The highly anticipated debate between vice-presidential candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz on Tuesday night delivered mixed reactions across the board on who came out on top and whether it will affect the 2024 race.

During the 90-minute debate hosted by CBS, the Ohio senator and Minnesota governor discussed and disagreed on ways in which to tackle the issues of healthcare, childcare, gun control, immigration, the economy, the climate crisis, reproductive rights, housing and the escalating conflict in the Middle East.

CBS News conducted a poll of registered voters after the debate and found that 42% of debate watchers surveyed said that Vance won the debate, while 41% thought Walz emerged as the winner, and about 17% called the debate a tie.

A majority of viewers surveyed also said that both candidates sounded “reasonable” on Tuesday night, rather than “extreme”.

Walz was seen as better at talking about healthcare and abortion, while Vance was seen as stronger on immigration, according to CBS. Voters also said that Vance spent more time attacking Kamala Harris than explaining his own stances and viewpoints, whereas Walz spent more time explaining his own views.

Another poll, conducted by CNN, found 51% of the viewers surveyed said that Vance did a better job, in contrast with 49% of viewers who said that Walz did a better job. That poll found Walz more in touch with the needs of voters and the vision for the country, though Vance did boost his standing among the debate audience and outperformed expectations.

A Politico poll from Tuesday night noted that Walz had a commanding advantage with independents, 58% of whom sided with the Minnesota governor. Walz received the highest rating from young people, particularly those aged 25 and 34, as well as those with college degrees and Black and Latino voters, per the poll. Vance performed best with people over the age of 55, white voters and those without college degrees.

After the debate, both presidential campaigns put out statements, arguing that their vice-presidential candidate won.

The Harris campaign stated that Walz “showed exactly why Vice President Harris picked him”, adding that he is a “leader who cares about the issues that matter most to the American people”.

“Americans got to see a real contrast: a straight talker focused on sharing real solutions, and a slick politician who spent the whole night defending Donald Trump’s division and failures,” the statement continued.

In a contrasting statement, the Trump campaign described Vance’s performance as “dominant” and called the debate a “victory”.

“Senator Vance unequivocally won tonight’s debate in dominating fashion. It was the best debate performance from any Vice-Presidential candidate in history,” the Trump campaign said. “Senator Vance spoke the truth, eloquently prosecuted the case against Kamala Harris’ failed record, and effectively held Governor Tim Walz accountable for his lies on behalf of the Harris-Biden Administration.”

Throughout Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, politicians, political strategists and others shared their reactions to the highly anticipated debate.

On NewsNation, Mark Kelly, a Democratic senator representing Arizona, said that Walz “did great” adding that he “spoke to the American people in a way that they will understand”.

Kelly highlighted one of the last moments from the debate, where Vance could not respond to the question of whether Trump won the 2020 election.

“It makes me rather concerned about whether we could find ourselves in a situation again where we have a challenge in certifying the election and you know, what could happen in the days that follow,” Kelly said.

During the debate, Walz asked Vance whether Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance dodged and sidestepped the question and responded: “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” which Walz called a “damning non-answer”.

On social media, Stuart Stevens, an American author and a former Republican strategist who advises the Lincoln Project, a political action committee run by moderate conservatives and former Republican party members who oppose Trump and Maga, also pointed out Vance’s inability to say whether Trump won the 2020 election.

“How humiliating must it be for J.D. Vance that he can’t admit America has a legal election or his boss will fire him,” Stevens wrote on X.

Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator from Minnesota, told CNN after the debate that Walz was “someone that you can trust”, adding that Walz was not “messing around playing games up there in the debate stage and pretending I’m all with you, with my heart and then supports policies that have nothing to do with what you just said”.

“He is what he is, and I think that’s what’s going to come across to the American people. That’s what came across today,” she added.

Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary for the Biden administration and former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, wrote on X that Walz “displayed his characteristic decency and passion for making everyday life better for Americans” during the debate.

“Even when facing polished falsehoods, he reminded us why the future will be so much better under Kamala Harris’ leadership than a return to the chaos of the Trump era,” Buttigieg added.

The Maryland governor, Wes Moore, praised Walz and criticized Vance, saying that Vance “illustrated a revisionist history that further jeopardizes our freedoms and democracy as we know it”.

Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, praised Walz for “standing up for American workers” during the debate.

“Michigan remembers what happened under Donald Trump. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost across all industries, including manufacturing. The Biden-Harris administration was critical to bringing jobs back to Michigan,” Whitmer said.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers union, thanked Walz on social media, for “calling out JD Vance’s lies about immigrants in Springfield”.

“Those lies have led to bomb threats in schools and have upended the community” she said. “It’s shameful that Vance spread those lies.”

Weingarten also added in a statement that she believed that Walz won the debate, “by doing what good teachers do: On every question he was asked, he offered practical solutions for a better future”.

