Outrage is continuing to mount following the racist anti-Puerto Rican remarks at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York as Democrats, celebrities and even some Republicans condemned the incident.

Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe came under fire for comments made about Latinos and Puerto Rico at the Sunday rally.

“I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” he said, among other controversial remarks.

In the hours following, Democrats and Hispanic groups on both sides of the political aisle have condemned the comments as “offensive” and “derogatory”.

Kamala Harris called the remarks “nonsense” and said: “I think last night, Donald Trump’s event in Madison Square Garden really highlighted a point that I’ve been making throughout this campaign. He is focused and actually fixated on his grievances, on himself and on dividing our country.”

Joe Biden said the rally had been “simply embarrassing” and added: “It’s beneath any president, but that’s what we’re getting used to. That’s why this election is so important.”

Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, born in New York to Puerto Ricans, called out the comments in a series of posts.

“This isn’t the comedy store. You’re using your set to boost neo-Nazis like MTG & stripping women’s rights to the Stone Age. Your ‘sense of humor’ doesn’t change that,” she wrote in one post replying directly to Hinchcliffe defending his comments.

Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, was also unamused by the racist jokes.

“People in Puerto Rico are citizens. They pay tax and they serve in the military at almost a higher rate than anybody else,” he said on a Twitch livestream with AOC.

In addition to being immediately criticized by the Harris campaign, the comments drew angry responses from prominent Puerto Rican Republicans including Angel Cintron, the head of the Republican party on the island.

Republican congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, who represents parts of Miami and has participated in recent Trump events, criticized the remarks on X, writing: “Disgusted by @TonyHinchcliffe’s racist comment calling Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage.’ This rhetoric does not reflect GOP values. Puerto Rico sent 48,000+ soldiers to Vietnam, with over 345 Purple Hearts awarded. This bravery deserves respect. Educate yourself!”

Rick Scott, a Republican senator from Florida, also used X to call out the comedian.

“This joke bombed for a reason. It’s not funny and it’s not true. Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans!” he wrote in a post.

Peter Navarro, a former Trump administration official and loyal supporter, opted for more colorful language: “@tonyhinchcliffe must be the biggest, stupidest asshole that ever came down the comedy pike,” he wrote on X.

Trump’s team is scrambling to contain the backlash. Campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in an interview on Fox News that Hinchcliffe made a “joke in poor taste”, but also suggested that the incident was being overblown.

“This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” Danielle Alvarez, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said in a statement.

But the criticism continues outside politics. Puerto Rican music stars Bad Bunny and Ricky Martin announced their endorsement of Kamala Harris following the Trump rally. Martin wrote in a post to his 18 million followers on Instagram: “This is what they think of us. Vote for @kamalaharris.”

Several political action committees have seized the moment as an opportunity to grow support for the Harris campaign.

Nuestro Pac, a Democratic Super Pac focused on Latinos, began sending texts on Monday after raising $30,000 to text all Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania following the Trump rally, the Washington Post reports.

Donald Trump faced mounting suspicion of hatching a plot to steal next week’s presidential election as Democrats and commentators focused on his references to a “little secret” at Sunday night’s tumultuous Madison Square Garden rally.

The allusions initially attracted little notice amid the angry backlash provoked by racist jokes and incendiary rhetoric from a succession of warm-up speakers, including an offensive comment about Puerto Ricans that even Trump’s own campaign felt obliged to disavow.

However, some observers and Democratic politicians believed the most telling remark of the night came from the Republican nominee himself after he introduced Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, on stage and alluded to a shared secret.

“We gotta get the congressmen elected and we gotta get the senators elected,” Trump told the crowd, referring to the congressional elections at stake next week.

“We can take the Senate pretty easily, and I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House. Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a little secret – we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”

Trump embellished the tease with no further clues. But commentators and some Democrats drew their own conclusions.

In its Playbook column, Politico described the aside as “potentially … sinister comments that could be a reference to the House settling a contested election”.

