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      Georgia judge says women aren’t ‘some piece of collectively owned community property’ in ruling to overturn abortion ban – live

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      Georgia judge: ‘Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property’Some key quotes from the order in which Judge Robert McBurney struck down Georgia’s extremely restrictive abortion ban:
      Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote.
      … [T]he liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.
      … [L]iberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.
      After a Georgia judge’s ruling struck down the state’s restrictive 2019 abortion law, which abortion after roughly around six weeks of pregnancy, advocates and analysts have highlighted the order’s bold arguments, which invoked the Handmaid’s Tale and compared certain kinds of abortion bans to “involuntary servitude” or “compulsory labor.”Some advocates, like senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, have highlighted the broader importance of Georgia allowing access to abortion care through 22 weeks of pregnancy, since many surrounding states in the south also have very restrictive anti-abortion laws.Others, like my colleague Carter Sherman, have noted that this ruling comes after Georgia has made national headlines after a ProPublica investigation into the deaths of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, who died what experts called “preventable” deaths after delays in care that were related to Georgia’s anti-abortion law.Georgia judge describes ‘subtext of involuntary servitude’ in abortion debateAnother key quote from the order, by Fulton county superior court judge Robert McBurney, that overturned Georgia’s restrictive ban on abortion at around six weeks of pregnancy, which state legislators passed in 2019:“There is an uncomfortable and usually unspoken subtext of involuntary servitude swirling about this debate, symbolically illustrated by the composition of the legal teams in this case. It is generally men who promote and defend laws like the Life Act, the effect of which is to require only women – and, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, primarily poor women, which means in Georgia primarily black and brown women – to engage in compulsory labor, ie, the carrying of a pregnancy to term at the government’s behest.”Read my colleague Carter Sherman’s full report here:Who is Judge Robert McBurney, who struck down Georgia’s restrictive abortion ban?It’s not the first time Robert C I McBurney, a Fulton county superior court judge based in Atlanta, has made national headlines.McBurney previously struck down Georgia’s very restrictive ban on abortion at around six weeks of pregnancy and he also presided over parts of the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump and key allies, a case that is currently stalled.McBurney, a former federal prosecutor, was appointed to his role in 2012 by Republican governor Nathan Deal, to fill the seat of a judge who was retiring. He has since run for reelection and won.In 2023, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called McBurney “the hardest working judge in Georgia” and said that a joke recently at the Atlanta courthouse was , “Aren’t there any other judges in the county?”McBurney is also set to hear a key case on election regulations in Georgia tomorrow, the Associated Press reports.Georgia judge: ‘Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property’Some key quotes from the order in which Judge Robert McBurney struck down Georgia’s extremely restrictive abortion ban:
      Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote.
      … [T]he liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.
      … [L]iberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.
      More from the Associated Press on the legal reasoning behind the order:
      Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his order that ‘liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.’
      McBurney wrote that his ruling means the law in the state returns to what it was before the law was passed in 2019:
      When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then – and only then – may society intervene.
      An “arbitrary six-week ban” on abortions “is inconsistent with these rights and the proper balance that a viability rule establishes between a woman’s rights of liberty and privacy and society’s interest in protecting and caring for unborn infants”, the order says.Abortions in Georgia can once again be performed through 22 weeks – reportAfter a judge in Georgia struck down the state’s ban on abortions once a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat, which is usually about six weeks into pregnancy, the procedure is once again legal in Georgia through about 22 weeks of pregnancy, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.More context from the Associated Press:
      When the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022 and ended a national right to abortion, it opened the door for state bans. Fourteen states now bar abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with some exceptions. Georgia was one of four where the bans kick in after about the first six weeks of pregnancy – which is often before women realize they’re pregnant.
      A judge in Georgia struck down the state’s ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.The law was similar to many passed by Republican-led states after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. Democrats, including Kamala Harris, have recently seized on the law as an example of the consequences of electing Donald Trump and the Republicans, after a woman was reported to have died in the state after being denied lifesaving care due to the law. Here’s more on that:As many as 600 people remain missing after Hurricane Helene swept through the south-eastern United States, White House homeland security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall told reporters.“The current data we have is that it looks like there could be as many as 600 loss of lives, but we don’t have any confirmation of that. We know there are 600 who are either lost or unaccounted for, and so that work is ongoing,” Sherwood-Randall said at the White House press briefing.She added that there’s a high degree of uncertainty to the numbers:
      I’ll caution you, because we’ve seen this before. Those numbers vary widely. There’s a lot of reporting that doesn’t add up about the numbers. And so, while we may see the numbers go up as we get to more locations that have not yet been fully developed in terms of disaster immediate emergency response operations, we may see more people who unfortunately perished, but we may also not see the numbers skyrocket as people have predicted they might.
      Authorities in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and elsewhere have already confirmed more than 100 deaths from the storm that swept in from the Gulf of Mexico:Donald Trump’s dystopian vision for the United States took a new turn on Sunday, when he mulled adopting something only seen in horror films to fight crime. The Guardian’s Robert Tait has more:Donald Trump has been accused of invoking plotlines similar to The Purge – a dystopian horror film in which officially sanctioned murder is occasionally legal – as a possible solution to crime in the US after saying it could be eradicated in “one really violent day”.In what was seen as an extreme display of demagoguery even by his standards, Trump drew cheers from an audience in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a picture of an out-of-control crime spree that he said could be ended “immediately” with one “real rough, nasty day”, or “one rough hour”.“You see these guys walking out with air conditioners with refrigerators on their back, the craziest thing,” Trump said. “And the police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told, if you do anything, you’re gonna lose your pension.“They’re not allowed to do it because the liberal left won’t let them do it. The liberal left wants to destroy them, and they want to destroy our country.”In a passage that provoked a storm on social media, the former president and Republican nominee then said: “If you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day with the drug stores as an example, where, when they start walking out with … ”Further evidence that Donald Trump has no intention of giving the politicking a rest in the wake of Hurricane Helene can be found on X, where he implies, once again without evidence, that North Carolina’s Democratic governor Roy Cooper is frustrating the humanitarian response.“I’ll be there shortly, but don’t like the reports that I’m getting about the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of the State, going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” Trump wrote.North Carolina is considered a swing state in this election, though it has not voted for a Democratic candidate since 2008, and polls there have lately shown Trump with a narrow lead.The governorship seems to be slipping away from GOP candidate Mark Robinson, after CNN broke the news that he had a long history of making lewd and offensive comments on a pornography websites’s message board. Here’s the latest on that fiasco:When he spoke before a furniture store gutted by Hurricane Helene in Valdosta, Georgia, Donald Trump insisted he was not there for political purposes. His social media posts tell a different story.About an hour ago on Truth Social, he seized on the below tweet from Kamala Harris:The former president wrote that the photo of the president was “FAKE and STAGED”, without providing evidence, then went on to accuse both Harris and Joe Biden of leaving “Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South”.