VIENTIANE, Laos — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Southeast Asian leaders Friday that the U.S. is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea during an annual summit meeting and pledged the U.S. will continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the vital sea trade route.

The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ meeting with Blinken followed a series of violent confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam, which have fueled concerns that China’s increasingly assertive actions in the waterways could spiral into a full-scale conflict.

China, which claims almost the entire sea, has overlapping claims with ASEAN members Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei, as well as Taiwan. About a third of global trade transits through the sea, which is also rich in fishing stocks, gas and oil.

Beijing has refused to recognize a 2016 international arbitration ruling by a U.N.-affiliated court in the Hague that invalidated its expansive claims and has built up and militarized islands it controls.

“We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who is filling in for President Joe Biden, in his opening speech at the U.S.-ASEAN summit. “The United States will continue to support freedom of navigation, and freedom of overflight in the Indo Pacific.”

The United States has no claims in the South China Sea but has deployed navy ships and fighter jets to patrol the waters in a challenge to China’s claims.

Chinese and Philippine vessels have clashed repeatedly this year, and Vietnam said last week that Chinese forces assaulted its fishermen in the disputed sea. China has also sent patrol vessels to areas that Indonesia and Malaysia claim as exclusive economic zones.

The United States has warned repeatedly that it’s obligated to defend the Philippines — its oldest treaty ally in Asia — if Filipino forces, ships or aircraft come under armed attack, including in the South China Sea.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. complained to summit leaders on Thursday that his country “continues to be subject to harassment and intimidation” by China. He said it was “regrettable that the overall situation in the South China Sea remains tense and unchanged” due to China’s actions, which he said violated international law. He has called for more urgency in ASEAN-China negotiations on a code of conduct to govern the South China Sea.

Singaporean leader Lawrence Wong earlier this week warned of “real risks of an accident spiraling into conflict” if the sea dispute isn’t addressed.

Malaysia, who takes over the rotating ASEAN chair next year, is expected to push to accelerate talks on the code of conduct. Officials have agreed to try and complete the code by 2026, but talks have been hampered by sticky issues including disagreements over whether the pact should be binding.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang was defiant during talks on Thursday. He called South China Sea a “shared home” but repeated China’s assertion that it was merely protecting its sovereign rights, officials said. Li also blamed meddling by “external forces” who sought to “introduce bloc confrontation and geopolitical conflicts into Asia.” Li didn’t name the foreign forces, but China has previously warned the U.S. not to meddle in the region’s territorial disputes.

In another firm message to China, Blinken said the United States believed “it is also important to maintain our shared commitment to protect stability across the Taiwan Strait.” China claims the self-ruled island of Taiwan as its own territory and bristles at other countries’ patrolling the body of water separating it from the island.

Blinken also attended an 18-nation East Asia Summit, along with the Chinese premier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and leaders from Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand.

ASEAN has treaded carefully on the sea dispute with China, which is the bloc’s largest trading partner and its third largest investor. It hasn’t marred trade relations, with the two sides focusing on expanding a free trade area covering a market of 2 billion people.

Blinken said the annual ASEAN summit talks were a platform to address other shared challenges including the civil war in Myanmar, North Korea’s “destabilizing behavior” and Russia’s war aggression in Ukraine. He said the U.S. remained the top foreign investor in the region and aims to strengthen its partnership with ASEAN.
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WINTER PARK, Florida — Many Jews worldwide will mark Yom Kippur in fasting and prayer at their synagogues this weekend.

But for the faithful in Florida, destructive Hurricane Milton has disrupted plans for observing the Day of Atonement — the holiest day of the year in the Jewish faith — that begins Friday evening and caps off the High Holy Days that began with Rosh Hashana on October 2.

Across the storm-threatened areas, rabbis and their congregants spent part of the Days of Awe — the span between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur — protecting their homes and synagogues as Milton churned off the coast, spiraling into a Category 5 storm. Many — though not all — evacuated, heeding the voluntary and mandatory orders, and found safekeeping for their synagogues’ Torah scrolls and themselves.

Milton hit Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday as a Category 3 cyclone, with damaging winds, heavy rains and tornadoes. By Thursday, the storm had moved eastward into the Atlantic Ocean.

Why this rabbi decided against evacuating before storm

Rabbi Yitzchok Minkowicz evacuated most of his family ahead of the storm, but chose to ride it out with his son, also a rabbi, at Chabad Lubavitch of Southwest Florida near Fort Myers. The center is hosting people displaced by the storm, including doctors, first responders and elderly who cannot evacuate.

It’s important to be “with the people and for the people,” and provide emotional and spiritual support, he said as the storm approached.

