South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), the party once led by Nelson Mandela, has suffered its worst-ever local elections result, securing just 30% of the vote. Al Jazeera’s Clement Manyathela reports on the historic setback.
The Times is tracking race results across California, Congress and Los Angeles County from the moment polls close until the secretary of state certifies results in early December.
Twenty-three million registered voters in the state received a ballot by mail this fall. The vote count starts once the polls close at 8 p.m. on Tuesday. However, winners may not be known on election night because of the state’s mail-in and conditional ballot process.
The vote counts on these pages update periodically as results are reported by the Associated Press and the county registrars. On election day, those results include in-person voting as well as any mail-in ballots already received. In the days and weeks following, votes will be reported approximately once a day, as they are processed by county registrars. Voters can track their own cast ballot here.
The Associated Press surveys the numbers posted by local election officials. The AP projects the winner for all statewide and federal races using vote returns and other data. A race may be called before all expected votes are in. Results can change as more ballots are counted.
WASHINGTON — Democrats heralded a new era in American politics Wednesday after voters broke Republicans’ control of government and delivered a pivotal rebuke of President Trump.
Victories that handed Democrats control of the House and Senate on Tuesday night came in historic form, with margins outstripping expectations, posting double-digit shifts to the left by nearly every voting bloc. In some of the reddest states in the union, even Republican redistricting efforts designed to shield districts from competition were not enough to prevent Democratic inroads.
The sweeping wins were driven by a rare coalition of voters across nearly all walks of American life, in cities and countryside, from the rural Midwest and Deep South to a traditionally conservative mid-Atlantic. Not since voters were repulsed by President Nixon after the Watergate scandal half a century ago has the popular vote swung so decisively in a single election cycle.
The wave was so comprehensive that it handed Democrats wins that for decades have been unthinkable — flipping Senate seats in Kansas, South Carolina and Texas — and gained a majority of governor’s seats for the first time in a generation. How large their House majority would be remained to be seen as states continued counting votes.
Statehouses in Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania flipped for Democrats — and, as ballots were counted, Texas hung in the balance — while the party wrested at least five gubernatorial seats from Republican control.
“The only thing unusual here is scale,” said Andrew Sinclair, an assistant professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. “It is not at all unusual in American political history to see a poorly led party lose badly in the next election.”
“To build anything enduring out of this election,” he added, “Democrats are going to have to do the hard work of having honest conversations with each other about how such a diverse group of people can cooperate and deliver results.”
The seismic routing appeared to validate the populist messages Democrats — in many cases, both progressives and moderates — ran on, from lowering costs to addressing healthcare and housing issues to confronting the power of corporations in American society.
Party leaders vowed the morning after to respond to voters’ mandate on affordability and to check executive power, as members of both parties predicted the results would reshape politics for years into the future.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called it “a generational remake of the Senate map that is going to change America not only now but on into the future.”
He pledged Democratic senators would be intent on working for their constituents and delivering on promises to relieve Americans’ economic “anguish” and clean up government corruption. He also nodded to the responsibility the party now shoulders.
“With this majority, Americans have given we Democrats the opportunity to prove ourselves worthy of their trust, and that’s our most important job,” Schumer said.
In every demographic, whether cut by gender, race, age, education or region, voters shifted to the left compared to 2024, in most cases by double digits, according to New York Times data. Men 18 to 44 moved to the left by 31 points, Latinos by 28 points, voters under 30 by 32 points.
The nation also elected several historic “firsts,” including the first Muslim senator, the first openly gay male senator and the first Black female governor, in spite of Republican campaign attacks around identity. And Democrats defied Republican redistricting efforts in at least 11 districts, including four in Florida,four in Texas,one each in Ohio, Alabama and North Carolina.
The results showed the success of economic populist messages, said Alex Jacquez, a Democratic consultant and former policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
“The throughline for all the Democrats [who won] is the corporate-friendliness era of moderation is over and we are much more squarely in the prairie populism of the 80s and 90s,” Jacquez said. “You saw a real resurgence of that.”
The unambiguous nature of the victory helped repel the notion that Republicans might attempt to challenge election results, as Trump had telegraphed as a possibility before the election.
Republicans swiftly began trading blame as they parsed the results.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely 2028 presidential contender, predicted the results could “reverberate for the next decade or most,” saying the routing was worse than anticipated.
It was “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans across the country,” DeSantis told reporters Wednesday.
Republicans will now face questions about the party’s future direction, and how they prevent a repeat of Tuesday’s wave in 2028. President Trump signaled his willingness to accept the election results and work with Democrats, while evading blame for himself.
“For Republicans, it is clear that President Trump has led the party to disaster — again,” Sinclair said. “Looking to the future, Republicans should reconsider following his style of governance and his policy agenda.”
Democrats will now have to deliver on the affordability and accountability agenda. With full control of Congress, they will be able to send legislation to Trump’s desk, and could force him to sign bills or make unpopular vetoes. Schumer told reporters Wednesday that the party would work to lower costs “with the president or without him, period.”
“It is critically important now that Democrats, now that we’ve been given the keys to the car here, we’re able to drive it,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who won reelection Tuesday, said on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe.”
Shapiro, a likely presidential contender, projected confidence in the new majorities and said Democrats would need to show that they “can legislate, bring down costs, end these wars.”
The mood among Democrats was quickly turning to “resolute” amid the jubilation, said consultant Andrew DeStefano. Party operatives want to build lasting power, he said, not become just another swing in the electoral pendulum.
“Folks don’t want this to be the latest ping-pong volley,” DeStefano said. “Laser focused on how we can deliver on some achievable concrete policy.”