“Under this Administration, Americans always come last, because we have ‘leaders’ who have no idea how to lead!” Trump added.Thousands of Americans died in hurricanes that struck Texas, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere during Trump’s presidency. After he left office, a report found that his administration unnecessarily delayed emergency money for Puerto Rico, after it was devastated by Hurricane Maria:Donald Trump attempted to put politics aside as he spoke before a furniture store damaged by Hurricane Helene in Valdosta, Georgia.That’s despite the fact that he had minutes earlier accused Joe Biden of not speaking to the state’s governor Brian Kemp following the storm, even though the White House said the two men spoke on Sunday.“As you know, our country is in the final weeks of a hard-fought national election, but in a time like this, when a crisis hits, when our fellow citizens cry out in need, none of that matters. We’re not talking about politics now. We have to all get together and get this solved,” Trump said.Kamala Harris made a little bit of news earlier today, saying in an interview that she supported legalizing marijuana – a step even the cannabis-friendly administration of Joe Biden hesitated to embrace.“I just feel strongly people should not be going to jail for smoking weed. And we know historically what that has meant and who has gone to jail,” Harris told the All the Smoke podcast. “Second, I just think we have come to a point where we have to understand that we need to legalize it and stop criminalizing this behavior.”The vice-president added: “This is not a new position for me. I have felt for a long time we need to legalize it.”The statement represents a break with Biden, who moved to lower restrictions on cannabis while still keeping it broadly illegal at the federal level. Full decriminalization would solve the array of conflicts that have developed as states have moved to legalize marijuana for medicinal and recreational purposes. Here’s more on that:In about 30 minutes, Donald Trump will speak from a furniture store in Valdosta, Georgia, a town affected by Hurricane Helene.The former president began his visit to the swing state by falsely claiming that Joe Biden had not spoken to Georgia governor Brian Kemp. Here’s video of the remark, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:The White House announced yesterday that Biden had spoken to Kemp, a Republican, along with Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s Democratic governor, and Valdosta mayor Scott Matheson.When Tim Walz and JD Vance take the debate stage tomorrow night, expect to see two very different styles of debating, and two equally different views of the nation’s future, the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang reports:When Tim Walz and JD Vance square off as vice-presidential picks on Tuesday, it will be the biggest debate stage for both of the politicians who are newly becoming household names.Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, and Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, have been honing their public-speaking skills – and their pointed barbs at each other – in TV appearances and at events around the country in the past few months.Their experiences in electoral debates haven’t reached the levels or notoriety that come along with a presidential campaign, but both have faced opponents in public debates in past elections.Given the tightness of the presidential race, and how poorly the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump went, there will probably be more people tuned in to the vice-presidential debate than in past cycles. While VP debates don’t usually tip the scales much, they could matter in a close race – and they build profiles for lower-profile politicians who will probably stay on the national scene for years to come.On a press call this morning, Tom Emmer, the Republican representative from Minnesota, confirmed he has been playing Tim Walz in JD Vance’s debate prep.Republicans are seeking to frame Walz, the folksy Minnesota governor who has proved to be the most popular figure in the presidential race, as a mean-spirited, ogreish figure.Asked about his portrayal of Walz, Emmer said: “Quite frankly, it’s tough because he is really good on the debate stage.”Emmer, who ran unsuccessfully for Minnesota governor in 2010, added: “[Walz] is going to stand there and he lies with conviction, and he has these little mannerisms where he’s just, hey, I’m the nice guy, but he’s not nice at all.”Emmer predicted that Vance “is prepared to wipe the floor with Tim Walz and expose him for the radical liberal he is”. He added: “Tim Walz is nothing more than Gavin Newsom [the governor of California] in a flannel shirt.”Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, predicted that Walz is “going to look to stick the shiv into JD Vance at every opportunity” and predicted that: “The Tim Walz we see tomorrow night will be a completely different character from what we’ve seen so far on the 2024 campaign trail.”Asked whether Donald Trump would agree to debate Kamala Harris for a second time, Miller said Trump “has made it pretty clear where he is”. Harris has accepted an invitation to debate on CNN on 23 October, but Trump, who was widely viewed to have lost the first debate, has claimed that it is “too late” for a second debate.The US Department of Justice has agreed to pay $22.6 million to settle a lawsuit by 34 women who claim they were wrongly dismissed from the FBI’s agent training academy because of their sex, according to a court filing today.The settlement, which must be approved by a federal judge in Washington DC, would resolve a 2019 class action claiming the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is part of the Justice Department, had a widespread practice of forcing out female trainees, Reuters reports.The plaintiffs say that they were found unsuitable to graduate from the training academy even though they performed as well as or better than many male trainees on academic, physical fitness, and firearms tests. Some of them also say they were subjected to sexual harassment and sexist jokes and comments.Along with the payout, the proposed settlement would allow eligible class members to seek reinstatement to the agent training program and require the FBI to hire outside experts to ensure that its evaluation process for trainees is fair.Department’s internal watchdog released a report in 2022 finding that female FBI trainees were disproportionately likely to be dismissed and to be cited for conduct “unsuitable” for an agent. Less than one-quarter of FBI special agents are women, the agency said in a report released in April.The man charged with attempting to assassinate Donald Trump after allegedly positioning himself with a rifle outside one of the former president’s Florida golf courses on 15 September pleaded not guilty this morning to five federal charges.Ryan Routh, 58, entered the plea to charges that include attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate during a hearing in federal court. He has already been ordered to remain in jail to await a trial, Reuters reports.Prosecutors have said Routh intended to kill Trump as he golfed at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. Routh, a struggling roofing contractor, condemned the Republican presidential candidate in a self-published book and dropped off a letter months earlier with an associate referencing an attempted assassination on Trump, according to prosecutors.
      This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you,” the suspect wrote, according to a court filing by prosecutors.
      Lawyers for Routh suggested at a 23 September court hearing that the letter may have been an attempt by their client at gaining publicity and highlighted what they called Routh’s efforts to promote democracy in Ukraine and Taiwan.Routh is accused of poking a rifle through a fence at the course with the intention to kill Trump. When a federal agent spotted it and fired shots, the suspect fled but was arrested.Joe Biden finished up his remarks on the impact of Hurricane Helene by saying that as US president he had seen many disasters and heard “dozens of stories from survivors”.“I know how it feels to be left with nothing,” he said, “not even knowing where or when you’re back on track. I’m here to tell every single survivor in these impacted areas that we will be there with you as long as it takes … I urge everyone returning to their communities and homes to listen to the local officials and follow all the safety instructions.”He continued: “Take this seriously, please be safe, your nation has your back and the Biden-Harris administration will be there until the job is done.”In answer to a press question, Biden said no decision has been made yet on whether to ask the US Congress (which is in recess) to come back for a special session to approve additional emergency funding as a result of what he described as the “really, really devastating” storm.He said he had spoken to the governor of North Carolina [Democrat Roy Cooper] and expects to visit the state on Wednesday or Thursday of this week. More

