With just over three weeks until the US presidential election, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s campaigns are ramping up, with last-minute appeals to voters.
Need a quick overview of the biggest political news stories of the week? Look no further.
We’ll bring you five takeaways from the past seven days and a look at where the candidates stand in the polls.

The election at a glance
There are 23 days left until the November 5 elections.
- National polling averages give Harris a slight lead
As of October 11, poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight shows Vice President Kamala Harris up 2.5 points, with 48.5 percent support, compared to 46 percent for former President Donald Trump.
Another polling average, from the website 270toWin, shows Harris with a marginal lead, with 49.3 percent support. Trump, meanwhile, is at 46.5 percent.
Harris, the Democrat, could be poised to flip one of Trump’s key demographics: suburban voters.
On October 10, the Reuters news agency and the Ipsos market survey released a poll that showed Harris leading her Republican rival 47 percent to 41 among suburbanites.
But two days later, the New York Times and Siena College released a poll indicating that Harris may be slipping among black voters. She received 78 percent support – a drop from the estimated 90 percent support fellow Democrat Joe Biden achieved in 2020.

Hurricane Milton becomes a battleground for misinformation
Three days after forming in the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Milton strengthened into a powerful Category 5 storm, giving it the highest ranking on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
Such rapid development has rarely been observed. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called Milton “one of the most intense hurricanes on record in the Atlantic basin.”
And he was heading straight for Florida, the southernmost state in the contiguous United States.
But as Florida braced for impact, politicians braced not only for high winds and storm surges, but also for a flood of misinformation.
Swaths of the American South were still recovering from the September crisis. Hurricane Heleneand in the weeks that followed, Trump made a series of false claims, including that the Democratic-led federal government was “doing everything possible not to help people in Republican areas.”
The night Milton made landfall, outgoing President Joe Biden slapped backusing his White House remarks about the storm to blast Trump, his former political rival.
“Over the past several weeks, there has been a reckless, irresponsible and relentless promotion of misinformation and outright lies about what is happening,” Biden said, calling the distortions “un-American.”
“Former President Trump led this wave of lies,” he added.
Harris herself blasted Trump during remarks in Las Vegas. “This is not the time for people to get political,” she said, referring to the Republican.

Trump and Harris clash with the mainstream media
Once criticized for not appearing on the national media circuit, Harris darted from interview to interview earlier this week, as part of a recent media blitz.
It was a stark contrast to the start of his campaign. After announcing her candidacy on July 21, Harris did not appear in any major interviews until late August.
And even then, it was a joint interview with his running mate, Tim Walz. His first solo interview took place a few weeks later on September 13 with a local television station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
But in the past week, Harris has increased the frequency of her media appearances. Within two days, she appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast, on radio with The Howard Stern Show, and on television with talk show appearances on The View and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
And his pre-recorded interview with the famous television magazine 60 Minutes was also broadcast on Monday.
This latest interview was supposed to be part of a duet: 60 Minutes also invited Donald Trump to sit down for a recording.
But host Scott Pelley announced that Team Trump had pulled out of the agreed-upon interview, citing “changing explanations” including that the Republican’s facts could be fact-checked on air.
The friction between Trump and 60 Minutes did not stop there. When a teaser version of Harris’ interview showed the vice president answering a question differently than the longer version, Trump accused the news magazine of trying to “make it better.”
He also called on the Federal Communications Commission to “DELETE THE CBS LICENSE.” The remarks prompted a rebuke from the commission’s chairman, who warned that such action would threaten freedom of expression.

Harris presents health as an advantage over Trump
For much of the 2024 election, health and competency issues have loomed large, even dooming one candidate’s candidacy.
After a dismal debate in June, Biden, 81, was forced to withdraw from the presidential race due to questions about his age and ability to lead. It was the culmination of months of speculation and attacks, as Trump dismissed Biden as a “weak” and “sleeping” old man.
But at 78, Trump himself is facing questions about his age and mental abilities.
These questions came back to the forefront this week. Last Sunday, The New York Times published an article analyzing Trump’s “disjointed” and increasingly lengthy speeches, questioning whether his speaking habits reflected the consequences of age.
And then, on Saturday, the White House issued a note praising his The health of the Democratic rival.
Harris, 59, it reads, “possesses the physical and mental resilience required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”
Trump has long touted his performance on cognitive tests as proof of his abilities. On Saturday, his campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, responded to media attention with a statementarguing that Harris “lacks the stamina” of Trump.
“All concluded that he was in perfect and excellent health to be commander in chief,” Cheung wrote of Trump.

Trump presents anti-immigration agenda
During his election campaign this week, Trump intensified his attacks on migrants in the United States, continuing a series of false and inflammatory claims.
Immigration has been one of the defining issues of Trump’s political career, and he has gone to great lengths to project a tough image.
But critics warn that his nativist rhetoric has become increasingly extreme, echoing the sentiments of white supremacists and other controversial figures.
Monday, Trump recorded an audio interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show, where he repeated false claims that murderers were crossing the U.S. border in droves.
“Many of them have murdered many more than one person and they are now living happily in the United States,” Trump said. “Now, murderer, I believe this: it’s in their genes. And we have a lot of bad genes in our country right now.
The Republican continued to present the specter of immigrants as criminals in his appearances throughout the week, including Friday.
Speaking in Aurora, ColoradoTrump promised that, if re-elected, he would use his first days in office to “accelerate the removal” of “savage gangs” from abroad, as well as invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a war law , as a tool. for mass deportation.
He also called for the death penalty for migrants who killed American citizens.
Despite Trump’s depictions of lawlessness, studies have shown that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than U.S.-born citizens.

Bob Woodward’s book paints an unflattering portrait
Journalist Bob Woodward occupies an almost mythical status in the American journalistic sphere.
In 1972, he and Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein helped expose President Richard Nixon’s role in the Watergate scandal, precipitating the politician’s eventual resignation.
Since then, Woodward has published dozens of books purporting to show the inner machinations of American politics. His latest landing, right in the middle of a heated presidential race, offers an unflattering glimpse of Trump’s alleged relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Entitled War, the book was released to the media on Tuesday before landing on bookstore shelves.
In its pages, an anonymous aide claims that Trump has called Putin at least seven times since leaving office. The book also claimed that at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump sent Putin virus testing machines that were missing.
Since then, the media has struggled to independently verify some of the book’s most prominent claims. And Trump’s team refuted them entirely, calling Woodward an “angry little man.”
“None of these stories made up by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and disturbed man,” Cheung, the Trump spokesman, wrote in a statement.
But the book does have some high-level cited sources, including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley – once the highest-ranking military officer in the United States.
He tells Woodward in the book that Trump is “fascist to the core.”