Senior Republicans distanced themselves Sunday from comments made by Donald Trump at campaign stops over the weekend that opponent Kamala Harris was born “mentally disabled” and had compared her actions to that of “a mentally disabled person”.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, pushed back on Trump’s remarks, which came in what Trump himself admitted was a “dark” speech.

“I just think the better course to take is to prosecute the case that her policies are destroying the country,” Graham said on CNN. “I’m not saying she’s crazy, her policies are crazy.”

Graham’s comments came as immigration and border security remained the top domestic issue on Sunday’s political talk shows. Trump made his comments during a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday amid remarks on Harris’s actions on those issues as vice-president.

“Kamala is mentally impaired. If a Republican did what she did, that Republican would be impeached and removed from office, and rightfully so, for high crimes and misdemeanors,” he said.

Trump added: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”

Minnesota Republican representative Tom Emmer, a member of JD Vance’s debate preparation team, told ABC News: “I think we should stick on the issues. The issues are, Donald Trump fixed it once. They broke it. He’s going to fix it again. That – those are the issues.”

But Maryland governor Larry Hogan struck back, telling CBS News that Trump’s comments were “insulting not only to the vice-president, but to people that actually do have mental disabilities.

“I’ve said for years that Trump’s divisive rhetoric is something we can do without,” Hogan added.

Steven Cheung, the communications director for the Trump campaign, did not directly address Trump’s comments, widely criticized as offensive, but said Harris’s record on immigration and border security made her “wholly unfit to serve as president”.

Trump’s comments joined a long list of personal attacks against opponents that supporters at his campaign eagerly lap up. Democrats have their own reductive articulations, calling Trump and Vance “weird”.

But the use of mental disability to describe Harris’s faculties has been widely seized upon. Democrat Illinois governor JB Pritzker told CNN that Trump’s remarks were “name-calling”.

“Whenever he says things like that, he’s talking about himself but trying to project it onto others,” Pritzker said. Eric Holder, the former Obama administration attorney general, said Trump’s comments indicated “cognitive decline”.

“Trump made a great deal of the cognitive abilities of Joe Biden,” he told MSNBC. “If this is where he is now, where is he going to be three and four years from now?”

Maria Town, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, pointed out that many presidents had disabilities.

Town said in a statement to the Washington Post that Trump’s comments “say far more about him and his inaccurate, hateful biases against disabled people than it does about Vice President Harris, or any person with a disability”.

Kris Kristofferson, the country singer who ably balanced a prolific acting career alongside his music, has died aged 88.

Kristofferson’s family confirmed his death on Sunday night, saying he “passed away peacefully” at home on Saturday. “We’re all so blessed for our time with him,” read the statement, which was signed by his wife Lisa, his eight children and seven grandchildren. “Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.”

Admired for the grit, emotional vulnerability and literary craft of his country songwriting, Kristofferson frequently topped the US country charts and cover versions of his songs were hits for artists including Janis Joplin, Gladys Knight and Johnny Cash. In the mid-70s, he worked with film directors including Martin Scorsese and Sam Peckinpah, and won a Golden Globe for his work opposite Barbra Streisand in the 1976 remake of A Star is Born.

Born in Texas in 1936, Kristofferson attended high school in California and initially wanted to be a novelist, later studying literature at Pomona college in southern California and at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Inspired by the nascent rock’n’roll scene, his first foray into music was in the UK as Kris Carson, though the songs he recorded were never released.

He continued performing music during a spell in the US army, where he became a helicopter pilot, a skill he continued (in the oil industry and National Guard) after he left the forces in 1965 – angering his military family. “I took pride in being the best labour or the guy that could dig the ditches the fastest,” he later said. “Something inside me made me want to do the tough stuff … Part of it was that I wanted to be a writer, and I figured that I had to get out and live.”

He relocated to the country music hub of Nashville, where he worked as a bartender and as a janitor for Columbia Recording Studios. In the late 60s he wrote songs for Jerry Lee Lewis and country singers including Ray Stevens, Faron Young and Billy Walker, but his solo career faltered.

