El-Sayed criticized Obama. Obama just ENDORSED him.

The Vatican announced Tuesday that Pope Leo XIV has lung cancer, hours after surgeons removed the lower lobe of his right lung.

The pope told crowds in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday that doctors had found a small, localized nodule. He checked into Rome’s Gemelli Hospital Tuesday. The Vatican says tests before the operation had pointed to lung adenocarcinoma, and surgery confirmed it.

The operation lasted about 90 minutes with no complications. Leo woke up normally and is resting in his hospital room.A Georgetown oncologist told Reuters that if the cancer is small and hasn’t reached the lymph nodes, surgery alone is likely to cure it.

Leo is expected to stay in the hospital about a week. He’s scheduled to leave next month on a trip to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru.

Until Sunday, the first American pope had no publicly known health problems. He plays tennis every week.

We’re wishing him a full recovery.

Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, is now the biggest known donor of the 2026 midterms. All of it is going to Republican groups, of course.

The New York Times reported Monday that he has given more than $276 million since July, and a spokesperson for his super PAC confirmed the number. With his earlier giving, his total for the cycle comes to about $366 million. He spent roughly $290 million in the 2024 presidential race.

The biggest check, $158 million, went to the Senate Leadership Fund. The Times said that’s more than its Democratic rival raised from all of its donors that quarter.

Then there’s the $10 million for the super PAC backing Ken Paxton, who spent New Year’s Eve in Dubai with two fugitives (more on that below).

Barack Obama has endorsed Abdul El-Sayed for Senate in Michigan. In an ad released Monday, he told voters that “Michigan is where we fight back.”

Obama says El-Sayed has never taken corporate money and believes health care is a human right. He also says El-Sayed would rather invest at home than fund endless wars.

Obama stayed out of the August primary, which El-Sayed won over Rep. Haley Stevens. He’ll rally with him in Detroit on October 24 alongside gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson, the first day of in-person early voting in Michigan.

El-Sayed gave a brilliant answer on why he would campaign with Obama after criticizing him.

He compared it to how he thinks about his own father. He wouldn’t have his life without his dad, he said, but there are things he would do differently.

El-Sayed currently leads Rogers by one to five points.

Early voting started yesterday in Georgia with record-breaking turnout. On the same night, Sen. Jon Ossoff and Republican Rep. Mike Collins met for their second debate.

Collins tried to make Epstein Ossoff’s problem. He went after ads paid for by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who reportedly visited Epstein’s island in 2014.

“The Epstein class is on stage right now, and it’s you,” Collins said.

Ossoff fired back with “Mike, who on your team advised you to raise the Epstein files?”

“You voted to cover up the evidence, even though you knew 14-year-old girls had been raped,” he said. “Donald Trump, who, by the way, is named 1,000 times in the Epstein files.”

Then he brought up Collins’s white nationalist son-in-law.

“How weak a person do you have to be to be unable to stop someone under your own roof from disseminating neo-Nazi propaganda while you run for the Senate?”

“Can you commit for just 3 weeks to stop the production of neo-Nazi propaganda from your home?”

Collins said he condemns “any kind of hate speech.”

Ossoff also asked him whether Trump won the 2020 election. Collins answered that “there was a lot of doubt in that election.” Ossoff has held a steady lead in the polls.

Collins didn’t answer the 2020 question at their first debate either. That’s two for two.

The Wall Street Journal published video Monday of Ken Paxton, Trump’s pick for Senate in Texas, at a luxury New Year’s Eve party in Dubai at the end of 2024.

Two of the guests were fugitives from U.S. justice: Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail, both indicted in a federal health care fraud case.

Ahmed, a former Chicago hospital executive, was separately charged in an alleged scheme involving at least $195 million in government payments for bogus COVID tests.

He’s also a Paxton donor. Campaign records show he gave $190,000, including $25,000 days after his indictment.

Paxton’s date was Tracy Duhon, his extramarital girlfriend. They watched the fireworks over the Burj Khalifa with the group.His adviser didn’t address the party. Paxton, he said, has been “politically persecuted for years.”

