An incendiary device hidden in a DHL package that caught fire in Germany in July was due to be sent by air to the UK as part of a suspected Russian sabotage plot that may also have been a dry run for a similar attack on the US and Canada.

The device, reported to have been secreted in shipments of massage pillows and erotic gadgets, started a fire on the ground in Leipzig that was feared to be capable of downing a plane – similar to a package that ignited at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham on 22 July.

Sources indicated the suspect package in Leipzig was also bound for the UK, though why the UK was chosen as the destination for the two devices, originally sent from Lithuania, is not fully clear.

An unconfirmed German report suggests they were addressed to fake recipients at real addresses in the UK, as were two other incendiary devices found in Poland, one of which Polish media said caught fire at a warehouse in Warsaw while the other was successfully intercepted.

Metropolitan police counter-terror officers declined to comment. The only official statement in the UK about the alleged plot was made last month, when counter-terror police confirmed a device had caught fire in Birmingham, nobody was hurt, and it was dealt with “by staff and the local fire brigade at the time”.

Four people were arrested in Poland as part of the alleged plot, it was announced last week, which the country’s chief prosecutor said was intended to commit sabotage using “camouflaged explosives and dangerous materials” in Europe. Two other individuals are also wanted by investigators in the country.

Another intention, according to the Polish authorities, was “to test the transfer channel” for similar parcels to be sent to the US and Canada, to see if similarly dangerous and destructive attacks could be reproduced elsewhere.

British police and officials, as well as their European counterparts in Germany, Poland and Lithuania, strongly suspect that Russia was behind the attacks as part of an effort to cause “mayhem” in the west in retaliation for western military support to Ukraine.

Last month, Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, warned that Russia’s GRU military intelligence appeared to be on “a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets: we’ve seen arson, sabotage and more”.

His German counterpart, Thomas Haldenwang, told the Bundestag that had the Leipzig package started burning during a flight “it would have resulted in a crash”. Although Haldenwang did not say Russia was behind the fire when he gave evidence, he accused the Kremlin’s spy agencies of “putting people’s lives at risk”.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the massage items in the suspect packages were booby trapped with a magnesium-based flammable substance. Magnesium fires are notoriously difficult to put out and are worsened if water is applied; special dry powder extinguishers should be used instead.

Russia has denied involvement in the alleged plot. “These are traditional unsubstantiated insinuations from the media,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the US newspaper.

Depending on whom you ask, they are the boost that Russian forces need to make a significant breakthrough in Ukraine, or they are simple cannon fodder, destined for repatriation in body bags.

After weeks of speculation, Nato and the Pentagon have confirmed that around 10,000 North Korean troops are in Russia, with most massing near Ukraine’s border in Kursk, where the Kremlin’s forces have struggled to repel a Ukrainian incursion.

US officials believe the North Koreans could enter the conflict within days, as the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, pleads with his country’s allies to “stop watching” while his troops prepare to confront a new and untested enemy.

It is too early to say how the Russian-North Korean “blood alliance” will change the dynamics of the conflict. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said Russia had been training them to use artillery, drones and “basic infantry operations, including trench clearing, indicating that they fully intend to use these forces in frontline operations”.

But not one of the young men drafted from Kim Jong-un’s regular army of around 1 million – the “strongest in the world”, according to Kim – have seen combat. And they will be fighting on unfamiliar territory, with new weapons and in uniforms bearing the flag of a country – Russia – they know little about.

While their arrival relieves pressure on Russia to draft more of its own citizens, with the US estimating that more than 500,000 Russians have been killed or wounded since the war started in February 2022 – experts believe the military dividends for the Kremlin will be limited.

North Korean pilots flew during the Vietnam war, and the country provided military advisers and air force personnel to Egypt during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, as well as military aid to Syria.

But North Korea has not fought in a major war since the early 1950s, when a three-year conflict between North and South ended in an uncomfortable truce but not a peace treaty.

The soldiers, thought to be mostly in their teens or early 20s, have been trained in mountainous North Korea and have no experience of the large, flat battlefields of Ukraine, according to experts.

Russia appears to have armed more than 7,000 North Korean soldiers positioned near the border with Ukraine with 60mm mortars, AK-12 rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles, anti-tank guided missiles and anti-tank grenade launchers, as well as night vision equipment, the Yonhap news agency said, citing Ukraine’s intelligence agency.

