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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

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    The mainstream press is failing America – and people are understandably upset | Rebecca Solnit

    The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs”, but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

    Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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    We each have a Nazi in us. We need to understand the psychological roots of authoritarianism | Gabor Maté

    “Any attempt to understand the attraction which fascism exercises upon great nations compels us to recognize the role of psychological factors,” the German-Jewish social psychologist Erich Fromm asserted in 1941. Such factors are not specifically German or, say Italian, nor were they the manifestations of a unique historical era, now safely in the distant past. Not only can the malignant political-economic-ideological climates required for the flowering of fascism develop anywhere, so are its emotional dynamics present in the psyche of most human beings.“We each have a Nazi within,” the Auschwitz survivor Edith Eger has written – pointing, in my observation, to a near-universal reality. Many of us harbor the seeds for hatred, rage, fear, narcissistic self-regard and contempt for others that, in their most venomous and extreme forms, are the dominant emotional currents whose confluence can feed the all-destructive torrent we call fascism, given enough provocation or encouragement.All the more reason to understand the psychic sources of such tendencies, whose ground and nature can be expressed in a word: trauma. In the case of fascism, severe trauma.Nobody is born with rabid hatred, untrammelled rage, existential fear or cold contempt permanently embedded in their minds or hearts. These fulminant emotions, when chronic, are responses to unbearable suffering endured at a time of utmost vulnerability, helplessness and unrelieved threat: that is, in early childhood.The human infant enters the world with the implicit expectation of being safely held, seen, heard, physically protected and emotionally nourished, her feelings welcomed, recognzied, validated and mirrored. Given such an “evolved nest”, in the apt phrase of the psychologist Darcia Narvaez, we develop and maintain a strong connection to ourselves, a deeply rooted confidence in who we are, a trust in innate goodness present in the world and an openness to love within ourselves, as without. Trauma represents a disconnect from these healthy inclinations, in extreme cases a defensive denial of them as being too vulnerable to bear. And that, in essence, is what fascism is on the emotional level: a desperate escape from vulnerability.Looking at the hideous demigod of fascism, Adolf Hitler, or at his present-day caricature Donald Trump, who is often compared to him – including some years ago by his current vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance – we find many remarkable characteristic similarities: relentless self-hypnotising mendacity, mistrust bordering on paranoia, devious opportunism, a deep streak of cruelty, limitless grandiosity, unhinged impulsivity, crushing disdain for the weak.Both had grown up in homes headed by abusive fathers, with mothers impotent to defend their children. In Hitler’s case, the bright and sensitive child suffered merciless violence. Trump was subjected to the ruthless emotional dictatorship of a father, Fred Sr, who Mary, Donald’s psychologist niece, describes as a “sociopath”. “Donald Trump is a poster boy for trauma,” the eminent trauma psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk told me.In both cases the rage and hatred represent eruptions of the forbidden and therefore repressed emotions of childhood and the compensations of a psyche pulverized into insignificance. In turn, as the biographer Volker Ullrich writes: “Hitler … gave the decisive signal for Germans to give free reign to their hatred and destructive desires.” He spoke to and promised to redeem those masses in his nation who also experienced themselves as threatened and insignificant – to “make them great again,” if you will.“What they want,” he wrote, “is the victory of the stronger and the annihilation or the unconditional surrender of the weaker.” This fascistic drive to dominate is the unconscious rejection of the small child’s vulnerability and a defensive identification with the unassailable power of the abusive father.What draws people to such leaders? On the socioeconomic plane, their own sense of exclusion, dislocation, grievance, marginalization, loss of place and meaning. On the emotional, psychological level, a trauma-induced absence of confidence in themselves and the drive to submit for protection to some person perceived as “strong.”This is coupled with an urge to flee from responsibility by casting blame on some vulnerable yet vermin-like and threatening “other” – a Jewish, Muslim, Hispanic or Slavic person, say – who serves as the target of one’s ingrained hostility, the real sources of which rest in the deep infantile unconscious.The American psychologist, Michael Milburn, has studied the childhood antecedents of rightwing ideological rigidity. His research confirms that the harsher the parenting atmosphere people were exposed to as young children, the more prone they are to support authoritarian or aggressive policies, such as foreign wars, punitive laws and the death penalty.“We used physical punishment in childhood as a marker of dysfunctional family environment,” Milburn said. “There was significantly more support for the capital punishment, opposition to abortion and the use of military force, particularly among males who had experienced high levels of physical punishment, especially if they had never had psychotherapy.” I was intrigued by that last finding.“Psychotherapy,” Milburn said, “speaks to a potential for self-examination, for self-reflection.” Self-reflection, something the fascist mentality cannot abide, can soften the heart.Neuroimaging studies have shown that the amygdala, the tiny almond-shaped brain structure that mediates fear, is larger in people with more rightwing views. It is more active in those favoring strong protective authority and harboring a suspicion of outsiders and of people who are different. This is a telling finding, because we know that the development of the circuitry of the brain is decisively influenced by the child’s emotional environment in the early years.“The monster Adolf Hitler, murderer of millions, master of destruction and organized insanity, did not come into the world as a monster” – so wrote the psychoanalyst Alice Miller. Fascism, in that sense, is an all too human phenomenon, an outcome of many influences salient among which, on the personal scale level, is the unspeakable suffering of the child.

