Kamala Harris warned a crowd that time was running out at a get-out-the-vote event in Madison, Wisconsin, on Wednesday, joined by a lineup of folk and pop musicians including Remi Wolf, Gracie Abrams and Mumford & Sons.

“We have six days left in one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime,” the vice-president and Democratic nominee told the crowd, denouncing Donald Trump and issuing a dire warning about the consequences of a second Trump presidency.

“On day one Donald Trump would walk into office with an enemies list,” said Harris, before launching into a speech highlighting her policy planks, including a proposal to cut taxes on small businesses and to expand healthcare coverage for families caring for an elderly parent at home. To prolonged applause, Harris rallied the crowd in support of abortion rights, vowing to sign protections for reproductive healthcare into law.

As she has often during her campaign, Harris projected a centrist image, pledging “to listen to experts, to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make, and to people who disagree with me”.

During her speech, protesters in two different sections of the crowd interrupted her to draw attention to Israel’s war in Gaza, shouting “free Palestine” and unfurling banners.

Pausing to address the demonstrators, Harris said: “We all want the war in Gaza to end and get the hostages out as soon as possible, and I will do everything in my power to make it heard and known.” She added, to cheers: “Everyone has a right to be heard, but right now I am speaking.”

Harris has repeatedly visited Wisconsin, a key swing state where elections are decided by the razor-thin margins. She has paid special attention to Madison, and its suburbs, which reliably turn out overwhelming majorities for Democratic party candidates in races that generate unusually high turnout. In the 2020 presidential election, voter turnout in Dane county reached 89%.

The campaign has invested in youth organizing in Wisconsin, hiring seven full-time campus organizers and a youth organizing coordinator. To broad applause, Ty Schanhofer, a first-time voter and student at the University of Wisconsin, introduced Harris and encouraged students to vote early.

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“I love your generation, I just love you guys,” said Harris, during the rally, praising young people for being “rightly impatient for change” and enumerating a list of challenges, including the climate crisis and school shootings, that have come to define the gen Z experience. “I see your power, and I’m so proud of you. Can we hear it for our first-time voters!”

The former lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes spoke at the rally too, highlighting the narrow margins that have come to define statewide elections in Wisconsin.

“I want us to feel joy once again,” said Barnes, who ran for a seat in the US Senate and lost by one point to Ron Johnson, the incumbent Republican who has bolstered Donald Trump’s wildest conspiracy theories – including his claims of a stolen election in 2020. Chris LaCivita, a senior staffer on the Johnson campaign, is co-manager of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

The campaign punctuated speeches including Barnes’s with musical acts to rally the crowd.

“We have values and ideas that deserve a platform,” said the singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams, a popular gen Z musician whose performance drew uproarious applause. “Our participation and our vote have never been more crucial.” Abrams was likely a draw for some in the audience, which leaned young tonight.

The campaign also offered the elder millennials in the crowd something of their own: a performance by the British folk-pop band Mumford & Sons, whose lead singer announced to some surprise that he has voted in California, where he was born.

Harris has featured a lineup of celebrity endorsers and performers at her rallies during the 2024 election cycle. In Texas last week, Beyoncé herself appeared to endorse Harris’s presidential bid, and Jennifer Lopez is scheduled to appear with Harris at a rally later this week. The star-studded series of events could give the Harris campaign a boost. When Harris campaigned in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the folk band Bon Iver – from the Eau Claire area – opened for her.

The Madison crowd was energetic on Wednesday night, but with less than a week to go before election day, some Democrats at the venue seemed anxious.

“I’ve been making calls for Harris,” said Mary Ann Olson, a retired teacher, who waited in pouring rain for the rally. “If she doesn’t win, and I didn’t do anything, I think I would hate myself.”

Olson’s daughter, Chelsea, said she was “really stressed out”, adding: “I’m not sure I can handle four more years of Donald Trump.”

A judge ordered all parties, including Elon Musk, to attend a court hearing in Philadelphia on Thursday in a lawsuit seeking to stop a political action committee controlled by the billionaire from awarding $1m to registered US voters in battleground states before the 5 November election.

The Philadelphia district attorney’s office filed the lawsuit on Monday. It called the giveaway by Musk’s America Pac, which backs Donald Trump, an “illegal lottery” that entices Pennsylvania residents to share personal data.

“It is further ordered that all parties must be present at the time of the hearing,” a judge wrote on Wednesday in an order with the county court of common pleas. The hearing in the case was moved up to Thursday morning from Friday.

A representative for America Pac did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk’s representatives have not responded to requests for comment.

Musk has promised to give $1m each day to someone who signs his online free-speech and gun-rights petition. Legal experts consulted by Reuters last week were divided on whether the giveaway violates federal laws that make it a crime to pay or offer to pay a person to register to vote. The justice department sent a letter to America Pac warning that the billionaire’s giveaways for registered voters who sign his petition may violate federal law, CNN reported last week.

Before an extremely tight presidential race between Trump and Kamala Harris, Pennsylvania is seen as a crucial swing state that could determine the outcome of the election. “Pennsylvania will be a decisive Republican victory,” Musk tweeted on Wednesday.

Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, said earlier this month that he thought law enforcement should look into the legality of the giveaway.

“I think there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race, how the dark money is flowing, not just into Pennsylvania, but apparently now into the pockets of Pennsylvanians,” Shapiro told NBC’s Meet the Press on 20 October. “That is deeply concerning.”

At a Musk town hall in Pittsburgh on 20 October, at which the Tesla CEO praised Trump and gave a giant $1m check to a woman in a red Trump T-shirt, audience members appeared unfazed by the criticism of the scheme, and said they admired Musk’s success as a businessman, and what they saw as his championing of free speech.

