The death toll from the floods in Spain this week has risen to 205, as residents in the Valencia region were warned to brace for more rain and an additional 1,000 soldiers were earmarked to help with the rescue operations.

Authorities in Valencia raised the death toll there to 202 on Friday afternoon, bringing the overall toll to at least 205 in have been was the deadliest floods in Spain’s modern history.

The state weather agency Aemet said that four regions, including Valencia, remained on amber alert because of the risk of rains and storms, days after rivers of mud-coloured waters left a trail of devastation.

On Thursday, Aemet had warned that the adverse weather conditions were expected to continue in the coming days. “We’re going to send a clear message,” the agency wrote on social media. “The meteorological emergency is not over. The storm still continues over Spain.”

Days after the flash floods coursed across parts of the country, sweeping away bridges, cars and streetlights, the number of missing people remains unknown.

The situation remains dire in many of the affected areas. Thousands remain without access to water or reliable food while parts of the heaviest-hit areas remain inaccessible.

On Friday, the concerns over those who are still struggling coalesced into a show of solidarity. Thousands of people from unaffected areas in the Valencia region – carrying shovels, food and water – began turning up in the hardest-hit areas, offering help. As roads across the region remained blocked, they arrived by foot, often walking several kilometres to reach the devastated areas.

The regional government attempted to dissuade people from going to flood-hit regions. “We are deeply grateful for the help that is being provided to the affected populations,” it wrote on social media. “We ask that you please do not travel to these areas because the roads are collapsing and emergency services cannot access them.”

The regional leader, Carlos Mazón, later told people that it was “imperative” that they go home, citing concerns that the swells of volunteers would collapse access points that were crucial for emergency services.

Earlier this week, more than 1,000 soldiers from Spain’s emergency response unit were deployed to Valencia bolster the efforts of local emergency services.

On Friday, Spain’s defence minister, Margarita Robles, said a further 500 soldiers were being sent to the region and that more could be sent if needed. “Their missions include helping to dig out people who may be in basements or lower floors – unfortunately there are a lot of them – and helping to pump out water [from roads] to allow transportation so that food and water can reach certain populations.”

A mobile morgue had been deployed, along with psychologists, as well as specialised teams capable of locating bodies. “This is a horrible tragedy,” she told broadcaster RTVE. “One has to keep in mind that this is a storm that is unprecedented, not just in this century but even in the last.”

Robles linked the storm to the climate crisis, echoing the many scientists who have said that extreme weather events such as heatwaves and storms are becoming more intense because of climate change..

The country’s interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, later told reporters that a further 500 soldiers would be sent to the region on Saturday, adding to the 1,700 already on the ground.

The mayor of the municipality of Alfafar, south of the city of Valencia, appealed for help. Days after a deluge of muddy water had destroyed homes, swept away cars and cut off access to part of the town of 22,000 people, Juan Ramón Adsuara said there had been little sign of firefighters, soldiers or national police.

“We’ve been forgotten,” he told local media À Punt. “There are people living with corpses in their homes, this is really sad.”

Instead it had been left to residents and local police to do what they could. Some had been using their own machinery to try to clear out part of the municipality that remained inaccessible, while others were risking the roads to drive to Valencia in order to bring supplies.

“We’ve had to empty a supermarket to distribute food among the population,” he said. “Please, we’re asking for help. We’re running out of everything.”

The sentiment was echoed across the hardest-hit areas. “The situation is unbelievable. It’s a disaster and there is very little help,” Emilio Cuartero, of Masanasa, on the outskirts of Valencia, told the Associated Press. “We need machinery, cranes, so that the sites can be accessed. We need a lot of help. And bread and water.”

In Chiva, the Valencian town where nearly a year’s-worth of rain fell in eight hours, its mayor, Amparo Fort, told broadcaster RTVE that “entire houses have disappeared, we don’t know if there were people inside or not”.

As rescuers scrambled to comb the devastated areas, politicians sought to blame each for why the alert warning people to stay in their homes was sent out only after the flooding had begun.

Aemet had launched a red alert for the region on Tuesday morning. But it took until after 8pm for the civil protection service to send an alert urging residents not to leave their homes, leading the warning to sound as many were already grappling with the rushing waters.