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      Biden administration doubles down on asylum restrictions at southern border

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      The Biden administration said on Monday it was making asylum restrictions at the southern border even tougher, as it is increasingly eager to show voters uneasy over immigration that it is taking a hard stance on border security.The new rules, which toughen restrictions announced in June, bar people from being granted asylum when US officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed.Under the previous rules, the US could restrict asylum access when the number of people trying to enter the country between the official border crossings hits 2,500 a day. The daily numbers had to average below 1,500 a day for a week in order for the restrictions to be lifted.The version rolled out on Monday says the daily numbers will have to be below 1,500 for nearly a month before the restrictions can be lifted. And the administration is now counting all children toward that number, whereas previously only migrant children from Mexico were counted.These changes, which go into effect on Tuesday, will make it much more difficult to lift the restrictions and allow people entering the country between the official border crossings eventually to apply for asylum in the US.But the restrictions implemented in June have never been lifted because the numbers of border encounters have never gotten low enough for long enough, raising the question of why the administration felt the need to make them even tougher now. The seven-day average has gotten down to about 1,800 migrant encounters a day, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said.A senior administration official said on Monday that the longer timeline was necessary to make sure that drops in immigration are sustained and not due to a one-time event. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to brief reporters about the tighter restrictions before they were made public.Immigration advocates already had harshly criticized the restrictions announced in June, saying the administration was slashing away at vital protections for people fleeing persecution. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU and other groups are challenging the restrictions in court, saying that they differs little from a similar move by the Trump administration that was blocked by the courts. They argue that by law people who cross the border with a credible fear of persecution or harm deserve due process.The ACLU posted on the social media platform X on Monday: “The asylum law Congress enacted recognizes that people fleeing danger should not be forced to wait and try to secure an appointment to seek asylum. This restrictive rule is not just immoral but illegal.”The administration has touted its asylum restrictions, saying they have led to serious drops in the number of people coming to the southern border. The DHS said on Monday that since the changes were announced in June, the daily number of people encountered by border patrol between the legal border crossings had fallen over 50%.In a statement announcing the new rules, the DHS called on Congress to do more to solve immigration problems.Border security and immigration are a key weakness for the Biden administration and Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.The Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, and others from his party have hammered away at the high numbers of people who have come to the southern border under the Biden administration, saying the White House and the vice-president have not done enough to restrict migration and secure the border.Harris visited a border region of Arizona on Friday, her first visit as the Democratic nominee. She walked alongside the tall metal fence separating the US from Mexico and called for a tightening of asylum rules while pushing for a better way to welcome immigrants legally.“I reject the false choice that suggests we must choose either between securing our border and creating a system that is orderly, safe and humane,” Harris said. “We can and we must do both.”The restrictions do allow some exceptions. Victims of a severe form of trafficking, for example, would still be allowed to apply for asylum.The administration also allows people using its CBP One appointment system to apply for asylum, but those people must schedule an appointment on the app to come to an official border crossing point.The administration has tried to encourage people to use that app instead of crossing the border illegally.But demand far exceeds the 1,450 appointments available daily, and the administration has not indicated that it will increase the number of appointments. More

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      US looks unable to talk Netanyahu out of planned invasion of Lebanon

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      The Biden administration is losing influence over whether Benjamin Netanyahu launches a ground invasion into southern Lebanon or not.For more than a year, Joe Biden and his senior advisers have managed to forestall an Israeli ground incursion into Lebanon in fear of a larger war that could envelop the entire Middle East.In the days after the 7 October attack, Biden phoned Netanyahu to talk him out of a massive retaliation against Hezbollah, which had begun firing guided rockets against Israeli positions following the Hamas raid.In April this year, Biden also told Netanyahu that the US would not support Israel in an offensive war against Iran after Tehran launched dozens of loitering munitions, cruise missiles and drones toward Israel.But on Monday, US outlets reported that Netanyahu’s administration had told White House officials they were planning a limited ground incursion into Lebanon, essentially escalating a conflict with Hezbollah and its backer Iran to a level that Biden and his team have tried desperately to avoid.The Washington Post reported that Israel was planning a limited campaign – smaller than its 2006 war against Hezbollah – that nonetheless would mark a drastic escalation with Hezbollah and Iran. The New York Times suggested US officials believed they had talked Israel out of a full invasion of Lebanon, but that smaller incursions into southern Lebanon would continue.But Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, has briefed a meeting of local council heads in northern Israel on Monday, according to the Times of Israel. “The next stage in the war against Hezbollah will begin soon … We will do this. And as I said here a month ago [that] we will shift the center of gravity [to the north], this is what I say now: we will change the situation and return the residents home.”Earlier that day, he had told Israel Defense Forces soldiers that to return some 60,000 Israelis to their homes in the country’s north, we “will use all the means that may be required – your forces, other forces, from the air, from the sea, and on land”.The plan to attack comes at a unique moment – with war hawks dominating domestic Israeli politics at the same time as a lame duck Biden administration appears increasingly unable or unwilling to intervene in the conflict. And, according to analysts, Netanyahu believes he has a limited window around the US elections to attack Iranian proxies across the region.With just a month left until the US presidential elections, the Biden administration has launched a tepid effort at a ceasefire that Netanyahu appears to have chosen to ignore – or simply to wait out until US elections that could bring in a Trump administration that would do even less to restrain him than the current one has.“Netanyahu made a calculation, and the calculation was that there was no way that the Democrats between now and November 5th [election day] could do anything that would criticise, let alone restrain him from that,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who focuses on US foreign policy and the Middle East.“You saw [vice-president Kamala] Harris’s statement, you saw the White House statement, you saw the Democrat and Republican consensus on the killing of Nasrallah and what the Israelis have done there,” he said. “And since Iran is involved in this, unlike in Gaza, the toxicity of animus against Iran in this town is so intense that the Republican party, which is now the ‘Israel can do no wrong’ party, is just winging for the administration.”Until recently, prominent US officials have thought they still had a chance to conclude a ceasefire and prevent the war from escalating further. Last week, US and French officials along with dozens of other countries called for a ceasefire in Lebanon. US officials briefed on the matter said they believed the “time was right” and that Israel would sign up.A western official last week told the Guardian that the Israeli threat to invade northern Lebanon was probably “psyops” largely designed to force Hezbollah and Iran to the negotiating table.But, at the same time, the official said, the situation in the region was extremely volatile, and could be upset by as little as a single drone strike against a sensitive target.One day later, a massive airstrike launched by the Israeli air force killed the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, upending security calculations in the region and potentially emboldening Israeli officials to believe they could fundamentally change the security dynamics in the region.“I understand, and happen to be very understanding of the administration position, because I spent almost 30 years inside knowing full the constraints of how to get anything done in this region, which is very hard,” Miller said. “But the notion that a US-French proposal for a three-week ceasefire in the middle of all this could work, I mean, it was, it was simply not well thought out.” More

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      Top Republicans disavow Trump’s ‘mentally disabled’ attacks on Harris

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      Senior Republicans distanced themselves Sunday from comments made by Donald Trump at campaign stops over the weekend that opponent Kamala Harris was born “mentally disabled” and had compared her actions to that of “a mentally disabled person”.Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, pushed back on Trump’s remarks, which came in what Trump himself admitted was a “dark” speech.“I just think the better course to take is to prosecute the case that her policies are destroying the country,” Graham said on CNN. “I’m not saying she’s crazy, her policies are crazy.”Graham’s comments came as immigration and border security remained the top domestic issue on Sunday’s political talk shows. Trump made his comments during a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday amid remarks on Harris’s actions on those issues as vice-president.“Kamala is mentally impaired. If a Republican did what she did, that Republican would be impeached and removed from office, and rightfully so, for high crimes and misdemeanors,” he said.Trump added: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”Minnesota Republican representative Tom Emmer, a member of JD Vance’s debate preparation team, told ABC News: “I think we should stick on the issues. The issues are, Donald Trump fixed it once. They broke it. He’s going to fix it again. That – those are the issues.”But Maryland governor Larry Hogan struck back, telling CBS News that Trump’s comments were “insulting not only to the vice-president, but to people that actually do have mental disabilities.“I’ve said for years that Trump’s divisive rhetoric is something we can do without,” Hogan added.Steven Cheung, the communications director for the Trump campaign, did not directly address Trump’s comments, widely criticized as offensive, but said Harris’s record on immigration and border security made her “wholly unfit to serve as president”.Trump’s comments joined a long list of personal attacks against opponents that supporters at his campaign eagerly lap up. Democrats have their own reductive articulations, calling Trump and Vance “weird”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the use of mental disability to describe Harris’s faculties has been widely seized upon. Democrat Illinois governor JB Pritzker told CNN that Trump’s remarks were “name-calling”.“Whenever he says things like that, he’s talking about himself but trying to project it onto others,” Pritzker said. Eric Holder, the former Obama administration attorney general, said Trump’s comments indicated “cognitive decline”.“Trump made a great deal of the cognitive abilities of Joe Biden,” he told MSNBC. “If this is where he is now, where is he going to be three and four years from now?”Maria Town, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, pointed out that many presidents had disabilities.Town said in a statement to the Washington Post that Trump’s comments “say far more about him and his inaccurate, hateful biases against disabled people than it does about Vice President Harris, or any person with a disability”. More

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      ‘Running away from good news’: why is Harris distancing herself from Biden’s record?

