‘Shy’ Trump voters will power his win, says pollster who called 2016 race

Thanks to the hidden support from voters who are embarrassed to admit they will vote for Donald Trump, the president will be narrowly reelected on Nov. 3, says one of the few pollsters who correctly predicted his 2016 victory. Pollster Robert Cahaly, the head of the Georgia-based Trafalgar Group, saw interest in his company skyrocket in 2016 after he bucked the consensus of other pollsters and forecast that Trump would beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two states that were crucial to his victory. It's that same demographic that Trump often refers to as the “silent majority,” whom the president says will help him “win this election big.”

'A flat-out lie': Breonna Taylor attorneys seek new prosecutor after jurors speak out

The two anonymous members of the grand jury in the Breonna Taylor case who spoke out this week about the deliberations had no agenda other than to pursue the truth, their lawyer told Yahoo News on Friday. But their disclosures have spurred calls for a new prosecutor who, attorneys for Taylor's family hope, will handle the case differently than Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, whose office took over the case from local prosecutors in May. Taylor, 26, was killed during a botched raid on her Louisville apartment on March 13.

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  2nd Breonna Taylor grand juror criticizes proceedings

  Associated Press
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  Second anonymous juror in Breonna Taylor case speaks out

  TheGrio

Croatia accused of brutality, sexual abuse against migrants

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Danish aid workers stationed in the Balkans say dozens of migrants have alleged they were brutalized by Croatian law-enforcement officers when they tried to cross into the European Union nation, before being summarily expelled back to Bosnia. Nicola Bay, the head of the Danish Refugee Council in Bosnia, told The Associated Press Friday that 149 migrants of varying nationalities, independently interviewed by his staff in the country over the past 10 days, reported being exposed to “extremely abusive” treatment by Croatian police. The testimonies include allegations of brutal and prolonged beatings, of people being stripped naked and being forced to lie like logs stacked on top of each other, Bay said, adding: “In two cases, we have reports of severe sexual abuse.”

Republicans in Iowa, Alabama score legal victories on election rules

U.S. Republicans scored legal victories on Wednesday when a Supreme Court ruling allowed Alabama to ban curbside voting and an Iowa court upheld a law that makes it harder to fix problems with absentee ballot requests ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election. The rulings were a setback to Democrats, whose presidential candidate, Joe Biden, is running a close race against Republican President Donald Trump in Iowa, while Democratic Senator Doug Jones of Alabama is seen at risk of losing his seat in the election, imperiling Democrats' chances of seizing control of the Senate.

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  Supreme Court Says Alabama Can Ban Curbside Voting Amid COVID-19 Pandemic

  HuffPost
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  Just over a week before the US election, lawsuits linger

  Associated Press

'Mama, they just shot us for nothing': Waukegan police officer fatally shoots Black teen, injures woman

The incident happened just before midnight Tuesday, when an officer approached a "suspicious" vehicle, Waukegan Police Commander Edgar Navarro told reporters Wednesday. As the officer was conducting his investigation, the vehicle fled and was spotted moments later by another officer, who got out of his car to approach the vehicle, Navarro said. "That officer exited his vehicle, and the vehicle that he was investigating began to reverse towards the officer.

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  'We're Mothers!': Protesters Rally in Waukegan After Fatal Police Shooting of Black Man

  Storyful
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  Waukegan police officer shoots teen following traffic stop: police

  WLS – Chicago

Trump quietly closed the U.S.'s vaccine safety office last year. Researchers are scrambling to replace it.

Developers will start rolling out their COVID-19 vaccines in the coming months, leaving U.S. health officials to test their long-term safety. But that won't be easy, especially given that the Trump administration quietly shut down the office responsible for ensuring the safety of vaccines last year, The New York Times reports. Before the late 1980s, vaccine safety relied on parents, doctors, vaccine makers, and hospitals to step forward and report symptoms they feared were connected to a vaccine.

One million Hong Kongers coming to UK could generate £6bn in tax revenues

Up to one million Hong Kongers could take up the UK's citizenship offer to escape Chinese repression, netting the UK economy nearly £6 billion in tax revenues, a Home Office assessment has revealed. The influx – as a result of the Government's fast-track immigration lifeboat for Hong Kongers – would see up to 500,000 arrive in the UK in the first year, dwarfing any previous similar scheme, from the 15,000 Windrush arrivals in the 1950s to the 28,000 Ugandan Asians in the 1970s. The total potential one million spread over five years would be larger than the population of Liverpool and would bring the number of Chinese in the UK to 1.5 million, overtaking the number of Indians at 1.4 million.

