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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now to the final report in our three-part series this week, The Fight for Iraq.

The coming battle to reclaim the city of Mosul from ISIS will be the capstone in the campaign to drive the extremists from Iraq. But the hard work after the guns go silent of repairing both the city and relations with the people there is as important.

Tonight, with the support again of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, special correspondent Jane Ferguson and producer Jon Gerberg report from one city reclaimed from ISIS where the fighting was only half the battle.

JANE FERGUSON: Now an empty concrete ghost town, Fallujah was once a populous city, just an hour’s drive west from Baghdad.

ISIS quickly took this city two years ago, when they swept into Iraq from Syria and seized land across the country. They ruled the city and its people until the Iraqi army pushed them out in June.

In order to take back Fallujah City, the Iraqi military had to completely empty the city, and the fighting that happened afterwards destroyed everything that the eye can see. Now the atmosphere in this still largely empty city is incredibly eerie.

Khalil Abass is looking forward to rebuilding. He is getting his family ready to go back to their village on the outskirts of Fallujah. All their belongings have once again been packed, including even chickens for food. He is optimistic.

KHALIL ABASS, Fallujah Resident (through translator): I’m happy I’m going back to my home with my family to live a stable, normal life. If God wills it, we will get our old lives back.

JANE FERGUSON: Not everyone can do that. Only a small handful of families have been able to return to Fallujah City so far.

Thousands of others are crammed into camps like this one, not yet allowed to return. Many have not been cleared by the security forces. These people are trying to get home. They ran from the intense fighting when the Iraqi army recaptured Fallujah City from ISIS.

And now they want to return. At a sorting center outside the city, they hope to be given government permissions to go home. But first they will have to persuade the men inside here they are not ISIS members in disguise.

BRIG. GEN. HAMZA AL MOHAMMED, Iraqi Army (through translator): All of the government security branches are here, national security, intelligence, anti-terrorism, military intelligence and police intelligence.

JANE FERGUSON: Each of those groups has a list of suspected ISIS members, and everyone who applies to return to Fallujah has to be checked they are not wanted. When names are read out, the men here answer black or white. Anyone on the black list is arrested.

BRIG. GEN. HAMZA AL MOHAMMED (through translator): This is a family that wants to return to Fallujah. This family is under the name of someone, right? His name is Ahmad. White? We screened the name of the head of the family. The rest are women and children.

JANE FERGUSON: The word in Arabic for white, abyad, means they are free to go. Only then are they given the permit to return home. They are also given a free SIM card with some credit, and then they head up the road to Fallujah.

For those who do return, this is what greets them. The streets are now silent. By the time the gunfire finally finished in Fallujah City, most of those living here had fled.

Every highway, avenue and neighborhood is now smashed and scarred by war. There are few signs of life. According to the local government, only about 5 percent of the pre-ISIS population has so far returned to the city. Many houses are still booby-trapped, says the government. It will take a huge cleanup effort to make every street safe again.

Some families are missing relatives, picked up by the army as they fled the city. Security forces detained Fallujans as they evacuated, checking for ISIS fighters. Those they let go were sent to camps like this.

Hamad Khalaf was detained with his four grown sons, but only he and two of them were released. That was four months ago, and he has heard nothing of his other two sons.

HAMAD KHALAF, Fallujah Resident (through translator): They kept them. Someone came and said, “I saw this one with ISIS.” My son is normal. He is not with ISIS.

JANE FERGUSON: In many cases, he says, this came down to personal grudges. The process was often arbitrary, as neighbor turned on neighbor.

HAMAD KHALAF (through translator): It happened to thousands of people, not just my sons. They are innocent. I know they are innocent. They are being held without explanation. If a person hates another, he will tell the police this person is with ISIS.

JANE FERGUSON: Hamad’s wife, Fatima, is distraught at not knowing where they are.

FATIMA KHALAF, Fallujah Resident (through translator): I feel that they might not release them to me or they might keep them for another month or two. I might not see them. I might die and never see them again.

JANE FERGUSON: Americans fought two battles for Fallujah in 2004, and were never able to free the city from the grip of the Sunni extremists, al-Qaida in Iraq. Sunnis here rejected the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the rise of a Shia government in Baghdad, and many welcomed al-Qaida in Iraq as their defenders.

The legacy of that bloodshed means some people in this camp still hold bitter memories of American involvement in their country.

MAJID SALEH, Refugee From Fallujah (through translator): I lost 31 family members to the Americans. Of them, my sister’s son was four months old. My sister’s son, his sister and their father, they were all killed. What more can I say?

JANE FERGUSON: After the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, policies of the Shia-led Baghdad government became more sectarian. Sunni people in areas like Fallujah were left feeling disenfranchised. Many initially welcomed ISIS, a new, more ambitious version of al-Qaida in Iraq.

Sohaib Al-Rawi, governor of Fallujah’s Anbar Province, and a Sunni himself, saw that sectarian strife firsthand.

SOHAIB AL-RAWI, Anbar Governor (through translator): The Sunni community faced injustice. Many leaders were killed or driven from the country. So, the community feels oppressed. I do not excuse the Sunni extremists, but this is what inflamed the political and security situation in the Sunni provinces.

JANE FERGUSON: Today, the Iraqi government’s attempts to restore Fallujah include mass security and intelligence screening of all of its residents. But that won’t give Fallujans back the lives they once had, which now only live in memory.

MAJID SALEH (through translator): What else can we say about Fallujah? We used to have livestock and tasty food. Now we eat the food of livestock. Fallujah is gone. It’s lost. Fallujah is lost.

JANE FERGUSON: Fallujah has been destroyed by war before, and rebuilt. The repeated explosions of violence here are unlikely to end until its people feel like a real part of today’s Iraq.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jane Ferguson in Fallujah, Iraq.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: The recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize was announced this morning, its laureate chosen from a record 376 nominees. And, as in years past, the Nobel Committee had both a surprise and a message to convey.

Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner reports.

PRESIDENT JUAN MANUEL SANTOS, Colombia (voice-over): I don’t receive this in my name, but in the name of all Colombians, especially the millions of victims from this conflict we have been suffering for more than 50 years.

MARGARET WARNER: The new Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, met the news by vowing to ensure that this hemisphere’s longest war will finally, officially be ended.

PRESIDENT JUAN MANUEL SANTOS (through translator): To this cause, I will dedicate my efforts for the remainder of my days. Thanks to God, peace is near. Together, together, as a nation, we will construct it.

MARGARET WARNER: The Nobel announcement came just five days after Colombian voters narrowly rejected a peace deal negotiated between Santos’ government and the FARC rebel group.

But, in Oslo, Norway, the Peace Prize Committee voiced hope.

KACI KULLMANN FIVE, Chair, Norwegian Nobel Committee: The fact that the majority of the voters said no to the peace accord doesn’t necessarily mean that the peace process is dead. What the no-side rejected wasn’t the desire for peace, but a specific peace agreement.

MARGARET WARNER: In a break with Nobel tradition honoring leaders who settle conflicts, Santos’ counterpart in the peace talks, FARC leader Rodrigo Londono wasn’t recognized by the committee.

Yet, on Twitter today, Londono congratulated Santos and said: “The only prize to which we aspire is that of peace with social justice for Colombia, without paramilitarism, without retaliation, nor lies.”

A prominent former captive of the FARC, Ingrid Betancourt, said the rebels should share the prize. She was kidnapped in 2002 as she campaigned for the Colombian presidency herself, and was held hostage for six years.

INGRID BETANCOURT, Former “FARC” Hostage: It’s hard for me to say it, but I have to be just. And even though they were my captors and I suffered in their hands, I think that it’s true that they transformed themselves. This wouldn’t have been possible eight years ago, when I was abducted.

MARGARET WARNER: Ironically, even as President Santos is recognized internationally, he is facing a political headwinds at home. His approval ratings plummeted below 30 percent early this year, amid rising food prices and dissatisfaction with his handling of the peace talks. It is unclear if today’s honor will make any difference in his standing.

