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      Hurricane Milton live updates: storm still producing hurricane-force winds as it moves off Florida’s east coast

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      The US National Hurricane Center reports that Hurricane Milton has completed its transit of Florida, and has moved off the state’s east coast. However, the center warns that it is still producing “hurricane force winds and heavy rainfall in east-central Florida”.In an earlier update the center said Milton still had a consistent wind speed of 85 mph (140 kph). About 3 million customers in Florida have been left without power, and there are reports of fatalities as rescue and recovery operations get under way.Milton earlier made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, swerving south and missing a direct hit on Tampa in Hillsborough County.The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s office has said “post-storm recovery efforts have begun”. Danny Alvarez, the public information officer for Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, earlier said it had been difficult for crews receiving 911 calls but unable to deploy while winds were consistently about 40 mph.St Petersburg residents could no longer get water from their household taps because a water main break led the city to shut down service, and a construction crane collapsed, falling into a building in the city. Streets in downtown Gulfport were under water.About 125 homes were destroyed before the hurricane even made landfall, many of them mobile homes in communities for senior citizens, Kevin Guthrie, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management said, while authorities in St Lucie County said there had been more than one fatality.Fatalities have been reported on Florida’s east coast, after a tornado ripped through a retirement community in St Lucie county.One eyewitness, Doug Anderson, told local newspaper TCPalm that “I saw a truck knocked sideways. I followed the wreckage into Spanish Lakes. It looked like someone had dropped a weight from the sky and flattened a bunch of houses. One of the last houses I went to looked like it had been ripped in half. The people were out front crying. It was very heartbreaking to watch.”Anderson, a Lakewood Park resident, told the paper he spent about five hours on the scene trying to help, and witnessed numerous people with injuries.St Lucie county sheriff Keith Peterson earlier said of the location “Our deputies are out here. The Fire District is out here. We’re going through the rubble. We’re trying to recover anybody that we can, provide whatever help that we can.”Speaking to ABC News, meteorologist Kevin Musso has described the impact of Hurricane Milton compared to the forecast as a “mixed bag”. He said forecasts about the strength of the hurricane when it made landfall, and the location of the landfall, were “pretty good”, but that there is more that needs to be assessed.He told viewers “the question about the storm surge will really have to wait to be verified once we get to sunrise, get past these evening hours, and get into daylight.”Musso also said that the number of tornadoes associated with the hurricane had “exceeded expectations”. “Tornadoes happen,” he said, “but these were exceptional.”Here is some CCTV footage of CCTV showing Hurricane Milton flooding in a Fort Myers restaurant.The US National Hurricane Center reports that Hurricane Milton has completed its transit of Florida, and has moved off the state’s east coast. However, the center warns that it is still producing “hurricane force winds and heavy rainfall in east-central Florida”.In an earlier update the center said Milton still had a consistent wind speed of 85 mph (140 kph). About 3 million customers in Florida have been left without power, and there are reports of fatalities as rescue and recovery operations get under way.Milton earlier made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, swerving south and missing a direct hit on Tampa in Hillsborough County.The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s office has said “post-storm recovery efforts have begun”. Danny Alvarez, the public information officer for Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, earlier said it had been difficult for crews receiving 911 calls but unable to deploy while winds were consistently about 40 mph.St Petersburg residents could no longer get water from their household taps because a water main break led the city to shut down service, and a construction crane collapsed, falling into a building in the city. Streets in downtown Gulfport were under water.About 125 homes were destroyed before the hurricane even made landfall, many of them mobile homes in communities for senior citizens, Kevin Guthrie, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management said, while authorities in St Lucie County said there had been more than one fatality.The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s office has posted to Facebook that it is beginning recovery efforts. It said:
      Post-storm recovery efforts have begun in some parts of our county. Please stay home, as we have received reports of downed trees and flooded streets. Your safety is our priority.
      The number of customers without power in Florida has passed 3 million.It has just gone 4am in Florida, and the latest update from the National Hurricane Center reports that Hurricane Milton is moving north-east at 18mph with sustained winds of 85 mph (140 kph).Here is a video clip of a crane collapse in Florida caused by Hurricane Milton.Bill Litton, the emergency management director for Osceola County, south of Orlando, has said over 1,400 people were in shelters in the county as of early Thursday morning, the New York Times reports.Max Chesnes, reporting for the Tampa Bay Times from downtown Gulfport in Florida, states that “There are a few flooded streets in the city under less than a foot of water,” noting that is “far from what the worst case forecasts called for.”However, in a sign of how Florida has been hit by two hurricanes in the space of a few days, he posted a picture of debris that had not been cleared from the impact of Hurricane Helene now being soaked in the floodwaters from Hurricane Milton.The NWS National Hurricane Center in Miami has issued an update on Hurricane Milton, which it says now has maximum sustained winds of 85 mph (140 kph), and is 30 miles (45 km) off Orlando and 20 miles (30 km) off Cape Canaveral.WINK News meteorologist Matt Devitt has described one of the effects of Hurricane Milton being the “worst tornado outbreak I’ve seen in Southwest Florida in a long time,” adding “there was “horrible damage and devastation from outer bands ahead of Milton.”Witnesses have told CNN that a crane collapsing in St Petersburg due to Hurricane Milton sounded like “a mix of thunder booming, and the metal screeching sound of a train wreck.”Resident Makenna Caskey told the news network it came down and hit a building opposite her apartment, and she said it felt like “a massive rumbling tremor that shook our whole building.”The Tampa Bay Times reported that the crane collapsed near its own office in St Petersburg and that there was “a strong smell of gasoline in the air and the faint sound of alarms ring out.” More

