Special pods at Chester zoo helped conservationists breed and release more than 100,000 greater Bermuda snails

A button-sized snail once feared extinct in its Bermudian home is thriving again after conservationists bred and released more than 100,000 of the molluscs.

The greater Bermuda snail (Poecilozonites bermudensis) was found in the fossil record but believed to have vanished from the North Atlantic archipelago, until a remnant population was discovered in a damp and overgrown alleyway in Hamilton, the island capital, in 2014.

Peterchurch, Herefordshire: Some silage competitions are assessed in a lab far away, this one takes place in a noisy pub, with judges getting their hands dirty

What a night. I've just got home from the Nags Head, Peterchurch, having attended the Eskleyside Agricultural Society's annual silage competition. The Nags is one of the great social spots in the Golden valley. Here you can meet potato growers, social workers, sheep farmers, stranded pilgrims, water diviners and Thomas the cat. I've witnessed carol singing and dancing on tables, and the fire only goes out for two weeks each year, in the height of summer.

Tonight the focus is silage. Grass, maize and cereal crops, harvested last summer, have been under wraps ever since in the local barns. Starved of oxygen, they have been steadily "pickling", to ensure they're packed with nutrients when fed to hungry cattle and sheep.

Greater awareness of healthy diets and concerns over 'trusted' food mean sales are growing at fastest pace in two decades

When household finances were plunged into turmoil during the credit crunch, one of the first things that Britons cancelled was their veg box delivery.

But although the cost of living crisis persists, the organic market is enjoying its biggest boom in two decades, according to the veg box seller Riverford. It is not just fruit and veg, with a "massive" increase in sales of organic meat. Organic chicken was up 13% year on year, despite costing three times as much as other birds.

Wylie's Baths in Coogee turns away swimmers for the first time in memory. But people will head back into open waters soon, experts say

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At Wylie's Baths in Sydney's east, the blue and yellow-ringed upper deck has never been busier.

On the concrete below, towels are crowded together. In the water, regular lap swimmers have to contend with an onslaught of first-timers.

Government plans to protect species by increasing woodland and removing greys, but campaigners say it needs to go further

When Sam Beaumont sees a flash of red up a tree on his Lake District farm, he feels a swell of pride. He's one of the few people in England who gets to see red squirrels in his back garden.

"I feel very lucky to have them on the farm. It's an important thing to try and keep a healthy population of them. They are absolutely beautiful," he said.

What could be more romantic than those three little words: locally grown, seasonal? How to choose flowers that show you care - about both a Valentine and Australia's environment

• Change by degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household's carbon footprint

• Got a question or tip for reducing household emissions? Email us at changebydegrees@theguardian.com

A dozen red roses may say "I love you", but many conventional bouquets carry an environmental price, having been imported by air, dipped in chemicals and wrapped in plastic.

Valentine's Day is second only to Mother's Day for sales of cut flowers, a popular choice for the millions of Australians planning to buy gifts for that special someone.

Storm Leonardo has ravaged the southern regions of Spain and Portugal this week, leaving one man dead in Portugal and one woman missing in Spain

• Calls to postpone presidential election as Storm Leonardo lashes Portugal and Spain

Hawes, North Yorkshire: A stunning ray of sunshine, beamed on to a farmhouse, is a reminder of my family's history in this landscape

It is early Saturday morning and I'm on my way to the Hawes Honeys sale of "in-lamb" (pregnant) ewes at Hawes auction. Usually I drive through Nateby and up over the tops into North Yorkshire, past the big pipe under the road where I used to play with toy cars when I was little, and remembering my sons shouting "hold your breath everyone, don't breathe the Yorkshire air" as we passed the county boundary.

Today I take a different route, turning off at Wharton to go via Mallerstang instead. As I drove into Mallerstang I had to stop the car and watch as a single ray of sunlight broke through, lighting up a white farmhouse on the other side of the valley, opposite Pendragon Castle.

This week's best wildlife photographs from around the world

With plans to sell off over a million acres of natural habitat for oil and gas development, the Trump administration is ignoring the dire impact on its fragile ecosystem

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This week, the Trump administration took a key step towards opening new leases for oil and gas drilling across millions of acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - a pristine and biodiverse expanse in northern Alaska and one of the last wildlands in the US still left untouched.

