Aliyah Boston was looking forward to her second professional season.

The 2023 WNBA Rookie of the Year was coming off a successful debut as a television analyst for ESPN at the NCAA Women’s Final Four in April, one made even sweeter by seeing her beloved alma mater, South Carolina, win the national championship after an undefeated season. The delightful approbation given to Boston from her college and national team head coach Dawn Staley showed how beloved both are within basketball. And after witnessing the Gamecocks cut down the nets by getting revenge on Caitlin Clark’s Iowa – the team who had ended her collegiate career a year before – Boston knew she’d soon be playing alongside Clark, with her WNBA team, the Indiana Fever, set to take the 22-year-old with the No 1 overall pick in the upcoming draft.

Fast forward to now. Clark and Boston are indeed teammates but the Fever started their season with five straight losses, before Friday’s narrow win over the Los Angeles Sparks raised the team’s spirits a little. But an even more important, unfortunate storyline has emerged around the team. ESPN’s Holly Rowe revealed, before the Fever’s second regular season game against the Connecticut Sun, that Boston said she has deleted X from her phone and that TikTok is the only social media platform she now feels safe on. And the reason is the disturbing, toxic backlash she and other WNBA players have received from Clark’s wild fans.

Before we start, it’s important to note that this is not Clark’s fault – and she has not done anything to encourage the abuse of her fellow players. There is much to celebrate about Clark’s nascent superstardom and arrival in the world’s best women’s basketball league. Her historic impact on the college game, which led to the highest TV ratings the NCAA women’s Tournament has ever had, appears to be carrying over to the WNBA. Attendance and TV audience numbers for Clark’s preseason and regular-season debuts with the Fever reached zeniths for the 28-year-old league. Although its players had long fought for charter flights in their collective bargaining agreement talks, Clark being at the center of the W’s newfound popularity has undeniably help usher in that long-awaited change. Hell, Clark’s shoe deal with Nike may have led to the best player in league, A’Ja Wilson, finally getting her own signature shoe.

So, Clark has been a good thing for the league and women’s basketball as a whole. Some of her hardcore fans? Not so much.

Some of the tension originated from the matchup between Clark and Angel Reese in the 2023 NCAA title game. Reese’s boisterous personality was attacked by Clark fans at the same time as they praised their own heroine’s cockiness as “competitiveness”.

And a subset of Clark’s fervent fans have become fully unbearable.

Anywhere one turns on social media, Clark fans are blaming the Fever’s early-season struggles – which had been expected – on everyone but her. Disparaging comments about Boston’s weight and game, the rest of Clark’s Fever teammates and calls for head coach Christie Sides to get fired are constant. Yet those same Clark fans don’t demand accountability from the point guard when it comes to her setting a WNBA debut-record 10 turnovers, her below average defensive play and her zest for perimeter shooting, something she had free rein to do at Iowa but needs to scale back until she improves her consistency at the WNBA level. Clark’s occasional volatile temper, which earned her a rare technical foul last Monday night, is glossed over by her rabid supporters who treat her as an infallible celebrity instead of a still-developing professional player.

Added to this, many Clark fans have never been WNBA fans, and show a significant level of ignorance by not respecting the league’s quarter-century history of producing great athletes. The arrogance of pretending that Clark is the sole reason for any interest in the WNBA, or the high level of play it has long possessed, or believing that her fellow professionals are envious of her, are traits her ardent supporters must rid themselves of. That will not be an easy task though, thanks to NBA legends LeBron James and Charles Barkley only enabling the fans’ childish antics.

On the latest episode of his Mind The Game podcast with JJ Redick, James said that Clark “is the reason why a lot of great things are going to happen in the WNBA”. The Lakers forward even Clark’s early-season struggles to his son Bronny’s NBA draft process, claiming that both are getting “a lot of hatred and animosity”.

Barkley’s take was even more dreadful, as the Inside the NBA luminary claimed that her WNBA counterparts were being “petty” to Clark.

“LeBron, you are 100% right on, these girls hating on Caitlin Clark,” Barkley rambled. “I expect men to be petty because we’re the most insecure group in the world. Y’all should be thanking that girl for giving y’all ass private charters, all the money and visibility she is bringing to the WNBA. Don’t be petty like dudes. What she has accomplished, give her, her followers.”

