An American man has died after being electrocuted in a jacuzzi at a resort in Mexico, local officials have confirmed.

The 43-year-old man, identified by police as Jorge N, died after being electrocuted in a jacuzzi he was sharing with a woman. The woman, identified by police as Lizeth N, was taken to the US for medical treatment for her life-threatening injuries.

The incident happened at a complex of private condominiums at the resort city of Puerto Peñasco, in the Mexican state of Sonora.

The death of the man and the injuries suffered by the woman were “due to a possible electric discharge when both were inside the jacuzzi”, according to a social media post from the general prosecutor’s office of justice for the state of Sonora on Wednesday.

State officials said they were working to identify the cause of the shock. Video taken of the incident shows onlookers screaming in panic as they crowd around the jacuzzi, which is located near a beach. Someone is shown doing chest compressions on a person lying on the ground in the video.

The general prosecutor’s office of justice, known as La Fiscalía General de Justicia del Estado de Sonora (FGJES) in Mexico, is actively investigating the incident.

In a GoFundMe page set up by friends of Jorge, they wrote: “Our best friends have experienced a horrible accident. Jorge had a heart of gold and was always there for family and friends. The love they shared was one for ages. We are asking for your help to bring him home & help with medical expenses for her.”

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has reported 33 fatalities involving electrocutions in swimming pools and spas since 2002. If you think someone in the water is experiencing an electrical shock, the commission recommends immediately turning off all power and calling 911.

The American Red Cross recommends “using a fiberglass Shepherd’s crook/rescue hook, extend your reach to the victim and then follow these steps: Brace yourself on the pool deck and extend the Shepherd’s crook/rescue hook toward the victim. If the victim cannot grasp the Shepherd’s crook/rescue hook, use the loop to encircle the victim’s body and pull the victim, face-up, to the edge. Carefully remove the victim from the water”.

How often should you wash your clothes? Doctors don’t really know, but the decision is more cultural than medical, anyway. Worried about leaving the house in sweaty shirts or stained shorts, people often chuck clean clothes in the laundry basket after wearing them just once.

But the urge to avoid whiffy garments carries a climate cost that has largely been ignored. New research shows that feelings of disgust and shame encourage excessive clothes washing even among those who care about their carbon footprint.

Swedish scientists surveyed a representative sample of 2,000 people and found that when asked, in effect, to air their dirty laundry, their fear of being seen as unclean overpowered environmental identities.

When it comes to behaviours, “disgust simply wins out”, said Erik Klint, a researcher at Chalmers University of Technology, in Gothenburg, Sweden, and lead author of the study. “The study shows that the higher our sensitivity to disgust, the more we wash, regardless of whether we value our environmental identity highly.”

Klint and his colleague knew from previous research that many people do not link their laundry to the environment, despite washing machines draining energy and water. After seeing that studies to alter habits had mostly failed, the researchers decided to explore the societal dimensions that make people overwash clothes.

They found a high sensitivity to disgust, shame or violations of cleanliness norms was associated with frequent use of washing machines. They found no such effect for environmental beliefs.

The dilemma, the scientists concluded, is that the risk of societal pushback takes priority over abstract intentions such as reducing emissions.

Klint said disgust was an evolutionary trait used as a proxy for potential pathogens. “In practice this means that people intuitively must weigh an evolutionarily rooted driving force against a moral standpoint.”

Fast fashion has long been under fire from sustainably minded shoppers, but wasteful washing practices have so far escaped much attention. The average European household does four to five loads of laundry a week, and though the frequency of washing has stayed steady for 20 years, the size of the machines’ drums has grown. The share of devices that could hold 6kg rose from 2% of sales in 2004 to 64% in 2015, according to a report commissioned by the French environment agency.

While there are no hard rules about how often clothes should be washed, clothing manufacturers and fashion blogs generally recommend doing it less frequently – even if just to make the clothes last longer.

About 70% of clothes enter the washing machine with no visible stains, according to a survey commissioned by Unilever as part of a campaign to market a detergent suited to 15-minute wash cycles.

The extreme end of the no-wash movement – such as wearing the same pair of underpants for a week – is unlikely to pass the sniff test for most doctors. But other garments get the go-ahead. Wool jumpers and denim jeans top the list of items that last a long time before warranting a place in the laundry basket. (“Spot cleaning” – gently pressing a slightly soapy cloth on to a stain – can help spare an otherwise clean piece of clothing an unnecessary spin cycle.)

