Maureen 🌍 ☮️ 🟦

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"Today are the US midterms, an election that will have a deep and broad impact on international politics." French artist Joanie Lemercier used a projector from a room across the street to beam "OUT" next to the gold letters on Las Vegas's Trump Hotel. 📢🇺🇸✊🏼 📷 Notice News

Last night Trump said he could have won Vietnam in a week. His plan was “going after Ho Chi Minh City.” Ho Chi Minh City was Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. Our ally. The enemy’s capital was Hanoi. We bombed it. He called the presidents who fought that war stupid, then explained how he’d have won it by attacking our own side. 58,220 Americans died in that war. Trump got five deferments. Now he’s telling the rest of us how easy it would have been. He’s had more than fifty years to learn which side we were on. He still hasn’t. That alone should disqualify him from sending anybody else’s kids to war. Instead, he’s weighing more strikes on Iran after Tuesday. His administration has reportedly considered using the “mother of all bombs,” the one he calls “like a tiny nuclear bomb.” The man who thinks we should have bombed our ally’s capital gets to choose the targets.

There are people who put a lot of effort into their home for Halloween and there is this guy.

In 1987, Patrick Stewart refused to unpack his suitcase for six straight weeks. My throat still tightens every time I read why. Every Hollywood insider told the 47-year-old British stage actor that Star Trek: The Next Generation would be a disaster. Even his closest friend, Ian McKellen, begged him not to throw away his Shakespearean career on a television gamble. Stewart kept his bags packed by the door, waiting to be fired and sent home to London. That "six-week failure" lasted 36 years. Watching him late at night here in Japan, we saw something Hollywood never expected. In Japan, we call this quiet, unbreakable spirit "Fudoshin," an immovable heart under fire. Most action heroes scream and fire weapons to look strong. Captain Picard never needed to raise his voice. Born into deep poverty in Yorkshire, terrified of a violent home, he left school at age 15 and lost all his hair by 19, convinced his life as an actor was over before it began. Yet one English teacher, Cecil Dormand, handed that frightened 12-year-old boy a copy of Shakespeare, said "Read it out loud," and secretly paid for his first drama course. Never forget what happened decades later. On the morning Queen Elizabeth II knighted him as Sir Patrick Stewart, he invited that same retired schoolteacher to sit beside him at his knighthood luncheon. No suitcase left unpacked. No rage on the bridge. Just a cup of Earl Grey tea, a tug of his uniform, and three quiet words that commanded the galaxy: "Make it so." He passed away at 86 surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, and laughter. And this December, in Avengers: Doomsday, Professor X will grace the screen one final time. A boy who thought he wouldn't last six weeks in Hollywood gave the world an eternity of nobility. From Japan, with tears and our deepest salute: Thank you, Captain. Engage. ✨🖖🇯🇵

We mourn the passing of Patrick Stewart, who inspired countless individuals at NASA (and beyond) to boldly go where no one has gone before.

NEW: Pope Leo XIV is set to become the first sitting pontiff in the Catholic Church’s two-thousand-year history to vote in a secular election. Leo requested an Illinois mail ballot on Oct. 3, and it was sent to his brother John’s home in New Lenox, Ill. John Prevost visited the pope at the Vatican on Wednesday and may now be carrying the ballot back to the Will County clerk by hand. thelettersfromleo.com/p/pope…