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Halloween cuisine isn’t all about the candy.
If you’re looking for dishes to serve at a ghoulish gathering, we’ve got you covered with these treats that are as eye-catching as they are tasty.
Cranberry Cat Kisses. Pictured above. The cat-face cookies are on-theme and yet not over-the-top creepy, making them good for even the youngest trick-or-treaters. You can get creative with the decorations — we used purchased decorative sugar eyes and candy hearts for noses, but small candies, such as cinnamon red hots, would work, too. Fashion ears from chocolate bars or licorice candy, if you have them. And licorice whips make cute whiskers.
Finnish Chestnut Fingers. There’s just something particularly grisly about foods fashioned to look like severed digits. Use this recipe to make a witch’s finger by adding a sliced almond to the end to form a nail. For an even ickier effect, you can add a drip of fake blood (white chocolate tinted with red and black) to the opposite end.
Ectoplasm Punch. If you want something extra-theatrical, this boozy special-effects punch might be just the thing. Under a black light, this brew appears eerily luminescent, thanks to both the tonic water and vitamin B2 (also known as riboflavin) reacting to UV light. Just be sure to use a clear vessel. For an even more impressive effect, set the pitcher in a bowl with dry ice.
One of the country’s largest teachers unions is accusing the Trump administration of mismanaging a popular student loan forgiveness program for public servants.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) on Friday sued Education Secretary Linda McMahon over a raft of problems in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which cancels the education debt of government and nonprofit employees after 10 years of service and 120 monthly loan payments.
A chief complaint is the Education Department’s handling of a provision of the program, known as PSLF Buyback, that lets public servants make retroactive payments for months in which their loans were postponed through forbearance. Applications for the buyback initiative have piled up at the department, which is working through a backlog of nearly 90,000 claims, according to the lawsuit.
“Secretary McMahon has flagrantly ignored her responsibility to help teachers, nurses and first responders under the buyback provision her department pledged to implement,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten, who is being represented by attorneys at the nonprofit Protect Borrowers and the law firm Berger Montague.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, also details borrowers failing to get credit for qualifying payments and watching their payment count mysteriously drop without explanation from the Education Department.
The Education Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit. The federal agency has previously said that coding errors led to inaccurate payment counts, and the buyback backlog is a result of an arduous process that requires manual review of borrower records. All of this comes at a time when the department has cut nearly half of its employees.
The 50th anniversary of the TCS New York City Marathon is on Sunday, and during those 26.2 miles, many runners will “hit the wall,” slowing abruptly, too exhausted to keep up their pace.
Most will be men, according to the largest study yet of hitting the wall or “catastrophic deceleration,” as the study’s authors term it.
Using data for 873,334 Berlin Marathon finishers between 1999 and 2025, scientists checked each racer’s pace every 5 kilometers. If they slowed 20 percent or more in the second half of the race, they’d hit the wall, the researchers determined.
And men, they found, were twice as likely as women to be in that group.
Somewhat surprisingly, speed amplified the risk. Among racers finishing faster than three hours, men were six times as likely as women to hit the wall.
The results suggest experience is little protection against catastrophic deceleration, said Aldo Seffrin, an exercise scientist in São José dos Campos, Brazil, who led the study. Sub-three-hour racers may have run multiple marathons but still hit the wall, especially men, who “tend to start at a pace that’s too ambitious for what they can hold,” he said.
So if you’re racing on Sunday, he suggested, follow a fellow racer “who runs at an even pace at your goal pace, and in our data, that person is more often a woman.”
Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s leading investigative newspaper, announced it will shut down completely on Nov. 9 after more than 30 years of operation, as pressure from authorities reached new heights.
“They’ve killed us,” the newspaper said in a farewell letter published Friday. “The Russian authorities and the Russian security services have forced our editorial team to cease its operations.”
