A poll in Iowa that has unexpectedly put Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in what was previously expected to be a safe state for the Republicans has sent shockwaves through America’s poll-watchers.

The Selzer poll carried out for the Des Moines Register newspaper showed Harris ahead of her Republican rival by three points.

Midwestern Iowa is not one of the seven battleground states of the 2024 election, which have consisted of the Rust belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and the Sun belt states of Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona.

While political experts and pollsters are very wary of putting too much store in any one single poll, Selzer is a widely respected polling organisation with a good record in Iowa. If Harris were even competitive in Iowa – which Trump won in both 2016 and 2020 – it could radically reshape the race.

The Selzer poll has Harris over Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters. A September poll showed Trump with a four-point lead over Harris and a June survey showed him with an 18-point lead over then-candidate Joe Biden.

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” pollster J Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co, told the Register. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”

The poll showed that women are driving the late shift toward Harris in the state. If true and borne out more widely, that would also be significant as the Harris campaign has focused on turning out women amid a broad gender gap with Republican-trending male voters. Harris and her campaign have focused on the overturning of federal abortion rights by the conservative-dominated US supreme court.

The reaction among pundits and pollsters was largely one of shock and surprise, though it was also pointed out that a rival polling group still had Trump leading in Iowa.

“This is a stunning poll. But Ann Seltzer [sic] has as stellar a record as any pollster of forecasting election outcomes in her state. Women are powering this surge. Portents for the country?” said David Axelrod, a former top aide to Barack Obama.

“I mean, margins of error exist and polls can be outliers and I doubt Harris will win Iowa, but Selzer is extremely well-regarded and a within-the-margin race in Iowa is not impossible particularly if the reported late shifts to Harris were real,” said Washington Post columnist Philip Bump.

Selzer is the highest-rated pollster on the national US survey done by polling guru Nate Silver, one of the most closely watched polling experts in the US.

“In the world where Harris wins Iowa, she is probably also cleaning up elsewhere in the midwest, particularly in Michigan and Wisconsin, in which case she’s already almost certain to win the electoral college,” Silver said on his website.

However, he also cautioned that another survey had been published on Saturday in Iowa that still had Trump ahead. The Emerson poll put the former US president up by nine points in the state compared with Harris.

“It is incredibly gutsy to release this poll. It won’t put Harris ahead in our forecast because there was also another Iowa poll out today that was good for Trump. But wouldn’t want to play poker against Ann Selzer,” Silver said.

That seemed to prevent any premature celebrations on behalf of many Democrats.

“Celebrate the Selzer poll for 90 seconds and get back to work. We have an election to win,” said Christopher Hale, a former Democrat congressional candidate in Tennessee.

Detectives investigating historic allegations of sexual assault against Russell Brand have asked prosecutors to consider bringing charges against the actor and comedian.

It follows a joint investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Sunday Times, published in September 2023, in which four women accused Brand of offences including rape, sexual assault, and emotional abuse.

The allegations date back to between 2006 and 2013, when the 49-year-old was at the height of his fame.

He has denied any wrongdoing and insisted his sexual relationships have been “absolutely always consensual”.

Following the initial media reports, the Metropolitan police confirmed it had “received a number of allegations of sexual offences in London” and elsewhere in the country.

On Saturday it said “a man in his 40s had been interviewed by officers under caution on three separate occasions”.

“A file of evidence has now been passed to the Crown Prosecution Service for their consideration,” it said.

At the time of the alleged offences, Brand was working as a presenter on BBC Radio 2 and Channel 4 and as an actor in Hollywood, appearing in films including Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

One woman told Dispatches that Brand entered a relationship with her when he was 31 and she was 16.

She alleged that the relationship, which lasted three months, was ­emotionally abusive and controlling and that Brand would refer to her as “the child”. Another woman alleged Brand raped her in 2012 in his Los Angeles home, adding that she received treatment at a rape crisis centre the same day, the Sunday Times reported.

The paper said she then messaged him to say she had been scared and felt taken advantage of, adding: “When a girl say[s] NO it means no.” Brand reportedly replied saying he was “very sorry”.

A third woman said Brand sexually assaulted her while she worked with him in Los Angeles and that he threatened to taken legal action against her if she told anyone, according to the paper.

