It is the second-best place for nightingales in the country, a sanctuary for rare barbastelle bats and home to nearly 1,500 invertebrate species, including a quarter of all Britain’s spider species. But Middlewick Ranges on the edge of Colchester is poised to be sold by the Ministry of Defence for 1,000 new homes.

Conservation scientists have written to the UK defence secretary, John Healey, urging him to reverse the decision to sell the 76-hectare (187.8-acre) site for housing. Experts who have fought the proposals for eight years say the house-building is based on faulty and flawed environmental evidence and must be reversed.

A freedom of information request by campaigners has revealed an ecological report that in 2017 identified large swaths of rare acid grassland at Middlewick, which has been untouched by a plough for at least 200 years and contains more than 10% of Essex’s remaining acid grassland.

This report was not seen by Colchester city councillors when they allocated 1,000 homes to Middlewick in their local plan. A subsequent ecological report produced for the MoD in 2020 then downgraded almost half of the acid grassland. Conservation scientists say this vastly underestimates Middlewick’s natural riches, and makes it easier to build houses on the site.

Local campaigners also accuse the MoD of destroying scrub habitat of about 12 singing nightingales during new fencing works for a mitigation site south of Middlewick, which is controversially designed to provide biodiversity net gain (BNG) – as required by law when building new homes.

According to development plans by the MoD’s property arm, the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, acid grassland destroyed by the new homes can be replaced by adding sulphur to mitigation land to create “new” acid grassland. But conservationists say these methods are unproved and reckless, and it is impossible to replicate the richness of wildlife found in the undisturbed acidic soils of the ranges.

“It’s far bigger than one site in one part of Essex. If this goes ahead, it sets a catastrophic national precedent,” said Martin Pugh, a senior ecological consultant and deputy chair of Friends of Middlewick. “This idea that every habitat is replaceable is a misuse of biodiversity net gain. We need to draw a red line and say this is irreplaceable habitat. Middlewick is a litmus test. If this is allowed to pass, it makes a mockery of BNG.”

Middlewick has been a military range for more than 150 years, and local people have enjoyed its open green spaces when manoeuvres are not taking place. The MoD stopped using the site in 2021, and fenced-off areas have naturally rewilded, with new scrubland providing valuable habitat for nightingales. A survey this year found 59 singing males in the area affected by the development, part of a larger population in the area that is the second-best in the country after Lodge Hill in Kent, another MoD site once earmarked for development, which was reprieved after it was made a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) in 2014.

Conservation scientists say Middlewick could qualify as an SSSI for any one of at least five criteria, including its rare invertebrates, acid grassland, barbastelle bats, nightingales and ancient oak trees. The former firing range is also home to threatened species including the endangered necklace ground beetle and the four-banded weevil-wasp – a wasp only found in Essex and Kent – and thriving populations of reptiles, amphibians, mammals and specialist waxcap fungi.

During the long-running saga, the MoD claimed a bespoke biodiversity metric can be used to show a developer is adding wildlife value. According to campaigners, it will be impossible to show an uplift in biodiversity by destroying the acid grassland and its species.

An assessment of the two contradictory ecological reports by Pugh, a qualified environmental consultant with 19 years’ experience, found that the 2020 report incorrectly reduced the amount of acid grassland at Middlewick by almost half: from 52.88 hectares mapped in 2017 to 32.52 hectares. Pugh said the 2020 report mislabelled 20.36 hectares of acid grassland as “poor, semi-improved grassland”, which is of much lower biodiversity value.

On a Guardian visit, plant species such as sheep’s sorrel – an indicator of acid grassland – were widely found on areas that were reclassified in the 2020 survey as not being acid grassland.

Classifying these areas as much less biodiverse grassland makes it much easier for the site’s developers to claim there will be biodiversity net gain if Middlewick is built upon.

According to the Ministry of Defence, it is up to the local authority and its new owner “to determine the development of the site”. An MOD spokesperson said: “We commissioned a comprehensive range of surveys over a three-year period to ensure that environmental impacts were understood and mitigated.”

Colchester city council said: “The 2020 report provided a more detailed analysis of the site’s ecology, building on the earlier findings from the 2017 desktop study. This study was designed to establish the scope of ecological evidence needed for the later planning stages.” In response, campaigners said the more accurate 2017 report was not a desktop survey but included lengthy surveys by two qualified botanists.

As part of a five-year review of its local plan, the council will now re-examine the allocations of houses to all sites, including Middlewick Ranges. Cllr Andrea Luxford Vaughan, who holds the planning portfolio, said: “This review will consider all new evidence, including the findings from the latest ecological surveys commissioned by the council, to ensure that we continue to make informed and responsible decisions.”

