Former president has given series of blistering speeches to help candidates in key races – and deployment has proved a hit with party’s progressive wing

That could have been awkward. Barack Obama, campaigning for Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, acknowledged that his fellow Democrat has criticised some aspects of the Obama presidency.

“Yeah, Abdul didn’t agree with some things we wanted to do – that our administration was doing – when I was president,” he told a rally in Detroit. “You know who else doesn’t agree with everything I do? Michelle Obama.” The crowd erupted in laughter. “I’d say about five times a day, she says, ‘You knucklehead. Why you do that?’”

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With days until the midterm elections, a new poll from CNN places Democrats well in the lead in key Senate races in Texas and Michigan, while projecting tighter contests in Kansas and Maine.

In Texas, the poll found 49% of likely voters would back James Talarico, the Democratic nominee, over Republican Ken Paxton, who netted just 43%.

Barack Obama macht Wahlkampf für die Demokraten – und nimmt die Bilanz von Donald Trump auseinander. Der Frontalangriff gegen den Amtsinhaber zeigt auch: Der Ex-Präsident bleibt die Figur, nach der sich die Liberalen sehnen.

Former US president comes to Georgia to support Jon Ossoff for US Senate and Keisha Lance Bottoms for governor

Former US president Barack Obama mocked Donald Trump’s “whole of government” response to his critique of his successor’s gilded White House renovations as he rallied Democrats in the final week of the US midterm election campaign.

“These are not serious people,” Obama said of Trump and the Republican party at a campaign rally in suburban Atlanta on Wednesday evening. “And we’re all paying the price for their lack of seriousness.”

Both Obama and Trump are on the campaign trail, but only one of them appears to be descending into madness

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Barack Obama versus Donald Trump. It is the presidential election that never happened but has come to define an era of US politics.

Obama is back on the campaign trail for the midterms, still electrifying crowds, earning shouts of “We love you!” and skewering his successor. “What’s up with the gold?” he asked a crowd in Detroit. “I mean, he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” This has, predictably, set off a mini culture war involving questions of elitism and the tastefulness of chain restaurants.

Obama has been accused of ‘snobbery’ over his Trump diss, as people rush to defend the restaurant chain’s ‘affordable opulence’

Around lunchtime on Tuesday, a Rolls-Royce stopped at the intersection of Beverly Drive and Dayton Way in Beverly Hills, California. Local people in athleisure walked past Balenciaga, Dior and Prada boutiques, as visitors on Hollywood bus tours ogled nearby Rodeo Drive, where Burberry and Louis Vuitton shops meet at a celebrated street corner.

Up the street, across from the upmarket Erewhon grocery store – home to $21 smoothies – a few diners sat outside an American landmark: the Cheesecake Factory.

Former president speaks to crowd of thousands in support of Abdul El-Sayed for US Senate and Democratic ticket

Barack Obama told a Detroit crowd on Saturday that Abdul El-Sayed was “fighting for change, real change, that will get money out of politics and put money in your pocket”, as he threw his weight behind the Democratic Senate candidate and the rest of the ticket on the first day of early voting in Michigan.

Obama said in front of thousands of onlookers at Cass technical high school in Detroit that El-Sayed would “finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American”.

The former Democratic president is showing major support in Detroit for the progressive Michigan candidate in final days before US midterm elections

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Donald Trump voted in West Palm Beach, Florida today, telling reporters at the polls that he voted straight Republican on his ballot. Trump has historically mailed-in his ballot rather than voting in-person.

Speaking from the polling site, Trump defended an ad from Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, his administration’s lawsuit seeking to block certification of the Alaska Senate race if Repubican senator Dan Sullivan loses his race and the war in Iran.

Der Präsident wollte in die Auszählung der Stimmen in Alaska zu den Midterms eingreifen. Der ganze Fall dreht sich um eine Namensdopplung.

The administration seems intent on stripping the congresswoman of her US citizenship and deporting her. It’s a terrible abuse of power

What do you think it is about Ilhan Omar, exactly, that seems to get under Donald Trump’s tangerine-tinted skin? The president has claimed he has a problem with the progressive Democratic congresswoman because she is “unpatriotic” to the US and “disrespectful … to Israel”. However, the extent of his animus towards Omar, the first Somali American in Congress, suggests there’s more to it. Trump has insisted he is “the least racist person there is anywhere in the world”, so I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that she’s brown and Muslim. Truly, it’s a mystery.

Whatever the reason, Trump’s not a fan. The president has plenty of enemies, but few have been attacked as ferociously and consistently over the years as Omar. He’s called her “garbage”, among other nasty names, suggested (without evidence) that she married her brother, and said she “should be thrown the hell out of our country”. His supporters have echoed his calls to deport Omar, who fled war-torn Somalia as a child and became a naturalised US citizen at 17.

Speaking at live UK event, former US president expresses hope rooted in the past and discusses the modern challenges to democracy

Barack Obama cited the “wonderful” story of how Manchester cotton workers stood in solidarity with enslaved African Americans as an inspiration for our times in a live appearance in the city.

Tens of thousands of people packed Co-op Live in the city on Thursday for An Evening With Barack Obama, where the former US president was interviewed by the writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch.

Burnham welcomes Ukraine’s president to No 10 for the first time since he became PM

PMQs is about to start.

Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

After @genevieve_holl reported this last night, various sources in the Trump administration who are supportive of Farage said Badenoch was needlessly trying to cause a political row (per @katyballs @MrHarryCole) and accused her of undermining the Anglo-American relationship.

It is possible that these people are particularly sensitive about this topic because they are still considering buying the islands, as @connorstringer and I reported earlier in the year. Domestic opposition to the idea of the US running Chagos in the UK would be a problem for the White House.

Calamity Kemi Strikes Again.

Kemi Badenoch has risked causing a diplomatic row with Britain’s allies, all because she cannot control the Tory spin doctors around her that oversaw the disastrous premierships of Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Theresa May, and even David Cameron.

Kemi and the Conservatives cannot be trusted by the Chagos people.

If they really have interest in the Chagos, why would you have started negotiating about things you already own?

We are confused at why @KemiBadenoch is attacking @Nigel_Farage …

We understood Nigel Farage’s comments to mean that we would get perpetual use of the base, which, frankly, we’ve always had.

Former president to visit 10 days before election day as victory for progressive challenger could tip Senate balance

• Ask our reporters your questions about the Iran war and the US midterms

Barack Obama will head to Detroit this month to rally with Abdul El-Sayed, a show of establishment support for a progressive insurgent in Michigan, one of the most consequential Senate races in the country.

The former US president will appear with El-Sayed and the gubernatorial nominee, Jocelyn Benson, on 24 October, the state’s Democratic party announced on Monday. The rally falls on the first day of the state’s in-person early voting period and 10 days before election day.

From Oprah Winfrey to Dua Lipa, there is no shortage of celebrity literary champions. But the former US leader is in a class of his own

At the Labour party conference Andy Burnham revealed that Hamlet, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Tony Harrison’s poem V are his favourite works of literature. The UK’s first prime minister with an English literature degree was not the only political figure sharing his book choices last week. Barack Obama, the US’s most literary president since Abraham Lincoln, launched a new podcast in which he discusses six books that shaped him with writer friends.

First up was the actor – and recently turned short story writer – Tom Hanks on Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, a meditation on faith, fatherhood and forgiveness in the form of a letter written by a 76-year-old pastor to his son. It was an unabashedly highbrow start. With the exception of John le Carré’s cold war classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Mr Obama’s selections are American: Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, James Baldwin’s essays The Fire Next Time and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Questions of democracy, race, power and violence are all here.

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Meghan testet Sicherheitslücken, Bambasé Conté hat einen Lachflash, und Barack Obama trauert um ein vierbeiniges Familienmitglied.

„Werden sie schrecklich vermissen“: Mit einem emotionalen Post auf Instagram nehmen der frühere US-Präsident und seine Frau Abschied von Sunny, die 13 Jahre lang Teil der Familie war.

Donald Trump posted his own presidential rankings to Truth Social last week, separating past US presidents into six categories from ‘greatest’ to ‘failures’

Donald Trump has declared himself to be the “greatest” US president ever, sharing a post on social media last week which graded him above the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D Roosevelt and George Washington. Experts take a different view.

Few presidential historians have previously suggested Trump holds such a place in the history books. After all, neither Lincoln, nor Roosevelt, nor Washington – the three leaders typically seen as America’s best – orchestrated an insurrection. None were impeached. And none of them were convicted of felonies over hush-money payments to a pornstar-turned-ghost hunter.

A decade after Kaepernick’s quiet protest shook the NFL, his exile looks less like an aberration than a blueprint for the culture war that followed

America likes nice round numbers, perfect for anniversaries and reflections, and it has, suddenly, been 10 years since Colin Kaepernick first protested police killings – more accurately, police killings of Black people that went unpunished either internally or by the courts – by taking a knee during the national anthem for the entirety of the 2016 NFL regular season. He never played in the league again.

Ten years covers a lot of ground, especially in these years of American darkness, and many of the important details surrounding Kaepernick, his banishment and significance have disappeared, time replaced by more time and more darkness – time moving faster than ever, at internet speed, where nothing matters, where nothing sticks. We consume by clip, by click, by meme, and knowledge by meme is not knowledge at all.

Lily Tomlin, Beyoncé, Céline Dion and Oprah Winfrey are among those remembering the queen of country after she died aged 80

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Tributes have poured in for Dolly Parton, the country singer, songwriter and actor, after her death aged 80.

News of her death was shared by her nephew on social media. “Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus,” he said.

The Trump administration’s ‘America first’ approach has contributed to the scale of the crisis now unfolding in one of the world’s poorest countries

For months health experts have warned that the scale of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) could surpass the one that swept west Africa in 2014-16. This week, the authorities in the DRC announced that a grim milestone has already been passed: at least 2,325 people have died from the virus, making it the deadliest of the country’s 17 outbreaks and the fastest-growing in history.

There is no effective vaccine against Bundibugyo – a rare strain of the virus that spread fatally undetected during the spring, often being misdiagnosed as malaria or typhoid. In contrast to neighbouring Uganda, which succeeded in eliminating an outbreak, multiple factors are combining to let the disease rip through the DRC. The worst-affected region is contested by armed groups, and a context of population displacement and chronic insecurity has made monitoring and surveillance more difficult. Ebola treatment centres have been attacked as a result of misinformation and community distrust.