Less than a fortnight before polling day, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are locked in a nail-bitingly close US presidential election race, triggering pessimism among Democrats and confidence among Republicans – even though polls suggest both candidates have a near equal chance of entering the White House.

The Guardian’s 10-day polling tracking average shows Harris, the Democratic nominee and US vice-president, maintaining the single-point advantage over her Republican rival she had a week earlier, 47% to 46%.

Surveys for the seven battleground states are equally cliffhanging and provide little obvious clue as to who will reach the threshold of 270 electoral votes essential for victory.

According to poll averages, Harris leads by a single point in Michigan and by less than 1% in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada. Trump has a two-point lead in North Carolina and a one-point lead in Arizona.

Taken at face value, the figures are no disaster for Harris and hardly represent a triumph for Trump. If they match the outcome on 5 November, Harris will win a majority of votes in the electoral college.

But you would never know this from the jarringly different moods in the two camps.

Amid increasingly apocalyptic warnings from Harris that Trump represents fascism and dictatorship-in-waiting, her Democratic supporters have emitted an air of panic in recent days.

“A growing number of top Democrats tell us privately they feel Vice-President Kamala Harris will lose – even though polls show a coin-toss finish 11 days from now,” Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei wrote in Axios on Friday.

“Our private conversations with Democrats inside and outside her campaign reveal broad concern that little she does, says – or tries – seems to move the needle. Democrats are already starting to point fingers at who’d be more responsible for a Harris loss – President Biden for dragging his feet, or Harris herself. ‘Going down?’ a top Democratic official texted.”

The Trump campaign, meanwhile, appears “shockingly confident”, talking in “granular detail” about White House posts and policy playbooks for next year.

Buoying them is evidence that the former president’s support level appears unaffected by his ominous campaign rhetoric in which he has threatened to jail his opponents, or by what should have been damaging revelations from his former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, that he repeatedly praised Hitler when he was in the Oval Office.

Yet the conflicting moods are not justified by the numbers, some pollsters say.

While fresh polls have shown Trump closing the gap on Harris’s previous lead and even edging ahead in some cases, Harris supporters still have reasons to be reasonably cheerful.

The latest data from the polling organisation FiveThirtyEight showed that Trump’s recent surge – where his chances of winning overtook Harris’s – may have peaked. The site’s latest odds in favour of a Trump win, based on a collection of nationwide and state data, was down from 53% on 21 October to 51% against 49% for Harris by the evening of 24 October. An Economist forecast also showed a dip in Trump’s chances from a Wednesday peak of 56% to 53% the following day

CNN’s polling expert, Harry Enten, put the gap between perception and reality bluntly in a midweek segment on the network.

“Kamala Harris, based upon … polling data … has a very clear path at this particular point, just based upon [battleground] states, to 270 electoral votes,” he said. “The bottom line is, I don’t understand the Democratic panic right now, because the path is clear.”

The key to that panic may lie in the motivation factors of Harris supporters, among whom the prospect of a second Trump presidency provokes alarm.

Some 52% of Harris voters said they would be angry if Trump wins, according to data cited by Enten, while just 42% of the Republican nominee’s backers said they would feel the same way about a Harris victory.

“I think Democrats feel like there’s a lot more on the line in this election, and that’s why they’re panicking,” said Enten.

A poll conducted by Morning Consult of more than 4,500 voters from the seven swing states tended to support that conclusion.

While consistent with other surveys that the two candidates were neck-and-neck, it showed that pro-Harris voters in all states are more strongly against Trump than the former president’s supporters are against her.

In a sign that Harris’s characterisation of Trump as “unhinged and unstable” may be resonating, the poll showed that 49% of battleground state voters believed the Republican nominee to be “dangerous” – compared with 34% who said the same about her. Harris also heavily outscored Trump in categories of “too old”, “mentally fit”, “honest” and “cares about somebody like me”.

Trump, who is 78, was rated “too old” by more than half of the voters, 51%, compared with just 5% who said the same of Harris. The vice-president, who celebrated her 60th birthday this week, was elevated to the top of the Democratic ticket following concerns about the advanced age and mental acuity of Joe Biden, prompting the president to stand aside as the party’s candidate in July.

Donald Trump sat down for three hours on Friday with Joe Rogan, telling the US’s most-listened-to podcaster that the biggest mistake he made during his presidency was hiring “disloyal people”.

Those comments – which also described “neocons”, or neoconservatives who generally aim to promote democracy, as “bad people” – came days after the Trump White House’s former chief of staff John Kelly said the Republican nominee in the 5 November election met the definition of a fascist. Kelly also said Trump had no understanding of the US constitution and made admiring statements about generals commanded by Adolf Hitler, whose regime systematically murdered 6 million Jews as part of the Holocaust during the second world war.

At a rally on Friday that he held apart from his conversation with Rogan, Trump described Kelly as a “total whack job”.

Trump used his interview with Rogan on Friday to repeat his claim that his defeat in the 2020 presidential election against Joe Biden was a “rigged” outcome. But Trump changed the subject when Rogan asked him if he was ever going to release evidence proving the election was “stolen”.

Trump also said: “If I win, this will be my last election.” That was a true statement because the constitution would bar him from serving beyond a second term in the White House. Yet it seemed to contradict an earlier campaign promise that he would not run for the Oval Office again if he lost to Kamala Harris in the 5 November election.

