WASHINGTON CROSSING, Pennsylvania—At a campaign rally in the most important swing state in the country, anti-Trump activist George Conway told the Daily Beast why he thinks Kamala Harris can win over Republicans.

“She’s kind of done it already,” he said. “Look at all those people who voted for [Nikki] Haley when she was already done. I actually think there’s kind of a hidden Harris vote for Republicans who are just exhausted by Donald Trump.”

Turnout is another factor that plays to Democrat’s advantage, Conway predicted. “I also think that even the people who are still for Trump and won’t vote for Harris, I don’t think the turnout’s going to be great for him.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Fox News host Bret Baier recapped his Wednesday night interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, telling his colleagues that he got a sense early on that Harris “was going to be tough to redirect without me trying to interrupt.”

The interview, Harris’ first on the right-wing network since becoming the Democratic nominee, was broadcast on Special Report after being filmed in the previous hour. According to Baier, the interview had been scheduled for 5 p.m., but Harris showed up 15 minutes late. This, he complained, was like “icing the kicker” in football.

“We were supposed to start at 5 p.m. This was the time they gave us. Originally, we were going to do 25 or 30 minutes. They came in and said, ‘Well, maybe 20.’ So, it’s already getting whittled down. And then the vice president showed up at about 5:15 p.m. We were pushing the envelope to be able to turn it around for the top of the 6 p.m.. So that’s how it started,” Baier said.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

I never completed the original Red Dead Redemption, but not for the usual reasons of being terrible at the game, or thinking that open worlds are too big and boring these days and I just want to lie down forever and watch anime. I never finished it because my Xbox 360 version was not, in practice, an open world game, but a lonely farm at the bottom of a vortex of butchered spacetime. In the prologue, reformed outlaw John Marston confronts an old bandit acquaintance and gets himself roundly shot to bits. He’s rescued by local rancher Bonnie MacFarlane, who nurses him back to health and gives him a few odd jobs to warm him up for the next plot point.

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Some extremely fresh vintage workwear that I bought for entirely practical reasons aside, I’m not exactly a fashion person. I have nobody to impress most days but my cat, and the only item of clothing she appears to have an opinion on is my Oodie, which is very comfortable for both of us and also smells like a chicken shop, which I imagine is more pleasant for her than me.

This aside, I found myself taking a whole bunch of Dragon Age: The Veilguard screenshots as I played just to capture the RPG’s various outfits. They are ridiculous. Incredibly intricate and detailed, as well as being obscenely impractical for the most part. I do not like any of them in the sense I would wear them, but I like all of them in the sense that they display artists allowed to run free like caffeinated weasels and indulge their every whim.

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Some days, I wonder if every word written before a trailer is actually superfluous. It’s a visual medium, after all. What can a description achieve save to clumsily gesture at the true shape of something; a dog-eared tour brochure for a thrilling weekend spelunking in Plato’s cave? I can usually shake this feeling, but gory zombie action game Showa American Story is my breaking point. There is nothing I can impart about this thing that will not be conveyed better by allowing its new trailer to wash over you like a tide of sheer videogame. Here’s it:

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We’re still a week away from Blizzard’s Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct next Wednesday the 13th of November, but art from an apparent remaster of 1995 real time strategy game Warcraft II: Tides Of Darkness has leaked online, via Xibbly user Stiven. It’s a thin one, as far as leaks go, but does show what looks to be cover, logo art, and a Battle.net icon. Thanks for the spot, Percy Coswald Gamer.

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The dominion of hated Super Earth threatens to expand afresh as Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt toys openly with the prospect of Helldivers 2 cross-over games, beginning with tabletop wargame Trench Crusade and extending to, well, take your pick. Arrowhead's appetite for other licenses appears insatiable. It's the kind of sheer expansionism you'd expect from Earth's loathsome regime, whose "managed democracy" propaganda continues to enthrall thousands of hapless disposable imperialists. Pilestedt even wants to make a Fifth Element game! Milla Jovovich is spinning in her grave. Milla Jovovich isn't dead, you say? Well, that's good news at least.

