Saturday, August 30, 2025

Trump moves to limit US stays of students, journalists

By AFP
August 28, 2025

Graduates gather as they attend commencement ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 29, 2025 - Copyright AFP/File Rick Friedman

President Donald Trump’s administration moved Thursday to impose stricter limits on how long foreign students and journalists can stay in the United States, the latest bid to tighten legal immigration in the country.

Under a proposed change, foreigners would not be allowed to stay for more than four years on student visas in the United States.

Foreign journalists would be limited to stays of just 240 days, although they could apply to extend by additional 240-day periods.

The United States, until now, has generally issued visas for the duration of a student’s educational program or a journalist’s assignment, although no non-immigrant visas are valid for more than 10 years.

The proposed changes were published in the Federal Register, initiating a short period for public comment before it can go into effect.

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security alleged that an unspecified number of foreigners were indefinitely extending their studies so they could remain in the country as “‘forever’ students.”

“For too long, past administrations have allowed foreign students and other visa holders to remain in the U.S. virtually indefinitely, posing safety risks, costing untold amount of taxpayer dollars and disadvantaging U.S citizens,” the department said in a press statement Wednesday.

The department did not explain how US citizens and taxpayers were hurt by international students, who according to Commerce Department statistics contributed more than $50 billion to the US economy in 2023.

The United States welcomed more than 1.1 million international students in the 2023-24 academic year, more than any other country, providing a crucial source of revenue as foreigners generally pay full tuition.

A group representing leaders of US colleges and universities denounced the latest move as a needless bureaucratic hurdle that intrudes on academic decision-making and could further deter potential students who would otherwise contribute to research and job creation.

“This proposed rule sends a message to talented individuals from around the world that their contributions are not valued in the United States,” said Miriam Feldblum, president and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.

“This is not only detrimental to international students –- it also weakens the ability of US colleges and universities to attract top talent, diminishing our global competitiveness.”

The announcement came as universities were starting their academic years with many reporting lower enrollments of international students after earlier actions by the Trump administration.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Brazil police target network that siphoned billions from fuel sector

By AFP
August 28, 2025

Police raided Sao Paolo's Faria Lima Avenue, where many financial institutions are headquartered - Copyright AFP Tiziana FABI

Louis GENOT

Brazilian police launched a mega operation in several states Thursday to crush a criminal network that sold adulterated fuel to clients and concealed billions of dollars in earnings in cahoots with financial companies, officials said.

The group allegedly laundered money for the First Capital Command (PCC), one of the country’s most powerful gangs engaged in cocaine trafficking from South America to Europe, according to prosecutors.

The network is alleged to have hidden ill-gotten gains of some 52 billion reais (about $9.6 billion) in investment funds and fintech digital companies in four years to 2024, according to the Federal Revenue Service (RFB).

It controlled four refineries and allegedly diluted fuel products to increase yield and cheated clients with dispensers that supplied less fuel than indicated at the pump.

Irregularities were identified at more than 1,000 gas stations in ten states, according to officials.

The group is alleged to have controlled elements of fuel supply all the way from import, production, distribution and marketing to the end consumer, and had about 1,000 fuel delivery trucks of its own.

“Investigations indicate that the sophisticated scheme devised by the criminal organization, by laundering the proceeds of crime, generated significant profits in the fuel production chain,” the statement said.

In what Justice Minister Ricardo Lewandowski said was “one of the largest operations against organized crime in history,” some 1,400 agents were deployed Thursday to execute 350 search and seizure warrants targeting individuals and companies.

The operation was carried out in a dozen of Brazil’s 26 states, including Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo — the South American giant’s financial hub.

In the first hours, police arrested five people and seized 1,500 vehicles, 192 properties, two boats, and more than 300,000 reais ($55,000) in cash.

Brazilian police released images of a mass deployment of officers in Sao Paolo’s Faria Lima Avenue Thursday, where many financial institutions are headquartered.

– ‘Threatened with death’ –

According to the revenue service, the PCC controlled “at least 40 investment funds” worth about $5.5 billion used, among other things, to purchase ethanol plants to produce fuel sold at gas stations controlled by its members.

Some gas station owners who sold their establishments to PCC members, “did not receive the transaction amount and were threatened with death” if they insisted on payment, it said.