In another part of the show, the former president tried to address the age-related questions which forced Biden, 81, to drop out of seeking re-election – and which have since been redirected at Trump, 78.

Trump tried to convince Rogan that Biden was in cognitive decline because of brain surgery.

“It’s not his age,” Trump said. “Those are not good operations.”

Rogan alluded to how brain surgeries saved Biden’s life after he endured two aneurysms in the 1980s, when he was a US senator for Delaware before serving as vice-president to Barack Obama and then winning the presidency himself.

The reach of Rogan’s show, estimated at 14 million listeners on Spotify with an 80% male audience split between Democrats, Republicans and independents, has developed a reputation as a useful platform for seekers of political office.

But the interview, which was recorded in Rogan’s Austin, Texas, studio, delayed Trump’s arrival at an outdoor rally in Traverse City, Michigan, in cold 50F (10C) temperatures. The Associated Press reported that some rallygoers were already leaving by the time Trump arrived.

The rally was expected to begin at 7.30pm, but by that time Trump was only then leaving Texas. The ex-president recorded a video from his plane urging his supporters to stay, seeming to suggest that many rallygoers would not have work the next day because it was Friday and promising: “We’re going to have a good time tonight.”

“I am so sorry,” Trump said when he arrived. “We got so tied up, and I figured you wouldn’t mind too much because we’re trying to win.”

Meanwhile, Harris was in Houston, Texas, with superstar singer Beyoncé to drive her message opposing the conservative state’s abortion ban as she attempts to become the first woman ever elected as US president.

“We are at the precipice of an incredible shift,” the Houston-raised singer told the crowd of 30,000 people. “Our moment is right now. It’s time for America to sing a new song.”

Donald Trump sat down for three hours on Friday with Joe Rogan, telling the US’s most-listened-to podcaster that the biggest mistake he made during his presidency was hiring “disloyal people”.

Those comments – which also described “neocons”, or neoconservatives who generally aim to promote democracy, as “bad people” – came days after the Trump White House’s former chief of staff John Kelly said the Republican nominee in the 5 November election met the definition of a fascist. Kelly also said Trump had no understanding of the US constitution and made admiring statements about generals commanded by Adolf Hitler, whose regime systematically murdered 6 million Jews as part of the Holocaust during the second world war.

At a rally on Friday that he held apart from his conversation with Rogan, Trump described Kelly as a “total whack job”.

Trump used his interview with Rogan on Friday to repeat his claim that his defeat in the 2020 presidential election against Joe Biden was a “rigged” outcome. But Trump changed the subject when Rogan asked him if he was ever going to release evidence proving the election was “stolen”.

Trump also said: “If I win, this will be my last election.” That was a true statement because the constitution would bar him from serving beyond a second term in the White House. Yet it seemed to contradict an earlier campaign promise that he would not run for the Oval Office again if he lost to Kamala Harris in the 5 November election.

In another part of the show, the former president tried to address the age-related questions which forced Biden, 81, to drop out of seeking re-election – and which have since been redirected at Trump, 78.

Trump tried to convince Rogan that Biden was in cognitive decline because of brain surgery.

“It’s not his age,” Trump said. “Those are not good operations.”

Rogan alluded to how brain surgeries saved Biden’s life after he endured two aneurysms in the 1980s, when he was a US senator for Delaware before serving as vice-president to Barack Obama and then winning the presidency himself.

The reach of Rogan’s show, estimated at 14 million listeners on Spotify with an 80% male audience split between Democrats, Republicans and independents, has developed a reputation as a useful platform for seekers of political office.

But the interview, which was recorded in Rogan’s Austin, Texas, studio, delayed Trump’s arrival at an outdoor rally in Traverse City, Michigan, in cold 50F (10C) temperatures. The Associated Press reported that some rallygoers were already leaving by the time Trump arrived.

The rally was expected to begin at 7.30pm, but by that time Trump was only then leaving Texas. The ex-president recorded a video from his plane urging his supporters to stay, seeming to suggest that many rallygoers would not have work the next day because it was Friday and promising: “We’re going to have a good time tonight.”

“I am so sorry,” Trump said when he arrived. “We got so tied up, and I figured you wouldn’t mind too much because we’re trying to win.”

Meanwhile, Harris was in Houston, Texas, with superstar singer Beyoncé to drive her message opposing the conservative state’s abortion ban as she attempts to become the first woman ever elected as US president.

“We are at the precipice of an incredible shift,” the Houston-raised singer told the crowd of 30,000 people. “Our moment is right now. It’s time for America to sing a new song.”

Georgians have headed to the polls in a pivotal parliamentary election that could determine whether Georgia shifts away from its long-held western orientations towards stronger ties with the Kremlin.

Voters will decide on Saturday whether the Georgian Dream (GD) party, which has been in power since 2012 and steered the country into a conservative course away from the west and closer to Russia, secures another four-year term.

GD was founded by the shadowy billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s and is viewed by many friends and foes alike as Georgia’s most powerful figure, even though he has not held public office for more than a decade.

Casting his vote on Saturday morning, Ivanishvili, whose wealth is estimated to be $7.5bn (£5.8bn) in a country whose GDP is $30bn, said the election was a choice between electing a government for “the Georgian people” and an “agent of a foreign country”.