Dan Goldman, a Democratic representative from New York, was more explicit, telling CNN that Trump’s motivation for staging the rally – in a state he has no chance of winning – was boosting Republican candidates in an effort to ensure a Republican majority in Congress at a time when it will have the role of certifying the presidential election result.

“Why did Donald Trump come to New York nine days before the election? The state is going to go to Kamala Harris,” Goldman said.

“The answer is that the House really runs through New York. There are seven races that could go either way in the house, and that will likely determine the majority.

“On January 6, the certification of the electoral college will happen again, and as we know from 2021, whoever is in control of the House of Congress will have a lot of say on what happens on January 6. I suspect Donald Trump’s little secret plan with Mike Johnson is a backup plan for when he loses and he tries to go to the House of Representatives to throw out the electoral college.”

The situation under a Republican-controlled Congress would be a reverse of the certification process that followed the 2020 election, Goldman said. Then, Trump tried to deploy the then vice-president, Mike Pence – presiding over affairs in his constitutional role – to block the procedure at a time when the Senate and the House were controlled by the Democrats.

The gambit failed when Pence refused to play along, precipitating the attack on the US Capitol by a Trump-supporting mob, some of whom called for Pence to be hanged.

“If it’s the reverse, the Republicans have a lot more opportunity and a lot more possibilities for overturning this election,” Goldman said. “That I believe is what Donald Trump’s secret with Mike Johnson was.”

Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, played a key role in Trump’s attempt to reverse Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, supporting a Texas lawsuit that attempted to overturn the results in four swing states. He also voted with 146 other Republicans in Congress in favour of overturning the results.

On Monday, he responded obliquely to accusations that he and Trump were planning a repeat scenario but did not deny it – instead switching the focus to supposed “secrets” the Democrats had withheld.

“Speaking of secrets, Harris knew Biden was physically and mentally impaired and kept it a secret,” he wrote, referring to unproven accusations that the White House had covered up an age-related decline in the president’s cognitive abilities.

“They also knew that Russia collusion was a fake and kept that secret too. It appears that all those secrets didn’t matter to the media because they all helped Democrats. But this one might help Donald Trump and now they care?

“By definition, a secret is not to be shared – and I don’t intend to share this one.”

Hundreds of early ballots cast for the US presidential election have been burned in two suspected attacks in Washington and Oregon, exacerbating tensions ahead of next Tuesday’s knife-edge contest.

Police said Monday that the fires in the two states were believed to be connected and that a vehicle involved had been identified, according to the Associated Press.

Firefighters went to the scene after smoke was reported coming from a ballot drop box in the city of Vancouver in Washington state at 6.30am on Monday, according to local media.

KATU, a local television channel, reported capturing footage of responders releasing a pile of burning ballots to the grounds. The ballots continued to smolder after the flames had been doused.

Hundreds of ballots were believed to have been inside when smoke was reported billowing from the box, which had last been emptied at 8am on Sunday. KATU reported that only a few of the ballots deposited there after that had been saved.

The elections auditor for Clark county, the local authority administering the boxes, said voters who had cast their ballots into it after 11am could seek new voting documents at a link on the county’s election web page.

“There is absolutely zero place in our democracy for political violence or interference against our fellow citizens, election workers, or voting infrastructure … Our right to vote needs to be protected under all circumstances. We can’t yield to intimidation, and we must continue to stand up against unpatriotic acts such as this one,” said local congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.

She requested law enforcement officers be in place overnight at all ballot drop boxes in the county until election day, saying: “South-west Washington cannot risk a single vote being lost to arson and political violence.”

The fire was reported after a similar incident in nearby Portland in Oregon, where police say an incendiary device was set off inside a ballot drop box close to a building hosting the Multnomah county elections division.

