10/2: Women from 10 flights subjected to compulsory pelvic exams at Qatar's Doha airport. Speaking at a hearing in the Australian Senate on Wednesday morning, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said that 13 Australian citizens were among those removed from the flights and forced to undergo "grossly inappropriate" inspections while transiting through Qatar on October 2.
It was not clear how many women were searched in total. An Australian Department of Foreign Affairs spokesperson told CNN that 13 Australians were among 18 women searched on one flight. Women from nine other flights were also subjected to invasive internal examinations, according to the spokesperson. Among the planes involved was Sydney-bound Qatar Airways flight 908, which landed for a transit stop in Doha, Qatar, on that day, CNN affiliate Nine News reported. Payne said that Australia was not the only country whose citizens had been affected, but did not specify what other countries were involved. 10/4/20: Wallace furious & Trump campaign adviser is bad at lying. 10/4/20: Purdue Pharma & the Sackler Family’s Plan to Keep Its Billions. Practice Fusion agreed to pay a hundred and forty-five million dollars in fines and forfeiture.
The settlement seemed to represent the first half of a two-act drama: if the company was now coöperating with authorities, then the Justice Department would surely turn next to Pharma Co. X—a prospect that became all the more intriguing when Reuters reported, the next day, that the drugmaker’s identity was Purdue Pharma, the maker of the blockbuster opioid OxyContin. Many pharmaceutical companies had a hand in creating the opioid crisis, an ongoing public-health emergency in which as many as half a million Americans have lost their lives.
But Purdue, which is owned by the Sackler family, played a special role because it was the first to set out, in the nineteen-nineties, to persuade the American medical establishment that strong opioids should be much more widely prescribed—and that physicians’ longstanding fears about the addictive nature of such drugs were overblown. 10/7/20: McCloskeys indicted, grand jury adds charges of tampering with evidence. ST.
LOUIS (KMOV.com) -- A grand jury indicted Mark and Patricia McCloskey Tuesday on charges of exhibiting guns at protesters in a June incident in their neighborhood and added a charge of tampering with evidence for both members of the couple. The McCloskeys made national news when they pointed guns at protesters from the lawn of their home on Portland Place on June 28. A search warrant was served Friday night. Their attorney, Joel Schwartz, said he wasn’t surprised by the indictment, saying the grand jury didn’t have all the facts. “Once all the facts are out, it will be clear the McCloskeys committed no crime whatsoever,” Schwartz said. [WATCH: Mark McCloskey vents over lack of charges for trespassers, claims government is protecting criminals] 10/7/20: Tooning Out the News: Trump's Covid Roid Rage. 10/14/20: ‘Something is happening with the seniors’ In Arizona as elsewhere, Trump’s handling of the pandemic — even prior to his diagnosis — is proving costly, leaving him struggling to match his 2016 performance among those over the age of 65.
October polling shows Biden is chipping away at Trump’s support among older white voters, especially among the once reliably Republican senior population in populous Maricopa County. 10/14/20: How the 2020 census struggled to overcome Trump to get an accurate count. The court battle over when the census response period can end is effectively over, with a Supreme Court decision allowing the Trump administration to end it whenever it so chooses — and it has chosen October 15.
Door-to-door field operations will end that day, while the internet self-response option will be open until October 16, 5:59 am ET (that’s to give Hawaiians a deadline of 11:59 pm, October 15). 2020 has been a strange and unpredictable year for so many things, and the US census is no exception. Some of its challenges were anticipated: It’s America’s first digital census, with the majority of self-responses expected to come through the online option. The census has also been dealing with funding cuts and the Trump administration’s continued attempts to exclude undocumented immigrants from its count. But the pandemic added a whole new set of problems to the mix, resulting in what some experts fear will be the least accurate census in modern history.
20/15/20: GOP forges new alliance with QAnon. The QAnon movement suffered another blow on Thursday when YouTube became the latest platform to block some content from QAnon believers.