“I fear if Trump does not win, we are going to have a single-party state that is going to be like California, but actually worse,” Musk told the audience.

Musk has shared photographs of voters with $1m checks on X, the social media platform he owns. On Wednesday, the America Pac account announced that “Joshua from North Carolina earned $1M after signing our petition in support of the Constitution”.

The Trump campaign is broadly reliant on outside groups for canvassing voters, meaning the super Pac founded by Musk – the world’s richest man – plays an outsized role in what is expected to be a razor-thin election.

In the days leading up to the election, mysterious monuments continue to pop up in cities across the US, poking fun at candidate Donald Trump and his supporters.

On Wednesday in Maja Park in Philadelphia, a large statue of Trump was propped up. Titled “In Honor of a Lifetime of Sexual Assault”, the monument, showing Trump smiling and holding his hand in a suggestive manner, quotes from the infamous 2005 recording – leaked in 2016 – in which Trump is heard bragging about sexually assaulting women.

The monument was quickly removed, Philly Voice reported.

On Sunday, a similar satirical statue was found in Portland, Oregon. It was beheaded that day and further damaged by a Portland city council candidate and Trump supporter, who filmed himself chipping away at the base of the statue.

Underneath the statues in Philadelphia and Portland is a plaque with Trump’s brag about his status and how it allows him to sexually assault women: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

The two statues, in Philadelphia and Portland, were placed behind, and next to, nude sculptures sanctioned by the respective cities.

The Access Hollywood tape was recorded in 2005 and published by the Washington Post in 2016, a month before that year’s election. The tape’s release shook up the election, with some Republicans withdrawing their support for Trump.

Although Trump has never been criminally charged for sexual offenses, 27 women have accused him of sexual assault. Last year, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E Jean Carroll in a civil suit.

The recent Philadelphia and Portland statues follow other satirical Trump-related statues, found throughout the country.

In Washington on Monday, a tiki torch statue titled “The Donald J Trump Enduring Flame” was placed a few blocks away from the White House. The statue evokes the white nationalist Unite the Right rally from 2017, in which neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The first satirical statue, installed last Thursday also in Washington, depicts a bronze pile of feces on Nancy Pelosi’s desk and references the January 6 attack. After Trump supporters marched on the Capitol that day, some broke into the building, attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

“This memorial honors the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election,” the statue read.

Although it is unknown who is behind the four statues, the Washington Post reported that the National Park Service approved a request by Julia Jimenez-Pyzik to install the poop monument on the National Mall. On Tuesday, an anonymous person called the Washington Post to say he and others were behind the tiki torch and poop installations. On Wednesday, the same person called back, claiming they also were responsible for the Philadelphia and Portland statues.

“We are hoping they spark conversation about what we view are certain political issues that are relevant to voters and how they make their decision voting,” the anonymous caller told the Post.

Kamala Harris continued to make her closing argument to voters just six days before voting ends, reminding Americans in what is perhaps the most critical battleground state that two very different futures for the United States could be around the corner.

“We know who Donald Trump is. This is someone who is not thinking about how to make your life better,” she said in remarks that lasted about half an hour to a packed crowd at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex.

“This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power.”

“In less than 90 days, either he or I will be in the Oval Office,” she added.

Harris spoke in Harrisburg, the state capital, which is one of the few counties in the middle of the state that voted for Joe Biden in 2020. A faint whiff of livestock hung over the packed rally, which included people holding signs saying “Harris-burg” and “If Kamala was a man, she’d be THE MAN”, a reference to a Taylor Swift song.

The event was part of a campaign blitz for the vice-president before voting ends 5 November. She and Tim Walz, her vice-presidential candidate, were both in Pennsylvania on Wednesday. Harris also traveled to North Carolina and Wisconsin.

Polls show a tied race in Pennsylvania, which both campaigns are competing fiercely for. The path to winning 270 electoral votes is much more difficult for the candidate who loses Pennsylvania.

Harris did not mention a racist remark about Puerto Rico made by a comedian before Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Pennsylvania has a sizeable Latino and Puerto Rican population and could be a decisive voting bloc in the election.

At the rally, Harris did not directly mention Joe Biden’s comments on Tuesday in which he appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage”. Biden later clarified that he had “meant to say” that a pro-Trump comedian’s “hateful rhetoric” about Puerto Rico was “garbage”. But before getting on Air Force Two on Wednesday, Harris said: “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they voted for.”

Harris seemed to allude to the controversy at the end of her remarks, saying: “In these next six days, let us be intentional about building community. Let us please be intentional about building coalitions and let us remember we have so much more in common than what separates us.”

Minerva Ortiz-Garcia, a 68-year-old flight attendant who lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, carried a small Puerto Rican flag as she wandered through the crowd before Harris spoke.

“I feel horrible. I’m Puerto Rican I actually started to cry” after hearing the comments at Trump’s rally, she said. “How could someone say that about an island that is trying to survive [Hurricane] Maria?” Ortiz-Garcia said she thought many Latino voters were waiting for Harris to speak to them.

“I think that people want her to say something directly,” she said.

Harris was also briefly interrupted several times by protesters, who could be heard screaming “genocide” and “war criminal”.

As cheers of “USA! USA! USA!” nearly drowned out the protests, Harris said “ours is about a fight for democracy and your right to be heard. That is what is on the line in this election,” she said. “Look, everybody has a right to be heard, but right now I am speaking.” When a protester again interrupted a few minutes later, Harris again emphasized the stakes of the election, saying: “At this particular moment, it should be emphasized that unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy from within. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table.”

