Ron DeSantis is making a concerted effort to maintain draconian limits on abortion access in Florida that have led to accusations the rightwing Republican governor is conducting a “state-sponsored intimidation campaign” against abortion rights and trampling on civil liberties in the state.

A near total ban on abortions after the first six weeks of pregnancy took effect in Florida in May after the state supreme court ruled that the right to an abortion was no longer covered by the privacy clause in the Florida constitution.

Passage of legislation called Amendment 4 would change the state constitution to prohibit government interference with the right to an abortion before the viability of a fetus, which typically begins around the 24th week of a pregnancy.

But registered voters in Florida have recently reported unannounced visits from law enforcement personnel that appear to be part of an all-out drive by DeSantis to use state government agencies and public funds to block passage of Amendment 4, which would enshrine in the state constitution a woman’s right to an abortion.

The experience of Isaac Menasche is a cautionary tale. In early September, Menasche received an unexpected visitor at his home in the Florida Gulf coast city of Fort Myers – a plainclothes detective with a badge and a folder stuffed with documents containing Menasche’s personal information.

They included copies of his driver’s license and a petition form he had signed months ago at a local farmer’s market on behalf of a campaign to qualify a pro-choice referendum for the statewide ballot in this year’s general election.

The detective who turned up on Menasche’s doorstep wanted to know why his signature on the petition form did not match the one on his driver’s license. The retired 71-year-old attorney conceded the point but explained that his signature can sometimes vary. The officer left shortly thereafter.

“The experience left me shaken,” wrote the New Jersey native on his Facebook page that same day. “It was obvious to me that a significant effort was exerted to determine if indeed I had signed the petition. Troubling that so much resources were devoted to this.”

DeSantis initially asked the Florida supreme court to declare the ballot measure unconstitutional on the grounds that its language was vague and misleading. When that ploy failed last April, DeSantis shifted gears: in July a senior official in the state government department in charge of elections announced a review for possible fraud of tens of thousands of petition signatures collected in four counties in support of Amendment 4.

In more recent weeks, the state-run Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) has launched a website opposing the initiative on the grounds that it “threatens women’s safety”. It has also spent millions of dollars on television ads urging Florida voters to reject the proposed amendment.

“We’re seeing a state-sponsored intimidation campaign to make Floridians scared of voicing support for abortion access,” says Keisha Mulfort, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida which filed a lawsuit earlier this month seeking to halt the AHCA’s anti-Amendment 4 media campaign.

“Florida’s leadership has made it clear they don’t trust women to make decisions about their own healthcare,” she added. “They’ll go to great lengths to demonstrate they don’t support the democratic process, including sending law enforcement personnel to the homes of private citizens.”

DeSantis recently defended the state-funded anti-amendment website and television ads as “public service announcements” similar to those produced by the Florida department of transportation to encourage safe driving.

“It’s being used by the AHCA agency to basically provide people with accurate information,” said the governor during a roundtable discussion held in a Miami suburb on 9 September. “Everything that is put out is factual. That’s been done for decades, it’s not electioneering, and it is not inappropriate at all.”

The AHCA communications office failed to respond to a list of written questions submitted by the Guardian about the agency’s website and electronic media campaign. The governor’s communications director, Bryan Griffin, turned down The Guardian’s request for an interview with DeSantis, asserting that the newspaper was “completely consumed with left wing activism and does nothing to actually inform the public.”

Under a law passed by the Republican-dominated Florida legislature, ballot measures must be approved by 60% of the electorate, and Amendment 4 proponents say they are confident of meeting that threshold in the general election scheduled for 5 November.

To bolster his case against the pro-choice amendment proposal, DeSantis has even questioned the legitimacy of passing laws through popular referendums, even though that mechanism is authorized by the state constitution.

“It takes power away from the people to be able to decide this through elections and who they elect to office and who legislates,” he told a press conference recently. “It effectively puts it in the courts, and there will be 25 years’ worth of lawsuits on what any of these terms mean.”

