Tucker Carlson, the former CNN and Fox News political chat host, has said he was “physically mauled” by a demon a year and a half ago, in an assault that he says left him bleeding and with scars from “claw marks”.

Carlson made the claim while speaking in an upcoming documentary, Christianities? In a preview clip on YouTube, Carlson is asked by John Heers of the non-profit First Things Foundation if he believed that “the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good”.

“That’s what happened to me. I had a direct experience with it,” said Carlson.

Asked if he was referring to journalism, Carlson responded: “No, in my bed at night. I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”

Carlson, who said he still bears the scars, said his assailant was a “demon”. He added: “Or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides.”

He said at the time of the attack, he was asleep in bed. I was “totally confused, I woke up, and I couldn’t breathe, and I thought I was going to suffocate”, he said.

“I walked around outside and then I walked in and my wife and dogs had not woken up. And they’re very light sleepers. And then I had these terrible pains on my rib cage and on my shoulder, and I was just in my boxer shorts and I went and flipped on the light in the bathroom, and I had four claw marks on either side underneath my arms and on my left shoulder. And they’re bleeding.”

He added that he explained the encounter to an assistant, an evangelical Christian, who told him: “That happens, people are attacked in their bed by demons.”

Carlson, who lives in the woods of Maine, did not say where the attack occurred, but called it a “transformative experience” that left him “seized with this very intense desire to read the Bible”.

Carlson, who was fired from Fox News after the company paid more than $787m to settle a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over false statements and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, is stumping for Donald Trump on the campaign trial.

He addressed a rally in Georgia last week, telling Trump supporters that the candidate’s possible return to the White House was like a father returning home and Trump would give the country a “vigorous spanking”.

“He’s not vengeful. He loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them. Because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior. And he’s going to have to let them know,” Carlson said.

“When Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’”

A pregnant Texas teenager died after three separate visits to an emergency room in attempts to get care in another incident that has highlighted the medical impact of the loss of abortion rights in the US.

Nevaeh Crain, 18, had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours in October of 2023, each time returning home feeling worse than before. Crain was only diagnosed with strep throat upon her first visit. The hospital did not investigate her sharp abdominal cramps, according to reporting by ProPublica.

Crain is one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban brought in after the US supreme court overturned the federal right to abortion. Josseli Barnica, 28, died after a miscarriage in 2021.

These incidents are seen as evidence of a new reality where US healthcare professionals in states with new tough abortion restrictions are hesitant or even afraid to give care to pregnant mothers over fear of legal repercussions. Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, regardless of whether the pregnancy is wanted or not.

Medical records indicate Crain tested positive for sepsis, a potentially life-threatening condition, on her second visit. But doctors still cleared her to leave after apparently confirming that her six-month-old fetus still had a heartbeat.

On her third trip to the hospital, Crain was finally moved to intensive care after an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise”, reported ProPublica.

She died hours later after suffering organ failure. A nurse noted that her lips had turned “blue and dusky”, ProPublica said. The teen would have turned 20 this Friday.

Though Texas retains exceptions for life-threatening conditions, the fear and uncertainty instilled in doctors over which treatments may or may not be considered a crime has had devastating effects on women in need of healthcare.

The result is that in states with abortion bans, patients are often traded between hospitals in order to shirk responsibility and argue about legalities, an act which wastes precious and potentially life-saving time.

“Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables,” Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor emerita at George Washington University, told ProPublica.

Republicans are already laying the ground for rejecting the result of next week’s US presidential election in the event Donald Trump loses, with early lawsuits baselessly alleging fraud and partisan polls exaggerating his popularity to make it harder for his supporters to accept that he did not win, veteran strategists say.

The warnings – from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans – come as Americans prepare to vote on Tuesday in the most consequential presidential contest in generations. Most polls show Trump running neck and neck with Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee, with the two candidates seemingly evenly matched in seven key swing states.

But suspicions have been voiced over a spate of recent polls, mostly commissioned in battleground states from groups with Republican links, that mainly show Trump leading. The projection of surging Trump support as election day nears has drawn confident predictions from him and his supporters.