    Gabor Maté is a public speaker and the author of five books published in 41 languages, most recently The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in Toxic Culture More

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    Debate camp, role play and rival advice: Trump and Harris prepare for showdown – podcast

    Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will meet face to face on the debate stage next Tuesday. Jonathan Freedland speaks to Paul Begala – who helped Al Gore to prepare for his 2000 debate against George W Bush – about what the 2024 candidates will be doing to prepare.
    What can they do to increase their chances of coming out on top, and will this debate be as election-defining as the last?

    How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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    Trump tells Jewish donors they would be ‘abandoned’ if Harris is elected

    Donald Trump told Jewish donors on Thursday that they would be “abandoned” if Kamala Harris becomes president.In his speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, the Republican presidential candidate also said he would ban refugee resettlement from “terror-infested” areas such as Gaza and arrest “pro-Hamas thugs” who engage in vandalism, an apparent reference to the college student protesters.While Trump sketched out few concrete Middle Eastern policy proposals for a second term, he painted a potential Harris presidency in cataclysmic terms for Israel.“You’re going to be abandoned if she becomes president. And I think you need to explain that to your people … You’re not going to have an Israel if she becomes president,” Trump said without providing evidence for such a claim.Under both Trump and Joe Biden, similar numbers of Palestinians were admitted to the US as refugees. From fiscal year 2017 to 2020, the US accepted 114 Palestinian refugees, according to US state department data, compared with 124 Palestinian refugees from fiscal year 2021 to 31 July of this year.Trump also said US universities would lose accreditation and federal support over what he described as “antisemitic propaganda” if he is elected to the White House.“Colleges will and must end the antisemitic propaganda or they will lose their accreditation and federal support,” Trump said, speaking remotely to a crowd of more than 1,000 donors.Protests roiled college campuses in spring, with students opposing Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and demanding institutions stop doing business with companies backing Israel.Republicans have said the protests show some Democrats are antisemites who support chaos. Protest groups say authorities have unfairly labeled their criticism of Israel’s policies as antisemitic.The Association of American Universities, which says it represents about 70 leading US universities, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In the United States, the federal government does not directly accredit universities but has a role in overseeing the mostly private organizations that give colleges accreditation.The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Trump’s speech.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Democratic presidential candidate has hewed closely to the president’s strong support of Israel and rejected calls from some in the Democratic party that Washington should rethink sending weapons to Israel because of the heavy Palestinian death toll in Gaza.She has, however, called for a ceasefire in Gaza, calling the situation there “devastating”.Health authorities in Gaza say more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli assault on the enclave since the 7 October 2023 attacks led by Hamas.Approximately 1,200 Israelis were killed in the surprise attack and about 250 were taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.The subsequent assault on Gaza has displaced nearly its entire 2.3 million population, caused a hunger crisis and led to genocide allegations at the world court that Israel denies. More

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    Hunter Biden pleads guilty to nine federal tax charges – live

