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      Dick Cheney confirms he will vote for Kamala Harris, saying no ‘greater threat’ to US than Donald Trump – live

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      Dick Cheney has confirmed that he will be voting for the Democratic ticket in the US presidential election. The statement from the Republican former vice-president came hours after his daughter Liz Cheney, the former Republican representative for Wyoming, told a crowd that her father would be supporting Harris.His pronouncement comes days after Liz told a North Carolina crowd that she would also be voting for Harris.The Georgia bureau of investigations (GBI) has announced that threats directed at other Georgia schools in the wake of Wednesday’s mass shooting have been deemed non-credible.In a press release on its website, the GBI says that an increase in threats and subsequent tips from concerned people are common after these types of shootings, and that those who make these threats will be “investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”.The White House has condemned Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, over his interview with Darryl Cooper, a Holocaust revisionist and podcast host who, during an interview released on Monday, argued that the Holocaust was the result of Germany not knowing what to do with prisoners of war.The interview drew the ire of Jewish leaders, and in a statement to the New York Times, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said:
      Giving a microphone to a Holocaust denier who spreads Nazi propaganda is a disgusting and sadistic insult to all Americans, to the memory of the over six million Jews who were genocidally murdered by Adolf Hitler, to the service of the millions of Americans who fought to defeat Nazism and to every subsequent victim of antisemitism.
      In a now-deleted tweet, Elon Musk described the interview between Carlson and Cooper as: “Very interesting. Worth watching.”A 15-year-old student has been shot and injured at Joppatowne high school in Maryland, about 24 miles north of Baltimore. The shooting appears to have stemmed from a fight on campus, and a 16-year old student has been arrested, ABC News reports.The injured student was airlifted to a local trauma unit and is in serious condition, authorities say. Deputies responded within two minutes and at least 100 other officers showed up to the scene.“It showed our response – as if it was one – is ready. I pray we never have to test that system,” Jeff Gahler, sheriff of Harford county, said during a press conference.The shooting on Friday comes days after two students and two adults were killed and nine others were injured during a mass shooting at Apalachee high school in Georgia.Here is video of the moment Liz Cheney revealed that her father, Dick Cheney, will be voting for Kamala Harris:
      Think about the moment that we’re in and you think about how serious this moment is … My dad believes … there’s never been an individual in our country who is as grave a threat to our democracy as Donald Trump is and that’s the moment that we’re facing and so I think recognizing that, Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” Cheney said.
      Dick Cheney will vote for Kamala Harris in November, the former vice-president’s daughter Liz Cheney said on Friday.In an interview on Friday at the Texas Tribune Festival, Liz Cheney said: “Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” NBC reports.Earlier this week, Liz Cheney addressed an audience at Duke University, where she said: “Because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”During her interview on Friday, Liz Cheney also said that she will support the senatorial bid of Colin Allred, Texas’s Democratic representative.Speaking of Allred, who is challenging Ted Cruz, the Republican incumbent, Cheney called him a “tremendous, serious candidate”, adding: “We need people who are going to serve in good faith … We need people who are honorable public servants, and in this race, that is Colin Allred, so I’ll be working on his behalf.”Tim Walz has responded to JD Vance’s comment following Georgia’s deadly school shooting in which he said school shootings are “just a fact of life”.Walz, who has previously voiced support for an assault weapons ban, said in response to Vance’s comment:
      This is pathetic. We can’t quit on our kids – they deserve better.
      Republicans have repeatedly criticised and rejected calls for gun safety reforms including increased background checks and red flag policies, and have instead pointed to mental health issues as a chief reason for mass shootings across the country.Before Donald Trump’s trip to North Carolina today, the Fraternal Order of Police issued the following statement of endorsement of him:
      In every election cycle, the FOP pays close attention to which presidential campaign highlights the issues most vital to the men and women of the FOP, including the challenges faced by the rank-and-file law enforcement officers, the real issues in public safety, and the problems in our criminal justice system …
      The National FOP endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. He led our nation through some very tough times. He provided our nation with strong, effective leadership during his first term, and now that he is seeking election to a second term, we intend to help him win it.
      In his decision, Judge Juan Merchan wrote that the “court is a fair, impartial and apolitical institution”.He went on to add that delaying Trump’s sentencing should “dispel any suggestion” that he tried “to give an advantage to, or to create a disadvantage for, any political party and for any candidate for any office”.Hello, US politics blog readers. It’s a very busy news day even though the election campaign trail itself is rather quiet.Kamala Harris is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, behind closed doors preparing for her historic debate next Tuesday with her opponent for the White House in November, Donald Trump. But she has been given good news in the form of her latest fundraising and polling results.Trump, meanwhile, has been dealing with legal troubles in New York. First, he appeared in civil court at a hearing in which he is appealing a civil judgment against him that he sexually abused the writer E Jean Carroll, before holding a press conference uptown and then getting a vital judicial decision in his New York criminal case.Here’s where things stand:

      The judge in the New York criminal case in which Donald Trump was convicted earlier this year of election-related fraud over hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and a cover-up has delayed sentencing of the former president until after the election.

      Donald Trump launched an angry tirade against E Jean Carroll, the Biden administration, Kamala Harris, news networks including ABC and CNN, and Iran and China in a long and aggressive press conference filled top to bottom with outlandish claims and personal attacks.

      More than 90 business leaders, including the heads of Yelp and Chobani, endorsed Kamala Harris’s presidential bid, in a new letter. It was also signed by current and former top executives including the former CEOs of PepsiCo, Ford Motor, Yahoo! and 21st Century Fox, and said: “Harris has a strong record of advancing actions to spur business investment in the United States and ensure American businesses can compete and win.”

      Trump’s lawyers argued at an appeal hearing in civil court in New York that the trial spurred by a lawsuit brought forth by the writer E Jean Carroll, where a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse, consisted of improper evidence.

      Kamala Harris’s election campaign brought in $361m in contributions the last month, nearly tripling the $130m raised by Trump’s campaign during the same period. The campaign of Harris and Tim Walz, her running mate and the governor of Minnesota, called it the biggest grassroots fundraiser in presidential campaign history.

      Joe Biden is due to arrive in Ann Arbor, Michigan, soon, where he will speak about his administration’s economic agenda.

      JD Vance sparked a political row after calling school shootings an unwelcome “fact of life” and saying schools need stronger security, while Democrats, led by Biden and Harris, want stronger gun control, especially a ban on assault-style rifles, including the semi-automatic gun that was used in the school shooting in Georgia earlier this week.
      Donald Trump and his legal team had asked Justice Juan Merchan to push back the former president’s criminal sentencing date until after the presidential vote on 5 November.Merchan moments ago announced the sentencing would be pushed back from 18 September to 26 November (a Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving).Here’s a fuller quote from Merchan’s response to both sides’ legal teams, picked out from the official decision by Reuters:
      This matter is one that stands alone in a unique place in this Nation’s history. Unfortunately, we are now at a place in time that is fraught with complexities rendering the requirements of a sentencing hearing, should one be necessary, difficult to execute,.
      Trump’s lawyers earlier this month had argued there would not be enough time before the original sentencing date for the defense to potentially appeal Merchan’s forthcoming ruling on Trump’s request to overturn the conviction due to the supreme court’s landmark decision on presidential immunity. Merchan had been scheduled to rule on that motion on 16 September.He wrote today that he now plans to rule on that motion on 12 November.The supreme court’s 6-3 ruling, which related to a separate criminal case Trump faces – the federal election meddling case – found that presidents cannot be criminally prosecuted for their official acts, and that evidence of presidents’ official actions cannot be used to help prove criminal cases involving unofficial actions. More

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      ‘Deeply disturbed’: White House calls for inquiry in to killing of Ayşenur Eygi by Israeli troops

