With the presidential campaign entering its final two-month stretch, both President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden are ramping up travel to battleground states this week. But the candidates have very different approaches to getting their messages out to supporters. White House correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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Deadly windblown wildfires raging across the Pacific Northwest destroyed hundreds of homes in Oregon, the governor said Wednesday, warning it could be the greatest loss of life and property from wildfire in state history.The blazes from the top of the state to the California border caused highway closures and smoky skies and had firefighters struggling to contain and douse flames fanned by 80-kph wind gusts. Officials in some western Oregon communities gave residents “go now” orders to evacuate, meaning they had minutes to flee their homes.Fires were burning in a large swath of Washington state and Oregon that rarely experiences such intense wildfire activity because of the Pacific Northwest’s cool and wet climate.Flames trapped firefighters and civilians behind fire lines in Oregon and leveled an entire small town in eastern Washington. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown warned that the devastation could be overwhelming from the fires that exploded Monday during a late-summer windstorm.”Everyone must be on high alert,” Brown said. The blazes were thought to be extremely destructive around Medford, in southern Oregon, and near the state capital of Salem.”This could be the greatest loss of human life and property due to wildfire in our state’s history,” the governor said.At least two people were killed in Oregon fires, along with a small child in a Washington state blaze. Brown said some communities were substantially damaged, with “hundreds of homes lost.”A horse stands in a stall under smoky skies on the Oregon State Fairgrounds, Sept. 9, 2020, in Salem, Ore. Hundreds of horses have been brought to the fairgrounds in Salem by people fleeing the fires.The precise extent of damage was unclear because so many of the fire zones were too dangerous to survey, said Oregon Deputy State Fire Marshal Mariana Ruiz-Temple.”Quite frankly, we are not even able to get into these areas,” she said.In Washington, a 1-year-old boy died after his family was apparently overrun by flames while trying to flee a wildfire in the northeastern part of the state, Okanogan County Sheriff Tony Hawley said Wednesday.The child’s injured parents were discovered in the area of the Cold Springs Fire, which is burning in Okanogan and Douglas counties, Hawley said. They were transported to a Seattle hospital with third-degree burns.KOIN reported a boy and his grandmother died in a wildfire near Lyons, Oregon. Marion County Sheriff Joe Kast confirmed two fatalities but had no other details. He said they would likely “not be the only ones.” Lyons is in Marion County.Another wildfire hit Lincoln City, on the Oregon coast, where residents were being evacuated to a community college to the south.”The fire is in the city,” said Casey Miller, spokesman for Lincoln County Emergency Management. He said some buildings had been burned but had no details.The department imposed mandatory evacuation for the northern half of the city of roughly 10,000 residents, which stretches alongside U.S. Highway 101.The Pacific Northwest scenes of lines of vehicles clogging roads to get away from the fires were similar to California’s terrifying wildfire drama, where residents have fled fires raging unchecked throughout the state. But Northwest officials said they did not recall so many destructive fires at once in the areas where they were burning.A water-drop helicopter flies Sept. 9, 2020, near a wildfire burning in Bonney Lake, Wash., south of Seattle.Sheriff’s deputies, traveling with chain saws in their patrol cars to cut fallen trees blocking roads, went door to door in rural communities 64 kilometers south of Portland, telling people to evacuate. Since Tuesday, as many as 16,000 people have been told to abandon their homes.”These winds are so incredible and are spreading so fast, we don’t have a lot of time,” said Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts.”I’ve been through hell and high water but nothing like this. I’ve been shot down and shot at, but this – last night, I’m still not over it,” said Lloyd Dean Holland, a Vietnam veteran who barely escaped his home in Estacada on Tuesday night.Holland said Oregon State Police had warned him to leave earlier in the day, but the fire seemed far away and he decided to stay. Around 10 p.m., he said, his landlord came pounding on the door screaming at him to go.Fires were burning in seven Oregon counties and rural and suburban homes miles away from Portland were under preliminary orders to prepare for possible evacuations. Three prisons were evacuated late Tuesday, and Brown called the state’s blazes unprecedented.The Northwest is no stranger to wildfires, but most of the biggest ones until now have been in the eastern or southern parts of the region – where the weather is considerably hotter and drier and the vegetation more fire-prone than it is in the region’s western portion.Fires in 2017 and 2018 crested the top of the Cascade Range – the long spine that divides dry eastern Oregon from the lush western part of the state – but never before spread into the valleys below, said Doug Grafe, chief of Fire Protection at the Oregon Department