10 things you need to know today: October 7, 2016

(Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

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1. Hurricane Matthew nears Florida, weakening slightly as it moves up coast
2. Colombia's president wins Nobel Peace Prize for efforts to end civil war
3. Hurricane death toll rises in Haiti
4. Syrian president offers rebels amnesty if they leave Aleppo
5. Obama commutes sentences of 102 more prisoners
6. Paul Ryan to make first campaign appearance with Donald Trump
7. New Jersey train was exceeding speed limit when it crashed in Hoboken station
8. Security Council officially nominates Guterres as next secretary-general
9. Debris identified as part of missing Malaysia Airline plane's wing
10. New York Archdiocese establishes sex-abuse compensation fund

published 7 October 2016

1. Hurricane Matthew nears Florida, weakening slightly as it moves up coast

Hurricane Matthew weakened slightly as it moved north parallel to the Florida coast, just offshore, early Friday, but authorities cautioned that it remained an "extremely dangerous" storm. Matthew's top sustained winds dropped to 120 mph from 140 mph as it approached Florida after blasting through the Bahamas. It was downgraded from a Category 4 storm to a Category 3, still the strongest storm to threaten the U.S. in a decade. At 5 a.m., Matthew was about 40 miles east-southeast of Cape Canaveral, Florida, heading north-northwest at 13 miles per hour. The governors of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas have declared states of emergency, telling nearly 2 million people along the coast to evacuate. About 300,000 people already have lost power.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his work to end his South American country's 52-year civil war, which has killed at least 220,000 people and displaced nearly six million. Voters recently narrowly rejected the peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, but both sides say they remain committed to peace. "The award should also be seen as a tribute to the Colombian people who, despite great hardships and abuses, have not given up hope of a just peace," the Nobel committee said, "and to all the parties who have contributed to the peace process."

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Haiti's death toll from Hurricane Matthew has risen to more than 300 people, Haitian authorities said, as they began to get provisional damage reports from isolated communities on the western tip of the impoverished Caribbean nation's southern peninsula. "This is a very, very partial assessment of the damage and death," Haitian Interior Minister Francois Anick Joseph said, as the government worked on a nationwide damage assessment. Matthew hit Haiti with torrential rains, a punishing storm surge, and 145-mph winds, destroying crops and gutting thousands of homes and other buildings, as well as knocking out a bridge connecting the region with the rest of the country.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday offered rebels amnesty if they surrendered their arms and left Aleppo. The offer came after Russia and the Syrian government hit the divided city — Syria's second largest — with two weeks of the most intense bombing it has seen in the country's five-year civil war. Rebels in other strongholds, such as the Damascus suburb of Darayya, have accepted government amnesty offers in recent months. Rebels in Aleppo, however, said they had no plans of giving up.

President Obama on Thursday commuted the sentences of another 102 federal prisoners, the latest part of his push to reduce the number of inmates imprisoned for drug crimes. Obama has now granted clemency to 590 people this year, and 774 during his presidency — more than the last 11 presidents combined. "The vast majority of today's grants were for individuals serving unduly harsh sentences for drug-related crimes under outdated sentencing laws," White House counsel Neil Eggleston said in a statement.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) plans to campaign with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in Wisconsin on Saturday. The duo's first joint campaign appearance will mark a big shift for Ryan, the party's 2012 vice presidential nominee, after he only reluctantly endorsed Trump and spent months distancing himself from some of the candidate's most controversial comments. The RealClearPolitics polling average shows Trump trailing Hillary Clinton in the Badger State by 5 points in a four-way race.

The New Jersey commuter train that crashed last week in Hoboken sped up and was going 21 miles per hour — just over twice the 10 mph speed limit in the station. The engineer told investigators the train was traveling at 10 mph as it approached the station. He applied the brakes less than a second before the crash, according to information on the train data recorder. The train smashed into the terminal, killing one woman and injuring more than 100 others.

The United Nations Security Council on Thursday formally nominated former Portuguese prime minister Antonio Guterres as the U.N.'s next secretary-general. The council's 15 member nations recommended Guterres for a five-year term by acclamation. The full 193-member General Assembly will hold its vote on the nomination next week. If Guterres is approved, as expected, he will replace Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon when his second term ends Dec. 31. Guterres said he hopes the unity of the Security Council reflected a willingness to act together to make "swift decisions which the troubled world we live in demands."

Malaysian and Australian officials said Friday that investigators have confirmed that a piece of an aircraft wing found on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius came from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Investigators found a part number on the debris — a piece of wing flap — that linked it to the missing Boeing 777, which vanished in March 2014 with 239 people on board en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing. Several other pieces of wreckage that washed ashore around the Indian Ocean also have been linked to the plane, but none have led to the discovery of the main wreckage.

The New York Archdiocese on Thursday announced that it had created an independent reconciliation and compensation program for people who were sexually abused by Roman Catholic clergy. Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York, said he hoped the program would become a model for healing in other dioceses. "I just finally thought: 'Darn it, let's do it. I'm tired of putting it off,'" he said. The new program, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, will be headed by seasoned mediator Kenneth Feinberg and overseen by an independent, non-church panel. About 170 people who have come forward to report abuse by some 40 priests over the past 40 or 50 years will be the first eligible to apply. The archdiocese said others would be encouraged to apply later, and that it would work with police to investigate any living clergy implicated.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.