Farmers and conservationists will have to “learn to do more with less” ahead of expected deep budget cuts to the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the environment secretary has said.

Steve Reed said that Labour would continue to prioritise the restoration of the nature in England, but acknowledged that the chancellor’s budget would be “difficult”.

Speaking to the Guardian on the fringes of Cop16 in Colombia on the eve of Wednesday’s statement by the chancellor, the environment secretary said that the flagship nature-friendly farming scheme would continue to receive backing from the government despite expected cuts to its budget.

He said expected growth in housebuilding would generate much-needed funds through the government’s biodiversity net gain (BNG) initiative, which forces all new building projects to achieve a 10% net gain in nature or wildlife habitat.

“The prime minister and chancellor have been very clear this is going to be a difficult budget, right across the board,” he said when asked what expected cuts would mean for farmers and environmentalists. “We all are going to have to do more with less. I think that’s right because you should always look at how you can use any resource you’ve got more efficiently and effectively.”

On Tuesday, the Guardian reported that Defra was likely to see particularly severe cuts in Wednesday’s budget, and that the reductions will largely fall on nature and flood protections. Defra has historically faired worse than other departments in times of austerity, with the environment budget declining by 45% in real terms between 2009/10 and 2018/19, according to Guardian analysis.

Reed said that the government would begin consulting on a land use framework so the country to improve food security while meeting the government’s target to protect 30% of land and sea.

“The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world,” he said. “So that matters, because nature underpins everything. It underpins tomorrow’s budget, it underpins the economy, it underpins health, it underpins food, it underpins society as we know it. Without nature, there is no life.

“So the fact that we are an outlier in that respect should concern all of us.”

Asked whether planned investment in the economy in Wednesday’s budget would come at the expense of the natural world, Reed said that the government’s nature-friendly farming scheme – which is known as the Environment Land Management Scheme (ELMS) and pays farmers to create wildlife habitats – would remain the government’s “main lever” to protect nature.

“It’s a world-leading scheme today. We supported it when it was introduced. It will still be a leading scheme tomorrow,” he said, adding they would look to find other sources of funding from the private sector.

The environment secretary also committed to a consultation on a land use strategy in England to meet an international commitment to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030, the headline commitment of this decade’s UN agreement to halt the destruction of biodiversity.

“We have a relatively small amount of land for the size of our population and the many demands that we make of that land,” he said. “We will be publishing the land use framework initially as a consultation document, but it will be looking at how we balance the many different demands that we make of our land, particularly from the different perspective ensuring that we remain food secure, so we have enough land available for growing the food that we need, but also enough land to help nature recover and to meet our demanding but achievable 30 by 30 targets.

“By being much more explicit within the framework about how we’re going to ensure we meet all of our objectives, including nature’s recovery, we have a much better chance of achieving it,” he added.

Donald Trump praised Puerto Ricans on Tuesday during a Pennsylvania rally, days after a comedian made a racist joke and referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” at one of his rallies.

“Nobody loves our Latino community and our Puerto Rican community more than I do,” the former president said a little over an hour into a rally in Allentown, in the Lehigh Valley, which has a sizable Latino population.

More than 68,000 people – over half of the total population – in Allentown are Hispanic or Latino, according to US census data. A few blocks from the rally, a home had a Puerto Rican flag posted on the door.

He also claimed that he had done a lot for Puerto Rico as president. Trump drew ridicule for tossing paper towels into a crowd on the island after it was ravaged by a hurricane; blocked hurricane aid; and mused about selling the island.

He also again praised the rally at Madison Square Garden, saying “the love was unbelievable” and told a rambling story about watching a SpaceX rocket that lasted longer than his discussion of Puerto Ricans.

Many of the speakers on Tuesday, including the Puerto Rican official Zoraida Buxó, emphasized their Puerto Rican heritage, signaling the campaign’s effort to win Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania, the key battleground state in this election, where polls show a tight race.

“We won’t get rattled, we won’t yield to ignorance, foolishness, or irrational thoughtlessness,” she said.

Senator Marco Rubio, another speaker at the rally, also joined Trump onstage during the former presidents remarks to share with the crowd comments from Joe Biden Tuesday in which the president condemned the remarks about Puerto Ricans and said: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American”, according to a White House transcript. After Republicans circulated a clip of the statement, calling it an attack on Trump supporters, Biden put out a statement saying he meant to refer to the comedian who made the joke.

