I had already been nude for a solid seven minutes when renowned artist Spencer Tunick yelled into a megaphone: “Nobody should be naked yet – there’s still 45 minutes until sunrise!”

The thousands of other naked people milling around came to a halt. We glanced at each other with confused eyes. Did he just say we shouldn’t be naked?

A few keen beans had jumped the gun, and a few more had followed suit. Some people reunited with their clothes, but for me, there was no going back.

So at 4am on Sunday, I found myself sitting in a gutter near Brisbane’s Story Bridge, soaked from the rain, completely starkers. The weirdest thing is that it didn’t feel weird at all.

I had a lot of expectations going into RISING TIDE – the latest work by Tunick, a New York-based photographer who documents the live nude figure in public – and none of them were good. I have spent a lifetime wishing there was less of me and am yet to untangle my self-worth from my appearance; the unhinged diet culture of the 90s has a lot to answer for.

My biggest fear about joining in Tunick’s shoot was that someone I know would see me. Or, more accurately, that they wouldn’t like what they saw.

So I was braced to feel self-conscious, exposed, and ashamed. I mostly signed up because I was curious about the logistics of staging such a mammoth event. But there is safety in numbers, and I felt strangely at home surrounded by 5,500 bodies – a record-breaking turnout for Tunick in Australia.

“When there’s nowhere to hide, there’s nothing to hide,” drag artist Zach told me. “All your insecurities go away.”

RISING TIDE is a sequel to TIDE, a work Tunick shot in Brisbane in 2023 as part of Melt festival, which celebrates the queer community and our allies. As we gathered in the dark across the entire length of the Story Bridge, Tunick told the crowd our “living sculpture” was a vote for diversity, equity and inclusion. It felt especially timely the morning after Queensland elected a Liberal-National Party government.

The artist relayed directions over a loudspeaker. No smiling. We faced him, then faced away. Put our arms up toward the sky, then back down. Then we lay on our backs, and rolled to one side. The road was hard and wet. Hearing others shiver, I felt grateful for the soft folds insulating my body.

At first I tried not to look at other people’s bodies, but eventually I let myself see them. Stocky bodies. Sagging bodies. Tattooed bodies. Transitioning bodies. Scarred bodies. Bony bodies. Pregnant bodies. Chiselled bodies. Bodies needing assistance from a wheelchair, a walker, a pair of crutches. Taking in this ordinary and extraordinary landscape was an act of radical self-love. It made me feel less alone.

The crowd chatted and cheered between poses. A man named Chris told me he wanted to build up the confidence to enjoy nude beaches. Reeta hoped the experience would symbolise a turning point after a difficult year. Mark joked that Brisbanites just want any excuse to walk on a closed public roadway. “It’s our culture,” he said. He’s right – 50,000 people turned out for a public walk through the newly built Clem Jones tunnel back in 2010.

After an hour, we dressed again then headed to the next location, Howard Smith Wharves. We undressed for a second time, and took up new positions along the Riverwalk that snakes along the water.

The Riverwalk felt like a Broadway stage compared to the closed-off bridge. Tourists on a passing CityCat waved and took videos. Residents of the multi-million-dollar properties overlooking the water stood on their balconies, bemused. For one man, it was a rude awakening. “What a nightmare view,” he complained. His nightmare was just beginning: our next position was a child’s pose, our bare bums shining up at him.

It was liberating, fun, and also monotonous at times. There were tedious stretches of waiting around, first in the rain and later in the blazing sun. I walked a good six kilometres across the morning, much of it a slow shuffle. I’d wanted to feel anonymous, but I felt jealous of people with friends at their side. But in the end, the only truly horrifying part of the experience was setting my alarm for 1.45am.

I was moved by tiny moments that illuminated how much we share in common: hundreds of people collectively saying “bless you” when someone sneezed; a chorus of “aww” as a golden retriever came to see what all the fuss was about; laughter as we realised nobody knew which way to turn when Tunick told us to look south. (“Face the river!” he eventually clarified.)

As we walked back along the Riverwalk, a man watching from his balcony called out. He had stripped naked in solidarity. I have never heard a crowd cheer louder in my life.

Australia has rejected far-right provocateur Candace Owens’ visa application ahead of a planned national speaking tour, with the immigration minister, Tony Burke, saying she had the “capacity to incite discord”.

The US conservative influencer and podcast host, who has advanced conspiracy theories and antisemitic rhetoric including minimising Nazi medical experiments in concentration camps, will be blocked from coming to Australia after the federal government voiced alarm about her record.