In a letter dated 25 January of this year, the Florida department of state’s division of elections confirmed that the six organizations in support of the pro-choice referendum had collected enough valid signatures to qualify the proposed constitutional amendment for the November ballot.

Six months later, however, a deputy secretary of that same state government department revealed in a letter that his office had received “alarming information” from the Palm Beach county supervisor of elections office about “fraudulent constitutional initiative petitions” that were submitted by 35 individuals who had been hired to collect signatures on behalf of Amendment 4.

This apparent attempt to reopen the signature validity issue was replicated in three other counties in Florida, and as of two weeks ago an estimated 36,000 signatures are currently under review by an election fraud unit that was established by legislation that DeSantis signed into law two years ago.

The Palm Beach county supervisor of elections, Wendy Sartory Link, received an email four weeks ago from that deputy secretary of state, Brad McVay, asking her office to review 17,637 petition forms that were certified as valid by her office last winter.

The elections supervisor said the request from McVay was “not a common practice” that she had encountered in the five years since she was appointed to the position by DeSantis. Link is running for re-election this year as a Democrat, and she suggested that the entire exercise might be an academic one at this juncture.

“It doesn’t really apply to us,” she said. “The initiative was certified, and it’s on our ballots.”

The movement to hold US medical insurers to account scored a notable legal victory recently when a Louisiana civil court jury ordered the state’s most prominent health insurance company to pay up more than $400m after underpaying claims to a surgery center that often works with cancer patients.

But the insurer – Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) of Louisiana – has vowed to seek to reduce, if not entirely eliminate, the jury’s award to the St Charles Surgical Hospital and Center for Restorative Breast Surgery on appeal. BCBS can ask both the state’s fourth circuit court of appeal as well as the Louisiana supreme court for relief.

Nonetheless, a co-founder of the hospital hailed the 20 September verdict in his facility’s favor as a “landmark” win “for all those who have felt bullied by big corporate health insurance and the self-serving things they do”.

“We work the long hours, we pioneer advancements, we take care of these women – and we fought back for those who work on the frontline and the patients who depend on them,” Dr Frank DellaCroce told WDSU, the New Orleans NBC affiliate.

As the New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana noted, surgeons at the hospital that DellaCroce founded with Dr Scott Sullivan sued BCBS in 2017, alleging that the insurer had not reimbursed them for 9,000 procedures that had been previously authorized over the course of 10 years.

“Blue Cross either slow paid, low paid, or no paid all of those bills,” the hospital’s lead attorney, James Williams of the New Orleans-area Chehardy Sherman Williams law firm, said to WWL.

Named after the renowned New Orleans avenue on which it sits, the St Charles Surgical Center opted out of the BCBS insurance network prior to the dispute. Williams contended that BCBS’s lack of reimbursement was meant to pressure the facility into joining the company’s network, to which the vast majority of Louisiana’s medical service providers belong.

The insurer countered that authorization of a procedure did not mean payment had been guaranteed, as New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper reported. But a jury ultimately voted 11-1 that BCBS owed the hospital more than $421m in reimbursements for unpaid claims.

The St Charles hospital sought only to be made whole for unpaid claims. Its doctors had refused to pass the uncovered costs of the procedures on to patients, and they plan to pay off patients’ balances with the jury’s award.

BCBS issued a statement to multiple news outlets saying it “strongly” disagreed with the jury’s decision, which led to one of the largest ever such awards in Louisiana. The company’s statement predicted letting such an award stand would lead to higher insurance premiums, saying that “verdicts like this contribute to increasing healthcare costs for Louisianans who depend on us every day”.

“We will quickly appeal and expect to be successful,” the insurer’s statement said.

Meanwhile, the chief executive officer of the Louisiana insurance industry’s trade association echoed BCBS’s position. Jeff Drozda of the Louisiana Association of Health Plans told WDSU that the verdict – if left in place – would force health insurers “to pay out-of-network, non-negotiated providers … whatever they would like to charge”.

“You will have other providers across the state, regardless of what health plan it is … looking at the opportunity to similar bill charges for reimbursement,” Drozda said to the station.

As for the plaintiffs, Williams’ partner, Matthew Sherman, said to WDSU: “The jury’s finding of misconduct … shows that the legal system will not allow [BCBS] of Louisiana to put its self-interest ahead of that of its patients.”

“Physicians and patients have a right to expect [BCBS] of Louisiana to uphold their promise to provide fair and accurate payment for services.”

The US is the only wealthy democracy that lacks universal healthcare coverage, and Americans rely predominantly on employer-sponsored private health insurance from companies like BCBS.

Food companies should have to report how much they throw away as a first step towards reducing the vast amounts of edible food squandered in the UK, a group of prominent businesses have said.

About a third of the food produced globally every year is binned, much of it before it reaches the consumer at a cost of almost £22bn annually to the UK economy.

There is also a heavy environmental toll: food waste globally contributes up to a 10th of greenhouse gases.

More than 30 food businesses, including supermarkets and food producers, have written to the environment secretary, Steve Reed, calling for mandatory reporting of wasted food.

They argue that forcing companies to confront the reality of how much they produce and what happens to it will spur better behaviour, including more efficient processes and increased efforts to reuse surpluses.

Reed has spoken repeatedly of his desire to see a “circular economy”, with less waste of all kinds. The government has a target of halving food waste by 2030, but has yet to set out new measures to meet it. The Observer understands that ministers are willing to consider placing a duty on companies to report their waste.

Jamie Crummie, co-founder of Too Good to Go, an online service that lets restaurants and food retailers advertise last-minute surplus food at a discount to consumers, organised the letter to Reed, along with the British Retail Consortium (BRC).

He said compulsory reporting would be a vital first step and would allow everyone – consumers as well as the government and other businesses – to judge how careful, or profligate, suppliers were in comparison with their peers.

“Food waste is one of the largest contributors to climate change,” he said. “In the UK alone, we throw away 10.7m tonnes of food annually. We are delighted to see the environment secretary set out the creation of a zero-waste economy as a priority. In line with this ambition, and with the support of more than 30 businesses from across the food sector, we hope to see swift implementation of mandatory food waste reporting to ensure transparency and accountability when it comes to our food.”

The letter is signed by several of the UK’s biggest supermarkets, including Tesco, Waitrose, Aldi, Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer, as well as the BRC, which represents shops. Food producers including Nestlé, Princes, Innocent Drinks, Yoplait and Yo! Sushi are also on the list.

Mandatory reporting, as envisaged by the signatories, would not be imposed on farmers, but every company above a certain size in the food chain beyond the farm gate.

Some food producers are already using new techniques such as AI to make their supply chains more efficient and cut waste, as well as more traditional methods such as donating still-edible surpluses to food banks.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “The amount of food we waste is a stain on our country. We are working with business to drive down food waste and make sure food is put on the plates of those in greatest need. This includes supporting surplus food to be redistributed to charities and others that can use it and on programmes to help citizens reduce their food waste.”

The letter’s signatories are also working with MPs to raise awareness of the problem. Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, who is also vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the environment, said: “The number of meals that are simply thrown away in the UK each week is deeply concerning. To reduce food waste across the board, we first need to move beyond the throwaway culture we have become far too used to.

“That’s why we are pushing to work with businesses by putting in place the right incentives to cut back on waste and overconsumption.”

Jaime Rojo has been following the fate of the monarch butterfly for more than 20 years. In the process the Spanish photographer has watched one of the planet’s most colourful, flamboyant insect species succumb to the combined onslaught of habitat destruction, climate change, pesticides, drought and wildfires. Its population has crashed in the process.

It is a dramatic, disturbing story that will be recognised next month when Rojo is given a highly commended award for his photojournalism at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London.

The glories of the monarch – and human responses to them – are revealed in his startling images and could be critical in helping efforts by conservationists, scientists and local people who are now trying to overcome the threat facing these remarkable winged migrants.

