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Tulsi Gabbard said last week she was considering a boycott because she thinks the DNC and media are trying to "hijack the election."

A teacher at Drexel Hill Middle School in Pennsylvania has been placed on administrative leave after she used racial slurs in a viral Facebook video.

The UFO is still on the ground—for now.

An obese woman shrunk to five stone and starved to death, after a gastric bypass operation left her unable to eat, an inquest has heard. Kimberly Wall, 44, had undergone the procedure in 2008 over fears her obesity would kill her - but over the next 10 years her weight plummeted until she was just five stone. The mother-of-three, who previously weighed 23 stone, struggled to eat and could only manage two mouthfuls of food at a time. Her condition left her so weak she was barely able to walk, or even get out of bed.  Despite repeated attempts by doctors to treat her, Miss Wall, from Rochdale, Greater Manchester was admitted to Fairfield Hospital in Bury after her condition deteriorated.  She died a week later with tests showing she had suffered heart failure due to malnutrition, contributed to by the gastric by-pass operation. Last week, a coroner concluded there were no errors with the operation itself, but Ms Hall died on October 8 last year from long-term complications of it.  Miss Hall had undergone the operation at a private hospital on the NHS after she began comfort eating when she suffered a miscarriage when she was 18.  She subsequently complained of suffering crippling stomach pains, nausea, fatigue and low self-confidence. Speaking about her decision to have the operation in 2014 she said: “I completely regret having the gastric bypass.  “I wish I'd never done it. It's just such a shame that I had to get to this point to realise that I was happier when I was overweight.” Recording a narrative conclusion the coroner, Matthew Cox, said: "Kimberly's problem with nutrition is a rare but recognised complication of the gastric bypass surgery. "Given the extent of the problems Kimberly went on to suffer she had problems with anxiety and depression and this exacerbated the eating difficulties. It is clear to me the source of her problem was investigated thoroughly over the years."

The family of a missing Utah tech executive has called off a search for her after police reported that a body was found inside a parked car in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Syrian regime sent troops towards the Turkish border on Monday to contain Ankara's deadly offensive against the Kurds, stepping in for US forces due to begin a controversial withdrawal. Outgunned and without US protection, the autonomous Kurds in northeastern Syria had few other options to stop the rapid advance of Turkish troops and their Syrian proxies. Turkey wants to create a roughly 30-kilometre (20-mile) buffer zone along its border to keep Kurdish forces at bay and also to send back some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees it hosts.

A history worth examining on Indigenous People's Day.

One of Britain's most prolific child sex offenders, Richard Huckle, has died three years into a life sentence for abusing Malaysian and Cambodian children, Britain's Ministry of Justice said on Monday, with media saying he had been stabbed to death. Huckle, 33, who abused children and babies during a nine year period, was sentenced to life in prison in 2016 after pleading guilty to 71 offences. Dubbed the country's worst paedophile by Britain's media, he was found stabbed to death in prison on Sunday after being attacked with a makeshift knife, the BBC reported.

Ohio investigators say the six-foot log was pushed or thrown off the cliff in the Hocking Hills State Park. Two teens have been charged.

A handful of states are celebrating their first Indigenous Peoples Day on Monday as part of a trend to move away from a day honoring Christopher Columbus. From Minnesota to Vermont, at least five states and Washington, D.C., have done away with Columbus Day celebrations in deference to Native Americans, though the federal Columbus Day remains in place. Since 1992, Native American advocates have pressed states to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day over concerns that Columbus helped launched centuries of genocide against indigenous populations in the Americas.

The son of a Texas sheriff who used a White House press conference to describe immigrant offenders as “drunks” likely to repeatedly break the law has been arrested for public intoxication.Sergei Waybourn, 24, faces a count of indecent exposure as well as public drunkenness just days after his father, Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, was criticised for the comments.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) announced on Sunday that the whistleblower at the center of an impeachment inquiry into President Trump may not testify before Congress due to concerns over the person's safety."Our primary interest right now is making sure that that person is protected," Schiff told interviewers on CBS's Face the Nation.Schiff explained that Democrats may be able to gather enough evidence to impeach Trump without revealing the person's identity.Trump blasted Schiff's comments on Twitter on Monday morning ."Adam Schiff now doesn’t seem to want the Whistleblower to testify. NO!" Trump wrote. "We must determine the Whistleblower’s identity to determine WHY this was done to the USA.”Trump has repeatedly called on House Democrats to reveal the identity of the whistleblower. "I do not know why a person that defrauds at the American public should be protected," the president tweeted on Wednesday.The whistleblower initially came forward with concerns about a July phone conversation between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky based on second hand accounts of the discussion. Trump subsequently released a transcript of the call revealing that he asked Zelensky to investigate corruption allegations against Joe Biden.Days before the July conversation, Trump delayed a military aid package earmarked by Congress for Ukraine. The timing has caused Democrats to suspect that Trump withheld the aid package to pressure Ukraine to conduct an investigation damaging to his political rival.Trump has called the Democrats' accusations a "witch hunt" and a "hoax."Meanwhile, a second whistleblower who reportedly has direct knowledge of the conversation between Trump and Zelensky has come forward, and is being represented by the same legal team as the initial whistleblower.