James and Barkley failed to cite specifically who has been giving hate to Clark, exemplifying how counterproductive their surface-level takes are to an honest conversation around Clark, whose stumbles are entirely understandable for a player in their rookie season. And though James gave a shout out to Boston, he did not mention how awful some of Clark’s rambunctious loyalists have been to the forward. His apparent ignorance of that makes his comments all the more dreary.

Barkley meanwhile shows why Clark’s toxic fans and casual WNBA followers need to educate themselves about the league. The coddling of the talented Clark has been insulting and offensive to the great women of the W who have, despite all the misogynist, racist and homophobic attacks they’ve faced, carried the league to sustainability before her arrival. They aren’t going to just make it an open lay-up line and three-point shooting contest for Clark, something no one would expect any other league, male or female, to do. And the first person to admit that would be Clark herself.

Hopefully Clark’s more toxic fans can change before things get really ugly, something that would be unfortunate in what is supposed to be a golden period in women’s basketball. A period in which Clark, Boston and all who love the WNBA should be able to celebrate instead of squirm.

Since its inception, the international criminal court (ICC) has charged 50 people, 47 of whom were African. Its investigations have also been overwhelmingly focused on war crimes and crimes against humanity in African nations. What has long been understood but never stated is that the court and its processes, to put it bluntly, target a certain type of political leadership that is easier to go after. “The court is built for Africans and thugs like Putin,” is what one appalled elected senior leader reportedly told the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, when his team made a recent application for arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, its defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders.

Again, blunt, but not revelatory. At least not to the parts of the world that are more familiar with the court and its investigations. The lineup of suspects and defendants has long solidified the impression below the equator that the ICC is a court for Africans, and lately maybe Russians. How can that not be the takeaway when, in the years since the court was founded, the US – often with British support – has calamitously invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, established an extrajudicial prison for terror suspects, and created a CIA torture and detention network? African conflicts are seen as intimate, tribal and intentional in a way that those in other places are not. The underlying suggestion is that civilians in western wars are killed and illegally detained by accident, while other countries do this on purpose.

It would take a particularly gullible person to believe that it is only the actions of African or Russian leaders that meet the threshold for breaking the rules of engagement in conflict. But there was always a veneer of plausibility. That is now being stripped away by the US and Britain’s indignant rejection of the court’s move against Netanyahu, and the instruction from the international court of justice (ICJ) that Israel ought to protect Palestinians from genocide and halt its offensive in Rafah. Israel has sent its troops to invade another territory, causing the deaths of civilians in the process, yet we are encouraged to think of its campaign as falling along the same lines as all those other “good wars” the west has waged – another of those defensive moral missions during which unfortunate things have happened. Things that somehow never amount to the criminal, because the awfulness of war apparently can’t be avoided.

And besides, Israel is a democracy. The countries that don’t belong in the dock are the ones that investigate themselves, and are seen as not requiring the paternal oversight of global courts. The US Senate delivered a report and indictment of the CIA’s detention and interrogation techniques, while the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war condemned Britain’s military campaign and found that the legal basis was dealt with in an unsatisfactory way. That’s as far as the investigations went. The result was apologies (and unrepentant defiance from Tony Blair), and the performance of oversight was enough to maintain a veneer of justice.

Israel’s record obliterates all these exceptions. Its actions have failed to meet the standards set by its own allies for immunity from judgment. Civilian casualties in Gaza are too large to be written off as necessary collateral. Seven months in, and the goal of defeating Hamas is neither closer nor outlined in a coherent way. The famine and forced displacement of civilians are too systemic to be regarded only as unfortunate byproducts of the campaign. Israel’s reputation as a reliable democracy is shot. Its capacity to credibly investigate itself is too compromised by the short history of its pugnacious rightwing government that will brook no criticism, and its longer history of ignoring international law by allowing the expansion of settlements in occupied territories.

In continuing to treat Israel as a country that is responsible but whose actions are sometimes humanly flawed, its allies are making a perilous calculation that in the long run will undermine their own interests. Their support for Israel’s actions weakens not only international law, but the ability to hold their enemies to account and maintain red lines against belligerent countries in a world where the tools of the international system are becoming ever more important. Rising political and economic forces in Asia, the Middle East and South America are challenging Anglo-American models of power, and making their agenda harder to deliver.