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      The White House said it is “deeply disturbed” by the death of an American woman who was shot in the head by Israeli troops during a protest against Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and called for Israel to investigate her killing, which has caused strong reactions across the international community.The US state department confirmed the death of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, a volunteer peace activist with the anti-occupation International Solidarity Movement (ISM).Eygi – a US-Turkey dual national – died on Friday after being fatally shot during a regular protest against settlement expansion in Beita near Nablus, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.The ISM, which organises foreign volunteers in the Palestinian territories, said Israeli forces “intentionally shot and killed” an international human rights activist during the weekly protest on Friday morning. It did not name the volunteer.“The demonstration, which primarily involved men and children praying, was met with violence from the Israeli army stationed on a hill. The volunteer died shortly after being transported to a local hospital in Nablus,” the ISM said in a statement.The individual’s family had requested privacy as they mourn their loss, it said. “Their wish to grieve in peace should be respected by all, as they navigate this tragic and difficult situation.”The US has not said whether Eygi had been shot by Israeli troops. “We are urgently gathering more information about the circumstances of her death, and will have more to say as we learn more,” Matthew Miller, a state department spokesperson, said.The US ambassador to Israel, Jacob Lew, echoed those comments, posting to X his “deepest condolences” to Eygi’s family and loved ones. “We have no higher priority than the safety and security of American citizens,” he added.The White House said it had contacted the Israeli government and requested an investigation into Eygi’s killing. “We are deeply disturbed by the tragic death of an American citizen, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, today in the West Bank and our hearts go out to her family and loved ones,” said Sean Savett, the White House’s national security council spokesperson.Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, the country’s top diplomat, deplored the “tragic loss”. “When we have more info, we will share it, make it available and, as necessary, we’ll act on it,” Blinken told reporters, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).Turkey’s foreign ministry said it had learned “with great sorrow” that a Turkish national had been killed. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, condemned Israel’s “barbaric intervention against a civilian protest” that he said led to Eygi’s killing.The Israeli military admitted to firing at the demonstrators and said it was looking into reports that a foreign national was killed. The Israel Defense Forces said it “responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them”.Eygi graduated from the University of Washington earlier this year, according to Aria Fani, an assistant professor of Middle Eastern languages and cultures. Fani said Eygi was an exceptional student and person.He said he had seen Eygi about two months earlier and urged her not to go to the West Bank because he was worried for her safety there.The University of Washington said she had been a peer mentor there, having helped “welcome new students to the department and provided a positive influence in their lives”.In a statement, the university’s president, Ana Mari Cauce, described Eygi’s killing as “awful” and said she called for “a ceasefire and resolution to the crisis” on the West Bank.“My heart goes out to Ayşenur’s family, friends and loved ones,” she added.Pramila Jayapal, the US representative for the area, said in a statement that Eygi’s death was a “terrible tragedy”.“My office is actively working to gather more information on the events that led to her death,” Jayapal said. “I am very troubled by the reports that she was killed by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers. The Netanyahu government has done nothing to stop settlement expansion and settler violence in the West Bank, often encouraged by rightwing ministers of the Netanyahu government. The killing of an American citizen is a terrible proof point in this senseless war of rising tensions in the region.”Eygi is the third ISM activist to have been killed since 2000, according to the Associated Press. She was the 18th demonstrator to be killed in Beita since 2020, the ISM said.In 2003, while protesting against the Israeli military’s destruction of houses in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Rachel Corrie – a 23-year-old US citizen from Olympia in Washington state – was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer.A month later, Tom Hurndall, a 22-year-old Briton, was shot in the head while he was helping Palestinian children cross a street in Rafah. He died the following year. An Israeli soldier was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years in prison.In August, an American activist said he was shot in the leg by Israeli forces during a protest in Beita. The man, who spoke to the AFP using a pseudonym, said Israeli troops were “firing teargas at us, live rounds” and that he was shot while he was running away. More

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      North Carolina court rules RFK Jr’s name must be taken off state ballots

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      A North Carolina appeals court on Friday ruled that Robert F Kennedy Jr’s name must be taken off state ballots for president, upending plans in the battleground state just as officials were about to begin mailing out the nation’s first absentee ballots for the 5 November presidential election.The intermediate-level court of appeals issued an order granting Kennedy’s request to halt the mailing of ballots that included his name. The court also told a trial judge to order the state board of elections to distribute ballots without Kennedy’s name on them. No legal explanation was given.State law otherwise requires the first absentee ballots to be mailed or transmitted no later than 60 days before the general election, making Friday the deadline. The process of reprinting and assembling ballot packages would probably take more than two weeks, state attorneys have said. The ruling could be appealed.Kennedy, the nominee of the We the People party in North Carolina, had sued last week to get off the state’s ballots after he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump. But the Democratic majority on the state board of elections rejected the request, saying it was too late in the process of printing ballots and coding tabulation machines. Kennedy then sued.Rebecca Holt, a Wake county superior court judge, on Thursday denied Kennedy’s effort to keep his name off ballots, prompting his appeal. In the meantime, Holt told election officials to hold back sending absentee ballots until noon Friday.A favorable outcome for Kennedy could assist Trump’s efforts to win North Carolina. The Republican nominee won the state’s electoral votes by just 1.3% over Joe Biden in 2020.More than 132,500 people – military and overseas workers and in-state civilian residents – have requested North Carolina absentee ballots so far, the elections board said.In an email, Paul Cox, state board attorney, told election directors in all 100 counties after Friday’s ruling to hold on to the current ballots but not send them. More than 2.9m absentee and in-person ballots have been printed so far.No decision has been made on appealing Friday’s decision, Cox wrote, and removing Kennedy and running mate Nicole Shanahan from the ballot would be “a major undertaking for everyone”, Cox wrote.Since Kennedy suspended his campaign, the environmentalist and author has tried to get his name removed from ballots in several states where the race between Trump and Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, is expected to be close.Kennedy on Wednesday sued in Wisconsin to get his name removed from the presidential ballot there after the state elections commission voted to keep him on it. Kennedy also filed a lawsuit in Michigan but a judge ruled on Tuesday that he must remain on the ballot there.Read more about the 2024 US election

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      American democracy is in peril. And racism will be the sledgehammer that destroys it | Kimberlé W Crenshaw

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      Racism has been the achilles heel of American democracy since its founding as a racialized project, predicated on theft of land, of labor and of the reproductive autonomy of Black women. These are truths that Maga extremists want to erase.But it is not just history that Maga wants to silence and it isn’t just Maga that has acquiesced. Because we have not normalized the important conversation about our racial history and its present consequences, the dangerous nexus between anti-democratic forces in our nation and its racist foundations is among the least talked about dimensions of our slide into fascism.The anti-woke assault on race-conscious history and knowledge and against the hard-fought policies to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is extremely dangerous, not only to people of color, but to stakeholders of racial justice and democracy. Despite the intentional misdirection, the war against woke is not just a war against critical race theory, but it is a war against Black history and the entire infrastructure built out of the civil rights movement. It is a war against our multiracial democracy that too many are unable to name. And because assaults that cannot be seen or named cannot be fought, the consequences are disastrous.The mainstream media contribute to our collective incapacity to wrestle with the forces that continue to bedevil our democracy. In coverage of the January 6 insurrection, the racist and white nationalist underbelly that informs the mantra “we want our country back” is merely a footnote in the story of how we almost lost our democracy. This erasure denies the centrality of the racist narrative that defines who this nation belongs to, who gets to govern and who gets to belong.Exclusive notions of who belongs and who doesn’t are fundamental features of fascist regimes. Yet in the drama unfolding in the United States, the racial narratives that continue to target racial others to receive the wrath of disgruntled masses escape the grasp of those who now decry the collapse of our democracy. The media’s widespread reluctance to confront the racist underbelly of the “big lie” obscures the impossibility of saving our democracy without addressing racial denialism.Where did Trump target his venomous big lie? It was Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta and Phoenix. Who were the voters there who “illegitimately” denied him the White House? Black and brown voters. Who were the poll workers who supposedly did this dirty work? African American women like Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman. The failure to confront the racial contours of the myth of a stolen election has facilitated a dangerous and misleading wormhole to the past. It was no accident that among the most chilling symbols that marched through the Capitol that day – for the first time ever – was the Confederate flag.Congressman Jamie Raskin was one of a very few observers alarmed by this reflection of Maga’s “common cause with extremist groups steeped in racism and hellbent on insurrection”. And yet, the insight gained from a fully realized encounter with our past languishes in the margins of our national discourse. As the great poet Langston Hughes wrote, “we are the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word Fascism. We Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action. We know.” It is an enduring awareness that is being written out of our usable history.Toni Morrison, writing across the decades, explained how the creation of a pariah class was one of the first steps of fascist regimes. As she noted, such regimes “isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse”.So it is not merely ironic that Morrison, one of the most celebrated American authors of the 20th century, has become one of the most banned writers in this country. It is evidence. The fact that Morrison was so prophetic in telling us what this crisis means is all the more reason that our response to so-called “anti-woke” censorship should be reflexive. If the Maga faction wants to silence and suppress our voices, we must go to the mat to sustain them all the more. What is at stake is more than a book, a theory, a practice or a value. What is at stake is our democracy itself. We cannot save it without fortifying the tools, histories and ideas that are the legacies of the long fights against racial injustice.Derrick Bell once wrote something that may, unexpectedly, open a pathway to recover the lost momentum that was quashed by the fierce reaction to the post-George Floyd reckoning. The backlash against the demands for racial justice that erupted in all 50 states has metastasized into the anti-woke juggernaut against anti-racism, critical race theory, 1619 and now DEI. For too long, too many of our allies and stakeholders sat it out, thinking that the stakes were not that high, that we could simply pivot and not use certain words, effectively dodging the backlash by saying “we don’t do that here”.Now that this assault came for something that most Americans really do care about – their country – the potential for interest convergence is ripe. Our country cannot be saved without the input of “the other”, without our history, and without the knowledge about this country that we have long brought to the table. We cannot pivot our way out of this crisis. Our only choice is to fight – to fight for our freedom to speak our history, to name our reality, to learn our condition and to vote to change it.