“We’re leading big in the polls, all of the polls,” Trump told a rally in New Mexico on Thursday. “I can’t believe it’s a close race,” he told a separate rally in North Carolina, a swing state where polls show he and Harris are in a virtual dead heat.

An internal memo sent to Trump by his chief pollster is confirming that story to him, with Tony Fabrizio declaring the ex-president’s “position nationally and in every single battleground state is SIGNIFICANTLY better today than it was four years ago”.

Pro-Trump influencers, too, have strengthened the impression of inevitable victory with social media posts citing anonymous White House officials predicting Harris’s defeat. “Biden is telling advisers the election is ‘dead and buried’ and called Harris an innate sucker,” the conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec posted this week.

GOP-aligned polling groups have released 37 polls in the final stretch of the campaign, according to a study by the New York Times, during a period when longstanding pollsters have been curtailing their voter surveys. All but seven showed a lead for Trump, in contrast to the findings of long-established non-partisan pollsters, which have shown a more mixed picture – often with Harris leading, albeit within error margins.

In one illustration, a poll last Tuesday by the Trafalgar Group – an organisation founded by a former Republican consultant – gave Trump a three-point lead over Harris in North Carolina. By contrast, a CNN/SRSS poll two days later in the same state put the vice-president ahead by a single point.

The polling expert Nate Silver – who has said his “gut” favours a Trump win, while simultaneously arguing that people should not trust their gut – cast doubt on the ex-president’s apparent surge in an interview with CNBC. “Anyone who is confident about this election is someone whose opinion you should discount,” he said.

“There’s been certainly some momentum towards Trump in the last couple of weeks. [But] these small changes are swamped by the uncertainty. Any indicator you want to point to, I could point to counter-examples.”

Democrats and some polling experts believe the conservative-commissioned polls are aiming to create a false narrative of unstoppable momentum for Trump – which could then be used to challenge the result if Harris wins.

“Republicans are clearly strategically putting polling into the information environment to try to create perceptions that Trump is stronger. Their incentive is not necessarily to get the answer right,” Joshua Dyck, of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, told the New York Times.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democrat strategist and blogger, said it followed a trend set in the 2022 congressional elections, when a succession of surveys favourable to Republicans created an expectation of a pro-GOP “red wave” that never materialised on polling day.

“These polls were usually two, three, four points more Republican than the independent polls that were being done and they ended up having the effect of pushing the polling averages to the right,” he told MeidasTouch News.

“We cannot be bamboozled by this again. It is vital to Donald Trump’s effort if he tries to cheat and overturn the election results, he needs to have data showing that somehow he was winning the election.

“The reason we have to call this out is that Donald Trump needs to go into election day with some set of data showing him winning, so if he loses, he can say we cheated.”

Trump, who falsely claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, is also paving the way for repeating the accusation via legal means.

He told a rally in Pennsylvania that Democrats were “cheating” in the state, and on Wednesday his campaign took legal action against election officials in Bucks County, where voters waiting to submit early mail-in ballots were turned away because the deadline had expired. A judge later ordered the county to extend early voting by one day. There is no evidence of widespread cheating in elections in Pennsylvania or any other state, and mail-in ballots are in high demand in part because Trump himself has encouraged early voting.

Suing to allege – without evidence – that there has been voting fraud is part of a well-worn pattern of Trump disputing election results that do not go his way. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, his team filed 60 lawsuits disputing the results, all of which were forcefully thrown out in court.

Anti-Trump Republicans have expressed similar concerns to Democrats about Trump’s actions. Michael Steele, a former Republican national committee chairand Trump critic, told the New Republic that the GOP-commissioned polls were gamed to favour Trump.

“You find different ways to weight the participants, and that changes the results you’re going to get,” he said. “They’re gamed on the back end so Maga can make the claim that the election was stolen.”

