India and USA on Wednesday announced the dates of upcoming 2+2 dialogue between the two countries. The dialogue will take place next week on October 26 and 27 in New Delhi. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defence Secretary Mark Esper will be visiting India for 2+2 dialogue and meet Defense Minister Rajnath Singh and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar.

"This Sunday I will depart for India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives then on to Indonesia and at every stop will discuss a broad range of the bilateral topics and also work with each of the countries what is the best way to cooperate to preserve free and open Indo Pacific," said Pompeo.

"Especially looking forward with Secretary Espar at 2+2 ministerial dialogue with our Indian friend... the meeting will also include how free nations can work on threats posed by Chinese Communist Party," he added.

This is the third 2+2 dialogue that's taking place between India and the US. &nbsp;The first two 2+2 Ministerial dialogues were held in New Delhi in September 2018 and in Washington DC in 2019.&nbsp;

Also Read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/india-china-standoff-china-putting-military-pressure-on-india-says-us-defence-secretary-mark-esper-336848">India-China standoff: China putting military pressure on India, says US defence secretary Mark Esper</a>

"Agenda for the third Dialogue will cover all bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest," said the MEA while it made announcement about the dialogue.

This 2+2 dialogue between India and US will take place as both countries face an increasingly aggressive China. Both India and the US, are part of Quad grouping of countries which include Australia and Japan.

Pompeo will visit India just a week before US Presidential elections.

India and USA on Wednesday announced the dates of upcoming 2+2 dialogue between the two countries. The dialogue will take place next week on October 26 and 27 in New Delhi.

India and USA on Wednesday announced the dates of upcoming 2+2 dialogue between the two countries. The dialogue will take place next week on October 26 and 27 in New Delhi. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defence Secretary Mark Esper will be visiting India for 2+2 dialogue and meet Defense Minister Rajnath Singh and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar. "This Sunday I will depart for India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives then on to Indonesia and at every stop will discuss a broad range of the bilateral topics and also work with each of the countries what is the best way to cooperate to preserve free and open Indo Pacific," said Pompeo. "Especially looking forward with Secretary Espar at 2+2 ministerial dialogue with our Indian friend... the meeting will also include how free nations can work on threats posed by Chinese Communist Party," he added. This is the third 2+2 dialogue that's taking place between India and the US. The first two 2+2 Ministerial dialogues were held in New Delhi in September 2018 and in Washington DC in 2019. Also Read: India-China standoff: China putting military pressure on India, says US defence secretary Mark Esper "Agenda for the third Dialogue will cover all bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest," said the MEA while it made announcement about the dialogue. This 2+2 dialogue between India and US will take place as both countries face an increasingly aggressive China. Both India and the US, are part of Quad grouping of countries which include Australia and Japan. Pompeo will visit India just a week before US Presidential elections.

It's official: India and USA will hold 2+2 dialogue next week

The U.S. government has not determined what caused some U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers to suffer from a mysterious, debilitating affliction while they were overseas, despite devoting vast resources over more than three years to investigating it, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday.

Starting in late 2016, dozens of U.S. officials and family members living in Cuba and China or traveling for work in other countries, including Russia, reported contracting an illness that has become known as Havana Syndrome, based on where it first publicly emerged. The symptoms included headaches, memory loss, vertigo, nausea, bloody noses and hearing strange sounds.

Some U.S. officials, including experienced CIA analysts, and scientists believe the victims were targeted by a foreign adversary wielding weaponized microwave radiation. Russia beamed microwaves at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s, and it has more recently harassed diplomats and fueled violence against U.S. soldiers.

Other U.S. officials and scientists say the injuries may be the product of a psychological illness, or even pesticides.

Pompeo, who was the CIA director before leading the State Department, said the government was still examining multiple theories in what he described as “a very complicated situation.”

“There is not yet any complete U.S. government analysis which definitively tells us precisely how these all came to be, whether they’re part of a single cohort,” Pompeo said at a news conference.

“There are significant U.S. government resources now, what, three-plus years on, devoted to getting to the bottom of this and then holding those responsible accountable — should we determine that that’s required,” he said.

Pompeo was responding to a reporter’s question about what the State Department was doing to protect diplomats, and why there appeared to be deep disparities in the response to the episode in Cuba compared to the one in China. Pompeo took umbrage at the question.

“Yeah, that question is kind of like, ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ ” Pompeo said. “Right? Right?”

The question referred to the findings of separate investigations in The New York Times and GQ published Monday. Many U.S. government employees and family members who left China in 2018 after falling ill have had to fight the Trump administration for benefits, and some say that has led to retaliation by the government. Some victims are believed to be permanently injured.

The articles also revealed new victims — CIA officers who had recently made short trips overseas. One suspected attack took place in Moscow. In other cases, the officers were meeting with partner intelligence agencies to discuss plans to counter Russian covert operations, The Times found.

CIA Director Gina Haspel is not convinced Russia carried out attacks that caused the illnesses, officials said. Russia has denied any role.

The investigations led to some lawmakers criticizing the Trump administration over the reported mistreatment of diplomats and spies. The lawmakers are also calling for Pompeo and other top officials to stop concealing information on the suspected attacks.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said Tuesday that the articles were “deeply troubling and should spur the Trump administration to do everything in its power to protect federal employees from these attacks and investigate the full scope of this threat.”

“These findings should put an end to the foot-dragging, evasiveness and obstruction at the State Department to deliver benefits to all of these injured federal employees and their families, and get to the bottom about what happened,” she added.

A half-dozen U.S. officials told The Times that the Trump administration’s responses to the suspected attacks varied based on political considerations.

In Cuba, where President Donald Trump sought to undo President Barack Obama’s rapprochement, the State Department withdrew all but a handful of U.S. diplomats. It also expelled Cuban diplomats from the United States.

But the administration took a softer approach in China as Trump pursued a trade agreement with Xi Jinping, the authoritarian leader whom the president praises. And Trump has also tried strengthening ties with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

On Wednesday, Pompeo said “there were no politics attached to this” and it was “patently false, clearly false, unambiguously false” that the administration’s responses to the episodes were conditioned on political goals.

“We don’t want any country around the world to think for a moment that they can do something, and we won’t take serious action,” Pompeo said.

The State Department has refused to provide basic information to Congress about the episodes — even obscuring the number of U.S. government employees and family members affected worldwide. Lawmakers and scientists also fear the department is trying to bury a detailed report on the episodes it received in August from a committee at the National Academies of Sciences.

On Tuesday, after The Times reported on the State Department’s refusal to release the report to the public or Congress, Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Ca., said on Twitter that he had just directed aides to request the report from the department.

He wrote: “There’s no reason @SecPompeo should be hiding this information from the American people.”

Marc Polymeropoulos, a 26-year CIA clandestine officer who retired after the suspected attack in Moscow left him with constant migraines, said Wednesday that the current situation was similar to an earlier instance in which the U.S. government refused to recognize combat injuries. “This is the CIA’s gulf war syndrome,” he said.

The U.S. government has not determined what caused some U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers to suffer from a mysterious, debilitating affliction while they were overseas, despite devoting vast resources over more than three years to investigating it, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday.

The U.S. government has not determined what caused some U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers to suffer from a mysterious, debilitating affliction while they were overseas, despite devoting vast resources over more than three years to investigating it, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday. Starting in late 2016, dozens of U.S. officials and family members living in Cuba and China or traveling for work in other countries, including Russia, reported contracting an illness that has become known as Havana Syndrome, based on where it first publicly emerged. The symptoms included headaches, memory loss, vertigo, nausea, bloody noses and hearing strange sounds. Some U.S. officials, including experienced CIA analysts, and scientists believe the victims were targeted by a foreign adversary wielding weaponized microwave radiation. Russia beamed microwaves at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s, and it has more recently harassed diplomats and fueled violence against U.S. soldiers. Other U.S. officials and scientists say the injuries may be the product of a psychological illness, or even pesticides. Pompeo, who was the CIA director before leading the State Department, said the government was still examining multiple theories in what he described as “a very complicated situation.” “There is not yet any complete U.S. government analysis which definitively tells us precisely how these all came to be, whether they’re part of a single cohort,” Pompeo said at a news conference. “There are significant U.S. government resources now, what, three-plus years on, devoted to getting to the bottom of this and then holding those responsible accountable — should we determine that that’s required,” he said. Pompeo was responding to a reporter’s question about what the State Department was doing to protect diplomats, and why there appeared to be deep disparities in the response to the episode in Cuba compared to the one in China. Pompeo took umbrage at the question. “Yeah, that question is kind of like, ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ ” Pompeo said. “Right? Right?” The question referred to the findings of separate investigations in The New York Times and GQ published Monday. Many U.S. government employees and family members who left China in 2018 after falling ill have had to fight the Trump administration for benefits, and some say that has led to retaliation by the government. Some victims are believed to be permanently injured. The articles also revealed new victims — CIA officers who had recently made short trips overseas. One suspected attack took place in Moscow. In other cases, the officers were meeting with partner intelligence agencies to discuss plans to counter Russian covert operations, The Times found. CIA Director Gina Haspel is not convinced Russia carried out attacks that caused the illnesses, officials said. Russia has denied any role. The investigations led to some lawmakers criticizing the Trump administration over the reported mistreatment of diplomats and spies. The lawmakers are also calling for Pompeo and other top officials to stop concealing information on the suspected attacks. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said Tuesday that the articles were “deeply troubling and should spur the Trump administration to do everything in its power to protect federal employees from these attacks and investigate the full scope of this threat.” “These findings should put an end to the foot-dragging, evasiveness and obstruction at the State Department to deliver benefits to all of these injured federal employees and their families, and get to the bottom about what happened,” she added. A half-dozen U.S. officials told The Times that the Trump administration’s responses to the suspected attacks varied based on political considerations. In Cuba, where President Donald Trump sought to undo President Barack Obama’s rapprochement, the State Department withdrew all but a handful of U.S. diplomats. It also expelled Cuban diplomats from the United States. But the administration took a softer approach in China as Trump pursued a trade agreement with Xi Jinping, the authoritarian leader whom the president praises. And Trump has also tried strengthening ties with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. On Wednesday, Pompeo said “there were no politics attached to this” and it was “patently false, clearly false, unambiguously false” that the administration’s responses to the episodes were conditioned on political goals. “We don’t want any country around the world to think for a moment that they can do something, and we won’t take serious action,” Pompeo said. The State Department has refused to provide basic information to Congress about the episodes — even obscuring the number of U.S. government employees and family members affected worldwide. Lawmakers and scientists also fear the department is trying to bury a detailed report on the episodes it received in August from a committee at the National Academies of Sciences. On Tuesday, after The Times reported on the State Department’s refusal to release the report to the public or Congress, Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Ca., said on Twitter that he had just directed aides to request the report from the department. He wrote: “There’s no reason @SecPompeo should be hiding this information from the American people.” Marc Polymeropoulos, a 26-year CIA clandestine officer who retired after the suspected attack in Moscow left him with constant migraines, said Wednesday that the current situation was similar to an earlier instance in which the U.S. government refused to recognize combat injuries. “This is the CIA’s gulf war syndrome,” he said.

US still seeking clues to mystery illness afflicting diplomats and spies

In a fresh step in its confrontation with China, US has designated operations of six China-based media companies as foreign missions. Such a designation requires the outlets to inform the US State Department of their personnel rosters and real-estate holdings. US Secretary of Stae Mike Pompeo said that the fresh step was taken to resist communist propoganda. Pompeo also said that the US is going to start a dialogue with European Union on China.

The State Department named the newly designated publications as the Yicai Global, Jiefang Daily, the Xinmin Evening News, Social Sciences in China Press, the Beijing Review, and the Economic Daily. It brought to 15 the number of Chinese media outlets so designated this year.

It was the latest U.S. step to curb Chinese activity in the United States in the run-up to the Nov. 3 presidential election, in which President Donald Trump has made a tough approach to China a key foreign policy theme.

Pompeo said the move was part of efforts to push back against "Chinese communist propaganda efforts" in the United States.

"They are also substantially owned, or effectively controlled by a foreign government," he said.

Also Read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-election-2020-what-to-expect-as-donald-trump-joe-biden-gear-up-for-final-presidential-debate-337034">What to expect as Donald Trump, Joe Biden gear up for final debate</a>

"We are not placing any restrictions on what these outlets can publish in the United States; we simply want to ensure that American people, consumers of information can differentiate between news written by a free press and propaganda distributed by the Chinese Communist Party itself. Not the same thing."

The editor-in-chief of Chinese state-backed Global Times newspaper said in a tweet that the U.S. had "gone too far" and that China would retaliate.

"As long as Chinese media outlets suffer actual harm, Beijing will definitely retaliate, and US media outlets' operation in HK could be included in retaliation list," Hu Xijin said.

The State Department has required Chinese media outlets to register as foreign missions and announced in March it was cutting the number of journalists allowed to work at U.S. offices of major Chinese media outlets to 100 from 160.

In response, China expelled about a dozen American correspondents with the New York Times, News Corp's Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

The United States also said last month it would require senior Chinese diplomats to get State Department approval before visiting U.S. university campuses or holding cultural events with more than 50 people outside mission grounds.

China's embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Washington designated four major Chinese media outlets as foreign embassies in June and five in February.&nbsp;

(With Reuters inputs) 
&nbsp;

In a fresh step in its confrontation with China, US has designated operations of six China-based media companies as foreign missions. Such a designation requires the outlets to inform the US State Department of their personnel rosters and real-estate holdings.

In a fresh step in its confrontation with China, US has designated operations of six China-based media companies as foreign missions. Such a designation requires the outlets to inform the US State Department of their personnel rosters and real-estate holdings. US Secretary of Stae Mike Pompeo said that the fresh step was taken to resist communist propoganda. Pompeo also said that the US is going to start a dialogue with European Union on China. The State Department named the newly designated publications as the Yicai Global, Jiefang Daily, the Xinmin Evening News, Social Sciences in China Press, the Beijing Review, and the Economic Daily. It brought to 15 the number of Chinese media outlets so designated this year. It was the latest U.S. step to curb Chinese activity in the United States in the run-up to the Nov. 3 presidential election, in which President Donald Trump has made a tough approach to China a key foreign policy theme. Pompeo said the move was part of efforts to push back against "Chinese communist propaganda efforts" in the United States. "They are also substantially owned, or effectively controlled by a foreign government," he said. Also Read: What to expect as Donald Trump, Joe Biden gear up for final debate "We are not placing any restrictions on what these outlets can publish in the United States; we simply want to ensure that American people, consumers of information can differentiate between news written by a free press and propaganda distributed by the Chinese Communist Party itself. Not the same thing." The editor-in-chief of Chinese state-backed Global Times newspaper said in a tweet that the U.S. had "gone too far" and that China would retaliate. "As long as Chinese media outlets suffer actual harm, Beijing will definitely retaliate, and US media outlets' operation in HK could be included in retaliation list," Hu Xijin said. The State Department has required Chinese media outlets to register as foreign missions and announced in March it was cutting the number of journalists allowed to work at U.S. offices of major Chinese media outlets to 100 from 160. In response, China expelled about a dozen American correspondents with the New York Times, News Corp's Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. The United States also said last month it would require senior Chinese diplomats to get State Department approval before visiting U.S. university campuses or holding cultural events with more than 50 people outside mission grounds. China's embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Washington designated four major Chinese media outlets as foreign embassies in June and five in February. (With Reuters inputs)

Days ahead of elections, US designates six Chinese firms as foreign missions

Each art has its artists. At least in popular perception, there is always one figure in every field who people like to admire/ fear/ follow and so on. Science has its Einstein, painting has Picasso and those trying to peer into past and future have Nostradamus.

Mr Nostradamus is a go-to person for everyone from people seeking a little amusement to serious 'what if' conspiracy theorists. There are those who believe that Nostradamus predicted future events in his book Les Propheties. The book was written in 1555.

Whenever there is any major global event, Monsieur Nostradamus makes his presence felt. US Presidential Election&nbsp;2020 is&nbsp;no exception.

Joe Biden may be leading in poll numbers. He may be crisscrossing US states to meet voters. But&nbsp;some people think that it is futile, because Donald Trump is slated&nbsp;win the elections.

The reason for their hunch? A prediction by Nostradamus.

Some of his lines are being cited to drive home the point. A reference to a 'trumpet' is being taken to be Nostadamus' seal of approval for Trump to win the election.

The lines read:

"The false trumpet concealing madness,

"Will cause Byzantium to change its laws.

"From Egypt there will go forth a man who wants

"The edict withdrawn, changing money and standards."

As it is with other lines of Nostradamus taken to be predictions, these do not unequivocally say anything. But it is indeed being taken to be a prediction.

Critics of this thought process often say that Nostradamus' 'predictions' are nothing but cryptic poetry that is interpreted in a certain way to validate global events.

Donald Trump did clinch an unexpected victory during 2016 elections. It'll be interesting to see whether he can repeat the feat this time.

It'll then be all the more interesting to hear people who swear by Nostradamus.

Each art has its artists. At least in popular perception, there is always one figure in every field who people like to admire/ fear/ follow and so on. Science has its Einstein, painting has Picasso and those trying to peer into past and future have Nostradamus.

Each art has its artists. At least in popular perception, there is always one figure in every field who people like to admire/ fear/ follow and so on. Science has its Einstein, painting has Picasso and those trying to peer into past and future have Nostradamus. Mr Nostradamus is a go-to person for everyone from people seeking a little amusement to serious 'what if' conspiracy theorists. There are those who believe that Nostradamus predicted future events in his book Les Propheties. The book was written in 1555. Whenever there is any major global event, Monsieur Nostradamus makes his presence felt. US Presidential Election 2020 is no exception. Joe Biden may be leading in poll numbers. He may be crisscrossing US states to meet voters. But some people think that it is futile, because Donald Trump is slated win the elections. The reason for their hunch? A prediction by Nostradamus. Some of his lines are being cited to drive home the point. A reference to a 'trumpet' is being taken to be Nostadamus' seal of approval for Trump to win the election. The lines read: "The false trumpet concealing madness, "Will cause Byzantium to change its laws. "From Egypt there will go forth a man who wants "The edict withdrawn, changing money and standards." As it is with other lines of Nostradamus taken to be predictions, these do not unequivocally say anything. But it is indeed being taken to be a prediction. Critics of this thought process often say that Nostradamus' 'predictions' are nothing but cryptic poetry that is interpreted in a certain way to validate global events. Donald Trump did clinch an unexpected victory during 2016 elections. It'll be interesting to see whether he can repeat the feat this time. It'll then be all the more interesting to hear people who swear by Nostradamus.

Nostradamus on US Election 2020: Has he predicted a Donald Trump victory?

Washington has batted for the formalisation of Quad, a grouping of the United States, Japan, India and Australia.

In a telephonic briefing, Deputy Secretary of State Stephen E. Biegun said, "It is our view, that in the passage of time, Quad should become more regularised and at some point formalised as well, as we really begin to understand what the parameters of the cooperation are and how we can regularise it, that is very important"

The remarks come weeks after Quad foreign ministers had an in-person meeting in Tokyo earlier this month. This was the 2nd such Quad FMs meet that took place, the first took place last year in New York.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/eyeing-china-australia-accepts-indias-invitation-to-rejoin-quad-drill-naval-exercises-336547" hreflang="en">Eyeing China, Australia accepts India's invitation to rejoin 'quad' drill naval exercises</a>

Highlighting how Quad's origin lies after 2004 Tsunami in Asia, Biegun explained,"not necessarily advocating for Quad plus but rather continuation and regularisation of the Quad with an eventual goal of understanding how it can be best formalised and welcoming cooperation with any country in the Indo pacific that guarantees sovereignty and prosperity for its members"

Amidst the COVID pandemic, countries of the quad and other like-minded countries like Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand had a virtual meet at foreign secretary-level to exchange best ideas and deal with the crisis.

Asked on the expansion of the grouping, Biegun said, "There is no designed policy for quad expansion that is being advocated by US. Quad is still undefined entity....and it is premature...on expanding the Quad."

Deputy Secretary of State had visited India and Bangladesh earlier this month, a visit that comes ahead of US secretary of state Mike Pompeo's visit to India on 26th and 27th October for India and US 2+2 dialogue at foreign and defence ministers level. &nbsp;Pompeo will also visit Sri Lanka and the Maldives during that visit.

