It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Controversial EU-Mercosur free trade deal comes into force The European Union's mammoth trade deal with South American bloc Mercosur provisionally enters into force on Friday, despite a pending court ruling on its legality.
Issued on: 01/05/2026 - RFI Ursula von der Leyen and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva speak after a meeting about the EU-Mercosur deal in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 16 January. AP - Bruna Prado
The agreement to create one of the world's biggest free-trade zones was sealed in January after more than 25 years of intermittent negotiations.
The deal, which eliminates tariffs on more than 90 percent of trade between the two sides, has proven divisive in Europe, with France leading opposition over concerns some of its farmers will be left worse off.
But, backed by a majority of EU countries, Brussels went ahead as it pushes to diversify trade in the face of challenges from the United States and China.
"A lot of work went into getting this landmark deal over the line; now it's time to invest the same effort into making sure our citizens and businesses reap its benefits immediately," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
"From day one, tariffs are reduced and new market opportunities are opened."
To mark the day, EU chiefs von der Leyen and Antonio Costa will hold online talks with leaders from the Mercosur nations, which include Argentina and Brazil.
Together, the EU and Mercosur account for 30 percent of global GDP and more than 700 million consumers.
Court of Justice
The agreement favours European exports of cars, wine and cheese, while making it easier for South American beef, poultry, sugar, rice, honey and soybeans to enter Europe.
The application of the deal comes after the European Parliament referred it to the EU's Court of Justice in January, instead of giving it the green light.
France unsuccessfully attempted to block the deal over worries for its farmers, who fear being undercut by cheaper goods from agricultural powerhouse Brazil and its neighbours.
The staunch French opposition to the pact caused a public rift with Germany, pitting the EU's two largest economies against one another.
(with newswires)
Monday, April 27, 2026
Challenging the urban-rural divide in ecology
Framework focuses on need for connectivity to inform urban planning, sustainability, and human well-being
Instead of thinking of urban and rural as binary, the new ‘Continuum of Urbanity’ adds a third dimension (wildness) and room for mixture, so that urban planners and researchers can better understand and help the neighborhoods they work in.
Credit: Credit: Pickett et al./npj Urban Sustainability 2026
As cities sprawl into suburbs and exurbs, the distinction between urban areas and the countryside has become increasingly blurry. A new paper published in npj Urban Sustainability proposes that many modern landscapes can be managed more holistically when they are understood as a mixture of urban, rural, and wild features.
“There used to be a clear boundary between cities relative to the countryside and the wild, but that has been changing for a long time,” says lead author Steward Pickett, an urban ecologist and scientist emeritus at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. “You can’t just walk in a straight line from a city center and define where the ‘urban’ ends.”
Pickett and coauthors put forth a new framework that emphasizes the many connections among urban, rural, and wild places that can create a blend of these features in a given area.
“It’s like patchwork or a mosaic,” explains Pickett. “You can have a place that's 70% urban and 30% rural right next to a place that's the opposite, or has some wild mixed in.” He and his coauthors hope this new way of thinking, which they have dubbed the “continuum of urbanity,” helps urban ecologists, planners, and city managers better understand how these areas function and what matters most to residents. The continuum may also be useful to policy experts, engineers, decision makers, and activists.
Traditional thinking separates urban and rural (or ‘natural’) spaces, as well as the research fields that study them. In place of this black and white dichotomy, the new framework offers a middle ground with many shades of gray.
The blending of urban, rural, and wild is everywhere once you know how to look for it, says Pickett. Wild animals such as coyotes and even bears sometimes turn up in towns and cities. Rural influence can be seen in community gardens or a tomato plant growing on a fire escape. There are urban influences in rural areas, too, reflected in the types of jobs people perform and the entertainment they consume.