In a council meeting, LuxfordVaughan said: “I think it’s widely accepted that the Stantec [2020] report was rubbish.” Stantec, the company that produced the 2020 survey, defended the report saying it was “technically sound” and “accurate at the time of writing”.

The council also said it had begun conducting new botanical and invertebrate surveys across various seasons “to ensure a complete environmental picture of the Middlewick site” and that these would “guide future planning decisions”.

Jeremy Dagley, the director of conservation at Essex Wildlife Trust, said: “It is this level of detail that should have been provided six years ago – and which would have demonstrated that the site was not an appropriate place for development anywhere within its boundary.

“It is astonishing it is not an SSSI. It is of the same ecological importance as acid grasslands of fully protected SSSIs, like Epping Forest. The dream scenario would be to make it a nature reserve that people could access.”

In 2019, France’s best known climate expert sat down to work with its most feted graphic novelist. The result? Perhaps the most terrifying comic ever drawn.

Part history, part analysis, part vision for the future, World Without End weaves the story of humanity’s rapacious appetite for fossil fuel energy, how it has made possible the society people take for granted, and its disastrous effects on the climate.

Among French readers it was an immediate smash hit, selling more than 1m copies so far, becoming the country’s top-selling book in all categories in 2022 and hailed as “one of the most brilliant summaries of climate issues ever written”.

But its controversial solutions provoked a backlash from some quarters. The criticisms now seem set to follow the book into the anglophone world, where it appears next week in print in English for the first time.

When Christophe Blain began work on World Without End, he was already France’s most celebrated comic book artist and a recipient of international awards. He was in the enviable position of being able to choose any creative project.

He chose to call Jean-Marc Jancovici, one of France’s foremost climate science communicators. “I was frightened,” said Blain, in an interview with the Guardian. “I realised that the climate change was a reality. When I’m frightened I have to move – I can’t stay still, I have to jump in the action. And the action was to call Jean-Marc and tell him let’s make a book together.”

It was an opportunity for which Jancovici, already author of eight books on climate breakdown and energy transition, whose online lectures on the topics had been viewed millions of times, had been waiting.

“I felt very excited because it was a way that I knew would work for sure to get to an audience that doesn’t read books and who is not in my ecosystem,” he said. “It was a way to reach people that remained out of reach before, because you can add a zero to the number of copies for a graphic novel compared to a classical essay.”

Together, Blain and Jancovici devised a revealing deconstruction of the human-made processes that have pushed the planet to the brink of climate collapse, full of incredible observations, such as the fact that the effects of fossil fuel energy mean it is as if each human had, on average, 200 enslaved people working for them, or that, without machines, 1.5 trillion people would have to work to produce the same amount of energy.

There are also painful truths, including the little acknowledged fact that 35% of the world’s electricity is still produced from coal – the dirtiest of all fossil fuels.

But the book’s most powerful element lies in its use of a series of evocative images to decode concepts of energy production and consumption, and its burden on our planet.

Most notably, the fossil fuel economy, and all the advantages it has given human civilisation, is depicted as Iron Man (or rather Armour Man in the UK version, for reasons of copyright), an exoskeleton donned by humanity to expand its powers to near omnipotence.

The image of a superhero came naturally, Jancovici said. “As our superpowers come from all the machinery that we have in the world, mixing up the human shape and the idea of machines, well I could either choose Terminator or Iron Man, and I chose Iron Man. It’s a little bit more friendly.”

But Iron Man has a problematic counterpart, the spectre – quite literally in World Without End – of greenhouse gas pollution. “One of the metaphors we could have used in the book is the history of Faust,” Jancovici said. “First you enjoy, then you pay. It’s exactly what fossil fuels are bringing us.”

What sets World Without End apart from other examinations of climate breakdown is this look at the deep connection between energy abundance and the scientific and social progress it has enabled – comforts that cannot easily be abandoned – and the breakdown of our planet’s climate.

“The new part in the book, in my view, is that one,” said Jancovici. “It’s to put in just one piece something that gathers both knowledge on the physical flows of our productive system and our way of living, and a major externality, which is climate change.”

And that is also where its most terrifying aspect arises. World Without End describes a situation where the cataclysmic effects of climate change are beginning to grip human civilisation just as people can no longer use, and indeed are begin to run out of, the energy sources needed to cope with them.

The very name of the book can be seen as a précis of this paradox, Jancovici said. “It was Christophe’s idea, and I thought that it expressed very well the romantic idea of a never-ending story of growth and abundance, which is exactly what fossil fuels brought us for a while. Of course the understatement in the title appears to anyone: the world is not without end.”

That is where solutions come in – as well as the book’s most-contested claim. Jancovici and Blain downplay the potential of renewable energies such as wind, solar and hydropower. Nuclear power, they say, is the only way to decarbonise power grids fast while maintaining the benefits of industrial society.

