A controversial competition that allows children to hunt feral cats in rural New Zealand for cash prizes has produced its biggest haul yet, with roughly 340 animals killed – about 100 more than last year’s event.

The annual North Canterbury fundraising event, which wrapped up this weekend, is open to children and adult participants and targets deer, pigs, ducks, possums and rabbits.

In 2023, it introduced feral cats to its suite of other hunting categories, prompting furious backlash from animal rights activists.

Event organiser Matt Bailey said the feline category was created to help manage feral cats, which threaten native wildlife and carry diseases that put farmers’ livestock at risk. A NZ$500 cash prize is awarded to the hunter with the largest number of cats killed, while the largest cat caught is awarded $1,000.

Feral and domestic cats are a serious threat to New Zealand’s biodiversity and native wildlife. The predators hunt endangered native birds and eggs, lizards, bats and insects. But the issue of their control ignites furious debate in New Zealand, which has one of the world’s highest rates for cat ownership per capita, with close to half of households owning one. Conservation groups regularly call for feral cats to be added to one of the world’s most ambitious pest-eradication regimes, which aims to eliminate all possums, rats, stoats and ferrets by 2050.

Just over 1,500 people took part in the North Canterbury event this year, with roughly 440 of those under 14 years old.

Animal rights activists have condemned the competition, arguing it is cruel to animals, desensitises children to violence and puts domestic cats at risk.

Animal Save Movement protesters attended the event, where they said they were quickly approached by young people dressed in animal costumes with the words ‘Animal Slay Movement’ printed on them.

The group criticised the event’s attempt to justify violence towards animals by claiming it was conservation.

“There is nothing conservative about encouraging children to kill animals and people attempting to throw dead possums at us,” said Sarah Jackson, who attended the protest.

Bailey said he is “not too worried about people who don’t understand, and not too worried about their feelings.”

Children in the rural region grow up in an environment where animals are hunted, skinned, processed and eaten, Bailey said. “It’s usual rural life.”

There are safeguards in place to ensure domestic cats are not targeted and cats are humanely killed, he said. Feral cats must be trapped first to ensure they can be identified as feral, and must then be killed using a minimum of a .22 rifle. Hunting is restricted to areas outside any residential areas, with traps set a minimum of 10km away. Bailey said it is easy to differentiate between feral and domestic cats.

“When [ferals] are caged, it’s pretty obvious – they are like the devil on methamphetamine, they will try to attack you.”

This year, the general competition raised roughly $60,000 for a local school and community pool, meanwhile venison from the deer hunt has been processed and frozen to donate to food banks.

The hunters and animal rights groups share one area of common ground: calling for more emphasis on responsible cat ownership.

The Animal Justice Party said alternative methods to managing cat populations should be investigated, including trap-to-neuter programmes.

“If we genuinely care about bird conservation and wildlife protection, we need individuals to take responsibility for their cats by neutering to prevent unplanned breeding and the subsequent dumping of unwanted litters,” it said.

Bailey believes a law change is needed to ensure cats are microchipped and desexed.

“They are an apex predator – the time’s come that if we want to be predator-free, we need to stem the flow of people breeding and dumping in the countryside.”

Donald Trump’s lawyers on Monday asked the New York judge who presided over his hush-money trial to set aside his conviction and delay his sentencing, scheduled for later this month.

The letter to Judge Juan M Merchan cited the US supreme court’s ruling earlier Monday and asked the judge to delay the former president’s sentencing while he weighs the high court’s decision and how it could influence the New York case, according to the letter obtained by the Associated Press.

The lawyers argue that the supreme court’s decision confirmed a position the defense raised earlier in the case that prosecutors should have been precluded from introducing some evidence they said constituted official presidential acts, according to the letter.

In prior court filings, Trump contended he is immune from prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office. His lawyers did not raise that as a defense in the hush-money case, but they argued that some evidence – including Trump’s social media posts about former lawyer Michael Cohen – comes from his time as president and should have been excluded from the trial because of immunity protections.

The supreme court on Monday ruled for the first time that former presidents have broad immunity from prosecution, extending the delay in the Washington criminal case against Trump on charges he plotted to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss.

Trump was convicted in New York of 34 counts of falsifying business records, arising from what prosecutors said was an attempt to cover up a hush-money payment just before the 2016 presidential election.

Merchan instituted a policy in the run-up to the trial requiring both sides to send him a one-page letter summarizing their arguments before making longer court filings. He said he did that to better manage the docket, so he was not inundated with voluminous paperwork.

A brutal and long-lasting heatwave is threatening to wreak havoc across California this week, as sweltering conditions, power shutoffs and a severe uptick in wildfire risks coincide with 4th of July celebrations.

The dangerous weather event is expected to stretch for days with little reprieve. Starting Wednesday, parts of the state will be subject to “extreme” levels of heat risk – reaching the highest level on the National Weather Service’s index – that will last until Sunday or longer. In some areas, life-threatening triple-digit temperatures could linger for longer than a week.

“This is going to be a severe, prolonged, potentially record-breaking heatwave that may have large impacts for much of California,” said climate scientist Dr Daniel Swain during a broadcast discussion of the heat event on Monday. The long duration will only add to the potential impacts and intensity, especially because little relief can be expected even after the sun sets. “It just isn’t going to cool off – even at night,” he said.

