President again took aim at progressive Senate candidate and lauded Haley Stevens for endorsing Mike Rogers

Donald Trump railed against Democratic US senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed at a campaign event in Iowa Sunday, repeatedly referring to the Michigan progressive as a “jihadist”.

Trump’s comments aimed to influence a neck-and-neck race that will play an outsized role in determining which party controls the senate after Tuesday’s midterm elections.

• 26-year-old injured making tackle in fourth quarter

• Linebacker treated for nearly 10 minutes on field

Detroit Lions linebacker Jack Campbell sustained a neck injury and was taken to a local ⁠hospital after being injured during the fourth quarter of his team’s 19-15 victory over the Minnesota Vikings.

“Thoughts and ⁠prayers are ​with Jack and his family,” Lions head coach Dan Campbell said after the game. “He’s being ⁠taken care of. We don’t have any new information. We’ll keep you updated as this thing goes. But ⁠we are thinking about him. We are thinking about him.”

Bowen Wan was on anti-seizure medication, and chatbot provided her with a tapering schedule to reduce dosage

A woman’s death from an epileptic seizure after she received dangerous advice from a chatbot has prompted her parents to sue OpenAI earlier this week.

The legal action is the latest lawsuit that in which plaintiffs allege that a bot provided counsel to a user that ultimately led to their death.

• Gardner Minshew’s heroics inspire Arizona

• Jackson needs surgery on injured thumb

Chad Ryland kicked a winning 42-yard field goal in overtime after missing a PAT that would have won the game with six seconds left in regulation, and the Arizona Cardinals rallied for a wild victory over the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday. The Cardinals beat Dallas for the fifth consecutive time and improved to 5-0 at AT+T Stadium, the home of the Cowboys that opened in 2009.

Aircraft had departed Austin-Bergstrom international airport and was headed to the Bahamas when it crashed

A business jet carrying nine people nose-dived into a South Florida neighborhood Sunday and erupted into a giant fireball that appeared to just miss homes near a busy roadway, killing everyone onboard.

Video recorded by people inside their cars captured the terrifying moment the Bahamas-bound aircraft plunged from the sky before striking near the Palm Beach county roadway and exploding. Flames flickered around chunks of pavement lining a crater as people milled about, expressing shock that it landed only feet from homes and inches from passing vehicles. Thick black smoke engulfed the crash site.

Democratic senator was at his son’s hockey game when he felt a numbness in his arm and was in Johns Hopkins

Democratic US Senator Chris Murphy has been hospitalized after suffering a stroke.

Murphy, 53, started feeling numbness in his arm while attending his son’s hockey game on Saturday, according to the Connecticut senator’s chief of staff, Allison Herwitt. A hospital visit confirmed that Murphy had experienced a stroke.

️ Report: Antonelli wins world championship at age of 20

️ Antonelli claims the Formula One crown – his season in pictures

Lap 4 of 71: Hamilton inquires as to what action is being taken. He’s assured that people are looking into it.

For now:

Voting is particularly high in states with tight Senate races that could determine which party controls the chamber

US citizens are casting ballots in record numbers ahead of the midterm elections on Tuesday, another potential indication, analysts say, of voter dissatisfaction with Republicans and Donald Trump.

Voting was particularly high in states that feature tight Senate races that could determine which party controls the chamber.

Endorsement was met with backlash from the party, condemning Stevens for her ‘betrayal’

Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who lost the Michigan Democratic Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, in an extraordinary rebuke of her party’s nominee on the eve of the midterm elections.

Her endorsement came in a video posted to X after she attended an event with Rogers at the predominantly Black Perfecting church in Detroit on Sunday. Stevens’ endorsement was the culmination of an escalating feud between the former primary rivals – primarily over support for Israel – that has roiled one of the most fiercely contested Senate contests of the cycle.

Voters are turning against the Republicans. But the clearest possible message is needed to safeguard democracy

The psychologist Jennifer Freyd identified a pattern often used by perpetrators: deny, accuse, and reverse victim and offender. More than one observer has noted that Donald Trump employs that pattern politically. With polls suggesting Republicans are likely to lose the House and perhaps the Senate too in the midterms, the man who refused to accept Americans’ democratic verdict in 2020 is hawking a narrative of cheating Democrats who will steal seats via illegitimate votes.

