the EU-mandated quota on migrants, but the turnout was below the 50-percent threshold needed to make the results legally binding. Orban then turned to Parliament to buttress the referendum’s results, which he called a moral victory.
The EU plan to redistribute 160,000 asylum-seekers across the bloc would have resulted in 1,294 people being resettled in Hungary. Orban strongly opposed the plan, and has erected barriers to prevent migrants from entering the country.
Orban’s Fidesz party remains popular in Hungary, but Tuesday’s setback could hurt the prime minister’s negotiations with the EU on migrants.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says Scotland’s most senior law officer will apply to the U.K. Supreme Court to intervene in the U.K. government’s appeal against last week’s High Court ruling on Brexit.
The High Court ruled the U.K. government must seek parliamentary approval on invoking Article 50 of the EU charter, which would begin the formal negotiation on the country’s departure from the European Union. The U.K. voted last June 52 percent to 48 percent to leave the EU. But voters in Scotland chose overwhelmingly to remain, hence Sturgeon’s statement Tuesday on the lord advocate’s application to the Supreme Court.
"Triggering Article 50 will inevitably deprive Scottish people and Scottish businesses of rights and freedoms which they currently enjoy,” she said. “It simply cannot be right that those rights can be removed by the U.K. government on the say-so of a prime minister without parliamentary debate, scrutiny or consent.”
The United Kingdom comprises England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
German authorities reportedly arrested Tuesday five alleged ISIS members, including one described as a senior recruiter, in coordinated raids in Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia.
The senior recruiter is allegedly Ahmad Abdelazziz A., a 32-year-old Iraqi imam also known as Abu Walaa. Authorities say he and the others—a 50-year-old Turkish national, a 36-year-old German-Serb, a 27-year-old German, and a 26-year-old Cameroonian—tried to recruit young Germans into ISIS. The news was reported by WDR and NDR, the German broadcasters, and Süddeutsche newspaper. Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, adds:
Federal prosecutors had been investigating Walaa and his associates since last fall. In July, officials raided a mosque in the city of Hildesheim, which is known for being a key meeting place for the German salafist movement.
Walaa, who was colloquially known as the "preacher without a face," hosted sermons at the mosque about waging jihad in the Middle East. Security officials observed that a number of people who attended the seminars later left Germany to travel to Syria.
Authorities were reportedly aided by the testimony of a former ISIS fighter who fled the group in Syria.
Here’s some reading and viewing material on Election Day:
She’s Ready (The Atlantic)
Trump’s Last Stand (The Atlantic)
Has the Balance of Power Shifted from the Rust Belt to the Sunbelt? (The Atlantic)
Who Will Win the Presidency? (FiveThirtyEight)
Who Will Be President? (The New York Times)
Latest Polls (Real Clear Politics)
WATCH: Donald Trump and Mike Pence campaign in Manchester, New Hampshire
WATCH: Clintons and Obamas campaign in Philadelphia
Our election live blog here
Thirteen thousand miles. Infinite contenders. One beautiful loaf.
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Here is the promise you and I must cling to across the thousands of words that follow: At some point within this text, I will reveal to you what—after 555 responses, 13,000 miles of travel, and months of monomaniacal research—I have determined to be the best free restaurant bread in America. I will not attempt to slither to the moral high ground, arguing that best is a meaningless measure, or insisting that all bread is dear in its own way. Even if you attempt to betray me—for instance, by merely scanning the text that follows for the phrase Here it is: the best free restaurant bread in America—I will uphold my end of the bargain.
The president is on a losing streak, and even some of his aides are dismayed by his choices.
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You’ve heard the joke: The White House is going to start talking about the Epstein files to distract from how badly the Iran war is going.
Except that this reverse “Wag the dog” is based on bizarre truth: First Lady Melania Trump did bring the disgraced financier up, unprompted, late last week in an effort to distance herself from the scandal (in a move that, predictably, only shifted it back into the spotlight once again). Meanwhile, as negotiations with Iran stumble forward, the Strait of Hormuz is still in Tehran’s hands and now President Trump has authorized a risky naval blockade that will likely send prices soaring further. Moreover, Trump’s poll numbers have continued to fall, Republicans worry that both houses of Congress could be lost in November, and the president threw away a remarkable amount of geopolitical capital trying to support his now-defeated illiberal buddy Viktor Orbán of Hungary. Oh, and Trump deeply offended adherents of the world’s two largest religions in one week’s time.
Why reactionaries are taking over the world
Maybe you’ve seen photos of Tehran in the 1970s, just before the Islamic Revolution: images of young women going to work in miniskirts, of couples making out in parks while wearing bell-bottoms, of people at pools in bikinis. It looks like Paris or Milan or Los Angeles. But in 1979 the revolution happened, and now Tehran looks like something from an earlier century.
Sometimes I think that our whole world has become kind of like that—going backwards in time. The religious movements thriving in today’s secularized age are the traditionalist ones that dissent from large parts of contemporary culture—not only the Shiite Islam of post-revolution Iran, but Orthodox Judaism and conservative Catholicism. Young Americans are flooding into Eastern Orthodox churches.
The car industry says it has an answer for drivers wary of going electric.
Two hours into a road trip in my Tesla, I start to get twitchy. By that point, the battery in my 2019 Model 3 has dipped to an uncomfortably low percentage. If I can’t reach the next plug, I’m in trouble. This is the kind of problem that Ram’s electric pickup truck—the first of a new breed of EV to arrive in the United States—is intended to solve. When the range starts to dwindle, the truck automatically fires up a hidden gas engine that refills the giant battery. The “electric” vehicle keeps on chugging down the highway, hour after hour; pit stops are once again decided by the need for bathroom breaks rather than battery range.
The Ram 1500 REV, set to debut later this year, is what’s called an “extended-range electric vehicle,” or EREV. In essence, it is an electric vehicle that burns gas. There’s nothing revolutionary about a half-gas, half-electric car, of course. Hybrids have been a mainstay in the United States since the Toyota Prius broke through two decades ago, and automakers have released more efficient plug-in hybrids—allowing drivers to charge up for about 30 miles of electric driving, just enough to accomplish daily errands without fossil fuels. An extended-range EV is a different kind of beast. The engine burns gasoline for the sole purpose of replenishing the battery—it never actually pushes the wheels. In the Ram, the battery can run for about 150 miles of electric driving, and the whole setup delivers enough range to travel nearly 700 miles between stops.
Is the president’s son-in-law carrying out the public’s business or pursuing his own private interests?
In 2021, shortly after he left his role as a senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner let it be known that he had loved his job but disliked the scrutiny and disclosure that came with being a top U.S. government official. He set up a private-equity firm and took a $2 billion investment from a Saudi fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He proclaimed that he was embracing private life. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner said in a 2024 interview. If President Trump “calls you on November whatever and says, ‘I’d like you to come back to D.C.,’ you say, ‘Thanks, but I’m good’?” the interviewer, Dan Primack of Axios, pressed. “Yes,” Kushner responded.
But Kushner did come back. Two days before the United States and Israel attacked Iran this past February, he was in Geneva in a negotiation of the highest possible stakes. Over the weekend, he traveled with Vice President Vance to Islamabad to participate in failed peace talks with Iran. Without title or remit or any kind of official designation—only “presidential son-in-law”—Kushner has in the first 14 months of the second Trump administration sat down with world leaders including Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Volodymyr Zelensky, along with Saudis and multiple other actors from the Middle East.
A minimally speaking autistic man just wrote a best-selling book. Or did he?
On a recent morning at Rockefeller Center, NBC employees strolled through the crowd with copies of Upward Bound, the latest book-club pick from the Today show co-host Jenna Bush Hager. “It’s deeply heartfelt and moving,” Hager said, after holding up the debut novel from the 28-year-old Woody Brown, “and the reason it’s so authentic is that the author understands autism firsthand.”
