Isobel Chetwood moved to her dream home on her birthday just over a decade ago. As she wound up a 40-year career in the NHS as a GP practice manager in Stockport, Greater Manchester, she was keen to return to her roots in Cheshire. She settled in a comfortable house in the quiet village of Plumley.

Chetwood, 68, lives alone. When she moved in, she found a gardener (“I don’t do dirt down me fingernails,” she says, laughing). He made her a raised bed for growing strawberries, alongside a fence that divided her garden from her neighbour’s. “It was beautiful out there,” she says.

All was well until – a little over two years ago – alien shoots began rising like spears from the soil around her strawberry plants, having somehow found a way through the heavy railway sleepers and bricks used to build the bed.

The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution on charges of retaining classified documents agreed on Monday to expunge from the indictment a paragraph about an episode where the former president waved around a classified document at his Bedminster club in New Jersey.

The US district judge Aileen Cannon ruled she would strike the paragraph because Trump was not charged with a crime for the conduct it described and would be unfairly prejudicial if a jury later saw it at trial.

Cannon’s ruling is notable because it could indicate how she will rule on future motions by Trump to suppress evidence as he attempts to limit the scope of the evidence prosecutors can introduce against him – and thereby dramatically undercut the case.

The move to strike the paragraph was unusual, legal experts said.

Cannon ruled that the passage should be expunged relying in part on a federal rule that says evidence of “other crimes” cannot be used against a defendant to suggest bad character, without addressing the second part of that rule that allows it in the case that it shows proof of motive.

The prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, had argued that they included the passage precisely because it was allowed under the second part of the rule but Cannon took issue with the fact that Trump had not been charged for the conduct it described.

The passage in question – paragraph 36 – uses vague terms but describes Trump in 2021 waving around a classified map of Afghanistan while criticizing the US withdrawal to his now 2024 presidential campaign chief Susie Wiles, according to sources familiar with the matter.

“In August or September 2021, when he was no longer president, Tump met in his office at The Bedminster Club with a representative of his political action committee (the ‘PAC Representative’). During the meeting, Trump commented that an ongoing military operation was not going well,” the paragraph said.

“Trump showed the PAC Representative a classified map of Country B and told the PAC Representative that he should not be showing the map to the PAC Representative and to not get too close. The PAC Representative did not have a security clearance or any need-to-know classified information about the military operation.”

The move by Cannon came in a broader 14-page decision, where she denied Trump’s request to have the obstruction counts dismissed.

For the most part, Cannon wrote that she was rejecting Trump’s motion because his complaints were factual matters that should be raised as part of his defense arguments at trial and could not form the basis to dismiss an indictment, as opposed to matters of law, which can be adjudicated pre-trial.

Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist who has served nearly 50 years in prison for the killing of two FBI agents, was due to have his first parole hearing since 2009 on Monday, his lawyer said.

Peltier, 79, has maintained that he did not kill the FBI special agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Advocates, including figures such as the late Nelson Mandela and a former prosecutor and judge involved in his case, have long said he should be freed because of what they call legal irregularities in his trial.

But in letter send to the top federal parole officer, Christopher Wray, the FBI director, called Peltier a “remorseless killer” who should never be freed.

“Throughout the years, Peltier has never accepted responsibility or shown remorse,” Wray wrote to Patricia Cushwa, acting chair of the US Parole Commission, on 7 June. “He is wholly unfit for parole.”

Peltier was to meet with a US Parole Commission federal agent inside the Coleman federal complex in Florida, according to Peltier’s attorney, the former federal judge Kevin Sharp.

The US Parole Commission did not return requests for comment.

Peltier, who was a member of the American Indian Movement in the 1970s, has said he was among a group of Native American men who fired on the two FBI agents who arrived on the Pine Ridge reservation in June 1976, in search of a fugitive. Peltier has said that while he fired, he was not the person who killed the agents.

Two other Native American men who fired at the agents were tried in 1976 and found not guilty by reason of self-defense. Peltier fled to Canada before the trial. He was eventually extradited back to the US and tried separately in 1977, when he was found guilty.

