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      Trump stands by debunked claims immigrants are eating pets at event for Hispanic voters

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      Donald Trump – who has built his presidential campaign on the idea that immigrants are “destroying” the US and promoting mass deportation – faced blunt, tough questions from undecided Hispanic voters on Tuesday.At a town hall hosted by Univision, the largest US Spanish-language network, several dozen Latino voters from across the country questioned the former president about immigration, as well as the economy, abortion and other key issues.The Republican presidential candidate – who has been increasingly trying to court Latino voters – struggled to field specific questions about policy, even as he doubled down on misinformation about immigration.Polls have indicated that Trump is making inroads with Hispanic voters, who – like multiple other demographic groups – say they favour the former president on economic issues. Latino voters are an increasingly important voting bloc in several swing states. At the town hall, in front of 100 voters, Trump did not mention his plans to order the largest mass deportation in US history.He also dodged or dismissed tough questions about his rhetoric and policies concerning immigrants. When a voter, who mentioned he was a registered Republican, asked why Trump keeps repeating the debunked myth that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, Trump doubled down.“I was just saying what was reported,” Trump said – adding that migrants were “eating other things too, that they’re not supposed to”.Guadalupe Ramirez, whose parents immigrated from Mexico, asked Trump for more details about his proposals and asked why he had urged legislators to vote against a bipartisan immigration reform bill. Trump provided no details, but instead criticised Democratic leaders, including the governor of Illinois, alleging that migrants were driving up crime, and boasted that he had the “strongest border”.When Jorge Velázquez, a California farmworker, asked bluntly who would do the backbreaking labor of harvesting America’s fruit if Trump were to deport the many undocumented workers who currently do the job, the former president dodged.He accused newer immigrants of stealing jobs from Hispanic people in the US, and characterised migrants – as he often does – as “hundreds of thousands of people that are murderers, drug dealers and terrorists”.“We have to have people that are great people come into our country,” he said. “I want them in even more than you do.” But he never directly addressed deportations.During her town hall with Univision, Kamala Harris highlighted her policies to address inflation and protect abortion rights. She also warned that her opponent was sowing misinformation and division.“I know that the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us, and part of what pains me is the approach that frankly Donald Trump and some others have taken, which is to suggest that it’s us versus them … and having Americans point fingers at each other, using language that’s belittling people,” she said.“I don’t think that’s healthy for our nation, and I don’t admire that.” More

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      Desi Arnaz Historical Marker Celebrates the ‘I Love Lucy’ Star in Miami Beach

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      A new historical marker in Miami Beach pays tribute to his younger years, before Hollywood, when as a Cuban émigré he performed at a nightclub.Years before he played the charming and devoted husband Ricky Ricardo on the sitcom “I Love Lucy” and became a bandleader who belted out “Babalú” before audiences, Desi Arnaz was a teenage Cuban immigrant who struggled to learn English in Florida.He attended a Catholic school in Miami Beach, picking up the guitar and the conga drum. And he was eventually hired as a bandleader at a nightclub where he popularized the conga.Nearly 90 years after that first big break, Miami Beach honored him on Tuesday with a historical marker that was placed near where the nightclub stood. The marker pays tribute to his younger years in the city and celebrates him for paving the way for generations of Latino entertainers.“He was not only a pioneer for Cubans that were coming to the United States but he was a pioneer for the arts in Miami Beach,” said Alex Fernandez, a member of the Miami Beach Commission, the city’s legislative body.Desi, ‘an American Original’Desi Arnaz during a publicity tour to Lucille Ball’s hometown in Jamestown, N.Y., in 1956.Charlotte BrooksThe new marker is at Collins Park outside the Miami City Ballet. It is near the site of the former Park Avenue Restaurant that hosted performances and came to be remembered as the Park Avenue nightclub. The memorial joins an artsy Miami Beach district that includes the Bass Museum of Art and a library.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      California Rejects Bid for More Frequent SpaceX Launches

