the liberal democrats have won an historic by—election in chesham and amersham, taking a parliamentary seat that has always been conservative. sarah greene won the buckinghamshire seat, overturning a majority of more than 16,000. the seat was held by former welsh secretary cheryl gillan, who died in april. the us supreme court has rejected the latest republican—led challenge to the law known as 0bamacare. it's the third time the affordable care act law has survived a vote. barack 0bama said it showed that his signature policy "was here to stay". the united nations is warning of an imminent famine in ethiopia's tigray region, unless drastic measures are taken fast. it's close to eight months since war broke out and there continue to be reports of abuses. there have been repeated international calls for hostilities to end. now on bbc news, our world.

it just exploded. like, a whole mountainjust exploded in five seconds. i've never seen anything like it. australians know it as �*black summer'. the months in late 2019 and early 2020, when the country saw its most intense bushfire season on record. up to 3 billion animals were killed or displaced and huge swathes of their habitat were burnt. i'm nick lazaredes, and 18 months on, i've been travelling australia to discover how its wildlife is faring now. there's a complete removal of resources that wildlife needs. whether they eat leaves,

flower, pollen, fungi, all those resources, the foodstuff is gone. —— the foodstuff of the wildlife is gone. but from the ashes of catastrophe, there are also signs of hope and new beginnings for some of australia's most iconic animals. yes, there were some casualties, but there was no species lost, and that is important. and people have to realise that it takes time for a natural habitat to re—establish, for the wildlife to come back to it, but it will happen. machine beeps quickly. in far northern nsw, not far from where australia's worst bushfire season began in 2019, one of the country's best—known species is struggling under the strain.

so yeah, i'mjust looking — because he had an internal bleed and he had a blood transfusion, i'm looking just for fluid in the abdomen, just to make sure that that bleeding has stopped. here and in other parts of the country ravaged by the fires, slow—moving koalas stood little chance. yeah, koalas are in a tree, so they don't run away from fires and the fires just sweep through. and if it's a really slow—burning, intense fire, theyjust get burnt and then they fall to the ground, dead. with huge tracts of their native habitat destroyed, urban development and rampant land—clearing has put the species on a fast track to extinction. you can see his broken nose there. and he's still a bit wonky on one side.

in new south wales, the push to protect koalas has been mired in bitter political debate and weak national environmental laws appear to be hastening their demise. so it — it is a concern with politics and the koala recovery plans and things that the government's trying to put in place, it makes us concerned that they're not doing enough to protect these animals because we do know that they are very vulnerable at this stage due to habitat loss. this is triumph. hey, baby! hello, darlings. aw. you want cuddles? at the lismore koala hospital — one of a handful dedicated solely to koalas — the list of long—term residents is expanding. but this koala, named

triumph, is already famous. so do you have a special bond with this koala? 0h, absolutely! i've him since he was a baby. with part of his leg missing, triumph was recently fitted with a prosthetic limb — a world first. hey, buddy! there you go! it's a welcome milestone in koala care. but for the frontline teams caring for australia's iconic wildlife, the trauma of black summer looms large. we're already full with koalas that were suffering. we had record numbers. it was — i think we had at one stage 3a koalas, which is — yeah, we — we were struggling. so we were already building up runs. and then when the fires hit, unfortunately we had to wait until it was clear for us to go

out, but most of them perished. it did bring a lot of awareness around. if only covid didn't come out shortly after, othewise we could still be educating people. but yeah, absolutely, there was a keen interest all over the world. so in one way it was good, but it was devastating to our wildlife. with the recovery of the koala and other native species hampered by weak laws and toxic politics, the most substantive response is coming from the grassroots. so was your indigenous protected area affected by the fires? yes. yeah, yeah, 80%, yeah. and a lot of animal species have moved away, too. we know that over 80% in some areas of the koala habitat has been destroyed and affected by the fires, with over 61,000 koalas estimated to have

perished in the fires. so we do know that all of the way up the east coast of australia, there were fires affecting koala habitat, including in this area here. on this farm in tintenbar in northern new south wales, the world wildlife fund is helping with a community effort to plant koala food trees on a massive scale. evenjust today, we're planting 9000 koala food and habitat trees, and the cattle have been removed off this property and the landholders are really wanting to see this part of the property restored for the koalas. with more farmers choosing to rehabilitate cleared land, there are hopes that if koalas survive, other wildlife with also thrive. koala habitat is also home to a whole range of other species. so when we protect koala habitat, we're protecting habitat for a lot of different species — including a lot of other

threatened species like quolls, or powerful owls or lyrebirds or lots of different marsupials like platypus. so by supporting koala habitat, we are protecting habitat for a large range of animals. the gondwana rainforests of australia are amongst the oldest on the planet. a world heritage site, these cloud forests date to the time of the dinosaurs, when australia began separating from the ancient supercontinent of gondwana, 99 million years ago. the plants and animals that live here provide us with the best examples of the earth's stages of evolutionary history that exist. so we're looking here, basically, into the very middle

of the biggest unburned expanse of native forest in northern central new south wales... but in 2020, as flames ravaged at its fringes, precious pockets of its astonishing biodiversity disappeared in a flash. there were fireballs leaping 50m or maybe 100m above the canopy. the whole mountainside alight. the whole sky glowing. it was like watching a volcano erupt. the type of stuff that you look at, it's like "that could never burn". 0n the dorrigo plateau in the new england tablelands of new south wales, ecologist mark graham has been studying the impacts of the black summer bushfires in a region he's known intimately for more than 30 years.

half of the gazetted area of the gondwana rainforests of australia burned between september 2019 and january 2020 — that's wiping a global treasure from the landscapes that we're the custodians of. the mortality in these forests has been that great that what all these incredible — these globally significant — fauna species need to survive is not there. dead orchids. it's deathly silent. there's not a single bird calling. and that — i'm crying inside at that because i've been coming here since 1981 or �*82 and i know deep within my head what these forests should sound like.

and they're silent. as fires swept through from the west, the canopies of some of the state's most treasured national parks were engulfed. more than 18 months later, many of the burnt eucalypts are resprouting in a process known as epicormic growth. but in australia's harsh climate, with more frequent droughts, many will not survive. there are whole areas where we knew that species such as the sphagnum frog which is one of our most ancient frogs have been entirely wiped out. because all the leaf litter and organic matter in the forest floor and in the soil burnt through. they lived within these permanently wet soaks in the forest. and they are now gone from areas that we know

that they once occurred, and they have lineages going back to gondwana. so we've lost, in a geological instant, tens of millions of years of biodiversity. that is what has happened on our watch. and that's infinite sadness. these trees would have to be well over 500 years old, some well over 1000 years old. these ancient antarctic beeches. and there are super medicines in the fungi that are within these antarctic beech. and how was that affected by the fires? totally wiped them out. data is emerging that the bushfires of 2020 in the hottest and driest period in australian history were on a scale never experienced on this continent. here, on its burnt edges,

life will never be the same. the areas of grey forest visible in the distance are dead. a crown fire under a 90km wind burnt through and there has been widespread mortality. eucalypts don't have dormant seeds so because of the sheer scale, it is highly unlikely eucalypts will be regenerating or germinating where whole mountainsides are dead below us, so that is effectively ecosystem collapse. kangaroo island's story since the fires is one of extraordinary resilience and recovery. separated from the mainland 10,000 years ago, it liesjust off the coast of south australia and is the country's third largest island.

scientists say the interaction between plants and animals here provides a biological window into the past, a kind of noah's ark of australian wildlife. but with the island's iron—rich soils a magnet for lightning, the cataclysmic events of australia's black summer conspired against it. almost half the island — around 200,000 hectares — burned. so here we are coming up to the area where the fire burned to, just up around here. and then it left these little patches of unburnt vegetation, here was right on the edge where fire stopped. kangaroo island wildlife researcher pat hodgins remembers the fear which gripped him in the days which followed.

