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November 03, 2019 ,

Trump to California’s Governor: Get ‘Act Together’ on Fires(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump on Sunday blasted California Governor Gavin Newsom in a series of Twitter posts for his handling of the devastating wildfires that continue to blaze across the state.Trump said Newsom, a Democrat, has “done a terrible job of forest management.” In a second tweet, the president told Newsom California will no longer receive federal money for help, adding, “Get your act together Governor.” Federal agencies own and manage 57% of the state’s forests.In a final post, Trump said California desperately needs water and called for opening up “the ridiculously closed water lanes coming down from the North. Don’t pour it out into the Pacific Ocean.”Later, returning to the White House from a trip to New York, the president told reporters that Newsom “is like a child.”Newsom responded to Trump’s tweets with his own, saying “You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation.”“We’re successfully waging war against thousands of fires started across the state in the last few weeks due to extreme weather created by climate change while Trump is conducting a full on assault against the antidotes,” Newsom said in a emailed statement later Sunday.The president has tweeted on the subject several times, including in August 2018 that “bad environmental laws” and water diversion were behind the state’s wildfires. At that point Jerry Brown was California’s governor.In January, days after Newsom’s inauguration, Trump said he’d ordered that the federal government send no more money to California.House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, who joined Trump during a trip to New York on Saturday that included attending a mixed martial arts fight at Madison Square Garden, has said he’ll continue to try to ensure disaster-related funding for his state.Of about 33 million acres of forest in California, U.S. agencies including the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service own and manage 19 million acres, according to the University of California.(Updates with response from Newsom in sixth paragraph.)\--With assistance from Jennifer Jacobs.To contact the reporter on this story: Hailey Waller in New York at hwaller@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: James Ludden at jludden@bloomberg.net, Mark Niquette, Ros KrasnyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.




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November 02, 2019 ,

Lawyer indicates Bolton won't testify in impeachment probeThe lawyer for former national security adviser John Bolton signaled Thursday that Bolton will not testify anytime soon in the House impeachment inquiry. Democratic lawmakers want to hear next week from Bolton over the administration's approach to Ukraine that is central to House proceedings that could lead to the impeachment of President Donald Trump. Charles Cooper, Bolton's lawyer, was in federal court Thursday on behalf of another client whose testimony the House also wants.




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November 02, 2019 ,

Iran unveils new anti-US murals at former embassyIran on Saturday unveiled new anti-American murals on the walls of the former US embassy as Tehran prepares to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the storming of what it labels the "den of spies". The new murals -- mainly painted in white, red and blue, the colours of the US flag -- were unveiled by Major General Hossein Salami, the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, at the former mission turned museum. A third showed the American Global Hawk drone that was shot down by Iran in June over the Strait of Hormuz, with bats flying out of it.




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November 02, 2019 ,

Barack Obama thinks 'woke' kids want purity. They don't: they want progressThe 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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November 02, 2019 ,

Women killed by falling rocks climbing California's Red Slate MountainThe bodies of two women who were killed by falling rocks while climbing a narrow portion of California's Red Slate Mountain have been recovered.Jennifer Shedden, 34, and 22-year-old Michelle Xue, never returned from a narrow and icy portion of the mountain after embarking on the trek during the final weekend of October.