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      This is the future for Kamala Harris: unless she solves this economic mystery, Trump wins | Aditya Chakrabortty

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      The defining question in US politics was asked 44 years ago this month. One week before the 1980 presidential election, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter squared up to each other for a televised debate. A former Hollywood actor, Reagan was also proving a lethal Washington aphorist. At the close, he spoke into the camera: “Next Tuesday, all of you will go to the polls. You’ll stand there in the polling place and make a decision.” Watching at home were more than 80 million Americans. “When you make that decision … ask yourself: are you better off than you were four years ago?” Is it easier to buy things, he asked, is unemployment lower?A few days later, voters gave their answer, handing Reagan a 44-state landslide. Every presidential contest since has been framed in large part by his simple, deadly question. Ask it in the final stretch of this election and you get to the great mystery of why the race remains so close.Are Americans better off than they were four years ago? Pretty much every mainstream economist would say: you bet. Many go further. “I’ve hesitated to say this at the risk of sounding hyperbolic,” wrote Mark Zandi, the respected chief economist at Moodys, just a few days ago. “But … there is no denying it: this is among the best performing economies in my 35+ years as an economist.” Growth: up. Jobs: up. Wages: rising. The value of your home: up. Share prices: booming. Inflation: falling. Borrowing rates: dropping.In 2020, Donald Trump warned that his defeat would produce “a depression”. Today, even while Germany and Japan face recession, magazines toast the US economy’s “superstar status”. Yet ask Americans if they feel better off, and many answer: no.Under Reagan’s law, this election ought to be in the bag for Kamala Harris. As Joe Biden’s number two, she can claim co-authorship for this boom. Instead, she is neck and neck with a convicted criminal (never forget: three weeks after polling day, a judge will decide if Donald Trump should be jailed over the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels). On the economy, Trump regularly polls ahead of Harris. The issue that ought to be winning for her is instead losing.How come? It ranks among the most consequential questions of our time, yet, however hard they scratch their heads Washington’s finest can’t give a good answer. Many on the centre left paint it as a PR problem: that Biden has failed to claim the credit or that voters are too dumb to realise how good things are. But another suggestion emerges in a new report from a progressive thinktank, the Democracy Collaborative. And its argument should be heeded by Keir Starmer and the European left.The authors examine much the same economic dashboard as everyone else – growth, jobs, wages – but over a far longer timeframe. Behind each graph lies the implicit question: are you, your family, your community better off than you were not four years ago, but two, three, four decades ago? And for many people the numbers say: no.Take the biggest one: pay. For teachers, clerical workers, sales reps and the great bulk of US employees, whether white or blue collar, wages have flatlined – not for four or even 20 years – but for most of the past half century. Strip out inflation and average hourly earnings for seven out of 10 US employees have barely risen since Richard Nixon was in the White House.For the average US employee, and their families and their towns, the economy has kept on tanking whoever wins the White House, whichever judges make it to the supreme court, whether the analysts decree it to be boom or bust.Biden has spent trillions on boosting the economy and adapting to the climate crisis. He has bolstered unions and intervened in strikes. The graphs show it has had an impact – but it is a tiny uptick at the end of a line that otherwise points remorselessly down. Americans are better off than they were four years ago, it’s just that many were in distress in 2020.Reagan destroyed their unions, Bill Clinton threw open their trade barriers, George Bush Jr dispatched their kids to fight and die abroad, Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street and Trump ran a glorified protection racket. Only in 2020 did real wages for “production and non-supervisory employees” rise above where they were in 1973. This was not because they were unproductive: the US economy continues to do more with less almost every year. It’s just that most of the gains from that have gone to the top.“Even if Trump loses, America remains very vulnerable to a far nastier imitation winning next time,” says Joe Guinan, president of the Democracy Collaborative. The only way to see off Trump, JD Vance and the pluto-populists is to make the economy more equal, to give workers more of a stake in the riches they produce.To see how that plays out, I checked in on Mike Stout. We first talked in a diner in Pittsburgh in 2012, the year Obama won re-election. Mike and his wife, Steffi, had worked in Pennsylvania’s steel industry, with good union pay and pensions. They’d gone to Washington for the first inauguration of Obama, and stood in the freezing January cold. They had hopes.The Stouts did everything right. Worked hard and saved, and spent $50,000 to get their kids through university. In 2012, their daughter Maura was working in a downtown hotel for $14 an hour, the same as her father had earned in 1978. Even then she doubted whether she and her husband would ever enjoy the same standard of living as her parents.She’d lost that hotel job during the pandemic, said Mike, and was working from her one-bedroom flat. Her job was chasing people for their debts, even though at $18 an hour she was only just keeping her head above water. Now in her 30s, she’d split from her husband, and Mike thought much of the blame lay in money problems. As for his son, Mike, he was looking after his wife, who has stage 4 cancer, and their kids. Mike has health insurance, which counts as good fortune in the US, but the top-up fees are eye-watering, and now he works two jobs.“They are teetering on a ledge 60 floors up,” said Stout. “The slightest nuance – a recession or prices going up again – and they’re pushed out of the window.”Life for the Stouts has been frozen for years. At the root of democratic capitalism is an old promise: tomorrow will be better than today. But that promise was broken long ago for Mike’s family and many of his friends’ households, too. He knew plenty of former steelworkers in this swing state who next month would vote Trump. Sure he was a liar, “but at least he lies to their faces, rather than ignoring them”.And what about Mike? “Trump or Harris: it’s just one big uni-party,” he said. “It’s Wall Street that runs this country.”

      Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist More

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      US election briefing: Trump’s ‘onslaught of lies’ about hurricane relief; Walz calls for end to electoral college

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      As Florida braced for its second major hurricane in two weeks, the US president, Joe Biden, criticised Donald Trump for spreading an “onslaught of lies” about how the federal government is handling the damage from Hurricane Helene. Biden spoke as Hurricane Milton – which the president earlier said “is looking like the storm of the century” – was on the verge of making landfall in Florida. “Quite frankly, these lies are un-American,” Biden said from the White House. “Former president Trump has led this onslaught of lies.”Biden said that Donald Trump and his allies had misrepresented the response and resources of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). The president singled out the Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who claimed the federal government could control the weather.Biden was joined in his rebuke by a Republican congressman representing areas devastated by Hurricane Helene, who issued a scorching rebuttal of misinformation and conspiracy theories spread by Trump and his supporters about the storm and the government’s response. Chuck Edwards, the member for North Carolina’s 11th district, contradicted criticism from Trump, and others, of the Biden administration’s handling of the disaster by voicing praise for “a level of support that is unmatched by most any other disaster nationwide”.Trump kept up his campaign schedule even as the storm threatened to overshadow the presidential race with fears that it would cause catastrophic damage in Tampa and other parts of Florida’s Gulf Coast. He offered his prayers to those in Milton’s path while continuing to insult his rival and other women – saying he had no interest in stopping even if it turned off female voters.“I don’t want to be nice,” Trump said in Scranton at his first of two rallies of the day in the pivotal battleground state of Pennsylvania. “You know, somebody said, ‘You should be nicer. Women won’t like it.’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’”Trump also announced that he would not debate Harris again before the election, a few hours after Fox News invited the two presidential contenders to participate in a possible second debate on either 24 October or 27 October. “THERE WILL BE NO REMATCH,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform. “SO THERE IS NOTHING TO DEBATE.”The vice-president and Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, flew to the swing state of Nevada, with its six electoral college votes, but first attended a briefing on the storm and the federal response that Biden also received at the White House.In an interview on CNN, Harris condemned Trump’s comments on aid, saying: “It is dangerous – it is unconscionable, frankly, that anyone who would consider themselves a leader would mislead desperate people to the point that those desperate people would not receive the aid to which they are entitled.”Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, meanwhile, called for an end to the electoral college system, saying it “needs to go” and be replaced by a popular vote principle. He made his comments to an audience of party fundraisers. While most American voters are in favour of abolishing the electoral college, Harris has not adopted a position on the matter.Walz had earlier made similar remarks at a separate event in Seattle, where he called himself “a national popular vote guy”, while qualifying it by saying: “That’s not the world we live in.”Elsewhere:

      The FBI arrested an Afghan man who officials say was inspired by the Islamic State terrorist organisation and was plotting an election day attack targeting large crowds in the US, the justice department said. Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, of Oklahoma City, told investigators after his arrest on Monday that he had planned his attack to coincide with election day in November and that he and a co-conspirator expected to die as martyrs, according to charging documents.