But for Jen Psaki, the former press secretary for Joe Biden who is now a host on MSNBC, Walz “was spending a lot of time in the first half or two-thirds” of the debate “proving he read the briefing materials”, but Psaki felt like that the debate was “missing the magic and the organic spontaneity of Tim Walz”.

Asha Rangappa, a legal analyst and former FBI special agent, wrote on X that she believed that Walz “missed a lot of opportunities to go on the attack and point out Vance’s lies and hypocrisy”.

On Fox News, the Florida congressman Byron Donalds praised Vance, and said that he “kept the pressure on all night, keeping it to policy, Donald Trump’s vision, Donald Trump’s policies, why they work”.

Echoing Donalds, Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser, described Vance as having an “absolutely dominant performance” on Tuesday night, adding that “you can see why President Trump picked him”.

The former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy also praised Vance on X, saying that he was “very proud of JD for a stellar performance tonight”. Ramaswamy added: “And my condolences to Tim Walz – it was unkind for them to put him in this position.”

When it comes to the approaches by both candidates, Wendy J Schiller, a professor of political science at Brown University, told Newsweek that Vance wanted “to seem more presidential and less ‘mean’ and he mostly accomplished that goal” and that Walz “wanted to emphasize his appeal to moderates, especially in midwest swing states”.

Jennifer N Victor, associate professor of political science at George Mason University, also told Newsweek that in her view: “Vance won on style and Walz won on substance.”

Tim Walz and JD Vance took to the stage on Tuesday night for a vice-presidential debate that served up less drama than September’s presidential debate, but offered revealing differences on abortion, school shootings, and immigration.

Three weeks ago Kamala Harris and Donald Trump had endured a contentious hour and a half, with an emotional Trump being goaded into ranting about the number of people who attend his rallies and declaring the vice-president to be a “Marxist”, before reportedly threatening to sue one of the debate moderators. Harris enjoyed a brief polling uptick from that performance.

But on Tuesday, Walz and Vance largely avoided attacks on each other, and instead concentrated their fire on each other’s running mates. It was a more policy-driven discussion than that of their running mates’, but one with a few gaffes that might overshadow some of the substance in coming days.

In a key exchange over abortion, Walz, the governor of Minnesota, followed Harris’s lead in using personal stories.

Trump “brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturned Roe v Wade”, Walz said. He noted the case of Amanda Zurawski, who was denied an abortion in Texas despite serious health complications during pregnancy – Zurawski is now part of a group of women suing the state of Texas – and a girl in Kentucky who as a child was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant.

“If you don’t know [women like this], you soon will. Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said, which Vance contested.

Walz also criticized the Trump-Vance position that states should decide whether women have access to abortion.

“That’s not how this works. This is basic human rights. We have seen maternal mortality skyrocket in Texas, outpacing many other countries in the world,” he said.

When Harris was considering Walz as her vice-presidential candidate, he reportedly told her that he was a bad debater, and at the outset Vance, wearing a sharp blue suit, a pink tie, plenty of make-up and hair gel, looked the more polished performer. Walz, a former high school teacher and football coach, cut a more bustling figure in a loose black suit.

Vance, the Ohio senator who has been a regular on rightwing news channels for years, was polished from the off, comfortably dodging a question about whether he believes the climate crisis is a “hoax” to lament how much money has been spent on solar panels.

Walz rose to the vice-presidential nomination, in part, through his confident appearances on cable news – it was from there that his famous “weird” characterization of Vance and Trump was born – but appeared initially nervous, and did not reprise his searing critique of his opponents.

Both men also frequently referenced their upbringing in the midwest.

“I will be the first to tell you I have poured my heart into my community, trying to do the best I can, but I’ve not been perfect and I’m a knucklehead at times,” Walz said, while attempting to navigate a question about his time in China. “But [Minnesotans] elected me to Congress for 12 years.”

Walz also criticized Trump and Vance for demonizing immigrants in Springfield, Ohio; the two have falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets, which has led to bomb threats and children in the city having to be escorted to school by police.

Asked about immigration, one of the key issues in November, Walz discussed Harris’s history in California, demonstrating that the real goal here was for both him and Vance to talk up their bosses’ records rather than sell their own.

“Kamala Harris was the attorney general of the largest border state in California. She’s the only person in this race who prosecuted transnational gangs for human trafficking and drug interventions,” Walz said.

Vance blamed Harris for the number of people who have crossed the border under the Biden administration, which prompted Walz to raise the issue of a bipartisan border bill, endorsed by the National Border Patrol Council, which was torpedoed by Trump earlier this year.

“As soon as that was getting ready to pass and actually tackle this, Trump said ‘no’, told them to vote against it, because it gives them a campaign issue,” Walz said.