“This deployment is historic for North Korea, which has previously sent advisory or specialist groups abroad but never a large ground force,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US thinktank, said in an online post.

The North Korean forces in Russia are thought to include about 500 officers and a small number of generals, as well as members of the Storm Corps, elite troops who are better trained – and fed – than most of their comrades, who are poorly equipped and vulnerable to illness and malnutrition.

In 2017, a North Korean soldier who made a frantic escape across the border – barely surviving multiple gunshot wounds from his own side – was found by the South Korean doctors who saved him to have a 27cm intestinal worm and a host of other parasites in his system. His stomach contents reflected a poor diet – cheaper corn instead of rice – and this for a staff sergeant said to be from the relatively elite border guard. South Korean researchers in 2015 cited elevated rates of chronic hepatitis B and C, tuberculosis and parasites among North Korean defectors.

‘Most of them are unlikely to come back home alive’

Provided they survive, the transplanted troops could benefit from their time on the Ukrainian front, according to former North Korean soldiers who say many will see their tour as a source of pride. It will also an opportunity to earn extra money and, perhaps, secure better treatment for their families who, according to South Korean military intelligence, have been moved en masse to unknown locations to keep the deployment secret.

“They are too young and won’t understand exactly what it means,” said Lee Woong-gil, a former member of the Storm Corps who defected to the South in 2007. “They will just consider it an honour to be selected as the ones to go to Russia among the many North Korean soldiers. But I think most of them are unlikely to come back home alive.”

Most of their wages will go directly to the regime – potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign currency that is rumoured to form part of a deal Kim reached with Vladimir Putin this summer. Depending on how long the conflict lasts and the number of North Korean troops involved, their mutual defence agreement could include the transfer of sophisticated Russian weapons technology in return for North Korean ammunition, missiles and personnel.

Reports of dead and wounded soldiers would have little impact on the North Korean army – state media claimed last month that 1.4 million people had applied to join or return to the army in the space of a week. But significant losses would deal a blow to Kim should the news ever get past the country’s tightly controlled propaganda machine.

“Kim Jong-un is taking a big gamble,” said Ahn Chan-il, a former North Korean army first lieutenant who is now head of the World Institute for North Korean Studies, a thinktank in Seoul. “If there are no large casualty numbers, he will get what he wants to some extent. But things will change a lot if many of his soldiers die in battle.”

The coming weeks will tell if the North Korean troops are more than poorly prepared, unwitting mercenaries Kim has offered up to enrich and strengthen his regime.

Choi Jung-hoon, a former first lieutenant in North Korea’s army who now leads an activist group in Seoul, said his “heart ached” when he saw a Ukraine-released video purporting to show young North Korean soldiers lining up to collect their Russian military fatigues and equipment last month.

“None would think they are going to Russia to die,” Choi said. “But I think they’re cannon fodder because they will be sent to the most dangerous sites. I’m sure they will be killed.”

Agencies contributed reporting.

Edinburgh zoo has announced the birth of a pygmy hippo to rival Thailand’s internet hit, Moo Deng.

Khao Kheow open zoo’s Moo Deng went viral on social media earlier this year and fans became obsessed by her personality and charm.

However, now Scotland has its very own new arrival, which was announced on Monday.

The zoo posted to X on 4 November: “Moo Deng? Who deng? Introducing … Haggis.

“Otto and Gloria have welcomed an ADORABLE pygmy hippo calf! She is doing well, but we’ll be keeping the hippo house closed for the time being so that our expert keepers can keep a close eye on mum and baby at this sensitive time.”

Jonny Appleyard, hoofstock team leader at Edinburgh zoo, said: “Haggis is doing really well so far and it is amazing to see her personality beginning to shine already.

“The first 30 days are critical for her development so the pygmy hippo house will be closed for now to allow us to keep a close eye on mum and baby at this sensitive time.

“While Thailand’s Moo Deng has become a viral global icon, it is important to remember that pygmy hippos are incredibly rare.

“It is great to have our own little ambassador right here in Edinburgh to connect with our visitors and help raise awareness of the challenges the species face in the wild.”

The female calf was born on 30 October.

Pygmy hippos are native to forests and swamps in west Africa. It is estimated that only 2,500 are left in the wild due to habitat loss.

To celebrate Haggis’s arrival, Edinburgh zoo is offering people the chance to meet her, and funds raised will go towards animal care.

Edinburgh zoo’s X account playfully apologised for pitting Haggis and Moo Deng against one another later on Monday, posting: “Sorry guys this is our official notes app apology.

