The Clinton and Trump campaigns make their final pitches to voters, thousands of South Koreans protested against their president, and more from the United States and around the world.
—The 2016 presidential election is just two days away. Follow the news with our politics team here. The latest development: Donald Trump was temporarily rushed off stage at a campaign rally in Nevada Saturday night after fighting allegedly broke out in the crowd.
—Tens of thousands of South Koreans participated in protests this weekend demanding the resignation of President Park Geun-hye over a corruption scandal.
—U.S.-backed Iraqi forces continued their drive into the ISIS-held city of Mosul in Iraq, while U.S.-backed Syrian forces say they will begin an offensive to retake Raqqa, the terrorist group’s stronghold in Syria.
—We’re live-blogging the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).
Yemeni Rebels Release Detained Ex-Marine After More Than a Year
Houthi supporters at a rally in Sanaa, Yemen, on October 26, 2016 (Khaled Abdullah / Reuters)
An American held in Yemen for more than a year has been released and flown to Oman following diplomatic negotiations, and is expected to return to the United States.
The man was taken from Sanaa, Yemen's capital, to Oman, The New York Timesreported Sunday. U.S. State Secretary John Kerry was involved in the talks that led to his release.
The Times identified the man as Wallead Yusuf Pitts Luqman, a 37-year-old former Marine who was abducted in April 2015 as he tried to leave Yemen, where he had taught English for two years. Luqman was held by the Houthis, the Shiite rebel group that has controlled Sanaa since 2014 and which a Saudi-led coalition has been trying to dislodge with air strikes since March. Oman has claimed neutrality in the conflict, which has killed more than 10,000 people, according to the latest United Nations estimates.
Oman has been instrumental in facilitating the return of some Americans held by the Houthis during the conflict. In September 2015, two men who were held for six months were sent to Oman and then transported back to the U.S.
Fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces walk with their weapons in an area north of Raqqa, Syria, on November 6, 2016. (Rodi Said / Reuters)
Syrian forces said Sunday they have begun a military operation to capture Raqqa, the self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State in Syria.
The Syria Democratic Forces, a coalition of Kurdish and Arab militias backed by the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, made the announcement at a press conference in Ain Issa, about 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, away from Raqqa, the BBC reported. The force, formed in early 2015, has made gains in areas north of Raqqa.
In Iraq, U.S.-backed Iraqi forces continued their offensive against ISIS fighters in Mosul, which has been under the terrorist group’s control since June 2014. The military campaign consists of about 100,000 troops from government security forces and Shiite and Kurdish militias, according to Reuters. ISIS fighters have fought back by targeting troops with car bombs and ambushes.
The simultaneous attacks could help decrease the number of safe havens for ISIS fighters. But the fight for Raqqa could prove more difficult than the one for Mosul, explained Sarah El Deeb in the AP last month:
Perhaps that’s because Syria is proving to be a more daunting terrain than Iraq. Going after ISIS-held Raqqa would mean moving deeper into an explosive mix of regional and international rivalries, including a proxy war that has pitted the United States against Russia and its allies.
The fight against ISIS in northeastern Syria also underlines a U.S. reliance on its one effective partner there—Syria’s Kurds. But such an alliance for a Raqqa campaign threatens to ignite a new conflict, with another U.S. partner, NATO member Turkey, and its allied Syrian rebels.
There are about 1 million people living in Raqqa, and nearly 200,000 in Mosul.
Thousands Protest South Korea's President Over Political Scandal
People march in Seoul during a rally calling for the resignation of President Park Geun-hye on November 5, 2016.
On Friday, Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s president, gave an emotional televised address to South Koreans, apologizing for her involvement in a political scandal that has captivated the nation. A day later, tens of thousands of protesters filled the streets in the heart of Seoul, demanding she resign.
Park admitted last week that she relied on the private counsel of a longtime friend, Choi Soon-sil, in making decisions as head of state and allowed Choi to help edit presidential speeches. Police have arrested Choi, who has no official government position, for charges of attempted fraud and abuse of authority. Prosecutors say Choi used her close relationship with Park to collect money for her nonprofit foundations. One of Park’s top advisers, Ahn Chong-bum, is suspected of collaborating with Choi, and resigned last week.
