EAM Jaishankar and Pakistan PM Sharif shake hands at SCO reception
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday exchanged pleasantries with Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, hours after landing in the Pakistani capital in the first such visit from India in nearly a decade that came amid frosty ties between the two neighbours.
Colin Allred, Ted Cruz blast each other as “extreme,” throw jabs on border and abortion in Senate debate
The debate proved combative from start to finish, with Cruz and Allred trading barbs on nearly every issue that came up.
Houston ISD superintendent didn’t illegally funnel state money to out-of-state schools, TEA says
The Texas Education Agency found that checks mailed to Miles’ charter school network in Colorado were eventually deposited into the network’s Texas account.
Omar Abdullah set to take oath as CM of Jammu and Kashmir today
This will be Omar Abdullah’s second term as chief minister. His first term, under an NC-Congress coalition, was from 2009 to 2014 when Jammu and Kashmir was a full-fledged state.
More than 230 doctors and health care professionals call on Trump to release medical records
More than 230 doctors, nurses and other health care professionals are calling on former President Trump to release his medical records after Vice President Kamala Harris did so. In an open letter dated Oct. 13, first reported by CBS News, the health care providers raise concerns about Trump’s advanced age and argue that the 78-year-old Republican nominee should be transparent about his health and medical history. “On August 20, Donald Trump said he would ‘very gladly’ release his medical records. In the 55 days since, he has yet to do so,” the letter states. “With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances. And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.” Most of the signatories support Harris for president. The letter asserts that Trump appears to “ramble, meander, and crudely lash out at his many perceived grievances” during his campaign events and questions whether this behavior is the result of cognitive changes associated with old age. HARRIS GOADS TRUMP TO RELEASE MEDICAL RECORDS AFTER SHE GETS CLEAN BILL OF HEALTH FROM PERSONAL PHYSICIAN “The American people deserve to have confidence in their elected officials’ mental and physical capacity to do the jobs that they’ve elected them to do. Trump ought to be going above and beyond to provide transparency on his physical health and mental acuity, given his advancing age.” The letter comes while Harris is goading Trump into releasing his health information after the White House put out a “Healthcare Statement” on Saturday that declared her to be in “excellent health.” WHITE HOUSE CORRECTS RECORD ON BIDEN’S PHYSICIAN, PARKINSON’S EXPERT MEETING, SAYS IT WAS FOR PRESIDENT’S CARE The statement from Harris’ doctor also indicated she had her most recent annual physical exam in April of this year. Trump released his own health records while campaigning in 2016, and once he took over the White House he continued the trend. In August, with the 2024 election quickly approaching, Trump told CBS News that he would release updated medical records to the public. However, he has yet to do so, with roughly three weeks until Election Day. “He won’t put out his medical records,” Harris said Monday morning during an interview with podcast host Roland Martin. She also slammed Trump for refusing to debate a second time and questioned why Trump’s “staff” would not allow him to do an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes,” particularly when it is tradition for both presidential candidates to do a sit down with the show. WHITE HOUSE RELEASES MEDICAL REPORT ON VP KAMALA HARRIS “It may be because they think he’s just not ready and unfit and unstable and should not have that level of transparency for the American people,” Harris suggested. The Trump campaign responded by pointing out several times the former president has voluntarily released updates about his health. They also noted that he shared records from a July screening conducted by Dr. Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician turned GOP congressman, following the second assassination attempt on his life. “All have concluded [Trump] is in perfect and excellent health to be Commander in Chief,” said Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung. “He has maintained an extremely busy and active campaign schedule unlike any other in political history.” Meanwhile, Cheung slammed Harris as being “unable to keep up with demands of campaigning,” arguing that compared to Trump her schedule “is much lighter because, it is said, she does not have the stamina of President Trump.” Trump himself reacted to Harris’ medical statement on social media, calling it “really bad.” “With all of the problems that she has, there is a real question as to whether or not she should be running for President!” he wrote. “MY REPORT IS PERFECT – NO PROBLEMS!!!” Fox News Digital’s Alec Schemmel contributed to this report.
