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After flood defences failed yet again, heartbroken residents of Merseyside and Cheshire now face a painful clean-up and possible financial ruin
At about 3.15am on New Year’s Day, Caroline McClymont looked out of her bedroom window at the Sankey brook over the road. It looked a bit fuller than usual – to be expected, given the rain. “But there was nothing out of the ordinary,” McClymont said. “There was no indication it was going to flood.”
Within an hour, the whole street was under water. The home McClymont, a science lecturer, has owned with her husband Alan, a technician, for 31 years was filled with dirty water, higher than the kitchen countertops. It covered the sofas, washing machine, Christmas tree, everything on the ground floor. The neighbour’s car was submerged. “Everything is destroyed. Nothing could be saved,” McClymont said. “It’ll take six, seven months to get right again.
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UK diners are increasingly turning to the versatile, nutritious fish
For millions of Britons, smoked salmon on blinis or dill-laden gravadlax is a party staple. But restaurants and home cooks are increasingly choosing trout instead.
Trout sales are up 36% year on year at Waitrose, with raw trout seeing the biggest increase, up more than 60%. Over at online retailer Ocado, trout sales have jumped higher – up 54% year on year.
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A conservation project is helping identify and restore wildlife-rich sites previously degraded and dried up
When Joe Gray coppiced a patch of woodland on his Essex farm, he noticed that an abandoned pond sprang back into life after it was exposed to sunlight.
“It was a hole in the woods with some leaves in it – we didn’t think of it as a pond,” he says. Since then, he and his wife, Emma, have restored 11 “zombie” ponds on their 450-hectare (1,100-acre) regenerative farm. They’ve also persuaded a group of neighbouring farmers to bring back to life 80 ponds within a 3-mile (5km) radius near Braintree.
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Ports including in Saudi Arabia and the US projected to be seriously damaged by a metre of sea level rise
Rising sea levels driven by the climate crisis will overwhelm many of the world’s biggest oil ports, analysis indicates.
Scientists said the threat was ironic as fossil fuel burning causes global heating. They said reducing emissions by moving to renewable energy would halt global heating and deliver more reliable energy.
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Families Like Ours has become national talking point but some scientists say events depicted could not happen
Featuring scenes of huge crowds boarding ferries, protest and desperation as six million Danes become climate refugees and life as they know it rapidly collapses, the new TV series by the Oscar-winning director Thomas Vinterberg is a potential “look into the future”, he says.
Familier som vores (Families Like Ours) – a drama which depicts a flooded Denmark shut down and evacuated – has been viewed nearly 1m times and become a national talking point. At its premiere at the Venice international film festival, it evoked tears, shouts and a standing ovation, with one critic describing it as “grimly prophetic”.
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Volunteers’ data should be included in official monitoring reports to tackle pollution crisis, says Earthwatch
Citizen science testing of river water quality will expand this year in an attempt to make the data part of official monitoring of waterways, the head of an independent environmental research group has said.
The use of ordinary people across the country to test river water quality for pollutants including phosphates, nitrates and other chemicals has captured the imagination of thousands of volunteers. In 2024 more than 7,000 people took part in river testing “blitzes” run over two weekends by the NGO Earthwatch Europe. The research, using standardised testing equipment provided by the NGO and Imperial College London, gathered data from almost 4,000 freshwater sites across the UK.
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Watch Duty – which began in California and has expanded across 14 states – alerted the public to more than 9,000 wildfires in 2024
Cristy Thomas began to panic as she called 911 for the second time on a warm October day but couldn’t get through. She anxiously watched the plume of black smoke pouring over her rural community in central California get larger.
Then she heard a familiar ping.
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The French movie star has written an open letter to rescue Rillette, the boar faced with being put down by the French authorities
It is hard to raise much sympathy for a wild boar in France: hunters like to shoot and eat them; farmers claim they cause around €1m of damage to crops every year; health officials claim they spread diseases. The unfortunately named Rillette – it means a type of potted meat – however, is the exception to the general rule.
A threat by the local authorities in the Aube, eastern France, to put down the female boar has spread into an international campaign to save Rillette supported by animal activist and former actor Brigitte Bardot.
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They spent their lives and careers looking after animals and when the 2019-20 fires erupted they responded on the front lines. Veterinarians and carers recall those months – and the impact it has had since
The day before the fire front hit, the forest fell deadly silent. Normally, says wildlife carer Susie Pulis, “if you are driving or walking in the bush it’s nothing but chitter chatter. There’s lots and lots of noise, all the different bird life and insects and everything buzzing around.” But this was different. “The birds had gone.”
Pulis and her son were scouting for animals before the fires hit. “We could see the fire in the distance, we could see the flames.
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From post and planes to TV, phones and retail chains – and even a central bank – here are the chiefs facing the most testing of times
A year is a long time in business: enough time for things to turn sour financially, or to engineer a comeback. Here are our picks of the figures across all sectors who face a testing year with something big to prove in 2025
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