In the middle of Food, Inc 2 – the follow-up documentary to 2008’s Food, Inc, narrated by Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser – scientists share what they have recently discovered about ultra-processed foods (UPFs). They are not just bad for you in a trashy, empty-calories kind of way; they interfere with the brain and the body’s ability to process food; they mess with you on a cellular level. Whole populations are seeing health deteriorate, profoundly, for no purpose beyond profit. It must be annoying, I suggest to Pollan, 69, to hear scientists deliver this as a discovery. He been warning against processed food for decades.

Pollan’s mantra – “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” – was immortalised in his 2008 book In Defence of Food. By then, he was already an oracle of the genesis, meaning and production of what we eat, thanks to The Botany of Desire (2001) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006). His other memorable phrase from that time was: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food.”

His cultural impact, in the US and far beyond, was immense. It wasn’t just these nutritional fundamentals, but his entire modus operandi. He would follow a foodstuff from its birth, or germination, to the point where it hit your mouth in the most intricate detail. He took apart Bismarck’s apocryphal line about laws being like sausages. Maybe you do want to see them being made. Maybe, in the long term, you will end up with better sausages.

He has also written about psychedelics, in 2018’s How to Change Your Mind, which in 2022 became a Netflix documentary series that took a wild dive into MDMA, LSD, psilocybin and mescaline. Today, he is a nonfiction professor at Harvard and a science and environmental journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley. But, above all that, he is Mr Food.

Anyway, back to the question: does it irk him that science took so long to catch up with ultra-processing, grandmothers and so on? “We assume science always gets there first,” he says. “It has such authority. But sometimes the grandmas know things.” He is speaking over a video call from California, looking relaxed and urbane. “I remember being struck, when I was working on nutrition in 2008, by this study that came out saying that the lycopene in tomatoes [often claimed to be an antioxidant] can’t be absorbed by the body unless it comes in the form of fat. OK, so olive oil on tomatoes. There’s a wisdom in that and the grandmas got there first.”

While grandmas, Pollan and Schlosser (the author of 2001’s Fast Food Nation) have been on to junk food since for ever, “that had no scientific meaning”, Pollan says. The gamechanger was Carlos Monteiro, a professor of nutrition at the University of São Paulo, who appears in the new documentary. “He labelled and defined ultra-processed food,” says Pollan. “Processed food you could make at home. An ultra-processed food is one that contains ingredients no normal person has at home and requires equipment you could only find in a factory.”

If UPFs are driving obesity, they are just one part of a giant food pipeline that is completely bust. While Food, Inc 2 is about the US, so many of its elements are true of food systems across … well, for brevity, I would call it “late capitalism”, but Pollan pushes back on that. “Capitalism is a game that can be played according to different rules,” he says. “We can just change the rules.”

Pollan and Schlosser didn’t intend to make a sequel – until Covid. Its effects on the food system were dramatic. “We all had to scrounge for food. Getting into a supermarket was a challenge and then, once you’d got in, there were empty shelves,” says Pollan.

“This is such a weird idea for Americans. We live in abundance. Our supermarkets are cornucopias. We used to look at videos of empty shelves in the Soviet Union and feel self-satisfied. Suddenly, it was happening here. And for very similar reasons: an overly centralised system that didn’t have any redundancy built into it.”

At the same time, in the early days of the virus, pigs were being euthanised in jaw-dropping numbers, because they couldn’t be processed due to lockdowns. Academic papers have been written about the huge psychological toll this took on vets.

But the ripple effects are traumatic for democracy-lovers, too. Tyson Foods, one of the largest meatpacking companies in the US, started a meat-shortage panic with an advert in the New York Times imploring President Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act. “It’s a piece of legislation designed to make companies do things they don’t want to do in the national interest,” Pollan says. “In this case, Tyson wanted to be allowed to do exactly what they wanted, which was to reopen production lines.”

Meatpacking workers were incredibly vulnerable to Covid infection, due to the conditions, and these plants became vectors of infection in surrounding areas. One report in 2020 found that between 3% and 4% of all US Covid deaths were linked to the meatpacking industry.

The US food industry is a story of overconsolidation, usually with four mega-companies dominating 80% or more of every sector, from meat and dairy to cereals and soft drinks. It gives them undue political influence – almost an immunity to legislation. “We keep exempting agriculture from all the laws we have around labour and animal welfare,” Pollan says.

