Good morning.
There are just 50 days to go until a US presidential election that both sides see as existential. But while some voters are already filling out their absentee ballots, writes Tom McCarthy, there is still plenty of time for an October surprise to change the course of the race, which looks like Joe Biden’s to lose. Over the weekend, Michael Bloomberg pledged to spend $100m on ads backing the Democrat in Florida, still a key swing state.
Biden is hoping to make the election about Covid-19, reports Daniel Strauss, even as Donald Trump’s aides continue to insist the president’s confession that he “played down” the pandemic was in fact a demonstration of his strong leadership. On Sunday night, Trump held a largely mask-free indoor rally in Nevada, in breach of the state’s own coronavirus regulations.
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Trump boasted of receiving the ‘Bay of Pigs Award’ from Cuban Americans in Florida, as he sought to drum up support from Hispanic Americans on Sunday. No such award exists.
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The president is ‘compromised by the Russians’, former FBI agent Peter Strzok told NBC on Sunday. Strzok was removed from Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and fired by the FBI over text messages in which he was critical of Trump.
Disinformation is spreading like wildfire – and Trump isn’t helping
At least 35 people are known to have died amid the wildfires on the US west coast since mid-August, including 10 in Oregon in the past week alone. And authorities fear more bodies will be found in the charred ruins of towns from California to Washington state. Trump is scheduled to visit California on Monday, but continues to ignore the climate change implications of the catastrophe, claiming instead that poor “forestry management” is to blame for the blazes.
“He’s going to come out here and probably tell us ‘I’m going to send you rakes’ instead of more help,” the Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti, said on Sunday, suggesting the president was ignoring the crisis because it was taking place in Democrat-voting states:
We need leadership that is equal across this country instead of being partisan and divisive. We need actual help, material help not based on our party affiliation and not how we voted.
Major investors are demanding climate action from big polluters
A group representing climate-conscious investors, who collectively control $47tn in assets, is demanding environmental action from the world’s biggest corporate polluters. Climate Action 100+ has flexed its shareholder muscles by writing to 161 fossil fuel, mining, transport and other major emitters, warning they will be publicly held to account if they do not aim for a series of 30 climate targets designed to help reach net-zero emissions and achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris climate deal.
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The companies targeted in the letter include Exxon Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Rio Tinto and the mining firm BHP, which last week pledged to cut emissions from its operations by 30% by 2030, under pressure from activist shareholders.
The WHO says we can stop future pandemics with $5 each per year
The World Health Organization reported another one-day record in new coronavirus cases on Sunday, with the global total rising by 307,930 in 24 hours. The Covid-19 death toll is nearing 1 million, with a further 5,537 fatalities recorded on Sunday.
A former head of the UN health body has said investing $5 per person annually in global health security could help to prevent similar pandemics in future. Gro Harlem Brundtland argued that although the costs would run into billions, the total would still be dwarfed by the $11tn already spent on responding to Covid-19.
In other news …
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Dominic Thiem has won the US Open, defeating Alexander Zverev in a fifth-set tiebreak to claim the men’s singles title. The 27-year-old Austrian is the first player outside Rafa Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer to win a grand slam tournament since 2016.
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More than 100,000 people have marched in Minsk on the eve of a meeting between Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, and Vladimir Putin of Russia, proving Lukashenko’s brutal attempts to crush his opposition have so far failed.
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Two Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies were shot and wounded after being ambushed by a gunman in Compton on Saturday, prompting condemnation from Biden – and calls for the death penalty from Trump.
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TikTok’s US operations will not be sold to Microsoft, after all. Instead, the video-sharing app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance has reportedly chosen a consortium led by Oracle as a “technology partner” in the US.
Great reads
Almost Famous at 20
Cameron Crowe’s 2000 comedy drama Almost Famous was based on his own experiences as a precocious young music magazine writer in the 1970s. Two decades after its release, Scott Tobias says this bittersweet coming-of-age road movie is as insightful about journalism as All the President’s Men.
The lives of Appalachian kids captured on $10 cameras
In the late 1970s, Wendy Ewald moved from New York to teach in rural Kentucky, where she gave her schoolchildren $10 cameras with which to document their own lives. The book that resulted, Portraits and Dreams, is still considered a landmark of vernacular photography, writes Sean O’Hagan.
Opinion: Sydney and SF provide the template for a fiery future
Her Bay Area home always reminded Kirsten Tranter of her native Australia. Now the parallels are more troubling, as San Francisco’s 2020 fire season recalls last summer’s catastrophic bushfires around Sydney.
It is an instinctive human response, I suppose, to get through a disaster by imagining that it’s a one-time thing, a rarity. But climate change means that the seasons will just keep getting hotter. Records will keep being broken. Will this be the last year we can get away with calling the fires ‘unprecedented’?
Last Thing: a Florida city slackens its rules on pant-sagging
In 2007, the Florida city of Opa-Locka made headlines by introducing a ban on “sagging” – the wearing of trousers so low-riding that they expose the underwear – punishable by fines of up to $500. The city’s commissioners have voted to end the ban, which its vice-mayor said had “disproportionately affected a certain segment of our population, which is young, African American men.”
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