WNBF AM 1290 Binghamton, New York:  “An 11-year-old child is dead and a 9-year-old is said to be responsible for the homicide following a scuffle over a toy. Pennsylvania State Police say the older boy was fatally wounded as he and the younger boy had a dispute over the toy at a home on Randall Road in Ridgebury Township between 8:15 and 8:30 p.m. Saturday, October 30.

“Troopers say the boys were playing with Nerf toys when a tug-o-war ensued over a Nerf gun.  Investigators say the 9-year-old was holding a knife and cut the older boy across the upper left chest.

“The 11-year-old was transported to Robert Packer Hospital in Sayre where he was pronounced dead after life-saving attempts failed.  The homicide investigation is continuing. A news release from the State Police has not indicated what, if any, charges have been filed against the younger boy.”

Associated Press:  “About 9,000 New York City municipal workers were put on unpaid leave for refusing to comply with a COVID-19 vaccine mandate that took effect Monday and thousands of city firefighters have called out sick in an apparent protest over the requirement, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.  About 9 in 10 city workers covered by the mandate have gotten vaccinated and there have been no disruptions to city services as a result of staffing shortages, de Blasio told reporters at his daily news briefing. New York has more than 300,000 city employees.

“Firehouses remained open but 18 of the department’s 350 units were out of service and ‘many units are understaffed,’ Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said. Sanitation workers made an extra pickup on Sunday to ensure trash wouldn’t pile up, the mayor said.  ‘I want to thank everyone who got vaccinated,’ de Blasio said. ‘Thank you for getting vaccinated. Thank you for doing the right thing. Thank you for moving us forward.’

“City officials have been battling fierce resistance among a minority of workers in some critical public safety jobs, including police officers and firefighters, as well as a pending legal challenge to the mandate by the city’s largest police union.  As of Sunday, 1 in 4 of the city’s uniformed firefighters still hadn’t gotten a first dose of the vaccine, as required. About 1 in 6 police personnel and 1 in 6 sanitation workers were still unvaccinated.

Associated Press:  “President Joe Biden offered a public apology to a U.N. climate conference over his predecessor Donald Trump’s move to pull the U.S. from the Paris accord.  Biden was speaking in Glasgow, Scotland on Monday where world leaders were gathering to discuss implementing the agreement to contain global warming by mid-century.

“He said: ‘I shouldn’t apologize, but I do apologize for the fact the United States, the last administration, pulled out of the Paris Accords and put us sort of behind the eight ball a little bit.’

“Biden has frequently criticized the past administration’s approach to climate, but had not previously delivered a public apology to the world.  Biden reentered the agreement in one of his first official acts in office on Jan. 20.”

“OSHA has finished developing a rule that compels companies with 100+ employees to require vaccines or regular testing and to provide paid time to workers to get vaccinated and to recover from any side effects. The rule will go into effect in days” reports CBS News’s Weijia Jiang.

Rambling Trump statement: “The Fake News media, together with some of the perverts doing ads ad nauseam on primarily Fox (Fox shouldn’t take those ads!), are trying to create an impression that Glenn Youngkin and I are at odds and don’t like each other. Importantly, this is not true, we get along very well together and strongly believe in many of the same policies. Especially when it comes to the important subject of education. The reason the Fake News and perverts are working over time is to try and convince people that we do not like each other, and therefore, my great and unprecedented Make America Great Again base will not show up to vote.”

“Also, I am not a believer in the integrity of Virginia’s elections, lots of bad things went on, and are going on. The way you beat it is to flood the system and get out and vote. Remember this, Glenn Youngkin is a good man, a hardworking man, a successful man. He loves Virginia and wants to cut your taxes, save your children’s education, and many other very good things. Terry McAuliffe is a low-life politician who lies, cheats, and steals. He was a terrible high-tax governor and would be, if elected, an even worse governor again. I say to all of our millions of followers, don’t listen to the Fake News and misleading advertisements written largely by already-acknowledged perverts. Get out and vote for a man who will be a great governor, Glenn Youngkin!”

“Would we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem–that their manhood is the problem–more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games,” Republican Missouri Senator (and secret suitor of Ms. Pacman) Josh Hawley declares at the Edmund Burke Foundation as he tries to set up a weak line he thought would be a tearjerker.  “I found the comment by one young man to a Wall Street Journal report particularly evocative, and particularly heartbreaking.  He said, ‘I’m sort of waiting for a light to come on so I can figure out what to do next.'”

