Lara Kiswani urges the California Department of Education to defend the ethnic studies model curriculum against Israel lobby attacks, during a public hearing in Sacramento this month. (California Department of Education)

An Israel-backed propaganda app is claiming credit for pressuring California education officials to revise a proposed ethnic studies curriculum for public schools.

The curriculum, designed to be a graduation requirement for high schoolers and California State University students, aims to educate young people about the current and historic struggles of marginalized communities in the state and around the world. In its present model, the curriculum includes an accurate description of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign for Palestinian rights. It defines it as a "global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions."

The curriculum project was sidelined in August after Israel advocacy groups complained that the guidelines omit discussions of anti-Semitism. The right-wing group StandWithUs also claimed the curriculum "promotes hateful boycotts of Israel."

The presidential election in Afghanistan has been marred by violence that has followed the collapse of the US-Taliban peace talks, as well as numerous technical issues. The voter turnout is described by observers as low.

The polls were held in the war-torn country on Saturday. The elections had originally been scheduled for April 20, yet were delayed twice over technical setbacks and changes in election laws. The voters were choosing from among 18 candidates, including the country's incumbent president, Ashraf Ghani.

The vote count will take weeks, with the preliminary results expected not earlier than mid-October.

Reports indicate the voting process was not smooth - some 500 polling stations failed to open for various reasons, including lack of ballots. Apart from that, the country's Independent Election Commission (IEC) said it had failed to establish contact with 901 of some 5,000 presumably functioning stations, for reasons as yet undisclosed.

Don't like Greta Thunberg's eco-agenda? Well then you're an angry, triggered manchild who should feel ashamed. At least that's the message spat with disdain by the media, and endorsed by Thunberg herself.

Thungerg's meteoric rise to global climate change spokeswoman at the age of sixteen has been a polarizing one. On one hand, she's a voice for disaffected youth speaking truth to power. On the other, she's a doomsday preacher, whipping up the masses with far-fetched tales of the looming eco-apocalypse and shaming car drivers, plane travelers, and meat eaters for their sins.

Her message seems to be a personal one, as demonstrated in the excoriating speech to world leaders at the UN Climate Action Summit on Monday.

You may have noticed mystery towers going up all around the region where you live. The new cell towers are going incognito, dressed as trees.

Averaging between 50 to 200 feet, they awkwardly stand above other structures in order to provide good cell phone coverage. Instead of the roots, xylem, and phloem that give real trees life, cell tower trees have amplifiers, transceivers, and antennae that support our mobile devices' wireless communications.

5G is the fifth generation cellular network technology that claims to provide broadband access for mobile phone users, as well as non-essential perks such as driverless cars, smart appliances, better virtual reality, faster downloads, artificial intelligence (A.I.), Smart Cities and the Internet of Things (IoT). This means that everything we own and buy will have a microchip or antenna and will connect wirelessly, from milk cartons to refrigerators, toothbrushes to diapers. So your refrigerator can send a message to your cell phone to buy milk.

CITIES SAY NO TO 5G

Individuals, scientists, and grassroots groups around the world are saying no to 5G, citing health, aesthetics, and FCC bullying. In Cincinnati, Michelle Krinsky, RN, is pushing back. She demanded to know who put an ugly tower up near her home. She went to the village office, then to the County office, then to the State of Ohio, but "no one knew anything about it." Homeowners were finally able to identify that the tower is on the US 50 right-of-way, not in the Village, so that local officials would not have to be consulted and the public would, therefore, be unable to consent.

Authorities in Ukraine intend to resume regular passenger transportation with Russia's Crimea, according to the country's Ministry of Infrastructure. Crimean authorities have welcomed the plans.

In an interview with Ukraine's Radio Svoboda the country's Minister of Infrastructure Vladislav Krikliy said that official passenger traffic between Ukraine and Crimea is "undoubtedly" envisaged. Competitions for carrier selection will be held in the nearest future.

"We are constructing entry-exit checkpoints. I think that everything will be finished on time, as ordered by the president [of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky]," Krikliy said. His words follow President Zelensky's order in July to complete setting up checkpoints at the border with Crimea by December 20 of this year.

Crimean authorities called Kiev's plans "rational," as restoration of passenger traffic would benefit Ukrainians and the citizens of the Crimean peninsula equally.

Scores of climate change protesters were arrested outside a coal power plant in New Hampshire on Saturday as they staged a demonstration calling for the facility to be shut down.

About 120 people gathered outside Merrimack Station in Bow, New Hampshire, on Saturday afternoon, with 67 people being arrested, according to the Bow Police Department.

