Watch 2 giant, highly venomous black mambas fighting in someone's backyard

Jacklin Kwan
Wed, July 5, 2023 

close up of a black mamba with its mouth open on a black background

Two huge, highly venomous black mambas — both over 8 feet (2.4 meters) long — have been filmed in a fierce wrestling match in a person's backyard.

The males fought for over 30 minutes in Queensburgh, South Africa. The pair were filmed in a twisted embrace as they attempted to pull each other to the ground.

The bigger snake, which was 8.5 feet (2.6 m) long, tried to pin down the neck of the smaller, 8.2-foot-long (2.5 m) snake, Nick Evans, a snake rescuer who uploaded the video to Facebook, wrote in the description. This happened three times before the smaller snake "surrendered" and moved away. The exhausted black mambas were then caught and released away from people. Evans wrote they were likely fighting over a female, as it is currently their mating season.

The bruising encounter raises an intriguing question: Why don't black mambas (Dendroaspis polylepis) bite each other when they fight?

"Male mambas don't bite each other. They wrestle till one surrenders," Evans wrote.

Black mambas are one of the most venomous species of snake on Earth. These snakes have a "notorious reputation" for being Africa's deadliest snake, where they are found in the eastern and southern regions of the continent, John Dunbar, an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the Venom Systems lab at the University of Galway in Ireland, said.

Their venom targets the connection between their prey's nerves and muscles. It can rapidly paralyze and kill a human in 20 minutes. However, Dunbar told Live Science that after handling these snakes to extract venom, he has found them to be "shy, nervous snakes" that would only strike a human if they felt startled or threatened.

a black mamba coiled up on the ground surrounded by leaves with a tree trunk behind

"Venom is a precious resource reserved for catch[ing] prey and for defense," he said.

Dunbar said the behavior seen in the video is known as "plaiting combat," which typically takes place in the presence of a female. The name comes from how the snakes will "plait" their bodies around each other in an attempt to dominate their opponent and win the female's approval.

"Rather than simply biting and subduing [their opponent] with a fatal dose of neurotoxic venom, the aim is purely to win by [forcing] submission," Dunbar said. "[I]t's a demonstration of stamina and physical strength, not chemical warfare."

Snakes also possess immunity towards their own species' venom. Mild exposure to a snake's own venom, during activities like mating or feeding, can generate a mild immunity response, where a snake's antibodies neutralize the toxins. These same antibodies help protect it against being bitten by another member of the same species

Grey whales seen seeking human help to remove parasites


Philip Hoare
Thu, 6 July 2023


Grey whales have learned to approach whale-watching boats to have parasites removed by human beings, it has been claimed.

Video footage documenting the behaviour in the Ojo de Liebre lagoon, off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, shows a grey whale having whale lice picked off its head by the captain of a small boat. “I have done it repeatedly with the same whale and others,” Paco Jimenez Franco told a US news site. “It is very exciting for me.”

Whale lice or cyamids – pale, crab-like creatures that crawl about on the animal’s heads – can be beneficial for whales, eating algae on their bodies and feeding on flaking skin and the sites of wounds. However, it is assumed that they also irritate the animal.

“I think the grey whales have a love-hate relationship with their whale lice,” said Mark Carwardine, a British zoologist with wide experience in the region. “They have very sensitive skin, and thousands of these little creatures holding on tight, or moving about, with their exceedingly sharp, recurved claws, must drive them nuts.”

He added: “It can actually hurt when a whale louse grabs hold of your finger – it feels like tiny pinpricks.”

Franco picked a louse off the head of the whale the first time it came close enough for him to do so. “Once I removed the first one, she approached again so that I could continue,” he said. The same individual whale has returned repeatedly for more “grooming”, according to Franco.

Like many of the relatively slow-moving great whales, including humpbacks and right whales, grey whales – which can grow up to 15 metres (50ft) in length – are particularly susceptible to parasites. They also acquire barnacles as they graze on minute amphipods at the silty bottom of the sea.

The grey whales off Baja California are celebrated for their inquisitive behaviour towards boats, even though they were hunted drastically in the 20th century. They were known to whalers as “devil fish” on account of their ferocity in fighting back against hunters, whose tactics included killing a nursing female’s calf to ensure the adult came close enough to be harpooned. The whale’s only other predator is the orca.

While he could not confirm that approaching humans for delousing help constituted new behaviour in whales, Carwardine said he had not seen it before. “The whales certainly don’t seem to mind when people pick them off, although you’d have to pick off hundreds to make much of a difference,” he said.

Related: Ships are turning whales into ‘ocean roadkill’. This AI system is trying to stop it

Because the lice eat sloughed whale skin and damaged tissue, he noted that “rather than parasites, they are really what we call symbionts – in other words, each animal benefits from the other”.

