A man who got lost in California’s mountains for more than a week – after heading out on what he expected would be a hike of just a few hours – survived his ordeal by drinking creek water and eating wild berries, he told a local news station.

“I didn’t bring anything” besides a flashlight and folding scissors because “I thought I was doing a three-hour hike” on the way to work, Lukas McClish told KSBW for an interview published on Saturday.

McClish spoke out about his experience in the Santa Cruz mountains after about a half-dozen tourists in the Greek islands – including Americans – were either found dead or went missing upon setting out on hikes in unusually high temperatures across much of the world.

As McClish told it, the 34-year-old outdoors enthusiast from Boulder Creek, California, lost his bearings after beginning his hike the morning of 11 June. He had not informed anyone else of his plans, so it would not be until the afternoon of Thursday, 20 June, that the unkempt-looking hiker was found at the bottom of a remote canyon and rescued.

McClish spent much of the interim going up and down canyons, sitting by waterfalls and using his boot to collect water to drink and keep himself hydrated. He also sustained himself by collecting and eating berries, he said.

At one point, McClish said to KSBW, a mountain lion began following him – but the creature kept its distance and showed no interest in harming him. He said he would sleep on a bed of wet leaves, intermittently yell for help and think of what he would do to provide himself his next meal.

McClish described craving a burrito and a taco bowl constantly for the first five days of his disappearance. He thought “I might be in over my head” about five days in, but he never felt overly imperiled.

“I felt comfortable the whole time I was out there – I wasn’t worried,” McClish said to the news outlet. “I think it was just somebody watching over me.”

McClish’s family deduced something must have gone wrong when there was no sign of him on Father’s Day, which was on Sunday, 16 June. They reported him as a missing person to the local sheriff’s office, which mounted a search for McClish that involved dozens of law enforcement officers as well as first responders from around Boulder Creek.

“Some nights, I just had to trust God that he was going to be OK, and that was hard to do,” McClish’s mother, Diane, told KSBW. “Some nights when we would go to bed at night … I would worry about where he was, where he was sleeping and how cold he was and where he was if he was alive.”

The Boulder Creek area registered six days with highs above 80F (26.6C). The high on 11 June was reportedly 98F (32.2C), though for several days the low temperatures were relatively cold at less than 49F (9.4C).

Eventually, people heard McClish’s screams for help, the Santa Cruz county sheriff’s office said in a statement. The agency used several drones to find McClish in a densely wooded area. First responders equipped with off-road vehicles were then able to get to him, bring him to safety and reunite him with his family, the sheriff’s office said.

The sheriff’s office noted that McClish had no major injuries.

Local fire department chief Mark Bingham told the Santa Cruz Sentinel that McClish’s resourcefulness was remarkable.

“About 10 days he survived in the wilderness, essentially, drinking out of the creek and eating wild berries,” Bingham said. “For the most part, he was disoriented and lost and surviving off of the land, which is pretty impressive to say what a tough individual he … is.”

Diane McClish told KSBW that she was grateful not only for the first responders, but also for her community’s residents, many of whom had supportive words for her after the Santa Cruz sheriff’s office announced the search for her son.

“I had … people come to me and tell me how much they love my son and how they just hoped that we would find him,” she told the news station. “I didn’t realize that so many people in this town love Luke.”

A floating pier built by the US military for seaborne humanitarian deliveries to Gaza has proved itself to be fragile in the face of rougher seas than expected, and the future of the whole $230m project is now in question.

The pier has been usable for just 12 days since it began operations on 17 May. On most of those days the assistance arriving by sea has had to be left on the beach as there have been no trucks to distribute it to warehouses in Gaza, because of lack of security.

The scheme has fallen far short of initial expectations. When he announced it in his state of the union speech on 7 March, Joe Biden said the temporary pier “would enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day”.

It took more than two months to put together the two structures required, a floating dock anchored a few miles out to sea and a floating pier to be attached to the Gazan coast. About 1,000 soldiers and sailors and a small flotilla of ships were involved in the construction, including a Royal Navy landing ship, Cardigan Bay, which provided accommodation.

Over the entire course of the pier’s operation so far, however, only about 250 truckloads of food and other humanitarian assistance (4,100 tonnes) have arrived by the planned maritime corridor, less than half of what would cross into Gaza in a single day before the war. Much of the aid that has arrived so far is stuck at the foot of the pier on a marshalling yard established on the beach.