It is a position that led to criticism, even in France, which already gets most of its electricity from nuclear. Renewable energy advocates accused the book of a “pro-nuclear bias”, pointing out Jancovici’s connections to the energy industry through his think tank the Shift Project.

Some campaigners even took their actions into bookshops, masquerading as representatives of the French publisher, Dargaud, to persuade staff to insert an anti-nuclear “erratum” to copies.

Jancovici said that if the book were to be rewritten there would be less material on nuclear power, but not because he regrets it – he thought their position had been vindicated by the energy crisis provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Part of the debate is over in France,” he said. “Anti-nuclear positions are not at all as mainstream in the media as they were five years ago. We owe that to Putin, because it has been a general movement all across Europe.

“On renewable energies what we wanted to say is not that they are totally useless, or without interest. It’s that they by nature do not have the properties of dense and dispatchable fossil fuels, and that, of course, we can do something with them. But we won’t do with them what we believe we can do, which is sustain an industrial civilisation on renewable energies alone.”

Blain and Jancovici attributed the book’s phenomenal sales to its shareability, its offering an easy and discrete way for people who cared about the climate issue to use it to explain the problems to others. “When the book was released, what I expected was the book would become viral. And it became viral,” Blain said.

Jancovici added: “What happened is that the book was designed to be given, and this strategy became effective.”

The authors’ hope is that World Without End will precipitate a change in consciousness around energy consumption. “The book is made to understand the problem, to understand the orders of magnitude,” Blain said.

“To understand what it costs, really, what it means, what is behind the scenes. When you understand that, it’s impossible to think the same way as before … You can see the things around you differently. You imagine your future life differently, for you, or your children, for your parents, for anybody. You know that the world will be different.”

Or, as Jancovici put it: “It’s the kilowatt hours, stupid.”

World Without End is published in the UK on Thursday by Particular Books.

A fast-moving fire fed by strong winds burned two homes on Friday and damaged several others in a hillside neighborhood in the city of Oakland, where roughly 500 people were ordered to evacuate, officials said.

Damon Covington, the city’s fire chief, said that at about 1.30pm, calls had come in reporting a fire in front of a home in the Oakland hills. Crews arrived as the inferno quickly grew with winds ranging from calm breezes to 40mph (64km/h) gusts during red-flag conditions.

“Wind was whipping,” Covington said.

Michael Hunt, a spokesperson for the fire department, said one of the homes had been significantly burnt while the second had minor damage from the flames. Fewer than 10 other homes had smoke and water damage. Early reports had conflicting numbers of affected structures.

The fire was near the 580 Freeway, which connects the San Francisco Bay Area to central California, causing traffic jams as people tried to leave the area and smoke wafted over the city of 440,000.

The blaze charred through eucalyptus trees, which spread the fire as flames jumped across sides of the roadway, Covington said. Within three hours, it grew to to 13 acres (about 5 hectares). By about 4pm, crews were able to stop it from advancing, though scores of firefighters continued to battle.

“We have less than 10 homes that have been damaged, and we had hundreds of homes, structures, that were threatened,” the chief said.

The fire was burning in the Oakland hills where a 1991 fire destroyed nearly 3,000 homes and killed 25 people.

It comes as forecasters issued red-flag warnings for fire danger until Saturday from the central coast through the San Francisco Bay Area and into northern Shasta county, not far from the Oregon border.

About 16,000 customers were without electricity Friday after Pacific Gas and Electric shut off power in 19 counties in the northern and central parts of the state. A major “diablo wind” – notorious in the autumn for its hot, dry gusts – was forecast to cause sustained winds reaching 35mph in many areas, raising the risk of power lines sparking a wildfire. The gusts could top 65mph (104 km/h) along mountaintops, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). The strong winds are expected to last through part of the weekend.

The fire began as a vegetation fire near the freeway and grew uphill, Hunt said. At least eight structures have already been damaged.

He said “hundreds of residents” were being evacuated, but did not have an exact number.

“It’s a large, probably three-mile area that’s probably potentially evacuated,” he said.

A nearby elementary school was getting set up to serve as a temporary shelter for the evacuees.

A total of about 20,000 customers could lose power temporarily in the next couple of days, PG&E said in a statement Friday.

“The duration and extent of power outages will depend on the weather in each area, and not all customers will be affected for the entire period,” the utility said.

It was not immediately clear what caused the Oakland blaze. The fire department ordered people to evacuate Friday on two streets, Campus Drive and Crystal Ridge Court.

“This could end up being the most significant wind event for this year so far,” said meteorologist Brayden Murdock with the NWS’s Bay Area office. “We want to tell people to be cautious.”

Targeted power shutoffs were also possible in southern California, where another notorious weather phenomenon, the Santa Ana winds, are expected Friday and Saturday.

