Newspaper headlines: PM warns rule breakers as dad shops without mask
Boris Johnson's statement about a "critical moment" in the pandemic dominates most front pages.
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Boris Johnson's statement about a "critical moment" in the pandemic dominates most front pages.
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A 19-year-old woman begins a campaign to ban unpaid work trials after working a shift for no pay.
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Firms face higher furlough costs from Thursday, as Labour warns millions of jobs hang in the balance.
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Boris Johnson's statement about a "critical moment" in the pandemic dominates most front pages.
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A 19-year-old woman begins a campaign to ban unpaid work trials after working a shift for no pay.
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Since he first sought the Oval Office, President Donald Trump has relished in the idea that he is the “chaos president.” During his first debate with former Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday night, he distilled his past five years in the political spotlight into the most highly concentrated dose of chaos of his presidency.Trump, backed into an electoral corner with more than 200,000 dead from the coronavirus pandemic and an economy in shambles as a result, lashed out in every direction on the debate stage at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio. It was a petulant performance of personal and political grievance stunning even by Trumpian standards.According to advisers close to the president, the act was not purely impulsive, but strategic—born out of a strategy that sought to confuse and confound Biden with the ultimate goal of getting the former vice president to stumble and lose his train of thought.But in the aftermath of the carnage, even some of the president’s own boosters couldn’t help but concede that he had spent an hour and a half acting like a feral animal.“I think on the Trump side, it was too hot,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who had done debate prep with Trump leading up to Tuesday, said on ABC. “Listen, you come in and decide you want to be aggressive and that was the right thing, to be aggressive. But that was too hot.”Reached for comment late Tuesday night, Ed Rollins, a veteran GOP strategist who fronts the pro-Trump group Great America PAC, simply responded, “Wow. I have seen nothing like this ever. Don’t want to comment any further.” Asked if the president did a good job or not, Rollins would only reply, “No comment.”The president, famously intransigent about traditional debate preparation and visibly antsy behind the lectern, barely allowed a single sentence before trampling over the speaker, whether it was spoken by Biden or from beleaguered moderator Chris Wallace, who appeared nearly incapable of halting the president’s trampling of the debate format. When Trump did speak, the utterances bounced between the incendiary to outright assaults on the American political system. He closed out by saying he believed the Supreme Court would intervene in the election (on ballot-related issues) and urged his supporters to go into polling locations in thinly veiled intimidation tactics.Trump Says He’s ‘Counting’ on Supreme Court to Decide ElectionBiden, whose weeks of preparation were clearly modeled on at least some version of the president’s burn-it-all-down debate strategy, had multiple canned rejoinders to Wallace’s attempts to corral Trump’s tirades—he employed some version of “he doesn’t know how to do that” multiple times when Trump was asked to allow him to finish his remarks. But in the words of CNN reporter Dana Bash moments after the debate’s conclusion, Biden could not extricate himself—much less elevate—the “shitshow.”Beyond the supposed format of the debate, with two minutes of uninterrupted (dare to dream) remarks followed by open discussion, the minimal standards of adult behavior in the Trump era were thrown out of the window almost from its outset.As Biden discussed the death of his eldest son, Beau, an Iraq War veteran who died from brain cancer in 2015, Trump interrupted to harangue Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s younger son, attacking him for his past addiction issues.“Hunter got thrown out of the military, dishonorably discharged,” Trump said, incorrectly, as Biden and Wallace both appeared stunned that the president made his son’s struggles with substance abuse a topic of debate.“My son, like a lot of people, had a drug problem,” Biden responded. “He’s overtaken it, he’s fixed it… and I’m proud of him.”Biden, clearly operating under no false assumption that Trump would obey the rules of the debate, of decorum, or of human decency, often responded to Trump’s interruptions with his trademark “this guy’s such a clown” grin. But as the night wore on, and as Trump’s attacks on Biden’s mental fitness and his family increased in both frequency and savagery, his smile became a grimace, and finally a scowl.“Would you shut up, man?” Biden said at one point. In the debate’s second hour, his eyes shut in clear frustration, Biden fumed that “it’s hard to get any word in with this clown—sorry, this person.” During a spat about racial biases in policing, he turned to Trump and declared him a “racist.”In the Trump administration’s fourth year, it is universally acknowledged that the president will always be himself—he knows no other speed than breakneck, no other mode but attack. But in the midst of the melee, some moments of grievance managed to shock even the most jaded Trump observers.At one point, the president refused to condemn white supremacists, instead calling on Proud Boys—a violent ultranationalist club for hipster racists that takes their name from a cut song from Disney’s Aladdin—to “stand back and stand by” for civil unrest. That moment was almost immediately turned into a rallying cry by the group, which has begun policing Trump campaign events and has vowed to “monitor” polling places on election day. Later in the debate, he appeared to confuse Hillary Clinton’s famous “superpredators” quote with something that Biden had said.During an exchange about the pandemic, Trump interrupted his own rant with a mini-rant gleaned from Fox News about Biden misidentifying his alma mater.