Near midnight Thursday, the Chabad center and the rest of the neighborhood lost power, said Minkowicz, making them among the millions without it. The center was spared from the storm surge, but homes and other buildings in the area were not, he said.

“Our pressing need is for Power so that we can help our community & hold Yom Kippur services,” Minkowicz told The Associated Press via email Thursday. “We’re praying for this to be resolved asap.”

The center planned to host Yom Kippur observances regardless of the storm. He said it was similar two years ago, when the holy day followed the major hurricane, Ian.

“Yom Kippur is a day that you open up your soul to God and you totally connect with God,” Minkowicz said. “When you go through a hurricane, anything materialistic is not important. They’re already in that zone where they’re totally focused on God.”

Congregation Beth Am in the Tampa Bay area also lost power and plans to hold Yom Kippur services online, said Rabbi Jason Rosenberg of the Reform synagogue.

“It’s important to keep perspective. Having a service online is not what anybody wants, but it could’ve been a lot worse,” he said. “This feels like a blessing.”

The storm underscored one of Yom Kippur’s annual reflections.

An implicit question, he said before Milton’s landfall, is “If this was going to be your last year on earth, how would you want to act differently? … When you’ve got a historical storm, a potentially life-threatening and life-altering storm bearing down on you, that message is really present.”

Milton disrupts Yom Kippur and October 7 commemoration

Like most of her congregants, Rabbi Nicole Luna had evacuated after helping secure Temple Beth El in Fort Myers, and entrusting several Torah scrolls to congregants should the threatened surge devastate the synagogue.

While the congregation braved Hurricanes Irma in 2017 and Ian in 2022, Milton’s timing hit especially hard, having already forced the postponement of community-wide commemoration of Hamas attacking Israel on October 7, 2023. The war that followed is ongoing.

“It just feels like too much for our hearts to carry right now,” Luna said from Miami ahead of the storm. “It’s all very heavy.”

After the storm passed through, Luna told her congregation that their synagogue had emerged undamaged, though it lost power.

She announced plans for a service via Zoom on Friday evening, and in-person services Saturday.

“We hope by Saturday more traffic lights will be restored but please only come if you can safely navigate the roads,” she said in her message.

Luna said she was grateful for the “big outpouring of support” she received from fellow rabbis across the East Coast of Florida, who were opening their temples for the holidays to evacuees and have emphasized they can come as they are since few grabbed “holiday-appropriate clothing” in the rush to escape Milton’s fury.

The Chabad of Southwest Broward near Fort Lauderdale is hosting several evacuees from areas most affected by the storm, ranging from a mother with her newborn to an elderly couple, said director Rabbi Pinny Andrusier. They are invited to spend Yom Kippur with the Cooper City-based group, including sharing kosher meals before and after the day of fasting.

“We were spared, thank God,” Andrusier said of the storm. “We’ve been able to open up our doors” for those in the hurricane zone.

Synagogue skips holding Yom Kippur services

Hundreds of Jewish families on Longboat Key, a barrier island off Sarasota Bay, won’t be able to observe Yom Kippur in their synagogue for the very first time in their 45-year history, said Shepard Englander, CEO of The Jewish Federation of Sarasota-Manatee.

Access to the island, specifically the John Ringling Causeway, was closed ahead of the storm. The congregation decided it wasn’t worth risking Milton’s might for Day of Atonement services. They had celebrated Rosh Hashana in their building despite a number of nearby homes being damaged by Hurricane Helene, which made landfall last month.

Englander said he and his family evacuated from their home on a riverbank outside Sarasota and were hunkered down at a friend’s home inland. From there, he was trying to make sure community members from Longboat Key and other temples that won’t have services can say their prayers and break their daylong Yom Kippur fast at a newly constructed conference center in Sarasota with food items like blintzes, bagels, cream cheese and smoked salmon.

Ahead of the storm, people were scattered in the region at emergency shelters or staying with family or friends, Englander said.

“It’s in difficult times that you really understand the power of community,” he said. “And this is a caring, tight-knit, generous Jewish community.”
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When major disasters like hurricanes and floods hit the United States, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, coordinates major rescue efforts that would overwhelm local officials. VOA’s Jessica Stone reports on how the agency works. 
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WASHINGTON — Disinformation and conspiracy theories have spread quickly in response to natural disasters in the southeastern United States, creating distrust in the government response, according to the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“It is absolutely the worst I have ever seen,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters on a Tuesday call.

The spread of lies surrounding the natural disasters comes at a time when social media infrastructure will allow “virtually any claim” to amplify and spread, experts say.

Hurricane Helene left more than 200 people dead and many more injured or without power, and Hurricane Milton has left at least four dead after ravaging Florida, according to the Associated Press.

