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      Why Trump and Vance’s strategy is ‘say anything, make up anything’

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      JD Vance was holding court on CNN’s State of the Union programme. “The American media totally ignored this stuff,” he complained last Sunday, “until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.”But it wasn’t just a meme, objected interviewer Dana Bash. The Republican vice-presidential nominee gave a telling response: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”If ever there was a case of saying the quiet part out loud, Vance had perfected the art. The cat memes he referred to were prompted by baseless rumours about legal Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio eating house pets – rumours that led to bomb threats and evacuations of schools and government buildings in Springfield.But Vance’s willingness to “create stories” to grab attention before the November’s election hinted at a new frontier in post-truth America, where a lie is no longer slyly distributed but rather brazenly flaunted as a tactic to win political support and stir up social chaos.Some commentators draw a parallel with Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s coining of “alternative facts” when, on another Sunday politics show back in 2017, she sought to defend then White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s false statements about the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “It’s a logical continuation of what once was called ‘alternative facts’ by the same camp. It’s obvious that is a long-term mission statement, more than just an offhand comment.“Their entire strategy is to say anything, make up anything, invent false narratives to try and distract away from the very real consequences of their radical and extreme agenda that is so far out of the mainstream of the American people’s interests. They think they have a better chance of winning by making up insane stories about people eating pets versus having a subsequent conversation about the consequences of their policy agenda.”Dishonesty in politics is hardly new, from President Richard Nixon’s cover-up of the Watergate scandal to the false claim of weapons of mass destruction used as a pretext for the Iraq war. In 2004, the New York Times Magazine quoted an unnamed official in the George W Bush administration as saying: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”View image in fullscreenIt was fertile soil for Trump, who had spent years exaggerating his personal wealth and charity giving, misleading the public about ventures such as Trump University and even misrepresenting his own height and weight. From 2011, he was a leading promoter of the false conspiracy theory that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya and was therefore not eligible to be US president.From his inauguration on, Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his four years in the White House, according to a count by the Washington Post. He memorably claimed to have presided over the biggest tax cut ever – in fact, Ronald Reagan’s was bigger – and repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, telling the public that it would soon “disappear”.But perhaps the biggest lie of all came on the night of the 2020 presidential election when Trump claimed that he had won. He stuck to this position, arguing that it had been “stolen” from him through widespread voter fraud, ultimately leading to a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. He has since recast the rioters as martyrs and “patriots”.Now making his third consecutive bid for the White House, Trump’s mendacity has, if possible, shifted up a gear. He made more than 30 false claims during the presidential debate against Joe Biden in Atlanta, according to a fact-check by host network CNN, but escaped close scrutiny because of Biden’s feeble performance.In the debate against Harris in Philadelphia, he made false assertions about topics including inflation, immigration, tariffs, House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s role on January 6, Joe Biden’s role in the criminal cases against him and popular support for the overturning of the constitutional right to abortion.Astonishingly, he also plucked the racist Springfield conspiracy theory from the fever swamps of the internet and gave it a national platform before tens of millions of viewers when he said: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”Not for the first time that night, ABC News’s moderators were forced to step in with a fact-check. There is no evidence for such a claim. The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported that on the day Vance first promoted the rightwing rumours, Springfield’s city manager told his office that they were baseless.Vance’s team gave the Journal a police report in which a resident claimed her cat may have been stolen by Haitian neighbours. But a Journal reporter tracked down the resident and learned that her cat had been in the basement the whole time, prompting her to apologise to her neighbours.Yet still Trump and Vance persisted with the knowing falsehoods at rally after rally on the campaign trail, undeterred by warnings from the White House that they could stoke an ugly backlash against Haitians in Springfield. Then came Vance’s shocking admission that he would make stuff up and be proud of it.Days after the CNN interview, Vance continued to defend the comments while admitting that he had not fact-checked residents’ claims about the pets. “The media has a responsibility to fact-check,” he said at a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in an effort to shift blame.View image in fullscreenCharlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “What JD Vance is saying is that the facts don’t matter and that I am completely unashamed to have peddled a false story.