With a call for nominations officially issued on Tuesday, the US Bureau of Land Management began evaluating plots across the 1.5 million-acre Coastal Plain at the heart of the refuge - an area often referred to as the American Serengeti, thanks to its rich tundra ecosystems, which provide habitat for close to 200 species and serve as the traditional homelands of the Iñupiat and Gwichʼin peoples.

Flawed economic models mean climate crisis could crash global economy, experts warn

Fossil fuel firms may have to pay for climate damage under proposed UN tax

The lithium boom: could a disused quarry bring riches to Cornwall?

Trump's Greenland threats open old wounds for Inuit across Arctic

'Erasure of years of work': outcry as White House moves to open Arctic reserve to oil and gas drilling

Arctic endured year of record heat as climate scientists warn of 'winter being redefined'

Research in Wales found that home, not outdoor travel, was largest contributor to children's daily exposure

Children living in homes with wood burners could be exposed to over three times more pollution than those in non-wood-burning homes. The results come from a study that looked at air pollution experienced by primary schoolchildren in Wales.

Fifty-three children from two primary schools in Anglesey (Ynys Môn) were given backpacks equipped with air pollution sensors. They took the packs home and carried them during their journeys to and from school.

CAA's guidance also including booking sites to enable passengers to make 'more informed travel decisions'

Airlines and booking firms should give UK customers information about the environmental impact of their flights, the regulator has said.

The Civil Aviation Authority urged booking sites to enable passengers to make "more informed travel decisions" by setting out estimates for carbon emissions for flights landing or taking off from British airports.

Animal Equality says two surprise inspections in three years suggests 'embarrassingly poor' level of scrutiny

Scottish salmon farmers recorded more than 35m unexpected salmon deaths in just under three years but there were only two unannounced inspections of facilities over the same period.

In December, the Scottish government's secretary for rural affairs, Mairi Gougeon, said that there was "a really robust regulatory regime when it comes to fin-fish aquaculture" but animal welfare campaigners say the figures call that claim into question.

A mangrove conservation project in Guanabara Bay has shown how a dying ecosystem can be transformed into a thriving sanctuary

With deep blue waters flanked by dramatic peaks, Guanabara Bay is the postcard view of Rio de Janeiro - but it is also one of Brazil's most polluted coastal environments. Raw sewage and solid waste flow into the bay from surrounding cities, home to more than 8 million people. Cargo ships and oil platforms chug in and out of commercial ports, while dozens of abandoned vessels lie rotting in the water.

But at the head of the bay, between the cities of Itaboraí and Magé, the environment feels different. The air is purer, the waters are empty but for small fishing canoes, and flocks of birds soar overhead.

Rammed earth sourced from, or near, the grounds of a proposed building site is attracting attention as an eco-friendly construction material

From afar, the low-rise homestead perched in the Wiltshire countryside may look like any other rural outpost, but step closer and the texture of the walls reveal something distinct from the usual facade of cement, brick and steel.

The Rammed Earth House in the Cranborne Chase is one of the few projects in the UK that has been made by unstabilised rammed earth - a building material that consists entirely of compacted earth, and which has been used as far back as the Neolithic period.

On a recent trip to Lake Geneva in Switzerland, biodiversity reporter Phoebe Weston witnessed the impact of one of the planet's most potent invasive species, the quagga mussel. In just a decade the mollusc, originally from the Ponto-Caspian region of the Black Sea, has caused irreversible change beneath the surface of the picturesque lake. While ecologists believe invasive species play a major role in more than 60% of plant and animal extinctions, stopping them in their tracks is almost impossible. Phoebe tells Madeleine Finlay how invasive species spread, how conservationists are trying combat them and why some think a radical new approach is needed.

'It's an open invasion': how millions of quagga mussels changed Lake Geneva for ever

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Charity praises effort to stop Ramsgate's Pie Factory Music closing but calls for more youth services in coastal towns

The last remaining youth centre in one of England's most deprived coastal places has been saved from being sold after a long campaign by the charity that has for 13 years called it home.

In November the Guardian revealed how the centre in Ramsgate on the Kent coast was facing being auctioned off by Kent county council, despite an independent report that estimated the centre was saving the council more than £500,000 a year in costs, including for services in mental health, youth justice and social care.

Industry bigger than all but seven world economies, and accounts for more than third of China's economic growth

China's clean energy industries drove more than 90% of the country's investment growth last year, making the sectors bigger than all but seven of the world's economies, a new analysis has shown.

For the second time in three years, the report showed the manufacture, installation and export of batteries, electric cars, solar, wind and related technologies accounted for more than a third of China's economic growth.

