Anger and vitriol took center stage at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, as Donald Trump and a cabal of campaign surrogates held a rally marked by racist comments, coarse insults, and dangerous threats about immigrants.

Nine days out from the election, Trump used the rally in New York to repeat his claim that he is fighting “the enemy within” and again promised to launch “the largest deportation program in American history”, amid incoherent ramblings about ending a phone call with a “very, very important person” so he could watch one of Elon Musk’s rockets land.

The event at Madison Square Garden, in the center of Manhattan, had drawn comparisons to an infamous Nazi rally held at the arena in 1939. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ running mate, said there was a “direct parallel” between the two events, and the Democratic National Committee projected images on the outside of the building on Sunday repeating claims from Trump’s former chief-of-staff that Trump had “praised Hitler”.

There was certainly a dark tone throughout the hours-long rally, with one speaker describing Puerto Rico, home to 3.2m US citizens, as an “island of garbage”; Tucker Carlson mocking Harris’ racial identity; a radio host describing Hillary Clinton as a “sick bastard”; and a crucifix-wielding childhood friend of Trump’s declaring that Harris is “the antichrist”.

The Puerto Rico comments, made by Tony Hinchliffe, a podcaster with a history of racist remarks, were immediately criticized by the Harris-Walz campaign. Ricky Martin, the Puerto Rican popstar who has more than 18m followers on Instagram, wrote in a post: “This is what they think of us. Vote for @kamalaharris.”

Trump campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez in a statement said “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

But that could prove problematic in Pennsylvania, where the majority of the swing state’s 580,000 eligible Latino voters are of Puerto Rican descent. Both campaigns have been trying to appeal to Latino voters in the final weeks of the campaign, and Harris had visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia earlier on Sunday, where she outlined plans to introduce an “economic opportunity taskforce” for Puerto Rico.

The pugnacious mood didn’t change once Trump began speaking, as the former president quickly repeated his pledge to “launch the largest deportation program in American history”.

Trump continued his frequent rants about immigration and claimed that a “savage Venezuelan prison gang” had “taken over Times Square”, which will come as a surprise to anyone who has recently visited the New York landmark. The former president also stated, wrongly, that the Biden administration did not have money to respond to a recent hurricane in North Carolina because “they spent all of their money bringing in illegal immigrants, flying them in by beautiful jet planes”.

Trump’s usual dystopian threats were on offer, as the 78-year-old expanded on his claims about “the enemy within” – a group of political opponents that he has said he will set the military on if elected.

“We’re just not running against Kamala. I think a lot of our politicians here tonight know this. She means nothing, she’s purely a vessel that’s all she is,” Trump said.

“We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala and far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious radical-left machine that runs today’s Democrat party. They’re just vessels.”

Trump’s appearance at Madison Square Garden – home to the New York Knicks and Rangers, and venue for countless legendary acts including Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and John Lennon’s last concert appearance before his murder – marks the culmination of his peculiar love-hate flirtation with his native city. Despite the fact that he has no chance of winning New York state – Harris is 15 points ahead in the Five Thirty Eight tracker poll – this was his third rally here this year.

In May he made an audacious attempt to woo Black and Latino voters in the south Bronx, just a few miles from his childhood home in Queens. Then in September, he pitched up in the New York City suburbs in Long Island.

What Trump intends by staging this trilogy of seemingly pointless electoral appearances is unclear. He has used his rambling speeches to take a nostalgic walk down memory lane to what he sees as the golden days of his life as a New York real estate magnate.

But he has also portrayed New York City in the most dark and dystopian terms, as a rat-infested haven for drug addicts, gangs and “illegal aliens” housed in luxury apartments while military veterans shiver on the sidewalks. His toxic language is perhaps a reflection of his bitterness towards the city of his birth, which in separate court cases has convicted him of 34 felonies, found his company the Trump Organization guilty of criminal tax fraud, and found him personally liable for sexual abuse.

On Sunday Trump again criticized his home town, claiming that the Biden administration had forced “hundreds of thousands of really rough people” into the city and telling New Yorkers, despite police saying crime has declined: “Your crime is through the roof. Everything is through the roof.”

The pugnacious tone had been set earlier in the afternoon, when several of the opening speakers made obscenity-laced and hate-filled remarks.

Hinchcliffe’s comments about Puerto Rico – he also made lewd sexual innuendos about Latina women – were met with big laughs from the crowd. A comment from radio personality Sid Rosenberg that Hillary Clinton is a “sick bastard” was similarly well received, as was Rosenberg’s claim that “the fucking illegals get everything they want”.

David Rem, a Republican politician who the Trump campaign described as a childhood friend of the former president, called Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist”, to loud cheers. Rem later took a crucifix out of his pocket and announced that he was running for New York City mayor.

As soon as Trump announced his intention to stage a rally at Madison Square Garden just days before the election, critics leapt to point out historical parallels with one of the most notorious events in New York history. On 20 February 1939, just seven months before Germany invaded Poland, the pro-Hitler German American Bund held a mass Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden.

The organizers chose George Washington’s birthday as the date to parade their vision of an Aryan Christian country dedicated to white supremacy and American patriotism. They erected a giant portrait of Washington, which they flanked with swastika flags alongside the stars and stripes.

More than 20,000 American Nazi sympathisers attended, many dressed in storm trooper uniforms and giving the Sieg Heil salute. The “Führer” of the American Bund, Fritz Kuhn, told the crowd that America would be “returned to the people who founded it”, and decried the “Jewish controlled press”.

