People can livestream their every move on Facebook and chatter endlessly in group chats. But in most parts of the U.S., they still can’t reach 911 by texting — an especially important service during mass shootings and other catastrophes when a phone call could place someone in danger.

Although text-to-911 service is slowly expanding, the emphasis there is on “slow.” Limited funds, piecemeal adoption and outdated call-center technology have all helped stymie growth.

Emergency 911 centers stress that a phone call is still the best way to reach them, since calls provide them with location data and other needed details. But in some cases — for instance, if a person has a hearing disability, or when a call might attract the attention of assailants — texting is a far better way to call for help.

The 911 emergency system was developed for landlines. But now about 80 percent of U.S. 911 calls come from cellphones, according to the federal government’s National 911 Program. There is no legal requirement for call centers to offer text-to-911 services.

If a center requests the service from mobile companies like Verizon or Sprint, however, the companies are required to provide it within six months.

More money would speed implementation. “We need a significant federal grant program to modernize 911 systems across the country,” said Jeff Cohen, chief counsel at advocacy group the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials.

Congressional legislation could speed adoption of text-to-911, and while there are two bills currently making their way through Congress related to the issue, they need more bipartisan support, Cohen said. Traditionally 911 call centers have been funded by a combination of state and local funding, rather than relying on federal grants. For that reason, technology and adoption varies widely between states, cities and counties.

While some areas may have plenty of money to implement text-to-911 service, “others are cash-strapped cities or communities that would rather spend money on a police car rather than text-to-911,” said Brian Fontes, chief executive officer of the National Emergency Number Association. “When you don’t have the money, you have to prioritize what you do with the money you have.”

The first text-to-911 was sent in 2009 in Iowa. Now, according to data collected by the Federal Communications Commission, more than 1,600 emergency call centers across the nation have configured systems to receive text message requests for 911 services, up from about 650 two years ago. But that’s barely a quarter of the roughly 6,000 overall in the country. Figures are a bit murky since they are self-reported to the FCC.

Implementing text-to-911 service usually starts with a state law requiring emergency centers to support it.

State requirements

Indiana, for example, has state 911 requirements set by the Indiana General Assembly and a state 911 board that oversees the operation of the statewide 911 network, which routes and delivers 911 voice and text messages from people to their local 911 authority. It pays for 911 from monthly end user surcharges, $1 for landline, wireless and other types of phones, which are collected by phone service providers.

Four years after Indiana dispatch centers began adopting text-to-911 technology, residents in all 92 of the state’s counties can send texts during emergencies if they’re unable to speak to dispatchers, the state said in June. Minnesota, Connecticut, Maine and Vermont also offer statewide coverage.

Without state legislation, adopting text-to-911 can be more piecemeal. In California, a plan to raise taxes to pay for modernizing the 911 emergency dispatch system statewide fell one vote short in September in the Senate when Republicans refused to sign onto a tax increase.

But cities and municipalities can decide to support text-to-911 on their own. Los Angeles County, which includes cities such as Los Angeles, Burbank and Glendale, has supported text-to-911 since late last year, for example.

Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, where the synagogue shooting took place, does offer text-to-911 service. But high school students hiding from a gunman in Parkland, Florida, last February, had to make whispered 911 calls to authorities. Broward County, which includes Parkland, plans to have text-to-911 in place by the end of this year.

“We will never know where the next active shooter is going to be, whether it’s a rural school, synagogue, church or any public place,” said Fontes. “Certainly we want people to be able to text 911 for safety purposes.”
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President Donald Trump claimed Central American migrant caravans slowly moving toward the U.S. include “very tough fighters” who “fought back hard and viciously” against Mexican soldiers at the border, in his latest warning about the migrants in the lead up to next week’s midterm election.

Trump said some of the soldiers were injured and overwhelmed by members of the caravans, the first of which is comprised mostly of women and children and the other made up of primarily young people.  Trump’s tweet was referring to reports Sunday that a group of migrants broke through a gate at Guatemala’s border, clashing with local police.

