The son-in-law of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent killed himself after suffering adverse side-effects from antidepressants prescribed by a Buckingham Palace doctor, an inquest has found.

Thomas Kingston, 45, whose marriage to Lady Gabriella at Windsor Castle in 2019 was attended by the late Queen, died from a self-inflicted wound, the senior coroner for Gloucestershire concluded.

The financier was found dead at his parents’ home in the Cotswolds in February.

Gabriella, 43, told the inquest at Gloucestershire coroner’s court on Tuesday that the public needed to be warned about the effects of medications used to treat mental health conditions, or more people could die.

Kingston began taking antidepressants after complaining of trouble sleeping following stress at work. The medication was prescribed by a doctor at the Royal Mews surgery, a GP practice in the grounds of Buckingham Palace that is used by royal household staff, the inquest heard.

Recording a narrative conclusion, Katy Skerrett, senior coroner for Gloucestershire, said: “Mr Kingston took his own life … The evidence of his wife, family and business partner all supports his lack of suicidal intent. He was suffering adverse effects of medication he had recently been prescribed.”

In a statement read out at the inquest by Skerrett, Gabriella said: “[Work] was certainly a challenge for him over the years but I highly doubt it would have led him to take his own life, and it seemed much improved.

“If anything had been troubling him, I’m positive that he would have shared that he was struggling severely. The fact that he took his life at the home of his beloved parents suggests the decision was the result of a sudden impulse.”

She said she believed his death was “likely provoked” by an adverse reaction to the medication he had begun, and subsequently stopped taking, in the weeks leading up to his death.

He had initially been given sertraline – an anti-depressant – and zopiclone, a sleeping tablet, by a Royal Mews surgery GP, after trouble sleeping following stress at work.

Kingston complained this was not making him feel better and his doctor moved him off sertraline to citalopram, another selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) used as an antidepressant.

“The lack of any evidence of inclination – it seems highly likely to me that he had an adverse reaction to the pills that led him to take his life,” Gabriella said.

“I believe anyone taking pills such as these need to be made more aware of the side-effects to prevent any future deaths.

“If this could happen to Tom, this could happen to anyone.”

Gaby Hinsliff’s article (Starmer has discovered a tricky truth about the electric vehicles transition: there’s no gain without pain, 29 November) doesn’t address the key point in the analysis of car companies’ difficulties in selling enough electric vehicles (EVs). There is a lack of demand that is only partly due to the higher prices. More importantly, it is due to a failure to install the necessary infrastructure to enable mass charging.

A minority of car owners live in houses where home charging is possible. For the rest, to make EVs a possibility, never mind attractive, there need to be a huge number of charging points to accommodate millions of people. I live in a city with a very high density of tenement and other flats; at the moment there are virtually no charging points easily accessible for flat owners. In such areas, where it is not possible to install a charger in your home, it is simply not possible to run an EV.

There is no sign at all of the installation of the massive charging infrastructure required to meet the demand of mass ownership of EVs. People won’t buy these vehicles until they are confident that they will have the ability to easily access the energy necessary to drive them.
Stephen Smith
Glasgow

Gaby Hinsliff is correct to point out that the transition to net zero will be painful unless the government takes more action to alleviate the difficulties. Financial support to buy electric vehicles will be necessary until sales have reached volumes that will allow prices to come down.

But other steps on the technical front are also necessary. It makes no sense for there to be a multiplicity of charging methods – the government must commission the creation of industry standards that will ensure all electric vehicles can be charged using the same mechanism. Ease of use will greatly increase the attraction of electric cars.
Raj Parkash
London

Europe’s wolves will lose their “strict protection” status, alarming conservationists who fear for the survival of an animal brought back from the brink of local extinction.

A committee charged with saving wildlife took the wolf’s protection status down a notch on Tuesday after members voted through a proposal from the European Union that lowers the bar for shooting a wolf.

The EU, which proposed the measure to protect livestock, estimates that wolves kill 65,000 animals each year that were meant to be slaughtered for humans to eat.

The downgrade was welcomed by hunters but prompted outrage from nature groups.

“This decision is a green light to shoot wolves, given by the international community in white gloves,” said Marta Klimkiewicz, from ClientEarth.

Sofie Ruysschaert, from BirdLife Europe and Central Asia, said it risked “undoing decades of European conservation progress”.

