It may be known as snail mail, but researchers are hoping the public will use the postal service to send them a different kind of mollusc: slugs.

A team of scientists and farmers carrying out research into slug-resistant wheat say they need about 1,000 of the creatures to explore how palatable slugs find various crops.

“The ones that we’re specifically looking for are grey field slugs: they’re the ones that are the agricultural pests,” said Tom Allen-Stevens, the founder of the British On-Farm Innovation Network that is leading the work.

The study is asking people to send in slugs by signing up for a “slug scout” pack, which includes containers and postage-paid envelopes. The pack also contains guides on how to create an attractive habitat to catch slugs and how to identify species.

The latter, it seems, is crucial. “There is a slug called the leopard slug,” Allen-Stevens said. “And if you come across that for heaven’s sake don’t send it in, because they eat other slugs.”

The researchers are looking for farmers to become “slug sleuths”, which involves hosting trials such as using traps to monitor slug activity. The research is part of a three-year £2.6m project known as Slimers that began in 2023 and is funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

It aims to find new ways to tackle what it calls “arable farming’s biggest pest issue”. Slimers says slugs are responsible for £43.5m worth of crop damage to wheat and oilseed rape every year in the UK.

The chemical metaldehyde, which was commonly used in slug control products in the UK, was banned in 2022, resulting in the increased use of ferric phosphate pellets. However, the industry is keen for alternatives.

“Where we can we want to apply pesticides more precisely and everyone in the industry recognises that’s the right direction to go in,” said Allen-Stevens. “And farmers don’t want to spread slug pellets where they’re not needed.”

Slimers is looking at new ways to control the molluscs, including by identifying and predicting slug hotspots so that available treatments can be applied in a more focused way.

The team is also looking at the potential for slug-resistant crops. It is carrying out trials involving a landrace wheat known as Watkins 788 that slugs seem to spurn and 84 crosses of this crop with modern wheat.

While Allen-Stevens said the postal kits had been approved by Royal Mail, he cautioned against posting molluscs late in the week. “That’s just in case they sit in a post room over the weekend,” he said. “That’s the main thing … Don’t post them before a weekend or a bank holiday.”

The government has admitted that a proposed coalmine in Cumbria was approved unlawfully, as the carbon emissions of coal from the mine should have been taken into account in the planning decision.

This follows a precedent set by a supreme court judgment last month, when Surrey county council’s decision to extend planning permission for an oil drilling well at Horse Hill, on the Weald, was quashed.

Campaigners argued it should have accounted for greenhouse gas emissions from using the oil when assessing the environmental impacts of the project, not only the drilling site itself. These are known as “scope 3” or downstream emissions.

On Thursday, another oil drilling project – this time in the Lincolnshire Wolds area of outstanding natural beauty – was quashed after a concession from Angela Rayner, secretary of state for housing, communities and local government.

Hours later, lawyers acting for Rayner’s department said there was an “error in law” in the decision to grant planning permission for the Cumbrian mine in December 2022. The government will now not be defending two legal challenges by Friends of the Earth and South Lakes Action on Climate Change (Slacc) next week, and has instead informed the court that the decision to grant planning permission should be quashed.

The case is still expected to go ahead on Tuesday unless West Cumbria Mining also concedes.

Experts have said the mine would be likely to cause the UK to break its legally binding climate commitments as it would release about 17,500 tonnes of methane every year, according to estimates. The mine, which would have produced coking coal for steelmaking, was claimed to be carbon neutral by the previous government, though this only applies to the mining operations and does not take account of the scope 3 emissions.

The new government has a range of difficult decisions to make on energy, including whether to approve the oil and gas licences that are already in progress with the North Sea Transition Authority, and whether to grant the biofuel company Drax more government subsidies for burning wood.

Jamie Peters, a climate coordinator with Friends of the Earth, said: “We’re delighted the government agrees that planning permission for this destructive, polluting and unnecessary coalmine was unlawfully granted and that it should be quashed. We hope the court agrees, and that the mine is then rejected when the secretary of state reconsiders the application.

“Friends of the Earth will continue to stand alongside Slacc and the other community groups in Cumbria who have fought so bravely to halt this mine. The new government must now ensure that areas like west Cumbria get the jobs and investment they urgently need so that people living there can reap the benefits of building a clean, green and affordable future.”

West Cumbria Mining has been contacted for comment.

A food safety scandal has caused mounting public outrage in China days before a high-level Chinese Communist party meeting at which leaders will try to boost confidence in the economy.