Xavier Becerra, who grew up in a 685-square-foot house with his parents and three sisters in working-class Sacramento before ascending to Stanford University, Congress and the White House Cabinet, will become California’s first directly elected Latino governor.
The historic victory thrusts the unassuming Democrat into the forefront of California’s scathing fight with the Trump administration over immigration enforcement, healthcare funding, environmental protections and social issues.
“I didn’t run to make history,” Becerra told supporters at his election night party in West Sacramento. “I ran to make a difference for anyone and everyone who calls California home — whether you voted for me or not.”
He paid tribute to his parents and late labor icon Dolores Huerta before stating his “straightforward” mission: “Deliver a California we can afford and defend a California we can’t afford to lose.”
The Associated Press declared Becerra the winner at 8 p.m. Tuesday. He beat Republican Steve Hilton, a conservative commentator and former British political strategist backed by President Trump. Hilton conceded defeat a little before 9:15 p.m.
“We have a new governor of California,” he told about 800 supporters at his election night party in Garden Grove. “I know it’s not the one you wished for but I do wish Xavier Becerra well.”
Though the mood at his event was mostly one of defeat, Hilton stirred the crowd with a promise to help Republicans break the Democratic supermajority in the state Legislature in 2028.
“We love California and we’re going to fight for California,” he said. “The fight goes on. We have a plan.”
Becerra, 68, will take the helm with a slate of potential economic opportunity: luring back Hollywood production, drawing international visitors to the 2028 Olympic Games and responsibly growing the artificial intelligence industry.
But there are also a long list of challenges: grappling with worst-in-the-nation unemployment, solving the housing crisis, and preparing for and responding to seemingly endless natural disasters.
Becerra spent more than 25 years in Congress before he was appointed California attorney general and, later, secretary of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration. His long resume, as he often argued during the campaign, positions him to enter the governor’s office without “training wheels.”
“It’s groundbreaking,” Anna Sampaio, a professor of ethnic studies and political science at Santa Clara University, said of Becerra’s win. “It’s particularly important in this moment when Latinos are under siege, when they’re targeted by the federal government, and you have a Latino not only being elected, but a Latino who is consistently delivering this message that he is going to stand in opposition to a Trump agenda.”
Despite his long-standing presence in California politics, the modest Becerra initially struggled to energize support for his gubernatorial campaign. When explosive sexual assault allegations pushed a front-running Democrat out of the race, Becerra, a staid and experienced candidate with a clean reputation, leaped to the top of the crowded field and finished first in the top-two June primary.
The state has had one Latino governor, Romualdo Pacheco, who assumed office in 1875 when Gov. Newton Booth stepped down after winning a U.S. Senate seat.
Becoming the first Latino directly elected to California’s highest office is a distinction Becerra was reluctant to promote on the campaign trail, preferring instead to focus on his humble roots. His father, born in Sacramento and raised in Mexico, labored on farms and construction sites; his Mexico-born mother was a clerical worker.
The largest ethnic group in California, Latinos make up more than 40% of the state’s population and roughly a third of its voters.
Though noteworthy, polling suggests Latino voters care more about results than his history-making win.
“We’re moving from an era that has defined Xavier Becerra’s career as focused almost entirely on representation to one where the voters are demanding results far more,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who studies Latino voters. “When the housing situation for Latinos is getting worse, when affordability is getting worse, when school performance measures are not getting better, what difference does it make who’s holding office when we should be focused on results?”
Though he offered few specifics, Becerra discussed his priorities throughout the campaign. He plans to declare a housing emergency and speed up construction.
He will take Gov. Gavin Newsom’s baton on the thorny question of who should pay when megafires burn. And he wants to ensure there are no disruptions to Medi-Cal coverage, even for undocumented workers — a herculean task with as much as $30 billion in federal cuts looming.
“Hopefully he uses an overwhelming victory to achieve what he wants to get done in 100 days,” said Steven Maviglio, who served as a spokesman for former Gov. Gray Davis. “That’s when you’re most powerful: when you assume office with an agenda, so hopefully he’ll detail that within days of being elected.”
Becerra’s victory ushers in a new era of Latino political power in California. For the first time, all members of the “big three” who negotiate the state’s behemoth budget — the governor, Assembly speaker and state Senate president — come from working-class, immigrant backgrounds.
“When you’ve watched your parents and grandparents struggle to make ends meet, you bring a different perspective,” said Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister). “If we do this right, history won’t remember us simply because we were the first. History is going to remember us because we made a difference. We want California to work for everybody.”
Times staff writer Andrew Campa contributed to this report.
However, it appears that viewers will still have to wait and see just who it was that fell at the last hurdle. Fans were already warned that voting for who they wanted to win the series would be paused. The process was put on hold from Tuesday (November 3) morning at 9am.
According to the ITV voting website, it would open again after Wednesday night’s episode is aired. Afterwards, fans will be allowed to vote another five times for their favourite.
Last weekend, Philip and Rochelle were the last housemates evicted during a live show. It was the only double eviction during the current ITV series. Following their exit, it was reported that Philip would not be attending the planned reunion episode on Friday.
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The final line-up will be made up from seven of the following: Twinks, Samuel, Lynx, Rochelle, Frankie, Catrin, Omar and Yasmin. Fans think they have already worked out the order in which the remainder of the housemates will place, along with the eventual winner.
According to the results of polls shared on the Big Brother UK subreddit, Twinks is the overwhelming favourite. Across several polls for who people were apparently going to vote to win, she gained 47% of the vote.
The results claim that Lynx is most likely have been booted out in the backdoor eviction. Meanwhile, it states Samuel and Rochelle make up the rest of the top three.
Others have speculated on social media someone else will be the housemate to go. One person posted: “The fact someone is being evicted right now and we have to wait until tomorrow to find out. Feel cheated that we won’t get to hear any crowd reaction for Omar though.”