Hillary Clinton had noted the similarities between the two events in an interview with CNN last week, and at a rally in Nevada earlier on Sunday, Walz was happy to continue the comparison.

“Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden,” Walz said.

“There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden. And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there.”

The Trump campaign reacted furiously to the accusations, describing Clinton’s comments as “disgusting”. One of the few people to reference the 1939 rally on Sunday was Hulk Hogan, who emerged to wrestling music, spent several seconds struggling to rip off his shirt, then claimed: “I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here”.

After a night of fire and fury, it will be up to the American voters to decide.

A second high-profile Washington Post columnist has stepped down after the newspaper’s decision not to support Kamala Harris for president, as more readers announced the cancellation of their subscriptions.

Michele Norris, an opinion contributor at the Post and the first Black female host for National Public Radio (NPR), called the non-endorsement a “terrible mistake”.

“As of yesterday, I have decided to resign from my role as a columnist for The Washington Post – a newspaper that I love,” wrote Norris , who has been an opinion columnist at the paper since 2019.

“In a moment like this, everyone needs to make their own decisions. The Washington Post’s decision to withhold an endorsement that had been written & approved in an election where core democratic principles are at stake was a terrible mistake & an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates since 1976.”

Norris follows in the footsteps of Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large who left the paper last week after its publisher and CEO, William Lewis, declared it would not endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential race.

In a column published on the Post’s website on Friday, Lewis described the decision as a return to the newspaper’s roots of non-endorsement. The Post did not begin regularly endorsing presidential candidates until 1976, when the paper endorsed Jimmy Carter “for understandable reasons at the time”, Lewis wrote.

“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable,” Lewis wrote. “We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values the Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”

Shortly after the decision was made public, a cadre of Post columnists including the Pulitzer prize winner Eugene Robinson and the former deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus condemned the move.

Criticism extended to the Washington Post icons Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. “We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 12 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy,” the reporters wrote in a statement.

“Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.”

Hundreds of readers have shared screenshots on social media of their Post subscription cancellations. The Post has not provided cancellation numbers, while Lewis did not respond to an interview request made by his own newspaper.

More than 2,000 Los Angeles Times readers cancelled their subscriptions citing “editorial content” reasons after Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s billionaire owner, refused to let its editorial board endorse Harris for president.

Soon-Shiong’s daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, 31, made a surprise suggestion on social media that the choice to refrain from endorsing a candidate had been made by the whole family due in part to the Biden-Harris administration’s policies concerning Israel and Gaza.

Her father publicly denied the connection and said his daughter had no role over editorial policies and did not hold a position at the newspaper.

Donald Trump reveled in what advisers called his happy place at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, as he enveloped himself in the adulation ahead of the final stretch of campaigning until the November election.

The capacity rally at the Garden – something Trump had talked about for years – was essentially a reboot of the Republican national convention this summer, widely seen as Trump’s most confident moment.

Trump had the more polished speakers from the convention double down on crude and xenophobic rhetoric, while he had Hulk Hogan rip his shirt on stage again, and got Melania Trump to appear again.

The rally was a safe space for Trump and the campaign to lean into their most caustic impulses: speakers falsely saying Kamala Harris allowed migrants to “rape and kill” Americans or questioning whether Harris was Black or “Samoan-Malaysian”.

There was nothing about trying to broaden his base. The rhetoric of Trump and his speakers was designed to give the crowd what they wanted to hear, doubling down on immigration rhetoric which Trump thinks his supporters love to hear the most.

That disinterest to reach undecided voters by moderating the rhetoric also underscored the confidence of the Trump team with fewer than nine days until the election – they have long seen their path to victory as juicing turnout.

The Trump team in recent days have in hushed whispers suggested privately they might even get close to winning the popular vote, which Trump lost in 2016, describing him as a comeback story with momentum on his side.

Here are the key takeaways from perhaps Trump’s final major rally before election day:

Approximately 70 people have been killed in Israeli airstrikes in the past day, health officials in Gaza said, as Israel’s renewed campaign in the north of the strip shows no sign of slowing despite the revival of ceasefire talks after a three-month-long hiatus.

Separately, one person was killed when a truck rammed into a bus stop in Ramat Hasharon, north of Tel Aviv, on Sunday, in what Israeli police are treating as a suspected terrorist attack. About 40 people were injured to varying degrees, some seriously, and were taken to nearby hospitals, police said.

The Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad praised the suspected attack but did not claim it.

The driver of the truck was a Palestinian citizen of Israel, police said, and was “neutralised” by passersby carrying firearms.

Also on Sunday, the Israeli military said a Palestinian man was killed after he tried to stab a group of soldiers in the occupied West Bank town of Hizma.

Information about the situation in northern Gaza has become increasingly sporadic and difficult to verify as Israel’s new ground and aerial assault focusing on Jabaliya, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun enters its fourth week.

Internet and phone services have been down for hours at a time, and civil defence workers have been unable to reach the sites of recent strikes due to Israeli forces’ ever-tightening siege and attacks on their crews.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) withdrew from Kamal Adwan hospital, one of only three still operating in the area, on Sunday morning after raiding the compound a day earlier. Staff said dozens of male health workers and some patients had been detained.