Take the United Arab Emirates, a political player that was nowhere on the map 30 years ago. Today, it is an economic powerhouse and ally of the US, but it has also exchanged high-level meetings with Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine, and it continues to enable Russia to circumvent sanctions. There’s little the US can do about this. According to the Soufan Center, a global security and foreign policy research organisation, there is “little appetite in Washington” to do more than dish out warnings to the UAE.

The same goes for Qatar, which the US can only “urge” to expel Hamas’s political leadership from Doha. I’m old enough to remember a time when that language would have sounded unimaginably feeble. Rising volumes of trade between economies in the global south also increasingly cushion countries against the effect of punitive western sanctions. Chinese companies recently sanctioned for helping Russia belong to an economy that is Africa’s second-largest trading partner after the EU. Networks between sanctioned countries outside the regulated financial system are thriving. Gold, an unfreezable asset, has become a crucial part of how countries such as Russia, Venezuela and Iran engage in an international barter system.

In this new context, enforcement becomes crucial, but may be impossible. After their dismissal of the ICC and ICJ calls on Israel to comply with international law, how can the US and its partners make a convincing case again that their rules are fair and universal, and so must be followed by all? It is brazenly clear that the rules-based order is not about democratic values, the rule of law and the sanctity of human lives, but the observance of a global hierarchy in which some lives are sacred and others are not.

One day, the Gaza war will be over. And what will confront Israel’s allies is a world in which that logic, now plainly stated, is rejected once and for all. The stakes are higher than they realise. They will reap not only moral disgrace, but the crumbling of their entire postwar world order.

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Retailers are being urged to stop making everyday products such as drinks bottles, outdoor furniture and toys out of brightly coloured plastic after researchers found it degrades into microplastics faster than plainer colours.

Red, blue and green plastic became “very brittle and fragmented”, while black, white and silver samples were “largely unaffected” over a three-year period, according to the findings of the University of Leicester-led project.

The scale of environmental pollution caused by plastic waste means that microplastics, or tiny plastic particles, are everywhere. Indeed, they were recently found in human testicles, with scientists suggesting a possible link to declining sperm counts in men.

In this case, scientists from the UK and the University of Cape Town in South Africa used complementary studies to show that plastics of the same composition degrade at different rates depending on the colour.

The UK researchers put bottle lids of various colours on the roof of a university building to be exposed to the sun and the elements for three years. The South African study used plastic items found on a remote beach.

“It’s amazing that samples left to weather on a rooftop in Leicester and those collected on a windswept beach at the southern tip of the African continent show similar results,” said Dr Sarah Key, who led the project.

“What the experiments showed is that even in a relatively cool and cloudy environment for only three years, huge differences can be seen in the formation of microplastics.”

This field study, published in the journal Environmental Pollution, is the first such proof of this effect. It suggests that retailers and manufacturers should give more consideration to the colour of short-lived plastics.

“I’ve often wondered why microplastics in beach sand often appear to be all the colours of the rainbow,” said Professor Sarah Gabbott, also from the University of Leicester, who co-authored the study.

“I assumed that my eyes were being deceived and that I was just seeing the more colourful microplastics because they were easier to spot. Turns out there really are likely to be more brightly coloured microplastics in the environment because those plastic items pigmented red, green and blue are more susceptible to being fragmented into millions of tiny yet colourful microplastic particles.”

Adam Herriott, senior specialist for plastics at the anti-waste charity Wrap, said coloured plastic had traditionally been used to make products stand out in the shops, but the organisation is already advising manufacturers to avoid pigments so that plastic can be recycled more easily.

“If you mix up the colours together, it comes out a weird grey or greenish colour,” he said. The research was another reason to do this. “If we can avoid those bright colours in food packaging, especially high litter items like crisp packets or bottle tops, it would be better.”

The findings demonstrate that the black, white and silver colourants protect the plastic from damaging ultraviolet (UV) radiation, whereas other pigments do not. UV damage changes the plastic’s polymer structure, making it brittle and susceptible to fragmentation.

