'Cannibal' solar burst headed for Earth could make northern lights visible in U.S.


Two coronal mass ejections launched from the sun are set to merge on Thursday, causing a geomagnetic storm that can result in aurora borealis as far south as Illinois and Oregon. 

Photo courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Wikimedia Commons

Aug. 18 (UPI) -- A plume of "dark plasma" from the sun is expected to be overtaken by a "cannibal" solar burst that may cause an aurora display visible throughout large portions of the United States on Thursday.

The first "dark plasma explosion" was first seen on Sunday after erupting from a sunspot on the sun's surface at a speed of 1.3 million mph, tearing through the sun's atmosphere and creating a coronal mass ejection, or CME, Spaceweather.com wrote.

CMEs are clouds of charged matter known as plasma that are ejected by the sun when tangled magnetic field lines abruptly shift and release large amounts of energy. They occur frequently, but can interact with the Earth's magnetic field and cause geomagnetic storms if they're launched in our direction.

Geomagnetic storms can interfere with radio navigation and cause power grid fluctuations.

On Monday, a second CME was created by the collapse of a gigantic magnetic filament and was also launched from the sun.

The second eruption is forecast to become more energetic and ultimately faster than the first, overtaking it in a process known as CME cannibalization.

When the cannibal CME reaches Earth, it was expected to cause a G3 geomagnetic storm -- which occurs when planets with strong magnetic fields, such as Earth, absorb solar debris from CMEs.

Geomagnetic storms are classified from G1 to G5 according to severity. A G3 is considered a strong storm.

G3 storms can cause intermittent problems for low-frequency and satellite navigation, increased drag on low-Earth orbit satellites and may require some power systems to make voltage corrections.

The storms don't usually cause much trouble for humans' ordinary lives, but severe storms can create things like power grid blackouts. Earlier this year, a geomagnetic storm affected several SpaceX satellites and effectively led them to fall back to Earth.

Britain's national weather service, the Met Office, predicted that Thursday's geomagnetic storm will be minor and will not cause significant disruption.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also forecast that the storm could cause visible northern lights, or aurora borealis, to be visible in the U.S. mainland.

The northern lights could be seen as far south as Illinois and Oregon, which is well outside their normal realm.

India: Muslim rape victim aghast at attackers' release

The survivor of a 2002 gang rape during communal violence in Gujarat state has said she is "bereft of words" at her attackers' release after serving 14 years in jail. 

Narendra Modi was the state's governor at the time.

HINDUTVA; ARYANISM, FASCISM,

MISOGYNY, CASTEISM, RACISM   

Bilkis Bano was the only survivor of an attack on 17 people, several of them her relatives

A Muslim woman who was gang-raped when pregnant during communal violence in India in 2002 has issued a statement via her lawyers criticizing the Gujarat state government for releasing her attackers earlier this week. 

Bilkis Bano, who is now in her 40s, was the only person in a group of 17 Muslims to survive the attacks. Seven of her relatives, including her then 3-year-old daughter, were killed.

She said in the statement that her attackers' release left her "bereft of words. I am still numb." 

"How can justice for a woman end like this? I trusted the highest courts in our land," Bano said in a letter published late on Wednesday, adding that authorities had not reached out to her before releasing the men. "Please undo this harm. Give me back my right to live without fear and in peace." 

A group of women also protested in New Delhi against the men's release. Maimoon Mollah of the All India Democratic Women's Association told the Associated Press news agency that they were demanding the state roll back its decision. 

"Bilkis and other survivors should be allowed to live in peace and dignity," Mollah said. 

The 2002 Gujarat attacks have an additional political significance in India, given that current Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the state at the time of the attacks.

How did authorities in Gujarat explain the release? 

Gujarat's state government, run by Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), defended the decision to release the men by saying that they had served India's most common life imprisonment term of 14 years, among other factors. 

"The remission of the 11 convicts was considered after taking various factors like life imprisonment term in India which is typically of 14 years or more, age, behavior of the person and so on," senior Gujarat official Raj Kumar was quoted as saying by the Hindustan Times. 

According to Kumar, the men were eligible for release on this basis thanks to a 1992 remission policy that was in effect when they were convicted but that became defunct in 2014. Now, rape and murder are among crimes for which remission after 14 years is no longer granted to people serving a life sentence. 

The announcement of the men's release also coincided with celebrations of India's 75th anniversary of independence from colonial Britain. 