Last week the state-run newspaper Beijing News published an in-depth exposé on the “open secret” of fuel tankers being used to transport cooking oil, without the tankers being washed or disinfected in between.

In the report, an undercover reporter interviewed a trucker who had driven a tanker of coal-derived fuel from Ningxia, a region in the west of China, to the east coast city of Qinhuangdao in Hebei, a journey of more than 800 miles (1,290km). The trucker told the journalist he was not allowed to return with an empty vehicle, and subsequently drove to a facility in another part of Hebei to load up with nearly 32 tons of soya bean oil, without cleaning the tanker. Several other tankers featured in the article made similar journeys.

The scandal has implicated several major Chinese companies including the state-owned oil and grain company Sinograin and Hopefull Grain and Oil Group, a private conglomerate. Both companies said they were investigating the claims.

This week the office of the food safety commission under China’s State Council said it was investigating the claims and that “individuals found violating the law through improper use of tanker trucks will face severe punishment”.

Chinese regulations state that different tankers should be used for transporting cooking oil and fuel, which is derived from coal and is potentially poisonous.

The Beijing News report revealed that inspections were often absent or cursory. In one case, on a tanker waiting to collect a load of edible oil, a piece of white paper was taped over the writing that indicated it should be used for fuel.

It is not clear where the cooking oil in the fuel-contaminated tankers ultimately ended up. Follow-up reports tracking the truckers identified in the Beijing News article suggested that the tankers delivered oil to packaging facilities run by household brand names in China, intensifying concerns that people could be consuming toxic oil. The article also quoted an industry insider as saying that some of the oil may ultimately be packaged into small bottles for foreign sales.

The news has caused widespread outrage in China, where there are deeply rooted fears about food safety after a series of scandals and perceived lack of accountability for rule-breakers.

In 2008, six babies died and 300,000 were sickened by contaminated baby formula. In 2013, more than 16,000 dead pigs were found in the Huangpu River, which supplies Shanghai with drinking water. Last year, images of a school canteen in Jiangxi went viral after a student found a rat’s head in his meal, which the school initially claimed was duck meat.

The hashtag #edibleoil had more than 16m views on Weibo on Thursday. Many commenters praised the role of journalists in exposing the scandal. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen investigative journalism like this, kudos to the media,” one commenter wrote on Weibo.

Some analysts questioned why Beijing News, a Chinese Communist party-backed outlet, had been allowed to publish such a damning report shortly before CCP leaders meet for the third plenum, one of China’s most important political gatherings, next week.

Investigations into consumer and public health issues used to be relatively common in China’s media, but in the past decade the space for independent reporting has been dramatically squeezed and the CCP maintains a tight grip on what kind of information can be published.

Other hashtags relating to the incident, particularly those that named specific companies, appear to have been censored on Weibo.

One sensitive topic appears to be posts relating to Jinlongyu, a household brand of cooking oil that has been implicated in the scandal. Shares in Jinlongyu’s parent company fell by more than 8% on Wednesday amid concerns that its oil could be tainted. The company said its trucks met national requirements.

Additional research by Chi Hui Lin

This story is co-published with SourceMaterial and Floodlight

Some forest carbon offsets sold by the biggest offsetting company in the US offer little or no benefit to the climate, a satellite analysis has found.

Finite Carbon, created in 2009 and bought by British multinational oil and gas giant BP in 2020, is responsible for more than a quarter of the US’s total carbon credits, which it says it generates from protecting more than 60 “high credibility, high integrity projects” across 1.6m hectares (4m acres).

However, experts at the offsets ratings agency Renoster and the non-profit CarbonPlan analyzed three projects accounting for almost half of Finite Carbon’s total credits, with an estimated market value of $334m, according to analysis by market intelligence company AlliedOffsets. Renoster found issues, including trees in a project in the Alaskan Panhandle that were likely never in danger of being cut down in an already extensively logged area. Of the credits Renoster looked at, they found that about 79% should not have been issued.

Renoster, a company mostly used by prospective buyers of carbon credits to help them avoid those without real climate benefits, was commissioned by the nonprofit newsroom SourceMaterial to examine Finite’s projects. CarbonPlan provided additional analysis.

“We don’t think that the project should have been allowed to proceed and earn credits,” said Elias Ayrey, Renoster’s head scientist, commenting on the Alaskan project.

The analysis comes amid mounting concern about the global offsetting industry, predicted by Barclays bank to be worth $1.5tn by 2050. US treasury secretary Janet Yellen in May unveiled new principles to help strengthen the carbon market in an effort to “address significant existing challenges”, saying she had seen too many examples of offsets which didn’t represent real emissions reductions.