The event in Harrisburg was the first political rally Corine Wherley, a 38-year-old librarian from Harrisburg, had ever attended. She said that she was so alarmed after watching Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally that she wanted to come.

“A lot of it was the rhetoric around ‘this secret’ and other things like that they’re planning on doing,” she said, referring to Trump’s comment that he has a “little secret” with House Speaker Mike Johnson, that many took to be a plan to contest the election. “They’re like: ‘I can do whatever I want’ and I think that’s what scares me.”

Shawna Barnes, a 45-year-old healthcare worker from Philadelphia, said she’s concerned that men aren’t supporting Harris in this election. When she’s knocked on doors, she’s noticed that the women are often all-in, but the men are “iffy”.

“Black and brown women are going to come out and support. White women of course are going to support. The men are just kind of like afraid,” she said as the song Mr Brightside by the Killers blasted on the sound system. “I don’t think it’s about gender. I just think it’s fear.”

North Korea has test launched a long-range missile that is theoretically capable of striking the US mainland, in another display of defiance by the regime amid growing warnings over its troops’ participation in the war in Ukraine.

US officials said they believed the launch was that of an intercontinental ballistic missile [ICBM] but did not say how they had reached that assessment. Japan’s defence minister, Gen Nakatani, said the missile had flown higher and for longer than others tested by North Korea.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, citing the country’s military, said the US was preparing to deploy “strategic assets” – usually a reference to conventional and nuclear capabilities – in response to the missile test.

North Korean state media have not commented on the launch, and little is known about the type of missile involved. Japan’s government said it reached a maximum altitude of more than 7,000 km – a record height – and flew for an unprecedented one hour and 26 minutes.

The North, which last tested an ICBM almost a year ago, deliberately launches long-range missiles at a steep trajectory to avoid neighbouring countries.

Japan’s defence ministry said it believed the missile had fallen at about 8.36am outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone. The missile was launched from a site near the North Korean capital Pyongyang at 7.10am on Thursday and splashed down about 300km west of Hokkaido’s Okushiri island. Japanese officials said there had been no reports of damage or casualties.

US national security council spokesperson Sean Savett said the launch proved that North Korea “continues to prioritise its unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programmes over the wellbeing of its people,” adding that Washington would work to ensure the security of the American homeland and its allies South Korea and Japan.

If confirmed, Thursday’s test would be North Korea’s first of an ICBM since December 2023, when it launched the solid-fuelled Hwasong-18. Missiles with built-in solid propellants are easier to move and hide, and can be launched quicker than liquid-propellant weapons.

South Korea’s military intelligence warned MPs on Wednesday that the North was preparing to test a missile designed to reach the US. It said the regime may have completed preparations for its seventh nuclear weapons test.

Experts believe North Korea possesses short-range nuclear missiles that can strike South Korea, but are sceptical of Pyongyang’s claims that it is able to strike more distant targets using missiles tipped with miniaturised nuclear warheads.

Thursday’s launch came less than a week before American voters go to the polls to elect a new president. North Korea has used missile launches and other provocations to draw attention to itself in the run-up to elections and anniversaries in the US.

The North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has also been encouraged to step up his weapons programme by the war in Ukraine. About 10,000 North Korean troops are thought to have been sent to Russia in preparation for possible deployment in Ukraine. On Wednesday, South Korea said more than 3,000 had been moved close to battlefields in western Russia.

Pyongyang is already supplying Russian forces with ammunition and missiles as part of a mutual defence pact agreed this summer between Kim and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

This week defence chiefs in the US and South Korea urged North Korea to withdraw its troops from Russia, while the US’s envoy to the UN, Robert Wood, warned that North Korean soldiers entering Ukraine would “surely return in body bags”.

The US and South Korean defence chiefs have called for North Korea to withdraw its troops from Russia, as the US envoy to the UN, Robert Wood, bluntly warned that Pyongyang’s forces entering Ukraine “will surely return in body bags”.

Washington says 10,000 North Korean troops have been deployed for possible action against Ukrainian forces. Russia and North Korea have deepened their political and military alliance as the Ukraine war has dragged on, but sending Pyongyang’s troops into combat against Kyiv’s forces would mark a significant escalation that has sparked widespread international concern.

“I call upon them to withdraw their troops out of Russia,” US defence secretary Lloyd Austin said at the Pentagon on Wednesday, echoing a call made at a joint appearance with his South Korean counterpart, Kim Yong-hyun.

The White House has said that Pyongyang’s forces would become “legitimate military targets” if they fight against Ukraine, and Austin echoed that stance on Wednesday.

North Korean troops would be “co-belligerents, and you have every reason to believe that … they will be killed and wounded as a result of battle,” he added.

Speaking before the UN security council, Wood gave an even more explicit warning, saying if Pyongyang’s forces “enter Ukraine in support of Russia, they will surely return in body bags.”

“I would advise Chairman Kim [Jong-un] to think twice about engaging in such reckless and dangerous behaviour,” Wood added.

Despite his call for them to withdraw, Austin said there was a “good likelihood” that Moscow would still proceed.

South Korea’s Kim, speaking through a translator, said he believed the North Korean deployment to Russia “can result in the escalation of the security threats on the Korean peninsula”. That is because there is a “high chance” that Pyongyang will ask for technology transfers from Russia to aid its weapons programs – including on tactical nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles and reconnaissance satellites – in exchange for the deployment of its forces, he said.