Wolves were killed off across much of Europe in the 19th and 20th century but have returned in recent decades as governments have protected habitats and kept hunters at bay. An estimated 20,000 wolves now roam the continent, and rising tensions with farmers have sparked calls for culls in rural communities.

Laurens Hoedemaker, the president of the European Federation for Hunting & Conservation (FACE), said he welcomed news that the proposal was “positively received as an initiative to balance conservation and species management”.

European wolves have not killed anyone this century but have preyed on livestock and claimed one high-profile life. In September 2022, a male grey wolf called GW950m entered a paddock near a German farmhouse and killed a chestnut pony that belonged to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission.

In a statement after the vote, von der Leyen said the change in wolf protection status was “important news for our rural communities and farmers … because we need a balanced approach between the preservation of wildlife and the protection of our livelihoods”.

Instead of killing wolves, conservationists have called for measures that let them coexist peacefully with people, such as getting guard dogs and putting up electric fences. They have warned that wolf culls might even harm livestock by disrupting packs and forcing lone wolves on to farms to hunt. Researchers have noticed similar unintended effects with cougars, coyotes, pumas and badgers.

Sabien Leemans, from the European branch of WWF, said: “Downgrading a species’ strict protection status for the political gain of a few, against scientific evidence, puts decades of conservation efforts at risk.”

A 2018 assessment from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) found three of nine wolf populations in the EU were “vulnerable”, and three more were “near threatened”.

More recent assessments from the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe (LCIE) suggest five populations are near-threatened and one is vulnerable. Overall, scientists say Europe’s wolf population is healthy enough that the decision need not spell disaster for the species but warn it could prove fatal for local populations that hover near the survival threshold.

“Culling and killing a few wolves here and there is not going to harm the overall wolf population in Europe,” said Luigi Boitani, a zoologist at the Sapienza University of Rome and chair of the LCIE. “But it all depends on how it’s done and where.”

The wolf has become a symbol of rural anger against environmental rules as attacks on sheep have risen.

Switzerland tried to downgrade the wolf’s protection status with a similar proposal in 2022 but failed to gather enough support. Earlier this year, Swiss farmers dumped sheep carcasses in front of a government building to demand more action against the predators.

The proposal from the EU, which was approved by a two-thirds majority of the Council of Europe, comes after European politicians watered down a series of policies to protect nature in the aftermath of furious farmer protests this year.

The change will be enforced in three months unless at least one-third of the parties object. The EU will have to take further steps to update its habitats directive.

“If we could count on logic and rationality and scientific rigour, this decision is not dangerous,” said Boitani. “The problem is [that] out there, when we speak of wolves, there is a lot of irrationality.”

Coca-Cola has been accused of quietly abandoning a pledge to achieve a 25% reusable packaging target by 2030 in what campaigners call a “masterclass in greenwashing”.

The company has been previously found by researchers to be among the world’s most polluting brands when it comes to plastic waste.

In 2022, the company made a promise to have 25% of its drinks sold in refillable or returnable glass or plastic bottles, or in refillable containers that could be filled up at fountains or “Coca-Cola freestyle dispensers”.

But shortly before this year’s global plastics summit, the company deleted the page on its website outlining this promise, and it no longer has a target for reusable packaging.

Instead, its packaging targets now say it will “aim to use 35% to 40% recycled material in primary packaging (plastic, glass and aluminum), including increasing recycled plastic use to 30% to 35% globally”. Its previous goalpromised to “use 50% recycled material in our packaging by 2030”.

The current pledge also says the company will “help ensure the collection of 70% to 75% of the equivalent number of bottles and cans introduced into the market annually”.

When the target was announced in 2022, Elaine Bowers Coventry, the company’s chief customer and commercial officer, said: “Accelerating use of reusable packages provides added value for consumers and customers while supporting our world without waste goal to collect a bottle or can for every one we sell by 2030.”

The original pledge was removed from the company’s website at some point after 20 November, which was when the global plastics treaty negotiations began. The company’s new announcement includes no mention of its reusable commitment.

This week, nearly 200 nations failed to reach an agreement to reduce the production of plastics at a meeting in Busan, South Korea. The week of talks could not resolve deep divisions between “high-ambition” countries seeking a globally binding agreement to limit production and phase out harmful chemicals, and “like-minded” nations who want to focus on waste.