GD has run its campaign on accusations that the pro-western opposition was trying to pull Georgia into a Ukraine-style conflict. In 2008, Georgia – a country of 3.6 million people nestled in the Caucasus mountains – fought a war with Russia that lasted five days but left deep scars, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has left some in the country wary of the possible consequences of provoking Russia by moving closer to the west.

The party has also been accused by critics of plans to move the country into an authoritarian direction after Ivanishvili vowed to ban all major opposition parties and remove opposition lawmakers if his party was re-elected.

“The government is openly pledging to transform Georgia into a one-party state – a move unprecedented in modern Georgian history,” said Tina Khidasheli, the chair of the non-governmental organisation Civic Idea and a former defence minister.

Outside polling stations in central Tbilisi, some voters echoed this sentiment.

“This is the most important day in our modern history, the situation is very dangerous,” said Mariam Khvedelidze, a 23-year-old student who voted for Save Georgia, an opposition bloc centred around the party of Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president who is in prison on charges of abuse of power that his allies say are politically motivated.

Support for the pro-western opposition groups generally comes from urban and younger voters, who envision their political future with the EU.

“Our democracy and future in Europe is at stake. We can not become puppets of the Kremlin,” Khvedelidze added.

But other Georgians said they had voted for the ruling party, believing it was the only force that could keep the country out of war with Russia.

“Right now, we need stability and friendly relations with Moscow,” said Elene Kiknadze, a 74-year-old woman. Voting for GD, Kiknadze said, would also ensure Georgia would keep its “traditions”, referring to its conservative values, including opposition to rights for LGBTQ+ people. “Let Europe have their freedoms. We don’t need gay parades in this country,” she added.

The ruling Georgian government, aligned with the deeply conservative and influential Orthodox church, has sought to galvanise anti-liberal sentiments by campaigning on “family values” and criticising what it portrays as western excesses.

In the summer, the parliament passed legislation imposing sweeping restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights, a move critics say mirrors laws enacted in neighbouring Russia, where authorities have implemented a series of repressive measures against sexual minorities.

Georgia’s notoriously divided opposition has attempted to unite by forming four pro-European blocs, which have all endorsed the Georgian charter, an initiative proposed by the pro-western president, Salome Zourabichvili, urging them to prevent GD from forming a coalition and remaining in power.

The four blocs have vowed to form a coalition government to oust GD from power and put Georgia back on track to join the EU. “I am confident that Georgians will choose for the European future,” Tinatin Bokuchava, the leader of the biggest opposition party, United National Movement (UNM), said on Friday.

The EU granted Georgia candidate membership status last year but has put its application on hold in response to a controversial “foreign agents” bill that was passed in May requiring media and NGOs receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “agents of foreign influence”.

The bill, which triggered weeks of mass protests in the spring of this year, has been labelled a “Russian law” by critics, who liken it to legislation introduced by the Kremlin a decade earlier to silence political dissent in the media and elsewhere.

Independent NGOs have warned that GD will attempt to undermine the parliamentary elections, relying on their “administrative resources” – an umbrella term that includes pressing state employees to vote and offering cash handouts to mostly rural voters.

On Saturday morning, several videos circulated online appearing to show ballot stuffing and voter intimidation at various polling stations across Georgia. “We are reporting dozens, if not hundreds of electoral violations taking place across the country,” UNM wrote on X.

Predicting the elections is hard, given the absence of reliable polling. Surveys sponsored by the ruling party predict a landslide victory for GD, while media sympathetic to the opposing sides have published rival polls, with pro-opposition broadcasters forecasting the ruling party will lose its majority.

Observers generally agree that GD will become the biggest party but might come short of claiming a majority, and struggle to form a government, with all other blocs refusing to collaborate with it.

The opposition has warned that the ruling party may attempt to manipulate the results, which could trigger mass protests, potentially followed by a harsh police crackdown.

“I certainly don’t expect Georgians to tolerate electoral fraud. People won’t stand by as their future is taken from them,” said opposition leader Bokuchava.

Maria Elena Cárdenas is 76 and lives in a municipal shelter on Amargura Street in Havana’s colonial old town. The building has an elegant past, but for the last few days Maria has been cooking with sticks she had found on the street.

“You know, we Cubans manage the best we can,” she said. She lives in the shelter because her home collapsed, a regular occurrence in the poorest, oldest parts of the beautiful city.

Cuba’s government has spent the last days attempting to get the island’s national grid functioning after repeated island-wide blackouts. Without power, sleep becomes difficult in the heat, food spoils and the water supply fails.

Parts of Cuba’s communist system still function: the municipality sent Maria food. “We are three families here,” she said. “I live alone, the lady who lives next to me [does] also, and there are two children, the children’s mother, her aunt and an elderly man.”

A week after the blackout, the island has returned to the status quo ante with regular power cuts of up to 20 hours a day. But the crisis has left a deep, melancholy dread about the future.

“Cubans have a cheerful idiosyncrasy,” said Julio César Rodríguez, 52. “Even when things are bad we laugh. But this is really bad.”

This current crisis began on 17 October, when an order went out for all non-essential state workers to go home.

The effort to save power didn’t save the system, and a day later, the island went dark. Antonio Guiteras, one of the main power stations, shut down, crashing all the other big generating stations in the system.

“It’s very hard to restart a power station,” said a retired engineer from Antonio Guiteras, who asked to remain anonymous. “You need to produce a lot of electricity just to get it going.”