Since 274 Palestinians were killed by Israel Defense Forces in the course of a hostage rescue mission on 8 June, the World Food Programme (WFP) has suspended the convoys that were supposed to take pallets of aids from the marshalling yard to warehouses and then to the 2.3 million people of Gaza under bombardment and facing famine. The WFP says its security review is still in progress.

The seas in the eastern Mediterranean have been choppier than expected and the pier (known by the US military as the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, JLOTS) has been less robust than the Pentagon planners predicted. The JLOTS floating structure is designed to work in conditions up to “sea state 3”, defined by waves of 0.5 to 1.25 metres. It was hoped it would endure through the spring and summer until September, but it was badly damaged in a storm on 25 May, and the sea has been unseasonably choppy since then.

After repairs at the Israeli port of Ashdod, it came back into operation on 8 June but lasted a day before deliveries were suspended for another two days. On 14 June the pier was dismantled and towed to Ashdod again as a precaution against stormy seas.

It was put back in place on Wednesday and since then has been used to offload about 4,160 tonnes of aid, but there have been reports that, because of its vulnerability to weather and high seas, it could be dismantled once and for all ahead of schedule, as early as next month.

“They just miscalculated,” Stephen Morrison, a senior vice-president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. “They didn’t fully understand what was going to happen with the weather … So the DoD [Department of Defence] walks away, humiliated in a fashion.”

The Pentagon admits the challenges the JLOTS plan is facing but denies that a decision has already been taken to take it down early.

“We have not established an end date for this mission as of now, contrary to some press reporting on the matter,” the chief spokesperson Maj Gen Patrick Ryder, said on Thursday.

The pier was intended as a means of getting aid ashore independently of Israel to the besieged and devastated coastal strip, after the Biden administration became frustrated with the lack of access for relief supplies through land crossings.

Most aid workers involved in the Gaza emergency effort say that any relief is better than none but they voice concerns that the spectacular, expensive effort has distracted energy and attention from political pressure on Israel to open the land crossings fully to trucks, by far the most effective means of delivering food.

Ziad Issa, the head of policy and research at the British charity Action Aid, said that the amount of humanitarian aid arriving in Gaza had dropped to fewer than 100 trucks a day on average in the first half of June.

Hardly any assistance is being distributed around the strip because of the appalling security conditions. The main access point from Egypt, the Rafah crossing, has been closed since it was captured by the IDF on 7 May, at the start of a major offensive on Rafah city. Some trucks have been diverted to the Keren Shalom gate in southern Israel, but the roads leading into Gaza from Keren Shalom have proved extremely dangerous.

“It’s unsafe for aid workers and trucks to move because of the ongoing bombardments on Gaza,” Issa said. The IDF declared a “tactical pause” last Sunday to allow an aid corridor through southern Gaza, but Issa said: “We haven’t seen any difference since these tactical pauses have come in place.”

The IDF is not the only threat to aid delivery. Aid trucks driving through Gaza have been repeatedly held up by armed gangs, who are increasingly powerful in the ruined streets of Gaza’s cities as the war goes on.

The UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, relied on Palestinian police for the security of its aid convoys, but the police were treated by the IDF as an arm of Hamas and therefore legitimate targets. In their absence, there is a security vacuum.

The Israeli government also refuses to deal with Unrwa, which is by far the biggest relief agency in Gaza. In its place, the US government persuaded the WFP to distribute food arriving by the pier. The WFP did not respond to a query on when it might resume road convoys to and from the pier.

“They were sort of pushed to the front of the stage by the US to be the partner on the ground,” Morrison said. “They were very uneasy and very reluctant … They just didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of this craziness and the security on the ground is horrible.”

“We are deeply grateful for the UN’s work to get assistance to the people of Gaza in this increasingly volatile and dangerous environment and appreciate their dedication to ensuring the safety of their staff and those they aim to reach with assistance,” a spokesperson for the US Agency for International Development said.

“We continue to press the Israeli government to facilitate the transport of aid shipments by land and sea, accelerate inspections, open up all avenues of access, and facilitate safe movements of aid convoys within Gaza so humanitarians can get aid directly and effectively to those who need it throughout Gaza.”

