April the Giraffe's youngest calf dies at Texas zoo

‘This condition was entirely unexpected and unpreventable’

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Factbox: Key details from fifth plenum of China's Communist Party

Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Central Committee, the largest of the ruling Communist Party's top decision-making bodies, have concluded a four-day meeting on China's economic and social policy goals for the next five years. Below are some key details from the communique of the plenum, the fifth meeting of the Central Committee since the once-in-five years Communist Party congress in 2017, as released by state media on Thursday. Party leadership said in the communique that the value of China's gross domestic product is expected to exceed 100 trillion yuan ($14.92 trillion) this year.

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Eric Holder on the gendered impact of voter suppression

The former U.S. attorney general spoke to The 19th about voter suppression, redistricting and the importance of Breonna Taylor’s case.

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'The possibility of real-world harm is high': Experts warn of violence from QAnon around the election

Experts who study QAnon say they’ve observed an increase in calls for offline action among the movement’s followers, adding to the growing risk of postelection violence posed by a variety of extremist groups. 

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The Latest: President declares emergency in Mississippi

President Donald Trump has declared an emergency exists in Mississippi and ordered federal assistance be expedited to aid state, local and tribal efforts to recover from Hurricane Zeta. The president authorized the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate all disaster relief efforts in the state and provide help to save lives and protect property. It added that FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide equipment and resources to deal with the emergency caused by Zeta's passage.

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Trump’s Hard-Line Immigration Policies Go Before Voters

By BY ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/34COUcW

Trump and Biden Converge in Florida, an Elusive Prize Still Up for Grabs

By BY KATIE GLUECK AND PATRICIA MAZZEI from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3jOnh57

A Californian is battling both influenza and Covid-19 in an early case of ‘co-infection.’

By BY JOHN ISMAY from NYT World https://ift.tt/3e7alFW

Appeals court rules Minnesota cannot count ballots received after 8 p.m. on Election Day.

By BY NICK CORASANITI from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/35KvzFX

Jimmy Orr, a Favorite Target of the Colts’ Unitas, Dies at 85

By BY RICHARD GOLDSTEIN from NYT Sports https://ift.tt/3kTRvoF

Dems Mess With Texas

By BY LISA LERER from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/37TXZQo

Erdogan vows legal response to Charlie Hebdo cartoon showing him lifting skirt of veiled woman

Anger at France deepened in Muslim-majority countries on Wednesday over a Charlie Hebdo cartoon showing Turkey’s president drinking beer while lifting the skirt of a woman wearing a hijab to reveal her naked buttocks. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president, described the cartoonists as “scoundrels” and accused the West of wanting to “relaunch the Crusades”. His office also vowed to take unspecified "legal and diplomatic actions" through the Turkish legal system. His row with France erupted after President Emmanuel Macron ordered a crackdown on Islamists this month, following the beheading of a teacher who showed his class Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Protesters in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu shouted: “Down with France. It insulted our prophet.”

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Lev Parnas associate David Correia pleads guilty to fraud and lying

Correia and Parnas faced charges of campaign finance fraud and of duping investors in a company called "Fraud Guarantee" out of more than $2 million.

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Ice Cube explains why he blew off Zoom call with Kamala Harris: ‘I want to get things done’

Ice Cube has been adamant that Democrats told him to hold off until after the election before making demands for his “Contract With Black America.” The NWA rapper and actor recently revealed to Fox Soul’s Cocktails with Queens, that features Claudia Jordan, Vivica A. Fox, LisaRaye McCoy, and Syleena Johnson, that he turned down a request by the California senator to be a part of a Zoom call.

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A graphic shows how pumpkin pie looks when you mess up the recipe

Our food reporter made pumpkin pie eight ways to figure out what happens when you add ingredients like condensed milk or extra eggs.

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Trump and Biden to both campaign in battleground state Florida

President Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden will both rally supporters on Thursday in the critical battleground state of Florida.

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‘White racist cops got my own dad’: Walter Wallace’s young son speaks out

An investigation has been opened into the police shooting of Walter Wallace who died in Philadelphia on Monday afternoon

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About That ‘Uncoverable’ Biden Story

