The Guardian

Campaigners urge court of appeal to overturn communities secretary’s decision to allow Cuadrilla to drill in Lancashire

The communities secretary, Sajid Javid, “misunderstood key local and national planning policies” when he gave the green light to fracking in Lancashire, campaigners have told the court of appeal.

Leading judges were urged on Wednesday to overturn a government decision to approve a fracking site at Preston New Road in Lancashire.

Houston has experienced an unexpected side-effect of the floods that have hit the Texan city – floating islands made up of thousands of venomous fire ants. The naturally aggressive ants are able to survive the rising water by forming rafts with their own bodies, and can survive for weeks before breaking up

Flotillas of fire ants add new layer of horror to post-Harvey flood havoc

每头大象都是巨大的象群数据库和信息网络的一个神秘入口，让我们守护这份自然的奇迹。

• Elephant 2.0. - nature’s invisible information architecture
  

大象有着一 副如此悲伤的面孔，很难现象任何人会去伤害它们。它们有着苍白的嘴唇和下垂的肩膀；它们的姿态悠长而松弛，眼睛若有深意，可以让罪过者动容。但似乎单凭负 疚感并不能拯救大象。八年前，非洲象和亚洲象的种群总数大约有600万到900万头。如今，大约只剩50万头。日复一日，大象距离灭绝越来越近。

也许我们需要一些新的观念。也许是时候从新的角度考虑我们为什么需要保护大象。对于我们来说，珍贵的或许并不是它们的身体，而是它们共享的记忆和经验。这就是我在这篇文中想要提出的观点。

St Dennis, Cornwall From the moss-coated fort, spoil heaps dominate the view but close by sits the waste energy plant and a bog has become a nature reserve

From the ancient vantage point of Carne Hill, china-clay works dominate the landscape with vegetated spoil heaps, older conical tips and the whiteness of an open-cast pit at Fraddon.

The curved roofs and twin stacks of the Cornwall Energy Recovery Centre are close by, and lower down, to the north, rows of pylons slung with cables stretch along the flat expanse of Goss Moor towards the electricity substation.

Images of ants swarming together in ‘rafts’ and riding on top of floodwaters alarm Texans

There is a new threat to the millions of people in Texas affected by ex-hurricane Harvey: large “rafts” of fire ants that have been spotted floating in floodwaters.

Displaced by record flooding, the insects have responded by creating rafts built on top of dead ants to stay on the top of water and keep dry.

‘Last-chance tourism’ spurs on other visitors but there has been lull in bookings after coral bleaching, senators told

Overseas tourists have begun to doubt the value of a trip to the ailing Great Barrier Reef and it is getting increasingly difficult to “show people what they expect to see”, a dive operator has told a federal Senate inquiry.

A Port Douglas operator, John Edmondson, said “last-chance tourism” was spurring on other visitors but there had been a “weird” lull in bookings this year after back-to-back mass bleaching events made dead coral an unavoidable sight on reef visits.

At least 14 people have died and tens of thousands evacuated as Houston continues to be battered by catastrophic rainfall. Can we decode the disaster?

• Tropical storm Harvey – live updates
  

A tropical storm that is on course to break the US record for the heaviest rainfall from a tropical system. Meteorologists say the 120cm-mark set in 1978 could be surpassed on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Protesters hope appeal court will uphold council’s decision to reject planning consent for Cuadrilla, which was overturned by Sajid Javid

A last-ditch legal challenge to prevent fracking in Lancashire is being launched at the court of appeal.

The case brought by anti-fracking protesters, to be heard on Wednesday and Thursday, seeks to overturn planning consent that was granted to Cuadrilla by the communities secretary, Sajid Javid, last October.

Haze that led to 150 people seeking treatment caused a pollution spike and ‘might have been caused by a ship venting’

Authorities investigating the cause of Sunday’s chemical cloud are working on the assumption that it came from a ship in the Channel after environmental monitoring sites picked up a localised spike in pollution levels.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency is working with the Environment Agency to establish the source of the cloud, which left 150 people seeking medical treatment and caused the evacuation of Birling Gap beach in East Sussex.

Canada has a hand in the misery Haitians are fleeing. Asylum should serve as reparations

The minders of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s brand are surely displeased. He’s spent two years cultivating an image of Canada’s refugee system as the political equivalent of airport hugs and teddy-bears. And now the pressure is on him to act like that were remotely the truth.

The image of the country as a welcome haven was pitched to win the support of millions of people in Canada who rightly feel two things: compassion for the plight of refugees and disgust for the antics of Donald Trump. But refugee rights advocates had warned what would come to pass: desperate people would take Trudeau at his word.

Floridians have long recognised the threat of climate change to their homes. Amid the latest disaster, home buyers may increasingly look to higher ground

• Tropical storm Harvey – live updates
  

If Florida gleaned anything from Hurricane Andrew, the intensely powerful storm that tore a deadly trail of destruction across Miami-Dade County almost exactly 25 years to the day that Hurricane Harvey barrelled into the Texas coastline, it was that living in areas exposed to the wrath of Mother Nature can come at a substantial cost.

At the time the most expensive natural disaster ever to hit the US, Andrew caused an estimated $15bn in insured losses in the state and changed the way insurance companies assessed their exposure to risk for weather-related events.