Washington has batted for the formalisation of Quad, a grouping of the United States, Japan, India and Australia. In a telephonic briefing, Deputy Secretary of State Stephen E.

Washington has batted for the formalisation of Quad, a grouping of the United States, Japan, India and Australia. In a telephonic briefing, Deputy Secretary of State Stephen E. Biegun said, "It is our view, that in the passage of time, Quad should become more regularised and at some point formalised as well, as we really begin to understand what the parameters of the cooperation are and how we can regularise it, that is very important" The remarks come weeks after Quad foreign ministers had an in-person meeting in Tokyo earlier this month. This was the 2nd such Quad FMs meet that took place, the first took place last year in New York. Also read: Eyeing China, Australia accepts India's invitation to rejoin 'quad' drill naval exercises Highlighting how Quad's origin lies after 2004 Tsunami in Asia, Biegun explained,"not necessarily advocating for Quad plus but rather continuation and regularisation of the Quad with an eventual goal of understanding how it can be best formalised and welcoming cooperation with any country in the Indo pacific that guarantees sovereignty and prosperity for its members" Amidst the COVID pandemic, countries of the quad and other like-minded countries like Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand had a virtual meet at foreign secretary-level to exchange best ideas and deal with the crisis. Asked on the expansion of the grouping, Biegun said, "There is no designed policy for quad expansion that is being advocated by US. Quad is still undefined entity....and it is premature...on expanding the Quad." Deputy Secretary of State had visited India and Bangladesh earlier this month, a visit that comes ahead of US secretary of state Mike Pompeo's visit to India on 26th and 27th October for India and US 2+2 dialogue at foreign and defence ministers level. Pompeo will also visit Sri Lanka and the Maldives during that visit.

United States bats for formalisation of Quad

The Trump administration is close to an agreement with Sudan to remove Khartoum from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and an announcement could be made in coming days, two U.S. officials said on Monday.

The deal could also set in motion steps by Sudan toward establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, one of the officials told Reuters, following similar U.S.-brokered moves in recent weeks by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. But details were still being worked out, the source said.

Rapprochement between Israel and another Arab country would give U.S. President Donald Trump an opportunity to tout a new diplomatic achievement as he seeks re-election on Nov. 3.

Sudan`s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism dates to its toppled ruler Omar al-Bashir and makes it difficult for its transitional government to access urgently needed debt relief and foreign financing.

Many in Sudan see this as undeserved since Bashir was removed last year and Sudan has long cooperated with the United States on counter-terrorism.

A key sticking point in U.S.-Sudan talks has been Sudan`s insistence that any announcement of Khartoum`s de-listing not be explicitly linked to normalization with Israel. Differences remain between Sudanese political and military officials on how far and how fast to go in warming of relations with Israel.

Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok told U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Khartoum in August the normalization issue should not be linked to Sudan’s removal from the terrorism list.

One possibility, one U.S. official said, would be for Washington to first announce Sudan`s delisting and then leave it to Sudan and Israel to go public later with an agreement on establishing forging relations.

The UAE and fellow Gulf state Bahrain in September became the first Arab states in a quarter of a century to sign agreements to establish formal ties with Israel, forged largely through shared fears of Iran.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Negotiations related to Sudan`s deposit in escrow of a $335 million settlement to victims of al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 are expected to conclude in the next two days, one of the U.S. government sources said.

After that, the Trump administration would notify Congress of its intent to remove Sudan from the list.

The Trump administration is close to an agreement with Sudan to remove Khartoum from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and an announcement could be made in coming days, two U.

The Trump administration is close to an agreement with Sudan to remove Khartoum from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism and an announcement could be made in coming days, two U.S. officials said on Monday. The deal could also set in motion steps by Sudan toward establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, one of the officials told Reuters, following similar U.S.-brokered moves in recent weeks by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. But details were still being worked out, the source said. Rapprochement between Israel and another Arab country would give U.S. President Donald Trump an opportunity to tout a new diplomatic achievement as he seeks re-election on Nov. 3. Sudan`s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism dates to its toppled ruler Omar al-Bashir and makes it difficult for its transitional government to access urgently needed debt relief and foreign financing. Many in Sudan see this as undeserved since Bashir was removed last year and Sudan has long cooperated with the United States on counter-terrorism. A key sticking point in U.S.-Sudan talks has been Sudan`s insistence that any announcement of Khartoum`s de-listing not be explicitly linked to normalization with Israel. Differences remain between Sudanese political and military officials on how far and how fast to go in warming of relations with Israel. Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok told U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Khartoum in August the normalization issue should not be linked to Sudan’s removal from the terrorism list. One possibility, one U.S. official said, would be for Washington to first announce Sudan`s delisting and then leave it to Sudan and Israel to go public later with an agreement on establishing forging relations. The UAE and fellow Gulf state Bahrain in September became the first Arab states in a quarter of a century to sign agreements to establish formal ties with Israel, forged largely through shared fears of Iran. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Negotiations related to Sudan`s deposit in escrow of a $335 million settlement to victims of al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 are expected to conclude in the next two days, one of the U.S. government sources said. After that, the Trump administration would notify Congress of its intent to remove Sudan from the list.

US could soon take Sudan off state sponsors of terrorism list

The United States` land borders between Canada and Mexico will remain closed to all non-essential travel until Nov. 21, the U.S. Homeland Security Department said Monday.

The extension comes as the United States remains one of the worst-affected countries in the world and is reporting the second-highest number of new cases daily.

"To continue to limit the spread of COVID, the U.S., Mexico, and Canada will extend the restrictions on non-essential travel through Nov. 21. We are working closely with Mexico and Canada to identify safe criteria to ease the restrictions in the future and support our border communities," said U.S. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf on Twitter.

Mexico’s foreign ministry also confirmed that the measures will remain in place and unchanged until Nov. 21.

Canada`s Public Safety Minister Bill Blair earlier disclosed the latest one-month extension on Twitter, confirming a policy put in place in March to control the spread of COVID-19.

"We`d love to have the border open ... but we can`t do that unless we`re comfortable that Canadians are being kept safe," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in an interview on AM 900 CHML Hamilton radio earlier on Monday.

"Right now, the situation in the United States continues to be of concern," Trudeau added.

Last month, on the day the border extension was confirmed, U.S. President Donald Trump said it would open "pretty soon" because Canada wanted the restrictions lifted. But Canada`s government has made it clear it does not want the restrictions removed until COVID-19 is under control in both countries.

The restrictions are particularly painful for U.S. and Canadian towns along the border that are tightly intertwined. 
Statistics Canada said earlier U.S. visits to Canada by automobile had plummeted by more than 95% in August compared with August 2019.

The United States` land borders between Canada and Mexico will remain closed to all non-essential travel until Nov. 21, the U.S. Homeland Security Department said Monday.

The United States` land borders between Canada and Mexico will remain closed to all non-essential travel until Nov. 21, the U.S. Homeland Security Department said Monday. The extension comes as the United States remains one of the worst-affected countries in the world and is reporting the second-highest number of new cases daily. "To continue to limit the spread of COVID, the U.S., Mexico, and Canada will extend the restrictions on non-essential travel through Nov. 21. We are working closely with Mexico and Canada to identify safe criteria to ease the restrictions in the future and support our border communities," said U.S. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf on Twitter. Mexico’s foreign ministry also confirmed that the measures will remain in place and unchanged until Nov. 21. Canada`s Public Safety Minister Bill Blair earlier disclosed the latest one-month extension on Twitter, confirming a policy put in place in March to control the spread of COVID-19. "We`d love to have the border open ... but we can`t do that unless we`re comfortable that Canadians are being kept safe," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in an interview on AM 900 CHML Hamilton radio earlier on Monday. "Right now, the situation in the United States continues to be of concern," Trudeau added. Last month, on the day the border extension was confirmed, U.S. President Donald Trump said it would open "pretty soon" because Canada wanted the restrictions lifted. But Canada`s government has made it clear it does not want the restrictions removed until COVID-19 is under control in both countries. The restrictions are particularly painful for U.S. and Canadian towns along the border that are tightly intertwined. Statistics Canada said earlier U.S. visits to Canada by automobile had plummeted by more than 95% in August compared with August 2019.

US borders with Canada, Mexico to stay closed to non-essential travel until Nov 21

Belarus has released a jailed political consultant with US citizenship and two opposition figures into house arrest in a rare concession by veteran leader Alexander Lukashenko after months of protests.

A media report Monday said Vitaly Shkliarov, a consultant who has worked in the United States and Russia, was detained in Belarus in July and accused of organising public disorder in the runup to an August 9 presidential election.

He was shifted to house arrest, along with Lilia Vlasova, a member of an opposition body, the Coordination Council, and Ilya Saley, a lawyer for opposition leader Maria Kolesnikova, who were detained in a crackdown that followed the disputed vote.

The three were among a small group of jailed opposition figures that met Lukashenko on October 10 when he visited a KGB detention facility.&nbsp;

Belarusian state media reported at the time that Lukahshenko discussed constitutional reforms with the opposition figures.

Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Minsk on Sunday, as they have done every weekend since the presidential election, which the opposition says was rigged.

Belarus has released a jailed political consultant with US citizenship and two opposition figures into house arrest in a rare concession by veteran leader Alexander Lukashenko after months of protests.

Belarus has released a jailed political consultant with US citizenship and two opposition figures into house arrest in a rare concession by veteran leader Alexander Lukashenko after months of protests. A media report Monday said Vitaly Shkliarov, a consultant who has worked in the United States and Russia, was detained in Belarus in July and accused of organising public disorder in the runup to an August 9 presidential election. He was shifted to house arrest, along with Lilia Vlasova, a member of an opposition body, the Coordination Council, and Ilya Saley, a lawyer for opposition leader Maria Kolesnikova, who were detained in a crackdown that followed the disputed vote. The three were among a small group of jailed opposition figures that met Lukashenko on October 10 when he visited a KGB detention facility. Belarusian state media reported at the time that Lukahshenko discussed constitutional reforms with the opposition figures. Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Minsk on Sunday, as they have done every weekend since the presidential election, which the opposition says was rigged.

Belarus moves jailed US citizen, two others to house arrest

China has refuted a newspaper report that said foreign nationals were under threat of arbitrary detention.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that Chinese officials had issued repeated warnings to US government officials that China may detain Americans in response to the Justice Department`s prosecution of Chinese scholars affiliated to the military.

The Chinese foreign ministry said it was Washington that was mistreating foreign citizens, accusing the United States of "outright political repression" of their academics.

"The US claim that foreign nationals in China are under threat of arbitrary detention is playing the victim and confusing black and white," Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a news briefing.&nbsp;

China protects the safety and legitimate rights of foreigners, he said.

In September, a State Department advisory warned against travel to China, saying the Chinese government uses arbitrary detention and exit bans for US citizens and others "to gain bargaining leverage over foreign governments".

The Trump administration has increasingly accused China of using cyber operations and espionage to steal US technological, military and other know-how. Beijing denies this.

Earlier this year, Chinese prosecutors in June indicted two Canadian citizens on espionage charges, a move seen by Western governments as punishment for Canada's arrest of Huawei Technologies Co Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou in late 2018.

Beijing has denied the indictment was related to Meng's case and has repeatedly called for the release of Meng.

China has refuted a newspaper report that said foreign nationals were under threat of arbitrary detention. The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that Chinese officials had issued repeated warnings to US government officials that China may detain Americans in response to the Justice Department`s prosecution of Chinese scholars affiliated to the military.

China has refuted a newspaper report that said foreign nationals were under threat of arbitrary detention. The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that Chinese officials had issued repeated warnings to US government officials that China may detain Americans in response to the Justice Department`s prosecution of Chinese scholars affiliated to the military. The Chinese foreign ministry said it was Washington that was mistreating foreign citizens, accusing the United States of "outright political repression" of their academics. "The US claim that foreign nationals in China are under threat of arbitrary detention is playing the victim and confusing black and white," Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a news briefing. China protects the safety and legitimate rights of foreigners, he said. In September, a State Department advisory warned against travel to China, saying the Chinese government uses arbitrary detention and exit bans for US citizens and others "to gain bargaining leverage over foreign governments". The Trump administration has increasingly accused China of using cyber operations and espionage to steal US technological, military and other know-how. Beijing denies this. Earlier this year, Chinese prosecutors in June indicted two Canadian citizens on espionage charges, a move seen by Western governments as punishment for Canada's arrest of Huawei Technologies Co Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou in late 2018. Beijing has denied the indictment was related to Meng's case and has repeatedly called for the release of Meng.

China denies report that said it may detain Americans

October 18 in history: USA takes Alaska from Russia, and more!

A blast and a large fire injured at least five in Virginia (USA) on Saturday morning (local time). The blast took place in a shopping center in Harrisonburg in Virginia. Cause of the blast is yet unknown and an investigation is underway. Ralph Northam, Governor of Virginia was quoted by media as saying that the fire was due to a gas explosion, Harrisonburg Fire Chief Matt Tobia told reporters that cause of the fire was still being ascertained.

Soon after the blast, locals posted videos on Twitter

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Harrisonburg VA fire and explosion appear to be contained now. Ugly scene, explosion heard and felt miles away <a href="https://t.co/vs3r6BxHaH">pic.twitter.com/vs3r6BxHaH</a>
— Josh Edmonds (@joshdedmonds) <a href="https://twitter.com/joshdedmonds/status/1317463342773116928?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 17, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Harrisonburg is a city of around 50,000 that is home to James Madison University. The university said in its Facebook statement that three of its students were injured due to fire. It added that the injuries were minor. The students, said the university, were part of its US Army ROTC program and were taking part in the ten mile run at the time of the blast. One of the student was hospitalised but was expected to be discharged quickly.

Locals living nearby told TV station WHSV that the blast shook their homes.

A blast and a large fire injured at least five in Virginia (USA) on Saturday morning (local time). The blast took place in a shopping center in Harrisonburg in Virginia.

A blast and a large fire injured at least five in Virginia (USA) on Saturday morning (local time). The blast took place in a shopping center in Harrisonburg in Virginia. Cause of the blast is yet unknown and an investigation is underway. Ralph Northam, Governor of Virginia was quoted by media as saying that the fire was due to a gas explosion, Harrisonburg Fire Chief Matt Tobia told reporters that cause of the fire was still being ascertained. Soon after the blast, locals posted videos on Twitter Harrisonburg VA fire and explosion appear to be contained now. Ugly scene, explosion heard and felt miles away pic.twitter.com/vs3r6BxHaH — Josh Edmonds (@joshdedmonds) October 17, 2020 × Harrisonburg is a city of around 50,000 that is home to James Madison University. The university said in its Facebook statement that three of its students were injured due to fire. It added that the injuries were minor. The students, said the university, were part of its US Army ROTC program and were taking part in the ten mile run at the time of the blast. One of the student was hospitalised but was expected to be discharged quickly. Locals living nearby told TV station WHSV that the blast shook their homes.

US: At least 5 injured in blast, fire at Virginia shopping mall

United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday said that arms sales to Iran would breach UN resolutions and result in sanctions, after Tehran said the longstanding UN embargo on arms trade with the Islamic republic had expired.

"The United States is prepared to use its domestic authorities to sanction any individual or entity that materially contributes to the supply, sale, or transfer of conventional arms to or from Iran," Pompeo said in a statement.

"Every nation that seeks peace and stability in the Middle East and supports the fight against terrorism should refrain from any arms transactions with Iran."

The embargo on the sale of conventional arms to Iran was due to start expiring progressively from October 18 under the terms of the UN resolution that confirmed the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers.

Washington had notably withdrawn from the deal, and has tried to maintain an indefinite freeze on arms sales.

Tehran, which could now purchase weapons from Russia, China and elsewhere, hailed the development as a diplomatic victory over its arch enemy the United States,&nbsp;

"As of today, all restrictions on the transfer of arms, related activities and financial services to and from the Islamic Republic of Iran... are all automatically terminated," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

"As of today, the Islamic Republic may procure any necessary arms and equipment from any source without any legal restrictions, and solely based on its defensive needs," the ministry added in the statement on Twitter.

US President Donald Trump withdrew his country from the nuclear deal in 2018 and has unilaterally begun reimposing sanctions on Iran.

But Washington suffered a setback in August when it failed to win support from the United Nations Security Council to indefinitely extend the arms embargo.

Despite pulling out of the nuclear deal, the Trump administration insists it is still a "participant" and can therefore go ahead with reimposing sanctions.&nbsp;

Washington has said it has decided to unilaterally reinstate virtually all of the UN sanctions on Iran lifted under the accord.&nbsp;

But the US legal argument has been rejected by almost the entire Security Council, with European allies of the United States saying the priority is to salvage a peaceful solution to Iran's nuclear programme.

Iran urged the US to "abandon its destructive approach vis-a-vis Resolution 2231", adding that American attempts to "violate" the resolution had been "categorically rejected several times in the past three months by the Security Council".

Moscow said in September that it was ready to boost military cooperation with Tehran, while Beijing has also spoken of its willingness to sell arms to Iran after October 18.

Washington maintained it will seek to prevent Iran from purchasing Chinese tanks and Russian air defence systems.

(with inputs)

United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday said that arms sales to Iran would breach UN resolutions and result in sanctions, after Tehran said the longstanding UN embargo on arms trade with the Islamic republic had expired.

United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday said that arms sales to Iran would breach UN resolutions and result in sanctions, after Tehran said the longstanding UN embargo on arms trade with the Islamic republic had expired. "The United States is prepared to use its domestic authorities to sanction any individual or entity that materially contributes to the supply, sale, or transfer of conventional arms to or from Iran," Pompeo said in a statement. "Every nation that seeks peace and stability in the Middle East and supports the fight against terrorism should refrain from any arms transactions with Iran." The embargo on the sale of conventional arms to Iran was due to start expiring progressively from October 18 under the terms of the UN resolution that confirmed the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers. Washington had notably withdrawn from the deal, and has tried to maintain an indefinite freeze on arms sales. Tehran, which could now purchase weapons from Russia, China and elsewhere, hailed the development as a diplomatic victory over its arch enemy the United States, "As of today, all restrictions on the transfer of arms, related activities and financial services to and from the Islamic Republic of Iran... are all automatically terminated," the foreign ministry said in a statement. "As of today, the Islamic Republic may procure any necessary arms and equipment from any source without any legal restrictions, and solely based on its defensive needs," the ministry added in the statement on Twitter. US President Donald Trump withdrew his country from the nuclear deal in 2018 and has unilaterally begun reimposing sanctions on Iran. But Washington suffered a setback in August when it failed to win support from the United Nations Security Council to indefinitely extend the arms embargo. Despite pulling out of the nuclear deal, the Trump administration insists it is still a "participant" and can therefore go ahead with reimposing sanctions. Washington has said it has decided to unilaterally reinstate virtually all of the UN sanctions on Iran lifted under the accord. But the US legal argument has been rejected by almost the entire Security Council, with European allies of the United States saying the priority is to salvage a peaceful solution to Iran's nuclear programme. Iran urged the US to "abandon its destructive approach vis-a-vis Resolution 2231", adding that American attempts to "violate" the resolution had been "categorically rejected several times in the past three months by the Security Council". Moscow said in September that it was ready to boost military cooperation with Tehran, while Beijing has also spoken of its willingness to sell arms to Iran after October 18. Washington maintained it will seek to prevent Iran from purchasing Chinese tanks and Russian air defence systems. (with inputs)

US Secy of State Pompeo warns of sanctions for any arms sales to Iran

Women’s March protesters took to the streets of Washington on Saturday, galvanized by their opposition to President Donald Trump and his nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

Some women dressed in handmaid’s costumes, while others donned clothing reminiscent of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court regalia, just days before the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on Barrett’s nomination, paving the way for her confirmation. Marching less than a month before Election Day, Women’s March participants sought to call attention to the potential impact that a Justice Barrett, and four more years of the Trump presidency, might have on abortion rights and other issues.

“He’s trying to pack the courts with people who will subvert the will of Americans,” Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the Women’s March executive director, said of the president. “The election is all about the Supreme Court. It’s all about health care. It’s all about COVID.”

During the Senate confirmation hearing, Barrett declined to say whether she believed the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade was correctly decided. She has a conservative voting record in abortion-related cases, and her Supreme Court nomination has been championed by conservatives.

