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      Can ex-governor’s anti-Trump stance swing key Senate seat for Republicans?

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      At a conservative thinktank on 14th Street in Washington DC, awaiting Larry Hogan, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Maryland, one staffer turned to another. “It’s nice having something to vote for, for a change,” the staffer wryly said. Shortly after, the former governor arrived for his speech at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (Jinsa), part of his campaign to win in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican senator since 1980.When he left the executive mansion in Annapolis last year, Hogan told his friendly audience, he had governed for eight years as a popular moderate but had not been looking for another job – “And frankly, I didn’t yearn to be a part of the divisiveness and dysfunction in Washington,” he said.“But when I saw a bipartisan package to secure our border and to support Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and other American allies fail because people were told [by Donald Trump] to vote against a critical [immigration] bill that they claimed to be for, it made me frustrated enough that I knew I had to step up and try to do something about the mess in Washington.”Washington is not Maryland but the Old Line State is just a few miles up 14th from Jinsa. There, Hogan faces the Prince George’s county executive, Angela Alsobrooks, for an open seat in November – a race in which the Democrat, who if she wins will be only the third Black woman ever elected to the US Senate, enjoys significant polling leads.The race has become potentially decisive in determining Senate control, and a test of anti-Trump sentiment on the right. Significant spending and endorsements are pouring in. Highly regarded as a local leader and “tough on crime” Democrat, Alsobrooks defeated a DC establishment candidate, the congressman David Trone, in her primary and is now piling on praise from party grandees. She recently released an ad featuring Barack Obama and secured support from the Washington Post.On Thursday night, the two candidates will meet for a high-stakes debate.In practical terms, it takes 51 votes – or 50 if your party holds the presidency – to control the Senate. Democrats currently hold it 51-49 but face tough contests to hold seats in Republican-leaning states such as Montana and Ohio. It means Maryland counts this year, and Hogan’s toughest challenge may lie in persuading enough Democratic voters they can trust him should Republicans retake the chamber with him as the 51st vote. In turn, Democrats know that if they cannot hold so deep blue a state as Maryland, they will in all likelihood lose control of the Senate.Hogan is therefore seeking to depict himself as an antidote to Trump – and his rival as too far left. At Jinsa, talking foreign policy, he criticized Trump but he also knocked Alsobrooks, including for “repeatedly demand[ing] that Israel enact an immediate and unilateral ceasefire, and [for calling] for cutting off critical military aid”.As popular as Hogan is – he stepped down as governor with a 77% approval rating – polling suggests that message is not landing. According to 538, since one tied poll in August, Alsobrooks’s lead has ranged from five to 17 points.Hogan begged to differ. “I think it’s a very close race,” he said. “I’ve always been an underdog in every one of my races.“There are people out there that we’ve still got to convince,” he added, “and we’ve got [then] 34 more days to do it, and I feel confident we’re going to win the race. It’s tough, though. I mean, we’re a very blue state, and we’re overcoming a huge deficit at the top of the ticket.”Trump has been called many things, but “huge deficit” may be a new one. Hogan has said he won’t vote for Trump (or Kamala Harris), but must nonetheless fend off persistent questions about the man who rules his party. One recent ad from Hogan’s campaign deplored the “horror” of January 6. And yet, as Republicans from Trump and the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, on down know, sometimes a candidate must be allowed away from the party line.In Maryland, Hogan is free to be Hogan. That’s to his advantage. To his disadvantage, Democrats from the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, to Alsobrooks on down know Hogan has a bigger problem.View image in fullscreenIn June 2022, in the case Dobbs v Jackson, the US supreme court to which Trump appointed three hardliners removed the federal right to abortion. Two years on, Hogan insists he will not let his party go further.“[Alsobrooks’s campaign] want[s] to focus on making it a cookie-cutter Democratic talking points race but it’s not, because I have a different position than most Republicans,” he said at the Jinsa event. “And so, you know, I’ve promised to be a sponsor to codify Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that previously safeguarded abortion rights, so that nobody comes between a woman and her doctor in any state in America, and to sponsor a bill to protect IVF.”He also insisted that “most people are concerned about the economy. They’re concerned about affordability, inflation, they’re concerned about crime in their communities, and they’re concerned about securing the border and fixing [the] broken immigration system.”Among Democratic rejoinders: while a member of the executive committee of the Republican Governors Association, Hogan worked to elect allies in states that now have stringent abortion bans. In his own state, in 2022, he vetoed a bill to expand abortion access. The same year, he said Trump “nominated incredible justices to the supreme court”, a comment Democrats have brought back to haunt him. Hogan says he was not referring to Dobbs but Alsobrooks is happy to keep the spotlight on the issue. As she recently said: “I think my opponent’s record is very clear where abortion care is concerned.”Many Americans fear a national abortion ban, should Trump be president again. Hogan said he had been against that for decades “and I’ll be the one of the ones standing up, regardless of who the president is or who’s in control of Senate”. But he also said he would not support reform to the filibuster, the Senate rule that requires 60 votes for most legislation, in order to codify Roe.