Amnesty International has long championed Peltier’s case. Like others, they say that government prosecutors withheld critical evidence that would have been favorable to Peltier at trial and fabricated affidavits that painted him as guilty.

Since his conviction, a former prosecutor in his trial, a federal judge involved in an appeal, Pope Francis, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Coretta Scott King and multiple US senators, among others, have called for Peltier’s release.

Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International, wrote in letter to the US Parole Commission that granting parole on humanitarian grounds “is not only timely but a necessary measure in the interests of both justice and mercy”.

Rebecca Grossman, the California socialite who was found guilty of murder earlier this year for fatally striking two children with her car, was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.

A Los Angeles county judge on Monday ruled that Grossman should serve two 15-years-to-life sentences concurrently. She will also serve three years for fleeing the scene concurrently with her other sentences.

She had faced 34 years in prison for her role in the 2020 deaths of Mark Iskander, 11, and Jacob Iskander, eight.

In February, a jury found Grossman guilty of second-degree murder, gross vehicular manslaughter, and one felony count of hit-and-run driving resulting in death. The 60-year-old had recently sought a new trial, but her request was denied last week.

The sentencing brings to a close the years-long legal saga around the deaths of the Iskander brothers. Grossman, a cofounder of the Grossman Burn Foundation, was speeding in her Mercedes SUV through the community of Westlake Village on 29 September 2020 when she fatally struck the two boys at 73mph. The children had been traveling through a crosswalk on scooters and skates with their family.

During the highly publicized trial, prosecutors said that Grossman had been driving behind Scott Erickson, a retired Dodgers pitcher who she was allegedly romantically involved with. The pair had been drinking at a nearby restaurant before the collision. Moments before she hit the Iskander brothers, she had been traveling at speeds of 81mph, far above the 45mph speed limit, the prosecution argued.

“She acted with disregard for human life,’ a prosecutor said during the trial.

Grossman’s defense team had argued that the boys were first struck by another car, and that her role in the incident was an accident rather than murder.

Prosecutors had asked that Grossman spend the rest of her life in prison, serving 34 years to life. They said her actions had shown a lack of remorse and that she had refused to take responsibility. “She has lived a life of privilege and clearly felt that her wealth and notoriety would buy her freedom,” prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum.

Grossman’s attorneys and supporters pointed to her work for the Grossman Burn Foundation, describing her as a “humanitarian”. Her lawyers asked for probation or a shorter prison term of about 12 years. In a letter to the judge, Grossman said she was not a murderer.

“My pain, my recognition of the pain the Iskanders suffer and the pain I watch my family endure, are punishments that I already suffer and will for the rest of my life,” she wrote.

The UN security council has adopted a resolution calling for Hamas to agree to a three-phase hostage-for-ceasefire proposal outlined by Joe Biden, the first time the body has endorsed a comprehensive peace deal to end the Gaza war.

A Hamas statement said the group welcomed the resolution, though it was not immediately clear if that meant the leadership in Gaza accepted the ceasefire plan.

The position of the Israeli government is also ambiguous. It has officially accepted the peace plan but the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has sought to distance himself from it, and his coalition has shifted to the right since the proposal was put forward.

Fourteen council members voted for Monday’s resolution, none against, and only Russia abstained on the US-drafted resolution which calls for an initial exchange of elderly, sick or women hostages for Palestinian detainees held by Israel in the course of an initial six-week ceasefire.

The ceasefire would evolve into a permanent end to hostilities and the release of all hostages in a second phase that would be negotiated by the two parties and US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators. A third phase would involve the launch of a major reconstruction effort.

The resolution calls on Hamas to accept the agreement and urges both parties “to fully implement its terms without delay and without condition”.

The US has been seeking UN endorsement for the proposal since it was unveiled by Biden on 31 May. It won the support of the Palestinian mission, with a clause saying that an initial six-week ceasefire would be extended as long as talks continued over a second phase.

