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.



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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

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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.”

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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.

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Journal

Archaeology in Oceania

DOI

10.1002/arco.70002 

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Recent DNA Studies Question a 65 kya Arrival of Humans in Sahul

UC Riverside pioneers way to remove private data from AI models

Innovation addresses needs to strip AI models of private and copyrighted content

University of California - Riverside

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D.E.I.

image: 

Ümit Yiğit Başaran, left. Başak Güler and Amit Roy-Chowdhury

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Credit: UC Riverside

A team of computer scientists at UC Riverside has developed a method to erase private and copyrighted data from artificial intelligence models—without needing access to the original training data.

This advance, detailed in a paper presented in July at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Vancouver, Canada, addresses a rising global concern about personal and copyrighted materials remaining in AI models indefinitely—and thus accessible to model users—despite efforts by the original creators to delete or guard their information with paywalls and passwords.

The UCR innovation compels AI models to “forget” selected information while maintaining the models’ functionality with the remaining data. It’s a significant advancement that can amend models without having to re-make them with the voluminous original training data, which is costly and energy-intensive. The approach also enables the removal of private information from AI models even when the original training data is no longer available.

“In real-world situations, you can’t always go back and get the original data,” said Ümit Yiğit Başaran, a UCR electrical and computer engineering doctoral student and lead author of the study. “We’ve created a certified framework that works even when that data is no longer available.”

The need is pressing. Tech companies face new privacy laws, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and California’s Consumer Privacy Act, which govern the security of personal data embedded in large-scale machine learning systems.

Moreover, The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over the use of its many copyrighted articles to train Generative Pre-trained Transformer, or GPT, models.

AI models “learn” the patterns of words from vast amount texts scraped from the Internet. When queried, the models predict the most likely word combinations, generating natural-language responses to user prompts. Sometimes they generate near-verbatim reproductions of the training texts, allowing users to bypass the paywalls of the content creators.

The UC Riverside research team—comprising Başaran, professor Amit Roy-Chowdhury, and assistant professor Başak Güler—developed what they call a “source-free certified unlearning” method. The technique allows AI developers to remove targeted data by using a substitute, or “surrogate,” dataset that statistically resembles the original data.

The system adjusts model parameters and adds carefully calibrated random noise to ensure the targeted information is erased and cannot be reconstructed.

Their framework builds on a concept in AI optimization that efficiently approximates how a model would change if it had been retrained from scratch. The UCR team enhanced this approach with a new noise-calibration mechanism that compensates for discrepancies between the original and surrogate datasets. 

The researchers validated their method using both synthetic and real-world datasets and found it provided privacy guarantees close to those achieved with full retraining—yet required far less computing power.

The current work applies to simpler models—still widely used—but could eventually scale to complex systems like ChatGPT, said Roy-Chowdhury, the co-director of UCR’s Riverside Artificial Intelligence Research and Education (RAISE) Institute and a professor in the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering. 

Beyond regulatory compliance, the technique holds promise for media organizations, medical institutions, and others handling sensitive data embedded in AI models, the researchers said. It also could empower people to demand the removal of personal or copyrighted content from AI systems.

“People deserve to know their data can be erased from machine learning models—not just in theory, but in provable, practical ways,” Güler said.

The team’s next steps involve refining the method to work with more complex model types and datasets and building tools to make the technology accessible to AI developers worldwide.

The title of the paper is “A Certified Unlearning Approach without Access to Source Data.” It was done in collaboration with Sk Miraj Ahmed, a computational science research associate at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY who received his doctoral degree at UCR. Both Roy-Chowdary and Güler are faculty members in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with secondary appointments in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

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DOI

10.48550/arXiv.2506.06486 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

A Certified Unlearning Approach without Access to Source Data

 

Around 90% of middle-aged and older autistic adults are undiagnosed in the UK, new review finds

89 to 97 per cent of autistic adults aged 40+ years are undiagnosed in the UK, according to the largest review of its kind

King's College London

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89 to 97 per cent of autistic adults aged 40+ years are undiagnosed in the UK, according to the largest review of its kind which was conducted at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London. The review indicated that middle-aged and older autistic adults are facing higher rates of mental and physical health conditions than non-autistic adults of the same age, alongside challenges with employment, relationships and wellbeing.

Although research on ageing in autistic populations has increased nearly fourfold since 2012, only 0.4 per cent of research on autism since 1980 has focused on people in midlife or older age. The researchers collated the research to date and conducted a narrative review to understand whether autistic people have different ageing patterns to the general population.

The review, published in the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, provides a summary of research in this area, highlighting the critical need for more studies to find ways to improve outcomes for this population.

The review was supported by the British Academy and National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre. It highlights substantial challenges for autistic adults in midlife and older age across multiple areas, and identifies barriers to receiving appropriate healthcare support in older adulthood.

Over 89 per cent of autistic adults aged 40+ are undiagnosed

Although people do not ‘grow out’ of autism, there is a large discrepancy in diagnosis rates between younger and older generations. The authors of the review re-analysed previous research on UK healthcare record data from 2018 and found that 89 per cent of people age 40-59 years and 97 per cent of people age 60+ are estimated to be undiagnosed.