Critics say the industry has fundamental failings, and some companies have been shifting away from offsets. Last year the Guardian, SourceMaterial and German newspaper Die Zeit revealed that as many as 90% of the most commonly traded offsets may be practically useless in mitigating global warming.

Finite runs some of the largest offsetting projects in North America. Under California’s cap-and-trade system, it earns credits from across the US which it sells to polluters to offset their emissions.

In theory, developers like Finite encourage landowners to protect trees that would otherwise be cut down so that they continue to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Finite says its projects have nullified more than 70m tonnes of harmful emissions, the equivalent of 18 coal plants running for a year – and more than double the total emissions BP reported last year.

Critics, though, say California’s flawed offsetting system is handing companies a license to pollute with impunity. “The potential for mischief, for gaming … is just overwhelming,” said Mark Trexler, an independent climate scientist who created the first offsetting project in 1989.

Asked about Renoster’s analysis, Finite Carbon did not respond to specific questions but defended its offsets.

“All Finite Carbon’s compliance market projects have been independently verified, developed in accordance with the applicable standards and protocols under the California cap-and-trade program, and the projects have all been approved by the California air resources board,” said Brendan Terry, a Finite Carbon spokesperson.

BP directed requests to comment to Finite Carbon. The multinational oil and gas company praised Finite Carbon during its acquisition.

Potential for ‘gaming’ the system

The way the offsets work is that to justify claims that forests are being saved, each project is based on a “baseline,” which is a calculation of how many trees would be lost if the program did not exist.

Finite’s Sealaska project in the Alaskan Panhandle says it is protecting 67,000 hectares of forest. The project is owned by the Sealaska corporation, a for-profit company created in 1972 and owned by Alaska Natives. The credits this project has generated are valued at over $100m, according to analysis by Allied Offsets.

Using satellite imagery, Renoster found that trees there face little to no risk of ever being cut down. That’s because the corporation has already logged the vast majority of the land around the project. The only trees still standing are in deep ravines, along roadsides, rivers and coastlines. Instead of including the deforested land, Finite drew circles around thousands of tiny areas where trees were still standing, creating a hugely complicated map. In one of the project’s areas, Finite had circled fewer than 50 trees on a tiny island off the coast.

Renoster’s satellite analysis concluded: “They are not at risk of deforestation and thus should not be receiving credits.”

While this approach may be within the rules in California, where the credits are sold, it undermines the spirit of the regulations, Renoster concluded. Renoster gave the project a score of zero, meaning it thinks it should not be issued any credits.

Although some conservation may be going on, the “gerrymandering” made it impossible to assess, Ayrey said. “We have a zero tolerance policy on this behavior,” he said.

The report concluded: “We consider this type of manipulation to be ‘cheating’ … The drawing of these boundaries is an intentional act designed to avoid protocol rules.”

Asked about the findings, Sealasaka representatives say the trees left behind did hold economic value and were legal to cut down, but they opted not to because of Finite’s program. Former Sealaska executive vice president Rick Harris said at one point prices for chartering helicopters dropped to such low levels that the company could afford to hire them to cut down low-value pulp logs.

Brian Kleinhenz, who helped develop the credits while working at Sealaska and is now president of the carbon offsetting developer Terra Verde, said there’s always value in the trees, even if they are hard to get at. “There’s going to be a market for all this material, in one way or another,” he said.

Dave Clegern, public information officer for the California Air Resources Board (Carb), said: “If trees on steep terrain are valuable enough to warrant the cost of getting there and moving logs down the mountaintop, then they may be included in a baseline calculation.”

“These rules would apply with Sealaska,” he said.

Ayrey, however, argued the evidence did not support this.

“The strongest piece of evidence is the obvious,” he said. “They’ve clear-cut vast tracts around these trees and left them in place. Most of these clear cuts date to [more than] 20 years ago and if it were profitable to access these sites, they would have done it then.”

Alleged over-crediting

Another Finite project analyzed by Renoster for SourceMaterial in West Virginia scored above zero, meaning it should be awarded some credits. But it was “over-credited”, the findings showed.

The 39,000-hectare project is owned by Lyme Timber Company, which promised to preserve some trees in exchange for carbon credits. Renoster found that many of these trees are “inaccessible due to steep slopes”, meaning Lyme couldn’t actually cut them down.

David P Hoffer, president of Lyme Timber, said the project had already been developed when his company purchased the land.