Antonio Guiteras was built in 1989, and is now battered and obsolete. “The truth is that it was built rotten,” said the engineer. He told harrowing stories of working with faulty safety equipment, political management who would disappear when problems arose and a system long pushed to its limit.

“There was a scheduled maintenance programme, but it was never followed,” he said. “The requirements were too tight. We were told: ‘The factory has to produce, so patch it up.’”

The government acknowledges the parlous state of its system, blaming the 62-year old-trade embargo imposed by the United States. President Miguel Díaz-Canel said “financial and energy persecution” made it difficult to “import fuel and other resources necessary”.

For most of its existence, Cuba’s government has relied on the largesse of allies – first Russia and then Venezuela. But those countries, facing their own difficulties, have cut supplies heavily. “It’s like trying to keep a sinking ship afloat with corks,” said one European diplomat.

In a televised address, Cuba’s prime minister, Manuel Marrero, said the emerging private sector would have to pay more for its power, while the government looks to renewables to secure its future energy needs.

The island is blessed by sunshine, but the multiple attempts to start solar projects have nearly all failed when the companies involved failed to get paid. “The government isn’t stupid,” said a foreign businessman. “But there is no money.”

Instead a deal has been cut with a Chinese firm to provide the materials for a slew of solar farms in return for access to Cuba’s nickel deposits. But with well over 10% of Cuba’s population having fled the economic crisis on the island in the last two years, there is scepticism whether the expertise remains to build such systems.

Joe Biden has said that while he’s “tough” on the Cuban government, he supports the Cuban people. But Washington could do much more help Cuba, argued the US academic William LeoGrande in the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

“The proponents of regime change should be careful what they wish for,” he wrote. “A collapse of the regime would be a humanitarian disaster, spurring an emigration tsunami far larger than what we have seen so far. A breakdown of social order could unleash a surge of criminal violence.”

Unlike during previous power cuts, there has been very little protest this time , beyond the bashing of some pots and pans. People seem exhausted and government ministers have made it clear that the government will come down hard on any “indecent” behaviour.

Recent months have seen a new round of intimidation of journalists, with several forced to flee the country. On Wednesday, Amnesty International declared four people currently in Cuban jails – the journalist Félix Navarro and his daughter, Sayli Navarro, as well as protesters Roberto Pérez Fonseca and Luis Robles – as “prisoners of conscience”.

Meanwhile, one crisis begets another. Failures have been reported in the equally obsolete water supply system. Six hundred thousand people lack regular running water, but the blackouts appear to have multiplied that number by damaging pumps and pipes. Much of Havana is dry.

Dariel Ramírez was sitting on his stoop in the old town. He didn’t have much to eat because he had shared his stored food with others before it spoiled.

Asked how he was preparing for any repeat of the power crisis, he pointed towards the Museum of the Revolution, where the central symbol of communist rule is displayed: the boat on which Fidel and Raúl Castro arrived from Mexico in 1956.

“If this happens again, we need to prepare the Granma yacht,” he said. “So we can all sail away.”

Additional reporting by Eileen Sosin

An ancient Egyptian sarcophagus has been a prized object in Perth Museum since it was donated to the Scottish collection in 1936. Now the face of the woman mummified and buried inside it about 2,500 years ago has been brought to life in a dramatic digital reconstruction.

The curators and expert who recreated her believe she was a black woman from the kingdom of Kush, one of the largest empires in the ancient world, which took control of Upper Egypt and whose lands included modern-day Sudan. The reconstructed head and her sarcophagus will feature in the museum’s forthcoming exhibition, Waters Rising, opening on 8 November.

Dr Chris Rynn, a craniofacial anthropologist and forensic artist, realised the woman inside the sarcophagus had a skull shape that was not classically Kemetic ancient Egyptian. He told the Observer: “The skull shape doesn’t look like any of the ancient Egyptians that I’ve seen before. Kemetic skulls normally have narrow long craniums, more prominent narrow noses and longer faces.

“As you reconstruct the face, you’ve got no control over its shape because it’s all locked to the skull by the scientific method. I don’t have any artistic licence until the final stage, when the photo-realistic textures and colour are added.”

Rynn believes it is highly likely the woman was black, and that this theory matches the history and archaeology of the area.

The hieroglyphics on the woman’s sarcophagus show that the individual buried in it was named “Ta-Kr-Hb” or “Takerheb”. She is believed to have been a priestess or princess who died in her thirties and had suffered heavy tooth decay. She is thought to have lived during the 25th-26th dynasty (c. 760-525BC).

Dr Mark Hall, the museum’s collections officer, said: “What we now know from Chris’s facial reconstruction is that the female is Kushite. She’s from the kingdom of Kush, which was a neighbour of Ancient Egypt in Sudan.

“At this particular time, 2,500 years ago, that’s when the Kushite empire conquered Egypt. You get a whole sequence of black, Kushite pharaohs.”

Rynn works primarily with international police, helping to identify bodies, producing a likeness from a skull so friends and family might recognise the individuals. He said: “The face on the sarcophagus is totally different – a long face with a long narrow nose. I looked into how unusual it is that the sarcophagus did not look like its inhabitant. It was quite common. But, on the inside of the lid, there’s a painting of a woman with much darker skin.”