A small protest arrived outside the arena just before the rally began on Tuesday. Some of the protesters were carrying signs that said Latinos for Harris-Walz, while others wore the Puerto Rican flag.

One of the people marching was Luis Gonzalez, a retired 65-year-old truck driver from Allentown. He wore a sweater with the Puerto Rican flag stitched on it.

“The guy has no idea what he’s talking about,” he said. “I was born in Puerto Rico. That island as well as all the other islands around it are beautiful.

“For anybody to say that it’s a garbage island – they’ve never been to the Caribbean.”

But inside the rally, few people thought the fallout from the comment would have much effect on Trump. Some had not heard it.

“It was made in poor taste, I have to admit. But Donald Trump is Donald Trump, ” said Mark Melendez, 55, who is Puerto Rican and traveled to the rally from New Jersey. “I don’t think it will affect him; it might.”

At least one audience member was holding a sign that said “Boricuas for Trump”, using a term that describes people of Puerto Rican descent.

Jackie Beller, 60, who lives near Allentown, thought the joke was funny.

“If you take a comedian out of context and you look at it as a serious thing, yes, you would be offended,” Beller said.

“It’s all a joke – I’ve spoken to some Puerto Rican people and they weren’t offended, so I don’t know,” said Mary Mendez, 65, a retired paramedic from New York.

Trump’s speech kicking off the final week of the presidential race mixed personal attacks, grievance, anti-immigrant rhetoric and a smattering of policies. He accused Democrats of having already cheated, misrepresenting an ongoing investigation in Lancaster county in an example of how he is priming his supporters to challenge the election results if he loses.

His remarks were less an appeal to undecided voters than a full-throated appeal to his base, pledging that he would be able to fix all of the US’s ills.

“This is gonna be a very special time. It’s going to be America’s new golden age. Every problem facing us can be solved,” he said.

As Kamala Harris made her closing argument in Washington and called Trump “unstable” and “obsessed with revenge”, Trump called Harris a “low-IQ individual” and mused about getting retribution against Michelle Obama for criticizing him on the campaign trial.

“Michelle Obama was very nasty,” he said. “I’ve gone out of my way to be nice to Michelle. Haven’t said a damn thing about her. She hit me.”

Two women were removed from a British Airways flight at Heathrow after an altercation reportedly provoked by a Make America Great Again (Maga) cap.

The incident occurred on Saturday as the women, aged 40 and 60, were preparing to board a flight bound for Austin, Texas.

Witnesses said that one woman took offence at her fellow passenger’s red Maga hat, worn by supporters of the former US president Donald Trump, and asked that it be removed, the Sun reported.

Flight BA191 had been due to depart the airport at 12.10pm and eventually took off at 2.11pm without the two women onboard.

Punches were allegedly exchanged between the two women, both booked to fly in premium economy, before they ended up squaring up to one another in the cabin. When the captain called for assistance, police arrived at the scene to escort the passengers from the aircraft.

Arrests were not made but both women made claims of affray against the other.

Police are continuing to investigate the incident. A spokesperson said: “Shortly after 12.45pm on Monday, 28 October, police at Heathrow were made aware of an incident involving two women waiting to board a plane in Terminal 5.

“A woman in her 40s and a woman in her 60s made counter allegations of affray. Enquiries are ongoing.”

British Airways said in a statement: “We apologised to our customers for the delay and got them on the way as quickly as possible.”

A Heathrow source told the Sun: “With the US presidential election so close, tensions are sky high. Airline crew could not run the risk of a full scale punch-up at 30,000ft.

“BA officials cannot recall a flight being delayed before due to a passenger’s baseball cap. It was extraordinary.”

At least seven people are missing after torrential rain caused flash floods in southern and eastern Spain, shutting roads and high-speed train connections.

Raging mud-coloured flood waters swept through the town of Letur in the eastern province of Albacete on Tuesday, pushing cars through the streets, images broadcast on Spanish television showed.

Emergency services workers backed by drones were looking for six people who were missing in the wake of flash floods in the town, the central government’s representative in Castilla-La Mancha told Spanish public television TVE.

“The priority is to find these people,” she added.

Police in the town of L’Alcúdia in the eastern region of Valencia said they were looking for a truck driver who had been missing since early afternoon.

“I am closely following with concern the reports on missing persons and the damage caused by the storm in recent hours,” prime minister Pedro Sánchez wrote on X, urging people to follow the advice of the authorities.

“Be very careful and avoid unnecessary trips,” he added.