Many Colombians, after a war that claimed more than 220,000 lives, felt the peace agreement was overly generous to the FARC.

For some, the Nobel may do little to change their minds.

JESUS MENDOZA, Construction Worker (through translator): I think it is a farce that that man has won the prize. I think it is a farce.

MARGARET WARNER: Yet the Peace Prize appeared to energize others who have backed the Colombian president.

MANUEL ECHEVARRIA, Peace Accord Supporter (through translator): This international support is going to apply pressure on all involved parties in the negotiation. We think this helps. They all have to understand that the world, too, wants peace in Colombia.

MARGARET WARNER: When Santos himself sat down with the “NewsHour” in February, he acknowledged the difficulties ahead, especially reintegrating thousands of former fighters into society.

PRESIDENT JUAN MANUEL SANTOS: Kids that only know how to shoot, they were born in the guerrilla camps. And these have to be retrained and reeducated. And there’s a process. It’s cumbersome, it’s difficult, but it’s necessary.

MARGARET WARNER: But then, the prospects of an accord that the people would accept seemed promising.

PRESIDENT JUAN MANUEL SANTOS: A peace agreement is never perfect. Always, you have people from one side or the other criticizing it.

MARGARET WARNER: Now both sides have to renegotiate, even as a cease-fire with the FARC formally expires at the end of this month.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Margaret Warner.

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JUDY WOODRUFF:  In the day’s other news:  The United States formally charged that Russia organized the hacking of Democratic political sites and state election systems.

The Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence said it is an effort to interfere with the election process.

We get more now from David Sanger of The New York Times.

David, thanks for being with us.

What’s the significance of this and the fact that it comes, what, almost four months after we first heard about these hacks?

DAVID SANGER, The New York Times:  That’s right, Judy, and we reported in late July that the government and intelligence agencies already had high confidence that it was Russia.

What was interesting about this statement, there’s sort of three big things.  The first is that the White House decided to formally do this.  Usually, President Obama has been very reluctant to name foreign actors who were believed to be behind big hacks.

They named North Korea in the Sony hack two years ago, but declined to name China in the hack of more than 20 million security files from the Office of Personnel Management, and didn’t name Russia when they hacked into the State Department White House and Joint Chiefs of Staff e-mails, mostly unclassified e-mails.

But, in this case, I think they felt that it was getting too close and that they had to issue a warning to the Russians not the mess around on November 8 with voter rolls or other elements.

I think a second important part of it, Judy, is that, by naming them, the president has now got to announce what he’s going to do about it.  And they haven’t said that.  He could do economic sanctions.  He could take overt action.

But there is always a worry in cyber that you get into an escalation issue, where we do something, they do something back, and it can get much bigger.

Then I think the third interesting point is that they said the Russian leadership itself had to be behind some of the DNC hacks.  It couldn’t have just been done at a lower level.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  And I noticed they identified — they said most senior officials.

So what are the options, David, for the administration to do something in response?

DAVID SANGER:  Well, there are a few, Judy.

One is simply to say, by issuing a warning, they have put them on notice, we’re watching, we know what you’re doing, so don’t mess around a month from now.

Option number two would be to make the use of new presidential directive that President Obama signed after the Sony hacks — I think it was signed in April of 2015 — that basically would allow them to do economic sanctions, the way you do against terrorism suspects or nuclear proliferators.

The third option would be to issue a finding, a presidential intelligence finding, which is, by its nature, secret, and authorize the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command to take countervailing action against Web sites or servers inside Russia or to do something else that would show the Russian government and particularly President Putin that we can play this game, too.

But, as I said, that’s risky, because, you know, you never know where that stops, and you’re on the same kind of escalation ladder you are in any other conflict or in nuclear theory.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  But, finally, David, this certainly signals that the administration believes, if the Russians have the capacity to do this, they must have the capacity to do other damage.

DAVID SANGER:  Well, they do.

And you don’t know what other leaks come from the Russians, but just this evening, just as all of this was happening, we saw leaked e-mails posted on WikiLeaks that were written in communications with John Podesta, who helped run Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, that, if it turns out to be like the other material given to WikiLeaks or other groups, could turn out to be that the Russians are already spreading more of this around.

We don’t have the attribution on that yet.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Well, it certainly does seem to be a new — we have reached a new level in outside governments’ involvement in American politics.

DAVID SANGER:  We certainly have.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  David Sanger — David Sanger, we thank you.

DAVID SANGER:  Thank you, Judy.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Meantime, Russia moved today to keep its troops in Syria indefinitely.  The State Duma ratified a treaty with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.  It permits Russia to use a major air base on Syria’s coast for as long as it wants.

But, in Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry said Russia and Syria should be investigated for war crimes, for attacking hospitals and other civilian targets.

JOHN KERRY, Secretary of State:  They’re beyond the accidental now, way beyond, years beyond the accidental.  This is a targeted strategy to terrorize civilians and to kill anybody and everybody who’s in the way of their military objectives.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  The U.N. Security Council votes tomorrow on a resolution urging a truce in Aleppo, and an end to all airstrikes on the city.  Russia signaled that it will veto the proposal.

The Philippines is putting joint military exercises with the U.S. on hold in the South China Sea.  The country’s new president, Rodrigo Duterte, said today that he wants a current ongoing exercise to be the last during his six-year term.

In a speech, he warned Washington — quote — “Do not treat us like a doormat, because you will be sorry for it.  I can always go to China” — end quote.

The pace of hiring in the U.S. economy slowed a little in September.  Today’s Labor Department report tells the story:  Employers added a net of 156,000 jobs, despite the fact manufacturers cut their work force for a second month.  The unemployment rate ticked up a 10th of a point to 5 percent, as more people started looking for work.

And on Wall Street:  The Dow Jones industrial average lost 28 points to close at 18240.  The Nasdaq fell 14 to close at 5292.  And the S&P 500 slipped seven.  All three indexes were down for the week, after three straight weeks of gains.

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JUDY WOODRUFF:  It’s been a day to hunker down along the Atlantic shores of Florida.  Hurricane Matthew plowed north with winds of 110 miles an hour, and there were late reports of heavy damage in the state’s northeastern corner.

In the storm’s wake, the tragedy in Haiti only deepened, with more than 800 people dead.

Hari Sreenivasan is in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, and he begins our coverage.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Three days after the hurricane struck Haiti, the water is receding, and survivors are finding bodies by the hundreds.

Ingrid Arnesen is a freelance journalist who’s been out for a first-hand look.

INGRID ARNESEN:  The south is in a catastrophic situation.  The hurricane flattened the two main cities, destroyed the main roads connecting each three departments, pretty much a third of Haiti, destroyed bridges.  So, reaching the south is impossible.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  The death toll is expected to rise sharply as teams enter remote areas of the hard-hit southwestern peninsula.  For example, one official working in mountainous Beaumont, on the outskirts of Jeremie, says his group found more than 80 bodies that had not yet been recorded by the government.

The storm blasted Haiti with winds of 145 miles an hour and several feet of rain, and left utter devastation in one of the world’s poorest countries.

MAN (through translator):  We have big problems here.  There are almost no houses left standing.  We don’t have food, nor a hospital to get health care.

MAN (through translator):  We have nothing.  The hurricane took shirts from our backs.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Tens of thousands are now homeless, and their crops have been destroyed.  But relief efforts are gearing up.

The U.S. military expects to deliver food and water to hard-hit areas.  and international aid groups are appealing for donations.

Margaret Traub is with the International Medical Corps.

MARGARET TRAUB:  Right now, I would say the Haitian people need food, shelter, clean water, some medical supplies.  We are on Ile-a-Vache, which is an island about a 45-minute boat ride from Les Cayes.

In one of the hospitals where they reported some cholera patients, they didn’t have cleaning supplies, they didn’t have antibiotics.  So, we’re very worried about, while people may have survived the storm, they’re going to not survive the disease.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Meanwhile, people along Florida’s Atlantic Coast spent this day waiting out Matthew.  The eye of the storm stayed just off shore, and may have spared the state a catastrophic blow.