“When I first visited the monarch sanctuary in Mexico, there were so many of them, the forest floor would be a carpet of dead monarchs up to half a metre thick and every tree was blanketed with them,” Rojo told the Observer. “It was extraordinary.

“However, things have changed. Monarchs are now very thin on the ground and on branches and their numbers have declined dramatically. It has become very noticeable and worrying.”

Most estimates suggest there were once several hundred million monarch butterflies – possibly up to a billion – which used to sweep over the US and Mexico on their vast, Technicolor voyages. Today, conservationists believe the continent’s population of Danaus plexippus has dropped by 90% since the 1990s.

This crisis stems, in part, from the extraordinarily complex life cycle of the monarch, which makes it particularly vulnerable to habitat and climate changes. The butterfly – which has two sets of deep orange wings with black borders and a wingspan of seven to 10 centimetres – breeds for several generations in spring and summer in the north-east of America. Females use milkweed plants to lay the eggs from which caterpillars emerge, before they develop into chrysalises and then adult butterflies.

In autumn, a final generation of butterflies emerges from this process and flies in vast clouds on a 3,000-mile migration to Mexico and California, where the butterflies overwinter in the relative warmth of the south. “A new generation then starts heading back to the north the following spring,” explains Dr Blanca Huertas, principal curator of Lepidoptera at the Natural History Museum.

The vision of hundreds of millions of bright orange butterflies in flight is one of the most stunning spectacles in nature – one that Barbara Kingsolver describes vividly in her 2012 novel Flight Behaviour.

In it, she likens the mass migration of bright orange insects to a forest fire. “The flames appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a camp fire when it is poked. The sparks spiralled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against grey sky.”

But that spectacle is now being devastated. Initially conservationists thought deforestation was the sole cause of the monarch’s decline. “We tried to put that right, only to discover there were other reasons,” said Rojo.

It was found that the common milkweed – the wildflower upon which monarch caterpillars depend for food – was being wiped out by powerful new pesticides. In addition, climate change was bringing intense heatwaves and droughts in autumn. As a result, monarchs had no flowering plants to feed on while they migrated.

“They got very weak and could not store enough energy and so they never made it to Mexico,” said Rojo. “In a sense it was a little bit of everything that combined to do them down.”

There is little that can be done to halt climate change in the foreseeable future, but some actions can be taken, conservationists argue. Planting milkweed where they can provide food for monarch caterpillars and limiting pesticide use is now being promoted by US and Mexican environment groups.

“Education programmes for schools are raising awareness about the monarch and that is also crucial,” said Huertas.

Many of these projects are recorded in Rojo’s award-winning portfolio, which will be displayed at the museum from 11 October. These include images of drones monitoring milkweed prevalence in the US; the tagging of monarch butterflies as part of research aimed at understanding how they navigate on their 3,000-mile odysseys; and classroom conservation lessons for children whose families live on the butterflies’ flight route.

“I still believe this is a story of hope,” insists Rojo. “We can actually save the monarchs. This is one of the rare cases in conservation in which the citizens have something to do and that will make all the difference.”

England and Wales are braced for heavy rain and strong winds just days after homes and businesses were flooded.

Two fresh weather warnings come into force on Sunday for wind and rain which will hit areas already saturated by downpours earlier in the week.

The Met Office has issued a yellow rain warning – meaning further heavy rain is likely to cause some travel delays and flooding – covering much of southern England and south Wales between 4pm on Sunday and 9am on Monday.

There could be between 20mm and 30mm of rain within the warning area across nine to 12 hours on Sunday, and 50mm to 80mm could fall in some localised places on higher ground, the Met Office said.

The Met Office meteorologist Becky Mitchell said it was “not a huge amount of rain” but because of the recent weather “river levels are quite high and grounds are quite saturated”, so more flooding could develop.

