The D-day has finally arrived, and millions of Americans are set to head to the polls and choose between the two presidential candidates who remain neck and neck in the polls.

Democratic candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump who have been embroiled in a relentless battle for votes for months, remain split by 1.2% in favour of Harris according to the latest polls Monday — a lead well within the margin of error.

Trump wrapped up his campaign trail with a final speech in Grand Rapids, in the swing State of Michigan he flipped back in 2016. Meanwhile, Harris concluded by pledging to “get to work” if elected in Philadelphia, another battleground state where incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden won by 1.2% in 2020.

Europe and the rest of the world remain on tenterhooks as the result of the vote might lead to protests and legal challenges similar to the aftermath of the vote four years ago.

Trump’s final campaign speech concluded in Michigan. The former president stuck to some policy points, namely immigration, but spent a portion of his final message meandering through a series of tangents, and criticising Harris.

Promising to usher in a new “golden age” for the US, he then spoke about assigning nicknames for his political opponents — and said “groceries” was an old term he hadn’t heard much.

He cast doubt on the electoral process, saying using “paper” for ballots was old-fashioned and slow, insisting “we want the answer tonight.”

Harris was the subject of much vitriol, with Trump saying the Democrat has a “low IQ” and that she and Biden had destroyed the US.

He said Nancy Pelosi and Democrats were “trouble for our country. They are bad, sick, people.”

At the end of his speech, he brought out the mayor of Hamtrack, Amer Ghalib, on stage to signal his support among Arab Americans.

Republicans are hoping Arab American voters, frustrated with Biden’s policies in the Middle East, will vote for Trump today.

Harris expressed ‘optimism’ and ‘joy’ at final rally in Philadelphia.

“Ours is not a fight against nothing, but for something… Tonight we finish as we started: with energy, optimism, joy,” Democratic candidate Kamala Harris said, wrapping up her campaign trail in Philadelphia on Monday night.

Describing her months-long run as a fight for democracy, the incumbent vice-president chose to end on a positive note with one last appeal to young voters.

“Generations before us led the fight for freedom, and now the baton is in our hands,” Harris said. “We need to get to work and get out the vote.”

Philadelphia is the largest city in the East Coast state of Pennsylvania, one of the seven key swing states — US states where the election could reasonably go to either of the two candidates.

After weeks of campaigning, polls are set to open across the US to decide the next president.

It is currently past midnight eastern time with the first polls set to open in the northeastern state of Vermont in some places as early as 5 am EST (11am CET).

Polls in Hawaii and Alaska are set to close by 1 am EST (7 am CET).

Over 82 million have already voted, according to data published by the University of Florida’s election lab, breaking records in some crucial swing states such as North Carolina.

• Both Harris and Trump delivered their final message to voters in rallies last night.
• Harris pushed a message of unity and optimism for the US, focusing on abortion rights and pledging to lower food and housing costs.
• Trump painted a picture of America in despair — a problem only he could fix. Policy-wise, he vowed to seal the border between the US and Mexico and has proposed trillions worth of tax cuts.
• Both spent a portion of their speeches criticising the other, with Harris making a contrast between her and her opponent without using his name, and Trump calling Harris a “radical left lunatic,” among other things.

Agency Report

No fewer than 80 Nobel Prize winners have endorsed Kamala Harris for the presidency, warning that Donald Trump  would “jeopardize any advancements in our standards of living” given his earlier proposals for enormous cuts to science funding.

In an open letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, 82 Nobel prize winners from the US in the fields of physics, chemistry, economics and medicine, said “this is the most consequential presidential election in a long time, perhaps ever, for the future of science and the United States”.

The letter, which commends Harris for recognizing that “the enormous increases in living standards and life expectancies over the past two centuries are largely the result of advances in science and technology”, called Trump a potential threat to progress who could “jeopardize any advancements in our standards of living and impede our responses to climate change”.

The Nobel laureates range from a physicist involved in the discovery of remnant light from the Big Bang, to an immunologist instrumental in the development of a specific type of COVID-19 vaccine.

They includes signatories who won Nobels this month such as the molecular biologist Gary Ruvkun, the chemist David Baker, the physicist John Hopfield and the economist Daron Acemoglu.

Driven by concerns over the significant cuts to science funding proposed during Trump’s tenure, coupled with what he perceives as the former president’s adversarial stance toward science and academia, Joseph Stiglitz, an economist at Columbia University who won the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences in 2001, said he was motivated by the “enormous cuts in science budgets” that Trump proposed during his presidency, as well as former president’s “anti-science” and “anti-university” stances.

“I hope it’s a wake-up call for people,” Stiglitz told the New York Times about the letter. “A consequence of this election is the really profound impact that his agenda has on science and technology.”

The letter also lauds Harris for her understanding of the invaluable contributions immigrants make to scientific progress on a national and global scale.

On Thursday, in a separate letter obtained by CNN, 23 living US recipients of the Nobel prize in economics, have expressed their endorsement of Harris’s economic agenda, deeming it “vastly superior” to the economic strategies proposed by Trump.

“While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we believe that, overall, Harris’s economic agenda will improve our nation’s health, investment, sustainability, resilience, employment opportunities, and fairness and be vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda of Donald Trump,” they wrote.

Four Israeli soldiers have been killed and more than 60 people injured in a Hezbollah drone attack on an army base in central-northern Israel, according to first responders and the Israeli military.

The incident late Sunday local time is one of the bloodiest attacks on Israel since the beginning of the war last October.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, launched by Hezbollah hit an army base adjacent to Binyamina, a town north of Tel Aviv that lies some 40 miles from the Lebanese border.

The four killed soldiers were all 19 years old and in infantry training at the base, the IDF said, adding that eight other soldiers were severely injured.

According to Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency service, a total of 61 people were wounded in the attack, with dozens still hospitalized.

The news comes after Hezbollah said Sunday it had fired a swarm of attack drones on an Israeli infantry training camp in Binyamina.

The Lebanon-based militant group said the attack was in response to deadly Israeli strikes in Lebanon Thursday.

Hezbollah said it had targeted the Golani Brigade, an infantry unit of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that has been deployed in southern Lebanon. The claim of responsibility for the attack came shortly after the militant group released an audio message from its slain leader Hassan Nasrallah calling on its members to “defend your people, your family, your nation, your values and your dignity.”

Earlier on Sunday, the IDF said it had intercepted a Lebanon-launched UAV without specifying where. It was not immediately clear whether this was the same incident that led to the injuries.

Israeli air defence systems tend to be very reliable, but on Sunday, there were no reports of alerts in the Binyamina area at the time of the attack, raising questions of how the drone was able to penetrate so deep into the Israeli territory without being spotted.

Hezbollah said it had fired dozens of rockets toward the northern Israeli towns of Nahariya and Acre to engage Israel’s air defense systems, while simultaneously launching the drone swarm.

“These drones broke through the Israel defense radars without detection and reached its target at the training camp of the elite Golani Brigade in Binyamina,” Hezbollah said.

The IDF’s top spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the military would investigate how the drone got through without raising an alarm at the base.

“We will learn from and investigate the incident,” he said in a video statement from the base. “The threat of UAVs is a threat we are dealing with since the beginning of the war. We need an improvement to our defense,” he added.

Source: CNN