According to investigators, the PCC was also involved in illegally importing methanol, a “highly toxic and flammable” substance that was then mixed with ethanol, which Brazil produces mainly from sugar cane, and sold as car fuel.

One of the fintech companies implicated in the fraud acted as a “parallel bank” and received nearly 11,000 suspicious cash deposits in 2022 and 2023, according to the RFB.

The financial companies under investigation allegedly allowed clients to transfer money clandestinely, added the prosecutor’s office.

Organized crime represents an immense challenge for Brazil’s security forces, with a plethora of gangs involved in drug trafficking, illegal logging, extortion and other rackets.

Brazil is South America’s biggest producer of petroleum and other liquid fuels, and the ninth biggest in the world, according to a 2023 report of the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), based on 2021 data.

According to the International Energy Agency, it is the second biggest biofuels producer in the world.

CTHUHLU CALLS

‘Perfect storm’: UK fishermen reel from octopus invasion

By AFP
August 27, 2025

Fisherman Chris Kelly, 32, shows octopus caught aboard his vessel in Plymouth Harbour, southwest England - Copyright AFP Joe JACKSON

Joe JACKSON

When veteran fisherman Brian Tapper checked his 1,200 crab pots in waters off southwest England during this year’s crabbing season, he got a series of unwelcome surprises.

At first, in March and April, they were almost entirely empty. Then, starting in May, they were unexpectedly packed with octopuses, before sitting largely empty again over the last month or so.

It has been a similar story along the UK’s Devon and southern Cornwall coastline where the seas are warming, and an octopus bloom — the biggest in British waters in 75 years — has left the shellfish industry reeling.

The tentacled molluscs are notoriously voracious eaters, hoovering up crustaceans such as crab and shellfish.

Tapper’s wife has already shuttered her dockside crab processing factory due to the diminished catch, while he doubts he can keep his side of the business afloat.

“It’s like a perfect storm for us,” Tapper told AFP from Plymouth Harbour, where his three purpose-built crab fishing vessels are idled.

The 53-year-old estimates his catch is down by half, and risks dropping by four-fifths in 2025.

An 18-month marine heatwave in the region and beyond is blamed for causing the bloom in warm water-loving octopus.

Climate scientists say human activity, such as burning fossil fuels, is behind global warming which is driving up ocean temperatures.

“I’ve been fishing here 39 years and I’ve never seen octopus like this,” Tapper said.

“I’ve never seen an instant change like this. It’s so quick. They’re a plague.”

– ‘Scary’ –

Statistics from the Marine Management Organisation, a government agency, show UK fishermen landed more than 1,200 tonnes of octopus in the first six months this year.

That compares to less than 150 tonnes in the same period in 2023, and less than 80 tonnes in those months last year.

Meanwhile, landings of shellfish such as brown crab are down significantly in 2025.

Sue MacKenzie, whose Passionate About Fish firm sources produce from southwest England, said the octopus are “eating our indigenous species at a rate that nobody can anticipate — it’s quite scary”.

Decent market prices for octopus helped offset losses, but only until their numbers began dropping considerably in July.

“We’re incredibly worried about the impact on shellfish stocks. It’s really significant,” said Beshlie Pool, executive officer at the South Devon and Channel Shellfishermen cooperative association, which represents more than 50 different vessels.

“Some people have done incredibly well on octopus this year. But across our membership we’ve got some vessels who haven’t caught one octopus this whole season.”

Chris Kelly, who fishes “a bit of everything” from his seven-metre vessel “Shadow” using pots, nets and lines, has been among those getting good prices for the unexpected catch.

“But then we’re catching no lobsters, and then long-term, you’re thinking ‘what’s it going to do to the stocks?'” he said.

– Octopus on the menu –

The impact has rippled out to restaurants and food retailers, which have adapted by offering octopus instead of shellfish.

“This is the first year we’ve bought it,” said Caroline Bennett, whose Sole of Discretion company supplies direct-to-consumer food firms from Plymouth’s dockside.

“We didn’t have any crab at all to sell, and are now going a bit further down the coast for it.”

Meanwhile, local and national officials have helped commission an urgent study into the situation. An initial report is due in October.

Bryce Stewart, a University of Plymouth marine scientist leading the probe, noted past blooms in Britain — in 1950, the 1930s and 1899 — were all preceded by similarly “ideal” warmer-than-usual waters.

