In the last weeks, hundreds of young red kites (Milvus milvus) have been making their annual tour of the West Country. Numbers reached record highs in Cornwall, with 188 recorded over Penzance, 371 over Marazion and an unprecedented 518 seen together over Pendeen.

The gathering has been taking place every May for about 15 years, with one- and two-year-old immature birds flying down the south-west peninsula. When they reach Land’s End, they turn and head east, scattering into smaller groups. They come from across England, Wales and Scotland; it’s thought the congregations are caused by older birds with established territories pushing youngsters out of the area when nesting begins.

Once so persecuted that they almost became extinct in Britain, reintroduction programmes mean that these raptors are widespread now in parts of Wales and central and eastern England. They can often be seen soaring over motorways, slip-sliding the wind currents with taut ease.

But they remain rare on Exmoor. I was surprised to see seven in one day, riding the air above Oare Water. Their forked tails and elegant, angled wings were sharp cut against the sky, the sun burnishing their undersides chestnut-bronze. A few days later, 159 passed east over Porlock, circling for a while around the Hawkcombe phone mast on their way back from Cornwall.

The kite passage has synchronised with the annual explosion in numbers of a more harmful species – ticks. Last May, after walking my dog on the path beside Horner Water, I was amazed to find seven crawling through her fur. This year, after a similar walk beside the river at Watersmeet, I removed nearly 50.

Wetter weather and warm winters are creating ideal conditions for these blood-sucking arachnids, which wait in damp foliage, forelegs outstretched, to hitch on a host. Records show that numbers increased tenfold between 2000 and 2022, and tenfold again from 2022 to 2023. My unscientific dog test seems to indicate that they grew by a further 10 times last year.

The problem is that ticks can carry bacteria and viruses that cause debilitating illnesses, Lyme disease being the most common of these in people. Keep a tick removal hook handy.

Scientists in Edinburgh have developed a home heating system that draws its energy from the world’s most abundant resource: water.

The equipment can use sea water, rivers, ponds and even mine water to heat radiators and water for baths and showers, using the same technology as in air source heat pumps.

It is being trialled by Edinburgh University in an affordable housing project close to the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge, at a gold-mining museum in south-west Scotland and in a commercial greenhouse in Fife.

Another system is due to be installed this summer at the Scottish Seabird Centre in North Berwick, also drawing its energy from the Firth of Forth. All of the systems use water from the sea or nearby rivers.

It is the latest way of exploiting the ambient warmth in the natural environment to heat buildings, using the same technologies in air and ground source heat pumps.

The warmth of the sea or river water is captured by glycol, the liquid used in anti-freeze, which is then compressed in the heat pump. That compression makes it hot enough to heat water for radiators or baths. As it travels through the heat pump, the liquid cools down again, and the process repeats.

Similar technology is already used in large district heating networks: water from the Clyde is used at the Queen’s Quay housing development at Clydebank near Glasgow. Sewage is being used to power district heating systems in places such as Stirling, Borders college in Galashiels, and in Granton, Edinburgh.

Unlike large-scale plants, the prototypes built by hydrogeologists at Edinburgh University are designed to be compact, easily portable and used in homes and smaller buildings, particularly in rural and coastal areas.

They are intended to provide another type of the small-scale green energy systems needed in huge numbers to replace gas- and oil-powered heating, as the UK moves towards a zero-carbon energy supply. The UK has about 23m gas boilers, and about 1m oil-fired boilers.

The team behind the design said water was normally a more predictable source of energy than the outside air, as the sea, lakes and rivers generally remain at a consistent temperature.

It sits alongside the mini-hydro schemes used in hilly areas or the ground-source heat pumps householders with large gardens can install, by running pipes down deep boreholes into the ground or by laying the pipes over a large area below the surface of the ground.

While air source heat pumps need to work harder in very cold conditions, the Edinburgh University team say their designs, which they have called SeaWarm and RiverWarm, can also use frozen water.

“It’s about trying out a whole series of constellations, but at the heart of it is the same technology,” said Prof Chris McDermott, from Edinburgh’s school of geosciences and the lead designer.

Gus Fraser-Harris, a hydrogeologist involved with the design, said the system would be more expensive to buy and install than an air source heat pump but cheaper than a ground source heat pump when its final version goes on sale.

The SeaWarm system collects the water in a large circular tub, which holds 3.7 cubic metres of water, roughly the same volume as 12 bath tubs. Inside the tub are layers of looped tubing carrying the glycol, which transfers the warmth of the water to the heat pump. It can use a water body 500 metres away from the building.

They have called the system HotTwist and say the tub can be buried in the ground, which also helps to keep it at a constant temperature. It delivers 350% to 400% more heat than the electricity it needs to operate, Fraser-Harris said, comparable to the most efficient air source heat pumps.

The pilot project near Edinburgh, part of a project by LAR Housing Trust to convert an old naval barracks and prison into affordable housing project, involves pumping water up from the sea.

The gold-mining museum at Wanlockhead, south of Glasgow, uses gravity to transfer water from the river used for gold-panning down to the heat pump, while the greenhouses in Fife take water from a nearby burn.

At least 27 people have been killed and dozens injured in an Israeli strike on a UN school housing displaced people in al-Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office has said.

It accused the Israeli army of carrying out a “horrific massacre … that shames humanity”. There was no immediate confirmation by the health ministry, and the death toll could not immediately be verified.

Footage on X posted by Palestinian journalists in the early hours of Thursday showed rows of bodies laid out at al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, and wounded children being treated on the floor.

The Israeli military confirmed on X that it had targeted a UN school in al-Nuseirat, saying that it had been home to Hamas terrorists who had taken part in the 7 October attack on Israel. “Terrorists” who had been planning to carry out attacks in the immediate future had been “eliminated”, it said, and that “many steps were taken to reduce the chance of harm to those not involved”.

The attack on the school run by Unrwa, the UN refugee agency for Palestinians, follows the announcement on Wednesday by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of a new operation against Hamas in central Gaza, with Palestinian medics saying airstrikes had killed dozens of people.

The charity Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF) said that since Tuesday at least 70 dead and more than 300 wounded, mostly women and children, had been brought to al-Aqsa hospital after “heavy Israeli strikes” in central Gaza.

Karin Huster, an MSF medical adviser in Gaza, described the situation as “overwhelming”. “There are people lying everywhere on the floor, outside … bodies were being brought in plastic bags,” she said on X.

An Israeli military statement said of the new operation: “The forces of the 98th Division began a precise campaign in the areas of East Bureij and East Deir al-Balah, above and below ground at the same time.”

Residents said Israeli forces had sent tanks into Bureij and planes and tanks pounded the nearby settlements of al-Maghazi and al-Nuseirat as well as Deir al-Balah city.

The armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad said they had fought gun battles with Israeli forces in areas throughout the territory and fired anti-tank rockets and shells.

Abu Mohammed Abu Saif said two of his children were among the dead brought to al-Aqsa hospital after the earlier Israeli strikes. “This is not war, it is destruction that words are unable to express,” he said, adding that his children had been killed along with their mother, who had been unable to leave when others in the neighbourhood did.

Al-Aqsa hospital is one of the last hospitals functioning in Gaza. Earlier in the night it reported an electrical generator failure, which risked complicating the treatment of patients.

Israel also reiterated on Wednesday its refusal to halt the Gaza offensive for a resumption of hostage-release talks with Hamas, with defence minister Yoav Gallant quoted by Israeli media as saying, “Any negotiations with Hamas would be conducted only under fire.”

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh meanwhile said the group would demand a permanent end to the war in Gaza and Israeli withdrawal as part of a ceasefire plan.

The comments dealt an apparent blow to a much-touted truce proposal put forward last week by US president Joe Biden.

Israel’s military assault on Gaza has killed more than 36,000 people, according to health officials in the territory, who say thousands more dead are feared buried under the rubble. The war was sparked by an unprecedented attack by Hamas in southern Israel in October last year, killing about 1,200 people.

On Wednesday two new food security reports reported that many Palestinians in Gaza had been killed by months of extreme hunger while permanent damage had been caused to children through malnutrition, even before famine is officially declared.

The US-based famine early warning system network (Fews Net) said it was “possible, if not likely” that famine began in northern Gaza in April. Two UN organisations said more than 1 million people were “expected to face death and starvation” by mid-July.

Israel has blocked the entry of much aid and fuel to Gaza, and cut off most of the water supply.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has meanwhile threatened an “extremely powerful” response to attacks by Hezbollah from Lebanon, which have escalated in recent days and set off huge fires in northern Israel.

Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

You know you’re in for a bit of grandiose lecturing on climate change when conservative commentators start making comparisons to religion and throwing around quotes from the 20th-century science philosopher Karl Popper.