A fourth woman said she had also been sexually assaulted by Brand and that he had been “physically and emotionally abusive” towards her, the Sunday Times said.

The paper said the women it had spoken to did not know each other and had mostly chosen to remain anonymous.

Following the allegations, the BBC and Channel 4 removed material featuring Brand from their websites, while YouTube stopped him making money from videos posted on his channel.

King Charles and Prince William’s property empires are taking millions of pounds from cash-strapped charities and public services including the NHS, state schools and prisons, according to a new investigation.

The reports claim the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, which are exempt from business taxes and used to fund the royals’ lifestyles and philanthropic work, are set to make at least £50m from leasing land to public services. The two duchies hold a total of more than 5,400 leases.

One 15-year deal will see Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS hospital trust in London pay £11.4m to store its fleet of electric ambulances in a warehouse owned by the Duchy of Lancaster, the monarch’s 750-year-old estate.

The king will also make at least £28m from windfarms because the Duchy of Lancaster retains a feudal right to charge for cables crossing the foreshore, according to an investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Sunday Times.

William’s Duchy of Cornwall, the hereditary estate of the heir to the throne, has signed a £37m deal to lease Dartmoor prison for 25 years to the Ministry of Justice, which is liable for all repairs despite paying £1.5m a head for a jail empty of prisoners because of high levels of radon gas.

His estate also owns Camelford House, a 1960s tower block on the banks of the Thames, which has brought in at least £22m since 2005 from rents paid by charities and other tenants. Two cancer charities, Marie Curie and Macmillan – of which the king is a longstanding patron – have both recently moved out to smaller premises.

The Duchy of Cornwall has charged the Royal Navy more than £1m to build and use jetties and moor warships. It also charges the army to train on Dartmoor but the Ministry of Defence refused a Freedom of Information Act request asking how much it costs. The duchy also made more than £600,000 from the construction of a fire station and stands to get nearly £600,000 from rental agreements with six state schools.

In spite of the king and Prince William’s speeches and interventions on environmental issues, many residential properties let out by the royal estates are in breach of basic government energy efficiency standards.

InvestigatorsThe investigation found 14% of homes leased by the Duchy of Cornwall and 13% by the Duchy of Lancaster have an energy performance rating of F or G. Since 2020, it has been against the law for landlords to rent out properties that are rated below an E under the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards regulations.

The Duchy of Lancaster said: “Over 87% of all duchy-let properties are rated E or above. The remainder are either awaiting scheduled improvement works or are exempted under UK legislation.”

The royal estates also have deals with mining and quarrying companies.

The investigation has prompted calls for a parliamentary investigation and for the two empires to be folded into the crown estate, which sends its profits to the government. The king and Prince William pay income tax on profits from the estates after business expenses have been deducted, but both now refuse to say how much.

Critics say the estates, the income from which have been used by successive governments to keep the headline cost of the monarchy to the taxpayer down, enjoy a commercial advantage over rivals because they are exempt from corporation tax and capital gains tax.

Baroness Margaret Hodge, a former chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said the duchies should at least pay corporation tax. “This would be a brilliant time for the monarch to say, I’m going to be open, and I want to be treated as fairly as anybody,” she said.

Both duchies said they were commercial operations that complied with statutory requirements to disclose information. They also emphasised their efforts to become greener.

The Duchy of Lancaster said: “His majesty the king voluntarily pays tax on all income received from the duchy.”

In Spain, more than 200 people have been killed after the deadliest floods in the country’s modern history. Australia is heating faster than the global average, meaning more extreme heat events, longer fire seasons, increasingly intense heavy rain and sea level rise. And globally, this year is highly likely to be the hottest on record, beating the current title holder, 2023. For some, this escalating scientific evidence can be alarming. But the person in charge of Australia’s response to the climate crisis says that is not a word he would choose.

“If alarm implies concern, sure. But alarm implying surprise? No,” says Chris Bowen, the country’s climate change and energy minister.

“We’re living climate change. What we’re now trying to do is avoid the worst of it,” Bowen says.

“Report after report, temperature records tumbling, natural disasters increasingly unnatural – that’s why we keep going. That’s what drives me. It gets me out of bed every day. So perhaps alarmed is the wrong word. Disturbed, maybe. But, you know, not surprised.”

