Kamala Harris on Saturday released a report on her health and medical history which found that “she possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency” if voters elect her in November.

A senior aide to Harris, 59, said the vice-president’s advisers viewed the publication of the health report and medical history as an opportunity to call attention to questions about the Republican White House nominee Donald Trump’s physical fitness and mental acuity. The 78-year-old Trump has also not released any information about his health, though he would be the oldest president elected if Americans give him a second term in the Oval Office.

The report – in the form of a two-page letter from the vice-president’s physician, Joshua Simmons – described Harris as being in “excellent health” and asserted that her medical history was notable for seasonal allergies and hives. Harris manages those conditions with over-the-counter medications such as Allegra, Atrovent nasal spray and Pataday eye drops, and she has also been on allergen immunotherapy for three years, the letter said.

Otherwise, Harris is mildly nearsighted and wears corrective contact lenses as a result, had abdominal surgery when she was three years old and has a maternal history of colon cancer. “She has no personal history of diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cardiac disease, pulmonary disease, neurological disorders, cancer or osteoporosis,” said the letter from Simmons, who added that the vice-president’s most recent physical examination in April was “unremarkable”.

The statement on Harris’s health came on Saturday as Trump has become increasingly incoherent at campaign rallies, something the Guardian US reported on earlier in October. He has been slurring, stumbling over his words, hurling expletives – and showing signs of cognitive decline consistent with someone approaching his 80s, according to medical experts.

Recent speeches have seen him rant about topics ranging from his purportedly “beautiful” body to “a million Rambos” in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Harris campaign aides pointed to Trump’s backing out of an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes that the vice-president granted and his refusal to debate her again after their 10 September face-off. They argue that the former president is “avoiding public scrutiny” and giving voters “the impression … that he has something to hide and may not be up for the job”.

“Contrast her age and vitality with his,” the senior aide to Harris, 59, said early on Saturday.

Questions over whether he was too enfeebled forced Joe Biden to halt his bid for re-election to the presidency during the summer. The 81-year-old Democrat dropped out of a rematch with Trump on 21 July and endorsed Harris to succeed him.

Recent national polling averages show Harris with a nearly four-point edge over Trump in the 5 November race for the presidency. But key swing states remain too close to call, and most experts expect a competitive election.

The Republican party chose Trump as their nominee despite his being convicted in May of criminally falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to an adult film actor who claimed an extramarital sexual encounter with him about a decade before his successful run for the presidency in 2016. Among other legal problems, he is grappling with criminal charges that he tried to illicitly overturn his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election.

Trump, for his part, has maintained that Biden “became mentally impaired”. He also said that Harris “was born that way” while struggling to pronounce the vice-president’s name.

At a town hall in Las Vegas for a group of undecided voters on Thursday, Harris said “using language that’s belittling … [is not] healthy for our nation”.

“I don’t admire that,” Harris said. “And in fact, I’m quite critical of it coming from someone who wants to be president of the United States.”

King Charles has said he will not stand in the way if Australia wishes to replace him as the country’s head of state, it has been reported.

Ahead of his visit later this month, the king is said to be adopting an “anti-confrontational approach” to Australian republican campaigners, the Daily Mail reported.

In response to the Australian Republican Movement’s (ARM) request for a meeting with the monarch, the king’s assistant private secretary is understood to have emphasised his “deep love and affection” for Australia.

Nathan Ross reportedly told the anti-monarchists: “His majesty, as a constitutional monarch, acts on the advice of his ministers and whether Australia becomes a republic is, therefore, a matter for the Australian public to decide.”

The ARM says it is “the peak body advocating on behalf of the Australian people for an Australian republic with an Australian as our head of state”. Australia held a referendum in 1999 on the issue of becoming a republic, in which 54.9% voted against.

The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has previously said “Australia should have an Australian as our head of state”, but recently indicated that a second referendum was not a priority.

