--:-- Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. Today's Monday, October 28th.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: With eight days to go until the election, the race for the presidency remains extraordinarily tight. The polls show Donald Trump and Kamala Harris effectively tied, and it will be a race to the finish for both candidates.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Yesterday, Trump put on what his team billed as a capstone event for his campaign, though he did not hold it in a battleground state. I just want to say a very big hello to a special place, New York, and to an incredible arena, Madison Square Garden. Incredible.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The Trump team held the rally in Manhattan, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 10 to 1, making the event more about putting on a show than winning over voters.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Kamala, you're fired. Get out, get out. You're fired.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: For Trump, the importance of this rally was to come back to a city and a state that he feels rejected him and show that he could attract a crowd and fill the stadium.
--:-- Maggie Haberman: I was at the PACT rally, which featured a parade of speakers, including Elon Musk, Hulk Hogan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and a rare appearance from Trump's wife, Melania.
--:-- Maggie Haberman: Maggie says that Trump's rhetoric has been growing darker in the final weeks of the campaign, and that was reflected in the tone of the event overall.
--:-- Maggie Haberman: The content of a number of the speeches leading up to Trump's was pretty inflammatory. There were racist comments. There were misogynistic comments. There was a lot of cursing from one speaker.
--:-- Maggie Haberman: The main person who struck racist notes was a comedian who performed named Tony Hinchcliffe, and he talked about Puerto Rico as a barge of garbage floating in the ocean and jokes like that.
--:-- Maggie Haberman: This is a city with a large Puerto Rican community and it almost certain that Kamala Harris team is going to put those comments into ads for the final days of the race. And we'll see if Trump pays any price for it.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Meanwhile, Kamala Harris will deliver her own closing arguments tomorrow with a speech in Washington, D.C.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In the Middle East this weekend, Israel carried out its long-awaited retaliation against Iran in response to Iran's missile attack earlier this month.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And for the moment, things are quiet. The Israeli strikes destroyed air defense systems near oil refineries, a gas field, and a major port.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Notably, they did not hit the energy infrastructure itself or any of Iran's nuclear facilities, which American officials had urged them to avoid, fearing that it could escalate the conflict even further.
--:-- Mark Landler: I've been talking to former diplomats and analysts from both the United States and Israel over the past couple of days, and one thing is very clear.
--:-- Mark Landler: Where in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, the United States played really a pivotal role in the Middle East, setting the blueprint for solutions guiding the course of events.
--:-- Mark Landler: In this conflict, the U.S. is not really the pivotal player as it was so much in the past. You've seen the United States struggle to persuade the Israelis to allow enough humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza.
--:-- Mark Landler: You've seen the Israelis largely rebuff efforts for the United States to broker a ceasefire. They're not the only ones. Of course, Hamas has been resisting one.
--:-- Mark Landler: And you've also seen Israel escalate exchanges with militants from Hezbollah, expanding this conflict into a sort of a two war which is another thing the U had really really tried to avoid.
--:-- Mark Landler: But even as the U.S.'s influence over events has diminished, you've seen the U.S. get drawn militarily more and more into the conflict.
--:-- Mark Landler: The U.S. deployed warships to the Mediterranean. Commandos have been deployed to help look for hostages.
--:-- Mark Landler: You've seen the United States play a major role in helping the Israelis shoot down ballistic missiles that were fired by Iran into Israel.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: So across the board, you're seeing more and more of an American military role in a regional war over which it doesn't seem to have that much strategic and long-term influence.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: California used to be the place to film for TV and movies. It has the studios, the sun, the whole Hollywood infrastructure.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But for the past 20 years, other states have been chipping away at that. Almost 40 states have rolled out tax incentives to lure productions.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Check the credits and you'll see Georgia, Louisiana, and New York as the locations for everything from Marvel movies to indie dramas.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But this weekend, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a proposal to fight back.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: He wants to more than double the state's film tax incentive program to $750 million.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The industry as a whole has been struggling to bounce back from recent writers and actors' strikes, and there are fears that new technology like AI could also threaten Hollywood work.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Newsom said he hopes the program will generate thousands of jobs in California.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But tax incentives for the film industry often cost more than they worth. Study after study has found that for every dollar spent on the tax breaks states get as little as a quarter or even just a dime back in revenue.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And finally, this spring, a museum curator in Manhattan was sifting through a collection of papers, some postcards from Picasso, that kind of thing.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: When he came across a scrap of sheet music the size of an index card. On the top was a very famous name dashed off in cursive. Chopin.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The scrap appears to be an otherwise unknown waltz by the composer, Frédéric Chopin, who died almost 175 years ago.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The pianist Long Long performed the waltz for the times, possibly the first time it's ever been played for the public.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: There's a history in classical music of fakes and forgeries and long-lost pieces emerging out of nowhere, but the penmanship matches, and there are little drawings on the page, which fits.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Chopin liked to doodle. It's not clear what the composer himself would make of anyone playing this waltz now.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: He often covered up his drafts with furious scribbles or blacked them out with ink, And he told his friends that he wanted his unpublished works to be destroyed after his death.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Today on The Daily, inside Donald Trump's unorthodox campaign to win over voters in battleground states.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That's next in the New York Times audio app. or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.