However, Stewart suspects octopuses are now breeding in local waters — an unprecedented situation that could also explain their sudden disappearance.

Both male and female Atlantic longarm octopus — which typically only live about 18 months — tend to die not long after breeding.

“They eat everything, they’re ferocious, and they start to breed. It’s like the ultimate live fast, die young life cycle,” he explained.

He said he is constantly asked if the octopuses are here to stay. His answer? “Probably.”

Tapper fears as much. “The crab won’t come back in my working lifetime,” he predicted.

“The reproduction of a crab would probably take five to 10 years to get to its marketable size, and I haven’t got five to 10 years (to) pay the bills.”

NGO says starving Gaza children too weak to cry

By AFP
August 27, 2025

Naeema, a 30-year-old Palestinian mother, carries her malnourished 2-year-old son Yazan as they stand in their damaged home in the Al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, on July 23, 2025 -

AL-QATTAA

The head of Save the Children described in horrific detail Wednesday the slow agony of starving children in Gaza, saying they are so weak they do not cry.

Addressing a UN Security Council meeting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the president of the international charity, Inger Ashing, said famine — declared by the UN last week to be happening in Gaza — is not just a dry technical term.

“When there is not enough food, children become acutely malnourished, and then they die slowly and painfully. This, in simple terms, is what famine is,” said Ashing.

She went on to describe what happens when children die of hunger over the course of several weeks, as the body first consumes its own fat to survive and when that is gone, literally consumes itself as it eats muscles and vital organs.

“Yet our clinics are almost silent. Now, children do not have the strength to speak or even cry out in agony. They lie there, emaciated, quite literally wasting away,” said Ashing.

She said aid groups have been warning loudly that famine was coming as Israel prevented food and other essentials from entering Gaza over the course of two years of war triggered by the Hamas attack of October 2023.

“Everyone in this room has a legal and moral responsibility to act to stop this atrocity,” said Ashing.

The United Nations officially declared famine in Gaza on Friday, blaming what it called systematic obstruction of aid by Israel during more than 22 months of war.

A UN-backed hunger monitor called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Initiative (IPC) said famine was affecting 500,000 people in the Gaza governorate, which covers about a fifth of the Palestinian territory including Gaza City.

The IPC projected that the famine would expand to cover around two-thirds of Gaza by the end of September.

Israel on Wednesday demanded that the IPC retract the report, calling it “fabricated.”

After Wednesday’s Security Council meeting 14 members — all but the United States, Israel’s main ally — issued a joint declaration expressing “profound alarm and distress” over the declaration of famine and saying they trusted the IPC’s work and methodology.

“The use of starvation as a weapon of war is clearly prohibited under international humanitarian law. Famine in Gaza must be stopped immediately,” the declaration says.

Climate-driven wildfires reversing pollution progress in N. America: study

By AFP
August 28, 2025

A wildfire burns on Mount Underwood near Port Alberni, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, on August 12, 2025

- Copyright AFP/File Colby Rex O'Neill

Issam AHMED

Global air pollution is worsening, with the United States and Canada experiencing the sharpest increases due to record-breaking, climate-supercharged wildfires that are undoing decades of progress, a study said Thursday.

The Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) annual report uses satellite data to assess levels of particulate matter worldwide, with records dating back to 1998. It translates concentrations into years of life expectancy lost, based on peer-reviewed science.

“I just don’t think this can be repeated enough: particulate matter remains the greatest external threat to human health on the planet, period,” Michael Greenstone, an economics professor at the University of Chicago who co-created AQLI, told AFP.

“It’s worse than tobacco smoke. It’s worse than child and maternal malnutrition. It’s worse than road accidents. It’s worse than HIV-AIDS, worse than anything in terms of losses.”

According to the report, Canada’s catastrophic 2023 wildfire season drove a more than 50 percent rise in particulate levels compared to 2022, while the United States saw a 20 percent increase.

Although the data currently only extends until 2023, the trend is likely to have continued as both countries face intensifying wildfire seasons, driven by warming temperatures and drought fueled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

The year 2025 already ranks as Canada’s second worst wildfire season.

