Most mornings, Wolf Ruck walks the mown paths in his yard in Mississauga, Ontario, watching for insects landing on the goldenrod, birds feeding on native seed heads, and chipmunk kits playing in the tall grass.

The septuagenarian artist, film-maker and former Olympic canoeist began rewilding his garden with native plants three years ago, as part of a growing movement across Canada towards replacing water-thirsty lawns with “naturalised gardens”.

Letting nature take its course has been a blessing to observe, Ruck says. But to city officials, his garden violates the city’s nuisance weed and tall grass control bylaw. Twice, officers responding to anonymous neighbour complaints have brought workers to forcibly cut Ruck’s garden, billing him later for the work.

“My property is not abandoned. It’s not a blight on the community. It simply seems to offend some neighbours who don’t like the look of it,” Ruck says.

A growing number of Canadian gardeners are facing legal action for their efforts to rewild their gardens, a movement that took off during the coronavirus pandemic, as people confined to their homes reconsidered their relationship with their lawn. Proponents of rewilding cite greater biodiversity, drought resistance, and lower upkeep as advantages.

Beyond sidewalk gardens overflowing with black-eyed susan, hairy beardtongue and white turtlehead, signs of the growing movement can be seen in the proliferation of community initiatives, such as wildflower seed libraries and butterfly ranger programs. In recent years big-box retailers and garden centres have started carrying native plants alongside Kentucky bluegrass seed and hybrid tea roses.

But the growing movement is facing blowback from lawn-loving neighbours complaining about gardens overrun with “weeds”. Prof Nina-Marie Lister says the Ecological Design Lab she directs at Toronto Metropolitan University is receiving more requests than ever to help gardeners facing bylaw complaints. “The number of cases we have supported with advice through my lab has more than quadrupled since 2020,” she says.

Across Canada and the United States, local bylaws regulate private gardens, often using subjective terms such as “tidy” or “neat”, arbitrary rules such as limiting grass height to 20cm, and vague or undefined terms such as “weeds”. Enforcement is driven by anonymous complaints and are carried out by often harried bylaw officers without specific botanical training, who may also be dealing with noise complaints, parking violations and vermin outbreaks.

Lister is helping local bodies update their garden regulations and cites 12 municipalities in Ontario alone that have updated or are updating their bylaws.

“The aesthetic of the lawn has been increasingly challenged as out of date, especially at a time when many cities – and the city of Toronto specifically – encourage residents to plant native species,” she says.

“The advice we give to municipalities is this: diversify the palette of what a garden looks like. Recognise the rights of residents to plant, cultivate and grow native species … the only proviso must be that they are not harmful to human or ecological health.”

For ordinary citizens concerned with habitat loss, environmental degradation and climate change, their garden is one of the few areas in which they have agency to act, says Lorraine Johnson, an author on native gardening. “The growing appeal is that it’s something you can do locally that has an important and demonstrable positive impact,” she says.

Ruck agrees. “It’s certainly helping me in terms of countering that feeling of helplessness, because I can say at least I’m trying to do my part,” he says.

After his arguments failed to convince bylaw officers, Ruck took his case to court. Legal precedent supports naturalised gardening in Ontario, where in 1996 a court ruled that Sandy Bell, a Toronto gardener, had the right to express her environmental beliefs through gardening, overturning a fine issued to her under the city’s weeds and grass bylaw.

But Ruck, who represented himself, lost his case on procedural grounds after arguing that the city had applied the bylaw unfairly and arbitrarily. Now on the hook for the municipality’s legal bills of $6,000 (£3,450), he has filed an appeal.

Officials have tried to work with Ruck in dealing with nuisance weeds and tall grass complaints at his property, a Mississauga spokesperson said. “Because this matter is before the courts, the city does not have any further comment at this time.”

In the meantime, Ruck remains on alert for the sound of garden strimmers. “It’s a cloud hanging over my head,” he says.

A geoengineering technique designed to reduce high temperatures in California could inadvertently intensify heatwaves in Europe, according to a study that models the unintended consequences of regional tinkering with a changing climate.

