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      Donald Trump makes a theatrical return to Butler, scene of assassination attempt

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      Donald Trump has returned to the site where he narrowly escaped assassination in July, pushing the emotional buttons of his supporters and suggesting that his political opponents “maybe even tried to kill me” to stop him regaining the White House.The Republican presidential nominee – and perennial showman – mounted an unabashedly sentimental spectacle in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. He was joined by billionaire Elon Musk, who made the baseless claim that if Trump’s supporters fail to turn out, “this will be the last election”.Their joint appearance before an enthusiastic crowd of thousands capped hours of programming seemingly intended to mythologise the 13 July shooting for the Trump base exactly one month before the presidential election.The rally was held, with heightened security, at the same grounds where Trump was grazed in the right ear and one rallygoer – firefighter Corey Comperatore – was killed when a gunman opened fire. The would-be assassin, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper.View image in fullscreenA photo of Trump standing with blood streaked across his face as he raised his fist and shouted “Fight!” became the indelible image of his campaign. Yet Joe Biden’s decision just a week later to step aside and endorse his vice-president, Kamala Harris, stole Trump’s thunder and altered the trajectory of the race.On Saturday Trump became the first former president to return to the scene of his attempted assassination and weaponise it for political gain. His campaign sought to recapture the aura of their candidate as hero and martyr.As he walked out on stage, a video juxtaposed an image of George Washington crossing the Delaware River with the photo of Trump with fist raised. A voice boomed: “This man cannot be stopped. This man cannot be defeated.”“As I was saying …” Trump said as he appeared on stage, gesturing towards an immigration chart that he was looking at when the gunfire began 12 weeks earlier. The crowd, which was overwhelmingly white, roared enthusiastically, holding aloft signs that read “Fight! Fight! Fight!”Standing behind protective glass that now encases the stage at his outdoor rallies, Trump recalled: “On this very ground a cold-blooded assassin aimed to silence me and silence the greatest movement – Maga – in the history of our country … But by the hand of providence and the grace of God that villain did not succeed in his goal. He did not stop our movement.”Trump even seemed to be trying to emulate Abraham Lincoln’s Gettsyburg address as he described the field as a “monument to the valour” of our first responders and prophesied: “Forever afterward, all who have visited this hallowed place will remember what happened here and they will know of the character and courage that so many incredible American patriots have showed.”But Trump also hinted darkly, without evidence, about facing “an enemy from within” more dangerous than any foreign adversary. “Over the past eight years, those who want to stop us from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to throw me off the ballot, and who knows, maybe even tried to kill me,” he said. “But I’ve never stopped fighting for you and I never will.”Trump saluted volunteer firefighter Comperatore, who was shot and killed by the gunman, and two other supporters who were wounded. A memorial was set up in the bleachers, his firefighter’s jacket surrounded by flowers. Giant screens said “In loving memory of Corey Comperatore”, accompanied by his picture. Comperatore’s family were present.At 6.11pm, the exact time when gunfire erupted on 13 July, Trump called for a moment of silence. A bell then tolled four times, once for each of the four victims, including Trump. Then opera singer Christopher Macchio belted out Ave Maria.Trump then veered into more familiar territory of falsehoods about immigration and other topics. Later he called up on stage Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and owner of social media platform X, who has swerved politically right. Wearing a black cap and black “Occupy Mars” shirt and coat, Musk jumped around with his arms held high and was greeted with cheers.He said: “The true test of someone’s character is how they behave under fire. We had one president who couldn’t climb a flight of stairs and another who was fist-pumping after getting shot! Fight, fight, fight!”Despite Trump’s attempt to stage a coup and cling on to power on 6 January 2021, Musk argued: “President Trump must win to preserve the constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America. This is a must-win situation. Get everyone you know, drag them to register to vote. If they don’t, this will be the last election. That is my prediction.”View image in fullscreenThe Butler shooting led to widespread criticism of the Secret Service and the resignation of its director. Critics raised concerns about how Crooks was able to access a nearby rooftop with a direct line of sight to where Trump was speaking. In September the former president survived another attempt on his life when a gunman hid undetected for nearly 12 hours at a golf course in one of his Florida clubs.On Saturday there was an intensified security presence with Secret Service and other law enforcement officers in camouflage uniforms stationed on roofs. The building from which Crooks fired was completely obscured by tractor trailers and a fence.The rally had an upbeat atmosphere like a giant picnic. People sat on the grass or foldout chairs and walkers in blazing sunshine. They gazed up into a brilliant blue sky to see four special forces skydivers – one holding a giant Stars and Stripes – jumping from a Cessna 206 plane from more than 5,000 feet, then a flypast of “Trump Force One” accompanied by the theme music from the film Top Gun.One tent displayed paintings of the now famous image of a bloodied Trump with fist raised – reproductions were on sale for up to $200. That photograph was also visible on numerous T-shirts worn by Trump supporters with slogans such as “Fight … fight … fight!”, “American badass”, “Never surrender” and “Fight. Trump 2024. Legends never die”. The commercialisation of the former president’s near death experience was on vivid display.Attendees spoke of their ardent support for Trump, their suspicion that Democrats were behind an assassination plot and that his life had been spared by divine intervention.Patricia King, 82, using a walker, was at the rally in Butler in July with her 63-year-old daughter, Diana, and both felt it was important to return. “I remember the long wait and how hot it was and people being loyal enough to stand there and some of them fainted,” said King, a retired nurse. “I remember the shots going off – pop, pop, pop, pop – and I turned and looked where he was and everybody started running.”King praised Trump’s instinctively combative response that day. “That’s great with me. That’s like: I’m not quitting and that’s what America is about. We don’t quit. Kamala Harris is too weak. I think she’d be asking Putin to have a cup of tea with her, which is not strength to me.”Debbie Hasan, 61, a landlord wearing a Trump 2024 cap, described Saturday’s rally as “history in the making” and recalled the events of 13 July. “I was watching TV and my husband was in the other room. I start screaming: ‘They shot Trump! They shot Trump!’ Then I called my brother and I’m screaming. And then seeing him get up and the fist pump was an awesome sight. He’s a great man.”Hasan outlined a baseless conspiracy theory that Democrats orchestrated the shooting. “I hate to say it, I think they were behind all this. They can’t beat him any other way. They tried putting him in court on all kinds of trumped up charges. They’re at their limit. They don’t know what else to do. They promote hate and prejudice. How they talk about him, some wacko’s going to say, he needs to be keyholed.”View image in fullscreenMany rallygoers echoed Trump’s claim that God saved him in order to save the country. Rodney Moreland, 66, retired from various jobs including welding, truck driving and security, said: “I don’t know if you believe in God but there was an angel around him that day, absolutely. After that happened his demeanour, everything changed about him. Now he’s calm, cool and collected and he’s known what words to say.”But Moreland warned of a possible backlash to the election result. “If it goes the opposite direction, there’s going to be a war. The last election was rigged. They said, we cannot have him stay in office again.”Kristi Masemer, 52, a Walmart worker, wearing a T-shirt that said “I’m still a Trump girl. I make no apologies”, criticised people who said they wished the would-be assassin had killed the former president.“The amount of people who were like, ‘I’m sorry that he missed’. People actually said that about another human being. That’s the Democrat party. Are you kidding me? That’s not humanity. Who would think that?”Masemer praised the restraint of Trump supporters after the assassination attempt. “The best part of all that was the people in the Maga movement after that didn’t riot. We didn’t lash back at these people because we’re not haters. We just want our country back and that’s it.”Butler county, on the western edge of a coveted presidential swing state, is a rural-suburban community and a Trump stronghold. He won the county with about 66% of the vote in both 2016 and 2020. About 57% of Butler county’s 139,000 registered voters are Republicans, compared with about 29% who are Democrats and 14% other parties.Jana Anderson, 62, who works at an animal shelter, said: “I don’t think a woman should be president, only because it’s always been men. I’m a woman but I think men should lead the country, not a woman. Women, in my opinion, are wishy washy. I mean, she says a lot of things, she promises a lot of things, but I don’t know if she’s capable of doing those things.” More

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      Trump to attend rally at site of July assassination attempt in Pennsylvania

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      Donald Trump plans to return on Saturday to the site where a gunman tried to assassinate him in July, as the former president sets aside what are now near-constant worries for his physical safety in order to fulfill a promise – “really an obligation”, he said recently – to the people of Butler, Pennsylvania.“I’ll probably start off by saying, ‘As I was saying … ’,” the Republican presidential nominee has joked, in a bit of black humor about a speech cut short when a bullet struck Trump’s ear and he was whisked off stage – fist aloft – with blood dripping across his face.Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, also will be on hand at the Butler Farm Show grounds, as will billionaire Elon Musk, as the campaign elevates the headline-generating potential of his return with just 30 days to go in their the campaign against the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, and her running mate, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota.The campaign is predicting tens of thousands of people will attend what is being pitched as a “tribute to the American spirit”. Local hotels, motels and inns are reportedly full and some eager rallygoers were already arriving on Friday, according to a local Facebook page.Hundreds of people were lined up as the sun rose on Saturday. A memorial for firefighter Corey Comperatore, who died as he shielded family members from gunfire, was set up in the bleachers, featuring his firefighter’s jacket surrounded by flowers.“President Trump looks forward to returning to Butler, Pennsylvania, to honor the victims from that tragic day,” said Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. “The willingness of Pennsylvanians to join President Trump in his return to Butler represents the strength and resiliency of the American people.”Trump will use the 5pm ET event to remember Comperatore and to recognize the two other rallygoers injured during the assassination attempt, David Dutch and James Copenhaver. They and Trump were struck when the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, opened fire from an unsecured rooftop nearby before he was fatally shot by sharpshooters.How Crooks managed to outmaneuver law enforcement that day and scramble on top of a building within easy shooting distance of the ex-president is among myriad questions that remain unanswered about the worst Secret Service security failure in decades. Another is his motive, which has never been determined.The Butler county district attorney, Rich Goldinger, told WPXI-TV this week that “everyone is doubling down on their efforts to make sure this is done safely and correctly”.Mike Slupe, the county sheriff, told the station he estimates the Secret Service – which has undergone a painful reckoning over its handling of two attempts on Trump’s life – is deploying ”quadruple the assets” it did in July.Butler county, on the western edge of a coveted presidential swing state, is a Trump stronghold. He won the county – where turnout hovers around an impressive 80% – with about 66% of the vote in both 2016 and 2020. About 57% of Butler county’s 139,000 registered voters are Republicans, compared with about 29% who are Democrats.Three months after the shooting, townspeople are divided over the value of Trump’s return. Heidi Priest, a Butler resident who started a Facebook group supporting Harris, said Trump’s last visit fanned political tensions in the city.“Whenever you see people supporting him and getting excited about him being here, it scares the people who don’t want to see him re-elected,” she said.But Trump needs to drive up voter turnout in conservative strongholds such as Butler county, an overwhelmingly white, rural-suburban community, if he wants to win Pennsylvania in November. Harris, too, has targeted her campaign efforts at Pennsylvania, rallying there repeatedly as part of her aggressive outreach in critical swing states. More

