Amber Alert issued for car after it was carjacked with baby inside

Amber Alert issued for car after it was carjacked with baby inside

Maryland State Police issued an Amber Alert for a car that was carjacked Wednesday afternoon with an 11-month-old baby inside.

Police are looking for a 2009 white Suzuki SUV with the Maryland tag 42688CF. The car was last seen in the 400 block of Kane Street, in the Bayview neighborhood. The carjacking happened around 1:30 p.m.

Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton the final debate

5 things Clinton needs to do in the final debate

This is the final debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump before the Nov. 8 election, and both candidates will face tough questions in Las Vegas.

Trump will have to answer for a growing roster of allegations from women accusing him of improper sexual contact, while Clinton is contending with a trove of hacked emails from her campaign chairman, John Podesta.

Here are five things the Democratic nominee needs to do in the final debate:

The WikiLeaks cloud

There’s been a stream of embarrassing email exchanges between Podesta and Clinton aides made public through the website WikiLeaks. The campaign argues the hacked communications are being released via a Russian government attempt to influence the U.S. election, but they're not denying the veracity of many of them.

They include exchanges showing internal concerns about everything from Clinton's ability to convey sincerity to her use of a private email server.

While there is no single smoking gun, collectively the messages risk painting a cynical view of her campaign that could endure beyond the election. Clinton must have an effective rejoinder that doesn’t revolve solely around blaming the Russians.

Buck up liberals

The biggest risk for Clinton is a demoralized Democratic base, mainly among liberals whose first choice was Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. She needs to reactivate President Obama’s winning coalition that relied on strong turnout among young people and African Americans.

Trashing Trump probably isn’t enough, and time is running out.

Some WikiLeaks exchanges underscore just how significant a struggle this has been for her all along. In one exchange shortly after she lost New Hampshire to Sanders, Joel Benenson, the campaign’s chief strategist, expressed uncertainty about what “she believes or wants her core message to be?”

Let Trump be Trump

Since the first debate on Sept. 26 at Hofstra University, Clinton’s largely stayed out of the spotlight as Trump’s campaign reels from accusations about his treatment of women, including numerous allegations of sexual misconduct.

She’s kept a lighter campaign schedule than Trump, opting for private fundraisers and intense debate preparations, while allegations about Trump’s past behavior — and his response to them — have dominated the headlines.

In an election where the public is overwhelmingly negative about both of their options, the outcome appears to hinge on which candidate proves to be the least unpopular choice. In that context, it makes sense for Clinton to pull her punches if it looks like Trump is continuing to drive up his own negative ratings.

Sharpen answer on trade

Of all the WikiLeaks emails, the most politically damaging may be an excerpt of a 2013 Clinton speech to a Brazilian bank in which she said her “dream” is “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.”

The transcripts of Clinton’s paid Wall Street speeches have been a flashpoint since the primaries, and this excerpt probably shows why she’s kept them under wraps.

The statement risks inflaming both her liberal base — by pining for the same free-trade deals they’ve railed against — and Trump’s voters, by calling for a freewheeling system of open immigration. They also stand in contrast to the positions she’s taken publicly in this campaign, as Clinton’s insisted she’s a critic of trade deals that have hurt U.S. workers and denied she is for totally open borders.

The debate moderator, Fox News’ Chris Wallace, is almost guaranteed to ask her about this.

Be ready, literally, for anything

Based on numerous polls, Trump is trailing Clinton by margins that have proved to be historically difficult to recover from.

During the last debate, Trump invited women who’ve accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to the debate hall to try to confront the former president and in order to create an embarrassing spectacle tarnishing her image.

With Trump already potentially positioning himself for a defeat, arguing the system is “rigged,” it’s anyone’s guess as to what kind of opposition research he’ll throw out or what kind of made-for-TV spectacle he’ll orchestrate.




source: usatoday

Nobel Prize in literature

Bob Dylan wins Nobel Prize in literature

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for work that the Swedish Academy described as “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

He is the first American to win the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993, and a groundbreaking choice by the Nobel committee to select the first literature laureate whose career has primarily been as a musician.

Although long rumored as a contender for the prize, Dylan was far down the list of predicted winners, which included such renown writers as Haruki Murakami and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o.

This is the second year in a row that the academy has turned away from fiction writers for the literature prize. And it’s possibly the first year that the prize has gone to someone who is primarily a musician, not a writer.

Shocking part of Donald Trump’s tax records

The most shocking part of Donald Trump’s tax records isn’t the $916 million loss everyone’s talking about

Despite what Donald Trump says, we really can learn a lot from his tax returns — even from the partial ones made public by The New York Times.

The major takeaway from the three pages of Trump’s 1995 returns that the Times made public is that Trump is right when he says the system is rigged. What he doesn’t say is that it’s rigged in his favor and in the favor of people like him — and against regular people, those of us who earn money, pay income tax on it, and financially support the country in which we live.

To keep things relatively simple, I’m telling you what I see in Trump’s returns, based on my decades of experience parsing financial filings. I will try not to get bogged down in numbers and technicalities.

Sure, the $900 million-plus of losses reported by the New York Times — losses that could be used to offset income for a total of 18 years — are totally shocking. Legal, yes. But shocking.

But there’s something I consider even more shocking — although it involves a much smaller number.

By my read of the Trump tax return published by the New York Times, he would have been tax-free because of a $15,818,562 loss reported on Line 11 of the return under “Rental real estate, royalties, partnerships, S corporations, trusts, etc.” It looks to me that this loss reflects the outrageous, special tax break that real estate developers that people like Trump can get, but that the rest of us can’t.

To give you the brief version, people who qualify as real estate developers or managers can use depreciation deductions to offset non-real-estate income. But people who don’t qualify for this special treatment can’t do that. (For full details, ask a tax expert about Section 469 of the tax code.)

Now, to the $900-plus million loss reported by the New York Times — which vastly exceeds any cash losses that Trump would have suffered in the collapse of his casino-hotel-airline empire, which fell apart in the early 1990s and resulted in four bankruptcies. (He had two more bankruptcies, in 2004 and 2009, from a publicly traded company in which he was the primary shareholder.)

I’m guessing, but I can’t tell for sure — there’s not enough information — that the loss has to do with the collapse of his empire. I don’t understand how Trump, who had very little of his own cash invested in his projects in the 1990s but did personally guarantee part of their debt, could end up with tax losses of that magnitude. They’re almost certainly paper losses rather than out-of-pocket losses.

It’s possible that those losses somehow vanished into the ether from which they came — we have no way to tell.

What we can tell, though, is that what I wrote recently about Trump’s “That makes me smart” boast when Hillary Clinton prodded him about not paying taxes was right.

If Trump were truly smart — and wanted to lead by example — he would have disclosed his tax returns, showed the loopholes he used, and vowed to close them.

I have plenty of problems with the Clintons’ financial behavior, as I wrote. But at least Hillary Clinton is proposing tax code changes that would cost her and her family money. Trump, by contrast, is proposing tax changes that would greatly benefit the commercial real estate business, which is his primary field, and would greatly benefit his own family. And when I asked his campaign last week whether he was proposing any tax changes that would cost him and/or his family any money, I got no reply.

This whole column and most of the articles I’ve read are based almost entirely on just one page of Trump’s tax filings — the front page of his 1995 New York return. So, you see, we have learned quite a lot from Trump’s tax returns — and we could learn a lot more when and if more of them make their way into the public domain.

source: washingtonpost