The resolution said the US, Qatar and Egypt would “work to ensure negotiations keep going until all the agreements are reached and phase two is able to begin”.

A Palestinian presidential spokesperson, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said that the Palestinian Authority leadership would accept any resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza which preserved Palestinian territorial integrity.

Palestinian support for the US resolution made it much harder diplomatically for Russia or China to veto it. Since the start of the Gaza war in October, the security council has struggled to find consensus against a backdrop of deep polarisation. It has agreed on humanitarian resolution involving temporary ceasefires but this is the first time it has embraced a comprehensive peace.

“Over the past eight months this council has often faced divisions and the world has taken notice with understandable frustration,” the US envoy to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said after the vote. “But there’s another side to this story because today we adopted a fourth resolution on this conflict.

“Colleagues, today we voted for peace,” she declared.

The text stated that Israel had already accepted the ceasefire terms, though that claim is increasingly in question, as the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has made a string of sceptical comments on it, claiming that the US had only revealed parts of the plan, and insisting that any proposal for a lasting ceasefire without the complete destruction of Hamas’ military and governing capacity is a “non-starter”.

The resignation over the weekend of a centrist minister, Benny Gantz, has left Netanyahu even more dependent on far-right members of his coalition, who adamantly oppose the deal.

Hamas made positive comments when Biden first announced the deal, and said it welcomed the security council vote, but it has yet to give a formal response to the ceasefire proposal. The unusual show of relative unity by a deeply divided security council helps put pressure on both parties to strike an agreement, though both have shown themselves far more influenced by local constituencies and the personal interests of leaders, than by international public opinion.

Prospects for a hostage and ceasefire deal were significantly complicated by an Israeli raid in Gaza on Saturday to rescue four hostages, which killed 274 Palestinians.

One of the late changes made to the US draft resolution was designed to make it more palatable to Israel. It said the security council rejected any attempt to change the demographic or the geographical boundaries of Gaza, but it omits wording from the earlier version which specifically rejected the creation of a buffer zone around the coastal strip.

A council is trying to extend a controversial injunction against “persons unknown” to stop any future protests outside an oil terminal operated by Shell UK.

Lawyers for North Warwickshire borough council will argue in the high court on Tuesday that an interim injunction granted in 2022 should be made permanent to stop protests outside Kingsbury oil terminal in Tamworth.

The move comes as concerns are growing over the use of “persons unknown” injunctions, which Friends of the Earth says allow private companies to create bespoke public order laws that stifle peaceful protest.

The injunctions, which have begun appearing in the last two years, are taken out against unknown defendants to maximise the number of people who can be caught by them, even if they are unaware of the orders.

Sixteen people have already served time in jail for up to 85 days for breaching the interim civil injunction granted to the borough council in 2022 to protect the Kingsbury oil terminal, which is operated by Shell, along with Essar and Valero Energy Corporation, from the impact of demonstrations by Just Stop Oil.

More than 50 more people were arrested in September 2022 for breaching the injunction. Most were given two-year suspended sentences, six were jailed.

Those jailed included the retired GP Dr Sarah Benn and Sarah Webb. One hundred and twenty individuals are named on the injunction, as well as “persons unknown who are organising, participating in or encouraging others to participate in protests against the production and/or use of fossil fuels in the locality of the site known as Kingsbury oil terminal”.

The council, in its legal argument, denies it is using taxpayers’ money to protect a private oil company facility. It says it is seeking to make the injunction permanent in order to “protect the interests of the inhabitants of their area and those who work there and travel through it”.

The council cited the dangerous behaviour of some of the protesters in 2022, which included breaking into the terminal and tampering with pipework, while using electrical devices in the vicinity of potentially explosive oil fumes.

The local authority said there were no protests at the site now, but argued that there remained a high risk of disruptive and dangerous protests at the terminal if a final injunction was not granted.

None of the defendants are legally represented at the three-day hearing, which begins on Tuesday. Webb, who spent 16 days in Foston Hall women’s prison in Derby in 2022 for twice breaking the injunction, intends to ask the judge if she can speak. She said: “I knowingly broke the NWBC injunction twice in 2022. These were not selfish acts, but acts of peaceful protest.