The immigration conversation led to an uncomfortable moment for Vance. Trump has said that if he is elected he will carry out “the largest deportation in the history of our country”, but in a country where some families’ children may be US citizens born to non-citizen parents, he has failed to explain how that would work.

Asked whether a Trump administration would separate immigrant parents from their US-citizen children, Vance twice refused to answer.

Walz’s missteps, meanwhile, were largely style not substance but could prove fodder for the right in coming days. He was asked about his false claim that he was in Hong Kong “when Tiananmen happened”, referring to the anti-government protests that culminated in the massacre of hundreds of people in June 1989. It emerged this week that Walz had traveled to China in August, two months later.

“Look, I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, a town of 400, a town that you rode your bike with your buddies until the street lights come on, and I’m proud of that service,” Walz’s answer began, as he attempted to avoid the question entirely.

Pressed further, Walz said: “I got there that summer and misspoke on this. So I will just … that’s what I’ve said. So I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests. And from that I learned a lot of what needed to be in governance.”

As the debate drew towards a close, both men were asked about the issue of school shootings, and whether AR-15 style guns, which have been used in several mass shootings, should be banned.

Vance called school shootings “terrible stuff” before he sought to blame Harris for gun violence. He claimed there has been a “a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartels” – although in the majority of school shootings the weapons used have been legally purchased. Democrats have pushed for stricter gun controls to curb mass shootings, but Vance took a different approach.

“What do we do to protect our kids? And I think the answer is, and I say this not loving the answer, because I don’t want my kids to go to school in a school that feels unsafe or there are visible signs of security, but I unfortunately think that we have to increase security in our schools. We have to make the doors lock better. We have to make the door stronger. We’ve got to make the windows stronger,” Vance said.

Walz was more forthright. He said he had met with the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting, and said “our first responsibility is to our kids,” detailing his red flag policies in Minnesota.

“I ask all of you out there: your schools hardened to look like a fort – is that, is that what we have to go through?” he said.

“I think what we end up doing is we start looking for a scapegoat. Sometimes it’s just the guns.”

But his strong answer on gun reform was eclipsed on social media when he accidentally said he “befriended school shooters” rather than victims.

Vice-presidents, and their debates, have typically been viewed as unimportant, and it remains to be seen how much impact this debate will have. But with the election expected to be extremely close, if either Vance or Walz managed to convince a few voters, then the hour and a half of scrutiny, and even the gaffes, will have been worth it.

Donald Trump’s senior aides saw JD Vance as having a slick debate performance over Tim Walz, according to people close to Trump, that made his campaign appear palatable despite the former president’s increasingly caustic threats such as vowing to prosecute his perceived enemies.

The campaign aides also believed that Vance reset the narrative over his image and likely came across in a more favorable light to undecided voters after a brutal few months of being hammered for making disparaging remarks about women as “childless cat ladies”.

Vance’s favorability issue was perhaps the principal priority for Trump’s senior aides because they saw it as potentially fixable and if so, beneficial to the Trump campaign with fewer than five weeks until election day in what has become a vanishingly close race against Kamala Harris.

Afterwards, Trump predictably claimed Vance won the debate, but a CBS News poll confirmed how vice-presidential​ debates matter increasingly less in close elections compared to ground game efforts to drive turnout.

In the post-debate poll, 42% of respondents said Vance won the debate, 41% gave the win to Walz, while 17% said it was tied – suggesting the main takeaway remains that it is unlikely to play any material role in which campaign wins each of the seven battleground states in November.

Broadly, Trump’s aides were relieved that Vance came across as more polished than Walz in his answers and that Vance, for the most part, was able to deliver attack lines without interruption or immediate factchecking from Walz of the CBS News moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan.

They were also relieved that Vance got away with whitewashing Trump’s record on trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election that culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack and resulted in criminal prosecution.

Vance falsely claimed Trump did not want to destroy Obamacare but wanted a bipartisan solution to affordable health care, when in actuality Trump was thwarted in the Senate by Senator John McCain. Regarding the Capitol attack, Trump never called the National Guard and resisted calling off the rioters until it was already over.

Trump’s vice-presidential nominee got called out on uncomfortable territory – namely abortion and gun violence, to the second of which Vance at one point said his policy solution to prevent mass school shootings was to have stronger doors and windows.

But Trump’s aides suggested after the debate that Walz had enough of his own flubs that they could use to distract from Vance’s shaky answers.

In particular, the Trump aides noted that Walz misspoke on gun violence when he said he had become friends with some of the school shooters – he clearly meant to say shooting victims – and then struggled to explain why he falsely claimed he had visited Hong Kong at the time of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square.

“Tonight, Senator Vance proved why President Trump chose him as his running mate. Together, they make the strongest and most dynamic presidential ticket ever, and they are going to win on November 5th,” Trump’s co-campaign chiefs Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement.

