It’s a Tuesday morning, the infinite blue sky of Byron Bay has opened up and the six naturists – four men, two women – have stripped down to their birthday suits for a quick dip in the buff.

This section of beach – an 800-metre stretch along the vast coastline – forms the only legal clothing-optional beach in the shire. Among those taking advantage of the opportunity to be out in the open is Duncan James, vice-president of Northern Rivers Naturists, who is something of an evangelist for “embracing the beach as Mother Nature intended.”

“Many of the beach users have described the clothing-optional beach as their happy place, a place where they can disconnect from modern day stresses, a place they can feel at one with nature,” he says.

There is, however, a metaphorical cloud on the horizon. On Sunday, Tyagarah is set to be stripped of its status as an official clothing-optional beach.

“I guess these values aren’t shared by New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service [NPWS], who are hell-bent on closing one of Byron’s last alternative community hubs and experiences,” James says.

Tyagarah itself was first designated as a clothing-optional beach in 1998 to allow those looking to engage in non-sexual nudity to be one with the surf without risk of being fined or arrested.

It is not the only such beach, or event, in Australia. Maslin’s beach in South Australia was first designated in 1975 and since then, with the exception of Queensland, two dozen similar beaches dot the Australian coastline. Every year at Dark Mofo, hundreds brave the Tasmanian cold to swim naked to mark the winter solstice.

But with Tyagarah now being taken away, those on the beach see it as a troubling sign of the times.

‘We’re not prudes’

The politics of being naked in public has always been fraught.

For its part, Byron Bay has always been comfortable with a certain degree of exposed flesh. The region has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the country but when the sun is out, people sunbathe topless or discretely skinny dip along its beaches. Every year a naked bike-ride runs through the centre of town and in March local paper the Echo ran uncensored images from the ride showing male genitalia on its front cover.

Until the clothing-optional beach opened, Maxine Hawker says she would skinny dip each morning just outside her front door – something she has been doing since she was 18.

“My first time was probably when I was 18, swimming on an isolated beach on the north coast. We were on holiday and I just went ‘this is magic’,” she says.

Hawker says Tyagarah is far from town, which means it shouldn’t offend those with a more modest outlook, while not being so remote that it is totally inaccessible.

But Bradley Benham, president of Northern Rivers Naturists, says authorities took a “set and forget” approach soon after it was established, which led to problems involving indecent behaviour in the nearby dunes and a lake farther inland.

In 2016 a group calling itself the Safe Beaches Committee formed to clean up Tyagarah, but around this time residents and business owners along Gray’s Lane – a long stretch of road that runs from the Pacific Highway to the coast – began to campaign for its closure. In 2018 they delivered a petition with 86 signatures to council complaining of “lewd” behaviour.

Benham describes this period as “nasty”, saying the negative publicity only attracted the attention of people who weren’t interested in nude sunbathing. At one point he says he was abused by three fishers when leaving the beach.

“The people trying to close the beach down are quite obsessed with the idea of people having sex in the dunes,” Benham says. “The people trying to shut the beach are focusing on this idea that it’s a sex beach, which has never been my experience.”

Things died down for a while but the issue revived in February when the council announced the results of a land survey undertaken by NPWS that found the beach fell within the Tyagarah national park and the clothing-optional section had been created without proper authority.

A tense council meeting followed, featuring impassioned speeches for and against. A mother of two claimed she, her husband and daughter had encountered a naked man with an erect penis while on a bike ride nearby; in his own speech Benham said it was unfair to treat those who used the beach responsibly the same as those who may lurk in bushes.

None of this changed the council’s fundamental position and in a motion it was announced that on 30 June the beach would close.

Speaking to the ABC one resident, Gwen Gould, celebrated the news.

“We’ve worked for about eight years on trying to have this closed down,” she said.

“People say we’re prudes. We’re not prudes.”

Naked Frisbee, volleyball and cricket

Like others in the community, Maxine Hawker says she was “devastated” by the decision.

“I am so shocked by it. I can’t believe Byron Bay would become so conservative,” she says. “We have, as a people and a culture, become more conservative and I think that conservative creep has come to Byron.”

If residents were opposed to the beach being at the end of their street, she says the simplest solution would be to move it.

So far there has been little interest.

A Change.org petition addressed to the New South Wales environment minister, Penny Sharpe, and that received over 7,700 signatures to save Tyagarah beach or find an alternative failed to get anything moving. NPWS, partly citing opposition from traditional owners, has stood by its decision to close the beach but has written to Byron shire council to request that the date be extended.

“NPWS has requested that Byron shire council extend the permissibility of the COA from 30 June 2024 to 30 August 2024, which will allow appropriate notification for the naturist community,” a spokesperson said.

Whether or not the council has responded to the offer is unknown. The Byron shire council mayor, Michael Lyon, was contacted for comment.

With Sunday approaching, Benham says there is no word about alternatives, when exactly the designation will be lifted, or how the naturists will be treated at law if they continue to use the beach.

The community is planning a send-off that may include naked Frisbee, volleyball and cricket. Even if the weather’s bad, the group says they’ll be out. Getting into the elements in the buff, they say, makes you feel alive.

What happens after that is unknown but Benham says he intends to continue using the beach and that he is willing to risk fines and even jail to do so.

“Some people certainly work in jobs where they don’t want to be arrested and have to go to court,” he says. “I’m fortunately in a position where I’m prepared to do that for what I believe in.”

“That’s how much this means to me.”

It was the armoured vehicles circling the Plaza Murillo – the normally tranquil central square in historic downtown La Paz – that initially set Bolivians on edge on Wednesday afternoon. By the time a phalanx of troops had marched on the presidential palace, the sense of collective confusion and shock was at fever pitch.

By 2.30pm, a small tank was repeatedly ramming the gates of the neoclassical building known as Palacio Quemado until troops forced their way in and, in an extraordinary scene, the coup leader – disgruntled former army chief Juan José Zuñiga – faced off against the president, Luis Arce.

Flanked by cabinet ministers and clasping a ceremonial baton, a symbol of his rank as head of state, Arce, 60, ordered Zuñiga to back down, telling him: “I am your captain … withdraw all of your troops right now, general.”

The heated exchange was filmed and lasted several minutes. It ended when Zuñiga turned and left via the same broken door through which he had entered, disappearing into a bulletproof army vehicle that sped away.

It may be remembered as the shortest attempted coup in the Andean nation’s tumultuous two centuries of existence. It lasted just three hours, during which time Arce rallied Bolivians to “mobilise” to defend democracy, apparently defused the mutiny in a one-on-one confrontation and appointed a new military command which ordered mutinous troops back to their barracks.

The unrest left Bolivians shocked and baffled.

But as soon as a semblance of normality returned, rumours began to swirl in the country of 12.5 million people, which has seen about 190 coups, as well as military dictatorships and revolutions, since it gained independence in 1825.

Just before he was detained on Wednesday, the alleged plotter Zuñiga sowed seeds of doubt, telling journalists – without providing evidence – that Arce had ordered him to stage a sham coup in a bid to boost the president’s flagging popularity.

The former commander, who was reportedly close to the government, had been sacked the day before the mutiny, according to Bolivia’s minister of government, Eduardo Del Castillo.

Zuñiga’s remarks were seized upon by the opposition, who demanded a parliamentary inquiry into claims that Arce had tried to orchestrate an autogolpe (self-coup).

A legislator for the Civic Community bloc, Alejandro Reyes, told the Observer there were “indications, evidence and statements that allow us to think that this [coup] has been premeditated, and could even involve the participation of the executive”.

In Arce’s defence, Deisy Choque, a legislator for the governing Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party, warned that the coup might have been successful “had it not been for the position taken by the president, the ministers and Bolivian society as a whole in immediately repudiating these actions”. She claimed that Zuñiga’s words held little credibility as he had changed his story several times.

On Thursday, Arce strongly denied accusations that he was behind the attempted coup, saying: “We are never going to authorise weapons to be raised against the people. What the former army commander general did […] was to rise against the Bolivian people, attacking the democracy that has cost the Bolivian people blood. We are never going to do that. Never.”

On Friday, the government announced 20 further arrests, including a former Navy vice-admiral. About 200 military officers took part in the attempted coup, Bolivia’s ambassador to the Organization of American States said.

What is beyond doubt is that Arce is presiding over a flailing economy. Amid plummeting gas exports and dwindling foreign reserves, there are growing protests over rising food prices and the scarcity of fuel and US dollars, as well as deep divisions within his political party.

“Bolivia is going through multiple crises: political, economic, social and environmental, but above all institutional,” said Franklin Pareja, a political scientist at Bolivia’s University of San Andrés. “The government is in a very weak situation. It has no cohesion within its own party.”

Arce is embroiled in a bitter power struggle with former president Evo Morales, who helped elect him in 2020. Arce, a UK-educated economist, served as Morales’s finance minister and replaced him as the MAS candidate after Morales – the country’s longest-­serving democratically elected leader – was ousted in 2019 amid accusations of electoral fraud, which he denied.

Both men have said they plan to seek the presidency in next year’s election for the MAS. Morales was among the first to condemn the apparent coup attempt.

But in a video posted on X by Bolivia TV on Saturday, he is seen with supporters mockingly questioning the incident: “I don’t know what kind of coup it is? A coup with zero wounded, zero gunshots, zero deaths.”

However, some of his supporters have joined the chorus of doubters. Gerardo García, the MAS vice-president, accused Arce of making a “mockery of the country” and being the “intellectual author” of a sham coup.

Regardless of whether or not they are true, the rumours of a “self-coup” have “taken hold in the popular imagination”, said Pareja, and may be hard for Arce to shake. “If this backfires on him, the weakness and fragility of his government could deepen.”

The elements knocked a wild, sometimes thrilling match off kilter and then the deadening technocracy that is smothering elite football took its turn, too. At the end of it all Germany could celebrate to the strains of new wave classic Major Tom, their unofficial anthem, and perhaps dare to fantasise about a new summer fairytale. Much of the night had resembled a fever dream but the prospect of going all the way in their home tournament has become real for Julian Nagelsmann’s team.