Bowen is speaking to Guardian Australia shortly before a US presidential election where polls indicate a 50-50 chance voters will elect a candidate who calls climate change a “hoax” and who would lead an administration intent on gutting clean energy and science programs and again pulling the US out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Six days after the US election, thousands of delegates from nearly 200 countries will land in the Russia-aligned petrostate of Azerbaijan for Cop29, an annual UN climate summit. Bowen will be at the centre of that meeting, having been invited to help lead negotiations on what is considered its most important work – setting a new finance goal to help the developing world.

The Australian government is also likely to learn if it will co-host the Cop31 summit with Pacific countries in 2026, an event that would bring tens of thousands of people to the country and increase scrutiny on its role as the world’s third biggest fossil fuel exporter.

But for now, all eyes are on the US.

What will a Trump win mean?

Speaking in his ministerial office in the Sydney CBD, Bowen acknowledges the election result will be seismic, and will shape the fortnight-long talks starting in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku on 11 November.

Asked for his view on what a Donald Trump victory would mean, he is cautious but clear: the Albanese government and the Biden administration have been “closely aligned in policy and personal terms” and “obviously, having a United States administration with a very forward leaning climate policy is a good thing”.

He also gives three reasons why he believes a second Trump administration would be unlikely to live up to the former president’s anti-climate rhetoric on the climate crisis.

“Firstly, they are the United States. So the state functions are very important. And perhaps unlike 2016, where the result came as a surprise, if it is a Trump administration people are doing more preparation for it,” he says.

“Secondly, it’s hard to legislate in the United States, but it’s also hard to un-legislate. So the Inflation Reduction Act [which includes an extraordinary US$370bn in clean energy support] is the law of the land and will remain the law of the land unless it gets repealed, which will be very difficult to do. And thirdly, the private sector can help. In the United States, regardless of federal mandates, they know [climate action] is good business.

“Will the dynamics of Cop be different depending on who’s president? Of course they will. But does the rest of the world just walk away if the United States president is Donald Trump? No.”

Within climate activist circles, there is an expectation that if Kamala Harris wins, she may quickly set a 2035 emissions reduction target and other countries may follow. If Trump wins, many countries, including Australia, are likely to delay and recalibrate before setting their 2035 commitments, which are due next year.

Bowen says Labor will set a target based on “what we think we can achieve and what our contribution should be under the science” – and what others are doing. Initial advice from the Climate Change Authority found a target of up to a 75% cut below 2005 levels would be “ambitious, but could be achievable”.

According to a recent UN Environment Programme analysis, current national commitments would lead to only a 2.6% emissions reduction below 2019 levels by 2030. It is far short of what countries have agreed is necessary: a 43% reduction over that timeframe and a 60% cut by 2035.

Bowen says he understands “to a degree” why this big discrepancy makes people cynical, but argues the summits are important, not least because they send a signal to governments and investors marshalling trillions of dollars. He says there was genuine progress last year, including a non-binding agreement the world should transition away from fossil fuels and triple renewable energy by 2030.

“What’s the alternative? Not bother, not talk to other countries, not have targets?” he says. “Is it perfect? No, but it’s what we’ve got. I’d be surprised if people who are concerned about climate activism argue we should not be active participants in the global conversation.”

Bowen will arrive in Baku, an historic oil town on the shores of the Caspian Sea, wearing three hats. The most important role is co-charing with the Egyptian environment minister, Yasmine Fouad, negotiations to create a new finance goal – known in UN lingo as a “new collective quantified goal”, or NCQG – to help developing countries fight and limit climate catastrophe.

It is meant to replace a US$100bn a year goal that was set more than a decade ago and that it is agreed is woefully insufficient. Bowen says their ability to wrangle a consensus on the issue – covering how much is needed, who pays and what sort of public, private and multilateral bank finance should be counted – will largely determine if the summit is seen as a success or failure.

“I probably should manage expectations, but … this is the finance Cop,” Bowen says. “So getting an NCQG right is the key element.”

He is also chair of the negotiating bloc known as the umbrella group, which includes the US, UK, Canada and Japan, and will be representing Australia as it seeks to finalise whether it will host Cop31. Australia is favoured to win, but Turkey is also in the running and the decision-making process is opaque.

