The Guardian

First Nations lobby group will support remote communities looking to make transition – and tackle climate change

Like so many of the Indigenous communities dotted across the Australian continent, the remote communities in north-west New South Wales are struggling. “These are not happy places,” says the Euahlayi elder Ghillar Michael Anderson.

Many of the 300 or so residents of Anderson’s hometown of Goodooga rely on welfare, he says. Exorbitant electricity bills – up to $3,000 a quarter for some households – further exacerbate the poverty. “We’re always at the end of the power line, so the service that is there is quite extraordinary in terms of cost.”

A tunnel under construction beneath a Norwegian mountain is just one link in a new grid that will cross national borders

More than 2km down a dark tunnel deep inside a Norwegian mountain, a drilling machine is boring out holes in the rock. It’s part of a major project that will connect Britain to Norway’s huge hydroelectric power supplies, passing power lines through the mountain near Kvilldal, southwest Norway, before laying the world’s longest undersea power cable, 450km long, to Blyth in Northumberland.

It will take years to build, but when it is completed, the UK could import 1,400 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 750,000 homes. It will also allow Britain to export any surplus wind energy back to Norway.

Trump’s ‘America First’ proposal would cut funding by nearly a third to the Environmental Protection Agency, which is ‘already on a starvation diet’

Dozens of programs that deal with climate change, pollution clean-ups and energy efficiency would be wiped out by by the Trump administration’s budget, which seeks to demolish parts of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The regulator’s funding would be cut by nearly a third under Trump’s “America First” budget proposal (the name borrows from a phrase denounced by the Anti-Defamation League for its links to 1940s Nazi sympathisers), which requests $5.7bn for the EPA in 2018 – a $2.6bn cut, or 31%, on its existing budget. Around one in five EPA employees would lose their jobs.

Magistrates told that Phillip Cullen was spotted chasing large blues at Daneway Banks in Gloucestershire

A man used a child’s net to illegally capture specimens of Britain’s rarest butterfly, the large blue, magistrates have been told.

Phillip Cullen, 57, was allegedly spotted chasing the large blue at a nature reserve in Gloucestershire and was seen the next day at another location for the butterfly in Somerset.

The Guardian’s picture editors bring you a selection of photo highlights from around the world, including a cunning flower mimic and a twinkly night

The famous bird has rebounded across America, but many fear that progress is threatened by lead ammunition that ends up in carrion the eagles eat

His head twisted almost upside down and his body all but paralyzed, the bald eagle sat on its haunches, talons clenching, while two humans neared to put him in a cage. They could not save the bird from lead.

The eagle was the third this year to die from lead poisoning at the Blue Mountain Wildlife center, in north-east Oregon, where Lynn Tompkins has helped rehabilitate sick and injured birds for 30 years. “They eat things that have been shot,” Tompkins said, “whether it’s big game like deer or elk or coyotes or ground squirrels.”

Orphaned at a few months old and nursed back to health by a local wildlife centre, Paichit’s story has serious implications for critically endangered Sumatran elephants

Pushing on 400 kilograms, baby Paichit knows when it’s feeding time.

He lets out an appreciative bellow, a rumbling baby elephant purr from his patch in the Sumatran jungle, as soon as his mahout (keeper) Julkarnaini approaches bucket in hand.

More than 800,000 songbirds were killed last autumn say charities calling for UK government to help embattled military police at the Cyprus base

More than 800,000 songbirds, including blackcaps, robins and garden warblers, are estimated to have been illegally killed last autumn on a British military base in Cyprus.

New research by the RSPB and BirdLife Cyprus identified a record number of illegal and virtually invisible “mist” nets set to trap migrating birds on British territory in the Mediterranean. The number of nets discovered on Ministry of Defence (MoD) land in Cyprus has increased by 183% since monitoring began in 2002.

Saltburn-by-the-Sea, North Yorkshire Dead man’s fingers and a lumpsucker are marooned in seaweed along the strandline

At the bottom of the cliff, a two-minute walk from the high tide line, there is a small stone-built mortuary, constructed in 1881 and formerly the temporary resting place for the bodies of shipwrecked sailors washed up on the sands.

Today, by morbid coincidence, the strandline was littered with dead man’s fingers, Alcyonium digitatum. These soft corals live in deep water and are usually only seen by divers, but late winter storms had cast some ashore amid heaps of kelp.