Twelve flights that were due to land at Valencia airport have been diverted to other cities in Spain due to the heavy rain and strong winds, Spanish airport operator Aena said.

Another 10 flights that were due to depart or arrive at the airport were cancelled.

National rail infrastructure operator ADIF said it had suspended high-speed trains between Madrid and the eastern port of Valencia due to the effects of the storm on main points of the rail network in the Valencia region.

A high-speed train with 276 passengers derailed in the southern region of Andalusia, although no one was injured, the regional government said in a statement.

Emergency services rescued scores of people in Álora in Andalusia, some by helicopter, after a river overflowed.

State weather agency AEMET declared a red alert in the Valencia region and the second-highest level of alert in parts of Andalusia. Several roads were shut in both regions due to flooding.

The intense rain has been attributed to a phenomenon known as the gota fría, or “cold drop”, which occurs when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea. This creates atmospheric instability, causing warm, saturated air to rise rapidly, leading to the formation of towering cumulonimbus clouds in a matter of hours and dumping heavy rain across eastern parts of Spain.

Scientists warn that extreme weather such as heatwaves and storms is becoming more intense as a result of the climate crisis.

On 6 July 2024, a day when temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona, reached 114F (45.5C), Michael Kenyon was walking to his local store to buy a soda when two officers of the city’s police department stopped him.

They hastily told him he was being detained, Kenyon recalls, without clearly stating why. Two more officers arrived.

Surveillance footage from across the parking lot, which was viewed by the Guardian, shows the 30-year-old on the pavement soon after, with several officers on top of him and holding him down. Once they lift Kenyon off the ground after roughly four minutes, he appears limp.

Kenyon had been burned – severely burned – on the hot city pavement. Medical records indicate he suffered third-degree burns, and hospital photos show deep burn scars and skin peeled off across his body. Kenyon has not been charged with a crime and a police spokesperson confirmed he was not the suspect that officers were seeking as part of a theft investigation.

“It felt like acid burning my skin,” Kenyon told the Guardian. “I thought of George Floyd, and I didn’t understand why people wouldn’t help me as I was screaming in pain … like I was dying.”

It’s not the first time residents in the city have accused police of burning them on the pavement. In 2019, Phoenix police department officers held Roniah Trotter, then 18, on hot pavement on a 113F day, leaving her with second-degree burns. Earlier that year, a 28-year-old man died in police custody after officers held him down on hot asphalt for several minutes.

To Steve Benedetto, a civil rights lawyer representing Kenyon, the case illustrates that the Phoenix police department has systemic problems requiring outside intervention.

In June, the US Department of Justice accused the police department of routinely discriminating against people of color and killing civilians without justification, proposing that the force be subjected to independent monitoring. The department has pushed back, asserting that it is a “self-correcting agency” that doesn’t need oversight. Earlier this month, however, the department again faced scrutiny after footage showed two white officers repeatedly punching and deploying a stun gun on Tyron McAlpin, a 34-year-old deaf Black man with cerebral palsy.

On the day of Kenyon’s arrest, Phoenix was under an excessive heat warning, an increasingly frequent occurrence in the US south. Kenyon was wearing shorts and a tank top and talking on the phone when police approached, the footage shot from across the parking lot shows.

There’s no audio, but the video shows two officers initially holding Kenyon’s arms and having him sit on the back of a parked truck.

The footage shows two additional officers arriving, and Kenyon landing on the pavement with several officers holding him down.

Grainy cellphone footage taken by a witness from above appears to capture him screaming and pleading for help, at one point appearing to say: “Please … I didn’t do anything.”

Once the officers get Kenyon off the ground, footage shows him limping and stumbling as they bring him to a police vehicle. Kenyon said one officer eventually poured water on his burns as they waited for paramedics to arrive. He said he couldn’t remember being transported to the hospital and may have lost consciousness, but recalled waking up in the hospital handcuffed to a bed.

Graphic photos from the hospital, where he stayed for weeks, show layers of skin burned off his arms, legs, chest and side of his face.

Police haven’t released body-camera footage. A police spokesperson, Rob Scherer, said in a statement that officers were investigating a “theft in progress” and that Kenyon “matched the suspect description”.

“Officers made contact with Kenyon, telling him he was being detained so they could understand what may have occurred. The man struggled with police, which [resulted] with him being taken to the ground on the hot asphalt. The man sustained burns to different parts of his body from the time he was on the ground,” Scherer said. “Kenyon was determined not to be the suspect of the theft.”