“I was sent to a prison that at the time was deemed the most violent women’s prison in the country. Inside prison, I was physically assaulted by the prison guards.

“As a result of being sent to prison, I have lost my career as a children’s special educational needs tutor. I now have no income. Most of us named defendants broke the injunction in an attempt to protect millions of lives, and we were sent to prison as a result of our peaceful protest.”

She said she feared that the council would seek its costs from her and the other named individuals.

Asked if they were going to apply for costs from the defendants, a spokesperson for North Warwickshire borough council declined to comment.

Friends of the Earth is challenging the use of injunctions against persons unknown in the European court of human rights. The environmental NGO says it is concerned over a “rapid and widespread” increase in use of the orders in recent years, amid a wider crackdown on environmental protest and the introduction of strict anti-protest laws in Britain.

Katie de Kauwe, a lawyer at Friends of the Earth, said: “Anti-protest injunctions are a confusing, opaque, parallel system of prohibitions that private companies and public authorities are using to create their own bespoke public order laws.”

“These measures have really gone under the radar,” she said. “People don’t realise how serious the issues are, given the penalties for a breach are so severe. ”

The UN rapporteur for environmental defenders has heavily criticised the draconian clampdown on the right to protest in England and Wales, including the use of civil injunctions, saying the measures are having a chilling impact on fundamental freedoms.

The new European parliament is on course to have more politicians from parties that deny climate science and fewer from parties that want to cut pollution faster.

The results of the four-day election, which are still being finalised, show sizeable gains for far-right parties and a drop in support for the Greens that has cost them about a quarter of their seats. It has raised fears that the EU is about to put the brakes on climate ambitions that have helped set pollution-cutting standards globally.

Sven Harmeling, the head of climate policy at the European branch of the campaign group Climate Action Network, said many of the far-right groups that won seats could be characterised as climate deniers that were not up to the task of solving the climate and energy crises. “However, European climate policy cannot be rolled back easily,” he said.

After the last elections, in 2019, the EU pledged to make Europe the world’s first climate-neutral continent by cutting pollution and protecting nature. Under the leadership of the centre-right commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and with the support of other centrist factions, it passed a raft of measures known as the Green Deal, most of which ultimately made it over the finish line after being watered down by politicians and member states.

The European far right, while deeply divided over cutting its ties to its fascist roots, has mostly stood together in its opposition to the Green Deal. But its members have treated climate policy as a side issue – one that scores easy wins in culture wars but that is not worth pushing in election campaigns based on immigration, identity and the economy. Their supporters generally accept the science of climate change and vote based on their other policy positions.

Analysts say far-right gains are unlikely to unravel Green Deal policies put in place over the past five years but may dampen support for bringing the continent’s policies in line with what scientists say is needed to stop the planet from heating by 1.5C (2.7F) above preindustrial levels.

Vincent Hurkens, the lead on EU politics at the climate thinktank E3G, said: “Despite a lot of the attention going to the far-right gains, a vast majority of Europeans still voted for parties in the political centre. It is up to the centre right, liberals and social democrats [to decide] how much power and influence they allow the far right, and their ideas, to have on the future of the European Green Deal. Choices by these political families in the upcoming weeks will be decisive for Europe’s capacity to act against dramatic impacts and risks of climate change.”

The policies that have attracted the most ire from the right are those that affect voters directly – from phasing out combustion engine cars to in effect banning new gas boilers – and those that increase short-term costs for farmers. The centre-right European People’s party, which is projected to have increased its seats, had already begun to backtrack on support for some Green Deal measures in the outgoing parliament.

The next commission president is likely to be under even less pressure from the Greens, who are projected to have shed 20 of their 72 seats. The party took big losses in Germany and France but had small wins in the Nordic EU countries. Among the under-30s in Germany – traditionally seen as champions of climate action – exit polls showed the Greens shedding votes as the far right and newer parties gained them, a shift that could sound alarm bells for progressive parties that rely on younger voters in other countries holding elections this year.

