Anthony Joshua suffered a shocking knockout loss to Daniel Dubois, his far less celebrated British rival, on an extraordinary night at Wembley Stadium. It was a crushing defeat for Joshua who was knocked down in the first round and then utterly dominated and sent repeatedly to the canvas. The brutal end was finally sealed in the fifth round when, just as Joshua tried to turn the tide of a one-sided beating, Dubois landed two shattering right hands which resulted in a conclusive stoppage.

Even though Dubois was the nominal IBF world heavyweight champion, he walked to the ring first in a clear sign that he was meant to play a supporting role to the Joshua Show in front of 96,000 fans. Dubois had never experienced such a searing atmosphere before but he looked composed and determined as he climbed through the ropes. But he had a long wait before his more exalted rival joined him.

A Joshua fight entrance is always overblown and makes some of us yearn for those long-lost nights when Mike Tyson, shirtless and in black trunks, walked menacingly and silently on his own to the ring. Dubois would soon replicate the bad intentions and percussive force which once personified Tyson.

At least Joshua looked concentrated but the laboured prelude dragged on through the anthems and ritual introductions. Dubois was booed while Joshua was cheered deliriously before, finally, they were alone in the ring. An astonishing fight was about to unfold.

Dubois was the early aggressor and he stalked Joshua. He looked confident and full of intent as he backed up Joshua. Dubois was warned for excessive use of his head but his fists presented the most serious danger. A huge overhand right nailed Joshua, dropping him heavily near the end of the first round.

The contest changed in that shattering moment as Joshua looked badly dazed, even though he was saved by the bell.

Joshua was reeling early in the second as Dubois pressured him with ferocious force. A worried and sickly expression was etched across Joshua’s face and he was again hurt by a right and a clubbing left. Dubois soon caught him again and an anxious hum spread through the stunned crowd.

As they came out for the third Joshua tried to change the pattern of the fight behind his jab. His supporters also attempted to rouse him after such a rocky opening but then Dubois landed another monstrous left hand. Joshua wobbled and tottered against the ropes. He again needed to be rescued by the bell.

Joshua was dropped again early in the fourth round as a scything left sent him tumbling to the canvas. It seemed as if the referee was about to wave the fight over even though Joshua beat his chest in sad and lonely defiance.

They were allowed to continue and the slow, pitiless beating continued as Joshua absorbed yet more punishment.

The decisive round showed the courage of a former champion. Joshua rallied, briefly, and he hurt Dubois for the first time as he landed a jolting right which rocked the younger man. But facing that desperate burst of fire, Dubois responded with clinical authority. He landed successive heavy right hands which left Joshua a crumpled and broken figure on the canvas.

Despair for Joshua and his backers was swamped by elation for Dubois, who can finally claim that he became a world champion in the ring as he retained the IBF title which had been gifted to him three months ago with this stunning victory. The real king of the division remains Oleksandr Usyk who, four months ago, became the first undisputed world heavyweight champion of the 21st century when he won the IBF, WBA, WBC and WBO belts in a riveting contest against Tyson Fury.

But, in a typically shameless act of boxing chicanery, the IBF soon stripped Usyk of its title because he was already contracted to fight Fury again in December and unable to box their mandatory contender first. The IBF handed its championship as a present to Dubois, whom Usyk defeated last August, and set up his first defence against Joshua.

But Dubois deserves to savour the sweetness of his remarkable victory while, in contrast, the 34-year-old Joshua will be devastated. His admirable but flawed career is now much closer to ending after he was beaten so violently by a hungry fighter who is seven years younger than him.

Wembley had once belonged, in boxing terms, to Joshua, but this is a hard and unforgiving business. Dubois was simply too strong, too fresh and far too powerful for a lost and fallen champion.

The last time I met Evgenia Kara-Murza, it was a grim day in early March. The timing couldn’t have been worse. As we spoke, Alexei Navalny’s coffin was being lowered into the frozen ground in a Moscow cemetery. Meanwhile Evgenia’s husband, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was still incarcerated in a Siberian prison cell almost identical to the one in the Arctic Circle in which Navalny had been found dead, presumed murdered.