The death toll from an Israeli airstrike on Beit Lahia on Saturday evening rose to 40 on Sunday, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa. Another strike on houses in Jabaliya on Sunday morning killed 20 people, and 11 more people were killed in the bombing of a school turned shelter in the Shati area of Gaza City, the health ministry in the previously Hamas-controlled territory said.

In statements, the IDF said they had “eliminated over 40 terrorists” in Jabaliya, and they disputed the death toll in Beit Lahiya, which they said did not align with the “precise munitions” used.

Israel launched a new ground and aerial offensive on northern Gaza on 6 October that it says is necessary to mop up Hamas cells that have regrouped. Sweeping evacuation orders for the 400,000 people who the UN estimates still live there, the blockage of aid and food deliveries and the targeting of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals have led rights groups to accuse Israel of the war crime of seeking to forcibly displace the remaining population.

Israel has denied it is systematically removing Palestinians from the area or using food as a weapon, both of which are illegal under international law.

In a statement on Sunday, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, called the plight of civilians trapped by the fighting in north Gaza “unbearable”.

His office said: “The secretary general is shocked by the harrowing levels of death, injury and destruction in the north, with civilians trapped under rubble, the sick and wounded going without life-saving healthcare and families lacking food and shelter.”

The head of the Mossad, David Barnea, was expected to travel to Qatar on Sunday for meetings aimed at restarting ceasefire and hostage release negotiations. The indirect talks, mediated by Qatar, the US and Egypt, broke down after the death of Hamas’s leader Ismail Haniyeh in a bombing in Iran believed to have been carried out by Israel. Hostilities with Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah have since overshadowed the peace process in Gaza.

The killing of Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the 7 October 2023 attack, in the strip this month was presented by the international community as an opportunity to restart negotiations. Sinwar, who had the last word on Hamas’s position, had repeatedly blocked progress towards a deal.

Later on Sunday, family members of the approximately 100 Israeli hostages who remain captive in Gaza disrupted a speech by Benjamin Netanyahu at a televised memorial event for victims of the Hamas attack, forcing the Israeli prime minister to stop his address.

Many in Israel blame Netanyahu for the intelligence and response failures of 7 October and accuse him of dragging his heels on a deal in Gaza to bring the hostages home for political reasons.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese health ministry said that at least 21 people were killed on Sunday in Israeli strikes on three different areas in southern Lebanon.

Nine people were killed and 38 wounded in a strike on Haret Saida, near the port city of Sidon, the ministry said, with at least seven others including a nurse and three rescuers killed in the southern village of Ain Baal, and five in Burj al-Shemali.

Israel’s military claimed on Sunday it had killed 70 Hezbollah fighters, and it issued a new wave of evacuation orders to villages that it said hosted Hezbollah military infrastructure.

It also announced that five Israeli soldiers had been killed in the fighting in Lebanon, and another had died from wounds sustained in north Gaza.

Viktor Orbán has landed in Georgia after congratulating the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party for its “overwhelming victory” in parliamentary elections despite widespread concerns about intimidation and coercion of voters.

Hungary’s prime minister is leading a delegation of his senior ministers to meet Georgia’s prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, in a two-day visit that is likely to anger fellow EU leaders at a time when Hungary holds the rotating EU presidency.

Orbán “does not represent the European Union” on his visit, the bloc’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, told Spanish public radio on Monday. “The union’s rotating president has no authority in foreign policy,” he added.

In a statement released on Sunday, co-signed with the European Commission, Borrell flagged concerns about reported pressure and intimidation of voters during Saturday’s elections. “We call on the central election commission of Georgia and other relevant authorities to fulfil their duty to swiftly, transparently and independently investigate and adjudicate electoral irregularities and allegations thereof.”

The governments of Hungary and Georgia have drawn closer in recent years, with both focusing their policies on conservative “Christian” values and calling for “peace” in Ukraine while avoiding any condemnation of Russia.

The Hungarian leader arrived in Tbilisi as the opposition holds a protest rally on Monday evening over the election results, which dealt a blow to Georgia’s EU membership hopes. Georgia’s pro-EU president, Salome Zourabichvili, has said she does not recognise the results and that her country had fallen victim to a “Russian special operation”.

Zourabichvili said on Monday that GD had won only 40% of the vote, a figure broadly in line with two exit polls that showed the opposition winning a majority of seats in parliament. The country’s election commission announced on Sunday that GD had won 54% of the vote, a result securing its increasingly authoritarian hold on power for another four years.

An exit poll commissioned by the GD-supporting Imedi TV channel had put the ruling party on 56%.

Orbán issued his congratulations to Kobakhidze and GD for “their overwhelming victory” on Saturday, before the election results had even been published.

A team from the European parliament sent to observe the elections said it found one case of ballot box stuffing, as well as “physical assault on observers attempting to report on violations, observer and media removal from polling stations, tearing up of observer complaints, intimidation of voters inside and outside of polling stations, presence of multiple party-affiliated observers posing as citizen observers”.

The Spanish centre-right MEP Antonio López-Istúriz White, who led the delegation, also said there had been efforts “to undermine and manipulate the vote”, such as pressure on state employees to take part in campaign events and vote, as well as misuse of state resources to benefit the ruling party. “We express deep concern about the democratic backsliding in Georgia,” he said.

The Dutch MEP Thijs Reuten, who was not part of the delegation, called on the EU’s 26 other member states and the commission to push back against the Hungarian leader. “Orbán legitimising these elections undermines the EU itself,” he wrote on X.

However, western leaders have stopped short of saying the elections were stolen or falsified, instead urging GD to address the delegation’s findings.

