President says decision on whether to order evacuations in Florida will be made on Sunday

New York's Rockwell County Republican Party is in trouble over a campaign video widely deemed to be antisemitic, warning of a "Jewish takeover" of upstate towns and villages.

Space Command is literally just a ploy to sell campaign T-shirts to the easily impressed isn't it?

The Democrat-led House Ways and Means Committee yesterday suffered a setback after a judge refused to fast-track a congressional lawsuit seeking to force the disclosure of Trump's federal tax returns, saying it was a complicated and important matter that should not be rushed.

US district judge Trevor McFadden in Washington said in a written order that under US law, there was "only a narrow set of cases that must skip to the front of the line" and that the committee had not shown its lawsuit was one of them. McFadden said that while he was not prejudging the case, Trump's defenses "seem unlikely to be so trivial as to justify a rush to the merits of the case."

In a 20 August filing, the House Ways and Means panel said that "time is of the essence" in resolving the case it brought last month seeking to compel the Treasury Department to hand over years of the president's individual and business federal tax returns.

In the filing, lawyers for the committee said the current Congress would end on 3 January 2021 and that a prompt resolution of issues in the case was needed to give the committee enough time to investigate Trump's tax returns and pass any legislation in response.

Justice Department attorneys, in co-ordination with Trump's personal lawyers, had proposed a staged approach to hearing arguments in the case that drew objections from the House panel's legal team.

The committee filed the lawsuit after Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin defied congressional subpoenas seeking the returns, despite a federal law that says the department "shall furnish" such records on request.

The lawsuit began what is widely expected to be a lengthy legal battle likely to end in the US Supreme Court.

The Justice Department said in an advisory legal opinion in June that the committee lacked a "legitimate legislative purpose" in seeking Trump's tax returns and that Mnuchin therefore did not violate the law by refusing to provide them.

One of Trump's personal lawyers, Jay Sekulow, called the committee's efforts "presidential harassment" last month.

Before Trump, modern US presidential candidates customarily disclosed their tax returns during their campaigns.

Ways and Means is one of half a dozen House committees conducting investigations involving Trump and his administration but the White House is refusing to cooperate with most of them, setting up several legal battles unfolding in the courts.

Reuters

Trump's acting US Citizenship and Immigration Services director Ken Cuccinelli - last heard from rewriting the enscription on the Statue of Liberty - has been on CNN attempting to justify an administration policy change that means the children of American diplomats and members of the armed forces born overseas are no longer automatically granted US citizenship.

It was incredibly underwhelming.

Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden has been forced to defend his faulty description of a tale of military heroism and his interactions with the service members who carried it out. 

The "essence" of his recollection is correct, the former vice president told a South Carolina newspaper on Thursday after a Washington Post story detailed how an emotional anecdote Biden told recently while campaigning in New Hampshire contained inaccuracies. 

Biden's telling appeared to conflate multiple events, yielding a single story of himself as vice president pinning a Silver Star on a US Navy captain in the Konar province of Afghanistan for his efforts trying to save another service member. In his latest telling of a story he's varied over several years, according to The Post, Biden got most of the details wrong: There's no military record of that specific ceremony and Biden's records as a senator show he traveled to Konar when he was Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman and before he was vice president. 

Biden and his aides countered that the anecdote's fundamental point - that as vice president he once formally recognised the valor of a heartbroken solider who didn't want the recognition because his fellow solider ultimately lost his life - is true. 

"The central point is it was absolutely accurate what I said," Biden told The Post and Courier newspaper of Charleston, South Carolina, hours after The Post published its story. "He refused the medal. I put it on him, he said: 'Don't do that to me, sir. He died. He died."' 

Indeed, The Post account quoted staff sergeant Chad Workman recalling that he received a Bronze Star from Biden at Forward Operating Base Airborne in Wardak province, Afghanistan, on 11 January 2011. Workman confirmed Biden's account, adding that Biden treated him with empathy. 