In Rynn’s portrayal, the woman is bald. He said: “All the priestesses and priests would have shaved every hair off the body because they were embalming dead bodies. It was both ceremonial and a hygiene thing. If she was a princess, she probably would have shaved her head, too, but she might have worn a ceremonial wig.”

The imagery on the sarcophagus includes the goddess Maat, whose role in the underworld was to weigh an incoming soul against a feather.

João Philippe Reid, the museum’s exhibitions manager, said: “We’re very interested in exploring hidden histories and marginalised stories, looking at places where museum collections are not representative of the perspectives and experiences of societies today, and in the past. Seeing a Sudanese face appear is really exciting. These histories are hiding in plain sight.”

The sarcophagus is thought to have been discovered in the late-19th century and sold from a museum in Cairo to an Alloa businessman and civic official. It is thought to have emerged from Akhmim, a regular stop on the Nile for 19th-century travellers. The sarcophagus came to Alloa in about 1892 and was subsequently donated to Perth.

The museum’s collection includes the Stone of Destiny, also known as the Stone of Scone, used to crown kings and queens of the United Kingdom today.

Waters Rising has climate change as its theme, explored from a historical perspective. The sarcophagus had been damaged by flooding of the Nile.

Hall said that it is “exciting” to see Ta-Kr-Hb’s face: “We hope it gives visitors the feeling that here’s someone you can readily relate to as another human being.”

Jeremy Clarkson has spoken of having to adapt to a new way of life after having “extremely urgent” heart surgery.

The former Top Gear host was recently fitted with two stents, which improve blood flow to the heart.

Clarkson, 64, who last year recorded the final episode of The Grand Tour for Amazon Prime Video, said he was not fazed by the operation, and that the prospect of abstaining from alcohol, and having to exercise and adopt a healthy diet, was his real fear.

In his column in the Sun, the broadcaster wrote: “If I go to a party, I must stand in a corner, nursing some refreshing elderflower juice, before going home at about 9.30. That’s terrifying too.”

Clarkson maintains a packed schedule, despite having retired from his car show with longtime collaborators Richard Hammond and James May. He owns a farm, a brewery and a pub, writes three newspaper columns and hosts the ITV gameshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Clarkson will have to cut out red meat, chips, butter, chocolate and “the interesting bit” in an egg. “I’ve had a week now to live in the new regime and it’s horrific,” he said.

He will also have to exercise, something his is not happy about, writing that he regards working out as “something you do when travelling from the car to the pub, or from the lunch table to the sitting room”.

Clarkson adds: “But apparently, when I’ve recovered from the operation, I must do more. I must even go on the sort of ‘walk’ where I end up back where I started. What’s the point of that?”

He dismissed the idea of stopping work, saying he would “carry on” and just change his diet.

Despite Clarkson’s opposition to the new regime, heart surgery had made him realise that he would like to stick around. “Last week, when the Grim Reaper poked his nose round the door, I decided that actually I quite fancied living a little bit longer. I want to see my grandchildren grow up. I saw the dawn this morning, and it was magnificent, so I’d quite like to see a few more of those, too.”

According to a study by the British Heart Foundation, more than 39,000 people in England died prematurely in 2022 of cardiovascular conditions, including heart attacks, coronary heart disease and stroke – an average of 750 people a week.

Jeremy Clarkson has spoken of having to adapt to a new way of life after having “extremely urgent” heart surgery.

The former Top Gear host was recently fitted with two stents, which improve blood flow to the heart.

Clarkson, 64, who last year recorded the final episode of The Grand Tour for Amazon Prime Video, said he was not fazed by the operation, and that the prospect of abstaining from alcohol, and having to exercise and adopt a healthy diet, was his real fear.

In his column in the Sun, the broadcaster wrote: “If I go to a party, I must stand in a corner, nursing some refreshing elderflower juice, before going home at about 9.30. That’s terrifying too.”

Clarkson maintains a packed schedule, despite having retired from his car show with longtime collaborators Richard Hammond and James May. He owns a farm, a brewery and a pub, writes three newspaper columns and hosts the ITV gameshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Clarkson will have to cut out red meat, chips, butter, chocolate and “the interesting bit” in an egg. “I’ve had a week now to live in the new regime and it’s horrific,” he said.

He will also have to exercise, something his is not happy about, writing that he regards working out as “something you do when travelling from the car to the pub, or from the lunch table to the sitting room”.

Clarkson adds: “But apparently, when I’ve recovered from the operation, I must do more. I must even go on the sort of ‘walk’ where I end up back where I started. What’s the point of that?”

He dismissed the idea of stopping work, saying he would “carry on” and just change his diet.

Despite Clarkson’s opposition to the new regime, heart surgery had made him realise that he would like to stick around. “Last week, when the Grim Reaper poked his nose round the door, I decided that actually I quite fancied living a little bit longer. I want to see my grandchildren grow up. I saw the dawn this morning, and it was magnificent, so I’d quite like to see a few more of those, too.”

According to a study by the British Heart Foundation, more than 39,000 people in England died prematurely in 2022 of cardiovascular conditions, including heart attacks, coronary heart disease and stroke – an average of 750 people a week.

Thousands of Tommy Robinson supporters have gathered in central London for a protest which the political activist will miss after he was remanded into custody by police.

The Metropolitan police had put a condition on Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally that it could not begin its procession to Parliament Square before 1pm.

However, it appears the crowds were so large that the demonstration spilled out from its meeting point around Victoria Station and the supporters were initially held by a line of police from marching down Victoria Street.

