Donald Trump’s extremist attacks on top Democrats as “the enemy from within” and talk of deploying the military against political foes if he wins the election are stark signs Trump will endanger the rule of law in America, say former US justice department officials and scholars.

Trump’s threats – singling out ex-speaker Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and others as “the enemy from within” and “more dangerous than China [and] Russia” – jibe with his earlier incendiary talk of using a return to the White House to seek “revenge” against political foes led by Joe Biden. He also suggested the military could be used to quell violence at the polls from “radical left lunatics”.

Those comments, along with Trump’s adamant refusal to say clearly he will accept the election results if he is defeated, prompt critics to say Trump poses unprecedented dangers to the US constitution.

Critics call Trump’s campaign rhetoric especially worrisome since it squares with his efforts after he lost the 2020 election to falsely claim the voting was rigged, while scheming to overturn the results before a mob of his allies on January 6 attacked the Capitol as Congress was certifying the results.

Alarm about a second Trump term were heightened this month when Trump’s former chief of staff and former four-star marine general John Kelly condemned him in the Atlantic as unfit to govern and having said: “I need to have the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

Ex-justice department officials are appalled by Trump’s demonizing his political foes as “the enemy from within”, words used by the demagogic senator Joe McCarthy, and ruminating about using the military against them to exact revenge.

“Trump’s anti-democratic, authoritarian rhetoric has been ratcheted up the closer we draw to the election,” said Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general at the justice department.

“Rather than keeping a covert enemies list, he publicly names his enemies against whom he vows to take action. The implications for a Trump justice department, charged with dealing with Trump’s lust to retaliate against these enemies, are frightening to consider.”

Bromwich said: “People who take their oath to the constitution seriously have trouble wrapping their heads around someone who views the constitution and the rule of law as nuisances to be circumvented rather than a set of principles to be scrupulously honored.”

Other justice department veterans express similar worries about a second Trump term.

“Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous for two reasons. Using the powers of the presidency to go after his political rivals is an incredibly dangerous deviation from democratic norms and the rule of law,” said Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor in eastern Michigan and a law professor at the University of Michigan.

“The rule of law requires that we apply the law equally to everyone, and not in retaliation for political activity or speech. Second, the military is to be used against our foreign adversaries, not our own citizens. These tactics are things we see in authoritarian regimes, not democracies. Following through on these threats would change the country as we know it.”

Fears about how Trump would rule in a second term have metastasized as former senior top officials in his first administration have gone public, labeling him a fascist and unfit to be president again.

Mark Milley, Trump’s ex-chair of the joint chiefs of staff, was in quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book calling Trump “fascist to the core”.

Kelly, too, told the New York Times that Trump met the definition of a “fascist” and “prefers the dictator approach to government”, and once said that “Hitler did some good things”.

Trump in turn attacked Kelly last Friday, calling him a “whack job” and boasting that he had fired Kelly, who was a “nutjob to start off with. These are phoney stories by a general that got fired.”

Thirteen former Trump officials signed a letter supporting Kelly’s charges and attacking Trump’s “disdain for the American military and admiration for dictators like Hitler”.

Trump’s obsession with having a military loyal to him as Hitler did, fits with a larger pattern in Trump world: Trump and his allies have made it clear that loyalty to Trump will be a prerequisite to serve in a new administration, and that moderate Republicans would not be welcome.

Critics say Trump is intent on creating an administration without the kinds of guardrails that existed with people like Kelly and Milley as checks against his authoritarian instincts, a point that is underscored by Trump’s campaign talk of using the justice department to seek “revenge” on his enemies.

That mindset was palpable when Trump told the podcast host Joe Rogan on Friday that the country faces a “bigger problem … with the enemy from within” than the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, and allowed that his “biggest mistake” as president was hiring “disloyal people”.

Trump’s latest incendiary claims fit too with his call in 2022 on Truth Social for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the constitution”, which he justified by citing his false claims the 2020 election was stolen.

Tim Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University, said: “Trump wants a second go without any obstacles from people who will tell him what he can’t do. People who served as guardrails during his first term are now worried about what he will do if he gets a second term without guardrails. From personal experience they know that his instincts are injurious to US national security and our constitutional democracy.”

Naftali noted further that the supreme court’s much criticized ruling broadening presidential immunity “has made it easier for Trump, if he wins, to push his own people to do whatever he wants”.

“The court has made this a more permissive environment for an abusive president. If he’s re-elected, Trump can take advantage of the new permissive environment created by the supreme court which wraps his official acts in at least presumed immunity.”