The bid has been mostly warmly received by clean energy and climate advocates and business groups, but some critics say Australia should not be rewarded with summit hosting rights while it is still allowing large new coal and gas developments.

This is the conflict in the Australian government’s climate position. At home, it has a program to underwrite enough renewable energy to generate 82% of the country’s electricity by 2030 and has legislated policies to drive a shift to cleaner cars and that promises to start to deal with pollution at large industrial sites. It is also attempting to argue against a Coalition nuclear energy proposal that many experts say would in reality boost fossil fuel power over the next two decades.

But it also has no plan to limit coal and gas developments for export. In September the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, approved the expansion of three thermal coalmines that could lead to more than 1.5bn tonnes of CO₂ being pumped into the atmosphere.

Asked if the government’s mixed messages – action at home, but unlimited shipments of fossil fuels to burn overseas – undermines its credibility and risks making people disengage on climate, Bowen responds that the Greens’ argument for no new coal and gas is a “neat, politically effective slogan”, but that “life is nowhere near that simple”.

“The idea that we can just say we’re going to stop approving new coal, which means we stop exporting coal in due course, that is not the way you get this job done,” he says. “People say, ‘Oh, it’s a drug dealer’s defence’. Well, ok … But the reality is that other countries will continue to export coal, and we need to think about our place in the world.

“I agree with this entirely: the biggest impact [on climate] we can have is on our exports. Hence, the need to become a renewable energy superpower.”

He points to an ambitious $30bn-plus SunCable plan to export solar energy from the Northern Territory to Singapore via subsea cable. Bowen was in the city state last month for the announcement the project had received conditional approval.

“You’ve got to look holistically,” he says. “Yes, our exports are important, but replacing our current fossil fuel exports with renewable exports is the key to it. Not just focusing on the negative – that we should be stopping fossil fuel exports.

“We should be replacing fossil exports with renewable energy. And that is a big task, which is going to take a little while.”

Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib declined to endorse Kamala Harris at a union rally in Detroit, where the war in Gaza is the top issue for the largest block of Arab American voters in the country.

Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, is the only one of the so-called leftist “Squad” that has not endorsed the Democrat candidate. The other three members – Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York – endorsed Harris in July.

“Don’t underestimate the power you all have,” Tlaib told a get-out-the-vote United Auto Workers rallygoers. “More than those ads, those lawn signs, those billboards, you all have more power to turn out people that understand we’ve got to fight back against corporate greed in our country.”

Tlaib’s non-endorsement of Harris comes as a voter survey published on Friday suggested that 43% of Muslim American voters support the Green party candidate, Jill Stein.

After Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, Democrats blamed Stein voters for the loss of Michigan and Wisconsin to the Republican candidate. Some Democrats fear that the same scenario could play out again next week.

Earlier this year, during the presidential primary campaigns, about 100,000 Michigan voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” as a mark of protest against the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza after the cross -border Hamas attack in October last year that killed 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages, mostly civilians.

Israel’s attack on Gaza has since killed more than 40,000 people, with many of them women and children. In Lebanon, where Israel has now invaded to fight with Iran-backed Hezbollah, more than 2,897 people have been killed and 13,150 wounded, the country’s health ministry reports. A quarter of those killed were women and children.

The US has been a staunch ally of Israel during the fighting, continuing to send arms to the country and limiting its public criticism of Israeli actions.

Tlaib has been critical of the Democratic party’s position on the growing and bloody conflict, saying it was “hard not to feel invisible” after the party did not include a Palestinian American speaker at its convention in Chicago in August.

In an interview with Zeteo, the news organization founded by former MSNBC host (and Guardian contributor) Mehdi Hasan, Tlaib said the omission “made it clear with their speakers that they value Israeli children more than Palestinian children”.

“Our trauma and pain feel unseen and ignored by both parties,” she added. “One party uses our identity as a slur, and the other refuses to hear from us. Where is the shared humanity? Ignoring us won’t stop the genocide.”

Harris has faced continued protests on the trail, as demonstrators call for her to break with President Joe Biden and support an arms embargo on Israel. Harris has said Israel “has right to defend itself”, and that Palestinians need “dignity, security”.

