A proposed £1.2bn scheme to recycle effluent from the sewage system and turn it in to drinking water has been criticised as a threat to the environment and a potential costly “white elephant”.

Southern Water wants to treat effluent – wastewater from the sewage system – at a plant at Havant in Hampshire and pipe it into a nearby spring-fed reservoir to boost water supplies during droughts. The scheme would ensure less water is extracted from two rare chalk streams: the Rivers Test and Itchen.

It would be the first reservoir in the country to use recycled water derived from effluent to supplement its levels. Regulators says effluent recycling is successfully used overseas, providing plentiful and safe supplies, but campaigners say there are more environmentally friendly options.

Southern Water has been fined tens of millions of pounds in recent years for polluting rivers and coastal waters in Kent, Sussex and Surrey with sewage. Last week, Ofwat, the regulator, announced a proposed annual bill rise for Southern Water customers of 44%, or £183, by 2030.

The company’s proposed Hampshire water recycling project would deliver up to 90m litres of drinking water a day and is proposed to be operational by 2034. Southern Water is due to submit an application for a development consent order next year and says the scheme will keep “the taps and rivers” flowing.

Tracey Viney, an environmental specialist advising campaigners opposing the project, said: “This is not a sustainable solution. We get plenty of rainwater and should be developing schemes to store water that can be used in dry summers.”

Bill Cutting, a former director of Southern Water in the 1990s, said he was opposed to the scheme. “The costs are horrendous,” he said. “It’s a good idea if you’re living in a country where there is no water, but you can’t say the UK has no water.”

The Havant Thicket reservoir is the first large-scale reservoir to be built in the UK for more than three decades and is a collaboration between Southern Water and Portsmouth Water. It was given planning permission in 2021 and will hold about 8.7bn litres of water.

Southern Water lost about 108.5m litres of water a day in 2022-23 through leaks, according to most recent figures. Campaigners say the company should focus on reducing and repairing leakage.

Residents were told the reservoir, which is under construction, would be fed during the winter by underground springs. It is now proposed it is topped up with recycled effluent purified at a plant which would be built on a former landfill site at Havant.

Once purified under an energy-intensive process called reverse osmosis, the water would be piped to the reservoir and mixed with spring water. The rejected contaminated water would be pumped into the sea through a long sea outfall.

The water from the reservoir will be pumped about 25 miles to a treatment works at Otterbourne in Hampshire, where it would undergo further treatment to strict drinking water standards.

Viney said the scheme was intended to alleviate drought conditions, but Southern Water would operate it year-round to ensure the systems and pipework remained in good condition.

It would purify and pump about 30m litres of water a day, even during wet weather, to maintain the infrastructure, equivalent to the water held by 12 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Bob Comlay, who runs the Havant Matters website, which details community concerns, and who is also vice-chair of the Solent Protection Society, said construction work to build the plant on the former landfill site risked contaminating groundwater which would flow into the Solent. There are also concerns about the environmental impact on the marine ecology of rejected contaminated water discharged into the sea.

He said a Thames Water desalination plant which used the same technology had been mostly inactive since it was opened. “This is a vanity project,” he said. “It will be a white elephant.”

Tim McMahon, water director at Southern Water, said urgent action was required to provide increasing demand for water and to protect Hampshire’s chalk streams. Earlier this year, Southern Water admitted to discharging sewage into the River Test, a chalk stream famous for its trout fishing.

McMahon said: “More than 2.5bn extra litres of water a day will be needed in our region by 2050. [This project] will create a new safe and dependable source of supply that will help keep taps and rivers flowing.”

Southern Water says the impact of releasing reject water into the Solent is being investigated as part of its environmental impact assessment. It says the site of the proposed new plant at Havent will have “sustainable drainage features”.

Bob Taylor, chief executive of Portsmouth Water, said the firm was “consistently open and upfront” during the planning process about the potential supply for the reservoir of recycled water. He said Portsmouth Water was “proud to be building the first major new UK reservoir in over 30 years”.

Paul Hickey, managing director of the Regulators’ Alliance for Progressing Infrastructure Development, said: “We have allocated Southern Water £71m to further progress the development of the Hampshire water transfer and water recycling project.

“Water recycling is a safe, established method of water treatment. The technology is well tested elsewhere in the world. The scheme will need to go through a rigorous process before securing planning consent.”

For Anne-Marie Azevedo, 13 July 2022 started off like a normal day. Her brother David was staying with her while he got his life back on track after a period of unemployment. He was on the third day of a new job in construction and had been asked to work extra hours. Eager to make a good impression, David was up and out of the door first thing.

As she got ready for work later in the morning, Anne‑Marie thought David had mistakenly picked up her house keys, so she called him. She was reassured to hear that he sounded fine, despite the fact that the previous evening he had been exhausted and visibly unwell from the heat. France was in the grip of an intense heatwave, and he was working outside all day. David hadn’t taken the keys, so after a quick chat Anne-Marie got on with her day.

At 11.50am, she received a call from an unknown number. It was someone from the construction site saying that David was unwell and she needed to come and collect him. Anne-Marie immediately got into her car and drove the 10 minutes to the site.

Nothing had prepared her for what she saw. David was lying on the pavement, under a small tree – a patch of shade so small that part of his body was still in the sunlight. He was convulsing and drooling. No one was attending to him, and there were no medics to be seen. Anne-Marie screamed, and someone told her that an ambulance was on its way. “I didn’t understand what was happening,” she says. “I didn’t understand why my brother was like that, why they had called me, why they hadn’t called the emergency services first.” She is still haunted by the idea that the delay in medical treatment could have made a crucial difference.

