At Maple Farm, nature is returning in droves: nightingales, grass snakes, slowworms, bats and insects. All due to the vision of a group determined to accelerate its recovery

The manically melodic song of the nightingale is a rare sound in Britain these days, but not at Maple Farm. Four years ago, a single bird could be heard at this secluded spot in rural Surrey; this summer, they were everywhere. “We were hearing them calling all night, from five different territories,” says Meg Cookson, lead ecologist for the Youngwilders, pointing to the woodland around us. A group of Youngwilders were camping out at the site, but the birds were so loud, “we couldn’t sleep all night,” says Layla Mapemba, the group’s engagement lead. “We were all knackered the next day, but it was so cool.” An expert from the Surrey Wildlife Trust came to help them net and ring one of the nightingales the next morning, Cookson recalls: “He’d never held a nightingale in his hands before. He was crying.”

Rewilding is by definition a slow business, but here at Maple Farm, after just four years, the results are already visible, and audible. The farm used to be a retirement home for horses. Now it’s a showpiece for the Youngwilders’ mission: to accelerate nature recovery, in one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and to connect young people (18-30-year-olds) with a natural world they are often excluded from, and a climate crisis they are often powerless to prevent. Global heating continues, deforestation destroys natural habitats, and another Cop summit draws to a disappointing conclusion in Brazil – so who could blame young people for wanting to take matters into their own hands?

Peter Ruis discusses the chain’s £800m reboot, bringing ‘radical relevance’ – and that dance-driven Christmas ad

You may think the department store has had its day. Debenhams and Beales have left the high street, House of Fraser has closed almost two-thirds of its stores and Fenwick exited its prime London site.

Peter Ruis, the managing director of John Lewis, has a different view. After closing 16 stores during the pandemic and shedding thousands of jobs as it fought for survival, he says expansion is now “definitely something we are looking at”. The 161-year-old retailer is spending £800m by 2029 on giving its 36 remaining outlets a reboot.

Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson are increasingly espousing Christian ‘values’, and a wealthy US legal group is becoming influential – this could have dire consequences

Earlier this year, not long after Tommy Robinson embraced evangelical Christianity while in prison, the then Conservative MP Danny Kruger spoke in parliament about the need for a restoration of Britain through the “recovery of a Christian politics”. Less than two months later, Kruger joined Reform, and shortly after that, James Orr, a vociferously conservative theologian who has been described as JD Vance’s “English philosopher king”, was appointed as one of Reform’s senior advisers. The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, now frequently invokes the need for a return to “Judeo-Christian” values.

The British right is increasingly invoking the Christian tradition: the question is what it hopes to gain from doing so.

Lamorna Ash is the author of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever (Bloomsbury Publishing, £22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Still largely viewed as a peaceful philosophy, across much of south-east Asia, the religion has been weaponised to serve nationalist goals

In the summer of 2023, I arrived in Dharamshala, an Indian town celebrated as the home of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader. The place hadn’t changed much since my last visit almost two decades ago. The roads were still a patchwork of uneven asphalt and dirt, and Tibetan monks in maroon robes filled the streets. Despite the relentless hum of traffic, Dharamshala had a rare stillness. The hills seemed to absorb the noise. Prayer flags flickered in the breeze, each rustle a reminder of something enduring.

But beneath the surface, the Buddhism practised across Asia has shifted. While still widely followed as a peaceful, nonviolent philosophy, it has been weaponised, in some quarters, in the service of nationalism, and in support of governments embracing a global trend toward majoritarianism and autocracy.

Her commitment to food directly connected to its source shaped the tastes and thinking of a generation of cooks. We all wanted to sit next to her at dinner

Spring is a season of transition, when bare earth transforms into something alive with promise. It was also the name chef Skye Gyngell, who has died at age 62, chose for her London restaurant. She said it was her favourite season, but the truth is she embraced all four and lived them wholly.

Gyngell was singular: she had the palate of a chef and the palette of an artist. Those twin gifts met in food that was painterly in its composition, delicate in its details and tuned to nature’s shifting notes.

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It took some oblique wording, but Saudi Arabia made a last-minute decision to sign deal that marks departure for Cop

Dawn was breaking over the Amazonian city of Belém on Saturday morning, but in the windowless conference room it could have been day or night. They had been stuck there for more than 12 hours, dozens of ministers representing 17 groups of countries, from the poorest on the planet to the richest, urged by the Brazilian hosts to accept a settlement cooked up the day before.

Tempers were short, the air thick as the sweaty and exhausted delegates faced up to reality: there would not be a deal here in Brazil. The 30th UN climate conference would end in abject failure.

Damning official review finds many unpaid carers left with huge debt because of government failure

• ‘It’s like the Post Office scandal’: victims of carer’s allowance crisis speak out

• The carer’s allowance scandal – a timeline

Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable unpaid carers will have their cases reassessed after a damning official review concluded they had been left with huge debts because of government failure and maladministration.

The review, due to be published on Tuesday, was triggered after a year-long Guardian investigation revealed how carers had been hit with draconian penalties of as much as £20,000 relating to carer’s allowance. Some were plunged into hardship, others were jailed.

Reform leader denies racist or antisemitic behaviour ‘with intent’ at school, but says he can’t remember everything from 49 years ago

• Nigel Farage’s shifting answers on school-days racism claims – a timeline

Nigel Farage has broken his silence nearly a week after he was accused by about 20 people of racism and antisemitism as a teenager, by saying he “never directly, really tried to go and hurt anybody”.

His remarks came after the publication of a detailed investigation by the Guardian in which many of his school contemporaries claimed to be victims of, or witnesses to, repeated incidents of deeply offensive behaviour.

US army secretary Daniel Driscoll expected to hold meeting today having reportedly already met with Russia on Monday night

Nordic correspondent

Meanwhile, Sweden has today announced it is investing an additional 3.5bn SEK (£280m) in air defences amid the increased threat from drones and other forms of aerial attack.

“Sweden’s defence needs to be strengthened against threats such as robots, drones and helicopters. The best way to guarantee peace and freedom is to invest in defence. The orders also contribute to growth, jobs and security of supply. It also improves the possibilities of increasing production capacity in the defence industry.”

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

• Reeves expected to reveal cut in growth forecasts for next five years in budget

The “painful truth” is that sterling captures the confidence of international investors in the UK economy, writes Professor Costas Milas of the University of Liverpool’s Management School.

Professor Milas tells us:

Investors, of course, hate economic policy uncertainty. From a historical point of view (going back to 1965!) there is an inverse relationship between year-on-year growth (strength) of the sterling effective exchange rate and Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) in the UK, the latter proxied by economic policy uncertainty relative to its five-year moving average (the correlation coefficient is -0.43).

I also note (sadly) that economic policy uncertainty in 2025 is higher than that of 2016 in relative historical terms...

“We explained how our legislation is working, it is not discriminatory and it is not aimed at American companies. We simply need to do more explanation in this regard. We’ll engage in that process.”

“They rule out diesel gas and you gotta have batteries here by 2035. But Europe doesn’t make batteries! Only certain countries make batteries and Europe is not one of them. They gotta think better about themselves ... come on! Think correctly.”