Summary
We’re wrapping up our live coverage of US politics for today, but our live coverage of what is happening now in Israel and Lebanon will continue.
Some of today’s key events:
A Georgia judge struck down Georgia’s restrictive ban on abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy, and ruled that abortion care could once again be provided until around 22 weeks of pregnancy.
The ruling follows weeks of national scrutiny after a ProPublica investigation of what experts called the “preventable” deaths of two Georgia women, related to the state’s punitive anti-abortion law.
Fulton County superior court judge Robert McBurney’s ruling overturning the abortion ban was strongly worded, arguing that, “Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote,” and that forcing women to remain pregnant is a kind of “involuntary servitude,” which forces “primarily poor women, which means in Georgia primarily black and brown women – to engage in compulsory labor, ie, the carrying of a pregnancy to term at the government’s behest.”
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, as many as 600 people are still unaccounted for, and at least 100 confirmed dead, the White House said.
Donald Trump made a series of baseless claims related to the Biden administration’s handling of Hurricane Helene, asserting without evidence that his Democratic rivals “left Americans to drown” and claiming at an election event that Biden had not spoken with Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp in the wake of the storm. (Kemp told reporters they had spoken.)
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris expressed support for legalizing marijuana.
Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has won the endorsement of Rudy Giuliani’s daughter, who declared: “I’ve been grieving the loss of my dad to [Donald] Trump. I cannot bear to lose our country to him too.”
Caroline Rose Giuliani was writing in Vanity Fair, where she lamented how her father, who was once the former president’s personal attorney and trusted adviser, became caught up in the “destructive trail” and chaos of the Trump administration and its aftermath.
“I’m unfortunately well suited to remind Americans of just how calamitous being associated with Trump can be, even for those who are convinced he’s on their side,” wrote Giuliani, a California-based film-maker and activist who has frequently taken issue with her father’s political positions.
“I am constantly asking myself how America is back here, even considering the possibility of electing Donald Trump again, after all of the damage he has caused, both in office and since. There are unmistakable reminders of Trump’s destructive trail all around us, and it has broken my heart to watch my dad become one of them.”
Rudy Giuliani, who became an immensely popular mayor of New York after guiding the city through the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, paid a severe price for promoting Trump’s lies that his 2020 election defeat was fraudulent.