There were sporadic shouts of “oh Tommy, Tommy” from the mostly male, white and middle-aged crowd of demonstrators. Many carried union flags. One held a placard reading “Peter Lynch RIP patriot”, a reference to a riots prisoner who recently died in prison.

Police were dressed in public order overalls and carrying long batons but none was carrying a helmet. The blue vans of the territorial support group, a specialist public order unit, were also present.

By about 2pm, as a light drizzle fell, many people made their way out of the rally. Thousands remained to watch a screening of Robinson’s new documentary, Lawfare, which took the place of a stump speech by the figurehead.

A counter-protest is taking place in the capital organised by Stand Up to Racism, which has called on its supporters to “take to the streets” in a “massive anti-fascist demonstration”.

Elsewhere in central London, the United Families and Friends Campaign held its annual remembrance procession for relatives who have died in police custody, which included a protest over the acquittal this week of the firearms officer Martyn Blake who shot dead Chris Kaba.

Hundreds of people gathered in Trafalgar Square and marched to Downing Street. Activists held signs reading “No justice”, “No one forgotten, nothing forgiven” and “No to hatred, no to fascism”.

Five family members – including a relative of Kaba – arrived at Downing Street dressed in black with a handwritten note addressed to Keir Starmer. They knocked on the door and handed it to a security guard.

A speaker from the Justice for Chris Kaba campaign addressed the crowd as it marched to Downing Street. She spoke of “collective grief”, “devastation” and “disappointment”, adding: “We have each other. We are strong. We are powerful.”

Robinson, 41, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is accused of being in contempt of court after the airing of a film at a protest in Trafalgar Square in July.

He attended Folkestone police station on Friday, where he was remanded before a hearing at Woolwich crown court on Monday concerning allegations that he breached a 2021 high court order barring him from repeating libellous allegations against a Syrian refugee who successfully sued him.

Robinson was separately charged on Friday with failing to provide his mobile phone access code to police under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, Kent police said.

The Met and the British Transport police are being supported by officers from other forces across the country for the protests and the Met said there would be a “significant police presence” to ensure that the two groups were kept apart.

Russian actors were behind a viral video falsely showing mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in the swing state of Pennsylvania, US officials said on Friday, amid heightened alert over foreign influence operations targeting the upcoming election.

The video, which garnered millions of views on platforms such as the Elon Musk-owned X, purports to show a man sorting through mail-in ballots from the state’s Bucks county and ripping up those cast for the former president.

On Thursday, the Bucks county board of elections declared the video “fake”, saying that the envelope and other materials depicted in the footage are “clearly not authentic materials” belonging to or distributed by them.

A joint statement Friday from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said the video was part of a Russian disinformation operation.

“Russian actors manufactured and amplified a recent video that falsely depicted an individual ripping up ballots in Pennsylvania,” the statement said.

“This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans,” it added.

The statement said Russia was expected to create and release more such content in an attempt to “undermine trust” in the integrity of the 5 November elections.

The video surfaced as American authorities brace for a surge in disinformation in the final days of a nail-biting election between Republican nominee Trump and the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris.

The video, also debunked by AFP’s factcheckers, was connected to a Kremlin-aligned disinformation network known as Storm-1516, according to researchers including Darren Linvill, co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub.

Linvill, who has closely studied the network, said the account on X – previously called Twitter – that distributed the video has regularly amplified other narratives from this network.

Storm-1516 has previously produced fake videos to discredit the campaign of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, according to disinformation researchers.

In September, the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center said Russian operatives were ramping up disinformation operations to malign Harris’s campaign by disseminating conspiracy-laden videos.

Aside from Russia, Iran and China are also fanning “divisive narratives to divide Americans and undermine Americans’ confidence in the US democratic system,” the ODNI warned in a memo earlier this week.

“Foreign influence efforts will intensify in the lead-up to election day, especially through social media posts – some of which are likely to be AI generated or enhanced,” the report said.

It added: “These actors probably perceive that undermining confidence in the elections weakens the legitimacy of our democracy and consequently makes the United States less capable of effectively pursuing policies that are counter to their interests.”

Commonwealth leaders have resolved that “the time has come” for a conversation on reparatory justice despite the UK’s insistence that the issue was not on their agenda.

The language, agreed at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting (Chogm) on Saturday, is a blow to the UK, which wanted to avoid reparatory justice being mentioned.

Keir Starmer told a press conference after the summit that the text “notes calls for discussion and it agrees that this is the time for conversations”. But he stressed that “none of the discussions have been about money. Our position is very, very clear on that.”

The UK government has said it does not pay reparations and insisted that the question was not on the agenda for Chogm before the summit.

However, Commonwealth leaders ultimately defied the UK by including a paragraph on reparatory justice in the summit communique.

Starmer’s government succeeded in avoiding a separate declaration on reparatory justice, which some Commonwealth countries had been pushing for.
Proponents of reparatory justice say it can take many forms, including educational programmes, debt relief and other kinds of economic support. Starmer has spoken about the importance of helping Commonwealth countries access climate finance.

Asked after the summit what form the discussions would take, Patricia Scotland, the outgoing secretary general of the Commonwealth, said: “Our Commonwealth is going to take exactly the same approach to considering these matters … that they have taken to every difficult issue which has been painful and has been a matter of concern for our members.”