That understanding is indeed profound. Brown’s autism is such that he can barely speak, and he communicates mostly by pointing to letters, one by one, on a laminated board. This is also how his novel, which is already a New York Times best seller, came to be. In the recorded interview that followed Hager’s introduction, Brown’s mother, Mary, sat beside him, holding the letter board and reading his tapped-out messages.
The president’s attempts to interfere with the midterms demand vigilance, but a recent flimsy gambit is an argument against despair.
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Anxiety among election officials and experts had been building for months before Donald Trump issued his latest executive order purporting to ensure election integrity late last month. When the actual text emerged, the reaction wasn’t relief exactly—but a definite sense that things could have been much worse.
Americans have many reasons to be worried about whether the midterm elections will be free and fair. As I laid out in a cover story last fall, the president’s plan to subvert the 2026 election is multifaceted and already in swing. But last month’s order and the dismissive reaction it’s received from experts—along with this weekend’s decisive defeat of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which shows how the competitive-authoritarian playbook that Trump has imitated can be beaten—also point to the reasons to resist doomerism.
A phonics-based curriculum is only one part of how Mississippi went from worst to first in education. The other part is much harder to pull off.
Updated at 8:52 p.m. ET on April 9, 2026
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No story has caught the imagination of education reformers this decade quite like the “Mississippi miracle.” From 1998 to 2024, fourth-grade reading and math scores in my home state—the nation’s poorest—rose from among the worst in the country to among the best. When adjusting for demographic factors such as poverty, we’re in first place.
Other states are now trying to emulate what Mississippi did. Those efforts largely revolve around adopting what’s known as the “science of reading”— a set of principles and teaching techniques, including phonics, that are grounded in decades of empirical research. Last fall, for example, the Wall Street Journal editorial board marveled that “even California is now following Mississippi’s lead by returning to phonics” as Governor Gavin Newsom prepared to sign a major new reading bill into law. But what many outsiders fail to understand is that Mississippi changed far more than just how reading is taught. They therefore miss why and how our literacy approach succeeded.
In a new report, the World Bank thinks better of its old free-market absolutism.
How does a country get rich? For decades, the economics establishment generally agreed on a simple answer: Embrace free markets and avoid “industrial policy”—state-led efforts to shape what an economy produces—at all costs. No institution embodied this viewpoint, widely known as the “Washington Consensus,” quite like the World Bank. Established in 1944 to provide low-interest loans to developing countries, the bank soon became the intellectual center of development economics. In the 1990s, it took a hard stance against industrial policy, turning the concept almost into a taboo.
But now industrial policy is back, and it has a surprising new champion: the World Bank. A report issued last month argues that the bank’s previous stance had things backward: Government intervention, when done right, can actually be an essential ingredient of economic success. Industrial policy “should be considered in the national policy toolkit of all countries,” the report concludes.
America’s insane tax-filing process
If you are anything like me, you have spent a lot of time over the past few weeks opening letters, finding receipts, requesting PDFs, scanning documents, and going through your credit-card statements line by line. It’s tax season. And in the United States, taxes are a DIY affair.
This is the case even though Washington could probably do your taxes for you. If you earn a salary or an hourly wage, the Internal Revenue Service already knows how much money you make. It likely knows how much you owe or how big your refund should be too. Nine in 10 households take the standard deduction, making their liability easy to glean from payroll and banking data.
Yet Uncle Sam demands that Americans fire up TurboTax, head to a storefront preparer, hire an accountant, or sit down with a sharp pencil and a strong cup of coffee to get their taxes done each spring. The average filer spends 13 hours on their 1040—a time tax that many of our wealthy peer countries have reduced to a couple of minutes, if that. Prepopulated documents and return-free systems are common everywhere but here. Sweden lets residents file by text. Canada prefills paperwork. Japan sends households a document summarizing their tax contributions. If everything looks copacetic, many workers get to do a blissful nothing. Denmark, Estonia, Spain, and Norway have similarly simple processes.
