| Democrats release impeachment resolution that calls for open hearings Posted: 29 Oct 2019 02:02 PM PDT  House Democrats have released a resolution that calls for "open and investigative proceedings" in the impeachment inquiry against President Trump for his alleged political interference in foreign aid to Ukraine.
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| PHOTOS: Yugoslavia's brutalist relics fascinate the Instagram generation Posted: 30 Oct 2019 08:52 AM PDT  Genex Tower is unmissable on the highway from the Belgrade airport to the center of the city. Its two soaring blocks, connected by an aerial bridge and topped with a long-closed rotating restaurant resembling a space capsule, are such an unusual sight, the tower, built in 1977, has become a magnet for tourists despite years of neglect. The tower is one of the most significant examples of brutalism — an architectural style popular in the 1950s and 1960s, based on crude, block-like forms cast from concrete.
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| Biden's communion denial highlights faith-politics conflict Posted: 29 Oct 2019 04:04 PM PDT  A Roman Catholic priest's denial of communion to Joe Biden in South Carolina on Sunday illustrates the fine line presidential candidates must walk as they talk about their faiths: balancing religious values with a campaign that asks them to choose a side in polarizing moral debates. The awkward moment for Biden came during a weekend campaign swing through South Carolina, a pivotal firewall in his hopes to claim the Democratic presidential nomination. The former vice president on Sunday visited St. Anthony Catholic Church in Florence, a midsize city in the state's largely rural northeast.
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| China pushes higher 'moral quality' for its citizens Posted: 30 Oct 2019 04:16 AM PDT  From budgeting for rural weddings to dressing appropriately and avoiding online porn, China's Communist Party has issued new guidelines to improve the "moral quality" of its citizens. Officials have released several sets of guidelines this week alongside a secretive conclave of high-ranking officials in Beijing which discusses the country's future direction. Public institutions like libraries and youth centres must carry out "targeted moral education" to improve people's ideological awareness and moral standards, according to the rules.
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| Judge Allows Covington Student’s $250 Million Suit against WaPo to Move Forward Posted: 29 Oct 2019 05:15 AM PDT  A Covington Catholic High School student can move forward with his defamation suit against the Washington Post, a federal judge in Kentucky ruled on Monday.U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman of Kentucky had ruled in July that the student, Nicholas Sandmann, could not sue the Post for defamation. Bertelsman partially reversed that decision on Monday, ruling that of 33 allegedly defamatory statements in the Post's coverage of Sandmann, three of those statements could be challenged in court."The Sandmann family and our legal team are grateful that Judge Bertelsman has allowed the case to proceed," said Sandmann family attorney Todd McMurtry in an email to the Washington Times. "The Court's ruling preserves the heart of the Nicholas Sandmann's claims. We can consider this a huge victory and look forward to initiating discovery against the Washington Post."On January 18 of this year, Sandmann and classmates were in Washington, D.C. to participate in the March for Life, an annual pro-life demonstration. A viral video of Sandmann and his classmates appeared to show a confrontation between the students and a Native American man, Nathan Phillips.Sandmann and several other students were wearing MAGA hats, and the Post asserted in its coverage of the incident that the students had blocked Phillips on his way to the Lincoln Memorial. Phillips told the Post that the students had surrounded him.The three defamatory statements approved by Bertelsman for further investigation assert that Sandmann blocked Phillips's path.The students were pilloried as racist on social media when the video went viral. However, longer videos of the incident showed that Phillips had in fact approached the students and started to drum loudly when he came close to Sandmann. The students were also chanting during the incident with permission of their instructor, to drown out the shouts of a group of black nationalists nearby who were yelling insults such as "fa**ot" and "cracker" at the group.Covington Catholic High School cancelled classes for several days after the incident due to online harassment of its students.
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| Putin faces Syria money crunch after U.S. keeps control of oil fields Posted: 30 Oct 2019 11:16 AM PDT  Russian President Vladimir Putin is facing an unwelcome new financial challenge in Syria after the U.S. pullback enabled his ally Bashar Assad to reclaim the biggest chunk of territory in the country still outside his control.
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| Tucker Carlson and Guest Blame Diversity and ‘Woke’ Culture for California Fires Posted: 30 Oct 2019 04:17 AM PDT  Fox NewsFox News host Tucker Carlson and his guest, conservative YouTube personality Dave Rubin, both insisted Tuesday night that the wildfires burning across California are due largely to progressive ideology, "woke" culture, and diversity in hiring.During Tuesday's broadcast of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson welcomed on Rubin, a political commentator and podcaster, to discuss the issues surrounding the large fires engulfing the state, including those related to the electrical grid and firefighting methods."PG&E; strikes me as almost a metaphor for the destruction of the state," Carlson said about the state's power company. "Here's the utility which doesn't really know anything about its own infrastructure but knows everything about the race of its employees. How did we get there?"After noting that he lives near one of the fires in the Los Angeles area, Rubin immediately took aim at liberal politics as the main reason the wildfires have grown so large and dangerous."The problem right now is that everything, EVERYTHING, from academia to public utilities to politics, everything that goes woke, that buys into this ridiculous progressive ideology that cares about what contractors are LGBT or how many black firemen we have or white this or Asian that, everything that goes that road eventually breaks down," he declared.As Carlson nodded and said "that's true," Rubin continued, complaining that this isn't how "freedom is supposed to operate.""What is supposed to happen—imagine if your house was on fire," he added. "Would you care what the public utility or what the fire company, what contractor they brought in, what gender or sexuality or any of those things he or she was? It's just absolutely ridiculous."The Fox News host continued to agree with Rubin, who went on to tie PG&E;'s preemptive blackouts to a lack of "libertarian or conservative-minded people in California to fight what the progressives are doing to the state.""If you can't keep the lights on and you can't keep the place from burning down, you've reached the point where there is no kind of lying about it anymore," Carlson concluded. "It's falling apart. It's a disaster. It's not civilized anymore."Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Disaster for Trump? What If the Philippines Became Russia's Ally? Posted: 29 Oct 2019 05:00 PM PDT  How could that happen?