The former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt tweeted: “As Georgia is channelled towards Moscow with Kremlin interference, Viktor Orbán flies to Tbilisi to endorse a corrupted election. An EU leader now openly working for Moscow & Europe’s democrats sit idle! First step … finally remove Orbán’s EU voting rights.”

The European parliament launched a sanctions procedure against Orbán’s government in 2018 that could ultimately strip Hungary of EU voting rights, but the process has languished.

Orbán’s spokesperson said he had been invited by Kobakhidze and would be accompanied by Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, economy minister, Márton Nagy, and finance minister, Mihály Varga.

It echoes a furore over the Hungarian leader’s freelance diplomacy in the summer, when he visited Kyiv, Moscow, Beijing and Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on a so-called peace mission.

It also sets the stage for a rocky EU summit next week, when leaders will gather in Budapest, formally to discuss the bloc’s single market. Charles Michel, the European Council president, announced on Sunday that Georgia would be added to the agenda.

“Alleged irregularities must be seriously clarified and addressed,” he wrote on X. “We reiterate the EU’s call to the Georgian leadership to demonstrate its firm commitment to the country’s EU path.”

Georgia’s pro-western opposition has called on the country to protest on Monday against the disputed parliamentary victory of the ruling, Russia-aligned Georgian Dream (GD) party.

GD retained power in Saturday’s pivotal election that dealt a significant blow to the country’s long-held aspirations for EU membership, amid allegations of voter intimidation and coercion.

The opposition refused to concede defeat and accused the ruling party of a “constitutional coup”, setting the stage for a potential political crisis that could further polarise the Caucasus country.

At a press conference organised by the opposition on Sunday evening, Georgia’s pro-EU president, Salome Zourabichvili, declared that she did not recognise the election results and asserted that the country had fallen victim to a “Russian special operation”.

Zourabichvili, whose role is largely ceremonial, called on Georgians to protest against the results on Monday evening. “This was a total rigging, a total robbery of your votes,” she said.

The electoral commission announced on Sunday that GD secured 54% of the vote, winning 89 seats in the parliament – one fewer than in 2020. Four pro-western opposition parties collectively won a total of 61 seats.

The result thwarts the opposition’s hopes for a pro-western coalition of four blocs and in effect stalls the country’s aspirations for EU integration.

Voters in the country of almost 4 million people had headed to the polls on Saturday in a watershed election to decide whether the increasingly authoritarian GD, which has been in power since 2012 and steered the country into a conservative course away from the west and closer to Russia, should get another four-year term.

Bidzina Ivanishvili, the shadowy billionaire founder of GD, claimed victory shortly after polls closed in what has been called the most consequential election since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

“It is a rare case in the world that the same party achieves such success in such a difficult situation – this is a good indicator of the talent of the Georgian people,” said Ivanishvili, widely considered to be the country’s most powerful figure.

For the past three decades, Georgia has maintained strong pro-western aspirations, with polls showing up to 80% of its people favour joining the EU. In recent years, however, the government has increasingly shifted away from the west in favour of Russia, showing reluctance to condemn Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine.

An international observer mission on Sunday said the conduct of the election was evidence of “democratic backsliding” in the country.

A preliminary report by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said it “noted reports of intimidation, coercion and pressure on voters, particularly on public sector employees and other groups, raising concerns about the ability of some voters to cast their vote without fear of retribution”.

However, it stopped short of saying the elections had been stolen or falsified – a claim the opposition reiterated on Sunday.

On Saturday morning, several videos circulated online appearing to show ballot stuffing and voter intimidation at various polling stations across Georgia.

Electoral commission data showed GD winning by suspiciously big margins of up to 90% in some rural areas, though it underperformed in bigger cities.

Western officials have expressed concern over reports of election fraud, though they too have used cautious language and refrained from calling for a boycott of the results. The European Council president, Charles Michel, on Sunday pushed for a swift and transparent investigation into alleged irregularities during the election.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken joined calls from observers for a full probe into reports of election-related violations.

“Going forward, we encourage Georgia’s political leaders to respect the rule of law, repeal legislation that undermines fundamental freedoms, and address deficiencies in the electoral process together,” Blinken said in a statement.

It remains unclear if the opposition will be able to galvanise enough support in the coming days. Last spring, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Tbilisi to protest a controversial “foreign agents” bill that critics argued was designed to stifle the country’s media and NGOs. Those protests gradually faded after a police crackdown and a series of arrests.

The election result suggests GD retains support from a core group of Georgian voters, particularly in industrial heartlands and conservative, poorer regions where economic progress has been slow and the appeal of Europe feels distant and faint.

GD received congratulations from several foreign leaders including Hungary’s hard-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a longtime ally of Ivanishvili, who is scheduled to visit Tbilisi on Tuesday.

GD has been accused by critics at home and abroad of plans to move the country in an authoritarian direction after Ivanishvili vowed to ban all the leading opposition parties and remove opposition lawmakers if his party was re-elected.

The party was facing an unprecedented union of four pro-western opposition forces that had vowed to form a coalition government to oust it from power and put Georgia back on track to join the EU.

The biggest opposition force is the centre-right UNM, a party founded by Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president who is in prison on charges of abuse of power that his allies say are politically motivated. From jail, Saakashvili called on Georgians to take the streets.