“It’s really scary, since Justice Ginsburg passed away, what the future of women in this country looks like, especially when the nominee for her replacement doesn’t care about women’s rights,” said Tiffany Jones, a 37-year-old mortgage loan processor who drove to the march from Charleston, West Virginia.

Many marchers traveled far to attend Saturday’s event, despite the risks posed by the pandemic. Cierra Brooks, 19, drove with two college roommates for nine hours from Cullowhee, North Carolina.

“Our futures are totally affected by what happens,” Brooks said.

The crowd in Washington was far smaller than those at previous marches, which organizers attributed to the pandemic. This year, protesters were required to wear masks.

The march was met with a counterprotest in support of Barrett’s nomination, organized by the Independent Women’s Forum at the steps of the Supreme Court.

“The Women’s March does not represent all women,” said Sandy Chiong, a conservative activist. Barrett, she added, “is a role model for young women everywhere, an independent thinker.”

Women’s March protesters took to the streets of Washington on Saturday, galvanized by their opposition to President Donald Trump and his nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

Women’s March protesters took to the streets of Washington on Saturday, galvanized by their opposition to President Donald Trump and his nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Some women dressed in handmaid’s costumes, while others donned clothing reminiscent of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court regalia, just days before the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on Barrett’s nomination, paving the way for her confirmation. Marching less than a month before Election Day, Women’s March participants sought to call attention to the potential impact that a Justice Barrett, and four more years of the Trump presidency, might have on abortion rights and other issues. “He’s trying to pack the courts with people who will subvert the will of Americans,” Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the Women’s March executive director, said of the president. “The election is all about the Supreme Court. It’s all about health care. It’s all about COVID.” During the Senate confirmation hearing, Barrett declined to say whether she believed the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade was correctly decided. She has a conservative voting record in abortion-related cases, and her Supreme Court nomination has been championed by conservatives. “It’s really scary, since Justice Ginsburg passed away, what the future of women in this country looks like, especially when the nominee for her replacement doesn’t care about women’s rights,” said Tiffany Jones, a 37-year-old mortgage loan processor who drove to the march from Charleston, West Virginia. Many marchers traveled far to attend Saturday’s event, despite the risks posed by the pandemic. Cierra Brooks, 19, drove with two college roommates for nine hours from Cullowhee, North Carolina. “Our futures are totally affected by what happens,” Brooks said. The crowd in Washington was far smaller than those at previous marches, which organizers attributed to the pandemic. This year, protesters were required to wear masks. The march was met with a counterprotest in support of Barrett’s nomination, organized by the Independent Women’s Forum at the steps of the Supreme Court. “The Women’s March does not represent all women,” said Sandy Chiong, a conservative activist. Barrett, she added, “is a role model for young women everywhere, an independent thinker.”

Women take a stand in Washington, both for and against Barrett

China has warned USA that it may detain American citizens in China as a response to USA's prosecution of Chinese scholars that have links with Chinese army, Wall Street Journal reported.

The report said that Chinese officials have been conveying this to their US counterparts from summer this year. US Justice Department began arresting and prosecuting Chinese scholars conducting research in US institutions. They were accused of hiding their links with People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China.

Wall Street Journal said that China's message was that the United States should end prosecutions of Chinese scholars in U.S. courts, or Americans in China could find themselves in violation of Chinese law.

The Trump administration has increasingly accused China of suing cyber operations and espionage to steal U.S. technological, military and other know-how in a strategy to supplant the United States as the world's leading financial and military power. Beijing denies the allegations.

In July, the Justice Department said the FBI had arrested three Chinese nationals for allegedly concealing memberships in the Peoples Liberation Army when applying for visas to conduct research at U.S. academic institutions.

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/china-forces-prepare-for-possible-military-invasion-of-taiwan-deploy-hypersonic-missile-336157">China forces prepare for possible military invasion of Taiwan, deploy hypersonic missile</a>

Last month, the United States said it had revoked visas for more than 1,000 Chinese nationals under a presidential measure denying entry to students and researchers deemed security risks, a move China called a violation of human rights.

At the time, a State Department spokeswoman said the United States continued to welcome "legitimate students and scholars from China who do not further the Chinese Communist Party's goals of military dominance."

(With Reuters inputs)

China has warned USA that it may detain American citizens in China as a response to USA's prosecution of Chinese scholars that have links with Chinese army, Wall Street Journal reported.

China has warned USA that it may detain American citizens in China as a response to USA's prosecution of Chinese scholars that have links with Chinese army, Wall Street Journal reported. The report said that Chinese officials have been conveying this to their US counterparts from summer this year. US Justice Department began arresting and prosecuting Chinese scholars conducting research in US institutions. They were accused of hiding their links with People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China. Wall Street Journal said that China's message was that the United States should end prosecutions of Chinese scholars in U.S. courts, or Americans in China could find themselves in violation of Chinese law. The Trump administration has increasingly accused China of suing cyber operations and espionage to steal U.S. technological, military and other know-how in a strategy to supplant the United States as the world's leading financial and military power. Beijing denies the allegations. In July, the Justice Department said the FBI had arrested three Chinese nationals for allegedly concealing memberships in the Peoples Liberation Army when applying for visas to conduct research at U.S. academic institutions. Also Read | China forces prepare for possible military invasion of Taiwan, deploy hypersonic missile Last month, the United States said it had revoked visas for more than 1,000 Chinese nationals under a presidential measure denying entry to students and researchers deemed security risks, a move China called a violation of human rights. At the time, a State Department spokeswoman said the United States continued to welcome "legitimate students and scholars from China who do not further the Chinese Communist Party's goals of military dominance." (With Reuters inputs)

China warns US it may detain Americans over prosecution of Chinese scholars

Less than 20 days. It has been a long, hard road to this election. I see fearful faces, those of tormented migrants at the Mexican border, and hate-filled faces, those of the white nationalists in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

Donald Trump has been all about the fear of replacement, or as it’s sometimes called, “the great replacement.” His has been the stand — I am tempted to say the last stand — of whites against nonwhites.

Of America-first nationalists against migrants; of straight people against LGBTQ people; of the gunned-up against the unarmed. Of Trump against all those he believes would replace&nbsp;the likes of him.

All means have been used — lies, brutality, incitement. But fear has been Trump’s main weapon. Fear, which depends on pitting one group against another, is the currency of the Trump presidency. It is therefore no surprise that the America that is about to vote is probably more fractured than at any time since the Vietnam War.

“The great replacement” is a phrase generally attributed to a French writer, Renaud Camus, who said: “The great replacement is very simple. You have one people, and in the space of a generation, you have a different people.”

That, of course, is a good definition of America.

Of its vitality, its churn, its reinvention, its essential openness. The America that Trump would deny. He wants to freeze a white America. Some strange blend of Norman Rockwell and “Mad Men,” in an imaginary United States strutting across a world pliant to its will. Behind “America first” lurks a very un-American credo.

Change can be frightening, which is what the great replacement conspiracy theory hinges on. Camus warns grotesquely of a “genocide by substitution,” the replacement of a white French and European order by Muslim hordes in a plot orchestrated by cosmopolitan elites. In Trump’s case, read a white American order replaced by brown Mexican rapists and Black pillagers.

France is worried about Muslims from North Africa. Germans were once so worried about Jews replacing them that they killed 6 million of them. In a world of mass migration, fear rages: Some idea of the nation will be diluted or lost!

America is particularly susceptible to fear today because the world has changed in unsettling ways. Power has migrated eastward to Asia. America’s recent wars have been unwon. By midcentury, non-Hispanic whites will constitute less than 50% of the population.

It is frightening to see an industry disappear, like coal in Kentucky. Trump understood that he could be the voice of that fear. He would build a wall to keep those brown people out!

He is an impostor. He puffs out his chest, Mussolini-style, but he is a bone-spur coward. A narrow ramp makes his limbs tremble. He is good at getting the blood up. He is good at undoing. He is not good at getting anything constructive done.

Less than 20 days.

America will decide whether to opt for the future or burrow self-destructively into some warped fantasy of the past. It will decide whether to reinvent itself again or turn mean and further inward.

As Edward R. Murrow remarked, “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”

That was in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism. For Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the danger to the Republic came from Communist infiltration of American life. The real danger came from his obsessions. From the purges and blacklists that branded countless Americans as un-American.

Murrow, a great journalist, stood up to McCarthy.

Donald Trump does business the McCarthy way. He deals in specters: immigrants, and Muslims, and brown people, and Black people, and LGBTQ people.

As with McCarthy, however, the real danger comes from Trump’s obsessions, not from these imagined enemies.

American freedom is in decline. The freedom to think, because thought depends on truth. The freedom to dissent, because Trump believes he has “the right to do whatever I want as president.” The freedom to breathe because Trumpism — its nepotism, its cozying to dictators, its incessant volume&nbsp;— is suffocating.

The freedom inextricable from the American idea that I, a naturalized American, hold sacred with an unreasonable ardor.

No, we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. We can only defend those who trample human dignity and human rights. As Trump has done with cavalier abandon.

Is it unreasonable to see renewal in a 77-year-old man, Joe Biden? No. We live in the real world, where the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. Indecency demands the restoration of decency. That’s ground zero of this election. The choice was starkly evident in the televised town hall events Thursday as Trump spouted wild far-right conspiracy theories while Biden had the self-deprecating honesty to say that if he lost, it could suggest he’s “a lousy candidate.” Biden is not a lousy candidate; he is a good man, a brave man. I doff my hat to any parent who survives with such dignity the loss of two of his four children.

Of McCarthy, Murrow observed: “He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ ”

The fault is in ourselves. Time for Americans to look in the mirror — and realize their America is irreplaceable if it is lost.

Less than 20 days. It has been a long, hard road to this election. I see fearful faces, those of tormented migrants at the Mexican border, and hate-filled faces, those of the white nationalists in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us.

Less than 20 days. It has been a long, hard road to this election. I see fearful faces, those of tormented migrants at the Mexican border, and hate-filled faces, those of the white nationalists in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” Donald Trump has been all about the fear of replacement, or as it’s sometimes called, “the great replacement.” His has been the stand — I am tempted to say the last stand — of whites against nonwhites. Of America-first nationalists against migrants; of straight people against LGBTQ people; of the gunned-up against the unarmed. Of Trump against all those he believes would replace the likes of him. All means have been used — lies, brutality, incitement. But fear has been Trump’s main weapon. Fear, which depends on pitting one group against another, is the currency of the Trump presidency. It is therefore no surprise that the America that is about to vote is probably more fractured than at any time since the Vietnam War. “The great replacement” is a phrase generally attributed to a French writer, Renaud Camus, who said: “The great replacement is very simple. You have one people, and in the space of a generation, you have a different people.” That, of course, is a good definition of America. Of its vitality, its churn, its reinvention, its essential openness. The America that Trump would deny. He wants to freeze a white America. Some strange blend of Norman Rockwell and “Mad Men,” in an imaginary United States strutting across a world pliant to its will. Behind “America first” lurks a very un-American credo. Change can be frightening, which is what the great replacement conspiracy theory hinges on. Camus warns grotesquely of a “genocide by substitution,” the replacement of a white French and European order by Muslim hordes in a plot orchestrated by cosmopolitan elites. In Trump’s case, read a white American order replaced by brown Mexican rapists and Black pillagers. France is worried about Muslims from North Africa. Germans were once so worried about Jews replacing them that they killed 6 million of them. In a world of mass migration, fear rages: Some idea of the nation will be diluted or lost! America is particularly susceptible to fear today because the world has changed in unsettling ways. Power has migrated eastward to Asia. America’s recent wars have been unwon. By midcentury, non-Hispanic whites will constitute less than 50% of the population. It is frightening to see an industry disappear, like coal in Kentucky. Trump understood that he could be the voice of that fear. He would build a wall to keep those brown people out! He is an impostor. He puffs out his chest, Mussolini-style, but he is a bone-spur coward. A narrow ramp makes his limbs tremble. He is good at getting the blood up. He is good at undoing. He is not good at getting anything constructive done. Less than 20 days. America will decide whether to opt for the future or burrow self-destructively into some warped fantasy of the past. It will decide whether to reinvent itself again or turn mean and further inward. As Edward R. Murrow remarked, “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.” That was in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism. For Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the danger to the Republic came from Communist infiltration of American life. The real danger came from his obsessions. From the purges and blacklists that branded countless Americans as un-American. Murrow, a great journalist, stood up to McCarthy. Donald Trump does business the McCarthy way. He deals in specters: immigrants, and Muslims, and brown people, and Black people, and LGBTQ people. As with McCarthy, however, the real danger comes from Trump’s obsessions, not from these imagined enemies. American freedom is in decline. The freedom to think, because thought depends on truth. The freedom to dissent, because Trump believes he has “the right to do whatever I want as president.” The freedom to breathe because Trumpism — its nepotism, its cozying to dictators, its incessant volume — is suffocating. The freedom inextricable from the American idea that I, a naturalized American, hold sacred with an unreasonable ardor. No, we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. We can only defend those who trample human dignity and human rights. As Trump has done with cavalier abandon. Is it unreasonable to see renewal in a 77-year-old man, Joe Biden? No. We live in the real world, where the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. Indecency demands the restoration of decency. That’s ground zero of this election. The choice was starkly evident in the televised town hall events Thursday as Trump spouted wild far-right conspiracy theories while Biden had the self-deprecating honesty to say that if he lost, it could suggest he’s “a lousy candidate.” Biden is not a lousy candidate; he is a good man, a brave man. I doff my hat to any parent who survives with such dignity the loss of two of his four children. Of McCarthy, Murrow observed: “He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ ” The fault is in ourselves. Time for Americans to look in the mirror — and realize their America is irreplaceable if it is lost.

Trump, or the last stand of White America

Bosses of tech giants like Facebook, Twitter and Google have declined to appear before a panel of US Senate, said a Republican Senator. The panel had unanimously voted on Thursday to summon Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter's Jack Dorsey and Google's Sundar Pichai. They were to be questioned by the Commerce Committee of the US Senate on disinformation, online scams and a range of social ills.

"After extending an invitation to these executives, I regret that they have again declined to participate and answer questions on the record about issues that are so visible and urgent to the American people," said Republican Senator Roger Wicker, who chairs the panel.

Big tech platforms face heightened scrutiny on monopoly concerns. They are also on line for failing to stop the spread of hateful content.

"We have questioned how they are protecting and securing the data of millions of Americans, we've explored how they're combating disinformation fraud and other online scams, we've examined whether they are providing a safe and secure internet experience for children and teens," said Wicker.

Big Tech firms, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, have seen their economic power grow in recent years and accelerate during the coronavirus pandemic, dominating a range of economic sectors.

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-fumes-as-facebook-twitter-limit-reach-of-smoking-gun-article-on-biden-and-his-son-335344">Trump fumes as Facebook, Twitter limit reach of 'smoking gun' article on Biden and his son</a>

President Donald Trump and his allies have claimed tech platforms are biased against conservatives, despite his own vast social media following.

Democrats meanwhile have expressed concerns over monopoly abuses and the failure of social media to stem misinformation from Trump himself.

Lawmakers from both parties have called for changes to the legal liability shield of online services under a law known as Section 230, claiming the provision enables toxic and harmful content to proliferate.

Google and Facebook are also under scrutiny by federal and state antitrust regulators.

(With inputs from AFP)

Bosses of tech giants like Facebook, Twitter and Google have declined to appear before a panel of US Senate, said a Republican Senator. The panel had unanimously voted on Thursday to summon Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter's Jack Dorsey and Google's Sundar Pichai.

Bosses of tech giants like Facebook, Twitter and Google have declined to appear before a panel of US Senate, said a Republican Senator. The panel had unanimously voted on Thursday to summon Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter's Jack Dorsey and Google's Sundar Pichai. They were to be questioned by the Commerce Committee of the US Senate on disinformation, online scams and a range of social ills. "After extending an invitation to these executives, I regret that they have again declined to participate and answer questions on the record about issues that are so visible and urgent to the American people," said Republican Senator Roger Wicker, who chairs the panel. Big tech platforms face heightened scrutiny on monopoly concerns. They are also on line for failing to stop the spread of hateful content. "We have questioned how they are protecting and securing the data of millions of Americans, we've explored how they're combating disinformation fraud and other online scams, we've examined whether they are providing a safe and secure internet experience for children and teens," said Wicker. Big Tech firms, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, have seen their economic power grow in recent years and accelerate during the coronavirus pandemic, dominating a range of economic sectors. Also Read | Trump fumes as Facebook, Twitter limit reach of 'smoking gun' article on Biden and his son President Donald Trump and his allies have claimed tech platforms are biased against conservatives, despite his own vast social media following. Democrats meanwhile have expressed concerns over monopoly abuses and the failure of social media to stem misinformation from Trump himself. Lawmakers from both parties have called for changes to the legal liability shield of online services under a law known as Section 230, claiming the provision enables toxic and harmful content to proliferate. Google and Facebook are also under scrutiny by federal and state antitrust regulators. (With inputs from AFP)

Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai decline to appear before US Senate

US President Donald Trump on Thursday fired an angry tweet against Facebook and Twitter's decision to limit online distribution of a New York Post article on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The story raises allegations against Hunter Biden and his actions that involved Joe Biden.

"So terrible that Facebook and Twitter took down the story of “Smoking Gun” emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in the&nbsp;@NYPost. It is only the beginning for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician. REPEAL SECTION 230!!!" tweeted Trump.

The New York Post story says that Hunter Biden tried introducing a top executive of a Ukrainian firm to his father Joe Biden. Hunter Biden worked for this firm.

Donald Trump has been in dock in past over allegations that he colluded with Russia to secure victory in US Presidential elections 2020. Donald Trump's son was investigated for his contact with a Russian lawyer who had Russian spy agency as her client.

Given the background, latest allegations against Hunter Biden and Joe Biden may well present Trump with an opportunity to score political brownie points close to elections.

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trumps-son-barron-tests-positive-for-covid-19-335340">Trump's son Barron tests positive for COVID-19</a>

Meanwhile, Facebook Spokesperson Andy Stone said that the New York Post story had enough for it to be eligible for a fact check.

"While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook's third-party fact-checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform," tweeted Andy Stone, Facebook Spokesperson.

Spokesperson for Biden campaign defended Joe Biden and Hunter Biden by saying that there was "no wrongdoing" on part of Joe Biden. He added that New York Post never reached out to Biden campaign for their response on this.

US President Donald Trump on Thursday fired an angry tweet against Facebook and Twitter's decision to limit online distribution of a New York Post article on Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

US President Donald Trump on Thursday fired an angry tweet against Facebook and Twitter's decision to limit online distribution of a New York Post article on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The story raises allegations against Hunter Biden and his actions that involved Joe Biden. "So terrible that Facebook and Twitter took down the story of “Smoking Gun” emails related to Sleepy Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in the @NYPost. It is only the beginning for them. There is nothing worse than a corrupt politician. REPEAL SECTION 230!!!" tweeted Trump. The New York Post story says that Hunter Biden tried introducing a top executive of a Ukrainian firm to his father Joe Biden. Hunter Biden worked for this firm. Donald Trump has been in dock in past over allegations that he colluded with Russia to secure victory in US Presidential elections 2020. Donald Trump's son was investigated for his contact with a Russian lawyer who had Russian spy agency as her client. Given the background, latest allegations against Hunter Biden and Joe Biden may well present Trump with an opportunity to score political brownie points close to elections. Also Read | Trump's son Barron tests positive for COVID-19 Meanwhile, Facebook Spokesperson Andy Stone said that the New York Post story had enough for it to be eligible for a fact check. "While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook's third-party fact-checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform," tweeted Andy Stone, Facebook Spokesperson. Spokesperson for Biden campaign defended Joe Biden and Hunter Biden by saying that there was "no wrongdoing" on part of Joe Biden. He added that New York Post never reached out to Biden campaign for their response on this.

Trump fumes as Facebook, Twitter limit reach of 'smoking gun' article on Biden and his son

President Donald Trump's U.S. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on Wednesday said it is an "open question" as to whether Trump could pardon himself while adding that the nation's top judicial body "can't control" whether a president obeys its decisions.

On the third day of her four-day Judiciary Committee hearing, Barrett also sought to allay Democratic fears that she would be an automatic vote to strike down the Obamacare healthcare law in a case due to be argued Nov. 10, promising an "open mind."

