Florida prepares for Hurricane Ian; consumers gaining confidence; Biden’s strategy to end hunger | Hot off the Wire podcast
Hurricane Ian tore into western Cuba and left 1 million people without electricity. Now it’s on a collision course with Florida over warm Gulf waters expected to strengthen it into a catastrophic Category 4 storm.
At the White House, President Joe Biden said his administration was sending hundreds of Federal Emergency Management Agency employees to Florida and sought to assure mayors in the storm’s path that Washington will meet their needs.
Denmark says it believes “deliberate actions” by unknown perpetrators were behind big leaks, which seismologists said followed powerful explosions, in two natural gas pipelines running under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. European leaders and experts pointed to possible sabotage amid the energy standoff with Russia provoked by the war in Ukraine.
Over 194,000 Russian nationals have entered Kazakhstan, Georgia and Finland in the week since President Vladimir Putin announced a partial mobilization of reservists to fight in Ukraine.
Student activists have walked out of class across Virginia to protest Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposed changes to the state’s guidance on district policies for transgender students. If adopted by districts after they become final, the new policies would roll back some accommodations for transgender students.
A New Orleans social services nonprofit long known as the Kingsley House has ditched the name of a Victorian clergyman found to have held profoundly racist views. It was named in 1896 for both social reformer Charles Kingsley and the founder’s son Kingsley Warner, who died as a toddler. Now the organization is named “Clover.”
U.S. consumers grew more confident for the second month in a row as gas prices continued to fall. The Conference Board said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index rose to 108 in September, from 103.6 in August.
The Biden administration has an ambitious goal for America: ending hunger in the U.S. by 2030. The administration’s plan includes expanding monthly benefits that help low-income Americans buy food. It also seeks to promote healthy eating and physical activity so that fewer people are afflicted with diabetes, obesity, hypertension and other diet-related diseases.
Biogen has agreed to pay $900 million to resolve allegations that it violated federal law by paying kickbacks to doctors in the form of speakers and consulting fees to persuade them to prescribe its multiple sclerosis drugs.
Jury selection is underway in one of the most serious cases to emerge from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The founder of the far-right Oath Keepers extremist group and four associates are charged with seditious conspiracy. Stewart Rhodes and the others are the first Jan. 6 defendants charged with the the rare Civil War-era offense to stand trial.
King Charles III’s new monogram has been unveiled, as the official period of mourning for his mother Queen Elizabeth II came to a close. The emblem, known as the king’s cypher, will appear on government buildings, state documents and some post boxes in the coming months and years. The cypher unveiled Tuesday features the initial C intertwined with the letter R for Rex, the Latin word for king. The Roman numeral III sits in the center of the R and a crown hovers above the letters.