Shaban al-Dalou: The Palestinian teen burned to death in Israeli bombing
He was 19-years-old, a software engineering student, and displaced from his home, trying to survive in central Gaza. He was a few days away from his 20th birthday. Shaban al-Dalou wouldn’t make it. He had struggled for months to get help for his family, recording videos describing his family’s plight and their life under Israel’s bombs. But he wasn’t able to get enough money to get his family out of Gaza. The world finally paid attention to Shaban when his last moments were filmed this week. Connected to an IV drip, he was burned alive along with his mother after Israeli forces bombed the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital complex in Deir el-Balah in the early hours of Monday. In the videos Shaban recorded in the weeks and months before his death, he talks about the reality of living in Gaza, a premonition of the horror he faced at the end of his short life. “There is no safe place here in Gaza,” Shaban says in one video, speaking into a phone camera from the makeshift tent where he had been living since fleeing his home. In another video, Shaban talks about the difficulties of finding food “because the Israeli occupation managed to separate the middle area from the rest of Gaza and the people here are struggling to [meet] their basic needs”. He also filmed himself donating blood at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, which Israel had already bombed several times in the last year before the bombing that killed him. “We saw so many injuries, many children are in dire need of blood”, Shaban said. “All we demand is a ceasefire and for this tragedy to end”. In some videos, Shaban asked for donations to help his family evacuate to Egypt. “165 days of the continuous genocide against us”, he said in one. “Five months we have lived in a tent.” “I’m taking care of my family, as I’m the oldest,” he said in another, adding that his parents, two sisters and two brothers were displaced five times before finding refuge on the hospital’s grounds. “The only thing between us and the freezing temperatures is this tent that we constructed by ourselves.” Shaban al-Dalou with his parents and siblings. [Courtesy of the al-Dalou family] ‘The fire just engulfed everything’ Tents used for shelter in the hospital effectively became coffins on Monday, when it was set ablaze by Israeli bombs, trapping Shaban and his relatives in the flames. His father, Ahmad al-Dalou, who was severely burned, told Al Jazeera that the impact of the strike pushed him out of the tent, where he quickly realised that the fire had engulfed his children. He was able to save two of them. “After that, the fire just engulfed everything. I couldn’t rescue anyone”, he said. “I did what I could”. Ahmad said that Shaban had hoped to study abroad to become a doctor, but that he had wanted to keep his son closer to home. “Now, I wish I had sent him”, he said. Shaban was a studious boy who had memorised the entire Quran. Even during the war he would often take out his laptop to study, his father added. “He loved his mother the most”, Ahmad said. “Now, he’s been martyred in her arms. We buried them in each other’s embrace”. The attack that killed Shaban and his relatives tore through a makeshift camp set up by displaced people in the hospital’s courtyard, injuring at least 40. “I looked out and saw flames devouring the tents next to ours”, Madi, a 37-year-old mother of six, told Al Jazeera from the charred remains of her tent. “My husband and I carried the kids and ran towards the emergency building”. “People – women, men and children – were running away from the spreading fire, screaming,” she added. “Some of them were still burning, their bodies on fire as they ran.” ‘Where are we supposed to go?’ Like the al-Dalou family, many of those seeking refuge by the hospital have been displaced many times over. “Where are we supposed to go?” said Madi. “It’s nearly winter. Is there no one to stop this holocaust against us?” The hospital bombing came as Israel continues to escalate its attacks on Gaza. Just days earlier, another strike on a school turned shelter, in Jabalia, killed at least 28 people. Horrific images of the fire at the Al-Aqsa Hospital that killed Shaban earned a rare rebuke from US officials. “The images and video of what appear to be displaced civilians burning alive following an Israeli air strike are deeply disturbing and we have made our concerns clear to the Israeli government,” a spokesperson for the Biden administration said in a statement on Monday. “Israel has a responsibility to do more to avoid civilian casualties — and what happened here is horrifying, even if Hamas was operating near the hospital in an attempt to use civilians as human shields.” Israel has regularly made that accusation with little evidence. The end result of the Israeli bombing was the fire that devastated the al-Dalou family. “We are people that only ask for peace and freedom,” Ahmad told Al Jazeera, mourning his son and wife. “We want basic rights, nothing else. May God take care of our oppressors”. Adblock test (Why?)
Palestinian man burned alive after Israeli strike on hospital courtyard
NewsFeed A 20-year-old Palestinian man who was confined to a hospital bed and connected to an IV drip burned to death after an Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital courtyard where displaced people had been seeking shelter. Here’s what we know about Shaaban al-Dalou. Published On 15 Oct 202415 Oct 2024 Adblock test (Why?)
