Alan Hansen, the legendary former Liverpool and Scotland defender, is seriously ill in hospital.

Liverpool confirmed the news on Sunday afternoon and the club are providing support to the family of the 68‑year‑old, who retired in 1991 to begin a hugely successful career as a television pundit.

“The thoughts and support of everyone at Liverpool FC are with our legendary former captain Alan Hansen, who is currently seriously ill in hospital,” a statement read. “The club is currently in contact with Alan’s family to provide our support at this difficult time, and our thoughts, wishes and hopes are with Alan and all of the Hansen family.

“We will provide any further updates as we receive them in due course, and we request that the Hansen family’s privacy is respected at this time.”

Hansen joined Liverpool from Partick Thistle in 1977 and won three European Cups, eight league titles, two FA Cups and three League Cups in 620 appearances for the Anfield club before retiring in March 1991 because of injury.

The man known as “Jockey” also won 26 caps for his country and played at the 1982 World Cup in Spain, having made his international debut in 1979. He is widely recognised as being one of the finest centre-backs of his generation, combining ­excellent strength, speed and awareness with supreme composure in and out of possession.

After he hung up his boots Hansen became a regular on the BBC, ­appearing on Match of the Day as well as the broadcaster’s live ­coverage, establishing himself as a respected and charismatic voice on the game. In that role, however, he is perhaps best known for claiming “you can’t win anything with kids” after Manchester United’s 3-1 defeat against Aston Villa on the opening day of the 1995-96 Premier League season and after Alex ­Ferguson had fielded a team containing a host of raw, young talent including Gary Neville, Nicky Butt, Paul Scholes and, from the bench, David Beckham. United went on to win the Double that season.

Hansen retired from punditry in May 2014 and has largely lived a quiet life since. He is married and has two children.

Famous for its lush vineyards and cherished local wineries, Napa valley is where people go to escape their problems.

“When you first get there, it’s really pretty,” said Geoff Ellsworth, former mayor of St Helena, a small Napa community nestled 50 miles north-east of San Francisco. “It mesmerizes people.”

What the more than 3 million annual tourists don’t see, however, is that California’s wine country has a brewing problem – one that has spurred multiple ongoing government investigations and created deep divisions. Some residents and business owners fear it poses a risk to the region’s reputation and environment.

At the heart of the fear is the decades-old Clover Flat Landfill (CFL), perched on the northern edge of the valley atop the edge of a rugged mountain range. Two streams run adjacent to the landfill as tributaries to the Napa River.

A growing body of evidence, including regulatory inspection reports and emails between regulators and CFL owners, suggests the landfill and a related garbage-collection business have routinely polluted those local waterways that drain into the Napa River with an assortment of dangerous toxins.

The river irrigates the valley’s beloved vineyards and is used recreationally for kayaking by more than 10,000 people annually. The prospect that the water and wine flowing from the region may be at risk of contamination with hazardous chemicals and heavy metals has driven a wedge between those speaking out about the concerns and others who want the issue kept out of the spotlight, according to Ellsworth, a former employee of CFL.

“The Napa valley is amongst the most high-value agricultural land in the country,” he said. “If there’s a contamination issue, the economic ripples are significant.”

Employee complaints

Both the landfill and Upper Valley Disposal Services (UVDS) were owned for decades by the wealthy and politically well-connected Pestoni family, whose vineyards were first planted in the Napa valley area in 1892. The Pestoni Family Estate Winery still sells bottles and an assortment of wines, including an etched cabernet sauvignon magnum for $400 a bottle.

The family sold the landfill and disposal-services unit last year amid a barrage of complaints, handing the business off to Waste Connections, a large, national waste-management company headquartered in Texas.

Before the sale, Christina Pestoni, who has also used the last name Abreu Pestoni, who served as chief operating officer for UVDS and CFL, said in a statement that the company’s operations met “the highest environmental standards” and were in full legal and regulatory compliance. Pestoni is currently director of government affairs at Waste Connections.

In her statement, she accused Ellsworth and “a few individuals” of spreading “false information” about CFL and UVDS.

But workers at the facilities have said the concerns are valid. In December of last year, a group of 23 former and then-current employees of CFL and UVDS filed a formal complaint to federal and state agencies, including the US Department of Justice, alleging “clearly negligent practices in management of these toxic and hazardous materials at UVDS/CFL over decades”.

The employees cited “inadequate and compromised infrastructure and equipment” that they said was “affecting employees as well as the surrounding environment and community”.

Among the concerns was the handling of “leachate”, a liquid formed when water filters through waste as it breaks down, leaching out chemicals and heavy metals such as nitrates, chromium, arsenic, iron and zinc.

In the complaint, the employees also cited the use of so-called “ghost piping”, describing unmapped and unquantified underground pipes they said were used to divert leachate and “compromised” storm water into public waterways, instead of holding it for “proper treatment”.

Several fires have broken out at the landfill over the last decade and concerns have also been raised about the facility’s handling of radioactive materials.

Even the “organic compost” the UVDS facility generates and provides to area farmers and gardeners is probably tainted, according to the employee complaint, which cites “large-scale contamination” of the compost.