“With respect to harvesting activity, contrary to the Renoster report, Lyme has harvested substantially less than biological growth since we purchased the property in 2017,” he said.

Carb’s Clegern said concerns had been raised about Lyme’s program but were ultimately cleared by the state of West Virginia and a registered forester.

“The verifiers are reasonably assured that despite the highly variable terrain and steep slopes found on the project area, they would allow for traditional harvesting techniques,” he said.

Clegern added: “To the best of our knowledge, the project is in conformance with all regulatory and protocol requirements.”

Another project is a 200,000-hectare (494,000-acre) forest in Washington state owned by the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Finite’s offsetting calculations imagined a risk of far more logging than the tribes had planned – or had ever done before – according to Grayson Badgley, a scientist at CarbonPlan.

“One of the last things you want to do with offsets is pay someone not to do something they were never planning to do anyway,” Badgley said. “A significant number of credits may have been awarded for foregoing harvests that were unlikely to ever happen.”

Representatives for Colville did not respond to requests for comment. Clergen said Carb has not received any complaints about Colville’s carbon project.

California dreaming

Experts question whether California’s cap-and-trade system, through which Finite sells most of its credits, is a solution to climate change – or part of the problem.

Sellers have an interest in maximizing the volume of credits, while buyers have no incentive to question their effectiveness, said Trexler, the climate scientist.

“Everyone involved in designing these projects and protocols has an interest in generating credits,” he said. “Mother Nature … is not at the table when these rules are designed.”

California’s forest project methodology was designed with assistance from the carbon offsets industry. Finite’s co-founder, Sean Carney, took part in meetings to draft the Carb standards in 2008, just months before he set up the company, minutes show.

Yet despite the criticism, Carb, which since 2013 has required companies exceeding emissions limits to buy offsets, said it is not planning any changes to address the risk of over-crediting, according to Danny Cullenward, vice chair of California’s Independent Emissions Market Advisory, the official oversight committee for the cap-and-trade system.

“Carb is hostile to everybody who’s critical, and they’re friendly with all the lobbyists,” Cullenward said. “That’s the way things are done.”

Responded Clegern: “Carb’s offset program has been successfully litigated in court and found to deliver real, quantifiable and additional benefits.”

‘Too good to be true’

The expansion of Finite’s projects has had setbacks.

In 2012, a representative from the company approached the Hoopa Valley tribe, owners of a 36,180-hectare forest in northern California.

The company had an incredible proposition: if the tribe simply continued to manage its ancestral lands as it had always done, Finite would generate carbon credits worth millions. The tribe would be rich.

“They were saying: ‘You guys manage your forest so well that what you’re doing now would earn you carbon credits, and you wouldn’t have to do anything new,’” said Julia Hostler, a member of the tribe. “It sounded too good to be true.”

Finite Carbon said it’s company policy not to comment on projects that are not finalized, including on the Hoopa Reservation.

Tribal leaders ultimately did not pursue the company’s proposal.

They became uneasy after suggestions that they “rewrite and resubmit the forest management plan to allow theoretically greater harvest, in order to show we have discretion to harvest, or choose not to harvest, and thus get carbon credits”, according to emails provided by a tribal member.

The tribe now has “a strong wall against carbon brokers”, said Thomas Joseph, a tribe member and environmental educator.

For the Hoopa it’s personal, he explains. Recent years have seen tribal lands ravaged by wildfires made more extreme by climate change, and there is a realization that carbon markets have played a role in allowing companies to pollute.

“For us to be able to protect our lands, we need a reduction of emissions,” he said. “Not only would we be putting our community here in danger, and sacrificing our lands to corporate greed, we’d also be allowing the industry to not reduce its emissions.”

Additional reporting by Nathaniel Herz in Alaska and Bryony Craig-Matthews

New York City has unveiled its latest tactic in a “trash revolution” to wrangle control of its city back from rats.

So innovative is this “beautiful rat-fighting piece of engineering”, discovered by a consultancy firm paid $1.6m for its efforts, that the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, demonstrated how to use it during the announcement.

You open the lid, you put the rubbish in it, and you wheel it out. It’s a wheelie bin.

Other parts of the US already have wheelie bins, and the fact New York City is finally rolling out the mobile receptacle has drawn hilarious reactions online. As Arwa Mahdawi wrote for the Guardian, Britons have found this most hilarious because “wheelie bins occupy a large amount of space in the national consciousness”.