The president was also critical of Mexico, declaring that Mexican soldiers “were unable, or unwilling to stop” the migrants. His Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, however, told Fox News that Mexico has “stepped up in an unprecedented way.”

Earlier this week, Trump ordered the deployment of 5,200 troops to the southwest border. Trump said Wednesday, “Many more troops are coming” and vowed not to allow the caravans, which he claimed include “some very bad thugs and gang members” to cross our “sacred” border.

The first caravan, whose numbers have dwindled to less than 4,000, was in the southern city of Juchitan on Wednesday, about 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) from McAllen, Texas.

The second, smaller U.S.-bound caravan of about 2,000 people forced its way into Mexico on Monday from the Guatemalan border. It settled down Tuesday in the Mexican town of Tapachula, an AFP reporter said. Tapachula is about 1,850 kilometers (1,150 miles) from McAllen.

Trump has used the caravans to rally his Republican base before the Nov. 6 midterm elections, declaring on several occasions their approach toward the United States constitutes a “national emergency.” 

In addition to deploying more troops to the border, Trump has escalated his criticism of the migrants recently. He said on Monday he wants to construct tent cities to house asylum-seekers indefinitely, an apparent disregard of court orders that forbid long-term detention of families or children.

On Tuesday, he announced plans to end by executive order the right to U.S. citizenship for babies born in the United States to noncitizens.

Trump said on Oct. 23 he had no evidence people of Middle Eastern descent joined the large caravan, toning down an allegation he had recently made.

“There’s no proof of anything. But there could very well be,” Trump said in remarks at the White House.

The migrants from Honduras say they are seeking to escape deteriorating crime-related, political and economic conditions. President Juan Orlando Hernandez was re-elected last November in an election many Hondurans suspected was fraudulent, but was recognized by the United States.

Migrants from El Salvador and Guatemala have also joined the caravans.

The U.N. Refugee Agency has urged the Trump administration to allow people fleeing persecution and violence to request asylum on U.S. territory. The United Nations says about 1,500 people from the caravans have asked for asylum in Mexico.

If the caravans follow the same approach of previous migrant groups, they are likely to continue to lose members in the coming weeks.
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U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres announced Wednesday that Norwegian veteran diplomat Geir Pedersen will be his new special envoy for Syria.

Pedersen was widely rumored to be the top choice for the post. He succeeds Italian-Swedish envoy Staffan de Mistura who held the challenging job for more than four years.

Guterres wrote to the Security Council on Tuesday to inform them of his choice and thanked de Mistura for his work and “contributions to the search for peace in Syria.”

Pedersen, 63, is no stranger to either the United Nations or the region. He was Norway’s U.N. ambassador from 2012-2017. Since last year, he has been Oslo’s envoy in Beijing.

In the Middle East, he was the U.N.’s representative in Lebanon from April 2007 to February 2008 and Norway’s representative to the Palestinian Authority from 1998 to 2003. In 1993, he was a member of the Norwegian team to the secret Oslo negotiations that led to the signing of the Declaration of Principles and the mutual recognition between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel.

Pedersen is set to be the fourth U.N. envoy to try to bring a close to the Syrian conflict that began in 2011. In addition to de Mistura, the late Kofi Annan and Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi have both held the post.

De Mistura, 71, recently remarried and said he is leaving the post for personal reasons.

During his tenure, de Mistura worked to make the peace process more inclusive and had a role in facilitating some short-term cease-fires. He has been working intensively during his final weeks in office to solidify the creation of a constitutional committee, which is seen as a crucial step toward a credible and inclusive political process for ending the civil war.

“There is, in my opinion, still a clear window of opportunity that needs to be urgently seized,” de Mistura told members of the U.N. Security Council last Friday during his most recent briefing.
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For many Jewish journalists in the U.S., persistent online anti-Semitic harassment has become part of the job.