California has become the first US state to ban the sale and manufacture of new fur products.On Saturday, California’s governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law to prohibit residents from making or selling items such as clothing, shoes or handbags made of fur.

A report commissioned by the Committee on Climate Change says that just 15% of the entire British population take 70% of all flights from the country.

Vladimir Putin "didn't even have to try to make it happen," a NATO official told us. "Small wonder he'd interfere on Trump's side in an election."

From Ted Cruz’s sneering at “New York values” to the gratuitous scorn President Trump heaped on the city of Baltimore, Republicans seem to have tacitly accepted that they will never again be able to compete in urban centers. But at least one major city still has a viable, even thriving, Republican administration: San Diego, the eighth-largest urban area in America, whose mayor, Kevin Faulconer, has enjoyed two popular and successful terms in city hall despite a constituency that is actually less red than deep-blue California as a whole.In an interview, Faulconer attributes his ability to win elections in a city where only 22 percent of voters are registered Republicans to a political brand that is “not about partisanship, but leadership.” This may sound like a boilerplate talking point, but it contains a lesson that Republicans seeking a toehold in blue states could learn from: Mayors are simply not subject to the same partisan pressures as legislators and other elected officials. If they eschew divisive, bomb-throwing bombast in favor of a focus on competent, productive governance, voters will reward them.Faulconer’s rise and tenure is a case study in this dynamic. He was elected in the wake of the resignation of scandal-ridden Democratic mayor Bob Filner, with San Diego’s finances in deplorable shape. He promised to fix the city budget and did, establishing a low-key, technocratic image that helped him easily win his bid for a full term. It helped that he made an effort to reach out to voters who wouldn’t typically vote for a Republican. His campaign headquarters was located in a historically black city neighborhood, and he stressed throughout our interview how important that physical presence was in connecting with local residents. The result was that people knew him not “as a Republican,” he said, but as a competent mayor.If Faulconer’s success were just a matter of personal temperament and a concerted effort to transcend party labels, other California Republicans might be forgiven for assuming he doesn’t have much to teach the struggling state party. But as he closes out his second term, Faulconer has zeroed in on an issue that the state’s overwhelmingly Democratic leadership has failed to address: the homelessness crisis. Though the issue is not his only his policy focus, he trumpets it as one that Republicans should zero in on.At the recent California Republican party convention in Palm Springs, Faulconer devoted the bulk of his keynote address to discussing the explosion in the state’s homeless population. It is, he said, “not merely an issue in California, but the issue,” one that offers California Republicans a golden chance to present themselves as a viable alternative to their Democratic rivals. In our interview, he highlighted San Diego’s recent efforts to grapple with the crisis. Most crucially, he has committed the city to providing enough shelter beds for every member of its homeless population, which no other comparably large city on the West Coast is even close to doing. San Diego can now offer any persons living on the street housing, and compel them to enter it if they refuse. It’s a real accomplishment, though he is quick to caution that “housing first” cannot become “housing only.” If the goal is to keep people off the streets long-term, he argues, it is just as important for shelter services to connect homeless people with treatment and counseling as it is to give them a place to stay.The results of Faulconer’s fight against homelessness in San Diego have been mixed. Expansion of shelters, greater use of law enforcement against tent encampments, and increased spending on services have led to a 6 percent decrease in the homeless population, which he concedes is far from a massive improvement. But San Diego is the only major West Coast city to have seen any kind of decrease in homelessness, and it is one of the few with a clear plan to address the crisis.It remains to be seen what kind of impact Faulconer’s singular success — there are a smattering of other Republican mayors statewide, but the next-largest California city with a Republican administration is Fresno, just over a third the size of San Diego — will have on the state party. In our interview, he reiterated a long-standing refusal to announce plans for higher office, and the upcoming mayoral race in San Diego won’t feature a Republican candidate. But he is adamant that the state party could learn from his experience in office.In his convention keynote, he spoke about the need for a California Republican party clearly differentiated from the national party. This is sound advice. A state with as many acute problems as one-party Democratic rule has created in California might look like easy pickings for an opposition party. But state voters are significantly out of step with the national GOP on everything from support for the president to environmental issues to immigration, and the state GOP has failed to establish a brand of its own to account for that divergence.Faulconer is an example of what such a brand could look like. He has backed stronger environmental legislation, strongly opposed President Trump’s wall, and is pro-choice. There is nothing particularly radical about his tenure, no grand new vision for a conservative renewal in California or cities nationwide. What he has done is identify a crisis that defines the state — homelessness — and pledged to tackle it. Whether other California Republicans can do the same — delivering on local issues while staying as insulated as possible from divisive national politics — could be key to determining their party’s future.

