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Frontrunner Zack Polanski has dismissed claims of a ‘hostile takeover’ but contest has been unusually fractious
The Green party will name its next leader on Tuesday after a fiercely fought leadership contest that has exposed tensions over tone, strategy and the party’s ambitions on the national stage.
The frontrunner, Zack Polanski, has pitched himself as a bold communicator able to turn rising support into a mass movement. He is facing the joint candidates Ellie Chowns and Adrian Ramsay, two impactful Green MPs elected last year who are seen as offering a steadier, more targeted route to growth.
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Conservationists hope that in 15 years species will no longer be at risk of extinction in Mexico – but challenges remain
In 2010, Gerardo Ceballos and a group of other researchers set out to answer a burning question: how many jaguars were there in Mexico? They knew there weren’t many. Hunting, loss of habitat, conflict with cattle ranchers and other issues had pushed the population to the brink of extinction.
Ceballos and his team from the National Alliance for Jaguar Conservation (ANCJ) thought there were maybe 1,000 jaguars across the country. They decided to carry out the country’s first census of the animal to find out exactly how many there were. They found 4,100.
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Weather services of UK, Ireland and Netherlands chose list of 21 names from 50,000 suggestions by the public
Meteorologists in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands have announced this year’s north Atlantic winter storm names, chosen after 50,000 suggestions were submitted by the public.
Amy, Bram and Chandra will be the first named storms of winter 2025-2026, the Met Office said on Monday.
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Most of these little-known but already endangered fish have never been seen alive in their natural habitat, but are under threat from bottom trawling and deep-sea mining
Three years ago I was running a research project from a bottom trawler off Namibia about deep-sea sharks – all of which live under enormous water pressure, close to the seafloor and are rarely seen by humans.
These sharks were being brought up in the trawler’s nets. By the time they were brought to the surface, they had experienced such a dramatic change in pressure that they had undergone barotrauma, so they were internally damaged and unlikely to survive.
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Cadair Idris, Gwynedd: The heather is dominant on the slopes today, as I embark on a steep climb in the heavy heat
As I head over the top of the pass from Corris, the great mass of Cadair Idris emerges against a leaden sky. The steep crags that stand above the thickly wooded slopes are coloured a deep purple by the flowering heather, but the usual vibrancy is subdued by the flat, almost sullen, light.
Getting off the bus at Minffordd, I wander up the avenue of chestnut trees that form such an impressive welcome to the mountain. A drift of dry, discoloured leaves stands at the edge of the path, something I wouldn’t expect to see for another month or so, suggesting that the trees are suffering water-stress after the dry summer.
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Heavy rain, lightning and tornadoes lash swaths of continent, with France, Italy and Slovenia among worst hit
Severe storms linked to a deep upper air trough formed from the ex-hurricane Erin lashed parts of western and southern Europe last week.
Italy was hit by severe rainfall on Thursday that caused flooding in the Lombardy region. The commune of Busto Arsizio was badly affected, with more than 100mm of rain and frequent lightning.
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Unspecified number of vessels due to depart Barcelona on Sunday, with dozens more expected to leave other Mediterranean ports on 4 September
A flotilla carrying humanitarian aid and activists, including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, is due to leave from Barcelona on Sunday to try to “break the illegal siege of Gaza”, organisers said.
The vessels will set off from the Spanish port city to “open a humanitarian corridor and end the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people”, said the Global Sumud Flotilla.
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Across the world, women at the heart of their communities are leading the struggle to protect their culture, land and way of life
“We, the daughters of mother earth … have come together to collectively decide what we can do to bring about a world which we would like our children and our children’s children to live in,” so states the Beijing Declaration of Indigenous Women.
Adopted in 1995, the document outlined the oppression of women around the world and demanded governments recognise “the social, cultural, economic, and religious rights of the Indigenous peoples in their constitutions and legal systems”.
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Ditching sanitary towels and tampons has made my period much less stressful. Crucially, it’s better for the environment too
I was 18 when I tried a menstrual cup for the first time. I was studying at the University of Edinburgh and Scotland had just become the first country in the world to make period products free to those who need them. The university health service was offering menstrual cups alongside the usual sanitary pads and tampons. I picked one up out of curiosity and because I just couldn’t resist a freebie.
I was used to spending £10 to £15 a month on period products, more if I was caught short and had to do a panicked dash to an overpriced off-licence. As an eco-conscious teenager I already bought non-applicator tampons but often wore a security sanitary liner underneath. It was an attempt to keep the endless worry of heavy periods at bay: will I leak, run out of supplies, or find a clean loo in time? Even so, I leaked more often than I cared to admit.
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Pollution, warm oceans and hungry urchins devastated Pacific kelp. Now, thanks to divers with hammers, one of the world’s most successful rehabilitation projects has helped it rebound
On an overcast Tuesday in July, divers Mitch Johnson and Sean Taylor shimmy into their wetsuits on the back of the R/V Xenarcha, a 28ft boat floating off the coast of Rancho Palos Verdes, south of Los Angeles. Behind them, the clear waters of the Pacific are dotted with a forest of army-green strands, waving like mermaid hair underwater.
We are here to survey the giant Pacific kelp, a species that once thrived in these ice cold waters. But over the past two decades, a combination of warm ocean temperatures, pollution, overfishing and the proliferation of hungry sea urchins that devour the kelp has led to an 80% decline in the forest along the southern California coast.
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