An Ohio judge has decided that the state’s ban on most abortions was unconstitutional and could not be enforced.

Judge Christian Jenkins, of the Hamilton county common pleas court, also granted a permanent injunction in his ruling on Thursday.

Jenkins said that Ohio’s abortion prohibition flouted language in a voter-approved amendment to the state constitution that protected reproductive healthcare,

“Ohio voters have spoken. The Ohio constitution now unequivocally protects the right to abortion,” Jenkins said in his ruling.

Jenkins’s decision stems from a law that prohibited doctors from performing abortions after the detection of fetal cardiac or embryonic activity. This activity can be as early as six weeks into pregnancy, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

While Republican lawmakers in Ohio passed this law in 2019, the legislation did not go into effect until June 2022 – when the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.

Jenkins temporarily paused the law less than three months after it went into effect. Healthcare providers in Ohio filed suit to permanently end the legislation, as it drove patients to seek reproductive care outside of the state and imperiled several clinics.

A young girl who was sexual assaulted in Columbus, Ohio, even had to travel to Indiana for abortion care, spurring still more anger over the measure.

Advocates launched a ballot initiative to ensure that reproductive healthcare rights, including abortion, were protected by the state constitution. This campaign passed in November last year, winning 57% of voting Ohioans’ support, the newspaper said.

“This is a momentous ruling, showing the power of Ohio’s new Reproductive Freedom Amendment in practice,” Jessie Hill, cooperating attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, said. “The six-week ban is blatantly unconstitutional and has no place in our law.”

Jenkins’ ruling came several months after another Ohio judge temporarily paused a handful of state laws that instituted a mandatory 24-hour waiting period for receiving an abortion.

David C Young, the Franklin county common pleas judge who made this ruling in August, also said that the state constitutional amendment language protecting abortion was “clear and unambiguous.”

Young ruled that lawyers for Preterm Cleveland and healthcare providers who had sued clearly demonstrated “that the challenged statutes burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, and discriminate against patients in exercising their right to an abortion and providers for assisting them in exercising that right”.

The state’s attorney general said he will appeal Young’s ruling.

Jenkins’ decision comes less than two weeks before the presidential election. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris has made reproductive rights a key component of her campaign.

Harris has repeatedly pointed out that Trump appointed three supreme court justices who voted to Roe v Wade. Trump, who took credit for overturning Roe v Wade but recently toned down his language amid backlash, continues to poll far lower with women voters.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

A postal service collection box was set on fire early on Thursday in Phoenix, damaging a small number of mail-in ballots dropped off at the box.

Local media reported the incident on Thursday, citing police and fire department officials who said the United States Postal Service mailbox was on fire at about 1.30am local time.

Phoenix police said they arrested 35-year-old Dieter Klofkorn, who had an unrelated arrest warrant. Police said he was interviewed about the arson while in custody and admitted to the crime, a felony.

“Klofkorn stated that he committed the arson because he wanted to be arrested and that his actions were not politically motivated and not related to anything involving the upcoming election,” police said in a press release.

The exact number of ballots affected isn’t certain yet: police initially said about 20 were damaged, but the Arizona secretary of state’s office said it believes there were a handful affected, ABC reported.

Phoenix mayor Kate Gallego previously said on Twitter/X that she was concerned about the ballot fire. “There is zero tolerance for criminal activity in our community, and we are working collaboratively with every level of government to bring the perpetrator to justice,” she wrote.

The Maricopa county recorder’s office encourages any voters who dropped off their ballots at the mailbox, near 7th Avenue and Indian School Road in Phoenix, in the last 36 hours to monitor the status of their ballots online.

“Voters should be aware that tomorrow, October 25 is the last day to request a replacement ballot,” the Maricopa county recorder Stephen Richer said in a statement.

While the suspect said his actions weren’t politically motivated, Arizona elections officials have prepared for months for acts of violence or destruction because of the close election and concerning activity in past elections, such as dropbox monitoring in the 2022 midterms.

The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted how elections offices now have new barricades and will use drones and police snipers to patrol the exterior of their buildings. Some election workers have completed active-shooter trainings and learned to “wield fire hoses to repel armed mobs”, the paper reported.

Separately, police arrested a man this week in Phoenix who had been shooting at Democratic National Committee offices there and placed anti-Democratic signs outside his home that had razor blades and an unknown white powder attached to them. The man had amassed 120 guns and 250,000 rounds of ammunition, leading prosecutors to believe he was preparing to commit an act of mass casualty.

And in another incident, a school district employee in Tempe, Arizona, was arrested over threats he made last week against Donald Trump Jr and Charlie Kirk. The man sent threatening responses to an automated text seeking RSVPs for an event the two Republicans held in the city.

For the vast majority of those in the industrialized, affluent west, death was – until the recent Covid pandemic – something exotic, foreign and outside of everyday experience. This distancing from death – and our expectation that we will enjoy a long, healthy, happy and pain-free life – is, so far as I can tell, an anomaly in all of human history. The luxury of viewing death as remote and “other” seems to be unique to our particular time and place.

As recently as the 19th century, death and dead bodies were frequently encountered in everyday life. The average life expectancy in the US in 1860 was around 40 years of age, and in the first decades of the 1800s, as many as 50% of children died before they reached adulthood. Death was closely experienced and familiar: it was common to butcher one’s own animals, deadly epidemics were rampant, and it was not out of the ordinary to die from a surgery or during childbirth.

For our ancestors in the 19th century, a good death was considered one in which you died at home, in bed, surrounded by your friends and family, including the children. This was an era before old-age homes and hospices, when people tended to live in extended families and die in the home. After death, the body would be cleaned, prepared and dressed by (usually female) family members. It would then be laid out in a coffin in the home parlor for viewing, and possibly a wake. The body would be surrounded by flowers, which not only created a feeling of beauty and sanctity, but also helped keep unpleasant smells at bay.

After the death of a loved one, it was common to observe a period of formal mourning, which would be clearly signaled to others by your clothing and jewelry. You might also have marked your home with black ribbons or other ornaments to make it clear to the community that a death had taken place. There were cultural guidelines for what ways – and for how long – to mourn, depending on your relationship with the deceased. Arts and crafts, usually made by women, were part of the mourning process to keep the memory of the dead loved one close at hand.

These traditions began to erode from the late 19th to the early 20th century, a time marked by many social changes. People were living longer – and with a better quality of life – due to medical and hygienic advances. More and more people were dying in hospitals rather than at home. And after death, the body was increasingly tended to by professional (usually male-run) funeral homes, which were employing the new technology of embalming fluid to keep bodies looking fresh for a longer period of time. Personal mourning began to disappear from view, and people saw it as problematic, or even pathological, if it went on too long.

At the same time that death was moving further from the daily lives of many, it simultaneously, perhaps for the first time in human history, became largely unexplained by the traditional methods by which humans have created a sense of meaning – that is, religion, ritual and mythology. The subject of death moved from those realms to that of science and medicine, and while the scientific worldview offers a great many facts about death, it provides us with little sense of meaning. From the perspective of science, not only has death meant simply an end, but it has also commonly been seen as a failure of medical intervention rather than a meaningful rite of passage.

Part of what it means to be human – part of the human condition, if you like – is to be aware that we will, one day, die. To be human is to be aware of, and concerned with, our mortality. The mystery of death has, for millennia, led us to ask the big, existential questions: why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Why do we die? What happens after we die? What is the point of existence?

It is worth reminding ourselves that the vast majority of our ancestors saw the world in a very different way than we do today. They understood their universe to be ensouled or inspirited, with invisible deities intricately entwined with all aspects of life and death. For most of human history, the questions and answers of life and death were sought not in the causal relationships of a historical worldview or the scientific method, but rather through mythology and religion.

In ancient Rome, for example, it was not one’s genetic inheritance or socioeconomic class that was understood to determine the length and quality of a life, but rather the Fates, a trio of goddesses who spun, wove and cut the threads of life. In Christian medieval Europe, the black plague was understood not as a bacterial illness but, to many, as a sign that the culture – or sufferer – had committed a sin deserving of divine punishment. Similarly, in the Maya world, disease was understood as a result of physical and spiritual imbalance, with illness resulting from the transgression of the laws of nature and society or the captivity of the soul by supernatural beings.

Many people today dismiss myths as simple stories from the past, but the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and the mythologist Joseph Campbell, among many other important thinkers, understood them as narratives that express profound truths about what it is to be human, albeit in a symbolic form. As the Jungian psychoanalyst Marion Woodman points out, myths also, crucially, provide us with a sense of meaning around the trials and tribulations that are an inherent part of the human experience. In her own words: “Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.”

That said, might there be a myth that we in the industrialized, affluent, secularized west live by today, either consciously or unconsciously? Are there ideas that delineate our worldview about life and death, why we die, and what happens after we die, and undergird our beliefs about the world and the cosmos and our place in it? I am not alone in positing that this myth would be science, or more specifically, the branch of science called scientific materialism.

