In 2016 a friend phoned Linda Sparrow about a 400-metre stretch of koala trees on the western edge of Bangalow, a small regional town in northern New South Wales.

The landscape in the region had long since been cut back by loggers and farmers, and there were precious few eucalyptus trees left to provide refuge for koalas looking for food or shelter.

“My friend just rang up one day saying, ‘Linda, I need your help saving some koalas’. And I just went, ‘Of course you do’,” Sparrow says.

Until that time, there were only two recorded koala sightings in Bangalow. By the end of the enthusiastic community campaign, people were actively looking, the number of sightings had jumped and the patch of trees was saved.

It was then Sparrow had the idea: why not keep going?

The next year she founded Bangalow Koalas and the “little fuzz balls” have since taken over her life. The group, supported by the World Wildlife Fund and recognised by the World Economic Forum, held its first planting in 2019. With the help of private landholders who have volunteered to take part, it has gone on to plant more than 377,000 trees across the region. Its goal is to reach 500,000 by 2025.

Koalas on Australia’s east coast are increasingly at risk of disappearing altogether. In 2022 the species was officially listed as endangered with the Australian government at the time fronting up $50m to help reverse the decline.

The decision came as a shock to few. It was a long anticipated decision that was entirely preventable – koalas were first listed as vulnerable in 2012 and, in the 10 years since, have faced multiple ongoing threats, including the spread of chlamydia, catastrophic bushfires and habitat loss. Some of this habitat loss is due to logging, which continues in koala habitat in northern New South Wales despite the state government promising it would protect areas important to the species.

The koala corridors planted by groups such as Bangalow Koalas – whose funding runs out the end of the year – are intended to help solve part of this challenge by connecting fragmented habitat with stretches of eucalyptus trees.

Due to the nature of private ownership, the group has to rely on individual land holders to agree to participate and volunteer their properties. Though they have never had a shortage of willing volunteers, the situation means the group has to work piece by piece while also taking into account the specific area where they are planting. In some areas, where an ancient rainforest once rose, they plant a mix of koala trees and rainforest plants. Out west where the land opens up, the focus is on eucalypts.

Sparrow says the benefits are not just limited to koalas. Walking through the dappled light in one of the earliest sites her group worked on, she says revegetating a barren landscape has flow-on effects for wallabies, birds, lizards, insect life and even humans.

“We’re not just connecting and creating a koala wildlife corridor, and a fragmented habitat, we’re connecting communities,” Sparrow says. “Land care groups, Indigenous communities, schools – they come all the time to do planting.”

People have travelled from as far north as Toowoomba and Brisbane to pitch in, she says, and as far south as Sydney and even Melbourne. One time, after the catastrophic Black Summer bushfires, two aircraft cabin crew from San Francisco flew in to help with a planting.

Other groups have also looked to Bangalow Koalas as a model. When Dirk Jansen, an IT manager, moved to the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria in 2016 he kept hearing his neighbours ask “where all the koalas had gone”.

“The habitat on Mornington Peninsula is very fragmented,” Jansen says. “They may have farmland in between, or housing, or major roads, or freeways.”

With more than two-thirds of the peninsula’s koala habitat on private property, Jansen says it has been “death by a thousand cuts” as small patches of area have been progressively cleared over time. To address this, he asked Sparrow for advice about forming his own landcare group, which held its first planting of 4,000 trees in 2020.

“We’ve been able to scale up to 25,000 plants we plant each season,” Jansen says. “From a volunteering point of view, that’s what we aim for each year.”

Dr Edward Narayan is a senior lecturer in animal science from the University of Queensland whose research focuses on stress responses in animals, particularly wild koala populations. He says this re-forestation work is important for helping take pressure off the species.

His research, and that of his PhD students, has found koalas living on the urban fringes are most at risk of stress, with many moving into residential areas seeking safe havens – with all the risks this entails.

“Koalas are a very interesting wild critter,” he says. “You have baseline stress from their ecology like disease but there are new stressors like dog attacks and motor vehicle collisions.

“Those are immediate-term stressors. When you talk about stress, you’ve also got the state of the landscape – things like habitat loss, land clearance and long-term things like heat stress or bushfires.”

Narayan says the groundwork by community groups is “the necessary first step to heal the landscape” but it is also essential for governments to address climate change “otherwise you’re only dealing with one part of the puzzle”.

If governments do not take the risk seriously, and fail to take meaningful action to reduce CO2 emissions, he says the vital work of communities on the ground will eventually be overwhelmed. The New South Wales government has set aside $190m for a plan to double koala numbers through restoring 25,000 hectares of koala habitat in its first stage and the federal government maintains a $76.9m fund to support similar work.

Programs such as these are a good start but, during the Black Summer bushfires, more than 7.5m2 hectares of eucalypt forest burned and the Australian economy remains heavily reliant on the production of fossil fuels. The country ranks among the biggest LNG and coal exporters in the world, and is still permitting the development of new coalmines and gas fields.

