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Make no bones about it, the giant skeleton has become an American Halloween fixture
It reared its bony head in 2020, during that first, chaotic pandemic year that was rife with grief and fear but also toilet paper hoarding and questionable lockdown-inspired purchases. Behold Skelly, the 12-foot, 90-pound skeleton with glowing LCD eyeballs, on sale for $299 from Home Depot, just in time for Halloween -- at least, if you can get your hands on one.
Many did, because this is America. And when we get sad, stressed or bored, we shop, drowning our collective anxieties in things that we definitely don't need but most certainly want.
So, beginning in 2020, Skelly showed up on suburban lawns from California to New Jersey and on brownstone stoops in Brooklyn, naked or dressed in a costume, towering over jack-o'-lanterns and plastic gravestones with spooky puns like "Rest In Pieces." It didn't take long for people to realize that keeping Skelly out year-round meant new opportunities to dress him for every season: Christmas, Fourth of July, or even just a bikini for summer.
In 2024, Skelly got a chest lightning attachment. And in 2026, a Bluetooth connection lets you record sounds or speak into it live, entertaining (or unsettling) your whole block. He also has a dog, a cat, and a smaller, 6½-foot version for those who can't quite commit to a giant. It has sold out before Halloween every year.
"It is the ultimate American decoration," says Aubrey Horowitz, merchant of Decorative Holiday at Home Depot. "We really love this sense of nostalgia and having some form of connection with our communities and the people that live around us. And frankly, you know, a lot of times bigger is better."
I did not celebrate Halloween until I arrived in the U.S. from Eastern Europe at age 13. I was shocked by the sheer size of everything: giant cars, highways with all those lanes, enormous gallons of milk instead of our polite liters, skyscrapers so tall they were licking the clouds.
We also weren't used to whimsy. Gaudy yard decor, whether for Halloween or Christmas, was as foreign a concept as warehouse shopping or smiling at strangers.
Skelly would have certainly stopped us in our tracks. It still does. The uniquely American delight it brings to me, an immigrant still often in awe of Americans' seasonal joy and over-the-top ornamentations, is contagious.
The U.S. did not invent Halloween. But Halloween excess, with its pillowcases full of candy, elaborate costumes for everyone from babies to adults to dogs (and a few unlucky cats), could not be more American.
And why have a 5'8" skeleton when you can have a 12-foot one?
Senate is skeptical about making daylight saving time permanent despite Trump's pressure
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate is unlikely to act before the end of the year on a House-passed bill that would make daylight saving time permanent, defying President Donald Trump and dashing the hopes of Americans who don't like having to change their clocks twice a year.
As daylight saving time ends early Sunday and much of the country turns the clocks back an hour, several senators are holding up legislation that would eliminate the longtime U.S. practice. Supporters argue that ending the time change would provide more daylight during the afternoon, when Americans are most active, but opponents say commuters in some states wouldn't see the sun until after 9 a.m.
"No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter," said Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.
Cotton, a member of GOP leadership, is the most vocal opponent of the change, notably drawing Trump's ire earlier this month when the Republican president posted his personal cellphone number on social media and ordered him to "GET IT DONE!" But Cotton is not the only senator blocking the legislation, which would make daylight saving time the permanent national standard.
Several other Republicans, particularly those from some Northern states that would see much later sunrises, say they also oppose it.
"You'd be sending kids to school in the dark," said South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds.
Trump has aggressively pushed the change, putting pressure on Senate Republicans to pass the House bill and send it to his desk. In the posts targeting Cotton earlier this month, Trump wrote that sunshine is better in the afternoon than the morning and "CRIMINALS DON'T LIKE WORKING IN THE LIGHT."
He renewed his call in a social media post this week, writing on Truth Social that "United States Senate is letting the Daylight Saving Bill die, when a vast Majority of the Country want it."
An avid golfer, Trump has made clear that adding daylight hours would mean more time to hit the links. He has argued that changing the time can be dangerous, especially when "you have high and dangerous steeples to reach, like on churches and municipal buildings."
Even as many Americans now rely on digital clocks that change on their own, Trump said that "nobody wants to spend their precious time running all over the place, turning Clocks back twice a year."
CNN, MS NOW and Politico ask court to make Trump access order permanent
Three news outlets have beefed up their legal complaint against the White House over access, saying it is continuing to defy a judge's orders by refusing to let them return to covering President Donald Trump in the Oval Office and on Air Force One -- thus violating their free speech rights by continuing to keep them out of the rotating press "pool."
CNN, MS NOW and Politico said Wednesday that the president is retaliating against them for reports he does not like, which violates U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly's previous orders for the administration to allow reporters for the outlets to fully return to the pool of journalists covering the president.
Even after those orders, the White House was continuing to block reporters for those outlets from covering Trump in "the very locations that the president most frequently engages with the press," Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., the outlets' attorney, said in a statement.
The most recent filing asks the court to make those previous orders permanent.
At issue is whether the president, or anyone, can punish news outlets for the content of their reports. The news organizations say that doing so is "viewpoint discrimination" forbidden by the First Amendment's free-speech protections.
Trump insists that he doesn't have to let news outlets whose reports he dislikes onto White House grounds, on Air Force One or other areas. The White House had not responded to the amended lawsuit as of Thursday morning.
"Every news organization now faces the risk of similar punishment for coverage the President deems insufficiently favorable," the outlets wrote in their filing, "and the public is deprived of current and complete information about its government."