    Hunter Biden, the US president Joe Biden’s son, has pleaded guilty to federal tax charges.The 54-year-old entered his plea at a Los Angeles courthouse on Thursday. Prosecutors say he failed to pay his taxes on time from 2016 to 2019, and Biden faced two felony counts of filing a false return and an additional felony count of tax evasion.Hunter Biden’s decision to plead guilty in the high-profile federal tax case against him will spare the president from a potentially embarrassing trial ahead of a crucial US election.Hunter Biden has been open about his struggles with drugs and alcohol, and a trial was expected to dig into his life, including the millions he earned in consultancy work abroad, a crack cocaine addiction and the large sums he spent on online pornography. Republicans have long seized on his work with the Ukrainian industrial conglomerate Burisma and a Chinese private equity firm to criticize Joe Biden.Hunter Biden faces up to 17 years in prison and $450,000 in penalties after pleading guilty to all nine counts against him in a federal tax case.The president’s son was scheduled to stand trial in Los Angeles after he allegedly failed to pay $1.4m in taxes between 2016 and 2019. During that time, the 54-year-old, who has struggled with addiction, was reportedly spending lavishly on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature”.“In short, everything but his taxes”, prosecutors said.His guilty plea will allow Biden to avoid a trial. Typically, defendants who plead guilty in criminal cases reach an agreement with prosecutors beforehand in order to obtain a shorter sentence, but that does not appear to have happened in this case.Hunter Biden, the US president Joe Biden’s son, has pleaded guilty to federal tax charges.The 54-year-old entered his plea at a Los Angeles courthouse on Thursday. Prosecutors say he failed to pay his taxes on time from 2016 to 2019, and Biden faced two felony counts of filing a false return and an additional felony count of tax evasion.US investigators have indicted a prominent Russian state television personality and his wife for violating sanctions and for money laundering as the White House targets Kremlin influence operations before the US presidential election.Dimitri Simes, a television presenter and producer for Russia’s state-owned Channel One, was charged with receiving more than $1m (£759,000) in compensation, a personal car and driver and a stipend for a flat in Moscow, despite the television station’s designation in 2022 by the US’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. He and his wife, Anastasia, were charged with money laundering to hide the proceeds of his work for Channel One.Anastasia Simes, 55, was also charged with buying arts and antiquities for a sanctioned Russian oligarch, Aleksandr Udodov, and then storing the works in their home in Virginia before they were shipped onward to Russia. The works were bought from galleries and auction houses in the United States and Europe.The couple faces 20 years in prison for each count if convicted. They left the US after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and are now believed to be in Russia, the justice department said.Allan Lichtman, the historian dubbed the “Nostradamus” of US presidential elections, has predicted that Kamala Harris will win the White House in November’s poll.Having previously warned the Democrats of the dangers of removing Joe Biden from the ticket, Lichtman nevertheless forecast that the vice-president, who became the party’s nominee after the president withdrew in July, would be elected in a video for the New York Times.He said Harris was on course to beat Donald Trump even though the Democrats had effectively surrendered the valuable key of presidential incumbency, one of 13 he used to determine the likely outcome.“Kamala Harris will be the next president of the United States – at least that’s my prediction for the outcome of this race,” Lichtman, 77, says at the conclusion of the quirky seven-minute video, which features him running in a track athlete’s garb against other elderly competitors in a qualifying race for the 2025 national senior Olympics.“But the outcome is up to you. So get out and vote,” he adds.Lichtman’s predictions are based on a set of true/false propositions, and take no account of polling trends.Hunter Biden’s attorney said Biden is offering to plead guilty to the federal tax charges he faces, without a deal with prosecutors, according to CNN.Hunter Biden, 54, had earlier on Thursday offered to plead guilty to federal tax charges but avoid admitting any wrongdoing – an unusual, last-minute legal manoeuvre that federal prosecutors quickly opposed.In a Los Angeles court earlier today, Hunter Biden sought to enter what is known as an “Alford plea”, an unusual type of guilty plea wherein a defendant does not admit to the allegations against them. US justice department prosecutors in the courtroom, however, said they would not accept that plea.On Thursday afternoon, his lawyers took a surprising turn and said that Hunter Biden was prepared to admit that his conduct satisfied the elements of the tax offenses with which he has been charged, CNN reported.The Harris-Walz campaign launched a new ad on Thursday focused on Project 2025 aimed at Black Americans in key battleground states, warning that a Donald Trump administration would “take Black America backwards”.Trump’s “Project 2025 agenda will give him unchecked political power with no guardrails”, the Harris campaign’s new 30-second spot says:
    Project 2025 would strip away our voting rights protections, and it eliminates the Department of Education. It would also require states to monitor women’s pregnancies. It bans abortion and would rip away health coverage for millions.
    “Donald Trump’s Project 2025 makes one thing clear to Black America: He doesn’t give a damn about us,” said Quentin Fulks, the Harris-Walz principal deputy campaign manager, in a statement.
    This campaign is going to make Trump defend his indefensible Project 2025 and ensure the key coalitions this campaign needs to win in November know exactly how his extreme agenda will take their communities backwards.
    Black voters in the US are often lumped into one bloc, but a new national survey has found that they can be defined by specific clusters: legacy civil rights, secular progressives, next-gen traditionalist, rightfully cynical and race-neutral conservative.Out of the 2,034 registered voters and 918 Black unregistered voters surveyed, 41% of respondents were found to be legacy civil rights voters who skewed older than 50 years old and had the highest voter turnout rates. Legacy civil rights voters were also the most likely group to believe that their vote has the power to drive change. On the other end, the rightfully cynical, 22% of respondents, were the youngest cohort and the least likely to vote. Based on their personal experiences of racism at work and with the police, this cluster was the least likely to believe that their vote matters.Next-gen traditionalists, 18% of respondents, were the most religious and least educated cluster, mostly consisting of millennial and generation Z voters. They had a low voter turnout rate and a moderate belief in the power of their vote. The most progressive respondents fell within the secular progressives cluster, at 12%, of which the majority were educated women who were highly likely to vote.Finally, the race-neutral conservatives, 7% of respondents, consisted mostly of men and were the second oldest cohort as well as the most conservative. Race-neutral conservatives had a moderate voter turnout rate and were likely to blame systemic barriers on individual choices.Katrina Gamble, CEO of Sojourn Strategies, said during a press conference on Wednesday:
    These clusters indicate that there are incredible differences within the Black community, in terms of how people think about democracy and their role in our democracy.
    Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Thursday that President Joe Biden would not pardon Hunter Biden or commute his sentence.“No, it is still very much a no,” the White House press secretary said in response to a reporter asking her whether the president intended to pardon or commute his son’s sentence.This comes as earlier this summer, the president said that he would not commute his son’s sentence, according to the New York Times, and has said over the last few months that he would not pardon his son.“I’m extremely proud of my son Hunter,” the president said in June, per the Times. “He has overcome an addiction. He’s one of the brightest, most decent men I know. I am satisfied that, I’m not going to do anything. I said I’d abide by the jury decision. I will do that.”After Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, offered to plead guilty on Thursday to federal tax charges but without admitting any wrongdoing, the US justice department prosecutors in the Los Angeles courtroom said they would not accept that plea, according to Reuters.“It’s not clear to us what they are trying to do,” one prosecutor reportedly told the judge overseeing the case.It was not clear whether the judge would accept the offer or go ahead with the trial. Jury selection is due to begin on Thursday. More