The paper shows that targeted interventions to lower temperature in one area for one season might bring temporary benefits to some populations, but this has to be set against potentially negative side-effects in other parts of the world and shifting degrees of effectiveness over time.

The authors of the study said the findings were “scary” because the world has few or no regulations in place to prevent regional applications of the technique, marine cloud brightening, which involves spraying reflective aerosols (usually in the form of sea salt or sea spray) into stratocumulus clouds over the ocean to reflect more solar radiation back into space.

Experts have said the paucity of controls means there is little to prevent individual countries, cities, companies or even wealthy individuals from trying to modify their local climates, even if it is to the detriment of people living elsewhere, potentially leading to competition and conflict over interventions.

The recent sharp rise in global temperatures has prompted some research institutions and private organisations to engage in geoengineering research that used to be virtually taboo.

In Australia, scientists have been trialling marine cloud brightening strategies for at least four years to try to cool the Great Barrier Reef and slow its bleaching.

Earlier this year, scientists at the University of Washington sprayed sea-salt particles across the flight deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier, the USS Hornet, docked in Alameda in San Francisco Bay. This experiment was halted by the local government to allow it to evaluate whether the spray contains chemicals that might pose a health risk to people or animals in the Bay area.

The new paper suggests the consequences could be much further reaching and harder to predict. Published on Friday in Nature Climate Change, the authors claim to be the first to demonstrate that cloud brightening effects can diminish or reverse as climate conditions change due to the already dramatic human impacts of burning fossil fuels and forests.

Using Earth system computer models of the climate in 2010 and 2050, they simulated the impacts of two cloud brightening operations carried out over different regions of the north-eastern Pacific Ocean, one in the subtropics near California and one in the mid-latitudes near Alaska. Both were designed to reduce the risk of extreme heat on the target region, the US west coast.

Counterintuitively, the more distant operation had the greater impact because it tapped into “teleconnections”, links in the climate system between geographically remote parts of the world.

The 2010 simulation suggested the operation near Alaska would lower the risk of dangerous heat exposure in the target region by 55% – equivalent to 22 million people-days per summer – while the closer subtropical test would cause smaller but still significant gains of 16%.

In simulations of the more disrupted climate of 2050, however, the same two operations produced very different results because there were fewer clouds, higher base temperatures and a slowing of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc). Under these mid-century conditions, the operation near Alaska would have a drastically reduced effect on relieving heat stress in the western US, while the subtropical operation would push temperatures higher – the opposite of the desired result.

The consequences outside the target regions were also markedly different between 2010 and 2050. At the earlier date, the simulations suggested Europe would also be cooled by the marine cloud brightening in the north Pacific. However, by 2050, the local cooling operation would increase heat stress around the world, particularly over Europe, as a result of the slowing of Amoc.

“Our study is very specific,” said Jessica Wan, who is part of the research team led by UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It shows that marine cloud brightening can be very effective for the US west coast if done now, but it may be ineffective there in the future and could cause heatwaves in Europe.”

She said the results should concern policymakers, and prompt them to establish governance structures and transparency guidelines, not just on a global level but regionally.

“There is really no solar geoengineering governance right now. That is scary. Science and policy need to be developed together,” she said. “We don’t want to be in a situation where one region is forced to do geoengineering to combat what another part of the world has done to respond to droughts and heatwaves.”

Millions of mosquitoes are being released from helicopters in Hawaii in a last-ditch attempt to save rare birds slipping into extinction.

The archipelago’s endemic, brightly coloured honeycreeper birds are dying of malaria carried by mosquitoes first introduced by European and American ships in the 1800s. Having evolved with no immunity to the disease, the birds can die after just a single bite.

Thirty-three species of honeycreeper have become extinct and many of the 17 that remain are highly endangered, with concerns some could be extinct within a year if no action is taken. Now conservationists are urgently trying to save them with an unusual strategy: releasing more mosquitoes.

Every week a helicopter drops 250,000 male mosquitoes with a naturally occurring bacterium that acts as birth control on to the islands of the remote archipelago. Already, 10 million have been released.

“The only thing that’s more tragic is if [the birds] went extinct and we didn’t try. You can’t not try,” said Chris Warren, the forest bird programme coordinator for Haleakalā national park on the island of Maui.