“Manufacturers should consider both the recyclability of the material and the likelihood of it being littered when designing plastic items and packaging,” said Key. “For items that are used outdoors or extensively exposed to sunlight, such as plastic outdoor furniture, consider avoiding colours like red, green and blue to make them last as long as possible.”

A Scottish safari park has announced the birth of two female lemur pups native to Madagascar.

Nova and Evie, who are living at Blair Drummond safari and adventure park, near Stirling, were born on 14 April, and the park has now publicly announced their birth.

The six-week-old black-and-white ruffled lemurs are among as few as 1,000 remaining in the wild, with the species considered critically endangered.

They are known to have the second-loudest primate call in the animal kingdom, with howler monkeys the only louder species.

Their loud cry makes them more susceptible to capture for the illegal pet trade, and additional threats include hunting by locals and habitat destruction due to deforestation, logging and mining.

Blair Drummond participates in the European Endangered Species Breeding Programme in order to build the population of animals such as the lemurs.

The sisters are the third litter to be born at the park, with several of their siblings now in zoological establishments across the UK.

The park also collaborates with the conservation project Feedback Madagascar, which focuses on educating communities and protecting lemurs in their natural habitat.

The pups will eventually join the other lemurs at the park’s Lemur Land. Meanwhile, visitors can catch a glimpse of them in their indoor enclosure with their mother, Cali.

The twin sisters will later be rehomed as part of the breeding programme.

The zookeeper Lesley Rodger said: “We are overjoyed to welcome these two new arrivals to our lemur conspiracy. They are gaining confidence in their surroundings daily and are already testing their limb strength by hanging from branches in their aviary.

“Both pups are female, and based on our past experience, girls do tend to be more of a handful.

“We have named them Nova, meaning ‘new’, and Evie, meaning ‘life’.”

Donald Trump’s inner circle is stepping up efforts to woo Black and other minority voters, with a leading candidate to be his vice-presidential running mate claiming falsely on Sunday TV that Joe Biden was resegregating US public schools.

Tim Scott, the US senator from South Carolina who has been open about his desire to be on Trump’s ticket, made one of the most extreme claims yet. Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union show, he described President Biden as a supporter of educational segregation.

“We need four more years of common sense under Donald Trump, and not four more years of segregation under Joe Biden,” Scott, who is African American, said.

Asked by CNN host Dana Bash whether suggesting Biden was for segregation was going too far, Scott tried to justify the contention by saying that “the elimination of charter schools under Joe Biden resegregates schools in America”. He added that schools in the largest cities were being resegregated by “Joe Biden’s Department of Education which has halted the growth of charter schools that provide greater diversity”.

In fact, charter schools, which are publicly funded but which operate outside state school systems, are backed by federal government grants through the Charter Schools Program to the tune of $440m a year – a level that has remained unchanged since 2019 under the Trump administration. Scott’s argument that charter schools create more diversity is also open to question.

New research carried out by sociologists at Stanford University and the University of Southern California to mark 70 years of the landmark US supreme court ruling outlawing segregated schools, Brown v Board of Education, reveals that segregation has been creeping back up for the past 30 years. One of the main drivers of the revival, contrary to Scott’s claim, has been the rise of charter schools, the academics discovered.

In recent weeks Trump has stepped up his attempt to prise Black voters away from their long-standing support for the Democratic party. On Thursday, he staged a rally in the South Bronx, one of the most diverse and staunchly Democratic parts of the country, where 95% of the population is Black or Hispanic.

Trump made a brazen play for the support of Black voters at the rally, talking about “millions and millions of illegals coming into the country” who he said had a negative impact particularly on minority American communities. “African Americans are getting slaughtered. Hispanic Americans are being slaughtered,” he said.

The Trump campaign push comes as recent opinion polls indicate that his support among these demographic populations is climbing. The Pew Research Center found in a recent survey that 18% of Black voters were leaning for Trump, compared with the 8% of Black voters who voted for him in 2020.

The Biden campaign has responded to the apparent shift towards Trump by targeting negative political adverts accusing Trump of a track record of racism. Last week it released a 30-second ad that invoked the case of the Central Park Five, Black men who were wrongly convicted of raping a jogger in 1989.

