Susan Solomon was born and raised in Chicago and got her PhD in atmospheric chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the 1980s which established how the Earth’s protective ozone layer was being depleted by human-made chemicals. Her studies formed the basis of the 1989 Montreal protocol – an international agreement that helped eliminate 99% of these harmful solvents. Now a professor of environmental studies and chemistry at MIT, Solomon is the author of three books, the latest of which, Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do It Again, applies lessons from past environmental successes to the climate crisis.

What got you interested in science?
Easy answer: Jacques Cousteau – I thought it was just the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. But then I didn’t really like biology, and I loved chemistry. As I started reading about planetary atmospheres I thought: Oh, my goodness, chemistry on a planet instead of in a test tube! I want to do that!

What prompted you to write this book?
Having done a lot of work on the ozone hole, one is constantly asked: “If we could [solve the problem] for ozone, can we do it for climate change?” I had a lot of experience with the policy community with the Montreal Protocol [an international treaty to protect the ozone layer], as well as with the IPCC, so I learned a lot about how policy is made. And I was fascinated by the question of, why are these problems different?

What is the ozone layer and what does it do?
We wouldn’t have life on the planet’s surface if we didn’t have an ozone layer, because it protects us from ultraviolet light from the sun that would otherwise be very damaging to everything biological.

But by the 1980s it was becoming clear that we were depleting it through the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in aerosols and refrigerators, among other things. We have many measurements that show we have increased the amount of chlorine in the Earth’s atmosphere by about a factor of six compared with the small amount nature can produce. So it’s overwhelmingly human-made chlorine and almost all of that is from CFCs – hairspray and underarm deodorant were the source of most of the world’s emissions.

Despite the global scale of the issue, the ozone crisis was addressed remarkably quickly.
The level of standing infrastructure investment that the chemical industry had back then was relatively small compared to what the fossil fuel industry has today. It was only ever a dozen companies worldwide and a few billion dollars maximum. And the companies weren’t really being forced out of the business; they were being forced to change their business, and they had different degrees of recalcitrance. The thing I like to tell my students is: don’t imagine that industry is going to do the right thing just because it’s the right thing to do, that’s not their job. Their job is to make money and your job is to hold them to account. So that’s why the public and consumer actions are so important. Back in the 1970s, just the possibility of ozone depletion led lots of people in the US to get rid of spray cans and use underarm roll-on instead. That big phase out of voluntary consumer action had a massive effect on the market.

Aside from the ozone crisis, what did you learn from researching other issues such as smog and lead that we might carry forward to the fight against global heating?
Over the years in America and in the UK, we developed this anti-regulation mindset: regulation is bad, the market will find the best possible solution. Well, the market may find the most cost-effective solution. And the cost is the key thing there, and whether it’s best or not depends on your values, because if the market finds a solution that eliminates nature, some people would care about that. And what is actually the value of nature? And what’s the value of your child not getting asthma? How do we put a price on that? We don’t put a price on that, because they depend upon our values. This whole idea of, we’ll do it the cheapest way and don’t pay attention to your values – we just have to get past that.

Industry will continue to fight, just because they have an awful lot to protect. They have massive investments in fossil fuel infrastructure. And they have all these assets, whether it be the rights to go out and cut down this mountaintop and sell it as coal, or offshore oil rigs that are very expensive pieces of equipment. So you total it all up and it’s something in the order of a $40tn industry, completely dwarfing the chemical industry at the time of the CFC issue. But it’s interesting that the concept of stranded assets has become part of the vocabulary, and people are beginning to realise how much power they actually have, in terms of the way we make our investments – in your retirement fund, or your choice of bank. And so social choice is becoming part of the way people are thinking about bringing pressure on industries that are part of those assets. So this is all part of why I’m optimistic.

In the Guardian last month, 380 climate scientists were surveyed and many reported feeling despair – 77% of respondents believe global temperatures will reach at least 2.5C above pre-industrial levels and 42% think they’ll exceed 3C. Do you share their pessimism?
Well, the past calendar year has been a surprise – hotter than anyone expected it could or should be. There’s a lot of work going on to try to figure it out. So, yeah, that is certainly scary, but I don’t share the pessimism. And I worry, frankly, about climate scientists being encouraged to take a particular stance. You see it go in both directions, but in this case there has long been a group of people out there who believe we should tell the worst stories we possibly can, because then the public will get it and wake up and that will enable change. That practice has not really worked. Also, you can’t look at the [falling] price of solar energy and batteries and not see big change coming. And the idea that we’re going to go past 3C is very hard for me to see, because it’s pretty clear that the Paris agreement has already put us on a trajectory that won’t exceed that. Can we stay within 2C, given how the prices of clean energy have come down? Personally, I think we can.

