CHICAGO (WLS) — At least 13 people were wounded in shootings across Chicago and the surrounding area over Halloween weekend, including three victims who died, according to police.

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The Trump administration’s State Department has criticized a newly ratified maritime agreement between NATO member Türkiye and Libya, a country still divided by rival political and military authorities.

The Türkiye-Libya accord has triggered anger across the region, with several governments arguing that it attempts to redraw long-standing maritime boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, an area believed to contain significant natural gas reserves.

Libya’s eastern parliament approved the agreement in mid-October. That territory is controlled by military commander Khalifa Haftar, whose forces have aligned with Türkiye. The arrangement bypasses Libya’s internationally recognized administration in Tripoli, located in the country’s northwest.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson told News Media, “The announcement of the ratification of the Turkish-Libyan delimitation memorandum of understanding has raised tensions in the region and is unhelpful and provocative — and our position on this matter has not changed.”

The official urged all governments, including Eastern Mediterranean partners, to settle competing maritime claims through sincere negotiations and to avoid actions that could further inflame tensions. “Greece and Türkiye are both NATO allies,” the spokesperson said, encouraging the two countries to work directly toward resolving their differences.

The spokesperson said that resolving the disputes peacefully would create better conditions for commercial investment and energy exploration, potentially benefiting countries throughout the region.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan defended the agreement on Wednesday, calling it fully lawful and insisting that it does not conflict with international law, according to the Turkish news agency Anadolu.

“This is an entirely legitimate agreement, both from a legal and a political perspective. There is no need to debate it,” Fidan said.

Reuters reported that Fidan also dismissed the objections raised by other countries. “There are countries reacting to this. We know why they are reacting. Some are doing so because they need to, some really do have strategic problems with this issue. ​ However, this is an entirely legitimate deal, both from a legal and a statutory perspective. ​There is no need to argue this.”

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News Media contacted officials in Türkiye and Libya for comment, but neither side had responded by the time of publication.

Greek Foreign Minister George Gerapetritis rejected the accord in a forceful statement published on his ministry’s website. “The memorandum will not be implemented. And it will not be implemented for the simple reason that it produces no legal effects whatsoever, as it is entirely contrary to international law.” He accused Türkiye of building an influence network in Libya to pursue its own objectives and said Turkish media had intensified its anti-Greece messaging. “There is a constant stream of reports pushing the Turkish government to become even more aggressive.”

Endy Zemenides, executive director of the Hellenic American Leadership Council, told News Media that the agreement “absolutely” poses a threat to the security interests of the United States and its allies.

He argued that the memorandum could harm American energy companies and conflict with U.S. policy in the region by denying maritime rights around Crete. The Greek island is home to NATO’s southernmost base and has taken on added importance as the United States responds to conflicts across the Middle East. Zemenides also pointed to the presence of Exxon and Chevron in Crete.

Zemenides described the Türkiye-Libya agreement as part of an effort to weaken the American position in the Eastern Mediterranean. He said Washington has been unable to depend on Türkiye for roughly a decade and warned that permitting Ankara to challenge the pro-Western regional order could undermine U.S. interests.

The European Union also issued an unusually direct condemnation, saying the agreement violates established principles of maritime law.

“The EU position regarding the MoU is firm and clear. As outlined in the European Council Conclusions of December 2019 and reiterated in June 2025, the Türkiye-Libya Memorandum of Understanding infringes upon the sovereign rights of third States and does not comply with the Law of the Sea. It is null and void and cannot produce any legal consequences for third States.”

Israel also blasted Turkey and Libya. The Jewish state has developed a troika alliance with both Greece and Cyprus. Israel’s foreign ministry said on X it “strongly condemns the decision of the Libyan House of Representatives to ratify the Maritime Jurisdiction Memorandum between Turkey and Libya.”

Israel’s foreign ministry added on X that “This agreement infringes upon the sovereign rights of our close allies in the region. Regretfully, once again we see Turkey working to destabilize the east Mediterranean region.”

Martha Stewart is facing backlash after sharing a Halloween image that appeared to depict her dressed as a hungry beggar.

The 85-year-old lifestyle personality posted a photo on Instagram showing herself in torn clothing, with dirt covering her face and a cardboard sign reading, “I AM HUNGRY HELP ME!!”

The controversial image appeared in a carousel advertising Stewart’s QVC holiday and Halloween candle collection.

“My QVC candles are perfect for Halloween!!!!!” she wrote in the caption before deleting the post shortly afterward.

Stewart has not explained whether the image was intended to portray a hungry beggar or why she removed it.

The Daily Mail has contacted Stewart’s representative for comment.

Social media users quickly saved the image and circulated it on Reddit and X.

