Donald Trump has been told by some advisers that he should prematurely declare victory on election night if he’s sufficiently ahead of Kamala Harris in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, according to people close to him, though whether he will heed that advice remains unclear.

The consensus view is that Trump has nothing to lose by claiming he has won if he has a several-hundred-thousand-vote advantage in Pennsylvania or if his internal pollsters think a victory is plausible even if the results are not fully confirmed on Tuesday night.

But even Trump’s most pugnacious allies – including the former White House strategist Steven Bannon who spoke with him last week, one of the people said – have suggested he hold off making a pronouncement if the race is any closer by the time he goes to bed, lest it makes him look foolish.

In the final days of the campaign, Trump and his campaign have projected confidence. It has raised expectations among his supporters that he will win, laying the groundwork for baselessly claiming the election was stolen if he loses and Harris takes the White House. Any premature declaration of victory would also probably play into that phenomenon.

The wild-card factor in what Trump might do on election night remains Trump himself. His aides concede that if Trump decides he wants to declare, he will do as he pleases, and his travel-weary team might have little appetite and influence to dissuade him.

Trump’s team collectively shrugging at the prospect of the former president prematurely proclaiming himself the winner, as he did in the aftermath of the 2020 election, is itself notable as it underscores yet another norm of presidential politics shattered by Trump.

Trump declaring prematurely would not carry the element of surprise it had four years ago. The Harris campaign have said they are preparing for him to pull such a stunt again.

Trump has spoken less this time around about what he plans to do on election night, the people said, in contrast to his premeditation in the 2020 election when he told friends and allies of his intention to declare victory regardless of the outcome.

Trump dodged questions about his intentions as he cast his own ballot on Tuesday.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen in terms of declaring victory,” Trump said. “It looks like we have a very substantial lead. It looks like we have many more Republicans voting than Democrats. So if you have a lead and a bigger vote it means you’re doing well but they have to call a winner. And they should call a winner.”

But whether it is a product of the advisers around him tamping down on the kind of plotting that set into motion attempts to overturn the election results or the logistics of the news media being at a different venue from his private watch party, Trump has been quieter about his intentions.

Trump will watch the results come in at a private watch party at his Mar-a-Lago club for members, donors and other friends and family, while the official campaign watch party takes place a short drive away at a convention center in West Palm Beach, Florida, the people said.

The private watch party starts earlier and Trump is likely to project to members that he is winning, the people said. That event at Mar-a-Lago has also been described as a knife fight, with allies knocking off donors’ names from the list to get credentials for themselves.

Whether Trump will double down on any victory claim at the convention center party remains unclear. Trump’s aides have suggested if he does decide to announce himself as the winner, he will motorcade over from Mar-a-Lago, and if not, he might not make an appearance at all.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

The Irish mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor raped a woman in a Dublin hotel, the city’s high court has been told.

Nikita Ní Laimhín is claiming civil damages against McGregor and another man, alleging she was sexually assaulted in 2018.

But, the court heard on Tuesday, McGregor’s lawyers say Ní Laimhín, who has no automatic right to anonymity, is attempting extortion.

The fighter, nicknamed “Notorious”, was in court to hear Justice Alexander Owens tell the jury it is alleged Ní Laimhín was sexually assaulted by McGregor and James Lawrence on 9 December.

The judge said it was alleged that the pair had “in effect raped her”.

The court was told McGregor collected Ní Laimhín, a hairdresser in Dublin, and her friend after a Christmas party on 8 December.

John Gordon SC for Ní Laimhín said that she and McGregor were known to each other as they were in the same age group, from the same area and had mutual friends and had been in contact at various times through social media.

At the time she lived in the Dublin suburb of Drimnagh with her partner and seven-year-old daughter. She had been out with friends on the night of the alleged incident.

Gordon said McGregor was “enormously famous” and was considered a “hero” around Drimnagh.

He claimed that his client was “no angel” and “doesn’t pretend to be an angel”. On the night, she had been drinking and had taken some cocaine. The court also heard that she suffered from depression and had been on antidepressants.

The court was told that later on in the night, Ní Laimhín and two of her friends returned to her salon, where they continued to party and at some point she contacted McGregor. He collected her and her friend in his car, and Ní Laimhín understood they were to be taken to another party.

McGregor sat in the back seat with the two women, while his driver took them around housing estates and beeped the horn. They later went to the home of Lawrence, who joined them in the car.

The court was told that McGregor had a bag of cocaine, which was shared between him, Ní Laimhín and her friend.

Ní Laimhín, McGregor, his security team and others then went to a penthouse suite in the Beacon hotel in Dublin. The court was told that they were all drinking and laughing.