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November 02, 2019 ,

Dresden declares 'Nazi Emergency' amid growing far-Right threatThe Dresden City Council has officially declared a ‘Nazi emergency’ amid fears over the rise of far-Right groups in the eastern German city. Voting in favour of an official motion, supporters said it was necessary to ‘strengthen civil society and democracy’ in the city. The motion demanded increases in funding for education and civil engagement, while it also called upon council authorities not to approve any marches featuring far-Right elements. In calling for federal support to tackle the crisis, the motion stated “anti-democratic, anti-pluralist, misanthropic and right-wing extremist values and actions, including violence in Dresden, are increasingly becoming apparent.” The council is run by a Left-wing coalition, but has a strong Alternative for Germany (AfD) membership.  Leftist councillor Max Aschenbach, who developed the resolution, said the city needed to acknowledge extremism had reached crisis levels. “This city has a problem with Nazis and we need to do something about it,” Aschenbach said. “There's been five years of (right-wing rallies), terrorist attacks and terrorist groups – and everyday news reports on Swastikas and Hitler salutes. "Politicians must finally be able to stand up and say ‘no, this is unacceptable’,” he said. In addition to Aschenbach’s Die Partei (The Party), a satirical Left-wing party which has gained increasing mainstream support in recent years, the motion was also supported by the left-wing Greens and Die Linke (The Left), along with the centre-left Social Democrats and the centre-right Free Democrats. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats – along with the far-right AfD – both opposed the measure. A spokesperson for the Christian Democrats criticised the motion, telling the German Press Agency that it was an exercise in “pure symbolic politics” and represented a “linguistic error”. Councillor Holger Hase (Free Democrats), whose party supported the motion, was however critical of the language used – particularly as the city was one of the contenders for the 2025 European Capital of Culture designation. Dresden, the largest city in the former East Germany, has had persistent problems with violence and far-right rhetoric in recent years. The city has seen a number of far-right rallies and demonstrations, particularly in the wake of Chancellor Merkel’s pro-refugee policies were passed in 2015, while it is also the headquarters of the Pegida movement. Pegida, which in German stands for ‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West’, calls for restrictions on Islamic immigration. Since being founded in Dresden in 2014, the movement has spread across the globe in recent years.




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November 02, 2019 ,

Biden Says Warren’s Medicare for All Plan Would Require $9 Trillion Middle-Class Tax HikePresidential 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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November 02, 2019 ,

California wildfires: Climate change driving ‘horror and the terror’ of devastating blazes, say scientistsThe words from California’s former governor could barely have been more stark.“I said it was the new normal a few years ago,’’ said Jerry Brown. “This is serious, but this is only the beginning. This is only a taste of the horror and the terror that will occur in decades.”




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November 02, 2019 ,

Bill O’Reilly: 'If Joe Biden is elected president ... he has to be impeached'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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November 02, 2019 ,

Hezbollah TV channel says Twitter accounts suspendedThe television station of Lebanon's powerful Shiite movement Hezbollah protested Saturday that most of its Twitter accounts had been suspended. Al-Manar accused the US-based social media platform of giving in to "political pressures". "There is no place on Twitter for illegal terrorist organisations and violent extremist groups," a Twitter spokesperson told AFP.




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November 02, 2019 ,

UAW union president takes leave of absence under cloud of U.S. federal probeThe president of the United Auto Workers union, who has been linked https://ift.tt/30HV3Ab to an ongoing corruption probe by U.S. federal officials, has taken a leave of absence, the union said on Saturday in a statement. Gary Jones' leave of absence, which follows a vote by the executive board, will be effective beginning Sunday, the UAW said. "The UAW is fighting tooth and nail to ensure our members have a brighter future.




