New York City began drying out Saturday after being soaked by one of its wettest days in decades, as city dwellers dried out basements and traffic resumed on highways, railways and airports that were temporarily shuttered by Friday’s severe rainfall. 

Record rainfall — more than 8.65 inches (21.97 centimeters) — fell at John F. Kennedy International Airport, surpassing the record for any September day set during Hurricane Donna in 1960, the National Weather Service said. 

Parts of Brooklyn saw more than 7.25 inches (18.41 centimeters), with at least one spot recording 2.5 inches (6 centimeters) in a single hour, turning some streets into knee-deep canals and stranding drivers on highways. 

More rain was expected Saturday, but the worst was over, Governor Kathy Hochul said Saturday morning during a briefing at a transportation control center in Manhattan. 

What could have been a life-threatening event was averted, she said, because many people heeded early calls to stay put or head for higher ground before it was too late. 

As a result, Hochul said, “No lives were lost.” 

The governor said 28 people had to be rescued from the “raging water” by first responders in the Hudson Valley and on Long Island. 

“We’ve seen a whole lot of rainfall in a very short period of time,” Hochul said. “But the good news is that the storm will pass, and we should see some clearing of waterways today and tonight.” 

‘Like an ocean’

The deluge came two years after the remnants of Hurricane Ida dumped record-breaking rain on the Northeast and killed at least 13 people in New York City, mostly in flooded basement apartments. Although no deaths or severe injuries have been reported, Friday’s storm stirred frightening memories. 

Ida killed three of Joy Wong’s neighbors, including a toddler. And on Friday, water began lapping against the front door of her building in Woodside, Queens. 

“Outside was like a lake, like an ocean,” she said. 

Within minutes, water filled the building’s basement nearly to the ceiling. After the family’s deaths in 2021, the basement was turned into a recreation room. It is now destroyed. 

City officials received reports of six flooded basement apartments Friday, but all occupants got out safely. 

Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams declared states of emergency and urged people to stay put if possible. 

Climate change named culprit

The deluge also came less than three months after a storm caused deadly floods in New York’s Hudson Valley and swamped Vermont’s capital, Montpelier. 

Hochul blamed the frequency and intensity of storms on climate change. 

“This is the scale in terms of the water that dropped from the heavens during this torrential rain event that actually was the same as Hurricane Ida. The blessing is that we didn’t have the wind associated with it that accompanied Hurricane Ida. But I remember that event like it was yesterday,” the governor said Saturday. 

As the planet warms, storms are forming in a hotter atmosphere that can hold more moisture, making extreme rainfall more frequent, according to atmospheric scientists. 

For the most part, most New Yorkers returned to their usual weekend routines Saturday, strolling through still-damp pathways in Central Park and city sidewalks. 

Traffic was again flowing through highways that had been at a standstill just a day before, with water above car tires and forcing some drivers to abandon their vehicles. 

Flight delays at LaGuardia Airport could no longer be blamed on downpours and flooding, which forced the closure of one of the airport’s three terminals for several hours before resuming later that night. 

While skies remained overcast, one of the culprits for the severe weather — the remnants of Tropical Storm Ophelia — had moved on. 

Some service interruptions continued Saturday throughout the city’s subway system, which had been in complete chaos the day before because of flooded tracks. 
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The Supreme Court is returning to a new term to take up some familiar topics — guns and abortion — while concerns about ethics swirl around the justices.

The year also will have a heavy focus on social media and how free speech protections apply online. A big unknown is whether the court will be asked to weigh in on any aspect of the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump and others or efforts in some states to keep the Republican off the 2024 presidential ballot because of his role in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Lower profile but vitally important, several cases in the term that begins Monday ask the justices to constrict the power of regulatory agencies.

“I can’t remember a term where the court was poised to say so much about the power of federal administrative agencies,” said Jeffrey Wall, who served as the deputy solicitor general in the Trump administration.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

One of those cases, to be argued Tuesday, threatens the ability of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, to function. Unlike most agencies, the bureau is not dependent on annual appropriations from Congress, but instead gets its funding directly from the Federal Reserve. The idea when the agency was created following the recession in 2007-08 was to shield it from politics.

But the federal appeals court in New Orleans struck down the funding mechanism. The ruling would cause “profound disruption by calling into question virtually every action the CFPB has taken” since its creation, the Biden administration said in a court filing.

Gun availability

The same federal appeals court also produced the ruling that struck down a federal law that aims to keep guns away from people facing domestic violence restraining orders from having firearms.