The population of one honeycreeper, the Kauaʻi creeper, or ʻakikiki, has dropped from 450 in 2018 to five in 2023, with just one single bird known to be left in the wild on Kauaʻi island, according to the national park service.

Honeycreepers have a canary-like song and incredible diversity: each species has evolved with special beak shapes, adapted to eating different foods, from snails to fruit to nectar. They are an important part of the ecosystem, helping to pollinate plants and eating insects.

As Hawaii birds did not evolve alongside avian malaria, they have very little immune response to it – the scarlet honeycreeper (‘i’iwi), for example, has a 90% chance of dying if it is bitten by an infected mosquito.

The remaining birds generally live at high elevations above 1,200-1,500 metres (4,000-5,000ft), where mosquitoes with the avian malaria parasite do not live because it is too cold. As the climate warms, however, mosquitoes are moving to higher elevations.

Researchers are using the incompatible insect technique (IIT), which involves releasing male mosquitoes with a naturally occurring bacteria that stops the eggs of wild females that they mate with from hatching.

Female mosquitoes only mate once, and the idea is that over time this reduces the overall population. The bacteria, Wolbachia, lives naturally in most insects, which can only produce viable offspring with partners that have the same strain of Wolbachia.

The technique has been successfully used to reduce mosquito populations in China and Mexico, with programmes continuing in California and Florida. The effectiveness of this programme should become clear in summer when mosquito populations typically boom.

The project is being led by a coalition of groups including the US National Park Service, the state of Hawaii and the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project, operating under the banner Birds, Not Mosquitoes.

Dr Nigel Beebe, from the University of Queensland, researched how the IIT technique works on other mosquito species. “It’s much better than using pesticides that have large non-target effects. Especially for things like conservation of critical species,” he said.

He added, however, that long-term elimination of mosquitoes was challenging, especially for mainland countries. “Eradication may be difficult unless one can prevent migration back into the landscape,” he said. “Islands are ideal for this.”

Vladimir Putin’s suggestion that Russian could supply weapons to North Korea is “incredibly concerning”, a senior US official has said, days after Putin and the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, signed a defence pact that requires their countries to provide immediate military assistance if either is attacked.

Matthew Miller, a US state department spokesperson, said the provision of Russian weapons to Pyongyang “would destabilise the Korean peninsula, of course, and potentially … depending on the type of weapons they provide … violate UN security council resolutions that Russia itself has supported”.

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and South Korea’s foreign ministry said the treaty between Russia and North Korea posed a “serious threat” to peace and stability on the Korean peninsula. Blinken said the US would consider “various measures” in response to the pact, which elevated ties between the sanctions-hit states to their highest level since the cold war.

Friction over shipments of weapons to both sides in the war in Ukraine has worsened this week, amid speculation that Putin and Kim discussed additional supplies of North Korea missiles and ammunition for use by Russian forces when they met in Pyongyang on Wednesday.

During a state visit to Vietnam on Thursday, Putin said reciprocal supplies of Russian weapons to the North would be an appropriate response to the west’s supply of weapons to Ukrainian forces.

“Those who send these [missiles to Ukraine] think that they are not fighting us, but I said, including in Pyongyang, that we then reserve the right to supply weapons to other regions of the world, with regard to our agreements” with North Korea, Putin said. “I do not rule this out.”

Putin, who met Kim for the second time in nine months, also warned South Korea that it would be making a “big mistake” if it decided to supply arms to Ukraine.

“I hope it doesn’t happen,” he told reporters in Hanoi. “If it happens, then we will be making relevant decisions that are unlikely to please the current leadership of South Korea.”

South Korea, a growing arms exporter with a well-equipped military backed by the United States, has provided non-lethal aid and other support to Ukraine, and joined US-led sanctions against Moscow. But it has a longstanding policy of not supplying weapons to countries that are at war.

But on Friday, Chang Ho-jin, the national security adviser to the South Korean president, Yoon Su Yeol, said Seoul would reconsider its stance on providing arms to Ukraine.

The head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, also voiced concern that Russia could help the North further its ballistic and nuclear missile programmes – both of which have made significant progress despite years of UN security council sanctions.