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      Biden urges Congress to pass disaster-relief package as Helene costs soar

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      Joe Biden is urging lawmakers to refill the coffers of disaster relief programs as the projected recovery and rebuilding costs related to Hurricane Helene are estimated to be as much as $200bn over 10 years.In a letter sent to congressional leaders, the president said while the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and the Department of Defense is able to meet “critical life-saving and life-sustaining missions and will continue to do so within present funding levels”, they will need additional funding.“My administration has provided robust and well-coordinated federal support for the ongoing response and recovery efforts,” Biden wrote.“As with other catastrophic disasters, it will take some time to assess the full requirements for response and recovery efforts, and I fully expect that the Congress will do its part to provide the funding needed.”Biden said that a comprehensive disaster relief package would be necessary when Congress returns on 12 November – but said action on individual programs could be needed before then. But there are currently no plans for Congress to reconvene before the election.The request comes as Kamala Harris cut short a campaign swing through the western states to visit western North Carolina in the southern Appalachian mountains where entire towns were washed away.Biden viewed the damage and cleanup efforts in the Carolinas by air on Wednesday, and again in Florida and Georgia on Thursday. He said the work to rebuild will cost “billions of dollars” and additional disaster relief funding “can’t wait … people need help now”.At least 225 people have been confirmed dead from Helene, and officials say they expect the death toll to continue to rise as recovery efforts continue. A police department spokesperson in Asheville, North Carolina, told CBS News in an email late on Friday that it is “actively working 75 cases of missing persons”. Nearly 1 million people remain without power.In his letter to lawmakers, Biden said that funding through the Small Business Administration (SBA) “will run out of funding in a matter of weeks and well before the Congress is planning to reconvene”.The SBA is designed to help small business owners and homeowners recoup property and equipment through the disaster relief loan program. Administration officials told CNN that the program needs $1.6bn in additional funding to meet about 3,000 Hurricane Helene-related applications it is receiving daily.Last month, before Helene hit, the White House warned that the low funding levels could lead to the SBA “effectively ceasing operations” after paying out for weather-related costs and accidents, including the Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore, the continued recovery after Maui’s wildfires and tornado damage in the midwest.The damage caused by Helene could cost upwards of $34bn, according to early estimates from Moody’s Analytics. The private forecaster AccuWeather put the cost of damages at $225bn to $250bn, with very little covered by private insurance.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe issue of Helene costs is already deeply political. The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, has said lawmakers would assess the post-Helene needs in full after the election.Former president Trump has accused Democrats of spending over $640m in Fema funds on housing migrants, a claim the White House calls “bold-faced lies”.On Friday, in Georgia, Trump said: “A lot of the money that was supposed to go to Georgia and supposed to go to North Carolina and all of the others is going and has gone already.“It’s been gone for people that came into the country illegally, and nobody has ever seen anything like that. That’s a shame.”Officials say those funds, authorized by Congress, was part of an entirely different program run by Fema unconnected to disaster relief but to provide housing to immigrants applying for US citizenship.The disaster agency responded to Trump’s claim with a fact-check page. “This is false,” Fema said in a statement. “No money is being diverted from disaster response needs.” A week after the hurricane hit, more than $45m has been dispersed to communities affected by the storm. More

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      In the US, rats could soon have better birth control access than women | Arwa Mahdawi

