The Wildlife Trusts have bought part of the Duke of Northumberland’s estate in the largest land sale in England for 30 years.

Marketed by its estate agents as “a paradise for those with a penchant for sporting pursuits, from world-class fishing on the illustrious River Coquet to pheasant and grouse shooting”, Rothbury estate has now been bought by the charity, which plans to restore it for nature.

The trusts are buying the land in an unusual two-phase deal: having already bought a “significant” chunk of the 3,850-hectare (9,500-acre) estate, they have been given two years to find the rest of the money, for which they are launching a fundraising appeal. The estate was previously used for intensive sheep farming and shooting.

It was put up for sale by the Duke of Northumberland’s youngest son, Max Percy, and has been in the family for 700 years.

Craig Bennett, the chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, told the Guardian: “Our vision is to create an absolutely astonishing national flagship for nature recovery. It will be around two-and-a-half times the size of the [rewilded] Knepp estate and we are very excited to get ecosystems working again. If we get the whole site we will be looking at 9,500 acres.”

Bennett said he hoped to work with neighbours to create a giant haven for wildlife. “We hope the Rothbury estate will be the heart of a flourishing national landscape; it’s neighboured by two National Trust properties, for example, so we will work with them. We want Northumberland to become an amazing destination for eco-tourism. We want to create something really spectacular at a much bigger scale than has ever been done before in England. This is an extraordinary once-in-a-generation opportunity to restore nature.”

Shoots would not be allowed on the estate and the farming would be regenerative only, Bennett said. “Obviously [allowing shoots] would not be appropriate for the Wildlife Trusts. We hope to showcase nature-friendly farming and conservation grazing and produce fruit, vegetables and some sustainable meat for local people.”

The current purchase includes the Simonside Hills and a mixture of lowland, woods, riverside and farmland – the western side of the estate. Notable wildlife includes curlews, red grouse, merlins, cuckoos, mountain bumblebees, emperor moths and red squirrels.

Public access would be maintained by the Trusts. Being sold to one charity rather than broken up and sold to individual landowners meant access could be protected for future generations, the trusts said.

A tram has careered into a store in central Oslo after coming off its rails, in an incident that left at least four people injured and caused panic among passersby.

The accident happened in the late morning in a bustling commercial neighbourhood of the Norwegian capital.

The tram, which should have made a left turn at a crossing, jumped the rails and continued straight ahead, its front section crashing deep into an electronics retailer on the corner selling Apple products.

“Three people onboard the tram were injured and another person outside,” said Anders Ronning, the head of police operations at the scene.

“No one is described as being seriously injured,” he said, adding that “one or two other people” had gone to the emergency room on their own.

He said there were “a lot of people onboard” the tram.

Police had initially said there were 20 people onboard, but some passengers had already left the scene by the time emergency services arrived.

At least one passerby had to jump out of the way when the tram came speeding towards him.

Several hours later, the blue tram was still stuck in the store, surrounded by shattered glass and debris.

“Thankfully, a derailment makes a lot of noise and several [people in the store] had time to turn around and get out of the way,” Ronning said.

Julie Hogmo Madsen, 24, was seated in the back of the tram. “It started to shake more than usual in the turn and I understood we had derailed – and then it went ’bang’,” she told the Norwegian the news agency NTB.

“People became a little hysterical and began screaming all around. I ran to the front of the tram and found someone who needed help and I helped them get out,” she said.

“It’s just surrealistic,” Andre Norheim told the daily Verdens Gang. “If everyone came out of this unharmed it means there’s someone watching over us, because it was a powerful crash, to put it mildly.”

The block was cordoned off, disrupting traffic in the city centre, with many police cars and ambulances at the scene.

The driver of the tram was among the injured and police have formally declared him a suspect, amid suspicions that excessive speed caused the accident.

“I don’t want to speculate,” Ronning said. “We are working on the technical aspects to determine the cause of the accident,” he added.

The damaged building, which also houses offices, was evacuated. The tram will not be removed until experts determine the stability of the building’s bearing walls and measures have been taken to prevent it from collapse.

After swapping machetes and binoculars for computer screens and laser mapping, a team of researchers have stumbled on a lost Maya city of temple pyramids, enclosed plazas and a reservoir, all of which had been hidden for centuries by the Mexican jungle.

The discovery in the south-eastern Mexican state of Campeche came about after Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, began wondering whether non-archaeological uses of the state-of-the-art laser mapping known as lidar could help shed light on the Maya world.

“For the longest time, our sample of the Maya civilisation was a couple of hundred square kilometres total,” Auld-Thomas said. “That sample was hard won by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking away at the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of rocks that might have been someone’s home 1,500 years ago.”

Lidar is a remote sensing technique that uses a pulsed laser and other data obtained by flying over a site to generate three-dimensional information about the shape of surface characteristics.

Although Auld-Thomas knew that it could help, he also knew it was not a cheap tool. Funders are reluctant to pay for lidar surveys in areas without obvious traces of the Maya civilisation, which reached its height between AD250 and AD900.

It occurred to the anthropologist that others may already have mapped the area for different reasons. “Scientists in ecology, forestry and civil engineering have been using lidar surveys to study some of these areas for totally separate purposes,” Auld-Thomas said. “So what if a lidar survey of this area already existed?”

He was in luck. In 2013, a forest monitoring project had undertaken a detailed lidar survey of 122 square kilometres of the area. Together with researchers from Tulane University, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, and the University of Houston’s National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, Auld-Thomas began analysing the survey’s data to explore 50 square miles of Campeche that had never been investigated by archaeologists.

Their analysis turned up a dense and diverse range of unstudied Maya settlements, including an entire city they named Valeriana, after a nearby freshwater lagoon.

“The larger of Valeriana’s two monumental precincts has all the hallmarks of a Classic Maya political capital: multiple enclosed plazas connected by a broad causeway, temple pyramids, a ballcourt, a reservoir formed by damming an arroyo (a seasonal watercourse), and a probable … architectural arrangement that generally indicates a founding date prior to AD150,” the researchers write in their study, which is published in the journal Antiquity.

According to Auld-Thomas, the team’s findings show just how many undiscovered treasures the area could yet yield.

“We didn’t just find rural areas and smaller settlements,” he said. “We also found a large city with pyramids right next to the area’s only highway, near a town where people have been actively farming among the ruins for years. The government never knew about it, the scientific community never knew about it. That really puts an exclamation point behind the statement that no, we have not found everything, and yes, there’s a lot more to be discovered.”

The team are planning to follow up on their lidar analysis with fieldwork at the newly discovered sites, which they say could offer valuable lessons as parts of the planet deal with the demands of mass urbanisation.

“The ancient world is full of examples of cities that are completely different than the cities we have today,” Auld-Thomas said. “There were cities that were sprawling agricultural patchworks and hyper-dense; there were cities that were highly egalitarian and extremely unequal. Given the environmental and social challenges we’re facing from rapid population growth, it can only help to study ancient cities and expand our view of what urban living can look like.”

Six years ago, some of the same researchers used lidar to uncover tens of thousands of previously undetected Maya houses, buildings, defence works and pyramids in the dense jungle of Guatemala’s Petén region, suggesting that millions more people lived there than was previously thought.

The discoveries, which included industrial-sized agricultural fields and irrigation canals, were announced in 2018 by an alliance of US, European and Guatemalan archaeologists working with Guatemala’s Maya Heritage and Nature Foundation.

The study estimated that 10 million people may have lived within the Maya lowlands, meaning that huge-scale food production may have been needed.

CNN has apologised to its viewers after a panellist on its NewsNight programme made derogatory remarks implying that a fellow guest on the show, the broadcaster Mehdi Hasan, was a terrorist.

Ryan James Girdusky, a conservative commentator, told Hasan, a Guardian US columnist and former host on MSNBC, who is Muslim, that he hoped his “beeper doesn’t go off”, in an apparent reference to Israel’s targeting of Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon with exploding pagers last month. The wave of coordinated explosions killed 12 and injured thousands.

“Did your guest just say I should be killed on live TV?” Hasan asked the show’s anchor, Abby Phillip.

After a commercial break, Phillip issued an on-air apology to Hasan and viewers and said Girdusky had been removed from the show.

“I want to apologise to Mehdi Hasan for what was said at this table. It was completely unacceptable,” she said. “I want to apologise to the viewers at home.”

In a subsequent statement, CNN said there was “zero room for racism or bigotry at CNN or on our air” and that Girdusky “will not be welcomed back at our network”. Hasan retweeted the statement on X.

Earlier in their heated exchange, Hasan had said that if people on the far right “don’t want to be called Nazis, stop doing, stop saying”. Girdusky interjected by saying Hasan was called an “antisemite more than anyone at this table”.

After Hasan said he was used to being labelled an antisemite due to his support for the Palestinian people, Girdusky said, “Well, I hope your beeper doesn’t go off.” He attempted to apologise amid crosstalk and sought to justify his comment by indicating he thought Hasan said he supported Hamas.

In a later post on X, however, Girdusky appeared to double down on a more antagonistic approach. “You can stay on CNN if you falsely call every Republican a Nazi and have taken money from Qatar-funded media,” he said. “Apparently you can’t go on CNN if you make a joke. I’m glad America gets to see what CNN stands for.”

Robert Baluku, a Ugandan delegate to the UN’s biodiversity summit in Colombia, found himself between a rock and hard place when his team’s accommodation was abruptly cancelled, leaving them stranded before the start of Cop16 in Cali.

The city’s hotels were packed to capacity with thousands of country leaders, scientists, government ministers and UN negotiators, and Baluku was left scrambling for options – until the Motel Deseos (Desires) came to the rescue.

Now, Baluku finds himself among at least a dozen delegates and negotiators accommodated by the city’s hourly rate motels, which come equipped with circular beds, “love machine” chairs, dance poles and sex swings.

Showing the Guardian around his room, Baluku said it was “very unusual” to put a mirror above the circular bed. “I don’t know the motive behind that,” he said. He noted that it was “very funny” to watch yourself falling asleep.

The Motel Deseos’s manager, Diana Echeverry, said she was called by the local government one week before the start of the conference asking if they had space for delegates. She removed the love swings and added blankets and coat hangers. “They came and liked it so much they told their friends and colleagues to stay here too,” Echeverry said.

The motel is now housing 12 delegates from Uganda, Nepal, Brazil and Ecuador. Its most extravagant rooms have Jacuzzis, “Kama Sutra” loungers and dance poles, and cost 100,000 pesos (£18) to rent for four hours. Typically, guests drive into a private car park, picking their rooms from a selection of pictures as they enter.

“It’s like a McDonald’s drive-through but for rooms,” says Echeverry. For Cop16, she developed a special nightly rate of about $35 (£27).

The new arrangement has been an adjustment for hotelier and guests. Normally Echeverry does not meet her guests, and passes food, drink and exchanges of money through a cubby hole – but for the delegates she has introduced a breakfast service serving orange juice, coffee, fruit, eggs and Colombian bread. “Every morning each of them tells us how they want their eggs,” she said.

She is enjoying meeting people from other countries. “We’ll do it again,” she says. Her employees are going out of their way to make their stay comfortable. “We give them chocolates and coffee candy in the morning to show they are special to us.”

Baluku said some of his room’s attributes were not ideal for government negotiators: it had no wardrobe space because the average couple is there for just four hours, so his clothes are draped over his bed or hang from the shower screen. He noted that his room did not come with a pole, but some colleagues’ rooms did.

Aggrey Rwetsiba, another Ugandan delegate staying at the motel, said: “I’m not sure whether I’ve got the full understanding of what a motel should be, but I have seen some unique features … like the mirror on the ceiling. I have never seen [that] in a hotel.”

He noted that the lone wall socket was located next to the bed, rather than by the table where he needs to power his laptop.

“So the setup is quite different,” he said.

Overall, however, Baluku said the delegates were happy.

“We are enjoying ourselves here, it’s a nice hotel,” he said, with colleagues commenting that the rooms are “more comfortable” than many traditional hotels.

Cali’s mayor, Alejandro Eder, told reporters this week the city’s hotels were “100%” full. Initial expectations had been for between 12,000 and 15,000 people to attend the Cop16, but there have been closer to 23,000 registered delegates.

Echeverry said there were 40 rooms spread over two floors, but she has put Cop16 delegates on one corridor because noise comes from rooms “all the time” when they are in use.

“We guarantee good rest for our delegates,” she said.

She said that Cop16 had been great for hotels, taxi drivers and artisans in Cali. “We’re not complaining,” she says.

As he works with other delegates to reach international agreements to try to halt the decline of the natural world, Baluku is philosophical about his accommodation. “You have to prepare for such kind of eventualities. The world is changing every other day. Anything can happen.”

A small boy calls out the sights as the train speeds through the Suffolk countryside from London Liverpool Street.

“Tractor. Church. Pigs. Polar bear! Dad! A polar bear!”

The dad doesn’t glance up. “We don’t have polar bears in this country.”

But the boy isn’t dreaming. There they are: four polar bears lumbering across a big green meadow beside a pond, a few miles outside Ipswich.

The arrival of the bears beside the railway line is causing plenty of double-takes from passengers. Sometimes, the bears are announced by the conductor. Occasionally, the driver appears to slow down. It’s only a matter of time before this train is renamed the Polar Express.

Polar bears belong in the frozen Arctic, above 70 degrees north. And yet these magnificent carnivores, one of the largest surviving land mammals on Earth, have been kept in captivity at much hotter latitudes since Egyptian times. King Henry III housed one in the Tower of London. In the 20th century, they became the charismatic inmates of concrete enclosures in flourishing urban zoos. Screaming crowds loved them.

Sean “Diddy” Combs is accused in one of two lawsuits filed on Monday of drugging and sexually assaulting a 10-year-old boy in a New York City hotel room in 2005.

The second lawsuit accuses the jailed hip-hop mogul of similarly assaulting a 17-year-old would-be contestant on the reality television series Making the Band in 2008.

The lawsuits filed in state supreme court in New York are the latest in a wave of lawsuits in which accusers allege they were sexually assaulted by Combs at parties and meetings over the last two decades.

Combs’s lawyers denied the two new claims Monday and accused the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Anthony Buzbee, who also represents accusers in earlier lawsuits, of seeking publicity.

“Mr. Combs and his legal team have full confidence in the facts and the integrity of the judicial process,” an emailed statement said. “In court, the truth will prevail: that Mr. Combs never sexually assaulted or trafficked anyone – man or woman, adult or minor.”

Combs, 54, is incarcerated in a New York City jail after pleading not guilty to federal sex trafficking charges contained in an indictment unsealed the day after his 16 September arrest. Charges include allegations he coerced and abused women and silenced victims through blackmail and violence.

The 10-year-old boy who was not identified in the lawsuit was an aspiring actor and rapper who had traveled with his parents from California for meetings with music industry representatives. During what was supposed to be an audition for Combs, he was given a drug-laced soda by a Combs associate and sexually assaulted by the Bad Boy Records founder, according to the lawsuit.

The boy eventually lost consciousness. When he awoke, Combs threatened to badly hurt the child’s parents if he told anyone what happened, the filing said.

In a second lawsuit, a 17-year-old unidentified male said Combs forced him into sexual acts with Combs and a bodyguard during a three-day audition for the Making the Band television show, which Combs produced.

When the aspiring contestant expressed reservations, he was eliminated from the competition and unable to return to the music industry for seven years, according to the filing.

Both lawsuits were brought under New York City’s Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Act, which allows survivors to bring lawsuits even if the statute of limitations has passed.

Lisette Muratore swam with humpback whales for the first time off the coast of Mo’orea, an island in French Polynesia, as part of a guided tour. She describes the experience as “overwhelming.”

“You have a sudden realisation of the immensity of these creatures … seeing their wild beauty, it’s almost like there’s something sacred about them. When the baby [humpback whale] looked straight into my eyes it felt almost like I was looking at a god.”

A handful of Pacific Islands allow tourists to swim with humpback whales and in recent years, French Polynesia and Tonga have become increasingly popular destinations for this kind of tourism.

The marine mammals, which can grow to around 16m in length and weigh up to 36 tons, travel through the islands’ warm waters every year to give birth, rest and nourish their young before their long migration down to Antarctica.

Whale-watching tourism generates over $2bn in revenue, according to the International Whaling Commission – and the Pacific industry is growing. In French Polynesia, the number of certified whale-based tourism operators rose from 60 in 2023, to 90 in 2024, according to Tahiti Tourism.

But their growth has raised concerns over the potential harm to the animals. In April, a report by French Polynesia’s government said “increasing pressure on whales from human activities poses a considerable risk to these fragile animals.” It said due to the rising number of whale-based tourism operators, “cetaceans can be relentlessly pestered throughout the day.”

In response, French Polynesia plans to introduce new rules to reduce risks to whales, but some in the industry say they don’t go far enough.

“The government just keeps giving new [whale watching] permits,” says Temoana Poole, a founder of whale-based tourism operator WildMā.

Poole says boats in Mo’orea have been increasing year after year – and estimates there are more than 50 working on his island alone. “They need to put a quota on it,” he says.

Guardians of the sea

In Polynesian cultures, humpback whales are sacred animals, often seen as guardians or ancestors. Earlier this year, Indigenous leaders from French Polynesia, New Zealand and other Pacific islands signed a treaty granting whales legal personhood in a combined effort to protect them.

French Polynesia is home to one of the world’s largest marine sanctuaries for whales, and all marine mammals are protected species. The local tourism industry offers whale watching and swimming-with-whales tours. There are rules in place, including that operators must have a permit amd tourists must swim with a certified guide.

In 2025, French Polynesia will tighten some regulations for whale-based tourism. It will introduce a quota, with only three boats permitted to approach a whale at the same time. It will restrict whale-watching operators to one boat for each company, and private boats will have to stay at least 300m away.

But in a move that seems at odds with improving protections, divers will be able to swim closer to whales from next year, when the current limit of 30m from the mammals will be dropped to 15m. The government says the new limit still means swimmers will be a “safe distance” away.

“The reality on the ground shows that at 30m you can’t see much, and the animal often approaches out of curiosity anyway. But it’s still important to keep a safe distance, which we’ve set at 15m,” says Fanny Martre, spokesperson for the environment department.

Dr Mark Orams specialises in marine tourism and studied whale-based tourism in Tonga. He says allowing swimmers to get within 15m of a humpback whale is “dangerous.”

“These whales are 15 metres in length. You get within 15 metres and you are in immediate proximity of their biggest weapon which is their tail … I would be really concerned if there were approaches at that sort of length,” says Dr Orams.

He adds that we probably shouldn’t be swimming with whales – especially not with mothers and their calves. In a study he co-authored, researchers found that swimming with whales had a negative effect on the behaviour of mothers and calves in Tonga.

‘Brings light into the world’

Dr Agnès Benet, marine biologist and founder of the not-for-profit group Mata Tohora, has been campaigning for mandatory “quiet periods” during the day, without any boats or swimmers, to allow marine mammals to rest.

“In the second biggest sanctuary for marine mammals in the world, we might expect to have a period of time without human activity, to fulfil the original purpose of having a ‘sanctuary,’” says Benet.

WildMā’s Poole wants tourists to be sold “whale watching” experiences rather than whale swimming or diving. Getting in the water depends on the conditions being safe for the whales – and if that does happen it’s “the cherry on the cake.”

But experts and locals agree that whale-based tourism can be done ethically and respectfully.

Poole says that a portion of their earnings goes back into funding whale research and conservation, and supporting the local community.

He says when its done properly, whale tourism “brings so much light and love into the world, and to the people.”

Outrage is continuing to mount following the racist anti-Puerto Rican remarks at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York as Democrats, celebrities and even some Republicans condemned the incident.

Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe came under fire for comments made about Latinos and Puerto Rico at the Sunday rally.

“I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” he said, among other controversial remarks.

In the hours following, Democrats and Hispanic groups on both sides of the political aisle have condemned the comments as “offensive” and “derogatory”.

Kamala Harris called the remarks “nonsense” and said: “I think last night, Donald Trump’s event in Madison Square Garden really highlighted a point that I’ve been making throughout this campaign. He is focused and actually fixated on his grievances, on himself and on dividing our country.”

Joe Biden said the rally had been “simply embarrassing” and added: “It’s beneath any president, but that’s what we’re getting used to. That’s why this election is so important.”

Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, born in New York to Puerto Ricans, called out the comments in a series of posts.

“This isn’t the comedy store. You’re using your set to boost neo-Nazis like MTG & stripping women’s rights to the Stone Age. Your ‘sense of humor’ doesn’t change that,” she wrote in one post replying directly to Hinchcliffe defending his comments.

Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, was also unamused by the racist jokes.

“People in Puerto Rico are citizens. They pay tax and they serve in the military at almost a higher rate than anybody else,” he said on a Twitch livestream with AOC.

In addition to being immediately criticized by the Harris campaign, the comments drew angry responses from prominent Puerto Rican Republicans including Angel Cintron, the head of the Republican party on the island.

Republican congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, who represents parts of Miami and has participated in recent Trump events, criticized the remarks on X, writing: “Disgusted by @TonyHinchcliffe’s racist comment calling Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage.’ This rhetoric does not reflect GOP values. Puerto Rico sent 48,000+ soldiers to Vietnam, with over 345 Purple Hearts awarded. This bravery deserves respect. Educate yourself!”

Rick Scott, a Republican senator from Florida, also used X to call out the comedian.

“This joke bombed for a reason. It’s not funny and it’s not true. Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans!” he wrote in a post.

Peter Navarro, a former Trump administration official and loyal supporter, opted for more colorful language: “@tonyhinchcliffe must be the biggest, stupidest asshole that ever came down the comedy pike,” he wrote on X.

Trump’s team is scrambling to contain the backlash. Campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in an interview on Fox News that Hinchcliffe made a “joke in poor taste”, but also suggested that the incident was being overblown.

“This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” Danielle Alvarez, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said in a statement.

But the criticism continues outside politics. Puerto Rican music stars Bad Bunny and Ricky Martin announced their endorsement of Kamala Harris following the Trump rally. Martin wrote in a post to his 18 million followers on Instagram: “This is what they think of us. Vote for @kamalaharris.”

Several political action committees have seized the moment as an opportunity to grow support for the Harris campaign.

Nuestro Pac, a Democratic Super Pac focused on Latinos, began sending texts on Monday after raising $30,000 to text all Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania following the Trump rally, the Washington Post reports.