The protesters were charged with criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor, according to police. There were no injuries or any damage to property, authorities said.

"The Town of Bow would like to thank our local, county, regional and state partners for their assistance in ensuring that safety remained the top priority for our community, and all those who gathered at the Merrimack Station," Bow Police Chief Margaret Lougee said in a statement.

By the time drug enforcement agents swooped into his small medical office in Martinsville, Virginia, in 2017, Dr. Joel Smithers had prescribed about a half a million doses of highly addictive opioids in two years.

Patients from five states drove hundreds of miles to see him, spending up to 16 hours on the road to get prescriptions for oxycodone and other powerful painkillers.

"He's done great damage and contributed ... to the overall problem in the heartland of the opioid crisis," said Christopher Dziedzic, a supervisory special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration who oversaw the investigation into Smithers.

In the past two decades, opioids have killed about 400,000 Americans, ripped families apart and left communities — many in Appalachia — grappling with ballooning costs of social services like law enforcement, foster care and drug rehab.

Smithers, a 36-year-old married father of five, is facing the possibility of life in prison after being convicted in May of more than 800 counts of illegally prescribing drugs, including the oxycodone and oxymorphone that caused the death of a West Virginia woman. When he is sentenced Wednesday, the best Smithers can hope for is a mandatory minimum of 20 years.

Authorities in the U.S. Virgin Islands said they've expanded their search for Lucy Schuhmann, a 48-year-old from Kentucky who's been missing for more than a week.

Schuhmann was reported missing on Sept. 19 by the proprietor of her vacation rental in Coral Bay, on the island of St. John, after she didn't return home, local authorities said.

In recent days, local authorities and the Virgin Islands National Park Service began widening their search to additional hiking trails, roadsides and shorelines.

"I'm grateful for the diligence and care that our National Parks team on St. John have demonstrated," Stacey Plaskett, the Virgin Islands' Congressional delegate, said in a statement. "Our office will continue to support the team and are praying for Lucy and her family."

I have only ever known Julian Assange in detention. For nine years now, I have visited him in England bearing Australian news and solidarity. To Ellingham Hall I brought music and chocolate, to the Ecuadorian embassy I brought flannel shirts, Rake, Wizz Fizz and eucalyptus leaves, but to Belmarsh prison you can bring nothing — not a gift, not a book, not a piece of paper. Then I returned to Australia, a country so far away that has abandoned him in almost every respect.

Over the years I have learned to not ask, 'How are you?', because it's bloody obvious how he is: detained, smeared, maligned, unfree, stuck — in ever-narrower, colder, darker and damper tunnels — pursued and punished for publishing. Over the years I've learned to not complain of the rain or remark on what a beautiful day it is, because he's been inside for so long that a blizzard would be a blessing. I've also learned that it is not comforting but cruel to speak of sunsets, kookaburras, road trips; it's not helpful to assure him that, like me and my dog, he will find animal tracks in the bush when he comes home, even though I think it almost every day.

It is the prolonged and intensifying nature of his confinement that hits me as I wait in the first line outside the front door of the brown-brick jail. At the visitor centre opposite I've been fingerprinted after showing two forms of proof of address and my passport. Sure to remove absolutely everything from my pockets, I've locked my bags, keeping only £20 to spend on chocolate and sandwiches. Despite the security theatre that follows, the money gets nicked at some point through no fewer than four passageways that are sealed from behind before the next door opens, a metal detector, being patted down and having my mouth and ears inspected. After putting our shoes back on, we visitors cross an outdoor area and are faced with the reality of the cage: grey steel-mesh fencing with razor wire that is about 4 metres high all around. I hurry into the next building before going into a room where thirty small tables are fixed to the floor, with one blue plastic chair facing three green plastic chairs at each.

According to the latest Census Bureau figures released this month, real American incomes remained essentially flat in 2018 after three straight years of growth. Median household income was $63,179 in 2018, an uptick of 0.9% that census officials said isn't statistically significant from the prior year based on figures adjusted for inflation.

The new figures showed that the number of full-time, year-round workers increased by 2.3 million. When looked at by race and ethnicity, median household incomes in America were essentially flat in 2018 for all groups except Asians, who saw theirs rise 4.6% from the previous year in real dollars.

The good news is that while income were flat, the poverty rate in 2018 decline modestly to 11.8%, a decrease of a half percentage point from 2017, marking the fourth consecutive annual decline in the national poverty rate. It was the first time the official poverty rate fell significantly below its level at the start of the recession in 2007.