A study finds that accelerated growing conditions on some fish farms are causing hearing impairments in salmon. It’s a reminder that aquaculture’s own accelerated rise needs to be closely managed

To grasp the wide-ranging impacts of our industrial food systems, take a peek inside a salmon’s ear. That’s what marine biologist Tormey Reimer did when, in 2013 at the University of Melbourne, she began to investigate deformities that were developing on the structures that salmon use to hear.

Bony fish species have structures called otoliths in their ears, small crystals that they use to detect sound. Biologists have for decades relied on otoliths to age fish, using them like rings on a tree. But what Reimer saw was an altogether larger, lighter, and more transparent crystal called a vaterite, growing into the otolith and obstructing the fish’s ability to hear. “I did a bit of digging and found it was much more common in farmed salmon than wild,” she says. And, she began to suspect it had something to do with the accelerated growth rates in fish farms.

This year, China’s government enacted a ban on ivory sales and started closing down carving workshops. How did such an astonishing U-turn come about?

For years Chinese government officials were followed around the world, at every meeting, by a single issue: the scores of dead elephants across Africa, and the international community that blamed China for this “ivory “holocaust”.

Even the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, could not escape lectures on poached elephants and the evils of China’s legal domestic ivory trade from foreign leaders. For years, China deflected the criticism with claims of a long cultural heritage and incremental policies, such as a ban on ivory carving imports two years ago.

The anti-cycling backlash in the media in the aftermath of Charlie Alliston trial suggests roads and streets overrun by dangerous cyclists, but is this true?

When cycling reaches newspaper front pages it’s usually the sporting kind. The last couple of weeks have been an exception, with blanket coverage of the trial of Charlie Alliston, convicted last week over the death of Kim Briggs after he struck her on his bike.

This piece isn’t about the facts of this very tragic case. It’s about the aftermath, more specifically the repeated call in some part of the media for something to be done about what these articles believe is a particular problem of reckless and law-flouting cyclists.

Claxton, Norfolk Lined up on the telephone wires, they stretch, preen and snooze, riding the tide swell of air

The view from my office includes a junction box where five telephone wires converge at the top of a pole. For several years, it has been a favourite gathering place for the season’s young swallows and they wreathe this banal technology in the joyous rhythms of their movements and sounds.

The immatures are separable by pale fringes to their wing feathers, but also by the downturned yellow gape-lines at the corners of their mouths, which give them a wonderfully comic clown-like glumness. It is as if all the swirl of these late-August days – the balletic fly-snatching, the sun-blessed leisure, the quiet feather care as they sit amid a pool of the adult swallows’ desultory song – were a source of strange ennui.

La Trobe University Bendigo student Kirra Coventry filmed her group of outdoor and environmental education classmates helping a koala that had become stranded by rapidly rising water in the Murray river. The students were learning to be river guides when they saw the koala on the edge of Ulupna Island. The students told associate lecturer Chris Townsend it was low in a tree and seemed to be trying to find dry land. They pushed an empty canoe out to it and it climbed aboard, took a seat, then disembarked once it reached shore, where it had a lengthy drink. Townsend said koalas, which are considered a vulnerable species in parts of Australia, were relocated to river islands like Ulupna in the late 1980s and there was now a healthy population there. ‘Koalas are very, very fussy about the trees they will feed in and live in,’ he said. ‘Obviously leading up to this it had found the perfect tree, but I think the floodwaters came up a little bit quickly and it didn’t have time to get down’

Captain Paul Watson accuses ‘hostile governments’ in the US, Australia and New Zealand of being in league with Tokyo

The anti-whaling vessel Sea Shepherd will not contest the Southern Ocean against Japanese whalers this season, Captain Paul Watson has announced, accusing “hostile governments” in the US, Australia and New Zealand of acting “in league with Japan” against the protest vessel.

Sea Shepherd has been obstructing Japanese whaling vessels in the Southern Ocean each year since 2005, but Watson said the cost of sending vessels south, Japan’s increased use of military technology to track them, and new anti-terrorism laws passed specifically to thwart Sea Shepherd’s activities made physically tracking the ships impossible.

Study predicts power consumption to rise with hotter temperatures, increasing need for renewable sources, while northern Europe’s demand may fall

Demand for electricity is set to soar in southern Europe as climate change takes hold, research has revealed, with the effect likely to be down to a boom in the use of air conditioning.

By contrast, electricity demand is expected to drop in northern countries, leading to an increasingly polarised pattern across the continent – a situation, the researchers say, that bolsters the case for greater integration of electricity supplies across Europe, particularly given the shift to renewable energies.

Producing, selling and using plastic bags becomes illegal as officials say they want to target manufacturers and sellers first

Kenyans producing, selling or even using plastic bags will risk imprisonment of up to four years or fines of $40,000 (£31,000) from Monday, as the world’s toughest law aimed at reducing plastic pollution came into effect.

The east African nation joins more than 40 other countries that have banned, partly banned or taxed single use plastic bags, including China, France, Rwanda, and Italy.

30,000 people are expected to need emergency shelter after tropical storm Harvey caused ‘landmark’ flooding in Houston, Texas. Brock Long, administrator of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), held a press conference on Monday alongside the acting secretary of homeland security and the director of the National Weather Service, who said the city would experience more heavy rainfall in the coming days

• Tropical storm Harvey – live updates