Many South Koreans have expressed outrage over the possibility that Choi has influenced government decisions. Rallies against Park began last week and have grown steadily. Police estimated 50,000 people participated in Saturday’s protest, making it one of the largest held in the capital in recent years, according to Yonhap News Agency, South Korea’s largest news organization.
“I came out today because this is not the country I want to pass on to my children," Choi Kyung-ha, a protester, told the AP Saturday. “My kids have asked me who Choi Soon-sil was and whether she’s the real president, and I couldn’t provide an answer.”
Park said she takes responsibility for the scandal, calling it a “mistake.”
“I put too much faith in a personal relationship and didn't look carefully at what was happening," she said at Friday’s public address. "Sad thoughts trouble my sleep at night. I realize that whatever I do, it will be difficult to mend the hearts of the people, and then I feel a sense of shame and ask myself, 'Is this the reason I became president?'"
Park is in her fourth year of a five-year term. Her approval rating has plummeted to 5 percent since the scandal emerged, the lowest for any leader of the country in nearly 70 years.
Vice President Vance is worried that the U.S. is running low on weapons.
In closed-door meetings, J. D. Vance has repeatedly questioned the Defense Department’s depiction of the war in Iran and whether the Pentagon has understated what appears to be the drastic depletion of U.S. missile stockpiles.
Two senior administration officials told us that the vice president has queried the accuracy of the information the Pentagon has provided about the war. He has also expressed his concerns about the availability of certain missile systems in discussions with President Trump, several people familiar with the situation told us. The consequences of a dramatic drawdown in munitions reserves are potentially dire: U.S. forces would need to draw from these same stockpiles to defend Taiwan against China, South Korea against North Korea, and Europe against Russia.
For a brief moment this weekend, the president appeared introspective.
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For a guy who had just been rushed out of a ballroom at the sound of gunfire, he seemed remarkably calm. For a president who regularly attacks the press, he seemed unusually gracious. For a fleeting period on Saturday night, Donald Trump appeared introspective, or at least as introspective as he’s capable of being in public.
“It’s always shocking when something like this happens,” he told reporters in the White House briefing room, standing in his tux and appearing to speak without notes. He briefly seemed to consider how familiar he was with threats to his life, and how the shock doesn’t fade: “Happened to me a little bit. And that never changes.”
The legal right spent decades empowering the presidency. Now it must reckon with the system it helped create.
Julius Caesar styled himself as a servant of the republic, claiming to speak for the people even as he disregarded laws and norms to govern by caprice. The Roman republic did not survive him.
The second Trump administration has revealed American Caesarism in nearly full bloom. Despite ambitions to fundamentally change the course of the country, this administration has no real legislative agenda. Instead, the president governs by executive orders, emergency decrees, and extortionate transactions, using his power to reward his friends and punish his enemies. He’s launched foreign military adventures and full-blown wars seemingly based on personal whim, and has made the military a political prop and a tool for domestic law enforcement. With Congress sidelined and the courts reluctant to check Donald Trump’s excesses, America has been left with what some legal scholars have described as an “executive unbound”—and with a president who threatens to supplant the republic in all but name.
For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.
At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.
Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.
To understand the significance of someone running a marathon in less than two hours, you also need to understand that, until recently, the notion of this actually happening was truly, utterly absurd. Sure, a physiologist named Michael Joyner had floated the idea that such a feat might be humanly possible in a journal paper way back in 1991. But his peers laughed off the idea, and not much changed over the succeeding decades. In Runner’s World in 2014, I predicted that it would happen in 2075. Frankly, even that forecast seemed overly optimistic to me, but I figured I’d be dead by then, so no one would be able to call me on it.
Well, I was wrong. Yesterday morning, the two-hour marathon barrier finally went down. A relatively unheralded 31-year-old Kenyan named Sabastian Sawe won the London Marathon with a time of 1:59:30. That is, for reference, 26.2 miles run at an average of 4:34 a mile—or, put another way, a pace that most recreational runners would struggle to sustain for more than a few seconds, if they could hit it at all. Perhaps even more arresting was the fact that the man who took second place, Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, also ran under two hours, finishing just 11 seconds behind Sawe.