Founded in 1993 by journalists inspired by the freedoms that followed the Soviet collapse, Novaya Gazeta became Russia’s best-known independent newspaper, regarded for its investigative journalism and criticism of the state. It has continued operating in Russia throughout the war in Ukraine under immense pressure from authorities.
Earlier this month, the paper received notice that it was being evicted from its office and that its financial accounts channels would be blocked due to the “foreign agent” label Russian authorities put on outlets outside their control. The paper’s editor in chief, Sergei Sokolov, had also been detained and questioned.
The paper’s co-founder and publisher, Dmitry Muratov, shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, which he dedicated to six journalists he said were killed for their reporting. Among them was Anna Politkovskaya, who spent years reporting on rights abuses and the Kremlin’s war in Chechnya before she was shot dead outside her apartment in 2006.
You can generally count on Apple Maps and Google Maps to guide you around the world — with the occasional oversight. But if a transportation agency professional will be doing the driving, you should instead consider a free app with the most obvious name possible for that situation: Transit.
The usefulness of this app for Android and iOS goes well beyond directions that factor in bus, rail and even ferry options. Transit’s home screen shows arrival times near you from multiple agencies — around Washington, for example, including not just Metro but buses from such local agencies as Arlington’s ART and Montgomery County’s Ride On.
Better yet, you can also use this app to pay your fare in such cities as Denver, Las Vegas, Miami and New Orleans. And Transit, unlike too many transit-agency apps, lets you pay with whatever credit cards you’ve stored in Apple Pay and Google Pay, eliminating the need to thumb-type in a card number with one hand while holding a card in another.
The Montreal-based firm behind this app offers a $25/year “Royale” premium version with more trip-planning features, but in a crafty bit of business development, they also let transit agencies buy it for their own customers. In the D.C. area, Prince William County’s OmniRide has taken that step, unlocking those extra tools for its commuter bus services.
Democrats are now favored in enough House races to win the majority, according to the nonpartisan election prognosticator Cook Political Report, and could end up with up to 240 seats, their largest majority since 2009.
Cook on Friday moved 12 more House races in Democrats’ direction ahead of Tuesday’s elections.
Three races previously considered a “lean Republican” have been re-rated into “Toss Up,” including Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick’s in Pennsylvania and Republican Rep. Jeff Crank’s in Colorado. Three “likely Republican” seats are now “lean Republican” — including those of Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Indiana) and Rep. Darren Soto (D-Florida), whom Democrats believed to be among the most vulnerable in their party.
As The Post reported this week, an internal review of Cook ratings since 1984 found that 97 percent of its “Likely” ratings and 94 percent of its “Lean” ratings were ultimately correct. Its “Toss Up” ratings were more or less evenly split between parties, with a slight edge for Republicans.
Democrats need 218 seats for a majority, and Cook favors them in 222. An additional 18 races are toss-ups.
“If the bottom completely falls out for Republicans, Democrats could flip some seats in the Lean Republican and Likely Republican columns as well,” Erin Covey, Cook’s House analyst, wrote. “Republicans are particularly concerned about turnout in places like North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where Democrats are poised to win statewide races by comfortable margins.”
A hack that publicly shared the identities of 41,000 Department of Homeland Security workers this week is fueling some violent rhetoric targeting immigration officers, an analysis of social media by the SITE Intelligence Group found.
SITE, which monitors violent extremists and terrorist groups, said Thursday that while some users called for justice, other users reacted with threats.
An account tied to an anarchist movement in Colorado posted information about five DHS employees working in one city.
“We do not forget. We do not forgive. You will not avoid accountability,” the post read.
Several accounts on platforms such as Instagram, Threads and X espoused violence, including calls to kill the officers and harm their families.
As part of President Donald Trump’s push for mass deportations, masked federal immigration officers surged into U.S. cities last year, leading critics to demand they show their identities.
The “hacktivist” group that obtained the data said it aimed to promote transparency, but Trump officials have said publishing officers’ names puts them in danger.
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