While central and northern California are expected to bear the brunt of this event, areas in the southern part of the state are also going to cook. Heavily populated centers and rural agricultural enclaves alike could see record-setting highs during the day as well as record overnight temperatures. In the Central Valley, the state’s agricultural hub, temperatures are expected to hover near 110F through the week without dropping below 70F.

Forecasters have warned the dangerous weather conditions will pose health risks to the majority of the population, especially those unable to access cooling. “These are places where, yes, it is hot in summer – but it’s not often hot like this, and certainly not for this duration,” Swain said.

The extreme weather will also set the stage for new wildfire ignitions that can quickly turn into infernos. An abundantly wet winter left landscapes across California coated in grasses that quickly dried as the weather warmed. The yellowing hillsides and valleys are thick with fuel for fast-burning brush fires. Even deserts, typically-barren this time of year, are now primed to burn. “Unfortunately, I am not using the term ‘if wildfires develop’ because I think it’s inevitable during this event,” Swain said.

Fire risks always rise on the 4th of July, when hot dry weather aligns with explosive celebrations. Across the country, more than 18,500 fires ignite on average due to Independence Day celebrations, whether from errant fireworks or badly tended campfires. But as the temperatures rise, so do the dangers. Both fire activity and fire behavior this week will likely be extreme and new ignitions may become difficult to contain.

“It’s going to be a challenge both day and night – so the message is prevention,” said the Cal Fire deputy director Nick Schuler. The agency is at peak staffing levels to prepare for what’s expected to be an extremely busy week, extending into an extremely busy summer. Already, California has seen more than 131,400 acres burn, with months left before the risks peak.

“The important takeaway is that 95% of wildfires in California are human-caused, and the majority of them are preventable,” Schuler said, noting that careless barbequing, a spark from a trailer chain hitting the road or even some well-intended brush clearing can rapidly turn disastrous during the hottest days.

But the heat won’t only amplify the fire risks and intensity this week – it will also work to dry out more vegetation that could help fuel future fires.

A fiery start to July only adds to what’s been an incredibly hot spring. May wrapped up the 12th consecutive month of record warmth across the world. The trend continued in June in many places, including parts of California, and the summer is on track to be a scorcher. 2023 was declared the hottest year on record, and 2024 may quickly claim the title.

“Heat sucks the moisture out of vegetation and soil,” said Dr Alexander Gershunov, a research meteorologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, noting that, while this may be the worst heatwave to hit California this year, it will be far from the last.

While individual weather events can be difficult to connect to global heating more broadly, “heatwaves are the most directly impacted” by the climate crisis, Gershunov explained. Fueled by human-caused warming, heatwaves are increasing in both intensity and frequency, but they are also lasting longer and covering wider areas than before. This has only added to their potential to affect human health and put strain on systems.

“Heatwaves are certainly the weather extremes that are impacted by the steroids of climate change,” he said, explaining that the effect is similar to an athlete taking performance-enhancing drugs.

Summer weather has been extreme before, but it’s going to get hotter.

“The trend is toward more frequent, more extreme, longer-lasting heatwaves all over the world,” he said. “California is certainly no exception.”

More on extreme heat and wildfires in the US:

Apology accepted. In fairness, Cristiano Ronaldo simply does not shirk responsibility and by taking and scoring the first penalty in a shootout victory over Slovenia, the Portugal captain made amends for failing to score his spot kick in extra time, which was saved magnificently by Jan Oblak.

Ronaldo blubbered uncontrollably after the first but second time around he took another deep intake of breath, relaxing his super-sized muscles, pausing the gazillion thoughts running over in his mind and coolly dispatched his spot kick into the opposite corner to his earlier effort, before clasping his hands together to make a praying gesture and holding up his palms to say sorry to the curve of Portugal supporters going ballistic behind the goal.

In the end it was the Portugal goalkeeper Diogo Costa who was the undoubted hero, making three extraordinary saves, the last of which thwarted Benjamin Verbic down to his right, before Bernardo Silva sealed a 3-0 win on penalties. Even Ronaldo seemed a touch remorseful as Slovenia, whose steely resistance was broken in the cruellest of manners, came up short from 12 yards. They had exhibited a defensive masterclass against slicker opposition who registered more than twice as many passes and double the touches.

Ultimately the only ones that counted came in the shootout, Ronaldo spared. The more likely penalties became, the twitchier Portugal grew but they will now play France in Hamburg on Friday.

Ronaldo had extended his lean streak during normal and extra time – it is now eight appearances at a major tournament without a goal – but he was unperturbed when it came to putting the ball down in the shootout. Jan Oblak made an emphatic save to deny Ronaldo earning the lead on 105 minutes after Diogo Jota was upended. At times it felt like Ronaldo’s personal mission to get on the scoresheet; three free-kicks came and went, one which forced Oblak into a save, but Slovenia, who spent much of the game with all 10 outfield players behind the ball, were stubborn, fiercely disciplined and awkward opposition. The Slovenia manager Matjaz Kek was sent off for dissent in a fraught period of extra time but can take huge pride in reaching the knockout stage of a tournament for the first time.

