| Rep. Katie Hill, freshman targeted by revenge porn, resigns with a blast at Trump Posted: 31 Oct 2019 12:11 PM PDT  During her final speech on the House floor Thursday, Rep. Katie Hill apologized for actions that led to her resignation while also boasting that her last vote as a member of Congress was in favor of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.
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| Biden in Fourth Place in Latest Iowa Poll Posted: 01 Nov 2019 05:54 AM PDT  Former vice president Joe Biden fell to fourth place in the latest poll of Democratic presidential primary candidates in Iowa.The poll, conducted by the New York Times and Siena College, shows Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren in the lead with 22 percent of the prospective vote. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders placed second with 19 percent, while South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg took 18 percent.Biden received 17 percent of the vote.As part of the poll, respondents were asked which candidate they were most confident could beat President Trump in the elections. The survey found voters were most confident in Biden's and Warren's chances of winning against the incumbent president.Warren's surge to the front of the latest Iowa poll comes as details of her universal medicare plan were revealed Friday morning. The Senator's proposal, while similar to that of Sanders, would cost $52 trillion over ten years. The plan would be funded by taxes on employers as well as taxes on rich Americans and corporations, in addition to Warren's trademark wealth tax.A previous survey of Iowa caucus voters found Biden in the lead, barely edging out Warren.Biden also retains the national lead in the Democratic primaries, according to RealClearPolitics. The former vice president gained the lead in a CNN poll released October 23.Buttigieg, while not polling well nationally, surged in Iowa recently. The Indiana mayor has sought to portray himself as a moderate alternative to Warren and Sanders, and questioned their ability to fund universal medicare coverage during the October Democratic primary debate.
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| Greta Thunberg call to fight global warming cheers LA rally Posted: 01 Nov 2019 05:19 PM PDT  Greta Thunberg, Sweden's 16-year-old climate-change activist, joined fellow teenagers from throughout California Friday in telling a cheering crowd of hundreds at a Los Angeles rally that they can and will fight to save their planet from global warming. Thunberg, who has been traveling across the United States since delivering a passionate speech in New York in September that demanded world leaders do more to combat global warming, spoke at a rally organized by Youth Climate Strike Los Angeles.
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| A union for 28,000 American Airlines cabin crew has told Boeing's CEO its members are scared of getting back on the 737 Max Posted: 01 Nov 2019 03:38 AM PDT  Lori Bassani, who leads the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, wrote to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg about the 737 Max crisis.
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| Democrats begin to worry about Warren's electability Posted: 31 Oct 2019 05:47 AM PDT  Having pulled ahead of her rivals in Iowa, New Hampshire and many national polls, Elizabeth Warren has entered a new phase of her presidential campaign: the part where Democrats start to get second thoughts.
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| 4 Killed, Several Injured in Shooting at Airbnb Halloween Party in California. Here's What to Know Posted: 01 Nov 2019 04:19 AM PDT  The mass shooting at a Halloween party at an Airbnb in Orinda, Calif. left four people dead and several others injured.
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| ‘It’s like nothing we have come across before’: UK intelligence officials shaken by Trump administration’s requests for help with counter-impeachment inquiry Posted: 01 Nov 2019 11:27 AM PDT  As the impeachment hearings get more and more alarming for Donald Trump, with damning new evidence emerging every day, there appears to be increasing urgency in the parallel counter-offensives under way by the president's team in an attempt to defend him.There are attacks against the witnesses giving testimony by Trump and his supporters, including attempts to smear Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, Ukraine expert at the National Security Council who this week provided crucial testimony about Trump's telephone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. And there have been the extraordinary scenes of Congress Republicans breaking into the proceedings and disrupting them.
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| Hedge fund billionaire fires back at Warren: 'Your vilification of the rich is misguided' Posted: 31 Oct 2019 03:38 PM PDT  Hedge fund mogul Leon Cooperman takes issue with Sen. Warren's plans for a wealth tax.
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| Chasing shadows in China: Detained lawyer's wife battles on Posted: 01 Nov 2019 11:14 AM PDT  With winter approaching, Xu Yan brought some warm clothes and money for her husband to a detention centre in eastern China, though she's not even sure the arrested human rights lawyer is still being held there. Xu, 37, has travelled some 20 times from Beijing to Xuzhou in Jiangsu province in a vain struggle to get any information about Yu Wensheng after he was taken into custody last year. Xu returned again this week, joining the line at the Xuzhou City Detention Centre with other people bringing plastic bags bulging with thick duvets and sweaters for inmates.
