Donald Trump’s supporters have threatened the consultancy firm Deloitte with the loss of lucrative government contracts if he returns to the White House after the election in November because one of its employees leaked critical comments about his presidential performance made by his running mate JD Vance.

The Republican nominee’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, led the warnings of retribution after the Washington Post published correspondence that showed Vance expressing negative views about the Trump administration long after he claimed he had become a supporter. The correspondence also showed Vance forecasting – accurately – that the former president would lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Ethics experts seized on the threats to punish Deloitte for the actions of an individual employee and warned that it might be a harbinger of how a second Trump administration would use its power over the federal government.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” the senior director of ethics at the non-partisan Campaign Legal Centre, Kedric Payne, told the Washington Post. “You can’t imagine that if one employee out of thousands made a statement that offended an official, that then the government contracts would be in jeopardy.”

The Post did not name the individual to whom Vance had expressed the anti-Trump messages privately on social media but merely reported that their recipient had shared them with the paper.

However, in a post on X, Trump Jr – who was instrumental in persuading his father to install Vance as his running mate – revealed the correspondent to be a consultant working at Deloitte. He suggested that the company’s contracts with the US government should be annulled.

“An executive at @Deloitte … decided to interfere in the election & leak private convos with JD Vance to help Kamala Harris,” the former president’s son said.

“Deloitte also gets $2B in govt contracts. Maybe it’s time for the GOP to end Deloitte’s taxpayer funded gravy train?”

Trump Jr tagged the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, in his message and attached a screen shot of Deloitte’s contracts with the government and the employee’s company profile.

The post, which has received more than 2 million views and been retweeted 13,000 times, was circulated by Vance’s spokesperson, William Martin, and followed up by the rightwing news site, Breitbart. The site ran a story naming the Deloitte employee in question, focusing on his job.

Jason Miller, an advisor to Donald Trump Sr, reacted to the post by writing that the employee “FAFO”, short for “fucked around and found out”.

Trump Jr followed up his original 27 September post with another two days later, saying: “We’re not forgetting this.” That was shared by Eric Schmitt, a Republican senator for Montana, who called the matter “outrageous” and demanded that Deloitte “immediately and publicly respond to this scandal”.

Trump Jr justified his comments about the firm’s government contract in a statement to the Washington Post, saying the employee “had a right to leak the communications, Washington Post had a right to print them and … I have a right to speak my mind about where my tax dollars go”.

Vance’s messages examined by the Post – reported to have been triggered by an essay the Deloitte employee had written about the relationship between Catholicism and politics – reveal a far more negative view of Trump’s presidency as it approached the end of its term than he has previously acknowledged.

In February 2020, he wrote: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).”

“I think Trump will probably lose,” Vance wrote in June 2020 in a forecast of the outcome for that year’s election, which he subsequently falsely claimed was stolen by the Democrats, echoing the former president.

Vance has previously admitted to being a former critic of Trump, who he labeled around the time of his 2016 election triumph as “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler”. But Vance claims he was won over by Trump’s performance as president.

When a number of factors in a situation go wrong with enough precision to maximise damage, we tend to call it a perfect storm. Pay attention and you’ll hear it all the time; a few days ago, the lack of social housing in England was blamed on a perfect storm, similarly America is currently bracing itself for a perfect storm of election chaos, and outer space recently enjoyed a perfect storm of solar activity. The term, of course, is based on a 2000 film where George Clooney sailed a boat in a hurricane.

However, I would like to propose a change. From now on, instead of calling something a perfect storm, I recommend calling it a Daddio. This is a real election Daddio. Wow, the social housing in this country is really Daddioed. Did you see the sun Daddioing the other day?

I wish to propose this, because a fault on a recent Qantas flight resulted in every passenger being forced to watch Daddio, a film that has an erect penis in it.

You may have already read the story. If not, here’s a brief recap. On flight QF59 from Sydney to Tokyo, a technical fault meant that passengers were unable to choose their own individual movies from the in-flight selection. However, the fault allowed every seat to be shown the same movie at once. According to Qantas, staff then polled the passengers on which film they would like to see. The winner was apparently Daddio, a new drama starring Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn.

However, Daddio contains a few spicy sequences, which means it is not suitable for all passengers. Unfortunately, the fault meant the screens couldn’t be paused, dimmed or turned off. And, to make matters worse, passengers couldn’t avoid the scenes by simply removing their headphones either, because all the sequences take the form of sexting. Someone texts “Help me cum” and “Cock so hard” before, that’s right, sending a photo of their penis. Eventually Qantas saw sense and replaced it with a children’s film, but clearly the whole affair was a Daddio of epic proportions.

Now, obviously, mistakes can happen. If the Daddio incident reminds me of anything at all, it’s the time that our science teacher accidentally let us watch a VHS of the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme film Timecop at the end of Year 9, only to slam it off in a bluster of red-faced nervousness during the scene where a fully naked woman writhes around on a satin bed. So this sort of thing does have precedence.