Trump took out a full-page advert in local newspapers soon after the men were arrested, calling for New York to bring back the death penalty.

Six people who shared a meal involving black bear meat kebabs have been diagnosed with trichinellosis, a parasitic zoonotic disease.

In a new report released this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that in July 2022, a 29-year old hospitalized patient with suspected trichinellosis was reported to the Minnesota health department. His symptoms included fever, severe muscle aches, periorbital edema or eye swelling, and eosinophilia or the condition of elevated levels of eosinophils, a type of white blood cell.

According to the report, a week prior to the symptoms appearing, the patient and eight other people shared a meal that included the meat of a black bear which had been frozen for 45 days before being grilled and served rare with vegetables that had been cooked with the meat.

An investigation into the incident found six trichinellosis cases, including two in people who consumed only the vegetables. Trichinellosis is a parasitic infection caused by the larvae of trichinella, a type of roundworm. Typically, meat contaminated with the trichinella larvae comes from carnivorous animals such as bears, wild boars or walrus.

Molecular testing found that larvae from the bear meat had been frozen in a household freezer for more than 15 weeks and that the larvae was trichinella nativa, a freeze-resistant species. The CDC warns that adequate cooking is the only reliable way to kill trichinella parasites and that infected meat can cross-contaminate other foods.

The CDC reports that six days before the symptom onset in the initial patient, he and eight extended family members from Arizona, Minnesota and South Dakota gathered in South Dakota for several days. During their gathering, they ate the meat from a black bear which had been harvested by one of the family members in northern Saskatchewan, Canada, in May 2022.

According to the report, the meat was “initially inadvertently served rare, reportedly because the meat was dark in color, and it was difficult for the family members to visually ascertain the level of doneness”.

It added: “After some of the family members began eating the meat and noticed that it was undercooked, the meat was recooked before being served again.”

Three of the six symptomatic people, two of whom sought care at least twice before being offered treatment, were hospitalized. All three patients received trichinellosis-directed treatment with albendazole, a medication for the treatment of a variety of parasitic worm infections.

All six symptomatic people recovered, with the CDC reporting that the non-hospitalized patients did not receive trichinellosis-directed treatment because their symptoms had resolved with supportive care only.

Across the US, trichinellosis is rarely reported. Most of the cases that are reported relate to the consumption of meat from wild game.

From January 2016 to December 2022, there were seven trichinellosis outbreaks in the US that were reported to the CDC, including 35 probable and confirmed cases. Bear meat was the suspected or confirmed source of infection for the majority of these outbreaks, the CDC said.

Britain’s armed forces need more money not untrained teenage volunteers, former military leaders and Tory figures have said in a new blow to the Conservatives’ faltering election campaign.

Within hours of being announced, Rishi Sunak’s election pledge to bring back military service for 18-year-olds was rubbished by army chiefs and a former Conservative defence secretary.

Rishi Sunak pledged to introduce mandatory national service which would see young people spend a year in the military or do volunteer work on weekends.

The prime minister doubled down on the proposal on Sunday night, saying that national service schemes in other countries “show just how fulfilling it is for young people”.

But Adm Alan West, a former chief of the naval staff, said it was a “bonkers” plan which would deplete the defence budget.

“I’m delighted if more young people become aware of defence and are involved … but this idea is basically bonkers,” Lord West said. “We need to spend more on defence, and – by doing what he’s suggesting – money will be sucked out of defence.”

He added that Rishi Sunak should have committed more funds to the defence budget before the election.

Richard Dannatt, a former chief of the general staff, said the proposal was “electoral opportunism”. “The costs of this would be considerable in terms of trainers and infrastructure. This task cannot just be imposed on the armed forces as an extra thing to do,” he added.

Michael Portillo, a former defence secretary, said the announcement could do further damage to the Tories’ reputation for fiscal responsibility.

He told GB News on Sunday: “The way in which this policy has been produced worries me very much indeed. That is to say, I very much doubt whether it’s been thought through, and I doubt whether the armed services and all the charities that need to be involved have been consulted and are on board.

“It represents an increase in public expenditure and that’s very important, because it puts the Conservatives on the back foot. Because, on the whole, the Conservatives have been saying we’ve got clear plans, we’re the government. Now ask Labour how they’re going to find the extra money. But now this reverses all that, because now Labour can say the Conservatives are making promises which aren’t funded.”

