In New York, a cat leapt from a burning second-story apartment, a bit singed but now recovering —
Amazing video of a cat jumping out of a second floor window in East Harlem Saturday. Police responded to a domestic dispute at Lincoln Houses where they say man locked himself inside apartment & set it on fire. 7 people hurt including 2 cops @NBCNewYork (courtesy Aaron Ganaway) pic.twitter.com/1nLmFnsW0U
The feline appeared to be smoking as it took flight, and a spokesperson with the Animal Care Centers of NYC said it did suffer from smoke inhalation but “is in pretty good shape.”
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Two officers and five tenants were also injured in the apartment fire that was allegedly started by a man wanted on domestic violence charges who locked himself in a room.
Firefighters were dispatched to the apartment near 5th Avenue and 135th Street around 3 p.m. Saturday. Police were eventually able to force their way into the apartment room. The man was brought out unconscious and taken to the hospital.
The man has not been identified and it’s unclear what charges he will face.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:28 AM and sunset 5:48 PM, for 10h 20m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 9 AM.
On this day in 1938, Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing anxiety in some of the audience in the United States.
“Since the pandemic took hold in March, at least 18 large companies have rewarded executives with six- and seven-figure payouts before asking bankruptcy courts to shield them from landlords, suppliers and other creditors while they restructured,” Abha Bhattarai and Daniela Santamariña report. “They collectively meted out more than $135 million, documents show, while listing $79 billion in debts.”
The payouts preceded layoffs of tens of thousands of workers. Hertz, for one, awarded “$16.2 million three days before its Chapter 11 filing in May;” then won court approval to hand executives another $8.2 million tied to meeting financial goals as it fired 11,000 workers.
The story is the latest in a series of Washington Post investigations into an economic recovery concentrating its benefits among the wealthiest, while piling pain onto workers.
The situation is primed to deteriorate further.
Coronavirus cases are spiking across the country, notching new daily highs. And emergency aid from Washington has largely expired, as lawmakers head home until the election without providing more relief. Those developments prompted stocks to tank on Monday.
But small businesses and millions of jobless workers are facing more acute pain as winter sets in. The pandemic is “exacerbating existing disparities in labor market outcomes,” Lael Brainard, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, said in a speech last week. She noted that the pace of the job market’s recovery is slowing down and likely to continue doing so, threatening to leave permanent scars without another major spending package from Washington.
In November 2019, Donald Trump Jr.’s book Triggered debuted at the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. A week later, the paper’s books desk released a report that a nearly $100,000 bulk purchase of the book by the RNC had contributed to the ranking.
Trump Jr. wasn’t the first in his family to discover the joy of bulk sales—three decades earlier, as the New Republic reported in 2017, his dad encouraged owners of Trump properties to buy thousands of copies of The Art of the Deal, helping it ride the list for 48 weeks. Since then, dozens of nonfiction books each year—including by politicians like Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and Sarah Palin—have appeared on the list with an assist from bulk buys. Many of those authors used campaign funds to finance the purchases, which the FEC allows as long as the author doesn’t keep the royalties.
In 2020, 17 books on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list have scored their spots by dint of bulk buys. All but two have been written by Trumpworld superstars: Trump Jr.; founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk; Glenn Beck; conservative commentator Dave Rubin; Fox News host Pete Hegseth; Dinesh D’Souza; Newt Gingrich; Freedom Center founder David Horowitz; Ben Shapiro; Sean Hannity; Sarah Huckabee Sanders; Candace Owens; Jeanine Pirro; the American Conservative editor Rod Dreher; and Ted Cruz. Of these 15, nine appeared on the list for three weeks or less.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 7:27 AM and sunset 5:49 PM, for 10h 22m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Fire Department board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1812, the USS Constitution, under the command of Captain William Bainbridge, captures HMS Java off the coast of Brazil after a three-hour battle.
The CIA’s most endangered employee for much of the past year was not an operative on a mission abroad, but an analyst who faced a torrent of threats after filing a whistleblower report that led to the impeachment of President Trump.
The analyst spent months living in no-frills hotels under surveillance by CIA security, current and former U.S. officials said. He was driven to work by armed officers in an unmarked sedan. On the few occasions he was allowed to reenter his home to retrieve belongings, a security team had to sweep the apartment first to make sure it was safe.