PM Modi led Gujarat state at time of the attacks

In the western state of Gujarat in 2002, the deaths of 59 Hindu pilgrims in a train fire sparked communal violence and riots targeting Muslims. 

The train fire was blamed on a Muslim mob, and dozens were later convicted for it, though its cause remains disputed. 

This 2002 train fire that killed more than 50 Hindus sparked riots in which about 20 times as many people died

According to the official tally, about 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were hacked, beaten, shot or burned to death in the riots that followed. 

The riots — some of the worst communal violence in India since its independence — took place while Modi was the state's chief minister. The Hindu nationalist faced allegations of turning a blind eye to the violence, and was even refused a US visa in 2005. 

But Modi always argued that he was not complicit and did not turn a blind eye. In 2012, around a year before he was named candidate for national leader, the Indian Supreme Court declared he did not have a case to answer. 

Opposition politicians continued to pressure the government over the decision. 

The Congress Party's Rahul Gandhi, grandson of former premier Indira Gandhi, asked what message the men's release sent to women in India: "Prime Minister, the whole country is seeing the difference between your words and your deeds," he wrote on Twitter. 

Will fracking make a comeback in Germany in face of gas crunch?

As the Ukraine war continues, Germany is scrambling to reduce its dependence on Russian gas. Could fracked gas, long taboo in the country, creep into the energy mix?

After war derailed new Russian-German gas pipelines, could domestic fracked gas be a last resort?

Temperatures might be soaring across Germany but staying warm this winter without Russian gas — which until the start of the Ukraine war supplied over 50% of annual demand — is already a pressing concern. 

If Russian supplies run dry, plans to make up the shortfall are already in place: Higher liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports, restarting dormant coal plants, and even delaying the nuclear power phaseout.

But most surprising is talk of exploiting domestic shale gas deposits through fracking, a practice banned in Germany and in a number of European countries due to its potential environmental and climate impacts.

Yet members of Germany's coalition government want fracking to be reconsidered as a potential solution to the coming gas crunch. 

Germany loves gas, but fracking is banned  

Germany is already building infrastructure and terminals to facilitate the flow of LNG from the United States that comes primarily from fracked sources, which is the result of an EU-US gas deal struck in March. But Europe's largest economy banned shale gas fracking at home in 2017.

The ban, which was due to be reviewed in 2021 but remains in place, extends to deep-lying "unconventional" shale gas deposits that can only be extracted through hydraulic fracturing.

Here fracking fluid made up of water, sand and chemicals is injected up to 5 kilometers (3 miles) under the earth to break up the bedrock and extract gas. The process uses vast amounts of water and could contaminate groundwater that is already receding due to persistent drought in Germany. 

Fracking also leaks the greenhouse gas methane — the global heating impacts of which are over 80 times higher than CO2 over a 20-year period, noted Sascha Boden, an energy and climate advisor at NGO, Environmental Action Germany.

Methane leakage from tens of thousand of wells in the Permian Basin in the US states of Texas and New Mexico, for example, has helped create a "climate bomb" that is nullifying mitigation measures.

Yet drilling for gas in "conventional" and more accessible sandstone gas seams is permitted under strict regulations in Germany, and currently provides around 5% of supply — even if critics say the extraction method is akin to fracking and was simply labeled conventional to imply "good" fracking is possible.

German shale gas is primarily found in the northwestern states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia and has the potential to provide 3 to 20 times (between 320 and 2,030 billion cubic meters) the amount of conventional gas, according to the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ).

Shale deposits could cover 20% of current demand, as estimated by German Federal Association of Natural Gas, Petroleum and Geoenergy (BVEG). But for Sascha Boden, only half might be economically viable due to the high drilling infrastructure costs, for example. 

"This is hardly enough to make Germany independent of Russian gas," he said.

Fracking divides Germany's coalition

A recent German poll showed that just 27% of respondents embraced fracking as a short-term energy solution — compared to 81% support for an expansion of wind energy.   

"Germany is densely populated and developing the necessary tens of thousands of drilling wells would be nearly impossible without major resistance," Boden said. 

Such views have not stopped the pro-business FDP party — one third of Germany's governing coalition — from talking about fracking as a way out of the crisis.

"Fracking does not cause any relevant environmental damage under modern safety standards," Torsten Herbst, parliamentary director of the FDP, opined in a June interview with German weekly newspaper Welt am Sonntag.

