Local communities would be given the right to buy up derelict eyesores and turn them into parks under a Labour government, while walkers and swimmers would gain access to hundreds of miles of river pathways, the party has pledged.

Labour will make a direct appeal to voters’ patriotism, presenting the restoration of nature as a matter of national identity and status.

Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary, said: “Our landscape is a great source of national pride. Our children and grandchildren deserve to be astounded by the magnificence of our landscapes and coastlines and enjoy our iconic wildlife, just as we can. But after 14 years of Tory chaos, nature is under threat.”

He pointed to the decline of bird species, toxic sewage in rivers, and the depletion of wildlife and nature across the UK as examples of why an urgent change of direction was needed. “Labour are the conservers, not the Conservatives,” he said.

The countryside protection plan would also include the planting of three new national forests, with taskforces for tree-planting and flood resilience, as well as a ban on bee-killing pesticides and a commitment to revive wetlands and peat bogs.

Green spaces would be a requirement in the development of the 1.5m new homes the party has promised, and councils will be given new guidance to help local groups take over derelict buildings and degraded land under a community right to buy. People have the right to bid for such land when it comes on the market but the six-month window in which to raise the funds is often too short, and the right is rarely used. Labour believes that by lengthening the time to 12 months and encouraging councils to use it, many more urban and countryside sites can be restored for local use.

There will also be a new land-use framework, setting out how the UK’s land can best be used to deliver food security, housing and thriving natural environments, and farmers will be encouraged to use more environmentally regenerative methods.

The creation of hundreds of miles of new river pathways is also intended to give people greater rights of access to nature. Riverbanks are often on private land, and people seeking to canoe or swim sometimes face threats or abuse from landowners. River walks are often fragmented for the same reason, and only 3.4% of English rivers have an uncontested public right of navigation.

Using the same methods as for the creation of the national coastal path, a Labour government would have Natural England negotiate with landowners for rights of way. Compulsory purchase is not envisaged, and if landowners object then ways could have to be found around their parcels of land.

These plans are weaker than what Labour promised under Reed’s predecessor, Jim McMahon, who promised a “right to roam” act.

A spokesperson for the Right to Roam campaign group said: “While it’s good that Labour are promising increased access to nature, these policies on their own are totally incommensurate with the scale of the problems we face. With no clear right of access to 97% of our rivers, any effort to put in footpaths will be stymied by landowner objections for decades, just as happened with the England Coast Path, still incomplete after 15 years.”

The announcements flesh out Labour’s commitments to restore and protect at least 30% of the UK’s land and marine areas by 2030, and to fulfil the UK’s targets for nature recovery and halting biodiversity loss, revealed in the Guardian before the general election was called. Polling shows that people believe the UK’s landscape and natural environment is key to their national identity, and Reed recognises that winning a majority for Labour will require turning swathes of the Tory-voting countryside red, as well as Labour’s strongholds in the cities.

Green and heritage campaigners welcomed the plans. Hilary McGrady, the director general of the National Trust, said: “Environmental groups have laid down the gauntlet to political parties – nature cannot wait, and the UK public want to see urgent action. We’re pleased to see Labour’s response to that challenge today, recognising the strong role farm payments should play in driving wildlife recovery and food security, the importance of improving public access to nature and the need to restore nature alongside building new homes.”

Craig Bennett, the chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, said the UK’s environment was in clear need of rescue: “Our natural world is on its knees, appallingly degraded and robbed of its abundance – so it’s great to see Labour’s promises on regenerative farming to restore nature and ensure food security, ending the use of bee-killing pesticides, and improving people’s access to nature.”

However, there is still little detail on exactly what Labour would do, if elected, with the existing system of support payments for farmers, called environmental land management schemes (Elms). These are public payments supposed to reward farmers for restoring nature or creating new habitats on their farms, but take-up has been patchy and their environmental benefits are in doubt as there is, so far, little data available on their impact.

A Labour source said it was not yet possible to judge how Elms were performing, as the government had failed to provide enough details, but that if there was a change in government this would be closely examined.

Richard Benwell, the chief executive of Wildlife and Countryside Link, said: “Positive promises like this need to be matched by practical plans for delivery. We hope to see a race to the top on clear commitments for environmental improvement ahead of the election, then it will be time for the new government to knuckle down and deliver. There’s no doubt that will need significant public or private funding, and regulatory reform, and we’ll be looking for an explicit manifesto commitment that ambition will be matched by action.”

A 71-year-old woman was mauled to death by a black bear in a Sierra Nevada community in 2023 in what is believed to be California’s first fatal black bear attack, the state department of fish and wildlife confirmed this week.

