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with the environment secretary, Steve Reed, on Monday, the NFU’s president, Tom Bradshaw, demanded the new rules be withdrawn and put to consultation with the agricultural industry and Defra experts so that a solution that does not sting family farms can be found.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

Quincy Jones, a titan of American entertainment who worked with stars from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson and Will Smith, has died aged 91.

Jones’ publicist, Arnold Robinson, said he died on Sunday night at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, surrounded by his family.

“Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing,” the family said in a statement. “And although this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the great life that he lived and know there will never be another like him.”

Jones was arguably the most versatile pop cultural figure of the 20th century, perhaps best known for producing the albums Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad for Michael Jackson in the 1980s, which made the singer the biggest pop star of all time. Jones also produced music for Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Donna Summer and many others.

He was also a successful composer of dozens of film scores, and had numerous chart hits under his own name. Jones was a bandleader in big band jazz, an arranger for jazz stars including Count Basie, and a multi-instrumentalist, most proficiently on trumpet and piano. His TV and film production company, founded in 1990, had major success with the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and other shows, and he continued to innovate well into his 80s, launching Qwest TV in 2017, an on-demand music TV service. Jones is third only to Beyoncé and Jay-Z for having the most Grammy award nominations of all time – 80 to their 88 each – and is the awards’ third most-garlanded winner, with 28.

Jones was born in Chicago in 1933. His half-white father had been born to a Welsh slave owner and one of his female slaves, while his mother’s family were also descended from slave owners. His introduction to music came through the walls of his childhood home from a piano played by a neighbour, which he started learning aged seven, and via his mother’s singing.

His parents divorced and he moved with his father to Washington state, where Jones learned drums and a host of brass instruments in his high-school band. At 14, he started playing in a band with a 16-year-old Ray Charles in Seattle clubs, once, in 1948, backing Billie Holiday. He studied music at Seattle University, transferring east to continue in Boston, and then moved to New York after being rehired by the jazz bandleader Lionel Hampton, with whom he had toured as a high-schooler (a band for which Malcolm X was a heroin dealer when they played in Detroit).

In New York, one early gig was playing trumpet in Elvis Presley’s band for his first TV appearances, and he met the stars of the flourishing bebop movement including Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. (Years later, in 1991, Jones conducted Davis’s last performance, two months before he died.)

Jones toured Europe with Hampton, and spent much time there in the 1950s, including a period furthering his studies in Paris, where he met luminaries including Pablo Picasso, James Baldwin and Josephine Baker. At the age of 23, he also toured South America and the Middle East as Dizzy Gillespie’s musical director and arranger. He convened a crack team for his own big band, touring Europe as a way to test Free and Easy, a jazz musical, but the disastrous run left Jones, by his own admission, close to suicide and with $100,000 of debt.

He secured a job at Mercury Records and slowly paid off the debt with plenty of work as a producer and arranger for artists including Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan and Sammy Davis Jr. He also began scoring films, his credits eventually including The Italian Job, In the Heat of the Night, The Getaway and The Color Purple. (He produced the last of these, which was nominated for 11 Oscars, three for Jones himself.) In 1968, he became the first African American to be nominated for best original song at the Oscars, for The Eyes of Love from the film Banning (alongside songwriter Bob Russell); he had seven nominations in total. For TV, he scored programmes such as The Bill Cosby Show, Ironside and Roots.

His work with Sinatra began in 1958 when he was hired to conduct and arrange for Sinatra and his band by Grace Kelly, princess consort of Monaco, for a charity event. Jones and Sinatra continued working on projects until Sinatra’s final album, LA Is My Lady, in 1984. Jones’s solo musical career took off in the late 1950s, recording albums under his own name as bandleader for jazz ensembles that included luminaries such as Charles Mingus, Art Pepper and Freddie Hubbard.

Jones once said of his time in Seattle: “When people write about the music, jazz is in this box, R&B is in this box, pop is in this box, but we did everything,” and his catholic tastes served him well as modern pop mutated out of the swing era. He produced four million-selling hits for the New York singer Lesley Gore in the mid-60s, including the US No 1 It’s My Party, and later embraced funk and disco, producing hit singles including George Benson’s Give Me the Night and Patti Austin and James Ingram’s Baby Come to Me, along with records by the band Rufus and Chaka Khan, and the Brothers Johnson. Jones also released his own funk material, scoring US Top 10 albums with Body Heat (1974) and The Dude (1981).