Journalists claim they can’t cover the New York Post’s Hunter Biden email scoop because the underlying evidence has yet to been verified. Also, they won’t look for any verifying evidence because there isn’t enough evidence.It’s quite the conundrum.Because other than the now-corroborated emails, the laptop, the on-the-record source who was a CEO of a Biden corporation, a trove of text messages and documents, and a lack of denials, the Hunter Biden email story reminds me of the “Russian collusion” story. Surely it deserves a modicum of scrutiny and follow-up.Anyone who watched Tony Bobulinski’s interview on Tucker Carlson’s show this week -- apparently it pulled over 5 million viewers -- was confronted with a seemingly credible character. Bobulinski says he met with Joe Biden in 2017, and that the former vice president was intimately involved in the family business. Maybe someone will ask the candidate about this. Because Biden, widely seen as the frontrunner, has on numerous occasions emphatically denied any knowledge of what Hunter was doing. So even if he didn’t benefit from his son’s leveraging of the family name to strike deals with Chinese Communist energy interests, it is still newsworthy.Bobulinski alleges that during a meeting with Joe Biden’s brother, he asked how the former vice president gets away with this sort of thing: “I remember looking at Jim Biden and saying how are you guys getting away with this? Aren’t you concerned? He looked at me, and he laughed a little bit, and said ‘plausible deniability.’”Perhaps my favorite part of yesterday’s interview, though, was learning that Adam Schiff’s ugly and mendacious habit of smearing anyone he disagrees with as a Russian asset is what allegedly helped spur Bobulinski, a former U.S. Navy lieutenant, to come forward.Hunter’s ex-business partner, in fact, confronted Rob Walker, a Biden “family representative” about it.“If [Schiff] doesn’t come out, on record, I am providing the facts,” Bobulinski said in a recording.“Ah, Tony, you’re just going to bury all of us, man,” responded Walker, which sounds odd coming from someone charged with representing a supposedly completely innocent venture.To put all of this context as a journalistic matter, the week before the Post broke the Hunter Biden story, every major news network was reporting on surreptitiously taped conversation in which the First Lady was grousing about Christmas decorations.Indeed, these are just allegations. Some of them more compelling than others. We still know very little, for example, about potentially damaging emails that purport to show Biden helping his son while he was vice president — namely, by meeting with a Burisma energy executive on behalf of Hunter at the White House.In a strange way, the lack of coverage has perpetuated the story, not only through the Streisand effect, but because suppressing it -- the New York Post’s Twitter account is still frozen -- allows the imagination to run wild. While no conservative pundit has penned 8,000 words of Chait-style crackpottery pondering whether Joe has been Chinese asset since the 1980s, some have certainly jumped the gun.Does it matter? Yesterday, a number of journalists were retweeting an Axios interview in which Senator Ted Cruz, asked about the “Hunter Biden stuff,” said the story won’t move a single vote. Perhaps that’s true. It’s also irrelevant. The journalist’s job is to provide transparency, not to worry about elections or be society’s hall monitor.It is certain -- and, boy, am I sick of framing coverage in this way, but what can you do? -- that if a credible witness and former business partner of one of Donald Trump Jr.’s companies came forward to offer specific accusations and evidence that the president was profiting off of business dealings his shady son was striking with authoritarians, teams of investigative journalists would be descending on every tangential character as if they were a defunct Chinese bank account.And the assertion made by many reporters that journalistic ethics prohibit them from even mentioning these allegations is a new and concocted standard. There are thousands of allegations against Republicans reported without verification. Not one outlet had a problem referring to the recent Atlantic piece citing unnamed sources who claimed Trump belittled soldiers, even though the story came from one writer at a partisan outlet. Allegations by whistleblowers are covered all the time, whether they have been fully vetted or not. Major outlets were eager to amplify not only the uncorroborated accusations of Christine Blasey Ford, but a host of other very obviously dubious claims about Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.But much of the reticence about investigating the Hunter Biden story is in reaction to the fallout from the Hillary Clinton email scandal. No matter what evidence emerged, political media were never going to repeat 2016. One assumes even good reporters don’t want to be perceived as tipping the election (which speaks to the poor health of journalism).Lest we forget, as with this Biden story, the Clinton email scandal was newsworthy. There was, after all, an open FBI investigation into the frontrunning presidential candidate of the United States because of her reckless and potentially criminal behavior. It was Hillary who initially set up a secret server to circumvent transparency, likely to hide favor-trading related to her foundation, and sent unsecured classified documents through that illegal server, although she almost surely knew it threatened national security. As the New York Times reported at the time, the chance that her correspondences were being captured by foreign powers was extremely high. It was Hillary’s staff that destroyed evidence related to that server -- or as James Comey noted in his testimony, they “cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.” Any government employees conducting themselves in a similar manner would have been sent to jail.I’m not in the habit of defending Comey, but he saved Clinton by letting her and her staff slide on richly deserved charges. The letter Comey sent to Congress informing them that the bureau had found a cache of new evidence relating to a criminal investigation was Clinton’s fault, not his. It was her top aide and confidant Huma Abedin who failed to inform the FBI about her laptop. And it was Abedin’s then-husband who used that computer to court teenage girls. Comey had an ethical obligation to inform Congress when he was apprised that new evidence had been found -- as he had promised to do under oath during his testimony. If he didn’t, and the story leaked, as it surely would have, the perception would have been that he was attempting to cover up the potential wrongdoing of one of the candidates.Or, in other words, he would have been doing exactly what most of the political media are engaged in right now.