But he did not announce a change to Seoul’s longstanding policy that bars it from selling weapons into active conflict zones including Ukraine – a stance it has stuck to despite calls from Washington and Kyiv to reconsider.

“At the current moment, nothing is determined,” Kim said when asked if there are plans for South Korea to indirectly supply munitions to Ukraine.

The US and South Korean warnings came as North Korea tested what US officials said was an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Japan’s government said it reached a maximum altitude of more than 7,000 km – a record height – and flew for an unprecedented one hour and 26 minutes.

The Pentagon said the previous day that a “small number” of North Korean troops had already been deployed in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces have been conducting a ground offensive since August.

A Ukrainian official told the Associated Press that North Korean troops are now stationed 30 miles (50km) away from the Ukrainian border with Russia. The official was not authorised to disclose the information publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has not denied the deployment of North Korean troops to his country but has also refused to confirm it.

Moscow’s UN envoy, Vassily Nebenzia, said on Wednesday that Pyongyang’s forces were not present on the frontlines, deeming any suggestion to the contrary as “barefaced lies” and accusing Washington and London of “disinformation”.

Miroslav Jenca, the UN’s assistant secretary-general for Europe, meanwhile said the UN had been following reports of the North Korean deployment to Russia with “serious concern”, but could not independently confirm them.

Pyongyang has denied sending troops to Russia, but its vice foreign minister said that were such a deployment to happen, it would be in line with global norms.

North Korean foreign minister Choe Son Hui was in Moscow on Wednesday to hold “strategic” talks with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, while Wang Yi – the top diplomat for China, Pyongyang’s chief diplomatic ally – discussed the Ukraine crisis with Russia’s deputy foreign minister in Beijing.

With Agence France-Presse and Associated Press

At least 95 people have died in eastern, central and southern Spain after torrential rains triggered the country’s deadliest floods in three decades, unleashing torrents of muddy water that surged through cities, towns and villages, trapping people in their homes, bringing down trees, and cutting off roads and railway lines.

As the search for dozens of missing people continued, motorists were urged to stay off the roads and away from swollen rivers amid warnings that the severe weather was not over and that the number of deaths could still rise.

By Wednesday afternoon, the Valencian government’s emergency coordination centre said the latest number of known deaths in the region was 92, while the central government delegation in the neighbouring Castilla-La Mancha region reported two deaths, including that of an 88-year-old woman in the city of Cuenca. Another death was reported in Andalucía’s Málaga province.

The Valencian authorities urged people to keep clear of flooded or cut-off roads, saying the emergency services needed access and that more flood water could accumulate. More than 1,000 soldiers from Spain’s emergency response units were deployed to the devastated areas. The central government also sent nine forensic experts to Valencia to help with the task of identifying bodies.

Images on Spanish TV showed turbulent, muddy water coursing through the town of Letur in the eastern province of Albacete on Tuesday, dragging cars through its streets.

“Yesterday was the worst day of my life,” Ricardo Gabaldón, the mayor of Utiel, a town in Valencia, told the national broadcaster RTVE. He said several people were missing in his town. “We were trapped like rats. Cars and rubbish containers were flowing down the streets. The water was rising to 3 metres [10ft],” he said.

One elderly couple were rescued from the upper storey of their house by a military unit using a bulldozer, with three soldiers accompanying them in the huge shovel.

Television reports ran videos from members of the public showing waters flooding into the ground floors of flats, streams overflowing their banks and at least one bridge giving way.

A high-speed train with nearly 300 people onboard derailed near Málaga, although rail authorities said no one was hurt. The high-speed rail service between Valencia city and Madrid was interrupted, as were several commuter lines.

Tuesday’s floods were Spain’s worst since 1996, when 87 people died after torrential rain hit a campsite in the Pyrenees mountains. Europe’s most recent catastrophic floods came in July 2021, killing 243 people in Germany, Belgium, Romania, Italy and Austria.

The intense rain has been attributed to a phenomenon known as the gota fría, or “cold drop”, which occurs when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Mediterranean. This creates atmospheric instability, causing warm, saturated air to rise rapidly, leading to heavy rain and thunderstorms.

Scientists say extreme weather events such as heatwaves and storms are becoming more intense because of the climate crisis. Warmer air can hold more water vapour.

In a televised statement on Wednesday morning, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called for unity, solidarity and vigilance. “We mustn’t let our guard down because the weather front is still wreaking havoc and we can’t say that this devastating episode is over,” he said.

“There are still weather warnings in Andalucía, Valencia, Aragón, Castilla y León, in Catalonia, in Extremadura, in Navarre, in La Rioja and in Ceuta. That’s why I’m asking people in those areas to take special care: to stay off the roads; to avoid travelling close to ravines, riverbanks and riverbeds, and to heed the advice of the emergency services and of the police. No one should be putting their life at risk.”

By 6pm local time, a red weather warning remained in place for the zone around Jerez de la Frontera in southern Andalucía, while orange warnings were still in force in the same region for Cádiz, Seville and the area close to the strait of Gibraltar.

The prime minister said Spain had experienced more than its fair share of natural and health emergencies in recent years, mentioning the Covid pandemic, Storm Filomena in January 2021, and the volcanic eruptions in the Canary Islands that year. He said such adversity had often brought out the best in the country.

“We’re going to lend a hand and help those who can’t get into their homes or who are looking for relatives or friends or loved ones,” he said. “But most of all, right now, we’re going to stand with those who are suffering the loss of their loved ones.”

Three days of national mourning were declared and Spain’s congress held a minute’s silence on Wednesday to commemorate the dead.