His biggest success in this style was his work with Michael Jackson: Thriller remains the biggest selling album of all time, while Jones’s versatility between Off the Wall and Bad allowed Jackson to metamorphose from lithe disco to ultra-synthetic funk-rock. He and Jackson (along with Lionel Richie and producer Michael Omartian) also helmed We Are the World, a successful charity single that raised funds for famine relief in Ethiopia in 1985. “I’ve lost my little brother today, and part of my soul has gone with him,” Jones said when Jackson died in 2009. In 2017, Jones’s legal team successfully argued that he was owed $9.4m in unpaid Jackson royalties, though he lost on appeal in 2020 and had to return $6.8m.

After the success of The Color Purple in 1985, he formed the film and TV production company Quincy Jones Entertainment in 1990. His biggest screen hit was the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which ran for 148 episodes and launched the career of Will Smith; other shows included the LL Cool J sitcom In the House and the long-running sketch comedy show MadTV.

He also created the media company Qwest Broadcasting and in 1993, the Black music magazine Vibe in partnership with Time Inc. Throughout his career he supported numerous charities and causes, including the , National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Jazz Foundation of America and others, and mentored young musicians including the British multiple Grammy winner Jacob Collier.

Jones’ illustrious career was twice nearly cut short: he narrowly avoided being killed by Charles Manson’s cult in 1969, having planned to go to Sharon Tate’s house on the night of the murders there, but Jones forgot the appointment. He also survived a brain aneurysm in 1974 that prevented him from playing the trumpet again in case the exertion caused further harm.

Jones was married three times, first to his high-school girlfriend Jeri Caldwell, for nine years until 1966, fathering his daughter Jolie. In 1967, he married Ulla Andersson and had a son and daughter, divorcing in 1974 to marry actor Peggy Lipton, best known for roles in The Mod Squad and Twin Peaks. They had two daughters, including the actor Rashida Jones, before divorcing in 1989. He had two further children: Rachel, with a dancer, Carol Reynolds, and Kenya, his daughter with actor Nastassja Kinski.

He never remarried, but continued to date a string of younger women, raising eyebrows with his year-long partnership with 19-year-old Egyptian designer Heba Elawadi when he was 73. He has also claimed to have dated Ivanka Trump and Juliette Gréco. He is survived by his seven children.

As world leaders gathered in Colombia this week, they also watched for news from home, where many of the headlines carried the catastrophic consequences of ecological breakdown. Across the Amazon rainforest and Brazil’s enormous wetlands, relentless fires had burned more than 22m hectares (55m acres). In Spain, the death toll in communities devastated by flooding passed 200. In the boreal forests that span Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada, countries were recording alarming signs that their carbon sinks were collapsing under a combined weight of drought, tree death and logging. As Canada’s wildfire season crept to a close, scientists calculated it was the second worst in two decades – behind only last year’s burn, which released more carbon than some of the world’s largest emitting countries.

In global negotiations, climate and nature move along two independent tracks, and for years were broadly treated as distinct challenges. But as negotiations closed at the Cop16 biodiversity summit in Cali on Saturday, ministers from around the world underscored the crucial importance of nature to limiting damage from global heating, and vice versa – emphasising that climate and biodiversity could no longer be treated as independent issues if either crisis was to be resolved. Countries agreed a text on links between the climate and nature, but failed to include language on a phase out of fossil fuels.

The UK environment secretary, Steve Reed, said that attending the summit in Colombia had brought home the links between climate and biodiversity. “One of the other things that’s really struck me coming here and speaking to the Colombians in particular is how for them the nature crisis and the climate crisis are exactly the same thing. In the UK, perhaps more widely in the global north, we tend to talk a lot about climate and particularly net zero, and much less about nature – perhaps because we’re already more nature-depleted. But those two things connect entirely,” he said.