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November 02, 2019 ,

Kamala Harris Shuts Three of Four N.H. Offices: Campaign Update(Bloomberg) -- Kamala Harris is closing three of her four campaign offices in New Hampshire, with only Manchester and a slimmed-down staff remaining, said an aide familiar with the decision.All of the California senator’s field organizers in the Granite State will be laid off, a major blow to her campaign. New Hampshire holds the second Democratic nominating contest for 2020, after Iowa.The aide said it was part of Harris’s reallocation of resources to Iowa. The shift was forced by financial constraints as her campaign struggles for traction.Harris is campaigning in Iowa on Saturday, including an appearance at an NAACP forum in Des Moines focused on economic progress within African American communities.Biden Slugs Back at Warren Over ‘Wrong Primary’ (1:20 p.m.)Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden slugged back at Elizabeth Warren’s comment that he’s running in the wrong party’s primary after his criticism of her Medicare for All plan, arguing that his opponent’s suggestion that he’s thinking too small is unfair.“The press wants very much and some of the opponents want to very much characterize views -- whether you’re thinking big, and if you’re criticizing something that you think is outlandish, you must be a Republican,” Biden said at an event marking the opening of a field office in Des Moines, Iowa. “The vision I have for this country, there’s nothing small about it. It is like going to the moon,” he said.Biden was insistent Saturday that he’s been bold enough in advocating for adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act to ensure universal health care coverage. “The plans we have, and you’re going to help me implement, are bolder than any plans that have come across, come along,” he told supporters.Biden was interrupted In the middle of his riff by a small group of climate activists demanding that his campaign not take oil and gas money. Before he got a chance to answer, they marched out of the office. Once they were gone, he said, “This is what is going on that’s wrong with our party right now. That everything is taken in contexts that are not accurate.” -- Jennifer EpsteinDemocrats Sue Three States Over Ballot Position (6:30 a.m.)The Democratic National Committee accused three Republican-run states of favoring GOP candidates by listing their names first on the ballot, and filed lawsuits against those states on Friday.Laws in Arizona, Georgia and Texas require the Republican candidate for president to be listed first in most or all precincts. Many other states require election officials to rotate the order from place to eliminate what’s called “position bias.”The lawsuits, filed in federal courts in Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta on behalf of Democratic voters in those states, says that the ballot position laws give Republicans an “unfair, arbitrary, and artificial electoral advantage to Republican Party candidates.”Representatives for the three secretaries of state named in the lawsuits did not return telephone calls or did not immediately comment. -- Gregory KorteCOMING UPOn Saturday, seven Democratic presidential candidates -- including Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg -- will attend a fish fry in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, hosted by freshman Democratic Representative Abby Finkenauer.\--With assistance from Gregory Korte and Jennifer Epstein.To contact the reporter on this story: Sahil Kapur in Washington at skapur39@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Ros Krasny, Steve GeimannFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.




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November 02, 2019 ,

US military calls on Kurdish forces in northeast SyriaUS military vehicles Saturday entered a Kurdish-held area in northeastern Syria and met with officials, AFP correspondents and a local source said, in the second such visit since an announced US pullout from the Turkish border area. Beige-coloured armoured vehicles flying the American flag pulled up at the headquarters of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces outside the city of Qamishli. A US-led coalition has for years backed the SDF in fighting the Islamic State group, but the announcement of an American withdrawal triggered a deadly Turkish invasion against the Kurds on October 9.




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November 02, 2019 ,

Brazil police arrest man said to be one of world's most prolific human traffickersBrazilian federal police said they have arrested Saifullah Al-Mamun, born in Bangladesh and considered by authorities one of the world's most prolific human traffickers. In an operation conducted on Thursday after collaboration with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Brazilian police arrested members of a group allegedly implicated in a large scheme of smuggling people into the United States. Several arrests were made in Sao Paulo, where Al-Mamun was living, and in three other Brazilian cities.