“From downplaying the impact of the Holocaust with comments about [notorious Nazi doctor Josef] Mengele through to claims that Muslims started slavery, Candace Owens has the capacity to incite discord in almost every direction,” Burke said on Sunday.

“Australia’s national interest is best served when Candace Owens is somewhere else.”

Owens had scheduled a five-date speaking tour of Australia in November, with events in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. Tickets ranged from $95 for general admission to $295 for a VIP meet and greet and $1,500 for a private dinner with the conservative media personality.

She has courted controversy with incendiary claims about Jewish, transgender and Muslim people. In July, she appeared to cast doubt on well-documented Nazi medical experiments on prisoners, calling such accounts “completely absurd” and “bizarre propaganda”.

The US Anti-Defamation League, which works to combat antisemitism, has accused Owens of coming to “embrace and promote antisemitic tropes and anti-Israel rhetoric”, noting comments where she called Judaism a “pedophile-centric religion”. LGBTQ+ advocacy organisation Glaad has pointed to allegedly anti-trans comments from Owens, including calling the trans equality movement “evil” and “satanic”. She has also claimed “white supremacy and white nationalism is not a problem that is harming Black America”.

Owens’ Australian tour had been opposed by some local Jewish groups while the opposition home affairs spokesman, James Paterson, called her “a dangerous antisemite and a conspiracy theorist” during a Sky News interview.

Burke told Nine newspapers in August that he had asked his department for a brief on her visit and consulted the federal antisemitism envoy, Jillian Segal.

Nine first reported on Sunday that Owens would not be allowed to enter Australia. Burke’s office confirmed her visa had been denied.

Guardian Australia contacted Owens’ management and the local tour promoters, Rocksman, for comment. Neither responded immediately to requests and Owens has not addressed the visa news on her social media accounts.

“Candace Owens Live! Australian and New Zealand Tour event will appeal to audiences seeking alternative viewpoints and in-depth discussions on pressing political and social topics. Owens’ provocative approach often sparks debate, making the event a must-see for those who enjoy candid conversations about controversial issues,” the tour website states.

The Zionist Federation of Australia chief executive, Alon Cassuto, welcomed the news Owens had been denied entry to Australia.

“Bigotry and antisemitism are unacceptable in any form, regardless of whether they originate from the far left or right,” he said on Sunday.

“For the sake of our nation’s social cohesion, there is no place in Australia for Candace Owens.”

During the pandemic, Owens suggested the US military invade Australia to free its people “suffering under a totalitarian regime” while drawing comparisons to Hitler, Stalin and the Taliban.

Michelle Obama laced into Donald Trump in a searing speech in Michigan on Saturday, accusing the former president of “gross incompetence” and having an “amoral character” while challenging hesitant Americans to choose Kamala Harris for US president.

“By every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready,” the former first lady told a rapt audience in Kalamazoo. “The real question is, as a country, are we ready for this moment?”

With the race virtually deadlocked, Obama said she was in the Midwestern battleground heeding her own advice to “do something” to support Harris bid to be the country’s first female president. In raw and strikingly personal terms, she asked why Harris was being held to a “higher standard” than her opponent. Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and his failed attempt to cling to power after losing the 2020 election should alone be disqualifying, Obama argued. But now the people who worked closest with him when he was president – his former advisers and cabinet secretaries – had stepped forward with a warning that he should not be allowed to return to power.

“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn,” Obama said. “Preach!” a woman shouted.

The event in Kalamazoo, which Obama referred to as “Kamala-zoo”, was her first appearance on the campaign trail since her rousing speech at the Democratic national convention in August. Obama said voters shouldn’t choose Harris because she’s a woman but “because Kamala Harris is a grown-up – and Lord knows we need a grown-up in the White House”.

When Obama finished, Beyoncé’s Freedom thundered from the loudspeakers and Harris emerged on stage. The predominantly female audience erupted as the women embraced.

With 10 days left, Harris delivered her closing argument: she pledged to be a president who listened to the American people, unlike her opponent, whom she accused of “looking in the mirror all the time”.

“Just imagine the Oval Office in three months,” she said. “It is either Donald Trump in there stewing over his enemies’ list – or me working for you, checking off my to-do list.”

Before the event, Harris visited a local doctor’s office in nearby Portage, where she spoke to healthcare providers and medical students about the impact of abortion restrictions. Harris has made protecting “reproductive freedom” and what remains of abortion access a major theme of her campaign, using it to draw a sharp contrast with Trump, who has claimed credit for his role in overturning Roe v Wade but insisted he would allow a nationwide ban as president.