However, Frankie’s name has also been suggested a number of times. Some viewers shared their frustrations during companion show The Group Chat, awaiting confirmation of the eviction. One person said: “The fact we’re doing this group chat knowing someone (people??) been evicted right now and can’t see who really winds me up.”
One fan was confused that hosts GK Barry and Kate Lawler discussed bodily functions of housemates. They asked: “If this made the edit, can’t wait for part two.”
Big Brother continues tomorrow at 9pm on ITV2 and ITVX.
Hollywood Park was winning one fight and losing another, both by slim margins, as vote counting continued Tuesday night on two ballot measures in Inglewood.
According to results posted by the Los Angeles County registrar shortly after 10:30 p.m., Measure AT was losing, 51.9% to 48.1%, a margin of 583 votes; and Measure BB was losing 51% to 49%, a margin of 307.
Measure AT would mean more ticket taxes for big events in Inglewood, home to SoFi Stadium, Intuit Dome and the Forum. The City of Inglewood wants that.
Measure BB would bar the city from allowing billboard advertising on sidewalks, medians and the like. Owners of those sports and entertainment venues, who have their own sponsorship deals, are backing that measure.
Meanwhile, City Council member Gloria D. Gray led incumbent Mayor James T. Butts Jr., 34.6% to 29.8%, putting them on an early track for a runoff election in March.
Los Angeles County does not provide a timeline for when the election results will be listed as final.
The ballot measures were spawned by a feud between Inglewood and Hollywood Park, the nearly 300-acre development anchored by SoFi Stadium and owned by Rams owner Stan Kroenke.
The fight started last year over billboards. Inglewood signed a deal with WOW Media for 60 digital signs carrying 108 screens, some of them bus-shelter-sized kiosks. Others are street displays up to 22 feet tall on sidewalks and medians.
SoFi Stadium, Intuit Dome and the Forum sued to block the deal, arguing the signs would undercut their individual sponsors who paid for exclusivity. A judge sided with the city and an appeal is underway.
Measure BB, short for “Billboard Blight,” aimed to restrict billboard advertising on public property. It qualified with nearly 13,000 signatures.
The WOW deal runs 20 years with two 10-year options, so it could be around for 40 years.
“It’s biblical in length,” said John Shallman, the political strategist managing the “Yes on BB” campaign. “You go back 40 years. We didn’t even have the Internet. We didn’t have cell phones.”
Skip Miller, lead attorney for the city, said the kiosks “blend in with the surrounding areas” and connect to a network that provides traffic and safety information.
The billboards are subject to Inglewood Ballot Measure BB, which calls for the halt of advertising on them.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
Measure AT, backed by the city, would lift a $15-million cap on the 10% admission tax the stadium pays. Hollywood Park sees it as punishment for challenging the billboard deal.
The billboard fight led to a bigger one. Last month, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled void the 2015 development agreement that cleared the way for SoFi Stadium, citing a 2018 Moreno Valley decision.
Under the 2015 agreement, Hollywood Park paid up front for roads, water lines, streetlights and event-day police and emergency services, with the city agreeing to eventually reimburse Kroenke for those expenses. Now that the agreement has been voided, the city argues it isn’t required to pay.
And yet Trump bestrode the country like no figure since Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was not just a political titan, but an irresistible social and cultural force.
On Tuesday, however, time, impatience and gravity finally caught up with Trump.
He took an electoral thrashing that will stand alongside the worst political beat-downs of modern times. His party not only lost control of the House and Senate, but drowned in a blue wave that swept away Republicans in election contests big and small, from sea to shining sea.
Presidents almost invariably lose congressional seats at the midpoint of their term, especially during their second stretch in office. But Tuesday’s results weren’t predestiny. They were a Republican disaster wholly of Trump’s making.
Keeping control of the House, which the GOP held by a historically small margin, was always going to be exceedingly difficult, even after Trump and his allies ruthlessly gerrymandered congressional lines to improve their chances. Democrats needed a gain of merely three seats. They scooped those up before the polls even closed in California, Nevada and other Western states.
The only question, with many races still to be decided, is how big a majority Democrats will enjoy when the next Congress convenes in January.
The political map could scarcely have been more favorable. Roughly two-thirds of the contested Senate seats were in states that Trump carried in 2024. Five of the seven toss-up races were in states Trump won, several by double digits.
Democrats were happily biding their time Tuesday night, awaiting results from Michigan and Alaska to see how many seats they would ultimately gain.
At the start of this election cycle, the notion that Democrats would seriously compete in such deep-red bastions as Kansas, South Carolina and Texas would have seemed absurd. On Tuesday, voters elected Democrats James Talarico in Texas and Annie Andrews in South Carolina, the first time the party has won a statewide office in either state in decades.
In Kansas, Adam Hamilton beat Roger Marshall to become Kansas’ first Democratic U.S. senator since before “The Wizard of Oz” was released in movie theaters in 1939.
Trump could not have done more in the last two years to undermine his party and its political standing if he’d purposely set out on a mission of self-sabotage.
His tariffs and, in particular, go-it-alone war with Iran stoked inflation and sent the cost of gas, diesel, groceries and fertilizer soaring. Those elevated prices taxed consumers everywhere but hit particularly hard in rural, small town and exurban America, which is home to much of the Republican base.
As inflation worsened and his seeming obtuseness grew — “I don’t give a damn,” Trump said of higher gas prices, “we’re making a freaking fortune” — the president’s approval ratings sank to levels not seen since a Trump-inspired mob laid siege to the Capitol in a failed bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Even that defeat wasn’t as bad as Tuesday’s political massacre.
Voters were not happy.