Politico:  “Masked men hijacked and torched a bus in Northern Ireland early Monday in an attack linked to British unionists’ opposition to the post-Brexit trade protocol.  Unionist leaders condemned the attack as counterproductive. Democratic Unionist Party chief Jeffrey Donaldson said such threats and destruction would only ‘cement the protocol more firmly in place.’

“Police said two masked and armed men stopped the bus and ordered the driver off, before dousing the inside of the otherwise unoccupied vehicle with fuel and setting it on fire. Such roadside hijackings, particularly of buses, were common during the three decades of conflict over Northern Ireland known as the Troubles, but are a rarity today.  The attack in Newtownards, an overwhelmingly unionist town 10 miles east of Belfast, comes weeks after Donaldson warned he would withdraw his party from Northern Ireland’s cross-community government — triggering its collapse to be followed by new elections — unless Britain won fundamental concessions from the EU over enforcement of the trade protocol at Northern Ireland’s ports.

“Monday was widely viewed as Donaldson’s deadline for such action. But Donaldson suggested that his party’s withdrawal threat was unlikely to proceed this month because London’s own threats to trigger Article 16 of the protocol treaty had produced ‘fresh proposals’ from Brussels.  ‘Serious negotiations have reopened with the U.K. government. No reasonable person could deny that this represents significant and positive progress,’ Donaldson said. ‘That progress was secured through political action and not violence.'”

“Americans are divided on whether they would vote for a Democratic or Republican congressional candidate if the 2022 congressional election were being held today. About four in ten (37%) say that they would choose the Democratic candidate, three in ten say they would choose the Republican candidate (29%), 5% say they would vote for someone else or a third-party candidate, 23% say they don’t know who they would vote for, and 5% say they wouldn’t vote. Among those who say they would vote for someone else, a third party, or did not know, half of Americans (50%) say they would vote for a Democratic candidate and four in ten (39%) say they would vote for a Republican candidate when pushed to choose a side.”

“Predictably, most Republicans (83%) say they would vote for a Republican candidate, and most Democrats (81%) say they would vote for a Democratic candidate. Independents are more divided: One in four (26%) say they would vote for a Democrat, while one in five (20%) say they would vote for a Republican. One in ten independents say they would vote for someone else or a third-party candidate (11%). A third of independents say they don’t know which candidate they would vote for (36%), compared to 13% of Republicans and 14% of Democrats” says the toplines from a Public Religion Research Institute survey with a shit ton of other findings.

“After a devastating few months, the latest COVID surge is easing across much of the world. But while most countries are getting better, Russia is actually getting worse. And for one main reason. ‘A significant percentage of Russians fear the vaccine more than the virus,’ Anna Gotlib, a Russian-born philosopher and bioethicist at Brooklyn College, told The Daily Beast. And the Russian government, rather than battling vaccine skepticism, has actually encouraged it. All in the hope of scoring a quick buck and owning the West. Globally, authorities counted around 3 million new coronavirus infections last week – down from 4.6 million at the peak of the surge in early September. Deaths are declining, too. There were 49,000 COVID deaths last week, down from 69,000 six weeks ago. In Russia, however, the trends are heading in the opposite direction, based on even the most conservative official figures. On Wednesday, the country of 146 million people set all-time official records for daily cases (around 36,000) and deaths (nearly 1,100).”

“And it’s possible the actual numbers are worse than the official ones. Critics have credibly accused Moscow of cooking the books in order to downplay the seriousness of the crisis and insulate the government from criticism. ‘There’s a gap between reported and real COVID-19 cases and mortality everywhere, but based on comparisons of numbers of deaths in 2020 to 2021 with previous years, that gap is wider in Russia – and some other post-socialist countries – than anywhere else in the world,’ said Virginia Commonwealth University political science professor Judy Twigg. The pandemic is so bad in Russia that the Kremlin, which for months resisted mandating commonsense public health measures, ordered a 10-day partial lockdown in Moscow starting Thursday. But the lockdown is a band-aid on a gaping – and largely self-inflicted – wound” – Daily Beast.