US threatens Israel but deploys troops, revealing policy inconsistency
The deployment of an advanced United States anti-missile system to Israel, along with 100 troops to operate it, marks a significant escalation in US entanglement with a widening Israeli war that Washington has already heavily subsidised. But the deployment – in anticipation of an Iranian response to an expected Israeli attack on Iran – also raises questions about the legality of US involvement at a time when the administration of US President Joe Biden is facing growing backlash over its unwavering support for Israel. It also comes as US officials are seeking to project authority and threatening to at last enforce US law prohibiting military aid to countries that block humanitarian aid, as Israel has regularly done in Gaza. Two recent developments — the Sunday announcement that the US would deploy troops to Israel and a letter sent by US officials the same day calling on Israel to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza or face unspecified consequences — underscore the inconsistent approach of an administration that has effectively done little of substance to rein in Israel’s ever-widening war. At a press briefing on Tuesday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller declined to say what the consequences of Israel failing to comply with US requests would be, or how this differs from an earlier, unfulfilled threat by the Biden administration to withhold military aid to Israel. “I’m not gonna speak to that today,” Miller told reporters when pressed for details of how the US would respond to Israel’s failure to comply. Empty threats In the private letter, which was leaked on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called on Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer to implement a series of “concrete measures”, with a 30-day deadline, to reverse the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza. The US briefly paused the delivery of thousands of bombs to Israel earlier this year as Israeli officials planned to expand their operations in southern Gaza, but it quickly resumed and continued supplying Israel with weapons even as it escalated its assault in Gaza and later in Lebanon. “A letter jointly signed by both the secretary of state and secretary of defence indicates a heightened level of concern, and the not-so-subtle threat here, whether the administration carries through with it or not, is that they will actually impose consequences under these various legal and policy standards,” Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser to the US State Department and senior adviser with the US programme at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera. Whether the administration would carry through with it remained very much in question. “It’s important to note that there were legal standards during the entire course of this conflict, and the Biden administration has just not enforced them. It may be the situation is so dire in northern Gaza that the political calculations have changed, and that they may actually finally decide to implement US law. But it’s really long past the point at which they should have done so,” Finucane said. Finucane also noted that the 30-day deadline would expire after the US presidential election next month. “So they may feel that whatever political constraints the administration may have felt it was operating under, they may feel less constrained by,” he said. Miller, the State Department spokesman, told reporters on Tuesday that the election was “not a factor at all” — but Annelle Sheline, a former State Department official who resigned earlier this year in protest of the administration’s Israel policy, disagrees. “I interpret it as being intended to try to win over Uncommitted [National Movement] voters and others in swing states who have made clear that they are opposed to this administration’s unconditional support for Israel,” Sheline told Al Jazeera. “I do not expect to see consequences.” Deeper entanglement Whether the US would carry through with its threats, the deployment of troops to Israel sent a much more concrete message of ongoing US support no matter how dire the humanitarian situation. The US-made Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, an advanced missile defence system that uses a combination of radar and interceptors to thwart short, medium and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, adds to Israel’s already extraordinary anti-missile defences as it weighs its response to an Iranian missile attack earlier this month. Biden said its deployment is meant “to defend Israel”. The announcement of the deployment came just as Iranian officials warned that the US was putting the lives of its troops “at risk by deploying them to operate US missile systems in Israel”. “While we have made tremendous efforts in recent days to contain an all-out war in our region, I say it clearly that we have no red lines in defending our people and interests,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi wrote in a statement on Sunday. In practice, the deployment further drives the US into war at a time when US officials continue to pay lip service to diplomacy. “Rather than force de-escalation or act to rein in Israeli officials, President Biden is redoubling efforts to reassure Israeli leaders that he is in lockstep with them as they deliberately barrel towards regional war and escalate a genocidal campaign against Palestinians,” Brad Parker, a lawyer and associate director of policy at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Al Jazeera. Parker and other lawyers argue that the Biden administration is relying on narrow and stretched legal arguments in an attempt to justify a seemingly unilateral move under US law. The US is also already implicated under international humanitarian law for the support it has given Israel as it violated the laws of war. “So far, the Biden administration has tried to characterise the fortification of existing deployments and authorisation of new deployments as fragmented or individual incidents. However, what emerges is a comprehensive and robust introduction of US forces into situations where involvement in hostilities is imminent without any congressional authorisation as required by the law,” Parker said. “All
Laredo enters its sixth day of a boil-water notice after E. coli is discovered in water system
The South Texas city is the latest to grapple with aging water infrastructure, which officials suggested could have been the cause for the E. coli outbreak.