A breakthrough came after he landed a National Guard helicopter at Johnny Cash’s home and handed him a tape of his songs, later describing the incident as “kind of an invasion of privacy that I wouldn’t recommend”. Cash admired Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down and his recording of Kristofferson’s song topped the country chart in 1970 and won song of the year at the Country Music Association awards.

That year, Kristofferson recorded the first of 18 studio albums he would release during his career. He briefly dated Janis Joplin, who recorded his song Me and Bobby McGee, and it became a No 1 hit after her death in 1970. Another Kristofferson song from that year, Help Me Make It Through the Night, became a hit single for Sammi Smith and was later covered by Elvis Presley, Gladys Knight, Mariah Carey and others.

By the time his fourth album Jesus Was a Capricorn topped the country chart in 1972, the strikingly handsome Kristofferson had begun an acting career, first appearing in Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie. Further notable films include playing the outlaw Billy the Kid in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), opposite Ellen Burstyn in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and with Burt Reynolds in sports comedy-drama Semi-Tough (1977). A Star Is Born cemented his Hollywood success, but it was later undermined by Heaven’s Gate (1980), famously a box-office flop.

In 1979, Willie Nelson made a hit album of Kristofferson covers, and in 1982 the pair collaborated with Dolly Parton and Brenda Lee on a compilation of their mid-60s songs. In 1985, Kristofferson and Nelson formed another supergroup, the Highwaymen, with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. Their debut album, Highwayman, with its title track written by Jimmy Webb, returned Kristofferson to the top of the country charts.

In the 1980s, he was a vocal critic of US president Ronald Reagan and foreign policy in Central America, when the US funded combat against left-wing forces in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Kristofferson’s 1986 album Repossessed made reference to the conflicts.

His acting career, while consistent, was given a fillip in 1996 by playing villainous sheriff Charlie Wade in John Sayles’s acclaimed neo-western Lone Star alongside Chris Cooper and Matthew McConaughey. It led to prominent roles, including that of vampire hunter Abraham Whistler in three Blade movies, starring Wesley Snipes.

Kristofferson retired in 2021. His final film role was in the Ethan Hawke-directed drama Blaze (2018), and his most recent album was 2016’s The Cedar Creek Sessions.

He was married three times, first to Fran Beer in 1960. He married singer Rita Coolidge in 1973, and their duets album that year, Full Moon, became one of Kristofferson’s biggest hits, crossing over into the pop charts’ Top 30. They divorced in 1980. He is survived by his third wife, Lisa Meyers, whom he married in 1983 and had five children with, adding to three other children from his first two marriages.

The former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has accused the UK government of hypocrisy and concealment over the way it continues to block the release of secret files about the Spycatcher affair.

Before entering politics, Turnbull was a barrister for Peter Wright, a retired senior MI5 intelligence officer who revealed a series of illegal activities by the British security services in his memoir Spycatcher.

British officials have repeatedly refused to disclose 32 files concerning the Spycatcher affair. “There is something that they are still trying to hide,” Turnbull said. He added: “What’s the public interest in keeping them suppressed?”

Spycatcher detailed how MI5 bugged embassies, plotted against the former prime minister Harold Wilson, and was run for almost a decade by a suspected Soviet agent, Roger Hollis.

Turnbull represented Wright in a 1986 court battle in Australia that caused Margaret Thatcher global humiliation over her government’s failure to stop publication of the book.

During the trial Turnbull forced Thatcher’s cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong to admit he had been “economical with the truth”. Previously classified prime ministerial papers released last year revealed just how brazenly Armstrong had lied to the Australian court and how Thatcher had misled parliament.

The damning memos were released after a long campaign by the journalist and author Tim Tate for his book To Catch a Spy: how the Spycatcher affair brought MI5 in from the cold.

Speaking at an event to mark the book’s publication at the Chelsea history festival in London, Turnbull said: “Armstrong’s perjury was really extraordinary.”