Now I’ve got nothing against Popper, but you need to be on pretty solid ground to declare, as the Sky News contributor Chris Uhlmann did last weekend, that the idea global warming is causing more extreme weather is “an article of faith” rather than something we can just test and observe.

In an article in The Australian, Uhlmann, the former political editor at the ABC and Nine News, picked his way through Popper before cherry-picking his way through major climate reports to make his case.

“The zealots who invoke The Science as a gag order have never read the research or wilfully ignore its infuriating uncertainty,” wrote a confident Uhlmann.

“Take the deeply entrenched belief that global warming is causing more extreme weather. This is so ubiquitous as to be unquestioned.”

Uhlmann points to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) 2021 report The Physical Science Basis as evidence that there’s little sign of climate change having much to do with cyclones, droughts or bushfires.

This is a global warming “bible”, Uhlmann writes (actually, some scientists have complained for a long time that the IPCC has been too conservative in its reports).

When Uhlmann asks “what of bushfires?” he quotes the 2021 IPCC report, which says the “extreme conditions, like the 2019 Australian bushfires and African flooding, have been associated with strong positive (Indian Ocean Dipole) conditions”.

But he does not point to a different part of the same report that says: “Observations show a long-term trend towards more dangerous weather conditions for bushfires in many regions of Australia, which is attributable (at least in part) to anthropogenic climate change.”

Prof Jason Sharples, director of the bushfire research group at UNSW Canberra, says in his opinion Uhlmann’s attempt to explain changing fire conditions is “an extremely superficial and misleading representation”.

“The Indian Ocean Dipole is a mode of climate variability,” he says.

“Changes in fire risk are driven by climate variability superimposed on the general warming trend. The general warming trend means we are more likely to experience warmer temperatures, which means we can expect lower fuel moisture content. Lower fuel moisture content means more intense bushfires that are more likely to be driven by spotting and produce violent pyroconvective events.”

A “pyroconvective event” is when a fire becomes so ferocious that it connects to the atmosphere above and generates its own violent weather, creating plumes as high as 15km, with unpredictable wind gusts. They are feared by even the most experienced firefighters.

In a register of pyroconvective fires in Australia going back to 1979, only six occurred before 2000 and 63 before 2019. But the Black Summer fires of 2019-20 produced 45 on their own, Sharples says.

Fewer cyclones, more rain

Perhaps Uhlmann should have also looked at the 2022 report from the IPCC that covers “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”. That’s a pretty big clue in the title.

There’s a whole chapter on Australasia. To extend the analogy, this would be like flicking through the book of Genesis and then declaring you’ve read the whole Bible.

The chapter says changes in the climate are exacerbating many extreme events in Australia.

Those trends, the report says, include more hot days, more heatwaves, rising sea levels and more extreme fire weather in the south and east. All those trends are likely to worsen as more greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere.

Remember that, according to Uhlmann, this is apparently the climate change bible. Are the zealots only supposed to pick the parts they like? That would be very anti-Popper.

Uhlmann says it is “not true” that climate change was making cyclones more destructive, or that the December 2023 ex-Tropical Cyclone Jasper should be seen as a sign of things to come. The cyclone dumped several metres of rain in some areas.

To make his point, Uhlmann points to the bible (sorry, the IPCC), which says the number of cyclones forming in the Australian region is going down. “Pause on that,” he writes.

Except, this is hardly a revelation. Prof Andrew Dowdy, a University of Melbourne expert on Australian climate trends, says that for at least a decade climate models, and reports of those models, have been suggesting the number of cyclones might go down.

But those same projections, Dowdy says, also suggest a greater proportion of cyclones that do form will shift to the more intense categories as the planet warms. And rainfall?

Dowdy says: “While noting uncertainties around attribution of a single event like TC Jasper to climate change, the current scientific understanding is that climate change is loading the dice towards a higher chance of extreme rain from tropical cyclones.”

A recent review of rainfall intensity in Australia, co-authored by Dowdy, found that “although fewer [tropical cyclones] are likely in a warmer world in general, this is more likely for non-severe TCs than severe TCs, with extreme rainfall from TCs likely to increase in intensity”.

That same review found climate change was causing an increase of between 8% and 15% in rainfall intensity per degree of global warming.

All the warming

Uhlmann does at least concede the IPCC report shows the climate is changing and the world and Australia is getting warmer, “and that industrial activity has played a part in forcing some of it”.