Naftali’s warnings are buttressed by Trump’s repeated threats to seek revenge against his enemies, whom he has often portrayed as part of a “deep state” conspiracy against him that he claims involves a weaponized justice department waging “lawfare” against him.

Little wonder that Trump last Thursday upped his attacks on Jack Smith, the special counsel who has filed criminal charges against the former president over his election subversion efforts in 2020, and for improperly taking hundreds of classified documents with him when he left office. Trump said he would fire Smith in “two seconds” and that he should be “thrown out of the country”.

Justice department veterans voice alarm about Trump’s barrage of autocratic-style threats about seeking revenge on foes in both parties if he defeats Kamala Harris.

“For a long time, Donald Trump has been promising to use government to punish his enemies. It is shocking but not surprising that he has now adopted the language of Joseph McCarthy by labelling his likely targets ‘the enemy from within’”, said Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general under the former president George HW Bush.

“But this is just one more piece of his single-minded effort to divide the American people and establish his own authoritarian power by attacking the basic principles that have long united us. The American people must not let him get away with this.”

Other justice department alumni see Trump posing unprecedented dangers if he wins again.

“No one in our history has ever stressed the constitution the way Trump has,” said Ty Cobb, a lawyer who served in the Trump White House and former justice department official.

Cobb added: “The founders could not have conceived of the possibility a crippled narcissist like Trump, a court-determined rapist with dozens of criminal felony convictions, serious pending charges, some involving functional insurrection, and civil fraud liability in the hundreds of millions, could possibly be a serious presidential candidate, much less elected.”

Bromwich, too, sees the prospect of Trump in power again as frightening.

“What would a justice department staffed by senior officials willing to implement Trump’s authoritarian, unconstitutional, and retaliation-minded agenda look like? Like nothing we have ever seen: staffed by lawyers with much ambition and little principle, working for a president himself protected by the immunity from prosecution conferred by the supreme court.”

As the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, finished a speech to the European parliament, the Italian MEP Ilaria Salis rose from her seat and with about a dozen other leftwing colleagues belted out the anti-fascist anthem Bella Ciao.

Until May, Salis had been held in pre-trial detention in a Hungarian prison following her arrest on charges of assault in February last year at a counter-protest to a neo-Nazi rally in Budapest. She was then freed and allowed to return to Italy in June, after her election that month to the European parliament.

After her response to Orbán’s speech on 9 October, representatives of his Fidesz party said their government had formally requested the withdrawal of Salis’s parliamentary immunity in order to have her returned to prison in Hungary.

“I was expecting it,” Salis told the Guardian in an interview. “It was evident that they would do everything they could to send me back to prison. At stake is their credibility and my election as a member of the European parliament has certainly caught them off-guard and embarrassed them.

“They have not digested the fact that I was elected. They have not digested the fact that I received 178,000 votes. They have not digested the fact that, at least so far, anti-fascism and human rights have prevailed.”

The case of Salis, 40, a teacher from Monza near Milan, sparked diplomatic protests and anger in Italy after she was brought to court in Hungary in chains at the start of the year, her hands cuffed and feet locked together, to hear the charges against her of three counts of attempted assault and membership of an extreme leftwing organisation. She denied the charges, which carried a jail term of up to 11 years.

In a letter to her lawyer, Salis, who was held in detention for nearly a year before her first court appearance, described cells infested with rats and bugs, and said she was not allowed to wash for days at a time, or given urgent medical care. Her candidacy for the Greens and Left Alliance in Italy was intended to give her immunity from prosecution, and she won a seat in the EU parliament just weeks after she was freed from jail to house arrest at the beginning of her trial.

“My case is not just a judicial matter,” she said. “It is a political case. Orbán is losing support, both in Europe and in Hungary. My situation is just one of his strategies to continue his propaganda in his country. Moreover, my case can also be easily exploited in Europe. During the first plenary session, a member of the Patriots’ group, referring to me, said in parliament ‘there is a woman who goes around with a hammer hitting people,’ which is absolutely false, and even requested that my staff and I be searched.”

Salis had been the target of numerous death threats from far-right militant groups following her arrest. As a far-right march commemorating Nazi forces in the second world war passed through Budapest last February, a mural was painted on a wall imagining the death by hanging of Salis, while on Telegram channels, neo-Nazis said they wanted to put her in a wheelchair.