The pledge was launched just two days after the defence minister Andrew Murrison said that the government had no plans for national service in “any form” because it would do more harm than good.

In an answer to a written parliamentary question, Murrison said placing “potentially unwilling” recruits with professional soldiers “could damage morale, recruitment and retention and would consume professional military and naval resources”.

He added that if, on the other hand, temporary recruits were kept separate “it would be difficult to find a proper and meaningful role for them, potentially harming motivation and discipline”.

John Healey, the shadow defence secretary, said the Conservatives’ national service proposal was “an undeliverable plan and a distraction from their failures in defence over the last 14 years. Even Rishi Sunak’s own defence minister dismissed the idea days ago.

“Since 2010, Tory ministers have missed recruitment targets every year, hollowed out and underfunded our armed forces, and cut the British army to its smallest size since Napoleon. It’s time for change. Britain will be better defended with Labour,” Healey added.

Kevan Jones, a former Labour defence minister, said the plan was an “ill-thought-out and expensive election gimmick which will do nothing to add to the nation’s security”.

Some Tory MPs welcomed the policy but privately said they thought it had been poorly communicated. “We’ve made something bold but actually incremental sound insane,” one said.

Facing questions about the proposal on Sunday, James Cleverly, the home secretary, said that no teenagers would be sent to prison for avoiding “mandatory” national service.

Tory estimates said the policy would cost £2.5bn a year by the end of the decade. Of this, they said £1bn would come from cracking down on tax avoidance and £1.5bn from extending the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, which was designed to regenerate underfunded towns around the UK.

On Sunday night, the Conservatives said they would ask a royal commission to look at international examples of how full-time armed forces placements can offer young people better opportunities later in their careers.

The commission would be asked to look at Norway and Israel as case studies and asked to design incentives for young people to complete a year in the military, such as by offering them fast-track interviews in the civil service or with big employers.

The Liberal Democrat defence spokesperson, Richard Foord, said of the plans for a royal commission: “As Suella Braverman once said, when you’re in a hole, keep digging.”

Nigel Farage, the honorary president of Reform UK, told the BBC that the proposal was designed to appeal to his voters but ultimately a “joke” and “totally impractical”.

A professional horse rider has died while competing at an equestrian event in Devon.

Georgie Campbell was competing at the Bicton international horse trials when she suffered a fatal accident, according to British Eventing.

“Medical professionals attended immediately following her fall at fence 5b,” the governing body said in a statement. “However, unfortunately, she could not be saved. The horse, Global Quest, was assessed by the onsite vets and walked back to the stable and is uninjured.

“To respect the family’s privacy at this extremely difficult and sad time, no further details will be shared.”

An air ambulance, double-crewed land ambulance, operations officer and hazardous area response team were sent to the scene.

Campbell was initially a top-level showing rider before turning to eventing, and she had represented Great Britain numerous times on Nations Cup teams and appeared at several five-star events, the highest recognised level of eventing.

Overall, Campbell had competed in more than 200 events – winning on six occasions – during her career, and had outings at the five-star events Badminton and Burghley. She married event rider Jesse Campbell, who had previously represented New Zealand at the Tokyo Olympics, in 2020.

Together the pair joined personal and professional forces to create Team Campbell Eventing.

An earlier statement released by the organisers reported that Campbell and Global Quest had fallen and the rider had been attended to immediately by on-site medical professionals. The event, which was due to conclude on Sunday with a cross-country phase, was abandoned.

A spokesperson for South Western ambulance service NHS foundation trust said it was called to an incident near Budleigh Salterton at 3.05pm on Sunday. An air ambulance, double-crewed land ambulance, operations officer and hazardous area response team were sent to the scene.

The Bicton international horse trials is a four-day event taking place from Thursday to Sunday. Devon and Cornwall police have been contacted for comment.

PGA Tour golfer Grayson Murray took his own life, his family confirmed in a statement on Sunday.

The 30-year-old’s death was announced on Saturday, a day after he had withdrawn from the Charles Schwab Challenge.

