World leaders, environmental activists and prominent researchers have begun to arrive in Cali, Colombia, for a biodiversity summit that experts say will be decisive for the fate of the world’s rapidly declining wildlife populations.

The host nation is also hoping that the summit, which formally opens on Sunday evening, will be the most inclusive in history.

“One of Colombia’s objectives is that this is recognised globally as the Cop of the people, where citizens, afro-descendant and campesino communities, Indigenous peoples, scientists, social actors and all sectors are heard and have a broad participation in the discussions,” said Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister. “This means managing to mobilise the entire government and society in order to contribute to the care of biodiversity.”

The Cop16 UN biodiversity summit is expected to welcome 190 countries and 15,000 people with the goal of protecting the world’s flora and fauna. Ecologists warn ecosystems are reaching an inflection point where the extinction of species could begin to accelerate.

Gustavo Petro’s government is pushing for Indigenous people to have more of a role in protecting Colombia’s ecosystems and has said they will be at the centre of Cop16.

The environment ministry announced earlier this week that it will create Indigenous-led environmental authorities with public powers that settle Colombia’s “historical debt” with native communities.

Indigenous groups have praised the move to empower them to defend their ecosystems.

Some, however, have less confidence in Cop16’s promises of inclusion, including the creation of an area known as the green zone, which civil society groups, the private sector and the general public are being encouraged to attend. The green zone will host 1,000 events, including panels, workshops and musical performances, from 21 October to 1 November.

Harol Ipuchima, representative of Colombia’s Indigenous groups at Cop16 and the leader of the Maguta people in the Amazon, said the government’s narrative of inclusivity distracted from the fact that Indigenous peoples still have no significant involvement in the world’s decision-making process on the environment.

“It sounds nice but it is all superficial, really,” he said. “Out of everyone in the entire world, we are the ones who are the most knowledgable about conservation and how to live in harmony with our ecosystems, yet we remain observers. We are still in the same position as we have been for decades where we have to shout at politicians to protect the environment but have no vote.”

Making the Cop16 open to everyone could be a powerful way to engage those who are concerned about the global decline in biodiversity but do not know how to do something about it, said Ximena Barrera, director of government affairs and international relations at WWF Colombia.

“Our surveys show that 46% of Colombians are worried about the state of natural resources and seven out of 10 would like to take action to reduce biodiversity loss. This is an incredible opportunity to educate and mobilise them to protect the environment,” she said.

Cop16 is the first time countries will meet to discuss global biodiversity since the Kunming-Montreal agreement in 2022 when world leaders made a series of unprecedented pledges to protect the natural world.

Ecologists say the number of the world’s animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms are collapsing under the pressures of deforestation, pollution and the climate crisis.

Only 10% of the 196 parties who signed the 2022 agreement have since released the nature action plans they agreed to deliver in China, funding is well short of the $20bn a year needed to protect nature and only 2.8% of the world’s ocean is protected “effectively”.

With WWF warning that collapsing wildlife populations are near the “point of no return”, environmental activists and researchers say Cop16 is a critical opportunity for politicians to get the world back on track.

“The world agreed on an ambitious plan to safeguard our planet’s biodiversity. In Cali, countries now need to translate this ambition into concrete action,” said Loreley Picourt, executive director of the Ocean and Climate Platform, an NGO advocating the protection of the world’s seas.

Representatives will try to thrash out global budgets for protection of nature and create a mechanism to ensure countries hold to their word on protecting the world’s forests, rivers and oceans.

“Colombia is a perfect country to host a nature Cop. Not only is it home to incredible biodiversity and natural habitats, it is playing a leading role in demonstrating how conservation works for nature and people,” said Gavin Edwards, executive director of nature positive initiative secretariat, a coalition of conservation organisations. “However, in the midst of global elections, other key conferences and pressing issues of national and international security, this UN biodiversity conference is vying for attention on the global stage.”

The dramatic sea cliffs, crags and stacks of Rathlin Island, county Antrim, rise more than 200 metres above the Atlantic Ocean and host one of the UK’s largest seabird colonies, including hundreds of endangered puffins, attracting up to 20,000 birders and tourists a year.