“Threats and insults have now become the norm on social media,” said Salis. “But what hurt me the most was a post by the European parliament group, Patriots for Europe, where they wrote about me: ‘Does Salis seriously think that justice will not catch up with her? Does she think she will always be protected? There will come a time when she will be very alone. It’s hard to say what’s worse, that moment or the anticipation before it.’ What shocked me was that the post was not written by just any social media user, but by a democratically elected political group in the European parliament.”

Salis’s case is potentially embarrassing for Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, as she and the deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, have close ties with Orbán.

“I only hope that the Italian government supports me as one of their citizens and defends the rule of law,” Salis said. “I do not want to evade the trial. I just want a fair trial. In Hungary, there are no such conditions. Orbán has already condemned me, speaks of me as guilty, even though we have not yet reached a verdict, not to mention the fact that in Hungary I face a 24-year prison sentence in a country with several pending human rights violations.

“Myself and the Italian government will never be friends, as our ideas are diametrically opposed. All I ask is to be treated without prejudice, and fairly, like any Italian citizen.”

The Hungarian parliamentarians’ request to revoke Salis’s immunity has already been communicated to the president of the European parliament, Roberta Metsola. The request will then be announced in parliament and referred to the relevant committee.

The process before reaching the final vote in parliament could take up to four months. “I only hope that my colleagues who will be called to vote, do so thinking first and foremost not about being right wing or left wing, but being aware that at stake is the rule of law, the credibility of the European Union, and the very values for which it was founded, those of anti-fascism,” Salis said.

“As far as I am concerned, I have nothing left but to continue fighting.”

Experts agree that the world needs $700bn (£539bn) a year to restore nature – but no one knows where the money is going to come from, and anger is building about rich countries failing to pay their share.

With representatives of nearly 200 countries gathered in Colombia for the UN Cop16 biodiversity summit, the question of who will fund conservation and how those funds will be distributed is a key battleground – and as negotiations push into their second week, frustration is growing at the lack of movement.

In their first submission to the negotiations, the Africa Group (representing the African nations, who have opted to negotiate as a bloc) said it was “deeply concerned” about the progress being made. It said the idea that wealthy countries would reach their 2025 finance target – the deadline for which is three months away – was “wishful thinking”.

The headline figure agreed on by countries at Cop15 in 2022 was to generate $700bn a year in finance for nature, beginning with $200bn a year by 2030. Scientists estimated that $700bn is the amount required to sustainably manage biodiversity and halt the destruction of ecosystems and species. That figure includes all financing – including from the private sector, non-profits, NGOs, and governments. Within it, richer countries have promised to contribute $20bn a year of public funds to poorer countries by 2025.

But those funds have proven slow to materialise. On Monday, dubbed “finance day” at the talks, eight countries, including the UK, Germany, France and Norway, announced $163m in new pledges.

Alice Jay, director of international relations at Campaign for Nature, said that while they welcomed these new commitments, closing the finance gap “would require them to announce $300m each month from now to 2025, and then keep that up each year until 2030.”

Oscar Soria, director of thinktank The Common Initiative, described the amount as “paltry”. He said negotiations had been in gridlock in the first week and “the most contentious issues revolved around biodiversity finance”.

“Countries from the global south expect more from the global north,” said Nigeria environment minister Dr Iziaq Kunle Salako. “Finance is key in the context of implementing all the targets.”

“We cannot ignore the fact that one of the main factors limiting progress is the lack of finance,” agreed Inger Andersen, head of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), explaining that resource mobilisation is central to discussions because it is central to enabling developing nations – which contain the world’s globally important ecosystems – to implement their action plans.

Rich countries failing to contribute

So far, the majority of rich countries appear to be contributing less than half of their “fair share” of biodiversity finance, according to a report released ahead of the UN meeting. As of 2022 (the latest year for which data is available and before the Cop15 deal was signed) wealthy countries which signed the agreement provided $10.95bn in biodiversity funding, according to the report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Campaign for Nature.

It is not known how much was donated in 2023 or 2024, but ODI research found minimal new announcements of finance since Cop15, and analysis by research organisation BloombergNEF found no evidence of new and substantial public money committed to biodiversity in 2024.

“Financing is a currency of trust,” said Mark Opel, the finance lead at Campaign for Nature. “It is fundamental to building trust between the global north and the global south.”

It is not just about the quantity – the quality is equally important. There is no globally agreed definition of biodiversity finance, and donor countries sometimes give money to projects that only partially benefit nature – such as food production – and call it “biodiversity-related” funding.