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| Malaysia says trade spat with India over palm oil will not be prolonged Posted: 30 Oct 2019 03:33 AM PDT |
| Georgia Supreme Court temporarily halts man's execution Posted: 30 Oct 2019 01:29 PM PDT  With about eight hours to spare before a man convicted of killing a convenience store clerk was to be put to death Wednesday, Georgia's highest court stepped in and temporarily halted the execution. Ray Jefferson Cromartie, 52, was to receive a lethal injection at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the state prison in Jackson. Cromartie was convicted of malice murder and sentenced to death for the April 1994 killing of 50-year-old Richard Slysz in Thomasville, just inside Georgia's southern border.
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| Who are the Vietnamese feared dead in UK truck tragedy? Posted: 29 Oct 2019 03:37 AM PDT  AFP has spoken to several families of Vietnamese nationals missing in Britain, feared to be among the 39 people found dead in a truck in Essex last week. DNA has been collected from relatives as officials in Vietnam and the UK scramble to officially identify the victims. On October 21 he wrote to his family asking them to get $13,000 to pay to smugglers for his trip to the UK, the last they heard from him.
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| D.C. Panel Halts Release of Mueller Documents at DOJ’s Request Posted: 30 Oct 2019 06:02 AM PDT  The D.C. Circuit for the U.S. Court of Appeals on Tuesday night halted the scheduled release of grand-jury materials from Robert Mueller's investigation, just hours ahead of the scheduled distribution.The decision came after a federal judge ruled last Friday that the Justice Department must release unredacted material from the original Mueller investigation, a move House Democrats have clamored for in the midst of the ongoing impeachment inquiry.Judge Beryl Howell, an Obama appointee, wrote that the committee "has shown that it needs the grand jury material referenced and cited in the Mueller Report to avoid a possible injustice in the impeachment inquiry."The DOJ contested Howell's ruling and issued an emergency appeal, saying a quick release "threatens an irreparable loss of grand-jury secrecy before this court even has a chance to act on the Department's stay motion." The government also noted that Howell gave no explanation for her seemingly arbitrary deadline of Wednesday, which was not offered by Democrats.The three-judge D.C. panel — made up of judges appointed by Barack Obama — decided on an administrative stay in order "to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the emergency motion for stay pending appeal and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion," according to the decision.The debate centers around the validity of redactions to a grand-jury deposition, which is usually kept secret. The DOJ argues that materials in the report are squarely protected by federal evidence regulations, while others point to ongoing criminal matters involved, including a probe by Connecticut U.S attorney John Durham the origins of the investigation. House Democrats counter that secrecy rules do not apply to the impeachment inquiry, which is a judicial proceeding.
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| Meghan McCain Spars With Cory Booker Over Civility: Beto Was ‘Very Nasty’ to Me! Posted: 30 Oct 2019 09:39 AM PDT  During a Wednesday interview with Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker, The View's Meghan McCain did what she apparently does best: Make the conversation about herself and, in this case, her personal beef with a presidential hopeful.After applauding Booker for saying Medicare for All is unrealistic, the conservative View co-host took issue with the New Jersey senator's support for mandatory gun buybacks. This then prompted McCain to lump Booker in with former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke, who has made buybacks a central focus of his campaign."When I heard you and Beto say that, to me, that's like a left-wing fever dream," McCain said. "And I want to know how you think you and Beto are going to go to red states and go to my brother's house and get his AR-15s because, let me tell you, he's not giving it back."Booker, meanwhile, asserted he is not nearly where O'Rourke is when it comes to gun buybacks, causing McCain to reply, "Good! Because he's crazy!""We should watch the way we talk about each other," Booker shot back. "Seriously, we can't tear the character of people down. We have different beliefs."McCain, however, invoked her ongoing feud with the one-time Texas Senate candidate, complaining that O'Rourke "has no problem doing it to me.""He was very nasty to me about this," the ex-Fox News star lamented.Last month, reacting to McCain's overt warning that gun buybacks would lead to "a lot of violence" from gun owners, O'Rourke said "that kind of language and rhetoric is not helpful" and it could become "self-fulfilling" and give permission to violence."You and I both know that just because somebody does something to us, doesn't mean we show the same thing back to them," Booker responded to McCain, garnering audience applause."I'm not running for president, with all due respect," McCain snapped back. "And the way he talks about me inciting violence on this, I take very seriously and I speak for a lot of red state Americans whether he likes it or you like it or not, there's a lot of Republicans you have to win over."The New Jersey lawmaker reacted by telling McCain that her voice was one he respected before noting that "what we say about other people says more about us than it does about them."Booker would then go on to relay an anecdote from the campaign trail in which he defused a voter's call for violence against President Donald Trump. McCain, meanwhile, brushed it aside and went back to pressing Booker on his buyback proposal and how he's going to take her brother's guns.After a bit more back-and-forth over Booker's gun proposals, host Whoopi Goldberg jumped in to send the show to a commercial break, promising the pair that they'd continue the conversation in the next segment."No we're not," McCain grumbled. "It's fine."Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Trump falsely says Chicago is more dangerous than Afghanistan, which topped the list of the world's 10 most dangerous countries in 2019 Posted: 29 Oct 2019 03:32 PM PDT  The latest Global Peace Index has a new least peaceful country, assessed on metrics like political instability and deaths from conflict.