Given all the problems at the land crossings, the Biden administration is reluctant to give up entirely on the JLOTS pier. “With need in Gaza growing as well as the extreme insecurity that is making onward distribution from Keren Shalom in particular incredibly difficult for humanitarian organisations, the maritime pier is a critical additional conduit for aid deliveries,” a US official said.

Anyone who has read him will know that the historian Nikolas Pevsner was not a man much given to excessive praise. But even he was inclined to sigh at the sight of the Grand Hotel in Scarborough. In his series of architectural guides, The Buildings of England, he describes the hotel, which was completed in 1867, as wondrous, a “High Victorian gesture of assertion and confidence”. Believing no other building in Britain had as much to say about a certain kind of 19th-century ambition, in his perambulation of the Yorkshire town, he instructed readers on no account to miss the magnificent view of the hotel from the harbour.

And it’s true. Stand on the beach below and look up – perhaps while eating a choc ice – and the Grand really does look marvellous: a gigantic confection of towers and balconies that recalls a French chateau. From this vantage point, it isn’t hard to imagine the poet Edith Sitwell drinking cocktails in its ballroom (the Sitwells owned a holiday villa in Scarborough); to picture Winston Churchill, who once stayed in one of its suites, lighting a cigar at the bar.

But if its exterior is ever splendid, its interior, by contrast, is now a sorry sight. Since 2004, the Grand has been owned by the budget chain Britannia, and its reputation in the town – as well as on Tripadvisor – has become so woeful the Conservative mayoral candidate for York and North Yorkshire, Keane Duncan, vowed during his ultimately ill-fated election campaign to use public money to buy and restore it if he was elected. Once the height of luxury, its baths furnished with two sets of taps, the better that guests might be able to recline in both fresh and health-giving salt water, in 2024 it is shabby and neglected, with corridors that smell vaguely of baked beans. Some rooms cost as little as £37 a night.

It was the English who invented the seaside resort – the Scots and the Welsh followed later – and Scarborough, arguably, is where it all began. Indeed, we may think of it as the bucket and spade holiday in all its long history in microcosm. In the 17th century, people began making therapeutic claims for a spring in the cliffs of what was then a fishing town, a development that would lead, in turn, to the invention of sea bathing as a curative, and on the back of this it eventually became the very grandest of spas, the destination of choice for mill owners and steel and coal magnates in need of a holiday (the Sitwells made their money in iron and coal). When the Grand was built, on the spot where Anne Brontë died (she visited Scarborough in the hope of easing her tuberculosis), it was the biggest hotel in Europe, if not the swankiest.

In the 20th century, its popularity grew, though its demographic changed somewhat, workers now mingling with the middle-classes (they stayed in the North Bay rather than the genteel South Cliff). More employers had begun to make paid holidays available to their workers, and on their precious days off those who could afford to headed for the coast. Here were fairgrounds, warm-hearted (or not) landladies, and formal gardens. When it rained, there were plenty of places to shelter – in 2020, the Victorian pergola-style shelter in South Cliff Gardens was listed by Historic England. When it was sunny, there was swimming – or, for those who preferred it, the chance to watch other people swimming. According to the historian of the English seaside, John K Walton, in 1926, a newspaper reported that in a single morning at Scarborough’s South Bay Pool, about 3,500 people had paid sixpence each for the privilege of merely “spectating”.

So what changed all this? It’s a truism that inexpensive foreign holidays did for places like Scarborough in the late 20th century, and in the late 1970s, many resorts did indeed begin to decline. By 1981, the cost of package holidays had plummeted and more main holidays were taken abroad than at home. But we need to be cautious here. The deprivation we see in seaside towns – 12 neighbourhoods in Scarborough are among the 20% most deprived in the country – has multiple causes, not all of them connected exclusively to the decline of domestic tourism. Ten million people still visit Scarborough every year (for comparison, Blackpool is the third most deprived local authority in England, yet in 2022, it had 20 million visitors, an increase even on pre-pandemic years). We continue to love to be beside the seaside – and as some resorts focus on regeneration, this is set more and more to be the case. In Hastings and Margate, among other places, culture has been deployed in an effort to achieve this; Arts Council England recently awarded Blackpool a grant of £225k a year to develop its famous illuminations.