Portugal knew exactly what to expect. Slovenia beat them 2-0 in a friendly in Ljubljana in March and Bruno Fernandes admitted that defeat left his side wanting to set the record straight. Fernandes had done his homework, highlighting how Slovenia topped the table for clearances at the tournament, and Roberto Martínez stressed the need to stay patient against a low block. Slovenia depart Germany with an average of 36% possession, the lowest at the tournament, and given Portugal’s is almost double that figure this contest always had the makings of a mismatch. The biggest giveaway of the difficulty of the task, though, no matter their aesthetic differences, was that Slovenia arrived here unbeaten in nine matches having not tasted defeat since a qualifying loss last November.

Beforehand Fernandes also referenced Oblak, describing the Atlético Madrid goalkeeper as one of the best in the world, and for Portugal the overwhelming anxiety at half-time was the reality that they had failed to work him. Oblak easily held Ronaldo’s weak header, which lost its oomph when it pinballed off the defender Vanja Drkusic, after the half-hour and there were a string of agonising nearly moments. Ronaldo was at the centre of most of them, taking each swing-and-a-miss as a personal insult. The 39-year-old looked towards the heavens in disgust – though the roof here was again closed – after soaring between two defenders but failing to make contact on Vitinha’s scooped cross, as if a deep injustice had occurred.

It summed up Portugal’s frustrations. Ronaldo boomed a wide free-kick straight out of play and earlier sent another free-kick zooming over Oblak’s goal after the restored Rafael Leão was upended by Drkusic. Slovenia assembled the draught excluder. The overhead spider-cam surged into the perfect position anticipating lift-off, supporters pulled out their phones. But Ronaldo’s free-kick, all power, flew over the frame of the goal.

As a haze from the flares lit by the Slovenia fans behind Oblak’s goal filled the pitch midway through the second half, Martínez recognised the need to change the rhythm of an increasingly painful contest and replaced Vitinha with Jota. Regardless, the second half took on an identical mould to the first. Aside from the odd João Cancelo burst, it was one-dimensional; it all felt a bit Ronaldo or bust. Oblak repelled a leathered Ronaldo free-kick but, in truth, it was straight at him. Up the other end Benjamin Sesko gave Pepe a scare, beating him for pace after seizing on a Portugal mix-up on halfway, but the RB Leipzig striker’s shot was a daisy-cutter that pootled wide.

For a split-second it seemed Ronaldo would snatch victory in the 89th minute, but he was left slapping his thighs after flunking a shot at Oblak. It was nothing compared to the emotions he felt lifting his head after striking his first penalty, only to realise the ball had been pushed on to a post and clear. Ronaldo wept during the extra-time interval, his teammates taking it turns to console him. Diogo Dalot grabbed Ronaldo by the neck and shouted some words in his ear. There was nothing worth saying at the end of the shootout.

Labour will promise to take the lead on global efforts to tackle the climate crisis, filling a “vacuum of leadership” on the world stage and proving Rishi Sunak’s U-turn on net zero has been a “historic mistake”, Ed Miliband has said.

The shadow energy security and net zero secretary said the UK needed to change course and was “off track”.

Labour drew widespread criticism earlier this year from economists, industrial leaders and environmental campaigners when it cut its green investment plans by half, rolling back on a pledge to spend £28bn equipping the economy to reach its climate target.

It has also been locked in combat with the Tories over the costs and benefits of a green transition and has given way in certain key areas. Miliband has pledged to stick with the Tories’ decision to scrap a ban on gas boiler sales from 2035.

But Miliband says his party would put climate front and centre of its plans in government, promising to reverse the ban on onshore wind in the immediate days after parliament returns after the election.

He said it was also a chance to fundamentally change course on climate and to make that case on the world stage.

“We have taken the manifesto position we have because we think it is the right thing now,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “But it is also right that we fill the vacuum of leadership on this issue.

“We now have a government that is explicitly going along with the climate delayers. We have to change course as a country and as a world. And this election is an opportunity for us to change course.”

Miliband is to become one of the most influential figures in the expected next Labour government and one of very few with direct cabinet experience. He said that climate was the front line in the battle against the populist right across the world.

“If we win, we will seize the moment,” he said. “There is not a minute to waste in the drive for 2030 clean power and in the drive for climate action. The world is off track, Britain is off track and we intend to change that direction.”

There is a growing awareness within Labour of the scale of the party’s task internationally in the coming years, with the potential loss of progressive allies on climate issues in governments such as France, Canada and the US.

The former party leader said a Labour government would take on that mantle of climate leadership, should it win the election. “You only get to lead internationally if you set the right example at home,” he said.

“If we win the election, it will send a message round the world that the approach we are taking on clean energy, our argument on bills, independence, jobs and future generations, you can win an election on that argument.”

Labour has avoided getting into direct conflict with the Green party, which is outflanking Labour on most climate pledges and targeting seats against Labour in Bristol Central and in Brighton Pavillion.

But Miliband said his experience from the 2015 election taught him not to believe the polls – and that in seats with wafer-thin majorities a vote for small parties would risk allowing the Conservatives back in. “Do not vote Green and wake up with a Tory government,” he said.

And he also said he would not defend the actions of climate protesters like Just Stop Oil, accusing them of being part of breaking the consensus on climate and being “deeply counterproductive”.

Though there was a right to peaceful protest, he said, “I think all the evidence is that it turns people off the cause.”

Miliband said there had been huge damage done by the Conservatives to the climate consensus in Britain since the UK hosted Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021. Net zero has been a major battleground on the right and Sunak announced a dilution of green policies last autumn including moving back the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars.

Miliband said voters could chose to give their endorsement to tackling climate action on Thursday. “This is a moment to show that the Conservative party and Rishi Sunak made a historic mistake by trying to break the climate consensus in this country,” he said.

“This is the most important climate election in history – we are halfway through the decisive decade. The next government will serve for most of the rest of this decade. This is the biggest choice in our history on this,” he said.

In February, Labour cut its green investment plans by half and pledged only £15bn a year for its green prosperity plan – only a third of which would be new money.

The U-turn dismayed many business leaders and green campaigners, who said that without green investment on a larger scale the UK faced steep decline as a result of crumbling infrastructure and that energy targets would be difficult to hit.

Jürgen Maier, the former UK head of Siemens, the German industrial giant and major investor, said massive investment was needed to rebuild the UK economy and make it fit for the future.

Before the cut was announced he warned: “These are the growth areas of the future. The £28bn is not a cost, it’s an investment. If you make this investment, business will return to the UK.”

At the time Areeba Hamid, the co-executive director of Greenpeace UK, said the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, had “caved like a house of cards in the wind”.

Emma Pinchbeck, the chief executive of Energy UK, the trade association for the energy industry, said the issue was less the actual sum spent than “the signal it sends”.

Speaking after the cut, she said: “The party has been engaging constructively with business over recent months, but retaining the confidence of the market is dependent on not making U-turns that damage the UK’s investability.”

But Miliband insisted it remained the “most ambitious plan for climate and energy in our national history” and said the party was committed to clean power by 2030, no new oil and gas licences, a warm homes plan and a national wealth fund to rebuild industrial heartlands.

“We are seeking a mandate in this election for that agenda, it’s a mandate for economic change and it’s a mandate to tackle climate change,” he said.

“We will make the modern, progressive, big tent case for climate action which does the right thing now. Rishi Sunak may have departed the pitch but I don’t think the British public have.”

Research by More in Common has suggest Labour’s plan for Great British Energy is one of the main public cut-through policies – along with the Tories’ plans for national service.

While there have been concerns the project would be merely an investment vehicle akin to George Osborne’s Green Investment Bank, Miliband said it would be a generator of clean energy.

“It speaks to the sense we should own and invest in our own infrastructure,” he said. “And it speaks to a sense of a loss of control that we saw in the two years of our cost of living crisis that we have no control over fossil fuel markets governed by dictators like Putin.”

Miliband said that the Tory narrative on the cost of net zero could be disproved by the action Labour would take to cut bills.

“The truth is that we can beat the political right, the anti-climate right on this,” he said.

“Take the onshore wind ban: the Resolution Foundation has shown that the ban hits the poorest six times harder than the rich. Their opposition to clean energy is driving up poverty and energy bills.”

In a stark dissent from the conservative-majority US supreme court’s opinion granting Donald Trump some immunity from criminal prosecution, the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision was a “mockery” that makes a president a “king above the law”.

The court ruled Monday that Trump cannot be prosecuted for “official acts” he took while president, setting up tests for which of the federal criminal charges over his attempt to subvert the 2020 election are considered official and sending the case back to a lower court to decide.

“Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency,” Sotomayor wrote in dissent. “It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.”

Sotomayor, writing in a scathing tone, said the court would effectively allow presidents to commit clear crimes without punishment, an expansion of presidential powers that puts democracy at risk. She and fellow liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson lay out hypothetical ways the court’s ruling could create crises in the US.

“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution,” Sotomayor wrote.

“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

“Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

Until now, presidents have operated under the assumption that their actions were not immune from criminal prosecution if they used their office, and the trappings of their office, to commit crimes, she writes. But going forward, presidents won’t be so concerned.

“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” she concluded.

Jackson wrote a separate dissent, though noted that she “agree[s] with every word of her powerful dissent,” and wanted to lay out the “theoretical nuts and bolts of what, exactly, the majority has done today to alter the paradigm of accountability for Presidents of the United States”.

The ruling changes the balance of power among the three branches of government and gets rid of the ability to deter presidents from abusing their power, “to the detriment of us all”, Jackson wrote. The “practical consequences” of the majority decision “are a five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance and the normal operations of our Government”.

In a footnote in her dissent, Jackson games out the “oddity” of deciding whether a president is immune from prosecution based on the character of a president’s powers.

“While the President may have the authority to decide to remove the Attorney General, for example, the question here is whether the President has the option to remove the Attorney General by, say, poisoning him to death,” Jackson wrote. “Put another way, the issue here is not whether the President has exclusive removal power, but whether a generally applicable criminal law prohibiting murder can restrict how the President exercises that authority.”

While the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, claims it hems in presidential immunity in some ways, Sotomayor takes that idea to task. The majority opinion is an “embrace of the most far-reaching view of Presidential immunity on offer”. No one has claimed that purely private acts would be immune from prosecution, she writes, making their exclusion an “unremarkable proposition”.

