North-west Europe is forecast to experience a burst of autumn warmth this week, thanks to warm air from southern Europe spreading northwards. This brief episode of warmer-than-average conditions will be driven by an amplified, or “wavy”, jet stream, which will allow warm air to push farther north.

Daytime temperatures across much of France are forecast to reach the mid-20s on Tuesday and Wednesday, with some areas in the south-west potentially exceeding this. Meanwhile, the Benelux area and south-east England are expected to reach the low-20s by midweek.

However, the most notable temperature anomalies will occur during Tuesday night, when temperatures will stay in the high teens for areas of north-west Europe, 5-10C above October averages. In parts of southern France the temperature may not drop below 20C, a phenomenon known in meteorology as a “tropical night”.

Although an amplified jet stream can sometimes result in a blocked pattern, in which conditions persist for several days, this warm period is expected to be more short-lived, ending with a bang as heavy rain and thunderstorms push in from the south-east.

Significant rainfall is possible over France’s Massif Central, with forecast models suggesting more than 100mm (3.9in) could fall within 24 hours over Wednesday and Thursday.

Recent weather patterns have also been unusual in the Sahara desert. While rain in the Sahara is not uncommon, there have been higher-than-average amounts in recent months, with some parts of the desert receiving five times their usual precipitation in September. The deserts of south-eastern Morocco – usually one of the driest regions on Earth – had two days of torrential rain that exceeded the yearly average.

Some areas recorded more than 100mm within 24 hours, with downpours unleashing destructive flood waters that resulted in 20 fatalities and devastated local agriculture, as many farmers’ harvests were washed away.

However, after six years of drought, this rainfall has brought some relief for some, replenishing groundwater aquifers vital to desert communities and refilling reservoirs at record rates.

Meteorologists suggest the increase in rainfall may be linked to a northward shift in the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), a low-pressure band circling the Earth near the equator, where winds from the northern and southern hemispheres converge. Although there is no clear explanation for the shift in the position of the ITCZ, some climate models have linked it to higher air and ocean temperatures owing to the climate crisis.

Donald Trump’s campaign has limited ability to know whether their ground game operation is reaching target voters in battleground states, as the software being used needs fast internet service to properly track canvassers, according to multiple people familiar with the situation.

The Trump campaign this cycle is targeting so-called low propensity Trump voters, who are often in rural areas, as part of their bet that hitting those people who don’t typically vote but would cast a ballot for Trump if they did, could make a difference in a close election.

But the Trump campaign and the Elon Musk-backed America Pac, which is now doing an outsized portion of the Trump ground game, use a management app called Campaign Sidekick that struggles in areas with slow internet and means canvassers have to use an offline version.

The Campaign Sidekick app effectively forces canvassers who have less than 40mbps of internet – sufficient to stream 4K video – to use “offline walkbooks” which have no geo-tracking feature and do not always upload after a route is completed, the people said.

As a result, the Trump campaign and America Pac then have little way to know whether canvassers are actually knocking on doors or whether they are cheating – for instance, by “speed-running” routes where they literally throw campaign materials at doors as they drive past.

America Pac has tried to deter cheating by sending out teams of auditors to trail canvassers, but there is no way to directly audit every offline walkbook – which is particularly high because of the Trump campaign’s focus on hitting low propensity voters.

And even when canvassers legitimately complete a route offline, that data has sometimes failed to upload afterwards, the people said. Since the canvassers are paid by the door, they have to redo their work, wasting time and potentially annoying voters for harassing them twice.

“Maybe Elon Musk can give his canvassers a Starlink,” one political operative involved in the America Pac operation joked, referring to Musk’s satellite-based mobile internet router.

The Trump campaign has fielded complaints about Sidekick for some time, the people said. At least two other super Pacs, involved in doing ground game work on behalf of the Trump campaign in battleground states, have stopped using it for their own operations.

Those wider complaints include the app crashing during peak hours when there are many people using it at once, or tech glitches like the Google Maps preview in the app, which is there for canvassers to figure out their routes, being broken.

Campaign Sidekick’s has previously pushed back at the criticism, saying it has always been upfront about the limitations of offline walkbooks and recommends to clients to track factors that could indicate fraud, such as canvassers claiming they spoke to voters for than 25% of doors they hit.

And an executive at the September Group LLC, a major canvassing vendor that was contracted by America Pac to door-knock in Arizona and Nevada until last month, said they were happy with Sidekick even if they eschewed using offline walkbooks because of its drawbacks.

The Trump campaign’s co-campaign chief Chris LaCivita dismissed the complaints, saying in a statement: “Our canvassing apps work fine, and we’ve invested in new technology this cycle that is unmatched in politics to supplement our efforts. This is a clear hit job from a failed vendor who we’ll be sure to name and shame as soon as we finish winning this campaign.”

LaCivita did not address why their suspicion hinges on a vendor, given the fact that the grievances have come primarily from their own ground game partners. The statement also failed to address that the campaign has been aware of the issues for some time.