Jessica Haak, a political scientist at Hamburg University, said there was no single explanation for Green losses but that a shift in the perceived importance of the climate crisis partly explained the trend in western Europe.

“In previous European parliamentary elections, climate protests had pushed environmental concerns to the forefront of the political agenda across most of the EU,” she said. “Although voters in some western European countries still consider climate issues important, they prioritised economic concerns, migration and war.”

Big battles remain over existing climate policy proposals. The EU plans to set a legally binding emissions target for 2040 under the next commission, while European environment ministers will vote on Monday on the fate of a proposed law to protect nature that has faced a huge backlash from farming lobbies.

European leaders are also still struggling to respond to the vast subsidies pouring into green industries in big economies such as the US and China.

Matthias Buck, the Europe director at the climate thinktank Agora Energiewende, said the election underlined the importance of affordable energy, security, safe jobs and competitiveness. He said responding to this would mean speeding up investments in clean energy and developing a robust industrial strategy that provided certainty to companies investing in a climate-neutral future.

“The past five years have firmly established the Green Deal as the EU’s growth strategy on its path to climate neutrality,” Buck said. “The main task for the next five years is to make sure that citizens and businesses fully benefit from the transition.”

When temperatures creep past 90F in Oakland, California, the mini air-conditioning units in the classrooms at Melrose Leadership Academy can’t keep pace. So the middle schoolers in MLA’s chapter of the climate justice group Youth vs Apocalypse started doing some extra homework: they researched, planned and proposed installing a heat pump on campus.

Heating buildings accounts for 10% of CO₂ emissions globally, according to the International Energy Agency. Heat pumps have become an increasingly popular clean-energy technology because they can both heat and cool using electricity, reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The students proposed using a portion of a $735m school-district bond to invest in a long-term solution that would also shrink their carbon footprint. After a campaign marked by persistence, the teens, first profiled by the local news outlet the Oaklandside, succeeded. Now, their efforts have become a blueprint for what the district wants to implement at other schools.

Augie Balquist, age 13: It started last year when it was very, very hot and we really didn’t have any AC. We had these mini AC units, but the power would go out because there were too many of them going at once. It wasn’t very practical. And the only heating we had was our gas boilers. We realized that they’re producing so much carbon that’s really hurting the environment.

I went about researching and then made a presentation about heat pumps. We started off with talking about the Oakland Unified school district’s action resolution they made in 2020 that says we need to achieve 100% clean electricity and phase out the use of fossil fuels. We thought that the district should honor the action resolutions they had made.

Next was our estimate of just how much gas our boiler was burning: 32 metric tons of CO₂ every year. We also explained how heat pumps work.

Our estimated cost was $5m out of the school’s bond money of $32m. It was going to be more expensive than just putting in a new AC. And our boiler was just put in recently, so they didn’t want to pull it out because it was so new.

Then we wrote up a petition.

Jayden Tern, 14: We went to all the classrooms and presented, and we got 250 signatures. It was basically the entire middle school, and we got a bunch of elementary schoolers.

Yuji Hong, 14: We spoke at community meetings that were held in our cafeteria, where parents, staff, students and school board members could discuss the bond money and how to use it for the school.

Lyra Modersbach, 13: After that, we went to school board meetings. There was a lot more pushback there than at the community meetings. One of the board members told us to go back and learn more and stop trying to talk about things we didn’t know, which was completely untrue, because we had done a lot of research to present to them.

Augie: I think it was just because we’re young, and they assumed that we didn’t know anything.

Juliette Sanchez, 13: We persisted and made sure we showed up to pretty much every meeting, talked about it and showed that we put research into what we were saying.

Augie: We went to probably 10 meetings. Then the school board invited us to visit the office of the architects designing the upgrade for the school building. They showed us the cost of different heat pump options and their efficiency relative to gas boilers.