In Australia, the wheelie bin was introduced in the early to mid-80s, and since then, Australians have learned that it’s more than just a bin.

Like a magnificent volcano threatening to erupt, plumes of steam rise from the mountain in the farmyard. Every day, about a tonne of horse muck and bedding from the 20 or so stabled horses is added to the muck heap – a small car’s weight in manure.

The heap is shaped and piled by the digger into its mountainous form, to encourage effective rotting. It’s a hub for birdlife, rich in beetles, worms and insects. House sparrows flit over its surface, looking for tasty grains from horse feed, or soft arthropods such as larvae for their nestlings. Jackdaws forage on the craggy ravines, lending an air of drama. Pied wagtails hop about at base camp. Swallows skim its heights, feasting on the clouds of tiny cluster flies.

I still remember proudly the day my primary school visited the farm in the 1980s. In a moment when the teacher’s back was turned, I persuaded everyone how much fun it is to play in the muck heap. A feral bunch of us climbed to the top, ignoring the cries of despair from school staff, our hands sinking into the burning hot muck, and then jumped, free and glorious, from the summit into dark pools of effluent.

The temperature inside the heap can reach well over 50C as it decomposes. This level of heat kills eggs and larvae from parasites, showing the importance of this effective rotting over six months or so. Twice a year the heap is spread on the fields, replacing artificial fertiliser.

Recently I visited a nearby large-scale arable farm and discovered the Japanese practice of bokashi. This involves adding live microbes to cattle manure collected from local farms. The bacteria stimulate fermentation and increase nutrient availability, aiding crop growth. Bokashi also reduces emissions such as ammonia and carbon dioxide. It was noticeable standing next to the inoculated manure that there was no obvious smell. This innovative approach, unusual in the UK, brings significant benefits to both environment and productivity.

You might think the hay barn, gradually filling with this year’s sweet-scented bales of goodness, is the heart of the farm. Yet as I visit each day, pilgrim-like with my barrow of offerings for the great steaming god, I happen to think it is the muck heap.

Country diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary

It was the speech that made Nigel Farage’s reputation: inflammatory, insulting and riddled with distortions. Speaking on the floor of the European parliament, Farage addressed Herman Van Rompuy, an erudite, softly spoken former Belgian prime minister, appointed to the new post of European Council president. “I don’t want to be rude,” Farage began. “But, really, you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk and the question I want to ask is: ‘Who are you?’”

Van Rompuy’s job was to chair meetings between EU leaders, rather than, as Farage put it, be “the political leader for 500 million people”. Amid heckles and boos in the far-from-full Strasbourg chamber, Farage said Van Rompuy’s intention was to be “the quiet assassin of European democracy”, before going on to insult the Belgian’s home nation as “a non-country”.

The new MP for Clacton, who was sworn in on Wednesday, is not likely to get away with such unparliamentary behaviour in the House of Commons. (Farage was fined for the attack on Van Rompuy in 2010.) But allies and EU officials agree it was that 1 min 24 sec speech in 2010 that propelled him to public attention – and notoriety – all across Europe.

“Suddenly the media sat up and took notice,” said Gawain Towler, Reform UK’s head of press, who has been working with Farage for 20 years. “That really put Nigel Farage on the map,” he said, recalling “hundreds of thousands of views” on Greek, Italian and Dutch YouTube.

For EU insiders, the insults were not a surprise. “It was the usual stuff,” said Guy Verhofstadt, the veteran Belgian MEP, who is standing down from the European parliament and was in the chamber that day. “His style of debating was always like that,” Verhofstadt said. “What he did was attack everybody that stood for Europe. You could know from the start of the debate what he was going to say.”

But it took time for the Ukip MEP to craft his style.

Farage was first elected to the European parliament in 1999, benefiting from proportional representation, introduced by Tony Blair for the UK’s European elections that year. He was not yet the boisterous performer he would become, but his message was consistent. In one of his first speeches in 1999, his notes shake slightly in his hand as he urges the government to “leave this club and get into the real trading world”.

He and his MEPs were known for stunts: heckling, wearing protest T-shirts and fixing little union flags to their desks in the chamber. But they struggled to get the British media attention they craved. Towler – who along with a later Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall, once dressed up in a chicken suit for a photo opportunity about EU leaders’ alleged cowardice for not holding referendums on a treaty – complained that the British press ignored them.

The arrival of the European parliament’s streaming service in 2008 combined with the rise of social media was a gamechanger. Short, punchy clips of Farage haranguing European politicians went viral on social media, getting far more views than the EU’s official channels at that time.