Adam Serwer, The Atlantic: “The political leadership of Florida is today gripped by a new ‘lost cause.’ Despite the fact that Donald Trump triumphed in the Sunshine State in 2020, in an election that Governor Ron DeSantis called ‘the smoothest, most successful election in the country,’ the Republican-controlled legislature imposed a series of new voting restrictions in the aftermath of the election. The impetus for these restrictions was the falsehood that Trump had won reelection but had been deprived of victory by ‘voter fraud.’ Trump, along with his allies in the right-wing media, has inundated conservative voters with ludicrous claims that the election was ‘rigged.’ These claims cannot be proved, because they are false; in fact, the Trump camp has always known that they were false, and that their supporters would believe them nonetheless.”

“The allegations, though, need not be substantiated in any factual sense, because they are fundamentally an expression of the conviction that Trump should have won, not because he actually won the most votes but because the other side’s votes simply should not count. This belief justifies not merely restrictions on the right to vote but the right to simply overturn elections, as Trump supporters attempted to do when they ransacked the Capitol on January 6. The novel restrictions cannot be a solution to endemic voter fraud, a problem that DeSantis’s boasts implicitly acknowledge does not exist. They are a solution to a different problem: the fact that the other side gets to vote at all. None of these attempts to restrict the franchise has been as overtly racist or close to as successful as the efforts of the Redeemers. But as long as the risk of competitive elections exists, a party driven by the belief that its rivals are illegitimate will seek to eliminate them. That this effort is today led by the Republican Party, during Reconstruction the defender of Black rights in the South, is one of history’s great and tragic ironies.”

Tokyo cops have arrested an unidentified 24 year old man who took Halloween a little too seriously when he snapped and stabbed at least one other passenger leaving a man in his 60s critically injured, and set a car on fire near the Kokuryo Station Sunday night, NHK reports. Sixteen other passengers were hospitalized for smoke inhalation injuries in the attack.

“A man bled to death from his injuries after he was gored at a bull-running festival in eastern Spain, authorities said. It was the first such fatality in the country since such events resumed after Covid-19 curbs were relaxed during the summer. The 55-year-old man, who has not been named, was repeatedly attacked by the bull at the festival in Onda, the town’s council said on Saturday. Other participants tried to entice the animal away but their efforts failed.”

“The man died later on Saturday in hospital in the nearby town of Villarreal after hemorrhaging blood from a wound in his left thigh that perforated his artery, emergency services said. He also suffered a head wound. Onda Council canceled all bull-running planned at the town’s festival, which will end on Sunday. Other activities were not affected. A public debate over whether bull-running festivals should be abolished has become more heated in recent years, and only a small number have taken place since Spain’s Covid-19 restrictions were lifted” – CNN.

Reuters: “Barclays chief executive Jes Staley is to step down following a probe by British regulators into his ties with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, ending a controversial six year reign at the lender marked by his successful backing of its investment bank against an activist investor. Staley will be replaced as CEO by the bank’s head of global markets C.S. Venkatakrishnan, who on Monday pledged to continue his predecessor’s strategy. Barclays said it was made aware on Friday evening of the preliminary conclusions from the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulatory Authority’s investigation into Staley’s characterisation to Barclays of his relationship with Epstein and the subsequent description of that relationship in Barclays’ response to the regulator.”

“‘In view of those conclusions, and Mr Staley’s intention to contest them, the Board and Mr Staley have agreed that he will step down from his role as Group Chief Executive and as a director of Barclays,’ the bank said. ‘It should be noted that the investigation makes no findings that Mr Staley saw, or was aware of, any of Mr Epstein’s alleged crimes, which was the central question underpinning Barclays’ support for Mr Staley following the arrest of Mr Epstein in the summer of 2019.’ Barclays shares fell 2% following the announcement. Barclays said last year that Britain’s financial regulators were probing links between Staley and Epstein, who killed himself while awaiting trial on sex trafficking offences. Staley has previously said his relationship with Epstein, which he now regrets, ended in late 2015. The FCA and PRA said in a statement they could not comment further on the Epstein investigation.”

To the fools who think this would be done inside the Capitol: get a life!

The metal detectors are useless and we are getting rid of them when Republicans take back the House.

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) October 31, 2021

NBC News:  “More than 2,000 New York City firefighters have taken medical leave in the past week as unvaccinated municipal workers face the start of sanctions Monday. Frank Dwyer, deputy commissioner of the New York City Fire Department, said by email that the number of firefighters on medical leave was “very unusual.” The department employs roughly 11,000 firefighters.