“It underlines the degree to which Trump and Vance and the Maga movement are addicted to these fake online internet memes and unshakeable in their attachment to them. Even when they are refuted, they stick with them, which is a dangerous thing because it means that no matter how much evidence you can provide, no matter how dangerous the lies turn out to be, they’re not going to back off.”Sykes warned: “They’re going to keep pushing. Extrapolate this to what’s going to happen in November and the election results. Extrapolate it to anything.”On Saturday, Vance is due to appear with conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson on the former Fox News host’s live tour in Hershey, Pennsylvania. This is despite Carlson having recently hosted Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper on his podcast, a decision roundly condemned by Jewish members of Congress.Trump, meanwhile, has been joined on the campaign trail by far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. She turned up at the debate and then a day later in New York to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.Loomer, who commands a following of 1.2m people on the X social media platform, has previously suggested that 9/11 was an inside job. At a rally in Las Vegas, Trump said he had heard that Harris had used a secret earpiece during their debate, a baseless conspiracy theory that Loomer has promoted on X.Loomer also posted on X that if Harris, who is of Indian descent, wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center”. Even far-right Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced the comment as racist.Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, regards Loomer as a symptom rather than a cause. “Run through a list of all the conspiracy theories that Donald Trump has embraced or pushed and it’s lengthy,” he said. “It’s not as if Laura Loomer is making Donald Trump into a conspiracist. Donald Trump has been one for years. He’s now finding people who will stroke and validate his darker impulses.”There is another reason for Trump and Vance’s sense of impunity. Their lies originate from and are legitimised by a rightwing media ecosystem that now includes X, formerly Twitter, owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, hosted an interview with him and sought to portray his critics as enemies of free speech.Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the watchdog Media Matters for America, said: “This is a rightwing media ticket. Donald Trump and JD Vance are both people who are fully immersed in the information ecosystem of the far right and they’ve adopted its complete lack of standards and willingness to use any means necessary to achieve their ends of political gain and political victory. What we’re seeing here is how these lies can spiral totally out of control. Springfield, Ohio, is experiencing some real chaos right now.”Heading into the final sprint of the election, where he could face prison if he loses, Trump is surpassing himself with a blitz of falsehoods. On Thursday, CNN’s fact-checkers produced a list of “12 completely fictional stories” that he has told in the last month, including Harris reintroducing the military draft, schools sending children for gender-affirming surgeries without their parents’ knowledge and Harris negotiating with Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2022 in an effort to prevent the invasion of Ukraine.Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, said: “There’s nothing worse than a desperate man. There’s nothing worse than a desperate racist man who cannot control the woman in front of him who happens to be African American. Cannot control the conditions around him that have changed – the tightening of the political race for the presidency.“Cannot control what people are saying about him, the fact that Republicans are now coming out and speaking against a second Trump term and are creating lanes in which we are willing to support the Democrat over Donald Trump because he is that bad and that dangerous. When he cannot control that, he becomes even more dangerous and more desperate and you need to be aware of that because there’s more of this coming between now and November.” More

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      Ohio residents flock to Springfield’s Haitian restaurants: ‘They are family’