      Kimberlé W Crenshaw is the Co-founder and Executive Director of African American Policy Forum and Faculty Director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS). She is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism, and the law. She is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the Promise Institute Chair on Human Rights at UCLA Law School More

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      South Park creators to ignore Trump when show returns in 2025

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      The creators of the Emmy-winning series South Park intend to ignore Donald Trump when the irreverent animated show returns for a 27th season in 2025, they said in a rare interview.“I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump,” Matt Stone told Vanity Fair in reference to the former US president whose life is seemingly consumed by unadulterated drama.Stone added that part of the strategy for intentionally avoiding mention of the current Republican nominee for November’s presidential race is how much of “a mind scramble” it can be to satirize such a contest.“We’ve tried to do South Park through four or five presidential elections, and it is such a hard thing,” said Stone, who launched the series in 1997 alongside Trey Parker on Comedy Central. “And it seems like it takes outsized importance.“Obviously, it’s fucking important, but it kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun,” he added in the interview, which was posted on Thursday.Part of the reason that South Park’s latest season received a tentative 2025 release date was to give time for Paramount+ – the platform which now streams the show – “to figure all their shit out”, Stone remarked. But Stone also said, “honestly, it’s on purpose,” that he and Parker were skipping the electoral showdown between Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice-President Kamala Harris.The posture that Stone laid out to Vanity Fair strikes a marked contrast with how South Park addressed the 2016 presidential race that Trump unexpectedly won against former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. In the show, an elementary school teacher character voiced by Parker ran for president, defeated Clinton and served in the Oval Office for multiple seasons, adopting a look and style that was clearly inspired by Trump.Thursday’s interview in Vanity Fair described how Stone and Parker mounted a “36-hour mad dash to make an episode about the 2016 election after being stunned (like most of the rest of the country) about Trump’s victory”.Trump has offered commentators – satirical or otherwise – plenty of more material since, including by losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden and being convicted in May of criminally falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him.Among numerous other legal problems, he is facing three more criminal indictments stemming from his efforts to nullify his defeat to Biden as well as his retention of government secrets after his presidency – and he survived an assassination attempt at a political rally in July.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSouth Park centers on the adventures of a group of four, mostly foul-mouthed boys who are growing up in a town in Colorado. The show has profanely satirized an overwhelmingly wide range of topics, managing to win critical acclaim and establish itself as an unusually long-running program despite some viewers finding its content too offensive.Its creators are also famous for The Book of Mormon – their Tony-winning musical – along with the cult classic films BASEketball and Team America: World Police. More

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      Backlash for JD Vance after calling school shooting a ‘fact of life’