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| Bosnian Serb ex-soldier jailed for 20 years for burning Muslim civilians Posted: 30 Oct 2019 07:59 AM PDT ![Bosnian Serb ex-soldier jailed for 20 years for burning Muslim civilians]( "Bosnian Serb ex-soldier jailed for 20 years for burning Muslim civilians") A Bosnian court jailed a former Bosnian Serb soldier for 20 years on Wednesday for setting ablaze 57 Muslim Bosniaks, of whom 26 including a two-day-old baby died, near the eastern town of Visegrad early in Bosnia's 1992-95 war. Radomir Susnjar, 64, known as Lalco, was also found guilty of robbery and illegal detention of civilians, the court said. The group of Muslim Bosniaks had been seized after an attack on the village of Koritnik and locked in a house that was set ablaze with an accelerant and explosives while Susnjar and other Bosnian Serb Army members shot at it to prevent anyone fleeing.
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| Australian sentenced to 36 years for murder, rape of Israeli Posted: 29 Oct 2019 04:34 PM PDT  An Australian judge sentenced a man to 36 years in prison on Tuesday for the murder and rape of an Israeli student whom he bludgeoned into unconsciousness moments after she stepped off a tram in Melbourne before setting her corpse on fire. Victoria state Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth ordered Codey Herrmann, 21, to serve at least 30 years behind bars for his crimes against 21-year-old Aiia Maasarwe last January. The judge said she would have sentenced Herrmann to 40 years in prison with 35 years to be served before he became eligible for parole if he had not pleaded guilty in the face of an overwhelming prosecution case.
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| Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in? Posted: 28 Oct 2019 11:00 PM PDT  As with so many things, Californians are going first where the rest of us will followThe San Francisco skyline is shrouded in smoke from wildfires in the north part of the state. Photograph: Jose Carlos Fajardo/Associated PressMonday morning dawned smoky across much of California, and it dawned scary – over the weekend winds as high as a hundred miles an hour had whipped wildfires through forests and subdivisions.It wasn't the first time this had happened – indeed, it's happened every year for the last three – and this time the flames were licking against communities destroyed in 2017. Reporters spoke to one family that had moved into their rebuilt home on Saturday, only to be immediately evacuated again.The spectacle was cinematic: at one point, fire jumped the Carquinez Strait at the end of San Francisco Bay, shrouding the bridge on Interstate 80 in smoke and flame.Even areas that didn't actually burn felt the effects: Pacific Gas and Electric turned off power to millions, fearful that when the wind tore down its wires they would spark new conflagrations.Three years in a row feels like – well, it starts to feel like the new, and impossible, normal. That's what the local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, implied this morning when, in the middle of its account of the inferno, it included the following sentence: the fires had "intensified fears that parts of California had become almost too dangerous to inhabit". Read that again: the local paper is on record stating that part of the state is now so risky that its citizens might have to leave.On the one hand, this comes as no real surprise. My most recent book, Falter, centered on the notion that the climate crisis was making large swaths of the world increasingly off-limits to humans. Cities in Asia and the Middle East where the temperature now reaches the upper 120s – levels so high that the human body can't really cool itself; island nations (and Florida beaches) where each high tide washes through the living room or the streets; Arctic villages relocating because, with sea ice vanished, the ocean erodes the shore.But California? California was always the world's idea of paradise (until perhaps the city of that name burned last summer). Hollywood shaped our fantasies of the last century, and many of its movies were set in the Golden state. It's where the Okies trudged when their climate turned vicious during the Dust Bowl years – "pastures of plenty", Woody Guthrie called the green agricultural valleys. John Muir invented our grammar and rhetoric of wildness in the high Sierra (and modern environmentalism was born with the club he founded).California is the Golden state, the land of ease. I was born there, and though I left young enough that my memories are suspect, I grew up listening to my parents' stories. They had been newlyweds in the late 50s, living a block from the ocean in Manhattan Beach; when they got home from work they could walk to the sand for a game of volleyball. Date night was a mile or two up the Pacific Coast Highway to the Lighthouse, the jazz club where giants such as Gerry Mulligan showed up regularly, inventing the cool jazz that defined the place and time. Sunset magazine showcased a California aesthetic as breezy and informal as any on earth: the redwood deck, the cedar-shake roof, the suburban idyll among the eucalyptus and the pine. That is to say, precisely the kinds of homes that today are small piles of ash with only the kidney-shaped pool intact.Truth be told, that California began to vanish fairly quickly, as orange groves turned into airplane factories and then tech meccas. The great voices of California in recent years – writers such as Mike Davis and Rebecca Solnit – chronicle the demise of much that was once idyllic in a wave of money, consumption, nimbyism, tax dodging, and corporate greed. The state's been booming in recent years – it's the world's fifth biggest economy, bigger than the UK – but it's also home to tent encampments of homeless people with no chance of paying rent. And it's not just climate change that's at fault: California has always had fires, and the state's biggest utility, PG&E, is at this point as much an arsonist as electricity provider.Still, it takes a force as great as the climate crisis to really – perhaps finally – tarnish Eden. In the last decade, the state has endured the deepest droughts ever measured, dry spells so intense that more than a hundred million trees died. A hundred million – and the scientists who counted them warned that their carcasses could "produce wildfires on a scale and of an intensity that California has never seen". The drought has alternated with record downpours that have turned burned-over stretches into massive house-burying mudslides.And so Californians – always shirtsleeved and cool – spend some of the year in face masks and much of it with a feeling of trepidation. As with so many things, they are going first where the rest of us will follow. * Bill McKibben is an author and Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. His most recent book is Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
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| Russia's Risky Game Plan for Syria Posted: 29 Oct 2019 09:35 AM PDT  Moscow had hoped to be rewarded with the opportunity to base additional military equipment inside Syria in exchange for standing by Bashar al-Assad.
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| Beachgoers capture photos of washed up whale, sea turtle along New Jersey beaches Posted: 29 Oct 2019 07:37 AM PDT  A humpback whale and a sea turtle were found on two New Jersey beaches. The causes of death are unknown, but turtle may have been hit by boat.