“The very surprising finding to me is that in parts of the world, certainly Canada, certainly the US and it looks like parts of Europe as well, air pollution is like the zombie that we thought we had killed, and now it’s back,” said Greenstone.

While the most polluted counties in the US have historically been found in California, that’s now shifting to states downwind of Canadian wildfires including Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio but also further south.

More than half of Canadians breathed air with pollution above their national standard of 8.8 micrograms per cubic meter — a dramatic shift from less than five percent in the previous five years.

The hardest-hit regions were provinces of Northwest Territories, British Columbia, and Alberta, where particulate pollution levels rivaled those of Bolivia and Honduras, shortening lifespans by two years.

Globally, fine particulate levels — defined as 2.5 micrometers and smaller — were up from 23.7 micrograms per cubic meter in 2022 to 24.1 in 2023. This is nearly five times greater than the World Health Organization guideline of five.

Latin America saw its highest level since 1998, with Bolivia the worst affected country.

In South Asia — the world’s most polluted zone — pollution increased by 2.8 percent. Even China saw a small rebound of 2.8 percent after a decade of steady declines following under its “War on Pollution.”

There were some bright spots: within the European Union, particulate concentrations fell by six percent, while in Central and West Africa, they dropped by eight percent.

Wildfire mitigation strategies can cut destruction by half, study finds

A new UC Berkeley-led study demonstrates how home hardening and defensible space can have a major impact on wildfire risk.

University of California - Berkeley

Since January’s wildfires flattened entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles, displacing 12,900 households and causing an estimated $30 billion in losses, California’s many other fire-prone communities have been eager for solutions to better protect themselves.

A new UC Berkeley-led study provides these communities and their lawmakers with actionable data on how wildfire mitigation strategies can reduce the destructiveness of wildfires by as much as 50%.

One option to reduce wildfire damage is home hardening, which describes a variety of structural modifications that homeowners can use to make their houses less susceptible to fire. These include using fire-resistant siding and roofing materials, covering vents to prevent embers from entering the home, and upgrading to double-paned tempered glass windows that are less likely to break in a fire. Another strategy, defensible space, refers to a vegetation-free “buffer zone” around a home or structure. Because renovating existing homes is not always easy or cheap, data on the effectiveness of these measures is key to justifying future investment.

In the study, the researchers used state-of-the-art wildfire simulation tools, combined with real-world data from five of the most destructive fires that occurred in California before 2022, to quantify the impact of these strategies.

It found that home hardening and defensible space together can double the number of homes and other structures that survive a blaze. Notably, they also demonstrated that just removing the vegetation within a 5-foot perimeter of homes — the subject of California’s proposed Zone Zero regulations — could reduce structure losses by 17%.

“I view this as really powerful evidence that the mitigation measures that are available to us, hardening and defensible space, actually have some real-world effectiveness,” said study senior author Michael Gollner, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Berkeley.

These strategies may further prevent loss and death by slowing the spread of fire, giving residents more time to evacuate and emergency responders more time to arrive at the scene, Gollner said.

“We can't always change the spacing between structures or the exposure from flames and embers,” Gollner said. “But even within those limitations, we still have the power to cut the destruction in half, if not more. That is very powerful.”

The study was published online today (Aug. 28) in the journal Nature Communications, and was supported by grants from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) through the Forest Health program, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

Investment in mitigation pays off

To measure the impact of wildfire mitigation strategies, a research team led by Gollner and Berkeley postdoctoral scholar Maryam Zamanialaei took advantage of CAL FIRE’s unique damage inspection database (DINS), which includes data from on-the-ground surveys of all structures that were damaged or destroyed in major California wildfires since 2013. The study focused on the 2017 Tubbs and Thomas fires, 2018 Camp fire, 2019 Kincade fire and 2020 Glass fires. To build a comprehensive data set, researchers then added information from a variety of other geospatial sources to better define the spacing between each building, the construction materials used and the density of vegetation surrounding each structure.

A unique aspect of the study was the use of state-of-art simulation tools to model how wildfire might have spread through each community, allowing researchers to account for fire exposure to each structure.

By applying advanced machine learning techniques to the combined dataset, they developed a data-driven model that predicts structure survivability with 82% accuracy and disentangles how factors such as structure spacing, fire exposure, construction materials and defensible space combine to influence risk.

“We wanted to identify the risk factors that make a structure susceptible to loss,” Zamanialaei said.