A large chunk of the $700bn was expected to come from rewiring $500bn of environmentally damaging subsidies. Collectively, countries spend $1.25tn on subsidies for agriculture, fossil fuel development, and other industries that destroy biodiversity, according to a 2023 report by the World Bank. All countries were meant to identify harmful subsidies in their public spending by 2025, but so far only 36 have released information. “This is a point on which almost no progress has been made,” said Soria.

Also on the table is the question of whether increased debt should count as finance. Broadly, the countries with the most intact biodiversity are also the least developed – and the most indebted.

An Independent Expert Group report released in October shows countries most exposed to climate change and nature loss are increasingly having to borrow to fund disaster response and adaptation. Debts are rising and becoming more expensive, meaning countries are less able to invest in nature conservation and climate resilience. “Many low and middle-income countries are facing a ‘triple’ crisis not of their own making,” said Vera Songwe, former UN under-secretary general and co-chair of the review. “Unless the international community collectively takes measures to address this, countries are not going to be able to pursue the climate resilient, low-carbon, nature-positive growth which they need.”

But nature funding to these countries in the form of loans has been on the rise. The typical model is to offer countries loans at cheaper interest rates, on condition they meet certain nature preservation goals. About 80% of the increase in funding from 2021 to 2022 was in the form of loans, not grants, according to unpublished estimates from Campaign for Nature.

France, for example, has given 87% of its biodiversity contributions in the form of loans. Climate justice activists argue that this money should be given as grants to save poorer countries falling into a vicious circle of indebtedness.

The African group and Latin America group are pushing for official recognition of how debt burdens impact poor countries, while countries including France, the UK and China are against this.

Who distributes the money?

Countries are also locked into conflict over how funding is distributed. The current mechanism is the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) which was created at Cop15 in Montreal as a way for countries to make their finance contributions. It currently sits within the Global Environment Facility (GEF).

During negotiations, however, many developing countries (including Brazil and the Africa group), have argued this should be put in a separate fund because they say it is burdensome to access and controlled by wealthy nations. Wealthy countries, including Europe, Canada, the UK and Japan, are among those saying it should stay where it is. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) nearly blocked the nature deal from being signed in 2022 due to anger over GEF carrying all the cash.

Out of the 22 projects approved by the GBFF so far, 30% of funds have gone via WWF-US for work in developing countries, according to analysis by the campaign group Survival International, which has raised concerns about a lack of funds reaching Indigenous people and local groups.

In the meantime, as NGOs at the negotiation have emphasised, the clock is ticking. Progress on finance is crucial to the rest of negotiations moving forward, said Bernadette Fischler Hooper, global advocacy lead at WWF.

“It is the hottest of all the potatoes. It’s the core of the atom and everything else revolves around it.”

Farmers and conservationists will have to “learn to do more with less” ahead of expected deep budget cuts to the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the environment secretary has said.

Steve Reed said that Labour would continue to prioritise the restoration of the nature in England, but acknowledged that the chancellor’s budget would be “difficult”.

Speaking to the Guardian on the fringes of Cop16 in Colombia on the eve of Wednesday’s statement by the chancellor, the environment secretary said that the flagship nature-friendly farming scheme would continue to receive backing from the government despite expected cuts to its budget.

He said expected growth in housebuilding would generate much-needed funds through the government’s biodiversity net gain (BNG) initiative, which forces all new building projects to achieve a 10% net gain in nature or wildlife habitat.

“The prime minister and chancellor have been very clear this is going to be a difficult budget, right across the board,” he said when asked what expected cuts would mean for farmers and environmentalists. “We all are going to have to do more with less. I think that’s right because you should always look at how you can use any resource you’ve got more efficiently and effectively.”

On Tuesday, the Guardian reported that Defra was likely to see particularly severe cuts in Wednesday’s budget, and that the reductions will largely fall on nature and flood protections. Defra has historically faired worse than other departments in times of austerity, with the environment budget declining by 45% in real terms between 2009/10 and 2018/19, according to Guardian analysis.

Reed said that the government would begin consulting on a land use framework so the country to improve food security while meeting the government’s target to protect 30% of land and sea.

“The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world,” he said. “So that matters, because nature underpins everything. It underpins tomorrow’s budget, it underpins the economy, it underpins health, it underpins food, it underpins society as we know it. Without nature, there is no life.

“So the fact that we are an outlier in that respect should concern all of us.”

Asked whether planned investment in the economy in Wednesday’s budget would come at the expense of the natural world, Reed said that the government’s nature-friendly farming scheme – which is known as the Environment Land Management Scheme (ELMS) and pays farmers to create wildlife habitats – would remain the government’s “main lever” to protect nature.