Richard Corbett, a long-serving Labour MEP, recalls initial puzzlement over speeches from Farage and his Ukip team. “They’d get up and start doing a rant about something that had sometimes nothing to do with what was on the agenda, it was completely out of context … but of course, the reason was that it was geared to making a YouTube clip.”

In their occasional meetings on trains or planes, Corbett recalls someone who was “chatty” but “tried to avoid getting caught into discussing facts, figures”. EU civil servants remember a disrespectful attitude: “It was clear that he despised the civil servants, he despised any rule or custom,” said one former civil servant. “His demeanour was very dismissive, unpleasant.”

“He never did any proper work,” the person added. “He was really just there to disrupt things.”

He had frequent run-ins with officials over expenses – and was docked half his MEP salary in 2018 over allegations of misuse of public funds. And he appointed a woman he met in a Strasbourg bar, long rumoured to be his girlfriend, to a job as a parliamentary researcher.

While the chamber was an important stage, Farage made no impact in the committee rooms, where the legislative work was done. Over a three-year period, he attended only one of 42 meetings of the parliament’s fisheries committee when it was negotiating decisive reforms. In 2014-2016, he took part in four in 10 European parliament votes, the worst voting record of all British MEPs.

For the anti-EU party, that was the point. Farage and his MEPs “were voted [in] to fight it, not to take part in it”, Towler said. “And they won. In 2016, they won.”

As an MP, Farage will face new demands from his 78,000-strong constituency in Clacton. “The one thing we know from his time as an MEP is that he likes being in the limelight,” Simon Usherwood, a professor of politics at the Open University, said. “He is not a great paperwork guy.”

Towler, Reform’s spokesperson, said Farage saw his constituency work as “absolutely vital”, as was “ensuring you had a good team of caseworkers who can pick it up and do the job”.

Usherwood will also be watching to see whether Farage and the other Reform MPs join House of Commons committees. “He could justify not participating in the life of the European parliament because he rejected its legitimacy and its authority, but clearly he can’t do that with Westminster,” Usherwood said.

The jury is out, he added, on whether Farage tries to be “constructive and useful” or uses his seat “as a platform for protest”.

“I can imagine that [Farage] wants to be seen as being in parliament and speaking from the green benches. It is going to be part of that curation of an aura of respectability, which is presumably the next stage of his plans for getting ahead in the world.”

It’s happened to me dozens of times: I’m riding a wave when, out of the corner of my eye, I see a black shape coming up beneath me. Being in Cape Town – a great white shark hotspot – it’s hard not to assume the worst. But fear soon gives into relief when it becomes clear that I’m sharing the wave with a Cape fur seal. Sometimes, they get so close you can see the bubbles on their whiskers.

Now, nine seals have tested positive for rabies – the world’s first significant outbreak of the disease in marine mammals – and people like me are watching the water along this 400-mile (600km) coastline for a different reason.

“I was out surfing the other day, when this seal popped up in the lineup [of surfers] to sun itself,” says Gregg Oelofse, who is in charge of coastal management for Cape Town council. “Usually, surfers would enjoy the interaction. But now everyone was paddling as fast as they could to get away.”

Last month, a single seal bit several surfers in a matter of minutes and another seal swam ashore with horrific facial injuries that could only have been inflicted by a seriously aggressive animal. These attacks convinced authorities to euthanise four animals and send their bodies to be tested for rabies.

Three of those four seals tested positive, and the number of cases has since risen to nine.

Scientists from the University of Pretoria are sequencing the virus to determine where and when rabies entered the seal population. Rabies is endemic among many wild animals in southern Africa (jackals, for example) but most of these animals do not live close to humans.

Seal behaviour started to change a few years ago. Oelofse and his team noticed a marked increase in seal aggression in Cape Town in late 2021, after intermittent reports of seals attacking humans.

To understand this highly unusual behaviour, they joined up with marine scientists from a local research organisation, Sea Search, and an animal welfare organisation, the SPCA, to catch animals and test them.

They considered rabies as a possible cause, but the fact that there had only ever been one recorded case of a seal contracting rabies – in Norway’s Svalbard islands in 1980 – suggested this was very unlikely.

Oelofse stresses that the increasing number of cases is not a sign of the outbreak increasing exponentially. “We are retrospectively testing euthanised animals,” he says. “We are very fortunate that Sea Search has sampled and kept 120 brains over the last two and a half years.”

Testing these brains will allow them to get a better picture of when rabies first appeared in the population and how far it has spread. They will continue to test any animals that they suspect of having rabies.

