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US leaves Hurricane Helene survivors behind while funding Israel’s genocidal war

Thanks to the efforts of conservative lawmakers, a recently passed funding bill did not allocate additional funds to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) despite knowing that the agency’s funds had run low before the peak of hurricane season. Congress is now in recess until November 12, and while Biden had considered calling Congress back into session early to approve more FEMA funding, there has been no progress. Yet, somehow, conservative leaders and media are attempting to pin the blame of lack of FEMA funding on migrants crossing the US-Mexico border to seek asylum. “Feds say there’s no money left to respond to hurricanes — after FEMA spent $640M on migrants,” read a headline in conservative paper the New York Post following Mayorkas’ announcement. Communities in the southeast of the country, across the Gulf Coast and from Florida all the way to Virginia, have been forced to fend for themselves with grassroots and mutual aid organizations filling in for the state in terms of relief and aid efforts.

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Senator tells Native American candidate to go back to where she came from, storms out of public event

www.boisestatepublicradio.org

A bipartisan forum in a small Latah County community took a turn when Republican Senate incumbent Dan Foreman stormed out of the event, following a racist outburst directed at a Native American candidate. On Tuesday, local Democrat and Republican representatives organized a “Meet your candidates” forum in the northern Idaho town of Kendrick. ... In a statement released Wednesday, Democratic candidate for House Seat A and member of the Nez Perce tribe Trish Carter-Goodheart said she pushed back on that idea that discrimination existed in Idaho when it was her turn to speak, pointing to her own experience and the history of white supremacy groups in Northern Idaho. ... Foreman stood up and angrily interjected, using an expletive to criticize what he cast as the liberal bent of the response, according to the release and people present at the forum. Carter-Goodheart said he then told her she should go back to where she came from, and heatedly stormed off. One event organizer and two other panelists confirmed Carter-Goodheart’s account, adding Foreman appeared very agitated.

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Why the Biden Administration Is Shifting on Immigration

For much of the Biden administration’s first three years in office, migration surged at the Mexican border. Administration officials frequently argued that the problem was beyond their control — a reflection not of U.S. policy but of global forces pushing people toward the border. Then, starting in December, when the issue threatened President Biden’s re-election, he began a crackdown. The traffic of people crossing the border plummeted. Today, it remains near the lowest point since 2020 and not so different from levels during parts of the Trump and Obama administrations. This week, the Biden administration imposed tough new rules to keep it that way.

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A school district in Pennsylvania approved nearly $9,000 ‘to cut windows into the ‘gender-identity’ student bathrooms so passerby can look inside’

www.yorkdispatch.com

South Western’s elected school board is making some strange decisions. For the last two years, they’ve fixated on which bathrooms LGBTQ+ kids use. In 2023, officials in this Hanover-area district played musical chairs with school bathrooms in a misguided attempt to appease the loudest bigots among them — ending up with five different types of bathrooms. After a low-turnout school board election in which several far-right members joined their ranks, they hired a Christian law firm, decided to begin banning books and reopened the bathroom issue. Board President Matthew Gelazela, who was elevated to his post after previously serving as the board’s most vocal bomb-thrower, pointed to Red Lion’s discriminatory policies as something to aspire to. Now, upon the advice of that law firm — the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center — the board approved spending $8,700 to cut windows so passersby can look into the so-called “gender-identity” student bathrooms.

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Donald Trump escalates tariff threat as he doubles down on protectionism: Ex-president’s latest broadside warns countries to stick with the dollar or face 100% levy

Donald Trump is escalating his threats to increase tariffs on imports if he wins a second term in the White House, reviving fears of renewed trade wars that hit the global economy during his presidency. The Republican candidate, seeking to win blue-collar votes in swing states pivotal to November’s presidential election, has doubled down on his protectionist rhetoric, delivering blunt warnings of tariffs to US trading partners including the EU. On Saturday, Trump went further, promising tariffs of 100 per cent on imports from countries that were moving away from using the dollar — a threat that could engulf many developing economies too. “I’ll say, ‘you leave the dollar, you’re not doing business with the United States. Because we’re going to put a 100 per cent tariff on your goods,’” he said at a rally in Wisconsin. “If we lost the dollar as the world currency, I think that would be the equivalent of losing a war,” he told the Economic Club of New York on Thursday. https://archive.ph/2b2zp