US officials believe North Korea wants to acquire fighter aircraft, surface-to-air missiles, armoured vehicles, materials and equipment to build for ballistic missile production, and other advanced technologies from Moscow.

The US and South Korea say there is evidence that Pyongyang has already provided significant numbers of ballistic missiles and artillery shells to Russia. The North has described the allegations as “absurd”.

Exports of Russian weapons to the North would add to tensions on the Korean peninsula and, according to some experts, risk intensifying a regional arms race that has drawn in South Korea and Japan – both US allies.

Relations between the two Koreas have deteriorated dramatically in recent weeks with the resumption of cold war-era psychological warfare that included North Korea using balloons to drop huge quantities of rubbish on the southern side of the countries’ border.

Seoul has responded by broadcasting anti-North Korean propaganda via loudspeakers. On Friday its troops fired warning shots after soldiers from the North reportedly crossed the border for the third time this month.

There is also evidence that North Korea is building walls at points along the border, days after several of its soldiers were reportedly killed or injured while clearing land in areas packed with mines.

The BBC said high-resolution satellite imagery of a 7km stretch of the border appeared to show at least three sections where barriers have been built.

“My personal assessment is that this is the first time they’ve ever built a barrier in the sense of separating places from each other,” it quoted Dr Uk Yang, a military and defence expert at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, as saying.

Experts believe the intrusions could be related to the large number of troops the North Korea has deployed to fortify the border, possibly to prevent civilians and soldiers from defecting to the South.

Putin’s visit to Vietnam, where he was given a 21-gun salute on Thursday, has also caused unease in Washington. In response, the US’s most senior diplomat for east Asia, Daniel Kritenbrink, will visit Vietnam on Friday and Saturday to underline Washington’s commitment to working with Hanoi to ensure a “free and open” Indo-Pacific region.

When New Zealand opened its borders after the pandemic, the departures began immediately. For Kirsty Frame, then a 24-year-old journalist for the country’s national broadcaster in Wellington, the sense of loss was constant.

“It was goodbye dinner after goodbye dinner, leaving drinks after leaving drinks, and I think that started to take a toll.”

For her, the city’s beauty came from its people. “If what made Wellington so great as a place to live and work was my community, and I feel I don’t have that here now and there’s a lot less people my age, what do I want to do?”

She considered moving to Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, but heard it felt empty too. She mulled London, but Britain seemed too distant. Finally, in the middle of 2023, she moved to Melbourne.

The flow of departures from New Zealand has accelerated since then. Now, record numbers of people are leaving the country as cost-of-living pressures increase and residents grapple with limited job opportunities. Provisional figures from Statistics NZ show a net loss of 56,500 citizens in the year to April – up 12,000 from the previous record.

Separate figures indicated that half of those who left New Zealand recently moved to Australia. Now, experts are worrying that a grim economic picture means departing Kiwis may not come back.

“We can’t compete with the salaries in Australia,” says David Cooper, director of immigration firm Malcolm Pacific. “Some people view that New Zealand has gone backwards, and so they’re voting with their feet.”

Frame says it “just felt like bad news after bad news” in New Zealand, and in Melbourne she found a higher-paying job in communications and a flat with lower rent.

“I could be happy here for a long time. I think I will be here for the long run.”

‘Grass looks a lot greener’ in Australia

New Zealand has a tradition of young residents travelling for an overseas experience. According to Gareth Kiernan, chief forecaster at economics consultancy Infometrics, part of the reason the recent surge hit record levels is a backlog of people travelling abroad after delaying their plans due to travel restrictions and uncertainty amid the pandemic.

Among them is Joshua Scott, who weathered the pandemic in Wellington, then decided to move to the UK. The prospect of European adventures and a larger city beckoned, and the 29-year-old settled in east London last year, and found a job in healthcare.

The shift was made easier by the number of New Zealanders making a similar move. “I haven’t really made new friends here, beyond getting to people that I sort of knew from Wellington,” he says.

But much of the record flow out of New Zealand, according to Cooper and Kiernan, is also due to the growing attraction of Australia. As New Zealand inches out a recent recession, many citizens have a perception that the cost of living is lower and salaries higher in Australia, says Keirnan, which might lead to more permanent shifts.

