One morning in February, 16-year-old Levi Hormuth took off school as his parents called out of work, and the three began a five-and-a-half-hour drive.

The purpose of the 350-mile trip from their home in St Charles county, Missouri, to Chicago, Illinois, was a routine doctor’s appointment.

Levi, a transgender boy, now 17 and in his final year of high school, had been a patient at the Washington University (WashU) Transgender Center since he was 13. The center, a short drive from home, had helped Levi in his transition, providing counseling and eventually hormone treatments at age 15. The testosterone had profoundly positive impacts, Levi and his parents said, helping him overcome significant mental distress stemming from his gender dysphoria.

But in June 2023, Missouri’s Republican governor enacted a bill banning gender-affirming healthcare for youth under 18. The law had an exception for youth like Levi who were already accessing the care, but WashU, fearing legal liability, stopped prescribing medications to all trans youth.

The best alternative for Levi and his family was to cross state lines.

“The fact that I have to drive five hours both ways for treatment just shows our government in Missouri doesn’t care about things that are actually important,” Levi said one afternoon, sitting on his backyard deck with his parents in St Charles county, which is more conservative than neighboring St Louis. “We have potholes galore that should be fixed, we have horrible crime rates. It’s enraging that they’re not focusing on what matters and listening to our voices.”

The stakes of the presidential election are enormous for people like Levi and the broader LGBTQ+ community.

Donald Trump has promised aggressive attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, with a focus on trans youth, who have been a central target of the GOP’s culture war. The former president’s proposed “plan to protect children from leftwing gender insanity” includes ordering federal agencies to end all programs that “promote … gender transition at any age”; revoking funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to youth and subjecting them to US justice department investigations; punishing schools that affirm trans youth; and pushing a federal law stating the government doesn’t legally recognize trans people.

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A federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s federal election interference case will allow special counsel Jack Smith to submit a 180-page brief that could contain new evidence.

The oversized brief contains legal arguments and evidence reflecting how the supreme court’s ruling regarding presidential immunity will affect the case against Trump, which include felony charges for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The supreme court’s ruling regarding presidential immunity affects the charges against Trump, who is facing four felony counts related to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Trump’s legal team called the request to submit the brief “fundamentally unfair” in part because it was so much longer than most opening briefs.

Seeking to secure every last electoral vote he can get, Donald Trump had been pushing allies in Nebraska to change the state’s electoral system to a winner-takes-all system. The state currently awards its five electoral votes based on congressional district.

But after a key Republican legislator declined to support the last-minute effort to change the state’s system, the state’s governor has said that he won’t be calling a special legislative session to make the changes.

“My team and I have worked relentlessly to secure a filibuster-proof 33-vote majority to get winner-take-all passed before the November election. Given everything at stake for Nebraska and our country, we have left every inch on the field to get this done,” said Jim Pillen, Nebraska’s governor. “Unfortunately, we could not persuade 33 state senators.”

Mike McDonnell, a Republican state senator, announced he wouldn’t support the change. “Elections should be an opportunity for all voters to be heard, no matter who they are, where they live, or what party they support,” McDonnell said in a statement. “I have taken time to listen carefully to Nebraskans and national leaders on both sides of the issue. After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from Election Day, is not the moment to make this change.”

Nebraska has awarded its electoral votes by congressional district since 1991, and since then, Republican candidates have usually secured all of the state’s votes. But in 2008, Barak Obama got the vote from the state’s second congressional district in the Omaha region, and in 2020, Joe Biden took that vote.

Back at the United Nations, Ukraine’s president spoke before the security council, and suggested that negotiations to end Russia’s invasion would do no good.

“This war can’t be calmed by talks. Action is needed, and I’m grateful to all the nations that are truly helping in ways that save the lives of our people,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

“Putin has broken so many international norms and rules that he won’t stop on his own. Russia can only be forced into peace, and that is exactly what’s needed, forcing Russia into peace as the sole aggressor in this war, the sole violator of the UN charter.”