      Harris campaign and organisations that support her have raised $1bn in donations since she launched her presidential campaign in July. The haul, confirmed to Reuters by a source familiar with the vice-president’s fundraising, went to her campaign, the Democratic national committee and Pacs supporting her run. Trump has raised about $853m in 2024, according to a New York Times tally of public campaign statements. With less than three weeks to go until voting day, the Harris campaign and the Democrats had $404m cash on hand to the Trump campaign’s $295m.

      The Florida health department sent cease-and-desist letters to local news stations over an advertisement urging people to vote in favour of a ballot measure – an issue voted on by people in a given state on election day – that would expand abortion rights in the state.

      A judge ruled that three voting rights groups in Georgia who want voter registrations reopened haven’t proven that internet and power disruptions from Hurricane Helene unfairly deprived people of the opportunity to register. She set another hearing for Thursday to consider evidence and legal arguments. Georgia’s presidential race was decided by only 12,000 votes in 2020. State officials and the state Republican party argue it would be a heavy burden on counties to order them to register additional voters.

      Early in-person voting began on Wednesday in Arizona, making it the first of this year’s presidential battleground states where all residents can cast a ballot at a traditional polling place ahead of election day. Biden defeated Trump in the state in 2020 by just 10,457 votes. Early voting, particularly by mail, has long been popular in Arizona, where nearly 80% of voters submitted their ballots before election day in 2020, according to the secretary of state’s office. More

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      ‘I am your retribution’: Trump’s radical plan to remake the presidency – podcast

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      By the time Donald Trump left the White House in January 2021, he was frustrated by the limits of his office. As Guardian US’s chief reporter, Ed Pilkington, explains to Michael Safi, Trump felt he had been held back as president not by the standard checks and balances of a democracy, but by a shadowy “deep state”. In the years since, he and his key advisers have come up with a plan to defeat it should he come to office again – a plan that would radically reshape the presidency and give Trump unprecedented power. How much would a Trump victory threaten US democracy, and what might still thwart his plans in office even if he wins? More

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      Kamala Harris and allies top Trump and Republicans with $1bn in donations – as it happened

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      Kamala Harris and groups supporting her have brought in $1bn in donations since she launched her presidential campaign in July, Reuters reports.The mammoth haul, confirmed to Reuters by a source familiar with the vice-president’s fundraising, went to her campaign, the Democratic national committee and Pacs supporting her run. The money will be spent on staff and operations in battleground states, as well as advertising.Harris and the Democrats lead Trump and the GOP in cash on hand as of the end of September, with $404m in the bank compared to the ex-president’s $295m.With Hurricane Milton presenting a mortal threat to Florida’s west coast, Kamala Harris warned businesses against defrauding or price gouging people fleeing the storm, while, at the White House, Joe Biden slammed the recent flood of hurricane-related disinformation as “off the wall”. The Trump campaign was busy assailing Harris and Biden over their response to Hurricane Helene, which devastated south-eastern states like North Carolina days ago. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, JD Vance accused the Biden administration of “incompetence” in responding to the storm, prompting a rebuke from homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.Here’s what else happened today:

      Harris and groups supporting her campaign have brought in $1bn since she declared her candidacy in July, a huge fundraising total.

      Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, decried the electoral college at a fundraiser yesterday, saying it would be better if the popular vote decided the presidency. The Harris campaign later said his remarks do not represent their position.

      The vice-president was on the line when Biden spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu today, in the leaders’ first call since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon.

      The economy remains the issue most important to voters, and Donald Trump has the edge, a Gallup survey found. A separate Reuters/Ipsos poll found Harris remained the favorite nationally, although her lead has declined a bit.