“We were wrong to pit Haggis and Moo Deng against each other.

“There is space in this world for two beautiful pygmy hippo divas and we should celebrate them all.

“Sorry to Moo Deng. Let’s work it out on the remix.”

Moo deng literally means “bouncy pork” in Thai and refers to a type of meatball.

The Republican mega-donors Dick and Liz Uihlein, who are the third largest donors in this year’s US presidential election, have sought information about who employees at their company Uline will be voting for in Tuesday’s ballot.

A screenshot seen by the Guardian shows how employees at the private Wisconsin paper and office products distributor were asked to take part in what was called an anonymous survey to track who the employees were voting for on 5 November.

Below a picture of a blue donkey and a red elephant, the online survey says: “We’re curious – how does Uline compare to the current national polls?”

While the button employees are meant to click says the survey is anonymous, the webpage also says that employees “may be asked to sign in”. “This is solely to verify you are a Uline employee and to ensure one submission per person. Your name is not tracked, and your answers remain anonymous.”

Public records show that Dick Uihlein has donated almost $80m to the Restoration Pac in the 2024 cycle, which supports the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, and other Republican candidates.

One employee who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution said the request felt like an infringement on their privacy and that people inside the company were angered by it. Another said multiple employees had privately questioned how anonymous the survey really was. There was an assumption that Democrats would not answer the survey truthfully, a source close to Uline told the Guardian.

For Uline workers, there is little doubt about who their bosses want to win in this week’s election.

The billionaire Uihleins are staunchly pro-Trump and anti-abortion and have had significant influence on local and national politics, including changes to state laws that will make it more difficult for states to pass pro-choice legislation or changes to state constitutions in the wake of the Dobbs decision that overruled national abortion protections.

The voter survey is particularly significant because Uline’s operations are headquartered in the critical swing state of Wisconsin, which is one of three so-called “blue wall” states that are seen as necessary for Kamala Harris to win the White House. While Joe Biden won Wisconsin in the 2020 race for the White House, Trump took it in 2016, solidifying its status as a swing state.

Asked whether the request for voting information might be seen as intimidating, Liz Uihlein responded in a statement to the Guardian: “This is stupid! The survey was for fun after enduring two years of this presidential election. The results were anonymous and participation was voluntary. This is completely benign.”

Danielle Lang, senior director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, said she did not believe the request was benign.

“Employers should know to be very careful around pressure on employees, about whether they vote and certainly who they vote for,” Lang said.

“Regardless of intentions, this very clearly could create anxiety for many employees,” she said. “Employees rely on employers for their livelihood.”

Federal and some state laws protect employees from voter intimidation and coercion, including by employers. Under federal law, voters who need help at the voting booth because of a disability may choose so-called “assisters” under the Voting Rights Act. But those assisters may not be employers or union reps, Lang said.

“I think that is an implicit recognition of how much power employers can have over employees and the undue influence they can wield,” Lang said.

In Wisconsin, it is also criminal to solicit a person to show how their vote is cast.

A spokesperson declined to answer the Guardian’s question about the results of the survey, which were due by 25 October.

The government argument that just one-third of farmers will be affected by the new inheritance tax rules is in direct conflict with data produced by the its own environment department, according to the head of the farmer’s union, as the row over inheritance tax for farmers continued.

The announcement in Rachel Reeves’s budget last week of plans to remove the Agricultural Property Relief inheritance tax exemption from farms worth more than £1m has been met with a storm of fury from across the farming industry and suggestions of “militant protest”.

In an emergency meeting with the environment secretary, Steve Reed, on Monday, the NFU’s president, Tom Bradshaw, demanded the new rules be withdrawn and put to consultation with the agricultural industry and Defra experts so that a solution that does not sting family farms can be found.

The original aim of the tax, when brought in, said experts, was to stop wealthy people buying up farmland to avoid inheritance tax. Prominent farming figures James Dyson and Jeremy Clarkson have come out against the tax change. But some experts including tax policy writer Dan Neidle and Paul Johnson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies said it would be a good idea to close the loophole.

However, the Treasury numbers the analysis is based on are being questioned. The chancellor last week claimed that 72% of farms would be unaffected. The NFU argues that cash-poor, medium-sized family farms will be unaffordably hit if the rate remains at £1m, and pointed to Defra figures, which it said indicated that the true percentage of farms affected by the APR changes will be 66%.