“It’s all very heavily in favour of people getting across the Tasman, because the grass looks a lot greener,” he says.

Emily Partridge is one of those who recently left New Zealand in search of opportunity. The 26-year-old, who grew up in Dunedin, made a professional calculation when the clothing company she worked for was sold to new owners.

“I was working in a relatively small industry in a small country,” she says. “Looking into the future five or 10 years, I’d think: I’m not sure how much growth there is down the line.”

She decided earlier this year to move to Sydney, where she works for a perfume brand.

“In New Zealand, you could either work for a cool company and get paid quite poorly, or you could work a job that’s less exciting but pays well. In Australia, because the economy is better, I can do both of those things.”

Fears New Zealanders won’t return

Maia Vieregg, a 26-year-old geologist, graduated university last year and struggled to find work in Wellington or elsewhere in the country. And when several conservative parties displaced New Zealand’s former progressive government at the last election, she felt “cynical and hopeless” about New Zealand’s future.

She had never planned to go overseas, but the combination pushed her to consider new options. In January, Vieregg moved to Newcastle – a couple of hours’ north of Sydney – where she found a job with a mining company that paid much better than anything she had seen at home. She has found Australia difficult to adjust to.

“New Zealand is a quite down-to-earth place,” she says, compared with Australia’s materialism. She plans to eventually return home – but does not expect that to happen any time soon.

Cooper worries that outflow might worsen an already severe skills shortage in the country.

“The record numbers of Kiwis leaving are not the desperate and dateless. They’re the young, skilled people,” he says.

“These are people who are well qualified, with good skills. It’s hard to attract the highly skilled people we need to replace the ones leaving.”

Kiernan agrees. “If we’re not able to keep people here because the economy isn’t going well and the cost of living is too high, it does reflect pretty poorly on our economic situation.”

For many of the young travellers, the pull of having children will probably be the driver to bring them home. Partridge does not expect to return to New Zealand unless she decides to have children, while Scott will also head back when he’s ready to start a family.

Frame, meanwhile, says: “What might bring me back is that feeling of missing my family, or a new chapter of my life starting. Or just feeling homesick for the country and the smallness of it.”

In the meantime, she does not even need to return to New Zealand to get a taste of home.

“There’s so many New Zealanders here, it’s kind of ridiculous,” Frame says. “Bumping into people from Wellington here is almost an everyday event.”

Rishi Sunak has indicated that young people might face restrictions on access to finance or driving licences if they refuse to do national service, as he faced a TV quizzing from voters.

Asked during a BBC Question Time special what sanctions people could face for declining to take part in the Conservative policy of compulsory national service for all 18-year-olds, the prime minister pointed to “driving licences, or the access to finance, all sorts of other things”.

Questioned on whether this could mean denying young people bank cards, he replied: “There’s lot of different models around Europe.”

In his half-hour slot on the show, following Keir Starmer, Ed Davey and John Swinney, the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National party leaders, Sunak was also repeatedly challenged on why the public should trust the Tories after 14 sometimes chaotic years in office.

He received shouts of “shame” after refusing to say he would keep Britain in the European convention on human rights.

He was also challenged on revelations about alleged betting on the general election date, saying he was “incredibly angry” about the issue. .

The prime minister was asked why Brexit was “absent” from the current Conservative manifesto, a question which prompted applause from the audience in York.

Pressed on NHS waiting lists, he conceded that the government “haven’t made as much progress as I would like” but insisted things were improving. Asked if this had convinced him, the questioner replied: “No.” Another audience member, a doctor, then attacked Sunak over his NHS plans, saying: “People are suffering.”

The sceptical tone was set by the first question to Sunak, which noted the quick succession of five Tory prime ministers, including Liz Truss’s six weeks in office: “I am asking if you would confess to us tonight even just a small amount of embarrassment to be leading the Conservative party?”

Sunak insisted people should judge him on his own record, but was then asked why young people should trust him given the “shenanigans with the Tory party”. Fiona Bruce, hosting the show, said: “There’s a bit of a theme emerging.”

