Today’s comic by Matt Bors is Who could have possibly inspired this terrorism?
• Have problems or questions about voting? Call the nonpartisan hotline:
There are thousands of trained nonpartisan volunteers staffing these hotlines—open now through election day—to answer questions and help address any problems voters have.
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SMS (text message) hotline (English): text OUR VOTE to 97779
• Illinois law could move state from 35th in solar power to 17th in just a few years. The state’s lousy showing up to now is a product of not having had the kind of supportive government policies that boost solar and other renewable sources of energy elsewhere. Currently, Illinois only has 98 megawatts of installed solar capacity, which generate less than 1 percent of the state’s electricity. Under the new policy, that capacity is expected to grow to nearly 1,900 megawatts by 2025, with 25 percent of electricity coming from renewables, mostly solar. This will require going pedal to the metal in building a solar energy infrastructure from scratch. Nonprofit groups have organized Job-training programs across the state as part of the law, and hundreds of people have enrolled. Developers have proposed numerous new solar projects:
This boom in renewable energy stems from the state's Future Energy Jobs Act, a 2016 law that provided subsidies for two nuclear power plants and also set the target to get 25 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2025, among other requirements. The renewable energy provisions were part of a legislative compromise to get enough votes to approve the nuclear power subsidies. (The law was upheld by a federal court in September.)
• Worst fake rabbi ever: Jews were furious Tuesday when Loren Jacobs, the “Messianic rabbi” who Vice President Mike Pence invited onstage to speak at a Republican campaign rally in Michigan, invoked Jesus when he delivered a prayer for the synagogue congregants slaughtered in Pittsburgh. It turns out that his own movement defrocked him 15 years ago. Monique Brumbach, a spokeswoman for the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations, told NBC News in an email, “Loren Jacobs was stripped of his rabbinic ordination by the UMJC in 2003, after our judicial board found him guilty of libel.” She wouldn’t say who was libeled, but Jacobs was apparently embroiled in a theological fight, arguing that the group, which asserts that Jesus is the son of God—anathema to most Jews—wasn’t adequately conservative enough on doctrinal matters.
MIDDAY TWEET
• C’mon, people, sheesh. Decorating for Halloween with dead bats is now a thing: The bats are often shipped from abroad in regular mail without the proper import-export licenses and without the species being declared. Except for flying foxes, most species are not protected as endangered by international agreements. But there’s another problem, the potential for spreading fatal diseases:
All bat shipments are also referred to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which requires an additional import permit for bats. The CDC says it regulates incoming bats because they are potential reservoirs for infectious diseases including rabies and Ebola. It requires that deceased bats are “properly processed” to render them safe, either with high heat, formaldehyde or another approved method.
Viruses such as rabies and Ebola “can’t survive for very long outside of the host, but can survive longer in a dead animal,” Brian Amman, an ecologist with the CDC’s viral special pathogens branch, said in an email. “While the likelihood is low that something like Ebola would be transmitted via an imported bat carcass, even a small chance with a potentially deadly disease is too much.”
• Venice suffers worst flooding in a decade: After days of torrential storms, the “Queen of the Adriatic” is 70 percent flooded with as much as five feet of water during high tide. That’s the fourth highest level ever recorded and the worst since 2008. Effects of the storms have killed at least 10 people throughout Italy, including one woman who was buried in a mudslide and a firefighter struck by a falling tree.
• ADP reports 227,000 new private sector jobs generated in October: The organization’s reports frequently do not match the official job numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For instance, last month, ADP reported that 230,000 new had been created in September, but the BLS reported just 134,000 new jobs had been generated in both the private and public sectors. The BLS report for October will be released Friday morning.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Less than a week to go to the election! Greg Dworkin, Armando, and Joan McCarter analyze a collection of Trumpist flops: the Jacob Wohl trash fire, the Pittsburgh visit, the birthright citizenship fiasco, and the dumbest preexisting conditions lie yet.