Donald Trump over the weekend told supporters of his campaign for a second presidency that his Democratic opponents want to ban cows and windows in buildings, inviting another round of questions about his mental fitness.

“They just come up, they want to do things like no more cows and no windows in buildings,” the Republican White House nominee said during a campaign event with Hispanic voters in Las Vegas on Saturday. “They have some wonderful plans for this country.

“Honestly, they’re crazy, and they’re really hurting out country, badly.”

Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign subsequently reacted to the remarks on social media by writing, “a confused Trump goes on a delusional rant”.

Other Trump critics echoed the Democratic vice-president’s observation, describing the rant as “stunningly senile” and “incoherent”.

Nevada’s Democratic party also criticized the former president, writing “Trump came to town and questioned Nevadans’ values and rambled about cows and windows”.

Saturday was not the first time that the former president has accused Democrats of wanting to get rid of cows.

During a rally earlier this summer, Trump said that Harris would pass laws to outlaw red meat if elected. He added: “You know what that means – that means no more cows.”

Trump has also said over the last several years that the Green New Deal, an expansive climate plan introduced and supported by progressive Democrats, would “take out the cows”.

The Green New Deal, he said in 2020, “would crush our farms, destroy our wonderful cows”

“I love cows. They want to kill our cows. You know why, right? You know why? Don’t say it. They want to kill our cows. That means you are next,” he said.

The Green New Deal, introduced in part by progressive Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, outlines broad principles of a plan to fight inequity and tackle climate change while aiming to begin reducing the US’s reliance on fossil fuels that are fueling destructive global warming.

The resolution does not call for eliminating animal agriculture. But it calls for “working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible”.

Though it suggests reducing emissions from agriculture, that “doesn’t mean you end cows,” Ocasio-Cortez said in 2019.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, about 10% of total American greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, including cows, soils, and rice production.

Trump’s confusing comments about Democrats wanting to get rid of cows and windows on buildings on Saturday came just two days before another bizarre moment from this campaign cycle.

On Monday, at a town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, Trump stood on stage swaying and bobbing his head for about 30 minutes while music played after medical emergency-related interruptions.

At the same event, although his election against Harris is on 5 November, he told the crowd to get out and vote on “January 5 or before” – prompting critics online to again comment on Trump’s cognitive health.

Harris released a medical report which found that the most notable aspects of her health history were seasonal allergies and hives. “She possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency” if she is elected in November, the report said.

A senior aide to Harris, 59, stated that the vice-president’s advisers saw the release of her health report and medical history as a chance to call attention to questions about Trump’s physical fitness and mental acuity.

On Sunday, more than 230 doctors, nurses and healthcare providers, called on the 78-year-old Trump to release his medical records, arguing that he should be transparent about his health as he seeks to become the oldest president elected.

“With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances,” the doctors wrote in a public letter. “And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”

Trump has consistently declined to disclose detailed information about his health during his public life. On Tuesday, the former president went on his Truth social media platform and published a post claiming his health “IS PERFECT – NO PROBLEMS!!!”

Opposition outrage over Donald Trump’s rabble-rousing demagoguery turned to bewilderment after the Republican nominee spent 40 minutes swaying to his favourite songs at a rally near Philadelphia, prompting Kamala Harris to express apparent concern for his mental state.

“Hope he’s okay,” Harris, the US vice-president and Democratic nominee, posted on social media, accompanying footage of a performance that many observers agreed was bizarre, even by Trump’s standards.

The ad hoc music fest in the Pennsylvania suburb of Oaks happened after two members of the audience at an indoor rally fainted, apparently because of the heat.

When Trump requested air-conditioning, the event moderator, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, tried to keep things strictly political with a joke alluding to high inflation. “They probably can’t afford it, sir, in this economy,” she said.

Trump then decided to switch tack.

“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he said.

A nine-song playlist ensued, that included standard Trump rally favourites such as James Brown’s It’s A Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World, the Village People’s YMCA, Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinead O’Connor, and Luciano Pavarotti’s rendition of Ave Maria, all played as the candidate stood mid-stage swaying or gently bouncing on his heels, with Noem joining in to mimic his movements.

Eventually, Trump concluded: “Those two people who went down are patriots. We love them. And because of them, we ended up with some great music, right?”

The resort to music in place of angry, provocative rhetoric was not without its ironies. A long list of musical artists – including Celine Dion, Abba, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen – have denounced or taken legal steps to stop the Trump campaign playing their songs at rallies. Rufus Wainright – whose cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah Trump also danced to at the rally – said in 2016 shortly before the election that he would not sing it again unless Trump lost.