Some of it? More like all of it.

According to a part of the IPCC’s summary report not mentioned by Uhlmann, between the pre-industrial period and 2010 to 2019, the planet warmed between 0.8C and 1.3C. Natural changes barely contribute.

Greenhouse gases caused between 1C and 2C of that warming. Aerosol pollution had a cooling influence, which is why it’s possible that greenhouse gas warming could be higher than the observed warming.

So it’s more likely “all of it” and then some. But that’s just what the bible says.

Here we are then, at last. The chrysalis has finally hatched. The thing that was always going to be the thing has now become the thing. Welcome to a very Premier League kind of coup.

As news emerged of Manchester City’s potentially devastating legal case against English football’s top tier it was tempting to see a kind of parable. Here we have a league founded out of greed, for the future benefit of greed, which now finds itself threatened with internal detonation by – yes – greed. Invite a tiger in for tea and the tiger might be fun. But it’s also still a tiger. And in the end it’s going to eat you too.

This isn’t the whole story however. Greed may have opened the door. Greed made ushering an ambitious nation state into your inner sanctum look like a really great idea with no possible downsides. But it isn’t greed that’s going to pull the trigger. This is about control, hard power and a quarter century of yee-hawing wild west governance and oversight.

Allow hyper-ambitious nation states to buy your sporting institutions, and, well, you might just end up with an unhappy hyper-ambitious nation state on your hands. Not to mention a sense that nobody, right now, has any kind of control over how this ends up.

More immediately, scanning down the public details of City’s legal claim, it is hard to decide which is the most nauseating aspect of the whole affair. Perhaps it is the ragbag of populism and hot-button shouting tagged on by City’s lawyers and mouthpieces.

See for example the deeply cynical Trumpian framing, the idea that this is a battle being fought against “the elites”. Here we have a richer-than-god inherited monarchy, owners of the most powerful football club in the world, somehow presenting themselves as outsiders. When will the boundlessly rich kings and princes of the overclass finally be allowed to take a seat at the top table? Other than now, and for ever, in every single sphere of life?

Then again, perhaps the most nauseating part is the free market libertarian nonsense, the “commercial freedom” stuff often parroted around this issue by people who don’t understand what a free market is. This relates to the absurd suggestion that allowing a propaganda entity to spend whatever it wants for non-commercial reasons is somehow “allowing the market to function”.

In reality it is the opposite, a distortion of the market via state subsidies and PR aims that have nothing to do with value or competition, that lead us into such appalling non-market outcomes as Neymar being sold for €220m. The ghost of Milton Friedman says: this is not capitalism. It’s closer to the command economy.

Then there’s the dreadfully tin-eared phrase “tyranny of the majority”, used here to describe that most tyrannical of things, democracy. In its proper context John Stuart Mill’s quote is supposed to describe a state of mob rule, where no institution regulates the urges of the herd. Not so much the richest guy at the table failing to get his way in a boardroom vote.

But then, this is the autocratic billionaire lens. L’état c’est nous. And nothing must be allowed to intrude on the exercise of power. Does that really sound like sport?

It is important to remember none of this is actually meant in good faith. It is simply public relations, a way of stirring useful anger. It is also not really “Manchester City” pursuing these ends, but the entity that owns and controls it, a government with a very clear policy agenda.

There are no good elite football owners. Hedge funds and leveraged buyouts are their own kind of evil. But the basic question here seems ever more profound. Why, other than blind stupid greed, would anyone want a government to own a football club?

Governments are not benevolent enterprises. The UK government sells arms and kills people to protect its own interests. The US government is an imperialist machine. What did we expect Abu Dhabi to do here exactly? Play nice?

The direct analogy would be the British government buying, say Royal Antwerp, splurging billions of pounds of its GDP on winning the Belgian league while Antwerp’s fans say this is all great, and Antwerp thanks you Grant Shapps, before eventually suing the Belgian league into oblivion for refusing to allow us, the UK government, to rewrite its rules.

And yet this kind of ownership has been waved through at City and Newcastle United, and remains explicitly preserved in the draft football governance bill. Despite the fact the potential consequences of all this could be disastrous for English football.

A key issue in City’s claim, abolition of the Associated Party Transaction rules, would remove any ceiling on how much money a state owner can pump in to a club. This would destabilise every part of the game, destroying every lever that isn’t pure hard cash. What’s the point in building a team, or grooming players for anything other than sale to your nation state overlords? Once an entity with bottomless pockets is permitted to deploy that wealth however it pleases, it basically owns the stage.