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    Hunter Biden pleads guilty in tax case after day of back and forth

    Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to tax charges in federal court in Los Angeles on Thursday, after a day of legal wrangling and in a dramatic move that will avoid a potentially embarrassing trial for Joe Biden’s son.Biden, 54, pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges on a day of courtroom twists and turns, after prosecutors earlier objected to his surprise intention to enter an “Alford” plea, an unusual legal maneuver where a defendant pleads guilty but does not acknowledge wrongdoing. Following prosecutors’ objections, lawyers said Biden was ready to change course and enter an “open” plea, where a defendant pleads guilty to the charges and leaves his sentencing fate in the hands of the judge.In court on Thursday afternoon, Abbe Lowell, Biden’s attorney, told Judge Mark Scarsi: “Mr Biden will agree that the elements of each offense have been satisfied.”Biden quickly responded “guilty” as the judge read out each of the nine counts. The charges carry up to 17 years in prison, but federal sentencing guidelines are likely to call for a much shorter sentence.A sentencing hearing has been set for 16 December.The president’s only surviving son had previously pleaded not guilty. The surprise back-and-forth unfolded on Thursday morning as Biden entered a Los Angeles courthouse for the start of his tax-avoidance trial.After learning of Biden’s earlier plan to enter an Alford plea, US justice department prosecutors said that would not be acceptable. Alford pleas are usually negotiated in advance, because prosecutors must get high-level approval before agreeing to them.“It’s not clear to us what they are trying to do,” one prosecutor told Scarsi, the judge overseeing the case.“[Hunter Biden] is not entitled to plead guilty on special terms that apply only to him,” said prosecutor Leo Wise. “Hunter Biden is not innocent. Hunter Biden is guilty.”A trial, in the run-up to the November presidential election, could air embarrassing details of the younger Biden’s life. A defense attorney for Biden, Abbe Lowell, told the judge that the evidence against his client is “overwhelming” and that he wanted to resolve the case.The son of the president stands accused of failing to pay his taxes on time from 2016 to 2019, as well as two felony counts of filing a false return and an additional felony count of tax evasion.Hunter Biden walked into the courtroom for jury selection on Thursday morning holding hands with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, and flanked by Secret Service agents. Initially, he pleaded not guilty to the charges related to his taxes from 2016 to 2019 and his attorneys had indicated they would argue he did not act “willfully”, or with the intention to break the law, in part because of his well-documented struggles with alcohol and drug addiction.A guilty plea will head off a weeks-long trial that would mark the second time in three months that the younger Biden sits in a federal courtroom as a jury of his peers is assembled to assess whether he is guilty of a slew of criminal charges.Hunter Biden was found guilty in Delaware on three felony counts relating to his purchase of a handgun in 2018 because he wrote on his gun-purchase form, falsely, that he was not a user of illicit drugs. The new trial takes place in the city where Biden has lived for years and where, according to the prosecution, he spent extensively on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes”.The most serious charges relate to his 2018 return on which, according to the prosecution, he sought to claim his children’s college tuition fees and more than $27,000 in online pornography as business expenses.The tax charges and the gun charges carry maximum sentences of more than 20 years in prison, although legal experts say that, as a first-time offender, Biden is likely to be punished far less harshly even if he were to be found guilty a second time.It has been a whirlwind of a summer for Joe Biden’s son, one in which he was convicted of felonies, rushed to Washington as pressure mounted on his father not to run for re-election, raised eyebrows by dropping into White House meetings – and, according to one report, acting as his father’s “gatekeeper” – then appeared on stage at the Democratic national convention to bask in his father’s reflected glory.Now that Joe Biden has abandoned his re-election ambitions and thrown his support behind his vice-president, Kamala Harris, the political stakes of Hunter Biden’s latest trial will be lower. Still, his legal troubles will take some of the sting out of Donald Trump’s constant complaints that he is the target of a political witch-hunt and that the president has “weaponized” the justice system against him.After Hunter Biden’s June conviction, Joe and Jill Biden issued a statement saying they would respect the judicial process and not consider a pardon for their son. The first lady attended court in Delaware most days, but it is not clear whether she would do the same in California. More

