Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump has claimed that "corrupt" media were seeking to rig November's presidential election in favour of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
With his White House campaign in chaos over snowballing accusations of sexual assault, Mr Trump has cast himself as the victim of a "smear campaign" and further escalated his attacks on his rival heading into the final weeks of the race.
"Hillary is running for president in what looks like a rigged election," he told a fired-up rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
"The election is being rigged by corrupt media pushing completely false allegations and outright lies in an effort to elect her president."
Mr Trump tweeted out a similar allegation earlier today to his 12 million followers, charging: "Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted and should be in jail. Instead she is running for president in what looks like a rigged election."
As the Manhattan billionaire tanks in the polls, he has spent the last week claiming the media and a "global elite" is working against him, and that Mrs Clinton had plotted to destroy the sovereignty of the United States.
"Either we win this election or we lose this country," he told supporters in New Hampshire.
"I really believe this is the last chance we have to win. I really believe it. Not going to happen again."
The virulence of Mr Trump's attacks on the Clinton camp have raised concerns about whether the real estate mogul would even acknowledge a defeat, and how his legions of fired-up supporters would react should he lose.
US President Barack Obama echoed those concerns at a campaign rally yesterday.
"This is somebody who... is now suggesting that if the election doesn't go his way, it's not because of all the stuff he's said, but it's because it's rigged and it's a fraud," Mr Obama said.
"You don't start complaining about the refs before the game's even done. You just play the game, right?"
Earlier, Mr Trump said that the women accusing him of sexual misconduct fabricated their stories to damage his campaign after two more women came forward yesterday with allegations that he had groped them.
The new accusations were made by a contestant on his reality TV show The Apprentice, who cited a 2007 incident, and by a woman who described an incident in a nightclub from the early 1990s.
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With the allegations against Mr Trump dominating the campaign, opinion polls show him trailing Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll taken 7-13 October and released yesterday showed the Republican behind Mrs Clinton by 7 percentage points among likely voters in the election on 8 November.
Mr Trump has spent more and more time at his rallies denying allegations of groping since a video from 2005 became public a week ago showing him bragging about groping and making unwanted sexual advances.
Yesterday, in addition to his denials, he suggested that he never would have found two of the women who have made allegations attractive.
Ryan urges people to look beyond 'ugliness' of campaign
Many Republicans have sought to distance themselves from Mr Trump.
The most senior of them, House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, angered Mr Trump when he announced this week he would no longer campaign for Mr Trump or defend him but would focus on trying to preserve the Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate in the election.
Mr Ryan gave a campaign speech in Madison, Wisconsin, yesterday without mentioning Mr Trump's name once.
He urged college students to look beyond the "ugliness" of the presidential campaign to focus on issues such as tax and healthcare reform.
"The kind of election we really want to have, it's not the one we're necessarily having right now," Mr Ryan said, urging students to "take the high ground".
Mr Trump yesterday also accused Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, the top shareholder in The New York Times Company, of helping to generate the reports of sexual misconduct.
Arturo Elias, Mr Slim's spokesman and son-in-law, said Mr Slim had "absolutely no contact" with the newspaper's reporters or editors on their Trump campaign coverage and "zero" contact with the paper's news operations.