Some frequently spread falsehoods include accusations that FEMA prevented Florida evacuations and claims that funding for storm victims was instead given to undocumented migrants.

Such misinformation is “demoralizing” to first responders, Criswell said in the press call.

Additionally, the fabrications could put first responders and residents of impacted areas in even more danger, according to Matthew Baum, a Harvard University professor who focuses on fake news and misinformation.

“When you’re talking about life-and-death situations, [misinformation] can cause people not to take advantage of help that’s available to them, and it can also be dangerous for first responders who are being accused of all sorts of badness,” Baum told VOA. “And if first responders start to worry about their own safety, that’s going to undermine how they do their jobs.”

Many of the other falsehoods stem from former President Donald Trump’s campaign and allies.

In an October 3 rally, the former president falsely claimed that the Biden-Harris administration was diverting FEMA funding to house illegal migrants.

Last week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, claimed that “they control the weather” in a post on social media platform X, formerly Twitter. She did not specify who “they” are.

To combat popular conspiracies surrounding hurricane relief efforts, FEMA launched a “Hurricane Rumor Response” webpage to “help correct rumors and provide accurate information,” according to a press release.

Baum, however, told VOA that those who believe the false claims may not be swayed by the government-funded website, as they are already “deep down the rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking.”

“I don’t think the website will have a significant effect, but it’s still worth doing because journalists read it and having that information out there gets it into the news ecosystem,” Baum said. “But fundamentally, it’s not likely to reach many of the people that are at risk of being harmed by this disinformation.”

FEMA put up a similar rumor response webpage during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

On social media platforms such as X, misinformation tends to spread faster than true stories, a 2018 MIT study found. False news stories are 70% more likely to be reposted than true ones are.

Media scholar Matt Jordan told VOA the vast amount of disinformation circulating is part of a “firehose of falsehood” strategy, in which bad actors publish so much “garbage” that people don’t know what to believe.

“It’s a way of eliminating the capacity for the press to help generate democratic consensus by just putting so much garbage into the zone,” the Penn State professor said.

U.S. President Joe Biden said during a Tuesday morning briefing that this misinformation “misleads” the public.

“It’s un-American, it really is,” he said in his remarks. “People are scared to death; people know their lives are at stake.”
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WASHINGTON — Inflation in the United States dropped last month to its lowest point since it first began surging more than three years ago, adding to a spate of encouraging economic news in the closing weeks of the presidential race. 

Consumer prices rose 2.4% in September from a year earlier, down from 2.5% in August, and the smallest annual rise since February 2021. Measured from month to month, prices increased 0.2% from August to September, the Labor Department reported Thursday, the same as in the previous month. 

But excluding volatile food and energy costs, “core” prices, a gauge of underlying inflation, remained elevated in September, driven higher by rising costs for medical care, clothing, auto insurance and airline fares. Core prices in September were up 3.3% from a year earlier and 0.3% from August. Economists closely watch core prices, which typically provide a better hint of future inflation. 

Taken as a whole, the September figures show that inflation is steadily easing back to the Fed’s 2% target, even if in a gradual and uneven pattern. Apartment rental costs grew more slowly last month, a sign that housing inflation is finally cooling, a long-awaited development that would provide relief to many consumers. 

Overall inflation last month was held down by a big drop in gas prices, which fell 4.1% from August to September. Grocery prices jumped 0.4% last month, after roughly a year of mild increases, though they’re 1.3% higher than a year earlier. 

Restaurant food prices increased 0.3% last month and are up 3.9% in the past year. And clothing prices rose 1.1% from August to September and are up 1.8% from a year ago. 

The improving inflation picture follows a mostly healthy jobs report released last week, which showed that hiring accelerated in September and that the unemployment rate dropped from 4.2% to 4.1%. The government has also reported that the economy expanded at a solid 3% annual rate in the April-June quarter. Growth likely continued at roughly that pace in the just-completed July-September quarter. 

Cooling inflation, solid hiring and healthy growth could erode former President Donald Trump’s advantage on the economy in the presidential campaign as measured by public opinion polls. In some surveys, Vice President Kamala Harris has pulled even with Trump on the issue of who would best handle the economy, after Trump had decisively led President Joe Biden on the issue. 

At the same time, most voters still give the economy relatively poor marks, mostly because of the cumulative rise in prices over the past three years. 

For the Fed, last week’s much-stronger-than-expected jobs report fueled some concern that the economy might not be cooling enough to slow inflation sufficiently. The central bank reduced its key rate by an outsized half-point last month, its first rate cut of any size in four years. The Fed’s policymakers also signaled that they envisioned two additional quarter-point rate cuts in November and December. 

In remarks this week, a slew of Fed officials have said they’re still willing to keep cutting their key rate but at a deliberate pace, a signal that any further half-point cuts are unlikely. 