There have been complaints about Campaign Sidekick from other groups, as well. Turning Point Action, run by the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, told the Trump campaign they encountered so many difficulties that they would use their own app in Arizona and Wisconsin and parts of Michigan.

The complaints from Turning Point have centered on having to do everything manually. If a canvasser could only complete part of a door-knocking route, they complained, there was no way for the remaining doors to be automatically reassigned to another canvasser – those voters would simply not be reached at all.

The reason why the Trump campaign has stuck with the software is not entirely clear, apart from wanting continuity.

The Trump campaign took over the RNC in March and directed America Pac to use the app in part because the Trump team was already using it itself, and the thinking was it would be easier to analyze the data if it all came through the same system, a Trump official said.

But there have been political considerations as well. The Trump campaign decided not to use other platforms such as i360 Walk, partly as a result of distrust with its owners, the Koch brothers, who have opposed Trump in the past, one of the people said.

The Trump campaign also did not use software from Advantage Inc, seeing it as inferior and because the Florida governor Ron DeSantis used that platform for his get-out-the-vote operation during his 2024 Republican primary bid against Trump.

And the Numinar platform currently being used by America First Works, another Trump-allied Pac doing ground-game work, failed to gain traction with the RNC – for reasons that remain unclear – after it was pitched as an alternative to Campaign Sidekick earlier in this presidential cycle.

I was 70 when I became a grandmother for the first time in 2023. My son Marlon had a son of his own, and while I had never been the kind of mother who was desperate to become a grandmother, I was delighted.

But it soon became clear I was entering uncharted waters. Very little about the way they entered into pregnancy and parenthood was the route I’d taken in my hippy-punk way. They were consciously well informed. I think I made it to two NCT classes. Lina – my son’s partner – had a birth doula. I’d read the one book, The Experience of Childbirth by Sheila Kitzinger, from 1962; they’d read a raft of parenting books like Philippa Perry’s recent The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read.

Then, when it came to the birth, I wasn’t able to be around. My partner (not my son’s father) and I had been planning a weekend festival in north Wales for the past year to celebrate his 80th birthday, my 70th, and our 10-year relationship. Santi, my grandson, was born in London while we were there. Lina and Marlon were very understanding about it, but I worried that missing this huge event messed up the beginning of my role as grandmother. I felt guilty that I wasn’t on hand for Marlon as Lina’s family were.

When I finally met my grandson, I was reminded that I’m not very good with tiny babies. They are such delicate little creatures, and I was afraid of doing the wrong thing. Lina and Marlon tried to support me around the basics like nappy changing, but at times it felt to me as though they didn’t trust me. That then made me feel inadequate. So I did less than I would have liked to do.

Lina’s mum seemed to know exactly what she was doing, springing up with cooked food or nappies at the right moment. Meanwhile, I was forever making too much noise, threatening to disturb the sleeping baby, or missing a text not to ring the doorbell – Santi’s parents were constantly having to shush me.

And my ideas about child rearing were out of sync with theirs. Back in the 80s, we didn’t use white noise to get our babies to sleep, we simply plonked a Moses basket in the middle of crowded restaurants or parties and expected the baby to fit in with our lives, not the other way round. The focus now was on trying to get Santi into a routine. I thought they were reading too much, while they were horrified that I seemed to remember so little about what I used to do.

A mini-battleground was forming, which culminated in some uncomfortable attempts to explain and understand each other’s points of view.

However, the real lightbulb moment came after they went away to Colombia for a couple of months when Santi was eight months old. I was all in favour: I’m a big fan of travel as education. And they came back so much more relaxed. A new flexibility had arrived, partially brought about by long treks, including wading through rivers with Santi in a carrier on their chests. I, in turn, started to understand some of their parenting philosophy and respect it. How and why they were feeding him the food they were eating in Colombia – amazing fruits like soursop and dragon fruit, rather than supermarket jars of puree. That they were keeping him away from sugar and salt, mostly. Watching Santi eat, I remembered all the tinned spaghetti that Marlon had consumed with less pride.

I loved how Lina was only speaking Spanish to him so that he will be bilingual. And how they navigate saying yes and no. They don’t avoid saying no to their son, but they explain why they are saying no. There is negotiation involved. This is a tender, considered kind of parenting, which makes me wish that I’d been more able to be like that – particularly the understanding shown to Santi when he doesn’t want to do something. In that way, I had been less questioning about my own parents’ parenting, and carried it on.

Looking back, I began to see that some of the new ways of parenting had been benefiting me all along – I had been so touched, for example, that Lina and Marlon shared the news of their pregnancy before the “traditional” 12-week scan because they wanted the grandparents to feel part of the process. When I was pregnant, I waited, as I didn’t think my mother would have wanted to be involved.

Now I can see that whatever new forms of parenting are introduced in whatever era, it can feel not just like an invitation to reflect on your own parenting, but also unconsciously like an attack on it. No wonder there is such tension during these crucial transitional times.

And so, gradually, my hippy-punk parenting has turned into an eager-to-find-out kind of modern grandmothering: 14 months on, I find myself listening to my son and his partner a lot more than I used to. After all, they have researched and discussed what they’re doing, so it’s the least I can do.