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November 01, 2019 ,

Latest Impeachment Witness: I Wasn’t Worried That Trump Broke the Law With CallSAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty ImagesTim Morrison, a senior White House official who listened to President Donald Trump's controversial call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, said he did not worry Trump broke the law on the call. He also said he was not aware of any meaningful material being left out of the White House’s memo on the call.“I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed,” he said in a prepared statement to Congress obtained by The Daily Beast. After the call between Zelensky and Trump took place, Morrison directed that the transcript of it be put on a secret White House server. He said that the memo the White House released about the call is, to the best of his memory, complete and thorough. Another witness, NSC official Alex Vindman, suggested that noteworthy parts of the conversation were missing from the White House’s memo.Those dual statements from Morrison may prove to be a setback for Democrats who have argued that the call amounted to an impeachable offense since it involved the president demanding an exchange of a political favor for military aid. Morrison, who served as the senior director for European affairs on the National Security Council until his resignation on Wednesday, says he had a different recollection of events than what Ambassador Bill Taylor described in his Oct. 22 testimony—including an episode that appeared to indicate the lofty expectations that Trump and his team had for Zelensky’s commitment to investigating the Bidens. John Bolton Brings a Nuclear Superhawk Into the White HouseIn his testimony, Taylor recounted a conversation in which Morrison briefed him on another conversation between Ambassador Gordon Sondland and a top adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Taylor said Morrison informed him that Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, told Zelensky-aide Andriy Yermak that U.S. security aid wouldn’t come until Zelensky publicly committed to an investigation into Burisma, the company on whose board Hunter Biden served.That is not how Morrison remembers it. “My recollection is that Ambassador Sondland’s proposal to Yermak was that it could be sufficient if the new Ukrainian prosecutor general, not President Zelensky, would commit to pursue the Burisma investigation,” Morrison told impeachment investigators. Morrison concluded his opening remarks with something that GOP lawmakers have noted frequently: that the hold on Ukraine’s security aid ultimately was released. “I am pleased our process gave the president the confidence he needed to approve the release of the security sector assistance,” said Morrison. “My regret is that Ukraine ever learned of the review and that, with this impeachment inquiry, Ukraine has become subsumed in the U.S. political process.”On Thursday morning, Republicans hinted that Morrison’s testimony might undermine aspects of the narrative Democrats have constructed on impeachment so far. They noted that his opening statement had not yet surfaced, as it frequently had with other witnesses in the inquiry. But other parts of Morrison’s opening statement did seem to bolster the idea that Trump was applying a pressure campaign on the Ukrainians through a non-official channel. Morrison noted that his predecessor, former national security official Fiona Hill, had told him that Sondland and the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani "were trying to get President Zelensky to reopen a Ukrainian investigation into Burisma.” Morrison went on to say that “At the time, I did not know what Burisma was or what the investigation entailed.”“I did not understand why Ambassador Sondland would be involved in Ukraine policy,” he added. Morrison was slated to be the first senior White House official to testify to the impeachment inquiry, but he resigned just hours before his appearance. On the eve of his testimony on Thursday, NPR broke the news that he would be leaving the post after less than two years on the job.A senior administration official quoted by The Washington Post said in a statement that Morrison had “decided to pursue other opportunities — and has been considering doing so for some time.” However, Morrison’s appearance still comes in defiance of a White House directive that officials not cooperate with the probe, and congressional officials said that he appeared for testimony after being issued a subpoena. Morrison’s testimony occurred as the House took a vote to formally codify the impeachment investigation and bring it into a so-called “public” phase. 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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November 01, 2019 ,

Lawyer indicates Bolton won't testify in impeachment probeThe lawyer for former national security adviser John Bolton signaled Thursday that Bolton will not testify anytime soon in the House impeachment inquiry. Democratic lawmakers want to hear next week from Bolton over the administration's approach to Ukraine that is central to House proceedings that could lead to the impeachment of President Donald Trump. Charles Cooper, Bolton's lawyer, was in federal court Thursday on behalf of another client whose testimony the House also wants.




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November 01, 2019 ,

Bill O’Reilly: 'If Joe Biden is elected president ... he has to be impeached'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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November 01, 2019 ,

New California fire grows as crews make headway on other blazesA 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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November 01, 2019 ,

Border wall, impeachment battle imperil budget progressThe Senate passed a long-overdue, $209 billion bundle of bipartisan spending bills Thursday, but a bitter fight over funding demanded by President Donald Trump for border fencing imperils broader Capitol Hill efforts to advance $1.4 trillion worth of annual Cabinet agency budgets. The 84-9 vote sends the measure into House-Senate negotiations but doesn't much change the big picture. There has been little progress, if any, on the tricky trade-offs needed to balance Democratic demands for social programs with President Donald Trump's ballooning border wall demands.




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November 01, 2019 ,

The Latest: PG&E equipment sparked 3 Bay Area firesNorthern California officials say Pacific Gas & Electric Co. equipment caused three fires that broke out in San Francisco suburbs earlier this week. The Contra Costa County Fire Protection District confirmed Friday that the utility's power lines sparked a pair of fires Sunday in Lafayette east of San Francisco. One of the fires destroyed the Lafayette Tennis Club.