“We have spent the last 24 hours trying to come to terms with the fact that our son is gone. It’s surreal that we not only have to admit it to ourselves, but that we also have to acknowledge it to the world. It’s a nightmare,” Murray’s parents, Eric and Terry, said in the statement.

“We have so many questions that have no answers. But one. Was Grayson loved? The answer is yes. By us, his brother Cameron, his sister Erica, all of his extended family, by his friends, by his fellow players and – it seems – by many of you who are reading this. He was loved and he will be missed.

“We would like to thank the PGA Tour and the entire world of golf for the outpouring of support. Life wasn’t always easy for Grayson, and although he took his own life, we know he rests peacefully now.”

Murray had spoken about his struggles with alcohol and mental health. After winning the Sony Open in January he talked about his problems away from the golf course.

“It’s not easy,” he said. “I wanted to give up a lot of times. Give up on myself. Give up on the game of golf. Give up on life, at times.”

As well as his victory at the Sony Open, Murray won the Barbasol Championship in 2017. His best finish in a major was a tie for 22nd at the 2017 US PGA Championship. He also won three events on the Korn Ferry Tour and was ranked No 58 in the world at the time of his death.

On Saturday, Murray’s fellow professionals expressed their grief at his death.

“Truly devastating news that Grayson Murray has passed away,” the former world No 1, Luke Donald, wrote on X. “He asked me for some advice on how to play Augusta a few months ago, last week I saw him at the PGA Championship, life truly is precious. My condolences and prayers to his whole family that they may find some peace.”

Webb Simpson said he learned of Murray’s death just before he teed off at the Charles Schwab Challenge. “I just hate it so much,” Simpson said. “I’ll miss him. I’m thankful he was in the place with his faith before this morning happened.”

The PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, said grief counsellors would be available for players at tournaments in the coming days.

“To be in the locker room, to see the devastation on the faces of every player that’s coming in, it’s really difficult to see. And really just profound,” Monahan told CBS on Saturday. “Grayson was a remarkable player on the PGA Tour, but he was a very courageous man, as well. And I’ve always loved that about him, and I know that the locker room is filled with people that really will take that away when they think about Grayson.”

In January, Murray said he had been sober for eight months, had become a Christian and was engaged. He said he believed his best golf was ahead of him. He had recently been appointed as a member of the 16-person Player Advisory Council.

Asbestos has been found in recycled soil fill for sale in New South Wales landscape and garden stores, more than a decade after investigators first raised concerns about contamination.

Guardian Australia bought four products at Sydney landscape supply shops and had samples analysed by accredited private laboratories.

Two did not comply with state regulations on pH levels, and one was found to contain asbestos fibres.

One of the products that passed the laboratory tests contained large physical contaminants such as glass and a metal screw.

The results prompted the state’s environment regulator to express concern about the “poor product and levels of non-compliance we are seeing in the industry”. Earlier this year Guardian Australia revealed that widespread breaches by waste recycling facilities meant potentially contaminated product might have been applied in the past decade to land across the state, including at childcare centres, residential areas, schools and parks.

Jason Scarborough, a former senior waste compliance officer at the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA), who took the samples sent for testing, said the product containing asbestos posed a potential health hazard, another would be “unsuitable for any sort of horticultural use” and he also would not use the product that had “serious visible physical contamination”.

The products bought from each store were marketed as crusher dust, recycled turf underlay, recycled soil and budget underlay – all names which can be used to sell the recycled residues from construction and demolition sites known as “recovered fines”. The visual appearance and descriptions of the products were also consistent with recovered fines.

The products are used by industry and at public places such as parks and schools, as well as being sold directly to consumers for back yard landscape purposes such as a foundation for turf, backfill for a retaining wall, or as a base for pavers. An estimated 700,000 tonnes of the product is applied to land in NSW each year.

Testing the samples

Guardian Australia bought products from four Sydney landscape stores. Scarborough took samples from each product in accordance with accepted scientific standards and sent them to two private laboratories accredited by the National Association of Testing Authorities (Nata).

The two EPA investigations revealed previously by Guardian Australia, one in 2013 and one in 2019, found facilities producing recovered fines were breaching regulations intended to limit the spread of contaminants, including lead and asbestos.

