A Pittsburgh-area Halloween parade’s depiction of Kamala Harris in chains and being dragged by a vehicle displaying Donald Trump’s name is being condemned as racist – and has prompted an apology from the event organizer.

Photos of Wednesday night’s parade in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, that circulated widely across social media show a person dressed as the Democratic vice-president shackled and walking behind a golf cart-like vehicle. The vehicle – a float in a Halloween parade organized by the Mount Pleasant volunteer fire department – is decorated with American flags and Trump campaign signs carrying people dressed in what appear to be Secret Service agent costumes, along with a mounted rifle.

Social media was quick to express disgust at the float’s display, which came less than a week before the presidential election between Harris and the Republican former president comes to a head on 5 November.

The NAACP was among those to say the float was racist. A statement from Daylon A Davis, the president of the NAACP’s Pittsburgh branch, said: “This appalling portrayal goes beyond the realm of Halloween satire or free expression; it is a harmful symbol that evokes a painful history of violence, oppression, and racism that Black and Brown communities have long endured here in America.”

Harris is of Jamaican and Indian descent.

Nearly 24 hours after the parade, the Mount Pleasant volunteer fire department issued a statement apologizing on Facebook for allowing the offensive float.

“We do not share in the values represented by those participants, and we understand how it may have hurt or offended members of our community,” the statement said.

The post did not elaborate on the process of getting approved for the parade, leaving questions about how the float was allowed to roll.

On a CBS News segment, Mount Pleasant’s mayor, Diane Bailey, denounced the portrayal of Harris.

“I was appalled, angered, upset,” the Democratic mayor said on Thursday. “This does not belong in this parade or in this town.”

Bailey added that the fire department must change its process for allowing floats.

“They’ve never taken applications in the past,” Bailey said. “They’ve never vetted anyone who wanted to come to the parade.”

Michelle Milan McFall, the chairperson of Westmoreland county’s Democratic party, added that the float in question rolled during what she said may be the US’s “most contentious election”.

On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly threatened to imprison his opponents. He has also been targeted by two assassination attempts, according to authorities.

“It’s vile. It’s heartbreaking. It’s concerning. And I think it’s also got an element of danger,” Milan McFall told ABC affiliate WTAE. “Again, we’re living in this climate where people aren’t just thinking about hatred and feeling it in their guts and bones. They’re acting on it.”

A New York author and journalist has released audio tapes that appear to detail how Donald Trump had a close social relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that he has long denied.

The tapes, released as part of the Fire and Fury podcast series by Michael Wolff, author of three books about Trump’s first term and 2020 bid for a second, and James Truman, former NME journalist and Condé Nast editorial director, include Epstein’s thoughts about the inner workings of the former US president’s inner circle.

Wolff says the recordings were made during a 2017 discussion with Epstein about writing his biography. Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges two years later. Despite his crimes, the wealthy financier was at the heart of a social circle of the rich and powerful in the US and overseas that contained many famous names.

Wolff claims the excerpt tape is a mere fraction of some “100 hours of Epstein talking about the inner workings of the Trump White House and about his longstanding, deep relationship with Donald Trump”.

Trump once praised Epstein in conversation with New York magazine in 2002, calling him “a terrific guy” and hinted at his interest in women “on the young side”. But he claimed the pair had fallen out 15 years before Epstein was convicted on a prostitution solicitation charge in Florida in 2008.

“I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you,” the president said after Epstein was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges in 2019.

The Fire and Fury tapes reveal Epstein recalling how then president Trump played his circle off against each other. “His people fight each other and then he poisons the well outside,” he says.

The author names Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus and Kellyanne Conway as being among the acolytes and officials Trump played off each other like courtiers in a competitive court.

“He will tell 10 people ‘Bannon’s a scumbag’ and ‘Priebus is not doing a good job’ and ‘Kellyanne has a big mouth – what do you think?’

“‘[JPMorgan Chase CEO] Jamie Dimon says that you’re a problem and I shouldn’t keep you. And I spoke to [financier] Carl Icahn. And Carl thinks I need a new spokesperson.’”

Epstein continues his exposition of Trump’s approach to management: “So Kelly[anne] – even though I hired Kellyanne’s husband – Kellyanne is just too much of a wildcard. And then he tells Bannon: ‘You know I really want to keep you but Kellyanne hates you.’”