“These industrial sites are affecting the environment and residents of Napa Valley,” former UVDS employee Jose Garibay Jr wrote in a 2023 email to Napa county officials. “Also, the biggest revenue for the wine country could be tremendously affected; the wine industry, tasting rooms, wineries, hotels, resorts, restaurants, and local businesses.”

Pestoni did not respond to a request for comment. Other representatives for CFL, UVDS and Waste Management also did not respond to requests for comment.

“Both UVDS and [CFL] have no business being in the grape-growing areas or at the top of the watershed of Napa county,” said Frank Leeds, a former president of Napa Valley Grapegrowers who runs an organic vineyard across from the UVDS composting operation. “There are homes and vineyards all around that are affected by them.”

Leeds co-owns a vineyard near UVDS with his daughter, Lauren Pesch; Pesch said she had deep concerns about water contamination from CFL and has seen pipes from the UVDS property carrying liquid into the creek next to her vineyard.

But the wine industry itself more broadly has not expressed public concern, and when asked for comment about the issues, there were no replies from Napa Valley Grapegrowers, Napa Valley Vintners or California Certified Organic Farmers.

Michelle Benvenuto, executive director of Winegrowers of Napa County, said she was “not knowledgable enough on the details of this issue” to comment.

Anna Brittain, executive director of the non-profit Napa Green, a sustainable wine-growing program that lists UVDS as a sponsor, also said she was not aware of concerns about contamination held by any members.

More than a dozen Napa valley vineyards or wineries did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment.

Toxic PFAS found

Clover Flat Landfill opened in 1963, and together with UVDS provides a range of valuable services to the community, according to the facility websites, including collecting and capturing methane gas to convert to electricity. It provides enough energy to power the equivalent of 800 homes and operates with “net zero” emissions, according to the website.

As previously revealed by the Guardian, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has listed CFL as one of thousands of sites around the country suspected of handling harmful per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

After a request from regulators for an analysis of leachate and groundwater samples at the landfill, Pestoni reported to the California regional water quality control board in 2020 that a third-party analysis had found PFAS in all the samples collected.

PFAS are human-made chemicals that don’t break down and have been linked to cancers and a range of other illnesses and health hazards. Levels of PFOS and PFOA – types of PFAS considered particularly dangerous – were detected in the landfill’s leachate at many times higher than the drinking-water standard recently set by the EPA.

In early 2023, the San Francisco Bay regional water quality control board sampled a creek downstream from CFL for eight PFAS, identifying multiple PFAS compounds in each sample, according to an email from water board inspector Alyx Karpowicz to Waste Connections.

“There are detections in the creek of the same compounds detected at the Clover Flat landfill,” Karpowicz informed the company.

When asked about the results, a spokesperson for the water board said the PFAS concentrations in the creek samples were low enough that “chronically exposed biota are not expected to be adversely affected and ecological impacts are unlikely”.

The site has racked up a number of regulatory violations and left at least one state investigator worried about “long-term stream pollution”.

In a 2019 report, a California department of fish and wildlife officer determined that the landfill had “severely polluted” both streams that flow through the landfill property with “large amounts of earth waste spoils, leachate, litter, and sediment”. There was “essentially no aquatic life present”, the investigator noted.

Heavy metals also are present in “alarmingly high detection” levels at the landfill, said Chris Malan, executive director of the Institute for Conservation Advocacy, Research and Education, a watershed conservation non-profit in Napa county.

Last year, CFL settled a case brought against it by the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, which said its discharges were harming aquatic life and endangering people who use the Napa River for recreation. CFL agreed to implement new erosion-control measures, and to take action if testing showed contaminants above certain levels, among other measures.

Also in 2023, the state fined it roughly $620,000 for discharging “leachate-laden” and “acidic” water into one of the streams, among other violations.

Last fall, a group of water board officials visited the landfill to hunt down the “ghost piping” alleged in the worker complaint. They reported in an October 2023 email that they discovered an array of pipes, and a culvert, that require further scrutiny, the email said.

There remains an “ongoing investigation” into environmental concerns tied to CFL and UVDS, according to Eileen White, executive director of the San Francisco Bay regional water quality control board.

Separate from the environmental investigation by state and local officials, the US justice department has issued subpoenas for information from UVDS as well as from more than 20 other companies and individuals in the region. That investigation appears to focus on local political connections and contracts, not environmental concerns.

Little public pushback

Ellsworth, the former mayor, is among a small group of community members who have tried taking their own actions against UVDS and CFL.

In February of 2021, dozens of residents voiced complaints about odors, noise and light pollution from UVDS at a virtual meeting. Some initiated litigation, but were unable to fund an ongoing legal battle and dropped the effort.

Ellsworth maintains that Napa valley’s wine industry prefers any contamination concerns be kept quiet.

“We tried to talk to the Napa valley wine industry trade organizations. They completely stonewalled us,” he said. “Everybody’s afraid to speak up or is too apathetic or doesn’t want to see it.”

This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group

When the Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah arrived at a Manhattan cafe on Thursday afternoon, he had just learned that his article had been reinstated in the Columbia Law Review. After a weeklong censorship controversy, the prestigious journal’s website was back online, too.

The law school journal’s faculty and alumni board had shuttered the website for most of the week rather than publicize Eghbariah’s 105-page article, titled Toward the Nakba as a Legal Concept. In it, he proposed a new framework to explain the complex, fragmented legal regimes governing Palestinians. He wanted to bring the word Nakba – which translates from the Arabic as catastrophe, and is better known for describing the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 – to the center of a new legal conversation.

Wearing a white T-shirt and linen pants and sipping iced coffee, he reflected on an extraordinary week that saw his legal theories – ordinarily the stuff of arcane law school debates – ignite emotive conversations about the legitimate bounds of debate about Israel and Palestine.

What’s more, it wasn’t the first time his ideas were deemed too dangerous to publish by the Ivy League.

He had worked on his contribution for almost half a year, finding a home for it at the Columbia Law Review after a shorter web piece he had written for the Harvard Law Review had been blocked at the last minute.

He was proud of his scholarship but found it dangerous that the content of his article had become secondary to what he saw as the manufactured controversy of its censorship. “Now, we have to debate about my right to say what I want to say instead of debating about what I actually said,” he told the Guardian.

“I felt convinced by my work if it’s generating this repression,” he said. Ultimately, the story led to headlines in major newspapers, and a PDF of the article was posted widely on social media, getting far more readers than is typical for legal scholarship. “People can see through these authoritarian tactics and reject them. The censorship in this case is actually counterproductive.”

When Eghbariah woke up on Monday morning, his article was online. “It was supposed to be a very exciting moment,” he recalled.

But soon, the journal’s website was inaccessible – “under maintenance”, it said. It turned out the law review board had taken it down. “It was very alarming that they would go to that extent,” he said.

Eghbariah, a Harvard Law School doctoral candidate, had been splitting his time between Massachusetts and Haifa, Israel, when he formulated the ideas driving his scholarship. He was working for the legal organization Adalah, where he has represented Palestinian clients in the Israeli judicial system – some in Gaza, others in the West Bank or East Jerusalem, still others citizens of Israel. He has worked on a landmark case about Israel’s cyber unit, which works with social media platforms to censor speech, and fought to reunite families separated by these different legal regimes. He realized that each time he and colleagues brought a case forward, they had to figure out which legal framework applied.

It is variegated, by design. “You have an invisible map in your head where you know what laws to invoke depending on the case,” Eghbariah said, “and this is not intuitive at all.”

Different legal systems apply to Palestinians living under Israeli rule or in neighboring Arab states or elsewhere. “It’s kind of a system of domination by fragmentation,” he explained. “We become trained in doing these legal gymnastics, and flipping from one framework to the other, without sometimes even reflecting about the nature of this.”

To articulate that fragmentation in his legal research, he realized he needed a new terminology. Just as the genocide convention emerged after the Holocaust, and the word apartheid entered everyday speech amid South Africa’s systemized segregation, Eghbariah was finding that analogies to other seemingly comparable situations were insufficient. In the article, he argues that the term Nakba, in use by Palestinians for decades, encapsulates the layered and overlapping legal entanglements of Palestinian life in the absence of self-determination.

The Nakba of 1948, he says, is not a historical artefact. His grandparents survived the Nakba and it informs Eghbariah’s research. Like many Palestinian scholars, he views Israel’s war on Gaza as part of a continuing Nakba to destroy Palestinian life on the land Israel seeks to control. “It’s an organic framework that has been developed in Palestine to reference the ramifications and ongoing nature of the Nakba of 1948,” Eghbariah said. “What the genocide moment and discourse did to that is that it actually made me think about it in legal terms.”

The article lays out the concept, and as he develops the idea further in his dissertation, he hopes it could have practical ramifications for outstanding disputes over matters like Palestinian property rights and the status of refugees. This is how laws in the US have often developed: scholars put out a new approach in a law review, practitioners try it out, and it can lead to case law or legislative efforts. “Those ideas get refined in the process,” Diala Shamas, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, told the Guardian. “It’s provocative, and it’s exactly what scholarship should be doing. It’s exactly what Palestinian scholars need to be doing.”

After Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel and amid Israel’s military campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, the student editors at the Columbia Law Review contacted Eghbariah. No Palestinian author had previously contributed to the journal.

His draft went through “at least” five edits, he says, with extensive feedback from about a dozen editors at the student-run journal, as he added 427 footnotes to the piece. But in early June, on the eve of the article’s publication, the publication’s alumni and faculty board urged the student editors to postpone Eghbariah’s piece or pull it from the journal entirely.

Student editors told the Intercept that the article had been extensively vetted according to procedure. Some, however, “expressed concerns about threats to their careers and safety if it were to be published”, the Associated Press reported. The students went ahead with publication against the board’s wishes. The board said in a statement published when it restored the website that it had “received multiple credible reports that a secretive process was used to edit” the article, and that was its reasoning for taking the journal offline.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at the university, wrote that “nuking the website is a drastic, extraordinary step that requires much more justification than has been supplied by the directors thus far”.