Stuart Stevens, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate, and a founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told the same outlet: “Their gameplan is to make it impossible for states to certify. And these fake polls are a great tool in that, because that’s how you lead people to think the race was stolen.”

Trump-leaning surveys have influenced the polling averages published by sites such as Real Clear Politics, which has incorporated the results into its projected electoral map on election night, forecasting a win for the former president.

Elon Musk, Trump’s wealthiest backer and surrogate, posted the map to his 202 million followers on his own X platform, proclaiming: “The trend will continue.”

Trump and Musk have also promoted online betting platforms, which have bolstered the impression of a surge for the Republican candidate stemming from hefty bets on him winning.

A small number of high-value wagers from four accounts linked to a French national appeared to be responsible for $28m gambled on a Trump victory on the Polymarket platform, the New York Times reported.

Trump referenced the Polymarket activity in a recent speech. “I don’t know what the hell it means, but it means we’re doing pretty well,” he said.

The Arhuaco live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast, which they consider the heart of the world. They are so respected that in recent years it has become tradition for each new Colombian president to be sworn in twice: once in the capital, Bogotá, and once in the Sierra with the Arhuaco.

The Sierra, the highest tropical coastal mountain range in the world, is a biodiversity hotspot, in urgent need of safeguarding. This year, the Arhuaco, who are key to its protection, have been awarded the UN Development Programme’s Equator prize for rewilding and agroforestry for their work.

A massive shootout linked to drug trafficking has seriously wounded a teenager and four others in western France, the interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, said, in the latest such gunfight to injure children.

The shootout erupted overnight in front of a restaurant in Poitiers, Retailleau told BFMTV/RMC radio on Friday. “What started as a shooting at a restaurant ended up in a fight between rival gangs that involved several hundred people,” he said.

The 15-year-old boy was between life and death, he said.

The minister warned that France was at a “tipping point” when it came to drug trafficking violence, saying he was planning to travel later in the day to Rennes, where a five-year-old child was also critically ill after being shot on Saturday in another drug trafficking fire exchange.

White House press officials altered the official transcript of a call in which President Joe Biden appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two US government officials and an internal email obtained on Thursday by the Associated Press.

Biden created an uproar earlier this week with his remarks to Latino activists responding to racist comments at a Trump rally made by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to the US island territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

Biden, according to a transcript prepared by the official White House stenographers, told the Latino group on a Tuesday evening video call, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

The transcript released by the White House press office, however, rendered the quote with an apostrophe, reading “supporter’s” rather than “supporters,” which aides said pointed to Biden criticizing Hinchcliffe, not the millions of Americans who are supporting Trump for president.

The change was made after the press office “conferred with the president,” according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by the AP. The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.”

“If there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,” the supervisor wrote, adding, “Our Stenography Office transcript – released to our distro, which includes the National Archives – is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff.”

The edit of the transcript came as the White House scrambled to respond to a wave of queries from reporters about Biden’s comments. The president’s remarks clashed with vice-president Kamala Harris’ near-simultaneous speech outside the White House in which she called for treating Americans of differing ideologies with respect.

The Trump campaign quickly moved to fundraise off the quote, and the next day, Trump himself held a photo op inside a garbage truck to try to capitalize on Biden’s criticism.

Harris on Wednesday distanced herself from Biden’s comments – making the clearest break from the president since she took over for him at the top of the Democratic ticket just over three months ago. “Let me be clear,” she told reporters, “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”

According to the email, the press office had asked the stenographers to quickly produce a transcript of the call amid the firestorm. Biden himself took to social media to say that he was not calling all Trump supporters garbage and that he was referring specifically to the “hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally.”

The stenographers office is charged with preparing accurate transcripts of public and private remarks of the president for preservation by the National Archives and distribution to the public.

The two-person stenography team on duty that evening – a “typer” and “proofer” – said any edit to the transcript would have to be approved by their supervisor, the head of stenographers’ office.

The supervisor was not immediately available to review the audio, but the press office went ahead and published the altered transcript on the White House website and distributed it to press and on social media in an effort to tamp down the story.

