Greetings from Oklahoma. Here are a few thoughts from here on video about the decisions of the owners of the Washington Post and the LA Times to suppress their editorial boards’ decisions to endorse Kamala Harris.

A problem with the very wealthy is that, alas, the least vulnerable have a tendency to think of themselves as the most vulnerable.

And from that position they harm everyone else, while proclaiming that they are simply being neutral or following business interests. But doing what Trump wants in advance only makes it more likely that Trump will have power, and only teaches him that you are easy to intimidate. You are giving the authoritarian power he would not otherwise have. The irony is that the rest of us will have to save the billionaires from their own cowardice.

But that of course is not what this is moment is about. It is about all of us doing the little things we can, the truthful things we can, to get through this moment and come out on the bright side. In the video I explain why “do not obey in advance” is the main lesson of the twentieth century. In my book On Tyranny “Do not obey in advance” is the first lesson.

Please share this video. And please act. Vote, register people to vote, phone bank, keyboard, write letters, work a poll. Do something, and think of all the others who are doing what they can. You feel feel better, and you will make a difference.

Betsy Reed
Editor, Guardian US

Editor

Dear Guardian reader,

In the past 72 hours, two of America’s largest newspapers have declined to endorse a candidate for president in this election. The LA Times and the Washington Post both have a tradition of issuing editorial endorsements, but in this most consequential of contests for our country, they have chosen to sit on the sidelines of democracy and not alienate any candidate.

Something these two papers have in common? They both have billionaire owners who could face retaliation in a Trump presidency.

It has never been clearer that media ownership matters to democracy. The Guardian is not billionaire-owned; nor do we have shareholders. We are supported by readers and owned by The Scott Trust, which guarantees our editorial independence in perpetuity. Nobody influences our journalism. We are fiercely independent and accountable only to you, our readers.

We need to raise $2m in order to keep up our momentum next year. Your ongoing support has helped us enormously. Are you able to spare anything again today?

The stakes of this election could not be higher. Fearless journalism and an informed public are bedrocks of our democracy, and it is an abdication of our duty as journalists to sit out this election out of self-interest. A Guardian editorial strongly endorsed Kamala Harris for president earlier this week – and we are unafraid of any potential consequences.

Please help protect the truly free press by contributing to the Guardian today.
Make a one-time contribution

Yours,
Betsy Reed
Editor, Guardian US

A new temporary bronze installation depicting a pile of feces on Nancy Pelosi’s desk was erected in Washington DC this week across from the US Capitol, appearing to satirically “honor” the people behind the January 6 insurrection.

The scatological statue, which was installed on Thursday, features a swirl somewhat resembling the common “poop” emoji sitting on a desk with Pelosi’s name.

“This memorial honors the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election,” the plaque under the statue reads.
‘Fascist’, ‘conman’, ‘predator’, ‘cheat’: what 11 former Trump staffers say about him now

“President Trump celebrates these heroes of January 6th as ‘unbelievable patriots’ and ‘warriors.’ This monument stands as a testament to their daring sacrifice and lasting legacy.”

It's believed that Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent Novachok. he recovered from the attack in Germany, and was arrested almost immediately after he returned to Moscow.

In the final moments of Navalny, Alexei gives a serious answer to the director's question about the risk he was taking.

"My message for the situation when I am killed is very simple, [to] not give up."

A look at his memoir.

In his posthumous memoir, Patriot, Navalny wrote - "If they do finally whack me, the book will be my memorial."

Though his voice has fallen silent, his wife Yulia Navalnaya is sharing his message. She now leads the movement her husband started, fighting Russian President Vladimir Putin's grip on power.

She spoke with NPR's Ari Shapiro about her husband's book, and legacy. For Navalnaya, it's a look into him in his entirety; including his unshakeable sense of positivity.

"I think that it was a kind of his superpower," Navalnaya told Shapiro. "That's why he was so popular. That's why people love him. That's why he had so many supporters. From one side, he was the leader of the Russian opposition. He was a serious politician."

But as he shares in the book, Navalny also wanted to be the ordinary guy next door.

"He was really funny. It's not about the book. It's about all of his life. I spent more than 25 years with him, and all the time, he was very funny and he was very easy. And he laughed a lot during very difficult moments in our life. And it helped a lot and it gave him a lot of strength."

So I was lying in bed the other night, trying to read my phone, and started complaining to my wife about how my vision keeps getting worse, and then how stiff I feel when I wake up in the morning, and how a recent injury is taking too long to heal, and she said, “Well, yeah. You’re 44. That’s when things start to head downhill.”

And I was like, “Forty-four? That seems very specific. I thought 50 was what people complain about.” And she said, “No, it’s a thing — 44 years old and 60 years old. There’s a drop-off there.”

And you know what? She was right.

A study, “Nonlinear Dynamics of Multi-omics Profiles During Human Aging,” published in Nature Aging in August 2024, analyzed a ton of proteins and metabolites in people of various ages and found, when you put it all together, that there are some big changes in body chemistry over time — and those changes peak at age 44 and age 60. I should know better than to doubt my brilliant spouse.

