Attention to the Unseen

Des Moines Register reports: Kamala Harris has significantly narrowed the presidential race in Iowa, cutting Donald Trump’s lead to 4 percentage points in a dramatic turnaround from Joe Biden’s double-digit deficit. A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows that Trump leads Vice President Harris 47% to 43% among likely Iowa voters — a far slimmer margin than the 18-point lead the former Republican president enjoyed over Democratic President Biden in late spring. Before Biden ended his reelection campaign, a…

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Politico reports: In this city thrust unwillingly into the white hot center of Donald Trump’s immigration wars, conspiratorial fervor lept from internet memes into the humdrum tasks of everyday life. Just since Tuesday, bomb threats shuttered city hall, closed a middle school and forced the evacuation of two elementary schools. Even the city’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the Ohio License Bureau closed Thursday. As its own senator and the former president trafficked baseless claims that immigrants in this blue-collar…

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The Observer reports: Britain and the US have raised fears that Russia has shared nuclear secrets with Iran in return for Tehran supplying Moscow with ballistic missiles to bomb Ukraine. During their summit in Washington DC on Friday, Keir Starmer and US president Joe Biden acknowledged that the two countries were tightening military cooperation at a time when Iran is in the process of enriching enough uranium to complete its long-held goal to build a nuclear bomb. British sources indicated…

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NBC News reports: The day after the presidential debate at which former President Donald Trump spread a false story about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, Christopher Pohlhaus, leader of the national neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, took to his Telegram channel to take credit. Pohlhaus, a Marine-turned-tattoo artist known as “Hammer” to his hundreds of followers, wrote Blood Tribe had “pushed Springfield into the public consciousness.” Members of his hate group agreed. “The president is talking about it now,”…

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The Guardian reports: While Donald Trump made baseless, dangerous claims that immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets in front of millions of viewers at Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Johnson Salomon, a Haitian man who moved to Springfield in 2020, was watching cartoons with his kids before putting them to bed. He got a text from a friend telling him to turn on the debate. When he saw the headlines about what the former president and Republican nominee in November’s…

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The Guardian reports: Neo-Nazi groups and the online far right are latching on to the anti-immigration rhetoric coming from Donald Trump’s campaign for the White House in an effort to recruit new supporters and spread their extremism to broader audiences. After the Republican national convention in July, where supporters waved “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” placards, it became clear that Trump’s xenophobia has become part of the Republican establishment. Upon his return to X, formerly known as Twitter, Trump released a stream…

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The New York Times reports: Amid fallout from Donald J. Trump’s debunked claim about immigrants from Haiti stealing and eating people’s pets in a small Ohio city, the former president’s oldest son weighed in with his own aspersions on Haitians. Donald Trump Jr. suggested on Thursday that Haitian immigrants were less intelligent than people from other countries, and claimed that there was demographic evidence to back this up. He provided none. “You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic…

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Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump used increasingly harsh rhetoric Friday in describing Haitian migrants in Ohio, saying they’re “destroying their way of life” and threatened mass deportations. He made his comments as he and some of his allies, including his running mate JD Vance, have claimed that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats, dogs and geese, sparking a backlash from Democrats, including President Joe Biden. “Illegal Haitian migrants have descended upon a town of 58,000 people, destroying…

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Politico reports: Vice President Kamala Harris is circulating her first detailed goals for rural America in a bid to woo voters the party has been hemorrhaging support among for decades — and who will help determine the outcome of the November elections. The new document is the furthest Harris has gone in her career to outline how she would approach policy for rural communities and comes as her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, who has been tapped as a sort…

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Ian Ward writes: JD Vance’s political career has been defined by an apparent paradox. On the one hand, Vance is a member of the upper echelon of America’s ruling elite — a graduate of Yale Law School, a New York Times best-selling author, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and a United States senator. On the other hand, he has become a vociferous conservative critic of that same elite on behalf of disaffected Middle Americans, a role he can claim by…

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