Security staff extinguished the fire before police arrived. The device was deactivated and removed by the local bomb squad.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned of ballot drop box destruction in a September memo obtained by Property of the People, a public records watchdog group. The agency said in an intelligence brief that election infrastructure will be seen as an “attractive target for some domestic violent extremists”, with drop boxes as a “soft target” because they are more accessible.

Social media posters in forums frequented by extremists have shared ideas for attacked drop boxes, the agency said, including “road flares, fireworks, petroleum fuel, linseed oil and white phosphorus, cement or expanding foam, bleach or other chemicals, and farm machinery”. Other methods could include putting up fake signs to claim a drop box is out of order, putting up decoy drop boxes or putting “timed explosives” into drop boxes. They have also discussed ways to avoid law enforcement detection.

“Damaged ballot drop boxes could temporarily decrease voting opportunities and accessibility and intimidate voters from casting votes if safety concerns arise in the vicinity of a targeted or damaged ballot drop box,” the DHS wrote in the intelligence brief. “Successful ballot drop box destruction could inspire others with related grievances to conduct similar actions.”

The incidents came days after a US Postal Service mail box containing a small number of ballots was set on fire in Phoenix, Arizona, last Thursday.

Police arrested a 35-year-old man who they said admitted to the crime while he was in custody. They also said he had told them his actions had not been politically motivated and he had committed the office with the purpose of getting himself arrested.

The Guardian has reported that far-right election denial groups supporting Donald Trump have been monitoring election drop boxes as part of their activity in the run-up to next week’s poll, when officials are bracing themselves for disruption and challenges to the vote tallies.

When voters in Portland, Oregon, head to the polls next month, they will be tasked not only with selecting new leaders, but also the implementation of a monumental overhaul of the city’s government.

Two years ago, residents moved to fundamentally alter their local government structure and adopted what experts have described as some of the most “expansive voting reforms” undertaken by a major US city in recent decades. Come November, the city will use ranked-choice voting to elect a mayor and a larger, more representative city council as Portland moves from a commission form of government to one overseen by a city administrator.

The shake-up comes after challenging years for Portland in which the city of 630,000 grappled with a declining downtown, rising homelessness, a fentanyl crisis, growing public drug use and the continued economic impacts of the pandemic years.

While some news coverage has portrayed the shift as Portlanders rejecting the city’s historically progressive values, those involved with the project counter that residents are embracing democratic reforms that will lead to a more equitable government better equipped to solve the city’s problems.

“It was really clear that this system was, as operated, very inequitable,” said Jenny Lee, managing director of Building Power for Communities of Color, a non-profit that was a key proponent of the effort.

“And the challenges in governing are going to be felt the most by those who already have been marginalized in our political system.”

Now the city waits to see what the “once-in-a-generation” change will mean for its future.

Since 1913, Portland has used a commission form of government. The commission consisted of five people elected citywide and who were responsible for passing policies and also acting as administrators in charge of city departments.

The system was briefly popular in other major US cities, but then largely abandoned, said Richard Clucas, a political science professor at Portland State University.

“Most cities who adopted that form of government realized there were problems with it,” he said. “Someone may be good as a legislator but it doesn’t make them good as an administrator.”

And Portland’s system had long failed to adequately represent different demographics in the city, Lee said. The city’s elected officials historically have been white men from more affluent areas where residents are more likely to have a higher income and own their homes, according to the Sightline Institute. In 2017, only two people of color had ever been elected to the city council.

Under the charter system, simple decisions – such as where to put a bike lane – were politicized, said Shoshanah Oppenheim, the charter transition project manager.

“It was based on the political tide,” said Oppenheim, who is also a senior adviser in the city administrator’s office.

For more than a century, Portlanders rejected attempts to reform the commission system, but that changed when the 10-year review of the city charter coincided with upheaval and challenges of the pandemic years.

The pandemic exacerbated the existing limitations of the city’s form of government, according to a report from Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation chronicling Portland’s reforms.