On a spectacularly sunny day in September, the cliff faces are devoid of birds, with the puffins already having made their annual migration to spend the winter months at sea. Instead, Rathlin’s cliffs are dotted with roped-up figures in harnesses and bulging rucksacks, directed from above by a Scottish mountaineer, via a walkie-talkie.

They are part of a crack team of 40 scientists, researchers, conservationists and volunteers who this week will put the first poisoned food into the bait stations designed to kill the island’s rats. It is the final phase in a £4.5m project to eradicate the key predators believed to be affecting the island’s puffin colony. Ferrets were eradicated in the first phase and it has been a year since the last confirmed sighting. Puffin numbers declined here by 74% between 1991 and 2021, according to an EU study.

“It is a monster task,” says Stuart Johnston, director of operations at Climbwired International Ltd, which trains scientists and researchers to access remote areas by rope. “Some of the highest cliffs in the UK are found on this island. We can’t abseil down from these clifftops, as they are basalt and laterite, and very crumbly. We have to go underneath, that’s where the mountaineering comes in.”

Johnston and his crew have been preparing the ground for this event over the past year as part of the Life Raft project, an EU and National Lottery Heritage Fund partnership that includes the RSPB Northern Ireland and the local community association. He points out a horizontal stainless steel safety wire, running across the middle of the 150-metre Knockans cliffs, on to which the climbers are clipped to stop them falling into the Atlantic when placing the traps. The traps, or “bait stations” designed for rats, are plastic tubes, fitted with wires to keep out crows, rabbits and other non-target species.

For the next seven months, come rain, snow or shine, the climbers will scale each cliff, crag and stack, loading the traps with poison, while others will cover the fields, forests, gardens and other terrain. “The ledges are full of bird shite and are just minging,” says Johnston. “The stacks are riddled with rats.”

Rats probably arrived on boats centuries ago, and ferrets were released deliberately to control rabbits. They both feed on seabirds and their young, and until last year, when almost 100 ferrets were caught and killed in the project’s first phase, they were everywhere.

Eradicating rats and other invasive animals from islands is one of the most effective tools for protecting wildlife, and has an 88% success rate, leading to dramatic increases in biodiversity, according to a study in 2022 that analysed data stored on the Database of Island Invasive Species Eradications.

By early October, 6,700 traps, one every 50 metres squared – the size of a rat’s territory – had been laid in a grid pattern across the 3,400-acre (1,400-hectare) island. Now they will be loaded with poison.

Liam McFaul, warden for the RSPB, who was born and raised on Rathlin, which has a population of 150, shows us around the cliffs and stacks at the West Light Seabird Centre and its “upside down” lighthouse.

Below the viewing platform, two seals lie on the cobbled beach under the guano-spattered crags. “In the summer, you can’t see the rock for guillemots, they all crowd into one area,” he says. About 200,000 auks (a family of birds that includes guillemots, puffins, and razorbills) nest here, he says, and 12,000 breeding pairs of kittiwakes.

“Puffins come from late April to July. They find the same partner every year. They are notoriously hard to count because they nest in burrows in the ground, which also makes them vulnerable.”

Years ago, they used to nest on the grassy “apron” at the top of the cliffs, but now stick to lower, more inaccessible areas, a behaviour change McFaul believes is due to rats and ferrets reaching the aprons. Once, he spotted a ferret at a puffin burrow near the beach and quickly organised a boat and a trap to catch it. By the time it arrived, 27 dead puffins lay on the stones.

On Rathlin, only one in three puffin chicks survives, compared with two out of three on islands free of rats, according to the RSPB. Ground-nesting birds, such as puffins and Manx shearwaters, are most at risk.

“We have had a serious decline in Manx shearwaters over the last 15 years,” says McFaul. “They might be on the brink of extinction from the island. We have just one or two left on the remote cliffs in the north.”

Liam’s brother Jim McFaul, 75, a farmer on Rathlin, says the skies above the island have gradually quietened since the 1990s and early 2000s, due to multiple threats including changes in farming practices. “I used to love hearing the snipe at dusk and nightfall,” he says. “It’s like a drumming sound. You hardly hear it now. The corncrake was another one – you couldn’t get to sleep for them, they would call and answer each other all night.”

