The women whom Russell Brand raped and sexually assaulted have for weeks endured the ordeal of a heavily publicised trial. Throughout, Brand held online prayer meetings with followers. Does he feel Christian sympathy for those women?

Only Brand, in the deepest recesses of his conscience, can know.

The answer would be the best indicator of whether the disgraced comic, actor and born-again Christian has worn his newfound faith as a cloak in an effort to deflect and distract from the seriousness of the allegations against him. Or whether his conversion is a profound and sincere one – a spiritual crutch he may need in the coming years.

Whatever the truth, Brand’s case demonstrates how Christianity has become a frontier in the culture wars along which battle lines are now drawn on all kinds of ethical, political and even legal issues.

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After a disastrous midterm showing that placed the future of the MAGA movement in abject peril, the White House decided it was a good time to let conservative groups know that they were being watched.

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Two staffers on Republican Mike Rogers’s Senate campaign are registered foreign agents for the state of Israel—including the campaign spokesperson who facilitated his Sunday press conference with Democratic Representative Haley Stevens.

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This year’s statewide ballot measures are written, on average, at a graduate-school reading level, according to a new report.

The readability of 2026’s ballot questions — which ask voters to weigh in on issues as varied as abortion, property taxes, voter ID and firearms — varies by state, political data tracking nonprofit Ballotpedia found in its newest Ballot Measure Readability Report.

The report analyzes the level of education voters would need to understand the titles and summaries of the measures put before them. Because ballot measures are often lengthy and full of legal language, states write shorter titles to be published on the ballot for voters to read.

Many of this year’s ballot measures don’t include summaries to supplement the titles. And many voters don’t read beyond a measure’s title before deciding how to vote, Ballotpedia researchers note.

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Making hay was more than a figure of speech last week at the New Holland auction house in Pennsylvania last week, where a ton of top quality hay bales were going for upwards of $400, up about 20% from last year.

For members of the Lancaster settlement, a term used to describe the Amish population that settled here in 1760, the price of hay was only part of the discussion: the price of horses, donkeys and milk were also topics of conversation and, as it has been for year or more, a potentially deadly outbreak of measles.

In the most recent count, 1,398 cases had been detected, according to the Pennsylvania department of health. Since 1 August, 150,000 doses of MMR vaccine had been administered, with more than 50,000 given in October alone.

The outbreak, and the politics surrounding it under Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary, has focused on Lancaster county, placing the Amish under a spotlight. While there is no Amish religious opposition to vaccines broadly, a study found that that less that a third of Amish residents had been immunized against measles, mumps and rubella.

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The attention the Amish have received while experiencing the worst outbreak in the nation has not always been welcome. But the state, under Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor, has mounted an intensive outreach of pop-up clinics and mailings to encourage the community to get protection.

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Top Trump Administration officials have taken to the campaign trail to boost Republican candidates ahead of the pivotal midterm elections as the party battles to retain control of Congress.

Last month alone, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum appeared alongside President Donald Trump to support Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan in his tight reelection fight against Democrat Mary Peltola at a rally in Wasilla, Alaska, on Oct. 13. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared in Wisconsin alongside GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden on Oct. 20 to speak to manufacturing workers during a Pentagon tour highlighting U.S. defense production. Last Monday, Vice President JD Vance and Burgum spoke at a rally in Topeka, Kansas. And on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefly joined Trump on stage, at the President’s urging, during a rally in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Cabinet members and other leading Trump officials have been wading into the midterms in these and other ways for months. In August, for instance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy endorsed Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers in Michigan.

Legal experts and advocacy groups contend that in making such moves, members of the Administration have violated a decades-old law: the Hatch Act, passed by Congress in 1939, which places restrictions on certain political activities for federal executive branch employees.

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An unprecedented surge in Black voter turnout across the American South is fundamentally reshaping the 2026 midterm political landscape. This massive, highly localized mobilization is defying traditional non-presidential voting patterns and threatening to turn what was expected to be a standard midterm election cycle into a "Blue Tsunami" for Democrats, breaking open what were previously considered safe Republican strongholds.

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From betraying Ukraine and dispatching masked agents who killed Americans to deporting US citizens and pulling out of accords controlling climate change and Iranian nuclear weapons, the list of Donald Trump’s abuses is long and growing still longer, seemingly by the day.

Looking back decades from now, historians will see that at the top of this shameful list is Trump’s utter abuse of his pardon power. It started on the first day of his second term, when he pardoned more than 1,500 insurrectionists who, on 6 January 2021, had stormed the US Capitol.

More recently, as documented in astonishing accounts by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and 60 Minutes, Trump has overseen a robust pardons market in which friends or relatives of criminals offer to pay millions for presidential clemency.

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Soon, weed-killing chemicals will start falling from the sky over the Red Hill area of Boulder county, Colorado.

The wildland is known for its biodiversity, home to hundreds of important species and a concentration of rare environmental resources. It is a key habitat for beloved herds of elk and bighorn sheep, with farms and ranchland lying at its base.

But any day now, hundreds of acres of Red Hill are set to become the target for drone spraying of a chemical herbicide that some researchers warn come with concerns.

County officials say the plan is an effective and essential move that will wipe out invasive weeds and mitigate the risk of dangerous and costly wildfires that could use the unwanted vegetation as fuel.

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President Trump has spent hours running massive political decisions—like the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—past artificial intelligence chatbots like Elon Musk’s Grok. Now Democrats are demanding the records of his chats.

Representatives Jamie Raskin and Robert Garcia, the top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, wrote a five-page letter to President Trump on Wednesday pressing for answers on his chatbot use, whether it be Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other such tool.

“We are writing to ask whether you have actually been soliciting advice from Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, Grok, in order to help you carry out your official duties as President of the United States. If so, we are writing to inform you that any prompts that you, your staff, or advisors in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) have submitted to AI chatbots … are the sole property of the United States and legally must be preserved for posterity.”

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Experts have long warned that immigration dragnets will inevitably result not only in the erosion of rights for immigrants but also for citizens. Since the start of this Trump administration, we've watched those warnings come true.

So we have once again done what the government won’t: We have tallied and cataloged every case we can find of an immigration agent reportedly detaining a citizen during the current administration — more than 500 cases from Inauguration Day through Oct. 21, 2026.

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We compiled our list by scouring social media, court records and local media, and we included an incident only if we could find at least two sources for it. We asked the Department of Homeland Security about each incident, and we searched for any federal criminal charges that were brought in relation to each incident. (DHS has repeatedly said it is not arresting U.S. citizens.)

Since the government itself does not track these cases, our list is almost certainly an undercount. Below, we're showing you every case we found — the reality that the administration denies — along with the receipts. Read more about how we reported this project.

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A California county elections official is speaking out about the Department of Justice’s campaign against purported “voter fraud”, saying federal officials provided him a disorganized list of names filled with inaccuracies – and threatened to criminally prosecute him if he didn’t take action.

Keaton Denlay, the county clerk-recorder for Butte county, a region north of Sacramento, said a federal agent on Friday hand-delivered what appeared to be a printout of a “poorly formatted Excel spreadsheet with missing and jumbled information”. The DoJ claimed the list was of 47 “likely” noncitizens who were unlawfully registered to vote and demanded the county set aside their ballots. But Denlay said the document was riddled with errors and lacking crucial details, and he declined to act on it.

The DoJ’s letter to Denlay, which the Guardian reviewed, said: “If persons knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime.”

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