“You graduated either the lowest or almost the lowest in your class. Don’t ever use the word ‘smart’ with me,” Trump said. “Because you know what, there’s nothing smart about you, Joe.”As a moderator—working solo due to coronavirus restrictions—Wallace had all the influence of a windsock in such situations.Despite the vast gap between his and Biden’s effective speaking time, Trump avoided directly answering many of the questions, including two that are generally not difficult for American presidents: “Will you condemn white supremacists?” and “Will you accept the results of the election?”“I guess I’m debating you and not him,” Trump said after his first of many tangles with Wallace about interrupting Biden, “but that’s OK.”“Do you realize you're both speaking at the same time?” Wallace said weakly in the debate’s first half-hour. When the debate’s second section, devoted to discussing the coronavirus pandemic, began, Wallace pleaded with the candidates to “try to be serious.”Trump’s entourage, at least, did not see the issue as particularly serious. Despite urgings from the Cleveland Clinic, which advised the Commission on Presidential Debates on health guidance to avoid spreading the coronavirus, that all attendees observe social distancing rules and wear facial coverings due to coronavirus restrictions, more than half of Trump’s guests, including all four of his adult children, did not wear facial coverings.Across Trumpworld and the president’s re-election effort, however, the evening’s shouting and the belligerent cross-talking was, in large part, precisely the point. According to two sources familiar with the president’s preparations, it has long been Trump’s stated intention to try to knock Biden off his game by flooding the debate with personal and family jabs, subject change, and indignant-sounding interruptions. Part of the president’s thinking, the sources said, was to attempt to get the former veep to start faltering on live national TV, thus reinforcing Team Trump’s narrative of a doddering, “sleepy” Democratic opponent.For the most part, it didn’t seem to work on Tuesday night. Some Trump advisers and confidants cheering on the president as the debate aired resorted to making the Fox News host and moderator the primary object of derision, instead of Barack Obama’s vice president.“Wallace is Trump’s real adversary. Biden is a mumbling footnote,” Rudy Giuliani, a Trump attorney and lead Biden antagonist who the president brought along to Cleveland Tuesday, messaged The Daily Beast as he watched the debate. “Look how aggressive Wallace is with Trump. And he’s beating Wallace, Biden’s kind of disappearing. Trump is in command of both and Wallace is more effective than Biden.”John McLaughlin, a top pollster for Trump, also seemed eager to work the refs and make the Fox News Sunday host the villain, saying shortly after the debate ended that the “president dominated. Wallace was [the] loser. Biden got away with calling the President a liar and clown and Wallace asked Trump about taxes but never asked Biden about Hunter and family corruption.”The Trump campaign, apparently so confident of the president’s victory in Tuesday night’s debate that the debate itself was irrelevant to that conclusion, blasted an email to Trump supporters forty minutes before the debate began lauding the president’s performance.“I showed the American People that I will ALWAYS fight to put America First no matter what,” the Trump-signed email read.Still, not every Trump ally and operative was pleased with how the leader of the free world handled himself, arguing that the president was too grumpy, to the detriment of his strategy to humiliate or trip-up his liberal opponent.“They both yelled too much and were too angry,” one Republican close to the Trump campaign told The Daily Beast shortly before midnight. “Biden’s entire theory of the case and pitch to voters is his calmness and a return to normalcy and I think he undermined that pitch with this performance. On the other hand, while Biden was clearly struggling throughout, every time he began to fumble the football, Trump would throw him a lifeline and interrupt him before the fumble was completed. It wasn’t a debate that either side should be proud of.”Near the end of the televised event, Trump implied ominously that the violence and tumult in American streets, and the deep divisions in the nation, that were discussed at the debate were just a sample of what was to come on and after Election Day.“This is not going to end well,” Trump vowed. “This is not going to end well.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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After a three-week manhunt, a Los Angeles man was arrested and charged Wednesday with attempting to murder two sheriff’s deputies who were ambushed as they sat in their car.Deonte Lee Murray, 36, is facing two counts of attempted murder of a peace officer and possession of a firearm for allegedly walking up to the squad car parked outside a Metro station on Sept. 12 and opening fire, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said Wednesday.“They became victims of a violent crime for one reason: They wear a badge,” L.A. County District Attorney Jackie Lacey said in a press conference.‘Cowardly’: Video Shows Gunman Ambushing Two L.A. Deputies in Patrol CarMurray, who faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, was recently charged with attempted murder for a carjacking in Compton two weeks before the shooting. He allegedly used the stolen car as a getaway vehicle in the ambush.He faces further charges of being part of a criminal street gang, discharging a rifle inflicting great bodily injury, and personal use of a rifle in the carjacking incident.The two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies, identified in media reports as 31-year-old Claudia Apolinar and a 24-year-old man, were sitting in their car in Compton when Murray allegedly approached the front passenger side and opened fire.A security video showed a man in dark clothing approaching the patrol car before raising his handgun and firing several rounds through the window. One deputy is then seen emerging from the car and stumbling for several seconds.