However, the question remains: why Daddio? The Qantas in-flight entertainment selection contains a number of big hitters, including Inside Out 2, The Fall Guy, A Quiet Place: Day One and Bad Boys: Ride or Die. These are all big, mainstream films with a varying range of broad appeal. And yet the passengers apparently chose Daddio.

In truth, despite the sexting, the headlines about the Daddio incident were a little misleading. While it’s true that the film is inappropriate – there’s no way to look past the penis – for the most part, it is extremely boring. The entire film takes place in a taxi travelling between an airport and a city, and is just one long dialogue between Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn. There are a lot of pauses, plenty of meaningful glances. It’s fine as an experiment, and perfectly decent if it’s something you sought out yourself.

But this is a film that was apparently chosen by the majority of an entire airliner. Hundreds of people, when asked how they would like to spend a tedious nine-hour flight, apparently responded by singling out a ruminative, dialogue-heavy two-hander over something fun like The Fall Guy. Who on earth are these people? What sort of ridiculous pathology causes a majority of passengers to decide that, to silence the niggling thought that human flight is a betrayal of God’s wishes and that only a thin sheet of metal separates them from an unimaginably horrible death, they should watch one hour and 41 minutes of Dakota Johnson mournfully gazing through a car window?

It doesn’t make sense. It’s entirely troubling to me, and I don’t think I can rest until I get concrete answers. Forget the penis, this choice was the real Daddio.

If genealogy is destiny, as Donald Trump believes, then “poison in the blood” – a phrase Trump repeatedly uses – determines the fate of nations. By Trump’s logic, “blood” is the true and final measure. Trump, like Hitler, appears to classify people and countries by “blood” on a scale of their innate racial characteristics. Those features define the essence of nations, which are themselves delineated on a racial pyramid, with the purest and whitest, the most Aryan, at the pinnacle. True to his doctrine, the Nazis on his family tree must explain his penchant for Hitlerian rhetoric.

“Poison in the blood” was the core of Hitler’s race doctrine as well. Hitler, too, believed it explained the rise and fall of civilizations. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” stated Hitler. It is also Trump’s fundamental trope. “We’re poisoning the blood of our country, and you have people coming in, think of it, mental institutions all over the world are being emptied out into the United States,” he said on Fox News in March. “Jails and prisons are being emptied out into the United States. This is poisoning our country.”

Just recently, on 31 August, addressing Moms For Liberty, a rightwing group devoted to book-banning, he raised again the menace of “poison in the blood”: “But what’s happening to our country, our country is being poisoned, poisoned!”

At a rally on 18 September, Trump elaborated: “They’re coming from the Congo, they’re coming from Africa, they’re coming from the Middle East, they’re coming from all over the world – Asia! A lot of it coming from Asia … And what’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we’re not going to take it any longer, and you got to get rid of these people.”

“Blut und Boden” – blood and soil – was adopted as an official slogan of the Nazi regime to express its ideal of the nation rooted in the authentic unity of Aryan blood. The community of its people – Volksgemeinschaft – comprised only those of shared ethnic blood. Aliens corrupting the blood, principally Jews, but also Slavs, Poles and Roma, were described as disease carriers and “vermin” – Volksshadlinge – and posed an existential threat. Only those people of the blood belonged to the Heimat, a concept the Nazis cast as the racially pure home, intrinsic to Blut und Boden.

Jews were Heimatlos – a people separate from the Heimat, without a true home, wanderers, cosmopolitans and globalists, a menace to the sanctity of the culture and the identity of the nation. They were not simply outsiders, or the Other. They were a different species – subhumans, Untermenschen – and must be eradicated to preserve the blood of the race. “Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal,” instructed a pamphlet entitled Der Untermenschen, illustrated with distorted photographs of these lower beings to depict the “bestial” nature of the subhuman Jews and Slavs. Four million copies were published in 1942 under the direction of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS.

“In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion,” Trump said this March. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it.” When they are removed, it will be, says Trump, “a bloody story”.

Friedrich Trump, Trump’s grandfather, was deported from his native Bavaria as an undesirable and had his German citizenship revoked in 1905. Born in the town of Kallstadt in 1869, he dodged compulsory military service and emigrated to the United States in 1885. In and around Seattle and the Yukon, he owned restaurants and hotels that also did a brisk business as brothels. He returned to Germany a well-to-do man, married Elisabeth Christ, and took her to New York. But his wife did not like America and was homesick.

He returned to Kallstadt to settle, but the authorities investigated him and ruled he should be banished for dodging military service. He wrote the Prince of Bavaria a letter begging to stay. “Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family.” His plea was rejected. He was expelled. Upon his return to New York, in October 1905, a son, named Fred, was born. The Trump family saga began.

The Trump and Christ families, with the exception of Friedrich and Elisabeth Trump, remained in Kallstadt. Many of them served in the Nazi army. Some were members of the Nazi Party. Two of these relatives of Donald Trump are now known to have fought and died for Hitler. It appears that they were involved in the early stage of the Holocaust. (The research of a certified professional genealogist distinguished in the field discovered these Trump Nazi soldiers, but prefers to remain anonymous to avoid retribution.)

