News on the Blue Marble

CNN:"President Donald Trump is struggling to find a compelling rationale for his reelection ahead of the final presidential debate, firing off wild, scattershot attacks against an expanding list of perceived political enemies.On a day of vitriol and stunts, the President's base-stoking narrative of anger and personal persecution targeted Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Lesley Stahl of '60 Minutes' the Commission on Presidential Debates, the Supreme Court and Dr. Anthony Fauci. At an evening rally in Pennsylvania, he even took a shot at 'Crooked Hillary.' He also intensified pressure on Attorney General William Barr to launch criminal probes into Biden..."

ABCNews: "Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spoke exclusively to ABC News on Friday morning for the first time since he tested positive for COVID-19 and was released from the hospital. 'It hits you like a freight train.'...'It all happened very, very quickly. Within 24 hours, I went from feeling absolutely fine to being in the intensive care unit.'...Christie urged the public to wear masks...'I think no matter what you're doing...you should have a mask on and you should try to remain socially distant from folks..."

NBC News: "Far more Americans have died as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic than have been counted and reported, according to new research published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.'For every two Americans that we know of who are dying of Covid-19, another American is dying,' said Dr. Steven Woolf, author of the new research and director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University..."

CNN:"...A leading health expert says US Covid-19 cases will begin to rapidly accelerate in a week as the country topped 60,000 new infections Tuesday...That figure is triple what the daily average was back in June, when restrictions had begun to ease...As cases also rise across Europe, some cities in the UK, France, Spain are resisting centralized efforts to impose tighter regulations..."

Bloomberg:"White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said the goal in talks with Nancy Pelosi is a deal on a coronavirus relief package within the next 48 hours, as the House Speaker said she's 'pretty happy' about the negotiation. 'The last 24 hours have move dhte ball down the field,' Meadows said on Fox Business Wednesday morning, after the latest round of talks between Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The goal is 'some kind of deal in the next 48 hours or so.'..."

Bloomberg:"The U.S. Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc.'s Google, accusing it of abusing its monopoly in search in the most stignificant antitrust action against an American company in more than two decades, with more action by states likely to follow..."

Bloomberg:"Retailers, airlines, restaurants. But also oil producers, a hotel near Disneyland, and a chain of yoga studios. These are some of the more than 260 companies that declared bankruptcy in the U.S. this year and blamed Covid-19 in part for their demise..."

CNN:"President Trump's attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, won't help the United States battle the coronavirus pandemic, said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University School of Public Health. It's 'disturbing and 'upsetting' to hear the President say such things, Jha told CNN's Jake Tapper. 'We're in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century and Dr. Fauci is America's most respected infectious disease expert for good reason,' Jha said."

Bloomberg:"U.S. stocks swung between gains and losses as investors assessed the latest headlines on the state of aid-deal talks. Treasury yields climbed and the dollar retreated. The S&P 500 Index turned lower in afternoon trading, giving up a brief bounce sparked by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's upbeat take on negotiations even as the odds remained long for a deal before the Nov. 3 election. Small caps lagged behind. Energy producers were among the worst performers ..."

Bloomberg:"Applications for U.S. state unemployment benefits unexpectedly jumped last week to the highest since August and Americans increasingly moved to longer-term jobless aid. Both are troubling signs for a labor market whose recovery from the pandemic was already slowing. Initial jobless claims in regular state programs totaled 898,000 in the week ended Oct,10, up 53,000 from the prior week, Labor Department data showed Thursday. On an unadjusted basis, the figure posted the largest one-week increase since July..."

Reuters:"Republicans are mobilizing thousands of volunteers to watch early voting sites and ballot drop boxes leading up to November's election, part of an effort to find evidence to back up President Donald Trump's unsubstantiated complaints about widespread voter fraud..."

CNN:"...But beyond Trump's rhetoric, his campaign and Republicans at the state and local level are moving to make it more difficult for voters to cast a ballot, more difficult for states to count votes and more likely that tallies will be challenged in the courts--..."

CNN: Republican Governor Greg Abbott issued a proclamation Thursday limiting the amount of drop-off locations for mail-in ballots to one site per county. The move significantly affects the Democratic stronghold of Harris County which is the state's largest county by population..."A federal court upheld the governor's order that limits ballot drop-off boxes to one per county over the objections of voting rights groups

CNN: Almost 1,000 absentee ballots are sitting in a locked bin somewhere in the Guilford Board of Elections waiting to be prcessed. At least two voters in Greensboro, North Carolina, part of Guilford County, had no idea their ballots were sitting in that pile. Vincint Gager, a 48-year-old Black man, and his 83-year-old father Nathaniel mailed their ballots on September 4..."