In one of the only studies that managed to change people’s behaviour, said Klint, researchers gave participants “excuse strategies” that addressed their initial fear of social exclusion. But when they stopped washing their clothes so often, they realised nobody noticed. “There’s a general consensus that people, at least in western countries, tend to wash clothes that others perceive as clean,” said Klint.

The environmental benefits of washing clothes less often are sizeable. A single laundry load of polyester clothes can discharge 700,000 microplastic fibres, according to a report from the European parliament’s research service.

Levi’s has estimated that consumers are responsible for more than a third of the lifetime climate impact of one pair of its 501 jeans. Washing the jeans after every 10 wears, instead of just a couple as is the norm in the US and UK, cut total water use by three-quarters.

Ian Walker, the head of the psychology school at Swansea University, who was not involved in the Swedish study, said it looked like “a solid piece of research [with] good methods” but added that self-reported data on habitual behaviours, such as washing machine use, was “notoriously problematic”.

He said the study provided a useful insight into the conflict between the environmental desire to run washing machines less often and feelings of disgust at rewearing clothes. “At a practical level, the study might help … people find ways better to reconcile these contrary desires, perhaps through messaging about how normal it is to rewear things, or about how little dirt or germs clothes typically pick up.”

Time seems to have stood still at Dennis Severs’ House. Its four-poster bed has been left unmade, half-empty glasses of wine sit on the table and breakfast has been only partly eaten. It’s as if its 18th-century residents have only just departed. Yet, astonishingly, these interiors were created in the 1980s, by an American with a vision of history drawn largely from watching British costume dramas on TV. The house, in the Spitalfields area of London, remains one of the city’s sublime eccentric gems – and it is about to evolve once more, with a new tour that tells the story of Severs himself and of the glorious queer lives of those who lived with him.

Severs was a blond Californian surfer boy fresh out of college when he arrived in London in 1967. It was there that he found the freedom to live openly as a gay man. With an inborn sense of theatricality and a well-tailored coachman’s outfit, Severs was a natural showman who hosted tours around London in an open carriage. After he spied the opportunity in 1979 to buy the then decrepit house for just £18,000, he moved in with little more than a bedroll, a candlestick and a chamber pot – then swiftly embarked upon a camp, do-it-yourself aesthetic, conjuring the interiors as his fantasia on historical themes.

From the moment he acquired his house, Severs opened it for tours. It did not matter that it was of no special historical significance because he just made stories up as he went along. He shepherded groups around by candlelight for up to three and a half hours while he grew more extravagant in his flights of fancy, seeking to evoke what he called “atmospheres”.

His improvised tales centred around the heteronormative fictional tale of the Jervis family – Huguenot silk weavers who, he explained, had lived there through three generations. He had no patience with participants who were less than rapturous: they were ejected on to the pavement and their money thrown into the street after them. Severs was an innovator, breaking new ground in employing poetic means to evoke the past. He acquired a cult following among creatives, including David Hockney and Derek Jarman, and high-status celebrities including Princess Margaret and Lady Bird Johnson.


The reputation of Dennis Severs’ House was forged by these tours, hosted from 1979 until 1999. Yet that was only one aspect of Severs’ life. He would host his heritage tours by day, then cruise leather bars and sex clubs by night. His house, then, served another function: as a steam-punk seduction machine. Anecdotes are still recounted of his legendary sex parties, including how he once entertained the entire male chorus of a famous ballet company.

Severs succumbed to Aids in 1999. No tours took place after that for more than 20 years. Then, when the house reopened after lockdown, I was commissioned to reimagine them and start again.

It was a formidable act to follow. The challenge was how to remain true to the spirit of Severs’ original tours but speak to an audience today. We live in a very different world now, and promenade or “immersive” theatre has evolved too. Drawing on some fragmentary sound recordings of Severs – and my personal experience of writing and directing plays at the Royal Court and National Theatre in the 80s and 90s – I devised a play script of 90 minutes entitled Dennis Severs’ Tour, which followed the same fictional narrative, only reinvented for our time.

