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Most recent fatality marks 17th beluga to die at Niagara Falls, Ontario, aquarium since 2019

A fifth beluga has died at Canada’s Marineland, as questions mount over the future of both the controversial theme park and one of the world’s largest populations of captive whales.

The most recent fatality marks the 17th beluga to die at the Niagara Falls aquarium since 2019.

Elnur Soltanov recorded speaking with fake oil and gas group that asked for deals in exchange for sponsoring talks

The chief executive of Cop29 has been filmed apparently agreeing to facilitate fossil fuel deals at the climate summit.

The recording has amplified calls by campaigners who want the fossil fuel industry and its lobbyists to be banned from future Cop talks.

It could have been better designed, but Rachel Reeves’s inheritance tweak will help farmers with mud on their boots

Should multimillionaire landowners benefit from a tax break designed to help small family farms pass down their land to their children? This is a hotly contested question, given last week’s budget. Labour has reintroduced 20% inheritance tax for farms that are valued at more than £1m, meaning the children of farmers will no longer inherit land tax-free. Granted, 20% is still only half of the standard inheritance tax rate, and it probably sounds more than generous to an ex-miner, foundry worker or shipbuilder. But today, £1m would only buy you about 40 hectares (100 acres) of farmland, which is far short of a viable farm.

Farming is a long-term business that requires substantial assets and often makes only meagre returns. Farming families have not had to consider tax planning for family succession since 1992. As a second-generation farmer, I support much of the budget. But on the inheritance tax threshold, I thought, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, had got it wrong. The positive reading of her decision is that she was trying to close a loophole whereby wealthy people buy up farmland and pass it, tax-free, to their children. If that was the main objective, though, the threshold should have been set substantially higher than £1m.

Guy Singh-Watson is the founder of the organic veg box company Riverford and a member of Patriotic Millionaires UK. He grows organic vegetables on 60 hectares (150 acres) in Devon and 120 hectares (300 acres) in the French Vendée. He sold Riverford in 2018 to its 1,000 employees, and the company is now 100% employee-owned

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Prospects of strong outcome appear dim but there is hope the talks will address pressing issue of climate finance

More than 100 heads of state and government are expected to land in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, over the next few days and the first thing they are likely to notice is the smell of oil. The odour hangs heavy in the air, evidence of the abundance of fossil fuels in this small country on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

Flaring from refineries lights up the night sky, and the city is dotted with diminutive “nodding donkey” oil wells raising and lowering their pistons as they draw from the earth. Even the national symbol is a gas flame, epitomised in the shape of three skyscrapers that tower over the city.

On the eve of Cop29 in Baku, António Guterres says dangers are underestimated as irreversible tipping points near

The world is still underestimating the risk of catastrophic climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse, the UN secretary general has warned in the run-up to Cop29, acknowledging that the rise in global heating is on course to soar past 1.5C (2.7F) over pre-industrial levels in the coming years.

Humanity is approaching potentially irreversible tipping points such as the collapse of the Amazon rainforest and the Greenland ice sheet as global temperatures rise, António Guterres has said, warning that governments are not making the deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions needed to limit warming to safe levels.

Newfoundland Memorial Univeristy team find white masses are likely material used to clean pipes in oil industry

When the chemist Chris Kozak finally got his hands on a sample of the mysterious blobs that recently washed up on the shores of Newfoundland’s beaches, Project Unknown Glob officially began.

At his disposal, Kozak and a team of graduate students had the “gorgeous” new science building and “world-class facilities” of Newfoundland’s Memorial University to run a battery of tests on the white, doughy blob.

More than 200 people have died in floods that the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has described as the worst natural disaster in the country's recent history. Thousands of troops and police officers were drafted to help with clean-up and searches. Anger rose among residents who felt abandoned by the government and King Felipe and Queen Letizia were heckled when they visited one of the worst-affected areas

• ‘It can lead to chaos’: false claims and hoaxes surge as Spain’s floods recede

• At least 89 people remain missing after floods in eastern Spain

• ‘There’s so much confrontation’: Valencians sick of political bickering after Spain’s floods

Pollution is affecting the climate, biodiversity, ecosystems, ocean acidification and human health, according to analysis

Plastic pollution is changing the processes of the entire Earth system, exacerbating climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and the use of freshwater and land, according to scientific analysis.

Plastic must not be treated as a waste problem alone, the authors said, but as a product that poses harm to ecosystems and human health.

Annual FrogID week aims to collect thousands of recordings of country’s 250 frog species using downloadable smartphone app

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They moan, hum, whistle and click, and can be found almost everywhere, from the neighbourhood pond to the most remote outback dunny.

From 8 to 17 November, people across the country are encouraged to participate in FrogID week, Australia’s biggest frog count. The annual event, now in its seventh year, aims to collect thousands of recordings via an app, with the data providing a snapshot of how frogs are faring across the country.

