Baby shark Yoko hatched in early January, flummoxing staff and experts at a US aquarium

Birds do it, bees do it. Even educated fleas do it, according to Cole Porter’s classic song on the universal nature of sex.

But a baby swell shark born in a Louisiana aquarium that houses only females has flummoxed marine experts and raised the possibility that the species may not require such earthly pleasures to produce offspring.

Lib Dem Tim Farron seeks law to protect fund as Treasury tries to take control of £11m

Fines from water companies that pollute rivers must be ringfenced by law to be spent on restoring water quality in rivers, MPs will urge.

The Treasury is trying to take control of £11m in fines from water companies, which was intended for small charities to restore rivers, in a move criticised by river restoration campaigners as “appalling”.

The Hollywood actor was stopped mid-scene as a man and a woman climbed on stage at London's Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Hayley Walsh, 42, a lecturer from Nottingham, and Richard Weir, 60, a mechanical engineer from Tynemouth, set off a confetti cannon and held up a banner referring to the 1.5C global temperature rise as a 'shipwreck', a nod to the Shakespeare play that features a ship sinking at sea

• Just Stop Oil activists interrupt play starring Sigourney Weaver in London

Welburn, North Yorkshire: I watch shadows playing out across the walls, tree trunks and scrambling roses finding their way inside

I’m a hibernator. The season doesn’t get me down so much as simply insist that I sleep, but this year I’ve done even more than usual, having succumbed to a festive double whammy of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (aka that cough, you know the one).

During convalescence, struggling to focus on reading or a screen, I found myself watching wall shadows for hours. In the bedroom, framed in the cross-hatches of our small-paned Georgian windows, I noticed strange, smouldering upright forms, which I eventually realised were the trunks of trees growing on the steep bank that rises opposite the house, their outlines fuzzied by a long focal length. At this time of year, the sun never makes it above them. Instead it scans them like a woody barcode, projecting daylong shadow plays which gradually traverse my walls, marking time. In the kitchen, the arboreal shadow-wraiths are joined by the more defined shades of ivy and scrambling roses growing just outside. And in my study they are illuminated by sudden flares of gold from gilded lettering on the spines of shelved books.

Across the continent, millions of hectares of land are being used and run by local people coexisting with wildlife in spaces where both can thrive

• Photographs by Nicoló Lanfranchi

Africa’s first national park was created 100 years ago by the Belgian colonial state in the Congo, and since then hundreds more have been developed – but in many areas there is more wildlife in protected areas run by local people.

Tens of millions of hectares across the continent are home to community-run “conservancies”, managed by herders, farmers and hunter-gatherers, who coexist with herds of large animals such as elephants, giraffes and buffalo.

The Nashulai conservancy in southern Kenya. The country now has more than 230 community-run reserves covering 16% of the country. Conservancies have helped wildlife recover while benefiting local people

An economic shift raises alarming questions about government vision, priorities and commitment to transformative policies

To hear Labour’s economic message, one might wonder if Downing Street has developed an unlikely admiration for Liz Truss. Given its focus on growth through cutting planning regulations, reducing welfare budgets and removing dissenting bureaucrats, some believe Labour is in danger of echoing not just the spirit but the substance of Ms Truss’s brief, ill-fated tenure. For a party that rose to power criticising the Tory right’s ideological misadventures, this shift in tone is striking.

Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves may see Labour’s sinking poll ratings as reason to align with their opponents, adopting policies – like curbing legal challenges to planning decisions – few rightwingers would contest. In a speech later this week, Ms Reeves plans to give the go-ahead for a third runway at Heathrow, a divisive choice even within Labour that has earned support from the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch.

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Second human case of H5N1 bird flu caught on farm in West Midlands but risk to public remains very low, says UKHSA

A human case of highly pathogenic bird flu has been detected in England, authorities have said, as bird flu cases escalate across the country.

It is only the second symptomatic human case of H5N1 bird flu recorded in the UK, after the first was detected in 2022, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said.

Net increase of 80,000 deaths a year projected in hottest scenario, with milder winters failing to redress balance

Dangerous temperatures could kill 50% more people in Europe by the end of the century, a study has found, with the lives lost to stronger heat projected to outnumber those saved from milder cold.

The researchers estimated an extra 8,000 people would die each year as a result of “suboptimal temperatures” even under the most optimistic scenario for cutting planet-heating pollution. The hottest plausible scenario they considered showed a net increase of 80,000 temperature-related deaths a year.

Marathon Petroleum said a massive fire at its Louisiana refinery caused ‘no offsite impacts’. Reporting by the Guardian and Forensic Architecture raised doubts about this claim

• The huge US toxic fire shrouded in secrecy: ‘I taste oil in my mouth’

Oil giant Marathon Petroleum is fighting an expanded class-action lawsuit fueled by an investigation by the Guardian and Forensic Architecture, which examined a huge toxic blaze at the company’s sprawling refinery in south-east Louisiana in 2023.

Parts of the oil refinery, the third largest in America, caught fire for over three days in August 2023 after a large storage tank containing the toxic and flammable hydrocarbon naphtha leaked for more than 13 hours unbeknown to the predominantly Black low-income communities that surround the facility.