According to TMZ, critics described the costume as “gross,” “offensive” and “out of touch,” accusing Stewart of using poverty and homelessness as a marketing gimmick.

The apparent joke drew particular criticism because Stewart is estimated to have a net worth of $400 million.

In 1999, she became the first female self-made billionaire in the United States for a period after her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, went public on the New York Stock Exchange.

Her fortune later suffered a significant setback following insider trading charges, a five-month prison sentence in 2004 and subsequent market fluctuations involving her company.

Her wealth now comes from a range of sources, including real estate, book publishing, media ventures and brand partnerships, according to Tasting Table.

The latest controversy follows Stewart’s tense exchange with Craig Melvin after he spilled chocolate ganache on her $3,000 designer white trousers during a Halloween cooking segment on Today.

Stewart wore an all-white outfit similar to the ensemble she wore at the 2024 Paris Olympics, while Melvin dressed as her close friend Snoop Dogg.

Carson Daly dressed as Choosin’ Texas singer Ella Langley, while Savannah Guthrie recreated an outfit worn by an NBC page for the program’s 100th anniversary Halloween celebration.

During the segment, Stewart taught the Today crew how to decorate a cheesecake with a chocolate ganache spider web. The demonstration soon ran into trouble when the key ingredient could not be found.

“Uh oh. Somebody forgot the chocolate ganache,” Stewart said.

“Oh, there it is,” she added.

‘It’s right here,’ Melvin said, picking it up and holding it out to Stewart.

The piping bag then started to leak ganache on Stewart’s luxury pants, and the celebrity chef’s horror was written all over her face.

‘Whoa!’ they exclaimed together.

‘Eeeeh! Snoop!’ she chided her equally horror-struck helper.

‘I’m so sorry, Martha,’ Melvin said, before covering his mouth with his hand.

‘Good thing you’re best friends,’ Daly jokingly commented.

‘Real Snoop would never do that,’ Stewart chided Melvin.

Earlier this month, Stewart rubbed people the wrong way again when she shot down the notion of a traditional 9-to-5 job or work-life balance.

During a live appearance on Richer Lives by SoFi podcast with financial expert Vivian Tu, Stewart called people who try to achieve ‘balance’ as ‘boring’ with ‘thick skulls.’

When asked how she juggles her personal life with her vast media and business empire, Stewart replied there is ‘no such thing.’

‘Just get that through your thick skulls. You can’t balance it, it doesn’t balance,’ she asserted.

‘This thing about balance, I don’t know who thought about that, but it just doesn’t work. Maybe infrequently, and I’m jealous of those people, but they’re all so boring,’ Stewart went on.

‘You’re gonna get divorced if you’re going to get divorced. You’re going to get married three times if you’re going to get married three times. It just doesn’t work out.’

“Thou hast this!”

Few institutions are as closely tied to New York City as the New York Post and the New York City Marathon. So who better than the Post’s famed founder to rally Sunday’s runners across the five boroughs?

Several actors portraying Alexander Hamilton joined the thousands of spectators gathered near the finish line in Central Park, cheering on the marathoners as they completed the course.

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The Founding Father impersonators held signs featuring old-fashioned rallying cries, including “MAKE HASTE,” “THOU HAST THIS!,” “LONG DASH —!” and “YE HAST GOT THIS!” Their cheers helped encourage the record-setting field of 60,000 runners competing in the 50th running of the world’s most famous race.

The Hamiltons also took to the streets to launch The Post’s celebration of its 225th anniversary, honoring the people, places and traditions that help make New York City iconic.

President Abelardo de la Espriella is making his campaign against Colombia’s cartels a defining priority. The country’s new leader, widely known as “El Tigre,” won office on a law-and-order platform, and his early crackdown appears to be producing results both at home and in Washington.

In the early morning hours, de la Espriella arrived at the Barranquilla police command as 587 police officers and soldiers raided 50 sites across the Caribbean port city and surrounding areas in Operation Blindaje 360. Days earlier, Colombian media had publicized a police recording in which “Keko,” the alleged leader of the gang Los del Freseo, boasted that de la Espriella could not touch him.

“The Tiger’s got nothing. Let him come out, and we’ll put lead in him,” Keko allegedly said in the recording.

Before dawn, however, the president had tracked him down. The confrontation, in which the two men faced each other, was captured on video.

In footage released by the presidential office, El Tigre told Keko that the gang leader was “a tough guy on the phone… but the look of the fear on his face matched that of his many victims.” The operation resulted in 72 arrests.

The highly publicized encounter resonated with Colombians who had long argued that former leftist President Gustavo Petro’s policy of engaging drug traffickers had made the country more vulnerable to organized crime. Colombian and Venezuelan cartels were reportedly moving into territory left exposed by a power vacuum and weak law enforcement.