of Forestry.A family arrives with their two dogs and other precious belongings at an evacuation center that has been set up at the Oregon State Fairgrounds in Salem, Ore., on Sept. 8, 2020.”We do not have a context for this amount of fire on the landscape,” he said.Fire crews were focusing on trying to keep people out of harm’s way and preventing houses from burning on Wednesday, with officials saying that containing the fires was a secondary priority.After a 30-minute tour of the fire area south of Seattle in Sumner, Washington, Gov. Jay Inslee said the blaze is “just one example of probably the most catastrophic fires we’ve had in the history of the state.”He said that in the past couple of days, more than 194,424 hectares burned.”This is an extraordinary series of events we have suffered,” Inslee said.About 80% of the small eastern Washington farming town of Malden was leveled by flames from a fast-moving fire on Monday.In Sumner helicopters flew over a ridge, dropping water on smoldering areas. Bud Backer, fire chief for East Pierce Fire & Rescue, told Inslee that the recent winds were “like a blowtorch.”Bonney Lake Police Chief Bryan Jeter said that about 2,500 homes in the area were given evacuation orders.In Oregon, at least four major fires were burning in Clackamas County, a suburban county in Oregon that’s a bedroom community of Portland. The entire county of nearly 420,000 people was put on notice to be ready to evacuate late Tuesday amid winds gusting up to 48 kph.Another major fire in southern Oregon prompted evacuation orders in much of Medford, a city of about 80,000 residents near the California border.And several huge blazes burning in Marion County, southeast of the state’s capitol city of Salem, merged overnight – turning the sky blood red in the middle of the day. 
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The number of adult children who have had to move back home with their parents is at a level not seen since the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to a new study.A majority of 18- to 29-year-olds have moved home because of the coronavirus pandemic, subsequent shutdowns and quarantines, and job losses, a Pew Research Center study found.“Young adults have been particularly hard-hit by this year’s pandemic and economic downturn, and have been more likely to move than other age groups,” study authors Richard Fry, Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn wrote Friday.The number tipped into the majority in July, when 52% of young adults reported having moved home. In February, when the coronavirus pandemic started in the U.S. in earnest, 47% of young adults were living with their parents. The study comes from Pew’s analysis of monthly Census Bureau data.That 52% equates to 26.6 million young adults of all racial and ethnic groups, both genders, urban and rural areas, according to Pew. But, the study authors said, growth was “sharpest,” for young white adults ages 18 to 24.At the end of the Great Depression — an economic decline sparked by a stock market crash in 1929 that lasted a decade — 48% of young adults had moved in with their parents. The authors cautioned that some data were lacking for that period.“The pattern is consistent with employment losses since February. The youngest adults have been more likely than other age groups to lose their jobs or take a pay cut,” Pew reported. “The share of 16- to 24-year-olds who are neither enrolled in school nor employed more than doubled from February (11%) to June (28%) due to the pandemic and consequent economic downturn.”Because unmarried college students who live in dorms are counted by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey as living with their parents, their moving home because of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, this spring would not register. Students who lived off campus and returned home would, however, Cohn said in an email to VOA.But this year, the increase in young adults living with their parents in the summer was much sharper than usual — 5 percentage points higher in July than in February, compared with 2 percentage points for the same period in 2019, Cohn said.In a July 6 report Cohn authored for Pew, “Among all adults who moved due to the pandemic, 23% said the most important reason was because their college campus had closed, and 18% said it was due to job loss or other financial reasons.”And while Asian, Black and Hispanic young adults have been more likely to live with their parents than white young adults, that gap has narrowed since February, Pew stated.“In fact, whites accounted for about two-thirds (68%) of the increase in young adults living with their parents. As of July, more than half of Hispanic (58%) and Black (55%) young adults now live with their parents, compared with about half of white (49%) and Asian (51%) young adults,” the study found.While both young women and men have “experienced increases in the number and share of residing with Mom, Dad or both parents since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak,” young men are more likely to be home than young women, the report stated.Urban young adults are more likely than rural young adults to have returned home, but both groups experienced increases.“Growth was sharpest in the South, where the total rose by more than a million and the share increased by 6 percentage points, from 46% to 52%,” Pew reported. “But the Northeast retained its status as the region where the highest share of young adults live with their parents (57%).”