“It’s a world-leading scheme today. We supported it when it was introduced. It will still be a leading scheme tomorrow,” he said, adding they would look to find other sources of funding from the private sector.

The environment secretary also committed to a consultation on a land use strategy in England to meet an international commitment to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030, the headline commitment of this decade’s UN agreement to halt the destruction of biodiversity.

“We have a relatively small amount of land for the size of our population and the many demands that we make of that land,” he said. “We will be publishing the land use framework initially as a consultation document, but it will be looking at how we balance the many different demands that we make of our land, particularly from the different perspective ensuring that we remain food secure, so we have enough land available for growing the food that we need, but also enough land to help nature recover and to meet our demanding but achievable 30 by 30 targets.

“By being much more explicit within the framework about how we’re going to ensure we meet all of our objectives, including nature’s recovery, we have a much better chance of achieving it,” he added.

Donald Trump praised Puerto Ricans on Tuesday during a Pennsylvania rally, days after a comedian made a racist joke and referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” at one of his rallies.

“Nobody loves our Latino community and our Puerto Rican community more than I do,” the former president said a little over an hour into a rally in Allentown, in the Lehigh Valley, which has a sizable Latino population.

More than 68,000 people – over half of the total population – in Allentown are Hispanic or Latino, according to US census data. A few blocks from the rally, a home had a Puerto Rican flag posted on the door.

He also claimed that he had done a lot for Puerto Rico as president. Trump drew ridicule for tossing paper towels into a crowd on the island after it was ravaged by a hurricane; blocked hurricane aid; and mused about selling the island.

He also again praised the rally at Madison Square Garden, saying “the love was unbelievable” and told a rambling story about watching a SpaceX rocket that lasted longer than his discussion of Puerto Ricans.

Many of the speakers on Tuesday, including the Puerto Rican official Zoraida Buxó, emphasized their Puerto Rican heritage, signaling the campaign’s effort to win Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania, the key battleground state in this election, where polls show a tight race.

“We won’t get rattled, we won’t yield to ignorance, foolishness, or irrational thoughtlessness,” she said.

Senator Marco Rubio, another speaker at the rally, also joined Trump onstage during the former presidents remarks to share with the crowd comments from Joe Biden Tuesday in which the president condemned the remarks about Puerto Ricans and said: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s – his – his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American”, according to a White House transcript. After Republicans circulated a clip of the statement, calling it an attack on Trump supporters, Biden put out a statement saying he meant to refer to the comedian who made the joke.

A small protest arrived outside the arena just before the rally began on Tuesday. Some of the protesters were carrying signs that said Latinos for Harris-Walz, while others wore the Puerto Rican flag.

One of the people marching was Luis Gonzalez, a retired 65-year-old truck driver from Allentown. He wore a sweater with the Puerto Rican flag stitched on it.

“The guy has no idea what he’s talking about,” he said. “I was born in Puerto Rico. That island as well as all the other islands around it are beautiful.

“For anybody to say that it’s a garbage island – they’ve never been to the Caribbean.”

But inside the rally, few people thought the fallout from the comment would have much effect on Trump. Some had not heard it.

“It was made in poor taste, I have to admit. But Donald Trump is Donald Trump, ” said Mark Melendez, 55, who is Puerto Rican and traveled to the rally from New Jersey. “I don’t think it will affect him; it might.”

At least one audience member was holding a sign that said “Boricuas for Trump”, using a term that describes people of Puerto Rican descent.

Jackie Beller, 60, who lives near Allentown, thought the joke was funny.

“If you take a comedian out of context and you look at it as a serious thing, yes, you would be offended,” Beller said.

“It’s all a joke – I’ve spoken to some Puerto Rican people and they weren’t offended, so I don’t know,” said Mary Mendez, 65, a retired paramedic from New York.

Trump’s speech kicking off the final week of the presidential race mixed personal attacks, grievance, anti-immigrant rhetoric and a smattering of policies. He accused Democrats of having already cheated, misrepresenting an ongoing investigation in Lancaster county in an example of how he is priming his supporters to challenge the election results if he loses.

His remarks were less an appeal to undecided voters than a full-throated appeal to his base, pledging that he would be able to fix all of the US’s ills.

“This is gonna be a very special time. It’s going to be America’s new golden age. Every problem facing us can be solved,” he said.

