The US Department of Justice has sued Visa, accusing one of the world’s largest payment networks of antitrust violations that affect “the price of nearly everything”.

The financial giant has suppressed competition by threatening merchants with high fees and paying off potential rivals, according to the complaint, filed in US district court for the southern district of New York.

The lawsuit alleges that Visa makes it difficult for merchants to use alternatives, like lower-cost or smaller payment processors, instead of its own payment processing technology, without incurring what prosecutors described as “disloyalty penalties”.

Some $3.3tn in transactions were processed on Visa’s sprawling financial network in the latest quarter.

The firm processes more than 60% of debit transactions in the US, bringing it $7bn each year in fees collected when transactions are routed over its network, the justice department said. The company protects that dominance through agreements with card issuers, merchants and competitors, prosecutors allege.

The attempt to tackle such fees, sometimes known as swipe fees or interchange fees, is part of the Biden administration’s efforts to combat rising consumer prices, which have been a key issue on the presidential election campaign trail.

“We allege that Visa has unlawfully amassed the power to extract fees that far exceed what it could charge in a competitive market,” said the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, in a statement. “Merchants and banks pass along those costs to consumers, either by raising prices or reducing quality or service.

“As a result, Visa’s unlawful conduct affects not just the price of one thing – but the price of nearly everything.”

Visa described the complaint as “meritless” and vowed to “vigorously” defend itself. “Anyone who has bought something online, or checked out at a store, knows there is an ever-expanding universe of companies offering new ways to pay for goods and services,” Julie Rottenberg, the firm’s general counsel, said. “Today’s lawsuit ignores the reality that Visa is just one of many competitors in a debit space that is growing, with entrants who are thriving.”

The San Francisco-based company is valued at more than $500bn on the stock market. Its shares dropped by almost 5% following reports of the lawsuit.

Visa’s alleged anticompetitive conduct began around 2012, as competing companies entered the payments space following reforms that required card issuers to accommodate unaffiliated networks, a senior justice department official said.

The lawsuit seeks to have a judge in Manhattan impose requirements that would restore competition for services to process debit payments both online and at physical stores.

The justice department’s antitrust division began investigating Visa over its debit card practices in 2021, the same year it blocked the credit card company’s acquisition of the financial technology company Plaid. Its rival Mastercard said in April it was being investigated by the justice department as well.

Both companies have been in litigation for nearly two decades over their dominance in the cards market, and agreed in 2019 to pay US merchants $5.6bn to settle damages claims in a class-action lawsuit accusing them of anticompetitive practices.

Jon Donenberg, deputy director of the White House national economic council, said: “We do not have a comment on this DoJ lawsuit, but the Biden-Harris administration has been clear that the American economy thrives when there is real competition. This ddministration has also taken on credit card late fees and banking overdraft fees, and will continue working to take on other unfair junk fees on everyday transactions.”

Reuters and Associated Press contributed reporting

A new species of invasive flatworm has been discovered in the United States and has been found in several states in the south, according to a new paper.

The species, named Amaga pseudobama, was discovered by an international team of researchers and first spotted in 2020 in North Carolina. It is thought to be native to South America.

The researchers said the flatworm was brown and a few centimeters long.

Apart from North Carolina, the species is also present in Florida and Georgia and may have already invaded other states, the researchers said in a news release of the research paper on Tuesday.

This new species joins other invasive flatworm species discovered in the southern United States, including Platydemus manokwari.

Initially, the researchers believed that the flatworm belonged to the species Obama nungara, an invasive species native to Brazil and Argentina that has invaded much of Europe. However, after more analysis, the researchers found that this flatworm species was a completely different species.

Once the species was officially identified, researchers found that samples of the species had been collected in the past in North Carolina, Georgia and Florida in 2015.

The researchers say that citizen science observations suggest that the worm is probably present in other states, and therefore, it is likely that the flatworm “has already invaded a part of south-east USA and that the invasion took place more than ten years ago”.

According to North Carolina State University, terrestrial flatworms are flat, shiny and covered in a slime-like substance that helps them move. “Terrestrial flatworms are known to kill other invertebrates, especially other native worms, snails, and slugs,” according to the university, and thus “they have been considered damaging where they are introduced.”

In a news release on Tuesday, Matt Bertone, the co-author of a paper on the discovery and director of the plant disease and insect clinic at North Carolina State University, said the newly identified flatworm “has not been observed in the wild or native habitats, so we don’t know much about how it interacts with its environment”.

He said that the researchers can infer what they know about related species, he said, but they don’t know yet exactly what it preys on or how quickly it reproduces.

“Do they pose a risk to native worms and, by extension, native ecosystems? We have to study these species to find out,” he added. “And the first step in that process is clearly identifying a species and naming it.”

I’m afraid I shrieked when I read that Michael Cole – longterm publicist for the late former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed – cannot come to the phone these days. If you covered a certain phase of British public life, you would know that Michael Cole could always come to the phone. Coming to the phone was what Michael Cole did, always to emit some hugely pompous shitblast in defence of his master, who is now the subject of multiple rape and sexual assault allegations. Alas, Michael is currently so shocked that no emission has been forthcoming. Instead, his wife was deployed to inform the press that Michael “is not giving any interviews or talking at the moment”. However, she did claim he found the women’s allegations “terribly distressing” and that “of course” he had been unaware of all of it.

From spokesman to sending out your spokeswife … I would say life comes at you fast, but of course it doesn’t. Fayed ran his entire race without his years of alleged sexual crimes catching up with him, and though he is not entombed in a pyramid on the roof of Harrods, as he wished, he certainly got away with it all. When he died, Cole rushed out to inform Radio 4’s Today programme that his former boss was “fascinating … larger than life … full of great humanity”. Yeah – not the third one.

According to the spokeswife, Cole is now in seclusion dealing with the incredible shock of the mounting allegations that Fayed was a prolific sex offender. Since the BBC documentary based on the testimony of 20 women aired, another 100 approaches have been made to the legal team who were already representing 37 women, and it is safe to assume there are many still too traumatised to make that call. I shall leave it to readers to decide whether Michael, a former journalist, has somehow forgotten about all the allegations of sexual impropriety made during Fayed’s lifetime that he personally batted away – or whether he is simply the worst publicist ever for having zero clue about any of his client’s alleged … what is the word? … “vulnerabilities”. Given that Tom Bower’s unauthorised biography, which detailed several allegations of sexual assault, came out while Cole was specifically charged with handling Fayed’s publicity, his lack of curiosity/memory seems sensationally remarkable.

But then, it isn’t remarkable – and it is unfair to single out Michael. The Times yesterday published a useful rundown of Fayed’s people, from the mouthpieces, lawyers and security henchmen to the doctors who performed “purity examinations” on young female PAs. When you see the vast scale of it all, “entourage” sounds too wan a word for this motley crew of enablers, enforcers and concealers, and for all the other motley crews that surrounded “larger than life” men, from Michael Jackson to Harvey Weinstein to Jimmy Savile. I prefer to think of such set-ups as the sex-case industrial complex.

Fayed’s isn’t even the only one in the current news cycle. Much has and will be written about the charges of sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution laid against the music mogul Diddy, real name Sean Combs. But for space constraints I want to focus on a 2016 surveillance video which surfaced back in May, in which a towel-clad Combs is shown throwing his former girlfriend Cassie Ventura to the floor in a hotel corridor, then repeatedly kicking her before dragging her motionless body back towards the room she has just escaped.

I wasn’t surprised that Cassie had long been telling the truth, despite Diddy’s serial denials. What took my breath away was what the location implied – the sheer number of people who must have been involved in justice not being served. What exactly is the process for covering up a filmed incident of serious assault by an international star in the corridor of a hotel owned by a major international chain? Let’s just say I imagine Diddy’s lot are quite familiar with it. But think of the hotel side. There are CCTV images – it is a whole department’s job to monitor CCTV. Were the management informed? Where were the police? Quite the mystery.

In Combs’s camp, you can only guess at how many of the sex-case industrial complex were called upon to do their special designated job to make it go away. Lawyers, NDA experts, crisis PRs – who knows the precise combination of moving parts, but they were presumably all working in perfect symphony to ensure that this ghastly footage never went anywhere until CNN published it in May, a staggering eight years after it occurred. Diddy’s powers were beginning to desert him – but even weeks before, a raid as he was about to board his private jet had resulted in the arrest of only one individual for possession of drugs. Not Diddy, you understand, but a former college basketball star player who was part of his entourage. “How did a college hooper become Diddy’s alleged drug mule?” ran a New York magazine headline.