Anne-Marie had no idea what was wrong with her brother, but she kicked into action. She works as a medical secretary and had some first-aid knowledge. She immediately removed his safety boots and socks, thinking – correctly – that he needed to cool down. She searched for water, which she says was not readily available. Someone handed her a bottle with a small amount in the bottom, and she used it to moisten her brother’s mouth. “I asked myself thousands of questions, but at the same time I tried to see if he was talking to me, if he was still conscious,” she says.

It was about half an hour before the ambulance arrived. One of the first things the paramedics did was to check David’s body temperature. It was 42C. He was in the throes of heatstroke. This is the most serious heat-related illness: it means that the body cannot control its temperature. As the temperature rises rapidly, the sweating mechanism fails and the body is unable to cool down. If treatment is delayed, the condition is fatal.

David was taken to hospital, where for hours doctors tried to save him. Just after midnight, he died. On his death certificate, the cause of death is written: “Cardiac arrest caused by severe hyperthermia”. David died because of the heat.

Anne-Marie is a small woman with dark brown hair, who speaks with firm clarity and wears her emotions on her face. This summer I visit her apartment in Clermont-Ferrand, a small city in central France nestled in the volcanic Chaîne des Puys region. It has been two years since David’s death – an event so sudden and shocking, and a loss so enormous, that Anne-Marie is still struggling to come to terms with it. Her home is full of painful reminders of her older brother. “This is where David spent his last days,” she says simply, gesturing at the small living room and the sofa where she found him asleep the night before he died.

We sit at her dining table and talk about happier times. Anne-Marie tells me that she, David and their middle brother, Eric, grew up in social housing in Brioude, a small town about an hour south of Clermont-Ferrand. The family didn’t have much, but they were close-knit, supportive and loving. “We chose to be together as much as possible,” she says. David was exceptionally generous. As a teenager, he would sometimes take food from the cupboard to sneak to friends whose families were struggling more than his own, or give away his clothes or shoes. “He was someone who loved people,” says Anne-Marie. “He never fought with anyone, he was never mean, he said hello to anyone who passed him on the street.”

When Anne-Marie was eight and David was 16, he left home to complete a qualification in masonry. He moved in with his girlfriend, but was always back and forth to his parents’ house. Anne-Marie remembers him poking his head round her bedroom door one evening. Thinking Anne-Marie was asleep, he told his girlfriend: “This is my little princess.” This continued into adulthood. “We called each other all the time; we were always together,” says Anne-Marie. “At one point he came over for lunch every day – he practically lived at my house.”

When Anne-Marie separated from her husband in 2009, she found herself socially isolated, with two young children. David, who never had children of his own, loved being an uncle. He stepped in, babysitting whenever Anne-Marie needed him, and introducing her to a new set of friends. “He helped me get my life back and flourish after divorce,” she says.

On 28 May 2022, David turned 50 and decided it was time to change his life. He was living in Brioude and had been out of work for a couple of years, drinking too much and struggling to break out of bad habits. He called Anne-Marie and told her: “I’m tired of life right now, and I want to start a new one.” David’s drinking was a taboo subject – he denied having a problem – and Anne-Marie was relieved to hear him talking about the future. “He realised that, at 50, he still had time to do a lot of things,” she recalls. “I was going to support him.”

The siblings hatched a plan. David – who had always worked in construction – would find a job in Clermont-Ferrand, staying with Anne-Marie until he’d saved up enough money to rent a place of his own. She lives in a modest two-bedroom apartment with her youngest daughter, Emma, who was 16 at the time. They agreed that David would take Emma’s room, and mother and daughter would share.

In June 2022, David signed up with Sovitrat, a major temp agency. As he was filling in the application forms and going to interviews, extreme heat swept across Europe, the first of several intense heatwaves that would hit the continent that summer. France was one of the worst-affected countries, with temperatures of 40-43C recorded in some places. The heat briefly let up, returning to summer averages as David got the good news: Sovitrat had found him a job in Clermont-Ferrand, working for the construction giant Eiffage. The contract was temporary, but the agency said that if all went well it could be extended until 2025. David was determined to make a good impression.

In July, David moved in with Anne-Marie, and a second, even more severe heatwave struck. It extended north to the UK, where temperatures surpassing 40C were recorded for the first time. France’s public health authority operates a colour-coded warning system for heatwaves: on 9 July 2022, they issued a red alert in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the region in which Clermont-Ferrand is situated. David’s first day of work was 11 July. Those most at risk in high temperatures are elderly people, young children, pregnant women, people with health conditions and outdoor labourers.

As climate change radically alters the world we live in, extreme heat in Europe is becoming an annual occurrence. According to Copernicus, the EU’s Earth observation programme, 2022 was at the time Europe’s hottest ever summer. (It has since been surpassed by the summer of 2023.) Intense periods of heat over the past few summers have caused wildfires in countries from Greece to France, led to parched riverbeds across the continent, and created issues with water supply.

Heatwaves also have a devastating effect on human health, typically causing a significant increase in deaths. But establishing which deaths are actually caused by the heat is not a straightforward process. The human body’s reaction to heat is complex: there is no set temperature at which heat is dangerous to human life; no specific limit to the time that can be safely spent outside. This is why one person might collapse and die in the heat, while another working alongside them might emerge unscathed.

Clermont-Ferrand is home to a large Michelin tyre factory, and David was working on the construction of a new truck depot, pouring a large concrete slab as a base. He worked in direct sunlight. Temperatures in Clermont-Ferrand soared to around 35C. That first day, David came home exhausted. He had no appetite, so he skipped dinner, took a shower and went straight to bed.

“I asked him, ‘Is there any shelter on the site?’” Anne‑Marie remembers. “He said there was no shade at all, just a little hut to eat lunch.” The next morning, he seemed better, and went to work as normal. Anne‑Marie didn’t think much of it. It had been a while since David had worked, so it was no surprise he was tired – and besides, she too was feeling the effects of the heat. Everyone was.

The second evening, David was clearly unwell. When Anne-Marie came home at 7.30pm, she found him asleep on the sofa. She roused him and prepared a salad, something light and fresh, to encourage him to eat. He told her that he had been asked to work overtime the next day – starting early and finishing late. Anne‑Marie was surprised. Every day, the news showed public health warnings about the need to stay hydrated and avoid being outside. “I told him, ‘It’s incredible to do overtime in these temperatures,’” she says. “But he said he was only a temporary employee and didn’t dare say no because he wanted to keep the job.”

When Anne-Marie recalls the events of 13 July 2022, her eyes fill with tears. “I relive that day very often,” she says. When the paramedics finally arrived at the construction site, they took David into the ambulance to provide treatment and get him out of the sun. When someone has heatstroke, their heart beats rapidly, trying to get blood to the skin to cool it. The heart can’t always keep up and, in the meantime, the other vital organs are starved of oxygen. Inside the vehicle, David had a cardiac arrest. He was transferred to intensive care at the hospital, where he was tested for Covid, as well as for alcohol and drugs in his system: all tests came back negative. For several hours, doctors tried and failed to lower his core body temperature. A quick response to heatstroke is vital.

Eiffage, the construction company running the site, disputes Anne-Marie’s account of the day David died, and says the site manager immediately took care of David, placing him in a lateral safety position and contacting emergency services. A spokesperson says: “All the preventive measures necessary to prevent heat-related risks were in place, in particular the provision of water on the site and the installation of a cooler on a generator as close as possible to the work area.”

Anne-Marie says she later found out that David had first felt unwell and fainted at 10.30am, over an hour before anyone on site called her, and nearly two hours before the emergency responders arrived. In hospital, he had a second cardiac arrest. He briefly came to his senses, and then deteriorated again. The doctor came to speak to Anne-Marie and told her that David’s organs were failing, one after the other. He said they would keep trying to treat him, but warned that he might not survive and that she should inform the rest of her family.

“What I was experiencing didn’t feel real,” says Anne-Marie. “I couldn’t comprehend that I spoke to my brother on the phone in the morning, and in the afternoon I was asking myself, ‘How am I going to tell my parents that my brother is going to die?’”

Anne-Marie’s daughter Emma was in Brioude visiting her sister Morgane when their mother rang to say their uncle was seriously unwell. They rushed to Clermont-Ferrand, taking their grandmother – David’s mother – with them. Anne-Marie’s father has his own health problems, so he and her brother Eric stayed behind in Brioude. The women arrived in the evening, joining Anne-Marie anxiously waiting at the hospital. Around 11pm, the doctor said that David’s situation was stabilising and they should go home and get some sleep. They had only got as far as the car park when Anne-Marie’s phone rang. It was the doctor, asking them to return immediately. Anne‑Marie and Morgane ran to find out what was going on, while Emma stayed with her grandmother outside.

Emma has never forgotten those moments. “My grandmother was screaming in the parking lot. She was in a state that I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” she says. “The pain crushed her as she realised she was going to lose her son.” Inside, the doctors told Anne-Marie that David was dying and it was time for the family to say their last goodbyes. Emma and her grandmother joined them inside the hospital. The doctors warned they might not recognise David because his face was so swollen. They each went into the room to say goodbye. Around midnight, David was pronounced dead. Emma recalls going in to see her uncle’s body after his death, and feeling that his body had gone cold. “I squeezed his left hand very tightly and I said to myself, ‘This will warm him up, he will come back.’ I kept repeating that to myself,” she says, and starts to cry. “I couldn’t understand why he was there, lying on this table – and how he went so quickly.”

A death like David’s, which happened as a direct result of exposure to heat, is unusual: more often, people die from heat placing a strain on their bodies and triggering another health issue. This means that it takes time to understand the death toll of a heatwave.

“Unlike other disasters, which are happening in real time, we only really know the true impacts of extreme heat weeks or months after the event itself – it comes from analysing death records, for instance,” says Julie Arrighi, associate director of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Climate Centre. “This is challenging from a risk communication perspective. With extreme heat, you end up talking about population-level statistics, which are harder to connect with.”

Nonetheless, those statistics are alarming: across Europe, people are dying in large numbers from the heat every summer. One study looking at excess mortality data across 16 European countries estimated that 70,000 people died due to heat in the summer of 2022. Italy was worst affected, with more than 18,000 heat-related deaths.

The increased risk to elderly people is due to the cardiovascular strain caused by extreme temperatures. But those with no choice but to be outside – homeless people, agricultural or construction workers – are also in more danger than the general population. The public health advice to stay indoors where possible, keep out of the midday sun, and avoid physical exertion is impossible for most labourers to follow.

“Fundamentally, illness related to heat is incredibly preventable. All you have to do is not overexpose someone and allow them to recover,” says Cora Roelofs, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who studies worker safety and the environment. “But workers are compelled to be in the heat. They have to work or they lose their livelihood. This speaks to a wider dynamic: power and money determine your vulnerability to climate change.”

A week after David’s death, José Antonio González, a street sweeper in Madrid, died of heatstroke after collapsing at work. He was 60, and like David was working on a temporary contract and determined to prove himself. His son told the Spanish newspaper El País: “I am convinced that he did not stop cleaning that street until he fainted. He thought his contract was not going to be renewed and he was giving his all to prove himself.”

There is a sad echo of this in the French public health insurer’s report into David’s death, which recorded Eiffage’s site manager telling investigators: “He was running everywhere. He wanted to prove that he was valuable to be kept.”

In her research on heat death in the US, Roelofs has found that it is common for workers to die in their first few days on the job, not just because of the physiological adjustment to heat exposure, but social factors.