The three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said its decision was compelled by the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling expanding gun rights and directing judges to evaluate restrictions based on history and tradition. Judges also have invalidated other long-standing gun control laws.

The justices will hear the Texas case, in November, in what is their first chance to elaborate on the meaning of that decision in the earlier case, which has come to be known as Bruen.

Abortion

The abortion case likely to be heard by the justices also would be the court’s first word on the topic since it reversed Roe v. Wade’s right to abortion. The new case stems from a ruling, also by the 5th Circuit, to limit the availability of mifepristone, a medication used in the most common method of abortion in the United States.

The administration already won an order from the high court blocking the appellate ruling while the case continues. The justices could decide later in the fall to take up the mifepristone case this term.

Ideological differences

The assortment of cases from the 5th Circuit could offer Chief Justice John Roberts more opportunities to forge alliances in major cases that cross ideological lines. In those cases, the conservative-dominated appeals court, which includes six Trump appointees, took aggressive legal positions, said Irv Gornstein, executive director of the Georgetown law school’s Supreme Court Institute.

“The 5th Circuit is ready to adopt the politically most-conservative position on almost any issue, no matter how implausible or how much defiling of precedent it takes,” Gornstein said.

The three Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump — Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — have been together in the majority of some of the biggest cases in the past two years, including on guns, abortion and ending affirmative action in college admissions.

But in some important cases last term, the court split in unusual ways. In the most notable of those, Kavanaugh joined with Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices to rule that Alabama had not done enough to reflect the political power of Black voters in its congressional redistricting.

Roberts and Kavanaugh, this time joined by Barrett, also were in the majority with the liberal justices in a case that rejected a conservative legal effort to cut out state courts from oversight of elections for Congress and president.

Those outcomes have yet to do much to ameliorate the court’s image in the public’s mind. The most recent Gallup Poll, released last week, found Americans’ approval of and trust in the court hovering near record lows.

It is not clear whether those numbers would improve if the court were to adopt a code of conduct.

Questions about ethics

Several justices have publicly recognized the ethics issues, spurred by a series of stories questioning some of their practices. Many of those stories focused on Justice Clarence Thomas and his failure to disclose travel and other financial ties with wealthy conservative donors, including Harlan Crow and the Koch brothers. But Justices Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor also have been under scrutiny.

Behind the scenes, the justices are talking about an ethics code, and Kavanaugh has said he is hopeful the court would soon take “concrete steps.”

Justice Elena Kagan, who backs a high court code of ethics, said in an appearance at the University of Notre Dame that her colleagues are trying to work through their differences.

“There are, you know, totally good-faith disagreements or concerns, if you will. There are some things to be worked out. I hope we can get them worked out,” Kagan said. There’s no timetable for the court to act.

Democratic lawmakers and progressive critics of Alito and Thomas said those justices’ impartiality in some cases is in doubt because of financial ties, joint travel or friendships with people involved in the cases.

Alito has rejected calls to step aside from a tax case, and Thomas, who has been silent in the past about recusals, seems exceedingly unlikely to bow to his critics’ wishes now.
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The United States is on the brink of a federal government shutdown after hard-right Republicans in Congress rejected a longshot effort to keep offices open as they fight for steep spending cuts and strict border security measures that Democrats and the White House say are too extreme.

With no deal in place by midnight Saturday, federal workers will face furloughs, more than 2 million active-duty and reserve military troops will work without pay and programs and services that Americans rely on from coast to coast will begin to face shutdown disruptions.

The Senate will be in for a rare Saturday session to advance its own bipartisan package that is supported by Democrats and Republicans and would fund the government for the short-term, through November 17.

But even if the Senate can rush to wrap up its work this weekend to pass the bill, which also includes money for Ukraine aid and U.S. disaster assistance, it won’t prevent an almost certain shutdown amid the chaos in the House. On Friday, a massive hard-right revolt left Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s latest plan to collapse.

“Congress has only one option to avoid a shutdown — bipartisanship,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky echoed the sentiment, warning his own hard-right colleagues there is nothing to gain by shutting down the federal government.

“It heaps unnecessary hardships on the American people, as well as the brave men and women who keep us safe,” McConnell said.

The federal government is heading straight into a shutdown that poses grave uncertainty for federal workers in states all across America and the people who depend on them — from troops to border control agents to office workers, scientists and others.