Governor Rick Scott repeatedly made clear the danger had not passed.

GOV. RICK SCOTT (R-Fla.):  There’s no victory lap here.  The victory lap is when the storm leaves our state.  And I hope it doesn’t hit Georgia, South and North Carolina.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  The city of Jacksonville may get the worst of it, as the hurricane passes this evening.  From there, it will push north along Georgia and the Carolinas, keeping hundreds of miles of coastline under threat for 15 inches of rain and a nine-foot storm surge.

The governors of South Carolina and Georgia warned today that time is running out.

GOV. NIKKI HALEY (R-S.C.):  This is the last time you will see me before we are actually in storm mode.  So, please evacuate.

GOV. NATHAN DEAL (R-Ga.):  There’s nothing certain about this other than the danger, and we should pay due heed to the warnings that have been given.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  In Washington, President Obama met with the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and repeated his own warning.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:  The potential for storm surge, flooding, loss of life and severe property damage continues to exist, and people continue to need to continue to follow the instructions of their local officials over the course of the next 24, 48, 72 hours.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Thousands along the Florida coast did heed those warnings from authorities to evacuate and move further inland.  They found themselves in places like Orlando in Central Florida.  For them, today was a long day of watching and waiting.

Gloria and David Floyd live in Satellite Beach, southeast of Orlando.  Their home and yard took some damage, but they said it could have been much worse.  Even so, they headed to a hotel on higher land.

DAVID FLOYD, Satellite Beach, Florida:  Once it got to be a Category 4, I knew that it could get really ugly, and that is when I knew that I decided I had better leave.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  The McChrystal family waited out the storm at the same hotel.

LIZ MCCHRYSTAL, Satellite Beach, Florida:  I’m a little nervous.  I think today will be a long day, until we can get back tomorrow and see what — you know, what the results are.  But most likely, a lot of people in the neighborhoods local are lucky so far.  So I’m going to feed off the good luck.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Others may not be so lucky, and there’s economic disruption as well.  Coastal businesses and tourism are shut down, and airlines have canceled thousands of flights through tomorrow.

The entire last half-hour on the drive out to New Smyrna Beach here in Florida, the power has been out, businesses have been shut down, and people are slowly starting to creep back in, trying to figure out how they are going to try to get things back to normal, and that’s not even the worst of it.  The northeast corner of Florida has gotten it much worse — Judy.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Hari, tell us more about what you have seen.  I think you started in Orlando.  You have been making your way to where you are now, in New Smyrna Beach.  Tell us about what you have seen.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Well, just a little while ago, we were at kind of one of the central park areas in New Smyrna.

Huge trees.  A woman that was passing by said, look, these trees take 100 years to grow, 100 years to die, and this is an just unbelievable sight just to see so many trees down all over the place.

There is a boatyard or a drydock where people keep their boats.  The roofs have been peeled off.  Boats have been kind of tossed around inside it as if they were toys.  The force of this hurricane, it depends on which house you look at, which street you look down, whether there is debris, whether there is walls and fences that have been pulled down, whether there is water that is slowly inundating around these low-lying areas.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Hari, I think a lot of people don’t appreciate what storm surge means, but the water is lethal in a storm like this.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  That’s right.

In St. Augustine and further north here in Florida and also in Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, the real big concern is what a two-foot or an eight-foot storm surge could do, because so many of these cities are low-lying.  And these storm surges just really push.  Almost imagine like a wave taking that last bit of water right onto land.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  And, Hari, from what you can tell, most of the people along this coastal area did evacuate?

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Yes, I think that was the sort of silver lining to this is that a lot of people heeded the warnings.  They didn’t put first-responders at risk.  Authorities were relatively happy about that.

There are, of course, people who decided to try and ride out the hurricane.  And we won’t know until everybody gets back what the damage was, but most people heeded the warnings from the local and national authorities who said get out of the way.

And now people are very anxious, of course, to see what the state of their property is like, how everything fared through the storm.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Hari Sreenivasan reporting for us from New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

Hari, we want you to get someplace where you are dry and safe.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Thanks, Judy.

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The Trump campaign is regrouping after the release of 2005 audio revealing the candidate’s sexist attitude towards two television personalities. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Republicans on Friday were quick to condemn Donald Trump’s vulgar 2005 remarks about women, which were caught on tape during preparations for an Access Hollywood segment. The recording of Trump talking on a bus to then-Access Hollywood host Billy Bush was published earlier on Friday by The Washington Post, threatening to derail Trump’s campaign just two days before the second presidential debate.

In the recording, Trump talked in lewd terms about his attempt to seduce a married woman. “I did try and f**k her. She was married,” Trump said. Trump added that he “moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there.”

At another point in the recording, which was made as Trump and Bush spoke off-camera on a bus, Trump boasted about kissing and groping women. “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”

Trump added that he thought his celebrity status allowed him to act this way. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said. “You can do anything.”

We’re tracking comments from Trump’s supporters, detractors and primary rivals as they pour in through emails and across social media. While many Republican commenters seem to agree with Michael Gerson’s assessment that Trump’s comments were “predatory,” and “demeaning,” there was no immediate sign on Friday of a broader shift in voting loyalty away from the party’s nominee.

TEAM TRUMP

Donald Trump, Republican presidential nominee
Response: “This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course – not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended.”

Gov. Mike Pence, Republican vice presidential nominee
Response: None, so far. Reporters at his Ohio rally asked Pence for a response; he ignored them.

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Trump’s Texas campaign chairman
Response: “There is absolutely no excuse to ever talk about women in such a crude and demeaning way. He was certainly right to apologize. But we can’t let this firestorm distract voters from the frightening policies revealed today in the WikiLeaks of Hillary’s emails, including her “dream” of “open trade and open borders,” which would spell ruin for the future of our country.”

GOP LEADERSHIP

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R, Wisconsin
Response: “I am sickened by what I heard today. Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified. I hope Mr. Trump treats this situation with the seriousness it deserves and works to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests. In the meantime, he is no longer attending tomorrow’s event in Wisconsin.”
Trump endorsement? Yes

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R, Ky.
Response: “These comments are repugnant, and unacceptable in any circumstance. As the father of three daughters, I strongly believe that Trump needs to apologize directly to women and girls everywhere, and take full responsibility for the utter lack of respect for women shown in his comments on that tape.”
Trump endorsement? Yes

Reince Priebus, RNC Chairman
Response: “No woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner. Ever.”
Trump endorsement? Yes

CURRENT GOP SENATORS/REPS/GOVS

Gov. Gary Herbert, R, Utah
Response: “Donald Trump’s statements are beyond offensive & despicable. While I cannot vote for Hillary Clinton, I will not vote for Trump. #utpol”
Trump endorsement? Yes

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R, Utah
Response: “I’m out. I can no longer in good conscience endorse this person for president. It is some of the most abhorrent and offensive comments that you can possibly imagine.”
Trump endorsement? Yes

Sen. Ron Johnson, R, Wisconsin
Response: Donald Trump’s recent comments are completely indefensible and I refuse to event attempt to try and do so.”
Trump endorsement? Yes

Sen. John McCain, R, Arizona
Response: “There are no excuses for Donald Trump’s offensive and demeaning comments. No woman should ever be victimized by this kind of inappropriate behavior. He alone bears the burden of his conduct and alone should suffer the consequences.”
Trump endorsement? Yes

Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R, New Hampshire
Response: “His comments are totally inappropriate and offensive.”
Trump endorsement? No, but has said she will vote for him

Sen. Pat Toomey, R, Penn.
Response: “Donald Trump’s comments were outrageous and unacceptable.”
Trump endorsement? No

Sen. Mark Kirk, R, Illinois
Response: “DJT is a malignant clown – unprepared and unfit to be president of the United States.” + “.@realDonaldTrump should drop out. @GOP should engage rules for emergency replacement.”
Trump endorsement? No

Rep. Joe Heck, R, Nev. (Candidate for U.S. Senate)
Response: “I condemn in the strongest terms possible terms Donald Trump’s comments. The language he used was disgraceful and there are no circumstances where such behavior is acceptable.”
Trump endorsement? Yes

Rep. Mike Coffman, R, Colorado
Response: “For the good of the country, and to give the Republicans a chance of defeating Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump should step aside. His defeat at this point seems almost certain. And four years of Hillary Clinton is not what is best for this country. Mr. Trump should put the country first and do the right thing.”