A Buckingham Palace spokesperson said: “Like his mother before him, it has always been the case that his majesty the king feels that it is a matter for the Australian people.”

Graham Smith, the head of the British campaign group Republic who is in Australia to protest against the monarchy during the king’s visit, said the main reaction to the trip had been one of “indifference and disinterest”.

“I’ve been in Australia talking to friends, campaigners and others for the past two weeks. Most people are barely aware of the visit and couldn’t care less.

“I’m here to promote the UK campaign, to question how Charles can represent us and why he is making this very brief visit at great expense to Australian and British taxpayers.

“I’m also here to say to Australians this isn’t an institution that deserves respect or deference, and that they shouldn’t believe for a moment that the UK is a nation of royalists. I’m hoping the visit will help influence the debate in both countries and highlight the irrelevance of the monarchy.”

The visit will be the king’s most significant overseas tour since his cancer diagnosis and his first to Australia as its head of state.

The engines rev, the guitars thrum and a gruff narrator lays out why the vehicle occupying the driveway is more than just a machine. “A truck is a tool,” he says, “but a Ram – a Ram is life.”

So begins an advert for the Ram 1500, a pickup truck slightly bigger than the Panzer I tanks of Nazi Germany and almost as heavy. It is growing in popularity in Europe, with the number of Rams arriving on the continent up 20% in 2023 from the year before, according to registration data from the European Environment Agency. Road safety and environmental campaigners in the UK and Europe are aghast as the latest, most extreme cases of North American car bloat – giant pickup trucks – are increasingly crossing the Atlantic.

“Europe should ban the Ram,” said Dudley Curtis from the European Transport Safety Council. “This type of vehicle is excessively heavy, tall and powerful, making it lethal in collisions with normal-sized vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists.”

For now, the giant vehicles fall foul of EU environmental rules but can be imported through a back-door channel known as an individual vehicle approval (IVA) that subjects them to less scrutiny. Nearly 5,000 Dodge Rams were brought to Europe last year, and about 60% of IVA approvals in the EU, Norway and Iceland are for the Ram – whose manufacturer, Stellantis, did not respond to requests for comment. Other large pickup trucks, such as the Ford F-150 and Chevrolet Silverado, are also arriving but in smaller numbers. On Tuesday, the Guardian revealed that one of Europe’s first Tesla Cybertrucks may have been registered incorrectly through the same route.

It is the latest development in the global story of car bloat. Sales of SUVs have been soaring for several years as carmakers have marketed larger cars and consumers have chosen to pay premiums to snap them up. The weighty vehicles, vaunted for off-road abilities that let them conquer rugged terrain, have become common sights on the smooth tarmac of supermarket car parks and the concrete pavements outside school gates.

“People wear their large SUV like an expensive coat,” said Robin Hickman, a transport planner at University College London. “It’s an aspiration for a certain type of lifestyle that people subscribe to.” Increasingly, however, pickup trucks are being marketed as versatile vehicles that urban dwellers can use to meet their daily needs.

Brutal physics reveals a dark side to the big-car boom. At its simplest, a vehicle with more mass will hit a person with more force. But a higher bonnet also makes it harder for the driver to see a child and more likely that their vehicle will strike its head, or an adult’s vital organs. Unlike the victims of regular car crashes, who are often pushed to the side or on to the windscreen, people struck by pickup trucks tend to be pushed forward and mown down.

Researchers have seen such mechanisms play out in crash data. In August, the Vias institute in Belgium found a pedestrian or cyclist hit by a pickup was 90% more likely to face serious injury than one hit by a regular car, and almost 200% more likely to be killed.

In November last year, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in the US found the risk of death was about 45% greater if a pedestrian were hit by a vehicle with a tall bonnet than one that was low and sloped. In January, a US study found a 10cm increase in bonnet height causes a 22% increase in fatality risk for pedestrians. The increase in risk rose to 31% for over-65s, and to 81% for children.