Cross-examining Armstrong during the 1986 trial, Turnbull asked Armstrong whether No 10 and MI5 had agreed to cooperate with the right-leaning writer Chapman Pincher in a book about Hollis in the hope of securing a “safely conservative” account of Hollis’s suspected treachery. Armstrong dismissed this as “a very ingenious conspiracy theory” and “totally untrue”.

But the memos released last year showed Armstrong had in fact instructed how Pincher should be briefed because he believed he would write a “sympathetic presentation”. The memos were signed off with Thatcher’s initials. The former prime minister later told parliament that a secret investigation into Hollis found no evidence that he was a Soviet agent, when it fact it had warned there was a 20% chance that he was a traitor.

Turnbull said: “Armstrong’s perjury was really extraordinary. Since then I’ve obviously had a lot of experience as a prime minister in government. To me, it is still mind boggling that the cabinet secretary of the United Kingdom feels so entitled that he could go into a witness box and tell a dead set 100% lie.

“Not a fudge, a dead set lie, knowing that what he described as ‘totally untrue’ was, in fact, totally true, and evidenced by a memo signed by him sitting in a filing cabinet in Downing Street. The fact that he felt so invulnerable, really staggers me.”

Turnbull also pointed out that years before those memos were declassified they were made available to Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore.

He said: “Interestingly Charles Moore was able to read them, for his official biography of Maggie Thatcher, and even Charles, who is a very sympathetic biographer, was unable to defend Armstrong.”

He said giving Moore access to secret memos had echoes of how Thatcher’s government tried to brief Pincher in the hope of securing a sympathetic account. He said: “Of course it’s hypocritical, it’s the same old thing all over again. If it has been made available to Charles Moore it should be made available to everyone.”

Turnbull said he had been discussing the Spycatcher affair recently, and Armstrong’s perjury, with the former Australian politician Kim Beazley. He said: “We could not imagine an Australian civil servant doing that. But maybe Armstrong was unique. It was a shocking act of perjury, Armstrong was bang to rights.”

Referring to the Spycatcher trial, Turnbull added: “I accused Armstrong of lying on several occasions, and it turns out I was right on several occasions.”

Most government documents are released after 30 years, but officials have cited various exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act to block publication of the 32 Spycatcher files.

Armstrong died in 2020. Wright died in 1995.

This is the nadir of Erik ten Hag’s Manchester United tenure: a shambolic mess that Tottenham exploited gleefully, pinging the ball about, and punching through their storied host as if in a men-v-kids knockabout.

The manager claims to have a plan and on this showing it seems to be based on waving opponents through on a figurative red carpet, as Spurs did so endlessly. Towards the end, at 2-0 down, a 10-man United rallied, as Casemiro raided and ^­Alejandro Garnacho darted in: this merely showed what Ten Hag’s charges might have done if they were not an embarrassment to their famous shirt.

By then Brennan Johnson and Dejan Kulusevksi had scored and Bruno Fernandes had been handed a red card, so the captain will miss the next three league games. If the latter decision appeared harsh, further insult and injury ensued as Lucas Bergvall’s first touch – a corner, from the left – was headed on at the near post by Pape Matar Sarr – his first touch, too – and the unmarked ­Dominic Solanke touched home.

Ten Hag, drenched in pouring rain, had overseen a duck shoot and this, too, with Ange Postecoglou’s men missing the injured Son Heung-min, and who might have given United a six or seven-nil trouncing.

United are next at Porto on Thursday, in the Europa League, then travel to Aston Villa on Sunday in this competition. After this utter farrago, the manager, desperately, needs to win again – preferably both of these games – as it is now this defeat and two draws in his side’s past three outings.

As the jubilant travelling congregation sang “when the Spurs go marching in”, and despite the denial of any job-security concern, the beleaguered Dutchman ended his afternoon dicing with the territory marked “sacking”.

Postecoglou, though, bathes in the warm glow of his side ­having turned over the record 20-time ­champions, on their own turf. With his “it’s just who we are, mate” high-line mantra and could‑not-care-less declaration about a second ­season “always” ­yielding silverware, there is an endearing swagger about Postecoglou.