The board never spelled out why it pulled the piece, beyond what it called an opaque editorial process – a description the student editors disputed. But for non-scholarly audiences, Eghbariah’s word choice may have seemed inflammatory. In the piece, he defines Zionism as inextricable from the Nakba and builds on the legal scholarship of apartheid and genocide. Its table of contents was itself arguably provocative, with the header “Zionism as Nakba”.

It echoed another episode from November, when the Harvard Law Review blocked publication of an earlier version of the article that it had commissioned from Eghbariah, after the law review president reportedly expressed safety concerns tied to the piece. That version of the piece later appeared in the Nation magazine.

“What is so scary about Palestinians having the right to narrate their own realities?” Eghbariah said. Student-run law review journals rarely if ever hear from their outside boards. “It’s unprecedented to even interfere in editorial processes,” he said. There have been no substantive or factual contestations of the claims of the Columbia Law Review article.

One of Eghbariah’s advisers at Harvard Law School is the prominent academic Noah Feldman, author of the new book To Be a Jew Today. He has called Eghbariah “one of the most brilliant students I’ve taught in 20 years as a law professor”. He declined to provide comment on the law review article, but said he “certainly” stood by his assessment of Eghbariah’s talents.

Eghbariah hopes the fracas around his article could bring more attention to the violence against Palestinians and what he describes as a genocidal campaign.

“There is a continuum between the material reality in Gaza and shutting down these debates,” he said. “They’re not separate issues.”

In many ways, Shahad Darwish’s life in Michigan is just like anyone else’s. The 23-year-old is studying for a master’s degree in psychology at a local university and helps out at her family’s jewelry business.

But in other ways, it’s very different: Darwish is one of about 3,000 Michigan-based Sabean Mandaeans, followers of John the Baptist – and one of the oldest surviving gnostic religions in the world.

Every July for 36 hours, Darwish and her family observe the Mandaean new year holiday – karsa – where followers stay indoors at home and are forbidden from using running water. She prays daily and once a week goes to the mandi, the Mandaean place of worship where she volunteers. She’s learning to read, write and speak the Mandaean language.

“It’s an important part of our upbringing,” she said.

Mandaeans – who do not consider themselves Christians despite John the Baptist’s reverence for Jesus – lived mostly in towns and cities of southern Iraq, their important religious and cultural customs centering on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

But wars in Iraq, including the US-led invasion there in 2003, changed that. About 85% of the community’s estimated population of 70,000 Mandaeans have fled the country, with many moving to neighboring Syria.

“Four guys came to my store [in Baghdad] and stole everything and told me I have to pay [them] otherwise my family and I would be kidnapped,” said Shahad’s father, Bashar Harbi Darwish, who fled Iraq with his family in 2006.

A civil war in Syria that followed a popular uprising in 2011 forced many to move again. This time, they went to Australia, Europe and North America.

Today, Darwish runs a jewelry store in Warren, a suburb of Detroit, where he’s a leading member of one of the largest US-based Mandaean communities.

Despite the traumas it has endured, for him the community is in the midst of a revival.

“After we fled Iraq, we established more than 80 associations all over the world,” Darwish recounted recently. “The number of baptisms we do in Europe every year is maybe 10 times what we did in Iraq before 2003.

“There are five or six Mandaean schools teaching the new generations in Australia, the US and Europe.”

A festival held in Michigan in the summer of 2023 attracted more than 500 Mandaeans from across the US and Canada, and about 150 baptisms were held. The Mandaean community’s religious head, Sattar Jabbar Hilo, flew in from Baghdad to oversee a host of important ceremonies.

That fuels further involvement, according to Bashar. “They want to be baptized and married by the top sheikh,” he said. “It’s a big thing for your reputation.”

He said that to ensure the long-term viability of the community, the Mandaean Association of Michigan had taken measures to involve the community’s younger members.

“Our board of directors is mostly made up of young people, most of them have degrees – they have the ability to do more for our community,” he said.

But while getting out of Iraq and Syria has saved lives, others argue the resettlement strategies adopted by countries receiving Mandaeans has created new problems for the community.

About 15,000 Mandaeans are now thought to live in Australia and Sweden, respectively, with about 12,000 to 15,000 in the US. Several thousand more have been resettled across the Netherlands, Denmark, Canada and elsewhere.

For many now in the US, a new life has oftentimes meant being relocated hundreds of miles from the nearest community members.

“[The US government] saved us from the Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq, but you distributed us to 35 different states,” Suhaib Nashi, the president of the Mandaean Society of America, said. “The families are safe, but how can they maintain their traditions when there are three families in Ohio or Oklahoma?”

He added that the community had been cleansed having survived invasions, wars and forced conversions in Iraq for more than 2,000 years, all the while keeping alive the theology of the Sumerians – the earliest known literate society – with whom they identified long before John the Baptist became their central prophet. He said he had asked US immigration officials: “Don’t distribute us like sand in the air.”

