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With Election Day on November 3 just under a month away, Democrats enter the final stretch of the midterms with a clear structural advantage. NPR's political team reports that President Trump's approval ratings are deep underwater and voters, including in rural areas, increasingly blame him for rising prices and the fallout of his immigration crackdown. An AP–KFF poll out this week found rural voters — long Trump's firewall — split on whether the deportation campaign has helped or hurt their communities.

The closing argument from the White House has been both unorthodox and, by any normal standard, scandalous. For two weeks the Department of Homeland Security spent at least $2.5 million of a $20 million allocation airing nationally televised ads starring Trump himself — one a near-frame-for-frame copy of a 2024 campaign spot. After ethics watchdogs and members of both parties warned the campaign likely violated federal anti-propaganda law, Trump announced Monday night that his MAGA Inc. super PAC would pay for the ads going forward. Vice President JD Vance had spent the day insisting the taxpayer-funded spots were simply "public service announcements."

Trump's rhetoric on the trail has grown correspondingly unhinged. At a Nebraska rally for Republican candidates on Monday he used an anti-trans slur against Democratic Senate candidate Annie Andrews of South Carolina, and told the crowd that the possible destruction of Los Angeles or San Diego would be "a small price to pay" for the war with Iran — comments California officials condemned as monstrous. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, meanwhile, said in a new book that his deciding vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary was "the biggest regret of my career."

The midterms will decide control of both chambers of Congress and, with them, whether the second half of Trump's term faces any effective check. On present evidence, voters appear ready to deliver one.

Belgian-born physicist Francis Halzen was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for his decades-long campaign to build an observatory out of a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited his "vision and scientific leadership" in creating the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, which has transformed how astronomers see the universe.

Neutrinos are nearly massless subatomic particles — "ghost particles" that stream through planets, stars and human bodies by the trillions without leaving a trace. But very occasionally one of the highest-energy neutrinos, forged in cataclysms like supermassive black holes or exploding stars, slams into a nucleus in the Antarctic ice and produces a tiny flash of blue light. IceCube's thousands of buried optical sensors catch those flashes and reconstruct where in the sky the particle came from.

Halzen, now 82 and based at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, first laid out the idea in 1988. The experiment went live in 2010 and has since pinned neutrino emissions to specific distant galaxies, confirming for the first time that cosmic rays and neutrinos are produced in the same violent engines. Mark Pearce, chair of the Nobel physics committee, said Halzen's "tenacity and scientific vision has paved the way for a new kind of astronomy."

The prize caps a Nobel week that opened Monday with the medicine award and continues through the economics prize next Monday. For a field often associated with ever-costlier particle colliders, IceCube is a reminder that some of the most profound instruments humans have ever built are, essentially, holes drilled into ice.

After more than a year of court fights, protests from Hollywood guilds and regulatory wrangling, the merger of Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery officially closed, with the combined company — called Skydance — beginning operations this week. NPR described it as the dawn of a "new Hollywood era," and it is hard to overstate how dramatically the industry's map has been redrawn.

The deal folds CBS, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, MTV, HBO, Warner Bros. film and television, CNN, TNT and the Max and Paramount+ streaming services under a single corporate roof. David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and the force behind Skydance Media, now controls one of the two or three most powerful media companies on earth. Two of the traditional seven Hollywood majors have become one.

Critics, including unions that opposed the deal, argue that the combination will mean deep layoffs, cancelled projects, and a dangerous concentration of news and entertainment under an owner with close ties to the Trump administration. Supporters counter that the economics of streaming have made such consolidation inevitable: Netflix dwarfs any individual legacy studio, and standalone players have struggled to make the math work.

The Skydance era begins amid a broader turf war between the Trump White House and the entertainment industry — Disney's ABC is simultaneously in court fighting an FCC campaign over Jimmy Kimmel and The View. The question now is whether a bigger Paramount–Warner will be more capable of standing up to political pressure, or more vulnerable to it.