He added that it's contradictory to support the import of fracked gas from the US while opposing domestic fracking.

Holger Weiß, member of the German parliament's expert committee on the technology, told the Sunday edition of German daily FAZ that fracking can be done "nowadays with an acceptable residual risk."

Robert Habeck, Germany's vice chancellor and a Green Party member disagrees with his coalition partners that fracking is a potential energy crisis solution. "The debate about fracking is of no use to us at all right now," he said in July, explaining that this is in part due to the difficulty of getting approval.

Kjell Kühne, climate activist and director of the Germany-based Leave it in the Ground Initiative, said the new fracking push was "opportunistic."

"It would take several years to get any fracked gas out of the ground in Germany," he said. "Fracking is not going to do anything about this winter or the next."

Tens of thousands of fracking wells have helped create a 'carbon bomb' in the Permian Basin in Texas

Another solution: Renewables and cutting energy consumption 

In response to the fracking advocates, calls are growing for a quicker transition to renewable energies.

"Crucial to the gas phase-out are energy savings and a renewable heat transition," said Gerald Neubauer of Greenpeace Germany, adding that gas heating systems should be banned in favor of "a massive expansion campaign for heat pumps, solar thermal energy and home insulation."

The European Union's emergency gas plan that went into force on August 9 intends to cut gas use by 15% over the next 9 months. 

"We have a clear task: reduce the amount of energy we consume, at all levels," said Robert Habeck.

Meanwhile, German climate campaigners are articulating broader opposition to fracking.  

"The gas industry is unscrupulously exploiting Russia's war of aggression to advance its interests and make even more profits," said Charly Dietz from German climate activist group Ende Gelände, who last week blocked the construction of a terminal in Hamburg where fracked LNG gas will be delivered.

Edited by: Jennifer Collins

HOW EU COUNTRIES ARE REACTING TO HIGH GAS PRICES

France: Fresh protests feared 

An eco tax on fuels led to violent protests in France back in 2018 and 2019. This is why Paris intends to allow for no more than a 4% increase in electricity costs this year. State-owned utility EDF has been forced to provide cheaper power to households, with the state paying €8 billion ($8.9 billion) in compensation.          1234567

Pope rules out sex assault inquiry into Canada cardinal


Alice RITCHIE
Thu, August 18, 2022 


Pope Francis has ruled out a formal church investigation into a sexual assault claim against Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet after a preliminary inquiry found no basis for one, the Vatican said Thursday.

Ouellet, himself once considered a strong candidate to be pope, was named in court documents this week relating to a class action suit targeting more than 80 members of the clergy in the archdiocese of Quebec.

The 78-year-old is accused of abusing a female intern, identified only as "F", from 2008 to 2010, when he was archbishop of Quebec.

In the Vatican's first public response to the civil suit, spokesman Matteo Bruni said a "preliminary investigation" already ordered by Pope Francis had found there were "no elements to initiate a trial".

He said the pontiff again consulted the author of that probe, a Father Jacques Servais, and was told again that there were no grounds for opening a formal investigation.

"Following further relevant consultations, Pope Francis declares that there are insufficient elements to open a canonical investigation for sexual assault by Cardinal Ouellet against person F," the statement said.
- 'Chased after' -

Ouellet is a prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, one of the most important functions within the Curia, the government of the Vatican.

The claims against him in the civil suit, which the Quebec supreme court ruled could go ahead in May, are among the testimonies of 101 people who say they were sexually assaulted by members of the clergy and church staff from 1940 to today.

They emerged just weeks after Pope Francis visited Canada, where he apologised for the decades-long abuse of Indigenous children in Catholic-run residential schools.

So far, the cardinal is not facing criminal charges.

Ouellet's accuser claims the cardinal assaulted her multiple times -- kissing her, "forcefully" massaging her shoulders, and once sliding his hand along her back to her buttocks.

She says she had the feeling of being "chased after", according to the documents. When the woman tried to raise the issue, she was told she was not the only woman to have such a "problem" with Ouellet, documents show.

It was not until 2020 that F., who says she was also sexually abused by another cleric, spoke to the Quebec church's sex abuse advisory committee.

It recommended she write to the pope, who in 2021 responded by nominating Servais to look into the case. She had not yet been told of his conclusions.