The sex-case industrial complex is a place where everyone has their job, a whole interconnected corrupt society that regularly comes into contact with actual society – a boring place of rules and boundaries – but only in order to take what it wants and spin off back into the lawless ether again. Mohamed Al Fayed’s Harrods was also like this, according to multiple allegations. As far back as 1998, Henry Porter wrote in this newspaper of some investigative run-ins with Fayed’s people, stating that he had been “left with the eerie sense that we had been dealing with a foreign power: a fiefdom, which despite its real location in Knightsbridge, operated quite independently from the rest of Britain, with a security service of its own, an armed police force and a tyrant in command”. He was right, as all those shut down by the Diddy machine in recent years were too. We still live in a world of powerful men’s Neverlands.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html

• A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar
  On Tuesday 3 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back at a political year like no other, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Police in northern Switzerland say several people have been detained and a criminal case opened in connection with the suspected death of a person in a new “suicide capsule”.

The “Sarco” capsule, which has never been used before, is designed to allow a person inside to push a button that injects nitrogen gas into the sealed chamber. The person is then supposed to fall asleep and die by suffocation in a few minutes.

Prosecutors in Schaffhausen canton were informed by a law firm that an assisted suicide involving use of the Sarco capsule had taken place on Monday near a forest cabin in Merishausen, police said in a statement.

Police added that “several people” were taken into custody and prosecutors had opened an investigation on suspicion of incitement and accessory to suicide.

The Dutch newspaper Volkskrant reported on Tuesday that police had detained one of its photographers who wanted to take pictures of the use of the capsule. It said Schaffhausen police indicated the photographer was being held at a police station but gave no further explanation.

The newspaper declined to comment further when contacted by Associated Press.

Exit International, an assisted suicide group based in the Netherlands, has said it is behind the 3D-printed device that cost more than $1m to develop.

Swiss law allows assisted suicide as long as the person takes his or her life with no “external assistance” and those who help the person die do not do so for “any self-serving motive”, according to a government website.

Dr Philip Nitschke, an Australian doctor who was behind Exit International, has told AP that his organisation had received advice from lawyers in Switzerland that use of the Sarco would be legal in the country.

In July, the Swiss newspaper Blick reported that Peter Sticher, a state prosecutor in Schaffhausen, wrote to Exit International’s lawyers saying that any operator of the capsule could face criminal proceedings if it was used there – and any conviction could bring up to five years in prison.

Prosecutors in other Swiss regions have also indicated that use of the capsule could lead to prosecution.

Over the summer, a 54-year-old woman from the US with multiple health ailments had planned to be the first person to use the device, but those plans were abandoned.

Israel struck Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon and the Iran-backed Islamist militant organisation fired rockets into northern Israel on Tuesday, a day after a wave of Israeli airstrikes killed nearly 500 people in Lebanon and sent tens of thousands fleeing for safety.

Hezbollah said it had targeted several Israeli military targets overnight including an explosives factory about 35 miles (60km) into Israel and the Megiddo airfield near the town of Afula, which it attacked three separate times.

Officials in Israel said more than 50 projectiles were fired from Lebanon into northern parts of the country on Tuesday morning, most of which were intercepted.

The fighting has raised fears that the US, Israel’s close ally, and Iran, which has proxies across the Middle East, will be drawn into a wider conflict. On Tuesday Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, expressed fears of a regional conflagration but said Hezbollah, which Iran helped to found in 1983, “cannot stand alone” against Israel.

“Hebzollah cannot stand alone against a country that is being defended and supported and supplied by western countries, by European countries and the United States,” Pezeshkian said in an interview with CNN translated from Farsi to English.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, described the escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah as almost a “full-fledged war”, as world leaders gathered in New York for the opening of the 79th United Nations general assembly.

“If this is not a war situation, I don’t know what you would call it,” Borrell said before the UN gathering, citing the increasing number of civilian casualties and the intensity of military strikes. He said efforts to reduce tensions were continuing but Europe’s worst fears about a spillover were becoming a reality.

