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Horticulturalists begin moving and propagating plants before the rusty and warped Palm House begins renovation – but some are too tall to save

It will be a gut-wrenching moment for the horticulturalists at Kew Gardens when some of the magnificent trees in the Palm House have to be felled.

“There are some sad moments ahead,” said Palm House manager, Will Spoelstra, who knows all the plants inside the cathedral-like greenhouse.

В первой части я обещал беспарольный вход в админку. Здесь он наконец заработал.

Что внутри:

— mTLS в nginx и apache: все директивы, все переменные $ssl_client_* и SSL_CLIENT_*, семь справочников на 309 параметров, сверенных с документацией; — вход по кнопке вместо диалога выбора сертификата на первом же заходе — с отдельным хостом, одноразовым пропуском и защитой от login CSRF; — выпуск сертификата в один клик: ключ рождается в браузере и не уезжает на сервер; — свой web-УЦ на Go без единой зависимости, где ключ УЦ отделён от веба сетевой границей.

И честная часть: три дефекта, которые вылезли только на живом стенде, окно версий nginx между CVE и регрессией, и дыра, которую состязательная проверка нашла в уже работавшем коде.

US Geological Survey says massive glacial collapse caused catastrophic flash floods in the Himalayan border region of Nepal ⁠and Tibet

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• Tell us: have you been affected by the flash floods?

At 8.37am on Wednesday, an enormous section ⁠of a glacier in the Himalayas sheared free and crashed on to the valley floor in Nepal’s Langtang national park, about 35 miles (60km) north of the capital, Kathmandu, near the mountainous Nepal-Tibet border.

Such was the force of the event, it was initially reported as an earthquake of magnitude 4.4. The US Geological Survey later determined the tremor was caused ​by glacial rock and ice collapsing, registering a magnitude of 5.2.

Laborious to harvest and extortionately priced, the sunset-coloured stigmas of the saffron crocus have an extraordinarily warm, pungent taste. Fortunately, however, a little goes a very long way …

The saffron crocus has six lilac-purple flowers, three yellow stamens and three orange-red stigmas that extend beyond the petals like the wiry antennae of an insect. The thread-like stigmas have to be picked only by hand when the flowers are fully open, a laborious, finickety job that hasn’t changed much since ancient times. Then, to avoid the colour and flavour fading, the stigmas need to be dried very quickly, a process that reduces their weight by about 80%. Tens of thousands of fiery-looking filaments are required to produce half a kilogram of the dried threads, which make the “hay” or powder we know as saffron and explains the exorbitant cost. Fortunately, just a few threads of this precious spice go a long way.

Native to Crete, Iran and south-west Asia, the saffron crocus has been cultivated since the dawn of civilisation for its medicinal properties, as well as for use in cosmetics, perfume, food and as a dye. According to Alan Davidson in The Oxford Companion to Food, the Moguls brought the use of saffron from Persia to India, in particular Kashmir; meanwhile, in the westward direction, the Arabs were cultivating saffron in Spain by AD960, although it was not until the 13th century that cultivation spread to Italy, France, Germany and England, particularly Essex. In his book The Last Food of England, Marwood Yeatman describes the “orderly strips of purple flowers inches apart in beds of up to 10ft wide” growing in a field outside the prosperous, half-timbered Essex wool town of Chipping Walden. “The women (‘crokers’) stooped to lift the crop on damp and dewy September mornings.” By the early 1500s, Chipping Walden had been renamed Saffron Walden.

Underbelly, Cowgate, Edinburgh
Grace McLean brings vocal and emotional range in the central role of Alex Bechtel’s Homeric song cycle

She is the one played by Anne Hathaway in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the central figure in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and the inspiration behind a 2010 play by Enda Walsh. And here she is again, this time alone with her thoughts, a longsuffering woman in white, in a seductive song cycle by Alex Bechtel.

Penelope is played by Broadway actor Grace McLean who brings both vocal and emotional range to the part. Drily witty, defiant and elegant, she is the wife of Odysseus, doggedly hanging on for her husband’s return long after the end of the Trojan war. Much to her annoyance – and occasional temptation – a load of suitors are camping out in her house, ready to take his place.

Findings from research into illnesses associated with bathing in lakes and rivers come amid boom in hobby

Wild swimming has been linked to a higher risk of stomach bugs and skin rashes, according to the largest ever controlled study of illnesses associated with bathing in rivers and lakes.

The research found that swimmers at locations in Hungary were more than twice as likely to develop skin problems, while the risk of contracting a stomach bug rose significantly in water with higher concentrations of E coli and other bacteria linked to faecal pollution.

Steel rails warping and signalling equipment failing in metal cabinets are among the problems to be solved

Tarmac softens in the summer heat, which may cause problems on the roads, but even trains running on steel rails are not immune.

Railways in the UK are generally designed to operate within a 45C temperature range. The rails expand slightly in the heat, and excessive temperatures can produce “sun kink” with rails warping into S-shapes. The effect is small but the distortion can derail fast trains, so speeds are reduced for safety.

Exclusive: utility company wants to draw off tens of millions of litres of water a day from Thames and replace it with treated effluent

Levels of a toxic “forever chemical” rose to 13 times the legal limit during Thames Water pilots for a controversial multimillion pound water recycling scheme that will pump millions of litres of treated sewage into the River Thames during drought.