Harrison: Record $57M haul in US Senate race has been spent

Jaime Harrison raised a record-shattering $57 million last quarter in his bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, but the South Carolina Democrat told The Associated Press on Thursday that the cash is already spent. Harrison's financial haul in the third quarter of this year was the most ever brought in by a Senate candidate in a quarterly fundraising period and came as other Democratic Senate challengers raked in eye-popping cash against Republican incumbents. At the time, pundits questioned if Harrison, an associate chairman of the Democratic National Committee, would even be able to spend the mountain of money, noting South Carolina's relatively small size and inexpensive media markets.

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  Lindsey Graham Calls For Probe Of Rival Jaime Harrison's Ability To Out-Fundraise Him

  HuffPost
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  In October, SC's Graham rakes in $1M per day for Senate race

  Associated Press

Inside Putin’s Mysterious Purge of Top FSB Official General Sergei Smirnov

MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin vowed on Thursday he would not be swayed by Western pressure over the poisoning of his most prominent domestic critic, Alexei Navalny. Speaking in front of Russian businessmen, Putin declared he had personally allowed Navalny to leave Siberia for Berlin for medical treatment, which saved the opposition leader's life. A few hours later, Putin fired the deputy director of Federal Security Service (FSB), General Sergei Smirnov, according to a report in a respected business newspaper, RBK.

Fact check: Biden owns 2 of the 4 homes pictured in a viral meme

Zillow estimates the home is now worth more than $1.9 million. DuPont mansion Biden bought the five-bedroom, 2.5-bath former DuPont mansion at 6 Montchan Drive, Wilmington, Delaware, in 1974. He nicknamed the home “The Station” and used it as campaign headquarters during his 1988 election run.

Battleground postal delays persist with mail voting underway

U.S. Postal Service records show delivery delays have persisted across the country as millions of Americans are voting by mail, raising the possibility of ballots being rejected because they arrive too late. Postal data through Oct. 9, released through a federal court order, show nearly all the agency's delivery regions missing its target of having at least 95% of first-class mail arrive within five days. Parts of the presidential battleground states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio fell short of delivery goals by wide margins as the agency struggles to regain its footing after a tumultuous summer.

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  U.S. Postal Service has delivered more than 100 million ballots

  Reuters
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  USPS boosts extra trips, returns mail processing machines to service

  Reuters

U.S. says no justification for 'concentration camps' in China

The deputy White House national security adviser on Friday denounced China's treatment of Uighur Muslims, saying there was no justification for the country maintaining "concentration camps" within its borders. Matt Pottinger, who has been a leading figure in the development of President Donald Trump's China policy, made the remark in Mandarin in an online address to the U.K.-based Policy Exchange think tank. "There is no credible justification I can find in Chinese philosophy, religion, or moral law for the concentration camps inside your borders," Pottinger said in his speech, which he said was directed to the Chinese people.

Grandmother’s pill mills made millions in Tennessee, feds say. She’s going to prison

A 56-year-old grandmother from Miami is accused of pocketing millions selling oxycodone and other opiates at four pain clinics she operated in east Tennessee, according to federal prosecutors. Sylvia Hofstetter was also ordered to pay back $3.6 million after a jury found her guilty of racketeering, money laundering and other crimes during a lengthy trial earlier this year, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee said Wednesday in a news release. “This defendant reaped millions of dollars in personal profits by operating destructive opioid pill mills in multiple states, inflicting lasting harm on multiple communities,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt said in the release.

Trump campaign sues in Nevada to stop Vegas-area vote count

The Trump campaign and Nevada Republicans asked a state judge on Friday to stop the count of Las Vegas-area mail-in ballots, alleging that “meaningful observation” of signature-checking is impossible in the state's biggest and most Democratic-leaning county. A lawsuit filed in state court in Carson City less than two weeks before the Nov. 3 election complains that observers haven't been allowed close enough to workers and machines at the busy vote processing center to see whether ballots that get second- and third-step validation should be rejected. It alleges that Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria failed to get proper approval in April from Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske for his plan to accommodate observers, and seeks a court order to “prohibit ... processing and counting ballots until the proper procedures are in place.”

Philippines' Duterte promises payment as Red Cross stops COVID-19 tests

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Friday his government will pay the 931 million pesos ($19.25 million) it owes the Red Cross after the humanitarian agency stopped conducting COVID-19 tests. The Philippine Red Cross (PRC), which has conducted 1.1 million swab tests and accounts for quarter of the country's output, on Friday stopped providing testing services until it gets paid, prompting the country's limited number of laboratories to fill the gap. "The president has given his commitment that the government will pay its obligation to the PRC," Duterte's spokesman, Harry Roque, said in a statement.