These and other threats to the community’s future, such as forbidding Mandaeans from marrying outside the religion, have roiled fierce internal debate.

“There are the conservative and reform sides conflicting now, and there’s no clear vision of what comes next because this is a fundamental issue,” Nashi said.

Despite the relative calm in Iraq, the Mandaean community, which is thought to number about 7,000 to 10,000 people mostly in the southern regions of the country, continues to be targeted for violence. In March, an attack injured two Mandaeans and damaged a house of worship in Maysan province.

Back in the US, Mandaeans have recorded some measure of success in altering resettlement policies. About 1,500 individuals have been able to move together to the city of Worcester in Massachusetts.

And in Michigan, baptisms are now regularly held in the Clinton River, north of Detroit.

Michigan’s community is preparing for another major gathering in July that is expected to attract Mandaeans from as far away as Sweden, with the number of planned weddings expected to nearly double from six last year.

The change in the air is palpable, Shahad Darwish said.

“In the past two years I’ve noticed the younger generation becoming more involved; they’re showing up to events more, creating new events,” she said. “People hang out at the bowling alley or meet at each other’s houses.

“Before, it wasn’t really like that.”

Greek authorities have confirmed that the body of a man believed to be the missing British TV presenter Michael Mosley has been found on the island of Symi.

Mosley, 67, went missing after going for a coastal walk on the island.

“He has been found in the area of Ayia Marina,” the island’s deputy mayor Nikitas Grillas told the Guardian. “I can confirm that it is him.”

On the fifth day of what had become an increasingly frantic search, Mosley, 67, was reportedly discovered by a camera operator working with the state broadcaster ERT.

The body was discovered on rocky terrain close to a fence around 50 metres from a small resort which is accessible only by boat or by foot, on the opposite side of the bay where he had left his wife and friends earlier in the day. It is understood that the baseball cap he was wearing, and an umbrella he had been carrying to protect himself from the sun were found with him.

“It is clear from his watch and clothes that it is Dr Mosley,” a police spokesperson Konstantina Dimoglou said. It was unclear how long he had been dead. “We don’t know that yet but what we do know is that he had walked a very long way, he was very close to his destination.”

A news camera crew said they had spotted the body of the missing doctor lying on rocky terrain from a boat in the bay of Ayia Marina, having zoomed in on an image they had captured.

“We located him [from a boat] when we went into the bay of Ayia Marina,” said the ERT journalist Aristiedis Miaoulis, who described how when the team’s camera operator looked back at his footage he noticed “something strange”.

“Looking back at the material he had got, he saw something strange near a fence, about 50 metres from the sea, and then we could see, once we zoomed in, that it was this man because his watch was glinting [in the sun].”

The island’s mayor, who was with the media team, said previously 200 people had searched the site and, yet, he had not been found. The Hellenic coastguard was immediately called to the area, and it was taped off.

The discovery was made on the day that search teams had turned their focus to a set of caves belonging to a rocky outcrop close to Ayia Marina beach. Images, which had been intentionally blurred, showed the remains were found on rocky land by a chain link fence close to the beach resort.

The father of four is thought to have been hiking from St Nikolas beach to the port of Symi Town where his holiday villa is located.

Extreme weather warnings have been in place this week in Symi, where temperatures have reached above 40C in the afternoon.

The discovery of the body came amid a massive air, land and sea operation to find the TV presenter and health guru, who popularised intermittent fasting and designed the 5:2 diet.

Mosley set off hiking from St Nikolas beach at 1.30pm local time on Wednesday, bound for the port town of Symi when he vanished outside the seaside village of Pedi.

His wife, Dr Clare Bailey, raised the alarm after he failed to return by 7.30pm. A search and rescue operation was launched to locate Mosley, who is best known for his appearances on The One Show and This Morning. Bailey was later joined by the couple’s adult children on the island.

The search included police, firefighters, specially trained dogs and volunteers.

Mosley, a columnist for the Daily Mail, made a number of documentaries about diet and exercise, including the Channel 4 show Michael Mosley: Who Made Britain Fat? He was also part of the BBC series Trust Me, I’m a Doctor.

He lived with tapeworms in his guts for six weeks for the documentary Infested! Living With Parasites on BBC Four.

Mosley was also credited for the rising popularity of the 5:2 diet, which involves fasting for two days a week to lose weight. He was named medical journalist of the year by the British Medical Association in 1995.

Yet another opinion poll was published last week, focusing on British people’s attitudes towards new arrivals on our shores.

They didn’t get here on small boats, and they won’t feature in the TV election debates. They’re not human beings, but birds: ring-necked parakeets.

Nevertheless, they are highly divisive, with the poll revealing that the colourful creatures prompt reactions from downright hostility, through grudging acceptance, to a warm welcome.

Almost 4,000 UK residents were interviewed for the online survey, published in the open-access journal NeoBiota. Researchers from Imperial College London, the Universities of Exeter and Brighton and the British Trust for Ornithology discovered that 90% were aware of the gaudy birds, and just over half knew the name of the species, which is also known as the rose-ringed parakeet, after its pink and grey neck ring.