The court effectively expanded what is considered an official act in a way that will capture events beyond a presidential’s core duties and ensnare unofficial acts, she claims. And a prohibition on bringing up these official acts during a prosecution of unofficial acts “deprives these prosecutions of any teeth”.

She lays out an example: “For instance, the majority struggles with classifying whether a President’s speech is in his capacity as President (official act) or as a candidate (unofficial act). Imagine a President states in an official speech that he intends to stop a political rival from passing legislation that he opposes, no matter what it takes to do so (official act). He then hires a private hitman to murder that political rival (unofficial act). Under the majority’s rule, the murder indictment could include no allegation of the President’s public admission of premeditated intent to support the mens rea of murder. That is a strange result, to say the least.”

The majority wrote that immunity is necessary because it allows the nation’s top elected official to execute his duties “fearlessly and fairly” and take “bold and unhesitating action” without the threat of looming prosecution. But, Sotomayor hits back, it’s more dangerous for a president to feel empowered to break the law.

“I am deeply troubled by the idea, inherent in the majority’s opinion, that our Nation loses something valuable when the President is forced to operate within the confines of federal criminal law.”

The testy dissent was replete with digs at the conservative-dominated court, which, aided by justices Trump appointed when he was in office, now counts just three liberal justices and has moved the country further to the right in recent years as a result.

Sotomayor directs readers to “feel free to skip over those pages of the majority’s opinion” about one area in the conservatives’ arguments. She said the majority “invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law”. The conservatives relied on “little more than its own misguided wisdom”, she wrote. She added that “it seems history matters to this Court only when it is convenient.”

“In sum, the majority today endorses an expansive vision of Presidential immunity that was never recognized by the Founders, any sitting President, the Executive Branch, or even President Trump’s lawyers, until now. Settled understandings of the Constitution are of little use to the majority in this case, and so it ignores them,” she wrote.

“You must go to the rats,” the Great Owl tells Mrs Frisby in the Rats of Nimh.

Mrs Frisby, a mouse, needs help: her son is sick and she has to move out of her house at the edge of a field, because the field will soon be ploughed.

“The rats on Mr Fitzgibbon’s farm have – things – ways – you know nothing about. They are not like the rest of us,” the Great Owl says (hoots). “They are not, I think, even like most other rats.”

But most rats are, of course, like no other. Most rats, like most people, try to distinguish themselves. “Rats are genetically very similar to humans, even more closely related to us than cats or dogs are,” the National Fancy Rat Society says, driving home the similarity of the fancied to us, the fanciers, “They’re curious, intelligent, trainable, omnivorous, social, and eat their food sitting on their haunches, grasping it with their tiny front feet.”

The NFRS owes its existence to a woman named Mary Douglas who, in 1901, convinced the National Mouse Club to admit her rat to an exhibition. It won best in show. (“The judge was one Walter Maxey, a man who is widely known as the father of the mouse fancy, as Mary was later known as the mother of the rat fancy,” the NFRS history page says. Among the society’s current leaders is a woman with the surname Feline.) Rat fanciers used to tie ribbons around the necks of their pets. Charming!

In Australia, rats learned, in two years, how to kill cane toads, eat their hearts and carve out their organs with “surgical precision”, a scientist told Guardian Australia’s Naaman Zhou, a reporter committed to uncovering the (beautiful) truth about rats (and Ratatouille). Cane toads have poisonous gallbladders: the rats removed these. Using their miniature hands and pointy claws, they peeled off the poisonous skin and ate the thigh muscle. (The secret at the heart of The Secret of Nimh, the eerie, reverent movie version of the book: “We can no longer live as rats: we know too much.”)

The film Ratatouille is about a rat. It is also, naturally, about becoming an artist. “You must be imaginative, strong-hearted. You must try things that may not work,” says Auguste Gusteau, a human chef; and Remy, the main character/rat listens.

The New York Times said the film was “a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film”.

If you want to make a portrait of an artist, then, too, “You must go to the rats”, natural emissaries, natural vessels for a story of the pursuit of perfection. Except, I would argue, in the case of poetry. Poets are confounded by rats and must resort to prose to survive. Here is Matthew Sweeney:

I walked along Rue du Faubourg du Temple on the way to Belleville and I stopped at a shop selling rat poison. To my astonishment and my amusement they had a window full of stuffed rats, including four small rats standing round a table, playing cards. I liked that very much.

When I was eight, I had two pet rats. I can’t remember their names. I remember their pink wax flower ears, the way one would crawl up the sleeve of my pyjamas while I watched The Simpsons. Its cold, bony, sentient tail falling out: “And the way when you put them on your shoulder their awful tail curls around the back of your neck”, a friend tells me when we reveal to each other that both of us owned pet rats (I’d deny it to almost anyone else). Pet rats and our names written on a grain of rice inside a tiny glass vial on black cord, bought from a market.

And how when you approach their cage, or they are curious, they lift their twitching noses into the air, then lift their front paws up from the ground, and finally rise up and sit, the size and shape of a pear, on their back legs.

• Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a memoir for Scribner Australia

• Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you’d like to see profiled by this columnist? Email [email protected]

Mainstream European politicians have warned about the advance of the far right, after Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) made historic gains in France’s snap elections, bringing the anti-immigration party closer than ever to power.