Santa Anas are dry, warm and gusty north-east winds that blow from the interior of southern California toward the coast and offshore, moving in the opposite direction of the normal onshore flow that carries moist air from the Pacific into the region.

The National Weather Service issued red-flag warnings for the valleys and mountains of Los Angeles county, portions of the Inland Empire, and the San Bernardino mountains.

Winds around greater Los Angeles won’t be as powerful as up north, with gusts from 25-40mph (40-64 km/h) possible in mountains and foothills, said Mike Wofford, a meteorologist with the NWS’s Los Angeles-area office.

The strongest winds were being recorded in the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains, where Friday there were gusts from 45-55mph (72-88 km/h) with isolated gusts up to 60mph (96km/h), he said.

“Humidities are drying out and we have the winds. If we had a fire spark, it could really spread quickly because of the current conditions,” Wofford said.

A former soldier “congratulated” the police officer who captured him three days after he was accused of escaping from prison, a jury has heard.

Woolwich crown court on Friday heard evidence from the Metropolitan police officer, who said he grabbed hold of Daniel Khalife on a canal towpath in west London.

The plainclothes detective sergeant, who was not named in court, said he jumped out of his car and ran down an alleyway to the canal.

“It was quite a fast-moving situation. I could see Khalife coming towards me on the footpath riding his bike with clothing matching the description. I was sure it was Daniel Khalife, I told him he was under arrest. I ran down the stairs, I pulled my Taser out,” he told the jury.

Khalife “flinched” when he saw the device, but did not “have a chance to stop” because of the speed he was moving at, the court heard. “I grabbed hold of his arm and pulled him off of the bike on to the floor.”

The 23-year-old is alleged to have escaped from HMP Wandsworth in south London while on remand by strapping himself to the underside of a food delivery lorry on 6 September 2023. He was arrested in west London on 9 September carrying several items, including a Waitrose bag containing a phone, receipts, a diary and about £200 in notes, the jury was told.

Jurors were shown an image of Khalife after the arrest, which showed him sitting on the ground wearing a white T-shirt, blue shorts and red socks with no shoes on.

The Met police officer who apprehended the alleged fugitive said he had driven in the direction of where Khalife had been spotted to try to get ahead of him. Once he caught up with the former soldier, the officer said he “did comply”, and was handcuffed. The officer was then joined by colleagues, who sat up Khalife and formally arrested him.

Asked about Khalife’s demeanour, the officer said: “He was friendly towards me. Quite jovial. At no point did he try to resist. He was pleasant. He congratulated me on catching him.”

Asked by the defence barrister, Gul Nawaz Hussain KC, if he had told Khalife: “Stop, or I’ll shoot,” the officer replied: “No.” Asked if Khalife had stopped and come over to the officer voluntarily, before saying: “You’ve got me,” the detective sergeant laughed and replied: “Complete and utter rubbish.”

The prosecutor, Mark Heywood KC, previously told the jury Khalife “quite deliberately escaped” after being escorted to the kitchen where he had a job.

On 6 September, Khalife had been to Richmond, in south-west London, and went to Mountain Warehouse, a clothing store. The next day, he was pictured in an M&S and Sainsbury’s, the court heard. On the day of the arrest, the former soldier was seen in a McDonald’s, his trial was told.

His absence was discovered during a headcount and then all movement in the prison was suspended, the jury was told.

Khalife also faces charges contrary to the Official Secrets Act and Terrorism Act, and is accused of perpetrating a bomb hoax. He denies all of the charges.

The trial continues.

Donald Trump billed the government for Secret Service accommodations at his hotels many times over what other guests were charged, particularly foreign dignitaries, according to a report released Friday from Democratic members of the House oversight committee.

Describing the former US president’s term in office as “the world’s greatest get-rich-quick scheme”, the report’s authors referred to documents obtained by subpoenas of the Mazars firm, Trump’s accountants, citing guest logs for Trump International hotel in Washington, DC, between September 2017 and August 2018.

The hotel “charged as much as 300% or more above the authorized government per diem”, for Secret Service hotel rooms, according to the report.

It added: “Not only did former President Trump’s D.C. hotel routinely charge the Secret Service more than the government rate, it frequently charged the Secret Service more than it did other patrons, including members of a foreign royal family and a Chinese business interest.”

Eric Trump has said previously that the Trump organization let Secret Service agents “stay at our properties for free”. But the report calls that assertion into question, noting that the agency was charged “far in excess of approved government per diem rates and even many times the rates charged to hundreds of other patrons—including some of the rooms rented by the Qatari royal family and Chinese business interests—for rooms used by agents protecting members of the Trump family.”