They will need to be better than this if, as seems likely, they face Spain in the quarter-finals. Germany looked like blowing Denmark away early on but, having not done so, had become a skittish mush by the time a cataclysmic weather intervention stopped proceedings for nearly half an hour during the opening period. They eventually pulled clear but had, in large part, to thank a handball law that is offensive to the sport’s spirit. Once Kai Havertz had scored from the penalty spot the air was sucked out of a pleasantly bold Denmark side.

Where to start? Perhaps with some of the football, even if the rule that facilitated Germany’s opener should have no place in the sport. Denmark had picked up from where they left off after half-time and felt hard done by when Joachim Andersen, having lashed past Manuel Neuer for what was seemingly a deserved lead, had his celebrations curtailed. Thomas Delaney had swung at the ball and missed just before Andersen applied the finish but was adjudged, through VAR, to have strayed offside by a toenail’s length.

Straight down the other end, and the marauding Germany left-back David Raum had men to aim for in the centre. His cross glanced off Andersen’s hand, a fact picked up by the VAR official Stuart Attwell and the “snickometer” deployed in the control room, and it was enough for Michael Oliver to award a penalty after pulling play back. Havertz converted and, for any neutral, the fun was over.

Andersen had been at close quarters to Raum and his arm, while not beside his body, was hardly outstretched. The decision was probably correct, according to a strict interpretation of handball’s modern definition. But the law needs calling out loudly for what it is: a ruinous example of overreach that makes the sport appreciably worse.

It would probably be a cheap shot to correlate such farce with the oversight of Premier League officials, even if handball controversies resemble catnip to those refereeing and re-refereeing English matches. Oliver’s night had been difficult enough already. Denmark were dominating when, just after the half-hour, a portentously close and muggy evening became something far more serious.

The heavens opened, as they had been threatening to; forked lightning cracked the night sky and loud, ominous claps of thunder shuddered the stands. With 35 minutes played Oliver led the players off, first to the side of the pitch and then down the tunnel as conditions continued to deteriorate. The playing area was patently unsafe and for a time proceedings seemed at risk of being curtailed altogether.

Eventually conditions eased and play could resume. The famous Südtribüne, part of which had emptied out to escape a biblical drenching refilled and bedded in for a contest that had already delivered. Germany had called Kasper Schmeichel into action four times in the first 11 minutes, saves from Havertz and Joshua Kimmich particularly eye-catching, but they had become nervous and twitchy after not putting Denmark to the sword. Before the unscheduled break Christian Eriksen and Joachim Maehle had been given openings and the ingredients for a classic, if a flawed and ragged one, were present.

Schmeichel made an even better stop from Havertz shortly after Oliver had led the sides back out, and before half-time Rasmus Højlund was denied one-on-one by Neuer. Denmark had been chastised back home for dull group stage performances but they had evidently spied an opportunity and, at this point, looked the better side.

Then came the extraordinary sequence that Andersen, the Crystal Palace defender, may struggle to shrug off. Germany could enjoy themselves after going ahead and should have settled things soon after when Havertz, who had held off the claims of local hero Niclas Füllkrug and kept his starting place, escaped the defence with sublime skill only to miss the target. Leroy Sané, recalled to the starting lineup by Nagelsmann, then missed a sitter of his own.

It fell to Jamal Musiala, who had been relatively quiet, to run on to a laser-like pass from Nico Schlotterbeck and see the whites of Schmeichel’s eyes. There was no redemption available to Andersen, who had seemed hesitant in trailing him. Musiala finished superbly for the third time in a European Championship that he has illuminated. Germany, rampant on the break but profligate, could have scored several more after that.

Few can begrudge this Germany side a crack at the last eight. Kasper Hjulmand certainly did not but the Denmark manager knew where the evening had turned.

“This is not how football is supposed to be,” he said of the calls that sent them home. As rumbles and flashes started up anew outside, someone seemed to agree.

In the summer months, north-easterly winds frequently herald the arrival of bluebottles on beaches along Australia’s east coast. But while bluebottles – or to give them their more formal name, the Pacific man-of-war – are a common sight on Australian shores, they are not native to coastal waters. Instead, they spend most of their lives on the open ocean, drifting with the winds and the currents.

Bluebottles are just one of a collection of organisms that have made their home at the ocean’s surface. Some of these animals are hydrozoans like the bluebottle.

There is the by-the-wind sailor, Velella velella, which has a stiff, transparent, oval sail about five centimetres long attached to its bright blue float, and Porpita porpita, sometimes known as the blue button, which is shaped like a disc about three centimetres in diameter surrounded by stinging polyps. But there is also the strikingly beautiful sea dragon; crustaceans such as shrimp, buoy barnacles and tiny swimming copepods; and even molluscs such as the violet snail and Recluzia.

Known collectively as the neuston, these creatures are not tied to any one place. Instead, they move with the wind and the water. Sometimes they gather into huge drifts, living islands of velella and bluebottles like those that wash occasionally ashore on beaches in Australia or the western coast of the Canada and the United States. At other times they clump together around drifting debris or spread out sparsely over hundreds or even thousands of square kilometres.