The parallels were eerie. Because Vladimir, a journalist turned political activist, was not just also loathed and feared by the Kremlin and imprisoned on spurious charges, he’d also been poisoned – twice – targeted by the same FSB (Federal Security Service) unit that had poisoned Navalny.

The prospects were so grim and the news from Russia and Ukraine so unrelentingly depressing, it feels almost unimaginably miraculous six months later to see Evgenia walk into the lobby of a London hotel, this time with Vladimir right next to her. Six weeks ago, he was in a Siberian gulag. Today, he’s a free man on a trip to London with his wife and their youngest son, nine-year-old Daniel, the result of the largest prisoner exchange between Russian and the west since the cold war.

I find myself suddenly overwhelmed by the sight of them together so I can’t begin to imagine how Evgenia is feeling. “I cry all the time,” she says. “And I make other people cry. Just when I speak, people start crying in the audience. I just seem to have that effect on people.” She’d been so exasperated when we’d last met, fresh from a meeting she’d waited two years to get with the foreign secretary with the steely demeanour of a woman who can’t afford to give up.

“There has been so much emotional trauma. I mean, let alone the fact that Vladimir was in prison in those horrible conditions and solitary confinement in Western Siberia, but I also had to deal with people who couldn’t really understand this. It’s so difficult for a person living in a normal democratic country to grasp what political repression is in the 21st century. They just couldn’t get it.”

But then, it is difficult to grasp. What’s disorienting about Vladimir’s descriptions of the Siberian gulag is how familiar it is from the works of Solzhenitsyn and other writers of the Stalinist era – though for Kara-Murza, who studied history at Cambridge, this was a source of both incredulity and solace.

“I’m a historian, and one of the biggest areas of study has always been the Soviet dissidents. I made films about it. I’ve written about it extensively. I’ve known many of these people. And it’s sometimes said that every historian subconsciously dreams of personally experiencing the area of his or her study. If that’s true, you know, I’ve got my wish fully.

“I felt like I was living inside these books because it’s astonishing and shocking, and, frankly, very sad how, all these decades later, nothing has changed. Even the minutest details of what a prison cell is like, how the walk is organised, how prison guards speak to you, how the prison transportation works, everything is exactly the same.”

Though it was his knowledge of the system, gained from these Soviet memoirs, that enabled him to navigate the system. “I knew the rules. These Siberian prisons are notorious even by the standards of the Russian system for having rules for everything, every minute of every day, but I also knew that I had the right to these books, to the prison library, so they had to give them to me.”

For Evgenia too, there were models from the past. When her husband heaps praise on “this amazing woman” who helped keep his fate in the mind of western politicians, he compares her to the “Decembrist wives” of the early 19th century who followed their husbands to Siberia. But the shock of his sudden change in circumstances, and of the luck that ran out for Navalny who was intended to be part of the exchange, still hasn’t sunk in.

For his close friend, Bill Browder, the businessman and anti-corruption campaigner who lobbied tirelessly for Kara-Murza’s release, it’s “been such a gift. I was sure he was going to die in custody”. As did Kara-Murza.

“I was convinced I was going to die in prison. Sitting here, with you, a few hundred yards from the Palace of Westminster, it feels completely and utterly surreal. It’s too much. It’s too fast for the human mind to process. I’m sort of watching this film since the end of July. It’s a wonderful film, but it still doesn’t feel real.” He talks about how, as he was taxiing down the runway of Vnukovo airport, the FSB agent sitting next to him told him to look out of the window because it would be the last time he’d see his country. “I just laughed in his face and said, ‘Look man, I’m a historian. I don’t only think, I don’t only believe, I know I will be back home and it’s going to be much quicker than you imagine.’”

Most people he met in the Russian prison system, “the police officers, prison officials, judges, prosecutors, they don’t believe in anything”. Most are not pathological sadists, he says, they were just doing a job. “But the Alpha Group, the FSB special unit that was escorting us, I saw ideological hatred. They believe in this stuff and that’s even scarier.”

Kara-Murza’s grasp of history underpins his certainty that Putin’s regime will collapse – quickly and without warning. “That’s how things happen in Russia. Both the Romanov empire in the early 20th century, and the Soviet regime at the end of the 20th century collapsed in three days. That’s not a metaphor, it was literally three days in both cases.” He believes passionately that the best chance of a free and democratic Russia and peace in Europe rests on Russia’s defeat in Ukraine.