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      The line down the center of the Rose Goute Creole restaurant on Springfield, Ohio’s South Limestone Street is halfway out the door. It’s been like this ever since former president Donald Trump falsely accused immigrants in Springfield of eating cats and dogs during a televised debate on 10 September.At the back of the restaurant, kitchen staff scramble to take orders and load plates of herring patties, rice and beans, and barbecued chicken legs on to serving trays. Outside, cars with plates from Georgia, Wisconsin and Indiana – diners who’ve stopped off a nearby highway to show support for the Haitian community – fill the parking lot.It’s a partly chaotic scene, as Dady Fanfan, a 41-year-old from Plaisance in northern Haiti, stands inside the door, greeting diners as they enter, before slipping away to clear nearby tables.“One day I came to the restaurant to buy something, and I saw there was a lot of people,” says Fanfan, who despite not knowing the restaurant owners personally is this week spending his free time helping his countrymen and women. “I just stayed a little bit to help them, and then the next day I came because they are family.”As Trump and JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate and Ohio senator, continue to spread false information about Haitians in Springfield, regular people from the city and beyond are taking it upon themselves to seize back the narrative around immigrants in the Ohio city.And the outpouring of support aimed at countering Trump’s damaging comments hasn’t been limited to volunteering.Many community healthcare centers and support organizations that have been assisting Haitians in Springfield for several years are reporting increased donations and contributions coinciding with the furor of the past 10 days.“In the last three days, we’ve taken cash donations about seven times the normal rate, and it’s specifically because of this polarization,” says Casey Rollins, executive director of Springfield’s Society of St Vincent de Paul. She says the money is then transferred to gift cards to be used by those in need at a local international grocery store.Unlike his party colleagues, Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has come out in strong support for the Haitian community, urged Trump and Vance to end their “very hurtful” comments and pledged $2.5m over two years to assist healthcare organizations in Springfield.“I’m just trying to make it easier for them to go through the firestorm that they’re in,” says Sammy, who drove her Yamaha motorbike 176 miles (283km) from Cleveland last Saturday and pulled into the parking lot of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center without knowing a single person in town. Seeing the threats and hate for Springfield’s Haitians online and having served in the army, she wanted to help protect people she saw as innocent victims.“I believe that America does best when it is one community standing up for, protecting and in solidarity with another,” she says.Sammy, who asked not to be fully identified as she is a trans woman in the process of changing names, says she’s seen supporters bring fresh garden vegetables, perform yard work around the center, and drop off furniture and office supplies.“It’s been one of the most American experiences of my life,” she says.“It’s humbling.”As Sammy speaks, JoAnn Welland, 79, from the neighboring town of Enon, walks by the front of the center, asking where she can donate.“The people who are coming here [from Haiti] have sacrificed so much to come, and Springfield, in my opinion, is a lovely town,” she says. Welland says she was motivated to get into her car and drive to the Haitian community center to donate after hearing the lies on television about Haitians eating pets.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Then, I heard that the town hall got a bomb threat, the elementary school got a bomb threat. The hatemongering, that’s wrong. That’s ugly and negative and hateful. This is my way of standing up for truth,” Welland says.But even as Welland speaks, across town three supermarkets are abruptly evacuated and closed due to bomb threats, dozens of which have set the town on edge since Trump singled out Springfield during last week’s debate. One Springfield elementary school saw around 200 children absent from classes on Tuesday due to security concerns and bomb threats, which largely have been found to be hoaxes.Earlier this week, CultureFest, a fall festival beloved by locals, was canceled to “prevent any potential risks” to attendees. A debate involving local politicians up for election has also been canceled.Springfield’s Republican mayor, Rob Rue, has pleaded for both presidential candidates not to come to the town, saying it would place an extreme strain on the city’s already stretched resources. Despite that, at a rally in New York on Wednesday, Trump said he’d travel to Springfield in the coming weeks.Back at the Rose Goute Creole restaurant, the stream of customers keeps coming. Orders stack up as hungry Haitian workers wearing T-shirts depicting their employers dart over to the counter to collect their orders before scampering back out the door.And Fanfan isn’t alone. Amanda Payen hands out free bottles of water and asks diners if they’re being served. Her husband, Jacob, who’s from Port-au-Prince but lived in Florida for decades before coming to Springfield, thanks diners for coming in as they leave.None are employees of the restaurants, but as Haitians, they want to help.“I’ll come back again tomorrow,” says Fanfan, “and if I see they need help, I’ll stay.” More

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      Trump rejects Harris call for second debate, saying ‘it’s too late’