In response to the podcast, Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary, said, “Wolff is a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because he clearly has no morals or ethics” and accused the author of making “outlandish false smears” and engaging in “blatant election interference on behalf of Kamala Harris”.

Wolffs claims on the podcast that he became an “outlet” for Epstein “to express his incredulity about someone whose sins he knew so well, and then this person actually being elected president. Epstein was utterly preoccupied with Trump, and I think, frankly, afraid of him.”

In the broadest strokes, Wolff’s intention is to paint a picture of two wealthy men of the 1980s whose shared interests lie in money, women and status. He describes how they socialized together in New York.

The Guardian recently revealed that in 1993 Epstein had taken Stacey Williams, a Sports Illustrated model and his girlfriend of two months, to Trump’s Fifth Avenue penthouse and allowed or perhaps encouraged the former US president to grope her in what she described as a “twisted game”.

Speaking on the podcast, Wolff said: “Here are these two guys both driven by a need to do anything they wanted with women: dominance and submission and entertainment. And one of them ends up in the darkest prison in the country and the other in the White House.”

Tucker Carlson, the former CNN and Fox News political chat host, has said he was “physically mauled” by a demon a year and a half ago, in an assault that he says left him bleeding and with scars from “claw marks”.

Carlson made the claim while speaking in an upcoming documentary, Christianities? In a preview clip on YouTube, Carlson is asked by John Heers of the non-profit First Things Foundation if he believed that “the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good”.

“That’s what happened to me. I had a direct experience with it,” said Carlson.

Asked if he was referring to journalism, Carlson responded: “No, in my bed at night. I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”

Carlson, who said he still bears the scars, said his assailant was a “demon”. He added: “Or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides.”

He said at the time of the attack, he was asleep in bed. I was “totally confused, I woke up, and I couldn’t breathe, and I thought I was going to suffocate”, he said.

“I walked around outside and then I walked in and my wife and dogs had not woken up. And they’re very light sleepers. And then I had these terrible pains on my rib cage and on my shoulder, and I was just in my boxer shorts and I went and flipped on the light in the bathroom, and I had four claw marks on either side underneath my arms and on my left shoulder. And they’re bleeding.”

He added that he explained the encounter to an assistant, an evangelical Christian, who told him: “That happens, people are attacked in their bed by demons.”

Carlson, who lives in the woods of Maine, did not say where the attack occurred, but called it a “transformative experience” that left him “seized with this very intense desire to read the Bible”.

Carlson, who was fired from Fox News after the company paid more than $787m to settle a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over false statements and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, is stumping for Donald Trump on the campaign trial.

He addressed a rally in Georgia last week, telling Trump supporters that the candidate’s possible return to the White House was like a father returning home and Trump would give the country a “vigorous spanking”.

“He’s not vengeful. He loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them. Because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior. And he’s going to have to let them know,” Carlson said.

“When Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’”

A pregnant Texas teenager died after three separate visits to an emergency room in attempts to get care in another incident that has highlighted the medical impact of the loss of abortion rights in the US.

Nevaeh Crain, 18, had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours in October of 2023, each time returning home feeling worse than before. Crain was only diagnosed with strep throat upon her first visit. The hospital did not investigate her sharp abdominal cramps, according to reporting by ProPublica.

Crain is one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban brought in after the US supreme court overturned the federal right to abortion. Josseli Barnica, 28, died after a miscarriage in 2021.

These incidents are seen as evidence of a new reality where US healthcare professionals in states with new tough abortion restrictions are hesitant or even afraid to give care to pregnant mothers over fear of legal repercussions. Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, regardless of whether the pregnancy is wanted or not.

Medical records indicate Crain tested positive for sepsis, a potentially life-threatening condition, on her second visit. But doctors still cleared her to leave after apparently confirming that her six-month-old fetus still had a heartbeat.

On her third trip to the hospital, Crain was finally moved to intensive care after an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise”, reported ProPublica.

She died hours later after suffering organ failure. A nurse noted that her lips had turned “blue and dusky”, ProPublica said. The teen would have turned 20 this Friday.

Though Texas retains exceptions for life-threatening conditions, the fear and uncertainty instilled in doctors over which treatments may or may not be considered a crime has had devastating effects on women in need of healthcare.

The result is that in states with abortion bans, patients are often traded between hospitals in order to shirk responsibility and argue about legalities, an act which wastes precious and potentially life-saving time.

“Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables,” Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor emerita at George Washington University, told ProPublica.

Republicans are already laying the ground for rejecting the result of next week’s US presidential election in the event Donald Trump loses, with early lawsuits baselessly alleging fraud and partisan polls exaggerating his popularity to make it harder for his supporters to accept that he did not win, veteran strategists say.

The warnings – from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans – come as Americans prepare to vote on Tuesday in the most consequential presidential contest in generations. Most polls show Trump running neck and neck with Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee, with the two candidates seemingly evenly matched in seven key swing states.

But suspicions have been voiced over a spate of recent polls, mostly commissioned in battleground states from groups with Republican links, that mainly show Trump leading. The projection of surging Trump support as election day nears has drawn confident predictions from him and his supporters.

“We’re leading big in the polls, all of the polls,” Trump told a rally in New Mexico on Thursday. “I can’t believe it’s a close race,” he told a separate rally in North Carolina, a swing state where polls show he and Harris are in a virtual dead heat.

An internal memo sent to Trump by his chief pollster is confirming that story to him, with Tony Fabrizio declaring the ex-president’s “position nationally and in every single battleground state is SIGNIFICANTLY better today than it was four years ago”.

Pro-Trump influencers, too, have strengthened the impression of inevitable victory with social media posts citing anonymous White House officials predicting Harris’s defeat. “Biden is telling advisers the election is ‘dead and buried’ and called Harris an innate sucker,” the conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec posted this week.

GOP-aligned polling groups have released 37 polls in the final stretch of the campaign, according to a study by the New York Times, during a period when longstanding pollsters have been curtailing their voter surveys. All but seven showed a lead for Trump, in contrast to the findings of long-established non-partisan pollsters, which have shown a more mixed picture – often with Harris leading, albeit within error margins.

In one illustration, a poll last Tuesday by the Trafalgar Group – an organisation founded by a former Republican consultant – gave Trump a three-point lead over Harris in North Carolina. By contrast, a CNN/SRSS poll two days later in the same state put the vice-president ahead by a single point.

The polling expert Nate Silver – who has said his “gut” favours a Trump win, while simultaneously arguing that people should not trust their gut – cast doubt on the ex-president’s apparent surge in an interview with CNBC. “Anyone who is confident about this election is someone whose opinion you should discount,” he said.

“There’s been certainly some momentum towards Trump in the last couple of weeks. [But] these small changes are swamped by the uncertainty. Any indicator you want to point to, I could point to counter-examples.”

Democrats and some polling experts believe the conservative-commissioned polls are aiming to create a false narrative of unstoppable momentum for Trump – which could then be used to challenge the result if Harris wins.

“Republicans are clearly strategically putting polling into the information environment to try to create perceptions that Trump is stronger. Their incentive is not necessarily to get the answer right,” Joshua Dyck, of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, told the New York Times.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democrat strategist and blogger, said it followed a trend set in the 2022 congressional elections, when a succession of surveys favourable to Republicans created an expectation of a pro-GOP “red wave” that never materialised on polling day.

“These polls were usually two, three, four points more Republican than the independent polls that were being done and they ended up having the effect of pushing the polling averages to the right,” he told MeidasTouch News.

“We cannot be bamboozled by this again. It is vital to Donald Trump’s effort if he tries to cheat and overturn the election results, he needs to have data showing that somehow he was winning the election.

“The reason we have to call this out is that Donald Trump needs to go into election day with some set of data showing him winning, so if he loses, he can say we cheated.”

Trump, who falsely claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, is also paving the way for repeating the accusation via legal means.

He told a rally in Pennsylvania that Democrats were “cheating” in the state, and on Wednesday his campaign took legal action against election officials in Bucks County, where voters waiting to submit early mail-in ballots were turned away because the deadline had expired. A judge later ordered the county to extend early voting by one day. There is no evidence of widespread cheating in elections in Pennsylvania or any other state, and mail-in ballots are in high demand in part because Trump himself has encouraged early voting.

Suing to allege – without evidence – that there has been voting fraud is part of a well-worn pattern of Trump disputing election results that do not go his way. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, his team filed 60 lawsuits disputing the results, all of which were forcefully thrown out in court.

Anti-Trump Republicans have expressed similar concerns to Democrats about Trump’s actions. Michael Steele, a former Republican national committee chairand Trump critic, told the New Republic that the GOP-commissioned polls were gamed to favour Trump.