“A lost war of aggression” has been the country’s greatest driver of political change, he says. Though it’s not just the Russian people, in his view, who need to take collective responsibility but western leaders too, who “for all these years were buying gas from Putin, inviting him to international summits, rolling out red carpets”.

He tells me he thinks the truth will out. “These guys keep meticulous records. When the end comes – and it will – the archives will open, we will find out about Trump and Marine Le Pen and your British guys too.”

Sitting in London, the money and reputation-laundering centre of Putin’s empire, he laughs when I mention one of the more notorious figures of British political patronage, Evgeny Lebedev, the proprietor of the Independent and Evening Standard, son of KGB lieutenant colonel Alexander Lebedev.

“Is that the guy who’s Baron of Siberia?” he says. “I should meet him. I guess he represents me?”

Siberia, the land of Soviet-style gulags and British lords and one delighted former political prisoner walking out into the London sunshine with his wife and son, a small flickering light from the heart of Putin’s darkness.

At the beginning of 2000 I moved to Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand to study midwifery. I had been a volunteer firefighter before, so I decided to live in my old hometown of Lyttelton while I was studying so I could join their local fire brigade.

It had been more than 10 years since I had lived there but not much had changed. It still had that small-town vibe where everyone knew each other. I fronted up for training night at the brigade and recognised quite a few faces, still the same, just a bit older. There was a very tall, handsome young guy standing at the back who I recognised as Grant. He looked very shy and serious but when he smiled it was like turning a light on. His mum and my mum had been friends when we were younger, but we didn’t hang out in the same circles; I was seven years older than him and we went to different schools.

I had been in the brigade for a few months when we had a function at the fire station and, with the courage of a few drinks in me, I danced with Grant to Neil Diamond’s Forever in Blue Jeans. By the end of the night, I was a bit wobbly on my feet and he did the gentlemanly thing and escorted me home.

A couple of days later he called and invited me to go to the movies with him. He later said it took many attempts at picking up the phone and putting it down before he managed to make the call (this was back in the days of telephones with handsets).

The date was “nice”, not earth-shattering and I could tell he was nervous, but I could sense the attraction between us. We went to a Bruce Willis film, The Whole Nine Yards, which was a good choice because I’m a fan of his action movies. (Several years later I bought a DVD of the movie as an anniversary present.)

I was 32 and a single mum with a seven-year-old son. I had no plans to settle down – I had goals and plans for a future that did not include marriage and more children, and truly believed that ship had sailed. Grant was 25, had just returned from a trip overseas and was taking off again. Like me, he had no intention of settling down any time soon.

On our second date, Grant included my son, Jesse, and took us ice-skating. It was Jesse’s first time at an ice-skating rink and Grant held Jesse’s hands while skating backwards so he could guide Jesse along the ice while everyone else zoomed around them. Grant was calm and considerate and made Jesse feel important and safe, which absolutely melted my heart.

It was such a weird feeling. I had never considered getting married, but in that instant, watching him patiently teaching my boy how to skate, all I knew was that Grant was a genuinely good man and I didn’t want to let him get away. He was the one.

The next day friends asked how the date went. I surprised them – and myself – when I said: “I’m going to marry him and have his children.”

Six weeks later we were engaged, and nine months after that we married under a huge kahikatea tree in February on the hottest day of the year, with my son as my best man, and our friends, family and dogs gathered together. The band played a Neil Diamond song for our first dance together as husband and wife.

Soon after that, we bought our first house. I marvelled at how much Grant’s life had changed in one short year. He had gone from being a young, single guy with a two-seater sports car to having a wife, a young son, a mortgage … and a baby on the way. I always said it’s lucky he has big shoulders because that was a lot to carry!

We have built a chaotic, beautiful life together through the hard times and the good. We have six amazing children, lots of animals and live in a beautiful part of Aotearoa New Zealand. Twenty-four years later, his smile still lights up my world. He will always be “the one” – and we still dance together to Neil Diamond.

The Israeli military says it has launched airstrikes on hundreds of targets in southern Lebanon, as Hezbollah launched its deepest rocket attacks into Israel since the start of the Gaza war, fuelling fears of a wider conflict.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Saturday night it launched two wave of attacks – one attacking about 290 targets, and a second targeting 110 sites – across southern Lebanon as sirens warning of Hezbollah rocket attacks sounded in dozens of towns across northern Israel.