“I think it’s a terrible idea, because it’s actually something that … my opponent and Donald Trump both agree on. They want to be able to jam things through on a 51-vote [majority]. ”Right now, [the Senate is] a deliberative body where we actually have to find bipartisan cooperation and common sense and kind of common ground for the common good. That’s what I did in Maryland with a 70% Democratic legislature. We got things done.”A few days after Hogan’s event at Jinsa, about 40 miles (65km) north-east in Baltimore, Democrats gathered at a canvassing hub. Once a wedding venue, the Majestic Hall of Events was surrounded by less-than-majestic auto shops and down-at-heel churches. Inside, Alsobrooks addressed a crowd organized by D4 Women in Action, linked to Delta Sigma Theta, one of the Divine Nine Black women’s sororities, to which Alsobrooks belongs.View image in fullscreenIn her speech, Alsobrooks spoke about her links to Baltimore and “the number one issue across our state, and the thing that people most desire to have: economic opportunity”. She also took shots at her opponent. “What did he do [as governor] when he had the opportunity to stand up for all of our families in Baltimore? He sent back $900m to the federal government.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat was a reference to a 2015 decision to scrap a light rail project, a call that attracted lawsuits. But Alsobrooks also looked to the national stage, and the issue she wants foremost in voters’ minds.“This race is bigger than both of us,” Alsobrooks told the Guardian. “Bigger than Larry Hogan the person. It’s bigger than Angela the person. It’s about issues and about the future. It is about reproductive freedom.”Alsobrooks listed other policy priorities – “sensible gun legislation … economic opportunity” – as part of a platform “that really does favor hard-working people, middle-class families, and that is about preserving freedoms and democracy”. But protecting abortion rights was a theme to which she returned.At Jinsa, Hogan said Democrats were trying to turn a state race into a national contest. Alsobrooks embraced the charge: “The former governor thinks he’s running to go back to Annapolis. We’re actually running to go to Washington DC, and we would represent Marylanders there.”She added: “This [Republican Senate] caucus is led by people like Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Rick Scott, Mitch McConnell, and they … have really proclaimed war on the reproductive freedoms of women. They have very clear records, and [Hogan has] aligned himself with the party whose policies do not align with the average Marylander.”Much has been made of the warm relationship Hogan and Alsobrooks enjoyed when Hogan was governor. Asked about an unearthed Hogan comment – that Alsobrooks was a better Prince George’s county executive than his own father, the late congressman Lawrence Hogan – Alsobrooks said: “He has become, in a lot of ways, the kind of politician he says he despises, one who’s very disingenuous.“But I think that people see through it. Marylanders are very savvy and they have seen how he has changed … and I think they will see through the disingenuous nature of his campaign, and will again vote to keep Maryland Democratic.”Keeping Maryland Democratic will require turning out the vote. At the canvassing hub, one phone-banker wearily said: “Put in two shifts this morning.” A friend smiled back: “Only a hundred more to go.”The same Jinsa staffer who earlier had said it was “nice to have something to vote for” with Hogan also said that he hadn’t felt so good about a Senate race since 2006 – which was still a defeat – in which “getting more than 40% felt like a moral victory”.Back then, Ben Cardin, the Democrat retiring this year, beat Michael Steele, a Hogan-esque GOP moderate. Steele went on to chair the Republican National Committee, then became an MSNBC host and Never Trumper. Asked for his view of the current Maryland race, Steele was not as convinced of an Alsobrooks win as many other observers.“This race was not a competitive race until Larry got into it,” Steele said. “He is a popular two-term governor who left, I think, an important mark on how politics play out in Maryland for Republicans and made this very competitive out of the gate, largely because people had come to trust his style of governance.“It’s open, it’s compassionate, it’s concerned … I think a lot of people remember that.”Steele said Hogan had a good chance of attracting split-ticket voters – rare beasts, precious to any campaign, in this case prepared to back Harris for president but Hogan for Senate.It all added up to a warning for anyone expecting a comfortable Democratic win.“I think the latest polling has Alsobrooks up by 11,” Steele said. “I don’t believe that, largely because when I’m out in neighborhoods talking to people, and from everything I can piece together, this race is a lot tighter than the traditionalists who look at Maryland think it to be.”

