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When people take extended time off to care for a new child or ailing family member, it can be a hard and long process to return to paid work. Here are four key things to consider, according to the experts we interviewed for a story:
1. Don’t worry about the macro environment: Looking for a job seems more intimidating when headlines about the labor market are bad. But don’t dwell on this, as people can find their own path.
2. Own your caregiving experience: Think about how your caregiving skills — time management and navigating difficult interpersonal relationships, for example — directly translate to marketable job skills.
3. Be sure to tap your networks: Take some time to nurture your contacts before you dive back into the job search, and consult friends and work acquaintances alike.
4. Consider taking a step back to move forward: Caregivers who are reentering the workforce might need to take a step back before they take a leap forward.
While much of the attention this week has focused on Latino voters shifting left, another group also moved sharply toward Democrats: Asian Americans.
Early exit polling showed that Asian Americans overwhelmingly rejected Republicans in this election, reversing gains Donald Trump made in the 2024 presidential race with the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group.
Asian American conservative leaders had warned this could happen. In the past two years, many conservative influencers and elected officials increasingly have railed against immigration from Asian countries, particularly India, targeting those who arrived on “high-skill” H-1B visas. Conservatives, including Vice President JD Vance, have argued that multinational corporations were undercutting U.S.-born workers by importing employees from Asian countries.
In Texas, especially, antipathy toward H-1B recipients was explicitly anti-Indian, with Bo French, a statewide candidate, going viral for his racist social media posts complaining about Indian Americans succeeding in Texas school and businesses.
The most prominent Asian American Republican candidate this election, Vivek Ramaswamy, who lost his race for Ohio governor to Amy Acton (D), appeared to make some oblique references to that kind of bigotry in his concession speech.
“I have serious concerns about the future direction of our country,” Ramaswamy said at the end of his speech. “The United States … is the only country built on a set of ideals that brought together a divided group of people … I believe those ideals still exist. I believe as our founders did that all people are created equal.”
Anti-Trump Republicans, including several former GOP lawmakers who voted to impeach President Donald Trump during his first term, saw Tuesday’s blue wave as a vindication.
Former congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) wrote on his website Wednesday that the midterm election results were “not just a rejection of Trump, but of the cruelty, corruption, arrogance, and authoritarianism that have defined” his Make America Great Again movement.
“To the Republicans and former Republicans who refused to bend the knee … You made a difference,” Kinzinger wrote.
Former senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee, said he hoped for a “course correction” for both the party and the United States.
“Bad policy, bad character make bad politics,” Romney wrote on X.
Former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh, who left the GOP over his opposition to Trump, has been celebrating Tuesday night’s election results.
“I feel like I’ve been doing nothing but shouting and sounding the alarm for 22 months,” Walsh wrote on X Wednesday. “But dang, I’m happy. The country got it. The country woke up yesterday.”
JetBlue raised its checked luggage fees for the second time this year, hiking prices to at least $50 one way. Because U.S. airlines often move in lockstep, other carriers could bump their rates, too.
In a statement, JetBlue attributed the increase to “help offset fuel and operating costs,” the same reasons cited in March, when it raised fees by as much as $9. The new pricing structure went into effect for bookings made on or after Nov. 3.
The fees vary by travel dates, destination and time of payment. The lowest amount ($50 one way) applies to the first checked bag purchased more than 24 hours before departure during off-peak travel periods in the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean or Canada. Passengers who wait to pay for their luggage and fly during peak times — “about 50 percent of the calendar year,” said Katy Nastro, travel correspondent at Flighty, a flight-tracking app — will spend $70. During peak periods, the first bag will set travelers back $55 if purchased more than 24 hours before departure.
The carrier also raised luggage prices on transatlantic flights to Europe (starting at $80), as well as additional checked pieces (from $70). Bags are complimentary for JetBlue credit-card holders and passengers in higher fare classes.
“This isn’t giving off a premium vibe,” Nastro said. Paying “$50 to $85 for a checked bag is more in line with what an ultra-low-cost carrier would charge, not a full-service airline.”
Kyle Potter, executive editor of Thrifty Traveler, said JetBlue’s move could spark fee changes throughout the industry, similar to earlier this year.
“It took all of nine days for every other major U.S. airline to either match or exceed what JetBlue had raised their bags to,” Potter said. “Unfortunately, the clock is very much ticking before the next airline does it again.”
On Tuesday, one world-famous Midwesterner hosted another in a private audience at the Vatican, and the photos of their rendezvous have been delighting observers online.
Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan wore a black zip-up sweatshirt, hood up, with a black jacket, a black hat, a white shirt and a loosely knotted tie. Dylan also wore black leather gloves, which he looks to have removed to shake hands with the pontiff.
The whole ensemble is a variation on what the famously taciturn Dylan has been wearing to perform and appear in public in recent years; the pope, too, wore a version of his own signature look, appearing in a cream-colored cassock and mozzetta with a zucchetto cap of the same shade. Together, the pair looked uncannily like the duo you don’t want to see at the end of your hospital bed.
President Donald Trump spent months telling voters he was on the ballot in Tuesday’s midterm elections. But when Republicans suffered historic losses, he insisted he wasn’t.
Trump declared himself on the ballot — or urged supporters to pretend he was — 63 times before Election Day, a Washington Post analysis found. He delivered the message in speeches, interviews and Truth Social posts.
He repeated the message more than 50 times in October and early November alone, making it a central focus of his rallies as he barnstormed the country in the weeks before Election Day.
As recently as Monday, Trump told South Carolina voters during a tele-rally: “Get out and vote tomorrow, and pretend I’m on the ballot. And really, I am on the ballot.”
By 10:37 p.m. Tuesday, his message had changed.
“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote on Truth Social.
Trump’s reversal came after months of warning that Republicans struggled to turn out his supporters when his name was absent from the ballot. Between August 2025 and November 2026, he made that argument 61 times, according to The Post’s analysis.
Methodology: The Post used AI to analyze Trump’s in-person public statements using data from Factbase, as well as his Truth Social posts. The Post used a large language model, OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna, to tag the statements based on what, if anything Trump said about his presence on the ballot: statements that he is on the ballot, that his supporters should pretend he is on the ballot, that Republicans perform better in elections when he is on the ballot, and counterfactual claims that they would have performed better if he had been on the ballot. This classifier had an accuracy rate of 100 percent on a human-labeled test set of 100 statements.
Idaho has an official state bird (the mountain bluebird) and a state song (“Here We Have Idaho”), and now they’ll have … an official state gun.
Voters in the Gem State approved a new state gun Tuesday, picking — from six choices — the lever-action repeating rifle Winchester Model 1873, historically nicknamed “the Gun That Won the West.”
About 60 percent of households in Idaho have guns, according to a Rand study in 2020, and the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety ranks Idaho last on its list of states, saying it has “the worst gun laws in the country, with some of the highest rates of gun suicides and household firearm ownership.”
Idaho House Majority Leader Jason Monks (R) told the Idaho Statesman he had pushed the measure in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary.
“Obviously, without guns, there would be no America,” he told the Statesman. “We’d still be a British colony.”
Turns out 10 other states already have embraced official state guns, according to a list compiled by the National Rifle Association. Those include Texas’s rare Colt Walker revolver or Missouri’s Hawken rifle, which was developed for the bison, grizzly and elk of the American West.
The post Idaho voters choose an official state gun appeared first on Washington Post.