Campaigners have called on companies such as Coca-Cola to move from recycled plastic targets to reusable bottle targets, because it is single-use items that are the problem, and recycled single-use items still end up polluting the environment most of the time.

“Coke’s latest move is a masterclass in greenwashing, ditching previously announced reuse targets, and choosing to flood the planet with more plastic they can’t even collect and recycle effectively. This only reinforces the company’s reputation as the world’s top plastic polluter,” said Von Hernandez, the global coordinator of the campaign group Break Free from Plastic. “If they can’t even keep their low-bar commitments, how can they claim to be serious about addressing the global plastic crisis?”

The Coca-Cola Company has been contacted for comment. It previously told the Guardian: “We care about the impact of every drink we sell and are committed to growing our business in the right way.”

The Vietnamese property tycoon Truong My Lan has lost her appeal against the death penalty for masterminding a multibillion-dollar fraud scandal – though she could still save her life if she can repay most of the funds she embezzled.

Lan, who founded the real-estate developer Van Thinh Phat, was sentenced to death in April for embezzling $12bn (£9.95bn) from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB), in a case that shocked the country.

Lan had appealed against the sentence, asking the court to consider a more “lenient and humane approach”. However, on Tuesday judges upheld the death penalty, saying her crimes had caused grave consequences, and that there were no mitigating circumstances, according to local media.

Under Vietnamese law, Lan could still save her life if she returns three-quarters of the embezzled assets, which means she faces a desperate scramble to gather billions of dollars. If she does so, her sentence could be reduced to life imprisonment.

Lan is a prominent tycoon in Vietnam, and she and Van Thinh Phat own a shopping mall, a harbour as well as luxury housing complexes in Ho Chi Minh City.

Although Lan did not directly hold executive power at SCB, she owned 91.5% of the bank’s shares through friends, family and shell companies, it was heard at her trial earlier this year.

The court heard she had set up fake loan applications to withdraw money from the bank over a period of 11 years, from 2012 to 2022. The loans accounted for 93% of the total credit the bank has issued, according to state media. Tens of thousands of people who invested their savings lost money.

According to a report by Reuters, documents suggest Vietnam’s central bank has injected $24bn of “special loans” into SCB to try to rescue the bank.

While Lan was found guilty of embezzling $12.5bn, prosecutors said the total damages were in fact $27bn, equivalent to about 6% of the country’s GDP last year.

She was tried alongside 85 others, including former central bankers and government officials, as well as previous SCB executives.

Lan said last week she felt “pained due to the waste of national resources” and “very embarrassed to be charged with this crime”.

The case is part of a wider, national corruption crackdown known as “Blazing Furnace” led by the former secretary general of the Communist party of Vietnam, Nguyễn Phú Trọng, which has led to the indictments of thousands of people.

In a separate case, Lan was convicted of money laundering and jailed for life in October.

Despite the many obituaries for British elms, their death has been greatly exaggerated, as Mark Twain might have said. North Derbyshire is full of them, despite elm disease. There are superb centurion elms in Buxton’s town centre, but my favourite is here on the path to Errwood Hall.

I confess that I’ve walked past it many times over the last half-century and hadn’t previously noticed it. That inattention speaks of the tree’s deepest and – if it’s not too contradictory – grandest quality: its ability to stand to one side, to live unseen in full view, to flourish outside our ken. It is all the more magnificent for living so truly unto itself.

Not to suggest for a second that this wych elm is a solitary organism. It is itself entangled among taller oak and chestnut woodland, but every part of it is further smothered in other organisms. Fountain sprays of polypody (fern) erupt from several parts and all the branches, even some twigs, are engorged by mosses, including (I suspect) the appropriately named mamillate plait-moss. These also drip down from their tree anchor in long stalactitic hanks.

This overcoat bulks it up and gives it a green-furred, almost animate character. Add in the tentacular sway of its upper body and an arachnid droop in one half of the limbs, and you have some primordial, eldritch beast. In his monumental work The Matter With Things, Iain McGilchrist summarises the latest research on the cognitive capabilities of plants. You have only to look at this tree to know it also “knows” things.

There is a further defining quality in elms that this one illustrates perfectly. The tree’s outer surface is often dense, matted and gnarly with rootlets, and on other elms I’ve seen these excrescences swell into enormously thick, cankerous bosses. Elms literally bristle with extra vitality, the very bark seems prolific and promiscuous. The Goyt elm is one of the only trees I know where the leaves – and such lovely rough-crinkled leaves – sheath around the trunk itself. Come here in April and the thickness of that foliage flushes this part of the path in a green light so dense you could swim in it.

It’s known as living apart, together. Being in a serious relationship while remaining at separate addresses has long been a lifestyle more associated with people starting out in life.

But those aged 60 and above who date like people in their 20s enjoy better mental wellbeing, the largest study of its kind has found.

Couples who meet in later life and decide against moving in together experience mental health benefits comparable to marriage or cohabiting – but without the “frictions”, “intense day-to-day interactions” and care commitments that come with those relationships, the research showed.

They also avoid the “legal obligations and institutional binding” that make it harder to get out of an unhappy marriage, according to the study from Prof Yang Hu at Lancaster University and Dr Rory Coulter at University College London.

Challenging the perception that older people prefer more “conventional” arrangements involving marriage and cohabitation, the research found that when the over-60s form a new relationship, “living apart, together” is the most popular option: 10 times more probable than marriage.

The actor Helena Bonham Carter and the director Tim Burton lived separately – next door to one another – during their 13-year relationship. They first met when Burton, 56, directed Carter, 48, in 2001’s Planet of the Apes.

Miriam Margolyes has lived apart from her partner Heather Sutherland for more than 50 years, though last year the Blackadder and Harry Potter star said the pair wanted to move in together.

The new research relied on data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, tracking the over-60s, their relationships and their mental health between 2011 and 2023 – the first time the subject has been looked at on a national scale.

It follows earlier research that looked at living apart, together across the whole population and revealed it was a more “durable kind of relationship form” among the over-60s in particular, Hu said.

“If you look at younger people they are LAT [living apart, together] because they couldn’t afford a house … but for older people the picture is very different – it’s a long-term arrangement rather than transitory,” he said.

While the study found marriage and its protections offered marginally greater mental health benefits for the over-60s, they found there was less of a risk to mental health with LAT break-ups than there was with a marriage or cohabitation ending.

Previous research has shown mental health benefits for marriage and cohabitation are greater for men than women and that “older women typically undertake a larger share of domestic and care tasks” in such relationships.

In contrast, older women and men enjoy similar mental health benefits from LAT, according to the study, soon to be published in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences.

However, Hu said they “didn’t find evidence LAT is on the rise” among the over-60s. “It’s not new, it’s new in terms of the attention being paid to it,” he said.

“We need to acknowledge the strength of these ties stretching across households, they are really important in sustaining individuals’ wellbeing. What’s also interesting is that among older people who LAT, 64% were living within 30 minutes of each other – and [they were] more gender egalitarian.

“LAT is a sort of fine balance between intimate union and individual autonomy. It allows individuals to still keep their commitments to existing family relationships, while leaving a space for them to have an intimate partner at a late stage in life.

“In terms of numbers there are many more younger people living apart together, but they do that under completely different circumstances … for younger adults living apart together, seven out of 10 are saying they want to move in together in three years’ time, in contrast to just one in four older adults.”

Adding that the research aims to deepen knowledge of an “important, previously overlooked aspect of older people’s intimate life”, Hu said it also has implications for policymakers concerning care, mental health and lockdown-type policies.

“Household-centered governance has its limitations,” he said. “During the [Covid-19] pandemic the whole LAT population was cut off.”

Full-size replica swords sold as souvenirs at a popular Harry Potter exhibition in Tokyo have fallen foul of Japan’s strict weapons control law and been recalled.

The 86cm stainless steel blade, which comes mounted on a wooden plaque, is described on the Warner Bros website that promotes the event as an “authentic recreation of Godric Gryffindor’s sword”.

But the tip of the blade was found to be sharp enough for the police to inform Warner Bros in November that possession without a special licence was illegal under Japan’s 1958 firearms and sword control law.

More than 350 replica swords were sold – at 30,000 yen (US$200) – between May 2023 and April 2024 but the police appear to have only recently become aware of its potential illegality.

The company is asking buyers to return the sword for a refund due to what it calls a “distribution issue”, with notices in Japanese and English posted on its website.

A number of the swords were available on online marketplaces in Japan but appear to have been removed.