it was pretty clear to us the impacts for threatened species on the island was going to be pretty massive. if you see just the fire ripping through the habitat and taking everything away, it's like a massive habitat loss, just like that, the click of a — heartbeat, really. the dunnart is pretty distinctive. it runs along here, in front of this camera trap, and the camera will detect the movement and then take a series of photos. and this was what worried him the most. the fate of the endangered kangaroo island dunnart, a tiny marsupial. when you have species like the kangaroo island dunnart, that's only found here, there are none on mainland australia, not on any other islands, not in captivity, and they only live in this really small location — if you have a fire that comes through and takes them all out, takes out the habitat, you don't really know how that species

is going to respond. so, we were obviously pretty concerned that there was going to be some pretty major impacts for that species. with predators on the prowl, teams worked quickly to create a safe havens for any remaining ground species, setting up simple contraptions like these netted tunnels, where animals could hide. nearby, drift nets were placed with cameras attached to help identify anything moving on the surface. within a couple of days, miraculously, we had found kangaroo island dunnarts that had persisted here, which was fantastic, and also a whole host of other threatened species like southern brown bandicoots, which were endangered, southern emu wrens and western whipbirds. so, that was amazing, to know that they'd persisted in this location. with that tiny success,

a rescue plan was hatched to secure remaining populations. and within months, the western river refuge was created — almost 400 hectares of habitat protected with a cat exclusion fence that ecologists hope will become a sanctuary for the dunnarts and other species. because of that effort and because of the funding and the resources that have gone into the kangaroo island dunnart, we know more about the dunnart than we ever have, because of the bushfire, which i guess is a bit of a silver lining. and what we've seen from that is that we have found dunnarts in a lot more locations than we previously have. and it's notjust dunnarts which have survived. this is a possum, a brushtail possum. yep. it's very, very nice to sort of see these guys, burrowing down and have sort of survived, or moved along in different areas.

tiny little pygmy possums, which you would never think would be able to survive such an intense fire. in the aftermath of the fires, anything that managed to survive the inferno faced a new threat on the charred landscape: feral cats. with so many species already pushed to the brink, a battle is now underway to remove them from the fragile environment. so it looks like quite a contraption. they're a snap trap, so a cat will put its paw inside it, it will snap shut, it will hold the paw and then we come out, basically a sunrise, at the earliest time, and euthanise the cat. it's great that they can hold a feral cat and not damage native wildlife. at the far end of the island, untouched by the fires of black summer,

wildlife is flourishing. this is a map of kangaroo island showing where the fires occurred, this last year, and the colours, they show you the intensity of the fire in a lot of area. so the western end of the island, you can see there was some very, very intense burns. but there were also some areas that didn't burn. so there were some refuges for the wildlife to escape some of this. here we go, echidnas... dr peggy rismiller has been studying the wildlife of kangaroo island for more than 35 years, with a particular focus on the island's largest natural predator, the rosenberg's goanna, which can live several decades, and the short—beaked echidna, an egg—laying creature which is the world's oldest surviving mammal. everyone loves echidnas, and echidnas are really good in the environment.

both echidnas and goannas are our natural gardeners. so they're very, very good. they're both diggers, that means they are cultivating the soil, they are turning over the soil, and they are helping the natural environment actually spread. just days after the worst fires in living memory reduced much of the island's bushland to ash, dr rismiller discovered the first vital signs of recovery. immediately after the fire we still found invertebrate life. we still found the ants, we found the termites, we found the spiders. all of those were also food sources for other things. there were areas of refuge, areas that didn't burn, where animals did take refuge, so that there were areas that we have populations that were able to expand as the environment itself started to expand. the whole chemical powerhouse of the environment has changed post—fire.