One really important thing they told us is our school’s exact carbon output for the past couple years, which was way more than we estimated. It was the equivalent of somewhere around 250 transatlantic flights of carbon every year. We also learned that the heat pump really didn’t cost that much more than keeping our gas boiler, which requires a lot of upkeep.

A lot of the pushback had been people saying there was not enough money. But the architects told us that there was enough funding.

Someone from the district who was hesitant at first ended up supporting us at the very end to convey to everybody else how good heat pumps are.

Lyra: There was a final Zoom meeting with the project advisory committee, and Augie and I were there to inform the district about what we’d learned in the meeting with the architects. When we learned the campaign had succeeded and we would get the heat pump, it was exciting.

Juliette: I learned that no matter our age, we can make a difference through what we do, and we can use our voice to impact the world in a positive way.

Augie: Sometimes it’s difficult, but you’ve just got to keep persisting and eventually you can do whatever you put your heart to.

Lucy Downed, 13: That’s why I was interested in Youth vs Apocalypse, because we care about the climate and how our actions affect others.

Lyra: Something I hope politicians do is really look at what they’re doing to the world and start doing what they need to do as fast as they can, because we don’t have much time and we need to do everything we can at this point.

Augie: They should listen to the young people’s voices, because we’re the people who are going to be growing up with these problems. If you listen to young people, we can provide solutions that are going to help everyone in the long term.

• My DIY climate hack is a series about everyday people across the US using their own ingenuity to tackle the climate crisis in their neighborhoods, homes and backyards. If you would like to share your story, email us at [email protected]

Microplastic pollution has been found in all human semen samples tested in a study, and researchers say further research on the potential harm to reproduction is “imperative”.

Sperm counts in men have been falling for decades and 40% of low counts remain unexplained, although chemical pollution has been implicated by many studies.

The 40 semen samples were from healthy men undergoing premarital health assessments in Jinan, China. Another recent study found microplastics in the semen of six out of 10 healthy young men in Italy, and another study in China found the pollutants in half of 25 samples.

Recent studies in mice have reported that microplastics reduced sperm count and caused abnormalities and hormone disruption.

Research on microplastics and human health is moving quickly and scientists appear to be finding the contaminants everywhere. The pollutants were found in all 23 human testicle samples tested in a study published in May.

Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood, placentas and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people’s bodies. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory.

Millions of tonnes of plastic waste are dumped in the environment and much is broken down into microplastics. These have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. People are known to consume the tiny particles via food and water as well as breathing them in.

“As emerging research increasingly implicates microplastic exposure as a potential factor impacting human health, understanding the extent of human contamination and its relation to reproductive outcomes is imperative,” said Ning Li, of Qingdao University in China, and colleagues.

“[Mouse studies] demonstrate a significant decrease in viable sperm count and an uptick in sperm deformities, indicating that microplastic exposure may pose a chronic, cumulative risk to male reproductive health.”

The research, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, detected eight different plastics. Polystyrene, used for packaging, was most common, followed by polyethylene, used in plastic bags, and then PVC.

The particles may be causing inflammation in tissue, as air pollution particles do, or the chemicals in the plastics could cause harm. In March, doctors warned of potentially life-threatening effects after finding a substantially raised risk of stroke, heart attack and earlier death in people whose blood vessels were contaminated with microscopic plastics.

Luigi Montano, of the University of Rome, who led the Italian study, said: “Intervention is necessary to stop the exponential increase in plastic waste.” More than 180 nations are negotiating a UN treaty to regulate plastic and cut pollution.

“In particular, there is a need for action to avoid additional permanent damage to the planet and the human body,” Montano said. “If microplastic pollution impacts the critical reproductive process, as evidenced in particular by the decline in seminal quality recorded in recent decades globally, it may prove to be [even worse] for our species in the not too distant future.”

In a down-to-earth suburb of Catania on Sicily’s east coast, smoke billows from street stands selling traditional grilled horse meat, and local youngsters gather around kiosks selling the region’s unique handmade drink, seltz limone e sale (seltzer with lemon and sea salt). It is here that a family of charismatic ex-fishers have opened a seafood restaurant that bravely challenges long-held regional conventions.