Meanwhile, Portland was the site of widespread racial justice protests and an ensuing federal crackdown, the city’s economic recovery from the pandemic was slow, and residents grew increasingly disillusioned with their leaders’ ability to make meaningful progress tackling homelessness and drug abuse.

Those challenges created an opportunity to have meaningful conversations about elections and government, Lee said.

Clucas echoed that sentiment: “I think the public was looking and happy to take on some sort of change.”

Community leaders had spent years educating themselves about electoral reform, and saw an opportunity to create change in the city, the report stated.

With support from community organizations and local activists, the commission brought a measure before voters that would make key changes to the city’s system, allowing voters to rank local candidates in order of preference, expand the city council from five to 12 representatives elected from four newly created districts, and move to a system of government overseen by a professional city administrator.

Despite criticism about the complexity of the measure and opposition from political leaders and the business community, 58% of voters approved the package of reforms proposed by the commission.

Although the timing coincided with major changes and social issues, Lee said the reforms were not reactionary and instead an example of Portland being willing to try new things, which ties into Oregon’s long history of democratic reforms aimed at making government more participatory.

“It was a message about change, but it was definitely a hopeful one,” she said. “It was always about these changes will make our government more effective and equitable.”

The city has spent the last two years preparing for a project unlike anything Portland has seen before,Oppenheim said. “We had a really short timeline … It’s been an all-hands-on-deck approach,” she said. “There is no playbook. We are making it up as we go along.”

Next month, voters will decided among more than 100 candidates for 12 council seats and 19 candidates for mayor. A recent poll from the Oregonian suggested a once-longshot candidate, whose campaign has focused on ending homelessness, is well positioned to win.

In a poll of roughly 300 voters from early October, before election packets were sent out, two-thirds responded that they understood how voting works very well or somewhat well. People tend to understand the system right away given that they rank things every day, Oppenheim said.

The city has also developed a voter education program to inform residents about the changes and trained operators on its information line how to explain ranked-choice voting.

The hope is that voters will feel the increased power of their vote, Lee said. “Every vote has a lot of power. Your constituents’ voices really matter. Their second- and third-choice rankings actually really matter.”

After the election, the other major test comes next year when Portland’s new government takes the reins. “We want to be ready on day one so all the city business can continue,” Oppenheim said.

“Portlanders have huge expectations for change and we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do things better,” Oppenheim said. “They want a more representative government. We have it in our power to deliver that.”

Hedgehogs are now listed as “near threatened” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list after a decline in numbers of at least 30% over the past decade across much of their range.

While hedgehogs were once common across Europe, and were until now listed as of “least concern” on the red list, they are being pushed towards extinction by urban development, intensive farming and roads, which have fragmented their habitat.

Their population has suffered from vehicle collisions, the use of pesticides and poorly managed domestic gardens. Pesticides kill the insects that hedgehogs eat and may also poison them directly.

Abi Gazzard, a programme officer at the IUCN, said: “Unfortunately, evidence points towards a worrying and widespread downward trend. The red list assessment also highlights data uncertainties – for example, the limits of this species’ distribution are not entirely clear, and there are gaps in knowledge of its populations. There is still a chance to halt the decline of the western European hedgehog, and we must aim to prevent any further worsening of status.”

The Mammal Society is calling for people to look after hedgehogs by gardening in a wildlife-friendly way. This includes leaving small gaps in fences to allow hedgehog movement between gardens, not using pesticides and creating shelter with log piles or hedgehog houses. One in four UK mammal species are threatened with extinction, and many others are in decline.

Hope Nothhelfer, a communications officer at the Mammal Society, said: “This decline will likely come as no surprise to the average person. When hedgehogs come up in conversation, it’s not long before someone says that they just don’t see them any more. The hope is that as hedgehogs become more and more like a distant memory from our childhoods, we will respond with action that will bring these memories back to life.”