Scientific materialism, also known as materialistic reductionism or scientism, presupposes that only matter and the concrete world around us – that which can be studied by the natural sciences – exists. In this worldview, human consciousness is understood as brain activity, so it naturally follows that our consciousness ends with bodily death. As far as this cosmology goes, we are only the body; there is no such thing as the soul or a part of us that lives on after bodily death. And when we die? That’s it. The end. Game over.

I want to be very clear here that when I propose science as our guiding myth, I do not in any way mean to suggest that I do not believe in science, or that I do not think it is real or true. Instead, I am offering that the lens provided by science might be seen as serving a similar role to that of myth. As the Nobel prize–winning biologist François Jacob pointed out: “Myths and science … both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible.”

Maybe you are lucky enough to have a belief that addresses, in a satisfying way, the mystery of death. But many of us, in this particular historical moment, do not. And, in contrast to the vast majority of our ancestors, we have not been provided with a myth or belief about what happens when we die beyond the scientific model, which posits death as an end. This means that many of us are, whether we like it or not, under an obligation to develop our own belief and understanding or, as Carl Jung would say, our own personal myth.

In my book Memento Mori, I created a 12-week program to help people to think about death in their own way. Below are a few of the prompts I offer to help readers excavate what ideas we may hold about death without even knowing it, and where they might come from. This is an essential first step to making more discriminating, considered choices about what we believe, knowing that the beliefs of our cultures and families are not in any way inevitable or provably true; they are just the traditions we happened to be born into.

This knowledge empowers us to release ideas that are not our own – that may be damaging, toxic, or simply not useful – and replace them with something that feels true to us. Try writing responses to the following questions in a journal.

Questions

1. Death memories. What is your earliest experience of death? How old were you? How did you feel? Was it a pet? A person? How was it talked about by your family? What was your grieving like? How about that of your family?

2. Death in your family. Was death talked about in your family? Were you invited to attend funerals? What were you told when a pet or loved one died? What did you think about what you were told?

3. Associations with death. What are your associations with the idea of death? Without thinking, write down every word that comes to your mind. They might include: fear, decay, end, sadness, grief, rebirth, corpse, horror films, release, surrender ... Added bonus: divide these words into two columns, one for positive associations, one for negative associations. Is there an imbalance between the two?

4. A good death. In the 19th century, a good death was considered one at home, surrounded by family. What is your idea of a good death? Do you hope to die painlessly in your sleep? Would you like to die in a special place? Alone or with someone (or many) you love? Write, in detail, about what an ideal death would look like to you.

5. Thought experiment: death is not the end. The death of the body also meaning the end of our existence is, historically speaking, very new, and it runs counter to the beliefs of people for nearly all of human history in all parts of the world. One fun thought experiment I have enjoyed: what are the odds that all of human history is wrong, and our particular historical moment has it right? Further, what have been the fruits of the past 150 years that we have lived with these beliefs? Has it made a better, kinder society? If it were as simple as choosing, what would you believe? Write down your thoughts.

6. Myths and death. Were you brought up with a mythic or religious understanding of death? What did these stories tell you about your life, your relationship to the natural world, and punishment? What did they tell you about death and what happens after? How did they impact the way your life unfolded? What are your thoughts about it now?

7. How I feel about death. Complete these sentences.
   The worst thing I can imagine about death is …
   The best thing I can imagine about death is …
   The thing that most frightens me about death is …
   The thing that most frightens me about being dead is …

8. Your own death. Write a short story about your own death, in as much detail as possible. What was dying like? Who, if anyone, was with you? How did it feel? Was there any sort of post-death existence? What was it like?

Joanna Ebenstein is the founder and creative director of Morbid Anatomy.

From Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life by Joanna Ebenstein, published by TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Joanna Ebenstein

When Fritz Schumacher laid out his vision for Hamburg a century ago, the sketch looked more like a fern than a town plan. Fronds of urban development radiated from the centre to tickle the countryside, bristling with dense rows of housing. The white spaces in between were to be filled with parks and playgrounds.

Schumacher was Hamburg’s chief building officer in the early 20th century, and a pioneer of green cities with widespread access to nature. “Building sites emerge even if you don’t invest in them,” he warned in 1932. “Public spaces disappear if you don’t invest in them.”

Not all of Schumacher’s ideas survived the wartime bombs that blew Hamburg apart, or the rebuilding process, but his schematic of the “natural development of the organism Hamburg” has steered the city down a greener path than its neighbours. Stitched together by a series of green axes and rings, nature reserves make up more of the state of Hamburg than any of the other federal states in Germany – nearly 10%. “We call it Hamburg’s green network,” says Barbara Engelschall of the city’s environment authority.