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| Brazil authorities zero in on ship suspected of oil spill Posted: 01 Nov 2019 01:39 PM PDT  After oil mysteriously washed ashore on some 2,100 kilometers (1,300 miles) of Brazil's coastline for two months, authorities on Friday identified a suspect: a Greek-flagged ship belonging to Delta Tankers Ltd. Brazil's government has been striving to investigate the cause of the spill that has hit 286 beaches along the northeast coast and hurt fishing and tourism. The specific source of the oil has remained unclear since it began appearing in early September.
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| Kids of U.S. Immigrants Move Up Just Like Those 100 Years Before Posted: 31 Oct 2019 12:30 PM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- Children of U.S. immigrants tend to earn more than their parents and have higher rates of upward mobility than their American-born peers.Those are some of the conclusions in a working paper circulated this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research that explores how immigrants often improve their children's prospects in life -- and shows those born to recent immigrants are moving up just like those who came to American shores a century before.Many immigrants earn less than U.S.-born workers upon arrival, and while they don't completely catch up in a single generation, their children do, according to the research by Ran Abramitzky of Stanford, Leah Platt Boustan and Elisa Jacome of Princeton University, and Santiago Perez of the University of California at Davis."Children of immigrants from nearly every sending country have higher rates of upward mobility than the children of the U.S.-born," they said.They also directly take on the politics around immigration, which was a central theme during the 2016 election that installed Donald Trump as president and remains a controversial topic as the country gears up for the 2020 campaign."Although some politicians have a short-term perspective on immigrant assimilation, our findings suggest that this view might underestimate the long-run success of immigrants," they wrote. "Our findings are more consistent with the idea of the 'American Dream,' by which even immigrants who come to the U.S. with few resources and little skills have a real chance at improving their children's prospects."The analysis tracks immigrants using historical data that stretch back more than 100 years. The first earliest groups consist of 4 million first-generation immigrants and their children in the 1880 or 1910 censuses, with the first group mostly from northern and western European nations such as Ireland or Germany, and the second including more from the southern and eastern parts of the continent who are thought to have faced more initial disadvantages in the labor market.The researchers then follow the children of those groups to the 1910 and 1940 censuses using information on their names, ages and birthplaces. The historical data show "immigrant families were more likely than the U.S.-born to move to areas that offered better prospects for their children," the researchers wrote.To contact the reporter on this story: William Edwards in Washington at wedwards29@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Margaret Collins at mcollins45@bloomberg.net, Jeff Kearns, Alister BullFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| U.S., allies working to offset loss of Iranian oil: Mnuchin Posted: 01 Nov 2019 09:51 AM PDT  The United States is working with allies to ensure adequate global oil supplies after its sanctions barred nations from buying Iranian crude, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Friday. Mnuchin spoke to reporters during a trip to India - which was one of the main importers of Iranian oil until New Delhi stopped the shipments this May in the aftermath of the U.S. sanctions. "We are working with our allies to make sure that there is significant supply in the market of oil to offset sanctions," said Mnuchin, who is on a regional tour to try to build up support against Iran.
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| Trump impeachment: Top White House security official says he had ‘sinking feeling’ after learning of Ukraine quid pro quo Posted: 31 Oct 2019 01:20 PM PDT  Donald Trump did withhold military aid to Ukraine while demanding its president launch an investigation into Joe Biden's son, in an apparent quid pro quo deal, a top White House security official has said.Tim Morrison confirmed to members of Congress on Thursday that he had a "sinking feeling" after speaking to Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, and learning of the president's desire for Ukraine to publicly announce a corruption probe. Mr Sondland had told Ukrainian officials aid would be released if the investigation went ahead, according to a report of Mr Morrison's testimony in the Washington Post.
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| View Photos of Honda's SEMA Lineup Posted: 01 Nov 2019 09:00 AM PDT |
| Belgium told to bring back IS mother, children from Syria Posted: 31 Oct 2019 02:59 AM PDT  Belgian authorities have been ordered to repatriate a woman who joined the Islamic State group and her two children from the camp in Syria where she is being held, a lawyer for her family said Thursday. The Belgian government has 75 days to bring back the 23-year-old Belgian woman and her children from the Al-Roj camp controlled by Kurdish fighters under the order issued by a Brussels court, the lawyer, Nicolas Cohen, told AFP, confirming a report on Belgian state television. The ruling lays bare a debate in Europe over the fate of European citizens who left to join IS and who are now being held in camps in Syria and Iraq following the defeat of the jihadists' so-called "caliphate".