FORMER RIVALS

Sen. Marco Rubio, R, Florida
Response: “Donald’s comments were vulgar, egregious & impossible to justify.
No one should ever talk about any woman in those terms, even in private.”
Trump endorsement? Yes

Sen. Ted Cruz, R, Texas
Response: “These comments are disturbing and inappropriate, there is simply no excuse for them.” + “Every wife, mother, daughter — every person — deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.”
Trump endorsement? Yes

Fmr. Gov. Jeb Bush, R, Florida
Response: “As the grandfather of two precious girls, I find that no apology can excuse away Donald Trump’s reprehensible comments degrading women.”
Trump endorsement? No

Gov. Scott Walker, R, Wisconsin
Response: “Inexcusable. Trump’s comments are inexcusable.”
Trump endorsement? Yes

FORMER GOV/REP/SENATORS

Fmr. Gov. Jon Huntsman, R, Utah
Response: “In a campaign cycle that has been nothing but a race to the bottom — at such a critical moment for our nation — and with so many who have tried to be respectful of a record primary vote, the time has come for Governor Pence to lead the ticket.”
Trump endorsement? Yes

Fmr. Gov. Mitt Romney, R, Mass.
Response: “Hitting on married women? Condoning assault? Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters and corrupt America’s face to the world.”
Trump endorsement? No

OTHER REPUBLICANS

Ana Navarro, former Jeb Bush adviser/Republican strategist
Response: “It is time to ask [Trump] to step down … he is not fit to be the Republican nominee, he is not fit to be called a man.”
Trump endorsement? No

The post Republicans react to Trump’s vulgar comments about groping women appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Donald Trump apologized on Friday night for vulgar comments he made about women in a decade-old video, as he sought to move past a controversy that is threatening to derail his campaign.

“I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more than a decade-old video are one of them,” Trump said in a taped, minute-long video that was published on Facebook shortly after midnight.

“I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize,” Trump added.

The apology came roughly eight hours after The Washington Post published a 2005 video of Trump making deeply offensive comments about women during a conversation with then-Access Hollywood host Billy Bush.

Trump used lewd language in the recording to describe his attempts to sleep with a married woman, and bragged about using his celebrity status to kiss and grope women. House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republican leaders denounced the comments. At least one, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, withdrew his endorsement of Trump.

READ: Republicans react to Trump’s vulgar comments about groping women

In his video statement late Friday night, Trump said that his comments in the 2005 video “don’t reflect” his views about women.

“Anyone who knows me knows those words don’t reflect who I am,” Trump said.

But the comments are in line with a long series of sexist remarks that Trump has made throughout his business career and current presidential campaign.

And after apologizing, Trump, sounding defiant as he spoke into the camera in the video statement, quickly pivoted to an attack on Hillary Clinton and her husband, saying that his past comments were “nothing more than a distraction from the important issues we’re facing today.”

Trump also took a shot at the Clintons.

“I’ve said some foolish things but there’s a big difference between the words and actions of other people,” Trump said. “Bill Clinton has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims. We will discuss this more in the coming days.”

The controversy will dominate the news cycle over the weekend ahead of the second presidential debate in St. Louis on Sunday. Democrats joined Republicans in denouncing Trump. Clinton also chimed in.

“This is horrific,” Clinton said in a statement on Twitter. “We cannot allow this man to become president.”

The post Trump, appearing defiant, apologizes for lewd comments appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Some experts are skeptical of a vodka that claims to reduce stress on the liver. Photo via Getty Images

WASHINGTON — The scion of an Indian pharmaceutical family claims to have crafted a liver-friendly vodka — and wants to tout that health benefit on the bottle.

But does it work? And, if so, would the US officials who regulate the alcohol industry permit a company to make such a claim?

The entrepreneur behind the spirits is Harsha Chigurupati, whose relatives are majority owners of Granules India, a major supplier of acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and other drugs. Already, his drink of choice, Bellion Vodka, is available in 11 US states. And although Chigurupati’s company can’t yet legally claim the vodka has health benefits, the website for the spirit says it has a “function beyond its normal use” and is “made smarter without sacrificing the fun.”

“We’re earned the right to let everybody in the world know about this,” Chigurupati said at a news conference in April, when Bellion Vodka declared it would petition regulators to claim a health benefit for the drink.

In an interview with STAT, Chigurupati said he and his team had developed a technology that infuses vodka with a proprietary blend of additives that make it easier for the body to break down alcohol and reduce stress on the liver.

That claim leaves some experts deeply skeptical. It rests largely on a small clinical study in which half of the 12 participants drank the blend that included the additives in Bellion Vodka, and half drank vodka without the blend. All of them drank until they had a blood alcohol level of 0.12 — considered seriously drunk and significantly over the limit for safe driving.

The study was conducted by consultants to Chigurupati’s company, including a former university pharmacology dean, as well as by Chigurupati himself. It was peer-reviewed and published in the journal Phytotherapy Research.

The researchers concluded that consuming the alcohol with the additives — glycyrrhizin, derived from licorice; D-mannitol, a sugar alcohol; and potassium sorbate, a preservative — may support improved liver health compared with drinking alcohol alone.

READ NEXT: 7 things you didn’t know about alcohol in America

Marsha Bates, a distinguished research professor and director of the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University, said the study design “seemed appropriate.” But, she added, study itself was small, with only 12 healthy men and women, and “doesn’t really provide any information of what the long-term effects of consuming alcohol with this additive would be.”

“It’s a positive preliminary study but certainly does not provide a firm basis for speculating about long-term impact.”

Functional or not, Chigurupati needs approval from federal regulators before he can tout curative powers on a label.

His quest has led him to petition the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (known as TTB), which oversees labels on alcoholic beverages sold interstate, and the Food and Drug Administration, which works with TTB to evaluate health claims.

Specifically, Chigurupati is seeking approval to make the claim that his blend, known as NTX for “No Tox,” provides “antioxidant and inflammatory support” and “reduces the risk of alcohol-induced liver diseases,” among other claims.

Makers of wine and spirits have tried to claim health benefits in the past — and rarely with success. Red wine producers in recent years sought to note various health benefits on their labels, for instance, but were rejected.

Nathan Brown, a partner in Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, who specializes in food and drug law, said the fact that Bellion Vodka claims health benefits could set off alarms at the FDA.

“If the company makes a claim for protecting the liver, as opposed to a more limited claim, then the product would likely be treated as a drug,” Brown said. “I also think more broadly that the FDA would have some public health concerns, much like they did about five years ago for caffeinated alcoholic beverages.”

If approved, Bellion Vodka would become the first US alcoholic beverage permitted to make a health claim, and could set a precedent for other beer, wine, and spirits companies to pursue similar claims that to date have been rejected.

If the government “allows claims to be made, the whole alcohol market place will be transformed,” said Chigurupati’s lawyer, Jonathan Emord.

Bates, the Rutgers professor, noted that any such claim could come with unintended consequences, emboldening people to drink more than they otherwise would.

“There’s certainly that potential to encourage addiction,” she said, noting that the study of vodka didn’t address the potential consequences of high-level consumption, including the risk of cardio vascular problems, drunk driving, and other negative effects.

Chigurupati said his goal is not to enable people to drink more, but to drink with less physical harm. He said he hired a team of pharmacology PhDs, with the goal of finding a less toxic way for people to drink.

At first, Chigurupati recalls, their concoction “tasted terrible and it actually burned my mouth.” Eventually, he said, he and his team developed a vodka that they believe tasted good, gave drinkers a “buzz,” and proved healthier than other drinks.