      Jim McCain, the son of late Republican senator and presidential candidate John McCain, endorsed Harris during a campaign alongside Walz in Arizona.
      Speaking to supporters in Scranton, Donald Trump leveled baseless accusations of election fraud against Democrats, warning that they would “cheat like hell” next month.Trump has, of course, continued to insist that the results of the 2020 presidential election were tainted by widespread fraud, even though he has failed to produce evidence substantiating those claims.Complaining about a recent New York Times poll showing Kamala Harris pulling ahead in Pennsylvania, Trump attacked journalists as “the enemy of the people”.Donald Trump has taken the stage at his campaign rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a battleground state he is looking to recapture after narrowly losing it to Joe Biden in 2020.Trump arrived to Lee Greenwood’s song “God Bless the USA” as his supporters waved signs reading “47” and “Make America Great Again”. He claimed he was far ahead of Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania, despite polls suggesting the two candidates are running neck and neck in the state.“It’s great to be back in the beautiful commonwealth,” Trump told the crowd. “Just 27 days from now, we are going to win Pennsylvania. We are going to defeat Lyin’ Kamala.”The son of late Republican senator and president candidate John McCain announced his endorsement of Kamala Harris at a campaign event in swing state Arizona.Standing onstage with Tim Walz and Democratic Senate candidate Ruben Gallego in the city of Chandler, Jim McCain said he had recently left the GOP to become a Democrat, and would be voting for Harris in November.“This is the time for our courage and for standing up for what is right, even when it’s hard. But the courage we have shown already, the sacrifices that we made, now, that courage needs to be shown in the polls coming up,” McCain said.“This is the time. I stand for you before you today, not as a Republican or Democrat, but as an Arizonan. I love this state more than I love anything, and as someone who has served with all of you and continues to believe in the greatness of this country and this state, we must elect vice-president Harris and governor Tim Walz.”McCain, who died in 2018, was the GOP’s nominee for president in the 2008 election, which he lost to Barack Obama. He continued to represent Arizona in the Senate until his death, and one of his final notable acts was casting a vote that prevented an effort by Donald Trump to repeal the Affordable Care Act without any replacement being ready.Kamala Harris was in New York City yesterday to make high-profile media appearances, including on much-watched talk show the View, where she proposed a plan to allow Medicare to pay for long-term at-home care.Today, Bernie Sanders, the independent senator who is influential in the progressive movement, particularly when it comes to expanding government-funded health care, announced his support for the plan:
      Congratulations to Vice President Harris for announcing a bold vision to expand Medicare to cover not only home health care, but also vision and hearing.
      It is no secret that we have a major crisis in home health care. Millions of seniors would prefer, when possible, to receive care in their homes rather than be forced into nursing homes. Kamala’s plan is a major step forward not only in improving the quality of life for seniors and their families, but also in saving the health care system large sums of money.
      Further, her plan to expand Medicare to cover the cost of vision and hearing is enormously important. In the wealthiest country on earth, millions of lower-income seniors today are unable to afford the hearing aids and eyeglasses they desperately need. That is not acceptable. Every senior in America should be able to access these basic health care needs.
      Here’s more on what Harris has proposed:Kamala Harris and groups supporting her have brought in $1bn in donations since she launched her presidential campaign in July, Reuters reports.The mammoth haul, confirmed to Reuters by a source familiar with the vice-president’s fundraising, went to her campaign, the Democratic national committee and Pacs supporting her run. The money will be spent on staff and operations in battleground states, as well as advertising.Harris and the Democrats lead Trump and the GOP in cash on hand as of the end of September, with $404m in the bank compared to the ex-president’s $295m.Democratic congressional candidate Eugene Vindman first made a name for himself when he and his brother, former National Security Council official Alexander Vindman, became whistleblowers over Donald Trump’s alleged pressure campaign against Ukraine, which resulted in the former president’s first impeachment.Although Vindman is well known among Democrats, his status as a first-time candidate in one of Virginia’s battleground districts has complicated his path to victory. Joe Biden won the district by seven points in 2020, but Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin carried it by the same margin when he won the office in 2021.This year, Vindman’s success may depend on whether the seventh district backs Kamala Harris or Trump in the presidential race.“If [Harris] wins this district by several points, that should be enough to pull him across the finish line,” the Cook Political Report’s Erin Covey writes. “But strategists from both parties agree that this is shaping up to be a tight race.”Democrat Eugene Vindman is facing a tougher-than-expected fight against Republican Derrick Anderson in Virginia’s seventh congressional district, as the Cook Political Report has moved the race from “lean Democrat” to “toss-up”.Democrats are looking to hold the seat, which was left open after congresswoman Abigail Spanberger chose to launch a gubernatorial campaign rather than seek reelection.“Polls from both parties show Republican Army Special Forces combat veteran Derrick Anderson and Democratic retired Army lieutenant colonel Eugene Vindman neck and neck, despite Vindman outspending Anderson significantly,” Cook’s Erin Covey writes.“[T]hough Vindman has spent nearly $6 million on TV ads to Anderson’s half million, including softer spots featuring his family and pledging to ease I-95 traffic, he hasn’t been able to establish a clear lead.”Last week the nation’s top emergency official, Deanne Criswell of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), warned that a slew of falsehoods spread by Donald Trump, his supporters and others after Hurricane Helene, including claims of funds diverted from storm survivors to help migrants in the US and that Democrats somehow directed the hurricane itself, was hampering the response to one of the deadliest hurricanes ever to hit the US.Criswell warned about similar damaging nonsense today when she briefed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee for president, asked her if disinformation was getting in officials’ way as they prepare for Milton to hit Florida.Harris had already criticized on Monday “the disinformation being pushed by Donald Trump” about Helene. She just asked Criswell if she was concerned about misinformation and disinformation relating to evacuations from the path of Milton.“There has been a lot of misinformation out there, Madame Vice-President, that’s for sure, but I have not heard anything specific to the evacuations,” Criswell began.She added that people were listening to their local officials and evacuating. “That’s good, thank you,” Harris said.The US president and US vice-president, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have just wrapped up the public portion of a lengthy briefing session with Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary and emergency chief dealing with incoming Hurricane Milton.We are following all the storm developments in our hurricane live blog, including warnings from the president that this looks like it could be “the storm of the century”, but there has been a political side to all this, too.Biden and Harris both sounded off about disinformation coming from Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president in this election, and his acolytes.Biden said: “All this misinformation going out about how we’re devoting all this money to migrants, even one congresswoman suggesting I control the weather and implying I’m sending it to red states. This stuff is off the wall. It’s like out of a comic book.”Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene last week posted on social media that “Yes they can control the weather” and although she didn’t specify who “they” are it was widely taken to mean Democrats and Biden has clearly taken it personally.With Hurricane Milton presenting a mortal threat to Florida’s west coast, Kamala Harris has issued a warning to businesses that defraud or price gouge people fleeing the storm, saying she will hold them accountable. The Trump campaign is meanwhile continuing to pressure Harris and Joe Biden over the response to Hurricane Helene, which devastated south-eastern states like North Carolina days ago. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, JD Vance accused the Biden administration of “incompetence” in responding to the storm, prompting a rebuke from homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.Here’s what else has happened today so far:

      Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, decried the electoral college at a fundraiser yesterday, saying it would be better if the popular vote decided the presidency. The Harris campaign later said his remarks do not represent their position.

      Harris was on the line when Biden spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu today, in the leaders’ first call since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon.

      The economy remains the issue most important to voters, and Donald Trump has the edge, a Gallup survey found. A separate Reuters/Ipsos poll found Harris remained the favorite nationally, although her lead has declined a bit.
      Joe Biden spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu this morning, the White House said, marking the first time the leaders have spoken since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon. Kamala Harris was also on the call.Biden spoke to Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, on Monday to mark the one-year anniversary of the 7 October attack, but has not spoken to Netanyahu since 21 August. That was before the pager explosions that killed dozens and wounded thousands, and before Israel targeted and killed Hezbollah’s leader in Lebanon then launched a ground incursion.The White House has not released a readout of their call. We have a live blog covering the crisis in the Middle East, including the call between the leaders: More

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      Tim Walz calls for scrapping of electoral college to decide US presidential race

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      Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, has called for the electoral college system of electing US presidents to be abolished and replaced with a popular vote principle, as operates in most democracies.His comments – to an audience of party fundraisers – chime with the sentiments of a majority of American voters but risk destabilising the campaign of Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, who has not adopted a position on the matter, despite having previously voiced similar views.“I think all of us know, the electoral college needs to go,” Walz told donors at a gathering at the home of the California governor, Gavin Newsom. “We need a national popular vote. We need to be able to go into York, Pennsylvania, and win. We need to be in western Wisconsin and win. We need to be in Reno, Nevada, and win.”He had earlier made similar remarks at a separate event in Seattle, where he called himself “a national popular vote guy”, while qualifying it by saying, “that’s not the world we live in.”The statements refer to the apparent democratic anomaly whereby US presidential polls are decided not by who wins the most votes nationwide but instead by which candidate captures a majority of 538 electoral votes across the 50 states, plus Washington DC.The votes are distributed broadly reflective of each state’s population size, so populous California, for example, has 54 electoral college votes, while tiny Rhode Island has just four. However, rare cases of US presidents winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote tally do happen, notably in recent times George W Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.The concerns over the electoral college system crystallise the reality that next month’s contest between Harris and Trump, the Republican nominee, will come down to the outcomes in a small number of battleground states, where polls show them running neck-and-neck.Most surveys indicate Harris having a small but consistent nationwide lead. Yet even if these are borne out on polling day, Trump could still return to the White House by winning enough swing states to reach the 270 electoral votes needed.That scenario is feared by Democrats since it would repeat the outcome of the 2016 election, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton thanks to the electoral college despite winning nearly 3m fewer votes across the nation.Walz’s comments are eye-catching because he was chosen as Harris’s running mate because his homely, plain-speaking style was judged as appealing to working-class voters in three of the most important battleground states, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.It is not the first time that Walz, the Minnesota governor, has advocated ditching the electoral college.Last year, he signed legislation that added Minnesota to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would force states to award their electors to the national popular vote winner if enough of them agreed to do so.In the absence of that, only a constitutional amendment could alter the current electoral system.Harris-Walz campaign officials stressed that abolishing the electoral college was not part of its agenda.“Governor Walz believes that every vote matters in the electoral college and he is honored to be traveling the country and battleground states working to earn support for the Harris-Walz ticket,” Teddy Tschann, a spokesman for Walz, told the New York Times.The comments were seized on gleefully by Trump’s campaign, which is generally believed to have an advantage in the present system.“Why does Tampon Tim [Trump’s derisive nickname for Walz] hate the Constitution so much?,” the Trump campaign posted on its official X account.The comment overlooked the fact that Trump himself has been accused of calling for “terminating the constitution” in support of his lie that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election.Research published last month by Pew showed 63% of American voters favouring electing the president by the popular vote, although support was greatest among Democrats, while a small majority of Republicans favoured keeping the electoral college.Harris said in a 2019 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live that she was “open to the discussion” of changing the current system, saying the popular vote had been “diminished”. But she has avoided more categorical statements on the subject.In a 60 Minutes interview on CBS that aired on Monday, the vice-president said she had recently told Walz that “you need to be a little more careful on how you say things.” More

