Good morning and Welcome to the Morning Brief, It’s Tuesday November 3rd, election day and I’m Keegan Billings.with The Epoch Times, one of America’s largest independent newspapers

Allright Now Let’s jump right into today’s rundown

• The Make America Healthy Again movement helped President Trump win the White House in 2024. But Today’s midterm elections are a major test of the movement’s resilience.

• Meanwhile To maintain their slim majority in the House, Republicans must overcome a well-established pattern of midterm losses by the party of a sitting president.

• Next The Supreme Court rejected the DOJ’s request to order California to set aside about 20,000 mail-in ballots the department says likely belong to noncitizens ,The ruling came just one day before Election Day.

• In more news U.S. immigration officials say that the second Trump administration has moved to terminate or revoke the status of more than 2.2 million illegal immigrants.

• And in world news Several supermarket chains across Europe are reporting technical incidents with their refrigerator systems, with companies blaming potential cyberattacks.

NOW, BACK TO OUR TOP STORY:

MAHA Movement Faces Midterm Test

Ohio Republican Kathleen Wilson and Georgia Democrat Katie Wiggs are among many Americans who want unhealthy additives removed from food.

But the two voters expressed divergent views when asked about the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement—a multipronged effort “to reform America’s food, health, and scientific systems,” the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website states.

Wilson and Wiggs, who spoke to The Epoch Times at October political events in their respective states, said issues such as immigration and the economy outranked the MAHA agenda as they considered how to vote in the midterms.

Their responses highlight the challenge MAHA-promoting candidates and other MAHA advocates face as they look to woo voters in this hard-to-define voting bloc.

This election season, a leading advocacy group, MAHA Action, has endorsed 24 candidates—all Republicans except Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-Calif.), who left the GOP in March.

At an Oct. 23 get-out-the-vote rally in Fort Myers, Florida, the president touted one of his MAHA-related initiatives—reducing prescription drug prices—and said, “That alone should give us a win in the midterms.”

Republicans face headwinds from voters disgruntled over high prices, including gasoline costs that many people blame on the war against Iran.

Pew Research Center reported in early October About 65 percent of respondents said they disapprove of how Trump is handling U.S. military action in Iran. In addition, 73 percent of people polled said they were “extremely concerned” or “very concerned” about higher gasoline and fuel prices.

The administration also faces opposition from some MAHA advocates. Some say they expected to see more successes by now. Others have accused the Trump administration of actions that contradict MAHA principles. (More)

Losing either chamber of Congress in the midterms to Democratic control would likely stall many aspects of Trump’s agenda, including MAHA initiatives.

This election season, some MAHA-endorsed candidates made health-related issues major planks in their campaign platforms. All face the challenge of translating MAHA motivations into votes.

The outlook is blurry because some people don’t even know what MAHA is, based on The Epoch Times’ interviews with voters across several states, and polls indicate that parts of MAHA’s agenda are more popular among Americans than the movement itself.

At the same time, signs of discontent have emerged within MAHA’s ranks. A “MAHA Promises Scorecard” criticizes the Trump administration’s record on food safety, pesticides, agriculture, and environmental health.

Dr. Irene Mavrakakis, who is heavily involved in the MAHA movement, asserted that the conflicts are overblown and that legal and political hurdles still must be overcome to make more progress.

NOW, OVER TO POLITICS:

To maintain their slim majority in the House, Republicans must overcome a well-established pattern of midterm losses by the party of a sitting president.

Over the past 80 years, only two presidents have defied that trend. Both had approval ratings well above 60 percent: Bill Clinton in 1998 and George W. Bush in 2002.

The Trump Factor

Trump has significantly boosted voter turnout since 2016, driving record participation for a midterm election in 2018,

During the past few weeks, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have barnstormed at least 17 states, seeking to retain slim Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress.

Trump’s approval rating stands at 38 percent in an average of polls compiled by RealClear Politics.

Democrats need to gain just four House seats to gain a majority.

27 House races are listed as competitive, and 17 are considered toss-ups by independent elections analysts Cook Political Report.

Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University. said

“Republicans would have to essentially have no losses at all in order to keep control of the House of Representatives, and that would be an extraordinary outcome,”

Control of the Senate is also uncertain, as Republicans have a seven-seat margin with 10 races rated as competitive, seven of them toss-ups by the Cook Political Report.