Roughly three-quarters of those sampled by the Associated Press said they were angry or dissatisfied with the overall direction of the country as well as the state of the economy. Nearly 7 in 10 said they wanted Congress, supine under Republican control, to provide more checks and balances on the capricious president.
From 1960 to 1978, there were three elections in which control of the White House, Senate or House switched parties. From 1980 to 1998, there were four. Since 2000, there have been 12 elections in which power shifted, with Tuesday’s midterm referendum being the latest.
Voters have punished presidents for an unpopular war (in Iraq), for policies they didn’t like (Obamacare, threatened cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) and for that particular scourge of presidents and their parties, inflation.
But no other midterm election this century delivered the kind of personal repudiation that Trump faced, because no other president placed himself so very front and center in the campaign.
Riding the thermals of his over-inflated ego, marching stridently beneath his banner of self-regard, Trump incessantly urged voters “to pretend I’m on the ballot.” They did and their verdict was thunderous and clear.
As voters cast their ballots in the much anticipated midterms on Tuesday, TV networks will give their viewers a closer look at how the election sausage is made.
As usual, anchors and analysts will be at their network news desks when votes are counted to determine whether the Democrats can take the House and the Senate from Republicans for the final two years of President Trump’s second term, along with gubernatorial races across the country.
But TV news organizations are rolling out additional tools and options for viewers who want a more granular look at how the vote is counted and winners are declared, responding to a heightened interest in national politics and a demand for greater transparency in an age of media distrust.
“In the last few years, as we’ve seen incredibly close elections with higher turnout and tight political divides, people are understandably looking for more transparent ways to understand how and why elections turn out the way they do,” said Jennifer Agiesta, CNN’s vice president of election and data reporting innovation.
Chuck Todd, the former NBC News political director and “Meet the Press” moderator who was among the first analysts to do deeper dives into voting data on TV, compared the increased appetite to how viewers watch sporting events. Tighter races pull in more eyeballs, especially at a time when the electorate is deeply divided over Trump’s actions and polices.
“Do people sit and watch and want more things when things are blowouts, or do people want more information when it’s decided by a nose hair?” Todd said. “You can’t discount that this is a generation of political competitiveness that feels existential.”
Todd noted that in the 21st century, the House, Senate or White House has changed hands in 11 out of 13 elections, while all but one of the seven presidential contests have been won by less than five percentage points.
While NBC News is delivering an unprecedented 13 hours of midterm coverage to its affiliates, data junkies can see analyst Steve Kornacki’s real-time number crunching at the county and precinct level on the “Kornacki Cam” stream, available on YouTube and and the network’s streaming platform. Kornacki drew millions of viewers online with his big board and trademark khakis throughout the primary season, when he streamed on nights the network was not on the air. This time around, the network will turn to him throughout the night for a broader look at the results, but he’ll be streaming continuously for those who need an immediate numbers fix.
“I’m hoping they will live stream on the phone and the broadcast on TV,” Kornacki said in a recent interview. “They can be complementary.”
Kornacki will have plenty of company in this election cycle. While CBS News chief political correspondent Ed O’Keefe has the assignment of breaking down the numbers on TV, the network is also serving up a live stream of “The Nerd Show,” with Anthony Salvanto, the network’s director of elections and surveys, and Caitlin Huey-Burns, a CBS News congressional correspondent. They will provide a continuous deep dive into the numbers as they come in.
Nexstar’s cable news channel NewsNation will have a camera fixed on the analysts from Decision Desk HQ, the upstart company that provides voting data to media outlets and corporations.
“You are going to hear my voice about the data, what we’re seeing, not seeing, why we think we can make a projection or why we need to hold off,” said Scott Tranter, Decision Desk HQ’s director of data science. “Sometimes we get data that may look good, but it may not be enough [to call a race]. So you kind of get that back and forth, that ebb and flow.”
Todd is among the growing number of independent journalists who have launched their own programs on streaming platforms. He will host a live stream on election night with veteran Washington pundit Chris Cillizza through their Noosphere platform, which will also have full access to Decision Desk HQ data. Todd and Cillizza are partners with Decision Desk HQ on the special, which will be developed into a daily program in 2027.
CNN is also offering its digital users more advanced voting analysis though a new tool called Sightline. Sightline will provide the data the network uses to determine the outcome of races, showing the outstanding vote total, geography, vote method and comparisons with past elections. Viewers can see the information before CNN chief national correspondent John King presents the results on the network’s Magic Wall.
Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer will deliver results and vote counts on an augmented reality set. But users of the Fox News app will have an AI-powered function that provides instant access to the network’s reporting on any contest.
“The idea is to really offer a personalized experience for the users of the national picture or their state or race that they want to look at specifically,” said Doug Rohrbeck, executive vice president of Washington News & Politics for Fox News Media. “The folks who log on can ask about specific races, voting trends, candidates, when polls close and a grid of the balance of power as it’s populating.”
The major networks each have their own decision desk where statisticians, political scientists and analysts pore over vote counts, historical trends and polling to determine a winner. They are typically insulated from the anchors and pundits during coverage, but occasionally show up on the air when necessary.
Showing the work carries its own risk. Early returns can swing sharply as mail-in and election day ballots are counted at different times, and those shifts have been seized on as evidence that something is amiss. Fox News had to put its decision desk chief Arnon Mishkin on camera in 2020 when the network’s viewers and the Trump White House were angered over its early but accurate projection that Joe Biden won Arizona in the presidential election.
NBC News is betting on openness. The network aired a lengthy segment on the Thursday’s edition of “Today” to explain how its decision desk operates and comes up with its election night projections.