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| Exxon, Chevron Begin Pushing Back Against Warren’s Fracking Ban Posted: 01 Nov 2019 12:53 PM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- America's two biggest oil companies are starting to push back against the fracking ban touted by the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, which may become one of the most consequential flashpoints for energy markets during the election campaign.Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. executives spoke out publicly against the proposals for the first time on Friday, saying they would shift profits from crude production from the U.S. to other countries, and may increase prices for consumers while doing nothing to reduce oil demand or greenhouse-gas emissions.It's a line of attack that's likely to feature heavily in debates in the year ahead as the energy industry and Republicans seek to counter the Democratic Party's green wing. To be sure, whoever gets elected next year will find it difficult to end fracking. Presidential powers to enact a ban only extend to federal lands, something that would be certain to face immediate legal challenges. A wider restriction would need to go through Congress."Any efforts to ban fracking or restrict supply will not remove demand for the resource," Neil Hansen, Exxon's vice president of investor relations, said on a conference call with analysts. "If anything it will shift the economic benefit away from the U.S. to another country, and a potentially impact the price of that commodity here and globally."Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, two front-runners in the race to be the Democratic candidate, are keen to stop America's reliance on fossil fuels, and they also want to end what they say is Washington's subservience to corporate interests. They also know how to hit Exxon and Chevron where it hurts. Five years ago, both companies produced little crude from fracking and might have even have benefited from a ban if it led to higher oil prices. But now fracking is the fastest-growing part of their global businesses and a key profit driver.Hydraulic fracturing of shale rock is pushing U.S. oil production to record highs, touching 12.4 million barrels a day in August. Exxon said Friday its output from the Permian Basin in West Texas and New Mexico had boomed by more than 70% in the third quarter from a year earlier. Chevron, a bigger Permian producer, saw its output there climb 35%.That wave of supply has ensured lower gasoline and energy prices for domestic consumers, bolstered economic growth for states such as Texas and North Dakota, and restored the country to ranks of the world's major crude exporters."It's really unlocked an economic huge economic benefit for the country, as well as for the companies involved," Jay Johnson, the boss of Chevron's upstream business, said during the company's earnings conference call.But fracking also has costs, particularly in terms of the climate. Cheap fossil fuels typically mean people use more of them, causing higher emissions. Hansen said that while Exxon shares concerns about climate change, "there are more effective policies" such as a revenue-neutral carbon tax and technology initiatives.To contact the reporter on this story: Kevin Crowley in Houston at kcrowley1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Simon Casey at scasey4@bloomberg.net, Joe CarrollFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Barack Obama thinks 'woke' kids want purity. They don't: they want progress Posted: 01 Nov 2019 03:00 AM PDT  The former president took black and progressive movements to task, without understanding his own failure to deliver change • Call-out culture: how to get it right (and wrong)Former president Barack Obama speaks with actress, model, and activist Yara Shahidi during the Obama Foundation summit in Chicago, on 29 October. Photograph: Ashlee Rezin Garcia/APOn Tuesday, in Chicago, former president Barack Obama joined actress Yara Shahidi in a conversation with activists from his Obama Foundation program. Over the nearly 1.5-hour Obama Foundation summit event, the beloved political figure deployed his trademark charm and humor while discussing the challenges of movement politics.Media attention has focused on a particular part of the conversation – Obama's criticism of call-out culture and what he perceived as an excessively strident activist left. "We can't completely remake society in a minute," Obama said, "so we have to make some accommodations to the existing structures."He added, "This idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you."He then made a separate point about social media activism:"If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn't do something right or used the wrong verb, I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself. 'Man you see how woke I was, I called you out.'" But "that's not activism. That's not bringing about change."On its face, these are fair remarks. During the session, both Obama and Shahidi drew from examples of the nonviolent civil rights movement of the early 1960s, which required enormous faith, patience and compromise from its activists in the face of threats to their lives and livelihood. Today, as social justice activists' material conditions have relatively improved, they will encounter people in positions of power with wealth and access, and they have to learn to work with them on some level, Obama implied. And no, tweeting about a verb probably won't bring about change.However, we can't look at Obama's remarks in a vacuum. From 2016 – as he prepared to exert his influence over who would be the next Democratic nominee – to the present, Obama has often aimed his political critiques at youth-led, black and progressive movements. While upholding the necessity of nuance, Obama himself seems to force these movements into a box, cherry-picking anecdotes for a strawman: that these movements expect purity and demand perfection.