In July, a dedicated network of about 800 grassroots organizers in Arkansas had collected the necessary signatures to get a measure on the 5 November ballot that – if passed – would have changed Arkansas’s constitution to protect the right to abortion for any reason up to 18 weeks of pregnancy. It also would have legalized exceptions for abortion after 18 weeks, including in cases involving rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies, and life and health of the mother.

The measure did not provide the same rights that existed under Roe – which protected abortion until viability, or around 24 weeks – a fact that organizers said kept national organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU from getting involved in the effort. But organizers believed that it was a measure that even conservative voters would support. After all, voters in neighboring Kansas, another Republican stronghold, overwhelmingly voted to protect abortion rights when its ballot was put to voters in a referendum in 2022.

To the dismay and shock of the grassroots organizers, however, the Arkansas initiative was ultimately quashed before it ever reached voters. A paperwork error by organizers prompted a legal challenge by Arkansas’s secretary of state, John Thurston, who rejected the abortion amendment. On 22 August, the Arkansas supreme court upheld his decision.

For Arkansas women, there is no end in sight.

A Guardian investigation into the ballot’s demise tells a more complicated story than just a bureaucratic screw-up, revealing a confluence of rightwing actors working in parallel to ensure it never got to voters: a reclusive donor who has helped shape the anti-abortion movement across the US; the inner circle of the Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has proclaimed Arkansas “the most pro-life state in the country”; and judges who are supposed to be non-partisan but are deeply aligned with the state’s Republican party.

The Stakes: if Trump wins the election, Nato can expect more turbulence ahead

Dan Sabbagh

Politeness and convention dictate that European leaders try to sound noncommittal when asked whether a Donald Trump presidency would hurt Nato. But despite the rhetoric about “Trump-proofing”, Nato cohesion will be at risk from a hostile or isolationist Republican president, who has previously threatened to leave the alliance if European defence spending did not increase.

“The truth is that the US is Nato and Nato is the US; the dependence on America is essentially as big as ever,” said Jamie Shea, a former Nato official who teaches at the University of Exeter. “Take the new Nato command centre to coordinate assistance for Ukraine in Wiesbaden, Germany. It is inside a US army barracks, relying on US logistics and software.”

US defence spending will hit a record $968bn in 2024 (the proportion the US spends in Europe is not disclosed). The budgets of the 30 European allies plus Canada amount to $506bn, 34% of the overall total. It is true that 23 out of 32 members expect to spend more than 2% of GDP on defence this year, but in 2014, when the target was set, non-US defence spending in Nato was 24%. Lower than now but not dramatically so.

There are more than 100,000 US personnel stationed in Europe, more than the British army, a figure increased by more than 20,000 by Joe Biden in June 2022 in response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. US troops have long been based in Germany, but a 3,000-strong brigade was moved by Biden into Romania, a forward corps command post is based in Poland, and US troops contribute to defending the Baltic states, while fighter and bomber squadrons are based in the UK and five naval destroyers in Spain.

Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defence minister, was recently asked whether Nato was ready for Trump. “Elections will have a result whatever,” he began, before acknowledging that much of Europe had been slow to increase defence budgets, missing the warning of Russia’s capture of Crimea in Ukraine in 2014 and only reacting substantively in 2022 after Russia’s full invasion. “What we did was push the snooze button and turn around,” Pistorius said.

Read the full analysis here:

The highest court rejected an emergency appeal to remove Robert F Kennedy Jr, a third-party presidential candidate that has dropped out of the race and endorsed Donald Trump, from the ballots in Wisconsin and Michigan.

Kennedy wanted to have himself remove from the ballots in these key swing states, arguing that keeping him on would violate his first amendment rights. But with early voting already under way, Wisconsin and Michigan said that removing him from the ballot now would be impossible.

It is unclear how Kennedy’s presence on the ballot will affect the election, and how many voters might choose to cast votes for Kennedy who would otherwise have voted for Trump.

Deterioration of the Washington Post’s subscriber base continued on Tuesday, hours after its proprietor, Jeff Bezos, defended the decision to forgo formally endorsing a presidential candidate as part of an effort to restore trust in the media.

The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik.

A day earlier, 200,000 had left according to the same outlet.

The numbers are based on the number of cancellation emails that have been sent out, according to a source at the paper, though the subscriber dashboard is no longer viewable to employees.

The Washington Post has not commented on the reported numbers.

The famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said on Tuesday he disagreed with the paper’s decision, adding that the outlet was “an institution reporting about Donald Trump and what he’s done and supported by the editorial page”.

Bezos framed the decision as an effort to support journalists and journalism, noting that in “surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress”.

But in this election year, he noted, the press had fallen below Congress, according to a Gallup poll.

“We have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working,” he wrote.

Lauren Gambino

In her remarks this evening, Kamala Harris is also expected to say that returning Trump to power will bring “more chaos” and “more division”.

“I offer a different path,” she will say, in a speech dedicated to the still-undecided slice of US voters. “And I ask for your vote.”

Harris will pledge to “seek common ground and commonsense solutions”.

“Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table,” Harris is expected to say.

The Democrat has built a broad coalition that includes conservative anti-Trump Republicans such as Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman and her father, the former vice-president Dick Cheney.

“I pledge to be a President for all Americans,” Harris will say, “to always put country above party and above self.”

Harris to warn Trump is ‘unstable’ and ‘out for unchecked power’ in Tuesday speech

Lauren Gambino

Kamala Harris will warn that Donald Trump is “unstable”, “obsessed with revenge” “consumed with grievance” and “out for unchecked power” during her speech at the Ellipse on Tuesday night, according to excerpts of her remarks released by the campaign.

“Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other. That’s who he is,” she will say. “But America, I am here tonight to say: that’s not who we are.”

Harris is attempting to cast herself as a unifying figure who will work for “all Americans” as president, regardless of who they voted for in the November election, drawing a sharp contrast with Trump who has threatened a campaign of retribution against his political enemies. It’s a similar approach Biden took in the waning days of the 2020 election, but healing the tribalism and polarization proved elusive.

Harris suggests that her election would “turn the page” on the Trump era entirely, though there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical that Trump would accept his defeat and retreat from the national stage.

At his press conference, Steve Bannon also flirted with the idea that Democrats would try to steal the 2024 election from Trump.

He also continued to deny the results of the 2020 election, though there is no credible evidence of misconduct that undermines the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

“Were going to have a reprise of 2020 where they’re going to do everything humanly possible to nullify” Trump’s victory and “delegitimize his second term”.

“The working-class people in this country that support Donald John Trump are not going to let that happen.”

“The 2020 election was stolen,” Bannon said later.

During a question-and-answer session, some sort of apparent interloper – it was unclear whether this was a comedian or performance artist or someone else entirely – asked Bannon: “When’s the next insurrection, and can we storm the Burger King after this?”

This person appears to have been escorted out of the press conference.