Saoirse Ronan’s comment about women’s safety on The Graham Norton Show has gone viral after she said using a phone as a weapon is something “girls have to think about all the time”. Ronan later said the reaction has been “wild” and that the moment was “opening a conversation”.

Here, six women tell us what they think about the comments and how they feel about women’s safety.

‘I change my commute to avoid unlit paths’

It wasn’t just when [Ronan] said that line, it was that she was trying to say it and the others kept talking over her. She attempted at least twice to say it and they just kept making jokes. The whole context of it shows how much women’s lived experiences and attempts at sharing these are overlooked. People are more aware than before, but the show showed it’s not necessarily in the forefront of people’s minds. I normally cycle through Southampton common but I change my commute in the winter to avoid unlit bike paths. I also wear clothes where my phone is accessible at all times. Lizzi, 35, pharmacist, Southampton

‘I try and make myself appear bigger or angrier’

Self protection is the uppermost, but routine, concern when out and about on my own. Guys enjoy a different world and I’m so glad Saoirse seized the opportunity to tell it as it is. I feel keys are the best bet [for self-defence], although I’ve used my legs [to run] and have put on a surprisingly loud deep voice in the past. I did a self-defence class in the 80s and we were told to try and make ourselves seem unattractive to predators because they prey on those they think look frightened. That really struck me and sometimes I try and make myself appear bigger or angrier. Sarah, 59, speech and language therapy assistant, London

‘My dad taught me to box and I had soppy but fierce-looking big dogs’

I was about nine when my dad taught me how to box. Our independence as children was very important to him and he used to spar with me. He must’ve realised that as a girl it might be useful too. I’ve never really felt extreme fear but it’s still there. I’ve also had soppy but fierce-looking big dogs. I lived in London for 35 years and I had a doberman-German shepherd cross called Boo, because she was frightened of everything. I would take her for a walk around 11pm and people would cross the road. Janey, 72, retired graphic designer, Norfolk

‘It’s so easy to ignore a danger or threat if you don’t have to experience it yourself’

I’m a trans woman who only came out fully a couple of years ago. My style is everyday, nothing provocative, and I’m always taken for a woman. Walking home from the bus at night for the first time and feeling really unsafe I suddenly realised – this is what women go through the whole time. I’ve always been aware and supportive of women’s issues but even so, it was a horrible, shaming epiphany to realise that I’d seen past this basic fact of women’s lives. It’s so easy to ignore a danger or threat if you don’t have to experience it yourself. Kim, 60, classical musician, Sweden

‘The clip will be shared but will anything change?’

I agree with her, however, sometimes I worry people only have an interest in feminism when it’s delivered in viral, digestible moments. Yes, the clip will be shared and posted about, but will anything change? Probably not. I’m glad I’m a lesbian because my partners are less likely to cause me harm or kill me. It’s taken us decades to get even this far and I feel like we’re getting stuck at best and at worst going backwards. My mum always taught me to carry a can of strong deodorant that I could spray at someone. I have a big, metal water bottle I carry because I know I can swing it at someone. Ruby, 30s, works in education, US

‘Your elbow is one of your best weapons’

While living in South Africa for almost 20 years I attended a self-defence course for women. The facilitator, a former cop from Zimbabwe, said that most women who were raped had reported they had not known what to do, even when their hands were free. Your elbow is one of your best weapons. Who knew? Even 30 years later I remember what was taught. That said, I do sometimes travel with a small awl in my pocket. Aletta, 66, retired application software facilitator, the Netherlands

The Rhine overflowed last winter, covering fields miles from the river and in some places leaving just the tops of trees visible.

But Thomas Bollig, who farms just a few miles from the banks of the Rhine, was not worried. Even as floods inundated the fields of his neighbours, making sowing impossible, his holdings were largely unaffected. Bollig farms organically, and the natural methods he uses to improve his soil allow his fields to hold more water when it rains, and release it gradually, coping well with floods and droughts.

“It’s like a sponge,” he says, pointing across largely flat fields by Wachtberg village, near the city of Bonn. “We didn’t have the problems that many farmers did.”

That is not the only advantage he sees in having switched his arable and livestock farm from conventional intensive farming to fully organic farming. Around him, in the summer sunlight, bees are buzzing and the air is full of insects, alighting on the flowers that speckle his crops of beans and grain, the song of birds a cheerful background.

“We have a farm full of life today,” he says. “Wildflowers, insects, pollinators – it’s a perfect symbiosis, as they feed on the pests on the crops. And the soil is full of worms.” Out of 75 hectares (185 acres) on his farm, about eight hectares are wildflower meadows. In the middle of some of his cropping fields, tangled areas are left untouched for flowers and animals, a riot of colour – red, blue and gold – amid the green.

A recent pest infestation in his beanfield illustrates the point. “It was so bad, that we considered spraying,” Bollig says. But he kept faith in the organic process, and two weeks later the pests were gone and the fields “full of ladybirds”.