Holidaying at the British seaside is still, of course, an unpredictable business, and the weather and bad hotels are only the start of it. The news is full of reports of the raw sewage being dumped in the sea at popular beaches – in 2023, there were 31,000 such discharges across the UK’s designated bathing sites, the equivalent of 228,000 hours – and the climate crisis is wreaking its own destruction, buildings sliding from cliffs, and cliffs sliding into the sea. Thanks to heavy rainfall, erosion is a growing problem. Last Easter, part of the cliff at West Bay in Dorset crumbled like a sandcastle, 4,000 tonnes of rockfall disappearing into the water below (it is lucky no one on the beach that day was killed).

But against such things we must set the fact that by staying in the UK, we don’t contribute to global heating (no need to fly) – and the special beauty and joy of the British seaside. People returned to it during Covid, when they had no other choice, and many remembered then how much they liked it. Though things were already shifting: new hotels; new restaurants, some run by those escaping from London and other cities; the sense that not all resorts need resemble a photograph by Martin Parr – even if we are still a long way from the days when Wallis Simpson chose to visit a smart hotel in Felixstowe to escape the abdication crisis (the hotel in question, I learn from Madeleine Bunting’s book, The Seaside, is now converted into flats).

Thirty-six per cent of the British population lives within 5km of the sea, and 63% within 15km – and this is (or it should be) our great, good fortune. I’ve taken to hopping on the train to Eastbourne, having bagged a deal on a bed at another Grand Hotel (this one, wrapped in white stucco, resembles a wedding cake, and it’s where Debussy wrote La Mer). Eastbourne has a modern art gallery, The Towner, where you can see good paintings by Sussex artists such as Eric Ravilious, and lots of hipster bakeries. But it also maintains its more traditional attractions: a gold-domed pier, a turquoise-topped bandstand, a promenade with candy-coloured beach huts (my only sadness is that its old, family-run ice-cream bar, Fusciardi’s, has been sold).

Our Victorian and Edwardian resorts are an extraordinary legacy, and I’m always surprised by how little they’re valued by some. If we were a different kind of country – less snobbish, more proudly confident – Blackpool would be more akin to, say, Deauville, in Normandy, France, which is to say, deeply treasured and considered rather chic. Everyone in Britain would know about the circus below the ballroom of the Blackpool Tower, the tiled ring of which fills with 42,000 gallons of water in less than a minute for its finale (this is thrilling).

People want change, if not gentrification precisely; but they also want some things to stay the same. As Travis Elborough writes in Wish You Were Here, his fond history of the British seaside, because most of us first visit the seaside as children, Fab ice lollies and penny slots tend to have a powerfully Proustian effect on our adult selves. As a child, my granny took us to Withernsea, on the Lincolnshire coast, to Bridlington, and to Morecambe, where we stayed at Pontins (RIP) and played a lot of crazy golf. They were happy times – though happier, perhaps, in memory – and thanks to this, whenever I’m at the coast now, some small part of me is always hoping to recreate them, even as I moan about white bread and crab sticks. I want to eat my fish and chips outside; I will have a Flake 99, not a Magnum; I gaze longingly at helter-skelters, wondering if I’m too old to have a go.

A few years ago, I dragged my husband to Filey, Scarborough’s traditionally more genteel neighbour (in a desperate effort to make it sound alluring, I told him it was where Margaret Drabble and her sister A S Byatt holidayed as children). It was off season. The day was grey, and the wind howling. The only possible thing to do was to find a caff, order tea and toasted tea cakes, and to listen in to the Alan Bennett-style conversations that were going on all around us. Naturally, I loved every second.

Bridie, you’re a millennial – tell me about your socks

Oh Gabs, you could ask me what beauty I saw in the world on this glorious blue sky morning, or how my relationship is with my mother, or what rage is in my heart. But no, everyone wants to talk about millennial socks.

I actually wear great socks. Heavily influenced by my little brother, I’ve worn Uniqlo crew socks for years. Which are actually “zoomer socks”. But I have loved ankle socks as well, and that is the foghorn that signals I’m a millennial apparently.

Wait, I’m just trying to wrap my head around the concept of “millennial socks” – which you now tell me are just ankle socks – and now you’ve introduced the concept of “zoomer socks”. Are they merely coloured crew socks or is there more to it?