As Kamala Harris made her closing argument in Washington and called Trump “unstable” and “obsessed with revenge”, Trump called Harris a “low-IQ individual” and mused about getting retribution against Michelle Obama for criticizing him on the campaign trial.

“Michelle Obama was very nasty,” he said. “I’ve gone out of my way to be nice to Michelle. Haven’t said a damn thing about her. She hit me.”

Two women were removed from a British Airways flight at Heathrow after an altercation reportedly provoked by a Make America Great Again (Maga) cap.

The incident occurred on Saturday as the women, aged 40 and 60, were preparing to board a flight bound for Austin, Texas.

Witnesses said that one woman took offence at her fellow passenger’s red Maga hat, worn by supporters of the former US president Donald Trump, and asked that it be removed, the Sun reported.

Flight BA191 had been due to depart the airport at 12.10pm and eventually took off at 2.11pm without the two women onboard.

Punches were allegedly exchanged between the two women, both booked to fly in premium economy, before they ended up squaring up to one another in the cabin. When the captain called for assistance, police arrived at the scene to escort the passengers from the aircraft.

Arrests were not made but both women made claims of affray against the other.

Police are continuing to investigate the incident. A spokesperson said: “Shortly after 12.45pm on Monday, 28 October, police at Heathrow were made aware of an incident involving two women waiting to board a plane in Terminal 5.

“A woman in her 40s and a woman in her 60s made counter allegations of affray. Enquiries are ongoing.”

British Airways said in a statement: “We apologised to our customers for the delay and got them on the way as quickly as possible.”

A Heathrow source told the Sun: “With the US presidential election so close, tensions are sky high. Airline crew could not run the risk of a full scale punch-up at 30,000ft.

“BA officials cannot recall a flight being delayed before due to a passenger’s baseball cap. It was extraordinary.”

At least seven people are missing after torrential rain caused flash floods in southern and eastern Spain, shutting roads and high-speed train connections.

Raging mud-coloured flood waters swept through the town of Letur in the eastern province of Albacete on Tuesday, pushing cars through the streets, images broadcast on Spanish television showed.

Emergency services workers backed by drones were looking for six people who were missing in the wake of flash floods in the town, the central government’s representative in Castilla-La Mancha told Spanish public television TVE.

“The priority is to find these people,” she added.

Police in the town of L’Alcúdia in the eastern region of Valencia said they were looking for a truck driver who had been missing since early afternoon.

“I am closely following with concern the reports on missing persons and the damage caused by the storm in recent hours,” prime minister Pedro Sánchez wrote on X, urging people to follow the advice of the authorities.

“Be very careful and avoid unnecessary trips,” he added.

Twelve flights that were due to land at Valencia airport have been diverted to other cities in Spain due to the heavy rain and strong winds, Spanish airport operator Aena said.

Another 10 flights that were due to depart or arrive at the airport were cancelled.

National rail infrastructure operator ADIF said it had suspended high-speed trains between Madrid and the eastern port of Valencia due to the effects of the storm on main points of the rail network in the Valencia region.

A high-speed train with 276 passengers derailed in the southern region of Andalusia, although no one was injured, the regional government said in a statement.

Emergency services rescued scores of people in Álora in Andalusia, some by helicopter, after a river overflowed.

State weather agency AEMET declared a red alert in the Valencia region and the second-highest level of alert in parts of Andalusia. Several roads were shut in both regions due to flooding.

The intense rain has been attributed to a phenomenon known as the gota fría, or “cold drop”, which occurs when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea. This creates atmospheric instability, causing warm, saturated air to rise rapidly, leading to the formation of towering cumulonimbus clouds in a matter of hours and dumping heavy rain across eastern parts of Spain.

Scientists warn that extreme weather such as heatwaves and storms is becoming more intense as a result of the climate crisis.

On 6 July 2024, a day when temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona, reached 114F (45.5C), Michael Kenyon was walking to his local store to buy a soda when two officers of the city’s police department stopped him.

They hastily told him he was being detained, Kenyon recalls, without clearly stating why. Two more officers arrived.

Surveillance footage from across the parking lot, which was viewed by the Guardian, shows the 30-year-old on the pavement soon after, with several officers on top of him and holding him down. Once they lift Kenyon off the ground after roughly four minutes, he appears limp.

Kenyon had been burned – severely burned – on the hot city pavement. Medical records indicate he suffered third-degree burns, and hospital photos show deep burn scars and skin peeled off across his body. Kenyon has not been charged with a crime and a police spokesperson confirmed he was not the suspect that officers were seeking as part of a theft investigation.