“You know, I’ve got two kids,” Narayan says. “This is about the future we are leaving them. Can you imagine Australia without koalas? I don’t think so. It would be like having no Opera House or Harbour Bridge. It’s built into who we are as Australians.”

According to the World Wildlife Fund, more than 60,000 koalas were killed during the Black Summer bushfires, an example Sparrow says illustrates how it is already affecting their work – and how she hopes the tree plantings might inspire others to take further action.

“You know, people come to me and say they feel so hopeless. They say, ‘with everything going on, how can I possibly have an impact?’ Then they come here and plant a tree, see they are actually doing something,” she says.

“My hope is that maybe then they start thinking, ‘What else can I do?’”

Hunter Biden’s conviction on gun-ownership charges may have handed his father, Joe, a boost in the forthcoming presidential election, analysts say, because it undermines the image of a president weaponising the US justice system to pursue Donald Trump.

Trump, the former president and presumptive GOP presidential nominee, has pushed that line relentlessly to explain his conviction last month on charges related to the concealment of hush-money payments to a porn star to help him win the 2016 election.

He has made the claim even though his prosecution was brought in a New York state court that is independent of the Department of Justice, which is overseeing 54 other criminal charges against him that have so far not come to trial.

Hunter Biden, by contrast, was prosecuted and convicted under the authority of the justice department, which is part of his father’s administration – an inconvenient fact that weakens Republican claims that it has been turned into a political weapon in the president’s hands.

The result, some observers say, is that Hunter’s conviction may help the president in a close race, even though the personal cost of his son’s troubles is heavy.

That suspicion was further fuelled by a low-key reaction from Republicans that attempted to switch the focus to other supposed crimes they say, but have never proved, that father and son have committed.

“It’s a marginal political gain, that’s what I’m feeling,” said John Zogby, a veteran pollster. “I don’t see it hurting him in any way, and especially when he neutralised the issue when he said he was not going to extend the pardon, which is very painful for him.

“It pulls the rug out from under that Republican argument that the justice system is rigged against Republicans to get Trump … a Biden did not get a pass.”

Zogby said the verdict – and Biden’s acceptance of it – could revive an image that was electorally helpful in 2020 of “Uncle Joe”, a man of empathy who had known suffering and personal tragedy, through the deaths of his eldest son, Beau, from cancer in 2015, and his first wife and baby daughter in a car accident in 1972.

“It could put some folks who have been wavering … on the track towards seeing that more sympathetic fellow, a father who is experiencing pain again,” he said. “You know, enough to give them another point or two. I don’t think it moves mountains, but it may not have to [in a close race].”

Larry Jacobs, a professor of politics at the University of Minnesota, said the verdict, while a “personal disaster” for Biden, could boomerang on the Republicans and translate into Democratic gain.

“The tragic case of Hunter Biden is painful for Joe and Jill Biden [the first lady], but it is a win for the Democratic party and the Biden campaign,” he said. “It puts a lie to the Republican claims that the justice system is being manipulated by [and for] the benefit of Democrats.

“It’s harder for the Republicans to say with a straight face and to audiences not already in their capture that the legal system is captured by the Democratic party.”

Biden is known to be deeply concerned by the troubles of Hunter, who was found guilty by a jury in Delaware on Tuesday of lying about his drug use and addiction when buying a gun in 2018. Close aides have voiced worries about the emotional strain the matter is putting on the 81-year-old president in the midst of a close election race.

“I don’t think voters are going to hold Biden accountable for his son’s addiction or his son’s misbehaviour. But I think the real question is the toll it takes on him and his family,” David Axelrod, a senior Democratic operative and former adviser to President Barack Obama told the Washington Post.

“To a guy who’s already experienced great loss and tragedy, this is another heavy brick on the load. And it’s going to take enormous strength to carry that load, given all the other bricks that are on there of the presidency and being a candidate.”

Despite the fact that his son now faces a possible jail sentence – and will stand trial again on unrelated tax-evasion charges in September – Biden has said he will not use his presidential powers to pardon him. That message was somewhat clouded on Wednesday when the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, on board Air Force One en route to the G7 summit in Italy, was reported as refusing to rule out a commutation of whatever sentence Hunter receives.

Hunter’s conviction followed legal manoeuvring in which some observers said he had received harsher treatment because he is the president’s son. A plea bargain worked out last year that would have seen him plead guilty to the tax charges while avoiding prosecution on the gun charge was dropped following criticism from the judge in the latter case, Maryellen Noreika, who was appointed to the bench by Trump.

Republicans, who have pursued Hunter Biden for years in an unsuccessful effort to prove his father profited financially from his business dealings in Ukraine, had denounced it as a sweetheart deal.