But few people seem aware of the dangers. Just 40% of British adults agree that SUVs and pickup trucks are dangerous to other people, a YouGov survey found in February, falling to 20% for owners of such vehicles.

Some people justify buying big vehicles because they offer families more comfort. Others say they feel safer in larger cars – even if that security comes at the expense of others.

“People buying the SUVs are either very selfish and do not care about anyone else on the street, or, more likely, they just do not think of those issues,” said Hickman. “It may [one day] be their children walking out of the football pitch or the cricket pitch who get run over by an SUV, and then they would be horrified.”

Researchers suggest the mix of aggressive advertising, status-seeking and poor public awareness make it easy for carmakers to push ever bigger vehicles. A study of UK residents from the campaign group Badvertising in 2021 found a positive correlation between exposure to SUV advertising and the desire to buy one.

Mònica Guillen-Royo, a co-author of the report, said: “The industry’s efforts to expand sales of bigger cars are likely to succeed, due to their alignment with people’s everyday lives, which are shaped by car dependency. On the other hand, society’s efforts to reduce emissions from cars will not be supported by messaging alone.”

European cities such as Paris, Lyon, Grenoble and Tübingen have imposed weight-based fees that make SUV and pickup truck drivers pay more to park. Campaigners have called on the European Commission to tighten safety rules and close the approval loophole that lets big pickups sneak on to European roads.

“It’s the old story of a chain only being as strong as its weakest link,” said James Nix, from the campaign group Transport & Environment. “The EU and UK have built a legal framework to safeguard the public from high levels of air pollution, climate emissions and road safety risks from vehicles. But then, when importers of mass market pickup trucks get them approved as ‘individual’ vehicles, they avoid Europe’s carefully constructed safeguards.”

However, despite the explosive growth, large pickup trucks still only made up less than 1% of new car and van registrations in Europe in 2023. The vehicles are far more polluting than regular cars, but those approved via the IVA loophole do not count toward the EU’s fleet-wide CO₂ targets of 94g/km for cars and 154g/km for vans from 2025.

To meet the targets and compensate the emissions from each large pickup truck, a manufacturer would, in theory, have to put three extra electric vehicles on the road, said Peter Mock, the managing director of the European branch of the International Council on Clean Transportation. “Instead of complaining about regulation, automakers would be better off reconsidering their marketing shift to ever bigger SUVs and pickup trucks.”

Body parts found in a freezer that was left behind at a Colorado home that was sold are of a 16-year-old girl who went missing in 2005, authorities have said.

The death of Amanda Leariel Overstreet – the biological daughter of the home’s previous owner – is being investigated as a homicide, according to the sheriff’s office overseeing the case. An investigation into Overstreet’s slaying remains ongoing.

The discovery of Overstreet’s remains was made in January, after the new owner of a house near Grand Junction gave away a freezer left behind by the previous occupant. The person who claimed the freezer found a human head and forearms with hands attached, said the Mesa county’s sheriff’s office.

Overstreet’s body parts were identified through DNA testing. She had not been seen since April 2005, and “there is no record that Amanda Overstreet was ever reported missing,” a statement from the sheriff read.

An exact cause of death has not yet been determined, and no arrests have been made. The missing girl lived in the Grand Junction and Harris county, Texas, areas, according to the Mesa county coroner’s office.

The new owner of the home was “completely unrelated to the previous case”, said the sheriff’s office. “The house was purchased, fully remodeled, and sold to the current owner.”

According to Colorado Public Radio, records show a home on the street block where Overstreet’s remains were discovered belonged to a Bradley David Imer, who died of Covid-19 in 2021. The outlet said Imer’s death certificate lists his spouse as Leanne Overstreet.

Colorado Public Radio noted that it was unable to determine whether Leanne Overstreet and Amanda Overstreet were related. But the sheriff’s office did confirm to the outlet that Amanda’s biological mother was a previous owner of the home where the remains were found.