Baroness Sheehan challenges refusal to remove 25,000 tonnes of waste by school causing 'grave environmental hazard'

A 25,000 tonne illegal waste dump next to a primary school in Wigan presents "a grave environmental hazard" and should be cleared, the chair of the Lords environment committee has told the government.

Baroness Sheehan challenged the refusal of the Environment Agency to clean up an illegal waste dump in Bolton House Road, Wigan, given the agency was spending millions clearing up illegal waste deposited in Kidlington, Oxfordshire.

States and financial bodies using modelling that ignores shocks from extreme weather and climate tipping points

Flawed economic models mean the accelerating impact of the climate crisis could lead to a global financial crash, experts warn.

Recovery would be far harder than after the 2008 financial crash, they said, as "we can't bail out the Earth like we did the banks".

At a party event in a school hall in Lewisham, people told me how disillusionment with Labour has led to this moment

"How many?"

On the end of the phone is a nice press officer for the Greens, head full from a long day in Gorton, Manchester, showing off their would-be MP. And now, as Friday's sky turns indigo, I'm calling about reports from Lewisham, south London, that tomorrow they're expecting a flood of 500 Green activists. This comes as a surprise to the party's own news machine.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

Castletown Bay, Isle of Man: The smell is unpleasant, but these slimy mounds are full of flies, molluscs and sand hoppers - all vital winter food

My British Trust for Ornithology wetland bird survey includes patrolling a storm beach, which, at this time of year, has huge piles of rotting wrack thrown up by the gales. They're made up of hand-like fronds of laminaria, bladderwrack with its buoyant bubble vesicles, sugar kelp and the long "washing line" strands of non-native sargassum seaweed that arrived from Japan on Pacific oysters and ships' hulls in recent years.

These slimy, smelly heaps are generally unpopular with passersby - some even call for their removal - but for wildlife they are a food source of the highest quality.

My dad, John Barkham, who has died aged 82, was an inspirational teacher of ecology and a lifelong naturalist. As the first ecologist to join the new University of East Anglia in 1969, he taught students over three decades in the pioneering School of Environmental Sciences.

After studying the person-centred theories of Carl Rogers, whom he visited in California, John experimented with bold new teaching techniques, one year informing baffled students that they would design their own syllabus and teach themselves.

Paying attention to the calls of our avian neighbours can reduce stress, find scientists in Germany

Feeling stressed? Try a dose of birdsong to lift the spirits. A new study shows that paying attention to the treetop melodies of our feathered friends can boost wellbeing and bring down stress levels.

Previous research has shown that people feel better in bird-rich environments, but Christoph Randler, from the University of Tübingen, and colleagues wanted to see if that warm fuzzy feeling translated into measurable physiological changes. They rigged up a park with loudspeakers playing the songs of rare birds and measured the blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol levels (a marker of stress) of volunteers before and after taking a 30-minute walk through the park. Some volunteers experienced the birdsong-enriched environment, some heard just natural birdsong, and some wore noise-cancelling headphones and heard no birdsong. Half of the recruits were asked to pay attention to the birdsong.

A shortlist of 24 images has been selected for the wildlife photographer of the year people's choice award. You can vote for your favourite image online. The winner will be announced on 25 March and shown from that date as part of the overall wildlife photographer of the year exhibition, which runs until 12 July at the Natural History Museum in London

Inkpen, Berkshire: We're paying the price now for a poor grass harvest, and the concern is isn't a one-off bad year

At this point in the year, when the growing season seems so far away, last summer's hay harvest is most remembered, sometimes rued. The hottest summer followed the driest spring in over 100 years in southern England. And although making hay while the sun shines is genuinely crucial, rain is critical to growth. Last year produced a very poor harvest, and hay is now running out.

Traditionally, two cuts are made, in late spring and summer, doubling the yield. It's an ancient, ingenious and hopeful system, and in the case of meadow hay (rather than single-species ryegrass) it benefits nature, removing nutrient‑laden grass and encouraging biodiversity. But long-term studies show that as our weather patterns change, grass-growing potential has declined greatly over the last 80 years.

When Essex University's Southend campus opened, it was a message of hope for a 'left behind' UK seaside town. Its closure will be felt far beyond its 800 students, some of whom will not get their degrees

The seaside city of Southend-on-Sea, on England's east coast, looks grey on a winter afternoon in term-time. Its cobbled high street, bordering the university campus, is sparsely populated with market stalls, vape shops and discount retailers, and feels unusually quiet.