“People don’t know their name, they feel like they can’t step out and say to a manager: ‘I don’t feel well.’ They don’t know where the water is, where the shade is, when it’s acceptable to slack off,” she says.

What is happening to outdoor workers is a concern for all of us. Back in 2014, Roelofs wrote a paper for the American Journal of Public Health in which she warned that workers are “the canary in the climate coalmine”: a warning of the health risks that are coming for the general population as extreme temperatures become the norm. “I wouldn’t use that phrasing now, because canaries were dispensable,” Roelofs tells me. “I’d say now that workers are the sentinels.”

Safeguards for workers are a major frontier in climate policy. Spain introduced a raft of new protections after the outcry that followed the death of González, including a requirement for employers to specifically risk assess for heat, prohibiting certain tasks in high temperatures, and making it mandatory to adapt work during a heatwave, with measures such as reducing or modifying work hours. But not all countries have taken such steps: in France, a “bad weather fund” is available for workers affected by storms or other adverse conditions, but it does not currently cover heatwaves.

“There’s basic good practice: shifting work schedules, frequent breaks, access to water, and training so that everyone can spot signs of heat stress – such as confusion – in their colleagues and administer immediate first aid,” says Arrighi. “But this is an area that absolutely needs strengthening. It’s a challenge that’s only going to get worse as temperatures increase.”

When David died, Anne-Marie didn’t know that it was not an isolated incident: Santé Publique France, the public health agency, would later release figures estimating that more than 2,800 people died in France in the heatwaves of summer 2022, with a significant proportion in the region around Clermont-Ferrand. At the time, the family was consumed by their own personal tragedy. Anne-Marie organised the funeral, handling the grim logistics that follow a death. (“My mother was very, very, very strong,” says Emma, who is now 18.) She was so busy, she barely had time to think, let alone to grieve. The whole family was anxious that people would think David had died because of his drinking, when in fact he was at a turning point.

“He died because he wanted to go back to work and it wasn’t because of alcohol, or being lazy, or anything like that,” Anne-Marie tells me. When she stood up to speak at his funeral, she addressed her brother: “You came to Clermont more determined than ever to take control of yourself, but unfortunately life has decided not to take this new path. Instead, eternal rest.”

The shock and grief of the early days soon gave way to anger. Sovitrat, the temp agency, sent the family flowers, but Eiffage, the construction company he had been working for, sent nothing. (When asked why, a spokesperson said: “Our teams were not aware of the family’s wishes, ahead of the funeral organised very quickly.”) A week after David’s death, Anne-Marie received paperwork from Eiffage. In it, the company denied any link between David’s death and his work on the construction site. Later, in an email to Sovitrat, Eiffage reiterated this, writing that David’s collapse and subsequent death were “simply the manifestation of a health problem totally independent of work”.

To Anne-Marie, this felt like an abdication of responsibility. When her brother died, his body temperature had been 42C. He had never had heart problems or other health conditions, and his death certificate stated that his cardiac arrest was caused by heatstroke. Had he not been working, David would not have spent three full days out in the sun, physically exerting himself. Anne-Marie thought of the lack of water, the overtime, the state she had found him in, convulsing and drooling in partial shade. She worried that if the company didn’t take responsibility, this could happen to someone else. “I can’t stand injustice,” she says. “I can’t stand when things aren’t taken seriously.”

That August, the French public health insurer l’Assurance Maladie conducted an administrative investigation, interviewing the site managers and Anne-Marie. The report concluded that David’s death should be deemed a workplace accident – not put down to a totally unrelated illness. Eiffage did not accept the finding. In March 2023, Anne-Marie’s lawyer filed a manslaughter case with the French public prosecutor against multiple parties, and followed this up in January 2024 with a complaint in Clermont-Ferrand. To date, they have heard nothing. Eiffage says they are still awaiting the insurer’s position on “which accidental event was the cause of Mr Azevedo’s discomfort”, and that they will comply if the prosecutor decides to open an investigation.

Anne-Marie doesn’t care about compensation.

“I would simply like the people who work for them to work in humane conditions,” she says. “They should have water, they should have reduced hours in the extreme heat, they should be taken care of quickly if they’re unwell.”

More than anything, the family craves information: what happened in that crucial hour and a half when David was taken ill? “I don’t understand why a company, when an employee doesn’t feel well, doesn’t call for medical help, doesn’t do first aid,” she says. They still don’t have answers, and sometimes it feels as if they never will. “I think about it all the time,” says Anne-Marie. “Will I get mail today? Will someone call to tell me the investigation has started?”

As they wait, they feel David’s absence keenly. When the family comes together, as they often do, they don’t talk about his harrowing and avoidable death, but about his life. The jokes they shared, his love of silly hats and cycling, the way he taught his nieces and nephews the value of respect and generosity. “We often talk about David, even if it hurts us,” says Anne-Marie. “We still try to make him live with us. But we constantly ask ourselves the questions: why, and for what?”

Around the world, extreme heatwaves are happening more frequently and hitting ever-higher temperatures. If we continue on our current trajectory, global temperatures will reach 2C above pre-industrial averages by the 2040s. One recent study in the Lancet predicted that if this happens, heat-related deaths will quadruple. This would take us into uncharted territory – and nowhere in the world is adapting fast enough to these rapidly changing temperatures to prevent deaths on a massive scale.

David’s loved ones all bear the trauma in different ways. His father rarely discusses the death, but goes to the cemetery to visit his eldest son’s grave every day. Since seeing her uncle swollen and dying in the hospital, Emma has suffered with sleep paralysis. Every time her phone rings with a call from a family member, she gets a jolt of panic that something awful has happened.