“It’s possible that a well-protected home may have a low chance of survival because of everything around it,” Gollner added. “The model allows us to tune in to see the impact of each factor and how they interplay.”

Their research identified structure separation distance as the most influential factor driving structure loss, especially in densely built areas where wildfire is spread from building to building. Flame length also emerged as a critical contributor.

In addition, construction features such as exterior siding and window materials substantially contributed to the vulnerability of structures. The findings highlight how building arrangement and exposure to flames, combined with ignition resistance, all contribute to wildfire risk.

However, for mitigation strategies to work best, they need to be adopted by everyone in a fire-prone community, Gollner said. As the fierce debates over Zone Zero regulations illustrate, it can be challenging to cultivate the social and political will to implement these changes on a large scale.

“Much of what you can do to prevent these fires from spreading through the whole community happens on an individual's property and depends on what your neighbor does,” Gollner said. “This is a really challenging social, economic and political problem that requires a lot of groups working together.”

He hopes that the study further highlights the importance — and positive impact — of this challenging work.

“We need to justify the investments we're making in mitigation, and I was glad to see that for many of them, we do see significant payback in terms of risk reduction,” Gollner said.

Additional co-authors of the study include Daniel San Martin of the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María; Maria Theodori and Dwi Purnomo of UC Berkeley; Ali Tohidi, Arnaud Trouvé and Yiren Qin of the University of Maryland; and Chris Lautenberger of Cloudfire.

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-025-63386-2

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Fire risk to structures in California’s Wildland-Urban Interface

Article Publication Date

28-Aug-2025

Norway, environmentalists back in court over oil field permits

By AFP
August 28, 2025

Norway, western Europe's biggest oil and gas producer, is regularly criticised for its huge fossil fuel output - Copyright AFP/File Tom LITTLE

Pierre-Henry DESHAYES

The Norwegian state and environmental groups face off in court again Thursday over three oil fields ruled illegal last year due to insufficient environmental impact studies.

In January 2024, the Oslo district court ruled that the permits awarded for three North Sea fields were invalid because the CO2 emissions generated by the future burning of oil and gas in the fields had not been taken into account.

The Scandinavian branch of Greenpeace and the Natur og Ungdom (“Nature and Youth”) organisation appeared to have won a decisive victory, but Norway’s energy ministry, which awarded the permits for the Tyrving, Breidablikk and Yggdrasil offshore sites, appealed the verdict.

The ministry “considers that there has been no procedural error and there is no reason to stop the projects”, its legal representatives Omar Saleem Rathore and Goran Osterman Thengs told AFP in an email this week.

The state said the operators of the fields, Equinor and Aker BP, had conducted additional impact studies to address concerns raised in the lower court’s ruling.

These assessments “conducted after the fact, that is to say after the fields were found to be illegal, aren’t worth the paper they’re written on,” said the head of Greenpeace Norway, Frode Pleym.

“What needs to be quantified are the real emissions that emanate from the burning (of the fossil fuels), and in particular what impact these emissions will have on human lives, nature and the climate,” he told AFP.

Norway, western Europe’s biggest oil and gas producer, is regularly criticised for its huge fossil fuel output, which has brought immense prosperity to the nation.

The case comes amid growing legal battles over climate change.

In a milestone but non-binding ruling, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in July that climate change was an “urgent and existential threat” and that countries had a legal duty to prevent harm from their planet-warming pollution.

“A state’s failure to take appropriate action to protect the climate system from greenhouse gas emissions — including through fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, the granting of fossil fuel exploration licenses or the provision of fossil fuel subsidies — may constitute an internationally wrongful act,” the ICJ said.

– Like Trump? –

After the conclusion of the Oslo appeals court proceedings on September 4, judges will decide on the permits’ validity and whether operations can continue at the contested sites.

The lower court judge had barred the state from taking any decisions related to the fields, effectively halting their production and development, until all legal channels had been exhausted.

But to the dismay of the two environmental groups, the government has authorised the continuation of operations.

Breidablikk and Tyrving are currently operational, while Yggdrasil — whose reserves were just revised upwards — is due to begin producing in 2027.

The environmental groups have called for them all to be stopped immediately.