The accounts represent a growing conundrum for Democrats. Their 2020 pack-leader is hinging his campaign on the propositions that Trump is a serial liar and a fundamental threat to the nation and that Biden, a 76-year-old veteran of US politics and world affairs, offers his party the best hope of victory. 

But Biden is also repeatedly subjected to media scrutiny, social media derision and quiet grumbling from his rivals over his penchant for verbal missteps, a cacophony that fosters questions about whether he is indeed the best Democrat to send into a general election campaign against Trump. 

Biden rejected those questions, telling The Post and Courier they are "ridiculous." 

Veteran Democratic strategist David Axelrod said the episode speaks to two well-known attributes of Biden: his liability as undisciplined and his strength as one who empathises with those in pain. 

Axelrod doesn't see it as particularly damaging, but notes such episodes, should they continue, could answer one of the central question facing Biden: Is he up to the intellectual rigors of being president? 

"Where it becomes problematical is if It's seen as evidence of some sort of decay," said Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama. "That is obviously a danger. Anything that raises those concerns is problematic. I don't think this is the one that could tip the scales." 

Biden's supporters this week in South Carolina have been unfazed by any mounting criticism - particularly in comparison to Trump, who regularly misspeaks and has treated truth casually since he first launched his campaign in 2015. 

"Look at Trump, a habitual, sinister liar," said Dawn Deboskey, a 57-year-old from Anderson, South Carolina. "The vice president is absolutely on point, discussing every issue in a knowledgeable way. I have zero concerns." 

At the campaign town hall where Deboskey came to see Biden, the candidate opted for a humorous defence against those who question whether he's still up for the job. On education, he opted against offering detailed numbers when talking through his usual riff on the need for more social workers. 

Offer a number and turn out to be wrong, Biden said, "and the press will say Biden's losing his mind. He can't remember." 

AP

Alabama's Republican governor Kay Ivey has been forced to apologise and is facing calls to resign after it emerged she had appeared in blackface in a college sorority skit.

Ivey, 74, issued the apology after a 1967 radio interview surfaced in which her now-ex-husband describes her actions at Auburn University in the state, where she was vice president of the student government association. 

"I offer my heartfelt apologies for the pain and embarrassment this causes, and I will do all I can - going forward - to help show the nation that the Alabama of today is a far cry from the Alabama of the 1960s," Ivey said. 

Ivey released a recording of the college radio interview she and then-fiance Ben LaRavia gave. In the interview, LaRavia describes Ivey as wearing coveralls and "black paint all over her face" while pretending to search for used cigars on the ground in a skit at the Baptist Student Union party. The skit was called "Cigar Butts." No other details of the skit were given. 

Ivey and LaRavia were married for a short time and later divorced. She said on Thursday that she did not remember the skit, but "will not deny what is the obvious." 

"As such, I fully acknowledge - with genuine remorse - my participation in a skit like that back when I was a senior in college," she said. 

"While some may attempt to excuse this as acceptable behavior for a college student during the mid-1960s, that is not who I am today, and it is not what my Administration represents all these years later." 

Ivey's press secretary, Gina Maiola, said Auburn University brought the recording to the attention of the governor's office, which decided to release it publicly. University officials discovered the interview while working on a project to digitize and archive old university records, Maiola said.

Migrant girls being held by the Trump administration in border detention centres are being given only very limited access to items as basic as sanitary pads and tampons, according to a news lawsuit casting fresh light on the appalling conditions being endured by youngsters held in US custody.

As 2020 Democratic contender Julian Castro points out above, this is a disturbing but very necessary read from Andrew Buncombe.

In the last hour, Trump has been attacking General Motors for relocating production to China and, seemingly, his own inspector general Michael Horowitz for not prosecuting James Comey over those leaked memos. 

This is indeed very odd.

Here's our report?

The latest on Hurricane Dorian from FEMA's Pete Gaynor on CNN's New Day.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has also given an update.

It's all a cunning plan, you see.