Before Covid, Pollan didn’t think enough had changed in the industry to make it worth another look. But this concentration of power and production was “a new wrinkle”, as was the ultra-processing. “So it was a sad moment – because, as much attention as Eric’s and my books had had, we hadn’t made that much of a dent. The forces arrayed against us were so much stronger than we realised. I think that we were naive about how merely arming the consumer with information would drive change in the food system. It did drive some change, but nowhere near as much as it would take to dislodge power in the food system.”

He believes in the power of organised consumer boycotts, which are justified by another of the film’s scandals, in which farm workers are so mistreated that their employment amounts to a state of semi-serfdom (you have to watch it for the labourers’ stories – they are staggering). But he is also powerfully aware of state failure. “Policies should be organised around two pillars – one is health of the citizens and the other is health of the environment – and they are not,” he says. “They’re basically designed to lead to overproduction and cheap agricultural commodities, which benefits the soda makers and meat makers.”

There is no doubt that food as it is produced is as harmful to health as tobacco, but there is a question mark over whether that sea change – where cigarette giants were forced to take responsibility for their products – would be possible now, when corporations seem so much more powerful and better defended.

“You realise that it was the tobacco companies, under pressure from the government over smoking, that bought the food industry,” says Pollan. “So it’s a similar playbook, except now they know to burn the internal memos saying: ‘We know this food is unhealthy.’ ‘We know how we can get people to overeat.’ Because the reason they got screwed on tobacco was that there was a paper trail. So they’re not going to make that mistake again.”

Their other strength now, of course, is that food is too big to fail. When the supply chain of Abbott Laboratories, one of only four significant baby formula manufacturers in the US, was disrupted in 2022 after two shutdowns at its main plant, contributing to a nationwide shortage, the panic in young mothers’ faces as they recounted it to the media was palpable and contagious.

If Pollan comes off as much more optimistic – jaunty, even – in the film than these case studies warrant, it’s because he has a great deal of faith in technology. He is surprisingly enthusiastic about the frontiers of synthesised and cultured meat, given that your great-grandmother would definitely not recognise any of this as food.

In person, though, he is ambivalent about it. “If you can pick off 10% of meat eaters and get them to reduce their consumption, that’s a good thing. But you can’t escape the fact that synthesised meat has 21 ingredients or whatever, some of them never seen before in the human diet. We may look back on this and say: ‘Oh no – we didn’t see this health problem coming.’ But it’s such a non-American idea, precaution. It doesn’t go with the frontier spirit, the heroic individual. It’s so namby-pamby.”

But despite what he has discovered, Pollan still takes enormous pleasure in food: “I just pay more attention to it.” Thank God someone does.

Food, Inc 2 is in UK cinemas and available on demand from Friday, with previews at selected cinemas

The European Central Bank has eased the pressure on borrowers across the eurozone after cutting its main interest rate for the first time in almost five years.

Citing a sustained fall in inflation, the ECB said its deposit rate would be cut to 3.75% from a record high of 4%, putting it ahead of the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, which have yet to cut interest rates.

Financial markets eagerly anticipated the first eurozone cut since September 2019, which will also affect the ECB’s main refinancing operations rate, which fell from 4.5% to 4.25%.

City analysts had forecast the cut in borrowing costs at the ECB’s June meeting after signals that the central bank was ready to offer more support to eurozone economies after a period of economic stagnation following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In a statement, the ECB said: “Keeping interest rates high for nine months has helped push down inflation. It is now appropriate to moderate the degree of monetary policy restriction.”

Dean Turner, the chief eurozone economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, said the outlook for inflation, as indicated by the ECB’s latest projections, point to further interest rate reductions later this year.

Turner said: “Of course, the timing of the next move from the ECB is uncertain, as this will be dependent upon incoming data. But with the disinflationary process firmly under way, the ECB, along with other central banks, should feel confident enough to ease policy, most likely at a pace of one cut per quarter.”

However, the ECB expects inflation to be marginally higher this year and in 2025 than it was forecasting in March. It said inflation would average 2.5% in 2024 and 2.2% in 2025, up from its previous forecast of 2.3% and 2%, respectively.

Mark Wall, the chief European economist at Deutsche Bank, said the higher than previously forecast inflation numbers would make ECB policymakers more circumspect about futures cuts.

“The statement arguably gave less guidance than might have been expected on what comes next. In that sense, the immediate tone is a ‘hawkish cut’. This is not a central bank in a rush to ease policy,” he said.

Economic growth is expected to improve after better than expected performances in Germany, Italy and Spain. The average growth rate for the eurozone would be 0.9% in 2024, 1.4% in 2025 and 1.6% in 2026, the ECB said.