That warning was echoed by the US, with a senior state department official saying Washington was discussing “concrete ideas” with allies and partners to prevent the war from broadening.

Diplomatic efforts appear to have had little impact so far, with Lebanon recording more casualties on Monday than in any other single day since the 15-year civil war that started in 1975.

Israeli officials have said the recent rise in airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon is designed to force the group to agree to a diplomatic solution, cease its own attacks on Israel or unilaterally withdraw its forces from close to the contested border.

Many experts and officials question the assumption that air power or other military operations can achieve such strategic aims. Others point out that Hezbollah has repeatedly pledged to stop firing into Israel if there is a ceasefire in Gaza.

A US state department official said: “I can’t recall, at least in recent memory, a period in which an escalation or intensification led to a fundamental de-escalation and led to profound stabilisation of the situation.”

After almost a year of war against Hamas in Gaza, Israel has shifted its focus to its northern frontier. About 60,000 people were evacuated from northern Israel in the days after the 7 October raid by Hamas into southern Israel that triggered the conflict, and they have been prevented from returning by the ongoing exchanges of fire across the contested border with Lebanon.

Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, has said the campaign of airstrikes will continue until the residents are back in their homes. He said Monday marked a “significant peak” in the nearly year-long conflict.

“This is the most difficult week for Hezbollah since its establishment – the results speak for themselves,” Gallant said. “Entire units were taken out of battle as a result of the activities conducted at the beginning of the week in which numerous terrorists were injured.”

The Israeli military said Israeli strikes had hit long-range cruise missiles, heavyweight rockets, short-range rockets and explosive drones.

Though Hezbollah has remained defiant, there is no doubt that the waves of strikes have further ramped up pressure on the group, which was already reeling from heavy losses last week when thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by its members exploded.

That operation killed 42 and wounded several thousand. It was widely blamed on Israel, which has not confirmed nor denied responsibility.

The US has said it would send a small number of additional troops to the Middle East, given the escalating tensions.

The Lebanese prime minister, Najib Mikati, urged the UN and world powers to deter what he called Israel’s “plan that aims to destroy Lebanese villages and towns”. He said he was cancelling a scheduled cabinet meeting to fly to New York to “make further contacts” with leaders to try to end the violence.

In Lebanon, displaced families slept in shelters hastily set up in schools in Beirut and the coastal city of Sidon. With hotels quickly booked to capacity or rooms priced beyond the means of many families, those who did not find shelter slept in their cars, in parks or along the seaside.

Well-wishers offered up empty apartments or rooms in their houses in social media posts, while volunteers set up a kitchen at an empty petrol station in Beirut to cook meals for the displaced.

In the eastern city of Baalbek, the state-run National News Agency reported that queues formed at bakeries and petrol stations as residents rushed to stock up on essential supplies in anticipation of further strikes.

In northern Israel, Galilee Medical Center said two people arrived with minor head injuries from a rocket falling near their car. Several others were being treated for light wounds from running to shelters and traffic accidents when alarms sounded.

Joe Biden’s administration has repeatedly called for the Israel-Lebanon border crisis to be resolved through diplomacy, but in a call with Gallant on Monday he said the US “remains postured to protect US forces and personnel and determined to deter any regional actors from exploiting the situation or expanding the conflict”.

French officials have requested an emergency UN security council meeting to discuss the situation and called on all sides to avoid a regional conflagration.

China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, expressed support for Lebanon and condemned what he termed “indiscriminate attacks against civilians”, Beijing’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

The man behind Project 2025, the rightwing policy manifesto that includes calls for a sharp increase in immigrant deportations if Donald Trump is elected, told university colleagues about two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family, according to former colleagues who spoke to the Guardian.

Kevin Roberts, now the president of the Heritage Foundation, is alleged to have told colleagues and dinner guests that he killed a neighbor’s pit bull around 2004 while he was working as a still relatively unknown history professor at New Mexico State University.

“My recollection of his account was that he was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem,” said Kenneth Hammond, who was chair of the university’s history department at the time.

Two other people – a professor and her spouse – recall hearing a similar account directly from Roberts at a dinner at his home. Three other professors also said they heard the account at that time from the colleagues who said they had heard it directly from Roberts.

None recall Roberts – who worked at the university as an assistant professor from 2003 to 2005 – ever saying that the dog he allegedly said he killed was actively threatening him or his family.