It also came at a time when Harris was calling on the media and voters to play special attention to the much darker themes that are more frequently featured at Trump rallies to illustrate the threat to freedom she says he would pose if he was returned to the White House.

At a rally of her own in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Monday, Harris took the unusual step of playing footage from Trump’s rallies of him excoriating opponents as “the enemy within”, saying it showed him to be “unstable and unhinged”.

“He considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country,” Harris said after playing a clip of the comment on a giant screen. “This is among the reasons I believe so strongly that a second Trump term would be a huge risk for America, and dangerous.”

Trump’s interlude recalled the days of his relative youth in the 1970s and 1980s, when he was a fixture at New York’s Studio 54 nightclub and rubbed shoulders with celebrities like Mick Jagger and Diana Ross. Despite the former president’s professed enthusiasm for vintage hits from the era, the venue’s founder told the Guardian in 2018 that he never saw Trump dance when he was in the club.

Trump’s staff depicted the episode as a joyful “lovefest” – perhaps subconsciously trying to imitate the theme of “joy” that Harris proclaimed in the early stages of her campaign.

“Total lovefest at the PA townhall! Everyone was so excited they were fainting so @realDonaldTrump turned to music,” Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, wrote on X. “Nobody wanted to leave and wanted to hear more songs from the famous DJT Spotify playlist!”

Karoline Leavitt, another spokesperson, posted simply: “DJ Trump.”

Other social media users were less impressed. “Donald Trump is not well,” wrote one. “He ended his town hall early and then stood on the stage awkwardly for nearly 30 minutes while random music played over the PA.” Another called it “absolutely INSANE. This was supposed to be a Town Hall.”

When Project 2025 began making headlines this summer, it was largely for the ways the conservative “wish list” of policies for a future Trump administration would restructure the entire federal bureaucracy, deepen abortion restrictions and eliminate the Department of Education.

But the document – a proposed mandate for the next Republican president authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank – also outlines steps that would radically transform food and farming, curtailing recent progress to address the excess of ultra-processed foods in the United States. Among those: weakening the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), ending policies that consider the effects of climate change – and eliminating the US dietary guidelines.

“This is a deregulatory agenda,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food policy at New York University. “And what we know historically from deregulation is that it’s really bad for consumers, it’s bad for workers, it’s bad for the environment.”

Project 2025 proposes changes to the country’s food assistance programs, like Snap and the Women, Infants and Children supplemental nutrition program (Wic), that Nestle believes are intended to dismantle such programs. It also calls for ending support for school meals.

But one of the most notable of its proposals is calling on the next Republican president to eliminate or reform the dietary guidelines. Those guidelines form the basis for all federal food policies, from school meals to Snap, Wic and other programs.

“There is no shortage of private-sector dietary advice for the public, and nutrition and dietary choices are best left to individuals to address their personal needs,” the document reads.

The food industry has long pushed the idea that chronic, diet-related health conditions, like diabetes and obesity, are the result of individual choices – like not exercising enough. Today, nearly 42% of adults in the US are obese and about 12% have diabetes. But nutritionists emphasize that those conditions are not the result of a moral failing, but rather conditions caused by the ingredients and policies (like aggressively advertising to children) pushed by food companies.

Nestle sees that as one of many pro-business policies outlined in Project 2025’s agricultural provisions that trusts companies to prioritize public health over profit.

“There’s twice as many calories available in the food supply as the country needs on average. So the food industry is enormously competitive in selling calories,” she said. “Republicans want to deregulate, and give those food businesses every opportunity to make as much money as they possibly can, regardless of the effects on health and the environment.”

Experts also fear the way Project 2025 could undermine the work being done by the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture to limit the flow of ultra-processed foods in the US food supply.

Today, ultra-processed foods make up 73% of the US food supply, according to Northeastern University, and provide the average US adult with more than 60% of their daily calories. While the science is still emerging, researchers are increasingly linking UPFs to a range of health conditions including diabetes, obesity, depression and certain cancers.

At the FDA, work is currently under way to develop a front-of-package label that corporations would be required to print on the fronts of products indicating when an item is high in sugar, fats, sodium or calories (the exact label has not yet been made public). Although the label wouldn’t specifically indicate when a food is ultra-processed, it would likely apply to a high percentage of UPFs in the food system because many contain large quantities of those nutrients.

And at the USDA, members of the US dietary guidelines advisory committee are currently meeting and will give their recommendations for the 2025-30 dietary guidelines later this year. As it considers the advice it will issue to the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services, the committee has been tasked with also evaluating research related to UPFs. It’s unclear what they’ll recommend – and whether that advice will make it into the 2025 dietary guidelines – but it’s a significant development for the committee to even consider ultra processing.