The phenomenon became pervasive during the 2016 presidential campaign, and there’s been a resurgence in recent months ahead of next week’s midterm elections, according to the Anti-Defamation League. 

Targeted journalists have found different ways of responding. CNN commentator Sally Kohn reaches out kindly to some of her online harassers. Michael Duke, an editor at the Houston-based Jewish Herald-Voice, has reduced his use of social media. Yair Rosenberg, a writer with Tablet Magazine, developed a method of tracking down and disrupting anti-Semitic accounts on Twitter. 

Rosenberg has written in detail about the vitriol directed at him, including a doctored photo showing him a gas chamber. When the ADL reported that he received the second-largest amount of abuse among all Jewish journalists on Twitter during the 2016 campaign, Rosenberg wrote, “My parents didn’t raise me to be No. 2; fortunately, there’s always 2020.” 

Twitter, over the past two years, has become more effective at removing certain types of virulent anti-Semitism from its feeds, according to Rosenberg. But he said the company is less effective at blocking the spread of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories in tweets that avoid certain phrases and hashtags that would catch the eye of Twitter monitors. 

Rosenberg said he has grown hardened to the constant flow of anti-Semitic material. 

Perspective

“I don’t feel like a victim,” he said by telephone from Pittsburgh, where and he and his Tablet colleagues are covering the aftermath of the synagogue shooting Saturday that killed 11 Jews. 

“What some people deal with in real life is worse than what I deal with online,” he said. “There’s life-and-death stuff, and there’s me getting mean tweets.” 

A few spots below Rosenberg on the ADL’s 2016 “Top 10” list was Kohn, a liberal political commentator who appears regularly on CNN. 

For a book she published earlier this year, The Opposite of Hate, she reached out to several of her own Twitter trolls, conversing with them about the reasons for their vitriol and in some cases receiving apologies. 

In an interview Tuesday, Kohn said she is now less tempted to engage with her harassers. 

“It’s all just so negative,” she said. “I’ve stopped paying as much attention to my trolls.” 

Also on the 2016 Top 10 list was Jonah Goldberg, a senior editor of the conservative National Review. He began receiving a torrent of online anti-Semitic invective in the second half of 2015, after Donald Trump declared his presidential candidacy and Goldberg was among the conservative commentators who expressed misgivings. 

“You had endless photoshopped images — Trump in an SS outfit putting me in a gas chamber,” he said. “You don’t see that stuff very much anymore.” 

However, he said there was a new surge of anti-Semitic material — much of it generated by bots — after the Pittsburgh massacre. 

“They flood the zone in the wake of these kinds of controversies … sowing discord and distrust,” he said. 

Like Rosenberg and Kohn, Goldberg tries to take the harassment in stride, though he took notice when photos of his dog became vehicles for further anti-Semitic abuse. 

‘Sheer inhumanity’

One specific episode still stands out: Goldberg said that at one point he made public reference to the death of his brother and was “pelted with jokes asking if he’d been turned into soap or a lampshade.” 

“I have a pretty thick skin,” he said. “The sheer inhumanity of it — that’s stuck with me.” 

At The Forward, a New York-based Jewish magazine, editor-in-chief Jane Eisner said anti-Semitic harassment directed at her staff surged in 2016, prompting new procedures for reporting particularly menacing threats to the police. 

“There’s no doubt we’ve gotten used to this, which in some ways is a tragedy, but we have to do our job,” Eisner said. “Just because you accept it and move on doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect you.” 

At the ADL, one of the experts tracking anti-Semitic harassment is Daniel Kelley, associate director of the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society. Even if some prominent Jewish journalists are able persevere in the face of such harassment, he worries that some Jews might be deterred from pursing a journalism career for fear of becoming a target. 

In Houston, Duke, a Jewish Herald-Voice associate editor, was targeted with anti-Semitic abuse after the paper reported on a 2016 visit by white nationalist leader Richard Spencer to Texas A&M University. Duke was called a “Zionist Nazi” and was emailed a photo of Auschwitz with the tag, “We’re on the march.” 

