First Thing: October surprise? Trump caught the coronavirus

Good morning. Who could have guessed that a president who repeatedly spread misinformation about the coronavirus, held campaign rallies in infection “red zones” and rarely wore a face mask in public would end up catching Covid-19? Actually, “anyone who was paying attention”, says David Smith.

Donald Trump announced on Twitter early on Friday morning that he and the first lady had tested positive for the disease, after his close aide Hope Hicks contracted the virus and traveled with them to campaign events including the first presidential debate. Trump joins a growing list of world leaders to have caught Covid-19. At 74 years old and overweight, he now faces the greatest threat to a US president’s life since Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.

The news also brings Trump’s already chaotic campaign to a virtual standstill a month from election day. Even if he remains healthy, the president faces two weeks of quarantine at the White House, leaving him unable to attend planned rallies in several key states, not to mention the second debate in Florida.

• Do Trump’s tax revelations damage Ivanka? The president’s daughter received almost $750,000 in “consulting fees” from the Trump Organization, helping reduce the family’s tax bill, while she was simultaneously an employee.

Amy Coney Barrett could help strike down Obamacare

Days after the election, the US supreme court is set to hear yet another challenge to the Affordable Care Act, a case in which Amy Coney Barrett could prove to be the decisive vote. And if Trump’s nominee is indeed confirmed by then, experts say Obamacare will be in serious danger of being struck down – potentially leaving millions of Americans without healthcare in the middle of a pandemic.

• Barrett signed off on an ad calling Roe v Wade ‘barbaric’, which was sponsored by an extreme anti-choice group and ran in the South Bend Tribune newspaper in 2006 – further evidence that women’s reproductive rights would be threatened by her elevation to the supreme court.

Women of color are running for Congress in record numbers

It may seem like an election dominated by elderly white men, but there will be more women – and more women of color – on the ballot in 2020 than ever before. A record 298 women are running for Congress as Democrats or Republicans in November, 117 of whom are women of color, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. Adam Gabbatt looks at several of the candidates.

Election round-up

• Governor Greg Abbott has made it even harder to vote in Texas, issuing an executive order to limit the number of mail-in ballot drop-off sites to just one per county, generating fresh accusations of voter suppression.

• A second Trump term would be ‘game over’ for the climate, top scientist Michael Mann told the Guardian in an interview, saying: “The future of this planet is now in the hands of American citizens.”

• A Russian group accused of meddling in the 2016 election created a phoney independent news outlet to target rightwing voters on social media ahead of this year’s vote. The Internet Research Agency was also accused of being behind a fake leftwing media outlet exposed in September.

• Who’s leading in the swing states? Biden has a solid lead in national polls, but the electoral college map is closer. The Guardian’s poll tracker is keeping tabs on six key states during the last month of the election.

In other news …

• Nasa has launched its first new space potty in decades on a mission to the International Space Station, where the $23m titanium toilet – designed to be better suited for women – will be tested before it goes to the moon.

• The Trump administration says only 15,000 refugees will be allowed to settle in the US in the 2021 fiscal year, a record low figure that has prompted outraged from civil rights groups.

• More than 5,000 wildfires broke out across Paraguay on Thursday, with neighbouring Brazil’s Amazon rainforest already suffering its worst wildfire season for a decade.

Great reads

Rashida Jones: ‘It’s a weird time to celebrate anything’

The writer and actor gave birth to a son and lost her mother, both while she was shooting Sofia Coppola’s new movie, On the Rocks. “I didn’t know if I was coming or going, which was the perfect place for me to be, with filming,” she tells Emma Brockes.

China sets its sights on solving ‘the Taiwan problem’

China has at last stripped Hong Kong of its autonomy with the imposition of a controversial security law. And now, say observers, the methods Beijing used to crush dissent in the former British territory could be applied to Taiwan. Emma Graham-Harrison and Helen Davidson report.

The data scientist exposing US white supremacists

Emily Gorcenski came face-to-face with neo-Nazis at the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2018. Since then, she tells Sam Levin, the data scientist has used her website, First Vigil, to track far-right links journalists and authorities have missed.

Opinion: Radiohead are the Blackest white band of our times

It’s 20 years since the release of their groundbreaking album Kid A and, contrary to the consensus that they’re the whitest of white bands, Daphne A Brooks says there are powerful resonances between Radiohead’s work and radical Black art.

Resistance, futurism and critiques of bald-faced power are hardwired into Radiohead’s sound, and this blend, along with their embrace of jazz and other revolutionary Black musical forms, is likely why a whole host of contemporary Black artists have covered their work.

Last Thing: is there Russian treasure in this Nazi shipwreck?

Polish divers in the Baltic sea say they have found the wreck of a German second world war ship, the Karlsruhe, which was sunk by a Soviet air attack in 1945. They believe it may hold the remains of the Amber Room, an ornate chamber decorated with amber and gold, which was looted by the Nazis from the Catherine Palace near St Petersburg.

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