Linkee-poo there's got to be a morning after

PBS Newshour Election Results.

"Tropical Storm Eta still has days of devastation in store for Central America, and after lingering there the storm is set to move on to the US coast… Reports of Eta's catastrophic damage from rains, winds and flooding in Nicaragua and Honduras have begun to roll in, but it could be days until residents there are able to survey the totality of the impact."

"Hurricane Zeta lashed the Louisiana coast this week, the fifth named storm to hit the state during a long and exhausting season. The storms have decimated homes, forced widespread evacuations and knocked out power for thousands of people. The working-class city of Lake Charles was hit especially hard by Hurricanes Laura and Delta in August and October. Thousands of people are still displaced."

"In the decades since government restrictions reduced logging on federal lands, the timber industry has promoted the idea that private lands are less prone to wildfires, saying that forests thick with trees fuel bigger, more destructive blazes. But an analysis by OPB and ProPublica shows last month’s fires burned as intensely on private forests with large-scale logging operations as they did, on average, on federal lands that cut fewer trees."

"The ISS — a collaboration among the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and the participating nations of the European Space Agency (ESA) — still has considerable life left: It's officially approved to operate through December 2024, and an extension to the end of 2028 seems likely. And whenever the station's race turns out to be run, several other projects are poised to take the baton."

"But because Voyager 2 has dipped so far south of the plane of the Solar System, it can now only communicate by line of sight with the 70-meter-wide antenna in Canberra, Australia. Because this facility is about five decades old, it needed to undergo refurbishment and upgrade work beginning in March, and it had been offline since that time. This work is expected to conclude in February, so NASA has been unable to send signals to Voyager 2 since that time."

"Neanderthals and humans were at war for over 100,000 years, evidence shows." Well, maybe. There's a lot in this article that I question. It's not like I think we were all peaceful, far from it. But there's lots of "war is just what we do" thinking in there. And they also include the fallacy that humans, and likely Neanderthals, are "predators." We are not. We're a prey species who learned how to hunt. We occupy a strange niche of aberration, but we carry all the evolutionary traits of prey.

"Much like we do, Neanderthals introduced their babies to solid foods around 5 to 6 months of age, a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal revealed."

"Back in August, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a report that found 97,000 children had tested positive for COVID-19 during the last two weeks in July, a 40 percent jump from the previous two-week period. Now, the AAP has released a new report with even more startling numbers: More than 61,000 children tested positive for the virus just last week." But it's not being spread in schools… yeah, right.

"President Donald Trump has previously made several promises that the country would have a COVID-19 vaccine ready "very soon," including by election day… But as of November 3, all vaccine candidates across the globe are still at their pre-clinical and clinical evaluation stages, according to the latest report Tuesday by the World Health Organization (WHO). These include several being developed by companies in the U.S., none of which have applied for approval of their vaccine candidates." This is my shocked face.

"Over the summer, the Food and Drug Administration announced that in order for an experimental Covid-19 vaccine to get the green light, it would need to be safe and 'prevent disease or decrease its severity in at least 50 percent of people who are vaccinated.'… In fact, no vaccine is 100 percent effective, but some work better than others. One of the most successful is the measles vaccine — two doses are 97 percent effective in preventing the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

"At the start of the pandemic, many Americans were not getting the unemployment benefits they were due. Now, seven months into the economic crisis, another problem is emerging: In the chaotic rush to push out payments, some workers have been paid by mistake and states are insisting that the recipients return the money… It’s no secret that unemployment systems in many states are outdated and hard to navigate by design. The idea is that the harder a system is to use, the fewer people will use it, and the less money a state will have to spend on benefits. It’s common for even native English speakers to misunderstand or mischaracterize something on their application, said Anne Paxton, an attorney at the Unemployment Law Project, a legal aid organization based in Washington state. More complicated systems are, unsurprisingly, more likely to produce inaccuracies, according to a study conducted for the U.S. Department of Labor." By design the systems meant to help people have been twisted into ways of punishing people for needing help.

"Private job creation showed a sharp deceleration in October as the U.S. economy struggled against a resurgent coronavirus pandemic, according to a report Wednesday by ADP… Companies added 365,000 positions for the month, well below the 600,000 estimate from a Dow Jones economist survey. That was the lowest reported gain from ADP since July… The ADP estimate, done in conjunction with Moody’s Analytics, has varied widely from the government’s official nonfarm payrolls report, particularly during the pandemic."

"Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has ordered a military offensive to subdue the authorities in Tigray state, following an alleged attack on an army base… Mr Abiy accused the region's ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), of launching the attack."

"Questions were mounting in Austria on Wednesday about how a convicted Islamic State sympathiser was able to carry out the deadly gun rampage in the heart of the capital Vienna."

"South Korea has detained a North Korean man who it believed was trying to defect by crossing the heavily armed land border separating the two countries."

"A nationwide push to relax drug laws took a significant step forward Tuesday as more states legalized marijuana for adults and voters made Oregon the first state to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of street drugs such as cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine."

"Shares of Uber and Lyft were up big Wednesday after early voting projections suggest that Californians have decided both companies should be exempt from a labor law that aimed to make drivers employees instead of contractors." Fucking over others because they think it'll help them get ahead.

"House Democrats went into election night feeling good about expanding their majority, but haven't had the big night they hoped for so far, with at least two Democrats in seats President Donald Trump won in 2016 losing and several top-targeted Republicans holding onto their seats, according to CNN projections early Wednesday morning."

"President Trump's top campaign strategist, Jason Miller, has been paid tens of thousands of dollars a month through a third-party campaign vendor rather than taking a salary from the campaign, obscuring the flow of money and apparently concealing how much he makes — an arrangement campaign finance experts say is illegal."

"Four key battleground states — Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and Georgia — began Wednesday with tens of thousands of absentee ballots uncounted, leaving the White House race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden up in the air."

"Michigan’s top election official said on Wednesday morning the state’s presidential results could be known by the end of the day."

"The three Rust Belt states that unexpectedly vaulted Donald Trump into the White House in 2016 — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — now represent the difference between his reelection and a one-term presidency."

"Democrats expecting a comfortable victory in the presidential election found themselves in a nail-biter instead, as the race remained in limbo past midnight Tuesday… By early Wednesday, Joe Biden led with 236 electoral votes to 213 for President Trump, both well short of the 270 necessary to win the presidency. Biden also had a narrow edge in the popular vote… (President Trump said) 'Frankly, we did win this election. We will be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.'" Are we having fun, yet?

"President Donald Trump's demand for vote counting to stop in an election that is still undecided may have been his most extreme and dangerous assault on the institutions of democracy yet in a presidency replete with them."