Families in Vaca Muerta, the centre of Patagonia’s shale operation, report cancers, miscarriages and pollution

In Allen, a small town in Argentine Patagonia, many people living on the same street ended up falling ill. For some, it was severe migraines, nausea or skin irritation. For others, cancers, congenital abnormalities, miscarriages or stillbirth seemed to affect foetuses or children. People say it all started 13 years ago – when a well was drilled near their homes to extract gas and oil.

Calle Ciega 10 [Dead-end Street 10] lies on the eastern edge of Vaca Muerta, a vital area for Argentina’s economy, home to the world’s second-largest reserve of shale gas and fourth-largest reserve of shale oil. The region has more than 2,600 active wells, including one on this small street where about 20 families live, most of them seasonal workers on fruit farms.

Federal environment department says Black Mountain Energy has provided insufficient data as it seeks to drill 20 gas wells in the Kimberley region

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The federal government has repeatedly raised concerns about an American company’s bid to frack for gas in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, part of the world’s largest and most intact tropical savanna.

Texas-based Black Mountain Energy, through its subsidiary Bennett Resources, is seeking federal approval to drill 20 gas wells for its Valhalla project west of Fitzroy Crossing.

Sarah Finch’s fight against drilling led to a landmark ruling on fossil fuel emissions – and a leading environmental prize

It started with a notice in the local newspaper and ended with winning one of the world’s most prestigious environmental prizes. In 2010, Sarah Finch was flicking through the local planning notices when one caught her eye: a proposal to drill for oil at Horse Hill in Surrey, just outside Crawley, over the border in West Sussex, 6 miles (10km) from her home.

Surrey is not the kind of place one expects to find the oil industry. It’s a county of little villages, farms, woods and commuter railway stations. Its semi-rural landscape stretches off towards the horizon in a typically English green patchwork. It is difficult to envision it littered with nodding donkey pumpjacks and gas flares.

Die Berater von Wirtschaftsministerin Reiche bringen die umstrittene Gasfördermethode wieder ins Spiel. Was für ein Unsinn.

Online influencers are soaking and spraying their fresh produce, but experts say the ‘number one rule’ of food hygiene has nothing to do with special sanitisers

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You know the cost-of-living crisis is biting when videos of influencers unpacking their grocery “hauls” are viral on TikTok. Chewing through millions of views, fruit and vegetables are aesthetically plopped into a sink filled with water, piece by piece. “Sanitising” products are then added, ranging from the fizz of baking soda and vinegar to specialised vegetable soaps (“Amazon link in my bio!”). There are even expensive electronic purifiers, which shake, shimmy and bubble away in the basin, supposedly removing any nasties.

But is ASMR deep-cleaning your fresh produce really necessary? And is it all too late for those of us who can barely remember to rinse our pears?

Exclusive: Documents show Andrea Jenkyns asked how she could help firm after major gas find in Lincolnshire

Lincolnshire’s Reform party mayor, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, has courted the head of an American oil and gas dynasty in the hope of bringing fracking to the county, the Guardian can reveal.

Egdon Resources, a British subsidiary of the US fracker Heyco Energy, announced a major gas discovery in Lincolnshire’s Gainsborough Trough last year. Jenkyns, who became the first mayor of Greater Lincolnshire in May, reached out personally to the company asking how she “could help with your recent gas find in my county”, according to records released by the mayoral authority in response to a freedom of information request.