The new grooming behaviour could be considered similarly symbiotic. Given that grey whales can live for at least 80 years, it is possible that animals that were alive during the period of hunting have since adapted to benefit from interaction with humans.

Palestinians defiant and angry after Israel's Jenin raid



Wed, July 5, 2023 
By Ali Sawafta

JENIN, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinian militant fighters paraded in Jenin on Wednesday and angry crowds confronted senior Palestinian Authority officials, accusing them of weakness, after one of the largest Israeli military operations in the occupied West Bank in years.

The two-day operation, which the Israeli military said targeted infrastructure and weapons depots of militant factions in the Jenin refugee camp, left a trail of wrecked streets and burned-out cars and sparked fury across the Arab world.

At least 12 Palestinians, most confirmed as militant fighters, were killed and around 100 wounded in an incursion that began with late-night drone strikes, followed by a sweep involving more than 1,000 Israeli troops. One Israeli soldier was killed.

"We stayed inside the house, but then they cut off the electricity then the water," said Mohammad Mansour, a resident of the camp where armoured bulldozers tore up streets to expose roadside bombs, cutting power cables and water pipes.

"We ended up running out of bread and supplies ... I've never been through such days."

At a funeral for 10 of the dead, thousands of mourners, including dozens of gunmen, confronted three senior Palestinian Authority leaders, chanting "Get out! Get out!" They forced them to leave under protection of guards who used tear gas to push back the crowds.

The Authority, which exercises nominal governance over parts of the West Bank, protested against the Israeli operation, which it called a war crime, but was unable to do anything to halt it.

RESIDENTS DEFIANT

Following the withdrawal of the Israeli force on Tuesday evening, leaders of Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad and other armed factions claimed victory, and the mood among residents returning home to the camp appeared defiant.

"They did not get what they wanted, thank God. The youths are fine, the families are fine, and the camp is fine," Mutasem Estatia, a father of six, said after what he described as two nights being kept away, one of them in Israeli detention.

"There are 12 martyrs and we are proud of them, but we expected more damage."

Israeli forces detained 150 suspected militants, seized large caches of money, guns and roadside mines - including an arsenal under a mosque - and destroyed a command centre, the army said. It said all the Palestinians killed were armed fighters. Islamic Jihad claimed eight as members, with Hamas claiming another.

As the troops withdrew overnight, Israel reported a volley of rockets from the Gaza Strip, another Palestinian territory, which is run by Hamas. The rockets were shot down and Israel's air force struck targets in Gaza, causing no casualties.

In a further sign of violence spilling over from Jenin, a Palestinian rammed his car into pedestrians in Tel Aviv and went on a stabbing spree, wounding eight people before he was shot dead. Hamas claimed him as a member.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on Tuesday the Jenin operation was unlikely to be a "one-off" and said it would be "the beginning of regular incursions and continuous control of the territory".

In turn, the spokesman for the Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, said "every alley and street will soon turn into clashes and fighting fields."

'THINGS WE FACED 20 YEARS AGO'

The scale of the Israeli operation, one of the biggest in 20 years, pointed to the growing strength of the militant groups in Jenin, where Israel estimates almost half the population is affiliated to Islamic Jihad or Hamas.

"War rooms, explosive devices, planting powerful but primitive mines based on solar water heaters or similar objects - these are things we faced 20 years ago in Gaza," said Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, a former army general."

"Only then they were buried in the sand and now they had to be buried in asphalt."

The operation also underlined the weakness of the Palestinian Authority, set up some 30 years ago after the Oslo peace accords, which has been unable to impose itself against either Israel or militant groups in Jenin or nearby Nablus.

Both cities have been traditional centres of Palestinian resistance, but their semi-detached position from Palestinian Authority control has become more pronounced as a wave of violence has swept the West Bank over the past two years.

In Jenin, footage circulating on social media showed hundreds throwing rocks at the wall of the Palestinian Authority governor in the early hours of the morning.

Israel has been fiercely critical of the Palestinian Authority and its president Mahmoud Abbas, 87, accusing them of failing to rein in the militant groups.

PA officials in turn say Israel makes it impossible to exert control by deliberately undermining their authority and blocking any attempt to create the basis for a future Palestinian state in the West Bank, which Israel seized after the 1967 Middle East war.

Surveys show almost 80% of Palestinians want Abbas to resign but without any designated successor and with no elections held for almost 20 years, it remains unclear who might replace him.

(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Writing by James Mackenzie; Editing by Conor Humphries and Peter Graff)

An EU mission in Gaza once represented hope. Today, it is a symbol of a sputtering Western vision






- A general view of the West Bank Jewish settlement of Efrat, Monday, Jan. 30, 2023. The European Union withdrew the monitoring mission formed to promote a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians from Gaza after the Hamas militant group seized power in 2007. But 16 years later, the mission continues to maintain offices in Israel in hopes of one day returning. Critics say the ongoing Western commitment to the two-state solution fails to recognize the changing circumstances in the region and maintains a costly-status quo. 

(AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean, File)

JOSEF FEDERMAN
Thu, July 6, 2023 

JERUSALEM (AP) — It’s been 16 years since the borders of the Gaza Strip slammed shut after Hamas militants seized control of the territory.

The takeover forced the European Union to withdraw monitors who had been deployed at a Gaza border crossing to help the Palestinians prepare for independence. Yet the EU has regularly renewed funding for the unit since then, most recently late last month.

The continued existence of the unit known as EUBAM is an extreme example of the West’s willingness to keep pumping hundreds of millions of dollars a year into the moribund vision of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.

Proponents say this approach remains the best chance for securing an eventual peace deal. Critics argue that opting for such costly conflict management helps keep a 56-year-old Israeli military occupation in place and allows Europe and the U.S. to avoid making the hard political decisions needed to end the conflict.

This week's deadly Israeli raid of a West Bank militant stronghold and previous eruptions of violence also underscore the limits of international efforts to contain the conflict.

“The international community, in my view, understands the reality that the two-state solution is gone,” said Marwan Muasher, a onetime Jordanian foreign minister and former ambassador to Israel. “It does not want to acknowledge this publicly, because acknowledging it publicly is going to have to force the international community to start talking about alternatives, all of them problematic.”

Muasher, now a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is unusual among his peers. The legions of diplomats and politicians who have devoted their careers to Mideast peacemaking remain committed to the two-state vision, even as the ground around them has shifted.

“I am still a believer,” said Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister who led the last round of substantive peace talks with Palestinian leaders before leaving office in 2009.

“There is no other solution. Everything else is almost inevitably a prescription for disaster,” Olmert said.

The two-state approach has guided international diplomacy since the 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The interim accords were meant to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Palestinians seek the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, areas Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war, for their state. The land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, made up of pre-1967 Israel and the occupied lands, is populated in roughly equal parts by Palestinians and Israeli Jews. Pollsters predict an eventual Palestinian majority because of higher birth rates.

Proponents of partition say it would create a democratic Israel with a clear Jewish majority in defined borders and enable Palestinians to realize their national aspirations.

Without partition, the default is an apartheid-like reality in which a shrinking Jewish minority controls a growing Arab majority with few political rights. Leading rights groups say an apartheid system is already in place.

Since the Oslo accords 30 years ago, the U.S. and EU have spent billions of dollars on development projects and direct aid to the Palestinian Authority to promote the two-state vision. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell both pledged support for a partition deal.

Yet the West has little to show for its efforts. Peace initiatives led by successive U.S. presidents were derailed by violence, Israeli settlement expansion and mutual distrust.

Hamas, shunned by the West as a terrorist group, has fought four wars against Israel and remains entrenched in Gaza. The Palestinian Authority, which governs semi-autonomous enclaves in the West Bank, is weaker than ever. Israel’s far-right government opposes Palestinian independence and is racing to expand a settler population that has ballooned to over 700,000 people.

Preoccupied with the war in Ukraine and its rivalry with China, the Biden administration has done little more than condemn Israeli settlement plans and call for de-escalation.

Recent opinion polls show that only about one-third of Israelis and Palestinians still favor a two-state solution.

Even some members of the Palestinian Authority, which has the most to gain from independence, have begun to speak publicly about equal rights between the river and the sea, rather than two states.

“The basis for us is ending the occupation, obtaining freedom,” said Mahmoud Aloul, an aide to President Mahmoud Abbas. He said it does not matter if the conflict ends with two states or a single binational state for Israelis and Palestinians.

In academic and human rights circles, many now speak about a “one-state reality” – in which Israel wields overall control over Palestinians. Muasher said given this environment, it is time for the world to focus on Palestinian human rights instead of unrealistic peace plans.

Ines Abdel-Razek, executive director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, an advocacy group, said calls for a two-state solution are “comfortable” for the international community, but insincere.

She said that if the U.S. were serious about peace, it would force Israel to reverse its settlement enterprise. Instead, she said, Washington gives Israel billions in military aid, allows settlement groups to raise funds in the U.S., engages with institutions promoting the annexation of the West Bank and pushes for normalization with other Arab countries.

“The problem is the dire gap and hypocrisy between the discourse and then the policies and practices that are put in place,” she said.

Nearly a generation ago, when EUBAM was established, Palestinian statehood hopes hadn't yet been crushed.

The unit was set up after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. The border monitors helped the Palestinian Authority run the territory’s Rafah crossing with Egypt, while coordinating with Israel. It had 130 workers and helped some 2,700 people cross the border each day.

