Clinton raises prospect of landslide victory

Hillary Clinton hinted at a possible landslide in the 8 November election, exhorting several thousand supporters at a San Francisco fundraiser on Thursday to help her “have the kind of victory we need” to serve as a “rebuke” to Donald Trump. “Everything we care about is at risk,” she said. “If you can help me to have the kind of victory we need, that stands as a rebuke of all the bigotry and bullying we’ve seen, then together, together we will build the future that all of us, particularly the children of our country, deserve to have.”

Clinton says landslide would be rebuke to Trump’s ‘bigotry and bullying’

Michelle Obama: Trump beyond ‘basic standards of human decency’

The first lady delivered a devastating rebuke to Donald Trump’s boundless vulgarity, describing his recent remarks about groping women without their consent as “disgraceful” and “intolerable”. “I can’t believe that I’m saying that a candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women,” Obama said, as she addressed several hundred people in Manchester, New Hampshire. “And I can’t stop thinking about this. It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted.”

Michelle Obama denounces Trump’s rhetoric: ‘It has shaken me to my core’

Trump blames sexual assault claims on Clinton-media collusion

Meanwhile, Republican nominee Donald Trump scrambled to dig himself out from an avalanche of fresh abuse allegations on Thursday after a series of women came forward to dispute his claim that his comments about sexual assault were only empty boasts. The Republican nominee called his many accusers “horrible, horrible liars”. Many of nearly a dozen women who have now come forward said they were moved to speak after Trump claimed his boasts about sexually assaulting women were “words not action”.

Trump blames sexual assault claims on collusion between Clinton and media

Florida’s disenfranchised voters

Nearly six million Americans cannot vote due to felony disenfranchisement. In Florida, 1.7 million people are disenfranchised, or 10.4% of the state’s total population. The Guardian takes a closer look at the consequences, and the fight to regain the right to vote, in the midst of a heated election season.

Florida’s disenfranchised: voices of the 1.7 million not allowed to vote

Bashar al-Assad: Aleppo must be ‘cleaned’

Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has spoken of “cleaning” the besieged city of Aleppo, where a quarter of a million people are caught under heavy bombardment by his government’s forces, and using it as a “springboard” for winning the country’s war. Speaking to Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda, Assad said Aleppo was effectively no longer Syria’s industrial capital but taking back the city would provide important political and strategic gains. Victory in the city would allow the Syrian army to liberate other areas of the country from who Assad calls “terrorists”.

Aleppo must be ‘cleaned’, declares Assad, amid outcry over bloody siege

‘Hard Brexit’ to come

After months of wishful thinking over the consequences of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union, the British have received a sharp reality check from European political leaders. Donald Tusk – who chairs the EU leaders’ summits – said it was useless to speculate about a soft Brexit, in which the UK remained a member of the single market. “The only real alternative to a hard Brexit is no Brexit, even if today hardly anyone believes in such a possibility.” Meanwhile, France says US banks plan to leave the UK.

EU council president: it’s hard Brexit or no Brexit at all

Who won the marijuana war?

Candi CdeBaca voted to legalize the free sale of marijuana in Colorado four years ago because she thought it would be good for her Denver neighborhood. Now she’s not so sure. “We have just swapped one kind of drug dealer for another,” said CdeBaca. “I believed it would positively impact communities of colour by decriminalizing it. So watching it unfold has been surprising.” As CdeBaca sees it, all legalization has done is open the door to a takeover by corporate interests. “It’s your typical capitalist who is in our neighborhood now and benefiting from an industry that at one time was our only option,” she said.

‘Commercialization won out’: will legal marijuana be the next big tobacco?

Why Bob Dylan deserves his Nobel prize

“Some will argue against the award, as they argued against him in the long and infinitely tiresome Dylan v Keats controversy, and as others have contested the meaning and value of every phase and nuance of his output,” writes Richard Williams. Still, the singer has “explored ways of playing games with time, voice and perspective, continuing to expand the possibilities of song in ways that disarm all possible criticism of this new and perhaps greatest honour.” Meanwhile, the contrarian singer predictably made no mention of the accolade during a show in Las Vegas last night, ending his set with a cover of Frank Sinatra’s Why Try To Change Me Now.

Why Bob Dylan deserves his Nobel literature win

Music in the dark

Events like London’s Pitch Black Playback are returning music to darkness. “The atmosphere shifts in the shadows,” writes Arwa Haider, “basslines go deeper in the dark; voices make you tingle; the silences hit you harder.” Music in the dark sounds more appealing, says Pitch Black Playback creator Ben Gomori. “The darkness is a way to underline that desire to cut yourself off from other distractions, but also to create a shared experience.”

Dancing in the dark: the growing trend of gigs with the lights off

In case you missed it ...

There are conceivably – or inconceivably – 2tn galaxies in the universe, up to 20 times more than previously thought, astronomers reported on Thursday. The surprising finding, based on 3D modeling of images collected over 20 years by the Hubble Space Telescope, was published in the Astronomical Journal. The new calculation comes with a caveat: even within the “observable universe”, current technology only allows us to glimpse 10% of what is out there.

Universe has two trillion more galaxies than previously thought