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      The fight for rat-productive rightsEric Adams, we recently learned, seems to have spent the bulk of his time as mayor of New York trying to wangle criminally cheap business class tickets from Turkish Airlines. But while Adams may have made history by becoming the first sitting mayor of New York to be indicted on federal corruption charges, the fact that he has a slightly wonky moral compass is old news. Even before being appointed mayor, there were questions about Adam’s truthfulness, including a long-running debate about whether the swagger-obsessed candidate lived in Brooklyn, as he insisted he did, or New Jersey.Still, let’s give the mayor his due, shall we? It would be unfair to say he’s spent the entirety of his time in high office trying to live the high life. Adams, who appointed New York City’s first “rat tsar” last year, has also spent a lot of time thinking about the city’s rodent problem. “I don’t think there’s been a mayor in history that says how much he hates rats,” he grandly proclaimed during New York City’s inaugural Rat Summit in September. “I dislike rats.” Adams added that he was confident New York could “look forward to a new paradigm in urban rat management”.Wheelie bins are part of that exciting new paradigm in urban rat management. There was much mirth on social media over the summer when it transpired that New York City had paid McKinsey over a million dollars to figure out whether it might be a good idea to put loose rubbish in a bin. (Or, in management consultant speech, “containerize” it.) Now the brainiacs in Adams’s orbit have come up with an exciting new paradigm shift: the city council recently greenlit pilot schemes to deploy ContraPest, a type of rodent birth control.The irony that New York is investing in rodent contraceptives at a time when women’s access to reproductive services across the US is under fire hasn’t gone unnoticed. Social media has been filled with wry observations along the lines of “it’s easier to get reproductive rights as a rodent in New York than it is for a woman to get reproductive rights in most of the country”.Because pedants never take a day off I will note that quip isn’t strictly true. At least for the moment it isn’t. But if Donald Trump wins the election and the extremists backing him have their way then it might very well be true that rats will soon have better access to birth control in the US than women. Over the past few years, rightwingers have started to speak more openly about the possibility of banning birth control. In 2022, for example, an Idaho Republican leader suggested he’d consider banning certain forms of birth control, including the morning-after pill. Around the same time the governor of Mississippi refused to rule out future contraception bans during an interview on NBC.This isn’t just all talk. Over the years the right has managed to undermine access to birth control in a number of alarming ways. In 2022, for example, an appeals court ruled that federally funded family planning centers in Texas must receive parental consent before prescribing birth control to teenagers. (Previously federal courts had found that the national title X program guaranteed minors the right to access birth control without parental involvement.) Then, this summer Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have recognized a legal right to contraception.Perhaps most importantly, anti-abortion activists have also been doggedly trying to argue that certain birth control methods, such as Plan B and certain intrauterine devices (IUDs), are abortifacients because they may prevent the implantation of fertilized eggs. While it’s unlikely that we’ll see any sort of direct push to outlaw access to contraceptives, expect to see anti-abortion laws sneakily widen to restrict access to birth control. As advocates have noted, Roe was not toppled in a day–and access to contraceptives won’t be overturned imminently. But anti-abortion extremists have made clear what their endgame is. And when these people tell you who they are, you’d better believe them.‘I’ve never worn trousers up a mountain, and I never will’I find cycling in a dress awkward. Meanwhile, Cecilia Llusco, one of Bolivia’s first female Indigenous mountain climbers, scales icy peaks in a pollera: a traditional voluminous floral skirt. Don’t miss this wonderful Guardian feature on the Cholita climbers of Bolivia–it has some incredible photographs.Melania Trump wants you to know she is passionately pro-choiceIn her new memoir the former first lady writes, “Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body.” Good question Melania! Ever tried asking your husband that? Speaking of which, Melania’s decision to speak out about abortion rights a month before the election feels part of a calculated strategy by the Trump campaign to soften its rhetoric on abortion.Prominent Palestinian journalist Wafa Aludaini killed in an Israeli airstrikeWafa was killed alongside her husband, her five-year-old daughter and her seven-month-old son. As Reporters Without Borders recently noted: “At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza, there will soon be no-one left to keep you informed.”India’s government thinks criminalizing marital rape would be “excessively harsh”One in 25 women in India have faced sexual violence from their husbands, the BBC reports. And, of course, nothing happens to most of these men because marital rape is not a criminal offence in India. For years now, campaigners have been petitioning India’s supreme court to try and change this but have faced enormous resistance from the government, religious groups, and men’s rights activists. An affidavait submitted by India’s Interior Ministry on Thursday argued criminalizing marital rape “may seriously impact the conjugal relationship and may lead to serious disturbances in the institution of marriage.” It also said that while a man “does not have any fundamental right to violate the consent of his wife” including marital rape under anti-rape laws would be “excessively harsh” and “disproportionate”.Mexico’s first woman president announces reforms to battle gender discriminationOn her second full day in office, Claudia Sheinbaum said her government had proposed reforms to broaden women’s rights, including a constitutional guarantee of equal pay for equal work.EU court rules gender and nationality enough to grant Afghan women asylumAn important ruling by the European court of justice recognizes Afghan women as a persecuted group.The week in podtriarchyIn 2012 Melania Trump famously posted a photo of a smiling beluga whale with the caption “what is she thinking?” Despite the fact that entire podcast episodes have been devoted to this question, we still don’t know. Scientists have recently discovered, however, that bottlenose dolphins ‘smile’ at each other to communicate during social play. The open-mouth expression is meant to signal fun and avoid conflict. So, in other words, dolphins have better social skills than many politicians. More