In some of the hardest-hit areas, residents drew a direct link between the delay and the death toll. “If they had warned us, these deaths would not have happened,” Laura Villaescusa, a resident of La Torre, told Reuters. “The deaths we have now could have been avoided.”

The low-pressure system responsible for Spain’s most devastating floods in decades in Valencia also set new rainfall records across south-eastern Spain. In Jerez de la Frontera, 115mm of rain fell in 24 hours on Wednesday – the wettest day on record for the southern Spanish city. The deluge caused widespread flooding and road closures, and there is a heightened risk that the River Barbate in Cádiz could overflow as more rain is forecast through Friday and into the weekend.

While the rare red warning issued on Thursday for Valencia has expired, Spain’s national meteorological service, Aemet, has maintained yellow and orange rainfall warnings for southern and Mediterranean regions as storms continue to push in.

Also this week, severe thunderstorms in north-eastern South Africa prompted the South African Weather Service to issue a yellow warning as strong winds, hail and heavy rain swept across the region. On Monday and Tuesday, the provinces of Limpopo and Mpumalanga reported more than 40 injuries and four fatalities due to collapsing buildings and flying debris. Hailstones caused severe damage to more than 30 schools, while flooding led to road closures and widespread power outages.

In Japan, a dismal new October record has been set for the longest period without snow atop Mount Fuji. The previous record, set in 1955, was when the first snow arrived as late as 26 October. Snow typically falls on Mount Fuji in early October, with the first flakes appearing last year on 5 October. Warm conditions throughout the summer and high sea temperatures have contributed to the lack of snow, which is likely to continue for several more days.

Meanwhile, northern parts of Western Australia (WA) have experienced unseasonably high temperatures in the last few days. The town of Roebourne, in the Pilbara region of WA, recorded a record-high temperature of 45.3C over the weekend, Australia’s highest October temperature in 15 years. Over the following days, a cold front will move in from the north, alleviating temperatures. However, this heat will migrate across central and southern Australia over the weekend, with temperatures reaching about 34C in Adelaide on Saturday, and 36C in Sydney on Sunday, 12C and 10C above the seasonal averages respectively.

Republicans are already laying the ground for rejecting the result of next week’s US presidential election in the event Donald Trump loses, with early lawsuits baselessly alleging fraud and polls from right-leaning groups that analysts say may be exaggerating his popularity and could be used by Trump to claim only cheating prevented him from returning to the White House.

The warnings – from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans – come as Americans prepare to vote on Tuesday in the most consequential presidential contest in generations. Most polls show Trump running neck and neck with Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee, with the two candidates seemingly evenly matched in seven key swing states.

But suspicions have been voiced over a spate of recent polls, mostly commissioned in battleground states from groups with Republican links, that mainly show Trump leading. The projection of surging Trump support as election day nears has drawn confident predictions from him and his supporters.

“We’re leading big in the polls, all of the polls,” Trump told a rally in New Mexico on Thursday. “I can’t believe it’s a close race,” he told a separate rally in North Carolina, a swing state where polls show he and Harris are in a virtual dead heat.

An internal memo sent to Trump by his chief pollster is confirming that story to him, with Tony Fabrizio declaring the ex-president’s “position nationally and in every single battleground state is SIGNIFICANTLY better today than it was four years ago”.

Pro-Trump influencers, too, have strengthened the impression of inevitable victory with social media posts citing anonymous White House officials predicting Harris’s defeat. “Biden is telling advisers the election is ‘dead and buried’ and called Harris an innate sucker,” the conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec posted this week.

GOP-aligned polling groups have released 37 polls in the final stretch of the campaign, according to a study by the New York Times, during a period when longstanding pollsters have been curtailing their voter surveys. All but seven showed a lead for Trump, in contrast to the findings of long-established non-partisan pollsters, which have shown a more mixed picture – often with Harris leading, albeit within error margins.

In one illustration, a poll last Tuesday by the Trafalgar Group – an organisation founded by a former Republican consultant – gave Trump a three-point lead over Harris in North Carolina. By contrast, a CNN/SRSS poll two days later in the same state put the vice-president ahead by a single point.

The polling expert Nate Silver – who has said his “gut” favours a Trump win, while simultaneously arguing that people should not trust their gut – cast doubt on the ex-president’s apparent surge in an interview with CNBC. “Anyone who is confident about this election is someone whose opinion you should discount,” he said.

“There’s been certainly some momentum towards Trump in the last couple of weeks. [But] these small changes are swamped by the uncertainty. Any indicator you want to point to, I could point to counter-examples.”

Democrats and some polling experts believe the conservative-commissioned polls are aiming to create a false narrative of unstoppable momentum for Trump – which could then be used to challenge the result if Harris wins.

“Republicans are clearly strategically putting polling into the information environment to try to create perceptions that Trump is stronger. Their incentive is not necessarily to get the answer right,” Joshua Dyck, of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, told the New York Times.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democrat strategist and blogger, said it followed a trend set in the 2022 congressional elections, when a succession of surveys favourable to Republicans created an expectation of a pro-GOP “red wave” that never materialised on polling day.

“These polls were usually two, three, four points more Republican than the independent polls that were being done and they ended up having the effect of pushing the polling averages to the right,” he told MeidasTouch News.

“We cannot be bamboozled by this again. It is vital to Donald Trump’s effort if he tries to cheat and overturn the election results, he needs to have data showing that somehow he was winning the election.

“The reason we have to call this out is that Donald Trump needs to go into election day with some set of data showing him winning, so if he loses, he can say we cheated.”

Trump, who falsely claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, is also paving the way for repeating the accusation via legal means.

He told a rally in Pennsylvania that Democrats were “cheating” in the state, and on Wednesday his campaign took legal action against election officials in Bucks County, where voters waiting to submit early mail-in ballots were turned away because the deadline had expired. A judge later ordered the county to extend early voting by one day. There is no evidence of widespread cheating in elections in Pennsylvania or any other state, and mail-in ballots are in high demand in part because Trump himself has encouraged early voting.

Suing to allege – without evidence – that there has been voting fraud is part of a well-worn pattern of Trump disputing election results that do not go his way. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, his team filed 60 lawsuits disputing the results, all of which were forcefully thrown out in court.

Anti-Trump Republicans have expressed similar concerns to Democrats about Trump’s actions. Michael Steele, a former Republican national committee chairand Trump critic, told the New Republic that the GOP-commissioned polls were gamed to favour Trump.

“You find different ways to weight the participants, and that changes the results you’re going to get,” he said. “They’re gamed on the back end so Maga can make the claim that the election was stolen.”

Stuart Stevens, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate, and a founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told the same outlet: “Their gameplan is to make it impossible for states to certify. And these fake polls are a great tool in that, because that’s how you lead people to think the race was stolen.”

Trump-leaning surveys have influenced the polling averages published by sites such as Real Clear Politics, which has incorporated the results into its projected electoral map on election night, forecasting a win for the former president.

Elon Musk, Trump’s wealthiest backer and surrogate, posted the map to his 202 million followers on his own X platform, proclaiming: “The trend will continue.”

Trump and Musk have also promoted online betting platforms, which have bolstered the impression of a surge for the Republican candidate stemming from hefty bets on him winning.

A small number of high-value wagers from four accounts linked to a French national appeared to be responsible for $28m gambled on a Trump victory on the Polymarket platform, the New York Times reported.

Trump referenced the Polymarket activity in a recent speech. “I don’t know what the hell it means, but it means we’re doing pretty well,” he said.

At least eight people have been killed after part of an outdoor roof collapsed at a train station in the Serbian city of Novi Sad, the country’s interior minister said.

“Eight bodies have been recovered, eight people have died … two people are in hospital, one of whom is in critical condition,” Ivica Dačić told reporters. The minister said rescuers were in contact with two people who were still trapped beneath the rubble.

“The operation is still ongoing and extremely challenging. Over 80 rescuers are involved, with the assistance of heavy machinery,” he added.

Footage posted on social media showed several ambulances and fire engines at the scene. Two excavators could also be seen digging through the pile of rubble. The blood transfusion institute in Novi Sad called on people to donate blood after the accident.

The station, in Serbia’s second-largest city,reopened in July after three years of renovation work. Construction work was still going on in parts of the station.