There are two things that could in theory be done to resist this. The first is the Premier League could threaten to eject City. The league has that democratic right (sorry, chaps, that word again) to expel any member threatening its stability, for example, by taking punitive legal action demanding damages for enacting its own rules.

The fact there is zero chance of this happening is just as telling. Essentially, the league can’t afford it. The product would collapse. Freed from the yoke of membership City would bleed it white through the high courts. What you have here is a club that can in the end do as it wishes, because its budget will always be bigger, because it is not a commercial entity but a state. Did anyone ever actually think this through?

The other thing that could happen, but also won’t, is that government could take an interest. We must ask again why it is deemed unacceptable for a PR-hungry state to own the Daily Telegraph, but fine for a PR-hungry state to own a Premier League club.

There is a case to be made that Manchester City are a far more significant broadcaster than the Telegraph. They have 22 million followers on X, five times as many as the Telegraph. They have global reach and a cult of loyalty. They will use that to project a message, while also taking steps to destabilise a key British industry.

And yet, of course, given the potential trade issues, there will be zero interest in regulation. The top tier of English football can be rinsed through the courts by an overseas state, a clear tactic to diminish its power to resist, and analogous to the Slapp lawsuits the government is currently taking a stand against.

But then, there are so many structural elements to this that feel irreversible. This isn’t just City and Abu Dhabi. The Premier League could soon be assailed on all sides by everyone from unhappy shipping tycoons, to unhappy US hedge funds, to soft power hungry states. Invite an entire pack of tigers to tea, and, well, it might not end that happily.

More broadly the most depressing aspect is the wider issue with this entire public circus, illuminated by the willingness of football supporters to engage, the vulnerability of people to this level of engineered tribalism, the feeling that all you really have is a choice of which “elite” to back, a failure of basic concepts, meaning, agency.

Football’s vulnerability to this is no more than a bellwether of the wider swirls of digital rage, manipulation and post-truth politics. Go well, plucky sky blue underdog as you enter the establishment den, concerned only with fair competition and fighting for the little man. For the first time it is possible to see an end game here for the Premier League, and it isn’t very pretty.

The Georgia court of appeals has put a hold on the trial of Donald Trump and other defendants while it considers whether to disqualify the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, the lead prosecutor in the case.

Trump had appealed an order by the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee that declined to disqualify Willis after bombshell revelations about a romantic relationship with her chosen special prosecutor. As part of their effort to dismiss the case, Trump and his co-defendants alleged Willis’s relationship meant she should be recused from the case.

On Monday, the appeals court selected a three-judge panel to hear the appeal and docketed the case to be heard in October. Then on Wednesday, the court paused the case while this argument plays out.

Both the Trump attorney Steve Sadow and a spokesperson for Willis’s office declined comment on the court’s order.

The order staying the case in Fulton county essentially ensures that the former president will not be tried on charges of election interference and racketeering in Georgia before the November election.

“The history books will look back on what the country lost by not having a televised trial before November 2024 and historians will wonder what Fani Wills was thinking. And they’ll just scratch their heads,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor in Georgia and a close observer of the case. “I don’t know how much Judge McAfee could have done between now and the appeal’s pendency anyway. But the real loss is McAfee’s ability to deal with the question of presidential immunity and the supremacy clause over the summer.”

Trump was charged alongside more than a dozen associates last year with racketeering over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election result in the state, after Georgia voted for Joe Biden to become US president.

Willis won her Democratic primary bid for re-election with nearly 90% of the vote last month.

Nine of the initial 19 defendants, including Trump, remain in the case and have appealed the lower-court decision allowing the case to continue.

Trump faces charges of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act – Rico – stemming from his work with lawyers, political organizers and other aides in an alleged “criminal enterprise” to retain power after losing the 2020 election to Biden.

The charges stem in part from the “perfect phone call” Trump made to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Raffensperger, asking him to “find 11,780 votes” and flip Georgia’s election, as well as an alleged scheme to submit an alternate slate of Republican electors to Congress in order to provide the then vice-president, Mike Pence, a rationale to reject the electoral count and send the election to the House to decide.