“Some first responders in the U.S. have been relatively resistant to employers’ Covid-19 vaccination mandates, with some saying they would rather lose their jobs than lose their sense of freedom over having to be inoculated.

“Fire Commissioner Daniel A. Nigro suggested in a statement Sunday that firefighters who participated in the apparent sickout were neglecting their oaths, which commit them to ‘faithfully discharge the duties’ of their jobs. Those who do not meet the vaccination requirement have been threatened with unpaid leave starting Monday.  ‘Irresponsible bogus sick leave by some of our members is creating a danger for New Yorkers and their fellow Firefighters,’ Nigro said. ‘They need to return to work or risk the consequences of their actions.’

Associated Press:  “Southwest Airlines said Sunday it is conducting an internal investigation after one of its pilots used a phrase that’s become a stand-in for insulting President Joe Biden during the pilot’s greeting to passengers over the plane’s public address system last week.  The airline announced its investigation after The Associated Press reported the incident in a story about the growing use of the phrase ‘Let’s go, Brandon,’ an aphorism in conservative circles for a vulgarity targeting Biden.

“The pilot’s use of the phrase drew audible gasps from some passengers on the flight from Houston to Albuquerque on Friday. An AP reporter was on the flight.  The airline said in a statement it would ‘address the situation directly with any Employee involved while continuing to remind all Employees that public expression of personal opinions while on duty is unacceptable.’

“‘Southwest does not condone Employees sharing their personal political opinions while on the job serving our Customers, and one Employee’s individual perspective should not be interpreted as the viewpoint of Southwest and its collective 54,000 Employees,’ the statement said.

“The phrase took off after an Oct. 2 incident at a NASCAR race in Alabama won by Brandon Brown, a 28-year-old driver who was being interviewed by an NBC Sports reporter.  The crowd behind Brown was chanting something, and the reporter suggested they were saying “Let’s go, Brandon” to cheer the driver. But it became increasingly clear to viewers that they were saying, “F—- Joe Biden.”

Seth Hettena at Rolling Stone:  “For most businesses, a freak thunderstorm flooding your golf course would constitute something between an inconvenience and a crisis — especially after you faced accusations of illegally modifying your course in a way that caused water damage to your neighbor’s buildings. But most businesses aren’t run by Donald Trump.

“When a deluge flooded the Trump Organization’s Westchester County golf course and a nearby town in 2011, the organization used a wildly inflated claim to score an insurance payout of nearly $1.3 million, pulling in far more than what it spent to repair the course, two people tell Rolling Stone. The previously unreported insurance claim at Trump National Golf Club in the Village of Briarcliff Manor far outstripped the cost to repair the damages, which were about $130,000 to $150,000, one of the sources says.

“One of the sources, a former Briarcliff employee, says superficial repairs were made to the damaged parts of the course. ‘The work was never completed,’ the former employee says. ‘They basically band-aided it.’ The Trump Organization had sought even more than the nearly $1.3 million that was paid out, but the insurer withheld a portion because the Trump Organization failed to produce the required receipts, the other source says.

CBS News:  “President Biden on Sunday placed blame on Russia and China for a lack of momentum by the world’s most powerful nations in the fight to combat climate change as he marked the end of the Group of 20 conference in Rome ahead of a crucial summit on climate change in Glasgow, Scotland.  ‘Not only Russia, but China, basically didn’t show up in terms of any commitments to deal with climate change,’ the president told reporters when asked about criticisms of the G20’s progress in addressing climate change ahead of the next conference. ‘There’s a reason why people should be disappointed in that. I found it disappointing myself.’

“As they wrapped up the two-day summit that laid the groundwork for the U.N. climate conference, the leaders of the world’s largest economies made a vague commitment to seek carbon neutrality ‘by or around mid-century.’  According to the final meeting communique, the G20 members also agreed to end public financing for coal-fired power generation abroad but set no target for phasing out coal domestically — a clear nod to China, India and other coal-dependent countries.

“‘The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. I think you’re going to see we made significant progress and more has to be done,’ the president said. ‘It’s going to requires us to continue to focus on what China’s not going, what Russia’s not doing, and what Saudi Arabia is not doing.’  Mr. Biden said the summit demonstrated the ‘power of America showing up’ and working with allies to make progress on key issues. He highlighted discussions he had with world leaders across the summit, including talks with the leaders of Germany, France and the United Kingdom, during which they reiterated their commitment to diplomacy in preventing Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon.”