At one point, McGregor allegedly went into a bedroom and beckoned Ní Laimhín to join him. The court was told that McGregor “came on to her”, but she did not want to have sexual intercourse with him as she was on her period.

Gordon told the court that she alleged that McGregor pinned her down on the bed and that she was no physical match for him. “She will tell you that she was nervous, that she tried to push him off her but she was completely unable to do so,” he added.

“You will see pictures of her hands and wrists, which are black and blue. You will see that her left breast has a bloodied scratch. The scratch is there because she was wearing a watch and had her hands up to protect herself. She was pressed down on and the watch scarred her breast.

“Mr McGregor then flips her over and puts her arm in a lock and draws her up by the neck. She can’t breathe. And he does it again.

“By the third time he does it, she gives up. She can’t resist this any more. In the course of this he says: ‘Now you know what it was like to be in the Octagon when I went down three times.’

“She was at this point completely terrified. She subjected herself to what was about to happen, which was a violent and vicious assault.”

It is alleged later that she had sex with Lawrence, but Gordon said she had no recollection of such an event ever happening.

Ní Laimhín later went home and visited her mother, who called 999. She was taken to hospital in an ambulance. The court was told that she was shaking and in pain while being transferred to hospital.

Gordon said: “In the face of this, Mr McGregor will tell you that this was a consensual encounter, that they were just having fun and a bit of rough sex. That’s his answer.

“What did I say about common sense? Don’t be fooled into leaving it behind in this [court] room. What he is saying is that she gave him a licence to carry out what has to have been a brutal assault on her body.”

The court also heard from Dr Daniel Keane, who works as a gynaecologist as well as a forensic examiner in sexual assault cases.

He told the court he was working at the emergency department at the Rotunda hospital in Dublin when Ní Laimhín was brought in by ambulance.

Keane said she was “very upset”, and was “shaking and crying”. He told the court how they had to get a blanket for her to sit on because of the pain she was in.

In his report, he said Ní Laimhín had told him that morning that the alleged attacker had her by the neck and that he had stopped her from breathing. He told the court that she had claimed she did not fight him any more and thought he was going to kill her.

Keane detailed extensive bruising across Ní Laimhín’s body, including her face, arms, fingers, forearms, knuckles, legs, lower back and buttocks. She also had a 9cm scratch on her left breast.

Her also stated that Ní Laimhín was worried about a tampon she had been wearing on the night. He explained how he had to use forceps to remove the tampon, which had been “wedged inside”.

He told the court that he had carried out hundreds of examinations on women, and said the extent of bruising on Ní Laimhín was “quite unusual”.

The defence claimed in the evidence booklet that Ní Laimhín had several opportunities to complain to people about how she was treated but did not. It would also claim that Ní Laimhín was engaged in an attempt at extortion, the court heard.

Gordon said his client was being called a “gold digger and a fraud”, adding: “Brave. But where is the bravery in this? Bravery ultimately sits with my client.

“Because she pursued her mission for vindication and compensation to which she is entitled. And for these defendants to breezily and cheekily dispose of her claim is something you will consider in due course.”

Earlier the jury was sworn in at the high court and told that they were judges of fact as to what happened and would have to draw a conclusion, and it would be based on their decision.

The action is expected to last around two weeks.

Electoral college votes

Electoral college votes

First results expected after 18.00 EST (15.00 PDT or 23.00 GMT)

How does the US election work?

The winner of the election is determined through a system called the electoral college.

What is the electoral college and how does it work?

Each of the 50 states, plus Washington DC, is given a number of electoral college votes, adding up to a total of 538 votes. More populous states get more electoral college votes than smaller ones.

A candidate needs to win 270 electoral college votes (50% plus one) to win the election.

In every state except two – Maine and Nebraska – the candidate that gets the most votes wins all of the state’s electoral college votes.

Electoral college votes correspond to electors from each state. These electors vote directly for the president, based on the results in the general election in their state. In early January, following the presidential election, Congress convenes in a joint session to count and certify the electoral votes.

How do people vote in the US election?

Elections in the US are administered by each state. Whether by mail-in ballots or voting in person on election day, people effectively vote in 51 mini-elections in the presidential election.

Due to the electoral college rules, a candidate can win the election without getting the most votes at the national level. This happened in 2016, when Trump won a majority of electoral college votes although more people voted for Hillary Clinton across the US.

A handful of races are run with a ranked choice voting system, whereby voters can rank candidates in their order of preference. If no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their supporters’ votes will be counted for their next choice. The Guardian has marked these elections where applicable above, and shows the results of the final result with redistributed votes.

