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First Thing: Hurricane Milton barrels toward Florida as Trump spreads falsehoods

A top emergency official says lies spread by Donald Trump and his supporters about Hurricane Helene have hampered recovery efforts. Plus: how to combat food waste
Debris is collected for removal in the Pass-A-Grille section of St Petersburg, Florida, before the arrival of Hurricane Milton. Photograph: Bryan R Smith/AFP/Getty Images

Vivian Ho

Good morning.

Hurricane Milton is expected to sweep past Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula and hit the south-west coast of Florida by Wednesday evening local time, bringing sustained winds of nearly 155mph (250km/h) to an area already reeling from Hurricane Helene’s devastation 12 days ago. Almost all of Florida’s west coast was under a hurricane warning and more than a million people were told to evacuate.

As Florida prepared for Milton and recovery efforts continued in five other states hit hard by Helene, Kamala Harris urged politicians to stop “playing games” with lives at stake, as the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, reportedly refused her calls and Donald Trump and his supporters spread misinformation that there was no money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).

How has the Fema chief responded to Trump’s falsehoods? Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have accused the Biden administration of “abandoning” people and, baselessly, of being short of disaster relief funds due to money spent on undocumented migrants. (Fema’s housing program, which offers shelter to migrants leaving detention, is separate from its disaster relief program.) Deanne Criswell, the Fema administrator, said these falsehoods were “creating an impedance to our ability to actually get people the help they need”.

What else is the right saying about the hurricanes? The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been criticised for spreading false conspiracy theories that “they can control the weather”. Though she never specified who she meant by “they”, she has a history of promoting untrue conspiracy theories around the federal government, her political opponents and Jews.

What will happen to disaster relief if Trump is elected? Experts say that under the controversial rightwing Project 2025 manifesto, which was authored by numerous former Trump officials, federal forecasting of severe storms and aid given to shattered towns and cities would be drastically scaled back.

Kamala Harris defends her economic plan in a wide-ranging 60 Minutes interview
Kamala Harris has vowed to raise taxes on billionaires and the biggest corporations. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/AFP/Getty Images

In an interview with CBS’s Bill Whitaker, Kamala Harris refused to call Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu a close ally and said she would not meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin for peace talks if Ukraine was not also represented. This interview was the latest in the vice-president’s unusually robust media blitz as she strikes to gain a lead in the neck-and-neck presidential race against Donald Trump.

What else did Harris say? She vowed to raise taxes on billionaires and the biggest corporations in order to fund her economic proposals, which include plans to build millions of new housing units, tax breaks for new parents and $25,000 down-payment assistance for new homebuyers.

Will Trump sit down with 60 Minutes? The CBS correspondent Scott Pelley told the audience that Trump cancelled an interview last week, with the Trump campaign providing “shifting explanations” for why the Republican nominee had declined to participate, including that he did not want to be factchecked.

What do the polls say? Harris has a narrow lead over Trump in national polls, though the race is in effect neck and neck in the swing states that will decide the election.

In other news …
Women protest in Atlanta, Georgia, in June 2022 against the supreme court decision that overturned Roe v Wade. Photograph: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

The Georgia supreme court ruled on Monday to reinstate a six-week abortion ban, one week after a state judge blocked it and restored broad access to abortion.

Myanmar’s military has launched some of its heaviest aerial campaigns since the 2021 coup, killing at least 26 people, including 10 children.

The main suspect in the disappearance of the British toddler Madeleine McCann has been found not guilty in a separate rape and sexual abuse case, in which he was charged with aggravated rape and sexual abuse of children in Portugal between 2000 and 2017.

Stat of the day: An estimated 17% of total global food production goes to waste
An Indian laborer dumps leftover and waste vegetables at a market outside Dadar railway station in Mumbai, India. Photograph: Divyakant Solanki/EPA

Food waste not only increases food insecurity in poorer countries, it contributes to the climate crisis, with the UN estimating that 8% to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with food that is not consumed. With the global average for household waste at 74kg (163 lbs) per person annually, Julian Baggini explores how the world can reduce it, as they have in Denmark.

Don’t miss this: The intelligence failures before 7 October
A woman touches a mural with portraits of victims at the site of the Nova music festival on the one-year anniversary of the 7 October attack. Photograph: Ariel Schalit/AP

One year ago yesterday, Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage. Since the attack, there have been bitter recriminations in Israel over warnings missed by Israeli military and intelligence services. Israel knew of Hamas training exercises simulating raids on the Israeli side of the border, but officials dismissed them, believing the group was incapable of carrying out such operations. Many believed that Hamas had been deterred or pacified through repeated rounds of conflict and economic incentives.

… or this: A musical journey to Ethiopia
Girma Yifrashewa plays on the new piano at Homosha school for girls in September. He was playing at New York’s Carnegie Hall in June. Photograph: Genaye Eshetu/Pharo Foundation

Getting a piano to Ethiopia is a logistical headache that often requires long stints in customs and enormous shipping fees. But the concert pianist Girma Yifrashewa never forgot what it meant to him when a Christian group gifted him his first piano more than 30 years ago. So when the opportunity arose to raise funds for a piano for a remote girls’ boarding school in north-west Ethiopia, Yifrashewa got onboard. “Music has helped me to live my dream, or I can even say live beyond my wildest dreams,” he said.

Climate check: Deforestation on the rise
An aerial view shows a deforested area during an operation to combat deforestation near Uruara, Para state, Brazil. Photograph: Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters

Deforestation has increased worldwide, with almost 6.4m hectares (16m acres) of forest razed in 2023 – just three years after 140 countries promised to halt it by the end of the decade. “We’re only six years away from a critical global deadline to end deforestation, and forests continue to be chopped down, degraded and set ablaze at alarming rates,” said Ivan Palmegiani, of Climate Focus.

Last Thing: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure

The artwork All the Good Times We Spent Together by the artist Alexandre Lavet, which looks like two crushed beer cans, was thrown away by a mechanic at a Dutch museum. Photograph: Alexandre Lavet/LAM museum

At first glance, Alexandre Lavet’s piece All the Good Times We Spent Together looks like just two empty beer cans – so much so that a staff member at a museum in the Netherlands accidentally threw it away. Fortunately, the museum was able to recover the artwork, which had been meticulously hand-painted with acrylics.

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