By Maren Roeske ’18 | Staff Writer

Local
As fall comes to a close, crews working to renovate over three miles –18,000 feet exactly– of Grosse Pointe Farms water mains completed the project. Construction began in May to increase water pressure and prevent water main breaks, which were common in the renovated areas.

“We are hoping for some good dividends this winter, with less main breaks,” City Manager Shane Reeside said in an interview with the Grosse Pointe Times.

According to the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority, winter is when water main breaks are most common due to the expanding and contracting of pipes in the cold weather.

This project cost roughly $3.5 million paid for by bond Reeside said. Of that money, $500,000 was spent on sewer lining repairs. But Farms Mayor James Farquhar said it was money well spent.

“I thought they did a great job [that was] on target, and the residents are going to reap the rewards for years to come,” Farquhar said in an interview with the Grosse Pointe Times.

While the construction work on the pipes finished in late October, there is still some work to be done repairing sidewalks, concrete and curbs Reeside said. The majority of these final restoration steps are projected to be finished in mid November, yet Reeside expects that some final touches will need to be made in spring.

State
As the world begins to recover from the shock of recent attacks in Paris made by ISIS, Governor Rick Snyder released a statement, Sunday Nov. 15, announcing he would be suspending efforts to allow Syrian refugees to relocate in Michigan until the Department of Homeland Security fully reviewed its procedures.

“Michigan is a welcoming state and we are proud of our rich history of immigration,” Snyder said in the statement. “Our first priority is protecting the safety of our residents.”

This controversial decision immediately sparked reactions in. Many people were angered by this shift in policy yet conservative members of the Legislature applauded Snyder’s choice.

U.S Representative Candice Miller spoke Sunday in support of Snyder and the ceased efforts.

“Terrorist organizations like ISIS,” Miller said in the statement, “are looking for any and every opportunity to exploit a nation’s hospitality to carry out their barbaric attacks against the innocent.”

Many critics of Snyder’s actions point to the hypocrisy of the historically pro-immigration governor, given that early this fall, in September, Snyder was working to increase the Syrian refugees allowed into Michigan.

His policy shift came as a surprise given only two weeks before the decision, Snyder visited Hamtramck, which has the highest percentage of immigrants among all cities in the state. Snyder addressed a crowd of Bangladeshi Americans while there stating “I believe I’m the most pro-immigration governor in the country.”

Dr. Yahya Basha, a Syrian-American advocate from West Bloomfield, has family members who are refugees, disagrees with the notion Snyder made. Basha was at the White House recently to discuss the Syrian refugee crisis with U.S. officials and believes the U.S. should allow refugees to seek help here.

“The United States should be a safe haven,” said Basha said in an interview with the Detroit Free Press. “We should welcome them.”

National
Terrorist attacks in Nigeria, Beirut and Paris have left the international community reeling, but nationally, they have been shaping the recent course of ongoing 2016 presidential campaigns as candidates voice their opinion on the events.

National security and foreign policy have become leading topics in current discussions, leading some candidates to fall behind. Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump have all been criticized recently for their lack of foreign policy experience given their non traditional political backgrounds.

All of the republican candidates were united in standing against President Obama’s strategy of airstrikes and criticized his plan to increase the number of Syrian refugees allowed in the country from 2,000 to 10,000.

On Monday, Carson sent a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan urging Congress to terminate public funding for programs that help resettle refugees in the U.S.

Immigration and gun control are other topics under the spotlight since theses terrorist attacks.

Trump took this as an opportunity to push for less strict gun regulations. “If they had guns, if our people had guns…it would have been a much different situation,” Trump said of the Paris attacks at a rally in Texas.

Although inexperienced in foreign policy, Trump was the republican front runner in a recent Reuters poll on which a candidate is best equipped to combat terrorism with a 33 percent majority. Hillary Clinton was voted the best democrat with 52 percent of the poll.

Clinton’s performance in the recent democratic debate was centered around foreign policy, as was the entire debate which took place only a day after the Paris attacks. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley all took strong stances on combating terrorism,

Clinton in particularly distanced herself from President Obama claiming that more intensive airstrikes were needed and that ISIS “cannot be contained” as President Obama said in remarks on Nov. 12, but needs to be “defeated.”

