A community in Devon has raised £22,555 to turn a 500-year-old oak tree into what they believe will be the longest table ever crafted from a single English oak tree.

The 18 metre-long (59ft) Great Oak Table, capable of seating 60 people, was being built in a small patch of private woodland near Chagford, on the edge of Dartmoor.

It would, said Elizabeth-Jane Baldry, a local artist who owns the wood and conceived the idea, “be a 21st-century re-enchantment of the land: a rewilding with bells on because it brings in the element of human imagination and human flourishing, as well as nature restoration, to a wild space where people can gather to share food, friendship and lively conversation”.

“In its own small way, I want this table to be somewhere hope can be sparked that we can tip the world towards joy,” she added. “It’s a micro-project but these micro-projects are what are going to change the dialogue about how we can all move into a happier future.”

After two years of research, the group says it can find no reference to another table crafted from a single oak tree, apart from the 13-metre “Table for the Nation” made for Ely Cathedral.

Baldry bought the patch of low-grade agricultural land 18 years ago when it was rubbish-ridden and unloved. Naming it Pigwiggen Wood after a fairy knight, she and her two sons have since nurtured it into a nature and wildlife-rich sanctuary, where dormice nest and slow worms thrive.

Baldry had long harboured the dream of placing a long table at the forest’s heart.

“I knew it had to be oak, because there’s such a long tradition in British culture of oak as a great symbol of courage and endurance,” she said. But it took her a year to find one that was sufficiently long, ancient and magnificent.

“I was offered French oak but I said I wouldn’t import oak. I said it had to be Devon oak; every sawmill in Devon was on a search for over a year for a tree worthy of the project,” she said.

Eventually a tree was found: a 45 metre ancient oak that had fallen in a storm 15 years ago but lay undisturbed because the owner couldn’t bear to see it chopped up for firewood.

The project started two years ago with loans and financial gifts from the community. Now that crowdfunding has raised more than Baldry hoped, the loans can be repaid and the costs for the final work met.

“We can now finish making the table and open the space up for community events, such as parish picnics, immersion days for the local primary schoolchildren and quiet days when visitors can ditch their to-do lists and simply read, paint or relax in the dancing shadows of the leaves,” she said.

“Once in a while on one of those rare English summer evenings when the moon is bright and the sky is clear, the woodland glade will become a fairytale space for people to gather. There will be food and fellowship under the trees, the telling of tales and the sound of the harp,” she added.

Terri Windling, a neighbour and local folklore specialist, said bringing a table into a wild space “blurs the boundary between indoors and outdoors, wild and civilised”.

“It brings us, as a community, to a place that is wild and yet still part of human life. The fact that it’s a table is key. There are so many things you can do at a table: it’s where you gather with your family, with your friends, with your community to share food, sit and draw, or write or just be in the outdoors with neighbours that aren’t human: neighbours that are the plants and the animals and the insects.”

Another neighbour, Alan Lee, the Oscar-winning concept artist for the Lord of the Rings films, designed an elfin throne for the head of the table.

Baldry said: “I had this idea for a throne at the end, not for humans – because the whole thing about the table is that it’s a place where all are equal – but because I wanted to have the symbol of the larger world of which we’re all a part,.”

Beej Trigg Woods, the local carpenter who has spent two years on the project, said it was probably the most special design he would ever create.

“It’s humbling to work on wood this ancient, for a project that’s so meaningful,” he said. “I started when my son was just a few weeks old. I hope the table will still be standing when his grandchildren are able to sit round it.”

There is “no route to net zero” that ignores the real concerns of businesses, a cabinet minister has warned, as the government prepares to reduce financial penalties handed to carmakers not selling enough electric cars.

Ministers are also looking at how cheaper loans could be introduced to help people buy an electric vehicle (EV), after a wave of job losses and closures in which carmakers blamed the onerous fines they were facing.

Jonathan Reynolds, the business and trade secretary, stood by the government’s “cast iron commitment” to reinstate a 2030 ban on new cars that run on petrol and diesel. The deadline was dropped by Rishi Sunak a year ago. But he said the government had to be “clear eyed” in its effort to “keep the auto industry alive in the UK”.

“When this government says that decarbonisation must not mean deindustrialisation, we mean it,” Reynolds writes for the Observer today. “There is no route to net zero without backing British industries and workers. We are in no doubt at all about the global challenges the industry is facing and the need for us to play our part to support them.”

Labour sources said support for the 2030 target remains solid across government, including Keir Starmer. However, ministers are fast-tracking plans to review the fines for manufacturers who miss the EV quotas.

Carmakers have to ensure 28% of the cars and 16% of vans they sell are electric from January. If they fail, they currently face fines of £15,000 for each vehicle outside the target. Ministers are holding a consultation on how far the fines could be reduced.

Electric vehicles have very low carbon emissions and are considered to be vital in the bid to reach net zero. This is the point at which emissions across the planet have been reduced so much that these residues can be easily removed from the atmosphere, making it possible to halt the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere, the cause of global heating.

Reynolds blamed the setbacks on the last government, who he accused of waging a “culture war” with green targets – destroying certainty and investment in the process. He said he wanted to make EVs “affordable and accessible for working people and to boost the take-up of electric vehicles”. It is understood that officials are looking at plans to boost demand, including the use of cheaper financing deals.

It comes after a decision by Stellantis, the owner of Vauxhall, to close its van factory at Luton, putting 1,100 jobs at risk of being cut or relocated. The company blamed the UK’s economic conditions and the government’s zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate. Days before, Ford announced it would cut 4,000 jobs in Europe, including 800 in the UK.

Car manufacturers are under financial pressure from EV sales quotas because public demand is lower than expected. Carmakers met Reynolds last month to warn of the economic pressures caused by the tough targets.

Ford UK boss Lisa Brankin warned last week that market challenges were making the financial regime around the move to electric vehicles “unworkable”. Brankin, chair and managing director of Ford UK, posted on LinkedIn: “The end goal is not in question, but current demand for electric vehicles is lower than expected and not in line with the mandated trajectory.

“For manufacturers like Ford who have invested billions in new technologies and advanced manufacturing, there needs to be greater flexibility built into the scheme and government-backed incentives to help encourage customers to make the switch.”

There are also concerns among the unions over the goals to ensure the UK reaches net zero by 2050. Gary Smith, the GMB general secretary, told the BBC in September that the government’s green policy were “hollowing out working class communities’.

Des Quinn, Unite national officer for the automotive industries, said that officials had introduced ambitious targets for EV sales, but had not provided the investment required for the charging infrastructure. He said he was optimistic there would be significant changes to the pathway for zero emission vehicles, but it had already caused economic damage.

“It’s inevitable there are going to be further job losses,” he said. “Some work on electric vehicles might not start, or at least be put back.”

Quinn said in addition to reviewing the current targets, there needed to be a detailed impact assessment of the cost to jobs of moving to EVs. He said most losses would be in the supply chain where components now being manufactured for petrol and diesel cars will no longer be required. “Car workers are going to be the new coal mining communities,” he said. “Thrown on an industrial scrap heap and left to get on with it.”

The humpback whales watched by Paul Watson from his prison cell this summer have long since migrated from the iceberg-flecked Nuup Kangerlua fjord to warmer seas. It is over four months since Watson – an eco-terrorist to some and a brave environmentalist to others – was brought here to Anstalten, a high-security jail perched on the frozen coast of south-east Greenland after being arrested while refuelling his ship, MV John Paul DeJoria, in nearby Nuuk, the capital of the autonomous Danish territory.

He had been on his way with a 32-strong crew to practise his decades-long policy of “non-violent aggression” by intercepting a new Japanese whaling “mothership”, the ¥7.5bn ($47.4m) Kangei Maru. But shortly after tying up his vessel in the harbour “a nice police car turned up” and 12 armed officers boarded.

It was to prove the opening of just the latest, but perhaps the most dramatic, chapter yet in the story of Watson’s running battles on the high seas with the whalers of Japan. The Japanese government initially used a “research” loophole to circumvent a 1986 International Whaling Commission moratorium on hunts in international waters, and then withdrew from the IWC entirely in order to continue commercial hunting within its own exclusive economic zone. Now, it is said to retain a desire to expand again.

“I was sitting in the captain’s chair at the time, and one of them just walked up, grabbed me by the shirt, pulled me off the chair and turned me around and handcuffed me,” Watson says of his arrest in Nuuk harbour. “And I said: ‘What’s this for?’ And they said: ‘You’ll find out’ and took me down to the police station. They weren’t a very friendly bunch.”

The arrest on 21 July had been prompted by an Interpol red notice issued by Japan whose government accuses Watson of conspiracy to trespass, interrupt a business and cause damage to the Shonan Maru 2 whaling ship in 2010 in the Antarctic – but also, crucially, to lightly injure a Japanese crew member via the mild acid from a stink bomb.

He was not at the scene of the alleged crime and denies playing any commanding role in it, but on Monday Watson is expecting to mark his 74th birthday by being told by a judge that his detention in Greenland will be extended by at least another month as the Ministry of Justice in Copenhagen continues to weigh up a Japanese demand for his extradition on charges that could see him jailed for up to 15 years. And so Watson, a grandfather, and father of two young children, finds himself here, long after the whales have left, talking from a spare cell that is acting as a visitors’ room.

Anstalten was opened in 2021 by the Greenland government as a “humane” alternative to sending the territory’s most serious criminals 1,800 miles south-east to Denmark. He has the benefit of a 12-square-metre room, an en suite bathroom and a spectacular view of the fjords. The inmates are given 1,350 Danish kroner (£150) every Wednesday to buy food in the prison shop, which they cook in a communal kitchen. He has eggs in the morning, skips lunch, and eats noodles and vegetables in the evening. On one occasion, the prison guards knocked on his door to offer him some freshly caught cod. “They do sell whale and seal in the store,” he says. “At one point, [an inmate] said: ‘You want to eat some whale with us?’ I said: ‘What do you think?’”

It is, he admits, an “interesting prison”. Convicts here have a right to go hunting with loaded weapons. Watson would also like to give the impression that he is sanguine about his predicament; that this is a burden that he knew he might have to bear as the price for his activism. He talks quickly and lucidly. He has a series of stock answers and anecdotes that help convey his message: his campaign continues from here.

But it is when talking about his youngest children, aged three and eight, that he gives more away. He admits that his 44-year-old daughter from the first of his four marriages did not see him much during her childhood. But she is doing well and he made different choices about his life with his sons, Tiger and Murtagh. On their birth he had elected not to take long trips away, but today he has just 10 minutes a week on a Sunday evening for a video call home. “I don’t feel upset, so they don’t feel upset,” he says. “I mean, I know what it’s like. My mother died when I was 13. My father was extremely abusive. So I didn’t really have that kind of, you know, happy childhood in that way. But that made me committed to making sure that my children are taken care of in every sense.” His wife, Yana, 43, worries. “She tends to be a little more emotional than most,” he says with a dry laugh. “She’s OK. She does get a little dramatic sometimes”.

Watson, a joint US-Canadian citizen, was born in Toronto but grew up in St Andrews, New Brunswick. His response to physical abuse from his father was to throw himself into the Kindness Club, an animal welfare organisation founded by Aida Flemming, the wife of New Brunswick premier Hugh John Flemming. It was a temporary fix. “I ran away from home when I was 14, 15, 16, and finally, permanently, I ran off to sea. I joined the Norwegian Merchant Marine,” he says.

Watson does not describe himself as a protester. He regards himself as an enforcer of international treaties on whaling and animal welfare. He proudly states that his work has never hurt anyone but it has involved him putting his body in the way of harm. His crews would be asked whether they were willing to lose their life to save that of a whale. “And if they said no, then I said: ‘Well, then we don’t need you.’”

It has also involved the scuttling of whaling boats in the past. This robust approach saw him leave Greenpeace, where he was one of the pioneers, and later to clash again with colleagues at the Sea Shepherd organisation he founded when others wanted to take a less controversial path. It also earned him the admiration of a plethora of celebrities and in 2009 the ultimate tribute for the notorious: a South Park parody that played on his Father Christmas-like appearance.

Famous names who have called for Watson’s release in recent weeks include the actors Brigitte Bardot and Pierce Brosnan, the film-maker James Cameron and businessman Richard Branson. Brazil’s president Lula da Silva has written to him in jail. Watson lives in Paris and Marseille, and the Élysée Palace has said publicly that Emmanuel Macron wants him home. Yet Watson, dressed entirely in white, emphasising the pallor of a man unexposed to sunlight, remains incarcerated.

His left hand, his writing hand, gives him some discomfort after he was handcuffed and put in a police car without a seat belt. It is healing well enough for him to be writing a children’s book entitled Spaceship Earth, about its passengers killing off the key engineers, but he is trapped. He says he regards Japan’s extradition efforts as revenge for his often successful attempts to thwart the whalers, a battle that was chronicled in Whale Wars, a hit show on the Animal Planet channel in the late 2000s.

He does not believe that he would survive a spell in a Japanese prison. “I know that if I get sent to Japan, I’m not coming home,” he says. And so Watson waits, and hopes and keeps calm for his family. “You can’t be frustrated over something you can’t control,” he says. “You know, what’s the point? And I’ve never been angry at anything. What’s the point of being angry?” But, in his eighth decade, there would be no shame in Captain Paul Watson being just a little scared.

There is an irony to the fact that many Welsh communities are now threatened by the coal that has been dug up around them for ­centuries. This is the fuel that helped launch the Industrial Revolution and changed the world. At the same time, its combustion has played a key role in boosting amounts of carbon in the atmosphere to levels that have triggered global temperature rises to near 1.5C, propelling the UK – and the rest of the world – into a climate crisis.

Sea levels are rising, meaning our shores are being battered by higher, more destructive waves, while rainfall in Britain is intensifying, putting communities at real risk of devastation, as seen in Wales last week.

It is not surprising that local people feel aggrieved that the government and local authorities have not done enough to protect them.

We have known for decades that climate change is real, dangerous, and will continue to worsen as we persist in burning more and more fossil fuels and raising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere – while, at the same time, doing little to tackle the consequences.

Such neglect is not confined to Wales, of course. It is mirrored by the inaction of most developed nations, which have flourished through industrialisation, driven by the burning of fossil fuels. Indeed, it is a further irony of this story that just as Storm Bert was battering homes around Cwmtillery and Pontypridd, delegates at Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, were concluding yet another climate summit that failed to tackle the roots of the crisis.

Once more, no mention was made of the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels, a decision that world leaders have been urged to make for decades. Wales will not be the last place to suffer the repercussions.

What is more worrying, at a local level, is the political response to this inaction. As an Observer report reveals, many in the region feel betrayed and are now threatening to switch their vote to the Reform party at forthcoming elections in order to punish their current leaders. Yet Reform denies that climate change has anything to do with the devastation that struck Wales. Britain has had bad weather forever, it claims.

This is not a view shared by scientists, who insist it has played a key role in the intensification of rainfall in the UK. To deny such links is worrying, says Bob Ward, head of policy at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change.

“You cannot work out how best to repair the damage that has been caused by rain from these storms, or find ways to prevent them from causing more ­damage in future, if you do not accept the reality of the causes of these events,” he says. “We will get nowhere unless we face up to the realities of the current climate crisis. It’s as ­simple as that.”

Damage from Britain’s storms is only going to worsen until net zero is reached across the planet sometime in the future. And rainfall will not decrease in intensity when that day arrives – it will ­simply ­linger at its new heightened level until humanity finds a way of extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

We may have a long wait for that eventuality, it should be noted. The science fiction author Isaac Asimov once remarked that “the easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists”.

The lessons from Wales highlight what would be the dangers in following such a path. The climate crisis and its long-term consequences cannot be avoided – or denied.

Victoria police have carried out one of the “more bizarre welfare checks” after a deadly tiger snake slithered up a driver’s leg as she was travelling at 80km/h on a major freeway.

Police said they were called to Monash Freeway near the Toorak Rd exit in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs on Saturday morning after receiving reports of a barefoot woman trying to flag down passing traffic.

The woman told police she had been driving on the freeway when she felt something on her foot and looked down to find a snake “slithering up her leg”.

It was later identified as a tiger snake, one of the world’s most venomous snakes, that had curled up under the steering wheel of the car.

Police said that “remarkably” the woman was able to fend off the snake and weave through traffic before pulling over in the slip lane and leaping out of her car to safety.

Paramedics were called to make sure the woman – who police said was in a state of shock – had not been bitten.

A spokesperson for Ambulance Victoria said they couldn’t find any puncture marks or other signs the woman, aged in her 40s, had been bitten.

She was taken to the Alfred hospital in a stable condition for further observation at about 11.30am, the ambulance spokesperson said.

Police said they called snake catcher Tim Nanninga from Melbourne Snake Control to wrangle the snake safely and get it out of the car.

“Passing motorists were left in bewilderment as the massive snake was safely removed from the vehicle,” a police spokesperson said.

“And so ended one of the more bizarre welfare checks you’ll ever hear about.”

Nanninga said he didn’t know how the woman managed to pull over safely.

“I do feel sorry for the lady that was driving – it would have been absolutely terrifying,” he said.

He said he received six to 12 requests a year to remove snakes from cars but this was the first time he had been called to a freeway.

“There were about a million people filming,” he said. “I’m just not used to doing it in front of such a big audience, to be honest.”

Nanninga said the woman had travelled from south-west Victoria, which is where the snake is believed to have got into her car and then under the dashboard.

He said the snake was taken to a reptile vet and checked for parasites. He was given the all clear to release it in a local catchment area, which he said was a “safe place right away from people and pets”.

Tiger snakes can be found across much of Victoria, including in highly populated areas.

The Victorian environment department has identified them as one of the most venomous snakes in the world, and says all tiger snakes should be regarded as “highly dangerous” to humans.

Donald Trump has tapped Kashyap “Kash” Patel to be FBI director, nominating a loyalist and “deep state” critic to lead the federal law enforcement agency that the president-elect has long slammed as corrupt.

Patel, 44, has worked as a federal prosecutor and a public defender but rose to prominence in Trump circles after expressing outrage over the agency’s investigation into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. He has called for the FBI leadership to be fired as part of a drive to bring federal law enforcement “to heel.”

If confirmed, Patel would replace Christopher Wray, the FBI director who was appointed by Trump in 2017 after the then-president fired James Comey over the FBI’s Russia collusion probe.

Comey later testified to Congress there was no evidence of any collusion but the FBI had a “basis for investigating” the matter.

Patel had ties to former Republican representative Devin Nunes, who led opposition to the Russia probe by special counsel Robert Muller while serving as chair of the House intelligence committee.

In making his nomination for FBI director, Trump said in a statement on Truth Social that Patel “is a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People.”

“Kash will work under our great Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to bring back Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity to the FBI,” Trump added.

Trump noted Patel’s service as chief of staff at the department of defense, deputy director of national intelligence, and senior director for counter-terrorism at the national security council during his first term.

Patel, he said, “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution.”

“This FBI will end the growing crime epidemic in America, dismantle the migrant criminal gangs, and stop the evil scourge of human and drug trafficking across the Border”, he said.

If confirmed by the senate – Gina Haspel, CIA director during Trump’s first term, reportedly threatened to resign in 2020 when Trump sought to install Patel as her deputy – Patel will likely prove a loyal agent of Trump’s desire to reform what the president-elect considers Washington’s bureaucratic overreach.

Patel told the Conservative Political Action Conference in July it was necessary to “identify the people in government that are crippling our constitutional republic”.

Trump has called Patel’s 2023 book “Government Gangsters”, in which he argued for firing of government employees who undermine the president’s agenda, a “blueprint to take back the White House”.

The reforms Patel outlined in the book “to defeat the deep state” include moving the FBI headquarters from Washington to “curb FBI leadership from engaging in political gamesmanship” and to reduce the general counsel’s office, which he claimed had taken on “prosecutorial decision-making”.

A man who became an internet sensation after sharing his Mars bar without the ripple was handed £2 in compensation.

Harry Seager’s picture of his smooth Mars confectionery bar inspired interest from thousands of members of the Dull Men’s Club Facebook page.

Seager said he wasn’t interested in receiving compensation for his underdeveloped bar but just wanted to find out “what industrial process might have caused the ripple to not be on the top”.

Seager said he was on the way to a classic car show in Birmingham with his friends on a vintage bus when he spotted the strange smoothness of his Mars after purchasing it from an Oxfordshire service station.

“I’d actually forgotten about it, and then the next day, I remembered,” he said. “And I thought, Oh, you know what? I’ll send them a message and find out. You know, maybe something’s been missed out, and it’s not been spotted.”

The 34-year-old broadcaster from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire had even wondered if Mars’s signature ripple had been phased out completely. Mars Wrigley UK was skittish and would not explain what had gone wrong.

“They were very secretive about it, like they instantly went on to the compensation, yeah, rather than tell me what the manufacturing defect was.”

The corporation said earlier this month the bar “slipped” through its production line and reassured consumers that the ripple was here to stay.

Members of the Dull Men’s Club told Seager the bar had escaped being blown by air by a machine called an enrober. “It tasted the same,” said Seager. “It just was a lot thinner on top that’s all – not quite as thick.”

Mars bars were first made by hand in Slough, Berkshire, in 1932 and are still manufactured in the town. They are the most popular chocolate bars in the UK.

Seager thinks there might be a future in defective chocolates. “[It’s a] bit like buying broken biscuits, isn’t it? They should do broken chocolate bars. That’s a good idea.”