Serbia’s prime minister, Miloš Vučević, said authorities would investigate the cause of the accident. “We will insist on finding those responsible, those who should have ensured the structure’s safety. My condolences to the families of the deceased,” he said. “This is a black Friday for us, for all of Serbia, for Novi Sad.”

Serbian Railways said in a statement that the outdoor roof that collapsed had not been part of the renovations completed at the station. “Serbian Railways regrets the accident that occurred, and the causes and any new details from the investigation will be promptly announced,” the company wrote in a social media post.

A high-speed rail connection between Novi Sad and the capital, Belgrade, opened in March 2022.

The US asked Lebanon to declare a unilateral ceasefire to revive stalled talks to end hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, according to a report later denied by the Lebanese prime minister

Two unnamed sources, a Lebanese political source and a senior diplomat made the claim to Reuters, saying the US envoy, Amos Hochstein, had communicated the proposal to Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, this week.

The Biden administration, which critics say has made a series of missteps in its handling of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, has come up with a number of proposals to the end the fighting in both conflicts, all of which have come to nothing.

The claim emerged as Kamal Kharrazi, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told the pro-Iranian broadcaster Al Mayadeen on Friday that Tehran was likely to increase the range of its ballistic missiles. Kharrazi also reiterated that Iran’s nuclear doctrine could change if the country faced an existential threat.

The latest flurry of US diplomacy, during which the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, again appeared more optimistic than parties to the conflict about bringing it to an end, comes against the backdrop of the US presidential election next week.

Mikati’s office, however, denied in a statement that the US had asked Lebanon to declare a unilateral ceasefire. He said his government’s stance was clear on seeking a ceasefire from both sides and implementation of UN security council resolution 1701, which ended the last round of conflict between the two foes in 2006.

Lebanon’s armed forces are not involved in the hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, which began firing rockets at Israeli military sites a year ago in solidarity with its Palestinian ally Hamas in Gaza.

Any effort to reach a ceasefire would need a green light from Hezbollah, which has ministers in Lebanon’s cabinet and whose members and allies hold a significant number of seats in Lebanon’s parliament.

The US embassy in Beirut did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The sources said Washington had sought to persuade Beirut to take back some initiative in the talks, particularly given the perception that Israel was likely to continue military operations that have already killed most of Hezbollah’s leadership and destroyed much of the country’s south.

Diplomats mediate with Hezbollah through the group’s ally Nabih Berri, the speaker of parliament.

Hezbollah has said it backs Berri’s efforts to reach a ceasefire but that a deal must meet certain parameters without providing details.

A unilateral declaration was seen as a non-starter in Lebanon, the sources said, because it would be likely to be equated with a surrender.

Israeli officials have been pushing for a “side letter” from the US in which Washington would guarantee Israel’s freedom to take military action in response to any violation of a ceasefire deal by Hezbollah. Lebanese parties, including Hezbollah, are highly unlikely to accept such a letter.

Talks about a ceasefire foundered as Mikati accused Israel of stubbornness in the negotiations, while the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said his priority was to impose security “despite any pressure or constraints”.

The hostilities have eroded the prospect of truce being reached before the US election on Tuesday.

The claims emerged as Israel’s air force continued to bombard Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh overnight, destroying dozens of buildings in several neighbourhoods, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said on Friday.

Israel has recently intensified its airstrikes on the north-eastern city of Baalbek and nearby villages, and parts of southern Lebanon. International mediators are increasing their efforts to halt the wars in Lebanon and Gaza, circulating fresh proposals to de-escalate the regional conflict.

Medics in Gaza said about 60 people had been killed and dozens injured overnight and into Friday morning in Israeli strikes on the city of Deir Al-Balah, the Nuseirat camp and the town of Al-Zawayda, all in central Gaza, as well as in the south.

At least 10 people were killed in an Israeli strike that hit the entrance to a school sheltering displaced people in Nuseirat, medics told Reuters. Another 10 were killed in a car in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, they said.

The Israeli military said its troops had killed what it called armed terrorists in central Gaza and the Jabalia area in the north of the terriory. It had no immediate comment on the reported school strike, but it habitually denies targeting civilians.

