Weeds have punctured through the vacant parking lot of Martin General Hospital’s emergency room. A makeshift blue tarp covering the hospital’s sign is worn down from flapping in the wind. The hospital doors are locked, many in this county of 22,000 fear permanently.

Some residents worry the hospital’s sudden closure last August could cost them their life.

“I know we all have to die, but it seems like since the hospital closed, there’s a lot more people dying,” Linda Gibson, a lifelong resident of Williamston, North Carolina, said on a recent afternoon while preparing snacks for children in a nearby elementary school kitchen.

More than 100 hospitals have downsized services or closed altogether over the past decade in rural communities like Williamston, where people openly wonder if they’d survive the 25-minute ambulance ride to the nearest hospital if they were in a serious car crash.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, an ally of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, will not accept the results of the Nov. 5 election if they are "unfair," he said on Sunday.

"Will you accept the election results of 2024, no matter what happens, senator?" NBC News' "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker asked Rubio, a Florida Republican, in an interview.

"No matter what happens? No," Rubio answered. "If it's an unfair election, I think it's going to be contested by either side."

Trump and his allies are laying the groundwork to contest a potential loss in November, stoking doubts about the election's legitimacy even as polls show the former president leading in battleground states, Reuters reported on Thursday.

Khalil, a shy 21-year-old whose name has been changed, was arrested in a pre-dawn raid last October for his allegiance to Hamas. But when Israeli forces smashed through the door of his family home, they didn’t tell him why they were detaining him. He was imprisoned for six months without charge, in conditions he described as “unbelievable”.

“The Israelis are trying to restrain and terrorise us using these methods,” he said. “People are afraid. There is no freedom of speech … I’m scared to travel to any of the cities in the West Bank in case I get detained. Still, it feels like they could raid my house at any minute.”

But as Israeli forces continue to pummel Gaza, claiming to be targeting the remaining Hamas brigades, they have also swept up thousands of Palestinians in raids in the West Bank. The majority, according to the Palestinian prisoners’ commission, are not aligned to Hamas. Even so, the raids and an increasing number of settler attacks have succeeded in creating a climate of fear that is undermining Hamas’s rivals Fatah, who operate the ruling Palestinian Authority, highlighting its inability to protect Palestinians and quietly fuelling Hamas’s popularity.

“These raids are generating distrust towards the Palestinian Authority but also fear of attack by them – they can’t protect us but at the same time they could attack us too,” said Khalil, pointing to the authority’s history of detaining members of Hamas in the West Bank.

The rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs admitted in a video apology that he punched and kicked his ex-girlfriend in 2016 in the hallway of a hotel after CNN released footage of the attack, saying he was “truly sorry” and his actions were “inexcusable”.

“I take full responsibility for my actions in that video. I was disgusted then when I did it. I’m disgusted now,” he said in the video statement, posted Sunday on Instagram and Facebook.

He denied the allegations in the lawsuits and was not detained in the raid or named as the target of the investigation, adding at the time that he cooperated with authorities and that there was no finding of criminal or civil liability, calling the investigation a “witch hunt based on meritless accusations made in civil lawsuits”. But neither he nor his representatives had responded to the newly emerged video until Sunday.

But privately in the climate and biodiversity sector, the mood around the Bezos Earth Fund has turned to one of growing unease. Researchers, climate policy advisers and NGO staff voiced concerns about the level of influence the organisation holds over critical environmental institutions for halting climate change and biodiversity loss, many of which now count Bezos Earth Fund among their biggest funders. Some did not want to be named due to concerns about the consequences for their own funding.

“We have seen millions of dollars paid to conservation and climate organisations. So many have taken money from the Bezos Earth Fund and I find it really worrying. There is obviously a risk of a conflict of interest,” says Holger Hoffmann-Riem from the Swiss NGO Go for Impact. “The credibility of the system relies on independence.”

One climate policy expert, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says: “In the few years since it started distributing enormous amounts of money for climate change and conservation, Bezos Earth Fund has established influence over many major initiatives and their board members.

“At this point, Bezos Earth Fund’s enormous presence in the climate and conservation space starts to look less philanthropical, and more like an attempt to take over the corporate governance system for its own interests and agenda.”

Guardrails to prevent artificial intelligence models behind chatbots from issuing illegal, toxic or explicit responses can be bypassed with simple techniques, UK government researchers have found.

The UK’s AI Safety Institute (AISI) said systems it had tested were “highly vulnerable” to jailbreaks, a term for text prompts designed to elicit a response that a model is supposedly trained to avoid issuing.

The AISI said it had tested five unnamed large language models (LLM) – the technology that underpins chatbots – and circumvented their safeguards with relative ease, even without concerted attempts to beat their guardrails.