Despite its ubiquity, the neuston remains comparatively poorly understood and critically understudied. A mere handful of papers concerning the ecosystem are published each year, and only three of the 400 proposals received for the International Zooplankton Production Symposium earlier this year concerned the neuston.

Marine ecologist Associate Prof Kerrie Swadling,from the University of Tasmania, puts it bluntly. “We know more about deep sea vents than we know about the neuston.”

The reasons for this ignorance are partly historical. Although several important studies of the neuston were published during the 20th century, they were written in Russian by scientists from the Soviet Union and were largely ignored outside the Eastern Bloc. But for the most part, the lack of research into the neuston is a consequence of the practical challenges involved in observing organisms that are scattered unevenly across the immensity of the open ocean.

Griffith University’s Prof Kylie Pitt specialises in jellyfish ecology. She says, “The neuston’s transient nature makes it difficult to study. You’ll see large numbers of jellyfish or bluebottles and then you won’t be able to find them again.”

In recent years, however, there has been an uptick in interest in the neuston. New research is revealing not just its importance to the health of ocean ecosystems as disparate as coral reefs and the deep ocean, but also important gaps in our understanding of how it will be affected by changes in the ocean environment.

The person most responsible for the increased visibility of the neuston is Dr Rebecca Helm. Now an assistant professor at Georgetown University in the United States, Helm was scrolling Twitter in 2018 when she came across a tweet about The Ocean Cleanup’s plans to remove plastic from the oceans by sweeping a floating net across the surface.

Helm says she immediately wondered about the potential impact of this technology on the neuston, and so began to investigate.

“Initially I was just doing a little digging in my free time. But once I did, I realised how little information there was available and how little had actually been done on this group of animals.”

Helm might have left it at that if the pandemic hadn’t meant she was locked out of her lab for several months. “I suddenly had all of this nebulous time to start looking into this more deeply, and became really fascinated.”

‘An inverted sea floor’

Helm’s response is easy to understand. The ocean surface is an extremely challenging environment: food is often scarce and survival requires an ability to withstand not just waves and storms, but also the heat of the sun and high levels of ultraviolet radiation. This last part may help explain why so many neuston species are blue: as well as acting as camouflage, the colour acts as an inbuilt sunscreen that reflects UV radiation.

However, survival in the neuston also requires animals to find some way to remain at the surface. For free-swimming species such as copepods and zooplankton, this is easy. But for other organisms it requires special adaptations.

Hydrozoans like the bluebottle and velella employ gas-filled floats, while the buoy barnacle extrudes air into the cement that it would otherwise use to attach itself to ships and rocks, creating a substance a bit like pumice that it uses as a float. Similarly, violet snails suspend themselves beneath rafts constructed out of hardened bubbles of mucus. There is even a form of free-floating sea anemone that hangs upside down from the surface with the aid of a float in their pedal disc.

Fascinatingly, this need for a float helps explain one of the more surprising discoveries to have come out of Helm’s research, which is that many of the animals that inhabit the neuston are not particularly closely related to other free-swimming species. Instead, they are descended from species that usually exist attached to the bottom of the sea that have migrated upwards, meaning that the neuston is, in a very real sense, what Helm dubs “an inverted sea floor” clinging to the ocean’s surface.

This unexpected evolutionary link between the ocean’s surface and the sea floor echoes the growing awareness of the neuston’s role in connecting ocean ecosystems more generally. Many animals from other parts of the ocean rely upon it for food: numerous species of fish and fish larvae feed in the neuston, as do turtles and oceangoing birds such as fulmars, shearwaters, storm petrels and some albatrosses. The neuston also provides vital nutrition for many of the species that ascend each night from deeper waters to feed as part of the diel migration.

The neuston also plays a critical role in the life cycles of many fish, whose larvae spend time near the surface before migrating to other parts of the ocean as they mature. “The ocean surface is an incredibly important nursery ground for diverse species of fish,” says Helm. “Deep sea viper fish can be found at the surface when they’re very young. Many seahorses and pipefish, mahi mahi and billfish also seek out the ocean surface when they’re young.”

It’s likely many of the fish that spend time at the surface as juveniles do so because it is safer than deeper waters. Some shelter among the stinging tentacles of bluebottles and porpita, while others hide under floating mats of sargassum. Others join the many species that congregate around driftwood and other floating debris in search of food, protection or simply a scratching posts with which to remove parasites.

Plastic and the neuston

But wood and sargassum are not the only kinds of debris in the sea. Although most of the more than 12m tonnes of plastic that ends up in the oceans every year sinks, a considerable amount of that which remains accumulates in the subtropical gyres, huge current systems that circulate in the centre of the Indian Ocean, the North and South Atlantic and the North and South Pacific.

The regions at the centres of the gyres are often called garbage patches, but Helm rejects that label, arguing they are in fact neuston environments that have been invaded by plastic. Nonetheless, samples taken when long-distance swimmer Ben Lecomte swam through the North Pacific garbage patch in 2019 showed plastic and neustonic life clustered together.