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Trevor Noah laughs at Trump attacking Kamala Harris. The Late Show's Jon Batiste wrote a song about her.

Trevor Noah had a good laugh on Tuesday's Daily Show about a Florida man who stole a bulldozer from an Arby's and tore up Joe Biden lawn signs in people's yards, followed by a good-natured lecture on how politics has taken over our lives. "Meanwhile, President Trump, the Florida Man in chief, is holding coronavirus giveaways all across the Midwest -- and he clearly is getting tired of attacking Joe Biden because now he's putting effort into getting Kamala Harris," he said. Trump's attacks on the Democratic vice presidential nominee are outlandish, mendacious, and a little revealing."I love that a 'female socialist' president is Trump's worst nightmare," Noah said. "Because now I can just picture him waking up in a cold sweat and Melania just being like, 'Oh no, honey, was it the female socialist president again?' I'm just kidding, Melania and Trump don't share a bedroom." He also found it amusing that Trump is criticizing Harris' laugh, or anything else about her. "My man, you look like you were built by the same company who made the Tower of Pisa," Noah said. "I'm surprised people don't pose in front of you as well."At The Late Show, musical director Jon Batiste went the other direction and created a whole song about Harris, his MVP, "most vice presidential."The Late Show also mocked Jared Kushner's comments on Black people not wanting success. You can watch that below. More stories from theweek.com How to make an election crisis 64 things President Trump has said about women Republicans are on the verge of a spectacular upside-down achievement

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Citing a burden on minority voters, US judge overrules Texas governor's exemption for masks at polls

The judge said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's exemption for masks at polling sites put a "discriminatory burden on Black and Latino voters.”

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SpaceX delayed its NASA astronaut launch because a red 'nail polish' material was plugging part of its rocket engines

SpaceX's Crew-1 launch is now set for November 14 after the company checked tiny holes in its rocket engines for bright-red lacquer.

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US election polls tracker: who is leading in swing states, Trump or Biden?

With the presidential election just days away, the Guardian is tracking the latest polling in eight states that could decide the electiondefault Joe Biden is leading ​Donald Trump in the national polls for the presidential election.But that doesn’t guarantee ​the Democratic candidate victory. Hillary Clinton also had a clear lead over Trump in the polls for almost the entire 2016 campaign. She ended up losing in the electoral college.​Because the presidential ​voting system assigns each state a number of electoral college votes, which​ go to the state’s victor regardless of the​ margin of victory (with the exception of Nebraska and Maine), a handful of swing states will ​probably decide the election and be targeted heavily by campaigners.Each day, the Guardian’s poll tracker takes a rolling 14-day average of the polls in ​eight swing states.In order to track how the race is developing in the areas that could decide the election, six of the eight states we focused on were those that flipped to Trump​ in 2016 after backing Barack Obama in 2012. Arizona and North Carolina were also added due to what they might tell us about a shifting electoral landscape – they could emerge as vital new swing states this year.We must caution that the polls – particularly some swing state polls – severely undercounted Trump supporters in 2016. We are not certain, despite assurances, that they they have corrected this​. Additionally, they may be over-counting Democratic support (more people may say they will vote for Biden than actually turn out).We present the latest polls with those caveats in mind.default The national pollsThe latest polling average puts Biden ahead of Trump nationally.While the national poll tracker is a poor indicator of how the crucial swing states will sway the election, a strong polling lead across the country can point to how the race will develop.Each day, the Guardian’s national poll tracker takes a 14-day average of national voting intention polls.default On Tuesday 3 November 2020, Americans will vote for their next president, with a choice between ​Donald Trump, the Republican incumbent, or his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.default MethodologyThe Guardian poll tracker tracks the latest polls in eight crucial swing states. For Biden to win, he needs to reclaim some of these swing states.The Guardian is collating polls in each of these ​states, as well as another set of national polls. Polls are assessed for their reliability by looking at factors such as their sample size.Our polling average is a 14-day rolling average: on any day, we collate any polls published in the last 14 days and take a mean average of their results.If any ​company ​has conducted multiple polls in the last 14 days, we average out their polling results in order to give them just one entry. After this standardi​zation process, we take a mean average of these daily entries to present the polling average. * This article was amended on 28 October 2020 to clarify that Maine and Nebraska are alone in assigning their electoral college votes in proportion to the popular vote.

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