The report follows up investigative reports made when Democrats controlled the House oversight committee. When Republicans took the House majority in 2023, new committee chairman James Comer ended the committee’s lawsuits to obtain records and refused to issue new subpoenas. The report by the committee’s Democratic minority relies on documents obtained earlier.

A 156-page report on Trump’s business dealings by House Democrats released in January noted that four businesses owned by Trump’s family conglomerate received at least $7.8m in payments in total from 20 countries during his four years in the White House.

While Trump was in office, Republicans made regular use of Trump International hotel while visiting Washington. Democrats on the committee cited three people Trump appointed to the federal bench, eight ambassadors, five people who later obtained presidential pardons like Dinesh D’Souza and Ken Kurson, and numerous other state and federal officials who stayed there on official travel.

The US constitution’s emoluments clause states that a president may receive no payments from the federal government other than a salary. Previous presidents have divested from business interests that could conflict with the clause. Jimmy Carter famously sold his peanut farm in Georgia before taking office. Trump refused to do so, and took efforts to shield his personal and business finances from public scrutiny.

The US supreme court dismissed two cases accusing Trump of violating the emoluments clause in January 2021, ruling that the issue was moot because he was no longer president.

Trump has disparaged the emoluments issue in prior comments, likening it to the earnings made by Barack Obama on book sales to foreign universities.

The hotel made about $150m in revenue over the course of Trump’s term in office, but incurred net losses of about $70m largely due to the pandemic, according to previous reports from the oversight committee.

Trump sold the lease on the 263-room hotel, known as the Old Post Office building, in 2022 to a Florida-based investment group, CGI Merchant Group. Since the hotel reopened as a hotel in the Waldorf Astoria chain in June 2023, spending by Republican groups there has cratered, according to a report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an oversight group that sued Trump over emoluments issues.

A man who had gone into cardiac arrest and been declared brain dead woke up as surgeons in his home state of Kentucky were in the middle of harvesting his organs for donation, his family has told media outlets.

As reported Thursday by both National Public Radio and the Kentucky news station WKYT, the case of Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II is under investigation by state and federal government officials. Officials within the US’s organ-procurement system insist there are safeguards in place to prevent such episodes, though his family told the outlets their experience highlights a need for at least some reform.

Hoover’s sister, Donna Rhorer, recounted how Hoover was taken to Baptist health hospital in Richmond, Kentucky, in October 2021 because of a drug overdose. Doctors soon told Rhorer and her relatives that Hoover lacked any reflexes or brain activity, and they ultimately decided to remove him from life support, as WKYT noted.

The staff at Baptist then reportedly told Rhorer and her family that Hoover had given permission for his organs to be donated in the event of his death. To honor his wishes, the hospital tested which of his organs would be viable for donation, and the facility even had a ceremony honoring him.

Rhorer said she noticed Hoover’s eyes open up and seemingly track his loved one’s movements, according to WKYT. “We were told it was just reflexes – just a normal thing,” she said to the outlet.

“Who are we to question the medical system?”

About an hour after Hoover had been brought into surgery for his organs to be retrieved, a doctor came out and explained that Hoover “wasn’t ready”.

“He woke up,” Rhorer said.

Rhorer recalled getting instructions to bring her brother home and make him comfortable, though he likely would not live much longer. As she said to WKYT, she has been caring for Hoover for the past three years.

WKYT reported that Rhorer only learned the full details of her brother’s surgery at the hands of Baptist and the Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates (Koda) in January. That’s when a former employee of Koda contacted her before sending a letter to a congressional committee that in September held a hearing scrutinizing organ-procurement organizations, NPR reported.

The letter’s author said she saw Hoover begin “thrashing” around on the operating table as well as start “crying visibly”, according to NPR.

In response to the accounts relayed by Rhorer to WKYT and NPR, Baptist health said in a statement that patient safety was its “highest priority”. “We work closely with our patients and their families to ensure our patients’ wishes for organ donation are followed,” the hospital’s statement said.

Koda issued its own statement to NPR maintaining that Hoover’s case “has not been accurately represented”, that the organization has never collected organs from live patients and that no one there has ever been pressured to do so. A statement to WKYT from the Network for Hope organization, which Koda joined in May, said groups like theirs are “not involved in patient care … do not declare death … [and] only have the authority to proceed with organ donation recovery after a patient’s independent healthcare provider has declared death”.

Nonetheless, WKYT and NPR reported that the state’s attorney general’s office as well as a federal agency that helps oversee organ procurement are investigating Hoover’s case.

NPR made it a point to say that some observers worry that the media attention Hoover’s case has drawn could undermine an organ-transplant system with a waiting list of more than 100,000 people. A professor of medical ethics with whom NPR spoke said all indications are that cases like Hoover’s are generally “one-offs that hopefully we’ll be able to get to the bottom of and prevent from ever happening again”.