Barrett sidestepped questions from senators on the ability of presidents to evade efforts to hold them accountable.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/barretts-testimony-is-a-deft-mix-of-expertise-and-evasion-335202" hreflang="en">Barrett’s testimony is a deft mix of expertise and evasion</a>

Trump has said he has the "absolute power" to pardon himself, part of his executive clemency authority. Asked by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy whether a president has such power, Barrett said the "question has never been litigated."

"That question may or may not arise but it's one that calls for legal analysis of what the scope of the pardon power is. So because it would be opining on an open question when I haven't gone through the judicial process to decide it, it's not one on which I can offer a view," Barrett added.

Trump faces a criminal investigation about the conduct of himself and his businesses by a New York City prosecutor who is seeking his financial records and tax returns. Trump also has issued executive clemency to political allies and friends.

Barrett, a conservative federal appellate judge, is the Republican president's third selection for a lifetime job on the Supreme Court. Trump has asked the Senate, controlled by his fellow Republicans, to confirm her before the Nov. 3 U.S. election.

Barrett said "no one is above the law" but twice declined to answer directly when Leahy asked her whether a president who refuses to comply with a court order is a threat to the U.S. constitutional system of checks and balances within the three branches of government.

"The Supreme Court can't control whether or not the president obeys," Barrett said.

Supreme Court rulings, Barrett said, have the "force of law" but the court lacks enforcement power and relies on the other branches of government.

"A court can pronounce the law and issue a judgment but it lacks control over how the political branches respond to it," Barrett added.

Barrett declined to discuss whether Trump is violating the U.S. Constitution's "emoluments" clause with his business dealings, objecting to Leahy's characterization of the provision as an anti-corruption measure. The provision bar presidents from taking gifts or payments from foreign and state governments without congressional approval.

"I don't know if I would characterize it as an anti-corruption clause," Barrett said, adding that it was designed to "prevent foreign countries from having influence."

OBAMACARE CASE

Barrett could be on the high court for arguments in a challenge by Trump and Republican-led states to the 2010 law formally called the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that has helped millions of Americans obtain medical coverage and includes protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

In response to Democratic suggestions that she would vote to strike down Obamacare in its entirety if one part is deemed unlawful, Barrett said that if a statute can be saved, it is a judge's duty to do so.

Barrett indicated she favors of a broad reading of the "severability doctrine" in which courts assume that when one provision of a law is unlawful, Congress would want the rest of the statute to remain in place. The Supreme Court has taken such an approach in recent years.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/barrett-declining-to-detail-legal-views-says-she-will-not-be-a-pawn-of-trump-335274" hreflang="en">Barrett, declining to detail legal views, says she will not be ‘a pawn’ of Trump</a>

"I think insofar as it tries to effectuate what Congress would have wanted, it's the court and Congress working hand in hand," Barrett said of the doctrine.

When judges address the legal question raised in the Obamacare case, the "presumption" is that Congress did not intend the whole statute to fall, Barrett added.

"If I were on the court, and if a case involving the ACA came before me, I would approach it with an open mind," Barrett told Republican Senator John Cornyn.

Barrett has criticized previous Supreme Court rulings upholding Obamacare.

ABORTION RIGHTS

Barrett has faced questions on contentious social issues including abortion, which as a devout Catholic she personally opposes.

"This is history being made folks," Senator Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the panel, said. "This is the first time in American history that we've nominated a woman who is unashamedly pro-life and embraces her faith without apology, and she's going to the court."

Barrett, 48, would be the fifth woman ever to serve on the court.

Barrett reiterated her Tuesday comments that the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide was not a "super-precedent" that could never potentially be overturned. Barrett also said she has an "open mind" on whether to allow television coverage of Supreme Court proceedings.

Barrett's confirmation would give the court a 6-3 conservative majority. Republicans have a 53-47 Senate majority, making Barrett's confirmation a virtual certainty.

Democrats have said the winner of the presidential election should get to fill the court's vacancy left by the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The four-day hearing is scheduled to end on Thursday with testimony from outside witnesses. Republicans are preparing for a committee vote next week and a final Senate confirmation vote before the end of October. Trump nominated Barrett to a lifetime post on the court on Sept. 26.

President Donald Trump's U.S. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on Wednesday said it is an "open question" as to whether Trump could pardon himself while adding that the nation's top judicial body "can't control" whether a president obeys its decisions.

President Donald Trump's U.S. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on Wednesday said it is an "open question" as to whether Trump could pardon himself while adding that the nation's top judicial body "can't control" whether a president obeys its decisions. On the third day of her four-day Judiciary Committee hearing, Barrett also sought to allay Democratic fears that she would be an automatic vote to strike down the Obamacare healthcare law in a case due to be argued Nov. 10, promising an "open mind." Barrett sidestepped questions from senators on the ability of presidents to evade efforts to hold them accountable. Also read: Barrett’s testimony is a deft mix of expertise and evasion Trump has said he has the "absolute power" to pardon himself, part of his executive clemency authority. Asked by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy whether a president has such power, Barrett said the "question has never been litigated." "That question may or may not arise but it's one that calls for legal analysis of what the scope of the pardon power is. So because it would be opining on an open question when I haven't gone through the judicial process to decide it, it's not one on which I can offer a view," Barrett added. Trump faces a criminal investigation about the conduct of himself and his businesses by a New York City prosecutor who is seeking his financial records and tax returns. Trump also has issued executive clemency to political allies and friends. Barrett, a conservative federal appellate judge, is the Republican president's third selection for a lifetime job on the Supreme Court. Trump has asked the Senate, controlled by his fellow Republicans, to confirm her before the Nov. 3 U.S. election. Barrett said "no one is above the law" but twice declined to answer directly when Leahy asked her whether a president who refuses to comply with a court order is a threat to the U.S. constitutional system of checks and balances within the three branches of government. "The Supreme Court can't control whether or not the president obeys," Barrett said. Supreme Court rulings, Barrett said, have the "force of law" but the court lacks enforcement power and relies on the other branches of government. "A court can pronounce the law and issue a judgment but it lacks control over how the political branches respond to it," Barrett added. Barrett declined to discuss whether Trump is violating the U.S. Constitution's "emoluments" clause with his business dealings, objecting to Leahy's characterization of the provision as an anti-corruption measure. The provision bar presidents from taking gifts or payments from foreign and state governments without congressional approval. "I don't know if I would characterize it as an anti-corruption clause," Barrett said, adding that it was designed to "prevent foreign countries from having influence." OBAMACARE CASE Barrett could be on the high court for arguments in a challenge by Trump and Republican-led states to the 2010 law formally called the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that has helped millions of Americans obtain medical coverage and includes protections for people with pre-existing conditions. In response to Democratic suggestions that she would vote to strike down Obamacare in its entirety if one part is deemed unlawful, Barrett said that if a statute can be saved, it is a judge's duty to do so. Barrett indicated she favors of a broad reading of the "severability doctrine" in which courts assume that when one provision of a law is unlawful, Congress would want the rest of the statute to remain in place. The Supreme Court has taken such an approach in recent years. Also read: Barrett, declining to detail legal views, says she will not be ‘a pawn’ of Trump "I think insofar as it tries to effectuate what Congress would have wanted, it's the court and Congress working hand in hand," Barrett said of the doctrine. When judges address the legal question raised in the Obamacare case, the "presumption" is that Congress did not intend the whole statute to fall, Barrett added. "If I were on the court, and if a case involving the ACA came before me, I would approach it with an open mind," Barrett told Republican Senator John Cornyn. Barrett has criticized previous Supreme Court rulings upholding Obamacare. ABORTION RIGHTS Barrett has faced questions on contentious social issues including abortion, which as a devout Catholic she personally opposes. "This is history being made folks," Senator Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the panel, said. "This is the first time in American history that we've nominated a woman who is unashamedly pro-life and embraces her faith without apology, and she's going to the court." Barrett, 48, would be the fifth woman ever to serve on the court. Barrett reiterated her Tuesday comments that the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide was not a "super-precedent" that could never potentially be overturned. Barrett also said she has an "open mind" on whether to allow television coverage of Supreme Court proceedings. Barrett's confirmation would give the court a 6-3 conservative majority. Republicans have a 53-47 Senate majority, making Barrett's confirmation a virtual certainty. Democrats have said the winner of the presidential election should get to fill the court's vacancy left by the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The four-day hearing is scheduled to end on Thursday with testimony from outside witnesses. Republicans are preparing for a committee vote next week and a final Senate confirmation vote before the end of October. Trump nominated Barrett to a lifetime post on the court on Sept. 26.

Supreme Court can't control a president, says Trump's nominee Barrett

US election 2020 - The US presidential polls are due in three weeks - 20 days precisely. On November 3, the United States of America will vote in&nbsp; one of the most bitterly contested election in recent history.

Donald Trump wants to secure four more years at the White House. Trump says he has recovered from the coronavirus, or “kung flu"&nbsp;as he likes to call it.

Eager to prove himself healthy and lively despite days of hospitalisation, Trump has hit the campaign trail again.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/were-going-to-crush-the-virus-very-quickly-its-happening-already-says-trump-in-pennsylvania-rally-335096">We're going to crush the virus very quickly, says Trump in Pennsylvania rally</a>

On Tuesday, he made a grand return at a campaign rally in Orlando, Florida. Trump declared he was in perfect shape, and even tossed face masks into the audience. Additionally, he offered to give everyone a “big fat kiss”.

His supporters rejoiced:

“I think this covid is all political. Just to make Trump look bad”, Sandra Colanese, a Trump supporter said.

“I think, I think the virus is been extremely politicated [sic]. It is, it is been used to lockdown this country, which is what'll happen if Joe Biden is reelected. They will lock down the nation,” another supporter said.

"I'm not concerned, I've been working all the time. Ain't got no covid. I take vitamins, I eat healthy, I just ain't worried about it”, Mark Nobel, another supporter of Trump said.

The US president is racing against the clock to make up for the time he lost after testing positive.

On October 14, Trump took his campaign to Pennsylvania - a battleground state that he had won by a narrow margin in 2016. Speaking in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Trump declared how he did not care about being politically correct.

He also requested “suburban women” to like him. And once again offered to kiss everybody, every single man and woman in the audience.

“So can I ask you to do me a favour? Suburban women, would you please like me? (cheers) please. I saved your damn neighbourhood, ok?&nbsp; The other thing, i don't have that much time to be that nice. You know, I can do it, but I got to go quickly”, Donald Trump said.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/give-you-a-big-fat-kiss-donald-trump-dances-at-florida-rally-post-virus-treatment-335141" hreflang="en">'Give you a big fat kiss': Donald Trump 'dances' at Florida rally post-virus treatment</a>

“… And now i'm immune, they tell me. I'm immune. I could come down and start kissing everybody. I'll kiss every guy, man and woman, man and woman. Look at that guy, how handsome he is. I'll kiss him. Not with a lot of enjoyment, but that's okay.”, the US president added.

Sometime later, the US president decided to dance to the 1978 mega-hit YMCA. Trump plans on holding many such electrifying rallies in the coming days - in Iowa, North Carolina, Wisconsin.

The second presidential debate was supposed to take place on October 15, and has now been cancelled by the commission on presidential debates.

Joe Biden is insisting on a virtual debate, citing Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis. Trump, on the hand hand, is not too keen on the idea of a virtual debate.He wants the face off to be live and in-person.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/us-election">Click here for more US election stories</a>

US election 2020 - The US presidential polls are due in three weeks - 20 days precisely. On November 3, the United States of America will vote in one of the most bitterly contested election in recent history.

US election 2020 - The US presidential polls are due in three weeks - 20 days precisely. On November 3, the United States of America will vote in one of the most bitterly contested election in recent history. Donald Trump wants to secure four more years at the White House. Trump says he has recovered from the coronavirus, or “kung flu" as he likes to call it. Eager to prove himself healthy and lively despite days of hospitalisation, Trump has hit the campaign trail again. Also read: We're going to crush the virus very quickly, says Trump in Pennsylvania rally On Tuesday, he made a grand return at a campaign rally in Orlando, Florida. Trump declared he was in perfect shape, and even tossed face masks into the audience. Additionally, he offered to give everyone a “big fat kiss”. His supporters rejoiced: “I think this covid is all political. Just to make Trump look bad”, Sandra Colanese, a Trump supporter said. “I think, I think the virus is been extremely politicated [sic]. It is, it is been used to lockdown this country, which is what'll happen if Joe Biden is reelected. They will lock down the nation,” another supporter said. "I'm not concerned, I've been working all the time. Ain't got no covid. I take vitamins, I eat healthy, I just ain't worried about it”, Mark Nobel, another supporter of Trump said. The US president is racing against the clock to make up for the time he lost after testing positive. On October 14, Trump took his campaign to Pennsylvania - a battleground state that he had won by a narrow margin in 2016. Speaking in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Trump declared how he did not care about being politically correct. He also requested “suburban women” to like him. And once again offered to kiss everybody, every single man and woman in the audience. “So can I ask you to do me a favour? Suburban women, would you please like me? (cheers) please. I saved your damn neighbourhood, ok? The other thing, i don't have that much time to be that nice. You know, I can do it, but I got to go quickly”, Donald Trump said. Also read: 'Give you a big fat kiss': Donald Trump 'dances' at Florida rally post-virus treatment “… And now i'm immune, they tell me. I'm immune. I could come down and start kissing everybody. I'll kiss every guy, man and woman, man and woman. Look at that guy, how handsome he is. I'll kiss him. Not with a lot of enjoyment, but that's okay.”, the US president added. Sometime later, the US president decided to dance to the 1978 mega-hit YMCA. Trump plans on holding many such electrifying rallies in the coming days - in Iowa, North Carolina, Wisconsin. The second presidential debate was supposed to take place on October 15, and has now been cancelled by the commission on presidential debates. Joe Biden is insisting on a virtual debate, citing Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis. Trump, on the hand hand, is not too keen on the idea of a virtual debate.He wants the face off to be live and in-person. Click here for more US election stories

US election 2020: With 20 days to go, Trump offers kisses to his supporters at Florida rally

Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Wednesday grilled Donald Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, on Obamacare. &nbsp;Amy Coney Barrett, who will be a judge in US Supreme Court if US Senate confirms her, is currently facing Senate Judiciary Committee for hearing in order to get clearance. Democratic Party fears that if confirmed, Barrett will be instrumental in striking down Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) that has given health cover to millions of Americans.

Harris asked Barrett whether she knew President Trump was seeking to nominate a judge who would strike down Affordable Care Act.

Without naming the President, Amy Coney Barrett said that she did not recall seeing or hearing those statements.&nbsp;

During the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Harris also focussed on abortion rights and the record of the woman who held the seat Barrett would fill.

"As the Senate considers filling the seat of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was straightforward enough in her confirmation hearing to say that the right to choose is, quote, essential to woman's equality, unquote," Harris said. "I would suggest that we not pretend that we don't know how this nominee views a woman's right to choose and make her own health care decisions."

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trumps-supreme-court-pick-says-she-is-not-hostile-to-obamacare-dodges-on-abortion-335070">Trump's Supreme Court pick says she is not 'hostile' to Obamacare, dodges on abortion</a>

Amy Coney Barrett is known for her conservative views on a range of issues. Her confirmation to US Supreme Court will see conservative judges have a 6-3 majority over those having liberal views.

Republican Party has long resented Affordable Care Act brought in effect by former US President Barack Obama. A hearing on the Act is due on November 10.

Amt Coney Barrett opted not to say whether she would step aside from taking part in the hearing as Democrats have requested.

(With Reuters inputs)

Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Wednesday grilled Donald Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, on Obamacare. Amy Coney Barrett, who will be a judge in US Supreme Court if US Senate confirms her, is currently facing Senate Judiciary Committee for hearing in order to get clearance.

Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Wednesday grilled Donald Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, on Obamacare. Amy Coney Barrett, who will be a judge in US Supreme Court if US Senate confirms her, is currently facing Senate Judiciary Committee for hearing in order to get clearance. Democratic Party fears that if confirmed, Barrett will be instrumental in striking down Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) that has given health cover to millions of Americans. Harris asked Barrett whether she knew President Trump was seeking to nominate a judge who would strike down Affordable Care Act. Without naming the President, Amy Coney Barrett said that she did not recall seeing or hearing those statements. During the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Harris also focussed on abortion rights and the record of the woman who held the seat Barrett would fill. "As the Senate considers filling the seat of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was straightforward enough in her confirmation hearing to say that the right to choose is, quote, essential to woman's equality, unquote," Harris said. "I would suggest that we not pretend that we don't know how this nominee views a woman's right to choose and make her own health care decisions." Also Read | Trump's Supreme Court pick says she is not 'hostile' to Obamacare, dodges on abortion Amy Coney Barrett is known for her conservative views on a range of issues. Her confirmation to US Supreme Court will see conservative judges have a 6-3 majority over those having liberal views. Republican Party has long resented Affordable Care Act brought in effect by former US President Barack Obama. A hearing on the Act is due on November 10. Amt Coney Barrett opted not to say whether she would step aside from taking part in the hearing as Democrats have requested. (With Reuters inputs)

Kamala Harris grills Barrett on Obamacare, she sidesteps question

Judge Amy Coney Barrett flatly refused Tuesday to pledge that she would recuse herself if a dispute over the Nov. 3 election came before the Supreme Court, insisting that despite her nomination by President Donald Trump, she would not “allow myself to be used as a pawn to decide this election for the American people.”

During a nearly 12-hour question-and-answer session, Barrett evaded Democratic senators’ efforts to pin down her views on the Affordable Care Act, abortion rights, gay marriage and a possible election-related case. She played down her history of taking conservative stances in legal writings and personal statements, arguing that she might view issues differently as a sitting justice.

“I have not made any commitments or deals or anything like that,” she told the Senate Judiciary Committee on her second day of confirmation hearings. “I’m not here on a mission to destroy the Affordable Care Act. I’m just here to apply the law and adhere to the rule of law.”

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/barretts-testimony-is-a-deft-mix-of-expertise-and-evasion-335202" hreflang="en">Barrett’s testimony is a deft mix of expertise and evasion</a>

After days of hammering Barrett over the health care law, Democrats dismissed her assurances as essentially meaningless. Trump did not need to secure any specific promises from Barrett, they argued. He selected her precisely because her honestly held legal views would achieve the end he is after.

“I am then left with looking at the tracks of your record and where it leads the American people,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., “and I think it leads us to a place that’s going to have severe repercussions for them.”

Barrett’s refusal to discuss specific cases or commit to recusing from particular matters was in line with a decades-old playbook used by Supreme Court nominees to avoid giving substantive answers during confirmation hearings. But her attempts to deflect such questions were more conspicuous than usual, given how explicit Trump has been about how he would want his nominees to rule.

The president has stated that he wants Barrett confirmed by Election Day given that he anticipates an election dispute and is “counting” on the court to “look at the ballots.” And he has said he wants justices who would “do the right thing” and invalidate the Affordable Care Act.

“I am gravely concerned by what I see,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. “I believe your views are sincere, but I also think you genuinely think the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.”

Referring to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose seat she would be taking if confirmed, he added that if Trump and Republicans “are able to swing the court out of balance by replacing Justice Ginsburg by someone whose views may be significantly to the right, the health of a majority of Americans may well be in peril.”

Republicans, rushing to secure Barrett’s confirmation before the election, lavished her with praise for her legal qualifications and personal virtues. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the judiciary panel’s chairman, called her “one of the most qualified people of your generation,” while Sen. John Cornyn of Texas encouraged her to hold up the blank notepad in front of her at the witness table to show that she was speaking entirely without notes.

“That is impressive,” Cornyn said.

The marathon day of televised questioning offered senators and Americans their first detailed look at Barrett’s conservative legal philosophy, heavily influenced by former Justice Antonin Scalia, and a window into her personal life as a 48-year-old judge and mother of seven children. She will face another day of questioning Wednesday.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/honour-justice-ginsburgs-dying-wish-hillary-opposes-barretts-appointment-before-us-elections-335117" hreflang="en">Honour Justice Ginsburg's 'dying wish': Hillary opposes Barrett's appointment before US elections</a>

Barrett was most eager to discuss her legal philosophy on broad strokes. She expounded at length on the tenets of textualism and originalism, approaches made popular by Scalia that privilege plain reading of legal texts and seek to minimize a judge’s own interpretations of statute or the Constitution.

“Judges cannot just wake up one day and say, ‘I have an agenda — I like guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion,’ and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world,” she said.