“You find different ways to weight the participants, and that changes the results you’re going to get,” he said. “They’re gamed on the back end so Maga can make the claim that the election was stolen.”

Stuart Stevens, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate, and a founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told the same outlet: “Their gameplan is to make it impossible for states to certify. And these fake polls are a great tool in that, because that’s how you lead people to think the race was stolen.”

Trump-leaning surveys have influenced the polling averages published by sites such as Real Clear Politics, which has incorporated the results into its projected electoral map on election night, forecasting a win for the former president.

Elon Musk, Trump’s wealthiest backer and surrogate, posted the map to his 202 million followers on his own X platform, proclaiming: “The trend will continue.”

Trump and Musk have also promoted online betting platforms, which have bolstered the impression of a surge for the Republican candidate stemming from hefty bets on him winning.

A small number of high-value wagers from four accounts linked to a French national appeared to be responsible for $28m gambled on a Trump victory on the Polymarket platform, the New York Times reported.

Trump referenced the Polymarket activity in a recent speech. “I don’t know what the hell it means, but it means we’re doing pretty well,” he said.

The Arhuaco live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast, which they consider the heart of the world. They are so respected that in recent years it has become tradition for each new Colombian president to be sworn in twice: once in the capital, Bogotá, and once in the Sierra with the Arhuaco.

The Sierra, the highest tropical coastal mountain range in the world, is a biodiversity hotspot, in urgent need of safeguarding. This year, the Arhuaco, who are key to its protection, have been awarded the UN Development Programme’s Equator prize for rewilding and agroforestry for their work.

A massive shootout linked to drug trafficking has seriously wounded a teenager and four others in western France, the interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, said, in the latest such gunfight to injure children.

The shootout erupted overnight in front of a restaurant in Poitiers, Retailleau told BFMTV/RMC radio on Friday. “What started as a shooting at a restaurant ended up in a fight between rival gangs that involved several hundred people,” he said.

The 15-year-old boy was between life and death, he said.

The minister warned that France was at a “tipping point” when it came to drug trafficking violence, saying he was planning to travel later in the day to Rennes, where a five-year-old child was also critically ill after being shot on Saturday in another drug trafficking fire exchange.

White House press officials altered the official transcript of a call in which President Joe Biden appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two US government officials and an internal email obtained on Thursday by the Associated Press.

Biden created an uproar earlier this week with his remarks to Latino activists responding to racist comments at a Trump rally made by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to the US island territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

Biden, according to a transcript prepared by the official White House stenographers, told the Latino group on a Tuesday evening video call, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

The transcript released by the White House press office, however, rendered the quote with an apostrophe, reading “supporter’s” rather than “supporters,” which aides said pointed to Biden criticizing Hinchcliffe, not the millions of Americans who are supporting Trump for president.

The change was made after the press office “conferred with the president,” according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by the AP. The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.”

“If there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,” the supervisor wrote, adding, “Our Stenography Office transcript – released to our distro, which includes the National Archives – is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff.”

The edit of the transcript came as the White House scrambled to respond to a wave of queries from reporters about Biden’s comments. The president’s remarks clashed with vice-president Kamala Harris’ near-simultaneous speech outside the White House in which she called for treating Americans of differing ideologies with respect.

The Trump campaign quickly moved to fundraise off the quote, and the next day, Trump himself held a photo op inside a garbage truck to try to capitalize on Biden’s criticism.

Harris on Wednesday distanced herself from Biden’s comments – making the clearest break from the president since she took over for him at the top of the Democratic ticket just over three months ago. “Let me be clear,” she told reporters, “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”

According to the email, the press office had asked the stenographers to quickly produce a transcript of the call amid the firestorm. Biden himself took to social media to say that he was not calling all Trump supporters garbage and that he was referring specifically to the “hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally.”

The stenographers office is charged with preparing accurate transcripts of public and private remarks of the president for preservation by the National Archives and distribution to the public.

The two-person stenography team on duty that evening – a “typer” and “proofer” – said any edit to the transcript would have to be approved by their supervisor, the head of stenographers’ office.

The supervisor was not immediately available to review the audio, but the press office went ahead and published the altered transcript on the White House website and distributed it to press and on social media in an effort to tamp down the story.