On Cape Town’s shoreline, swimmers and surfers like me are being given a clear message: anyone bitten by a seal, no matter how long ago, must seek medical attention immediately. Rabies can take anywhere between a week and two years to incubate, with a few months being the norm.

But the evidence Oelofse has seen of reports is reassuring. “We think quite a few people have been bitten by rabid seals, but luckily no human has got infected yet,” he says. “We don’t know why. Perhaps the transfer rate is low? Does salt water in their mouth reduce the viral load?”

Two million Cape fur seals live in colonies stretching from southern Angola to Algoa Bay on the east coast of South Africa, says Dr Greg Hofmeyr, a marine biologist who has been studying seals for 32 years. “They can spend days to weeks at sea, covering vast distances, and only hauling out on to islands occasionally to rest or to mate.”

When they are on these offshore colonies, however, they live in extremely close proximity, where there are frequent fights. Rabies is primarily transmitted through saliva, so there is a concern that the disease could spread quickly among seals.

Meanwhile, lifeguards and shark spotters have been instructed to close beaches if an aggressive seal is spotted, and members of the public are urged to report any unusual seal behaviour, to always keep their dogs on leashes and to stay away from seals in harbours that have become habituated to humans.

While panic and the urge to swim away from any seal fast is understandable, Oelofse says it is not entirely justified. “If a seal is behaving weirdly or aggressively, stay well away and report it to the authorities,” he says. “A relaxed seal is unlikely to pose a threat.”

The message seems to be getting through. I was out surfing yesterday when a seal joined us at the backline, rolling around on the surface like an oversized labrador. No one around me panicked and after a while the seal swam away from us.

There is, Oelofse stresses, “no global ‘best practice’ to follow”, so the authorities are taking a proactive approach.

“We really want to know the transfer rate [of the disease],” he says, expressing concern that rabies might become endemic in the seal population or jump to other coastal mammals such as Cape clawless otters.

“We’re also super-worried about what it might mean for our seals,” he says. “And we really don’t want any humans to get rabies.”

Put out more flags. Dig out the George Cross jester’s hat from behind the sofa. At the end of a Euro 2024 campaign that has seen England’s footballers, questioned, written off, and even described in post-watershed terms by respected broadcasters, Gareth Southgate and his team will now contest the final of Euro 2024 in Berlin on Sunday after yet another thrilling moment of late drama in Dortmund.

The Aston Villa striker Ollie Watkins scored the winning goal, playing at his first tournament, on here as a late sub for Harry Kane. With the game poised at 1-1 England and the Netherlands were already staring balefully at the prospect of extra time and beyond that the late-night horror of a semi-final penalty shootout. Watkins had been on the pitch for nine minutes. With his fourth touch of the ball he took a pass from Cole Palmer, another Southgate substitute, turned swiftly and simply hammered the ball low into the far corner.

The BVB Stadion is another of the Rhineland’s huge lankly industrial metal football hangars. In that moment the ground just exploded, a huge wave of noise barrelling down from the flag-draped red and white end.

As the full-time whistle blew shortly afterwards Watkins crumpled and crouched, breathing hard, his own clear still moment of light. This is a footballer who came up through the levels, who was still trying to get his break at Exeter City when Southgate took over as England manager, and who has now added his own mark to England’s baroque tournament history.

Victory here is significant in other ways, not least for the relentlessly resilient Southgate, who has dodged plastic cups and V-signs from his own supporters at this tournament, and who has become a kind of lightning rod for English rage and frustration.

His team will now play in their second successive final in this tournament, extraordinary progress for a nation that had reached one final in its entire history pre-Southgate. Spain will present a daunting obstacle in Berlin. But whatever happens on Sunday, England’s reluctant fill-in for a fill-in now has a fair case as England’s most successful men’s team manager of all time.

From the start the whole occasion felt big, epic, retro, and always somehow slightly out of control. Dortmund was thronging all afternoon with orange shirts, crackling with broken glass under foot, its winding shopping streets haunted by England songs, England wails and drones and chants. Don’t Take Me Home. Phil Foden’s on Fire, and recent addition to the canon Stop the Boats Nigel Farage, heard here echoing around Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof.

England fielded their comfortable armchair formation again, the Southgate security truss, three at the back, with the hugely composed Marc Guéhi returning after suspension. They look happier with that extra defensive body, the box of white shirts tighter. Southgate-ism is control and security, the footballing equivalent of a pensive and reassuring frown.