“The audience wants to know the work behind the calls and they really want to understand it,” said Rebecca Blumenstein, president-editorial for NBC News. “By showing that work, we feel that it’s a really important part of building trust.”
Another element driving interest is online prediction markets, where users can wager on election results — and the betting companies are now paying for some of the coverage. Kalshi is a sponsor of CBS News’ coverage and of Todd’s election night stream. DraftKings is sponsoring election coverage on CBS’ owned television stations, including KCBS in Los Angeles.
It could take days to determine which party has the majority in the House and Senate. But Kornacki said there will be a strong indicator in the 7 p.m. Eastern hour when results come in from Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District, where both parties are competing for an open seat held by Rep. Andy Barr, a Republican who is running for Senate. Trump has won the district by 15 points or more in each of his three presidential runs.
“It’s an early test,” Kornacki said. “If the Democrats were able to win that or be really close, that’s a sign they’re having the kind of night that they’re kind of dreaming of.”
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc headed McLaren’s Lando Norris in Friday practice at the Mexico City Grand Prix.
Mercedes driver Kimi Antonelli, who is poised to clinch his first world title on Sunday, was fourth fastest behind team-mate George Russell.
Only a victory by Russell or Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton can theoretically stop Antonelli becoming champion on Sunday. Even then, Antonelli only needs ninth place if Russell wins and 10th if Hamilton does.
Leclerc, who topped both sessions on Friday, was 0.103 seconds quicker than Norris, with Russell just 0.003secs further adrift.
Antonelli was 0.217secs off the pace, and ahead of the Red Bulls of Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar.
Leclerc’s team-mate Lewis Hamilton was 11th overall after stopping on track with a technical problem before completing his qualifying simulation runs on the soft tyre.
Behind Hadjar, Racing Bulls duo Arvid Lindblad and Liam Lawson sandwiched Pierre Gasly’s Alpine, while McLaren’s Oscar Piastri completed the top 10.
Verstappen and Lawson face a trip to the stewards after a collision in the stadium early in the session.
“I don’t think it’s called unlucky,” said Verstappen. “Maybe not very smart behaviour what he was trying to do there.
“At the end of the day it is not going to change my weekend, but if I were him I would act a little smarter and when you’re fighting for your seat it’s not very smart behaviour.”
Lawson is one of three drivers competing for two seats at Racing Bulls, Red Bull’s junior team, next year, alongside current team-mate Arvid Lindblad and Bulgarian Formula 2 front-runner Nikola Tsolov.
Verstappen added: “When he saw me coming, he suddenly started to accelerate. I don’t know what was going through his head, that he wanted to drive me off the track in the hairpin.
“That’s not very sensible behavior from someone in his position, to pick a fight with me.”
The first session was marked by 10 of the 11 teams running ‘rookie’ drivers in their cars.
One of them was Cadillac’s Colton Herta, who the team are considering promoting to a race seat in place of Valtteri Bottas next season.
Initially, the team felt his running in Mexico had given him enough points under the F1 system to earn a ‘superlicence’, which is required to race in F1.
But further investigation by governing body the FIA revealed the American nine-time Indycar race winner is still one point short and will have to complete one further practice session this year to secure his licence.
The team plan to do that before the end of the season.
‘Zionism and the state of Israel is a racist enterprise’
Rami Khouri, a public policy fellow with the American University of Beirut challenges the idea that a strong IsraelI-Arab bloc result signals any positive shift in Israeli society, arguing that it will never change.
Shaun Wright-Phillips has revealed the moment it dawned him on that he could be about to leave Strictly Come Dancing after a tense dance-off that took place over the weekend
20:06, 26 Oct 2026Updated 20:07, 26 Oct 2026
Shaun Wright-Phillips has spoken out after his Strictly Come Dancing exit (Image: BBC)
Shaun Wright-Phillips has revealed the moment it dawned him on that he knew he was about to leave Strictly Come Dancing.
It was the second time in the series that the couple had found themselves in the dance off, but, in his first interview since exiting the programme, Shaun has admitted he knew it was coming.
Speaking to Ellie Taylor on Monday’s edition of It Takes Two, when asked how it felt when he was told he was in the bottom two again, he said: “I kind of knew. In my head I kind of knew so mentally I was already preparing myself from that moment.
“As soon as we got into that room in the back, I was visualising straight away. We were running the steps where I made the mistakes and once again I was doing them fine so that confused me to the point where I knew them but I still made the mistake.”
It was then that Alexis chipped in to show that she still has nothing but support for her former dance partner. She said: “That happens. I think… I want him to give himself grace for that because that’s sometimes just what happens on the floor and with everything.
“Sometimes things don’t always make sense but even when he did mess up, he kept pushing and he ended strong. He always kept pushing. He’s a fighter, from day one until now. He just has that fight in him, that spirit.”
On Sunday evening, viewers watched as Shaun and Alexis failed to turn things around in the dance off with Jaime Winstone and her partner Carlos Gu, who finished in the bottom two after the public vote despite scoring 25 for their dance on Saturday’s episode of the BBC dancing show.
Shaun said: “I don’t think I can put into words how my time has been, from the pros, judges, staff behind the cameras, everyone who’s helped me along the way, it’s been the most amazing journey I’ve had. And thank you for giving me the chance to be on the Strictly Ballroom floor and actually learn how to dance.”
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Alexis, commented: “The resilience that this man has is so admirable, and I just want to say thank you so much. You have made this season such a joy for me, and it’s been so lovely to just get to know you and get to see you completely handle something different.
“And I’m so proud of how you just danced that dance-off. And that, that’s what we talk about, that’s the grit that you did. And I am so proud of you, and you should be so beyond happy with yourself. And also, the gentleman that this man is, I feel so honoured to have had him as my partner, so a friend for life!