Ukraine has said that its forces have withdrawn from the eastern city of Vuhledar, a defensive bastion that had resisted repeated Russian attacks since Vladimir Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion.

The military command in Kyiv said its troops left late on Tuesday. They had retreated in order to preserve personnel and combat equipment, it said, adding that Russian combat units had attacked from three directions and were close to “encircling” the city.

The fall of Vuhledar is a boost for the Kremlin and comes as Russian troops advance across the eastern Donetsk oblast. In February they captured the city of Avdiivka, outside the regional capital of Donetsk, occupied in 2014.

Since then the Russian advance has swallowed up towns and villages and come to within six miles of the city of Pokrovsk, a logistics hub 80km (50 miles) north of Vuhledar. Defence experts think Ukraine may next have to retreat from other under-pressure urban settlements, including Toretsk and Selydove.

Russian Telegram channels published video of triumphant troops waving the Russian tricolour flag over shattered buildings in Vuhledar. In one clip, four soldiers stood inside a gutted highrise flat and placed a flag outside. “Everything will be Russia. Victory will be ours,” an officer declared.

The communist hammer and sickle was also raised. Vuhledar was originally built around a mine in the mid-1960s when it was within the Soviet Union. Before the war it had a population of about 14,000. It is now a sprawling ruin, with apartment buildings smashed apart and scarred.

Ukraine’s 72nd mechanised brigade had defended Vuhledar for more than two years. On Tuesday it said the Russians had suffered “numerous losses as a result of prolonged fighting” as it tried to storm the city, which sits on an elevated plain.

“In an effort to take control of the city at any cost, the enemy managed to direct reserves to carry out flanking attacks, which exhausted the defence of our units,” the brigade explained.

Russia claimed it had wiped out large numbers of fleeing Ukrainian soldiers. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), however, said the scale of casualties was unknown and added that more would have been killed or captured if Russia had managed to encircle them.

According to the ISW, the loss of Vuhledar will not fundamentally alter offensive operations because it is “not a particularly crucial logistics node”. Russian forces already controlled surrounding access roads, the institute said. They would now have to “manoeuvre” across open terrain in order to link up with units farther north.

The overall picture for Kyiv is grim. Russian forces are advancing in eastern Ukraine at their quickest rate for two years. A Ukrainian incursion in August into Russia’s Kursk region was launched to relieve pressure on its exhausted frontline troops. It prompted Moscow to divert some of its units – but these came from other parts of the battlefield, in the south and north-east.

Putin has said Russia’s chief political goal was to seize the whole of the Donbas region in south-eastern Ukraine. In September 2022, he claimed to have “annexed” four Ukrainian regions, including Donetsk and neighbouring Luhansk. Moscow controls just under a fifth of Ukraine as a whole, including about 80% of the Donbas.

The war has largely been a story of grinding artillery and drone strikes along a heavily fortified front stretching for nearly 1,000km (620 miles) and involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Russia has increasingly been employing pincer tactics to trap and then constrict Ukrainian strongholds.

Speaking in September, the Ukrainian president, Voldymyr Zelenskyy, acknowledged the situation in the east was difficult. He said the Russians were using airdropped guided bombs to “destroy everything”. They “finished off” with artillery and then sent in infantry to capture Ukrainian positions, he said.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly argued that Kyiv needs long-range weapons to counter the Kremlin’s superior air power. So far, however, he has been unable to persuade the US president, Joe Biden, to allow the use of US-provided weapons such as Atacms (army tactical missile systems) to destroy aerodromes and other military targets deep within Russia.

During a trip to Washington and New York last week – which included a meeting with Biden, as well as with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump – Zelenskyy again called for restrictions to be lifted. The UK is supportive. But so far it has not managed to overcome White House fears of possible nuclear escalation with Russia.

In the US, Zelenskyy also outlined his vision for a “just peace”. His plan for ending the war featured economic assistance from the west and enhanced military support. Another element appears to involve a possible trade of territory controlled by Ukraine inside Russia’s Kursk province for Ukrainian land occupied by Russia.

After gaining Vuhledar, Russian bloggers said Russia could now try to push towards Velyka Novosilka, just over 30 km (20 miles) to the west in the neighbouring Zaporizhzhia province. Vuhledar sits close to a railway line going to Crimea, which Moscow seized in 2014. Russian forces currently control 98.5% of the Luhansk region and 60% of the Donetsk region.

Half of all Haitians are struggling every day to find food as rampant gang violence and lawlessness are causing “the worst hunger emergency in the western hemisphere”, a report has found.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) and its partner organisations estimate that 5.4 million Haitians are now regularly finding it hard to get enough to eat, a record for the Caribbean nation and the largest proportion of acutely food insecure people anywhere in the world, WFP said. The figure suggests another 600,000 people have fallen into “crisis” level hunger since the previous peaks recorded earlier this year and in 2023.