The Fed “should not rush to reduce” its benchmark rate “but rather should proceed gradually,” Lorie Logan, president of the Federal Reserve’s Dallas branch, said in a speech Wednesday. 

Inflation in the United States and many countries in Europe and Latin America surged in the economic recovery from the pandemic, as COVID closed factories and clogged supply chains. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine worsened energy and food shortages, pushing inflation higher. It peaked at 9.1% in the U.S. in June 2022. 

Economists at Goldman Sachs projected earlier this week that core inflation will drop to 3% by December 2024. And few analysts expect inflation to surge again unless conflicts in the Middle East worsen dramatically. 

Though higher prices have soured many Americans on the economy, wages and incomes are now rising faster than costs and should make it easier for households to adapt. Last month, the Census Bureau reported that inflation-adjusted median household incomes — the level at which half of households are above and half below — rose 4% in 2023, enough to return incomes back to their pre-pandemic peak. 

In response to higher food prices, many consumers have shifted their spending from name brands to private labels or have started shopping more at discount stores. Those changes have put more pressure on packaged foods companies, for example, to slow their price hikes. 

This week, PepsiCo reported that its sales volumes fell after it imposed steep price increases on its drinks and snacks.
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Hurricane Milton left behind widespread destruction as it hit Florida on Wednesday as a dangerous Category 3 storm – the second time in two weeks the southeastern state was hit by a powerful hurricane. VOA’s Richard Green has the latest.
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Expect the unexpected, especially during the month before a U.S. presidential election. It’s called an October surprise.
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US President Joe Biden warned Wednesday about the ‘storm of the century’ as Hurricane Milton churned toward Florida’s western coast. He and the head of his disaster management agency urged residents to evacuate — as did local officials who spoke to VOA on Wednesday. VOA’s Anita Powell and Jose Pernalete report from Washington and Pinellas County, Florida.
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NEW YORK — You’ve heard the horror stories: Someone casting multiple ballots, people voting in the name of dead relatives, mail-in ballots being intercepted. 

Voter fraud does happen occasionally. When it does, we tend to hear a lot about it. It also gets caught and prosecuted. 

The nation’s multilayered election processes provide many safeguards that keep voter fraud generally detectable and rare, according to current and former election administrators of both parties. 

America’s elections are decentralized, with thousands of independent voting jurisdictions. That makes it virtually impossible to pull off a large-scale vote-rigging operation that could tip a presidential race — or almost any other race. 

“You’re probably not going to have a perfect election system,” said Republican Trey Grayson, a former Kentucky secretary of state and the advisory board chair of the Secure Elections Project. “But if you’re looking for one that you should have confidence in, you should feel good about that here in America.” 

What’s stopping people from committing voter fraud? 

Voting more than once, tampering with ballots, lying about your residence to vote somewhere else, or casting someone else’s ballot are crimes that can be punished with hefty fines and prison time. Non-U.S. citizens who break election laws can be deported. 

For anyone still motivated to cheat, election systems in the United States are designed with multiple layers of protection and transparency intended to stand in the way. 

For in-person voting, most states either require or request voters provide some sort of ID at the polls. Others require voters to verify who they are in another way, such as stating their name and address, signing a poll book or signing an affidavit. 

People who try to vote in the name of a recently deceased friend or family member can be caught when election officials update voter lists with death records and obituaries, said Gail Pellerin, a Democratic in the California Assembly who ran elections in Santa Cruz County for more than 27 years. 

Those who try to impersonate someone else run the risk that someone at the polls knows that person or that the person will later try to cast their own ballot, she said. 

What protections exist for absentee voting? 

For absentee voting, different states have different ballot verification protocols. All states require a voter’s signature. Many states have further precautions, such as having bipartisan teams compare the signature with other signatures on file, requiring the signature to be notarized or requiring a witness to sign. 

That means even if a ballot is erroneously sent to someone’s past address and the current resident mails it in, there are checks to alert election workers to the foul play. 

A growing number of states offer online or text-based ballot tracking tools as an extra layer of protection, allowing voters to see when their ballot has been sent out, returned and counted. 

Federal law requires voter list maintenance, and election officials do that through a variety of methods, from checking state and federal databases to collaborating with other states to track voters who have moved. 

Ballot drop boxes have security protocols, too, said Tammy Patrick, chief executive officer for programs at the National Association of Election Officials. 

She explained the boxes are often designed to stop hands from stealing ballots and are surveilled by camera, bolted to the ground and constructed with fire-retardant chambers, so if someone threw in a lit match, it wouldn’t destroy the ballots inside. 

Sometimes, alleged voter fraud isn’t what it seems 

After the 2020 election, social media surged with claims of dead people casting ballots, double voting or destroyed piles of ballots on the side of the road. 