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    Kamala Harris will win election, predicts leading historian Allan Lichtman

    Allan Lichtman, the historian dubbed the “Nostradamus” of US presidential elections, has predicted that Kamala Harris will win the White House in November’s poll.Having previously warned the Democrats of the dangers of removing Joe Biden from the ticket, Lichtman nevertheless forecast that the vice-president, who became the party’s nominee after the president withdrew in July, would be elected in a video for the New York Times.He said Harris was on course to beat Donald Trump even though the Democrats had effectively surrendered the valuable key of presidential incumbency, one of 13 he used to determine the likely outcome.“Kamala Harris will be the next president of the United States – at least that’s my prediction for the outcome of this race,” Lichtman, 77, says at the conclusion of the quirky seven-minute video, which features him running in a track athlete’s garb, against other elderly competitors in a qualifying race for the 2025 national senior Olympics.“But the outcome is up to you. So get out and vote.”Lichtman’s predictions are based on a set of true/false propositions, and take no account of polling trends.He previously vociferously argued against replacing Biden as Democratic nominee after his disastrous debate performance against the former president in June and dismissed the validity of opinion polls indicating it had damaged Biden’s ability to win the race.View image in fullscreenNevertheless, of 13 keys, he found eight favoured Harris – who he said gained from the absence of a strong third party candidate following the demise of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s independent campaign, positive short- and long-term economic indicators, major legislative achievements enacted by the Biden administration, and absence of social unrest or scandal attached to the White House. She was also favoured in not having had to undergo a party nomination battle to succeed Biden, as other mooted candidates quickly lined up to endorse her before last month’s Democratic national convention.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven if two still unanswered keys on foreign policy successes or failures fell in Trump’s favour, they would not be enough for him to win the election, according to the formula.Lichtman accurately forecast Trump’s unheralded 2016 election triumph over Hillary Clinton at a time when most opinion polls indicated a contrary outcome. He also correctly forecast that Trump would be impeached during his presidency – which he was, twice.A history professor at American University, he has been forecasting the results of US presidential elections since 1984 and claims to have accurately predicted all but one – George W Bush’s contested triumph over Al Gore in 2000, which was decided after the US supreme court ruled in Bush’s favour following weeks of legal wrangling over disputed ballots.Lichtman claims even that blemish is unjustified, arguing that thousands of disallowed ballots had been cast by voters who had tried in good faith to back Gore, the then vice-president and Democratic candidate, but had inadvertently spoilt their ballot papers. More