In legal documents submitted to the appeals court, they cite experts who claim that the total greenhouse gas emissions from the three fields alone would lead to “around 109,100 deaths linked to heat by 2100” and reduce the size of glaciers worldwide by “6.6 billion cubic metres”.

The state has meanwhile argued that the economic, social and industrial consequences of a temporary halt would be disproportionate.

“It is up to elected politicians to determine Norway’s energy and climate policy,” Rathore and Thengs insisted.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the subsequent reduction of Russian gas to Europe, Norway has “played a crucial role as a stable energy supplier” to the continent, they added.

But Greenpeace’s Pleym compared the moves by Norwegian authorities to US President Donald Trump, putting themselves above the country’s own laws.

“The rule of law is under threat in Trump’s America and certain other European countries,” he said.

“Norway remains thankfully a solid democracy, but even here the state’s actions play a central role in maintaining confidence in the system.”

US banana giant Chiquita returns to Panama

By AFP
August 29, 2025

Chiquita closed its Changuinola plant in the Caribbean province of Bocas del Toro at the end of May and laid off 6,000 workers after a strike over pension reforms that crippled production for weeks - Copyright POOL/AFP Manon Cruz

Juan José Rodríguez

US banana giant Chiquita Brands will resume operations in Panama and rehire thousands of workers fired after a crippling strike, the government of the Central American country said Friday.

Chiquita closed its Changuinola plant in the Caribbean province of Bocas del Toro at the end of May and laid off 6,000 workers after a strike over pension reforms that crippled production for weeks.

The strike, declared illegal by a labor court, caused more than $75 million in losses as well as road closures and product shortages in the province.

The Panamanian government has been negotiating with the company for its return to Bocas del Toro, which relies heavily on tourism and banana production.

On Friday, President Jose Raul Mulino announced “a positive agreement for Bocas del Toro and the thousands of workers who were left unemployed” by the closure.

“We are going to resume operations in the country under a new operational model that is more sustainable, modern, and efficient, creating decent jobs and contributing to the economic and social development of the country and the province of Bocas del Toro,” Chiquita President Carlos Lopez added in a statement.

According to the agreement, Chiquita will hire about 3,000 workers in a first phase and another 2,000 later.

“The goal is to be operational no later than February 2026,” said the government, adding Chiquita will invest some $30 million to resume production on 5,000 hectares of banana-growing land.

Bananas accounted for more than 17 percent of Panamanian exports in the first quarter of 2025, according to official data.

Luxury carmaker Lotus to slash UK jobs amid US tariffs

By AFP
August 28, 2025

Automakers have been among the companies hit hardest by Trump's tariff onslaught - Copyright AFP/File Mandel NGAN

Chinese-owned luxury carmaker Lotus said Thursday that it planned to cut up to 550 UK jobs, in part over uncertainty caused by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The layoffs represent over forty percent of its 1,300 employees in Britain.

Lotus said the restructuring was necessary to “secure a sustainable future,” citing the “rapidly evolving automotive environment, which is seeing uncertainty with rapid changes in global policies, including tariffs.”

The carmaker, which is majority owned by Chinese auto giant Geely, has several sites in the UK, including its headquarters in Hethel, eastern England.

Another Lotus factory is in Wuhan, China.

Automakers have been among the companies hit hardest by Trump’s tariff onslaught as he tries to bring auto production back to the United States.

Britain and the United States struck a trade deal in May under which a 27.5-percent tariff rate on UK car exports dropped to 10 percent for the first 100,000 vehicles per year.

But the levy remains higher than that placed on UK cars before Trump’s tariff blitz in April.

UK exports of vehicles to the United States rebounded in July following months of declines as the trade agreement came into force on June 30, industry data showed Thursday.

When did humans first colonize Australia?

New study by Utah anthropologist used genetic studies to conclude Sahul colonizers arrived later than the commonly held 65,000-year timeframe

University of Utah

Aboriginal Australian culture is regarded as humanity’s oldest continuous living culture. Existing scientific literature estimated their arrival on the continent of Australia at 65,000 years ago as a group known as the Sahul peoples. However, recent genetics research led by the University of Utah that analyzes traces of Neanderthal DNA in Homo sapiens suggests the actual origination date was no more than 50,000 years ago.