so, after the fire, some of the first things we saw were these amazing fungus that have come up, because with all of the ash, the ph has to change before other things can start to grow. and it's actually one step after another, is the way that nature does it. but that's not the way that humans usually think, you know? we want things to happen and we want them to happen much quicker than nature does. so nature's time is definitely different than people time. watch your head. like elsewhere in australia, plant and animal species on kangaroo island have evolved with fire, and although the intensity of the black summer bushfires were off the charts, renewal of the environment is already under way. you can see that the termite mound is actually covered with a type of soil, and what we found was that the termites will actually mine certain chemicals from the soil, and build that

into the top of their mound, and that actually makes their mounds more fire—resistant. so, in some places, with the bushfire, the mounds look totally intact. you can see them with everything black and burned around them, and the mound is standing there looking like it wasn't touched. i think if you're a scientist and biologist you have to be positive about these things. you're looking at species such as the echidna, that was around 120 million years ago. now, australia has gone through ice ages, gone through greenhouse effects, gone through probably a number of catastrophic fires in that time, and echidnas are still considered one of australia's most common native mammals. so they are really true survivors, and it's the true survivors we should look at and perhaps try to model ourselves a bit about them, about being survivors ourselves. they are resilient, the ecosystems are resilient, kangaroo island people are resilient.

australia is still assessing the scale of the immense damage done by its black summer. but the resilience of kangaroo island could hold the key to protecting the nation's rich biodiversity from future catastrophic fires. as public attitudes to climate change begin to shift, there is renewed hope that australia's remarkable wildlife will be given a fighting chance.

hello there. friday is set to be another day of split weather fortunes, with largely dry and often sunny weather across northern and western areas. further south and east, well, the chance once again of some thunderstorms or at least some torrential downpours of rain. feeding up from the near continent, you can see this weather system herejust fringing into south—eastern areas, whereas this ridge of high pressure is going to be keeping things mainly dry settled across a part of scotland, northern ireland, north—west england, wales, and the far south—west, after a fairly cool, fresh start. there will be some spells of sunshine and just the odd shower. but down toward the south—east, you can see more in the way of cloud and some sporadic outbreaks of rain. now, don't take the detail on this chart too literally, it's often hard to pin down the detail in these thundery scenarios, but there will be some heavy bursts of rain, perhaps as far as the west country, the west midlands, up to parts of lincolnshire and east yorkshire. the greatest chance of seeing thunder and lightning is across parts of east anglia and the far south—east, where you will also notice the strength of a keen,

north—easterly breeze. so while it will still feel humid here, temperatures will be a good few degrees down on where they have been. maybejust 16 there in norwich. 20 in the sunshine in plymouth, that's the expected high. but more generally, we're looking at temperatures in the mid—to—high teens. now, as we head through friday night, we'll see this wet weather clearing off into the north sea. still some cloud affecting eastern areas, clearer spells further west and further north and quite a cool, fresh start to the weekend for most. a little bit fresher than it has been, even across the south—east corner. on saturday, we find ourselves between weather systems, so that means, actually, a decent amount of dry weather. quite a cloudy start for some, i think we should see some spells of sunshine, chance of one or two showers here and there, and more especially, creeping up from the south through the latter part of the afternoon. temperatures not doing too badly in the strong june sunshine, maybe 23 degrees there in liverpool. always a little bit cooler the further north you look across the uk. but for sunday, well, the weather picture

is a lot more complex. low pressure swinging in from the west, this frontal system driving its way northwards, what it means that is most places will see some outbreaks of rain from time to time throughout the day, could be some heavy, thundery downpours creeping in towards the south, and those temperatures ranging from 21 in london, 22 in norwich, tojust 12 degrees in aberdeen. burned.

this is bbc news. i'm lewis vaughan jones. our top stories: cheering and applause. the liberal democrats win an historic by—election in buckinghamshire, taking a parliamentary seat that has always been conservative and give a message to all young women. there will be people who will try to put you down, who will try to block your way and tell you that you can't. i'm here tonight to tell you you can, you must, and you will. the us supreme court rejects the latest republican—led challenge to the law known as 0bamacare — the third time the law has survived a vote. japan's naomi 0saka pulls out of wimbledon a month after withdrawing from the french open. # i am titanium.