Missouri’s supreme court won’t hear an appeal by Republican secretary of state Jay Ashcroft over the wording of ballot question on access to abortion, a win for advocates attempting to enshrine protections for the procedure.

A state appeals court ruled last month that wording asking voters if they were in favor of “dangerous and unregulated abortions until live birth” was politically partisan.

On Tuesday, the state supreme court declined to hear Ashcroft’s appeal of that ruling. Missouri’s Republican controlled legislature banned abortion except in cases of medical emergency after the US supreme court last year overturned the Roe v Wade ruling and ended 50 years of federal protections.

In all seven states where abortion has been on the ballot since, voters have either supported protecting abortion rights or rejected attempts to erode them.

Here’s our state-by-state guide to where abortion laws stand:

A judge in Atlanta is hearing arguments on a request to revoke the bond of Harrison Floyd, one of former president Donald Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia case related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis filed a motion last week telling superior court judge Scott McAfee that Floyd attempted to intimidate and contact likely witnesses and his co-defendants in violation of the terms of his release, the Associated Press reports.

Floyd’s attorneys wrote in a court filing that Willis’ allegations are without merit and that the motion is a “retaliatory measure” against their client. Floyd “neither threatened or intimidated anyone and certainly did not communicate with a witness or co-defendant directly or indirectly,” they wrote.

Willis was in court Tuesday to present the prosecution’s case. She planned to call three witnesses, including Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia who strenuously defended the legitimacy of the state’s 2020 vote count against Trump’s false claims that the election was fraudulent.

The charges against Floyd relate to allegations of harassment toward Ruby Freeman, a Fulton county election worker who had been falsely accused of election fraud by Trump and his supporters. Floyd took part in a 4 January 2021 conversation in which Freeman was told she “needed protection” and was pressured to lie and say she had participated in election fraud, the indictment says.

Four of the original 19 defendants agreed plea deals that include a promise to testify in any trials in the case. Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty.

No trial date has been set, but Willis last week asked McAfee to set it for August next year, and warned the case could stretch into 2025.

Donald Trump appealed a ruling in which a Colorado judge said he could not be disqualified from the presidential ballot under the 14th amendment to the US constitution, even though he engaged in insurrection by inciting the deadly January 6 attack.

The former president took issue with the finding that he participated in insurrection in connection with the attack on the Capitol staged by his supporters.

“The district court ruled that section three [of the 14th amendment] did not apply to the presidency, because that position is not an ‘officer of the United States’,” lawyers for Trump said in a court filing, responding to the ruling last week.

“The district court nonetheless applied section three to President Trump, finding that he ‘engaged’ in an ‘insurrection’. Should these findings be vacated because the district court self-admittedly lacked jurisdiction to apply section three to President Trump?”

The group that filed the suit on behalf of six state petitioners, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), also lodged an appeal.

It argued: “Section three of the 14th amendment, passed after the civil war, excludes from federal or state office those who engaged in insurrection against the constitution after previously taking an oath to support it.

“Because the district court found that Trump engaged in insurrection after taking the presidential oath of office, it should have concluded that he is disqualified from office and ordered the secretary of state to exclude him from the Colorado presidential primary ballot.”

Read Martin Pengelly’s full story here:

Joanna Walters

John Dean, former White House counsel to Richard Nixon, is scathing about Donald Trump’s efforts to persuade an appeals court that he should not have a gag order in his federal election interference case because he is running for president.

Dean has weighed in on what appears to be a court leaning towards, narrowing the gag order that bans Trump from making inflammatory statements and social media posts attacking prosecutors, potential witnesses and court staff.

Dean posted on X/Twitter, saying: “Donald Trump has turned the rule of law in the United States upside down, and it is stunning that federal circuit court judges are buying into his remarkable con!” He said the hearing yesterday in Washington, DC, “bordered on pure farce.”

Dean, who ultimately helped bring down Nixon despite being involved in the-then president’s cover-up of corrupt and illegal presidential conduct known as Watergate, must be experiencing deja vu right now. He told the Guardian’s David Smith in June 2022, of now-GOP frontrunner Trump: “I was never worried about the country and the government during Watergate but from the day Trump was nominated, I had a knot in my stomach…he just discovered late in his presidency the enormous powers he does have as president…he knows he can hurt his enemies and help his friends.”

On X last night his new post on Trump concluded: “For heaven sakes, hold this man responsible for his aberrant and bullying behavior before he further destroys our country. Enough is enough is enough!”

Hostage deal between Israel, Hamas ‘very close’ – White House

Joanna Walters

Joe Biden says negotiators are “very close” to securing the release of potentially dozens of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

The US president was speaking at the White House and said: “We’re now very close, very close – we can bring some of these hostages home very soon, but don’t want to get into the details of things.”

He added: “Nothing is done until it’s done and when we have more to say we will, but things are looking good at the moment.”

We are closely covering all the news in the Israel-Gaza crisis via our global live blog and you can find the details here.

It’s lunchtime on a quiet day so far in US politics, and time for a recap of what we’ve looked at so far:

• Joe Biden has called on Congress to pass his $106bn supplementary budget request that he said includes funding to “step up” the fight against a flow of deadly fentanyl entering the US. The president, speaking at the White House before leaving for a Thanksgiving break in Massachusetts, said the fentanyl crisis was hurting families in every state and curbing it was “something every American needs to get behind”.

• Wisconsin’s supreme court justices have been grilling attorneys for both the respondents and plaintiffs in a much-watched gerrymandering case that could end in a complete redraw of the state’s legislative districts. Lawyers for Democratic governor Tony Evers say the current maps favoring Republicans breach a law that says they must be “contiguous”; a conservative justice says the plaintiffs want to upend 50 years of precedent.

• A trio of prominent conservative lawyers said in a scathing New York Times oped that a second term in office for former president Donald Trump would imperil democracy. George Conway, J Michael Luttig and Barbara Comstock say Trump has surrounded himself with “grifters, frauds and con men willing to subvert the Constitution” and that “our country is in a constitutional emergency, if not a constitutional crisis”.

Joe Biden has called on Congress to join him to “step up the fight” against the flow of fentanyl coming into the US.

The president was speaking at the White House in his final official engagement before he and first lady Jill Biden head to Nantucket later for their Thanksgiving break.

Before a cabinet meeting that’s now gone into private session, Biden said he was heartbroken for families who will have an empty seat at their Thanksgiving table because they had lost a loved one to the drug:

Fentanyl is likely the number one killer of Americans at this point. It’s an issue that’s hurting families in every…