The measures were imposed by the CIA’s Security Protective Service, which monitored thousands of threats across social media and Internet chat rooms. Over time, a pattern emerged: Violent messages surged each time the analyst was targeted in tweets or public remarks by the president.
“The president was tweeting, ‘Where’s the whistleblower? Where’s the whistleblower?’?” said a former senior U.S. official involved in overseeing the protection of the analyst, whose name has not been disclosed by the government. The analyst was never in direct danger, the official said, but some threats were so serious that without security, “there is a strong possibility that grave harm would have come to him.”
We are in a global pandemic that is at least 15 times more fatal than seasonal influenza.
When people argue otherwise it puts more lives at risk; more families will mourn. Covid-19 conspiracies are dangerous. In New Zealand those conspiracies were driven by arguments against lockdowns and misinformation about the seriousness of the virus.
As our country was gearing up for an election, those fringe theories were mainstreamed and amplified by a sitting MP, Jami-Lee Ross. Ross had plummeted from grace this parliamentary term: a high-profile implosion and resignation from the centre-right National party, with allegations of bullying and harassment as well as facing fraud charges in the high court.
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On election night I was in the studio co-presenting five hours of live coverage. We came off-air somewhere around midnight and I returned to the newsroom the next morning for our post-election special. That’s when I found out we had Ross on the show and I was interviewing him. His party had received 0.9% of the vote, nowhere near enough to return to parliament. The interview was legitimate, capping off an extraordinary and destructive political career but nonetheless I asked my producer to give him half the time we had allotted.
I have been asked about my strategy going into that interview which has since had a dizzying response – what my mentor and former bureau chief Gordon “Flash” McBride would call “feral” (he meant viral). There was no strategy. It was about giving this guy an exit interview and trying to understand why he made some of the choices he made.
Jessica Denson lead the Trump campaign’s Hispanic engagement effort. Now she’s speaking out against his “vile, self-serving” candidacy.
“Donald Trump does not care about the welfare of the people. Everything that the Trump campaign champions is a complete lie, and it is to the detriment of the American people.”
In political life, boosterism is the overzealous promotion of officials or programs while ignoring actual conditions (particularly conditions of the disadvantaged). It’s wrong and repulsive.
(An acknowledgement worth making: I have never criticized boosterism because of a personal concern. My life is comfortable; objections to political boosterism are deep-seated in me as a matter of learning.)
Civilizations across the planet have for thousands of years expressed justified contempt for that which we, in our time, describe as boosterism. If boosters spent as much time reading books as looking in the mirror, then this understanding might reach them, too.
A cousin of political boosterism would be something like toxic positivity – the insistence and expectation that people should always see the world in a rosy way. From Voltaire’s Candide to Office Space’s parody of wearing pieces of flare, there are plentiful critiques of what we now describe as toxic positivity.
“While cultivating a positive mind-set is a powerful coping mechanism, toxic positivity stems from the idea that the best or only way to cope with a bad situation is to put a positive spin on it and not dwell on the negative,” said Natalie Dattilo, a clinical health psychologist with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “It results from our tendency to undervalue negative emotional experiences and overvalue positive ones.”
Think of it as having “a few too many scoops of ice cream,” Dattilo said.
“It’s really good and it makes us feel better, but you can overdo it,” she said. “Then, it makes us sick.
“Or trying to shove ice cream into somebody’s face when they don’t feel like having ice cream,” she continued. “That’s not really going to make them feel better.”
With data indicating that anxiety and depression, among other mental health problems, have surged to historic levels in recent months, adding toxic positivity to the mix may only exacerbate the rising tide of negative emotions by preventing people from working through the serious issues they’re experiencing in a healthy way, experts say.
“By far the most common [phrase] is ‘It’s fine,’ ‘It will be fine,’ ” said Stephanie Preston, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “You’re stating that there really isn’t a problem that needs to be addressed, period. You’re kind of shutting out the possibility for further contemplation.”
There’s still some political boosterism in the city, and – more generally – toxic positivity (where everything is awesome, even if it’s not).
There was much more of this view in Whitewater over a decade ago (esp., 2007-2009), and to the shame and disgrace of her officials back then many persisted in this view even during and after that era’s Great Recession.