He hopes the eradication programme will help birds, as well as farmers. “Because of the ferrets, nobody could keep poultry. They’re like foxes. I trapped dozens of them, some as big as pole cats.”

The project will continue until 2026, when the hope is that all ferrets and rats will be gone. After that, biosecurity measures will continue, including training ferry operators in how to minimise risks of rodents on board, such as removing food, inspecting animal feed and careful monitoring of vessels.

Woody, a two-year-old labrador retriever trained to detect ferret faeces, was brought to the island this year to help identify any rogue animals and monitor the project’s success.

Michael Cecil, chair of the Rathlin Development and Community Association and ferry skipper, says that while a few concerns have been expressed over the ethics of killing ferrets, as well as access to property needed for the project, the community were persuaded of the benefits. Much of its economy is based around thousands of summer visitors, attracted by the seabirds.

“Ferrets caused all sorts of problems and people used whatever means necessary – they’d be driven over, drowned, clubbed or shot with rifles, not the most humane ways to kill them,” he says. “That’s come to an end now.

“We can’t do anything about the wider worldwide problem seabirds are facing, but we are hoping that Rathlin will do its bit.”

On the first day of early voting in Detroit, Michigan, rapper Lizzo campaigned for Kamala Harris, saying she rejected the argument that America was not ready for a female president, adding, “It’s about damn time”. In Atlanta, Georgia, Harris was joined by singer Usher, with the Democratic candidate describing Donald Trump’s speeches as “nonsense”.

With Harris and Trump essentially tied in the most competitive states, both campaigns are focused on early by mail or in person voting, with just 17 days until the 5 November election.

In the battleground of Pennsylvania, Trump escalated his personal attacks on Harris, calling her a “shit vice-president”. The Republican candidate had billed the event as the start of his final argument to voters but quickly went off script with a long story about Arnold Palmer that included remarks about the genitalia of the late golfing legend.

Here’s what else happened on Saturday:

Kamala Harris election news and updates

• In both Detroit and Atlanta, Harris urged her supporters to put in an all-out effort to win. “On election day, we don’t want to have any regrets about what we could have done these next 17 days,” she said. Harris hammered Trump for a second straight day for cancelling events and for avoiding another presidential debate because of what she called “exhaustion”. Her campaign called Trump’s Pennsylvania rally “junk”, saying he had focused on the issue “most important to voters in this election: a deceased golfer’s ‘anatomy’.”

• In Atlanta, Harris said Trump was “cruel” for how he talked about the grieving family of a Georgia mother who died after complications from an abortion pill. Harris blamed Amber Thurman’s death on Georgia’s abortion restrictions and referenced a clip of Trump at a Fox News town hall. When asked about the Thurman family joining a separate media call, Trump reportedly said “we’ll get better ratings, I promise.” “Donald Trump still refuses to take accountability, to take any accountability, for the pain and the suffering he has caused,” Harris said.

• Harris repeated her call for a ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza and said it was important to seize the opportunity provided by the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Harris dodged a question on whether Arab American and Muslim anger over US support for Israel could cost her the election in the battleground state of Michigan, but said she would continue speaking out about the tragic loss of innocent lives. “I speak publicly all the time about the fact that there are so many tragic stories coming from Gaza,” Harris said.

Donald Trump election news and updates

• In Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Trump said Harris is further to the left than Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, adding “You have to tell Kamala Harris that you’ve had enough, that you just can’t take it any more.” Trump underscored the importance of the eastern state’s electoral college delegates to the overall election: “If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole damn thing.”

• Donald Trump’s campaign may be failing to reach thousands of voters they hope to turn out in Arizona and Nevada, with roughly a quarter of door-knocks done by America Pac flagged by its canvassing app as potentially fraudulent, according to leaked data and people familiar with the matter. The Trump campaign earlier this year outsourced the bulk of its ground game to America Pac, the political action committee founded by Elon Musk, betting that spending millions to turn out Trump supporters, especially those who don’t typically vote, would boost returns.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail

• Early voting also began on Saturday in Nevada, where Barack Obama campaigned for Harris in Las Vegas. The former president poked fun at Trump, telling the audience “we don’t need to see what an older, loonier Donald trump with no guard rails looks like.”