“Despite being critically injured, deputies valiantly cared for each other’s wounds and safety, communicated their location and plight to others and tactically prepared for another attack,” the sheriff’s department said in an earlier statement, adding that the suspect fled the scene in dark a Mercedes-Benz.Apolinar was shot in the jaw while her partner was shot in the head—and both are now at home recovering.The shooting was seized on by President Donald Trump, who claimed it was part of ongoing attacks on law enforcement by anti-police brutality protesters.While authorities on Wednesday wouldn’t comment on Murray’s motive, Kent Wegener, captain of the Sheriff's Homicide Bureau, said the 36-year-old “obviously hates policemen and he wants them dead, not specifically.”“These acts and that day, I will not forget it, and it represents the worst in humanity, and it shocked the whole nation,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva added during the press conference. “And that evening I said we’ll find this man, and I can report today we have found our suspect.”“That worst of humanity was followed by the best of humanity,” he added. “Our entire department rallied together.”Murray was charged earlier this month over the Sept. 1 carjacking. He allegedly confronted another man in Compton, shot him in the leg then stole his car. He was found and arrested on Sept. 15 after a lengthy standoff in Lynwood. Speculation was rife after the Sept. 15 standoff that Murray was the same person who had ambushed the deputies, although officials said at the time that he wasn’t. On Wednesday, however, Wegener said authorities later learned the car Murray used to flee the scene of the ambush on Sept. 12 was the same car he’d stolen two weeks prior in the carjacking. A ghost gun used in the shooting was recovered by investigators in Compton.Murray is scheduled to be arraigned in Los Angeles Superior Court Wednesday, where prosecutors are recommending bail be set at $6.15 million.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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Former FBI director James Comey claimed on Wednesday that he learned of various details related to the FBI's investigation in to collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign from the DOJ Inspector General report on FISA abuse, years after Comey had left his former agency.Comey headed the FBI from 2013 until May 2017, when he was fired by President Trump. During Comey's tenure, agents carried out the Crossfire Hurricane probe, investigating allegations that the Trump-campaign had ties to Russian intelligence. Many of those allegations were compiled in the so-called Steele dossier, whose primary source, Igor Danchenko, was revealed last week to be a suspected Russian spy.The DOJ Inspector General report, released in December 2019, detailed "significant" errors and omissions in FBI agents' applications to surveil former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page. That report also cast doubt on the veracity of some allegations in the Steele dossier.On Wednesday, Comey appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify regarding questions on the Crossfire Hurricane probe."Before the Inspector General's report on the dossier…did you know that the information that was reported by [Inspector General Michael] Horowitz that should have raised questions about the reliability of the Steele dossier?" Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas) asked."I learned a lot about the Steele material and the sub-source interviews from the Horowitz report that I didn't know before then," Comey replied.Earlier in the Wednesday hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), asked Comey if he was aware that the FBI interviewed Danchenko in January 2017."I don't remember anything about interviews with [Danchenko]," Comey said.Comey has previously said he learned many of the details of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation from what has been publicly reported. The former director stated in December 2019, following the release of the IG report, that he "didn’t know the particulars of the investigation" while he head of the FBI."As a director sitting on top of an organization with 38,000 people, you can’t run an investigation that’s seven layers below you," Comey told Fox News at the time. Attorney General William Barr criticized Comey's statement several days later, saying "One of the problems with what happened was precisely that they pulled the investigation up to the executive floors."During Wednesday's hearing, Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah), a proponent of reforms to federal surveillance practices, criticized Comey for appearing to know little about the Crossfire Hurricane probe."Mr. Comey, with all due respect, you don't seem to know anything about an investigation that you ran," Lee said.
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Mail-in voting has gotten off to a rocky start in New York City, where election officials sent out nearly 100,000 absentee ballots with the wrong names and addresses printed on the return envelopes. The deluge of faulty ballots, sent to voters across Brooklyn, could result in ballots being voided if voters sign their own name on return envelopes bearing different names.
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A Kentucky police officer who may have fired the shot that killed Breonna Taylor is seeking to retire after receiving “countless threats”, his family has said. According to an online fundraising drive apparently organised by the family of Myles Cosgrove, it is no longer safe for the Louisville officer to remain in his job. It said his relatives were trying to raise enough money for him to stand down from the force, and take care of his family.