In the aftermath of the elections, voters in Tbilisi seemed divided over the country’s future course. Ana Machaidze, a 25-year-old student, said: “We have lost our country today. I don’t know what to do next. I hope we can take to the streets, but if we lose, maybe I will live abroad.”

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

Irakli Shengelia, 56, a restaurant worker, said he was glad GD would remain in power because the party guaranteed “peace and stability” with Russia.

The 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 that critics say mirrored laws enacted in neighbouring Russia, where authorities have implemented a series of repressive measures against sexual minorities.

In Russia, the election results were widely welcomed. As the results trickled in, state propaganda celebrated the outcome, with Margarita Simonyan, the influential editor-in-chief of the state media outlet RT, declaring that “the Georgians had won”.

Manchester United have sacked Erik ten Hag after the 2-1 defeat at West Ham on Sunday meant the club registered one of their worst starts to a Premier League season.

United have one victory from their past five top-flight matches and sit 14th in the division, seven points above the relegation zone after scoring only eight goals in nine league games. The club’s hierarchy felt there were no excuses for the performances on the pitch and made the decision to part ways with Ten Hag, informing him on Monday morning.

The former Manchester United striker Ruud van Nistelrooy, who joined the club’s coaching staff in the summer, will take charge of the first team in the short term, alongside other incumbent members of the club’s backroom. United’s next match is on Wednesday at home against Leicester in the Carabao Cup.

“Erik ten Hag has left his role as Manchester United men’s first-team manager,” the club said in a statement. “Erik was appointed in April 2022 and led the club to two domestic trophies, winning the Carabao Cup in 2023 and the FA Cup in 2024.

“We are grateful to Erik for everything he has done during his time with us and wish him well for the future. Ruud van Nistelrooy will take charge of the team as interim head coach, supported by the current coaching team, whilst a permanent head coach is recruited.”

It was thought Ten Hag needed to win at least one of the club’s fixtures in the past week against Fenerbahce in the Europa League and at West Ham. United scraped a 1-1 draw against José Mourinho’s side in Turkey and the result on Sunday sealed his fate.

United were eager to give Ten Hag time as they wanted as much continuity amid period of change at the club. It was hoped he would work closely with the new sporting director, Dan Ashworth, and technical director, Jason Wilcox, to help turn the club around after finishing eighth last season but there has been no obvious improvement.

The decision is the most significant made by Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his allies since his company Ineos took a minority stake. United finished last season eighth in the Premier League, their lowest league finish since 1990, and have started this campaign with four wins from 13 matches in all competitions.

At the start of September the United chief executive, Omar Berrada, and Ashworth publicly threw support behind Ten Hag. Berrada said: “Do we still believe in Erik? Absolutely. We think Erik is the right coach for us and we’re fully backing him.” Three days later, however, the Guardian reported that his “game model” was being scrutinised.

Ten Hag was under intense pressure at the end of last season but oversaw victory against Manchester City in the FA Cup final and kept his job after United held talks with a number of candidates.

They included Thomas Tuchel, who ruled himself out of the job and subsequently was appointed as head coach of the England national team. Other potential successors include Brentford’s Thomas Frank and the former England manager Gareth Southgate.

Ten Hag left Ajax to succeed the interim manager Ralf Rangnick at United for the 2022-23 season. The Dutchman was given a contract to June 2025, with the option to extend for a further year which was taken up this summer in a short-lived show of support from Ratcliffe.

After extending his contract, Ten Hag was backed in the transfer market. Matthijs De Ligt, Noussair Mazraoui, Joshua Zirkzee and Manuel Ugarte all joined the club for large fees but none have looked settled since arriving. Questions were raised of Ten Hag’s signings, with the £85.6m spent on bringing Antony with him from Ajax, seen as a disaster move.

United finished third, 14 points off the top, in Ten Hag’s first campaign and won the Carabao Cup, beating Newcastle in the final.

Boeing has announced moves to raise as much as $19bn (£14.6bn) as it tries to shore up its finances amid a costly worker strike and an ongoing crisis about the safety of its aeroplanes.

The US manufacturer said on Monday it would sell 90m common shares, raising about $14bn, plus another $5bn in depositary shares.

The company had last week said it was hoping to raise up to $25bn in new capital through a stock and debt offering, plus a separate $10bn through a credit facility with a consortium of lenders.

Monday’s long-awaited stock offering will give Boeing a financial cushion as its chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, tries to deal with the steep costs of the strike by 33,000 workers, while also solving production problems that this year renewed focus on the manufacturer’s safety culture and delayed its new 777X jet.

Adding to its troubles, problems with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft – which had to return to Earth last month without two astronauts left on the International Space Station – have dealt a blow to its space division.

The share offer could help Boeing stave off the prospect of a downgrade of its debt from investment grade to “junk” status by one of the three big credit-rating agencies. Such a downgrade could make it more expensive for the company to borrow, particularly given its enormous $58bn debt pile.

Boeing last week reported a $6bn quarterly loss up to the end of September, and it is bleeding money from the strike action. Last month it announced a plan to cut 17,000 jobs.

Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) union last week voted to reject a pay offer from Boeing that was brokered in part by Joe Biden’s administration. The strike began on 13 September, and continued despite the offer of a 35% wage increase over the four-year contract. Boeing workers are holding out for a better deal after years of lagging pay, including the restoration of a defined-benefit pension plan they lost a decade ago.

The manufacturer has fallen far behind its European rival, Airbus, since two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 of its bestselling plane, the 737 Max. Those crashes were blamed on design flaws, prompting the grounding of every 737 Max worldwide.