Millennial socks are small socks that stop at the ankle, or even the ones you can’t see at all above the shoe (I loved these!). Zoomer socks are generally crew socks – any sock pulled up high. They invented them (citation needed). Also, I think they’re actually called gen Z socks – my beloved zoomer colleagues are always telling me that only millennials say zoomer.

OK, so millennials love ankle socks – good to know. But why is Jennifer Lawrence being called “brave” by Vogue for stepping out in “millennial socks”?

Ah, I think because one of the most tragic things you can be in some corners of the internet is a woman in her 30s dressing herself with no regard for a trend.

Oh no, what about a woman in her 40s?

I don’t believe they exist.

So, ahem, the long and short of it is that gen Z have pulled their socks up?

Ha! They’ve also moved their hair part to the middle, millennials favour the side part. And they’re wearing enormous pants – skinny jeans are definitely out. Also high-waisted jeans are a millennial relic. Gen Z are wearing pants that hang off their hips.

Wait, I wore pants that hung off my hips!

Ssshh, ssshhhh. This is the first time in history that any of this is cool. And it will stay cool forever. There definitely won’t be articles in 10 years calling a 35-year-old zoomer “brave” for wearing crew socks.

With temperatures hovering around 0C this week, leaving ankles across pre-Y2K generations practically frostbitten, I have been wearing crew socks instead of ankle socks. This Xennial is accidentally cool now.

Voters in Temecula, California, have ousted the local school board president who thrust the political body to the forefront of rightwing culture wars by seeking to eliminate discussions of race and gender identity from the classroom.

Joseph Komrosky on Thursday lost a recall vote with 51% of voters favoring his removal.

Temecula – a predominantly white city of 100,000 residents – was a hotbed of the culture wars that conservative Americans have mounted in an attempt to censure how schools teach racism, gender and American history.

In June of 2023, Komrosky presided over the Temecula school board’s banning of critical race theory – which examines how racism was embedded into American law – as well as attempts to purge elementary school textbooks of any reference to Harvey Milk, the gay politician from San Francisco who supported LGBTQ+ rights before his 1978 assassination.

Komrosky first joined the board in November 2022. Since then, the school board has forced out the district superintendent and passed a parent-notification policy requiring schools to tell parents if students go by a gender different from what they were assigned at birth.

Komrosky has called critical race theory a “racist ideology” that uses “division and hate as an instructional framework in our schools”. He and fellow school board members then voted to reject California’s social studies curriculum over its inclusion of references to Milk, whom Komrosky described as a “pedophile”.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, threatened to impose a $1.5m fine on the district for not adopting the curriculum, though Komrosky and the school board vowed to find a way to circumvent doing so while adhering to state mandates. The board also initiated another controversial vote to limit which flags can be displayed on school grounds.

The unflattering public attention drawn by the controversies Komrosky’s actions ignited incited the recall election against him.

The recall vote was conducted on 4 June with final results released on Thursday. Among 9,722 ballots tallied, 4,963 supported the recall. The recall election turned out 45.1% of registered voters in Temecula.

Komrosky told the LA Times he is inclined to run for the school board again given his slim margin of defeat in the recall.

“Given the narrow margin, I will likely run again in the November 2024 general election,” Komrosky said. “If not, it has been an honor to serve the Temecula community, and I am proud to have fulfilled all of my campaign promises as an elected official.

“My commitment to protecting the innocence of our children remains unwavering.”

Israeli army forces strapped a wounded Palestinian man to the hood of a military Jeep during an arrest raid in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on Saturday.

A video circulating on social media and verified by Reuters showed a Palestinian resident of Jenin, Mujahed Azmi, on the Jeep that passes two ambulances.

The Israeli military said its forces were fired at and exchanged fire, wounding a suspect and apprehending him.

Soldiers then violated military protocol, the statement said. “The suspect was taken by the forces while tied on top of a vehicle,” it said.

The military said the “conduct of the forces in the video of the incident does not conform to the values” of the Israeli military and that the events will be investigated and dealt with.

The individual was transferred to medics for treatment, the military said.

Reuters was able to match the location from corroborating and verified footage shared on social media that shows a vehicle transporting an individual tied on top of a vehicle in Jenin. The date was confirmed by an eyewitness interviewed by Reuters.

According to the family of Azmi, there was an arrest raid, during which he was injured and, when the family asked for an ambulance, the army took him, strapped him on the hood and drove off.