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November 01, 2019 ,

Katie Hill delivers scathing resignation speech after Trump impeachment vote: 'I am leaving because of a double standard'Katie Hill has unloaded with a scathing resignation speech, in which she claimed she is the victim of a gendered "double standard" in society that has punished her for her sexual life even as Donald Trump remains president in spite of bragging "about his sexual predation".Ms Hill, who was elected to Congress in 2018 as a part of a wave of women Democrats who took office that year, delivered her final speech in the House just after participating in a historic vote to formally launch the impeachment inquiry into the president over his alleged effort to force Ukraine to investigate a potential chief political foe.




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November 01, 2019 ,

Biden stumbles over words, struggles to deliver his message to votersJoe Biden was making an impassioned case for protecting immigrants in the country illegally one recent Sunday when he abruptly stopped himself. “There’s many more things, but —” he said before trailing off at a union forum. Six months into his presidential campaign, Biden is still delivering uneven performances on the debate stage and on the campaign trail in ways that can undermine his message.




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November 01, 2019 ,

The Latest: Man accused of arson in California wildfireAuthorities say a man was arrested and accused of arson after a crew responded to a report of a wildfire in Northern California. A CalFire statement said engine crews were able to quickly contain the small fire in the Sonoma County community of Geyserville and identified a potential suspect. Authorities reported progress Wednesday in battling the Kincade fire in Sonoma County that started last week outside of Geyserville and forced the evacuation of the entire community, home to about 900 people.




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November 01, 2019 ,

Exxon, Chevron Begin Pushing Back Against Warren’s Fracking Ban(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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November 01, 2019 ,

Ex-beauty queen accuses former Gambia president of rapeA 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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November 01, 2019 ,

Beto O’Rourke Drops Out of 2020 RaceREUTERSFormer Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) is ending his presidential campaign after struggling for months to gain sustained momentum, as the crowded Democratic primary thins out less than 100 days before the Iowa caucus. “Though it is difficult to accept, it is clear to me now that this campaign does not have the means to move forward successfully,” O’Rourke wrote in a Medium post announcing his move on Friday. “My service to the country will not be as a candidate or as the nominee. Acknowledging this now is in the best interests of those in the campaign; it is in the best interests of this party as we seek to unify around a nominee; and it is in the best interests of the country.”Rumors about O’Rourke’s candidacy began shortly after his Senate campaign concluded. But for months, he put off making a decision, leaving top Democratic operatives who may have signed on with him to look elsewhere. The entrance into the race of South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, perceived to occupy the same lane for a young, fresh-faced outsider, appeared to further dull the allure of O’Rourke’s bid. When he finally launched he did so with much fanfare. A Vanity Fair article timed to his announcement marketed his bid as a second chance at political greatness for the former Texas congressman after failing to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. O’Rourke was featured on the magazine cover’s standing on a dirt road, outside a pick-up truck with the words, “Beto’s Choice” written in bold over his left shoulder and the quote, “I want to be in it. Man, I was born to be in it.” And he was, for a few weeks, anyway.  In the first 18 days of his candidacy, O’Rourke raised an impressive $9.4 million. But his star began to fall as quickly as it rose. A lack of fully formed policy positions and a series of lackluster debate appearances contributed to his failure to harness the same energy that that was seen during his Senate campaign. A mass shooting at a Walmart in his hometown of El Paso took him off the campaign trail briefly in August as he mourned with his community. When he returned to the race, O’Rourke, 47, called for a mandatory buyback program of assault-style weapons, which ignited loud applause during a Democratic primary debate in his native Texas in September. Days later, his unofficial campaign slogan became “hell yes”—a line from his debate performance that if he were elected president, he would buy back such weapons. Beto O’Rourke’s Finest Hour Came Off the Presidential Campaign Trail, in El PasoWhile the move helped rally some progressives in key voting states, his promise proved to be politically risky and was met with some skepticism among his fellow Democrats and guns rights activists, who argued he was giving fuel to Republicans by calling for such drastic measures. By the end of his campaign, O’Rourke was at approximately 2 percent nationally. And while he made his plans to withdraw from the presidential race public on Friday, he has consistently ruled out running for any other office in 2020, including challenging Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX). “Oh no, Beto just dropped out of race for President despite him saying he was “born for this.” I don’t think so!,” President Donald Trump tweeted on Friday afternoon. Just hours before he suspended his bid, his campaign released official plans to file for the New Hampshire primary and return to the state on Nov. 8. “Beto will be joined by local supporters at the New Hampshire State House for the filing event,” the release reads. Ultimately, O’Rourke pledged to help elect the party’s nominee to take on Trump in the general election. “We will work to ensure that the Democratic nominee is successful in defeating Donald Trump in 2020,” he wrote. “I can tell you firsthand from having the chance to know the candidates, we will be well served by any one of them, and I’m going to be proud to support whoever that nominee is.”Beto Going Bust: The Once Great Dem Hope Is Among the Many 2020ers Struggling for CashRead 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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November 01, 2019 ,