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      Harris and Trump neck-and-neck in polls with early voting under way

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      More than 1.4 million people have now voted in the presidential election, as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump continue to crisscross the country in the final stretch of a neck-and-neck campaign.Their vice-presidential picks, JD Vance and Tim Walz, also faced off this week in the only vice-presidential debate of this cycle. But initial polls suggested voters saw the debate as a draw, without clear impact on the race.Harris earned her highest national polling average since July, though the presidential race remains extremely close in battleground states, according to the Guardian’s poll tracker. Harris is leading in five of seven swing states, according to the Guardian’s average of high-quality state polls aggregated by the polling analysis platform 538 over the last 10 days. But overall, both candidates continue to have about even odds of winning.The Guardian’s tracker shows Harris with 49.3% of the vote nationally, compared with 46% for Trump. Early voting is already under way and more than 1.4 million Americans had voted as of midday Friday, according to data collected by the Election Lab at the University of Florida.Harris retains a slight lead, similar to the Guardian’s analysis last week. But the numbers have yet to reflect the vice-presidential debate.The simplest path to winning the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency continues to be winning the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. While Harris leads Trump in the 10-day average of polls in all three, according to the Guardian’s analysis (Pennsylvania by 1.2 points, Michigan by 0.1 point, and Wisconsin by 2.2 points), those advantages aren’t significant enough to say who will win, analysts say.The race is similarly close in the four other battleground states, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona.“No candidate enjoys a significant lead in states worth the 270 electoral votes needed to win,” Nate Cohn, the polling analyst for the New York Times, wrote in his weekly newsletter. “This might be the clearest read we’ve had of the race so far. It was arguably the first ‘quiet’ week since Vice-President Harris’s entry into the race.”One slight exception may be in Pennsylvania, Cohn wrote. Polls showed Harris leading in the state by about 2 points after the 10 September debate, but now the race there was essentially tied, he wrote.The Guardian’s tracker is based on an average of high quality polls over the last 10 days compiled by 538. As of Friday, the forecasting site said the race was essentially a toss-up, with Harris having a 55% chance of winning and Trump having a 45% chance.Some of Trump’s best polling has been in Arizona – he leads Harris there 48.8% to 48%, according to the Guardian’s state poll tracker. Some of that advantage may have to do with his support among Hispanic voters, Cohn wrote.When Joe Biden won Arizona in 2020, he carried Latino voters by nearly 25 points. Four high-quality polls released this week showed Harris leading among Hispanic voters by no more than 12 points, Cohn noted. A national poll from NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC found Harris leading among Hispanic voters 54%-40%. Biden won 59% of the Hispanic vote in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Mr Trump’s strength among Hispanic voters this cycle might seem surprising, but four years ago he made big gains among them across the country,” Cohn wrote. “And in 2016, he fared no worse than Mitt Romney’s 2012 showing among them, even though his anti-immigration rhetoric created the expectation of a significant backlash. In retrospect, his resilience among Hispanic voters in 2016 looks like a harbinger of what was to come.”Hispanic voters are not a monolith and Trump and Biden may be targeting different parts of the demographic. A Pew analysis found Biden won college-educated Hispanic voters 69% to 30% in 2020. But among non-college educated Hispanics, he won a much narrower 55% to 41%.Recent polling from the non-partisan Cook Political Report also found that the race was essentially tied. But its analysis did show some good signs for Harris.A plurality of voters now think Harris will win the election, with 46% saying so compared to 39% for Trump.“That represents an 11-point swing in Harris’s favor since August, and suggests that Harris has been successful in presenting herself as a serious candidate, while Trump’s attempts to portray her as unable to do the job have not been effective,” Amy Walter and Jessica Taylor, two of the site’s editors, wrote in an analysis.There were also some encouraging signs for Harris on the economy, the Cook Political Report found. While Trump continues to lead among voters who believe he is better equipped to handle the economy, voters are evenly split on who would be better to get inflation under control. In August, Trump had a 48%-42% advantage on the issue.The shift might reflect that Harris’s messaging on the economy is breaking through to voters, Walter and Taylor wrote. It could also suggest that Trump hasn’t been successful in linking Harris to the rising cost of living, they said. More

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      If Trump wins the election, US protest movements could face serious crackdowns