The Cop16 president, Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister, has sought to put nature on a level with global efforts to decarbonise the world economy during the summit, warning that slashes to greenhouse gas emissions must be accompanied by the protection and restoration of the natural world if they are to be effective. Her presidency has repeatedly described nature and climate as “two sides of the same coin”.

“There is a double movement humanity must make. The first one is to decarbonise and have a just energy transition. The other side of the coin is to restore nature and allow nature to take again its power over planet Earth so that we can really stabilise the climate,” she has said throughout Cop16 and during the buildup.

The shift toward a more intertwined view of climate and biodiversity was also reflected in the negotiations at last year’s Cop28 climate summit in Dubai. Countries agreed to update their next generation round of climate plans in line with their commitments on nature. It comes amid growing scientific concerns about how forests, oceans and other natural carbon sinks are responding to global heating, with new research indicating a collapse in the amount of carbon absorbed by land – as a net category – in 2023, the hottest year on record.

The planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions, shielding humanity from the full effects of fossil fuel pollution. Without this, warming would rapidly accelerate.

Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to enormous areas of the Amazon and Congo basin rainforests respectively, pushed for greater recognition of the climate-stabilising effects of the ecosystems they house, both of which are threatened with destruction.

Ève Bazaiba, DRC’s environment minister, said that her country’s forests helped sustain rainfall as far away as Egypt and were critical to the health of the planet, calling for better international recognition of its importance. Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister, who has once again overseen a sharp drop in deforestation under the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said that more money for forested countries was required.

“Brazil has a commitment to zero deforestation by 2030. We know that the reasons why biodiversity is destroyed have to do with several factors, one of which is certainly overwhelmingly the issue of deforestation. Another that is closely associated with the serious problem of climate change that is destructive to our biodiversity.

Smaller forested countries were also keen to underscore the importance of natural ecosystems to mitigating climate breakdown. Jiwoh Abdulai, the environment and climate change minister of Sierra Leone, said he was concerned that land sinks had absorbed less carbon in 2023. “That’s why we’re here. We have these assets which are essentially globally critical infrastructure,” he said.

The degradation of forests is already affecting rural communities that depend on rain-based agriculture as weather patterns are no longer predictable, resulting in lower yields, a drop in income and more food insecurity. As land becomes less fertile, people are increasingly encroaching into the forest.

Abdulai added: “Our countries host these forests. Our local communities are the custodians, but the benefits of having these forests are shared globally.”

Others were concerned that the loss of their forests could undermine climate progress. In Nigeria there has been a 13% decrease in forest cover since 2000. “The rate of forest loss in Nigeria is one of the highest in the world,” said the country’s environment minister, Iziaq Kunle Salako.

He added: “The role that forests need to play in net zero targets is particularly significant. If you look at the UN convention on climate change, on biodiversity, and on desertification, the forest is central. So this is an area that is very, very concerning in Nigeria.

“If the forest is not sequestering [carbon], it’s not playing the primary role it has to play, and it will be challenging for the world to reach the target of zero emissions.”

With less than 48 hours to go in the US election and more than 77.6m votes already cast, new polling shows Kamala Harris leading among early voters in the country’s battleground states.

The Democratic candidate has an 8% lead among those who have already voted, while her opponent, Donald Trump, is ahead among those who say they are very likely to vote but have not yet done so. The poll, from the New York Times and Siena College, also found Harris was slightly ahead in three swing states, with Trump up in one and the other three too close to call.

With only hours of campaigning left, Harris was speaking in Michigan, while her Republican opponent used a rally in Pennsylvania to complain about gaps in the bulletproof shields surrounding him and suggested he would have no concerns about reporters being shot at if there were another assassination attempt against him.

“To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news and I don’t mind that so much,” he said, adding the press were “seriously corrupt people”. Trump’s communications director claimed in a statement the comments were supposedly an effort to look out for the welfare of the news media.

Here’s what else happened on Sunday:

Donald Trump election news and updates

• The Trump campaign claimed the NYT polling and Saturday’s Selzer poll of Iowa for the Des Moines Register were designed to suppress Trump voter turnout by presenting a biased, bleak picture of Trump’s re-election prospects. “No President has done more for FARMERS, and the Great State of Iowa, than Donald J. Trump,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network.