After three minutes this strut was visible in his charges and it never left. Fernandes slid the ball into ­Garnacho on halfway. He tapped to Marcus Rashford who pushed forward, overhit the ball, Micky van de Ven pilfered this, then launched a ram­paging surge that left United in tatters. When he reached the left byline and crossed, Johnson had a simple tap-in.

Superb from Spurs and criminal from United. Similar naivety ensued when Manuel Ugarte ­dawdled, James Maddison mugged the supposed “shielding” player and set up Solanke. A well-timed Lisandro Martínez tackle saved Ten Hag’s men from fielding serious jeering from the support – these came at the torrid first half’s close.

United were like Anthony Joshua in the first round against Daniel Dubois: dazed from hitting the canvas instantly and never recovering. There is always hope against ­Postecoglou’s boom-or-bust ethos. Yet when ­Rashford broke along the left, his ball for Joshua Zirkzee was aimless, and here we saw the lack of ruthlessness Ten Hag bewails.

Spurs continually knifed through United’s crepe-paper-like resistance. Example: from deep in their territory, Destiny Udogie did a Van de Ven impression, skating along an inside left channel. Space, once more, was created for Johnson who was unlucky his effort defeated André Onana but not his right post.

Earlier the keeper’s left shoulder thwarted a Maddison chip after he, Kulusevski and Udogie combined. Later, Johnson was inches from ­giving Timo Werner an open goal, Nassar Mazraoui’s interception ­saving United.

Cut to a grim-faced Ten Hag ­seeing his side shredded. Cut back to the action as an ambling Diogo Dalot, who somehow lost Johnson for his strike, was pick^­pocketed, allowing ­Maddison to unload. He was wide, as was ­Cristian Romero with an aesthetically pleasing scissors-kick that offered further evidence of how splayed United were.

An abacus was needed to track Spurs’ chances. Another clear one came when Kulusevski prodded for Werner to race in behind. Onana saved, though the German should not have aimed at him again. Then, disaster: Fernandes clipped, slightly, ­Maddison, who made the proverbial of this. Up went Christopher Kavanagh’s red card and off went the Portuguese.

Now came the break and the United support’s jeers. There were more when Spurs doubled the lead. Casemiro had replaced Zirkzee for the second 45, with Rashford switching to No 9. Done, presumably, to shore United up, suddenly Johnson was wheeling down their left and popping in a ball that, deflected, Kulusevski deftly beat Onana with.

United, hapless, could not embody, even, the truism that having 10 men is awkward for the foe. And came close to losing a ­second captain of the day when Martínez (who took Fernandes’s armband) chopped Maddison down but he saw only yellow.

Romero, too, escaped a loud ball-to-hand shout in the area and so, too, ­Guglielmo Vicario’s goal when Martínez missed when it bounced to him from this.

Ron DeSantis is making a concerted effort to maintain draconian limits on abortion access in Florida that have led to accusations the rightwing Republican governor is conducting a “state-sponsored intimidation campaign” against abortion rights and trampling on civil liberties in the state.

A near total ban on abortions after the first six weeks of pregnancy took effect in Florida in May after the state supreme court ruled that the right to an abortion was no longer covered by the privacy clause in the Florida constitution.

Passage of legislation called Amendment 4 would change the state constitution to prohibit government interference with the right to an abortion before the viability of a fetus, which typically begins around the 24th week of a pregnancy.

But registered voters in Florida have recently reported unannounced visits from law enforcement personnel that appear to be part of an all-out drive by DeSantis to use state government agencies and public funds to block passage of Amendment 4, which would enshrine in the state constitution a woman’s right to an abortion.

The experience of Isaac Menasche is a cautionary tale. In early September, Menasche received an unexpected visitor at his home in the Florida Gulf coast city of Fort Myers – a plainclothes detective with a badge and a folder stuffed with documents containing Menasche’s personal information.

They included copies of his driver’s license and a petition form he had signed months ago at a local farmer’s market on behalf of a campaign to qualify a pro-choice referendum for the statewide ballot in this year’s general election.