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      A commission denied a request to increase the number of rocket launches on the state’s central coast, citing environmental concerns.A California state commission this week rejected the U.S. Space Force’s bid to increase the number of SpaceX rocket launches on the state’s central coast, citing concerns about the environmental impacts of the launches.The Space Force had sought to increase the number of launches of SpaceX’s flagship Falcon 9 rocket from 36 to 50 per year out of California. But on Thursday, the California Coastal Commission denied the bid in a 6-4 vote, pointing to its previous requests for the military and SpaceX to mitigate the disruptive sonic booms caused by the rockets and to keep a closer eye on the operations’ effects on the state’s wildlife.The commission also rejected the military and SpaceX’s argument that the launches should be considered a federal activity, saying they mostly benefit SpaceX and its private business operations, as opposed to the government.The move came just a couple of months after the commission had approved increasing the number of SpaceX launches to 36, contingent on the military’s commitment to adopting such measures. The board, which is tasked with protecting the state’s coastal resources, previously expressed its reservation for approving more launches without understanding the effects of the sonic booms and launch debris on wildlife.SpaceX, which is owned by Elon Musk, has grown to dominate the space launch business, serving as the primary provider to both NASA and the Pentagon. It has blasted its own commercial satellites into space out of bases across the country at a rapid clip, and it is set to test its new Starship rocket on Sunday in Texas. In California, SpaceX carries out many of its missions at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.But the sonic booms have been startling residents in Southern California, whose homes have been shaken by powerful, confusing jolts, The Los Angeles Times reported. And several environmental groups submitted letters urging the commission to take more time to study the impact on wildlife ahead of this week’s meeting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden Declares Disaster From Milton Ahead of Florida Visit

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      The president will visit communities ravaged by Hurricane Milton on Sunday. The disaster declaration will enable funds for the state to be deployed.President Biden approved a major disaster declaration for Florida for communities ravaged by Hurricane Milton, freeing up federal funding to assist in the state’s recovery and rebuilding.A statement from the White House on Saturday said that Mr. Biden had approved the deployment of the additional resources to Florida. It comes before he is set to travel there on Sunday to visit communities damaged by the hurricane and speak to emergency medical workers and residents trying to pick up the pieces. It will be his second such visit to the state this month.The White House typically approves disaster declarations for states after major natural disasters. The president makes the declaration after a state’s governor — in this case, Gov. Ron DeSantis — makes a request for the federal assistance.Mr. Biden finalized the declaration on Friday, freeing up federal funding for 34 counties, as well as the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. The move also provides grants for temporary housing and home repairs, loans to cover uninsured property losses and other programs to help residents and businesses, according to the White House.“I want everyone in the impacted areas to know we’re going to do everything we can to help you pick back up the pieces and get back to where you were,” Mr. Biden said during a hurricane briefing with top cabinet officials at the White House on Friday.Total economic losses from Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene, which struck several states in the Southeast last month, could soar to over $200 billion, according to early estimates. Mr. Biden has said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has enough resources to respond to the immediate needs of communities in the wake of both storms. But he has warned that Congress will need to pass more funding for longer-term recovery.“We’re going to be going to Congress,” Mr. Biden said. “We’re going to need a lot of help. We’re going to need a lot more money as we identify specifically how much is needed.”FEMA has approved $441 million in assistance for survivors of Hurricane Helene and over $349 million in public assistance funding to help rebuild communities, according to a statement from the agency.The visit to Florida on Sunday also comes amid rising frustration in the White House with the flood of misinformation about the federal response to recent natural disasters, led by former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, and his allies.“The misinformation out there is not only disgusting but dangerous,” Mr. Biden said on Friday. More

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      Trump wants the FCC to take CBS’s license away. This is a dark omen | Dennis Aftergut and Austin Sarat