It was every public relations executive’s worst nightmare.

Seth Burton was vice-president of communications at the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team when, in 2014, news broke that team owner Donald Sterling had been caught on tape making racist comments in a scandal that shook American sport.

“It was a tough situation and one that couldn’t necessarily be cleaned up,” Burton recalls. “It was remarkable how quickly it took on a life of its own and became a real media firestorm. It was wild how many messages and emails there were – I was staying until two or three in the morning just responding.”

The story of the bombshell tape, and the controversial man behind it, is told in the FX drama series Clipped: The Scandalous Story of LA’s Other Basketball Team, starring Laurence Fishburne, Ed O’Neill, Cleopatra Coleman and Jacki Weaver, streaming on Hulu from Tuesday. It comes two years after HBO’s series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty about the Clippers’ more illustrious city rivals.

O’Neill plays Sterling, a billionaire lawyer and businessman once described as having a “plantation mentality”. He was born Donald Tokowitz to Russian immigrants in Chicago in 1934. When he was a young child the family moved to Boyle Heights, then a predominantly Jewish low-income neighbourhood east of downtown Los Angeles.

Tokowitz eventually changed his last name, earned a law degree and began practicing divorce and personal injury in 1961. He spent his earnings methodically buying up properties all across Los Angeles, becoming famous for almost never selling any of them.

He became the biggest residential landlord in Los Angeles and, like Donald Trump in New York, Sterling loved to put his name on buildings. In 1989 California magazine profiled him with the headline: “The Man Who Would Be Trump.”

A profile in the Los Angeles Times newspaper noted: “Sterling, the son of a vegetable peddler, was not shy about trumpeting his transformation. In his penthouse office in Beverly Hills, Sterling often showed visitors a Louis XIV desk, paintings by Rembrandt and Renoir and centuries-old Chinese antiques. He eagerly dropped celebrity names, bragging that he bought properties from Elizabeth Taylor and John Wayne, and once boasted of plans to buy an NFL franchise.”

With encouragement from his friend and contemporary the Lakers owner Jerry Buss, Sterling paid just over $12m in 1981 for the beleaguered San Diego Clippers. He abruptly moved the franchise to Los Angeles in 1984, putting them in the decrepit Los Angeles Sports Arena and turned a tidy profit thanks to a sweetheart lease deal.

The team consistently underperformed on court, living in the shadow of the mighty Lakers. Sterling, who was known to heckle his own team from his centre court seat, gained a reputation as a notoriously erratic and frugal owner, often refusing to spend money on player salaries or facilities.

Ramona Shelburne, who reported and hosted The Sterling Affairs, an ESPN 30 for 30 podcast on which Clipped is based, explains: “If you want to be the cool guy in town and you want to be up there with the Lakers and Jerry Buss you’ve got to spend money, treat people right, throw parties that people want to go to.

“Donald tries to do a lot of the things that Jerry Buss does, that the Lakers do, but he’s just not able to do it. He pays people to come to his parties and forces them to come to his parties. He doesn’t treat the players well. It informs the way they run the team. It’s critical to understand how that insecurity plays into who Donald Sterling becomes over the course of 20 or 30 years.”

But that started to change. Suddenly winning became a priority. Under Doc Rivers (Fishburne), a Black coach whom Sterling brought in from Boston and paid $7m a year, the team was enjoying the most successful two-year stretch in its history and was finally a title contender. Then disaster struck.

In April 2014 a recording of Sterling made by his personal assistant and mistress, V Stiviano, was leaked to the TMZ website. In the nine-minute, 27-second audio, Sterling could be heard chiding Stiviano for posting a photo on her Instagram account of herself with Black athletes Magic Johnson and Matt Kemp.

Sterling: In your lousy fucking Instagram, you don’t have to have yourself walking with Black people …
Stiviano: And it bothers you?
Sterling: Yeah, it bothers me a lot that you want to promote, broadcast that you’re associating with Black people, do you have to?
Stiviano: You associate with Black people!
Sterling: I’m not you and you’re not me. You’re supposed to be a delicate white or delicate Latina girl
Stiviano: I’m a mixed girl.

There was more:

Sterling: Why are you taking pictures with minorities, why?
Stiviano: What’s wrong with minorities? What’s wrong with Black people?
Sterling: Nothing. How about your whole life, every day, you could do whatever you want? You could sleep with them, you could bring them in, you could do whatever you want! The little I ask you is not to promote it on, and not to bring them to my games.