They assert that NTX reduces the increased stress on the liver ordinarily caused by the breakdown of alcohol. In addition, they say it helps the liver regenerate and heal faster than it otherwise would.

Those claims are being supported by an organization calling itself the Coalition for Safer Drinking. Emord, Chigurupati’s lawyer, called it an independent group, and said he serves as legal counsel. But there is no record of the coalition working on anything except promotion of NTX.

Despite his and his client’s confidence in the vodka, Emord said he was doubtful its petition would be approved by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. He expects the case to go to court.

This article is reproduced with permission from STAT. It was first published on Oct. 7, 2016. Find the original story here.

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Schools are warning parents about a “virtual kidnapping” scam aimed at collecting ransom money. Photo by Alan Levine/Flickr

Schools across the U.S. are warning about a scam to convince parents that their children have been kidnapped — even though they haven’t — and to collect ransom money.

Cases of “virtual kidnapping” have been reported over the past two months in Virginia, California, Texas, Arizona and other states. Authorities say the scam often targets the parents of college students, tricking some into paying thousands of dollars and appears to be on the rise nationally.

In many cases, parents receive a call from a stranger who claims to have kidnapped their child, and can often provide the child’s name or other details. Some parents have reported hearing screams or a muffled cry in the background. Then the caller orders parents to wire money in exchange for their child’s release.

“They really prey on people’s fears, and in this case it’s a very intense fear, thinking that your child’s been kidnapped,” said Jay Gruber, police chief at Georgetown University, where a parent reported the scam on Thursday. In that case, the parent used social media to contact the child, and didn’t pay the ransom.

Usually, the ransom demand is between $600 and $1,900, according to the FBI’s New York field office, which issued a warning about the scam in January 2015. FBI officials said they weren’t available to comment on Friday. Gruber said the scheme emerged in the U.S. more than a year ago but has become more common recently.

Thirkel Freeman was driving with his wife, Coretta, last week when a man called Coretta’s cell phone and said he had kidnapped their daughter, Kiauna, a senior at the University of Maryland. The caller even put a woman on the phone who claimed to be Kiauna and had a similar voice, pleading them to pay the ransom. The man threatened to kill Kiauna if they didn’t.

“He says, ‘If you play games with me, it’s over,'” said Thirkel, of White Plains, Maryland. “At that point, we were at the peak of traumatization.”

Coretta called the police, who arrived and guided the couple through the call. But the Freemans ultimately wired $1,300 to the caller before finding out Kiauna was safe on campus.

Several colleges have issued alerts about the scam, including Georgetown, Arizona State University, George Mason University and the University of Texas at Arlington.

The calls often come from outside area codes, sometimes from Puerto Rico, according to the FBI. If someone calls demanding a ransom, authorities say parents should try to text their child or reach them through social media to confirm their child’s safety. Or they can ask the alleged kidnapper to have their child call back from his or her own phone.

“Once you find out that your child is fine, just disengage with them,” Gruber said. “Or, if your child is with you, tell them to go to hell and hang up on them.”

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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Reno, Nevada, U.S., October 5, 2016. On Saturday he said he will “never” quit his bid to be president despite sexually charged comments revealed on Friday. PHoto By Mike Segar/Reuters

NEW YORK — A defiant Donald Trump insisted Saturday he would “never” abandon his White House bid, rejecting a growing backlash from Republican leaders across the nation who disavowed the GOP’s presidential nominee after he was caught on tape bragging about predatory advances on women.

“We pray for his family,” Pence said in a statement after canceling a Wisconsin appearance scheduled with House Speaker Paul Ryan and the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, both of whom had condemned Trump’s remarks the day before but stopped short of withdrawing support altogether. The furor places enormous pressure on Trump to try to tamp down a crisis sure to spill into Sunday night’s presidential debate.

Even as the fallout deepened fractures in a party already torn about Trump, many remained loyal to the political outsider.

Wisconsin voter Jean Stanley donned a shirt proclaiming “Wisconsin Women Love Trump” and called Ryan a “traitor” for denouncing the presidential contender’s comments.

“He’s a real human,” Stanley said of the New York businessman, surrounded by Trump supporters at the Wisconsin rally where he and Pence were scheduled to appear before the videotape emerged.

Ryan and Priebus did not join a chorus of GOP officeholders from Utah to Alabama to New Hampshire who decided the former reality television star’s bombshell was too much to take. More than a dozen Republicans — senators, congressmen and sitting governors — announced Saturday they would not vote for Trump. Many went farther and called on him to quit the race altogether.

“I thought supporting the nominee was the best thing for our country and our party,” Alabama Rep. Martha Roby said in a statement. “Now, it is abundantly clear that the best thing for our country and our party is for Trump to step aside and allow a responsible, respectable Republican to lead the ticket.”

His party in chaos, Trump spent Saturday with a close circle of advisers in his campaign’s midtown Manhattan headquarters.

Most of his staff and network of supporters were left in the dark about the fast-moving developments. Conference calls were canceled and prominent supporters were given no guidance about how to respond to the explosive development, according to a person close to the Trump operation. The person insisted on anonymity, lacking the authority to discuss internal campaign matters publicly.

Trump addressed the dire situation on Saturday with a light-hearted tweet: “Certainly has been an interesting 24 hours!”

He later tweeted he would not yield the GOP nomination under any circumstances: “The media and establishment want me out of the race so badly – I WILL NEVER DROP OUT OF THE RACE, WILL NEVER LET MY SUPPORTERS DOWN!”

The political firestorm was sparked by a 2005 video obtained and released Friday by The Washington Post and NBC News. In the video, Trump, who was married to his current wife at the time, is heard describing attempts to have sex with a married woman. He also brags about women letting him kiss them and grab their genitals because he is famous.

“When you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything,” Trump says in the video. He adds seconds later: “Grab them by the p—-. You can do anything.” He said of his impulse to kiss beautiful women: “I don’t even wait.”

He apologized in a video statement released by his campaign after midnight early Saturday morning.

Melania Trump said she hoped people would accept her husband’s apology “as I have.”

Trump said, “I was wrong and I apologize,” but also defiantly dismissed the revelations as “nothing more than a distraction” from a decade ago. Foreshadowing a likely attack in Sunday night’s presidential debate, he also suggested that rival Hillary Clinton has committed greater sins against women.

“I’ve said some foolish things,” Trump said. “But there’s a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.”

While still publicly backing Trump, the Republican National Committee is considering how to move forward.

One possibility: re-directing its expansive political operation away from Trump and toward helping vulnerable Senate and House candidates. Such a move would leave Trump with virtually no political infrastructure in swing states to identify his supporters and ensure they vote.

The latest Trump drama forced vulnerable Republican candidates to answer a painful question: Even if they condemn Trump’s vulgar comments, will they still vote for him?

The answer was No for a growing number of GOP officeholders, including at least two sitting governors, six senators and a half dozen congressmen.

“I’m a mom and an American first, and I cannot and will not support a candidate for president who brags about degrading and assaulting women,” New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte said. “I will not be voting for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton and instead will be writing in Gov. Pence for president on Election Day.”

South Dakota Sen. John Thune, a member of the Senate Republican leadership team, offered a sharp rebuke as well: “Donald Trump should withdraw and Mike Pence should be our nominee effective immediately.”

Nevada Senate candidate Joe Heck said he was withdrawing his support: “I can no longer look past this pattern of behavior and inappropriate comments from Donald Trump.”

And Republican Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho revoked his endorsement: “This is not a decision that I have reached lightly, but his pattern of behavior left me no choice.”

Election law experts suggest it would be logistically impossible to replace Trump on the ballot altogether, with early voting underway in some states and overseas ballots already distributed to military servicemen and others.

Ryan fundraising chief Spencer Zwick, however, said he’s been fielding calls from donors who “want help putting money together to fund a new person to be the GOP nominee.”

Zwick told The Associated Press that a write-in or “sticker campaign” relying on social media could “actually work.” While there has never been a winning write-in campaign in a U.S. presidential contest, such an effort could make it harder for Trump to win.