Those officials were narrow of mind and small of heart. There’s no doubt that they thought well – very well – of themselves.
What a shame for them that thinking a thing doesn’t make it so.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-nine. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 5:51 PM, for 10h 25m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 91.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this date in 1892, an exploding oil barrel starts a small fire in Milwaukee’s Third Ward that spreads rapidly and by morning leaves four people dead, 440 buildings destroyed, and more than 1,900 people homeless.
The former homeland security department chief of staff, Miles Taylor, said this wishlist was reserved for the second term because it included policies that were too unpopular for a president seeking re-election.
This comes as no surprise to those who have watched and worried as legal pathways to US immigration shut under Trump, and who wonder not just about for more years of him as president, but also of four more years with Miller at his side.
The 35-year-old has managed to keep his position as a senior adviser to the president after being outed for having an affinity for white nationalism and becoming synonymous with unpopular Trump administration policies such as family separation – when thousands of children were taken away from their parents at the southern border to deter would-be migrants. Three years later, more than 500 kids are still yet to be reunited with their parents.
Jean Guerrero, author of the Miller biography Hatemonger, told the Guardian: “There’s a number of things they have been cautious about because of the legal and political risks in the first term and I think that in a second term you would see Stephen Miller get much freer rein when it comes to his wishlist of items.”
Those items are expected to include attempting to eliminate birthright citizenship, making the US citizenship test more difficult to pass, ending the program which protects people from deportation when there is a crisis is their country (Temporary Protected Status) and slashing refugee admissions even further, to zero.
The president’s federal income tax records, obtained by The New York Times, show for the first time that, since 2010, his lenders have forgiven about $287 million in debt that he failed to repay. The vast majority was related to the Chicago project.
How Mr. Trump found trouble in Chicago, and maneuvered his way out of it, is a case study in doing business the Trump way.
When the project encountered problems, he tried to walk away from his huge debts. For most individuals or businesses, that would have been a recipe for ruin. But tax-return data, other records and interviews show that rather than warring with a notoriously litigious and headline-seeking client, lenders cut Mr. Trump slack — exactly what he seemed to have been counting on.
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Those forgiven debts are now part of a broader investigation of Mr. Trump’s business by the New York attorney general. They normally would have generated a big tax bill, since the Internal Revenue Service treats canceled debts as income. Yet as has often happened in his long career, Mr. Trump appears to have paid almost no federal income tax on that money, in part because of large losses in his other businesses, The Times’s analysis of his tax records found.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 5:52 PM, for 10h 28m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Carrier plant in Indianapolis is where outsourcing was supposed to have stopped.
Within days of winning the 2016 election, President-elect Donald Trump persuaded the company — in return for $7 million in Indiana state incentives and some presidential goodwill — to keep in the United States most of the 1,100 jobs it had planned to ship to Mexico.
“Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences. It’s not going to happen,” Trump told cheering Carrier employees when he visited the plant. “We’re not going to have it anymore.”
Trump advertised Carrier’s Dec. 1, 2016, announcement that it would preserve about 800 jobs in Indianapolis as a decisive break from decades of U.S. executives capitalizing on lower labor costs overseas at the expense of blue-collar workers at home.
Four years later, it has proved to be nothing of the sort.
This year alone, Indiana employers have sent more jobs to Mexico, China, India and other foreign countries than were saved at Carrier. Without headlines or presidential notice, at least 17 companies — names like Vibracoustic, Molnlycke Health Care, Allura, Altex, Stanley Black & Decker, Dometic, Johnson Controls and Horizon Terra — have closed plants or otherwise reduced employment in Indiana and moved jobs abroad, according to U.S. Department of Labor filings.
“We have many, many firms making these decisions, and Trump likes to negotiate these deals one at a time. It’s trade policy by press release, and often there’s nothing behind the press release,” said Robert Scott, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute in D.C. “He makes a deal, smiles for the photographers, and then he walks away.”
Roughly 16,000 university employees will take between three and six unpaid days off between Jan. 1 and June 30, reducing their pay between 2.5% and 4.6%. [Chancellor Rebecca] Blank and vice chancellors will take a 15% salary cut over those same six months. School and college deans will take voluntary 10% salary cuts.