White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates that evening also posted on X the edited version of the quote and wrote that Biden was referring ”to the hateful rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally as ‘garbage.’”

The supervisor, a career employee of the White House, raised the concerns about the press office action – but did not weigh in on the accuracy of the edit – in an email to White House communications director Ben LaBolt, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and other press and communications officials.

“Regardless of urgency, it is essential to our transcripts’ authenticity and legitimacy that we adhere to consistent protocol for requesting edits, approval, and release,” the supervisor wrote.

The supervisor declined to comment to the AP and referred questions about the matter to the White House press office.

Asked to comment, Bates did not address the alteration of the transcript and said: “The President confirmed in his tweet on Tuesday evening that he was addressing the hateful rhetoric from the comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. That was reflected in the transcript.”

House Republicans, meanwhile, were debating launching an investigation into the matter. House Republican Conference chairwoman Elise Stefanik, a Republican of New York, and House Oversight and Accountability chairman James Comer, a Republican of Kentucky, on Wednesday accused White House staff of “releasing a false transcript” of Biden’s remarks.

In a letter to White House counsel Ed Siskel on Wednesday, they called on the administration to retain documents and internal communications related to Biden’s remarks and the release of the transcript.

“White House staff cannot rewrite the words of the President of the United States to be more politically on message,” the lawmakers wrote to Siskel.

Stefanik and Comer said the action could be in violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

A New York man who turned a rescued squirrel into a social media star called Peanut is pleading with state authorities to return his beloved pet after they seized it during a raid that also yielded a raccoon named Fred.

Multiple anonymous complaints about Peanut – also spelled P’Nut or PNUT – brought at least six officers from the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to Mark Longo’s home on Wednesday, Longo said.

“The DEC came to my house and raided my house without a search warrant to find a squirrel!” said Longo,from Pine City. “I was treated as if I was a drug dealer and they were going for drugs and guns.”

The officers left with Peanut, who has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms during his seven years with Longo. They also took Fred, a more recent addition to the family.

By Thursday night, Longo had gathered nearly 20,000 signatures urging the return of Peanut, and says he has hired a legal team to get Peanut back.

A spokesperson for the DEC said in a statement that the agency had started an investigation after receiving “multiple reports from the public about the potentially unsafe housing of wildlife that could carry rabies and the illegal keeping of wildlife as pets.”

Longo, who runs an animal refuge inspired by his squirrel buddy called P’Nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary, took to Instagram to mourn Peanut’s loss and said he fears that Peanut has been euthanised. “I don’t know if Peanut is alive,” he said in a phone interview on Thursday. “I don’t know where he is.”

The DEC spokesperson did not respond to a question about whether Peanut had been euthanised.

Longo said he took in Peanut seven years ago after seeing Peanut’s mother get hit by a car in New York City. Longo brought Peanut home and cared for him for eight months before trying to release the squirrel. “A day and a half later I found him sitting on my porch missing half of his tail with his bone sticking out,” Longo said.

Longo decided that Peanut lacked the survival skills to live in the wild and would remain an indoor squirrel.

Internet fame followed, after Longo posted videos of Peanut playing with his cat.

An Instagram account dedicated to Peanut shows the animal leaping on to Longo’s shoulder, wearing a miniature cowboy hat, and eating a waffle while wearing crocheted bunny ears.

Over the years Peanut’s story has been featured on TV and newspapers including USA Today.

Longo, who works as a mechanical engineer, was living in Norwalk, Connecticut, until he decided to move to upstate New York last year to start an animal sanctuary. P’Nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary opened in April 2023 and now houses about 300 animals including horses, goats and alpacas, said Longo, who runs the sanctuary with his wife, Daniela, and other family members.

Longo is aware that it’s against New York state law to own a wild animal without a licence. He said he was in the process of filing paperwork to get Peanut certified as an educational animal.

“If we’re not following the rules, guide us in the right direction to follow the rules, you know?” Longo said. “Let us know what we need to do to have Peanut in the house and not have to worry about him getting taken.”

