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A Satanic Temple group in Iowa must be allowed to host its holiday event at the state’s Capitol next month, a federal judge ordered Monday.
The Satanic Temple has applied to host the one-day gathering in the building’s rotunda for the past three years but has been denied each time, according to court documents.
The Iowa Department of Administrative Services objected to the event’s costume contest, which it said featured Krampus, the folkloric Christmas demon, saying it would harm children.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa filed a lawsuit in August on behalf of the religious organization, arguing that the decision violated its rights to free speech, free exercise and equal protection.
Chief U.S. District Judge Stephanie Rose granted a preliminary injunction Monday, saying the Satanic Temple was likely to succeed on its free-speech claim. She ordered the department to approve the event application within seven days.
Matt Kezhaya, general counsel for the Satanic Temple, said it was “always going to be a family-friendly event.”
“None of this became ‘harmful’ just because state officials disapproved of our chosen expression,” he said in a statement.
The Administrative Services Department did not immediately respond to an overnight request for comment.
Tempted to use artificial intelligence to navigate your midterm ballot? You’re not alone — but you should be careful.
Two in five Americans said they used AI to look up election information in a recent survey by the National Conference on Citizenship.
To see how well that works, The Washington Post challenged six of the most popular chatbots to make voter guides for addresses in every county in the United States. The results were not great.
Chatbots invented races that don’t exist, mixed up candidates and cited nascent websites with incorrect information that also appear to have been produced with help from AI.
Many of the companies behind the chatbots tested said they made changes after The Post contacted them, but experts recommend avoiding them in favor of checking trusted sources directly.
Click here to see which AI chatbots were most accurate for voting information.
Additional Coverage
- October 28, 2026
We asked AI chatbots to make voter guides. They invented races and misidentified candidates.
Five people, including two children, have been rescued in the South Pacific after drifting more than 3,000 miles in a small boat for months.
The boat was carrying nine people when it was reported missing on July 30 after failing to reach Micronesia’s Ruo Island, according to the U.S. Coast Guard in Guam. The search was called off after 10 days, having covered around 25,000 square nautical miles, the Coast Guard said in a statement.
On Sunday, villagers on Fanning Island in Kiribati — some 3,355 miles away from where the group was last seen — spotted the 20-foot skiff and brought the passengers to safety, the Australian Broadcasting Corp reported.
“Incredible and wonderful news these five folks were found and are receiving care,” the Coast Guard told the Associated Press. It is unclear what happened to the four other passengers.
The governor of Micronesia’s Chuuk state, Alexander Narruhn, said in a statement Sunday that he had asked his country’s president to work with Kiribati to bring the survivors home.
“Thanks be to God for his love and mercy that five of the nine people have been found,” he said. “We continue to pray for their four companions.”
North Korea rejected allegations that it was involved in a $6.3 billion heist on cryptocurrency exchange platform Binance, saying it was “absurd rhetoric.”
Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in a statement Tuesday accused the United States of “blindly linking” the country with international cybercrime incidents.
Binance, which allows users to trade cryptocurrencies and other assets, said Thursday that $6.3 billion in user funds had been stolen in the attack, in what appeared to be the largest crypto hack on record. The company has since said it obtained assets to cover about 95 percent of the digital currencies stolen.
The FBI and third-party analysts attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state hacker group that has been linked to other record-breaking crypto hacks. Pyongyang has been linked to several cyberattacks in recent years but has repeatedly denied involvement.
Kim Yo Jong called the FBI’s announcement “a trite provocation” and said it was evidence of “Washington’s hostile attitude toward the DPRK,” using the abbreviation for North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“We have issues to reconsider in diverse aspects as regards the very unpleasant U.S. hostile attitude,” she said.
Binance and the FBI did not immediately respond to an overnight request for comment.
People from eastern Texas to Iowa will contend with a line of showers and thunderstorms — some strong — as they head out to vote on Tuesday.
That includes cities such as San Antonio and Tyler in Texas; Fayetteville, Arkansas; and Springfield, Missouri, on Tuesday morning before the risk spreads into Shreveport, Louisiana; Little Rock; and St. Louis on Tuesday afternoon.
On the backside of this storm system, a chilly rain will dampen areas from Kansas to Minnesota, including places such as Topeka, Kansas; Lincoln, Nebraska; Omaha; and Minneapolis by afternoon.
That rain will also spread into Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, potentially reaching Chicago toward the end of the day.
Some rain is also forecast across Northern California, including San Francisco and Sacramento, as well as across Alabama, Georgia and Florida — but the rain won’t be as intense in Florida as it was on Sunday and Monday.
Showers are also expected to swing into northern New England, including northern parts of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, mostly on Tuesday afternoon.
Meanwhile, unseasonable warmth and sunshine is expected across a broad stretch including the Ohio Valley and Appalachians, the Carolinas, Mid-Atlantic and southern New England.
Generally dry conditions are also expected across the Intermountain West and Pacific Northwest.
Good morning. It’s Tuesday, Nov. 3, and Election Day is here at last, leaving voters to cast the final ballots that will decide control of Congress, state governments and more.
It will not shock you to learn that the midterms top today’s edition of The 7 briefing. You can find out how voters are feeling heading into this pivotal day, and which races you should keep an eye on for early clues about whether the Democratic wave that many expect has actually materialized.
While the election will dominate the headlines today, the briefing also has updates from the plane crash in South Florida which left nine people dead on Sunday. An investigation is ongoing.
Further down, we look at new research showing that more young people are having strokes. Finally, is it ok for schools to create AI-generated photos of its students? A viral debate is raging.
Read today’s edition of The 7 here.
Michigan’s high-profile Senate race has been moved from “toss-up” to “lean Democrat” by the nonpartisan election prognosticator Cook Political Report. The move comes despite Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s primary challenger, Haley Stevens, making a shocking cross-party endorsement, backing Republican candidate Mike Rogers on Sunday.
Cook found evidence that Democratic base voters, including Black voters, have coalesced behind El-Sayed in the final stretch of campaigning, analyst Jessica Taylor wrote. The race rating makes Democrats more likely to win a Senate majority than Republicans to keep it.
“Our decision to move this race was in the making before the endorsement fracas, and it did not change our view. We are basing our final ratings change on new public and private polling,” Taylor wrote.
“We view Stevens’ decision to revisit the bitter primary as primarily noise this late in the race,” she added.
El-Sayed has also made overtures to win over Republican voters. On Monday afternoon, he shared what he described as his closing message: an op-ed published on the Fox News website.
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