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Shame on Donald Trump for worsening NC’s Helene tragedy with political lies

Shame on Donald Trump for worsening NC’s Helene tragedy with political lies

An editorial in The Charlotte Observer: Western North Carolina is trying to pick up the pieces left behind by Hurricane Helene, which decimated the region, leaving communities destroyed and a death toll in the triple digits. This is not a situation to capitalize on for political gain. But former President Donald Trump has politicized the situation at every turn, spreading falsehoods and conspiracies that fracture the community instead of bringing it together. The worst example is a social media post…

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Helene response hampered by misinformation, conspiracy theories spread through social media

Helene response hampered by misinformation, conspiracy theories spread through social media

The Washington Post reports: One day after Helene slammed into Asheville, N.C., leading to seven trees falling on her house and destroying her roof, Nicole McNeill read an alarming article that warned a second storm was barreling toward the area. McNeill, 43, had a panic attack, her anxiety spiking and her heart pounding. She knew she didn’t have enough gasoline in her car to evacuate from yet another disaster. But it was all a hoax. “The second storm turned out…

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Harris weighs more breaks with Biden as he keeps injecting himself into the campaign

Harris weighs more breaks with Biden as he keeps injecting himself into the campaign

CNN reports: Neither aides in the Harris campaign nor the Biden White House would commit to another joint campaign event between now and the election. Harris wants to create space, top aides say, but not too much space. She wants to be loyal — but she also wants to win. She is still planning to lean on Biden, who is flying to Milwaukee on Tuesday for an event trumpeting more projects made possible by administration efforts, to buck up union…

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Arab American leaders urge Harris to ‘show distance’ from Biden’s Israel policy during private Michigan meeting

Arab American leaders urge Harris to ‘show distance’ from Biden’s Israel policy during private Michigan meeting

CNN reports: In a side room backstage at a Friday campaign rally in Flint, Michigan, Arab American advocates asked Vice President Kamala Harris to break from President Joe Biden’s Israel policy and push harder for an end to the war in Gaza. The conversation, scheduled to last 10 minutes, ended up going 20, according to Wa’el Alzayat, the CEO of Emgage Action, a group aimed at boosting the Muslim American vote. Harris did not make any promises, he said, but…

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Election skeptics are running some county election boards in Georgia. A new rule could allow them to exclude decisive votes

Election skeptics are running some county election boards in Georgia. A new rule could allow them to exclude decisive votes

By Doug Bock Clark and Heather Vogell This story was originally published by ProPublica An examination of a new election rule in Georgia passed by the state’s Republican-controlled election board suggests that local officials in just a handful of rural counties could exclude enough votes to affect the outcome of the presidential race. The rule was backed by national groups allied with former President Donald Trump. It gives county boards the power to investigate irregularities and exclude entire precincts from…

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Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah

Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah

The Washington Post reports: Among the half dozen Iranian-backed militia groups with weapons aimed at Israel, Hezbollah is by far the strongest. Israeli officials had watched with increasing anxiety as the Lebanese group added new weapons to an arsenal already capable of striking Israeli cities with tens of thousands of precision-guided missiles. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service responsible for combating foreign threats to the Jewish state, had worked for years to penetrate the group with electronic monitoring and human informants….

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How dark is the night sky?

How dark is the night sky?

Phil Plait writes: How dark is dark? When you go outside on a clear, moonless night, you can see not only lots of stars but also the black space between them—literally space, in this case. Given that you can see stars and that the sky is black, you might think the sky is transparent. But it’s not—at least, not really. Various molecules, atoms and particulates float around in the air, and these reflect light. During the day, sunlight entering the…

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Biden urges Congress to replenish disaster relief funds quickly

Biden urges Congress to replenish disaster relief funds quickly

The New York Times reports: President Biden urged members of Congress on Friday to provide emergency funding for the Small Business Administration, saying the agency is critically low on money needed to help people in communities devastated by Hurricane Helene. In a late-night letter addressed to the leadership of Congress, Mr. Biden wrote that the S.B.A.’s disaster relief program, which supports small-business owners in recovering from the storm, will run out of money in weeks, before Congress is set to…

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Helene hit Trump strongholds in Georgia and North Carolina. It could swing the election

Helene hit Trump strongholds in Georgia and North Carolina. It could swing the election

Politico reports: Hurricane Helene hit especially hard in heavily Republican areas of Georgia and North Carolina — a fact that could work to Donald Trump’s disadvantage in the two swing states. Research has shown that major disasters can influence both voter turnout and voter preference. And Helene has pushed this contest into novel territory: It’s the first catastrophic event in U.S. history to hit two critical swing states within six weeks of a presidential election, based on a POLITICO’s E&E…

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Trump is everywhere. Anxious Democrats wonder why Harris isn’t

Trump is everywhere. Anxious Democrats wonder why Harris isn’t

Politico reports: Democratic operatives, including some of Kamala Harris’ own staffers, are growing increasingly concerned about her relatively light campaign schedule, which has her holding fewer events than Donald Trump and avoiding unscripted interactions with voters and the press almost entirely. In interviews with POLITICO, nearly two dozen Democrats described Harris as running a do-no-harm, risk-averse approach to the race they fear could hamper her as the campaign enters its final 30-day stretch. With early voting by mail and in…

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Truth Social users are losing ridiculous sums of money to scams

Truth Social users are losing ridiculous sums of money to scams

Gizmodo reports: Donald Trump launched Truth Social in 2022 as a social media platform where the MAGA faithful could hang out without any liberals to spoil the fun. The biggest selling point? It was the only place where Trump was personally posting his unhinged screeds after getting banned from Twitter over that whole coup attempt. But new documents obtained by Gizmodo reveal the site has also been flooded with scammers who are swindling users out of enormous sums of money….

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Macron calls to halt weapons deliveries to Israel, but who is listening?

Macron calls to halt weapons deliveries to Israel, but who is listening?

Politico reports: French President Emmanuel Macron called for a halt to the delivery of weapons to be used in the Gaza Strip. Macron made the comments in an interview on the French radio show “Etcetera” on France Inter, which was recorded on Oct. 1 and aired on Saturday. “I think today, the priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop delivering arms for fighting in Gaza,” Macron said. He said France is not delivering any. The…

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Marwan Bishara: ‘Israel’s recent attacks shows it infiltrated Hezbollah’

Marwan Bishara: ‘Israel’s recent attacks shows it infiltrated Hezbollah’

  Al Jazeera’s political analyst Marwan Bishara says Hezbollah losing contact with its leader Hashem Safieddine shows that Israel is able to “deliver one blow after another” to the group. “It is also significant that it proves there is an intelligence breach when it comes to Hezbollah, allowing Israel to locate and attack one leader after another,” he said. “From the rigging and detonating of communication devices and the assassination of one Hezbollah leader to another, all the way to…

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I wasn’t prepared to be a climate refugee

I wasn’t prepared to be a climate refugee

Melissa Hanson, a climate advocate who recently moved from wildfire-prone California to Asheville, North Carolina, writes: Asheville was supposed to be one of those places where people were safer from climate disasters. It was listed in the top three cities in this country to escape climate impacts. It’s not Florida, where sea level rise threatens to drown coastal communities, or California, with its wildfires, or Arizona, battered with its record-breaking heat waves. But now I know firsthand that no place…

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