The government has appointed the UK’s first envoy for nature, a former environment campaigner described as “the environmentalist’s environmentalist”, who will be charged with forging global agreement on halting the precipitous decline of species.

Ruth Davis, the new special representative for nature, is in Colombia for the start of two weeks of vital talks that will decide the global response to the biodiversity crisis. The UK has played a leading role in such efforts in the past and Davis helped draw up a global pledge on deforestation that was one of the main outcomes of the UN Cop26 climate summit hosted in Glasgow in 2021.

She will report to the foreign secretary, David Lammy, and the environment secretary, Steve Reed. The appointment of a nature envoy, first revealed by the Guardian, is an initial step in the government’s plan to put the UK at the centre of global efforts to stave off environmental collapse.

Davis previously held senior roles at charities including Greenpeace, the RSPB and Plantlife, and the thinktank and consultancy E3G. She has worked on environmental policy for 25 years, and is renowned for her commitment – at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 she was said to have slept overnight in a cupboard in the conference centre as the talks dragged on.

Reed is leading the UK’s negotiations on biodiversity in Cali, Colombia. He said: “We cannot address the nature and climate crises without coordinated global action. That is why we have appointed Ruth as our special representative for nature – a landmark first – who will champion our ambition to put climate and nature at the heart of our foreign policy.”

He added: “We depend on nature in every aspect of our lives – it underpins our economy, health and society – and yet progress to restore our wildlife and habitats has been too slow. Ruth’s extensive knowledge and expertise will be vital to help us deliver on our commitments to put nature on the road to recovery.”

Lammy has also promised to put the climate and nature protection at the heart of the UK’s foreign policy, as he views the environmental crises as threats to national security. Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has also set out his intention for the UK to lead in these areas, citing the climate in his speech to the UN general assembly last month.

“We are returning the UK to responsible global leadership,” he told fellow heads of government. “Because it is right, but also because it is plainly in our self-interest.”

Davis said: “The government has recognised that the nature crisis is of equal gravity to the climate crisis, and that we cannot tackle one without addressing the other. Ecosystems and the species they support are essential to maintain food security, reduce health risks and manage the impacts of rising global temperatures.”

Her appointment follows that of Rachel Kyte, formerly the top climate official at the World Bank, to the role of climate envoy, a post that was scrapped under the Conservative government. That appointment was criticised as Kyte also holds a position on an advisory board to a charitable foundation funded by a financial investment firm that made a £4m donation to Labour before the election.

Kyte was not involved in that decision, and many prominent environmental experts leaped to her defence. Nicholas Stern, the economist, told the Guardian: “Rachel was on the board of the philanthropic foundation and not the company, and she was very well equipped to advise that foundation. No conflict of interest.”

The Guardian understands that Davis will not hold any other external roles.

Davis beat a strong field of candidates for the new role of nature envoy. Names spoken of in relation to the post included Tanya Steele, the chief executive of WWF UK; Matthew Gould, the chief executive of the Zoological Society of London; and Tony Juniper, the chair of Natural England.

Leading voices in green campaigning hailed Davis’s appointment. Edward Davey, the head of the UK office of the World Resources Institute thinktank, said: “Ruth Davis is the environmentalist’s environmentalist, and the best of us: profoundly knowledgeable, deeply committed, a person of fearless integrity, and entirely selfless. She will be a wonderful nature envoy and is a brilliant appointment.”

Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative former minister, said: “I worked with Ruth as a minister and was always impressed by her knowledge and commitment. She will be a real asset to the new government.”

Oscar Soria, the director of the Common Initiative, a thinktank specialising in global environmental policy, said: “Ruth’s name means: a compassionate friend. The UK is now appointing a big heart and a clear mind, and that’s good news for the world.

“Her deep understanding of global contexts, paired with a diplomatic touch that bridges cultures and countries, sets her apart. In a world needing both global insight and local action, Ruth thrives in complexity. Her intelligence is matched by an often overlooked quality: compassion. At a time when the world needs thoughtful, caring leadership, Ruth is the person to guide the UK with empathy and respect, ensuring no path is left unexplored in the fight for biodiversity.”

The UN biodiversity conference Cop16 in Cali begins on Monday. At the summit, governments will examine progress towards meeting this decade’s UN targets to halt biodiversity loss, which include protecting 30% of land and sea for nature and repurposing $500bn (£380bn) of environmentally harmful subsidies.

Giant orange pumpkins with ghoulish grins have become a Halloween doorstep tradition but this year trick-or-treaters may be greeted with even spookier green-tinged jack-o-lanterns after a nightmare season for growers.

In Asda, pumpkin displays have signs telling shoppers “don’t worry if I’m slightly green, I will ripen at home and turn orange”.

With shoppers used to increasingly super-sized pumpkins, reviewers on supermarket websites also complain that this year’s batch don’t measure up.

“We had a cold, wet spring so the initial plantings on some farms failed,” said Julian Marks, the chief executive of the producer Barfoots. When the weather improved the fields were replanted but some did not have enough time to turn orange, he said. “There is quite a lot of green out there.”

