A federal jury in Texas on Monday cleared a group of Donald Trump’s supporters and found one driver liable in a civil trial over a so-called “Trump Train” that surrounded a Biden-Harris campaign bus on a busy highway days before the 2020 election.

The two-week trial in a federal courthouse in Austin centered on whether the actions of the “Trump Train” participants amounted to political intimidation. Among those onboard the bus was Wendy Davis, the former Democratic lawmaker, who testified she feared for her life while a convoy of Trump supporters boxed in the bus along Interstate 35.

The jury awarded $10,000 to the bus driver.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit had alleged they were terrorised and intimidated for more than 90 minutes on 20 October 2020, as they took a bus tour canvassing for the Democratic ticket in the final days of the election in Texas as they travelled from San Antonio to Austin.

About 40 vehicles flying Make America Great Again flags encircled the bus, trying to run it off the road and playing what the suit claims was a “madcap game of highway ‘chicken’”.

No criminal charges were filed against the six Trump supporters who were sued by Davis and two others onboard the bus. Civil rights advocates hoped a guilty verdict would send a clear message about what constitutes political violence and intimidation.

Video that Davis recorded from the bus shows pickup trucks with large Trump flags slowing down to box in the bus as it tried to move away from the group of Trump supporters. One of the defendants hit a campaign volunteer’s car while the trucks occupied all lanes of traffic, forcing the bus and everyone around it to a 15mph crawl.

The event was canceled after Davis and others on the bus – a campaign staffer and the driver – made repeated calls to 911 asking for a police escort through San Marcos and no help arrived.

Davis, who is best known for the 11-hour speech she made in the Texas senate in 2013 to filibuster an anti-abortion bill, said she suffered “substantial emotional distress” form the experience.

Associated press contributed to this report

Democrats are increasingly worried that pollsters are undercounting Donald Trump’s voter support, rating his prospects of winning November’s presidential election as much higher than headline opinion polling figures suggest.

While most national surveys show consistent, though moderate, leads for Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, some supporters are unnerved by the small margin of her advantage in three northern battlegrounds – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – which are deemed must-wins in her quest for the White House.

Although some polls have shown the vice-president with leads of between four and six points in Pennsylvania – generally judged the most important swing state – others show Trump trailing by smaller deficits. Narrower gaps separate the two in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Harris’s lead is just 1 or 2%, according to several different recent polls.

Underpinning Democrats’ fears is the knowledge that Trump greatly out-performed predictions in all three states in 2016, when he narrowly won them en route to his election triumph over Hillary Clinton, and in 2020, when he was pipped by Joe Biden by far smaller margins than forecast.

The worries are compounded by the latest New York Times/Siena poll, which records Trump performing more robustly in three Sun belt battleground states – Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina – than he has in weeks.

The survey shows the Republican nominee leading by five points – 50 to 45% – in Arizona, which Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, and four points – 49 to 45% – in Georgia, which was won by the president by a similar margin. In North Carolina, where Trump is trying to avoid being tarred by revelations over past comments by Mark Robinson, the GOP’s candidate for governor, he has a smaller advantage, 49 to 47%.

Putting the Democrats’ worries into perspective are projections showing that Trump will win all seven designated battleground states – the seventh being Nevada – if he outstrips polling predictions by the same margins he achieved in losing the 2020 election.

A separate projection by Focaldata – using a model that takes into account different demographic factors in determining the likelihood that certain cohorts will vote – reduces Harris’s lead by an average of 2.4% across swing states.

“In an election which could be decided by just 60,000 voters in November, this margin could easily be the difference between a right and wrong call on the election winner,” writes Focaldata’s Patrick Flynn. “Pollsters who simply rely on self-reporting [in defining likely voters] may be subject to another polling miss in Trump’s favor.”

The one piece of encouraging news for Harris is that she will win every swing state except Georgia if the polls turn out to be as wrong as they were in the campaign for the 2022 congressional midterm elections.

That has not placated some Democrats, who note that both Clinton and Biden were performing better against Trump in polling – both nationally and in swing states – than Harris is now.

