Good afternoon. While several politicians have announced their resignations following allegations of sexual harassment, Roy Moore’s campaign in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat is running full steam ahead. Over the weekend, Alabama’s senior senator, Richard Shelby, condemned his fellow Republican on CNN, but polls show most Republicans don’t believe Moore’s accusers. The outcome of Tuesday’s special election will reflect Alabama’s — and the GOP’s — position on sexual-assault accusations and could help determine the voting on any number of issues in the narrowly divided Senate. If you're not happy with the result, you might consider a getaway to the moon. —Megan Hess
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| After multiple women alleged that Roy Moore had pursued them as teenagers, his campaign for a Senate seat looked finished. Four weeks later, on the eve of the special election in Alabama, conservative news media have resurrected Moore, and the party has followed, thanks largely to Steve Bannon. |
| Here are today's top stories... | | Terror in Times Square. A man wearing a pipe bomb set off the explosive in a Times Square subway station on Monday morning, injuring himself and three others. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called it an attempted terrorist attack. The 27-year-old suspect, who is in custody, told police he’s a follower of ISIS, but investigators believe he’s a solo actor who planned the attack after reading one of the terror group’s publications online. | | The middle class might not even notice if the GOP cuts its taxes. When Congress approved a tax cut for the middle class in 2009, most Americans didn’t feel it. In fact, 24 percent thought their taxes had increased. That’s a warning sign for President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, who have repeatedly promised a tax cut to their working-class voters. On the cost side, the Senate bill’s proposed cuts would pay for themselves over 10 years, according to a one-page report by the U.S. Treasury. | | Trump is taking credit for killing hundreds of regulations that were already dead. “In the history of our country, no president, during their entire term, has cut more regulations than we’ve cut,” the president said last month. His press secretary, Sarah Sanders, puts the total at nearly 1,000. Government records tell a very different story. For one thing, only a handful of regulations have actually been taken off the books. | | Siri, what’s that song? Apple agreed to acquire Shazam, a service that identifies songs after hearing just a few bars, using a microphone on a smartphone or computer. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but last week TechCrunch reported the business was valued at about $400 million. That price would be a disappointment for some of Shazam’s investors, who had valued the company at about $1 billion when it closed its last funding round in 2015. | | The Trump-Russia probe is about to get uglier, Albert R. Hunt writes for Bloomberg View. “There are three avenues Mueller is exploring. Did the Trump team aid and abet the Russian efforts to hack and steal e-mails with an eye toward influencing with the U.S. presidential election? Did the president try to obstruct the investigation into those efforts? What was the nature of any financial arrangements Trump may have had with Russians linked to the Kremlin?” Hunt writes. “Many of the Trump defenses seem to be unraveling.” | |
| All eyes on... | | Facebook Watch is the company’s nascent effort to carve out a dedicated space for videos of several minutes to half an hour or more. That may not sound like a big deal, but it would offer users a big shift from their typical Facebook habit. Yet four months after launching Watch, Facebook has yet to hit on the right formula and is already rejiggering its strategy. | | |
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