About 10 rockets are believed to crossed over from Lebanon, with most intercepted, the IDF said. Israel’s emergency medical services reported that a man was lightly wounded by shrapnel from a missile that was intercepted in a village in the lower Galilee.

Hezbollah posted on its Telegram channel early on Sunday morning that it had targeted the Israeli Ramat David airbase near Haifa with dozens of missiles in response to what it described as “repeated Israeli attacks on Lebanon”.

The airbase is the furthest target the Lebanese group has hit in Israel since the beginning of fighting in October, about 50km from the Lebanon-Israel border.

Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant delivered a speech at the Ramat David airbase on Wednesday, telling air force personnel that Israel’s war with Hezbollah had reached a “new phase”. He also praised the army’s Mossad intelligence agency for its “excellent achievements” in the region, just hours after a wave of attacks struck Lebanon, striking walkie-talkies commonly held by Hezbollah members. Wednesday’s attack, in addition to a previous operation targeting pagers, left 42 dead and more than 3,000 wounded. Israel is presumed to be behind the operation, though it has not officially claimed responsibility.

In July, Hezbollah released footage filmed by a drone over the city of Haifa that highlighted Ramat David airbase, as part of an almost 10-minute long video marking military infrastructure in the densely populated city in northern Israel.

On Saturday, Israel closed its northern airspace as it awaited Hezbollah retaliation for the assassination of Ibrahim Aqil, a veteran commander of the elite Radwan unit, along with more than a dozen other militants.

Three children and seven women were among 37 people killed by the Israeli strike on Beirut on Friday that targeted the top Hezbollah leader in a densely populated neighbourhood, Lebanese authorities have said.

US and UN officials have warned against further escalation, with airlines including Air France, Turkish Airlines and Aegean cancelling flights to Beirut, reflecting fears that a tumultuous week had pushed the region closer to full-blown war.

Israel has not visibly slowed its war in Gaza to focus on the north. On Saturday its forces bombed a school turned shelter, killing at least 22 and injuring 30 others, mostly women and children, the Gaza health ministry said. Israel’s military said the target was a Hamas base inside the school, without providing details or evidence.

Last week, however, Israel said it was expanding its strategic aims for the Gaza war to include returning 60,0000 evacuated residents of northern Israel to their homes, which are regularly targeted by Hezbollah. It then unleashed a series of unprecedented attacks on the group.

The US state department on Saturday urged Americans in Lebanon to leave. “Due to the unpredictable nature of ongoing conflict between Hezbollah and Israel and recent explosions throughout Lebanon, including Beirut, the US embassy urges US citizens to depart Lebanon while commercial options still remain available,” it said in an updated advisory. “At this time, commercial flights are available, but at reduced capacity. If the security situation worsens, commercial options to depart may become unavailable,” it added.

In late July, the US raised its travel advisory for Lebanon to its highest “do not travel” classification, after a strike on southern Beirut killed a Hezbollah commander.

Hezbollah began launching attacks in support of its ally Hamas after 7 October, and has indicated it will stop targeting Israel when the Gaza Strip offensive stops, unless Israel continues shelling Lebanon.

Months of missile, rocket and drone hits have killed at least 23 soldiers and 26 civilians, and in effect turned Israel’s border regions near Lebanon into a strategic buffer zone, too dangerous for ordinary life.

Inside Lebanon, more than 500 people have been killed by Israeli strikes, most of them fighters with Hezbollah and other armed groups, but also more than 100 civilians.

Israel has not visibly slowed its war in Gaza to focus on the north. On Saturday its forces bombed a school turned shelter, killing at least 22 and injuring 30 others, mostly women and children, the Gaza health ministry said. Israel’s military said the target was a Hamas base inside the school, without providing details or evidence.

With Agence France-Presse and Associated Press

Independent MPs and a crossbench senator are trying to increase the pressure on the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, to remove Howard-era exemptions that allow native forest logging to operate outside national environment laws.

The government has been negotiating over reforms to the laws in the Senate, where Greens and crossbenchers David Pocock and Lidia Thorpe have been pushing for an end to the exemptions for logging covered by regional forest agreements.