Former President Donald Trump promoted and has continued to amplify these claims. But the vast majority of them were found to be untrue. 

An Associated Press investigation that explored every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by Trump found there were fewer than 475 out of millions of votes cast. That was not nearly enough to tip the outcome. Democrat Joe Biden won the six states by a combined 311,257 votes. 

The review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots. In one case, a man mistakenly thought he could vote while on parole. In another, a woman was suspected of sending in a ballot for her dead mother. 

Former election officials say that even more often, allegations of voter fraud turn out to result from a clerical error or a misunderstanding. 

Pellerin said she remembered when a political candidate in her county raised suspicion about many people being registered to vote at the same address. It turned out the voters were nuns who all lived in the same home. 

Patrick said that when she worked in elections in Maricopa County, Arizona, mismatched signatures were sometimes explained by a broken arm or a recent stroke. In other cases, an elderly person tried to vote twice because they forgot they had already submitted a mail ballot. 

“You really have to think about the intent of the voter,” Patrick said. “It isn’t always intuitive.” 

Why voter fraud is unlikely to affect the presidential race 

It would be wrong to suggest that voter fraud never happens. 

With millions of votes cast in an election year, it’s almost guaranteed there will be a few cases of someone trying to game the system. There also have been more insidious efforts, such as a vote-buying scheme in 2006 in Kentucky. 

In that case, Grayson said, voters complained, and an investigation ensued. Then participants admitted what they had done. 

He said the example shows how important it is for election officials to stay vigilant and constantly improve security in order to help voters feel confident. 

But, he said, it would be hard to make any such scheme work on a larger scale. Fraudsters would have to navigate onerous nuances in each county’s election system. They also would have to keep a large number of people quiet about a crime that could be caught at any moment by officials or observers. 

“This decentralized nature of the elections is itself a deterrent,” Grayson said. 
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One county in the battleground U.S. state of Wisconsin plays a disproportionate role in deciding whether Democrats or Republicans win the White House in November, analysts say. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias takes us to Dane County, where the fight to sway votes is getting hotter as the election draws near.
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LAS VEGAS — Sin City blew a kiss goodbye to the Tropicana before first light Wednesday in an elaborate implosion that reduced to rubble the last true mob building on the Las Vegas Strip. 

The Tropicana’s hotel towers tumbled in a celebration that included a fireworks display. It was the first implosion in nearly a decade for a city that loves fresh starts and that has made casino implosions as much a part of its identity as gambling itself. 

“What Las Vegas has done, in classic Las Vegas style, they’ve turned many of these implosions into spectacles,” said Geoff Schumacher, historian and vice president of exhibits and programs at the Mob Museum. 

Former casino mogul Steve Wynn changed the way Las Vegas blows up casinos in 1993 with the implosion of the Dunes to make room for the Bellagio. Wynn thought not only to televise the event but created a fantastical story for the implosion that made it look like pirate ships at his other casino across the street were firing at the Dunes. 

From then on, Schumacher said, there was a sense in Las Vegas that destruction at that magnitude was worth witnessing. 

The city hasn’t blown up a Strip casino since 2016, when the final tower of the Riviera was leveled for a convention center expansion. 

This time, the implosion cleared land for a $1.5 billion baseball stadium for the relocating Oakland Athletics, part of the city’s latest rebrand into a sports hub. 

That will leave only the Flamingo from the city’s mob era on the Strip. But, Schumacher said, the Flamingo’s original structures are long gone. The casino was completely rebuilt in the 1990s. 

The Tropicana, the third-oldest casino on the Strip, closed in April after welcoming guests for 67 years. 

Once known as the “Tiffany of the Strip” for its opulence, it was a frequent haunt of the legendary Rat Pack, while its past under the mob has long cemented its place in Las Vegas lore. 

It opened in 1957 with three stories and 300 hotel rooms split into two wings. 

As Las Vegas rapidly evolved in the following decades, including a building boom of Strip megaresorts in the 1990s, the Tropicana also underwent major changes. Two hotel towers were added in later years. In 1979, the casino’s beloved $1 million green-and-amber stained glass ceiling was installed above the casino floor. 

The Tropicana’s original low-rise hotel wings survived the many renovations, however, making it the last true mob structure on the Strip. 

Behind the scenes of the casino’s grand opening, the Tropicana had ties to organized crime, largely through reputed mobster Frank Costello. 

Costello was shot in the head in New York weeks after the Tropicana’s debut. He survived, but the investigation led police to a piece of paper in his coat pocket with the Tropicana’s exact earnings figure, revealing the mob’s stake in the casino. 