In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the fictional sword is said to be 1,000 years old and commissioned by the founder of the Hogwarts school for wizards.

Tight restrictions on weapons contribute to keeping violent crime rates in Japan very low, with the annual number of shooting incidents, which usually involve yakuza gangsters, rarely breaching double figures.

A television reporter received a police caution for holding a gun without a licence during a sequence on hunting, while even ceremonial swords need to be registered with authorities.

Crimes involving weapons do occur occasionally. A 78-year-old man was arrested in July 2023 in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, for attacking his septuagenarian neighbour with a ceremonial samurai sword during an argument over noise in their apartment block.

The Warner Bros tour opened in 2023 on the site of the former Toshimaen amusement park. The facility features sets from the hit films, such as the London Ministry of Magic, and is billed as the largest indoor Harry Potter attraction in the world.

Australia has been accused of undermining its Pacific neighbours in a landmark international legal case after it argued that high-emitting countries are not obliged to act on the climate crisis beyond their non-binding commitments to the 2015 Paris agreement.

In the case before the UN’s international court of justice (ICJ), Vanuatu is leading an argument brought by several Pacific nations and developing states – including Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu – that developed countries have a legal responsibility beyond existing UN frameworks. The case does not specify the names of countries that would fall under the definition of high emitters.

The hearing, which began on Monday, follows years of campaigning by a group of law students from Pacific island countries and a unanimous UN general assembly resolution calling on the ICJ to provide an advisory opinion on what obligations states have to tackle climate change and what the legal consequences could be if they don’t.

Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate change and environment, told the Peace Palace in The Hague, that responsibility for the climate crisis lay with “a handful of readily identifiable states” that had produced the majority of greenhouse gas emissions, but stood to lose the least from rising sea levels and extreme weather events.

In its submissions, the Australian government said it was “resolutely committed” to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris agreement, which set a goal of trying to keep global heating since preindustrial times well below 2C and as close as possible to 1.5C. The goal is non-binding.

It said the agreements were the “central instruments” for global cooperation “to tackle the grave challenge of climate change”, and international legal requirements had already been considered when they were negotiated.

Most states recognised a responsibility to prevent “transboundary harm” – damage from pollution that crosses international borders – but Australia and other parties did not agree that the principle applied to damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

The country’s solicitor-general, Stephen Donaghue, said Australia’s view was that the UNFCCC and the Paris agreement had been widely adopted, and that customary international law should not extend beyond those frameworks.

Despite this, the general counsel for the Australian attorney general, Jesse Clarke, said the country applauded Vanuatu’s leadership in “driving forward” on the climate crisis.

“Climate change poses the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security, and wellbeing of the peoples of small island states, including Pacific island states,” Clarke said. “Australia acknowledges the extent of the challenge posed by climate change, and recognises that ambitious individual and collective action must be undertaken urgently.”

But Greenpeace Australia Pacific’s general counsel, Katrina Bullock, said Australia’s submissions “completely undermined its Pacific neighbours” and its position was “fundamentally flawed”.

“The UNFCCC and the Paris agreement were created to protect people, not to shield states like Australia from accountability. Compliance with these treaties is necessary, but not sufficient to safeguard human rights and the environment,” she said.

“The global annual conference of the parties, Cop, has shown us negotiation spaces where wealthy developed countries can call the shots have not led to the ambition we need to secure a safe climate for humanity.

“Where political negotiations have failed, the court must not.”

The Australia Institute’s strategic director, Leanne Minshull, said the UN general assembly request for the ICJ to give its opinion on countries’ climate obligations showed a significant number of nations were not satisfied with the existing multi-lateral agreements.

“Listening to the oral pleadings of Australia, and it’s consistent referral to existing multilateral agreements, it felt as though they were saying to the court ‘relax, we already have this under control’,” she said.

“Whether it’s Australians facing a climate-fuelled cost-of-living crisis or a Pacific islander watching their country be washed away, ordinary people understand we don’t have this under control.

“As an Australian, I would have liked to hear our government plead a case that looked for global solutions rather than rely on sophistry to limit our legal obligations to ourselves and others.”

The ICJ hearing runs for two weeks, with a judgment expected next year. The court’s advisory opinions are not binding, but experts say its assessment in this case will be referred to as authoritative document in future climate litigation and during international climate negotiations.