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U.S. Attorney General William Barr says a recently launched U.S. federal crime-fighting initiative championed by President Donald Trump has helped reduce violence in several major American cities, cutting in half the number of homicides in Chicago in recent weeks.”Together, federal, local and state law enforcement in Chicago working as part of Operation Legend and joint task forces have reversed the dangerous spike in violence,” Barr said Wednesday during a press conference in the Midwestern U.S. city.The Justice Department program, known as Operation Legend, was rolled out in in early July to help U.S. cities struggling with a surge in violent crime and gun violence after a decline during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Under the operation, more than 1,000 federal agents have been deployed in nine major cities to work alongside local and state law enforcement officers.As he has campaigned for reelection, Trump has touted Operation Legend’s success in reducing crime in cities run by Democratic mayors, drawing criticism that both he and Barr are deploying law enforcement tools to advance the president’s electoral prospects against his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. Barr has dismissed the charge.Chicago resultsIn Chicago, Barr said the effect of Operation Legend has been most dramatically felt in the third most populous U.S. city, where the murder rate in late July, when the program was launched, was up 51% over the previous year. In addition to deploying more than 400 federal agents in the city, Barr said, the Justice Department has provided the Chicago Police Department with more than $12 million.In all, Operation Legend has resulted in more than 2,500 arrests in nine cities, with federal charges brought against 600 defendants, according to Barr. In Chicago, more than 500 people have been arrested as part of the operation, with 124 facing federal charges, mostly for weapon and drug offenses.“The results of these actions speak for themselves,” Barr said.  “Over the first five weeks of Operation Legend, murders dropped by 50% over the previous five weeks. August ultimately saw a 45% decrease in murders compared to July and a 35% decrease compared to June.”FILE – Police officers investigate at the scene of a shooting outside a funeral home in Chicago, July 21, 2020.Despite the recent drop in murders, homicides remain about 50% higher than a year earlier, according to Chicago Police data. In the latest incident, an 8-year-old girl was shot and killed while riding in a car with family members over the Labor Day weekend.Crime rates fluctuate because of a number of factors, according to criminologists, and Barr stressed that he was not attributing the drop in homicides entirely to Operation Legend.Chicago touts own effortsNevertheless, Chicago officials, who declined to attend Barr’s press conference, have attributed the recent decrease in violence to their own crime-fighting strategy without acknowledging the role of Operation Legend.“Seven weeks of the reorganization that I put in place under my tenure has resulted in a 50% reduction in murders and an 18% reduction in shootings,” Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown said at a news conference Tuesday.Noting Chicago officials’ refusal to acknowledge Operation Legend’s role, the U.S. attorney general said, “So that’s the way things roll here in Chicago.”And asked Wednesday if he shared Trump’s view that the violence in Chicago was related to the Democratic leadership of the city and the state, Barr declined to weigh in.“I’ve observed that the most important ingredients to maintaining safety and dealing with violent crime are a strong police force, a [district attorney] that is oriented toward taking violent offenders off the street, and the backing of the law enforcement community by the political leaders, both the mayor and the governor,” said Barr.Operation Legend is named after a 4-year-old boy who was killed in Kansas City in June.  Barr said the initiative has helped reduce violent crime in Kansas City as well as several other U.S. cities.The program is unrelated to the deployment in June and July of federal agents in Portland, Oregon, where they were accused of using excessive force against demonstrators outside a federal courthouse and grabbing protesters off the streets.
 
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U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is unveiling a plan Wednesday to try to protect American workers by raising taxes on companies that move jobs overseas. Biden, challenging Republican President Donald Trump in the Nov. 3 national election, is delivering details of the plan during a campaign stop in the industrial heartland city of Warren, Michigan.  Traditional working-class Democratic voters embraced Trump in his unexpected win in the Midwestern state in 2016, but Biden is hoping to win them back to help him deny Trump a second term in the White House. Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event at UAW Region 1 headquarters in Warren, Mich., Sept. 9, 2020.Trump is remaining in Washington on Wednesday, but on Thursday will also visit Michigan — considered a must-win political battleground state by both campaigns — and other key electoral states late in the week. On Friday, both Biden and Trump will be in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the 2001 al-Qaida terrorist attacks on the U.S. A jetliner crashed in a field near Shanksville as passengers tried to overcome hijackers who commandeered the aircraft. President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Winston-Salem, N.C., Sept. 8, 2020.After suspending his television advertising in the state during the summer, Trump resumed this week with an ad trumpeting what he called the “Great American Comeback,” saying the American economy is on the way back in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Ad trackers say Biden is outspending Trump on the airwaves in Michigan. Trump visited two other battleground states on Tuesday — Florida, where he extended an offshore drilling ban, and North Carolina, where several thousand supporters gathered in an airport hangar to hear him criticize Biden. Few of the people attending the rally adhered to health experts’ advice to wear face masks or remain 6 meters apart.  
