The old adage is that a week is a long time in politics – this year’s US election is making a day in politics feel like an eternity. Since we went to press last week, hot off revelations about Donald Trump’s tax returns, we witnessed the miserable spectacle of the first presidential debate in Cleveland. That event – an international embarrassment for the US – was quickly overshadowed a few days later by the news that the president and his wife, Melania, had both tested positive for coronavirus.
The resulting chaos – a four-day stay in hospital, many of Trump’s inner circle also testing positive and the still-ill Trump’s supposedly triumphal return to the White House on Monday evening – capped yet another unbelievable week in Trumpworld. Our world affairs editor Julian Borger analyses Trump’s desperate departure from hospital and Stephanie Kirchgaessner meticulously details the spread of Covid-19 in the administration to work out how we got from the Rose Garden reveal of Amy Coney Barrett to the supposed leader of the free world being given a cocktail of experimental drug treatments.
Last year, the Guardian made its inaugural climate pledge: a journalistic and business commitment to covering the global climate emergency and doing our best to contribute to it as little as possible. Since then, the Guardian has published more than 3,000 articles on the environment – many of which you will have read in the Guardian Weekly. You can read Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner’s 2020 climate pledge in this week’s issue. Before that, Oliver Milman analyses the fledgling carbon capture industry . Is this green “moonshot” the cure it claims to be?
Keir Starmer was elected leader of the UK Labour party in April and has quickly established himself as a serious politician with an eye for detail. Starmer spoke to the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley and Toby Helm about winning back voters lost to the Tories in Labour’s traditional heartlands. Then, on the opinion pages, John Harris looks at those “red wall” seats – are Britain’s political classes misunderstanding them again?
One of the hardest-hit industries from the pandemic has been air travel. With borders shut and billions facing restriction on their movements, the airline industry knew in March that it was facing disaster. Will it survive the crisis? Samanth Subramanian has spent the past few months speaking to industry insiders about the future – and discovering what happens to a fleet of planes that can’t go anywhere. (It’s not quite as simple as parking them up for six months … )