The detective who turned up on Menasche’s doorstep wanted to know why his signature on the petition form did not match the one on his driver’s license. The retired 71-year-old attorney conceded the point but explained that his signature can sometimes vary. The officer left shortly thereafter.

“The experience left me shaken,” wrote the New Jersey native on his Facebook page that same day. “It was obvious to me that a significant effort was exerted to determine if indeed I had signed the petition. Troubling that so much resources were devoted to this.”

DeSantis initially asked the Florida supreme court to declare the ballot measure unconstitutional on the grounds that its language was vague and misleading. When that ploy failed last April, DeSantis shifted gears: in July a senior official in the state government department in charge of elections announced a review for possible fraud of tens of thousands of petition signatures collected in four counties in support of Amendment 4.

In more recent weeks, the state-run Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) has launched a website opposing the initiative on the grounds that it “threatens women’s safety”. It has also spent millions of dollars on television ads urging Florida voters to reject the proposed amendment.

“We’re seeing a state-sponsored intimidation campaign to make Floridians scared of voicing support for abortion access,” says Keisha Mulfort, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida which filed a lawsuit earlier this month seeking to halt the AHCA’s anti-Amendment 4 media campaign.

“Florida’s leadership has made it clear they don’t trust women to make decisions about their own healthcare,” she added. “They’ll go to great lengths to demonstrate they don’t support the democratic process, including sending law enforcement personnel to the homes of private citizens.”

DeSantis recently defended the state-funded anti-amendment website and television ads as “public service announcements” similar to those produced by the Florida department of transportation to encourage safe driving.

“It’s being used by the AHCA agency to basically provide people with accurate information,” said the governor during a roundtable discussion held in a Miami suburb on 9 September. “Everything that is put out is factual. That’s been done for decades, it’s not electioneering, and it is not inappropriate at all.”

The AHCA communications office failed to respond to a list of written questions submitted by the Guardian about the agency’s website and electronic media campaign. The governor’s communications director, Bryan Griffin, turned down The Guardian’s request for an interview with DeSantis, asserting that the newspaper was “completely consumed with left wing activism and does nothing to actually inform the public.”

Under a law passed by the Republican-dominated Florida legislature, ballot measures must be approved by 60% of the electorate, and Amendment 4 proponents say they are confident of meeting that threshold in the general election scheduled for 5 November.

To bolster his case against the pro-choice amendment proposal, DeSantis has even questioned the legitimacy of passing laws through popular referendums, even though that mechanism is authorized by the state constitution.

“It takes power away from the people to be able to decide this through elections and who they elect to office and who legislates,” he told a press conference recently. “It effectively puts it in the courts, and there will be 25 years’ worth of lawsuits on what any of these terms mean.”

In a letter dated 25 January of this year, the Florida department of state’s division of elections confirmed that the six organizations in support of the pro-choice referendum had collected enough valid signatures to qualify the proposed constitutional amendment for the November ballot.

Six months later, however, a deputy secretary of that same state government department revealed in a letter that his office had received “alarming information” from the Palm Beach county supervisor of elections office about “fraudulent constitutional initiative petitions” that were submitted by 35 individuals who had been hired to collect signatures on behalf of Amendment 4.

This apparent attempt to reopen the signature validity issue was replicated in three other counties in Florida, and as of two weeks ago an estimated 36,000 signatures are currently under review by an election fraud unit that was established by legislation that DeSantis signed into law two years ago.

The Palm Beach county supervisor of elections, Wendy Sartory Link, received an email four weeks ago from that deputy secretary of state, Brad McVay, asking her office to review 17,637 petition forms that were certified as valid by her office last winter.

The elections supervisor said the request from McVay was “not a common practice” that she had encountered in the five years since she was appointed to the position by DeSantis. Link is running for re-election this year as a Democrat, and she suggested that the entire exercise might be an academic one at this juncture.

“It doesn’t really apply to us,” she said. “The initiative was certified, and it’s on our ballots.”

The movement to hold US medical insurers to account scored a notable legal victory recently when a Louisiana civil court jury ordered the state’s most prominent health insurance company to pay up more than $400m after underpaying claims to a surgery center that often works with cancer patients.

