Two days before early voting began in New York, a group of elected officials and voting rights advocates gathered at the Brooklyn Museum—a building that would soon become one of the city’s busy early voting sites—with a straightforward message: don’t wait, don’t be scared, and don’t let anyone take your voice away. The event was part rally, part practical briefing, part safety net. Officials knew that a lot of voters were worried. They had heard the rumors and seen the headlines about mail-in ballots being delayed, about federal efforts to restrict voting by mail, and about the general chaos and…

In a quiet but tense corridor of South Korea’s National Assembly, intelligence officials and lawmakers gathered for a closed-door meeting on a Friday morning, their conversation strictly off the record. The subject was not a new missile launch or a diplomatic overture, but something more visceral and unsettling: a wave of unverified social media rumors claiming that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un might have died. According to sources who were present at the briefing, the National Intelligence Service, or NIS, delivered a blunt assessment: these rumors are false. The speculation had erupted on overseas social media platforms earlier in the…