Patrice Miller was found dead in her Downieville home in November by a Sierra county sheriff’s deputy who was called to the residence to check on the senior after she had not been seen for several days, KCRA3 reported.

“Upon showing up, [they] immediately saw evidence of bear intrusion into the house,” Mike Fisher, the county sheriff, told the outlet. “The door was broken. There was bear scat on the porch.”

Authorities initially believed Miller had died of natural causes before the bear entered her home and mauled her, but earlier this year a pathologist determined she had been fatally attacked by the animal.

The California department of fish and wildlife confirmed the incident is the first known and documented fatal black bear attack in state history.

The bear responsible for the attack in Downieville, a small mountain town near the Tahoe national forest, was later trapped and euthanized, the department said in a statement. Authorities used DNA testing to confirm that the bear was the same animal responsible for her death.

The region has long had an issue with bears rummaging near homes and yards looking for food. Around the nearby Lake Tahoe, a popular designation for winter skiing and summer recreation, there has been an increase in bear break-ins in recent years.

In Downieville, Miller’s daughter said that bears were frequently trying to get in “through broken windows, and that her mother had physically hit one to keep it from entering her residence”, KCRA reported. She had reportedly named one bear who was a regular visitor “big bastard”.

The sheriff told the outlet that Miller’s home had a lot of “bear attractants”, and that she would feed her cats on the front porch of the house.

Last month, a bear tried to break into several Downieville homes and was later shot by deputies as it attempted to gain access into a local school gym.

“Since early May, the sheriff’s office has been inundated with daily reports from distressed homeowners and business owners regarding bears breaking into residences and vehicles, creating havoc and endangering local residents,” the sheriff’s office said of the most recent incident.

“Given the escalating danger posed by the bear’s behavior and the imminent threat it presented to residents, deputies were left with no choice but to euthanize the bear in the interest of public safety.”

The sheriff’s office advises residents in Downieville to take precautions to avoid encounters with bears and other wildlife, including closing doors and windows, locking vehicles and removing any outside food sources such as garbage.

Eyebrows were raised at the Ministry of Defence when French immigration and customs insisted on checking the paperwork of 400 British paratroopers immediately after they dropped into fields near Saneville, Normandy on Wednesday.

Some felt the French were trying to make a point in response to the UK’s decision to leave the EU and, while immigration checks for British troops on exercise abroad are routine, doing so at a public commemoration is deemed exceptional.

US and Belgian troops involved in the drop were not checked, part of an international commemoration of one of the earliest operations of D-day. The US forces flew from France and had already completed their border formalities; no check was required for the Belgians as EU citizens.

Passport checks were required between Britain and France before Brexit, but since the UK left the EU officials stamp passports on entry to the 27-country bloc.

Though the drop and the event happened 24 hours ago, film of the French officials greeting the British soldiers was picked up online on Thursday. Brig Mark Berry, the commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade, told the Sun: “It is something we haven’t experienced before.”

French immigration officials said checking papers in the field was exceptional given the significance of the event, part of the celebrations of the 80th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy on D-day in 1944. Jonathan Monti, an immigration official, said: “We are welcoming the UK soldiers.”

Film showed the checks were brief, while crowds of spectators cheered and praised those undertaking the airdrop.

Eighty years ago, more than 18,000 men of the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and the British 6th Airborne Division were dropped into Normandy shortly after midnight to secure critical points and areas behind the five invasion beaches. It was a risky exercise and many soldiers were killed on landing, having come down unsafely or into enemy gunfire – as at the village of Sainte-Mère-Église.

England’s model for countryside access cost six times more to implement than Scotland’s right to roam policy, new figures reveal.

In England, only 8% of the countryside is open for walking, picnicking and other outdoor activities. This includes footpaths, the coastal path, mountains, moors, heaths and downs. In Scotland, all of the countryside is open for access as long as guidelines are followed such as leaving no trace and not harming farmland.

Official figures analysed by the Right to Roam campaign reveal that implementing the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (Crow) cost about £69m over the course of a five-year parliament. By comparison, statistics published by the Scottish government show that implementing the access provisions in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 cost only £11m over the same length of time.

The reason Crow cost so much to put in place was because it granted people access only to certain landscape types: mountains, moorland, heaths, downs and commons. This meant civil servants had to spend five years and millions of pounds mapping those landscapes, and then responding to thousands of appeals from landowners disputing the maps.

It was much cheaper to implement the Scottish laws, which exempted only private gardens and fields where crops were growing.

Guy Shrubsole from the Right to Roam campaign, who uncovered the figures, said: “When Labour was last in power in both England and Scotland, it expanded the public’s access to nature in both nations – but it chose a more sensible and cost-effective approach in Scotland. Not only do Scots enjoy a far better system of access rights than we do in England, it was also cheaper to implement.

“Rather than spend millions of pounds on a piecemeal extension of the Crow Act, the next government should learn from Scotland’s experience and legislate for a right of responsible access to the majority of England’s countryside. The money saved can be spent instead on public education campaigns and local access rangers to ensure roaming is done responsibly.”

No major political party is expected to have a right to roam policy in its manifesto. Labour initially committed to a Scottish-style right to roam but made a U-turn after pressure from landowners.

In the middle of Food, Inc 2 – the follow-up documentary to 2008’s Food, Inc, narrated by Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser – scientists share what they have recently discovered about ultra-processed foods (UPFs). They are not just bad for you in a trashy, empty-calories kind of way; they interfere with the brain and the body’s ability to process food; they mess with you on a cellular level. Whole populations are seeing health deteriorate, profoundly, for no purpose beyond profit. It must be annoying, I suggest to Pollan, 69, to hear scientists deliver this as a discovery. He been warning against processed food for decades.

Pollan’s mantra – “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” – was immortalised in his 2008 book In Defence of Food. By then, he was already an oracle of the genesis, meaning and production of what we eat, thanks to The Botany of Desire (2001) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006). His other memorable phrase from that time was: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food.”

His cultural impact, in the US and far beyond, was immense. It wasn’t just these nutritional fundamentals, but his entire modus operandi. He would follow a foodstuff from its birth, or germination, to the point where it hit your mouth in the most intricate detail. He took apart Bismarck’s apocryphal line about laws being like sausages. Maybe you do want to see them being made. Maybe, in the long term, you will end up with better sausages.

He has also written about psychedelics, in 2018’s How to Change Your Mind, which in 2022 became a Netflix documentary series that took a wild dive into MDMA, LSD, psilocybin and mescaline. Today, he is a nonfiction professor at Harvard and a science and environmental journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley. But, above all that, he is Mr Food.

Anyway, back to the question: does it irk him that science took so long to catch up with ultra-processing, grandmothers and so on? “We assume science always gets there first,” he says. “It has such authority. But sometimes the grandmas know things.” He is speaking over a video call from California, looking relaxed and urbane. “I remember being struck, when I was working on nutrition in 2008, by this study that came out saying that the lycopene in tomatoes [often claimed to be an antioxidant] can’t be absorbed by the body unless it comes in the form of fat. OK, so olive oil on tomatoes. There’s a wisdom in that and the grandmas got there first.”

While grandmas, Pollan and Schlosser (the author of 2001’s Fast Food Nation) have been on to junk food since for ever, “that had no scientific meaning”, Pollan says. The gamechanger was Carlos Monteiro, a professor of nutrition at the University of São Paulo, who appears in the new documentary. “He labelled and defined ultra-processed food,” says Pollan. “Processed food you could make at home. An ultra-processed food is one that contains ingredients no normal person has at home and requires equipment you could only find in a factory.”

If UPFs are driving obesity, they are just one part of a giant food pipeline that is completely bust. While Food, Inc 2 is about the US, so many of its elements are true of food systems across … well, for brevity, I would call it “late capitalism”, but Pollan pushes back on that. “Capitalism is a game that can be played according to different rules,” he says. “We can just change the rules.”

Pollan and Schlosser didn’t intend to make a sequel – until Covid. Its effects on the food system were dramatic. “We all had to scrounge for food. Getting into a supermarket was a challenge and then, once you’d got in, there were empty shelves,” says Pollan.

“This is such a weird idea for Americans. We live in abundance. Our supermarkets are cornucopias. We used to look at videos of empty shelves in the Soviet Union and feel self-satisfied. Suddenly, it was happening here. And for very similar reasons: an overly centralised system that didn’t have any redundancy built into it.”

At the same time, in the early days of the virus, pigs were being euthanised in jaw-dropping numbers, because they couldn’t be processed due to lockdowns. Academic papers have been written about the huge psychological toll this took on vets.

But the ripple effects are traumatic for democracy-lovers, too. Tyson Foods, one of the largest meatpacking companies in the US, started a meat-shortage panic with an advert in the New York Times imploring President Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act. “It’s a piece of legislation designed to make companies do things they don’t want to do in the national interest,” Pollan says. “In this case, Tyson wanted to be allowed to do exactly what they wanted, which was to reopen production lines.”

Meatpacking workers were incredibly vulnerable to Covid infection, due to the conditions, and these plants became vectors of infection in surrounding areas. One report in 2020 found that between 3% and 4% of all US Covid deaths were linked to the meatpacking industry.