But even forward-thinking cities such as Hamburg have struggled to break free from the instinct to pave over plants. In 2018, conservation groups petitioned the city to preserve its green space after Olaf Scholz, the centre-left mayor who would go on to become chancellor of the country, pledged to build 10,000 flats in the pricey port each year. The demand attracted 23,000 signatures and led to a rather German solution to nature conservation: a contract.

The authorities signed an agreement with the citizen’s initiative to protect 30% of Hamburg’s land area – 10% as untouchable nature reserves and 20% with a looser conservation status – and ensure the share of public green space in the city rises over time. The city also agreed to increase the biotope value, an index it uses to measure the quality of nature.

And the plan has been successful. A progress report in July found it had risen from 2019 reference values as result of efforts to upgrade grasslands, rewet moorlands and use nature-friendly conservation measures on land owned by city companies.

The contract also contains clauses that mean construction works that hurt nature in one part of town must be compensated for elsewhere. A similar flexibility governs the 20% of the city area under light conservation rules, allowing authorities to build on green areas if they save new ones.

It really is a “big lever” of change, says Malte Siegert, who negotiated the deal on behalf of the local branch of the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (Nabu). He sympathises with calls for more affordable housing and says cities just have to think about where to build it and how to offset its impacts. “It’s a good compromise to say: yes, we will make the city more dense, but then do more to make the remaining green spaces really deliver an ecological service.”

Sophie, an actor who works at Good One Cafe in the Eimsbüttel district, says that the city does a good job of bringing greenery into every neighbourhood. Hamburg ranks highly in quality of life surveys, but she admits that residents are probably not aware of the politics behind what they’re enjoying. “You easily take things for granted when they’re right outside your door.”

The scale of Hamburg’s hurdles varies from district to district. The industrial harbour has the highest levels of cemented surface – though what it lacks in greenery it makes up for in waterways – and deprived inner-city neighbourhoods such as St Georg and St Pauli are also heavy on concrete, though they sit close to parks. The latter is home to a vast anti-aircraft bunker from the second world war that reopened in July as an entertainment centre housing 23,000 plants on its public rooftop garden.

And, speaking from a park in front of the environment authority’s office, surrounded by wild flower meadows thrumming with insects, Engelschall says there are challenges involved in putting the city’s green ideals into practice. Increasing an area’s biodiversity score means first measuring it – a mammoth task that she and her colleagues have been painstakingly working at for years – and understanding the local nuances of how to improve it. Training the city’s time-strapped gardeners and changing the practices of private contractors can also take time.

Bernd-Ulrich Netz, who heads the city’s conservation department, says there is also still a cultural hurdle to overcome which requires a shift in how people relate to nature. “The classic English image of a castle with a green lawn is deep in the minds of many people. They couldn’t imagine a castle with a meadow of flowers in front of it, even though it would be much more beautiful.”

Volunteers have set out to change that in parks across the city. Luisa Schubert, who runs a hands-on ecology project for Hamburg’s city park association, says 160 people have signed up to her newsletter volunteering programme that seeks to foster stronger connections between people and nature. About 25 of them turn up on a given day to sow seeds, rake leaves, and plant shrubs.

“Although it’s work, I think they enjoy it – otherwise they wouldn’t come,” says Schubert. One regular volunteer told her that he comes with his son to replace having a private garden, after having struggled to decide between living in a village or a city. Another recently held up a flower and told Schubert excitedly: “Wildflowers change the world.”

On another day, Schubert was with a group of raucous third-grade pupils who suddenly fell silent upon seeing a dead squirrel. One of the children started a ceremony, she says, and they buried the animal together.

“This is the kind of nature experience that will really influence kids’ lives later on,” says Schubert.

What she hears most often from volunteers is a feeling of purpose, she says. “It’s so important amid this environmental, climate and biodiversity crisis to feel a little sense of fulfilment – like ‘I have done something’, even on a small scale.”

The huge cuts in carbon emissions now needed to end the climate crisis mean it is “crunch time for real”, according to the UN’s environment chief.

An unprecedented global mobilisation of renewable energy, forest protection and other measures is needed to steer the world off the current path towards a catastrophic temperature rise of 3.1C, a report from the UN environment programme (Unep) has found. Extreme heatwaves, storms, droughts and floods are already ravaging communities with less than 1.5C of global heating to date.

Current carbon-cutting promises by countries for 2030 are not being met, according to the report, and even if they were met, the temperature rise would only be limited to a still-disastrous 2.6C to 2.8C. There is no more time for “hot air”, the report said, urging nations to act at the Cop29 summit in November.