The vast majority of people – roughly five out of six – consider parakeets aesthetically pleasing, yet at the same time almost half have negative opinions about them. In rural areas, this rises to almost two-thirds, with some suggesting that these noisy, screeching birds disturb the bucolic peace – hence the title of the research paper, Not in the countryside please!

Age also makes a difference: older respondents are far more hostile to the birds than younger ones, who mostly accept their presence, especially in London, their main stronghold. Comments varied from “very colourful and interesting to see”, to “a pain in the backside – so intrusively noisy”, which can’t really be argued with. Newspaper columnist Hugo Rifkind once likened them to young men on a stag do.

Others welcome them as a splash of colour in what they see as nature-depleted urban environments.

I’ve been aware of these exotic birds for almost half a century. In the late 1970s, only a decade after they first began to colonise Britain, I caught sight of one near my childhood home, on the outskirts of west London. To say it stood out among the drab suburban birdlife would be an understatement.

Ring-necked parakeets remained fairly scarce for decades, but from the late 1990s onwards numbers began to rise exponentially. Twenty years ago, when my youngest offspring were born, we lived in a small house in the London suburbs, with a tiny garden. The parakeets soon discovered our bird feeders, and would happily stay put even as the children played only feet away from them.

Today I see – or more often hear – them almost anywhere I go in London. They are also found in cities elsewhere in the UK, but their preference for gathering each evening in large communal roosts has limited their spread – I’ve yet to see one in my adopted home of Somerset.

Over the years, I’ve heard many myths about how they got here in the first place. “They were released by a stoned Jimi Hendrix, who let them out in London’s Carnaby Street…”; “They escaped from the film set of The African Queen…”; “They made a bid for freedom when their cage broke during the Great Storm of 1987…”

But as Nick Hunt and Tim Mitchell point out in their entertaining and informative book The Parakeeting of London: An Adventure in Gonzo Ornithology, all these apparently convincing stories are urban myths. Hunt and Mitchell were actually the first to investigate people’s response to these exotic new arrivals, speaking to those who were surprised to come across them in their local neighbourhood.

The truth about the parakeets’ presence here is rather a letdown: as popular cagebirds, it was inevitable some would escape. And because they live in the foothills of the Himalayas, they are easily able to cope with the worst of the British winter, and not just survive, but thrive.

There are genuine concerns about the birds’ ecological impact, including the devastation that a flock can wreak on fruit crops. They could also harm native species, by competing for nest-holes with jackdaws, stock doves and starlings. Conversely, London’s growing population of peregrines are delighted by the arrival of the parakeets, whose slow, direct flight makes them far easier to catch than the faster and more manoeuvrable pigeons.

Numbers are rising, too. The latest population estimate, from the British Trust for Ornithology, suggests a UK breeding population of 12,000 pairs, a 10-fold increase in the past 30 years. If this exponential rise continued, then by the end of this century parakeets would rival the wren as our commonest bird. Fortunately, perhaps, the signs are that their numbers have finally begun to level out. Nevertheless, conservationists are keeping a close eye on the expansion of the species.

Although I appreciate the ecological arguments against these birds, and have some sympathy with the suggestion that they should be culled to avoid problems in the future, I also have a real soft spot for them. And on a winter’s evening, when a hundred-strong flock streaks across the darkening sky like a green meteor, I can’t help admiring their sheer chutzpah, and be thankful for the way they brighten up our dull city lives.

The climate change minister, Chris Bowen, has savaged the Coalition after a frontbencher insisted the opposition was “absolutely committed” to the Paris climate agreement a day after leader Peter Dutton foreshadowed he would scrap Labor’s target to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030.

Dutton told the Weekend Australian he would oppose the legislated 2030 target – a 43% cut compared with 2005 levels – at the next election, declaring there was “no sense in ­signing up to targets you don’t have any prospect of achieving”.

On Sunday, the shadow communications minister, David Coleman, said the Coalition would release its full climate policy “well in advance of the election” but warned it was “not going to just blindly accept a [2030] forecast that’s obviously wrong”.

“We are absolutely committed to the net zero target by 2050,” Coleman told ABC TV on Sunday. “We are absolutely committed to the Paris agreement but we’re not going to maintain a [climate change minister] Chris Bowen fantasy when it’s plainly not going to happen.”

Bowen said on Sunday afternoon that Coleman had done a “valiant job” trying to say “white is black” after his leader’s comments were reported.

“The fact of the matter is, the Paris accord is crystal clear. There can be no backsliding,” Bowen said. “If you reduce your target, then you’re in breach of the Paris accord.”

Climate diplomacy experts agree Dutton’s position could break Australia’s 2015 commitment to the Paris agreement, under which nearly 200 countries said they would aim to limit global heating to well below 2C and attempt to limit it to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.

Departmental projections last year suggested Australia was likely to achieve a 42% emissions cut by 2030 based on an assessment of existing and announced policies.

“Very clearly, 42% puts us within striking distance of 43%, and here’s the key difference – Peter Dutton is giving up on it. We’re saying we’re still working to achieve it,” Bowen said on Sunday, adding Dutton was “obsessed ideologically with a nuclear fantasy”.