The company has since lurched from crisis to crisis. As well as the huge drop in air travel during the coronavirus pandemic, it had continued production problems on other planes, and a mid-air door panel blowout in January put the focus back on its safety record. Regulators forced Boeing to slow production to address issues.

Ortberg was named as chief executive in July, becoming the second person tasked with turning the company around. However, he has nearly immediately had to scramble to steady the company.

Boeing said the new funding would be used for “general corporate purposes”, including potentially for paying off debt. Ortberg last week said the company was saddled with too much borrowing, among other problems.

Its share price dropped by 1.8% shortly after trading opened on Wall Street on Monday. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan were the four banks managing the stock offering.

Robert Stallard, an analyst at Vertical Research Partners, said before the offering that Boeing had still not provided “much clarity on the pathway out of its calamitous situation, with the IAM strike still ongoing”.

Boeing has announced moves to raise as much as $19bn (£14.6bn) as it tries to shore up its finances amid a costly worker strike and an ongoing crisis about the safety of its aeroplanes.

The US manufacturer said on Monday it would sell 90m common shares, raising about $14bn, plus another $5bn in depositary shares.

The company had last week said it was hoping to raise up to $25bn in new capital through a stock and debt offering, plus a separate $10bn through a credit facility with a consortium of lenders.

Monday’s long-awaited stock offering will give Boeing a financial cushion as its chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, tries to deal with the steep costs of the strike by 33,000 workers, while also solving production problems that this year renewed focus on the manufacturer’s safety culture and delayed its new 777X jet.

Adding to its troubles, problems with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft – which had to return to Earth last month without two astronauts left on the International Space Station – have dealt a blow to its space division.

The share offer could help Boeing stave off the prospect of a downgrade of its debt from investment grade to “junk” status by one of the three big credit-rating agencies. Such a downgrade could make it more expensive for the company to borrow, particularly given its enormous $58bn debt pile.

Boeing last week reported a $6bn quarterly loss up to the end of September, and it is bleeding money from the strike action. Last month it announced a plan to cut 17,000 jobs.

Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) union last week voted to reject a pay offer from Boeing that was brokered in part by Joe Biden’s administration. The strike began on 13 September, and continued despite the offer of a 35% wage increase over the four-year contract. Boeing workers are holding out for a better deal after years of lagging pay, including the restoration of a defined-benefit pension plan they lost a decade ago.

The manufacturer has fallen far behind its European rival, Airbus, since two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 of its bestselling plane, the 737 Max. Those crashes were blamed on design flaws, prompting the grounding of every 737 Max worldwide.

The company has since lurched from crisis to crisis. As well as the huge drop in air travel during the coronavirus pandemic, it had continued production problems on other planes, and a mid-air door panel blowout in January put the focus back on its safety record. Regulators forced Boeing to slow production to address issues.

Ortberg was named as chief executive in July, becoming the second person tasked with turning the company around. However, he has nearly immediately had to scramble to steady the company.

Boeing said the new funding would be used for “general corporate purposes”, including potentially for paying off debt. Ortberg last week said the company was saddled with too much borrowing, among other problems.

Its share price dropped by 1.8% shortly after trading opened on Wall Street on Monday. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan were the four banks managing the stock offering.

Robert Stallard, an analyst at Vertical Research Partners, said before the offering that Boeing had still not provided “much clarity on the pathway out of its calamitous situation, with the IAM strike still ongoing”.

Sudanese militia have been accused of killings, sexual violence, looting and arson during eight days of attacks on villages south of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum.

The UN said there were reports of “gross human rights abuses” linked to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) group, which has escalated attacks on civilians in el-Gezira state since the area’s key commander was reported to have defected to government forces on 20 October.

The Sudan Doctors Network said on Saturday that 124 people had been killed and dozens wounded after an attack on the village of al-Suhra.

The UN has reported that nearly 47,000 people have been displaced from their homes over the past week, mostly to neighbouring states, and at least 30 villages have been attacked.

The RSF has suffered key battlefield losses around Khartoum to the Sudanese army. Both sides have been fighting for control of Sudan since April 2023, causing the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.

Famine was declared in the Zamzam displacement camp in Darfur in August, with warnings that extreme hunger would spread if the warring parties did not allow aid in.

The UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, said the violence echoed the RSF’s actions in the western region of Darfur, where it has control and has been targeting ethnic groups.

“I am shocked and deeply appalled that human rights violations of the kind witnessed in Darfur last year – such as rape, targeted attacks, sexual violence and mass killings – are being repeated in el-Gezira state. These are atrocious crimes,” said Nkweta-Salami.

The departure of RSF commander Abu Aqleh Keikal, reportedly after a deal was struck with the Sudanese army, is the first such defection in the 18-month conflict.

The Sudanese army had been trying to “choke out” RSF forces in the neighbouring cities of Khartoum, Omdurman and Bahri, said political analyst Kholood Khair.

“The RSF attacks though are mostly on civilians particularly [Keikal’s tribal group] the Shukriya, so they’re not a counter-offensive on the SAF [Sudanese Armed Forces] but acts characterised by atrocity violence on civilians,” Khair said.

“I think considering the nature of the violence, the level of impunity enjoyed by the RSF and the near-total global silence on this, that the numbers of dead may end up being a gross underestimation.”

