RETURN TO WORK: If enough members of the House can navigate the diminished air travel system they might arrive in Washington today after seven weeks of hiatus in time to vote on funding and re-opening the federal government.

  While federal employees and air traffic controllers may soon return to work and getting paid, the political crisis is not over for the Trump administration, which has yet to offer any solution to spiking health insurance costs when federal subsidies run out at the end of December. Congressional Republicans have only promised a vote on healthcare … not approval. 

  President Trump has long railed against the inadequacies of the health plan known as Obamacare … and it has some … but he has never offered an alternative. The biggest problem with Obamacare under a Trump administration is that it’s named after a president other than him.

  Trump mixed his political message yesterday with the solemnity of Veterans Day, declaring in a speech at Arlington National Cemetery that “We’re opening up our country, should have never been closed.”

  In the presence of rows of graves of war dead and veterans, the president who craves the Nobel Peace Prize crowed about winning wars. “So we’re not going to be politically correct anymore,” he said. “From now on, when we fight a war, we only fight for one reason: to win.”

THE REGIME:

— US government officials and many corporate executives are skipping the annual United Nations climate summit for the first time in 30 years, The NY Times reports. President Trump claims climate change is a “hoax” and major business executives risk his ire by attending.

— The Department of Justice is appealing a federal judge’s order requiring the White House to immediately begin providing American Sign Language interpretation at its press briefings when President Trump or press Secretary Karoline Leavitt are speaking.

  The DOJ says it takes 24 hours to schedule an ASL interpreter and their presence should be limited to regularly scheduled rather than impromptu remarks and events. 

— With the government on the brink of re-opening, the Supreme Court extended its order pausing a lower court order for the Trump administration to fully fund the SNAP food benefits for 42 million Americans.

— You can put a lot of things on your pasta … garlic, marinara, pesto, cream and cheese … and now the federal government wants to put a tariff on it. The Trump administration is threatening a 107 percent tariff on 13 brands of Italian pasta they claim are being dumped on the US market at anti-competitive prices.  The most common brand on the list is Barilla. Most of the others are sold in Italian specialty stores.

TERROR: A suicide attack outside a court in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad killed 12 people yesterday and injured at least 27 others. Authorities said the bomber was planning to attack the district courthouse but was unable to get in the building.

  Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has alleged that extremist groups “actively backed by India” were involved, and India denied it.

  This happened just a day after an explosion in a car near the Red Fort metro station in India’s capital Delhi killed at least eight people. The blast was so powerful … and hot … that several nearby vehicles almost melted. 

  There’s no evidence that the two explosions are related.

WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK: Actress and musician Paris Jackson, daughter of the late Michael Jackson, admitted that the whistle emitted when she speaks or sings is the result of a perforated septum caused by drug use. There’s a hole she can shine a light through in the tissue that separates her nostrils.

 The 27-year-old  said she won’t get surgery to fix it because she would have to take painkillers afterwards and she’s six years sober.

THE OBIT PAGE: Cleto Escobedo III, a saxophonist and leader of the house band for comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, and a close friend of Kimmel’s since they were boys growing up in Las Vegas, has died at age 59. No cause was given.

  Kimmel was in tears talking about it. 

  Escobedo’s band, Cleto and the Cletones, has been with “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” since the show went on the air in 2003.  “Cleto and I have been inseparable since I was 9 years old,” Kimmel wrote on Instagram. “The fact that we got to work together every day is a dream neither of us could ever have imagined would come true.”

  Escobedo’s father, Cleto Jr., came out of retirement to play with his son. 

THE SPIN RACK: In one of his last letters to shareholders as CEO of the business conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway,  Warren Buffett said he would speed up plans to give away much of his $150 billion fortune to his children’s philanthropic foundations. “My children are now at their prime in respect to experience and wisdom but have yet to enter old age,” The 95-year-old Buffett said of his daughter and two sons, who range in age from 67 to 72. — A Utah judge this week rejected a congressional map proposed by the state’s Republican legislature, instead ordering the use of a map drawn by a centrist coalition that had filed a lawsuit challenging the Republican proposal. The Republicans, who had tried to carve up the state in their own favor, vowed to fight the ruling, calling it an “Activist Map Decision.” — A 2,500-foot bridge in China that was completed earlier this year partially collapsed under a landslide on the mountain where it was built.  

BELOW THE FOLD: The Marion County government in central Kansas has agreed to pay $3 million to several parties and apologize for a 2023 raid on the local newspaper, the Marion County Record, searching for the source of purportedly leaked information involving a story never published.

  The money goes to the paper’s editor, two reporters, the publishing company, and the city’s former vice mayor whose home was searched.

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