The past few months have weighed heavily on Walter Barrientos.
The 32-year-old former undocumented immigrant, who has relatives and friends who remain without legal status, has seen the harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric from GOP nominee DonaldTrump’s presidential campaign spill over into everyday life. A relative of his was in the process of buying a home. But she thought twice when she saw a stream of Trump lawn signs in the neighborhood. His father, an electrician, has had clients ask for his papers (he’s a green card holder) and mock his limited English.
But as Election Day has neared and the contest grown tighter, that emotional toll has morphed into an acute anxiety. For Barrientos, the days are now filled with frantic calls from friends and family and regular checks of polling data. His dad, who had never been politically active during his 15 years living on Long Island, New York City, has felt it, too. For the first time in his life, he’s been doing Get Out The Vote drives for local candidates.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Donald Trump gave an important and revealing speech in Pennsylvania this week, although the significance may have been less what he said and more who said it with him.
The subject was Obamacare and the supposed havoc that the program is wreaking upon America. Both Trump and vice presidential nominee Mike Pence spoke ― making it one of the few times in this campaign the two have appeared together. Even more telling, however, was the appearance of a half-dozen Republicans from Congress, including Sen. John Barrasso from Wyoming and Rep. Tom Price from Georgia, all talking about the same subject.
Progressives should take note. Trump has spent a lot of time criticizing Republican leaders in Congress, and they have spent a lot of time criticizing him ― on everything from his treatment of women to his pronouncements about Muslims. Trump also deviates from the GOP party line on a few key issues. Most notably, his hostility to international trade agreements puts him at odds with Republican leadership and its backers in the corporate community.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
The HuffPost presidential forecast gives Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton a 98 percent chance of winning the general election on Tuesday. That means we’re pretty darn certain that ― barring some major catastrophe, scandal or nearly every single poll being wrong ― Clinton will be elected.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean Clinton will win in a landslide. It’s still a close race in several states; Clinton could win with as few as 273 electoral votes. Or she could blow the race out and win 341 or more. The high win probability doesn’t choose between those scenarios ― it just means that the model shows Clinton below 270 is very unlikely.
In simple terms, here’s how the model does that: We take all the polls entered into the HuffPost Pollster database in each state and calculate a trendline to estimate what they say in the aggregate. Unlike the Pollster charts, which stop on the current date, the forecast model keeps running to Nov. 8 (although there’s not much difference four days out). And then we bump up the uncertainty in the model to account for the undecided proportions in the polls.
Three days before a historic election, a disturbing twist has emerged: the possibility that agents in the country’s preeminent investigative service are attempting to swing the outcome.
Reuters reported on Thursday that FBI Director James Comey wrote his unprecedented letter to Congress last week in part because he feared his own employees might leak word of the Hillary Clinton email investigation to the press. Two sources told Reuters that investigators in the FBI’s New York field office are “known to be hostile” to Clinton. On Thursday, The Guardian reported its sources described the FBI as a “Trumpland,” where agents have “deep antipathy” toward Clinton.
Those reports follow a whirlwind week of leaks from the FBI that appear intended to cast a shadow over Clinton.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Rudy Giuliani said Friday that he knew the FBI planned to review more emails tied to Hillary Clinton before a public announcement about the investigation last week, confirming that the agency leaked information to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The former New York City mayor and Trump surrogate has recently dropped a series of hints that he knew in advance that the FBI planned to look at emails potentially connected to Clinton’s private server. The agency discovered the messages while investigating former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) for allegedly sexting with a minor. (Weiner’s estranged wife, Huma Abedin, is a top aide to Clinton.)
Giuliani has bragged about his close ties to the FBI for months, mentioning in interviews that “outraged FBI agents” have told him they’re frustrated by how the Clinton investigation was handled. And two days before FBI Director James Comey announced that the agency was reviewing the newly uncovered emails, Giuliani teased that Trump’s campaign had “a couple of surprises left.”
“You’ll see, and I think it will be enormously effective,” he said in an interview with Fox News.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
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New images from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile showed the massive “Pillars of Destruction” in the Carina Nebula, some 7,500 light years from Earth:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The images revealed a “nursery” of new stars, which were wiping out the very clouds from which they formed.
“In an ironic twist, one of the first consequences of the formation of a massive star is that it starts to destroy the cloud from which it was born,” the ESO wrote in a news release.
That destruction led to scenes that looked like the cover of a 1960s psychedelic album. Some of the nicknames even sounded like the titles of those albums, such as the Mystic Mountain, a formation of gas and dust that spans more than three light years:
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ESOA McLeod
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On Nov. 14, skywatchers will be treated to a supermoon so big and bright that it’s being billed as a “super-dupermoon” or an “extra-supermoon.”
Supermoons aren’t especially uncommon, but this will be the nearest that a full moon has come to Earth since January 26, 1948. The full moon won’t get this close again until November 25, 2034.
The term supermoon refers to a full moon that occurs when our planet’s natural satellite is at its closest point to Earth in its elliptical orbit. Astronomers call that point perigee, and so “perigee moon” is another term for supermoon. (The point at which the moon is most distant from Earth in its orbit is known as apogee.)
A supermoon can appear up to 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than an apogee full moon, according to NASA. The effect is most pronounced when the moon is viewed near the horizon.
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pjsells via Getty Images
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I went to a white nationalist ethnostate in Indiana. I got bounced from a secret meeting in D.C. I spent weeks figuring out how hate gurgles up from the nastiest recesses of the Internet. And I’m sorry to report that unconscionable racists will be a force in American politics well beyond November 8.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
For the first time in 108 years, the Chicago Cubs are World Series Champions.
The Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians, 8-7, on Wednesday in Game 7 of the World Series behind home runs from Dexter Fowler and David Ross.
The Cubs got things started immediately with a leadoff home run from Dexter Fowler. The solo shot to center field was the first leadoff homer in a winner-take-all World Series game, according to ESPN Stats & Info.
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ASSOCIATED PRESS
At a 1984 playoff game, Wrigley Field got a visit from Sam Sianis, nephew of the Billy Goat Tavern owner who put the curse on the Cubs in 1945, according to legend.
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A black church in Mississippi was burned and vandalized with pro-Donald Trump graffiti late Tuesday.
Authorities responded to the fire at Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi, Tuesday night. Delta Daily News reports that the majority of the damage was to the main sanctuary and there were no reported injuries. Someone had spray-painted the words “Vote Trump” along the side of the building.
A woman at the nearby Rose Hill Missionary Baptist Church told The Huffington Post that Hopewell is a historically black church. She said the community is in shock over what happened.
Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons called the incident “a heinous, hateful and cowardly act” in a press conference Wednesday, adding that it was “an attack on the black church and the black community.”
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Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press
The sanctuary of the church sustained the most damage.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
James' World 2 