Criticism of the Israeli government and calls for tolerance and a commitment to a two-state solution were the major themes of an event in London on Sunday organised by the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

The conference, titled Israel After October 7th: Allied or Alone?, featured speakers from across Israeli and UK politics, academia and media. It served in part to show the extent to which some members of the Jewish diaspora have been traumatised not just by the horrors of 7 October but also the response of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Haaretz’s publisher, Amos Schocken, opened the event by saying the Israeli government was so disastrous and had so distorted Zionism that the only recourse lay in the international community applying sanctions, just as it had done to change apartheid South Africa.

David Davidi-Brown, the chief executive of the New Israel Fund, one of the event’s other organisers, said: “We can support Israel and stand against the extremism of Israel’s government.”

Ironically, given how many of the speakers were critical of the Israeli government’s conduct, conference-goers were met outside the JW3 community centre in north London by a pro-Palestinian demonstration.

Some attenders were keen to make clear that the diaspora was not simply an extension of the Netanyahu government, seen as the most rightwing in Israel’s history.

Mick Davis, a former Conservative party chief executive and former leader of the Jewish Leadership Council, said: “When people like me want to speak about peaceful settlement with the Palestinians, fairness in society, I’m looked upon as if I’m a complete idiot or I’m speaking stuff which is inappropriate to be speaking.

“Israel’s existential threat is entirely internal,” he added. “The issue is not October 7,” he said, but “the relationship to the Palestinian people” and the fact that the “occupation is corrosive in every sense in Israeli society”.

In a day of striking speeches, perhaps the most compassionate came from Dr Sharone Lifschitz, whose parents were taken by hostage by Hamas. Her 86-year-old mother, Yocheved, was among the first hostages to be freed but her 83-year-old father, Oded, remains in the tunnels.

“While people have said that the other side are murderers and beasts and have no heart and have lost all signs of humanity, in effect we depend on their humanity,” she said. “The survival of our loved ones depends on their humanity. It’s this shared humanity that we must hold on to.”

Her mother, on being released, famously shook the hands of her captors. Lifschitz said: “That is not all she did. She looked really clearly into her captors’ eyes, and in that look is a demand – to acknowledge shared humanity.”

She said Israel had made it impossible for the people holding her father and the other hostages to make good choices, and she feared that the “illusion that liberal democracies are safe is crashing in front of our eyes”.

The Labour peer Michael Levy noted that his 28-year-old cousin Emily Damari was still being held hostage. Saying he hoped to become proud of Israel again in his lifetime, he argued that the deadly conflict in the region had resulted in a “divided Israel, divided world Jewry and divided world opinion on Israel”.

Surveying the devastation in the region, he said: “Frankly things are just out of control.” He admitted he had been screamed at by some over Labour’s criticism of Israel, but he was sure Labour leadership was not anti-Israel but for a Palestinian state.

When the Middle East minister, Hamish Falconer, spoke he was unflinching in defending the steps Labour had taken, including withholding arms export licences, saying: “Everything we do is based on international law.”

Many speakers urged Labour to do more. Ayman Odeh, the leader of Israel’s Arab-Jewish party Hadash, said the UK government must “end all military, financial and diplomatic support” provided to the Netanyahu government.

“Palestinians themselves are looking for a different future, and therefore it underlines the urgency of ending the conflict and establishing a new reality for Gaza, one which provides Israel with the security it needs, and Palestinians in Gaza with the ability to govern themselves effectively, and that is what we must all work towards,” Odeh said.

Naama Lazimi, a member of the recently formed Democrats in the Knesset, singled out Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, for criticism, accusing him of undermining the independence of the police and destroying Israeli values of pluralism.

Many in the audience wanted to know what more the UK could do to try to influence a society that seemed blind to what was happening in Gaza. Alistair Burt, the Conservative former Middle East minister, said it was easy to exaggerate the UK’s influence but suggested pressing Israel harder to allow reporters access to Gaza.

He also struck a note of realism about Hamas. “Everyone knows it’s not going to be destroyed. Everyone knows that, and therefore there has to be other answers,” he said. “But as the length of the conflict approaches, then the question is: what is going to happen next, and what Israel strategy will be for the future?

“Then the United Kingdom should be unequivocal. A strategy which involves expanding the Palestinian population, either from Gaza or the West Bank, is not acceptable to the United Kingdom, and it needs to make it clear it will not support such a policy.”

Critics will say the event was a throwback to an Israel that has gone, destroyed by demography, Hamas extremism and Netanyahu’s populism. The most senior Israeli politician present was the former prime minister Ehud Olmert. The Israeli ambassador to the UK was not present.

The organisers insisted the event reflected a true cross-section of the Jewish diaspora, and as speaker after speaker said, no one has any other solution but two states eventually living side by side.

Lazimi reminded her audience: “A two-state solution – a Jewish state and a Palestinian state – might look far away now, but peace is made between enemies.”

Hedgehogs are now listed as “near threatened” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list after a decline in numbers of at least 30% over the past decade across much of their range.

While hedgehogs were once common across Europe, and were until now listed as of “least concern” on the red list, they are being pushed towards extinction by urban development, intensive farming and roads, which have fragmented their habitat.

Their population has suffered from vehicle collisions, the use of pesticides and poorly managed domestic gardens. Pesticides kill the insects that hedgehogs eat and may also poison them directly.