But there’s been an upside to Duke’s subsequent decision to reduce his engagement on social media. 

“It’s made me a little better as a journalist,” he said. “With social media, you can be a little lazy. This puts me back in touch with people we write about.” 
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A yellow excavator, forklift and other heavy equipment made by U.S. firm Caterpillar gleam outside Cuba’s annual trade fair, reflecting once-bright hopes for increased U.S.-Cuban commerce fanned by the 2014 detente between the old Cold War foes.

But inside the pavilion where U.S. firms present their wares, only eight have stands this year, according to a Reuters count. That is down from 13 last year and several dozen in 2015-16, underscoring the decline in U.S. business interest since Donald Trump became president.

Last year, the Trump administration tightened the decades-old trade embargo on the Communist-run island once more and sharply reduced staffing at the U.S. embassy in Havana due to a series of health incidents among U.S. diplomats.

“Trump has scared everyone off,” said Eduardo Aparicio, general manager of U.S. logistics company Apacargoexpress, operating under an exemption to the embargo allowing U.S. companies to sell food and medical supplies here.

Aparicio says he is struggling to find U.S. firms keen on doing business with Cuba given fears of reprisals from the Trump administration.

“Not that many things have changed with the Trump administration, but the outlook has. It no longer feels like we are advancing,” said Jay Brickman, vice president of Florida-based shipping company Crowley Maritime Corporation, which has been shipping to Cuba for 17 years.

“If you are a corporate executive who feels like nothing is happening, then eventually you look elsewhere.”

Brickman, Aparicio and others at Cuba’s premier business event said the country’s dire financial situation was another factor in declining U.S. business interest. Cuba is battling a cash crunch amid lower aid from ally Venezuela and weaker exports.

Brickman said Cuban orders via his firm were down 10 percent this year.

U.S. companies had embraced Cuba in the wake of the detente reached by former U.S. and Cuban Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro, jostling for a foothold in an opening market of 11 million consumers.

Lawyers working with U.S. firms interested in doing business with Cuba say the larger ones are taking a long-term view and remain keen.

Heavy equipment maker Caterpillar, for example, had lobbied to sell in Cuba for years before one of its dealers, privately held Puerto Rican company Rimco, said last year it was opening a distribution center here.

“This is the beginning of a lot of things to come,” Rimco Vice President Caroline McConnie said of the machinery displayed outside the pavilion.

McConnie said Rimco would look to rent as well as sell machines in Cuba given its cash crunch, and expected to announce its first two deals soon: one to rent equipment for quarries and another to sell marine motors for tugboats.

“We will benefit from the first movers’ advantage,” she said.
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President Donald Trump has warned that if Democrats regain political power in the midterm elections, the U.S. economy would essentially implode. 

Democrats, he insists, would push tax hikes and environmental restrictions that stifle growth. Undocumented immigrants would steal jobs and unleash a crime wave that would halt commerce. Health insurance would devolve into a socialist program offering shoddy care at unsustainable cost. 

“At stake in this election,” Trump declared at a rally in Houston, “is whether we continue the extraordinary prosperity that we’ve all achieved or whether we let the radical Democrat mob take a giant wrecking ball and destroy our country and our economy.” 

Almost no private economist agrees with Trump’s portrait of a financial apocalypse. 

If Democrats win control of the House in next week’s congressional elections, their legislative priorities wouldn’t likely much alter a $20 trillion economy. For one thing, Trump would remain able to block Democratic initiatives — just as they could stop his plans for more tax cuts and a 5 percent cut to Cabinet department budgets. 

What instead would likely result is continued gridlock — perhaps even more entrenched than what exists now in Washington. Arrayed against a stout Republican majority in the Senate, a Democratic House majority couldn’t do much to reorder the economy, which typically hinges more on the willingness of consumers and businesses to spend and on the state of the global economy than on government policy priorities. 