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President Donald Trump might have choked on his Egg McMuffin on Wednesday when tuning into his favorite morning show.Fresh from an aggressive debate performance which his campaign chalked up as a victory before it had even happened, Trump most likely tuned into Fox & Friends expecting the kind of sycophantic flattery he’s become accustomed to over the past four years. However, even the president’s pals at Fox thought his debate performance, well, kinda sucked.All three of the hosts—Brian Kilmeade, Steve Doocy, and Ainsley Earhardt—made clear how deflated they felt the morning after the debate. In particular, Kilmeade seemed despondent that Trump blew the big moment in the one-on-one with Biden: When he failed to grasp the opportunity to condemn white supremacy and the extremist Proud Boys group.> Fox & Friends' immediate debate takes -- disappointed about no "knockout punch," "when we were walking into work this morning everyone was just shaking their heads," and "we were the big losers last night, meaning the American people." pic.twitter.com/Xc2yx6MGKJ> > — Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) September 30, 2020After saying it was pretty rude of Biden to call Trump a “clown” and “the worst president ever,” Kilmeade went on to criticize Trump. “Donald Trump blew the biggest layup in the history of debates by saying, not condemning white supremacists,” he said. “I don’t know if he didn’t hear it, but he’s got to clarify that right away. That’s like, ‘Are you against evil?’ Why the president didn’t knock that out of the park I’m not sure.”The disheartened host was referring to perhaps the key moment during the debate, when Fox News moderator Chris Wallace challenged Trump to condemn right-wing extremism live on air. Instead of doing that, Trump managed to provide a thrilled Proud Boys group with a new slogan that they rapidly incorporated into a new logo: “Stand back, Stand by.”Trump Planned to Go Feral on Biden. Now His Allies Want to Call Animal ControlDoocy was perhaps the saddest-sounding of all the hosts, comparing the debate to a substandard meal at a well-regarded eatery. In a heartbreaking analogy, the co-host said, “You know how you really look forward to Friday night, and you plan on going to your favorite restaurant, and you get there after a week of anticipation and it’s like, ‘Hmm, that was just OK.’ I think a lot of people today are frustrated because we thought, on this, the post-game show, we’d have a winner... We didn’t see that.”Striking the same subdued tone, Earhardt said that when she was walking to work, “Everybody was just shaking their heads.” She added, “Punches were thrown, it got a little nasty... But I don’t think any minds were changed after watching last night, there weren’t any big zingers.”Kilmeade then remarked that “we were the big losers last night,” before quickly clarifying that he meant the American people in general, rather than himself and his two co-hosts.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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The Joseph Rowntree Foundation calls on the chancellor to extend an increase to Universal Credit.
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UK ethics body says it would give women worried about declining fertility more time and options.
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Sir Lenny Henry is among a variety of figures to feature on the postboxes in Black History Month.
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Scientists explain how the biggest deep-sea study of two marine parks led to exciting discoveries.
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How female Muslim Koran reciters are making their voices heard.
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The Hydroflex made a 25-mile round-trip in Warwickshire, reaching speeds of up to 50 mph.
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Experts keep discussing the value of R, but what is it and why does it matter?
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Dejection over latest government help for business has left many small firms fearing for their futures.
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'Flabbergasted' Marina Udgodskaya only entered the race as her boss needed someone else to stand.
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Joe Biden and his wife paid nearly $288,000 (£224,000) in income tax last year, the documents say.
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We are failing to harness the many benefits plants can provide, say scientists.
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The Joseph Rowntree Foundation calls on the chancellor to extend an increase to Universal Credit.
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UK ethics body says it would give women worried about declining fertility more time and options.
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The NHS now has access to 30,000 machines that can help people breathe if they are very ill with Covid-19.
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Sir Lenny Henry is among a variety of figures to feature on the postboxes in Black History Month.
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Many of Wednesday's papers reflect on Boris Johnson's confusion over Covid rules in the North East.
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Scientists explain how the biggest deep-sea study of two marine parks led to exciting discoveries.
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How female Muslim Koran reciters are making their voices heard.
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The Hydroflex made a 25-mile round-trip in Warwickshire, reaching speeds of up to 50 mph.
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Experts keep discussing the value of R, but what is it and why does it matter?
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Dejection over latest government help for business has left many small firms fearing for their futures.
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'Flabbergasted' Marina Udgodskaya only entered the race as her boss needed someone else to stand.
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Sophia Smith-Galer explains why President Trump shifted his position on banning new downloads of the app
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The city's first Lord Mayor of Chinese heritage reveals the racism she and her family have faced.
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Theresa is one of the first women from her community of tea pickers in Sri Lanka to go to university.
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The scientists behind a microscopic "walking" robot hope their tech could one day be used against cancer.
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Former Scottish rugby player Dean Nicholson met a lifelong friend as he cycled around the world.
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The Chinese artist and dissident says the West should have worried about China decades ago.
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BBC One drama Life follows residents of Manchester whose lives intertwine unexpectedly.