The president, who travelled on Wednesday to Italy for the G7 summit, said that he would respect whatever outcome the legal process reached – a jarring contrast to Trump’s repeated assaults on the judicial system as “rigged”.

“So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery,” Biden said.

“I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal. Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that.”

The largest Protestant group in the US has condemned the use of in vitro fertilization, a move that is sure to inflame the already white-hot battle over IVF and reproductive rights in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v Wade.

On Wednesday, during the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, delegates voted in favor of a resolution that urges Southern Baptists “to reaffirm the unconditional value and right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation”.

The resolution in effect calls on the Southern Baptist Convention – a group that includes nearly 50,000 churches and almost 13 million members – to avoid IVF.

The success of the resolution is a major victory for the anti-abortion movement, swathes of which have long opposed IVF on the grounds that providers create embryos that are not implanted in a woman’s uterus or are set aside after being screened for genetic anomalies. It also advances the tenets of “fetal personhood”, a movement to enshrine embryos and fetuses with full legal rights and protections that, if fully enacted, would rewrite vast swaths of US law.

The Catholic church already officially opposes IVF, but the issue has not historically loomed as large among Protestants. Majorities of both white non-evangelical Protestants, white evangelical Protestants, and Black Protestants all support access to IVF.

The Wednesday resolution suggests that this support may be in flux, since the Southern Baptist Convention has long been seen as a barometer of US evangelicalism and its future.

IVF has been in the national spotlight since the Alabama state supreme court ruled earlier this year frozen embryos qualify as “extrauterine children”, a decision that led many IVF providers in the state to temporarily cease work. Although the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade cleared the way for attacks on IVF, many in the state and across the country were shocked by the ruling and its implications.

This week, the US Senate is expected to vote on a bill that would codify a federal right to IVF. Although the bill is not expected to pass, Democrats in the Senate are hoping to get Republicans on the record opposing an infertility treatment that is widely popular.

As part of the anti-IVF resolution, the Southern Baptist Convention called on its members to “promote” adoption.

“Couples who experience the searing pain of infertility can turn to God, look to Scripture for numerous examples of infertility, and know that their lament is heard by the Lord, who offers compassion and grace to those deeply afflicted by such realities,” the resolution added.

Russia engaged in a “deliberate pattern” of starvation tactics during the 85-day siege of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in early 2022, which amounted to a war crime, according to a fresh analysis submitted to the international criminal court.

The conclusion is at the heart of a dossier in the process of being submitted to the ICC in The Hague by the lawyers Global Rights Compliance, working in conjunction with the Ukrainian government. It argues that Russia and its leaders intended to kill and harm large numbers of civilians.

It has been estimated that 22,000 people were killed during the encirclement and capture of the city of Mariupol at the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Civilians were left without water, gas or electricity within days of the siege as temperatures fell below minus 10C.

Catriona Murdoch, a partner at Global Rights Compliance, said the aim of the research was “to see if there was a broader narrative” that amounted to a deliberate denial of food and other amenities necessary for life by the Russian military and its leadership, a strategy of starvation that could be said to amount to a war crime.

“What we could see is that there were four phases to the Russian assault, starting with attacks on civilian infrastructure, cutting out the supply of electricity, heating and water. Then humanitarian evacuations were denied and even attacked, while aid was prevented from getting through,” Murdoch said.

“In the third phase, the remaining critical infrastructure was targeted, civilians terrorised with aid and water points bombed. Finally, in phase four, Russia engaged in strategic attacks to destroy or capture any remaining infrastructure items,” she said.

The phased targeting of Mariupol, she said, demonstrated that Russia had planned to capture the frontline city without mercy for its civilian population, which was estimated at 450,000 before the full invasion began in 24 February 2022.

The dossier concludes that an estimated 90% of healthcare facilities and homes in the city were destroyed or damaged during the siege, and food distribution points were bombed as well as humanitarian evacuation routes.

Given the importance of Mariupol and the centralisation of Russian decision-making, culpability for the deaths of thousands of civilians went to the top, it says. “Vladimir Putin is culpable,” Murdoch said, “and echelons of the Russian military leadership”, although she did not name commanders.

The ICC accepts third-party submissions although it does not necessarily act on them. Starvation and the denial of amenities necessary for civilian life are considered war crimes, but this remains a relatively new area of international law, and so far no alleged perpetrator has been prosecuted.

Last month, Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor at the ICC, applied for an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and minister of defence, Yoav Gallant, arguing that the two had deliberately inflicted starvation on Palestinians in Gaza – a claim rejected by Israel.

“Israel has intentionally and systematically deprived the civilian population in all parts of Gaza of objects indispensable to human survival,” Khan said. Three Hamas leaders were also subject to similar applications, relating to the war that began with the attack by the group on Israel on 7 October.