A coalition of 12 leading aid agencies has called for immediate action to alleviate the escalating hunger crisis as gang control of major roads blocks food supplies and causes huge price rises.

“Without immediate action the hunger crisis in Haiti will continue to deepen, with devastating consequences for millions of vulnerable people,” civil society groups in Port-au-Prince, including Action Against Hunger, Save the Children and Mercy Corps warned in an open letter.

Ten years ago only 2% of Haiti’s population was food insecure but the country was plunged into chaos when its president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in 2021 and gangs have since seized control of more than 80% of the capital.

An explosion of gang violence earlier this year – which forced Haiti’s interim leader Ariel Henry to step down – brought shipping and airport operations to a halt, blocking food getting into the import-dependent country.

The added cost of gang tolls on major roads combined with inflation and ever deepening poverty means food now accounts for up to 70% of total household expenditure, the 12 NGOs said.

Supplies from southern Haiti, a key region for food distribution, have been blocked for months, said Angeline Annesteus, president of Cadre de Liaison Inter-Organisations (Clio), an association of 80 Haitian and foreign NGOs.

“While markets may still have food, violence and inflation have driven prices out of reach for millions,” Annesteus said. “What we’re witnessing in Haiti isn’t a food shortage – it’s a full-blown hunger crisis.”

Two million Haitians are now at “emergency” hunger levels, WFP said, which is one step away from famine.

Aid groups say heads of families are regularly having to choose whether to feed themselves or their children and that they are particularly concerned about the growing number of displaced people who are at the highest risk of malnutrition and the diseases coursing through refugee camps. About 6,000 Haitians are at risk of death from starvation, the report found.

The number of people displaced has nearly doubled to more than 700,000 in the past six months, with some seeking shelter in schools and public buildings. Women and girls are being forced to offer sex for food.

Aid groups are desperately trying to support millions in need but humanitarian food agencies and NGOs in Haiti are $230m (£173m) short of funding.

“We must not turn our backs on the worst hunger emergency in the western hemisphere. WFP is urgently calling for broad-based support to massively increase life-saving assistance to families struggling every day with extreme food shortages, spiralling malnutrition and deadly diseases,” said WFP’s executive director Cindy McCain.

Kenya deployed 400 police officers to Haiti in June as part of a UN-backed security mission intended to tackle the gangs but that mission has stalled as countries have not provided the estimated $600m (£450m) required.

The UN security council voted unanimously on Monday to extend the mission for another year but a plan from the US and Ecuador to make it an official UN peacekeeping force, allowing them to tap the organisation’s international funding, was shelved because of opposition from China and Russia.

In the first half of 2024, 3,661 people have been killed in the violence, the UN office of the high commissioner for human rights said last week.

Amazon confirmed on Tuesday the removal of a memoir from its site that purports to tell the story of an abusive relationship between the late actor and model Kim Porter and her longtime partner, the hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs.

Porter and Combs’s children denounced the book – titled Kim’s Lost Words: A journey for justice, from the other side … – as a complete fabrication after it became a bestseller on Amazon in September.

Christian, 26, and Jessie and D’Lila, 17-year-old twins, as well as Quincy Brown, Porter’s son with Al B Sure!, whom Combs helped raise, posted a statement on Instagram saying: “We have seen so many hurtful and false rumors circulating about our parents, Kim Porter and Sean Combs’ relationship. As well as about our mom’s tragic passing.”

They said that claims their mother wrote the book are “simply untrue”.

“We were made aware of a dispute regarding this title and have notified the publisher,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “The book is not currently available for sale in our store.”

The independent publisher is Todd Christopher Guzze, who goes by the name Chris Todd and defines his occupation as an “investigative producer, author and journalist”.

Todd told the Associated Press in a phone interview in September that sources “very close to Kim and Sean Combs” provided him with a “flash drive, documents and tapes” from Porter that he eventually pieced together to create the memoir. Todd used the pseudonym Jamal T Millwood when publishing the title.

Todd also told Rolling Stone: “If somebody put my feet to the fire and they said, ‘Life or death, is that book real?’ I have to say I don’t know. But it’s real enough to me.”

Combs was arrested last month and is facing multiple charges of sexual misconduct. On Tuesday, an attorney in Texas announced that he was representing a further 120 accusers.

Porter died in 2018 as a result of lobar pneumonia.

At least 166 people have died from Hurricane Helene, many are still missing and more than 1 million people remained without power as rescue and recovery efforts continued from the devastating storm.

Hundreds of people were missing in Buncombe county, home to Asheville, earlier this week, and 85 people were missing in Tennessee, CNN reported.