Revelations in January that Willis had a romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade led to days of courtroom spectacle as Trump attorneys tore into Willis’s private life while arguing that she had an impermissible conflict of interest. A few days after Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for the defendant Michael Roman, made Willis’s relationship a legal issue in court filings, Willis addressed a historically Black church in Atlanta to discuss the controversy. Willis described the revelations as an act of racism.

Trump’s lawyers subsequently argued that those statements in the “church speech” created “forensic misconduct” – an act by a prosecutor that requires disqualification in Georgia law.

McAfee’s ruling, while deeply critical of Willis, allowed the case to continue as long as either Wade or Willis stepped aside. Wade resigned within minutes of the ruling.

The law, however, is unclear about how the forensic misconduct standard should be applied, a point McAfee made in his ruling and that has formed the basis for much of the appeal.

In the appeal, Trump’s attorneys argue that Willis was not honest when testifying about the relationship, creating an appearance of impropriety that requires her removal.

Each of the appeals court’s 18 members is elected to a six-year term. Georgia’s court of appeals is one of the busiest in the country, hearing 2,500 cases a year. It typically resolves a case within nine months because state law requires appeals to be resolved quickly. Most cases are resolved without oral arguments, decided only by written briefs, though it would be surprising for the court to forgo oral arguments in a case as important as one against a former president.

French anti-terror prosecutors have launched an investigation after a Ukrainian-Russian man detonated explosive materials in a hotel room north of Paris.

A source at the French anti-terrorism prosecutors office (PNAT) said that on Monday night the 26-year-old man was given medical treatment by fire officers in a hotel in the Val-d’Oise, north of Paris, for “significant burns after an explosion”.

An initial search of his hotel room led to the discovery of “products and materials intended for the manufacture of explosive devices”, the source said. The man, of Ukrainian and Russian nationality, was still being questioned by police on Wednesday night.

The source confirmed that the PNAT, working with France’s domestic spy agency, had opened an investigation into the man, who was suspected of participating in a terrorist conspiracy and bomb plot.

The Ukrainian and Russian embassies in Paris did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, which is close to where the man was arrested, said operations had not been affected.

France is on maximum threat alert with less than two months to go until the start of the Paris Olympics. The Games will take place against a complex geopolitical backdrop with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and pose a major security challenge.

Last month French security services said they had foiled a planned attack on the Games with the arrest of an 18-year-old Chechen man allegedly preparing a suicide attack at Saint-Étienne’s football stadium.

Two Nasa astronauts were on their way to the international space station on Wednesday after Boeing’s pioneering Starliner capsule finally made its much delayed first crewed flight from Cape Canaveral.

The visually stunning liftoff, against a mostly clear and blue Florida sky, came seven years beyond the spacecraft’s original target date, five years after the failure of an uncrewed test flight, and following a more recent series of postponements for technical reasons that saw launch attempts aborted twice.

Veteran astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams reached orbit 12 minutes after the 10.52am ET launch. They are scheduled to dock with the ISS shortly after noon on Thursday, and if the eigh-to-10-day mission is successful, Starliner will give Nasa a second privately owned option for ferrying humans to lower Earth orbit alongside SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.

Bill Nelson, the agency’s administrator and former space shuttle astronaut, hailed what he said was “a special moment”.

“This is another milestone in this extraordinary history of Nasa,” he told a post-launch press conference. “The whole team went through a lot of trial and tribulation. But they had perseverance.

“With Dragon and Starliner, the US is going to have two unique human space transportation systems. We always like to have a backup that makes it safer for our astronauts.

“That’s why we started the commercial crew program [CCP] in the first place, partnering with US companies to deliver safe and reliable spaceflight at the same time of cutting the cost. When we expand our fleet of spacecraft, what we’re doing is expanding our reach to the stars.”

The launch also gave a welcome lift to Boeing. Although space operations are conducted independently of its aviation wing, executives will be pleased the company’s name is attached to some good news following a recent series of safety and quality issues.

“The whole company has rallied around us. I get emotional talking about it,” Aaron Kraftcheck, senior manager for Starliner’s flight software, design and development, told reporters in April.

Nasa has ordered from Boeing a further six astronaut rotation flights to the space station as part of the CCP. Each capsule can be flown up to 10 times, Boeing says, with a six-month turnaround between each mission.

The hi-tech Starliner capsule, officially called CST-100 (crew space transportation), is designed to totally transform how astronauts fly in space. Its autonomous flight, navigation and course-correct systems make Williams and Wilmore effectively only passengers, although they can step in to take over manually if required.

