Police described his condition today as serious but stable

This British article titled "Two stabbings near Crumpsall Park overnight in separate incidents just 200 metres apart" says:

He was taken to hospital with serious injuries. Police described his condition today as serious but stable.

In the second sentence, what does 'today' modify, 'described' or 'condition'?

If it modifies the noun 'condition', what's the part of speech of 'today'?

Solution 1:

In the example today is a clause-level adjunct that modifies the entire clause:

Words do not modify words; syntactic constituents modify other syntactic constituents. Do not get hung up on word order. Temporal adjuncts in English have flexible placement: they can come before, after, or at appropriate spots within the clause they modify. So today could be placed before police, after police, after serious, or after condition, and the sentence would have the same underlying grammatical structure.

If it was necessary to draw a distinction between the time of description and the time that the description referred to, then the sentence would have been phrased differently. Meaning is as vague as it's allowed to be in the context.