In today’s newsletter: Extreme heat, droughts and floods are proving disastrous for farmers on the frontline of climate change, and consumers in the supermarket, too
Good morning. My mum is a livestock farmer in Kent. This year her hay crop was down by 50% because the spring rains never came. She’s not alone – up and down the UK, farmers have watched their fields turn brown and their hay crops collapse.
Hay keeps animals alive over winter (when there is no fresh grass outside) and some farmers are already selling off cows because they can’t guarantee they will be able to feed them. From extreme drought to biblical floods, more than 80% of UK farmers are worried wild swings in weather are affecting their ability to earn a living.
Israel-Gaza war | Israel bombed the main hospital in southern Gaza on Monday and then struck the same place again as rescuers and journalists rushed to help the wounded, killing at least 20 people including five journalists, health officials said.
UK news | Schools will need to give democracy lessons to children from the age of 11 and ask teachers to leave their politics at the classroom door to help prepare for votes at 16, the head of the UK elections watchdog has said.
Health | People using the weight loss jab Mounjaro have been warned against switching to black market sellers or bulk buying after its manufacturer announced the UK will get a significant price rise this autumn.
US news | Some national guard units patrolling the US capital at the direction of Donald Trump have started carrying firearms, an escalation of the president’s military deployment that makes good on a directive issued late last week by his defence department.
UK news | Ministers are introducing a clearer legal definition of “honour-based” abuse in an attempt to catch more perpetrators and protect women and girls from violence and coercion.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
08/26/2025 - 00:43
08/26/2025 - 00:00
Views of forward-thinking artist and writer who lived off land in national park celebrated at museum in Glastonbury
She was considered an eccentric by some, eking out a frugal existence on a wild English moor, surviving off the land and exchanging her sketches of the countryside for meals.
But the first museum exhibition on the life and work of the largely forgotten nature writer and artist Hope Bourne highlights that her views on the environment, recycling, access to the countryside – even rewilding – were ahead of her time.
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08/25/2025 - 23:00
Report finds regenerative approach could yield economic benefits while helping to meet environmental targets
The degradation of nature in the UK will lop nearly 5% off the country’s GDP if the private sector does not make a greater effort to halt the decline, experts have warned.
Conversely, investing in nature can produce economic returns for companies in a range of sectors, from manufacturing and construction to food, according to a report from the Green Finance Institute (GFI) and WWF.
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08/25/2025 - 18:01
Customers to get £5 vouchers for donating M&S clothes to Oxfam, which will get 15% of profits from eBay sales
Marks & Spencer is opening a secondhand clothing store on eBay to find new homes for “old favourites” as the household name taps into booming demand for preloved clothing.
The retailer has collected 36.5m secondhand clothes since it launched its “shwopping” clothing recycling scheme – now called Another Life – over a decade ago. Most of that clothing has been resold by charity partner Oxfam.
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08/25/2025 - 16:02
Workers say president’s attacks on the agency and lack of qualified leadership could lead to deadly catastrophe
US politics live – latest updates
Donald Trump’s attacks on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) risk exposing the US to another Hurricane Katrina, staff at the agency have warned Congress in a withering critique that also takes aim at its current leadership.
Writing in the run up to this week’s 20th anniversary of the devastating 2005 storm that killed 1,833 people and caused widespread destruction in New Orleans and the Gulf coast, more than 180 current and former Fema employees say the Trump administration’s policies are ignoring the mistakes that led to it.
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08/25/2025 - 12:00
A fad for consuming high-protein, high-fat food, while avoiding vegetables, has taken off online. Followers are doing themselves no favours
Once, it seemed that much of the world was intent on drastically cutting back on meat for health and environmental reasons. Vegetarian and vegan options appeared on restaurant menus and the very idea of a bloody red steak became almost unthinkable in liberal circles. And yet the carnivore diet is now all over Instagram and TikTok, prompting health bodies to start issuing warnings.
Followers of this diet eat meat, fat, seafood, eggs and butter, avoiding all vegetables, fruits, grains and legumes as if plants were, as Paul Saladino, an advocate of this diet alleged, “poison”. Dr Saladino is a US psychiatrist and health influencer with a range of supplements called Heart and Soil that contain dried animal organ meat. He appears shirtless on social media, denouncing vegetables, which he says will harm us. Other Instagrammers tuck into plates of huge steaks and seven or more eggs for breakfast. It’s not just for weight loss.
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08/25/2025 - 10:00
Exposure to high temperatures could result in long-lasting damage to health of billions of people, scientists warn
Repeated exposure to heatwaves is accelerating ageing in people, according to a study. The impact is broadly comparable with the damage smoking, alcohol use, poor diet or limited exercise can have on health, the researchers said.
Extreme temperatures are increasingly common owing to the climate crisis, potentially causing widespread and long-lasting damage to the health of billions, the scientists warned.
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08/25/2025 - 09:05
Labor will seek to legislate national standards and federal EPA in one package rather than multiple stages, as it tried and failed to do last term
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A major overhaul of the federal environmental protection regime will be put to parliament this year, the minister, Murray Watt, has promised, as he warns further delays risk causing more “environmental destruction” and stalled investment.
After last week’s economic reform roundtable agreed to fast-track the original 18-month timeframe, Watt will on Tuesday confirm that legislation to rewrite the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) will be introduced before parliament rises for the year in late November.
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08/25/2025 - 09:00
After Ice’s infiltration of LA, the community is rallying to provide essentials for survival for those forced to stay home
When Danielle Duran Zecca saw military-style immigration raids and people being snatched off the streets and put into unmarked vehicles in her native Los Angeles earlier this summer, she was in disbelief.
“It just felt unreal like this wasn’t a world that we could be living in right now,” said Duran Zecca, a James Beard Award nominated chef and co-owner of Amiga Amore in Highland Park, a historically Latino neighborhood in north-east LA. “I didn’t know what to do, but I knew how to feed people and love on people because that is exactly how I was brought up in my family.”
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08/25/2025 - 08:00
Rangers cleared about 2,377 marijuana plants and 2,000lbs of trash and hazardous chemicals from Sequoia park
Park rangers have removed an illegal marijuana cultivation site in California’s Sequoia national park spanning approximately 13 acres (5 hectares).
In a press release on Thursday, the National Park Service said that it had removed a total of 2,377 full-grown marijuana plants and approximately 2,000lbs of trash and infrastructure last week by hand and helicopter sling-load operations.
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