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Chancellor is in favour of North Sea project, but energy secretary has said she is leaning towards rejecting it
A cabinet split has emerged over whether to approve drilling at the Rosebank oilfield, with the chancellor, John Healey, in favour of the controversial North Sea project.
The energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, is ultimately in charge of the decision, and the Guardian reported last week that she was leaning towards rejecting it after granting permission for the smaller Jackdaw gasfield.
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Concrete sprawl in Yaoundé has devastated the city’s trees and parks, so volunteers are stepping up, shrub by shrub
A little piece of paradise is buried under the asphalt that is now lined with parked cars. The romantic spot where Sosthène Hugues Ngono used to bring his first dates had been green and beautiful. “It wasn’t just a park,” he says, standing at the edge of what is now a private car park in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé.
“It was where I came to clear my head when things felt confused,” he says. “Where I met people; where I fell in love, more than once.”
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Eldwick Crag, West Yorkshire: In the low light and the high wind, these corvids are preparing to roost for the night. And they seem to be enjoying themselves
Jackdaws like blustery weather the same way dolphins love choppy seas. There are faster flyers and more graceful flyers, but I can’t think of a bird that just enjoys flying as much as a jackdaw does. They bob and bank and yaw and wheel. And right now it’s roosting time in the copse above the quarry.
A jackdaw roost – or rather the prelude to the roost, the bedtime gathering, the swirl of small, clacking crows above and about the trees, like particles about to be drawn into a plughole – isn’t a murmuration. It’s neither as spectacular nor as enigmatic as the twilight displays of starlings; it’s a flock, plain and simple (plain as the jackdaw’s call of its own name, “jack”). But like everything jackdaws do, it’s full of bustling, garrulous life.
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Every autumn, Corvo Island in the Azores turns off its public lighting for a few key days to help fledgling Cory’s shearwaters as they attempt to fly to the ocean guided by the stars
Once a year, Corvo, the smallest and most northerly island of Portugal’s Azores archipelago, goes dark. Since 2019, the island’s 450 or so inhabitants have chosen to switch off the lights every autumn for five nights to tackle the disastrous effects of artificial light on Cory’s shearwaters, a seabird endemic to the Atlantic Ocean.
It began in 1991 when the community noticed huge numbers of deaths among young shearwaters.
A newborn Cory’s shearwater chick
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The 2030 target for 80% of new cars to have zero emissions could be cut to as low as half
Electric cars make people happy. More than nine in 10 EV drivers – 94% in a recent poll – are saving money, and a similar number would stick with electric for their next purchase, and recommend them to family and friends. Sales are soaring: more than half of the new cars sold in the UK last month were electric, if hybrids are taken into account, and about 28% of new car sales overall were electric only.
This is hardly surprising, given that soaring petrol and diesel costs have pushed up the price of a full tank to about £120. EV drivers are paying about 2.4p a mile.
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Tim and Geli Harris have spent more than a decade fighting to protect Catfield Fen, a rare wetland in the Norfolk Broads
Polluters and regulators who fail to stop pollution must quake in their boots when they receive a letter from the lawyers for Tim and Geli Harris. The couple, who farm 460 acres in the Norfolk Broads, have now scored a hat-trick of landmark legal victories to save an internationally important wetland after they won again in the high court this month.
Lady Justice Lieven found that Natural England failed in its statutory duty to protect Catfield Fen from pollution after nitrates and phosphates washed from arable fields into one of the finest examples of calcareous fen in western Europe, home to 2,500 species including rarities such as the fen orchid, crested buckler fern, breeding bittern and swallowtail butterflies.
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Season will be less vibrant with trees such as birches, which usually offer a striking burst of yellow leaves, already bare
Among a canvas of copper, red and purple autumn leaves on display at Wisley garden in Surrey, south-east England, one tree stands conspicuously naked.
“The birch has lost all its leaves,” says Guy Barter, the chief horticulturist at the Royal Horticultural Society. “That’s the effect of drought, so it’ll have no autumn colour this year.”
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Company imitates reflection of sun from mirrors, prompting pushback from some scientists, environmentalists and California locals
Locals in a rural area of California were recently startled to see dazzlingly bright light shining down from nearby mountains at night, illuminating a swathe of the desert below.
Unbeknown to them, the strange nocturnal illumination was the latest step in a company’s plan to erect thousands of giant mirrors in space to reflect sunlight on to the Earth during night-time.
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Queensland researchers say a published study contains ‘silly mistake’ that over-inflates vaccine’s efficacy but the regulator is standing by decision to approve it
At wildlife hospitals across eastern Australia, many koalas brought in have distinctive brown patches on their bottoms – a sign of urinary incontinence and a painful inflamed bladder. Others have red, weeping eyes, pointing to a bacterial disease that can cause blindness in the endangered marsupials.
Chlamydia infection, also known as chlamydiosis, is the most significant disease affecting the animals. The culprit is most commonly the bacterium Chlamydia pecorum, which is spread via mating or close contact.
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Dom Phillips warned that Jair Bolsonaro would make life more dangerous for reporters and the Amazon rainforest, and that his sons were even more extreme
“Bolso shows all signs of fascism, as do his supporters,” the murdered British journalist Dom Phillips told me before his death. “His sons are all more extreme if anything.”
These words were written in 2018 by the Guardian contributor shortly before the election of the far-right former army captain Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil – a prospect that Dom viewed with dread.
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Photo: Vivian Grisogono
