Ministers are being urged to overhaul the “nightmare” compensation scheme for flood victims after it emerged that nearly 80% of businesses in some parts of England had been denied support.

After heavy downpours caused chaos across much of England and Wales this week, new figures laid bare the “opaque” and inconsistent level of help available to those whose properties lay in ruin.

In Calderdale, West Yorkshire, where hundreds of homes have been battered by a series of storms in recent years, only 17% of businesses received government help in the wake of Storm Ciara in 2020.

The government’s Property Flood Resilience (PFR) scheme allows flood victims to apply for a grant of up to £5,000 to help repair the damage and make them more resilient to future storms.

However, campaigners have called for the Defra scheme to be overhauled due to the complex rules governing how the money is handed out, resulting in disparities across England.

Data obtained by Greenpeace’s Unearthed investigative unit found that on average, 72% of applicants to the PFR scheme in England were successful in 2020, the most recent year for which figures are available.

In Tunbridge Wells, all 42 of the homeowners and businesses who applied for the grant that year received a payout. But the success rate was far lower in other parts of England.

In Telford and Wrekin, where floods again caused havoc last week, barely half of those who applied in 2020 received support.

In Calderdale, which includes the flood-prone valleys of Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd, only 48% of the 519 homes and businesses who requested help in 2020 received any money. Of the 194 businesses, only 33 were successful.

Calderdale Council said one reason for the low acceptance rate was that many of the properties flooded in 2020 had already received a PFR grant in 2015.

Tracey Garrett, chief executive of the National Flood Forum, a charity that helps flood victims, said: “There are no rules or governance around how the grant is activated. It’s all very opaque. We need proper governance on it so it’s clear when it is activated and how to access it.”

Heather Shepherd, a flood consultant, described the PFR grants process as a “nightmare” and said there was a lack of support for flood victims generally.

Lynn Shortt, 63, said she received no help from the scheme after her home in Attleborough, Norfolk, was badly flooded in Christmas 2020. They were deluged again last year, when Storm Babet destroyed everything on the ground floor.

Shortt, who has multiple sclerosis, said she and her 73-year-old husband, Hans Shortt, had spent about £28,000 repairing the damage, taking money from a fund intended to pay her future nursing home bills, which, she said, had been “completely emptied”.

Shortt said they had been “strung along” since making their first PFR application in 2020 but were last month told they were being considered for help after last year’s flood.

“It’s just a complete mockery. It’s nonsensical,” she said. “I can absolutely categorically state this has got me down very badly. Your whole life has been whipped out from underneath you. The minute it starts to rain heavily, I can start to feel my heart racing. It’s horrific.”

Although the Shortts were advised to apply for the grant by Norfolk county council, the authority was not eligible for the 2019 and 2020 PFR schemes because it did not meet the eligibility criteria of 25 flooded properties, Defra said.

A spokesperson for Norfolk county council said it did not find out that it would be ineligible for the schemes until after households had lodged their applications.

A Defra spokesperson said: “Protecting communities from flooding is an absolute priority for this government, which is why we will launch a flood resilience taskforce to turbocharge the delivery of flood defences and natural flood management.

“The PFR grant helps make homes more resilient in case of future flooding events and grant funding is paid once the works are done, to ensure appropriate use of public money.

“Local authorities are responsible for assessing and approving individual applications for the PFR grant, which alongside the Flood Recovery Framework is only activated following severe weather events with wide area impacts. With localised flooding incidents, we would expect local authorities to have well-established contingency arrangements in place.”

More than 20 scientific experts have written to the UN’s food agency expressing shock at its failure to revise or withdraw a livestock emissions report that two of its cited academics have said contained “multiple and egregious errors”.

The alleged inaccuracies are understood to have downplayed the potential of dietary change to reduce agricultural greenhouse gases, which make up about a quarter of total anthropogenic emissions and mostly derive from livestock.

In the joint letter, which the Guardian has seen, the scientists say they are dismayed that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has failed to remedy “serious distortions” originally identified by the academics Paul Behrens and Matthew Hayek, which the Guardian reported on earlier this year.

Behrens and Hayek say a separate complaint has received short shrift. They say a “technical dialogue” promised by the FAO never materialised, beyond an invitation to a muted webinar where they could type questions into a Q&A box.

“There has been no serious response,” Behrens said. “They partially addressed one of the points in the webinar in an unscientific way. But they gave no response at all to the vast majority of our complaints. Our concerns have barely been acknowledged, let alone seriously engaged with. It’s been like hitting a brick wall. The FAO has made grievous errors that need urgent correction to maintain its scientific credibility.”

One of the signatories to the letter, Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, compared the FAO’s complaints process unfavourably with those of a science journal, “where you could at least expect a correction to the article”.

The FAO’s “pathways toward lower emissions” study was originally billed as “an updated comprehensive overview” of global livestock emissions and was launched at last December’s Cop28 climate summit.

Behrens and Hayek said it inappropriately used their work on now outdated nationally recommended diets (NRDs), double-counted meat emissions, mixed different baseline years in analyses, and omitted the opportunity cost of carbon sequestration on non-farmed land.

Correspondingly, the emissions savings from farming less livestock were underestimated by a factor of between six and 40, Hayek estimated.

In an initial response to complaints, seen by the Guardian, the FAO’s chief scientist, Beth Crawford, described the report’s NRD-based emissions forecast for 2050 as “a rough estimate”. She said: “This methodological choice was made because there is no global database on dietary preferences and no policy instrument that supports the adoption of alternative diets based on balanced environmental, economic and social criteria.”

She did not touch on other points raised by the pair, such as alleged double counting and mixed baseline years, which Hayek said “are related to their misuse of our scientific data”.

Crawford’s response said the FAO had received a “rigorous and thorough review” supporting its conclusions from a group of scientists led by three named academics.

The joint letter, which was also signed by 78 environmental groups, said: “It is not acceptable for the FAO, a respected UN institution, to gloss over these serious errors as a ‘rough estimate’ when the data and policy recommendations it provides are so internationally influential. A higher standard of scientific rigour is required.”

Jacquet said: “It seems clear to me that some of the choices made by the FAO in their methodology were just there to uphold the status quo of increasing meat production and consumption.”

The FAO was contacted for a response.

A Palestinian militant group said three of its leaders were killed in an Israeli attack on central Beirut early on Monday, in what would be the first time Israel’s military had struck the centre of Lebanon’s capital city since 2006, as it expanded hostilities against Iran’s regional allies with further attacks across Lebanon and Yemen.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a militant group taking part in the fight against Israel, said three senior figures were killed in the Beirut attack, with initial footage from the scene showing two storeys of an apartment building completely blown out, and onlookers running towards the building.

Two bodies could be seen lying on the street atop a car outside the building, seemingly ejected by the force of the blast. The sound of the explosion was heard around the city.

There was no immediate comment from Israel’s military.

The Beirut strike, carried out using a drone, according to one source quoted by Agence France-Presse, hit near the Kola intersection, a popular reference point in the city, where taxis and buses gather to pick up passengers.

Israel had confined its strikes on Lebanon’s capital city to its southern suburbs. The airstrike threw into doubt which areas of Beirut were still safe from Israel’s expanding aerial campaign. Israeli drones hovered over Beirut for much of Sunday, with the loud blasts of new airstrikes echoing around the city.

Monday’s airstrike comes after Lebanon’s health ministry said 105 people had been killed and another 359 injured by Israeli strikes across the country on Sunday. More than 1,000 Lebanese have been killed and 6,000 wounded in the past two weeks, it said, without saying how many were civilians. The government said a million people – a fifth of the population – have fled their homes.

On Sunday, Israel launched a wave of airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, fuelling fears of a slide towards a devastating regional conflict on multiple fronts.

The attack on the port of Hodeidah in Yemen involved dozens of Israeli planes and appears to have targeted fuel facilities, power plants and docks at the Ras Issa and Hodeidah ports. It one of the biggest such operations yet seen in the near year-long crisis in the region.

Houthi media reported the strikes had killed four people and wounded 33. Residents said the strikes caused power cuts in most parts of Hodeidah.

Israeli military officials said the raid targeted the Houthis, who have fired at Israeli targets for months in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. The Houthis have also targeted international shipping in the Red Sea. On Saturday, they launched a ballistic missile attack on Israel’s main international airport when Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was arriving.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah confirmed that Nabil Kaouk, the deputy head of its central council, was killed on Saturday, making him the seventh senior Hezbollah leader slain in Israeli strikes in a little over a week. The group also confirmed that Ali Karaki, another senior commander, died in the airstrike on Friday that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Three days of mourning were announced, starting on Monday, after the killing of Nasrallah.

Hezbollah denied claims that Abu Ali Rida, the commander of the group’s Bader Unit in south Lebanon had been killed. Rida is the last remaining senior military commander of Hezbollah who remains alive.

Israel has vowed to keep up the assault and says it wants to make its northern areas secure again for residents who have been forced to flee Hezbollah rocket attacks.

US president Joe Biden, asked if an all-out war in the Middle East could be avoided, said “It has to be.” He said he will be talking to Netanyahu.

With Reuters

Senior Republicans distanced themselves Sunday from comments made by Donald Trump at campaign stops over the weekend that opponent Kamala Harris was born “mentally disabled” and had compared her actions to that of “a mentally disabled person”.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, pushed back on Trump’s remarks, which came in what Trump himself admitted was a “dark” speech.

“I just think the better course to take is to prosecute the case that her policies are destroying the country,” Graham said on CNN. “I’m not saying she’s crazy, her policies are crazy.”

Graham’s comments came as immigration and border security remained the top domestic issue on Sunday’s political talk shows. Trump made his comments during a rally in Wisconsin on Saturday amid remarks on Harris’s actions on those issues as vice-president.

“Kamala is mentally impaired. If a Republican did what she did, that Republican would be impeached and removed from office, and rightfully so, for high crimes and misdemeanors,” he said.

Trump added: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”

Minnesota Republican representative Tom Emmer, a member of JD Vance’s debate preparation team, told ABC News: “I think we should stick on the issues. The issues are, Donald Trump fixed it once. They broke it. He’s going to fix it again. That – those are the issues.”

But Maryland governor Larry Hogan struck back, telling CBS News that Trump’s comments were “insulting not only to the vice-president, but to people that actually do have mental disabilities.

“I’ve said for years that Trump’s divisive rhetoric is something we can do without,” Hogan added.

Steven Cheung, the communications director for the Trump campaign, did not directly address Trump’s comments, widely criticized as offensive, but said Harris’s record on immigration and border security made her “wholly unfit to serve as president”.

Trump’s comments joined a long list of personal attacks against opponents that supporters at his campaign eagerly lap up. Democrats have their own reductive articulations, calling Trump and Vance “weird”.

But the use of mental disability to describe Harris’s faculties has been widely seized upon. Democrat Illinois governor JB Pritzker told CNN that Trump’s remarks were “name-calling”.

“Whenever he says things like that, he’s talking about himself but trying to project it onto others,” Pritzker said. Eric Holder, the former Obama administration attorney general, said Trump’s comments indicated “cognitive decline”.

“Trump made a great deal of the cognitive abilities of Joe Biden,” he told MSNBC. “If this is where he is now, where is he going to be three and four years from now?”

Maria Town, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, pointed out that many presidents had disabilities.

Town said in a statement to the Washington Post that Trump’s comments “say far more about him and his inaccurate, hateful biases against disabled people than it does about Vice President Harris, or any person with a disability”.

Kris Kristofferson, the country singer who ably balanced a prolific acting career alongside his music, has died aged 88.

Kristofferson’s family confirmed his death on Sunday night, saying he “passed away peacefully” at home on Saturday. “We’re all so blessed for our time with him,” read the statement, which was signed by his wife Lisa, his eight children and seven grandchildren. “Thank you for loving him all these many years, and when you see a rainbow, know he’s smiling down at us all.”

Admired for the grit, emotional vulnerability and literary craft of his country songwriting, Kristofferson frequently topped the US country charts and cover versions of his songs were hits for artists including Janis Joplin, Gladys Knight and Johnny Cash. In the mid-70s, he worked with film directors including Martin Scorsese and Sam Peckinpah, and won a Golden Globe for his work opposite Barbra Streisand in the 1976 remake of A Star is Born.

Born in Texas in 1936, Kristofferson attended high school in California and initially wanted to be a novelist, later studying literature at Pomona college in southern California and at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Inspired by the nascent rock’n’roll scene, his first foray into music was in the UK as Kris Carson, though the songs he recorded were never released.

He continued performing music during a spell in the US army, where he became a helicopter pilot, a skill he continued (in the oil industry and National Guard) after he left the forces in 1965 – angering his military family. “I took pride in being the best labour or the guy that could dig the ditches the fastest,” he later said. “Something inside me made me want to do the tough stuff … Part of it was that I wanted to be a writer, and I figured that I had to get out and live.”

He relocated to the country music hub of Nashville, where he worked as a bartender and as a janitor for Columbia Recording Studios. In the late 60s he wrote songs for Jerry Lee Lewis and country singers including Ray Stevens, Faron Young and Billy Walker, but his solo career faltered.

A breakthrough came after he landed a National Guard helicopter at Johnny Cash’s home and handed him a tape of his songs, later describing the incident as “kind of an invasion of privacy that I wouldn’t recommend”. Cash admired Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down and his recording of Kristofferson’s song topped the country chart in 1970 and won song of the year at the Country Music Association awards.

That year, Kristofferson recorded the first of 18 studio albums he would release during his career. He briefly dated Janis Joplin, who recorded his song Me and Bobby McGee, and it became a No 1 hit after her death in 1970. Another Kristofferson song from that year, Help Me Make It Through the Night, became a hit single for Sammi Smith and was later covered by Elvis Presley, Gladys Knight, Mariah Carey and others.

By the time his fourth album Jesus Was a Capricorn topped the country chart in 1972, the strikingly handsome Kristofferson had begun an acting career, first appearing in Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie. Further notable films include playing the outlaw Billy the Kid in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), opposite Ellen Burstyn in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and with Burt Reynolds in sports comedy-drama Semi-Tough (1977). A Star Is Born cemented his Hollywood success, but it was later undermined by Heaven’s Gate (1980), famously a box-office flop.

In 1979, Willie Nelson made a hit album of Kristofferson covers, and in 1982 the pair collaborated with Dolly Parton and Brenda Lee on a compilation of their mid-60s songs. In 1985, Kristofferson and Nelson formed another supergroup, the Highwaymen, with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. Their debut album, Highwayman, with its title track written by Jimmy Webb, returned Kristofferson to the top of the country charts.

In the 1980s, he was a vocal critic of US president Ronald Reagan and foreign policy in Central America, when the US funded combat against left-wing forces in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Kristofferson’s 1986 album Repossessed made reference to the conflicts.

His acting career, while consistent, was given a fillip in 1996 by playing villainous sheriff Charlie Wade in John Sayles’s acclaimed neo-western Lone Star alongside Chris Cooper and Matthew McConaughey. It led to prominent roles, including that of vampire hunter Abraham Whistler in three Blade movies, starring Wesley Snipes.

Kristofferson retired in 2021. His final film role was in the Ethan Hawke-directed drama Blaze (2018), and his most recent album was 2016’s The Cedar Creek Sessions.

He was married three times, first to Fran Beer in 1960. He married singer Rita Coolidge in 1973, and their duets album that year, Full Moon, became one of Kristofferson’s biggest hits, crossing over into the pop charts’ Top 30. They divorced in 1980. He is survived by his third wife, Lisa Meyers, whom he married in 1983 and had five children with, adding to three other children from his first two marriages.

The former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has accused the UK government of hypocrisy and concealment over the way it continues to block the release of secret files about the Spycatcher affair.

Before entering politics, Turnbull was a barrister for Peter Wright, a retired senior MI5 intelligence officer who revealed a series of illegal activities by the British security services in his memoir Spycatcher.

British officials have repeatedly refused to disclose 32 files concerning the Spycatcher affair. “There is something that they are still trying to hide,” Turnbull said. He added: “What’s the public interest in keeping them suppressed?”

Spycatcher detailed how MI5 bugged embassies, plotted against the former prime minister Harold Wilson, and was run for almost a decade by a suspected Soviet agent, Roger Hollis.

Turnbull represented Wright in a 1986 court battle in Australia that caused Margaret Thatcher global humiliation over her government’s failure to stop publication of the book.

During the trial Turnbull forced Thatcher’s cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong to admit he had been “economical with the truth”. Previously classified prime ministerial papers released last year revealed just how brazenly Armstrong had lied to the Australian court and how Thatcher had misled parliament.

The damning memos were released after a long campaign by the journalist and author Tim Tate for his book To Catch a Spy: how the Spycatcher affair brought MI5 in from the cold.

Speaking at an event to mark the book’s publication at the Chelsea history festival in London, Turnbull said: “Armstrong’s perjury was really extraordinary.”

Cross-examining Armstrong during the 1986 trial, Turnbull asked Armstrong whether No 10 and MI5 had agreed to cooperate with the right-leaning writer Chapman Pincher in a book about Hollis in the hope of securing a “safely conservative” account of Hollis’s suspected treachery. Armstrong dismissed this as “a very ingenious conspiracy theory” and “totally untrue”.

But the memos released last year showed Armstrong had in fact instructed how Pincher should be briefed because he believed he would write a “sympathetic presentation”. The memos were signed off with Thatcher’s initials. The former prime minister later told parliament that a secret investigation into Hollis found no evidence that he was a Soviet agent, when it fact it had warned there was a 20% chance that he was a traitor.

Turnbull said: “Armstrong’s perjury was really extraordinary. Since then I’ve obviously had a lot of experience as a prime minister in government. To me, it is still mind boggling that the cabinet secretary of the United Kingdom feels so entitled that he could go into a witness box and tell a dead set 100% lie.

“Not a fudge, a dead set lie, knowing that what he described as ‘totally untrue’ was, in fact, totally true, and evidenced by a memo signed by him sitting in a filing cabinet in Downing Street. The fact that he felt so invulnerable, really staggers me.”

Turnbull also pointed out that years before those memos were declassified they were made available to Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore.

He said: “Interestingly Charles Moore was able to read them, for his official biography of Maggie Thatcher, and even Charles, who is a very sympathetic biographer, was unable to defend Armstrong.”

He said giving Moore access to secret memos had echoes of how Thatcher’s government tried to brief Pincher in the hope of securing a sympathetic account. He said: “Of course it’s hypocritical, it’s the same old thing all over again. If it has been made available to Charles Moore it should be made available to everyone.”

Turnbull said he had been discussing the Spycatcher affair recently, and Armstrong’s perjury, with the former Australian politician Kim Beazley. He said: “We could not imagine an Australian civil servant doing that. But maybe Armstrong was unique. It was a shocking act of perjury, Armstrong was bang to rights.”

Referring to the Spycatcher trial, Turnbull added: “I accused Armstrong of lying on several occasions, and it turns out I was right on several occasions.”

Most government documents are released after 30 years, but officials have cited various exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act to block publication of the 32 Spycatcher files.

Armstrong died in 2020. Wright died in 1995.

This is the nadir of Erik ten Hag’s Manchester United tenure: a shambolic mess that Tottenham exploited gleefully, pinging the ball about, and punching through their storied host as if in a men-v-kids knockabout.

The manager claims to have a plan and on this showing it seems to be based on waving opponents through on a figurative red carpet, as Spurs did so endlessly. Towards the end, at 2-0 down, a 10-man United rallied, as Casemiro raided and ^­Alejandro Garnacho darted in: this merely showed what Ten Hag’s charges might have done if they were not an embarrassment to their famous shirt.

By then Brennan Johnson and Dejan Kulusevksi had scored and Bruno Fernandes had been handed a red card, so the captain will miss the next three league games. If the latter decision appeared harsh, further insult and injury ensued as Lucas Bergvall’s first touch – a corner, from the left – was headed on at the near post by Pape Matar Sarr – his first touch, too – and the unmarked ­Dominic Solanke touched home.

Ten Hag, drenched in pouring rain, had overseen a duck shoot and this, too, with Ange Postecoglou’s men missing the injured Son Heung-min, and who might have given United a six or seven-nil trouncing.

United are next at Porto on Thursday, in the Europa League, then travel to Aston Villa on Sunday in this competition. After this utter farrago, the manager, desperately, needs to win again – preferably both of these games – as it is now this defeat and two draws in his side’s past three outings.

As the jubilant travelling congregation sang “when the Spurs go marching in”, and despite the denial of any job-security concern, the beleaguered Dutchman ended his afternoon dicing with the territory marked “sacking”.

Postecoglou, though, bathes in the warm glow of his side ­having turned over the record 20-time ­champions, on their own turf. With his “it’s just who we are, mate” high-line mantra and could‑not-care-less declaration about a second ­season “always” ­yielding silverware, there is an endearing swagger about Postecoglou.

After three minutes this strut was visible in his charges and it never left. Fernandes slid the ball into ­Garnacho on halfway. He tapped to Marcus Rashford who pushed forward, overhit the ball, Micky van de Ven pilfered this, then launched a ram­paging surge that left United in tatters. When he reached the left byline and crossed, Johnson had a simple tap-in.

Superb from Spurs and criminal from United. Similar naivety ensued when Manuel Ugarte ­dawdled, James Maddison mugged the supposed “shielding” player and set up Solanke. A well-timed Lisandro Martínez tackle saved Ten Hag’s men from fielding serious jeering from the support – these came at the torrid first half’s close.

United were like Anthony Joshua in the first round against Daniel Dubois: dazed from hitting the canvas instantly and never recovering. There is always hope against ­Postecoglou’s boom-or-bust ethos. Yet when ­Rashford broke along the left, his ball for Joshua Zirkzee was aimless, and here we saw the lack of ruthlessness Ten Hag bewails.

Spurs continually knifed through United’s crepe-paper-like resistance. Example: from deep in their territory, Destiny Udogie did a Van de Ven impression, skating along an inside left channel. Space, once more, was created for Johnson who was unlucky his effort defeated André Onana but not his right post.

Earlier the keeper’s left shoulder thwarted a Maddison chip after he, Kulusevski and Udogie combined. Later, Johnson was inches from ­giving Timo Werner an open goal, Nassar Mazraoui’s interception ­saving United.

Cut to a grim-faced Ten Hag ­seeing his side shredded. Cut back to the action as an ambling Diogo Dalot, who somehow lost Johnson for his strike, was pick^­pocketed, allowing ­Maddison to unload. He was wide, as was ­Cristian Romero with an aesthetically pleasing scissors-kick that offered further evidence of how splayed United were.

An abacus was needed to track Spurs’ chances. Another clear one came when Kulusevski prodded for Werner to race in behind. Onana saved, though the German should not have aimed at him again. Then, disaster: Fernandes clipped, slightly, ­Maddison, who made the proverbial of this. Up went Christopher Kavanagh’s red card and off went the Portuguese.

Now came the break and the United support’s jeers. There were more when Spurs doubled the lead. Casemiro had replaced Zirkzee for the second 45, with Rashford switching to No 9. Done, presumably, to shore United up, suddenly Johnson was wheeling down their left and popping in a ball that, deflected, Kulusevski deftly beat Onana with.

United, hapless, could not embody, even, the truism that having 10 men is awkward for the foe. And came close to losing a ­second captain of the day when Martínez (who took Fernandes’s armband) chopped Maddison down but he saw only yellow.

Romero, too, escaped a loud ball-to-hand shout in the area and so, too, ­Guglielmo Vicario’s goal when Martínez missed when it bounced to him from this.

Ron DeSantis is making a concerted effort to maintain draconian limits on abortion access in Florida that have led to accusations the rightwing Republican governor is conducting a “state-sponsored intimidation campaign” against abortion rights and trampling on civil liberties in the state.

A near total ban on abortions after the first six weeks of pregnancy took effect in Florida in May after the state supreme court ruled that the right to an abortion was no longer covered by the privacy clause in the Florida constitution.

Passage of legislation called Amendment 4 would change the state constitution to prohibit government interference with the right to an abortion before the viability of a fetus, which typically begins around the 24th week of a pregnancy.

But registered voters in Florida have recently reported unannounced visits from law enforcement personnel that appear to be part of an all-out drive by DeSantis to use state government agencies and public funds to block passage of Amendment 4, which would enshrine in the state constitution a woman’s right to an abortion.

The experience of Isaac Menasche is a cautionary tale. In early September, Menasche received an unexpected visitor at his home in the Florida Gulf coast city of Fort Myers – a plainclothes detective with a badge and a folder stuffed with documents containing Menasche’s personal information.

They included copies of his driver’s license and a petition form he had signed months ago at a local farmer’s market on behalf of a campaign to qualify a pro-choice referendum for the statewide ballot in this year’s general election.

The detective who turned up on Menasche’s doorstep wanted to know why his signature on the petition form did not match the one on his driver’s license. The retired 71-year-old attorney conceded the point but explained that his signature can sometimes vary. The officer left shortly thereafter.

“The experience left me shaken,” wrote the New Jersey native on his Facebook page that same day. “It was obvious to me that a significant effort was exerted to determine if indeed I had signed the petition. Troubling that so much resources were devoted to this.”

DeSantis initially asked the Florida supreme court to declare the ballot measure unconstitutional on the grounds that its language was vague and misleading. When that ploy failed last April, DeSantis shifted gears: in July a senior official in the state government department in charge of elections announced a review for possible fraud of tens of thousands of petition signatures collected in four counties in support of Amendment 4.

In more recent weeks, the state-run Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) has launched a website opposing the initiative on the grounds that it “threatens women’s safety”. It has also spent millions of dollars on television ads urging Florida voters to reject the proposed amendment.

“We’re seeing a state-sponsored intimidation campaign to make Floridians scared of voicing support for abortion access,” says Keisha Mulfort, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida which filed a lawsuit earlier this month seeking to halt the AHCA’s anti-Amendment 4 media campaign.

“Florida’s leadership has made it clear they don’t trust women to make decisions about their own healthcare,” she added. “They’ll go to great lengths to demonstrate they don’t support the democratic process, including sending law enforcement personnel to the homes of private citizens.”

DeSantis recently defended the state-funded anti-amendment website and television ads as “public service announcements” similar to those produced by the Florida department of transportation to encourage safe driving.

“It’s being used by the AHCA agency to basically provide people with accurate information,” said the governor during a roundtable discussion held in a Miami suburb on 9 September. “Everything that is put out is factual. That’s been done for decades, it’s not electioneering, and it is not inappropriate at all.”

The AHCA communications office failed to respond to a list of written questions submitted by the Guardian about the agency’s website and electronic media campaign. The governor’s communications director, Bryan Griffin, turned down The Guardian’s request for an interview with DeSantis, asserting that the newspaper was “completely consumed with left wing activism and does nothing to actually inform the public.”

Under a law passed by the Republican-dominated Florida legislature, ballot measures must be approved by 60% of the electorate, and Amendment 4 proponents say they are confident of meeting that threshold in the general election scheduled for 5 November.

To bolster his case against the pro-choice amendment proposal, DeSantis has even questioned the legitimacy of passing laws through popular referendums, even though that mechanism is authorized by the state constitution.

“It takes power away from the people to be able to decide this through elections and who they elect to office and who legislates,” he told a press conference recently. “It effectively puts it in the courts, and there will be 25 years’ worth of lawsuits on what any of these terms mean.”

In a letter dated 25 January of this year, the Florida department of state’s division of elections confirmed that the six organizations in support of the pro-choice referendum had collected enough valid signatures to qualify the proposed constitutional amendment for the November ballot.

Six months later, however, a deputy secretary of that same state government department revealed in a letter that his office had received “alarming information” from the Palm Beach county supervisor of elections office about “fraudulent constitutional initiative petitions” that were submitted by 35 individuals who had been hired to collect signatures on behalf of Amendment 4.

This apparent attempt to reopen the signature validity issue was replicated in three other counties in Florida, and as of two weeks ago an estimated 36,000 signatures are currently under review by an election fraud unit that was established by legislation that DeSantis signed into law two years ago.

The Palm Beach county supervisor of elections, Wendy Sartory Link, received an email four weeks ago from that deputy secretary of state, Brad McVay, asking her office to review 17,637 petition forms that were certified as valid by her office last winter.

The elections supervisor said the request from McVay was “not a common practice” that she had encountered in the five years since she was appointed to the position by DeSantis. Link is running for re-election this year as a Democrat, and she suggested that the entire exercise might be an academic one at this juncture.

“It doesn’t really apply to us,” she said. “The initiative was certified, and it’s on our ballots.”

The movement to hold US medical insurers to account scored a notable legal victory recently when a Louisiana civil court jury ordered the state’s most prominent health insurance company to pay up more than $400m after underpaying claims to a surgery center that often works with cancer patients.

But the insurer – Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) of Louisiana – has vowed to seek to reduce, if not entirely eliminate, the jury’s award to the St Charles Surgical Hospital and Center for Restorative Breast Surgery on appeal. BCBS can ask both the state’s fourth circuit court of appeal as well as the Louisiana supreme court for relief.

Nonetheless, a co-founder of the hospital hailed the 20 September verdict in his facility’s favor as a “landmark” win “for all those who have felt bullied by big corporate health insurance and the self-serving things they do”.

“We work the long hours, we pioneer advancements, we take care of these women – and we fought back for those who work on the frontline and the patients who depend on them,” Dr Frank DellaCroce told WDSU, the New Orleans NBC affiliate.

As the New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana noted, surgeons at the hospital that DellaCroce founded with Dr Scott Sullivan sued BCBS in 2017, alleging that the insurer had not reimbursed them for 9,000 procedures that had been previously authorized over the course of 10 years.

“Blue Cross either slow paid, low paid, or no paid all of those bills,” the hospital’s lead attorney, James Williams of the New Orleans-area Chehardy Sherman Williams law firm, said to WWL.

Named after the renowned New Orleans avenue on which it sits, the St Charles Surgical Center opted out of the BCBS insurance network prior to the dispute. Williams contended that BCBS’s lack of reimbursement was meant to pressure the facility into joining the company’s network, to which the vast majority of Louisiana’s medical service providers belong.

The insurer countered that authorization of a procedure did not mean payment had been guaranteed, as New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper reported. But a jury ultimately voted 11-1 that BCBS owed the hospital more than $421m in reimbursements for unpaid claims.

The St Charles hospital sought only to be made whole for unpaid claims. Its doctors had refused to pass the uncovered costs of the procedures on to patients, and they plan to pay off patients’ balances with the jury’s award.

BCBS issued a statement to multiple news outlets saying it “strongly” disagreed with the jury’s decision, which led to one of the largest ever such awards in Louisiana. The company’s statement predicted letting such an award stand would lead to higher insurance premiums, saying that “verdicts like this contribute to increasing healthcare costs for Louisianans who depend on us every day”.

“We will quickly appeal and expect to be successful,” the insurer’s statement said.

Meanwhile, the chief executive officer of the Louisiana insurance industry’s trade association echoed BCBS’s position. Jeff Drozda of the Louisiana Association of Health Plans told WDSU that the verdict – if left in place – would force health insurers “to pay out-of-network, non-negotiated providers … whatever they would like to charge”.

“You will have other providers across the state, regardless of what health plan it is … looking at the opportunity to similar bill charges for reimbursement,” Drozda said to the station.

As for the plaintiffs, Williams’ partner, Matthew Sherman, said to WDSU: “The jury’s finding of misconduct … shows that the legal system will not allow [BCBS] of Louisiana to put its self-interest ahead of that of its patients.”

“Physicians and patients have a right to expect [BCBS] of Louisiana to uphold their promise to provide fair and accurate payment for services.”

The US is the only wealthy democracy that lacks universal healthcare coverage, and Americans rely predominantly on employer-sponsored private health insurance from companies like BCBS.