Australia’s net zero emissions by 2050 commitment was made by the former Morrison government after weeks of crisis meetings between the Liberals and the Nationals ahead of Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021.

The legally binding international treaty requires countries to offer increasingly ambitious emissions reduction targets in an effort to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. To do so, it notes, “greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030”.

Under the agreement, Australia has committed to announce a new emissions reduction target for 2035 by February.

The move by Dutton to ditch a 2030 target at the next federal election was labelled a “big mistake” by Labor frontbencher Jason Clare on Sky News on Sunday. Clare said it made Tony Abbott – who is sceptical of human-induced climate change – “look like Al Gore”.

“Any Australian who thinks climate change is real would think now that Peter Dutton is a real risk – [not just a] risk to investment or a risk to jobs but just a risk that Australia will do nothing to tackle climate change,” Clare said.

“You know, even Tony Abbott didn’t pull out of a global agreement on climate change and he thinks it’s crap.”

Kooyong MP Monique Ryan described the scrapping of a 2030 target while committing to a net zero by 2050 target as “nonsense”.

“They’re just trying to keep the door open for as long as possible for coal and gas and they’ll say anything in the meantime,” Ryan told Guardian Australia. “But it’s obfuscation and it’s insincere.”

The Coalition is expected to soon release its nuclear power plan as part of its pathway to net zero by the middle of the century.

Dutton, in the Weekend Australian interview, reportedly conceded a nuclear power plant would not be built before 2040 under the Coalition’s plan – a point made by experts and critics who have accused the opposition of planning to delay action to address the climate crisis.

In the meantime, the opposition leader planned to unveil a new gas strategy before Australians go to the polls before May 2025 – noting there had “never been any doubt in my mind that gas is ­absolutely essential”.

Clare said nuclear “costs a bomb” and wouldn’t rate well with the general Australian public.

“It costs a fortune wherever it’s been rolled out, or attempted to be rolled out. Around the world costs have blown out. So it costs a bomb. It takes too long.”

Italians cast their ballots on Saturday as Italy became the first key player to vote in the European parliamentary elections, which could lead to far-right leader, Giorgia Meloni, acting as kingmaker.

Far-right parties are expected to make gains in the elections, as most countries, including EU heavyweights France and Germany, go to the polls on Sunday. Projected results are expected late on Sunday evening.

While an increase in support for the far right is expected, with such parties expected to win a quarter of seats, the centrist mainstream is still forecast to emerge as the main force in the EU parliament.

Meloni, who was elected on a platform largely focused on immigration, shared a social media video message on Saturday in which she said her priorities were to “defend Europe’s borders against illegal immigration (and) protect the real economy and jobs”.

Italy, which will hold 76 of the 720 seats in the new parliament, could play a crucial role deciding the balance of power in the bloc. With polls suggesting Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party may gain 27% of the vote – up from just 6.4% in the 2019 EU elections – Italy’s prime minister could decide the political fate of the European Commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen, and whether she receives sufficient backing to secure a second term.

The question of whether von der Leyen’s European People’s Party (EPP) will agree to work with the far right is likely to prove decisive after the vote: von der Leyen has suggested she is willing for the EPP to collaborate with far-right lawmakers, provided they are pro-EU and not what she describes as “puppets” of Vladimir Putin.

The EU Commission chief has explicitly ruled out working with the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, whose National Rally (RN) party is also topping the polls in the EU race, or with Germany’s AfD, over this issue. Hungary’s ruling populist Fidesz party is opposed to aiding Kyiv, with the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, widely regarded as the EU’s most pro-Russian leader.

But von der Leyen appears to be more relaxed about working with Meloni and some fellow members of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group. “I’ve been working very well with Giorgia Meloni”, who is “clearly pro-European”, she has said.

Underlining the pivotal role Meloni may come to play in the bloc’s arrangement of power, the Italian leader has been courted by Le Pen, who aims to form a rightwing supergroup in the parliament, but also the centre-right von der Leyen.

Socialists, liberals and greens, who are concerned that Meloni could demand a dilution of EU climate measures in exchange for support for the EU Commission president, have threatened to oppose von der Leyen’s reappointment if she makes any deals with the far right.

Slovakia also went to the polls on Saturday, following an assassination attempt last month on its premier, Robert Fico. Fico’s leftwing populist Smer-SD party, which opposes sending EU arms to Ukraine, appears to have drawn support after the incident.

A dog ran four miles to get help for his owner who crashed his car into a ravine in Oregon – and was ultimately rescued because of the animal’s heroics, according to authorities.

The case unfolded as Brandon Garrett was driving with his four dogs north on US Forest Service Road 39 in Baker county, near where his family was camping.

During the trip, Garrett failed to navigate a curve in the road and crashed over an embankment, according to a statement from the Baker county sheriff’s office.

Garrett survived the crash, but the accident left him stranded and forced him to wait – and hope – for help.