But Rhorer defended her decision to go public with Hoover’s story, saying it would be worth sharing if it could “give one other family the courage to speak up or if it could save one other life”.

“He made … attempts to say: ‘Hey, I’m here,’ but it was kind of ignored,” Rhorer said to WKYT. “They finally stopped the procedure because he was showing too many signs of life.

“In my heart of hearts, I knew something went on, but I compared it to David and Goliath. Who am I to go up against the medical system?”

Your editorial (15 October) lamented the “dismaying” decline in wild salmon in British waters, commenting rightly that climate change and failures of marine conservation have contributed to this collapse. Another significant contributing factor has been the explosive growth, enthusiastically promoted by the Scottish government, in salmon farming around the Scottish coast. This activity has been shown to be damaging to wild salmon stocks, through the transmission of disease and parasites when farmed salmon escape, as they do in large numbers, from the nets that contain them.

The day after your editorial, you ran an article on the “gifts” being declared by Labour ministers (More ministers declare gifts after Keir Starmer’s decision to repay £6,000, 16 October). These include a declaration by Ian Murray, the Scottish secretary, that he accepted £320 of tickets to a football match in Liverpool in September thanks to Salmon Scotland. He was in Liverpool to meet the chief executive of the industry body that describes itself on its website as “the voice of the Scottish salmon sector”.

Accepting tickets to Taylor Swift concerts may seem arrogant, but at least she isn’t lobbying for anything. Accepting “gifts” from organisations that are seeking to influence your decisions is surely of a different order?
Lindy Sharpe
London

The pollution caused by intensive rearing of farmed salmon is trashing the ecosystems of some of our most beautiful lochs and rivers. The vast number of salmon in these farms increases the rate of disease and necessitates the use of antibiotics and chemical treatments. And the farmed fish are easy prey to millions of sea lice, which eat them alive. Then, in turn, the lice prey on the young of the wild fish that have bred upstream and are attempting to pass those farms to go out to sea – and also, as adults, to migrate upstream and spawn. If we care about what we eat, and we want to see salmon leaping in British rivers again, we need to stop eating farmed salmon.
Kathleen Roberts
Harrogate

Salmon stocks have been declining for years and there are myriad reasons for this. Your editorial gives the impression that the principal causes are due to the lack of enforcement of regulations in our rivers by government agencies and the criminal activity of water companies. It is certainly true that poor water quality, pollution, changing flow patterns and warming river water temperatures due to climate change and other reasons are significant contributory factors to the decline in salmon numbers. However, it is believed that the most significant reason for the decline is the vast drop in returning numbers from the sea. It is not properly understood what is causing such significant mortality at sea, but changes in the marine food chain driven by climate change, and illegal or uncontrolled fishing along the salmon migration routes are significant factors.

What is to be done? Enforcement of regulations on land and sea, and halting climate change can in the long run of course make a difference, but our salmon may become extinct in many of our rivers before we sort out our act. A more immediate difference could be made by the Environment Agency urgently getting behind the establishment of hatcheries on many of our rivers to substantially increase the number of smolts heading for the sea.
Michael Robins
Richmond, London

Your editorial, though welcome, repeats a tired trope: that “they” are responsible, be “they” water companies or farmers or industrialists. Equally damaging to aquatic ecosystems are the gallons of household cleaning products, garden chemicals and cosmetics that we all flush down our drains daily, all of which pass unmitigated through sewage treatment plants. If we are to save our rivers and the beautiful salmon, readers of the Guardian are going to have to change their habits.
Michael Heaton
Warminster, Wiltshire

As an ecologist working for a statutory nature conservation body, I’m encouraged by the interest in the UK’s appalling water quality shown in your editorial. However, I am becoming frustrated by the intense focus on this single issue rather than looking at our wildlife more widely.

Your editorial explains that salmon populations and riverine quality reveal something about failed stewardship and flouted regulations. It does. But at least their condition and the flouting of these regulations are well known.

Rivers and salmon are a snapshot of the UK’s habitats and species, but sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) are designed to act as a series representing our whole range of wildlife: not just rivers. These are failing too. Wales has published data showing that the health of half of these SSSIs isn’t even known. At a UK level, this lack of information isn’t even reported as the headline indicator only looks at sites that have been monitored. For most habitats and species, we only have part of the picture due to a lack of monitoring.

You highlight that regulations exist for water quality, but they are poorly enforced, and this is the same for SSSIs. I know of SSSIs that haven’t been visited in the last 20 years. They haven’t been monitored, and they certainly haven’t been regulated. People are more aware of water quality issues and recognise and report them. Most SSSIs cannot be accessed and their management and condition cannot easily be assessed.