Murdoch said Khan’s applications for the arrest warrants linked to the conflict in Gaza “were the first of their kind” relating to starvation as a war crime, and had highlighted the issue in the minds of lawyers and prosecutors. “What it showed is where the ICC’s thinking is,” she said.

The lawyers said initially they were unsure as to how easy it would be to create a war crimes dossier for Mariupol because the Russian occupation made evidence-gathering difficult, despite the fierce fighting and high numbers of casualties.

But they developed a technique that used a specially created algorithm to map the destruction of specific locations, as monitored by satellite imagery, with what explosives experts assessed as Russian attacks.

The House voted on Wednesday to hold the attorney general, Merrick Garland, in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over audio of President Joe Biden’s interview in his classified-documents case, Republicans’ latest and strongest rebuke of the justice department as partisan conflict over the rule of law animates the 2024 presidential campaign.

The 216-207 vote fell along party lines, with Republicans coalescing behind the contempt effort despite reservations among some of the party’s more centrist members.

“We have to defend the constitution. We have to defend the authority of Congress,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said at a press conference before the vote. “We can’t allow the Department of Justice and executive branch to hide information from Congress.”

Garland is now the third attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress. Yet it is unlikely that the justice department – which Garland oversees – will prosecute him. The White House’s decision to exert executive privilege over the audio recording, shielding it from Congress, would make it exceedingly difficult to make a criminal case against Garland.

The White House and congressional Democrats have slammed Republicans’ motives for pursuing contempt and dismissed their efforts to obtain the audio as purely political. They also pointed out that Jim Jordan, the GOP chair of the House judiciary committee, defied his own congressional subpoena last session.

“This contempt resolution will do very little, other than smear the reputation of Merrick Garland, who will remain a good and decent public servant no matter what Republicans say about him today,” Jerry Nadler, a New York representative and the top Democrat on the judiciary committee, said during floor debate.

Garland has defended the justice department, saying officials have gone to extraordinary lengths to provide information to the committees about the special counsel Robert Hur’s classified-documents investigation, including a transcript of Biden’s interview with him.

“There have been a series of unprecedented and frankly unfounded attacks on the justice department,” Garland said in a press conference last month. “This request, this effort to use contempt as a method of obtaining our sensitive law-enforcement files, is just the most recent.”

Republicans were incensed when Hur declined to prosecute Biden over his handling of classified documents and quickly opened an investigation. GOP lawmakers – led by Jordan and Representative James Comer – sent a subpoena for audio of Hur’s interviews with Biden during the spring. But the justice department only turned over some of the records, leaving out audio of the interview with the president.

On the last day to comply with the Republicans’ subpoena for the audio, the White House blocked the release by invoking executive privilege. It said that Republicans in Congress only wanted the recordings “to chop them up” and use them for political purposes.

Executive privilege gives presidents the right to keep information from the courts, Congress and the public to protect the confidentiality of decision-making, though it can be challenged in court.

Administrations of both political parties have long held the position that officials who assert a president’s claim of executive privilege cannot be prosecuted for contempt of Congress, a justice department official told Republicans last month.

An assistant attorney general, Carlos Felipe Uriarte, cited a committee’s decision in 2008 to back down from a contempt effort after then President George W Bush asserted executive privilege to keep Congress from getting records involving Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Before Garland, the last attorney general held in contempt was Bill Barr in 2019. That was when the Democratic-controlled House voted to issue a referral against Barr after he refused to turn over documents related to a special counsel investigation into Trump.

Years before that, the then attorney general, Eric Holder, was held in contempt related to the gun-running operation known as Operation Fast and Furious. In each of those instances, the justice department took no action against the attorney general.

The special counsel in Biden’s case, Hur, spent a year investigating the president’s improper retention of classified documents, from his time as a senator and as vice-president. The result was a 345-page report that questioned Biden’s mental competence but recommended no criminal charges for the 81-year-old. Hur said he found insufficient evidence to successfully prosecute a case in court.

In March, Hur stood by his no-prosecution assessment in testimony before the judiciary committee, where he was grilled for more than four hours by Democratic and Republican lawmakers.

His defense did not satisfy Republicans, who insist that there was a politically motivated double standard at the justice department, which is prosecuting former President Donald Trump over his retention of classified documents at his Florida club after he left the White House.

But there are major differences between the two investigations. Biden’s team returned the documents after they were discovered, and the president cooperated with the investigation by voluntarily sitting for an interview and consenting to searches of his homes.

Trump, by contrast, is accused of enlisting the help of aides and lawyers to conceal the documents from the government and of seeking to have potentially incriminating evidence destroyed.

SpaceX and its chief executive, Elon Musk, have been sued on Wednesday by eight engineers who say they were illegally fired for raising concerns about alleged sexual harassment and discrimination against women, their lawyers have said.