According to Thursday's Vatican statement, Servais said he had interviewed the woman via Zoom in the presence of a member of the committee.

He was quoted as saying that neither in her report to the pope, nor in the testimony he heard, "did this person make an accusation that would provide material for such an investigation".

In February, Ouellet opened a Vatican symposium on the priesthood by apologising for "unworthy" clergy and the cover-up of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, before an audience that included Pope Francis.

"We are all torn and humbled by these crucial questions that every day question us as members of the Church," Ouellet said at the time.

He said the symposium was an opportunity to express regret and ask victims for forgiveness, after their lives were "destroyed by abusive and criminal behaviour" that was hidden or treated lightly to protect the institution and the perpetrators.

Since becoming pope in 2013, Francis has sought to tackle the decades-long sexual abuse scandals, although many activists against paedophilia insist much more needs to be done.

bur-ar/har

Drought blamed for dozens of cow poisoning deaths in Italy

Dead cows on a farm in Sommariva del Bosco, near Italy's Turin, 

after around 50 cows were poisoned by young sorghum plants.

 PHOTO: AFP

SOMMARIVA DEL BOSCO, ITALY (AFP) - An Italian farm became an open-air morgue earlier this month after around 50 cows were poisoned by young sorghum plants, an accident experts blame on drought.

The Piedmontese cattle on the farm in Sommariva del Bosco, near Turin in northwest Italy, died suddenly due to acute prussic acid poisoning on Aug 6, according to the local IZS animal welfare body.

This acid comes from dhurrin, which is naturally present in young sorghum plants, although not in the same high concentrations as those found in samples taken at the site.

"We suspect that the drought caused this very large quantity of dhurrin within the sorghum plants," said Stefano Giantin, a vet at the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale for northwest Italy, who is on the case.

With normal growing plants, the amount of dhurrin would lower as the plants grew larger. But since the ongoing drought has stunted the growth of sorghum plants, dhurrin has concentrated inside them.

Prussic acid poisoning in cattle is quick and brutal, with symptoms occurring 10-15 minutes after ingestion and death some 15-30 minutes later. It causes respiratory, nervous and muscular disorders.

Dhurrin naturally occurs in sorghum, particularly in young shoots that use it as a defence against herbivores, but when digested, releases prussic acid, also known as hydrogen cyanide.

But "normally, it doesn't cause death", Giantin told AFP.

In the samples taken from Sommariva del Bosco, the concentration of dhurrin in the shoots was at an unusually high level, which Giantin said appeared to be the result of the drought that has hit Italy and much of Europe this summer.



A dose of more than 700 mg/kg of prussic acid is considered fatal for cattle, but the animals at Sommariva were found to have quantities of more than 900 mg/kg in their blood.

The only way of saving affected cows is to inject them with sodium thiosulfate, to neutralise the hyrogen cyanide.

With this, experts were able to save around 30 cows on Aug 11, when three more farms in Piedmont were hit by the same phenomenon - although not before 14 died.

MORE ON THIS TOPIC
Drought-hit Rhine reopens in Germany after blocked by vessel

France's river Loire sets new lows as drought dries up its tributaries

MEGA CULTURE

Huge megalithic complex of more than 500 standing stones discovered in Spain

Archaeologists says prehistoric site in Huelva province could be one of largest of its kind in Europe

Side view of a menhir and stone platform at La Torre-La Janera megalithic site near Huelva. Photograph: Huelva Información

Agence France-Presse in Madrid

Thu 18 Aug 2022

A huge megalithic complex of more than 500 standing stones has been discovered in southern Spain that could be one of the largest in Europe, archaeologists have said.

The stones were discovered on a plot of land in Huelva, a province flanking the southernmost part of Spain’s border with Portugal, near the Guadiana River.

Spanning about 600 hectares (1,500 acres), the land had been earmarked for an avocado plantation. Before granting the permit the regional authorities requested a survey in light of the site’s possible archaeological significance. The survey revealed the presence of the stones.


Neolithic paintings in Spain reveal art was social activity for both sexes

“This is the biggest and most diverse collection of standing stones grouped together in the Iberian peninsula,” said José Antonio Linares, a researcher at Huelva University and one of the project’s three directors. It was probable that the oldest standing stones at the La Torre-La Janera site were erected during the second half of the sixth or fifth millennium BC, he said. “It is a major megalithic site in Europe.”