Anne-Marie used to love sitting in the sun, but now she is filled with a deep, bodily fear when the temperature rises. She stays inside as much as she can, and anxiously checks on her elderly parents, wishing she could afford to move them to a place with air conditioning. “Whenever they announce heat,” she says, “it scares me.”

Serena Williams has taken a swing at the Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, saying women “don’t need” him after he controversially railed against Pride month, working women and abortion rights during a May graduation speech.

The 23-time tennis grand slam winner took aim at Butker while she was speaking on stage at the Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly (Espy) awards ceremony on Thursday alongside her sister, Venus Williams – the seven-time tennis grand slam winner – and the Abbott Elementary actor Quinta Brunson.

Venus Williams wrapped the segment by urging the audience “to go ahead and enjoy women’s sports like you would any other sports – because they are sports”.

Serena Williams then chimed in: “Except you, Harrison Butker. We don’t need you.”

With Butker in attendance, Brunson added: “At all, like ever.”

Butker earned widespread criticism – except among adherents to the US’s political right – over his 11 May commencement speech at Benedictine College, a Catholic private liberal arts school in Atchison, Kansas. He dismissed Pride month – which each year in June celebrates LGBTQ+ achievements – as a “deadly sin” and argued that some Catholic leaders were “pushing dangerous gender ideologies on to the youth of America”.

During the roughly 20-minute address, the three-time Super Bowl champion also claimed that the “most important” role for a woman to assume was being a homemaker.

Addressing the female graduates, Butker said: “Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world. But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”

Butker also said access to abortion – which most Americans favor despite the US supreme court’s elimination of it as a nationwide right in June 2022 – resulted from the “pervasiveness of disorder”.

The 28-year-old’s speech sparked a backlash that prompted the NFL to issue a statement distancing itself from his comments, saying they ran contrary to the pro football league’s “commitment to inclusion”.

Butker’s superstar teammates Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes publicly said they did not agree with him.

The placekicker later said he had some regrets about expressing his views, saying: “If it wasn’t clear that the timeless Catholic values are hated by many, it is now.”

Nonetheless, amid the fallout from his speech, US conservatives rallied around Butker and helped his jersey become one of the most sold at NFL.com.

US senator Susan Collins didn’t vote for her fellow Republican Donald Trump for president in 2016 or 2020 – and the third time will not be the charm.

The longtime moderate conservative from Maine told reporters on Friday that she intended to write in former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s name on the ballot in November. The move recalls 2016, when Collins said she wrote in then-US House speaker Paul Ryan for president over Trump, who won the White House before losing to Democratic rival Joe Biden in 2020.

Collins is the only New England Republican in Congress and the only Republican holding statewide office in Maine, where Trump has twice won an electoral vote. She said Friday that she is sticking with her endorsement of Haley despite the fact Haley will not be on the ballot.

“I publicly endorsed Nikki Haley, and I wanted her to win. She’s still my favorite candidate, and I think she could do a great job. She’s my choice, and that’s how I’m going to express it,” Collins told WMTW-TV.

Collins made the remarks about the election at an event in Limerick, about 34 miles west of Portland, where she was speaking at a ribbon-cutting for a new fire and emergency medical services station.

After the event, Collins spokesperson Annie Clark said the senator “has said this before”, including during a June television appearance.

During that appearance, on Spectrum News, Collins said she “does not support the Democratic nominee either” and supports “some of … Trump’s policies”.

However, she also said Trump’s style is “divisive at a time when our country is already so polarized”.

Collins was also one of seven Republicans who voted at an impeachment trial to convict Trump of inciting an insurrection after his supporters attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Collins was elected to the Senate in 1996. She is the longest-serving Republican woman in the Senate, is often a key vote and is famous for not missing votes.

Collins is not on the ballot in 2024 and was most recently reelected in 2020, when she defeated Democratic challenger Sara Gideon.

She represents a state where Trump has twice lost the statewide vote – but he picked up one electoral vote because Maine is one of two states to apportion electoral votes by district.

Trump has many fans in rural Maine, which makes up most of the second congressional district.

One week into Alec Baldwin’s involuntary manslaughter trial, a New Mexico judge has dismissed the case against the actor and found that the state improperly withheld evidence.

In dramatic proceedings on Friday, Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer ruled in favor of the defense and agreed that the charges against Baldwin should be dropped with prejudice, finding that the state had concealed evidence that would have been favorable to the actor.

“There is no way for the court to right this wrong,” Sommer said.

The news was met with relief from Baldwin, who hugged his attorneys, and his wife, who could be seen crying as the judge issued her ruling.

The evidence in question was live rounds of ammunition turned over to New Mexico police in March, following Gutierrez-Reed’s conviction. That evidence suggested the live ammunition that made its way on to the set came from the prop supplier, rather than the film’s armorer, Baldwin’s attorney Alex Spiro said.

A witness confirmed to the judge on Friday afternoon that a special prosecutor in the case, Kari Morrissey, was directly involved in the decision to file the evidence in an entirely different case file separate from the other Rust materials.

The development in hearings Friday brings to a sudden end, at least temporarily, the ongoing criminal case against Baldwin over death of Halyna Hutchins on the Rust movie set. The 42-year-old cinematographer died after a gun Baldwin was holding during rehearsals fired a single live round of ammunition. Prosecutors have long said evidence shows that Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armorer who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in March, was the source of the live round.

The defense brought forward evidence during the trial that they said the state had “buried” regarding the live ammunition and where it originated, and on Friday asked the judge to dismiss the case.

A report of the interview was not included with the other Rust evidence nor shared with the lawyer of Gutierrez-Reed, Spiro said. Testimony from Alexandria Hancock, with the Santa Fe county sheriff’s office, revealed that she and other officials made the decision to file it separately from the other Rust evidence in an entirely different case file.