But the insurer – Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) of Louisiana – has vowed to seek to reduce, if not entirely eliminate, the jury’s award to the St Charles Surgical Hospital and Center for Restorative Breast Surgery on appeal. BCBS can ask both the state’s fourth circuit court of appeal as well as the Louisiana supreme court for relief.

Nonetheless, a co-founder of the hospital hailed the 20 September verdict in his facility’s favor as a “landmark” win “for all those who have felt bullied by big corporate health insurance and the self-serving things they do”.

“We work the long hours, we pioneer advancements, we take care of these women – and we fought back for those who work on the frontline and the patients who depend on them,” Dr Frank DellaCroce told WDSU, the New Orleans NBC affiliate.

As the New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana noted, surgeons at the hospital that DellaCroce founded with Dr Scott Sullivan sued BCBS in 2017, alleging that the insurer had not reimbursed them for 9,000 procedures that had been previously authorized over the course of 10 years.

“Blue Cross either slow paid, low paid, or no paid all of those bills,” the hospital’s lead attorney, James Williams of the New Orleans-area Chehardy Sherman Williams law firm, said to WWL.

Named after the renowned New Orleans avenue on which it sits, the St Charles Surgical Center opted out of the BCBS insurance network prior to the dispute. Williams contended that BCBS’s lack of reimbursement was meant to pressure the facility into joining the company’s network, to which the vast majority of Louisiana’s medical service providers belong.

The insurer countered that authorization of a procedure did not mean payment had been guaranteed, as New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper reported. But a jury ultimately voted 11-1 that BCBS owed the hospital more than $421m in reimbursements for unpaid claims.

The St Charles hospital sought only to be made whole for unpaid claims. Its doctors had refused to pass the uncovered costs of the procedures on to patients, and they plan to pay off patients’ balances with the jury’s award.

BCBS issued a statement to multiple news outlets saying it “strongly” disagreed with the jury’s decision, which led to one of the largest ever such awards in Louisiana. The company’s statement predicted letting such an award stand would lead to higher insurance premiums, saying that “verdicts like this contribute to increasing healthcare costs for Louisianans who depend on us every day”.

“We will quickly appeal and expect to be successful,” the insurer’s statement said.

Meanwhile, the chief executive officer of the Louisiana insurance industry’s trade association echoed BCBS’s position. Jeff Drozda of the Louisiana Association of Health Plans told WDSU that the verdict – if left in place – would force health insurers “to pay out-of-network, non-negotiated providers … whatever they would like to charge”.

“You will have other providers across the state, regardless of what health plan it is … looking at the opportunity to similar bill charges for reimbursement,” Drozda said to the station.

As for the plaintiffs, Williams’ partner, Matthew Sherman, said to WDSU: “The jury’s finding of misconduct … shows that the legal system will not allow [BCBS] of Louisiana to put its self-interest ahead of that of its patients.”

“Physicians and patients have a right to expect [BCBS] of Louisiana to uphold their promise to provide fair and accurate payment for services.”

The US is the only wealthy democracy that lacks universal healthcare coverage, and Americans rely predominantly on employer-sponsored private health insurance from companies like BCBS.

Food companies should have to report how much they throw away as a first step towards reducing the vast amounts of edible food squandered in the UK, a group of prominent businesses have said.

About a third of the food produced globally every year is binned, much of it before it reaches the consumer at a cost of almost £22bn annually to the UK economy.

There is also a heavy environmental toll: food waste globally contributes up to a 10th of greenhouse gases.

More than 30 food businesses, including supermarkets and food producers, have written to the environment secretary, Steve Reed, calling for mandatory reporting of wasted food.

They argue that forcing companies to confront the reality of how much they produce and what happens to it will spur better behaviour, including more efficient processes and increased efforts to reuse surpluses.

Reed has spoken repeatedly of his desire to see a “circular economy”, with less waste of all kinds. The government has a target of halving food waste by 2030, but has yet to set out new measures to meet it. The Observer understands that ministers are willing to consider placing a duty on companies to report their waste.