Innovation includes a weldless design, which reduces the risk of structural failure, and interior space similar to a midsize SUV. Starliner can carry up to seven humans, but will be configured for four astronauts and cargo for space station flights.

Today’s crew both have extensive spaceflight experience, having spent more than 500 days in orbit between them on previous space shuttle and ISS missions. With Wednesday’s launch from Cape Canaveral space force station aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, Williams became the first female to fly in an orbital test vehicle.

“Butch and Suni bring a lot to the table in terms of helping us as a team get to a place where we’re ready to go fly. They’ve been very integral to the process for years, and all of that culminates with this one,” LeRoy Cain, manager of mission integration and operations for Boeing’s commercial crew program, and a former Nasa flight director, told Nasa TV.

Cain was flight director during the 2002 Columbia space shuttle disaster, which killed seven astronauts, and he said safety was an overriding priority.

“Exploring space is not for the faint of heart. It has the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. It’s very unforgiving [and] the margins are small. I expect it to be a very successful flight test. I think we’ll learn some things, we learn every time we fly. And that’s part of the beauty of this business, part of why we were so drawn to the exploration of space.”

Wilmore, in a short speech from Starliner’s flight deck immediately before launch, paid tribute to the hundreds of Nasa and Boeing employees who worked on the mission, and the 450 suppliers from 37 states that contributed.

“[They are] people who use their gifts and talents for the common good, are passionate,” he said.

“We all know that when the going gets tough, and it often does, the tough get going, and Suni and I are honored to share this dream of spaceflight with each and every one of you.”

Fossil-fuel companies are the “godfathers of climate chaos” and should be banned in every country from advertising akin to restrictions on big tobacco, the secretary general of the United Nations has said while delivering dire new scientific warnings of global heating.

In a major speech in New York on Wednesday, António Guterres called on news and tech media to stop enabling “planetary destruction” by taking fossil-fuel advertising money while warning the world faces “climate crunch time” in its faltering attempts to stem the crisis.

“Many governments restrict or prohibit advertising for products that harm human health, like tobacco,” he said. “I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil-fuel companies. And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil-fuel advertising.”

In his speech, Guterres announced new data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) showing there is an 80% chance the planet will breach 1.5C (2.7F) in warming above pre-industrial times in at least one of the next five calendar years. The past 12 months have already breached this level, with the average global temperature 1.63C (2.9F) higher than the pre-industrial average from June 2023 to May this year, following a string of months with record-breaking heat, according to the European Union’s Copernicus monitoring system.

Governments agreed in the 2015 Paris climate pact to restrain the global temperatures rise to 1.5C to avoid cascading heatwaves, floods, droughts and other ruinous impacts, and while a single year beyond this limit does not mean the target has been lost, scientists widely expect this to happen in the coming decade.

According to the WMO, there is a roughly 50-50 chance that the period of 2024 to 2028 will average above 1.5C in warming, globally. “We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” Guterres, known for his strident language on the climate crisis, told an audience underneath a suspended 94ft model of a blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History. “We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.”

In a nod to the venue of his speech, Guterres said that “like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, we’re having an outsized impact. In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs – we are the meteor. We are not only in danger – we are the danger.”

Guterres insisted that the 1.5C target was “still just about possible” but said there needed to be far greater effort from countries to slash carbon emissions, boost climate finance to poorer countries, and for the fossil-fuel industry to be made pariahs by governments, the media and other businesses for its role in causing the climate crisis.

“The godfathers of climate chaos – the fossil-fuel industry – rake in record profits and feast off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies,” he said. “It is a disgrace that the most vulnerable are being left stranded, struggling desperately to deal with a climate crisis they did nothing to create.

“We cannot accept a future where the rich are protected in air-conditioned bubbles, while the rest of humanity is lashed by lethal weather in unlivable lands.”

‘Stop taking fossil-fuel advertising’

Guterres attacked fossil-fuel firms for their meagre investments in cleaner forms of energy and for “distorting the truth, deceiving the public, and sowing doubt” about climate science, before calling for government bans on fossil-fuel advertising and for public relations and media companies to cut ties with oil, gas and coal interests.

“I call on these companies to stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. Stop taking on new fossil-fuel clients, from today, and set out plans to drop your existing ones. Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet – they’re toxic for your brand.”

Guterres lauded the growth in clean energy deployment, amid record levels of investment in wind, solar and other renewable sources, predicting that “economic logic makes the end of the fossil-fuel age inevitable,” but added that governments must hasten the phase-out of fossil fuels.