But that was more or less as much as she would say about any one issue. Barrett invoked her predecessors — including Ginsburg — in refusing to say how she would rule on all manner of politically potent issues. Democrats were exasperated.

Pressed by Coons, Barrett said she would take the question of recusal on any election-related cases “very seriously,” but pointed to strict guidelines that govern such matters rather than making a commitment in advance.

“I would certainly hope that all members of this committee would have more confidence in my integrity than to think that I would allow myself to be used as a pawn to decide this election for the American people,” she said.

On the Affordable Care Act, an issue Democrats see as central to their success in next month’s elections, Barrett offered even less insight into her thinking. If confirmed, she could be hearing arguments in a Republican challenge to the law in November.

At one point, Klobuchar displayed a 2015 Twitter post by Trump in which he said as president he would appoint judges who would “do the right thing unlike Bush’s appointee John Roberts on ObamaCare.” The tweet was a reference to Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinions that left the health law in place.

“I can’t speak to what the president has said on Twitter,” Barrett said. “He hasn’t said any of that to me.”

Barrett also resisted attempts by Democrats to argue that her own academic writing criticizing Roberts meant she would certainly vote to strike it down in the case coming before the court.

“One of the upsides of being an academic is you can speak for yourself,” she told Klobuchar. “It’s difficult for me to say how I would have decided that case if I had to go through the whole process of judiciary decision-making.”

Besides, she told Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the panel’s top Democrat, the legal question now before the court — whether the entire law must be struck down because one part of it has been deemed flawed, or whether the flawed part is “severable” from the rest — poses a different question.

Democrats likewise argued Barrett would be a vote to chip away at or outright strike down the Roe v. Wade decision establishing abortion rights. Conservatives believe she will and have enthusiastically backed her nomination as a result. The nominee gave neither side much help, though.

When Feinstein reminded Barrett that Scalia had famously written that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overturned, Barrett refused to clarify her own views.

“I have no agenda to try and overrule Casey,” she said, referring to another abortion rights case. “I have an agenda to stick to the rule of law and decide cases as they come.”

Still, she said later that she did not consider Roe “superprecedent,” which she defined as “precedent that is so well established that it would be unthinkable that it would ever be overruled.” Democrats took the answer to mean she would be open to overturning the ruling.

“I would suggest that we not pretend that we don’t know how this nominee views a woman’s right to choose and to make her own health care decisions,” said Sen. Kamala Harris of California, the Democrats’ nominee for vice president.

Multiple senators presented Barrett with a 2006 advertisement she had signed in support of overturning Roe v. Wade and its “barbaric legacy.” She said she had signed it quickly in the back of a church when she was a private citizen, but would not do so now as a judge.

“I’m happy to talk about views I’ve expressed when I was a private citizen, but now I’m a judge, so I cannot publicly express views,” she told Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

In more personal moments, often elicited by Republicans looking to cool the heat, Barrett spoke of a lapsed love of the piano and of rusty French language skills. She implied that mockery of her Catholic faith, her large family and her decision to adopt two of her children from Haiti had been painful.

She said that she and her husband, Jesse Barrett, “knew that our faith would be caricatured, we knew our family would be attacked” if Trump nominated her, and had discussed in advance whether to submit to that level of scrutiny.

While she said her faith was important to her, Barrett — a member of People of Praise, a tight-knit Christian community inspired by the traditions of charismatic Christianity — said it would have no bearing on her work as a justice.

“I have a life brimming with people who have made different choices, and I have never tried, in my personal life, to impose my choices on them,” said Barrett, who teaches at Notre Dame, a Catholic university, and serves on an appeals court in Chicago. “The same is true professionally.”

She spoke in deeply personal terms about her family’s experience on matters of race, saying that she had wept with her 17-year-old daughter, Vivian, who is Black, after the killing of George Floyd in police custody in May in Minneapolis.

Senate Republicans alternated between burnishing Barrett’s image and arguing that Democrats were inflating the risk posed to the Affordable Care Act, abortion rights and gay marriage. In doing so, said Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, they were acting as if the Supreme Court were a supergovernmental entity ruling the country.

At many points, senators on both sides simply used their 30-minute block of time to give speeches, forgoing perhaps waning opportunity to solicit public answers from Barrett before she takes a lifetime appointment.

“It speaks volumes that collectively they have had very few questions for you and virtually none calling into question your credentials, which are impeccable, your record and what I think has been an extraordinary life you’ve led,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett flatly refused Tuesday to pledge that she would recuse herself if a dispute over the Nov. 3 election came before the Supreme Court, insisting that despite her nomination by President Donald Trump, she would not “allow myself to be used as a pawn to decide this election for the American people.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett flatly refused Tuesday to pledge that she would recuse herself if a dispute over the Nov. 3 election came before the Supreme Court, insisting that despite her nomination by President Donald Trump, she would not “allow myself to be used as a pawn to decide this election for the American people.” During a nearly 12-hour question-and-answer session, Barrett evaded Democratic senators’ efforts to pin down her views on the Affordable Care Act, abortion rights, gay marriage and a possible election-related case. She played down her history of taking conservative stances in legal writings and personal statements, arguing that she might view issues differently as a sitting justice. “I have not made any commitments or deals or anything like that,” she told the Senate Judiciary Committee on her second day of confirmation hearings. “I’m not here on a mission to destroy the Affordable Care Act. I’m just here to apply the law and adhere to the rule of law.” Also read: Barrett’s testimony is a deft mix of expertise and evasion After days of hammering Barrett over the health care law, Democrats dismissed her assurances as essentially meaningless. Trump did not need to secure any specific promises from Barrett, they argued. He selected her precisely because her honestly held legal views would achieve the end he is after. “I am then left with looking at the tracks of your record and where it leads the American people,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., “and I think it leads us to a place that’s going to have severe repercussions for them.” Barrett’s refusal to discuss specific cases or commit to recusing from particular matters was in line with a decades-old playbook used by Supreme Court nominees to avoid giving substantive answers during confirmation hearings. But her attempts to deflect such questions were more conspicuous than usual, given how explicit Trump has been about how he would want his nominees to rule. The president has stated that he wants Barrett confirmed by Election Day given that he anticipates an election dispute and is “counting” on the court to “look at the ballots.” And he has said he wants justices who would “do the right thing” and invalidate the Affordable Care Act. “I am gravely concerned by what I see,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. “I believe your views are sincere, but I also think you genuinely think the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.” Referring to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose seat she would be taking if confirmed, he added that if Trump and Republicans “are able to swing the court out of balance by replacing Justice Ginsburg by someone whose views may be significantly to the right, the health of a majority of Americans may well be in peril.” Republicans, rushing to secure Barrett’s confirmation before the election, lavished her with praise for her legal qualifications and personal virtues. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the judiciary panel’s chairman, called her “one of the most qualified people of your generation,” while Sen. John Cornyn of Texas encouraged her to hold up the blank notepad in front of her at the witness table to show that she was speaking entirely without notes. “That is impressive,” Cornyn said. The marathon day of televised questioning offered senators and Americans their first detailed look at Barrett’s conservative legal philosophy, heavily influenced by former Justice Antonin Scalia, and a window into her personal life as a 48-year-old judge and mother of seven children. She will face another day of questioning Wednesday. Also read: Honour Justice Ginsburg's 'dying wish': Hillary opposes Barrett's appointment before US elections Barrett was most eager to discuss her legal philosophy on broad strokes. She expounded at length on the tenets of textualism and originalism, approaches made popular by Scalia that privilege plain reading of legal texts and seek to minimize a judge’s own interpretations of statute or the Constitution. “Judges cannot just wake up one day and say, ‘I have an agenda — I like guns, I hate guns, I like abortion, I hate abortion,’ and walk in like a royal queen and impose their will on the world,” she said. But that was more or less as much as she would say about any one issue. Barrett invoked her predecessors — including Ginsburg — in refusing to say how she would rule on all manner of politically potent issues. Democrats were exasperated. Pressed by Coons, Barrett said she would take the question of recusal on any election-related cases “very seriously,” but pointed to strict guidelines that govern such matters rather than making a commitment in advance. “I would certainly hope that all members of this committee would have more confidence in my integrity than to think that I would allow myself to be used as a pawn to decide this election for the American people,” she said. On the Affordable Care Act, an issue Democrats see as central to their success in next month’s elections, Barrett offered even less insight into her thinking. If confirmed, she could be hearing arguments in a Republican challenge to the law in November. At one point, Klobuchar displayed a 2015 Twitter post by Trump in which he said as president he would appoint judges who would “do the right thing unlike Bush’s appointee John Roberts on ObamaCare.” The tweet was a reference to Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinions that left the health law in place. “I can’t speak to what the president has said on Twitter,” Barrett said. “He hasn’t said any of that to me.” Barrett also resisted attempts by Democrats to argue that her own academic writing criticizing Roberts meant she would certainly vote to strike it down in the case coming before the court. “One of the upsides of being an academic is you can speak for yourself,” she told Klobuchar. “It’s difficult for me to say how I would have decided that case if I had to go through the whole process of judiciary decision-making.” Besides, she told Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the panel’s top Democrat, the legal question now before the court — whether the entire law must be struck down because one part of it has been deemed flawed, or whether the flawed part is “severable” from the rest — poses a different question. Democrats likewise argued Barrett would be a vote to chip away at or outright strike down the Roe v. Wade decision establishing abortion rights. Conservatives believe she will and have enthusiastically backed her nomination as a result. The nominee gave neither side much help, though. When Feinstein reminded Barrett that Scalia had famously written that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overturned, Barrett refused to clarify her own views. “I have no agenda to try and overrule Casey,” she said, referring to another abortion rights case. “I have an agenda to stick to the rule of law and decide cases as they come.” Still, she said later that she did not consider Roe “superprecedent,” which she defined as “precedent that is so well established that it would be unthinkable that it would ever be overruled.” Democrats took the answer to mean she would be open to overturning the ruling. “I would suggest that we not pretend that we don’t know how this nominee views a woman’s right to choose and to make her own health care decisions,” said Sen. Kamala Harris of California, the Democrats’ nominee for vice president. Multiple senators presented Barrett with a 2006 advertisement she had signed in support of overturning Roe v. Wade and its “barbaric legacy.” She said she had signed it quickly in the back of a church when she was a private citizen, but would not do so now as a judge. “I’m happy to talk about views I’ve expressed when I was a private citizen, but now I’m a judge, so I cannot publicly express views,” she told Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. In more personal moments, often elicited by Republicans looking to cool the heat, Barrett spoke of a lapsed love of the piano and of rusty French language skills. She implied that mockery of her Catholic faith, her large family and her decision to adopt two of her children from Haiti had been painful. She said that she and her husband, Jesse Barrett, “knew that our faith would be caricatured, we knew our family would be attacked” if Trump nominated her, and had discussed in advance whether to submit to that level of scrutiny. While she said her faith was important to her, Barrett — a member of People of Praise, a tight-knit Christian community inspired by the traditions of charismatic Christianity — said it would have no bearing on her work as a justice. “I have a life brimming with people who have made different choices, and I have never tried, in my personal life, to impose my choices on them,” said Barrett, who teaches at Notre Dame, a Catholic university, and serves on an appeals court in Chicago. “The same is true professionally.” She spoke in deeply personal terms about her family’s experience on matters of race, saying that she had wept with her 17-year-old daughter, Vivian, who is Black, after the killing of George Floyd in police custody in May in Minneapolis. Senate Republicans alternated between burnishing Barrett’s image and arguing that Democrats were inflating the risk posed to the Affordable Care Act, abortion rights and gay marriage. In doing so, said Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, they were acting as if the Supreme Court were a supergovernmental entity ruling the country. At many points, senators on both sides simply used their 30-minute block of time to give speeches, forgoing perhaps waning opportunity to solicit public answers from Barrett before she takes a lifetime appointment. “It speaks volumes that collectively they have had very few questions for you and virtually none calling into question your credentials, which are impeccable, your record and what I think has been an extraordinary life you’ve led,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

Barrett, declining to detail legal views, says she will not be ‘a pawn’ of Trump

A large majority of Indian Americans plan to cast ballots for the Democratic ticket of former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris, according to a survey released Wednesday, despite elaborate overtures by the Trump White House to win their support.

The survey, by the polling firm YouGov, found that 72% of Indian American voters planned to vote for Biden, with just 22% planning to go for President Donald Trump.

While Indian Americans hold a wide variety of political views, the presence on the Democratic ticket of Harris, whose mother immigrated from Chennai, India, has had a galvanizing effect on a voting bloc that could help Biden in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan.

Their potential impact on the presidential election highlights the growing importance of Indian Americans in U.S. politics: As the second-largest immigrant group in the country, Indian Americans are gaining influence, making political donations, vocally supporting candidates and causes and, most notably, running for office, from the school board to Congress.

“We have arrived,” said Ramesh Kapur, a Democratic Party fundraiser.

Kapur, 72, who owns a gas processing and distributing company in Medford, Massachusetts, and supported Harris’ 2016 Senate race and her run for the 2020 presidential nomination, said that Indian Americans donated $3.3 million to the Biden Victory Fund at a single fundraising event he organized in September.

But Harris isn’t the only reason many Indian Americans support the Democratic ticket this year, Kapur said. They are also turned off by the president’s frequent attacks on immigrants and people of color, despite standing to gain from Trump’s economic policies.

“Even though they are supposedly saving taxes, to the Indian American community, when you get the president of the United States saying to an elected official, ‘Go home,’ that scares the hell out of us,” he said, referring to Trump’s tweet in July 2019 about a group of four minority congresswomen.

While the approximately 2 million Indian American voters comprise less than 1% of the electorate, they are voters who both parties seek to attract. The larger Indian American population is twice as rich as the rest of the country as a whole, and two times as likely to hold a bachelor’s degree or higher.

And at the rate the community is growing — doubling in size every decade since the 1980s — they represent an increasingly formidable force in U.S. politics.

The apparently wide support among Indian Americans for Biden comes despite high-profile efforts by Trump and the Republicans to win their votes.

A year ago, Trump drew 50,000 people to a rally in Houston with India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, an event that organizers called “Howdy, Modi.” The prime minister, a right-wing populist whose bellicose views on two of India’s rivals, Pakistan and China, helped win his party a landslide reelection in 2019, and who has generally received support from the Indian diaspora, lauded Trump’s name as “familiar to every person on the planet.” He returned the favor in February with an even larger spectacle for Trump in India.

The rallies did win Trump some support, said M.R. Rangaswami, the founder of Indiaspora, a nonpartisan group that promotes the interests of Indians in the United States.

“Trump has invested in India, has invested in Indian Americans with the ‘Howdy, Modi’ visit and with going to India, and it has shown results,” Rangaswami said. “The question is: Will it outweigh the Kamala factor?”

Indeed, the survey reported that 45% of respondents said that Harris’ nomination had made them more likely to vote, and 49% said they were more enthusiastic about supporting Biden. It also showed that respondents cared more about health care, the economy and the environment than U.S.-India relations.

YouGov conducted the survey as part of a research project by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Trump has also lost some favor in India, where the news media criticized him for casting doubt on the integrity of Indian government coronavirus statistics during the presidential debate last month.

Rangaswami, who attended the Houston rally and is registered as an independent, said the audience appeared to consist largely of older Indian Americans, who he said leaned conservative and most likely voted for Trump in 2016.

That Indian American voters lean liberal overall is partly because a younger generation, born in the United States, is far less convinced by the conservative cultural mores brought by their parents and grandparents from India, Rangaswami said.

“There’s definitely that schism in the Indian American community,” said Raj Bhutoria, 20, a junior at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, who has dreamed of running for office since working as a volunteer on the successful 2016 campaign of Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., an Indian American.

Khanna’s victory and Harris’ nomination show that “now being Indian is no longer a barrier to run for office or get elected,” Bhutoria said.

Despite wishing that the Democratic nominees were more progressive on some issues, Bhutoria said he was supporting them — though with perhaps less gusto than his parents, Ajay and Vinita Bhutoria, Bay Area tech entrepreneurs in their 40s who, as avowed liberals, are somewhat of an exception for their generation. They have starred in three ads supporting the Biden-Harris campaign, set to Bollywood music and featuring slogans in a variety of Indian languages.

Bhutoria cited Trump’s trade disputes with India, pressure on countries not to trade with Iran — an important source of cheap oil for India — and the suspension of H-1B visas for high-skilled workers, a large number of which go to Indians.

“The ‘Howdy, Modi’ event was wonderful to look at, but they were only beautiful picture moments,” he said. “Trump has not done much for India or Indians Americans.”

A large majority of Indian Americans plan to cast ballots for the Democratic ticket of former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris, according to a survey released Wednesday, despite elaborate overtures by the Trump White House to win their support.

A large majority of Indian Americans plan to cast ballots for the Democratic ticket of former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris, according to a survey released Wednesday, despite elaborate overtures by the Trump White House to win their support. The survey, by the polling firm YouGov, found that 72% of Indian American voters planned to vote for Biden, with just 22% planning to go for President Donald Trump. While Indian Americans hold a wide variety of political views, the presence on the Democratic ticket of Harris, whose mother immigrated from Chennai, India, has had a galvanizing effect on a voting bloc that could help Biden in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan. Their potential impact on the presidential election highlights the growing importance of Indian Americans in U.S. politics: As the second-largest immigrant group in the country, Indian Americans are gaining influence, making political donations, vocally supporting candidates and causes and, most notably, running for office, from the school board to Congress. “We have arrived,” said Ramesh Kapur, a Democratic Party fundraiser. Kapur, 72, who owns a gas processing and distributing company in Medford, Massachusetts, and supported Harris’ 2016 Senate race and her run for the 2020 presidential nomination, said that Indian Americans donated $3.3 million to the Biden Victory Fund at a single fundraising event he organized in September. But Harris isn’t the only reason many Indian Americans support the Democratic ticket this year, Kapur said. They are also turned off by the president’s frequent attacks on immigrants and people of color, despite standing to gain from Trump’s economic policies. “Even though they are supposedly saving taxes, to the Indian American community, when you get the president of the United States saying to an elected official, ‘Go home,’ that scares the hell out of us,” he said, referring to Trump’s tweet in July 2019 about a group of four minority congresswomen. While the approximately 2 million Indian American voters comprise less than 1% of the electorate, they are voters who both parties seek to attract. The larger Indian American population is twice as rich as the rest of the country as a whole, and two times as likely to hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. And at the rate the community is growing — doubling in size every decade since the 1980s — they represent an increasingly formidable force in U.S. politics. The apparently wide support among Indian Americans for Biden comes despite high-profile efforts by Trump and the Republicans to win their votes. A year ago, Trump drew 50,000 people to a rally in Houston with India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, an event that organizers called “Howdy, Modi.” The prime minister, a right-wing populist whose bellicose views on two of India’s rivals, Pakistan and China, helped win his party a landslide reelection in 2019, and who has generally received support from the Indian diaspora, lauded Trump’s name as “familiar to every person on the planet.” He returned the favor in February with an even larger spectacle for Trump in India. The rallies did win Trump some support, said M.R. Rangaswami, the founder of Indiaspora, a nonpartisan group that promotes the interests of Indians in the United States. “Trump has invested in India, has invested in Indian Americans with the ‘Howdy, Modi’ visit and with going to India, and it has shown results,” Rangaswami said. “The question is: Will it outweigh the Kamala factor?” Indeed, the survey reported that 45% of respondents said that Harris’ nomination had made them more likely to vote, and 49% said they were more enthusiastic about supporting Biden. It also showed that respondents cared more about health care, the economy and the environment than U.S.-India relations. YouGov conducted the survey as part of a research project by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania. Trump has also lost some favor in India, where the news media criticized him for casting doubt on the integrity of Indian government coronavirus statistics during the presidential debate last month. Rangaswami, who attended the Houston rally and is registered as an independent, said the audience appeared to consist largely of older Indian Americans, who he said leaned conservative and most likely voted for Trump in 2016. That Indian American voters lean liberal overall is partly because a younger generation, born in the United States, is far less convinced by the conservative cultural mores brought by their parents and grandparents from India, Rangaswami said. “There’s definitely that schism in the Indian American community,” said Raj Bhutoria, 20, a junior at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, who has dreamed of running for office since working as a volunteer on the successful 2016 campaign of Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., an Indian American. Khanna’s victory and Harris’ nomination show that “now being Indian is no longer a barrier to run for office or get elected,” Bhutoria said. Despite wishing that the Democratic nominees were more progressive on some issues, Bhutoria said he was supporting them — though with perhaps less gusto than his parents, Ajay and Vinita Bhutoria, Bay Area tech entrepreneurs in their 40s who, as avowed liberals, are somewhat of an exception for their generation. They have starred in three ads supporting the Biden-Harris campaign, set to Bollywood music and featuring slogans in a variety of Indian languages. Bhutoria cited Trump’s trade disputes with India, pressure on countries not to trade with Iran — an important source of cheap oil for India — and the suspension of H-1B visas for high-skilled workers, a large number of which go to Indians. “The ‘Howdy, Modi’ event was wonderful to look at, but they were only beautiful picture moments,” he said. “Trump has not done much for India or Indians Americans.”