The filing comes about two weeks after Kelly ruled that CNN, MS NOW and Politico are likely to succeed in the extraordinary case pitting the president against the news outlets that cover him.
Justice Department issues new subpoenas over Alaska spoiler candidate controversy, AP source says
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department is escalating a criminal investigation over an Alaska Senate candidate who shares a name with the Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan, issuing a raft of new grand jury subpoenas, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Subpoenas seeking grand jury testimony or documents, along with records preservation demands, were issued after The New York Times reported that Democratic candidate Mary Peltola's campaign appeared to be involved in recruiting Dan J. Sullivan Jr. as part of an alleged effort to confuse voters in the hotly contested race.
More subpoenas were expected to be sent Thursday, according to a person briefed on the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing probe. Neither the recipients of the subpoenas nor the total number of them were immediately clear.
It's the latest aggressive move by the Justice Department in a politically sensitive matter in the weeks leading up to Tuesday's midterm elections. The Justice Department has historically avoided taking overt investigative actions against candidates in the weeks before an election, or other public steps that could be perceived as attempting to influence a political outcome.
Election law experts said they were unaware of what federal law would justify the investigation.
"I don't know what they're putting out subpoenas to investigate because I don't know what federal violations are implicated that DOJ would have jurisdiction over," said Justin Levitt, a former Department of Justice official under President Joe Biden. "Sure makes it seem like the point of the investigation is to become the story."
The information came to light the same day that the U.S. Justice Department issued subpoenas to California officials in an escalation of its scrutiny of local election administration. Earlier Thursday, a federal judge in California appointed a special master to evaluate claims by the Trump administration that the state has some 20,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls. That action came less than 24 hours after the judge rejected the Justice Department's demand that California sequester the ballots until citizenship can be verified, a ruling the department immediately appealed.
For months, the Justice Department has been looking into allegations that Dan J. Sullivan Jr. entered the race to mislead voters and help Peltola's campaign. The potential targets of the Justice Department's investigation are unclear, but President Donald Trump earlier this week called for the criminal prosecution of Peltola and her campaign.
The new subpoenas were confirmed by a person briefed on the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing probe.
Attorney General Todd Blanche in a Fox News interview on Wednesday said he wouldn't discuss any criminal investigations, but accused Democrats of "cheating."
"They are trying to take votes away from the incumbent, not by running an election, not by running on issues but by putting up a person with the same name," Blanche said.
Man pleads guilty to federal hate crimes in deadly firebomb attack on Colorado demonstrators
DENVER (AP) -- An Egyptian man faces an additional life sentence after pleading guilty Thursday to federal hate crime and other charges for a deadly firebombing attack on demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado, last year.
Mohamed Soliman is already serving life in prison plus hundreds of years of additional time after pleading guilty to state charges last spring. Federal prosecutors, who previously said they would not seek the death penalty against Soliman, said at his change-of-plea hearing they would seek a life term plus 50 years in prison for the dozen counts.
Soliman spoke through an interpreter at the hearing and said little besides "yes" and "no" responses to the judge's questioning, such as whether he understood the consequences of pleading guilty. That was in contrast to his change-of-plea hearing and sentencing in state court in May, when Soliman apologized to the victims and expressed regret for the attack but also defended his basic view motivating it.
Wearing a brown shirt and khaki-colored pants, Soliman was led out of court in handcuffs and shackles without looking at the victims in the courtroom.
Yelling "Free Palestine," Soliman lit and threw two Molotov cocktails at the demonstrators who were marching in support of hostages taken in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
Federal prosecutors accused Soliman of attacking in June 2025 because the demonstrators were Jewish. The flames badly burned Karen Diamond, 82, and injured a dozen others.
Diamond died three weeks later. Her family says she suffered "indescribable pain."
In all, Soliman pleaded guilty to nine federal counts of hate crimes, including one resulting in Diamond's death and eight for attempting to kill other demonstrators. Three additional counts were federal explosives charges.
The plea agreement, including Soliman's proposed sentence, was "victim-driven" and gave them all they sought, Colorado U.S. Attorney Peter McNeilly said in a news conference after the hearing.
Police chief says shooting outside Virginia GOP offices has nothing to do with election
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- A shooting Thursday just outside the Republican Party of Virginia offices in Richmond had nothing to do with the upcoming midterm elections, police said.
The party said in a statement posted online that a woman was shot around 1:45 p.m. directly in front of the building that houses its offices. Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards said the woman suffered non-life-threatening injuries.
Authorities believe the woman was an innocent bystander, Edwards said. A woman inside a hair salon across the street, who remains in custody, told police a man with whom she had an ongoing dispute had come into the shop and she fired shots in self-defense.
The woman who was shot just happened to be on the block and has been taken to a hospital. She is expected to survive, he said.
Police believe the man who was inside the business may also have been shot, based on blood at the scene. Edwards urged the man to turn himself in to receive care and speak with detectives.
Frank Loehr, chief financial officer for the Republican Party of Virginia, told reporters that he and other staffers were working inside the office when shots rang out outside.
The woman had been speaking with two people who had a booth outside the building and was brought inside the office bleeding after being shot, he said. The booth was not affiliated with the party.
The woman was conscious and moaning in pain, and it appeared she had been struck in the shoulder, Loehr said. First responders arrived quickly and took her away, he said.
"I was shook up, and I'm still a little shook up," Loehr said.