Florin Bulgariu, the current director of EUBAM, said the initial agreement included plans to help the Palestinians develop a seaport, airport and take over additional border crossings.

Those plans came crashing down when Hamas won Palestinian parliament elections in 2006 and took control of Gaza in 2007, driving out Abbas' forces. The EU shuttered the Rafah operation but still maintains a scaled-down office in Israel.

With a staff of 18 and a budget of 2.5 million Euros a year, EUBAM helps train Palestinian officials in the West Bank to spot counterfeit documents, use X-ray technology and stop drug and weapons smuggling.

“The idea is for the PA to be fully prepared to take over the Rafah crossing point when the time comes,” he said, acknowledging that the odds of this happening anytime soon are nonexistent. Some of this training has bolstered PA border agents in the West Bank as well, he said.

Bulgariu said he is proud of what the mission has accomplished but also frustrated “because I cannot share or implement all what I know.”

Yet he remains committed to the EU’s two-state vision. “This is the only solution that might work in the end, separate borders, everyone with his own business,” he said.

'A Wake Up Call': The World Needs to Prepare for Massive Crop Failure


Angely Mercado
Wed, July 5, 2023 

Drought-stricken corn crops bake in the sun as temperatures continue to hover around 100 degrees  in Tomball, Texas.

The climate crisis has changed weather patterns, and this could increase crop failure in multiple agricultural regions around the world, a new study says. In a report published in Nature Communications this week, researchers in the U.S. and Germany outline how food-producing regions of the world will see significantly lower crop yields in the near future.

The researchers analyzed climate models and observational data from 1960 and 2014 and then looked at future projections between 2045 and 2099. By analyzing the data, they found that a changing jet stream has contributed to crop failure in the past. Jet streams are air currents that change weather patterns around the world. But many scientists have observed that climate change is changing how jet streams move, which could challenge crop-growing regions around the world. Climate models are equipped to show those changes in the atmosphere, but these models cannot always show how it affects conditions on the ground.

The study explains that under a high emissions scenario, a “strongly meandering jet stream” or a wavy jet stream could actually trigger some of these lower crop yield events worldwide. Data showed the researchers that years with “more than one wave event” often lead regional crop yields to drop up to 7%. They also found that agricultural regions in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and North America were likely to be impacted by these events. The study referenced a heat wave that significantly hurt agriculture in Russia back in 2010. The high temperatures that year were connected to a shift in the jet stream, according to the researchers.

Russia’s heat wave destroyed 9 million hectares (22,239,484 acres) of crops, and it also sparked droughts and forest fires, according to the UK Met Office. The fires killed Russians and displaced many families from their homes. That July, the city of Moscow recorded 14,000 deaths, that’s more than 5,000 more deaths compared to July 2009. This was just one event related to changes in the jet stream. “Potentially disruptive impacts have become more common and will increase further if greenhouse gas emissions remain unmitigated,” study authors warned.

Kai Kornhuber, a lead author in the study and researcher at Columbia University called this information a “wake up call.” He emphasized that instances of crop failure are underestimated, which could mean less adequate preparations worldwide. “We need to be prepared for these types of complex climate risks in the future and the models at the moment seem to not capture this,” he said in a press release.

This will worsen an already significant issue. More than 800 million people around the world were considered food insecure in 2021, according to the United Nations. That number increased in 2020 during initial covid lockdowns. Volker Türk, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, recently warned that climate change-related disasters will probably increase that number by more than 80 million by the middle of this century.

‘You can never become a Westerner:’ China’s top diplomat urges Japan and South Korea to align with Beijing and ‘revitalize Asia’

“No matter how blonde you dye your hair, how sharp you shape your nose, you can never become a European or American, you can never become a Westerner,” 


China's top diplomat Wang Yi attends the opening ceremony of the 2023 International Forum for Trilateral Cooperation in Qingdao, Shandong province on Monday. 

- Li Ziheng/Xinhua/Alamy Live News/AP

Nectar Gan
Wed, July 5, 2023 at 12:27 AM MDT·4 min read

China’s top diplomat has urged Japan and South Korea to foster a sense of “strategic autonomy” from the West and cooperate with Beijing to “revitalize Asia,” amid rising tensions between China and the two neighboring American allies.

The comments by Wang Yi on Monday come as Japan and South Korea forge closer relations with the United States – and mend ties with each other – driven by common concerns about Beijing’s growing influence and assertiveness in the region.

In a video shared by Chinese state media, Wang told Japanese and South Korean guests attending a trilateral forum in the eastern coastal city of Qingdao that most Americans and Europeans can’t tell China, Japan and South Korea apart.

“No matter how blonde you dye your hair, how sharp you shape your nose, you can never become a European or American, you can never become a Westerner,” Wang said. “We must know where our roots lie.”