Royal Botanic Gardens scientists are heading to the Victorian national park in search of plant survivors amid the charred landscape

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The Grampians globe-pea, a critically endangered wiry shrub, had finished flowering and was fruiting when fires tore through its home in the Grampians national park, in western Victoria. The spiny plant with vibrant orange and yellow flowers is extremely rare and restricted to a handful of sites, including areas within the 76,000 hectares that burned over December and January.

Finding the globe-pea will be a priority when a plant rescue mission led by Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria heads to the Grampians to search for survivors and signs of life amid the charred landscape.

‘It was striking that the White House memo included toilets and shower heads as a presidential priority,’ said one expert

From crusading against showers he feels don’t sufficiently wash his hair to reversing protections for a small fish he calls “worthless”, Donald Trump’s personal fixations have helped shape his first environmental priorities as US president.

While withdrawing the US from the Paris climate accords and declaring an “energy emergency” were among Trump’s most noteworthy executive orders on his first day in office, both were further down a list of priorities put out by the White House than measures to improve “consumer choice in vehicles, shower heads, toilets, washing machines, lightbulbs and dishwashers”.

Private developers offer politicians a simple solution for bulldozing through this crisis – build more. But it won’t work

Build baby, build. That’s about the intellectual limit of the government’s housing strategy. Millions are under-housed, so let’s “bulldoze” the planning system and build more homes. But it’s not nearly so simple.

As soon as anyone challenges the policy, the government brands them a nimby – another of the crude truncations that pass for debate on this issue: nimbys versus yimbys. So before I go further, let me state that I want to see lots of new social and genuinely affordable housing built as part of a massive programme to solve the worst housing crisis of any wealthy country. I’ve been making similar calls for years, not least in the report I co-authored for the Labour party in 2019: Land for the Many. I oppose Labour’s current approach for a different reason. It will fail.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

The TV wild man complains about silly game shows and steamed potatoes, munches toast and goes outdoors with his amazing dog

What’s first? I’ll take my dog out. I’m totally his servant. He doesn’t leave my side. If I sit in the woods, he’ll sit in front of me and watch in the same way. He’s amazing.

Sunday grub? Maybe a bit of toast. Nothing exciting. I like a Sunday lunch, but it’s a rare event. We might go out, but it’s getting harder to find somewhere that does a decent roast.

A gripping play in London’s West End tells how agreement of the first climate protocol in 1997 was a triumph, as scientists share new warnings about the scale of the crisis

As material for a West End show, the backroom machinations of an international climate conference sound unpromising.

Pedantry, boredom and delegates fighting over the wording of treaty clauses do not sound like the stuff of high drama. Nevertheless, Kyoto, a Royal Shakespeare Company production by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson now playing at Soho Place in London, has been widely praised by critics and rapturously received at its opening this month.

The chancellor’s attempt to get rich landowners to pay their fair share was correct in principle. But this measure has missed the mark

Rachel Reeves needs to rid herself of ­troublesome farmers. It’s become obvious, if it wasn’t at the time of the budget, that they are not going to go away.

Their shouts of protest are getting louder and the petition against proposals to tax inherited farms is growing longer.

Rachel Reeves flies back from Davos to lead a revival of the aviation perennial. Labour hated the idea before, but growth won’t grow itself, will it?

How can people say we can’t build anything in this country any more? Listen: our parliament is literally falling down, has caught fire 45 times in the past decade alone, and is going to take tens of billions of investment just to get it in the same postcode as fit-for-purpose – a fact which has now been kicked down the road for actual decades by successive cohorts of MPs who can’t handle being the ones to face reality, even though they are actually walking around in it every day. So don’t you dare tell me we don’t build things. We build the best damn metaphors in the world.

Another thing we might be building, perhaps in our own inimitable style, is a third runway at Heathrow. This is the heavy hint dropped by chancellor Rachel Reeves at Davos this week, which – if realised – could open the gate to the Labour Upside Down. Half of the cabinet hate it, half of them love it. Imagine Tony Blair but in asphalt.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

An aquarium in Galway has been hit by strong winds and flooding as Storm Éowyn sweeps Ireland and the UK. Footage shows water rising to the top of a staircase and streaming past the building as gusts blow flood water across the car park

• Storm Éowyn live – latest updates

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

First there was Moo Deng, then there was Pesto the Penguin – but have you met Sydney's Putricia, the corpse flower? To the scientific community, the Botanic Gardens of Sydney’s corpse flower is known as Amorphophallus titanum, which translates to 'large, deformed penis'. But online, the rare endangered plant has taken a life of its own.

It’s the first time a corpse flower has bloomed in the Royal Botanic Garden in 15 years – and when they do blossom, they last just 24 to 48 hours

• ‘Putricia for president’: Sydney’s blooming corpse flower becomes a cult hero – to those who can’t smell her

• She looks like a ‘deformed penis’ and smells like a dead possum: Sydney goes wild for its blooming corpse flower

As the captain of a royal research ship, I break ice to get to British stations in the Antarctic. It’s great fun - but getting stuck is always a risk

I have been working for the British Antarctic Survey since I was 19. I started icebreaking on my first trip to the Antarctic and got hooked. Now I am the captain of the royal research ship Sir David Attenborough and I find icebreaking addictive.