Ernst Christ, of the Christ branch of the family, a first cousin once removed of Donald Trump, the son of his great-uncle Johannes Christ, born in Kallstadt, was a Nazi. Unteroffizier Christ, a corporal, served in the 1st Company of the Panzerjager-Abteilung 670, an anti-tank unit that saw action on the western front in Belgium and France before being transferred to participate in the invasion of Russia.

In July 1942, Christ’s company occupied the town of Polodovitoye, about 100 kilometers south of Stalingrad. The Nazi soldiers rounded up about 100 Jewish families who had fled there from throughout the region. According to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust research center in Jerusalem, “Jews were loaded onto trucks, supposedly to be taken home. In fact, the victims were taken outside the village toward a ravine located 50 meters south of the village. There the victims were shot or probably severely wounded and then doused with some highly flammable liquid and then set on fire.” A month later, on 13 August, Unteroffizier Christ was killed in battle.

Three days before, on 10 August, the Wehrmacht reached the outskirts of Stalingrad. On that day, Private Eduard Freund, born in Kallstadt, was killed. He was the first cousin once removed of Donald Trump, the son of Donald’s great aunt Elisabetha Trump and Karl Phillip Freund. Private Freund served in a security unit, the fourth company of the Sicherungs-Battalion 790, whose task of guarding supply lines and police work quickly turned, like that of all such units, into the operation of wholesale brutal terror. He was one of those soldiers from “all walks of life” described in historian Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, who found themselves occupiers in eastern Europe to execute the regime’s policies, often under the control of the SS, where “mass murder and routine had become one”, murdering partisans and civilians alike, and systematically killing Jews. The policy was justified in a phrase – Jude gleich Bolschewik gleich Partisan, or “Jew equals Bolshevik equals Partisan”.

If “blood” is the biological marker of indelible personal, racial and ethnic character, by his own reasoning Trump’s organic linkage to Nazis must inexorably explain his unapologetic Hitlerian politics. On Fox News, in March, Howard Kurtz, the host of its show Media Buzz, interviewed Trump. “Why do you use words like ‘vermin’ and ‘poisoning of the blood’?” he asked. “The press, as you know, immediately reacts to that by saying, ‘Well, that’s the kind of language that Hitler and Mussolini used.’” To which Trump replied, “Because our country is being poisoned.”

But another Trump relative stands as a repudiation of Trump’s theory. John G Trump, Fred’s younger brother, did not go into real estate. Instead, he earned a master’s degree in physics and a doctorate in electrical engineering. He became a co-inventor of high-voltage electrostatic generators, which during the second world war he applied to advancements in radar. He served as the secretary of the microwave committee created by the federal government’s new National Defense Research Committee. After the war, he was appointed director of MIT’s High-Voltage Research Laboratory, whose work he used in cancer research and on environmental pollution.

His obituary in Physics Today in 1985 by a colleague paid tribute to his personal virtues as well as his scientific contributions: “Trump’s remarkable personality mix contributed to all of this achievement and success. He was remarkably even-tempered, with kindness and consideration to all, never threatening or arrogant in manner, even when under high stress. He was outwardly and in appearance the mildest of men, with a convincing persuasiveness, carefully marshaling all his facts.” Furthermore, wrote his eulogist, “He cared very little for money and the trappings of money.”

In other words, John Trump was nothing at all like his bullying, ignorant and greedy nephew, who bears the middle name “John”, the only apparent correspondence between them. The resemblance, regardless of genetics, is nil. Yet Trump cites him as proof of his intelligence, a case positive of “blood”. “I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr John Trump. A genius,” Trump said in an interview with CNN in 2015. “It’s in my blood. I’m smart. Great marks. Like really smart.” From time to time, he brings up his uncle as his forebear of his own “genius”. “Good genes, very good genes. OK, very smart.”

Through his distorted lens, Trump’s uncle, who was the opposite of a narcissist, serves as a rationale for his narcissism. He is held up as an example of Trump’s “blood” mania, though the scientist in the family had no use for the sort of malevolent superstition the Nazis propagated and his nephew mimics.

Trump designates his blood as superior and the blood of those he chooses to demonize as inferior. “Well, I think I was born with a drive for success,” Trump told CNN in 2010. “I’m a gene believer. Hey, when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse. And I really was – you know, I had a – a good gene pool from the standpoint of that.”

“I have an Ivy League education, smart guy, good genes. I have great genes and all that stuff, which I’m a believer in,” Trump informed a crowd in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 2016. He had recently called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States.

“You have good genes, you know that, right?” Trump told another nearly all-white rally during his 2020 campaign in a Minnesota town that had voted against accepting refugees. “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.” He compared and contrasted. “Every family in Minnesota needs to know about sleepy Joe Biden’s extreme plan to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet.”

“Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?” Trump bemoaned in a White House meeting in 2018. He pointed to Haiti – “take them out” – El Salvador, and the entire continent of Africa. “We should have more people from Norway.”

This April, at a fundraiser with donors at Mar-a-Lago, Trump proudly recalled his “shithole countries” moment to elaborate on his categories of acceptable and unacceptable immigrants. “And when I said, you know, ‘Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries,’ I’m trying to be nice. Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”

Trump claims he has not read Mein Kampf. His first wife, Ivana Trump, said he “reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed”, Vanity Fair reported in 1990. Trump explained it was a gift from a Jewish friend. Then, he told Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

As Trump ginned up his third campaign, Hugh Hewitt, a rightwing radio talk show host, tried to help cleanse Trump of taint from his “poison in the blood” incantations. “Now, Mr President,” said the deferential Hewitt, “your critics say that you are using Hitlerian language that was used to dehumanize Jews by saying that Jewish blood cannot be part of German blood. Do you have anything like that in mind when you say poisoning our blood?”

“No, and I never knew that Hitler said it, either, by the way,” Trump replied. “And I never read Mein Kampf. They said I read Mein Kampf. These are people that are disinformation, horrible people that we’re dealing with. I never read Mein Kampf.”

Asked again by Hewitt, Trump answered, “First of all, I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works. They say that he said something about blood. He didn’t say it the way I said it, either, by the way.” Then, after showing he was familiar with Hitler’s “blood” obsession that he had just said he did not know about, he repeated his “poison” meme eight times.

“I know nothing” was the comic punchline of Sergeant Schultz, the buffoonish Nazi prisoner-of-war camp guard from the 1960s television series Hogan’s Heroes. “I know nothing” has been a useful if transparently false tactic of deflection for Trump, from David Duke – “I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?” – to the Proud Boys.

After the violent neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in 2017, ringing with chants of “Jews will not replace us,” attended by a number of Proud Boys, Trump infamously stated, “There are fine people on both sides.”

When Chris Wallace, the moderator of the 2020 CNN presidential debate, asked Trump if he would denounce white supremacists, he replied, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” a message to the neo-fascist paramilitary group that would be the shock troops in the attack on the Capitol on January 6. After the debate, he told reporters, “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are.” Now, he has pledged to pardon those Proud Boys and others serving prison terms for their actions in the insurrection of January 6. He refers to them as “hostages”.

White supremacists, neo-fascists and neo-Nazis attach themselves to Trump, sometimes appearing as more than a fringe – including, recently, the self-proclaimed “Black Nazi” Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, whom Trump called “Martin Luther King on steroids.”

Neo-Nazis just seem to pop up weirdly on Trump’s property. At Mar-a-Lago, on 22 November 2022, Trump had a night to remember: dinner with the anti-Semitic rapper Kanye West, aka Ye, and Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi, who was a leader at the Charlottesville march and riot, present in the mob on January 6, and has built an antisemitic following he calls the “Groypers”. Afterward, when the press reported on the dinner, Trump issued a statement that Ye brought “a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about”.

Trump’s footsie with Nazis mingles narcissism with Nazism. But it is his belief in the far-right “replacement theory”, which is the central idea of his campaign, that provides the greatest illumination on what are more than overlapping coincidences. The historical lineage of poisonous ideas, rather than “poison in the blood”, explains Trump’s doctrine of a master race, whether Trump is aware or not of the origins of his venom.

Trump’s embrace of the replacement theory may owe a good deal to its relentless promotion by its chief exponent, Tucker Carlson, who also serves as an intellectual mentor to JD Vance. On more than 400 shows when Carlson was on Fox News, according to the New York Times, “he has amplified the idea that a cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration”.

On his 2 September podcast, Carlson interviewed a self-proclaimed “non-racist fascist”, Darryl Cooper, whom he introduced as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”. For two hours, he held forth on Winston Churchill as the “chief villain of the Second World War” and the Holocaust as an accident forced on Hitler. Despite Carlson’s Nazi fascination, his principal influence has been as a recent popularizer of a doctrine developed more than a century ago.

Trump’s replacement theory is derivative of the nativism of eugenicists and “race scientists”, especially Madison Grant, whose 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, warned against “the old stock being crowded out” by “swarms of Polish Jews” and other aliens, who were pushing aside “the Nordic man”, and fostering “suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race”.

Grant served as an adviser to the congressional members who wrote the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration of those ethnic groups from eastern and southern Europe that he deemed inferior, closing out Italians and Jews. He also helped write laws in the south banning interracial marriage.

Hitler regarded Grant’s book in his speeches as scientific proof and wrote him an admiring letter telling him it was his “Bible”. “It was America, in spite of its enormous territory, that was the first country to teach us by its immigration law that a nation should not open its doors equally to all races,” Hitler told the New York Times in an interview on 20 December 1931, before he seized power. “Let China be for the Chinese, America for the Americans and Germany for the Germans.” In 1936 the Nazis promoted The Passing of the Great Race as essential reading for Germans.