He said the incident was subject to an “ongoing criminal investigation” and an investigation by the “professional standards bureau”, which investigates misconduct.

Kenyon said he believes one of his roommates may have called the police on another roommate over a potential theft.

Cellphone video of one of Kenyon’s roommates in the aftermath of the incident captures her frantically calling 911 to report what had happened. “They just unlawfully detained [him] … the boy you guys just burned,” she appears to tell an operator.

After she got off the call, the video captures her explaining to police on the scene that she had been on the phone with Kenyon during the arrest and heard him scream. She sobbed and begged officers to help him: “Treat him now! Treat him, treat him!” And she told one officer: “His whole body has third-degree burns on it. [They] wouldn’t let him up … I watched him get burned … If someone did this to your son, how would that feel?”

Dr Cecilia Sorensen, director of Columbia’s global consortium on climate and health education, said when air temperatures climb above 100F, the pavement can sometimes be 40 to 60 degrees hotter: “If you have direct contact with that surface, you’re going to start getting damage to your skin.”

Pavement burns can happen within seconds, added Dr Rabia Nizamani, surgeon at the University medical center’s Lions Burn Care Center in Las Vegas: “It takes a few minutes … to get a third-degree burn that keeps you in the hospital for weeks.” Bony body parts, such as knees, are particularly vulnerable, and wounds can take months to heal, with scars that can affect a patient’s functioning for years and require additional procedures, she said.

Kenyon said he had worked in construction, door-to-door sales and other jobs that he fears he can’t do any more: “I probably will never go back to having an outside job where I have to work in the sun.”

For now, he’s been unable to work and said a roommate had been helping with bills.

“I’m speaking out because I don’t want this to happen to other people,” he added. “I want to be the last one.” He said he didn’t blame the individual officers. “Whoever trained these guys are really responsible. These guys all acted the same, so somebody drilled it into them.”

Benedetto, the lawyer, said: “A guy was walking to the store to get a soda and then minutes later he’s wondering if he’s going to die, and that’s really endemic of where this department is at. This is a department that presumably should be on its best behavior with the DoJ looming … This is the impact of their policies, procedures and training that we’ve seen over and over. There’s never any real accountability.”

Kenyon said he had struggled to process what happened.

“I don’t really want to look at my body any more,” he said, noting it was too painful to see photos from the hospital. “Every time I see myself, I have flashbacks. And every time I see cops, I think, is he after me? And I know in my head it’s not true, but it just comes up.” He said he questions whether he could’ve done something differently. “I have to keep telling myself … I didn’t deserve this.”

He added: “I just want the Department of Justice to take care of them and fix what they say they’re going to fix … I’m not trying to get attention, I just want my story to be heard because I hurt.”

An ancient oak named after a ceilidh band has won the UK’s tree of the year competition and will now compete in the European edition.

The Skipinnish Oak in Lochaber, Scotland, was discovered by chance by members of the band of that name who were playing a nearby gig for the Native Woodland Discussion Group.

It is in the middle of a sitka spruce timber plantation and expert delegates from the discussion group registered it in the ancient tree inventory.

The Skipinnish oak is one of the largest trees of its kind in the region, which has been populated by nonnative timber forests. It is a fragment of the ancient ecosystem, and provides a home to diverse lichens including the rare black-eyed Susan.

The Skipinnish band said they were delighted the tree won and plan to compose a new song in honour of the mighty oak.

The Woodland Trust, which runs the competition, chose 12 ancient oaks for the shortlist this year to highlight their importance. They can live for more than 1,500 years and support 2,300 species of wildlife. The UK boasts more ancient oaks than the rest of western Europe combined.

The Skipinnish Oak won 21% of the vote, while the Darwin Oak in Shrewsbury came second with 20%. The 1,000-year-old Bowthorpe Oak in Lincolnshire came in third, with 14%.

Other oaks on the shortlist included the Queen Elizabeth Oak in West Sussex, the second-largest sessile oak on record, and the Elephant Oak in the New Forest, shortlisted for its unique shape and distinctive character.

Dr Kate Lewthwaite from the Woodland Trust said: “The Skipinnish Oak is a magnificent example of the natural heritage we strive to protect, and its recognition as UK tree of the year shines a light on the incredible biodiversity that our trees support. We encourage everyone to celebrate and preserve these vital features of our environment.”

The next European Tree of the Year competition will take place in 2025.

The Wildlife Trusts have bought part of the Duke of Northumberland’s estate in the largest land sale in England for 30 years.