Morrissey earlier in the day said she had never before seen the report about the ammunition brought to the sheriff’s office. But as the judge questioned Hancock, the corporal said that Morrissey took part in the decision to keep the evidence separate from the Rust case – which elicited gasps in the courtroom.

Luke Nikas, one of Baldwin’s attorneys, said the report was relevant to the entire case and relevant to the credibility of witnesses who testified in the trial.

“If this evidence wasn’t as important as we say it is, they would have turned it over,” Nikas said.

In the morning, Morrissey had said the state had not violated its obligations and that the defense was aware of the evidence brought forward.

“This is a wild goose chase,” she said. “This has no evidentiary value whatsoever.”

A New York judge dismissed Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy case on Friday, clearing the way for two Georgia election workers to try and recover nearly $150m Giuliani was ordered to pay them for defaming them after the 2020 election.

The ruling by US bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane comes after lawyers for the two women, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, as well as other creditors accused Giuliani of concealing information about his finances. The judge also prevented Giuliani from refiling for bankruptcy within one year.

“Since day one, Giuliani has regarded this case and the bankruptcy process as a joke, hiding behind the façade of an elderly, doddering man who cannot even remember the address for his second multimillion-dollar home and claims impending homelessness if he must sell that second multimillion-dollar home,” lawyers for creditors wrote in a filing earlier this month.

Giuliani had initially asked a judge to convert the case from chapter 11 bankruptcy – a type of bankruptcy that allows a debtor to reorganize their assets – to a chapter 7, which would allow him to liquidate his assets. He abruptly reversed course and requested that Lane dismiss the bankruptcy altogether.

More details soon…

Recently, I have become very upset about past colleagues who were once friends or housemates, ghosting or ignoring me on social media.

I worked abroad with these colleagues and when I moved back to Europe with my husband, we began a family. I am a stay-at-home mum of two lovely young children and I went off the radar for a few years due to pregnancies, births, the passing away of my dad and then raising kids. I also had a miscarriage before my eldest was born and it took me a while to recover emotionally.

Since then, I have found out that old colleagues and a former housemate have unfriended me on Facebook. On top of that, my other former housemate, who I was fairly close to, has ignored my recent Facebook friend request and messages. With all of these former colleagues and housemates, there were never any disagreements, no animosity. With time, I drifted away from them in an organic way.

I do understand that people move on, or can be going through a hard time in life and don’t feel like staying in touch. I understand they do spring cleaning on their Facebook page when they haven’t seen or heard from people for a long time. But being ignored or ghosted when I haven’t technically done anything “mean” or “bad” is hurtful, and the fact that it is a handful of people who have done so hurts even more.

Instead of focusing on all the beautiful people in my life, I chose to home in on people who really don’t matter or care at all about me. And I do care a lot about what others think of me. Is that a self-esteem thing at play? I have noticed it as a pattern over the years; I often ruminate on the past rather than living in the present.

I wonder how your friends felt when you “drifted away from them in an organic way”? This isn’t to blame you, but hopefully it will make you realise that you aren’t as powerless as you feel. It’s very easy to look at things entirely from our own point of view. You feel excluded now, but maybe they felt excluded back then?

We all bring our past baggage to a situation and sometimes what hurts us is not just what’s happening in front of us, but what it reminds us of. Something in your longer letter – the way you say you find it hard to get over past romantic relationships – made me think that perhaps you expect rejection, so see it in more places than it actually exists.

I consulted UKCP-registered psychotherapist Lisa Bruton who had empathy with your situation: “We are social creatures who have evolved to be in groups and when we are ousted from one, it can really hurt. We also aren’t schooled on how to end friendships and often people feel embarrassed about having such strong feelings about them.”

We thought it was great you had tried to reconnect with your friends but maybe they have moved on now too. The point is you seem to realise this in a rational way, but then emotions take over.

Bruton wondered if what feels like a “very personalised rejection to you might just be them drifting away, too”.

You asked about self-esteem and certainly that could be an issue. Bruton hypothesised that you might veer more towards an “anxious attachment style (for example, sensitivity to rejection, rumination) and this could be something to reflect upon”.

You didn’t say much about growing up, except that this episode with your friends made you feel you were back in school. Despite this hint at unhappiness growing up, the past may feel safer to you because it’s known; you might not trust your present happiness which is why you can’t seem to concentrate on it. This might be worth exploring with a trusted friend or in therapy. Bruton also wondered if looking into the past was “a distraction” – and I wondered what you’re avoiding thinking about now?

We don’t think you should pursue friends who don’t seem to want to connect any more. Try to concentrate on the people around you who really like you and want to be with you. As Bruton says: “Nothing eases our social- or friend-related anxiety more than having positive social interactions.”

Every week, Annalisa Barbieri addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Annalisa, please send your problem to [email protected]. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.

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The latest series of Annalisa’s podcast is available here.

The first beavers in Northumberland for more than 400 years have been stupendously busy. There are new dam systems, as well as canals and burrows, new wildlife-rich wetlands and, thrillingly, a baby beaver.

Whether it is male or female remains to be seen. “Beavers don’t have external genitalia,” said Heather Devey, an expert. “They are really hard to sex. It’s really only through their anal glands that you can tell.”

The National Trust has not yet done that check but it is overjoyed by the birth and the wider benefits one year on from the release of a family of four Eurasian beavers on the Wallington estate in Northumberland.

Paul Hewitt, the countryside manager for the trust at Wallington, said their impact on the estate’s environment had been “astonishing”.

He said: “This time last year I don’t think I fully knew what beavers did. Now I understand a lot more and it is a massive lightbulb moment. It is such a magical animal in terms of what it does.”

On Friday the Guardian joined a beaver safari, and while there were no actual beavers to fawn over – they are nocturnal – there was lots to see in terms of their positive effect on the habitat.