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      America’s ideological split over gun control has spilled over into the presidential campaign after JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, voiced regret that school shootings had “become a fact of life” in the US.Vance’s comments – in the wake of the latest deadly shooting, at Apalachee high school in Georgia – ignited a political row after Democrats depicted them as evidence of a lack of empathy while Republicans claimed the remarks had been taken out of context.Vance called for more security measures in schools without mentioning gun control, while Democrats including Kamala Harris and the US president, Joe Biden, want a ban on assault-style rifles, more background checks and other gun safety action.Asked about the Georgia shooting while speaking at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on Thursday evening, Vance said: “I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realise that our schools are soft targets.”The boy who is charged in the Georgia school shooting is 14 years old.Vance continued: “We’ve got to bolster security at our schools so that a person who walks through the front door … and wants to kill a bunch of children – they’re not able to. As a parent, do I want my kids’ school to have additional security? No, of course I don’t. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”The remarks, which were prefaced by an attack on the pro-gun control stance of Harris, the Democratic nominee for president in this November’s election, were immediately seized on by the Harris campaign.“School shootings are not just a fact of life,” the Democratic nominee posted on X (formerly Twitter), linking to footage of Vance’s comments.“It doesn’t have to be this way. We can take action to protect our children – and we will.”Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, had accused Harris of wanting to “take law-abiding citizens’ guns away from them”.Republicans and Democrats have become increasingly polarised on gun control, with one party standing on the issue of gun owners’ rights and the other identifying with efforts to bring stricter controls.But the row between the two presidential tickets was overshadowed by Republican anger at the Associated Press, which had been accused of misrepresenting Vance’s comments in a post on X.“JD VANCE says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security,” read the post. It was subsequently taken down and replaced with a more nuanced version providing greater explanation.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and says the US needs to harden security to prevent more carnage like the shooting this week that left four dead in Georgia,” the second iteration read. A second follow-up post said: “This post replaces an earlier post that was deleted to add context to the partial quote from Vance.”The posts were greeted with derision on X, with the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, writing: “AP stand for Associated Propaganda.”On Thursday night, Tim Walz, the governor or Minnesota and Harris’s running mate on the Democratic ticket, posted to X, Elon Musk’s social media platform formerly called Twitter, a clip of Vance’s speech, and commented: “This is pathetic. We can’t quit on our kids – they deserve better.”Trump, responding to a question on the Georgia shootings at a Fox News town hall meeting from the Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday, said: “It’s a sick and angry world for a lot of reasons and we’re going to make it better, and we’re going to heal our world.”The former president has been accused of showing a lack of sympathy after previous shooting episodes. In response to a deadly assault in Perry, Iowa, last January that killed three people, he said: “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here. But we have to get over it – we have to move forward.”A 14-year-old suspect, Colt Gray, is in police custody and is expected to be tried on four counts of murder over Wednesday’s shooting in Georgia, which left two pupils and two teachers dead. The authorities have pressed second-degree murder charges against his father, Colin Gray, for allowing his son to posses the gun. More

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      The Kamala Harris campaign has Fox News grasping at straws – literally | Margaret Sullivan