> This idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're always politically woke … you should get over that. The world is messy. There are ambiguities> > Barack ObamaIn an early instance of this ideological pattern, at a 2016 youth town hall in London, Obama spoke generally of Black Lives Matter while referring to the handful of activists who confronted the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for her role in criminalizing black youth:"Once you've highlighted an issue and brought it to people's attention … then you can't just keep on yelling at them. And you can't refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position. The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room."A few months later in a Howard commencement address, with Chicago protests of the police killing of Laquan McDonald not far in the distance, he told the audience of mostly black students about his criminal justice reform as a state senator:"I can say this unequivocally: without at least the acceptance of the police organizations in Illinois, I could never have gotten those [criminal justice reform] bills passed … If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you're not going to get what you want."And earlier this year, Obama again raised the amorphous specter of purity politics as people have embraced a leftward policy shift:"One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States … is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, 'Uh, I'm sorry, this is how it's going to be' and then we start … a 'circular firing squad', where you start shooting at your allies because one of them has strayed from purity on the issues."Obama has offered these platitudes without much evidence that progressives, Black Lives Matter activists or young voters expect purity. Impatience with the status quo is not purity. A consistent political project is not purity. And being patient has its limits.> For many Americans, the normalization of genuinely leftwing policies is providing the hope and change Obama campaigned onYou can gather from the general direction of Obama's career, from turning down a route in corporate law to his community organizing, that he has some commitment to social justice. However, his remarks indicate discomfort with more radical tactics in achieving it, reducing them to petulant zeal and not a legitimate strategy among the broad scope of tools needed to dismantle oppressive systems.While discussing Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King as examples of patient progress, he freezes them in time. He failed to note either King's or Parks's evolutions. Over time King became more radicalized and questioned integration. When Parks was forced to Detroit to retreat from the backlash against her bus boycott activism, she became a proponent of the Panthers' self-defense demands and identified Malcolm X as her personal hero.Obama also failed to discuss how, despite King's strategies negotiating with Lyndon Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress waffled in passing further civil rights measures until the 1968 riots after King's assassination, when Congress was forced to swiftly pass the Fair Housing Act.Or go back further: despite the negotiations and patience of abolitionists in the 1800s, it was a steady stream of black uprisings, and an entire civil war, that gave abolition laws and the Emancipation Proclamation any teeth.Obama's fundamental problem is in confusing a strategy of pragmatism with the strategy. Pragmatic approaches can coexist with more radical politics. But Obama's pattern of dismissing radical demands altogether shows a serious unwillingness to appreciate the times. Obama is committed to a notion of reaching across the aisle that may have seemed necessary in 2012, but not so much in 2019.Americans in the throes of economic struggle and social oppression have been advised to hold their nose for so long that they're suffocating. The labor movement is experiencing more worker strikes now than in the past 40 years. We're in a 1968 moment, not 1963. But Obama has not accepted this evolution.As people demand universal policies for basic needs of shelter, food, freedom from police terror, and economic security, and when wealth inequality is the worst in a century, Obama has to reckon with his own questions. How is his form of calling out – scolding black, young and progressive movements – bringing about change? Is he part of the solution or part of the problem?For many Americans, the normalization of genuinely leftwing policies is providing the hope and change Obama campaigned on. This is the time for him to finally help achieve it.
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| Teachers strike taught Chicago's new mayor tough lessons: analysts Posted: 01 Nov 2019 12:27 PM PDT  Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot made strategic errors in the first major fight of her tenure, an 11-day teachers' strike, but may have learned lessons that will prove useful as she confronts immense city budget challenges, political observers said. Lightfoot, 57, was elected in convincing fashion to become Chicago's first black woman mayor in April, when she vaulted to victory on promises to dismantle the city's corrupt political machine and reform the city's school district.
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| U.S.-Led Coalition Blocks Russia in Syria While Allowing Turkey to Terrorize the Kurds Posted: 01 Nov 2019 04:59 AM PDT  Syrian Kurds are stuck between Donald Trump's 2016 campaign promise to "take the oil" and a hard place.