One lesson from your book is that, if you’re an ordinary person worried about the climate crisis, the most impactful thing you can do is to band together with others to push for change.
Yes, that is the biggest impact, for sure. It’s been the kickstarter in so many past environmental problems and it has already kickstarted us on this problem. For goodness sake, let’s not give up now, we’re right on the cusp of success. That’s the fundamental message of the book.

To come back to where we started with the ozone layer. Is there still a problem up there? Is it fixed now?
We have seen the chlorofluorocarbons going up, up, up and now coming down, down, down. So that has been spectacular, a massive environmental success story. And it involves every country in the world – the Montreal Protocol is the only UN agreement that’s been signed by every country that was formally part of the UN. That’s pretty cool.

It also helped the climate change issue, by the way, because chlorofluorocarbons are very strong greenhouse gases. If we hadn’t pulled back on them, we’d be looking at an extra degree of warming by 2050, and then, for sure, 2C would have been out of reach. But we checked a degree off by dialling down on chlorofluorocarbons. How cool is that?

• Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do It Again by Susan Solomon is published by the University of Chicago Press (£21). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

The two Russian soldiers jogged across an apocalyptic landscape. They kept going, zigzagging over a vegetable patch. At the intersection between Hoholia and Travnia streets, the pair disappeared into a roofless brick building. Around them was the ruined town of Vovchansk. It was a smouldering hell of blackened blocks of flats and shell-dinted cottages.

Vovchansk, once home to about 17,000 people, is approximately three miles (5km) from the border with Russia in north-east Ukraine.

Russian troops seized it on the first day of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale February 2022 invasion. They retreated six months later, going back up the road to the Russian city of Belgorod. A month ago – on 10 May – they swept in again, taking over Vovchansk’s polyclinic and meat processing factory.

A brutal battle has raged ever since. Russian forces control the north of the city and a grid of shattered western districts. Ukrainian troops hold the centre. Their fiefdom includes half of Korelenka Street, with the Russians concealed in nearby basements. Fighting takes place house by house. Vovchansk now resembles a 21st-century mini Stalingrad, a place of death, rattling gunfire and close-quarters combat.

Everything is seen. “The sky is thick with drones. Our drones, their drones,” said Sasha, a 34-year-old lieutenant with Ukraine’s 57th Separate Motorised Infantry Brigade, while sitting in his HQ, located beyond the city. Neither side was able to use armoured vehicles inside Vovchansk because of kamikaze attacks. He said: “At the start, Russia sent in tanks. We destroyed them all in five minutes. If artillery doesn’t get you, drones will.”

Instead, small groups of infantry go in on foot. It is a perilous journey, through a wood and across the Vovcha river. Evacuating casualties was very difficult, Sasha said.

The Ukrainian military uses heavy-lift Vampire drones to airdrop supplies to forward posts: water, food, bullets. Clearing abandoned buildings was dangerous, with the enemy waiting in ambush, or just 200 metres away. “You never know when someone will open fire,” he said.

A bank of screens showed a live video feed of the city. The two Russians seen jogging earlier were inside their brown cottage. A closeup of the central market – located in a grey zone – presented a gruesome scene. The corpses of six Russian soldiers lay on the ground. “I feel no pity for them. They are constantly trying to take our territory. Russians are zombified people. If we don’t halt them, they will continue,” Sasha said.

A veteran of the grinding battle for Bakhmut – won by Russia in May 2023 – Sasha said Moscow was guilty of genocide. Wagner mercenaries went into a cellar and murdered a Ukrainian family, including children. “They shot everybody,” he said.

Street battles in Vovchansk were so intense that only experienced Ukrainian soldiers were deployed there, rotating among themselves in shifts. The Russians were a mixture of professionals and novices, he added.

The 57th scrambled to Vovchansk last month. The brigade’s commander, Maj Yuriy, said his men had pushed the Russians back and stabilised the situation. “A couple of days ago we stopped their advance here. Our task is to hold our positions and to inflict maximum losses. And then to gradually move forward,” he said. The Russians would typically attack about 7pm or 8pm, creeping forward as dusk fell.

Ukraine’s biggest challenge is Russian air power. Earlier last week, enemy combat planes dropped 36 guided bombs known as KABs in a 24 hour-period. Strikes were more frequent near the occupied eastern city of Avdiivka,

Sasha said. “If we had air defences to shoot down Russian bombers, the situation would have changed a long time ago. We wouldn’t be defending. We would be attacking,” he pointed out.

