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Donald Trump is already claiming the vice presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz is “rigged.”

Donald Trump is already explaining away J.D. Vance’s performance during the vice presidential debate, and it hasn’t even happened yet. 

During an interview on Fox Business Monday, Kellyanne Conway asked Trump whether he would consider doing another debate. 

The former president tried to downplay his outright refusal to go head-to-head with Kamala Harris again, and implied that Vance would face the same treatment Tuesday night.

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California has become the fourth state to ban legacy admissions in the college application process, a practice that has long been criticized as favoring white or wealthy students based on their familial alumni connections.

"In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work," Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a Monday statement. "The California Dream shouldn't be accessible to just a lucky few, which is why we're opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly."

The decision affects private and nonprofit universities. The University of California system eliminated legacy admission preferences in 1998, according to Newsom's office.

The number of kids dying from influenza in the 2023-2024 season has set a new record for a regular flu season, after one new death was reported last week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

There were 200 pediatric flu-related deaths in the 2023-2024 season, compared to the previous high of 199 during the 2019-2022 season.

About 80% of the kids that died from flu this season were not fully vaccinated against influenza, CDC data shows. Nearly half of the children had at least one pre-existing medical condition.

“It is damning that here in California, where abortion care is a constitutional right, we have a hospital implementing a policy that’s reminiscent of heartbeat laws in extremist red states,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said.

A Catholic hospital in Northern California is facing a lawsuit by the state’s attorney general after it reportedly refused to perform an abortion on a woman whose pregnancy was not viable and whose life was in danger.

Anna Nusslock was already in severe crisis when she and her husband Daniel arrived last February at Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka, according to the suit, which AG Rob Bonta filed Monday in Humboldt County Superior Court. A doctor examined Nusslock, who was 15 weeks pregnant with twins, and told her they would not survive, the suit explains.

Without a dilation and evacuation procedure, or, what is commonly known as "an abortion," Nusslock was also at risk of death, the complaint contends.

However, it goes on, “Providence refused to allow Anna’s doctors to treat her, as the hospital’s policies prohibited them from terminating a pregnancy so long as they could detect fetal heart tones. The only exception was if the mother’s life was at immediate risk, a high threshold that Anna apparently did not yet reach. Only at some poorly defined point in the future, when Anna was close enough to death, would Providence permit her doctors to intervene. Until then, Anna and her physicians could do nothing but wait, worry, and hope.”

Having a baby via in vitro fertilization is about to become more accessible for many Californians after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring certain health insurers to cover the fertility treatment.

IVF is a process in which eggs are retrieved from the ovaries and fertilized by sperm in a lab. The fertilized egg, or embryo, is then transferred to the uterus. The process can be stressful and emotional. It's also expensive. Treatments can run in the tens of thousands of dollars, making it unattainable for some and leaving others in debt.

California's move to insure IVF comes after four similar bills over the last five years stalled in the Legislature. At least 14 other states already require that IVF be covered.

Newsom's signature also follows IVF's emergence as a contested issue in the presidential election, and after a controversial court decision in Alabama jeopardized access to fertility treatment for people in that state.

A network of illegal drug sellers based in the U.S., the Dominican Republic and India packaged potentially deadly synthetic opioids into pills disguised as common prescription drugs and sold millions of them through fake online drugstores, federal prosecutors said Monday.

At least nine people died of narcotics poisoning between August 2023 and June 2024 after consuming the counterfeit pills, according to an indictment unsealed in federal court in Manhattan.

The indictment charges that the leader of the enterprise, Francisco Alberto Lopez Reyes, orchestrated the scheme from the Dominican Republic, directing co-conspirators to set up dozens of online pharmacies that mimicked legitimate e-commerce sites. The sites lured customers into buying synthetic opioids — in some cases methamphetamine — disguised as prescription drugs such as Adderall, Xanax and oxycodone.

The counterfeit pills were sold to tens of thousands of Americans in all 50 states and to customers in Puerto Rico, Germany and Slovenia, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said at a news conference announcing the indictment.