Starmer downplayed the significance of the section in question. “The slave trade, slave practice, was abhorrent, and it’s very important that we start from there. Abhorrent is the right word,” the prime minister told reporters in Samoa.

“There is … the paragraph in the communique about reparatory justice, which does two things: it notes calls for discussion and it agrees that this is the time for a conversation.”

He said the section on reparations was a small part of “quite a long communique” and that the “absolute priority” for Commonwealth countries at the summit had been to discuss resilience to the climate crisis.

The prime minister added that the next opportunity to discuss the issue would be the UK-Caribbean Forum next year. During the summit, he told other leaders he recognised the “strength of feeling” about reparations.

The communique’s section on reparatory justice referred not just to the slave trade across the Atlantic but also to the Pacific. It said most Commonwealth countries “share common historical experiences in relation to this abhorrent trade, chattel enslavement, the debilitation and dispossession of Indigenous people”.

It referred to the “enduring effects” of slavery and mentioned the practice of “blackbirding”, where Pacific islanders were forced into slave or cheap labour in colonies including Australia.

The document said: “Heads, noting calls for discussions on reparatory justice with regard to the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and chattel enslavement, and recognising the importance of this matter to member states of the Commonwealth … agreed that the time has come for a meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation towards forging a common future based on equity.

“Heads further agreed to continue playing an active role in bringing about such inclusive conversations addressing these harms, paying special attention to women and girls, who suffered disproportionately from these appalling tragedies in the history of humanity.”

Starmer said none of the discussions at the summit had concerned money.

“Well, no figure,” Frederick Mitchell, the foreign minister of the Bahamas told BBC Radio’s Today programme on Saturday. “We’ll see what happens going forward.”

He said he hoped a report on the issue would follow, which nations would discuss in the future. Mitchell also mentioned the UK government’s decision in 2013 to recognise the torture of Kenyans by British colonial forces during the Mau Mau uprising, which resulted in a £20m payout. “I have no doubt …. that the arc of history always goes in the right direction,” he said.

An expert said the summit could come to be seen as historic. Kingsley Abbott, the director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, said: “The commitment to conversations on reparatory justice wedges open the door for dialogue.

“The Commonwealth and its new secretary general should see this as an opportunity to lead on a potentially historic process, and to do so with vision and courage.”

A recent study has revealed that some people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) cope best during periods of high stress.

Maggie Sibley, a clinical psychologist and psychiatry professor at the University of Washington and the study’s lead author, initially set out to learn whether it is possible for adults to recover from ADHD. In an earlier study, published in 2022, she investigated a National Institute of Mental Health data set that tracked 600 patients with ADHD over 16 years, starting from childhood.

“What we found was this pattern of fluctuating ADHD, and most of the people that were getting better, they would then get back to ADHD again,” she said.

For the more recent study, published last week in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, she went back to that same data set to try and figure out what circumstances might lead to relief from ADHD symptoms.

Sibley thought that ADHD patients would experience the most relief during periods of low stress. What she found was more counterintuitive.

Her study identified three different groups of ADHD patients: those who experienced periods of apparent full recovery, those who experienced partial remission, and those whose ADHD symptoms remained steady over time.

People who experienced temporary full recovery were most likely to experience it during times of “high environmental demand”, or, put more simply, stress. Those who had periods of partial recovery were also more likely to have comorbid anxiety.

Arij Alarachi, a psychology phD student at McMaster University who has researched ADHD and anxiety with St Joseph’s hospital in Hamilton, Canada, says it makes sense that ADHD would respond differently to different circumstances.

ADHD brains might not change that much, said Alarachi, but people can adapt their circumstances to better cope with their ADHD. As Sibley’s study shows, though, even among people with ADHD, those strategies might look different, since “ADHD comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes,” Alarachi added.

“ADHD patients may do best when they have to rise to the occasion. And we see that on the micro level … deadlines [could feel] helpful, or when things are more urgent, you’re able to be your most productive and hyperfocus,” said Sibley.

Although it’s impossible to completely untangle how much this is a result of ADHD patients choosing to take on more stress when their symptoms are in check.

Sara Vranes, who was diagnosed with ADHD at 36, relates to this idea. She said she sees her ability to hyperfocus under pressure as a “superpower”. Vranes now works with homeless communities, but had 15 years of experience as a midwife and doula before that, and she says she was most calm in crisis.

“I don’t want anyone to be hurt, but I was able to handle it because my brain just can hyperfocus. I could see everything clearly and see a process in my mind, and act on it in real time.” During downtime, however, she’s often anxious and can’t focus.

More than half of adults with ADHD also experience anxiety. But, Sibley’s study shows this might not always be a bad thing.

“We call it a protective factor in ADHD,” she said, explaining that multiple studies have found that children with ADHD and anxiety respond better to behavioral treatment, like cognitive behavioral therapy, than children who just have ADHD.

Alarachi said that in her research, too, she’s come across people with ADHD who say anxiety helps them keep impulsivity in check. They will say: “My anxiety [has] kind of helped me stop myself from maybe acting on some of those impulses, or it’s kind of made me think about some of the consequences.”

“Think about it like the gas and the brakes in a car, right? The ADHD might be the gas, and then the anxiety is putting the brakes on, like getting people to inhibit a little bit,” said Sibley.