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      This is the first part of the standfirst This is the second part of the standfirst Headline what’s at stake?
      The Knox county commission was questioning a property developer one evening in April three years ago when protesters quietly filed in to their auditorium and raised their fists in the air.A week earlier, police had shot and killed 17-year-old Anthony Thompson Jr in a bathroom at his high school after they found him with a gun. Protests erupted in Knoxville, the county seat and largest city in eastern Tennessee, and one the loudest voices speaking out was Constance Every, who had organized demonstrations in the city during the national outrage that followed George Floyd’s death less than a year earlier. Now, she was in the county commission chamber with about two dozen others, intending to press them for the release of police body-camera footage that captured Thompson’s death.As the protesters lined up near the meeting room’s back wall, Every, who was wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt, retrieved from her backpack a white T-shirt Thompson’s aunt gave her, which read: “Who do you call when the murderer wears a badge?” Then, she pulled out an electronic bullhorn, and sounded the siren.“Knox county, county commission, your meeting is over,” Every said through the bullhorn, as the protesters clustered around her. “’Cause what we’re not going to tolerate is that we got a kid who was murdered at Knox county schools, and y’all going to carry on like these children don’t deserve to have their rights and other factors. It is not OK, what you all are doing, whatsoever.”View image in fullscreenWithin seconds of the siren going off, sheriff’s deputies, both in uniform and in plainclothes, converged on Every, grabbing her and some of her group, and marching them outside. While many kept silent as they left, Every did not. “I have not broke any laws! I am exercising my right to peacefully assemble and use my freedom of speech, you fucking murderers!” she shouted.The disruption lasted just over 70 seconds. But for Every and the six others arrested in the commission chambers, it marked the beginning of a three-year legal saga, after the county prosecutor charged them with disrupting a lawful meeting – a misdemeanor for which Tennessee’s Republican leaders had just months earlier doubled the punishment.Since Floyd’s death in May 2020, Republican-led states have enacted laws expanding the definition of rioting to encompass protesters who stayed peaceful when others did not, protecting drivers who run over demonstrators that block roads and enhancing penalties against protesters who target oil and gas infrastructure and deface monuments. The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), which tracks the legislation, has found that hundreds of proposals have been made by state and federal lawmakers nationwide, and more than two dozen signed into law.The push comes as the GOP’s standard bearer, Donald Trump, campaigns for the presidency on a platform that includes suppressing protests. He has vowed to deploy the national guard “where there has been a complete breakdown of law and order”, while simultaneously promising pardons for people convicted over the January 6 insurrection. As president, Trump reportedly encouraged the military to shoot protesters, and, this year, allies such as the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, have said the national guard should be used against college students demonstrating over Israel’s invasion of Gaza.If he returned to the White House, Trump could direct a militarized response to protests and pressure congressional Republicans to pass legislation that would impose nationwide penalties like those already in effect in Tennessee.Tennessee is a thoroughly red state where the GOP holds a supermajority in its general assembly. Last year lawmakers temporarily expelled two Black Democratic representatives who staged a noisy protest calling for gun control legislation in the state house chamber. In August 2020, Republicans passed a bill that increased penalties for blocking a street or sidewalk and created a new felony offense for protest encampments on state property, in addition to making disrupting a meeting a more severe category of misdemeanor.The Republican governor, Bill Lee, justified the legislation as necessary to prevent “lawlessness”, and in the years since, he has signed two more anti-protest bills, one of which made blocking roads a felony, and the other of which expanded the definition of aggravated rioting and created a mandatory minimum sentence for people convicted.View image in fullscreen“These laws that we are seeing in Tennessee are really representative of the kinds of tactics that we’re seeing nationwide in response to particular protest movements,” said Nick Robinson, a senior legal advisor at ICNL’s US program.To Amelia Parker, a Black Lives Matter activist who now serves on the Knoxville city council, it is not surprising that Every wound up being perhaps the first person to run afoul of such laws.“She’s one that authorities would want to make an example out of. They definitely would not want another Constance,” Parker said.An African American army veteran who is disabled with post-traumatic stress disorder from two tours in Afghanistan, Every became politically active after struggling to find services during a period of homelessness in Knoxville, the home town she returned to after leaving the military.“I’m not a sugar-coater, I’m not a person that’s going to come in and say, ‘with all due respect’. I’m not that,” Every said in an interview from her apartment, where a framed photograph of her speaking to protesters in a police station parking lot in the days after Floyd’s death hangs over the couch.“I’m going to come in and tell you straight to your face the failures, the problems, and more importantly, you holding this role as a political, elected body or member, that you should hold a lot of accountability for what’s happening.”Her leadership of the 2020 protests, which in Knoxville were generally peaceful, put her on the radar of local authorities, she believes. Tensions in the city escalated again following Thompson’s shooting on 12 April of the following year at Austin-East, a predominantly Black high school where, in the few months since the new year, four students had already died in shootings in its neighborhood.Officers went to the school that afternoon to find Thompson after his ex-girlfriend reported him for assaulting her earlier in the day and warned he was known to carry a gun, an investigation by Knoxville’s police department would find. In a lawsuit filed against the city and the four officers involved in his death, attorneys for Thompson’s mother and his best friend would write that he carried a pistol because his ex-girlfriend’s family had threatened him, and because the streets around the school were unsafe.The fours officers looking for Thompson found him in a bathroom stall with a gun. A struggle ensued, and after Thompson’s pistol went off and hit a garbage can, one of the officers fired twice, fatally wounding the teenager and injuring a school resource officer.Days later, the Knox county district attorney general, Charme Allen, said she would not prosecute the officers who encountered Thompson. The lawsuit filed by his mother and friend was dismissed by a federal judge, who found the officers had qualified immunity – the controversial doctrine that limits law enforcement officials’ liability for some lawsuits. Their attorney has appealed the decision.Every and other activists in Knoxville remember an atmosphere of distrust in the days after Thompson’s death, which was worsened by authorities’ decision to initially describe him as an “active shooter” and lead the public to believe the teenager was responsible for wounding the school resource officer, when he was in fact shot by one of their colleagues. They decided to hold protests to demand more details of what really happened, including the release of footage from the cameras the police were wearing on their uniforms.