Kamala Harris will do a sit-down interview with the rightwing broadcaster Fox News on Wednesday, the news channel announced on Monday, in the most dramatic moment yet in a recent media blitz by the Democratic presidential nominee.

The interview with Fox News’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, comes as Democrats have increased their presence on Fox News, part of an outreach to undecided voters and after CBS News’s 60 Minutes became embroiled in a controversy when rightwing critics have said they edited an interview to make Harris appear more succinct.

In a press release, Fox said the interview with the vice-president would take place on Wednesday 16 October and hit the airwaves on Special Report with Bret Baier and be broadcast at 6.00pm.

Harris’s appearance comes after weeks of criticism that she was avoiding all but the softest of sit-downs, including with Oprah Winfrey, ABC’s morning talk-in The View, with the former shock jock Howard Stern and with Late Night’s Stephen Colbert.

Harris has also appeared on the podcast Call Me Daddy. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is reported to be going on Joe Rogan’s Full Send before election day.

The Fox announcement comes after the Time magazine owner, Marc Benioff, complained on Sunday that Harris had denied multiple interview requests. Benioff said the denial was “unlike every other presidential candidate”, including Biden and Trump.

“We believe in transparency and publish each interview in full,” Benioff wrote on X. Why isn’t the Vice President engaging with the public on the same level?”

Harris’s sit-down with Fox News will be her first formal interview with the network – but not the first for Democratic campaign surrogates. With at least three times the viewership of CNN and MSNBC, candidates looking for votes often make Fox a pragmatic choice.

Nielsen Media Research shows Fox News is the highest-rated network in all swing states. According to a recent YouGov poll – 54% of Republicans, 22% of Democrats and 28% of independent voters had watched the cable station in the past month.

Jessica Loker, vice-president of politics at the network, told Bloomberg that the network saw ratings go up when Democrats are on. Baier told Axios: “If you build it, they will come.”

It’s also well-worn path for Democrats in this election cycle. The Transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has been on the network so often he introduced himself at the Democratic party convention in August with: “I’m Pete Buttigieg and you might recognize me from Fox News.”

Buttigieg said he was proud to go on conservative outlets to speak on behalf of the Democrats because their arguments and facts might not otherwise be aired to a Fox audience.

So too have the Democratic governors Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer, and the senators Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, John Fetterman and Chris Coons also dropped in on the network.

Harris appearance points to an effort to escape Democrats’ ideologically aligned media bubbles in the effort for votes.

“We have so many hyper-close elections in swing states that even if you only get a point or two that you take away from Republicans and put in your column can be the 10,000 votes that give you that swing state,” the University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato told the Guardian last month.

Donald Trump has provoked an angry backlash from Democrats after calling for the US armed forces to be turned against his political adversaries when voters go to the polls at next month’s presidential election.

In comments that added further fuel to fears of an authoritarian crackdown if he recaptures the White House, the Republican nominee said the military or national guard should be deployed against opponents that he called “the enemy within” when the election takes place on 5 November.

He singled out the California congressman, Adam Schiff, who was the lead prosecutor in the ex-president’s first impeachment trial, as posing a bigger threat to a free and fair election than foreign terrorists or illegal immigrants, his usual prime target for abuse.

Trump’s comments, to Fox News in response to a question on possible election “chaos”, triggered an angry reaction from Kamala Harris’s campaign, which likened them to previous remarks that he would be a dictator “on day one” of a second presidency and his suggestions that the US constitution should be terminated to overturn the 2020 election result, which he falsely claims was stolen by Joe Biden.

Trump and the vice-president are locked in a tight contest as election day looms. Most national polls put Harris narrowly ahead, but in the crucial swing states which will decide the election, the contest appears much tighter and offers Trump numerous paths to a potential victory.

After initially saying election chaos would not come from his side, Trump launched a vituperative attack on his opponents when the interviewer, Maria Bartiromo, raised the possibility of outside agitators or immigrants who had committed crimes.

“I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people,” he said on Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures programme.

“It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the national guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and expert on fascism at New York University, told NBC that Trump was flagging up what he planned to do as president, which she compared to the “‘strongman’ ruling templates of Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin, the leaders of Hungary, India and Russia respectively.

“He’s actually rehearsing, in a sense, what he would be doing as head of state, which is what Orbán does, Modi is doing, Putin has long done,” she said.

Trump also turned his fire on Schiff, who is a candidate for the US Senate in next month’s poll. He said: “The thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff.”

It was his second attack in two days on Schiff, who earned Trump’s enmity when he was the ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee during his presidency, when he said there was evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016. The House later voted, under Republican leadership, to censure Schiff over his comments.

At a rally in Coachella, California – a state he has virtually no chance of winning – on Saturday, Trump mocked Schiff’s physical characteristics and labelled him a bigger threat than foreign adversaries, including the Chinese president Xi Jinping.

“He [Xi] is somebody that we can handle,” Trump said. “The worst people are the enemies from within, the sleaze bags, the guy that you’re going to elect to the Senate, shifty Adam Schiff. He’s a major low-life.”

He claimed, without providing evidence, that Schiff was engaged in mass voter fraud. “They send millions and million of ballots all over the place,” he said. “[In] California, you don’t have anything like a voting booth. They take ballots and they just send them all over the place. They come back and they say, oh, somebody won by 5m votes.”

Schiff responded on Twitter/X by accusing Trump of inciting violence in the same manner as he was widely accused of doing on 6 January 2021, when a mob attacked the US Capitol in an effort to stop certification of Biden’s election win.

“Today, Trump threatened to deploy the military against the ‘enemies from within.’ The same thing he has called me,” Schiff wrote.

“Just as he incited a mob to attack the Capitol, he again stokes violence against those who oppose him.”

Harris’s campaign issued a more extensive condemnation. “Donald Trump is suggesting that his fellow Americans are worse ‘enemies’ than foreign adversaries, and he is saying he would use the military against them,” campaign spokesperson Ian Samms said.

“Taken with his vow to be a dictator on ‘day one’, calls for the ‘termination’ of the constitution, and plans to surround himself with sycophants who will give him unchecked, unprecedented power if he returns to office, this should alarm every American who cares about their freedom and security.

“What Donald Trump is promising is dangerous, and returning him to office is simply a risk Americans cannot afford.”

While Trump, being out of power, will be in no position to deploy troops on election day, his call for military power to quell political opposition is familiar, recalling his demand that soldiers be deployed in the streets of Washington DC in 2020 to disperse thousands of demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd.

Gen Mark Milley, the then chairperson of the joint chiefs of staff, reportedly came close to resigning over the demand.

Milley, who has since fallen foul of Trump, is quoted in a new book by Bob Woodward – the journalist who, along with Carl Bernstein, helped to expose the Watergate scandal of the 1970s – as calling the ex-president “a toal fascist” and has voiced fears that he could be recalled to service and court-martialled if he returns to office.

Donald Trump railed against a just released biopic about his life in a social media screed early on Monday, calling it a “cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job” meant to thwart his presidential candidacy.

The Apprentice portrays how Trump created his real estate empire under the tutelage of Roy Cohn, a notoriously cutthroat attorney and power-broker in 1970s and 1980s New York City, Intelligencer notes. Trump is played by the Marvel actor Sebastian Stan and Cohn by the Succession star Jeremy Strong.

Trump’s ex-wife Ivana Trump is played by Maria Bakalova – whose breakout role in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm landed her an Academy award nomination. There is a disclaimer at the beginning of The Apprentice indicating that portions were “fictionalized for dramatic purposes”, Intelligencer notes.

In his rant Trump described the film as “fake and classless”. Trump said he hoped it would “bomb” and alleged that it was “put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country, ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’”

The Apprentice has spurred praise and controversy since its premiere at the Cannes film festival in May. The screenwriter, Gabriel Sherman, described numerous roadblocks in its production.

Actors were reluctant to “humanize” Trump, Sherman said in Vanity Fair, and Hollywood institutions did not want to fund the project. And, the most significant investor into this project allegedly threatened to kill the film after viewing it.

This investor was Dan Snyder, a billionaire who formerly owned the NFL’s Washington Commanders and a major Trump supporter. Snyder reportedly invested in The Apprentice through his son-in-law Mark Rapaport’s film production company, Variety said.

“He was under the impression that it was a flattering portrayal of the 45th president,” the outlet reported.

The Apprentice is anything but. It contains a scene in which Trump’s character appears to sexually assault his first wife, Ivana, takes amphetamines, undergoes liposuction, and receives a hair transplant.

Ivana claimed that Trump raped her during a divorce deposition, but later recanted this allegation. Trump has denied attacking Ivana. Trump, who has been found liable of sexually abusing the writer E Jean Carroll in civil court, has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 20 women.

Trump’s lawyers sent The Apprentice’s film-makers cease-and-desist letters, and prominent distributors would not go near it. “Hollywood fashions itself as a community of truth tellers,” Sherman said, “but here they were running from a movie to prepare for a Trump presidency.”

In his social media attack posted just before 1am, Trump focused on the film’s depiction of Ivana, who died in July 2022 after an accidental fall.

“My former wife, Ivana, was a kind and wonderful person, and I had a great relationship with her until the day she died,” Trump wrote. “The writer of this pile of garbage, Gabe Sherman, a lowlife and talentless hack, who has long been widely discredited, knew that, but chose to ignore it.

“So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us. MAGA2024!”

The film’s director, Ali Abbasi, seemed unbothered by Trump’s Truth Social invective.

“Thanks for getting back to us @realDonaldTrump,” Abbasi posted on X this morning, with a screenshot of his post. “I am available to talk further if you want. Today is a tight day w a lot of press for #TheApprentice but i might be able to give you a call tomorrow.”

Asked to elaborate on Trump’s statement, his campaign pointed to Sherman’s comments about fictionalization in the film.

“The filmmakers now readily admit they fabricated scenes and created fake stories to fit some deranged narrative about President Trump that is completely untrue. This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” Steven Cheung, Trump campaign communications director, said in a statement.

Cheung likened the film to purported “witch-hunts” by his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, saying it was “election interference by Hollywood elites right before November, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.

“This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should never see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire,” Cheung also said.

North-west Europe is forecast to experience a burst of autumn warmth this week, thanks to warm air from southern Europe spreading northwards. This brief episode of warmer-than-average conditions will be driven by an amplified, or “wavy”, jet stream, which will allow warm air to push farther north.

Daytime temperatures across much of France are forecast to reach the mid-20s on Tuesday and Wednesday, with some areas in the south-west potentially exceeding this. Meanwhile, the Benelux area and south-east England are expected to reach the low-20s by midweek.

However, the most notable temperature anomalies will occur during Tuesday night, when temperatures will stay in the high teens for areas of north-west Europe, 5-10C above October averages. In parts of southern France the temperature may not drop below 20C, a phenomenon known in meteorology as a “tropical night”.

Although an amplified jet stream can sometimes result in a blocked pattern, in which conditions persist for several days, this warm period is expected to be more short-lived, ending with a bang as heavy rain and thunderstorms push in from the south-east.

Significant rainfall is possible over France’s Massif Central, with forecast models suggesting more than 100mm (3.9in) could fall within 24 hours over Wednesday and Thursday.

Recent weather patterns have also been unusual in the Sahara desert. While rain in the Sahara is not uncommon, there have been higher-than-average amounts in recent months, with some parts of the desert receiving five times their usual precipitation in September. The deserts of south-eastern Morocco – usually one of the driest regions on Earth – had two days of torrential rain that exceeded the yearly average.

Some areas recorded more than 100mm within 24 hours, with downpours unleashing destructive flood waters that resulted in 20 fatalities and devastated local agriculture, as many farmers’ harvests were washed away.

However, after six years of drought, this rainfall has brought some relief for some, replenishing groundwater aquifers vital to desert communities and refilling reservoirs at record rates.

Meteorologists suggest the increase in rainfall may be linked to a northward shift in the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), a low-pressure band circling the Earth near the equator, where winds from the northern and southern hemispheres converge. Although there is no clear explanation for the shift in the position of the ITCZ, some climate models have linked it to higher air and ocean temperatures owing to the climate crisis.

Donald Trump’s campaign has limited ability to know whether their ground game operation is reaching target voters in battleground states, as the software being used needs fast internet service to properly track canvassers, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.

The Trump campaign this cycle is targeting so-called low propensity Trump voters, who are often in rural areas, as part of their bet that hitting those people who don’t typically vote but would cast a ballot for Trump if they did, could make a difference in a close election.

But the Trump campaign and the Elon Musk-backed America Pac, which is now doing an outsized portion of the Trump ground game, use a management app called Campaign Sidekick that struggles in areas with slow internet and means canvassers have to use an offline version.

The Campaign Sidekick app effectively forces canvassers who have less than 40mbps of internet – sufficient to stream 4K video – to use “offline walkbooks” which have no geo-tracking feature and do not always upload after a route is completed, the people said.

As a result, the Trump campaign and America Pac then have little way to know whether canvassers are actually knocking on doors or whether they are cheating – for instance, by “speed-running” routes where they literally throw campaign materials at doors as they drive past.

America Pac has tried to deter cheating by sending out teams of auditors to trail canvassers, but there is no way to directly audit every offline walkbook – which is particularly high because of the Trump campaign’s focus on hitting low propensity voters.

And even when canvassers legitimately complete a route offline, that data has sometimes failed to upload afterwards, the people said. Since the canvassers are paid by the door, they have to redo their work, wasting time and potentially annoying voters for harassing them twice.

“Maybe Elon Musk can give his canvassers a Starlink,” one political operative involved in the America Pac operation joked, referring to Musk’s satellite-based mobile internet router.

The Trump campaign has fielded complaints about Sidekick for some time, the people said. At least two other super Pacs, involved in doing ground game work on behalf of the Trump campaign in battleground states, have stopped using it for their own operations.

Those wider complaints include the app crashing during peak hours when there are many people using it at once, or tech glitches like the Google Maps preview in the app, which is there for canvassers to figure out their routes, being broken.

Campaign Sidekick’s has previously pushed back at the criticism, saying it has always been upfront about the limitations of offline walkbooks and recommends to clients to track factors that could indicate fraud, such as canvassers claiming they spoke to voters for than 25% of doors they hit.

And an executive at the September Group LLC, a major canvassing vendor that was contracted by America Pac to door-knock in Arizona and Nevada until last month, said they were happy with Sidekick even if they eschewed using offline walkbooks because of its drawbacks.

The Trump campaign’s co-campaign chief Chris LaCivita dismissed the complaints, saying in a statement: “Our canvassing apps work fine, and we’ve invested in new technology this cycle that is unmatched in politics to supplement our efforts. This is a clear hit job from a failed vendor who we’ll be sure to name and shame as soon as we finish winning this campaign.”

LaCivita did not address why their suspicion hinges on a vendor, given the fact that the grievances have come primarily from their own ground game partners. The statement also failed to address that the campaign has been aware of the issues for some time.

There have been complaints about Campaign Sidekick from other groups, as well. Turning Point Action, run by the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, told the Trump campaign they encountered so many difficulties that they would use their own app in Arizona and Wisconsin and parts of Michigan.

The complaints from Turning Point have centered on having to do everything manually. If a canvasser could only complete part of a door-knocking route, they complained, there was no way for the remaining doors to be automatically reassigned to another canvasser – those voters would simply not be reached at all.

The reason why the Trump campaign has stuck with the software is not entirely clear, apart from wanting continuity.

The Trump campaign took over the RNC in March and directed America Pac to use the app in part because the Trump team was already using it itself, and the thinking was it would be easier to analyze the data if it all came through the same system, a Trump official said.

But there have been political considerations as well. The Trump campaign decided not to use other platforms such as i360 Walk, partly as a result of distrust with its owners, the Koch brothers, who have opposed Trump in the past, one of the people said.

The Trump campaign also did not use software from Advantage Inc, seeing it as inferior and because the Florida governor Ron DeSantis used that platform for his get-out-the-vote operation during his 2024 Republican primary bid against Trump.

And the Numinar platform currently being used by America First Works, another Trump-allied Pac doing ground-game work, failed to gain traction with the RNC – for reasons that remain unclear – after it was pitched as an alternative to Campaign Sidekick earlier in this presidential cycle.

I was 70 when I became a grandmother for the first time in 2023. My son Marlon had a son of his own, and while I had never been the kind of mother who was desperate to become a grandmother, I was delighted.

But it soon became clear I was entering uncharted waters. Very little about the way they entered into pregnancy and parenthood was the route I’d taken in my hippy-punk way. They were consciously well informed. I think I made it to two NCT classes. Lina – my son’s partner – had a birth doula. I’d read the one book, The Experience of Childbirth by Sheila Kitzinger, from 1962; they’d read a raft of parenting books like Philippa Perry’s recent The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read.

Then, when it came to the birth, I wasn’t able to be around. My partner (not my son’s father) and I had been planning a weekend festival in north Wales for the past year to celebrate his 80th birthday, my 70th, and our 10-year relationship. Santi, my grandson, was born in London while we were there. Lina and Marlon were very understanding about it, but I worried that missing this huge event messed up the beginning of my role as grandmother. I felt guilty that I wasn’t on hand for Marlon as Lina’s family were.

When I finally met my grandson, I was reminded that I’m not very good with tiny babies. They are such delicate little creatures, and I was afraid of doing the wrong thing. Lina and Marlon tried to support me around the basics like nappy changing, but at times it felt to me as though they didn’t trust me. That then made me feel inadequate. So I did less than I would have liked to do.

Lina’s mum seemed to know exactly what she was doing, springing up with cooked food or nappies at the right moment. Meanwhile, I was forever making too much noise, threatening to disturb the sleeping baby, or missing a text not to ring the doorbell – Santi’s parents were constantly having to shush me.

And my ideas about child rearing were out of sync with theirs. Back in the 80s, we didn’t use white noise to get our babies to sleep, we simply plonked a Moses basket in the middle of crowded restaurants or parties and expected the baby to fit in with our lives, not the other way round. The focus now was on trying to get Santi into a routine. I thought they were reading too much, while they were horrified that I seemed to remember so little about what I used to do.

A mini-battleground was forming, which culminated in some uncomfortable attempts to explain and understand each other’s points of view.

However, the real lightbulb moment came after they went away to Colombia for a couple of months when Santi was eight months old. I was all in favour: I’m a big fan of travel as education. And they came back so much more relaxed. A new flexibility had arrived, partially brought about by long treks, including wading through rivers with Santi in a carrier on their chests. I, in turn, started to understand some of their parenting philosophy and respect it. How and why they were feeding him the food they were eating in Colombia – amazing fruits like soursop and dragon fruit, rather than supermarket jars of puree. That they were keeping him away from sugar and salt, mostly. Watching Santi eat, I remembered all the tinned spaghetti that Marlon had consumed with less pride.

I loved how Lina was only speaking Spanish to him so that he will be bilingual. And how they navigate saying yes and no. They don’t avoid saying no to their son, but they explain why they are saying no. There is negotiation involved. This is a tender, considered kind of parenting, which makes me wish that I’d been more able to be like that – particularly the understanding shown to Santi when he doesn’t want to do something. In that way, I had been less questioning about my own parents’ parenting, and carried it on.

Looking back, I began to see that some of the new ways of parenting had been benefiting me all along – I had been so touched, for example, that Lina and Marlon shared the news of their pregnancy before the “traditional” 12-week scan because they wanted the grandparents to feel part of the process. When I was pregnant, I waited, as I didn’t think my mother would have wanted to be involved.

Now I can see that whatever new forms of parenting are introduced in whatever era, it can feel not just like an invitation to reflect on your own parenting, but also unconsciously like an attack on it. No wonder there is such tension during these crucial transitional times.

And so, gradually, my hippy-punk parenting has turned into an eager-to-find-out kind of modern grandmothering: 14 months on, I find myself listening to my son and his partner a lot more than I used to. After all, they have researched and discussed what they’re doing, so it’s the least I can do.

Recently, I was immersed in all the different sounds that Santi makes and began distinguishing the layers of want and joy in them. There’s one mammammam sound that is a cry of I want that now. I found myself on the brink of declaring it a “bad” sound when my hand flew to my mouth. Be less mouthy – that’s my modern grandmother motto.

• Rose Rouse is the editor and co-founder of Advantages of Age, a social enterprise challenging media stereotypes around ageing

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It begins each day at nightfall. As the light disappears, billions of zooplankton, crustaceans and other marine organisms rise to the ocean surface to feed on microscopic algae, returning to the depths at sunrise. The waste from this frenzy – Earth’s largest migration of creatures – sinks to the ocean floor, removing millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year.

This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions.

But as the Earth heats up, scientists are increasingly concerned that those crucial processes are breaking down.

In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.

There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor.

“We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems. We’re seeing massive cracks on land – terrestrial ecosystems are losing their carbon store and carbon uptake capacity, but the oceans are also showing signs of instability,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told an event at New York Climate Week in September.

“Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end,” he said.

The 2023 breakdown of the land carbon sink could be temporary: without the pressures of drought or wildfires, land would return to absorbing carbon again. But it demonstrates the fragility of these ecosystems, with massive implications for the climate crisis.

Reaching net zero is impossible without nature. In the absence of technology that can remove atmospheric carbon on a large scale, the Earth’s vast forests, grasslands, peat bogs and oceans are the only option for absorbing human carbon pollution, which reached a record 37.4bn tonnes in 2023.

At least 118 countries are relying on the land to meet national climate targets. But rising temperatures, increased extreme weather and droughts are pushing the ecosystems into uncharted territory.

The kind of rapid land sink collapse seen in 2023 has not been factored into most climate models. If it continues, it raises the prospect of rapid global heating beyond what those models have predicted.

‘We have been lulled – we cannot see the crisis’

For the past 12,000 years, the Earth’s climate has existed in a fragile equilibrium. Its stable weather patterns allowed the development of modern agriculture, which now supports a population of more than 8 billion people.

As human emissions rose, the amount absorbed by nature increased too: higher carbon dioxide can mean plants grow faster, storing more carbon. But this balance is beginning to shift, driven by rising heat.

“This stressed planet has been silently helping us and allowing us to shove our debt under the carpet thanks to biodiversity,” says Rockström. “We are lulled into a comfort zone – we cannot really see the crisis.”

Only one major tropical rainforest – the Congo basin – remains a strong carbon sink that removes more than it releases into the atmosphere. Exacerbated by El Niño weather patterns, deforestation and global heating, the Amazon basin is experiencing a record-breaking drought, with rivers at an all-time low. Expansion of agriculture has turned tropical rainforests in south-east Asia into a net source of emissions in recent years.

Emissions from soil – which is the second-largest active carbon store after the oceans – are expected to increase by as much as 40% by the end of the century if they continue at the current rate, as soils become drier and microbes break them down faster.

Tim Lenton, professor of climate change and Earth system science at Exeter University, says: “We are seeing in the biosphere some surprising responses that are not what got predicted, just as we are in the climate.

“You have to question: to what degree can we rely on them as carbon sinks or carbon stores?” he says.

A paper published in July found that while the total amount of carbon absorbed by forests between 1990 and 2019 was steady, it varied substantially by region. The boreal forests – home to about a third of all carbon found on land, which stretch across Russia, Scandinavia, Canada and Alaska – have seen a sharp fall in the amount of carbon they absorb, down more than a third due to climate crisis-related beetle outbreaks, fire and clearing for timber.

Combined with the declining resilience of the Amazon and drought conditions in parts of the tropics, the hot conditions in the northern forests helped drive the collapse of the land sink in 2023 – causing a spike in the rate of atmospheric carbon.

“In 2023 the accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere is very high and this translates into a very, very low absorption by the terrestrial biosphere,” says Philippe Ciais, a researcher at the French Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, who was an author of the most recent paper.

“In the northern hemisphere, where you have more than half of CO₂ uptake, we have seen a decline trend in absorption for eight years,” he says. “There is no good reason to believe it will bounce back.”

The oceans – nature’s largest absorber of CO₂ – have soaked up 90% of the warming from fossil fuels in recent decades, driving a rise in sea temperatures. Studies have also found signs that this is weakening the ocean carbon sink.

‘None of the models have factored this in’

The flow of carbon through the land and ocean remains one of the least understood parts of climate science, say researchers. While human emissions are increasingly simple to measure, the sheer number and complexity of processes in the natural world mean there are important gaps in our understanding.

Satellite technology has improved monitoring of forests, peatlands, permafrost and ocean cycles, but assessments and forecasts in international reports often have large error margins. That makes it difficult to predict how the world’s natural carbon sinks will behave in future – and means many models do not factor in a sudden breakdown of multiple ecosystems.

“Overall, models agreed that both the land sink and the ocean sink are going to decrease in the future as a result of climate change. But there’s a question of how quickly that will happen. The models tend to show this happening rather slowly over the next 100 years or so,” says Prof Andrew Watson, head of Exeter University’s marine and atmospheric science group.

“This might happen a lot quicker,” he says. “Climate scientists [are] worried about climate change not because of the things that are in the models but the knowledge that the models are missing certain things.”

Many of the latest Earth systems models used by scientists include some of the effects of global heating on nature, factoring in impacts such as the dieback of the Amazon or slowing ocean currents. But events that have become major sources of emissions in recent years have not been incorporated, say scientists.

“None of these models have factored in losses like extreme factors which have been observed, such as the wildfires in Canada last year that amounted to six months of US fossil emissions. Two years before, we wrote a paper that found that Siberia also lost the same amount of carbon,” says Ciais.

“Another process which is absent from the climate models is the basic fact that trees die from drought. This is observed and none of the models have drought-induced mortality in their representation of the land sink,” he says. “The fact that the models are lacking these factors probably makes them too optimistic.”

‘What happens if the natural sinks stop working?’

The consequences for climate targets are stark. Even a modest weakening of nature’s ability to absorb carbon would mean the world would have to make much deeper cuts to greenhouse gas emissions to achieve net zero. The weakening of land sinks – which has so far been regional – also has the effect of cancelling out nations’ progress on decarbonisation and progress towards climate goals, something that is proving a struggle for many countries.

In Australia, huge soil carbon losses from extreme heat and drought in the vast interior – known as rangelands – are likely to push its climate target out of reach if emissions continue to rise, a study this year found. In Europe, France, Germany, the Czech Republic and Sweden have all experienced significant declines in the amount of carbon absorbed by land, driven by climate-related bark beetle outbreaks, drought and increased tree mortality.

Finland, which has the most ambitious carbon neutrality target in the developed world, has seen its once huge land sink vanish in recent years – meaning that despite reducing its emissions across all industries by 43%, the country’s total emissions have stayed unchanged.

So far, these changes are regional. Some countries, such as China and the US, are not yet experiencing such declines.

“The issue of natural sinks has never really been thought about properly in political and government fields. It’s been assumed that natural sinks are always going to be with us. The truth is, we don’t really understand them and we don’t think they’re always going to be with us. What happens if the natural sinks, which they’ve previously relied on, stop working because the climate is changing?” says Watson.

In recent years, several estimates have been published on how the world could increase the amount of carbon that its forests and natural ecosystems absorb. But many researchers say the real challenge is protecting the carbon sinks and stores we already have by halting deforestation, cutting emissions and ensuring they are as healthy as possible.

“We shouldn’t rely on natural forests to do the job. We really, really have to tackle the big issue: fossil fuel emissions across all sectors,” says Prof Pierre Friedlingstein of Exeter University, who oversees the annual Global Carbon Budget calculations.

“We can’t just assume that we have forests and the forest will remove some CO₂, because it’s not going to work in the long term.”

The week Maria Bakalova was asked to consider playing Ivana Trump for the new film The Apprentice, she was in New York filming something else. With the meeting scheduled for her one day off, she spent the evening before trying to channel Donald Trump’s first wife. The film is set in the 70s and 80s, so she spent hours wading through photos of Ivana in that era. “A lot of makeup, a lot of hair,” she says. Bakalova laughs as she remembers spending the evening experimenting with a mushroom-like hairstyle and “heavy eyeliner with a lot of powder, like inches”, although she didn’t have an Ivana-esque wardrobe – “Am I gen Z or a millennial?” asks the 28-year-old. Either way, “We wear a lot of baggy clothes”, so she chose her most skintight outfit.

She met the director Ali Abbasi in the middle of the day, feeling a little clownish in her Ivana cosplay. They spoke for a couple of hours, “about people growing up in post-communist countries – because [Ivana] was from Czechoslovakia, and I was born and raised in Bulgaria – which shapes your inner world, your thoughts. We talked a lot about the similarities of our stories.”

Ivana had been a competitive skier, with a place on the national junior team that allowed her to compete outside communist Czechoslovakia in the late 60s. By the mid-90s, when Bakalova was born, Bulgaria was no longer a socialist republic but, for most people, travel outside the country was still rare. As a child, Bakalova, a competitive singer, got to travel to competitions all around Europe. It opened her eyes and instilled a sense of independence.

This is Bakalova’s highest profile role since her big break in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2020 mockumentary sequel about the Kazakhstani reporter Borat Sagdiyev. She played Borat’s daughter, Tutar, in a performance so cringingly brilliant it got her an Oscar nomination. Despite this early success, Bakalova says her agents warned her not to get her hopes up about the role of Ivana – higher profile US actors were also in the running. “What I think is important is that [Abbasi] gave a chance to an eastern European to compete,” she says. “To have the opportunity, rather than just playing a prostitute or a crazy Russian scientist or a mobster or somebody that is just in the background with a few lines.”

It was six months before she found out that she’d got the role, followed by a tortuous journey to get the film made and released. In a Vanity Fair piece, the film’s screenwriter, Gabriel Sherman, detailed the various obstacles – actors who didn’t want to “humanise” Trump, Hollywood studios and streamers who wouldn’t finance it, Trump’s Muslim travel ban that made it difficult for Abbasi, who is Iranian and based in Denmark, to work in the US (as well as the actors’ strikes and a global pandemic). The Apprentice’s largest investor, a film-making son-in-law of a billionaire and prominent Trump donor, reportedly threatened to sink the film once he’d seen it, because of a scene in which the Trump character appears to rape his wife. Ivana alleged Trump raped her in her divorce deposition, but later retracted. Trump’s lawyers sent the film-makers cease-and-desist letters and the big American distributors wouldn’t touch it. “Hollywood fashions itself as a community of truth tellers,” wrote Sherman, “but here they were running from a movie to prepare for a Trump presidency.”

“We’ve been facing a bit of difficulty to release it,” says Bakalova, with comic understatement.

In the film, Trump (played by a toupeed Sebastian Stan) is ambitious but slightly awkward and in the shadow of his father, then mentored and moulded by nefarious lawyer Roy Cohn (played, typically magnificently, by Succession’s Jeremy Strong). A cinephile, Bakalova was desperate to work with Abbasi – she was a huge fan of his work, including Holy Spider, the Iranian serial killer film. She wanted, she says, to be involved in his “dive into the underbelly of the American empire”. The more she researched Trump’s first wife – and the mother of three of his children – the more she found herself fascinated by how much Ivana achieved on her own. “She wanted to be Donald’s partner,” she says. Ivana is credited with promoting the couple’s 80s glitz, she was involved in running part of his businesses and managed New York’s Plaza hotel. “I think she was the reason he achieved so much early because she was very smart, very ambitious.”

In the film, the power balance between Ivana and Donald is in her favour at the start of their relationship; Ivana is horrified at the idea of a prenup, and the measly amount it would give her in the event of a separation, and negotiates a better deal. “I saw an interview with her after the divorce, saying she didn’t know anything about prenups, and why do you need to have them? But if you’re going to play this game that way, if that’s going to be the picture of our marriage, OK, I’m going to play the same way.”

How did she feel about the inclusion of the alleged rape in the film? Trump has always denied the allegations, since retracted by Ivana, who died in 2022. Bakalova says she trusted Sherman. “Do I think it’s important to have it out there?” she says. “Do I think it’s a crucial scene for both of the characters? It is, because we see somebody completely dismissing the person who built him in a lot of ways, who gave birth to his children. Not only physically, but verbally as well.”

She says she doesn’t think it matters if the film “humanises” Trump (reviews have said it lacks bite). “When you dive deeper into a human being, there’s always good and bad sides, and there are always decisions that you make based on circumstances, people you surround yourself with, that change your point of view … I think we should step away from the idea of demonising people or creating idols, because people are complex.” That said, she also describes Trump as “one of the most vicious people of our century”.

The Borat sequel was released less than two weeks before the 2020 US election, with the words “now vote” flashed up at the end. The Apprentice is also coming out around election time. Is it intended to have any influence? No, says Bakalova – it’s been too long in the making for any kind of intentional timing. “This is not a political film, this is not a hit piece,” she says. Although there are clear echoes, deafening in parts, of who the Trump character will later become. “Will it change opinions? I don’t know. But I feel like the biggest privilege that we have living in a democracy is to share our voices and to have an opinion, one way or another.”

Bakalova grew up in Burgas, a city on the Black Sea coast. Her mother was a nurse, and her father a chemist; she is an only child. They were considered middle-class, she says, but she remembers as a child that nobody in Bulgaria had much.

“Because of communism and because of inflation, because of a lot of things. I remember back in the 90s, chewing gum going from 100 bucks to 10 bucks to one penny.” They were comfortable, financially, she says, “but it’s not so easy that you can allow yourself to just rest and wait for something to happen. You know that you have to do something if you’re going to succeed.”

Her love of the arts started with music. Her father would play the guitar at home, and she grew up listening to rock music and wanting to emulate those musicians. “Unfortunately, again, growing up in Bulgaria and in a place that still has some kind of patriarchy mindset, playing guitar is a little bit too masculine.” Instead, she became a flautist and was also singing in the choirs that would take her around Europe to various competitions.

When she was 12, she damaged her voice and stopped singing for several months to rest it. “I started reading a lot of books and imagining that I’m in different places, I want to be like these characters. How can you somehow escape real life and imagine that you’re somebody else? That was the starting point of me falling in love with acting.” Later, Bakalova would study at Sofia’s National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts.

She loves theatre and arthouse cinema, but she laughs and says “I’m not going to hide that I was always dreaming about Hollywood and America and cinema.” She remembers drawing the Hollywood sign in an exercise book at school, and writing that she was going to be “a great movie star someday. But of course, my last name finishes with ‘o-v-a’, and I didn’t see that in a lot of credits at the end of films.” One teacher told her that if she wanted to expand beyond Bulgarian film, she should try to get involved in the types of films shown on the European festival circuit.

Bakalova discovered the Danish avant garde Dogme 95 movement and, during her final year of university, used some of her scholarship money to buy flights to Copenhagen for her and her parents. She had an ambitious plan to march into the offices of Lars von Trier’s production company, Zentropa. “I was, like, ‘I’m going there, and I’m going to say, ‘I am willing to work here for free, to study, to learn how you guys do all of these incredible movies.’” She laughs, remembering her and her mother in the rain, Googling the office address. (They were kind, but sent her away, saying she would have to be fluent in Danish, which she then vowed to study.)

Not long afterwards, Bakalova was shooting a Bulgarian French film, Women Do Cry, in which she played a young woman with HIV, when she heard through a friend about a project, which she would later find out was Borat, which required an eastern European actor. So secretive was the process that she feared she was being conned into human trafficking, but she was also tempted by the chance to audition in the UK – she thought she might get a chance, somehow, to meet the British director Andrea Arnold.

In Borat, her character Tutar dreams of becoming like “Princess Melania” and becomes the “gift” Borat is supposed to deliver to one of Trump’s men, first the vice-president Mike Pence, and then Rudy Giuliani, to strengthen relations between their countries. Bakalova was a revelation in the film, infusing her character with a life-changing feminist trajectory while also having to pull off some excruciating scenes with “real” people, including leading an anti-abortion campaigner at a clinic to believe she was pregnant with her father’s baby and describing, to a group of women at a Republican conference, having just masturbated for the first time in the loos.

“I don’t know how I did it,” she laughs. “I don’t know if I will I ever be able to do it again. It’s so strange, and I think that is why Sacha’s work is so brilliant. He challenges people, he does these movies that are like a social experiment of how far can you go?” It was “definitely difficult” she says. With only one shot, did it feel like a lot of pressure not to mess it up, or come out of character? “Sacha was so gracious, he was holding my hand every step of the way and guiding me, and I trusted him.”

There is a scene with Giuliani, which created a lot of attention. Tutar, by now a reporter for a rightwing news channel, is conducting a fawning interview with the former New York mayor and attorney to Trump in a hotel suite, before suggesting they go to the bedroom. Giuliani is filmed lying back on the bed with his hands down the front of his trousers (later, he claimed he was rearranging his clothes after removing a microphone). Was it the plan to get him in the bedroom? “You can only plan so much, but it’s about real people, real places, real situations. You can have goals that you want to achieve, but it depends on the moment. It was ideal to see how far things can get.” Was she nervous? “It was nerve-racking, because you don’t know how these things are going to turn. We worked with a great team of people. We had a great security team, we had a great stunt team. We had a lot of people that made sure we were all safe.”

It helps, she says, having female producers – Monica Levinson on Borat, and Amy Baer on The Apprentice. “It’s important to have a female perspective behind the scenes, [and] if you’re doing such challenging roles, both as Ivana or Tutar, having a female there looking after you, looking after the story.”

Bakalova has voiced a character in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 (Cosmo the Spacedog), was in the dark comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies and has just finished shooting a family drama, Learning to Breathe Underwater – but in Borat and The Apprentice, her two standout films are about Trump. It is strange, she admits, but adds: “I think Borat is not about Trump. I do find a few similarities between the movies because they explore the American empire, and that land that we all have heard is the place you can feel freedom and opportunity. But both movies show there is always a dark side to it.”

The Apprentice is released in cinemas on 18 October.

A five-person team of expert shooters will soon target feral cats in New South Wales national parks as the state steps up efforts to control the pest animals.

The intensive ground operation is being deployed in response to increased cat numbers, according to National Parks and Wildlife Service deputy secretary, Atticus Fleming.

“Intensive, well-targeted ground shooting operations will now be part of an enhanced strategy including trials of cat baits, deployment of innovative cat traps, establishing large feral-cat free areas and exploring genetic controls,” he said in a statement.

Jack Gough, advocacy director at the Invasive Species Council, welcomed the “modest investment” in improved feral cat management. He said he hoped it would involve long-term funding for the positions, and be part of a broader plan for controlling both feral and roaming pet cats.

“Every day, 5 million native mammals, birds, reptiles and frogs are killed by feral and roaming pet cats in Australia,” he said.

“Feral cats have sent at least 25 of our native species extinct since they were introduced by Europeans over 200 years ago,” Gough said. “Large numbers of our native species are at direct risk of going extinct because of the impacts of feral cats and because they are such effective hunters and killers.”

Populations of feral cats, deer, pigs and invasive weeds often increased in response to rainfall and seasonal conditions, Gough explained.

Feral cats “breed up very fast”, he said. “We’ve had a couple of really good seasons in terms of rainfall, and that means that the level of feed, the level of prey, has gone up.”

“It’s not unexpected that the numbers [of feral cats] have increased. And when the numbers increase, the pressure on our native species increases as well.”

In September, the federal government announced funding for 55 feral cat control projects, and said it would release an updated national threat abatement plan later this year.

Containing the problem would require significant ongoing effort and funding from both national and state governments, Gough said, as well as the full range of tools, including ground shooting, trapping, baiting and new artificial intelligence tools.

“On top of this, we really need Premier Minns to move on the issue of bringing in clear rules about cat containment,” he said. This would bring NSW into line with the majority of other states, enabling councils to stop “roaming pets killing our neighbourhood wildlife and sending our suburbs silent”.

Some animal rights groups have opposed the use of lethal control methods for non-native species.

The Animal Justice party said while it recognised the environmental impact of non-native species, including cats, it objected to the term “feral” and supported research and policy that focused on non-lethal methods of control.

It advocated “responsible animal guardianship”, which includes keeping companion animals safe in their homes to prevent accidental breeding and abandonment.

In the Australian Capital Territory, all cats born after July 2022 must be contained on a person’s premises, with several suburbs declared cat containment areas for nature conservation reasons – meaning no cat of any age can roam further afield.