The talk at this tournament had been about gaps. Gaps in the team. Gaps between the manager, fans, media. But there was a window of light in this game as for half an hour in the first half England’s young midfielders played like princelings.

The Dutch had taken the lead from a quick turnover, Xavi Simons slamming a shot into the top corner past the flailing palm of Jordan Pickford. The noise came in an extraordinary slingshot from that end as the Dutch players ran to their fans.

No matter. England looked perky, fresh, unafraid. They pushed back and were awarded a penalty with 16 minutes gone, made by Bukayo Saka’s intricate, slaloming run. Kane buried the kick to make it 1-1.

The sky above the city had turned a lovely Martian red by now, and for a while Foden, Saka and Kobbie Mainoo had the ball on a string, just zipping about, making things up. It was the nicest, sunniest most liberated half an hour of England time so far in Germany. They can play, these boys.

On the touchline the Dutch manager, Ronald Koeman, sank deep into his chair, flaring his jowls, then rejigged his team, reinforcing the Dutch where England were creating the overloads. And half-time just seemed to draw the life out of the game. The Netherlands set themselves defensively to match England, a kind of mass orange-shirted embrace.

On his touchline, Southgate appeared concerned. The waistcoat is long gone now, glimpsed only in the retro cardboard cutouts brandished by England’s supporters in bars around the town, like a stag-do memento. At this European Championship, Southgate has gone charity pro-am golf weekend: the lattice-weave cream polo shirt, the skinny black slacks. He stood and frowned and waited.

Patience has been a slow-burn virtue at this European finals tournament. And it was Southgate’s two late subs who won the game here.

Arguably this tournament will now stand as his greatest achievement with England, if only because he has had to overcome two additional things: his own tactical mistakes, and also the absurd white noise around him, anti-support, a self-sustaining cycle of bad news.

That toxicity is a function of wider politics, free-floating rage, an extraordinary few years in the country generally. Southgate’s own politics have faded. He seems a little careworn and bruised. He has been a unique public figure over the past eight years, a kind of beacon of centrist dad-ness, the handsome middle-aged man with the courteous, moderate manner.

He has been such an oddly pervasive public figure, so vividly present. What will he do now if this is to be his final tournament? Run the Football Association perhaps, or became the government’s football tsar, the nation’s PE teacher. He could probably spend his time wearing black roll necks and doing TedTalks called Functionalising Your Management Culture Reach.

For now England will face a huge challenge in Berlin on Sunday. But this is an era that has now almost run its course; and with a sense now of a kind of completion.

An Iraqi court has issued a death sentence against one of the widows of the late Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, alleging that she was complicit in crimes committed against Yazidi women captured by the militant group.

The ruling comes weeks before the 10-year mark since IS launched a series of attacks against the Yazidi religious minority in the northern Iraqi region of Sinjar in early August 2014, killing and capturing thousands – including women and girls who were subjected to human trafficking and sexual abuse. The UN said the campaign against the Yazidis amounted to genocide.

A statement by Iraq’s judicial council said the Karkh criminal court sentenced the woman for “detaining Yazidi women in her home” and facilitating their kidnapping by “the terrorist Isis gangs in Sinjar district”, the state-run Iraqi News Agency reported. It also said the ruling was issued in accordance with Iraq’s anti-terrorism law and its “Yazidi survivors law”.

The statement did not name the defendant, but two court officials
identified her as Asma Mohammed, who was arrested in 2018 in Turkey and
later extradited. A senior Iraqi security official told the Associated
Press that another wife of al-Baghdadi and his daughter, who were also
extradited from Turkey to Iraq, had been sentenced to life in prison.

The sentences were handed down a week ago but were announced by the judicial council on Wednesday, he said.

Survivors of the IS attacks in Iraq have complained of a lack of accountability and have criticised the decision – made at the request of the Iraqi government – to wind down a UN investigation of IS crimes, including the alleged use of chemical weapons.

At the same time, human rights groups have raised concerns about the lack of due process in trials of alleged IS members in Iraq and have particularly criticised mass executions of those convicted on terrorism charges. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have said the convictions are often extracted under torture and urged Iraq to abolish the death penalty.

On 29 June 2014, al-Baghdadi, known as one of the most ruthlessly effective jihadist leaders of modern times, declared the militant group’s caliphate in large swaths of Iraq and Syria.

In 2019, he was killed in a US raid in Syria, dealing a big blow to the militant group which has now lost its hold on all the areas it previously controlled, though some of its cells continue to carry out attacks.