It’s unique in a maritime career to have the ability, even as a junior officer, to do quite intricate ship handling and manoeuvring at all stages. Ships break the ice continually, 24/7 – so the whole bridge team gets to do it.

A decade ago, up to 1,000 of the apex predators lived in one South African bay. Now they have gone, fleeing from killer whales. But the gap they have left creates problems for other species

The first carcass of a great white, a small female, washed up in South Africa on 9 February 2017. The 2.6-metre-long body had no hook or net marks, ruling out human involvement. Whatever had killed her had vanished. So too had all the other great white sharks in Gansbaai on the Western Cape, Dr Alison Towner noticed.

“We had several sharks acoustically tagged, and later realised three had moved as far as Plettenberg Bay and Algoa Bay, more than 500km [300 miles] east,” says the Rhodes University marine biologist.

Some areas of the Amazon experienced their worst drought in 120 years in 2024. Brazilian rivers such as the Negro fell to their lowest levels on record, affecting more than 140,000 families for months.
Photographer Musuk Nolte documented the crisis

Juan Guillermo Garcés had a brush with death while burning jungle for cattle pasture – now he runs a nature reserve in Colombia where more than 100 new species have been discovered

• Words and photographs by Anastasia Austin and Douwe den Held

Juan Guillermo Garcés remembers coming face to face with death at age 17. Smoke filled the air, choking his lungs. The temperature rose and Garcés struggled to see through the haze. Panic set in as he watched monkeys, snakes, lizards and birds desperately trying to escape the flames surrounding them.

Garcés and his brother started the fire that nearly killed them to clear a large stretch of land. But when the wind suddenly changed direction, they found themselves locked in. The brothers survived, but the fire destroyed the little remaining patch of virgin forest on the family’s 2,500-hectare (6,200-acre) ranch, nestled along Colombia’s Magdalena River. Experiencing firsthand what the animals and plants endured was a turning point for Garcés.

Artisanal shellfish farmers face ruinous losses but money meant to help is going to the powerful fishing industry, say critics

Early on a warm September morning in southern Italy, Giovanni Nicandro sets out from the port of Taranto in his small boat. Summoning his courage, the mussel farmer inspects his year’s work – only to find them all dead, a sight that almost brings him to tears.

“We have many problems,” he says. “The problems start as soon as we open our eyes in the morning.” The loss is total – not only for Nicandro but also for Taranto’s 400 other mussel farmers, after a combination of pollution and rising sea temperatures devastated their harvest.

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

Report criticises ‘slow progress’ on industry regulation, amid record fish mortality and concerns over welfare and environmental pollution

The Scottish government has been criticised for its “slow progress” on regulating the salmon farming industry by a parliamentary inquiry that took evidence for five months before reaching its conclusion.

The report reveals that MSPs “seriously considered” calling for a moratorium on new farms and expansion of existing sites due to concerns over persistently high salmon mortality rates but did not do so due to uncertainties over the impact on jobs and communities.

Ontario’s Marineland lost five belugas last year, which the park’s management puts down to the ‘circle of life’. But activists claim animal welfare is at stake

On the southern shores of the Niagara River, a few hundred feet from the thundering falls, sits Marineland of Canada – an amusement park, zoo, aquarium and forest occupying nearly 1,000 acres of land (400 hectares). Over the years, millions of people have clamoured to view the park’s 4,000 animals, including its prized walruses, orcas, dolphins and belugas.

But over the past few years, the park has taken a decidedly dark turn as there has been a string of deaths among the world’s largest captive beluga population. Last year, five belugas died at the facility bringing the total number of whales and dolphins to die there since 2019 to more than 20.

A fire tornado was spotted as the Palisades fire continued to blaze through the San Fernando valley in California

• LA fires: international crews arrive to battle raging wildfires as evacuations spread

• Politicians quibbling as LA burns: Gavin Newsom’s latest beef with Trump

• California fires live: latest news updates

Firefighters battle on as people across Los Angeles struggle to find a way forward on Friday

The tiny nation of Niue has raised £3m selling sponsorship of its marine protected area at just over £100 for a square kilometre

Niue, also known as the Rock of Polynesia, is one of the tiniest island states in the world. It takes a mere two hours to drive around it, giving views of its rugged limestone cliffs and occasional sandy coves. These coves give way to caves and chasms, once used for storage, burial sites and even as living spaces. But perhaps what visitors seek most are its crystal clear waters, home to spinner dolphins, eels, grey reef sharks, sea snakes and humpback whales.

Now the island is engaged in an innovative plan to try to conserve these vast and pristine territorial waters. The scheme, which has been running for a year, involves selling off sponsorship of the ocean surrounding the island to individuals or companies for NZ$250 (£116) a square kilometre. So far, it has raised NZ$7m, nearly halfway to its target.