Rachel Leingang

The misinformation about migrants in Springfield, Ohio comes as the Trump campaign has sought to make immigration a key issue, tying Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the towns unprepared for migrants arriving via the southern border.

The city has seen a large number of migrants from Haiti, which has both helped the economy there with staffing concerns while also stretching the capacity of some services like clinics and schools, the New York Times reported.

A Biden administration policy provided temporary protected status to hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants, who have left their home country because of ongoing violence. Some estimates say as many as 20,000 people from Haiti have come to the city, the Times said.

Last year, a migrant driving a van outside Springfield crashed into a school bus, killing one child, which added fuel to the concerns some residents have had with migration. Housing costs have also increased, which has led to fewer options for low-income residents of all backgrounds, the paper reported.

Springfield’s mayor, Rob Rue, went on Fox to say the Biden administration was to blame for “failing cities like ours and taxing us beyond our limit”.

Residents at recent council meetings have appealed to their elected officials to better manage the new stream of residents. In now viral testimony, one woman said she and her husband might need to move from their home because of ongoing problems with “men that cannot speak English in my front yard screaming at me” and throwing items in her yard.

Some have also tried to tie a woman who was charged recently in Canton, Ohio, for allegedly killing and then eating a cat to the influx of migrants in Springfield, a different city more than 150 miles (241km) away. She does not appear to be a Haitian migrant.

The White House described false claims being shared by prominent Republicans including the Trump campaign and JD Vance about Haitian migrants in an Ohio city eating pets and local wildlife as “dangerous” misinformation.

The White House’s national security adviser John Kirby told reporters on Tuesday:

This kind of misinformation is dangerous. Because there will be people that believe it, no matter how ludicrous and stupid it is. And they might act on that kind of misinformation and act on it in a way where somebody can get hurt so it needs to stop.

He added:

What’s deeply concerning to us is you’ve got now elected officials in the Republican Party pushing yet another conspiracy theory that’s just seeking to divide people based on lies and – let’s be honest – based on an element of racism.

Social media posts have claimed, without evidence, that migrants from Haiti to Springfield, Ohio, are stealing pets and local wildlife such as ducks and geese and are butchering them for food.

Many of the posts, including one shared by the X account for the Republicans on the House judiciary committee, use images generated by artificial intelligence to show Donald Trump holding and protecting cats and ducks, casting him as a savior to the town.

Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, shared a meme of two cats hugging one another that said, “Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.”

Donald Trump sexual abuse accuser Jessica Leeds says she ruefully “laughed out loud” when the former president recently disputed her sworn testimony that he grabbed her, tried to kiss her and ran his hand up her skirt on a plane in the 1970s by insisting “she would not have been the chosen one”.

“He assaulted me 50 years ago and continues to attack me today,” Leeds said alongside her attorneys during a press conference in New York on Monday.

It was like he had 47 arms – like an octopus, but not a sound was spoken.

Her remarks came after Trump appeared at an appeal hearing on the sexual abuse case brought by E Jean Carroll, which resulted in a jury finding Trump liable of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll.

Leeds, 82, came forward in 2016 and later testified in the Carroll trial, which centered on Carroll’s testimony that the Republican nominee in November’s election had assaulted her at a department store in the 1990s.

Leeds has accused Trump of groping her in the first-class section of an airplane. She said she fought him off and moved to the back of the plane. At her press conference, she said she later ran into him, prompting him to exclaim, “I remember you,” before calling her a derogatory word.

Melania Trump, the former first lady, questioned the official account of the attempted assassination of her husband, Donald Trump, in a bizarre new video posted to X to promote her new memoir.

“The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible, distressing experience,” she said.

Now, the silence around it feels heavy. I can’t help but wonder: Why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech?

“There is definitely more to this story, and we need to uncover the truth, she added.

The video ends with an image of her new book, “Melania”, due to be released on 8 October.

The dispatching of election police to voters’ homes is not the only beef Ron DeSantis critics have with the Republican Florida governor’s efforts to upend the amendment 4 abortion ballot measure.

The official Florida health department’s website is urging voters to reject it, an unlawful use of taxpayers’ money for what amounts to political advertising, according to the ACLU of Florida.

Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said in a statement:

To our knowledge, it is unprecedented for the state to expressly advocate against a citizen-led initiative.

This kind of propaganda, using taxpayer money and operating outside of the political process, sets a dangerous precedent. This is what we would expect to see from an authoritarian regime.

The state’s illegal act to undermine amendment 4 is nothing more than an abuse of power, aimed at preventing voters from rejecting the cruel and extreme abortion ban in place.

DeSantis has railed against amendment 4, which would nix the six-week abortion ban he signed into law in April last year, and allow abortions until viability of the fetus.

There’s a new squabble in Florida over an amendment on November’s ballot to protect abortion rights.

Having failed to persuade the state’s supreme court from blocking the measure going before voters in the first place, Ron DeSantis, the state’s hard-right Republican governor, now claims the signature collection process for amendment 4 was fraudulent, and is reportedly sending his election police force to voters’ homes to try to gather evidence.

The Tampa Bay Times spoke to voters who said uniformed officers from the Florida department of law enforcement showed up at their door. One told the newspaper that the officer had a 10-page dossier on him, including a printout of his driver’s license and a copy of his signature.

After the voter confirmed he had indeed signed the petition, the officer left.

DeSantis set up his own election fraud unit in 2022 and has been busy scouring thousands of the almost one million signatures that put the abortion measure on the ballot for authenticity.