King Felipe offered his support to the families of the dead and missing, saying he was heartbroken by the news of the flooding and deaths. “I’m sending strength, encouragement and all the necessary support to all those affected,” he said. “We recognise and appreciate all the local and regional authorities and the emergency and security services as they continue with the titanic task they have been carrying out since the very first moment.”

By 10am on Wednesday, the rains in Valencia had subsided. But Spain’s national weather service forecast more storms on Thursday, with the rains moving to the north-east of the Iberian peninsula.

A 71-year-old British man has died after he was rescued from the floods in Spain, a local government leader has said.

He died hours after being rescued from his home on the outskirts of Alhaurin de la Torre, Málaga, the president of the Andalusian government said on Wednesday.

Juanma Moreno added that the man, who has not been named, died in hospital after suffering hypothermia and cardiac arrests.

He paid respects to the Briton’s family in the statement on X.

At least 95 people have died in eastern Spain after flash floods swept away cars, turned village streets into rivers and disrupted rail lines and major roads in the worst natural disaster to hit the nation in recent memory.

Emergency services in the eastern region of Valencia confirmed a death toll of 62 people on Wednesday.

The central government office for Castilla La Mancha region added that an 88-year-old woman was found dead in the city of Cuenca.

Rainstorms on Tuesday caused flooding in a wide swathe of southern and eastern Spain, stretching from Málaga to Valencia.

Floods of mud-coloured water tumbled vehicles down streets at high speeds, while pieces of wood swirled in the water with household items.

Police and rescue services used helicopters to lift people from their homes and rubber boats to reach drivers trapped on the roofs of cars.

The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said dozens of towns had been flooded.

“For those who are looking for their loved ones, all of Spain feels your pain,” he said in a televised address.

“Our priority is to help you. We are putting all the resources necessary so that we can recover from this tragedy.”

A giant sculpture of a hand with a disapproving face that has ominously presided over Wellington’s civic square for five years will soon wave its final goodbye to the city, prompting relief from the capital’s mayor and sorrow from those who came to love him.

The work, called Quasi, is by Melbourne-based New Zealand artist Ronnie van Hout, who made the “partial self-portrait” to sit in his home town of Christchurch after the devastating 2011 earthquake. The polystyrene and resin sculpture is also a reference to Quasimodo, from Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Wellington mayor Tory Whanau said Quasi had generated plenty of conversation and curiosity in Wellington, and left a true mark on the city. “Quasi also showcased to us why it’s important to have diverse art and creative projects in our city,” she said. “That said, I’m looking forward to seeing Quasi head somewhere else for a change.”

Wellington central MP Tamatha Paul said many Wellingtonians were initially appalled by the sculpture and were disturbed by its unintended resemblance to former US president Donald Trump.

But Quasi had since “become iconic” for the city, and achieved its purpose as an artwork, Paul said. “People had quite strong views about it and I guess that’s probably the essence of art – being open to everybody’s different interpretations, and the love and the hate that people had for it.”

Quasi spent three years atop the Christchurch Art Gallery, before relocating to Wellington. One Christchurch art critic was so incensed with its presence, he felt compelled to list 10 reasons why it should go, including that the sculpture’s ring finger “appears to be inappropriately and belligerently pointing at pedestrians and office workers”.

His arrival in the capital in 2019, to sit above the City Gallery Wellington, elicited a polarising response, with some residents labelling the sculpture a “nightmarish fever dream” or a “hideous malevolent being”, and others believing it would draw people to the gallery.

“Everything comes to an end eventually,” van Hout told Associated Press. “I am sure it will be missed, but even Lovecraftian nightmares have to return to where they came from, and now you only have an absence to reflect on.”

Quasi will depart on Saturday in the same way he arrived – helicoptered over the city like a sinister deity – where he will eventually be transported to an undisclosed venue in Australia, the gallery said in a statement.

Like his namesake, Quasi was “misshapen and misunderstood, he was hated by the people but turned out to be a great tragic-romantic hero – a beautiful soul,” the gallery added.

The gallery’s Judith Cooke said it had been a privilege to home Quasi “who has had a huge impact on Wellington, generating vigorous discussion about art, in keeping with the gallery”. “Quasi will continue to bring his big personality wherever he goes,” she said.

People writing on social media expressed either delight or devastation at his impending departure.

Some were happy to hear the “ridiculous” and “repulsive” sculpture was leaving.

Others wrote about how, initially disgusted with the addition to Wellington’s skyline, Quasi had grown on them, while a great many others expressed sadness.

“I’ll miss seeing your beautiful, but controversial, face,” one user wrote. Another said: “Quasi was such a perfect fit for keeping Wellington weird.”

Quasi caused a stir from day one, said Jane Black, the chair of the Wellington Sculpture Trust. “He will be missed and leaves a Quasi-shaped hole on our civic skyline.”

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke walked off stage during a solo show in Melbourne on Wednesday night after being heckled by a pro-Palestine protester in the crowd.

Footage from concert-goers captured a man in the crowd yelling at Yorke. While it was difficult to hear his full comments, he said “the Israeli genocide of Gaza” and then referred to the death toll, saying that “half of them were children”.

Yorke responded: “Come up here and say that. Right here, come on. Hop up on the fucking stage and say what you wanna say. Don’t stand there like a coward, come here and say it. You want to piss on everybody’s night?”

The protester then yelled out: “How many dead children will it take for you to condemn the genocide in Gaza?”

Yorke responded, “OK, you do it, see you later then”, and walked offstage.

He returned a few minutes later to perform his final song of the evening, Radiohead’s 1997 hit Karma Police.