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It was the 20-year anniversary of Halo 2 at the weekend, which saw the shooter's modern counterparts celebrating with classic multiplayer maps and long-lost levels. But also emerging from the dust of time are insights to the sequel's development back in 2004. Rolling Stone interviewed two key designers of the game and made a fun discovery. The Flood (the sickly pale alien infestation that briefly turns Halo into sci-fi horror) was partly inspired by a colourful and innocent children's book about a nice elephant.

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WASHINGTON — For U.S. presidents, meeting the families of military personnel killed in war is about as wrenching as the presidency gets. President Donald Trump’s suggestion Monday that his predecessors fell short in that duty brought a visceral reaction from those who witnessed those grieving encounters.

“He’s a deranged animal,” Alyssa Mastromonaco, a former deputy chief of staff to President Barack Obama, tweeted about Trump. With an expletive, she called Trump’s statement in the Rose Garden a lie.

Trump said in a news conference he had written letters to the families of four soldiers killed in an Oct. 4 ambush in Niger and planned to call them, crediting himself with taking extra steps in honoring the dead properly. “Most of them didn’t make calls,” he said of his predecessors. He said it’s possible that Obama “did sometimes” but “other presidents did not call.”

The record is plain that presidents reached out to families of the dead and to the wounded, often with their presence as well as by letter and phone. The path to Walter Reed and other military hospitals, as well as to the Dover, Delaware, Air Force Base where the remains of fallen soldiers are often brought, is a familiar one to Obama, George W. Bush and others.

Bush, even at the height of two wars, “wrote all the families of the fallen,” said Freddy Ford, spokesman for the ex-president. Ford said Bush also called or met “hundreds, if not thousands” of family members of the war dead.

READ MORE: What Trump said about his drug czar pick, health care fixes

Obama’s official photographer, Pete Souza, tweeted that he photographed Obama “meeting with hundreds of wounded soldiers, and family members of those killed in action.” Others recalled his frequent visits with Gold Star families, and travels to Walter Reed, Dover and other venues with families of the dead and with the wounded.

Retired Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed these contacts, tweeting: “POTUS 43 & 44 and first ladies cared deeply, worked tirelessly for the serving, the fallen, and their families. Not politics. Sacred Trust.”

Trump addressed the matter when asked why he had not spoken about the four soldiers killed in Niger. They died when militants thought to be affiliated with the Islamic State group ambushed them while they were patrolling in unarmored trucks with Nigerien troops.

“I actually wrote letters individually to the soldiers we’re talking about, and they’re going to be going out either today or tomorrow,” he said, meaning he wrote to the families of the fallen soldiers. He did not explain why letters had not been sent yet, more than a week after the attack.

“If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls,” Trump said.

Pressed on that statement later, he said of Obama: “I was told that he didn’t often, and a lot of presidents don’t. They write letters.” He went on: “President Obama, I think, probably did sometimes, and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. That’s what I was told. … Some presidents didn’t do anything.”

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said later that Trump “wasn’t criticizing predecessors, but stating a fact.” She argued that presidents didn’t always call families of those killed in battle: “Sometimes they call, sometimes they send a letter, other times they have the opportunity to meet family members in person.”

She said anyone claiming a former president had called every family was “mistaken.”

Bush’s commitment to writing to all military families of the dead and to reaching out by phone or meeting with many others came despite the enormity of the task. In the Iraq war alone, U.S. combat deaths were highest during his presidency, exceeding 800 each year from 2004 through 2007. The number fell to 313 in Bush’s last year in office as the insurgency faded. Bush once said he felt the appropriate way to show his respect was to meet family members in private.