Official results showed the RN and its allies received 33% of the national vote, well ahead of the leftwing alliance New Popular Front on 28%, with Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc reduced to third place with 20% of the vote. It remains unclear whether Le Pen’s party will emerge as the largest in the final round of voting next Sunday, or if the French president will be confronted with a hung parliament, leaving the EU’s second-largest economy in chaotic stasis.

After the record-breaking gains became clear, Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, warned about politicians who advocated for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and sought untrammelled power.

“They love Putin, money and power without control. And they are already in power or are reading for it in the East or West of Europe. They are joining ranks in the European parliament,” he wrote on X.

Although he did not name parties, it is understood his remarks were triggered by the French elections. The comments also followed a decision by Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán, to join forces with Austria’s far-right Freedom party and the Czech populist ANO group in an attempt to create a new alliance in the European parliament.

A Kremlin spokesperson said Russia was following the results of the French elections “very closely”, but Russian officials have played down any change in relations between Paris and Moscow.

“We should not expect an improvement in relations between Paris and Moscow after the legislative elections,” said Vladimir Dzhabarov, the vice-president of the foreign affairs commission, reported Agence France-Presse citing local media.

National Rally, including under its previous incarnation as the National Front, has historically been friendly towards the Kremlin; but its current candidate for prime minister, Jordan Bardella, has said he would stand by existing commitments to Ukraine, although he would not send troops or long-range weapons.

Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen’s allies celebrated. “Felicitations,” the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders wrote on X with a heart and two strong-arm emojis. National Rally’s advance follows Wilders’ Freedom party’s victory in Dutch elections last year that make it the biggest party in an incoming government, led by the technocrat Dick Schoof.

In Germany, Michael Roth, a prominent member of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, laid some of the blame for the far right’s triumph at the feet of the German government.

“We didn’t ask ourselves enough how we could better support the pro-European liberal president, Macron,” Roth, the chair of the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, told the German edition of Politico.

“We don’t show enough consideration to the political debates and problems of other countries,” he added, noting that the alternative to Macron “is indeed no longer [conservative ex-president Nicolas] Sarkozy but rather a hard-right nationalist like Marine Le Pen”.

If Le Pen gained power, “that would have dramatic consequences for us. France is the heart of united Europe. If that heart doesn’t beat robustly, the EU could have a heart attack”.

The previous German government led by Angela Merkel is widely seen as having failed to respond to Macron’s bold plans for the future of Europe after his 2017 victory.

Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, described Sunday’s French election results as a warning, but said he did not take the victory of the far right as a given.

“I think everything will depend on the socialist party, on its strength and on the unity of the left. There’s also a lesson from Spain there,” he told the Cadena Ser radio network on Monday morning. “You always beat the far right by governing and bringing in progressive policies that, one by one, give the lie to all the fake news that it spreads.”

The Environment Agency is refusing to provide campaigners with details of potential conflicts of interests with water companies held by its directors across England.

The refusal to provide the information comes after the head of the agency, Philip Duffy, admitted that freedom of information requests have been buried by the regulator because the truth about the environment in England is “embarrassing”.

Ash Smith, of Windrush against Sewage Pollution (Wasp), said the refusal to provide details of any potential conflicts of financial and business interests held by the regulator’s regional directors was inexcusable. He revealed that a freedom of information (FoI) request had been rejected by the EA on the grounds that there was no lawful basis on providing the information as it was not necessary to satisfy a legitimate interest.

The EA also said it would be unfair to individuals to disclose such information to the world at large. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is now investigating the refusal to comply with the FoI request.

In a letter to Duffy, Smith said: “Claiming that the public has no right to know and that the interest of potentially conflicted employees takes precedence is ludicrous and disgraceful … public scrutiny and transparency are vital.”

He called on Duffy not to wait for the ICO ruling on the refusal but “to set the professional standards of your organisation, apply the Nolan principles of public life and order the release of the directors interests under the Freedom of Information Act”.

Smith highlighted past cases of senior agency staff moving to work for water companies as the reason transparency was needed.

These include the former director of operations for the EA, who became a non-executive director of British Water, then an industry lobbying organisation, and was later recruited by Southern Water at the time it had been accused of illegal sewage dumping, for which it was later fined a record £90m.

Duffy, who took over as the EA chief executive last July, told an audience at the Rivers Summit last month that his officials were “worried about revealing the true state of what is going on” regarding the state of the environment.

Duffy said: “I see these letters and these FoI requests and I’ve got great volumes of them, and I see local officers going through quite a contorted processes to not to answer when they know, often, the answer but it’s embarrassing.

“They do it because they are frightened. They are worried about revealing the true state of what’s going on, they’re worried about reaction from NGOs and others, and possibly from the government, about the facts of the situation. And they’re often working at a local level but in a very nationally charged political environment, which is very difficult for them.”

The ICO, which oversees the law on the Freedom of Information Act, has warned the EA that the public have a right to have their requests answered and that transparency should be taken seriously.

Last year, theEA was served with an enforcement notice by the ICO because of evidence seen by the commissioner about its performance in relation to its statutory duties under the FoI Act.