Violence in the West Bank, already on the rise before the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, has escalated since then with frequent army raids on militant groups, rampages by Jewish settlers in Palestinian villages, and deadly Palestinian street attacks.

Saturday night was all right for a fightback as Belgium marmalised Romania to come back from their shock opening defeat to leave Group E all square. The Red Devils will now surely fancy themselves to qualify for the knockout stages but after a performance that was scintillating, if not without flaws, the question will be quite how far they are able to go.

Any conversation around the match will probably centre on the continuing idiosyncrasies of VAR, after Romelu Lukaku had a third overturned goal of the tournament decided by the tip of a knee. It may even centre on the apparently cursed nature of the striker himself, who again spurned a series of chances. But the focus ought to be on an electric performance by Domenico Tedesco’s side. Youri Tielemans opened the scoring after 73 seconds and Kevin De Bruyne wrapped up the match after 80 minutes, yet in between there was so much to admire.

Tedesco was in pragmatic mood and appeared to display some frustration at his team’s inability to kill the game earlier. Belgium had 20 shots and nine on target but could have been hauled back to parity had Romania managed their own opportunities better. “We are very relieved that we won the game and it was very important to get those three points,” Tedesco said. “But of course we missed one or two chances and I am not happy about that. It would be great if we could have won the game earlier.”

The Belgium manager has insisted he was happy with his side’s performance in the opening game, a 1-0 defeat to Slovakia in the only real shock of the tournament. He switched his personnel up for this encounter, however, making four changes including restoring Jan Vertonghen to defence and adding the more progressive Tielemans alongside Amadou Onana in midfield.

It made a quick difference. The move for the opening goal began with Lukaku driving deep into Romanian territory. He laid the ball off to De Bruyne, who in turn found Jérémy Doku, who dinked across the edge of the box before finding Lukaku again on the penalty spot. The striker held off his man, saw Tielemans approaching and gently laid the ball to his feet for the Aston Villa midfielder to drive low under the dive of Florin Nita.

It was beautiful, graceful, football with a little bit of oomph for good measure, and Belgium continued in the same vein for the rest of the match. At the heart of much of their good play was Doku.

Restored to the left side – his customary position when marauding for Manchester City – he was at times unstoppable. He dropped deep, held the ball, span and ran. He hung on the shoulder of the full-back and ran beyond him. He was almost impossible to shake off the ball.

Then there was De Bruyne, who was at his impish best. An incredible, Kaká-esque run through the heart of the Romania midfield set up the impressive right winger Dodi Lukébakio for a great chance on the half hour but Nita turned the ball round the post.

Just after the hour the Belgian captain’s slide rule pass sent Lukaku clear to finish calmly into the bottom corner, only for VAR, in its own time, to intervene.

Finally with 10 minutes to go De Bruyne pushed himself on to the Romania defence before a goal kick cleared everyone and he poked the ball past Nita to score. “We had a couple of balls that came up front and no one was really running into the spaces, so I thought I would go”, he said.

As for Lukaku, he has more goals overturned than the competition’s leading scorers have actual goals. As in his previous appearance, he passed up a series of presentable chances too. But there is no doubt that Belgium could not have played as they did without their record scorer on the field. His hold-up play, connection with his teammates and dominant physical presence were a major influence.

As a jubilant Belgium support at the end of a raucous match cheered their team in victory, their hopes must surely have turned to going deep in this tournament.

Not many teams can match the verve Belgium showed, and the mood around the team has just performed the mother of all 180s. “Our mentality tonight was good,” Tedesco said.

Water companies in England and Wales have averaged five serious sewage spills into rivers or seas every day over the past decade, the Observer can reveal.

Analysis of Environment Agency data has found that the 10 firms recorded 19,484 category 1-3 pollution incidents between 2013 and 2022, the most recent year recorded, an average of one every four and a half hours.

Campaigners accused the water industry of “polluting our rivers and seas at a catastrophic scale”, while Labour said the government had “folded their arms and looked the other way” as the crisis worsened.

Thames Water was the worst offending company according to the Environmental Performance Assessments analysed by this newspaper, recording some 3,568 incidents in that time, followed by Southern Water (2,747), Severn Trent (2,712) and Anglian Water (2,572).

Most of the incidents recorded were category 3, the least severe of those collected and a type that is supposed to have only a localised effect.