Abi Gazzard, a programme officer at the IUCN, said: “Unfortunately, evidence points towards a worrying and widespread downward trend. The red list assessment also highlights data uncertainties – for example, the limits of this species’ distribution are not entirely clear, and there are gaps in knowledge of its populations. There is still a chance to halt the decline of the western European hedgehog, and we must aim to prevent any further worsening of status.”

The Mammal Society is calling for people to look after hedgehogs by gardening in a wildlife-friendly way. This includes leaving small gaps in fences to allow hedgehog movement between gardens, not using pesticides and creating shelter with log piles or hedgehog houses. One in four UK mammal species are threatened with extinction, and many others are in decline.

Hope Nothhelfer, a communications officer at the Mammal Society, said: “This decline will likely come as no surprise to the average person. When hedgehogs come up in conversation, it’s not long before someone says that they just don’t see them any more. The hope is that as hedgehogs become more and more like a distant memory from our childhoods, we will respond with action that will bring these memories back to life.”

Shorebirds have fared badly on the red list this year, with four UK shorebird species moving to higher threat categories. These are birds that come to the UK in winter from colder climates and rest and feed on the shore and in estuaries before moving back to their breeding grounds for spring.

Birds that have been added to the list include the grey plover, which has declined by more than 30% globally since the late 1990s. Its conservation status has moved two categories from “least concern” to “vulnerable”. Dunlins and turnstones have faced steep declines and have both been moved from “least concern” to “near threatened”, and curlew sandpipers have declined by more than 30% globally since the late 2000s and have moved from “near threatened” to “vulnerable”.

Threats they face include pollution, development and the climate crisis, with sea level rise causing increased erosion and a heightened risk of coastal flooding, forcing wildlife into smaller and smaller spaces.

The red list also reveals that 38% of the world’s tree species are at risk of extinction, in its first global tree assessment. The list shows that at least 16,425 of the 47,282 species assessed are at risk of extinction. Islands host the largest proportion of threatened trees, where they are at risk due to deforestation for urban development and agriculture, as well as invasive species, pests and diseases.

Uruguay is heading for a tight presidential election runoff next month after a center-left candidate came out ahead of two candidates who split the conservative vote in Sunday’s first round.

Voters also rejected a controversial pension reform plan in one of two plebiscites.

Official results showed center-left Yamandú Orsi – a two-time mayor and former history teacher – with some 1.06m votes, ahead of the ruling conservative coalition’s candidate, Álvaro Delgado, who received 644,147 votes. In third place with 385,685 votes was Andrés Ojeda, who has pledged to back Delgado.

The 24 November runoff vote will take place because no candidate got more than 50% of the first-round vote.

The country of just 3.4 million people is known for its generally moderate politics, without the sharp right-left divides seen elsewhere in the region.

“We are going in for these 27 days,” Orsi told thousands of energized supporters waving flags and setting off flares in Montevideo late on Sunday. “The Broad Front is once again the most voted party in Uruguay.”

Delgado also struck a confident tone, saying he had the team to win the runoff and adding that Uruguayans now faced a binary choice between the two remaining candidates.

Supporters of Orsi’s Broad Front were generally buoyant, but noted the second round would be a tough contest given the combined conservative vote.

“A return of the Broad Front would mean a new cycle of renovation, progressive proposals ensuring economic growth, with better wealth distribution,” said 53-year-old Orsi backer Gabriela Balverde.

Uruguayans also voted down two binding plebiscites. The key one on pension reforms would have lowered the retirement age by five years to 60 and increased payouts. The other regarded boosting police powers to fight drug-related crime.

The prospect of a change to the country’s $22.5bn private pension system had dragged on local markets in recent months and prompted jitters among investors and politicians.

The proposal was to scrap private pension schemes and shift to a public model, which analysts say would put a bigger debt burden on the state, create legal complexities around transferring pension funds, and put Uruguay’s investment-grade credit rating at risk.

In Treinta y Tres, a rural region of eastern Uruguay that has traditionally voted conservative, the 60-year-old farm worker Ramon Silveira, said he had cast his ballot for the continuity candidate Delgado, favoring stability over change.

“I want the trend of the last five years to continue.”

Miguel Ángel Chirivao, 71, meanwhile, voted for Orsi’s Broad Front bloc, but was concerned the victory was narrower than hoped for and that could hurt the left in the second round.

“They had a poorer result than we expected,” he said.

An abandoned $20 bill became a $1m jackpot for a North Carolina man who plans to finance his retirement with his good fortune.

Jerry Hicks, a carpenter from Avery county, walked into a Speedway convenience store after having found a $20 bill in the parking lot outside. He used the newly discovered bill to buy a $25 Extreme Cash scratch-off ticket – and it turned out to be a lucky investment.

According to a news release from North Carolina lottery officials, Hicks had first planned to buy a different lottery ticket that the store didn’t have – so he settled for playing the Extreme Cash lottery instead and won the seven-figure jackpot.

“They actually didn’t have the ticket I was looking for, so I bought that one instead,” Hicks said in a news release that went viral in circles of the internet dedicated to finding stories with good outcomes.

Hicks claimed his prize money at the North Carolina Education Lottery headquarters on Friday. He opted to receive the prize as a lump sum of $600,000 instead of as an annuity over 20 years, according to the news release.

The lottery winner took home $429,007 after the required state and federal taxes.

Hicks shared that he plans to use his winnings to retire after 56 years of working as a carpenter. He also plans to help his children. But a family celebration is first on the list.

“We are going to head straight to Golden Corral and eat everything they’ve got,” he told lottery officials.