Donald Trump’s campaign may be failing to reach thousands of voters they hope to turn out in Arizona and Nevada, with roughly a quarter of door-knocks done by America Pac flagged by its canvassing app as potentially fraudulent, according to leaked data and people familiar with the matter.

The potentially fake door-knocks – when canvassers falsely claim they visited a home – could present a serious setback to Trump as he and Kamala Harris remain even in the polls with fewer than 20 days to an election that increasingly appears set to be determined by turnout.

The Trump campaign earlier this year outsourced the bulk of its ground game to America Pac, the political action committee founded by Musk, betting that spending millions to turn out Trump supporters, especially those who don’t typically vote, would boost returns.

But leaked America Pac data obtained by the Guardian shows that roughly 24% of the door-knocks in Arizona and 25% of the door-knocks in Nevada this week were flagged under “unusual survey logs” by the Campaign Sidekick canvassing app.

The Arizona data, for example, shows that out of 35,692 doors hit by 442 canvassers working for Blitz Canvassing in the America Pac operation on Wednesday, 8,511 doors were flagged under the unusual survey logs.

The extent of the flagged doors in America Pac’s operation underscores the risk of outsourcing a ground-game program, where paid canvassers are typically not as invested in their candidate’s victory compared to volunteers or campaign staff​.

America Pac denied it was experiencing that level of actual fraud in Arizona and Nevada and declined to comment on reporting for this story.

And a person familiar with the America Pac operation said: “Sidekick was never expected to handle the auditing of America Pac’s door operation. The reason the pac is confident in its numbers is because of the auditing procedures each canvassing firm puts in place and the auditing procedures of the pac writ large.”

But multiple people familiar with the Campaign Sidekick app, including a recent auditor for Blitz Canvassing and a senior executive at another vendor who signed a non-disclosure agreement with America Pac, agreed the unusual activity logs were an effective tool to detect cheaters.

The unusual activity logs, for instance, showed a canvasser who was marked by GPS as sitting at a “Guayo’s On the Trail” restaurant half a mile away from the doors he was supposedly hitting in Globe, Arizona. Another canvasser was recorded marking voters as “not home” two blocks away from that apartment.

The Guardian also conducted its own test to see whether manually removing instances of “false positives” – doors wrongly marked as fraudulent – would show the unusual activity logs were too sensitive. Using a randomly picked sample of 26 canvassers in Arizona, the rate of suspected fakes was in line with the overall rate.

Suspicious doors

The Trump campaign took a gamble this cycle when it outsourced the bulk of its ground game to political action committees, after the Federal Election Commission​ earlier this year for the first time allowed campaigns to coordinate its voter turnout efforts with ​outside groups.

The campaign initially envisaged multiple pacs helping to drive the Trump vote, but America Pac ultimately became the largest and most ambitious of the outside groups as it poured more than $29.8m into its field operation for Trump and became the only pac with a material presence in every battleground state.

The largest of the other pacs involved with doing field work, such as Turning Point Action and America ​First Works, have a smaller footprint. Turning Point’s team in Wisconsin has also since been subsumed into America Pac’s operation, two people familiar with the matter said.

A​s a result of its heavy investment, America Pac has been able to post impressive numbers of door-knocks in only a matter of months through its network of several vendors and dozens of subcontractors under those vendors in each of the battleground states.

But in the final stretch to the election, as the total door-knocks have increased, so too have suspected fakes, according to the leaked data. On 15 October, 20.1% of doors in Arizona were flagged under the unusual activity logs. On 16 October, it rose to 23.8% and on 17 October, it hit 26.9%.

The uptick was also reflected in Nevada. On 15 October, 21.2% were flagged by the unusual survey log, a figure that rose on 16 October to 23.8% and then jumped dramatically on 17 October to 30.1%.

Under normal circumstances, a canvasser walks up to a door for a home where a Trump voter lives. The canvasser then navigates to a list of questions on the smartphone app and records responses to the survey.

An unusual activity report on the Campaign Sidekick app is auto-generated when a survey is filled out by a canvasser some distance from the location of the target voter’s home.

The app has built-in tolerances and generates an unusual survey report after taking into account several factors, such as how quickly the canvasser at issue is supposedly hitting doors and if the responses are recorded more than 100ft away from the target door.

America Pac has said its auditing is done by its vendors. In Arizona and Nevada, Blitz Canvassing is understood to audit the numbers at least every five days and, when a canvasser is caught cheating, they are immediately fired with their walkbooks reassigned to another canvasser.

“The America Pac field program is the most robust and effective outside canvassing effort ever, knocking on more doors with more people in more isolated terrain than has ever been done before,” America Pac’s vendors Blitz Canvassing, Echo Canyon, Synapse Group, Patriot Grassroots and Campaign Sidekick said in a joint statement.

