Today's Top Headlines

Monday, November 3

Good morning Wypierdalaj,

Fewer style points, same result.

The New England Patriots fended off a feisty Atlanta Falcons team Sunday afternoon to secure a 24-23 win at Gillette Stadium that extended their winning streak to six games — their longest since the 2021 season.

New England was far from perfect in this one: Drake Maye committed two turnovers and was sacked six times, while Atlanta’s Drake London racked up 118 yards and three touchdowns on nine catches. But the Patriots’ defense got a crucial red zone stop late in the fourth quarter, and Maye found Hunter Henry for a 17-yard pickup on third down with 1:42 remaining that iced another victory for Mike Vrabel’s club.

President Donald Trump’s administration faces deadlines on Monday to tell two federal judges whether it will comply with court orders that it continue to fund SNAP, the nation’s biggest food aid program, using contingency funds during the government shutdown.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture planned to freeze payments to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program starting Nov. 1 because it said it could no longer keep funding it due to the shutdown. The program serves about 1 in 8 Americans and is a major piece of the nation’s social safety net — and it costs about $8 billion per month nationally.

The situation leaves millions with uncertainty about how they will feed themselves. Benefits will be delayed in November regardless of the outcome of the court cases because many beneficiaries have their cards recharged early in the month and the process of loading cards can take a week or more in many states.

Now that we’re all adjusting to the new sunrises and sunset times, we’re entering a weather pattern that will be quite busy in the coming week.

Our first round of rain will roll in here later Monday afternoon. Despite the chilly (cold?) start, we manage to bounce back into the upper 50s as the clouds tighten and lower. We’re not expecting much rain this time around, but part of the evening drive may be wet.

This system zips out overnight, and as the skies clear, the wind returns. Gusts will be 30 mph or more late tonight and 40+ Tuesday. There isn’t much time for the wind to linger, since the next weather system is rolling in by Wednesday.

Investigators are still searching for two suspects following an explosion at Harvard Medical School early Saturday that appeared to be intentional.

Harvard Medical School students were shocked to wake up to an email this weekend notifying them of an explosion inside one of their campus buildings on Longwood Avenue.

It happened around 3 a.m. Saturday at the Goldenson Building, which is being renovated. A Harvard police officer responding to a fire alarm saw two people running from the building. He tried to stop them — but the suspects got away.

Setti Warren, the former mayor of Newton, Massachusetts, died unexpectedly at his home on Sunday. He was 55.

Warren, a Democrat who served two terms as mayor from 2010 to 2018, was known as a charismatic figure who believed in supporting public education, fighting income disparities and pushing innovation. He was the first popularly elected African-American mayor in Massachusetts.

“His smile lit up a room. He drew people to him and turned their energy into positive action,” Newton Mayor Ruthanne Fuller wrote in a statement, adding that Warren believed “that government can be a force for good.”

The Trump administration has begun detailed planning for a new mission to send U.S. troops and intelligence officers into Mexico to target drug cartels, according to two U.S. officials and two former senior U.S. officials familiar with the effort.

The early stages of training for the potential mission, which would include ground operations inside Mexico, has already begun, the two current U.S. officials said. But a deployment to Mexico is not imminent, the two U.S. officials and one of the former U.S. officials said. Discussions about the scope of the mission are ongoing, and a final decision has not been made, the two current U.S. officials said.

The U.S. troops, many of whom would be from Joint Special Operations Command, would operate under the authority of the U.S. intelligence community, known as Title 50 status, the two current officials said. They said officers from the Central Intelligence Agency also would participate.