Addressing Alexis, Shaun said: “Thank you, I couldn’t ask for a better partner, a better human being, you knew how to deal with my mood swings, you put me in my box, you got me back on the dancefloor, you knew how to work with me, I wish I could’ve taken you further.”
When asked if he’ll continue dancing, he responded: “Oh hell yeah,” before saying he would return each week to support his co-stars.
Brazil’s right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro has called for the presidential election result to be ‘annulled’ after losing to incumbent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. He called the circumstances ‘unprecedented’ after voting was extended by two hours.
In what may be one of the most comical self-owns in recent politics, the esteemed attorneys of the U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday that despite the extravagant and terrifying misuse of their investigative power under the Trump administration, they have so far been able to identify only 28 people in all of California who may have voted illegally.
“The announcement today by the United States DOJ makes the point that there is no widespread voter fraud,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said after the news conference announcing the results of “Operation Protect the Vote.”
Twenty-eight people out of about 23 million registered voters in the state — and not all of them even tried to vote, according to the feds. That’s about 1 in 820,000 folks allegedly registering or voting illegally, a rate that roughly matches how often people in the United States get struck by lightning in a given year.
So much for Trump’s endless claims that there is a vast, organized conspiracy between Democrats and undocumented people to have them vote in large numbers to steal elections. I’ll point out here that none of those charged Monday have been accused of colluding with one another or with Democratic overlords.
All the power of the government — investigative, technological, legal — has been thrown at finding these mysterious, diabolically clever ballot baddies. And now, thanks to Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, and his colleagues across this great state, we now know that all 28 of them will be held accountable, if the government can prove wrongdoing. And let’s be clear — people who vote illegally should be held accountable.
But wait, there’s more, because this election-stealing plot by immigrants certainly doesn’t stop at the state line. Seamus Hughes of Court Watch, an excellent site that tracks federal litigation, reported Monday that since the start of this administration, 169 people have been charged federally with illegally registering or voting.
That number includes the new California cases, so it means an additional 141 potentially illegal voters have been charged across the U.S. — all told about 1 in 1.25 million registered voters being accused of illegally registering or voting, making this crime slightly less likely than guessing a six-digit pin code on the first try.
There. Is. No. Election. Stealing.
But that’s where the funny part ends, because this attack on California elections is serious and just getting started.
The federal government, you’ve probably read, is suing California, claiming it gave the state a janky thumb drive with 20,000 names of registered voters that it sort of strongly suspects maybe aren’t legal voters. Important note here: The government has been very careful not to claim that these people voted illegally, just that it might be so based on questionable data, which I’ll get to in a minute.
The feds gave the state a silly 48-hour deadline to agree to change constitutional law, dump common sense and sequester these 20,000 ballots, if they were even returned, to double-check they were cast by valid voters.
When California rightfully refused — because elections are run by states, not the federal government — the federal government sued on the thinnest of legal grounds. It basically claimed that voting illegally is illegal, and if California doesn’t do exactly what Trump wants, it could be violating the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution by impeding the feds from enforcing the crime of voter fraud.
First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli speaks at a news conference Monday at which officials announced that 28 people in California had been charged with voter fraud.
(David Butow / For The Times)
Which is basically arguing that if the state government fails to stop voter fraud using the flawed methods Trump likes, then the state is somehow stopping federal authorities from prosecuting voter fraud themselves. But didn’t they just enforce it with 28 cases?
Get ready, because “state-facilitated voter fraud,” is a new right-wing thing.
California is “being complicit in non-citizens voting in our elections, and as they were warned last week, not only is it a civil violation, but they could also face criminal consequences,” Essayli said, which if it happened would give Trumped-up charges a whole new meaning.
Essayli said state officials are not being “good faith actors,” but I’ll argue that shoe is on the other foot. The list of 20,000 alleged, suspected, maybe-maybe-not illegal voters was likely drawn from the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, created by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, if you can remember that unfortunate relic.
It sought to draw data from more than a dozen government databases that were not only not compatible with such information sharing, but which had been kept separate until now for privacy reasons. Americans in general did not want the government collecting unified, know-all records of every citizen.
Luckily for us, I guess, the SAVE system can’t actually create reliable, unified records. It confuses people, convolutes them, merges records of people with similar names, and in general has been deemed unreliable by data experts.
In September, the good folks at the UCLA Voting Rights Project joined with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights to sue the federal government over its use of that system to target naturalized citizens for removal from voter rolls. Turns out, the government appears to be targeting immigrants who are now citizens with these voter fraud accusations.
As I wrote about a few weeks ago, naturalized citizens make up about 1 in 10 eligible voters, and nearly a quarter of them live in California. But they also live in swing states such as Michigan, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed may draw such voters, and in other places such as Georgia and Nevada where races might be decided by only a few votes.
These arrests and lawsuits while voting is already underway in the midterms are a not-subtle form of voter suppression. Imagine being a naturalized citizen in the Central Valley, where ICE is driving rampant fear and where Republican Rep. David Valadao is running against Democrat Randy Villegas in California’s 22nd Congressional District — one of the nation’s most closely contested races.
Would you consider sitting this election out just in case your ballot draws the frightening eye of the federal government? Even knowing that your vote is legal, what if you lived in a mixed-status household? Would it be worth risking voting if it meant a knock at the door from immigration checking on your status, and maybe finding that family member who lacks it?
Why take the risk?
“Basically, what they’re doing now is just completely harassing and intimidating naturalized citizens who are legally eligible to vote through these actions,” said Matt Barreto, co-founder of the Voting Rights Project.
And if the vote isn’t suppressed enough to give Trump the results he wants, these prosecutions and lawsuits feed the beast of conspiracy, giving Trump fodder to claim the results are fake, the election stolen.