Recently, I was immersed in all the different sounds that Santi makes and began distinguishing the layers of want and joy in them. There’s one mammammam sound that is a cry of I want that now. I found myself on the brink of declaring it a “bad” sound when my hand flew to my mouth. Be less mouthy – that’s my modern grandmother motto.

• Rose Rouse is the editor and co-founder of Advantages of Age, a social enterprise challenging media stereotypes around ageing

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

It begins each day at nightfall. As the light disappears, billions of zooplankton, crustaceans and other marine organisms rise to the ocean surface to feed on microscopic algae, returning to the depths at sunrise. The waste from this frenzy – Earth’s largest migration of creatures – sinks to the ocean floor, removing millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year.

This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions.

But as the Earth heats up, scientists are increasingly concerned that those crucial processes are breaking down.

In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.

There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor.

“We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems. We’re seeing massive cracks on land – terrestrial ecosystems are losing their carbon store and carbon uptake capacity, but the oceans are also showing signs of instability,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told an event at New York Climate Week in September.

“Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end,” he said.

The 2023 breakdown of the land carbon sink could be temporary: without the pressures of drought or wildfires, land would return to absorbing carbon again. But it demonstrates the fragility of these ecosystems, with massive implications for the climate crisis.

Reaching net zero is impossible without nature. In the absence of technology that can remove atmospheric carbon on a large scale, the Earth’s vast forests, grasslands, peat bogs and oceans are the only option for absorbing human carbon pollution, which reached a record 37.4bn tonnes in 2023.

At least 118 countries are relying on the land to meet national climate targets. But rising temperatures, increased extreme weather and droughts are pushing the ecosystems into uncharted territory.

The kind of rapid land sink collapse seen in 2023 has not been factored into most climate models. If it continues, it raises the prospect of rapid global heating beyond what those models have predicted.

‘We have been lulled – we cannot see the crisis’

For the past 12,000 years, the Earth’s climate has existed in a fragile equilibrium. Its stable weather patterns allowed the development of modern agriculture, which now supports a population of more than 8 billion people.

As human emissions rose, the amount absorbed by nature increased too: higher carbon dioxide can mean plants grow faster, storing more carbon. But this balance is beginning to shift, driven by rising heat.

“This stressed planet has been silently helping us and allowing us to shove our debt under the carpet thanks to biodiversity,” says Rockström. “We are lulled into a comfort zone – we cannot really see the crisis.”

Only one major tropical rainforest – the Congo basin – remains a strong carbon sink that removes more than it releases into the atmosphere. Exacerbated by El Niño weather patterns, deforestation and global heating, the Amazon basin is experiencing a record-breaking drought, with rivers at an all-time low. Expansion of agriculture has turned tropical rainforests in south-east Asia into a net source of emissions in recent years.

Emissions from soil – which is the second-largest active carbon store after the oceans – are expected to increase by as much as 40% by the end of the century if they continue at the current rate, as soils become drier and microbes break them down faster.

Tim Lenton, professor of climate change and Earth system science at Exeter University, says: “We are seeing in the biosphere some surprising responses that are not what got predicted, just as we are in the climate.

“You have to question: to what degree can we rely on them as carbon sinks or carbon stores?” he says.

A paper published in July found that while the total amount of carbon absorbed by forests between 1990 and 2019 was steady, it varied substantially by region. The boreal forests – home to about a third of all carbon found on land, which stretch across Russia, Scandinavia, Canada and Alaska – have seen a sharp fall in the amount of carbon they absorb, down more than a third due to climate crisis-related beetle outbreaks, fire and clearing for timber.

Combined with the declining resilience of the Amazon and drought conditions in parts of the tropics, the hot conditions in the northern forests helped drive the collapse of the land sink in 2023 – causing a spike in the rate of atmospheric carbon.

“In 2023 the accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere is very high and this translates into a very, very low absorption by the terrestrial biosphere,” says Philippe Ciais, a researcher at the French Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, who was an author of the most recent paper.

“In the northern hemisphere, where you have more than half of CO₂ uptake, we have seen a decline trend in absorption for eight years,” he says. “There is no good reason to believe it will bounce back.”

The oceans – nature’s largest absorber of CO₂ – have soaked up 90% of the warming from fossil fuels in recent decades, driving a rise in sea temperatures. Studies have also found signs that this is weakening the ocean carbon sink.

‘None of the models have factored this in’

The flow of carbon through the land and ocean remains one of the least understood parts of climate science, say researchers. While human emissions are increasingly simple to measure, the sheer number and complexity of processes in the natural world mean there are important gaps in our understanding.

Satellite technology has improved monitoring of forests, peatlands, permafrost and ocean cycles, but assessments and forecasts in international reports often have large error margins. That makes it difficult to predict how the world’s natural carbon sinks will behave in future – and means many models do not factor in a sudden breakdown of multiple ecosystems.