Jamie Crummie, co-founder of Too Good to Go, an online service that lets restaurants and food retailers advertise last-minute surplus food at a discount to consumers, organised the letter to Reed, along with the British Retail Consortium (BRC).

He said compulsory reporting would be a vital first step and would allow everyone – consumers as well as the government and other businesses – to judge how careful, or profligate, suppliers were in comparison with their peers.

“Food waste is one of the largest contributors to climate change,” he said. “In the UK alone, we throw away 10.7m tonnes of food annually. We are delighted to see the environment secretary set out the creation of a zero-waste economy as a priority. In line with this ambition, and with the support of more than 30 businesses from across the food sector, we hope to see swift implementation of mandatory food waste reporting to ensure transparency and accountability when it comes to our food.”

The letter is signed by several of the UK’s biggest supermarkets, including Tesco, Waitrose, Aldi, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer, as well as the BRC, which represents shops. Food producers including Nestlé, Princes, Innocent Drinks, Yoplait and Yo! Sushi are also on the list.

Mandatory reporting, as envisaged by the signatories, would not be imposed on farmers, but every company above a certain size in the food chain beyond the farm gate.

Some food producers are already using new techniques such as AI to make their supply chains more efficient and cut waste, as well as more traditional methods such as donating still-edible surpluses to food banks.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “The amount of food we waste is a stain on our country. We are working with business to drive down food waste and make sure food is put on the plates of those in greatest need. This includes supporting surplus food to be redistributed to charities and others that can use it and on programmes to help citizens reduce their food waste.”

The letter’s signatories are also working with MPs to raise awareness of the problem. Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, who is also vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the environment, said: “The number of meals that are simply thrown away in the UK each week is deeply concerning. To reduce food waste across the board, we first need to move beyond the throwaway culture we have become far too used to.

“That’s why we are pushing to work with businesses by putting in place the right incentives to cut back on waste and overconsumption.”

Jaime Rojo has been following the fate of the monarch butterfly for more than 20 years. In the process the Spanish photographer has watched one of the planet’s most colourful, flamboyant insect species succumb to the combined onslaught of habitat destruction, climate change, pesticides, drought and wildfires. Its population has crashed in the process.

It is a dramatic, disturbing story that will be recognised next month when Rojo is given a highly commended award for his photojournalism at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London.

The glories of the monarch – and human responses to them – are revealed in his startling images and could be critical in helping efforts by conservationists, scientists and local people who are now trying to overcome the threat facing these remarkable winged migrants.

“When I first visited the monarch sanctuary in Mexico, there were so many of them, the forest floor would be a carpet of dead monarchs up to half a metre thick and every tree was blanketed with them,” Rojo told the Observer. “It was extraordinary.

“However, things have changed. Monarchs are now very thin on the ground and on branches and their numbers have declined dramatically. It has become very noticeable and worrying.”

Most estimates suggest there were once several hundred million monarch butterflies – possibly up to a billion – which used to sweep over the US and Mexico on their vast, Technicolor voyages. Today, conservationists believe the continent’s population of Danaus plexippus has dropped by 90% since the 1990s.

This crisis stems, in part, from the extraordinarily complex life cycle of the monarch, which makes it particularly vulnerable to habitat and climate changes. The butterfly – which has two sets of deep orange wings with black borders and a wingspan of seven to 10 centimetres – breeds for several generations in spring and summer in the north-east of America. Females use milkweed plants to lay the eggs from which caterpillars emerge, before they develop into chrysalises and then adult butterflies.

In autumn, a final generation of butterflies emerges from this process and flies in vast clouds on a 3,000-mile migration to Mexico and California, where the butterflies overwinter in the relative warmth of the south. “A new generation then starts heading back to the north the following spring,” explains Dr Blanca Huertas, principal curator of Lepidoptera at the Natural History Museum.

The vision of hundreds of millions of bright orange butterflies in flight is one of the most stunning spectacles in nature – one that Barbara Kingsolver describes vividly in her 2012 novel Flight Behaviour.

