With tickets doubling as public transport passes and recycled props, Hans Otto Theater is embracing a €3m federal project to make culture climate neutral

A handful of Spanish conquistadors fight through thick undergrowth to emerge in the ivy-clad ruins of a fallen civilisation during a rehearsal of Austrian playwright Thomas Köck’s Your Palaces Are Empty.

Premiered last month at the Hans Otto Theater in Potsdam, south-west of Berlin, the bleak and unforgiving drama probes the wounds of a shattered capitalist world that has exploited its people and the planet’s resources.

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The founder of the Seahorse Trust explains how his life-long fascination with the enigmatic creatures helped us to understand and protect them

I saw a seahorse for the first time when I was 14. There is something very unfishlike about the way seahorses swim upright, and their constantly moving eyes – it made me feel completely in awe of them. Fifty-one years later, and that feeling has never gone away. Even now, if I’m on a dive and I see one, I find it amazing.

Seahorses are fish that don’t fit into any category; they seem like an amalgam of lots of different creatures. They have horse-like heads, kangaroo-like pouches and prehensile, monkey-like tails – which often seem to have a mind of their own – plus they can change colour like a chameleon. It’s quite remarkable.

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Beavers’ dams have created more places for water voles to hide from predators and hopefully flourish, say experts

Beavers reintroduced to a Scottish rainforest 15 years ago may have created the right habitat for the area’s endangered water voles to flourish.

The voles, once abundant in Scotland but now one of the country’s most threatened native animals, could thrive in the “complex boundary between water and land” that beavers have created in Knapdale in Argyll and Bute since their reintroduction there in 2009.

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Unease and anger are rising over proposals to build country’s first facility on Kilifi coast, home to white sand beaches, coral reefs and mangrove swamps

Kilifi County’s white sandy beaches have made it one of Kenya’s most popular tourist destinations. Hotels and beach bars line the 165 mile-long (265km) coast ; fishers supply the district’s restaurants with fresh seafood; and visitors spend their days boating, snorkelling around coral reefs or bird watching in dense mangrove forests.

Soon, this idyllic coastline will host Kenya’s first nuclear plant, as the country, like its east African neighbour Uganda , pushes forward with atomic energy plans.

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Jordanians died in Saudi Arabia after suffering heatstroke, said officials, with temperatures reaching 47C in Mecca

At least 14 Jordanian pilgrims have died while on the hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia as temperatures soar in the kingdom.

Jordan’s foreign ministry said “14 Jordanian pilgrims died and 17 others were missing” during the performance of hajj rituals. It said its nationals had died “after suffering sun stroke due to the extreme heatwave” and that it had coordinated with Saudi authorities to bury the dead in Saudi Arabia, or transfer them to Jordan.

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Party begins week of campaigning on economy under pressure to say if it will raise taxes to pay for £7.3bn plans

Labour will create more than 650,000 jobs with its green investment plans, Rachel Reeves has said, as the party kickstarts a week of campaigning on the economy.

The UK shadow chancellor has revealed new details about the £7.3bn green investment vehicle that Labour intends to create after the election, saying it will help create hundreds of thousands of new industrial jobs.

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Britain may be chilly, but from Greece to India, people are dying due to record temperatures. The death toll will grow without urgent action

While Britons don jumpers and complain about the unseasonable cold, much of the world has been reeling due to excessive temperatures. India has been in the grip of its longest heatwave in recorded history, with thermometers hitting 50C in some places. Greece closed the Acropolis in the afternoon last week as temperatures hit 43C; never has it seen a heatwave so early in the year. Soaring temperatures in the Sahel and western Africa saw mortuaries in Mali reportedly running short of space this spring , while swathes of Asia suffered in May .

Mexico and the south-west of the US have also endured blistering conditions; it was particularly shocking to hear Donald Trump pledge again to “drill, baby, drill” at a rally that saw supporters taken to hospital with heat exhaustion. These bouts of extreme weather are increasing as the climate crisis worsens . Although the El Niño weather pattern contributed to heatwaves over the last 12 months, they are becoming more frequent, extreme and prolonged thanks to global heating. By 2040, almost half the world’s inhabitants are likely to experience major heatwaves , 12 times more than the historic average.

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Meteorologists warn that heat will spread east through the week, with ‘heat dome’ expected to trap high temperatures

Millions of Americans are facing “dangerously hot conditions”, the National Weather Service said, with a heatwave set to hit the midwest and north-east US from Monday.

Michigan, Ohio and western Pennsylvania were all under heat warnings starting Monday, with alerts in place until Friday evening. Meteorologists warned that the heat will spread east through the week, with a “heat dome” expected to trap high temperatures across New York, Washington DC and Boston.

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This forest is our home, our existence and our children’s future. Politicians who can’t resist selling it for oil cash will feel the strength of the Waorani people

In 2019 I helped lead a movement that defeated the Ecuadorian government’s plans to auction half a million acres of Waorani territory in the Amazon to oil companies. We showed in court that the government had violated its legal obligation to obtain free, prior and informed consent from Indigenous communities. We won a moral and legal victory on behalf of our ancestral home in that moment – or so we thought. Now, however, Ecuador’s president plans to plough through that legal judgment and recommence oil drilling on nearby Indigenous lands. He obviously hasn’t reckoned with the strength and tenacity of the Waorani people.

In winning that landmark legal case, we protected pristine rainforest lands, Indigenous autonomy and our planet’s climate from further deforestation. We protected our homes, our children’s future and the forests where I grew up playing with my siblings and pet monkeys, learning to garden and make fresh chicha, and where my people still live today. No more destroying our lives, homes and forests to pump the blood of our ancestors from beneath the soil.

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