But while Project 2025 makes no specific references to front-of-package nutritional labels like those currently under consideration at the FDA, Lindsey Smith Taillie, a professor of nutrition and co-director of the Global Food Research Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says that eliminating the dietary guidelines will inevitably affect those.

“It’s almost like they’re removing scientific evidence from federal food policy,” she said.

Even if Trump isn’t elected next month, Philip Kahn-Pauli, director of legislative affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says he is “already seeing the impact of the policy proposals in Project 2025 in Congress today”.

While approving funding for government agencies in 2025, the Republican-controlled House considered a bill that would “fundamentally change” the dietary guidelines process, he said in an emailed statement. The budgetary bill would have, among other things, nullified the currently in-process 2025 dietary guidelines. Although that bill was abandoned in favor of a continuing resolution to fund the government, Kahn-Pauli said, “the fact that there was such a partisan attack” on the dietary guidelines “signals a new focus on undercutting evidence-based policy”. He expects to see more attacks on the guidelines in the new year.

Across the food system, Nestle says, Project 2025 would promote industry over climate, public health or welfare concerns: “The basic principle here is: don’t do anything that’s going to reduce industry profits.”

The number of sites identified as potentially having been polluted with banned cancer-causing “forever chemicals” in England is on the rise, and the Environment Agency (EA) says it does not have the budget to deal with them.

A former RAF airfield in Cambridgeshire and a fire service college in the Cotswolds have joined a chemicals plant in Lancashire and a fire protection equipment supplier in North Yorkshire on the agency’s list of “problem sites” for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

In total, according to a report compiled for the agency, there could be more than 10,000 locations in England contaminated with PFAS – substances that have been linked to a wide range of diseases including cancers, and which do not break down in the environment, earning them the nickname “forever chemicals”. But to date the agency is only taking action on four sites.

Banned PFAS were widely used in firefighting foams, which could explain why the area around the former RAF base, now the Fire Service College in Moreton-in-Marsh in Gloucestershire is on the agency’s “problem site” list. Elevated concentrations of PFAS in the surface water are being investigated by the EA.

Also on the list is Angus Fire, a fire protection equipment supplier in Bentham, North Yorkshire, where high levels of PFAS have been found and where the company says it has been testing for a number of years. Angus has said: “We no longer manufacture or test any PFAS-containing foam products at Bentham, or anywhere else in the world.”

The EA is also inspecting the Imperial War Museum at Duxford in Cambridgeshire, which used to be an RAF base, at the request of South Cambridgeshire district council. In 2022 the Guardian revealed drinking water in the area had been contaminated with PFAS.

A museum spokesperson said no banned substances were knowingly used anywhere across the estate. “We are tested and checked by Cambridge environmental health services and our firefighting team no longer trains with foam as we are aware of the sensitivity of the aquifer that sits below IWM Duxford. We continue to support the relevant water companies and agencies as they monitor the water supplies near the Duxford site.”

Investigations are also under way at the site of AGC Chemicals in Thornton-Cleveleys in Lancashire, after the Guardian and Watershed Investigations’ work uncovered very high concentrations of a banned PFAS called PFOA in effluent discharging into the protected River Wyre. AGC has said it does not “use or manufacture PFOA … any PFOA in the effluent may have come from historical usage at the site”.

Correspondence between the EA and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), seen by the Guardian and Watershed, reveals the agency’s “fear” about not being able to afford the investigation and risk assessment work at the four sites.

In an email sent to Defra in May, the agency says there are “funding pressures this year to take on all the inspection work we have been asked to do” relating to “PFAS and the two new potential site inspection requests we have accepted for AGC and Duxford”.

“These are the first requests we have had for many years and the very high cost of analysing for PFAS is beginning to get frightening,” the agency wrote. The “ballpark estimate of costs to carry out … investigations on four PFAS problem sites … has just come out at between £1.8m-£2.7m. We aren’t planning to spend anything like [that], certainly not immediately but it does put the total value of our contaminated land budget of £300k plus £200k from [the chemicals funding stream] into context.”

These figures do not include estimates for cleaning up the sites, which would only fall to the EA if the polluters cannot be found and current landowners are not held liable.

Dr Shubhi Sharma from the charity Chem Trust said: “It is quite right that the Environment Agency is flagging their lack of resources and the huge costs of monitoring for PFAS across what could be thousands of PFAS-contaminated sites across England. These costs do not even consider the further expense of removing these forever chemicals from our soil and water.