An EA spokesperson said: “We are completely committed to complying with the freedom of information/environmental information regulations. It’s a top priority and we constantly review our performance. We receive around 46,000 requests each year. As is standard practice for public sector organisations, we make public the personal interests of all board members and executive directors at the Environment Agency, but it’s right we do not make public the interests of other employees. This is because it would be unlawful, unfair and would breach data protection rules.”

Monday marked four decades since late New Orleans furniture magnate Aaron Mintz heard a jury declare him not guilty of fatally shooting his wife in their bed, and his family is no closer to reaching a consensus on whether their patriarch was truly innocent.

Aaron and Palma “Pam” Mintz’s two children have neither forgotten nor forgiven the tabloid, media circus treatment to which their family was subjected after Pam Mintz’s death in 1984. One prominent voice in their community deemed the case “the trial of the century”, although it came a full decade before OJ Simpson was acquitted in the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. So the Mintzes’ son, Bruce, and daughter, Karen, declined to reflect on the legacy of their mother’s violent death or their father’s acquittal, one of the most infamous in the lengthy history of New Orleans’s criminal justice system.

Yet sources with direct knowledge of their family’s thinking explained how a collective rush to judgment among authorities, neighbors and the news media – as they see it – robbed those closest to Aaron and Pam Mintz of approaching anything resembling the truth about whether their marriage ended in murder (as police posited) or a suicide (as Aaron Mintz, who died in 2003, always maintained).

“The pain has not faded with time – at all,” said one of the sources, who agreed to speak with the Guardian in hopes that the Mintz family’s experience reinforces lessons about the need for thorough official investigations and restraint from those chronicling high-profile trials.

Countless hours of therapy aimed at treating post-traumatic stress – and at preserving marriages strained in the case’s chaotic aftermath – were some of the lighter costs paid by those dealing with the loss of one parent and the public suspicion of another.

“For anyone who cares, words hurt,” the unnamed source said. “For a long time.”

‘Easy way to die’

Those who say Aaron Mintz was a murderer rooted their theory in well-plod tropes. As they told it, upon being confronted about carrying on an extramarital affair, the wealthy businessman grabbed his wife’s .380-caliber Mauser pistol, fired it through a foam pillow meant to act as a silencer, and shot her in the head, killing her.

The speculation is that he then wiped the pistol clean, put the gun in Pam Mintz’s grasp, tried to hide the pillow in another bedroom nearby and falsely reported that his wife – a former fashion model – had died by suicide in their bed. Police maintained that his ruse fell apart when they found the bullet-pierced, bloodstained pillow haphazardly placed behind another, and prosecutors obtained an indictment charging Aaron Mintz with murder within days of Pam Mintz’s death.

Television news cameras captured video of Aaron being led into a courtroom in handcuffs after the indictment, and it was at that moment many in the city concluded he had murdered his wife, as noted in a 1984 New Orleans Magazine article, which provides an exhaustive account of the case.

Nonetheless, with the help of his deep pockets, locally renowned criminal defense attorney Mike Fawer, and a cast of his own nationally eminent forensic expert witnesses, Aaron Mintz mounted a furious counterattack to the state’s allegations against him.

They presented evidence that Pam Mintz was being heavily medicated to treat chronic stomach pains and depression, exacerbated by a long-held awareness of her husband’s affair. Fawer established that, late in her life, she had gone to a pharmacist, and declared: “I am never without pain,” and asked if there was “an easy way to die”.

Citing what a former coroner had once said to him, the pharmacist told Pam Mintz the easiest way to die by one’s own hand was a self-inflicted bullet wound to the head. The coroner shot himself to death three days after their exchange, according to the pharmacist. Pam Mintz, meanwhile, died two weeks after her conversation with the pharmacist.

Fawer ultimately suggested that Pam had shot a hole through the pillow at the center of the case outside her home before taking her own life. Then, the defense maintained, she placed it near her in the moments prior to turning the gun on herself to incriminate Aaron Mintz in a final act of resentment.

Aaron Mintz later told a jury that he moved the pillow into the other room after finding his wife – and before reporting her death – because “I just didn’t want to see it”.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Mintz would later testify with respect to an act that authorities pointed to as indicative of a guilty conscience. “I don’t know what I was doing.”

‘Ground up in the system’

Which of the accounts triumphed in court largely came down to the forensic evidence authorities had collected – or failed to gather.

Fawer established over seven days of testimony at his client’s trial just months after the killing that police did not find any gunshot residue on Aaron Mintz after testing him for the presence of it. Though the prosecution argued that Mintz simply could have washed it off his hands before police arrived, investigators altogether failed to test Pam Mintz for the presence of gunshot residue, leaving a jury of six men and six women to wonder whether that was a tactical decision to strengthen the case for the suicide theory.

Another of the more substantial flaws with the state’s case involved investigators’ failure to find any foam particles in Pam Mintz’s head wound or around her corpse. The prosecution’s theory – that Aaron Mintz shot his wife through a pillow meant to silence the sound – meant foam particles should have been found on or near her, but they weren’t.

Despite the investigation’s shortcomings, some of Aaron Mintz’s surviving relatives to this day recall vividly and bristle at how during the trial a newscaster said on air: “Aaron Mintz is still trying to pass off his wife’s death as a suicide.”

They also remain disgusted by how another of the station’s late personalities – usually revered for his straightforward, hard-hitting delivery of the news – surprised many viewers by suddenly dubbing the action in court “the trial of the century”.