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      Watching Fox News these days is like being at open-mic night at a marginal comedy club.Rightwing pundits, like a lineup of amateur comics, are trying out their new material and hoping it kills. So far, not so much.Take Jesse Watters (please). The primetime successor to Tucker Carlson was grasping at straws – yes, literal straws – the other day as he looked for a way to put down Tim Walz. How best to mock the popular Minnesota governor who is Kamala Harris’s running mate?“Women love masculinity and women do not like Tim Walz, so that should just tell you about how masculine Tim Walz is,” Watters said on the roundtable talk show he co-hosts, The Five.With that setup, he tried to prove his point.“The other day you saw him with a vanilla ice-cream shake. Had a straw in it. Again, that tells you everything.”The joke, or whatever it was, didn’t really land. Most people know that Walz is the opposite of a wimp. He’s a famously regular guy – America’s dad – who will use his newfound power to demand that all Americans own jumper cables and know how to use them.The straw-grasping is getting a little desperate these days as Harris and Walz spread their forward-looking message, and as their rivals – the felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance – prove themselves less appealing by the day.“Fox is really feeling the loss of Tucker Carlson right now,” theorized Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, the progressive media-watchdog non-profit, who watches a lot of rightwing cable news as part of his job.“He was very effective at lifting something from the rightwing fever swamp and making it into a coherent message” that could spread through the conservative ecosystem.Failing Tucker’s contributions to the commonweal, Fox and its pundits are floundering. They keep trying new approaches to replace their well-honed attacks on Biden – his family’s supposed corruption (“Biden crime family”) and his age (“senile”).Over the past week, Fox tried to gin up controversy over Harris’s “code-switching” – the use of a different accent or speaking style when speaking to Black audiences. Fox’s White House correspondent Peter Doocy pressed the question at an official press briefing.“Since when does the vice-president have what sounds like a southern accent?” Doocy demanded. The press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, dismissed him and moved on after posing a query of her own: “Do you think Americans seriously think this is an important question?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMaria Bartiromo focused on this “southern accent” scandal on her Fox Business show, using a clip of Harris speaking to an audience in Detroit about how unions have helped win benefits for all Americans, like paid sick leave and a five-day work week, by repeating the phrase: “You’d better thank a union member.”The pro-Trump cable network didn’t help its own cause with that one. “The funny thing about Fox News being mad at Harris for code-switching,” one observer noted on X, “is they had to play the clip of her talking about how great unions are over and over again.” You can’t buy that kind of media exposure.The well-circulated photograph of Tim Walz’s family members wearing pro-Trump T-shirts fizzled, too, though it got a good ride on Fox for a day or two. Soon enough, it became clear that these were mostly distant cousins, a Nebraska branch of the family. Walz’s sister told the Associated Press she didn’t even recognize them. Walz does have an older brother who favors Trump, but most Americans are familiar with family disputes over politics.Gertz told me that Fox pundits were sent reeling by Harris’s ascension and are “very shook by the ‘weird’ narrative” that Tim Walz has popularized. That’s the idea that Trump, Vance and their ilk are deeply strange people – way out of the mainstream with their nasty putdowns of “childless cat ladies” and their outlandish conspiracy theories. It applies all too well to the Fox personalities as well as the politicians they promote.There’s time, of course, for Fox to come up with an effective message. Until something hits, we’re going to see a lot of painful tryouts.The alternative, of course, is obvious: just don’t turn it on.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      What’s at stake in the US election? The climate for the next million years | Bill McKibben