“We are fully confident in the authenticity of our door counts thanks to the rigorous auditing infrastructure each canvassing firm deploys to supplement Campaign Sidekick’s strong capabilities, and we are on pace to exceed every single one of our door goals,” the statement said.

But that auditing system used in Arizona and Nevada only works if the fraudulent canvassers are caught quickly, which has not always been the case. In one instance, one canvasser was terminated for blatant fraud only after he had worked for five days and supposedly hit 796 doors – with every single one flagged as suspicious.

Part of the problem with paid canvassing, in general, is that canvassing vendors are disincentivized to fire canvassers the more doors they hit because the vendors are paid by the door. If the doors are not hit, the vendor owes money back to the client or owes that many “free” doors.

For America Pac, there is further disincentive for vendors to fire canvassers who might only be frauding one door out of every 10 – effectively someone who just cuts corners – because the labor supply of canvassers is diminished this late in the cycle and hiring a replacement is increasingly difficult, two people familiar with the situation said.

Satan is a feminist now

The devil works hard, but the Republican party works harder. Not a day seems to go by without anti-abortion zealots on the right advancing some cunning new plan to strip women of their bodily autonomy. As well as shutting down abortion clinics, Republican states are trying to essentially outlaw abortion pills: on Friday, Missouri, Kansas and Idaho renewed a legal push to drastically reduce access to mifepristone.

Amid this hellscape, help may be at hand from a somewhat unlikely source: Satan. Or, to be more accurate – and since the devil is in the details – the Satanic Temple.

Founded in 2012, the Satanic Temple (which is not to be confused with the very different Church of Satan) is not about devil worship. Rather, it is about raising hell to fight for freedom from the religious right’s crusade to impose their beliefs on everyone else. “Right now, we have a minority religious theocratic movement, so entrenched in politics and getting away with whatever they want,” co-founder Lucien Greaves told the Guardian earlier this year.

Recognized as a religion by the IRS, the Satanic Temple uses the religious right’s tactics, and their victories, against them. When a Ten Commandments monument was erected at the Oklahoma state capitol in 2012, for example, the temple submitted an application to put a 7ft-tall statue depicting Satan as Baphomet, a goat-headed figure with horns, alongside it. In its application, it argued that the decision to have a Ten Commandments monument paved the way for satanic representation. (They weren’t the only ones protesting: the satirical Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster also requested a monument.) In the end, the Ten Commandments statue was removed by order of the state’s supreme court and the Horned One did not get immortalized in Oklahoma.

Over the years, the Satanic Temple has taken on issues like prayer in the classroom, after-class Bible study groups, and the distribution of Bibles in schools. Now, for obvious reasons, it’s increasingly turning its not-so-evil eye to abortion rights. Last year, it opened an online abortion clinic in New Mexico called The Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic, in reference to the conservative justice who wrote the majority opinion that overturned Roe v Wade. “In 1950, Samuel Alito’s mother did not have options, and look what happened,” Malcolm Jarry, co-founder of the Satanic Temple said at the time.

As with its other causes, the Satanic Temple brands abortion as a core part of its religious beliefs. Women are asked to recite a ritual (“By my body, my blood, by my will, it is done”) before taking abortion pills to ward off “unjust persecution”. The temple has also sued states that have banned abortion, arguing that abortion is a religious rite for their congregation and that denying them access to these ritual abortions would be a constitutional violation.

All of this has had the desired effect of driving the satanists’ adversaries bonkers. The Christian Research Institute, an evangelical group, described the group as “troll lords” and said they were “exploiting their cartoonishly dark and villainous branding to agitate the public and pester the Christian Right into a judicial showdown”.

That showdown may be forthcoming because the Satanic Temple has just opened its second telehealth abortion clinic, this time in Virginia. It’s called the Right to Your Life Satanic Abortion Clinic. “We’re also actively working to increase access in other states, including taking legal action in restrictive states such as Indiana and Idaho to provide religious abortion services there as well,” the temple said in a statement. Truly, they are doing the Lord’s work.

“It is important to protect people, primarily the younger generation, from having the ideology of childlessness imposed on them on the internet, in the media, in movies and in advertising,” one politician said. I imagine that JD Vance, who has very strong views on “childless cat ladies” is nodding along furiously to all this, and taking notes for copycat legislation in the US.

US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’

Video footage shot by the group Hope Not Hate and reviewed by the Guardian show the company Heliospect Genomic marketing its services at up to $50,000 for 100 embryos, with one manager boasting a possible gain of more six IQ points. A genetics expert told the Guardian that one of the many problems with this “is that it normalises this idea of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ genetics … [and] reinforces the belief that inequality comes from biology rather than social causes”.

UK women who suffer cardiac arrest in public less likely to get CPR

According to a new study, this is because bystanders worry about touching women’s breasts when giving chest compressions. The report suggests better training could address this problem and save lives.