US election 2020: Indian-Americans overwhelmingly support Joe Biden, new poll shows

President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett said on Tuesday at her US&nbsp;Senate confirmation hearing she is not hostile to the Obamacare law, as Democrats have suggested, and declined to specify whether she believes landmark rulings legalizing abortion and gay marriage were properly decided.

Barrett, a conservative federal appellate judge, answered questions from senators for the first time on the second day of her Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing. It gave Barrett a chance to respond to Democrats who have opposed her because of her potential as a justice to undermine the 2010 healthcare law and its protection for patients with pre-existing conditions.

Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/us-election-2020-trump-defends-supreme-court-pick-barrett-331308" hreflang="en">US election 2020: Trump defends Supreme Court pick Barrett</a>

Trump has asked the Senate to confirm Barrett before the Nov. 3 election in which he is seeking a second term in office.

Barrett declined to say if she would step aside from any election-related cases that reach the court. The Republican president has said he expects the Supreme Court to decide the election's outcome as he faces Democratic challenger Joe Biden. Barrett said no one at the White House sought a commitment from her on how she would rule on that or any issue.

"It would be a gross violation of judicial independence for me to make any such commitment or for me to be asked about that case," Barrett told the committee of possible election cases.

Barrett declined to say whether she would consider stepping aside, as Democrats have requested, from an Obamacare case due to be argued at the court a week after Election Day in which Trump and Republican-led states are seeking to invalidate the law formally called the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Barrett noted that the new case centers upon a different legal issue than two previous Supreme Court rulings that upheld Obamacare, which she had criticized. Barrett declined to say how she would approach the new case, but said, "I am not hostile to the ACA."

Barrett also said the White House did not seek her assurance that she would vote to strike down the law.

"Absolutely not. I was never asked - and if I had, that would have been a short conversation," Barrett said.

The Affordable Care Act is Democratic former President Barack Obama's signature domestic policy achievement and has enabled millions of Americans to obtain medical coverage. Democrats have blasted Trump for trying to kill Obamacare amid a deadly pandemic.

Republicans have a 53-47 Senate majority, making Barrett's confirmation a virtual certainty. If confirmed, Barrett, 48, would give conservatives a 6-3 Supreme Court majority. She is Trump's third Supreme Court appointment.

ABORTION RULING

Like other Supreme Court nominees before her, Barrett opted to sidestep some questions on some matters that could come before the court.

Abortion rights advocates have expressed concern that Barrett would vote to overturn the 1973 ruling called Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion nationwide. Asked about that ruling, Barrett said she would consider the various factors usually applied when justices weigh whether to overturn a precedent. 
 
Also read:&nbsp;<a href="http://13.235.153.162/world/white-house-ceremony-for-amy-coney-barrett-was-a-superspreader-event-dr-fauci-334172" hreflang="en">White House ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett was a 'superspreader' event: Dr Fauci</a>

"I promise to do that for any issue that comes up, abortion or anything else. I'll follow the law," Barrett said.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the panel's top Democrat, asked Barrett whether she agreed with her mentor, the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, that Roe v. Wade can was wrongly decided and should be overturned.

After Barrett declined to answer, Feinstein told her, "So on something that is really a major cause with major effects on over half of the population of this country - who are women, after all - it's distressing not to get a straight answer."

Religious conservatives are hoping the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade.

Republican committee chairman Lindsey Graham, asked Barrett, a devout Catholic and a favorite of religious conservatives, whether she could set aside her religious beliefs in making decisions as a justice.

"I can," Barrett said, adding that she expected that as a nominee her religious faith would be "caricatured."

During her 2017 confirmation hearing after Trump nominated her to her current post on the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Feinstein told Barrett that "the dogma lives loudly in you" - a comment that some Republicans said represented anti-religious bigotry.

Questioned by Feinstein, Barrett declined to say whether she agreed with Scalia that the 2015 Supreme Court ruling called Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing gay marriage nationwide was wrongly decided.

"I have no agenda and I do want to be clear that I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and I would not discriminate on the basis of sexual preference," Barrett said.

Asked about George Floyd, a Black man killed by police in Minneapolis in May in an incident that triggered widespread protests, Barrett said the issue was "very, very personal for my family" because of her seven children, two - adopted from Haiti - are Black. Barrett said she and one of her daughters, Vivian, cried together after seeing the video.

"It's a difficult one for us like it is for Americans all over the country," Barrett said.

Barrett said "racism persists" in the United States but declined to give her view on whether it is systemic or how it should be addressed.

Barrett was nominated to a lifetime post on the court on Sept. 26 by Trump to replace the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The four-day confirmation hearing is a key step before a full Senate vote by the end of October on Barrett's confirmation.

President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett said on Tuesday at her US Senate confirmation hearing she is not hostile to the Obamacare law, as Democrats have suggested, and declined to specify whether she believes landmark rulings legalizing abortion and gay marriage were properly decided.

President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett said on Tuesday at her US Senate confirmation hearing she is not hostile to the Obamacare law, as Democrats have suggested, and declined to specify whether she believes landmark rulings legalizing abortion and gay marriage were properly decided. Barrett, a conservative federal appellate judge, answered questions from senators for the first time on the second day of her Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing. It gave Barrett a chance to respond to Democrats who have opposed her because of her potential as a justice to undermine the 2010 healthcare law and its protection for patients with pre-existing conditions. Also read: US election 2020: Trump defends Supreme Court pick Barrett Trump has asked the Senate to confirm Barrett before the Nov. 3 election in which he is seeking a second term in office. Barrett declined to say if she would step aside from any election-related cases that reach the court. The Republican president has said he expects the Supreme Court to decide the election's outcome as he faces Democratic challenger Joe Biden. Barrett said no one at the White House sought a commitment from her on how she would rule on that or any issue. "It would be a gross violation of judicial independence for me to make any such commitment or for me to be asked about that case," Barrett told the committee of possible election cases. Barrett declined to say whether she would consider stepping aside, as Democrats have requested, from an Obamacare case due to be argued at the court a week after Election Day in which Trump and Republican-led states are seeking to invalidate the law formally called the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Barrett noted that the new case centers upon a different legal issue than two previous Supreme Court rulings that upheld Obamacare, which she had criticized. Barrett declined to say how she would approach the new case, but said, "I am not hostile to the ACA." Barrett also said the White House did not seek her assurance that she would vote to strike down the law. "Absolutely not. I was never asked - and if I had, that would have been a short conversation," Barrett said. The Affordable Care Act is Democratic former President Barack Obama's signature domestic policy achievement and has enabled millions of Americans to obtain medical coverage. Democrats have blasted Trump for trying to kill Obamacare amid a deadly pandemic. Republicans have a 53-47 Senate majority, making Barrett's confirmation a virtual certainty. If confirmed, Barrett, 48, would give conservatives a 6-3 Supreme Court majority. She is Trump's third Supreme Court appointment. ABORTION RULING Like other Supreme Court nominees before her, Barrett opted to sidestep some questions on some matters that could come before the court. Abortion rights advocates have expressed concern that Barrett would vote to overturn the 1973 ruling called Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion nationwide. Asked about that ruling, Barrett said she would consider the various factors usually applied when justices weigh whether to overturn a precedent. Also read: White House ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett was a 'superspreader' event: Dr Fauci "I promise to do that for any issue that comes up, abortion or anything else. I'll follow the law," Barrett said. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the panel's top Democrat, asked Barrett whether she agreed with her mentor, the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, that Roe v. Wade can was wrongly decided and should be overturned. After Barrett declined to answer, Feinstein told her, "So on something that is really a major cause with major effects on over half of the population of this country - who are women, after all - it's distressing not to get a straight answer." Religious conservatives are hoping the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. Republican committee chairman Lindsey Graham, asked Barrett, a devout Catholic and a favorite of religious conservatives, whether she could set aside her religious beliefs in making decisions as a justice. "I can," Barrett said, adding that she expected that as a nominee her religious faith would be "caricatured." During her 2017 confirmation hearing after Trump nominated her to her current post on the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Feinstein told Barrett that "the dogma lives loudly in you" - a comment that some Republicans said represented anti-religious bigotry. Questioned by Feinstein, Barrett declined to say whether she agreed with Scalia that the 2015 Supreme Court ruling called Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing gay marriage nationwide was wrongly decided. "I have no agenda and I do want to be clear that I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and I would not discriminate on the basis of sexual preference," Barrett said. Asked about George Floyd, a Black man killed by police in Minneapolis in May in an incident that triggered widespread protests, Barrett said the issue was "very, very personal for my family" because of her seven children, two - adopted from Haiti - are Black. Barrett said she and one of her daughters, Vivian, cried together after seeing the video. "It's a difficult one for us like it is for Americans all over the country," Barrett said. Barrett said "racism persists" in the United States but declined to give her view on whether it is systemic or how it should be addressed. Barrett was nominated to a lifetime post on the court on Sept. 26 by Trump to replace the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The four-day confirmation hearing is a key step before a full Senate vote by the end of October on Barrett's confirmation.

Trump's Supreme Court pick says she is not 'hostile' to Obamacare, dodges on abortion

President Xi Jinping of China recently pledged&nbsp;to the United Nations General Assembly that the country would become carbon neutral by 2060. It was an unexpected announcement from the world’s greatest emitter of carbon dioxide.

President Trump fired back: “Those who attack America’s exceptional environmental record while ignoring China’s rampant pollution are not interested in the environment. They only want to punish America, and I will not stand for it.”

Mr. Trump’s criticism is both self-serving and not entirely wrong. Despite China’s growing commitment to environmental protection and huge investments in renewable energy — more than 45 percent of the world’s total in 2017, according to the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation — there is no clear evidence that the stricter and more centralized enforcement measures introduced by Mr. Xi have brought truly significant gains against pollution so far.

Steel production in China, after peaking in 2014 and dropping for two years, has risen again since 2017. So have coal production — China produced half of the world’s total last year&nbsp;— and coal consumption. (The share of coal in China’s total energy consumption has dropped a bit, though, and in 2018 dipped to below 60 percent for the first time.)

According to a briefing paper by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air from June, China had more coal-fired capacity under construction or in planning at the time (249.6 gigawatts) than the existing capacity of either the United States or India.

Now, too, the Chinese government’s rush to stimulate an economic recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic gives officials at all levels reason to “go all out to make up for the loss,” as the deputy governor of the northwestern province of Gansu, Li Peixing, urged this summer.

More construction permits reportedly were issued for coal-fired power plants in China in the first half of this year than in 2018 or 2019. By May, the concentrations of four air pollutants exceeded levels recorded a year earlier, according to the Finland-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

Mr. Xi’s recent vow to make China carbon neutral by 2060 might be inspired by the environmental version of the Kuznets curve hypothesis: Growth might increase pollution and environmental degradation at early stages of economic development but will eventually decrease them, when incomes are high. For the theory to pan out with China, however, Beijing would have to shift growth models, and move away from its reliance on heavy industry as the engine of growth and from its dependence on coal.

It doesn’t seem inclined to, and Washington doesn’t have much standing when it comes to holding Beijing to account for its environmental record.

The problem predates the Trump administration. While I was conducting fieldwork in the northern province of Shanxi several years ago, a local official told me that, considering how much better China’s environmental record was than India’s, foreign governments’ loud demands that China curb pollution must be a plot to contain the country’s rise.

Since then, Mr. Trump’s move to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate accord — under which the Obama administration had committed to reducing America’s emissions and to contributing $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund — has further undermined, predictably, Washington’s credibility on environmental issues. The same goes for the Trump administration’s&nbsp;on domestic environmental regulations: undoing the Clean Power Plan, promising to revitalize the coal industry, easing restrictions on oil and gas drilling, and moving to lift limits on chemicals that can be used near streams and wetlands.

Rising tensions between the United States and China, and the suspension of most official mechanisms for bilateral dialogue, have also diminished the United States’ influence.

Beijing, facing what it considers to be an increasingly hostile international context, is trying to make the Chinese economy more self-reliant. Even liberal-minded Chinese leaders, such as Vice Premier Liu He — Mr. Xi’s top economic adviser and his point person for trade negotiations with the United States — is promoting a strategy of so-called, <a href="http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/xxjxs/2020-09/05/c_1126455277.htm">which prioritizes “domestic circulation</a>,” or&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-xi-speeds-up-inward-economic-shift-11597224602">the development of domestic consumption and market</a>, partly to reduce China’s dependence on foreign trade.

As China moves to become more self-sufficient economically, Washington’s leverage over the country’s development and environmental standards is likely to decline.

For years, many Chinese people looked at U.S. diplomatic missions in China as the only reliable source for air-quality data. In late July, amid a rapid downward spiral in U.S.-China relations, the U.S. consulate in the southwestern city of Chengdu was closed. A month later, an American journalist <a href="https://twitter.com/luoshanji/status/1297344062207344641">tweeted</a>, “Joke among Chengdu friends is how much better the air quality has become since the U.S. consulate closed”— at least going by <a href="https://aqicn.org/city/chengdu/">air-quality data</a>&nbsp;provided by the Chinese government.

Environmental degradation in China is bad for the United States, too.

Air pollution from Asia has been the cause at times of as much as <a href="https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/17/2943/2017/">65 percent of the increase in ozone levels</a>&nbsp;in some parts of America. A 2014 study of 2006 data for air pollution in China found that when strong winds blew across the Pacific Ocean, pollutants produced by <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/111/5/1736">China’s export industries</a>&nbsp;accounted for, at worst, 4 percent to 6 percent of the carbon monoxide recorded in the Western United States, up to 11 percent of the black carbon pollution and 12 percent to 24 percent of sulfate concentrations. <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/03/08/391056439/why-chinas-pollution-could-be-behind-our-cold-snowy-winters">NASA physicists</a> have said that air pollutants from China and other Asian countries may “contribute to colder and snowier winters in the United States.”

These facts should be of great concern for the Trump administration — if only because they are of great concern for Americans. According to <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/04/21/u-s-views-of-china-increasingly-negative-amid-coronavirus-outbreak/">a survey by the Pew Research Center in April</a>, China’s impact on the global environment topped American people’s list of concerns about China.

Yet Washington’s attempt to decouple the U.S. and Chinese economies will only make matters worse. In&nbsp;his agenda <a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/trump-campaign-announces-president-trumps-2nd-term-agenda-fighting-for-you">for a second term in office</a>, Mr. Trump vows to deny federal contracts to companies that outsource activities to China, while offering major deductions to companies in essential industries, like pharmaceutics and robotics, that bring back their manufacturing to the United States. If that shift happens, though, the production of pollutants that Washington had essentially exported to China along with its outsourcing could return to America.

In 2010, China’s export sector accounted for <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/9/2/024010/meta">1.8 million tons of the fine particulate matter known as PM2.5</a>&nbsp;in China’s air, with 60 percent of these emissions attributed to the production of exports for the United States and other countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. More recent analyses, or even data, are hard to come by, but <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15883-9">a study from May published in Nature Communications</a>&nbsp;found that in 2012, “14.6 percent of China’s industrial-related CO2 emissions were driven by foreign final consumption,” with the United States, Hong Kong and Japan being “the top three regions with the largest carbon footprints in China.”

President Trump likes to cast U.S.-China relations as a zero-sum game: During the 2015 presidential campaign <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/10-times-trump-attacked-china-trade-relations-us/story?id=46572567">he said</a>, “I beat the people from China. I win against China. You can win against China if you’re smart.” But when it comes to environmental protection, decoupling is a lose-lose proposition for both countries.

President Xi Jinping of China recently pledged to the United Nations General Assembly that the country would become carbon neutral by 2060. It was an unexpected announcement from the world’s greatest emitter of carbon dioxide.

President Xi Jinping of China recently pledged to the United Nations General Assembly that the country would become carbon neutral by 2060. It was an unexpected announcement from the world’s greatest emitter of carbon dioxide. President Trump fired back: “Those who attack America’s exceptional environmental record while ignoring China’s rampant pollution are not interested in the environment. They only want to punish America, and I will not stand for it.” Mr. Trump’s criticism is both self-serving and not entirely wrong. Despite China’s growing commitment to environmental protection and huge investments in renewable energy — more than 45 percent of the world’s total in 2017, according to the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation — there is no clear evidence that the stricter and more centralized enforcement measures introduced by Mr. Xi have brought truly significant gains against pollution so far. Steel production in China, after peaking in 2014 and dropping for two years, has risen again since 2017. So have coal production — China produced half of the world’s total last year — and coal consumption. (The share of coal in China’s total energy consumption has dropped a bit, though, and in 2018 dipped to below 60 percent for the first time.) According to a briefing paper by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air from June, China had more coal-fired capacity under construction or in planning at the time (249.6 gigawatts) than the existing capacity of either the United States or India. Now, too, the Chinese government’s rush to stimulate an economic recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic gives officials at all levels reason to “go all out to make up for the loss,” as the deputy governor of the northwestern province of Gansu, Li Peixing, urged this summer. More construction permits reportedly were issued for coal-fired power plants in China in the first half of this year than in 2018 or 2019. By May, the concentrations of four air pollutants exceeded levels recorded a year earlier, according to the Finland-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Mr. Xi’s recent vow to make China carbon neutral by 2060 might be inspired by the environmental version of the Kuznets curve hypothesis: Growth might increase pollution and environmental degradation at early stages of economic development but will eventually decrease them, when incomes are high. For the theory to pan out with China, however, Beijing would have to shift growth models, and move away from its reliance on heavy industry as the engine of growth and from its dependence on coal. It doesn’t seem inclined to, and Washington doesn’t have much standing when it comes to holding Beijing to account for its environmental record. The problem predates the Trump administration. While I was conducting fieldwork in the northern province of Shanxi several years ago, a local official told me that, considering how much better China’s environmental record was than India’s, foreign governments’ loud demands that China curb pollution must be a plot to contain the country’s rise. Since then, Mr. Trump’s move to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate accord — under which the Obama administration had committed to reducing America’s emissions and to contributing $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund — has further undermined, predictably, Washington’s credibility on environmental issues. The same goes for the Trump administration’s on domestic environmental regulations: undoing the Clean Power Plan, promising to revitalize the coal industry, easing restrictions on oil and gas drilling, and moving to lift limits on chemicals that can be used near streams and wetlands. Rising tensions between the United States and China, and the suspension of most official mechanisms for bilateral dialogue, have also diminished the United States’ influence. Beijing, facing what it considers to be an increasingly hostile international context, is trying to make the Chinese economy more self-reliant. Even liberal-minded Chinese leaders, such as Vice Premier Liu He — Mr. Xi’s top economic adviser and his point person for trade negotiations with the United States — is promoting a strategy of so-called, which prioritizes “domestic circulation,” or the development of domestic consumption and market, partly to reduce China’s dependence on foreign trade. As China moves to become more self-sufficient economically, Washington’s leverage over the country’s development and environmental standards is likely to decline. For years, many Chinese people looked at U.S. diplomatic missions in China as the only reliable source for air-quality data. In late July, amid a rapid downward spiral in U.S.-China relations, the U.S. consulate in the southwestern city of Chengdu was closed. A month later, an American journalist tweeted, “Joke among Chengdu friends is how much better the air quality has become since the U.S. consulate closed”— at least going by air-quality data provided by the Chinese government. Environmental degradation in China is bad for the United States, too. Air pollution from Asia has been the cause at times of as much as 65 percent of the increase in ozone levels in some parts of America. A 2014 study of 2006 data for air pollution in China found that when strong winds blew across the Pacific Ocean, pollutants produced by China’s export industries accounted for, at worst, 4 percent to 6 percent of the carbon monoxide recorded in the Western United States, up to 11 percent of the black carbon pollution and 12 percent to 24 percent of sulfate concentrations. NASA physicists have said that air pollutants from China and other Asian countries may “contribute to colder and snowier winters in the United States.” These facts should be of great concern for the Trump administration — if only because they are of great concern for Americans. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center in April, China’s impact on the global environment topped American people’s list of concerns about China. Yet Washington’s attempt to decouple the U.S. and Chinese economies will only make matters worse. In his agenda for a second term in office, Mr. Trump vows to deny federal contracts to companies that outsource activities to China, while offering major deductions to companies in essential industries, like pharmaceutics and robotics, that bring back their manufacturing to the United States. If that shift happens, though, the production of pollutants that Washington had essentially exported to China along with its outsourcing could return to America. In 2010, China’s export sector accounted for 1.8 million tons of the fine particulate matter known as PM2.5 in China’s air, with 60 percent of these emissions attributed to the production of exports for the United States and other countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. More recent analyses, or even data, are hard to come by, but a study from May published in Nature Communications found that in 2012, “14.6 percent of China’s industrial-related CO2 emissions were driven by foreign final consumption,” with the United States, Hong Kong and Japan being “the top three regions with the largest carbon footprints in China.” President Trump likes to cast U.S.-China relations as a zero-sum game: During the 2015 presidential campaign he said, “I beat the people from China. I win against China. You can win against China if you’re smart.” But when it comes to environmental protection, decoupling is a lose-lose proposition for both countries.