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      Donald Trump’s 10 October attack on CBS for editing its 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris – a normal television process – is pure distraction. It is designed to draw our attention away from the fact that he was afraid to give the news magazine its traditional interview with both political candidates. Trump’s statement that the Federal Communications Commission should “take away” CBS’s broadcast license betrays his ignorance of the fact that the FCC does not license networks and foreshadows a full-on assault on free speech and freedom of the press if he becomes president.History is clear that dictators move early to take control of the media in order to censor information unfavorable to their people. Our safety requires preventing that control, as Thomas Jefferson wrote two centuries ago: “The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed.”Only Rumpelstiltskin would fail to grasp how much Trump cannot tolerate criticism from the press or anyone. Attacking mainstream media is his way of desensitizing us to the important role of the press in a free society.If you want a preview of how first amendment rights will disappear if Trump is elected president, look to his home state of Florida where Governor Ron DeSantis, his Maga copycat, runs that government in a way Trump would like to bring to the whole nation. On 9 October, we saw one of the governor’s lackeys try to carve away freedom of speech and the press, along with reproductive rights.John Wilson, the general counsel to the state’s department of health, threatened the state’s broadcast stations with prosecution unless they removed a campaign ad promoting amendment 4. It’s the ballot measure to add abortion rights to the state’s constitution.The amendment 4 ad featured Floridian Caroline Williams saying that she would be dead had the state’s six-week ban on abortion been in effect when her health required one in 2022. The irony of the Florida government trying to quash the ad is rich. Here we have a bare-knuckles attempt at censorship from the party that purports to oppose the “cancel culture”.That’s not the end of the irony. The health department’s letter alleged that the pro-amendment 4 ad violated the state’s “sanitation nuisance” statute. This ground for government censorship, based as it is on a statute designed to prohibit overflowing septic tanks or unclean slaughterhouses, fails the laugh test, much less the constitution.Still, don’t miss what’s going on here: people’s rights are not removed in one fell swoop but rather in steps. The first stage is eroding people’s expectations that freedoms are sacred and will be respected. By getting us thinking we can live with this or that little invasion of someone else’s rights, autocrats normalize those intrusions and then expand them to cover all of us. Diminishing the media’s and the public’s rights to criticize a leader is how dictatorships get started.That’s why American law – at least in its current state – forbids what Wilson was threatening. Campaign ads are core political speech, entitled to the highest level of first amendment protection. That means that content-based restrictions on such speech must promote a compelling government interest and be the least intrusive way to promote that interest. Specifically, even false statements in the context of abortion law campaigning – and Williams’ statements in the ad were not false – must survive such strict scrutiny.A Florida crocodile’s tears would be more compelling than Wilson’s description of Florida’s interest in protecting women from the ad’s purported “danger” – that it suggests that they need to go to other states or find unlicensed abortionists if they do not have access to an abortion in Florida. That danger arises from the statute, not the ad.If the department of public health is so concerned about women’s safety, why not issue a regulation clarifying that doctors will not be prosecuted if, in their professional judgment, they believe that a woman has “pregnancy complications posing a serious risk of death or substantial and irreversible physical impairment”?Without that assurance, a doctor’s decision to perform an emergency abortion is so chilled that, in effect, there is no exception to Florida’s six-week ban. Interviews with Florida doctors establish their understandable unwillingness to risk their liberty given the prospect of a district attorney second-guessing their judgment.But whatever the ban’s impact on the practice of medicine, Wilson and DeSantis’s effort to stop groups from promoting their point of view puts all of us in jeopardy.George Washington captured that danger at the beginning of the republic. As he put it: “The freedom of Speech may be taken away – and, dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.” Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, 250 years later, are sending us a clear message that our lives and our freedoms are on the ballot.

      Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy

      Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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      A Retirement Community Prepared for a Hurricane. Tornadoes Came Instead.