The surprising results come from “Age-Related Changes in Gait, Balance, and Strength Parameters: A Cross-sectional Study," appearing in PLOS One, which analyzed 40 individuals — half under age 65 and half over age 65 — across a variety of domains of strength, balance, and gait. The conceit of the study? We all know that things like strength and balance worsen over time, but what worsens fastest? What might be the best metric to tell us how our bodies are aging?

But the strongest correlation between any of these metrics and age was a simple one: How long can you stand on one leg?

Particularly for the nondominant leg, what you see here is a pretty dramatic drop-off in balance time around age 65, with younger people able to do 10 seconds with ease and some older people barely being able to make it to 2.

When U.S. Supreme Court justices write opinions, they mostly talk about the case in question. But occasionally, they will discuss themselves or the court, using what is called the "monologic voice."

Researchers in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science trained a large language model (LLM) to identify the monologic voice—used in an attempt to affirm one's legitimacy, monologue style—including its collective and individualistic tones, in eight decades' worth of U.S. Supreme Court opinions.

Among the findings: The monologic voice is used at approximately the same rate throughout, but majority opinions tend to use a collective tone, while concurring and dissenting opinions use more individualistic tones. Additionally, all current justices except Chief Justice John Roberts write overwhelmingly in individualistic tones, contrasting sharply with the William Rehnquist court, which used collective tones at a historically high rate.

"There's a lot of research into how Supreme Court justices go about legitimating the court, but this often focuses on public moments—nomination hearings, television interviews, speeches and oral arguments. There's not as much research into how they do legitimation in the court opinion," said Rosamond Thalken, a doctoral candidate in the field of information science and corresponding author of "Judicial Self Fashioning: Rhetorical Performance in Supreme Court Opinions," which published in the journal Discourse Studies.

Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly went on the record this week in two bombshell interviews detailing his concerns about former President Donald Trump’s fascist ambitions.

On Tuesday, Kelly told The New York Times that the former president meets the established definition of fascism. “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure,” Kelly said, adding that Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

Kelly’s blunt interview with the Times came on the heels of a separate interview with The Atlantic, in which he elaborated on his previous assertions that the former president had expressed admiration for Hitler’s generals during his time as president. According to the recollections of two people who spoke to The Atlantic, Trump had once said he needed “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” as in “people who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” When Kelly attempted to clarify with the former president exactly whose generals he was referring to, Trump confirmed that he meant “Hitler’s generals.”

Donald Trump billed the government for Secret Service accommodations at his hotels many times over what other guests were charged, particularly foreign dignitaries, according to a report released Friday from Democratic members of the House oversight committee.

Describing the former US president’s term in office as “the world’s greatest get-rich-quick scheme”, the report’s authors referred to documents obtained by subpoenas of the Mazars firm, Trump’s accountants, citing guest logs for Trump International hotel in Washington, DC, between September 2017 and August 2018.

The hotel “charged as much as 300% or more above the authorized government per diem”, for Secret Service hotel rooms, according to the report.

It added: “Not only did former President Trump’s D.C. hotel routinely charge the Secret Service more than the government rate, it frequently charged the Secret Service more than it did other patrons, including members of a foreign royal family and a Chinese business interest.”

Eric Trump has said previously that the Trump organization let Secret Service agents “stay at our properties for free”. But the report calls that assertion into question, noting that the agency was charged “far in excess of approved government per diem rates and even many times the rates charged to hundreds of other patrons—including some of the rooms rented by the Qatari royal family and Chinese business interests—for rooms used by agents protecting members of the Trump family.”

The report follows up investigative reports made when Democrats controlled the House oversight committee. When Republicans took the House majority in 2023, new committee chairman James Comer ended the committee’s lawsuits to obtain records and refused to issue new subpoenas. The report by the committee’s Democratic minority relies on documents obtained earlier.

MOUNT OLIVE, N.C. (AP) — The U.S. military trained him in explosives and battlefield tactics. Now the Iraq War veteran and enlisted National Guard member was calling for taking up arms against police and government officials in his own country.

Standing in the North Carolina woods, Chris Arthur warned about a coming civil war. Videos he posted publicly on YouTube bore titles such as “The End of America or the Next Revolutionary War.” In his telling, the U.S. was falling into chaos and there would be only one way to survive: kill or be killed.

Arthur was posting during a surge of far-right extremism in the years leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He wrote warcraft training manuals to help others organize their own militias. And he offered sessions at his farm in Mount Olive, North Carolina, that taught how to kidnap and attack public officials, use snipers and explosives and design a “fatal funnel” booby trap to inflict mass casualties.

While he continued to post publicly, military and law enforcement ignored more than a dozen warnings phoned in by Arthur’s wife’s ex-husband about Arthur’s increasingly violent rhetoric and calls for the murder of police officers. This failure by the Guard, FBI and others to act allowed Arthur to continue to manufacture and store explosives around young children and train another extremist who would attack police officers in New York state and lead them on a wild, two-hour chase and gun battle.

Arthur isn’t an anomaly. He is among more than 480 people with a military background accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection.