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Category: Politics

Inside a refugee camp on America’s doorstep

Inside a refugee camp on America’s doorstep

The New York Times reports: A butter yellow sun rose over the crowded tent camp across the river from Texas and a thick heat baked the rotten debris below, a mixture of broken toys, human waste and uneaten food swarming with flies. Clothing and sheets hung from trees and dried stiff after being drenched and muddied in a hurricane the week before. As residents emerged from the zipper-holes of their canvas homes that morning in August, some trudged with buckets…

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The U.S. is poised to enter into its worst stretch yet of the coronavirus pandemic

The U.S. is poised to enter into its worst stretch yet of the coronavirus pandemic

The Washington Post reports: America is poised to enter the worst stretch ever of the coronavirus pandemic, with cases spiking and the country on the precipice of shattering its daily record for infections in the next few days. The current surge is already considerably more widespread than the waves from last summer and spring. On Thursday, the number of cases topped 70,000 for the first time since July. The unprecedented geographic spread of the current surge makes it especially dangerous,…

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Election experts game out the chaos that could unfold after the last ballot is cast

Election experts game out the chaos that could unfold after the last ballot is cast

Garrett M. Graff writes: North Carolina and Florida, two key bellwethers, both will likely report results relatively quickly on election night itself; early victories for Biden in either or both states will hint that Biden might be the clear winner within a day or so. And while a Trump win in either or both states wouldn’t necessarily foreclose an eventual Biden victory, it would likely mean that the nation would be in for a long period of uncertainty. And the…

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The Trump administration shut down an office dedicated to studying the long-term safety of vaccines

The Trump administration shut down an office dedicated to studying the long-term safety of vaccines

Carl Zimmer reports: As the first coronavirus vaccines arrive in the coming year, government researchers will face a monumental challenge: monitoring the health of hundreds of millions of Americans to ensure the vaccines don’t cause harm. Purely by chance, thousands of vaccinated people will have heart attacks, strokes and other illnesses shortly after the injections. Sorting out whether the vaccines had anything to do with their ailments will be a thorny problem, requiring a vast, coordinated effort by state and…

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You’re not supposed to be able to make sense of the rumors about Biden

You’re not supposed to be able to make sense of the rumors about Biden

Anne Applebaum writes: On Tuesday, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham broke some news: An “investigative journalist” named Matthew Tyrmand had uncovered a cache of 26,000 emails belonging to Hunter Biden’s disgraced business partner Bevan Cooney, who is now in jail. Tyrmand claimed that he had gotten hold of the emails via a person in the same facility as Cooney (a “federal work camp for white-collar infractions,” is how Tyrmand put it). Tyrmand explained that Cooney felt stiffed by Biden, the son…

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Trump campaign spokesperson claims parents of separated children don’t want them back

Trump campaign spokesperson claims parents of separated children don’t want them back

Politico reports: The Trump campaign’s communications director asserted on Friday that the reason some migrant families separated by the administration at the U.S. border have not been reunited is because the parents do not want their children back. Multiple media outlets reported this week that the federal government remains unable to reach the parents of more than 500 children who were separated from their families after crossing the U.S. border, according to recent court filings. Speaking on CNN’s “New Day,”…

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Russia’s clandestine chemical weapons program and the GRU’s Unit 29155

Russia’s clandestine chemical weapons program and the GRU’s Unit 29155

Bellingcat Investigation Team reports: On October 15, 2020, the European Union imposed sanctions on six senior Russian officials and a leading Russian research institute over the alleged use of a nerve agent from the Novichok family in the poisoning of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Russia dismissed as baseless the EU’s allegations that it had not complied with its obligations, under the convention it ratified in 1997, to discontinue its chemical weapons program. Russian officials said the country had nothing to…

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In the calm before the possible storm, it doesn’t look like courts will decide the election

In the calm before the possible storm, it doesn’t look like courts will decide the election

CNN reports: The doomsday scenario of lawyers and judges setting surprise terms for voting or even deciding the election this year has loomed large. Yet that likelihood is diminishing by the day, several elections law experts say, with the terms for voting already essentially set in many states and a calm coming over the courts in pre-Election Day litigation. The focus on courts has been extreme at times this year, especially with President Donald Trump pushing for the confirmation of…