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      Kamala Harris has accepted an invitation from CNN to participate in another debate with Donald Trump, on 23 October, her campaign said on Saturday.“Donald Trump should have no problem agreeing to this debate. It is the same format and setup as the CNN debate he attended and said he won in June, when he praised CNN’s moderators, rules and ratings,” the Harris campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said in a statement.“I will gladly accept a second presidential debate on October 23,” Harris later posted on X. “I hope Donald Trump will join me.”Trump debated Joe Biden in June when the US president was still running for re-election. Biden performed so badly that he ended up dropping out of the race in July, and Harris, his vice-president, ascended to the nomination.Asked about Harris’s acceptance of the CNN invitation, a Trump spokesperson pointed to the former president’s prior statements that there would be no more debates.Shortly afterwards, Trump spoke at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, and said that Harris only wants a rematch because she is losing.“She’s done one debate, I’ve done two. It’s too late to do another, I’d love to in many ways but it’s too late, the voting is cast, the voters are out there, immediately – is everybody voting, please? Get out and vote,” Trump said.The first in-person voting began in Minnesota, Virginia and South Dakota on Friday and some postal ballots were sent out a few days earlier.Harris and Trump held their first presidential debate in Philadelphia on 10 September, with Harris, the Democratic nominee for the White House, widely deemed to have won – a judgment rejected by Trump.The lead-up to that event was touch-and-go, scheduled originally when Biden had been at the top of the Democratic ticket, but Trump eventually acquiesced to appear, while the Harris campaign eventually agreed to the original rules of muted microphones when it was not the candidate’s turn to speak.Two days after the debate, when Trump had said he wouldn’t do another, he cited Harris’s invitation for a rematch then as proof he’d won the first.“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH,’” he wrote.This prompted the Harris campaign to taunt Trump as a chicken, and Saturday’s ostentatious acceptance of another debate invitation also seemed designed to needle her opponent.The vice-presidential debate is on 1 October between Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate and the governor of Minnesota, and JD Vance, a US senator for Ohio.Debate scheduling and platforming have become almost as contentious as the election campaign itself. The Harris and Trump campaigns repeatedly clashed over where, on what TV network, with which moderators and in what format they should debate, such as with muted or unmuted microphones, or whether with an audience or not.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter the debate hosted by ABC News earlier this month, Trump criticized the network’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for what he claimed was a biased approach.“They are the most dishonest, in my opinion, the most dishonest news organization,” he grumbled on Fox News.But a post-debate YouGov poll found that registered voters who responded said, by double digits, that the moderators had been “fair and unbiased”.While 43% said they had been fair, 29% said they had been biased in Harris’s favor and 4% said they had been biased in Trump’s favor. There was a big partisan split, with 55% of Republicans saying the moderators had been biased in Harris’s favor.But Trump praised, in comparative terms, the debate he’d had with Biden in June, saying the cable network was “more honorable” than ABC.CNN moderators did not live-fact-check the candidates, while ABC’s moderators did, including, most memorably, David Muir debunking as baseless the racist rightwing conspiracy theory repeated by Trump that the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, had been eating other residents’ pets.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Activist with far right ties fronts Marco Rubio-linked anti-immigration effort

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      The rightwing activist Nate Hochman, who was fired last year by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, for employing neo-Nazi imagery in a campaign video, is now the face of a Marco Rubio-linked thinktank’s efforts to spread anti-immigrant panic from Ohio to Pennsylvania.Videos featuring Hochman recorded in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, have been boosted on X by a range of rightwing figures including the platform’s owner, the tech billionaire Elon Musk.In recent days Hochman, 26, has recorded several videos on location in Charleroi for America 2100, a rightwing thinktank where he is an adviser, according to his biographies on X and at websites where he has published articles. Hochman is also a staff writer and podcaster at the rightwing website the American Spectator, where his recent output has mostly consisted of anti-immigrant messaging.Like Springfield in Ohio, Charleroi has attracted a community of Haitian migrants.The borough manager, Jim Manning, told CBS News on Wednesday that immigrants including Haitians “have been a benefit to the town”.He added: “They come here. They buy property. They open businesses. They work here. They pay taxes. So for us, at the end of the day, it has been a benefit.”At the time of reporting, Hochman had only published interviews with older white residents of the town, who have variously complained that the newcomers do not speak English and that migrants have taken “American jobs”.One interviewee appears to concede that the Haitians are in Charleroi legally but dismisses the importance of that fact.