10 things you need to know today: November 2, 2022

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1. Chief Justice Roberts temporarily blocks release of Trump tax returns
2. Bolsonaro doesn't concede defeat but allows transition to start in Brazil
3. Netanyahu's right-wing bloc leads Israel elections
4. North Korea launches 17 missiles, including 1 that crossed maritime border
5. Supreme Court says Lindsey Graham must testify in Georgia election inquiry
6. Suspect in attack against Pelosi's husband pleads not guilty
7. Abortion travel time increases sharply, post-Roe study shows
8. Rapper Takeoff shot and killed in Houston
9. 2nd Herschel Walker abortion accuser tells her story in TV interview
10. Julie and Julia writer Julie Powell dies at 49

published 2 November 2022

1. Chief Justice Roberts temporarily blocks release of Trump tax returns

The Supreme Court's chief justice, John Roberts, on Tuesday temporarily blocked the House Ways and Means Committee from obtaining former President Donald Trump's tax returns, putting on hold a lower court ruling that could have allowed the Internal Revenue Service to hand over the documents Thursday. Trump on Monday filed an emergency request to keep the committee from getting the documents, which he claims the Democratic-led panel wants for political reasons. The committee says it needs the materials as part of its review of how the IRS conducts required annual audits of presidents' taxes. Roberts ordered the committee to respond by Nov. 10, two days after midterm elections in which Trump's fellow Republicans hope to take control of Congress.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro spoke Tuesday for the first time since his defeat in Sunday's presidential runoff. He stopped short of acknowledging he had lost the race, but his government said it was starting the "process of transition." The far-right Bolsonaro did not mention the election's winner, leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, but Brazil's Supreme Court released a statement saying Bolsonaro had recognized the election result. Lula won with 50.9 percent to Bolsonaro's 49.1 percent, the narrowest victory since Brazil's return to democracy in the 1980s. Bolsonaro previously said "only God" could remove him from office.

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Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared poised to return to power as his right-wing bloc led in exit polls and the early vote count after Tuesday elections, the country's fifth since 2019. Netanyahu, already Israel's longest serving leader, held onto a lead with nearly 50 percent of ballots counted across the country early Wednesday. His bloc appeared likely to cross the 61-seat threshold to control Israel's parliament, the Knesset, with 61 or 62 seats, although it still could fall short of a majority. If it does win, Netanyahu, who served from 1996-1999 and 2009-2021, could return to office even as he faces a corruption trial. The current government of centrist caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid was projected to get 54 or 55 seats.

North Korea on Wednesday launched 17 missiles, the most it has ever fired in one day. One missile came down less than 40 miles off South Korea's coast, prompting South Korea's President Yoon Suk-yeol to call the launch an unprecedented act of "territorial encroachment." It was the first time a North Korean ballistic missile landed south of the disputed inter-Korean maritime border, the Northern Limit Line, since the peninsula was divided in 1945. The flurry of launches marked an escalation of tensions between the two countries. South Korea responded with rare air raid warnings, and South Korean warplanes fired three missiles into the sea north of the maritime border.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected Sen. Lindsey Graham's (R-S.C.) request to block a subpoena for him to testify to an Atlanta-area grand jury investigating efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn Georgia's 2020 presidential election result. Graham argued that he shouldn't have to testify because his conversations with Georgia officials were part of his duties as a senator to decide whether to certify the results. The Supreme Court said in a single-paragraph ruling with no dissents that lower courts had "assumed that the informal investigative fact-finding that Senator Graham assertedly engaged in constitutes legislative activity protected by the speech or debate clause," and ruled that the grand jury couldn't question him about those activities.

The man accused of beating House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and other charges on Tuesday. David DePape, 42, allegedly broke into the Pelosis' San Francisco home on Friday intending to kidnap Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and break her "kneecaps" if she refused to tell the "truth" about Democrats' "lies," according to police. DePape reportedly told investigators he was on a "suicide mission" and planned to attack other state and federal politicians, according to a court filing. The Washington Post reported that Capitol Police cameras captured images of the break-in but no one was monitoring the video.

Average travel time for women seeking abortions has risen from about a half-hour to nearly two hours since the Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that had protected abortion rights nationwide for half a century, according to a new study by researchers at several institutions, including the University of California, San Francisco and Harvard University. The research team, which also included experts from Boston Children's Hospital and Boston University, found that before the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision in June, women lived an estimated 27.8 minutes from one of about 750 abortion clinics that were in operation. Post-Dobbs, 671 clinics remained open and travel time rose to an average of 100.4 minutes.

Rapper Takeoff, whose given name was Kirshnick Khari Ball, was shot and killed at a bowling alley in downtown Houston on Tuesday. The 28-year-old performer was part of the Atlanta-based group Migos, along with Quavo and Offset. Police Chief Troy Finner said at least two people opened fire outside the bowling alley, and it wasn't immediately clear whether Takeoff or Quavo were the intended victims. "We will find who's responsible for it," Finner said. "Somebody knows exactly who it was and I'm really confident someone will speak up." A 23-year-old man and a 24-year-old woman also were shot and hospitalized with injuries that were not considered life-threatening.

The second woman who has said Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker pressured her into getting an abortion told her story in an appearance on ABC News Tuesday night. The woman, who asked ABC's Frontline to continue identifying her as "Jane Doe," said she and Walker had a six-year affair in the late 1980s and early '90s, when Walker was married. She said when she got pregnant that Walker told her "because of his wife's family and powerful people around him, that I would not be safe and that the child would not be safe." It was "very menacing," she said. Walker said in a statement Tuesday that "this was a lie a week ago and it is a lie today," calling it an election ploy by Democrats.

Food writer Julie Powell, whose blog about cooking recipes from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking led to a book and movie, has died at her home in upstate New York. She was 49. Powell's husband, Eric Powell, told The New York Times on Tuesday that the she died of cardiac arrest on Oct. 26. Powell launched her blog, called the Julie/Julia Project, in 2002 before her 30th birthday, at a time when she felt unfulfilled with her administrative job. She cooked the 524 recipes in Child's 1961 cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1 over the course of a year. She had no formal training, but her honest writing about her kitchen struggles attracted fans.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.