Confronted by a protester in Wisconsin two weeks ago who accused the Jewish state of genocide, Harris said: “I know what you’re speaking of. I want a ceasefire. I want the hostage deal done. I want the war to end.”

At a rally in Dearborn earlier on Friday, Tlaib the criticized Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who has been endorsed by the Muslim mayors of Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck.

“Trump is a proud Islamophobe + serial liar who doesn’t stand for peace,” Tlaib posted on X. “The reality is that the Biden admin’s unconditional support for genocide is what got us here. This should be a wake-up call for those who continue to support genocide. This election didn’t have to be close.”

A piece of the radioactive fuel left from the meltdown of Japan’s tsunami-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has been retrieved from the site using a remote-controlled robot.

Investigators used the robot’s fishing-rod-like arm to clip and collect a tiny piece of radioactive material from one of the plant’s three damaged reactors – the first time such a feat has been achieved. Should it prove suitable for testing, scientists hope the sample will yield information that will help determine how to decommission the plant.

The plant’s manager, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco), has said the sample was collected from the surface of a mound of molten debris that sits at the bottom of the Unit 2 reactor’s primary containment vessel.

The “telesco” robot, with its frontal tongs still holding the sample, returned to its enclosed container for safe storage after workers in full hazmat gear pulled it out of the containment vessel on Saturday. But the mission is not over until it is certain the sample’s radioactivity is below a set standard and it is safely contained.

If the radioactivity exceeds the safety limit then the robot must return to find another piece, but Tepco officials have said they expect the sample will prove to be small enough.

The mission started in September and was supposed to last two weeks, but had to be suspended twice.

A procedural mistake held up work for nearly three weeks. Then the robot’s two cameras, designed to transmit views of the target areas for its operators in the remote control room, failed. That required the robot to be pulled out entirely for replacement before the mission resumed on Monday.

Fukushima Daiichi lost its cooling systems during the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, causing meltdowns in three of its reactors. An estimated 880 tons of fuel remains in them, and Tepco has carried out several robotic operations.

Tepco said that on Wednesday the robot successfully clipped a piece estimated to weigh about 3 grams from the area underneath the Unit 2 reactor core, from which large amounts of melted fuel fell during the meltdown 13 years ago.

The plant’s chief, Akira Ono, said only the tiny sample can provide crucial data to help plan a decommissioning strategy, develop necessary technology and robots and retroactively establish exactly how the accident had developed.

The Japanese government and Tepco have set a target of between 30 and 40 years for the cleanup, which experts say is optimistic. No specific plan for the full removal of the fuel debris or its final disposal has been decided.

A high school in California has decided not to invest in coal, oil or gas, instead pledging to put money into clean energy. It’s the latest win in a new fossil fuel divestment campus campaign launched by high schoolers across 11 countries that is gaining support in the US.

The Nueva School, an elite private school outside San Francisco, pledged in spring 2024 to invest a portion of its $55m endowment in renewable power. The commitment followed months of pressure from students.

“If you’re choosing to put that money in the right projects, then you’re helping the world get where it needs to be,” said Ines Pajot, 18, a former student of the Nueva School who helped spearhead the campaign.

Unlike many other institutions that have faced divestment calls, the Nueva School had no direct investments in coal, oil or gas to pull. But it does have indirect investments, with less than 4% of its endowment in funds that are indirectly exposed to fossil fuels.

The students at the Nueva School say their win was made possible by engaging with the school’s board of trustees over the course of six years. By including a promise to place financial stakes in climate-friendly causes, they say the institution’s pledge goes a step further than traditional divestment commitments like those seen on many college campuses.

“The divestment movement looks different now than it did 15 years ago,” said Anjuli Mishra, 18, a Nueva student and coalition leader. “There are more opportunities to invest in clean energy, and it’s imperative for schools to align with this new investment landscape.”

Pajot said the students took a “collaborative” approach to their pressure campaign, choosing to work openly with the board and hear its concerns rather than simply making demands.

“We had a lot of conversation with the board and our knowledge very much evolved,” she said. The students started by calling for divestment, then became interested in a “divestment and reinvestment” framework. Eventually, they landed on a call for sustainable investment “because we realized that, to our core, we wanted to use money to facilitate the energy transition”, Pajot said.