The eight engineers include four women and four men and claim that Musk, who owns the rocket-maker, electric carmaker Tesla and the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, ordered their firing in 2022.

The dismissals came, they say, after they sent around a letter calling the billionaire a “distraction and embarrassment” and urging executives to disavow sexually charged comments he had made on social media.

The lawsuit was filed in state court in Los Angeles, according to the lawyers, Anne Shaver and Laurie Burgess.

The lawsuit says Musk’s conduct fostered a “pervasively sexist culture” at SpaceX, where female engineers were routinely subjected to harassment and sexist comments and their concerns about workplace culture were ignored.

“These actions … had the foreseeable and actual result of offending, causing distress, and intruding upon plaintiffs’ wellbeing so as to disrupt their emotional tranquility in the workplace,” the plaintiffs said in the lawsuit.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment. SpaceX has denied wrongdoing, saying the 2022 letter was disruptive and the workers were properly fired for violating company policies.

Paige Holland-Thielen, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement provided by her lawyers that Wednesday’s lawsuit was an attempt to hold SpaceX leadership accountable and spur changes in workplace policies.

“We hope that this lawsuit encourages our colleagues to stay strong and to keep fighting for a better workplace,” she said.

The eight engineers are already the focus of a US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) case claiming that their firings violated their rights under US labor law to advocate for better working conditions.

SpaceX filed a lawsuit claiming that the labor board’s in-house enforcement proceedings violate the US constitution. A US appeals court last month paused the NLRB case while it considers SpaceX’s bid to block it from moving forward pending the outcome of the company’s lawsuit.

Wednesday’s lawsuit accuses SpaceX and Musk of retaliation and wrongful termination in violation of California law, and further accuses the company of sexual harassment and sex discrimination.

The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages and an order barring SpaceX from continuing to engage in its allegedly unlawful conduct.

Reuters contributed reporting

Rishi Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide placed a £100 bet on a July election just three days before the prime minister named the date, the Guardian can reveal.

The Gambling Commission is understood to have launched an inquiry after Craig Williams, the prime minister’s parliamentary private secretary, who became an MP in 2019, placed a bet with the bookmaker Ladbrokes on Sunday 19 May in his local constituency of Montgomeryshire.

On 22 May, Sunak made the surprise announcement that a general election would be held on 4 July.

In a statement, Williams said: “I’ve been contacted by a journalist about Gambling Commission inquiries into one of my accounts and thought it best to be totally transparent.

“I put a flutter on the general election some weeks ago. This has resulted in some routine inquiries and I confirm I will fully cooperate with these.

“I don’t want it to be a distraction from the campaign, I should have thought how it looks.”

A Conservative party spokesperson added: “We are aware of contact between a Conservative candidate and the Gambling Commission.

“It is a personal matter for the individual in question. As the Gambling Commission is an independent body, it wouldn’t be proper to comment further, until any process is concluded.”

It is understood that a red flag was automatically raised by Ladbrokes as the bet in Williams’ name was potentially placed by a “politically exposed person”, and the bookmaker is particularly cautious over “novelty” markets.

The £100 bet, which could have led to a £500 payout on odds of 5/1, is believed to have been placed via an online account that would have required the user to provide personal details including their date of birth and debit card. The bookmaker also knows the location of the bet.

Ladbrokes referred the case to the Gambling Commission, which is understood to have launched an inquiry. The Guardian understands the regulator informed Downing Street officials last week. Using confidential information to gain an unfair advantage when betting may constitute a criminal offence.

Separately, the MPs’ code of conduct prohibits members from “causing significant damage to the reputation and integrity of the house”. The bet was placed while parliament was still in session.

While Sunak’s general election announcement last month came as a surprise to the public and many Conservative MPs, the prime minister is thought to have been considering and debating the timing for months. He is believed to have settled on the July date weeks before confirming it in heavy rain outside Downing Street.

The alleged bet, which would not have received a payout until after the election took place, is likely to be highly embarrassing for Sunak, who has been accused of presiding over a calamitous general election campaign. Sunak and Williams will now face questions about who knew about the election date and when.

Williams, 39, is the Tory candidate for Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr in mid-Wales. He had a majority of 12,000 before the boundary change.

His role as parliamentary private secretary is to be the prime minister’s eyes and ears in parliament. He is understood to have been in Downing Street on an almost daily basis, and to be a trusted member of Sunak’s team.

Ladbrokes declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Gambling Commission said: “If someone uses confidential information in order to gain an unfair advantage when betting, this may constitute an offence of cheating under section 42 of the Gambling Act, which is a criminal offence.

“The Gambling Commission does not typically confirm or deny whether any investigations are under way unless or until they are concluded, or if arrests are made or charges are brought during a criminal investigation.”

Many Tory MPs were blindsided by Sunak’s decision to call a summer election. After he ruled one out in May, most had assumed that his plan to hold the vote in the “second half of the year” meant that it would be in the autumn.