The independent MP for Mackellar in New South Wales, Dr Sophie Scamps, wrote to Albanese on Thursday urging him to remove the exemptions, saying without that step it would be “difficult to credibly say that your government has kept your promise” to fix broken environment laws.

Co-signatories to the letter, seen by Guardian Australia, were Allegra Spender, Zali Steggall, Zoe Daniel, Monique Ryan, Kylea Tink, Kate Chaney and Thorpe.

Two years ago the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said it was “time to change” laws that did not protect the environment and said new legislation could be introduced in 2023.

The government has since ruled out introducing the new laws in this term of government, but is trying to bring in legislation to create an independent environment agency. The powers and role of the agency are under negotiation in the Senate.

Scamps said: “It’s a critical time in these negotiations and we have been putting pressure on from the House and have moved amendments to have these RFAs abolished and we continue to apply pressure.”

She said the RFAs were signed by John Howard, adding: “The problem is we have a completely different context nearly 25 years later. We’re facing a climate crisis, an extinction crisis and an environment crisis. This needs to be addressed.”

Logging under the agreements is not assessed under environment laws geared to protect threatened species such as the koala and greater glider.

Scamps said forests were being logged for low-level products such as palettes and garden stakes while damaging critical habitat for threatened species.

In NSW, the state’s land court this year said the Forestry Corporation of NSW had a “pattern of environmental offending” with a “significant history of unlawfully carrying out forestry operations”.

Victoria and Western Australia ended native forest logging in January. Native forest logging will end across 70,000 hectares of state forest in south-east Queensland at the end of this year.

Questions to Albanese’s office were sent to the office of Plibersek, who said in a statement the government was “doing more than ever to protect our country’s natural treasures and iconic native plants and animals”.

She did not comment on the forestry agreements but encouraged the crossbench to support the government’s legislation before the Senate.

She said this would establish an independent environment protection agency that could “issue ‘stop-work’ orders to prevent serious environmental damage and proactively audit business to ensure they’re doing the right thing”.

Traffic came to a standstill on Saturday afternoon in Milan as Madonna arrived at Dolce & Gabbana fashion week show. Widely rumoured to be a front-row guest, the singer was the last to arrive at the brand’s HQ, prompting a spontaneous standing ovation from the 1,000-strong crowd.

A long-term friend of designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana and ambassador for their brand since the early 1990s, Madonna was dressed in a head-to-toe black lace look from the brand’s last collection and wore a gold crown atop a black Chantilly lace veil as she chatted with her front-row neighbours before the show began.

The show itself, called Italian Beauty, was a dedication to Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition tour wardrobe, designed by Jean Paul Gaultier, and the titular theme.

Descending from a penthouse-style staircase, each model sported the conical bra bustier that Madonna wore during the tour and blond corkscrew-curl wigs reminiscent of the style she sported at the time and documented in the fly-on-the-wall documentary In Bed with Madonna. They were joined by pencil dresses with corset and suspender detailing; sheer lace overlays revealing more conical bras and big pants; and black and pinstripe tailoring that all featured in the music video for Vogue.

As the designers took their final bow, they made the unusual decision to walk the catwalk in search of their front-row muse who stood to receive kisses on her hands and more applause from the crowd.

It was not the first time that Dolce & Gabbana had dedicated a collection inspired by the platinum artist. In 2000, they presented their spring/summer 2001 collection entitled Madonna, Gli Anni Ottanta, preceded by the costumes they designed for her The Girlie Show tour in 1992.

“Madonna has always been our icon. It’s thanks to her that a lot of things in our lives changed,” the designers wrote in the show notes.

Jason Hughes, fashion and creative director of Wallpaper* magazine, said after the show: “Madonna has always engaged in her Italian American heritage long before she became Madonna the pop star and she has a long history with Dolce & Gabbana. They are a match made in heaven – think of their shared 1990s notoriety relating to religious iconography, sex appeal and female power. The Blonde Ambition era was Madonna at the height of her fame and power when she was the biggest superstar on the planet and in the newspapers every day. It’s hard when you’re working at that level to accept and understand how important it is what one has done, but now she can. This feels like her accepting how major it was.”