Keeping the international goal of 1.5C within reach was technically possible, said the report, but it required emissions to fall by 7.5% annually until 2035. That means halting emissions equivalent to those of the EU every year for a decade. Delaying emissions cuts only means steeper reductions would be needed in future.

Unep said countries must collectively commit to cut 42% off annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 57% by 2035 in their next UN pledges, called nationally determined contributions and due in February. Without these pledges, and rapid action to back them up, the 1.5C goal would be gone, the UN said.

However, the head of Unep, Inger Andersen, said it was misguided to fixate only on whether the 1.5C target was kept or not, because every fraction of a degree of global heating avoided would save lives, damage and costs: “Don’t over-focus on a magic number. Keeping temperature as low as possible is where we need to be.”

The finance and technology to slash emissions exists, Andersen said, but “political courage” was needed, particularly from the G20 nations (excluding the African Union) that cause 77% of global emissions.

Andersen said the world’s nations made strong climate promises at the Paris summit in 2015. “Now is the time to live up to that – it’s climate crunch time for real. We need global mobilisation on a scale and pace never seen before, starting right now, or the 1.5C goal will soon be dead and the ‘well below 2C’ target will take its place in the intensive care unit.”

Unep’s last two annual reports highlighted “the closing window” for action and the “broken record” of failed promises. “Now we’re saying, this is it,” she said.

“The irritating thing is technology is there for the grasping, as are the job and economic development opportunities,” Andersen said. “It just takes political courage and some strong leadership.”

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said: “We’re playing with fire; but there can be no more playing for time. We’re out of time.” He said global heating was supercharging monster hurricanes, bringing biblical floods, turning forests into tinder boxes and cities into saunas.

“Governments must wean us off our fossil fuel addiction: showing how they will phase them out – fast and fairly,” he said, adding that levies on fossil fuels could help pay for climate action.

The Unep report found that faster rollout of solar and wind energy could provide 27% of the emissions cuts needed. “That’s massive and this is a cheap, proven technology – it’s not a gamble to invest in,” Andersen said.

Stopping the destruction of forests could bring another 20% cut, the report said. Much of the rest could come from energy efficiency and the electrification of buildings, transport and industry, as well as cutting methane emissions from fossil fuel facilities, which Andersen described as “not hard”.

The estimated investment needed to cut emissions to net zero is $1-2tn a year, according to the report, about 1% of the value of the global economy and financial markets. “We’re talking a couple of percentage points that would be incremental in terms of renewal of ageing infrastructure” in developed countries, said Andersen. But developing countries would need finance from rich nations, a topic at the top of the Cop29 agenda.

The global geopolitical situation was difficult, acknowledged Andersen, with conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, and tensions between western nations and Russia and China. But she said: “If there is a space where the world has been able to meet, it is really the environment space.”

She cited a recent G20 meeting of environment and climate ministers. “These are not the best friends, all of them, and yet they managed to have a [good] communique.” She said there had been significant green policy shifts in the US, China, Germany, India and Brazil, but a a much greater effort was required.

“The sooner we strike out hard for a low-carbon, sustainable and prosperous future, the sooner we will get there – which will save lives, save money and protect the planetary systems upon which we all depend,” she said.

“World leaders continue to drag their feet, protecting the interests of the fossil fuel industry, while people are suffering right now. At Cop29, leaders must respond and act on their fair share of responsibility – especially wealthier nations who have fuelled this crisis for decades,” said Harjeet Singh, at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.

This Tuesday, Charlie Kirk brought his You’re Being Brainwashed Tour to the campus of my public university in a Republican-controlled state. It was nothing like the last time Kirk and his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) organization had visited. Although the different timing matters – this was literally two weeks before election day – the differences between the 2018 and 2024 events in many ways reflect the dangerous radicalization of the US right wing.

In 2018, Kirk had a fairly similar agenda when coming to my university: “exposing leftist lies and progressive propaganda” at US universities. I wrote a column about the rather bland event, describing it as a “rightwing safe space”, in which Kirk railed against the “cultural Marxists”. Most students seemed more amused than aggrieved. How different this week’s event was.

When I came to campus early, I saw them set up their stands. I drank my coffee opposite to a lone female student with a Trump hat – a rare sight even at my university. I then went to teach my course on far-right politics, where TPUSA’s event was the talk of the class. I told my students that I totally understood if they wanted to observe the event – who am I to stand in the way of them getting “de-brainwashed”? – and approximately half of my students indeed left halfway through class to attend the event.