The prime minister is said to have opted for a pre-summer election in April, when it became clear that growth figures were going to show inflation falling and an economy returning to better health. He was said to be concerned that the public would grow increasingly frustrated if he did not name a date.

Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister; Liam Booth-Smith, Sunak’s chief of staff; and James Forsyth, his political secretary, were at the heart of the deliberations. Isaac Levido, who is running the summer campaign, was one of those arguing against an early election, according to sources.

They said David Cameron, the foreign secretary, and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, were told only the night before Sunak’s announcement, while the rest of the cabinet were informed just before it.

A Downing Street spokesperson declined to comment.

America’s top professional eater, Joey Chestnut, has been excluded from entering New York City’s annual hotdog eating competition after he signed a deal with a plant-based meat company.

Chestnut, 40, the defending champion, said on X that he “was gutted to learn from the media that after 19 years” he had been “banned” from the competition, held every summer on Independence Day at Nathan’s Famous original hotdog outlet in Coney Island. “I love celebrating America with my fans all over this great country on the 4th and I have been training to defend my title,” he added.

In a statement posted to its social media account, Major League Eating (MLE), which oversees the seafront contest, said it was “devastated” that Chestnut had “chosen to represent a rival brand that sells plant-based hot dogs”.

However, it added that the door was still open for Chestnut – known as “Jaws” for slugging dozens of wieners down his throat – to ditch the new endorsement deal and enter the competition.

MLE, which describes itself as a governing body for “all stomach centric sport worldwide”, said organisers had gone to great lengths to accommodate Chestnut during recent negotiations. “However, it seems that Joey and his managers have prioritized a new partnership with a different hot dog brand over our long-time relationship,” the statement said.

“Joey Chestnut is an American hero,” it added. “We hope that he returns when he is not represented by a rival brand.”

The New York Post, which first reported the story, said Chestnut had reached a deal to represent Impossible Foods, which recently introduced beef-substitute hotdogs that it says generate 84% less greenhouse gas emissions than the animal-based alternative.

The California-based company said that Chestnut was free to compete in “any contest he chooses”.

“It’s OK to experiment with a new dog. Meat eaters shouldn’t have to be exclusive to just one wiener,” it added.

The 10-minute Nathan’s contest, broadcast on ESPN, began in 1980. Last year, Chestnut took his 16th win in the annual eat-off, which he has dominated every year since 2015. He hit a world record in 2021, devouring 76 franks and buns.

With Chestnut out, the number two, Geoffrey Esper, could take the title this July. Esper finished second last year, wolfing down 49 dogs, 13 fewer than Chestnut.

George Shea, the host and promoter of the ​contest, ​said he was devastated by the separation. “It would be like back in the day Michael Jordan coming to Nike, who made his Air Jordans, and saying, ‘I am just going to rep Adidas too,’” Shea ​t​old the New York Times. “It just can’t happen.”

The wreck of the ship on which renowned Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton died has been found off the coast of Labrador, Canada, searchers have announced.

Locating the Quest – a schooner-rigged steamship which sank on a 1962 seal hunting voyage – represents a last link to the “heroic age of Antarctic exploration”, said search leader John Geiger.

“Finding Quest is one of the final chapters in the extraordinary story of Sir Ernest Shackleton,” said Geiger, who heads the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

Geiger was speaking from the bridge of Leeway Odyssey as the oceanographic research vessel returned to port in St John’s, Newfoundland, after locating the Quest in 400 metres of water 15 nautical miles from shore.

Quest’s final resting place was 7,500 miles (12,000km) from where it was anchored when Shackleton died of a heart attack onboard in the harbour at Grytviken, South Georgia, on 5 January 1922.

The explorer was just 47 and was returning to Antarctica seven years after his previous ill-fated expedition had ended in near catastrophe.

Coming three years after the expeditions of the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and the Englishman Robert Falcon Scott first reached the south pole just weeks apart, in 1914 Shackleton hoped to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. Instead, his doomed expedition became one of the most gruelling – and miraculous – survival ordeals of all time.

The mission went awry when his ship, the Endurance, became trapped in pack ice in the Weddell Sea, forcing Shackleton and his men to camp on unstable ice floes. After months adrift, the Endurance sank and Shackleton sailed with his crew in lifeboats to the desolate and uninhabited Elephant Island.

Realising their chances of rescue remained slim, Shackleton took five of his men in an open boat on an 800-mile odyssey across perilous oceans to reach the whaling station at Grytviken on South Georgia. Four months later, Shackleton succeeded in rescuing his crew from Elephant Island.

All 27 members of Shackleton’s crew survived the ordeal, establishing their leader as a lion of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, with his care for his men distinguishing Shackleton in an era when polar explorers often died in the extreme conditions due to rudimentary equipment and insufficient supplies.