“The irony is that by putting Madison Grant’s theories into practice, the Nazis discredited those theories forever,” wrote the historian Jonathan Spiro in his biography of Madison Grant, Defending the Master Race.

That is, until Trump.

When Trump says immigration, he means race. When he says crime, he means race. When he says communism, socialism, or Democrat, he means race. When he says America is declining, he means race. When he says “American First”, he means race. When he says blood, he means race. When he says poison, he means race.

When he says race, he means Black people. When he says race, he means Hispanics. When he says race, he means Muslims. And when he says race, he means other white people, too, some less white, less pure, less clean, less acceptable depending on their ancestral origin, than others. When he says race, he means the replacement theory.

Trump has Hitler on the brain in unknowable ways until he lets his admiration seep out. “Well, but Hitler did some good things,” Trump remarked to his White House chief of staff, General John Kelly. “Well, what?” asked Kelly. “Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy,” Trump replied. Kelly was outraged. He told him, “Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.” Kelly reflected, “It’s pretty hard to believe he missed the Holocaust, though, and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theater,” Kelly told Jim Sciutto, the CNN correspondent. “But I think it’s more, again, the tough guy thing” – Trump’s insatiable need to playact.

On 17 September, Trump launched a new theme with an old echo. He made a prophecy about who should be blamed if he is defeated in the election. “I’m not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss,” he said. Then, he repeated, “If I don’t win this election – and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens because if 40%, I mean, 60% of the people are voting for the enemy…” He complained that as “the most popular person in Israel” he was not “treated right” by American Jews.

Trump’s Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner, his converted Jewish daughter Ivanka, his Jewish grandchildren, his Jewish adviser Stephen Miller, who is poised to be the implementer of the replacement theory and deportation of millions, including legal immigrants, and his Jewish supporters and donors are exempt from his condemnation of “the Jewish people”. Trump’s family ties don’t give him pause from his obsession. His “blood” makes them kosher. In the case of an inconvenient contradiction his narcissism prevails.

Trump’s blame game is his version of the Dolchstosslegende – the stab in the back legend – that Germany did not lose the first world war in battle but was betrayed on the home front by Jews and leftists. Hitler traced his political awakening to his understanding of the Dolchstoss.

Now, after all Trump has done for the Jews, after all he has done for Israel, “the Jewish people” are ungrateful. Too many of them support “the enemy”. Trump is warming up his myth of a scapegoat.

Hurricane Kirk is heading towards Europe. At its peak strength in the mid-Atlantic, Kirk reached category 4 status with maximum wind speeds of 145mph. As Kirk tracks north-east towards Europe, leaving the warm seas behind, it is expected to be downgraded to a category 1 hurricane by Monday.

Over the next few days, Kirk will undergo extratropical transition, becoming an ex-hurricane by the time it reaches Europe’s shores on Tuesday or Wednesday. Although there remains some model differences in the exact path of extratropical cyclone Kirk, it is projected to track across northern Europe with France, Belgium, the Netherlands and then northern Germany having the strongest winds and heaviest rain. Southernmost parts of the UK may experience some heavy rainfall if the system tracks ever so slightly further north.

Hurricane activity remains strong in the Atlantic, with Hurricane Leslie also being closely monitored. Leslie, situated in the mid-Atlantic, was upgraded to a category 1 hurricane on Saturday, with maximum sustained winds reaching 90mph by Sunday evening. Leslie is not forecast to last long and is expected to be downgraded back to a tropical storm by Tuesday morning, with no interaction with land.

A tropical disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico, named Milton, has recently been upgraded to tropical storm status, marking the 13th tropical storm to date in the Atlantic this season. Milton is projected to rapidly intensify to major hurricane status as it tracks towards Florida over the coming days. While there is still some uncertainty on the exact track and intensity of the system, damaging winds, heavy rain, and a life-threatening storm surge are possible across parts of the west coast of the Florida peninsula. This will be barely a week after Hurricane Helene caused significant loss of life and devastation across a number of states.

Meanwhile, in South America, drought remains a major crisis for many after months of below normal rainfall. This led to extensive wildfires in Brazil only a few weeks ago. Water levels across the Amazon River have been decreasing for months, with levels reaching a 120-year low at the Port of Manus, which lies on the Negro River tributary in northern Brazil, according to Brazil’s geological service. Water levels here measured 12.66 metres, compared with an average of 21 metres, and are expected to continue dropping for several weeks.

Rivers dried up at the highest rate in three decades in 2023, putting global water supply at risk, data has shown.

Over the past five years, there have been lower-than-average river levels across the globe and reservoirs have also been low, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) State of Global Water Resources report.

In 2023, more than 50% of global river catchment areas showed abnormal conditions, with most being in deficit. This was similar in 2022 and 2021. Areas facing severe drought and low river discharge conditions included large territories of North, Central and South America; for instance, the Amazon and Mississippi rivers had record low water levels. On the other side of the globe, in Asia and Oceania, the large Ganges, Brahmaputra and Mekong river basins experienced lower-than-normal conditions almost over the entire basin territories.