The January 6 insurrection showed how acute the peril to American democracy had become. It is more so now. This time, Republican efforts to undermine the results began well in advance. In 2020, Mr Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, the attorney general, William Barr, and others refused his most outrageous demands; now the justice department is supine. And the supreme court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, which safeguarded against the worst kinds of racial discrimination, means that states no longer require pre-approval for decisions that could well tilt a race. Districts have already been redrawn.

• Lions hand Vikings their first loss with 19-15 win

• Ravens lose Lamar Jackson and Tyler Huntley to injury

SACK! Vikings 0-0 Lions 9:28, 1st quarter

The Lions are punting after a pair of sacks from Andrew van Ginkel and Eric Wilson. Minnesota take over from their 10-yard line.

J Allen one yard rush

Residents of Menomonie mounted a successful protest against a huge campus in the city as national resistance to the AI boom grows

In the spring of 2025, Sydney Brennan was riding high. The 22-year-old was finishing college and was a newly elected councilwoman in Menomonie, a city of about 17,000 in the lush plains of north-western Wisconsin.

Weeks into the new job, she was invited to a meeting with consultants pitching a $1.6bn AI hyperscale datacenter campus that an undisclosed big tech company wanted to build just outside of town. The project’s numbers were eye-opening: a 320-acre site that would use an estimated 75,000 gallons of water per day, making it the most significant development in Menomonie’s nearly 150-year history.

• Kenya’s Sheila Chepkirui wins second women’s title

• USA’s Jessica Jessica McClain finishes in second

• Sweden’s Andreas Almgren wins men’s race on debut

Sheila Chepkirui of Kenya won the women’s race of the New York City Marathon on Sunday for the second time, while Sweden’s Andreas Almgren claimed the men’s title in his first ever race over the distance.

Almgren was making his debut at 26.2 miles after a successful career running half marathons and the 10,000m. He pulled away from Yemaneberhan Crippa of Italy in the final mile to take the victory in two hours, six minutes and one second. Crippa finished 13 seconds behind. Kamohelo Mofolo of Lesotho was third, edging out defending champion Benson Kipruto.

Police trying to determine if separate shootings are related, among several violent incidents nationwide on weekend

Four people are dead and 15 are injured following separate shootings in a Dallas neighborhood, police say. It was among several violent incidents nationwide on Halloween weekend.

The police chief, Daniel Comeaux, said police are still trying to determine if the shootings in the Deep Ellum neighborhood over the span of one hour and 15 minutes were related.

A coach shaped by her circuitous basketball journey was uniquely suited to building the trust that made Golden State champions just 534 days after their first game

The mighty, miserly Golden State Valkyries won their first WNBA title on Saturday night with a point guard Dallas had given up on and cast aside, a starting forward who had been waived five times and a late-blooming All-Star once passed over by every team in the league. That made them a fitting match for their coach. Natalie Nakase has pieced together a basketball life on making small openings count, turning a walk-on place at UCLA into a scholarship and an unsolicited scouting report into a coaching job in Japan’s top men’s league.

The Valkyries’ nerve-shredding 68-63 fightback over the Atlanta Dream in Game 7 did more than make them the fastest expansion team in major North American professional sports history to win a championship – as 45-1 preseason longshots in their second season of existence. It was proof of concept for an organization that gave overlooked players the resources, responsibility and trust to become champions – and enlisted a leader whose own circuitous journey had taught her what those things could unlock.

Incumbent Dan Sullivan says he will accept election results after ‘unprecedented intervention’ by Trump’s DoJ

A judge has dismissed the Donald Trump-backed lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska’s US Senate race if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses.

Trump said on 23 October that he had ordered the justice department to file the lawsuit in a move that voting rights experts called an “unprecedented intervention” by the federal government with control of Congress in the balance.

Republican congressman’s support of many of the president’s policies has infuriated some of his constituents

The Republican congressman Mike Lawler is in danger of losing his seat next week. Again.

In the last two elections, Lawler, 40, has defeated Democratic opponents in New York’s 17th congressional district – one of the closest-run battlegrounds in this year’s midterms – with moderate policies.

• Eight injured in shooting outside Legion Field

• Annual game draws huge crowds to Birmingham

One person was killed and eight others were wounded in a mass shooting outside Legion Field after the annual Magic City Classic football game on Saturday night, police in Birmingham, Alabama, said.

Michael Pickett, chief of the Birmingham Police Department, said most spectators and families had left the stadium property after the game, but the shooting happened nearby, where vendors were set up along Graymont Avenue.