After class, I walked down to Tate Plaza, the open space in front of the student center, and was perplexed by the sight. I saw what looked like a sea of Maga hats on the large open space. I bumped into one of my students, who told me that TPUSA handed out the Maga hats for free, and that he was leaving because you couldn’t hear anything anyway. In the background Kirk was droning on about Kamala Harris, wokeism and his other favorite enemies. But there was something to the meeting, an energy that was lacking six years ago. This was not just a safe space, this was a boisterous and proud rally!

Sure, almost anyone wearing their own Maga hat was older and not related to the university, but a couple hundred students happily accepted and wore the hat. Moreover, most kept them on when they left the rally, and went to the food court, to class or even downtown. Turns out that a hat that is the most recognizable symbol of support for a man that has been loudly and openly authoritarian and racist in the last months is a rather cool gimmick for privileged young white men.

There are important broader lessons to be drawn from the differences between these two TPUSA events. First, the 2024 meeting shows the radicalization of conservative America. While Turning Point was already supportive of Trump in 2018, it still had a largely independent program, ostensibly focused on traditional conservative values as small government and capitalism. In the past years, Kirk has not only fully embraced the authoritarian and nativist agenda of Trump, he and his organization have pivoted to full-on Christian nationalism.

Second, Turning Point USA targets college and high school students, that is, those 21 and under. These kids and young adults have been socialized in a world in which 1 Trump is a former president; 2 the Republican party is the party of Trump; and 3 the US Capitol got stormed by Trump sympathizers. For those raised in Republican households, which means most of the students at my university, this means that Trump and the far right are completely normal. What we see as far right, they see as mainstream conservatism. They have no conception of the Republican party of George Bush Sr or Jr.

Third, radicalized organizations like TPUSA have overtaken the role of mainstream conservative organizations such as the College Republicans, not just on campus but also as training grounds for the next “conservative” elite. Kirk has literally been training the cadres for the next Trump administration, should it happen. This is a very different kind of “Republican”, if they are Republicans at all. They are more assertive and extremist but less tied to traditional conservative organizations, including the Republican party.

Fourth, and most optimistically, the sea of Maga hats also gave me a shimmer of hope for the upcoming election. Since Trump’s shock 2016 win, the media has obsessed about “shy Trump supporters”, that is, people who support Trump in the elections but do not say so in polls because of social desirability. Although empirical evidence has always been weak, the “shy Trump voter” never disappeared from the public debate. Seeing these students wear the Maga hats, not for fun or provocation, but as a “normal” expression of support for the “conservative” candidate in the presidential election, confirmed my suspicion that there are no “shy Trumpers” left in 2024.

And, if this is true, there might still be hope, in the sense that the current polls are overrepresenting the Trump vote, because they are overcompensating for a dated phenomenon, the shy Trump voter, yet another victim of the normalization of Trump.

• Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today

Nearly 25 million Americans have already voted, less than two weeks out from the US election, with records broken in multiple battleground states, at least partly driven by Republicans embracing early voting at Donald Trump’s direction.

Either through in-person early voting or mail-in ballots, more than 1.9 million voters have cast early votes in Georgia, where Trump lost by a mere 11,779 votes four years ago to Democrat Joe Biden, while North Carolina also set a new record of more than 1.7m despite the chaos caused by Hurricane Helene last month.

At an event in Georgia, Trump celebrated the state’s record-breaking vote levels, and at a separate rally urged his supporters to “just vote – whichever way you want to do it.”

Here’s what else happened on Wednesday:

Donald Trump election news

• A former model who says she met Donald Trump through the late sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein has accused the former president of groping and sexually touching her in an incident in Trump Tower in 1993, in what she believed was a “twisted game” between the two men. The Trump campaign called the allegations by Stacey Williams “unequivocally false”, calling it a fake story “contrived by the Harris campaign”.

• Trump appeared in Zebulon, Georgia, with lieutenant governor and 2020 election denier Burt Jones, at a faith-focused event his campaign dubbed a “Believers and Ballots town hall”. Trump praised tech mogul Elon Musk, for providing hurricane relief where he claimed the federal government did not.

• Trump stayed in Georgia for a rally in Duluth with guests Tucker Carlson, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. He escalated his personal insults against Kamala Harris, saying she was “crazy” and inviting voters to tell his opponent: “‘You’re the worst ever. There’s never been anybody like you. You can’t put two sentences together. The world is laughing at us because of you.’”

• The US justice department warned Musk’s Super Pac that the billionaire and Tesla CEO’s $1m-a-day giveaways may violate federal law, according to multiple reports. Musk, who has thrown his support behind Trump, announced on Saturday while speaking before a crowd in Pennsylvania that he was giving away $1m each day until election day to someone who signs his online petition supporting the US constitution.