The Nueva School organizers are part of the International High School Clean Energy Investment Coalition, which officially launched this fall after two years of informal organizing. The group of private high school students – hailing from about 50 schools, half of which are in the US and the rest of which span 10 other countries – are pushing their institutions to clean up their financial portfolios. Some of those schools have endowments of more than $1bn, rivaling those of some private universities, Pajot said.

In another recent win, the board of the prestigious Seattle Academy in Seattle, Washington, officially voted in favor of a divestment proposal this year and is determining next steps. And St Marks, a private boarding school in Southborough, Massachusetts, started to phase out its fossil fuel investments in 2022, while pledging not to directly invest in fossil fuels in the future. Today, less than 3% of the school’s endowment is tied to fossil fuels.

“The fact that the schools are making this decision shows that they’re taking climate change, in and of itself, seriously,” said Pajot.

Bill McKibben, the veteran environmental activist and author, praised the students’ efforts. “They understand the deep contradiction between educating people for the future and investing in ways that make sure that future won’t exist,” he wrote in an email. “Thank heaven they’re gently calling out that hypocrisy!”

High schools are a new arena for the fossil fuel divestment campus movement. Until now, activists have largely been focused on universities, where they have seen major wins.

More than 260 educational institutions worldwide have in recent years committed to halt investments in fossil fuel companies, according to data from Stand.earth and 350.org. Over the past four years, students at two dozen schools in the US have also filed legal complaints arguing that their institutions’ investments in planet-heating fossil fuels are illegal.

In 2015, a Pennsylvania high school made history when, under student pressure, it divested its $150m endowment from all holdings in coalmining companies. At that time, at least five other east coast high schools had launched fossil fuel divestment campaigns; an initiative at St Paul’s School in New Hampshire resulted in a decision not to divest.

Some educators are bringing the divestment movement beyond individual private institutions. In 2022, the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers union in the nation, overwhelmingly supported a resolution calling on pension trustees to pull members’ retirement funds from fossil fuels and reinvest in “projects that benefit displaced workers and frontline communities”.

“As a lifelong educator, I’ve learned that climate change is probably the No 1 concern on their list that is keeping them up at night,” said Lee Fertig, head of the Nueva School. “They’re looking at this as an educational endeavor and not just a financial endeavor – what they can do, as young people dealing with pressing challenges thrust upon them.”

Carefree menstrual pads are contaminated with toxic PFAS “forever chemicals”, which presents a threat to the reproductive health of women using the products, a new lawsuit filed in California state court alleges.

The suit demands Carefree and its parent company, personal care product giant Edgewell, remove PFAS from the products or put a warning label on its packaging.

The exposure is potentially a “big health problem”, said Vineet Dubey, an attorney representing Ecological Alliance, a consumer advocacy group which brought the suit.

“This is a product that has direct exposure into the bloodstream because of the way it’s used and positioned on women’s bodies, so this is alarming, and it’s scary,” Dubey said. The suit was brought under California’s Proposition 65 law that requires companies to warn the state’s consumers if toxic chemicals are present in products.

Edgewell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

PFAS are a class of about 15,000 chemicals typically used to make products that resist water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and they accumulate in humans and the environment. The chemicals are linked to cancer, kidney disease, liver problems, immune disorders, birth defects and other serious health problems.

There are virtually no federal limits on PFAS in consumer products despite the fact that they are widely used across the economy.

Ecological Alliance tested the products and found PFOA, one of the most common and dangerous PFAS compounds. The Environmental Protection Agency this year found that virtually no level of exposure to PFOA in drinking water is safe and set a drinking water limit of 4ppt (parts per trillion). Testing found PFOA leached from the menstrual pads at about 756ppt per hour.

Recent research found that skin likely absorbs PFAS at much higher rates than previously thought, raising concerns about a product that is pressed up against women’s skin for hours at a time.

PFOA specifically is linked to reproductive health issues like hormone disruption, low birth weight, infertility, immune system toxicity in fetuses and more.

It’s unclear why the chemicals are in the products. PFAS are commonly used as waterproofing agents, and it is possible the PFOA, or a chemical that breaks down into PFOA once in the environment, is intentionally added. PFAS have been detected at high levels in toilet paper and diapers. It is also possible there is unintentional contamination somewhere in the supply chain.