“The perception is that it’s not legal,” the interviewee says at one point. “Now, you get a lot of people saying they’re illegals and everyone wants to fight about that term, but it doesn’t really matter.”In an email sent after publication, Mike Needham, America 2100’s founder and president, pointed to an interview with a Black resident that had been published on the organization’s X account on Friday afternoon.Needham added in the same email: “Nate also recorded interviews with multiple Haitian workers in the course of his week-long investigation.” As of noon on Saturday, no interviews with Haitian immigrants had been published on the X account.Most have not been shared extensively, although one of the videos was reposted by far-right account End Wokeness, and reposted in turn by Musk to his nearly 200 million followers along with a nugget of political analysis. “Pennsylvania is a swing state,” Musk wrote. His repost was shared in turn by the America 2100 account.America 2100 is ostensibly a thinktank, launched by Needham, Rubio’s one-time chief of staff, in June 2023. Rubio is a Republican senator from Florida. Coverage of the launch presented it as a project with Rubio’s blessing, whose mission was to “begin the work of codifying and institutionalizing the ideas Rubio helped pioneer”.In July, however, Needham was also appointed as chairman of another thinktank, American Compass, which is led by a former Mitt Romney aide, Oren Cass.Cass and American Compass have drawn attention by promoting interventionist economic policies. Those policy ideas overlap with those of JD Vance: in reporting on the Needham hire, Politico called American Compass a “Vance-aligned think tank”, and Vance “an ally whose own staff has deep ties to the organization”.American Compass’s policy director, Chris Griswold, meanwhile, is another former Rubio staffer.After being dubbed “Little Marco” by Trump in a 2016 primary in which he, in turn, mocked the size of Trump’s hands, Rubio moved closer to Trump politically over the succeeding eight years, and in May even refused to commit to accepting the results of the upcoming election.At that time, Rubio was under consideration as Trump’s running mate but was eventually passed over for JD Vance.Although there was reporting on America 2100 at launch, there is little information on the site about its current personnel or the nature of the entity underlying its activities.America 2100 was registered as a non-stock corporation in Virginia in June 2023.Officers listed in filings include Needham and another former Rubio staffer, Albert Martinez, along with Lisa Lisker, a lawyer who was reportedly previously involved in an organization that spread misinformation about solar power in 12 states, and was also secretary for JD Vance’s campaign committee during his run for Senate in the 2022 election.The Guardian emailed America 2100 for comment via an email address designated for “press”, and emailed Needham and Lisker. The Guardian also contacted Rubio’s office.Only Needham responded, writing that: “I know this article will be bad-faith political hit job.”Needham added: “Nate did a great job reporting on the tragic story playing out in Charleroi.”In mid-2022, Hochman appeared poised for a high-profile career in conservative media, having been rewarded with blue ribbon fellowships and a staff job at the home of mainstream conservative opinion, National Review.His status as a representative of the emerging, harder-edged “national conservative” movement made him “the leftwing media’s go-to voice for insight into this crowd”, according to a story on rising rightwing influencers published at that time by the Dispatch, a “never Trump” conservative website.Hochman’s appearance in that story, however, was the start of his undoing.The Dispatch reported on a recording of Hochman in a Twitter spaces conversation with the white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes.In that conversation, Hochman reportedly disagreed with Fuentes on some topics, but also appeared to compliment the “America First” far-right activist, telling Fuentes: “You’ve gotten a lot of kids based, and we respect that for sure,” and “I think Nick’s probably a better influence than [the conservative commentator] Ben Shapiro on young men who might otherwise be conservatives.”Amid the furore that followed, Hochman was stripped of his fellowships. In March 2023 he left the National Review to work for DeSantis’s abortive presidential campaign. He was fired by the campaign that July, however, after he retweeted a meme-drenched pro-DeSantis video on his personal account that embraced the aesthetics of the online far right.As the Guardian reported at the time, the video portrayed “a ‘Wojak” meme, a sad-looking man popular on the right, against headlines about Trump policy failures before showing the meme cheering up to headlines about DeSantis and images of the governor at work”, all to the tune of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill.Then finally it superimposed DeSantis on to ranks of marching soldiers and a Sonnenrad – a Norse symbol frequently appropriated by neo-Nazis.As Hochman departed the campaign, Axios