The US food industry is a story of overconsolidation, usually with four mega-companies dominating 80% or more of every sector, from meat and dairy to cereals and soft drinks. It gives them undue political influence – almost an immunity to legislation. “We keep exempting agriculture from all the laws we have around labour and animal welfare,” Pollan says.

Before Covid, Pollan didn’t think enough had changed in the industry to make it worth another look. But this concentration of power and production was “a new wrinkle”, as was the ultra-processing. “So it was a sad moment – because, as much attention as Eric’s and my books had had, we hadn’t made that much of a dent. The forces arrayed against us were so much stronger than we realised. I think that we were naive about how merely arming the consumer with information would drive change in the food system. It did drive some change, but nowhere near as much as it would take to dislodge power in the food system.”

He believes in the power of organised consumer boycotts, which are justified by another of the film’s scandals, in which farm workers are so mistreated that their employment amounts to a state of semi-serfdom (you have to watch it for the labourers’ stories – they are staggering). But he is also powerfully aware of state failure. “Policies should be organised around two pillars – one is health of the citizens and the other is health of the environment – and they are not,” he says. “They’re basically designed to lead to overproduction and cheap agricultural commodities, which benefits the soda makers and meat makers.”

There is no doubt that food as it is produced is as harmful to health as tobacco, but there is a question mark over whether that sea change – where cigarette giants were forced to take responsibility for their products – would be possible now, when corporations seem so much more powerful and better defended.

“You realise that it was the tobacco companies, under pressure from the government over smoking, that bought the food industry,” says Pollan. “So it’s a similar playbook, except now they know to burn the internal memos saying: ‘We know this food is unhealthy.’ ‘We know how we can get people to overeat.’ Because the reason they got screwed on tobacco was that there was a paper trail. So they’re not going to make that mistake again.”

Their other strength now, of course, is that food is too big to fail. When the supply chain of Abbott Laboratories, one of only four significant baby formula manufacturers in the US, was disrupted in 2022 after two shutdowns at its main plant, contributing to a nationwide shortage, the panic in young mothers’ faces as they recounted it to the media was palpable and contagious.

If Pollan comes off as much more optimistic – jaunty, even – in the film than these case studies warrant, it’s because he has a great deal of faith in technology. He is surprisingly enthusiastic about the frontiers of synthesised and cultured meat, given that your great-grandmother would definitely not recognise any of this as food.

In person, though, he is ambivalent about it. “If you can pick off 10% of meat eaters and get them to reduce their consumption, that’s a good thing. But you can’t escape the fact that synthesised meat has 21 ingredients or whatever, some of them never seen before in the human diet. We may look back on this and say: ‘Oh no – we didn’t see this health problem coming.’ But it’s such a non-American idea, precaution. It doesn’t go with the frontier spirit, the heroic individual. It’s so namby-pamby.”

But despite what he has discovered, Pollan still takes enormous pleasure in food: “I just pay more attention to it.” Thank God someone does.

Food, Inc 2 is in UK cinemas and available on demand from Friday, with previews at selected cinemas

The European Central Bank has eased the pressure on borrowers across the eurozone after cutting its main interest rate for the first time in almost five years.

Citing a sustained fall in inflation, the ECB said its deposit rate would be cut to 3.75% from a record high of 4%, putting it ahead of the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, which have yet to cut interest rates.

Financial markets eagerly anticipated the first eurozone cut since September 2019, which will also affect the ECB’s main refinancing operations rate, which fell from 4.5% to 4.25%.

City analysts had forecast the cut in borrowing costs at the ECB’s June meeting after signals that the central bank was ready to offer more support to eurozone economies after a period of economic stagnation following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In a statement, the ECB said: “Keeping interest rates high for nine months has helped push down inflation. It is now appropriate to moderate the degree of monetary policy restriction.”

Dean Turner, the chief eurozone economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, said the outlook for inflation, as indicated by the ECB’s latest projections, point to further interest rate reductions later this year.

Turner said: “Of course, the timing of the next move from the ECB is uncertain, as this will be dependent upon incoming data. But with the disinflationary process firmly under way, the ECB, along with other central banks, should feel confident enough to ease policy, most likely at a pace of one cut per quarter.”

However, the ECB expects inflation to be marginally higher this year and in 2025 than it was forecasting in March. It said inflation would average 2.5% in 2024 and 2.2% in 2025, up from its previous forecast of 2.3% and 2%, respectively.

Mark Wall, the chief European economist at Deutsche Bank, said the higher than previously forecast inflation numbers would make ECB policymakers more circumspect about futures cuts.

“The statement arguably gave less guidance than might have been expected on what comes next. In that sense, the immediate tone is a ‘hawkish cut’. This is not a central bank in a rush to ease policy,” he said.