In collaboration with a colleague from Australia’s La Trobe University, James O’Connell, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, reported new findings in a study in the journal Archaeology in Oceania. The team highlights conclusions from previous studies that argue Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred only once, over a period of several thousand years—between 43,500 and 51,500 before present, or BP. Most modern humans, including Indigenous Australians, carry 1–4% Neanderthal DNA. The logic follows that modern Aborigine ancestors’ arrival on the continent could not have predated this time range.

Moreover, the dating of most archaeological sites across Australia points to a range between 43,000 and 54,000 years. “The colonization date falls within that interval,” O’Connell said. “That puts it in the same time range as the beginning of the displacement of Neanderthal populations in western Eurasia by anatomically modern humans.”

Other hominids, such as Homo erectus, had lived in Southeast Asia for more than a million years, but had not crossed overseas in large enough numbers to create a stable population in Australia. That is an important measure of the significance of Homo sapiens’ arrival.

Dating archaeological sites using OSL

One important Australian outlier among archaeological sites, O’Connell notes, is Madjedbebe, a site dated within a range of 59,000 to 70,000 years ago. The dating technique used in a 2017 study of Madjedbebe published in Nature was optically stimulated luminescence, or OSL. The technique reads minerals, typically quartz or feldspar, recovered at the site like a “clock” by measuring the energy they store. Radiation accumulates when these minerals are buried, then released when they are exposed to light. Measurements of the amount released determine when the minerals were last exposed to light.

The site has been subject to sand deposition, which may explain the estimated age of the artifacts. “The question for us has not been about the validity of the date. It’s about the relationship between the date and material evidence of human presence—that is, artifacts. In that part of Australia, many older archaeological sites are in situations where the depositional environment is a sand sheet. Material can move down through those deposits over time.”

Artifacts that are heavier than sand could settle through the sand deposit over time, and as a result, the dating process may have accurately analyzed the age of the sand deposits but not the artifacts they come to contain.

O’Connell also reviewed the hurdles the first Sahul peoples to arrive in Australia would have faced. The Sahul likely relied on rafts or canoes for exploration from Southeast Asia and colonization of Australia. But several challenges existed: first, they would need to engineer marine-capable watercraft that could pass through a “formidable ecological barrier,” the Wallacean archipelago, spanning 1,500 kilometers. Island-hopping through the archipelago, now comprising the nation of Indonesia, to Australia would involve at least eight separate crossings, the longest being 90 kilometers.

Early colonizers arrived in at least four groups

Moreover, these journeys would need to support a sizable population. Citing mitochondrial data, O’Connell noted: “Genomic analysis shows that early human colonizing populations included at least four separate mitochondrial lineages. Simple modeling exercises show that establishing each lineage on Sahul required the presence of at least five–10 women of reproductive age, which implies census populations of at least 25–50 individuals per lineage among the founders.”

The analysis indicates that these founding populations arrived within a short timeframe, lasting just a few centuries.

“This strongly suggests that colonizing passage was deliberate, not accidental,” O’Connell said,” and that it required sturdy rafts or canoes capable of holding, say, 10 or more people each plus the food and water needed to sustain those folks on open ocean voyages of up to several days, and of making headway against occasionally contrary ocean currents.”

Altogether, this technological progression adds more weight to a post-50,000-year arrival date, with other innovations and behavioral shifts—including cave art, tools, and ornaments—emerging in that timeframe.

The 50,000-year hypothesis has been a focus of the Australian anthropological debate since 2018. Four separate genetics studies have outlined the DNA ancestries of modern Indigenous New Guineans and Australians, concluding they could not have arrived earlier than 55,000 years ago. The other side of the debate continues to favor a 65,000-year date, which O’Connell disputes.

“I would expect in the next five years or so, the pendulum is going to swing back to general agreement for an under 50,000-year date for Australian colonization. It links up with the broader Eurasian record of an out-of-Africa population wave that spreads across Eurasia—a process that occurs over several thousand years. That raises all kinds of questions about why it happens, what it involves, what prompts it, and what changes in behavior are indicated in greater detail than they are now.”

O’Connell’s co-author and longtime collaborator is archaeologist Jim Allen, a retired professor from La Trobe University. Their study, titled “Recent DNA Studies Question a 65 kya Arrival of Humans in Sahul,” appeared online June 29 in the journal Archaeology in Oceania.