James Tapper

4 days ago | observer.co.uk | James Tapper

Scraping the ocean floor and dumping the unwanted catch leaves an undersea desert Mankind is killing the seas. That’s the message from David Attenborough’s new film Ocean, which has put bottom trawling in the crosshairs of environmental activists. So what? The film cuts through. Bottom trawling and dredge fishing are among the most widespread methods of destructive fishing, but for decades they’ve been largely hidden from view.

1 week ago | observer.co.uk | James Tapper

Global temperatures could rise as high as 1.9C above the pre-industrial average over the next five years, according to new data from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). It’s the first time climate models have predicted such a large increase, and 2C is not out of the question. So what? The Paris treaty aimed to limit the increase to 1.5C, a threshold that was breached for the first time last year, while also setting the goal of keeping the rise “well below” 2C.

1 week ago | observer.co.uk | James Tapper

A Shropshire laboratory is taking skin samples so that beloved pets can be reproduced before finding their way home Tauron, a dog of unknown pedigree, died defending his master Zenon from a wild boar, and the third century BC Greek bureaucrat repaid his courage by burying him with an 11-line epitaph detailing how the dog had “made a gift of the beast to Hades and died himself”. Modern Zenons have more options for their memorials.

1 week ago | observer.co.uk | James Tapper

Passengers on the first rail company to be nationalised by Labour share hopes and fears as a new era chugs in There’s a fight going on at Weymouth station. Not a fair fight – it’s man versus seagull and the bird has pulled off a fly-by heist, swooping down from the station roof to nab a tasty-looking bag from its victim’s hand. The gull is pecking at a pharmacy prescription – which it seems to think is full of chips – while the furious man is throwing things at it.

1 month ago | observer.co.uk | James Tapper

The president’s big buddies vie to be his man at the Court of St James It’s the sort of series finale that Mark Burnett would have tried to script for The Apprentice: two heavyweight candidates with very different styles, vying for a role as Donald Trump’s top man in London. One is Warren Stephens, the freshly minted US ambassador to the UK, a billionaire banker rewarded by Trump for being a generous donor to his 2024 presidential campaign with a top job and a Regent’s Park ambassadorial mansion.