The coup-attempting criminal former president also accused Biden and Harris of having "left Americans to drown" in the South.

Donald Trump, who as president withheld hurricane aid to Puerto Rico and threatened to withhold wildfire assistance to California, on Monday falsely accused President Joe Biden of failing to help Hurricane Helene’s flood victims in western North Carolina and Georgia, having “left Americans to drown” in the South.

“He’s been calling the president, he hasn’t been able to get him,” Trump said of Georgia’s governor, fellow Republican Brian Kemp, in his remarks to reporters in Valdosta, a city in the southern part of the state.

It was a lie — refuted by Kemp himself earlier that day.

“The president just called me yesterday afternoon. I missed him and I called him right back,” Kemp told reporters. “And he just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’”

The ex-president said Brian Kemp, the state governor, was trying to reach the president who was ‘sleeping’, in vain

Donald Trump spoke in front of a furniture store gutted by Hurricane Helene in Valdosta, Georgia, on Monday, claiming falsely that Georgia’s governor had not been able to reach Joe Biden.

Upon landing in Valdosta, Trump claimed to reporters the president had been “sleeping” and that Brian Kemp, the governor, had been “calling the president and hasn’t been able to get him”. He repeated the false claim when speaking in front of the store.

Kemp refuted the allegation earlier in the day. He said he had been playing phone tag with vice-president Kamala Harris, but also said: “The president just called me yesterday afternoon and he just said: ‘Hey, what do you need?’ … He offered that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly, which, I appreciate that.”

During the White House press briefing on Monday, the homeland security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall said Biden had offered Kemp “anything” Georgia needed in terms of storm response.

Georgia’s Republican governor praised Democratic President Joe Biden for reaching out to him in the wake of Hurricane Helene’s deadly devastation as the state and surrounding areas scramble to recover from the disaster.

Former President Donald Trump told a different story when he landed there to survey the damage.

“The governor’s doing a very good job. He’s having a hard time getting the president on the phone,” Trump told reporters. “The federal government is not being responsive.”

It wasn’t true.

Here’s what Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp had to say about Biden and the feds:

“The president just called me yesterday afternoon. I missed him and called him right back and he just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’ And I told him, ‘We got what we need. We’ll work through the federal process. He offered that if there’s other things we need just to call him directly, which I appreciate that,” Kemp said.

“We’ve had FEMA embedded with us since a day or two before the storm hit in our state operating center in Atlanta. We’ve got a great relationship with them,” he said.

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Jimmy Carter celebrates his 100th birthday on Tuesday, making him the first US president to reach the milestone.

Carter, a Democrat who served in the White House from 1977 to 1981, has spent the past 19 months in hospice care in his home state of Georgia.

But the former peanut farmer, who first entered politics in the 1960s as a state senator, is "emotionally engaged and still having experiences and laughing, loving," his grandson, Jason, said in September.

And the centenarian still has political ambitions: "I'm only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris" in November's election, the humanitarian and Nobel Prize recipient said, according to his grandson.

Elon Musk’s X is now worth less than a quarter of its $44 billion purchase price, according to a new estimate from investor Fidelity. 

The asset manager, which helped Musk acquire the social network formerly known as Twitter, now values its stake in X at approximately $4.19 million, based on newly released disclosures from Fidelity’s Blue Chip Growth Fund. The fund has reduced the value of its holding in X by a total of 78.7% as of August end.

At two rallies this weekend, Trump called the vice president "mentally impaired" in comments that were criticized by some members of his own party.

Former President Donald Trump said at a rally here Sunday that Vice President Kamala Harris should be "impeached and prosecuted" for her actions related to the southern U.S. border. 

He argued that people were "murdered because of her action at the border, and thousands more will follow in rapid succession," adding, "She should be impeached and prosecuted for her actions."

Trump also lobbed personal attacks at Harris on Sunday, echoing comments at his rally the day Saturday, when he called Harris “mentally disabled” and “mentally impaired.”

With Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket and a tight race in the final stretch of the presidential campaign, Trump's rhetoric has escalated.