This blog is now closed. See our latest full reports here:

• Democrat Haley Stevens endorses Abdul El-Sayed’s Republican rival

• Trump launches racist diatribe against Abdul El-Sayed at Iowa rally

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At the end of 2022, the four largest US cities – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston – all had Black mayors. It was a historic alignment made possible by the aftereffects of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement and the unprecedented wave of protests following the killing of George Floyd in 2020.

Six years on, only one of those mayors remains: the embattled Karen Bass of Los Angeles, who is facing a strong challenge from a younger, even more progressive challenger. Bass’s opponent is Nithya Raman, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, although the group is considering rescinding its endorsement over her refusal to explicitly embrace the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

In state that has become ‘ground zero’ for discrimination against south Asians, experts say they are seeing voters motivated to fight back

Last winter, while Pooja Sethi was canvassing to become the Democratic candidate for the Texas house of representatives, she received a text from a staff member alerting her to a post on X. The Turning Point USA influencer Savanah Hernandez – a Trump supporter known for creating videos that target immigrants – had posted a photo of Sethi’s campaign banner with the caption: “Welcome to politics in Texas.”

The post went viral.

Officials in Red Hill, Colorado, say they have a safe plan to wipe out invasive weeds, but some locals are concerned

Soon, weed-killing chemicals will start falling from the sky over the Red Hill area of Boulder county, Colorado.

The wildland is known for its biodiversity, home to hundreds of important species and a concentration of rare environmental resources. It is a key habitat for beloved herds of elk and bighorn sheep, with farms and ranchland lying at its base.

Trump’s utter abuse of the power proves it. As the midterms approach, voters have not forgotten January 6

From betraying Ukraine and dispatching masked agents who killed Americans to deporting US citizens and pulling out of accords controlling climate change and Iranian nuclear weapons, the list of Donald Trump’s abuses is long and growing still longer, seemingly by the day.

Looking back decades from now, historians will see that at the top of this shameful list is Trump’s utter abuse of his pardon power. It started on the first day of his second term, when he pardoned more than 1,500 insurrectionists who, on 6 January 2021, had stormed the US Capitol.

Haitian community in Springfield demands dignity and better rights for immigrants as ICE crackdown ramps up

Michaelle Louis’s feet and legs are aching. She can barely walk.

Surrounded by corn fields and the distant hum of a busy highway, the native of Haiti and dozens of other activists are 23 miles into a 45-mile march from Springfield to Ohio’s statehouse in Columbus to demand better rights for Haitian immigrants.

The conflict that tore through New England 350 years ago was the bloodiest per capita in colonial or US history

Massachusetts is proud of its ties to the American Revolution. From Paul Revere’s Ride to the siege of Boston, the past year-plus has been devoted to celebrating 250 years of US independence. Yet during this time, the state, and New England in general, has given far less attention to an older, more complex remembrance: The 350th anniversary of King Philip’s war.

King Philip, or Metacom, was an Indigenous leader from the Pokanoket people. Alarmed by English colonists’ infringement of Indigenous rights, from seizing land to proselytizing, Metacom led an alliance of New England tribes – including the Pokanoket, Nipmuc and Narragansett – in an existential struggle for control of the region. He gave his name to the conflict, but paid with his life – as did many others, soldiers and civilians alike. With an estimated 800 dead on the colonial side, and three to five thousand Indigenous slain, the war claimed more deaths per capita than any other in colonial American or US history.

One man’s campaign finance operation in Wisconsin exemplifies the opacity of the US political funding system

In the summer of 2024, a non-profit called the Green Dragon Coalition wired the last $20,000 of a $445,000 grant to a Super Pac. Its tax return for that year would describe the purpose of the transfer as “educational”.

The same day, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records, the Super Pac spent $8,000 attacking Celeste Maloy, the Republican congresswoman for Utah’s second district, four days before the primary that would decide whether she kept her seat. It had already spent more than $400,000 promoting her challenger, Colby Jenkins, who was running to her right with the endorsement of the rightwing Utah senator Mike Lee.

Cost of living has loomed over this election cycle as workers and unions champion candidates fighting for higher wages and tackling rising prices

For millions of Americans heading to the polls on Tuesday, affordability is a constant and worsening issue, and it’s been a prevailing concern this election cycle.

