Leaders paint Kamala Harris as Jezebel, who is cast out – from a window, trampled by horses, and eaten by dogs

As the sky darkened on the National Mall in DC last Saturday, evangelical pastor Ché Ahn addressed the thousands of worshippers gathered there and issued a decree.

Trump, Ahn said, was a figure akin to the biblical King Jehu, and “Kamala Harris is a type of Jezebel, and as you know, Jehu cast out Jezebel”.

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The novelist and short story writer on her new book about Azrael, the angel of death, her encounters with Raymond Carver and Richard Yates, and why fiction should be uncanny

Joy Williams, 80, has written five novels and four story collections and is the recipient of numerous awards. Her most recent book of short stories, Concerning the Future of Souls : 99 Stories of Azrael (Tuskar Rock), was published earlier this year. Her work ranges from the philosophical examination of being, belief and morality to urgent engagements with environmental catastrophe; James Salter wrote of her that she belongs in the company of Céline and Flannery O’Connor. Born in Massachusetts, she now lives in the Sonoran desert.

An earlier collection of yours was called 99 Stories of God , and now you’ve moved on to Azrael (the angel of death and transporter of souls) as the subject. What drew you to him?
I read in a WS Merwin collection his translation of Hadrian’s deathbed poem to his soul – Animula vagula blandula – so sorrowful and succinct. The soul, a worthy subject. And Azrael has always fascinated me: he was death, but not death exactly. He was more a gorgeous creation of Islam. I picture him as responsible for all the souls of this ensouled Earth.

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Recognized as a religion by the IRS, the group uses the religious right’s tactics, and their victories, against them

The devil works hard, but the Republican party works harder. Not a day seems to go by without anti-abortion zealots on the right advancing some cunning new plan to strip women of their bodily autonomy. As well as shutting down abortion clinics, Republican states are trying to essentially outlaw abortion pills: on Friday, Missouri, Kansas and Idaho renewed a legal push to drastically reduce access to mifepristone.

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Officials point to a string of cases they suspect are part of a cross-border effort sanctioned by Delhi to silence separatists

On one summer night in Ontario, a Canadian Sikh activist received a panicked call from his wife: police had come to the family home and warned her that his life was at risk.

Two weeks later and thousands of kilometers away, a gunman in the province of British Columbia filmed himself firing a volley of bullets into the home of a prominent Indo-Canadian singer as two vehicles burned in the driveway.

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Exclusive: George Carey says 26 bishops should ‘be on the side of those who … want a dignified, compassionate end to their lives’

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George Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has urged Church of England bishops in the House of Lords to back a parliamentary bill on assisted dying, saying that in the past “church leaders have often shamefully resisted change”.

Instead, the 26 bishops should “be on the side of those who … want a dignified, compassionate end to their lives”, Lord Carey told the Guardian.

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UCLouvain staff and students express ‘incomprehension and disapproval’ over pope’s views on role of women

Pope Francis has been sharply criticised by one of Belgium’s Catholic universities over his stance on the role of women in society, in a strongly worded press release issued just moments after the pontiff spoke at the college.

Professors and students at UCLouvain, where the 87-year-old pontiff had made a speech on Saturday afternoon, said they wanted to express their “incomprehension and disapproval” about the pope’s views.

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Powerful documentary probes the shameful story of hundreds of residential schools in Canada, largely run by the Catholic church, that subjected pupils to horrific abuse

This deeply disquieting and indeed enraging documentary is about the hundreds of residential “Indian schools” for Indigenous children in Canada, largely administered by the Catholic church from the 1930s until the 1990s. It highlights the grotesque scandal of one in particular: the St Joseph’s Mission school in British Columbia (long since closed) where Indigenous children were routinely subject to physical and sexual abuse, with girls impregnated by their rapist-abusers. Some prosecutions of individual priests were brought. Reports were made. But very clearly, this hardly scratches the surface.

The film-makers speak to community members in the Sugarcane Reserve in British Columbia near the hated school and we get some sense of the pain and inherited trauma . But more than that: new radar technology is now revealing babies’ graves around the school’s property and the film recounts the case in 1959 of a newborn baby apparently abandoned by an Indigenous mother and fortuitously rescued from a garbage incinerator by a dairyman who happened to hear crying. We hear a trial report: the mother was sentenced to a year in jail with the judge sternly noting that had the baby not been found in time, this would have been a murder charge. But on that subject … if the school were simply quietly allowing these rape victims’ babies to die and get buried or disposed of, then wouldn’t that also be homicide?

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Exclusive: Justin Welby says violent disorder was racist and calls adoption of Christian imagery an ‘outrage’

• Opinion: ‘After all these days of hate and violence, we must find a way to live together well’

Far-right groups are “unchristian” and their use of Christian imagery is an “outrage”, the archbishop of Canterbury has said.

Writing in the Guardian , Justin Welby condemned violent unrest that he said was “racist” and “anti-Muslim, anti-refugee and anti-asylum seeker”.

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People share their pride and disappointment on the tenure of Britain’s first Asian and Hindu prime minister

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With Rishi Sunak’s tenure as the first prime minister of Indian heritage having come to a crushing end, south Asians living in the UK have had cause to reflect. The Conservative party’s general election capitulation ends a shortlived but historic period for the country, which for the first time was led by a person of colour, and a Hindu .

In his last address to the country, Sunak reflected on the significance of his family background. “One of the most remarkable things about Britain is just how unremarkable it is that two generations after my grandparents came here with little, I could become prime minister, and that I could watch my two young daughters light Diwali candles on the steps in Downing Street,” he said.

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