Aaron Mintz’s family members directly attribute that sensationalism to the anonymous calls they would receive while at the home where Pam Mintz died that, to them, embodied many locals’ prejudgment. “One caller kept asking Karen how she could [be] in the house where her father killed her mother,” the 1984 New Orleans Magazine article recounted.

The trial’s final night, 1 July 1984, has become anthological within some quarters of New Orleans’ legal community. Expecting lengthy jury deliberations, Fawer and his entourage headed to a leisurely dinner after closing arguments. But the jury rendered its verdict in less than five hours, forcing Fawer to make a hasty return to the courthouse.

Aaron Mintz purportedly gasped “son of a bitch”, when the jury foreman announced the acquittal. As the 2019 podcast Combat in the Courtroom put it, Fawer maybe overate, overdrank or both – and he stumbled into the judge’s chamber to vomit all over his dress shirt.

He trashed the shirt, threw on a suit jacket over his bare chest, and faced the news media outside the courthouse to discuss a verdict that, for him, proved to be career-defining.

With his chest hair gleaming under his blazer, Fawer said to journalists gathered there that Aaron Mintz “was indicted before any … investigation”.

“I do not know where the steamroller came from,” Fawer added. “I think he just got sort of ground up in the system.”

One juror told the local newspaper that the tide turned in favor of Aaron definitively when a member of the panel “raised the possibility that Palma Mintz fired a bullet into a pillow outside the house to make it look like her husband had killed her”.

Nearby, another juror declared: “The state didn’t really prove their case to me – at all.”

Aaron Mintz offered his thoughts later at a post-trial news conference, saying: “More forethought should’ve been given to the handling of the case.

“I think I should’ve been given the benefit of our system – that I was presumed innocent until proven guilty – rather than, at this trial, [us] having to prove my innocence.”

‘Hurts to this day’

Reclined on a couch in the backroom of his house recently, Fawer fields the same questions that he’s gotten about the Mintz case in the decades since.

The New York native would never say he is 100% certain his client was innocent. But he is certain there was always more evidence to support his client’s defense than the state’s allegations against him, which would have sent him away to prison for the rest of his life if proven.

Fawer acknowledges the Mintz case led to other high-profile work. Another of his famous cases was that of Curtis Kyles, who was tried five times for the same murder. One of the trials resulted in a conviction and death sentence that the US supreme court overturned because prosecutors withheld evidence – the other four ended in hung juries, with Fawer representing Kyles in three of those deadlocks.

Yet Fawer said it is easy for him to avoid becoming arrogant about some of the successes he recorded in the courtroom.

He alluded to how the jury foreman in the Mintz case, Glenn Boquet, served in the same role for the fifth and final Kyles trial in 1998. Mintz believed Boquet’s involvement could only help his client given the outcome of the Mintz case.

But he realized how wrong he was after, in a book about Kyles’ journey through the legal system, he read about how much Boquet despised the way Fawer conducted his business – the expensive suits he preferred to wear in court, the Bronx accent in which he spoke, and the theatrical way he made his arguments.

“Fuck Fawer” was how Boquet summarized his feelings for the attorney in an interview cited by the author of the Kyles book, Jed Horne. And, as Horne writes in Desire Street, Boquet said he tried to convince his fellow jurors to convinct both Mintz and Kyles – only to relent when he couldn’t persuade them.

“Shows what I know,” Fawer said, ruefully.

He said he had met relatively recently with the Mintzes’ children, who were in their 20s at the time of the trial. They described seeking a sense of closure. Fawer said he was unsure whether he had helped them achieve it.

Family sources say Fawer’s uncertainty was well-founded.

They know juries are instructed to acquit if there’s any reasonable doubt about a defendant’s guilt. But at least one member of Aaron Mintz’s remaining close family believes the acquittal morally made little difference.

“You won’t hear me say that Aaron was framed,” that source said. “Whatever happened, he is morally and ethically responsible.”

Another family member thinks that Pam Mintz has sole responsibility for her death if she indeed died by suicide, even if her husband behaved unethically and immorally.

“When people decide to do stupid things, it’s their decision,” that source said of Pam Mintz.

The sources note how Aaron Mintz in 1996 was fined $15,000 for pleading guilty to a federal racketeering charge after being accused of obtaining a license to operate video poker machines and using it to help mobsters conceal money.

He ended up marrying – and divorcing – the woman with whom he was engaged in an affair at the time his children’s mother died. His 2003 obituary, written by his son, doesn’t mention her. Her 2013 obituary doesn’t mention the Mintz patriarch.

Sources said Aaron Mintz’s second marriage was not the only one in the family which later failed at least partially under the weight of Pam Mintz’s death and the subsequent spectacle. Some of the struggles with depression and other ailments were, in essence, passed down to the next generation, who used therapy and other tools to battle them as best they could.

The sources said Aaron Mintz’s relatives cannot help but conclude that the polarized opinions between them about the meaning of their ordeal four decades earlier has at least something to do with how the truth behind their trauma took a backseat to narratives in service of other agendas – while media consumers seeking their next fix basically enabled them.

“That … can change the course of a person’s life,” one of the Mintz family sources said. “The hurt … felt then was palpable, and it hurts to this day.”