As well as Vovchansk, Russia has advanced towards the village of Lyptsi. Its two-pronged incursion piles pressure on Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, almost 19 miles away.

The Kremlin’s goal is to bring its big guns to within shelling range of Kharkiv in order to inflict daily misery on its 1 million-strong population – a repeat of 2022. An additional objective is to capture a road connecting Vovchansk to the city of Kupiansk, where Russian troops are closing in.

The latest Vovchansk offensive has forced Kyiv to divert forces from other parts of the frontline. Putin, though, might have miscalculated. With Kharkiv in peril, the Biden administration last month lifted its prohibition on the use of some US weapons inside Russian territory.

European allies followed suit, but White House restrictions on long-range ballistic missiles – which may knock out Russian military aerodromes – remain.

On Thursday, Joe Biden – attending D-day celebrations – reaffirmed US support for Ukraine and described Putin as a “tyrant bent on domination.” The US president, however, made clear that Kyiv could not strike Moscow or the Kremlin. It was allowed to attack “just across the border where they’re receiving significant fire from conventional weapons used by the Russians to go into Ukraine to kill Ukrainians”, Biden said.

Still, this local change helps. Previously, Russia amassed soldiers between about nine and 19 miles away from the Vovchansk district, beyond the range of Ukrainian drones. Ihor, a volunteer with the Barracuda drone surveillance group, said the invaders parked their armoured vehicles in an old Soviet collective farm and used the Russian town of Shebekino as a staging post. “Their logistics are now more difficult,” he said. “The new rule might be a gamechanger.”

On 1 June or the following day, Kyiv used a US-supplied Himars rocket system to destroy a Russian S-300/400 missile complex close to Belgorod. Images showed two wrecked launchers and a damaged command post.

Sasha said he would only call in a Himars strike if he could be certain to kill “20-30” Russians. “American rockets are expensive,” he added.

More US weapons were arriving after Congress in April passed a $61bn military aid package, he said.

When the battle for Vovchansk began, thousands of residents fled the city. Some exited in private cars, others went on evacuation buses. A few left it too late.

Oleksandr Humaniuk, founder of the Rose in Hand charity, said he received desperate phone calls from 10 families living in basements in Russian-occupied streets. Rescue was impossible. A disabled man called him and said he wanted to get out but could only walk 50 metres.

“We also have calls from people where it’s a trap. A few locals support the Russians. They try and lure police in so the Russians shoot them,” Humaniuk said.

He said Russian soldiers kidnapped an unknown number of civilians, using them as a human shields and taking them across the border. They murdered others. Bodies lay in the streets. A man in a wheelchair was killed outside his house. Two volunteers and a policeman died trying to help civilians, he said.

Villagers living in the nearby countryside have also escaped. Oleksandr Lubianko said he was the last person to leave his hamlet home in Yuchenkove, west of Vovchansk. “We have no power, no water,” he said. He said he packed a single suitcase and set off across the fields, eventually coming across a Ukrainian soldier.

Lubianko had been feeding his neighbours’ goats, chickens and ducks. “I was sad to abandon them. Who knows if they will survive. The goat looked at me reproachfully,” he said.

His sister Nataliia Hrybenkova left the nearby village of Bilyi Kolodayaz. She described Russia’s occupation two years ago as “bearable”. “Masked gunmen came round and stole my husband’s Toyota car,” she recalled. “You were not allowed to speak Ukrainian. But if you kept your head down, it was OK.”

Russia’s latest bloody attack was much worse. “There is bombing all the time. There are airstrikes every day,” she said, adding that the kindergarten and mill were flattened.

Before the war, Vovchansk was a prosperous city. It had several big factories and a thriving agricultural sector. There were close ties with relatives and other Russians living in Belgorod.

“Now we are enemies. So many people have suffered, so many lives have been lost,” Hrybenkova said, speaking at a reception centre in Kharkiv for displaced and homeless people. “We became bums, almost. These are borrowed clothes,” she added wryly.

Valentina – who declined to give her surname – said she got out of Vovchansk in a car with her husband, daughter Anya and six-year-old grandson. They hid for several hours, before fleeing under gunfire.

“We saw planes and heard bombs. We crossed ourselves and hoped for the best,” she said. She previously worked in the city’s aggregate factory, which manufactured parts for helicopters and Kamaz lorries. “I did the detailing,” she explained.

Her daughter, a nurse, helped evacuate patients from the hospital. “We got everybody out in time,” Anya said. Soon afterwards, Russian soldiers stormed the building and set up on observation point in a medical department with a tower across the road.