Wang called for Japan and South Korea to work together with China to “prosper together, revitalize East Asia, revitalize Asia and benefit the world.”

Wang was speaking on the sidelines of the International Forum for Trilateral Cooperation, an annual event organized by Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul since 2011.

To experts on the region, Wang’s racialized comments harken back to the sentiment of racial pan-East Asian solidarity against the West in the early 20th century.

“Imperial Japan really leaned into that as it expanded, eventually declaring a ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’, with conquest styled as win-win racial liberation,” said Joel Atkinson, a professor specializing in Northeast Asian international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul.

“The reality, of course, was Japanese ultra-nationalists destroyed all that good will in China and Korea in their attempt to replace Western influence with a new Japanese hegemony.”

Atkinson said Japan and South Korea are likely to find Wang’s pitch “unpersuasive” given a long list of assertive actions Beijing has taken toward both countries over the years.

“Unsurprisingly, China’s Northeast Asian neighbors are now resisting Beijing’s attempt to change the regional order in its favor,” he said.

“Both have made it clear they feel safer with the US around, and have no interest in abandoning their alliances to instead rely on Beijing’s goodwill.”

‘Strategic autonomy’

On Monday, Wang also addressed the forum’s opening ceremony in an effort to “send a clear signal” of the potential for the three neighbors’ regrouping, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

In his opening remarks, Wang called for Japan and South Korea to “promote inclusive Asian values, foster a sense of strategic autonomy, maintain regional unity and stability, resist the return of the Cold War mentality and be free of the coercion of bullying and hegemony,” the statement said.

“The fate of the region is firmly in our own hands,” Wang was quoted as saying.

Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader in decades, has pushed to expand Beijing’s role on the world stage with an increasingly assertive foreign policy that has fueled tensions with many of its neighbors and the West.

In recent years, the Biden administration has stepped up efforts to unite allies and like-minded partners to counter China’s rising influence in the Pacific, including with South Korea and Japan, two of its most important allies in Asia.

Their trilateral ties are furthered strengthened by security concerns about North Korea. The three countries have conducted joint military drills this year to boost their coordination against increasing North Korean missile threats.

They’ve also issued joint statements on tensions in the Taiwan Strait – an area both Tokyo and Seoul say is vital to their respective security – which drew the ire of Beijing.

In a thinly veiled swipe at the US, Wang on Monday accused “certain major powers outside the region” of “exaggerating ideological differences” to sow confrontation and division, in order to seek geopolitical gains, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

“If this trend is allowed to develop, it will not only seriously interfere with the smooth progress of trilateral cooperation, but also aggravate tension and confrontation in the region,” Wang added.

South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin and Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi addressed the event via video link, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

SHITTING IN YOUR NEST

83,000 Hawaii homes dispose of sewage in cesspools. Rising sea levels will make them more of a mess










2 / 10
This photo provided by the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, shows a home after it collapsed onto a beach on Feb. 28, 2022, in Haleiwa, Hawaii. Rising seas and more intense storms are encroaching on coastal properties. Some coastal erosion removes sand surrounding cesspools and pulls sewage out to sea.

 (Dan Dennison/Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources via AP)

AUDREY McAVOY
Wed, July 5, 2023 

HONOLULU (AP) — The town of Hauula packs hundreds of homes into a narrow strip of land sandwiched between verdant, towering cliffs of the Koolau mountain range and the Pacific. But the stunning views obscure an environmental problem beneath the ground.

This rural part of the island of Oahu is not connected to city sewers — and waste from toilets, sinks and showers is mostly collected in hundreds of pits called cesspools.

With climate change, rising seas are eroding Hawaii’s coast near homes with cesspools. Sea rise also is pushing the island’s groundwater closer to the surface, allowing the cesspool effluent to mix with the water table and flow into the ocean. And scientists say cesspool pollution may even percolate into streets and parks in low-lying former wetlands in the future.

“We want proper sanitation as much as anybody wants it. We don’t want our children swimming in an ocean of bacteria,” said Dotty Kelly-Paddock, president of the Hauula Community Association. “It’s got to change.”

Hawaii has 83,000 cesspools — more than any other state — and about 20% are less than 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) from shore. Six years ago, Hawaii mandated removal of all cesspools by 2050.

The task is daunting and costly, but scientists warn that problems from this unsanitary complication of island life will only be exacerbated by global warming.

Cesspools sprang up across Hawaii during years of rapid growth and now are everywhere from old sugar plantation towns to the posh Honolulu enclave Black Point.

Most homes with cesspools are in neighborhoods without sewers. In theory, the ground gradually filters bacteria and pathogens in effluent from them.

But rising seas and more intense storms are encroaching on coastal properties, as happened last year when a house collapsed onto a beach along Oahu's North Shore surfing mecca. Some coastal erosion removes sand surrounding cesspools and pulls sewage out to sea.

