First Thing: Can Trump offset his chronic losses at the first debate?

Good morning.

It was in Cleveland that a triumphant Donald Trump accepted the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. On Tuesday, he returns to the Ohio city at what could be the lowest point of his 2020 re-election campaign, to debate Joe Biden for the first time amid a wave of revelations about his tax affairs. Facing stubbornly unfavourable poll numbers, Trump must now contend with evidence that the image he presented as a successful businessman on The Apprentice in fact belied years of chronic financial losses.

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Trump ‘paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017’ – video report

Biden, who has portrayed the presidential contest as “Scranton v Park Avenue”, pitting his Pennsylvania home town against Trump’s Manhattan, will undoubtedly use the debate to seize on the New York Times’ report that the president pays much less tax than many of his working-class supporters.

• Trump’s 2016 campaign targeted 3.5 million Black Americans to deter them from voting – including in several swing states that fell to Trump when the Black Democratic vote collapsed – according to a report by the UK’s Channel 4 News.

• The US election will have far fewer international observers than originally planned, due to a combination of health concerns over Covid-19 and the state department’s failure to invite Latin American observers to witness the vote.

The first million coronavirus deaths – that we know of

The official worldwide coronavirus death tally maintained by Johns Hopkins University has at last passed 1 million, with no end to the pandemic in sight and no sign that the global death rate is slowing. The US alone accounts for more than a fifth of those fatalities, though WHO experts said the numbers were most likely an underestimate of the true global death toll. This interactive shows how the virus caused a million deaths in nine months.

• Conflict within the White House Covid-19 taskforce is clearer than ever, after the CDC director, Robert Redfield, was overheard on a commercial flight criticising Trump adviser Scott Atlas for spreading misinformation about the pandemic.

• A simple Covid-19 test that gives results in minutes is to be rolled out globally, with an initiative co-led by the WHO and the Gates Foundation promising at least 120m of the rapid antigen tests to low- and middle-income countries.

• Most countries are failing to adequately protect women and girls from the impact of the pandemic, according to a new UN database that tracks government responses to Covid-19 in more than 200 nations.

Kentucky will release the Breonna Taylor grand jury recordings

A recording of the deliberations of the Kentucky grand jury that declined to charge three police officers in the killing of Breonna Taylor is to be released, after an anonymous juror sued for the recording to be made public. The state’s attorney general, Daniel Cameron, said the release could compromise an ongoing federal investigation of the case, adding in a statement that “the grand jury is meant to be a secretive body.”

But the anonymous grand juror’s lawyer, who also sued for the release of transcripts and other court documents from the behind-closed-doors trial, disagreed, writing in a court filing:

The full story and absolute truth of how this matter was handled from beginning to end is now an issue of great public interest and has become a large part of the discussion of public trust throughout the country.

In other news …

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Armenia and Azerbaijan clash over disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region – video report

• Fighting between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces in Azerbaijan’s ethnic Armenian region of Nagorny Karabakh continued on Monday night, with the UN security council set to hold emergency talks on the conflict on Tuesday.

• A fast-moving wildfire has killed three people in northern California, while more than 53,000 in the wine country region were under evacuation orders on Monday as nearly 30 major blazes are still burning across the state.

• The Trump administration says it will end the US census early on 5 October, despite a federal judge’s ruling that the count should continue until the end of the month. US district judge Lucy Koh said the shortened schedule would probably produce inaccurate results that would last a decade.

• The case of an NYPD officer accused of spying on fellow Tibetan exiles for China has become emblematic of the pressures facing the Tibetan diaspora, many of whom fled Beijing’s severe restrictions on religious freedom, speech and movement in their Himalayan home nation.

Great reads

Is Dick Johnson is Dead the most radical film of 2020?

When her father developed Alzheimer’s, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson decided to make a rule-breaking documentary commemorating his life – by persuading him to perform his own death in multiple imagined situations. “I want to break cinema,” she tells Charles Bramesco.

Inside the airline industry’s meltdown

Few industries have been hit as hard by the pandemic as aviation. While tens of thousands of jobs have been lost – not to mention billions in revenue – airlines have been trying to reimagine their business for an unexpected future. Samanth Subramanian reports.

How trans activists have led the way in protest movements

Pauli Murray was arrested for taking a seat in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus in March 1940, 15 years before Rosa Parks. Murray’s gender identity resembled contemporary definitions of non-binary, and her story shows how trans leaders have long been at the forefront of civil rights struggles, writes Sam Levin.

Opinion: we should focus on Covid’s long-term health impact

Coronavirus survivors seem likely to experience a spectrum of varied, longer-term health consequences. In the absence of a vaccine, argues Elizabeth Hartland, we must work out how to treat those ongoing symptoms.

Survivors report a disturbing array of ongoing symptoms and disabilities, including confusion, heart palpitations, extreme fatigue, joint pain, loss of taste or smell and shortness of breath. How many of these will translate to chronic ill health in the future? We simply don’t know yet, and that’s worrying.

Last Thing: is there life on Mars?

Two years after identifying what they believe is a large lake buried beneath Mars’s south pole, a group of Italian scientists say they have discovered evidence of a network of salty ponds, thus raising the prospect of aquatic, Martian life.

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