Marketed by its estate agents as “a paradise for those with a penchant for sporting pursuits, from world-class fishing on the illustrious River Coquet to pheasant and grouse shooting”, Rothbury estate has now been bought by the charity, which plans to restore it for nature.

The trusts are buying the land in an unusual two-phase deal: having already bought a “significant” chunk of the 3,850-hectare (9,500-acre) estate, they have been given two years to find the rest of the money, for which they are launching a fundraising appeal. The estate was previously used for intensive sheep farming and shooting.

It was put up for sale by the Duke of Northumberland’s youngest son, Max Percy, and has been in the family for 700 years.

Craig Bennett, the chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, told the Guardian: “Our vision is to create an absolutely astonishing national flagship for nature recovery. It will be around two-and-a-half times the size of the [rewilded] Knepp estate and we are very excited to get ecosystems working again. If we get the whole site we will be looking at 9,500 acres.”

Bennett said he hoped to work with neighbours to create a giant haven for wildlife. “We hope the Rothbury estate will be the heart of a flourishing national landscape; it’s neighboured by two National Trust properties, for example, so we will work with them. We want Northumberland to become an amazing destination for eco-tourism. We want to create something really spectacular at a much bigger scale than has ever been done before in England. This is an extraordinary once-in-a-generation opportunity to restore nature.”

Shoots would not be allowed on the estate and the farming would be regenerative only, Bennett said. “Obviously [allowing shoots] would not be appropriate for the Wildlife Trusts. We hope to showcase nature-friendly farming and conservation grazing and produce fruit, vegetables and some sustainable meat for local people.”

The current purchase includes the Simonside Hills and a mixture of lowland, woods, riverside and farmland – the western side of the estate. Notable wildlife includes curlews, red grouse, merlins, cuckoos, mountain bumblebees, emperor moths and red squirrels.

Public access would be maintained by the Trusts. Being sold to one charity rather than broken up and sold to individual landowners meant access could be protected for future generations, the trusts said.

A tram has careered into a store in central Oslo after coming off its rails, in an incident that left at least four people injured and caused panic among passersby.

The accident happened in the late morning in a bustling commercial neighbourhood of the Norwegian capital.

The tram, which should have made a left turn at a crossing, jumped the rails and continued straight ahead, its front section crashing deep into an electronics retailer on the corner selling Apple products.

“Three people onboard the tram were injured and another person outside,” said Anders Ronning, the head of police operations at the scene.

“No one is described as being seriously injured,” he said, adding that “one or two other people” had gone to the emergency room on their own.

He said there were “a lot of people onboard” the tram.

Police had initially said there were 20 people onboard, but some passengers had already left the scene by the time emergency services arrived.

At least one passerby had to jump out of the way when the tram came speeding towards him.

Several hours later, the blue tram was still stuck in the store, surrounded by shattered glass and debris.

“Thankfully, a derailment makes a lot of noise and several [people in the store] had time to turn around and get out of the way,” Ronning said.

Julie Hogmo Madsen, 24, was seated in the back of the tram. “It started to shake more than usual in the turn and I understood we had derailed – and then it went ’bang’,” she told the Norwegian the news agency NTB.

“People became a little hysterical and began screaming all around. I ran to the front of the tram and found someone who needed help and I helped them get out,” she said.

“It’s just surrealistic,” Andre Norheim told the daily Verdens Gang. “If everyone came out of this unharmed it means there’s someone watching over us, because it was a powerful crash, to put it mildly.”

The block was cordoned off, disrupting traffic in the city centre, with many police cars and ambulances at the scene.

The driver of the tram was among the injured and police have formally declared him a suspect, amid suspicions that excessive speed caused the accident.

“I don’t want to speculate,” Ronning said. “We are working on the technical aspects to determine the cause of the accident,” he added.

The damaged building, which also houses offices, was evacuated. The tram will not be removed until experts determine the stability of the building’s bearing walls and measures have been taken to prevent it from collapse.

After swapping machetes and binoculars for computer screens and laser mapping, a team of researchers have stumbled on a lost Maya city of temple pyramids, enclosed plazas and a reservoir, all of which had been hidden for centuries by the Mexican jungle.

The discovery in the south-eastern Mexican state of Campeche came about after Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, began wondering whether non-archaeological uses of the state-of-the-art laser mapping known as lidar could help shed light on the Maya world.

“For the longest time, our sample of the Maya civilisation was a couple of hundred square kilometres total,” Auld-Thomas said. “That sample was hard won by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking away at the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been someone’s home 1,500 years ago.”