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| Denmark Snubs Trump With Approval of Russian Gas Pipe to Europe Posted: 30 Oct 2019 11:14 AM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- In a major boost for Russia's effort to tighten its grip over natural gas supplies to western Europe, Denmark said it will allow the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline to pass through its territory.The decision removes the last important hurdle for the $11 billion project, which is slated for commissioning by the end of this year and bolster gas flows from Siberia into Germany. The link has drawn the threat of sanctions from the U.S., which wants Europe to buy its liquefied natural gas. It risks reigniting a feud between Donald Trump and Danish lawmakers that erupted in the summer after the U.S. president's offer to buy Greenland.Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed the pipeline decision. "Denmark showed itself to be a responsible participant in international relations, defending its interests and sovereignty and the interests of its main partners in Europe," he told a briefing in Budapest, where he was on a visit.The green light gives Gazprom PJSC, Russia's gas export champion and already Europe's biggest supplier, yet another route to one of the world's most liquid gas markets. While Trump has accused Russia of using its natural gas as a political weapon, it's ultimately a commercial deal over which Washington has little influence, according to Raffaello Pantucci, Director of Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London."It's frankly too far advanced," Pantucci said. "Who are they going to sanction?"The approval also gives Russia more clout in ongoing talks with Ukraine on a new gas transit deal, increasing the risk of a disruption from Jan. 1. Uncertainty about whether those two nations can agree on time has been weighing on forward prices in Europe and sending incentives for traders to stockpile gas as a cushion against disruption."If Gazprom are confident in Nord Stream 2's imminent completion, it may encourage a tougher negotiating stance on any new Ukrainian transit deal," said John Twomey, a gas analyst at BloombergNEF in London. "If anything, the risks of a disruption on Jan. 1 have gone up as a result of this."The pipeline has divided EU governments, with nations led by Poland concerned about the bloc's increasing dependence on Russian gas."It is not too late to stop NS2," an official at the U.S. embassy in Germany said. "There are clear negative energy security and geopolitical implications for Europe from Putin's pipeline. The U.S. government agrees with the European Parliament, the U.S. House and nearly 20 European countries in our opposition to NS2."Russia, Ukraine, Europe Pledge New Gas Deal by Year-EndDenmark said on Wednesday it will allow the pipeline to pass southeast of the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. The company behind the pipeline submitted the route plan in April. Denmark had been conducting a security and environmental review of the project.Trump had objected to the link, instead urging the European Union to diversify the sources of its energy and dilute Putin's economic influence over the region. U.S. officials have also warned that project partners are at an elevated risk of U.S. sanctions.The approval is another snub of Trump by the Nordic country after it ruled out his proposal to buy Greenland this summer. The president responded by canceling a state visit to Denmark.The Danish approval covers 147 kilometers (91 miles) of the project. Nord Stream 2 said in its statement that it has already completed 87%, or 2,100 kilometers, of the pipeline in Russian, Finnish and Swedish waters as well as most of the German part. Dan Jorgensen, Denmark's minister for climate, energy and utilities, declined to comment on Wednesday.Nord Stream 2 said it will continue its "constructive cooperation with the Danish authorities to complete the pipeline."Six WeeksGazprom CEO Alexey Miller said that the pipeline is expected to be completed on time by the end of the year. "The remaining 147 kilometers -- that's five weeks of work," Miller told reporters in Budapest.A statement from the company highlighted some uncertainties in that timetable. Nord Stream 2 said Wednesday the actual start of the construction depends on a number of legal, technical and environmental factors, which will "take a few weeks" and the project aims for completion "in the coming months."Gazprom can't use the permit for the next four weeks when all involved parties have leeway to make a complaint under Danish law. Those issues left analysts anticipating some delay beyond Jan. 1 for the completion of the link."It's unlikely that Nord Stream 2 is online in time for Jan. 1, so Ukrainian transit disruption risks remains," said Twomey.While Gazprom owns the pipeline, half the financing of the 8 billion-euro capital cost comes from five European companies: Uniper SE and Wintershall of Germany, OMV AG of Austria, Engie SA of France and Royal Dutch Shell Plc.Dutch gas for the first quarter declined to the lowest since at least 2017 as the region is oversupplied with the fuel, storage sites across Europe are full, and LNG imports surge.(Updates with Putin comment in third paragraph.)\--With assistance from Dina Khrennikova, Vanessa Dezem and Ilya Arkhipov.To contact the reporters on this story: Morten Buttler in Copenhagen at mbuttler@bloomberg.net;William Wilkes in Frankfurt at wwilkes1@bloomberg.net;Anna Shiryaevskaya in London at ashiryaevska@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Christian Wienberg at cwienberg@bloomberg.net, ;Tasneem Hanfi Brögger at tbrogger@bloomberg.net, ;Nick Rigillo at nrigillo@bloomberg.net, Gregory L. White, Reed LandbergFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| U.S. bill would provide Puerto Rico a path to statehood Posted: 29 Oct 2019 04:33 PM PDT  Proponents of the bill said it would provide the island with the same path to statehood taken by Alaska and Hawaii, the last two states admitted to the union. Under the legislation, which has some bipartisan support, a federally authorized referendum would appear on the Nov. 3, 2020, ballot in Puerto Rico. Approval by a majority of the island's voters would lead to a presidential proclamation within 30 months making Puerto Rico the 51st state.
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| Senior adviser Jared Kushner: Time in White House spent 'cleaning up the messes' left by Biden Posted: 29 Oct 2019 04:28 PM PDT  Jared Kushner, senior adviser and son-in-law to President Trump, responded to former Vice President Joe Biden's claim that he was unqualified to serve in the White House in a recent interview, telling an Israeli journalist that he's spent his time in the administration addressing problems of Biden's making.