People have never been swayed by ‘rational debate’. Only a genuine change in the way we do politics can prevent the march of the right

We were losing slowly. Now we are losing quickly. Democracy, accountability, human rights, social justice – all were rolling backwards as money swarmed our politics. Above all, our life-support systems – the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, ecosystems, ice and snow – have been hammered and hammered, regardless of who is in power. Donald Trump might strike the killer blows, but he is not the cause of an ecocidal economic system. He is the embodiment of it.

Under Joe Biden, the US was missing its own climate goals, and those goals were insufficient to meet the global objective of limiting heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. That target in turn might not be tight enough to prevent a tipping of Earth systems. Already, at roughly 1.3C of heating, we see what looks alarmingly like climatic flickering: the ever wilder perturbations that tend to precede the collapse of a complex system.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Conservation groups are asking for the decision to allow Hvalur to hunt to be put on hold until after election

A coalition of conservation and animal welfare groups are urging Iceland’s president to step in and stop any plans the prime minister has to issue a whaling licence to Europe’s last whaler before the Icelandic election at the end of the month.

Earlier this year, the country granted a one-year licence to Hvalur to kill more than 100 fin whales this hunting season, despite hopes the practice may have been stopped after concerns about cruelty led to a temporary suspension in 2023.

Copernicus Climate Change Service says 2024 marks ‘a new milestone’ and should raise ambitions at Cop29 summit

It is “virtually certain” that 2024 will be the hottest year on record, the European Union’s space programme has found.

The prognosis comes the week before diplomats meet at the Cop29 climate summit and a day after a majority of voters in the US, the biggest historical polluter of planet-heating gas, chose to make Donald Trump president.

How damaging this presidency is to the planet depends very much on how other countries react. There’s no time to waste

• US election 2024 live: latest news and updates
• US election results 2024: live map and tracker

Donald Trump’s re-election to the White House is a major setback for climate action but ultimately it’s the US that could end up losing out, as the rest of the world will move forward without it.

The US is the world’s biggest economy and its second biggest emitter. Positive US engagement on climate has been crucial to landmark leaps forward, like getting the Paris agreement over the line, and just last year committing to transitioning away from fossil fuels.

The US missing in action in the latter half of this critical decade for climate action is nobody’s idea of a good outcome.

MEPs express concern for EU climate leadership as commission head confirms she will miss Baku summit

Ursula von der Leyen’s decision to miss the Cop29 climate summit is “a fatal signal” and raises questions about Europe’s commitment to the climate crisis, observers have said.

The European Commission confirmed on Tuesday that its president would not attend the UN climate talks in Baku, which start on Monday. “The commission is in a transition phase and the president will therefore focus on her institutional duties,” a spokesperson said.

Overblown concerns about potential dangers of a common chemical threaten to undermine scientific evidence to the contrary

Because of his job as a dermatologist, Dr Deshan Sebaratnam frequently gets asked questions by friends, family and strangers about skin treatments. But lately, he says, he has been confronted by “a lot of myths around sunscreens”, especially on his social media feed.

Among the most frequent is “that sunscreen can actually cause skin cancer”, says Sebaratnam, a conjoint associate professor at the University of New South Wales.

Murrumbidgee River, in New South Wales, had 55% less water in 2018 than it did in 1988, with the Lowbidgee Floodplain hardest hit

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A section of one of Australia’s longest rivers, the Murrumbidgee, lost more than half of its water over a 30-year period due to dams and other diversions, according to new research.

Scientists at the University of New South Wales examined the impacts of dam infrastructure and irrigation on natural water flows in the lower Murrumbidgee River since 1890.

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Millionaire points to Broken Hill’s blackout to attack the energy transition but experts say he should look at South Australia and Europe

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For 15 minutes on Sunday morning, ABC local radio listeners were treated to a rant from Dick Smith as the millionaire attacked Australia’s transition away from fossil fuels, claiming renewables would make electricity unaffordable and cause sweeping blackouts.

“It seems we have been sold a pup and we are not getting the full truth all the time,” responded Ian McNamara, the host of Australia All Over. “There are lots of people who will back you up.”

Land reform charities call for better regulation of UK’s carbon market so profits can be shared with public

Nature campaigners have called for taxpayers to take stakes in forest and peatland projects designed to store carbon, to avoid all the profits from carbon credits going to private investors.

A report from the Revive Coalition, an umbrella group for Scottish land reform and conservation charities, says carbon credits also need to be used much more effectively to bolster demand and help the UK meet its net zero targets.

Government-owned banks such as the Scottish National Investment Bank should invest in carbon projects, including on public land.

It becomes mandatory for all large and medium-sized companies to have audited carbon reduction targets to avoid greenwashing.

All carbon offsetting projects must register with the official schemes, the Woodland carbon code and the Peatland carbon code.

A new land tax is set up that is reduced if the land is managed to protect the climate and promote nature recovery.