“The Environment Act sets out the importance of the polluter pays principle. The chemical industry in England should be putting its hands into its pockets and financially contributing to the vast costs that society and nature are facing. We must also make sure that we stop adding to this pollution burden, and the UK government needs to urgently act to ban these chemicals at the source.”

Historic landfills make up the bulk of the 10,000 sites that could also be causing pollution, according to the agency’s report, followed by wastewater treatment works, heavy industry, and fire stations and airports where PFAS-laden firefighting foams were also widely used.

Unused foams containing banned PFAS are stockpiled around the country. According to data obtained by the Guardian and Watershed from the previous government, the EA has registered more than 800 tonnes of PFOA- and PFOS-containing foams stockpiled in England.

A spokesperson for Defra said the government had “already begun investigating whether to restrict PFAS in firefighting foams and will set out more detail in due course”, adding that it had “recently announced a rapid review of the environmental improvement plan to deliver on our legally binding targets to save nature and this includes how best to manage chemicals, including the risks posed by PFAS.”

An EA spokesperson said the agency was undertaking a “multi-year programme to better understand sources of PFAS pollution in England. We are collaborating with several partners, including local authorities, to improve our evidence base and to assess and manage any environmental risks.”

The Fire Service College did not respond to requests for comment.

South Korea has condemned North Korea after it destroyed roads linking the countries on Tuesday, in another blow to bilateral ties on the increasingly tense peninsula.

The South Korean unification ministry, which overseas inter-Korean relations, described the North’s decision to blow up roads on its side of the countries’ heavily armed border as “abnormal” and a violation of bilateral agreements designed to lower tensions.

The South’s joint chiefs of staff said its military had fired “retaliatory” warning shots near the border after the North blew up sections of road that, while not in use, are seen as symbolic of efforts to improve ties and, eventually, reunite the peninsula.

“North Korean has detonated parts of the Gyeongui and Donghae roads north of the military demarcation line,” the JCS said, adding that the South had boosted its military readiness in response.

It did not provide details of the warning shots and it was not immediately known if North Korea had responded.

The North has laid fresh mines, erected anti-tank barriers and deployed missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads along the border since its leader, Kim Jong-un, declared the South his country’s “principal enemy” earlier this year.

Last week Pyongyang said it would permanently seal its southern border in response to joint military exercises between South Korea and the US and the recent arrival in the South of a nuclear-powered US submarine.

On Monday, the North said it was preparing to blow up the roads, days after it accused Seoul of using drones to scatter propaganda leaflets over Pyongyang in what it called a political and military provocation that could lead to war.

Kim convened a security meeting to direct a plan of “immediate military action” in response, state media reported on Tuesday, while his influential sister, Kim Yo-jong, said the regime had “clear proof” that the South’s military was behind the reported drone incursions.

Using typically florid language, she said: “If sovereignty of a nuclear weapons state … by mongrels tamed by Yankees, the master of those dogs should be held accountable for this,” according to the KCNA state news agency.

The two Koreas are connected by roads and railway lines that were built with South Korean loans worth $133m, the South’s Yonhap news agency said.

The roads and railways have been closed for years, but destroying them sent a clear message that Kim Jong-un did not wish to negotiate with the South, experts said.

Destroying physical connections between North and South would be in line with Kim’s order in January to ditch the goal of a peaceful Korean unification, in a break with his predecessors’ long-held dream of creating a united peninsula in the image of North Korea.

“This is a practical military measure related to the hostile dual-state system that North Korea has frequently mentioned,” said Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.

The North may be looking to erect more physical barriers along the border, Yang said, adding that the detonations could be “preparatory work for its construction of those walls”.

Seoul’s military initially denied sending drones north but has subsequently declined to comment, even as Pyongyang has blamed them directly, warning it would consider it “a declaration of war” if another drone was detected.

Activist groups have long sent propaganda northwards, typically by balloon, and enthusiasts are also known to have flown small, hard-to-detect drones into the North.

At Kim’s meeting on Monday, officials heard a report on the “enemy’s serious provocation”, KCNA said, adding that Kim had “expressed a tough political and military stand”.

In 2022, five North Korean drones crossed into the South, the first such incident in five years, prompting the South Korean military to fire warning shots and deploy fighter jets. The jets failed to shoot down any of the drones.

In July, Seoul said it would deploy drone-melting lasers this year, saying the South’s ability to respond to provocations would be “significantly enhanced”.