Reuters:New Zealand's next parliament is set to be the most inclusive ever, with several people of colour, members from the rainbow communities and a high number of women. The ruling Labour Party was handed a resounding mandate in the election over the weekend, as voters rewarded Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern for her decisive response to COVID-19...Labour won 64 of the 120 parliamentary seats, and more than half of those are female candidates. It also has 16 indigenous Maori MPs, the first leader of Afrian origin, Ibrahim Omar, and Vanshi Walters of Sri Lankan origin. 'This is the most diverse parliament we have ever had...said Professor Paul Spoonley from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Massey University...'"

CNN: Trump has been reliably deceptive or his entire presidency, filling his speeches and tweets with lies and other false statements. The frequency and magnitude of his deception tends to accelerate, however, during campaign season--when he complements his usual ad-libbed inaccuracy with a barrage of inaccurate statement that are written into his speech scripts...

NBC News:"In President Donald Trump's favored narrative of how elections are won and lost, the candidate who holds the most events with the biggest crowds wins. 'Every RALLY is BOFFO,' he said in a Monday tweet about his confidence of winning re-election, telling campaign staffers on a call the same day that he was now more confident of winning than he was two weeks ago, when he appeared at no campaign events while recovering from Covid-19..."

CNN: Admiral William McRaven (Ret.) went on the record to state that he voted for Joe Biden, on the grounds that the country is going in the wrong direction under Donald Trump. You need alliances to face the crises the US and the world are facing, and Donald Trump has effectively killed America's role as a world leader and as an alliance builder."Now the world no longer looks up to America. They have been witness to our dismissiveness, our lack of respect and our transactional approach to global issues."

Washington Post:"...The records show that Trump has continued to make money off foreign investments and projects while in office; that foriegn officials have spent lavishly at his Washington hotel and other properties; and that despite this revenue he is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt with massive payments coming due..."

ABC News:"...Responding to a story that reported that hundreds of corporations, special interest groups and foreign governments seeking benefits patronized Trump Organization properties...'We've lost a fortune. My father lost a fortune running for president. He doesn't care,'...'The last thing I can tell you Donald Trump needs in this world is this job.'...'"

CNN Business:"It was a conspiracy that Fox News portrayed as one of the greatest—if not the greatest—political scandals in American history...This week however, the conspiracy theory collapsed when The Washington Post reported that a Justice Department investigation into the supposed scandal quietly ended with no charges..."

CNN: "The California Republican Party said Wednesday it will not comply with the states cease and desist order over unofficial ballot drop boxes placed in at least four counties, escalating a brewing political showdown ahead of the November election..."

CNN Business: The New York Post, a Murdoch publication was given a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden (but the repairman isn't sure it was Hunter who dropped it off) claiming Hunter helped arrange a meeting between Joe Biden and an executive at Burisma. The hard drive containing the emails was supplied by Rudy Giuliani who has openly coordinated with a known Russian agent to promote disinformation about the Bidens. ...President Donald Trump has been tweeting and discussing it for days...major professional media--doesn't seem to be falling for it..That might be because the details of the story have been denied by a credible Joe Biden staffer and the Biden campaign, and US authorities are investigating whether the emails are part of an ongong Russian disinformation effort..."

Washington Post:"The Commission on Presidential Debates said Monday night that it will mute President Trump's and Democratic nomineen Joe Biden's microphones during parts of Thursday's presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville. The commission said it will give Trump and Biden two minutes apiece to speak uninterrupted at the start of each segment..."

"...The Harrison-Graham race has gained national attention for the tight polling numbers between a well-known GOP stalwart seeking his fourth term who has aligned himself closely with President Donald Trump, after losing the party's presidential nomination to him in 2016 and denigrating Trump as the party's standard bearer, and an insurgent Democrat whose message of resetting the political conversation has helped him raise an eye-popping $57 million in the final weeks of the race..."

President Donald Trump told Fox News that if Biden wins, the US would become a socialist hell hole like Venezuela.He also said that the US was "rounding the turn" on Covid-19 despite the surge in coronavirus cases across the United States. In the same "interview" Trump stated regarding Dr. Fauci "..he's a little bit sometimes not a team payer. But, he is a democrat and I think that he's just fine. It's a view, we have others. Scott Atlas is fantastic..."

NY Times:"...Mr. Trump did not merely fail to end Washington's insider culture of lobbying and favor seeking. He reinvented it, turning his own hotels and resorts into the Beltway's new back rooms, where public and private business mix and special interests reign...