“That’s ominous. There’s no question that is concerning, but you’re working as hard as you can work, no matter what,” the Hill quoted one unnamed Democratic senator as saying. “My sense is there’s not a lot more you can do than we’re already doing.”

John Fetterman, the Democratic senator for Pennsylvania, told the same site that Trump was a threat despite some buoyant recent polling for Harris in his state. “Polling has really been seriously damaged since 2016 … Trump is going to be tough in Pennsylvania, and that’s absolutely the truth,” he said.

In a further worrying sign for Harris, the New York Times/Siena poll indicated that her “bounce” from this month’s debate against Trump – which most surveys indicated she won – was the smallest enjoyed by any presidential debate-winning candidate in the 21st century.

“On average, Kamala Harris is faring about one point better across 34 polls that measured the race before and after the debate,” wrote the New York Times’ chief polling analyst Nate Cohn, concluding that the contest remained deadlocked despite the encounter.

“George W Bush, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and, yes, Donald J Trump earlier this year, all peaked with gains of at least two points after their debates.”

Twenty-five years ago, when I lived in Barcelona, it had a brilliant scheme for getting rid of unwanted articles (Councils in England to get revised guidance on ‘middle-class fly-tipping’, 22 September). Each barrio had one night every month when you could put your stuff out on the pavement – first to be picked over by your neighbours, then by people coming back from a night out, when you invariably picked up something you didn’t want, and then the professional pickers with vans. In the early hours, the pavement would be cleared by binmen and washed by the nightly cleaners – job done.

The answer is to have only one night in each area, which is well known so people visit especially for it. Recycling is a cause for reward and celebration, not fines. And for goodness sake, leave class out of it.
Jane Swan
Delabole, Cornwall

Industrial civilisation is close to breaching a seventh planetary boundary, and may already have crossed it, according to scientists who have compiled the latest report on the state of the world’s life-support systems.

“Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold”, particularly in higher-latitude regions, says the latest report on planetary boundaries. “The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems.”

The report, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), builds on years of research showing there are nine systems and processes – the planetary boundaries – that contribute to the stability of the planet’s life-support functions.

Thresholds beyond which they can no longer properly function have already been breached in six. Climate change, the introduction of novel entities, change in biosphere integrity and modification of biogeochemical flows are judged to be in high-risk zones, while planetary boundaries are also transgressed in land system change and freshwater change but to a lesser extent. All have worsened, according to the data.

Stratospheric ozone depletion has remained stable, however, and there has been a slight improvement in atmospheric aerosol loading, the research says.

At a briefing outlining the findings, Levke Caesar, a climate physicist at PIK and co-author of the report, said there were two reasons the levels of ocean acidification were concerning.

“One is [that] the indicator for ocean acidification, which is the current aragonite separation state, while still being in the safe operating space, is approaching the threshold of transgressing the safe boundary,” Caesar said.

“The second is that there are actually several new studies that were published over the last years that indicate that even these current conditions may already be problematic for a variety of marine organisms, suggesting a need [to] re-evaluate which levels can actually be called safe.”

Ocean acidification was getting worse globally, with the effects most pronounced in the Southern Ocean and the Arctic Ocean, she added.

Ocean acidification is the phenomenon of increasing acidity (decreasing pH) in ocean water due to the absorption of atmospheric CO₂. The process not only harms calcifying organisms, potentially leading to food web breakdown, but also reduces the ocean’s efficiency in acting as a vital carbon sink.

“This illustrates the connection between ocean acidification … and biosphere integrity,” Caesar said. “Indeed, one of the main messages of our report is that all nine planetary boundaries are highly interconnected.

“This means that any human perturbation of the global environment that we observe at the moment … cannot be addressed as if they were separate issues, which is how it is at the moment primarily handled. Because this type of approach ignores that the components of the Earth system constantly interact forming a large network where changes in one area affect the others.”

Planetary boundary science was pioneered in 2009 by Johan Rockstrom, the director of the PIK, and others. In that research and two subsequent reports, the researchers identified and quantified boundaries relating to climate change, biosphere, land system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, ozone layer depletion and the introduction of novel entities, such as synthetic chemicals, to the environment.

