Hillary Clinton

German media group Bertelsmann will acquire U.S. publisher Simon & Schuster from ViacomCBS for more than $2 billion. Bertelsmann, the owner of Penguin Random House, outbid Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for the publisher of authors Dan Brown, Hillary Clinton and Stephen King that Viacom put up for sale earlier this year.

CEO Thomas Rabe is restructuring the group to reduce its exposure to declining areas such as printing, has merged its Arvato CRM customer services unit and made a string of smaller technology bets.

The editorial board of American newspaper USA Today has published its first presidential endorsement in its history, urging Americans to vote for Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

"In 2016, we broke tradition in urging you not to vote for Trump. Now we're making our first presidential endorsement. We hope it's our last," so the Editorial Board. "We urged readers not to vote for Donald Trump, calling the Republican nominee unfit for office because he lacked the “temperament, knowledge, steadiness and honesty that America needs from its presidents.” We stopped short, however, of an outright endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. This year, the Editorial Board unanimously supports the election of Joe Biden, who offers a shaken nation a harbor of calm and competence."

During Thursday's town hall event, President Donald Trump refused to disavow the QAnon QAnon conspiracy theory. QAnon followers believe that Trump will save the world from a globalist cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and cannibals controlled by the "deep state," including public figures such as Hillary Clinton, Tom Hanks and Pope Francis.

"I know nothing about QAnon. I do know they are very much against pedophilia," the president told NBC Town Hall moderator Savannah Guthrie.

Back in August, Trump voiced support for the QAnon movement, telling reporters that he appreciated their support for him and that "these are people that love our country."

Judge Stanley Bastian has temporarily blocked the US Postal Service and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy from changing USPS policies or protocols before the November election. Recent changes have slowed mail nationwide, in what Judge Bastian called "a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service".

"Although not necessarily apparent on the surface, at the heart of DeJoy's and the Postal Service's actions is voter disenfranchisement. This is evident in President Trump's highly partisan words and tweets, the actual impact of the changes on primary elections that resulted in uncounted ballots, and recent attempts and lawsuits by the Republican National Committee and President Trump's campaign to stop the States' efforts to bypass the Postal Service by utilizing ballot drop boxes, as well as the timing of the changes," so the Judge in a statement. "It is easy to conclude that the recent Postal Services' changes is an intentional effort on the part of the current Administration to disrupt and challenge the legitimacy of upcoming local, state, and federal elections, especially given that 72% of the ... high speed mail sorting machines that were decommissioned were located in counties where Hillary Clinton received the most votes in 2016."

CNN and Buzzfeed obtained further reports and notes from "special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election [...] in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by BuzzFeed News and CNN." The notes contain interviews with major witnesses during Robert Mueller's investigations, including Steve Bannon and multiple witnesses whose names had been retracted.

Some of the key takeaways of these notes are:

• Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign manager, expressed severe mistrust of Roger Stone, accusing Stone of having leaked damaging information to the press to get Paul Manafort as a replacement for Corey Lewandowski as campaign manager. Bannon called Stone a "nasty piece of work" with a "sketchy background."

• Bannon described Trump asking frequently about "dirt" on Hillary Clinton and her missing emails to hurt her campaign. According to Bannon, Trump assumed the emails could contain information that would link "crooked Hillary" to the conspiracy theory about an illicit uranium deal.

• FBI agents visited a male, unnamed witness who asked "if the agents were there to inquire about the campaign, and about Erik Prince, a military contractor and unofficial adviser to Trump’s campaign."

After Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton - 2016 Democratic presidential nominee - announced her endorsement of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

The endorsement, at an online town hall on the effects of the coronavirus crisis on women, came at a critical moment as Biden aims to raise his profile with female voters and other key demographic groups even as the pandemic ravages the U.S. economy.

Biden, who has vowed to pick a woman as his running mate this year, introduced Clinton at the town hall as the person who should now be president.