Working at first with actor Joel Saxon, and then with two others, Lisa D’Agostino and Beko Wood, we explored what theatrical performers could bring to the experience. We soon discovered that not only could they embody the spirits of each of the fictional residents of the house that Severs invented, they also brought their own skills, in particular a sophisticated linguistic dexterity which allowed the performance to become a virtuoso endeavour. Audiences are limited to seven and we perform at night by candlelight, following in the footsteps of Severs through the 10 rooms of the house and through 300 years. These performances have been running six times a week for over three years now, and I must confess we have not had occasion to throw anyone out yet.

Emboldened by this success, we have now turned the idea on its head for Simon’s Story, which explores the lives of Severs and the small circle of men who lived with him and created the house as we know it. For them it was a place of refuge, consolation and personal freedom, at a time when HIV and Aids was inducing existential terror in a generation of gay men.

This is a parallel story to Severs’ fiction yet it is certainly no less dramatic. In Simon’s Story we portray Severs through his relationship with Simon Pettet, as told by Patrick Handscombe who lived in the house at the time. Pettet was an 18-year-old art student when he was picked up by Severs outside the club Heaven under the Charing Cross arches in 1983 and moved in with him shortly after. “How long have you been gay?” Severs asked Pettet that night. “About five minutes, since I got in this taxi,” Pettet replied.

Just as Severs set up the rooms and furniture in his house to illustrate the tale of the Jervis family, in our performance we are able to reveal their use in the actual domestic drama that took place here – the kitchen chairs where Severs and Pettet sat to eat, the four poster bed in the 18th-century bedroom where they slept together, and the “Poor Room” under the eaves, set up to evoke the lives of 19th-century paupers, where Pettet kept his things and where they remain to this day. In Simon’s Story, the role of Handscombe is performed by an actor leading an audience of eight through these rooms, recounting the love story and revisiting the events of that time.

It was a contradictory and conflicted relationship. Severs was Pettet’s first love. He also inducted Pettet into London’s hedonistic gay scene and Pettet embraced it enthusiastically, even if he would have preferred a monogamous partnership with Severs.

When Severs created his house to tell a story, he never expected to become part of that story himself. Yet this is precisely what has happened because the rooms take on an intimate, deeper meaning when you understand the real drama that was played out there. Severs is described by Handscombe as “the most promiscuous man in London”, yet he came to realise that his relationship with Pettet was the most significant of his life. Pettet was a talented ceramicist and, over the 10 years he was involved with Severs, he made all the delftware – fireplaces, tiles, dishes and tulipieres – that enliven the house today.

In 1984 Pettet and Severs were both diagnosed HIV+, making them two of the earliest cases in Britain. Pettet died at the age of just 28 in 1993 and Severs at 51 in 1999. Today, their story is as much a part of the meaning of the house as the fictional tales that Severs told.

Think sun, sea, Skye – and seaweed. It’s early summer off the west coast of Scotland, and Alex Glasgow is landing a long string of orangey-black seaweed on to the barge of his water farm. It emerges on what looks like a washing line heavy with dirty rags, hoicked up from the depths. And yet, this slippery, shiny, salty substance might, just might, be going to save the planet.

When it comes to sustainability, seaweed is about as shipshape as it gets. Minimal damage to the environment, check. No use of pesticides, check. Diversifies ocean life, check. Uses no land, check. And, in the case of Skye’s seaweed farm, spoils no one’s view, check.

Dublin TV viewers watching news coverage on Wednesday night of a hotel fire were surprised to find themselves tuning in to an interview with a Hollywood legend.

RTÉ News dispatched a camera crew to the Shelbourne hotel in the city centre, only to discover that one of the guests who had been evacuated was the Happy Days star Henry Winkler.

“When I heard the fire alarm, I thought it was the clock radio – I thought somebody had set the alarm before we got there, like another guest,” he told reporters, before putting on a comedy voice to explain how a member of staff cleared up the misunderstanding. “The woman said in a very calm voice: ‘Yes, we’re all evacuating, you must evacuate right now!’”

Six fire engines attended the scene after a witness saw smoke coming from one of the upper bedroom windows. The actor, known for high-profile roles in comedy series such as Arrested Development, Parks & Recreation and Barry, was captured thanking the fire brigade effusively.

“You know what? How wonderful! Firemen are some of my favourite human beings – firemen and firewomen. They run in when other people are running out. I think they deserve to be shook [by the hand].”