The paper explores how these dynamics play out in the Mid-Hudson Valley as an example. This region of upstate New York is composed of small cities, towns, farms, and forests. It is physically connected to New York City by the Hudson River, several highways, railways, and more. This connectivity lets people, money, and culture flow between the two locations. For example, asylum seekers (some bused to New York City from southern states) have been housed in hotels in the Mid-Hudson Valley. The COVID-19 pandemic sent many New Yorkers into the Hudson Valley, driving up property prices and threatening to increase development on recently reforested land. The growth of online shopping, intensified by COVID-19, has changed livelihoods and locations in the Mid-Hudson Valley through novel employment opportunities, conversion of land to warehouses and large distribution centers, and the road infrastructure and associated truck traffic to serve them. In another example, the paper shares how, in suburban landscapes, connecting previously fragmented forests has facilitated the spread of blacklegged ticks and Lyme disease.
Global-scale connections can link distant places, too, such as the accidental introduction, via international trade, of forest pests like the emerald ash borer and the spotted lanternfly that are harming Hudson Valley forests. Similarly, the demand for beef in the Hudson Valley can incentivize deforestation for cattle grazing in the Amazon. And as climate change causes more droughts, floods, and fires across New York City and the Hudson Valley, it may continue to reshape the distribution of homes and businesses and the flow of ideas between the region’s urban, rural, and wild places.
“The message of the Mid-Hudson River Valley case is that familiar urban and rural features are tightly linked,” the authors write in the paper. “One cannot be understood without the other, nor can policies, plans, and interventions neglect the entanglement of the seemingly discrete urban and rural human ecosystem characteristics.”
From theory to practice
The authors outline four main areas of life where urban, rural, and wild influence could potentially be measured:
Livelihood: How do people in this community support themselves? People who own or work on farms, for example, will likely experience more rural influence. Urban livelihoods can become part of rural places — for example, when remote workers in the financial sector bring urban resources and expectations to seemingly rural locations.
Lifestyle: How do people identify socially? Who do they consider part of their community? This can be linked to the kinds of houses they live in or the cars they drive, says Pickett. “If you are a farmer who owns a truck and a Mercedes, the Mercedes is something that expresses your social status and connects you with wealthy people way beyond the farm.”
Connectivity: How are different parts of the region connected, and how well are they connected? Connectivity goes beyond physical infrastructure. For example, Pickett explains, people living on farms in South Africa may be supported by money flowing from family members working in big cities in South Africa or even the US or Europe.
Location: The specific geography where livelihood, lifestyle, and connectivity interact.
How the continuum of urbanity can help
“We hope that the continuum of urbanity encourages people to slow down and think before they design, build, or renovate,” says Pickett. “For example, someone might want to coordinate the traffic lights to reduce traffic and gasoline consumption. That's all well and good, but if you only design your city for efficiency, you're likely to neglect some of the amenities people need for a pleasant, healthy life. Our framework slows you down and makes you ask, ‘How's this going to affect how people live, or where they can recreate, or how they can build social relationships?’ If your profession is an urban ecologist or an urban designer, an urban planner, or a city manager, you have to be aware of all of these components.”
Coauthor and Cary ecologist Shannon LaDeau said she is already incorporating the continuum of urbanity in Defining Urban Biodiversity, a project she co-leads with Scenic Hudson that seeks to understand how changing green spaces in three Hudson Valley cities impacts plants, animals, and people. “The ideas in the paper inform how I think about the urban matrix that links our study sites to each other, to New York City, as well as to ecosystems of the Hudson River and Catskills,” she said.
Coauthor Robert Freudenberg, vice president of energy and environmental programs at the Regional Plan Association, said the Continuum of Urbanity approach is helping him move away from oversimplistic categorizations of land and community, to better consider the complex mixtures in the places where he works, especially when planning for climate change.
“The concept provides an extraordinary framework for considering how climate impacts are manifesting within the natural systems that bind the region together,” said Freudenberg. “If we are going to plan and manage our way to adapt to climate change, and hopefully avoid its very worst impacts, understanding the ecological interactions that branch across our developed places will be essential.”
Cary’s Winslow Hansen, coauthor and director of a large collaborative that seeks to reduce the risk of catastrophic fires in the western US, says the continuum of urbanity helps him see an important part of his work in a new way.