The Environment Agency had 44 flood warnings, indicating flooding was expected, and 84 flood alerts, where flooding was possible, in place across England on Saturday evening.

Meanwhile, there was a yellow warning for wind that was also predicted to cause disruption across south-west England and Wales between 9am on Sunday until the end of the day.

Gusts of between 50mph and 60mph could occur, with large waves, trees brought down, travel disruption and some power cuts, Mitchell said.

Further rain warnings could be issued for Monday, but it was forecast to be drier later in the week, she added.

The Met Office said temperatures on Sunday would be 3C-4C below average, in the low double figures.

Another Met Office meteorologist, Craig Snell, advised people travelling on Sunday to plan ahead.

He said: “Check rail conditions before setting off, check buses are running on time, and allow extra time for your journeys. If you’re driving allow extra braking distances.

“For the areas affected under the yellow rain warning, if you are concerned about flooding, for people in England the main advice is to check the Environment Agency website or Floodline. If you live in Wales it will be Natural Resources Wales.”

England has suffered heavy rain and localised flooding in recent days, with commuters facing widespread disruption on road and rail services.

According to the Met Office, some counties in southern and central England have already had more than 250% of their average September rainfall.

Parts of the country had more than the monthly average rainfall on Monday and there were further downpours on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

About 650 properties were flooded in Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and the home counties, according to the Environment Agency, which estimated around 8,200 properties had been protected.

Rail services between Shrewsbury in Shropshire and Wolverhampton in the West Midlands were cancelled on Friday after severe flooding at Wellington station and a tree on the line earlier.

The pitch at the SEAH Stadium in Wellington, home to Telford United FC, was completely flooded on Thursday evening.

The Marston Vale line in Bedfordshire, which operates services between Bedford and Bletchley, is suspended until Monday because of standing water on the track.

Liberal senator Bridget McKenzie has again left the door open for a Coalition government to level a road user charge against owners of electric vehicles, indicating concern about decreasing fuel excise and the impact on budgets for road repairs.

But the shadow transport minister also said the Coalition wouldn’t follow the US in banning Chinese-made EVs, which put her at odds with comments on Sunday from Nationals colleague, Barnaby Joyce. He invoked last week’s Hezbollah members’ pager explosions in raising his concern about technology he claimed could be made with a “malevolent purpose” by a “totalitarian state”.

McKenzie told the ABC’s Insiders on Sunday she was developing the Coalition’s transport policy ahead of the next election, which would outline the opposition’s plans for electric vehicles.

Asked if that policy would include a road user charge for electric vehicle owners – a widely suggested option to replace fuel excise due to EVs not requiring petrol – McKenzie didn’t rule it out, but said the current government should already be acting on the issue.

“This is one of the great privileges of holding the Treasury benches. You get to solve wicked problems such as this,” she said.

“The high court has ruled on the need for the treasurer to get going on a national way to actually tax EV users in terms of their use of roads, because right now, it is only petrol excise that is actually funding those roads and they [the government] are again doing nothing.”

The government has come under pressure from motoring groups to address the declining fuel excise take, as EVs take-up rises.

From January to August, 7.6% of total car sales were EVs, according to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries and the Electric Vehicle Council, while hybrid vehicles sales, including plug-ins, made up 15.5%.

McKenzie has spoken often about the policy challenges of road user charges, in 2023 telling Guardian Australia the government shouldn’t rule out road user charging “when it is tied to fuel excise and fuel efficiency standards – there needs to be one policy discussion rather than a fragmented one”.

In a speech last year, she also said “equity in contributing taxes to fund road maintenance is a key principle” of Coalition thinking on the issue.

The Biden administration last week proposed new rules that would in effect prohibit Chinese-made vehicles from US roads after concerns about software and digital connections that could be used to spy on Americans or sabotage vehicles. The Australian energy minister, Chris Bowen, said Australia would not follow suit.

McKenzie, asked about whether Australia should ban Chinese-made EVs, answered: “It is not the Coalition’s plan. We won’t be banning EVs.”