Those seven races remain near or within the margin of error in an average of polls despite $1.8 billion in spending by the major candidates and political action committees.

Democrats have marginal pre-election leads in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas.

Republicans also have a path to victory, Wilson said.

“But it would require them to hold on to closely contested seats like Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Alaska, while potentially picking up a Democratic seat in a place like Michigan,” 

The GOP candidate holds a marginal polling lead in Kansas.

If Democrats do win the House, congressional investigations are likely to follow, according to our analysts. But a third impeachment would be largely symbolic and unlikely to succeed.

Democrats are unlikely to attempt a bold legislative agenda unless they win a sizable majority in both chambers, according to analysts. More likely, they would pass messaging bills to set the stage for the 2028 presidential election.

Trump, asked on Oct. 27 how he intended to work with Democrats if they should prevail in the election, said, “We'll figure a way. Look, I have a strong veto.”

• the day before Election Day The Supreme Court rejected a DOJ request to order California to sequester those 20,000 mail ballots the department says likely belong to noncitizens, 

The Supreme Court did not provide reasons for its decision in its unsigned order. No justices dissented.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauerhad  said in the emergency filing that the justices urgently needed to act. 

Because he said“Once California commingles the challenged ballots with lawful ones, there is no way to get the challenged ballots back,”

 he added

“California admits that there is no way to trace a ballot after it is processed,” he said, quoting a dissenting Ninth Circuit judge in a prior ruling in the case.

California officials disputed the accuracy of the list compiled by the DOJ.

In the lower courts, they argued that the federal government has no standing to sue a state in federal court over how the state administers elections, they also said California’s own citizenship verification system already addresses noncitizen voting, and that segregating the ballots would violate federal election laws and risk disrupting the count.

President Donald Trump has said on multiple occasions that states are not doing enough to prevent noncitizens from voting.

• Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) has said Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola might not be seated if she wins the race, 

This came after reports alleged that her campaign and national Democrats were involved in a scheme to recruit a candidate with the same name as the Republican incumbent senator. To confuse voters

but comer did note that he has “not spoken to Sen. Thune about that,” referring to Senate Majority Leader John Thune yet(R-S.D.).

Comer, who is the chairman of the House Oversight Committee and has already started an investigation into the reports against Peltola’s campaign added

“We kind of tend to operate within the confinement of the House with respect to our investigations, but at the end of the day, I think the American people can see loud and clear what was done here,”.

• U.S. immigration officials say that the second Trump administration has moved to terminate or revoke the status of more than 2.2 million illegal immigrants.

In an Oct. 29 news release, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said that the actions that (ICE) took do not include “the millions of visa revocations and denials issued by the U.S. Department of State and removals carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

An arm of the (DHS), the Immigration Services reviews requests for visas, U.S. work permits, green cards, and more.

According to the release, the immigration agency said that it has moved to end the “misuse” of the Temporary Protected Status program  (TPS), which provides protection from deportations as well as providing work authorizations to foreign nationals who are from countries where the status is applicable.

• A federal judge dismissed a criminal complaint alleging two former FBI officials that were involved in an investigation into Hunter Biden lied to Congress.

Judge Zia Faruqui said in a ruling from the bench during a hearing in Washington. “What has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization.”

So Faruqui dismissed the case against former officials Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides.

The government charged Floris and Benavides in October with lying to Congress.

Floris and Benavides were both part of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force.

Floris said during a congressional briefing that she did not know of a Senate report on Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, and that she was not involved with the bureau’s investigation of Hunter Biden, according to charging documents.

Benavides said during a briefing that he did not know about the FBI probe until he read Wikipedia while preparing for the briefing.

However, according to emails and other evidence prosecutors obtained, both allegedly discussed the probe, including with agents on the team investigating Hunter Biden.

And in several emails in 2020, Floris circulated the Senate report detailing financial transactions between Hunter Biden and his associates and foreigners.

Faruqui on Monday said that prosecutors did not establish that any of the statements were intentionally false or that Floris and Benavides had any motive to deceive.

Faruqui said. “Without motive, without direct evidence, I have nothing” to go on, 

The judge also said prosecutors could have brought the case, which covers comments made in 2023, at any time, but chose just before the Nov. 3 midterm election.