In a statement to the Guardian, Roberts denied ever killing a dog with a shovel. He did not answer questions about why several people say he told them that he had.

“This is a patently untrue and baseless story backed by zero evidence. In 2004, a neighbor’s chained pit bull attempted to jump a fence into my backyard as I was gardening with my young daughter. Thankfully, the owner arrived in time to restrain the animal before it could get loose and attack us.”

The people who say they heard Roberts talk about killing a dog at the time said they found the apparent admission to be unsettling and said they did not ask Roberts – who as a conservative Republican was already seen as something of an outsider among the university’s mostly liberal academic staff – to provide any more detail about the incident.

“I think that probably people were not eager to engage with him over this. It sounded like a pretty crazy thing to do and people didn’t want to get into it at that point,” Hammond said.

News of Roberts’s alleged comments to colleagues comes as Trump, the Republican nominee for president, and his running mate, JD Vance, have engaged in a racist and false propaganda campaign to demonize Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, by claiming that they have been killing and eating people’s pets. The xenophobic claims, which are probably meant to strengthen support among white, racist and anti-immigrant voters, have incited multiple bomb threats that have disrupted the Springfield community.

Project 2025, which was written by the Heritage Foundation under Roberts’s watch, has become a focal point of the 2024 presidential election as Democrats warn that its radical policy prescriptions – such as the eradication of the Department of Education and imposing further restrictions on abortion – will serve as a blueprint for Trump’s administration if he is elected. Both Trump and Vance have sought to distance themselves from the 900-page report, with Trump claiming he had not read it. But in a foreword to Roberts’s book written by Vance, the vice-presidential nominee praises Roberts’s “depth and stature within the American Right” and says that, “in the fights that [lie] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon”.

Roberts is one of the most prominent rightwing voices in Washington. He has close ties to Opus Dei, the Catholic group, and has spoken openly about how he considers the outlawing of birth control to be one of the “hardest” political battles facing conservatives in the future.

Twenty years ago, Roberts – now a staunch supporter of Trump – was an academic who may have been uneasy among fellow professors who were not politically aligned with him. Yet, Hammond said, colleagues treated him with respect and kindness – including bringing food to his home after his wife had a baby – and were happy to have him working at the university.

One former colleague remembers being reprimanded by Roberts after she used her university email account to tell colleagues she was going to help campaign for John Kerry, the then Democratic nominee for president, because she recalled him saying – rightly, she now admits – that it was inappropriate. But relations were generally good.

Marsha Weisiger, a colleague of Roberts at the time who is now an environmental history professor at the University of Oregon, recalled being invited to dinner at Roberts’s home with her husband, and Roberts telling both of them the story about how he had hit a neighbor’s pit bull with a shovel and killed it.

“My husband and I were stunned. First of all, that he would do such a thing. And second of all, that he would tell us about it. If I did something horrific, I would not be telling my colleagues about it,” she said.

To make matters worse, she recalled Roberts saying that the neighbor in question also had puppies and that he had considered killing them, too. Weisiger’s husband, who asked not to be named, recalled Roberts saying he had complained about the dog to the police, who were not responsive, and that the dog sometimes got into his yard.

Roberts, public records confirm, was living with his wife and young family in a modest and mostly immigrant community in Las Cruces at the time, in a historic neighborhood lined with traditional adobe homes and chain-link fences.

In his statement, Roberts claimed that the city later arrived and removed “more than ten dogs” from his neighbor’s property, citing animal abuse. He said he was “incredibly grateful” to animal control for rescuing the “abused animals” and was grateful that he and his daughter did not have physical contact with the dog.

Roberts also identified the man who he called the “animal owner”: a native of Las Cruces named Daniel Aran who, a spokesperson for Roberts pointed out in an email, was sentenced to 78 months in prison for cocaine trafficking in 2017, more than a decade after the alleged incident occurred.

Public records and the Guardian’s reporting confirm that Aran and his mother lived nextdoor to Roberts at the time that Roberts lived there.

The Guardian could not independently verify whether Roberts actually killed a dog or whether Roberts’s account of his interactions with his neighbor’s dog was accurate. The Guardian has repeatedly sought out public records to try to verify the alleged accounts. The city of Las Cruces, the police and animal control authorities said public records were not available for the time frame in which the alleged incident occurred.