Winkler later posted a selfie with firefighters on X (formerly Twitter), with other users replying to thank him for lifting their spirits during the evacuation.

“It was an amazing adventure right here in Dublin. I cannot wait to see the rest of Dublin,” said Winkler, who was in the city to promote his autobiography, Being Henry.

It isn’t the first time Winkler has stumbled into a TV news interview. In 2013, he was stopped on a street in south-west London by BBC News and asked for his thoughts on the construction of a third runway at Heathrow.

“Hello! I was going to ask you a question … are you a voter?” asked the interviewer, before realising that he was talking to the Fonz himself. “Do you have a view on … the plan to potentially expand Heathrow?”

“Richmond is a lovely place. I watch the planes go every day, I hear nothing,” offered Winkler, who was appearing as Captain Hook in a local pantomime.

“Im not a resident. I’m [living here temporarily]. It’s hard to commute when you’re doing two shows a day.”

It was the summer I graduated from secondary school, when Germans openly displayed their patriotism for the first time in decades. I had survived Germany’s inherently racist education system, passed the final exams with acceptable grades, become the first in my working-class immigrant family to qualify for university. In short: I was ready to celebrate.

That summer of 2006 was surprisingly summery for Germany, so my classmates and I spent June organising outdoor parties, the last before we moved away to pursue our studies in other cities. But it was also the summer when Germany hosted the football World Cup and it quickly seemed to infect almost everyone around me with an enthusiasm for the alleged greatness of the reunified country. Like zombies, my white classmates transformed into aggressively drunk nationalists and our graduation parties turned into occasions for them to celebrate their Germanness together.

Overt patriotism had been taboo in German society for decades – for good reason. But in 2006 it felt as if an invisible chain had broken. Never before had I seen so many black-red-gold flags waving from windows, hanging in cars, painted on cheeks. All the symbolism and pride in being German that had been reserved primarily for neo-Nazis who had been busy beating up and killing immigrants throughout the 1990s had suddenly become mainstream.

The World Cup gave Germany permission for a positive expression of nationalism, a moment that many Germans may have yearned for since 1945, according to the millennial German Jewish writer Max Czollek, who describes this collective feeling of relief as “perpetrator solidarity”.

Being German was finally cool again, without needing to be weighed down by guilt over Nazi crimes. But this so-called “summer fairytale” – the kitschy marketing concept of the World Cup 2006 – was unfortunately not restricted to four weeks of football matches; it had a deep impact on the German self-image. In his book De-Integrate, Czollek even draws a direct connection between the 2006 World Cup and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland’s election into the Bundestag in 2017: “The former signified the normalisation of nationalism and national symbols, the latter demanded that corresponding concepts return to the front row of the political arena.”

When Germany won the World Cup in 2014, the national team were welcomed with a public victory celebration in the heart of Berlin, sponsored by major German brands and broadcast live by state channels. A journalist colleague rightly criticised this “warrior-like self-aggrandisement” of the national team and its ludicrous mocking of the defeated Argentinian players as “loser gauchos”. This caused a a social media furore. Proud German football fans didn’t want their fun spoiled, especially not by some lefty female journalist.

The presence of players from dual-heritage families on the German football team doesn’t really change the racist dynamic attached to this national fan culture. When the German team unexpectedly went out in the early group stage of the 2018 World Cup, Mesut Özil, a player of Turkish descent, quit the national team with the words: “I am German when we win but I am an immigrant when we lose.” Özil said he never wanted to wear the German national shirt again after an outcry over his meeting with the Turkish president and autocrat, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Of course, it was appropriate to criticise Özil’s endorsement of a political figure known for human rights violations and curbs on media freedom, but did it make his barb about not feeling accepted as a German any less valid? Moreover, given the corruption scandals around the 2006 World Cup, it’s hard to see the German football federation as a moral authority

Almost two decades after my graduation, a new “summer fairytale” of unbridled xenophobia and racism is the big fear among minorities and anti-fascists as Germany prepares to host the 2024 Uefa European Football Championship. We are not paranoid. Nobody should be surprised if the Euros unleash a wave of the most aggressive nationalism in Germany since the one we saw in 2006.

The current mood is a perfect breeding ground. Rightwing extremists have had secret meetings to discuss how to “remigrate” immigrants, their descendants and allies, once they are in power. The AfD overtook all the governing parties in last weekend’s European elections, and it is especially east Germans and young people who seem more and more attracted to the party’s extremist positions.

