The Guardian

British journalist and Brazilian Indigenous expert were killed a year ago on Monday in remote Amazon region they tried to defend

Friends and admirers of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira are preparing to gather in towns and cities across Brazil as well as London to remember the men and the causes they cherished.

The British journalist and the Brazilian Indigenous expert were shot dead during a reporting trip in the Amazon’s remote Javari valley region one year ago, on 5 June 2022.

If you want to help finish Dom Phillips’s book on the Amazon you can contribute here.

Deteriorating conditions and other whales in area south of Sydney hampered attempts, say rescuers

A humpback whale trapped in waters south of Sydney has finally been freed after a gruelling eight-hour rescue mission.

Rescue efforts began on Saturday morning after reports of a whale in distress off Five Islands near Port Kembla. Volunteer crews from Marine Rescue NSW and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service were called to assist at about 8.30am.

Pollution from gas flaring – the burning of natural gas associated with oil extraction – is also a major concern in the oil-rich but extremely dry south

Western oil companies are exacerbating water shortages and causing pollution in Iraq as they race to profit from rising oil prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Water scarcity has already displaced thousands and increased instability, according to international experts, while Iraq is now considered the fifth most vulnerable country to the climate crisis by the UN. In the oil-rich but extremely dry south, wetlands that used to feed entire communities are now muddy canals.

Hollywood director of climate crisis satire praised protestors for waking up ‘sleeping governments’ and will triple donations over weekend

The Hollywood director of Netflix film Don’t Look Up has pledged to triple donations to Just Stop Oil over the weekend, the group has said.

Adam McKay, who made the satire on the climate crisis as well as Step Brothers and The Big Short, said he stands with the protesters, praising them for waking up “sleeping governments”.

Travel blog Capture the Atlas has crowned its best Milky Way photographs of the year. This year’s shots captured the galaxy glowing above dramatic landscapes in Namibia, Chile, Japan, Spain, Iran and New Zealand

Dupont, Chemours and Corteva agree deal and 3M also reportedly considering $10bn settlement to avoid trial due to start on Monday

DuPont and two related companies said they would pay close to $1.2bn to settle liability claims brought by public water systems serving the vast majority of the US population on Friday, just days before the start of a bellwether trial in South Carolina over PFAS contamination.

PFAS maker 3M was reportedly also considering a settlement that would keep the company from having to face allegations that it was responsible for knowingly contaminating drinking water supplies around the United States.

Flies chilled to sub-zero temperatures amputate one or more of their six limbs to protect their internal organs

Flightless snow flies in the US and Canada can amputate their legs to survive as they begin to freeze, researchers have discovered.

Lab experiments in which the flies were chilled gradually to sub-zero temperatures revealed they can detach one or more of their six legs, an apparent “last-ditch tactic” to protect their internal organs from the advancing cold.

Investigation involving Guardian shows systematic and vast forest loss linked to cattle farming in Brazil

More than 800m trees have been cut down in the Amazon rainforest in just six years to feed the world’s appetite for Brazilian beef, according to a new investigation, despite dire warnings about the forest’s importance in fighting the climate crisis.

A data-driven investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), the Guardian, Repórter Brasil and Forbidden Stories shows systematic and vast forest loss linked to cattle farming.

With six months until UN summit in Dubai, can its oil executive president bring unwilling countries into line?

• El Niño may push heating past 1.5C but urgent action could avert catastrophe

Within the next five years, the world is likely to experience at least one year in which the global average surface temperature exceeds 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. That was the stark prediction of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) this week, in its climate forecast.

Straying beyond 1.5C could lead to potentially irreversible effects on the global climate system, scientists have warned, including the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the abrupt melting of permafrost, rising sea levels and bleaching coral reefs. For these reasons, the 1.5C limit is at the heart of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which bound countries to hold global temperature rises “well below 2C” and “pursuing efforts” to 1.5C.

Heatwave continues in southern and eastern Asia as temperatures exceed 40C in vast swathes of region

Shanghai in China has reported a record high May temperature of 36.7C, breaking the previous record by 1C. The new high temperature on 29 May comes amid the heatwave affecting southern and eastern Asia since mid-April. Vast swathes of the region have had temperatures exceeding 40C, with parts of Pakistan reaching almost 50C in mid-May.

South-east Asia has been affected particularly badly, with record high national temperatures in Laos (43.5C), Vietnam (44.2C), and Thailand (45.4C). This is due to low amounts of rainfall over the previous winter resulting in drier soils, which can heat up more quickly than moist soils, thus exacerbating the effect.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs, including owl chicks, a white moose calf and hungry brown bear cubs

Many of Britain’s poorest towns are in areas with greatest potential for renewable energy, says report

A network of underground geothermal plants is being touted as a way to help level up the UK after a report discovered many areas with the greatest geothermal potential lie beneath the towns and cities most in need of investment.