But the Guardian did track down Daniel Aran, whose mother Norma Noriega still lives in the adobe home next to where Roberts previously lived in Las Cruces.

Noriega’s family moved into their home in about 2002 with her husband and children – Denise Aran, who was about seven at the time, and Daniel, who was about 16.

Daniel Aran, who has been released from prison and is now the owner of a small construction company, spoke to the Guardian from the front yard of the small stone house. Aran is lean and muscular, with a chiseled face and hardened stare.

“When I was younger, I was wild. But I gave respect to get respect. Now I’m more about work and family,” he said, dusting off his clothes from a day of construction. “And I’ve always been a dog lover, an animal lover, since I was a little kid. I’ve always had dogs.”

Aran said he was diligent about watching his dogs – small pit bulls – which he bred, selling the pups as a way of making money for his family’s household.

When asked if he had a dog disappear around 2004, he said: “Yes, definitely, my dog, Loca, my little female”. She had been his favorite, he said.

“I had one female, and that was her. She was a little, little thing like this,” he said, holding up his hands in an affectionate gesture. “She was a tiny, cute little thing.”

“She went missing, and we never could find her,” he said.

When he was asked by the Guardian about comments Roberts allegedly made to colleagues about killing a neighborhood pit bull with a shovel, he grimaced. “Man, you never know what’s inside someone’s head.”

“I’m not here to make up stories or to say he did it,” he said. “But it was right around 2004 when all that happened, that Loca was missing,” he said. “I wish I could say, yeah, I know this fool did that. But I can’t tell you that. But what I can tell you is that my dog went missing, and we never found her. She wasn’t at the dog catchers.”

Aran also denied Roberts’s claim that dogs had been taken away from the property.

“We had three dogs that we kept, and then there were puppies occasionally that I would sell,” he said.

His mother, 53-year-old Norma Noriega, sitting out in the front yard, also disputed Roberts’s account.

“That never happened,” she said in Spanish. “[Animal services] never came and took dogs. Sure, [the dogs] would get out on occasion, and we’d go find them and bring them back. But there was never an incident where our dogs were taken, for abuse or whatever, that is simply not true.

“It was only with Loca that we could never figure out what happened. She disappeared, and we always knew it was strange that we simply never saw her again. [Daniel] went out looking for her, but she was never found,” said Noriega.

The family has had a number of pit bulls over the years – Brownie and Casper were their longtime pets – but it was the disappearance of Loca that had always distressed the family.

“She’s the one that disappeared. We went out looking for her, we went out to the dog catchers, and we never found her,” Aran said quietly. “And I know the dog catchers never got her.”

Asked about his recollection of Roberts, Aran said: “Well, it’s been more than 20 years,” and he did acknowledge that his dogs could be noisy.

“I’m pretty sure he had to have some patience,” said Aran. “But, as far as I can remember, he never came across as disrespectful,” he said.

Additional reporting by Melissa Segura

In Norway, nature is something of a national obsession. Norwegian children are taught that “there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing”, and Norwegian babies are packed into thermals and overalls and taken on day trips to the woods. Cross-country skiing, hunting for wild mushrooms or cloudberries, or huffing and puffing up a mountain are standard weekend activities.

The recent decision to scrap a campaign that aimed to attract more foreign tourists to the country’s rural landscapes was a stark reminder of this: rather than encouraging tourists and the income they provide, many Norwegians would prefer to protect their natural environment.

Norway has some extremely beautiful landscapes, such as Lofoten, a stunning chain of islands that offers northern lights during the winter months and midnight sun during summer, and the countless breathtaking fjords. It is therefore no surprise that tourist numbers have surged in the last few years.

Lofoten, for instance, has seen a 15% increase in tourism from 2022 to 2023. And this summer has seen a record number of vehicles on the road in the area, as many Europeans drive to Norway. Another contributing factor to the explosion in tourism is the newly started direct flights from cities in western Europe like London and Amsterdam to “the Paris of the north”: nearby Tromsø. Visiting Norway from the US and European countries has also become cheaper than it used to be as the currency rate has dropped. Norway has enough cool, rainy days to satisfy those who are growing sick of heatwaves, and enough remote and sparsely populated landscapes to escape the crowds in other parts of Europe. While other destinations have imposed measures on tourists once they arrive – such as Venice’s €5 “tourist tax” – Norway is highly unlikely to do any such thing. The Norwegian approach is to deter them from coming by slashing funding for tourism adverts, as the Western Norway tourist board has done, and quietly shelving campaigns.

