�������ýҕ�l

The Department of Homeland Security announced Monday that borders with Mexico and Canada will remain closed to all nonessential travel until Nov. 21 in response to spiking COVID-19 cases. “We are working closely with Mexico & Canada to identify safe criteria to ease the restrictions in the future & support our border communities,” acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said on Twitter. (Polus, 10/19)

Saeb Erekat, a top Palestinian leader who tested positive for the novel coronavirus this month, was placed on a ventilator Monday and is in critical condition at an Israeli hospital, the facility said in a statement. Erekat, well known to diplomats as the Palestinians’ chief negotiator and the leader most frequently quoted by Western media, was rushed from his West Bank home to a hospital in Tel Aviv on Sunday, then transferred to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center. (Hendrix, 10/19)

The world’s chocolate companies depend on cocoa produced with the aid of more than 1 million West African child laborers, according to a new report sponsored by the Labor Department. The findings represent a remarkable failure by leading chocolate companies to fulfill a long-standing promise to eradicate the practice from their supply chains. Under pressure from Congress in 2001, some of the world’s largest chocolatiers — including Nestlé, Hershey and Mars — pledged to eradicate “the worst forms of child labor” from their sources in West Africa, the world’s most important supply. Since then, however, the firms have missed deadlines to eliminate child labor in 2005, 2008 and 2010. (Whoriskey, 10/19)

After years of local debate and international ridicule, the Quebec town of Asbestos has finally relented. The community of 7,000 people some 100 miles east of Montreal, heretofore named for the deadly mineral that was for more than a century the lifeblood of the local economy, will henceforth be known as Val-des-Sources. That’s Valley of the Springs, more or less. (Coletta, 10/19)