      This article was amended on 11 October 2024. It originally stated that Larry Hogan chaired the Republican Governors Association. He was actually a member of its executive committee. More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene condemned over Helene weather conspiracy theory

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      Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is facing condemnation following several conspiratorial comments amid the devastation of Hurricane Helene that seemed to suggest she believed the US government can control the weather.In a post last week shared with her 1.2 million X followers, the US House representative from Georgia wrote: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”Greene does not specify to whom “they” is referring, but she has a history of promoting conspiracy theories around the federal government and other groups.She appeared to double down on these comments with a post on Saturday, sharing a clip from a 2013 CBS News broadcast about experimental efforts to induce rain and lightning using lasers. “CBS, nine years ago, talked about lasers controlling the weather,” Greene wrote, apparently mistaking the year of the broadcast.Greene, who is no stranger to misinformation including once raising the idea of Jewish space lasers being behind wildfire outbreaks, was met with a wave of criticism for her blatantly false statements.The US government’s top disaster relief official condemned on Sunday false claims made about Helene and its relief efforts, stating that such conspiracy theories, including those made by Donald Trump as he seeks a second presidency, are causing fear in people who need assistance and “demoralizing” the workers who are providing assistance.“It’s frankly ridiculous, and just plain false. This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” said Deanne Criswell, who leads the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people, and that’s what we’re here to do.”Shawn Harris, who is running for Greene’s congressional seat, condemned the incumbent’s comments.“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s conspiracy theories are sickening, but she does it to distract from her failed effort to block crucial funding for Fema as Hurricane Helene was making landfall,” Harris wrote in a post on X.Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and popular internet personality, seemed to poke fun at Greene’s comments while also factchecking her false claims.He suggested on X that some conspiracy theories turn out to be true – but added: “I can assure you that the Hurricane Helene weather modification theory is not one of them.“I would know, too.”In an email to his supporters, the Republican US senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina also seemed to condemn conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene, though he did not specify the rightwing source of the theories.“The destruction caused by Helene is incomprehensible and has left many communities in western North Carolina absolutely devastated. The last thing that the victims of Helene need right now is political posturing, finger-pointing, or conspiracy theories that only hurt the response effort,” the email stated.In an opinion piece on Saturday by its editorial board, North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer criticized Trump because of his falsehoods over the government response to Helene, saying the state’s affected parts were “not a political football” and “not a campaign opportunity”.Criticism of Greene’s conspiracy theories even made it to the sports world, with the tennis legend Martina Navratilova using her platform to call out not only Greene as well as Trump’s running mate in November’s election, JD Vance. Vance had praised Greene at a rally just hours after she posted her conspiracies.“Marj is even more stupid than we thought possible,” Navratilova wrote on X. “And Vance is not stupid – he is just a cowardly sycophant. Which is actually worse.”Greene is also facing criticism for her hypocrisy of peddling conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene while she was photographed in attendance at the University of Alabama’s home football game against the University of Georgia with Trump on 28 September. She reportedly left her state of Georgia to attend the game in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, while Helene devastated communities across the state she was elected to represent. 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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      Trump falsely claims Helene victims had no federal help despite Biden-Harris sending $20m in aid – live