The new laser weapons – called the “StarWars Project” by the South – shoot an invisible, silent beam that costs just 2,000 won ($1.45) a use, according to the Defense Acquisition Program Administration.

After Kim’s meeting in Pyongyang, “attention is turning to whether North Korea will respond by sending drones into the South or take strong action if drones infiltrate its territory again”, said Cheong Seong-chang of the Sejong Institute.

“North Korea is likely to engage in strong provocations along the border if there is a recurrence of drone infiltrations.”

Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report

More than 80% of countries have failed to submit plans to meet a UN agreement to halt the destruction of Earth’s ecosystems, new analysis has found.

Nearly two years ago, the world struck a once-in-a-decade deal in Montreal, Canada, that included targets to protect 30% of land and sea for nature, reform billions of dollars on environmentally harmful subsidies and slash pesticide usage. Countries committed to submit their plans for meeting the agreement before the biodiversity Cop16 in Cali, Colombia, which begins this month – but only 25 countries have done so.

The other 170 countries have failed to meet the deadline. The world has never yet met a single target set in the history of UN biodiversity agreements, and there had been a major push to make sure this decade was different.

Analysis by Carbon Brief and the Guardian shows that some of the most important ecosystems on the planet are not covered by National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs).

Only five of the 17 megadiverse countries, home to about 70% of the world’s biodiversity, produced NBSAPs: Australia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Mexico. Suriname was the only Amazon rainforest nation to submit a plan, and no Congo basin nations had produced NBSAPs by the deadline. Canada, Italy, France and Japan were the only G7 nations to meet the deadline. The UK has submitted a technical document to the UN convention on biological diversity but is not expected to publish its plan until the beginning of 2025, citing the change of government.

Crystal Davis, global director for the Food, Land and Water Program at the World Resources Institute, said: “Nature is facing a crisis, largely driven by humanity’s use of the land and ocean … at Cop16, it’s time for all countries to step up and turn a landmark global agreement to protect and restore nature into action.”

Colombia, despite hosting the summit, also failed to meet the deadline, but said it would present its plan during the meeting. Brazil, which failed to meet the deadline, said it was formulating a plan that would last until the middle of the century and had been delayed due to the scale of what it was trying to achieve. Other countries are expected to present NBSAPs at Cop16 but it was unclear how many would be unveiled, the UN said.

“More NBSAPs would be better, that’s clear,” said UN biodiversity chief Astrid Schomaker. “We expect more to be announced at Cop16 – including some of the big ones like India, who want to have the ministerial announcement at Cop16 and give it a lot of profile.

“We are confident that by the end of the year, there will be quite a few more. We understand that when they are late, countries had to get funding first. Very often that’s because they are trying to do the whole-of-society approach. That takes time.”

Braulio Dias, director of biodiversity conservation at the Brazilian ministry of environment who is responsible for the NBSAP process, said he expected his country would publish a plan in early 2025.

“We are working on a new NBSAP extending till 2050. Brazil is a huge country with the largest share of biodiversity, with a large population with a complex governance,” he said.

Dr V Rajagopalan, chair of India’s working group tasked with reviewing the country’s national biodiversity plan, told Carbon Brief that the goals of the global nature deal must be adapted to local contexts.

“Our situation is different from the west: what can be done there, cannot be done here,” he said. “For example, subsidies are a challenge for us – similarly, pesticides – because of our agricultural status and food security requirements. But, still, we have kept our targets very ambitious.”

Fan Bingbing, once one of China’s most famous film stars, is returning to the screen after a more than five-year hiatus following her alleged involvement in a massive tax evasion scandal.

Fan stars in Green Night, a Hong Kong-produced neo-noir thriller set in South Korea, which is released on US streaming services on 18 October. The film has been billed as Fan’s comeback from professional purgatory since she disappeared from public view for nearly a year in 2018. During her year of silence, she was hit with a bill of more than 880m yuan (£99m) by the Chinese tax authorities.

The fact that Fan, who once starred in blockbusters such as the X-Men and Iron Man franchises, is returning to cinema in an edgy, international production, which has received scant discussion in China, reflects the likelihood that her fame will never recover to its former heights, say experts.

“I don’t believe she can come back,” said Sabrina Qiong Yu, a professor of film and Chinese studies at Newcastle University. “Chinese film stars are very vulnerable … the fame they have, it’s something that the state never likes.”

Fan’s fall from grace sent shockwaves through China’s film industry. Her undoing started in May 2018, when a famous TV presenter posted pictures of two contracts online, which appeared to suggest that Fan had used a false contract to underreport her income to the Chinese tax authorities to the tune of several million dollars. Such a practice, known as “yin-yang” contracts, was allegedly widespread in the film industry.