The release of the videotape and ensuing backlash almost completely overshadowed the release of hacked emails from inside the Hillary Clinton campaign that revealed the contents of some of her previously secret paid speeches to Wall Street.

The Democratic nominee told bankers behind closed doors that she favored “open trade and open borders” and said Wall Street executives were best-positioned to help overhaul the U.S. financial sector. Such comments were distinctively at odds with her tough talk about trade and Wall Street during the primary campaign.

Republican strategist Terry Sullivan, who previously led Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, predicted Trump’s defeat.

“It’s over,” Sullivan said. “The only good news is that in 30 days Trump will be back to being just a former reality TV star like the Kardashians, and Republican candidates across America will no longer be asked to respond to his stupid remarks.”

Steve Peoples and Jill Colvin of the Associated Press wrote this report. Peoples reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jonathan Lemire in New York, Bill Barrow in Atlanta, Julie Bykowicz in Washington, Julie Pace in Syracuse, New York, and Scott Bauer in Elkhorn, Wisconsin contributed to this report.

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Raheem Grant, 39, poses for a portrait with his daughter, Nature Grant. “When I was growing up I didn’t have a father. My little one, she gets scared of the dark: ‘You don’t have to be scared because Daddy is here.’ Just knowing that I am there for them makes me feel like I accomplished a lot.” Photo by Phyllis Dooney

As thousands of people in cities across the U.S. took to the streets in recent years to protest the police killings of black men — most recently for Keith Scott and Terence Crutcher — photographer Phyllis Dooney noticed something missing.

In all the media coverage of these killings, “there’s so little mention that these guys are fathers,” she said. “I see this gaping hole in terms of representing people of color, especially the black man, as a family member, as a father, as somebody who loves.”

Dooney said that omission is the result of a racially-charged stereotype of black fathers as neglectful. But that stereotype does not account for the complex social effects of mass incarceration, the War on Drugs and other events that have disproportionately affected black families. She decided to document their stories in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood that lies between the southernmost reaches of Queens and the shallow marshes of Jamaica Bay, where approximately one-third of residents live below the poverty line. “What I found was a lot of strength, resolve, character and self reflection,” she said.

Dooney, who currently is earning a Masters of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University, first saw the neighborhood in 2012 while photographing a marching band for The New York Times. She talked to us about the process of taking the portraits and what they add to our national conversation on race.

What’s your relationship to East New York?

The first time I was introduced to East New York was probably 2011. … It was this very interesting version of New York. Right away, I was just in love with the sort of rhythms of the place and the people. It felt really warm and people were creative and friendly and then aesthetically, there’s just so many housing projects packed into one area that it’s really visually sort of astounding. You have these row houses interrupted by a giant public housing complex. So visual and just the energy of it, I felt like that was a different version of New York.

David “Prince” Pierce, 22, poses for a portrait with his son, Prince David Pierce, in East New York, NY on March 29, 2015. “I think about this all the time: who am I doin’ this for? Can I really make this work with his mother or am I just running away from it ’cause I still want to live my life? I don’t want to be tied down. I know a lot of cats that didn’t see 21, didn’t see 25, didn’t see 30.” Photo by Phyllis Dooney

Why was fatherhood your main focus?

I spent a lot of time thinking about the way race is projected in the media, the way it’s talked about, the way it’s visually represented. Especially as there’s more and more attention being brought to it over police shootings and things like that in the last couple of years. I see this gaping hole in terms of representing people of color, especially the black man, as a family member, as a father, as somebody who loves. And I just wanted to see what it felt like to have that discussion.

What’s missing from that conversation?

I was watching the news with the Charlotte protests that were going on recently. A lot of the newscasters were saying, “Mothers are concerned.” There’s this emphasis on sons and mothers but there’s never, “Parents are concerned,” “Fathers are concerned.” These men are fathers, these men are sons. Somehow this figure is being cut out of the family and I think that’s probably the result of many years’ worth of discussing the black man as criminal, the “other.”

Now it’s coming more full-circle. You have Black Lives Matter activists that are pointing this out finally, and what implicit bias means, and how pervasive it is, and how we’re responsible as image-makers to not feed into that identification of, “Boy with hoodie is probably carrying drugs.”

Jason “Law” Woods, 42, poses for a portrait with his daughter, Nevoeh West-Woods, in East New York, NY on July 28, 2015. “The courts do work for men but a lot of men won’t pursue that. ‘Cause it’s been throughout time that you go to court for your child and nine times out of ten, they gonna give it back to the woman. It’s like: why fight?” Photo by Phyllis Dooney

In the photos, camera obscuras project images of the streets into the families’ homes. How did you choose this method?

I had been wrestling with how to do this project for awhile. There were other ideas and ways of attacking it that had been discarded, and when I landed on this it seemed like the right fit, and one of the obvious reasons was that the streets coming into somebody’s domestic space is such a good visual metaphor. What does the outside world do to your private life? How does it shape it? What are the counter-influences that take place? So it was actually visually happening, and that actually enriched the audio conversations, I feel. We were able to see that effect. What are these streets, that are now on your walls, how do you think they’ve shaped your private life as a partner and as a father?

How did you choose your subjects?

I found the subjects through various conduits. Some were people that I knew through working there and doing other stories in East New York. I asked them if they would also be a part of this because they happened to be a father. Other ones were referrals.

They were different from other portraits because it’s so invasive to install a camera in someone’s living room. You’re carrying around sheets of black plastic and taping on the walls and the whole thing is very invasive, and that’s not my normal style of working. But on the flip side, there was an experience to be had. Because when it was successful, there was a shared experience.

Michael Cathlin, 26, poses for a portrait with his step father, Michael Burke-Andrade, in East New York, NY on July 25, 2015. “Thankfully I walked in [the delivery room] right before my son started crying. So I was there for the whole thing but it was the fact that the mother didn’t want me there.” Photo by Phyllis Dooney

Is there anything else you want people to know about the project?

I think it’s important for people to understand that problems that happened in the past are inter-generational. We hand down our problems to our [descendants] if they’re not resolved in that generation. That idea that mass incarceration or the crack epidemic happened in the 1980s, what that means is, a lot of these men … a good proportion of them grew up without a parent that was victim of that. And that affects how they parent, and it lives in their psyche, and it gets handed down. It shapes how they love. And also with incarceration, if their father has been locked up for most of their childhood, a direct transmission of how to parent, what it means, has not been handed down. These problems are very much something that is manifesting now and will continue to manifest and does shape family life.

It makes me think about social issues and social justice because really what we’re all trying to do on this planet is love, live, laugh and the most important thing for me to look at is, how is our system or our policies affecting your ability to do those things? Which is why I tend to go in and check out how it’s taking shape in families.

You can see more photos from the project below.

“Boo” poses for a portrait in East New York on July 25, 2015. Photo by Phyllis Dooney

Ariel “AJ” Jones, 25, poses for a portrait with his daughter, Lexi Preston, in East New York, NY on July 12, 2015. Photo by Phyllis Dooney

Esau “Chubbs” Johnson, 23, poses for a portrait in East New York, NY on May 30, 2015. “The cops are cracking down on us. You know, they are shooting kids. That’s really what I am worried about: my daughter growing up in that environment.” Photo by Phyllis Dooney

Ramall Thomas, 24, poses for a portrait in East New York, NY on April 19, 2015. “[As a father] you can’t teach a woman to be a woman, but you can show her what it’s like to be loved by a man, what type of man would she want to look into [later on]. Hopefully it would be somebody like her dad.” Photo by Phyllis Dooney

Clifton Jerrick, 35, poses for a portrait with his son, Logan Suttor, in East New York, NY on March 12, 2016. “Being a father is just not a title, it’s a job. It’s a full time job until the day you die.” Photo by Phyllis Dooney

“Brother Kenny” Watson, 49, poses for a portrait with his step children, Sammie Lee Brown Jr. (center) and Justin Grant (right), in East New York, NY on Feb. 7, 2016. “One of the challenges I have is that I am fearful for my son that lives in Atlanta. It’s a hard adjustment. You have a family here but you also have a son who needs you there. How do you split yourself?” Photo by Phyllis Dooney

Pedro Rodriguez, 27, poses for a portrait in East New York, NY on Feb. 7, 2016. “It’ s hard work, but at the end of the day, I’ m still a happy man.” Photo by Phyllis Dooney

Willie Johnson, 33, poses for a portrait in East New York, NY on Feb. 13, 2016. Photo by Phyllis Dooney

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The smoke stacks at American Electric Power’s (AEP) Mountaineer coal power plant in New Haven, West Virginia, on Oct. 30, 2009. An initiative on Washington’s November ballot asks if the state should impose a carbon tax. Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

SEATTLE — Washington lawmakers have tried and failed in recent years to make big polluters pay for their carbon emissions to fight climate change. Now, voters will get to decide.