And round and round we go, reckoning with Trump’s claims that lightning is striking everyone, everywhere, all at once, because the vote didn’t go his way.
Let’s take you through the critical decisions Roberts made Wednesday night, the ones you second-guessed at home. They all pretty much backfired on him.
Situation: In the third inning, and again in the fifth inning, Tommy Edman comes to bat with Miguel Rojas on first base, none out, and the Dodgers trailing, 1-0. By the end of the fifth, the Dodgers had gone nine consecutive innings without scoring, and with a game plan of getting ahead before the Brewers’ vaunted bullpen could take over. Roberts does not ask Edman, one of the team’s most accomplished bunters, to sacrifice the runner into scoring position.
Roberts: “I just didn’t feel like giving up an out right there. … We could have bunted, but I felt I wanted to give Tommy an opportunity to drive in a run. … We haven’t been getting hits with runners in scoring position (3 for 32 in the postseason). To give up an out, to bank on getting a hit with runners in scoring position, I’d rather just try to maybe slug, hit a double.”
Result: Edman flied out both times. The Dodgers did not score in either inning.
———
Situation: In the sixth inning, with the Dodgers still trailing, 1-0, the Brewers turn to Abner Uribe, who had faced 26 batters and walked two in the postseason. Uribe walks the first two batters, and Roberts deploys his primary left-handed bench threat, Max Muncy. That takes right-handed Andy Pages out of the game; the only Dodgers with more hits than Pages this October are Kyle Tucker and Mookie Betts.
Roberts: “Abner is death on righties. You’re trying to guard against — you want to keep the inning going, and you don’t want a double play ball. Muncy’s not starting, and you want to fire that bullet in a leverage spot. First and second base, nobody out, it gives us the best chance to keep the inning going, in my opinion, and it gets Shohei up, and you have a chance to build an inning.”
Result: Muncy struck out.
———
Josue DePaula’s presence was wasted in Game 3.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Situation: After Muncy, Ohtani walks to load the bases, and Will Smith follows with a two-run double to give the Dodgers a 2-1 lead. With the right-handed Rojas due up, Roberts opts for the left-handed Josue De Paula as a pinch-hitter. Brewers manager Pat Murphy promptly replaces Uribe with left-hander DL Hall, who had been warming up. Roberts counters with the right-handed Kiké Hernández.
Roberts: “It’s a decision: Do I want Uribe facing Rojas? Then I chose De Paula, and they made the move. At that point in time, I felt we had the matchup advantage with Kiké. … For me, all the experience that Kiké’s had, I feel very confident with Kiké taking a bat with a guy on second and third, infield in.”
Result: Hernandez struck out, and so did Edman. The inning was over, and the Dodgers would not advance another man past first base the rest of the evening. The Dodgers could have used De Paula to bat against right-handed closer Trevor Megill in the ninth inning, but Roberts had already burned him.
Murphy said Uribe was coming out after Smith’s double no matter what — at that point, Uribe had thrown six strikes and 14 balls — so Roberts could have saved De Paula had he waited to see what Murphy would do.
———
Situation: Blake Snell has retired 14 consecutive batters entering the seventh inning, with the Dodgers leading, 2-1. It’s the first time the left-handed Snell has pitched beyond the sixth inning this season, with the right-handed Andrew Vaughn leading off and the left-handed Jake Bauers and Garrett Mitchell to follow. Evan Phillips is warming up in the Dodgers bullpen.
Roberts: “His stuff was really good. I don’t think they were seeing him well. I was trying to get him three more hitters. We had Evan for that fourth hitter.”
Result: Vaughn walks, on six pitches. Bauers homers, on 11 pitches. The Brewers have the lead, 3-2.
Roberts: “Hasn’t given up a homer all year, but it just — it’s baseball. For me, I felt good with where Blake’s stuff was at. You’ve got to give Bauers credit.”
Situation: By that time, Snell is at 99 pitches, two shy of his season high, after the exhausting battles with Vaughn and Bauers. Roberts sticks to his plan: Snell for Mitchell, then Phillips for the right-handed Cooper Pratt.
Result: Mitchell homers, giving the Brewers a 4-2 lead. Hall and Megill combine for 3 1/3 innings of scoreless relief, and the Dodgers are one defeat from winter vacation.
Shohei Ohtani emerged from the visiting dugout at American Family Field with a bat in his hand, and the mass of media members scattered in foul territory up the third-base line shifted his way, pulled by the magnetic force that is Ohtani’s stardom.
Monday marked the third straight day Ohtani had hit on the field, after a multi-round session off the pitching machine on the workout day and batting practice before each of the first two games of the National League Championship series against the Milwaukee Brewers. But the novelty of the move — Ohtani only took batting practice on the field a few times during the regular season, always in the midst of a slump — had yet to fully wear off.
“The results, take full responsibility,” Ohtani said through interpreter Will Ireton on Tuesday. “That’s all I can really say, why the results haven’t been where I wanted it to be. But I think there’s different approaches to this, whether that be focusing on reducing the symptoms and getting rid of the pain and/or just making sure that I’m moving well in the swing.”
That break of routine for the start of the NLCS did not pay off in terms of results. But after a conversation with Ohtani, manager Dave Roberts said Tuesday that he felt “great” about playing Ohtani in Game 3 of the NLCS, even though Ohtani is still physically compromised by nagging right biceps and left knee problems.
“He’s adamant he feels good enough to be in there,” Roberts said. “He’s close to finding something with his swing. … Yeah, he wants to be in there and help us win a ballgame and win a championship. Great conversation, and I’m excited about having him in there.”