This intermingling of plastic and neustonic life has severe impacts on species that feed upon the neuston. Unable to distinguish fragments of plastic from food, fish, turtles and other animals consume it, resulting in malnutrition and passing toxins into the food chain.

The effects of this can be catastrophic: Laysan albatrosses feed almost five tonnes of plastic to their chicks every year, while on Lord Howe Island plastic appears to be connected to rising mortality among shearwater chicks.

The effect of plastics upon the neuston itself seem to be more complex, however. While animals such as fish and buoy barnacles are likely to suffer adverse effects from ingesting plastic, larger pieces of floating plastic have the potential to provide shelter to some fish and fish larvae and appear to benefit sea skaters and other species that require objects on which to lay their eggs.

The effects of technologies designed to remove plastics from the ocean on the neuston also remain unclear. Partly as a result of Helm’s advocacy, Ocean Cleanup have adjusted their technology to minimise its impact on neustonic life.

But Helm is unconvinced. “I think it’s difficult to assess whether this technology is harming neuston. We don’t understand these animals … So while they may have made efforts that are perhaps trending in the right direction, I’m sceptical that can be stated with any confidence.”

Others are less concerned, believing the neuston’s dispersed distribution is likely to protect it against significant harm. Although she says her views may change if the operation scales up in the future, Swadling points to the fact Ocean Cleanup’s operation has only cleared a tiny fraction of the North Pacific gyre and says “the effect to date will be negligible.”

Nor is plastic the only area where our understanding of the human impact on the neuston remains worryingly incomplete. Oil and chemical spills have the potential to adversely affect neustonic life, as do rising air and ocean temperatures. Yet in a reminder of how little we know about the neuston, Swadling says that not only is she unaware of a single experiment gauging the thermal tolerance of neustonic organisms, our knowledge of the ecosystem is so incomplete that we don’t even possess a useful baseline from which to measure change.

To overcome these gaps in our knowledge, scientists are increasingly utilising the power of citizen science. Helm helped establish Go Sea, a Nasa-funded community that allows both scientists and the public to report sightings of surface life, and in collaboration with SeaKeepers has been helping train yachters to take samples of the neuston. Meanwhile the University of NSW is developing Bluebottle Watch, a bluebottle forecasting system that will use public sightings, ocean surveys, laboratory experiments and computer modelling to track and anticipate bluebottle swarms.

Nonetheless, there is no question that this crucial ecosystem deserves more attention. “People think of the open ocean as an empty environment, but it’s absolutely not,” says Pitt. “Just because we can’t see what’s going on doesn’t mean it’s not important.”

More than 100 dolphins have become stranded in the shallow waters around Cape Cod on Friday in what an animal welfare group is calling “the largest single mass stranding event” in the organization’s 25-year history.

A group of Atlantic white-sided dolphins were found Friday in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, about 100 miles south-east of Boston, in an area called the Gut – or Great Island at the Herring River – which experts have said is the site of frequent strandings, due in part to its hook-like shape and extreme tidal fluctuations.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare, which rescues and rehabilitates animals, described the area as “the epicenter of our mass strandings” in a Facebook post.

The team of 25 animal-welfare workers and 100 trained volunteers had a rescue operation in place by an hour after high tide on Friday evening, Stacey Hedman, the fund’s communications director, told CNN.

“We had 125 Atlantic white-sided dolphins strand and 10 died before we arrived,” Hedman said in an email to CNN on Friday.

“We estimate 115 live dolphins, and we’re continuing to encourage them further out of the shallow mudflats,” Hedman told CNN Friday evening. “The tide in this area can be 10, 11 ft, and can make a dramatic difference in just a few hours.”

Misty Niemeyer, the organization’s stranding coordinator, said rescuers faced many challenges Friday including difficult mud conditions and the dolphins being spread out over a large area.

“It was a 12-hour exhausting response in the unrelenting sun, but the team was able to overcome the various challenges and give the dolphins their best chance at survival,” Niemeyer said in a statement.

The team started out on foot, herding the creatures into deeper waters and then used three small boats equipped with underwater pingers, according to the organization.

“The plan, given the number, is to triage and aim to support animals, refloat and herd as many as possible,” Hedman said. “Luckily, it is cooler today, but these animals will risk sunburn and overheating until the tide rises, and then we have the challenge of herding them into deeper water.”

The group also had the support of Whale and Dolphin Conservation, the Center for Coastal Studies, AmeriCorps of Cape Cod and the New England Aquarium.

Emmanuel Macron’s centrist grouping was fighting for survival this weekend before the first round of France’s high-stakes snap election, which could see the far-right National Rally (RN) become the biggest force in parliament.

Macron, who warned last week that France risked “civil war” if Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration RN, or the leftwing New Popular Front coalition, came to power, said at the European summit in Brussels that “uninhibited racism and antisemitism” had been unleashed in France.

But his strategy of stoking a climate of fear, in which his centrists are presented as the only rational force to hold back the breakdown of French society, is seen as backfiring.