The data from the pilots is in stark contrast to public comments from Thames Water that their water recycling project in south-west London will not harm the riverine environment.

An anti-Farage army of voters is there to be galvanised, as exclusive data shows. But getting them out will be tricky

Who can stop Nigel Farage? Which voters would actually dig out their ID and schlep down to the polling booth to fight him?

Over the past year, these two questions have come to shape British politics. From Runcorn and Helsby to Caerphilly and Aberdeen South, via countless flimsy leaflets claiming “Only X can win here”, parties have jostled for the part of his majesty’s opposition to Reform. Those battles have given us Hannah Spencer and Andy Burnham; they have bulldozed Labour in Wales and forced Keir Starmer out of No 10.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

Every now and then the Thursday quiz gets involved in a flap, as it did last week with “birb”-gate. After a sustained campaign lasting at least two weeks, subeditors finally relented and allowed the quiz to call our feathered friends “birbs” – only for half the comment section to revolt against the indignity of modern internet parlance. Still, that is nothing compared with the time a reader complained that the quiz using the phrase “baby cows” was unbecoming of a broadsheet newspaper. Anyway, 15 questions on news, general knowledge and obscure trivia await, and no “birbs” were harmed in the process. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 262

Allegations Nathan Cofnas was unqualified for Ghent role and would cause ‘negative impact’ made to senior leaders months ago

Nathan Cofnas, the academic who accused Jason Arday of plagiarism, has been accused of having “very limited expertise” for his academic role by professors also working at Ghent University, who say he has a “far-right agenda”.

Cofnas secured a postdoctoral research role “on the future of liberalism” at Belgium’s Ghent University in March. Weeks later, Ghent’s department of philosophy and moral sciences handed a 19-page statement to university officials, setting out why it believed it was “improbable” that Cofnas was the best candidate.

Findings from research into illnesses associated with bathing in lakes and rivers come amid boom in hobby

Wild swimming has been linked to a higher risk of stomach bugs and skin rashes, according to the largest ever controlled study of illnesses associated with bathing in rivers and lakes.

The research found that swimmers at locations in Hungary were more than twice as likely to develop skin problems, while the risk of contracting a stomach bug rose significantly in water with higher concentrations of E coli and other bacteria linked to faecal pollution.

Exclusive: utility company wants to draw off tens of millions of litres of water a day from Thames and replace it with treated effluent

Levels of a toxic “forever chemical” rose to 13 times the legal limit during Thames Water pilots for a controversial multimillion pound water recycling scheme that will pump millions of litres of treated sewage into the River Thames during drought.

The data from the pilots is in stark contrast to public comments from Thames Water that their water recycling project in south-west London will not harm the riverine environment.

Horticulturalists begin moving and propagating plants before the rusty and warped Palm House begins renovation – but some are too tall to save

It will be a gut-wrenching moment for the horticulturalists at Kew Gardens when some of the magnificent trees in the Palm House have to be felled.

“There are some sad moments ahead,” said Palm House manager, Will Spoelstra, who knows all the plants inside the cathedral-like greenhouse.

Allegations Nathan Cofnas was unqualified for Ghent role and would cause ‘negative impact’ made to senior leaders months ago

Nathan Cofnas, the academic who accused Jason Arday of plagiarism, has been accused of having “very limited expertise” for his academic role by professors also working at Ghent University, who say he has a “far-right agenda”.

Cofnas secured a postdoctoral research role “on the future of liberalism” at Belgium’s Ghent University in March. Weeks later, Ghent’s department of philosophy and moral sciences handed a 19-page statement to university officials, setting out why it believed it was “improbable” that Cofnas was the best candidate.

The Marches, Shropshire: For this hoverfly, pretending to be far more dangerous than it actually is has been a useful evolutionary technique

Back in the analogue world – where “analogue” means signals transmitted by continuous waves of sound or light, but also means something that looks like something else – intelligence is more poetic and weirder than its shambling digital doppelganger.

In a bend of the heatwave, a remarkable fly lands on a rose leaf in full sun. The hornet mimic hoverfly, Volucella zonaria, is a stonking great (for a hoverfly) 2cm-long creature with a peachy-yellow and black striped abdomen. It has no sting, a chestnut thorax and a big-eyed head with a pad for nectar, not jaws for chomping insects, two rather than four cellophane wings folded at rest, and an aura to unnerve the uninitiated.

It has inspired violent protests from Norway to Rome – and now it’s hitting the UK. Playwright Tiago Rodrigues explains why the far-right speech at the drama’s climax has proved so incendiary

In February, turbulent scenes inside a German theatre made headlines around the globe. During the final act of a play at Schauspielhaus theatre in Bochum, the audience first jeered and whistled at a performer in the role of a far-right politician. An orange lobbed from the auditorium narrowly missed its target; eventually, two spectators climbed on to the stage and tried to wrestle the actor off. News of the incident travelled around the world: it seemed a bizarre throwback to a world in which people were not able to tell the difference between art and real life, like 19th-century Parisians stampeding out of a cinema after watching a train hurtle towards the camera.

For the man who wrote the play, however, it was nothing unusual. “I was not surprised by the reaction,” says Portuguese playwright Tiago Rodrigues. “I was surprised by the fact that it was so surprising for so many people.” He describes the audience’s reaction to his play Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists as “very intense”, but also “typical”.