Democrats are calling foul. State representative Anna Eskamani told the Orlando Sentinel:

These tactics set a very dangerous precedent for the future of our elections where [an] election police force can be sent in to intimidate, to try to re-evaluate history and to take away our votes and to take away our voices.

At a press conference Monday, DeSantis defended his tactics. His investigators, he said, found signatures that “appeared” not to be authentic.

“It may be… that voter will say, ‘No, I actually did do that,’ maybe they signed their name. That is absolutely possible,” DeSantis conceded.

A new Harris-Walz campaign ad features Barack Obama mocking Donald Trump over his “weird obsession” with crowd sizes during his speech at the Democratic national convention last month.

The ad, titled Crowd Size, features footage from the former president’s remarks the convention in Milwaukee where he decries Trump for “whining about his problems” such as his “weird obsession with crowd sizes”.

“This weird obsession with crowd sizes ... it just goes on, and on, and on,” Obama says, making a suggestive hand gesture that drew laughter from the audience.

The ad launched this morning and will air nationally and in markets that appear intentionally targeted at Trump, including on Fox News and in West Palm Beach, Florida, as well as Philadelphia, where tonight’s debate is taking place.

Joan E Greve

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will arrive in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday for their first (and potentially only) presidential debate.

The event will mark the first time that Harris and Trump have ever met face to face, and it comes less than two months after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race following his own fateful debate performance in June.

The change at the top of the Democratic ticket appears to have unnerved Trump and his campaign advisers, who have struggled to land attacks against Harris. The debate will present Trump with his most significant opportunity yet to negatively define Harris in voters’ minds, as polls show a neck-and-neck race in key battleground states.

For Harris, the debate could allow her to deliver on her oft-repeated promise to voters: that she will prosecute the case against Trump. Her political history – both on the debate stage and in Senate hearings – suggest she is well-positioned to make that case. But Harris is not without her vulnerabilities either.

Here are five key moments from Harris’s career that could offer a preview of her debate strategy.

Two former Trump White House officials will join Kamala Harris’s campaign in Philadelphia as surrogates for Tuesday’s presidential debate, the Harris campaign announced.

Anthony Scaramucci, who served as Donald Trump’s White House communications director, and Olivia Troye, who was homeland security adviser to Mike Pence and a top aide on the Trump White House’s coronavirus task force, will speak out against Donald Trump and for Harris ahead of the debate, the campaign said.

Announcing the campaign’s plans to bring Scaramucci and Troye to the debate, the Harris-Walz campaign’s communications director Michael Tyler said:

Listen, don’t take it from us: Take it from the ones who know Donald Trump the best and who are telling the American people exactly how unfit Trump is to serve as president. They saw firsthand the abject failure of Donald Trump’s presidency.

The White Stripes’ Jack White and Meg White have filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump for what they allege is the “flagrant misappropriation” of a recording of their hit song Seven Nation Army in a campaign video.

The video that spurred the legal action was posted by Trump staffer Margo McAtee Martin on X on 29 August, but has since been deleted. It shows the Republican presidential nominee boarding a plane with the opening riff of Seven Nation Army playing in the background.

Responding via Instagram at the time, Jack White wrote:

Don’t even think about using my music you fascists. Law suit coming from my lawyers about this (to add to your 5 thousand others).

The singer has made good on the threat, filing a copyright infringement suit, alongside Meg White, as the White Stripes, seeking “significant monetary damages”, and listing Trump, his campaign and Martin as defendants.

The suit alleges that the campaign did not seek or obtain permission from the band to use the song, and did not respond to pre-litigation efforts to resolve the issue.

As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump meet tonight for their only scheduled debate, here’s what to know:

What time is the debate?

The debate will start at 9pm Eastern Time (1am GMT) and is expected to last 90 minutes with two commercial breaks.

Where is the debate?

Tonight’s debate will take place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, a key election battleground state. As with the previous debate between Trump and Joe Biden, there will be no audience present.

World News Tonight anchor David Muir and ABC News Live Prime anchor Linsey Davis will moderate the debate.

How can I watch the debate?

ABC News will carry the debate live on its broadcast network as well as its streaming platform ABC News Live, Disney+ and Hulu. Several networks have also agreed to carry the event live.

When is the next debate?

As of now, there is only one debate scheduled before the election. Tim Walz and JD Vance are due to face off at a vice-presidential debate on 1 October in New York City.

Good morning US politics readers. It was the debate that was never meant to happen. Tonight, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will meet for the first time ever when they take the stage at Philadelphia’s national constitution center for the presidential debate.

With just eight weeks until election day and recent polls showing the candidates neck-and-neck, the stakes couldn’t be higher for both Harris and Trump. Today’s debate, which will start at 9pm ET and is expected to last 90 minutes, may well be the only chance the American public have to see their Democratic and Republican presidential candidates face off against each other on what voters say are their key issues, including the economy, immigration and reproductive rights.

We will be covering the debate tonight on our live blog. In the meantime, here’s what else we’re watching:

• The Harris-Walz campaign unveiled a new ad for debate day, entitled “Crowd Size”, that features Barack Obama ridiculing Trump’s insecurities about his crowd size.

• Paul Dans, the former director of Project 2025, sharply criticized the Trump campaign, revealing discontent on the right about what some see as a pivot to the center.

• Voters in Delaware, New Hampshire and Rhode Island will cast their ballots in a slate of primary races today.

• Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor, appears before the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic this afternoon.

• Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, is in the UK for a US-UK strategic dialogue and will meet with the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer.