The United Nations has added Israel to the global list of states and armed groups who have committed violations against children, according to the country’s UN envoy, Gilad Erdan.

News of Israel’s inclusion on the list follows eight months of war on Gaza, in which more than 13,000 children are estimated to be among the 36,500 killed, and comes a day after the Israeli bombing of a UN school in central Gaza, which killed more than 40 Palestinians, some of them children.

According to human rights officials, Hamas is also named in the report for its killing and kidnapping of children in its 7 October attack on Israel, in which nearly 1,200 Israelis were killed.

Erdan said he was “shocked and disgusted” by the “shameful” decision to include Israel on this year’s list, which is part of a report on children and armed conflict due to be presented to the UN security council next Friday.

The report covers the killing, maiming, sexual abuse, abduction or recruitment of children, denial of aid access and targeting of schools and hospitals.

The report is compiled by the UN secretary general’s special representative for children and armed conflict, Virginia Gamba. The list attached to the report, is widely intended to name and shame parties to conflicts in the hope of deterring violence against children.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a statement that the UN had “added itself to the black list of history when it joined those who support the Hamas murderers”.

Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, warned that the decision would have an impact on his country’s relations with the UN, which are already very strained. It is refusing to deal with the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), the main organisation channeling aid to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

There have been claims by UN staff that Israel had been left off the list of offenders in previous years after political pressure from Israeli officials.

“There have been already a few years in which there have been verified violations by Israel government forces and by Palestinian armed groups, but they have never been listed,” Ezequiel Heffes, the director of the human rights group, Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict.

Heffes said that once a state or a group had been cited in the UN report for violations, the UN is supposed to engage with the parties, and “for those parties to take actions that may serve to prevent future violations”.

The UN had been in discussion in previous years with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Palestinian armed groups, seeking the persuade them to mitigate harm to children, he added.

“This is a big deal because this is a framework that is created to protect children from the effects of armed conflict,” Heffes said.

Erdan said he had been notified of the decision by the chief of staff to the UN secretary general, António Guterres, and he gave his response in a video on social media.

“I am utterly shocked and disgusted by this shameful decision of the secretary-general,” said Erdan. “Israel’s army is the most moral army in the world, so this immoral decision will only aid the terrorists and reward Hamas.”

There was no immediate comment from Guterres’s office on the list.

Clarence Thomas, the US supreme court justice, officially disclosed he took luxury vacations paid for by the conservative billionaire, Harlan Crow – something he had yet to acknowledge in the official record.

The right-leaning justice has updated a financial disclosure to the court to confirm the Crow-funded travel, to Indonesia and a men’s club in California, amending a previous version.

He belatedly reported travel paid for by others from 2019: a hotel room in Bali and food and lodging in Sonoma county, California, both were paid for by Crow . He did not report any travel paid by others last year.

ProPublica first revealed the trips in April 2023, but Thomas, had not previously included them in court financial disclosure records, which are updated annually, although he had acknowledged publicly the “hospitality”. ProPublica’s reporting on Thomas and Crow won the Pulitzer Prize for public service this year.

The filing only offers a brief explanation of why Thomas is now disclosing the expenses. “During the preparation and filing of this report, filer sought and received guidance from his accountant and ethics counsel,” the report says.

Following ProPublica’s reporting last year, Thomas released a statement acknowledging travel with Crow, but said Crow, a Republican megadonor, did not have business before the court. Thomas previously said he had been advised that he did not have to report “this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends”.

But Crow was affiliated with Club for Growth, which has lobbied the court with amicus briefs while Thomas has sat on it, the Guardian reported last year.

ProPublica has also reported that Thomas sold his mother’s home in Savannah, Georgia to Crow (Thomas disclosed the transaction last year after the report). Thomas also disclosed that his wife, Ginni, received income from consulting she did on behalf of various conservative organizations, Politico reported. Thomas has faced pressure to recuse himself on cases involving January 6 over his wife’s ties to the right, but he has refused so far.

Thomas received 103 gifts totaling $2.4m, according to an analysis by Fix the Court, a watchdog group. The total dollar amount he received is ten times what his fellow justices combined received over the same period.

Thomas’ relationship with Crow set off calls for more transparency by the justices and calls for more transparency. ProPublica also reported last year that Samuel Alito, another of the court’s conservative justices, flew on a private jet and vacationed with a billionaire who had business before the court. Alito was granted a 90-day extension to file his report, something he has routinely sought.

Alito is also under scrutiny after reports from the New York Times that there was an upside down flag flying outside of his home in Virginia as well as an appeal to heaven flag flying outside of a beach home in New Jersey. The former is affiliated with the January 6 attack on the capitol and the latter with Christian nationalism.

The supreme court’s nine justices all agreed to a code of conduct last year, though some experts have noted it does not go far enough and there is no way to adequately enforce it.

The newest justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, collected nearly $900,000 last year for her upcoming memoir, one of four supreme court justices who reported sizable income from book deals. Jackson also disclosed that Beyoncé gave her four tickets worth $3,700.

The first heatwave of the year is expected to maintain its grip on the US south-west for at least another day through Friday, after records tumbled across the region with temperatures soaring past 110F (43C) from California to Arizona.

Although the official start of summer is still two weeks away, roughly half of Arizona and Nevada were under an excessive heat alert, which the National Weather Service extended until Friday evening. The alert was extended through Saturday in Las Vegas, where it’s never been hotter this early in the year.

“High temperatures as much as 10 to 15 degrees above normal can be expected, with record high temperatures likely for some sites through Friday,” the weather service in Las Vegas said. Temperatures will slowly retreat over the weekend, but will remain above normal into early next week.

“It’s so hot,” said Eleanor Wallace, nine, who was visiting Phoenix from northern Utah on Thursday on a hike celebrating her birthday with her mother, Megan Wallace.

The National Weather Service in Phoenix, where the new record high of 113F on Thursday leap-frogged the old mark of 111F set in 2016, called the conditions “dangerously hot”.

There were no immediate reports of any heat-related deaths or serious injuries.

But at a campaign rally for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, in Phoenix, 11 people fell ill from heat exhaustion by late afternoon and were taken to the hospital, where they were treated and released, fire officials said.

And in Las Vegas, with a new record of 111F on Thursday that also matched the earliest time of year the high reached at least 110F, the Clark county fire department said it had responded to at least 12 calls for heat exposure since midnight on Wednesday. Nine of those calls resulted in a patient needing hospital treatment.

Several other areas of Arizona, California and Nevada also broke records by a degree or two, including Death Valley national park with a record high for the date of 122F, topping 121F dating to 1996 in the desert that sits 194ft (59 meters) below sea level near the California-Nevada line. Records there date to 1911.

The heat has arrived weeks earlier than usual even in places farther to the north at higher elevations – areas typically a dozen degrees cooler. That includes Reno, where the normal high of 81F for this time of year soared to a record 98F on Thursday. Records there date to 1888.

The National Weather Service forecast mild cooling across the region this weekend, but only by a few degrees. In central and southern Arizona, that will still mean triple-digit highs, even up to 110F.

On Thursday in Phoenix, the unseasonably hot weather did not prevent Oscar Tomasio of Cleveland, Ohio, from proposing to his girlfriend, Megan McCracken, as they attempted to hike to the peak of a trail on Camelback Mountain with three liters of water each in tow.

“It was a grueling hike,” Tomasio told the Associated Press. “It was extra hot, so we started extra early.”

“The views were beautiful. We didn’t make it quite to the top because she was a little nervous with the heat,” he said. “So I proposed to her when the sun rose.”

McCracken confirmed they’d planned a sunrise hike and awoke about 5am in an effort to beat the heat and an impending closure of the trail.

“Probably not early enough,” she said.

Megan Wallace, mother of the birthday girl from Utah who also came packing water bottles, said: “We started just a few minutes after six and it’s like we came prepared, but we got through all of our water and it was hot – was hotter than we’re used to.”

A few hundred metres from her house, Rosemary Lewis stands at a clearing on a footpath overlooking a tract of rolling hills in the Oxfordshire countryside that could become home to UK’s largest solar farm. With plans to install 2.5m solar panels along an 11-mile (18km) stretch north of Oxford, the Botley West solar farm would be vast.

The proposal is one of 30 large-scale solar projects vying for approval, which could give the UK a much-needed shot in the arm to achieve its climate goals of generating 100% clean electricity by 2035 and reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

But Lewis sees it differently. “It’s a nightmare,” she says of the proposal that would spread across 1,400 hectares (3,500 acres) of mostly green belt land. Her husband, Tom, says: “It’s just too big. We will be living on an industrial site.”

Large-scale solar farms have become the latest net zero technology to be bogged down by local disputes and polarising debates across the country. A growing coalition of grassroots groups argue that the ballooning pipeline of solar developments would “armour-plate” the countryside, destroy good farmland and threaten food security. Instead, they want to see solar “in the right places”, on rooftops and brownfield sites.

Conservative MPs, representing the rural constituencies where these solar proposals are concentrated, have given their support to calls for stricter rules to regulate solar on farmland.

However, while most experts agree that a lack of land use and energy planning has led to a suboptimal and opportunistic approach to solar deployment, large-scale solar is one of the key building blocks of the UK’s climate plan. “Solar on farmland is an important part of energy decarbonisation,” said Tom Lancaster, of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

To decarbonise the electricity system, the Conservative government said it would increase solar capacity nearly fivefold to 70GW by 2035 and called for “large-scale ground-mounted solar deployment across the UK” – one of the cheapest forms of electricity generation. To balance energy security and food production, it told developers to prioritise poorer-quality land and avoid using the best farmland for large projects “where possible”.

The Botley West proposal goes to the heart of the issue. The solar farm would cost £950m to build on land predominantly leased by the Blenheim estate, 38% of which is considered “best and most versatile” agricultural land. Campaigners have been lobbying the government to change the rules and restrict large-scale solar on farmland even of moderate quality.

This “would basically do to solar what has been done to onshore wind in England”, said Lancaster, referring to the introduction of planning rules that brought the nascent onshore wind industry to a juddering halt.

He said rolling out solar power in line with the net zero goal would take up less than 1% of the UK’s agricultural land, which would have “relatively insignificant” impacts on food security compared with other non-food uses, such as bioenergy crops.

What was lacking was “a helicopter view from the centre of government over what we use land for” that could minimise conflicts and trade-offs, he added. The government has repeatedly delayed the publication of a land use framework for the UK.

Nick Eyre, a professor of energy and climate policy at Oxford University, said solar on rooftop and brownfield sites must be deployed at greater speed but it would not be sufficient for the UK to secure the solar power it needed to meet decarbonisation goals.

By 2050, Oxfordshire alone would need the equivalent of four or five Botley Wests in solar capacity under a progressive scenario, he said. “We should have had a plan for where solar was going to get built in the county and work from there. But if we want to build solar quickly then this is probably the sort of project that needs to go ahead.”

The German developer Photovolt Development Partners (PVDP) says the 840MW Botley West proposal could power 330,000 homes and has been designed to reduce the visual impact on the landscape, increase biodiversity and allow sheep to graze the land.

Solar farms this big are designated as nationally significant infrastructure projects and are examined by the Planning Inspectorate, with the secretary of state making the final decision, which will fall to the next government. PVDP expects to submit a planning application in September and hopes to start generating power in 2027.

Alex Rogers, a professor at the University of Oxford who specialises in marine ecology, and who chairs the Stop Botley West campaign, rejects accusations that the group is made up of an old guard of anti-solar nimbys. “I see the impacts of climate change everywhere we go in the ocean. There is absolutely no doubt that we are in a climate emergency,” he said. The problem, he said, was a vacuum in national policies, which had led to a “solar gold rush”.

However, some of the campaign’s arguments are seemingly based on more spurious claims. In what it describes as “uncomfortable truths”, Stop Botley West says solar farms are “inefficient” and the scheme “may never pay back its carbon debt”. A local election leaflet from a Conservative candidate and member of the campaign falsely claimed that the project’s carbon footprint “will be greater than the benefits”.

Eyre described the claim that solar farms are inefficient as “misleading” and the idea that it would not repay the carbon debt as “simply wrong”.

The International Energy Agency says solar panels need to operate for only four to eight months to offset their manufacturing emissions, and studies have shown that emissions savings from avoiding fossil fuels trump the technology’s carbon footprint. While wind power is more efficient than solar, a recent Royal Society report found solar power was a necessary part of the mix.

Claims solar farms are inefficient and “not environmentally friendly” are also being promoted by the UK Solar Alliance, a coalition of 124 groups opposing about 9GW worth of large-scale solar plans, as part of a toolkit of resources for local campaigns. The document was compiled by the alliance’s former chair Michael Alder, who recently joined the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s most prominent climate sceptic thinktank, which has repeatedly attacked renewable energy and net zero policies.

The Stop Botley West campaign and the UK Solar Alliance say they strongly reject climate denial views. Alder told the Guardian he was “not a climate change denier” but had accepted a GWPF invitation to “give independent views on academic papers”.

For Hilary Brown, the chair of Sustainable Woodstock, the Stop Botley West campaign has distracted from needed discussions about how to improve the proposal so it benefits local people and nature if approved.

Despite the vocal opposition, ECIU polling found that in the south-east of England 70% of respondents would support a solar farm being built in their local area. Lilah McKim, 22, a local climate activist, said the project gave her hope at a time when the world urgently needed climate action.

US workers at John Deere plants have accused the company of acting on “greed” as America’s most famous agricultural equipment company plans to shift more production to Mexico.

The company – famous for its green tractors and leaping deer logo – has announced layoffs of several hundred workers over the last several months with more layoffs planned for later this year.

“We get wind of more layoffs daily, it seems, and it’s causing uncertainty all over,” said a longtime John Deere worker at the Harvester Works plant in East Moline, Illinois, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “The only reason for Deere to do this is greed.”

They cited the company’s recent profits. John Deere reported a profit of over $10bn in fiscal year 2023 and its CEO John May received $26.7m in total compensation. John Deere spent over $7.2bn on stock buybacks in 2023 and provided shareholders with more than $1.4bn in dividends.

The worker said: “Our harvester plant is still in production and management has been quiet. They’re not doing the normal ‘time to talk’ meetings as they have in recent past. My belief is that they don’t want people to know they are losing their jobs until they get everything built for the year.

“We know a layoff is coming, we don’t know if, how many or when it will happen. We’re expecting to finish production in mid-August and believe we will see a large layoff then.”

In October last year, John Deere announced 250 indefinite layoffs at the Illinois plant. Another 34 workers were laid off in May.

Earlier this year, at least 650 jobs were cut at John Deere’s plants in Iowa, with 500 jobs cut in Waterloo and 150 jobs cut at the Ankeny plant. Another 103 workers took an early retirement offer at the Ottumwa plant after the company announced plans to cut more jobs at the plant later this year and shift that production to Mexico.

Chris Laursen, 53, is one of the employees at the Ottumwa plant who took the early retirement, citing concerns about being laid off given he was terminated last year but through his union won his job back. He had worked there for 22 years.

Laursen said: “[For] a lot of these communities, like mine in Ottumwa, losing John Deere would be an extremely big loss. It’s a town of 28,000, and the only other manufacturing is a pork processing facility, so it doesn’t leave a lot of options for jobs.

“A multinational corporation like Deere sees Mexico as pretty attractive for a cheap labor source: they can import steel cheaper there and bring it across the border and sell it to the majority of their market in the US. It’s a sign of the times, perpetuating what’s been going on with the loss of manufacturing here in America, good union jobs and otherwise.”

KWWL News 7, a local NBC News affiliate in Iowa, reported that John Deere sent out an email to workers stating plans of further layoffs in the third quarter of this year, but the number of layoffs were not provided.

Deere announced plans to move production of skid steer loaders and compact track loaders from a Dubuque plant to Mexico by late 2026.

In 2022, the company had announced plans to move cab production from Iowa to Mexico, impacting 250 employees.

John Deere stated its 2023 annual report that it employs 33,800 workers in the US and Canada.

The layoffs come in the wake of a strike of more than 10,000 workers represented by the United Auto Workers at 14 John Deere plants in Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado and Georgia in October 2021. The strike led headlines during ‘Striketober’ – a month of large scale industrial actions around the US. The John Deere strike ended in November that year when workers ratified a new six-year union contract agreement.

John Deere did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Rishi Sunak has apologised for leaving D-day anniversary events early to take part in a TV interview, admitting it was “a mistake not to stay in France longer”.

The prime minister had been heavily criticised for allowing the foreign secretary, David Cameron, to take his place in the late afternoon ceremony at Omaha beach on Thursday, while he left Normandy to do a prerecorded ITV segment to be broadcast next week.

On Friday, the prime minister said on X: “I care deeply about veterans and have been honoured to represent the UK at a number of events in Portsmouth and France over the past two days and to meet those who fought so bravely.

“After the conclusion of the British event in Normandy, I returned back to the UK. On reflection, it was a mistake not to stay in France longer – and I apologise.”

Conservative activists reacted with fury at the sight of Cameron standing alongside the French, German and US leaders, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and Joe Biden, with one saying it had left them questioning whether to “bother to continue campaigning”.

Sunak was forced to apologise after the ITV presenter Paul Brand confirmed on News at Ten that the prime minister had returned from Normandy to speak to him. Brand said ITV was interviewing all of the party leaders and had been working to secure a date with Sunak for some time. “Today was the slot they offered us,” he said. “We don’t know why.”

Opposition politicians criticised the Sunak on Friday morning, saying he had “brought shame” on the office.

Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth said: “Yesterday’s D-day commemorations were about remembering the bravery of all those who serve our country. In choosing to prioritise his own vanity TV appearances over our veterans, Rishi Sunak has shown what is most important to him. It is yet more desperation, yet more chaos, and yet more dreadful judgment from this out-of-touch prime minister.”

The Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, said: “One of the greatest privileges of the office of prime minister is to be there to honour those who served, yet Rishi Sunak abandoned them on the beaches of Normandy. He has brought shame to that office and let down our country.

“I am thinking right now of all those veterans and their families he left behind and the hurt they must be feeling. It is a total dereliction of duty and shows why this Conservative government just has to go.”

The Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, posted on X that Sunak “could not even be bothered to attend” the Omaha Beach event.

One Tory activist said: “Lots of us are asking each other what’s the point, across associations. He allowed a former PM to get some pics next to Biden in his place. Why should we bother to continue campaigning, knocking on hundreds of doors when Sunak seems to be doing all he can to completely ruin our chance of losing in a way that’s just about tolerable.”

Sunak’s interview will not be shown in full until Wednesday night. It was part of a series of pre-recorded ITV interviews with political party leaders that will be broadcast throughout the election campaign – meaning the prime minister could have recorded it at any point in the next four days.

On Thursday evening, ITV decided to release a short taster clip from the longer interview, in which Sunak was challenged about his tax claims, hoping to attract coverage ahead of Friday night’s televised debate between party representatives.

A Conservative source played down the diplomatic impact of the prime minister’s absence from the event, as they said Sunak would see Macron, Biden, Scholz and other key leaders at the G7 summit in Puglia, Italy, which starts next Thursday.

Sunak did attend an event on Thursday morning at Ver-sur-Mer, in Normandy, which was also attended by Macron, King Charles and Queen Camilla.

Sunak’s apology came minutes after a junior Conservative minister defended his absence. David Johnston told Times Radio: “As children’s minister I don’t exactly know what the prime minister’s diary looks like.

“But I do know, because we saw him at the various commemorations this week, that he has been paying tribute to our veterans and marking the D-day commemorations and I think everybody can see he’s very committed to that.”

Rishi Sunak has been criticised for leaving the D-day commemorations in Normandy early on Thursday, with reports that he returned to the UK to do a prerecorded TV interview.

The prime minister attended an event at Ver-sur-Mer in northern France, which was also attended by King Charles and Queen Camilla, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

But he did not attend the late afternoon ceremony at Omaha beach, in Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, and instead returned to the UK. Paul Brand, ITV’s UK editor, said the prime minister returned from Normandy to do an interview.

He said the broadcaster was interviewing all the party leaders and had been working to secure a date with the Conservative leader for some time. Speaking on News at Ten, Brand said: “Today was the slot they offered us. We don’t know why.”

Tim Montgomerie, the founder of the grassroots Conservative Home website, told BBC Newsnight: “I want to put my head in my hands. If he came back for a political interview from the D-day commemorations that is indefensible.

“This is going to be the last big commemoration where survivors will be present,” he added. “I think it’s political malpractice of the highest order if Mr Sunak absented himself for an election interview on ITV.”

Keir Starmer joined world leaders including Macron and the US president, Joe Biden, at the event at Omaha beach alongside the defence secretary, Grant Shapps, and the foreign secretary, David Cameron. The Labour leader was photographed in conversation with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Later on Thursday, ITV published an interview with Sunak in which he denied accusations from Starmer that he “lied” by arguing that Labour would hike taxes by £2,000, in claims that were criticised by the UK statistics watchdog.

ITV would not confirm when the released interview was recorded.

Chris Bryant, the Labour candidate for Rhondda and Ogmore, wrote on X: “So Sunak left the Normandy D-day landings commemoration to fly home to lie about lying. The rest is silence.”

The shadow paymaster general, Jonathan Ashworth, said: “The prime minister skipping off early from D-day commemorations to record a television interview where he once again lied through his teeth is both an embarrassment and a total dereliction of duty.

“Our country deserves so much better than out-of-touch, desperate Rishi Sunak and his chaotic Tory party.”

A Conservative source played down the diplomatic impact of the prime minister’s absence and said Sunak will see Macron, Biden, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and other key leaders at the G7 summit in Puglia, Italy, which starts next Thursday.

Col Richard Kemp, a former British army commander in Afghanistan, told the Mirror: “I know there is a general election campaign to fight but this is a very significant anniversary of a major military achievement which led to freedom in Europe.

“It’s being attended by some of the veterans who may never attend another due to their age. I think it was very important that he showed his commitment to it.

“He should have stayed. As the PM of our country he should have been there to represent the country and to show our gratitude to those who fell.”

A Russian nuclear-powered submarine – which will not be carrying nuclear weapons – will visit Havana next week, Cuba’s communist authorities have announced, amid rising tensions with the US over the war in Ukraine.

The nuclear submarine Kazan and three other Russian naval vessels, including the missile frigate Admiral Gorshkov, an oil tanker and a salvage tug, will dock in the Cuban capital from 12-17 June, Cuba’s ministry of the revolutionary armed forces said in a statement.

“None of the vessels is carrying nuclear weapons, so their stopover in our country does not represent a threat to the region,” the ministry said.

The announcement came a day after US officials said that Washington had been tracking Russian warships and aircraft that were expected to arrive in the Caribbean for a military exercise. They said the exercise would be part of a broader Russian response to US support for Ukraine.

The US officials said that the Russian military presence was notable but not concerning. However, it comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested that Moscow could take “asymmetrical steps” elsewhere in the world in response to President Joe Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use US-provided weapons to strike inside Russia to protect Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.

The unusual deployment of the Russian military so close to the US – particularly the powerful submarine – comes amid major tensions over the war in Ukraine, where the western-backed government is fighting a Russian invasion. The Russian vessels’ visit to Cuba will also overlap with Biden’s visit to the G7 leaders summit in Italy.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel met with Putin last month for the annual 9 May military parade on Red Square outside the Kremlin.

During the cold war, Cuba was an important client state for the Soviet Union. The deployment of Soviet nuclear missile sites on the island triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when Washington and Moscow came close to war.

Relations between Russia and Cuba have become closer since a 2022 meeting between Diaz-Canel and Putin.

During the Russian fleet’s arrival at the port of Havana, 21 salvoes will be fired from one of the ships as a salute to the nation, which will be reciprocated by an artillery battery from Cuba’s revolutionary armed forces, the foreign ministry said.