Areas that have been earmarked by the government as part of its levelling up agenda are about three times as likely to be rich in untapped energy from the earth, according to an academic study commissioned by No 10.

The central Asian country has the worst rate of climate-heating ‘super-emitter’ events in the world

The US is in negotiations with Turkmenistan over an agreement to plug the central Asian nation’s colossal methane leaks.

Turkmenistan was responsible for 184 “super-emitter” events in which the powerful greenhouse gas was released in 2022, the highest number in the world. One caused climate pollution equivalent to the rate of emissions from 67m cars.

Exclusive: Study finds pests could damage crops, and households would incur costs for pesticides, veterinary bills and electrical faults

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Failure to stop the spread of an outbreak of invasive fire ants in south-east Queensland could cost the Australian economy more than $1bn a year, including damage to high-value crops, infrastructure and homes.

A previously unreleased cost-benefit analysis, commissioned by a steering committee managing the outbreak of red fire ants and obtained by Guardian Australia, says that eradication of the species provides “much higher returns” than suppression measures that simply limit its spread.

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Alexandre Saraiva gives alert on organised crime in region ahead of anniversary of killings of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira

The rapid advance of organised crime groups in the Brazilian Amazon risks turning the region into a vast, conflict-stricken hinterland plagued by heavily armed “criminal insurgents”, a former senior federal police chief has warned.

Alexandre Saraiva, who worked in the Amazon from 2011 to 2021, said he feared the growing footprint of drug-trafficking mafias in the region could spawn a situation similar to the decades-long drug conflict in Rio de Janeiro, where the police’s battle with drug gangs and paramilitaries has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Photos and videos on phone found near site of men’s killing show some of their last movements in Brazilian Amazon

Some of the last images of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira have been found after Indigenous activists recovered a mobile phone Pereira was carrying when the two men were killed in the Brazilian Amazon last year.

The phone was found last October when activists from Univaja, the Indigenous association where Pereira worked, returned to a stretch of flooded forest along the Itaquaí River where the men’s bodies were taken after they were shot dead on their boat on the morning of 5 June 2022.

Dom’s tragic death presents an opportunity to share what the Amazon meant to him – and to ensure its protection

It’s been a year since my life changed dramatically with a phone call from a journalist friend telling me Dom had gone missing in the Javari valley. I could tell from the worry in his voice that it was unlikely Dom was still alive.

Dom and I both knew his research into criminal acts against the rainforest and its defenders might one day put him at risk. But we never believed it would actually happen. Dom followed strict safety protocols and was very careful and focused on the details of his trips, organising the itineraries and sending me all the information, as well as contacts.

One year ago, Bruno Pereira, a Brazilian Indigenous expert, and Dom Phillips, a British journalist and longtime Guardian contributor, were killed on the frontline of the battle to protect the planet.

They were ambushed on the Amazon’s Itaquaí River while returning from a reporting trip to the remote Javari valley region. The attack prompted international outcry, and cast a spotlight on the growing threat to the Amazon posed by extractive industries, both legal and illegal, such as logging, poaching, mining and cattle ranching.

Today, we launch the Bruno and Dom project, a year-long collaborative investigation coordinated by Forbidden Stories that involves more than 50 journalists from 16 media organisations in 10 countries around the world.

The goal is to honour and pursue their work, to foreground the importance of the Amazon and its people, and to suggest possible ways to save the Amazon. Here, the Guardian's Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, looks at their lives and legacies

• Read more here

• The writer and the activist: how Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira bonded over the Amazon

Scientists monitored the Royal Entomological Society’s garden and listed its most bug-friendly plants

A bug-friendly garden at Chelsea flower show has inspired additions to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) pollinator-friendly plant list.

The garden, displayed at the show in London last week, was designed by the horticulturist Tom Massey in collaboration with the Royal Entomological Society (RES). It used various techniques to attract insects, including gravel for the bugs to burrow in rather than paving stones, piled-up logs, and a large range of pollinator-friendly plants, including 106 different species.

A bill passed the state legislature that will require state-funded institutions to provide halal and kosher meals on request

As a student at Sullivan high school in Chicago, Ridwan Rashid frequently skipped lunch and was distracted by hunger, even though his school offered free meals to all students. Rashid is Muslim, as are a growing number of students at Sullivan. But until recently, none of the meals served at the Sullivan cafeteria were halal, which meant they were off limits for most of the school’s Muslim students.

“We go to school and it’s like, OK, some of the kids can eat and none of the Muslim kids can eat,” Rashid said. “It’s not fair.”