Cesspools that are inland are sometimes so close to aquifers that sewage pollutes them and can travel through springs to beaches and the ocean.

When researchers placed dye in shoreline cesspools in the town of Puako on the Big Island for a 2021 study, it emerged in coastal springs only nine hours to three days later, said Tracy Wiegner, a University of Hawaii-Hilo marine science professor.

Researchers also found bacteria levels in the ocean exceeded state health standards in front of 81% of the Puako homes sampled.

Public health officials warn exposure to sewage can cause gastroenteritis, diarrhea, conjunctivitis and skin infections. A 2020 Hawaii Department of Health report said little is known about how bacteria and viruses are carried through waters in wet tropical regions where people swim year round, but it said Hawaii had twice the rate of difficult-to-treat superbug MRSA infections than the national average.

Environmental scientist Daniel Amato coordinates volunteers who test water quality at 24 sites across Oahu for the Surfrider Foundation every two weeks. He said it’s difficult to prove that cesspools are the source of the bacteria the team finds but bacteria levels are high where there are many cesspools.

——

Sewage in the ocean — from cesspools and other sources — also harms coral reefs that support marine life and tourism.

The nitrogen in wastewater acts like fertilizer for non-native seaweeds that dominate once-diverse coral reefs. This reduces food for native fish and hurts reef health.

Scientists say some feces-laced groundwater may come up through storm drains and the soil as rising sea levels lift the groundwater above it. This aspect of climate change is most likely to occur first in extremely low-lying areas where coastal wetlands have been filled in and built over.

“When the water table rises, as it will and as it does already, that’s going to be extremely polluted water right there in our communities, in the midst of our communities — on the roads, on the sidewalks, in the backyards,” said Chip Fletcher, interim dean at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. “That is going to represent a massive health threat.”

Elevated groundwater is already contributing to chronic flooding in a Honolulu industrial area.

Mapunapuna — home to auto body shops, a vehicle rental store and scrap metal yards — was once a wetland and is sinking. Several streets regularly flood even when it’s sunny and hasn’t rained. At high tide, water covers roads and sidewalks.

Shellie Habel, a coastal geologist with the University of Hawaii’s Climate Resilience Collaborative, said parts of Waikiki in Honolulu could exhibit such flooding in a decade or two. The world-famous beach resort visited by millions of tourists a year was also built on former wetlands.

There are no cesspools in Waikiki, but there are some in the watershed of the Ala Wai Canal bordering the district.

—-

Hawaii property owners have 27 years to hook up to sewer lines or convert cesspools to a cleaner method of disposal. Those without nearby sewer mains may consider installing a septic tank, which stores solid waste and has a connected leach field to gradually filter wastewater through the soil.

But experts say rising sea levels and groundwater will prevent leach fields from filtering sewage in many coastal lots. A 2018 report by Florida's Miami-Dade County found 1,000 septic systems there were already failing due to high groundwater levels.

The solution to such problems is not a simple one. The uncertainty created by climate change makes it harder for policymakers to decide where to install sewers, said Juliet Willetts, a professor at the University of Technology Sydney’s Institute for Sustainable Futures.

“We can no longer definitely predict there’ll be floods this often or whatever," she said. "We just have ideas about what it might be."

—-

Honolulu City Council member Matt Weyer said his constituents are concerned about cesspool conversion costs, with estimates running $10,000 to $50,000 per property.

His largely rural district includes Hauula, Oahu’s North Shore and most of the Oahu cesspools scientists say most urgently need to be closed.

In March, the state offered $5 million in grants of up to $20,000 each to help property owners. The money ran out in just two weeks.

Honolulu’s municipal government, responsible for all of Oahu, plans to eliminate nearly 1,000 of the island’s 7,500 cesspools by spending $50 million to run sewer lines to an Ewa Beach neighborhood. The project mainly will be funded by tax-exempt municipal bonds.

The city is also studying ways to connect homes in Haleiwa, Kahuku and Waimanalo — coastal towns with many cesspools. But Roger Babcock, director of Honolulu’s Department of Environmental Services, said it won’t be feasible to lay sewer lines everywhere.

The city is already spending $2.7 billion, under an agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to upgrade two wastewater treatment plants and reduce sewage spills.

Even with its hundreds of cesspools, the scenic seaside town of Hauula is not currently on the city’s list for a sewer line study.

Kelly-Paddock, the community association president, said many of its nearly 4,000 residents work two or three jobs to keep food on the table and stay in their homes. She doesn’t know how they’ll pay to convert their cesspools.

The solution for many Hawaii communities will require significant spending, said Wiegner, the marine science professor.

“We know this is a problem. Everybody wants to solve it,” she said. “But finding the money to make it happen is really challenging.”