The Treasury’s assumption was based on former claims for APR but many assets on farmland were claimed for under a separate inheritance tax relief scheme – BPR, according to the union, and the new regime joins these schemes together. The NFU said that the Treasury has therefore undervalued many of the UK’s farms and the Defra data is more accurate. This data was worked out recently when farms were applying for subsidy after the UK left the EU farm payments system and they had to register their value and size with Defra.

Bradshaw said the Treasury and Defra agreed in the meeting to go away and come up with the “true figure”.

Bradshaw said farmers were furious after Reed promised before the budget that there would be no changes to APR, so businesses were unable to prepare for the shock.

He told journalists on Monday: “They do not understand the immediate impacts this having to intergenerational farms. Some very, very concerned successful businesses have a parent involved who is in their 80s but the person running the farm is in their 50s. The assets are still in the ownership of the older family member. We have seen some in ill health who will not live seven years to utilise the gifting rules. It is unbelievable the pressure they are putting on the industry. To make this change now, to rip the rug out from under the farming industry, I don’t see how they can justify it.”

The NFU usually advises its members not to protest but Bradshaw warned that “militant” action may be taken over this.

“The outrage from rural communities is like nothing we have ever seen before. They are talking about militant action. We’ve always said, don’t protest, but we can’t say to people don’t do that now. We will be doing our mass lobby for people who have a meeting with a constituency MP but I know others are doing other things,” he said, adding that 190,000 people have signed a petition against the changes.

The NFU policy chief, Nick von Westenholz, explained: “In a very best-case scenario with spouses using all of their allowances it’s true they can claim up to £3m but in most instances that will not be the case. Not all farm business owners are married. One of the spouses could have other assets which use up the £1m threshold. So it is not a reasonable figure to say that it will be available for most farms. Good policy should be based on the reasonable worst case scenarios rather than best case scenario”.

A government spokesperson said: “We understand concerns about changes to Agricultural Property Relief and the Defra secretary of state and exchequer secretary to the Treasury met with NFU president Tom Bradshaw today. Ministers made clear that the vast majority of those claiming relief will not be affected by these changes. They will be able to pass the family farm down to their children just as previous generations have always done.

“This is a fair and balanced approach that protects the family farm while also fixing the public services that we all rely on. We remain committed to working with the NFU and listening to farmers.”

The degradation of the world’s soils and landscapes is threatening human life, and must be addressed as a matter of urgency, the government of Saudi Arabia has said.

Neglect of the land is wiping trillions of dollars from global economies, hampering agricultural production, disrupting water supplies, threatening children with poor nutrition, and destroying vital ecosystems, according to the country’s deputy environment minister.

Land degradation, and ways to combat the problem, will come into sharp focus at a global summit to be held in the nation’s capital, Riyadh, in December.

The conference of the parties (Cop) to the UN convention on combating desertification (CCD), which takes place every two years, is often an overlooked international meeting, sparsely attended compared with the Cops on climate and on biodiversity.

But as this year’s host, Saudi Arabia is planning to put the issue of land management in the spotlight, inviting senior ministers and heads of government from around the world, in an attempt to bring in some financial muscle. In so doing, the country, often accused of obstructive behaviour at climate Cops, will offer an unusual glimpse of its own environmental priorities, in a world increasingly imperilled by global heating and related water shortages.

Osama Faqeeha, deputy environment minister in the kingdom’s government, said people should not be misled by the term desertification, which could appear a narrow concern limited to arid countries. In fact, the CCD should be understood to cover all of the globe’s vulnerable lands, and efforts to rescue and protect them.

“This Cop is about land degradation, land preservation and drought,” he told the Guardian, in a rare interview. “It’s very important for water security, food security, biodiversity, and human community. We need to go back to basics and remind the world of this connection we all have with the land.”

“Desertification tells us that we have not exercised good land management,” said Faqeeha, who will take a prominent role assisting the Cop president designate, the Saudi environment and water minister, Abdulrahman al-Fadley. “We need to take a comprehensive view. Land degradation is universal. More than 2bn hectares globally are degraded. Already, 55% of countries report land degradation, and there is not enough reporting … The cost of land degradation is a staggering $6tn a year.”

On current trends, he warned, the amount of land affected could triple by 2050, without strong action to restore fertility and prevent land from being over-exploited.