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      As Joe Biden visits the wreckage of Hurricane Helene, Donald Trump has been baselessly suggesting that the administration has ignored Republican victims and that federal aid is scarce because funds are being given to immigrants.“They’re dying, and they’re getting no help from our federal government because their money has been spent on people that should not be in our country,” Trump told his supporters.The Biden-Harris administration said that the government has provided $20m in “flexible, upfront funding” and deployed 5,000 federal personnel to aid in recovery.Donald Trump repeated lies about the Biden administration’s hurricane response, going so far as to claim that the president and vice-president were “stealing” Fema funds to give to immigrants.“They stole the Fema money like they stole it from a bank so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season,” he said.Trump and his allies have been repeatedly claiming that Fema is out of money because it allocated funds to help communities receiving an influx of immigrants at the border.Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, did warn that Fema is underfunded for the remainder of hurricane season. That’s in part because the stop-gap government funding bill did not contain enough funding for Fema, which is facing a $2bn deficit.Fema’s Shelter and Services Program allocated $300m during the 2024 fiscal year to help communities “offset the costs of providing food, shelter and other supportive services after receiving an influx of migrants”. That’s a small fraction of the agency’s overall budget. For 2025, it has requested a total of $33.1bn.At his rally, Trump also claimed he “had the best four years with hurricanes”.During his tenure …

      Trump imposed a hiring freeze at the National Weather Service, resulting in more than 200 of vacancies within the agency that predicts and oversees extreme weather warnings. The Washington Post reported in 2017: “Some of those Weather Service vacancies listed in the document, obtained by the Sierra Club through a Freedom of Information Act and shared with The Washington Post, were in locations that would be hit by the major hurricanes that barreled through the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean.”

      Trump falsely claimed that Hurricane Maria’s death toll was being inflated by his Democratic rivals. In fact, studies suggest that far more people died than the official death toll suggested at the time. A report by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health estimates up to 4,600 people were killed.

      In 2021, a report by the housing department’s office of the inspector general found that Trump administration delayed more than $20bn in hurricane relief aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

      An internal report from the Federal Emergency Management Agency also found that it failed to properly prepare for hurricane season.
      In a review of Trump’s record responding to natural disasters, E&E also found a discrepency in aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, which primarily affected Florida; and Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
      On March 9, 2019, Trump signed an order directing FEMA to pay 100 percent of most disaster costs in Florida. As a result, FEMA paid roughly $350 million more than it would have without Trump’s intervention, according to an E&E News analysis.
      But less than two months earlier, Trump threatened to veto a disaster-aid measure in Congress that would have FEMA pay 100 percent of all disaster costs in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricane Maria killed more than 3,000 people.
      According to Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s book, Trump said: “They love me in the Panhandle … I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?”The voting habits of residents did play into Donald Trump’s decision-making about disaster relief when he was president, reports E&E News.The outlet interviewed Mark Harvey, Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council, who revealed that the former president refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018.From E&E:
      But Harvey said Trump changed his mind after Harvey pulled voting results to show him that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.
      ‘We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,’ said Harvey, who recently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris alongside more than 100 other Republican former national security officials.
      California’s governor Gavin Newsom, reacted to the report on Twitter/X, calling it a “glimpse into the future” if Trump is re-elected.Joe Biden, meanwhile, wrote: “You can’t only help those in need if they voted for you. It’s the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it.”As Joe Biden visits the wreckage of Hurricane Helene, Donald Trump has been baselessly suggesting that the administration has ignored Republican victims and that federal aid is scarce because funds are being given to immigrants.“They’re dying, and they’re getting no help from our federal government because their money has been spent on people that should not be in our country,” Trump told his supporters.The Biden-Harris administration said that the government has provided $20m in “flexible, upfront funding” and deployed 5,000 federal personnel to aid in recovery.“His competition that night? He cannot be president. He cannot be president of the United States,” Donald Trump said of JD Vance’s vice-presidential opponent, Tim Walz.“How good did JD Vance do the other night?” Trump added, praising his running mate as the crowd descended into a cheers of “JD! JD!”“I drafted the best athlete,” Trump continued.Donald Trump pledged to bring back drilling in the Alaska arctic wildlife refuge if he becomes president.Trump said:
      We would have supplied the entire Asian continent. We would have supplied Asia. We would have supplied everybody. But we’ll have it redone very quickly … I actually got it approved in Congress as part of …the biggest tax cuts in history for this country. I got that approved in Congress. We got ANWR [Alaska National Wildlife Refuge] so they didn’t kill it in Congress, and I don’t think they ever could. So we’ll get it back very quickly. It’s going to be back very fast.
      Trump added:
      And it would have been great for Alaska but it would have also … been great for our country but we’ll have it approved very quickly.
      In 2021, Trump’s administration auctioned off portions of ANWR to oil drillers but failed to attract much bidders.Donald Trump has switched his attacks on Joe Biden, calling him “the worst foreign policy president”.The former president then went on to say: “We have to be too big to rig” before going on to repeat the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.The crowd, highly energized, descended into a chant of “Trump! Trump! Trump!”Donald Trump has walked on stage to Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA.“We’re going to make America great again,” Trump said in his opening remarks before launching into a tirade against Kamala Harris, calling her a slew of names including “Lying Kamala”.Donald Trump is scheduled to hold a rally shortly in Saginaw, Michigan.Stay tuned as we bring you the latest updates.Here are some images coming through the news wires of Hurricane Helene and its aftermath across the country:The Biden administration has provided nearly $4m directly to individuals and families in need of critical financial assistance, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said onboard an Air Force One gaggle as the president was en route to Tallahassee, Florida.She went on to add:
      Yesterday, we announced that the president approved 100% federal cost share for emergency response activities in Florida and Georgia, as well as Tallahassee [Tennessee] and North Carolina. This means that the federal government will cover 100% of the costs associated with things like debris removal, first responders, search and rescue, shelters, and mass feeding.
      This latest announcement builds the president’s previously approved requests for major disaster declarations from the governors of Florida and Georgia, which unlocked additional assistance for residents on their road to recovery. More