Joe Biden will travel to both North and South Carolina on Wednesday to survey the storm damage. The vice-president, Kamala Harris, will travel to Georgia to do the same. Donald Trump traveled to Georgia earlier in the week.

Nearly 1.3 million people were without power in several south-eastern states as of 7.30am ET, according to the site poweroutage.us, which tracks outages. That total includes more than 373,000 people in Georgia, nearly 494,000 in South Carolina, and more than 347,000 in North Carolina. More than 40,000 people were still without power in Florida and Virginia, as well as an additional 10,000 people in West Virginia.

Several areas affected by the storm are also struggling to find drinking water. In Asheville, North Carolina, around 100,000 people were without running water, according to the Washington Post. Residents are boiling water and washing themselves and dishes in creeks, the Post reported. Fema delivered a cargo plane of food, water and emergency supplies on Tuesday, CNN reported.

Residents in Augusta, Georgia, also have not had running water for three days and several are under a boil water advisory.

Biden and some lawmakers from affected states, including Rick Scott, a Republican from Florida, suggested earlier this week he would call on Congress, which is on recess, to pass additional disaster relief funding. But that does not seem likely.

A stopgap funding measure Congress passed earlier this month allows Fema to more quickly use $20bn in disaster relief funds. About $6bn of those funds, however, were expected to be used to address relief for previous disasters, including Vermont flooding and Hawaii wildfires, according to Roll Call.

“Congress has previously provided the funds it needs to respond, so we will make sure that those resources are appropriately allocated,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said on Tuesday.

At least 166 people have died from Hurricane Helene, many are still missing and more than 1 million people remained without power as rescue and recovery efforts continued from the devastating storm.

Hundreds of people were missing in Buncombe county, home to Asheville, earlier this week, and 85 people were missing in Tennessee, CNN reported.

Joe Biden will travel to both North and South Carolina on Wednesday to survey the storm damage. The vice-president, Kamala Harris, will travel to Georgia to do the same. Donald Trump traveled to Georgia earlier in the week.

Nearly 1.3 million people were without power in several south-eastern states as of 7.30am ET, according to the site poweroutage.us, which tracks outages. That total includes more than 373,000 people in Georgia, nearly 494,000 in South Carolina, and more than 347,000 in North Carolina. More than 40,000 people were still without power in Florida and Virginia, as well as an additional 10,000 people in West Virginia.

Several areas affected by the storm are also struggling to find drinking water. In Asheville, North Carolina, around 100,000 people were without running water, according to the Washington Post. Residents are boiling water and washing themselves and dishes in creeks, the Post reported. Fema delivered a cargo plane of food, water and emergency supplies on Tuesday, CNN reported.

Residents in Augusta, Georgia, also have not had running water for three days and several are under a boil water advisory.

Biden and some lawmakers from affected states, including Rick Scott, a Republican from Florida, suggested earlier this week he would call on Congress, which is on recess, to pass additional disaster relief funding. But that does not seem likely.

A stopgap funding measure Congress passed earlier this month allows Fema to more quickly use $20bn in disaster relief funds. About $6bn of those funds, however, were expected to be used to address relief for previous disasters, including Vermont flooding and Hawaii wildfires, according to Roll Call.

“Congress has previously provided the funds it needs to respond, so we will make sure that those resources are appropriately allocated,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said on Tuesday.

A man and woman have been fired from their jobs at the Vatican bank because they flouted a ban on marriage between employees.

The young couple, nicknamed “Romeo and Juliet” by the Italian media, got married in August, after the bank imposed a rule banning marriage between employees aimed at preventing nepotism.

The newlyweds were given 30 days for one to resign so the other could keep their job.

Neither was willing to do this, and so they were both sacked after the deadline expired on Tuesday.

The Vatican bank said in a statement on Wednesday that it had reached the “difficult decision” to end their employment contracts because “the formation of a married couple among employees is, in fact, blatantly contradictory to the current regulations within the institute”.

The bank said that the primary objective of the marriage ban was to avoid the reputational risk of accusations of nepotism, and “avoid the possible emergence of situations of conflicts of interest in the institute’s operations, in order to protect its integrity and service to its clients”.

The bank added: “This decision, taken with deep regret, was dictated by the need to preserve transparency and impartiality in the institute’s activities, and in no way intended to question the right of two people to be united in marriage.”

The Vatican bank, which has spent much of the past decade cleaning up its books and reputation after an overhaul ignited by several scandals, announced the rule in April.

The policy had been in the pipeline for some time but was reportedly applied only after one spouse of the last remaining married couple among the bank’s staff retired.

The rule, which also bars staff from marrying someone employed by another Vatican institution, was made public only after disgruntled employees shared details with the Italian press.

The Vatican bank has more than €5bn-worth of assets but employs only 100 people in one location.

