Number of Teamsters union members who have endorsed Harris reaches one million A million of the 1.3 million members of the Teamsters union have now endorsed Harris, according to Harris spokesperson Lauren Hitt, despite the union’s executive board’s decision not to endorse a candidate for the first time in decades yesterday. The union had endorsed every Democratic candidate since 2000. When Harris touched down in Michigan a short while ago, Michigan Teamsters President Kevin Moore was among the people waiting to greet her on the tarmac, according to the press pool report. Michigan’s Joint Council 43 endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket yesterday. Trump’s event has started but he is not yet speaking. We will bring you any important news from his comments when they happen. US officials now believe that a Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas is not expected before the end of President Joe Biden’s term in January, the Wall Street Journal reports. The newspaper cites top-level officials in the White House, State Department and Pentagon without naming them. Those bodies did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said two weeks ago that 90% of a ceasefire deal had been agreed upon, while Vice President Kamala Harris has repeatedly said Washington has been working “around the clock” to get to an agreement. The United States and mediators Qatar and Egypt have for months made attempts to reach a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas but have failed to arrive at a final agreement. Negotiations have been ongoing to clear two obstacles: Israel’s demand to keep its forces in the Philadelphi corridor to maintain a buffer between Gaza and Egypt, and the specifics of an exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Biden laid out a three-phase ceasefire proposal on May 31 that he said at the time Israel had agreed to. The deal has run into obstacles and officials have for weeks said a new proposal would soon be presented. Critics and human rights groups have also urged Washington to use its leverage by conditioning military support to Israel but the US has maintained its support for its ally. Trump’s ‘fighting anti-semitism’ event in Washington is now running almost an hour late. Here are the Teamsters endorsements, via the Harris campaign: Teamster Retirees Teamsters National Black Caucus Teamsters Joint Council 43 (Michigan) Teamsters Joint Council 39 (Wisconsin) Teamsters Joint Council 42 (Southern Nevada) Teamsters Joint Council 7 (Northern Nevada) Teamsters Joint Council 40 (Western PA and Northern WV) Teamsters Joint Council 28 (WA, AK and Northern ID) Teamsters Joint Council 32 (MN, IA, ND, SD, and WI) Teamsters Joint Council 25 (Illinois) Teamsters Joint Council 13 (Missouri) Teamsters Local 623 (Philadelphia, PA) Teamsters Local 122 (Boston, MA) Teamsters Local 186 (Ventura, CA) Teamsters Local 572 (Carson, CA) Teamsters Local 769 (Miami, FL) Teamsters Local 848 (Long Beach, CA) Teamsters Local 238 (Cedar Rapids, IA) Teamsters Local 237 (NYC) Teamsters Local 396 (Southern California) Teamsters Local 89 (Kentucky and Indiana) Teamsters Local 202 (New York) The head of the US Postal Service expressed frustration Thursday with ongoing criticism by election officials of how it handles mail ballots while also seeking to reassure voters that it’s ready to handle an expected crush of those ballots this fall, AP reports. US Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told reporters that it’s difficult for the Postal Service to address “generalities” about perceived problems and said some election officials don’t fully understand its efforts to deliver ballots in time to be counted. He said the service will collect and deliver mail ballots more frequently in the days before the 5 November presidential election and would keep processing centres open the Sunday before Election Day. The Postal Service, he said, would take extraordinary measures to “rescue” ballots that are mailed late and at risk of missing state deadlines to be received by election offices. Elections officials have said for weeks that they are concerned about the Postal Service’s readiness. They’ve cited ballots arriving late or without the postmarks required by some state laws during the primary season. “We engage in heroic efforts intended to beat the clock,” DeJoy told reporters during a virtual news conference. “These efforts are designed to be used only when the risk of deviating from our standard processes is necessary to compensate for the ballot being mailed so close to a state’s deadline,” he added. “This is commonly misunderstood in the media and even by election officials.” Trump is due to speak shortly at an event called “Fighting Anti-Semitism in America” in Washington. We’ll bring you anything important from that. Number of Teamsters union members who have endorsed Harris reaches one million A million of the 1.3 million members of the Teamsters union have now endorsed Harris, according to Harris spokesperson Lauren Hitt, despite the union’s executive board’s decision not to endorse a candidate for the first time in decades yesterday. The union had endorsed every Democratic candidate since 2000. When Harris touched down in Michigan a short while ago, Michigan Teamsters President Kevin Moore was among the people waiting to greet her on the tarmac, according to the press pool report. Michigan’s Joint Council 43 endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket yesterday. Harris and Oprah to speak at campaign event in Michigan Kamala Harris will speak at a campaign event in