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The music industry is trying to clampdown on the latest form of music piracy known as stream-ripping.
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Taiwan said on Monday the European Union had stepped in to help after a global alliance of mayors stopped referring to Taiwanese cities as part of China, in a rare win for the island amid growing Chinese pressure. China has ramped up efforts to get international groups and companies to refer on their websites and in official documents to democratic, self-ruled Taiwan as being part of China, to the ire of Taiwan's government and many of its people. Over the weekend, Taiwan officials expressed anger after the Brussels-based Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy began listing on its website its six Taiwan member cites as belonging to China.
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The remains of 117 Chinese soldiers who died in the 1950-53 Korean War were returned to China on Sunday in an annual repatriation delayed this year by the coronavirus outbreak. South Korea handed over the remains at a ceremony at Incheon airport outside Seoul, and a Chinese military transport plane flew them to Shenyang, a northeastern Chinese city near the North Korean border. Chinese soldiers fought on the North Korean side against US-led forces in the South during the war on the Korean Peninsula. Most of the 117 remains were found in the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea. It was the seventh annual repatriation, and the largest since the 437 returned in the first one in 2014. In all, the remains of 716 Chinese soldiers have been sent back. This year's return, originally planned for the spring, was postponed for several months because of the spread of Covid-19.
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The percentage of COVID-19 tests taken in New York state that have come back positive has inched up to 1.5%, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Monday, a worrisome trend for the former epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus epidemic. New York's positivity rate had hovered around 1% for weeks, a hard-won metric after the state tallied thousands of cases per day during the peak of its outbreak in the spring. The rate's uptick now comes as 27 other states recorded increases in the number of cases for two straight weeks.
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A self-proclaimed white nationalist who rose to prominence during a deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was found guilty Monday by a federal jury of threatening to rape the wife of a man who was part of a racist group he felt was harassing and bullying him. Christopher Cantwell, a 39-year-old New Hampshire resident and radio host, was found guilty of extortion and threatening to injure property or reputation but not guilty of cyberstalking related to a series of threats he made toward a Missouri man over the Telegram messaging app. “We're pleased that justice has been done and we're glad to have been vindicated,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Davis said after the verdict.
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When former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s nonprofit sought to restore an American golden age, it turned to a company with connections to a consortium that allegedly strip-mined the retirement accounts of elderly conservatives, The Daily Beast has discovered.Bannon’s “economic nationalist” group Citizens of the American Republic hired the Wyoming-based firm Platinum Advertising Corporation in 2018 to handle its “websites/social media,” Internal Revenue Service records show. A tangle of corporate and legal documents ties Platinum Advertising to TMTE Inc.—a precious metal dealer accused on Friday of fraudulently extracting $185 million from senior citizens by selling them overpriced bullion.The massive joint action the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission and 30 states announced against TMTE alleged that the Los Angeles-based company had suckered 1,600 mostly silver-haired victims into sinking their life savings into precious metals sold at up to 300 percent of their market value. The charges are familiar to anybody who has followed the long trail of news reports and regulatory actions describing how TMTE—which has variously used the monikers Access Unlimited, TEM, Chase Metals, and Metals.com—cashed in on the right-wing paranoia of the Trump era.Even prior to the CFTC-led case on Friday, a dozen states, including Alabama and Kentucky, had accused TMTE of posing as an investment adviser and bilking senior citizens of their assets. Articles in Quartz last year detailed how the company used a combination of politically themed Facebook ads, talk radio spots, misleading websites, and high-pressure telephone sales tactics to target right-leaning, Fox News-viewing retirees and convince them to purchase gold and silver at hugely inflated rates. These efforts often involved overt biblical appeals, or echoed the rhetoric of President Donald Trump and Republican pundits by invoking the threat “liberals” and the “Deep State” supposedly posed to the economy and to the victims’ personal finances.“Metals[.com] reached potential investors through advertisements on Facebook, conservative talk radio show, and conservative-leaning financial newsletters,” Colorado Securities Commissioner Tung Chan told The Daily Beast. “They targeted these ads at potential investors at or near retirement age with conservative political leanings.”These echo findings in Missouri, Arkansas, and Nevada that TMTE relied on ominous advertising, “scare tactics,” and “misstatements and omitted information” to sell marked-up coins to vulnerable people aged 60 and up. Despite signing multiple cease-and-desist deals and disgorging millions of dollars, TMTE has publicly denied ever committing fraud.Citizens of the American Republic’s bank-shot association with TMTE, which has never before been revealed, is just the latest problematic partnership for Bannon, who was caught up in a two-count federal indictment alleging fraud at a separate nonprofit, We Build the Wall, Inc. But the ties between the