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Israeli election authorities released a final vote tally early Friday local time, setting the stage for backroom negotiations between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc, the main opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot and the Arab parties as they vie to form a government.
The turnout was 77.9 percent — the highest in decades — with 5,690,685 valid votes, according to Israel’s Central Elections Committee (CEC).
The completed count comes amid accusations from Netanyahu’s Likud party that Qatar illegally interfered in the elections to bolster the Arab parties, which drew on unprecedented voter turnout from Israel’s Arab minority to increase their seat count from 10 to 19.
Qatar denies the allegations, and the acting director of the CEC said there was no basis to the claims.
The tally confirms the outcome from Tuesday’s election: Netanyahu’s bloc is set to hold 53 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, with former military chief Eisenkot’s opposition bloc holding 48. But to reach a governing coalition, the two blocs must either cooperate with Arab parties or peel seats away from the opposing camp.
The official tally is to be presented to Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Wednesday.
The president then asks each party leader for their recommendation on who will form the next Israeli government.
Election officials in at least one Florida county are urging in-person voting amid reports of mail-in ballot delays.
Broward County Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott said delays are affecting both ballots sent to voters and returned to his office. Scott’s son in Orlando waited 12 days for a ballot, according to WLRN. It’s unclear how many Broward voters are affected.
“We’ve seen where people, even locally in Broward County, have mailed a ballot and it’s taken up to two weeks for that ballot to get here, which is totally unacceptable,” Scott told WSVN 7News.
In Monroe County, home to Key West, election officials said about 100 voters reported delays. Supervisor of Elections Sherri Hodies said some ballots mailed in from other states in early October reached Miami on Oct. 24 and Key West two days later, Hodies said.
In a statement, the U.S. Postal Service reported no delays at its facilities serving either county. It said it could not investigate further without reviewing individual pieces of mail and that local postal managers have contacted election officials.
In Florida, domestic ballots must reach election officials by 7 p.m. Tuesday, regardless of postmark.
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.
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