Economic growth is expected to improve after better than expected performances in Germany, Italy and Spain. The average growth rate for the eurozone would be 0.9% in 2024, 1.4% in 2025 and 1.6% in 2026, the ECB said.

It was every public relations executive’s worst nightmare.

Seth Burton was vice-president of communications at the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team when, in 2014, news broke that team owner Donald Sterling had been caught on tape making racist comments in a scandal that shook American sport.

“It was a tough situation and one that couldn’t necessarily be cleaned up,” Burton recalls. “It was remarkable how quickly it took on a life of its own and became a real media firestorm. It was wild how many messages and emails there were – I was staying until two or three in the morning just responding.”

The story of the bombshell tape, and the controversial man behind it, is told in the FX drama series Clipped: The Scandalous Story of LA’s Other Basketball Team, starring Laurence Fishburne, Ed O’Neill, Cleopatra Coleman and Jacki Weaver, streaming on Hulu from Tuesday. It comes two years after HBO’s series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty about the Clippers’ more illustrious city rivals.

O’Neill plays Sterling, a billionaire lawyer and businessman once described as having a “plantation mentality”. He was born Donald Tokowitz to Russian immigrants in Chicago in 1934. When he was a young child the family moved to Boyle Heights, then a predominantly Jewish low-income neighbourhood east of downtown Los Angeles.

Tokowitz eventually changed his last name, earned a law degree and began practicing divorce and personal injury in 1961. He spent his earnings methodically buying up properties all across Los Angeles, becoming famous for almost never selling any of them.

He became the biggest residential landlord in Los Angeles and, like Donald Trump in New York, Sterling loved to put his name on buildings. In 1989 California magazine profiled him with the headline: “The Man Who Would Be Trump.”

A profile in the Los Angeles Times newspaper noted: “Sterling, the son of a vegetable peddler, was not shy about trumpeting his transformation. In his penthouse office in Beverly Hills, Sterling often showed visitors a Louis XIV desk, paintings by Rembrandt and Renoir and centuries-old Chinese antiques. He eagerly dropped celebrity names, bragging that he bought properties from Elizabeth Taylor and John Wayne, and once boasted of plans to buy an NFL franchise.”

With encouragement from his friend and contemporary the Lakers owner Jerry Buss, Sterling paid just over $12m in 1981 for the beleaguered San Diego Clippers. He abruptly moved the franchise to Los Angeles in 1984, putting them in the decrepit Los Angeles Sports Arena and turned a tidy profit thanks to a sweetheart lease deal.

The team consistently underperformed on court, living in the shadow of the mighty Lakers. Sterling, who was known to heckle his own team from his centre court seat, gained a reputation as a notoriously erratic and frugal owner, often refusing to spend money on player salaries or facilities.

Ramona Shelburne, who reported and hosted The Sterling Affairs, an ESPN 30 for 30 podcast on which Clipped is based, explains: “If you want to be the cool guy in town and you want to be up there with the Lakers and Jerry Buss you’ve got to spend money, treat people right, throw parties that people want to go to.

“Donald tries to do a lot of the things that Jerry Buss does, that the Lakers do, but he’s just not able to do it. He pays people to come to his parties and forces them to come to his parties. He doesn’t treat the players well. It informs the way they run the team. It’s critical to understand how that insecurity plays into who Donald Sterling becomes over the course of 20 or 30 years.”

But that started to change. Suddenly winning became a priority. Under Doc Rivers (Fishburne), a Black coach whom Sterling brought in from Boston and paid $7m a year, the team was enjoying the most successful two-year stretch in its history and was finally a title contender. Then disaster struck.

In April 2014 a recording of Sterling made by his personal assistant and mistress, V Stiviano, was leaked to the TMZ website. In the nine-minute, 27-second audio, Sterling could be heard chiding Stiviano for posting a photo on her Instagram account of herself with Black athletes Magic Johnson and Matt Kemp.

Sterling: In your lousy fucking Instagram, you don’t have to have yourself walking with Black people …
Stiviano: And it bothers you?
Sterling: Yeah, it bothers me a lot that you want to promote, broadcast that you’re associating with Black people, do you have to?
Stiviano: You associate with Black people!
Sterling: I’m not you and you’re not me. You’re supposed to be a delicate white or delicate Latina girl
Stiviano: I’m a mixed girl.

There was more:

Sterling: Why are you taking pictures with minorities, why?
Stiviano: What’s wrong with minorities? What’s wrong with Black people?
Sterling: Nothing. How about your whole life, every day, you could do whatever you want? You could sleep with them, you could bring them in, you could do whatever you want! The little I ask you is not to promote it on, and not to bring them to my games.