This was evident in a video that went viral recently. Filmed on Sylt, an elite German party island, the footage shows revellers chanting the unlawful Nazi slogan “Foreigners out – Germany for the Germans” to Gigi D’Agostino’s hit L’amour toujours while drinking champagne, dancing and making the illegal Nazi salute. Their terribly conventional dress and rosy faces confirmed what many already suspected: there is a new generation of wealthy, young and powerful Germans who don’t care about the guilt of the country’s Nazi past, let alone feel it. It is not a topic of shame for them. Instead, it appears to be a history to celebrate when they are among their peers. I call them the rich toddlers of 2006.

Luckily, some faces from the video were identified, and some are reported to have lost their jobs as a result of the ensuing outrage. But new videos of different people at other parties chanting the same song have also appeared, with faces blurred. You can already guess what the unofficial anthem of the European Cup will be, when the German flags are out once again.

Multiculturalism is a positive trait only when the football tournament is won. In the run-up to the Euros, a new survey found that 21% of Germans agreed that there should be more white players in the national football team. I can’t decide what is scarier: this answer, or the question being asked in this survey?

I, for one, will be doing what I have done since 2006: hoping that the German football team – again one of the favourites – lose their opening matches and get kicked out of the tournament as quickly as possible. It might be the only way to limit the ugly party mood.

• Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based author, novelist, playwright and a Guardian Europe columnist

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

We have only been waiting in the grey Atlantic swell a few moments when the first flash of metallic blue appears in the water. A blue shark, a few miles from the coast of Penzance in Cornwall, emerges from the depths. It is time to get in the water – but part of my brain rebels.

“It’s not what you think it will be like … not that ingrained fear that everyone has about sharks. But until you get in the water with them, that fear will remain,” the guide says to the group.

Slipping off the boat, covered head to toe in dark wetsuits, we are instructed not to shout if we see one but to raise a hand, wave and point. We wait, peering through the gloom at the mackerel lure below us. But the shark does not return, and we heave ourselves back on board.

Three hours go by, and finally a flash of silver reappears, sending us scrambling into the sea. I peer into the water and wait. Metres away, others raise their hands, but I see nothing.

Then, a blue shark glides below, black eyes holding ours until it disappears into the gloom. Those lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the predator return to the boat beaming.

The shark-diving industry in Britain is still tiny, with a few providers on the south-west coast in England and Wales, but the idea has attracted increasing interest since the pandemic, spurred by footage of encounters on social media.

“People are travelling from all over the country to come and do it. They’ve got a love of sharks or certainly a curiosity around it,” says Richard Rees, the director of Celtic Deep, which operates off the coast of Pembrokeshire. “We’re very keen to always say that sharks are not sort of like harmless puppy dogs. They should be respected for what they are: apex predators in the ocean,” he says.

Blue sharks, which can grow nearly 4 metres long, are at risk of extinction, according to the IUCN red list. They are threatened by finning and harmful fishing practices that claim the lives of about 20 million a year. They feed on squid and small fish, and are not a danger to humans, with only a handful of recorded bites since 1580 – 10 according to International Shark Attack File.

It is a sign of how rare shark attacks are in the UK that some statistics include a bite that took place in a pub in the West Midlands, more than 50 miles from the sea. The chef was reportedly attacked by a black-tipped reef shark in a restaurant aquarium while feeding the animals prawns in 2000.

But the growing UK sector was rattled in 2022, shortly after my own dive, when a woman on a blue shark tour was bitten on the leg, in an incredibly rare example of an “unprovoked” attack in British waters.

The bitten woman, who walked off the boat, issued a statement through the company saying she was scared but fine: “Despite how the trip ended, it was amazing to see such majestic creatures in the wild and I don’t for a second want this freak event to tarnish the reputation of an already persecuted species.”

The bite was a blow to the tour operators. Two years on, however, the sector has not seen a drop-off in bookings for experiences with blue sharks.

“The incident in Penzance in 2022 was an unfortunate occasion. Blue sharks feed on fish and squid mostly, so going after something big like a human is super rare – in fact, this was the first incident with a blue shark in-water ever reported,” says Gonzalo Araujo, the director of Marine Research and Conservation Foundation, who works with tour operators to study blue sharks in the UK. “It is unlikely to happen again.”