In a further testament to Shackleton’s leadership, eight of the Endurance crew would return with him on his next expedition. This despite the Quest being smaller than the Endurance with a design apparently ill-suited for polar expedition. A wooden-hulled former sealer built in Norway in 1917, the Quest was “small, poorly fitted and reckoned exceedingly uncomfortable by those who sailed in her”, according to an exhibition on the ship at the South Georgia Museum.

But journalists at the time marvelled at its modern gadgetry, which included wireless radio equipment, electric lights, an electrically heated crow’s nest, an instrument for plotting a ship’s course called an odograph, and even an Avro Baby seaplane.

After Shackleton’s death, Frank Wild took command and the Quest continued towards the Weddell Sea but the underpowered ship struggled in icy conditions and its men returned despondent to the UK months later.

The journey marked the end of the so-called heroic age, which was followed by a new “mechanical age” which relied less on the derring-do of its leaders and more on technological advances including tracked motor vehicles and aircraft.

But the Quest continued sailing for decades in various capacities. When Norwegian polar explorer Amundsen disappeared while flying on a rescue mission over the Arctic in 1928, the Quest was sent to help in the unsuccessful search for his remains.

British explorer Gino Watkins then used the Quest on his 1930 British Arctic air route expedition, which sought to survey an air route from the UK to Winnipeg.

During the second world war the Quest served as a minesweeper in the Caribbean.

After the war, the ageing vessel returned to her original purpose and it was while hunting seals in the Labrador Sea that the Quest struck ice and sank in May 1962, though all her crew were rescued.

This year marks 150 years since Shackleton’s birth in County Kildare and more than a century after his death, the Anglo-Irish explorer’s story continues to make headlines.

In 2022, the wreck of the Endurance was discovered 3,000 metres below the Weddell Sea, preserved by the freezing waters and absence of wood-eating organisms.

“After Endurance was found, a lot of Shackleton buffs all over the world … immediately turned to Quest,” said Geiger, asking “‘Where’s Quest? Can we find it?’”

“It was a bit of a detective story initially,” said search director David Mearns, a shipwreck hunter who was also involved in the decades-long project to find the Endurance. “I thought, personally, we had a shot, maybe a 70% chance of finding it.”

Five days into the search, the team’s sonar equipment detected the wreck lying on the seafloor. “The masts are knocked down and that’s what we would expect, but the whole basically is intact,” said Mearns. The team plans to return to photograph the wreck later this year.

The discovery has been welcomed by Shackleton’s closest living relative, Alexandra Shackleton, who noted that her grandfather had originally planned to use Quest on a Canadian Arctic expedition until the Canadian government of Arthur Meighen withdrew its support.

“It is perhaps fitting that the ship should have ended its storied service in Canadian waters,” she said.

Since the UK’s general election was called, the Labour party has been seeking to capitalise on voters’ fury over the sewage filling England’s rivers and seas.

The debt-ridden, leaking, polluting water industry, owned largely by foreign investment firms, private equity and pension funds, has overseen decades of underinvestment and the large-scale dumping of raw sewage into rivers. It has become one of the touchstone issues of this election, with voters across the political spectrum angry at the polluting of waterways treasured by local communities. Groups have sprung up to look after rivers and lakes; protests pop up most weekends along the coast.

Labour is keen to present itself as having the answer – though the Liberal Democrats have also been making a splash on the issue – with the shadow environment secretary, Steve Reed, talking tough by threatening to put water bosses in prison, ban their bonuses and impose fines for sewage spills.

But after vowing to end the “Tory sewage scandal”, Labour – predicted by multiple polls to win the election with an outright majority – will have to act quickly and ambitiously to clean up the mess, say experts.

With no rivers in good condition, water bills projected to skyrocket, crumbling infrastructure leaking sewage into groundwater, people getting sick from tap water, and water companies in dire financial straits, this is not an easy problem to fix. It will take focus, investment and potentially an entirely new regulatory and ownership system.

Labour has identified the potential collapse of Thames Water, the country’s largest water company, as a key crisis issue that will have to be immediately tackled by the incoming government. The party leadership does not want to nationalise water, arguing that it would cost the taxpayer tens of billions of pounds.

But some within Labour have been pushing hard for nationalisation – England is the only country in the world that has a fully privatised water system.

Clive Lewis, who was the MP for Norwich South until the general election was called, recently tabled an early day motion asking for water companies to be brought into public ownership. He thinks this should start with Thames Water and gradually include all of England’s water companies. He has been supported by a group of Labour MPs, including the former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, and it is also a key policy of the Green party. Launching the motion, Lewis said: “Water companies in England have incurred debts of £64bn and paid out £78bn in dividends since they were privatised, debt-free, in 1989 … Water companies paid out £1.4bn in dividends in 2022 even as 11 of them were fined in the same year for missing performance targets.”