CNN: At a televised debate Monday night, Amy McGrath, who is running against McConnell for a US Senate seat from Kentucky, noted again and again that the pandemic has plunged the country into an unrelenting crisis and McConnell's Republican controlled Senate is refusing to do anything to alleviate the pain, In response, McConnell laughed. And laughed. And laughed.

Washington Post:..We're now learning that two of President Trump's most devoted propagandists...encourage his supporters to vote by mail...It turns on a basic trick:..the Trump campaign ... will only contest mail ballots in states where he's on track to lose...and where invalidating them would make it more likely that he prevails..."

CNN: "At least 74,000 absentee ballot requests submitted by voters in three Iowa counties will remain invalid because of technical problems with the paperwork, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled Wednesday. The court upheld earlier rulings that the forms were invalid because the counties pre-emptively filled out some voters' information..."

"...The 2020 election is taking place against a backdrop of extreme partisan rancor and social unrest, placing unprecedented strain on the police chiefs and sheriffs responsible for maintaining order at the polls. The situation is compounded by the increasing threat of right-wing militia groups and a president who has called for an 'army' of poll watchers to monitor contested election areas... more than half dozen law enforcement officials across the country described their preparations for safeguarding the polls and their lingering concerns ahead of Election Day. 'There's not a day that goes by where I'm not up late envisioning what the worst case scenario is to make sure that we are able to prevent it,' said Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Andrew Wellbrock...'"

NBC News Think:"Joe Biden's campaign manager, Jen O'Mally Dillon, recently warned supporters that despite their side's strong poll numbers in national surveys, defeating President Donald Trump shouldn't be taken for granted. 'There is still a long way to go in this campaign,' O'Malley Dillon said on Twitter on Oct. 14. And 'we think this race is far closer than folks on this website (Twitter) think. Like a lot closer..."

NYTimes:"The top Senate Republican told colleagues that he had advised the White House against striking a pre-election deal with Democrats to deliver pandemic aid, fearing political repercussions...With the deficit balooning to $3.1 trillion, conservative Republicans say they cannot stomach another huge federal pandemic relief measure..."

At a rally Trump complained that CNN was always talking about Covid this Covid that there always talking about it, they don't want you to vote, people are not going for it you "dumb bastards" to the loud applause of the crowd. CNN's Brianna Keilar responded that we do it for the 220,417 people who have died and we are going to keep doing it. CNN then rolled videos of the hundreds of people who have lost loved ones due to the virus, every single person that Trump does not care to empathize with and who he has failed as a president...

hubble legacy field crop

Hubblesite.org: "This Hubble Space Telescope image represents a portion of the Hubble Legacy Field, one of the widest views of the universe ever made. The image is a combination of thousands of snapshots represents 16 years' worth of observations...This cropped image mosaic contains roughly 200,000 galaxies..."

NBCNews:"President Donald Trump accused Democrats of 'politicizing' the deadly coronavirus...claiming the outbreak is 'their new hoax' as he continued to downplay the risk in the U.S...'This is their new hoax,' Trump continued, adding that attacking the White House's response to the coronavirus had become the Democratic Party's 'single talking point.'..."

NASA xrays the sky

CNN: "The streaks of light in NASA's latest image look like air traffic routes, but it's a different way of looking at the entire sky. The arcs are actually tracing X-rays, recorded by the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, known as NICER. NICER acts as a detector of cosmic sources from the International Space Station..."

CNN: "About 30 million light-years from Earth, two galaxies came together in an epic collision, and the beautiful fallout was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The collision was more like an accidental hit and run between two neighboring galaxies..."

Tim Berners Lee

CNN Business: "Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has warned of a 'digital dystopia' if the world fails to tackle threats such as disinformation and invasion of privacy. Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist...has reiterated his call for a Contract for the Web..."

Alan Naiman

CNN:"Nearly 25 years ago, when Gary Larson retired from drawing his iconic single-panel cartoon that ran daily in newspapers from 1980 to 1995, he didn't think much about what the budding internet might have to do with his work..."

Shakespeare

CNN:"When you see a big discovery about William Shakespeare hit the press before fellow scholars have had a chance to ask questions, take a breath and be very, very skeptical..."

CNN:"Betelgeuse, the red supergiant star that acts as the shoulder of Orion in his constellation, is having a moment. Normally one of the brightest stars in the constellation, it's been dimming..."

Reuters:"...Welcome to the longest U.S. economic expansion in history, one perhaps characterized by the excesses of extreme wealth and an ever-widening chasm between the unfathomably rich and everyone else..."

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