Fan denied wrongdoing and the presenter retracted his claims. But the tax authorities launched an investigation and in October of that year she was ordered to pay 883m yuan in unpaid taxes and related fines. She apologised on social media and said: “Without the good policies of the party and the state, without the love and protection of the people, there would be no Fan Bingbing.”

Since then, Fan’s career has been muted, although she has maintained a presence on social media and developed her e-commerce beauty brand, Fan Beauty.

In recent months, Fan’s posts on Chinese social media feeds have been full of posts about her fashion endeavours and nationalist comments. There is no mention of Green Night in recent posts. On 2 September, the day before the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in the second world war, Fan wrote on Weibo: “Remember history, love China, cherish peace, and forge ahead bravely!”

Celebrities in China have long been held to high moral standards and expected to be squeaky clean in their personal lives. But in recent years, as the Chinese Communist party (CCP) has deepened and strengthened its control over all parts of society, stars have been expected to be overtly loyal to the CCP as well.

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has also tightened the party’s control over the mega-rich. After more than a decade of rapid growth and massive wealth accumulation, political leaders have become concerned about elites amassing influence outside the CCP’s control.

The sudden crackdown on a darling of China’s booming film industry shocked observers. But since then, several high-profile wealthy people have received similar treatment. In November 2020, Jack Ma, one of China’s most successful and well-known billionaires, disappeared for three months, after criticising China’s financial regulators. Last year, a billionaire Chinese dealmaker named Bao Fan disappeared.

For celebrities to thrive in China in today’s political environment, they have to be seen to “love the country, love the party”, Yu said. She added that in some instances fans themselves had taken to policing the nationalist credos of high profile figures, without the authorities needing to get involved. In March, the Nobel prize-winning author Mo Yan was attacked by internet users who declared him insufficiently patriotic.

In Green Night, Fan stars as a Chinese immigrant, Jin Xia, who works at South Korea’s Incheon airport. While on duty she encounters a mysterious green-haired girl, who pulls Xia into a world of drug trafficking and lesbian romance, and an escape from Xia’s abusive husband. Such racy themes would be highly unlikely to pass the censorship regime required for films to be released in China.

Doctors are hailing a “remarkable” new treatment regime for cervical cancer that reduces the risk of dying by 40%, in the biggest advance against the disease in 25 years.

Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women globally, with about 660,000 new cases and 350,000 deaths every year, according to the World Health Organization. In the UK, there are about 3,200 cases and 800 deaths each year.

Many of those affected are in their 30s, and despite improvements in care, the cancer returns in as many as 30% of cases.

The new treatment plan was tested in patients recruited over 10 years from the UK, Mexico, India, Italy and Brazil. It involves a short course of chemotherapy before patients undergo chemoradiation, the standard treatment for cervical cancer involving a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

In research led by University College London, it has been reported that the results of the phase-three clinical trial showed a 40% reduction in the risk of death from the disease and a 35% reduction in the risk of cancer coming back within at least five years. Their findings have been published in the Lancet.

Dr Mary McCormack, the lead investigator of the trial at UCL, told the Guardian the discovery was the most significant breakthrough in treating cervical cancer since the end of the last century. “This is the biggest gain in survival since the adoption of chemoradiation in 1999,” she said.

“Every improvement in survival for a cancer patient is important, especially when the treatment is well-tolerated and given for a relatively short time, allowing women to get back to their normal lives relatively quickly.”

Researchers at UCL and University College London hospital (UCLH) completed a long-term follow-up of patients who were given the short course of chemotherapy before chemoradiation.

The Interlace trial, funded by Cancer Research UK and UCL Cancer Trials Centre, looked at whether a short course of induction chemotherapy prior to chemoradiation could cut relapses and deaths among patients with locally advanced cervical cancer that had not spread to other organs.

The trial recruited 500 women who were randomly allocated to receive either the new treatment regime or the standard chemoradiation treatment. None of the patients’ tumours had spread to other organs.

In the study, one group received the new regime of six weeks of carboplatin and paclitaxel chemotherapy. This was followed by standard radiotherapy plus weekly cisplatin and brachytherapy chemotherapy, known as chemoradiation. The control group received only the usual chemoradiation.

After five years, 80% of those who received a short course of chemotherapy first were alive and for 72% their cancer had not returned nor spread. In the standard treatment group, 72% were alive and 64% had not had their cancer return or spread.

Separately, UCL said the trial found a 40% reduction in the risk of death and a 35% reduction in the risk of cancer returning, when comparing the two groups using a different metric.