In his first campaign rally after being convicted of 34 felonies, former president Donald Trump recalled how he just went through a “rigged” trial with a “highly conflicted” judge despite there being “no crime”.

The court cases Trump faces have become a mainstay of his campaigning throughout the last year, where he frequently tells his followers that the charges are a form of election interference and designed to tamp down the Maga movement.

“Those appellate courts have to step up and straighten things out, or we’re not going to have a country any longer,” he said.

Trump spoke at a Turning Point Action event in sweltering Phoenix, at Dream City church, a megachurch where he and Turning Point have held rallies in the past. The extreme heat led to some waiting outside for the venue to open to need medical attention for heatstroke.

Trump held a rally at the same church in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, when church leaders claimed to have an air-purification system that killed 99% of the Covid-19 virus. Turning Point Action is the campaign arm of Turning Point, the conservative youth group founded by Charlie Kirk, a figure in the Maga movement.

The former president also took aim at Joe Biden’s recent executive order limiting asylum seekers, which Trump called “bullshit” and said he would rescind on his first day in office, should he win. He condemned Biden on immigration and ran down Trump administration border policies, saying his Democratic rival could solve immigration problems by reinstating all of his old policies.

“Arizona is being turned into a dumping ground for the dungeons of the third world,” Trump said.

While immigration is a top issue for voters nationwide, it is especially acute in a border state like Arizona, which Trump hit on in his speech. He wistfully recalled the days of former Maricopa county sheriff Joe Arpaio, infamous for his strict immigration policies that led to frequent lawsuits and financial settlements, and brought Arpaio on stage for impromptu remarks.

Trump kissed Arpaio on the cheek, then said: “I don’t kiss men, but I kissed him. We had a real border with this guy.” Arpaio called Trump his hero.

Arizona is a key battleground this year, as Trump tries to win back the once solidly red south-western state from Biden, who beat him by about 10,500 votes. Election denialism has gripped the state for years – some Republicans who lost their races in 2022 midterms still have not conceded and have filed lawsuits to try to reverse the results.

The Democratic National Committee put up a billboard in Phoenix on Thursday that is the first paid ad from the party to focus on the former president’s convictions, Meidas Touch News reported. The ad says: “Trump already attacked Arizona’s democracy once. Now he’s back as a convicted felon. He’s out for revenge and retribution. Trump: unfit to serve.”

For the Trump faithful, the convictions have become a point of ire against the other side and something akin to pride. Shirts and signs at the Phoenix rally said “I’m voting for the convicted felon”.

Trump repeated claims of a stolen election, saying the Democrats “used Covid to cheat” in 2020. He welcomed Kari Lake, the losing gubernatorial candidate in 2022 who is now running for Senate, and Abe Hamadeh, the losing attorney general candidate now running for Congress, claiming that they won their races but their elections were rigged.

He directed people to a “Swamp the Vote” website after talking about how certain groups need to vote more consistently, such as gun owners and evangelicals. The site, paid for by the Republican National Committee, includes links for people to register and pledge to vote. “Do your part to guarantee we win by more than the Margin of Fraud by casting your vote and taking responsibility for ensuring every Republican and Trump voter in your household casts theirs too,” the site says.

The end of the campaign event included a Q&A with audience members, who asked about border issues, drugs and cost-of-living issues. He said he would “get rid of inflation” in part by drilling to bring energy prices down. Cost-of-living concerns come up with voters frequently, Trump said; he used a regular-size container of Tic Tacs beside a mini version to demonstrate the effects of inflation.

“People that made the same amount of money live half as well because the inflation is so high,” he said, adding that inflation is a “country-buster”.

Trump’s answers often implored his supporters to vote him back in to solve whatever issue they were facing, though they were scant on details. How would he help restore access to healthcare in rural areas in Arizona, where the nearest hospital can be more than an hour away? He’ll handle it, because rural America loves him, he said.

One woman who said she works with senior citizens who struggle to pay their bills and must choose between food or medication asked Trump what he would tell them.

“Vote for Trump,” he responded.