Israel also launched at least 10 strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs, Reuters journalists said. It was the first bombardment of the area, once a densely packed district and a Hezbollah stronghold, in nearly a week.

The strikes came after Israel issued evacuation orders for 10 separate neighbourhoods. The attacks began before the final series of orders were published.

Agencies contributed to this article.

A shooting and massive brawl linked to drug trafficking has seriously wounded five people, including three teenagers, in western France, officials and media said, in the latest such gunfight to injure children.

The shooting began at about 10.45pm on Thursday in front of a restaurant in Poitiers and rapidly escalated into a mass fight, the interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, told BFMTV/RMC radio on Friday.

“What started as a shooting at a restaurant ended up in a fight between rival gangs that involved several hundred people,” Retailleau said. A 15-year-old boy who was shot in the head was in a critical condition, he said.

Citing police sources, BFMTV said two other teenagers, both 16, were among the injured. People in a car had opened fire on a bar-restaurant on the Place Coimbra, a known drug-trafficking hotspot, before driving off, it reported.

Police found the five victims near the bar, which was riddled with up to a dozen bullets. The officers were then attacked by youths amid a battle between rival gangs that at its height involved hundreds of people, BFMTV said.

Retailleau said France was at a “tipping point” when it came to drug-related violence. He said he was planning to travel later in the day to Rennes, in Brittany, where a five-year-old was critically ill after being shot last Saturday.

“Trafficking gangs today have no limits,” he said. “These shootouts are not in Latin America, they are in Rennes, in Poitiers, in once-tranquil western France. We have a choice between general mobilisation or the Mexicanisation of the country.”

The child in Rennes was hit by gunfire while in a car with his father in the city’s Maurepas neighbourhood, identified by intelligence services as one of the city’s major drug dealing areas.

Police sources told France Info that while the fight on Thursday may have involved as many as 400 or 600 people during the course of the evening, it happened in phases and there were rarely more than 100 individuals taking part at any one time.

The mayor of Poitiers, Léonore Moncond’huy, said the gunfight was “another unacceptable episode of violence”, lamenting “in particular the young age of the victims and the participants” and praising the work of the police.

The local MP, Sacha Houlié, said the violence was “symptomatic of the gangrene that sets in as drug-trafficking grows” and promised police reinforcements would arrive on Friday to “ensure a return to calm and guarantee public order”.

Drug-related violence in France has largely been associated with Marseille, which has had 17 drug-related killings so far this year, and where a 14-year-old boy was allegedly hired last month to carry out a revenge murder.

In August, a 10-year-old boy in a car with his uncle was shot dead in suspected drugs-related violence in the southern town of Nimes. Police believe the killing was a case of mistaken identity as the car resembled one used in an earlier drive-by shooting.

A shooting and massive brawl linked to drug trafficking has seriously wounded five people, including three teenagers, in western France, officials and media said, in the latest such gunfight to injure children.

The shooting began at about 10.45pm on Thursday in front of a restaurant in Poitiers and rapidly escalated into a mass fight, the interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, told BFMTV/RMC radio on Friday.

“What started as a shooting at a restaurant ended up in a fight between rival gangs that involved several hundred people,” Retailleau said. A 15-year-old boy who was shot in the head was in a critical condition, he said.

Citing police sources, BFMTV said two other teenagers, both 16, were among the injured. People in a car had opened fire on a bar-restaurant on the Place Coimbra, a known drug-trafficking hotspot, before driving off, it reported.

Police found the five victims near the bar, which was riddled with up to a dozen bullets. The officers were then attacked by youths amid a battle between rival gangs that at its height involved hundreds of people, BFMTV said.

Retailleau said France was at a “tipping point” when it came to drug-related violence. He said he was planning to travel later in the day to Rennes, in Brittany, where a five-year-old was critically ill after being shot last Saturday.

“Trafficking gangs today have no limits,” he said. “These shootouts are not in Latin America, they are in Rennes, in Poitiers, in once-tranquil western France. We have a choice between general mobilisation or the Mexicanisation of the country.”

The child in Rennes was hit by gunfire while in a car with his father in the city’s Maurepas neighbourhood, identified by intelligence services as one of the city’s major drug dealing areas.