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      As Joe Biden walked on the set of The View, one of America’s most popular daytime television programmes, he was greeted by Hail to the Chief and a studio audience erupting in wild applause and cheers. “They love you!” said the co-host Joy Behar. The US president replied wryly: “It’s always better when you’re leaving.”During the ABC show, filmed live in a New York studio where digital screens showed images from Biden’s career, he claimed to be “at peace” with his decision not to seek re-election in November. Yet he also insisted that he could have beaten “loser” Donald Trump. And the co-host Whoopi Goldberg criticised the way Democrats forced Biden’s hand: “I didn’t like the way it was done publicly.”The wistfulness might be owed in part to Biden supporters’ faith that, for all the concerns over his age and mental acuity, his record should be viewed more as an asset than a liability. Their argument has been bolstered of late by trends that could neutralise three scourges of his presidency.Inflation has been tamed. Illegal immigration has stabilised. Violent crime is down. In theory it is a perfect recipe for electoral success. Yet it is a gift that the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, seems reluctant to accept. Far from embracing her role in Biden’s White House, the 59-year-old is presenting herself as a change agent who will “turn the page” and offer “a new way forward”.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “A new way? She’s been part of a very successful administration and she was chosen by Joe Biden as VP and then essentially chosen to be his successor.“But she has to pretend that she’s going to be forging a new path because she can’t afford to be too closely associated with Biden. I know one person on the inner campaign staff who cringes every time Harris and Biden have to appear together because the visual reinforces the tie they don’t want people to make. It’s nonsensical.”View image in fullscreenTravelling by motorcade, helicopter and Air Force One, the Guardian accompanied Biden for two days this week, from his daytime TV slot to a Ukraine event with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, from a glamorous reception at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to a gun safety event with Harris where the audience chanted: “Thank you, Joe!”There were reminders of the 81-year-old’s struggles, which culminated in a career-ending debate performance against Trump in June. “Welcome to Washington!” he told a room full of world leaders, diplomats and journalists at the InterContinental New York Barclay hotel in New York, New York.But this was also a man seeking to cement his legacy, calling for a 21-day temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, pledging $8bn in military aid for Ukraine and signing an executive order to combat emerging firearms threats and improve active shooter drills in schools. That legacy will also include economic growth, low unemployment and a string of legislative wins.Biden’s tenure has been overshadowed, however, by inflation – in 2022 the prices of gas, food and most other goods and services surged by 9%, a 40-year high – insecurity at the southern border and fears over crime. His approval rating has hovered below 40%. But with less than four months left in office, there are clear signs of the tide turning.Inflation has returned to close to where it was shortly before the Covid pandemic, defying predictions of recession and giving the Federal Reserve confidence to cut interest rates. Petrol prices, always a key indicator of discontent, have been coming down for months; in August the national average for a gallon was $3.38 – about 47 cents lower than the same time a year ago.Border security, long Trump’s signature issue, is also improving. After the former president compelled Republicans in Congress to block a border security bill, Biden stepped in to partially suspend asylum processing. In July the number of people illegally crossing the southern border dropped to 56,400, the lowest level in nearly four years, according to government figures.View image in fullscreenMoreover, Trump recently claimed that crime was “through the roof” under Biden’s administration. But this week the FBI released statistics that showed violent crime in the US declined an estimated 3% in 2023 from the year before, part of a continued trend since the Covid pandemic. Last year witnessed the biggest ever decline in the homicide rate, now 16% below its level in 2020. And for all Trump’s rhetoric, violent crime is now at a near 50-year low.Yet in a polarised political atmosphere, with rightwing media constantly attacking him, Biden is receiving little credit. Opinion polls showed him trailing Trump badly when voters were asked which candidate they trust to handle the economy, immigration and crime (Trump has a narrower lead over Harris on these issues).Sabato said: “Everything’s getting better except the American public thinks we’re in a recession and there are thieves outside their door every evening and those immigrants are trying to eat their pets. It’s insane. A classic case of the failure of civic education. I know that’s basic and people laugh about the term but it’s absolutely the root cause of all this.”In this climate, Harris appears to have concluded that, whatever the headline economic figures say, people are not feeling it. She has acknowledged many families are struggling with the cost of living, including the price of groceries and the dream of buying a home. She has promised to focus on basics such as being able to save for a child’s education, take a holiday and buy Christmas presents without financial stress.View image in fullscreenWendy Schiller, a political scientist at Brown University, noted that in the last quarter of 2023 and first quarter of 2024, every state in the country had growth in real disposable income. “The problem for the Democrats is that inflation eroded the power of that income up until, you could argue, the late spring of 2024. Do consumers now feel like their wages are buying them something and that things are less expensive?”She added: “You can tell them things are better but, unless they’re feeling it, it won’t help the Democrats in November. There’s a disconnect between voter impression of the economy and personal voter feelings about the economy. But certainly having a series of indicators and the news feed going from negative to positive can help sustain Kamala Harris’s campaign message that she, in fact, will produce a good economy.”Harris, as the incumbent vice-president, will be hoping to avoid a repeat of the Republican president George HW Bush’s fate in 1992. Economic indicators improved over the spring and summer but too late to save him from defeat by Bill Clinton, whose lead strategist, James Carville, memorably summed up: “It’s the economy, stupid.”Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington DC, said: “When it comes to the economy people believe their own eyes and they will make their judgments on that basis. This is a lesson I have learned in the six presidential campaigns I’ve wandered in and out of: if you have statistics on the one hand and personal experience on the other, it’s no contest.”Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, acknowledged that inflation, immigration and crime are heading in the right direction. “The political damage is done and I wouldn’t say that these developments are too little but I would say they are too late,” he added.View image in fullscreen“That’s especially true for immigration because, as far as I can tell, there’s nothing that President Biden did eight months ago that he couldn’t have done four years ago. I’m ever mindful of the fact that immigration is the issue that Trump rode to the presidency the first time in 2016.”Harris has accused Trump of killing the bipartisan Senate compromise that would have included tougher asylum standards and hiring more border agents, immigration judges and asylum officers. She says she would bring back that bill and sign it into law. Trump promises to mount the biggest domestic deportation in US history, an operation that could involve detention camps and the national guard.As for Biden, a memo released by the White House this week said he intended to “aggressively execute” on the rest of his agenda and hit the road to highlight the Biden-Harris record. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he delivered an address on the sidelines of the UN general assembly while surrounded by sculptures from antiquity; a moment, perhaps, to consider his own place in history.“I’ve seen the impossible become reality,” he told guests, recalling how he saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, end of South African apartheid and war criminals and dictators face justice and accountability for human rights violations.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “There’s a very strong argument that we will hear from historians about Joe Biden getting a bad break. He was a better president than was appreciated in his time. If Kamala Harris loses, one of the major critiques is going to be that the Democrats were too quick to turn on Biden and that Harris ran a campaign running away from the good news.” More

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      Harris to call for tougher border action on Arizona visit; Trump threatens to prosecute Google for ‘bad stories’ – as it happened

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      Kamala Harris has arrived at the US-Mexico border in Arizona, where the vice-president was briefed by two customs and border protection officials.Harris stepped out of her motorcade on a dusty desert road outside Douglas, Arizona, and shook hands with two men, the Associated Press reported. Harris chatted with the uniformed agents as they walked along the rust-colored border wall in temperatures that neared 100F (38C).The section of the wall Harris is viewing was constructed during Barack Obama’s administration, in 2011-2012, according to the White House pool reporter.Harris’s conversation with the CBP officers was not audible to the pool reporter on scene. A White House official told him that Harris had “heard directly from CBP officials on their efforts to combat traffickers and transnational criminal organizations”.Kamala Harris delivered a speech on immigration policy, laying out the balance she wants to strike: what’s important to her about the US immigration system is that “it works in an orderly way, that it is humane and that it makes our country stronger”.Donald Trump threatened to prosecute Google for “displaying bad stories” about him. In the middle of a busy day of presidential campaign events in Michigan, a key swing state, Donald Trump posted on his social media platform that, if elected president, he plans to prosecute Google for, he alleged, “only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J Trump” while “only revealing Good stories about Kamala Harris”.And, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state of Alabama for last-minute voter purges. The justice department is suing Alabama for what it alleges is an illegal attempt to remove voters from the rolls too close to November’s election.Here’s what else happened today:

      Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke after his meeting in New York with Donald Trump and said the two men had a “very productive” talk. Ukraine’s president said the two “thoroughly reviewed” the situation in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion more than two-and-a-half years ago, Reuters reports.

      In a video address on Friday, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, spoke of the indictment of three Iranian nationals for their role in a “wide-ranging hacking campaign sponsored by the government of Iran”. Wray said: “These individuals, employees of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, targeted a US political campaign, current and former US officials, and members of the American media, all in an attempt to sow discord and undermine our democracy.”

      Kamala Harris arrived in Tucson, Arizona, from Washington DC for election campaign events, including a visit to the US-Mexico border.

      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are tied among voters in North Carolina, a new poll shows. The CNN poll, released today and conducted from 20 to 25 September, shows Harris and Trump both receiving 48% of support among likely voters in North Carolina.