The clip went viral, which was no mean feat in 2014, and the outcry was huge. At their next game Clippers players wore black wristbands or armbands and went through their pregame routine with their red shirts on inside-out to hide the team’s logo as a silent protest. Criticism poured in from players such as LeBron James (“There’s no room for Donald Sterling in the NBA”), fans on social media and even the White House.

Burton, who did not defend Sterling and was grateful to Rivers for speaking out, says: “The moment when President Obama commented on it was the first time it hit home to me just how massive it had become. He was actually at the time on a tour of Asia and was getting asked about this in Asia.

“I remember seeing it on the news and being like, wow, this has now taken on a whole another level. It’s not just something that’s in sports and the NBA. It’s become a little bit of a worldwide situation and then the NBA realised at that point, of course, they had to do something quick, which they did.”

With sponsors threatening to abandon the NBA, its commissioner, Adam Silver, did indeed respond swiftly, banning Sterling for life from all league activities and fining him $2.5m, the maximum amount allowed under league rules. (Sterling had an estimated net worth of about $2bn.)

Sterling gave an interview to Anderson Cooper of CNN and repeatedly apologised and denied accusations that he was racist, claiming he had been “baited” into making “terrible” remarks. But he also launched another bizarre rant against Johnson.

A decade later his wife, Shelly, continues to defend him and blame the crisis on Stiviano. “It’s totally ridiculous,” she says in a phone interview with the Guardian. “She had drugged him for quite a while and what he said was not what he meant. He sponsors and donates to many African American churches and they were even going to give him a plaque and everything, so it’s totally ludicrous. She did it for money.”

Sterling showered Stiviano with gifts such as money, cars and a $1.8m duplex. Yet Shelly, who married Sterling in 1956, refuses to believe that they were having an affair. “I don’t think it was an affair because they never had a sexual relationship and I knew pretty well.

“Didn’t the world forgive [President Bill] Clinton for having his girlfriend underneath the desk? Every one of the presidents – I guess they have affairs. But I don’t think this was an affair because I knew her too. I never saw them kiss or hold hands or anything. She was basically working for him and she just did what she wanted to.”

Donald and Shelly Sterling did separate for a while, however. She says: “I felt it was better for me. I was a little afraid with all the paparazzi and everything so I moved to our other house and it was quite a ways. I just had to get away from all this craziness and the people stalking us. I was a little afraid.”

In the aftermath of the tape furore, Shelly decided to sell the Clippers, a move that Sterling tried to block. Shelly went to court and had her estranged husband removed as a trustee on grounds of mental incapacitation. The Clippers were bought by the former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer for a then-record $2bn.

Looking back, Shelly contends that Sterling was better off not keeping the franchise. “I don’t think he wanted to, to be honest, and in today’s world we’re so happy we don’t have a team.

“Right now to own a team is really tough and the salaries are crazy and there’s so many problems. He’s sort of relieved that he doesn’t have to go through all that. I have more than I had when we had the team. I have 12 tickets and everybody, when I go there, they like me, and I don’t have any problem.”

Shelly continues to deny that Sterling, now 90, is a racist. “Absolutely not. We have many friends that are African American. We donate a lot of money to them and it’s just ridiculous but I guess anybody can write anything they want.”

The infamous tape was hardly out of character, however. In 2009 Sterling and his insurance company paid $2.75m to settle a federal housing discrimination lawsuit after court proceedings packed with scandalous testimony about Sterling’s opinions of African American and Latino tenants of his properties.

Elgin Baylor, a former Clippers general manager who brought an unsuccessful lawsuit alleging race and age discrimination, claimed that Sterling had a “plantation mentality”, envisioning a team of “poor black boys from the south playing for a white coach”.

The Sterling Affairs podcast, which in 2019 provided a definitive account of the entire saga, interviewed Olden Polynice, who joined the Clippers in 1991. He recalled Sterling walking into the locker room when Polynice had a towel on. “So I’m sitting there and I’m the only guy in the locker room and he said, ‘Hey Olden, how you doing?’

“He put his hand on my shoulder, he’s rubbing, ‘Look how big and strong he is. Wow, look at that.’ I’m like, ‘OK, this is getting a little awkward.’ So I put my hand out, shake his hand. His friends, shake their hands and say, ‘How y’all doing?’ He goes right back, ‘Wow, look at these muscles.’ I’m like, ‘Oh hell. What the fuck is going on here?’