De la Espriella’s administration is also working to dismantle Petro’s “total peace” policy, which sought negotiations with several armed organizations. Before taking office, de la Espriella said he would reverse key parts of the initiative and reinstate arrest warrants for members of illegal armed groups.

Nearly three months into his presidency, the 48-year-old lawyer has ended his predecessor’s “total peace” negotiations, ordered that every armed group be treated as a terrorist organization and claimed more than 32,000 arrests. He is pursuing that offensive in close coordination with Washington.

A dual U.S.-Colombian citizen who lived in Miami before entering the presidential race, de la Espriella has aligned Colombia with President Donald Trump’s anti-cartel coalition. Last month, he personally handed over a guerrilla commander accused of supplying Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel to DEA agents, delivering the prisoner with his hands and feet shackled.

The prisoner, Geovany Andrés Rojas, known as “Araña,” is accused of leading the Comandos de la Frontera dissidents. He now faces narco-terrorism charges in Southern California.

“The option of dialogue is completely exhausted,” de la Espriella told troops after his Aug. 7 inauguration. In an Oct. 12 address, he reported 32,503 arrests, 33 ringleaders removed from action and 679 drug-production sites destroyed or disabled. He has also signed more than 100 extradition orders, including five involving former armed-group peace negotiators wanted in the United States whose transfers had been frozen by the previous government.

The offensive has extended into rural areas, where conflict monitor ACLED recorded August as the deadliest month for clashes between security forces and armed groups since it began monitoring Colombia in 2018.

In late August, de la Espriella warned FARC dissident leader Iván Mordisco: “When you least expect it, a bomb is going to fall on you.” Two days later, he walked past the bagged bodies of 23 suspected dissidents at an army base in Guaviare. Troops also killed the top commander of a trafficking organization with paramilitary roots in La Guajira.

Colombia joined Trump’s Shield of the Americas coalition as its 19th member in August. War Secretary Pete Hegseth said Bogotá had authorized “joint military operations to destroy terrorists and terror networks domestically.” The administration has pledged $1 billion in security assistance, subject to congressional approval, while Marine Gen. Francis Donovan, the head of U.S. Southern Command, has visited Colombian bases.

However, Colombian Vice President José Manuel Restrepo told News Media on camera that although Colombia supports Trump’s push for a new Western Hemisphere security alliance, it has set clear limits on the role of U.S. forces inside the country. Colombian troops, he said, rather than American forces, will conduct operations against Colombia’s armed groups.

Benjamin Gedan, a senior fellow and director of the Latin America Program at the Stimson Center in Washington who previously served as a South America director at the White House, said the developments of the past several years represented an exception:

“For decades, the United States and Colombia closely cooperated to fight guerrillas and organized crime. Plan Colombia was celebrated by both Republicans and Democrats. The Colombian military is well-trained and battle-tested. Renewed close cooperation between Bogotá and Washington is a cornerstone of the renewed U.S. focus on security in Latin America,” he said.

“Still, flashy military strikes on criminal targets will not answer the mail. These groups are well-armed, well-funded and thrive in regions with little state presence. Images of criminals in body bags may give the impression of forward progress after the failed strategy of Colombia’s last leader, much as videos of exploding speedboats have become the calling card of the Shield of the Americas. In both cases, a more sophisticated strategy is needed to deal lasting blows to criminal groups,” Gedan argued.

Oscar Palma, a professor of security studies at the University of Rosario in Bogotá, said it is still a little too early to assess the change in policies and affirm they will be fruitful within the Colombian context. “Beyond the policing acts themselves, there is the subjective feeling of security with debates within Colombian society on whether this open war strategy brings more or less security to the population. Many argue that the gangs are acting now more forcefully to defend their territories and business deals, while others believe that a strong police presence will eventually lead to less organized crime.”

Palma said there is a false dichotomy between having to choose all-out war or dialogue in order to achieve peace with groups such as the FARC and other gang leaders: “It is a fiction that you will come to zero combatants simply pursuing one strategy or the other—all-out war will never zero down those combating in the FARC and organized crime just as peace talks, especially if carried out in a misguided policy such as the one led by [Gustavo] Petros, will achieve real results.”

He said, “A better example is the strategy carried out by President [Juán Manuel] Santos during the dealings with the FARC, which led to a much safer Colombia: there were talks, but those were part of a bigger strategy of also fighting these groups with arms and bringing them to justice,” he added.

“There is a wave of freedom, a wave of democracy, a wave of free market… There is a new momentum for the region and we have to take advantage of that momentum. That’s what I said to President Trump,” Restrepo told News Media. “If we want to keep and preserve democracy in the region, the Shield of the Americas is going to be the best opportunity to do it.”