"There used to be lots of shops, restaurants and youth clubs around here," says 23-year-old Nathan Doucette-Chiddicks. Now, the city is about to lose something else that it can scarcely do without.

Known as 'white gold', lithium is among the most important mined elements on the planet - ideal for the rechargeable batteries used in tech products. Can Europe's largest deposit bring prosperity to the local community?

It looks more like the past than the future. A vast chasm scooped out of a scarred landscape, this is a Cornwall the summer holidaymakers don't see: a former china clay pit near St Austell called Trelavour. I'm standing at the edge of the pit looking down with the man who says his plans for it will help the UK's transition to renewable energy and bring back year-round jobs and prosperity to a part of the country that badly needs both. "And if I manage to make some money in the process, fantastic," he says. "Though that is not what it's about."

We'll return to him shortly. But first to the past, when this story begins, about 275-280m years ago. "There was a continental collision at the time," Frances Wall, professor of applied mineralogy at the Camborne School of Mines at the University of Exeter, explained to me before my visit. This collision caused the bottom of the Earth's crust to melt, with the molten material rising higher in the crust and forming granite. "There are lots of different types of granite that intrude at different times, more than 10m years or so," she says. "The rock is made of minerals and, if you've got the right composition in the original material and the right conditions, then within those minerals there are some called mica. Some of those micas contain lithium."

Trump has prioritized fossil fuel companies over consumers, hitting the lowest-income families hardest

Donald Trump promised to cut energy prices by 50%. Instead, average electricity prices over the past year have risen by about 6.7%, while natural gas prices have increased by 10.8%. Energy prices are influenced by many factors beyond any president's direct control, including market conditions, weather-driven demand, regional infrastructure constraints, and the rapid growth of energy-intensive data centers that are driving new system costs. Policy choices do not determine prices on their own, but they do shape market outcomes, and the direction of this administration's energy policy has been clear.

From his first days in office, President Trump made clear that his energy agenda would prioritize fossil fuel producers over consumers. His administration moved to expand US liquefied natural gas exports, increasing exposure to volatile global markets. At the same time, it froze wind power projects that provide some of the cheapest new electricity, intervened to keep costly coal plants running, and backed the elimination of energy-efficiency tax credits that lower household energy bills.

Mark Wolfe is executive director of National Energy Assistance Directors Association, co-director of the Center on Energy Poverty and Climate and adjunct faculty at the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy at George Washington University

Researchers say sediment changes due to waste dumping and coastal erosion intensified by climate breakdown

As much as half of some British beaches' coarse sediments consist of human-made materials such as brick, concrete, glass and industrial waste, a study has found.

Climate breakdown, which has caused more frequent and destructive coastal storms, has led to an increase in these substances on beaches. Six sites on the Firth of Forth, an estuary on Scotland's east coast joining the River Forth to the North Sea, were surveyed to better understand the makeup of "urban beaches".

With government action stalled and living in 'inhumane' conditions, families in San José are making plans to relocate

In Emilio Peña Delgado's home, several photos hang on the wall. One shows him standing in front of a statue with his wife and oldest son in the centre of San José and smiling. In another, his two sons sit in front of caricatures from the film Cars. For him, the photos capture moments of joy that feel distant when he returns home to La Carpio, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Costa Rica's capital.

Delgado migrated with his family from Nicaragua to Costa Rica when he was 10, as his parents sought greater stability. When he started a family of his own, his greatest hope was to give his children the security he had lacked. But now, that hope is often interrupted by the threat of extreme weather events.

Chagossian people would be allowed to fish in area that has teemed with life since ban was introduced in 2010

One of the most precious marine reserves in the world, home to sharks, turtles and rare tropical fish, will be opened to some fishing for the first time in 16 years under the UK government's deal to hand back the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

Allowing non-commercial fishing in the marine protected area (MPA) is seen as an essential part of the Chagossian people's return to the islands, as the community previously relied on fishing as their main livelihood. But some conservationists have raised the alarm, as nature has thrived in the waters of the Indian Ocean since it was protected from fishing.

Ministers' proposals to tackle 'forever chemicals' fail to match tougher stance taken in Europe, say experts

Environmental campaigners have criticised a "crushingly disappointing" UK government plan to tackle "forever chemicals", which they warn risks locking in decades of avoidable harm to people and the environment.

The government said its Pfas action plan set out a "clear framework" of "coordinated action … to understand where these chemicals are coming from, how they spread and how to reduce public and environmental exposure".