The Salamone family sell all the usual local specialities in their slick new business “La Fish”, such as Sicily’s famous swordfish, sardines and tuna. However, the feature of tonight’s tasting menu – attracting customers who range from local families to food connoisseurs – is a relative newcomer to these shores and to Sicilian tables: the Atlantic blue crab.

Inside the restaurant, about half a dozen blue crabs are displayed on a large fish counter alongside an array of other seafood. These crabs, with their striking blue claws and olive-green shells, are creating a crisis for Italy. Originating from the western Atlantic Ocean, they have no natural predators in the Mediterranean and feed on young clams, disrupting traditional shellfish harvests and affecting Italy’s position as one of the top clam producers in the world.

So some Italians, like the Salamones, have adapted by incorporating these crustaceans into their cuisine.

“I love the blue crab,” says chef Mario Contadino, who is in charge of tonight’s dinner at La Fish, citing its delicious and sweet taste that, he says, adds depth to any dish. To entice local people to try this alien critter, he serves it on sticky sushi rice with onions, bell peppers, garlic, tomatoes and coriander, adorned with vibrant, edible yellow flowers.

He says people in Catania can be “closed-minded” when it comes to trying unfamiliar ingredients such as the blue crab. “It’s possible people may think to themselves, ‘What is this?’ or say, ‘Oh no, I don’t like this.’” But he believes the taste will speak for itself and win over even the most sceptical diners. “That first bite does not lie.”

Francesco Tiralongo, a marine biologist at the University of Catania, has documented the explosive population growth of the blue crab. He explains how rising water temperatures in the Mediterranean, have made Sicilian waters a welcoming environment for such alien species. “Changing fish consumption habits in Sicily to include alien species like the blue crab is a necessary response to climate change and current ecological challenges,” he says.

The blue crab can also now frequently be found in Catania’s famous fish market behind the city’s Piazza del Duomo. On a warm day, the market bustles with activity – a cacophony of sounds, sights, and smells. Fishers, traders, local people and tourists mingle in narrow alleys, stepping over black cobblestones covered in bright crimson blood, as fishmongers cut large chunks of silvery swordfish and tuna.

On a small wooden table, holding a large knife next to buckets filled with crustaceans and fish, is Rosario, a local fishmonger who has been selling blue crab for the past few months. “I sell it because people like it,” he says. Having started with just a few kilos of blue crab a day, he now averages sales of about 20 kilos daily.

Rosario says the traditional crustaceans he used to sell are not so readily available, but he gets “more and more of these blue crabs” from the fishers he buys from.

Though it may be an unfamiliar ingredient in Sicily, he says it helps that blue crabs are no different from the many varieties of crustaceans the Catanese eat as a staple part of their diet. “Here in Sicily, we eat fish every day.”

“People are getting to know it,” Rosario says, adding that they seem to really like its delicate and tender taste. Most of his customers prefer to eat blue crabs with spaghetti in tomato sauce, while he prefers to eat his crab boiled. “A very good dish,” he says.

For now, Rosario only sells the Atlantic blue crab. He says other invasive species such as scorpion fish, lionfish and the silver-cheeked toadfish are too strange for his customers, adding: “They would not eat them.”

The island needs a new way to deal with the interlopers, as the rising numbers of blue crabs are now causing serious economic pain to local Sicilian fishers, who are already facing a crisis over dwindling fish populations. Alberto Pulizzi, the director general of the fisheries department of the Sicilian regional government, says the crabs are destroying fishers’ nets and eating clams and mussels. These molluscs are highly prized in Italian dishes such as spaghetti alle vongole (pasta with clams).

Tommaso Salamone says the family’s major motivation for starting their restaurant a few months ago was to take a new approach to the invaders, presenting them as something desirable. In other words – if you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em. He says: “We are making these dishes with blue crab to show people that anything can be edible.”

This report was supported by Journalismfund Europe