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

__

This version of the story corrects the spelling of the last name of Juliet Willetts.

New CAPITALIST report reveals that China is reaching a ‘tipping point’ that could affect the entire world — here’s what’s happening



Jeremiah Budin
Tue, July 4, 2023 at 5:30 AM MDT·2 min read

China is the largest producer of planet-overheating gases in the world. According to some research, the country accounted for 27% of the world’s total air pollution in 2019, and more than tripled its air-polluting gases over the past three decades.

However, there may be cause for some hopefulness, as China’s investments in solar energy and electric vehicles (EVs) may be pushing the country toward a “tipping point,” where dirty energy usage falls into long-term decline and more sustainable energy sources take over, according to Bloomberg News.

Bloomberg painted a scene of the recent SNEC PV Power Expo in Shanghai, where China’s largest automaker, BYD; the world’s largest EV battery manufacturer, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd.; and thousands of domestic solar companies were all in attendance, signaling massive investment in clean energy.

China is now expected to add nearly three times the solar capacity in 2023 than it did just two years ago, while EVs made up a third of all car sales in the country last month. One expert predicted recently that “half of China’s total car fleet could be electric by 2030.”

In addition, the country has made major investments in wind energy, including building one wind turbine as tall as a 70-story building.

According to an analysis by Bloomberg, China needs another $38 trillion in clean energy investment to hit net zero by 2050, in accordance with the 2015 Paris Agreement, in which 196 countries agreed on standards and goals to meaningfully address our planet’s changing climate.

Though it had not previously seemed like China was on track to meet those goals, per Bloomberg, the country’s newly invigorated push into clean energy now leaves the outcome more up in the air.

China currently imports 10.8 million barrels of oil per day, accounting for 19% of the global demand for crude oil. But experts predict that that number will begin to fall sharply, thanks to China’s investment in solar and wind energy.

According to Goldman Sachs, “China’s progress on renewables should help cut its energy imports by 10% by 2030,” and could cut them in half by the early 2040s.

China releases its first open-source computer operating system

Josh Ye
Wed, July 5, 2023 

A computer keyboard is seen in this picture illustration taken in Bordeaux, Southwestern France

HONG KONG (Reuters) -China has released its first homegrown open-source desktop operating system, named OpenKylin, state media said, as the country steps up efforts to cut reliance on U.S. technology.

Released on Wednesday, and based on the existing open-source Linux operating system, China's version was built by a community of about 4,000 developers, and is used in its space programme and industries such as finance and energy, they added.

China's massive market for operating systems was worth 15.5 billion yuan ($2.1 billion) last year, state media said, citing an industry report.

Developing an operating system independent of U.S. technology has been an important goal for China's tech industry in recent years, with many companies and organisations having contributed to the development of the OpenKylin system.

It most notable backer is the China Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team under the purview of the industry and information technology ministry.

More than a dozen Chinese companies are trying to develop operating systems that could replace Microsoft's Windows and Apple's MacOS operating systems.

One such company, UnionTech Software Technology Co Ltd, has been developing what it calls the "Unity operating system".

($1=7.2472 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Josh Ye; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

The remote-work culture wars are far from over

Many employees like working from home, but bosses want them back in the office.

Alexander Nazaryan
·Senior White House Correspondent
Wed, July 5, 2023 

A vacant office in San Francisco. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

For the last two years — since the coronavirus vaccine became widely available and most children returned to in-person schooling — corporate executives and business owners have been trying to coax (and, in some cases, force) employees back to the office, arguing that remote work hinders creativity and, in the long run, makes people less productive.

About 60% of white-collar workers are fully back in the office, according to one recent study, but millions continue to come in only once or twice a week — or not at all. And in many cities, including Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, the majority of workers are continuing to work from home most of the time.

According to a 2022 study by McKinsey, most workers appreciate the flexibility afforded by hybrid arrangements that ask them to work in the office two or three days a week. That typically means they have Mondays and Fridays to work from home.

That hasn’t been enough for some executives in finance and technology, who want workers back in the office five days a week — and haven’t been shy about saying so.

Workers have resisted where they could. For their part, they say they can get more work done when they don’t have to deal with long commutes or distracting co-workers. Some have said they would quit if forced to return to the office full-time, though it is not clear how many would actually do so.

Others feel unsafe riding commuter trains or buses, where crime and homelessness have seemingly become more frequent. Those transit systems, in turn, worry that they will face their demise unless ridership returns to pre-pandemic levels. And civic leaders nationwide say that downtowns face a “doom loop” that could devastate municipal services unless workers return.

The summer vacation season is approaching its height. But when it ends, and the ordinary rhythms of life return, the remote-work wars could also flare with a renewed ferocity.