Roberts made clear that he wasn’t ever considering “benching” Ohtani, but rather weighing whether it would make sense to give him a couple days to “reset,” similar to how they approached Freddie Freeman’s ankle injury in 2024, giving him two days off during that postseason run.
“The symptoms have subdued a lot, especially when I was on the IL, spending that time just being able to reduce the symptoms,” Ohtani said. “As of now with the swing, it’s a daily process of trying different things, different feel on a daily basis.”
Though Ohtani’s arrival kicked off the Dodgers’ back-to-back championships, this isn’t his first time slumping in the postseason. His bat went quiet in the 2024 World Series (two for 19). And between his two-homer game to open last year’s wild-card round, and Game 4 of the NLCS when the two-way star authored the best individual game ever played, he went four for 33.
The difference this time is Ohtani, who has hit three singles in 20 postseason at-bats, isn’t fully healthy. But he was adamant that he would still be able to find a way to produce regardless.
“Over the course of this long season, there’s only really a short period of time when my mechanics is completely in sync,” he said. “So it’s just really kind of just going back and forth, finding the right parts of the swing and managing just the different parts of the swing. So it’s a constant, ongoing process that’s headed in the right direction.”
When healthy, Ohtani has the ability to break out of even the most dire of slumps with an otherworldly performance, like that three-homer (as a hitter), 10-strikeout (as a pitcher) all-timer. Opposing pitchers still have taken a cautious approach to facing him.
This version of Ohtani, however, hasn’t hit a home run since Aug. 18, a little over three weeks before he landed on the injured list. He’d played through nagging knee and biceps injuries for most of the season. But by the first week of September, the Dodgers could no longer argue that his poor performance wasn’t necessarily connected to his ailments.
Shohei Ohtani strikes out during the sixth inning of Game 2.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Now, the stakes are as high as ever. Trailing the Brewers 2-0 in the best-of-seven series, the Dodgers desperately need to put themselves in the best possible position to win Game 3 and avoid four straight win-or-go-home contests. And to do so, they need to know what kind of production Ohtani is physically capable of.
“I’ve never wavered in my belief in him,” Roberts said. “The work that he’s putting in — shoot, he squared the bunt in Game 2 to potentially get on base. That just speaks to whatever it takes to help the team win. He’s always been about the team, whether it’s hitting first, second, fourth, or wherever, right? So for me, just hearing his conviction, that’s what I wanted to hear.”
The communication between Ohtani and the team on injuries has been a work in progress in his third year with the Dodgers.
“We certainly had a lot of communication with him throughout the year, and worked together really well in terms of how to go about this,” president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said in late September.
“And I think in his mind, he just thought that what he was dealing with was more minor, because it wasn’t like he would see a doctor and go, ‘Oh my God, you have this ailment.’ There were just a number of different things that were bothering him. And I think in his mind, he thought the best way to help the team was to go out and play, which I respect. But us staying really connected and sharing that information, I think, will be really important going forward.
“And again, the communication back and forth has been awesome. The fully sharing exactly how he’s feeling, maybe not as awesome. But again, I would rather [have] that with a guy than the other side of that.”
So, Ohtani kept trying to work his way back to the mound for weeks after receiving a lubricating Orthovisc injection in his knee at the beginning of the All-Star break. And when his biceps injury flared again, and the discomfort extended up through his neck, the Dodgers put off an IL move as long as possible.
Roberts said Ohtani’s conviction lined up with what the manager was hearing from the Dodgers hitting coaches and medical staff.
“No one knows what’s going to happen tomorrow and the ensuing days,” Roberts said. “At the end of the day in this big moment, we’re listening to Shohei, and we’re going to support the crap out of him and believe in him, and that’s it.”
Hamilton had started on the medium tyres while Verstappen and Leclerc chose the softs. Despite his theoretically more durable tyres, the Briton pitted on lap 18 to switch to the softs, while Leclerc waited until lap 24 to swap his softs for mediums.
Leclerc came out of the pits from his stop just ahead of Hamilton, who had stronger pace on his softer tyres.
Yet Ferrari chose not to order Leclerc to let Hamilton through to maximise his pace, a decision that was questioned by Hamilton from the car.
A virtual safety car was called on lap 39 and Leclerc and Antonelli, who had chased the Ferraris closely from the start from his fourth place on the grid, took the opportunity for a cheap pit stop – it takes 10 seconds less to stop under a safety car than under racing conditions.
Yet Hamilton, despite having older tyres, did not stop, a decision that promoted him to second behind Verstappen.
As Leclerc was catching Hamilton, the Briton was told he needed to stop again; he pushed back to suggest he try to go to the end, but was told they were six laps short to make it in terms of tyre life.
Leclerc soon caught Hamilton and passed him on lap 46 and set off after Verstappen, but could get no closer than 7.3 seconds to the Red Bull.
Hamilton never did stop, but as his tyres lost grip he fell back into the clutches of Norris and Antonelli.
A passing attempt by Norris on lap 54 with eight to go saw Hamilton run off track and take to the escape road at Turn One, but as he did, Antonelli grabbed the chance to pass the McLaren, and then Hamilton later on the same lap.
Norris followed him through, and now Hamilton fell back towards the second McLaren of Oscar Piastri, who passed him on the final lap after a resolute attempted defence from Hamilton.
It was Hamilton’s call not to stop and he apologised for it on the slowing down lap – but there remain a number of questions as to the choices made.
Russell’s fight back through the field took him up to seventh as he delayed his pit stop as long as possible.
But after dropping back to 10th behind Audi’s Nico Hulkenberg and Alpine’s Pierre Gasly, he passed Gasly after trailing him for 10 laps or so, but could not make it past Hulkenberg, who was himself chasing Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson.
Red Bull’s Isack Hadjar took the final point in 10th after starting from the back.