Get ready for Trump TV, America

Now, as the voters are about to weigh in on whether Trump gets a second term, Trump TV is back in the news. But the truth is that if Trump does not win re-election, it's because he has conducted his re-election campaign, and much of his presidency, like it was already Trump TV. While it is hard for his critics to believe, there are millions of Americans who not only support Trump because of his more or less conservative policies, but also actually like the qualities that set him apart from normal politicians: the tweeting, the belligerence, the political incorrectness, the adversarial relationship with a media they regard as partisan and biased to the point of being corrupt.

North Korea told citizens to stay inside, claiming (with no scientific basis) that a storm of yellow dust coming from China was carrying COVID-19

North Korea has warned its citizens to stay indoors to avoid a yellow dust storm which it claims could carry the coronavirus over from China. The state-run KCTV network warned Wednesday that the storm would arrive Thursday. The Rodong Sinmun newspaper said the storm posed a "danger of invading malicious viruses."

In October, SC's Graham rakes in $1M per day for Senate race

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham has continued to rake in campaign cash in the closing days of his bid for a fourth term, raising about $1 million a day for the first two weeks of October. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham played a prominent role in the televised process, introducing members as they spoke and able to opine on her nomination and the legal process in general. Graham's comments on the third day of those hearings — and the last day of the fundraising period in question — prompted an ethics complaint against him from South Carolina Democrats, who claimed Graham had broken Senate ethics rules by making a campaign fundraising appeal while speaking with reporters on Capitol Hill.

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  Harrison: Record $57M haul in US Senate race has been spent

  Associated Press
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  Lindsey Graham Challenger Jaime Harrison Raises More Than $22 Million in Two Weeks

  National Review

100-year-old voter shares advice ahead of election, names favorite president in her lifetime

Mabel Cook is older than the right to vote, and in advance of her 101st birthday on Oct. 28, she exercised that right. The only reason she did not vote for the other four — Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge or Herbert Hoover — was because she was just too young. Now, at her advanced age, Cook is living up to her maiden name — Duty — by doing her civic duty and voting.

Germany readies for coronavirus vaccine before end of year: Bild

Germany is making preparations to start vaccinations against the coronavirus before the end of the year, Bild daily reported on Friday. The health ministry plans to create 60 special vaccination centres to ensure the vaccines can be stored at the proper temperature and has asked the country's 16 federal states to provide addresses for them by Nov. 10, Bild reported without citing its sources. At a video conference earlier this week, Health Minister Jens Spahn, who himself tested positive for the coronavirus on Wednesday, said Germany's BioNTech was close to getting a vaccine approved, Bild cited participants as saying.

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  German health minister expects COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021: Spiegel

  Reuters
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  Trump insists a COVID-19 vaccine will be ready by the end of the year

  CBS News Videos

GOP House Candidate Sounds Racist Dog Whistle in Attack on Journalist

Madison Cawthorn, a Republican candidate for the House from North Carolina, created an attack website accusing a journalist of leaving a job in academia “to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.” The journalist, Tom Fiedler, who had written favorably about Cawthorn's opponent, is a former dean of the Boston University College of Communications. Fiedler has since written articles and fact-checks about Cawthorn for a nonprofit news website in North Carolina's 11th Congressional District, where Cawthorn is facing Moe Davis, a former Air Force prosecutor.

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  GOP House candidate Madison Cawthorn launched an attack website accusing a journalist of working with Cory Booker 'to ruin white males running for office'

  Business Insider
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  Republican House candidate's website attacks critic for going to 'work for non-white males'

  NBC News

‘Nature can sure throw some curveballs.’ Two deer die with antlers locked in Kansas

Two bucks died in Kansas with their antlers locked together, leaving a big clue about how they died. Kansas Wildlife, Parks and Tourism game wardens posted a Facebook photo Thursday of the deer lying on a field of grass with their antlers still touching. “Nature can sure throw some curveballs at times,” the game wardens posted.

Trump campaign tapes voters at drop boxes, threatens lawsuit

The Trump campaign has been videotaping people as they deposit ballots in drop boxes in Philadelphia in what it says is an attempt to catch violations, surveillance that the battleground state's Democratic attorney general suggested could amount to illegal intimidation. City elections officials responded they could not confirm the activity was inappropriate under Pennsylvania law. Linda Kerns, the lawyer for the Trump campaign — which has already sued to ban the use of drop boxes — wrote to city election officials last week to request that they end the use of “unmanned drop boxes.”

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  Trump Campaign Caught Videotaping Voters At Philadelphia Ballot Drop Boxes

  HuffPost
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  Trump campaign warned over potentially illegal filming of voters at Pennsylvania drop boxes

  The Independent