Remote work is good for individuals but bad for teams, says CEO with fully in-person office: ‘It’s not just about you’

The lonely employee

An online conference for employees. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

The U.S. is already facing a crisis in loneliness and social isolation, and remote work probably isn’t helping. The freedom to work from home has kept some people tethered to their computers in bedrooms or at kitchen tables, without the kind of interactions that many say are healthy or even necessary.

One tech worker who recently returned to the office described remote work in unstinting terms: “Staying at home had made me so depressed, lonely even tho I was hanging out every weekend with my friends. Despite me being a quiet and shy person, talking to new people in office or just seeing people everyday has made me a lot happier person,” the worker wrote anonymously.

Why being a digital nomad could be a boon — or disastrous — for your mental health

Employers learn the advantages of remote work

A digital artist in Japan takes a coffee break at home. (Getty Images)

Some exasperated employers who have spent months trying to get employees back into the office have discovered a hidden benefit to the problem: If workers don’t want to work in the office, then employers can make hiring decisions accordingly — and potentially save on payroll.

Some are calling it the “Uberization” of white-collar work, with employees treated more like gig workers than permanent team members who deserve health care and other benefits.

“If somebody’s coming into your site five days a week, week in, week out, it feels like they’re your employee. You want to give them health care, a pension, train them up, have them as a long-term part of the firm,” remote-work expert Nicholas Bloom of Stanford told Business Insider. “But as soon as they’re not on site, managers are thinking it’s not so obvious they want to pay all those additional costs. Employees aren’t mixing, they aren’t talking over lunch about kids. They may be less loyal to the company. I do hear this from companies — the more remote someone is, the more transactional it feels.”

Bosses are fed up with remote work for 4 main reasons. Some of them are undeniable.

A civic duty

More vacant office space in San Francisco. (Getty Images)

Most office workers don’t think of their 9-to-5 as a form of municipal patriotism, but that is precisely what some say it is. Empty offices lead to lower property tax assessments, which result in fewer taxes for cities to collect, meaning they may have to cut essential services.

“What we really need is for office buildings to reoccupy,” San Francisco Comptroller Ben Rosenfield told Yahoo News. The city is facing an $800 million budget gap for the next two years. And as leases come up for renewal, that gap could grow into a chasm.

Paul Graham says remote work ‘does work initially,’ which is why it ‘fooled’ leaders who have since ‘changed their minds’

The pushback

A man in Arlington, Va., working from home. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Once given, a benefit is very difficult to take away. And whether executives like it or not, many workers now see remote work as a benefit of post-pandemic life.

“It's time for CEOs to abandon the sinking ship of forced in-office work and embrace the flexible work revolution,” says future-of-work consultant Gleb Tsipursky. “The office has its place for collaboration, mentoring and training — but not for productivity.”

He and others say the future is probably hybrid.

Hybrid work ramps up as employers push in-office time over work from home

North America’s Biggest Biochar Plant Takes Shape in Canada

Francois de Beaupuy
Wed, July 5, 2023 


(Bloomberg) -- A group of Canadian and French companies will build a C$80 million ($60 million) plant in Quebec to turn forestry waste into biochar, a black substance which can store carbon for hundreds of years and improve soil quality at the same time.

The facility in Port-Cartier — about 850 kilometers (528 miles) northeast of Montreal — will be completed next year with an initial annual capacity of 10,000 tons per year, which will be tripled by 2026, making it North America’s largest biochar plant. The plan was announced in a joint statement by Canadian cleantech startup Airex Energy Inc, lumber producer Groupe Remabec and French waste-treatment group Suez SA on Wednesday.

The project will sequester 75,000 tons of carbon per year — equivalent to over 400 railcars worth of burned coal — and generate certified carbon credits that will be sold by First Climate AG.

The nascent market for biochar could grow if more farmers use it as a soil additive, or if it’s integrated into building materials as companies seek new ways to reduce emissions. Biochar is produced by heating wood residues and other biomass in a low-oxygen chamber that limits emissions, in a process known as pyrolysis. As the biomass heats, bio-oils and gas are also produced, which can be used for power generation.

“There’s much more demand for biochar than supply,” Yves Rannou, the head of the Recycling and Recovery at Suez, said in an interview. The cost of building the three production lines at the Port-Cartier plant by 2026 will amount to C$80 million, he said.

Suez and Airex aims to produce 350,000 tons of biochar by 2035. The French company has identified areas in Europe and Africa where it would have access to feedstock to produce the carbon sink, as well as potential buyers, Rannou said, without providing details because the projects are still at “very early stages.”

Airex, which will provide the pyrolysis technology, is backed by investors such as Cycle Capital, Investissement Quebec, Desjardins Group and Export Development Canada. Groupe Remabec is owned by its founders and managers as well as Produits Forestiers Arbec Inc.