Jon Henley

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Jon Henley

Romania may be home to as many as 13,000 brown bears, almost twice as many as previously thought, the country’s forestry research institute has said, as officials promised new laws to allow communities to deal with “crisis bear situations”. The institute’s study of 25 counties in the Carpathian mountains was the first to use DNA samples from material such as faeces and hair. Previous estimates based on prints and sightings put the bear population at less than 8,000.

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Jon Henley

Most of the time, nothing much happens. A wide Nordic river, melting snow still lining its banks, meanders peacefully through a pristine forest of spruce and pine. But this spring, as every spring for the past six years, a lot of people will be glued to it. When Den stora älgvandringen – variously translated as The Great Moose Migration or The Great Elk Trek – first aired on the public broadcaster SVT’s on-demand platform in 2019, nearly a million people tuned in. Last year, it was 9 million.

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Jon Henley

At least 85 sperm donors in the Netherlands have fathered 25 or more children, the national gynaecology and obstetrics organisation has said, after a new registration system showed fertility clinics have been breaking existing rules on sperm donation for decades. The NVOG said on Monday that some clinics had deliberately used sperm batches more than 25 times, exchanged sperm without the necessary paperwork or donors’ knowledge, and allowed the same donors to donate sperm at multiple clinics.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Jon Henley

More people were executed in 2024 than in any other year over the past decade, mainly reflecting a huge increase in executions in Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, according to Amnesty International’s annual report on the use of the death penalty. The human rights NGO said that although the number of countries carrying out executions was the lowest on record, it had confirmed 1,518 executions globally in 2024, a 32% increase over the previous year and the highest since the 1,634 carried out in 2015.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Jakub Krupa |Ashifa Kassam |Angela Giuffrida |Stephen Burgen |Jon Henley

Key eventsShow key events onlyPlease turn on JavaScript to use this featureUS tariffs calculations are ‘nonsense’, German economy minister saysOutgoing German economy minister Robert Habeck is not mincing his words this morning in response to a question on US tariffs and how they were calculated. He says: “The calculations, from my point of view, are nonsense. Even the basis of the calculation is nonsense.