More American women than men have tattoos

Thirty-eight percent of women v 27% of men, to be exact, according to Pew Research Center. The Washington Post explores the ways that some women use tattoos to represent a way of “reclaiming control” over their bodies.

A South Korean court recognizes misogyny as a motive for hate crime in landmark ruling

The ruling was made in regards to a case where a woman was attacked by a man who shouted “feminists deserve to be beaten” because she had short hair.

Donald Trump calls himself the ‘father of IVF’ during a Fox News town hall

After this nonsensical statement, he added that he hadn’t actually known what IVF was until Senator Katie Britt, whom Trump described as a “a fantastically attractive person from Alabama”, explained it to him. “And within about two minutes, I understood it,” the former president exclaimed. Donald: I’m not sure you actually did.

Nicola Coughlan says being called a ‘plus-size heroine’ is insulting

Coughlan had strong words for viewers who called her “brave” for the nudity scenes in season 3 of Bridgerton. “Don’t call me brave. I have a cracking pair of boobs … that’s actually just me showing them off,” she told Time magazine. “I’m a few sizes below the average size of a woman in the UK and I’m seen as a ‘plus-size heroine’ … Making it about how I look is reductive and boring.”

Palestinian woman shot by the IDF while picking olives in the West Bank

Hanan Abu Salameh, 59, had been picking olives with her family when she was killed. Her son has said that the Israeli forces started shooting randomly and shot his mother when she was fleeing. The IDF has said it is “investigating” but, based on prior “investigations”, one imagines nobody will be held accountable.

The week in pawtriarchy

A US paraglider flying over Egypt’s great pyramids recently spotted something unusual on top of the second-tallest pyramid. Was it a bird? Was it a plane? No, it was a dog that had seemingly summited the 448ft-tall structure so it could bark at birds. After a satisfying barking session, the dog made its way down safely. However, since climbing the pyramids is illegal, the adventurous animal could well find itself in the doghouse.

In many countries around the world, breakfast TV means cele­brity interviews, soap operas and last night’s football highlights. On the German-language channel 3sat this Sunday morning, it means a one-hour philosophical discussion on trauma psychology, followed by a book review programme and a classical concert by the Munich Radio Orchestra.

The collaboration between public broadcasters in Austria, Germany and Switzerland is a unique experi­ment in pan-European broadcasting that has defied doubters for almost four decades: highbrow television.

Yet whether 3sat will get to cele­brate its 40th anniversary this De­cember is in serious doubt. At a summit in Leipzig this week, the heads of Germany’s 16 federal states will consider a proposal to close the world’s most donnish TV station by merging it “partially or completely” into Arte, the Franco-German culture channel that is embarking on a Europe-wide expansion.

Admirers of 3sat’s resolute intellectualism say the merger plans are a sign that authorities are bowing to populist attacks on public service broadcasting, by cutting culture programming that may appear painless but which is also unlikely to save much money. A petition to save the channel has been signed by 140,000 people including the film director Wim Wenders and actor Sandra Hüller.

But the debate over 3sat’s future also raises questions over the reformability of Germany’s public broadcasting system, which has one the biggest budgets in the world but is also one of the most complex and decentralised.

3sat was launched in 1984 as an antidote to what the then head of Austria’s public broadcaster bemoaned as the “­feeble-mindedness” of mainstream television. The bulk of its content is provided by the two main German public broadcasting channels, ARD and ZDF, with Austria’s ORF contributing 25% and Switzerland’s SRG supplying 10% of its programming.

“To make a daily feuilleton [arts and ideas] programme for tele­vision was something no one else dared do,” says the journalist and philosopher Gert Scobel, who presents several channel’s flagship shows. “Everyone told us we would last only three weeks.”

Among its mainstays are Scobel’s science programme Nano and the culture news programme Kulturzeit, which go out during mornings and evenings each weekday, as well as themed days on subjects as diverse as the dramatist Bertolt Brecht, Afghan history and genetics. It is the only channel to show all the three countries’ main news programmes, and to live-broadcast the two-week-plus Theatertreffen festival in Berlin and readings from the three-day Bachmannpreis poetry competition in Klagenfurt.

Scobel says: “I tell the guests on my show that each programme only has one aim – to leave viewers smarter than they were before, and that they approach each subject from different directions with the aim of finding a solution.”

3sat’s market share is only about 1% in each of the three collaborating countries, though with 90m German-language households, its viewing figures are considerable. The channel costs German public broadcasters around €92m a year, roughly the same as the German children’s TV channel Kika.

But, as in other countries across Europe, Germany is facing an increasingly acrimonious debate over state-funded public service broadcasting. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland has vowed to shrink the public broadcasters down to a tenth of their current size, scrap the compulsory licence fee and finance the remaining offering with a tax on streaming giants such as Amazon and Netflix.

Where the popu­list right is buoyant, centrist parties have fallen in line: in Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg, the Christian Democrat and Social Democrat state premiers have in the past few years tried to block plans for a licence fee rise.

From 2025, people registered in Germany face a monthly licence fee of €18.94 (£15.78), slightly higher than its equivalent in the UK (£14.12) and considerably more than France (£9.64). In multilingual Switzerland, the fee is higher still at SFr27.91 (£24.73) and there is political pressure to cut back spending on public service television.

High-minded 3sat could become the sacrificial lamb on the altar of the populist zeitgeist. Swiss broadcaster SRF said it would not comment on German proposals to close the jointly funded channel. Only Austria’s ORF said it would seek an “intense exchange” with its partners on the station’s future, insisting it was “essential” that its marquee TV productions reach an international audience.

Not all criticism of 3sat is motivated by populist rabble-­rousing. The channel’s budget has been salami-sliced for years and its schedule increasingly includes reruns of period dramas, crime shows and wildlife documentaries.

“A lot of the original programmes produced by 3sat deserved to be protected, but are we sure we need them all in a separate channel?” asks Stefan Niggemeier, a German journalist and media commentator.

Its shortcomings are exposed by comparison with the Franco-German culture broadcaster Arte, which presents itself less and less as a linear TV channel and more and more as an arts-focused streaming platform, a “Netflix for the educated classes”, as the broadsheet Die Zeit has called it.

Established via a treaty between France and Germany in 1990, six years after the birth of 3sat, Arte has gained considerable momentum in recent years after the French president Emmanuel Macron proposed developing it into a “European platform”. Over the past six years, it has added offerings of programmes subtitled or dubbed into Polish, Italian, Spanish and English.

“Because Arte had to straddle a language barrier, it was always under more pressure to develop its own identity and come up with original ideas,” says Niggemeier. “Arte has managed to stay cool, while 3sat feels like a magazine for linear television.”

He doubts that politicians will close the German-speaking world’s most erudite TV channel in the immediate future. “But in the long-term, I think it’s right to ask how we can change it.”

Mexico’s navy has said it arrested 23 people in its largest-ever drugs bust, seizing over eight tonnes of illicit cargo in an operation off the country’s south-western Pacific coast.

“Navy personnel seized 8,361 kilograms of illicit cargo, which represents the largest amount of drugs seized in a maritime operation, unprecedented in history,” a statement from the ministry of the navy said on Friday.

It did not specify the type of the drugs, but said they were valued at 2.099bn pesos ($105m).

The navy also seized 8,700 litres of fuel and six boats of the coast near Lazaro Cardenas, in Michoacan state, and further south off the coast of Guerrero state.

“The 23 detainees, who were read their rights, as well as the six boats, the presumed drugs and the fuel were handed over to the competent authorities for integration into the corresponding investigation,” the navy added.

The drugs were distributed in six small boats and one of the vessels was a submersible, which implied a “complex” action on the part of the sailors, the ministry added.

The largest drug seizure in Mexico’s history was 23 tonnes of Colombian cocaine in November 2007. According to the navy, Friday’s announcement represents the largest amount ever seized in a maritime operation.

The latest raid reported on Friday was carried out “days ago” by surface units backed by a helicopter, the ministry said.

On 23 August, authorities reported they had impounded about seven tonnes of drugs in two separate operations in the same area of the country.

The Mexican navy, which conducts surveillance operations on a permanent basis, has discovered all kinds of drug shipments, including one of cocaine stuffed in 217 barrels of chilli sauce in 2016.

The US has pushed Mexico to ramp up its efforts to stop drug trafficking, while Mexico has pressured the US to do more to stem the flow of firearms to criminal groups across the border into Mexico.

With Reuters and Agence France-Presse

It is the second-best place for nightingales in the country, a sanctuary for rare barbastelle bats and home to nearly 1,500 invertebrate species, including a quarter of all Britain’s spider species. But Middlewick Ranges on the edge of Colchester is poised to be sold by the Ministry of Defence for 1,000 new homes.

Conservation scientists have written to the UK defence secretary, John Healey, urging him to reverse the decision to sell the 76-hectare (187.8-acre) site for housing. Experts who have fought the proposals for eight years say the house-building is based on faulty and flawed environmental evidence and must be reversed.

A freedom of information request by campaigners has revealed an ecological report that in 2017 identified large swaths of rare acid grassland at Middlewick, which has been untouched by a plough for at least 200 years and contains more than 10% of Essex’s remaining acid grassland.

This report was not seen by Colchester city councillors when they allocated 1,000 homes to Middlewick in their local plan. A subsequent ecological report produced for the MoD in 2020 then downgraded almost half of the acid grassland. Conservation scientists say this vastly underestimates Middlewick’s natural riches, and makes it easier to build houses on the site.

Local campaigners also accuse the MoD of destroying scrub habitat of about 12 singing nightingales during new fencing works for a mitigation site south of Middlewick, which is controversially designed to provide biodiversity net gain (BNG) – as required by law when building new homes.

According to development plans by the MoD’s property arm, the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, acid grassland destroyed by the new homes can be replaced by adding sulphur to mitigation land to create “new” acid grassland. But conservationists say these methods are unproved and reckless, and it is impossible to replicate the richness of wildlife found in the undisturbed acidic soils of the ranges.

“It’s far bigger than one site in one part of Essex. If this goes ahead, it sets a catastrophic national precedent,” said Martin Pugh, a senior ecological consultant and deputy chair of Friends of Middlewick. “This idea that every habitat is replaceable is a misuse of biodiversity net gain. We need to draw a red line and say this is irreplaceable habitat. Middlewick is a litmus test. If this is allowed to pass, it makes a mockery of BNG.”

Middlewick has been a military range for more than 150 years, and local people have enjoyed its open green spaces when manoeuvres are not taking place. The MoD stopped using the site in 2021, and fenced-off areas have naturally rewilded, with new scrubland providing valuable habitat for nightingales. A survey this year found 59 singing males in the area affected by the development, part of a larger population in the area that is the second-best in the country after Lodge Hill in Kent, another MoD site once earmarked for development, which was reprieved after it was made a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) in 2014.

Conservation scientists say Middlewick could qualify as an SSSI for any one of at least five criteria, including its rare invertebrates, acid grassland, barbastelle bats, nightingales and ancient oak trees. The former firing range is also home to threatened species including the endangered necklace ground beetle and the four-banded weevil-wasp – a wasp only found in Essex and Kent – and thriving populations of reptiles, amphibians, mammals and specialist waxcap fungi.

During the long-running saga, the MoD claimed a bespoke biodiversity metric can be used to show a developer is adding wildlife value. According to campaigners, it will be impossible to show an uplift in biodiversity by destroying the acid grassland and its species.

An assessment of the two contradictory ecological reports by Pugh, a qualified environmental consultant with 19 years’ experience, found that the 2020 report incorrectly reduced the amount of acid grassland at Middlewick by almost half: from 52.88 hectares mapped in 2017 to 32.52 hectares. Pugh said the 2020 report mislabelled 20.36 hectares of acid grassland as “poor, semi-improved grassland”, which is of much lower biodiversity value.

On a Guardian visit, plant species such as sheep’s sorrel – an indicator of acid grassland – were widely found on areas that were reclassified in the 2020 survey as not being acid grassland.

Classifying these areas as much less biodiverse grassland makes it much easier for the site’s developers to claim there will be biodiversity net gain if Middlewick is built upon.

According to the Ministry of Defence, it is up to the local authority and its new owner “to determine the development of the site”. An MOD spokesperson said: “We commissioned a comprehensive range of surveys over a three-year period to ensure that environmental impacts were understood and mitigated.”

Colchester city council said: “The 2020 report provided a more detailed analysis of the site’s ecology, building on the earlier findings from the 2017 desktop study. This study was designed to establish the scope of ecological evidence needed for the later planning stages.” In response, campaigners said the more accurate 2017 report was not a desktop survey but included lengthy surveys by two qualified botanists.

As part of a five-year review of its local plan, the council will now re-examine the allocations of houses to all sites, including Middlewick Ranges. Cllr Andrea Luxford Vaughan, who holds the planning portfolio, said: “This review will consider all new evidence, including the findings from the latest ecological surveys commissioned by the council, to ensure that we continue to make informed and responsible decisions.”

In a council meeting, LuxfordVaughan said: “I think it’s widely accepted that the Stantec [2020] report was rubbish.” Stantec, the company that produced the 2020 survey, defended the report saying it was “technically sound” and “accurate at the time of writing”.

The council also said it had begun conducting new botanical and invertebrate surveys across various seasons “to ensure a complete environmental picture of the Middlewick site” and that these would “guide future planning decisions”.

Jeremy Dagley, the director of conservation at Essex Wildlife Trust, said: “It is this level of detail that should have been provided six years ago – and which would have demonstrated that the site was not an appropriate place for development anywhere within its boundary.

“It is astonishing it is not an SSSI. It is of the same ecological importance as acid grasslands of fully protected SSSIs, like Epping Forest. The dream scenario would be to make it a nature reserve that people could access.”

In 2019, France’s best known climate expert sat down to work with its most feted graphic novelist. The result? Perhaps the most terrifying comic ever drawn.

Part history, part analysis, part vision for the future, World Without End weaves the story of humanity’s rapacious appetite for fossil fuel energy, how it has made possible the society people take for granted, and its disastrous effects on the climate.

Among French readers it was an immediate smash hit, selling more than 1m copies so far, becoming the country’s top-selling book in all categories in 2022 and hailed as “one of the most brilliant summaries of climate issues ever written”.

But its controversial solutions provoked a backlash from some quarters. The criticisms now seem set to follow the book into the anglophone world, where it appears next week in print in English for the first time.

When Christophe Blain began work on World Without End, he was already France’s most celebrated comic book artist and a recipient of international awards. He was in the enviable position of being able to choose any creative project.

He chose to call Jean-Marc Jancovici, one of France’s foremost climate science communicators. “I was frightened,” said Blain, in an interview with the Guardian. “I realised that the climate change was a reality. When I’m frightened I have to move – I can’t stay still, I have to jump in the action. And the action was to call Jean-Marc and tell him let’s make a book together.”

It was an opportunity for which Jancovici, already author of eight books on climate breakdown and energy transition, whose online lectures on the topics had been viewed millions of times, had been waiting.

“I felt very excited because it was a way that I knew would work for sure to get to an audience that doesn’t read books and who is not in my ecosystem,” he said. “It was a way to reach people that remained out of reach before, because you can add a zero to the number of copies for a graphic novel compared to a classical essay.”

Together, Blain and Jancovici devised a revealing deconstruction of the human-made processes that have pushed the planet to the brink of climate collapse, full of incredible observations, such as the fact that the effects of fossil fuel energy mean it is as if each human had, on average, 200 enslaved people working for them, or that, without machines, 1.5 trillion people would have to work to produce the same amount of energy.

There are also painful truths, including the little acknowledged fact that 35% of the world’s electricity is still produced from coal – the dirtiest of all fossil fuels.

But the book’s most powerful element lies in its use of a series of evocative images to decode concepts of energy production and consumption, and its burden on our planet.

Most notably, the fossil fuel economy, and all the advantages it has given human civilisation, is depicted as Iron Man (or rather Armour Man in the UK version, for reasons of copyright), an exoskeleton donned by humanity to expand its powers to near omnipotence.

The image of a superhero came naturally, Jancovici said. “As our superpowers come from all the machinery that we have in the world, mixing up the human shape and the idea of machines, well I could either choose Terminator or Iron Man, and I chose Iron Man. It’s a little bit more friendly.”

But Iron Man has a problematic counterpart, the spectre – quite literally in World Without End – of greenhouse gas pollution. “One of the metaphors we could have used in the book is the history of Faust,” Jancovici said. “First you enjoy, then you pay. It’s exactly what fossil fuels are bringing us.”

What sets World Without End apart from other examinations of climate breakdown is this look at the deep connection between energy abundance and the scientific and social progress it has enabled – comforts that cannot easily be abandoned – and the breakdown of our planet’s climate.

“The new part in the book, in my view, is that one,” said Jancovici. “It’s to put in just one piece something that gathers both knowledge on the physical flows of our productive system and our way of living, and a major externality, which is climate change.”

And that is also where its most terrifying aspect arises. World Without End describes a situation where the cataclysmic effects of climate change are beginning to grip human civilisation just as people can no longer use, and indeed are begin to run out of, the energy sources needed to cope with them.

The very name of the book can be seen as a précis of this paradox, Jancovici said. “It was Christophe’s idea, and I thought that it expressed very well the romantic idea of a never-ending story of growth and abundance, which is exactly what fossil fuels brought us for a while. Of course the understatement in the title appears to anyone: the world is not without end.”

That is where solutions come in – as well as the book’s most-contested claim. Jancovici and Blain downplay the potential of renewable energies such as wind, solar and hydropower. Nuclear power, they say, is the only way to decarbonise power grids fast while maintaining the benefits of industrial society.

It is a position that led to criticism, even in France, which already gets most of its electricity from nuclear. Renewable energy advocates accused the book of a “pro-nuclear bias”, pointing out Jancovici’s connections to the energy industry through his think tank the Shift Project.

Some campaigners even took their actions into bookshops, masquerading as representatives of the French publisher, Dargaud, to persuade staff to insert an anti-nuclear “erratum” to copies.

Jancovici said that if the book were to be rewritten there would be less material on nuclear power, but not because he regrets it – he thought their position had been vindicated by the energy crisis provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Part of the debate is over in France,” he said. “Anti-nuclear positions are not at all as mainstream in the media as they were five years ago. We owe that to Putin, because it has been a general movement all across Europe.

“On renewable energies what we wanted to say is not that they are totally useless, or without interest. It’s that they by nature do not have the properties of dense and dispatchable fossil fuels, and that, of course, we can do something with them. But we won’t do with them what we believe we can do, which is sustain an industrial civilisation on renewable energies alone.”

Blain and Jancovici attributed the book’s phenomenal sales to its shareability, its offering an easy and discrete way for people who cared about the climate issue to use it to explain the problems to others. “When the book was released, what I expected was the book would become viral. And it became viral,” Blain said.

Jancovici added: “What happened is that the book was designed to be given, and this strategy became effective.”

The authors’ hope is that World Without End will precipitate a change in consciousness around energy consumption. “The book is made to understand the problem, to understand the orders of magnitude,” Blain said.

“To understand what it costs, really, what it means, what is behind the scenes. When you understand that, it’s impossible to think the same way as before … You can see the things around you differently. You imagine your future life differently, for you, or your children, for your parents, for anybody. You know that the world will be different.”

Or, as Jancovici put it: “It’s the kilowatt hours, stupid.”

World Without End is published in the UK on Thursday by Particular Books.

A fast-moving fire fed by strong winds burned two homes on Friday and damaged several others in a hillside neighborhood in the city of Oakland, where roughly 500 people were ordered to evacuate, officials said.

Damon Covington, the city’s fire chief, said that at about 1.30pm, calls had come in reporting a fire in front of a home in the Oakland hills. Crews arrived as the inferno quickly grew with winds ranging from calm breezes to 40mph (64km/h) gusts during red-flag conditions.

“Wind was whipping,” Covington said.

Michael Hunt, a spokesperson for the fire department, said one of the homes had been significantly burnt while the second had minor damage from the flames. Fewer than 10 other homes had smoke and water damage. Early reports had conflicting numbers of affected structures.

The fire was near the 580 Freeway, which connects the San Francisco Bay Area to central California, causing traffic jams as people tried to leave the area and smoke wafted over the city of 440,000.

The blaze charred through eucalyptus trees, which spread the fire as flames jumped across sides of the roadway, Covington said. Within three hours, it grew to to 13 acres (about 5 hectares). By about 4pm, crews were able to stop it from advancing, though scores of firefighters continued to battle.

“We have less than 10 homes that have been damaged, and we had hundreds of homes, structures, that were threatened,” the chief said.

The fire was burning in the Oakland hills where a 1991 fire destroyed nearly 3,000 homes and killed 25 people.

It comes as forecasters issued red-flag warnings for fire danger until Saturday from the central coast through the San Francisco Bay Area and into northern Shasta county, not far from the Oregon border.

About 16,000 customers were without electricity Friday after Pacific Gas and Electric shut off power in 19 counties in the northern and central parts of the state. A major “diablo wind” – notorious in the autumn for its hot, dry gusts – was forecast to cause sustained winds reaching 35mph in many areas, raising the risk of power lines sparking a wildfire. The gusts could top 65mph (104 km/h) along mountaintops, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). The strong winds are expected to last through part of the weekend.

The fire began as a vegetation fire near the freeway and grew uphill, Hunt said. At least eight structures have already been damaged.

He said “hundreds of residents” were being evacuated, but did not have an exact number.

“It’s a large, probably three-mile area that’s probably potentially evacuated,” he said.

A nearby elementary school was getting set up to serve as a temporary shelter for the evacuees.

A total of about 20,000 customers could lose power temporarily in the next couple of days, PG&E said in a statement Friday.

“The duration and extent of power outages will depend on the weather in each area, and not all customers will be affected for the entire period,” the utility said.

It was not immediately clear what caused the Oakland blaze. The fire department ordered people to evacuate Friday on two streets, Campus Drive and Crystal Ridge Court.

“This could end up being the most significant wind event for this year so far,” said meteorologist Brayden Murdock with the NWS’s Bay Area office. “We want to tell people to be cautious.”

Targeted power shutoffs were also possible in southern California, where another notorious weather phenomenon, the Santa Ana winds, are expected Friday and Saturday.

Santa Anas are dry, warm and gusty north-east winds that blow from the interior of southern California toward the coast and offshore, moving in the opposite direction of the normal onshore flow that carries moist air from the Pacific into the region.

The National Weather Service issued red-flag warnings for the valleys and mountains of Los Angeles county, portions of the Inland Empire, and the San Bernardino mountains.

Winds around greater Los Angeles won’t be as powerful as up north, with gusts from 25-40mph (40-64 km/h) possible in mountains and foothills, said Mike Wofford, a meteorologist with the NWS’s Los Angeles-area office.

The strongest winds were being recorded in the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains, where Friday there were gusts from 45-55mph (72-88 km/h) with isolated gusts up to 60mph (96km/h), he said.

“Humidities are drying out and we have the winds. If we had a fire spark, it could really spread quickly because of the current conditions,” Wofford said.

A former soldier “congratulated” the police officer who captured him three days after he was accused of escaping from prison, a jury has heard.

Woolwich crown court on Friday heard evidence from the Metropolitan police officer, who said he grabbed hold of Daniel Khalife on a canal towpath in west London.

The plainclothes detective sergeant, who was not named in court, said he jumped out of his car and ran down an alleyway to the canal.

“It was quite a fast-moving situation. I could see Khalife coming towards me on the footpath riding his bike with clothing matching the description. I was sure it was Daniel Khalife, I told him he was under arrest. I ran down the stairs, I pulled my Taser out,” he told the jury.

Khalife “flinched” when he saw the device, but did not “have a chance to stop” because of the speed he was moving at, the court heard. “I grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him off of the bike on to the floor.”

The 23-year-old is alleged to have escaped from HMP Wandsworth in south London while on remand by strapping himself to the underside of a food delivery lorry on 6 September 2023. He was arrested in west London on 9 September carrying several items, including a Waitrose bag containing a phone, receipts, a diary and about £200 in notes, the jury was told.

Jurors were shown an image of Khalife after the arrest, which showed him sitting on the ground wearing a white T-shirt, blue shorts and red socks with no shoes on.

The Met police officer who apprehended the alleged fugitive said he had driven in the direction of where Khalife had been spotted to try to get ahead of him. Once he caught up with the former soldier, the officer said he “did comply”, and was handcuffed. The officer was then joined by colleagues, who sat up Khalife and formally arrested him.

Asked about Khalife’s demeanour, the officer said: “He was friendly towards me. Quite jovial. At no point did he try to resist. He was pleasant. He congratulated me on catching him.”

Asked by the defence barrister, Gul Nawaz Hussain KC, if he had told Khalife: “Stop, or I’ll shoot,” the officer replied: “No.” Asked if Khalife had stopped and come over to the officer voluntarily, before saying: “You’ve got me,” the detective sergeant laughed and replied: “Complete and utter rubbish.”

The prosecutor, Mark Heywood KC, previously told the jury Khalife “quite deliberately escaped” after being escorted to the kitchen where he had a job.

On 6 September, Khalife had been to Richmond, in south-west London, and went to Mountain Warehouse, a clothing store. The next day, he was pictured in an M&S and Sainsbury’s, the court heard. On the day of the arrest, the former soldier was seen in a McDonald’s, his trial was told.

His absence was discovered during a headcount and then all movement in the prison was suspended, the jury was told.

Khalife also faces charges contrary to the Official Secrets Act and Terrorism Act, and is accused of perpetrating a bomb hoax. He denies all of the charges.

The trial continues.

Donald Trump billed the government for Secret Service accommodations at his hotels many times over what other guests were charged, particularly foreign dignitaries, according to a report released Friday from Democratic members of the House oversight committee.

Describing the former US president’s term in office as “the world’s greatest get-rich-quick scheme”, the report’s authors referred to documents obtained by subpoenas of the Mazars firm, Trump’s accountants, citing guest logs for Trump International hotel in Washington, DC, between September 2017 and August 2018.

The hotel “charged as much as 300% or more above the authorized government per diem”, for Secret Service hotel rooms, according to the report.

It added: “Not only did former President Trump’s D.C. hotel routinely charge the Secret Service more than the government rate, it frequently charged the Secret Service more than it did other patrons, including members of a foreign royal family and a Chinese business interest.”

Eric Trump has said previously that the Trump organization let Secret Service agents “stay at our properties for free”. But the report calls that assertion into question, noting that the agency was charged “far in excess of approved government per diem rates and even many times the rates charged to hundreds of other patrons—including some of the rooms rented by the Qatari royal family and Chinese business interests—for rooms used by agents protecting members of the Trump family.”

The report follows up investigative reports made when Democrats controlled the House oversight committee. When Republicans took the House majority in 2023, new committee chairman James Comer ended the committee’s lawsuits to obtain records and refused to issue new subpoenas. The report by the committee’s Democratic minority relies on documents obtained earlier.

A 156-page report on Trump’s business dealings by House Democrats released in January noted that four businesses owned by Trump’s family conglomerate received at least $7.8m in payments in total from 20 countries during his four years in the White House.

While Trump was in office, Republicans made regular use of Trump International hotel while visiting Washington. Democrats on the committee cited three people Trump appointed to the federal bench, eight ambassadors, five people who later obtained presidential pardons like Dinesh D’Souza and Ken Kurson, and numerous other state and federal officials who stayed there on official travel.

The US constitution’s emoluments clause states that a president may receive no payments from the federal government other than a salary. Previous presidents have divested from business interests that could conflict with the clause. Jimmy Carter famously sold his peanut farm in Georgia before taking office. Trump refused to do so, and took efforts to shield his personal and business finances from public scrutiny.

The US supreme court dismissed two cases accusing Trump of violating the emoluments clause in January 2021, ruling that the issue was moot because he was no longer president.

Trump has disparaged the emoluments issue in prior comments, likening it to the earnings made by Barack Obama on book sales to foreign universities.

The hotel made about $150m in revenue over the course of Trump’s term in office, but incurred net losses of about $70m largely due to the pandemic, according to previous reports from the oversight committee.

Trump sold the lease on the 263-room hotel, known as the Old Post Office building, in 2022 to a Florida-based investment group, CGI Merchant Group. Since the hotel reopened as a hotel in the Waldorf Astoria chain in June 2023, spending by Republican groups there has cratered, according to a report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an oversight group that sued Trump over emoluments issues.