Standing in blinding sunlight on an archipelago above the Arctic Circle, the photographer Christian Åslund looked in shock at a glacier he had last visited in 2002. It had almost completely disappeared.

Two decades ago Greenpeace asked Åslund to use photographs taken in the early 20th century, and photograph the same views in order to document how glaciers in Svalbard were melting due to global heating. The difference in ice density in those pictures, taken almost a century apart, was staggering.

This summer he visited those same places again, 22 years later, to find that the glaciers had visibly shrunk again.

“In 2002, climate change wasn’t as well known as it is now, so that was a compete shock when we saw it,” he says. “And then I didn’t know what to expect going back this time. But seeing all the glaciers, we really saw the difference from these last 22 years. There is a massive amount of glacier ice that has disappeared.”

The disappearance of glaciers was one of the first signs that global heating caused by fossil fuel burning was rapidly affecting conditions on Earth. “It is sad,” says Åslund, “especially when you’re holding the historical picture in your hand and you see the whole fjord was from the glaciers and where the glaciers met, and you’re standing in the landscape when they were almost gone, in the same fjords.”

The weather during his visit was also strikingly warm. “When we were there it was the hottest month ever recorded for that area. So you are standing in the Arctic in a T-shirt and the glaciers are almost gone, and that is sad. It is heating up at a rapid speed, the Arctic. I did expect a retreat of the glacier but not as much as we encountered. It was a shock.”

Thousands of giant spiders that can grow to the size of a human hand are thriving in the UK, thanks to a successful breeding programme from Chester zoo.

The fen raft spider is a harmless arachnid that plays a vital role in aquatic ecosystems, but 15 years ago was on the brink of extinction because of habitat loss.

Chester zoo worked with the RSPB to raise hundreds of baby spiders, keeping them separate in test tubes so that they did not eat one another.

The spiders were hand-fed with tweezers in the zoo’s bio-secure breeding facility until they were big enough to be released into the wild.

This year, the spiders have had their best mating season on record, Chester zoo said, with the RSPB estimating that there are 10,000 breeding females across the UK.

According to London zoo, the stretched-out leg span of a fen raft spiders is typically 65-70mm – roughly the width of a human palm or the length of a newborn rat.

The zoo was also involved in the breeding programme, along with other members of BIAZA, the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

The spiders were hand-reared between 2011 and 2013, and later released into the wild. Chester zoo said it had helped to release “thousands” 10 years ago, adding “you can’t miss them, they grow to be the size of your hand!”

“We’re super proud to be part of this conservation breeding rescue programme, working alongside our friends at the RSPB to prevent the extinction of the fen raft spider,” the zoo said in a post on X.

Also known as the great raft spider, the semi-aquatic arachnids have a chocolate-brown body with cream stripes along the side and are able to walk on water. They live in unpolluted fens and marshes.

The first fen raft spider population in the UK was identified in 1956 by the arachnologist Dr Eric Duffey, at the source of the River Waveney in East Anglia.

“Of course, there is also nothing to fear from increased numbers of spiders,” Dave Clarke, who heads up London zoo’s Friendly Spider Programme, wrote in a blog post.

“This is a huge conservation success, both for the spiders and the wider habitat restoration driving the success. And more natural bio-controls out there (even if this species is never coming into human areas) are only a good thing.”

Off the west coast of Greenland, a 17-metre (56ft) aluminium sailing boat creeps through a narrow, rocky fjord in the Arctic twilight. The research team onboard, still bleary-eyed from the rough nine-day passage across the Labrador Sea, lower nets to collect plankton. This is the first time anyone has sequenced the DNA of the tiny marine creatures that live here.

Watching the nets with palpable excitement is Prof Leonid Moroz, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida’s Whitney marine lab. “This is what the world looked like when life began,” he tells his friend, Peter Molnar, the expedition leader with whom he co-founded the Ocean Genome Atlas Project (Ogap).

Moroz gestures toward Greenland’s glaciated valleys. The rapid warming here is replicating conditions from 600m years ago, when complex life forms began appearing. “We’re sailing through deep biological time right now,” he says.

Moroz and Molnar’s mission is to classify, observe, sequence and map 80% of the sea’s smallest creatures to learn more about ourselves, and the health of the planet.

Plankton and humans do not have much in common at first glance. But studying marine organisms has led to breakthrough understandings about our own brains and bodies. Observing the electrical discharges of jellyfish taught us how to restart the heart. Sea slugs showed us how memories form. Squid taught us how signals spread between different parts of the brain. Horseshoe crabs demonstrated how visual receptors work.

An unusual aspect of Moroz and Molnar’s research trips is that they are unlocking plankton’s secrets onboard sailing boats rather than engine–powered vessels – and they are not alone in this endeavour.

“Large oceanographic vessels can cost $100,000 [£77,000] a day, which can quickly bankrupt your research organisation,” says Chris Bowler, an oceanographer with France’s National Centre for Scientific Research and a scientific adviser to the Tara Ocean Foundation.

For the past two years he has collected plankton samples for the Microbiomes Mission, a research initiative to study micro-organisms in the ocean, onboard a 33-metre schooner. “Working from a sailboat is 50 times cheaper,” Bowler says.

That cost saving also allows researchers the luxury of time, which is imperative for finding the genetic commonalities and patterns that will reveal answers about human health. Bowler says it is important to analyse and observe these microscopic organisms interacting with each other and the world around them. That cannot happen in a lab back on land because the organisms are too fragile.

Low-carbon, readily available and easier to manoeuvre near to shore, sailing boats also “don’t vibrate, so you can do really precise work aboard”, says Molnar, who has captained Ogap voyages over more than 9,000 nautical miles.

The reason that microscopic marine life can teach us about our own development is convergent evolution. This is when unrelated organisms arrive at the same solution to a problem, such as how birds, beetles, butterflies and bats all adapted to fly, but did so at different times and in slightly different ways. Overlapping solutions provide common building blocks for everything from how to fold a protein to how to form a brain.

“Every organism that lives here today is a logbook of every single adaptation that made it successful,” Moroz says. “The brain is one of the most complicated structures in the universe. Yet 70% of our knowledge about how the brain works is thanks to marine creatures. Without them, many of today’s medicines would simply not exist.”

The reason he studies plankton is because their “logbook” is the longest – some single-celled marine organisms have been around for more than 3bn years. That means they have more tricks up their metaphorical sleeves than we do.

“Some groups of these marine species do not age, never develop cancers and they can fully regenerate when damaged. They are able to perform many tasks better than us,” Moroz says.

One way to take human medicine to the next level is to take our cues from these organisms. But first, we have to identify them. Ogap’s lofty mission would not have been possible 10 years ago; rapid technological advances have reduced the size of equipment, while satellite communications and AI have shrunk the timeframe for analysing results from months to minutes.

In Greenland, for example, Ogap kept marine organisms alive for several days on their sailing boat while sequencing their DNA during different stages of life. “We were able to watch them reproduce, decay, then repair themselves, even die, all while taking high-resolution video,” Molnar says.

The team then uploaded the data via Starlink to universities where scientists used AI to look for pattern recognition in the organisms’ DNA. “Literally within an hour, we would have results back on the sailboat,” Molnar says. “This type of work was simply science fiction 10 years ago.”

While the technology is new, using sailing boats to explore is a millennia-old human endeavour.

“There’s a long history of sailing to answer scientific questions,” says David Conover, the owner of ArcticEarth, the sailing boat Ogap used for its Greenland expedition. From Captain Cook’s anthropological discoveries in the Pacific to Darwin’s groundbreaking observations on natural selection onboard the Beagle, sailing boats have afforded many types of researchers the luxury of getting to far-flung parts of the world to deeply engage with their surroundings.

“The more time you can afford to be at sea, the more open you are to discovery,” Conover says.

The key now is to observe the cornucopia of unknown marine organisms before they disappear for ever. “By the time you finish your coffee tomorrow morning, between 20 and 100 species will have vanished for ever, including the wonderful solutions they were offered by nature, which is a huge loss for biomedical science,” Moroz says.

To continue documenting the wonders of tiny single-celled sea creatures, Ogap will head next to Patagonia, at the tip of South America. Eventually, Ogap’s genomic atlas will be digitised and made freely available, providing a baseline of marine biodiversity as well as valuable insights for the development of new medicines.

“Every day is a surprise,” Moroz says. “That is the finest part of all of these voyages – the level of excitement, of discovery. It’s so rich. It’s nonstop.”

Plans to build what would be the biggest onshore windfarm in England will move forward this week, the first since the Labour government lifted the de facto ban put in place by the Conservatives nine years ago.

An independent renewable energy developer has submitted plans to erect 21 wind turbines next to an existing windfarm near Greater Manchester.

While other onshore sites in England have more turbines, those at the proposed windfarm at Scout Moor would be more powerful because of technological advances that would enable more than 100 megawatts to be generated there.

That is enough electricity to power the equivalent of 100,000 homes and meet more than 10% of Greater Manchester’s domestic energy needs before the end of the decade.

This would help to meet the government’s target of doubling Britain’s onshore wind power capacity by 2030. That target alongside goals to triple its solar power capacity and quadruple its offshore wind capacity are part of a plan to create a zero-carbon electricity system in the 2030s.

The developer, Cubico Sustainable Investments, will set out its plans to build the new project alongside its proposal for a multimillion-pound community wealth fund to support local people.

If approved, the site would also be the fifth biggest onshore wind power producer in the UK, with the others all in Scotland, topped by the 539MW generated by the 215 turbines at Whitelee, south of Glasgow.

Plans for the Scout Moor site were shelved 10 years ago after a backlash against onshore windfarms in England prompted the then Tory government to put in place planning rules that in effect ruled out new developments.

David Swindin, the Cubico chief executive, said his team had been developing new projects “for about four years in anticipation of the rules changing” to allow further onshore windfarms to be built in England.

Cubico is one of the world’s largest privately owned renewables developers. It is one of many windfarm developers hoping to erect onshore turbines in England for the first time in almost a decade. Labour lifted the Tories’ de facto ban within 72 hours of coming into power in July.

Swindon said: “It was obvious that there was going to be pressure to change the rules, even for the Conservatives. And for some time it seemed likely that Labour would come to power. So we have been eagerly waiting for the moment that we can press the button.”

Peter Rowe, the project’s development manager, said the site was “one of the most ideal locations for a windfarm” in England thanks to its high wind speeds and close proximity to energy consumers in Greater Manchester. The location rules out the need for expensive grid upgrades to carry the electricity long-distances.

“Clearly we will be going into a public consultation [with the local community] very sensitively. The site itself has been used in the past for mining and quarrying, and the area has been at the heart of Britain’s industrial story. So what we’re putting forward is a modern reinterpretation of how the moors and uplands have been used historically,” he said.

James Robottom, the head of policy at Renewable UK, a trade association, said that since the government lifted the block on onshore windfarms in England, ambitious plans were beginning to come forward “with a strong emphasis on the new investment, jobs and benefit funds which they would bring to local communities”.

“Close consultation with these communities is a key element of every proposal, ensuring that local people have a strong voice in the planning process,” he added.

A government spokesperson said: “While we can’t comment on this specific case, onshore wind is crucial to making Britain a clean energy superpower, boosting the UK’s energy independence and protecting bill payers.”

An incendiary device hidden in a DHL package that caught fire in Germany in July was due to be sent by air to the UK as part of a suspected Russian sabotage plot that may also have been a dry run for a similar attack on the US and Canada.

The device, reported to have been secreted in shipments of massage pillows and erotic gadgets, started a fire on the ground in Leipzig that was feared to be capable of downing a plane – similar to a package that ignited at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham on 22 July.

Sources indicated the suspect package in Leipzig was also bound for the UK, though why the UK was chosen as the destination for the two devices, originally sent from Lithuania, is not fully clear.

An unconfirmed German report suggests they were addressed to fake recipients at real addresses in the UK, as were two other incendiary devices found in Poland, one of which Polish media said caught fire at a warehouse in Warsaw while the other was successfully intercepted.

Metropolitan police counter-terror officers declined to comment. The only official statement in the UK about the alleged plot was made last month, when counter-terror police confirmed a device had caught fire in Birmingham, nobody was hurt, and it was dealt with “by staff and the local fire brigade at the time”.

Four people were arrested in Poland as part of the alleged plot, it was announced last week, which the country’s chief prosecutor said was intended to commit sabotage using “camouflaged explosives and dangerous materials” in Europe. Two other individuals are also wanted by investigators in the country.

Another intention, according to the Polish authorities, was “to test the transfer channel” for similar parcels to be sent to the US and Canada, to see if similarly dangerous and destructive attacks could be reproduced elsewhere.

British police and officials, as well as their European counterparts in Germany, Poland and Lithuania, strongly suspect that Russia was behind the attacks as part of an effort to cause “mayhem” in the west in retaliation for western military support to Ukraine.

Last month, Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, warned that Russia’s GRU military intelligence appeared to be on “a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets: we’ve seen arson, sabotage and more”.

His German counterpart, Thomas Haldenwang, told the Bundestag that had the Leipzig package started burning during a flight “it would have resulted in a crash”. Although Haldenwang did not say Russia was behind the fire when he gave evidence, he accused the Kremlin’s spy agencies of “putting people’s lives at risk”.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the massage items in the suspect packages were booby trapped with a magnesium-based flammable substance. Magnesium fires are notoriously difficult to put out and are worsened if water is applied; special dry powder extinguishers should be used instead.

Russia has denied involvement in the alleged plot. “These are traditional unsubstantiated insinuations from the media,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the US newspaper.