In his half-hour slot before Sunak’s, Starmer was also asked a series of tricky questions, with one audience member calling out “all of the backtracking on policies from Labour”.

Starmer gave a bullish response, saying tough decisions were needed, characterising one as being between reducing NHS waiting lists and removing student tuition fees.

“They are political choices,” he said, calling himself “a commonsense politician” and adding: “I’m telling you what they are before the election, so people can make their mind up.”

The Labour leader faced a grilling over whether he was being sincere when he praised Jeremy Corbyn during the 2019 election as someone who would make a “great” prime minister.

After deflecting the question by saying he did not expect Labour to win in 2019, as he has done before, Starmer said: “I was campaigning for the Labour party, I was a Labour politician.”

Pressed by Bruce for a yes or no answer about whether he meant it, Starmer indicated he believed Corbyn would have been better than his Conservative opponent, saying: “Look what we got – Boris Johnson.”

Asked about transgender rights and differences within the Labour party over the issue, Starmer stressed that he wanted to bring the public together on divisive issues. He contrasted this with Sunak’s decision to make a “trans joke” in parliament, winning applause.

Davey, the first leader to be grilled, faced audience opprobrium over his party’s role in the 2010-15 coalition government, with one audience member winning applause by accusing the Lib Dem leader of having “enabled Cameron’s and Osborne’s austerity”.

Another questioner prompted applause by asking how young people could trust the Lib Dems when they had broken a pledge over introducing tuition fees.

Davey conceded that he was “not proud” of some of the policies enacted, saying that one lesson he had learned from the coalition period was that in 2010 his party “promised what we couldn’t deliver”.

Similarly, Swinney was asked about the succession of recent scandals for his party, with one questioner saying it had “destroyed itself from the top down”. The SNP leader said he realised his party had to “rebuild the trust of people in Scotland”.

He was also pressed on whether the SNP would continue to push for independence if it did not achieve a majority of Scottish Westminster seats, a question he somewhat dodged.

Federal authorities have raided a home belonging to the mayor of Oakland, California, as part of an investigation that included a search of at least two other houses, officials said on Thursday.

The raid took place on Thursday morning, when FBI agents carried 80 boxes out of a four-bedroom home that property records link to Sheng Thao, who is serving her first term as the city’s mayor.

Details about the nature of the raid and investigation remain thin. In a statement to the Guardian, an FBI spokesperson confirmed the bureau had conducted “court-authorized law enforcement activity” but declined to provide further information.

Agents also conducted searches about 3 miles (5km) to the south at two homes owned by members of the politically influential Duong family that owns the recycling company Cal Waste Solutions, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The firm has been investigated over campaign contributions to Thao and other elected city officials, the local news outlet Oaklandside reported in 2020.

One of the properties is owned by Andy Duong and the other is connected to David and Linda Duong, according to records cited by the Chronicle.

Thao, 38, assumed office in January 2023 after a stint on the Oakland city council. She campaigned for mayor on a progressive platform that championed her experiences with homelessness and pledged to address Oakland’s ongoing struggles with housing and crime.

Thao has faced criticism since taking office from some residents who remain frustrated with crime levels in the East Bay city and is likely to face a recall vote in November.

Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge who has come under fire for her handling of classified document charges against Donald Trump, ignored the advice of more senior colleagues to decline the case and pass it to another jurist, it has been reported.

Two senior judges on the Florida bench urged Cannon to defer when it was randomly assigned to her last June, in part due to a perception that she was biased in Trump’s favour because of her actions after the allegations against him of illegally retaining sensitive government documents first came to light.

According to the New York Times, Cannon – who was appointed to the federal bench by Trump – rejected the advice and kept the case, in which the former president faces charges being prosecuted by the special counsel Jack Smith.

She has since issued a series of widely criticised rulings that have had the effect of delaying the trial, playing into Trump’s legal strategy of holding the case at bay until after November’s presidential election, when he could be elected president once again and be in a position to instruct the Department of Justice to drop the charges.

Her rulings have drawn the scorn of Trump’s former White House counsel, Ty Cobb, who this month described as “dangerous and incendiary” Cannon’s refusal to grant a gag order request from Smith against Trump.