“It felt like acid burning my skin,” Kenyon told the Guardian. “I thought of George Floyd, and I didn’t understand why people wouldn’t help me as I was screaming in pain … like I was dying.”

It’s not the first time residents in the city have accused police of burning them on the pavement. In 2019, Phoenix police department officers held Roniah Trotter, then 18, on hot pavement on a 113F day, leaving her with second-degree burns. Earlier that year, a 28-year-old man died in police custody after officers held him down on hot asphalt for several minutes.

To Steve Benedetto, a civil rights lawyer representing Kenyon, the case illustrates that the Phoenix police department has systemic problems requiring outside intervention.

In June, the US Department of Justice accused the police department of routinely discriminating against people of color and killing civilians without justification, proposing that the force be subjected to independent monitoring. The department has pushed back, asserting that it is a “self-correcting agency” that doesn’t need oversight. Earlier this month, however, the department again faced scrutiny after footage showed two white officers repeatedly punching and deploying a stun gun on Tyron McAlpin, a 34-year-old deaf Black man with cerebral palsy.

On the day of Kenyon’s arrest, Phoenix was under an excessive heat warning, an increasingly frequent occurrence in the US south. Kenyon was wearing shorts and a tank top and talking on the phone when police approached, the footage shot from across the parking lot shows.

There’s no audio, but the video shows two officers initially holding Kenyon’s arms and having him sit on the back of a parked truck.

The footage shows two additional officers arriving, and Kenyon landing on the pavement with several officers holding him down.

Grainy cellphone footage taken by a witness from above appears to capture him screaming and pleading for help, at one point appearing to say: “Please … I didn’t do anything.”

Once the officers get Kenyon off the ground, footage shows him limping and stumbling as they bring him to a police vehicle. Kenyon said one officer eventually poured water on his burns as they waited for paramedics to arrive. He said he couldn’t remember being transported to the hospital and may have lost consciousness, but recalled waking up in the hospital handcuffed to a bed.

Graphic photos from the hospital, where he stayed for weeks, show layers of skin burned off his arms, legs, chest and side of his face.

Police haven’t released body-camera footage. A police spokesperson, Rob Scherer, said in a statement that officers were investigating a “theft in progress” and that Kenyon “matched the suspect description”.

“Officers made contact with Kenyon, telling him he was being detained so they could understand what may have occurred. The man struggled with police, which [resulted] with him being taken to the ground on the hot asphalt. The man sustained burns to different parts of his body from the time he was on the ground,” Scherer said. “Kenyon was determined not to be the suspect of the theft.”

He said the incident was subject to an “ongoing criminal investigation” and an investigation by the “professional standards bureau”, which investigates misconduct.

Kenyon said he believes one of his roommates may have called the police on another roommate over a potential theft.

Cellphone video of one of Kenyon’s roommates in the aftermath of the incident captures her frantically calling 911 to report what had happened. “They just unlawfully detained [him] … the boy you guys just burned,” she appears to tell an operator.

After she got off the call, the video captures her explaining to police on the scene that she had been on the phone with Kenyon during the arrest and heard him scream. She sobbed and begged officers to help him: “Treat him now! Treat him, treat him!” And she told one officer: “His whole body has third-degree burns on it. [They] wouldn’t let him up … I watched him get burned … If someone did this to your son, how would that feel?”

Dr Cecilia Sorensen, director of Columbia’s global consortium on climate and health education, said when air temperatures climb above 100F, the pavement can sometimes be 40 to 60 degrees hotter: “If you have direct contact with that surface, you’re going to start getting damage to your skin.”

Pavement burns can happen within seconds, added Dr Rabia Nizamani, surgeon at the University medical center’s Lions Burn Care Center in Las Vegas: “It takes a few minutes … to get a third-degree burn that keeps you in the hospital for weeks.” Bony body parts, such as knees, are particularly vulnerable, and wounds can take months to heal, with scars that can affect a patient’s functioning for years and require additional procedures, she said.

Kenyon said he had worked in construction, door-to-door sales and other jobs that he fears he can’t do any more: “I probably will never go back to having an outside job where I have to work in the sun.”

For now, he’s been unable to work and said a roommate had been helping with bills.

“I’m speaking out because I don’t want this to happen to other people,” he added. “I want to be the last one.” He said he didn’t blame the individual officers. “Whoever trained these guys are really responsible. These guys all acted the same, so somebody drilled it into them.”

