Trump rushed off stage by security

Republican candidate Donald Trump was briefly rushed off the stage by Secret Service agents at a rally in Reno, Nevada in a false alarm.

A man holding a sign saying Republicans Against Trump was tackled by security agents, after claims that he had a gun.

Mr Trump returned to the stage minutes later.

The Republican candidate says he is going to target states seen as Democratic strongholds ahead of Tuesday’s election.

He is set to visit Pennsylvania, Michigan and also Minnesota, which has not voted Republican since 1972.

On Saturday evening, Mr Trump had stopped speaking at the Reno rally after seeing something in the auditorium.

He was grabbed by two agents, who rushed him off stage, while the protester was held down and searched.

When he resumed his speech, Mr Trump said: “Nobody said it was going to be easy for us... I want to thank the Secret Service.”

The Secret Service later confirmed that someone in front of the stage had shouted “gun”, but that “upon a thorough search of the subject and the surrounding area, no weapon was found”.

Austyn Crites, the man at the centre of the disturbance, said he was attacked when he brought out his sign.

“I keep repeating - I’m down, someone is trying to choke me and I’m saying to these people; ‘There is no gun, I just have a sign’,” Mr Crites explained after the incident.

Earlier, Mr Trump had started off a four-state swing in Florida, where rival Hillary Clinton also campaigned.

She unveiled an advert to run in nearly a dozen states, set to the Katy Perry song, Roar.

Mrs Clinton later appeared with Perry at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the Democratic presidential candidate urged the crowd to vote.

“When your kids and grandkids ask you what you did in 2016,” Mrs Clinton said, “I want you to be able to say, I voted for a better, stronger, fairer America.”

Perry, who took to the stage to sing the song Nasty, said she was looking forward to election day. “Tuesday’s going to be fun,” she said, “but Wednesday is going to be better.”

Opinion polls suggest Mrs Clinton is still ahead in key states.

But she has seen her lead slip following last week’s FBI announcement that it was looking into emails that may be connected to her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

A nationwide McClatchyMarist opinion poll on Saturday gave her a one point lead, compared to six in September.

A YouGov polling estimate on Saturday gave her a three-point lead.

More than 40 million early voters have already cast their ballots. Reports suggest many more Latino voters are turning out early in key states including Florida, Arizona and Nevada compared to past elections.

Analysts in Nevada say the Democrats appear to have taken a significant lead there because of the early ballots.

Donald Trump told a rally in Tampa, Florida: “We’re going into what they used to call Democrat strongholds, where we’re now either tied or leading. We’re going to Minnesota, which traditionally has not been Republican at all.”

Pennsylvania and Michigan are also both on his agenda and they too have been tough states for Republicans. They have not won them since 1988.

Florida is an important state, particularly for Mr Trump, with many seeing it as a must-win. Candidates need 270 electoral college votes to win the presidency. Florida is worth 29.

The contest appears to be tight. Real Clear Politics’ poll average puts the Democratic candidate ahead, but poll analysis website FiveThirtyEight says Mr Trump has a slightly better chance of winning the state.

Mrs Clinton’s campaign has revealed she will do a two-minute national TV commercial on Monday night which they expect will reach a combined audience of 20 million people.

She has been relying heavily on A-list supporters - on Friday in Cleveland it was singer Beyonce and rapper husband Jay Z.

After Katy Perry, she will take the stage with basketball star LeBron James in Cleveland.

Giant snowballs appear on Russian beach in Siberia

A strange and beautiful sight greeted locals in the Gulf of Ob, in northwest Siberia, after thousands of natural snowballs formed on the beach.

An 11-mile stretch of coast was covered in the icy spheres.

The sculptural shapes range from the size of a tennis ball to almost 1m across.

They result from a rare environmental process where small pieces of ice form, are rolled by wind and water, and end up as giant snowballs.

Locals in the village of Nyda, which lies on the Yamal Peninsula just above the Arctic Circle, say they have never seen anything to compare to them.

Russian TV quoted an explanation from Sergei Lisenkov, press secretary of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute:

“As a rule, first there is a primary natural phenomenon - sludge ice, slob ice. Then comes a combination of the effects of the wind, the lay of the coastline, and the temperature and wind conditions.

“It can be such an original combination that it results in the formation of balls like these.”

A similar phenomenon was witnessed in the Gulf of Finland in December 2014, and on Lake Michigan in December 2015, the Ura.ru website said.

Pictures of the snowballs have charmed Russians online. A reader of the TJournal news site calling himself “Anton Antonov” joked: “Soon the peninsula will be invaded by hatched snowsaurs!”

Man confesses to seven killings

Todd Kohlhepp, the man arrested after a woman was found “chained like a dog” on his property in South Carolina, has confessed to seven killings, a sheriff says.

Kohlhepp told police on Saturday that he was responsible for the deaths of four people in 2003.

He also showed law enforcement officers where he said he had buried two other victims on his property. This comes after the discovery of a body at the 95-acre site on Friday. Registered sex offender Kohlhepp, 45, was arrested on Thursday when police found a woman on his property chained in a container. She had been missing, along with her boyfriend, since late August. The woman was discovered after police heard banging noises and screams from inside a metal shipping container in Woodruff, 80 miles northwest of the state capital of Columbia.

It was described by Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright as “a hellish place to be locked in hot weather. No lights, no windows, no air flow”.

Officers had been led to the property thanks to a tip-off by a sex-crime investigator.

The woman told officers that Kohlhepp had shot and killed her boyfriend in front of her.

Mr Wright confirmed on Saturday that the body found on the site a day earlier was that of her boyfriend Charles Carver, 32.

“They’re obviously heartbroken,” he said after talking to the Carver family. “It’s terrible.” Mr Carver died of multiple gunshot wounds. Kohlhepp told investigators that he was also the gunman behind the fatal shooting in 2003 of four people at a motorcycle shop in Chesnee near Spartanburg, South Carolina.