Facebook in August announced a ban on QAnon groups with “discussions of potential violence,” expanding it to a blanket ban on QAnon-affiliated groups and pages in early October. Twitter’s approach was narrower, simply banning nearly 7,000 accounts back in July. The Facebook and Twitter moves came in response to reports that QAnon pages had been spreading pandemic-related misinformation, as well as inspiring acts of violence nationwide. But QAnon has already found other ways to survive. Parts of the GOP are falling into an uneasy relationship with the QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleges in part that a cabal of demon-worshipping, pedophile elites live in Washington and will stop at nothing to maintain their power.
At a NBC News town hall on Thursday night, Trump himself refused to denounce QAnon when asked about the movement. 10/20/20: GAO will investigate Trump administration influence over FDA, CDC. CDC Director Robert Redfield testified at a Senate panel on coronavirus and gave his opinion on face masks, but then President Trump contradicted him.
USA TODAY WASHINGTON – An independent government watchdog agency has agreed to investigate alleged political influence from the Trump administration over the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. The Government Accountability Office, an independent legislative agency that investigates, audits and evaluates government operations for Congress, accepted a Senate request on Monday to examine potential political interference and "determine whether this interference has violated the agencies’ scientific integrity and communication policies.” "We expect the work will start in January, as staff who cover those issues become available," Charles Young, a spokesman for GAO, told USA TODAY. More: Trump slammed China for COVID-19 'secrecy'; critics slam White House for lack of transparency. 10/21/20: The stakes of the 2020 election are so high because the system itself is at stake. I recently asked Melissa Schwartzberg, a professor of politics at NYU who specializes in democratic theory, why democracy survives in some countries and crumbles in others.
Why was I thinking about it? Oh, no reason. 10/22/20: ICE officers 'used torture to make Africans sign own deportation orders' US immigration officers allegedly tortured Cameroonian asylum seekers to force them to sign their own deportation orders, in what lawyers and activists describe as a brutal scramble to fly African migrants out of the country in the run-up to the elections.
Many of the Cameroonian migrants in a Mississippi detention centre refused to sign, fearing death at the hands of Cameroonian government forces responsible for widespread civilian killings, and because they had asylum hearings pending. According to multiple accounts, detainees were threatened, choked, beaten, pepper-sprayed and threatened with more violence to make them sign. Several were put in handcuffs by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, and their fingerprints were taken forcibly in place of a signature on documents called stipulated orders of removal, by which the asylum seekers waive their rights to further immigration hearings and accept deportation. 10/23/20: Voter Suppression Efforts May Be Backfiring on GOP. October 13, 2020: People in Garden Ridge, Texas line up early to cast their votes as early voting in the Presidential battleground state of Texas began early Tuesday.
Voter turnout was expected to be very heavy as early voting runs through October 30 in Texas.Robin Jerstad/ZUMA For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter. In the last week of September, Chris Hollins, the county clerk of Harris County, Texas, sent out mail ballots to voters in the Houston area who had requested them and set up 12 locations where voters concerned about delays with the US Postal Service could drop their ballots off. Then, on October 1, just as voters had started to return their mail ballots, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued an emergency declaration limiting mail ballot drop-off sites to one per county. It was the latest attempt by Texas Republicans to depress turnout in a state with a long record of voter suppression.
10/24/20: 2 sailors die after Navy plane crashes in Alabama. Two sailors died Friday when the trainer aircraft they were flying crashed in Magnolia Springs, Alabama. While the cause of the crash is still under investigation, Navy officials say the sailors were flying in a T-6B Texan II when their plane came down at about 5:00 p.m. central time.
“The aircrew did not survive the crash,” wrote U.S. Naval Air Forces on Facebook. “We are not aware of any civilian casualties [at] this time.” 10/24/20: COVID-19 vaccine won't be ready in weeks, nor mandatory. Pressure to create a coronavirus vaccine is increasing by the day, but for a safe vaccine to enter the market, it takes time. USA TODAY The claim: COVID-19 vaccine will be ready in weeks, and the government will force everyone to get it The global effort to develop a COVID-19 vaccine has been a priority since the coronavirus pandemic started. Seven months into the U.S. outbreak, vaccine candidates are facing skepticism by some in the general public and various elected officials.
