Mexico Digs Out, Puerto Rico Hit

Mexico Earthquake: Rescuers in Mexico are digging in the rubble looking for survivors of Tuesday’s 7.1 magnitude earthquake. Yesterday they found a child alive in a collapsed school in which 30 other children died.

Many people have been found alive and pulled out. Some survivors have sent messages from beneath the wreckage. A friend in Mexico City posted about an acquaintance, “She’s writing from under the rubble. They haven’t located her, but she’s still alive.”

Maria: The hurricane knocked out power to the entire island of Puerto Rico when it hit as a Category 4. Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said in a newspaper interview, “We know there are severe damages along different rivers and reservoirs, and water has overflowed from riverbanks, causing flooding.” As much as 25 inches of rain could fall on the island through tomorrow.

There are reports of flash floods and mudslides on the mountainous island. Rick Jervis wrote for USA Today, “At my hotel, Maria sheared off the front facade, pushed a wall down, crushed several balconies, punched holes in the first-floor ceiling and flooded the floors.”

The storm, diminished to a Category 3, is now arcing northeast of the Dominican Republic and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

The Russia Thing: Special Counsel Robert Mueller is seeking documents about President Trump’s activities while in office, including the firing of FBI Director James Comey and Trump’s Oval Office meeting with senior Russian officials in which he said getting rid of the FBI director had relieved “great pressure” on him, according to a report in the NY Times.

This basically means Mueller is aiming for the head.

  The Washington Post reports that less than two weeks before Trump accepted the Republican nomination, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort offered to provide briefings to a Russian billionaire close to the Kremlin.

 “If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in a July 7, 2016, email read to Post reporters by their source.

The email traffic suggests Manafort was looking to trade something, possibly valuable information, in exchange for money he was owed by Eastern European political clients. The Post has no verification that the meeting ever took place.

If You Can’t Do the Time: Prosecutors are asking a judge to send former NY Rep. Anthony Weiner away for two years on his conviction for sexual texting with a 15-year-old girl. Weiner says he’s reformed, but he’s been reformed before. “This is not merely a ‘sexting’ case,” prosecutors wrote in a filing. “The defendant did far more than exchange typed words on a lifeless cellphone screen with a faceless stranger. … Transmitting obscenity to a minor to induce her to engage in sexually explicit conduct by video chat and photo — is far from mere ‘sexting.’”

The Obit Page: Jake LaMotta, the former world middleweight boxing champion who inspired the 1980 Robert DeNiro movie “Raging Bull,” has died at age 95.

LaMotta held the middleweight title from 1949 to 1951 and was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990. He went 83-19-4 with 30 knockouts in a career that lasted from 1941 to 1954.

LaMotta fought six bloody battles with Sugar Ray Robinson, and was the first to beat him, knocking Robinson through the ropes. Robinson said after their first fight, “I never fought a fighter as strong as he is.”

Raised in the Bronx, LaMotta spent time in reform school for petty crimes and was a rough character through much of his adult life. When the movie came out he said he was initially upset because it made him look bad but, “Then I realized it was true. That’s the way it was. I was a no-good bastard. I realize it now. It’s not the way I am now, but the way I was then.”

Diversity Report: The President of the predominantly white Lipscomb University in Nashville held a dinner for black students to talk about their concerns and experiences at the school. When the kids arrived, the table was decorated with centerpieces of cotton stalks and the students were served collard greens, macaroni and cheese, cornbread, and ribs. They had to stand while eating.

At a previous dinner for Latino students, they were served Tacos.

The president of Lipscomb has since been seen eating a dirt sandwich.

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It's Been Said

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