• In Pennsylvania, Trump told supporters that he should have stayed in the White House, despite his losing the 2020 election. “We had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left,” Trump said.

• At a rally in Macon, Georgia, Trump kept up anti-migrant rhetoric and again suggested he would give a role on health policy to Robert F Kennedy Jr. Trump said he told Kennedy: “You work on women’s health, you work on health, you work on what we eat. You work on pesticides. You work on everything.”

• After RFK Jr proposed removing fluoride from drinking water on the first day of a new Trump administration, the former president appeared to approve the idea. “Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me,” Trump told NBC News. “You know, it’s possible.”

• Trump also spoke in Kinston, North Carolina, where he criticised Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader. “Hopefully we get rid of Mitch McConnell pretty soon,” Trump said. Republican voters in Kinston told the Guardian they are ready to fight a “stolen election”.

Kamala Harris election news and updates

• In her final rally in Michigan, Harris pledged to do everything in her power to “end the war in Gaza”, as she attempted to appeal to the state’s large Arab American and Muslim American population. Michigan is home to about 240,000 registered Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for Biden in 2020. But Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in the state have expressed dissatisfaction over the administrations stance on Israel’s war on Gaza.

• Harris dodged a question on whether she voted for a controversial tough-on-crime measure that would make it easier for prosecutors to imprison repeat shoplifters and drug users to jail or prison, after submitting her ballot in California. Proposition 36 would roll back provisions of Proposition 47, which downgraded low-level thefts and drug possession to misdemeanours.

• At Michigan’s Greater Emmanuel Institutional church of God in Christ in Detroit, Harris told the congregation that God’s plan was to “heal us and bring us together as nation” but that they “must act” to realise that plan.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail

• A US government communications regulator has claimed that Harris’s appearance on Saturday Night Live violates “equal time” rules that govern political programming. Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the federal communications commission (FCC), said “the purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct – a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election.”

• Iowa can continue challenging the validity of hundreds of ballots from potential noncitizens, a federal judge has ruled. The state has targeted illegal voting but critics said the effort threatened the voting rights of people who have only recently become US citizens.

Read more about the 2024 US election:

The Dawson’s Creek star James Van Der Beek has revealed he has been diagnosed with bowel cancer.

Despite the diagnosis, the 47-year-old said there was “reason for optimism” and that he was “feeling good” as he made the announcement in an interview with the US outlet People.

The star made his name playing Dawson Leery in the US teen drama series from 1998 to 2003 and is due to appear in a US Fox special called The Real Full Monty, which is based on the 1997 British film and will see a group of male celebrities strip down to raise awareness for cancer awareness and research.

He told People: “I have colorectal cancer, I’ve been privately dealing with this diagnosis and have been taking steps to resolve it, with the support of my incredible family. There’s reason for optimism, and I’m feeling good.”

The Connecticut actor has continued to work, appearing in an episode of Walker, the reboot of Walker, Texas Ranger, on the US network The CW, and will appear in Sidelined: The QB And Me, a Tubi original film which will be released on 29 November.

He told People he had been prioritising time with his wife, Kimberly Van Der Beek, and their children Olivia, Joshua, Annabel, Emilia, Gwendolyn and Jeremiah.

Van Der Beek is also known for his roles as a fictional version of himself in Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, in CSI: Cyber as the FBI agent Elijah Mundo, and as Matt Bromley in the first season of the FX drama Pose.

Bowel cancer can develop in the rectum or colon and is one of the most common types of cancer in many parts of the world. It is sometimes known as colorectal cancer because it affects the large bowel, which includes the colon and rectum. Symptoms include pain in the rectum or anus, a change in appearance or shape of faeces, blood or mucus in the stool, unexplained anaemia or a change in normal bowel habits.

“As Republicans, we are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

The startling comment came from a mother of five and grandmother of two, Vikki Westbrook, as she lined up on Sunday outside an aircraft hangar in rural North Carolina. She had come to hear Donald Trump make one of his last pitches of the 2024 presidential election.

Westbrook, 55, wasn’t entirely joking with her “locked and loaded” remark. Nor was she being entirely frivolous.