Families that rely on Head Start for children, food benefits and countless other programs large and small are confronting potential interruptions or outright closures. At the airports, Transportation Security Administration officers and air traffic controllers are expected to work without pay, but travelers could face delays in updating their U.S. passports or other travel documents.

Congress has been unable to fund the federal agencies or pass a temporary bill in time to keep offices open for the start of the new budget year Sunday in large part because McCarthy, a Republican from California, has faced unsurmountable resistance from right-flank Republicans who are refusing to run government as usual.

McCarthy’s last-ditch plan to keep the federal government temporarily open collapsed in dramatic fashion Friday as a robust faction of 21 hard-right holdouts opposed the package, despite steep spending cuts of nearly 30% to many agencies and severe border security provisions, calling it insufficient.

The White House and Democrats rejected the Republican approach as too extreme. The Democrats voted against it.

The House bill’s failure a day before Saturday’s deadline to fund the government leaves few options to prevent a shutdown.

“It’s not the end yet; I’ve got other ideas,” McCarthy told reporters.

Later Friday, after a heated closed-door meeting of House Republicans that pushed into the evening, McCarthy said he was considering options — among them, a two-week stopgap funding measure similar to the effort from hard-right senators that would be certain to exclude any help for Ukraine in the war against Russia.

Even though the House bill already cut routine Ukraine aid, an intensifying Republican resistance to the war effort means the Senate’s plan to attach $6 billion that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is seeking from the U.S. may have support from Democrats but not from most of McCarthy’s Republicans.

Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is working to stop that aid in the Senate package.

The White House has brushed aside McCarthy’s overtures to meet with President Joe Biden after the speaker walked away from the debt deal they brokered earlier this year that set budget levels.

Catering to his hard-right flank, McCarthy had returned to the spending limits the conservatives demanded back in January as part of the deal-making to help him become the House speaker.

The House package would not have cut the Defense, Veterans or Homeland Security departments but would have slashed almost all other agencies by up to 30% — steep hits to a vast array of programs, services and departments Americans routinely depend on.

It also added strict new border security provisions that would kickstart building a wall at the southern border with Mexico, among other measures. Additionally, the package would have set up a bipartisan debt commission to address the nation’s mounting debt load.

As soon as the floor debate began, McCarthy’s chief Republican critic, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, announced he would vote against the package, urging his colleagues to “not surrender.”

Gaetz said afterward that the speaker’s bill “went down in flames as I’ve told you all week it would.”

He and others rejecting the temporary measure want the House to keep pushing through the 12 individual spending bills needed to fund the government, typically a weekslong process, as they pursue their conservative priorities.

Republican leaders announced later Friday that the House would stay in session next week, rather than return home, to keep working on some of the 12 spending bills.

Some of the Republican holdouts, including Gaetz, are allies of former President Donald Trump, who is Biden’s chief rival in the 2024 race. Trump has been encouraging the Republicans to fight hard for their priorities and even to “shut it down.”

The hard right, led by Gaetz, has been threatening McCarthy’s ouster, with a looming vote to try to remove him from the speaker’s office unless he meets the conservative demands. Still, it’s unclear if any other Republican would have support from the House majority to lead the party.

Late Friday, Trump turned his ire to McConnell on social media, complaining the Republican leader and other GOP senators are “weak and ineffective” and making compromises with Democrats. He urged them, “Don’t do it!”
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Former President Jimmy Carter is set to mark his 99th birthday on October 1 while in hospice care. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports on an outpouring of admiration and well wishes for the onetime peanut farmer and Georgia governor who promoted peace and fought tropical diseases after leaving the White House.
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The United States called on Belgrade to pull its forces back from the border with Kosovo on Friday after detecting what it called an unprecedented Serbian military buildup.

Serbia deployed sophisticated tanks and artillery on the frontier after deadly clashes erupted at a monastery in northern Kosovo last week, the White House said.

The violence in which a Kosovo policeman and three Serb gunmen were killed marked one of the gravest escalations for years in Kosovo, a former Serbian breakaway province.

“We are monitoring a large Serbian military deployment along the border with Kosovo,” White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters. “That includes an unprecedented staging of advanced Serbian artillery, tanks, mechanized infantry units.”

“We believe that this is a very destabilizing development,” he said. “We are calling on Serbia to withdraw those forces from the border.”

The buildup happened within the past week, but its purpose was not yet clear, Kirby said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had telephoned Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic to urge an “immediate de-escalation and a return to dialogue.”

And White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan spoke to Kosovo’s prime minister.