Shorebirds have fared badly on the red list this year, with four UK shorebird species moving to higher threat categories. These are birds that come to the UK in winter from colder climates and rest and feed on the shore and in estuaries before moving back to their breeding grounds for spring.

Birds that have been added to the list include the grey plover, which has declined by more than 30% globally since the late 1990s. Its conservation status has moved two categories from “least concern” to “vulnerable”. Dunlins and turnstones have faced steep declines and have both been moved from “least concern” to “near threatened”, and curlew sandpipers have declined by more than 30% globally since the late 2000s and have moved from “near threatened” to “vulnerable”.

Threats they face include pollution, development and the climate crisis, with sea level rise causing increased erosion and a heightened risk of coastal flooding, forcing wildlife into smaller and smaller spaces.

The red list also reveals that 38% of the world’s tree species are at risk of extinction, in its first global tree assessment. The list shows that at least 16,425 of the 47,282 species assessed are at risk of extinction. Islands host the largest proportion of threatened trees, where they are at risk due to deforestation for urban development and agriculture, as well as invasive species, pests and diseases.

Spain is set to experience an extraordinary weather event this week, with severe rainfall forecasted, particularly along the eastern coast. Regions such as Valencia, Catalonia, Murcia, and eastern Andalucía could get more than 150mm of rain within just 24 hours on Tuesday, which is more than seven times the typical average for this month. Gibraltar is also expected to experience significant rainfall, with totals exceeding 40mm.

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

A gota fría is officially known as a “depresión aislada en niveles altos” (“Dana” to Spanish meteorologists) which translates as “isolated depression at high altitudes”. While this weather pattern can result in torrential rainfall, hail, thunderstorms, and severe flooding, the exact areas affected can be difficult to predict, as gota fría events are often very localised.

Meanwhile, unusually high night-time temperatures are expected across the US this week. Overnight lows are expected to exceed 20C in cities, including Chicago, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Fort Worth – more than 9C above the seasonal average. This unexpected warmth is attributed to a southerly airflow drawing warm air up from the Gulf of Mexico.

In the north Pacific Ocean, Tropical Storm Kong-rey is tracking north-westwards, and is likely to pass by Taiwan early this week, potentially making landfall on Thursday morning. The storm is currently strengthening rapidly and has the potential to develop into a typhoon. Kong-rey is forecasted to bring heavy rain and strong winds, with totals exceeding 300mm in northern Taiwan and 150mm in other areas, posing a significant risk of severe flooding and disruption, and wind gusts could reach over 100mph. However, at this stage it is important to note that the exact track of Kong-rey is uncertain, and its positioning can quickly change over the next few days.

The concentration of planet-heating pollutants clogging the atmosphere hit record levels in 2023, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has said.

It found carbon dioxide is accumulating faster than at any time in human history, with concentrations having risen by more than 10% in just two decades.

“Another year, another record,” said Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the WMO. “This should set alarm bells ringing among decision makers.”

The increase was driven by humanity’s “stubbornly high” burning of fossil fuels, the WMO found, and made worse by big wildfires and a possible drop in the ability of trees to absorb carbon.

The concentration of CO2 reached 420 parts per million (ppm) in 2023, the scientists observed. The level of pollution is 151% greater than before the Industrial Revolution, when people began to burn large amounts of coal, oil and fossil gas.

Concentrations of strong but short-lived pollutants also surged. Methane concentrations hit 1,934 parts per billion (ppb), a rise of 265% from preindustrial levels, and nitrous oxide hit 336.9 parts per billion (ppb), a rise of 125%, it said.

Saulo said: “We are clearly off track to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to well below 2C and aiming for 1.5C above preindustrial levels. These are more than just statistics. Every part per million and every fraction of a degree temperature increase has a real impact on our lives and our planet.”

Burning fossil fuels – such as the petrol to power a car or the coal to feed a thermal power plant – releases gases that trap sunlight and heat the planet.