“Right from the start of the season the weather has been not conducive to a bountiful harvest,” Marks continued. “In terms of ripeness, they’re perfectly good pumpkins and they’ll carve and look wonderful in the dark with a candle stuck in the middle, but they might not be 100% orange.”

It has been a year to forget for all farmers, not just those in the pumpkin business. England is said to have had its second-worst harvest on record after heavy rain last winter hit production of key crops, including wheat and oats.

Marks said Barfoots, which supplies 1m pumpkins to retailers, “scraped by” against the odds. “We’ve had a good crop but no surplus. We’ve had one or two shortages of speciality pumpkins but in general we’ve managed to meet demand.”

While it is usually zombies, witches and ghouls causing sleepless nights at Halloween, you could add a new slimy foe this year, with National Trust gardeners blaming the “slug army”, which thrived in the inclement weather, for disappointing pumpkin hauls.

The Royal Horticultural Society gardeners had a similar story. “Our pumpkin and squash harvest are below expectation by probably about 25% compared with other years,” said Peter Adams, a horticulturist at RHS Garden Rosemoor in Devon.

“The overall size of many of the pumpkins and squashes is considerably down on other years,” he said, citing “poorer than average light levels, fewer sunny days, and colder temperatures early on in the season”.

Jack Ward, the chief executive of the British Growers Association, said the rain in the early part of the growing season had caused problems for a lot of growers. “Pumpkins don’t like those conditions … slugs are a big problem too,” he said. “It’s by no means universal. Some people have had a good run but I think the general feedback is that it has been a difficult season.”

The grim dispatches from pumpkin patches have fuelled fears of shortages as the countdown to Halloween begins in earnest, but Tesco, the UK’s biggest retailer, has plenty, and price competition between the supermarkets is as fierce as ever.

“There’s a disconnect between what consumers are asked to pay and availability,” said Ward. “Retailers like to have a sort of consistent pricing and quite often, the price that consumers pay isn’t a true reflection of what it cost to put it on the shelf.”

If the shelves are bare when you get there, you could “cherish” a turnip instead, as Thérèse Coffey, the then environment secretary, suggested during last year’s salad shortage. You may even remember a time when turnips were the Halloween decoration of choice.

In previous years, English Heritage has revived this old practice, decorating its sites with the root vegetable, so should aficionados of the autumn celebration be carving turnips?

Dr Michael Carter, an English Heritage historian, said holiday traditions were always being reinvented. If I wanted to avoid getting a callus on my hand, it “would most definitely be a pumpkin”, he said, but opting for a turnip would “speak to older, indigenous traditions”.

“Carving a turnip would definitely turn it into a way of connecting with my childhood,” he said. “So much of what we think about calendar festivals as adults is nostalgia and connecting with our own past, as much as deeper trends in history.”

After the FBI arrested an Afghan man in Oklahoma planning an election day shooting on behalf of the Islamic State, the terrorist organization re-entered what has become one of the most chaotic news cycles leading up to a November vote.

Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, of Oklahoma City admitted to investigators he and a co-conspirator expected to die as IS martyrs as they opened fire on crowds on election day, according to charging documents.

Warnings about IS-sponsored or -inspired attacks in the west have intensified in recent weeks.

In a statement on the Tawhedi case, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, remarked there was a continuing need to “combat the ongoing threat that [IS] and its supporters pose to America’s national security”. Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence service, described how his agency had “one hell of a job” managing the threat of the resurgent terrorist organization.

Despite the talk from top officials, public perception still remains that IS was defeated or has somehow disappeared.

But, experts say, before and after that incident, internal IS talk was anything but quiet: on chat boards and encrypted apps, both supporters and operatives alike have increasingly been discussing attacks on the west and the US homeland.

The online conversations are being led by IS-Khorasan (IS-K), the branch based in Afghanistan that was behind the Moscow attack that killed 145 people in March. Khorasan is a reference to an ancient region that includes parts of what is modern-day Iran, Afghanistan and other bordering countries.

IS-K has quickly become the most active international force of the terror group, having already carried out the deadly plot in Russia and another in Iran months before it. Days after Tawhedi’s arrest, US officials later confirmed it was an IS-K operative allegedly directing the plot.

In a propaganda poster it released in September, IS-K put American targets on notice as top of its hitlist.

“[IS-K] has recently reiterated its intent to target the US with a poster depicting one of its militants holding a grenade in front of the US Capitol building captioned ‘you are next,’” said Lucas Webber, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism, a watchdog organization working with government agencies around the world.

The Guardian obtained the same poster, which was released online through a known IS-K platform.

“This is additionally concerning given the branch’s mass casualty attacks on Russia and Iran, leaving the United States as the remaining adversary on this shortlist for a successful external operation,” said Webber.

Webber said the arrest of Tawhedi gave a glimpse into the “uptick” in attempted stateside plots emanating from IS. For example, earlier this week a Maryland man was charged for supporting IS with the criminal complaint describing his attempt at buying a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

Webber continued: “This follows a Tajik [IS suspect] arrested in Costa Rica; a central Asian network rolled up in New York City, Los Angeles and Philadelphia; as well as a Canada-based Pakistani national who was allegedly plotting an attack against a New York Jewish center.”