In it, she likens the mass migration of bright orange insects to a forest fire. “The flames appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a camp fire when it is poked. The sparks spiralled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against grey sky.”

But that spectacle is now being devastated. Initially conservationists thought deforestation was the sole cause of the monarch’s decline. “We tried to put that right, only to discover there were other reasons,” said Rojo.

It was found that the common milkweed – the wildflower upon which monarch caterpillars depend for food – was being wiped out by powerful new pesticides. In addition, climate change was bringing intense heatwaves and droughts in autumn. As a result, monarchs had no flowering plants to feed on while they migrated.

“They got very weak and could not store enough energy and so they never made it to Mexico,” said Rojo. “In a sense it was a little bit of everything that combined to do them down.”

There is little that can be done to halt climate change in the foreseeable future, but some actions can be taken, conservationists argue. Planting milkweed where they can provide food for monarch caterpillars and limiting pesticide use is now being promoted by US and Mexican environment groups.

“Education programmes for schools are raising awareness about the monarch and that is also crucial,” said Huertas.

Many of these projects are recorded in Rojo’s award-winning portfolio, which will be displayed at the museum from 11 October. These include images of drones monitoring milkweed prevalence in the US; the tagging of monarch butterflies as part of research aimed at understanding how they navigate on their 3,000-mile odysseys; and classroom conservation lessons for children whose families live on the butterflies’ flight route.

“I still believe this is a story of hope,” insists Rojo. “We can actually save the monarchs. This is one of the rare cases in conservation in which the citizens have something to do and that will make all the difference.”

England and Wales are braced for heavy rain and strong winds just days after homes and businesses were flooded.

Two fresh weather warnings come into force on Sunday for wind and rain which will hit areas already saturated by downpours earlier in the week.

The Met Office has issued a yellow rain warning – meaning further heavy rain is likely to cause some travel delays and flooding – covering much of southern England and south Wales between 4pm on Sunday and 9am on Monday.

There could be between 20mm and 30mm of rain within the warning area across nine to 12 hours on Sunday, and 50mm to 80mm could fall in some localised places on higher ground, the Met Office said.

The Met Office meteorologist Becky Mitchell said it was “not a huge amount of rain” but because of the recent weather “river levels are quite high and grounds are quite saturated”, so more flooding could develop.

The Environment Agency had 44 flood warnings, indicating flooding was expected, and 84 flood alerts, where flooding was possible, in place across England on Saturday evening.

Meanwhile, there was a yellow warning for wind that was also predicted to cause disruption across south-west England and Wales between 9am on Sunday until the end of the day.

Gusts of between 50mph and 60mph could occur, with large waves, trees brought down, travel disruption and some power cuts, Mitchell said.

Further rain warnings could be issued for Monday, but it was forecast to be drier later in the week, she added.

The Met Office said temperatures on Sunday would be 3C-4C below average, in the low double figures.

Another Met Office meteorologist, Craig Snell, advised people travelling on Sunday to plan ahead.

He said: “Check rail conditions before setting off, check buses are running on time, and allow extra time for your journeys. If you’re driving allow extra braking distances.

“For the areas affected under the yellow rain warning, if you are concerned about flooding, for people in England the main advice is to check the Environment Agency website or Floodline. If you live in Wales it will be Natural Resources Wales.”

England has suffered heavy rain and localised flooding in recent days, with commuters facing widespread disruption on road and rail services.

According to the Met Office, some counties in southern and central England have already had more than 250% of their average September rainfall.

Parts of the country had more than the monthly average rainfall on Monday and there were further downpours on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

About 650 properties were flooded in Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and the home counties, according to the Environment Agency, which estimated around 8,200 properties had been protected.

Rail services between Shrewsbury in Shropshire and Wolverhampton in the West Midlands were cancelled on Friday after severe flooding at Wellington station and a tree on the line earlier.

The pitch at the SEAH Stadium in Wellington, home to Telford United FC, was completely flooded on Thursday evening.

The Marston Vale line in Bedfordshire, which operates services between Bedford and Bletchley, is suspended until Monday because of standing water on the track.