Meanwhile, the Mesa county sheriff’s office provided a statement to the Daily Mail confirming Leanne Overstreet indeed owned the home where her daughter’s remains were found.

Body parts found in a freezer that was left behind at a Colorado home that was sold are of a 16-year-old girl who went missing in 2005, authorities have said.

The death of Amanda Leariel Overstreet – the biological daughter of the home’s previous owner – is being investigated as a homicide, according to the sheriff’s office overseeing the case. An investigation into Overstreet’s slaying remains ongoing.

The discovery of Overstreet’s remains was made in January, after the new owner of a house near Grand Junction gave away a freezer left behind by the previous occupant. The person who claimed the freezer found a human head and forearms with hands attached, said the Mesa county’s sheriff’s office.

Overstreet’s body parts were identified through DNA testing. She had not been seen since April 2005, and “there is no record that Amanda Overstreet was ever reported missing,” a statement from the sheriff read.

An exact cause of death has not yet been determined, and no arrests have been made. The missing girl lived in the Grand Junction and Harris county, Texas, areas, according to the Mesa county coroner’s office.

The new owner of the home was “completely unrelated to the previous case”, said the sheriff’s office. “The house was purchased, fully remodeled, and sold to the current owner.”

According to Colorado Public Radio, records show a home on the street block where Overstreet’s remains were discovered belonged to a Bradley David Imer, who died of Covid-19 in 2021. The outlet said Imer’s death certificate lists his spouse as Leanne Overstreet.

Colorado Public Radio noted that it was unable to determine whether Leanne Overstreet and Amanda Overstreet were related. But the sheriff’s office did confirm to the outlet that Amanda’s biological mother was a previous owner of the home where the remains were found.

Meanwhile, the Mesa county sheriff’s office provided a statement to the Daily Mail confirming Leanne Overstreet indeed owned the home where her daughter’s remains were found.

At least 11 people have been killed in tribal clashes in the north-west of Pakistan, a local official has said.

Tensions rose in Kurram district, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, after two people were critically injured in a shooting incident between rival tribes. It was not immediately clear what caused the shooting.

Vehicles were targeted in different areas of the district, leading to more casualties, said Javedullah Khan, a senior official. Khan said efforts were being made to secure travel routes and to restore calm to the area. The injured, which included children, were taken to hospital.

Pir Haider Ali Shah, a former parliamentarian and a member of a tribal council, said elders had arrived in Kurram to mediate a peace agreement between the tribes. He said: “The recent firing incidents are regrettable and have hampered efforts for lasting peace.”

Last month, at least 25 people were killed in several days of clashes between armed Shia and Sunni Muslims over a land dispute. Although both groups live together largely peacefully in Pakistan, tensions have existed for decades in some areas, especially in Kurram, where Shia Muslims dominate in parts of the district.

Also on Saturday, a separatist group in the south-west of Pakistan claimed responsibility for an attack that killed 21 people. The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) said its fighters targeted a coalmine in Duki district on Thursday night with heavy weapons, rocket launchers and grenades.

The BLA gave higher figures of 30 dead and 18 injured. It also said Pakistani security personnel were disguised as workers, without giving evidence, and threatened more assaults unless the military withdrew from the province.

Balochistan is home to several groups that demand independence from the federal government, accusing it of exploiting the oil- and mineral-rich province at the expense of local people.

The far-right website The Gateway Pundit acknowledged for the first time on Saturday that there was not any fraud during ballot counting in Atlanta in 2020 when Donald Trump lost the presidency, a significant concession from one of the most influential conservative sites that plays a key role in spreading election misinformation.

The statement, the first acknowledgment from the site that there was no proof of fraud in Atlanta, came days after the site settled a defamation lawsuit with Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, two local election workers who the site falsely accused of wrongdoing. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed publicly, but the site appears to have removed all mention of the two women.