But the wildlife that abounds on Bollig’s farm is no longer typical for western European farms. About a quarter of Europe’s bird population has been wiped out in the last four decades – that is half a billion fewer birds in the sky today compared with 1980. Four in 10 European tree species are classed as threatened, butterfly numbers are down by about a third, one in 10 bee species are dying out, and two-thirds of the habitats of ecological importance are in an unfavourable condition. A fifth of European species face extinction.

Everywhere you look, the richness and abundance of European nature is under threat. Since the 1970s and 80s, even while many environmental indicators in Europe have improved – cleaner air in cities, less industrial pollution, less sewage in waterways (outside the UK) – the story of nature is one of steep and stark decline. Wildlife, trees, plants, fish and insects – the picture is bleak.

It is not possible to lay all of this destruction at the door of intensive farming, as urbanisation, invasive species and pollution from industry have their own impacts, but the figures clearly suggest farming has played a big role. Amid the overall decline in bird numbers, the ones making their home in farmland had it by far the worst, with numbers down by 57%, and separate research suggests steeper declines of insects in farmed areas.

Brian MacSharry, the head of the nature and biodiversity group at the European Environment Agency, says: “The habitat situation is pretty bad, the species little better, and there is a time lag between [the destruction of habitats and decline in] species. Overall, we know it is bad and that the trend is deteriorating. Agriculture is by far the biggest pressure.”

It was not supposed to be this way. Since the early 2000s, changes to Europe’s farming practices and subsidy regime – the common agricultural policy (CAP) – have been geared explicitly towards protecting the environment, as well as supporting farmers and food production. The CAP represents a third of the EU budget, coming to about €55bn (£46bn) a year and in return for that largesse, farmers are supposed to meet a minimum level of environmental protection. Taking additional measures such as growing more trees or conserving wetlands can net them extra support.

But so far at least, the environmental aspects of the CAP changes have not worked. The European court of auditors in 2020 found little evidence of a positive impact on biodiversity from the CAP. The European Environment Agency, in its State of Nature report in 2023, found that the EU’s farmed environment had continued to decline, with the health of only 14% of habitats and about a quarter of non-bird species classed as “good”. The CAP is also making the climate worse: about 80% of the budget goes to support carbon-intensive animal food products, according to a paper published this month in Nature.

“The CAP has become a monster,” says Faustine Bas-Defossez, the director of nature, health and environment at the European Environmental Bureau, a network of citizens’ organisations. “It is not helping farmers in the mainstream to adopt more sustainable practices. It’s driving the intensification of farming, and increasing the pressure on natural resources. Instead of the polluter pays principle, it’s turning into a system of the polluter gets paid.”

Pieter de Pous, the programme lead at the E3G thinktank, says the CAP is “a policy in search of a justification”. “It is an emotionally charged topic that touches on identity, nationhood, culture. It is about concerns over depopulation in many areas of Europe, and the strong policy wish to not have depopulation.”

After pressure from protesting farmers, even the meagre protections for nature will be further watered down. De Pous says farmers capitalised onthe European Commission’s fear of a backlash against green policies and green parties in the parliamentary elections this June. “This is political opportunism, it’s tactical on the part of the farmers who are protesting.” He believes the farmers were simply going after a larger slice of the European budget.

Whatever the causes, the results for nature are likely to be dire. And ironically, given the fervour of the protests, any hoped-for boon to small farmers is unlikely to materialise – it will be big farmers who benefit from less stringent regulation, as they do from the CAP overall. As payments to farmers under the CAP are based on the amount of land they farm, the CAP favours size above everything else. That means the squeeze on traditional small-scale family farms will continue, with the biggest farmers continuing to scoop up the lion’s share of the cash, and the poorest forced further to the margins.

How did we get into this mess? And is there a way out?

A focus on food security above all

In the early years of what became the EU, the focus of European agricultural policy was on food security above all. When the CAP was conceived, in the early 1960s, farmers were encouraged to increase yields by adopting more efficient machinery and the new fertilisers and pesticides. They were given quotas to supply certain amounts of food, and guaranteed prices for their produce. These were seen as ways to provide stability to farmers, and food security to consumers.

In the late 1980s, when it became clear the quotas were distorting the market and leading to surpluses of some products – the EU’s famous “butter mountain” and “wine lake” – overhaul of the CAP led to more direct payments to farmers. Then, from 2003 to 2012, farm payments were “decoupled” entirely from production and based instead on the amount of land farmed, with extra payments available for farmers who could exhibit good stewardship of the environment. While that has simplified the payment system and removed many of the distortions, it also means the biggest farmers reap the biggest rewards.

“CAP is just welfare for the rich,” is how Ariel Brunner, the director of BirdLife Europe, termed it, on the social media platform X. “With symbolic consolation for smaller farmers to muddy the water. It doesn’t serve any social purpose. And it favours the destruction of the resources farming depends on.”