Smith had asked for the order after the former president falsely alleged that the FBI was “locked and loaded” and ready to kill him and his family when officers entered his Mar-a-Lago home to retrieve a trove of documents in 2022. In fact, the raid had been agreed with Trump’s lawyers in advance and timed to take place when he would not be present.

The attempt to persuade Cannon to step aside was reportedly prompted by her actions after the FBI seized the documents – when she intervened on Trump’s side after he had filed suit claiming they were his personal property, appointing a special master to review them before prosecutors had a chance to see them.

This ruling was later reversed by the 11th court of appeals in Atlanta, which issued a rebuke of Cannon’s judgment, saying she had no authority to bar investigators from seeing the documents.

The argument that this episode was sufficient reason for Cannon to pass on the case was reportedly put forward by Cecilia Altonaga, the chief judge of Florida’s southern district.

Another unnamed judge was said to have put a different line of reasoning to her – that it would be better to have the case transferred to a jurist based closer to the district’s busiest courthouse in Miami, which had a facility to store the classified documents and where Trump had initially been indicted.

Since Cannon rejected entreaties to defer the case to another judge, a secure facility to store the documents has since been built at taxpayers’ expense in the courthouse where she presides at Fort Pierce, around two hours’ drive north of Miami.

“England, England, It’s Never ­Coming Home.” The chant from the ­Denmark support – to the tune of ­Yellow Submarine – had been heard outside the stadium in the hours before kick-off and it would reverberate inside it ­during a highly stressful 90 minutes. On this evidence, it was the understatement of Euro 2024 so far.

Gareth Southgate can highlight the point, which moved England closer to the job-done territory of qualification for the last 16. It must be said there is precious little jeopardy around that. Who exactly does not advance?

The jeopardy was to be found in the England performance. They might have nicked the win, Phil Foden hitting a post in the second half; a few other assorted flickers. But, equally, they might have lost because ­Denmark had their chances. There was a last-ditch quality to England’s defending and when Pierre-Emile Højbjerg shaped a curler for the far corner in the 85th minute, England’s hearts were in their mouths. Fortunately, the shot was off target.

England lacked structure and progressive patterns in midfield, progressive patterns, with all three of Southgate’s starters – Trent Alexander-Arnold, Declan Rice and Jude Bellingham – enduring difficult games. The manager raised eyebrows when he withdrew his front three of Bukayo Saka, Harry Kane and Foden on 70 minutes but the first two could not complain. Is Kane fully fit? Foden was bright enough. Jarrod Bowen, Ollie Watkins and Eberechi Eze brought something in their places.

For England, the control was not there and nor was the belief. They looked edgy, the pressure weighing heavily. The worst thing that could be said was they looked less than the sum of their vaunted parts. The hope had been when Kane put them ahead that they could settle but they did not. Southgate had demanded care with the passing. It did not happen. It was horrible to see how poor they were in this department.

After the 1-0 win over Serbia on Sunday, which featured a second-half retreat, it was a backwards step for England, Denmark good value for the draw, which they secured with Morten Hjulmand’s scorching 30-yard drive just after the half-hour. The hope remains that England can put their problems behind them and grow into a tournament that they started as one of the favourites. Who was buying that in Frankfurt?

England were ragged at the outset, making errors, so many loose passes. There was a lack of cohesion when it mattered on the ball while many of the players had problems with the turf, which cut up noticeably.

Kyle Walker was one of them, ­slipping over twice in the early ­running, rolling his ankle on the second occasion, which looked bad. Fortunately, he was able to continue, changing his boots before he returned to the pitch. Walker would be key to the move for the breakthrough goal.

Quite how Victor Kristiansen, the Denmark left wing-back, was unaware of Walker stealing up on his outside was a mystery. Maybe it was because any shouts from ­teammates were impossible to hear amid the remorseless din under the closed roof of an excellent venue.

Kristiansen just did not see him as the Dane pondered a backpass and, when Walker robbed him, England felt the surge of possibility. Their luck was in, Walker’s low cross, seemingly intended for Foden, deflecting first off Jannik Vestergaard and then Andreas Christensen to break perfectly for Kane. It was a done deal at that point.