An initiative on the November ballot asks voters whether the state should impose the nation’s first direct carbon tax on the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and gasoline.

Sponsors say residents have a moral responsibility to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and a carbon tax is the best way to do it. They say the tax encourages businesses to conserve or switch to clean energy by making fossil fuels more expensive.

Businesses say the tax will drive up fuel and energy costs and put Washington companies at a competitive disadvantage.

And in a move that has bewildered some, major environmental groups do not support the measure. They say it doesn’t take the right approach.

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Rain batters homes as the eye of Hurricane Matthew passes Daytona Beach, Florida, U.S. October 7, 2016. Photo by Phelan Ebenhack/Reuters

After killing hundreds of people in Haiti and several in Florida, a weakening Hurricane Matthew churned north off the the state’s coast and hit South Carolina on Saturday, where it continued to inundate coastal areas with floods.

Wind speeds dropped below 85 mph, downgrading the hurricane to Category 1, according to the National Weather Service, but the service still extended a warning for North Carolina, saying that “serious inland flooding” was unfolding.

Graphic by NOAA/NHC

Matthew, the most powerful hurricane to threaten the Eastern Seaboard in a decade, ravaged Haiti’s western peninsula on Tuesday, killing as many as 877 people with torrential rains and winds up to 145 mph, Reuters estimated.

Damage from Hurricane Matthew is seen from the air along the west coast of Haiti, October 6, 2016. Photo by Reuters

Homes were completely demolished, leaving tens of thousands homeless as clinics overflowed with patients whose wounds are still largely untreated.

Clean up from Hurricane Matthew continues in Jeremie, Haiti, October 6, 2016. Picture taken October 6, 2016. Photo by Reuters

Then, Matthew plowed toward the U.S. as officials warned more than 2 million to evacuate. President Barack Obama declared states of emergencies in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

By Thursday night, Matthew had worked its way up to Florida’s eastern coastline. Though it stayed off the coast, Florida officials blamed it for the death of five people, including one woman who had a heart attack but could not be reached.

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Responding to reports that the storm was not as bad as anticipated, Obama warned against complacency.

“I just want to emphasize to everybody that this is still a really dangerous hurricane, that the potential for storm surge, flooding, loss of life and severe property damage continues to exist,” he told reporters at the White House on Friday. “Pay attention to what your local officials are telling you. If they tell you to evacuate, you need to get out of there and move to higher ground.”

Florida Gov. Rick Scott said at a news conference on Saturday that more than 6,000 people stayed in shelters on Friday night and more than 878,000 people were left without power.

Homeowner Joe Lovece surveys the damage to the kitchen at the back of his oceanfront home after the eye of Hurricane Matthew passed Ormond Beach, Florida, U.S. October 7, 2016. Lovece rode out the storm as waves took away the room at the back of his home. Photo by Phelan Ebenhack/Reuters

“We’re all blessed that Matthew stayed off our coast,” he said, while describing the extensive damage in Florida.

Meanwhile, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory warned that the worst is yet to come for his state.

“I cannot stress enough how serious an issue this hurricane could be for North Carolina, not only in damaging structures, but also risking human life,” said McCrory. “Beware that this will be a prolonged event that will not end tomorrow.”

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Utah Governor Gary Herbert waits for a news conference at McKay-Dee Hospital in Ogden, Utah, on Jan. 5, 2012. Photo by George Frey/Reuters

SALT LAKE CITY — If the pushback against Donald Trump becomes a Republican Party revolt, it could be said that it got its start in Utah.

Utah is a deeply conservative state, with politics influenced by the Mormon Church based in Salt Lake City. But only 14 percent of the state’s Republicans voted for Trump during its caucuses in March, and Utah’s favorite political son, 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, is a leading critic of this year’s nominee.

Tim Chambless, a political scientist at the University of Utah, recalled attending the caucuses, where attendees waved signs with red lines through the names of Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton rather than ones in favor of the candidate who ultimately won, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

“Rather than emphasizing a positive thing, they were emphasizing the negative,” Chambless said. “I saw confusion and negativity.”

That continues. Herbert did not say for whom he would vote when he announced he could no longer support Trump. Utah’s senior senator, Orrin Hatch, released a statement scolding Trump, but not pulling his support. Others hoped Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, could take over.

Boyd Matheson, a veteran Utah Republican strategist who runs the conservative Sutherland Institute, said Trump will probably still win the state. Utah allows straight party-line voting, allowing voters effectively to choose the GOP nominee without having to check his name.

Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson based his longshot campaign in Salt Lake City, hoping to capitalize on the state’s dislike for Trump. But Johnson’s socially liberal positions are an awkward fit with some in the deeply religious state.

“Governor Johnson is known here, he spends a lot of time here, both politically and personally, and he connects as a fellow westerner,” his spokesman, Joe Hunter, said Saturday. “Trust and character are important in Utah, and for Republican leaders here, Donald Trump has just put them in a really tough spot.”

Matheson said Evan McMullin, a Brigham Young University graduate, former CIA officer, investment banker and congressional aide running as a third-party conservative, might have an opening if he can articulate a positive alternative.

“The thing about Utah is it really does come down to what’s the principle and what’s the policy,” Matheson said.

Utah’s unique political culture, dominated by the Mormon Church, puts a premium on personal decency and openness to immigrants and refugees. Trump has struggled to appeal to Mormons throughout the West, a challenge for him in other states with large Mormon populations, such as Nevada and Arizona. On Saturday morning, Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo, who is also Mormon, called on Trump to step aside for Pence.

But Matheson said Utah’s resistance to Trump goes beyond Mormon culture.

“This is the most upwardly mobile place in America, this is a place that takes care of refugees, this is a place with international reach,” he said. “America is great in Utah because of civil society and neighborhoods.”

Riccardi reported from Denver.

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People carry the body of man killed in what witnesses said was an airstrike by Saudi-led coalition aircraft on mourners in Sanaa, Yemen on October 8, 2016. Photo by Khaled Abdullah/Reuters

At least 82 people have died and hundreds were injured in Yemen today after warplanes from a Saudi-led coalition targeted a funeral hall in the rebel-held capital Sanaa, amid an ongoing civil war.

It was the latest attack by an international air campaign organized by Saudi Arabia, which borders Yemen to the north, in support of the internationally recognized Yemen government that was overthrown by the Shiite Houthi-rebels. Several Houthi militia and security officials were mourning the death of the father of rebel-appointed Interior Minister Galal Al-Rishwan when the hall was hit, according to the Associated Press.

“The place has been turned into a lake of blood,” one rescuer Murad Tawfiq told the AP.

Mohammed Abdul-Salam, Houthis’ spokesman in Sanaa, said the attack was part of a larger “genocide” by the coalition.

“The silence of the United Nations and the international community is the munition of the murderers,” Abdul-Salam said. “Those murderers will not escape divine justice.”

The airstrikes began in March 2015 in an attempt to keep the Houthi rebels in the Arab world’s poorest country, with a population of 24 million, away from Saudi Arabia’s border to the north. The attacks have killed roughly 3,799 civilians since then, according to a recent report by the U.N.’s human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein.