At the site they found a large number of various types of megaliths, including standing stones, dolmens, mounds, coffin-like stone boxes called cists, and enclosures.

“Standing stones were the most common finding, with 526 of them still standing or lying on the ground,” said the researchers in an article published in Trabajos de Prehistoria, a prehistoric archaeology journal. The height of the stones was between one and three metres.

At the Carnac megalithic site in north-west France, there are about 3,000 standing stones.

Alignments of Menhirs of Menec
in Carnac, Western France. Photograph: Andia/Alamy

One of the most striking things was finding such diverse megalithic elements grouped together in one location and discovering how well preserved they were, said Primitiva Bueno, co-director of the project and a prehistory professor at Alcalá University, near Madrid.

“Finding alignments and dolmens on one site is not very common. Here you find everything all together – alignments, cromlechs and dolmens – and that is very striking,” she said, hailing the site’s “excellent conservation”.

An alignment is a linear arrangement of upright standing stones along a common axis, while a cromlech is a stone circle, and a dolmen is a type of megalithic tomb usually made of two or more standing stones with a large flat capstone on top.

Most of the menhirs were grouped into 26 alignments and two cromlechs, both located on hilltops with a clear view to the east for viewing the sunrise during the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes, the researchers said.

Many of the stones are buried deep in the earth. They will need to be carefully excavated. The work is scheduled to run until 2026, but “between this year’s campaign and the start of next year’s, there will be a part of the site that can be visited”, Bueno said.

'Spanish Stonehenge' emerges from drought-hit dam

By Silvio Castellanos and Marco Trujillo

CACERES, Spain, Aug 18 (Reuters) - A brutal summer has caused havoc for many in rural Spain, but one unexpected side-effect of the country's worst drought in decades has delighted archaeologists - the emergence of a prehistoric stone circle in a dam whose waterline has receded.

Officially known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal but dubbed the Spanish Stonehenge, the circle of dozens of megalithic stones is believed to date back to 5000 BC.

It currently sits fully exposed in one corner of the Valdecanas reservoir, in the central province of Caceres, where authorities say the water level has dropped to 28% of capacity.

"It's a surprise, it's a rare opportunity to be able to access it," said archaeologist Enrique Cedillo from Madrid's Complutense University, one of the experts racing to study the circle before it gets submerged again.

It was discovered by German archaeologist Hugo Obermaier in 1926, but the area was flooded in 1963 in a rural development project under Francisco Franco's dictatorship.

Since then it has only become fully visible four times.

 

Ruben Argenta drives his boat towards the dolmen of Guadalperal, which can only be seen when the Valdecanas reservoir waters become low in the outskirts of El Gordo, Spain, August 3, 2022. REUTERS/Susana Vera

Dolmens are vertically arranged stones usually supporting a flat boulder. Although there are many scattered across Western Europe, little is known about who erected them. Human remains found in or near many have led to an often-cited theory that they are tombs.

Local historical and tourism associations have advocated moving the Guadalperal stones to a museum or elsewhere on dry land.

Their presence is also good news for Ruben Argentas, who owns a small boat tours business. "The dolmen emerges and the dolmen tourism begins," he told Reuters after a busy day spent shuttling tourists to the site and back.

But there is no silver lining for local farmers.

"There hasn't been enough rain since the spring... There is no water for the livestock and we have to transport it in," said Jose Manuel Comendador. Another, Rufino Guinea, said his sweet pepper crop had been ravaged.

Climate change has left the Iberian peninsula at its driest in 1,200 years, and winter rains are expected to diminish further, a study published by the Nature Geoscience journal showed.


Additional reporting by Susana Vera, writing by Anna Valderrama and Andrei Khalip; editing by John Stonestreet

Can technological fixes solve France’s water crisis, amid record droughts?

Cyrielle CABOT - 2h ago

Amid searing heatwaves, a historic drought has racked France since the end of July, causing water shortages in large parts of the country. Climate change is bound to make such droughts frequent, if not the new normal – so scientists are looking for technological fixes to find a way around the problem.


© Jean-Christophe Verhaegen, AFP

France’s worst drought since 1959 has emptied the water tables and vastly reduced water flow in the country's rivers. The French government has had to restrict unnecessary use of water. Around 100 towns lack the usual water supplies due to the drought, necessitating deliveries by water tanker and distributions of water bottles.