The latest round of furloughs and salary cuts is expected to save $27 million, university spokesman John Lucas said. That’s about the same as what UW-Madison recouped when it imposed its first six-month furlough period that ends Friday.
The university estimates about $320 million in revenue losses and increased costs from March through the end of this fiscal year, which ends June 30. Some of that shortfall has already been made up for through the first round of furloughs, a hiring freeze, travel restrictions and other reductions.
But the budget gap is still “larger than any that we’ve faced in any past year,” Blank said.
In this documentary with Columbia Journalism Investigations and USA Today, New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb reports on allegations of voter disenfranchisement, how unfounded claims of extensive voter fraud entered the political mainstream, rhetoric and realities around mail-in ballots, and how the pandemic could impact turnout.
With director June Cross, the Fred W. Friendly Professor of Media and Society at Columbia, and producer Thomas Jennings, Cobb scrutinizes one of the first elections held during the pandemic — Wisconsin’s April 2020 primary, which saw long lines, claims of disenfranchisement, an unprecedented number of absentee ballots and dueling legal battles between Republicans and Democrats.
The film places the election within the context of America’s history around voting rights and suppression, and discovers lessons for the country as a whole as the November presidential contest approaches.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a dusting of snow, and a high of forty. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 5:54 PM, for 10h 30m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 77.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 7 PM.
President Trump’s extraordinary directive allowing his administration to weed out career federal employees viewed as disloyal in a second term is the product of a four-year campaign by conservatives working from a little-known West Wing policy shop.
Soon after Trump took office, a young aide hired from the Heritage Foundation with bold ideas for reining in the sprawling bureaucracy of 2.1 million came up with a blueprint. Trump would hold employees accountable, sideline their labor unions and give the president more power to hire and fire them, much like political appointees.
The plan was a counterweight to the “deep state” Trump believed was out to disrupt his agenda. Coordinating labor policy for the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, James Sherk presented his bosses with a 19-page to-do list titled “Proposed Labor Reforms.” A top category was “Creating a government that serves the people.”
The result this week threatens to be the most significant assault on the nonpartisan civil service in its 137-year history: a sweeping executive order that strips job protections from employees in policy roles across the government. Exactly which roles would be affected will be up to personnel officials at federal agencies, who were tasked on Friday with reviewing all of their jobs and deciding who would qualify.
The Republican party has become dramatically more illiberal in the past two decades and now more closely resembles ruling parties in autocratic societies than its former centre-right equivalents in Europe, according to a new international study.
In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonising and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey.
The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Donald Trump.
By contrast the Democratic party has changed little in its attachment to democratic norms, and in that regard has remained similar to centre-right and centre-left parties in western Europe. Their principal difference is the approach to the economy.
The new study, the largest ever of its kind, was carried out by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, using newly developed methods to measure and quantify the health of the world’s democracies at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise.
Anna Lührmann, V-Dem’s deputy director, said the Republican transformation had been “certainly the most dramatic shift in an established democracy”.
This Tuesday, October 27th at 10 AM or 1 PM, there will be a showing of The House with a Clock in Its Walls @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
(Family/Comedy/Fantasy)
Rated PG
1 hour, 45 minutes (2018)
Our annual Halloween film offering is a fun blend of fantasy, horror, humor and whimsy. A young orphan boy aids his weird and wacky uncle (Jack Black), who’s not only a mad magician, but also a warlock, in locating a magical clock that is counting down to Doomsday, within the walls of his haunted house. Also stars Cate Blanchett.
Masks are required and you must register for a seat either by calling, emailing or going online at https://schedulesplus.com/wwtr/kiosk. There will be a limit of 10 people per movie time slot. No walk-ins.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 5:55 PM, for 10h 33m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 69.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1836, the first legislative session of the Wisconsin territory convenes in Belmont, Wisconsin. (“During this first session, forty-two laws were put in the statute books. At this time, the Territory of Wisconsin included all of present-day Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and part of the two Dakotas.”)
Recommended for reading in full —
Ashley Parker reports How Trump claimed credit for an Obama veterans achievement (‘President Trump has told mistruths about the 2014 VA Choice Act more than 156 times, seeking to deny the contributions of rivals including Barack Obama and John McCain’):
The first time President Trump claimed false credit for the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act — which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2014 — was on June 6, 2018. That day, as Trump signed the Mission Act, a modest update to the bipartisan VA Choice legislation, he seemed to conflate the two.