Police sources told France Info that while the fight on Thursday may have involved as many as 400 or 600 people during the course of the evening, it happened in phases and there were rarely more than 100 individuals taking part at any one time.

The mayor of Poitiers, Léonore Moncond’huy, said the gunfight was “another unacceptable episode of violence”, lamenting “in particular the young age of the victims and the participants” and praising the work of the police.

The local MP, Sacha Houlié, said the violence was “symptomatic of the gangrene that sets in as drug-trafficking grows” and promised police reinforcements would arrive on Friday to “ensure a return to calm and guarantee public order”.

Drug-related violence in France has largely been associated with Marseille, which has had 17 drug-related killings so far this year, and where a 14-year-old boy was allegedly hired last month to carry out a revenge murder.

In August, a 10-year-old boy in a car with his uncle was shot dead in suspected drugs-related violence in the southern town of Nimes. Police believe the killing was a case of mistaken identity as the car resembled one used in an earlier drive-by shooting.

Manchester United have announced that Rúben Amorim is to take over as their head coach on 11 November, at the start of the international break. The 39-year-old is joining from Sporting, where he won two league titles and two league cups in four full seasons.

“Manchester United is delighted to announce the appointment of Rúben Amorim as head coach of the men’s first team, subject to work visa requirements,” the club said. “He has signed a contract until June 2027 with a club option of an additional year. He will join Manchester United on Monday 11 November once he has fulfilled his obligations with Sporting CP.

“Rúben is one of the most exciting and highly rated young coaches in European football. Highly decorated as both a player and coach, his titles include winning the Primeira Liga twice in Portugal with Sporting CP, the first of which was the club’s first title in 19 years. Ruud van Nistelrooy will continue to take charge of the team until Rúben joins.”

Amorim was swiftly identified as United’s favoured candidate after Erik ten Hag was sacked with the club 14th in the Premier League. Sporting announced on Tuesday that United had approached them and expressed a willingness to pay the €10m (£8.3m) release clause but the move was held up by negotiations regarding his 30-day notice period. A compromise was agreed for Amorim to continue at Sporting until after their game against Braga on 10 November.

It is understood United have not spoken to any other coaches and were aware of the notice period before they opened talks and are pleased to have curtailed the extra time Amorim has to spend with Sporting. He is expected to bring five backroom staff with him but confirmation of his coaching team will not come on Friday.

Amorim had been on Manchester City’s radar as they plan for Pep Guardiola’s possible departure and a home Champions League game against City on Tuesday is among his final three matches with Sporting. Amorim, who held talks with West Ham this year, had a short spell as Braga’s head coach before taking the Sporting job in March 2020.

He is regarded by United as an ideal candidate because of his playing style, personality and capacity to develop young players.

Van Nistelrooy will continue for three more home games – against Chelsea on Sunday, Paok on Thursday and Leicester on 10 November – before handing over. Amorim is the sixth permanent manager or head coach appointed since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in May 2013. None of the previous five remained in position for three full seasons.

An EU citizen caught up in a Home Office backlog of applications for post-Brexit residency status has been forcibly removed from the UK.

Costa Koushiappis, 39, a Greek Cypriot, was put onboard a plane to Amsterdam with only three days’ notice. Speaking as he was being escorted on to the aircraft in Edinburgh shortly before 9am on Friday, he said he could not understand his unfolding nightmare.

“I am here with the Border Force. They have all my documents. I can’t talk about how I feel because if I do will have a breakdown,” Koushiappis added.

When it became clear late on Thursday night that his lawyer was unable to get the Home Office to reverse the Border Force decision, his friends came to his flat to help him pack up.

His employer at the motorbike franchise Two Wheels, Stuart West-Gray, described what had happened as a “disgrace”.

He said: “I spoke to him this morning. He said the Border Force officials who had escorted him were very good to him and told him he had conducted himself very well, had adhered to the bail conditions and they didn’t have to come look for him this morning.

“But why give someone three days to pack up their life? You would think they would at least give them 28 days so he could mount a legal case. When he was in the shop last night as we were closing, he said: ‘I’ve got to go round and say goodbye to everyone.’ He was in tears as he went round the shop floor. It was absolutely heartbreaking.”