This vexed situation has prompted many to look at new ways of providing water, such as reusing wastewater and desalinating seawater. These measures have already been put in place in some countries – but face regulatory hurdles and environmental concerns in France.

Reusing wastewater

“France in particular, and EU member states more generally, need to catch up with other countries when it comes to recycling wastewater,” said Julie Mendret, an expert on water systems at the University of Montpellier. “At present less than 1 percent of treated water in France is reused. That figure is at 8 percent in Italy and 14 percent in Spain. This is a long way from the situation in some countries where a lot of wastewater is recycled back into the system, notably Gulf states such as the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar. Israel a real pioneer in the field – (it) recycles 80 percent of its wastewater.”

>> Source of Thames dries up as heatwave scorches Britain

Traditionally, the water that ends up in France's taps has been extracted from groundwater, then purified. After it is used, the water is treated in purification plants before being discharged into waterways. But if it is recycled, it will go straight back into the pipes to go to homes and businesses instead of back into waterways.

France recycles 19,000 cubic metres of wastewater every day to irrigate crops and water golf courses. “We could extend this use to clean roads or water green spaces,” Mendret said. “Indeed, why not go further and produce drinking water by recycling water?”

In the Vendée département (administrative unit) on France’s Atlantic coast, the Jourdain project will soon experiment with this solution. Instead of being discharged into the sea, some of the water from the Sables-d’Olonne wastewater treatment plant will be recovered and treated before it is put back into the system providing drinking water. “This will be the first time such a process is used in Europe, after it has already been implemented in Singapore and Namibia,” Mendret pointed out.

>> France’s unprecedented drought shows climate change is ‘spiralling out of control’

France is held back by “unduly tight regulations”, as well as other obstacles to getting projects approved at a local level. Nevertheless, the French government in March expanded the use of recycled water, allowing for its use in fighting fires and indeed boosting parched supplies of groundwater. At the EU level, member states have agreed in principle to step up the use of recycled water.

“We won’t be able to recycle all the water,” Mendret said. “Sometimes it’s necessary to release it to keep nearby rivers flowing as they should and to protect biodiversity. You can’t solve one problem by creating another. Yet it remains a very interesting option, especially for coastal areas where wastewater is often discharged into the sea. That’s fresh water that’s just lost.”

Desalination, boosting rainwater use

Widespread use of rainwater is also going to be needed, said Fabienne Trolard, director of research at France’s National Institute of Research for Agriculture and the Environment. “In France, the overwhelming majority of water we use is potable; we can only use rainwater to water our plants,” Trolard said. “But in Belgium and Germany, households have for a long time been using double-circuit systems, whereby potable water is there only for drinking and showering and water for other uses comes in the form of rainwater, stored in individual tanks.”

If France put such a system in place, Trolard continued, “we could even reuse this grey [non-potable] water several times; they do it three or four times in some of our European neighbours and five or six times in Israel”.

>> ‘Humanity is bullying nature – and we will pay the price,’ WWF chief tells FRANCE 24

Two small towns, Rogliano in Corsica and the island of Groix in Brittany, are experimenting with another solution to the drought: desalinating seawater.

Like recycling wastewater, this technique is already widely used abroad. There are more than 17,000 desalination plants across the world, according to the International Desalination Association, which brings together scientists, industrialists and NGOs who favour the use of the technique. In total, more than 300 million people depend on desalination for their water needs.

>> 'Code red for humanity': Bombshell UN climate change report shows global warming accelerating

“The main users of desalination are Saudi Arabia and Israel, but Maghreb countries have also been investing massively in it,” Trolard said. “It’s not hard to see why they do it: These are arid countries where fresh water is in short supply – and this is one of the few solutions.”

In Jordan, a plant is due to be installed on the banks of the Red Sea in 2026, and is expected to produce between 250 and 300 million cubic metres of drinking water per year, or 750 million litres of water per day.

Yet desalination has its drawbacks. “These plants consume a lot of energy and so aren’t very economical,” Trolard said. “Above all, desalination produces brine that we don’t know what to do with.”

On average, every litre of fresh water produced by desalination produces 1.5 litres of saline sludge, which is usually discharged into the ocean, disrupting ecosystems.

>> How France’s wine industry is adapting to climate change

An array of small-scale solutions are used elsewhere in the world. Chile, for example, harvests water from fog every year. This technique has existed since pre-Columbian times and is very simple: Nets with very tight meshes are installed on foggy days. The droplets cling to the nets and then flow into containers. It is an inexpensive, environmentally friendly process – but, of course, only works under very specific weather conditions.