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      Walz asks America to ‘stand up’ for democracy – as it happened

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      Here are some of the key lines from the debate between the Democratic and Republican vice-presidential candidates, Tim Walz and JD Vance:On the Middle East:

      Both candidates were asked whether they would support a pre-emptive strike by Israel on Iran. Walz said: “Israel’s ability to defend itself is absolutely fundamental” after the Hamas attacks on 7 October. He said Trump’s own national security advisers have said it’s dangerous for Trump to be in charge. “When our allies see Donald Trump turn towards Vladimir Putin, turn towards North Korea, when we start to see that type of fickleness about holding the coalitions together – we will stay committed,” Walz said.

      Vance said it was up to Israel to decide what it needs to do. He said Trump “consistently made the world more secure”.
      On the climate crisis:

      Vance said he and Trump “support clean air, clean water” when asked what responsibility the Trump administration would have to reduce the impact of climate change. “If we actually care about getting cleaner air and cleaner water, the best thing to do is to double down and invest in American workers and the American people,” he said. He did not answer when asked whether he agreed with Trump that climate change is a hoax.

      Walz praised the Biden administration for the Inflation Reduction Act, and criticized Trump for calling climate change a “hoax”. “My farmers know climate change is real,” he said.
      On immigration:

      Walz criticized Trump for derailing a legislative package that he described as “the fairest and the toughest bill on immigration that this nation’s seen”.

      Walz accused Vance of having “vilified a large number of people who worked legally in the community of Springfield”, adding that those immigrants had been “dehumanized”. “This is what happens when you don’t want to solve it,” he said. “You demonize it.”

      Vance said the people he was most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, “are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border”.

      At one point, CBS News muted the microphones for both candidates as the moderators tried to turn the debate to the economy.
      On the economy:

      Walz said presidents should seek advice from advisers around them. “If you’re going to be president, you don’t have all the answers. Donald Trump believes he does,” he said. “My pro-tip is this: if you need heart surgery, listen to the people at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, not Donald Trump.”
      On abortion:

      Vance said he “never supported a national ban”. He said that Ohio had passed an amendment protecting the right to an abortion, and that it taught him that his Republican party “have got to do a better job of winning back people’s trust”.