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| Bangladesh opposition stalwart jailed for threatening PM Posted: 29 Oct 2019 05:49 PM PDT  A Bangladesh opposition stalwart was jailed in absentia for three years Wednesday for threatening the prime minister in what his party said was another example of government critics being muzzled. Thousands of opposition activists have been arrested under the rule of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has tightened her grip on power since being re-elected in December. Giasuddin Quader Chowdhury, a vice-chairman of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), was found guilty of making statements "conducive to public mischief" and "criminal conspiracy", the court said.
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| 2 women have been criminally charged over their partners' suicides. Why do men escape the same blame? Posted: 30 Oct 2019 12:46 PM PDT  Experts told Insider they could not recall a similar instance of a man being charged with manslaughter in connection with his partner's suicide.
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| Doctor at Missouri abortion clinic defends patient care Posted: 30 Oct 2019 05:39 PM PDT  The top doctor at Missouri's sole abortion clinic on Wednesday defended its handling of four patients who faced complications — women whose care has been cited by the state as it seeks to revoke the clinic's license. The testimony from Dr. Colleen McNicholas at a hearing that could determine the St. Louis clinic's fate came as the state faced fallout over a revelation a day earlier from Missouri's top health official that he kept a spreadsheet that tracked the menstrual cycles of women who obtained abortions. Missouri officials were staying mum, while Democrats and abortion-rights supporters decried what they called government overreach into women's private lives.
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| A California couple who was forced to evacuate their home and winery share what it's really like to endure the wildfires engulfing the state Posted: 30 Oct 2019 06:53 AM PDT  California's Sonoma wine country dealt with destructive wildfires in 2017. Here's how one winery is dealing with 2019's Kincade Fire.
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| Belgium bars Chinese professor suspected of spying for Beijing Posted: 30 Oct 2019 10:53 AM PDT  The head of a Chinese language and cultural institute at a Brussels university has been banned from Belgium after security services accused him of being a spy. Xinning Song, 65, was also barred from the EU's passport-free Schengen zone for eight years, Belgian media reported. Professor Song has lived in Belgium for ten years. His work visa expired while he was on a trip to China. When he applied for its renewal, however, he was rejected by Belgian authorities. Their decision to impose the Schengen ban infers he is viewed as an espionage threat by security services, the De Morgen newspaper reported. Mr Song was the director of the Confucius Institute at the VUB (Free University Brussels), a department said to benefit from 200,000 euros a year in money from the Chinese government. Scrutiny has intensified around the world regarding Confucius Institutes, language and cultural centres that operate on university campuses. What separates these institutes from organisations like the British Council is that they fall directly under the Chinese ministry of education, which ultimately reports to the ruling Communist Party's central propaganda department. US and UK politicians have raised concerns about the risks Confucius Institutes pose in terms of academic freedoms, and potential theft of proprietary research on university campuses. Confucius Institutes, for instance, must obey Chinese law, which could include advocating for Beijing's territorial claims around the world and censoring discussion by not allowing events, speakers or textbooks deemed sensitive by the Communist Party, according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute, a security think tank. "Pressure has also been applied to academics at [the University of] Nottingham to stand down or avoid inviting certain external speakers, because they and/or their chosen subjects were deemed too sensitive," reads the report written by Charles Parton, a British diplomat who was posted to China. Beijing approves Confucius Institute course materials, events and even evaluates teachers. The centres "represent an endeavour by the Chinese Communist Party to spread its propaganda and suppress its critics beyond its borders," said a February report by the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission, an advocacy group. The UK alone has around 30 of these on attached to major universities such as Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Cardiff and University College London. There are an additional 148 Confucius "classrooms" in schools around the UK, according to a Chinese government website. At least 27 universities around the world have terminated ties with Confucius Institutes, including campuses in the US, the Netherlands, Sweden, France and Canada, while others reversed decisions to break ground on an institute In 2018, Belgian security services advised government ministers against supporting a Confucius Institute at the VUB, but the warning was ignored. Mr Song couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
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| Rep. Devin Nunes: Reporters asking me questions about Ukraine scandal are 'assassins' Posted: 29 Oct 2019 11:18 AM PDT  Rep. Devin Nunes on Monday announced he is now refusing to answer journalists' questions about President Trump's Ukraine scandal, labeling reporters who ask him about the story "assassins."
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| Pentagon reveals details, video of fast, violent raid that killed ISIS leader Baghdadi Posted: 30 Oct 2019 04:41 PM PDT ![Pentagon reveals details, video of fast, violent raid that killed ISIS leader Baghdadi]( "Pentagon reveals details, video of fast, violent raid that killed ISIS leader Baghdadi") The general who oversaw the operation said the raid killed six ISIS fighters, including Bagdhadi.
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| Exclusive: How Lebanon's Hariri defied Hezbollah Posted: 30 Oct 2019 12:34 PM PDT  After hitting a dead end in efforts to defuse the crisis sweeping Lebanon, Saad al-Hariri informed a top Hezbollah official on Monday he had no choice but to quit as prime minister in defiance of the powerful Shi'ite group. The decision by the Sunni leader shocked Hussein al-Khalil, political advisor to Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who advised him against giving in to protesters who wanted to see his coalition government toppled. The meeting described to Reuters by four senior sources from outside Hariri's Future Party captures a critical moment in the crisis that has swept Lebanon for the last two weeks as Hariri yielded to the massive street protests against the ruling elite.