Benedetto, the lawyer, said: “A guy was walking to the store to get a soda and then minutes later he’s wondering if he’s going to die, and that’s really endemic of where this department is at. This is a department that presumably should be on its best behavior with the DoJ looming … This is the impact of their policies, procedures and training that we’ve seen over and over. There’s never any real accountability.”

Kenyon said he had struggled to process what happened.

“I don’t really want to look at my body any more,” he said, noting it was too painful to see photos from the hospital. “Every time I see myself, I have flashbacks. And every time I see cops, I think, is he after me? And I know in my head it’s not true, but it just comes up.” He said he questions whether he could’ve done something differently. “I have to keep telling myself … I didn’t deserve this.”

He added: “I just want the Department of Justice to take care of them and fix what they say they’re going to fix … I’m not trying to get attention, I just want my story to be heard because I hurt.”

An ancient oak named after a ceilidh band has won the UK’s tree of the year competition and will now compete in the European edition.

The Skipinnish Oak in Lochaber, Scotland, was discovered by chance by members of the band of that name who were playing a nearby gig for the Native Woodland Discussion Group.

It is in the middle of a sitka spruce timber plantation and expert delegates from the discussion group registered it in the ancient tree inventory.

The Skipinnish oak is one of the largest trees of its kind in the region, which has been populated by nonnative timber forests. It is a fragment of the ancient ecosystem, and provides a home to diverse lichens including the rare black-eyed Susan.

The Skipinnish band said they were delighted the tree won and plan to compose a new song in honour of the mighty oak.

The Woodland Trust, which runs the competition, chose 12 ancient oaks for the shortlist this year to highlight their importance. They can live for more than 1,500 years and support 2,300 species of wildlife. The UK boasts more ancient oaks than the rest of western Europe combined.

The Skipinnish Oak won 21% of the vote, while the Darwin Oak in Shrewsbury came second with 20%. The 1,000-year-old Bowthorpe Oak in Lincolnshire came in third, with 14%.

Other oaks on the shortlist included the Queen Elizabeth Oak in West Sussex, the second-largest sessile oak on record, and the Elephant Oak in the New Forest, shortlisted for its unique shape and distinctive character.

Dr Kate Lewthwaite from the Woodland Trust said: “The Skipinnish Oak is a magnificent example of the natural heritage we strive to protect, and its recognition as UK tree of the year shines a light on the incredible biodiversity that our trees support. We encourage everyone to celebrate and preserve these vital features of our environment.”

The next European Tree of the Year competition will take place in 2025.

The Wildlife Trusts have bought part of the Duke of Northumberland’s estate in the largest land sale in England for 30 years.

Marketed by its estate agents as “a paradise for those with a penchant for sporting pursuits, from world-class fishing on the illustrious River Coquet to pheasant and grouse shooting”, Rothbury estate has now been bought by the charity, which plans to restore it for nature.

The trusts are buying the land in an unusual two-phase deal: having already bought a “significant” chunk of the 3,850-hectare (9,500-acre) estate, they have been given two years to find the rest of the money, for which they are launching a fundraising appeal. The estate was previously used for intensive sheep farming and shooting.

It was put up for sale by the Duke of Northumberland’s youngest son, Max Percy, and has been in the family for 700 years.

Craig Bennett, the chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, told the Guardian: “Our vision is to create an absolutely astonishing national flagship for nature recovery. It will be around two-and-a-half times the size of the [rewilded] Knepp estate and we are very excited to get ecosystems working again. If we get the whole site we will be looking at 9,500 acres.”

Bennett said he hoped to work with neighbours to create a giant haven for wildlife. “We hope the Rothbury estate will be the heart of a flourishing national landscape; it’s neighboured by two National Trust properties, for example, so we will work with them. We want Northumberland to become an amazing destination for eco-tourism. We want to create something really spectacular at a much bigger scale than has ever been done before in England. This is an extraordinary once-in-a-generation opportunity to restore nature.”

Shoots would not be allowed on the estate and the farming would be regenerative only, Bennett said. “Obviously [allowing shoots] would not be appropriate for the Wildlife Trusts. We hope to showcase nature-friendly farming and conservation grazing and produce fruit, vegetables and some sustainable meat for local people.”

The current purchase includes the Simonside Hills and a mixture of lowland, woods, riverside and farmland – the western side of the estate. Notable wildlife includes curlews, red grouse, merlins, cuckoos, mountain bumblebees, emperor moths and red squirrels.

Public access would be maintained by the Trusts. Being sold to one charity rather than broken up and sold to individual landowners meant access could be protected for future generations, the trusts said.