former Breitbart chairman and TMTE are less direct and more complex than his relationship to the alleged private border wall grifting operation.The most recent tax forms Citizens of the American Republic filed with the Internal Revenue Service show it paid Platinum Advertising Corporation $143,655 in 2018 to shape its web presence. Platinum Advertising’s filings in Wyoming reveal little, beyond that the company registered in that jurisdiction in 2018. Gerald Pitts was listed as its secretary and director. Pitts runs Wyoming Corporate Services, which has filed paperwork in the notoriously opaque state for dozens of clients, including TMTE.But Platinum Advertising—named for one of the priciest precious metals on Earth—also registered an affiliate in March of this year in California, where TMTE operates. And the registration statement bears the name and distinctive signature of Conor O’Reilly, whose LinkedIn profile shows he was employed full-time during that period as in-house counsel and compliance officer to Metals.com. Among his listed responsibilities were “reviewing, revising, and approving any legal work done on behalf of the company” and “the formation of various entities.”O’Reilly’s signature also marks the cease-and-desist and rescission agreements that TMTE and its affiliates agreed to in Colorado and Texas in 2019. In May 2020, two months after registering Platinum Advertising in the Golden State, he Docusigned a consent order with the Missouri secretary of state, again identifying himself as TMTE’s counsel and compliance officer.TMTE’s attorney, Charles Harder—who has also recently represented Trump and his family—initially denied any link between TMTE and Platinum Advertising, even going so far as to suggest the latter company may not be real.“Today is the first day that TMTE has ever heard of the existence of ‘Platinum Advertising Corp.’ (assuming that it exists),” he wrote in an email. “TMTE knows nothing about it and, again, is not in any way affiliated with it.”Confronted with the evidence of O’Reilly’s involvement in Platinum, Harder asserted that the lawyer “was not exclusive to TMTE—he also did legal work separate from, and completely unaffiliated with, TMTE.”This claim contradicts all publicly available evidence regarding O’Reilly, who did not reply to calls or emails from The Daily Beast. His LinkedIn profile characterizes his employment arrangement with Metals.com as “full-time” and “in-house,” and does not list any other work as an attorney. O’Reilly was admitted to the bar in December 2018, just one month before he began his job at Metals.com, and he is the only person by that name licensed to practice law in California.During negotiations with the Texas State Securities Board in 2019, O’Reilly presented himself as an important official at TMTE.“He represented that he had the authority to contractually bind the company,” said Enforcement Division Director Joseph Rotunda. “We are not talking about a low-level employee.”Rotunda told The Daily Beast he was familiar with Platinum Advertising, but could not say whether it was involved in any criminal scheme, due to the ongoing legal actions.Steve Bannon Is Behind Bogus Study That China Created COVIDFurther, all other legal documents bearing O’Reilly’s name or signature are traceable to TMTE or one or more of its principals. The only corporate entity besides Platinum Advertising he has registered at the state level is USA Marketing Inc., another California affiliate of a Wyoming company originally incorporated by Pitts. USA Marketing uses the same Golden State address, inside Los Angeles’s Century Plaza Towers complex, as Platinum Advertising.Wyoming filings from late 2019 list Graham Norris, a Utah-based lawyer, as USA Marketing’s “director.” Norris, who frequently works with Pitts, was listed as TMTE’s CEO, CFO, and secretary in a 2018 filing in California. A 2019 lawsuit brought by former executive vice president of sales at Chase Metals identified Norris as one of that company’s three principals.In May this year O’Reilly applied for a trademark on behalf of another Wyoming-based precious metals-slinging company called Capital Today, Inc.Capital Today’s state-level corporate filings are highly similar to Platinum Advertising’s. In Wyoming, both initially used Gerald Pitts as their registration agent, then switched to the Cloud Peak Law Group. In California, both firms used the exact same Wyoming address, the exact same California address, and the exact same agent for service of process—an Ethan D. Kirschner of Culver City, who did not respond to requests for comment.Finally, the trademark application O’Reilly filed for Capital Today, which operates USAMint.com, used the address 8383 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 700, in Beverly Hills. Metals.com identified this location as one of its two in its correspondence with the Missouri secretary of state’s Securities Division, and the aforementioned lawsuit brought by the ex-sales executive described the Wilshire Boulevard suite as Chase Metals’ “principal business location.”This also happens to be the address of Tower Equity—the investment firm founded by Norris’s fellow TMTE principals Lucas Asher and Simon Batashvili, which was also named and seized in the joint federal-state action on TMTE on Friday. All of this strongly indicates a nexus between Platinum Inc. and firms tied to TMTE—strongly enough that, when confronted with this evidence, a representative for TMTE walked back part of Harder’s statement in part.The representative admitted that O’Reilly in fact had registered Platinum Advertising on the metal dealer’s behalf. However, they insisted that TMTE had only acquired the company as a “shelf entity” for future use in 2020, and that it was unaware of Platinum Advertising’s work for Bannon before and that the firm has not done any work with him since. Platinum Advertising, they maintained, currently has no assets, no employees, and has never had any business dealings during the time TMTE owned it. In fact, they asserted that the principals of TMTE had never even heard of Platinum Advertising before The Daily Beast inquired about it.The TMTE representative declined to provide any documentation or on-the-record statements to substantiate these claims, and even suggested that Bannon might have hired another Platinum Advertising based in Wyoming. However, the state’s business records show only one entity of that name—the same one O’Reilly signed for in California.In the TMTE representative’s version of events—at least, the version that lines up with the available documentary evidence—Bannon contracted Platinum Advertising to handle web and social media outreach for his conservative nonprofit. Then, sometime afterward, TMTE—which sells precious metals, including platinum, by targeting conservative voters on the web and through social media—happened to purchase the same company completely unaware of its history. Despite being completely empty and inactive, Platinum was somehow known to the Texas State Securities Board even when it was unknown to TMTE’s principals.A representative for Bannon, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, did not answer repeated requests for comment.Bannon has picked up a number of unsavory associates since his unceremonious exit from the White House in 2017. The Daily Beast revealed in June that the distributor of his podcast War Room is a longtime white-collar criminal. The former Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood producer also launched several ventures with Guo Wengui, a billionaire Chinese national accused of an array of crimes in his home country, all of which he denies. Two of these entities have recently funded and promoted a dubious study asserting COVID-19 originated in a government lab in Wuhan.It was on Wengui’s yacht that federal authorities arrested Bannon on fraud charges related to We Build the Wall Inc., itself a joint project with disabled war veteran, conservative activist, and serial entrepreneur Brian Kolfage—who has also been accused of misappropriating funds.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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Five weeks out from the 2020 presidential election, significant media attention is being given to the small possibility that President Donald Trump could again pull off a narrow Electoral College victory while losing the popular vote, or that even an Electoral College tie could push the election to the House. Those scenarios, though, are mainly making headlines because they're interesting fodder for the pundit class. All the data point to a big blowout victory for Democratic nominee Joe Biden.The major recent polls (Economist/YouGov: Biden +7, CNBC: Biden +9, Quinnipiac: Biden +10, NYT: Biden +8) show Biden with a truly commanding lead nationally. Equally important is how Biden leads. The 2016 election was always a much closer and more dynamic race, Trump was facing a much more unpopular opponent, and a much larger number of voters were undecided. None of those are the case this time.This year we have experienced a global pandemic which has so far killed over 200,000 Americans, a massive economic disruption, multiple Trump administration scandals, and the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Yet Biden's large lead over Trump is basically identical to what it was at the end of last year. There is still the possibility that some new development — even bigger than those listed above — could shift the dynamics of the race, but that seems very unlikely.Biden also polls much better than Hillary Clinton ever did in the late stages of the 2016 election cycle — largely because there are significantly fewer undecided and third-party voters. In the RealClearPolitics polling average of the four-way race, Clinton's share of the vote never went over 46.2 percent while, by comparison, Biden has been bouncing right around 50 percent for the past few months with 7 percent third-party/undecided. To realistically win, Trump would need to pick up almost all the undecided voters and even flip some Biden voters.In 2016, both candidates were unpopular. The final YouGov poll found Clinton with a favorable rating of 43 percent and 56 percent unfavorable, compared to Trump's rating of 39 percent favorable and 60 percent unfavorable. This gave the outsider Trump a chance to win over voters who disliked both candidates. By comparison, right now Biden's favorability numbers are 45 percent to 47 percent compared to Trump at 42 percent favorable and 53 unfavorable. In addition, 52 percent of voters disapprove of how Trump has handled his job as president, while 57 percent of voters are upset or dissatisfied with Trump. Trump effectively needs to win over voters who dislike him, disapprove of his job performance, and are simply ambivalent about Biden.To be sure, in 2016, the very limited polling in certain critical swing states was off in important ways, and the final national polling undercounted Trump's support by roughly 1-2 points. Maybe there is another systematic undercounting of Trump's support in the polling this year, and maybe late-breaking events move voters towards him, and maybe a large share of voters who disapprove of Trump's job performance can be persuaded to vote against Biden — but that is a lot of maybes.It is just as likely that Biden will outperform his already big lead. Elections tend to be referendums on incumbents, which is particularly true this year. Trump's polling numbers in head-to-head matchups with Biden have closely mirrored his overall job approval numbers. At the same time, Trump's job approval has been stuck in the low 40s effectively his entire time in office. Almost unique among modern presidents, he has never appealed to the majority of the country and has basically never tried. There really is no precedent for a chronically unpopular president who never tried to reach out beyond his base.If the final election results follow this job approval pattern, Biden wins in a landslide even larger than his current polling lead. Winning by such a large margin would swamp Trump's modest advantage in the Electoral College.More stories from theweek.com Trump literally can't afford to lose the election Trump avoids tax return questions as he brings yet another truck to the White House The bigger truth revealed by Trump's taxes
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Supermarket chain Tesco has teamed up with the food-sharing app Olio in a bid to reduce food waste.