“So it’s now my great honor to sign the VA Mission Act, or as we all know it, the Choice Act, and to make Veterans Choice the permanent law of our great country,” the president said, standing in the Rose Garden. “And nobody deserves it more than our veterans.”
In the coming weeks, Trump began systematically erasing from the legislation’s history not just Obama but also the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), who not only co-sponsored the VA Choice Act but also was so instrumental in passing the Mission Act that he is one of three senators for whom the act is officially named.
“McCain didn’t get the job done for our great vets and the VA, and they knew it,” Trump said.
More than two years after signing the Mission Act, which made limited changes to the much broader Obama veterans law, Trump has repeated some version of his VA Choice Act mistruth more than 156 times, according to an analysis by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, eventually claiming full credit for the bill codified by his predecessor.
A lot of people in Cleveland chose not to vote [in 2016]. Driven by disillusionment with Obama and dislike for Hillary Clinton, turnout fell in the overwhelmingly Democratic city where nearly half the population is black, as it did in others across the midwest, helping to usher Trump to victory.
This year, [Jamal] Collins sees it differently.
“Trump’s presidency, the last four years, have been absolutely horrible. Trump blew life back into white supremacy. Him being so open and unapologetic about the stuff he says, and things that he’s done, really gave that power,” he said.
“Plus coronavirus, because now we have tens of thousands of people, especially in the black community, really suffering from Covid-19. We have an economy decimated to almost the proportions of the depression. The loss of jobs and loss of wealth is worse than I’ve ever seen before.”
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-three. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 5:56 PM, for 10h 36m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 59.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1590, John White, the governor of the second Roanoke Colony, returns to England after an unsuccessful search for the ‘lost’ colonists.
Wisconsin Republican lawmakers and top GOP aides have been facing a coronavirus outbreak in recent weeks following a series of in-person events, including a retirement party for a longtime Capitol staffer, a dozen sources told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
But Republican leaders would not disclose how many or which lawmakers have contracted COVID-19, nor would they answer questions about contact tracing efforts — including whether anyone worked at the state Capitol after they were exposed to the virus.
Those affected by the COVID-19 outbreak include Jenny Toftness, chief of staff for Speaker Robin Vos, who got sick after attending the retirement party in September.
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It’s unclear whether those who were infected notified any Capitol authorities, who could alert others who work in the statehouse.
“We are not aware of any reports from either legislators or legislative staff,” Britt Cudaback, spokeswoman for Gov. Tony Evers, said in an email in response to questions about COVID-19 policies of the Department of Administration, which oversees the Capitol.
The Trump Organization has re-upped the domain every year of his presidency. This year it renewed its ownership on June 9, under a company called DTTM Operations, which Trump’s financial disclosures show manages more than 100 company trademarks. DTTM Operations appears now to have registered a total of more than 3,000 domains, according to a whois search, including renewals for TrumpRussia.com, TrumpTowerLondon.com and DonaldTrumpSucks.com — 2,000 more than reported in 2017.
The domain was first reported in early July 2017, about two months before the Washington Post’s bombshell report that during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Trump Organization had tried to strike a deal with Russian developers to build the luxury hotel and condo tower. A series of BuzzFeed News reports starting the next year illustrated the significant progress the project had made and the extent of Donald Trump’s involvement.
Initially envisioned as the tallest building in Europe, Trump Tower Moscow was spearheaded on the Trump side by Sater and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, and included the personal involvement of Ivanka Trump. But even with a Russian developer on board, the project needed the blessing of government officials to get off the ground, a responsibility that fell to Cohen.
At one point the company proposed awarding Russian President Vladimir Putin the $50 million penthouse suite for free, a quid pro quo for the green light to break ground, and which had Trump’s approval.
(While most domain renewals are routine, a renewal of this domain is extraordinary – it shows the Trump Organization is willing to persist in visible conflicts of interest even after widespread ethical criticism. Shameless, truly.)
SpaceX attached the nose cone to the Starship SN8 prototype at their Boca Chica, Texas facility on Oct. 22, 2020. They are prepping the rocket for an uncrewed 9 mile (15 km) hop.