The impacts can be felt not just on the loss of species, but also on human nutrition, he added. Children eating the same amount of food now as a few decades ago are receiving far fewer of the vital nutrients they need, because degraded soils produce food with less nutritional value.

The UNCCD was forged in Rio in 1992, alongside the UN framework convention on climate change, and the UN convention on biodiversity, and each hold separate Cops – annually, in the case of the climate, and every other year for the other two. Cop29 on the climate will be held in Azerbaijan from 11 November, while Cop16 on biodiversity finishes in Colombia this week. Their findings will feed into CCD Cop16 in Riyadh. Of the three Cops, it has been “the least understood”, said Faqeeha.

Harjeet Singh, global engagement director at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said the Saudi government must address the climate at the Riyadh talks. “As droughts, land degradation, and desertification continue to intensify due to rising temperatures, particularly in vulnerable regions like the Middle East, aligning climate action with sustainable land management must be central to the discussions,” he said.

“Saudi Arabia will face significant international scrutiny over whether it will take bold action by committing to phase out fossil fuels or restrict its efforts to promoting tree-planting initiatives and land restoration practices.”

But Saudi is reluctant to link the CCD talks to the climate, despite the obvious interaction between desertification and the massive changes to the world’s hydrological cycles that are wreaked by the climate crisis, and that are becoming increasingly obvious in the form of extreme weather, heatwaves, droughts and floods. Saudi’s climate responsibilities, as holder of the world’s biggest oil reserves, will not form part of the discussion.

“This Cop is not about Saudi Arabia, it’s about the whole world and global challenges,” Faqeeha said. “Other countries have an equal voice – we are just a facilitator.”

Meanwhile at the climate summit this year, nations will discuss the need to raise trillions of dollars for developing countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather. Saudi, with its extraordinary oil wealth, is still classed as a developing country at the climate talks. But for the first time, Saudi and fellow petrostates will be asked by developed country leaders at Cop29 to contribute to funds for the poor world – a demand the government is likely to refuse.

Faqeeha insisted these questions were not connected to the UNCCD Cop. He said the key source of funds for protecting lands against degradation must be the private sector, which would be extensively represented by investors and business leaders at the Riyadh meeting.

Faqeeha said Saudi was a good place to hold a desertification Cop. “This region is highly impacted by desertification,” he said. “It makes sense to hold this Cop in an arid country.” He said the kingdom’s government had already embarked on a series of initiatives to restore land, protect water sources and conserve biodiversity.

For instance, the country is working to preserve a system of terraces on a mountain range parallel to the Red Sea, where rainfall is harvested. The Saudi Green Initiative has a target of restoring 40m hectares of degraded land by 2030.

Just as many countries agreed at the biodiversity Cop16 in Cali, Colombia, to conserve at least 30% of their land, Faqeeha hopes that countries will make commitments to restore their areas of highly degraded land at the CCD Cop. “Not all countries have targets yet on restoring lands,” he noted. “And we also need to prevent degradation, by better land management.”

How healthy are Europe’s soil and species?

More than 80% of habitats are in bad shape, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA), and only 27% of assessed species have a “good” conservation status.

What are farmers required to do to protect the environment?

Over the last few decades, the EU has brought in and built up directives to protect water, birds and habitats, and to manage nitrates. The rules that affect farmers range from limits on when nitrogen fertilisers can be applied to protections that keep some areas of nature free from farms altogether.

In 2021, the EU tied a new set of green strings to the common agriculture policy (CAP) subsidy scheme, most of which came into force in 2023, and devoted a greater chunk of the budget to green schemes. To receive CAP payments, farmers would have to comply with “good agricultural and environmental conditions” such as maintaining a ratio of permanent grassland to farmland, and protecting wetlands and peatlands.

But over the last year, many of the CAP’s green rules were weakened, delayed or deleted. The EU scrapped a requirement to devote a small percentage of farmland to features that are not directly productive, such as planting trees and letting fields lie fallow, and exempted all farms smaller than 10 hectares (25 acres) from the rules.

Another package – the Farm to Fork project – included a proposal for a more sustainable pesticide regulation, which would have solidified the European Commisson’s target to halve the use and risk of chemical pesticides by 2030. That was also withdrawn.

And the nature restoration law, a cornerstone of the EU’s green deal, was heavily watered down and only passed in June. It now sets targets to protect and restore nature but does not directly force farms to change. The law contains targets to rewet peatlands and help birds recover, for instance, but specifies that these are voluntary for farmers and landowners.