Leading health officials, such as Dr. The effectiveness and safety of a COVID-19 vaccine is not the only thing people are worried about. A post from from Before It's News, a website that allows anyone to contribute, — which was shared 38,00 times as of Oct. 15 — furthers the conspiracy theory of a mandatory vaccine, with a headline reading, "The Government Has Released Their Initial Plans to Force a Vaccine on Everyone. " 10/24/20: Former Giuliani associate raises questions about Hunter Biden’s ‘hard drive from hell’ Parnas, who collaborated with Giuliani on the former New York mayor’s quest to find damaging information on the Bidens beginning in late 2018, now says that similar materials were being offered to Giuliani just weeks after Joe Biden launched his presidential run.
“It was May 30, 2019 when we first heard about this stuff,” Parnas said in an interview this week. 10/24/20: Biden Outlines His Top 2 Priorities as President in Rare Pod Save America Appearance. Sean Rayford/Getty For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter. During the Democratic 2020 primary, former Vice President Joe Biden was the only Democratic presidential hopeful who did not appear on Pod Save America, the flagship podcast of the liberal Crooked Media network. But that long absence ended in an episode released on Saturday morning, when he spoke with the hosts—both former Obama staffers—to outline his priorities should he defeat President Donald Trump. 10/27/20: Kavanaugh defense of voter suppression riddled w/errors. While the Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett on Monday night, Justice Brett Kavanaugh handed down a startling opinion that laid out how the Supreme Court could steal the election for Donald Trump.
Kavanaugh’s opinion was an assault on the integrity of America’s upcoming election; it was also extraordinarily sloppy, riddled with errors that would make even a traffic court judge blush. It’s worth highlighting these mistakes, not just to set the record straight but also to show how Kavanaugh uses falsehoods to twist the law against voting rights. Mistake No. 1: Vermont hasn’t changed its election laws in response to the pandemic. Monday’s order required Wisconsin to disqualify ballots that are mailed by Election Day but arrive shortly thereafter. A federal judge had ordered the state to count these ballots, but SCOTUS shot him down by a 5–3 vote.
10/27/20: Turner gets right in teammate's faces after World Series win. What I'm Hearing: Our MLB insider Bob Nightengale breaks down what's next for the Dodgers and Justin Turner after it was found he had a positive COVID-19 test during the clinching game of the World Series. USA TODAY ARLINGTON, Texas — Major League Baseball was just two innings away from pulling off an upset, completing its 2020 season in the middle of a global pandemic. It was showing the world it was possible to safely return to work providing health and safety protocols are followed.
A phone call, and subsequent irresponsible actions, left a scar for all of the world to see. Commissioner Rob Manfred got the telephone call that Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner tested positive for COVID-19. 10/27/20: Early voting in key battleground states being driven by women. General Assignment Reporter Published November 1, 2020.
10/28/20: Former DHS Chief of Staff says he wrote 'Anonymous' Trump critiques. WASHINGTON (AP) — A former Trump administration official who penned a scathing anti-Trump op-ed and book under the pen name “Anonymous” revealed himself Wednesday as a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security. Formerly anonymous Taylor's letter is worth reading. 10/28/20: Former Trump campaign official: Father forgive me, I believed his con. 10/30/20: ‘Trump Train’ Ambushes Biden-Harris Campaign Bus in Texas. 10/30/20: Rittenhouse extradited to Kenosha on homicide charges. 12 Photos. 10/31/20: Undelivered ballots discovered at Miami-Dade post office. Special agents with the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General discovered 48 pieces of election mail sitting in a post office in South Miami-Dade County on Friday, the office announced Saturday morning.
10/31/20: Texas GOP asks judge to throw out ballots in Harris County. Texas Republicans have asked a federal judge to throw out at least 117,000 ballots cast in Harris County, a heavily Democratic area that has experienced an unprecedented surge in early voting this month.