The incident happened near the end of the concert at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, the second of two in Melbourne as part of Yorke’s Everything tour, featuring music from across his career, including solo material and songs from Radiohead and the Smile. He is scheduled to play the Sydney Opera House forecourt on Friday 1 November and Saturday 2 November.

Yorke has previously criticised the pro-Palestine Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and has defended Radiohead’s decision to perform in Israel.

Radiohead played Tel Aviv in 2017, defying a BDS-led call to boycott the country that included public criticism from figures including the British director Ken Loach. In a statement on X at that time, responding directly to Loach, Yorke said: “Playing in a country isn’t the same as endorsing the government. We’ve played in Israel for over 20 years through a succession of governments, some more liberal than others. As we have in America. We don’t endorse Netanyahu any more than Trump, but we still play in America.”

Radiohead has a long history with Israel, with their early hit Creep first finding success on Israeli radio, and the band has performed in the country throughout their career. But pressure on the band and its members to boycott Israel has grown over the past year.

In May, Radiohead and the Smile musician Jonny Greenwood was criticised for playing a gig in Tel Aviv with Israeli artist Dudu Tassa, with the BDS movement accusing him of “artwashing genocide”.

Responding in a statement on his social media accounts, Greenwood, who is married to Israeli visual artist Sharona Katan and has collaborated with Israeli musicians previously, lamented “the silencing of this – or any – artistic effort made by Israeli Jews”.

“No art is as ‘important’ as stopping all the death and suffering around us,” he said. “How can it be? But doing nothing seems like a worse option. And silencing Israeli artists for being born Jewish in Israel doesn’t seem like any way to reach an understanding between the two sides of this apparently endless conflict.”

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke walked off stage during a solo show in Melbourne on Wednesday night after being heckled by a pro-Palestine protester in the crowd.

Footage from concert-goers captured a man in the crowd yelling at Yorke. While it was difficult to hear his full comments, he said “the Israeli genocide of Gaza” and then referred to the death toll, saying that “half of them were children”.

Yorke responded: “Come up here and say that. Right here, come on. Hop up on the fucking stage and say what you wanna say. Don’t stand there like a coward, come here and say it. You want to piss on everybody’s night?”

The protester then yelled out: “How many dead children will it take for you to condemn the genocide in Gaza?”

Yorke responded, “OK, you do it, see you later then”, and walked offstage.

He returned a few minutes later to perform his final song of the evening, Radiohead’s 1997 hit Karma Police.

The incident happened near the end of the concert at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, the second of two in Melbourne as part of Yorke’s Everything tour, featuring music from across his career, including solo material and songs from Radiohead and the Smile. He is scheduled to play the Sydney Opera House forecourt on Friday 1 November and Saturday 2 November.

Yorke has previously criticised the pro-Palestine Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and has defended Radiohead’s decision to perform in Israel.

Radiohead played Tel Aviv in 2017, defying a BDS-led call to boycott the country that included public criticism from figures including the British director Ken Loach. In a statement on X at that time, responding directly to Loach, Yorke said: “Playing in a country isn’t the same as endorsing the government. We’ve played in Israel for over 20 years through a succession of governments, some more liberal than others. As we have in America. We don’t endorse Netanyahu any more than Trump, but we still play in America.”

Radiohead has a long history with Israel, with their early hit Creep first finding success on Israeli radio, and the band has performed in the country throughout their career. But pressure on the band and its members to boycott Israel has grown over the past year.

In May, Radiohead and the Smile musician Jonny Greenwood was criticised for playing a gig in Tel Aviv with Israeli artist Dudu Tassa, with the BDS movement accusing him of “artwashing genocide”.

Responding in a statement on his social media accounts, Greenwood, who is married to Israeli visual artist Sharona Katan and has collaborated with Israeli musicians previously, lamented “the silencing of this – or any – artistic effort made by Israeli Jews”.

“No art is as ‘important’ as stopping all the death and suffering around us,” he said. “How can it be? But doing nothing seems like a worse option. And silencing Israeli artists for being born Jewish in Israel doesn’t seem like any way to reach an understanding between the two sides of this apparently endless conflict.”

The Dodgers are World Series champions for an eighth time after roaring back from five runs down to win 7-6 over the New York Yankees in a tightly wound Game 5 clincher on Wednesday night in the Bronx.

The Yankees appeared bound to send a series they’d once trailed 3-0 back to Los Angeles when Aaron Judge and Jazz Chisholm Jr pounced on Dodgers starter Jack Flaherty with back-to-back homers in the first inning, staking a 3-0 lead before a delirious sellout crowd of 49,263. Alex Verdugo’s RBI single in the second and Giancarlo Stanton’s solo shot in the third extended the lead to 5-0.

But the Dodgers pulled level with a five-run fifth behind a series of dreadful errors from the Yankees and RBI hits from Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and Teoscar Hernández, all off Yankee starter Gerrit Cole, who’d brought a no-hitter into the frame.

The Yankees nosed ahead 6-5 on a Stanton sacrifice fly in the sixth, but the Dodgers went ahead for good in the eighth on a pair of sacrifice flies by Gavin Lux and Mookie Betts.

New York made a final push when Judge reached second on a one-out double in the bottom of the eighth and Chisholm walked on five pitches to set the table for Stanton. But the Yankees’ $325m designated hitter popped out to short right-field before Anthony Rizzo struck out on a nasty 85mph sweeper to end the threat.

Game 3 winner Walker Buehler struck out Verdugo swinging for the final out after many of the Yankee faithful had already filed out of the stadium.