Climate breakdown appears to be changing where water goes, and helping to cause extreme floods and droughts. 2023 was the hottest year on record, with rivers running low and countries facing droughts, but it also brought devastating floods across the globe.

The extremes were also influenced, according to the WMO, by the transition from La Niña to El Niño in mid-2023. These are naturally occurring weather patterns; El Niño refers to the above-average sea-surface temperatures that periodically develop across the east-central equatorial Pacific, while La Niña refers to the periodic cooling in those areas. However, scientists say climate breakdown is exacerbating the impacts of these weather phenomena and making them more difficult to predict.

Areas that faced flooding included the east coast of Africa, the North Island of New Zealand, and the Philippines.

In the UK, Ireland, Finland and Sweden, there was above-normal discharge, which is the volume of water flowing through a river at a given point in time.

“Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change,” said the WMO secretary general, Celeste Saulo. “We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods and droughts which wreak a heavy toll on lives, ecosystems and economies. Melting ice and glaciers threaten long-term water security for many millions of people. And yet we are not taking the necessary urgent action.

“As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated. It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture which is conducive to heavy rainfall. More rapid evaporation and drying of soils worsen drought conditions,” she added.

These extreme water conditions put supply at risk. Currently, 3.6 billion people face inadequate access to water for at least one month a year, and this is expected to increase to more than 5 billion by 2050, according to UN Water.

Glaciers also fared badly last year, losing more than 600 gigatonnes of water, the highest figure in 50 years of observations, according to the WMO’s preliminary data for September 2022 to August 2023. Mountains in western North America and the European Alps faced extreme melting. Switzerland’s Alps lost about 10% of their remaining volume over the past two years.

“Far too little is known about the true state of the world’s freshwater resources. We cannot manage what we do not measure. This report seeks to contribute to improved monitoring, data-sharing, cross-border collaboration and assessments,” said Saulo. “This is urgently needed.”

London Wetland Centre – the capital’s branch of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust. A regular haunt, just a train ride away in Barnes. Today’s visit has an added frisson. Someone has seen a bittern, and I want a piece of the action. Some people will travel countrywide for a glimpse of a rare bird’s backside. I won’t, but will happily make a short trip across town for this most charismatic bird.

Not that the sighting’s guaranteed. Bitterns are secretive birds, fond of skulking in reedbeds, their streaky brown plumage the most effective camouflage. Factor in their relative scarcity, and any encounter is to be treasured.

Bitterns have a weird, alien quality. Streaky tubes of awkwardness, prowling through the reeds, head forward, thick neck slung low. In the right place, in breeding season, you might hear one. Their far-carrying boom – like someone blowing across the top of a milk bottle – is the deepest British bird sound. Unlike other birdsong, it’s produced by the expulsion of air through the oesophagus. Get close enough and you’ll hear clicks and wheezes as it inflates the bellows before burping out the call. Hooomb – hooomb – hooomb.

Once regarded as an ill omen, that haunting sound is a boon for modern birders. The bittern’s recovery from 19th-century near-extinction was slow, but recent restoration of reedbeds has boosted their population. And each winter, one or two choose this wetland reserve as their temporary home. A bird of the fens in the heart of London’s urban sprawl. Crazy.

The hide is empty. Tranquillity seeps into my bones. A Cetti’s warbler shouts from deep in the reeds. A cormorant perches on a post – beaky, prehistoric, strangely noble. On the island, 30 lapwings stand stoic, buffeted by the wind. Starlings scurry among them, Flash Harrys in shiny suits. Gulls, geese, ducks. No bittern.

The lapwings, spooked, fly up in a flurry. They swing round in a loose, coordinated flock, accompanied by the starlings. Sweeping low over the water, they jink to the left as if dodging a tackle. The unanimity of it is breathtaking, group telepathy at work. Nimble, elegant and mesmerising, an aerial ballet of the highest order. Enough to take me out of myself, and away from the cares of the world. I almost – almost – forget about the bittern.

Country diary is on Twitter/X at @gdncountrydiary

Al Pacino has revealed he almost died from Covid-19 in 2020, saying he “didn’t have a pulse” for several minutes.

In interviews with the New York Times and People magazine published on the weekend, the 84-year-old Godfather and Scarface actor detailed his experience with the virus, which he contracted in 2020 before a vaccine was available.

“They said my pulse was gone. It was so – you’re here, you’re not. I thought: Wow, you don’t even have your memories. You have nothing. Strange porridge,” Pacino told the New York Times.

The actor said he “felt not good – unusually not good”, and recalled having a fever and dehydration before losing consciousness. “I was sitting there in my house, and I was gone. Like that. I didn’t have a pulse,” he said.

An ambulance arrived and he woke up to a medical team in his living room including six paramedics and two doctors. “They had these outfits on that looked like they were from outer space or something,” he said. “It was kind of shocking to open your eyes and see that. Everybody was around me, and they said: ‘He’s back. He’s here.’”