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North Carolina is the center of the political universe as the state’s demographics shift dramatically

North Carolina is the center of the political universe as the state’s demographics shift dramatically

CNN reports: Donald Trump has a math problem in North Carolina. The state the President won by more than 3 percentage points four years ago has continued its gradual political transformation, moving away from the red states to its south and toward its bluer neighbors to the north. The transformation has been propelled by a mix of factors: The state is growing more diverse with Hispanic and Asian immigrants, its cities and suburbs are booming with unbridled growth from northern…

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Five states where the threat of militia activity around the elections is the highest

Five states where the threat of militia activity around the elections is the highest

NPR reports: Five states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Oregon — have the highest risk of seeing increased militia activity around the elections: everything from demonstrations to violence. That’s the conclusion of a new report by ACLED, a crisis-mapping project, and the research group MilitiaWatch. They worked together to map out potential hot spots for militia-style activities around the elections. Their report looks at states where militias have had recruitment drives and training, where they have cultivated relationships with…

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Most people arrested in protests aren’t leftist radicals

Most people arrested in protests aren’t leftist radicals

The Associated Press reports: President Donald Trump portrays the hundreds of people arrested nationwide in protests against racial injustice as violent urban left-wing radicals. But an Associated Press review of thousands of pages of court documents tells a different story. Very few of those charged appear to be affiliated with highly organized extremist groups, and many are young suburban adults from the very neighborhoods Trump vows to protect from the violence in his reelection push to win support from the…

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To deter immigration, the Trump administration kidnapped children

To deter immigration, the Trump administration kidnapped children

In an editorial, the Washington Post says: The Trump administration’s immorality, cruelty and bureaucratic malpractice in tearing migrant toddlers, tweens and teens away from their parents in 2017 and 2018 were the work of many co-conspirators, most of them faithfully carrying out the wishes of the president himself. A draft report by the Justice Department’s inspector general has made that clear. Perhaps even more shocking is that policy’s present-day legacy: More than 500 children who, having been wrenched from their…

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One in four Britons believe in QAnon-linked theories, survey finds

One in four Britons believe in QAnon-linked theories, survey finds

The Guardian reports: One in four people in Britain agree with conspiracies propagated by QAnon, the global movement claiming there is a secret satanic network of child-abusing politicians and celebrities, a survey has found. The research for Hope Not Hate also found that 17% of people questioned said they believed Covid-19 was intentionally released as part of a “depopulation plan” by the UN or “new world order”. It found that QAnon, which originated in the US where the FBI has…

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GOP pollster Frank Luntz blasts Trump campaign as worst he’s ever seen

GOP pollster Frank Luntz blasts Trump campaign as worst he’s ever seen

The Hill reports: Prominent Republican pollster Frank Luntz blasted President Trump and his campaign on Tuesday for focusing on Hunter Biden in the stretch run to Election Day, calling Trump’s campaign the worst he’s ever seen and saying the president’s advisers should be “brought up on charges of political malpractice.” Speaking at a briefing for the British strategic advising company Global Counsel, Luntz said Trump’s advisers have “their heads up their asses” if they think Hunter Biden will be a…

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Trump calls on Barr to ‘act’ against Biden before election

Trump calls on Barr to ‘act’ against Biden before election

The New York Times reports: President Trump on Tuesday called on William P. Barr, the attorney general, to take action before Election Day against his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., over his son’s foreign work, an extraordinary attempt to pressure the government’s chief law enforcement to help him politically. The president made the remark during an interview with “Fox & Friends,” after days of caustic criticism of Mr. Biden, the moderators of the presidential debates, the…

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Parents of 545 children still not found three years after Trump separation policy

Parents of 545 children still not found three years after Trump separation policy

The Guardian reports: Three years after Donald Trump ordered a crackdown on undocumented migrants crossing into the US, lawyers are still struggling to find the parents of 545 children separated from them under the “zero-tolerance” policy, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. In a court filing, the ACLU said that about two-thirds of the parents had been deported back to the country of origin in Central America, leaving their separated children behind. In the rush to carry out Trump’s…

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