What would happen now? “We don’t know,” Valentina said. “All I can tell you is the Russians thought it would be easy to take Vovchansk. They were wrong. Ukraine is fighting back.”

Democrats will target Donald Trump’s first full-scale campaign rally since his criminal trial with a billboard that brands him “a convicted white-collar crook”.

The ad, paid for by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), is the latest indication that the party is ready to become more aggressive in capitalising on last month’s guilty verdict in New York.

“Trump was a disaster for Nevada’s economy,” says the billboard, which will be displayed in Las Vegas, where Trump is due to speak on Sunday. “Now he’s back. A convicted white-collar crook. Coddling billionaires, leaving workers behind.”

A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in his hush-money criminal trial, making him the the first former US president to be convicted of a felony. Judge Juan Merchan set a sentencing hearing for 11 July.

But Democrats have been unsure how far to go in hammering home the verdict to voters in this year’s presidential election campaign. Some fear it could fuel a narrative that the trial was politically motivated and backfire by generating sympathy for the presumptive Republican nominee.

However, this week there have been signs of a more direct approach. On Monday, at a campaign reception in Greenwich, Connecticut, Joe Biden referred to his opponent as a “convicted felon”.

The Las Vegas billboard attempts to tie Trump’s criminal record to his economic one, portraying him as a “white-collar crook” who ripped off Nevada’s working class when he was president. The phrase also has echoes of the “Crooked Hillary” label that proved effective for Trump during the 2016 campaign.

Stephanie Justice, a DNC spokesperson, said: “As Donald Trump returns to Nevada this weekend for the first time as a convicted felon, voters will remember this crook left Nevada’s workers out to dry as president.

“After promising to take care of Nevada’s middle class, he implemented a tax scam that made the ultra-wealthy and corporations wealthier off the backs of working families, repeatedly attacked unions and sat back as Nevada bled tens of thousands of jobs.”

Justice added: “Now he’s promising tax handouts to his billionaire donors instead of putting the interests of working Nevadans first. Nevada voters know that Trump is too corrupt and unfit to serve, and will reject him again in 2024.”

The political impact of Trump’s conviction remains uncertain, but a post-verdict analysis of nearly 2,000 interviews with voters who previously participated in New York Times/Siena College surveys found that Trump’s lead over Biden narrowed from three points to just one point.

There is “no chance” that the search for the British TV doctor Michael Mosley on the Greek island of Symi will be called off until he is found, the island’s mayor has said, after the search was described as “a race against time”.

Mosley, 67, has been missing since Wednesday afternoon when he decided to walk from the beach he was at with his wife, leaving his phone behind. The search and rescue operation, which involves divers, helicopters and drones, is now in its fourth day.

There has been no sign yet of Mosley, said Manolis Tsimpoukas, a search organiser, as firefighters resumed their search covering a four-mile (6.5km) radius on the island’s mountainous terrain.

The mayor, Eleftherios Papakaloudoukas, questioned how anyone could survive in the scorching heat gripping the island, with the mercury topping 40C on the day Mosley disappeared. Symi and nearby islands are under a yellow weather warning for high temperatures and the mayor said the search dog was only able to work for an hour on Saturday morning due to the heat.

Papakaloudoukas said the area where Mosley is believed to have walked through was “difficult to pass” and was “only rocks”, and there were “loads” of snakes.

Mosley’s four children arrived on Symi on Saturday to assist with the search, the mayor said, joining Mosley’s wife, Dr Claire Bailey, and her friends. Mosley and Bailey arrived on the island on Tuesday.

On Friday, CCTV images of Mosley were released showing him shielding himself from the sun with an umbrella outside a restaurant in the village of Pedi, providing the first piece of concrete evidence that he made it to the village. The images were taken about 20 minutes after he left St Nikolas beach at about 1.30pm local time.

While Bailey has been searching for her husband in a wooded area above the village of Pedi, search teams now believe Mosley travelled through a much sparser area on the other side of the bay, Papakaloudoukas said, citing other CCTV evidence. Police have instructed taxi boats to raise the alert if they see anything strange after the search was expanded to the sea.

Further CCTV footage from a house at the edge of Pedi’s marina showed Mosley on a mountain path that leads towards the island’s port town at about 2pm on Wednesday. A senior police officer coordinating the operation said of the development: “In some ways the mystery has only deepened. Now we have to ask where did he go from there, and if he took another unexpected route [to the port town] did he slip and fall? We’re still no nearer to solving this.”

One of the rescuers told the PA news agency that it would have taken a fit young person three hours to walk to the port from Pedi – the path on which Mosley is believed to have embarked after he reached the village. “The path is not easy to follow, if he took a wrong turn he would be lost. He could be anywhere, it is a race against time,” the rescuer said of the little-used path, which runs over inland terrain rather than along the coast.