By the 1970s, federal authorities investigating mobsters in Kansas City charged more than a dozen operatives with conspiring to skim $2 million in gambling revenue from Las Vegas casinos, including the Tropicana. Charges connected to the Tropicana alone resulted in five convictions. 

There were no public viewing areas for the event, but fans of the Tropicana did have a chance in April to bid farewell to the vintage Vegas relic. 

“Old Vegas, it’s going,” Joe Zappulla, a teary-eyed New Jersey resident, said at the time as he exited the casino, shortly before the locks went on the doors.
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Washington — Hurricane Helene’s torrential rain and powerful winds were made about 10% more intense due to climate change, according to a study published Wednesday by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.  

Although a 10% increase “might seem relatively small… that small change in the hazard really leads to big change in impacts and damage,” said climate scientist Friederike Otto, who heads the research organization.  

The study also found that fossil fuels — the primary cause of climate change — have made hurricanes like Helene 2.5 times more likely to occur.  

In other words, storms of Helene’s magnitude were formerly anticipated once every 130 years, but now the probability is closer to once every 53 years, on average.  

To conduct the study, researchers focused on three aspects of Hurricane Helene: precipitation, winds and the water temperature of the Gulf of Mexico — a key factor in its formation.  

“All aspects of this event were amplified by climate change to different degrees,” Ben Clarke, a co-author of the study and researcher at Imperial College London, told a press conference.  

“And we’ll see more of the same as the world continues to warm,” he continued.  

The research by WWA, an international group of scientists and meteorologists who study the role of climate change in extreme weather events, comes as the southeastern US state of Florida prepares for the arrival of another major hurricane, Milton, just 10 days after it was hit by Helene.   

Destruction

Helene made landfall in northwestern Florida on September 26 as a Category 4 hurricane with winds up to 140 mph (225 kph).  

The storm then moved north, causing heavy rain and devastating floods in several states, including North Carolina, where it claimed the highest death toll.  

The authors of the study emphasized that the risk posed by hurricanes has increased in scope beyond coastal areas.  

Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at NGO Climate Central, said Helene “had so much intensity” that it would take time for it to lose strength, but the “storm was moving fast… so it could go farther inland pretty quickly.”  

This study utilized three methodologies to examine the three aspects of the storm, and was conducted by researchers from the US, the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands.  

To study its rainfall, researchers used an approach based on both observation and climate models, depending on the two regions involved: one for coastal areas like Florida, and another for inland areas like the Appalachian mountains.  

In both cases, the study found precipitation had increased by 10 percent because of global warming, which is currently at 1.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.  

To study Helene’s winds, scientists looked at hurricane data dating back as far as 1900.  

They determined Helene’s winds were 11 percent stronger, or 13 mph (21 kph), as a result of climate change.  

Lastly, the researchers examined the water temperature in the Gulf of Mexico, where Helene formed, finding it was around 2 degrees Celsius above normal.  

This record temperature was made 200 to 500 times more likely due to climate change, the study asserts.  

Warmer oceans release more water vapor, providing more energy for storms as they form.  

“If humans continue to burn fossil fuels, the US will face even more destructive hurricanes,” Clarke warned in a statement. 
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NEW YORK — The U.S. said on Tuesday it may ask a judge to force Alphabet’s Google to divest parts of its business, such as its Chrome browser and Android operating system, that it says are used to maintain an illegal monopoly in online search.

In a landmark case, a judge in August found that Google, which processes 90% of U.S. internet searches, had built an illegal monopoly. The Justice Department’s proposed remedies have the potential to reshape how Americans find information on the internet while shrinking Google’s revenues and giving its competitors more room to grow.

“Fully remedying these harms requires not only ending Google’s control of distribution today, but also ensuring Google cannot control the distribution of tomorrow,” the Justice Department said.

The proposed fixes will also aim to keep Google’s past dominance from extending to the burgeoning business of artificial intelligence, prosecutors said.

The Justice Department might also ask the court to end Google’s payments to have its search engine pre-installed or set as the default on new devices.

Google has made annual payments – $26.3 billion in 2021 – to companies including Apple and other device manufacturers to ensure that its search engine remained the default on smartphones and browsers, keeping its market share strong.

Google, which plans to appeal, said in a corporate blog post that the proposals were “radical” and said they “go far beyond the specific legal issues in this case.”

Google maintains that its search engine has won users with its quality, adding that it faces robust competition from Amazon and other sites, and that users can choose other search engines as their default.

The world’s fourth-largest company with a market capitalization of over $2 trillion, Alphabet is under mounting legal pressure from competitors and antitrust authorities.

A U.S. judge ruled on Monday in a separate case, that Google must open up its lucrative app store, Play, to greater competition, including making Android apps available from rival sources. Google is also fighting a Justice Department case that seeks the breakup of its web advertising business.