Serbia’s Vucic did not directly deny there had been a recent buildup but rejected claims that his country’s forces were on alert.

“I have denied untruths where they talk about the highest level of combat readiness of our forces, because I simply did not sign that and it is not accurate,” Vucic told reporters. “We don’t even have half the troops we had two or three months ago.”

‘Worrisome’

Serbia said on Wednesday that the defense minister and head of the armed forces had gone to visit a “deployment zone” but gave no further details.

The clashes on Sunday began when heavily armed Serb gunmen ambushed a patrol a few kilometers from the Serbian border, killing a Kosovo police officer.

Several dozen assailants then barricaded themselves at an Orthodox monastery, sparking an hourlong firefight in which three gunmen were killed and three were arrested.

Kosovo’s government has accused Belgrade of backing the entire operation. A member of a major Kosovo Serb political party admitted to leading the gunmen, his lawyer said Friday.

Kirby said the attack had a “very high level of sophistication,” involving around 20 vehicles, “military-grade” weapons, equipment and training.

“It’s worrisome,” he said. “It doesn’t look like just a bunch of guys who got together to do this.”

Peacekeeping force expected to grow

NATO would be “increasing its presence” of its peacekeeping force known as KFOR following the attack, Kirby added.

In Brussels, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg confirmed that the U.S.-led alliance was ready to boost the force to deal with the situation.

Kosovo broke away from Serbia in a bloody war in 1998-99 and declared independence in 2008 — a status Belgrade and Moscow have refused to recognize.

It has long seen strained relations between its ethnic Albanian majority and Serb minority, which have escalated in recent months in northern Kosovo.
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A potent rush-hour rainstorm swamped the New York metropolitan area on Friday, shutting down some subways and commuter railroads, flooding streets and highways, and delaying flights into LaGuardia Airport.

Up to 13 centimeters of rain fell in some areas overnight, and as much as 18 centimeters more was expected throughout the day, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said Friday morning.

By midday, although there was a break in the downpour, Mayor Eric Adams urged people to stay put if possible.

“It is not over, and I don’t want those gaps in heavy rain to give the appearance that it is over,” he said at a news briefing. He and Hochul, both Democrats, declared states of emergency.

No storm-related deaths or critical injuries had been reported as of midday, city officials said. But residents struggled to get around the waterlogged metropolis.

Traffic hit a standstill, with water above cars’ tires, on a stretch of the FDR Drive — a major artery along the east side of Manhattan. Some drivers abandoned their vehicles.

Priscilla Fontallio said she had been stranded in her car, which was on a piece of the highway that wasn’t flooded but wasn’t moving, for three hours as of 11 a.m.

“Never seen anything like this in my life,” she said.

On a street in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, workers were up to their knees in water as they tried to unclog a storm drain while cardboard and other debris floated by. The city said that it checked and cleared key drains, especially near subway stations, ahead of the storm. But that was little comfort to Osman Gutierrez, who was trying to pry soaked bags of trash and scraps of food from a drain near the synagogue where he works.

“The city has to do more to clean the streets,” he said. “It’s filthy.”

As the rain briefly slowed, residents emerged from their homes to survey the damage and begin draining the water that had reached the top of many basement doors. Some people arranged milk crates and wooden boards to cross the flooded sidewalks, with water close to waist-deep in the middle of some streets.

High school student Malachi Clark stared at a flooded intersection, unsure how to proceed as he tried to get home to Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. He had tried to take a bus, then a train.

“When it stops the buses, you know it’s bad,” he said. Bus service was severely disrupted citywide, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Elsewhere, photos and video posted on social media showed water pouring into subway stations and basements.

Jessie Lawrence said she awoke to the sound of rain dripping from the ceiling of her fourth-floor apartment in Brooklyn ’s Crown Heights neighborhood. She set out a bowl to catch the drips, but she could hear strange sounds coming from outside her door.

“I opened my front door, and the water was coming in thicker and louder,” pouring into the hallway and flowing down the stairs, she said. The heavy rainfall had pooled atop the roof and was leaking through a skylight above the stairwell.

Dominic Ramunni, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in New York, said Friday’s rain was brought by a coastal storm, with low pressure off the East Coast helping to bring in some deep moisture from the Atlantic Ocean.

“This will be one of the wettest days in quite some time,” he said.

Virtually every subway line was at least partly suspended, rerouted or running with delays, and the Metro-North commuter railroad was suspended.