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      This is the first part of the standfirst This is the second part of the standfirst Headline what’s at stake?
      View image in fullscreenHere is the biggest thing happening on our planet as we head into the autumn of 2024: the Earth is continuing to heat dramatically. Scientists have said that there’s a better than 90% chance that this year will top 2023 as the warmest ever recorded. And paleoclimatologists were pretty sure last year was the hottest in the last 125,000 years. The result is an almost-cliched run of disasters: open Twitter/X anytime for pictures of floods pushing cars through streets somewhere. It is starting to make life on this planet very difficult, and in some places impossible. And it’s on target to get far, far worse.Here’s the second-biggest thing happening on our planet right now: finally, finally, renewable energy, mostly from the sun and wind, seems to be reaching some sort of takeoff point. By some calculations, we’re now putting up a nuclear plant’s worth of solar panels every day. In California, there are now enough solar farms and wind turbines that day after day this spring and summer they supplied more than 100% of the state’s electric needs for long stretches; there are now enough batteries on the grid that they become the biggest source of power after dark. In China it looks as if carbon emissions may have peaked – they’re six years ahead of schedule on the effort to build out renewables.And here’s the third biggest thing in the months ahead: the American presidential election, which looks as if it is going down to the wire – and which may have the power to determine how high the temperature goes and how fast we turn to clean power.Donald Trump gave an interview last week, in which he laid out his understanding of climate change:
      “You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming. They don’t call it that any more, they call it climate change because you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming, and it didn’t work. So they finally got it right, they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming. You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling. In the 1920s they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up. And we’re still waiting for the 12 years. You know we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand that, where these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at school, they didn’t even study it, they predict, they said we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies because they said – it’s so crazy. But the problem isn’t the fact that the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch, the problem is nuclear weapons. It’s nuclear warming … These poor fools talk about global warming all the time, you know the planet’s going to global warm to a point where the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years, you know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather.”
      I’ve quoted this at length because this could again be the most important man on the planet, talking about the most important issue the planet has ever faced. And he’s gotten every word of it wrong. It’s gibberish.View image in fullscreenBut it’s gibberish in the service of something very important and very dangerous: doing all that he can to block the energy transition, in America and around the world. His friends at Project 2025 have laid out in considerable detail how you translate that gibberish into policy. It lays out in loving detail many of the steps his administration would use to bolster oil, gas and coal while sidetracking sun and wind. These include ending the effort to spur EV production in Detroit; ending support for renewables (Trump has promised to “kill wind”, whatever that means); and reversing a crucial 2009 finding from the EPA that carbon dioxide causes harm, a position that undergirds much of the federal effort to rein in climate pollution. He has also – chef’s kiss – promised to close down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, otherwise known as the people who measure how much the temperature is rising. That’s on the grounds that those measurements are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”.‘Drill, baby, drill’In return for this endless largesse (beginning on day one, Trump said, he would become a dictator in order to “drill, baby, drill”), he has asked the industry for only (Austin Powers moment here) “one billion dollars” in campaign contributions. Big oil is doing its best. As the Washington Post reported a couple of weeks ago, Harold Hamm, one of the country’s most prominent frackers, is working the phones to come up with as much cash as possible. Hamm is working “incredibly hard to raise as much money as he can from the energy sector”, said a Trump campaign aide. “We’ve gotten max-out checks from people we’ve never gotten a dollar from before.”Can Trump reverse the tide towards renewable energy? No, not entirely – it’s too strong, based on the ever-falling cost of sun, wind and batteries. Even in Texas, HQ of the hydrocarbon cartel where the state legislature has tried to pass laws limiting renewables, the undeniable economics of clean power continue to surge. The Lone Star state is now leading the nation in installing batteries on its grid, a good thing given the ongoing spate of climate disasters that strain and stress the state’s system.But he can slow it down considerably. America’s buildout of renewables is dependent, among other things, on overcoming the bewildering array of permitting requirements that make every transmission line a harrowing bureaucratic battle. At the moment, the Biden-Harris White House has a dedicated team at work, with senior officials assigned to senior projects, constantly bird-dogging them to make sure that they get built on schedule. That would disappear, replaced with a new set of bureaucrats deeply invested in making sure these projects didn’t happen.At least as bad would be the effect around the world. Last time, Trump withdrew America from the Paris climate accords, badly denting the momentum those talks had produced. This time he’d do the same and more – he’s promised, for instance, to end Biden’s pause on liquefied natural gas export terminals. These are designed to take huge volumes of US gas and ship it to Asia, where it will undercut the move to renewables. It is the last real growth strategy the oil industry has, and it is the biggest greenhouse gas bomb on the planet.View image in fullscreenIn essence, Trump would give every other oligarch in the world – Vladimir Putin, the king of Saudi Arabia, and on down the list – license to keep pumping away. If the biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases is not going to play a role, why should anyone else feel any pressure? As Project 2025 quite clearly declares, Trump would “rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs” and “cease its war on fossil fuels in the developing world”. (Though Trump has claimed not to know anything about Project 2025.) The global climate talks in Brazil next year and the 2026 version in Australia – currently shaping up to be the last huge chance for global cooperation – would be turned on their heads.There are ways to calculate the meaning of all this. The UK-based NGO Carbon Brief, for instance, said earlier this year that “a victory for Donald Trump in November’s presidential election could lead to an additional 4bn tonnes of US emissions by 2030 compared with Joe Biden’s plans”. Just for perspective, that’s a lot: “This extra 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2030 would cause global climate damages worth more than $900bn, based on the latest US government valuations. For context, 4GtCO2e is equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries.” It’s like finding an extra continent full of greenhouse gases.But worse than the totals is the timing. If a Trump administration was merely going to be a four-year interregnum, it would be annoying. But in fact it comes at precisely the moment when we need, desperately, acceleration. We’re on the edge of breaking the planet’s climate system – we can see it cracking in the poles (the Thwaites glacier now undermined by warm seawater), in the Atlantic (the great currents now starting to slow) and in the Amazon (where savannafication seems to be gathering speed). The earth’s hydrological system – how water moves around the earth – has already gone kaflooey, as warm air holds far more water vapor than cold.The world’s climate scientists have done their best to set out a timetable: cut emissions in half by 2030 or see the possibilities of anything like the Paris pathway, holding temperature increases to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, disappear. That cut is on the bleeding edge of the technically possible, but only if everyone is acting in good faith. And the next presidential term will end in January of 2029, which is 11 months before 2030.If we elect Donald Trump, we may feel the effects not for years, and not for a generation. We may read our mistake in the geological record a million years hence. This one really counts. More