“Overall, models agreed that both the land sink and the ocean sink are going to decrease in the future as a result of climate change. But there’s a question of how quickly that will happen. The models tend to show this happening rather slowly over the next 100 years or so,” says Prof Andrew Watson, head of Exeter University’s marine and atmospheric science group.

“This might happen a lot quicker,” he says. “Climate scientists [are] worried about climate change not because of the things that are in the models but the knowledge that the models are missing certain things.”

Many of the latest Earth systems models used by scientists include some of the effects of global heating on nature, factoring in impacts such as the dieback of the Amazon or slowing ocean currents. But events that have become major sources of emissions in recent years have not been incorporated, say scientists.

“None of these models have factored in losses like extreme factors which have been observed, such as the wildfires in Canada last year that amounted to six months of US fossil emissions. Two years before, we wrote a paper that found that Siberia also lost the same amount of carbon,” says Ciais.

“Another process which is absent from the climate models is the basic fact that trees die from drought. This is observed and none of the models have drought-induced mortality in their representation of the land sink,” he says. “The fact that the models are lacking these factors probably makes them too optimistic.”

‘What happens if the natural sinks stop working?’

The consequences for climate targets are stark. Even a modest weakening of nature’s ability to absorb carbon would mean the world would have to make much deeper cuts to greenhouse gas emissions to achieve net zero. The weakening of land sinks – which has so far been regional – also has the effect of cancelling out nations’ progress on decarbonisation and progress towards climate goals, something that is proving a struggle for many countries.

In Australia, huge soil carbon losses from extreme heat and drought in the vast interior – known as rangelands – are likely to push its climate target out of reach if emissions continue to rise, a study this year found. In Europe, France, Germany, the Czech Republic and Sweden have all experienced significant declines in the amount of carbon absorbed by land, driven by climate-related bark beetle outbreaks, drought and increased tree mortality.

Finland, which has the most ambitious carbon neutrality target in the developed world, has seen its once huge land sink vanish in recent years – meaning that despite reducing its emissions across all industries by 43%, the country’s total emissions have stayed unchanged.

So far, these changes are regional. Some countries, such as China and the US, are not yet experiencing such declines.

“The issue of natural sinks has never really been thought about properly in political and government fields. It’s been assumed that natural sinks are always going to be with us. The truth is, we don’t really understand them and we don’t think they’re always going to be with us. What happens if the natural sinks, which they’ve previously relied on, stop working because the climate is changing?” says Watson.

In recent years, several estimates have been published on how the world could increase the amount of carbon that its forests and natural ecosystems absorb. But many researchers say the real challenge is protecting the carbon sinks and stores we already have by halting deforestation, cutting emissions and ensuring they are as healthy as possible.

“We shouldn’t rely on natural forests to do the job. We really, really have to tackle the big issue: fossil fuel emissions across all sectors,” says Prof Pierre Friedlingstein of Exeter University, who oversees the annual Global Carbon Budget calculations.

“We can’t just assume that we have forests and the forest will remove some CO₂, because it’s not going to work in the long term.”

The week Maria Bakalova was asked to consider playing Ivana Trump for the new film The Apprentice, she was in New York filming something else. With the meeting scheduled for her one day off, she spent the evening before trying to channel Donald Trump’s first wife. The film is set in the 70s and 80s, so she spent hours wading through photos of Ivana in that era. “A lot of makeup, a lot of hair,” she says. Bakalova laughs as she remembers spending the evening experimenting with a mushroom-like hairstyle and “heavy eyeliner with a lot of powder, like inches”, although she didn’t have an Ivana-esque wardrobe – “Am I gen Z or a millennial?” asks the 28-year-old. Either way, “We wear a lot of baggy clothes”, so she chose her most skintight outfit.

She met the director Ali Abbasi in the middle of the day, feeling a little clownish in her Ivana cosplay. They spoke for a couple of hours, “about people growing up in post-communist countries – because [Ivana] was from Czechoslovakia, and I was born and raised in Bulgaria – which shapes your inner world, your thoughts. We talked a lot about the similarities of our stories.”

Ivana had been a competitive skier, with a place on the national junior team that allowed her to compete outside communist Czechoslovakia in the late 60s. By the mid-90s, when Bakalova was born, Bulgaria was no longer a socialist republic but, for most people, travel outside the country was still rare. As a child, Bakalova, a competitive singer, got to travel to competitions all around Europe. It opened her eyes and instilled a sense of independence.

This is Bakalova’s highest profile role since her big break in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2020 mockumentary sequel about the Kazakhstani reporter Borat Sagdiyev. She played Borat’s daughter, Tutar, in a performance so cringingly brilliant it got her an Oscar nomination. Despite this early success, Bakalova says her agents warned her not to get her hopes up about the role of Ivana – higher profile US actors were also in the running. “What I think is important is that [Abbasi] gave a chance to an eastern European to compete,” she says. “To have the opportunity, rather than just playing a prostitute or a crazy Russian scientist or a mobster or somebody that is just in the background with a few lines.”