The home runs by Judge and Chisholm marked the first back-to-back homers by the Yankees in a World Series since Thurman Munson and Reggie Jackson in Game 5 of the 1978 Fall Classic, but the early outburst wasn’t enough to fend off the National League champions.

None of the 25 teams to have faced a 3-0 deficit in the World Series have managed to extend it to a Game 6 much less come back to win. The Yankees are only the fourth team to have avoided a sweep and even forced a fifth game, joining the 1970 Cincinnati Reds, the 1937 New York Giants and the 1910 Chicago Cubs.

Full report to follow.

Concerns are growing about the health of Xu Zhiyong, China’s most prominent imprisoned human rights lawyer, who is thought to have been on hunger strike for nearly a month.

Xu, a scholar and leading figure in China’s embattled civil rights movement, started his hunger strike on 4 October, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an NGO. He is protesting against what he describes as inhumane treatment in prison, including lack of contact with his family and intensive surveillance by other prisoners, according to reports released through his relatives.

Xu has been detained since February 2020 after he attended an informal gathering of lawyers and activists who had met in December 2019 to discuss civil society and current affairs. Several of the meeting’s participants were arrested, including Ding Jiaxi, another human rights lawyer whose case was handled with Xu’s. The men were convicted of subverting state power. Last year, Xu was sentenced to 14 years and Ding to 12 years, lengthy punishments that the UN’s human rights chief criticised.

It is Xu’s second time behind bars. In 2014, he was sentenced to four years in jail for “gathering crowds to disrupt public order”.

Xu is the founding father of the New Citizens’ Movement, a loose collective of scholars, lawyers and activists who called for improved civil rights and government transparency. The movement has largely been squashed in the era of Xi Jinping, China’s leader since 2012, who has cracked down on civil society.

Since the death of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel peace prize-winning activist who died in 2017 while serving an 11-year jail sentence, Xu is considered by many to be the most significant dissident in China.

“I would say that Xu Zhiyong at this point is China’s most important living activist,” said Thomas Kellogg, the executive director of the Centre for Asian Law at Georgetown University, who worked with Xu when Xu was a visiting law professor at Yale University. “His career as a lawyer and an activist tracks the broader trend of civil society development and then the crackdown under Xi Jinping.”

Maya Wang, the associate China director at Human Rights Watch, said: “Given that this is Xu’s second imprisonment, he is certainly not someone who is new to Chinese prisons and their mistreatment and torture of prisoners. The fact that he is going on hunger strike now probably testifies to how harshly and badly he is being treated.”

On 23 October, Xu was able to speak on the phone to a relative. He said he had not been able to communicate with his partner, Li Qiaochu, an activist recently released from prison herself. “You must tell Qiaochu and my friends about my hunger strike, otherwise my hunger strike will be in vain. I will continue to insist until they guarantee the right of communication between Qiaochu and me,” Xu said, according to a statement published by his supporters.

Xu’s imprisonment and the difficulty of maintaining contact with the outside world has reduced his fame inside China, where he was once a well-known figure.

In 2009, charges against him for tax evasion were dropped, reportedly because of a public outcry. But Li Fangping, a human rights lawyer and friend of Xu’s, said the Chinese government had been effective at silencing Xu’s impact. “They want him to disappear completely, and they want no one to remember him,” Li said. “There are many young people and lawyers who haven’t heard of Xu Zhiyong today.”

Xu is being held in Lunan prison in Shandong province. The prison could not be reached for comment.

Additional research by Chi-hui Lin

Eight of Mexico’s 11 supreme court judges have submitted their resignations after controversial judicial reforms, the top court has said.

In a move that has sparked diplomatic tensions and opposition street protests, Mexico is set to become the world’s only country to allow voters to choose all judges, at every level, starting next year.

The eight justices – including president Norma Pina – declined to stand for election in June 2025, a statement said, adding that one of the resignations would take effect in November and the rest next August.

The announcement came as the supreme court prepares to consider a proposal to invalidate the election of judges and magistrates. President Claudia Sheinbaum, however, has said that the court lacks the authority to reverse a constitutional reform approved by congress.

“Eight people intend to change a reform about the people of Mexico … Do they realise the magnitude?” she told a news conference on Wednesday.

A day earlier Sheinbaum suggested the judges’ real motive was to protect their retirement benefits.

“If they resign now, they will leave with all their retirement benefits,” Sheinbaum said. “If they do not resign now, they will no longer have their retirement benefits … which is a lot of money,” she added.

Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who enacted the reforms in September before leaving office, argued the changes were needed to clean up a “rotten” judiciary serving the interests of the political and economic elite.

Critics fear that elected judges could be swayed by politics and vulnerable to pressure from powerful drug cartels that regularly use bribery and intimidation to influence officials.

During his six years in office, López Obrador often criticised the supreme court, which impeded some of his policies in areas such as energy and security.

Sheinbaum, a close ally of López Obrador who became Mexico’s first female president on 1 October, strongly supported the judicial reforms.

The changes sparked diplomatic friction with key economic partners the United States and Canada, upset financial markets and prompted a series of protests by judicial workers and other opponents.

Washington warned that the reforms threaten a relationship that relies on investor confidence in the Mexican legal framework.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres has warned Israel could carry out the “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza if the international community does not make a determined stand to prevent it.

Guterres made his appeal at a time of mounting civilian casualties from the Israeli bombardment of northern Gaza. A strike on Tuesday in Beit Lahiya district killed at least 93 people, in what the UN said was just one of at least seven “mass casualty incidents” across Gaza in the past week.