      Walz rejected Trump’s claim that he supports abortion in the ninth month of pregnancy, saying the accusation “wasn’t true”. He said that under Project 2025, there would a “registry of pregnancies” and that it would “get more difficult, if not impossible, to get contraception and limit access, if not eliminate access, to infertility treatments”.
      On mass shootings:

      Walz said his 17-year-old son had witnessed a shooting at a community center. He referred to his record in Minnesota, where there are enhanced background checks and red-flag laws in place. “We understand that the second amendment is there, but our first responsibility is to our kids to figure this out,” he said.

      Vance said that the country needs to buckle down on border security, and strengthen safety in schools. “We have to make the doors lock better, we have to make the doors stronger,” he said.
      On the candidates’ previous comments:

      Walz stumbled when asked about his misleading claims that he made about being in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen protests. “I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times,” he initially said. When pushed for an answer, he conceded that he “misspoke”.

      Vance said he was “wrong about Donald Trump” when asked about his previous criticisms of his running mate. He accused the media of spreading false stories about Trump that he believed, and said he supports Trump because he “delivered for the American people”.
      On healthcare:

      Vance, when asked how a Trump administration would protect Americans with pre-existing conditions who were able to secure health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act, said there were laws and regulations on the books that should be kept in place. He said the functionality of the health insurance marketplace also needed to be improved.
      On paid family leave:

      Walz did not give a definitive answer when asked how long employers should be required to pay workers for parental leave. He said paid family leave is beneficial for families because it “gets the child off to a better start”.

      Vance said the nation should “have a family care model that makes choice possible”. He said the issue was important to him because he is married to a “beautiful woman” and “incredible mother” who is also a “very brilliant corporate litigator”.
      On the January 6 attack on the Capitol:

      Walz said democracy is “bigger than winning an election”, and that a “president’s words matter”. He said the January 6 attack “was a threat to our democracy in a way that we have not seen” and that it manifested itself because of Trump’s inability to accept that he had lost the 2020 election.

      Vance claimed that Trump wanted protesters to remain peaceful on January 6. He said he believes the biggest threat to democracy is “the threat of censorship”.

      Walz directly asked Vance whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance declined to answer, instead saying that he was “focused on the future”. “That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.
      Closing remarks:

      Walz said he was as “surprised as anybody” at the broad coalition of support that Harris had built, including progressives like Bernie Sanders and Republicans like Dick Cheney. He said Vance had made it clear that he would stand with Trump’s agenda, adding that Harris is “bringing us a politics of joy”.