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Ukraine faces its darkest hour: Zelenskyy must deal with Russian advances, an exhausted society and the prospect of winter energy shortages

“Right now, I’m thinking more about how to save my people,” says Mykhailo Temper. “It’s quite hard to imagine we will be able to move the enemy back to the borders of 1991,” he adds, referring to his country’s aim of restoring its full territorial integrity. Once buoyed by hopes of liberating their lands, even soldiers at the front now voice a desire for negotiations with Russia to end the war. Yuriy, another commander on the eastern front who gave only his first name, says he fears the prospect of a “forever war”. “I am for negotiations now,” he adds, expressing his concern that his son — also a soldier — could spend much of his life fighting and that his grandson might one day inherit an endless conflict. “If the US turns off the spigot, we’re finished,” says another officer, a member of the 72nd Mechanised Brigade, in nearby Kurakhove. Ukraine is heading into what may be its darkest moment of the war so far. It is losing on the battlefield in the east of the country, with Russian forces advancing relentlessly — albeit at immense cost in men and equipment.

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A series of quiet moves, first by Trump, and now by Biden, have produced a humanitarian crisis throughout Cuba.

There has been a shift towards minimizing visible harm to civilian populations since the sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, which resulted in widespread malnutrition and epidemics. “There’s a strategy of trying to offload the enforcement to the private sector,” she said. “U.S. policy has created conditions that make it commercially compelling for the private sector to withdraw from whole markets, resulting in severe and widespread economic harm, but in a form that is not directly attributable to US policymakers.” The Helms-Burton Act is a good example. In 2019, Trump implemented Title III of the law, which allows Americans to sue companies doing business with Cuba, which every previous president had waived. Cruise liners that took American tourists to Havana during the Obama years have since been sued for hundreds of millions of dollars in a Florida federal court for docking at Havana’s main port. The effect has been to deter multinationals from investing in the island. But perhaps the best example of an almost invisible but insidious sanction is designating Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism”. Presented as a benign policy tool to make the world a safer place rather than an arm of economic warfare, it has contaminated the word “Cuba” more than ever in the global economy. Almost overnight the label provoked both global banks and vital exporters to pull out of the Cuban market, according to diplomats and businesspeople on the island.

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US officials quietly backed Israel’s military push against Hezbollah

Senior White House figures privately told Israel that the U.S. would support its decision to ramp up military pressure against Hezbollah — even as the Biden administration publicly urged the Israeli government in recent weeks to curtail its strikes, according to American and Israeli officials. Presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, told top Israeli officials in recent weeks that the U.S. agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah in order to convince the group to engage in diplomatic talks to end the conflict, the officials told POLITICO.

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Man who claimed he had explosives at Trump rally in Michigan is charged

www.cnn.com

The complaint says he sped past the traffic point, disobeyed commands by officers to stop and, when he finally stopped after being chased by police, “removed bags of fertilizer from his vehicle and threw them on the ground to make it appear that they were explosives.” Nauta told law enforcement, the complaint says, that “he intended to make officers, and others, believe that he had explosives.”

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Spain's NGOs, unions observe nationwide strike in solidarity with Palestine

www.trtworld.com

More than 200 trade unions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Spain have initiated a 24-hour general strike titled "Against the genocide and occupation in Palestine." As part of the nationwide strike on Friday, demonstrations took place in the capital Madrid and other major cities such as Barcelona and Bilbao, with university students suspending classes in solidarity. The unions and NGOs expressed that Israel's attacks on Gaza have become "intolerable," urging the Spanish government to "immediately cut diplomatic, commercial, and military relations with Israel" to prevent its participation in "Israel's ethnic cleansing."