Those comments put her at odds with Joyce, the shadow veterans affairs minister, who earlier on Sunday had criticised Bowen for not replicating the US move.

Joyce, in a Sky News interview, joked that Bowen had “boldly stated that he knows more about issues pertinent to electric vehicles than the United States of America does”, accusing the minister of “catastrophic decisions” previously.

The former deputy prime minister went on to appear to draw a link between Chinese-made EVs and the pager attack on Hezbollah members which killed dozens in Lebanon last week.

A senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters that the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency planted a small amount of explosives inside 5,000 Taiwan-made pagers ordered by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations. At least 32 people were killed and thousands wounded, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

“After the pager issue, the pagers basically blowing up around terrorists in southern Lebanon, the penny dropped for so many people that there is a capacity remotely to create massive pain, massive hurt, maybe at the least to create a complete breakdown and chaos,” Joyce said on Sky.

“People have got to start asking the questions like ‘if you can update the software, if you can track these vehicles, if they’re made in China, if there was a malevolent purpose behind it from a totalitarian state, what might be the consequences of that?’”

Joyce also raised concern about “200,000 Chinese-made solar heaters sitting on roofs” nationwide.

In an Sky News interview taped on Saturday, the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, said Hezbollah “is a terrorist organisation and we understand the security position Israel is in.”

But she stressed the “cycle of violence” and “continued escalation” will not bring peace, citing Australia, the US and the UK’s calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon.

Wong repeated government warnings for Australians in Lebanon to leave “by whatever means are available while Beirut airport is still open.”

“We are concerned about regional escalation,” she said.

Pope Francis has been sharply criticised by one of Belgium’s Catholic universities over his stance on the role of women in society, in a strongly worded press release issued just moments after the pontiff spoke at the college.

Professors and students at UCLouvain, where the 87-year-old pontiff had made a speech on Saturday afternoon, said they wanted to express their “incomprehension and disapproval” about the pope’s views.

“UCLouvain deplores the conservative positions expressed by Pope Francis on the role of women in society,” said the statement, in extraordinary language from a Catholic university about a pope.

Francis went to the university on Saturday to celebrate its upcoming 600th anniversary as part of a weekend trip he is making to Belgium. His speech largely called for global action on climate change, but he also responded to a letter to him from students and professors that had asked about the Catholic church’s teaching on women.

In the letter, which was read out loud to him, the students questioned him on the Church’s historical part in entrenching female subservience, the unfair division of labour and even disproportionate female poverty.

“Throughout the history of the Church, women have been made invisible,” the letter read. “What place, then, for women in the Church?”

Francis replied by saying the Church was female, noting that the Italian word for it, “chiesa”, is a feminine noun.

“A woman within the People of God is a daughter, a sister, a mother,” he said, adding “womanhood speaks to us of fruitful welcome, nurturing and life-giving dedication”.

He did not give any details about potential plans for reform.

The university statement called the pope’s position on women’s roles in society “deterministic and reductive”.

“We are really shocked,” said Valentine Hendrix, a 22-year-old student. “He reduces us to a role of childbearer, mother, wife, everything we want to emancipate ourselves from.”

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at UCLouvain university, said Francis had “failed to rise to the occasion.”

“To reply that the Church is a woman is really missing the point of the question – about the Church’s respect for women and their role in the institution and in society,” he said.

Earlier the pope visited the tomb of Belgium’s King Baudouin who in 1990 famously refused to sign a law lifting penalties against abortion, citing personal convictions.

Francis described the legislation – passed after the king temporarily renounced his functions to avoid having to endorse it – as “a murderous law”.

Francis has faced criticism during events throughout his trip to Belgium. The country’s king and prime minister called on the pope to take more concrete actions to help survivors of abuse by Catholic clergy, and a rector at a different Catholic university asked him to reconsider the Catholic church’s ban on ordaining women as priests.

UCLouvain is a French-speaking university in Belgium. It has 38,000 students studying across 20 faculties.