      Vance said that Harris’s polices were to blame for key needs like heat, housing and food being harder to afford. Harris has proposed a lot of things that she wants to accomplish on day one, Vance said, but he noted that Harris has been vice-president for three-and-a-half years and that “day one was 1,400 days ago”.
      With that, this blog is closing. Thank you for following along. Here is our full story on the vice-presidential debate:As the Middle East spiraled towards full-scale war, the US vice presidential debate focused largely on domestic issues, like school shootings and the cost of housing, healthcare, and childcare.The CBS News debate moderators largely declined to fact-check JD Vance or Tim Walz, asking them instead to respond to each other.Here are some key takeaways from the debate between the Republican senator from Ohio who wrote a bestselling memoir about poverty in Appalachia and the Democratic football-coach-turned-governor of Minnesota:The topics of abortion and the likelihood of Trump accepting this year’s result if he loses led to the most interesting moments during the debate.Walz demanded that Vance agree to abide by the results of the election and commit to a peaceful transfer of power. And he asked Vance whether Trump lost the 2020 election.“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied.“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz shot back.Walz noted that Vance was only on the stage because Trump cut ties with his former vice-president, Mike Pence, for certifying the results of the last election.Vance did not answer the question about whether Trump, who continues to falsely claim the 2020 election was marred by widespread fraud, lost four years ago. The exchange served as a reminder of one of Trump’s biggest vulnerabilities heading into the election, one that the Harris campaign will continue to highlight in the coming weeks.Reuters has this interesting bit of analysis of Vance’s performance tonight, writing that the Vance on stage was the one the Trump campaign had in mind when Trump selected him as his number two in July.” The idea then was that the 40-year-old first-term senator and best-selling author of “Hillbilly Elegy” could serve as an articulate and rational voice for Trump’s Make American Great Again movement as well as perhaps one day become a generational torchbearer.But instead Vance had a rocky rollout on the campaign trail, becoming the target of online scorn and mockery while most often serving as Trump’s attack dog. The headlines were mostly negative, and his approval ratings suffered.On Tuesday, Vance largely kept his message positive, while taking every opportunity to advocate for Trump.Vance seemed to be succeeding at a vice-presidential running mate’s primary task: Making the candidate at the top of the ticket more palatable to the viewers at home.It was clear as the evening progressed, that it was this, rather than trying to smear Walz, that was the goal of the Trump campaign in this debate.More from the CNN poll – and as expected – the debate did not shift the polled voters’ views much. Just 1% of them changed their minds:Here is what the Guardian’s panellists made of the debate:When Harris was considering Walz as her vice-presidential candidate, he reportedly told her that he was a bad debater, and at the outset Vance, wearing a sharp blue suit, a pink tie, plenty of make-up and hair gel, looked the more polished performer. Walz, a former high school teacher and football coach, cut a more bustling figure in a loose black suit.Vance, the Ohio senator who has been a regular on rightwing news channels for years, was polished from the off, comfortably dodging a question about whether he believes the climate crisis is a “hoax” to lament how much money has been spent on solar panels.Walz rose to the vice-presidential nomination, in part, through his confident appearances on cable news – it was from there that his famous “weird” characterization of Vance and Trump was born – but appeared initially nervous, and did not reprise his searing critique of his opponents.Both men also frequently referenced their upbringing in the midwest.Tim Walz and JD Vance took to the stage on Tuesday night for a vice-presidential debate that served up less drama than September’s presidential debate, but offered revealing differences on abortion, school shootings, and immigration.Three weeks ago Kamala Harris and Donald Trump had endured a contentious hour-and-a-half, with an emotional Trump being goaded into ranting about the number of people who attend his rallies and declaring the vice-president to be a “Marxist”, before reportedly threatening to sue one of the debate moderators. Harris enjoyed a brief polling uptick from that performance.But on Tuesday, Walz and Vance largely avoided attacks on each other, and instead concentrated their fire on each other’s running mates. It was a more policy-driven discussion than that of their running mates’, but one with a few gaffes that might overshadow some of the substance in coming days.In a key exchange over abortion, Walz, the governor of Minnesota, followed Harris’s lead in using personal stories.Trump “brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturned Roe v Wade”, Walz said. He noted the case of Amanda Zurawski, who was denied an abortion in Texas despite serious health complications during pregnancy – Zurawski is now part of a group of women suing the state of Texas – and a girl in Kentucky who as a child was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant.“If you don’t know [women like this], you soon will. Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said, which Vance refuted.Both candidates were seen more favourably after the debate than before it, according to CNN:
      Following the debate, 59% of debate watchers said they had a favorable view of Walz, with just 22% viewing him unfavorably – an improvement from his already positive numbers among the same voters pre-debate (46% favorable, 32% unfavorable).
      Debate watchers came away with roughly net neutral views of Vance following the debate: 41% rated him favorably and 44% unfavorably. That’s also an improvement from their image of Vance pre-debate, when his ratings among this group were deeply underwater (30% favorable, 52% unfavorable).
      That is the closest of the last five VP debates, according to CNN snap polls:CNN’s snap poll has viewers split over who won the debate – but Vance narrowly wins.The poll of 574 registered voters saw 51% say that Vance won the debate, with 49% choosing Walz.Polled before the debate, 54% of voters thought Walz was likelier to win.CNN adds this caveat: “The poll’s results reflect opinions of the debate only among those voters who tuned in and aren’t representative of the views of the full voting public. Debate watchers in the poll were 3 points likelier to be Democratic-aligned than Republican-aligned, making for an audience that’s about 5 percentage points more Democratic-leaning than all registered voters nationally.” More