While IS-K has seized on the tumult in Afghanistan since the Taliban took over in the summer of 2021 and established a base of operations in that country, its broader movement has also been heavily recruiting since the 7 October attacks and the Israeli military operations that followed.

It’s part of an IS-K recruitment plan targeting young men in the west who can’t travel overseas easily. A relative of Tawhedi, who was an Afghan national who came to the US after the fall of Kabul, was charged in France for a similar plot.

In one spring issue of Voice of Khurasan, its English-language propaganda magazine, IS-K encourages “contacting the organization directly” through encrypted communications and being covertly recruited from western locales.

Riccardo Valle, the director of research at the Islamabad-based publication the Khorasan Diary, closely follows the movements of IS on everything from Facebook and Instagram to Telegram and the lesser-known encrypted chat app Rocket.Chat.

“Discussions online are very diverse,” he said. “However, there has been an increase in talks about either carrying out attacks or making hijra [migration] to tamkeen – lands where IS is present in force and controls.”

For years, a long-observed debate within IS channels is whether or not it’s more effective for followers to carry out attacks at home or travel to active war zones where IS operates and join in its ranks there.

On a Rocket.Chat forum, the choice communications platform among IS supporters and operatives, Valle said one user posted about lamenting Tawhedi’s arrest.

“I feel like if we had contact with these brothers before they bought the guns from the informants things would’ve turned differently,” they said, while another wrote: “I live in the west and we can do more damage here.”

In other chat dumps that Valle had access to and shared with the Guardian, users talked about “kitchen made bombs, commercial drones” and other potential simplistic tools for carrying out terrorism.

Another Rocket.Chat user, Valle showed the Guardian, directed an account to target Jewish people in an unnamed western country with knives.

“Now take a kitchen knife and drive it into the throat of a young Jew around your age when nobody is paying attention and then escape,” wrote the user.

Webber noted that a part of the problem in raising awareness surrounding the seriousness of the moment is the “common misconception that [IS] was defeated”.

But, he added, branches still remain in “Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere”.

Tributes have poured in for the Olympic cycling champion Sir Chris Hoy after he revealed he had received a terminal cancer diagnosis.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Hoy, who won six golds and one silver medal for Team GB, said doctors had told him he had between two and four years to live.

While Hoy, 48, had said earlier this year he had been receiving treatment for cancer, he did not say which type, but he told the Sunday Times he had been diagnosed with primary cancer in his prostate, which had spread to his bones.

His wife, Sarra, has also been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease. The couple have two children, Chloe and Callum.

“As unnatural as it feels, this is nature,” Hoy told the Sunday Times. “You know, we were all born and we all die, and this is just part of the process. You remind yourself, aren’t I lucky that there is medicine I can take that will fend this off for as long as possible.”

“Hand on heart, I’m pretty positive most of the time and I have genuine happiness,” he added. “This is bigger than the Olympics. It’s bigger than anything. This is about appreciating life and finding joy.”

After the publication of the article, social media platforms have been full of tributes and support from friends and well-wishers.

“You’re incredible Chris, sending much love and strength,” the Olympic gold medallist Sally Gunnell said.

Television pundit and ex-footballer Ally McCoist wrote: “You, my friend are a superstar in every sense of the word. Love and strength from all of us.”

Fellow Olympic cyclist Mark Cavendish called Hoy a “hero of a human being”.

The Edinburgh-born athlete has been credited with playing a key role in making British Cycling the success it is today.

Hoy later shared a picture on Instagram from the World Track Cycling championships in Copenhagen, and wrote: “You may see in the news this weekend some articles about my health, so I just wanted to reassure you all that I’m feeling fit, strong and positive, and overwhelmed by all the love and support shown to my family and me. Onwards!”

“Such sad news,” the prime minister, Keir Starmer, wrote on X. “Chris is a British sporting legend. To face his diagnosis with such positivity is inspiring. The whole country is behind him and his family.”

The UK health secretary, Wes Streeting, said: “I’m in awe that Chris Hoy is meeting his cancer with the same positivity and resilience that has defined his life and career. The whole country will be cheering him on as we have done so many times before and sending him and his family so much love.”

“I send every good wish to Sir Chris Hoy and his family,” the Scottish first minister, John Swinney, wrote. “He has always inspired us by all that he has done. He is a person of incredible courage and that shines through today.”

“Chris Hoy is one of the finest to ever represent our country,” said the Olympic rower Matthew Pinsent. “Thoughts with him, Sarra and his immediate family.”

“An article to stop you in your tracks,” the football commentator Jacqui Oatley posted. “Devastating to read the diagnosis of Sir Chris Hoy as well as that of his wife, Sarra. Life can be so cruel. But the class and humility with which he tells this story is truly humbling.”

“Blown away by the resilience and determination of Sir Chris Hoy this morning,” the television presenter Dan Walker said. “Shortly after being told that he has between 2-4 years to live because of his terminal cancer … his lovely wife, Sarra, was diagnosed with MS.

“The man remains an incredible inspiration. Sending love to the whole family.”

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.”