Koushiappis arrived in the UK in 2017, before Brexit, and – after an absence due to poor health and then Covid lockdowns – did not return until 2021. His subsequent application for pre-settled status was rejected by the Home Office on 28 October 2022. He then asked for his case to be given closer consideration, as the rules allow.

Days later, on 2 November 2022, he applied for the “administrative review” but was told as recently as last week the decision could take two years to be processed such was the backlog of cases.

Andrew Jordan, an immigration lawyer from the charity Settled, took up his case this week, saying due process had to take place. But a flurry of emails to the Home Office and to the Independent Monitoring Authority, the statutory body set up after Brexit to protect the rights of EU citizens living in the UK before Brexit, came to nothing.

Jordan has accused the Home Office of breaching the withdrawal agreement and said he will be taking the case to the EU.

He said: “At no point does the withdrawal agreement include anything about exercising administrative review right or even appeal rights from outside the UK. This is something new being brought into the mix. I am sure the EU will have something to say about this.

“The whole point of the withdrawal agreement is to allow people here to have their rights protected here in the UK. It was never envisaged they could be removed and then have matters dealt with while outside the country.”

In a letter to the Home Office’s team dealing with vulnerable EU citizens, he argued that the “removal directions … disregards the fact that there is a valid pending administrative review of his EU settlement scheme refusal” and the Border Force decision “ignores the fact that our client was exercising European Economic Area treaty rights prior to 31 December 2020 [Brexit day] as protected by the withdrawal agreement”.

He said that under the rules his client had a right for his case to be reviewed and to appeal before a judge if he faced a further adverse decision. “None of that process has happened,” Jordan added.

The Home Office said it did not comment on individual cases.

Historic England is commemorating the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s time in Newcastle in a project that links the legacy of black abolitionists with listed buildings.

The story of how black Americans came to Britain to fight slavery has still not been fully recognised. The Missing Pieces Project aims to shed new light on the struggle by charting the locations on the lecture tours of 19th-century activists.

In church halls, factories and theatres across Britain, Christians, workers, radicals and liberals came to hear African American abolitionists talk and show solidarity with the cause. Now, buildings in 189 cities, towns and villages have been added to Historic England’s Missing Pieces Project, which uncovers overlooked stories behind historic sites with an interactive online map.

Douglass, a writer, reformer, orator and a seminal figure in American civil rights who escaped enslavement, travelled to Britain and Ireland three times. Among the buildings Douglass visited was the music hall at Nelson Street, Newcastle, which, testifying to Tyneside’s radical past, was also visited by the activists William Wells Brown, William Craft, Henry Highland Garnet and Moses Roper.

Buckingham Palace is on the map – having been visited by the “Black Swan”, the singer and activist Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, who performed for Queen Victoria in 1854. Greenfield was born in enslavement and worked with British aristocrats to end slavery.

Sarah Parker Remond, the free-born feminist who refused to conceal the sexual violence of slavery, played a leading role in securing support in Manchester for a boycott of Confederate cotton, telling an audience: “When I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those 80,000 cotton plantations on which was grown the $125m worth of cotton which supply your market, and I remember that not one cent of that money ever reached the hands of the labourers.”

Now, 165 years later, Parker Remond’s visit to Leeds town hall, on the same tour, is recorded by the Missing Pieces Project.

The project reveals that the fight against American slavery was not confined to urban centres. Moses Roper went from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands, resolving to “tell the truth” of the system’s brutality, with his autobiography selling thousands of copies in Welsh. His lectures at Wattisham Baptist chapel, Suffolk, on tours between 1838 and 1844, are charted on the Missing Pieces Project map.

Dr Hannah-Rose Murray, a lecturer in history at the University of Suffolk who created the new entries, said: “If the walls of churches, chapels or town halls could talk, they would tell powerful, emotional and hard-hitting stories of Black life, liberty and love that have been deliberately erased from our landscape.”

Historic England said: “From rural communities to large industrial cities, the map tracks a historical trail of Black activists who had been championing the anti-racist and anti-slavery cause for decades. Between 1833 and 1899, more than 50 African American activists spoke at venues across England, from churches and theatres to schools and factories (and) spoke to millions of people.