“It’s We the Peoples versus the polluters and the profiteers,” he said. “Together, we can win. But it’s time for leaders to decide whose side they’re on.”

The speech has been timed to act as a key rallying call by a UN leadership concerned that the climate crisis has slipped down the list of priorities for a world racked by war in Ukraine and Gaza, and other economic worries. A meeting of the powerful G7 group of countries will take place in Italy next week, and then November’s Cop29 climate summit, to be held in Azerbaijan, along with a G20 gathering in Brazil.

Countries are currently working on new pledges on how they will cut emissions until 2035, with these promises to be delivered by next year. Governments have not kept pace with previous pledges, however, with emissions rising to a new record level last year at a time when they must be halved by 2030 to avoid the worst climate effects.

Even though there are hopes that last year will represent a peak in global emissions, there “lies the bleak reality that we are way off track to meet the goals set in the Paris agreement,” said Ko Barrett, secretary general of the WMO.

The world is also lagging in progress towards a pledge made in December to triple renewable electricity generation by 2030, although there are signs that the pace of deployment has started to quicken.

The impacts of the climate crisis continue to be made increasingly vivid amid this wrangling, with countries including India and the US recently gripped by severe heatwaves. A study released this week found that extensive flooding that has devastated parts of southern Brazil, leading to 169 deaths, was made at least twice as likely due to human-caused climate change.

“The problem is now urgent, and we can’t say we need to do something about it in the future, we need to take action now,” said Andrea Dutton, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “The earlier we start making big cuts to emissions, the earlier we can start making a difference.”

Almost four out of every 10 journalists covering the climate crisis and environment issues have been threatened as a result of their work, with 11% subjected to physical violence, according to groundbreaking new research.

A global survey of more than 740 reporters and editors from 102 countries found that 43% of those threatened “sometimes” or “frequently” were targeted by people engaged in illegal activities such as logging and mining. Some 30%, meanwhile, were threatened with legal action – reflecting a growing trend towards corporations and governments deploying the judicial system to muzzle free speech.

The global survey by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network (EJN) and Deakin University is the first-of-its-kind scrutiny of the challenges faced by journalists covering arguably the most pressing – if not existential – issues of our time.

The Covering the Planet report includes in-depth interviews with 74 journalists from 31 countries about what help they need to do a better job reporting extreme weather, plastics pollution, water scarcity, and mining as global heating and unchecked corporate greed pushes the planet to its limits.

The majority said climate and environmental stories have more prominence – relative to other subjects – than a decade ago, but the volume of coverage of the climate crisis is still not commensurate with the gravity of the problem.

Record-breaking temperatures, storms, floods, drought and wildfires are striking with increasing intensity across the world, with low-income communities, Indigenous peoples and people of color the most vulnerable to climate impacts. Slow-onset disasters such as sea level rise, glacier melts, ocean acidification and desertification are also driving forced migration, hunger and other human health disasters.

Despite the breadth and magnitude of the problems, 39% of journalists surveyed reported having self-censored – mostly due to fear of repercussions from “those undertaking illegal activities” or the government. It’s not just that some reporters and editors feel compelled to exclude potentially important information from their audience – 62% reported including statements from sources who are skeptical of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change or climate science, in the misguided belief that this was required for balance.

“The work of ‘covering the planet’ poses diverse challenges for journalists all around the world – but this work is urgent and vital,” said Dr Gabi Mocatta, lead researcher from Deakin University. “This study, for the first time, offers truly global insights on reporting climate change and environmental harms … Such insights are crucial in order to support and amplify the work of journalists who tell the most important stories of our times.”

The survey also found an overwhelming need for more resources for newsrooms covering the environment and the climate crisis: 76% of those surveyed said insufficient resources limit their coverage, and identified more funding for in-depth journalism, in-person training and workshops, and more access to relevant data and subject experts as among their top priorities.

Many rely on funding from non-profits that are often tied to particular subjects, yet journalists would prefer the freedom to cover the most locally relevant climate environmental topics.

“The journalists surveyed are steadfast in their dedication to reporting on how climate change and environmental crimes are negatively impacting both people and the planet – but they desperately need more support,” said James Fahn, executive director of the Earth Journalism Network.

It’s not just environmental journalists under threat. At least 1,910 land and environmental defenders around the world have been killed since 2012.