Progressive Briefing for Monday, October 15

DNA confirms Elizabeth Warren's ancestry, Trump says 'we won' in regards to Christine Blasey Ford, Bernie Sanders rips White House for dismissal of climate science, and more.

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With DNA rest confirming ancestry, Elizabeth Warren tells Trump to send $1 million check to Indigenous rights group

Weeks after indicating that she is considering a run for president in 2020, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released DNA test results on Monday that confirmed she has Native American ancestry – showing that President Donald Trump’s attacks on her heritage were not only racist, but baseless as well.

A nearly six-minute video posted to Warren’s “Fact Squad” website details Warren’s family history and upbringing in Oklahoma and shows a genetics professor from Stanford University confirming that Warren has Native American ancestry from six to 10 generations ago.“Trump can say whatever he wants about me. But mocking Native Americans or any group in order to try to get at me – that’s not what America stands for.” —Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)

With the video release, Warren appears intent on putting to rest the president’s main line of attack on her ahead of a potential presidential challenge.

Trump says ‘it doesn’t matter’ how Christine Blasey Ford was treated because ‘we won’

During a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday, President Trump was asked if he thought it was respectful to mockingly mimic sexual assault survivor Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at one of his political rallies, prompting thousands of people to boo her.

Trump responded by saying it doesn’t matter, because the man she accused of assaulting her – Brett Kavanaugh – was ultimately confirmed to the Supreme Court.

“Had I not made that speech, we would not have won,” Trump said, referring to an October 2 speech in which he mocked Blasey Ford for not being able to remember details surrounding the night in the summer of 1982 when she claims Kavanaugh assaulted her at a high school party while one of his friends looked on.

With planet in ‘crisis mode,’ Bernie Sanders rips Trump White House for ‘dangerous’ dismissal of climate science

Appearing on ABC‘s “This Week” on Sunday just moments after President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser and noted Wall Street stooge Larry Kudlow dismissed a new United Nations climate report showing that the world must cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 to avert global catastrophe, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) denounced the White House for its “dangerous” rejection of climate science and slammed Trump for working hand-in-hand with Big Oil to make “a bad situation worse.”

“The comments a moment ago that Larry Kudlow made are so irresponsible, so dangerous that it’s just hard to believe that a leading government official could make them,” Sanders told host George Stephanopoulos after Kudlow – a fervent climate denier – accused the U.N. of overestimating the severity of the climate crisis.

“What the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said is that we have 12 years – 12 years to substantially cut the amount of carbon in our atmosphere or this planet, our country, the rest of the world, is going to suffer irreversible damage,” the Vermont senator continued. “We are in crisis mode and you have an administration that virtually does not even recognize the reality of climate change and their policies, working with the fossil fuel industry, are making a bad situation worse.”

Latin America backslides in struggle to reach zero hunger goal

For the third consecutive year, South America slid backwards in the global struggle to achieve zero hunger by 2030, with 39 million people living with hunger and five million children suffering from malnutrition.

“It’s very distressing because we’re not making progress. We’re not doing well, we’re going in reverse. You can accept this in a year of great drought or a crisis somewhere, but when it’s happened three years in a row, that’s a trend,” reflected Julio Berdegué, FAO’s highest authority in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The regional representative of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations said it is cause for concern that it is not Central America, the poorest subregion, that is failing in its efforts, but the South American countries that have stagnated.

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