She does own guns, she said, though she wouldn’t specify how many.

Personally, she intended to avoid any trouble that might erupt in the wake of Tuesday’s election, she said. “I have kids, I can’t afford to go to prison. And I don’t like orange.”

It’s her fellow Make America Great Again (Maga) supporters whom she fears might be tempted to take action should the former president lose the election. “At this point, a lot of Republicans aren’t going to take it any longer. They won’t let the election be stolen from us twice.”

Westbrook remains convinced that the 2020 presidential election was snatched from Trump. Now she is equally certain that should Kamala Harris win on Tuesday, it will be for one reason only.

“Only if they cheat. I’m absolutely positive of that.”

Trump has been studiously nurturing such passions for years, his rhetoric rising in intensity in recent days. He has repeatedly refused to confirm that he will accept the results of the vote count, and earlier on Sunday he told supporters in Pennsylvania that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House four years ago.

A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute recorded that one in four Republican Trump supporters believe that were Trump to lose the election, he should declare the results invalid and do “whatever it takes” to retake the White House. That’s a sobering finding, but a grossly understated one, judging from the mood at Trump’s Kinston rally.

“People will riot if Trump doesn’t win,” said Cedric Perness, 38, an African American Trump supporter. He said it would be too dangerous for him to participate in any post-election unrest – “I’d get killed right there.”

Instead he does what he can, he said, to help Trump by selling merchandise on his campaign’s behalf. He has a stall of hats and T-shirts, some saying: “You missed bitches. Two times!”

In the final stages of the 2024 race, Trump has been whipping up the passions of his millions of devoted followers to a fever pitch. In the last three days of campaigning alone he has made four stops in North Carolina, a battleground state which the Democrats have won only twice since Jimmy Carter in 1976 (the other time being Barack Obama in 2008).

Trump must hold North Carolina to have a clear shot at returning to the White House.

In these frantic last hours, he has pursued a two-pronged strategy to fire up his followers. On the one hand, he has been raising their expectations by claiming that he is well ahead in the polls.

“We’re going to have on Tuesday a landslide that’s too big to rig,” a tired and hoarse-sounding Trump told the Kinston crowd. “We have a big lead. We have a big lead. The fake news, they don’t tell you this. We have a big, beautiful lead.”

In fact, poll trackers suggest that he and Harris remain neck-and-neck in North Carolina and the other six critical swing states.

On the other hand, Trump has also been laying the foundations of a renewed conspiracy, should he need it, to subvert the election results by alleging widespread fraud. He touted the false accusation at the Kinston rally that Democrats are enabling non-citizens to vote in vast numbers, accusing the Biden administration of pursuing an open-border policy on the southern border with Mexico “maybe [because they] want to put them on the voting rolls. That’s probably the reason.”

Supporters at the rally faithfully parroted the lie on Sunday.

“That’s why they opened the border, to allow all the illegals in so they could vote for Democrats,” said a woman in the line who declined to give her name. “There’s always been corruption in this country, but I had no idea it was this bad. America has been run into the ground – anyone with half a brain can see that.”

Almost as pervasive as the supporters’ belief in the demonic intentions of Democrats was their frustration at what they could do about it. Last time around, such toxic emotions culminated in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

The Kinston rally goers, following Trump’s lead, universally dismissed January 6 as a “set up” in which peaceful and patriotic Americans were lured into a dastardly deep-state trap. Westbrook, the “locked and loaded” grandmother, admitted to having been present at the Capitol that day.

Hundreds of Trump supporters, driven to distraction by the then president’s “stop the steal” rhetoric, stormed the heart of American democracy on that day. In the violent clashes that ensued, approximately 140 police officers were assaulted.

That’s not how Westbrook sees it. “It wasn’t what they said happened. The only people causing trouble were antifa, they were put into us to cause problems.”

This is a lot for any American voter to be carrying. The 2020 election was stolen from her candidate of choice, she firmly believes, and now she’s worried that Tuesday could see a repeat performance.

“Four years ago I felt angry, very angry. This time I will be even more angry.”

Should her worst fears come to pass, and Trump lose, where will all that powerful emotion go?

“If he loses, I’m scared,” the grandmother said.