As part of its efforts to prevent Google’s dominance from extending into AI, the Justice Department said it may seek to make available to rivals the indexes, data and models it uses for Google search and AI-assisted search features.

Other orders prosecutors may seek include restricting Google from entering agreements that limit other AI competitors’ access to web content and letting websites opt out of Google using their content to train AI models.

Google said the AI-related proposals could stifle the sector.

“There are enormous risks to the government putting its thumb on the scale of this vital industry — skewing investment, distorting incentives, hobbling emerging business models — all at precisely the moment that we need to encourage investment,” Google said.

The Justice Department is expected to file a more detailed proposal with the court by Nov. 20. Google will have a chance to propose its own remedies by Dec. 20.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling in Washington was a major win for antitrust enforcers who have brought an ambitious set of cases against Big Tech companies over the past four years.

The U.S. has also sued Meta Platforms, Amazon.com and Apple claiming they illegally maintain monopolies.

Some of the ideas in the Justice Department’s proposals to break up Google had previously garnered support from Google’s smaller competitors such as reviews site Yelp and rival search engine company DuckDuckGo.

Yelp, which sued Google over search in August, says spinning off Google’s Chrome browser and AI services should be on the table. Yelp also wants Google to be prohibited from giving preference to Google’s local business pages in search results.
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Wisconsin, a Midwestern U.S. state known for its dairy farms and beer production, has emerged as a crucial battleground in the 2024 presidential election. With a history of extremely close races, Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes could determine who becomes the next president. The state’s unique mix of urban and rural voters, along with key issues like the economy and abortion rights, make it a microcosm of the nation’s political divide.
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washington — The FBI has arrested an Afghan man who officials say was inspired by the Islamic State militant organization and was plotting an Election Day attack targeting large crowds in the United States, the Justice Department said Tuesday.

Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, told investigators after his arrest Monday that he had planned his attack to coincide with Election Day next month and that he and a juvenile co-conspirator expected to die as martyrs, according to charging documents. 

Tawhedi, who entered the U.S. in 2021 on a special immigrant visa, had taken steps in recent weeks to advance his attack plans, including by ordering AK-47 rifles, liquidating his family’s assets, and buying one-way tickets for his wife and child to travel home to Afghanistan. 

“Terrorism is still the FBI’s number one priority, and we will use every resource to protect the American people,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement. 

After he was arrested, the Justice Department said, Tawhedi told investigators he had planned an attack for Election Day that would target large gatherings of people. 

Tawhedi was charged with conspiring and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State group, which is designated by the U.S. as a foreign terrorist organization. 

It was not immediately clear if he had a lawyer who could speak on his behalf. 
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President Joe Biden postponed his trip to Germany and Angola Tuesday to oversee the response to Hurricane Milton, which is heading toward Florida just days after Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern United States. Patsy Widakuswara reports. Jose Pernalete contributed to this report.
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Washington — Then-president Donald Trump secretly sent COVID test kits to Vladimir Putin despite a U.S. shortage during the pandemic, and spoke multiple times with the Russian leader after leaving office, says an explosive new book by Bob Woodward. 

The upcoming opus, War, also chronicles some of President Joe Biden’s own acknowledged missteps and his struggle to prevent escalation of conflict in the Middle East, including exasperation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over futile efforts to get Israel and Hamas to reach a cease-fire. 

In excerpts published Tuesday by The Washington Post, where he is an associate editor, Woodward lays out damning details and actions by Trump, who the writer says has retained a personal relationship with Putin even as Trump campaigns for another presidential term and the Russian president conducts a war against Ukraine, a U.S. ally. 

With the coronavirus ravaging the world in 2020, Trump sent a batch of test kits to his counterpart in Moscow. Putin accepted the supplies but sought to avoid political fallout for Trump, urging that he not reveal the dispatch of medical equipment, this book says. 

According to Woodward, Putin told Trump: “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.” 

Woodward also cites an unnamed Trump aide in the book who indicated the Republican flag bearer may have spoken to Putin up to seven times since leaving the White House in 2021.  

The Post, reporting Woodward’s account, said that at one point in early 2024, Trump ordered an aide out of his office in his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida so he could hold a private call with Putin. 

War is set for publication on Oct. 15, just three weeks before a critical U.S. election in which Trump is locked in a tight race against Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee. 

While Harris does make appearances in the book, she is seen in a supporting role to Biden “and hardly determining foreign policy herself,” the Post reported. 

Woodward has chronicled American presidencies for 50 years, and this is his fourth book since Trump’s upset victory in 2016. He began his presidential reportages with Richard Nixon, who was undone by the 1970s Watergate scandal exposed by Woodward and Post colleague Carl Bernstein. 