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Harris to propose toughening Biden’s asylum clampdown during border visit

Vice President Kamala Harris plans to announce Friday that not only would she keep in place President Joe Biden’s sweeping asylum crackdown if she wins the White House, but that she would take it even further. During her border visit in Douglas, Arizona, the vice president will propose toughening the president’s policy that suspends asylum claims in between ports of entry when border crossings reach a certain threshold, per a senior campaign official, who was granted anonymity to not get ahead of the vice president’s speech. The senior campaign official did not provide further details of Harris’ proposal. It’s a striking and aggressive move from Harris in the final stretch of the campaign, as she doubles down on her efforts to cut into former President Donald Trump’s advantage with voters on immigration. The new proposal comes as the vice president makes her first trip to the southern border as the Democratic nominee, when she also plans to emphasize her opponent’s role in killing the bipartisan border deal.

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Prigozhin used JPMorgan and HSBC for Wagner payments: Banks handled transactions for companies in Africa controlled by Russian warlord

Leaked documents obtained by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), a Washington-based think-tank, show that in 2017 a Sudanese company controlled by Prigozhin made purchases of industrial equipment from China that passed through large western banks. Wagner, which the US Treasury has accused of “mass executions, rape, child abductions and other brutalities against innocents” in Africa, became infamous for providing mercenary services to repressive dictators and for fighting in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The leaked documents show how Prigozhin, whose plane crashed last year after attempting a mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin, was able to establish a transnational criminal empire in natural resources in part by secretly hijacking the payments systems of western financial institutions. One invoice shows that in August 2017, Meroe Gold, a Sudanese mining company that was a front for Wagner, sent a payment from a local bank account via JPMorgan Chase as an intermediate bank in New York to a seller in China. Another invoice from the same year shows that Meroe Gold sent payment for diesel generators and spare parts to a Chinese company via Hang Seng Bank, which is part of the HSBC Group.

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Western nations join forces to break China’s grip on critical minerals

The Minerals Security Partnership, a coalition of 14 nations and the European Commission, will unveil a new financing network at an event in New York on Monday as they try to ramp up international collaboration and pledge financial support for a huge nickel project in Tanzania, backed by mining company BHP. A joint statement due to be published on the margins of the UN general assembly says the network will “strengthen co-operation and promote information exchange and co-financing”. It lists 10 critical minerals projects that have already attracted support from MSP partner governments. Representatives of BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Rio Tinto and Anglo American are scheduled to attend the meeting, amid a push to attract private investors and miners to invest further in the sector.

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University of Pennsylvania will sanction Amy Wax, the law prof who invited a white nationalist to speak to her class

www.inquirer.com

Wax — who has called into question the academic ability of Black students, invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to her classroom, and said the country would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration — will be suspended for one year at half pay with benefits intact. She also will face a public reprimand issued by university leadership, the loss of her named chair and summer pay, and a requirement to note in her public appearances that she is not speaking for or as a member of the Penn Carey Law school or Penn. But she will not be fired or lose her tenure. ... Wax’s conduct, according to Magill’s letter, “included a history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status.” She also, according to the letter, breached “the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of University policy.” Wax also, both in and out of the classroom, repeatedly and in public made “discriminatory and disparaging statements targeted at specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify,” the letter said. ... The decision is likely to reignite scrutiny over Penn’s handling in September of the Palestine Writes literature festival, which critics say included speakers with a history of making antisemitic remarks, and for resisting calls to discipline faculty and students for remarks some called antisemitic in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the country’s subsequent military response in Gaza. The campus continued to be roiled last spring after a pro-Palestinian encampment was erected on the College Green and eventually removed by university and city police. The encampment — one of dozens on campuses around the country — was up for more than two weeks. The U.S. congressional committee that investigated Penn’s handling of antisemitism complaints, a lawsuit filed by two Jewish students at Penn, and Wax’s lawyer all have pointed to the proceedings against Wax as evidence that Penn is willing to attempt to take action against some professors for some speech. “Penn has demonstrated a clear double standard by tolerating antisemitic … harassment, and intimidation, but suppressing and penalizing other expression it deemed problematic,” Virginia Foxx, the Republican congresswoman who heads the House Education and Workforce Committee, wrote in January.