It was six months before she found out that she’d got the role, followed by a tortuous journey to get the film made and released. In a Vanity Fair piece, the film’s screenwriter, Gabriel Sherman, detailed the various obstacles – actors who didn’t want to “humanise” Trump, Hollywood studios and streamers who wouldn’t finance it, Trump’s Muslim travel ban that made it difficult for Abbasi, who is Iranian and based in Denmark, to work in the US (as well as the actors’ strikes and a global pandemic). The Apprentice’s largest investor, a film-making son-in-law of a billionaire and prominent Trump donor, reportedly threatened to sink the film once he’d seen it, because of a scene in which the Trump character appears to rape his wife. Ivana alleged Trump raped her in her divorce deposition, but later retracted. Trump’s lawyers sent the film-makers cease-and-desist letters and the big American distributors wouldn’t touch it. “Hollywood fashions itself as a community of truth tellers,” wrote Sherman, “but here they were running from a movie to prepare for a Trump presidency.”

“We’ve been facing a bit of difficulty to release it,” says Bakalova, with comic understatement.

In the film, Trump (played by a toupeed Sebastian Stan) is ambitious but slightly awkward and in the shadow of his father, then mentored and moulded by nefarious lawyer Roy Cohn (played, typically magnificently, by Succession’s Jeremy Strong). A cinephile, Bakalova was desperate to work with Abbasi – she was a huge fan of his work, including Holy Spider, the Iranian serial killer film. She wanted, she says, to be involved in his “dive into the underbelly of the American empire”. The more she researched Trump’s first wife – and the mother of three of his children – the more she found herself fascinated by how much Ivana achieved on her own. “She wanted to be Donald’s partner,” she says. Ivana is credited with promoting the couple’s 80s glitz, she was involved in running part of his businesses and managed New York’s Plaza hotel. “I think she was the reason he achieved so much early because she was very smart, very ambitious.”

In the film, the power balance between Ivana and Donald is in her favour at the start of their relationship; Ivana is horrified at the idea of a prenup, and the measly amount it would give her in the event of a separation, and negotiates a better deal. “I saw an interview with her after the divorce, saying she didn’t know anything about prenups, and why do you need to have them? But if you’re going to play this game that way, if that’s going to be the picture of our marriage, OK, I’m going to play the same way.”

How did she feel about the inclusion of the alleged rape in the film? Trump has always denied the allegations, since retracted by Ivana, who died in 2022. Bakalova says she trusted Sherman. “Do I think it’s important to have it out there?” she says. “Do I think it’s a crucial scene for both of the characters? It is, because we see somebody completely dismissing the person who built him in a lot of ways, who gave birth to his children. Not only physically, but verbally as well.”

She says she doesn’t think it matters if the film “humanises” Trump (reviews have said it lacks bite). “When you dive deeper into a human being, there’s always good and bad sides, and there are always decisions that you make based on circumstances, people you surround yourself with, that change your point of view … I think we should step away from the idea of demonising people or creating idols, because people are complex.” That said, she also describes Trump as “one of the most vicious people of our century”.

The Borat sequel was released less than two weeks before the 2020 US election, with the words “now vote” flashed up at the end. The Apprentice is also coming out around election time. Is it intended to have any influence? No, says Bakalova – it’s been too long in the making for any kind of intentional timing. “This is not a political film, this is not a hit piece,” she says. Although there are clear echoes, deafening in parts, of who the Trump character will later become. “Will it change opinions? I don’t know. But I feel like the biggest privilege that we have living in a democracy is to share our voices and to have an opinion, one way or another.”

Bakalova grew up in Burgas, a city on the Black Sea coast. Her mother was a nurse, and her father a chemist; she is an only child. They were considered middle-class, she says, but she remembers as a child that nobody in Bulgaria had much.

“Because of communism and because of inflation, because of a lot of things. I remember back in the 90s, chewing gum going from 100 bucks to 10 bucks to one penny.” They were comfortable, financially, she says, “but it’s not so easy that you can allow yourself to just rest and wait for something to happen. You know that you have to do something if you’re going to succeed.”

Her love of the arts started with music. Her father would play the guitar at home, and she grew up listening to rock music and wanting to emulate those musicians. “Unfortunately, again, growing up in Bulgaria and in a place that still has some kind of patriarchy mindset, playing guitar is a little bit too masculine.” Instead, she became a flautist and was also singing in the choirs that would take her around Europe to various competitions.

When she was 12, she damaged her voice and stopped singing for several months to rest it. “I started reading a lot of books and imagining that I’m in different places, I want to be like these characters. How can you somehow escape real life and imagine that you’re somebody else? That was the starting point of me falling in love with acting.” Later, Bakalova would study at Sofia’s National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts.

She loves theatre and arthouse cinema, but she laughs and says “I’m not going to hide that I was always dreaming about Hollywood and America and cinema.” She remembers drawing the Hollywood sign in an exercise book at school, and writing that she was going to be “a great movie star someday. But of course, my last name finishes with ‘o-v-a’, and I didn’t see that in a lot of credits at the end of films.” One teacher told her that if she wanted to expand beyond Bulgarian film, she should try to get involved in the types of films shown on the European festival circuit.