The clip went viral, which was no mean feat in 2014, and the outcry was huge. At their next game Clippers players wore black wristbands or armbands and went through their pregame routine with their red shirts on inside-out to hide the team’s logo as a silent protest. Criticism poured in from players such as LeBron James (“There’s no room for Donald Sterling in the NBA”), fans on social media and even the White House.

Burton, who did not defend Sterling and was grateful to Rivers for speaking out, says: “The moment when President Obama commented on it was the first time it hit home to me just how massive it had become. He was actually at the time on a tour of Asia and was getting asked about this in Asia.

“I remember seeing it on the news and being like, wow, this has now taken on a whole another level. It’s not just something that’s in sports and the NBA. It’s become a little bit of a worldwide situation and then the NBA realised at that point, of course, they had to do something quick, which they did.”

With sponsors threatening to abandon the NBA, its commissioner, Adam Silver, did indeed respond swiftly, banning Sterling for life from all league activities and fining him $2.5m, the maximum amount allowed under league rules. (Sterling had an estimated net worth of about $2bn.)

Sterling gave an interview to Anderson Cooper of CNN and repeatedly apologised and denied accusations that he was racist, claiming he had been “baited” into making “terrible” remarks. But he also launched another bizarre rant against Johnson.

A decade later his wife, Shelly, continues to defend him and blame the crisis on Stiviano. “It’s totally ridiculous,” she says in a phone interview with the Guardian. “She had drugged him for quite a while and what he said was not what he meant. He sponsors and donates to many African American churches and they were even going to give him a plaque and everything, so it’s totally ludicrous. She did it for money.”

Sterling showered Stiviano with gifts such as money, cars and a $1.8m duplex. Yet Shelly, who married Sterling in 1956, refuses to believe that they were having an affair. “I don’t think it was an affair because they never had a sexual relationship and I knew pretty well.

“Didn’t the world forgive [President Bill] Clinton for having his girlfriend underneath the desk? Every one of the presidents – I guess they have affairs. But I don’t think this was an affair because I knew her too. I never saw them kiss or hold hands or anything. She was basically working for him and she just did what she wanted to.”

Donald and Shelly Sterling did separate for a while, however. She says: “I felt it was better for me. I was a little afraid with all the paparazzi and everything so I moved to our other house and it was quite a ways. I just had to get away from all this craziness and the people stalking us. I was a little afraid.”

In the aftermath of the tape furore, Shelly decided to sell the Clippers, a move that Sterling tried to block. Shelly went to court and had her estranged husband removed as a trustee on grounds of mental incapacitation. The Clippers were bought by the former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer for a then-record $2bn.

Looking back, Shelly contends that Sterling was better off not keeping the franchise. “I don’t think he wanted to, to be honest, and in today’s world we’re so happy we don’t have a team.

“Right now to own a team is really tough and the salaries are crazy and there’s so many problems. He’s sort of relieved that he doesn’t have to go through all that. I have more than I had when we had the team. I have 12 tickets and everybody, when I go there, they like me, and I don’t have any problem.”

Shelly continues to deny that Sterling, now 90, is a racist. “Absolutely not. We have many friends that are African American. We donate a lot of money to them and it’s just ridiculous but I guess anybody can write anything they want.”

The infamous tape was hardly out of character, however. In 2009 Sterling and his insurance company paid $2.75m to settle a federal housing discrimination lawsuit after court proceedings packed with scandalous testimony about Sterling’s opinions of African American and Latino tenants of his properties.

Elgin Baylor, a former Clippers general manager who brought an unsuccessful lawsuit alleging race and age discrimination, claimed that Sterling had a “plantation mentality”, envisioning a team of “poor black boys from the south playing for a white coach”.

The Sterling Affairs podcast, which in 2019 provided a definitive account of the entire saga, interviewed Olden Polynice, who joined the Clippers in 1991. He recalled Sterling walking into the locker room when Polynice had a towel on. “So I’m sitting there and I’m the only guy in the locker room and he said, ‘Hey Olden, how you doing?’

“He put his hand on my shoulder, he’s rubbing, ‘Look how big and strong he is. Wow, look at that.’ I’m like, ‘OK, this is getting a little awkward.’ So I put my hand out, shake his hand. His friends, shake their hands and say, ‘How y’all doing?’ He goes right back, ‘Wow, look at these muscles.’ I’m like, ‘Oh hell. What the fuck is going on here?’

“So I’m sitting there, now I’m starting to sweat a little bit. Because I’m like, ‘Nobody’s in here. There’s a reason why they left.’ And it’s like he just kept looking at me like, ‘Wow, look at this buck.’ Now when he said that, that’s when I, ‘Oh shit.’ I’m like, ‘Buck? I was like what the fuck?’