Mathew Lawrence, the director of the Common Wealth thinktank, said the potential collapse of Thames Water could give a new Labour government an incentive to act boldly. “A crisis is also an opportunity: to show how they will govern differently and end financial extraction from essential services. If we want to see fairer bills, clean water and well-run services, our water system must be brought into public ownership, just as it is in Scotland, and most of Europe.”

Water companies have been trying to get on the front foot in anticipation of a Labour victory at the election. The industry fears a shake-up, and has been briefing heavily that if companies are fined too heavily and end up failing, it will dent investor confidence in the UK.

Liv Garfield, the chief executive of Severn Trent, last year proposed to her fellow CEOs: “One idea we believe might be attractive to the Labour leadership is repurposing utilities and utility networks into a new breed of declared social purpose companies – companies that remain privately owned, who absolutely can (and should) make a profit, but ones that also have a special duty to take a long-term view.”

Water UK, the trade association for the water industry, is working alongside the regulator, Ofwat, to avoid higher fines for water companies and potential jail time for chief executives. Water UK has recently appointed a number of people who are well-connected in Labour circles. David Henderson, the body’s new CEO, was a longtime adviser to Gordon Brown, and the former Labour cabinet minister Ruth Kelly was appointed as its chair last year. Its head of policy, Stuart Colville, used to work for Ed Miliband, the shadow energy security secretary. Colville then moved to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which is in charge of regulating the water sector, before joining Water UK. He has a public-facing role at the lobbying group, recently hitting the airwaves to tell people the water industry was “working really hard” to stop sewage spills.

This has led to concern about a revolving door between the UK’s political and corporate classes, which risks preventing action to tackle the water crisis. James Wallace, the chief executive of River Action UK, said: “If the leaders of Water UK speak the same political language as a potential new government it could go one of two ways: collegiate and urgent transition of a failing sewage and water industry for the benefit of people and planet; or a cosy continuation of the scandalous degradation of waterways permitted by under-resourced regulators and profiteering corporations.

“We will be pressuring for the former … History will judge harshly any more broken promises.”

A Water UK spokesperson said: “We are focused on securing regulatory approval for £100bn in new investment. At almost twice the current rate, this investment is vital for ensuring the security of our water supply and reducing the amount of sewage entering rivers and seas as fast as possible. Regardless of which party is in government, the industry will remain focused on securing approval for this investment.”

Also keeping Labour on the straight and narrow is its unofficial water adviser, Feargal Sharkey, former frontman of the Undertones and now one of the country’s most vocal water campaigners. Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, has been seen socialising with Sharkey and the campaigner has accompanied Reed on the campaign trail . Now touring the country to campaign for Labour candidates, Sharkey has been clear that any wavering on their part will cause them to lose his support – which would in turn tarnish the party’s credibility on the sewage issue.

Sharkey, who also chairs Sera, an environmental campaign group affiliated to the Labour party, told the Guardian: “The simple truth is they are going to have to conduct a complete root and branch review and potential restructuring of the ownership and funding not only of the water companies, but the whole system of regulation that oversees their activities.” He said he did not know yet if nationalisation was the answer, but the current system had to change: “For example, in the case of Thames Water, there is not a single year since privatisation the Thames Water shareholders put in more money than they took out. It’s always been a cash-sum game to them. They’ve always abstracted more money out of that company than they ever invested in it.”

There are rumours that Labour is planning a review of the regulators, and to potentially scrap Ofwat and replace it with a new, stronger body. The investment for the new reservoirs that are needed – London is projected to run out of water in coming years if there are any more droughts like that of 2022 – and for sewers to stop human effluent being poured into waterways, also has to come from somewhere. How much of this will a Labour government allow billpayers and taxpayers, rather than shareholders, to shoulder? Sharkey thinks it can force shareholders to pay for the bulk of it. But most think bills will have to rise. Labour has pledged not to raise taxes for working people and is sticking to stringent fiscal rules, so any large-scale investment would be unlikely to come from central government.

An equally pressing issue Labour needs to tackle, experts say, is farming pollution, caused largely by the spread of animal manure on fields that then leaches into waterways, causing harmful plant and algae blooms.

Shaun Spiers, the executive director of the Green Alliance thinktank, said: “Farming must be properly regulated and particular problem areas tackled.” He said an action plan must be put in place for the Wye, one of the most polluted rivers in the UK due to the muck from the intensive chicken farms surrounding it.

Farming unions will be lobbying hard against this, and it will be much easier to blame water company CEOs than farmers, who have more public sympathy. It remains to be seen whether Labour will stick to its guns and clean up the UK’s waters, or if, as has happened for the past 14 years, the tough decisions are deemed just too difficult to make. The harsh truth, however, is that many of England’s rivers and chalk streams do not have 14 more years to wait before ecological collapse.