“In my current area of work, we think about the wildland urban interface as a distinct boundary between human communities and wild areas as the epicenter of fire risk,” says Hansen. “But if you instead embrace a continuum of urbanity, then risk mitigation from fire could become more nuanced, tailored to local ecological and social conditions rather than viewing the world as clearly categorized into one or the other.”
There remains much work to do to refine the continuum of urbanity and figure out how to measure the three dimensions. However, the authors hope that the new concept will change the way people think about communities, guiding more thoughtful research and helpful interventions.
Funding
This publication was funded by the US National Science Foundation, the National Science Foundation of China, and the Science Innovation Funds of Cary Institute.
Authors
Steward T. A. Pickett - Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Weiqi Zhou - Chinese Academy of Sciences
Daniel L. Childers - Arizona State University
J. Morgan Grove - Yale School of the Environment
Winslow D. Hansen - Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Dexter H. Locke - USDA Forest Service
Christopher Boone - University of Southern California
Karen C. Seto - Yale School of the Environment
Dawa Zhaxi - Chinese Academy of Sciences
Shannon LaDeau - Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Leonard Nevarez - Vassar College
Robert Freudenberg - Regional Plan Association
Christopher T. Solomon - Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Elizabeth M.Cook - Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Barnard College
Russell Urban-Mead - LaBella Associates
David Maddox - The Nature of Cities
Adam R. Bosch - Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress
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Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies is an independent nonprofit center for environmental research. Since 1983, our scientists have been investigating the complex interactions that govern the natural world and the impacts of climate change on these systems. Our findings lead to more effective resource management, policy actions, and environmental literacy. Staff are global experts in the ecology of: forests, freshwater, soils, cities, and disease.
Antonio has spent the past seven years running toward fires that most others run from. A firefighter in the Brazilian Amazon since 2019, he works inside the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth.
But things are changing, and fast. “2024 was the most extreme year for fires,” Antonio said. “I had never seen anything like it. The forest burned like dry pasture – it was frightening for those of us who risk our lives to protect it.”
What Antonio and his fellow firefighters are witnessing on the ground has been backed up by a new study. An international team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, have found that the policies that helped reduce deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon over the past two decades have mostly failed to stop forest degradation: a slower and potentially more dangerous form of destruction. Their results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Unlike deforestation, where whole areas of forests are cleared for farming, industry or infrastructure, a degraded forest still has trees standing. However, it has been so damaged by fire, illegal logging, fragmentation, droughts and over-hunting that it has lost much of its ecological value. The forest floor, stripped of shade and moisture, becomes a tinderbox.
“There’s still a forest there, but it’s so damaged that the carbon it once stored starts leaking, the animals have disappeared, and new grass species colonise the forest edges,” said lead author Federico Cammelli from Cambridge’s Department of Geography and the Conservation Research Institute. “Tropical forest fires are low intensity, flames often go undetected under the canopy, but after one or two years, trees die while standing, and the forest transforms into a cemetery of dead standing trees.”
Earlier research found that between 2001 and 2018, net carbon emissions from forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon were comparable or even higher than those from deforestation itself. By 2050, degradation could affect the entire Brazilian Amazon, but it has barely featured in the policies meant to protect it.
Brazil has made real progress on deforestation. The first phase of the government’s Plan for Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon, launched in the mid-2000s, reduced tree clearing by an estimated 60 to 80 percent. Agreements in the private sector – including a moratorium on soybeans from deforested land, and a commitment from meat packers not to source cattle from newly deforested areas – also contributed to the region’s success.
However, the researchers found that four major policies meant to reduce deforestation across three Brazilian states did not reduce degradation.
When deforestation slows down, some degradation slows as well, since forests suffer less from so-called edge effects where cleared areas touch intact woodland. “However, we found no conclusive evidence that any of the supply chain policies, like the soy moratorium or the cattle agreements, tackled other big drivers of anthropogenic degradation, like fires, logging and fragmentation,” said Cammelli.