As for Fred, Longo said he had had the raccoon for only a few months and was hoping to rehabilitate the injured creature and release him back into the woods.

Longo is not the first animal owner to protest against the confiscation of a pet by New York authorities. A Buffalo-area man whose alligator was seized by the DEC in March is suing the agency to get the 750lb (340kg) reptile back.

Flanked by a turquoise lagoon, a newly rebuilt US military runway slices through forest in southern Palau. Completed just months ago, the airfield is the latest example of a push by the United States to build its presence in the Pacific as concerns around China’s reach in the region grow.

The small Pacific country is one of 12 in the world that has diplomatic ties with Taiwan instead of China and will head to the polls on 5 November, the same day as the US.

Voters are mostly concerned about a weak economy and cost of living crisis. But outside Palau, the election symbolises the growing tussle for influence by Washington and Beijing playing out across the Pacific.

The contest is an unlikely battle between brothers-in-law – President Surangel Whipps Jr will take on former president Tommy Esang Remengesau Jr. Whipps, a staunch pro-US candidate, wants to reform Palau’s economy and strengthen security ties with Washington. Remengesau, a Palauan chief known for his environmental achievements, has signalled a willingness to work more closely with China and other partners on climate action and to meet Palau’s economic needs.

The archipelago of about 18,000 people lies just east of the Philippines. Dr Michael Green, chief executive officer at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, says Palau’s strategic position has made it a focal point in a geopolitical tug-of-war.

“These small islands that few people know about suddenly become the objects of major strategic competition,” he says.

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On the east coast of Babeldaob, Palau’s largest island, truck driver Aiu Andres says it is getting more difficult to make ends meet.

“Life today is a little bit harder,” the 33-year-old says from his home as he pats his baby to sleep. “The prices are going up, but usually it’s because we import a lot of our products, so we cannot even really control the prices.”

Most of Palau’s goods – worth about $70m each year – are imported from the US. Palau was fully administered by America until independence in 1994, and it continues to have deep ties with the US under a Compact of Free Association. The agreement sees the US provides more than 10% of Palau’s annual budget, and gives Palauans the right to work and live in the US. In return, Washington has full control of defence and military operations over land, air and sea in this strategic string of islands.

Palau’s president, Whipps, has welcomed US support and sought to extend its military presence in the country over his four-year term.

“We see what’s happening around our region, we see what’s happened in the Philippines, China has just moved into those reefs, no respect for sovereignty” Whipps said, referring to China’s contested incursions into the South China Sea.

“As a small nation … I think it’s a benefit for Palau to have that special relationship with the United States.”

Even before he was a politician, Whipps’ name was well known to Palauans. He served as CEO of the massive family company started by his father, Surangel & Sons. Its logo – a smiley face wearing a crown – emblazons the country’s only mall, the diggers that crisscross a massive quarry site near the national airport, the shirts of grocery store workers, a local bakery, a car rental company and countless other local businesses.

Whipps no longer works for the company since becoming president in 2021. Over the past four years, Surangel & Sons’ construction arm has won at least 37 US defence contracts, valued at more than $5.8m.

Whipps’ rival for the presidency, Remengesau Jr, calls this a “conflict of interest”.

“There seems to be no equal opportunities or opportunities for other companies to get the benefits of government projects or military projects,” Remengesau said, adding that if he were elected president, he would look to break up the size of tendered projects so that smaller Palauan companies could compete for them.

Whipps dismisses such criticisms as “sounding like a Chinese narrative”.

“We have never cheated, never taken advantage of any situation that we’ve been in, from when we started our business 40 years ago, until now,” the president told the Guardian.

Remengesau served as president of Palau for 16 years, on-and-off between 2000 and 2020. Under his administration, Palau became known globally for several ambitious environmental policies – from creating the world’s first shark sanctuary to converting 80% of Palau’s waters into a marine sanctuary.