Abbie Halls, a client service manager from London who was diagnosed with cervical cancer when she was 27, is one of the women who received the new treatment regime. “I’ve been cancer-free for over nine years now and I’m not sure if I’d be here without the treatment that I received,” said the 37-year-old. “I’m happy that I could play a part in advancing the research, which I hope is going to save the lives of many more women in years to come.”

The results prompted calls for the regime to be implemented across the UK and internationally. McCormack said: “A short course of induction chemotherapy prior to standard chemoradiation treatment greatly boosts overall survival and reduces the risk of relapse in patients with locally advanced cervical cancer.

“This approach is a straightforward way to make a positive difference, using existing drugs that are cheap and already approved for use in patients. It has already been adopted by some cancer centres and there’s no reason that this shouldn’t be offered to all patients undergoing chemoradiation for this cancer.”

Dr Iain Foulkes, the executive director of research and innovation at Cancer Research UK, said: “The simple act of adding induction chemotherapy to the start of chemoradiation treatment for cervical cancer has delivered remarkable results. A growing body of evidence is showing that additional chemotherapy before other treatments, like surgery and radiotherapy, can improve the chances of successful treatment for patients. Not only can it reduce the chances of cancer coming back, it can also be delivered quickly, using drugs already available worldwide.”

Britain is at risk of experiencing a repeat of the sharp increase in energy costs which has fuelled the continuing cost of living crisis because it relies too heavily on gas, according to an expert panel of industry leaders.

The Energy Crisis Commission has warned that the UK is still “dangerously underprepared” for another crisis because it continues to rely on gas for its power plants and home heating.

The newly formed commission, made up of representatives from business groups Energy UK and the CBI, and the consumer groups Citizens Advice and National Energy Action, used its first report to warn that too little progress has been made in insulating homes and scaling up the installation of heat pumps since the UK economy was rocked by record high gas prices.

The energy crisis began in late 2021 as rising gas prices led to 29 household suppliers failing and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 sent bills soaring, forcing the UK government to step in to subsidise bills.

Adam Scorer, the head of National Energy Action, a fuel poverty charity, said the “risk of future crises is real” and would “hit hardest those less able to withstand price shocks”.

The report found the crisis had a “catastrophic” impact on British households. Energy bill payers were hit harder than in many other European countries because the UK ranks as the second most dependent on gas for heating, and the fifth most dependent on gas for electricity, it said.

The report also took aim at the government’s “poorly targeted” support scheme which cost the exchequer more than £78bn, according to the Office for National Statistics, but left about 7.5m households in fuel poverty and bill payers in £3.5bn of debt to energy companies.

Gillian Cooper, an executive director at Citizens Advice, said: “Underpreparedness and missed opportunities helped drive the energy market crisis. Sluggish action on green upgrades, supplier failures, poor practices like forced prepayment meter installations, and inaction on targeted bill support has left millions of households feeling the devastating impacts of the crisis first-hand.”

David Laws, Energy UK’s chair and the chair of the commission, said: “The UK has experienced regular energy price shocks over the last 50 years, which have damaged economic growth and hit both households and businesses. Future oil and gas shocks seem inevitable, but the UK remains poorly prepared to absorb these.”

The commission called on the government to prioritise shifting the UK away from a reliance on gas to help protect households and the economy from future energy price shocks. It called for a rollout of energy efficiency measures, such as insulation and tougher efficiency standards in the private rental market, to help improve the UK’s draughty homes.

It also called for the government to set out a plan to move homes away from gas heating by rolling out more heat pumps or other low-carbon alternatives.

The commission urged the government to continue its efforts to cut the UK’s reliance on gas power plants in favour of low-carbon electricity sources, and to help energy intensive businesses to switch to clean energy alternatives.

Louise Hellem, the CBI’s chief economist, said: “The energy crisis sent a shock wave through the economy that affected nearly every business in the UK, with industry, small businesses and high street firms particularly impacted … Addressing why the UK was particularly vulnerable to price spikes is vital not only to prevent serious consequences for consumers, but its impact on the wider economy.”

Ed Miliband,the secretary of state for energy security and net zero, said: “This report shows industry experts support making Britain a clean energy superpower, which is a core mission of this Labour government.

“After the Tories’ catastrophic failures, we have taken decisive action. We overturned the nine-year onshore wind ban within 72 hours, have overseen the most successful renewable auction in history, set up Great British Energy and taken action to lift 1 million renters out of fuel poverty with new energy efficiency standards.”