In one case, the research suggests, even successful deforestation policies can make degradation worse. The G4 cattle agreement, signed by Brazil’s four biggest meat packers, appeared to be linked to an increase in timber extraction: possibly because as cattle ranching became more regulated, some businesses switched to the less-regulated logging sector.
Back in Chico Mendes, Antonio sees some of the consequences of these gaps in policy. He said the dry season now lasts longer each year, forests are growing more fragile, and the rains arrive with sudden violence, washing out bridges and blocking roads.
He is not optimistic that the law is keeping up. “Environmental laws should be stricter, and offenders should be properly published,” he said. “If we lose the forest, we indirectly lose our lives.”
Cammelli said that political will is vital. An update to Brazilian environmental policy published in 2023 includes forest degradation among the criteria for targeting environmental law enforcement towards municipalities with poor environmental records, along requirements to reduce deforestation specifically.
“Fires often spread over many properties and entail complex liabilities: who is responsible for ignition, who for fire spread? They are best addressed at the landscape scale. The timber sector remains poorly regulated, and much can be done to crack down illegal logging,” he said.
The researchers are calling for a fundamental shift in how governments, companies and regulators think about how to best protect forests.
The EU Deforestation Regulation, which bans imports of products linked to forest destruction, defines degradation too narrowly, the researchers say, and largely overlooks the fire damage and fragmentation caused by soybean and beef production. The researchers are urging the EU to expand their definition of degradation.
Despite commitments on deforestation, the researchers found no publicly documented examples of companies operating in the Brazilian Amazon that had set concrete targets for specifically addressing forest degradation.
“Avoiding deforestation and degradation is so much more important for climate and nature than restoring what’s already gone,” said senior author Professor Rachael Garrett, also from Cambridge’s Department of Geography and Conservation Research Institute. “There are certain things you can’t get back.”
“Every year,” said Antonio, “the forest and wildlife become more vulnerable.”
The research was supported in part by the European Union and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Beef has a double meaning. On the one hand it is meat, and on the other a feud.
The latter definition holds sway in “Beef 2,” an eight-episode series streaming on Netflix now. The series creator, Lee Sung Jin, gained notoriety with his Emmy-award winning “Beef,” a 2023 series that follows a road rage incident between two adults, Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, that descends into violent retribution.
In both series, Jin captures aspects of the class structure in capitalist America: income and wealth inequality driving personal instability, fueling divisions of class, ethnicity and gender.
In “Beef 2,” Oscar Issac and Carey Mulligan portray an upwardly mobile couple in their 40s who are treading water. They are hot and cold with each other, physically and verbally.
He works as a general manager of a country club with a $300,000 initiation fee. She is an interior decorator there until the billionaire owner sacks her. The boss doesn’t have to be right. S/he just has to be the boss in the largely union-free U.S. workforce after a near half-century of anti-labor policies. Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny are the Gen-Z couple in “Beef 2.” They aspire to settle down and rear a family.
Such aspirations are out of reach given the young couple’s paltry wage-income at the tony country club. Some 40 percent of the American population have no savings, income and wealth shifted from them upward to the ruling class.
The “Beef 2” narrative grows from the Gen-Z female videotaping a violent clash between the Millennial couple.
This leads to blackmail. The ransom demand is for a pay raise and employer health care insurance.
There’s a catch, though. Think health-care insurance deductible. That $5,000 deductible compounds.
Meanwhile the male Millennial also experiences debt woes, leading him to criminal behavior. Money, or the lack of it, is central to the Gen-Z and Millennial characters’ desperation.
Chairwoman Park, Youn Yuh-jung, is the South Korean ice queen billionaire owner of the club. Her slight stature belies her lethal power over everybody else. She and Dr. Kim, Song Kang-ho, her plastic surgeon husband, take the corruption of capital accumulation by any means necessary to a higher level. Smartphones and social media play a prominent role in “Beef 2.” Suffice it to say that digital communication creates personal and social situations that worsen relations of inequality percolating throughout “Beef 2.”