reported that Hochman had made the video, but endeavored to make it “appear as if it was produced externally”.Since then, Hochman has more fully embraced the more extreme actors of the so-called “new right”.A week ago, he published an essay at the far-right magazine IM–1776, which appeared to embed conspiratorial claims about the media in a jeremiad against democracy.Hochman claims at one point in the piece: “The US constitution was conceived to thwart tyranny; but it did so, in part, by limiting mass democracy. Once those limits were removed, power was no longer dispersed across a system of checks and balances, but centralized in the hands of whoever controlled the machinery of opinion formation.”Another recent essay published at IM–1776 characterized critics of Darryl Cooper – the “Holocaust revisionist” who recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s webcast – as adherents of “Hitlerian Satanism”.IM–1776 also gave space for the alt-right influencer Douglass Mackey to characterize his prosecution under Klan-era election laws as the government “prosecuting people [for] posting election jokes”.The Guardian previously reported on IM–1776’s close links to the rightwing activist Christopher Rufo, who has spent much of the last week trying in vain to substantiate Donald Trump’s false claims that Haitian immigrants are eating “dogs” “cats” and “pets”.In his essay, Hochman praises Rufo, saying that he “has won an impressive string of culture war victories by actively crafting news cycles rather than responding to them”.In May, in the American Mind, Hochman began a glowing review of The Unprotected Class, a book by the Claremont Institute’s Jeremy Carl that claims America is racked by anti-white racism, with the line: “Ethnic discrimination is as old as human civilization itself,” and goes on to argue: “Racial revenge is the germ of the sustained campaign to defame, attack, and disenfranchise white Americans on behalf of their country’s most powerful institutions.” More

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      Is this week Netanyahu goes from pariah to fugitive? | Andrew Roth

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      One year ago, Benjamin Netanyahu came to the UN with a vision of a “new Middle East” anchored by Israel’s growing ties with its Arab partners in the region. Now he is on the brink of launching a major escalation against Hezbollah, ignoring calls for restraint from his allies over the Gaza war and defying criticism that he is prevaricating in negotiations over a temporary ceasefire.The Israeli PM remains scheduled to speak on Friday at the UN general assembly in an appearance that is sure to lead to walkouts and protests on the streets of midtown Manhattan.He has delayed his arrival in the US by at least a day as tensions rise with Lebanon, after an elaborate operation to detonate thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah that may signal the beginning of a broader war in the region.The trip to New York may offer him a chance to evaluate support for an escalation in Lebanon, or to let Joe Biden and other allies know that he had made his decision and would not be talked down from a broader war.Netanyahu’s trip to the UN comes after a year of bloodshed in Gaza that has left more than 41,000 people dead and led the international criminal court (ICC) to consider issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. The ICC judges are regularly rumoured to be close to approving a warrant that could accuse Netanyahu of war crimes.Among those killed during the Gaza conflict have been 200 UN humanitarian aid workers. Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces have made claims that staff from the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) had taken part in the 7 October Hamas-led attacks, and nine members of the organisation had their contracts terminated after an internal UN review.António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has said that he and Netanyahu have not spoken since the beginning of the war, but that he was ready to meet him on the sidelines of the summit if the Israeli PM asked.“I have not talked to him because he didn’t pick up my phone calls, but I have no reason not to speak with him,” Guterres said. He blasted the “lack of accountability” for the deaths of the humanitarian aid workers, most of whom have been killed in strikes that the UN has slammed as indiscriminate.Asked earlier this month if Netanyahu would meet Guterres, Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, said that the Israeli PM’s schedule had not been finalised yet.Netanyahu’s most recent trip to the US came in July, when he addressed a raucous joint session Congress, promising “total victory” in his war against Hamas and mocking demonstrators against his appearance in the US Capitol as “idiots”. On the streets outside near Union Station, protesters clashed with police and defaced marble statues with paint.It remains to be seen whether Netanyahu is ready to take a step further towards the abyss. Following an airstrike in Beirut on Friday that killed a senior Hezbollah commander and at least 13 others in Beirut’s Dahiyeh area, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said that “even in Dahiyeh in Beirut – we will continue to pursue our enemy in order to protect our citizens”.The new “series of operations in the new phase of the war will continue until