At the same time, aid deliveries to Gaza are reported to have fallen to their lowest level since the start of the war, leading to growing allegations that Israel’s true intention is to drive the remaining Palestinian population out of at least part of Gaza.

The UN secretary general, speaking on the sidelines of the COP16 biodiversity conference in Colombia, suggested that the “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza had been prevented until now by its people’s refusal to succumb to the intense pressure to flee their homes and by Arab resolve not to accept mass population transfers.

“The intention might be for the Palestinians to leave Gaza, for others to occupy it,” Guterres told the Guardian. “But there has been – and I pay tribute to the courage and the resilience of the Palestinian people and to the determination of the Arab world – [an effort] to avoid the ethnic cleansing becoming a reality.

“We will do everything possible to help them remain there and to avoid ethnic cleansing that might occur if there is not strong determination from the international community,” he added.

Jordan’s foreign secretary, Ayman Safadi, last week told the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken that ethnic cleansing was already happening in Gaza. Israel’s military denies systematically trying to force Palestinians from the territory.

There has been broad international condemnation of Tuesday’s bombing of a five-storey residential building in Beit Lahiya, in which there were many children among the 93 fatalities. The US called it “a horrifying incident with a horrifying result” and on Wednesday the French foreign ministry said it condemned the bombing and “recent Israeli strikes on hospitals in the north”.

“The siege imposed on north Gaza must be ended immediately,” the French statement said.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was aware of the reports of civilian casualties in Beit Lahiya and was looking into it.

Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, urged IDF troops to “continue exerting as much [military] pressure on Hamas as possible” to bring about the return of Israeli hostages. The Mossad director, David Barnea, met his CIA counterpart, Bill Burns, and the Qatari prime minister, Mohammed Al Thani, in Doha earlier in the week amid reports of a new proposal for a short-term truce to allow some civilian respite and the return of hostages held by Hamas, but there was no confirmation of a breakthrough after five months of talks.

Israel kept up its bombing campaign in Lebanon against Hezbollah, calling on the resident population to leave the Baalbek region in the north-east of the country. Lebanon’s health ministry later said at least 19 people, including eight women were killed in separate Israeli strikes in the region.

Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, said on Wednesday he would agree to a ceasefire with Israel under terms Hezbollah found acceptable but said a viable deal had yet to be presented.

In Gaza, the intense bombardment of Beit Lahiya continued with 19 people killed in separate strikes overnight, and 10 more deaths on Wednesday. The injured people and the dead were taken on donkey carts to the nearby Kamal Adwan hospital, which is barely functional after medical staff have fled or reportedly been detained, and medical supplies and fuel are almost completely depleted.

“Only two … out of 20 health service points and two hospitals, Kamal Adwan and Al-Awda, remain functional, although partially, hampering the delivery of life-saving health services,” the UN humanitarian affairs agency, OCHA, said in a daily bulletin.

“Across the Gaza Strip, October has seen very limited food distribution due to severe supply shortages,” the agency said. It said 1.7 million people, 80% of the population, did not receive rations.

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), said on X: “Today, even as we look into the faces of children in Gaza, some of whom we know will die tomorrow, the rules-based international order is crumbling in a repetition of the horrors that led to the establishment of the United Nations, and in violation of commitments to prevent their recurrence.”

On Monday, the Israeli Knesset voted to ban Unrwa operations in the country within the next three months, in defiance of near-unanimous global appeals, which could further prevent aid distribution in Gaza and the West Bank.

A Los Angeles woman has filed a lawsuit alleging that Metro Boomin, a Grammy-nominated producer who has worked with some of the biggest names in hip-hop and R&B, raped her in 2016 and she became pregnant from the attack.

The producer’s attorney calls the accusations false and said the lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles superior court is “a pure shakedown”.

Vanessa LeMaistre, 38, says in the lawsuit that she became friends with Metro Boomin, whose legal name is Leland Wayne, after the death of her nine-month-old son. While visiting him in a recording studio months later, she blacked out and woke on a bed to find Wayne raping her, the lawsuit alleges.

She learned she was pregnant from the attack a few weeks later, the suit says.

An attorney for the 31-year-old St Louis-born producer immediately denied the allegations.

“This is a pure shakedown. These are false accusations,” Lawrence Hinkle II said in a statement Wednesday. “Mr. Wayne refused to pay her months ago, and he refuses to pay her now. Mr. Wayne will defend himself in court. He will file a claim for malicious prosecution once he prevails.”

Wayne curated the soundtrack to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and co-produced most of the songs on the album. His 2022 album Heroes & Villains, featuring contributions from John Legend, The Weeknd and Travis Scott, was nominated for a Grammy for best rap album. He has also worked with Future, Kendrick Lamar, Offset, 21 Savage and A$AP Rocky.

LeMaistre said in the suit that she met Wayne in the spring of 2016 at a party in Las Vegas and in the months that followed they met up several times and she “believed that they had bonded over the ability of music to help people in their darkest moments”.

Around September, she visited him at a California recording studio where she was given a shot of alcohol and took half a bar of Xanax.

“The next thing Ms. LeMaistre can recall is waking up on a bed in a different location with Wayne raping her and being completely unable to move or make a sound,” the lawsuit says. “She was in and out of consciousness for an unknown amount of time but awoke again at some point to Wayne performing oral sex on her.”

At no point was she able to consent, the lawsuit says.

She learned she was pregnant a few weeks later, and there was no question that the child was Wayne’s, the suit says. She had an abortion soon after.

The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly, as LeMaistre has. She is named in the lawsuit and consented to being publicly identified through her attorneys.

Her lawsuit alleging sexual battery and gender violence seeks damages to be determined at trial.