• Writing on Truth Social, Trump assailed John Kelly as a “a bad general” gripped by “pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred”. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and a retired Marine general, on Tuesday said he believed Trump met the definition of “fascist” and was “certainly an authoritarian”. Two retired army officers said they agreed with Kelly, while Republicans including the governor of New Hampshire dismissed the comments.

Kamala Harris election news

• Kamala Harris denounced Trump as a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power” and a military personally loyal to him. In a surprise speech from her Washington DC residence, the Democratic nominee jumped on Kelly’s claims. Joe Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said the president also agreed with those calling Trump a fascist.

• Harris repeated the fascist claim during a televised town hall with undecided voters in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In response to CNN moderator Anderson Cooper asking her: “Let me ask you tonight, do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?”, Harris answered: “Yes, I do.” Trump was invited to attend the same town hall but declined.

• Harris’s campaign announced she will deliver a major “closing argument” address next week in the same location that Donald Trump rallied January 6 rioters before they stormed the US Capitol in 2021.

• Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz voted early along with his wife, Gwen, and son, Gus. Leaving the voting booth in St Paul, Minnesota, Walz said his vote was “an opportunity to turn the page on the chaos of Donald Trump and a new way forward”.

• Second gentleman Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, rallied Democrats in Florida, marking a break from his recent stumping in more competitive states including Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Both parties expect the Sunshine state to once more swing for Trump, but the Harris campaign’s rare foray drew attention to the close Senate race between the Republican incumbent and Democratic challenger.

Elsewhere on the campaign trail

• The Los Angeles Times opinion editor resigned after the newspaper’s owner blocked the masthead from endorsing Kamala Harris for president. Mariel Garza said she was standing up against the decision by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s billionaire owner. In a social media post, Soon-Shiong wrote that the Los Angeles Times editorial board had rejected a proposed alternative to a typical presidential endorsement editorial, which he described as “a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House”.

• China-linked social media bots are targeting Republicans including Marco Rubio, according to new research from Microsoft, while a senior US intelligence official said groups in Russia created and helped spread viral disinformation targeting Tim Walz.

• Pennsylvania’s highest court allowed people whose mail ballots were rejected on technicalities to cast provisional ballots, likely affecting thousands of early voters. The decision was another defeat for the Republican National Committee’s legal campaign, after it argued some provisional ballots cast during the April primary should have been rejected.

Read more about the 2024 US election:

Biodiversity is declining more quickly within key protected areas than outside them, according to research that scientists say is a “wake-up call” to global leaders discussing how to stop nature loss at the UN’s Cop16 talks in Colombia.

Protecting 30% of land and water for nature by 2030 was one of the key targets settled on by world leaders in a landmark 2022 agreement to save nature – and this month leaders are gathering again at a summit in the Colombian city of Cali to measure progress and negotiate new agreements to stop biodiversity loss.

However, simply designating more areas as protected “will not automatically result in better outcomes for biodiversity”, researchers warn, in the latest study to challenge the effectiveness of conservation practices.

Nearly a quarter of the world’s most biodiversity-rich land is within protected areas, but the quality of these areas is declining faster than it is outside protected areas, according to the analysis by the Natural History Museum (NHM).

Researchers looked at a Biodiversity Intactness Index, which scores biodiversity health as a percentage in response to human pressures. The report found the index declined by 1.88 percentage points globally between 2000 and 2020. It then focused on the critical biodiversity areas that provide 90% of nature’s contributions to humanity, 22% of which is protected.

The study found that within those critical areas that were not protected, biodiversity had declined by an average of 1.9 percentage points between 2000 and 2020, and within the areas that were protected it had declined by 2.1 percentage points.

The authors say there are a few reasons why this might be the case. A lot of protected areas are not designed to preserve the whole ecosystem, but rather certain species that are of interest, which means total “biodiversity intactness” is not a priority.

Another reason is that these landscapes could have already been suffering degradation, which is why they were protected in the first place. Researchers say specific local analysis is key to working out why each one is failing.

Dr Gareth Thomas, head of research innovation at NHM, said: “The 30×30 target has received so much attention – as it should do – and has become a key target people talk about at UN biodiversity talks, but we wanted to understand if it was really fit for purpose.

“I think if you asked most people they would assume an area designated as ‘protected’ would at the very least do exactly that: protect nature. But this research showed that wasn’t the case.”

The amount of land protected for nature stands at 17.5% of land and 8.4% of marine areas – an increase of about half a percentage point each since Cop15 in 2022. This will need to increase substantially by 2030 to meet the target.

But for many of those areas, the “protections in place are not stringent enough”, said Thomas.

