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Joe Bidens former boss returned to the campaign trail on his behalf on Wednesday. Barack Obama told a drive-in rally in Philadelphia that this was the most important election of our lifetime and urged Americans to deliver a rebuke so resounding to Trump at the ballot box that he could not dispute the result.

Donald Trump isnt suddenly going to protect all of us. He cant even take the basic steps to protect himself.

Trump responded to his predecessors criticisms on the stump in North Carolina, saying of his 2016 victory: I think the only one, the only one more unhappy than crooked Hillary that night was Barack Hussein Obama.

A Maryland man has been charged with making death threats against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, in a letter left on the doorstep of a neighbour who had put up yard signs in support of the Democratic nominee and his running mate.

Russia and Iran are using US voter registration information to try to sow unrest ahead of the election, the Trump administrations national intelligence director, John Ratcliffe, said in a press conference on Wednesday. The news comes after Democratic voters in swing states including Florida and Pennsylvania received threatening emails purporting to be from the far-right Proud Boys group, warning the recipients we will come after you if they did not vote for Trump.

Ratcliffe characterised Irans efforts as designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump, but Democrats pushed back on the idea that the attacks were aimed at the president, describing Ratcliffe a Trump loyalist as a partisan hack.

Trump and Biden will travel to Belmont University in Nashville on Thursday for the final presidential debate which could be the presidents last chance to move the poll needle in his favour. He will probably arrive with a win in his pocket: the senate judiciary committee is set to vote to move Amy Coney Barretts supreme court nomination on to the next stage: a full senate ballot.

Meanwhile, the Guardian has learned of accusations of sexual abuse and emotional torment being levelled at People of Praise by former members of the charismatic Christian group to which Barrett belongs.

Can we trust the polls? Biden seems to have a comfortable lead, but the Guardian US data editor, Mona Chalabi, tells the Today in Focus podcast we should remain sceptical of the same experts who predicted the wrong outcome in 2016.

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While Rudy Giuliani was busy trying to whip up outrage over Hunter Bidens emails, Sacha Baron Cohen was waiting to spring an October surprise on Giuliani himself. On Wednesday, it emerged that Trumps personal lawyer would appear in a potentially mortifying sequence from the new Borat movie, featuring a flirtatious interview with an actor pretending to be the bumbling Kazakh reporters daughter.

Giuliani has denied any impropriety. At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate, the former New York mayor told WABC. If Sacha Baron Cohen implies otherwise he is a stone-cold liar.

Could Borat swing the election? Cohens comedy sequel joins a host of urgent documentaries and dramas released in the run-up to 3 November. But most of them preach to the choir, writes Charles Bramesco. And besides, many subscribers to the Trumpist worldview are not the most receptive to the swaying powers of art.

Borat 2 reviewed. Despite some laughs and a few pointed political moments, says our critic Peter Bradshaw, it is 14 years since Borats first cinematic outing and the shock of the new is gone.

The Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who has spearheaded Republican attacks on Hunter Biden, is facing questions over whether he benefited personally from a 2017 change in tax law that he had demanded of the Trump administration.

Floridas Republican secretary of state has been accused of voter suppression after making two last-minute changes to the states voting guidance that critics say are likely to lead to intimidation and confusion at the polls.

Cameroonian asylum seekers claim they were tortured by Ice to force them to sign deportation orders in what their lawyers and activists say is a scramble to fly African migrants out of the US before the election and a potential change of administration.

Grassroots Latinx organisations have a secret weapon for getting out the vote, says Xochitl Oseguera: WhatsApp has more than 32 million Latinx users in the US more than half the countrys entire Latinx population. There are 10 million more Latinos on WhatsApp than on Instagram, and three times as many as on Twitter.

Rather than ask serious questions about Hunter Bidens emails, mainstream outlets have chosen to act like an unofficial arm of the Biden campaigns communications department or so Ben Shapiro argues at Fox News.

At a time when our trust in media is already low, the media have thoroughly debunked themselves as neutral arbiters of fact. At a time when social media has consolidated unprecedented power to control the information seen by Americans, social media overseers have decided to bottleneck information they dont like.

For the latest film from our Anywhere but Washington series, Oliver Laughland travelled to Youngstown, Ohio, one of the depressed manufacturing centres to which Trump promised new jobs and economic prosperity. So far, he has not delivered.

It attracted almost $2bn in investment and a deep bench of Hollywood talent, but after just six months, the much-heralded short-form video service Quibi or quick bites is shutting down. There was widespread scepticism about the viability of the platforms costly content, but its co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg blamed simple bad timing, telling the New York Times in May: I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus.

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First Thing election special: Barack Obama is back on the campaign trail - The Guardian