“Georgia officials concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020,” the site’s co-founder, Jim Hoft, said in a statement posted on Gateway Pundit on Saturday. “The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night. A legal matter with this news organization and the two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement.”

As Trump sought to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat to Joe Biden, Gateway Pundit relentlessly amplified a misleading video it said showed poll workers fraudulently counting ballots on election night. Gateway Pundit was the first site to identify Freeman and Moss as the two women in the video and published dozens of articles falsely accusing them of wrongdoing.

Moss and Freeman have publicly spoken out about the severe harassment they faced. They received many death threats. People showed up unannounced at Freeman’s home, and she feared they were going to kill her. Both women testified last year that they were still afraid to go out alone in public.

Hoft and his twin brother, Joe, who is also a contributor to the site, refused to back down from their false claims. They held a press conference on the sidelines of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee in July insisting that the video showed wrongdoing.

Freeman and Moss previously settled a lawsuit with One America News Network, another far-right conservative outlet, which subsequently broadcast a correction to its reporting and noted the two women had not engaged in fraud.

A Washington DC jury also ordered Trump ally Rudy Giuliani to pay the two women nearly $150m in damages last year. Giuliani has appealed the verdict and undertaken legal maneuvers to avoid payment. Lawyers for Freeman and Moss have asked a federal judge in New York to give them control over his assets.

Gateway Pundit still faces a defamation lawsuit from Eric Coomer, a former employee of Dominion voting systems, whom the outlet falsely accused of rigging the election.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign worked with X to prevent information about his running mate JD Vance from being posted on the social media platform, a move that resulted in the journalist who revealed the information being kicked off the site, according to reports.

The former president’s team contacted X, owned by the billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk, about a 271-page document compiled by his campaign to vet Vance that was linked to by Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist, the New York Times has reported.

X responded by blocking links to the material, claiming that it contained sensitive personal information such as the Ohio US senator’s social security number, and banned Klippenstein from the platform.

The materials published by Klippenstein on his Substack in September appear to be related to a hack of the Trump campaign earlier this year, which the FBI has linked to Iran. Documents from the hack have been shared with several media outlets, which have chosen to not publish them.

Media outlets did not reach the same decision when they gave significant attention to files from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign that were hacked and leaked by Russian intelligence before she ultimately lost that election to Trump. At one point Trump also said he hoped Russia would be “able to find” some of Clinton’s files.

The removal of the material from X has highlighted the increasingly strident support of Musk, the world’s richest person, for Trump’s attempt to return to the White House after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. After buying Twitter in 2022, Musk said that he was an advocate of free speech and the open sharing of information, even if it offended either political party.

Last week, Musk appeared at a Pennsylvania rally alongside the former president, performing an awkward jump on stage before declaring that “I’m not just Maga – I’m dark Maga” while invoking the Republican nominee’s Make America Great Again slogan.

Musk added that “this will be the last election” if Trump doesn’t win in November against Kamala Harris, complaining that she and her fellow Democrats want “to take away your freedom of speech, they want to take away your right to bear arms, they want to take away your right to vote, effectively”.

Klippenstein, whose X account has been restored following the New York Times reporting, said in a Substack post on Friday that Musk had purchased political influence and “is wielding that influence in increasingly brazen ways”.

“The real election interference here is that a social media corporation can decree certain information unfit for the American electorate,” he wrote.

“Two of our most sacred rights as Americans are the freedoms of speech and assembly, online or otherwise. It is a national humiliation that these rights can be curtailed by anyone with enough digits in their bank account.”

Musk is set to appear at further Trump rallies – and he may even knock on voters’ doors for the campaign in Pennsylvania in the coming week. He has funded a political action entity called America Pac that has spent around $80m to help Trump reach voters in crucial swing states like Pennsylvania.