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| Hearing Ends With Victim's Kin Urging CEO to Quit: Boeing Update Posted: 30 Oct 2019 01:02 PM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- Boeing Co. President Dennis Muilenburg testifies before House lawmakers Wednesday, the day after being peppered with tough question in the Senate during his first appearance before lawmakers since a pair of the planemaker's 737 Max jets crashed, killing 346 people.In both crashes, faulty data from one of two angle-of-attack sensors, which measure the pitch of the plane against the oncoming stream of air, caused a flight control system called MCAS to drive down the jet's nose, which pilots struggled to counteract before ultimately entering a fatal dive.Muilenburg faced the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, chaired by Oregon Democrat Peter DeFazio, who's overseen a months-long investigation into the certification of the 737 Max.Here are the key developments:Hearing Ends With Victim's Kin Urging CEO to Quit (3:52 p.m.)The mother of a young woman killed in the Ethiopian Airlines crash confronted Muilenburg after the hearing in front of a phalanx of reporters and cameras, demanding that he step down from the company.Nadia Milleron, mother of Samya Rose Stumo, 24, said she and other family members were struck by the Boeing executive's repeated references in testimony to his upbringing on a farm in Iowa."The whole group said, 'Go back to the farm, go back to Iowa,''' she told him. "You're not the person anymore to solve the problem.''"I respect that, I really do,'' Muilenburg responded as aides stood by. "What I learned from my father in Iowa is when things happen on your watch, you have to own them and you have to take responsibility.''\-- Courtney Rozen, Alan LevinDocument Shows Max Feature Didn't Follow Specs (3:32 p.m.)A June 2018 Boeing document, unveiled at the hearing by Representative Greg Stanton, an Arizona Democrat, detailed internal design requirements for MCAS, including one specifying that "MCAS shall not interfere with dive recovery."In the two crashes, the planes dove steeply after pilots struggled with MCAS failures."Boeing did not even follow its own design requirements when it created this MCAS system and put it on the Max," Stanton said.The document is one of many showing what Indonesian investigators concluded Friday: that the planemaker assumed pilots would quickly respond to such a failure but their actual actions showed those assumptions weren't realistic.Asked by Stanton whether MCAS affected the dive recovery on the doomed Lion Air flight, Hamilton said "it caused the airplane to go into a dive that the crews were not able to recover from" after the pilots didn't respond as Boeing assumed they would.The document also said: "MCAS shall not have any objectionable interaction with the piloting of the airplane."\-- By Alan Levin, Ryan BeeneMax's MCAS Getting What Air Force Had From Start (2:39 p.m.)Michigan Republican Representative Paul Mitchell asked why the 737 Max's version of MCAS had key differences from a midair refueling tanker Boeing supplies to the U.S. Air Force. He pointed out that the Pentagon required that the KC-46 tanker's MCAS system activate only once, when the civilian application could -- and did -- fire repeatedly, he said."Why the difference? What motivated that?" the lawmaker said.John Hamilton, chief engineer of Boeing Commercial Airplane division, cited specifications set by the Air Force. Muilenburg said the tanker's MCAS system was designed for different flight scenarios than the 737 Max's version.\-- By Ryan BeeneCEO Slammed Over $23 Million Pay, Asked to Resign (1:17 p.m.)Representative Stephen Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, blasted Muilenburg for failing to take a cut in pay after the 737 Max crashes, the first time he's been publicly quizzed about why he didn't forgo pay after the crashes.The Boeing Co. CEO received $23.4 million last year, a sum that includes a $13 million bonus. His total compensation rose 27% from a year earlier.Muilenburg said that he hasn't offered to resign, and that it's up to the company's board to decide whether to dock his pay."These two accidents happened on my watch. I feel responsible to see this through," Muilenburg said. Earlier in the hearing, Muilenburg spoke about his humble upbringing in Iowa and the beginning of his career at the company as an intern.Nadia Milleron, mother of 24-year-old Ethiopian Airlines crash victim Samya Rose Stumo, said outside the hearing room that she was outraged that Muilenburg received a bonus in 2018."He is not the human being to be doing this job, and neither is his board," Milleron said.\-- By Courtney Rozen, Julie Johnsson, Alan LevinMuilenburg Grilled on 737 Production Meltdown (12:12 p.m.)Muilenburg was grilled by Representative Albio Sires, a Democrat from New Jersey, on a production meltdown last year caused by a shortage of parts as suppliers fell behind a new, record manufacturing pace at which 737 jets were built.Sires read from a June 2018 email a senior manager who led a final assembly team at Boeing's plant south of Seattle sent to Scott Campbell, who was vice-president and general manager of the 737 program at the time.The Boeing manager warned that schedule pressure and fatigue are "creating a culture where employees are either deliberately or unconsciously circumventing established processes." He added: "And for the first time in my life, I'm sorry to say that I'm hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane."The factory issues raised by the employee weren't related to MCAS.Muilenburg said he'd read the concerns of the manager, who has since retired. The company took action to address the out-of-schedule work, including adding quality checkpoints, he said. The manufacturing pace for the 737 was trimmed 19% to a 42-jet monthly pace after the Max was grounded globally.\-- By Julie JohnssonCEO 'Will Never Forget' Hearing Victims' Stories (11:54 a.m.)In an emotional exchange, Muilenburg described a private meeting Tuesday with the victims' loved ones -- many of whom have attended the hearings displaying large pictures of their smiling children, siblings and spouses."We wanted to listen and each of the families told us the stories of the lives that were lost and those were heart breaking," said Muilenburg, his voice breaking with emotion. "I'll never forget that."Michael Stumo, whose daughter died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash, told reporters Tuesday after the session that, "It was very emotional.""But he was there, he heard, and he expressed his sorrow appropriately, and expressed a desire to change the culture of the company to make it better," Stumo said.