As the number of UK shark swimming operations grows, many are teaming up to develop a common set of standards to keep people and sharks safe. Alongside wearing dark wetsuits and not displaying jewellery, there’s a ban on handfeeding the inquisitive fish.

Operators say they have been busy with bookings for the summer ahead. From June to October, the creature is one of more than 30 shark species thought to be in British waters. The animals visit the UK’s south-west coast in the summer, travelling thousands of miles from the Azores to the Caribbean and back to Britain and Ireland in their north Atlantic territory.

Some tours are working with university researchers to aid the survival of the species, testing magnets to repel the sharks in the hope that they can one day be used on long-line trawlers to stop them being caught as bycatch. But for many operators, it is about showing people a different side of the UK.

“When we can get people in the water out in the Celtic deep, where the water is clear, warm, really blue and they can have these encounters with amazing animals – not just the sharks, but other animals, too – it might just paint a different picture of the marine wildlife here,” Rees says.

In 2016 a friend phoned Linda Sparrow about a 400-metre stretch of koala trees on the western edge of Bangalow, a small regional town in northern New South Wales.

The landscape in the region had long since been cut back by loggers and farmers, and there were precious few eucalyptus trees left to provide refuge for koalas looking for food or shelter.

“My friend just rang up one day saying, ‘Linda, I need your help saving some koalas’. And I just went, ‘Of course you do’,” Sparrow says.

Until that time, there were only two recorded koala sightings in Bangalow. By the end of the enthusiastic community campaign, people were actively looking, the number of sightings had jumped and the patch of trees was saved.

It was then Sparrow had the idea: why not keep going?

The next year she founded Bangalow Koalas and the “little fuzz balls” have since taken over her life. The group, supported by the World Wildlife Fund and recognised by the World Economic Forum, held its first planting in 2019. With the help of private landholders who have volunteered to take part, it has gone on to plant more than 377,000 trees across the region. Its goal is to reach 500,000 by 2025.

Koalas on Australia’s east coast are increasingly at risk of disappearing altogether. In 2022 the species was officially listed as endangered with the Australian government at the time fronting up $50m to help reverse the decline.

The decision came as a shock to few. It was a long anticipated decision that was entirely preventable – koalas were first listed as vulnerable in 2012 and, in the 10 years since, have faced multiple ongoing threats, including the spread of chlamydia, catastrophic bushfires and habitat loss. Some of this habitat loss is due to logging, which continues in koala habitat in northern New South Wales despite the state government promising it would protect areas important to the species.

The koala corridors planted by groups such as Bangalow Koalas – whose funding runs out the end of the year – are intended to help solve part of this challenge by connecting fragmented habitat with stretches of eucalyptus trees.

Due to the nature of private ownership, the group has to rely on individual land holders to agree to participate and volunteer their properties. Though they have never had a shortage of willing volunteers, the situation means the group has to work piece by piece while also taking into account the specific area where they are planting. In some areas, where an ancient rainforest once rose, they plant a mix of koala trees and rainforest plants. Out west where the land opens up, the focus is on eucalypts.

Sparrow says the benefits are not just limited to koalas. Walking through the dappled light in one of the earliest sites her group worked on, she says revegetating a barren landscape has flow-on effects for wallabies, birds, lizards, insect life and even humans.

“We’re not just connecting and creating a koala wildlife corridor, and a fragmented habitat, we’re connecting communities,” Sparrow says. “Land care groups, Indigenous communities, schools – they come all the time to do planting.”

People have travelled from as far north as Toowoomba and Brisbane to pitch in, she says, and as far south as Sydney and even Melbourne. One time, after the catastrophic Black Summer bushfires, two aircraft cabin crew from San Francisco flew in to help with a planting.

Other groups have also looked to Bangalow Koalas as a model. When Dirk Jansen, an IT manager, moved to the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria in 2016 he kept hearing his neighbours ask “where all the koalas had gone”.

“The habitat on Mornington Peninsula is very fragmented,” Jansen says. “They may have farmland in between, or housing, or major roads, or freeways.”

With more than two-thirds of the peninsula’s koala habitat on private property, Jansen says it has been “death by a thousand cuts” as small patches of area have been progressively cleared over time. To address this, he asked Sparrow for advice about forming his own landcare group, which held its first planting of 4,000 trees in 2020.