They have also exacerbated a civil war that is already starving the country to death and has forced more than 2.4 million people to leave in search of refuge.

A project coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in the Middle Eastern region has told NewsHour that he has “never seen such destruction conducted in such a short period as in Yemen.”

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U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign rally in Akron, Ohio, U.S., October 3, 2016. Photo by Brian Snyder/Reuters

N.Y. — Hillary Clinton took nearly every precaution to ensure voters would never know what she told investment bankers, lobbyists and corporate executives in dozens of closed-door paid speeches before running for president.

The private comments strike a tone starkly at odds with the fiery message she’s pushed throughout her campaign, particularly during the hard-fought Democratic primary. Some of her remarks give fresh fuel to liberals’ worst fears about Clinton, namely that she is a political moderate, happy to cut backroom deals with corporate interests and curry favor with Wall Street for campaign dollars.

The WikiLeaks organization on Friday posted what it said were thousands of emails obtained in a hack of the Clinton campaign chairman’s personal email account. Among the documents posted online was an internal review of the speeches conducted by campaign aides to survey the political damage her remarks could cause if they ever became public.

In what aides calculated were the most damaging passages, she reflects on the necessity of “unsavory” political dealing, telling real estate investors that “you need both a public and private position.” To investment bankers from Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, Clinton admits that she’s “kind of far removed” from the middle-class upbringing that she frequently touts on the campaign trail. She tells Xerox CEO Ursula Burns that both political parties should be “sensible, moderate, pragmatic.”

And in speeches to some of the country’s biggest banks, she highlighted her long ties to Wall Street, bantering with top executives and saying that she views the financial industry as a partner in government regulation.

“Part of the problem with the political situation, too, is that there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives,” she said, according to an excerpt from an October 2013 discussion with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Clinton goes on to appears to question the importance of the divestment of assets that financial executives often undertake to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest when they enter government service.

“You know, the divestment of assets, the stripping of all kinds of positions, the sale of stocks. It just becomes very onerous and unnecessary,” she said.

Clinton’s campaign has refused to confirm – or deny – the authenticity of the thousands of emails, suggesting they were part of a Russian effort to influence the outcome of the presidential race. “I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump,” campaign chairman John Podesta tweeted. “Don’t have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked.”

In an effort to keep those speeches private, strongly worded contracts prohibited unauthorized recordings, reporters were banned and, in some cases, blog posts about her remarks pulled off websites. Throughout her campaign, she has staunchly refused to release transcripts, resisting pressure from primary rival Bernie Sanders and the media to do so.

The WikiLeaks disclosures should be the kind of “October surprise” that would thrill Clinton’s opponents, who’ve spent years attacking her as untrustworthy and willing to say anything for personal gain.

Yet Republicans have found themselves largely unable to capitalize on the moment, consumed instead by the latest scandal of their nominee, a video showing Trump admitting to making predatory and lewd advances on women.

This isn’t the first time Trump has saved Clinton from damaging political fallout. The memory of Clinton staggering and stumbling after leaving a 9/11 memorial event last month was largely erased by Trump’s destructive performance in the first presidential debate.

But Clinton’s private comments, now public, aren’t going away. If she wins the White House, they’ll trail her into the Oval Office, planting seeds of distrust among some of her liberal allies.

A January 2016 email from the Clinton campaign’s research director to top communications staffers includes excerpts from 15 of the more than 100 speeches she gave after leaving the State Department, appearances that netted her $21.7 million.

One passage puts Clinton squarely in the free-trade camp, a position she has struggled with repeatedly during the 2016 election. During the first general election debate, Clinton said she supports “smart and fair trade.”

But nearly three years earlier, in a talk to a Brazilian bank, she said her “dream” is “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders” and asked her audience to think of what doubling American trade with Latin America “would mean for everybody in this room.”

In another speech that year, Clinton conceded that presidential candidates need the financial backing of Wall Street to mount a competitive national campaign. That’s a position that plays right into political attacks leveled by both Sanders and Trump, who’ve accused Clinton of being bought and paid for by Wall Street.

“New York is probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for candidates on both sides of the aisle,” she said at the October 2013 investor conference, sponsored by Goldman Sachs. “There are a lot of people here who should ask some tough questions before handing over campaign contributions to people who were really playing chicken with our whole economy.”

Three years after her speech, her campaign and pro-Clinton super PACs have raised nearly $59 million from financial investors, according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics.

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WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Hello and thank you for joining us.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is in full throttle damage control mode following yesterday’s release of an 11-year-old videotape showing him making vulgar, sexual, remarks demeaning to women.

Today, Trump told the Wall Street Journal there is “zero chance I’ll quit” the race for the White House. This despite widespread condemnation from Republican Party leaders.

Trump also told the Washington Post, which firs tpublished the video on its website, “I’d never withdraw. I’ve never withdrawn in my life.” Trump told the newspaper he still has “unbelievable” and “tremendous” support. He began his pushback overnight with this 90-second video.

DONALD TRUMP: “I’ve never said I’m a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that I’m not. I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more than a decade-old video are one of them. Anyone who knows me, know these words don’t reflect who I am. I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize.”

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The recording in question revealed Trump, who seemingly didn’t know his micrphone was on, telling an entertainment reporter how he could easily make sexual advances on women because he was famous. He also boasted of groping women by their genitals and propositioning a married woman. In his apology, Trump pledged to “be a better man.”

But he called the 11-year-old video a “distraction” from the real issues. And then his statement morphed into an attack on Bill and Hillary Clinton.

DONALD TRUMP: “I’ve said some foolish things, but there is a big difference between words and actions. Bill Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.”

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Trump’s running mate — Indiana governor Mike Pence — says he was offended by the 2005 recording. In a written statement today, Pence said: “I do not condone his remarks and cannot defend them. I am grateful that he has expressed remorse and apologized to the American people.”

Pence was a no show in Wisconsin today at a Republican fundraiser hosted by Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan. Ryan had announced Pence would be there after he dis-invited Trump, Ryan saying he was “sickened” by Trump’s comments.

Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called Trump’s comments “repugnant and unacceptable.” The last two Republican presidential nominees condemned Trump. Mitt Romney calling his comments “vile,” and Sen. John McCain saying there were “no excuses” for them. South Dakota Sen. Johyn Thune — number three in the Senate Republican leadership — went further, saying, “Donald Trump should withdraw and Mike Pence should be our nominee effective immediately.

Illinois Republican Senator Mark Kirk, in a tough re-election campagin, agreed that Trump should step aside, calling him “a malignant clown.” New Hampshire Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, also in a very competitive race, said she would write in Pence for president. She announced on Twitter today: I cannot and will not support a candidate for president who brags about degrading and assaulting women.

Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz is among the growing number of Republican members of the House of Representatives renouncing their previous support for Trump.

REP. JASON CHAFFETZ: “I can’t look at my 15-year-old-daughter in the eye and tell her I endorse this person to become the president of the United States. I just, I just can’t do it.”

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Finally, Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said of the lewd Trump video: “This is horrific. We cannot allow this man to become president.”

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Emergency vehicles as far as I can see on Del Lago. The epicenter of this shooting is in there. #palmsprings pic.twitter.com/F6KZEbyY4e

— Brett Kelman (@TDSbrettkelman) October 8, 2016

Two police officers in Palm Springs, California were fatally shot and another was wounded during a call for a domestic dispute, the city’s police chief said.

The Los Angeles Times reported that one officer was killed during a dispute between a father and son. Palm Springs Police Chief Bryan Reyes identified the officers as Jose Gil Vega and Lesley Zerebny but he did not name a suspect.

“It was a simple family disturbance and he elected to open fire on the guardians of the city,” Reyes said.

Police described the scene as “active,” and a manhunt is now underway for at least one suspect, according to the Times.

Palm Springs Police Sgt. William Hutchinson advised residents in the area to stay indoors. Images and videos on social media show a heavy police presence near the shooting with at least one helicopter overhead.

“If you do live somewhere in the area, keep your doors locked,” Hutchinson told the Times.

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