Nature and outdoor activities are needed to get our minds off the cold, harsh and unforgivingly dark winters, which last about six months a year, with just five to six hours of daylight in the south and polar nights in the north, meaning the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon for months. Slaloming down snowy slopes or skiing cross-country through the woods is far preferable to becoming a prisoner in one’s own home. But that will get harder with tourism. You only need to look at the Alps to see how tourism can cause overcrowded villages, traffic jams and worn-down hiking trails and skiing slopes.

There’s an increasing fear that Norway’s natural landscapes might become overcrowded or misused, especially because large parts of the country are free to roam, thanks to centuries-old traditions and laws called allemannsretten (literally: “everyone has ownership”). What these mean is that anyone has the right to roam free in the wilderness, and set up camp, even if the land has an owner. As long as camp is set 150 metres from houses and cabins and for a maximum of two days, you can usually pitch your tent wherever you like.

There is another unique tradition administered by the Norwegian Tourist Organisation, which gives its members access to hundreds of small cabins almost for free (about £20 a night). These are simple wood cabins placed in remote, picturesque areas, mostly with outdoor toilets, no heating and no water. They are well taken care of and loved, as the visitors have to “leave it as you found it” – meaning you keep it clean and fix it if you break it. Foreigners are allowed to apply for membership, allowing them to access these cabins, but the organisation tells me it has made a conscious decision not to advertise this fact internationally.

Norway’s pain threshold for tourists is low – lower than it might be in other countries where tourism is a vital source of national income. Partly, that’s because Norway can afford to miss out on potential tourism income as it has the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. One could also point out the irony of Norway being the world’s fifth largest oil exporter, and a prime contributor to global heating, while it obsesses about protecting its woods and mountains. In this sense, the recent scrapping of this campaign points to something deeper: Norway and Norwegians struggle with the dilemma of retaining their privileges, which flow largely from fossil fuels, while scrambling to save nature.

You may think the strong sentiments to preserve Norwegian nature and heritage may have some undercurrents of racism and nationalism, but I would argue that it is not about where the tourists are from, but whether they respect nature and the local traditions.

The love for the outdoors is almost as a religion to many Norwegians. So much so that even trying to adapt to the climate crisis cannot interfere with nature. The Norwegian authorities have for years been trying to put up onshore wind power plants across the country in an effort to produce more green energy, for instance. But these plans have faced resistance from locals, who object to the damage these structures do to the natural environment.

In the long term, saying no to tourists may become more difficult. Norway has been struggling with high inflation, high interest rates, and tanking currency rates. Economic disparity and social injustice have seeped into one of the world’s most successful welfare states, affecting those less fortunate, the sick and the poor. One in 10 Norwegian children are growing up in poverty, many of whom belong to immigrant families. Arguably, a booming tourism industry could be a means of diversifying away from fossil fuels, and securing a much-needed source of income.

However, there is still time to put in place measures that welcome the tourists, and at the same time safeguard our natural environment. Visitors need clearer signs, guidelines and guides telling them how to protect themselves and nature. There needs to be proper infrastructure put in place that doesn’t strain our wilderness, and there needs to be stricter regulations – such as the one in the west-coast city of Bergen, where a maximum of 8,000 cruise ship tourists are allowed to step ashore daily.

To put a ticket on visits to places such as the spectacular Pulpit Rock might not be the Norwegian way, but to try to regulate the number of tourists to the country is.

6 May 2023

Today the UK woke up to a day of excitement. A day of street parties, a national holiday, and celebrations for a new king. It was also day three of gale-force winds on Fair Isle, and it was the day my mother died. A brief phone call from her care home, then the aloneness. The phone call came as I stood outside the south lighthouse. I watched the tower-tall waves, Payne’s grey, reflecting the colour of the sky. Waves built by wide, powerful seas and a wild wind that rocked me back and forth on my heels. The news was expected; it was the logical conclusion for a fragile 92-year-old.