When the US and China fight, it is the environment that suffers

When President Trump introduced Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his third nominee to the Supreme Court, he praised her “unyielding loyalty to the Constitution.” The implicit premise was that her fidelity to the nation’s founding document as a judge could excuse his violations of the Constitution as president.

But the highest test of politicians’ constitutional scruples is not how they populate another branch of government. It is how they carry out their responsibilities in their own spheres. By that test, Mr. Trump’s loyalty to the Constitution has yielded to political convenience time and again.

The rhetoric surrounding Judge Barrett’s nomination, which the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to take up on Monday, reflects a troubling strain of constitutional decay: the belief that presidents and legislators fight over policy, while the Constitution is the province of the courts. This view suggests that elected officials can check the box on their own oaths to the Constitution not by upholding them but rather by outsourcing the defense of the Constitution to judges.

Last month, Mr. Trump declared that “apart from matters of war and peace, the nomination of a Supreme Court justice is the most important decision an American President can make.”

Exhorting his fellow Republicans to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the president also said that “we were put in this position of power and importance to make decisions for the people who so proudly elected us, the most important of which has long been considered to be the selection of United States Supreme Court Justices.” Not faithfully executing the law, which Article II of the Constitution requires presidents to do?

Similarly, in late 2017, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader now shepherding Judge Barrett’s nomination, likewise cited the confirmation of conservative judges as the most important achievement of his 36 years in the U.S. Senate. Not the essential constitutional power of Congress, deliberating on legislation?

James Madison assumed that all federal officeholders, not simply judges, were required to maintain the Constitution. As a member of the House of Representatives, Madison routinely participated in debates about whether proposed legislation was constitutional, not just whether it was expedient. As president, his view of executive power was so modest that he would not even lobby members of Congress over dinner, as his predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, had done.

Mr. Trump has not felt comparably constrained. He operates in an alternate constitutional reality in which criticism of him is treason; the process of electing a chief magistrate requires the incumbent to accept the result; and Article II accords him, as Mr. Trump put it last year, “the right to do whatever I want as president.”

In keeping with the tradition of his recent predecessors, he has asserted executive power without any sense of constitutional self-control, sometimes in startling ways. Campaigning for the White House, he famously claimed he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose voters.

Last year, one of his lawyers asserted that occupants of the office were immune from prosecution even if they did commit murder, a view the Supreme Court rejected as placing the president above the law. Recently, when Congress did not agree with him about economic relief in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Trump issued a series of executive orders attempting to achieve through decree what constitutional processes denied him.

For its part, Congress suffers from the opposite problem. Rather than expanding its power, it often declines to exercise it at all. During the Trump era, Mr. McConnell, once known as an institutionalist who defended the Senate’s prerogatives, has abetted this surrender of legislative authority.

When a newly inaugurated Mr. Trump used a 1952 law to ban entry into the United States from several Muslim-majority countries, Mr. McConnell raised constitutional objections. As a legislator, he could have addressed them by working to curtail the decades-old legislative authority Mr. Trump cited.

Instead of asserting personal responsibility for the Constitution, though, Mr. McConnell punted to the judiciary: “Ultimately,” he said, “it is going to be decided in the courts as to whether or not this has gone too far.” That is not what Mr. McConnell’s oath says: On the first day of each of his six terms, Mr. McConnell has sworn that he, not someone else, would “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

In February 2019, Mr. Trump’s insistence on funding for his coveted border wall threatened a government shutdown. Mr. McConnell helped avert it by supporting the president’s unconstitutional contention that he could divert funds by declaring a bogus national emergency.

As Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial loomed in late 2019, Mr. McConnell acknowledged with astonishing candor that he did not regard the Senate as independent from the president: “Everything I do during this, I’m coordinating with the White House counsel,” he declared on Fox News.

Mr. McConnell has also rejected attempts to reclaim Congress’s war powers. When the Senate passed a bipartisan resolution to assert Congress’s constitutional authority over potential hostilities with Iran, for example, Mr. McConnell opposed it. He also endorsed Mr. Trump’s end run around Mr. McConnell’s own branch of government on coronavirus relief.

The image of Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell as constitutional defenders because they support originalist judges is itself a strange breed of originalism. It assumes that judges should adhere to the original meaning of the Constitution with respect to everything but the Constitution’s modest view of judicial power. Yet there is no Madisonian case for seeing judges as more responsible for the Constitution than anyone else who holds national office.

In abrogating their own constitutional responsibilities, Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell have often referred to Democratic support of President Barack Obama’s use of unilateral executive authority.

They are correct to note that Democrats were also complicit in constitutional abuses. Mr. Obama’s executive orders on topics from health care to immigration extended the imperial presidency into the domestic realm. Many of the Democrats opposing Mr. Trump’s assertions of executive power now were quiet then.

But this situational constitutionalism is exactly the problem, and a party whose platform proclaims “a rebirth of constitutional government” bears a particular responsibility to break the cycle. It cannot do so through judges alone because the Constitution is not merely a judicial instrument. Far from it. Every elected official is a constitutional custodian. If Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell — or their eventual successors — want to proclaim themselves champions of America’s founding principles, the best way for them to prove it is not by delegating the Constitution’s defense to judges. It is by undertaking it themselves.

When President Trump introduced Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his third nominee to the Supreme Court, he praised her “unyielding loyalty to the Constitution.” The implicit premise was that her fidelity to the nation’s founding document as a judge could excuse his violations of the Constitution as president.

When President Trump introduced Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his third nominee to the Supreme Court, he praised her “unyielding loyalty to the Constitution.” The implicit premise was that her fidelity to the nation’s founding document as a judge could excuse his violations of the Constitution as president. But the highest test of politicians’ constitutional scruples is not how they populate another branch of government. It is how they carry out their responsibilities in their own spheres. By that test, Mr. Trump’s loyalty to the Constitution has yielded to political convenience time and again. The rhetoric surrounding Judge Barrett’s nomination, which the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to take up on Monday, reflects a troubling strain of constitutional decay: the belief that presidents and legislators fight over policy, while the Constitution is the province of the courts. This view suggests that elected officials can check the box on their own oaths to the Constitution not by upholding them but rather by outsourcing the defense of the Constitution to judges. Last month, Mr. Trump declared that “apart from matters of war and peace, the nomination of a Supreme Court justice is the most important decision an American President can make.” Exhorting his fellow Republicans to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the president also said that “we were put in this position of power and importance to make decisions for the people who so proudly elected us, the most important of which has long been considered to be the selection of United States Supreme Court Justices.” Not faithfully executing the law, which Article II of the Constitution requires presidents to do? Similarly, in late 2017, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader now shepherding Judge Barrett’s nomination, likewise cited the confirmation of conservative judges as the most important achievement of his 36 years in the U.S. Senate. Not the essential constitutional power of Congress, deliberating on legislation? James Madison assumed that all federal officeholders, not simply judges, were required to maintain the Constitution. As a member of the House of Representatives, Madison routinely participated in debates about whether proposed legislation was constitutional, not just whether it was expedient. As president, his view of executive power was so modest that he would not even lobby members of Congress over dinner, as his predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, had done. Mr. Trump has not felt comparably constrained. He operates in an alternate constitutional reality in which criticism of him is treason; the process of electing a chief magistrate requires the incumbent to accept the result; and Article II accords him, as Mr. Trump put it last year, “the right to do whatever I want as president.” In keeping with the tradition of his recent predecessors, he has asserted executive power without any sense of constitutional self-control, sometimes in startling ways. Campaigning for the White House, he famously claimed he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose voters. Last year, one of his lawyers asserted that occupants of the office were immune from prosecution even if they did commit murder, a view the Supreme Court rejected as placing the president above the law. Recently, when Congress did not agree with him about economic relief in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Trump issued a series of executive orders attempting to achieve through decree what constitutional processes denied him. For its part, Congress suffers from the opposite problem. Rather than expanding its power, it often declines to exercise it at all. During the Trump era, Mr. McConnell, once known as an institutionalist who defended the Senate’s prerogatives, has abetted this surrender of legislative authority. When a newly inaugurated Mr. Trump used a 1952 law to ban entry into the United States from several Muslim-majority countries, Mr. McConnell raised constitutional objections. As a legislator, he could have addressed them by working to curtail the decades-old legislative authority Mr. Trump cited. Instead of asserting personal responsibility for the Constitution, though, Mr. McConnell punted to the judiciary: “Ultimately,” he said, “it is going to be decided in the courts as to whether or not this has gone too far.” That is not what Mr. McConnell’s oath says: On the first day of each of his six terms, Mr. McConnell has sworn that he, not someone else, would “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” In February 2019, Mr. Trump’s insistence on funding for his coveted border wall threatened a government shutdown. Mr. McConnell helped avert it by supporting the president’s unconstitutional contention that he could divert funds by declaring a bogus national emergency. As Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial loomed in late 2019, Mr. McConnell acknowledged with astonishing candor that he did not regard the Senate as independent from the president: “Everything I do during this, I’m coordinating with the White House counsel,” he declared on Fox News. Mr. McConnell has also rejected attempts to reclaim Congress’s war powers. When the Senate passed a bipartisan resolution to assert Congress’s constitutional authority over potential hostilities with Iran, for example, Mr. McConnell opposed it. He also endorsed Mr. Trump’s end run around Mr. McConnell’s own branch of government on coronavirus relief. The image of Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell as constitutional defenders because they support originalist judges is itself a strange breed of originalism. It assumes that judges should adhere to the original meaning of the Constitution with respect to everything but the Constitution’s modest view of judicial power. Yet there is no Madisonian case for seeing judges as more responsible for the Constitution than anyone else who holds national office. In abrogating their own constitutional responsibilities, Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell have often referred to Democratic support of President Barack Obama’s use of unilateral executive authority. They are correct to note that Democrats were also complicit in constitutional abuses. Mr. Obama’s executive orders on topics from health care to immigration extended the imperial presidency into the domestic realm. Many of the Democrats opposing Mr. Trump’s assertions of executive power now were quiet then. But this situational constitutionalism is exactly the problem, and a party whose platform proclaims “a rebirth of constitutional government” bears a particular responsibility to break the cycle. It cannot do so through judges alone because the Constitution is not merely a judicial instrument. Far from it. Every elected official is a constitutional custodian. If Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell — or their eventual successors — want to proclaim themselves champions of America’s founding principles, the best way for them to prove it is not by delegating the Constitution’s defense to judges. It is by undertaking it themselves.

Donald Trump’s alternate constitutional reality

A new exhibition at the National Museum of American History shows the challenges that young women are facing growing up in the United States.

Museum exhibition highlights girlhood in America

Under pressure from the federal government, Nevada health officials Friday rescinded a statewide order directing nursing homes to halt the use of two government-issued rapid coronavirus tests that the state had deemed to be inaccurate.

The reversal came shortly after the United States Department of Health and Human Services issued a threatening letter, dated Oct. 8, to Nevada officials. The federal document noted that swift punitive actions could be taken if the state did not promptly revoke its ban, which Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, called “unwise, uninformed and unlawful” and a violation of the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act.

Outside health experts who reviewed the letter, which condemned the state’s actions as “based on a lack of knowledge or bias,” described its tone as “acid.”

In a statement released on Friday, Dr. Ihsan Azzam, Nevada’s chief medical officer, said that he and his colleagues were “very disappointed by the letter received today.” Nevada’s priorities, Azzam said, remained aligned with the federal government’s: to protect “those most vulnerable in our communities from COVID-19.”

The two brands of rapid tests, manufactured by Quidel and Becton, Dickinson and Company, had been shipped en masse to nursing homes around the country in August to address the delays and equipment shortages that for months had stymied laboratory testing. Both tests detect bits of coronavirus protein, or antigens.

In submitting applications to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency clearance, BD and Quidel reported no false positives from their products, and advertised these accuracy rates on their packaging.

But among a sample of 39 positive antigen test results collected from nursing homes across Nevada, 23 were found to be false positives when confirmed by a more accurate laboratory test. The discovery prompted state officials to issue their directive on Oct. 2, urging nursing homes to promptly pivot from antigen tests to other types of tests that look for viral RNA while the discrepancies were being investigated.

Dr. Valerie Fitzhugh, a pathologist at Rutgers University, said the number of false positives the state had reported was “significant” and worthy of scrutiny. “In the meantime, switching to an alternative, accurate method of testing would be the responsible thing to do,” Fitzhugh said. “Nevada was on the right track for trying to fix this issue.” 
&nbsp;

Under pressure from the federal government, Nevada health officials Friday rescinded a statewide order directing nursing homes to halt the use of two government-issued rapid coronavirus tests that the state had deemed to be inaccurate.

Under pressure from the federal government, Nevada health officials Friday rescinded a statewide order directing nursing homes to halt the use of two government-issued rapid coronavirus tests that the state had deemed to be inaccurate. The reversal came shortly after the United States Department of Health and Human Services issued a threatening letter, dated Oct. 8, to Nevada officials. The federal document noted that swift punitive actions could be taken if the state did not promptly revoke its ban, which Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, called “unwise, uninformed and unlawful” and a violation of the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act. Outside health experts who reviewed the letter, which condemned the state’s actions as “based on a lack of knowledge or bias,” described its tone as “acid.” In a statement released on Friday, Dr. Ihsan Azzam, Nevada’s chief medical officer, said that he and his colleagues were “very disappointed by the letter received today.” Nevada’s priorities, Azzam said, remained aligned with the federal government’s: to protect “those most vulnerable in our communities from COVID-19.” The two brands of rapid tests, manufactured by Quidel and Becton, Dickinson and Company, had been shipped en masse to nursing homes around the country in August to address the delays and equipment shortages that for months had stymied laboratory testing. Both tests detect bits of coronavirus protein, or antigens. In submitting applications to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency clearance, BD and Quidel reported no false positives from their products, and advertised these accuracy rates on their packaging. But among a sample of 39 positive antigen test results collected from nursing homes across Nevada, 23 were found to be false positives when confirmed by a more accurate laboratory test. The discovery prompted state officials to issue their directive on Oct. 2, urging nursing homes to promptly pivot from antigen tests to other types of tests that look for viral RNA while the discrepancies were being investigated. Dr. Valerie Fitzhugh, a pathologist at Rutgers University, said the number of false positives the state had reported was “significant” and worthy of scrutiny. “In the meantime, switching to an alternative, accurate method of testing would be the responsible thing to do,” Fitzhugh said. “Nevada was on the right track for trying to fix this issue.”

Nevada revokes halt on rapid antigen testing in nursing homes

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday weighed in on the ongoing standoff between India and China at the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Pompeo asserted that there was a need for closer ties between India and the US in order to counter China. He warned of China's growing might on India's doorstep.

"They absolutely need the United States to be their ally and partner in this fight," Pompeo said of his four-way meetings earlier this week in Tokyo with his counterparts from India, Japan and Australia. He said this in a radio interview with hot Larry O'Connor.

"The Chinese have now begun to amass huge forces against India in the north," Pompeo told radio host Larry O'Connor.

"The world has awakened. The tide's begun to turn. And the United States under President Trump's leadership has now built out a coalition that will push back against the threat," he said.

After his visit to Tokyo, Pompeo is due to travel to New Delhi with Defence Secretary Mark Esper for annual talks with Indian counterparts.

Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun will also travel to India next week to prepare the meeting, the State Department said.

Tensions have soared between India and China since violent hand-to-hand fighting in the Himalayan region of Ladakh in June that left 20 Indian troops dead.

China has acknowledged suffering casualties but has not revealed any figures.

Citing national security grounds, New Delhi has since banned dozens of Chinese apps including TikTok, the blockbuster video-sharing platform which had counted on India as its largest overseas market.

Despite wide concerns about China, India has historically shied away from formal alliances with outside powers under its doctrine of "strategic autonomy."

Asked at the conservative Heritage Foundation about tensions with China, India's ambassador to the United States, Taranjit Singh Sandhu, stressed that the Asian powers had historic linkages and welcomed each other's scholars.

US-India ties have been rapidly growing and "this relationship has a much wider perspective than simply China," Sandhu said.

But he said he expected India and the United States to discuss boosting defense ties during the visit by Pompeo and Esper.

"I would underline that there is a great further potential for our defense cooperation," he said.

(With AFP inputs)

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday weighed in on the ongoing standoff between India and China at the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Pompeo asserted that there was a need for closer ties between India and the US in order to counter China.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday weighed in on the ongoing standoff between India and China at the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Pompeo asserted that there was a need for closer ties between India and the US in order to counter China. He warned of China's growing might on India's doorstep. "They absolutely need the United States to be their ally and partner in this fight," Pompeo said of his four-way meetings earlier this week in Tokyo with his counterparts from India, Japan and Australia. He said this in a radio interview with hot Larry O'Connor. "The Chinese have now begun to amass huge forces against India in the north," Pompeo told radio host Larry O'Connor. "The world has awakened. The tide's begun to turn. And the United States under President Trump's leadership has now built out a coalition that will push back against the threat," he said. After his visit to Tokyo, Pompeo is due to travel to New Delhi with Defence Secretary Mark Esper for annual talks with Indian counterparts. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun will also travel to India next week to prepare the meeting, the State Department said. Tensions have soared between India and China since violent hand-to-hand fighting in the Himalayan region of Ladakh in June that left 20 Indian troops dead. China has acknowledged suffering casualties but has not revealed any figures. Citing national security grounds, New Delhi has since banned dozens of Chinese apps including TikTok, the blockbuster video-sharing platform which had counted on India as its largest overseas market. Despite wide concerns about China, India has historically shied away from formal alliances with outside powers under its doctrine of "strategic autonomy." Asked at the conservative Heritage Foundation about tensions with China, India's ambassador to the United States, Taranjit Singh Sandhu, stressed that the Asian powers had historic linkages and welcomed each other's scholars. US-India ties have been rapidly growing and "this relationship has a much wider perspective than simply China," Sandhu said. But he said he expected India and the United States to discuss boosting defense ties during the visit by Pompeo and Esper. "I would underline that there is a great further potential for our defense cooperation," he said. (With AFP inputs)

Pompeo bats for closer ties with India, says China amassing huge force

For the past decade, gun owners dressed in flak jackets and camouflage fatigues have brought their rifles into the Michigan Legislature at least twice every year, asserting their vehement support for gun rights by displaying weapons in the hallways.

This spring, those gatherings intensified as participants turned what had been a declaration about the Second Amendment into a protest over how far the government could go in limiting individual behavior amid the pandemic. Hundreds turned out to demand an end to lockdowns, social distancing and mask wearing.

Among the demonstrators who stormed into the Capitol to protest those measures were two brothers who have now been charged as part of an extremist plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and to commit other violence. The brothers subscribed to a larger anti-government movement that has evolved in Michigan and throughout the United States over decades, but was spurred on this year by the pandemic, social justice protests and the presidential election.

With its fervent gun culture and its gaping differences between urban and rural populations, Michigan has seen its divisions grow ever wider since at least the 1990s, when armed groups on the right adopted increasingly extreme positions on limiting the government’s power.