“So I’m sitting there, now I’m starting to sweat a little bit. Because I’m like, ‘Nobody’s in here. There’s a reason why they left.’ And it’s like he just kept looking at me like, ‘Wow, look at this buck.’ Now when he said that, that’s when I, ‘Oh shit.’ I’m like, ‘Buck? I was like what the fuck?’

Polynice added: “Black slave on the trading block, yes. I’m telling you that’s when I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ That fucked me up.”

Shelburne, a Los Angeles native who covered the story when it broke in 2014, says in episode one of The Sterling Affairs: “Los Angeles sits on two faultlines – the San Andreas and race. All of us know it. We live with it.

“Donald Sterling was another. Anyone who played for him, or worked for him, or covered him in the press, or lived in one of his hundreds of apartments. On the one hand knew that it was all a matter of time until he blew up.”

Shelburne adds by phone: “Covering the story in real time felt like living in a larger-than-life movie. Even in the early days of reporting it, I felt like it was a very Los Angeles story. It had everything, it had sex, it had money, it had betrayal, it had racism, it had sexism and all of these characters jumped out in this elevated kind of way. It’s a narrative story that you can sink your teeth into.”

From brown trout becoming “addicted” to methamphetamine to European perch losing their fear of predators due to depression medication, scientists warn that modern pharmaceutical and illegal drug pollution is becoming a growing threat to wildlife.

Drug exposure is causing significant, unexpected changes to some animals’ behaviour and anatomy. Female starlings dosed with antidepressants such as Prozac at concentrations found in sewage waterways become less attractive to potential mates, with male birds behaving more aggressively and singing less to entice them than undosed counterparts.

The contraceptive pill has caused sex reversal in some fish populations – leading to a collapse in numbers and local extinction events as male fish reverted to female organs. Scientists have said that modern pharmaceutical waste is having significant consequences for wildlife exposed to discharges in their ecosystems, and warned it could have unintended consequences for humans.

Michael Bertram, an assistant professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, said: “Active pharmaceutical ingredients are found in waterways all around the globe, including in organisms that we might eat.”

He said evidence of the problem had grown over recent decades, and it was a global issue for biodiversity that deserved more attention.

In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Sustainability, researchers said the pharmaceutical industry must urgently reform the design of drugs to make them greener.

“There are a few pathways for these chemicals to enter the environment,” Bertram, one of the paper’s authors, said. “If there is inadequate treatment of pharmaceuticals that are being released during drug production, that’s one way. Another is during use. When a human takes a pill, not all of that drug is broken down inside our bodies and so through our excrement, the effluent is released directly into the environment.”

Drugs such as caffeine, anti-anxiety medications, antidepressants and antipsychotics were all entering ecosystems, Bertram said, as were illegal drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine.

Bertram pointed to the notable example of diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug routinely given to cattle in south Asia at the time, that caused India’s vulture population to fall by more than 97% between 1992 and 2007. The country subsequently had a surge in rabies cases from dogs that were feeding on the cattle carcasses that were no longer being eaten by the birds.

Other examples include fathead minnows that remained anxious after they were exposed to low levels of caffeine, and antibiotic pollution that has an effect on microbes.

Alarmingly, it is the very same characteristic of pharmaceuticals that makes them effective in human and animal patients that also makes them particularly hazardous environmental pollutants: drugs are specifically designed to have biological effects at low doses.

A recent study that measured 61 different drugs from 104 countries from rivers in 1,052 locations found 43.5% of the sites had traces of at least one drug that were above safe levels for ecological health.

The researchers said active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) pollution was occurring against a backdrop of other pressures on biodiversity, including the climate crisis, habitat destruction and overconsumption.

They said the lifecycle of drug production could be reformed to curb their spillover on ecosystems, and pharmacists, physicians, nurses and vets should be trained in the potential environmental impact of medicines. They added that drugs could be designed to break down more easily after use and said wastewater treatment should be expanded to prevent API pollution entering the environment.

“Appreciating that patient access to pharmaceuticals will remain vital into the future, wWe urge drug designers and manufacturers, scientists and policymakers to recognise the growing environmental threat posed by APIs and to urgently prioritise the sustainable molecular design of greener drugs to prevent further environmental harm,” the paper said.

“Greener drugs reduce the potential for pollution throughout the entire cycle,” said Gorka Orive, a scientist and professor of pharmacy based at the University of the Basque Country, and an author of the study.

“Drugs must be designed to not only be effective and safe, but also to have a reduced potential risk to wildlife and human health when present in the environment,” he said..”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

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.