“All tested LLMs remain highly vulnerable to basic jailbreaks, and some will provide harmful outputs even without dedicated attempts to circumvent their safeguards,” wrote AISI researchers in an update on their testing regime.

Joe Biden has launched one of his most scathing attacks yet on Donald Trump’s record of racism, suggesting that the former US president would have acted differently to the January 6 2021 insurrection if was led by Black people.

The remarks, at a dinner hosted by a civil rights organisation in a critical swing state, pointed to an intensifying battle between Biden and Trump for African American voters ahead of November’s presidential election.

“Let me ask you,” Biden said during an address to an NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) dinner in Detroit. “What do you think he would have done on January 6 if Black Americans had stormed the Capitol?”

There was a collective gasp and murmur in the cavernous convention centre, where an estimated 5,000 guests had gathered. The president insisted: “No, I’m serious. What do you think? I can only imagine.”

When Larry Callies went to the movies as a boy in Rosenberg, Texas, the heroes riding horses and wearing 10-gallon hats were all white men.

But the real cowboys Callies knew were Black. His great-grandfather Lavel Callies was an enslaved cowboy who worked with horses professionally after emancipation. “We’re cowboys for three generations back,” says Callies, 71, who runs the Black Cowboy Museum.

Historians estimate that 20% to 25% of the people who settled the continental US west – a region from Washington state to Montana and New Mexico to California – were Black men and women. They moved cattle on horseback, settled towns, kept the peace and delivered the mail in the wild, wild west. But Black cowgirls and cowboys have been pretty much invisible to most. For nearly 200 years, two separate cowboy narratives, one Black and one white, have trotted side by side in the US. The two have rarely crossed paths. Until now.

Donald Trump flirted with the idea of being president for three terms – a clear violation of the US constitution – during a bombastic speech for the National Rifle Association in which he vowed to reverse gun safety measures green-lighted during the Biden administration.

“You know, FDR 16 years – almost 16 years – he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?” The ex-president and GOP presidential frontrunner said to the organization’s annual convention in Dallas, prompting some in the crowd to yell “three!” Politico reported.

Trump has floated a third term in past comments, even mentioning a prolonged presidency while campaigning in 2020. He has also tried distancing himself from this idea, telling Time magazine in April: “I wouldn’t be in favor of it at all. I intend to serve four years and do a great job.”

It was early August 2022, when Michelle Wigmore was on her way back from leading a crew of wildland firefighters near Grande Prairie, Alta. They stopped for a coffee in Fox Creek, about 230 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

"There was a 'help wanted' sign up and the wage that they were offering at the Tim Hortons was higher than all our crew members," said Wigmore in an interview with CBC's What On Earth.

While they made a joke of it at the time, Wigmore — who has about three decades of experience fighting wildfires in Ontario and Alberta — says it felt unfair when she considered the amount of training and work involved in the job.

Low wages are one of the reasons Wigmore and others say wildland firefighters in Alberta are not returning to the seasonal jobs, resulting in a dwindling number of experienced firefighters and creating potential safety risks to personnel and the public.

Other reasons include "lack of benefits [and] lack of potential opportunity in the organization," said a former wildland firefighter, whom CBC News has agreed to call by one of his initials, D, because of concerns speaking out could harm his livelihood.

The Virginia State Police investigator seemed puzzled about what the inmate was describing: “unbearable” conditions at a prison so cold that toilet water would freeze over and inmates were repeatedly treated for hypothermia.

“How do you get hypothermia in a prison?” the investigator asked. “You shouldn’t.”

The exchange, captured on video obtained by The Associated Press, took place during an investigation into the death of Charles Givens, a developmentally disabled inmate at the Marion Correctional Treatment Center, who records show was among those repeatedly hospitalized for hypothermia.

After a special grand jury considered the case but opted not to bring criminal charges, Givens’ sister sued in federal court, alleging her brother was subjected to routine mistreatment, including “cold-water torture,” before he was fatally beaten in 2022.

The lawsuit has raised broader questions about conditions at the southwest Virginia prison, which the grand jury described as “inhumane and deplorable.”

Some Canadian provinces have logged a jump in unclaimed dead bodies in recent years, with next of kin citing funeral costs as a growing reason for not collecting loved ones' remains.

The phenomenon has prompted at least one province to build a new storage facility. Demand for memorial fundraisers has surged. The overall cost of a funeral in Canada at the top end has increased to about $8,800 from about $6,000 in 1998, according to industry trade group estimates.

Now, in the wake of an uproar over unclaimed bodies kept in freezers outside the (Health Sciences Centre in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador), the province is constructing a permanent storage unit to hold remains.

"People weren't claiming bodies because they realized they couldn't afford to bury them," said Jim Dinn, leader of the province's opposition New Democratic Party. "It's not about building a bigger storage unit: It's about addressing the underlying cause causing the accumulation of bodies and removing the barriers so people can have a dignified burial."