Polynice added: “Black slave on the trading block, yes. I’m telling you that’s when I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ That fucked me up.”

Shelburne, a Los Angeles native who covered the story when it broke in 2014, says in episode one of The Sterling Affairs: “Los Angeles sits on two faultlines – the San Andreas and race. All of us know it. We live with it.

“Donald Sterling was another. Anyone who played for him, or worked for him, or covered him in the press, or lived in one of his hundreds of apartments. On the one hand knew that it was all a matter of time until he blew up.”

Shelburne adds by phone: “Covering the story in real time felt like living in a larger-than-life movie. Even in the early days of reporting it, I felt like it was a very Los Angeles story. It had everything, it had sex, it had money, it had betrayal, it had racism, it had sexism and all of these characters jumped out in this elevated kind of way. It’s a narrative story that you can sink your teeth into.”

From brown trout becoming “addicted” to methamphetamine to European perch losing their fear of predators due to depression medication, scientists warn that modern pharmaceutical and illegal drug pollution is becoming a growing threat to wildlife.

Drug exposure is causing significant, unexpected changes to some animals’ behaviour and anatomy. Female starlings dosed with antidepressants such as Prozac at concentrations found in sewage waterways become less attractive to potential mates, with male birds behaving more aggressively and singing less to entice them than undosed counterparts.

The contraceptive pill has caused sex reversal in some fish populations – leading to a collapse in numbers and local extinction events as male fish reverted to female organs. Scientists have said that modern pharmaceutical waste is having significant consequences for wildlife exposed to discharges in their ecosystems, and warned it could have unintended consequences for humans.

Michael Bertram, an assistant professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, said: “Active pharmaceutical ingredients are found in waterways all around the globe, including in organisms that we might eat.”

He said evidence of the problem had grown over recent decades, and it was a global issue for biodiversity that deserved more attention.

In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Sustainability, researchers said the pharmaceutical industry must urgently reform the design of drugs to make them greener.

“There are a few pathways for these chemicals to enter the environment,” Bertram, one of the paper’s authors, said. “If there is inadequate treatment of pharmaceuticals that are being released during drug production, that’s one way. Another is during use. When a human takes a pill, not all of that drug is broken down inside our bodies and so through our excrement, the effluent is released directly into the environment.”

Drugs such as caffeine, anti-anxiety medications, antidepressants and antipsychotics were all entering ecosystems, Bertram said, as were illegal drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine.

Bertram pointed to the notable example of diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug routinely given to cattle in south Asia at the time, that caused India’s vulture population to fall by more than 97% between 1992 and 2007. The country subsequently had a surge in rabies cases from dogs that were feeding on the cattle carcasses that were no longer being eaten by the birds.

Other examples include fathead minnows that remained anxious after they were exposed to low levels of caffeine, and antibiotic pollution that has an effect on microbes.

Alarmingly, it is the very same characteristic of pharmaceuticals that makes them effective in human and animal patients that also makes them particularly hazardous environmental pollutants: drugs are specifically designed to have biological effects at low doses.

A recent study that measured 61 different drugs from 104 countries from rivers in 1,052 locations found 43.5% of the sites had traces of at least one drug that were above safe levels for ecological health.

The researchers said active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) pollution was occurring against a backdrop of other pressures on biodiversity, including the climate crisis, habitat destruction and overconsumption.

They said the lifecycle of drug production could be reformed to curb their spillover on ecosystems, and pharmacists, physicians, nurses and vets should be trained in the potential environmental impact of medicines. They added that drugs could be designed to break down more easily after use and said wastewater treatment should be expanded to prevent API pollution entering the environment.

“Appreciating that patient access to pharmaceuticals will remain vital into the future, wWe urge drug designers and manufacturers, scientists and policymakers to recognise the growing environmental threat posed by APIs and to urgently prioritise the sustainable molecular design of greener drugs to prevent further environmental harm,” the paper said.

“Greener drugs reduce the potential for pollution throughout the entire cycle,” said Gorka Orive, a scientist and professor of pharmacy based at the University of the Basque Country, and an author of the study.

“Drugs must be designed to not only be effective and safe, but also to have a reduced potential risk to wildlife and human health when present in the environment,” he said..”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

In the last weeks, hundreds of young red kites (Milvus milvus) have been making their annual tour of the West Country. Numbers reached record highs in Cornwall, with 188 recorded over Penzance, 371 over Marazion and an unprecedented 518 seen together over Pendeen.

The gathering has been taking place every May for about 15 years, with one- and two-year-old immature birds flying down the south-west peninsula. When they reach Land’s End, they turn and head east, scattering into smaller groups. They come from across England, Wales and Scotland; it’s thought the congregations are caused by older birds with established territories pushing youngsters out of the area when nesting begins.