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| Jury finds Chicago gang member guilty in the murder of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee Posted: 01 Nov 2019 08:20 AM PDT  A jury found gang member Drwight Boone-Doty guilty Thursday in the murder of Tyshawn Lee, a 9-year-old boy was shot and killed.
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| Seniors at California complex 'abandoned' during blackout Posted: 31 Oct 2019 04:49 PM PDT  One woman in her 80s tripped over another resident who had fallen on the landing in a steep stairwell. At least 20 seniors with wheelchairs and walkers were essentially trapped, in the dark, in a low-income apartment complex in Northern California during a two-day power shut-off aimed at warding off wildfires. Residents of the Villas at Hamilton in Novato, north of San Francisco, say they were without guidance from their property management company or the utility behind the blackout as they faced pitch-black stairwells and hallways and elevators that shut down.
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| New California fire grows as crews make headway on other blazes Posted: 01 Nov 2019 05:11 PM PDT  A new wildfire in California grew to nearly 9,000 acres (3,700 hectares) on Friday, sending thousands of people fleeing and further stretching resources in a state struggling with a spate of wildfires this season. The so-called Maria Fire erupted Thursday evening in Ventura County, 65 miles (105 kilometers) northwest of Los Angeles, and burned out of control through the night, driven by high winds and threatening 2,300 structures. Ventura County Sheriff Bill Ayub said fire crews had been thwarted by people flying drones in the area.
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| Bill O’Reilly: 'If Joe Biden is elected president ... he has to be impeached' Posted: 01 Nov 2019 08:19 AM PDT  Disgraced former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly shared his dream of what should happen if Joe Biden were to win the Democratic nomination and then defeat President Trump in 2020. "If Joe Biden is elected president, the day after he's sworn in, he has to be impeached," said O'Reilly.
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| Warren Reveals $52 Trillion Medicare for All Plan, Claims No Middle-Class Tax Increase Necessary Posted: 01 Nov 2019 05:10 AM PDT  Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) unveiled a Medicare for all plan Friday that will cost nearly $52 trillion over the next ten years and, she claims, will not require any middle-class tax increases.The proposal would be funded by roughly $20 trillion in taxes on employers, financial transactions, and super-wealthy corporations over the next decade. Existing federal and state spending would account for the remaining $30 trillion in costs."We don't need to raise taxes on the middle class by one penny to finance Medicare for All," Warren writes as part of the plan."When fully implemented, my approach to Medicare for All would mark one of the greatest federal expansions of middle class wealth in our history," she continues. "And if Medicare for All can be financed without any new taxes on the middle class, and instead by asking giant corporations, the wealthy, and the well-connected to pay their fair share, that's exactly what we should do."Warren would impose $9 trillion in new Medicare taxes on employers over the next decade, which she claims will replace what employers currently pay for employee health insurance.The plan includes a "Supplemental Employer Medicare Contribution" — another tax — on large corporations if the Medicare plan risks running out of funds.Warren also proposes more taxes on the super-rich in addition to her trademark wealth tax, which would raise another $1 trillion. Additional taxes on foreign earnings and financial transactions would also be implemented under the plan.Warren admitted on Tuesday that a universal medicare plan would eliminate about two million jobs, mostly among health-care-industry professionals, necessitating a plan to help those professionals adjust."I think this is part of the cost issue and should be part of a cost plan," Warren commented.Rival candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed his own universal medicare plan, which he projected would cost around $32 trillion over ten years. Sanders would fund the plan with taxes on wealthy Americans, although his wealth tax would only raise a comparative $4.35 trillion over ten years, along with other taxes on the middle class.Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg criticized medicare for all and Warren during last month's Democratic primary debate."No plan has been laid out to explain how a multi-trillion-dollar hole in this Medicare-for-all plan that Senator Warren is putting forward is supposed to get filled in," Buttigieg said at the time.
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| Four people shot dead at Halloween party at Airbnb rental in California Posted: 01 Nov 2019 05:31 AM PDT ![Four people shot dead at Halloween party at Airbnb rental in California]( "Four people shot dead at Halloween party at Airbnb rental in California") The shooting took place around 10:45 p.m. on Thursday at a house party with more than 100 people attending in an expensive neighborhood of Orinda, a small city across the bay from San Francisco, the Contra Costa Sheriff's Office said in a statement. Four people died in the shooting and several other people were injured, the statement said.