Antoine Bristielle, the director of opinion at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès thinktank, said that since Macron called the election, France’s political future was extremely difficult to read. “Macron is more and more unpredictable,” he said. “It’s as if he’s running the country like he’s in a Netflix series – and has to put a cliffhanger at the end of each episode.”

Macron called the parliamentary poll after his centrist party was trounced by the far-right RN in the European election, saying it would “clarify” the political landscape. But even figures close to the president acknowledge that many of his own voters are uneasy over the resulting political turmoil and feel Macron himself has created chaos.

The exact results of the two-round election, with a high turnout expected in the first round on Sunday, are complex to predict. But the RN is riding on a wave of support. Polls show the party taking the greatest share of seats, followed by the left alliance, ahead of Macron’s centrists.

Political analysts say France is entering uncharted waters. If Le Pen’s party manages to go from its current 88 seats to an absolute majority of 289, it would form a far-right government and Macron would have to share power. Equally, the RN could win the largest number of seats but fall short of an absolute majority. Macron could then find himself with a hung parliament unable to produce a stable majority to govern the European Union’s second economy and its top military power.

Christelle Craplet, director of opinion at BVA pollsters, said that “the dynamique for the RN is strong”. She described a polarised mood in France. “Many of Macron’s core electorate are wondering why he dissolved parliament and called this election,” she said.

“There is incomprehension and anxiety, particularly among older voters who make up the core of Macron’s electorate. But equally, RN voters feel a sense of hope and satisfaction at this election. RN voters want change. Polling shows it’s not just passing anger or disgust at politics, they adhere to the party’s positions, saying they want to see things change in France, that they’re let down by political parties and feel why not try the RN.”

She said: “On the left, voters are also expressing a great deal of worry, because the left in France has historically constructed itself in opposition to the RN.”

Macron’s lack of popularity is at the centre of the election race. Centrist candidates for his Renaissance party have deliberately published posters without his name or face. “People detest you,” the former Renaissance MP Patrick Vignal was reported by Le Monde to have told Macron, summing up the mood on the ground. Most centrists wanted Macron to keep a low-profile during the campaign, to avoid the sense of a referendum against the president, but he has continued to give interviews and make public comments almost daily.

Macron was first elected in 2017 on a vow to defend progressive ideals and revolutionise the workings of French politics. Many voters he won from the centre-left have felt increasingly alienated during his second term, after he forced through of a rise in the pension age, as well as a hardline immigration law. Macron’s promise, in a recent letter to the French people, to govern differently, has not been taken seriously by voters.

Bristielle said that a feeling of rejection of Macron had been building over time and this was seen in his one-time voters from the centre-left. “That feeling is very linked to his personality and his way of doing politics, particularly [in] his second term. It is about pension changes, immigration law, but also what is seen to be a lack of willing on environmental issues and even on feminism, such as his support for Gérard Depardieu.” Macron faced anger from feminists and the left last year when he described the actor Dépardieu – who is under formal investigation for rape and was at the time facing fresh scrutiny for sexist comments – as the target of a “manhunt”.

The political scientist Jérôme Jaffré told Le Figaro last week there was a “visceral hostility” towards Macron among working-class voters. The president had hoped that the lightning three-week campaign would help him recover the support he lost in the European elections; instead, polls suggest it has fallen further.

Whether the left alliance can now make solid gains in parliament will depend on the results of the runoffs on 7 July.

I had a very happy childhood – I know that’s against the law. Everybody is suited to certain times of life and I was very suited to being a child. I am very suited to having no responsibilities.

I was really looking forward to my first day at kindergarten. I was only five. The day ended with me sitting in the corner with a Band-Aid over my mouth and holding up a sign saying: “I am a chatterbox.” Now I get paid for what I was punished for.

I grew up in a small town in New Jersey – a very beautiful, old pre-revolutionary war town. There was a portrait of George Washington in every single public room of every single building in the entire town. George Washington was a big part of my childhood.

Algebra was the end of school for me. I only had half a brain. Fractions were hard enough. I still count on my fingers.

I stopped playing the cello after my grandmother gave me a Pablo Casals record. When I heard what could be done on that instrument I thought, forget it, I could never do that. I am a perfectionist – and not just with myself.

Nothing is more contagious than a bad idea.

Happiness is a sensation, a fleeting thing. To me, it’s a pleasure, and there are moments of pleasure and sometimes even days of pleasure. I’m not like, “Why am I not happy all the time?” That’s a thing that came from Los Angeles.

I am a very angry person. I am angry almost all the time, especially when I’m not alone. I know my anger is disproportionate and I don’t express it. I knew from a really young age: do not act on this.

It’s imperative to me that people I spend time with have a good sense of humour. I don’t mean that they’re funny. I just mean that they know that things can be funny. Most things, other than tragedy, of which there is an over-abundance, are funny.

I hate money. I hate it physically; I hate having to earn it. But I’m also extremely materialistic, so I hate money, but I love things, you know? Like clothes, apartments…

People used to say, “If I was a millionaire…” Now they say, “If I was a billionaire…” I always say to these people: “Do you know how much a billion is?” And they really don’t. A couple of years ago I heard the word trillion. No one should ever use that word unless they are an astronomer.