The characters in “Beef 2” are perpetrators and victims of Big Tech’s digital domination. AI and algorithms strengthen that oppressive situation. “Beef 2” unpacks the dynamics of domination and subordination that govern late capitalism, where a predatory ruling class exploits everybody else. Such social relations are ripped from today’s headlines of normalized greed and theft.
This social class reality of late capitalism goes a long way to explaining the popularity of Lin’s work. Viewers see aspects of themselves in the characters’ lives.
Seth Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com
Saturday, April 25, 2026
France must avoid becoming ‘hostage’ on critical minerals: trade minister
France's Trade Minister Nicolas Forissier speaks at a press conference in Sydney on April 23, 2026 - Copyright AFP Jung Yeon-je
France and “like-minded countries” must work together to avoid becoming “hostages” on critical minerals used in everything from phones to solar panels, Paris’s trade minister said Thursday.
Speaking in Sydney, Nicolas Forissier told journalists that France was working to expand cooperation with Australia — among the world’s top five producers of lithium, cobalt and manganese, essential for goods like rechargeable batteries and aircraft jet engines.
He said democratic nations needed to avoid a situation in which critical minerals “could be weaponised again in this very uncertain and violent trade and economic world”.
“We have to organise things so that it’s secure,” he said.
China dominates the production of rare earths and has threatened to restrict supplies in a tit-for-tat trade war with Washington — leaving Western nations looking elsewhere.
“What is important is to build something which will last,” Forissier said.
“The idea is to find solutions that secure the system and that avoid us, I mean, all our like-minded countries, not to be hostages in the future.”
Critical minerals were also a key component of a landmark trade deal between the EU and Australia agreed to last month.
The agreement aims to give Europe better access to these materials, most notably aluminium, lithium and manganese.
The sweeping accord also means the quota of Australian beef allowed into the bloc will increase more than 10 times the current level over the next decade.
That upset both Australian farmers, who had hoped for more, and their European peers, who had pushed for the opposite.
Asked about domestic concerns around the deal, Forissier said that complaints from farmers in both France and Australia proved the agreement was “balanced”.
“For French exporters, especially in certain agro sectors, it’s an excellent deal that has been made,” he said.
“The discussion has been settled,” he added.
“We can say that we obtained as much as possible in the discussions.”
“When you have a trade agreement, everybody makes concessions.”
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
Evangelicals forced into a reckoning — thanks to Trump
Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s political career, writes the Nation, “pundits and religious observers have been asking themselves…just how a thrice-married casino owner who mocks opponents, savors vengeance, and revels in cruelty could become the hero of millions of devout Christians.” In 2016, he won 81 percent of the white evangelical vote — higher than George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, or John McCain in the preceding elections. Then in 2020, Trump secured 85 percent of Americans who both self-identified as evangelicals and attended church regularly. Finally in 2024, he yet again took over 80 percent of the evangelical vote.
Now in recent weeks, amidst Trump’s bizarre fight with the Pope, “Trump’s Christian right supporters have had to reckon anew with the fact that their purported values and those of their president are deeply misaligned.” From his decidedly un-Christian actions, to his beef with the Pope, to sharing photos of himself as Jesus, Trump “is a man who believes he is above faith and superior to those who profess it.”
What explains this “cognitive dissonance” on the part of evangelicals who profess Christian values on one hand but vote for a man who flaunts them on the other? “Trump is the ultimate American televangelist,” who “seized on a central truth about evangelism in the postmodern age: It is a style, not a theology.” This attracted a Christian audience that had been fed on flashy televangelism for decades.
As the Nation explains, Trump appeals to the same 20th-century revivalist landscape that produced the likes of Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, and now White House senior faith advisor Paula White-Cain: ministers who leveraged spectacle, cultural grievances, the defeat of enemies, and promises “that material success signaled divine favor” to draw evangelical masses raised on TV and consumerism. The future president took these lessons and applied them to his political rallies.
“Trump does not argue policy. He does not try to persuade with logic. He uses repetition over explanation and emotional intensity over coherence,” explains the Nation. “He regularly warns of an imminent apocalypse. He demands loyalty. He testifies. He reassures the devout…He also names his enemies, who happen to be the same groups that have dogged televangelists through the modern era.”