It is just one adult pair doing the work but already the beavers have dramatically changed water levels by creating wildlife-rich wetlands.

Hewitt said the dam-building work of the beavers had helped to create ponds, pools and mudscapes covering an area half the size of a football pitch.

All of it was positive, he said. The new ecosystems are attracting so much more wildlife, including kingfishers, grey herons and Daubenton’s bats, which feed in the ponds and pools.

He added of the beavers: “They have been gone for 400 years and you soon realise what we have been missing as a result.”

Beavers were once a mainstay of British rivers but were hunted to extinction about 400 years ago for their fur and meat, and also for their anal scent glands which produce castoreum, which is said to taste like vanilla.

For beaver lovers the hope is that successful small reintroduction projects such as the Wallington one will persuade authorities to allow much bigger rewilding schemes.

Campaigners have said beavers make a genuine difference to the countryside, boosting wildlife and increasing the landscape’s resilience to the climate crisis.

Devey is a co-founder of the not-for-profit group Wildlife Intrigue, which has been organising small beaver safaris at Wallington. She said visitors went away feeling more optimistic about the vast environmental challenges the world faces.

“That’s why beavers are great. There is so much understandable doom and gloom around – we’re in a climate crisis, a biodiversity crisis – but beavers provide a really positive outlook for the future, they can become an ally,” she said.

The beavers released last year were two adults and two kits. The trust would like to say it knows they are all there but since the animals don’t come out for group photographs, it said it would be no surprise if a young male had moved on.

Hewitt said there had been stories of a beaver being spotted in the River Derwent. “We’re not sure if it’s ours or not,” he said. “Our beaver is tagged and chipped but we’re not sure.”

If it is, it would have had to take a waterway route of an estimated 60 miles.

There were also stories last month of a beaver being seen in the Grand Union canal in Wolverhampton, which is far less likely to be from Northumberland.

Hewitt said the reintroduction of beavers had been his career’s proudest achievement – and he wants everyone to love them.

“Beavers are changing the landscape all the time, you don’t really know what is coming next and that probably freaks some people out,” he said. “They are basically river anarchists.”

As part of his role as UN rapporteur for environmental defenders, Michel Forst has been watching proceedings against climate activists at courts across Europe.

But he may not have seen anything like what unfolded at Southwark crown court in London over the past two and a half weeks, where five Just Stop Oil activists were convicted for conspiring to cause gridlock on the M25 in November 2022.

On the days Forst visited, he witnessed three of the five defendants being arrested in court and dragged to the cells, protesters outside attempting to warn jurors they were not hearing the full case and a judge desperately trying to maintain control over his courtroom.

The judge, Christopher Hehir, had ruled that information about climate breakdown could not be entered into evidence, and could only be referred to by defendants briefly as the “political and philosophical beliefs” that motivated them – which he would tell the jury were in any case irrelevant to their deliberations.

But the defendants had other plans. They sought to turn Hehir’s court into a “site of civil resistance”, causing as much disruption as necessary to ensure that if the jury could not see their evidence on climate breakdown, then the jurors could at least be in no doubt it was being kept from them.

By the time the jury retired to consider a verdict, police had been called into court no fewer than seven times, four of the five defendants had been remanded to prison and 11 others were facing contempt of court proceedings for protests outside the courtroom.

Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin were standing trial on charges of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, accused of being the “queen bees” behind a series of protests on the M25.

Under the banner of the climate campaign group Just Stop Oil, already notorious for its road-blocking protests, they were said to have recruited 64 people to climb gantries over London’s orbital motorway, forcing police to stop traffic on four consecutive days.

The prosecution said the disruption amounted to £750,000 of economic damage and a £1m policing cost, with about 709,000 drivers affected. The judge warned the defendants they faced a harsh penalty if convicted.

Two men who blocked the Queen Elizabeth II bridge the month before the gantry protests were jailed for two years each, sentences Hehir said he would take as a reference point.

But why was Forst there in the first place? What can only now be reported is that he had made an extraordinary intervention on the eve of the trial, issuing a public statement criticising the treatment of Shaw in particular. As he awaited trial, Shaw had already spent more than 100 days on remand, been forced to wear an ankle tag, made subject to a strict curfew and banned from meeting his co-defendants or attending environmental demonstrations.

Forst’s intervention came amid increasing alarm at tightening restrictions on protest rights. In the past two years, the UK government has passed two wide-ranging laws targeting direct actions by climate activists, creating a host of new offences with potentially stiff penalties. At the same time, with juries having repeatedly acquitted defendants prosecuted for climate and other protests on the basis that their cause was just, the attorney general had applied to the court of appeal to limit the kinds of defences available in such cases.

Forst had already written to the UK government to express concern over these developments, but issued his latest statement after getting no response. “I fail to see how exposing Mr Shaw to a multiyear prison sentence for being on a Zoom call that discussed the organisation of a peaceful environmental protest is either reasonable or proportionate, nor pursues a legitimate public purpose,” Forst wrote. “Rather, I am gravely concerned that a sanction of this magnitude is purely punitive and repressive.”

That Zoom call was a key piece of evidence for the prosecution case. Made just days before the M25 protests began, the call was, the prosecution said, part of efforts to recruit volunteers to take part in the direct actions. Unbeknown to those taking part, it had been infiltrated by a Sun journalist who recorded it and passed it to the Metropolitan police.

On the face of it, the prosecution evidence seemed damning – and was mostly uncontested by the defendants. But it was only after prosecutors completed their case that events in court began to get really interesting.

The defendants had wanted to mount a defence of reasonable excuse. They proposed inviting expert witnesses such as the geophysicist Bill McGuire, who has written extensively on the implications of climate breakdown, to explain why the urgency of the unfolding environmental crisis warranted their actions. Such defence strategies have worked in some previous cases, with defendants acquitted in the face of apparently conclusive evidence.