• Billionaire Mark Cuban – who has emerged as an energetic campaign surrogate for Harris – has told the Guardian that Trump’s planned tariffs could put “small retailers and manufacturers out of business.” “Small businesses don’t have the pricing elasticity of larger companies. They can’t pass on the incremental and administrative costs associated with tariffs.”

• Elsewhere another billionaire – Elon Musk – campaigned for Trump in Pennsylvania. Speaking in Harrisburg, he announced he would start randomly distribute cash awards – $1m each day until the election – to a registered voter in the state who signed his organisation’s petition. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has taken an increasingly visible role in Trump’s campaign and has donated almost $75m to his political organisation America PAC.

Read more about the 2024 US election:

Three people were killed and eight others were wounded in central Mississippi early Saturday when at least two people fired guns at a group of several hundred people who were celebrating a high school football team’s homecoming win at an outdoor trail several hours after the game had ended, authorities said.

The mass shooting near the community of Lexington was preceded by a fight among some of the men at the celebration, but deputies had not yet learned what sparked the fight, said Holmes county sheriff Willie March.

Anywhere from 200 to 300 people were on the trail celebrating, and the gunfire sent them fleeing, the sheriff said in a phone interview with the Associated Press.

“It was chaos, to tell you the truth,” March said. “The shooting just started and people started running.”

The shooting about 5 miles (8km) outside Lexington followed a football game several hours earlier at the Holmes county consolidated school’s homecoming celebration. After the victory, scores of young people headed to the trail to celebrate.

Lexington is located more than 60 miles (96km) north of Jackson.

Two of the victims who died were 19, and the third was 25. The injured victims were airlifted to local hospitals.

Deputies were collecting ammunition at the scene in an effort to determine how many weapons were fired, said March, whose county has a population of about 16,000.

There had been about 420 mass shootings across the US heading into this weekend, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

The nonpartisan archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are wounded or killed.

Perennially high rates of mass shootings in the US have prompted some in the country to call for more substantial federal gun control, though Congress has largely been unable or unwilling to implement such measures.

Guardian staff contributed reporting

Chris Hoy, the six-time Olympic gold medallist, has disclosed he has “two to four years” left to live after a terminal cancer diagnosis.

The 48-year-old told the Sunday Times that a scan in September showed a tumour in his shoulder.

And a second scan two days later found the main cancer to be in his prostate which has since metastasised to Hoy’s shoulder, pelvis, hip, ribs and spine and was stage 4.

Hoy had announced in February that he was being treated for the disease.

The 11-time track cycling world champion told the newspaper: “As unnatural as it feels, this is nature.

“You know, we were all born and we all die, and this is just part of the process.”

He added: “You remind yourself, aren’t I lucky that there is medicine I can take that will fend this off for as long as possible.”

The father of two said his chemotherapy had “no guarantee” of shrinking his tumours but on “the sliding scale” of predictions it achieved the most promising results.

Of the men who first trialled in 2011 the medication he is taking, a quarter are still alive.

Hoy, whose grandfather and father both had prostate cancer, added: “One in four may sound like a terrible stat. But to me that’s like, one in four!”

“I do have faith that there are amazing things happening all the time,” he added.

In his new book All That Matters, the former track cyclist discloses that his wife, Sarra, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis last year.

The couple, who married at St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh in 2010, have a son and daughter.

Hoy wrote of Sarra’s diagnosis: “It’s the closest I’ve come to … why me? Just, what? What’s going on here? It didn’t seem real.

“It was such a huge blow, when you’re already reeling. You think nothing could possibly get worse.

“You literally feel like you’re at rock bottom, and you find out, oh no, you’ve got further to fall. It was brutal.”

On his wife’s optimism, he said: “She says all the time, ‘How lucky are we? We both have incurable illnesses for which there is some treatment. Not every disease has that. It could be a lot worse.’”

As the sky darkened on the National Mall in DC last Saturday, evangelical pastor Ché Ahn addressed the thousands of worshippers gathered there and issued a decree.

Trump, Ahn said, was a figure akin to the biblical King Jehu, and “Kamala Harris is a type of Jezebel, and as you know, Jehu cast out Jezebel”.

“I decree in Jesus’s mighty name, and I decree it by faith,” said Ahn, “that Trump will win on November the fifth, he will be our 47th president, and Kamala Harris will be cast out and she will lose in Jesus’s name.”

