As Californians head to the polls Tuesday to decide whether to keep Gavin Newsom in office, the Democratic governor’s leading challenger is already trying to sow doubt about the outcome of the election. Larry Elder, the rightwing radio host who’s currently leading the pack of Republican challengers to Newsom in the polls, has been spreading conspiracy theories to falsely imply that, if he loses, the election was rigged against him. Elder has told reporters there might be “shenanigans” in the election and has a link on his website to a website encouraging users to “fight California election fraud” by submitting reports of “irregularities, interference, or intimidation”. There’s no proof of widespread election fraud. Polling has suggested that Newsom, who is still broadly popular in the state despite the Republican-led recall effort, has a comfortable lead in Tuesday’s election. Elder’s conspiracy theories echo efforts by Donald Trump to falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen and rigged against him. The language on the website the Elder site linked to appears lifted from a petition circulated to help Trump’s effort to overturn the results of last year’s presidential election. And on Monday, Trump added fuel to the fire with a statement that said, “Does anybody really believe the California Recall Election isn’t rigged?” Republicans across the US have turned to Trump’s big lie to propose legislation that makes it more difficult to vote and easier to overturn future elections. “It’s just an extension of the big lie and ‘stop the steal’,” Newsom told reporters last week. “The election hasn’t even happened, and now they’re all claiming election fraud. I think it’s important to highlight that.” Facebook aware of Instagram’s harmful effect on teenage girls, leak reveals Damien Gayle reports: Facebook has kept internal research secret for two years that suggests its Instagram app makes body image issues worse for teenage girls, according to a leak from the tech firm. Since at least 2019, staff at the company have been studying the impact of their product on its younger users’ states of mind. Their research has repeatedly found it is harmful for a large proportion, and particularly teenage girls. “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said a slide from one internal presentation in 2019, seen by the Wall Street Journal. “Thirty-two per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” a subsequent presentation reported in March 2020. Another slide said: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” Comprised of findings from focus groups, online surveys and diary studies in 2019 and 2020, the Instagram research shows for the first time how aware the company is of its product’s impact on the mental health of teenagers. And yet, in public, executives at Facebook, which has owned Instagram since 2012, have consistently downplayed its negative impact on teenagers. As recently as March, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, claimed social media was more likely to have positive mental health effects. In May, Adam Mosseri, who is in charge at Instagram, said he had seen research suggesting its effects on teenagers’ mental health was probably “quite small”. Joe Biden to propose target of vaccinating 70% of world in a year Joe Biden will reportedly propose a target for 70% of the world’s population to be vaccinated within the next year at a global vaccines summit he intends to convene alongside the UN general assembly in New York this month. The US president’s target, reported by the New York Times, is in line with ambitions set jointly by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the WTO and the World Health Organization (WHO) but is more ambitious than current performance and the targets set at the G7 meeting in Cornwall chaired by the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson. The G7 agreed to donate 870m doses of Covid-19 vaccines directly, with an aim to deliver at least half by the end of 2021. The west has been repeatedly accused of hoarding surplus vaccines and of moral failure by providing jabs to teenagers or a third set of vaccines to adults when large tracts of Africa remain totally unvaccinated. The 70% target “is ambitious but consistent with existing targets”, according to the White House. In June the heads of the World Bank Group, IMF, WHO and World Trade Organization (WTO) set a target of having 60% of the world’s population vaccinated by the middle of 2022. Regardless of whether Governor Gavin Newsom prevails in California’s gubernatorial recall election, the race will help his Republican challengers boost their name recognition and gain national prominence, political experts said. Case in point: “I have now become a political force here in California,” said the rightwing radio host and Republican frontrunner in the recall Larry Elder, on KMJ Now radio. “I’m not going to leave the stage.” “The recall can be a rallying cry, in California and across the county,” said Mindy Romero, the founder of the Center for Inclusive Democracy, a non-partisan research organization. “For the Republican candidates running against the governor, it can raise their national profiles.” Romero explained that anything short of a landslide victory for Newsom will be a boon to Republicans, who will be able to capitalize on the message that even in deep-blue California, conservative candidates got close to unseating a Democratic governor. Ahead of the midterm elections, the recall results in California could potentially fuel Republican messaging that the Democratic party is out of touch and losing relevance. Opinion: Condom ‘stealthing’ is a vile practice. California is right to ban it Moira Donegan writes: She told him a condom was “non-negotiable,” and that if he would rather not use one, she would leave. The young woman, identified as “Sara” in a 2017 study, describes the encounter, saying, “I set a boundary. I was very explicit.” Yet she then discovered that her partner, a man she’d been seeing for a couple of weeks, had secretly removed the condom during sex. “I ended up talking to him about it later,” Sara told the study’s author, the feminist civil rights attorney Alexandra Brodsky. “He told me, ‘Don’t worry about it, trust me.’ That stuck with me, because he’d literally proven himself to be unworthy of my trust.” The man who removed the condom was telling her to trust him not to put her at risk for the potential consequences of unprotected sex – for STD infection, or for unplanned pregnancy. But if he was someone she could trust on those issues, he never would have removed the condom in the first place. Sara was a victim of a phenomenon that 12% of women say they have experienced, and that 10% of men say they have perpetrated, but which for years has had no legal recognition and no name other than the one given to it by its practitioners: “Stealthing”, the non-consensual removal of a condom. Now, the violation experienced by Sara and others may finally be made illegal, at least in one state. A bill introduced by California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia has passed both houses of the state’s legislature, and would make non-consensual condom removal a civil offense. It now awaits a signature from Governor Gavin Newsom. If the bill goes into effect, it would give victims the power to sue men who removed condoms without their permission for the non-criminal charge of sexual battery and open the door for monetary damages. The Wisconsin and New York legislatures are considering similar bills. If California’s is signed, the state will become the first in the nation to recognize stealthing as a violation in law. Because the bill makes stealthing a civil offense, not a crime, it does not create the possibility that perpetrators will serve prison time. Instead, it makes them liable for fines and penalties if their victims prevail in court. (The pending bills in Wisconsin and New York do have criminal provisions.) But Brodsky believes that the worthiness of a civil avenue for justice should not be overlooked. “I’m glad to see California pursuing this approach,” she told me. “In my experience, many survivors find the kinds of outcomes available in civil litigation – including money damages – more meaningful and useful.” Joe Biden’s approval rating has dipped into negative territory for the first time since he took office, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. Overall, 42% approve of Biden and 50% disapprove. In early August, 46% approved and 43% disapproved. Respondents to the national poll of US adults found that opinion was mixed on the president’s handling of the pandemic. The majority of respondents disapproved of Biden’s foreign policy. Although nearly 7 in 10 Americans said the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was the right thing to do, 65 % disapproved of the way Biden handled withdrawing troops. California’s recall election: the frontrunners in a field of 46 candidates Californians are voting in the state’s gubernatorial recall election, where for only the second time in California’s history voters will get a chance to decide if the governor should keep his job. With the only requirements to run being a $4,200 filing fee “and a dream”, as recall expert Joshua Spivak put it, a total of 46 candidates have made it on to the ballot. Here are some of the frontrunners: Today so far That’s it from me today. My west coast colleague, Maanvi Singh, will take over the blog for the next few hours. Here’s where the day stands so far: California is holding its recall election today to determine whether Democratic governor Gavin Newsom will be allowed to remain in office. Newsom held a campaign rally last night in Long Beach alongside Joe Biden, who warned that Republican candidate Larry Elder is a “clone of Donald Trump”. “Can you imagine him being governor of this state? You can’t let that happen,” Biden said. Senate Democrats unveiled a new voting rights bill that would make Election Day a federal holiday and require states to offer same-day registration by 2024. The legislation is unlikely to become law unless Democrats alter the Senate filibuster, and moderates like Joe Manchin, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, have given no indication they would support such a proposal. Bob Menendez, the Democratic chairman of the Senate foreign affairs committee, threatened to subpoena defense secretary Lloyd Austin for information about the Afghanistan withdrawal. Menendez said he was “very disappointed” that Austin declined the committee’s request to testify at this morning’s hearing on the withdrawal operation. “I expect the secretary will avail himself to the committee in the near future,” Menendez said. “And if he does not, I may consider the use of committee subpoena power to compel him, and others over the course of these last twenty years, to testify.” US poverty fell in 2020, even as unemployment rose because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to new data from the Census Bureau. The supplemental poverty measure (SPM) showed that two rounds of pandemic-related stimulus checks lifted 11.7 million people out of poverty in 2020, and expanded unemployment benefits helped another 5.5 million people out of poverty. Maanvi will have more coming up, so stay tuned. The department of homeland security is expecting around 700 people to show up for the “Justice for J6” rally on Saturday, which is being held in support of the insurrectionists who carried out the Capitol attack in January. NBC News reports: The Department of Homeland Security is estimating roughly 700 people will attend the ‘Justice for J6’ rally in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, and has taken steps to make sure law enforcement is better prepared than it was prior to Jan. 6, said Melissa Smislova, deputy undersecretary for intelligence enterprise readiness. Saturday, Sept. 18 is the date supporters of former President Donald Trump, many with ties to groups that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in protest of his election loss, will return to Washington for a rally. Smislova said DHS has also learned via social media that similar protests are planned in other cities across the country. Smislova, speaking at the Homeland Security Enterprise Forum on Tuesday, estimated ‘tens of thousands’ of protesters attended the pro-Trump rally that turned violent in January. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One this afternoon, deputy White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre expressed confidence in law enforcement officials’ ability to respond to the rally. “We hope Saturday remains peaceful,” Jean-Pierre said. “To the extent needed, executive branch law enforcement agencies are postured, prepared and ready to assist Capitol Police.” US poverty fell in 2020 as government support offset pandemic damage US poverty fell in 2020, evidence that government aid can lift millions of Americans out of poverty – even in a global health and economic crisis. The first months of 2020 were marked by unemployment levels unseen since the Great Depression, but the US supplemental poverty rate fell to 9.1% in 2020 from 11.7% the year before, according to Census Bureau estimates released on Tuesday. The Census Bureau produces two estimates on poverty: the official rate which only looks at cash resources, and the supplemental poverty measure (SPM), which includes benefits such as pandemic relief aid. The official estimate rose slightly in 2020 to 11.4%, up from a record low of 10.5% the year before. In 2020, more than 37 million Americans lived below the poverty line. The supplemental measure, however, showed that two rounds of stimulus checks lifted 11.7 million people out of poverty in 2020. Expanded unemployment benefits also lifted 5.5 million people out of poverty and decreased poverty across all racial groups and all age groups, according to the census. Governor Gavin Newsom made a last-minute campaign stop in San Francisco today, as California voters cast ballots to determine whether he will be allowed to remain in office. Per Fox affiliate KTVU, Newsom was in San Francisco to thank some of his campaign volunteers for assisting him with the recall effort. Top Republicans, including Donald Trump and gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder, have circulated baseless claims of voter fraud in the California recall election – even before the results are known. An NBC News reporter pressed Elder yesterday on whether he would commit to accepting the results of the election, but the conservative radio host refused to do so. “I think we all ought to be looking at election integrity,” Elder said. “No matter whether you’re a Democrat, an independent or a Republican, let’s all make sure that the election is a fair election.” When asked again whether he would commit to accepting the results, Elder repeated his deflection, saying, “Let’s all work together on both sides of the aisle to make sure that the election is a fair election.” Maanvi Singh Early returns show that, of those who have already cast their votes in the recall election, most have been Democrats who are likely to oppose removing governor Gavin Newsom. More Republicans are expected to vote in person on election day. No major Democratic candidates are running against Newsom, who has encouraged supporters to leave the question of his replacement blank on their ballots. If even a hair more than 50% of voters opt to boot the governor, conservative radio host Larry Elder or any other challenger with a plurality could take office and upend politics in an overwhelmingly Democratic state. Such an outcome would cause national reverberations by placing a potentially antagonistic Republican leader at the helm of the nation’s most populous and economically productive state, and potentially dooming Democrats ahead of the midterm elections. The implication that a Republican could unseat a Democrat in deep-blue California would fuel criticism that the party is out of touch with voters. An upset in the Golden state “could also encourage recall elections potentially around the country”, said Mindy Romero, who heads the California Civic Engagement Project at the University of Southern California. Californians cast their ballots as polls show Newsom pulling ahead in recall election California is holding its recall election today to determine whether Democratic governor Gavin Newsom will be allowed to remain in office. Many Democrats had previously been concerned about Newsom getting recalled because polls taken over the summer indicated that he might be in trouble. However, the governor appears to have mitigated that threat in recent weeks. According to polling data compiled by FiveThirtyEight, about 57% of likely voters in California now oppose removing Newsom from office. Joe Biden visited California yesterday to encourage voters to support Newsom in the recall race, warning that Republican candidate Larry Elder is a “clone of Donald Trump”. “Can you imagine him being governor of this state? You can’t let that happen,” Biden said.