The Observer understands that Gaultier was not involved with the concept or realisation of the collection with the brand, and that the show was a homage to Madonna and the theme. Gaultier, who the Observer is in the process of trying to contact, continues to collaborate with Madonna.

Last June, it was reported that the designer was working on an animated feature directed by Benoît Philippon in which Madonna is to star, so one might assume that this collection has his blessing.

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) has generated fear and hatred. Seen as a danger to livestock and people, the once widespread predator was nearly completely eradicated from western Europe and most of the contiguous US in the 19th and 20th centuries. Pro- and anti-wolf groups now duel over how the species should be managed as populations have rebounded in places over the past few decades. American wildlife biologist Diane Boyd, 69, has spent 40 years studying the recovery of wild wolf populations in remote north-western Montana and Glacier national park. When she started in the late 1970s on the University of Montana’s Wolf Ecology Project (WEP) – which she later co-led – she was the only female biologist in the US trapping, radio-collaring and following their trails through the snow for research. Boyd’s new memoir, A Woman Among Wolves, charts her life’s work with the animals and looks at the challenges of wolf management across the world today.

What is it about wolves that drew you in?
I grew up in Minnesota, the only state in the lower 48, along with a tiny part of Michigan, where wolves hadn’t been completely extirpated. They were denizens of the wilderness that nobody saw and that fascinated me. They are clever, beautiful and interesting animals. The parallels between wolf and human society are intriguing – like us, they are social, live in family groups and defend their homes. I have also always been a dog person: a dog is kind of a dumbed down version of a wolf.

The successful reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone national park and central Idaho in 1995 is celebrated as a great wildlife conservation achievement. But what is the untold story?
That wolf recovery has been natural, too. Americans, along with the rest of the world, tend to think of wolves as all reintroduced and that reintroduction is the only way they become re-established: that is wrong. About 15 years prior to the Yellowstone and Idaho reintroductions, and just a few years after they had received federal endangered species status [granted in 1974], they walked down from Canada into north-western Montana and Glacier national park without any help or fanfare. And they began to filter out. The approximately 3,000 wild wolves in the western US today are, in part, because of that natural recolonisation.

Is reintroduction worthwhile, or should we let wolves just return naturally?
It is complicated. The advantage of reintroduction is it jump starts the process. The disadvantage is that wolves that are reintroduced can be resented by people: they’re not seen as native or natural any more, which leads to potentially less tolerance and therefore longevity for them.

An amazing piece of the wolf recovery puzzle is how, enabled by legal protection, wolves have so successfully recolonised western Europe on their own (nowhere in Europe has there been any reintroductions), squeezing into human-dominated landscapes and surviving. Germany, Denmark and even the heavily farmed Netherlands have all become home.

How would a typical year studying the wolves unfold?
Summer was trapping and radio-collaring. It is your classic, ugly, cold, steel foothold trap and it holds the animal against their will by their paw. The chance of success is low but you persist. I rebuilt the traps with modified parts to make them more humane and selective for wolves and we checked them often to minimise the time an animal was held. To fit the radio-collar, we would first tranquilise the wolf – I had a custom-made jab stick – and then wait nearby until it woke up.

Winter was tracking our animals with radio telemetry gear – both from the air (we hired a plane and skilled pilot) and from the ground on skis or snowmobiles. Following a wolf’s tracks in the snow is like reading a story. You can see where they stopped to sniff and pee, where they chased an animal and you learn their travel routes. We would also investigate wolf kills – skiing in after they left to determine what they had taken and its condition.

In spring, wolves den and we didn’t bug them.

You’ve had some hair-raising encounters with all sorts of wild animals. Have you ever been bitten?
I came close with an adolescent wolf we named Ice. We caught her on a cold rainy day and she was hypothermic. We drugged her and a colleague and I lay her on our laps in the front seat of our truck with the heater and our bodies trying to warm her up. As her temperature normalised, I turned the heater down and, though the rest of her was completely still, her ear swivelled in the direction of the click. I thought: “Oh my God, this wolf is fully awake.” I indicated silently to another colleague outside the truck to open the door. What happened next was a whirlwind: she leapt to her feet on top us. I grabbed her by the scruff and directed her snout away as she bit at the steering wheel and the air. My colleague pushed her rump and I fell out of the truck hanging on to her. We landed; she jumped up and ran away. All in the day of a life of a wolf biologist!