Once so persecuted that they almost became extinct in Britain, reintroduction programmes mean that these raptors are widespread now in parts of Wales and central and eastern England. They can often be seen soaring over motorways, slip-sliding the wind currents with taut ease.

But they remain rare on Exmoor. I was surprised to see seven in one day, riding the air above Oare Water. Their forked tails and elegant, angled wings were sharp cut against the sky, the sun burnishing their undersides chestnut-bronze. A few days later, 159 passed east over Porlock, circling for a while around the Hawkcombe phone mast on their way back from Cornwall.

The kite passage has synchronised with the annual explosion in numbers of a more harmful species – ticks. Last May, after walking my dog on the path beside Horner Water, I was amazed to find seven crawling through her fur. This year, after a similar walk beside the river at Watersmeet, I removed nearly 50.

Wetter weather and warm winters are creating ideal conditions for these blood-sucking arachnids, which wait in damp foliage, forelegs outstretched, to hitch on a host. Records show that numbers increased tenfold between 2000 and 2022, and tenfold again from 2022 to 2023. My unscientific dog test seems to indicate that they grew by a further 10 times last year.

The problem is that ticks can carry bacteria and viruses that cause debilitating illnesses, Lyme disease being the most common of these in people. Keep a tick removal hook handy.

Scientists in Edinburgh have developed a home heating system that draws its energy from the world’s most abundant resource: water.

The equipment can use sea water, rivers, ponds and even mine water to heat radiators and water for baths and showers, using the same technology as in air source heat pumps.

It is being trialled by Edinburgh University in an affordable housing project close to the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge, at a gold-mining museum in south-west Scotland and in a commercial greenhouse in Fife.

Another system is due to be installed this summer at the Scottish Seabird Centre in North Berwick, also drawing its energy from the Firth of Forth. All of the systems use water from the sea or nearby rivers.

It is the latest way of exploiting the ambient warmth in the natural environment to heat buildings, using the same technologies in air and ground source heat pumps.

The warmth of the sea or river water is captured by glycol, the liquid used in anti-freeze, which is then compressed in the heat pump. That compression makes it hot enough to heat water for radiators or baths. As it travels through the heat pump, the liquid cools down again, and the process repeats.

Similar technology is already used in large district heating networks: water from the Clyde is used at the Queen’s Quay housing development at Clydebank near Glasgow. Sewage is being used to power district heating systems in places such as Stirling, Borders college in Galashiels, and in Granton, Edinburgh.

Unlike large-scale plants, the prototypes built by hydrogeologists at Edinburgh University are designed to be compact, easily portable and used in homes and smaller buildings, particularly in rural and coastal areas.

They are intended to provide another type of the small-scale green energy systems needed in huge numbers to replace gas- and oil-powered heating, as the UK moves towards a zero-carbon energy supply. The UK has about 23m gas boilers, and about 1m oil-fired boilers.

The team behind the design said water was normally a more predictable source of energy than the outside air, as the sea, lakes and rivers generally remain at a consistent temperature.

It sits alongside the mini-hydro schemes used in hilly areas or the ground-source heat pumps householders with large gardens can install, by running pipes down deep boreholes into the ground or by laying the pipes over a large area below the surface of the ground.

While air source heat pumps need to work harder in very cold conditions, the Edinburgh University team say their designs, which they have called SeaWarm and RiverWarm, can also use frozen water.

“It’s about trying out a whole series of constellations, but at the heart of it is the same technology,” said Prof Chris McDermott, from Edinburgh’s school of geosciences and the lead designer.

Gus Fraser-Harris, a hydrogeologist involved with the design, said the system would be more expensive to buy and install than an air source heat pump but cheaper than a ground source heat pump when its final version goes on sale.

The SeaWarm system collects the water in a large circular tub, which holds 3.7 cubic metres of water, roughly the same volume as 12 bath tubs. Inside the tub are layers of looped tubing carrying the glycol, which transfers the warmth of the water to the heat pump. It can use a water body 500 metres away from the building.

They have called the system HotTwist and say the tub can be buried in the ground, which also helps to keep it at a constant temperature. It delivers 350% to 400% more heat than the electricity it needs to operate, Fraser-Harris said, comparable to the most efficient air source heat pumps.

The pilot project near Edinburgh, part of a project by LAR Housing Trust to convert an old naval barracks and prison into affordable housing project, involves pumping water up from the sea.

The gold-mining museum at Wanlockhead, south of Glasgow, uses gravity to transfer water from the river used for gold-panning down to the heat pump, while the greenhouses in Fife take water from a nearby burn.