The claim that Australian gas exports are “clean” and needed to drive the transition to net zero greenhouse gas emissions has become an article of faith for significant parts of the country’s industry, media and political classes – often repeated, only occasionally challenged.

It has buttressed a massive expansion of the liquified natural gas (LNG) industry in the north of the continent over the past decade, with major new developments in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

Actually, “major” doesn’t really cut it in describing the scale of the LNG facilities at Gladstone, in the Pilbara and near Darwin. They hoover up about 80% of the gas extracted in Australia, either using it on-site or shipping it to Japan, China, Taiwan or South Korea.

It’s a highly lucrative business. Revenue across the Australian LNG industry last financial year was nearly A$70bn. Infamously, the federal government’s tax take has not kept pace with the industry’s extraordinary growth.

This sort of income is a pretty powerful incentive to justify what your industry does, especially when what it does leads to accusations it is damaging the planet and people’s lives and livelihoods. The Australian gas industry has excelled in asserting that it is helping in the fight against the climate crisis.

Mainly, it argues that its LNG exports are replacing and displacing coal in Asia – and that gas has roughly half the emissions of coal when burned to create electricity. Ergo, Australian gas must be cutting global climate pollution. This line has been swallowed and repeated by politicians from the major parties in federal and state governments.

Former Coalition energy and emissions reduction minister, and current shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor claimed in parliament that the gas industry was cutting global emissions by 150m tonnes a year – an extraordinary amount if true, equivalent to about a third of Australia’s annual climate pollution. The current resources minister, Madeleine King, argues Australia’s Asian trading powers “depend on our gas to meet their commitments to net zero”.

The Western Australian premier, Roger Cook, has probably been the most audacious, declaring that gas from his state was leading to a “dramatic reduction in global emissions” and it had a responsibility to continue to sell it or people may die.

Over the past five years, Guardian Australia has asked industry leaders and MPs for specific evidence showing that Australian LNG is substantially displacing coal in Asian countries, or that LNG has substantially lower emissions than coal across its lifecycle. We are yet to receive any.

That failure to produce data to support these claims looks more conspicuous after a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Energy Science and Engineering earlier this month. Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at New York’s Cornell University, calculated the total emissions from the US LNG industry, which exports to Europe and Asia.

Once all upstream stages were factored in – extraction, piping to a processing facility, compression from gas into liquid form, shipping, decompression back to gas and burning for energy – he estimated the total climate pollution from LNG was 33% greater than that from coal over a 20-year period.

This is not an entirely new idea – previous studies have suggested the gas industry is dirtier than often claimed – but it is nevertheless a potentially extraordinary finding. It should have major ramifications for how policymakers think about what is necessary to cut emissions to as near zero as possible.

A key finding of Howarth’s study is that more gas leaks into the atmosphere before it is burned than is usually assumed. This has been successfully spun over decades as “natural gas”, which sounds harmless. In reality it is methane – a short-lived but potent fossil fuel that has about 80 times the atmospheric heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

The Guardian asked Howarth whether he thought his US findings were likely to apply to the Australian LNG industry. He replied: “There is no fundamental reason to believe LNG exports from Australia would differ much in terms of greenhouse gas emissions from those from the US.”

There are caveats, of course. No two fossil fuel developments are exactly the same, and there are differences in both the fugitive emissions (those that escape from a mine, well or pipeline) and the combustion emissions resulting from different sites. Some will be worse than others.

But the clear overarching message from the study is bigger than site-specific variation. As Prof Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University, told my colleague Oliver Milman, the issue isn’t really whether gas is slightly better or worse than coal. It’s that both are terrible for the climate and “we need to get rid of both of them”.

In other words: we need to kill the idea that gas is clean, even in relative terms, and should use as little as possible as quickly as possible.

That doesn’t mean just turning off the tap. Some gas will be needed in Australia for at least the medium-term to back up the electricity supply. It won’t be much. It is expected that fast-starting gas plants that are turned on only when required will continue to provide an important chunk – probably less than 10% – of total generation.

Some gas is also still used in high-temperature manufacturing processes and in heating and cooking. The latter could be relatively simply replaced given there are affordable alternatives that are not only better for the planet, but cheaper and healthier for households.

These domestic issues need to be addressed, but should be treated as a separate discussion to the export industry, which has a much more significant climate impact and is largely treated as though it is not Australia’s responsibility.

Again, no one is saying that supply should be shut off overnight. Trade relationships should be managed.

But Howarth’s study makes clear, not for the first time, that an honest national conversation about the real cost of our fossil fuel exports – both coal and gas – and what more the country should be doing to limit their impact, is beyond well overdue.