we achieve our goal: ensuring the safe return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes,” he said.Guterres had said that he viewed the booby-trapped pager attack against Hezbollah as a potential prelude to a military escalation by Israel in Lebanon and warned that the region was on the “brink of catastrophe”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhether Netanyahu is ready to escalate, including by launching a ground operation, remains unclear, and both Hezbollah and its benefactor Iran have promised retribution for recent strikes. But Netanyahu’s office on Friday announced that he would delay his arrival by a day due to the situation, and Danon later told reporters that Netanyahu’s arrival date would depend on events in Israel.Netanyahu addressed the UN last year riding high on the recently concluded Abraham accords. The landmark agreement normalised relations between Israel and two Arab states, Bahrain and UAE, with expectations that Saudi Arabia may soon sign the accords as well.“When the Palestinians see that most of the Arab world has reconciled itself to the Jewish state, they too will be more likely to abandon the fantasy of destroying Israel and finally embrace a path of genuine peace with it,” Netanyahu said, holding a crude map with the words “The New Middle East”.But the bloodletting in Gaza following the attacks by Hamas have sent tensions soaring, and most recently Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said his country would not recognise Israel without a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.And, if the ICC panel of judges makes a surprise decision this week to accuse Netanyahu of war crimes in Gaza, it will mark a further embarrassment as he goes from pariah to international fugitive. More

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      Harris campaign raised triple the funds in August that Trump team took in

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      Kamala Harris’s presidential election campaign raised more than triple the funds that Donald Trump’s did in August, according to the latest figures released by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).The US vice-president and the Democratic National Committee saw $257m (£193m) flow into their coffers, compared with $85m (£64m) raised by the former president and the Republican National Committee, continuing a towering financial fundraising advantage that has been leveraged since Joe Biden stepped away from his re-election bid in July and Harris became the party’s nominee for the White House.The FEC’s release on Friday showed that the Democratic campaign of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, and the Democratic National Committee have $286m (£215m) to play with in the final two months before the election on 5 November, compared with Trump’s $214m (£161m).Harris’s cash advantage translated into significantly more spending: FEC disclosures show spending on the Harris-Walz campaign reached $174m (£131m) last month, almost three times as much as the Trump campaign outlays of $61m (£47m).Campaign and national committee combined spending shows a less extreme split. Harris and the Democrats splurged with $258m (£194m) last month into her sprint for the presidency, with Trump and the Republicans dropping $121m (£91m) on campaign advertising and costs, $36m (£27m) more than they raised that month.Meanwhile, tech mogul Elon Musk also made his largest federal political contribution to date, giving a total of $289,100 (£217,090) to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), a committee dedicated to supporting Republican candidates in the US House of Representatives. The party narrowly controls the lower chamber of Congress, while Democrats have a wafer-thin majority in the US Senate and both parties are battling fiercely for control.Despite the Harris campaign cash advantage, allowing her to blanket the airwaves with ads, opinion polls both nationally and in swing states show an extremely tight race. Both campaigns have said most of their spending was on ads, with smaller sums paying for rallies, travel and campaign staff salaries.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Harris campaign spent more than $135m (£101m) on media buys and ad production in August, FEC records showed; more than $6m (£4.5m) on air travel; about $4.9m (£3.7m) on payroll and related taxes; and $4.5m (£3.4m) on text messaging. Harris’s campaign has assembled at least 2,000 aides and 312 campaign field offices across the battleground states.The Trump campaign has not disclosed comparative details about the size of its operation. In August, it spent more than $47m (£35m) on ads, alongside $10.2m (£7.7m) on direct mail to potential voters and about $670,000 (£503,000) on air travel.The financial disclosures come as an intriguing interpretation of how each candidate might get to the winning threshold of 270 electoral college votes has emerged: if Harris wins the northern swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and North Carolina, but loses the Sun belt swing states of Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, then the 2024 election could come down to Nebraska, where five electoral college votes are assigned proportionally but there is a push by Republicans to change that to a winner-take-all system. More