Speaking to People, Pacino questioned whether he had actually died, despite a nurse confirming his lack of pulse. “I thought I experienced death. I might not have … I don’t think I died. Everybody thought I was dead. How could I be dead? If I was dead, I fainted.”

The Oscar winner told the New York Times he “didn’t see the white light or anything” and that “there’s nothing there” after death – though the experience did prompt some existential reflection.

“As Hamlet says, ‘To be or not to be’; ‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn, no traveler returns.’ And he says two words: ‘No more’. It was no more. You’re gone. I’d never thought about it in my life,” Pacino said. “But you know actors: it sounds good to say I died once. What is it when there’s no more?”

When asked by People whether his brush with death had changed how he lives, he replied: “Not at all.”

Pacino details the experience in his upcoming memoir, Sonny Boy. His latest movie – titled Modì, Three Days on the Wing of Madness – premiered last week at the 72nd San Sebastián film festival.

A Royal New Zealand Navy vessel has run aground and sunk off Samoa, the New Zealand Defence Force said in a statement on Sunday.

Manawanui, the navy’s specialist dive and hydrographic vessel, ran aground near the southern coast of Upolu on Saturday night as it was conducting a reef survey, Commodore Shane Arndell, the maritime component commander of the New Zealand Defence Force, said in a statement. All 75 crew and passengers were safe.

Late on Sunday Samoa’s acting prime minister said an oil spill was “highly probable” as a result of the sinking.

Officials in Samoa were conducting an environmental impact assessment in the area where the ship sank, Tuala Tevaga Iosefo Ponifasio said in a statement.

Several vessels responded and assisted in rescuing the crew and passengers who had left the ship in lifeboats, Arndell said.

A Royal New Zealand air force P-8A Poseidon was also deployed to assist in the rescue. The cause of the grounding was unknown and would need further investigation, New Zealand Defence Force said.

Video and photos published on local media showed the Manawanui, which cost the New Zealand government NZ$103m in 2018, listing heavily and with plumes of thick grey smoke rising after it ran aground.

The vessel later capsized and was below the surface by 9am local time, New Zealand Defence Force said.

The agency said it was “working with authorities to understand the implications and minimise the environmental impacts”.

Chief of Navy Rear Adm Garin Golding told a press conference in Auckland that a plane would leave for Samoa on Sunday to bring the rescued crew and passengers back to New Zealand.

He said some of those rescued had suffered minor injuries, including from walking across a reef.

Defence minister Judith Collins described the grounding as a “really challenging for everybody on board.“

“I know that what has happened is going to take quite a bit of time to process,” Collins told the press conference.

“I look forward to pinpointing the cause so that we can learn from it and avoid a repeat,” she said, adding that an immediate focus was to salvage “what is left” of the vessel.

Rescue operations were coordinated by Samoan emergency services and Australian Defence personnel with the assistance of the New Zealand rescue centre, according to a statement from Samoa Police, Prison and Corrections Service posted on Facebook.

Manawanui is used to conduct a range of specialist diving, salvage and survey tasks around New Zealand and across the south-west Pacific.

New Zealand’s navy is already working at reduced capacity with three of its nine ships idle due to personnel shortages.

With Reuters and Associated Press

Florida has expanded its state of emergency as it braces for a major storm expect to pummel the state’s western peninsula by midweek, after Tropical Storm Milton gathered strength and was declared a category 1 hurricane on Sunday.

The impending landfall of Milton comes days after Hurricane Helene caused devastation and destruction through large swaths of Florida and other parts of the south-east of the US including North Carolina. The death toll stands at 230 people, and is expected to rise.

Forecasters expect Milton to continue to build, and could approach a category 3 hurricane or higher as it hits the Florida peninsula on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. The National Weather Service said there could be life-threatening storm surge and damaging winds, and urged local residents to follow evacuation orders as counties began to prepare for Milton’s arrival.

Kevin Guthrie, director of Florida’s emergency management division, urged people to prepare for the “largest evacuation that we have seen most likely since 2017 Hurricane Irma”. More than 6.8 million people were evacuated for Irma.

“I highly encourage you to evacuate,” Guthrie told Floridians in a press conference.

The Tampa Bay Times reported that 51 counties are under a state of emergency which had been expanded Sunday morning as Milton strengthened.

Counties on Florida’s west coast were readying for the storm surge and flooding. Pinellas county issued mandatory evacuation orders for six hospitals, 25 nursing homes and 44 assisted living facilities, totaling about 6,600 patients, according to the county’s emergency management department. Pasco county issued mandatory evacuations to go into effect Monday at 10am for all those living in low-lying or flood-prone areas.

Residents in parts of Florida whose lives have been upended by Helene now worry that a second wave of catastrophe could be imminent as debris left by the first disaster is shifted in further overpowering rains.

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, said on Sunday that while it remains to be seen just where Milton will strike, it’s clear that Florida is going to be hit hard – “I don’t think there’s any scenario where we don’t have major impacts at this point.”

As many as 4,000 National Guard troops are helping state crews to remove debris, DeSantis said, and he directed that Florida crews dispatched to North Carolina in Helene’s aftermath return to the state to prepare for Milton.

“All available state assets … are being marshaled to help remove debris,” DeSantis said. “We’re going 24-7 … it’s all hands on deck.”

Florida is the state mostly directly in the current expected path of Milton but the National Weather Service in Wilmington North Carolina warned that local impacts in north-east South Carolina and south-east North Carolina “are currently expected to be high surf & strong rip currents along with gusty winds along the coast”.

Joe Biden on Sunday ordered an additional 500 US troops to be sent into the hurricane-stricken area of North Carolina, bringing the total of active-duty troops assisting with response and recovery to 1,500. That is on top of 6,000 national guards personnel and 7,000 federal workers.

“My administration is sparing no resource to support families,” the president said.

The new storm barreling towards the western coast of Florida presents the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Fema, with a whole new level of crises. The agency has already had to respond to swirling misinformation concerning Helene, amplified on the presidential campaign trail by Donald Trump and his surrogates.

Helene made landfall on the Florida Gulf coast on 26 September. It then ripped through Georgia and North Carolina, both of which are battleground states that are being aggressively fought over by the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns.

The Fema administrator, Deanne Criswell, told ABC News’s This Week on Sunday that claims put out by the Trump campaign that millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money had been diverted from disaster relief to house undocumented immigrants were “frankly ridiculous and just plain false”. Criswell condemned what she called a “truly dangerous narrative”.

She added that “this kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people. It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people”.

On Thursday, Trump told a rally in Saginaw, Michigan, that his Democratic opponent, the Vice-President Kamala Harris, had “spent all her Fema money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal immigrants”. Then on Sunday Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, told CNN’s State of the Union that “you have migrants being housed in luxury hotels in New York City”.

She added: “We have paid so much money from our tax dollars into the crisis that didn’t need to happen.”

The Trump line that federal funds are being redirected away from hurricane relief to housing immigrants is false. Fema does have an immigration housing fund known as the Shelter and Services Program which has been granted $650m by Congress this year, but it is separate from disaster response.

Fema has indicated that it has enough resources to deal with Helene, but may need additional funds in the event of further calamities during the hurricane season.

Trump’s falsehoods have received some pushback from Republican leaders. Thom Tillis, the US senator from North Carolina, disputed the claim that funds had been diverted to immigrants.

“We could have a discussion about the failure of this administration’s border policies and the billions of dollars it’s costing. But right now, not yet is it affecting the flow of resources to western North Carolina,” he told CBS News’s Face the Nation.

Christopher Ciccone, a multihyphenate artist, dancer, designer and younger brother of Madonna, has died aged 63.

Ciccone died Friday in Michigan, his representative Brad Taylor told the Associated Press Sunday. He had cancer.

Madonna paid tribute to her brother in an Instagram post, describing him as “the closest human to me for so long”.

“Its hard to explain our bond,” she wrote. “But it grew out of an understanding that we were different and society was going to give us a hard time for not following the status quo. We took each other‘s hands and we danced through the madness of our childhood. In fact dance was a kind of superglue that held us together.”

“I admired him. He had impeccable taste. And a sharp tongue, which he sometimes used against me but I always forgave him,” she added.

She said had not spoken for a while but when Ciccone fell ill, “we found our way back to each other. I did my best to keep him alive as long as possible. He was in so much pain towards the end … I’m glad he’s not suffering anymore. There will never be anyone like him.”

A dancer since his youth, Ciccone was deeply intertwined with his sister’s rise in pop stardom in the 1980s, appearing in music videos like Lucky Star, art directing her Blond Ambition World Tour and serving as tour director for The Girlie Show tour. He also directed music videos for Dolly Parton and Tony Bennett.

In 2008, Ciccone released a bestselling autobiography called Life with My Sister Madonna in which he wrote about their strained relationship, her romantic entanglements as well as recollections from his time on tour with her. For two decades, he was by her side, choreographing, directing, dressing and helping his sister. He also interior designed her homes in New York, Miami and Los Angeles. He said that it was a bit like a marriage at times.

“It was a double-edged sword,” he told Good Morning America in 2008. “Nobody was chaining me down to make – to stay.”

The book, and his no-filter descriptions of the exploits of his sister’s famous circle, took its toll on some of his Hollywood friendships too. Several years later, in 2012, around the launch of a shoe collection he designed, he told the Standard that he and his sister were “on a perfectly personable level” and in contact.

“I don’t work for her, and it’s better this way,” he said.

In recent years Ciccone relocated to Michigan’s lower Peninsula to be closer to family. In 2016, Ciccone married Ray Thacker, a British actor, who was by his side when he died.

Madonna also lost her stepmother, Joan Clare Ciccone, to cancer just a few weeks ago, and her older brother Anthony Ciccone in early 2023.