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      Memoir contradicts Republican Senate candidate’s ‘below the poverty line’ tale

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      At a recent campaign event in Whitehall, Montana, the Republican US Senate candidate Tim Sheehy told voters that a decade ago, when he set up the aerial firefighting company through which he made his fortune, he and his wife were living “below the poverty line”.“My wife and I homeschool our kids,” Sheehy said. “We made that decision several years ago. She’s a Marine, naval academy graduate, she could have a great job and even when our company was tiny, and we … were below the poverty line and making no money, we said: ‘No … the most important job in the world is being a mother.’ And she’s doing that every day.”A little more than a month from election day, in a race that could decide control of the Senate, such hardscrabble tales are helping Sheehy lead the Democratic incumbent, Jon Tester, a longtime Montana farmer. The two men are due to debate in Missoula on Monday night.But Sheehy’s claim about living in poverty while building his company, Bridger Aerospace, is contradicted by his own memoir.In that book, Mudslingers, published last year, the former navy Seal writes that when he and his wife contemplated leaving the military, in 2013, they “weren’t wealthy, but … did have resources”.This, he writes, was in part thanks to having “lived quite frugally during our time in the military, spending a lot of time deployed, accumulating savings, taking advantage of base housing and meals, and of course spending almost nothing while on deployment.“So, we had amassed a nest egg of close to $300,000. I also had some money that my parents had been putting away for me since I was a kid. All told, we had roughly $400,000 to allocate toward building a business and establishing a new life.”In 2014, as Sheehy got his company going, the US health department defined the poverty guideline for a family of three in Montana as $19,790. The poverty threshold, as defined by the US Census Bureau, was $19,055.By his own account, Sheehy set out to build Bridger Aerospace with 20 times that – a sum he calls “not exactly chump change”.Sheehy has also regularly claimed to have “bootstrapped” his company, a term the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as “to promote or develop by initiative and effort with little or no assistance”.Yet in his book, Sheehy describes both receiving the $100,000 his parents had saved for him and asking his father and brother to help him pay $500,000 to buy necessary planes. His father, he writes, “backed me, financially and emotionally, without expecting anything in return”, while his brother was given an “equity stake in the business”.Sheehy also describes how in 2017 his brother helped secure investment from Blackstone Group, the New York private equity behemoth led by Stephen Schwartzman, a top Republican donor, in order to pull off a $200m aircraft order.Sheehy grew up in Minnesota and attended the US Naval Academy in Maryland. Describing his early days in Montana, he has often told of how he, his wife and their first child started out living in a tent. That might boost his claim of living below the poverty line, but Sheehy has also described how living under canvas was a choice.Having purchased “60 undeveloped acres”, Sheehy writes in his book, “the simple and probably sane thing to do would have been to rent an apartment in town while we got the business off the ground”. But they chose to build a house, and to camp while the structure went up.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSheehy’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. News of Sheehy’s book contradicting his own claim about living in poverty, however, follows similar reporting regarding his claims about his background.The Montana Free Press was among outlets to report that though Sheehy has said he grew up in “rural Minnesota … surrounded by farmland”, he in fact “grew up in a multimillion-dollar lake house, learned to fly under the tutelage of a neighbour, [and] attended a private high school”.In May, the Daily Beast reported that Sheehy’s campaign trail claims about how he left the US military do not match those in his book. Sheehy’s campaign responded angrily, claiming an attack on his patriotism and service. Then, this month, the Guardian reported documents seemingly showing Sheehy did not follow Department of Defense protocol for clearing sections of Mudslingers that deal with military subjects, including deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The campaign did not respond.Regardless, Sheehy seems well-placed to secure a Senate seat, holding seven- and eight-point leads over Tester, a three-term moderate Democrat.Federal figures regarding poverty in Montana in 2014 do back up one claim in Sheehy’s book. Describing how he hired his first employees, he says he paid just $1,500 a month, amounting to $18,000 a year, to his first chief pilot, Tim Cherwin.Cherwin brought with him “the chain-smoking desert rat Steve Taylor, who would become our director of maintenance”. Sheehy, who says he started the business with $400,000, says both men were “earning wages below the poverty line”. 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