Instead of a crackdown on his enemies, Trump wants his ballroom.
When an assassin murdered Charlie Kirk in September 2025, the MAGA movement seized the moment to demand a campaign of repression. Vice President Vance called for an ambitious program to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.” He named the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and The Nation magazine as examples of candidates for the retaliation he had in mind. The people who faced consequences after the killing almost universally did so for things they had written or said, not for acts of violence. In November, Reuters counted some 600 cases of people who were fired, suspended, or otherwise disciplined for their speech about Kirk’s life and death.
Now another gunman has attacked political targets. At the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a man discharged a firearm in the vicinity of hundreds of people from the worlds of politics, media, and business—among them, the president and vice president of the United States. Although much about the event remains unclear, the available evidence suggests that the gunman was motivated by an anti-Trump agenda. Yet this time, MAGA’s immediate response to political violence has been much less aggressive. At his press conference after yesterday’s attempted shooting, President Trump cited the attack as proof of the need for his wished-for White House ballroom. Social-media accounts that take their cues from the White House promptly echoed the message.
The pontiff has proved unwilling to subordinate his faith to politics, or to adjust his commitment to the Gospel in exchange for access to power.
American presidents and popes have clashed before, but the battle of words and wills between Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV is unprecedented.
The distinctiveness of their clash is not due mainly to the fact that Robert Francis Prevost is the first American-born pope, though that is significant. After all, Leo can’t be dismissed as a foreigner who is speaking about a country and culture he doesn’t understand. When he is critical of America, on matters ranging from war to mass deportation to those who “manipulate religions and the very name of God,” it comes from a place of love and devotion.
Nor does it have to do solely with the nature of the disagreements, most specifically the war waged by Trump against Iran. Past popes have criticized past presidents for going to war.
What makes the Trump-Leo collision most unusual is the manner of the disagreement, not on the part of the pope—whose criticisms have been direct but restrained—but on the part of the president.
The people we were died at the exact moment our child did.
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My husband, David, hates Valentine’s Day. He once called it “New Year’s Eve with nuclear weapons.” I pretend not to care. Still, when the day passes entirely unremarked on, a woman can’t help but feel overlooked.
On Valentine’s Day 2024, David found a way out. He booked a speech on February 14 that required traveling from our home in Washington, D.C., to Toronto. I couldn’t object—he was getting paid. Anyway, I had my own plans: an “anti–Valentine’s Day” dinner hosted by one of the foreign embassies.
As I got ready, I called our oldest daughter, Miranda. She answered from her Brooklyn bathroom, getting ready for her own party. She propped her phone up beside her sink and laughed when I told her about her father’s strategic Valentine’s Day escape.
The shooting at the Correspondents’ Dinner made clear who gets saved first.
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On one level, the system worked. The perimeter held. A would-be assassin was tackled in the hallway outside the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner. The one bullet that found a human target—a U.S. Secret Service agent—was halted, in part, by the officer’s phone and bulletproof vest, according to a law-enforcement summary report that we reviewed. A counterassault team promptly swarmed the stage with assault rifles and night-vision equipment in case the lights were cut. The government’s top leaders—president, vice president, Cabinet officials, speaker of the House—were ushered to secure locations in a matter of minutes. No one died in the attack.
The administration could exert much greater control over the industry—but just how far would it go?
AI companies are beginning to entertain the possibility that they could cease to exist. This notion was, until recently, more theoretical: A couple of years ago, an ex-OpenAI employee named Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote a lengthy memo speculating that the U.S. government might soon take control of the industry. By 2026 or 2027, Aschenbrenner wrote, an “obvious question” will be circling through the Pentagon and Congress: Do we need a government-led program for artificial general intelligence—an AGI Manhattan Project? He predicted that Washington would decide to go all in on such an effort.
Aschenbrenner may have been prescient. Earlier this year, at the height of the Pentagon’s ugly contract dispute with Anthropic, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth warned that he could invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA), a Cold War–era law that he reportedly suggested would allow him to force the AI company to hand over its technology on whatever terms the Pentagon desired. The act is one of numerous levers the Trump administration can pull to direct, or even commandeer, AI companies. And the companies have been giving the administration plenty of reason to consider doing so.