The WMO warned that this heating can lead to climate feedbacks that are “critical concerns” to society, such as stronger wildfires that pump out more carbon and hotter oceans that suck up less CO2.

There has been a slight slowdown in the growth of global emissions over the last decade but continued strong growth in atmospheric concentrations, said Glen Peters, a climate scientist at the Cicero in Norway, who was not involved in the study. “[That] should give us cause for thought on how strong carbon sinks will remain in a changing climate.”

The Earth last experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 a few million years ago, when the planet was 2-3C hotter and the sea level 10-20 metres higher.

Peters said the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are humanity’s “most accurate measure” of progress. “The data shows, again, we are not making much progress on reducing emissions.”

The WMO announcement comes ahead of the Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan next month. It follows a report from the UN Environment Programme on Thursday that found the world is on track to heat 3C by the end of the century. World leaders had promised to stop it from heating 1.5C.

Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and co-author of the report, said: “The record levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are the logical outcome of the record amounts of greenhouse gases that our economies continue to dump into our ambient air.”

Scientists have estimated investments of $1tn to $2tn (£800bn to £1.6tn) are needed each year to cut emissions to net zero by the middle of the century.

“Current trends will see global warming cross all warming limits that global leaders agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate agreement,” said Rogelj. “[The report] also shows that this doesn’t need to be the end of the story.”

Lev Skoriakin, 23, fled Russia in January 2023 after he was accused of organising a protest outside the FSB security service’s headquarters in Moscow. As his passport was confiscated by the Russian authorities, he was left with a limited number of escape destinations.

“I could choose Armenia, Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan. I do not know why I chose Kyrgyzstan,” Skoriakin says. “At the time we [Russians who sought to leave the country] thought that if we do not stick our heads out, we will be safe. But we were wrong.”

Late in the evening on 16 October 2023, a group of men from the Kyrgyzstan security services knocked on his hostel door in the capital, Bishkek, and asked him to come with them. They drove him to the airport and handed him over to the Russian security service, who handcuffed and accompanied him on a passenger flight back to Moscow.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of Russians fled the country in search of safety and to avoid mobilisation, many to central Asia. Many Russians do not have passports, and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan can be entered with only a national ID.

But a growing number of Russians are finding that neighbouring countries in the region, in particular Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, are far from safe.

At least 14 Russian citizens were either detained or deported at Russia’s request from Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan in 2022 and 2023 alone, according to a Freedom House report on transnational repression.

Grady Vaughan, from Freedom House, says: “There are three main types of people Russia seeks to return. These are, obviously, former military officials and soldiers who were afraid of being called up to the war and deserted.

“Then there have also been independent activists, both anarchists and anti-war activists, who have also found themselves detained in relation to their activism and sometimes deported. The third group are journalists.”

Central Asian countries, especially Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, have sought to remain neutral since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but cooperation between the local security services and their Russian counterparts has continued uninterrupted.

Vaughan says: “There is this history of coordination that has made it easier for Russia to rely on these countries’ security services to increase pressure or to intimidate Russian exiles.”

Alina Gorshenina, 29, an ethnic Russian born and raised in Kyrgyzstan, was travelling on an organised tour to Almaty, a city in Kazakhstan, with her mother and 10-year-old daughter to celebrate Children’s Day last June. As they tried to cross the border, she was arrested.

Unbeknown to Alina, Russian authorities had issued an international arrest warrant for her, accusing her of causing bodily harm to a judge in Russia. Thinking she would just be sent back to Kyrgyzstan, she told her mother and daughter to continue the trip without her.

She had only visited Russia twice in her life – the last time seven years ago – but had been a volunteer for Alexei Navalny’s team and a fervent anti-Putin activist, who often got involved in social media quarrels with pro-Putin public figures. “My posts must have offended someone high up,” she told the Guardian.