Denmark did not panic. They had given up a couple of flickers at 0-0, Foden slipping away from Højbjerg after a Walker cutback only to shoot wildly; Kane seeing a shot blocked after Rice had won the ball high up. But it was Denmark who looked the more cohesive.

It was worrying to see how much space they were able to enjoy, ­England’s midfield looking open against the ball. The pressing ­simply did not click. Denmark pushed, with England forced to defend with a degree of desperation.

There were an alarming number of situations where England had no options on the ball and Kane was guilty of trying to force a crossfield pass from the left inside his own half for the Denmark equaliser. It went straight to Kristiansen and when he moved it to Hjulmand, he unleashed his rocket, watching the ball glance in off Jordan Pickford’s right-hand post. The power and precision were extraordinary.

Foden would slice past a couple of challengers on 41 minutes only to ignore Kane and shoot weakly and England were the happier to hear the half-time whistle.

Southgate made a move on 54 minutes, introducing Conor Gallagher for Alexander-Arnold, whose performance will deepen the debate about the balance of the England midfield with him in it. Before the Liverpool player departed, he had pumped a long ball forward for Saka, which the winger almost made something of, waiting for the bounce and looping a header just off target.

England sought greater intensity, Gallagher helping, although he would tread a fine line after being booked for a stamp on Christensen. Foden almost scored with his best moment, a couple of touches followed by a rasping low drive from distance that rattled the upright.

Southgate made a triple change and Watkins got on to a Bellingham pass and forced a save from Kasper Schmeichel. The closing stages were frantic, Marc Guéhi dispossessed by the substitute Alexander Bah after a bad Rice pass but he raced back to make a crucial tackle. From the corner, Christensen went close and so did Højbjerg shortly afterwards. England got away with it.

The UK’s most hazardous nuclear site, Sellafield, has pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to cybersecurity failings brought by the industry regulator.

Lawyers acting for Sellafield told Westminster magistrates’ court on Thursday that cybersecurity requirements were “not sufficiently adhered to for a period” at the vast nuclear waste dump in Cumbria.

The charges relate to information technology security offences spanning a four-year period from 2019 to 2023. It emerged in March that the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) intended to prosecute Sellafield for technology security offences.

Late last year the Guardian’s Nuclear Leaks investigation revealed a catalogue of IT failings at the site dating back several years.

Sellafield pleaded guilty to a charge that it had failed to “ensure that there was adequate protection of sensitive nuclear information on its information technology network”, the Financial Times reported.

The Guardian reported last year that the site systems had been hacked by groups linked to Russia and China in December last year, embedding sleeper malware that could lurk and be used to spy or attack systems. At the time, Sellafield said it did not have evidence of a successful cyber-attack.

Paul Greaney KC, acting for Sellafield, told the court: “It is important to emphasise there was not and has never been a successful cyber-attack on Sellafield.”

Greaney added that Sellafield’s systems were now robust and said media reports of hacks were “false”.

An ONR spokesperson said: “We acknowledge that Sellafield Limited has pleaded guilty to all charges.

“There is no evidence that any vulnerabilities have been exploited,” the spokesperson said, adding that due to ongoing legal proceedings the ONR could not offer further detail at this time.

Sentencing is expected to take place on 8 August.

The site has the largest store of plutonium in the world and is a sprawling rubbish dump for nuclear waste from weapons programmes and decades of atomic power generation.

The Guardian investigation revealed a string of IT issues, including concerns about external contractors being able to plug memory sticks into its computer system while unsupervised.

The investigation found problems had been known by senior figures at the nuclear site for at least a decade, according to a report dated from 2012, which warned there were “critical security vulnerabilities” that needed to be addressed urgently.

Sellafield’s computer servers were deemed so insecure that the problem was nicknamed Voldemort after the Harry Potter villain, according to a government official familiar with the ONR investigation and IT failings at the site, because it was so sensitive and dangerous.

At the time, Sellafield said that “all of our systems and servers have multiple layers of protection”.

“Critical networks that enable us to operate safely are isolated from our general IT network, meaning an attack on our IT system would not penetrate these,” a spokesperson said.

Britain’s public spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, launched an investigation into risks and costs at Sellafield earlier this year.