“We knew we had to double down and, as activists, that we had to really rally around each other and dig in on having fortitude to ensure we put a spotlight to this,” said Calvin Skinner, a Baptist minister who has collaborated on social justice work with Every, and was arrested at the county commission meeting.Days after Thompson’s death, Every, Skinner and others disrupted a school board meeting without issue. But when they went to the county commission meeting a week after the teen’s fatal wounding, they knew something was off. Dozens of sheriff’s deputies were waiting for them, and signs had been posted warning of the state’s law.In the past, disruptions had not been uncommon at the Knox county commission. Like many local governments, the body had just weathered a tense period as they dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic, during which protesters opposed to mask mandates would sometimes start shouting at them during meetings, recalled the former county commissioner Dasha Lundy. The same thing would happen when people grew upset over zoning decisions, she said, but, to her knowledge, nobody from either group was arrested.“I keep going back to the people who were not supportive of [mask mandates] and how they were interrupting our meetings, but they just so happened to be white folks,” said Lundy, who was the sole Black commissioner during her four years in office.“They just tell them, be quiet, do this, whatever. They interrupted the meeting too, but we don’t want to talk about that.”After Every began talking, the commission’s then chair, Larsen Jay, a Republican, gaveled the meeting into a 10-minute recess. When it resumed, he called the disruption “clearly a staged set-up for one purpose: to draw attention, to draw in police reaction, and to make this commission put in a very bad position”. He then added that anyone who wanted to speak could sign up for their public forum.The seven protesters who were removed from the commission chambers were jailed for a few hours, then released and charged with disrupting a meeting. That was one of the offenses that the Tennessee general assembly had raised penalties for in their bill passed after Floyd’s death, upgrading it from a class B misdemeanor to class A, the most serious category that carries a maximum jail sentence of just under 12 months.View image in fullscreenThough the protesters were a multiracial group, Every believes their cause made them a target. “If we were talking about anything else than Black Lives Matter, [there] probably would have been a whole different approach,” she said.A spokeswoman for the Knox county sheriff, Tom Spangler, said he was unavailable to comment. A spokesman for Allen, the district attorney general, said she declined to comment, because the case was still “pending”.The arrest came as a surprise to Mary Winter, a white Ihop manager who had traveled from a Tennessee city nearly two hours west to attend the protest. She didn’t think she was in danger of breaking the law and had walked into the chamber holding Every’s phone, which was streaming the protest on Facebook. That video, as well as another recorded by the Knoxville News Sentinel, shows that Winter stayed silent until she was detained, but in an affidavit, the deputy who arrested her accused her of disrupting the meeting by “yelling and encouraging others to do the same”.“This sworn statement of this officer in my arrest affidavit, that was the basis for my being arrested. And it flat-out did not happen,” Winter said.Shortly before the trial started on 8 April, Winter opted to plead guilty in exchange for six months of unsupervised probation and paying court costs. She was already on probation for felony attempted murder after shooting her husband, with whom she said she was in an abusive relationship, and feared a conviction that would send her to jail. Two other protesters, Carrie Hopper and Kevin Andrews, also took plea deals.At the trial, attorneys for Every, Skinner and two co-defendants, Gavin Guinn and Aaron Valentine, attempted to convince the jury that prosecutors had failed to prove that they had “substantially” disrupted the meeting, as the statute demanded. Every testified that they never intended to halt the commission’s meeting, because that would defeat the purpose – rather, they wanted the lawmakers to use their power over the district attorney general’s budget to have the body-camera footage released. The video was made public two days after the protesters’ arrest.View image in fullscreenThe trial also answered the question of how the sheriff’s department was aware of Every’s plans: they had been monitoring her Facebook account.“We’ll check various activist groups, activist individuals, individuals who somebody calls to us about and says they have concerns. And one of those individuals was Ms Every,” testified John Sharp, a sergeant in the Knox county sheriff’s office’s narcotics division, one of the plainclothes officers that removed Skinner from the commission chambers.Both sides questioned Jay about why the mask mandate protesters were not arrested when they were disruptive. The commission chair replied: “I’m not aware that they got arrested” but “several of them were escorted out of the room after being disruptive. I don’t know what the result of their actions were afterwards.”“And you say [these two parties] disrupted your meeting in similar ways?” asked Mike Whalen, Skinner’s attorney.“Yes, basically shouting out and disrupting it from an auditory perspective,” the commissioner replied.The prosecution, led by the deputy district attorney, Sean McDermott, put Every’s use of the bullhorn, and the protesters gathering around her, at the center of their case.“Did any of the mask people pull a siren and announce that your meeting was over?” McDermott asked Jay. “No,” he replied.In his closing argument, McDermott said: “The group was acting as one. They were protecting the one with the bullhorn, surrounding her, making it more difficult, slowing law enforcement down, stopping the meeting.”After about six hours of deliberations, the jury found Every guilty, but acquitted the three other defendants. She was sentenced to nearly a year of probation. Her attorney, Andrew Beamer, has appealed the verdict.Even with the heightened penalties, it was unlikely that Every would have been sentenced to jail, Beamer said. But he believes the new law serves as a “shot across the bow of everybody, that they weren’t going to let you protest in this way.“I think that the state saying, ‘hey, we care about these protest laws, let’s charge people.’ I don’t think that was lost on the county here.” More

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      Biden issues terse words to Netanyahu over peace deal and election influence

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      Joe Biden had terse words at the White House on Friday for Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he didn’t know whether the Israeli prime minister was holding up a peace deal in the Middle East – where Israel is at war with Hamas in Gaza and on a military offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon – in order to influence the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election.“No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None. None, none. And I think Bibi should remember that,” Biden said, using Netanyahu’s nickname. He added: “And whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know – but I’m not counting on that.”The US president made a surprise and rare appearance in the west wing briefing room and answered reporters’ questions there for the first time in his presidency.He was responding to comments made by one of his allies, Chris Murphy, a Democratic US senator of Connecticut, who said on CNN this week that he was concerned Netanyahu had little interest in a peace deal in part because of American politics.The two leaders have long managed a complicated relationship, but they are running out of space to maneuver as their views on the Israel-Gaza war diverge and their political futures hang in the balance.Biden has pushed for months for a ceasefire agreement in Gaza – and the president and his aides boosted the idea repeatedly that they were close to success – but a ceasefire has not materialized. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, has engaged in shuttle diplomacy to Israel and to peace talks via intermediaries, but to no avail and, in some cases, Netanyahu has publicly resisted the prospect while US and Israeli officials continue to talk in private about eking out a deal.Meanwhile, Israel has recently pressed forward on two fronts, pursuing a ground incursion into Lebanon against Hezbollah and conducting strikes in Gaza. And it has vowed to retaliate for Iran’s ballistic missile attack this week, as the region braced for further escalation.Biden said there had been no decision yet on what type of response there would be toward Iran, though there has been talk about Israel striking Iran’s oilfields: “I think if I were in their shoes, I’d be thinking about other alternatives than striking oilfields.”Biden pushed back against the idea that he was seeking a meeting with Netanyahu to discuss the response to Iran. He wasn’t, he said.“I’m assuming when they make a decision on how they’re going to respond, we will then have a discussion,” he said.Netanyahu has grown increasingly resistant to Biden’s efforts. Biden has in turn publicly held up delivery of heavy bombs to Israel and increasingly voiced concerns over an all-out war in the Middle East and yet has never acquiesced to political calls at home or internationally for a halt on US arms sales to Israel.“I don’t believe there’s going to be an all-out war,” Biden said on Thursday evening. “I think we can avoid it. But there’s a lot to do yet.”Biden has remained consistent in his support for Israel in the aftermath of the 7 October Hamas attacks in Israel. Since then, with few exceptions, Biden has supported ongoing and enhanced US arms transfers to Israel while merely cautioning the Israelis to be careful to avoid civilian casualties.Biden has also ordered the US military to step up its profile in the region to protect Israel from attacks by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and Iran itself. In April, and again earlier this week, the US was a leading player in shooting down missiles fired by Iran into Israel.On Thursday, Biden said the US was “discussing” with Israel the possibility of Israeli strikes on Iran’s oil infrastructure.His off-the-cuff remark, which immediately sent oil prices soaring, did not make clear whether his administration was holding internal discussions or talking directly to Israel, nor did he clarify what his attitude was to such an attack.Asked to clarify those comments, Biden told reporters on Friday: “Look, the Israelis have not concluded what they’re going to do in terms of a strike. That’s under discussion.”Kamala Harris also has not taken a different stance on arms sales but has spoken more assertively for months to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and has decried civilian killings in Israel’s war in the Palestinian territory.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      US politics: underwhelming Walz and more presentable Vance in VP debate – Full Story podcast

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      Joan E Greve and Leah Wright Rigueur discuss JD Vance and Tim Walz’s clash on the debate stage in New York City on Tuesday night. Although Walz gave a solid performance, it was described as underwhelming, while Vance attempted to reset his image and get on the front foot. Will this debate have moved the needle at all? And as the situation in the Middle East escalates, where do Trump and Harris stand on foreign policy

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