Woodward concluded that Trump’s interactions, detailed in the book, with an authoritarian president at war with a U.S. ally make him more unfit to be president than Nixon. 

“Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024,” Woodward wrote. 

The Trump campaign blasted the book as “trash” and “made up stories.” 

They are “the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” campaign communications director Steven Cheung told AFP. 

According to CNN, which obtained a pre-release book copy, Woodward repeatedly quotes Biden dropping F bombs as he discusses his personal and political challenges. 

Biden called Putin “the epitome of evil,” blasted Netanyahu as a “liar” and said he “should never have picked” Merrick Garland as U.S. attorney general. 

According to the book, during an April phone call Biden turned testy with Netanyahu. 

“What’s your strategy, man?” Biden asked the Israeli leader, according to Woodward. 

“We have to go into Rafah,” Netanyahu said, referring to a city in southern Gaza. 

“Bibi, you’ve got no strategy,” Biden responded.
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State Department — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to visit Vientiane, Laos, later this week for meetings with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, where he is expected to engage directly with newly elected leaders from the Indo-Pacific.

Blinken will represent President Joe Biden at this year’s ASEAN-U.S. Summit and participate in the East Asia Summit, where leaders and senior officials from India, Japan, South Korea, and the People’s Republic of China are also expected to attend.

This week’s ASEAN summits will feature the debut of Paetongtarn Shinawatra, 38, who became Thailand’s prime minister in mid-August. She will make her first bilateral visit to Laos on Tuesday and will be the youngest Southeast Asian leader at the summit.

Singapore has also seen a generational shift with Lawrence Wong succeeding longtime Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in May.

Japan’s new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba took office on October 1. He has pledged to strengthen his country’s alliance with the U.S. during a call with President Biden last Wednesday.

“I am grateful for the prime minister’s commitment to the U.S.-Japan Alliance and look forward to working with his government to reinforce the enduring partnership between our two nations,” Blinken said in a statement last week.

Ishiba is also in discussions with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol about holding a meeting on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit.

Regional security, development and trade — including the creation of resilient semiconductor supply chains — are expected to be top priorities on the U.S. agenda.

In 2023, total two-way merchandise trade between the United States and ASEAN reached $395.9 billion, making the U.S. the second-largest trading partner after China. Additionally, the U.S. is ASEAN’s largest source of foreign direct investment, which amounted to $74.3 billion last year.

Susannah Patton, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Sydney-based think tank Lowy Institute, said that this year’s East Asia Summit must address contentious global issues such as the conflict in the Middle East and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The East Asia Summit comprises ASEAN’s 10 member countries and eight major dialogue partners, including the United States, China typically represented by Premier Li Qiang, and Russia represented by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

In a recent analysis published by the Lowy Institute, Patton noted that it is likely that the “ASEAN show will come to Laos and then roll on again,” adding that “concrete progress on pressing issues will be sorely lacking.”

“While the EAS is still likely to issue at least one jointly negotiated statement in 2024,” Patton wrote, “it is a reflection of global political polarization that ASEAN’s dialogue partners are no longer able to propose their own dueling statements to advance their preferred language on international issues.”
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STOCKHOLM — Two pioneers of artificial intelligence — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton — won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats to humanity, one of the winners said.

Hinton, who is known as the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto. Hopfield is an American working at Princeton.

“This year’s two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” the Nobel committee said in a press release.

Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”

She said that such networks have been used to advance research in physics and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation.”

Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a “huge influence” on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care.

“It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution,” he said in the open call with reporters and the officials from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

“Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us. And it’s going to be wonderful in many respects,” Hinton said. “But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

The Nobel committee that honored the science behind machine learning and AI also mentioned fears about its possible flipside. Moon said that while it has “enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind.”

Hinton shares those concerns. He quit a role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

On Tuesday, he said he was shocked at the honor.

“I’m flabbergasted. I had, no idea this would happen,” he said when reached by the Nobel committee on the phone.

There was no immediate reaction from Hopfield.

Hinton, now 76, in the 1980s helped develop a technique known as backpropagation that has been instrumental in training machines how to “learn.”

His team at the University of Toronto later wowed peers by using a neural network to win the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition in 2012. That win spawned a flurry of copycats, giving birth to the rise of modern AI.

Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data, the Nobel committee said.

Hinton used Hopfield’s network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method, known as the Boltzmann machine, that the committee said can learn to recognize characteristic elements in a given type of data.

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize for their discovery of tiny bits of genetic material that serve as on and off switches inside cells that help control what the cells do and when they do it. If scientists can better understand how they work and how to manipulate them, it could one day lead to powerful treatments for diseases like cancer.

The physics prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry physics prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.
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