The mayor’s daughter, Mika Papakalodouka, said some of the island’s 300 permanent residents were out searching for Mosley. “It’s such a small island to get lost on. It’s so weird for us. Everybody is worried and looking for him.”

South West Water has taken a legal stake in a customer’s home after she withheld her bill payments in a protest over sewage dumping in rivers and the sea.

Thousands of water company customers are thought to be withholding payments but this is the first known case of a company enforcing a claim against a customer’s home.

Imogen May, of Crediton, Devon, has withheld payment since 2019 and has a £2,809 debt. South West Water won a county court judgment over the debt and has claimed an interest in May’s cottage via the Land Registry. When it is sold, the company can claim what it says it is owed.

May has also withheld payment of council tax, arguing that the funds are not spent on people’s priorities, such as environmental projects and children’s mental health services. The council is now applying for a court order to force the sale of May’s cottage.

“This is about using my place of privilege as a homeowner to push the boundaries,” she said. “It’s about necessity – unless we challenge them and show them that we’re not frightened of them, they will continue to do what they’re doing.”

“They are killing our water,” May told the Guardian. “Without our water, we are dead. I care deeply about the planet and biodiversity and I just want to inspire people to stop paying these bastards to rip us off.

“The language of money is the only thing they really understand. They can have it by all means when they spend our money on what it’s designed for. But they are openly polluting our waters and I’m done with it.”

May, who works in a bakery, has frequently taken part in environmental protests. She was arrested while blocking Lambeth Bridge in London as part of an Extinction Rebellion protest in 2019 and released without charge. Charges brought over a protest against the HS2 rail development in Buckinghamshire in 2020 were later dismissed.

May’s home is already up for sale as she had decided to downsize after her two daughters left home. She is undecided about what to do once the house is sold, “but if I am set with a choice to pay these bills or go to prison then I’ll pay the bloody bills,” she said. “I’ve promised my kids that I would not end up in prison.”

A spokesperson for South West Water said it did not comment on individual customers’ cases. “We are serious about tackling storm overflows and change of this scale takes time, ambition and increased investment, and that is why we are investing £850m in our region over two years,” he said. “We will also be the first water company to meet the government target of less than 10 spills per overflow, per year, a decade ahead of target.”

South West Water increased its annual dividend to investors to £127m in May. In the same month, 17,000 of its customers had to boil water due to contamination with the cryptosporidium parasite, which results from faecal pollution of water supplies.

Frequent overflows of sewage into rivers and the sea has become a high-profile issue in recent years. Multimillion-pound court fines have been levied against a number of English water companies over their failings, and their large debts and dividend payments to shareholders have become controversial. Thousands of customers are thought to be boycotting their payments, with bill strikes ongoing against all nine companies dealing with wastewater in England.

Julie Wassmer, of Whitstable, Kent, helped found the BoycottWaterBills.com website. She has withheld the sewerage portion of her water bill from Southern Water since 2021, totalling about £1,000.

“We know for a fact that we’ve got boycott action in all the wastewater areas,” she said. “We haven’t got a complete figure on how many people are boycotting nationally but we believe it’s thousands,” based on mailing list numbers and web activity.

Wassmer said the process for complaining to water companies was “not fit for purpose” and that the industry regulator, Ofwat, was ineffective in stemming the sewage pollution. “So there’s no chance of holding the companies to account. The whole thing is just a legalised scam and it’s only benefited the companies, the executives and their shareholders, and people are doing the only thing I think we can do, which is to withhold payment.”

She likened the widespread bills boycott to the successful anti-fracking campaigns in which she has also taken part. “There are so many different people involved and that means we’re hydra-headed and more difficult for the companies to pick us off.”

Caz Dennett, of Weymouth, started the Don’t Pay for Dirty Water campaign with Extinction Rebellion. “It seemed like an obvious action for people to take to truly demonstrate how sickening and scandalous the water company racket is,” she said. She has withheld the sewage charge part of her Wessex Water bill for 14 months and is in dispute with the company over the £940 it says she owes.

Katy Taylor, the chief customer officer at Southern Water, said: “To reduce storm overflows, we have a £1.5bn investment increasing storage capacity and finding ways to divert rain back to the environment naturally.”

A Wessex Water spokesperson said: “We agree [storm overflows] are outdated and we’re currently spending over £3m a month to progressively improve them. Subject to regulatory approval, this investment will double.”