Police officers in Portland, Oregon, stopped a car Tuesday night when they noticed a bag inside that said “Definitely not a bag full of drugs”. It, in fact, was – full of drugs: 79 blue fentanyl pills, three fake oxycodone tablets and 230g of methamphetamine, to be exact.

Officers pulled over a man and a woman who were driving a stolen car near the intersection of SE 162nd Avenue and Division, according to the Portland police bureau. Inside the car, officers noticed that the Ford Taurus’s ignition had been visibly tampered with – and spotted baggies of drugs.

“The driver and passenger were both arrested,” said Portland police public information officer Sergeant Kevin Allen. “Inside the vehicle was a substantial number of packaged drugs including methamphetamine and blue fentanyl pills, multiple scales, money and a loaded firearm.”

Many of the baggies of drugs had been stored in a brown canvas bag reading “Definitely not a bag full of drugs”. A photo of the officers’ bust – including the bag – garnered media attention on X.

The suspects – Reginald Reynolds, 35, and Mia Baggenstos, 37 – are both facing charges of drug possession and possession of a stolen vehicle.

Reynolds has been charged with delivery of methamphetamine, unlawful possession of methamphetamine, unauthorized use of a vehicle and possession of a stolen vehicle, and possession of a controlled substance in the first degree. Baggenstos faces nearly the same charges – except possession of a controlled substance in the second degree.

In 2020, Oregon made history when it decriminalized the possession of small amounts of hard drugs (much smaller than the amounts officers found Tuesday), in an effort to redirect city funding from criminalization and toward treatment of substance-use disorders. The measure passed with high levels of public support that faltered as overdose and homelessness rates rose in the state during the Covid-19 pandemic – when fentanyl also became widely available and affordable housing less so.

In September, the state recriminalized drug possession under a Democratic-controlled legislature.

A woman who sued her former employer over not being given a leaving card lost her case when it was revealed it had been hidden from her after only three people signed it.

Karen Conaghan claimed that the “failure to acknowledge her existence” at IAG, the parent company of British Airways, was a breach of equality law.

However, a former colleague told an employment tribunal that managers had indeed bought a card but did not present it to Conaghan because of the low number of signatures, the Times reported.

The judge, Kevin Palmer, said: “He believed it would have been more insulting to give her the card than not to give her a card at all.”

The tribunal was told that two men also laid off during “restructuring” at the company, which also owns airlines Aer Lingus and Iberia, did not receive leaving cards either.

Conaghan, a former business liaison lead, brought 40 complaints against the company for sexual harassment, victimisation and unfair dismissal. But the tribunal dismissed every claim, with Palmer concluding that Conaghan, who started working at the company in 2019, had adopted a “conspiracy-theory mentality”, mistaking “normal workplace interactions” for harassment.

In one claim, she said a colleague had copied her use of the word “whiz” in a card for a colleague, but corrected her spelling by writing “whizz” instead.

She said another employee had asked her: “Are you taking the piss, Karen?” The tribunal heard that this was after Conaghan suggested she had “done all of the hard work” and it was his “turn to do some”.

Conaghan moved to Richmond, North Yorkshire, in September 2021 despite it being expected that all employees live within two hours of the office in Heathrow, the tribunal heard. She was made redundant in the same year as part of a restructuring of the organisation, with colleagues saying in evidence that many people also left around the same time.

Judge Palmer said that although further signatures were gathered on the leaving card after her departure, a former colleague took the view that “it was inappropriate to send such a card to [her] at a later date as she had raised a grievance against him and [another colleague]”.

Many of the acts cited in the claim “either did not happen or, if they did happen, they were innocuous interactions in the normal course of employment”, the judge ruled.

He said that there was no evidence to suggest that any of Conaghan’s allegations were in any way related to her sex and that one of the allegations was indicative of her “view of normal interactions being something more sinister”

In another, unrelated case earlier this year, an employment tribunal judge ruled that sending an employee an unwanted birthday card could amount to “unwanted conduct” and harassment.