Bakalova discovered the Danish avant garde Dogme 95 movement and, during her final year of university, used some of her scholarship money to buy flights to Copenhagen for her and her parents. She had an ambitious plan to march into the offices of Lars von Trier’s production company, Zentropa. “I was, like, ‘I’m going there, and I’m going to say, ‘I am willing to work here for free, to study, to learn how you guys do all of these incredible movies.’” She laughs, remembering her and her mother in the rain, Googling the office address. (They were kind, but sent her away, saying she would have to be fluent in Danish, which she then vowed to study.)

Not long afterwards, Bakalova was shooting a Bulgarian French film, Women Do Cry, in which she played a young woman with HIV, when she heard through a friend about a project, which she would later find out was Borat, which required an eastern European actor. So secretive was the process that she feared she was being conned into human trafficking, but she was also tempted by the chance to audition in the UK – she thought she might get a chance, somehow, to meet the British director Andrea Arnold.

In Borat, her character Tutar dreams of becoming like “Princess Melania” and becomes the “gift” Borat is supposed to deliver to one of Trump’s men, first the vice-president Mike Pence, and then Rudy Giuliani, to strengthen relations between their countries. Bakalova was a revelation in the film, infusing her character with a life-changing feminist trajectory while also having to pull off some excruciating scenes with “real” people, including leading an anti-abortion campaigner at a clinic to believe she was pregnant with her father’s baby and describing, to a group of women at a Republican conference, having just masturbated for the first time in the loos.

“I don’t know how I did it,” she laughs. “I don’t know if I will I ever be able to do it again. It’s so strange, and I think that is why Sacha’s work is so brilliant. He challenges people, he does these movies that are like a social experiment of how far can you go?” It was “definitely difficult” she says. With only one shot, did it feel like a lot of pressure not to mess it up, or come out of character? “Sacha was so gracious, he was holding my hand every step of the way and guiding me, and I trusted him.”

There is a scene with Giuliani, which created a lot of attention. Tutar, by now a reporter for a rightwing news channel, is conducting a fawning interview with the former New York mayor and attorney to Trump in a hotel suite, before suggesting they go to the bedroom. Giuliani is filmed lying back on the bed with his hands down the front of his trousers (later, he claimed he was rearranging his clothes after removing a microphone). Was it the plan to get him in the bedroom? “You can only plan so much, but it’s about real people, real places, real situations. You can have goals that you want to achieve, but it depends on the moment. It was ideal to see how far things can get.” Was she nervous? “It was nerve-racking, because you don’t know how these things are going to turn. We worked with a great team of people. We had a great security team, we had a great stunt team. We had a lot of people that made sure we were all safe.”

It helps, she says, having female producers – Monica Levinson on Borat, and Amy Baer on The Apprentice. “It’s important to have a female perspective behind the scenes, [and] if you’re doing such challenging roles, both as Ivana or Tutar, having a female there looking after you, looking after the story.”

Bakalova has voiced a character in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 (Cosmo the Spacedog), was in the dark comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies and has just finished shooting a family drama, Learning to Breathe Underwater – but in Borat and The Apprentice, her two standout films are about Trump. It is strange, she admits, but adds: “I think Borat is not about Trump. I do find a few similarities between the movies because they explore the American empire, and that land that we all have heard is the place you can feel freedom and opportunity. But both movies show there is always a dark side to it.”

The Apprentice is released in cinemas on 18 October.

A five-person team of expert shooters will soon target feral cats in New South Wales national parks as the state steps up efforts to control the pest animals.

The intensive ground operation is being deployed in response to increased cat numbers, according to National Parks and Wildlife Service deputy secretary, Atticus Fleming.

“Intensive, well-targeted ground shooting operations will now be part of an enhanced strategy including trials of cat baits, deployment of innovative cat traps, establishing large feral-cat free areas and exploring genetic controls,” he said in a statement.

Jack Gough, advocacy director at the Invasive Species Council, welcomed the “modest investment” in improved feral cat management. He said he hoped it would involve long-term funding for the positions, and be part of a broader plan for controlling both feral and roaming pet cats.

“Every day, 5 million native mammals, birds, reptiles and frogs are killed by feral and roaming pet cats in Australia,” he said.

“Feral cats have sent at least 25 of our native species extinct since they were introduced by Europeans over 200 years ago,” Gough said. “Large numbers of our native species are at direct risk of going extinct because of the impacts of feral cats and because they are such effective hunters and killers.”

Populations of feral cats, deer, pigs and invasive weeds often increased in response to rainfall and seasonal conditions, Gough explained.

Feral cats “breed up very fast”, he said. “We’ve had a couple of really good seasons in terms of rainfall, and that means that the level of feed, the level of prey, has gone up.”

“It’s not unexpected that the numbers [of feral cats] have increased. And when the numbers increase, the pressure on our native species increases as well.”

In September, the federal government announced funding for 55 feral cat control projects, and said it would release an updated national threat abatement plan later this year.