Zelenskyy is also using his visit to the summit of global leaders to press US lawmakers for continued aid that he says will give his military the edge over Russia in the conflict. Here’s more on that:

Joe Biden will travel to Angola next month, the White House announced, marking the first trip by a US president to sub-Saharan Africa since 2015.

Biden will visit the capital, Luanda, from 13 to 15 October, and meet with João Lourenço, the southern African nation’s president, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.

“The president’s visit to Luanda celebrates the evolution of the US-Angola relationship, underscores the United States’ continued commitment to African partners, and demonstrates how collaborating to solve shared challenges delivers for the people of the United States and across the African continent,” Jean-Pierre said.

Barack Obama was the last US president to visit sub-Saharan Africa, with a trip to Kenya and Ethiopia in July 2015. Biden welcomed Lourenço to the White House last year, and promised to visit Angola.

Prior to arriving in Angola, Biden will visit Germany “to further strengthen the close bond the United States and Germany share as allies and friends and coordinate on shared priorities”, Jean-Pierre said.

Local authorities in Tempe, Arizona, have said that someone fired shots at a Democratic party campaign office in a Phoenix suburb, causing damage but no injuries, according to the Associated Press.

Tempe police told the Associated Press that the damage was discovered early on Monday and that the incident is being investigated as a property crime. Nobody was in the office at the time the shots were fired.

On Tuesday, NBC News reported that the office is shared by staff for the Arizona Democratic party, the Kamala Harris campaign, and Senate and House campaigns.

This comes as Harris is scheduled to visit Arizona later this week.

New York’s Climate Change Superfund act was stripped from the state budget this year, but then it passed both chambers of the state’s legislature with bipartisan support in June.

Modeled after the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, it would require officials to work with scientists to figure out how much climate-related damage to people, ecosystems and infrastructure is attributable to big oil companies’ planet-heating pollution, then establish procedures to collect payments from big oil companies to fund those changes.

At the rally on Tuesday outside the New York governor Kathy Hochul’s office, New Yorkers detailed their own experiences with climate disasters.

Michael-Luca Natt from the New York chapter of the youth-led environmental group Sunrise Movement described how extreme city heat in the summer made it difficult to play outside as a youth.

“It is time for the fossil fuel industry to be held accountable,” he said.

If signed into law, the New York bill would be the largest policy of its kind in the nation. Vermont became the first state to pass a climate superfund bill in May.

Dozens of climate activists gathered outside Kathy Hochul’s office on Tuesday demanding the New York governor pass the Climate Change Superfund act, which would force big polluters to help the state pay for damages caused by the climate crisis.

“We are being played for suckers by the fossil fuel industry, and Governor Hochul is going along with it,” Bill McKibben, the veteran environmentalist who founded non-profits 350.org and Third Act, said at the rally.

The activists from the fossil fuel accountability group Make Polluters Pay coalition, which includes environmental and human rights organizations such as Food and Water Watch, the New York Public Interest Research Group, Fossil Free Media, and Avaaz, carried large boxes filled with more than 127,000 petitions to Hochul’s office. They chanted: “What do we want? Climate justice,” and: “Make polluters pay.”

The leader of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a non-profit that represents the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, has filed criminal charges against Donald Trump and JD Vance on behalf of the group, according to an announcement from the law firm representing them.

The group is charging the former president and Republican nominee for president, and his running mate and Ohio senator, with disrupting public service, making false alarms, committing telecommunications harassment, committing aggravated menacing and violating the prohibition against complicity per the press release.

The Associated Press is reporting that the group has invoked its private-citizen right to file the charges in the wake of inaction by the local prosecutor.

This comes as the city of Springfield has experienced an onslaught of disruption, harassment, chaos and threats since Trump and Vance began spreading false claims about Haitian immigrants there eating other residents’ pets.

Last week, the mayor of Springfield issued an emergency proclamation following the continued rise in public safety threats.