What else is the EU planning?

In September, farmers, retailers, consumer groups and environmentalists held strategic dialogues, at the suggestion of the commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and their shared vision is expected to feed into a plan that the commission will present in the coming months.

The proposal calls for “urgent, ambitious and feasible” change in farm and food systems, with financial support to help farmers get there. It also acknowledges that Europeans eat more animal protein than doctors and scientists recommend, and calls for a shift toward plant-based diets supported by better education, stricter marketing and voluntary buyouts of farms in regions that intensively rear livestock.

Does the EU have an obligation to clean up its farms?

The EU signed a global agreement in 2022 that promised to halt and even reverse biodiversity loss by the end of the decade. It has also promised to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

Neither goal will be possible without addressing the agriculture sector, which has faced less pressure to go green than many other parts of the economy, and made less progress. In the two decades from 2000 to 2020, EU member states slashed the greenhouse gas emissions from their energy supply by 40% but cut their agricultural emissions by just 10%. The transport sector made similarly slow progress.

Whatever happens next, one day historians will have to explain why a candidate who earlier this year had been presented as disciplined started to veer off into unrestrained racist rhetoric and dancing for 40 minutes to his own playlist. Was it age, as plenty of commentators have speculated? Was it a brilliant attempt to balance dehumanizing attacks on minorities with an effort to make himself look human?

A much more sinister explanation must be taken seriously. We still assume that we are witnessing two campaigns for the presidency. But what if we are witnessing one campaign and one slow-motion coup, whose organizers need to go through the motion of campaigning for the plan to work? Since winning at the ballot box does not matter, taking a break to listen to Pavarotti isn’t a problem; conversely, a festival of racism and conspiracy theories, as at Madison Square Garden, is not about convincing any undecided voter, but motivating committed Trumpists to go along with another coup attempt.

To be sure, this can also sound like conspiracy theory. The point is not prediction, but to call for preparedness. After all, there is an overwhelming number of reasons why, should Trump lose, he will once more try to take power anyway. His followers have long been primed to assume that evil Democrats will steal the election. The unchecked racism fits into a logic of far-right populism more generally: far-right populists claim that they, and they alone, represent what they call “the silent majority” or “the real people” (the very expression Trump used on January 6 to address his supporters).

If far-right populists do not win elections, the reason can only be that the majority of the electorate was silenced by someone (liberal elites, of course). Or, for that matter, people who are not “real people” – fake Americans – must have participated in the election to bring about an illegitimate outcome. This explains the Republican obsession with finding proof of “non-citizen” voting.

Dozens of lawsuits have already been launched to put election results into doubt. As in 2020 and early 2021, Trump is likely to make sharing his lies a test of loyalty.

Here analogies with other far-right populists are again illuminating: it is doubtful that all followers of the far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland truly believe that relatively liberal prime minister Donald Tusk had colluded with Russians to have the country’s president, a member of PiS, killed in a plane crash in Smolensk in 2010. But professing the Smolensk conspiracy theory was not about making an empirical statement; it became a means to signal membership of a political tribe.

In theory, Republicans could seize the chance at last to break with Trump, who, after all, has only delivered defeats to the party. He has stated that he will not run again (though it would of course be naive to take any of his promises at face value). Yet there were already plenty of incentives to get rid of Trump in early 2021, and still Republicans did not disown, let alone impeach, him.

Most worryingly, Maga members have been primed to resort to violence. Trump and his allies – including the world’s richest man, who just happens to be a rightwing extremist – have framed the election as an apocalyptic battle. If Democrats win, Musk has claimed, there will not be any proper elections ever after; they will bring in more foreigners to secure a permanent majority. It is already half forgotten that Trump held his first major rally this election cycle in Waco, Texas.

Who knows whether Trump can really mobilize large numbers of people on the streets; it might be enough to prolong a sense of chaos. Vance has claimed that the 2020 election was problematic, because so many citizens had doubts about its “integrity” and Democrats prevented a “debate” which the country needed to have (never mind that Republicans had created the doubts in the first place). How long a debate would Vance like, exactly? Incidents like the infamous Brooks Brothers riot, where rightwingers in fancy suits stopped a recount in Florida in 2000, might accompany this debate. After all, as Jack Smith has claimed, Trump campaign operatives in 2020 already issued the order: “Make them riot.”

