The thievery of these little creatures is endlessly amusing to me, but there have been, I’m told, a few rounds of inconvenience
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To have your knickers go missing at a music festival may be seen as evidence of having a great time, but what if you’re at a folk music festival in the lush green Huon Valley of Tasmania, where parents stroll around with children in prams, and the wildest thing happening is an 8pm ceilidh?
The thing is, I’m fortunate to live in that lush green valley, but my neighbours are inveterate kleptomaniacs. A guest who was visiting for the Cygnet folk festival this summer had left some laundry out on my landlady’s deck to dry in the sun, and as my landlady turned the corner, she saw the pair of knickers disappearing slowly between the wooden deck slats. She dived to rescue the knickers; the thief scuttled away beneath the deck. I learned early on that leaving shoes out at night was to kiss your shoes goodbye.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
06/18/2026 - 21:45
06/18/2026 - 14:31
Move to dismantle $368m sea observatory initiative faced opposition from experts and lawmakers
The Donald Trump administration has reversed its decision to dismantle a $368m deep-sea observation system following an outcry from lawmakers and ocean experts.
On Thursday, the National Science Foundation announced that it would halt plans to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative, stating: “effective immediately, [it] will not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment from the remaining arrays and will continue operations including planned maintenance”.
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06/18/2026 - 11:19
Expansion could also harm access to housing, education, healthcare, open spaces and transport, analysis says
Construction of a third runway at Heathrow is likely to have significant adverse effects on the health and wellbeing of up to 3 million people living nearby, an official report has said, as the government launched the next stage of its rapid airport expansion plan.
An analysis for the Department for Transport (DfT) has found that expanding London’s hub airport could have “major adverse” impacts on the health of the most local population.
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06/18/2026 - 11:15
‘Mastermind’ Dawie Groenewald given fine of 2m rand or four-year jail term almost 16 years after arrest
Two traffickers of rhino horns have been sentenced by a South African court in what police said was the world’s largest such case, partly bringing to an end an almost two-decade legal saga.
Dawie Groenewald and Tielman Erasmus had faced more than 1,700 charges ranging from illegally hunting and dehorning rhinos to racketeering and money laundering.
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06/18/2026 - 11:00
A prospecting company’s search for gold has the town of Lone Pine and Indigenous leaders on edge, as the Trump administration greenlights new projects across the American west
Lone Pine, population 1,882, lies along a stretch of California highway framed by the vast Inyo mountains and a sweeping desert landscape of sagebrush and dunes.
It’s the type of small town tourists drive through en route to Death Valley; where hikers get a motel room between Pacific Crest Trail treks. But amid the quiet downtown strip of bars and shops, there are signs of a battle brewing under the town’s sleepy surface.
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06/18/2026 - 10:00
Top 10% generate climate and biodiversity damage bill that exceeds economies of most countries, say researchers
The environmental damage bill racked up by the highest-consuming 10% of the world’s population has reached up to $5.7tn a year – larger than the economy of every country except the US and China, a study has found.
Mega-consumers in this group are concentrated in the global north, accounting for more than half the population of the US and 40-45% of people in the EU.
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06/18/2026 - 08:00
Federal agency to use herbicide to clear lands for replanting after 2021 Caldor fire – but public reaction to plan is fierce
Katherine Levy remembers a childhood deeply rooted in the natural offerings of Lake Tahoe – water-skiing in the summer and working as ski instructor on the surrounding snow-covered mountains during winter months.
She recently moved back to live out her retirement along the lake’s north shore. But she doesn’t like what she has found upon her return: a US government plan to spray multiple types of herbicides, including the cancer-linked glyphosate weedkiller – within national forest property that abuts the community’s cherished lake.
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06/18/2026 - 03:13
Generator’s shares rise as regulator finds no evidence of misleading statements about fuel’s sustainability
The City watchdog has closed an investigation into the owner of the Drax power plant after an almost 10-month review into whether the company’s sustainability claims mislead shareholders.
The Financial Conduct Authority said it had “reviewed thousands of pages” of “complex material” relating to the company’s sourcing of wood pellets for the Drax power plant in Selby, North Yorkshire, but “did not find evidence that justified any further action”.
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06/18/2026 - 03:00
More than half of Ayetoro – a Christian utopia founded in the 1940s – has been lost to the ocean, and its remaining people are running out of options
In the early hours of 15 February 2019, the Atlantic Ocean came for Arowo Victoria’s livelihood. The 60-year-old retired midwife was asleep when neighbours began banging on her door, shouting that the sea had started covering buildings along the nearby coastline.
By the time she got to her small shop, she discovered that the Atlantic had already swept it away, destroying the business she had built with borrowed money after retirement.
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06/18/2026 - 03:00
John Ray, 17th-century botanist who coined words petal and pollen, was a tutor at Cambridge when he created his first garden
He coined the terms petal and pollen, helped to lay the foundations of modern biology and is widely regarded as the greatest English naturalist of the 17th century.
But it was while he was a young college tutor at Cambridge in the 1650s that the botanist John Ray – also known as “the father of natural history” – created his first known garden and began to systematically study plants for the first time.
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