Thankfully for him, one of his dogs ran back to the campsite, and the animal’s appearance led the Garrett’s family to realize something had gone wrong. The dog ended up running nearly four miles through the wilderness before tracking down the other campers on 3 June at 9.30am.

The family quickly began searching for Garrett and eventually spotted his car. But they were unable to reach him because of the difficult terrain, prompting them to call emergency rescuers for help.

“The reporting party explained that his brother, Brandon Garrett, had not made it to his camp yesterday afternoon. Family members located his vehicle this morning but were unable to reach it due to the terrain,” the statement from the sheriff’s office said.

First responders managed to reach Garrett by using chainsaws to make a path. They then used a rescue blanket and rope to retrieve Garrett from the ravine.

Garrett was found about 100 yards from where the accident occurred with his three other dogs, who were also alive.

Authorities provided Garrett first aid on the scene. He was later driven in an ambulance to a helicopter that flew him to a hospital in the area.

Details about the extent of Garrett’s injuries or his medical condition were not immediately released.

Together, the collective age of the bride and groom was nearly 200. But second world war veteran Harold Terens and his sweetheart, Jeanne Swerlin, proved that love is eternal as they tied the knot Saturday inland of the D-Day beaches in Normandy, France.

Their respective ages – he’s 100, she’s 96 – made their nuptials an almost double-century celebration.

Terens called it “the best day of my life”.

On her way into the nuptials, the bubbly bride-to-be said: “It’s not just for young people, love, you know? We get butterflies. And we get a little action, also.”

The location was the elegant stone-worked town hall of Carentan, a key initial D-Day objective that saw ferocious fighting after the 6 June 1944, Allied landings that helped rid Europe of Adolf Hitler’s tyranny.

Like other towns and villages across the Normandy coast where nearly 160,000 Allied troops came ashore under fire on five code-named beaches, it’s an effervescent hub of remembrance and celebration on the 80th anniversary of that day, festooned with flags and bunting and with veterans feted like rockstars.

As the swing of Glenn Miller and other period tunes rang out on the streets, well-wishers – some in second world war-period clothes – were lined up a good hour before the wedding, behind barriers outside the town hall, with a rousing pipe-and-drum band on hand to serenade the happy couple.

After both declaring “oui” to vows read by Carentan’s mayor in English, the couple exchanged rings.

“With this ring, I thee wed,” Terens said.

She giggled and gasped: “Really?”

With champagne flutes in hand, they waved through an open window to the adoring crowds outside.

“To everybody’s good health. And to peace in the world and the preservation of democracy all over the world and the end of the war in Ukraine and Gaza,” Terens said as he and his bride clinked glasses and drank.

The crowd yelled “La mariée!” – “The bride!” – to Swerlin, who wore a long flowing dress of vibrant pink. Terens looked dapper in a light-blue suit and matching pink kerchief in his breast pocket.

They enjoyed a very special wedding-night party: they were invited to the state dinner at the Elysee Palace on Saturday night with President Emmanuel Macron and US President Joe Biden.

“Congratulations to the newlyweds,” Macron said, prompting cheers and a standing ovation from other guests during the toast praising French-American friendship. “[The town of] Carentan was happy to host your wedding, and us, your wedding dinner,” he told the couple.

The wedding was symbolic, not binding in law. Mayor Jean-Pierre L’Honneur’s office said he wasn’t empowered to wed foreigners who aren’t residents of Carentan, and that the couple, who are both American, hadn’t requested legally binding vows. However, they could always complete those formalities back in Florida if they wished.

L’Honneur likes to say that Normandy is practically the 51st state of the US, given its reverence and gratitude for Allied soldiers and the sacrifices of tens of thousands who never made it home from the Battle of Normandy.

“Love is eternal, yes, maybe,” the mayor said, referring to the newlyweds, although his comments also fittingly described the feelings of many Normandy veterans.

“I hope for them the best happiness together.”

Dressed in a 1940s dress that belonged to her mother, Louise, and a red beret, 73-year-old Jane Ollier was among spectators who waited for a glimpse of the lovebirds..

“It’s so touching to get married at that age,” Ollier said. “If it can bring them happiness in the last years of their lives, that’s fantastic.”

The couple, both widowed, grew up in New York City: she in Brooklyn, he in the Bronx. Terens first visited France as a 20-year-old US army air forces corporal shortly after D-Day. He enlisted in 1942 and, after shipping to Britain, was attached to a four-pilot P-47 Thunderbolt fighter unit as their radio repair technician.

On D-Day, Terens helped repair planes returning from France so they could rejoin the battle. He said half his company’s pilots died that day. Terens himself went to France 12 days later, helping transport German prisoners of war and former American prisoners of war to England. Following the Nazi surrender in May 1945, Terens again helped transport freed Allied prisoners to England before he shipped back to the US a month later.

Swerlin made it abundantly clear that her new centenarian husband doesn’t lack for rizz.

“He’s the greatest kisser ever, you know?” she proudly declared before they embraced enthusiastically for TV cameras.

“All right ! That’s it for now !” Terens said as he came up for air.

To which she quickly quipped: “You mean there’s more later?”