Sanders on the other hand, was criticized for not clearly addressing terrorism. He only had a few lines in his opening remarks before going back to discussing the key points he’d outlined throughout his campaign. He was applauded for calling out Clinton’s connections with Wall Street pointing to the millions of dollars her campaign has received in donations from Wall Street.

“Why over her political career has Wall Street been a major, the major campaign contributor to Hillary Clinton?” Sanders said. “Maybe they’re dumb and they don’t know what they’re going to get, but I don’t think so.. I have never heard a candidate, never, who has received huge amounts of money from oil, from coal, from Wall Street from the military industrial complex, not one candidate — ‘Oh these, these campaign contributions will not influence me.’ But why do they make millions of dollars of campaign contributions? They expect to get something, everybody knows that.”

In her response. Clinton fumbled, citing her involvement in the rebuilding of New York’s financial district after 9/11 as the reason she received so many donations.

In other election news, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal officially ended his campaign for president on Tuesday. Low poll numbers kept him from competing in the main debates and the lack of fundraising put him behind other candidates, only having raised $261,000 in the last fundraising period.

“I’ve come to the realization that this is not my time,” Jindal said on Fox News when he announced the decision to end his campaign.

International
Global terrorist attacks in Nigeria, Lebanon and France left many casualties in their wake.

On Friday, Nov. 13, seven ISIS attacks shook Paris. In the aftermath of the attacks, at least 129 people were killed and 312 injured, 99 critically. The most violent of the attacks was at the Bataclan concert venue where 89 people were killed by three masked men in suicide bomber vests who shot the crowd down with AK-47s.

The police released a statement describing the scene as SWAT teams rushed to rescue hostages from Bataclan. Two of the three men detonated their vests and the third was shot by police. An attacker elsewhere in the city was captured and from interrogation, police began to search for suspects.

On Wednesday, seven suspects were arrested who, police say, were in the final stages of carrying out an attack on Charles de Gaulle airport.

French President Francois Hollande introduced legislation to extend the state of emergency for three months and in a speech at Versailles declared that France is at war.

“France is at war,” President Hollande said. “The acts committed on Friday night in Paris and at the Stade are acts of war, leaving at least 129 dead and many wounded; this constitutes an attack against our country, against its values against its youth, against its way of life.”

France activated Article 42, a distress signal to all EU countries asking for military and civil support as well as increasing airstrikes. In the 72 hours following the Friday’s attack, France launched 20 strikes at the de facto capital of ISIS, Raqqa. At least 33 ISIS members died by French airstrikes according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Along with those measures, a series of homeland security raids began in France and at least 1,500 soldiers now patrol the streets of Paris.

Suicide bombing in the Lebanese city of Beirut left 43 dead after ISIS attack. On Thursday, Nov. 11 the Bourj al-Barajneh shopping district in Southern Beirut was rocked by a series of bombings.
“There’s a lot of shattered glass on the street, a lot of blood, and it’s really just a scene of chaos and carnage,” journalist Tamara Qiblawi said shortly after the blasts.

Along with the dead, at least 239 people were injured, according to statements released by the police.

A traditionally Hezbollah stronghold, ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack on social media and Lebanese officials believe the bombers were part of an ISIS cell dispatched to Beirut. So far authorities have arrested nine suspects.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram are responsible for two consecutive attacks, the first on Tuesday in the city of Yola. Suicide bombers killed 32 people and wounded 80 in an attack.

Wednesday saw another attack in the Northern Nigerian state of Kano where suicide bombers attacked a market square. Nigerian officials say that dozens were wounded and at least 12 people died. Red Cross officials and eyewitnesses believe 50 to 60 people died from the bombings.

Boko Haram claimed credit for both attacks and in the 2015 Global Terrorism Index released Wednesday by the Institute for Economics and Peace Boko Haram was found to be the most deadly terror organization in the world.

Boko Haram was responsible for 6,644 death in the past year, 571 more than ISIS. Boko Haram also targeted more private citizens with 77 percent of those deaths being private citizens. This is primarily because, according to the study, the greater number of guns used by Boko Haram.

In light of the recent events, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, who took office in May and ran on a platform of eliminating Boko Haram by December, released a statement to Nigerian citizens in an effort to reinstill faith.

“President Buhari reassures Nigerians that his administration is very much determined to wipe out Boko Haram in Nigeria and bring all perpetrators of these heinous crimes against humanity to justice,” the release said.