Wassmer said: “Nationalisation appears to be the only way forward. England is the only country in the world to have a fully privatised water industry. So it’s not only a national disgrace, it’s an international disgrace.”

Paola Ferraro marches through the neat grids of vines that chequer the slopes of Monfumo and rattles off the number of ways violent weather hurts her family’s prosecco production.

Spring frost kills buds, summer hail storms thrash leaves, long droughts starve vines of water, while strong rains spark landslides that drown them in mud.

In the rugged hills of Asolo, halfway between the canals of Venice and the peaks of the Dolomites, the farmers that produce prosecco, one of the most popular sparkling wines in the world, have been plunged into crisis mode by the tempestuous weather that has arrived with the climate crisis.

“It feels like there’s no time,” says Ferraro, from Bele Casel winery, whose grandmother lit candles and prayed during once-rare hail storms that have started to hit earlier in the year and pack more of a punch. “It’s changing so fast.”

Climate change is affecting wine producers everywhere. A study in Nature found that by the end of the century 90% of traditional wine regions could disappear from coastal and lowland parts of Spain, Italy, Greece and southern California.

Prosecco is particularly sensitive to volatile weather. When rain falls hard in the “hogback” hills of Valdobbiadene and Conegliano – a Unesco heritage site that, along with Asolo, makes the most exclusive labels – the steep slopes that grow glera grapes can quickly morph into torrents of fast-flowing earth. During long periods of drought, any water that does hit the sun-crusted inclines washes straight off.

“The impact of the two extremes is one thing on a plain, but it’s totally different on a steep slope,” says Paolo Tarolli, of the University of Padova, who studies the effects of climate change on wine terraces.

At the Vinitaly trade fair in Verona, where well-heeled wine dealers swill glasses of their finest, prosecco producers say the sector has only just woken up to the scale of the threat.

Nicola Ceschin, from the Sanfeletto winery, says that in the last couple of years “the debate has been opened, and it has become more and more lively. But in terms of practical action, I don’t know if much has really moved.”

Farmers can adapt to many of the changes, says Gregory Gambetta, a plant biologist at Bordeaux Sciences Agro and co-author of the Nature study. But customers place so much emphasis on a wine’s identity that it is “a completely different beast” to other foods threatened by global heating.

“The big fear is not: ‘I’m going to wake up and the climate change is so extreme I can’t grow grapes any more’,” says Gambetta. “The fear is that: ‘This product we always made – that everyone always loved – that they [the customers] don’t like it any more’.”

Sipped straight or mixed in a spritz, prosecco has had a boom in popularity over the last two decades, but green groups and some people in northern Italy have blamed the scale of the industry’s expansion for damaging the local environment, prompting pledges from producers to better protect ecosystems.

Some farmers have already started to change their practices. Black nets dot the green terraces of Valdobbiadene to guard grapes from hail. Some producers, taking a more experimental approach, have used cannon-style equipment to blast gas into clouds to stop stones from forming.

Others rely on natural solutions; Ferraro uses fig trees to shade the grapes and cool the vines. The trees also encourage a richer mix of wildlife, shelter plants from strong winds and keep soil stable in heavy rain.

There’s a reason trees were planted in vineyards from 100 years ago, says Ferraro. “It’s not just because they look good.”

Scientists have also looked to the past to deal with drought. Just a few generations ago, says Tarolli, farmers often built small ponds into the slopes to collect water. These “microwater storage systems” are still a common sight on terraces in south-east Asia and east Africa, he says, but the practice has mostly been lost in northern Italy.

To help farmers save water, Tarolli flies drones over slopes to build 3D models with which he can simulate rainfall patterns. He then uses these to find the best areas to build ponds, which farmers can connect to drip irrigation systems to water drier parts of the vineyard.

“It’s a low-cost intervention,” says Tarolli. “A mixture of ancient knowledge merged with modern technology.”

But even as such practices begin to take off, farmers say they have little control over the increasingly violent weather. At the Bresolin vineyard, which was founded by three brothers from a winemaking family who wanted to turn to organic farming, the years of drought and hail have led to a constant state of acute stress.

“The stress of the plant and the stress of the producer increases every year,” says Valentina Pozza, Bresolin’s export manager. “It’s your job, it’s your life, you live thanks to what the vineyards give to you.”

Though they try to adapt, she says, the lack of certainty leaves farmers feeling powerless.

“You cannot decide if there will be drought or rain or hail,” she says. “You wait and hope that everything will be OK. You try to do the best you can, but it’s not you who decides.”