I really do welcome the coverage of water quality and understand the use of salmon as a flagship species, but maybe the time has come for the media to take a wider picture?
Name and address supplied

South Korea’s intelligence agency said on Friday that North Korea had dispatched troops to assist Russia in its war against Ukraine, a development that could intensify the standoff between North Korea and the west.

In a statement on its website, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) said Russian navy ships transferred 1,500 North Korean special operation forces to the port city of Vladivostok between 8 and 13 October who were now undergoing training.

“The North Korean soldiers … are expected to be deployed to the frontlines as soon as they complete their adaptation training,” the agency said, adding that more North Korean troops were expected to be sent to Russia soon.

NIS said North Korean soldiers were given Russian military uniforms and Russian-made weapons and were issued with fake ID cards of residents of Yakutia and Buryatia, two regions in Siberia.

“It appears that they disguised themselves as Russian soldiers to hide the fact that they were deployed to the battlefield,” the agency said.

The NIS also published satellite and other photos showing what it calls Russian navy ship movements near a North Korean port and suspected North Korean mass gatherings in the past week in the far-eastern Russian cities of Ussuriysk and Khabarovsk.

The statement was the most comprehensive official report to date detailing North Korean involvement in Russia’s war in Ukraine. If proved accurate, it would amount to North Korea’s first major participation in a foreign war.

Additionally, South Korean media said on Friday, citing anonymous sources, that Pyongyang had decided to dispatch a total of 12,000 troops, formed into four brigades, to Russia. The NIS did not immediately confirm these reports.

The statements come a day after Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said his country had intelligence reports that 10,000 North Korean soldiers were preparing to enter the war. “This is the first step to a world war,” he told reporters in Brussels.

On Friday the Ukrainian foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, demanded an “immediate and strong reaction” from Kyiv’s allies. “Russia seriously escalates its aggression by involving DPRK [North Korea] on a war party scale,” he said. “We require an immediate and strong reaction from the Euro-Atlantic community and the world.”

Russia has denied using North Korean troops in the war. A Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, dismissed the claims at a media conference last week as “another piece of fake news”.

The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, said on Friday that the alliance could not yet confirm South Korean intelligence that North Korea was deploying large-scale troops.

The Guardian earlier revealed that North Korean military engineers had already been deployed to help Russia target Ukraine with ballistic missiles.

A source in Ukraine said: “There are dozens of North Koreans behind Russian lines, in teams that support launcher systems for KN-23 missiles.”

If confirmed, South Korean intelligence suggests that North Korea plans to engage in the war beyond merely sending military advisers. The extraordinary move also highlights Russia’s need to find new military personnel, amid reports of record casualties.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, who first met in 2019, have been seeking greater military and economic cooperation to counter their growing international isolation prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programmes. In June, the two leaders signed a pact that includes a clause requiring the countries to come to each other’s aid if either is attacked.

Pyongyang is estimated to have provided about half the larger-calibre ammunition used on the battlefield this year, more than 2m rounds, a Ukrainian source said. It also provided KN-23 missiles, which were used in dozens of strikes across Ukraine last winter, Ukrainian media reported.

In return for its missiles and other military hardware, North Korea is thought to be seeking Russian cash as well as help with its spy satellite programme, which has had embarrassing failures over the past two years.

Time after time, Sha’ban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old software engineering student living in Gaza, nearly escaped death. He began studying at Gaza’s al-Azhar University two months before it was destroyed in November by a US-made bomb dropped by Israeli forces.

Sha’ban posted videos to social media, describing how his family – which he took care of, as the eldest of five – was displaced five times by the assaults and asking for financial support to flee to Egypt.

On 6 October, another US-supplied bomb blew up a mosque, killing 20 people and burying Sha’ban beneath rubble. Against all odds, he was dug out and saved, and went to seek treatment at the al-Aqsa hospital for his many injuries. There he built his family a tent to shelter together.

Then, on Monday morning, Israeli forces dropped another US-supplied bomb just outside the hospital, and 30 tents, including Sha’ban’s, were set ablaze. People held back his 16-year-old brother as he watched Sha’ban, still attached to an IV, and his mother, aged 38, burn alive. It was all caught on video.

Hours later, 500 Jews and friends shut down the New York Stock Exchange, the epicenter of global capital, demanding the US stop arming Israel and stop profiting from genocide. In horror and agony over the US-funded slaughter of Palestinians, and this most recent news of Sha’ban’s murder, we chanted “stop arming Israel, let Gaza live,” as cops arrested over 200 of us, dragging elders and descendants of Holocaust survivors out by our arms and legs.

Day after day over the past year we have witnessed the Israeli military commit heinous crimes, bombing hospitals and mosques, slaughtering more children than any other war in recent years and forbidding the entry of humanitarian aid. The commissioner for the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) has called it “a war on children”.