Sector bounces back as consumers focus on provenance and healthy eating, but is still well behind Europe

Consumers searching for healthy food from trusted sources have fuelled the UK organic market's biggest boom in two decades, according to vegetable box seller Riverford.

The delivery business, which sells meat, cheese, cookbooks and recipe boxes alongside vegetables, recorded a 6% increase in sales to £117m in the year to May 2025, as the UK organic food and drink market grew by almost 9% in that year, according to new figures from the Soil Association. The strong growth, significantly outpacing the wider food market, helped the employee-owned business give a £1.1m bonus to workers.

Priestcliffe, Derbyshire: The limestone walls in this parish are festooned with luminous mosses, in a variety that's often beyond our comprehension

The word bryophyte refers to a group of plants that may have colonised terrestrial Earth almost half a billion years ago. They need water to reproduce sexually and they love rain. So it's hardly surprising that Britain is an important archipelago for them, with the two main groups, liverwort and mosses, represented by nearly 300 and 770 species respectively. This is a 20th of all the world's bryophytes.

Perhaps the best summary of the British public's sense of the group was offered by a friend recently, who said that he hadn't been aware that there was more than one bryophyte. Moss doesn't occupy our conscious minds. It lives at the periphery, trembling on the edge of our sense of things. Especially when it rains, because moss is then even more luminous.

Support from more than 20 countries propels National Trust to its target to protect chalk figure and local wildlife

It feels like a very British monument: a huge chalk figure carved into a steep Dorset hillside that for centuries has intrigued lovers of English folklore and legend. But an appeal to raise money to help protect the Cerne giant - and the wildlife that shares the landscape it towers over - has shown that its allure stretches far beyond the UK.

Donations have flooded in from more than 20 countries including Australia, Japan and Iceland, and on Tuesday, the National Trust confirmed it had reached its fundraising target to buy land around the giant.

Volunteer workers say increasing case numbers and dozens of dead birds raise fears spread is wider than recorded

Members of the public and charity volunteers are working to contain a suspected outbreak of bird flu among swans in the Thames Valley, amid signs that confirmed cases are continuing to rise.

Since October, 324 cases of bird flu in swans have been recorded by the Animal and Plant Health Agency (Apha), which is sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Of these, 39 were recorded in the first four weeks of 2026 alone.

The US president tried to kill offshore wind projects - now four are back under construction

Construction has resumed on four offshore wind mega-projects after they survived a near fatal attack by Donald Trump's administration thanks to rulings by federal judges. These are being seen as victories for clean energy amid a wider war being waged on it by the Trump administration.

The wind farms are considered critical by grid planners as America faces an energy affordability crisis. Together, the four projects will contribute nearly five gigawatts of energy to the east coast, enough to power 3.5 million homes.

Island's first tropical storm of season may bring 150mm of rain - meanwhile, eastern Europe freezes with possible night-time lows of -30C

At least three people have died and nearly 30,000 people have been affected by flooding after Madagascar's first tropical storm of the season hit over the weekend.

Tropical Cyclone Fytia formed to the north-west of Madagascar over the northern Mozambique Channel on Thursday.

A US judge will decide if, as research suggests, a chemical tyre additive is harming endangered fish species

Last week, a district judge in San Francisco, California, presided over a three-day trial brought by west coast fishers and conservationists against US tyre companies. The fishers allege that a chemical additive used in tyres is polluting rivers and waterways, killing coho salmon and other fish. If successful, the case could have implications far beyond the United States.

With some of Ukraine's most valuable biodiversity sites and science facilities under occupation, experts at Sofiyivka Park in Uman are struggling to preserve the country's natural history

In the basement laboratory of the National Dendrological Park Sofiyivka, Larisa Kolder tends to dozens of specimens of Moehringia hypanica between power outages. Just months earlier, she and her team at this microclonal plant propagation laboratory in Uman, Ukraine, received 23 seeds of the rare flower.

Listed as threatened in Ukraine's Red Book of endangered species, Moehringia grows nowhere else in the wild but the Mykolaiv region of Ukraine. Of those 23 seeds, only two grew into plants that Kolder and her colleagues could clone in their laboratory, but now her lab is home to a small grove of Moehringia seedlings, including 80 that have put down roots in a small but vital win for biodiversity conservation amid Russia's war with Ukraine.