Flights into LaGuardia were briefly halted Friday morning, and then delayed, because of water in the airport’s refueling area. Flooding also forced the closure of one of the airport’s three terminals.

Friday’s flooding wasn’t nearly as bad as that two years ago, she said, but it was again filling the basement of her home on 64th Street with water. “Too much raining,” she said. “it’s not as bad as before, but still, it’s bad, bad, bad.”

New York City officials said they received reports that six basement apartments had flooded Friday, but all the occupants got out safely. Governor Hochul pleaded with residents to evacuate their homes if the water starts to rise.

“People need to take this extremely seriously,” the governor said.
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U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein died on Thursday night at 90, her family confirmed. She was the oldest member of Congress. 

Feinstein’s peers in the Senate say she will be remembered as a trailblazer and an exemplar of perseverance whose many firsts paved the way for generations of women to take charge in politics and society.

She was the first woman to serve as mayor of San Francisco and the first woman to be considered for a presidential ticket in 1984 — though Walter Mondale ultimately ran with Geraldine Ferraro.

Feinstein also was the first female front-runner for governor of California; the state’s first woman to win a seat in the Senate; the first woman to preside over a presidential inauguration; and the first woman to serve 30 years as a senator.

As a self-described centrist, Feinstein sometimes changed her views. Like many older politicians, she was once opposed to same-sex marriage, but reversed herself and became a staunch advocate of it in her later years.

One of her most memorable changes of heart, though, came in the fallout of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Feinstein voted for the Iraq war and was a proponent of many of President George W. Bush’s so-called war on terror policies, including brutal interrogations of suspected extremists, many of whom were transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

But in 2007, Feinstein rallied to shut down Guantanamo, and, in 2014, as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, made public a shocking report about the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret prisons across the globe, where extrajudicial torture was being used to extract information from suspected terrorists.

“I came to the conclusion that America’s greatness is being able to say we made a mistake, and we are going to correct it and go from there,” Feinstein said in 2014 after an hour-long speech denouncing the CIA’s interrogation program.

Opened doors for women

For decades, Feinstein built her reputation around open-mindedness and working across the aisle. But she wasn’t one to compromise her values, her colleagues say.

“She was smart. She was strong. She was compassionate, but maybe the trait that stood out most of all was her amazing integrity — her integrity was a diamond,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

On Friday morning, a teary-eyed Schumer led a moment of silence on the Senate floor before delivering a eulogy.

“She gave a voice, a platform and a leader to women throughout the country for decades,” Schumer told his peers. “Dianne didn’t just push down doors that were closed for women, she held them open for generations of women after her, to follow her. Today, there are 25 women serving in this chamber, and every one of them will admit they stand on Dianne’s shoulders.”

Feinstein cast her final vote on Thursday, according to official roll call data. By Friday, her chair was empty, her desk draped in a black sheet with a large vase of white flowers on it.

“Dianne was a trailblazer, and her beloved home state of California, and our entire nation are better for her dogged advocacy,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday.

Nearly called off career

For decades, Feinstein was a mainstay of California politics. But there was a point when she nearly called off her career as a public servant.

The year was 1978. After two failed bids for mayor and nearly a decade on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Feinstein was unsure if politics was her calling. Then tragedy struck. A former supervisor shot dead San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

As board president, Feinstein announced their deaths and called for spiritual healing in one of her most famous speeches. Overnight, she became a national symbol of resilience and was appointed mayor, a post she held for nearly a decade before an unsuccessful bid for governor in 1990.

Two years after losing out, Feinstein ran for Senate and won. She would win five reelections, all by considerable margins.

Feinstein said that the horror of watching Milk die always stuck with her. She later recounted how she rushed to Milk’s office after hearing gunshots and attempted to locate a pulse. “My finger went into a bullet hole in his wrist,” she said. Feinstein went on to spearhead the first nationwide ban on assault weapons in 1994, which expired in 2004.

Throughout her career, Feinstein was a vocal critic of congressional inaction on gun control, particularly in recent years with nationwide upticks in school shootings. In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut, she tried unsuccessfully to restore the ban.

Feinstein also pushed for abortion rights and rights for crime victims. In 2018, she referred then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh to federal investigators over Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation that he sexually assaulted her when the two were teenagers.

“I’ve lived a feminist life,” Feinstein once told a reporter.

In a tribute on Friday, U.S. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi said “Dianne was a pioneering woman leader who served as San Francisco’s first female mayor with unmatched courage, poise and grace.”
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