The newlyweds appealed last month to Pope Francis, who approved the rule, decrying the “unjust” situation in a long letter, according to Il Messaggero. The newspaper reported that the couple could take the case to the Vatican’s court.

ADLV, the association of Vatican lay workers, had intervened on the couple’s behalf, arguing that “the birth of a new family should not be endangered by bureaucratic regulations”.

It is not the first workers’ dispute to embroil the Holy See. In May, dozens of employees at Vatican Museums launched an unprecedented legal dispute over job conditions and workplace safety. They sent a petition to the Vatican’s governorate alleging that the city state’s labour rules “undermine each worker’s dignity and health”, including overtime hours paid at lower rates and insufficient health and safety provisions.

A US bomb from the second world war that had been buried at a Japanese airport has exploded, causing a large crater in a taxiway and the cancellation of more than 80 flights but no injuries, Japanese officials said.

Land and transport ministry officials said there were no aircraft nearby when the bomb exploded at Miyazaki airport in south-western Japan on Wednesday.

Officials said an investigation by the self-defence forces and police confirmed that the explosion was caused by a 500-pound US bomb and there was no further danger. They were determining what caused its sudden detonation.

A video recorded by a nearby aviation school showed the blast spewing pieces of asphalt into the air like a fountain. Videos broadcast on Japanese television showed a crater in the taxiway reportedly about 7 metres in diameter and 1 metre deep.

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, said more than 80 flights had been cancelled at the airport, which hopes to resume operations on Thursday morning.

Miyazaki airport was built in 1943 as a former imperial Japanese navy flight training field from which some kamikaze pilots took off on suicide attack missions.

A number of unexploded bombs dropped by the US military during the second world war had been unearthed in the area, defence ministry officials said.

Hundreds of tons of unexploded bombs from the war remain buried around Japan and are sometimes dug up at construction sites.

One of two doctors charged in the investigation of the death of Matthew Perry is expected to plead guilty Wednesday in a federal court in Los Angeles to conspiring to distribute the surgical anesthetic ketamine.

Dr Mark Chavez, 54, of San Diego, signed a plea agreement with prosecutors in August and would be the third person to plead guilty in the aftermath of the Friends star’s fatal overdose last year.

Prosecutors offered lesser charges to Chavez and two others in exchange for their cooperation as they go after two targets they deem more responsible for the overdose death: another doctor and an alleged dealer that they say was known as “ketamine queen” of Los Angeles.

Chavez is free on bond after turning over his passport and surrendering his medical license, among other conditions.

His lawyer, Matthew Binninger, said after Chavez’s first court appearance on 30 August that he is “incredibly remorseful” and is “trying to do everything in his power to right the wrong that happened here”.

Also working with federal prosecutors are Perry’s assistant, who admitted to helping him obtain and inject ketamine, and a Perry acquaintance, who admitted to acting as a drug messenger and middleman.

The three are helping prosecutors in their prosecution of Dr Salvador Plasencia, charged with illegally selling ketamine to Perry in the month before his death, and Jasveen Sangha, a woman who authorities say sold the actor the lethal dose of ketamine. Both have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.

Chavez admitted in his plea agreement that he obtained ketamine from his former clinic and from a wholesale distributor where he submitted a fraudulent prescription.

After a guilty plea, he could get up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced.

Perry was found dead by his assistant on 28 October. The medical examiner ruled ketamine was the primary cause of death. The actor had been using the drug through his regular doctor in a legal but off-label treatment for depression that has become increasingly common.

Perry began seeking more ketamine than his doctor would give him, authorities say. About a month before the actor’s death, he found Plasencia, who in turn asked Chavez to obtain the drug for him.

“I wonder how much this moron will pay,” Plasencia texted Chavez. The two met up the same day in Costa Mesa, halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, and exchanged at least four vials of ketamine.

After selling the drugs to Perry for $4,500, Plasencia asked Chavez if he could keep supplying them so they could become Perry’s “go-to”.

Perry struggled with addiction for years, dating back to his time on Friends, when he became one of the biggest stars of his generation as Chandler Bing. He starred alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004 on the megahit sitcom on NBC.

Spain logged a record 21.8 million international visitors this summer, official data has revealed, during a period when anti-tourism protests also took place across the country.

The figure is a 7.3% rise on 2023, the national statistics institute (INE) said.

Spain is the world’s second most popular tourist destination after France and in July received 10.9 million visitors and as many again in August, according to the INE.

The tourism minister, Jordi Hereu, called the impact of tourism “a great success for the wellbeing, social cohesion and economic development of Spain” at an event organised by the tourism promotion agency Turespaña in Tenerife, but added that Spain must transform its model for the sector.

The rising number of tourists has not pleased all Spaniards, with protesters making their feelings known in recent months, notably in Barcelona, Málaga and the Canary and Balearic islands.