“We’ve been able to scale up to 25,000 plants we plant each season,” Jansen says. “From a volunteering point of view, that’s what we aim for each year.”

Dr Edward Narayan is a senior lecturer in animal science from the University of Queensland whose research focuses on stress responses in animals, particularly wild koala populations. He says this re-forestation work is important for helping take pressure off the species.

His research, and that of his PhD students, has found koalas living on the urban fringes are most at risk of stress, with many moving into residential areas seeking safe havens – with all the risks this entails.

“Koalas are a very interesting wild critter,” he says. “You have baseline stress from their ecology like disease but there are new stressors like dog attacks and motor vehicle collisions.

“Those are immediate-term stressors. When you talk about stress, you’ve also got the state of the landscape – things like habitat loss, land clearance and long-term things like heat stress or bushfires.”

Narayan says the groundwork by community groups is “the necessary first step to heal the landscape” but it is also essential for governments to address climate change “otherwise you’re only dealing with one part of the puzzle”.

If governments do not take the risk seriously, and fail to take meaningful action to reduce CO2 emissions, he says the vital work of communities on the ground will eventually be overwhelmed. The New South Wales government has set aside $190m for a plan to double koala numbers through restoring 25,000 hectares of koala habitat in its first stage and the federal government maintains a $76.9m fund to support similar work.

Programs such as these are a good start but, during the Black Summer bushfires, more than 7.5m2 hectares of eucalypt forest burned and the Australian economy remains heavily reliant on the production of fossil fuels. The country ranks among the biggest LNG and coal exporters in the world, and is still permitting the development of new coalmines and gas fields.

“You know, I’ve got two kids,” Narayan says. “This is about the future we are leaving them. Can you imagine Australia without koalas? I don’t think so. It would be like having no Opera House or Harbour Bridge. It’s built into who we are as Australians.”

According to the World Wildlife Fund, more than 60,000 koalas were killed during the Black Summer bushfires, an example Sparrow says illustrates how it is already affecting their work – and how she hopes the tree plantings might inspire others to take further action.

“You know, people come to me and say they feel so hopeless. They say, ‘with everything going on, how can I possibly have an impact?’ Then they come here and plant a tree, see they are actually doing something,” she says.

“My hope is that maybe then they start thinking, ‘What else can I do?’”

Hunter Biden’s conviction on gun-ownership charges may have handed his father, Joe, a boost in the forthcoming presidential election, analysts say, because it undermines the image of a president weaponising the US justice system to pursue Donald Trump.

Trump, the former president and presumptive GOP presidential nominee, has pushed that line relentlessly to explain his conviction last month on charges related to the concealment of hush-money payments to a porn star to help him win the 2016 election.

He has made the claim even though his prosecution was brought in a New York state court that is independent of the Department of Justice, which is overseeing 54 other criminal charges against him that have so far not come to trial.

Hunter Biden, by contrast, was prosecuted and convicted under the authority of the justice department, which is part of his father’s administration – an inconvenient fact that weakens Republican claims that it has been turned into a political weapon in the president’s hands.

The result, some observers say, is that Hunter’s conviction may help the president in a close race, even though the personal cost of his son’s troubles is heavy.

That suspicion was further fuelled by a low-key reaction from Republicans that attempted to switch the focus to other supposed crimes they say, but have never proved, that father and son have committed.

“It’s a marginal political gain, that’s what I’m feeling,” said John Zogby, a veteran pollster. “I don’t see it hurting him in any way, and especially when he neutralised the issue when he said he was not going to extend the pardon, which is very painful for him.

“It pulls the rug out from under that Republican argument that the justice system is rigged against Republicans to get Trump … a Biden did not get a pass.”

Zogby said the verdict – and Biden’s acceptance of it – could revive an image that was electorally helpful in 2020 of “Uncle Joe”, a man of empathy who had known suffering and personal tragedy, through the deaths of his eldest son, Beau, from cancer in 2015, and his first wife and baby daughter in a car accident in 1972.

“It could put some folks who have been wavering … on the track towards seeing that more sympathetic fellow, a father who is experiencing pain again,” he said. “You know, enough to give them another point or two. I don’t think it moves mountains, but it may not have to [in a close race].”