In the same vein, Laurent Royon, a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Future Energy Laboratory in Paris, is looking at the possibility of recovering dewdrops for use as fresh water. “This technique could be used everywhere, even in deserts, where it actually gets quite cold at night,” Royon said, referring to experiments under way in India, Morocco and Benin. Yet this technique is not very productive, with barely 0.5 litres per cubic metre harvested each night.

Moving icebergs?

Some scientists want to develop new methods for supplying fresh water instead of adopting ones already in use.

But some of these approaches are ultimately counterproductive, such as, for example, cloud seeding, which would allow rain to be triggered on command. Studied since the 1960s, particularly in China, the idea is to exploit the water present in the earth's atmosphere in the form of vapour in the clouds. Only 10 to 15 percent of the water contained in these clouds ends up falling as rain. By sending aerosols via small rockets or fireworks, for example, researchers are trying to increase the amount of rainfall. Not only is the effectiveness of this technique debated, but changing the weather could cause chain reactions elsewhere on the planet that would be difficult to anticipate.

Another unusual idea is to move icebergs, which are composed of fresh water. For nearly four decades, French engineer Georges Mougin has been looking at ways of moving these colossal blocks of ice to countries racked by drought. In 2010, his experiments concluded that it would take five months and 4,000 tonnes of oil to transport an iceberg from Canada to Spain’s Canary Islands. So this moonshot idea carries with it an array of technological, ecological and financial headaches.

>> Heatwaves threaten marine life as Mediterranean reaches record temperature

This article is translated from the original in French.

Jailed Saudi woman tweeter shrugged off risk: friend

Thu, August 18, 2022


A Saudi woman given 34 years in prison for tweets critical of the government knew people were informing on her but did not take it seriously, a friend said Thursday.

Salma al-Shehab, a member of the Shiite minority in the Sunni-ruled kingdom, had been studying for a doctorate in Britain and was arrested in January 2021 while on holiday.

On August 9 she was sentenced to 34 years in jail for aiding dissidents seeking to "disrupt public order" in the kingdom by relaying their tweets.

A friend of Shehab, who asked not to be identified for her own security, said she had not taken threats of denunciation seriously.

"We discussed people harassing her on Twitter and reporting her tweets to the security services online," the friend told AFP.

"She didn't think the authorities would be interested in someone with less than 2,000 followers," she added.

Shehab now has around 3,000 followers on Twitter.

A mother of two and a PhD candidate at Britain's University of Leeds, School of Medicine, she was also banned from travelling abroad for a further 34 years as part of the sentence.

The oil-rich Gulf state has cracked down on rights activists, many of whom have been jailed and banned from travel.

Women's rights activists have also been targeted.

The crackdown increased after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman became Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler in 2017.

The authorities have made available an app called "Kollona Amn" (Arabic for "We are all security") which allows "all citizens and residents in Saudi Arabia to play the role of police officer".

It is used to report accidents or crimes -- but can also be a tool to denounce political opponents.

Shehab tweeted mostly about women's rights in the conservative country.

She was jailed just weeks after US President Joe Biden visited Saudi Arabia, a controversial trip because of the kingdom's human rights record.

US State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters on Wednesday that Washington regularly raised the issue of human rights with Riyadh.

"Exercising freedom of expression to advocate for the rights of women should not be criminalised," he said.

Rights group Amnesty International has called for Shehab's immediate and unconditional release. It described her jailing as "outrageous".

On its website, the University of Leeds said in a statement it was "deeply concerned" by the development, "and are seeking advice on whether there is anything we can do to support her".

ht/aem/srm/it

Google’s robotic waiters: Company showcases robot that takes commands

Google has showcased a new robotic assistant that can understand and respond to spoken or typed commands to fulfil an array of tasks such as fetching food and drinks and cleaning up spills. The robot makes use of technology similar to that which powers advanced chatbots, scouring millions of pages of text from the web to help it make sense of natural human language.

A phone that speaks 50 languages: "Open" is designed for people who cannot read or write

"Open" is a phone designed for people who cannot read or write. It speaks 50 languages. "For parents, it's very important. When you ask them their phone number, they can't say it, because they actually don't know their phone number", creator of the Open phone Alain Capo Chichi says.