After stories revealed high levels of contamination in neighborhood around factory processing US toxic waste, government announces sweeping array of tactics

The Mexican government has announced it will pursue a sweeping array of tactics to combat industrial pollution, from $4.8m in fines against a plant processing US hazardous waste to the rollout of a new industrial air-monitoring system, following investigations by the Guardian and Quinto Elemento Lab, a Mexican investigative unit.

Those stories revealed high levels of heavy-metal contamination in the neighborhood around the factory, Zinc Nacional, in the Monterrey metropolitan area, and showed the broader extent of industrial pollution in the region, linked to Monterrey's role in manufacturing and recycling goods for the US market.

Bridport, Dorset: Paths became streams and new islands appeared as the River Brit burst its banks

We were warned that rain was coming - and so it did, barrelling down all night, falling through the darkness on to ground that was already saturated. By the time it was light, the rivers through Bridport had risen and spread across the floodplain, splicing into a broad, brown rope of water twisting to the harbour at West Bay.

Contemptuous of its banks, the River Brit was running noisily across meadows, forming new lakes where herring gulls sat floating on its muddy surge. Water went straight through the allotments, sending plastic pots bobbing like buoys against the boundary fence.

Inadequate food supplies and collapsing rainforests must be recognised as national security threats - not pigeonholed as green issues

Ecosystems and national security used not to be mentioned in the same breath all that often - unless environmental campaigners were doing the talking. For years, climate and nature experts have struggled to get across the message that species extinctions, dead rivers and deforestation are an existential threat to people as well as animals and plants. As George Monbiot wrote last week, the publication of a government report thought to have been authored by intelligence chiefs, about the threats to the UK's national security from biodiversity collapse, should be viewed as a step forward. The risks have become too extreme to be ignored.

The document is a national security assessment, not a scientific report. The data that it relies on comes from other sources. But the warnings that it contains about the UK's heavy dependence on food and fertiliser imports, and the probable consequences of nature depletion, must be heeded. Originally due to be published in the autumn, the review appears to have had some sections removed. An earlier version is reported to have included warnings about the risks of "eco-terrorism" and the growing likelihood of war between China, India and Pakistan due to competition over a shrinking water supply from the Himalayas.

Events such as Storm Chandra take a terrible toll on ecosystems, but nature can be part of the solution for mitigating flood waters

"The flood waters are only good for scavenger species," says Steve Hussey, searching hard for a silver lining to last week's deluges brought by Storm Chandra. When the waters recede, crows and ravens will feast on the carrion of hedgehogs, dormice and other small animals unable to escape the rising water, he says.

"It sounds very apocalyptic, doesn't it?" says Hussey, a communications officer with the Devon Wildlife Trust.

Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation could also force ultra-rich to pay global wealth tax

Fossil fuel companies could be forced to pay some of the price of their damage to the climate, and the ultra-rich subjected to a global wealth tax, if new tax rules are agreed under the UN.

Negotiations on a planned global tax treaty will resume at the UN headquarters in New York on Monday, with dozens of countries supporting stronger rules that would make polluters pay for the impact of their activities.

About 190,000 are still without power in the south-east as states scramble to prepare for more winter weather

Dozens of people have died in the teeth of a severe winter storm across the US south, with further freezing temperatures, snow and blizzards set to assail the east coast on Saturday.

At least 85 people have died across multiple states, according to an Associated Press tally, with frigid conditions and icy roads causing car crashes, hypothermia and other fatal incidents.

Exclusive: Formal validation for claret reflects hotter conditions, falling consumption and shift towards chillable reds

Bordeaux's wine industry has historically adapted to consumer habits. In the 1970s the region leaned towards white, but by the 2000s was famed for powerful oak-aged reds.

Now it's turning to a much older form of red with a name familiar to anglophones: claret. With origins in the 12th century, when it was first shipped to Britain, claret was soon our favoured wine, an unofficial byword for bordeaux red, which in recent decades has become increasingly full-bodied.

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Honduras is one of the most dangerous countries for environmentalists - and the release of Juan Orlando Hernández has reinforced its 'crisis of impunity', say critics

When Donald Trump announced that he would pardon the former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, only the second world leader to be convicted of drug trafficking, Anna*, an environmental defender, was shocked.

In 2022, Hernández, also known as JOH, was extradited to the US and later convicted, along with his brother, on drug trafficking and weapons charges. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle more than 400 tonnes of cocaine into the US, becoming the first Honduran head of state to be tried and sentenced abroad for running a narco state. He was also accused of grave human rights violations.