Larry Jacobs, a professor of politics at the University of Minnesota, said the verdict, while a “personal disaster” for Biden, could boomerang on the Republicans and translate into Democratic gain.

“The tragic case of Hunter Biden is painful for Joe and Jill Biden [the first lady], but it is a win for the Democratic party and the Biden campaign,” he said. “It puts a lie to the Republican claims that the justice system is being manipulated by [and for] the benefit of Democrats.

“It’s harder for the Republicans to say with a straight face and to audiences not already in their capture that the legal system is captured by the Democratic party.”

Biden is known to be deeply concerned by the troubles of Hunter, who was found guilty by a jury in Delaware on Tuesday of lying about his drug use and addiction when buying a gun in 2018. Close aides have voiced worries about the emotional strain the matter is putting on the 81-year-old president in the midst of a close election race.

“I don’t think voters are going to hold Biden accountable for his son’s addiction or his son’s misbehaviour. But I think the real question is the toll it takes on him and his family,” David Axelrod, a senior Democratic operative and former adviser to President Barack Obama told the Washington Post.

“To a guy who’s already experienced great loss and tragedy, this is another heavy brick on the load. And it’s going to take enormous strength to carry that load, given all the other bricks that are on there of the presidency and being a candidate.”

Despite the fact that his son now faces a possible jail sentence – and will stand trial again on unrelated tax-evasion charges in September – Biden has said he will not use his presidential powers to pardon him. That message was somewhat clouded on Wednesday when the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, on board Air Force One en route to the G7 summit in Italy, was reported as refusing to rule out a commutation of whatever sentence Hunter receives.

Hunter’s conviction followed legal manoeuvring in which some observers said he had received harsher treatment because he is the president’s son. A plea bargain worked out last year that would have seen him plead guilty to the tax charges while avoiding prosecution on the gun charge was dropped following criticism from the judge in the latter case, Maryellen Noreika, who was appointed to the bench by Trump.

Republicans, who have pursued Hunter Biden for years in an unsuccessful effort to prove his father profited financially from his business dealings in Ukraine, had denounced it as a sweetheart deal.

The president, who travelled on Wednesday to Italy for the G7 summit, said that he would respect whatever outcome the legal process reached – a jarring contrast to Trump’s repeated assaults on the judicial system as “rigged”.

“So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery,” Biden said.

“I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal. Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that.”

The largest Protestant group in the US has condemned the use of in vitro fertilization, a move that is sure to inflame the already white-hot battle over IVF and reproductive rights in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v Wade.

On Wednesday, during the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, delegates voted in favor of a resolution that urges Southern Baptists “to reaffirm the unconditional value and right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation”.

The resolution in effect calls on the Southern Baptist Convention – a group that includes nearly 50,000 churches and almost 13 million members – to avoid IVF.

The success of the resolution is a major victory for the anti-abortion movement, swathes of which have long opposed IVF on the grounds that providers create embryos that are not implanted in a woman’s uterus or are set aside after being screened for genetic anomalies. It also advances the tenets of “fetal personhood”, a movement to enshrine embryos and fetuses with full legal rights and protections that, if fully enacted, would rewrite vast swaths of US law.

The Catholic church already officially opposes IVF, but the issue has not historically loomed as large among Protestants. Majorities of both white non-evangelical Protestants, white evangelical Protestants, and Black Protestants all support access to IVF.

The Wednesday resolution suggests that this support may be in flux, since the Southern Baptist Convention has long been seen as a barometer of US evangelicalism and its future.

IVF has been in the national spotlight since the Alabama state supreme court ruled earlier this year frozen embryos qualify as “extrauterine children”, a decision that led many IVF providers in the state to temporarily cease work. Although the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade cleared the way for attacks on IVF, many in the state and across the country were shocked by the ruling and its implications.

This week, the US Senate is expected to vote on a bill that would codify a federal right to IVF. Although the bill is not expected to pass, Democrats in the Senate are hoping to get Republicans on the record opposing an infertility treatment that is widely popular.

As part of the anti-IVF resolution, the Southern Baptist Convention called on its members to “promote” adoption.

“Couples who experience the searing pain of infertility can turn to God, look to Scripture for numerous examples of infertility, and know that their lament is heard by the Lord, who offers compassion and grace to those deeply afflicted by such realities,” the resolution added.