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      Hurricane Milton’s death toll was highest far from the coast where it made landfall, in a retirement community where few were braced for destructive tornadoes.Victor Linero was watching coverage of Hurricane Milton’s churn toward Florida when, suddenly, he saw a live video of a tornado near his grandfather’s home — hours before the hurricane was supposed to hit on the opposite side of the state.In a panic, Mr. Linero warned his grandfather over the phone that he needed to take cover.“I was screaming, ‘Papi, get shelter now!’” recalled Mr. Linero, 26, who was raised by his grandfather. “And then I start hearing, ‘Oh my God. Ahh!’”He heard his grandfather, Alejandro Alonso, 66, let out a final scream. Then the other end of the line went silent.By the time it was over, what looked to be two tornadoes had plowed through Spanish Lakes Country Club Village, the retirement community north of Fort Pierce where Mr. Alonso lived. They had decimated mobile homes, tossed trucks aside and toppled trees, all while Hurricane Milton was nearly 200 miles away, in the Gulf of Mexico.In the end, Mr. Alonso, his 70-year-old girlfriend and four other people were dead. Roughly 125 houses, all of them mobile homes, were destroyed. It was one of Hurricane Milton’s most perplexing ironies: that an area on the opposite coast from where the brunt of the hurricane hit saw more deaths than any other single spot during the storm.“We were not in an evacuation area,” Anita Perrotta, who lives in the community with her husband, said as she described the two of them hiding in their home at Spanish Lakes while the tornado threw debris against it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hurricane Milton Leaves Many Florida Animals in Limbo

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      Hurricane Milton has displaced people all over Florida. It left thousands of shelter animals in limbo, too.On Friday, animal shelters in Florida were struggling to handle an influx of animals after the storm and scrambling to relocate them, sending some as far away as Massachusetts.Temporary evacuation centers for animals had opened, including one at Alaqua Animal Refuge, in Florida’s Northern Panhandle, which began receiving animals from coastal areas at risk of flooding. Even small shelters were taking in animals, wherever they had spare kennels.“Many shelters were over capacity before the storm,” said Sharon Hawa, senior manager of emergency services at Best Friends Animal Society, a national organization that helped coordinate the transport of around 250 of Florida’s shelter animals this week.In an event like Milton, Ms. Hawa said, shelters usually receive animals picked up by people who are concerned that the strays could die in a storm, as well as ones that get separated from their owners during the storm.“Then there are animals that have already been part of their shelter population,” Ms. Hawa said, adding, “You’re talking about potentially 50, 60, 70, maybe 100 more animals.”On top of that, some shelters suffered property damage. “There are shelters where people are having to wade through water to get there to see if their shelter can even be operational,” Ms. Hawa said.In the lead-up to the storm, people in Clewiston, Fla., about 80 miles northwest of Fort Lauderdale, brought in several stray dogs to the city, said Thomas Lewis, the police chief. Soon, the city’s animal services, which was only set up to handle 14 dogs, had more than 50. And Clewiston was in the direct path of the storm.Mr. Lewis wanted to save the animals, a mix of pit bull mutts and small dogs, and worked with Peggy Adams Animal Rescue League, in West Palm Beach, to relocate more than 40 of them.Nearly all were taken by truck to West Palm Beach. From there, 10 of them were flown to Panama City Beach, and from there, they continued their journey to the Humane Society of North Texas.Chief Lewis said it was good that they had been relocated, since the town was hit by tornadoes. But he wondered what would happen to them next. More

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      Scared by Helene, Everyone in This Florida Beach Town Evacuated for Milton

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      Chris Miller rode out Hurricane Helene just over two weeks ago inside his picturesque yellow home across from the Gulf of Mexico in Bradenton Beach, a tiny Florida city on a barrier island. As the storm surge rose, he readied a wet suit in case he needed to escape.As a huge wall of water swept away his next-door neighbor’s house, he called the mayor, who lives down the road.“I told him, ‘Bev’s house is headed your way,’” Mr. Miller recalled on Friday.So when Hurricane Milton bore down this week, with Bradenton Beach directly in its path, Mr. Miller knew that he had to evacuate.“After we saw what we saw,” he said, “we couldn’t stay.”Neither did anyone else, Bradenton Beach officials believe — the first time in recent memory that even the most dedicated die-hards had no interest in riding out the storm. The forecast was simply too scary, and the memory of Helene — and Ian, another frightening storm two years earlier — was too fresh.“Most of the time, we have a few stragglers,” Mayor John Chappie, who also stayed on the island for Helene, said on Friday. “I don’t think we had any this time.”Dan and June DeBaun returned to their home in Bradenton Beach briefly on Friday to survey the latest damage, which was less severe than what was inflicted by Helene.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More