The hope may well be that, if decisions are kicked to the correct court, things could still go Republicans’ way. Trumpists know from the US supreme court’s decisions about ballot access and immunity earlier that some parts of the judiciary have given up on any conventional legal logic; they are likely simply to deliver whatever benefits Trump. The conservative justices’ decision this past week allowing the removal of voters from the rolls in Virginia so close to the election – a clear break with precedent – might well have been a preview of what a court captured by Trumpists is willing to do.

To be sure, the system as a whole is less vulnerable than in 2020. What is officially known as the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 makes it harder to challenge results in Congress; the theory that legislatures could overturn the outcome – popular among Trumpists in 2020 – has not found much legal support. But since Trump has everything to lose (including his freedom, given the charges still pending), there’s every reason to think that he’ll try everything.

Processes intended to decontaminate noxious liquid landfill waste before it enters rivers and sewers have been found to increase the levels of some of the worst toxic chemicals, a study has shown.

Landfills are well known to be a main source of PFAS forever chemicals – or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances – but the new study shows that the treatment plants designed to clean up the liquid waste can instead boost the levels of banned PFAS such as PFOA and PFOS, in some cases by as much as 1,335%.

PFAS are a family of about 15,000 human-made chemicals with nonstick properties that are used in a wide range of consumer products and industrial processes. They can take thousands of years to break down in the environment and the handful that have been studied in detail have been found to be toxic, with PFOA and PFOS linked to cancers and other diseases. PFAS pollution is widespread, having been found in the remotest parts of the world, and it is thought every US citizen has it in their blood.

Using data from an Environment Agency investigation into landfill liquid waste, which is known as leachate, Dr David Megson from Manchester Metropolitan University, who co-authored the study found “that instead of removing the banned chemicals PFOS and PFOA our treatment plants are actually creating them … likely being formed from the transformation of other PFAS within a chemical soup”.

Megson is concerned that the understanding of what is going on in the UK at landfill sites is poor and that monitoring “only looks at a few specific PFAS, so we are only getting a tiny snapshot of what is actually out there and what impact it may be having”.

The study looked at the leachate from 17 historical and operational landfills, just a fraction of the total across the country. Pippa Neill from the Ends Report, a co-author of the study, said that “with potentially hundreds of landfill operators legally allowed to discharge their treated leachate into the environment” there is an “urgent need” for more research so that PFAS can be disposed of properly.

There is also “an urgent need to ban all PFAS globally, whether through the existing Stockholm convention or a new global treaty on PFAS”, according to Dr Sara Brosché, an adviser at the International Pollutants Elimination Network. “PFOS and PFOA were known by the producers to be toxic from the beginning of their use in consumer products, and they continue to poison the environment and our bodies many years after they have been regulated. A multitude of PFAS are now in use with little or no publicly disclosed information about where they are used or their health impacts.”

In an attempt to halt contamination, the European Commission is considering a groundbreaking proposal to regulate thousands of PFAS as one class, something that is being fiercely contested by the PFAS industry. The UK has not followed the EU’s lead, prompting dozens of the world’s leading PFAS experts to write directly to UK ministers on Thursday, urging the government to “take a more ambitious approach and follow the science … Regulating all PFAS as one group is the only way to tackle PFAS pollution”.

Dr Shubhi Sharma, a scientific researcher at the charity Chem Trust, said: “PFAS emissions from landfills can contaminate the surrounding groundwater and surface water and are linked to serious health risks, such as kidney and testicular cancer. The UK government must take immediate action to regulate this entire group of PFAS.”

Dr Daniel Drage, an associate professor at the University of Birmingham, is also concerned that the same thing is happening in a range of treatment systems.

“It’s paramount that we identify other treatment processes that remove PFAS from leachate prior to its release into the environment,” he said. “This is a multibillion pound global public health issue and likely to go beyond government expenditure. I would suggest that industries that have profited substantially from the use of PFAS over the last half a century have a moral duty to protect future generations from the consequences of these uses.”

A spokesperson for the Environment Agency confirmed it is “working closely with the landfill industry” and that it is “carrying out further investigations about PFAS within the landfill waste mass, treatment processes, and on the consequences of the treatment that leachate undergoes.”

Climate breakdown is likely to exacerbate pollution from landfills, according to Prof Kate Spencer from Queen Mary University of London. Particularly “for historic landfills that are not lined these PFAS chemicals can enter surface and groundwaters with potential consequences for ecological and human health. This is likely to increase as the severity and frequency of flooding increases”, she said.