But illogically your own mother’s death is never expected. We were not close, but at that moment that seemed irrelevant. My father had died four years ago so a door had now closed on a past that was gone for ever. It seemed very fitting to stand by this wild sea to take in the news, the wind bending back the curling waves, an aqua-turquoise light topping each wave.

The Pacific country of Kiribati might be surrounded by water, but on land its population is running dry. The ocean around them is steadily encroaching, contaminating underground wells and leeching salt into the soil.

“Our waters have been infected,” climate activist and law student Christine Tekanene says. “Those who are affected, they now can’t survive with the water that changed after sea level rise.”

The freshwater crisis is just one of the many threats driven by rising seas in Kiribati. Its people live on a series of atolls, peaking barely a couple of metres above a sprawling tract of the Pacific Ocean. As global temperatures rise and ice sheets melt, Kiribati – and other low-lying nations like it – are experiencing extreme and regular flooding, frequent coastal erosion and persistent food and water insecurity.

This week the United Nations general assembly will hold a high-level meeting to address the existential threats posed by sea level rise as the issue climbs the international agenda; last year the UN security council debated it for the first time.

Wednesday’s meeting aims to build political consensus on action to address the widespread social, economic and legal consequences of rising seas.

Samoa’s UN representative, Fatumanava Dr Pa’olelei Luteru, says the upcoming UN meeting is long overdue and “extremely important” for island nations.

“Economically, militarily, we’re not powerful,” says Luteru, who also serves as the current chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). “At least within the context of the UN and the multilateral system we have the possibility and the opportunity to engage and achieve some of the things that are a priority for us.”

‘We’re still fighting’

Sea level rise presents a range of contentious issues, not least of which is whether low-lying nations and their governments should begin preparations to relocate their populations. While some countries, like Tuvalu, have accepted this possibility and are lobbying for international recognition of their sovereignty even if their islands disappear, others seem more cautious. A decade ago, Kiribati bought land in Fiji as a potential refuge for its citizens, but the government has since reconsidered that strategy.

Ambassador Luteru says many small island states are unwilling to concede their futures, and “have not used the word ‘existential’” when referring to the threat of climate change on their statehoods.

“There’s a clear expression from people that they do not want to move,” he says.

Meanwhile, Tekanene says many Pacific Islanders feel “offended” when asked about their lands disappearing. “We’re still fighting, we’re not drowning,” she says.

Some experts argue, however, that world leaders must urgently face the reality of disappearing homelands for millions living on small islands and coastal areas.

Dr Benjamin Strauss, CEO and chief scientist at Climate Central, warns that while the worst impacts of sea level rise can be delayed, they cannot be undone.

“The long term sea level rise that we’ve already locked in is almost certain to drown a great number of Pacific atolls,” he says. “In the end, there are speeds and amounts of sea level rise that will make it impossible to stay on many islands.”

Kamal Amakrane from the Global Centre for Climate Mobility, who has been helping the UN general assembly prepare for the high-level meeting, stresses that while people have “the right to remain” in their homelands, it’s equally important to ensure safe and dignified options for those who are forced to relocate.

“The international community and regional institutions should enable climate mobility pathways,” Amakrane told the Guardian via email.

Both creating these migration pathways, and developing solutions to protect islands so people can stay, will require major financing from wealthier nations. Kiribati is seeking billions of dollars from foreign donors to raise its islands and escape the worst harms of rising seas. Strauss says it would take “some sort of massively heroic, unimaginable kind of geoengineering” to ensure island nations can withstand the impacts of sea level rise.

“A lot of the atoll nations don’t have a great deal of resources,” Strauss says. “So it’s not clear how much they would be able to invest and how much the world would decide to invest.”

For Kiribati, the situation is expected to get much worse. A recent Nasa assessment found the country will see sea levels rise up to 50 centimetres by 2050 whether or not global emissions are cut before then. If worst-case predictions come true, some of its islands will be uninhabitable, if not completely lost, by the end of the century.

Faced with such a looming catastrophe, activists like Tekanene are urging world leaders to do more to protect their country.

“We want to ensure that developed nations take responsibility for the historical emissions contributing to this crisis,” she says.

“They can help prevent it … they can do it more than us.”