Containing the problem would require significant ongoing effort and funding from both national and state governments, Gough said, as well as the full range of tools, including ground shooting, trapping, baiting and new artificial intelligence tools.

“On top of this, we really need Premier Minns to move on the issue of bringing in clear rules about cat containment,” he said. This would bring NSW into line with the majority of other states, enabling councils to stop “roaming pets killing our neighbourhood wildlife and sending our suburbs silent”.

Some animal rights groups have opposed the use of lethal control methods for non-native species.

The Animal Justice party said while it recognised the environmental impact of non-native species, including cats, it objected to the term “feral” and supported research and policy that focused on non-lethal methods of control.

It advocated “responsible animal guardianship”, which includes keeping companion animals safe in their homes to prevent accidental breeding and abandonment.

In the Australian Capital Territory, all cats born after July 2022 must be contained on a person’s premises, with several suburbs declared cat containment areas for nature conservation reasons – meaning no cat of any age can roam further afield.

They’re Australia’s own underwater punks in leopard print.

Spotted handfish are an endangered species of fish that prefer to “walk” instead of swim, thanks to their unusual pectoral and pelvic fins; have a fluffy dorsal fin on their head that looks almost like a mohawk; and live in the waters off south-east Tasmania.

Now CSIRO scientists have sequenced the first full genome of the critically endangered species, a step that could aid monitoring, captive breeding and conservation efforts.

Dr Tom Walsh, co-lead of CSIRO’s applied genomics initiative, said the genome was like a “blueprint” for the handfish, providing a better understanding of the species.

“What we don’t want is for all our endangered species to only exist as genomes,” he said. “The conservation has to happen on the ground. What the genome can do is provide more information to those people making those decisions.”

Fewer than 2,000 individual spotted handfish remain in the wild. Walsh said the genome could help scientists monitor its presence using sophisticated methods such as eDNA (environmental DNA) – testing water samples for DNA that matches a reference – that support other traditional approaches, such as surveys involving scuba divers.

The CSIRO initiative has produced genomes for a host of rare species, including night parrots, but the chance to produce a handfish blueprint arose opportunistically, Walsh said. When a spotted handfish died in Tasmania, it was preserved, frozen and shipped to CSIRO in Canberra where its raw data – DNA – was extracted.

CSIRO scientists have been watching the species since 1997, observing nine localised populations in the Derwent Estuary.

The principal investigator Carlie Devine, who specialises in spotted handfish conservation, said the genome’s “rich genetic information” would inform long-term management strategy.

A multidisciplinary approach – with genetics alongside ecology – was “essential for effective conservation of threatened species”, Devine said.

Dr Jemina Stuart-Smith, who researches handfish at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and was not involved in the genome sequencing work, said it could inform understanding of genetic diversity, as well as captive breeding and translocation.

“This information can also feed into identification of adaptive traits including disease resistance, and can therefore be extremely beneficial in guiding these breeding programs,” she said.

Stuart-Smith said many species of handfish were endangered due to their small size, low reproductive capacity, limited range and fragmented populations and habitats.

Conservation efforts remained largely focused on two species of handfish, she said: the spotted handfish and the red handfish.

Though these species are the most well-studied, Stuart-Smith said many questions about their breeding, biology and general ecology remained.

Walsh noted it was still early days but the reference genome data was now available to handfish researchers: “It really is the plan, the blueprint of the organism that allows all sorts of different work to be done.”

A man armed with guns and false press and VIP passes was apprehended by authorities at a campaign rally in California on Saturday being held by Donald Trump.

The suspect, identified as Vem Miller, was intercepted by police at a checkpoint about a half-mile from an entrance to the rally in Coachella Valley, California, soon before the rally began, police said Sunday.

“We probably stopped another assassination attempt,” Riverside county sheriff Chad Bianco said, adding that Miller was plotting to kill Trump.

Police said Miller was carrying a loaded shotgun, handgun and high-capacity magazine and is believed to be a member of a rightwing anti-government organization.

He holds a UCLA master’s degree, and in 2022 ran for Nevada state assembly. Bianco said Miller considers himself a so-called sovereign citizen, a group of people who do not believe they are subject to any government statutes unless they consent to them.

Bianco said Miller’s identity card was enough to raise suspicion with local rally security. “They were different enough to cause the deputies alarm,” he said, according to the Riverside Press-Enterprise.

Miller was booked for possessing a loaded firearm and a high capacity magazine – and was released after posting $5,000 bail, police records show.

“The incident did not impact the safety of former president Trump or attendees of the event,” the sheriff’s office said in a press release.

Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July, when a gunman’s bullet grazed his ear during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. In September, another man was charged with trying to assassinate Trump after Secret Service agents discovered him hiding with a rifle near Trump’s Palm Beach golf course. He has since pleaded not guilty.

The Secret Service put out a statement saying it was appraised of the arrest: “The incident did not impact protective operations. The Secret Service extends its gratitude to the deputies and local partners who assisted in safeguarding last night’s events.”