Romantic relationships are not choices, they are some chemical response you have to someone. Friendships are, to me, the most important relationships in life, because they are the only wholly chosen relationships. I believe I am an excellent friend.

Toni Morrison was a very close friend of mine. She probably had the biggest influence on me – she was one of the few people I actually listened to. When she died I spoke at her memorial service. I said: “For more than 40 years she was at least two of my four closest friends.” She was also the only wise person I have ever known and she just had this immense humanity. She once said to me, “You are always right, but never fair.” What she meant was I don’t give everybody the same credence for just being human. And that’s true, I don’t. But she did.

I find any food preparation to be immensely tedious. But, of course, I love to eat.

I absolutely don’t care about how I’m remembered. I think people who care about this believe in life after death, which means you don’t believe in death. To me, it’s like someone asking me what I’d like for dinner after I die. You know what? I’m good.

An Evening with Fran Lebowitz is in selected UK venues from 28 October, fane.co.uk/fran-lebowitz

America was meant to be Britain’s route to the sunlit uplands of Brexit. Then, after hopes of a free trade deal evaporated, successive Conservative governments have set their sights lower, by trying to forge closer ties with individual US states.

Now the civil servants responsible for delivering those state-level deals have been let go, in what a furious British businessman described as “an act of arson”.

More than one-sixth of trade posts within British consulates in the US have been axed, with 24 people losing their jobs and other vacancies left unfilled, out of 150 posts. The decision was taken barely two weeks before Rishi Sunak called the general election.

Many of the trade teams, based in the nine consulates across the US, had worked on trade pacts with Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, jetting around America to sign memorandums of understanding with governors of states including Florida, Indiana and Oklahoma.

But more importantly, according to British business leaders in the US, the regional trade directors and their staff had decades of experience and had built up contacts with American businesses from Google and Meta to the heads of Hollywood studios.

Jules Ehrhardt, a designer and investor, said there was “outrage and disbelief in the British business community” at the decision.

“They are tossing out collective centuries of relational and institutional knowledge core to the UK-US trading relationship,” he said. Ehrhardt moved to the US in 2012 to open the American arm of Ustwo, a digital design studio behind award-winning games such as Monument Valley, and worked with Google, Nike and Twitter, before founding a venture capital firm, FKTRY.

He said the consulate directors had “served as the connective tissue” between British and American business leaders, making introductions, giving advice and lending their expertise. “We shot ourselves in both feet by undermining Britain’s ‘gateway to Europe’ status for American companies following Brexit, and were told to go west, and now we’ve self-elected a lobotomy,” Ehrhardt said.

“This [is an] act of arson in the final stages of this government. We claim it is a special relationship, yet remove our people at the very heart of it.”

Allan Rooney, founder of Rooney Law, which has helped more than 300 companies from the UK, Ireland and Australia enter the US market, said the directors were “absolutely critical in building strong and mutually beneficial trade relationships between UK and US businesses”.

“The facilitation of strategic introductions that these directors provide is a massive benefit,” he said. “They plug companies into a market they otherwise don’t know anything about. They familiarise them via trade missions and other methods to support and understand the market and the subtle differences between the UK and the US ‘doing business’ culture. Removing that layer will impact trade relations.

“More than a million Brits are employed by American businesses – I can’t think of a more important trade relationship post-Brexit. It’s critical. And I think the removal of a very large swathe of intellectual capital and institutional knowledge is potentially worrisome. It could strain the trade teams who are already short on resources.”

Another US-based British business executive said that there was very little stability in the UK’s consulates because they were usually staffed by Foreign & Commonwealth Office officials who stayed in the US for two- or three-year periods. “It’s a constant revolving door,” the executive said. “Those are the people we lean on.”

William Bain, head of trade policy at the British Chambers of Commerce, said: “If we want to grow our economy then we need to boost trade, so it’s a concern if cuts are being made to the team supporting key export sectors in the US, our second largest trading partner.

“We need to scale up, not slash, our support for companies seeking to enter or raise market share in the US. This is especially true as we hope to see deals on critical minerals and digital trade reached with the US federal government in the next year or so.”

Boris Johnson, Liam Fox and other Brexiters had hoped that signing a trade deal with the US would provide economic growth for the UK, but Johnson failed to persuade either Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Last June, Rishi Sunak signed an “Atlantic declaration” with Biden which allowed UK firms access to some US subsidies.

State-level deals have seen some recognition of British professional qualifications and removed some regulatory barriers.

A UK government spokesperson said: “The UK’s trade and investment teams in America are fully focused on furthering UK interests in the US, driving investment and strengthening our trading relationship with our closest ally. We continually keep our structures under review to ensure they deliver maximum impact for the UK, ensure the highest quality service to businesses, while offering taxpayers the very best value for money.”

The New York Times’s editorial board has called on Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race after a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump.

Biden’s poor performance sent leading Democrats into a panic on Thursday night, after the US president appeared shaky and at points struggled to finish sentences. It amplified fears about his age and fitness for office that it had been hoped the debate would allay.

