--:-- Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Wednesday, October 30th. Here's what we're covering.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: So look, in less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office. Kamala Harris delivered what her campaign called her closing argument last night in Washington, D.C. as American voters decide, Harris or Trump.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Harris's choice of location for the speech was not at all subtle. She stood at the same spot where Trump spoke on January 6th, rallying his supporters, who then marched on the Capitol.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And throughout her speech, Harris made the case for what she would do if elected, versus Trump. I will fight to restore what Donald Trump and his hand-selected Supreme Court justices took away from the women of America.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: She pledged to defend abortion rights and help Americans with the cost of child care and housing tax credits. She also cast Trump as a threat to democracy.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: These United States of America, we are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That closing argument was all about contrast. It was a contrast with Donald Trump both in its setting, and it was a contrast in the content of her speech as well.
--:-- Peter Baker: She made a point of laying out specific policies in more detail than she often does, and in contrast to Trump, who doesn't talk about policy really at all, except in the broadest of generalities, and is meant to address critics who say she hasn't been specific enough.
--:-- Peter Baker: She presented herself as a problem solver, somebody willing to work across the aisle to make things better for Americans, as opposed to Trump, who is focused in her view on retribution, on attacking enemies, on dividing the country.
--:-- Peter Baker: And the other thing she wanted to do was to reach out to those uncommitted voters the very few of them who are left to say this is why it important for you to come to the polls and to support me at this time.
--:-- Peter Baker: The idea being that she will address their problems rather than the way Trump will only address his own.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Meanwhile, Donald Trump's campaign is taking a page out of their 2016 playbook and trying to recreate a moment that hit big with his supporters back then.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It was when Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters a, quote, basket of deplorables. They turned the insult into a rallying cry.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Now, President Biden has provided the ammunition. The president was reacting yesterday to remarks from Trump's Madison Square Garden rally, where a comedian called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage.
--:-- Joe Biden: They're good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there as his supporters.
--:-- Joe Biden: His demonization was seen as unconscionable.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The White House claims that what Biden was calling garbage was the demonization of Latinos.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But just moments ago, Joe Biden stated that our supporters are garbage.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump's allies seized on the soundbite. Our garbage. He's talking about the Border Patrol. He's talking about nurses. He's talking about teachers. He's talking about anything.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Senator Marco Rubio talked up the remarks at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and so did Trump himself.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But she said deplorable, that didn't work out. Garbage, I think, is worse, right?
--:-- Tracy Mumford: By last night, the Trump campaign had already sent a fundraising email with the subject line, you are not garbage.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In northern Gaza, an Israeli strike on a residential building yesterday killed dozens of people. The latest in a series of recent strikes there that have caused mass casualties.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Gaza's health ministry says at least 93 people were killed, including at least 25 children.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: We have reached out to the government of Israel to ask what happened here. We don't yet know the underlying circumstances.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: A spokesman for the U.S. State Department said it was a, quote, horrifying incident with a horrifying result, and that the U.S. was waiting for answers from Israel.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In recent weeks, Israel has been carrying out a renewed offensive against Hamas in northern Gaza. It says it's trying to stop militants from regrouping there.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Civilians in the area are once again caught in the middle.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: According to the United Nations, no aid has reached northern Gaza since early last week.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And an emergency effort to vaccinate kids there against polio which has flared up in the region has been put on hold.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: More than 100,000 kids now only have partial protection from the disease, potentially allowing it to spread in Gaza and beyond.
--:-- Jack Nickus: I have flown over the Amazon many times, and what we usually see is full green verdant forest or patches of barren land where the trees have been cut down.
--:-- Jack Nickus: But this was very different. What was left was a broad swath of forest that was gray and leafless.
--:-- Jack Nickus: The trees were still standing, but they were just their corpses.
--:-- Jack Nickus: The Times' Brazil bureau chief, reporting on a new threat to the country's forests.
--:-- Jack Nickus: The forests are some of the most biodiverse habitat left on the planet, and for years, authorities have been trying to fight back against ranchers who clear the woods to raise cattle.
--:-- Jack Nickus: Authorities have used satellites to look for intentionally set fires or for sections of trees that have been clear-cut with chainsaws.
--:-- Jack Nickus: But Jack says some ranchers have changed their tactics. They're now using chemicals to illegally kill off whole sections of forest.
--:-- Jack Nickus: Not only does it kill the trees, but it also contaminates the soil.
--:-- Jack Nickus: The chemicals can wash into rivers. It affects the wildlife, and it also affects the people who live in the forest in a much more dramatic way.
--:-- Jack Nickus: In several cases, there have been indigenous communities that have to move their villages because of aerial spraying of chemicals.
--:-- Jack Nickus: And in some cases, they've had to actually be evacuated because of symptoms of poisoning.
--:-- Jack Nickus: Just in the past few weeks, authorities have charged one rancher with spraying chemicals over a stretch of protected forests the size of New York City, 300 square miles.
--:-- Jack Nickus: And they are seeking nearly $1 billion in compensation from this rancher.
--:-- Jack Nickus: Now, this rancher has supplied some of the world's biggest meatpackers, and that includes JBS.
--:-- Jack Nickus: That's a Brazilian beef giant that exports a lot of meat to the United States.
--:-- Jack Nickus: And it shows how a lot of this illegal deforestation has connections to the beef supply chain that many Americans buy into.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Just a couple months into the school year, it become clear that college sports in the U have entered an entirely new era, one with a lot of jet lag.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Once upon a time, college conferences mostly had a geographic logic to them.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Schools played other schools nearby or at least in the same time zone.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But there's been a massive reshuffling of conferences recently to maximize profits and TV deals, and it's created some head-spinning schedules.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: One example, the UCLA football team, which is now in the Big Ten, kicked off in Hawaii this August.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Then they were in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Nebraska, and up to Washington State.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In all, the team will travel over 22,000 miles this season, almost enough to circumnavigate the globe.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That means student-athletes are missing more class and more sleep, and schools are scrambling to adjust.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Some are adding tutors, mental health support staff, or shifting budgets for more charter flights.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: One Stanford professor told the Times he's concerned about the balance between academics and athletics, which has always been somewhat controversial.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: He said at a certain point, the concept of a student-athlete, quote, gets so stretched that it's broken.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And finally, for anyone who flies in the U.S., including all of those college athletes, dealing with canceled or delayed flights just got simpler.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: New rules from the U.S. Transportation Department kicked in this week, requiring airlines to automatically refund passengers for significant disruptions.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The rules, which were announced this spring, apply to flights that are canceled, to domestic flights that are delayed by more than three hours, and to international flights that are delayed by more than six hours.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Passengers are now supposed to get those refunds automatically within 20 days, without having to listen to even one minute of that jazzy airline hold music.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, the last political roundtable before the election. Three Times reporters break down this week's news from the campaign trail, including why top members of the Harris campaign say they're feeling, quote,
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.