The Bible story Ahn invoked is extremely violent. In it, Jehu throws the Phoenician princess Jezebel from a window. She is then trampled by horses, her corpse left to be eaten by dogs. Ahn did not get into the particulars of this story at the DC event, but he likely didn’t need to: in his world of charismatic and evangelical preachers, pastors, self-styled prophets and apostles, and their many followers, the story of Jezebel is a key narrative.

The rally on the mall on 12 October, advertised under the name A Million Women, was billed as a gathering for women to wage spiritual warfare against changing gender norms in the US. Drawing tens of thousands, the event showcased the ability of leaders from the New Apostolic Reformation, a growing movement on the Christian right, to mobilize followers – and ply them with militant political rhetoric.

Experts fear their spiritual message has the potential to spur real-world political violence, especially if Trump were to lose the November election.

As Ahn spoke, the crowd that had gathered on the mall to “turn back hearts to God” through prayer and praise, swayed and listened. Some had heard about the rally through Bible studies and church groups and seemed unaware that many of the featured speakers were deeply involved in rightwing politics. Others had participated in the Capitol protest that devolved into a deadly riot on 6 January 2021. All received the messages of a dire, good-versus-evil vision of American politics that the speakers brought that day – and peddle regularly on podcasts, YouTube channels and Christian television and in front of their congregations.

Matthew Taylor, a scholar whose work has focused on the New Apostolic Reformation, said veiled calls for violence cloaked in religious rhetoric are common in the NAR, a loosely-affiliated network on the Christian right that embraces modern-day apostles and prophets.

“Having it be a women’s march, I think they kind of dialed back some of the more violent rhetoric,” said Taylor, who is a senior researcher at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies. But Ahn’s decree, he said, “shocked” him.

“I could very easily picture, if you had the right mix of charismatic identity theology that’s aligned with the NAR, and unhinged, violent tendencies in an individual – yeah, that could very easily be an instigating factor in an assassination attempt,” said Taylor.

Leaders in the movement who spoke with the Guardian emphasized that they meant only to draw their followers into battle of a spiritual nature, and correctly pointed out that the rally on the mall was peaceful.

“We were fasting, all of us on that stage were fasting,” said Folake Kellogg, a pastor who helped organize the event and spoke there. “We had not eaten, we were praying. We knew that the battle is not against any human being. We love our brothers and sisters.”

Ahn disputed the idea that his decree could spur his followers to violence, writing in an email that such language was “all spiritual” and that “[a]nyone who advocates physical violence in Jesus name is not a true follower of Jesus who taught us to turn our cheeks”.

Leaders in the NAR “believe themselves to be what they call kings and priests and [members of] a royal nation”, said Jonathon Sawyer, an academic whose research focuses on religious and political extremism. Such figures “have the sense that when they offer some type of decree such as this, that there is a tangible impact that will happen in the ‘natural sphere’ and in politics”, he added.

Because pastors like Ahn lean so heavily on biblical allegory, they are afforded a degree of plausible deniability if followers interpret their speech as an incitement to violence. And in the world that Ahn occupies, this kind of language has been thick in the air for years. Ahn’s decree itself was likely familiar to some: on 5 January 2021, Ahn issued a nearly identical one at a Stop the Steal rally in Washington DC.

The notion that Harris herself embodies the spirit of Jezebel has also become commonplace among preachers in the NAR.

“Republicans, like Ahab in the Bible, accommodate Jezebel,” said the pro-Trump, self-styled prophet Lance Wallnau on a 13 September episode of his podcast titled Trump vs The Jezebel Spirit: How Trump Can Still Win, which aired after the presidential debate. In the episode, Wallnau alleged collusion between the ABC anchors who aggressively fact-checked Trump’s many falsehoods, and the Harris campaign, saying: “What was accomplished was she looked presidential, and that’s – we’ll go to this later – that’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft.”

Wallnau, who enjoys a following of 1 million on Facebook and 78,000 on YouTube, where he offers a near-constant stream of discourses on topics ranging from electoral politics and theology to wellness supplements, frequently casts the 2024 election in apocalyptic terms.