But the figures are also likely to be an underestimate. The number and severity of sewage spill incidents are self-reported by water companies themselves.

The incidents, and their actual severity and impact, often go unverified. The Environment Agency, which regulates the sector, has faced staff shortages and major budget cuts that have forced it in the past to tell its inspectors to not investigate less serious incidents in order to cut down on costs.

Between 2020 and 2022, there were reportedly 931 pollution incidents in the north-west of England, but the EA attended just six.

A BBC investigation last year into the area’s water company, United Utilities, found that it had wrongly downgraded the severity of a significant number of its own sewage spills to lower categories, with the result that it avoided potential further scrutiny from the EA.

The state of the UK’s rivers and seas has become a major campaign issue in the general election.

Labour’s shadow environment secretary, Steve Reed, told the Observer that the Conservative government had “just folded their arms and looked the other way while water companies pumped a tidal wave of raw sewage into our rivers, lakes and seas”.

He said that Labour, if elected, would give regulators the power to ban bonus payments and even levy criminal charges for “law-breaking water bosses”.

The Liberal Democrats’ environment spokesperson, Tim Farron, whose rural Westmorland and Lonsdale constituency is one of the 25 worst affected by sewage releases, said the issue was a “national scandal which has gotten worse and worse under the Conservatives’ watch”.

“The Conservatives’ record is one of rising sewage levels and water firms stuffing their pockets with cash,” he added. “The Liberal Democrats have led the campaign against sewage, with plans for a new water regulator, an end to disgraceful bonuses and profits, and new sewage inspectors.”

In March it was revealed that England’s privatised water firms released raw sewage for a total of 3.6m hours in 2023, more than double the scale from the year before.

A small number of untreated sewage releases are allowed during periods of unprecedented rainfall when sewerage systems are overwhelmed, but a recent BBC investigation found thousands of “illegal” releases on days when it hadn’t rained, including during a record heatwave.

Despite the growing scrutiny of the industry in recent years, the pay packets for its leadership have remained high, with the nine chief executives of UK water companies receiving more than £25m in bonuses and incentives since the last general election. That has included bonuses awarded for hitting environmental and sustainability targets.

“This is further evidence of what we’ve all long suspected: water companies are polluting our rivers and seas at a catastrophic scale, each and every day,” said Giles Bristow, the chief executive of Surfers Against Sewage.

“These companies are brazen in their lack of regard for the law and have been allowed to pollute with barely more than a slap on the wrist.”

A Conservative spokesperson said the government had been clear that “water companies need to be held to account” and that they had “introduced unprecedented levels of transparency with 100% monitoring, and applied the largest ever fines to law-breaking water companies”.

A spokesperson for Water UK, the organisation that represents water companies, said that numbers of the most serious pollution incidents had fallen over the last decade, and stressed that the industry plans to invest £100bn into its network that will come into action once it receives approval from the regulator, Ofwat.

The husband of a bride who was killed in a South Carolina beach road crash on their wedding night last year will receive nearly a million dollars in a financial settlement connected to the wreck, which a drunk driver allegedly caused.

The Post and Courier reported that Aric Hutchinson will receive about $863,300 from Folly Beach, South Carolina, bars the Drop In Bar & Deli, the Crab Shack and Snapper Jacks; Progressive auto insurance; and Enterprise Rent-A-Car, according to a settlement approved earlier this week by the Charleston county circuit court judge Roger Young.

Hutchinson sued the businesses after driver Jamie Lee Komoroski crashed a rented car into a golf cart carrying him and his new bride, 34-year-old Samantha Miller, away from their wedding reception on 28 April 2023.

The golf cart was thrown 100 yards (91.44 meters). Miller died at the scene, still wearing her wedding dress. Hutchinson survived with a brain injury and multiple broken bones. Komoroski was driving 65mph (104.6km/h) on a 25mph road, the newspaper reported.

Hutchinson claimed in the wrongful death lawsuit that Komoroski had “slurred and staggered” across several bars around Folly Beach before speeding in her Toyota Camry with a blood-alcohol concentration more than three times the legal limit.

The settlements amount to $1.3m but will total less than that after attorney and legal fees are paid.

Komoroski is out on bond as her case makes its way through the court system. In September, she was charged with felony driving under the influence resulting in death, reckless homicide and two counts of felony driving under the influence resulting in great bodily injury.