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| Joe Walsh: In 2016, I was a proud 'deplorable.' In 2019, I'll gladly be 'human scum.' Posted: 01 Nov 2019 12:15 AM PDT  When Hillary Clinton called Republican voters 'deplorables,' it showed that she wanted to divide us. Donald Trump's 'human scum' comment is no better.
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| Convicted rapist mistakenly released from Georgia prison captured in Kentucky Posted: 31 Oct 2019 05:30 AM PDT  Tony Maycon Munoz-Mendez was serving a life sentence in Georgia when he was released "in error." Authorities captured him in Kentucky Wednesday.
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| Groups ask California governor to deter parolee deportations Posted: 01 Nov 2019 04:59 PM PDT  Immigrant rights groups called Friday for Gov. Gavin Newsom to end policies they say ease the transfer of prison inmates to federal authorities despite California's efforts to provide a sanctuary to those who are in the country illegally. The groups asked Newsom to stop prison officials from holding parolees until they can be picked up by federal immigration officials. California passed a law in 2017 barring local and state agencies from cooperating with federal immigration authorities over those who have committed certain crimes, mostly misdemeanors, but critics said it doesn't apply to the state prison system.
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| A plane flying from Portugal to Scotland was mistakenly told it was flying near the North Pole when its navigation gear malfunctioned Posted: 01 Nov 2019 05:43 AM PDT  A Ryanair Boeing 737-800 was flying to Edinburgh when it experienced a number of malfunctions, including with the plane's altitude readings.
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| Ex-beauty queen accuses former Gambia president of rape Posted: 31 Oct 2019 03:16 PM PDT  A Gambian former beauty queen on Thursday accused former President Yahya Jammeh of raping her to punish her for rejecting his marriage proposal, in evidence to the country's truth and reconciliation commission. "What he wanted to do was to teach me a lesson, what he wanted to do is manifest his ego," Fatou Jallow said. "There were words like 'who do you think you are?', that he is the president and that he gets any woman that he wants," Jallow told Gambia's Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC).
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| Tropical Cyclone Maha to threaten flooding, damaging winds in western India by middle of next week Posted: 01 Nov 2019 09:36 AM PDT  Tropical systems will continue to be the source of wet weather in India through the first full week of November.Maha, now a severe cyclonic storm that formed in the Arabian Sea on Wednesday, has slowly moved in a northwest direction while continuing to strengthen over the last few days.Maha is currently packing winds up to 110 km/h (68 mph), equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific oceans. The above satellite image shows Maha spinning off the western shores of India on Friday, 1 November. (Photo/NASA) Many of the typical impacts expected from a such a strong system have been kept at bay, due to Maha's offshore path. While staying parallel to the western coast of India, the strongest winds have remained over open water, with occasional downpours reaching western parts of the country."The northwesterly track is expected to continue for Maha into Monday, keeping most of the wind and rain offshore," said AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Dave Houk.Gradual strengthening into a very severe cyclonic storm is expected during this time, which is comparable to a Category 3 hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean.However, by Tuesday, AccuWeather meteorologists anticipate that Maha will hook eastward and head for the Gujarat region of western India.While southern and coastal parts of Gujarat may get some of the outer rain bands from Maha into Monday night, the heaviest rainfall will wait until later Tuesday and Wednesday. "When Maha moves closer to the Indian coast, it's likely to still be a very severe cyclonic storm, bringing increasingly dangerous winds and flooding rainfall," added Houk.While the proximity to land may ultimately weaken Maha before it makes landfall, gusty winds are likely to cause tree damage as well as power outages.Rounds of tropical downpours and locally heavy rainfall looks to stretch from the Gujarat coast to southern and eastern Rajasthan as well as northern Madhya Pradesh into Thursday. This amount of rainfall can amount to flooding, especially in poorly drained or low-lying areas.Both the rain and wind are likely to cause travel disruptions for many in the region.The rest of the western shores of India will continue to endure daily downpours next week as onshore flow brings moisture in from the Arabian Sea.Maha will not be the last of the tropical influences on India in early November.Meteorologists have been monitoring the lingering energy from what was once Tropical Storm Matmo, a tropical system that which crossed the western Pacific Ocean and made landfall in Vietnam late in October.The concern is that as the energy emerges into the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal late next week, it could redevelop into a tropical system."While such a development could spell more tropical rainfall for parts of India, any impacts felt to the country are likely to wait until somewhere around Nov. 9," said Houk.Until that time, most of the rainfall will remain over open waters, while some showers reach parts of Myanmar as well as the Adnaman and Nicobar Islands.