Sheriff Bianco told the outlet he had not expected a third attempt on Trump’s life, coming after a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July when Trump was grazed with an assassin’s bullet, and the arrest of man with a rifle hiding in the bushes near Trump’s Palm Beach golf course in September.

“I thought it’s not going to happen in Riverside county,” Bianco said. “We don’t have the same sicko issues and violent protests like they have in Los Angeles. We’re better than that. Go figure.”

Bianco said US Secret Service officials said his department went “above and beyond” in their efforts to protect Trump and others who attended the rally.

Bianco also said the FBI is questioning another man after bomb-detecting dogs “repeatedly” identified him as possibly dangerous. That man was not allowed in the rally, Bianco said.

Miller is scheduled to appear at the Indio Larson justice center on 2 January 2025, according to the Riverside county sheriff’s department inmate database.

It was precisely what Lee Carsley needed. After the mayhem of the Wembley defeat against Greece on Thursday night and all of the fallout, chiefly the uncertainty around his longer‑term role within the England setup, this was a return to the tranquil progress of his first camp in September.

It was a stroll against a limited Finland team, the whipping boys of this Nations League group, England not exactly wowing but doing more than enough to position the Greece defeat a little further back in the rearview mirror. It is now three wins out of four for Carsley, after those against Republic of Ireland in Dublin and Finland at Wembley.

The standout moment came when Trent Alexander-Arnold bent home a sumptuous free-kick from a position to the left of centre, wafting his right foot like a wand to make it 2-0. England had given up chances in the first half and a big one after the break, Finland wasting them, and there was always the sense that Carsley’s team had higher gears to find if needed. They were not.

For Jack Grealish, this was his third start under Carsley and he opened the scoring with a cool finish after a lovely flick from Angel Gomes. Declan Rice got the third from a cross by Ollie Watkins, on as a substitute, and Finland’s late consolation, Arttu Hoskonen running free to head home from a corner, was little more than a minor irritation for England.

The Carsley Question was a major theme – in terms of where he will go at the end of his interim tenure in November. Answer: back to his old job with the under-21s. It is absolutely the most likely outcome. The other big subject had concerned the style of his team. The botched all‑out attack against Greece had given the red tops the dream headline – “KamiCarsley” – and it was always going to be more conventional here, not only because Harry Kane was back from injury to play as the No 9.

England had dominated against Finland at Wembley in Carsley’s second game, creating so many chances, and it was a night when control was the theme. The idea was for more of the same; hence the recall for Gomes alongside Rice in midfield.

It was Gomes who picked the lock for the breakthrough goal, who found a way through Finland’s compact 5-4-1 system. It had all been a little too mannered at the outset, England measured in terms of tempo. They had all of the ball; it was patience over passion.

Grealish injected the urgency, surging off the left to find Alexander-Arnold and dart for the area. What a lovely assist it was from Gomes. He knew where Grealish was and when he accepted the ball from Alexander-Arnold in between the lines, he turned it neatly through for Grealish, who had only Lukas Hradecky to beat.

The Finland goalkeeper had been a titan at Wembley. Grealish simply opened up his body for the sidefoot finish and the sucking-thumb celebration for his recently born baby girl. He looked determined to embrace a more familiar role on the left wing, having previously been played by Carsley in more central areas.

There were imperfections from England in the first half, including when they attempted to build from the back; a few loose passes. Gomes was guilty of one in the early running at 0-0, giving the ball away and watching Finland work it to Benjamin Källman, John Stones jumping into an important block when he shot. On the rebound, Topi Keskinen dragged wide.

Twice before the interval, Stones went stride-for-stride with first Keskinen and then Källman and on both occasions the Finland player was able to unload. Dean Henderson, making his full England debut, saved easily. There was also a worry about Finland getting in on the blindside of Alexander-Arnold, who Carsley played at left-back. When Nikolai Alho did so in the 38th minute, he headed square for Fredrik Jensen, who got a break past Alexander‑Arnold before lashing off-target.

Rice had the sniff of a chance for 2-0 on 34 minutes when he took a decent first touch in the area from a floated Jude Bellingham pass and saw Matti Peltola miss his kick. Just as quickly as the close-range shooting opportunity presented itself, Robert Ivanov got back to shut the door.

Marc Guéhi slid over from left centre-half to make a back three when Alexander-Arnold sortied into midfield. But a word for Guéhi’s defending: commanding. He won a clutch of duels in the first half, and always looked like doing so.

It was a worry when Stones was one-on-one with his man. When Finland moved the ball left for Keskinen in the 57th minute, Stones could not prevent the low cross. It ran all the way through for Jensen, who lifted high from point-blank range. It was an almighty let-off.

It felt like a slog at times for England in creative terms. Bellingham was often frustrated in his attempts to use his twinkle toes to jink through. While Cole Palmer got little, Bellingham is not the type of guy to hide. Bellingham continued to demand the ball, to try his moves and when he hoodwinked the Finland substitute Leo Walta into stretching in for a tackle, he felt the contact and went down for the free‑kick. Grealish told Alexander‑Arnold he would give him £500 if he scored. The goal felt priceless to Carsley.