 
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A yearslong campaign to award a Black D-Day medic the Medal of Honor — the United States’ highest military award — received a boost this week after a bipartisan group of Waverly Woodson’s first Army portrait. (Courtesy of Joann Woodson)Cpl. Waverly Woodson Jr., a U.S. Army medic who had been wounded before he reached the shore, spent 30 hours caring for injured troops, according to official records. He cleaned wounds, amputated a man’s right foot, distributed blood plasma and pulled four drowning men out of the English Channel, avoiding Nazi machine-gun fire as he went.  Woodson, who eventually settled in Maryland, learned decades later that he had been recommended for the Medal of Honor. He died in 2005. On Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who has been involved with Woodson’s case since 2015, told reporters, “We’re coming together on a bicameral and bipartisan basis to correct a historical injustice. He was denied that Medal of Honor because of the color of his skin.”  Van Hollen, a Democrat, was joined by Sen. Pat Toomey, the Republican co-sponsor of the bill, and Democratic Congressmen David Trone and Anthony Brown, both of Maryland.  In 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded seven Black service members the Medal of Honor after an investigation found that a culture of racism prevented Black soldiers from receiving the honor.   ”History has been made whole today,” Clinton said then, FILE – Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., questions a witness on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 16, 2019.In 2019, Van Hollen and 51 members of the Congressional Black Caucus asked the Army to consider Woodson’s case but were again rejected due to a lack of documentation.Millions of old military records were destroyed in a 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Woodson’s records were presumably among them, Hervieux and lawmakers said Tuesday.  “The problem is, they need a clear records trail, and those records are gone,” Hervieux told History.com in 2019. “They need a firsthand witness, and they’re never going to get it, because these men are all dead.” In her Time article, Hervieux highlighted news coverage dubbing Woodson the “No. 1 invasion hero,” and an Army press release noting his treatment of more than 200 men, recognition that was rare for a Black soldier.  She also found a note from 1944, believed to have been written by an assistant director in the Office of War Information, which mentioned that Woodson had been recommended for the Medal of Honor.  “Here is a negro from Philadelphia who has been recommended … for a big enough award so that the president can give it personally, as he has in the case of some white boys,” the note to a White House aide said.  Trail leads to legislation Lawmakers said Tuesday they believed Woodson deserved the posthumous award.  “Our country and armed forces have for too long overlooked the service of Black soldiers. It’s vital that this generation tell their stories and celebrate heroes from all races, backgrounds and walks of life,” said Brown, himself a Black Army veteran.  “While he did receive other honors — the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart — this man deserves the Medal of Honor,” Toomey said.  Lawmakers said the legislation, which would authorize the president to award Woodson the medal, was expected to receive unanimous support in both the House and Senate.  “He deserves it,” Joann Woodson said Tuesday. “History has to be as correct as it possibly can.” 
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One New York City Park is getting some non-human help maintaining its green space this week, as a herd of goats has been brought in to help trim the lawn.The managers of Stuyvesant Cove Park on Manhattan’s East River brought in 20 goats to clear invasive weeds and brush that had built up over the summer. Staffing and budget cuts due to the COVID-19 pandemic left the area overgrown.Park service officials say as New York residents turned to parks as safe outlets for socialization and recreation, during the pandemic, they also left excessive trash and trampled plantings in their wake.So, the managers of Stuyvesant Cove turned to a nonprofit group and rented 20 goats, which began chewing their way through the weeds and long grass on Tuesday.  Park manager Candace Thompson says the goats are more efficient and environmentally friendly than hiring a team of gardeners.”These goats, in a matter of three days, are going to take all of this plant matter, eat it, and poop it out as fertilizer that’ll make this garden perfect for growing a bunch of native, edible plants next spring,” she said.The park is a few blocks from the United Nations headquarters and the largest commercial district in the U.S., which makes it an unlikely spot for farm animals.  But city residents who frequent the park have been positive, saying the goats provide a calming respite from the city around them.  After the goats have eaten their fill, Thompson says the space will be rehabilitated for next year’s growing season.
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