Donald Trump faces citizen criminal charges over false claims about Haitian immigrants – live | US politics

Local authorities in Tempe, Arizona, have said that someone fired shots at a Democratic party campaign office in a Phoenix suburb, causing damage but no injuries, according to the Associated Press.

Tempe police told the Associated Press that the damage was discovered early on Monday and that the incident is being investigated as a property crime. Nobody was in the office at the time the shots were fired.

On Tuesday, NBC News reported that the office is shared by staff for the Arizona Democratic party, the Kamala Harris campaign, and Senate and House campaigns.

This comes as Harris is scheduled to visit Arizona later this week.

New York’s Climate Change Superfund act was stripped from the state budget this year, but then it passed both chambers of the state’s legislature with bipartisan support in June.

Modeled after the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, it would require officials to work with scientists to figure out how much climate-related damage to people, ecosystems and infrastructure is attributable to big oil companies’ planet-heating pollution, then establish procedures to collect payments from big oil companies to fund those changes.

At the rally on Tuesday outside the New York governor Kathy Hochul’s office, New Yorkers detailed their own experiences with climate disasters.

Michael-Luca Natt from the New York chapter of the youth-led environmental group Sunrise Movement described how extreme city heat in the summer made it difficult to play outside as a youth.

“It is time for the fossil fuel industry to be held accountable,” he said.

If signed into law, the New York bill would be the largest policy of its kind in the nation. Vermont became the first state to pass a climate superfund bill in May.

Dozens of climate activists gathered outside Kathy Hochul’s office on Tuesday demanding the New York governor pass the Climate Change Superfund act, which would force big polluters to help the state pay for damages caused by the climate crisis.

“We are being played for suckers by the fossil fuel industry, and Governor Hochul is going along with it,” Bill McKibben, the veteran environmentalist who founded non-profits 350.org and Third Act, said at the rally.

The activists from the fossil fuel accountability group Make Polluters Pay coalition, which includes environmental and human rights organizations such as Food and Water Watch, the New York Public Interest Research Group, Fossil Free Media, and Avaaz, carried large boxes filled with more than 127,000 petitions to Hochul’s office. They chanted: “What do we want? Climate justice,” and: “Make polluters pay.”

The leader of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a non-profit that represents the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, has filed criminal charges against Donald Trump and JD Vance on behalf of the group, according to an announcement from the law firm representing them.

The group is charging the former president and Republican nominee for president, and his running mate and Ohio senator, with disrupting public service, making false alarms, committing telecommunications harassment, committing aggravated menacing and violating the prohibition against complicity per the press release.

The Associated Press is reporting that the group has invoked its private-citizen right to file the charges in the wake of inaction by the local prosecutor.

This comes as the city of Springfield has experienced an onslaught of disruption, harassment, chaos and threats since Trump and Vance began spreading false claims about Haitian immigrants there eating other residents’ pets.

Last week, the mayor of Springfield issued an emergency proclamation following the continued rise in public safety threats.

One of the few major pieces of legislation Donald Trump signed as president was an overhaul of the US tax code that dropped the rate for corporations.

The former president has now told the crowd in Georgia that he would cut taxes even further, if elected to the White House in November.

“The centerpiece of my plan is for a manufacturing renaissance, which will be a 15% Made in America tax rate,” Trump said.

“Now, we’re cutting the business tax from 21% to 15%, which makes us the most competitive tax anywhere on the planet, but only for those who make their product in the USA.”

He linked the lower taxes to the economy’s success during his term – which ended suddenly when the Covid-19 pandemic began in March 2020, causing the steepest economic decline in decades:

It was the greatest economy in the history of our country, and now what we’re doing is taking it one step further, and a bigger step, actually, we’re bringing it down to 15.

The non-profit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy earlier this year found that Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul allowed some of America’s biggest companies to pay little to no corporate taxes:

Donald Trump is onstage now in battleground state Georgia, where he’s told the crowd in Savannah that he will threaten American companies with tariffs if they don’t bring jobs back from overseas.

“I want GE, IBM and every other manufacturer that left us to be filled with regret and come sprinting back to our shores, and they will,” Trump said.

His pitch to these companies was somewhat vague:

So, as your president, here is the deal that I will be offering to every major company and manufacturer on Earth: I will give you the lowest taxes, the lowest energy costs and the lowest regulatory burden and free access to the best and biggest market on the planet, but only if you make your product here in America. It all goes away if you don’t make your product here and hire American workers for the job.

For companies that do not reshore positions, Trump said:

If you don’t make your product here, then you will have to pay a tariff, a very substantial tariff, when you send your product into the United States. And by the way, you know, for years they knock the word. The word ‘tariff’, properly used, is a beautiful word, one of the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard. It’s music to my ears. A lot of bad people didn’t like that word, but now they’re finding out I was right, and we will take in hundreds of billions of dollars into our treasury and use that money to benefit the American citizens, and it will not cause inflation, by the way.

We will soon hear from Donald Trump, who’s in Savannah, Georgia, for a speech billed as discussing his policies on manufacturing and taxation. The big question is whether the former president will remain on topic. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, spoke to a public radio station in battleground state Wisconsin, where the vice-president said she would support repealing the filibuster in the Senate to allow passage of a law restoring the constitutional right to abortion once guaranteed by Roe v Wade. And at the United Nations in New York, Joe Biden gave his final address as US president to the general assembly, urging the world to defend Ukraine while calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the weapons shipments fueling the war in Sudan.

Here’s what else is happening today:

A CNN poll conducted by SSRS and released a few minutes ago finds that the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is deadlocked nationally.

The survey of registered voters found Harris is supported by 48%, and Trump by 47% – findings that lie within its margin of error. Other polls have found a tied race nationwide, though some have found the vice-president with the lead.

If there are any unique insights from the network’s survey, it may be voters’ reasons for backing their candidate of choice. From CNN:

Both Harris and Trump hold positive support from the majority of their backers – 72% of Trump’s supporters say their choice is more for him than against Harris, while 60% of Harris’ supporters say their choice is more for her than against him.

That’s a major shift in voters’ attitudes toward the race compared with earlier this summer. In the last national CNN poll in July, shortly after President Joe Biden ended his campaign for president and Harris threw her hat into the ring for the Democratic nomination, Harris’ backers were evenly divided between affirmative support for her and those driven by anti-Trump sentiment. And Biden’s supporters in earlier polls said they were largely expressing opposition to Trump with their choice.

In an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio today, Kamala Harris said she would support repealing the filibuster in the Senate in order to pass legislation restoring the constitutional right to abortion that Roe v Wade protected prior to its overturning two years ago.

“I’ve been very clear. I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe … 51 votes would be what we actually need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom, and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do,” Harris said.

While legislation can pass with a simple majority in the House of Representatives, the Senate’s filibuster requires most legislation to receive 60 votes to pass. Repealing it would give Democrats the opportunity to enact a law restoring abortion rights, but they would also need to keep their control of the chamber to do that.

Here’s more on the obstacles the Democrats face to keeping their Senate majority:

Patrick Wintour

Speaking at the United Nations right after Joe Biden was Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had strong words for the United States over its support for Israel.

He accused America of continuing to arm Israel so it can continue its “massacre”, when it pretends to look for a ceasefire.

He asked Washington, a fellow Nato member: “How long are you going to be able to carry the shame of witnessing this massacre?”, adding that what has happened in Gaza is a great moral collapse. “Countries that have a say over Israel are openly complicit in this massacre,” Erdoğan said.