Local officials face off against Georgia’s elections board over rule that could shake up November
A hearing was held Tuesday in a key Georgia county’s lawsuit against the State Elections Board (SEB), roughly three weeks until voters head to the polls on Nov. 5. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney is overseeing the case filed by the Cobb County Board of Elections earlier this month. The bipartisan board is taking issue with a set of new rules imposed by the SEB, including a measure to require county election workers to hand count ballots after polls close to ensure accurate machine tabulation. The rule has also sparked a lawsuit filed by Georgia Democratic officials, which is set for a hearing on Wednesday. Cobb County is a majority suburban area anchored by the city of Marietta, a suburb of Atlanta. GEORGIA GOP CHAIR SHARES 2-PRONGED ELECTION STRATEGY AS TRUMP WORKS TO WIN BACK PEACH STATE During the Tuesday hearing, attorneys for the SEB argued that there were no limitations on when election rules can be passed and pointed out that the specific hand-counting rule applies only to the ballots themselves, not tallying individual votes cast on the ballots. “All we are doing is saying, you need to [have] receipts of votes cast, mirror the number that the machine says were cast,” the lawyer said. But McBurney noted that it was “late in the game” for the SEB to change election rules but also conceded that, in a vacuum, wanting to ensure that the number of ballots cast matched the machine-count was a “laudable goal.” GEORGIA DEMS CHAIR REVEALS MESSAGE TO UNDECIDED GOP VOTERS AS HARRIS WORKS TO BUILD BROAD BASE “Why wouldn’t we just pause, especially on the hand-count rule, given what looks like a fairly robust record of chaos that it is sowing?” the judge asked the defendants’ lawyer. “I’m asking you from a practical perspective, if the goal is orderly, reliable elections, why the prudent — in terms of reasonableness approach — wouldn’t be to say, ‘Let’s try this next election,’ when all those questions can be answered with no one having to sue?” Republican Party officials have held the rule up as a critical guardrail to ensuring voters can be confident in their elections, but Democrats contend that its goal is to foment doubt in the process. The Cobb County lawsuit argued the rules put elections boards across the state in “an untenable position.” An attorney in support of the plaintiffs later pointed out the state officials who have come out in opposition to the rules changes, including Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “All of them are concerned about the impact of this rule,” the lawyer said. TRUMP VS HARRIS ROUND 2? VOTERS IN KEY GA COUNTY REVEAL IF THEY WANT SECOND DEBATE “It would be one thing in an ideal sterile environment to have people who are fresh and energized sit down and count ballots… That’s not how this is going to play out. In reality, as our petitioner affidavits reference, poll workers get to their polls as early as 5 a.m., 5:30, 6 a.m. They stay as late as 8 p.m., 10 p.m. And so we’re talking about adding something on top of an already 14- to 16-hour day when people are exhausted.” McBurney pointed out that it could then be done the next day, to which the attorney responded, “But then there are challenges that come with that as well, Your Honor.” The judge said the hand-counting ballots rule “does not directly interfere with the certification work going on” but that it “will be a resource drain, no question.” But the SEB attorney later criticized the plaintiffs’ arguments as conjecture. “All that it says over and over again is, quote, ‘I am concerned about the rule’s last minute adoption….I am concerned that the Cobb County Elections Office lacks space. I am concerned that the hand-count rule may lead to delays,” he said. “It is hypothetical on top of conjecture, on top of speculation. There is no imminent threat here. There is a threat of potential things that might happen if the worst-case scenario comes up, and that’s simply not sufficient for declaratory judgment.” McBurney heard the case the same day as he issued a decision in a separate Georgia elections case, ruling that county elections supervisors are not allowed to delay certification of results on the grounds of their own suspicions of fraud or mistakes. There are a flurry of lawsuits expected around the vote count and voter access this election, as there are virtually every presidential election cycle. Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.