Voluntary standards proposed at Cop16 focus on keeping offsets strictly local, while critics call the issue a ‘distraction’

International biodiversity offsetting “doesn’t work”, according to experts aiming to create a nature market that avoids the pitfalls of carbon offsets.

The biodiversity sector has been circling the idea of a credits market that would allow companies to finance restoration and preservation of biodiversity, deliver “net-positive” gains for nature, and help plug the $700bn (£540bn) funding gap.

With $1tn a year needed, we analyse how best to fill the gap, from wealth taxes to levies on flying and oil extraction

Countries meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the Cop29 climate summit are under pressure to find ways to raise money to help poorer nations cut greenhouse gas emissions, shift to a low-carbon economy, and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather.

At least $1tn a year is needed. Developed countries are willing to ensure about half of that is provided from public sources, leaving a large gap that countries are hoping to fill with other sources of cash, known as innovative forms of finance .

The Canadian psychologist’s zealous exegesis of the Bible as a moral rulebook for life is long-winded and out of touch

There is an oddly entertaining, if largely unenlightening, debate available online between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson, two big beasts of the performing sage circuit. They discuss the Bible, or more specifically, Peterson’s latest study of its contents in his new book, We Who Wrestle With God .

Dawkins, looking increasingly bemused, quietly but repeatedly asks Peterson if he really believes in the virgin birth or whether Cain and Abel actually existed, and Canada’s best-known controversial psychologist responds with a series of ever more excitable exegeses of the biblical text.

The peak may have passed, but inflation-beating returns are still available if you’re quick. Here are the highest yielding and safest options

The UK’s army of savers have been given a wake-up call to check their interest rate and to move their money as soon as possible if they are getting a raw deal.

The Bank of England interest rate was cut from 5% to 4.75% on Thursday, while inflation is currently running at 1.7% .

He worked alongside Keith Haring and Andy Warhol in 1980s New York and now gets his first major institutional show in the same city

In the mid-1980s, Kenny Scharf biked from his Queens studio to his East Village apartment every night at around 3am. The ungodly hour would allow the young artist to “bomb” the walls of Manhattan’s east side with his energetic cartoonish figures. He had grown up making oil paintings outside Los Angeles, but upon moving to New York at age 19, he was fascinated by the graffiti all across the subway. Keith Haring – his roommate at the time – encouraged him to paint outside. “I immediately grabbed a spray can and learned how to make a painting on the run,” says Scharf.

Four decades later, the tireless painter of harmonically chaotic street art-infused dreamscapes opens his very first institutional show at the Brant Foundation in the East Village. After relocating to LA more than two decades ago, the self-titled outing marks Scharf’s return to his stomping grounds where he rose to fame along with Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. About 70 paintings and a few sculptures trace the 66-year-old’s lustrous career of many highs and comebacks. After a 1995-dated exhibition which started at Marco in Monterrey, Mexico, failed to tour, he – unlike his peers – never received a career-defining standalone affirmation from a museum. “Most people think they know my work, but they have never seen it in this volume, and they will be surprised,” says the artist.

Ishiba’s governing coalition lost majority and needs to find new partner or get consent from opposition to enact policy

Japan’s parliament re-elected the prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, on Monday after his governing coalition suffered the worst election loss in more than a decade.

Ishiba’s ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP) and its junior partner, Komeito, together lost their majority in the 465-seat lower house, the more powerful of Japan’s two-house parliament, in the 27 October election amid voter outrage over financial misconduct by his party and its lukewarm response.

While I was queueing at Wembley, I was struck by a falling barrier and hit my head on some concrete

I was queueing to get into the Taylor Swift concert at Wembley Stadium in August when a gust of wind blew a metal barrier into me, knocking me over. I hit my head on concrete. Police and stewards asked me if I wanted a paramedic but, in my shock, I declined and went to the toilets to recover. I started to feel faint and in pain and was checked by first aiders and a n onsite doctor who diagnosed concussion. I felt so unwell I had to go home , missing the concert .

At work the next day, I was still light-headed and in pain, and was advised by a 111 call operator to go to A&E. Hospital doctors confirmed concussion. My headache worsened over the next three days, I attended A&E again for checks and had to take two days off work. I’ve since complained to Wembley by email, by the web portal and by two signed-for letters, but have had no reply.

Privatisation of bailed-out bank continues after plan to try offer to retail investors was abandoned

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NatWest has bought back shares worth £1bn from the UK government, as the privatisation of the bailed out bank continues after a plan to offer a chunk of the stock to retail investors was abandoned.

The government and NatWest said on Monday that the Treasury’s holding will drop from 14.2% to 11.4%, after the sale of shares at a price of about £3.81, the bank’s closing price on Friday.

Elections have multiple causes, of course. Yet foreign policy was one of the reasons Americans gave Trump the largest Republican victory in decades

Last October, Joe Biden made the most significant address of a presidency defined by war. Sitting in the Oval Office, he asked Congress to approve $106bn in emergency aid mainly to arm Ukraine and Israel in their ongoing wars. He barely attempted to explain what the United States was seeking to achieve in either place, or how the fighting would come to an end. Instead, he claimed that American allies, and freedom itself, were under attack, and the United States had to help because of its very identity as a nation. “We are, as my friend Madeleine Albright said, ‘the indispensable nation,’” Biden intoned . Albright had served as Secretary of State in the late 1990s, at the apex of America’s global dominance.

The next day I attended a meeting of “outside experts” convened by the National Security Council. The group, in fact mostly composed of seasoned national-security hands, showered praise on the administration for Biden’s soaring speech. If the attendees had made up the US Congress, they would have rubber-stamped the aid that afternoon and probably added billions more. (The actual Congress balked at the request, approving it only after five months of uncertainty.)

Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University