Lidar is a remote sensing technique that uses a pulsed laser and other data obtained by flying over a site to generate three-dimensional information about the shape of surface characteristics.

Although Auld-Thomas knew that it could help, he also knew it was not a cheap tool. Funders are reluctant to pay for lidar surveys in areas without obvious traces of the Maya civilisation, which reached its height between AD250 and AD900.

It occurred to the anthropologist that others may already have mapped the area for different reasons. “Scientists in ecology, forestry and civil engineering have been using lidar surveys to study some of these areas for totally separate purposes,” Auld-Thomas said. “So what if a lidar survey of this area already existed?”

He was in luck. In 2013, a forest monitoring project had undertaken a detailed lidar survey of 122 square kilometres of the area. Together with researchers from Tulane University, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, and the University of Houston’s National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, Auld-Thomas began analysing the survey’s data to explore 50 square miles of Campeche that had never been investigated by archaeologists.

Their analysis turned up a dense and diverse range of unstudied Maya settlements, including an entire city they named Valeriana, after a nearby freshwater lagoon.

“The larger of Valeriana’s two monumental precincts has all the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital: multiple enclosed plazas connected by a broad causeway, temple pyramids, a ballcourt, a reservoir formed by damming an arroyo (a seasonal watercourse), and a probable … architectural arrangement that generally indicates a founding date prior to AD150,” the researchers write in their study, which is published in the journal Antiquity.

According to Auld-Thomas, the team’s findings show just how many undiscovered treasures the area could yet yield.

“We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements,” he said. “We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years. The government never knew about it, the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

The team are planning to follow up on their lidar analysis with fieldwork at the newly discovered sites, which they say could offer valuable lessons as parts of the planet deal with the demands of mass urbanisation.

“The ancient world is full of examples of cities that are completely different than the cities we have today,” Auld-Thomas said. “There were cities that were sprawling agricultural patchworks and hyper-dense; there were cities that were highly egalitarian and extremely unequal. Given the environmental and social challenges we’re facing from rapid population growth, it can only help to study ancient cities and expand our view of what urban living can look like.”

Six years ago, some of the same researchers used lidar to uncover tens of thousands of previously undetected Maya houses, buildings, defence works and pyramids in the dense jungle of Guatemala’s Petén region, suggesting that millions more people lived there than was previously thought.

The discoveries, which included industrial-sized agricultural fields and irrigation canals, were announced in 2018 by an alliance of US, European and Guatemalan archaeologists working with Guatemala’s Maya Heritage and Nature Foundation.

The study estimated that 10 million people may have lived within the Maya lowlands, meaning that huge-scale food production may have been needed.

CNN has apologised to its viewers after a panellist on its NewsNight programme made derogatory remarks implying that a fellow guest on the show, the broadcaster Mehdi Hasan, was a terrorist.

Ryan James Girdusky, a conservative commentator, told Hasan, a Guardian US columnist and former host on MSNBC, who is Muslim, that he hoped his “beeper doesn’t go off”, in an apparent reference to Israel’s targeting of Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon with exploding pagers last month. The wave of coordinated explosions killed 12 and injured thousands.

“Did your guest just say I should be killed on live TV?” Hasan asked the show’s anchor, Abby Phillip.

After a commercial break, Phillip issued an on-air apology to Hasan and viewers and said Girdusky had been removed from the show.

“I want to apologise to Mehdi Hasan for what was said at this table. It was completely unacceptable,” she said. “I want to apologise to the viewers at home.”

In a subsequent statement, CNN said there was “zero room for racism or bigotry at CNN or on our air” and that Girdusky “will not be welcomed back at our network”. Hasan retweeted the statement on X.

Earlier in their heated exchange, Hasan had said that if people on the far right “don’t want to be called Nazis, stop doing, stop saying”. Girdusky interjected by saying Hasan was called an “antisemite more than anyone at this table”.

After Hasan said he was used to being labelled an antisemite due to his support for the Palestinian people, Girdusky said, “Well, I hope your beeper doesn’t go off.” He attempted to apologise amid crosstalk and sought to justify his comment by indicating he thought Hasan said he supported Hamas.

In a later post on X, however, Girdusky appeared to double down on a more antagonistic approach. “You can stay on CNN if you falsely call every Republican a Nazi and have taken money from Qatar-funded media,” he said. “Apparently you can’t go on CNN if you make a joke. I’m glad America gets to see what CNN stands for.”