Sitting at his home in the main town of Koror, while his young granddaughter leans against his shoulders and a small white kitten nips at his legs, Remengesau says he never intended to get back into politics. But a petition signed by more than 6,000 Palauans and delivered to him earlier this year convinced him otherwise.

Remengesau doesn’t oppose US military involvement in Palau but says it should not be a priority for Palau. He wants more consultation with traditional and community leaders to ensure the projects don’t harm Palau’s environment.

“China and the US are trying to outdo each other with their defence and military strategies in the Pacific,” Remengesau says. “But security for us is not about defence and militarisation. Security for us is about climate change and global warming.”

It’s highly unusual in Palau for family members to run against each other, and both Whipps and Remengesau say it’s “unfortunate” that they are in opposition, especially at a time when Palau faces mounting economic pressures.

The president says a 10% goods and services tax (PGST) introduced last year provides necessary revenue for the government, while Remengesau and his supporters have criticised the levy for worsening the financial burden on Palau’s low-income households.

“The problem with our economy is we have only one source of revenue, and that is the tourism industry,” the country’s only female senator, Rukebai Kikuo Inabo, says.

“China was our main tourism market prior to Covid when we reached like 100,000 [visitors], but because of the Pacific politics, they have used tourism as an economic tool to try and change our foreign affairs.”

In 2017, the Chinese government ordered tour operators to stop selling packages to Palau in what many Palauans locals call “the China ban”. More recently, shortly after Palau’s government accused China of being behind a cyber-attack, Beijing issued a travel advisory for the Pacific country citing safety concerns.

China’s foreign ministry was contacted through regional embassies but did not respond.

Tourism makes up an estimated 40% of Palau’s GDP, and both presidential candidates have accused China of using economic pressure to influence its foreign and domestic policies. Whipps also believes the biggest opponents to the PGST are from businesses “affiliated with a lot of Chinese [nationals]”.

China maintains active commercial interests in Palau despite not having formal diplomatic relations with the country. At night-time in a downtown Koror bar, a group of Chinese businessmen play darts. They are in the country for the week, drafting the plans behind a new hotel on the island, one of several owned by Chinese nationals.

But not all Palauans see China’s activity in the country as a bad thing. Newspaper publisher Moses Uludong, who recently dropped out of Palau’s presidential race, struck a deal with Chinese businessmen in 2018 to create a new media group aimed at building ties between the two countries.

The initiative never came to fruition, but Uludong is still keen for Palau to better benefit from China’s lucrative market, saying it is wise for the country to “make friends with the biggest bully”.

“How come the Chinese can do business here and we can’t do business there?” Uludong tells the Guardian. “We want to promote Palau in China so tourists can come.”

While there’s no indication Palau will shift its alliance away from the US and Taiwan following the election, Green says its leaders’ ability to resist China’s overtures depends on the strength of its governance.

“It’s more about how well governed the country [is] … and how accountable its leaders are,” Green says. “[Otherwise] leaders will do things for short-term political gains, with long-term consequences.”

Palau’s alliance with Taiwan is popular among many of its voters. Taiwan provides the Pacific country a range of support – scholarships to study at Kainan University, visits from health staff to provide free medical checks to Palauns, and other modest agricultural and infrastructure projects.

The former president is open to working more closely with China, as long as Palau can maintain its existing diplomatic relationships, especially with Taiwan.

“To be honest, we would have relations with China and Taiwan if it was possible,” Remengesau said. “If China wants to become our friends, yes, we’ll accept them.”

Two former police officers who confessed to the murder of Rio city councillor Marielle Franco have been sentenced to decades in prison for their part in a crime that shook Brazil and cast a harsh spotlight on the links between politics and organised crime.

Ronnie Lessa admitted to firing 14 shots in the 2018 drive-by shooting that killed Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes, 39, and was sentenced to 78 years and nine months. Élcio de Queiroz, who confessed to driving the getaway car, was sentenced to 59 years and eight months.

In addition to the double homicide, they were convicted for the attempted murder of Fernanda Chaves, Franco’s press officer at the time, who was in the car.