(Bloomberg) -- The World Trade Organization on Monday formally authorized the U.S. to impose tariffs on about $7.5 billion worth of European exports annually in retaliation for illegal government aid to Airbus SE.Members approved this month’s arbitration award -- the largest in the trade organization’s history -- at a special meeting of the dispute settlement body at the WTO’s headquarters in Geneva. The development marks the final procedural hurdle before the U.S. can retaliate against European goods, which it plans to do on Oct. 18.The EU made a last-ditch appeal to the U.S. over the weekend to thwart the tariffs, seeking a negotiated settlement that would avoid the economic harm a tit-for-tat escalation would cause both parties. European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom told her U.S. counterpart, Robert Lighthizer, that his tariff plan would compel the EU to apply countermeasures in a parallel lawsuit over aid the U.S. provided to Boeing Co.“I strongly believe that imposing additional tariffs in the two aircraft cases is not a solution,” Malmstrom said in an Oct. 11 letter to Lighthizer seen by Bloomberg News. “It would only inflict damage on businesses and put at risk jobs on both sides of the Atlantic, harm global trade and the broader aviation industry at a sensitive time.”‘Short-Sighted’U.S. Ambassador to the WTO Dennis Shea said at Monday’s meeting in Geneva that the Trump administration’s preference is to “find a negotiated outcome with the EU that ends all WTO-inconsistent subsidies,” according to a copy of his remarks obtained by Bloomberg. Malmstrom said last month that the EU had reached out to the U.S. with a “detailed proposal,” but that the U.S. wasn’t willing to negotiate.The EU said that it would be “short-sighted” for the U.S. to impose retaliatory tariffs on European goods and urged the U.S. to find a “fair and balanced solution” to the dispute, according to a statement delivered by Paolo Garzotti, the EU’s deputy head of delegation to the WTO.“Both the EU and the US have been found at fault by the WTO dispute settlement system,” Garzotti said. “In the parallel Boeing case, the EU will in some months equally be granted right to impose additional countermeasures. The mutual imposition of countermeasures, however, would only harm global trade and the broader aviation industry.”The EU has already published a preliminary list of U.S. goods -- from ketchup to video-game consoles -- it will target in a $12 billion plan for retaliatory levies related to the Boeing case. The WTO will issue an arbitration award next year. The office of the U.S. Trade Representative previously said it would impose a 10% tariff on large civil aircraft from France, Germany, Spain and the U.K. The U.S. will also slap 25% levies on a range of other items including Irish and Scotch whiskeys, wine, olives and cheese, as well as certain pork products, butter and yogurt from various European nations.(Updates with U.S. comment in the fifth paragraph.)\--With assistance from Jonathan Stearns.To contact the reporter on this story: Bryce Baschuk in Geneva at bbaschuk2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Murray at brmurray@bloomberg.net, Richard Bravo, Chris ReiterFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

The United States appears to be heading toward a full military withdrawal from Syria amid growing chaos, cries of betrayal and signs that Turkey's invasion could fuel a broader war. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Sunday that President Donald Trump had directed U.S. troops in northern Syria to begin pulling out "as safely and quickly as possible." He did not say Trump ordered troops to leave Syria, but that seemed like the next step in a combat zone growing more unstable by the hour. Esper, interviewed on two TV news shows, said the administration was considering its options.

A team of British experts arrived in Iran on Monday to begin work to upgrade the Arak heavy water nuclear reactor, the UK embassy in Tehran said. Iran removed the core of the Arak facility and filled part of it with cement as part of a 2015 deal that gave the country relief from sanctions in return for curbs on its nuclear programme. Located southwest of Tehran, the reactor is to be modernised with the help of foreign experts under the deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.