Ecological Alliance in February filed a formal warning that it intended to sue Carefree if the company did not remove the chemicals or take action, or if the state’s regulators and attorney general did not take action. No one responded to the filing.

The suit asks the judge to stop the products from being sold until they’re free of the chemicals. Dubey has previously sued under Proposition 65 for PFAS or other toxic chemical contamination and said companies often reformulate products or make supply chain changes to address the issue, but they do not always.

“I hope [Carefree] acts responsibly because of how potentially dangerous PFAS exposure is in this way, but I never put it past corporations to fight to death to do the wrong thing,” he added.

Saoirse Ronan’s comment about women’s safety on The Graham Norton Show has gone viral after she said using a phone as a weapon is something “girls have to think about all the time”. Ronan later said the reaction has been “wild” and that the moment was “opening a conversation”.

Here, six women tell us what they think about the comments and how they feel about women’s safety.

‘I change my commute to avoid unlit paths’

It wasn’t just when [Ronan] said that line, it was that she was trying to say it and the others kept talking over her. She attempted at least twice to say it and they just kept making jokes. The whole context of it shows how much women’s lived experiences and attempts at sharing these are overlooked. People are more aware than before, but the show showed it’s not necessarily in the forefront of people’s minds. I normally cycle through Southampton common but I change my commute in the winter to avoid unlit bike paths. I also wear clothes where my phone is accessible at all times. Lizzi, 35, pharmacist, Southampton

‘I try and make myself appear bigger or angrier’

Self protection is the uppermost, but routine, concern when out and about on my own. Guys enjoy a different world and I’m so glad Saoirse seized the opportunity to tell it as it is. I feel keys are the best bet [for self-defence], although I’ve used my legs [to run] and have put on a surprisingly loud deep voice in the past. I did a self-defence class in the 80s and we were told to try and make ourselves seem unattractive to predators because they prey on those they think look frightened. That really struck me and sometimes I try and make myself appear bigger or angrier. Sarah, 59, speech and language therapy assistant, London

‘My dad taught me to box and I had soppy but fierce-looking big dogs’

I was about nine when my dad taught me how to box. Our independence as children was very important to him and he used to spar with me. He must’ve realised that as a girl it might be useful too. I’ve never really felt extreme fear but it’s still there. I’ve also had soppy but fierce-looking big dogs. I lived in London for 35 years and I had a doberman-German shepherd cross called Boo, because she was frightened of everything. I would take her for a walk around 11pm and people would cross the road. Janey, 72, retired graphic designer, Norfolk

‘It’s so easy to ignore a danger or threat if you don’t have to experience it yourself’

I’m a trans woman who only came out fully a couple of years ago. My style is everyday, nothing provocative, and I’m always taken for a woman. Walking home from the bus at night for the first time and feeling really unsafe I suddenly realised – this is what women go through the whole time. I’ve always been aware and supportive of women’s issues but even so, it was a horrible, shaming epiphany to realise that I’d seen past this basic fact of women’s lives. It’s so easy to ignore a danger or threat if you don’t have to experience it yourself. Kim, 60, classical musician, Sweden

‘The clip will be shared but will anything change?’

I agree with her, however, sometimes I worry people only have an interest in feminism when it’s delivered in viral, digestible moments. Yes, the clip will be shared and posted about, but will anything change? Probably not. I’m glad I’m a lesbian because my partners are less likely to cause me harm or kill me. It’s taken us decades to get even this far and I feel like we’re getting stuck at best and at worst going backwards. My mum always taught me to carry a can of strong deodorant that I could spray at someone. I have a big, metal water bottle I carry because I know I can swing it at someone. Ruby, 30s, works in education, US

‘Your elbow is one of your best weapons’

While living in South Africa for almost 20 years I attended a self-defence course for women. The facilitator, a former cop from Zimbabwe, said that most women who were raped had reported they had not known what to do, even when their hands were free. Your elbow is one of your best weapons. Who knew? Even 30 years later I remember what was taught. That said, I do sometimes travel with a small awl in my pocket. Aletta, 66, retired application software facilitator, the Netherlands