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Jim Grover's pictures of people he met on Clapham Common who talked about their altered lives.
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A woman describes her pain at not being able to see her husband regularly at his care home.
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The monster 738-yard hole on the Orkney island of Westray is one of the longest in the world.
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A voicemail app makes it easier to speak to family members in prison, as one young woman found when her mum was jailed.
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Grace Smith used hypnosis to give up smoking, and it inspired her to take up the profession.
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People who worked for England's NHS Test and Trace tell of technical problems, confusion and wasted resources.
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The entrepreneurs opening High Street businesses during Covid when others have closed or gone digital.
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The top Huawei executive's closely watched extradition case returns to court on Monday.
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Jermaine Jenas and Darren Fletcher discuss the handball rule which resulted in two controversial goals for Newcastle United and Everton.
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A new cough, fever and change in smell or taste are the key symptoms that mean you may have coronavirus.
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The coronavirus pandemic has transformed the working lives of the under-25s.
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The BBC has revealed how it will protect celebrities, dancers and crew working on the show.
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A wind-driven wildfire erupted on Sunday in the heart of northern California's Napa Valley wine country and spread across more than 1,000 acres (404 hectares), forcing the evacuation of several communities and a hospital, authorities said. The blaze, dubbed the Glass Fire, broke out east of Calistoga, about 75 miles (120 km) north of San Francisco, and raced toward the adjacent towns of Deer Park and St. Helena, with flames advancing to within a mile of the Adventist Health St. Helena hospital.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping said levels of happiness among all ethnic groups in the western region of Xinjiang are rising and that China plans to keep teaching its residents a "correct" outlook on China, Xinhua news agency reported late on Saturday. China has come under scrutiny over its treatment of Uighur Muslims and claims of alleged forced-labour abuses in Xinjiang, where the United Nations cites credible reports as saying one million Muslims held in camps have been put to work.
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South Korea said Saturday it will request North Korea to further investigate the killing of a South Korean government official who was shot by North Korean troops after being found adrift near the rivals’ disputed sea boundary while apparently trying to defect. Seoul could also possibly call for a joint investigation into Tuesday’s shooting, which sparked outrage in the South and drew a rare apology from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Kim was quoted as saying he was “very sorry” over what he described as an “unexpected, unfortunate incident" in a message sent by Pyongyang's United Front Department, a North Korean government agency in charge of inter-Korean relations.
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Ian Wilkinson has filmed more than 100 services since April.
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Rosie is passionate about brightening our cities but she says she's faced sexist views on the streets.
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The Mangrove Photography Award winners show the beauty and fragility of the unique ecosystems.
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How have white working-class boys been so left behind in getting university places?
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A favourite of social conservatives, Judge Barrett would swing the highest US court further right.
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From embracing awkward Zoom chats to persevering with annoying flatmates, experts give some advice.
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Jay and Hollie from Liverpool take us through their week's spending.
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The Bristol punks talk "mental" live shows, class warfare and "violent-toned" new music.
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The president is under scrutiny for his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
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When Gambian orphan Muhammed Sanneh arrived in Sicily aged 16, his life took an unexpected turn.
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Can Dominic Cummings succeed in shaking up the way civil servants deliver on the PM's promises?
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For the first time since June 5, New York state, the home of the United States' worst coronavirus outbreak since the pandemic began earlier this year, reported just over 1,000 new COVID-19 cases in a 24-hour period.Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced Saturday that the Empire State crossed the quadruple-digit threshold, though he didn't specifically address the number, saying only that New Yorkers should continue to practice social distancing, wear masks, and follow other mitigation guidelines.The state has seen a consistently upward trend in cases over the last week, which has prompted some concern as businesses and college campuses reopen, and officials have noted that spikes in some neighborhoods in the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens are especially worrisome. But New York also continues to see a high number of daily tests. Data collected by the state shows the positivity rate has remained at 1 percent, or just a tick below, for some time now, indicating that the high volume of tests is a significant factor in the case increase.A new study published by The Lancet on Friday that searched for COVID-19 prevalence in a large nationwide sample of patients on dialysis found that about one-third of those tested in New York showed signs of a previous coronavirus infection. In terms of the study, that's the highest of any state in the U.S. and while it's far from what experts have pinpointed as the target for herd immunity, those experts have also pointed out that numbers like that can still help slow the spread of the virus. Read more at Bloomberg and NBC New York.More stories from theweek.com America is the Holy Roman Empire of the 21st century Why Democrats probably won't boycott Supreme Court confirmation hearings Democrats need to bring retirement back to politics
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