Iran unveils new anti-US murals at former embassy

Iran 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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California wildfires: Ignition of Maria fire spotted on camera

The moment a wildfire burst into life and began to spread in California has been caught on camera.The Maria Fire has burned some 15 square miles and prompted evacuation orders for nearly 11,000 people since it began Thursday evening.

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Missing New Hampshire couple found buried on Texas beach, sheriff's office says

Missing New Hampshire couple James and Elaine Bulter were found dead, buried on a beach in Kleberg County, Texas in an ongoing homicide investigation.

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5 Killed, Several Injured in Shooting at Airbnb Halloween Party in California. Here's What to Know

The mass shooting at a Halloween party at an Airbnb in Orinda, Calif. left five people dead and several others injured.

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California wildfires: Climate change driving ‘horror and the terror’ of devastating blazes, say scientists

The 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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Hollow building becomes center of Iraq's uprising

The skeleton of a high-rise building overlooking Baghdad's central Tahrir Square known as the Turkish Restaurant has become a temporary home and a bustling center for protesters staging demonstrations against Iraq's ruling elites. Dressed in combat trousers and wearing an Iraqi flag as a cape, the 35-year-old is the leader of the group, made up of 20-odd young men who occupy a corner of the building's base. Groups of young men have occupied all 18 floors of the building, with its cramped unlit narrow staircases.

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Court ruling could throw impeachment timeline into disarray

Even as House Democrats on Thursday ratified an impeachment resolution against President Trump, a federal judge has potentially slowed the brisk pace of the inquiry by declining to rule on whether a key witness needed to testify before the House of Representatives.

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Barack Obama thinks 'woke' kids want purity. They don't: they want progress

The 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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Bad news for Boeing: Company says more 737 NGs found to have wing cracks

The FAA ordered the inspections in 737 NG's that have flown many thousands of flghts

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Trump says US knows who Islamic State's new leader is

President Donald Trump said Friday that the United States knows who the Islamic State group's new leader is, as the United States vowed to keep "unrelenting" pressure on the extremists. Islamic State on Thursday confirmed Baghdadi's death and named his replacement as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi.

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Dresden declares 'Nazi Emergency' amid growing far-Right threat

The 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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2020 Vision: If a single speech can shake up the Democratic race, it might happen in Iowa

Will any of this year’s candidates pull an Obama at the newly named Liberty and Justice Celebration?

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Georgia ex-policeman sentenced to 12 years in prison in shooting of unarmed black man

A former Georgia police officer was sentenced on Friday to 12 years in prison after his conviction in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man outside an Atlanta apartment in March 2015. Robert "Chip" Olsen, a 57-year-old white man, was convicted last month of aggravated assault and violating his oath of office but found not guilty of murder in the killing of 26-year-old Anthony Hill. Before the sentencing, members of Hill's family urged Dekalb County Superior Court Judge LaTisha Dear Jackson to sentence Olsen to the maximum penalty of 30 years behind bars.

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2 bodies found at Texas beach are New Hampshire couple

The two bodies found buried at a South Texas beach have been identified as a missing New Hampshire couple, investigators announced Friday. The deaths of James Butler, 48, and Michelle Butler, 46, are being investigated as homicides, the Kleberg County Sheriff's Office in Texas said in a release. A deputy on Sunday located a woman's remains in a shallow grave on Padre Island, near Corpus Christi, the sheriff's office said.

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A union for 28,000 American Airlines cabin crew has told Boeing's CEO its members are scared of getting back on the 737 Max

Lori Bassani, who leads the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, wrote to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg about the 737 Max crisis.

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Airbnb bans 'party houses' after Halloween shooting in California

Police were still searching for the shooter who opened fire on Thursday night at the costume party, which authorities say was attended by more than 100 people at the house in Orinda, less than 20 miles (30 km) east of San Francisco. The party host rented the home through Airbnb and told its owner she was holding a reunion for only a dozen people, the San Francisco Chronicle reported citing the owner, Michael Wang.

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The Latest: Some allowed to return home amid California fire

Authorities have lifted evacuation orders for a farm community as firefighters make progress on a large wildfire in Southern California. Ventura County officials allowed residents of Somis to return home Saturday morning after firefighters contained 20% of the Maria Fire, which has burned nearly 15 square miles (39 sq. kilometers) and continues to threaten more than 2,500 homes and other buildings. The fire began Thursday during what had been expected to be the tail end of Santa Ana winds that fanned destructively across Southern California.

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Texas woman says mother's gynecologist used his sperm to conceive her after submitting DNA to Ancestry.com

A woman in Texas has filed a lawsuit against a Colorado gynecologist accusing him of using his own sperm to artificially inseminate women without their consent.

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Hezbollah TV channel says Twitter accounts suspended

The 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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The Latest: Utility re-energized power line before fire

A Southern California utility that shut off power to tens of thousands of people to prevent wildfires says it restored electricity to a line minutes before another blaze exploded nearby. Southern California Edison says it began to re-energize a 16,000-thousand-volt circuit 13 minutes before flames broke out Thursday evening on a hilltop northwest of Los Angeles. The fire near Santa Paula was driven by gusts that lingered after calming elsewhere.

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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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US military calls on Kurdish forces in northeast Syria

US 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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Brazil police arrest man said to be one of world's most prolific human traffickers

Brazilian 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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