“We’re in a place, my brethren, where in 30 days – 30 days or so – the die is cast. I don’t think we come back from this one if Trump cannot secure a victory,” said Wallnau on his 7 October show. “I think that once he’s removed, the anti-Christ forces are going to start to move at a faster rate.”

Jenny Donnelly, the organizer of the 12 October rally, hopes the women she summoned to the National Mall – “Esthers”, she calls them – will be ready to fight such anti-Christ forces. Donnelly frequently cites the Bible story of Esther in her appeals to women and moms. In it, Esther, the Jewish wife of a Persian king, risks her life to save her people from persecution. Donnelly and others in the NAR invoke the story, which forms the basis of the Jewish holiday Purim, to urge their followers to take on spiritual battles of their own.

Many women in attendance at the rally wore T-shirts emblazoned with the words “If I Perish, I Perish”, a statement in the story.

“We had a dream in 2022 that we will collectively come together today and declare a war cry,” said Kellogg, a pastor affiliated with Donnelly, early in the day on 12 October. “On the cross, the last words of Jesus, he said: ‘It is finished.”

Shortly after, a dramatic video played on the large screens broadcasting the event on the mall.

“On this day of atonement, we gather to stand and cry out for America,” said the narrator of the video. “If we perish, we perish. United, we will make way for the Lord. The time is now.” A short clip of a hand casting a ballot flashed on the screen.

“As America goes, so go the nations of the Earth,” said the narrator. “This is the last stand.”

Benjamin Netanyahu’s house in the seaside town of Caesarea was hit by a drone on Saturday, causing superficial damage and no casualties, as Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon rage unabated after the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

The Israeli government said that one of the prime minister’s three homes was targeted by three drones, two of which were intercepted, and that neither Netanyahu nor his wife, Sara, were home at the time.

In a statement on Saturday night, Benjamin Netanyahu said: “The attempt by Iran’s proxy Hezbollah to assassinate me and my wife today was a grave mistake.”

Netanyahu vowed that Iran and its proxies would “pay a heavy price” and said Israel would continue to “eliminate the terrorists and those who dispatch them”.

Reports had emerged of his house in northern Israel being targeted on Saturday. The prime minister and his wife, Sara, were not home at the time. Israeli media later published a video of the prime minister walking in a park.

Israel’s air raid system was not triggered by the lightweight drones, which are difficult to detect. The Lebanese militia Hezbollah did not claim responsibility for the attack, but said it fired several barrages of rockets at northern and central Israel, which killed a 50-year-old man in Acre.

The rocket attacks came after Hezbollah said on Friday it had entered a new phase of the full-scale war that began with Israel’s ground invasion of southern Lebanon earlier this month. The Shia group, allied to Iran, said it planned to send more guided missiles and explosive drones into Israel.

On Saturday an Israeli drone strike killed two people driving on the highway in Jounieh, a Christian-majority city north of Beirut, marking the first time the city has been hit. The attack was the latest in a series of assassinations in northern Lebanon over the last month in areas that have otherwise not seen any Israeli strikes.

Eyewitness accounts said the drone fired at a car three times before a man and a woman fled the car on foot, where they were struck down in a field next to the highway. Glass storefronts near the airstrikes were shattered, shrapnel littered the highway and there was a crater where the couple was killed by the drone.

“I didn’t expect this here. Thank god my wife and daughter are OK, but my store is all broken,” Suhail Abd al-Karim, a 61-year-old who manages the building complex next to where the airstrike was carried out, told the Observer. He added that he expected that the target of the strike could have been affiliated with Hezbollah, though there has been no official information about the identity of those killed.

Israel also carried out at least three rare daytime airstrikes in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut, on Saturdayyesterday afternoon, with the blasts heard around the capital. Prior to the bombings, Israel issued warnings for people to evacuate at least 500 metres away from several buildings in Burj al-Barajneh and Chouifet, both neighbourhoods in Dahiyeh. The Israeli military said these were Hezbollah installations.

Israel also bombarded the Bekaa valley, killing five and wounding 13. Among the dead was Haidar Shahla, the mayor of the town of Suhmoor. Shahla was the second mayor killed by Israel in Lebanon this week. The mayor of Nabatieh, one of the largest cities in south Lebanon, was killed in a strike on the city’s municipality building on Wednesday.