But it is also still a lifeline for poor farmers. The problem is that the supermarkets that buy the farmers’ produce, and the suppliers of farm inputs such as fertiliser and pesticides, also count on the subsidy payments. “You have the retailers and middlemen sucking out all of the margin, and farmers being left with very little,” says Will White, the sustainable farming coordinator at the UK-based Sustain coalition of farming and food organisations. “That’s one of the things that locks us into a cycle of highly intensive farming. The status quo is not a good option for anyone.”

In the UK, for instance, farmers make less than a penny in profit from selling a loaf of bread or an average-sized block of cheese. (Although the UK is no longer under the CAP, the government still provides equivalent subsidies under a separate support scheme, so the mechanism is broadly similar.) On each kilo of apples, the farmer makes just 3p. Martin Lines, the chief executive of the Nature Friendly Farming Network, says “none of the payment really reaches the farmer. The payments go to the value chain. Their profits have mushroomed.”

So a system that was meant to help farmers, keep Europeans fed and the land well cared for, has turned into one that trashes the environment; enriches big landowners and leaves poor farmers struggling; delights retailers but costs money for consumers; and causes headaches for politicians of all stripes because they know they can be held to ransom by cavalcades of tractors and burning haybales.

In Britain, the post-Brexit farming system is tied up in similar muddles. The Conservative government vowed in 2017 to move away from area-based payments to “public money for public goods”, but that has proved easier in principle than practice, as environmental land management schemes have come under fire, with accusations of landowners forcing struggling tenants off their land so they can rewild it or grow trees for carbon offsets, and a renewed feeling that small farmers are still at the bottom of the heap.

Meanwhile, the climate crisis is gathering pace, and the effects are being felt on food and farming, sometimes quite brutally. Agriculture and land use change contribute at least a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, so the effects of farming on the climate need to be tackled at the same time as the effects of the climate on farming, but so far there is little sign of that happening.

To bring farmers round to the benefits of farming in a more environmentally sustainable manner, they need to be shown that green regulations ultimately benefit them, says Sustain’s White. “Farmers care about the bottom line – if they can make money from environmental schemes, I think most farmers will listen. Farmers should be working together with governments more – it’s not in their interests to be at the political extremes.”

There are encouraging signs of possible reform. In September, farmers, retailers, consumer groups and environmentalists held strategic dialogues, at the suggestion of the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and put together a proposal that calls for “urgent, ambitious and feasible” change in farm and food systems, with financial support to help farmers get there. It also acknowledges that Europeans eat more animal protein than doctors and scientists recommend, and calls for a shift toward plant-based diets supported by better education, stricter marketing and voluntary buyouts of farms in regions that intensively rear livestock.

There is plenty of scope for redirecting payments to farmers so that they reward greener and less intensive farming, argues Richard Benwell, the chief executive of the Wildlife and Countryside Link charity. “The environmental work that farmers do has been chronically undervalued for a very long time,” he says. “We need to recognise those public goods that traditional small farmers have long been expected to do for free. And on the other side, where harm occurs they should have to pay.”

Bollig believes the CAP could be better targeted, to benefit farmers who follow organic or less demanding “nature-friendly” practices. There are some schemes within the CAP to encourage sustainable farming, but they do not go far enough to help reduce inputs instead of seeking higher yields, he says.

“It doesn’t give farmers a motivation to change,” says Bollig. “Bad farms with better yields make more money, and good farms [with sustainable practices] are left to struggle.”

Building a sustainable global food system, in Europe and across the world, in which greenhouse gas emissions are low, in which biodiversity flourishes, in which the impacts of extreme weather are minimised using natural means, is difficult but possible, according to Ed Davey, of the World Resources Institute. “Farming can work in harmony with nature,” he says. “Sustainable farming techniques are there.”

Crucial to any successful reform will be separating out the interests of big farms and small ones, says De Pous. While big farmers benefit from intensification, with more fertiliser, more pesticide, more concentrated animal feed lots, small farmers could benefit from the opposite, with more emphasis on quality and organic production. “Small farmers should not give up, but they need to question who is representing them, and what they are asking for. The interests of small farmers are not necessarily the interests of big farmers. There are huge differences,” he said.

Consumers will also have to adjust. In the EU, about 80% of farm subsidy goes towards animal products, which means it has an outsize impact on greenhouse gas emissions. In some European countries, livestock now outnumber people. Changing this will be painful – the farmers of the Netherlands objected to proposals to start to limit the national herd, to cut down on pollution, and at recent polls it was one of the issues that pushed the far right to electoral success in the country. Yet if consumers in developed countries change their diet to eat more healthily – which means less ultra-processed food and less meat – there will be less demand for intensively farmed meat products, and the burden on the land will reduce markedly.

Hopes of reaching the point where farm subsidy systems around the world are dismantled or redirected towards providing the kind of planet we need to feed 8 billion people – or in future 10 billion, or even 12 billion – without destroying what remains of the wildlife, and permanently disabling the climate, may seem utopian. But there is no law of nature that says farming must kill off the natural environment it depends on; many small-scale farmers around the world, and for previous centuries, have worked in harmony with nature and other species. Farm subsidy regimes are economic systems that were drawn up by bureaucrats within the last half-century, and they can be redrawn, despite short-term pressure to the contrary. What that takes is political courage.

A 15-year-old boy who followed a teenager he did not know through Birmingham city centre and stabbed him to death after a four-minute conversation has been jailed for life with a minimum of 13 years.

Muhammad Hassam Ali, known as Ali, was 17 when he died in hospital on 20 January, hours after he and his friend were confronted by two masked 15-year-old boys they had never met as they sat in Victoria Square, drinking hot chocolate and chatting about cricket.

The two boys, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had followed Ali and his friend from the Grand Central Shopping Centre wearing Covid-style face masks.

Neither of them showed any emotion as they were sentenced by the judge, Mr Justice Garnham, who said 17-year-old Ali’s murder was “yet another illustration of the appalling consequences of carrying knives in public places” as he detained them at Birmingham crown court on Friday.

He said: “It is perfectly clear to me (Ali) was a much-loved son and brother and his family have been left utterly devastated by his death.”

He sentenced the second boy to five years’ detention in secure accommodation.

A trial at Coventry crown court earlier this year heard that, in a conversation lasting about four minutes, the two boys asked Ali and his friend where they came from and if they knew who had “jumped a mate” of theirs a week before. After Ali allegedly said: “Bro, I don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re pissing me off,” the youth pulled out a large knife and stabbed him in the chest.

A jury took just over four hours to return unanimous verdicts in July, finding the youth who carried out the fatal attack guilty of murder and possessing a knife and his friend, who was standing nearby when the stabbing happened, guilty of manslaughter and possessing a knife.

In his evidence, the teenager who wielded the knife told the court he only wanted to “scare” Ali and his friend, and that he did not intend to seriously harm or kill anyone.

Michael Ivers KC, representing the defendant, said he was remorseful and prays for Ali and his family regularly.

He said: “He isn’t a man who is in any sense proud of what happened. He truly, truly regrets what happened.

“If he could turn the clock back, not for his own sake but because of the impact it has had on others, he would.”

Sentencing the pair, who sat in the dock wearing white untucked shirts and dark trousers surrounded by four dock officers, Mr Justice Garnham said the knife had been pulled out “for no obvious reason”.

He said: “You suggested in evidence that the words of Ali caused you to fear for your safety. The jury did not accept that and neither do I.

“They did no more than was reasonable in trying to persuade you to go away. There was no justification for pulling out a knife on an unarmed young man who posed no risk to you.”

A statement from Ali’s family, who were in court for the hearing, read out by prosecutor Mark Heywood KC described the teenager as a budding engineer and said they would never get over his death.

They said: “The loss of a child is devastating and life-destroying, but the fact someone took his life in such a horrific and brutal way will always haunt us.”

Donald Trump on Friday tried to energize his voters during a rally in Warren, Michigan, delivering an address replete with his characteristic fear-mongering about immigrants and tangents including musings about his hair.

The former president also repeated his aggressive attack on former Republican representative Liz Cheney, one day after he said she should be under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.

Trump repeatedly urged his supporters to hit the polls. “We have to get out and vote, everybody. Don’t take any chances,” he said.

Trump’s speech came as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch, with both the former president and his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, battling to woo voters in Michigan and other key swing states.

Harris was campaigning in Wisconsin on Friday, where she emphasized that she is looking to be a political consensus builder.

“Here is my pledge to you. Here is my pledge to you as president. I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to the challenges you face,” Harris said. “I pledge to listen to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make. I will listen to experts. I will listen to the people who disagree with me. Because, you see, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy.”

“He wants to put them in jail,” Harris said, repeating a line she’s has frequently invoked of late. “I’ll give them a seat at the table.”

He asked voters whether they were better off than they were four years ago, and repeatedly stoked fears about immigrants, saying “every state is a border state” and falsely claiming immigrants are being flown into the south-west.

He repeated some of his most racist tropes, saying: “All of our jobs are are being taken by the migrants that come into our country illegally and many of those migrants happen to be criminals, and some of them happen to be murderers.”

There was time for reflection, too. “We’re gonna miss these rallies, aren’t we?” Trump asked the crowd at one juncture.

At another point, he remarked: “I’m studying my hair. It looks not so good today … not a good hair day for me, ay ay ay.”

Trump, while talking about various types of automobiles, spoke out against hydrogen cars, remarking: “The only thing we don’t want is a hydrogen car.”

“Can you imagine? You call the wife. ‘There’s your husband, in the tree. I don’t see him.’ The tree is bright red.”

Trump and Harris are neck-and-neck in swing state polling, and in Michigan, a Detroit Free Press survey shows her having a three-point lead.

Republicans and Democrats, as well as their unofficial boosters, have pounced on the tight split. Harris’s camp is pushing hard to convince young voters, who overwhelmingly support the Democrats, to go out and vote.

With mere days to go before the 5 November election, some Democrats in Michigan described being “freaked out” by the prospect of another Trump victory in this state. Biden won Michigan in 2020, but Trump defeated Hillary Clinton here in 2016. Relying on polls showing her far ahead, the Clinton campaign had prioritized campaigning in other states, neglecting key Democratic segments such as Black communities and auto workers in the state.

Harris has spent more time on the ground in Michigan than in any other state with the exception of Pennsylvania. Harris and her running-mate, Tim Walz, have bounced around the state in an effort to attract Black voters, white suburban women, college students and factory workers.

Last week, Barack Obama rapped with hip-hop legend Eminem at a rally in Detroit. Bernie Sanders, beloved by the Democratic left, tried to reassure young voters in the state that Harris is not just another corporate-minded Democrat.

Trump, too, has upped his efforts to woo Michigan voters. On Friday, the former president stopped in Dearborn to court Arab-American voters, many of whom have been left deeply disappointed by Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Many of the city’s Muslim leaders declined to meet with Trump, including Dearborn’s mayor, Abdullah H Hammoud.

“The architect of the Muslim Ban is making a campaign stop in Dearborn. People in this community know what Trump stands for – we suffered through it for years,” Hammoud, a Democrat, said on X. “I’ve refused a sit down with him although the requests keep pouring in. Trump will never be my president.”

Hammoud, who is neither supporting Harris nor Trump in the race for president, also called fellow members of his party. “To the Dems – your unwillingness to stop funding & enabling a genocide created the space for Trump to infiltrate our communities. Remember that.”

Meanwhile, Michigan residents have for months been bombarded by campaign ads, many of which feature exaggerated or blatantly false claims. With the state seeing $759m in political ad spending, Michigan ranks among the top for such disbursements in this election, per NPR.

At his rally on Friday evening, Trump tried to tie Harris to the most recent jobs report, which showed the US added just 12,000 jobs in October.

Trump also again attacked Liz Cheney, one day after he called the former Republican leader a “radical war hawk” in a conversation with Tucker Carlson and said she should face being under fire with rifles “shooting at her”.

“Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face,” he said.

On Friday, Trump’s comments were similar.

“She’s tough one. But if you gave Liz Cheney a gun, put her into battle facing the other side with guns pointing at her. she wouldn’t have the courage or the strength or the stamina to even look the enemy in the eye,” Trump said.

“That’s why I broke up with her,” Trump commented, prompting some laughs.

A federal judge on Friday denied an attempt by America Pac – the political action committee founded by Elon Musk to support Donald Trump’s campaign for a second presidency – to move to federal court a civil suit brought by the Philadelphia district attorney over a daily $1m prize draw for registered voters.

The lawyers for Musk and his America Pac had argued that the lawsuit, which is seeking to halt the sweepstakes in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, needed to be resolved in federal court as it referenced the 5 November presidential election.

But the presiding US district judge Gerald Pappert disagreed with that contention in a five-page opinion, writing that the motivations of the Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner, were irrelevant – and that his office had the power to bring the case in state court.

“Having now considered the parties’ submissions, the court grants the motion and remands the case back to the court of common Pleas,” it said.

The case was set for a hearing in Pennsylvania state court on Monday, the day before the election.

The civil suit that names both Musk and America Pac alleges that a petition asking registered voters in battleground states to submit their address, phone number and emails in exchange for $47, as well as to enter a daily $1m prize draw, was a lottery scheme that was illegal under state law.

The petition has separately attracted scrutiny from the US justice department, which warned America Pac that the lottery violated federal law as it in effect amounts to paying people to register to vote. But the civil suit was the first legal action taken to stop the scheme.

As the petition asks people to pledge their support to the US constitution’s first and second amendments – big causes for Republicans – it is widely seen by election law experts as illegally encouraging Trump supporters to register to vote in swing states. In a close election, turnout by voters for the former president could tip the result.

The suit also accuses Musk and America Pac of violating state consumer protection laws by deploying deceptive or misleading statements. For instance, Krasner contends that winners are not random, as advertised, because multiple winners have been people who showed up at Trump rallies.

Musk’s defenders say it is simply a contest open to registered voters. In theory, they say, Democrats registered to vote in battleground states can complete the petition and have a chance to win the $1m lottery.

The petition is perhaps the most public of the various strategies employed by America Pac to bolster Trump’s candidacy. The Super Pac now leads the crucial get-out-the-vote operation on behalf of the Trump campaign as Musk searches for more ways to help the former president return to the Oval Office.

The ground game effort has suffered from some setbacks. The Guardian has previously reported that tens of thousands of Trump voters might not be reached after America Pac’s internal systems flagged that 20 to 25% of door knocks reported in Arizona and Nevada may have been fraudulent.

A Pittsburgh-area Halloween parade’s depiction of Kamala Harris in chains and being dragged by a vehicle displaying Donald Trump’s name is being condemned as racist – and has prompted an apology from the event organizer.

Photos of Wednesday night’s parade in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, that circulated widely across social media show a person dressed as the Democratic vice-president shackled and walking behind a golf cart-like vehicle. The vehicle – a float in a Halloween parade organized by the Mount Pleasant volunteer fire department – is decorated with American flags and Trump campaign signs carrying people dressed in what appear to be Secret Service agent costumes, along with a mounted rifle.

Social media was quick to express disgust at the float’s display, which came less than a week before the presidential election between Harris and the Republican former president comes to a head on 5 November.

The NAACP was among those to say the float was racist. A statement from Daylon A Davis, the president of the NAACP’s Pittsburgh branch, said: “This appalling portrayal goes beyond the realm of Halloween satire or free expression; it is a harmful symbol that evokes a painful history of violence, oppression, and racism that Black and Brown communities have long endured here in America.”

Harris is of Jamaican and Indian descent.

Nearly 24 hours after the parade, the Mount Pleasant volunteer fire department issued a statement apologizing on Facebook for allowing the offensive float.

“We do not share in the values represented by those participants, and we understand how it may have hurt or offended members of our community,” the statement said.

The post did not elaborate on the process of getting approved for the parade, leaving questions about how the float was allowed to roll.

On a CBS News segment, Mount Pleasant’s mayor, Diane Bailey, denounced the portrayal of Harris.

“I was appalled, angered, upset,” the Democratic mayor said on Thursday. “This does not belong in this parade or in this town.”

Bailey added that the fire department must change its process for allowing floats.

“They’ve never taken applications in the past,” Bailey said. “They’ve never vetted anyone who wanted to come to the parade.”

Michelle Milan McFall, the chairperson of Westmoreland county’s Democratic party, added that the float in question rolled during what she said may be the US’s “most contentious election”.

On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly threatened to imprison his opponents. He has also been targeted by two assassination attempts, according to authorities.

“It’s vile. It’s heartbreaking. It’s concerning. And I think it’s also got an element of danger,” Milan McFall told ABC affiliate WTAE. “Again, we’re living in this climate where people aren’t just thinking about hatred and feeling it in their guts and bones. They’re acting on it.”

A New York author and journalist has released audio tapes that appear to detail how Donald Trump had a close social relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that he has long denied.

The tapes, released as part of the Fire and Fury podcast series by Michael Wolff, author of three books about Trump’s first term and 2020 bid for a second, and James Truman, former NME journalist and Condé Nast editorial director, include Epstein’s thoughts about the inner workings of the former US president’s inner circle.

Wolff says the recordings were made during a 2017 discussion with Epstein about writing his biography. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges two years later. Despite his crimes, the wealthy financier was at the heart of a social circle of the rich and powerful in the US and overseas that contained many famous names.

Wolff claims the excerpt tape is a mere fraction of some “100 hours of Epstein talking about the inner workings of the Trump White House and about his longstanding, deep relationship with Donald Trump”.

Trump once praised Epstein in conversation with New York magazine in 2002, calling him “a terrific guy” and hinted at his interest in women “on the young side”. But he claimed the pair had fallen out 15 years before Epstein was convicted on a prostitution solicitation charge in Florida in 2008.

“I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you,” the president said after Epstein was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019.

The Fire and Fury tapes reveal Epstein recalling how then president Trump played his circle off against each other. “His people fight each other and then he poisons the well outside,” he says.

The author names Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus and Kellyanne Conway as being among the acolytes and officials Trump played off each other like courtiers in a competitive court.

“He will tell 10 people ‘Bannon’s a scumbag’ and ‘Priebus is not doing a good job’ and ‘Kellyanne has a big mouth – what do you think?’

“‘[JPMorgan Chase CEO] Jamie Dimon says that you’re a problem and I shouldn’t keep you. And I spoke to [financier] Carl Icahn. And Carl thinks I need a new spokesperson.’”

Epstein continues his exposition of Trump’s approach to management: “So Kelly[anne] – even though I hired Kellyanne’s husband – Kellyanne is just too much of a wildcard. And then he tells Bannon: ‘You know I really want to keep you but Kellyanne hates you.’”

In response to the podcast, Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary, said, “Wolff is a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because he clearly has no morals or ethics” and accused the author of making “outlandish false smears” and engaging in “blatant election interference on behalf of Kamala Harris”.

Wolffs claims on the podcast that he became an “outlet” for Epstein “to express his incredulity about someone whose sins he knew so well, and then this person actually being elected president. Epstein was utterly preoccupied with Trump, and I think, frankly, afraid of him.”

In the broadest strokes, Wolff’s intention is to paint a picture of two wealthy men of the 1980s whose shared interests lie in money, women and status. He describes how they socialized together in New York.

The Guardian recently revealed that in 1993 Epstein had taken Stacey Williams, a Sports Illustrated model and his girlfriend of two months, to Trump’s Fifth Avenue penthouse and allowed or perhaps encouraged the former US president to grope her in what she described as a “twisted game”.

Speaking on the podcast, Wolff said: “Here are these two guys both driven by a need to do anything they wanted with women: dominance and submission and entertainment. And one of them ends up in the darkest prison in the country and the other in the White House.”

Tucker Carlson, the former CNN and Fox News political chat host, has said he was “physically mauled” by a demon a year and a half ago, in an assault that he says left him bleeding and with scars from “claw marks”.

Carlson made the claim while speaking in an upcoming documentary, Christianities? In a preview clip on YouTube, Carlson is asked by John Heers of the non-profit First Things Foundation if he believed that “the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good”.

“That’s what happened to me. I had a direct experience with it,” said Carlson.

Asked if he was referring to journalism, Carlson responded: “No, in my bed at night. I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”

Carlson, who said he still bears the scars, said his assailant was a “demon”. He added: “Or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides.”

He said at the time of the attack, he was asleep in bed. I was “totally confused, I woke up, and I couldn’t breathe, and I thought I was going to suffocate”, he said.

“I walked around outside and then I walked in and my wife and dogs had not woken up. And they’re very light sleepers. And then I had these terrible pains on my rib cage and on my shoulder, and I was just in my boxer shorts and I went and flipped on the light in the bathroom, and I had four claw marks on either side underneath my arms and on my left shoulder. And they’re bleeding.”

He added that he explained the encounter to an assistant, an evangelical Christian, who told him: “That happens, people are attacked in their bed by demons.”

Carlson, who lives in the woods of Maine, did not say where the attack occurred, but called it a “transformative experience” that left him “seized with this very intense desire to read the Bible”.

Carlson, who was fired from Fox News after the company paid more than $787m to settle a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over false statements and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, is stumping for Donald Trump on the campaign trial.

He addressed a rally in Georgia last week, telling Trump supporters that the candidate’s possible return to the White House was like a father returning home and Trump would give the country a “vigorous spanking”.

“He’s not vengeful. He loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them. Because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior. And he’s going to have to let them know,” Carlson said.

“When Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’”

A pregnant Texas teenager died after three separate visits to an emergency room in attempts to get care in another incident that has highlighted the medical impact of the loss of abortion rights in the US.

Nevaeh Crain, 18, had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours in October of 2023, each time returning home feeling worse than before. Crain was only diagnosed with strep throat upon her first visit. The hospital did not investigate her sharp abdominal cramps, according to reporting by ProPublica.

Crain is one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban brought in after the US supreme court overturned the federal right to abortion. Josseli Barnica, 28, died after a miscarriage in 2021.

These incidents are seen as evidence of a new reality where US healthcare professionals in states with new tough abortion restrictions are hesitant or even afraid to give care to pregnant mothers over fear of legal repercussions. Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, regardless of whether the pregnancy is wanted or not.

Medical records indicate Crain tested positive for sepsis, a potentially life-threatening condition, on her second visit. But doctors still cleared her to leave after apparently confirming that her six-month-old fetus still had a heartbeat.

On her third trip to the hospital, Crain was finally moved to intensive care after an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise”, reported ProPublica.

She died hours later after suffering organ failure. A nurse noted that her lips had turned “blue and dusky”, ProPublica said. The teen would have turned 20 this Friday.

Though Texas retains exceptions for life-threatening conditions, the fear and uncertainty instilled in doctors over which treatments may or may not be considered a crime has had devastating effects on women in need of healthcare.

The result is that in states with abortion bans, patients are often traded between hospitals in order to shirk responsibility and argue about legalities, an act which wastes precious and potentially life-saving time.

“Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables,” Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor emerita at George Washington University, told ProPublica.

Republicans are already laying the ground for rejecting the result of next week’s US presidential election in the event Donald Trump loses, with early lawsuits baselessly alleging fraud and partisan polls exaggerating his popularity to make it harder for his supporters to accept that he did not win, veteran strategists say.

The warnings – from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans – come as Americans prepare to vote on Tuesday in the most consequential presidential contest in generations. Most polls show Trump running neck and neck with Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee, with the two candidates seemingly evenly matched in seven key swing states.

But suspicions have been voiced over a spate of recent polls, mostly commissioned in battleground states from groups with Republican links, that mainly show Trump leading. The projection of surging Trump support as election day nears has drawn confident predictions from him and his supporters.

“We’re leading big in the polls, all of the polls,” Trump told a rally in New Mexico on Thursday. “I can’t believe it’s a close race,” he told a separate rally in North Carolina, a swing state where polls show he and Harris are in a virtual dead heat.

An internal memo sent to Trump by his chief pollster is confirming that story to him, with Tony Fabrizio declaring the ex-president’s “position nationally and in every single battleground state is SIGNIFICANTLY better today than it was four years ago”.

Pro-Trump influencers, too, have strengthened the impression of inevitable victory with social media posts citing anonymous White House officials predicting Harris’s defeat. “Biden is telling advisers the election is ‘dead and buried’ and called Harris an innate sucker,” the conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec posted this week.

GOP-aligned polling groups have released 37 polls in the final stretch of the campaign, according to a study by the New York Times, during a period when longstanding pollsters have been curtailing their voter surveys. All but seven showed a lead for Trump, in contrast to the findings of long-established non-partisan pollsters, which have shown a more mixed picture – often with Harris leading, albeit within error margins.

In one illustration, a poll last Tuesday by the Trafalgar Group – an organisation founded by a former Republican consultant – gave Trump a three-point lead over Harris in North Carolina. By contrast, a CNN/SRSS poll two days later in the same state put the vice-president ahead by a single point.

The polling expert Nate Silver – who has said his “gut” favours a Trump win, while simultaneously arguing that people should not trust their gut – cast doubt on the ex-president’s apparent surge in an interview with CNBC. “Anyone who is confident about this election is someone whose opinion you should discount,” he said.

“There’s been certainly some momentum towards Trump in the last couple of weeks. [But] these small changes are swamped by the uncertainty. Any indicator you want to point to, I could point to counter-examples.”

Democrats and some polling experts believe the conservative-commissioned polls are aiming to create a false narrative of unstoppable momentum for Trump – which could then be used to challenge the result if Harris wins.

“Republicans are clearly strategically putting polling into the information environment to try to create perceptions that Trump is stronger. Their incentive is not necessarily to get the answer right,” Joshua Dyck, of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, told the New York Times.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democrat strategist and blogger, said it followed a trend set in the 2022 congressional elections, when a succession of surveys favourable to Republicans created an expectation of a pro-GOP “red wave” that never materialised on polling day.

“These polls were usually two, three, four points more Republican than the independent polls that were being done and they ended up having the effect of pushing the polling averages to the right,” he told MeidasTouch News.

“We cannot be bamboozled by this again. It is vital to Donald Trump’s effort if he tries to cheat and overturn the election results, he needs to have data showing that somehow he was winning the election.

“The reason we have to call this out is that Donald Trump needs to go into election day with some set of data showing him winning, so if he loses, he can say we cheated.”

Trump, who falsely claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, is also paving the way for repeating the accusation via legal means.

He told a rally in Pennsylvania that Democrats were “cheating” in the state, and on Wednesday his campaign took legal action against election officials in Bucks County, where voters waiting to submit early mail-in ballots were turned away because the deadline had expired. A judge later ordered the county to extend early voting by one day. There is no evidence of widespread cheating in elections in Pennsylvania or any other state, and mail-in ballots are in high demand in part because Trump himself has encouraged early voting.

Suing to allege – without evidence – that there has been voting fraud is part of a well-worn pattern of Trump disputing election results that do not go his way. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, his team filed 60 lawsuits disputing the results, all of which were forcefully thrown out in court.

Anti-Trump Republicans have expressed similar concerns to Democrats about Trump’s actions. Michael Steele, a former Republican national committee chairand Trump critic, told the New Republic that the GOP-commissioned polls were gamed to favour Trump.

“You find different ways to weight the participants, and that changes the results you’re going to get,” he said. “They’re gamed on the back end so Maga can make the claim that the election was stolen.”

Stuart Stevens, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate, and a founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told the same outlet: “Their gameplan is to make it impossible for states to certify. And these fake polls are a great tool in that, because that’s how you lead people to think the race was stolen.”

Trump-leaning surveys have influenced the polling averages published by sites such as Real Clear Politics, which has incorporated the results into its projected electoral map on election night, forecasting a win for the former president.

Elon Musk, Trump’s wealthiest backer and surrogate, posted the map to his 202 million followers on his own X platform, proclaiming: “The trend will continue.”

Trump and Musk have also promoted online betting platforms, which have bolstered the impression of a surge for the Republican candidate stemming from hefty bets on him winning.

A small number of high-value wagers from four accounts linked to a French national appeared to be responsible for $28m gambled on a Trump victory on the Polymarket platform, the New York Times reported.

Trump referenced the Polymarket activity in a recent speech. “I don’t know what the hell it means, but it means we’re doing pretty well,” he said.