A federal judge in Mississippi has permanently blocked the most restrictive abortion law in the country that bans the procedure after 15 weeks of gestation.

Mississippi was set for a fairly mundane midterm election runoff next week — deciding who would win the final undecided U.S. Senate seat in a state that easily elects Republicans, until a senator greeted a cattle rancher.

In a video posted on Twitter last week, Republican Sen. Hyde-Smith is talking to a tall man. A rancher named Colin Hutchinson is seen putting his arm around Hyde-Smith at an event in Tupelo, Miss., earlier this month.

Evacuee Roxanne Peters had planned to prepare food tomorrow, for Thanksgiving dinner.

"I was celebrating at two different houses. We were invited to two different places, and I was cooking, you know, potluck," she said.

Both those homes burned to the ground in the historic Camp Fire. The scale of the fire's destruction is so spread out that very little of the towns of Paradise, Magalia and Concow remain. So far, the fire scorched 230 square miles — an area the size of Chicago.

"I'll be giving thanks this year that we made it out alive," Peters says.

Each autumn, farmer Amandeep Singh has just a few days to prepare his fields for the next crop. He must clear stubble left over from the rice harvest, before planting wheat, which grows over winter.

Amandeep, 42, is from a long line of farmers in India's breadbasket, in the northern state of Punjab. Like his father and grandfather before him, he'd always burned the residue known as rice straw – the dry stalks of the plant after the grain and chaff have been removed. It's the fastest, cheapest way to prepare his fields for the next planting.