Jim Bakker, the Pentecostal preacher who turned The PTL Club into a prosperity-gospel juggernaut and then became the face of American televangelism's spectacular 1980s collapse, has died at 86. His death was announced Monday and confirmed in obituaries by NPR, the New York Times and the Associated Press.

Alongside his first wife Tammy Faye, Bakker built an empire that at its peak reached millions of households daily and spawned Heritage USA, a Christian theme-park-and-resort complex in South Carolina that drew six million visitors a year. The pitch was pure prosperity gospel: God wanted his followers to be rich, and the quickest route was to send money to the Bakkers. In 1987 the enterprise unraveled amid revelations that Bakker had paid hush money to a church secretary, Jessica Hahn, who accused him of sexual assault. Two years later he was convicted of defrauding followers out of $158 million by overselling "lifetime partnerships" at Heritage USA and sentenced to 45 years in prison, later reduced; he was released in 1994.

Bakker never left television for long. He re-emerged in the 2000s on a show broadcast from the Missouri Ozarks, now preaching apocalyptic end-times theology and hawking buckets of freeze-dried survival food to viewers. Tammy Faye, who divorced him during his imprisonment, became an unlikely gay-rights icon before her death in 2007.

Bakker's arc — from suburban Pentecostal preacher to broadcasting billionaire to federal inmate to doomsday prepper — is one of the most improbable in American religious history, and a straight line can be drawn from the PTL playbook to the fundraising-and-fear economy of today's political and religious media. Love or loathe him, he helped invent the modern form.

Lionel Messi is set to play what is widely expected to be his final home match for Argentina on Tuesday night, facing Bolivia at the Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires in a World Cup qualifier. Argentine fans have been queuing for days for a last glimpse of the 38-year-old captain in the sky-blue-and-white, five years on from the Qatar triumph that completed his career.

The New York Times' Athletic reports a strange quirk accompanying the farewell: Argentina cannot retire Messi's No. 10. FIFA rules require every national team at an official tournament to number its outfield players 1 through 23, meaning someone, eventually, will have to wear the shirt once worn by both Diego Maradona and Messi. The federation has previously tried to leave the number symbolically vacant in friendlies, but the governing body has consistently pushed back.

Whether Tuesday truly is the end is up to Messi himself; he has suggested he will decide on next summer's World Cup in North America closer to the tournament. For now, Argentine supporters are treating it as a goodbye — to a player who, after a career spent in Barcelona, Paris and Miami, finally delivered the one trophy his country craved. The No. 10 may live on by regulation. The player wearing it will not be replaced.

Governor Kathy Hochul declared a statewide measles emergency in New York on Sunday as case counts in rural upstate counties climbed to the highest level since 2019. The state has now logged 108 cases in 2026, the New York Times reported, part of a broader national resurgence of a disease the United States officially eliminated a quarter-century ago.

Measles is one of the most contagious pathogens known to medicine — a single infected person in a susceptible population will on average infect 12 to 18 others — and it is also one of the most preventable, with two doses of the MMR vaccine conferring roughly 97 percent lifetime protection. The outbreak is not a mystery: MMR coverage among US kindergartners has fallen below the 95 percent herd-immunity threshold in many states, driven by exemptions, misinformation and distrust fanned by federal health leadership. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic whose confirmation Sen. Thom Tillis this week called one of his career regrets, has repeatedly softened federal messaging on childhood immunization.

Hochul's declaration gives state and local health departments broader authority to run vaccination clinics, conduct contact tracing, and exclude unvaccinated children from schools and daycares in affected areas. Public-health officials say the single most effective thing worried parents can do is check their children's MMR status.

Measles is not a mild childhood illness. Roughly one in five unvaccinated people who catch it will be hospitalized; about one in a thousand will develop encephalitis; a smaller number will die. The current outbreak is a direct, measurable consequence of eroding vaccination rates — and it will keep growing until that trend reverses.