AND MORE ON POLITICS:

• After a tense lead-up to the latest high-profile social media harms trial, Snap Inc., developer of the popular app Snapchat, has settled a bellwether lawsuit with two teenage plaintiffs before a California jury could hear the case.

The plaintiffs, identified in court documents as “S.J.,” a 16-year-old from Illinois, and “K.D.B.,” an 18-year-old from Mississippi, both claimed that they were “heavy” users of the defendants’ apps and quickly became addicted and suffered serious psychological harms as a result.

Meta, Google, and TikTok were originally named defendants in the case but settled before Snap.

Representatives for Snap Inc. did not immediately respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times, and the terms of the settlement agreement were not disclosed.

Emily Jeffcott, trial counsel for K.D.B., said in a statement on Nov. 2.

Our ultimate goal is to hold these social media companies accountable for how their actions have impacted millions of children across the country, and these settlements allow us to keep building toward that goal,” 

In a case filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, the plaintiffs alleged that Snap and other social media giants intentionally engineered their products to be addictive to young users despite known risks.

It was the third case selected to test how thousands of related lawsuits—brought by children, parents, school districts, and attorneys general across the country—will be tried.

But before jury selection began last week, YouTube and TikTok settled with both plaintiffs, and Meta settled with one, leaving the focus largely on Snap for the first time. And on Oct. 30, Meta announced that it had settled with the second plaintiff, leaving Snap as the sole defendant.

The company has avoided the spectacle, disclosures, and public scrutiny of trial by settling the previous two bellwethers and other key cases before they could land before a jury.

Parents involved in related cases against Snap had been following the latest bellwether closely, hoping to finally see the company’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, testify in court.

In March, a jury in the first bellwether social media addiction trial found Meta and Google liable for psychological harms suffered by a 20-year-old plaintiff, “K.G.M.,” who described becoming addicted to their platforms, Instagram and YouTube, respectively, as a young child. They awarded her $6 million, including compensatory and punitive damages.

• The first of the nine fatalities in the Nov. 1 Learjet crash in Palm Beach County, Florida, was identified as 20-year-old co-pilot Nathalia Gadelha Filgueiras.

One new injury was confirmed. An unnamed man who was in a vehicle leaving the adjacent impact area at the time of the crash suffered a leg injury. He was due to be interviewed by NTSB.

Filgueiras’s identity was confirmed independently to the New York Post by her mother, Camila, and her stepfather. Filgueiras was from Palm Beach County, and a graduate of West Boca Raton High School. She earned her private pilot’s license in 2023 when she was 17 years old. She was featured in local media at the time for having earned her pilot’s license before her driver’s license.

Filgueiras’s family said it was her voice that could be heard talking to Air Traffic Control in the lead-up to the crash.

NTSB member Tom Chapman t Chapman was joined at the press conference by the NTSB’s investigator in charge, Timothy Monville. They both said they would not be determining a cause of the crash at the scene, nor would they speculate the cause.

“The weather conditions are a major focus of the investigation,” Chapman said. “You all saw what the weather was like here at the surface. What we have to determine is what the weather conditions were like at altitude. They were at about 35,000 feet, and that’s still something that has to be determined.”

However, they already saw the reports of ice and turbulence as factors that may have played into the crash, and were looking into who held more responsibility in dealing with weather concerns—the flight crew or Air Traffic Control, which ultimately determines flight path and cruising altitude.

• Lindsay Clancy returned to court on Nov. 2 as her lawyers once again tried to have her case dismissed, this time on double-jeopardy grounds.

Clancy narrowly missed being acquitted of the murder of her three children when a single juror pushed back against his 11 peers and refused to find her “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

The defense now argues that the judge should not have declared a mistrial in September, when he could have replaced that juror.

Martin Weinberg, Clancy’s attorney, said the judge didn’t do enough to probe whether that juror was improperly applying the law by refusing to acquit despite what he alleged was reasonable doubt.

He said that meant Clancy was denied a fair trial.

“I apologize, but didn’t I do that?” Judge William Sullivan asked, interrupting him.

The judge pointed out that he had called the jurors individually to the bench and questioned them, under oath, about whether they understood and were willing to apply reasonable doubt.

Defense attorney Kevin Reddington and the judge have had a few heated back-and-forth discussions, including at Monday’s hearing when the attorney referenced the holdout juror by name, and mentioned private details about his life.