The Catholic church has an all-male clergy. Francis has created two commissions to consider whether women could serve as deacons, who, like priests, are ordained, but cannot celebrate Mass, but has not moved forward on the issue.

However, during his 11 years as pontiff, Francis has also changed the Vatican’s primary governing document to allow women to lead departments, and has also allowed women to vote at major global meetings of bishops, known as synods, for the first time.

The pope’s three-day Belgium visit has been dominated by the Church’s dark legacy of child sexual abuse, and saw him meet on Friday with 17 victims.

The group shared their stories and expressed their expectations to the pope, who “took note” of their requests, according to the Vatican.

Belgium has been rocked by decades of abuse scandals and cover-ups and a hard-hitting documentary last year put the issue back on front pages, prompting new victims to come forward.

In an open letter this month, some had demanded the pontiff address paedophilia and set up a process for financial reparations.

On Saturday morning, during a gathering with clergy and pastoral workers at the vast Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Brussels, Francis was pressed on the issue for a second day running.

Replying to a question by a representative of an organisation helping abuse victims, the pontiff acknowledged the “atrocious suffering and wounds” caused by the Church.

“There is a need for a great deal of mercy to keep us from hardening our hearts before the suffering of victims, so that we can help them feel our closeness,” Francis said.

Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Australia’s infamous magpies have started to attack – but they’re not the only birds you might fall victim to this swooping season.

Lesser known suspects including noisy miners, butcherbirds and masked lapwings also swoop to protect their eggs and young, typically between August and October.

Unlike magpies, which Sean Dooley from BirdLife Australia said tended to fly “behind you and hit you hard”, other birds take a different approach.

Magpie-larks (which resemble but are unrelated to magpies) and noisy miners tend to dive in from the front.

“I’ve even had a magpie-lark hover in front of me with its claws out as it tries to drive you away [from its young] … so they can cause some severe damage, especially if they come into contact with your eyes,” Dooley said.

Masked lapwings, also known as spur-winged plovers, will swoop “aggressively and make a really big clattering noise”, in contrast with other plovers, which typically run away and pretend to be injured to distract potential threats, according to Dooley.

He said the swoop of the noisy miner, previously described by the Australian National University ecologist Richard Beggs as “Australia’s most hated bird”, was also big on bluff.

The miners are also known to grab people’s food, according to Dr Meg Edwards, a lecturer in wildlife science at the University of Southern Queensland, who was swooped while picnicking in a park. They also take on much bigger birds, including kites and eagles, if they fear they are getting too close to their nests.

While it may seem as though Australia’s birds set the rules at this time of year, Edwards said the majority did not swoop, and just 10% of magpies are estimated to do so.

An article published in the journal Clinical & Experimental Ophthalmology found that while 40% of all bird-related eye injuries at Victorian Royal Eye and Ear hospital between 1 January 2006 and 31 December 2022 were magpie-inflicted, the magpie-lark was the second main culprit, contributing to 6% of cases. In almost half of cases, the species responsible was not identified.

Edwards advised avoiding nests during the breeding season – between July and November – but said even the most cautious could still be swooped. “In the animal world, we can never say anything’s a guarantee … never say never.”

Even Dooley, who has studied birds for almost his whole life, went 20 years without being swooped at a particular site before being dived-bombed unexpectedly one night.

He said swooping was more common in populated areas where birds “can’t keep a tally of who’s a friend and who’s a foe”.

Dooley stressed that individual birds only swoop for a few weeks and urged people to understand why they did so, which he said would make them “less likely to want to take retribution” and help them strategise to stay safe.

He recommends “getting out of the area as quickly and as calmly as you can”, which will not “exacerbate and entrench the view the bird has that you’re a threat”.

The Magpie Alert tracker has recorded 2,157 magpie swoops so far this year, resulting in 279 injuries.

In 1990, I was 24 and well on my way to enjoying a career as an actor. I’d joined a local band on Sydney’s northern beaches, and we played gigs most weekends up and down the New South Wales coast.

