The Guardian

A kangaroo affected by drought, a prize-winning sea lion and a polka-dotted zebra foal

A Fiorland penguin has spent eight weeks recuperating after a 2,500km swim from New Zealand to Australia. Now the endangered bird is being released by Melbourne zoo back into the wild

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From babies to bagpipers, hundreds of thousands filled the streets in more than 200 rallies

• Global climate protests – live updates

From the small sun-drenched Inner Hebridean island of Iona to the packed streets of central London, parents and grandparents, children and trade unionists have stepped out of their Friday routines to tell their political leaders time is running out to tackle the climate crisis.

Related: Greta Thunberg: face of the Global Climate Strike - in pictures

The huge influence of the Swedish schoolgirl who first began the Friday’s for Future strikes in 2018 is evident across this week’s global protests

Sand from Great Yarmouth seabed creates mobile dune defences to protect villages

An artificial dune of nearly 2m cubic metres of sand has been created on the Norfolk coast in an innovative approach to slowing coastal erosion.

In the £20m sandscaping scheme, enough sand to fill one-and-a-half Wembley stadiums has been dredged from existing North Sea seabed extraction sites off Great Yarmouth and ferried to the rapidly eroding coastline beside the large gas terminal at Bacton.

Jeremy Corbyn has called Donald Trump’s decision to walk away from the Paris climate agreement ‘disgraceful’ in a speech to climate strikers in London.

The Labour leader said the climate emergency could only be solved by international action. ‘Destroying nature ultimately destroys all of us’, he added

Climate striker Parker recited a poem with a powerful message on climate change at the global climate strike in Brisbane, Australia, on Friday. Ten-year-old Parker said he joined the strike ‘to tell the government that climate change is real and they need to act’. An estimated 300,000 people gathered at more than 100 rallies across Australia on Friday, calling for action to guard against climate change

• Global climate strike: Greta Thunberg and school students lead climate crisis protest – live updates
  

People around the world have been walking out of school and work to join the latest protests against the climate crisis. The global day of action, calling for a reduction in emissions, is being held in the run-up to a UN summit in New York

• Global climate strike – live updates

Exclusive: since January at least 45 consumers have fallen ill, investigation finds, despite assurances of very low risk

Dozens of people have been poisoned after consuming British eggs contaminated with salmonella, an investigation has found, despite recent government assurances that the risk had been virtually eliminated.

At least 45 consumers have fallen ill since January this year in a major disease outbreak health officials have traced back to contaminated eggs and poultry farms. Salmonella can cause food poisoning and – in the most serious cases – can prove fatal. Public Health England (PHE), which monitors salmonella, is not aware of any deaths.

Organisers of the school strike for climate estimate 300,000 people turned out in more than 100 cities and towns

Hundreds of thousands of Australians took to the streets on Friday as they called for greater action on the climate emergency in more than 100 cities and towns across the country.

Organisers of the school strike for climate claimed about 300,000 people attended dozens of rallies, including an estimated 100,000 in Melbourne and 80,000 in Sydney. The unprecedented climate crisis protests were likely the largest public demonstrations in Australia since the marches against the Iraq War in 2003.

Jones cited Joseph Goebbels while the Mail found a child who said they just wanted the day off school

The Daily Mail found a child at the climate strike who said they just wanted the day off school and Alan Jones quoted Joseph Goebbels. Those were just some of the more bizarre takes on the climate strike from sections of the media on Friday.

Hundreds of thousands of people rallied across Australia in what were overwhelmingly peaceful events but on Sydney’s most popular breakfast program Jones interviewed climate sceptics and claimed school children were being brainwashed by adults with a political agenda.

Australian climate strikers’ signs send government a bleakly humorous Texta message

Laughing in the face of looming apocalypse, Friday’s climate strike brought out the best in dark Australian humour.

While many signs were deadly serious, teens are nothing if not witty and they came armed with memes and pop culture references.

Cost of supporting offshore turbines drops to less than market price for energy

New renewable energy projects will be built at no extra cost for millions of British energy bill payers after record low state-backed subsidies fell below the market price the first time.

The results of a government subsidy auction have revealed that the cost of supporting offshore wind turbines has tumbled by almost a third in two years to record lows of less than £40 per megawatt hour (MWh).

The fashion industry is a fossil-fuel-guzzling operation as many of our clothes are made from petroleum-based textiles such as polyester. Even natural fibres such as cotton have a huge carbon footprint and require a large portion of the world’s pesticides. 

In a bid to solve this disastrous environmental equation, scientists and designers are creating completely new textiles from fast-growing, carbon-sucking organisms such as micro- and macro-algae, mycelium (elements of fungus), bacteria and fermented yeast. These new biotechnologies efficiently convert sunlight and CO2 into mass raw materials, suck carbon out of the atmosphere and pave the way to a carbon-negative wardrobe

• Dr Mark Liu, from the deep green biotech hub at the University of Technology, Sydney,  left his career as a fashion designer to focus on developing textiles made from micro-algae
  
• Charlotte McCurdy is a global security fellow at the Rhode Island School of Design and has created a carbon-negative raincoat from macro-algae

Children take time off school and workers down tools to take part in the global climate strike

• Global climate strike: Greta Thunberg and school children lead climate crisis protest – live updates

The global conservation body Nature Conservancy, working in 72 countries to tackle climate change and to conserve lands, waters and oceans, has announced its latest photo winners, selected from more than 100,000 entries

These tiny pests adapt so successfully to changing conditions that they have become humankind’s deadliest predator. We might soon be able to eradicate them – but should we? By Timothy Winegard

We are at war with the mosquito. A swarming and consuming army of 110tn enemy mosquitoes patrols every inch of the globe except for Antarctica, Iceland and a handful of French Polynesian micro-islands. The biting female warrior of this droning insect population is armed with at least 15 lethal and debilitating biological weapons, to be used against 7.7 billion humans deploying suspect and often self-detrimental defensive capabilities. In fact, our defence budget for personal shields, sprays and other means of deterring her unrelenting raids is $11bn (£8.8bn) a year, and rising rapidly. And yet her deadly offensive campaigns and crimes against humanity continue with reckless abandon. While our counterattacks are reducing the number of casualties she perpetrates – malaria deaths in particular are declining rapidly – the mosquito remains the deadliest hunter of human beings on the planet.

Taking a broad range of estimates into account, since 2000, the average annual number of human deaths caused by the mosquito was around 2 million. Humans came in a distant second at 475,000, followed by snakes (50,000), dogs and sandflies (25,000 each), the tsetse fly, and the assassin or kissing bug (10,000 each). The fierce killers of lore and Hollywood celebrity were much further down our list. The crocodile was ranked 10th, with 1,000 annual deaths. Next on the list were hippos with 500, and elephants and lions with 100 fatalities each. The much-slandered shark and wolf shared 15th position, killing an average of 10 people per annum.

On Friday 20 September, millions of people led by Greta Thunberg and students from Sydney to Delhi, Melbourne to London and New York, will march for urgent action on climate change. Follow for all the latest school strike 4 climate news

• Climate strike in Australia: everything you need to know about Friday’s protest
• Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses about the environment
• Young strikers: ‘The crisis is already here’

1.29am BST

Absolutely huge turnout in Geelong where they’re singing and chanting.

At Geelong City Hall for the #ClimateStrike . Huge turnout pic.twitter.com/AA5Pbdo151

“No planet B” song at Geelong #ClimateStrike pic.twitter.com/5xrMAXkSzc

Townsville locals #Strike4Climate, not a single southern latte-sipper in sight. pic.twitter.com/VjAYF9qfrB

1.26am BST

First Barnesy now The Oils:

We support today’s #climatestrike - "it happens to be an emergency". Look at these average annual temps (dark red = hottest years). For everyone, especially the young, we are now at the crossroads. pic.twitter.com/k9XZoL44oE

From the rise and rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to possible solutions

The level of CO2 has been rising since the industrial revolution and is now at its highest for about 4 million years. The rate of the rise is even more striking – the fastest for 66m years – with scientists saying we are in “uncharted territory”.

Charity warns of cost of doing nothing, saying contributions would need to hit $20bn a year

Two million people a week need humanitarian aid today because of the climate emergency, the Red Cross has warned, as extreme weather takes an “intolerable” toll in human suffering.

The number of people in need of interventions will double in the next three decades – from 108 million a year today to 200 million – if governments fail to act, stretching international humanitarian relief efforts to breaking point and beyond, the global charity said.