The Israeli army also said on Saturday it killed Hezbollah’s deputy commander, Nasser Rashid, in the southern town of Bint Jbeil.

In Gaza, hospital officials said more than 50 people had been killed in Israeli airstrikes in the past 24 hours amid Israel’s ferocious new assault on northern Gaza that has led to accusations Israel intends to forcibly expel the remaining 400,000 people living there. The Israeli army says the operation is aimed against regrouped cells of Hamas fighters.

At least two hospitals were targeted by Israeli forces on Saturday. At dawn, the Indonesia hospital in the northern town of Beit Lahiya was surrounded by Israeli tanks which shelled the upper floors of the complex and cut off the electricity, endangering staff and 40 patients and causing widespread panic, the local health ministry said. Two patients died due to oxygen shortages, medics said.

Al-Awda hospital in the Jabalia neighbourhood of Gaza City, already struggling to deal with the aftermath of a nearby strike overnight on Friday that killed 33 people, was also targeted by tank shelling that injured several staff members, the director said in a statement.

The killing of Sinwar in the southern city of Rafah after a year-long hunt for the architect of the 7 October Hamas attack that triggered the war in Gaza briefly raised hopes that an elusive ceasefire and hostage release deal could be reached.

Both Israel and Hamas, however, have so far stuck to their incompatible positions. Hamas has reiterated that Israeli hostages held by the Palestinian group will be released after a ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, while Israel says it will not countenance leaving at least two areas of the territory.

A former Montana park ranger has now publicly accused Tim Sheehy – a Republican running for a US Senate seat in the state – of lying about getting shot while at war in Afghanistan.

In an interview with the Washington Post published on Friday, 67-year-old Kim Peach went on the record about how Sheehy – a former US navy seal – actually shot himself on a family trip in 2015 at Glacier national park. Peach’s account explicitly contradicts Sheehy’s claim that he was shot in the arm during military combat, a story that the Republican candidate has shared throughout his US Senate campaign.

Peach said that Sheehy’s allegedly self-inflicted wound left him with a bullet lodged in his right arm at Glacier national park in Montana’s Rocky Mountains. He told the Post that he first met Sheehy at a hospital in the area of the park during the aftermath of the 2015 episode.

“I remember Sheehy obviously being embarrassed by the situation but at the same time thankful that it wasn’t worse,” Peach said to the Post. There, Sheehy also confirmed to Peach that he had mistakenly shot himself after his firearm discharged in his car.

Peach said he then inspected Sheehy’s gun and observed a bullet casing, confirming the firearm had discharged. That same day, Peach issued Sheehy a $525 fine for discharging a firearm in the national park, according to government records.

Peach also wrote about the case in a 2015 report about the gunshot, writing he was “grateful no other persons or property were damaged”, the Post reported.

The Post first spoke with Peach – who initially came forward anonymously – in April to dispute Sheehy’s claim. But several Republican public figures quickly disclosed Peach’s identity, leading to harassment.

Sheehy and others accused Peach of unduly attempting to discredit the candidate’s military service.

In response to the Post’s reporting in April, Sheehy claimed that he actually lied to Peach in 2015 about accidentally shooting himself. Sheehy said that he fell and injured his arm during the hike in Glacier – but he lied about the self-inflicted shooting to conceal the fact that he may have obtained the bullet wound during friendly fire that he endured while fighting in Afghanistan.

A spokesperson for Sheehy has said that Peach is a Democrat, and his most recent interview in an attempt to spread a “defamatory story”.

Nonetheless, Peach told the Post he was motivated to speak with his name on the public record because Sheehy has remained untruthful about having shot himself.

“He said that questioning his military service was ‘disgusting’,” Peach said to the Post. “What is disgusting is saying a wound from a negligent, accidental firearm discharge is a wound received in combat.”

Peach added: “I have no personal vendetta against Tim Sheehy. But when a person makes a statement that’s not true somebody has to call them on it.”

Sheehy is challenging Democratic incumbent Jon Tester in a race that could determine which political party controls the Senate after the 5 November presidential election.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suspicious doors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Satan is a feminist now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’

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

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

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

More American women than men have tattoos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The week in pawtriarchy

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