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Shells record West Antarctic glacier retreat
'You helmets, get a life!': Celebrating 25 years of the Dunwich Dynamo
To celebrate the anniversary of the annual 116 mile night ride, here’s how the night unfolded for one distinctly average rider
It was the 25th Dunwich Dynamo this weekend, and the fifth ridden by your correspondent.
Starting from a park in Hackney, the Dynamo is a madcap 116-ish mile dash from London through the night to the sea-covered remains of a medieval town that was once its rival.
Police tactics at fracking protests need urgent review, says MEP
Call for review follows repeated allegations of violence and excessive force by police and security staff at UK sites
Repeated allegations of excessive force by police and security staff against protesters at oil and gas fracking sites across the country have led to a call for an urgent review of police tactics.
Lancashire police are investigating an allegation of assault by a security official at the Cuadrilla site at Preston New Road in Lancashire. At other protest sites – including Surrey and Derbyshire – demonstrators have made complaints about the alleged heavy-handedness of police officers.
Continue reading...Fido's family tree – in pictures
A new series on Sky 1 traces the ancestry and evolution of the 500 million domesticated dogs worldwide, with biologist Patrick Aryee introducing some of the 36 wild species. Dogs: An Amazing Animal Family airs on Thursdays from 13 to 27 July.
All photographs: Offspring Films
Continue reading...Conservatives are again denying the very existence of global warming | Dana Nuccitelli
The best efforts to undermine the established climate science behind the Endangerment Finding are pathetically bad
As we well know, climate myths are like zombies that never seem to die. It’s only a matter of time before they rise from the dead and threaten to eat our brains. And so here we go again – American conservatives are denying the very existence of global warming.
Continue reading...Adani's Carmichael's short operating plan avoids expected legal obligation of $1bn environment bond
Plan details no mining or construction or resulting land disturbance, which would trigger government demand for rehabilitation assurance
Adani has kept an operating plan for its unfunded Queensland mine to just six months, postponing an expected legal obligation to provide a billion-dollar rehabilitation bond before financial backing emerges.
The miner has provided the state government with a plan that covers only up to the end of 2017, which falls before its deadline for securing US$2.5bn in financial backing to execute the first phase of Australia’s largest proposed coal project.
Continue reading...Gorgeous goats – in pictures
Meet Ben, Bella, Sherlock and Sydney – the elegant goats turned into portraits by Kevin Horan. As the American photographer explains, he just treated them ‘like customers in a small-town photo studio’
Continue reading...The Southern Highlands Shale Forest and Woodland of the Sydney Basin Bioregion
Can Elon Musk’s battery storage plant smash Australia’s gas cartel?
Know your NEM: Turnbull, Tesla and falling energy prices
Between two shires – a world of difference
Moonshine Gap, Cambridgeshire I watch a bird, listen to its dainty movements, then walk over into Northamptonshire, into the wood and signs of rural mischief
Moonshine Gap: what does that name say? When I saw it on the map it said something probably over-romantic, definitely nefarious, the sort of feature found in literature of the Kentucky backwoods. Or older, when the transit of and sightlines to stellar objects were watched, noted and sometimes immortalised. Seemed a stretch for this place.
Gap is like col or pass, a place where the ground gives to allow a way between this place and that. All are mountain words, so a strange find in this flat place. This “gap” marks a straddle between Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, so maybe that’s why. It’s not new: there it is on the 1889 map, attached to a wedge of wood amid crackle-glaze fields.
Continue reading...Community retailer Enova lifts solar tariff to 16c/kWh
It’s economics, stupid! Days of “baseload only” power over
Investors pour $1.5bn into Australian solar and wind energy in Q2
$60M FNQ biorefinery to create 130 jobs
Explainer: What the Tesla big battery can and cannot do
Record half year for rooftop solar after another bumper month
If Volvo wanted to be revolutionary, it would drop diesel altogether
PV plant built on nuke site as renewables surpass nuclear
Impressionist view of midsummer flowers: Country diary 100 years ago
Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 12 July 1917
Along the grassy cuttings of the railway line between Carlisle and Kilmarnock the midsummer flowers are rampant. One would like to have a free pass to investigate the flora of railway cuttings. Many are the tales one hears of the uncommon plants which turn up in such situations, but, in whirling past, one can get only an impressionist view. To-day the prevailing colour was a brilliant and beautiful lilac-blue, that of the tufted vetch (Vicia cracca) whose long-spikes of pea-shaped flowers made “little heavens” for many miles. In some places they had begun to mow the grass along the cuttings, and the farmers will be glad of this vetch, which makes a much-prized sweet food for cattle.
Related: How to access the Guardian and Observer digital archive
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