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      Our dystopian climate isn’t just about fires and floods. It’s about society fracturing | Bill McKibben

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      Even as the good people of Florida’s west coast pulled the soggy mattresses from Helene out to the curb, Milton appeared on the horizon this week – a double blast of destruction from the Gulf of Mexico that’s a reminder that physics takes no time off, not even in the weeks before a crucial election. My sense is that those storms will help turn the voting on 5 November into a climate election of sorts, even if – as is likely – neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump spend much time in the next 25 days talking about CO2 or solar power.That’s because these storms show not only the power of global heating (Helene’s record rains, and Milton’s almost unprecedented intensification, were reminders of what it means to have extremely hot ocean temperatures). More, they show what we’re going to need to survive the now inevitable train of such disasters. Which is solidarity. Which is something only one ticket offers.I confess that I’ve been all in to beat Trump for any number of reasons – Third Act, the group I founded to organize Americans over age 60 for action on climate and democracy, has been flooding the swing states with hundreds of thousands of postcards, and our silver wave door-knocking tour hits Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada in the days ahead But if there was one way to sum up what this election means to me, it would be: solidarity. In the 40 years since Ronald Reagan’s election, we’ve gone a long way down the path of hyper-individual, everyone for themselves. Joe Biden has tried to wrench the wheel back towards the FDR America-as-group-project model with tools like the spending in the Inflation Reduction Act, but it’s a work in progress. The climate crisis, above all, requires the return of that solidarity.That’s because there’s no way to keep it from getting worse without joint public action: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us we have five years left to cut emissions in half, which means it will not be accomplished one Tesla at a time; it requires aggressive public action of the kind the current White House is coordinating, as it sets up battery factories and shepherds new transmission lines through various regulatory fences.But there’s also no way to survive it, even in its current form, without intense cooperation. To give one example: Florida’s insurance system is clearly breaking down, as one storm after another drives private insurers out of the state.As the Tampa newspaper put it in June: “As the crisis escalates, state leaders are desperately trying to convince insurance companies to stick around. States are offering them more flexibility to raise premiums or drop certain homes from coverage, fast-tracking rate revisions and making it harder for residents to sue their insurance company.” But as that seawall begins to fail, “a flood of new policyholders are joining state-backed insurance ‘plans of last resort’, leaving states to assume more of the risk on behalf of residents who can’t find coverage in the private sector.”Indeed, so many people are swamping the “state-backed insurance plans” they’re becoming overloaded with risk. Ten months ago, the Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse and his budget committee colleagues wrote to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, to ask for proof that Florida’s public Citizens Insurance could survive disasters like the one now bearing down on Tampa. DeSantis may have given his most eloquent response in May, when he signed a bill essentially outlawing the phrase “climate change” in Florida statutes. “I’m not a global warming person,” he explained.Meanwhile, across the upland terrain drenched by Helene, rightwing forces have been relentlessly spreading rumors: most prominently, that the Federal Emergency Management Administration (Fema) spent all its money on migrants and has none left for Americans. This is not true. (Indeed, its closest approach to truth came during the Trump years when Fema did divert relief funds to “tighten the border”.) But it’s one more way to divide people, to use their very real trauma for political gain.The dystopian future is not just about the endless fires and floods; it’s also about a society that pulls apart in their face, where people can’t work together because they’ve been so divided by disinformation and hate. It feels like Harris and Tim Walz are offering, above all, one last chance at an America where people actually work together on things, a United States. They even imagine a world where the world keeps working together, imagine that – one where we have, say, effective climate negotiations. That these things seem farfetched to us now is probably the strongest proof of how much they’re needed.