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| Chile's fiery anger fueled by fears of poverty in old age Posted: 01 Nov 2019 03:11 AM PDT  As over a million people streamed through Santiago's streets in a series of protest marches last week, one elderly couple stood out from the largely youthful crowd. Amid the debris, tear gas and pot-banging youths, Norma Carrasco, 68, and husband Hernan Figueroa, 78, were protesting a grievance at the heart of swelling public anger in the South American nation: a pension system that has left many retired workers with scarce funds to get by. Carrasco's plight is key to understanding the potent violence that has seen buildings and buses burned, shut down the Santiago metro system, and forced President Sebastian Pinera to axe a third of his cabinet and cancel two major global summits.
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| Biden Says Warren’s Medicare for All Plan Would Require $9 Trillion Middle-Class Tax Hike Posted: 01 Nov 2019 10:45 AM PDT  Presidential candidate Joe Biden took a shot at the Medicare for All white paper released Friday by rival 2020 contender Senator Elizabeth Warren, saying her plan would require a nearly $9 trillion middle-class tax hike."For months, Elizabeth Warren has refused to say if her health care plan would raise taxes on the middle class, and now we know why: because it does," Biden's deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said. "Senator Warren would place a new tax of nearly $9 trillion that will fall on American workers."Warren on Friday released the results of her campaign's numbers crunching on Medicare for All, which does not raise taxes on the middle class through an increase in income tax, but does include an almost $9 trillion tax on employers. The Massachusetts Democrat argues that the tax would simply replace the costs employers currently incur for their workers' health insurance — but Biden warned that cost will ultimately be passed along to rank-and-file employees."There's no two ways about it, we cannot defeat Donald Trump with double talk on health care — especially not about the impact and cost of a proposal to completely dismantle our health care system and eliminate employer-sponsored and all other private health insurance," Bedingfield added.Biden has repeatedly criticized Warren's Medicare for All plan, which she claims would require $21 trillion in additional spending over ten years, which is significantly less than the cost projections for Senator Bernie Sanders' similar plan. The former vice president instead favors expanding the existing Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration's signature legislative accomplishment, so that all Americans would be eligible to sign up."My plan costs a lot," Biden said from the Democratic debate stage in September. "But it doesn't cost $30 trillion. That's twice the entire federal budget before it exists now. How will we pay for it? I want to hear. [Warren] has not said how she'll pay for it, and [Sanders] only gets about half way there. I lay out how I can pay for it and how I can get it done and why it's better."
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| Honduras joins El Salvador in obtaining protected status extension in U.S Posted: 01 Nov 2019 11:13 AM PDT ![Honduras joins El Salvador in obtaining protected status extension in U.S]( "Honduras joins El Salvador in obtaining protected status extension in U.S") The U.S. government has extended temporary protection for Hondurans living in the United States by a year, Honduran officials said on Friday, following a similar extension for Salvadorans in a rollback of U.S. plans to end the program. U.S. President Donald Trump last year said he would shut down temporary protected status (TPS) for Hondurans and Salvadorans after a January 2020 expiration, amid a slew of measures meant to crack down on growing numbers of migrants from Central America. "On our part, we will keep working to find a permanent and humane solution for our Honduran brothers," Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez said in a Tweet on Friday, adding that TPS covers more than 40,000 Hondurans.
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| Authorities say 40 pounds of seized fentanyl is enough to 'kill entire population of Ohio' multiple times Posted: 31 Oct 2019 12:08 PM PDT  A raid in southwest Ohio has seized more than 40 pounds of fentanyl –enough to 'kill the entire population of Ohio' several times, officials said.
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| China responds to reports of U.S. grounding its fleet of Chinese-made drones Posted: 31 Oct 2019 07:33 AM PDT  China's foreign ministry said on Thursday after reports that the United States Department of the Interior had grounded its fleet of Chinese-made drones that it hoped Washington would "stop abusing the concept of national security" and provide a nondiscriminatory atmosphere for Chinese companies.
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| 50 Tips for Better Interneting Posted: 31 Oct 2019 09:42 AM PDT |
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