Midday Roundup: Hurricane Patricia about to wallop Mexican coast

Peligro. The strongest hurricane on record in the Western Hemisphere is headed toward Mexico’s west coast. Hurricane Patricia likely will make landfall later today, clobbering fishing villages and resort cities such as Puerto Vallarta with winds as high as 200 mph. This morning, a long line formed in the Sheraton Hotel in Puerto Vallarta as guests waited to check out and get out of town before the storm hit. Patricia’s power is comparable to that of Typhoon Haiyan, which left more than 7,300 dead or missing in the Philippines two years ago, according to the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization.

Nixed spending. President Barack Obama vetoed a military appropriations bill Thursday in an ongoing spat with Republicans over spending policies. It was the fifth time Obama has exercised his veto power during his presidency. Four years after Congress passed and Obama signed into law spending limits called sequestration, both parties are eager to bust through the caps for defense spending. But Obama wants to raise domestic spending at the same time, while Republicans want only to raise defense spending by using a separate, sequester-proof account. “I’m going to be sending it back to Congress, and my message to them is very simple: Let’s do this right,” Obama said yesterday after vetoing the bill. The bill had bipartisan support but was 20 votes shy of the number needed to override the veto.

Killed in action. The military identified a U.S. soldier killed in a rescue operation in Iraq as Master Sgt. Joshua L. Wheeler, a member of the Army’s elite Delta Force. Wheeler, a 39-year-old, 20-year veteran of the military, had deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq three times. He was part of a team of advisers that accompanied Kurdish Peshmerga forces on a raid to rescue 20 hostages from an ISIS prison compound. The Kurds came under heavy fire, and U.S. forces came to their aid. Wheeler died in the firefight, but his team was able to liberate the prison, which held more hostages than expected. “It is always a tragedy when we lose one of our own,” said Col. Steve Warren, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. “In the end, we saved 70 people from execution that was planned in a few hours.”

Careless cleanup. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) carelessly caused a massive wastewater spill from a Colorado gold mine, government investigators said. The EPA failed to check water levels in the Gold King Mine before starting a poorly planned clean-up operation there in August, even though the agency knew pressurized wastewater was building up in the mine, according to a report by the U.S. Interior Department. The blowout tainted rivers in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and on the Navajo Nation with 3 million gallons of water contaminated with dangerous heavy metals, including arsenic and lead.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.