READ MORE: What the Bannon vs. McConnell fight means for Trump and the GOP

Obama declared an end to combat operations in Iraq in August 2010 and the last U.S. troops were withdrawn in December 2011. As Obama wound down that war, he sent tens of thousands more troops into Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, and the death count mounted. From a total of 155 Americans killed in Afghanistan in 2008, which was Bush’s last full year in office, the number jumped to 311 in 2009 and peaked the next year at 498. In all, more than 1,700 died in Afghanistan on Obama’s watch.

Among other rituals honoring military families, the Obamas had a “Gold Star” Christmas tree in the White House decorated with hundreds of photos and notes from people who had lost loved ones in war. Gold Star families visited during the holidays, bringing ornaments.

Trump visited Dover early in his presidency, going in February with his daughter Ivanka for the return of the remains of a U.S. Navy SEAL killed during a raid in Yemen, William “Ryan” Owens.

Trump’s relations with Gold Star families have not always been smooth, dating from his belittlement of the parents of slain U.S. soldier Humayun Khan, who was Muslim. Trump was angered when the soldier’s father, Khizr Khan, was given a platform to criticize him at the Democratic National Convention.

Owens’ grieving father said he didn’t want to talk with Trump at Dover. But the sailor’s widow, Carryn, attended Trump’s address to Congress and wept as he thanked her.

___

Associated Press writers Robert Burns and Jesse J. Holland contributed to this report.

The post Trump’s claim about predecessors, fallen troops disputed appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

‘Little red dot’ galaxies seen by JWST appear to be much more tightly packed with stars than other galaxies, raising big questions about how they came to be this way

Greg Eghigian's After the Flying Saucers Came and Luis Elizondo's Imminent both show how our fascination with UFOs goes beyond simple curiosity

The European Space Agency is sending a probe to get a closer look at the asteroid Dimorphos, which had its orbit altered by NASA’s DART mission in 2022

Combining two neural networks has helped researchers predict potentially disastrous collapses in complex systems, such as financial crashes or power blackouts

Cyborg: A documentary tells the intriguing story of Neil Harbisson, who wears an antenna to “hear” colour, but it is lacking in depth and should have probed its subject more, says Simon Ings

A new design for a nuclear battery that generates electricity from the radioactive decay of americium is unprecedentedly efficient

Gears just a few micrometres wide can be carved from silicon using a beam of electrons, enabling tiny robots or machines that could interact with human cells

A specialised algorithm could help autonomous vehicles track hidden objects, such as a pedestrian, a bicycle or another vehicle concealed behind a parked car

Emma Raducanu struck a deal to return to one of her favourite tournaments.

They were the ten words that sealed the comeback deal for Donald Trump.

Researchers calculated that if 30 per cent of vehicles in Chicago currently running on combustion engines were converted to electric, the reduction in pollution would save billions in health care costs every year. 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency supervisor who was fired after she told her staff to skip hurricane-damaged homes with Trump signs in their yards says it wasn't an isolated incident and is a "colossal event."

A company announced the launch of two new advanced drones designed to improve military operations with the use of cutting-edge technology.

LIVERPOOL midfielder Georginio Wijnaldum will be pivotal for Jurgen Klopp at Manchester City..

ROGER FEDERER has explained why he gets injured less than rivals Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic..

Imagine a world without Facebook. For just half an hour. A group of AI leaders get together but don’t seem to invite Elon Musk. Amazon takes data centres nuclear. A new competitor for ChatGPT and Google. And public trust in AI is declining.  All this and more on the “just breath, Facebook will be back” […]

A new study suggests there could be water miles under the dusty surface of Mars, with enough water to fill a global-sized ocean a mile deep.

Archaeologists have discovered a "remarkable" section of one of Britain's most important Roman roads in southeast London.

As many as 115 Post Office Branches and hundreds of jobs could be at risk following a strategic review held by Post Office Chairman Nigel Railton.

The spy writing star, whose series has become a huge television hit starring Gary Oldman, is to chair the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival 2025