The transgression of boundaries in each of those areas risks disrupting the stability, resilience and liveability of the state of the planet that has persisted for the past 12,000 years and that has allowed the rise of complex human civilisation.

The report, which came a year after the last, is the first of what will now be annual “planetary health checks” published by PIK, Rockstrom said.

“We recognise that the planet’s health … is at such risk today that we in science must also now step up and step right out in to the uncomfortable zone and say that we are now committing ourselves to produce every year a scientific measuring of the entire health assessment – a risk assessment – across all the planetary boundaries,” he said. “This is much more than science, this is science for change.”

Unlike previous iterations of PIK’s planetary boundaries research, the report does not appear in an academic journal but is instead written and formatted for a popular audience. Rockstrom and his colleagues said the findings were based on peer-reviewed science.

As I filed a recent Guardian Birdwatch column, about the rare Sabine’s gull that turned up unexpectedly on my local patch on the Somerset coast, I realised I have been contributing these short articles for exactly half my lifetime. When counted alongside my Weatherwatch column, this month sees my 1,000th dispatch from the great outdoors.

Coincidentally, my first Birdwatch, in January 1993, was also about gulls. It celebrated both their beauty and their ability to adapt to living alongside us, even though most people don’t appreciate them. Since then, Britain’s birdlife has changed beyond what I could have ever imagined.

When I was a fledgling birder, during the 1960s and 1970s, the number of species either gained or lost as British breeding birds was in low single figures. I recall the surprise and excitement when Cetti’s warbler and the Mediterranean gull colonised southern England, and the sense of loss we all felt when two once-common birds – red-backed shrike and wryneck – disappeared. During a brief spell of cooling in the north Atlantic, snowy owl – and a handful of other species – arrived from the north. But they stayed for just a few years, before beating a rapid retreat as climate change began to take hold.

Yet, as I have documented in the past decade or so, my adopted county has seen the arrival of little egrets, cattle egrets and great white egrets from continental Europe, bitterns and marsh harriers from the east, and (with a helping hand from conservationists) our tallest bird, the common crane. While these exotic new species are a welcome addition to our avifauna, many of them would not be here were it not for the milder winters brought about by the climate crisis.

My life has also changed dramatically since I first began writing for the Guardian. Then, I was living with my young family in north London, with little or no time to watch birds. Soon afterwards, following a move to west London, I stumbled across my first “local patch”, Lonsdale Road reservoir alongside the River Thames, next to the famous Boat Race course.

For the following three years I documented my sightings here in each month’s Birdwatch column, noting the changes of birdlife from season to season. During that time I received a letter from a reader who also frequented this tiny nature reserve, containing a stern admonishment. “You write about your local patch,” she wrote, “But it’s not just yours, it’s our local patch!” Suitably chastened, I duly apologised.

Wherever I have lived since, I made sure I featured each new local patch in my column, contrasting with accounts of my exotic adventures to far-flung locations around the world. These were thanks to my new career as a wildlife TV producer at the BBC Natural History Unit, usually accompanied by presenter Bill Oddie.

Guardian readers vicariously joined us as we went birding at Disney World in Florida, in Trinidad and Tobago, Mallorca and Poland, and on the Icelandic island of Surtsey – a land mass younger than I was, having emerged from beneath the ocean after undersea volcanic activity in late 1963. A trip to Antarctica with Michaela Strachan for the Really Wild Show, and to the Maasai Mara for Big Cat Diary, were also highlights for me – and hopefully for you, too.

By then in my 40s, I began to delve back in time, recalling the birding adventures of my childhood. Most were on the gravel pits and reservoirs of suburbia, a place famously described by the author and broadcaster Kenneth Allsop as “the messy limbo that is neither town nor country”. But there were also visits to the Isles of Scilly, north Norfolk, and the Kentish birding hotpots of Stodmarsh and Dungeness, which we cycled to as teenagers in the days when children were given the freedom to explore alone.

All of these pieces – my first 150 columns – were collated and published by the Guardian and Aurum Press in one of my earliest books, This Birding Life. I now realise that this marked a major advance for me: having turned my hobby into my job, I was embracing the genre of “New Nature Writing” – more personal, intimate and narrative-led accounts of the natural world.

This change was triggered by a divorce, remarriage, and my move to the West Country with my new young family. For the first few years here, I wrote mainly about the birds in our large garden on the Somerset Levels. The swallows, the very first bird I saw as we arrived at our new home on a baking July day; the buzzards, so scarce when I was growing up that my mother had to drive me all the way to north Wales to see one; and the blue-crowned parakeet – an escaped bird – that appeared unexpectedly a few months after our move. I was reminded of London’s rose-ringed parakeets, those impossibly noisy and exotic newcomers which are now all over the capital, but still haven’t made it to Somerset. I miss them.

As the years went by, and the children began to grow up, I explored farther afield. I now often write about the birds of my current favourite local patch on the Somerset coast, which I call the Three Rivers – the Huntspill, Parrett and Brue – and which I visit with my birding companions most weekends. The Sabine’s gull featured in this month’s 1,000th column was the 150th species I have seen there. Yet my excitement was tinged with the realisation that, during my 18 years of living in Somerset, I have witnessed the precipitous declines of so many once-common and familiar species.

It was recently announced that five species of seabird, including that extraordinary global traveller the Arctic tern, have joined the Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern. This has raised the total of UK breeding and wintering species on that list to 73 – that’s more than twice as many as on the first Red List in 1996, and representing three out of 10 of all our regularly occurring bird species. Most shockingly of all, species that even recently were common summer visitors – the swift and house martin –are now on the Red List. This is not just down to climate change, but also the decline of flying insects as a result of the biodiversity crisis.

Meanwhile, the British Ornithologists’ Union’s official list of birds recorded in Britain – including rare vagrants from around the globe – has risen since 1992 from just under 550 species to more than 630. To put this in perspective, I still have my battered copy of The Status of Birds in Britain and Ireland, published in 1971, which lists only 470 species – just three-quarters of today’s number.

This huge increase is down to the effects of the climate crisis on global weather patterns, producing more frequent and extreme weather events. These have in turn led to a higher incidence of vagrancy, such as the unprecedented landfall of North American landbirds on our western coasts, such as the magnolia and Canada warblers, both of which display much brighter and more striking plumage, combining yellows, blacks and greys, than our rather drab Old World warblers.

As well as the newly red-listed swift and house martin, familiar birds from my childhood, such as the grey partridge and turtle dove, have virtually disappeared from our rural countryside. As has that classic sign of spring: the cuckoo.

Soon after moving here, I chanced across Mick, who grew up in our village in the 1950s. “Did you used to get cuckoos here?” I asked. He responded with that look, a mix of kindness and pity, which Somerset folk give to idiots like me from “up London”. “Cuckoos …” he said. “Cuckoos? They used to drive us mad.”

I tried to imagine a time when the call of the cuckoo was an irritation rather than a wonder. And I didn’t hear one in my village for many years, until a timely visitor called twice from the bottom of our garden, on the morning of my 60th birthday, during the spring 2020 lockdown. Sadly, cuckoos have continued to decline on the Somerset Levels and this year I only heard one.

So, having clocked up my 1,000th column on weather, climate and birds, I wonder if I’ll still be writing them in another 32 years’ time, when I’m 96? I was cheered recently by the report that the doyen of Guardian columnists, the chess master Leonard Barden, is still making his weekly contribution at the age of 95, after almost 70 years at the helm.

But what will have happened to our weather, climate and birds by 2056? Looking back to 1992, it would have been hard to imagine the changes I have witnessed since then, so I’m not going to make any predictions. What I can say is that unless we halt the runaway progress of both the climate and the global biodiversity crises, then not only will the weather be unimaginably horrific, but there will be far fewer birds left to write about.

On a lighter note – and my wife, Suzanne, always tells me to end on a positive point – the younger generation is fighting much harder than we ever did to try to halt, and then reverse, the negative effects of our current calamities. Maybe they will, against all the odds, be able to return us to a time when changes in the weather were simply a topic of daily small talk, and common species of bird were just that – common.

Stephen Moss is a naturalist and author. His latest book, The Starling: A Biography, is published by Square Peg on 3 October

Stephen would like to thank his editors at the Guardian: Tim Radford, Celia Locks, Liz McCabe, Bibi van der Zee and Alan Evans

Six water companies overcharged customers between £800m and £1.5bn by “significantly or systematically” underreporting the true scale of their sewage pollution of rivers and waterways, a tribunal heard on Monday.

In the first environmental competition class action against water companies in England, lawyers argued that the privatised firms had abused their monopoly position to mislead regulators over the amount of sewage they were discharging from their assets over the past 10 years.

As a result the companies, Thames Water, Yorkshire Water, Anglian Water, Severn Trent, Northumbrian Water and United Utilities, were able to charge customers higher bills than they would have been allowed to if they had provided the regulators with a true picture of their sewage pollution.

Prof Carolyn Roberts, a water resource specialist, is taking the action in the competition appeals tribunal and seeking to represent millions of consumers who she believes have been overcharged by hundreds of millions of pounds.

Julian Gregory, for Roberts, told the tribunal on Monday that all the water firms were monopolies that were not subject to any competitive pressures to provide sewerage services to the public. The companies were all legally required to report pollution to the regulators – the Environment Agency and Ofwat, he said.

“Sewage spills pose a threat to wildlife, the environment and public health,” said Gregory.

The pricing regime, controlled by Ofwat, allows the regulator to limit the amount charged to customers for the monopoly services of providing drinking water and sewerage.

The structure provides a financial incentive for water companies to reduce sewage pollution.

But Gregory said the six companies had misled both Ofwat and the Environment Agency by significantly or systematically underreporting the number of sewage discharges from their treatment works and combined sewer overflows from 2014 onwards.

By misleading the regulators on the true scale of sewage discharges, they had been allowed by Ofwat to charge customers higher prices than if they had reported the sewage pollution accurately, said Gregory.

“Carolyn Roberts estimates across the six water companies customers may have been overcharged £800m to £1.5bn,” he said.

“Many people care deeply about the state of our rivers … sewage spills to them can be incredibly damaging. As the true number of sewage spills have become apparent there has been a public outcry,” he said.

“If the defendants [water companies] have been underreporting spills they will not have been properly incentivised to reduce sewage spills.”

Gregory said analysis of Thames Water data alone suggested the company may have failed to report more than 6,000 raw sewage discharges.

Roberts is applying to the tribunal for collective proceedings orders (CPOs) against the six water companies.

If the orders are granted, the proposed claims can proceed to a full trial to establish whether water companies have been overcharging household customers. Customers would automatically be refunded millions of pounds.

“As a professor of the environment, I have a deep appreciation of our waterways and their influence on our wider environment and firmly believe in preserving them for future generations,” said Roberts.

“I hope to be authorised as the class representative to bring these claims on behalf of millions of household consumers who have been overcharged due to the anti-competitive practices employed by these six water companies.”

The six water companies are defending the allegations in the tribunal.

A spokesperson for Water UK, the industry body, said: “This highly speculative claim is entirely without merit. The regulator has confirmed that over 99% of sewage works comply with their legal requirements. If companies fail to deliver on their commitments, then bills will automatically be reduced.”

Heavy rain caused extensive flooding in central Japan over the weekend, with at least one person reported dead and several more unaccounted for.

Officials said “unprecedented” rainfall generated floods and landslides in Ishikawa prefecture, where a powerful 7.5-magnitude earthquake on New Year’s Day killed more than 200 people. The Japan meteorological agency issued its highest-level warning for Ishikawa, advising of a “life-threatening situation”.

Authorities ordered tens of thousands of people to evacuate as more than a dozen rivers overflowed by late morning on Saturday, and a number of people were rescued from flood water in the cities of Wajima and Suzu. On Saturday morning 121mm (4.8in) of rain was recorded in one hour in Wajima, and 84.5mm in Suzu.

This was the heaviest rain observed in these locations since comparative data became available in 1929. Niigata and Yamagata prefectures were also affected with 16,000 people told to evacuate.

Elsewhere, Storm Boris moved into Italy late last week, having earlier caused devastation and some of the worst floods in decades in parts of Austria, Romania, the Czech Republic and Poland. The storm inflicted more suffering in some northern and central Italian regions. More than 1,000 people in Emilia-Romagna were forced to evacuate after floods and landslides, while towns in the central region of Marche also experienced significant flooding. The Italian air force was called in to rescue people who had escaped the flood water by climbing on to their rooftops in several towns, including Traversara di Bagnacavallo.

On the Adriatic coast, the seaside resort of Falconara Marittima had more than 200mm of rain over Wednesday and Thursday. The September average is just 67mm. More than 300mm was recorded in the Apennine mountain region. Conditions improved on Friday and during the course of the weekend as the low pressure responsible for the extreme rainfall eased away.

In stark contrast to the wet weather, northern Portugal has been suffering the effects of deadly wildfires. The prime minister declared a “state of calamity” for the areas worst affected on Tuesday. By Wednesday, 5,000 firefighters were battling more than 100 wildfires. Seven people have died, including three firefighters. Favourable weather conditions helped firefighters to contain the vast majority of the blazes by Friday.

The first time I came face to face with a great white shark, it was dead. I had caught it in my net. And I was so happy. I thought: I can bring a fortune back to my village. I can feed my family. I’m Malagasy – I come from Andavadoaka, a small fishing village on the south-west coast of Madagascar. It is a very dry place where no crops can grow. The name of my tribe, Vezo, means people who live off the ocean, but also people who survive it. Because we rely on it.

I became a shark fisher when I was 16 years old. I dropped out of school because my parents couldn’t afford to support me any more, and followed my uncle into fishing so I could bring some money back to my family. I didn’t see a shark as a magnificent creature. My mindset was: make money, kill, make money, kill. Support my family.

I caught the great white when I was 18 years old. We were in shark territory, 15km offshore and decided to pull in our net because the weather was getting really bad. We couldn’t see what was inside because the net was too deep. Then one of my crew put on a diving mask, saw the shark and shouted.

I put my life in danger to bring that shark home. It was the most terrifying thing I have ever done. It was 4 metres (13ft) long and weighed about 400kg. My boat was 6 metres long, with a 4-metre sail.

The weather was very stormy, lots of wind and heavy rain, and the weight of the shark meant that I had to sink the boat to the surface level of the ocean to get it onboard. We had no radio, no mobile phones, no engine. It took us five hours to sail back to shore. I shared half the meat with my community, and sold the rest for $120 (£90).

For five years, I used to kill up to 50 sharks a day – although on a bad day it was more like three. What made me stop was my brother. He began working with Blue Ventures, a British conservation NGO, to educate the people in my village about sharks. He made me reflect on my work and helped me get a new job, as a shark fishing data collector for Frances Humber, a conservationist with the NGO. I didn’t make good money, but I learned English and about marine life conservation.

The more I learned about sharks and the important role they play in balancing our marine ecosystem and ensuring my own family has enough fish to eat, the more they fascinated me. So I put my life in danger again, this time to help conservationists document overfishing and expose the shark fin trade in Madagascar. I helped a US reporter, Isobel Yeung, go undercover and film a large Chinese warehouse of shark fins with a hidden camera, and more recently I myself filmed a huge industrial fishing vessel that had about 4,000 dead sharks onboard.

It was heartbreaking. My community could eat for two months from what just one of those boats catches in our waters and takes to China.

I became a conservation and wildlife film-maker and photographer because I realised that making films and documentaries is one of the key ways we can protect sharks. It allows me to raise awareness about how beautiful these creatures are – and what is happening to them in our oceans.

I had the best dive of my life recently, filming whale sharks. When I got into the water, nine of them congregated around me, feeding on small plankton. Each was large enough to kill me but they are among the most gentle animals in the ocean.

I cannot describe how happy I was that day, down there with those sharks, witnessing the thriving marine life of the ocean. When I’m 90, I will still tell my child about it. I wanted to stay in that water, for ever.

As told to Donna Ferguson