White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates that evening also posted on X the edited version of the quote and wrote that Biden was referring ”to the hateful rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally as ‘garbage.’”

The supervisor, a career employee of the White House, raised the concerns about the press office action – but did not weigh in on the accuracy of the edit – in an email to White House communications director Ben LaBolt, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and other press and communications officials.

“Regardless of urgency, it is essential to our transcripts’ authenticity and legitimacy that we adhere to consistent protocol for requesting edits, approval, and release,” the supervisor wrote.

The supervisor declined to comment to the AP and referred questions about the matter to the White House press office.

Asked to comment, Bates did not address the alteration of the transcript and said: “The President confirmed in his tweet on Tuesday evening that he was addressing the hateful rhetoric from the comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. That was reflected in the transcript.”

House Republicans, meanwhile, were debating launching an investigation into the matter. House Republican Conference chairwoman Elise Stefanik, a Republican of New York, and House Oversight and Accountability chairman James Comer, a Republican of Kentucky, on Wednesday accused White House staff of “releasing a false transcript” of Biden’s remarks.

In a letter to White House counsel Ed Siskel on Wednesday, they called on the administration to retain documents and internal communications related to Biden’s remarks and the release of the transcript.

“White House staff cannot rewrite the words of the President of the United States to be more politically on message,” the lawmakers wrote to Siskel.

Stefanik and Comer said the action could be in violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

A New York man who turned a rescued squirrel into a social media star called Peanut is pleading with state authorities to return his beloved pet after they seized it during a raid that also yielded a raccoon named Fred.

Multiple anonymous complaints about Peanut – also spelled P’Nut or PNUT – brought at least six officers from the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to Mark Longo’s home on Wednesday, Longo said.

“The DEC came to my house and raided my house without a search warrant to find a squirrel!” said Longo,from Pine City. “I was treated as if I was a drug dealer and they were going for drugs and guns.”

The officers left with Peanut, who has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms during his seven years with Longo. They also took Fred, a more recent addition to the family.

By Thursday night, Longo had gathered nearly 20,000 signatures urging the return of Peanut, and says he has hired a legal team to get Peanut back.

A spokesperson for the DEC said in a statement that the agency had started an investigation after receiving “multiple reports from the public about the potentially unsafe housing of wildlife that could carry rabies and the illegal keeping of wildlife as pets.”

Longo, who runs an animal refuge inspired by his squirrel buddy called P’Nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary, took to Instagram to mourn Peanut’s loss and said he fears that Peanut has been euthanised. “I don’t know if Peanut is alive,” he said in a phone interview on Thursday. “I don’t know where he is.”

The DEC spokesperson did not respond to a question about whether Peanut had been euthanised.

Longo said he took in Peanut seven years ago after seeing Peanut’s mother get hit by a car in New York City. Longo brought Peanut home and cared for him for eight months before trying to release the squirrel. “A day and a half later I found him sitting on my porch missing half of his tail with his bone sticking out,” Longo said.

Longo decided that Peanut lacked the survival skills to live in the wild and would remain an indoor squirrel.

Internet fame followed, after Longo posted videos of Peanut playing with his cat.

An Instagram account dedicated to Peanut shows the animal leaping on to Longo’s shoulder, wearing a miniature cowboy hat, and eating a waffle while wearing crocheted bunny ears.

Over the years Peanut’s story has been featured on TV and newspapers including USA Today.

Longo, who works as a mechanical engineer, was living in Norwalk, Connecticut, until he decided to move to upstate New York last year to start an animal sanctuary. P’Nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary opened in April 2023 and now houses about 300 animals including horses, goats and alpacas, said Longo, who runs the sanctuary with his wife, Daniela, and other family members.

Longo is aware that it’s against New York state law to own a wild animal without a licence. He said he was in the process of filing paperwork to get Peanut certified as an educational animal.

“If we’re not following the rules, guide us in the right direction to follow the rules, you know?” Longo said. “Let us know what we need to do to have Peanut in the house and not have to worry about him getting taken.”

As for Fred, Longo said he had had the raccoon for only a few months and was hoping to rehabilitate the injured creature and release him back into the woods.

Longo is not the first animal owner to protest against the confiscation of a pet by New York authorities. A Buffalo-area man whose alligator was seized by the DEC in March is suing the agency to get the 750lb (340kg) reptile back.