Lessa and de Queiroz, who were arrested in 2019, had previously signed plea bargains, but the jury in Rio de Janeiro had final word on their guilt.

Prosecutors at the two-day trial had argued each man should be sentenced to the maximum possible 84 years.

By signing plea bargains – which led to the May arrests of the masterminds: two politicians and a former police chief – the defendants will have their sentences reduced. However, prosecutors declined to specify by how much, citing confidentiality of the previously signed agreements.

The crime was one of the most shocking and high-profile murders in Rio’s history: Franco, a gay Black woman, was a rising political star, and an outspoken critic of police violence and corruption.

Thursday’s verdict offered a measure of solace to her family and supporters, but marked just the first step towards justice: a second trial is yet to come for the men accused of ordering Franco’s death.

The case against the masterminds – two influential Rio politicians, Domingos and Chiquinho Brazão, and Rivaldo Barbosa, a former police chief – is under way in the supreme court and no trial date has been set yet.

Announcing the sentences, Judge Glioche said: “The jury is a democracy – a democracy which Marielle Franco defended.”

Addressing the two defendants she said: “This sentence is directed at the defendants here, but also at the many Lessas and Queirozes who exist in Rio and remain at large.”

Members of the two victims’ families hugged each other as the sentence was declared.

At a press conference afterwards, Franco’s daughter, Luyara, said the trial outcome “is a victory for Brazil’s democracy”. She added: “There are still many steps ahead in this case, but today the first step toward justice for them has certainly been taken, and we will keep fighting.”

Marielle’s widow, Monica Benicio, said the convictions are “a message that politicians cannot use murder as a means to conduct politics”.

During the trial, Lessa – whom the federal police accuse of being a contract killer – again admitted to the crime, speaking coldly about the murder.

According to him, the Brazão brothers – long accused of involvement with paramilitary mafia groups known as militias – ordered the killing after becoming frustrated by Franco’s efforts to disrupt profitable housing development plans.

“The masterminds saw Franco as an obstacle and wanted to deal with her at any cost,” he said, at times referring to the councillor not by name, but as “the target.” Lessa claimed he would receive land plots valued at 25m reais (£3.3m) as payment.

The now-convicted men participated in the trial via video link from the prisons where they are held.

Before Marielle Franco’s mother, Marinete Silva, testified, prosecutors asked if she wanted Lessa and Queiroz removed from the broadcast. She declined, and during her statement, she called both men “cowards”.

“I’m not here to talk about Marielle as a councillor or as a symbol of resistance for Brazil and the world,” she said. “I’m here as a mother who has suffered all these years from the loss of her daughter.”

Also invited to testify, Franco’s widow, Benicio, said that she was living “the happiest moment of her life”, shortly after becoming Rio de Janeiro’s fifth-most-voted councillor in her first election.

Gomes’s widow, Ágatha Arnaus, recounted that her husband – who left behind a son who was one year and eight months old at the time of the crime – was in the final stages of a selection process to work as an aircraft mechanic, his childhood dream.

The sole survivor from that night, Fernanda Chaves, also testified by video call – she had to leave Brazil in the following months, and since returning has lived outside Rio.

She celebrated Franco’s legacy; Chaves had been Franco’s press officer and friend for 15 years. “These people took Marielle from us, but they couldn’t interrupt what Marielle stands for. They [the killers and masterminds] will spend the rest of their lives in misery, having to hear ‘Marielle lives’ … and seeing her face on walls around the world,” she said.

Lessa and Queiroz were tried by a jury made up entirely of men (seven in total), all middle-aged. During the preliminary selection, the defence used its veto to block the only two women who had been chosen.

Following the verdict, Franco’s sister and Brazil’s current minister for racial equality, Anielle Franco, said that “people need to stop normalising so many bodies falling across the country”. She added, “When they murdered my sister, with those four shots to the head, they could not have imagined the strength with which this country and the world would rise up.

“What happened today is just part of the response we expect. Justice began to be served today,” she said.