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Freedom of information data reveals violations on intensive poultry and pig farms
Industrial-scale livestock farms across East Anglia have breached environmental regulations more than 700 times in the past seven years, freedom of information (FoI) data has revealed.
The farms across Norfolk and Suffolk are among the largest in the country. Pig and poultry farming is concentrated in the region and 28% of England’s pig population was farmed in the area in 2023.
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Prof James Hansen says pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated, though other scientists disagree
The pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated, according to renowned climate scientist Prof James Hansen, who said the international 2C target is “dead”.
A new analysis by Hansen and colleagues concludes that both the impact of recent cuts in sun-blocking shipping pollution, which has raised temperatures, and the sensitivity of the climate to increasing fossil fuels emissions are greater than thought.
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Scientists say unusually mild temperatures linked to low-pressure system over Iceland directing strong flow of warm air towards north pole
Temperatures at the north pole soared more than 20C above average on Sunday, crossing the threshold for ice to melt.
Temperatures north of Svalbard in Norway had already risen to 18C hotter than the 1991–2020 average on Saturday, according to models from weather agencies in Europe and the US, with actual temperatures close to ice’s melting point of 0C. By Sunday, the temperature anomaly had risen to more than 20C.
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Labour pledges to protect 66,500 more properties, criticising previous Tory efforts
Ministers are topping up flood defence investment in England to a “record” £2.65bn, after accusing the previous government of “putting lives at risk” by under-spending.
An extra £250m is being pledged on top of the £2.4bn previously announced, to shore up defences and protect an extra 66,500 properties from flooding over a two-year period, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said.
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North American native burrows into riverbanks causing leaks in canals and dams and carries crayfish plague
It is quite a claim to fame to be the least wanted species in Europe but the red swamp crayfish, Procambarus clarkii, seems to have that distinction. It was picked out as a major threat to other wildlife, riverbanks and ponds in 14 countries to illustrate the efforts of a new Europe-wide organisation trying to eliminate alien species.
So far this native of North America has only been found at 16 locations in England, including the ponds on Hampstead Heath in London, and more ominously in the Grand Union canal, which could give the crayfish access to a large part of the country.
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West Dartmoor, Devon: Landhoppers, originally stowaways from Australia in the soil of exported plants, bring a burst of life to my sluggish winter garden
The moor is cold and still. From the bleak tors topped with lumps of granite creased like fossilised dough to rocky valleys and bristling slopes of gorse, it waits for spring sunshine to warm its bony back. Save for a few birds animating the frostbitten hedgerows, my garden on the western flank of Dartmoor stares back at me blankly. Yet there is life to be found, taking refuge under plant pots on the veranda.
Beneath every lifted pot is a disc of dampness, dark as a vinyl record stencilled on to the flagstone. And sheltering within each moist circle, an assortment of invertebrates: slugs plump as black olives, centipedes, beetles, earwigs. Most are slow to react, skulking off bleary-eyed in search of cover. But a species among them, similar to a large flea, rapidly pings away the moment it is exposed to sunlight.
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The city is determined to solve the ‘whodumpedit’ mystery after a huge pile of refuse was discarded, blocking the road. But with fly-tipping across the UK on the up, will it be possible to find the culprit?
Squinting through her car headlights in the early dawn, it looked like some sort of surrealist horror. Weighing just short of 30 tonnes, the enormous pile of rubbish had appeared on Elaine Hutchings’ doorstep in Lichfield overnight. “The road was carnage,” she says. The smell of mildew was nauseating. Granted, Hutchings is only 5ft (1.52 metres) tall – but the heap loomed over her. “I just stood there in shock.”
Discernible among the bricks and rubble were toilet seats, office chairs, school exam papers from 15 years ago and, somehow compounding the absurdity of it all, a single hairdryer. “Nothing would surprise me as to what was in there,” says the 54-year-old business director. “It could have cost someone their life. I was so upset that somebody would even consider doing that without a thought for anybody.”
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Death looms large in the pair’s dance trilogy but, as Complicité’s artistic director says, confronting it is ‘integral to and essential for life’
To one side of this light-filled studio at Nederlands Dans Theater in the Hague are director Simon McBurney and choreographer Crystal Pite. McBurney is as still and reflective as a lake, though you sense the currents of contemplation moving behind his eyes. Next to him, Pite can barely stay on her chair and her arms keep rising up in urgency and encouragement. Both are facing the other side of the studio, where the company’s outstanding dancers are crafting a new piece, working through details of timing and spacing as they test the viability of different moves. At the centre of it all stands a deathbed.
It’s a shock at first, but it makes sense. Pite and McBurney are working on the last part of a trilogy called Figures in Extinction. The idea of extinction has evolved over the course of these three pieces: the first focused on non-human life forms; the second on neurological connections between our inner and outer worlds; and the third – well, that’s what they’re finding out right now.
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Many homes are seriously damaged after torrential rain but residents know it could have been much worse and that they were ‘pretty lucky’
Like anyone who has grown up and spent their life in the wet tropics of far north Queensland, Sonia Pollock is used to a bit of precipitation.
“So we just thought it was rain at first,” she says of the torrential downpour around her flat in south-west Townsville.
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Antamina, in the Andes, makes billions thanks to the green tech boom. But locals say they are being poisoned by arsenic, losing their water and sinking further into poverty
A chilly breeze passes along the shore of Lake Contonga, 4,400 metres up in the Peruvian Andes. Julio Rimac Damian, from the nearby village of Challhuayaco, points to the mud under his feet. “All this used to be covered with water,” he says.
A canal running from the lake that is supposed to carry water to lowland villages has also run dry. Damian says the water began to disappear two years ago when a mining company started exploratory drilling in Peru’s highlands.
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