      Bill McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College. He is the founder of Third Act, organizing people over 60 for progressive change More

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      in Elections

      New Trump January 6 court filing highlights perils of possible JD Vance vice-presidency

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      When the next electoral vote is certified on 6 January next year, Vice-President Kamala Harris will play a critical role – whether or not she’s the winner of the presidential contest. It’s a role that vice-presidents have routinely played throughout history: certifying the results of the election for a seamless transfer of power.The same might not be true for the election after that. In the most consequential line of the vice-presidential debate last week, the Republican nominee, JD Vance, refused to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and then pressed by moderators, declined to answer whether he would refuse to certify the vote this year if he had that power. (His opponent, Tim Walz, said in a clip that’s now been spliced for campaign ads: “That is a damning non-answer.”)The troubling nature of the answer was compounded less than 24 hours after the debate when the US district judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed a redacted version of the special counsel Jack Smith’s brief against Trump in the federal election interference case laying out new evidence of how the former president attempted to steal the election.In striking detail, the brief laid out how Trump made Vice-President Mike Pence a target of his angry supporters on January 6, how the Secret Service was forced to whisk him away to a secure location, and how Pence went on to certify the election after the violence had subsided.Under the US constitution, the vice-president has few specific powers. Walz and Vance debated last week about foreign policy, reproductive rights, immigration and other policies that the next administration will influence, though their role in any of it will be limited. But the constitution does spell out that the vice-president is the president of the Senate and is in charge of certifying the election results, and Vance, unlike Pence, has said multiple times that he would not have certified the vote in 2020.“I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had,” Vance said on a venture capitalist’s podcast in September. He made similar comments before he was tapped by Trump to be on the ticket, saying during an ABC News interview that he would have liked to see the certification of the 2020 election handled differently.The contrast between Vance leaving the door open to question election results, and the depiction of Pence’s role on January 6 laid out in the Smith indictment, is stark.According to Smith, Pence stood strong despite Trump’s pressure and threats. He told Trump he had seen no evidence of election-determining fraud and repeatedly tried to convince Trump to accept the valid results. Trump’s pressure campaign did not let up – he and his co-conspirators used “deceit”, lying to Pence that there was evidence of significant fraud and lying to the public that Pence had the ability to reject electoral votes and send them back to the state legislatures.Even after Trump tweeted: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” supporters started chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and the Secret Service had to evacuate the vice-president to a secure location, Pence maintained that the Electoral Count Act didn’t allow him to legally reject the valid electoral votes.Although the riots on January 6 delayed certification for approximately six hours, the House and Senate resumed their joint session at 11.35pm, according to the brief, and at 3.41am, Pence announced the certified results of the election in favor of Joe Biden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s not exaggeration to say that US democracy survived past January 2021 because of Pence. Had he refused to certify the vote, the peaceful transfer of power would not have occurred, and the chaos and violence probably would have continued.But Vance has already proved himself more eager to capitulate to Trump’s demands – despite previously condemning the former president, he’s transformed into a Maga acolyte who is in some ways “more Trump than Trump”, according to one retired Republican party operative. And he has explicitly said that he would have acted differently from Pence on the day Congress meets to certify the election.Trump is not currently president, so Vance won’t be able to refuse to certify and wreak havoc in January. But if Trump wins a second term, Vance will be in charge of certifying the vote after the 2028 election. Trump has now said multiple times that Americans “won’t have to vote any more” if he wins this year. It’s not far-fetched to think about what might happen if Trump and Vance refused to cede control of the White House in 2028. More