Heavy Weather: Tropical Storm Florence killed at least 14 people and knocked out power to a million as it makes a slow crawl inland from the coast of the Carolinas dumping record-breaking amounts of rain. It is now downgraded to a tropical depression.

What comes next is major river flooding. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said, “We face walls of water, at our coast, along our rivers, across farmland and in our cities and in our towns.”

At least 30 inches of rain wererecorded in Swansboro, NC, which sits behind barrier islands on the Atlantic coast. Nearby in the historic city of New Bern, officials reported that they had rescued more than 385 people from flooded homes.

In the Philippines, as Typhoon Mangkhut moves on to Southern China, authorities say landslides buried dozens of people, including some sheltering in a church and a dormitory for miners.

The Roundup: A 26-year-old Massachusetts man died after he was attacked by what was believed to be a great white shark yesterday at a beach in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. He was the first man killed by a shark in Massachusetts in 82 years, and the second bitten this summer. — A US Border Patrol agent in Texas has been arrested and charged with the serial killings of four prostitutes over a two-week period. The case broke when a woman escaped from the suspect, 35-year-old Juan David Ortiz. — As part of his federal plea agreement, Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is forfeiting an estimated $22 million worth of real estate in New York — including three Manhattan apartments, a Brooklyn townhouse and a place in the Hamptons.

Mexico Massacre: Gunmen dressed as mariachi musicians opened fire on the edge of  busy tourist square in Mexico City, killing five people. The Plaza Garibaldi, a major tourist attraction lined with mariachi bars, borders an area controlled by a violent drug gang.

The Obit Page: Dr.Walter Mischel, famous for his “marshmallow test” of delayed gratification in children, has died at 88. His studies clarified the importance of self-control in human development and changed how personality is understood.

Mishel and his researchers would sit a child in front of a treat, often a marshmallow, and tell them to wait before eating it. Sometimes they were given a strategy, like covering their eyes, and sometimes left to figure it out themselves. The results tended to be predictive of how people handle situations in their adult lives.

Trade War: President Trump is about to announce tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, The Washington Post reports. The paper describes it as  “one of the most severe economic restrictions ever imposed by a US president.”

The new tariffs would apply to more than 1,000 products, including refrigerators, air conditioners, furniture, televisions, electronic gizmos, and  toys, driving up prices for the Christmas season.

Continental Drift: President Trump was on Twitter again yesterday whining about Democratic opposition to his border wall and the “witch hunt” Russia investigation.

He wrote, “While my (our) poll numbers are good, with the Economy being the best ever, if it weren’t for the Rigged Russian Witch Hunt, they would be 25 points higher! Highly conflicted Bob Mueller & the 17 Angry Democrats are using this Phony issue to hurt us in the Midterms. No Collusion!”

The Republican Party has become the party of Trump and conservative author Andrew Sullivan bemoans the loss of true conservative values. He write in New Yorkmagazine that, “Republicans pursue the ideology of free markets and lower and lower taxation, regardless of its brutal assault on fiscal solvency, human dignity, social cohesion, and community life. They have nominated and protected a president who assaults the norms that conservatives revere, has contempt for existing institutions and sees the rule of law as a means to advance his own interests, rather than that of the society as a whole.”

He goes on, “This is a man and a party that has such disdain for conserving anything that it is actively despoiling our landscape, enabling a climate catastrophe. It is a party that has generated crippling and everlasting debt — even in good economic times — in a way that makes a mockery of any compact between generations. It is a party that actively endorses cruelty as a policy tool, deploys fear as its prime political weapon, and insists that the opposite party has no legitimate right to govern at all. It is the party of torture, the absolute nemesis of the liberal inheritance, the party of corruption, propaganda, vote suppression, and barely masked bigotry.”

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