“They published bestselling autobiographies; composed and recited poetry; exhibited panoramas and paintings; encouraged boycotts of goods produced by enslaved labour (cotton, rice, sugar) that also shaped Britain’s wealth and challenged the racism they experienced in England.

“These activists spoke at landmarks across the country and worked with all sections of society, influencing every aspect of Victorian Britain.”

Historic England, which is inviting the public to contribute stories to the Missing Pieces Project, said: “Sharing your story will add a unique piece to the picture and help people understand what makes these places so significant.”

Thieves have blown open the door of an art gallery in the southern Netherlands to try to steal four works from a famous series of Andy Warhol screen prints, but damaged them all and only managed to get away with two in the botched heist.

The gallery’s owner, Mark Peet Visser, said the thieves had attempted to steal the works from a 1985 series by the US pop artist called Reigning Queens, which features portraits of the then-queens of the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark and Swaziland, which is now called Eswatini.

Visser said the heist early on Friday at the MPV Gallery in the town of Oisterwijk was captured on security cameras, and he described it as amateurish.

“The bomb attack was so violent that my entire building was destroyed” and nearby shops were also damaged, he said. “So they did that part of it well, too well actually. And then they ran to the car with the artworks and it turns out that they won’t fit in the car.

“At that moment [two of] the works are ripped out of the frames and you also know that they are damaged beyond repair, because it is impossible to get them out undamaged.” The other two were left on the street damaged.

Visser declined to put a value on the four signed and numbered works, which he had planned to offer for sale as a set at an art fair in Amsterdam later this month.

The thieves got away with portraits of the late Queen Elizabeth II of the UK and the former Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. The prints of the former Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Ntombi Tfwala, who is known as the Queen Mother of Eswatini, were left on the street as the thieves fled, Visser said.

Not much is known yet about the theft, “but it is strange that explosives were used”, a Dutch art detective said. “That’s not common for art thefts,” said Arthur Brand, who has made headlines for recovering artworks, including a missing Picasso and a stolen Van Gogh.

Police appealed for witnesses as forensic experts examined the badly damaged gallery on Friday.

Visser told the local broadcaster Omroep Brabant that the stolen works were worth “a considerable sum”, but Brand told Agence France-Presse they were “not unique and most likely tens of them were made”.

“This makes it easier to sell than unique works, but not that much easier,” he said.

Tucker Carlson, the former CNN and Fox News political chat host, has said he was “physically mauled” by a demon a year and a half ago, in an assault that he says left him bleeding and with scars from “claw marks”.

Carlson made the claim while speaking in an upcoming documentary, Christianities? In a preview clip on YouTube, Carlson is asked by John Heers of the non-profit First Things Foundation if he believed that “the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good”.

“That’s what happened to me. I had a direct experience with it,” said Carlson.

Asked if he was referring to journalism, Carlson responded: “No, in my bed at night. I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”

Carlson, who said he still bears the scars, said his assailant was a “demon”. He added: “Or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides.”

He said at the time of the attack, he was asleep in bed. I was “totally confused, I woke up, and I couldn’t breathe, and I thought I was going to suffocate”, he said.

“I walked around outside and then I walked in and my wife and dogs had not woken up. And they’re very light sleepers. And then I had these terrible pains on my rib cage and on my shoulder, and I was just in my boxer shorts and I went and flipped on the light in the bathroom, and I had four claw marks on either side underneath my arms and on my left shoulder. And they’re bleeding.”

He added that he explained the encounter to an assistant, an evangelical Christian, who told him: “That happens, people are attacked in their bed by demons.”

Carlson, who lives in the woods of Maine, did not say where the attack occurred, but called it a “transformative experience” that left him “seized with this very intense desire to read the Bible”.

Carlson, who was fired from Fox News after the company paid more than $787m to settle a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over false statements and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, is stumping for Donald Trump on the campaign trial.

He addressed a rally in Georgia last week, telling Trump supporters that the candidate’s possible return to the White House was like a father returning home and Trump would give the country a “vigorous spanking”.

“He’s not vengeful. He loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them. Because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior. And he’s going to have to let them know,” Carlson said.

“When Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’”