Alina ended up spending two months behind bars in Kazakhstan before she was freed and allowed to return home. She is now working with a Russian lawyer to fight the charges remotely.

Murat Adam, a Kazakh lawyer who has worked on several cases of people detained at Russia’s request, says: “I think that Russia is trying to intimidate people and to show that those activists who left can also be arrested. They want to scare people off.”

In some of these cases, Kazakhstan refused to deport people to Russia. But according to Adam, this was not because of Kazakhstan’s goodwill, but rather Russia’s failure to submit all the documents to facilitate deportation.

“Our prosecutor general’s office would agree to deport these individuals if Russia provided sufficient proof of their wrongdoing and its intention to prosecute them. But no one provides the information, and Kazakhstan cannot keep people in detention indefinitely,” says Adam.

After his extradition to Russia, Skoriakin expected a long sentence. But instead, after pleading guilty, he received a fine and was set free. He has now moved to Germany, which had granted him asylum before he left for Kyrgyzstan.

“I do not feel completely safe anywhere, but it is surely safer than Kyrgyzstan,” he says. “Russia’s goal is one: to show that no one can escape them.”

Gas stoves kill 40,000 Europeans each year by pumping pollutants into their lungs, a report has found, a death toll twice as high as that from car crashes.

The cookers spew harmful gases linked to heart and lung disease but experts warn there is little public awareness of their dangers. On average, using a gas stove shaves nearly two years off a person’s life, according to a study of households in the EU and UK.

“The extent of the problem is far worse than we thought,” said lead author Juana María Delgado-Saborit, who runs the environmental health research lab at Jaume I University in Spain.

The researchers attributed 36,031 early deaths each year to gas cookers in the EU, and a further 3,928 in the UK. They say their estimates are conservative because they only considered the health effects of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), and not other gases such as carbon monoxide and benzene.

“Way back in 1978, we first learned that NO₂ pollution is many times greater in kitchens using gas than electric cookers,” said Delgado-Saborit. “But only now are we able to put a number on the amount of lives being cut short.”

One in three households in the EU cook with gas, rising to 54% of households in the UK and more than 60% in Italy, the Netherlands, Romania and Hungary. The cookers burn fossil gas and eject harmful substances that inflame airways.

The report, which was supported by the European Climate Foundation, builds on research last year that measured air quality in homes to find out how much cooking with gas increased indoor air pollution. This allowed scientists from Jaume I University and the University of Valencia to work out ratios between indoor and outdoor air pollution when cooking with gas, and map indoor exposure to NO₂.

They then applied risk rates of disease, sourced from studies on outdoor NO₂ pollution, to work out the number of lives lost.

“The main uncertainty is whether the risk of dying found with outdoor NO₂ from mainly traffic can be applied to indoor NO₂ from gas cooking,” said Steffen Loft, an air pollution expert at the University of Copenhagen, who was not involved in the research. “But it is a fair assumption and required for the assessment.”

The results fall in line with a study in the US in May, which found gas and propane stoves contribute up to 19,000 adult deaths each year.

The EU tightened its rules on outdoor air quality this month but it has not set standards for indoor air quality. The European Public Health Alliance (EPHA) has urged policymakers to phase out gas cookers by setting limits on emissions, offering money to help switch to cleaner cookers and forcing manufacturers to label cookers with their pollution risks.

“For too long it has been easy to dismiss the dangers of gas cookers,” said Sara Bertucci from the EPHA. “Like cigarettes, people didn’t think much of the health impacts – and, like cigarettes, gas cookers are a little fire that fills our home with pollution.”

People can partly protect themselves from fumes when cooking by opening windows when they cook and turning on extractor fans.

Delgado-Saborit said she and her husband grew up in homes where cooking was done on electric hobs, which is “cleaner, safer and healthier”, but later moved into a home with a gas stove in the kitchen.

“We are now in the midst of some home improvements and I am counting the days for having a new electric hob fitted in my kitchen.”