“It’s probably not that much of a change,” Beth Ann Bovino, chief U.S. economist at S&P Global, said of the likely outcome. “While you might see further gridlock if the Democrats take the House, that doesn’t mean it would tip the boat and slow growth.” 

Many polls and analyses suggest — though hardly assure — that the Democrats could regain a majority in the House if their voters turn out in sufficient numbers in key races. If so, Trump would have to contend with a divided government instead of one with Republicans in complete control. Yet depending on voter turnout, it’s also possible that the Republicans could maintain their hold on both the House and the Senate. 

Analysts at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley foresee a divided government as most probable. So do their peers at Oxford Economics and Keefe Bruyette & Woods. 

“The most likely political consequences would be an increase in investigations and uncertainty surrounding fiscal deadlines,” Goldman Sachs concluded in a client note. 

Oxford Economics’ senior economist, Nancy Vanden Houten, has suggested that the Republicans’ legislative agenda would stall if they lost the House. 

“A Democrat-controlled House would, in our view, be a line of defense against further tax cuts, reduced entitlement spending and efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act,” she said. 

The economy has enjoyed an acceleration in growth this year — to a gain estimated to be 3 percent after deficit-funded tax cuts. Unemployment is at a 49-year low of 3.7 percent, and employers continue to post a record number of job openings. The economic expansion is already the second longest on record. 

But annual growth is widely expected to dip back to its long-term average of near 2 percent by 2020. It’s even possible that the economy could slip into a recession within a few years as growth inevitably stalls — for reasons unrelated to who controls the White House or Congress. A global slowdown could, for example, spill over into the United States. Or higher interest rates, spurred by the Federal Reserve, might depress economic activity. 

Trump would still have plenty of discretion on some key economic issues. His trade war with China and his drive to reduce regulations are two of them. The president has managed to pursue those priorities without Congress’ involvement, though his updated trade agreement with Canada and Mexico would need congressional approval. 

“Trade stuff is being done administratively; regulatory stuff is being done administratively,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the right-of-center American Action Forum. “There’s just not that much on the table legislatively.” 

In an appearance this month at Harvard University, the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, outlined her agenda should her party regain the chamber’s majority and she the speakership. 

Within the first 100 days, Pelosi said, she would seek to reduce the influence of large campaign donors and groups that aren’t legally required to disclose their funding sources. She would also push for infrastructure funding — to rebuild roadways, rail stations or airports, for example — and seek protections for undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, among other priorities. 

Any such initiatives, though, could be blocked by a Republican Senate, or by Trump. 

Budget and deficit issues will also surface after the election. Congress will most likely need to raise the government’s debt limit and approve spending packages before October 2019. And mandatory government spending caps are set to kick in for the 2020 fiscal year after having been suspended for two years. Those spending limits could dampen economic growth. 

Lewis Alexander, chief U.S. economist at Nomura, said Republicans might renew their focus on reducing the national debt, after having approved tax cuts last year that swelled annual budget deficits by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. 

Alexander noted that shrinking the deficit has historically become a higher priority when competing parties have controlled the White House and Congress. If the government seeks to pare the deficit, it could possibly slow the economy, which in the past year has been fueled in part by government spending. 

It’s likely Trump would blame Democrats if growth falters, just as he might absorb criticism for his economic stewardship as Democratic presidential campaigns accelerate into a higher gear. 

The hostile rhetoric makes it unlikely that Democrats and Republicans would join to pass any meaningful legislation for the economy, such as for infrastructure rebuilding.  

“The way parties are talking about it right now, I don’t think anybody is dying to cooperate,” said Michael Madowitz, chief economist at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. 

Still, if Democrats regain the House, the president might feel pressure to produce some tangible legislative results ahead of his own quest for re-election in 2020. 

“Trump is the wild card here,” said Jason Rosenstock, a financial industry lobbyist with Thorn Run Partners. “He may want to be seen as a deal-cutter going into the 2020 election.” 
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