Protesters complained about the strain on infrastructure and of rising rental prices due to many properties being let to tourists at lucrative prices. Barcelona’s mayor has said the city will end apartment rentals to tourists by 2029.

The most common nationality among visitors to Spain over the summer was British, with 4.17 million UK tourists, followed by France (with 3.75 million visitors), Germany (2.49 million) and Italy (1.35 million). There was also a 13% increase in US tourists to 850,000.

Spain hosted 64.8 million tourists over the first eight months of the year – another record, the INE said. The most popular destinations were Catalonia (the region that includes Barcelona) and the Canary and Balearic islands.

Tourism revenues rose by 17.6% over the eight-month period to €86.7bn (£72bn), the equivalent of €187 spent per tourist a day.

According to Exceltur, an organisation created by Spain’s leading tourism groups, 90 million tourists are expected over the course of 2024.

Traditionally, visitors to Kyoto in October come for momijigari, the turning of the autumn leaves in the city’s picturesque parks. This autumn, however, there is a new draw: a Nintendo museum.

The new attraction, which opens on Wednesday, is best described as a chapel of video game nostalgia. Upstairs, Nintendo’s many video game consoles, from 1983’s Famicom through 1996’s Nintendo 64 to 2017’s Switch, are displayed reverently alongside their most famous games. On the back wall, visitors can also peer at toys, playing cards and other artefacts from the Japanese company’s pre-video-game history, stretching back to its founding as a hanafuda playing card manufacturer in 1889. Downstairs, there are interactive exhibits with comically gigantic controllers and floor-projected playing cards.

Situated on the site of the video game company’s old manufacturing plant in Uji, a 20-minute train ride south of central Kyoto, the museum is expected to welcome up to 2,000 people a day. Tickets – which are allocated via a lottery system and cost 3,300 yen (£17) for an adult – are sold out three months in advance. When it opened in 1969, Nintendo’s Uji Ogura plant manufactured the toys and playing cards that were Nintendo’s money-makers at the time. After the dawn of the video game age in the 1970s, it operated as a customer service centre for console repairs until 2016. The building is far from Kyoto’s other tourist attractions: the suburban town surrounding it has been renovating its train station, preparing for a flood of visitors in Mario hats.

Nintendo’s creative guru, Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario and Zelda series and an evident influence on the museum’s curation, used to visit this site often when it was still a working factory in the 1970s and 80s. “This a place of memories,” he said at a press conference during a preview event at the museum last week. “We were exploring how to preserve it somehow, and then the suggestion came up: why not make it into a museum? Our original headquarters in Toba-kaido was one of the candidates [for a museum site], but we decided that [Uji] would be convenient for transportation, and this area is now rather dilapidated. Since this is where we had our first factory, we wanted to help revitalise the area … We would like to work with the local community to develop [the museum] so that it isn’t resented by the local people.”

Visitors are given 10 virtual coins per visit, used to spend on the interactive exhibits. An adjacent hanafuda workshop guides guests through making their own Japanese playing cards, above a cafe that serves custom burgers. Given Nintendo’s notorious secrecy about its creative process – and corporate secrets – it is perhaps unsurprising that there is no insight into how any of the games or consoles on display were made, or who played a part in their development. Only a small display of factory prototype controllers give the briefest peek behind the curtain.

This museum is part of a growing number of video game tourist destinations in Japan. For decades, international video game fans have made the pilgrimage of the “geek mecca” of Akihabara in Tokyo, with its overstuffed electronics shops, once-great arcades, retro game shops, tucked-away arcade cabinet specialists and plethora of manga and anime-themed cafes. But now there is also the Super Nintendo World theme park at Osaka’s Universal Studios, the third-most-visited theme park in the world, and restaurants in every major Japanese city themed around famous games such as Kirby, Monster Hunter and Final Fantasy. A Pokémon theme park is also in the works in Inagi, Tokyo.

“Companies like Nintendo are hugely important for Japan’s cultural exports,” said Bloomberg’s Japan columnist, Gearoid Reidy. “These cultural exports and tourism form a symbiotic relationship – tourists come to Japan, perhaps in part because they’re interested in, say, Nintendo. Over time, they absorb new trends they encounter and bring them back home – think the rise of ramen over the past few decades.

“Firms like Sega or Sanrio, or properties like Jujutsu Kaisen or Elden Ring, are what is really boosting fondness for the country right now. They’re one of the key drivers behind the surge in people coming to the country, which has risen sevenfold in just 20 years.”

The Japanese government’s new Cool Japan strategy, announced in June, aims to quadruple the overseas market for video games, manga, anime and other cultural exports in the next decade. But for Nintendo, this museum is about preserving to its own corporate heritage. “I hope people will understand what Nintendo is through all of these past products,” said Miyamoto. “It would be a shame to have all of this gathering dust in a warehouse.”