The Wolf Ecology Project ran over 15 years until 1995. What did it reveal about wolves that was new?
One of our most surprising findings, which hadn’t been documented before – there weren’t GPS collars then – was the distance wolves can travel: easily hundreds of miles within months. We would often get radio-collars returned from animals that had been shot huge distances away from their last signal or there would be a faraway sighting of a collared wolf. Our longest dispersal, Wolf 8551, was killed having travelled a straight-line distance of 540 miles north into Canada.

What does the future hold for wolves in the US and beyond? The species has been delisted as endangered in parts of the west – Montana, Idaho and Wyoming – and state-managed hunting outside of national parks is now allowed there. Meanwhile, the EU is undertaking a review of wolves conservation status after growing complaints from farmers whose livestock has become prey.
Those US states are required to maintain a population of 150 animals, but no more. And the new hunting laws they have adopted in the past few years are horribly archaic and torturous – allowing for wolves to be taken by virtually any method. In Europe, wolves have been well tolerated, but that has its limits. Wolves are resilient but ultimately their fate is up to us: they exist in the landscape at our whim. I hope we continue to protect them in enough areas that they will always be here.

A company that sells cleaning products is giving customers some surprising advice: wash your clothes less.

Ecover is calling for a change in our laundry habits after research found people felt under societal pressure to wash their clothes more frequently, and were unaware that this could damage the environment.

The brand, in partnership with Falmouth University, is publishing a report this week into the impact of laundry on the environment. The researchers found that 18% of the 2,000 Britons interviewed for the report in August believed – wrongly – that washing less frequently would not affect the planet. One in 10 feel pressure to do laundry more frequently.

The report also found that 75% of participants in recent studies mentioned fear of judgment from others for wearing the same clothes multiple days in a row.

Model and environmental activist Lily Cole, who will chair a panel discussion on the findings in London this week, said she had experienced this. “The attitude has changed in recent years, but I was in the sidebar of shame a few times for wearing the same look on the red carpet,” she said.

“Back then it was seen as a faux pas. Celebrity culture is often an extreme version of what we’re seeing in culture in general: the values, the shaming, the conversation around cleanliness.”

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the number of wash loads in the UK increased by 9.6% from 6.2bn to 6.8bn between 2005 and 2014. By 2016, the ONS estimated that each household was responsible for 260 wash loads a year.

Pollution from detergent causes serious risks to flora and fauna and natural ecosystems. Changes to the textiles used to make modern clothes have exacerbated the problem – washing clothes made from synthetic fabrics accounts for about 8% of the microplastics released into our water. Microfibre shedding during washes decreases over time, but if “fast fashion” clothes are poorly made and quickly discarded, new clothes are constantly being added to the cycle.

Dr Cui Su, from the school of communication, Falmouth University, who worked on the report said: “For decades, our relationship with laundry has been shaped by powerful cultural forces and advertising that have conditioned us to believe that ‘perfectly clean’ is the only acceptable standard. From the smell of freshly washed clothes to the crispness of fabrics, cleanliness has been presented not just as a necessity, but as a reflection of success.”

In more recent years, influencers have also helped to shape our laundry habits – the hashtag #cleanwithme has 648.4k posts on TikTok and #cleaningobsessed has 162k posts on Instagram. But clean clothes and a large wardrobe of appropriate outfits have a long association with social standing.

Katherine Ashenburg, author of the book Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing, says: “In the 17th and 18th centuries – among the dirtiest centuries in the west – people, including doctors, believed that changing your linen shirt frequently was a safer and more effective way of removing dirt than washing your body with soap and water. Louis XIV bathed twice in his long life, but he was considered very clean because he changed his shirt several times a day.”

Cole – who said she was wearing the same T-shirt for the second day running for her interview – added: “My mum, who grew up on a mountain in southern Wales without electricity, tells me her mother would spend a whole day handwashing their clothes each week. I must admit I love having a washing machine. But there’s a bigger message here of a mindset towards the things that we own, taking care of them and making investments.

“Build a long-term relationship with clothes and think about the way you wash them, how you repair them and if you can pass them on or donate them if it’s not something you can wear for a long time.”