The South Australian premier, Jay Weatherill, unloads on the federal energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, at Frydenberg’s own media conference in Adelaide. Frydenberg who was scheduled to launch a federally funded battery storage scheme, was not expecting Weatherill at the event. The two hosted a joint press conference where Frydenberg accused the state of selfishly trying to ‘go it alone’ and Weatherhill of ‘crash-tackling’ his event. Weatherhill hit back claiming the Coalition was the ‘most anti-South Australian commonwealth government in living history’ and that it was ‘galling’ to listen to Frydenberg’s claims

Improvements to water quality or fishing controls don’t prevent underwater heatwaves damaging coral, studies of mass bleaching events reveal

The survival of the Great Barrier Reef hinges on urgent moves to cut global warming because nothing else will protect coral from the coming cycle of mass bleaching events, new research has found.

The study of three mass bleaching events on Australian reefs in 1998, 2002 and 2016 found coral was damaged by underwater heatwaves regardless of any local improvements to water quality or fishing controls.

Stagnant weather caused by fast-melting Arctic ice helped create conditions for China’s recent extreme air pollution events, scientists say

Climate change played a major role in the extreme air pollution events suffered recently by China and is likely to make such “airpocalypses” more common, new research has revealed.

The fast-melting ice in the Arctic and an increase in snowfalls in Siberia, both the result of global warming, are changing winter weather patterns over east China, scientists found. Periods of stagnant air are becoming more common, trapping pollution and leading to the build up of extreme levels of toxic air.

Residents opposed to the drilling sites in Lancashire say the communities secretary Sajid Javid’s decision was unlawful

The communities secretary, Sajid Javid, made significant legal errors when he overturned a council’s refusal to allow test drilling at a fracking site in Lancashire, a court has been told.

Residents opposed to the drilling sites near Blackpool told Manchester high court that Javid acted “in breach of the rules of natural justice” when he gave the green light to test fracking in October.

Chemical used in the best-selling Roundup herbicide is cleared for public use following an EU licensing battle due to potential health risks

A controversial chemical used in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller has been judged safe for public use by the European Chemical Agency (Echa).

Glyphosate has been the subject of a relicensing battle which split governments, regulators and scientists, with one arm of the World Health Organisation linking the substance to cancer, while another denied any risk.

Waters off the coast of Tasmania turned a shimmering blue this week, a phenomenon known as ‘noctiluca scintillans’, or sea sparkle. Despite people flocking to photograph the eerie scene, scientists have warned that it is, in fact, a worrying sign of climate change

• Tasmania’s coastline glows in the dark as plankton turn blue

A survey of five of the six biggest soft drinks firms found just 7% of throwaway plastic bottles are made from recycled materials

More than two million tonnes of throwaway plastic soft drinks bottles are sold each year, with only a small proportion made from recycled materials, research reveals.

A survey by Greenpeace found five of six global soft drinks firms sold single-use plastic bottles weighing more than two million tonnes – only 6.6% of which was recycled plastic.

Harrowbarrow, Tamar Valley Short twigs of February-grafted cherries already show swelling buds above the yellow plastic tape

The new tall fence should help protect Mary and James’s orchard from the attention of roe deer, which come from the valley’s sheltering woodland to nibble leaves, bark and the precious shoots of new grafts, as well as shed their potentially dangerous ticks.

Most of the fruit trees are more than 30 years old, but this diverse and catalogued collection of once widely grown apples, cherries and pears is constantly being refined and added to. Short twigs of February-grafted cherries already show swelling buds above the yellow plastic tape that binds specific varieties to vigorous root-stocks. Lanky poor specimens of cherries have been dug out and the spaces infilled with more apples.

Eerie scenes on north-west coast show bioluminescent waters caused by ‘sea sparkle’

The waters along Tasmania’s north-west coastline have taken on a bizarre, glowing appearance in recent days. Photographs taken off Preservation Bay and Rocky Cape showcase bioluminescent waters caused by Noctiluca scintillans (AKA sea sparkle), tiny plankton emitting blue light in self-defence.

The phenomenon, which is best seen in calm, warm seas, is foreboding. “The displays are a sign of climate change,” Anthony Richardson, from the CSIRO, told New Scientist after an occurrence in Tasmania in 2015.

In the first of a series about communities building renewable energy projects, we look at how Victoria’s Hepburn Shire overcame local opposition to deliver a new homegrown, community-owned generator

From the fertile spud-growing country of Hepburn Shire, 90km northwest of Melbourne, has sprung what many hope will become a revolution in renewable energy in Australia.

On Leonards Hill, just outside the town of Daylesford – famed for its natural springs – stand two wind turbines that not only power the local area, but have also added substantial power to the community-owned renewable energy movement in Australia.

Kicking off our six-part series highlighting innovative community renewable energy projects across Australia, we visit the town of Daylesford in Hepburn Shire in rural Victoria. Despite early local opposition, residents have tackled the electricity crisis by building their own renewable energy projects, starting with a cooperative-owned windfarm and moving into the hydro power that was once a feature of the town