Dr Gavin Stewart, British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the IoPPN and lead author of the review, said:

“These very high underdiagnosis estimates suggest that many autistic adults will have never been recognised as being autistic, and will have not been offered the right support. This could make them more susceptible to age-related problems, for example being socially isolated and having poorer health.

“The high rates of underdiagnosis also mean that much of our research has systematically overlooked a large proportion of the autistic population, potentially skewing our understanding of how autistic people age, and leaving critical gaps in policy and services.”

Higher risk of almost all physical and mental health conditions

The review emphasised a variety of challenges autistic adults in midlife and older age face. The collated evidence shows that middle-aged and older autistic adults have higher rates of almost all physical and mental health conditions compared to non-autistic adults. These include immune diseases, cardiovascular disease, neurological disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, anxiety and depression, as well as conditions associated with older age, such as Parkinson’s disease, cognitive disorders, osteoporosis and arthritis.

Particularly concerning findings indicate that older adults with high autistic traits are six times more likely to experience suicidal ideation, thoughts of self-harm, and self-harm. The collated findings also suggest that autistic adults were four-times as likely to have a diagnosis of early onset dementia compared to non-autistic people. Average life expectancy differed by six years, with autistic people living to age 75 years compared to 81 years for non-autistic people. The authors warn that these figures may be skewed due to high rates of underdiagnoses.

The review noted autistic adults experience barriers to receiving healthcare support, having to navigate systems not designed for them. These barriers included aspects associated with autistic traits, such as communication differences and sensory sensitivities, as well as concerns about continuity of care, uncertainty about which services to access, and limited clinician understanding of autism in adulthood.

In addition to health-related outcomes, poorer outcomes were also seen across employment prior to retirement, relationships and quality of life. There were high rates of social isolation among adults with autism, and the research indicates that strong social support is linked to better quality of life.

Professor Francesca Happé, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the IoPPN and co-author of the review, said:

“Understanding the needs of autistic people as they age is a pressing global public health concern. As autistic people age, the nature of the challenges they face changes. We must adopt a lifespan approach that funds long-term research, integrates tailored healthcare, and expands social supports so that ageing autistic people can live happy and healthy lives.”

The review particularly highlighted a lack of longitudinal research which follows autistic people over time to directly measure effects of ageing. The researchers emphasise that more research is needed to better understand the experiences of autistic people in midlife and older age, with the aim of improving outcomes for autistic adults as they age.

Ends

 

“Ageing across the Autism Spectrum – A narrative review” (Gavin Stewart and Francesca Happé) was published in the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-devpsych-111323-090813.

For more information, please contact Franca Davenport (Senior Communications and Engagement Manager at NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre). Em: franca.davenport@kcl.ac.uk, mob: +44 (0) 7976 918968

Notes to editors

About King’s College London and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience 

King’s College London is amongst the top 35 universities in the world and top 10 in Europe (THE World University Rankings 2023), and one of England’s oldest and most prestigious universities.

With an outstanding reputation for world-class teaching and cutting-edge research, King’s maintained its sixth position for ‘research power’ in the UK (2021 Research Excellence Framework).

King's has more than 33,000 students (including more than 12,800 postgraduates) from some 150 countries worldwide, and some 8,500 staff. The Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s is a leading centre for mental health and neuroscience research in Europe. It produces more highly cited outputs (top 1% citations) on psychiatry and mental health than any other centre (SciVal 2021), and on this metric has risen from 16th (2014) to 4th (2021) in the world for highly cited neuroscience outputs. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), 90% of research at the IoPPN was deemed ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’ (3* and 4*). World-leading research from the IoPPN has made, and continues to make, an impact on how we understand, prevent and treat mental illness, neurological conditions, and other conditions that affect the brain.

www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn | Follow @KingsIoPPN on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR)

The mission of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) is to improve the health and wealth of the nation through research. We do this by:

• Funding high quality, timely research that benefits the NHS, public health and social care;
• Investing in world-class expertise, facilities and a skilled delivery workforce to translate discoveries into improved treatments and services;
• Partnering with patients, service users, carers and communities, improving the relevance, quality and impact of our research;
• Attracting, training and supporting the best researchers to tackle complex health and social care challenges;
• Collaborating with other public funders, charities and industry to help shape a cohesive and globally competitive research system;
• Funding applied global health research and training to meet the needs of the poorest people in low and middle income countries.

NIHR is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care. Its work in low and middle income countries is principally funded through UK Aid from the UK government.

The British Academy

The British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. We mobilise these disciplines to understand the world and shape a brighter future. We invest in researchers and projects across the UK and overseas, engage the public with fresh thinking and debates, and bring together scholars, government, business and civil society to influence policy for the benefit of everyone.  

www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk @BritishAcademy_  

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Journal

Annual Review of Developmental Psychology

DOI

10.1146/annurev-devpsych-111323-090813 

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Ageing across the Autism Spectrum – A narrative review

Article Publication Date

28-Aug-2025

COI Statement

F. H. receives remuneration for sitting on the Research, Innovation, and Development Board for Outcomes First Group and also receives royalties from published books and book chapters. G.R.S. does not have any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.