Retired Maj Gen William Anders, the former Apollo 8 astronaut who took the famous Earthrise photo showing the planet as a shadowed blue marble from space in 1968, was killed Friday when the plane he was piloting alone plummeted into the waters off the San Juan Islands in Washington state. He was 90.

“The family is devastated,” said his son, retired air force Lt Col Greg Anders, who confirmed the death to the Associated Press. “He was a great pilot and we will miss him terribly.”

The former astronaut had said the photo was his most significant contribution to the space program, given the ecological philosophical impact it had, along with making sure the Apollo 8 command module and service module worked.

A report came in around 11.40am that an older-model plane had crashed into the water and sunk near the north end of Jones Island, the San Juan county sheriff Eric Peter said.

Only the pilot was on board the Beech A45 airplane at the time, according to the Federal Aviation Association.

Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, who is also a retired Nasa astronaut, wrote on the social platform X: “Bill Anders forever changed our perspective of our planet and ourselves with his famous Earthrise photo on Apollo 8. He inspired me and generations of astronauts and explorers. My thoughts are with his family and friends.”

William Anders said in a 1997 Nasa oral-history interview that he hadn’t thought the Apollo 8 mission was risk-free but that there were important national, patriotic and exploration reasons for going ahead. He had estimated there was about a one-in-three chance that the crew wouldn’t make it back, the same chance the mission would be a success and the same chance the mission wouldn’t start. He said he suspected Christopher Columbus had sailed with worse odds.

Anders had once recounted the experience as part of a BBC documentary on the mission. He recalled how Earth had looked fragile and seemingly physically insignificant, yet was home.

After two or three orbits around the moon, he and the crew began shooting photographs.

“We’d been going backwards and upside down, didn’t really see the Earth or the sun, and when we rolled around and came around and saw the first Earthrise,” he said. “That certainly was, by far, the most impressive thing. To see this very delicate, colorful orb, which to me looked like a Christmas tree ornament coming up over this very stark, ugly lunar landscape really contrasted.”

“I don’t know who said it, maybe all of us said: ‘Oh my God. Look at that!’” Anders said.

“And up came the Earth. We had had no discussion on the ground, no briefing, no instructions on what to do. I jokingly said, ‘Well, it’s not on the flight plan,’ and the other two guys were yelling at me to give them cameras. I had the only color camera with a long lens. So I floated a black-and-white over to Borman. I can’t remember what Lovell got. They were all yelling for cameras and we started snapping away.”

The photo of the thrilling swirl of life that is Earth on a backdrop of black space and a foreground of dull, lifeless moonscape became an icon of space travel and the defining image of our living world and its fragility.

The National Transportation Safety Board and FAA are investigating the crash.

Anders and his wife, Valerie, founded the Heritage Flight Museum in Washington state in 1996. It is now based at a regional airport in Burlington and features 15 aircraft, several antique military vehicles, a library and many artifacts donated by veterans, according to the museum’s website. Two of their sons helped them run it.

The couple moved to Orcas Island, in the San Juan archipelago, in 1993, and kept a second home in their hometown of San Diego, according to a biography on the museum’s website. They had six children and 13 grandchildren.

Associated Press contributed reporting

A 19-year-old who fatally shot an unhoused woman with a pellet gun in southern California was sentenced to five years and eight months in state prison on Thursday.

William Innes pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the killing last May of Annette Pershal, 68, who was living on the streets of San Diego and nicknamed “Granny Annie”. The case sparked national outrage after prosecutors reported that Innes had texted a group chat saying he was going “hobo hunting”.

Innes’s co-defendant, 19-year-old Ryan Hopkins, pleaded guilty last year to aiding and abetting assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to one year in jail. Police and prosecutors say that Hopkins drove Innes to the spot where Pershal had been camping, and that Innes fired multiple rounds at the woman with a pellet gun, hitting her in the head, leg and torso. Pershal, who was well-known in the neighborhood, was found unconscious and transported to a hospital, where doctors discovered she had been shot. She died several days later.

Brandy Nazworth, Pershal’s daughter, who attended the sentencing hearing, said in an interview on Friday that she felt the five-year sentence was appropriate: “Trying to understand this situation is impossible. I’m never really going to get closure, and none of it is going to make sense. It was a bad decision [Innes] made, but it shouldn’t affect his whole life.

“My mom always told me two wrongs don’t make a right,” she continued. “And me hoping for the worst for him isn’t going to bring me any more closure.”

Nazworth traveled to San Diego from Louisiana, where she lives, so she could share her mother’s story at the hearing: “I want to make sure she is remembered.”

In her victim impact statement, Nazworth said her mother’s friends had called her the “queen of Serra Mesa”, a reference to her San Diego neighborhood: “She had a great sense of humor, an infectious smile, and was a human library of San Diego history and stories.”