In March, the New York Post obtained a recording of a jail house telephone call during which Komoroski told her sister she expected to soon “be living [her] best life” despite facing up to 25 years in prison if convicted as charged.

“It’s so funny because when you’re in a bad situation, you’re so upset and you’re distraught,” Komoroski said on the call on 8 October, according to the Post. “But in the future when you see your future self looking back at that time, you wish you could tell yourself in that moment: ‘Stop freaking out, stop crying, it’s going to be OK. You’re happy now. And there’s no point being so upset. Everything is going to work out.’

“No matter how bad it is in the moment. It’s going to work out.”

The Guardian contributed reporting

Fat Beach Day events are springing up across the US in an effort to fight back against fat-phobia, reclaim safe spaces for the community and honor plus-size culture. Today, one of these celebrations is being held to coincide with Pride month at Jacob Riis Beach in New York, a location deeply ensconced in the city’s activism space.

“We’re going through something culturally that is impacting us every day on an individual level and a systemic level,” said Jordan Underwood, the event organizer. “We’re really trying to open up a space for people to be themselves.”

Underwood, a plus-size model, artist and activist, described being bullied for their weight as far back as middle school. Consistent hate, cruelty and harmful rhetoric from fellow students led to them setting up a blog at 12 years old, which became a place where they documented their experiences and made sense of what they were going through. In many ways, this marked the beginning of their journey into what they denote as “fat activism”.

Now, they organize events throughout New York City and work with Berriez, a vintage store “curated for curves” based in Brooklyn, to organize Fat Beach Day.

There may be rain, but the pair aren’t bothered. The day – featuring food, drinks and free sunscreen from Vacation – is something they’ve been looking forward to and planning for months.

“I’m so self-conscious at the beach, and I’m never around people that look like me,” said Emma Zack, who started Berriez in 2018. “I’m so excited we’ve created this space for other folks with bigger bodies to have a good time.”

In an era in which weight-loss drugs like Ozempic are deeply ingrained in mainstream diet culture, and thinness is resurgent as the ideal beauty standard, events like Fat Beach Day are becoming powerful tools in the fight against these norms. They have become not just events but calls to action – public stands against the societal pressures to conform to these shifting criteria.

Vogue Business reported that in the autumn/winter 2024 season across fashion weeks, only 0.8% of models were plus-size, and 3.7% were mid-size, a notable decline from previous years. A survey published by KFF in May found that about one in eight adults, or more than 15 million people in the US, had used a drug like Ozempic or Mounjaro at some point in their lives, highlighting the extent of this societal shift.

“In the 2000s, there was this anti-fat, intense cultural swing that really parallels what we’re going through right now,” Underwood said. “It’s indisputable how insidious the fat-phobia was in that decade. Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson, both then a size six, were plastered all over the tabloids, accompanied by headlines that used words like ‘fat’.”

For the next few months, like-minded communities across the US have planned other Fat Beach Days. A Fat Friends Pool Party is taking place in Chicago on 13 July. There will also be a Bellies Out Beach Day in Los Angeles in a few weeks.

“Fat bodies and Riis are a match made in heaven,” said Kleo Alana, one of the people attending the New York event today. “Jordan Underwood and Berriez have brought heaven to Queens.”

For decades, Jacob Riis Beach, named after a social reformer and photojournalist, has been an iconic and popular gathering place for the LGBTQ+ community. Also referred to as “the people’s beach”, it’s become a cultural and social landmark in the city’s history.

More broadly, New York has, for decades, been at the heart of the fat acceptance movement. In the 1960s, about 500 protesters held a “fat-in” in Central Park, burning diet books and photographs of the supermodel Twiggy, to publicly encourage body positivity and liberation.

In recent years, after organized activism, legislation has been passed to prohibit weight discrimination. New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, signed a bill in 2023 to ban weight discrimination in hiring and housing. Until then, you could be fired in New York for being overweight.

Despite this, stigmatizations still exist, and are at their most pervasive on social media.

“It’s a really shitty time, not just on the internet but in society, to be fat, and it feels really violent in a lot of ways,” Zack said. “You’d think it wouldn’t be such a thing because New York is so open, and you dress however you want. I always say I never realized how much people hate fat people until I got TikTok.”