“Countries need to continue their focus on 30×30, that shouldn’t waver. They just need to bring more into it, and pay more attention to actually conserving the land which provides those ecosystem services,” he said.

Oil, gas and mining concessions threaten key areas for biodiversity, as well as Indigenous territories. For example Conkouati-Douli national park is one of the most biodiverse protected areas in the Republic of the Congo – yet more than 65% of the park is covered by oil and gas concessions, according to a new report by Earth Insight.

In the Amazon, Congo basin and south-east Asia, at least 254,000 sq km (98,000 sq miles) of protected areas are threatened by oil and gas exploration. More than 300,000 sq km of Indigenous territories in the Amazon overlap with oil and gas concessions, the report has found.

Recent research from the University of New South Wales in Sydney looked at forested land in 300,000 of the world’s protected areas and found the policy was almost “completely ineffective” in many biodiversity-rich countries, including Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bolivia, Venezuela and Madagascar.

Corruption, political instability and a lack of resources were key reasons why conservation laws were not implemented.

Protected areas are also being threatened by the effects of the climate crisis: wildfires and droughts do not respect their boundaries. Australia, for example, used to have a strong record of protecting nature in its national parks but in 2019, many were destroyed by fire.

Emma Woods, director of policy at the Natural History Museum, said: “We urgently need to move beyond the current approach of simply designating more protected areas to 30×30. Our analysis reinforces the view that this will not automatically result in better outcomes for biodiversity and ecosystems.”

Thomas said he hoped the study’s findings would be “a wake-up call” to policymakers and enforcers of the legislation that it was not enough just to designate an area as protected. “The ministers and policymakers need to know it is not about just hitting a number,” he said.

Ben Groom, professor of biodiversity economics at Exeter University, who was not involved in the research, said it was “extremely positive” that there was support for 30×30 but “there was always a chance that this would manifest in shallow policy implementation in the form of cost-minimising attainment of the 30×30 target, rather than focusing on quality.”

Donald Trump escalated his personal insults against Kamala Harris at a Wednesday evening rally in Georgia as he faces growing scrutiny over reports of his praise of Hitler and alleged sexual misconduct.

“This woman is crazy,” the former president said at an event in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth, hosted by Turning Point USA, a far-right youth group. He said voters should stand up to the vice-president and tell her: “You’re the worst ever. There’s never been anybody like you. You can’t put two sentences together. The world is laughing at us because of you.” He also said that in her recent interview with CBS, she “gave an answer that was from a loony bin”, later adding: “She’s not a smart person. She’s a low IQ individual.”

The rally, less than two weeks before election day, came after the Guardian published an interview with a former model who accused Trump of groping her at Trump Tower in 1993 after notorious sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein introduced them, an allegation the Trump campaign denied. Stacey Williams said it felt as if the unwanted touching was part of a “twisted game” between the two men and that it appeared Epstein and Trump were “really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together”.

Williams’s account put the spotlight back on the roughly two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct throughout his career. Harris, campaigning with Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has sought to encourage Republican women to support the Democrat.

The Georgia rally also came after Harris’s surprise speech in Washington DC on Wednesday, when she denounced the former president as a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power”. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and a retired Marine general, told the New York Times this week that he believed Trump met the definition of “fascist” and was “certainly an authoritarian”. He also said Trump repeatedly commented: “Hitler did some good things, too.”

In a characteristically rambling speech, Trump went on meandering tangents about Google (“Google is treating us much better. Do you notice that? What happened to Google?”); McDonald’s (“McDonald’s was one of the most viewed things that [Google] ever had”); Emmanuel Macron (“I stopped wars with France”); Richard Nixon (“That was not good when they found out he taped every single conversation”); and the vice-president’s name (“You can’t call her ‘Harris’ because nobody knows who the hell you’re talking about”).

He threatened to sue CBS’s 60 Minutes, repeating false claims that the station manipulated Harris’s interview after Trump backed out of his planned interview with the program. He reiterated the threat a second time about an hour later in his speech.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, former independent presidential candidate, also rallied for Trump in Georgia, calling Kelly a “known liar”. Trump did not address Kelly at the rally, but on Truth Social called his former chief of staff a “LOWLIFE” and “total degenerate”.

In a “faith-focused” town hall in Zebulon, Georgia earlier on Wednesday, Trump praised Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s nationalist prime minister who has been condemned for undermining democratic institutions and aligning with Moscow and Beijing.

Asked about his faith, Trump responded: “When you believe in God, it’s a big advantage over people that don’t have that.” He went on to falsely suggest he has endured more investigations than notorious gangster Al Capone.