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      Thanks to Donald Trump, Apple’s new AirPods will make America hear again | John Naughton

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      Like many professional scribblers, I sometimes have to write not in a hushed study or library, but in noisy environments. So years ago I bought a set of Apple AirPods Pro, neat little gadgets that have a limited degree of noise-cancelling ability. They’re not as effective as the clunky (and pricey) headphones that seasoned transcontinental airline passengers need, but they’re much lighter and less obtrusive. And they have a button that enables you to switch off the noise cancellation and hear what’s going on around you.I remember wondering once if a version of them could also function as hearing aids, given the right software. But then dismissed the thought: after all, hearing aids are expensive, specialised devices that are often prescribed by audiologists – and also signal to the world at large that you are hard of hearing.But guess what? On 12 September, I open my laptop, click on the Verge website and find the headline: “Apple gets FDA authorisation to turn the AirPods Pro into hearing aids.” The new generation of the headphones will be able to serve as clinical-grade hearing aids later this autumn. More importantly, they can be bought over the counter (OTC in the lingo of the healthcare industry) and they will sell for $249 in the US (and £229 in the UK). Compare that with the prices of hearing aids sold by, say, Specsavers, which start at £495 and go all the way to £2,995 for the Phonak Infinio Sphere 90.Now of course price comparisons can be misleading. Vendors of conventional hearing aids will stress that customers get the undivided attention of an audiologist etc. And for customers with severe hearing difficulties, that’s fine. But for people with “mild to moderate hearing impairment”, even the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has concluded that the customisation software provided by Apple will be adequate.It works like this. You take an on-demand hearing test on your iPhone’s health app, which causes the earbuds to ping each ear with different frequencies at varying volumes. You tap the phone screen if you hear the sound. After a few minutes, the app will generate an audiogram that graphs your hearing deficits and this audiogram can then be used to program the AirPods Pro as hearing aids. Alternatively, you can upload an existing audiogram if you’ve had one generated by an audiologist.Neat, eh? And also a nice example of engineering ingenuity. But, as with most things, the technology is only part of the story. The healthcare industry in the US is tightly controlled by the FDA, which insisted for years that any device that goes into a human ear needs a prescription. As Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert and campaigner, points out, since 1993, campaigners have been calling for the FDA to loosen its stance on these devices and the calls got louder over the years. In 2015, the president’s council of advisers on science and technology issued a report seeking to make these devices more widely available. The next year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued a similar report.But eventually, in 2017, Congress passed the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act, proposed by senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Grassley and requiring the FDA to allow hearing aids without a prescription – and Donald Trump signed it! The act imposed a deadline of 2020 on the FDA, but the agency continually prevaricated until 2022, after the Biden administration compelled it to act with an executive order. Only then did the dam that had been building up since 1993 break.The moral of this story, in Stoller’s words, is simple: “How we deploy technology is not a function of engineering and science as much as it is how those interplay with law, in this case a law that fostered a hearing aid cartel and then a different law that broke it apart. So it’s not outlandish to say that Joe Biden designed Apple’s new hearing aid AirPods, with an assist from Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Grassley and Donald Trump. It’s just what happened.”This is perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but it captures an essential truth that Silicon Valley would prefer to ignore: technology does not exist in a vacuum, and the ways it is deployed and developed are shaped by social and political forces. Social media companies escape liability because of a 26-word clause in a 1996 law, for example. And millions of people in the US suffering from hearing impairment could have had hearing aids at affordable prices at least a decade ago. The problem was not that the technology didn’t exist, but that it wasn’t in the interest of the healthcare-regulatory establishment to make it available.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat I’ve been readingBad pressJeff Jarvis, the veteran journalist and City University of New York emeritus professor, has an insightful analysis on his blog titled What’s become of The Times & Co? about why US mainstream media has gone wrong.Top MarxThe Enduring Influence of Marx’s Masterpiece is a marvellous introduction by Wendy Brown to a new translation of Das Kapital.Head case A lovely essay by Erik J Larson is The Left Brain Delusion, which argues that we’re too governed by one side of our grey matter. More