Michigan with Oprah Winfrey at 8pm ET: in an hour and forty-five minutes’ time. We’ll bring that to you live. In response to Trump’s claim that the Federal Reserve’s decision to cut interest rates was “policital”, White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein said US President Joe Biden has never spoken to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell about interest rates. Biden had said earlier on Thursday that he had not spoken to Powell since becoming president. “By the way, I’ve never once spoken to the chairman of the Fed since I became president,” Biden had said. Today so far New polling shows that voters are almost evenly split between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in the three Great Lakes battlegrounds that could determine the outcome of the election. The Washington Post found that the vice-president is tied with Trump in Pennsylvania, though another poll released today by the New York Times and others said Harris had the advantage in that state, but was deadlocked with the former president nationwide. There are signs that Republicans are leaving nothing in this election to chance, with Nebraska’s congressional delegation and Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator and Trump ally, pushing for the red state’s governor to put in motion a plan to switch its system for allocating electoral votes to a winner-take-all set-up that will surely benefit Trump. Such calls have been made before, and we’ll see if this latest push makes a difference. Here’s what else is going on today: CNN has published reporting on Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, and found that he called himself a “black NAZI!” on a pornography website’s message board. Robinson has denied the lewd commends made in the report, which could tank his already diminishing chances and drag down Trump in the key swing state. Former advisers to Trump have collaborated to build a website that spreads conspiracy theories, including about Moscow’s enemies. Joe Biden said that the US economy has a ways to go before the toll of inflation is eased, but acknowledged yesterday’s interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve was a milestone in the fight against the price increases that bedeviled his presidency. Is the Secret Service investigating Elon Musk for his post on assassinating Harris and Biden? Perhaps. White dudes are reportedly putting down big money to promote Harris in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Biden and Harris will next week welcome Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the White House. Trump has said he will “probably” meet with Zelenskyy, who is traveling to the United States to address a UN security council meeting. The federal government has sent bomb-sniffing dogs to the town of Springfield, Ohio, where residents have been facing ongoing threats after Trump, JD Vance and others on the right spread false rumors that immigrants were killing and eating pets. In the US"s nail-biting 2024 presidential election, North Carolina is now in play North Carolina rejoins a list of crucial swing states whose voters will decide if Harris becomes the United States’ first woman of color to win the White House or if Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office from which he wreaked political chaos for four years. Up until about two months ago, the odds didn’t look like this. Though the margins in North Carolina have been close for decades in presidential races, Barack Obama in 2008 was the last Democrat since 1976 to win the state, eking out a win by three-tenths of a percentage point. Joe Biden’s weakness earlier this year threatened to turn North Carolina into an also-ran contest. Every poll through June had Trump beating the president by at least two points, with an average around six. Party affiliation can only tell so much in a state with a storied history of split-ticket voting. Almost four in 10 of North Carolina’s 7.6 million registered voters choose not to affiliate with a political party. But between August 2020 and August 2024, Republicans added about 161,000 new registered voters in North Carolina while Democrats lost about 135,000 registered voters. Trump won the state by about 75,000 votes in 2020, a margin of about 1.3 percentage points, his closest winning state, before losing the election. Biden won the four states with closer margins – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. The president’s withdrawal and Harris’s ascent scrambled the math. North Carolina’s secretary of state, Elaine Marshall, described the reaction as euphoric. “It’s such a dramatic contrast from that venom, that poison, that hatred that’s coming from Republican events,” she said. “That contrasts so strongly with the hope and the expectations of the future from Democratic party events.”’ Donald Trump is expected to hold a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, on Saturday. The former president had invited Mark Robinson to previous campaign events in the state. It’s unclear whether he will address the new report about Robinson. North Carolina would be a key state in Trump’s path to victory. The latest polls have Trump and Kamala Harris tied in a dead heat in the state. Still, expect for 2008, Democrats have not won North Carolina at the presidential level since 1976. But Democratic voter registration has been up in the state, and the vice-president has been investing time and resources to win its 16 electoral votes. If she manages to do so, Trump would have to virtually sweep every other swing state in order to win.