Trump resumes campaign
Looking to shove his campaign back on track, US President Donald Trump and his team have laid out an aggressive return to political activities, including a big White House event and a rally in Florida, a week after his hospitalisation with the Covid-19 coronavirus, which has killed more than 210,000 Americans.
As questions linger about his health, Trump is planning to leave Washington, DC. He is also increasing his radio and TV appearances with conservative interviewers, hoping to make up for lost time with just over three weeks until election day and millions already voting.
Two weeks after his Rose Garden event that has been labelled a ‘‘ superspreader’’ for the virus, Trump planned to convene another large crowd outside the White House for what his administration called ‘‘ a peaceful protest for law and order’’.
Trump’s rally in Sanford, Florida on Tuesday was originally scheduled to be held on October 2, the day after he tested positive.
The announcement of the new event came as Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, cautioned the White House again to avoid largescale gatherings of people without masks.
Meanwhile, next week’s town
hall- style Trump-Biden debate was officially cancelled, a few days after Trump backed away when the sponsoring commission switched it from a face- to- face debate to a virtual one following Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis.
■ Strengthening efforts to counter the Trump administration’s baseless claims that postal voting is rife with fraud, election officials in a growing number of US cities are providing a live video stream of their ballot processing.
From Tuesday, people will be
able to watch live 24-hour footage from the room where Denver’s ballots are received and counted.
Denver borrowed the idea from the King County Elections division in Seattle, which has done live webcasts of its ballot processing rooms since 2012. Others taking the video route include Yuma county in Arizona, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
■ House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has unveiled legislation that would allow the US Congress to intervene under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove the president – insisting that the move is not about Trump but inspired by the need for greater congressional oversight of his White House.
Pelosi has been raising questions about Trump’s mental fitness since his Covid-19 diagnosis, and demanding more transparency about his health. The bill would set up a commission to assess the president’s ability to lead the country and ensure a continuity of government.
■ Twitter is imposing tough new rules that restrict candidates from declaring premature victory and tighten its measures against spreading misinformation, calling for political violence and spreading thoughtless commentary in the days leading up to and following the US election.
The social platform will remove tweets that encourage violence or call for people to interfere with election results. Tweets that falsely claim a candidate has won will be labelled to direct users to the official results page.
Twitter will also make it more difficult to retweet posts it has labelled to highlight the presence of misleading information. People who want to retweet such posts will see a prompt pointing them to credible information about the topic.
The changes come after Facebook announced similar new restrictions.