      Eric Adams, the New York City mayor, pleaded not guilty to corruption charges when he appeared in court in Manhattan. He denies federal bribery and fraud charges. The mayor’s arraignment began just after noon local time at a federal courthouse in New York. It is the first time that a sitting mayor of the city has been charged with crimes.
      After Kamala Harris spoke about her policies related to the southern border during a speech in Douglas, Arizona, the National Border Patrol Council, the labor union representing the US border patrol, said that Harris “has ignored the border problem she created for over three years”.“She goes down there for 20 minutes for a photo op and decides to repeat some of the things the NPBC has said before. But again, where has she been the last 3 1/2 years?” the union wrote on X, repeating a Trump talking point.Google followed up on Donald Trump’s claim that the search engine is illegally using a system to only reveal bad stories about him and good stories about Kamala Harris by issuing a statement:
      Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries,.
      Following up on a report by Fox News, Google continued: “This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day a few weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google.”Hugo Lowell in Washington dug into these claims:The progressive advocacy group Center for American Progress Action Fund reacted to Harris’s speech tonight.“Donald Trump’s failed leadership fanned the flames of hate and did nothing to actually fix the problems at the border,” the group posted on X.During her speech, Harris said Trump made the challenges at the border worse.“He separated families, he ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, put children in cages, and tried to end protection of Dreamers,” Harris said.Here’s some more in-depth reporting from the Associated Press, capturing how the reality of what is happening at the border has changed dramatically in the past few months, even as the political rhetoric (Trump’s in particular) really hasn’t:
      As midnight nears, the lights of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, fill the sky on the silent banks of the Rio Grande. A few months ago, hundreds of asylum-seeking families, including crying toddlers, waited for an opening to crawl through razor wire from Juarez into El Paso.
      No one is waiting there now.
      Nearly 500 miles away, in the border city of Eagle Pass, large groups of migrants that were once commonplace are rarely seen on the riverbanks these days.
      In McAllen, at the other end of the Texas border, two Border Patrol agents scan fields for five hours without encountering a single migrant.
      It’s a return to relative calm after an unprecedented surge of immigrants through the southern border in recent years. But no one would know that listening to Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump talking about border enforcement at dueling presidential campaign events. And no one would know from the rate at which Texas is spending on a border crackdown called Operation Lone Star – $11 billion since 2021.
      Read the full Associated Press article here.If you’re looking to put both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s claims about what’s happening at the US-Mexico border in context, this article from August is a good place to start:Here’s how Hamed Aleaziz, a longtime immigration reporter, summed up the substance of Harris’s immigration policy today for the New York Times:
      In a sign of how the politics of immigration have changed, Harris is promoting a policy that resembles a Trump-era effort to ban asylum for those who cross the border illegally. Harris says that she understands that people are desperate to come into the United States, but that the system must be ‘orderly.’
      In the same speech, Harris slammed Trump for separating immigrant children from their families and putting “children in cages”, and called for a gentler rhetoric about immigrants, and a focus on solutions, rather than blame and attacks.Harris is getting big cheers from a Democratic audience as she shifts from talking about tough enforcement and Congress’s failures to pass immigration reform to talking about legal paths to citizenship for immigrants who have been in the US for years, the importance of helping “Dreamers” – undocumented young people who came to the US as children – and the many contributions of immigrant farm workers.Harris is repeating a central part of her immigration rhetoric: that Donald Trump deliberately torpedoed a bipartisan immigration reform bill because “he prefers to run on a problem than fixing a problem.”Harris’s campaign, like the Biden administration previously, is highlighting Mitch McConnell’s own remarks about Trump’s influence on the legislation.The White House has been using this approach to the immigration issue since early this year: “Congressional Republicans do not care about securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system,” Biden said in a statement in early 2024. “If they did, they would have voted for the toughest border enforcement in history.”As Kamala Harris begins her speech on immigration policy, she lays out the balance she wants to strike: what’s important to her about the US immigration system is that “it works in an orderly way, that it is humane and that it makes our country stronger”.Among the people who introduced Kamala Harris, who is beginning her remarks on immigration and border policy, was Theresa Guerrero, a woman from Tucson, Arizona, who has become an activist after her son, Jacob, died of a fentanyl overdose.Trump’s campaign also previously featured remarks, during the Republican national convention, from a parent of a child lost to fentanyl.The Harris campaign is already attacking Donald Trump using a video of his comments from Warren, Michigan, tonight, talking about tariffs and how prosperous the US was in the 1890s.Trump has been making the case for high taxes on imported goods, which Congressional Republicans who oppose tariffs hope they can “water down” if he’s elected, the Washington Post reported yesterday.Mark Kelly, the US senator from Arizona, has been shepherding Harris during her visit to the border town of Douglas on Friday.Kelly began his remarks by sending greetings from his wife, the former Arizona representative Gabby Giffords, setting off a round of cheers for the beloved former representative.He retold the story of negotiating the bipartisan border deal in Congress only to see Trump torpedo the package by pressuring Republican senators to reject it.“This is the most hypocritical thing I’ve seen in three-and-a-half years in Washington,” Kelly said, calling the plan “the deal that Arizona needs”. Harris has vowed to revive the bill, if elected, and said she would have signed it into law.Kelly ended his remarks by saying that the playbook for winning in November was simple: hard work.“This is not rocket science. If it was, I could help,” the former astronaut quipped, as he campaigned for the vice-president.Biden embraced a more Trump-like border policy. Trump still claims Harris is weak.Some context, as we wait for Harris to give a campaign speech in the border town of Douglas, Arizona, where she is expected to call for tougher action at the US border with Mexico:

      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris made criticism of Trump’s harsh immigration policies part of their bid for the White House in 2020. But the Democratic administration has increasingly moved right on immigration, leading to criticisms that, though Biden certainly does not verbally attack and revile immigrants as Trump does, Biden’s actual policy regarding the US-Mexico border made him a kind of Trump 2.0.

      This past June, Biden signed an executive order limiting the number of asylum seekers admitted at the US-Mexico border, a policy that that split Democrats, and that some advocates said “will only cause suffering.” The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued the Biden administration over the policy.

      Since June, migrant crossings have plunged, though Democrats are asking: at what price?

      Harris, who supported decriminalizing undocumented border crossings in 2019 during her brief presidential run, has moved away from that stance in her new campaign, also striking a more law-and-order tone, which she is expected to continue in her border policy speech today.

      In contrast with Biden or Harris, Trump’s current immigration policy is a pledge to carry out “mass deportations”, which he has promised will be the largest in US history. That is expected to include a legally dubious roundup of up to 11 million people, “deployments of military and police units, and the creation of vast detention camps along the southern border”.

      Trump has made political attacks against Harris, blaming her for the border crisis, a central part of his campaign against her. Polls have suggested US voters trust Trump more than Harris on immigration.

      The global picture: in the US, as in the UK and Europe, wealthy democracies have spent decades trying to deter immigrants from coming across their borders to seek a better life by making border crossings increasingly surveilled, militarized and deadly. This has not, broadly speaking, stopped people from continuing to migrate in hopes of finding safer lives for themselves and their families, particularly as wars, climate change and other crises provide reasons to seek asylum elsewhere. But deterrence policies do mean that children and adult attempting to migrate are more likely to die because of the conditions that wealthy countries create at their borders, in hopes of persuading people that it’s too dangerous to migrate.
      A Reuters/Ipsos poll last month found that 43% of voters favored Trump on the issue of immigration and 33% favored Harris, while 24% either didn’t know, chose someone else or declined to answer, Reuters reports.Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s town hall in Warren, Michigan, is running about an hour behind schedule, the New York Times reports. (The Detroit Free Press has a livestream here, should you wish to follow along.)PBS also has a livestream of Kamala Harris’s expected campaign remarks on border policy in Douglas, Arizona, that will go live in about a half-hour.Asked what she had learned from her conversation with customs and border protection officials, Kamala Harris told today’s White House pool reporter:
      They’ve got a tough job and they need, rightly, support to do their job. They are very dedicated. And so I’m here to talk with them about what we can continue to do to support them. And also thank them for the hard work they do. More

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      Biden and Harris joined by Parkland school shooting survivor at event on addressing gun violence – US politics live

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      Donald Trump said he would meet with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday morning at Trump Tower.Yesterday, the former president attacked Zlenskyy directly and accused him of “refusing” to negotiate a peace deal with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. “The president of Ukraine is in our country. He is making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president, me,” Trump said. “We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal: Zelenskyy.”A fued between Trump and Zelenskyy has escalated in recent days, as my colleague Andrew Roth reports:US and European officials have noted with varying levels of alarm the potential for a Trump administration to sharply reduce US aid to Ukraine in order to force Zelenskyy to accept terms for a ceasefire.Asked if the Democrats wanted to “Trump-proof” aid to Ukraine before a potential Trump presidency, a senior state department official said, “I don’t ever talk in those terms” but that the primary goal was to make sure Ukraine “has all the equipment it needs to keep fighting and manpower and other things”.“At the end of the year, regardless of who wins our election in December, as at the end of this fighting season, Zelenskyy and Putin need to look at the battlefield and say, here’s what we think next year will look like,” the official said.“And the primary factor there is, do I think the other side has all the equipment it needs to keep fighting and manpower and other things?”On Wednesday, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, a Republican, accused Zelenskyy of election interference and demanded he fire his ambassador to Washington over a visit to an ammunitions factory in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Johnson claimed the Ukrainian ambassador had failed to invite any Republicans to the event and called it a “partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats”.Zelenskyy sought to reduce tensions on Thursday as he thanked the US for the new arms package and praised political leaders’ “strong bipartisan support” in “Ukraine’s just cause of defeating Russian aggression”.“I am grateful to Joe Biden, [the] US Congress and both parties, Republicans and Democrats, as well as the entire American people for today’s announcement of major US defence assistance for Ukraine, totalling $7.9bn and sanctions against Russia,” Zelenskyy wrote.Donald Trump said he would meet with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday morning at Trump Tower.Yesterday, the former president attacked Zlenskyy directly and accused him of “refusing” to negotiate a peace deal with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. “The president of Ukraine is in our country. He is making little nasty aspersions toward your favourite president, me,” Trump said. “We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal: Zelenskyy.”A fued between Trump and Zelenskyy has escalated in recent days, as my colleague Andrew Roth reports:The joint appearance of Biden and Harris today highlights Harris’s role overseeing the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.“Over the years, I’ve held the hands of far too many mothers and fathers to try and comfort them after their child was killed by gun violence. And let us all agree, it does not have to be this way,” Harris said. “We know how to stop these tragedies, and it is a false choice to suggest you are either in favor of the second amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away.”The president today is marking the roll-out of an executive order that includes several gun-related measures, including the creation of a task force to assess the threat of machine gun conversion devices.Joe Biden took the podium to chants of “Thank you Joe.”The audience at the White House is full of survivors and the families of those killed by gun violence. Biden was also introduced by Birmingham mayor Randall Woodfin, whose city was rocked by gun violence on Saturday in the Five Points entertainment district. Four people were killed and 17 injured.“I know the scream of a mother when her child is killed. I know that because I heard it from the voice of my own mother when my brother was killed by gun violence,” Woodfin said. “I heard that scream again this past Saturday.”The president and vice president are speaking from the White House, and were introduced by a student who was 15 when a gunman on students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.We’ll follow their remarks.In a characteristically rambling news conference, Donald Trump ripped into Kamala Harris for visiting the border – and unleashed a slew of fiction and fear-mongering about the border and immigrants.Among his claims was that the CBP One app, which people arriving at the US southern border must use to schedule appointment for an asylum screening, was being used by “virtually unlimited numbers of illegals to press a button schedule their illegal immigration appointment at our ports of entry”.Using the app to schedule an asylum screening, is, of course one way to legally immigrate to the US. Seeking asylum is legal.Trump also repeated his fictitious claim about migrants contributing to increased crime, and that crime overall was “up” – dividing ABC’s presidential debate moderators for fact-checking his claims.Here’s my colleague Edward Helmore with more on the actual stats:
      Murder dropped by more than 11% from 2022 to 2023, the largest single-year decline in two decades, according to FBI data released on Monday.
      Meanwhile, the broader category of violent crime nationwide decreased about 3%, said the data, which is audited and confirms earlier reporting from unaudited statistics.
      Monday’s release of audited data contradicts a talking point that Donald Trump has made on the campaign trail as the Republican presidential nominee seeks a return to the White House during the 5 November election: that crime has been rampant and out of control without him in power.
      In its annual Crime in the Nation summary, the FBI said rape decreased by an estimated 9.4%, property crime dropped 2.4% and burglary fell by an estimated 7.6%.
      Some more background:After the 2020 election, Newsmax aired several false claims about the company, whose voting machines were only used in Los Angeles county in 2020. The network repeatedly aired false claims from Trump allies that the software was widely used across the country and that it had been hacked to change votes.Smartmatic sued Newsmax, Fox, One America News Network (OANN) and others for broadcasting their false claims. It settled the case with OANN earlier this year and the Fox case is still pending in New York.Smartmatic said in a statement: “We are very pleased to have secured the completion of the case against Newsmax. We are now looking forward to our court day against Fox Corp and Fox News for their disinformation campaign. Lying to the American people has consequences. Smartmatic will not stop until the perpetrators are held accountable.”First amendment scholars were closely watching the case and several others like it to see whether libel law can be used as an effective tool to police misinformation.The case was set to be a kind of sequel to the defamation litigation between Dominion, another voting machine company, and Fox over 2020 election lies. That case settled just before the trial was set to begin, with Fox agreeing to pay Dominion $747.5m. Eric Davis, the judge who oversaw the Fox case, also was overseeing the Newsmax case.Read the full story here:The voting machine company Smartmatic and the conservative outlet Newsmax have settled a closely watched defamation lawsuit days before it was scheduled to go to trial in Delaware.A spokesperson for the Delaware courts said the case had settled on Thursday. He did not offer additional details.Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Kamala Harris made an appearance together after meeting.Harris emphasized: “Nothing about the end of this war can be decided without Ukraine.”She also referenced, without explicitly mentioning, Donald Trump, who has said that Ukraine should have made concessions to Russian president Vladimir Putin before Russia’s attack:“There are some in my country who would instead force Ukraine to give up large parts of its sovereign territory,” she said. “These proposals are the same as those of Putin. Let us be be clear. They are not proposals for peace. Instead, they are proposals for surrender.”Here’s a look at where things stand:

      New York City mayor Eric Adams was charged in a 57-page federal indictment with crimes relating to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, federal program bribery and receiving campaign contributions by foreign nationals, wire fraud, solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national and bribery. He has maintained his innocence.

      Federal prosecutors called Adams’s alleged misconduct a grave breach of public trust. The US attorney for the southern district of New York Damian Williams strongly criticized the mayor at a press conference a little earlier.

      Williams vowed to continue to investigate the mayor’s case and to “hold more people accountable”. Charges against Adams include bribery, wire fraud and acceptance of illegal foreign campaign contributions including from Turkish government officials. Williams said the mayor “kept the public in the dark”.

      The indictment against Adams includes many luxury trips that were not put in annual disclosure forms, prosecutors say. Trips cost many thousands of dollars and included visiting Turkey and flying via Turkey while visiting countries such as China, India, France, Hungary and Ghana.

      Federal agents raided Adams’s official residence, Gracie Mansion, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the early hours today, as reports emerged of the mayor being hit with a federal indictment. The raid reportedly included a group of nearly a dozen people in suits entering the property, with several carrying briefcases, backpacks or duffel bags.

      Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are meeting at the White House as the Ukrainian president attempts to shore up support for his country’s war aims in its fight against Russia. Before the meeting, Zelenskyy thanked the US president for his support, saying: “Your determination is incredibly important for us to prevail … We must restore normal life, and we greatly value your leadership.”

      Before their meeting, Biden released a statement, saying: “I am proud to welcome President Zelenskyy back to the White House today.” As part of the US’s “surge” in security assistance to Ukraine, Biden has directed the defense department to allocate all of its remaining security assistance funding that has been appropriated for Ukraine by the end of his term. More

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      Biden signs three-month funding bill to avert US government shutdown

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      Joe Biden signed a three-month government funding bill on Thursday, averting an imminent shutdown and delaying a fuller conversation about government spending until after the November elections.The stopgap spending bill, known as a continuing resolution or CR, will extend government funding until 20 December. It will also provide an additional $231m for the Secret Service “for operations necessary to carry out protective operations including the 2024 presidential campaign and national special security events”, following the two recent assassination attempts against Donald Trump.Biden’s signing of the bill came one day after the House and Senate passed the legislation with sweeping bipartisan majorities in both chambers.“The passage of this bill gives Congress more time to pass full-year funding bills by the end of this year,” Biden said Wednesday. “My administration will work with Congress to ensure these bills deliver for America’s national defense, veterans, seniors, children and working families, and address urgent needs for the American people, including communities recovering from disasters.”The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, had initially tried to pass a more rightwing proposal that combined a six-month stopgap funding measure with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, a controversial proposal that would require people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote.That effort failed last week, when 14 Republicans and all but two Democrats opposed Johnson’s bill. The failure forced Johnson to take up a three-month spending bill that was narrow enough to win Democrats’ support. The House passed that bill on Wednesday in a vote of 341 to 82, with all of the opposition to the legislation stemming from Republicans.“Our legislative work before November has now been officially done, and today the House did the necessary thing,” Johnson told reporters on Wednesday. “We took the initiative and passed a clean, narrow, three-month CR to prevent the Senate from jamming us with another bloated bill while continuing resolutions.”Johnson nodded at the widespread opposition to the bill within his conference, as 82 Republicans voted against it amid complaints of wasteful government spending.“While a continuing resolution is never ideal – none of us like them; that’s not a way to run a railroad – it allows Congress to continue serving the American people through the election,” Johnson said.Once the House passed the continuing resolution on Wednesday afternoon, the Senate moved immediately to take up the bill. The upper chamber passed the bill just two hours after the House did in a bipartisan vote of 78 to 18.The Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, thanked Johnson for his work to avoid a shutdown, but he lamented that it took Congress until the last minute to pass a funding package when it seemed evident for weeks that a narrow stopgap would be necessary.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Tonight the American people can sleep easier knowing we have avoided an unnecessary government shutdown at the end of the month,” Schumer said before the vote. “It is a relief for the country that, once again, bipartisanship prevailed to stop another shutdown threat. It took much longer than it should have, but because House Republicans finally, finally chose to work with us in the end, Congress is getting the job done tonight.”Schumer had previously blamed Donald Trump for the delay, as the former president had implored Republican lawmakers to reject any funding bill unless it was tied to “election security” measures. The newly signed bill did not meet that demand, but Johnson insisted that Trump backed Republicans’ efforts to keep the government funded.“President Trump understands the current dilemma and the situation that we’re in,” Johnson told reporters on Tuesday. “So we’ll continue working closely together. I’m not defying President Trump. We’re getting our job done, and I think he understands that.”Both chambers of Congress now stand adjourned for six weeks, meaning members will not return to Capitol Hill until after election day. Johnson’s decision to rely on Democratic support to pass the funding package has raised questions about his future as speaker, but he voiced confidence on Wednesday about his leadership and his party’s prospects for expanding its narrow House majority.“I would be a fool to project a certain number of seats, but let me just say I’m very optimistic,” Johnson told reporters. “I believe we’re going to hold the House. And I intend to be the speaker in the new Congress.” More