While some have argued the novelty of his “presidential bully pulpit,” the Nation notes that “Trump did not invent a new political style; he refashioned a religious style to transform politics. He merged his idiosyncratic form of pseudo-populist authoritarianism with classic revivalist evangelicalism. He has perfected the evangelical style in American politics” to the point where the two are indistinguishable.
Judging by the backlash against his AI-Jesus photo, says the Nation, “Donald Trump may have erred in promoting himself as a latter-day messiah,” but one thing is hard to deny: “he is the televangelist meme incarnate.”
Sunday, April 19, 2026
How France fell for reimagined 19th-century workers’ canteens
So-called bouillon restaurants are mushrooming all over France, reviving a traditional low-cost Gallic meal concept that can compete with fast-food on prices and easily beat it on quality.
“It’s exploding! 253 bouillon restaurants have opened in France in four years,” Bernard Boutboul, a restaurant consultant, told AFP.
“It’s an ultra-intensive expansion, driven by a trend of returning to traditions, with the reappearance of iconic French dishes at very low prices.”
Created in the 1850s by the butcher Adolphe-Baptiste Duval to fill workers’ stomachs with hearty meals, Duval’s ran 250 restaurants in the capital by the turn of the 20th century.
That made them France’s first mass chain of restaurants, serving traditional recipes at low prices in high-volume and bustling restaurants.
But as eating habits changed, with higher quality and more expensive brasseries dominating the French food market, and international and fast-food trends appearing, the bouillon concept fell out of favour.
Its revival began in 2005 with the resurrection of the Bouillon Chartier, an ornate Parisian landmark that had been slowly fading.
“A bouillon is the gateway to French gastronomy,” explained Christophe Joulie, part of the gastronomic family who took over the Chartier.
He modernised the kitchens and put beef bourguignon with macaroni back on the menu.
“For me, you have to be able to have a starter, main course and dessert for under 20 euros,” he said.
With its leek vinaigrette for one euro and bills scribbled on paper tablecloths by apron-clad waiters, the restaurant hums with activity as locals and tourists alike pack out its tables, which crucially cannot be reserved.
“In a world where fast food is taking up more space, it’s French-style fast food, because we serve a full dish for less than a sandwich at McDonald’s,” said Joulie.
– ‘Dust off’ –
Even multi-Michelin-starred French chef Thierry Marx has got in on the act, attracted by the idea of providing quality food at affordable prices.
He has opened a bouillon in a northern Paris suburb.
“In the 1960s, it took the equivalent of an hour of the minimum wage to eat at a bistro,” he told AFP. “Today, with an hour of minimum wage, you only get fast food, something from the bakery — or a bouillon dish.”
Other restaurateurs with a keen eye for the market have sensed an opportunity.
“We looked at needs and changing habits and realised there was demand for intergenerational social spaces with no price-based exclusion,” Enguerran Lavaud, director of Groupe Bouillon Restaurants, told AFP.
“I wanted to dust off the bouillon -— its mass-market French dishes available from noon to midnight.”
Boosted by its Instagram presence, his Bouillon Pigalle now serves 2,300 customers a day, often with long queues along the pavement.
Since 2017, the concept has spread, attracting more and more restaurateurs across France from Angers to Nancy and Toulouse.
Some are adapting the concept.
In the Romainville suburb northeast of Paris, a family of Mauritian origin took over a large brasserie in 2026 to turn it into a “Mauritian-style bouillon”.
There is an Italian bouillon in Paris too.
Industry insiders say they do not fear competition around what has become a “bouillon culture”.
“But there are bouillons and bouillons: those that can’t sustain the low prices over time, and whose menus change all the time, won’t make it to 2027 or 2028 because you have to protect the quality of the experience to protect volume — and therefore prices,” warned Lavaud.
According to consultant Bernard Boutboul, you specifically need “at least 300 seats and not exceed an average bill of 18 euros”.