In Kalamazoo, both Harris and Obama argued that Trump had no credibility on the matter. But Obama went further, describing the full spectrum of women’s reproductive health – from period cramps to pregnancy to menopause. She lamented the lack of research on women’s health and the racial disparities in treatment. Directing her comments to the “men who love us”, Obama asked them to consider the harm that is done when a government “keeps revoking the basic care from its women”.

“I am asking y’all, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously,” Obama said, her voice swelling with emotion. “If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women will become collateral damage to your rage.”

Abortion bans, she argued, affected men as well. If something happened during a pregnancy or a delivery and the doctor was prevented from providing care, “you will be the one praying that it’s not too late. You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something, and then there is the tragic but very real possibility that in the worst-case scenario, you just might be the one holding flowers at the funeral,” she said.

Obama’s appeal reflected the gaping gender divide between the candidates, with women powering Harris and men turning to Trump. She acknowledged the challenges facing the country, and conceded that progress could be too slow, but she argued that sitting out or voting third-party was not the answer.

“There is too much we stand to lose if we get this one wrong,” she said.

While Barack Obama is known as his party’s great orator, Michelle Obama remains one of its most popular albeit reluctant speakers. Having once encouraged Democrats to “go high” when they “go low”, Obama on Saturday made no effort to conceal her disdain for the man who led a years-long campaign questioning her husband’s birthplace.

“In any other profession or arena, Trump’s criminal track record and amoral character would be embarrassing, shameful and disqualifying,” she said.

The Harris campaign deployed Obama – along with Barack Obama and other leading figures and celebrities, including Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen – in hopes that their star power might deliver an 11th-hour jolt to a presidential contest that has otherwise remained static.

Both Harris and Trump were in Michigan on Saturday, chasing the state’s 15 electoral votes. After Pennsylvania, where Harris will campaign on Sunday, Michigan is perhaps the next most critical state on the Democrat’s path to the White House.

Trump won the state in 2016, when he tore down the trio of “blue wall” battlegrounds. But four years later, Michigan delivered Biden his biggest swing state victory and then Democrats swept the state in the 2022 congressional midterms, after the supreme court ruling overturning Roe v Wade.

Polls show a dead heat. Trump has sought to exacerbate Democratic divisions over the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon, elevating the issue in Michigan, where scores of Muslim and Arab American voters have said they cannot support Harris. On Saturday, Trump was joined on stage in Novi, Michigan, by Bill Bazzi, the current and first Muslim mayor of Dearborn Heights.

“I have never seen the devastation that we’re seeing right now,” Bazzi said. “When President Trump was president, there was no wars.”

The Harris campaign has conducted several outreach attempts to the Arab community, but tensions remain high with little time for a course change and the risk of escalation following Israel’s pre-dawn strikes on Iran. At the event, Harris was interrupted by a pro-Palestinian protester. “We have to end that war,” she responded, as the crowd drowned out the demonstration with “Kamala” chants.

Democrats are focused on juicing turnout in Detroit – which Trump insulted (again) at his Novi event on Saturday – while aggressively courting women, independents and anti-Trump Republicans in the suburbs. Her campaign recently earned the support of Fred Upton, the state’s long-serving Republican representative who left office in 2022. Upton told the Detroit Free Press that he had never supported a Democrat for president but this year cast an absentee ballot for Harris: “He’s just totally unhinged. We don’t need this chaos.”

Speaking before Harris, Michigan senator Gary Peters compared the presidential campaign to the highest-stakes job interview. Extending the metaphor, he suggested that they check Trump’s references. The senator quoted Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff John Kelly, who recently said on the record that his former boss fit the definition of a fascist.

“Would you hire that guy?” Peters asked. “No!” the crowd thundered back.

When journalist and author Lech Blaine was 11 years old, his mother Lenore would often joke she could write a book about the trouble that lay just beyond their Toowoomba driveway.

At the time, Blaine couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to read about Michael and Mary Shelley, and the “visceral terror” these two outsiders inspired in him and his siblings. Mary, with her purple dress and slightly posh accent, appearing on their doorstep calling his mother “Satan’s handmaiden”, calling his siblings by unfamiliar biblical-sounding names like “Saul” and “Joshua”. Michael, sitting ominously in the White Chrysler outside, already a convicted kidnapper with a long and colourful rap sheet. Blaine’s family would grow familiar with the wild, all-caps letters that would appear in their letterbox, and the police cars that would follow a visit from the two strangers who wrote them.

“I’d been so terrified of them, even when I was still a teenager,” Blaine explains, now 32. “Even after I’d moved away from Toowoomba I used to dread their potential arrival.”

It could seem there was no escaping the Shelleys. In his latest book Australian Gospel: A Family Saga, Blaine tries to make sense of the deep ties binding the families together.

Blaine’s siblings Steven, John and Hannah had been born Saul, Joshua and Hannah Shelley – the biological children of Mary and Michael. But they were, separately, removed as babies and toddlers from their care by social service workers concerned about their treatment and placed into the care of foster parents – Tom and Lenore Blaine. Mary and Michael would never stop trying to recover their children; by law or by threat of force.

The Shelleys were a pair of self-styled Christian prophets sharing their custom blend of Old Testament brimstone and back-to-the-earth hippie culture with anyone who listened.

For years the pair had hitchhiked their way around Australia and New Zealand, leaving a scorched-earth paper trail across courtrooms, gaols and newspaper columns. They quickly burnt through the goodwill of anyone who helped them, and waged scornful campaigns of harassment against those who didn’t.

That placed them on a collision course with the Blaine family; two working-class parents and their chaotic brood of rugby-loving foster kids with matching back yard haircuts, being raised against the backdrop of small-town country pubs. To the Shelleys, they represented everything that was morally and spiritually corrupt about modern Australia.

For years, their children’s new identities, foster family and location were a closely guarded secret. Finding them, and recovering them, became the Shelley’s obsession. They spent decades harassing social workers, sending death threats to the premier of Queensland, and in 1983 kidnapped their eldest son, Elijah, from his foster home.

Despite the restraining orders and stalking charges, the Shelleys would haunt the Blaines for years, with a near-constant stream of threatening and pleading letters sent from wherever Mary and Michael were in the world.

“The contempt I feel for you two child abusing deviates is profound and deserved,” Michael would write in one email to Lenore, adding, “I rejoice in where you are both going – HELL!”

These tirades formed part of a long and knotty paper trail that Blaine would base his book on.

Blaine began piecing together the story after moving back home at 21. His mother had been diagnosed with a rare and terminal neurodegenerative illness, and as he tried to make sense of her future, he also found himself grappling with the family’s past.

“She’d kept this meticulous record of everything and passed all that stuff on to me,” he explains. “So I spent that summer organising her nursing home placement, selling the house, and going through basically everything that she had.”

There were years’ worth of diary entries, newspaper clippings, social service reports and, more recently, a decade of emails that the Shelleys had inundated her inbox with.

“I got so addicted to information at times,” he says.

“At that point, thanks to a lot of the information that Mum had kept, I realised how much more interesting the Shelleys were than these really quite terrifying, monstrous people in my imagination as a child.”

With his mother too sick to write the story, Blaine resolved to do it himself.

His mother’s archive told one side of the Shelley story. But as he began to reach out to social workers and other witnesses, Blaine knew there was another source he needed to hear from: Michael Shelley.

“I lived in absolute fear of him,” Blaine says. Nevertheless, he sent him an email. “I actually still can’t believe that I really did it.”

Michael responded to Blaine’s first tentative email and was soon sharing his own personal archive of over 400,000 words of material including unpublished autobiographical accounts, reports and sermons. Even from someone Blaine knew was an “incredibly unreliable narrator”, it created a vivid picture.

Blaine’s siblings were burnt-out from years of Michael’s fiery attempts to reconnect – often by accusing his children of being a “TRAITOR”, “brainwashed” by authorities and the Blaines. But Lech Blaine’s correspondence struck a different tone to the harassing messages his family had received for years.

“It was pretty civil,” Blaine recalls. “Occasionally he would go on some rants, but he never really got vicious with me. I think that he was more angry at my foster siblings because they weren’t paying him any attention or trying to get in contact.

“This is a guy who had spent decades desperately trying to get people to read his writing and to ask him what he thinks about things. I was really one of the only people who’ve ever actually showed much interest in what he had to say.”

Shelley’s own voluminous writings filled in the gaps in the public record, his mother’s records and Blaine’s own childhood memories.

“I got a much better sense of who they were before they’d suffered nervous breakdowns, and I got a genuine sense that they weren’t evil. They weren’t irredeemably awful. From their birth they were rich, complex people who had quite serious, especially in Mary’s case, quite serious mental health issues.”

In a previous life, the Shelleys had been charismatic, privileged Sydney socialites whose relationships and exploits had garnered magazine front pages and newspaper column inches.

The Shelleys found each other in the wake of breakups and breakdowns, beginning a decades-long co-dependency that saw them drop out of mainstream Australia for good, no matter the cost.

As the book took shape, Blaine was also committed to recognising how his own parents’ complexities shaped their family experience. He could see how his “larrikin” Dad’s sense of humour was a “coping mechanism for some of the things that he suffered when he was quite young”. He understood how his mother was an excellent foster carer because she was nonjudgemental, “she didn’t radiate any sense of superiority to children”.

Lenore and Tom Blaine, and Michael and Mary Shelley all passed away years ago and as Lech Blaine worked on the book, his siblings wanted the same treatment in the book as their elders: to be seen as complex, not caricature.

“They weren’t expecting me to paint like a rose-coloured portrait of them,” he says.

Blaine did not want, either, to paint a rose-coloured portrait of hope in modern Australia. Through tracking the lives of his siblings and their siblings, Blaine shows that whether someone’s life becomes an Australian dream or nightmare can hinge on an opaque mix of nature, nurture, systematic factors beyond most people’s control and sheer luck.

A woman accused of leaving her boyfriend to die after he was zipped into a suitcase in their home was found guilty of second-degree murder by a jury in central Florida.

Four years after Sarah Boone was arrested over the death of Jorge Torres, jurors handed down the verdict against her on Friday evening after deliberating for about 90 minutes. Boone had pleaded not guilty.

Boone initially told detectives with the Orange county sheriff’s office that she and Torres had been playing hide-and-seek on 23 February 2020, in their Winter Park, Florida, residence when they thought it would be funny for Torres to get into the suitcase.

They had been drinking and she decided to go to sleep, thinking her boyfriend could get out of the suitcase on his own, she told detectives, according to an arrest report.

When she woke up the next morning, she couldn’t find Torres but then remembered he was in the suitcase. She unzipped the suitcase and found him unresponsive, the arrest report said.

Detectives charged Boone with murder after they found videos on her mobile phone showing Torres yelling from inside the suitcase that he couldn’t breathe and repeatedly calling out Boone’s name, according to the arrest report.

During her trial, Boone testified that past violent incidents between her and Torres caused her to perceive a threat of imminent harm and that she acted in self-defence by keeping him in the suitcase.

“Yeah that’s what you do when you choke me,” Boone said in one of the mobile phone videos from that night, according to the arrest report. “Oh, that’s what I feel like when you cheat on me.”

An autopsy report said Torres had scratches on his back and neck and contusions to his shoulder, skull and forehead from blunt force trauma, as well as a cut near his busted lip.

Boone had gone through several attorneys since her arrest, contributing to the delay in her trial, which lasted 10 days.

She is scheduled to be sentenced on 2 December.

Consumers and celebrities around the world covet it for its warm, earthy and musky scent, but Australian sandalwood’s popularity has come at more than just a hefty cost to the wallet, with some scientists warning the species is at risk of extinction in the wild.

“Australian sandalwood’s downfall is that it’s one of the most fragrant species of sandalwood in the world,” said Richard McLellan, an adjunct research fellow at Charles Sturt University.

“A lot of people know sandalwood very well but very few people know it’s declining in the wild and it’s been over-harvested for decades.”

McLellan has spent the past six years researching wild Australian sandalwood – Santalum spicatum – which is harvested in Western Australia for oil that is used in luxury perfumes, incense, cosmetics and other consumer products.

Dutjahn Sandalwood Oils is a 50% Aboriginal-owned business that sells sandalwood oil to companies such as Aesop and Givaudan – a multinational that supplies the Estée Lauder group, among others.

Its chief executive, Guy Vincent, said the business sourced Santalum spicatum from a combination of plantations, the WA government-owned Forest Products Commission and native title lands managed by traditional owners.

“From our perspective, the species is not threatened, it’s thriving especially on native title land where there are traditional owners managing their land,” he said.

He said regeneration of the species on native title lands was “monitored and validated scientifically”.

“Here we have this spicatum that is valued greatly by international fragrance houses and managed sustainably by Aboriginal people and gives opportunities for Aboriginal people.

“There needs to be a broader view of the sustainability in this context.”

In WA, the primary commercial harvest operator is the Forest Products Commission, which manages the harvest of up to 2,500 tonnes of wild Australian sandalwood each year.

Australian sandalwood is also harvested in plantations but the warnings from conservationists are focused on trees found in the wild and long-standing concerns that there is insufficient natural regeneration of the species.

Historically, Santalum spicatum grew across most of southern Western Australia and into South Australia. It was listed as a threatened species decades ago in South Australia but has no such protections in WA, where wild populations have largely retreated to the semi-arid parts of the state.

McLellan is hoping that could soon change with the federal threatened species scientific committee (TSSC) considering whether to list Australian sandalwood for protection under national environmental laws.

“My research shows it is a keystone species for native fauna and yet we pull it out of the ground to make perfume with no thought to its ecological value in the landscape,” he said.

The committee is due to deliver its recommendation to the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, on 30 October, one of almost 50 expected recommendations – including on the conservation status of the maugean skate.

Three years ago, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed wild Australian sandalwood as vulnerable on its international red list of threatened species after scientific advice identified “unsustainable, legal wild harvest” as a major threat to its survival.

Prof Kingsley Dixon, a botanical specialist at Curtin University, said across its range, “we are seeing the species reduced in both abundance and vigour and vanished in many areas where it was once common”.

“The evidence is we have less sandalwood in the wild than probably ever in its evolutionary history,” he said.

The WA department of biodiversity, conservation and attractions manages wild sandalwood by imposing limits on how much can be harvested each financial year. The department is due to set new annual harvest limits in 2027.

A spokesperson said that review process would “respond to any decision by the commonwealth should sandalwood be listed as a threatened species”.

“As acknowledged in Western Australia’s sandalwood biodiversity management program, there is concern that a lack of natural regeneration in some areas in the wild is threatening long-term stability of populations,” they said.

“Therefore, re-seeding and regeneration programs are important for sandalwood conservation. WA’s sandalwood management program seeks to conserve, maintain or re-establish self-sustaining sandalwood ecosystems in the state.”

Peter Robertson, an environmental consultant and convener of the “Save our Sandalwood” network, said that – in addition to over-exploitation – climate change and grazing by feral animals were major threats.

“It’s in a dire state,” he said.

“We think that the minister must accept that advice and ensure that Santalum spicatum is listed as a threatened species.”

Donald Trump sat down for three hours on Friday with Joe Rogan, telling the US’s most-listened-to podcaster that the biggest mistake he made during his presidency was hiring “disloyal people”.

Those comments – which also described “neocons”, or neoconservatives who generally aim to promote democracy, as “bad people” – came days after the Trump White House’s former chief of staff John Kelly said the Republican nominee in the 5 November election met the definition of a fascist. Kelly also said Trump had no understanding of the US constitution and made admiring statements about generals commanded by Adolf Hitler, whose regime systematically murdered 6 million Jews as part of the Holocaust during the second world war.

At a rally on Friday that he held apart from his conversation with Rogan, Trump described Kelly as a “total whack job”.

Trump used his interview with Rogan on Friday to repeat his claim that his defeat in the 2020 presidential election against Joe Biden was a “rigged” outcome. But Trump changed the subject when Rogan asked him if he was ever going to release evidence proving the election was “stolen”.

Trump also said: “If I win, this will be my last election.” That was a true statement because the constitution would bar him from serving beyond a second term in the White House. Yet it seemed to contradict an earlier campaign promise that he would not run for the Oval Office again if he lost to Kamala Harris in the 5 November election.

In another part of the show, the former president tried to address the age-related questions which forced Biden, 81, to drop out of seeking re-election – and which have since been redirected at Trump, 78.

Trump tried to convince Rogan that Biden was in cognitive decline because of brain surgery.

“It’s not his age,” Trump said. “Those are not good operations.”

Rogan alluded to how brain surgeries saved Biden’s life after he endured two aneurysms in the 1980s, when he was a US senator for Delaware before serving as vice-president to Barack Obama and then winning the presidency himself.

The reach of Rogan’s show, estimated at 14 million listeners on Spotify with an 80% male audience split between Democrats, Republicans and independents, has developed a reputation as a useful platform for seekers of political office.

But the interview, which was recorded in Rogan’s Austin, Texas, studio, delayed Trump’s arrival at an outdoor rally in Traverse City, Michigan, in cold 50F (10C) temperatures. The Associated Press reported that some rallygoers were already leaving by the time Trump arrived.

The rally was expected to begin at 7.30pm, but by that time Trump was only then leaving Texas. The ex-president recorded a video from his plane urging his supporters to stay, seeming to suggest that many rallygoers would not have work the next day because it was Friday and promising: “We’re going to have a good time tonight.”

“I am so sorry,” Trump said when he arrived. “We got so tied up, and I figured you wouldn’t mind too much because we’re trying to win.”

Meanwhile, Harris was in Houston, Texas, with superstar singer Beyoncé to drive her message opposing the conservative state’s abortion ban as she attempts to become the first woman ever elected as US president.

“We are at the precipice of an incredible shift,” the Houston-raised singer told the crowd of 30,000 people. “Our moment is right now. It’s time for America to sing a new song.”

Water firms “passed” thousands of pollution tests under a self-monitoring regime … yet the tests were never even conducted, the Observer can reveal. The water firms’ own operational data for sewage plants across the country reveals how outflows of effluent had stopped – in some cases for just a few hours – on days that samples were supposed to be taken.

Despite testers being unable to check whether firms were allowing too much pollution to flow into rivers, the Environment Agency rules allowed these “no-flows” to be recorded as compliant with the environmental conditions of their operating permits.

Southern Water has already been found to have “deliberately manipulated” the effluent flow to avoid pollution detection. The number of no-flows it reported plummeted after its practices were investigated.

Peter Hammond, from the campaign group Windrush Against Sewage Pollution (Wasp), has conducted an analysis of no-flow events from 2021 to 2023 where the sewage plants were deemed to be compliant with their permits. He says such incidents should be properly investigated by the regulator and the regime should be overhauled.

“Water companies cannot be allowed to mark their own homework,” he said. “Monthly manual testing of treated sewage must be replaced by continuous automated sampling. Default assumption of permit compliance in the face of failed sampling is totally unacceptable.”

After being contacted by the Observer, the Environment Agency said it was changing its rules. The new changes to shut down the loophole will be made in early 2025.

Ministers last week announced an independent commission into the water sector and regulation, in what is expected to be the largest review of the industry since privatisation. The water regulator, Ofwat, could be overhauled or even abolished.

Water firms are allowed to “self-monitor” for pollution incidents under a controversial scheme introduced in 2009. The samples for lab testing are typically taken by water firm employees and are in addition to audits conducted by the Environment Agency. The environmental performance of firms is linked to bosses’ remuneration and the cost of bills.

Under the “operator self-monitoring system”, between 12 and 24 samples are taken from the outflows of sewage works each year to check if the treated effluent complies with the conditions of their environmental permit. In the event that no effluent is flowing, the plant is reported as compliant with its permit, providing the employee taking the sample is satisfied with the evidence of no flow.

In October 2019, Ofwat announced that Southern Water would pay £126m in penalties and rebates for breaches of licence conditions, including what it described as “artificial no-flows” at sewage plants on some sampling days. It said information on the dates of sampling by employees was supposed to be confidential, but the dates were easily predicted.

It said in its deliberation: “As a result of this manipulation, a false picture of Southern Water’s [wastewater] performance was provided internally within the company, to the Environment Agency and to Ofwat.” Ofwat calculated that Southern Water avoided price review penalties of £75m because of the manipulation.

Once Southern was under investigation, the number of no-flows it reported fell from 124 in 2017 to 12 in 2018. From 2021 to 2023, there were about 120,000 samples taken at sewage plants in England, with about 5,000 recorded as no-flows.

Wasp has compiled 18 examples at 14 plants involving seven water firms from 2021 to 2023 where no-flows were reported on the day that a sampler arrived. In some cases, previous tests had already shown the plants were at risk of breaching or had breached the environmental conditions of their permits.

Wasp says the agency should properly investigate the reasons in each case and it is unacceptable that the plant was deemed to be compliant when no samples were taken.

The water firms claim there were various legitimate reasons for the no-flows, which they have investigated. These include a blockage, a power cut, planned maintenance, tankering of sewage to other plants and intermittent flow. They say there are strict safeguards to prevent manipulation of operator self-monitoring or abuse of the system.

A Water UK spokesperson said: “It is up to the regulator to set the rules on testing, and for companies to follow whichever regime they impose. The current approach has tightly-controlled requirements that include detailed obligations about the timing and frequency of samples, and how they should be taken.”

The Environment Agency said the rules were being updated from 1 January, which would require water firms to reschedule a sample in the event of no flow of effluent from the plant. Water firms will be required to document when and why no-flows have occurred and make this available for subsequent audit by the agency.

The agency said that. on average, about 5% of samples a year are no-flows and this compares with no-flow rates when the agency took the samples. Officials say a water company may legitimately choose to tanker flows away from a plant rather than allow poor quality effluent to be discharged.

An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “We investigates no-flow samples where there is a risk to the environment or if we suspect that an offence has occurred.”

It is already carrying out its largest ever criminal investigation into potential widespread non-compliance by water companies. It is also recruiting up to 500 additional staff and increasing compliance checks.

Ofwat said it would review Hammond’s report. A spokesperson said: “We have ongoing enforcement activity against all 11 water and wastewater companies. As part of this investigation, we will consider whether they are fulfilling their obligations to protect the environment and minimise pollution. All relevant evidence will be taken into account.”

Southern Water said it instituted a “root-and-branch” review after the failings identified in the Ofwat report in 2019. “Processes and systems were radically changed to ensure that all no-flow events were genuine,” a spokesperson said. “We remain committed to transparently providing the best possible data and disclosure.”

Maria Elena Cárdenas is 76 and lives in a municipal shelter on Amargura Street in Havana’s colonial old town. The building has an elegant past, but for the last few days Maria has been cooking with sticks she had found on the street.

“You know, we Cubans manage the best we can,” she said. She lives in the shelter because her home collapsed, a regular occurrence in the poorest, oldest parts of the beautiful city.

Cuba’s government has spent the last days attempting to get the island’s national grid functioning after repeated island-wide blackouts. Without power, sleep becomes difficult in the heat, food spoils and the water supply fails.

Parts of Cuba’s communist system still function: the municipality sent Maria food. “We are three families here,” she said. “I live alone, the lady who lives next to me [does] also, and there are two children, the children’s mother, her aunt and an elderly man.”

A week after the blackout, the island has returned to the status quo ante with regular power cuts of up to 20 hours a day. But the crisis has left a deep, melancholy dread about the future.

“Cubans have a cheerful idiosyncrasy,” said Julio César Rodríguez, 52. “Even when things are bad we laugh. But this is really bad.”

This current crisis began on 17 September, when an order went out for all non-essential state workers to go home.

The effort to save power didn’t save the system, and a day later, the island went dark. Antonio Guiteras, one of the main power stations, shut down, crashing all the other big generating stations in the system.

“It’s very hard to restart a power station,” said a retired engineer from Antonio Guiteras, who asked to remain anonymous. “You need to produce a lot of electricity just to get it going.”

Antonio Guiteras was built in 1989, and is now battered and obsolete. “The truth is that it was built rotten,” said the engineer. He told harrowing stories of working with faulty safety equipment, political management who would disappear when problems arose and a system long pushed to its limit.

“There was a scheduled maintenance programme, but it was never followed,” he said. “The requirements were too tight. We were told: ‘The factory has to produce, so patch it up.’”

The government acknowledges the parlous state of its system, blaming the 62-year old-trade embargo imposed by the United States. President Miguel Díaz-Canel said “financial and energy persecution” made it difficult to “import fuel and other resources necessary”.

For most of its existence, Cuba’s government has relied on the largesse of allies – first Russia and then Venezuela. But those countries, facing their own difficulties, have cut supplies heavily. “It’s like trying to keep a sinking ship afloat with corks,” said one European diplomat.

In a televised address, Cuba’s prime minister, Manuel Marrero, said the emerging private sector would have to pay more for its power, while the government looks to renewables to secure its future energy needs.

The island is blessed by sunshine, but the multiple attempts to start solar projects have nearly all failed when the companies involved failed to get paid. “The government isn’t stupid,” said a foreign businessman. “But there is no money.”

Instead a deal has been cut with a Chinese firm to provide the materials for a slew of solar farms in return for access to Cuba’s nickel deposits. But with well over 10% of Cuba’s population having fled the economic crisis on the island in the last two years, there is scepticism whether the expertise remains to build such systems.

Joe Biden has said that while he’s “tough” on the Cuban government, he supports the Cuban people. But Washington could do much more help Cuba, argued the US academic William LeoGrande in the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

“The proponents of regime change should be careful what they wish for,” he wrote. “A collapse of the regime would be a humanitarian disaster, spurring an emigration tsunami far larger than what we have seen so far. A breakdown of social order could unleash a surge of criminal violence.”

Unlike during previous power cuts, there has been very little protest this time , beyond the bashing of some pots and pans. People seem exhausted and government ministers have made it clear that the government will come down hard on any “indecent” behaviour.

Recent months have seen a new round of intimidation of journalists, with several forced to flee the country. On Wednesday, Amnesty International declared four people currently in Cuban jails – the journalist Félix Navarro and his daughter, Sayli Navarro, as well as protesters Roberto Pérez Fonseca and Luis Robles – as “prisoners of conscience”.

Meanwhile, one crisis begets another. Failures have been reported in the equally obsolete water supply system. Six hundred thousand people lack regular running water, but the blackouts appear to have multiplied that number by damaging pumps and pipes. Much of Havana is dry.

Dariel Ramírez was sitting on his stoop in the old town. He didn’t have much to eat because he had shared his stored food with others before it spoiled.

Asked how he was preparing for any repeat of the power crisis, he pointed towards the Museum of the Revolution, where the central symbol of communist rule is displayed: the boat on which Fidel and Raúl Castro arrived from Mexico in 1956.

“If this happens again, we need to prepare the Granma yacht,” he said. “So we can all sail away.”

Additional reporting by Eileen Sosin