Shortly after the debate, senior Democrats including the vice-president, Kamala Harris, acknowledged Biden’s “slow start” but emphasised his “strong finish”, while others privately suggested he should step aside.

In a move that will add further pressure on the White House, the New York Times editorial board said in an opinion piece on Friday that “the greatest public service [Biden] can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election”.

“The president appeared on Thursday night as the shadow of a great public servant,” it said. “He struggled to explain what he would accomplish in a second term. He struggled to respond to [Trump’s] provocations. He struggled to hold [Trump] accountable for his lies, his failures and his chilling plans. More than once, he struggled to make it to the end of a sentence.”

“Biden is not the man he was four years ago,” it added.

Earlier in the day, the leading New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman called on his “friend” to step aside. “Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election,” he said.

The former US president Barack Obama defended Biden in a social media post on Friday. “Bad debate nights happen,” he said. “But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”

In a campaign stop in North Carolina on Friday, Biden appeared far more energised and coherent. He acknowledged his widely panned debate performance.

“I don’t walk as easily as I used to, I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to, I don’t debate as well as I used to,” Biden said. “But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth.”

The New York Times has become the first US newspaper to call on Biden to drop out of the race, but other influential publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Atlantic have published op-eds by their leading columnists calling on Biden to step aside. Journal columnist Peggy Noonan said allowing Biden to continue “looks like elder abuse”.

In 2020, the New York Times jointly endorsed Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary.

In response to the NYT’s call, the Biden campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond told CNN: “The last time Joe Biden lost the New York Times editorial board’s endorsement, it turned out pretty well for him.”

Biden and Trump are neck and neck in national polls for November. A New York Times/Sienna poll published this week before the debate found that Trump had a three-point lead over Biden. In the “battleground” states that are key to winning the White House, Trump is ahead in six out of seven, according to RealClearPolling.

The Conservative party deputy chair Angela Richardson called the sewage crisis a “political football” and claimed opposition parties and activists had put Tory MPs in physical danger by campaigning on the issue.

Richardson, who is standing for re-election in Guildford, where the River Wey was recently found to have 10 times the safe limit of E coli, also suggested the only reason people were talking about the problem was “because the Conservatives let everyone know it was happening”.

Speaking at a hustings held last week by Zero Carbon Guildford, Richardson was asked about her party’s record on sewage spills. “The reason we’re all talking about this is because the Conservatives let everyone know it was happening,” she said. “If you go and have a look at the manifestos in 2019 you will not find anything about water quality. It is a very, very convenient hobby horse to jump on and attack Conservative MPs for voting against things that would not work.”

She added that activists putting up blue plaques around the town criticising her record on the issue in 2021 “resulted in a police helicopter above my house and police sniffer dogs through my house”.

“I was in danger because of the actions taken by political parties. It is no laughing matter,” she went on. “So my suggestion to everybody is to actually look at what we’re trying to do, working together and not turning this into a political football that’s actually dangerous.”

In March it was revealed that raw sewage was discharged into waterways for 3.6m hours in 2023 by England’s privatised water firms, more than double the figure in 2022.

The issue has become a theme of this election, as opposition parties take aim at ministers’ failure to get to grips with the crisis.

Research by the Rivers Trust found that sewage was spilled for 1,372 hours in the Guildford constituency last year, and recent water testing by local campaigners found E coli in the river last month at nearly 10 times the safe rate in government standards.

Richardson’s comments have caused outrage among campaigners. “Every single river in England is now polluted and one of the largest sources of that pollution is the water industry, so for her to even suggest this is some sort of hobby horse or convenient political issue is wrong,” said the environmental campaigner Feargal Sharkey.

“It is clearly an act of desperation that instead of taking responsibility for the environmental decimation caused by their own incompetence they are now trying to shift blame away and point the finger at others. It is the dying, decaying voice of a discredited government.”

The campaign group Surfers Against Sewage said: “Sewage pollution has become a core election issue because people love being in and around water but they are getting sick when they do it. We have been campaigning on this issue for nearly 35 years, because we surfers, swimmers and water users have been getting sick when we do what we love.

“We don’t want anybody to feel in danger and do not condone any actions that threaten any individuals,” the spokesperson said. “But as campaigners and indeed as citizens in a democracy it is our duty to hold elected representatives to account for the decisions they have made in a proportionate and effective manner.”

Richardson told the Observer her support for government legislation on the issue showed her “commitment to tackle storm overflows, which are now fully monitored thanks to this Conservative government”. She claimed that opposition parties and activists have wrongly “allowed the public to believe that we voted to put sewage into our waterways”.

She confirmed the police response to the Observer, saying it occurred on 30 October 2021 – 15 days after the murder of MP David Amess – and came after the police received “credible intelligence that a protest would target a local MP’s home”.

She added: “While my property was then deemed safe, no elected representative of any party should feel their safety is under threat in order to represent their constituents.” Surrey Police confirmed that it responded to a report of a suspicious incident that day with a helicopter and dog units, but that “the situation was thoroughly investigated, and officers found no cause for concern”.