At the time, it felt like Ali was omnipresent as the cover girl queen of Dolly, Cleo and Cosmo magazines. It seemed liked every newsagent had a poster out the front with her megawatt smile and sparkling eyes. One day, while I was at those magazine publishing offices for a photoshoot, I walked by her latest cover on the wall and commented on her beauty.

“Have you met her,” asked the photographer I was with. “Nah,” I said, in a trying-to-be-cool kind of way. “Do you want to?” My attempt at cool instantly evaporated as I blurted, “Of course!”

A week later, after cancelling a gig to be there, Ali and I (surrounded by three bandmates who also wanted to meet her) were being introduced in a nightclub. I was instantly struck by her sparkling aura; she confessed she’d had couple of vodka tonics. We chatted for an hour and I promised to call her the next day – which I did. I don’t think we spent many days apart after that.

She was kind, her humour was whip fast, and as much as I enjoyed laughing with her, what I loved most was the sound of her laugh.

After a month of dating I invited Ali on a road trip to my favourite hideaway, Yamba. It’s a not-so-secret place nowadays, but back then it was a quiet fishing town with access to excellent surf breaks and fibro cottages for rent. We would celebrate her 21st birthday there.

Yamba was at her sparkling best and we’d spent an afternoon on my boat, fishing on the Clarence River, when the breeze began to freshen, taking the heat out of the day. We headed home, crossing back over the channel and past the old oyster beds when the boat ramp came into view in the late afternoon sun.

We were travelling fairly fast and it was difficult to read the wind’s direction; one thing was sure, it was blowing hard enough to whip up chop, which always made the task of getting the boat back on to the trailer troublesome.

As we drew closer, we felt the full brunt of the breeze on our backs. One question burned my brain: how are we going to do this?

The plan was to hop out in shallows, and Ali would hold the boat – my 18ft wooden Riviera-style cruiser, a heavy beast – off the ramp while I retrieved the car and backed the trailer down the ramp (a challenge for my dyslexic brain). The wooden hull never liked the scraping on an unforgiving concrete ramp so I had to move fast.

So far, so good. Ali was waist-deep in water clutching the bowline and gave me an assuring look that she could do her part. After a couple of false starts and with more luck than skill, I was able to swing the trailer down the ramp – but Ali was no longer where I left her. The relentless chop and breeze had pushed her a few boat-lengths away from the ramp and she was fighting hard to keep the boat off the rocky shore.

She had naively but bravely put herself between the boat and the shore which would have given even the hardest of men fits. Her slight frame was thumped by the hull as each wave crashed into its opposite side. The look of relief (or was it WTF?!) she gave me as I appeared, I’ll never forget.

We dragged the boat into deeper water and swung the stern around. Using the last of our strength I fought to keep the hull straight while Ali attached the winch-line and began hand-winding the boat on to the trailer.

We howled with delight as the old girl ground into the trailer’s cradle where the wind and chop could no longer have their wicked way. Twenty minutes after landing, we miraculously drove up the ramp, boat secure, and into the twilight. Exhausted.

Later at our accommodation, Ali was exiting a hot shower when I caught sight of her naked hip and back – it looked like a hot mess of purple and red welts!

“Have you seen your back?” I exclaimed. “When did you get those?”

“Holding your boat off the ramp. You’re welcome,” she said, as she continued to dry herself. Not a word of complaint, not a scratch on the boat, but Ali’s actions that afternoon that helped me understand that this gorgeously funny, brave and resilient woman was my person.

And yet, the truth about falling in love with Ali isn’t really about a moment, it’s about a lifetime. And what a lifetime; it’s included 25 years living in Los Angeles, and raising three incredible humans who make us so proud. We’ve weathered storms, but we’ve also shared victories, an ever-deepening friendship and wonderfully simple moments of love.

After almost 33 years of marriage, I am so grateful and fortunate to walk with Ali. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And her laugh is still one of the most pleasing things I know.