Although the world is crying out for the horrors to stop, Joe Biden and the US Congress continue to send weapons and money, totaling more than a staggering $18bn since last October.

Everyone has the same question: why is the US – and a Democratic administration at that, which is trying to win an election – still arming Israel when it’s carrying out what the international court of justice (ICJ) has deemed plausible genocide, while violating the US’s own laws?

The Biden administration wants you to believe that the reason they are funding the Israeli military is out of a commitment to Jewish safety. This is the moral cover they use, a cloak for their collaboration in heinous war crimes.

As Jews, we reject this myth with every fiber of our beings. Together, with tens of thousands of American Jews who have spent the last year protesting for an end to the slaughter, we refuse to let our histories, identities and traditions be used as the justification to massacre Palestinians.

The true interest of the US government? Control of the region and is its own financial gain.

Over the past year of Israel’s relentless bombing that has killed at least 46,000 Palestinians, including at least 16,500 children, with the true death toll probably much higher, the stock prices of leading US weapons manufacturers have been soaring.

Their bottom line is boosted by the fact that the only condition placed by the US government on its $18bn slush fund for the Israeli military, is not on how those bombs may be used, but instead on how they must be bought.

Israel is stipulated to purchase from US weapons manufacturers. In turn, two such leading corporations, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, have posted staggering record-breaking returns.

Meanwhile, at least 50 members of Congress or their spouses are owners of their stock. While they should be voting based on the will of their constituents, they have profits to gain from voting to send billions of dollars in military funding to Israel while it carries out a genocide.

The reason I am alive today is because the day that my entire family was massacred in their shtetl in Lithuania, in another genocide – the Holocaust – my grandmother just happened to be away.

I grew up aware that I am not supposed to be here. I also grew up agonizing over these questions. Where were the neighbors? Why did they just stand by? Why didn’t they hurl their bodies between the killers and my family?

As the NYPD dragged me by my arms and legs out of the New York Stock Exchange, I felt all of my Jewish ancestors at my back, the one who survived and all those who didn’t. We say now, with more conviction than ever before: we refuse to be neighbors who just stand by.

Sha’ban should have celebrated his 20th birthday today. In one of the most urgent tasks of our lifetimes – stopping our government from continuing to arm Israel – we all have a role to play.

• Elena Stein is director of organizing strategy for Jewish Voice for Peace, the largest anti-Zionist Jewish organization in the world and currently the fastest-growing Jewish organization in the country.

Labour is using its first animal welfare policy since entering government to dilute standards by legalising the harmful practice of carrying chickens by their legs, charities have said.

European transport regulation 1/2005, which still applies in the UK, prohibits lifting chickens by their legs on farms and during loading and unloading, but the government is going to change the law to permit the widespread but illegal method, according to the Animal Law Foundation.

This comes despite the animal welfare committee of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) having previously said that it caused distress and injuries such as fractures and dislocations.

Edie Bowles, the executive director at the Animal Law Foundation, said: “It is shocking that the Labour government has chosen a dilution of welfare protections as its first animal welfare policy. It is especially surprising given it is the first dilution of an EU animal welfare protection since Brexit.

“The British people do not want this. They want animal welfare standards high and enforced. The decision to legalise the inhumane handling of chickens in the UK is a stark reminder of the lack of care for animal welfare at the highest level.”

During and after the Brexit campaign, leaving the European Union was repeatedly framed as an opportunity to strengthen the UK’s animal welfare standards. During the general election campaign, the environment secretary (then shadow), Steve Reed, said: “The Conservatives are on the side of animal cruelty. Labour will end it.”

Despite the EU regulations, the government had until recently argued that it was not illegal to handle chickens by the legs and Defra’s codes of practice explicitly permitted “leg-catching”.

However, the Animal Law Foundation threatened Defra with legal action, prompting the government to concede that carrying chickens by their legs was currently prohibited. At the same time it informed the charity that it would be changing the law so that it was no longer forbidden.

Kipster, a Dutch poultry farm that produces carbon-neutral eggs, has calculated that the additional cost of handling chickens upright is €0.0004 (£0.0003) per egg.

Sean Gifford, the executive director of the Humane League, said: “Chickens are thinking, feeling animals. Some are shy, some are playful, and they all want to live their lives free from harm. Grabbing them by their legs, which are often already sensitive and painful due to being bred to grow so quickly to maximise profit, then carrying them upside down, causes intense suffering.

“This outrageous decision by the government will ensure that millions of animals continue to needlessly suffer and is completely at odds with Labour’s pledge to introduce the biggest boost in animal welfare for a generation.”

The Humane League will be at the court of appeal on Tuesday to challenge the government for allowing fast-growing broiler chickens, known as “Frankenchickens”, which suffer a wide range of health problems. The high court rejected the initial challenge last year.

Defra declined to comment.