Democrats' decision to televise Trump impeachment hearings could prove politically perilousDemocrats in the U.S. Congress took a major step toward impeaching President Donald Trump this week when they agreed on the rules for publicly televised hearings after weeks of testimony behind closed doors. Leaders of the Democratic-run U.S. House of Representatives believe that putting the main witnesses on TV will convince independent voters and other doubters that Trump was wrong in asking the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on a political rival, Democrat Joe Biden, who hopes to be the candidate to oust Trump in the 2020 election. While Republicans and the president face great political risk in the hearings, so do Democrats.




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November 01, 2019 ,

Police officer retires after far-right group ties revealedA Connecticut police officer has retired after a civil rights organization raised concerns about his membership in a far-right group known for engaging in violent clashes at political rallies, a town official said Friday. Officer Kevin P. Wilcox retired from the East Hampton Police Department on Oct. 22, according to Town Manager David Cox. Wilcox had been an East Hampton police officer since 1999.




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November 01, 2019 ,

Barack Obama thinks 'woke' kids want purity. They don't: they want progressThe 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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November 01, 2019 ,

Syria's Assad calls Trump the 'most transparent president'Syrian President Bashar Assad on Thursday hailed Donald Trump as the “best American president” for his “transparency” regarding his stated desire to maintain U.S. control of the Middle Eastern nation’s lucrative oil fields. “I tell you, he’s the best American president. Not because his policies are good, but because he’s the most transparent president,” Assad said in a state television interview, according to a translation of his remarks by NBC News.




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November 01, 2019 ,

The Latest: Wildfire threatens homes in Southern CaliforniaAuthorities have ordered evacuations for about 7,500 people as a wildfire burns on a hilltop north of Los Angeles. The fire on South Mountain near Santa Paula erupted Thursday evening and quickly grew to over 6 square miles (16 square kilometers). The fire is driven by moderate winds that continue in some mountainous areas even as they have eased elsewhere in Southern California.




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November 01, 2019 ,

Maskless Merkel braves severe Delhi smogGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel got a toxic welcome to India on Friday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi treated her to a military parade in New Delhi's severely polluted air. Ignoring medical advice to the choking megacity's 20 million inhabitants, Merkel and Modi reviewed a guard of honour at the presidential palace without pollution masks. The European Union's longest-serving leader is due to step down in 2021.




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October 31, 2019 ,

Pathologist says Epstein's injuries point to murder, not suicideA forensic pathologist hired by Jeffrey Epstein's brother said Wednesday that evidence suggested the disgraced financier had not died by suicide in his jail cell but had been murdered. "I think that the evidence points toward homicide rather than suicide," Baden, a former New York City medical examiner who was present at the autopsy, told Fox News.




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October 31, 2019 ,

Fire sweeps Pakistani train, killing 73, after cooking fireA fire swept through a Pakistani train on Thursday, killing 73 people and injuring nearly 40 after a gas canister that passengers were using to cook breakfast exploded, the minister of railways said. The fire destroyed three of the train's carriages near the town of Rahim Yar Khan in the south of Punjab province. It was the worst disaster on Pakistan's accident-plagued railway system in nearly 15 years.




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