Reddington’s team wants the judge to preserve the man’s phone records, after other jurors said during interviews that he was “scrolling” through it during deliberations.

The defense team also suggested the juror was untruthful about a past arrest record on his juror questionnaire.

Prosecutors have submitted a motion asking the judge to bar Reddington from making “extrajudicial” and “prejudicial” statements about the trial, including about the holdout juror.

Judge Sullivan said he expects to rule on those three motions shortly, and he set another hearing for Nov. 16, when the parties may finally settle on a trial date.

The judge asked Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague how the Commonwealth of Massachusetts intends to proceed with the case. She said it would be a retrial, but the exact details would depend on his rulings.

​​NOW MOVING ONTO WORLD NEWS:

• Several supermarket chains across Europe are reporting technical incidents with their refrigerator systems, including rising temperatures, with companies blaming potential cyberattacks.

Incidents were reported in Belgium, Ireland, and Sweden, among other countries, on Nov. 2, following similar attacks that took place across France last month.

Irish food wholesaler Musgrave said a cyberincident affected refrigeration units in 13 of its SuperValu stores. It said it had to remove some chilled and frozen products from sale.

The Delhaize and Colruyt chains operating in Belgium and Luxembourg said cyberincidents had affected fridge and freezer systems in several stores. French multinational chain Carrefour also said 15 of its 700 stores in Belgium were affected.

Colruyt operates Spar stores in Belgium, and a spokesperson said on Nov. 2 that five Spar shops had their fridge ⁠systems attacked.

Stephan Moelans, CEO of refrigeration installer Sabcobel, which operates Delhaize’s systems, told the Belga News Agency that his company began sending technicians to address the problem at about 1 a.m. local time.

“Personally, I’ve been awake since 2 a.m.,” Moelans said. “We’ve been working all night and morning to disconnect the affected units from the network.”

He said that over the past few weeks, Sabcobel had worked to protect customers against this kind of vulnerability, but that fixes must go beyond software updates to units needing physical modification—a move, he said, many of his customers made after the French cyberattacks.

ICA and Coop in Sweden were also affected.

The sales manager at one ICA franchise store in Stockholm told Reuters that the attack occurred at 2 a.m. local time but wasn’t discovered until hours later.

“There has been a cyberattack and all our freezers reached 50 degrees Celsius [122 degrees Fahrenheit],” Engla Ingwall said.

Sweden’s neighbor, Finland, also reported attacks on cold storage units at supermarkets.

Nearby Estonia was also affected, with one Selver supermarket hit. The attack forced a freezer to increase its temperature to 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

• High-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials attending last week’s top meeting were forbidden to go home while the Party tightened its control over their social contacts, according to an insider within its system.

As the CCP’s Fifth Plenum concluded in Beijing on Oct. 29, a Beijing-based insider using the pseudonym Tang Ming for fear of reprisal from the Chinese regime told The Epoch Times that the CCP is imposing increasingly strict controls on the private interactions of officials—to the extent that even retired high-ranking officials are now required to report phone calls among themselves.

In the Fifth Plenum, the CCP adopted a decision on “advancing full and rigorous governance of the party,” further tightening discipline while an internal purge continues to widen.

As regulations become more stringent, during CCP Central Committee sessions, senior officials are not permitted to return home every day, according to Tang.

“In previous years, high-ranking officials based in Beijing could return home after the day’s meeting, but during this Fifth Plenum they were required to stay in designated hotels.”

It has become difficult for officials to arrange private meetings or socialize with other senior leaders during the sessions, Tang said.

“In the past—for instance, during the Fifth Plenum—several State Councilors or Politburo members might have gotten together for dinner after the day’s meeting. But things are different this year; they must eat at the designated hotel. Everyone stays within the confines of the meeting arrangements.”

These kinds of requirements have been formalized into internal CCP documents, Tang said. “Even private gatherings involving more than three senior officials must now be reported to the General Office of the CCP’s Central Committee.”

Local officials can still communicate with central government departments through formal channels; however, private dinners, informal visits, or other forms of interaction that evade organizational oversight have become political risks to be avoided, according to Tang.

“This puts an end to officials’ private gatherings,” he said.

And before we leave, here are some words of wisdom to start the day…Today’s quote is by Aristotle,

It goes,

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” 

—Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics”