Hundreds of early ballots cast for the US presidential election have been burned in two suspected attacks in Washington and Oregon, exacerbating tensions ahead of next Tuesday’s knife-edge contest.

Police said Monday that the fires in the two states were believed to be connected and that a vehicle involved had been identified, according to the Associated Press.

Firefighters went to the scene after smoke was reported coming from a ballot drop box in the city of Vancouver in Washington state at 6.30am on Monday, according to local media.

KATU, a local television channel, reported capturing footage of responders releasing a pile of burning ballots to the grounds. The ballots continued to smolder after the flames had been doused.

Hundreds of ballots were believed to have been inside when smoke was reported billowing from the box, which had last been emptied at 8am on Sunday. KATU reported that only a few of the ballots deposited there after that had been saved.

The elections auditor for Clark county, the local authority administering the boxes, said voters who had cast their ballots into it after 11am could seek new voting documents at a link on the county’s election web page.

“There is absolutely zero place in our democracy for political violence or interference against our fellow citizens, election workers, or voting infrastructure … Our right to vote needs to be protected under all circumstances. We can’t yield to intimidation, and we must continue to stand up against unpatriotic acts such as this one,” said local congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.

She requested law enforcement officers be in place overnight at all ballot drop boxes in the county until election day, saying: “South-west Washington cannot risk a single vote being lost to arson and political violence.”

The fire was reported after a similar incident in nearby Portland in Oregon, where police say an incendiary device was set off inside a ballot drop box close to a building hosting the Multnomah county elections division.

Security staff extinguished the fire before police arrived. The device was deactivated and removed by the local bomb squad.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned of ballot drop box destruction in a September memo obtained by Property of the People, a public records watchdog group. The agency said in an intelligence brief that election infrastructure will be seen as an “attractive target for some domestic violent extremists”, with drop boxes as a “soft target” because they are more accessible.

Social media posters in forums frequented by extremists have shared ideas for attacked drop boxes, the agency said, including “road flares, fireworks, petroleum fuel, linseed oil and white phosphorus, cement or expanding foam, bleach or other chemicals, and farm machinery”. Other methods could include putting up fake signs to claim a drop box is out of order, putting up decoy drop boxes or putting “timed explosives” into drop boxes. They have also discussed ways to avoid law enforcement detection.

“Damaged ballot drop boxes could temporarily decrease voting opportunities and accessibility and intimidate voters from casting votes if safety concerns arise in the vicinity of a targeted or damaged ballot drop box,” the DHS wrote in the intelligence brief. “Successful ballot drop box destruction could inspire others with related grievances to conduct similar actions.”

The incidents came days after a US Postal Service mail box containing a small number of ballots was set on fire in Phoenix, Arizona, last Thursday.

Police arrested a 35-year-old man who they said admitted to the crime while he was in custody. They also said he had told them his actions had not been politically motivated and he had committed the office with the purpose of getting himself arrested.

The Guardian has reported that far-right election denial groups supporting Donald Trump have been monitoring election drop boxes as part of their activity in the run-up to next week’s poll, when officials are bracing themselves for disruption and challenges to the vote tallies.

When voters in Portland, Oregon, head to the polls next month, they will be tasked not only with selecting new leaders, but also the implementation of a monumental overhaul of the city’s government.

Two years ago, residents moved to fundamentally alter their local government structure and adopted what experts have described as some of the most “expansive voting reforms” undertaken by a major US city in recent decades. Come November, the city will use ranked-choice voting to elect a mayor and a larger, more representative city council as Portland moves from a commission form of government to one overseen by a city administrator.

The shake-up comes after challenging years for Portland in which the city of 630,000 grappled with a declining downtown, rising homelessness, a fentanyl crisis, growing public drug use and the continued economic impacts of the pandemic years.

While some news coverage has portrayed the shift as Portlanders rejecting the city’s historically progressive values, those involved with the project counter that residents are embracing democratic reforms that will lead to a more equitable government better equipped to solve the city’s problems.

“It was really clear that this system was, as operated, very inequitable,” said Jenny Lee, managing director of Building Power for Communities of Color, a non-profit that was a key proponent of the effort.

“And the challenges in governing are going to be felt the most by those who already have been marginalized in our political system.”

Now the city waits to see what the “once-in-a-generation” change will mean for its future.

Since 1913, Portland has used a commission form of government. The commission consisted of five people elected citywide and who were responsible for passing policies and also acting as administrators in charge of city departments.

The system was briefly popular in other major US cities, but then largely abandoned, said Richard Clucas, a political science professor at Portland State University.

“Most cities who adopted that form of government realized there were problems with it,” he said. “Someone may be good as a legislator but it doesn’t make them good as an administrator.”

And Portland’s system had long failed to adequately represent different demographics in the city, Lee said. The city’s elected officials historically have been white men from more affluent areas where residents are more likely to have a higher income and own their homes, according to the Sightline Institute. In 2017, only two people of color had ever been elected to the city council.

Under the charter system, simple decisions – such as where to put a bike lane – were politicized, said Shoshanah Oppenheim, the charter transition project manager.

“It was based on the political tide,” said Oppenheim, who is also a senior adviser in the city administrator’s office.

For more than a century, Portlanders rejected attempts to reform the commission system, but that changed when the 10-year review of the city charter coincided with upheaval and challenges of the pandemic years.

The pandemic exacerbated the existing limitations of the city’s form of government, according to a report from Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation chronicling Portland’s reforms.

Meanwhile, Portland was the site of widespread racial justice protests and an ensuing federal crackdown, the city’s economic recovery from the pandemic was slow, and residents grew increasingly disillusioned with their leaders’ ability to make meaningful progress tackling homelessness and drug abuse.

Those challenges created an opportunity to have meaningful conversations about elections and government, Lee said.

Clucas echoed that sentiment: “I think the public was looking and happy to take on some sort of change.”

Community leaders had spent years educating themselves about electoral reform, and saw an opportunity to create change in the city, the report stated.

With support from community organizations and local activists, the commission brought a measure before voters that would make key changes to the city’s system, allowing voters to rank local candidates in order of preference, expand the city council from five to 12 representatives elected from four newly created districts, and move to a system of government overseen by a professional city administrator.

Despite criticism about the complexity of the measure and opposition from political leaders and the business community, 58% of voters approved the package of reforms proposed by the commission.

Although the timing coincided with major changes and social issues, Lee said the reforms were not reactionary and instead an example of Portland being willing to try new things, which ties into Oregon’s long history of democratic reforms aimed at making government more participatory.

“It was a message about change, but it was definitely a hopeful one,” she said. “It was always about these changes will make our government more effective and equitable.”

The city has spent the last two years preparing for a project unlike anything Portland has seen before,Oppenheim said. “We had a really short timeline … It’s been an all-hands-on-deck approach,” she said. “There is no playbook. We are making it up as we go along.”

Next month, voters will decided among more than 100 candidates for 12 council seats and 19 candidates for mayor. A recent poll from the Oregonian suggested a once-longshot candidate, whose campaign has focused on ending homelessness, is well positioned to win.

In a poll of roughly 300 voters from early October, before election packets were sent out, two-thirds responded that they understood how voting works very well or somewhat well. People tend to understand the system right away given that they rank things every day, Oppenheim said.

The city has also developed a voter education program to inform residents about the changes and trained operators on its information line how to explain ranked-choice voting.

The hope is that voters will feel the increased power of their vote, Lee said. “Every vote has a lot of power. Your constituents’ voices really matter. Their second- and third-choice rankings actually really matter.”

After the election, the other major test comes next year when Portland’s new government takes the reins. “We want to be ready on day one so all the city business can continue,” Oppenheim said.

“Portlanders have huge expectations for change and we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do things better,” Oppenheim said. “They want a more representative government. We have it in our power to deliver that.”

Hedgehogs are now listed as “near threatened” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list after a decline in numbers of at least 30% over the past decade across much of their range.

While hedgehogs were once common across Europe, and were until now listed as of “least concern” on the red list, they are being pushed towards extinction by urban development, intensive farming and roads, which have fragmented their habitat.

Their population has suffered from vehicle collisions, the use of pesticides and poorly managed domestic gardens. Pesticides kill the insects that hedgehogs eat and may also poison them directly.

Abi Gazzard, a programme officer at the IUCN, said: “Unfortunately, evidence points towards a worrying and widespread downward trend. The red list assessment also highlights data uncertainties – for example, the limits of this species’ distribution are not entirely clear, and there are gaps in knowledge of its populations. There is still a chance to halt the decline of the western European hedgehog, and we must aim to prevent any further worsening of status.”

The Mammal Society is calling for people to look after hedgehogs by gardening in a wildlife-friendly way. This includes leaving small gaps in fences to allow hedgehog movement between gardens, not using pesticides and creating shelter with log piles or hedgehog houses. One in four UK mammal species are threatened with extinction, and many others are in decline.

Hope Nothhelfer, a communications officer at the Mammal Society, said: “This decline will likely come as no surprise to the average person. When hedgehogs come up in conversation, it’s not long before someone says that they just don’t see them any more. The hope is that as hedgehogs become more and more like a distant memory from our childhoods, we will respond with action that will bring these memories back to life.”

Shorebirds have fared badly on the red list this year, with four UK shorebird species moving to higher threat categories. These are birds that come to the UK in winter from colder climates and rest and feed on the shore and in estuaries before moving back to their breeding grounds for spring.

Birds that have been added to the list include the grey plover, which has declined by more than 30% globally since the late 1990s. Its conservation status has moved two categories from “least concern” to “vulnerable”. Dunlins and turnstones have faced steep declines and have both been moved from “least concern” to “near threatened”, and curlew sandpipers have declined by more than 30% globally since the late 2000s and have moved from “near threatened” to “vulnerable”.

Threats they face include pollution, development and the climate crisis, with sea level rise causing increased erosion and a heightened risk of coastal flooding, forcing wildlife into smaller and smaller spaces.

The red list also reveals that 38% of the world’s tree species are at risk of extinction, in its first global tree assessment. The list shows that at least 16,425 of the 47,282 species assessed are at risk of extinction. Islands host the largest proportion of threatened trees, where they are at risk due to deforestation for urban development and agriculture, as well as invasive species, pests and diseases.

Spain is set to experience an extraordinary weather event this week, with severe rainfall forecasted, particularly along the eastern coast. Regions such as Valencia, Catalonia, Murcia, and eastern Andalucía could get more than 150mm of rain within just 24 hours on Tuesday, which is more than seven times the typical average for this month. Gibraltar is also expected to experience significant rainfall, with totals exceeding 40mm.

The intense downpour is likely due to a phenomenon known as a gota fría, or “cold drop”, which occurs when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea. This seasonal occurrence creates atmospheric instability, causing warm, saturated air to rise rapidly, leading to the formation of towering cumulonimbus clouds in a matter of hours, dumping heavy rain across eastern parts of Spain.

A gota fría is officially known as a “depresión aislada en niveles altos” (“Dana” to Spanish meteorologists) which translates as “isolated depression at high altitudes”. While this weather pattern can result in torrential rainfall, hail, thunderstorms, and severe flooding, the exact areas affected can be difficult to predict, as gota fría events are often very localised.

Meanwhile, unusually high night-time temperatures are expected across the US this week. Overnight lows are expected to exceed 20C in cities, including Chicago, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Fort Worth – more than 9C above the seasonal average. This unexpected warmth is attributed to a southerly airflow drawing warm air up from the Gulf of Mexico.

In the north Pacific Ocean, Tropical Storm Kong-rey is tracking north-westwards, and is likely to pass by Taiwan early this week, potentially making landfall on Thursday morning. The storm is currently strengthening rapidly and has the potential to develop into a typhoon. Kong-rey is forecasted to bring heavy rain and strong winds, with totals exceeding 300mm in northern Taiwan and 150mm in other areas, posing a significant risk of severe flooding and disruption, and wind gusts could reach over 100mph. However, at this stage it is important to note that the exact track of Kong-rey is uncertain, and its positioning can quickly change over the next few days.

The concentration of planet-heating pollutants clogging the atmosphere hit record levels in 2023, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has said.

It found carbon dioxide is accumulating faster than at any time in human history, with concentrations having risen by more than 10% in just two decades.

“Another year, another record,” said Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the WMO. “This should set alarm bells ringing among decision makers.”

The increase was driven by humanity’s “stubbornly high” burning of fossil fuels, the WMO found, and made worse by big wildfires and a possible drop in the ability of trees to absorb carbon.

The concentration of CO2 reached 420 parts per million (ppm) in 2023, the scientists observed. The level of pollution is 151% greater than before the Industrial Revolution, when people began to burn large amounts of coal, oil and fossil gas.

Concentrations of strong but short-lived pollutants also surged. Methane concentrations hit 1,934 parts per billion (ppb), a rise of 265% from preindustrial levels, and nitrous oxide hit 336.9 parts per billion (ppb), a rise of 125%, it said.

Saulo said: “We are clearly off track to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to well below 2C and aiming for 1.5C above preindustrial levels. These are more than just statistics. Every part per million and every fraction of a degree temperature increase has a real impact on our lives and our planet.”

Burning fossil fuels – such as the petrol to power a car or the coal to feed a thermal power plant – releases gases that trap sunlight and heat the planet.

The WMO warned that this heating can lead to climate feedbacks that are “critical concerns” to society, such as stronger wildfires that pump out more carbon and hotter oceans that suck up less CO2.

There has been a slight slowdown in the growth of global emissions over the last decade but continued strong growth in atmospheric concentrations, said Glen Peters, a climate scientist at the Cicero in Norway, who was not involved in the study. “[That] should give us cause for thought on how strong carbon sinks will remain in a changing climate.”

The Earth last experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 a few million years ago, when the planet was 2-3C hotter and the sea level 10-20 metres higher.

Peters said the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are humanity’s “most accurate measure” of progress. “The data shows, again, we are not making much progress on reducing emissions.”

The WMO announcement comes ahead of the Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan next month. It follows a report from the UN Environment Programme on Thursday that found the world is on track to heat 3C by the end of the century. World leaders had promised to stop it from heating 1.5C.

Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and co-author of the report, said: “The record levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are the logical outcome of the record amounts of greenhouse gases that our economies continue to dump into our ambient air.”

Scientists have estimated investments of $1tn to $2tn (£800bn to £1.6tn) are needed each year to cut emissions to net zero by the middle of the century.

“Current trends will see global warming cross all warming limits that global leaders agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate agreement,” said Rogelj. “[The report] also shows that this doesn’t need to be the end of the story.”

Lev Skoriakin, 23, fled Russia in January 2023 after he was accused of organising a protest outside the FSB security service’s headquarters in Moscow. As his passport was confiscated by the Russian authorities, he was left with a limited number of escape destinations.

“I could choose Armenia, Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan. I do not know why I chose Kyrgyzstan,” Skoriakin says. “At the time we [Russians who sought to leave the country] thought that if we do not stick our heads out, we will be safe. But we were wrong.”

Late in the evening on 16 October 2023, a group of men from the Kyrgyzstan security services knocked on his hostel door in the capital, Bishkek, and asked him to come with them. They drove him to the airport and handed him over to the Russian security service, who handcuffed and accompanied him on a passenger flight back to Moscow.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of Russians fled the country in search of safety and to avoid mobilisation, many to central Asia. Many Russians do not have passports, and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan can be entered with only a national ID.

But a growing number of Russians are finding that neighbouring countries in the region, in particular Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, are far from safe.

At least 14 Russian citizens were either detained or deported at Russia’s request from Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan in 2022 and 2023 alone, according to a Freedom House report on transnational repression.

Grady Vaughan, from Freedom House, says: “There are three main types of people Russia seeks to return. These are, obviously, former military officials and soldiers who were afraid of being called up to the war and deserted.

“Then there have also been independent activists, both anarchists and anti-war activists, who have also found themselves detained in relation to their activism and sometimes deported. The third group are journalists.”

Central Asian countries, especially Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, have sought to remain neutral since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but cooperation between the local security services and their Russian counterparts has continued uninterrupted.

Vaughan says: “There is this history of coordination that has made it easier for Russia to rely on these countries’ security services to increase pressure or to intimidate Russian exiles.”

Alina Gorshenina, 29, an ethnic Russian born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, was travelling on an organised tour to Almaty, a city in Kazakhstan, with her mother and 10-year-old daughter to celebrate Children’s Day last June. As they tried to cross the border, she was arrested.

Unbeknown to Alina, Russian authorities had issued an international arrest warrant for her, accusing her of causing bodily harm to a judge in Russia. Thinking she would just be sent back to Kyrgyzstan, she told her mother and daughter to continue the trip without her.

She had only visited Russia twice in her life – the last time seven years ago – but had been a volunteer for Alexei Navalny’s team and a fervent anti-Putin activist, who often got involved in social media quarrels with pro-Putin public figures. “My posts must have offended someone high up,” she told the Guardian.

Alina ended up spending two months behind bars in Kazakhstan before she was freed and allowed to return home. She is now working with a Russian lawyer to fight the charges remotely.

Murat Adam, a Kazakh lawyer who has worked on several cases of people detained at Russia’s request, says: “I think that Russia is trying to intimidate people and to show that those activists who left can also be arrested. They want to scare people off.”

In some of these cases, Kazakhstan refused to deport people to Russia. But according to Adam, this was not because of Kazakhstan’s goodwill, but rather Russia’s failure to submit all the documents to facilitate deportation.

“Our prosecutor general’s office would agree to deport these individuals if Russia provided sufficient proof of their wrongdoing and its intention to prosecute them. But no one provides the information, and Kazakhstan cannot keep people in detention indefinitely,” says Adam.

After his extradition to Russia, Skoriakin expected a long sentence. But instead, after pleading guilty, he received a fine and was set free. He has now moved to Germany, which had granted him asylum before he left for Kyrgyzstan.

“I do not feel completely safe anywhere, but it is surely safer than Kyrgyzstan,” he says. “Russia’s goal is one: to show that no one can escape them.”

Gas stoves kill 40,000 Europeans each year by pumping pollutants into their lungs, a report has found, a death toll twice as high as that from car crashes.

The cookers spew harmful gases linked to heart and lung disease but experts warn there is little public awareness of their dangers. On average, using a gas stove shaves nearly two years off a person’s life, according to a study of households in the EU and UK.

“The extent of the problem is far worse than we thought,” said lead author Juana María Delgado-Saborit, who runs the environmental health research lab at Jaume I University in Spain.

The researchers attributed 36,031 early deaths each year to gas cookers in the EU, and a further 3,928 in the UK. They say their estimates are conservative because they only considered the health effects of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), and not other gases such as carbon monoxide and benzene.

“Way back in 1978, we first learned that NO₂ pollution is many times greater in kitchens using gas than electric cookers,” said Delgado-Saborit. “But only now are we able to put a number on the amount of lives being cut short.”

One in three households in the EU cook with gas, rising to 54% of households in the UK and more than 60% in Italy, the Netherlands, Romania and Hungary. The cookers burn fossil gas and eject harmful substances that inflame airways.

The report, which was supported by the European Climate Foundation, builds on research last year that measured air quality in homes to find out how much cooking with gas increased indoor air pollution. This allowed scientists from Jaume I University and the University of Valencia to work out ratios between indoor and outdoor air pollution when cooking with gas, and map indoor exposure to NO₂.

They then applied risk rates of disease, sourced from studies on outdoor NO₂ pollution, to work out the number of lives lost.

“The main uncertainty is whether the risk of dying found with outdoor NO₂ from mainly traffic can be applied to indoor NO₂ from gas cooking,” said Steffen Loft, an air pollution expert at the University of Copenhagen, who was not involved in the research. “But it is a fair assumption and required for the assessment.”

The results fall in line with a study in the US in May, which found gas and propane stoves contribute up to 19,000 adult deaths each year.

The EU tightened its rules on outdoor air quality this month but it has not set standards for indoor air quality. The European Public Health Alliance (EPHA) has urged policymakers to phase out gas cookers by setting limits on emissions, offering money to help switch to cleaner cookers and forcing manufacturers to label cookers with their pollution risks.

“For too long it has been easy to dismiss the dangers of gas cookers,” said Sara Bertucci from the EPHA. “Like cigarettes, people didn’t think much of the health impacts – and, like cigarettes, gas cookers are a little fire that fills our home with pollution.”

People can partly protect themselves from fumes when cooking by opening windows when they cook and turning on extractor fans.

Delgado-Saborit said she and her husband grew up in homes where cooking was done on electric hobs, which is “cleaner, safer and healthier”, but later moved into a home with a gas stove in the kitchen.

“We are now in the midst of some home improvements and I am counting the days for having a new electric hob fitted in my kitchen.”

Anger and vitriol took center stage at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, as Donald Trump and a cabal of campaign surrogates held a rally marked by racist comments, coarse insults, and dangerous threats about immigrants.

Nine days out from the election, Trump used the rally in New York to repeat his claim that he is fighting “the enemy within” and again promised to launch “the largest deportation program in American history”, amid incoherent ramblings about ending a phone call with a “very, very important person” so he could watch one of Elon Musk’s rockets land.

The event at Madison Square Garden, in the center of Manhattan, had drawn comparisons to an infamous Nazi rally held at the arena in 1939. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ running mate, said there was a “direct parallel” between the two events, and the Democratic National Committee projected images on the outside of the building on Sunday repeating claims from Trump’s former chief-of-staff that Trump had “praised Hitler”.

There was certainly a dark tone throughout the hours-long rally, with one speaker describing Puerto Rico, home to 3.2m US citizens, as an “island of garbage”; Tucker Carlson mocking Harris’ racial identity; a radio host describing Hillary Clinton as a “sick bastard”; and a crucifix-wielding childhood friend of Trump’s declaring that Harris is “the antichrist”.

The Puerto Rico comments, made by Tony Hinchliffe, a podcaster with a history of racist remarks, were immediately criticized by the Harris-Walz campaign. Ricky Martin, the Puerto Rican popstar who has more than 18m followers on Instagram, wrote in a post: “This is what they think of us. Vote for @kamalaharris.”

Trump campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez in a statement said “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

But that could prove problematic in Pennsylvania, where the majority of the swing state’s 580,000 eligible Latino voters are of Puerto Rican descent. Both campaigns have been trying to appeal to Latino voters in the final weeks of the campaign, and Harris had visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia earlier on Sunday, where she outlined plans to introduce an “economic opportunity taskforce” for Puerto Rico.

The pugnacious mood didn’t change once Trump began speaking, as the former president quickly repeated his pledge to “launch the largest deportation program in American history”.

Trump continued his frequent rants about immigration and claimed that a “savage Venezuelan prison gang” had “taken over Times Square”, which will come as a surprise to anyone who has recently visited the New York landmark. The former president also stated, wrongly, that the Biden administration did not have money to respond to a recent hurricane in North Carolina because “they spent all of their money bringing in illegal immigrants, flying them in by beautiful jet planes”.

Trump’s usual dystopian threats were on offer, as the 78-year-old expanded on his claims about “the enemy within” – a group of political opponents that he has said he will set the military on if elected.

“We’re just not running against Kamala. I think a lot of our politicians here tonight know this. She means nothing, she’s purely a vessel that’s all she is,” Trump said.

“We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala and far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious radical-left machine that runs today’s Democrat party. They’re just vessels.”

Trump’s appearance at Madison Square Garden – home to the New York Knicks and Rangers, and venue for countless legendary acts including Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and John Lennon’s last concert appearance before his murder – marks the culmination of his peculiar love-hate flirtation with his native city. Despite the fact that he has no chance of winning New York state – Harris is 15 points ahead in the Five Thirty Eight tracker poll – this was his third rally here this year.

In May he made an audacious attempt to woo Black and Latino voters in the south Bronx, just a few miles from his childhood home in Queens. Then in September, he pitched up in the New York City suburbs in Long Island.

What Trump intends by staging this trilogy of seemingly pointless electoral appearances is unclear. He has used his rambling speeches to take a nostalgic walk down memory lane to what he sees as the golden days of his life as a New York real estate magnate.

But he has also portrayed New York City in the most dark and dystopian terms, as a rat-infested haven for drug addicts, gangs and “illegal aliens” housed in luxury apartments while military veterans shiver on the sidewalks. His toxic language is perhaps a reflection of his bitterness towards the city of his birth, which in separate court cases has convicted him of 34 felonies, found his company the Trump Organization guilty of criminal tax fraud, and found him personally liable for sexual abuse.

On Sunday Trump again criticized his home town, claiming that the Biden administration had forced “hundreds of thousands of really rough people” into the city and telling New Yorkers, despite police saying crime has declined: “Your crime is through the roof. Everything is through the roof.”

The pugnacious tone had been set earlier in the afternoon, when several of the opening speakers made obscenity-laced and hate-filled remarks.

Hinchcliffe’s comments about Puerto Rico – he also made lewd sexual innuendos about Latina women – were met with big laughs from the crowd. A comment from radio personality Sid Rosenberg that Hillary Clinton is a “sick bastard” was similarly well received, as was Rosenberg’s claim that “the fucking illegals get everything they want”.

David Rem, a Republican politician who the Trump campaign described as a childhood friend of the former president, called Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist”, to loud cheers. Rem later took a crucifix out of his pocket and announced that he was running for New York City mayor.

As soon as Trump announced his intention to stage a rally at Madison Square Garden just days before the election, critics leapt to point out historical parallels with one of the most notorious events in New York history. On 20 February 1939, just seven months before Germany invaded Poland, the pro-Hitler German American Bund held a mass Nazi rally in the exact same arena.

The organizers chose George Washington’s birthday as the date to parade their vision of an Aryan Christian country dedicated to white supremacy and American patriotism. They erected a giant portrait of Washington, which they flanked with swastika flags alongside the stars and stripes.

More than 20,000 American Nazi sympathisers attended, many dressed in storm trooper uniforms and giving the Sieg Heil salute. The “Führer” of the American Bund, Fritz Kuhn, told the crowd that America would be “returned to the people who founded it”, and decried the “Jewish controlled press”.

Hillary Clinton had noted the similarities between the two events in an interview with CNN last week, and at a rally in Nevada earlier on Sunday, Walz was happy to continue the comparison.

“Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden,” Walz said.

“There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden. And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there.”

The Trump campaign reacted furiously to the accusations, describing Clinton’s comments as “disgusting”. One of the few people to reference the 1939 rally on Sunday was Hulk Hogan, who emerged to wrestling music, spent several seconds struggling to rip off his shirt, then claimed: “I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here”.

After a night of fire and fury, it will be up to the American voters to decide.

The high carbon emissions of the world’s richest 1% are worsening hunger, poverty and excess deaths, a report has found.

Owing to luxury yachts, private jets and investments in polluting industries, the consumption of the world’s wealthiest people is also making it increasingly difficult to limit global heating to 1.5C.

If everyone on Earth emitted planet-warming gases at the same rate as the average billionaire, the remaining carbon budget to stay within 1.5C would be gone in less than two days, the Oxfam analysis said, rather than current estimates of four years if carbon emissions remain as they are today.

Preceding a budget in the UK, a presidential election in the US and the Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, the anti-poverty group’s examination of carbon inequality calls on governments to tax the super-rich in order to curtail excessive consumption and generate revenue for the transition to clean energy, and to compensate those worst affected by global heating.

Oxfam’s research found that the world’s fifty richest billionaires produce on average more carbon emissions in under three hours than the average British person does in their entire lifetime. On average, they take 184 private jet flights in a single year, spending 425 hours in the air. This produced as much carbon as the average person in the world would in 300 years. Their luxury yachts emitted as much carbon as the average person would in 860 years.

The Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s two private jets spent nearly 25 days in the air over a 12-month period and released as much carbon as a US Amazon employee would emit in 207 years.

Two jets of Elon Musk, the second richest person in the world and Tesla chief, jointly discharged as much CO₂ in the same period as 834 years’ worth of emissions generated by an average person.

Meanwhile, the three yachts of the Walton family, heirs of the Walmart retail chain, had a combined carbon footprint in one year of 18,000 tonnes – an amount similar to that of 1,714 Walmart shopworkers.

Ahead of the Labour government’s first budget statement on Wednesday, Oxfam is calling on the UK chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to increase taxes on “climate-polluting extreme wealth”, starting with private jets and superyachts, to raise funds which could be used to tackle the climate crisis.

In response, a UK Treasury spokesperson said “We do not comment on speculation around tax changes outside of fiscal events”.

The Oxfam researchers developed a methodology for calculating the emissions from yachts that included data on the size of the vessel, engine specifications, fuel type, hours at sea and even generators for hot tubs and air conditioning for helicopter hangars.

“One of the key findings for us is that superyachts are by far the most polluting toy that a billionaire can own, except perhaps for a rocket ship,” said Alex Maitland, one of the authors of the report.

Far more destructive still are the greenhouse gas emissions from the investments of the ultra-rich, which are 340 times higher than the CO₂ from their yachts and jets.

On average, the portfolios of the 50 billionaires in the study were almost twice as polluting as an investment in the main US stock index. Almost 40% of their shareholdings were in emissions-intensive industries such as oil, mining, shipping and cement. Many of these companies also hire lobbyists and marketing professionals to delay or disrupt action on the climate.

Oxfam says investment is also the area that has the greatest potential for positive change because, unlike most poor and middle-income people, billionaires have a choice about how to use their money. If they were to switch their holdings into low-carbon-intensity funds, their investment emissions would be 13 times lower.

The report also projects the deadly consequences of carbon inequality: in the coming century, 1.5 million excess deaths will be caused by the consumption emissions of the richest 1% – those with incomes of at least $140,000 (£108,000) – between 2015–19.

It says the past three decades of consumption emissions of this wealthy group have caused global economic output to fall by $2.9tn and crop losses equivalent to the calorific needs of 14.5 million people a year.

Chiara Liguori, Oxfam’s senior climate justice policy adviser, said: “The evidence is clear: the extreme emissions of the richest, from their luxury lifestyles and even more from their polluting investments, are fuelling inequality, hunger and threatening lives.

“It’s not just unfair that their reckless pollution is fuelling the very crisis threatening our collective future – it’s lethal.”

The findings are the latest in a series of annual carbon inequality reports by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute.

As the Guardian reported last year, the wealthiest 1% – who tend to live climate-insulated, air-conditioned lives, mostly in the global north – produce as much carbon pollution as the 5 billion people who make up the poorest and most vulnerable two-thirds of the human population, who predominantly live in poorer countries in the global south.

The latest report stresses the need to address the climate and inequality crises alongside carbon taxes on high-emitting industries, higher income taxes on the super-rich and restrictions on the use of private jets and luxury yachts.

Liguori said: “This report shows that fairer taxes on extreme wealth are crucial to accelerate climate action and fight inequality – starting with private jets and super-yachts.

“It’s clear these luxury toys aren’t just symbols of excess; they’re a direct threat to people and the planet.”