\-- By Alan Levin, Courtney RozenCEO Acknowledges 737 Design Shortcomings (11:30 a.m.)Muilenburg offered his most candid public assessment of the company's shortcomings in designing a system implicated in two 737 Max crashes, after insisting for months that engineers followed the manufacturer's and Federal Aviation Administration processes.He said the company erred when it made a cockpit alert to inform pilots of disagreements between the 737 Max's two angle-of-attack sensors available on only some of the jets instead of all, saying "we got that wrong up front."He also cited the original architecture of MCAS, which the company redesigned to incorporate readings from both angle-of-attack sensors instead of one on the original design. Thirdly, he said the company needs to improve communication and documentation.But Muilenburg declined to name specific employees at Boeing or its 900-company supply chain who contributed to the botched design. "Mr. Chairman, my company and company alone is responsible," he said. "I am accountable and my company is accountable.""We can and must do better," Muilenburg said.\-- Julie Johnsson, Ryan BeeneLawmaker Confronts CEO With Internal Documents (10:53 a.m.)DeFazio displayed slides of internal Boeing documents and emails -- some never before seen publicly -- raising questions about the development of MCAS, the flight control system linked to both crashes.In both fatal crashes, faulty data from one of two angle-of-attack sensors, which measure the pitch of the plane against the oncoming stream of air, caused the MCAS to drive down the jet's nose, which pilots struggled to counteract before ultimately entering a fatal dive.In one document from 2015 a Boeing employee questioned the decision to permit MCAS to be triggered by only one of the two sensors mounted on the jet's nose. Boeing has since redesigned MCAS to prevent a repeat of such a failure, in part by incorporating readings from both angle-of-attack sensors."I guess the question is, why wasn't it that way from day one?" DeFazio said.Another document from 2018 examined Boeing's assumptions about how quickly pilots would respond to an MCAS malfunction.Muilenburg concedes Boeing made three mistakes on MCAS: designing it to activate with a single sensor, omitting it from pilot training and under-estimating how long pilots would take to respond when the system kicked on."We made some mistakes. We discovered some things we didn't do right. We own that. We are responsible for our planes," Muilenburg said. "If we knew then what we know now we would have done it differently."\-- be Ryan Beene, Julie JohnssonDay Two Opens with CEO Response to New Allegations (10:03 a.m.)As he was arriving for the hearing, Muilenburg told reporters that the safety concerns that prompted a manager to urge the company to pause the 737 Max assembly line were unrelated to the two fatal crashes by the jet.The issue was related to "concerns about production line safety as we were moving to production rate changes," Muilenburg said.The comment came in response to assertions made Tuesday by DeFazio that a Boeing manager urged a superior to halt the 737 Max assembly line over safety concerns, one of a number of new allegations stemming from an investigation began by the panel days after the second 737 Max crash last March."We now know of at least one case where a Boeing manager implored the then-vice president and general manager of the 737 program to shut down the 737 Max production line because of safety concerns, several months before the Lion Air crash in October 2018," DeFazio wrote in prepared remarks for the hearing.More:Boeing Manager Sought to Halt 737 Max Production Over SafetyKey Events:Muilenburg's testimony on Tuesday came one year from the day when a Lion Air 737 Max plunged into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board. The appearances are the first public questioning of a senior Boeing leader by lawmakers since the crash and a subsequent one by an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max in March, which killed all 157 people on board that led to the worldwide grounding of the company's top-selling and most profitable passenger jet.Uncertainty over when the 737 Max family of jets will fly again is rippling through the airline industry and Boeing's finances. The U.S. manufacturer's bill is $9.2 billion and rising, as it faces questions about the plane's development and its own transparency. Boeing is aiming for a return to service later this year but some airlines have pulled Max flights through next year.Both Democratic and Republican Senators alike grilled Muilenburg on Tuesday, especially on whether Boeing had too much sway in certifying the 737 Max through a longstanding program at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration that deputizes company employees to issue safety approvals on the agency's behalf.Muilenburg defended that program during the hearing and refused to publicly endorse any specific reforms when pressed by Senate lawmakersA report released Friday by Indonesian investigators highlighted the role of designees in approving the 737 Max design, including what investigators have flagged as a key vulnerability in the jet's flight controls that malfunctioned during the fatal crashes.\--With assistance from Courtney Rozen, Ryan Beene, Alan Levin and Julie Johnsson.To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Alan Levin in Washington at alevin24@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Jon Morgan at jmorgan97@bloomberg.net, ;Brendan Case at bcase4@bloomberg.net, Elizabeth WassermanFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| The Latest: Hundreds of thousands still without electricity Posted: 30 Oct 2019 05:02 PM PDT  More than 500,000 people who rely on Pacific Gas & Electric were still without power across Northern California, while about 250,000 people in Southern California were in the dark as utilities shut power in an effort to prevent more wildfires. California Office of Emergency Services Director Mark Ghilarducci told a news conference that as of Wednesday afternoon there were still PG&E customers without power, amid the third blackout in a week. Sonoma County officials, meanwhile, lifted nearly all the outstanding evacuations in place for the wildfire there, leaving fewer than 6,000 people out of their homes.