But Hehir ruled that the defendants in this case could not present any evidence about the climate to the court, save for the brief statements about their philosophical and political beliefs that ultimately would have no bearing on the verdict.

It was in this context that, as the second week of the trial began, protesters began appearing each morning outside the court, displaying placards saying: “Jurors deserve to hear the whole truth.”

Of the defendants, only Hallam disputed the role the prosecution claimed he played in the conspiracy. He told the court he had merely been asked to “give the case for civil disobedience”.

“I wish to say on oath that I was not involved in this campaign,” he said. However, he went on to argue that even if the jury determined he had played a role in the conspiracy, they should find him and his co-defendants not guilty on the basis they had a reasonable excuse or justification for the actions they took.

In a three-hour address, punctuated by interruptions from an irritated Hehir, Hallam lectured the jury on his interpretation of the law, and why, he claimed, it showed the activists had an excuse for blocking the M25 to raise the alarm about climate breakdown.

Hehir told jurors Hallam’s legal analysis was peppered with mistakes. He repeatedly sent the jury out to admonish Hallam for referencing climate science he had ruled irrelevant to the case. But the judge proved more patient than the defendant seemed to expect. In the end, Hallam told jurors: “I apologise to you if I’m a little bit incoherent, I didn’t actually expect that I was going to get this far.”

He did not get much further. The following morning, the judge brought Hallam’s evidence to an end and, after the defendant refused to answer a cross-examination and then refused to leave the witness box, insisting he was not finished, Hehir called police into the court and had him arrested for contempt.

“Democracy in action, guys! Democracy in action,” Hallam said to watching reporters, as he was dragged into the dock, then down to the cells.

It was the first of many such scenes. Later that same day, Shaw was arrested and taken to the cells in almost identical circumstances, and Hehir sent jurors – who had not witnessed the arrests – home early. “I have never had to order a defendant to be arrested in a courtroom before and I’m very sad to have had to do that not once, but twice today,” the judge said.

On the face of it, Hallam and Shaw’s theatrics looked self-defeating. But the defendants believed they contributed to a victory. The following morning, on agreement, four “facts not in dispute” relating to the climate crisis were read into the court record by Fiona Robertson, second barrister for the crown. They were: that the climate crisis was “an existential threat to humanity”; that global heating above 1.5C would have catastrophic consequences; that in the past 12 months average global temperatures were 1.6C above the pre-industrial baseline; and that in October 2022 the government had opened a new round of oil and gas licensing.

It was a development the defendants and their supporters said amounted to the prosecution conceding the climate crisis was “an existential threat to humanity” – and one that they were to refer to throughout the remaining days of the trial.

Forst was in court to see this. He also witnessed much else. Hallam, bailed the previous day, was dragged out of court again after he began speaking straight to jurors during Lancaster’s evidence. Shortly after, Shaw directly challenged the judge, asking: “Why are you not trying the people causing this crisis?” He too was dragged out. Lancaster was next, for refusing to leave the witness box, and that night, all three were remanded to prison. Gethin had to wait but was also arrested for contempt on both Monday and Tuesday.

By the end of the trial, Whittaker De Abreu, the only one who had not represented herself, was the only defendant left in court.

As a punishment for their “persistent disruption”, Hehir slashed the time given to each defendant from one hour to 20 minutes. He further prohibited any mention of the climate crisis, the legal defences he had disallowed or the principle of jury equity – the idea that jurors can acquit based on their conscience.

As Hallam, Shaw, Lancaster and Gethin gave their speeches from behind the reinforced glass screen of the dock, they each proceeded to flout Hehir’s prohibitions, arguing they had been denied a right to a fair trial.

Hallam told jurors: “It’s blindingly obvious to us here first that you have not been given all the evidence you need. You cannot be sure of our guilt if you are not sure that you have not been given the evidence … we have received no good reason why we are not allowed to tell you what is blindingly obvious, namely what I’m not allowed to speak about. If you are not allowed to hear the blindingly obvious then it’s not a fair trial is it?”

It took just a day’s deliberations for the jury to unanimously find them guilty.

Given the recent history of UK climate protest trials, in which defendants have been sentenced to jail for merely mentioning the words “climate change”, and notwithstanding the dramatic arrests in court, Forst said he was surprised the judge gave them an opportunity to mention climate breakdown at all.

“But the little latitude they had to mention climate change was in the meantime emptied of its very meaning by the fact that, overall, the jury was told to ignore most of it,” he added.

Forst also said he was dismayed by the judge’s decision to refuse the defendants a chance to present more fully their evidence about climate breakdown. “That’s precisely one of the serious concerns I have about what is happening in some courts in the UK. Defendants should be allowed to explain why they have decided to use non-conventional but yet peaceful forms of action, like civil disobedience, when they engage in environmental protest,” he said.

It is not just in the UK that climate defenders are facing persecution, according to Forst, but the problems in this country are particularly acute. Protesters in countries such as France and Germany also faced political opposition – and in some cases, police brutality – but when it came to judicial persecution, the UK was unique, he said.

“[Elsewhere] you see environmental activists who block roads or sporting events being sentenced to a fine, or even sometimes suspended prison sentences for instance,” Forst said. “However, while I don’t have a full picture of what’s happening in every country, the UK is a nightmare for climate activists from this point of view, in the sense that the sentences imposed in other countries are neither that harsh, nor that widespread.

“Facing several years of imprisonment for taking part in a Zoom call – this is something I have not seen anywhere else and it is shockingly disproportionate.”

The nightmare is just beginning for Hallam, Shaw, Lancaster, Gethin and Whittaker De Abreu, who have all been remanded to prison before sentencing next Thursday. Hehir has indicated that they face long sentences.