“This is like a bingo card of Ken Paxton scandals,” wrote the Bulwark’s Sam Stein.

This is the campaign that spent last week asking whether James Talarico really had the flu.

Trump was in Youngstown, Ohio, Monday night when a woman in a homemade “release the Epstein files” T-shirt stood up and heckled him.

At least three men subdued her. One of them appeared to punch her in the head and pulled her hair. When police arrived, they removed her.

Trump called her a “paid protester” and referred to her as “he.” Protesters “get paid by the lefties,” he said. “Scum.”

Then he went after her weight. She needed to “go on a diet.”

Once she was gone, Trump called her “a very low-class protester.”

A Reddit user who says she’s the woman wrote that she ended up in the hospital, and that “they ripped out a decent chunk of my hair.” She says she wants to press charges. No arrests have been reported.

Katie Zacharia held her first White House briefing Tuesday. It lasted about 14 minutes. She took three questions.

She thanked Trump “for his trust that he has placed in me,” read long prepared remarks, announced Guilfoyle was out, and told reporters the president would take their questions later.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said she wasn’t sure she’d “ever been to a press briefing where there were only three questions.”

A White House source told MS NOW that Zacharia “needs to get much better, fast, otherwise she’ll break Scaramucci’s record.”

Later, standing next to Trump, she was asked about her legal credentials. She said she passed the bar exam when she “moved to China.”

Popular Info found no record of her passing a bar exam in any U.S. state. Foreigners can’t practice law in China.

Her LinkedIn lists her Chinese as “elementary proficiency.”

Kimberly Guilfoyle is out as ambassador to Greece. The White House asked her to resign Tuesday, and she announced her exit the same day.

Her qualifications were being a Fox News personality and dating Don Jr.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that she asked a Trump donor to cover a $100,000 credit card bill before her confirmation hearing, and offered access to administration officials in return. The donor didn’t pay.

Earlier Journal reporting said she promoted a Greek construction and energy company and let its lobbyist sit in on private diplomatic meetings. She calls the allegations “false.”

New press secretary Katie Zacharia broke the news at her first briefing. Guilfoyle “has been a wonderful asset to the team,” she said, “and we wish her well.”

Trump took a different approach.

“Kimberly Guilfoyle was not a member of my family,” he told reporters. “I guess she dated my son a long time ago. I didn’t like what I read.”She was engaged to Don Jr. They broke it off last year, months before the Senate confirmed her.

Earlier this year, Trump was a lot warmer. “I love calling her Kimberlay. That’s my little pet name, right?” He told her he hoped she’d “come back here in 12 years or whenever the term ends.”

Rep. Gregory Meeks still wants her to testify under oath.

From “my little pet name” to “I guess she dated my son” in under a year.

Trump’s lawyers canceled his deposition with the BBC, which was set for this Friday. The president is no longer available, they wrote, “due to other matters of national importance.”

They want to push it to January, about a month after discovery closes.

His lawyers agreed to the October 16 date back in July. On September 28, they said it no longer worked.

BBC lawyer Charles Tobin called Trump “the most central figure in this case,” and the network is asking a magistrate judge to take it up next week.

Trump sued last year, claiming the BBC deceptively edited his January 6 speech in a documentary that aired the day before the 2024 election. The documentary never aired in the U.S.

So far, his lawsuit has gotten a court to order the release of his finances, plus records from Jack Smith’s investigation into his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. His kids are reportedly dodging BBC subpoenas.

He picked the fight. Now he’s too busy to answer questions about it.

Horse-drawn carriages will be illegal in New York City starting in June 2028 under a deal Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Council Speaker Julie Menin announced Tuesday.

The bill is called Romanch’s Law, after Romanch Mahajan, the 18-year-old tourist who died after falling from a runaway carriage in Central Park this summer. It also stops the city from issuing any new carriage licenses.

Mamdani has said all along that he wants the industry gone. He held back on the bill until now because he wanted better protections for the drivers who would lose their jobs. As part of the deal, his administration will draw up a plan to employ them.

The full Council votes October 22.

Bill de Blasio promised to ban the carriages in 2014. Mamdani has a deal in under a year. Good news for the horses.