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| Period emoji arrives on iPhones in bid to 'break the taboo' over menstruation Posted: 29 Oct 2019 08:54 AM PDT  Apple has released a new set of more than 350 new emojis for its iPhone keyboard, including gender-neutral characters, mixed-race couples, people with disabilities and a period "blood drop" that campaigners have heralded as a "breakthrough in the fight against period stigma". Girl's rights charity Plan International launched a campaign in 2017 to create a new period emoji in order to "make it easier for girls and women to talk about their period with friends, family and colleagues". More than 54,000 people cast their vote on the design to be submitted to the Unicode Consortium, which maintains and regulates the library of emojis. The original winning design of "period pants" was initially rejected, but the runner-up blood drop design – made in collaboration with the NHS – was proposed and accepted as an alternative. "We are thrilled to see the arrival of this long-awaited blood drop emoji, which signals a real breakthrough in the fight against period stigma," said Rose Caldwell, Plan International UK's chief executive. "Girls, women and other menstruators told us this emoji would help them talk more freely about their periods, which is why we campaigned so hard to make it a reality." Along with the blood-drop icon, the new emojis feature characters with disabilities as part of Apple's push to make the library more inclusive "But this is only one part of the solution. We know that girls around the world are being held back because of their periods, whether that's the one in five girls here in the UK who are bullied and teased, girls in Zimbabwe who have dropped out of school because the recent cyclone destroyed their period-friendly toilets, or those living in refugee camps in Bangladesh who can't access period products since fleeing their homes. "Period poverty will not stop until we fix the toxic trio of affordability of products, lack of education and period shame. We hope this emoji helps to keep the conversation going." The new period emoji arrives on iPhone with a slew of new icons submitted by Apple after the company said last year that it wanted to improve representation within its library. After consulting with charities on various issues, the new update includes allowing users to choose the gender and ethnicity of each person in the "holding hands" icon. There is also a gender-neutral option on each character emoji along with the original male and female. Insight | How are new emoji introduced? The largest addition, however, comes in the addition of characters with disabilities. The icons include hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, guide dogs and wheelchairs. On submitting its proposal to the Unicode Consortium last year, Apple said: "Currently, emoji provide a wide range of options, but may not represent the experiences of those with disabilities. "Diversifying the options available helps fill a significant gap and provides a more inclusive experience for all." The new emojis are part of Apple's 13.2 update for iOS,which also includes its "deep fusion" camera mode, which uses artificial intelligence to improve photographs, and support for its newly announced AirPods Pro earphones.
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| Russia is finding new islands in the Arctic, while the US is still trying to figure out how to get up there Posted: 29 Oct 2019 10:18 AM PDT  Russia already has the world's longest Arctic coastline, and five newly discovered islands give it even more territory to work with.
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| Former </>Time Editor Wants Hate-Speech Laws, Thinks Trump ‘Might’ Violate Them, and Misses the Irony Posted: 30 Oct 2019 02:11 PM PDT  A former Time editor claimed that the United States needs a law banning hate speech, and that President Donald Trump "might be in violation of it" if there were one -- because, apparently, he doesn't notice the irony of holding both of these views at once.In a Tuesday tweet promoting his Washington Post piece, titled "Why America needs a hate speech law," Richard Stengel stated:> My @WashingtonPost piece on why the very broadness of the First Amendment suggests we should have a hate speech law. And if we did, why the President might be in violation of it. https://t.co/3ybv3kC69f> > -- Richard Stengel (@stengel) October 29, 2019In the piece, Stengel writes that "many nations have passed laws to curb the incitement of racial and religious hatred" in the wake of World War II:> These laws started out as protections against the kinds of anti-Semitic bigotry that gave rise to the Holocaust. We call them hate speech laws, but there's no agreed-upon definition of what hate speech actually is. In general, hate speech is speech that attacks and insults people on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin and sexual orientation."I'm all for protecting 'thought that we hate,' but not speech that incites hate," he continues. "It undermines the very values of a fair marketplace of ideas that the First Amendment is designed to protect."It's interesting how Stengel actually does acknowledge the fact that "there's no agreed-upon definition of what hate speech actually is," and yet he still wants laws banning it. This makes absolutely no sense. After all, when he calls for laws to ban "hate speech," he is, inherently, giving the government the power to decide what would and would not qualify -- the exact same government that is led by Donald Trump, and that is full of people who support him.In other words: Stengel somehow trusts that the government will have the same view of "hate speech" as he does, and then, in the same thought, seems to acknowledge that there's actually no way that many of them would. Unless he thinks that the president and his congressional supporters would actually pass a law that they'd be in violation of, his argument for "hate speech" laws winds up being a pretty great argument against them.It's ironic, but it's not new: More often than not, it's the uber-progressives arguing for laws against "hate speech" -- despite the fact that they're often the same people who are also arguing that Donald Trump and Republicans are constantly spewing it. Maybe it's just me, but if I thought that the leader of my government was, you know, literally Hitler or whatever, the last thing that I'd want would be to give that person and their supporters control over my speech.Yes, the First Amendment gives us the right to be "offensive" with our speech. Given the fact that a new thing seems to be declared "racist" or "sexist" every day, I'm certainly glad that we do have this protection. After all, it would only take there being a few too many of the "super woke" in our government for a phrase like "you guys" to become a criminal offense.The truth is, though, the right to be "offensive" (however you define that subjective term, anyway) is not even the most important role that our First Amendment plays. No, what's most important is that it protects our right to speak out against the government when we see fit -- without having to worry about its retaliation. Like it or not, the only way to ensure that we retain this important check on government power is to never (ever) give its leaders a vehicle take it away.
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| China downplays Solomon island lease debacle, tells U.S. to stay out Posted: 29 Oct 2019 02:36 AM PDT ![China downplays Solomon island lease debacle, tells U.S. to stay out]( "China downplays Solomon island lease debacle, tells U.S. to stay out") There is nothing unusual about Chinese companies experiencing issues when investing in Pacific island states or elsewhere, China's Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday, after a rebuffed attempt by a Chinese firm to lease an island in the Solomons. The Solomon Islands government said last week a deal signed by one of its provinces to lease the entire island of Tulagi to a Chinese company is unlawful and should be terminated, a move applauded by United States. Details of the long-term lease between the Solomons' Central Province and China Sam Enterprise Group were made public shortly after the Pacific nation switched diplomatic ties to Beijing from Taiwan in September.
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| Joe Biden describes his health care plan using Pete Buttigieg's term, 'Medicare for all who want it' Posted: 30 Oct 2019 02:14 PM PDT  Biden on Wednesday referred to his health care plan as "Medicare for all who want it," employing the phrase used by rival Pete Buttigieg.
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| 2020 Toyota Land Cruiser Heritage Edition Is Even More Capable and Luxurious Posted: 29 Oct 2019 06:00 PM PDT |
