Foreign Office and MoD among only four departments with declining morale in annual Whitehall monitor report
Civil service morale rose slightly after Labour took power in 2024, with the biggest jumps in satisfaction in the energy and health departments, an annual Whitehall monitor report will show.
The survey from the Institute for Government (IfG) thinktank, due to be published this week, found that morale rose from 60.7 to 61.2% on the civil service employee engagement index.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
01/12/2026 - 02:00
01/12/2026 - 01:29
Volunteers found thousands of dead bats at Melbourne’s Brimbank park, wildlife expert says
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Thousands of flying foxes have perished in the heatwave that scorched south-east Australia last week, the largest mass mortality event for flying foxes since black summer.
Extreme temperatures resulted in deaths in camps across South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. Grey-headed flying foxes, listed as vulnerable under federal environment laws, were the most affected.
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01/12/2026 - 00:00
Charity plans to make stately homes more welcoming by inviting visitors to use furniture and reading rooms
There was a time, not so long ago, when a visit to a National Trust stately home could be a staid affair and sitting on the furniture tended to be discouraged, with pine cones or teasels often placed on chairs to remind people not to perch.
This year, one of the aims of the conservation charity will be to make people feel more at ease in its grand houses and, where practical, allow them to sit on historic chairs and use libraries and reading rooms rather than simply peer into them.
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01/11/2026 - 18:43
Flood warnings in place as BoM forecasts more rain while thousands remain without power
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Queenslanders are bracing for floods as repairs are under way after a tropical cyclone battered the north coast.
After days of intense buildup, ex-Tropical Cyclone Koji ran out of power as it crossed the coast and was downgraded to a tropical low on Sunday.
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01/10/2026 - 21:57
Almost a dozen emergency warnings remain in place across Victoria, with state premier saying ‘we are not through the worst of this by a long way’
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Australian authorities are assessing the damage after one of the worst heatwaves in years resulted in bushfires igniting across the country’s south-east, with one person dead, hundreds of homes and structures lost, thousands of hectares burned and entire towns evacuated.
A state of disaster remained in place across much of Victoria on Sunday as thousands of firefighters and emergency service workers continued to battle blazes that were expected to burn “for weeks”.
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01/10/2026 - 16:36
This blog is now closed
One person dead as PM visits bushfire-ravaged towns with 300 structures destroyed and 350,000 hectares burned
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The Bureau of Meteorology’s Dean Narramore said Tropical Cyclone Koji was crossing the coast “right now” between Ayr and Bowen, and was expected to move inland quickly.
Most of the heaviest rain was occurring south of Ayr and inland. Falls exceeding 300mm were recorded around the Clarke Range since 9am Saturday, with widespread falls of 100 to 200mm.
That’s bringing strong to locally damaging winds and also widespread heavy rainfall, that is going to lead to widespread flooding in the coming days.
There’s already a lot of flooding occurring through parts of Queensland, so this rainfall isn’t good news for those flood-affected areas.
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01/10/2026 - 14:00
Exclusive: Chris Bowen says key to next UN climate summit will be ‘engagement, engagement, engagement’ with countries such as Saudi Arabia
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Chris Bowen wants to use his stint as the world’s chief climate negotiator to lobby Saudi Arabia and others to stop resisting progress at UN summits, heeding calls for a “hard-nosed” approach in dealing with big emitters obstructing the transition.
Appointed “president of negotiations” for Cop31 under the deal that handed Turkey hosting rights for the conference, Australia’s climate change and energy minister has told Guardian Australia a focus ahead of the summit would be talking to countries “with whom we don’t traditionally agree”.
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01/10/2026 - 00:00
Richest 1% took 10 days while wealthiest 0.1% needed just three days to exhaust annual carbon budget, study shows
The world’s richest 1% have used up their fair share of carbon emissions just 10 days into 2026, analysis has found.
Meanwhile, the richest 0.1% took just three days to exhaust their annual carbon budget, according to the research by Oxfam.
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01/10/2026 - 00:00
npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 10 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s44183-025-00179-6
Reimagining coral reef futures
01/09/2026 - 14:15
Some wet years and recent winter storms have helped bring the state out of drought after years of insufficient rainfall
California is completely drought-free for the first time in a quarter of a century, a significant development in a state that endured grueling years with insufficient rainfall.
Over the last 25 years, drought conditions in California have intensified the state’s wildfire crisis and created challenges in its massive agricultural sector. But a few wet years, and a recent spate of winter storms, helped bring the state out of drought.
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