In Lorain county, Ohio, Gina Jones and her co-workers at the Lorain county job and family services have been on strike since February 2026, the longest public sector strike in Ohio history and on pace to break the US record for longest public sector strike.

From the cheesecake factory discourse to the double Dan Sullivans, campaign season has been ridiculous

Chances are, as you’re reading this, your bunker is fully stocked, your doors are locked, and you’re peeking at your computer screen through gaps between your fingers.

After all, it’s election day on Tuesday. Once again, democracy will be tested – like Beavis & Butthead taking the SATs. I’m not looking forward to it, and I’m sure you aren’t either.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Former president has given series of blistering speeches to help candidates in key races – and deployment has proved a hit with party’s progressive wing

That could have been awkward. Barack Obama, campaigning for Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, acknowledged that his fellow Democrat has criticised some aspects of the Obama presidency.

“Yeah, Abdul didn’t agree with some things we wanted to do – that our administration was doing – when I was president,” he told a rally in Detroit. “You know who else doesn’t agree with everything I do? Michelle Obama.” The crowd erupted in laughter. “I’d say about five times a day, she says, ‘You knucklehead. Why you do that?’”

With affordability a major election issue, the incumbent is trying to ward off her democratic socialist challenger

At the end of 2022, the four largest US cities – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston – all had Black mayors. It was a historic alignment made possible by the aftereffects of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement and the unprecedented wave of protests following the killing of George Floyd in 2020.

Six years on, only one of those mayors remains: the embattled Karen Bass of Los Angeles, who is facing a strong challenge from a younger, even more progressive challenger. Bass’s opponent is Nithya Raman, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, although the group is considering rescinding its endorsement over her refusal to explicitly embrace the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

Donald Trump uttered five words this summer that could seal the Republican party’s fate: ‘Pretend I’m on the ticket’

He spoke admiringly of a senator’s posterior. He baselessly accused a Muslim candidate of being a terrorist. He boasted about his renovations of the White House. He quipped that his own supporters couldn’t afford a hamburger at his Mar-a-Lago club. Every now and then, he spoke about the cost of living, and other everyday concerns of voters.

Donald Trump has held dozens of campaign rallies before next week’s US midterm elections. The 80-year-old remains convinced that he can prove the doubters wrong again and help Republicans retain control of the US Congress. But it was five words he uttered at this summer’s Republican convention in Dallas that could seal his party’s fate: “Pretend I’m on the ticket.”

A public spat has cast Democratic tensions in the spotlight as the close US Senate race draws to a head

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s tightly fought US Senate race, wants Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens to stay away from his campaign events.

“I don’t want any distractions,” El-Sayed told reporters after a campaign rally, according to the New York Times. “It seems as though other folks are more interested in making this race about things that it’s not about.”

Legal challenges to Donald Trump’s proposed memorial arch are mounting even as its construction is imminent

The legal challenges to Donald Trump’s proposed memorial arch are mounting, with the District of Columbia and Virginia suing in federal court on Saturday as the administration says construction could begin as early as next week.

There are now three lawsuits calling for a halt to potential work on a monument that would rise 250ft (76 meters) on a patch of grass off the bridge that spans the Potomac River, connecting the city with the Arlington national cemetery. That would make the arch 100ft taller (30 meters) than the Statue of Liberty is from its base to the top of the torch.

• Three women contacted police after Jacobs’ May arrest

• One alleged the Packers star threatened to kill her

• Lawyers call allegations ‘uncorroborated’ and ‘old’

As police investigated the battery case involving Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs following a May altercation with his then-girlfriend, multiple other women contacted them to detail their own allegations against him.

Those accounts were included in evidence regarding Jacobs’ battery case that the Hobart/Lawrence Police Department released on Friday night in response to a public records request. Green Bay TV station NBC 26 first reported the records’ release.

Benvenuto Cellini and Ryan Moore quickened clear to win the $5m Breeders’ Cup Turf

17.48 Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint, Grade One, 5½f

We’re on to the turf next, and the most obvious barrier to a European clean sweep on the grass in the form of Wesley Ward’s Bacio. He is already familiar to European racing fans as the winner of both the Palace of Holyroodhouse Handicap at Royal Ascot and the Nunthorpe at York in August.

Record number of early votes cast, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans in states which collect that information

There has been a surge of early voting for the US midterm elections, with millions more Americans going to the polls compared with the last such election amid a series of tight contests that will determine control of Congress.

More than 50.5m early votes have been cast across the US as of Saturday morning, according to an analysis by the University of Florida. This is already nearly 5m more votes than the total number of early votes made in the last midterm elections, in 2022.

On the Bering Sea, Unalaska is the US’s most productive seafood port, employing thousands of workers. But Trump’s cuts, and his disastrous war with Iran, have caused chaos – and put Republican control of Congress at risk

It was less than 17 hours until the start of Alaska’s lucrative Bering Sea crab season, and Oystein Lone was standing on a dock in the city of Unalaska, preparing to embark in rough conditions.

The problem wasn’t the next day’s forecast of 60mph gusts, which would kick up white-capped swells and make crabbing, already one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States, even more hazardous. Nor was it the question of whether there’d be enough red king, tanner and snow crabs to go around – state regulators had, in fact, announced higher quotas for the season.

But select Democrats, too, are being accused of having ties to the late sex offender as country prepares to vote

In races across the country, Democratic candidates or groups that support them have released ads accusing Republicans of protecting pedophiles by voting against legislation to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

The ads appear intended to evoke an emotional response by accusing candidates of “protecting” Epstein, a notorious pedophile accused of running a sex-trafficking ring involving minors.

Legal experts welcome judge’s rejection of firing of James Comey’s daughter prosecutor but warn an appeal is likely

A recent legal ruling against an effort to fire the star-prosecutor daughter of a former FBI chief targeted by Donald Trump could send a strong message about politicized firings – and influence other judges weighing similar cases, legal veterans said.

Judge Jesse Furman ruled this week that the Department of Justice’s firing of assistant US attorney Maurene Comey without cause was unlawful. Comey, the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, successfully litigated numerous high-profile cases during her tenure at the southern district of New York, including guilty verdicts against Ghislaine Maxwell and Sean “Diddy” Combs.

The administration’s efforts have raised concerns among experts about potential disruptions after election day

Donald Trump is waging a brazen effort to interfere with voting in this year’s midterm elections, escalating concerns that the federal government will try to slow down certification of election results – a strategy that could create chaos when the new Congress is seated next year.

Experts are certain the administration’s efforts to subvert America’s elections will not work. And some have bemoaned “fearmongering” about far-fetched scenarios that are unlikely to go anywhere in court.

Tensions had flared after Stevens gave a precondition for her appearance: El-Sayed must denounce an ad attributing rising costs to US support of Israel

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Located further west than the Hawaiian islands, Unalaska is closer to Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul than Washington DC. Most visitors arrive on flights from Anchorage, which cost at least $1,600 round trip and are prone to cancellation, due to the region’s unpredictable storms and fog.

But Unalaska is by no means a backwater. It has been the country’s most productive seafood port by volume for more than two and a half decades, and when its crab and pollock seasons are open, thousands of deckhands and processors arrive from elsewhere to work tough but well-paying jobs on boats offshore and in seafood plants crowded in the city.

Guardian readers share their concerns and disillusionment with the political climate under Trump as elections loom

Millions of Americans will head to the polls on 3 November in elections that will determine control of the Republican-held House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the governorships of 36 states.

The midterms come amid mounting public frustration over issues ranging from the rising cost of living and immigration to the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, big tech and the US’s overseas wars. Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 36%, according to a New York Times/Siena poll conducted this month.

Environmental Defense Fund analysis shows administration handed out $950m and Clean Air Act exemptions

It’s a good time to be a coal plant in the US. The Trump administration has given support to almost half of the nation’s coal plants, helping them to continue operating despite economic and regulatory headwinds, according to a new analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund.

The analysis, which looked at the 184 operating coal plants that are connected to the grid, found that 90 received support from the Trump administration through “cash handouts, free passes to pollute, and requirements to stay online past their retirement dates”.

After canceling events in 2025, US cities including Henderson, Kentucky, are reviving public Day of the Dead events

Julia, a 19-year-old born in the US, and her parents, undocumented immigrants from Mexico, enjoyed attending the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration each year in Henderson, Kentucky, and selling aguas frescas, horchatas and a sweet bread traditionally eaten on the Mexican holiday.

Last year, her family also built an ofrenda, or altar, featuring flowers and a violin, to honor her grandfather, who played the instrument and died in 2023 in Mexico.

The first lady has been praised for ‘singlehandedly’ brokering a ceasefire in a Ukrainian city – though she might have had some help

Haters be damned: Donald Trump just keeps on winning. He won the inaugural Fifa peace prize last year and was presented with the completely real, totally not made-up “Man of the Century” award at a recent rally. The president has also spent the greater part of a decade claiming he was once crowned Michigan’s Man of the Year: a fantastic achievement considering there is no such award and Trump has never lived in Michigan.

But despite his many trophies, there is one honour that has proved elusive: the Nobel peace prize. Trump holds a bit of a grudge about that, recently terming Norway a “shithouse country” for passing him over for the award. In response, the country’s tourism board highlighted some of its nicest public lavatories with the tagline: “Norway makes shit houses great again!”

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylviania, a post-industrial site gets a second life

Lance Wallnau has gathered supporters to talk about Charlie Kirk and school boards – with no mention of GOP

One of Donald Trump’s most influential Christian nationalist backers has privately shied away from rallying supporters for the Republican party before the midterms, instead urging them to focus their attention elsewhere – including emulating El Salvador and Poland, finding a successor for Charlie Kirk and even focusing on their own diets.

At the “As One” weekend for paying “partners” in the Dallas-Fort Worth area earlier this month, Lance Wallnau, one of the first prominent rightwing evangelicals to back Trump in 2015, spoke across three sessions about the virtues of El Salvador’s prison system, school boards and the movement’s future. The midterms, then little more than three weeks away, were not mentioned once.

Millions will vote to decide which party controls Congress – which will have a huge impact on Trump’s final years in office

US voters will soon deliver a national verdict on the second presidency of Donald Trump. On 3 November, millions of Americans will vote in midterm elections to decide control of the House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the governorships in 36 states and state legislatures across the country. The results could have a huge impact on Trump’s final two years in office.

Our reporters have interviewed nine voters across the country and the political spectrum about extremism in US politics, their confidence in the US voting system, what they hope Congress will tackle first and their views of the president’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth.

Nearly 500 men are detained at the T Don Hutto detention facility, and many have risked sharing their experiences in a unique way

What goes on inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers across the US happens behind closed doors and high fences.

Personal accounts of lengthy detention, misery and sickness and allegations of abuse rarely reach the public directly while people are still behind bars.

The unprecedented measure has enormous potential nationwide. The clash exposes the party’s corporate-progressive divide

Midway through this summer, a high-quality poll found that Democrats in California were overwhelmingly in favor of the upcoming ballot measure for a one-time 5% tax on billionaire wealth.

The ratio was more than 4 to 1. But the state’s most powerful Democrats – including the governor Gavin Newsom, his near-certain successor Xavier Becerra and the Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass – have lined up with Silicon Valley billionaires who’ve raised upward of $340m to defeat the initiative.

Alleged self-dealing by the president and his allies doesn’t look so good as corruption emerges as a key issue for midterm voters

• Government corruption a top issue for US midterm voters, exclusive poll finds

Voters under 50 probably won’t remember the “welfare queen”. But she once embodied Republicans’ claim of the underlying reason for US societal decay: the poor are a bunch of fraudsters.

Ronald Reagan introduced Linda Taylor to US voters at a rally during the Republican presidential primary season in 1976. A resident of Chicago’s South Side, Taylor had been arrested for welfare fraud. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, five phone numbers to collect food stamps, social security, veteran’s benefits for four non-existing deceased veteran husbands,” Reagan said. “Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”

The Qatari government gifted him a luxury jet, potentially violating the emoluments clause of the constitution.

The UAE gained access to some tightly guarded, high-end American AI chips soon after an investment firm linked to its ruling family secretly bought a $500m stake in World Liberty Financial, the crypto company funded by the families of Trump and his chum Steve Witkoff.

Rich people facing criminal charges have taken to donating to Trump’s political operations and then seeking pardons or clemency. Most recently, Wanda Vázquez Garced, the former governor of Puerto Rico, and the banker who paid her bribes, Julio Herrera Velutini, were pardoned after Velutini’s family gave a $50m deal to Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, and donated $3.5m to Trump’s Maga Inc Super Pac.

The first family is also making a killing from the government. The Pentagon lent more than $600m to Vulcan Elements, a rare earths startup, just three months after Donald Jr’s venture capital firm 1789 Capital bought a stake in the outfit.

Powerus, a drone maker backed by Eric and Donald Jr is selling drone interceptors to Persian Gulf allies of the US that are under attack by Iran, enriching the kids from a misbegotten war launched by the dad without consulting Congress.