Anxiety and impulsivity might be more extreme in people with ADHD, “but somehow they’re canceling each other out in a way that kind of makes neither of those processes as problematic as they might be on their own, which is kind of an interesting concept”, Sibley added.

Alarachi and Sibley agree that people with ADHD should look within to figure out how best to relax and keep their anxiety to a reasonable level where it’s useful. Vranes has a hard time just relaxing in front of the TV, but says playing phone games and watching TV at the same time can help stop her mind from wandering.

Sibley has encountered ADHD patients who are most relaxed while exercising and socializing.

“I always tell people with ADHD, you have to learn to write your own owner’s manual,” Sibley said. “So you have to figure out, what is your brand of relaxation? What is your brand of decompressing?”

Weeks before its scheduled grand reopening after a devastating fire, Notre Dame has become embroiled in an escalating row over whether to charge future visitors a fee to enter the 12th-century gothic masterpiece.

France’s culture minister, Rachida Dati, proposed this week that tourists visiting the Paris cathedral, known as “the soul of France” and one of the world’s great architectural treasures, should pay a €5 entrance fee to help preserve the country’s crumbling churches.

But while visitors to the most notable cathedrals in neighbouring countries, including Spain, Italy and Britain, routinely pay for the privilege, France’s Roman Catholic church is fiercely opposed to the idea, and experts have warned it could even be illegal.

Notre Dame is due to reopen on 8 December after narrowly escaping total destruction in April 2019 when flames tore through its wooden rafters and lead roof, toppling its monumental spire and prompting a mammoth five-year restoration project.

President Emmanuel Macron said at the time that the cathedral, visited by 12-14 million people a year before the fire, was “our history, our literature, our collective imagination – the place where we have lived all our great moments, our wars and our liberations. It is the epicentre of our life.”

But Dati told Le Figaro newspaper that, across Europe, people “have to pay to visit remarkable religious edifices”, adding that she had “suggested a very simple idea to the archbishop of Paris: a symbolic fee for all tourist visits to Notre Dame.”

The scheme could raise up to €75m (£62m) a year, which would be “completely dedicated to a grand preservation plan for France’s religious heritage”, she said. “Notre Dame would save all the churches of France. It would be a magnificent symbol.”

France’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, welcomed the idea, telling France Inter radio that if “€5 can save France’s religious heritage, that’s a good thing, whether one believes in heaven or not: quite simply, this is our landscape.”

France’s national heritage charity, the Fondation du Patrimoine, has described the state of many of the nation’s chapels, churches, abbeys and cathedrals as “very worrying”, with about 5,000 at risk and nearly 500 in such poor condition that they are closed to the public.

Guillaume Poitrinal, the body’s president, said it was “delighted to see that politicians are finally beginning to understand the threat to our religious buildings: €75m a year could help prevent them from disappearing altogether.”

Many European cathedrals charge tourists. Tickets to Milan’s Duomo cost €10 to €30 (for a fast track pass and terrace access by lift, rather than the stairs), while St Mark’s Basilica in Venice is a more modest €3 (plus €10 for the bell tower).

In Spain, the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba costs €13, Seville Cathedral charges €12 and the Sagrada Família in Barcelona €26. Canterbury Cathedral in the UK costs £17, Westminster Abbey £30 and St Paul’s £25.

For notable cathedrals in cities popular with tourists, the income can be substantial: the Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece and the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world, raised more than €125m from its almost 5 million visitors in 2023.

France’s Catholic church, however, remains strongly attached to the principle of free access for all, whether worshipper or tourist, although some cathedrals do charge visitors to enter certain parts of the building, such as bell towers, crypts and treasuries.

Churches and cathedrals must be able to “welcome all, unconditionally – thus necessarily free of charge – regardless of religion, belief, opinions and financial means”, the diocese of Notre Dame said in a stern statement.

It added that given Notre Dame’s design, establishing a system that distinguished between tourists and people coming to the cathedral for private prayer would be “extremely complicated in terms of its practicalities”.

It insisted it was open to “other schemes that do not consist of taxing visitors to the cathedral”, but said a universal €5 entrance fee would “inevitably lead to people declining to visit a building that by its nature should be wide open to all”.

The government’s suggestion could also run into legal difficulties under France’s 1905 secularism law, which separated the church and the state, transferring – among other things – the ownership of religious buildings from the former to the latter.

The law states that church visits “cannot be subject to any tax or duty”. Churches may charge visitors to enter certain rooms, for example, the bell tower, as Notre Dame itself did (for €17) before the fire, “but you cannot charge for access to the building itself”, said Maëlle Comte, a public law lecturer at Jean Monnet University.

Since the 1905 law is not part of the French constitution, some legal experts have suggested the government, if it was really determined, could simply rewrite it. Either way, said Ariel Weil, the mayor of central Paris, something needs to be done.

“The minister’s proposal as it stands may not be possible,” Weil told Radio France, “but it does raise the question of the huge number of visitors to Notre Dame and the colossal investments required in our religious heritage nationwide.”

It was by no means absurd, Weil said, to ask “whether 12, 13, 14 million visitors a year could not do their bit. Perhaps a voluntary contribution, with a suggested fee at the entrance? There’s a price, but you don’t have to pay it.”

Stéphane Bern, Macron’s heritage adviser, would go further. “Not when there’s a service on,” he said. “It’s the house of God; it must be free then. But is it really so bad to charge tourists in shorts, with cameras round their necks?”