The brothers are among 13 men who face a variety of charges related to the kidnapping plot, including terrorism, conspiracy and weapons possession. The authorities said the men were also affiliated with an extremist group called the Wolverine Watchmen, which court documents called “an anti-government, anti-law enforcement militia group.” Such groups have existed in Michigan for decades, most notably in 1994 with the formation of the Michigan Militia.

“There have been militia-type groups in Michigan even before we started using the phrase domestic terrorism,” said Bill Ballenger, a former Republican state senator who represented a rural area. “Before it never got to armed insurrection or an attempt to overthrow the government or assassinate people or anything like that.”

In a sense, experts said, the fight over measures like mask requirements to contain the spread of the virus was the latest example of what these groups see as government overreach. “It is really the perfect issue for far-right conspiracy theorists to rally around,” said Daniel Levitas, a lawyer and the author of “The Terrorist Next Door,” a history of extremist groups.

In the early 1990s, armed groups in Michigan, and around the country, were formed in reaction to bloody federal sieges against Randy Weaver and his family in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and against an armed cult in Waco, Texas, in 1993. The latter ended with the death of 76 people. The new far-right organizations accused the government of tyranny and began conducting paramilitary training and obtaining military equipment.

Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, later convicted of bombing a federal office building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, killing 168 people, attended some of the earliest meetings of the Michigan Militia. The gory details from the trial diminished the appeal of such groups, but they continued to exist.

“It has been a particularly fertile place for them,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

Various violent plots emerged in Michigan during the 1990s and 2000s, including the murder of a state police officer. In the 1990s, there was a plot to attack Camp Grayling in northern Michigan because Russian tanks captured during the gulf war and used there for training were seen as part of a scheme to store armaments for a Communist invasion of Michigan, Levitas said.

In 2010, the FBI arrested five members of a group called the Hutaree and charged them with sedition based on a plot to overthrow the government, but a federal judge threw out most of the charges based on lack of evidence.

Various factors contribute to the current strength of the anti-government movement in Michigan, including the collapse of the auto industry, which stripped the state of countless jobs, said Amy Cooter, a senior sociology lecturer at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who has studied such groups for a decade.

“We’ve always had some groups who had the potential to take things very personally,” she said, and they saw Whitmer’s handling of the pandemic as an affront. “They didn’t think it was being handled appropriately,” she said.

The pandemic hit much harder in cities like Detroit compared with rural areas, and the governor drew criticism from some parts of the state by using executive orders to put into place one-size-fits-all measures that treated counties with very few cases the same way as urban centers. She often clashed with President Donald Trump, who during the protests tweeted, “Liberate Michigan!”

Accusations by the president that Democrats like Whitmer were trying to steal the election have fed a certain paranoia and anxiety about the government that is standard among many of these extremist groups, experts said.

“It’s feeding into their beliefs that Trump will not get a fair shake and they’re seeing the open tensions between Trump and Whitmer,” Cooter said.

The anti-government movements in Michigan share ideology with other far-right groups across the country.

One of the men accused this week, Joseph Morrison, is considered the leader of the Wolverine Watchmen and used the online name Boogaloo Bunyan.

Adherents of the boogaloo movement express strong anti-government sentiments. The name “boogaloo” is a pop culture reference derived from a 1984 movie flop that became a cult classic called “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.” It went through various mutations online and emerged sometimes as the “Big Luau.”

That is why adherents sometimes wear Hawaiian shirts, including numerous armed protesters at the state Capitol in Lansing, in April. At least one of the men charged this week had posted a picture of himself in a Hawaiian shirt.

The six men directly accused of plotting to kidnap the governor seemed to adhere to a slightly different ideology, experts said, one that relied on a distorted interpretation of the Constitution. They contend it upholds individual liberty over all else, with people allowed to make citizen’s arrests against those who infringe on such rights. They labeled Whitmer a “tyrant,” and often couch their beliefs in the language of the American Revolution.

Both movements believe that only a new revolution or civil war will prevent the government from trying to control Americans, with the best government being almost none at all. Anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments are widespread.

Given that many such groups support Trump, they have diminished their ire toward the federal government and focused on state governments instead, Pitcavage said.

Most lawmakers in the state strongly condemned the violent threat to Whitmer.

“A threat against our Governor is a threat against us all,” state Sen. Mike Shirkey, a Republican, wrote in a tweet Thursday.

But others adopted the false line that it was all a left-wing plot. “Anarchists want to destroy the government,” said state Rep. Beau LaFave, a Republican, who blamed the governor for “turning up the heat on the partisan divide in the state.”

Mark Koernke, a broadcaster whose support of the Michigan Militia helped its spread in the early 1990s, wrote on Facebook, “Same FBI that let antifa burn down the country now attacking militia in Michigan to promote the Communist agenda.”

State Sen. Dayna Polehanki, a Democrat, took pictures on April 30 of the protesters with rifles in the state Legislature, including two of the men arrested in the plot against the governor. She said she saw no hope that the divided, Republican-dominated Legislature would act any time soon to ban armed protesters from the building.

“Maybe they were recruiting that day, or sending up a trial balloon for how it might go somewhere down the road,” she said. “To learn that the men in that photo are co-conspirators shakes me to my core.”

For the past decade, gun owners dressed in flak jackets and camouflage fatigues have brought their rifles into the Michigan Legislature at least twice every year, asserting their vehement support for gun rights by displaying weapons in the hallways.

For the past decade, gun owners dressed in flak jackets and camouflage fatigues have brought their rifles into the Michigan Legislature at least twice every year, asserting their vehement support for gun rights by displaying weapons in the hallways. This spring, those gatherings intensified as participants turned what had been a declaration about the Second Amendment into a protest over how far the government could go in limiting individual behavior amid the pandemic. Hundreds turned out to demand an end to lockdowns, social distancing and mask wearing. Among the demonstrators who stormed into the Capitol to protest those measures were two brothers who have now been charged as part of an extremist plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and to commit other violence. The brothers subscribed to a larger anti-government movement that has evolved in Michigan and throughout the United States over decades, but was spurred on this year by the pandemic, social justice protests and the presidential election. With its fervent gun culture and its gaping differences between urban and rural populations, Michigan has seen its divisions grow ever wider since at least the 1990s, when armed groups on the right adopted increasingly extreme positions on limiting the government’s power. The brothers are among 13 men who face a variety of charges related to the kidnapping plot, including terrorism, conspiracy and weapons possession. The authorities said the men were also affiliated with an extremist group called the Wolverine Watchmen, which court documents called “an anti-government, anti-law enforcement militia group.” Such groups have existed in Michigan for decades, most notably in 1994 with the formation of the Michigan Militia. “There have been militia-type groups in Michigan even before we started using the phrase domestic terrorism,” said Bill Ballenger, a former Republican state senator who represented a rural area. “Before it never got to armed insurrection or an attempt to overthrow the government or assassinate people or anything like that.” In a sense, experts said, the fight over measures like mask requirements to contain the spread of the virus was the latest example of what these groups see as government overreach. “It is really the perfect issue for far-right conspiracy theorists to rally around,” said Daniel Levitas, a lawyer and the author of “The Terrorist Next Door,” a history of extremist groups. In the early 1990s, armed groups in Michigan, and around the country, were formed in reaction to bloody federal sieges against Randy Weaver and his family in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and against an armed cult in Waco, Texas, in 1993. The latter ended with the death of 76 people. The new far-right organizations accused the government of tyranny and began conducting paramilitary training and obtaining military equipment. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, later convicted of bombing a federal office building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, killing 168 people, attended some of the earliest meetings of the Michigan Militia. The gory details from the trial diminished the appeal of such groups, but they continued to exist. “It has been a particularly fertile place for them,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. Various violent plots emerged in Michigan during the 1990s and 2000s, including the murder of a state police officer. In the 1990s, there was a plot to attack Camp Grayling in northern Michigan because Russian tanks captured during the gulf war and used there for training were seen as part of a scheme to store armaments for a Communist invasion of Michigan, Levitas said. In 2010, the FBI arrested five members of a group called the Hutaree and charged them with sedition based on a plot to overthrow the government, but a federal judge threw out most of the charges based on lack of evidence. Various factors contribute to the current strength of the anti-government movement in Michigan, including the collapse of the auto industry, which stripped the state of countless jobs, said Amy Cooter, a senior sociology lecturer at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who has studied such groups for a decade. “We’ve always had some groups who had the potential to take things very personally,” she said, and they saw Whitmer’s handling of the pandemic as an affront. “They didn’t think it was being handled appropriately,” she said. The pandemic hit much harder in cities like Detroit compared with rural areas, and the governor drew criticism from some parts of the state by using executive orders to put into place one-size-fits-all measures that treated counties with very few cases the same way as urban centers. She often clashed with President Donald Trump, who during the protests tweeted, “Liberate Michigan!” Accusations by the president that Democrats like Whitmer were trying to steal the election have fed a certain paranoia and anxiety about the government that is standard among many of these extremist groups, experts said. “It’s feeding into their beliefs that Trump will not get a fair shake and they’re seeing the open tensions between Trump and Whitmer,” Cooter said. The anti-government movements in Michigan share ideology with other far-right groups across the country. One of the men accused this week, Joseph Morrison, is considered the leader of the Wolverine Watchmen and used the online name Boogaloo Bunyan. Adherents of the boogaloo movement express strong anti-government sentiments. The name “boogaloo” is a pop culture reference derived from a 1984 movie flop that became a cult classic called “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.” It went through various mutations online and emerged sometimes as the “Big Luau.” That is why adherents sometimes wear Hawaiian shirts, including numerous armed protesters at the state Capitol in Lansing, in April. At least one of the men charged this week had posted a picture of himself in a Hawaiian shirt. The six men directly accused of plotting to kidnap the governor seemed to adhere to a slightly different ideology, experts said, one that relied on a distorted interpretation of the Constitution. They contend it upholds individual liberty over all else, with people allowed to make citizen’s arrests against those who infringe on such rights. They labeled Whitmer a “tyrant,” and often couch their beliefs in the language of the American Revolution. Both movements believe that only a new revolution or civil war will prevent the government from trying to control Americans, with the best government being almost none at all. Anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments are widespread. Given that many such groups support Trump, they have diminished their ire toward the federal government and focused on state governments instead, Pitcavage said. Most lawmakers in the state strongly condemned the violent threat to Whitmer. “A threat against our Governor is a threat against us all,” state Sen. Mike Shirkey, a Republican, wrote in a tweet Thursday. But others adopted the false line that it was all a left-wing plot. “Anarchists want to destroy the government,” said state Rep. Beau LaFave, a Republican, who blamed the governor for “turning up the heat on the partisan divide in the state.” Mark Koernke, a broadcaster whose support of the Michigan Militia helped its spread in the early 1990s, wrote on Facebook, “Same FBI that let antifa burn down the country now attacking militia in Michigan to promote the Communist agenda.” State Sen. Dayna Polehanki, a Democrat, took pictures on April 30 of the protesters with rifles in the state Legislature, including two of the men arrested in the plot against the governor. She said she saw no hope that the divided, Republican-dominated Legislature would act any time soon to ban armed protesters from the building. “Maybe they were recruiting that day, or sending up a trial balloon for how it might go somewhere down the road,” she said. “To learn that the men in that photo are co-conspirators shakes me to my core.”

Why Michigan is considered ‘fertile’ ground for anti-government extremists

US vice-presidential Debate&nbsp; 2020 - Live coverage of US vice-presidential Debate was blocked in China at the time when US Vice President Mike Pence was asked a question on the communist nation. The broadcast came back when Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris criticised Trump government for its approach to China. Harris said during the debate that Trump's approach to China resulted in 'loss of American lives, American jobs, and America's standing'.

The broadcast block affected a small number of viewers in China who had access to CNN. The channel is available in some hotels in China.

Fox News reported that a screen featuring colour bars with all-caps message 'NO SIGNAL PLEASE STAND BY' flashed as the broadcast was censored.

"The censorship offered a vivid example of Beijing`s willingness to excise information it cannot control, even when it involves potentially important insights into relations with the country`s largest trading partner," Fox News was quoted as saying by ANI.

"Censors in China are moving quickly to block criticism of the country`s leaders, discussion of historical events like the Tiananmen Square massacre or any conversation that could involve organizing resistance to the government," Fox News added.

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/internet-goes-berserk-after-errant-housefly-on-pences-head-photobombs-vp-debate-333508">Internet goes berserk after errant housefly on Pence's head photobombs VP debate</a>

US vice-presidential Debate on Wednesday (local time) witnessed sharp exchange of words between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence.

Though the debate did not see exchanges as heated as those seen in the first Presidential Debate, some memorable moments included Kamala Harris asking Mike Pence to stop talking by saying "Mr Vice President, I'm (still) speaking".

Both debaters overshot the time limit several times during the debate but Mike Pence was observed to do this more than Kamala Harris. The moderator of the debate had to step in many times and had to remind Pence to conclude his argument.

(With ANI inputs)

US vice-presidential Debate 2020 - Live coverage of US vice-presidential Debate was blocked in China at the time when US Vice President Mike Pence was asked a question on the communist nation.

US vice-presidential Debate 2020 - Live coverage of US vice-presidential Debate was blocked in China at the time when US Vice President Mike Pence was asked a question on the communist nation. The broadcast came back when Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris criticised Trump government for its approach to China. Harris said during the debate that Trump's approach to China resulted in 'loss of American lives, American jobs, and America's standing'. The broadcast block affected a small number of viewers in China who had access to CNN. The channel is available in some hotels in China. Fox News reported that a screen featuring colour bars with all-caps message 'NO SIGNAL PLEASE STAND BY' flashed as the broadcast was censored. "The censorship offered a vivid example of Beijing`s willingness to excise information it cannot control, even when it involves potentially important insights into relations with the country`s largest trading partner," Fox News was quoted as saying by ANI. "Censors in China are moving quickly to block criticism of the country`s leaders, discussion of historical events like the Tiananmen Square massacre or any conversation that could involve organizing resistance to the government," Fox News added. Also Read | Internet goes berserk after errant housefly on Pence's head photobombs VP debate US vice-presidential Debate on Wednesday (local time) witnessed sharp exchange of words between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence. Though the debate did not see exchanges as heated as those seen in the first Presidential Debate, some memorable moments included Kamala Harris asking Mike Pence to stop talking by saying "Mr Vice President, I'm (still) speaking". Both debaters overshot the time limit several times during the debate but Mike Pence was observed to do this more than Kamala Harris. The moderator of the debate had to step in many times and had to remind Pence to conclude his argument. (With ANI inputs)

China censors US vice-presidential debate when Pence gets asked on the communist nation

Hurricane Delta is bearing down on Louisiana after sweeping over western part of Gulf of Mexico. US national guard has been mobilised and people on Louisiana coast have been evacuated from their homes. Officials say that Hurricane Delta will cause a deadly storm surge and flash flooding in Louisiana. On Friday, Hurricane Delta packed sustained winds of 120 mph.

"I don't even know if we'll have a house when we come back," Kimberly Hester, a resident of Louisiana told AFP.

"I just pray to God every night we can at least have a house to come home to," she said.

Hurricane Delta is a category 3 storm now. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said that Hurricane Delta was still able to cause a "devastating damage". It warned of a "life-threatening storm surge" along parts of northern Gulf Coast.

The hurricane earlier barreled into Mexico's Yucatan region, which escaped major destruction, with no reports of deaths.

Battered US Gulf

Many along the Louisiana coastline have yet to recover from Hurricane Laura, which struck near the end of August as a strong Category 4 storm on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards urged residents to be extremely careful with Delta, and announced that 2,400 National Guard personnel had been mobilized to aid locals.

Hurricane Delta would hit "in the area of our state that is least prepared to take it," Edwards said late Thursday.&nbsp;

"To the people of Southwest Louisiana, I know you are strong. I also know you are about to be tested again. Please finish making preparations now We will get through this."&nbsp;

In the city of Lake Charles, where torn planks of wood, uprooted trees and debris from Hurricane Laura still litter the streets, Shannon Fuselier drilled plywood over the windows of a friend's home as protection from flying debris.

Many neighborhood houses are covered with tarps from previous hurricane damage, and the home Fuselier was working on had already suffered roof damage from a fallen tree and smashed windows during Laura.

"The branches and leaves don't do that much damage," said Fuselier, 56. "It's pieces of metal, steel, frames of other peoples windows, signs from people's stores, nails."

Fuselier said that she was staying because she didn't think the storm was strong enough for her to flee.&nbsp; 
Edwards has already warned that Delta could sweep up old debris and hurl it like missiles.

On Thursday there was a traffic jam in both directions on the highway out of Lake Charles as people left the city.

Terry Lebine had already evacuated to the town of Alexandria, some 100 miles (150 kilometers) to the north, during the previous hurricane, and was ready to head out again.

"It's exhausting," she told AFP. "...I've got my mother, she's 81 years old and not in the best of health. Right after we went back home after Laura, we have to leave again for Delta. We were home a good two to three weeks."

Delta is the 26th named storm of an unusually active Atlantic hurricane season.

In September, meteorologists were forced to break out the Greek alphabet to name Atlantic storms for only the second time ever, after the 2020 hurricane season blew through their usual list, ending on Tropical Storm Wilfred.

As the ocean surface warms due to climate change hurricanes become more powerful -- and scientists say there will likely be an increase in powerful Category 4 and 5 storms.

 
&nbsp;

Hurricane Delta is bearing down on Louisiana after sweeping over western part of Gulf of Mexico. US national guard has been mobilised and people on Louisiana coast have been evacuated from their homes.

Hurricane Delta is bearing down on Louisiana after sweeping over western part of Gulf of Mexico. US national guard has been mobilised and people on Louisiana coast have been evacuated from their homes. Officials say that Hurricane Delta will cause a deadly storm surge and flash flooding in Louisiana. On Friday, Hurricane Delta packed sustained winds of 120 mph. "I don't even know if we'll have a house when we come back," Kimberly Hester, a resident of Louisiana told AFP. "I just pray to God every night we can at least have a house to come home to," she said. Hurricane Delta is a category 3 storm now. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said that Hurricane Delta was still able to cause a "devastating damage". It warned of a "life-threatening storm surge" along parts of northern Gulf Coast. The hurricane earlier barreled into Mexico's Yucatan region, which escaped major destruction, with no reports of deaths. Battered US Gulf Many along the Louisiana coastline have yet to recover from Hurricane Laura, which struck near the end of August as a strong Category 4 storm on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale. Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards urged residents to be extremely careful with Delta, and announced that 2,400 National Guard personnel had been mobilized to aid locals. Hurricane Delta would hit "in the area of our state that is least prepared to take it," Edwards said late Thursday. "To the people of Southwest Louisiana, I know you are strong. I also know you are about to be tested again. Please finish making preparations now We will get through this." In the city of Lake Charles, where torn planks of wood, uprooted trees and debris from Hurricane Laura still litter the streets, Shannon Fuselier drilled plywood over the windows of a friend's home as protection from flying debris. Many neighborhood houses are covered with tarps from previous hurricane damage, and the home Fuselier was working on had already suffered roof damage from a fallen tree and smashed windows during Laura. "The branches and leaves don't do that much damage," said Fuselier, 56. "It's pieces of metal, steel, frames of other peoples windows, signs from people's stores, nails." Fuselier said that she was staying because she didn't think the storm was strong enough for her to flee. Edwards has already warned that Delta could sweep up old debris and hurl it like missiles. On Thursday there was a traffic jam in both directions on the highway out of Lake Charles as people left the city. Terry Lebine had already evacuated to the town of Alexandria, some 100 miles (150 kilometers) to the north, during the previous hurricane, and was ready to head out again. "It's exhausting," she told AFP. "...I've got my mother, she's 81 years old and not in the best of health. Right after we went back home after Laura, we have to leave again for Delta. We were home a good two to three weeks." Delta is the 26th named storm of an unusually active Atlantic hurricane season. In September, meteorologists were forced to break out the Greek alphabet to name Atlantic storms for only the second time ever, after the 2020 hurricane season blew through their usual list, ending on Tropical Storm Wilfred. As the ocean surface warms due to climate change hurricanes become more powerful -- and scientists say there will likely be an increase in powerful Category 4 and 5 storms.

Hurricane Delta heads towards Louisiana

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