Scarborough was the EPA official who led the 2013 investigation. He spoke publicly in February about his concern that the regulator had failed to act on known problems in the waste sector.

The laboratories each tested a portion of the samples against the legislated thresholds for contaminants set out in the regulations for recovered fines. They include physical contaminants such as plastics, hard metal and glass, chemical contaminants such as lead, zinc and nickel, and other toxins such as pesticides and polychlorinated biphenyls. The laboratories also tested the products for asbestos, but this is not a specific requirement under the recovered fines regulations.

Soil fill made from recovered fines is heterogeneous. Even if it has been well processed, the composition can be variable, meaning one portion of a sample won’t necessarily have the same concentration of contaminants as another portion.

The crusher dust was found by one lab to contain a “bundle” of asbestos fibres, meaning it is considered asbestos waste under current NSW laws and must be disposed of.

That product and the recycled soil were found by both labs to have breached the legislated range for pH levels set by the Environment Protection Authority.

The recycled turf underlay contained visible physical contaminants including electrical wire, large pieces of glass and a metal screw. But both the commercial labs found it complied with the legislated thresholds for the full suite of contaminants.

The samples of the budget underlay were given a pass by the labs against every aspect of the regulations and also did not have the large visible contaminants.

“Based on those four products, one of them potentially poses a health risk because it contained asbestos fibres,” Scarborough said.

“Another would be unsuitable for any sort of horticultural use.

“50% are not compliant with an aspect of the [recovered fines] order and another had serious visible physical contamination that wasn’t reflected in the laboratory results.

“So the maths there is 75% – three out of the four products, I wouldn’t use.”

Poor documentation increases risk to consumers

The results showed no traces of pesticides or of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are potentially carcinogenic chemicals. All samples tested were within the limits for heavy metals such as lead.

But Scarborough said he would exercise caution in interpreting those findings because of the variable nature of the material.

“The portion the lab took to analyse may not be representative of the whole, which is really the fundamental problem with this stuff,” he said.

But he said this aspect of the tests did seem to show an improvement on samples the EPA tested in the 2013 investigation, which he said detected regular breaches of thresholds for lead, zinc and copper in particular.

The 2013 report recommended that soil products made from recovered fines should be used only for things such as pipe bedding and deep earth works where the risk of human contact was lower. It recommended the products not be sold by third parties such as landscapers because poor documentation made it difficult to follow the chain of custody for the material, and landscape suppliers were not necessarily equipped to explain the nature of the product to their customers.

Guardian Australia’s tests were limited to stores that sold the products in small quantities – most recovered fines products are sold in bulk.

The original source of the material and the recycling facility that processed it was not contained in the product information for any of the soil fill bought by Guardian Australia.

Under the recovered fines regulations, the waste facilities that process the material are required to give the purchaser a statement certifying they have met all of the legislated requirements for the product as well as a copy of the regulations or a link to where the purchaser can find that information.

But those rules only apply to the processors. That information often won’t reach the consumer who buys the product from a third party such as a landscaper. None of the landscape stores Guardian Australia bought the products from provided that information, nor were they required to.

“This is where it breaks down,” Scarborough said.

“That information may have been provided to the landscape stores, but it wasn’t provided to you when you bought the stuff.

“Realistically, the person using the material is the most important in this supply chain, because they are the ones that are going to be exposed to the product.”

An EPA spokesperson said the regulator was “concerned by reports of suspected contamination of recycled products and to investigate this matter further we would require more information”.

They said a recent compliance campaign following up on the 2019 investigation had found “asbestos in stockpiles at several facilities resulting in prevention notices being issued to stop the distribution of this material”.

“We will shortly be taking regulatory action as a result of this compliance campaign,” they said.

In 2022, the EPA abandoned a proposal to tighten the regulations for producers of recovered fines products after pressure from the waste industry.

An EPA spokesperson said the regulator was now considering changes to those rules and was consulting the industry.

They said any reforms would be informed by a review under way by the NSW chief scientist into the management of asbestos in products made from recycled construction and demolition waste.

As part of that review, the office of the chief scientist is examining approaches to asbestos management taken in other Australian jurisdictions and whether a “tolerable threshold level” can be set for asbestos in waste intended for beneficial reuse.