She also recounted the ways her mother had helped others on the street, giving her umbrella away to a young unhoused woman during a rainstorm, saying: “When a man ran out of gas in front of the sidewalk she slept on, she gave him some of her food money so he could get home. And she was grateful for every little thing that people did for her.”

After her death, two dozen people showed up for her memorial and left flowers at the spot of her killing, Nazworth said: “She was a person, not just a thing to be used for target practice. Her life mattered to me and my kids and her friends.”

Nazworth addressed some of her remarks to the defendant, saying: “I have no words for how angry and sad I am. But as a mother, I am not looking for revenge and take no joy in the harm you have done to yourself and your family. My only prayer and hope is that my mother did not suffer and die for nothing. The only good that can come from this senseless tragedy is if you use it to become a better man. She may have looked like just a dirty homeless person to you, but she was still my mom and the grandmother to my kids.”

She also recalled her mother’s many struggles, including losing her home and possessions, suffering the deaths of close friends, the sudden passing of her boyfriend and worsening arthritis – all of which contributed to her alcoholism. Nazworth said: “Alcohol use disorder is a serious disease … like cancer. Would you shoot a cancer patient with a pellet gun for fun?”

Nazworth added that she had tried many times to get her mother to live with her in Louisiana, “but she just couldn’t imagine leaving the neighborhood she grew up in and we couldn’t force her to go. She had a lot of friends, and her neighborhood was all she had left of the happier life she remembered.”

She also noted that local agencies had not been able to help her mother find appropriate housing.

Lawyers for both teenagers have sought to shift blame on to their co-defendants in court, but Innes’s lawyer said on Thursday that his client was “being punished appropriately”.

In court, Innes addressed the victim’s family, NBC 7 San Diego reported, saying: “I can’t change what happened, but I wish I could. That’s the only thing I can say that hopefully will make you feel better about what happened, which it probably never will.”

A high-seas shootout pitting drug runners against the law ended with the smugglers’ boat at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea and the US Coast Guard seizing $63m worth of cocaine, authorities in Florida said on Friday.

The dramatic encounter took place on Tuesday about 25 miles (40km) north of Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, when the coast guard cutter Resolute – patrolling with the Dutch navy ship Groningen – identified a vessel in international waters suspected of carrying narcotics, according to a press release from the USCG south-east region.

The crew of a joint forces fast interception craft fired on the suspected smugglers when the “non-compliant vessel” was turned at speed towards them, and the boat caught fire and sank. The US and Dutch sailors acted “in self-defense and defense of others in response to the life-threatening situation”, the press release said.

On Friday, the US Coast Guard and Dutch authorities said they had called off an air and sea search for the three persons onboard the boat, who went overboard when it caught alight.

A day earlier, the Coast Guard said in a tweet published on Thursday, Resolute docked at Port Everglades, Florida, and unloaded more than 4,800lb (2,177kg) of cocaine – valued at about $63m – recovered from the scene.

There were no reported injuries to any members of the joint law enforcement operation, officials said.

“Our crews work hard to safely bring suspected smugglers to face federal prosecution in the US for alleged crimes,” Lt Cmdr John Beal, public affairs officer for USCG district seven, headquartered in Miami, said in a statement.

“The missions our coast guard service members and allied partners do every day to deny transnational criminal organizations access to maritime smuggling routes are inherently dangerous. The decision to suspend active search efforts is not one we take lightly, and the coast guard is working to investigate the incident in accordance with coast guard policy.”

The region is one of the coast guard’s busiest for encounters with drug smugglers – as well as interdictions at sea of migrants attempting to reach the US.

Also on Friday, in a separate case, the crew of the coast guard cutter Charles David Jr offloaded 540lb (245kg) of cocaine in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and transferred nine suspected smugglers into the custody of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

The cocaine, worth $7.4m, according to another USCG press release, was seized in the early hours of Monday after the USCG cutter Heriberto Hernández located a suspect vessel about 75 miles (121km) south of St Croix in the US Virgin Islands.

“The crew observed the occupants of the suspect vessel jettison multiple packages overboard,” the statement said, adding that nine men arrested onboard the boat claimed to be Venezuelan nationals.

“The cutter crew … recovered multiple packages of the jettisoned cargo and seized a total of 10 bales and two additional bags, with individual packages, which tested positive for cocaine.”

Denise Foster, DEA special agent in charge of the investigation, said: “The successful interdiction and seizure underscore the relentless commitment and collaboration of our federal, local, and regional partners in combating drug trafficking in the Caribbean.”