Breaking Waves: Ocean News

People returned to Palacios de Jamuz, a village in north-west Spain, after homes, crops and trees were badly burnt in recent blazes. Relentless heat and raging wildfires continue to ravage southern Europe, with a quarter of weather stations in Spain recording temperatures of 40C (104F) or above over the weekend Wildfires rage in Spain and Portugal amid searing heat Continue reading...

Exclusive: Public comments show that a crackdown on signs ‘disparaging’ Americans is not popular As part of his administration’s war on “woke”, Donald Trump has asked the American public to report anything “negative” about Americans in US national parks. But the public has largely refused to support a world view without inconvenient historical facts, comments submitted from national parks and seen by the Guardian show. Notices have been erected at every National Park Service (NPS) site, which spans 433 national parks, monuments and battlefields, following an order from May entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, issued by Trump’s department of the interior. The president had demanded a crackdown on any material that “inappropriately disparages Americans”. Continue reading...

We can save water and help the environment just by clearing out our inboxes – so what am I doing with all these old takeaway receipts? Our worst water-wasting habit might not even feel slightly damp: we’re now being told to save water by clearing out our inboxes. “Deleting emails, unbelievably, makes a difference to the amount of water the country uses,” Helen Wakeham, the Environment Agency director of water, told the World at One last week. Hoarding decades’ worth of “Your Amazon order is out for delivery” notifications in datacentres consumes not just energy but water for cooling, and tech companies are building those datacentres in some of the most water-scarce places in the world. Wakeham called an email cull “something really tangible people might not think of that can make a difference”, and I do want to make a difference. I don’t use water-gobbling ChatGPT, I comply with the hosepipe ban (albeit swearing at Yorkshire Water as I slop washing-up water into my shoes transporting it to my dying plants) and my showers are so short they’re basically pointless. So I checked my inbox: 39,674 emails dating back to 2009. Ugh. Continue reading...

There’s been fury in Spain over the tragic death of a street cleaner. It’s not hard to imagine something similar playing out in the UK Montse Aguilar was only 51 when she died. She lived in the El Poble-sec area of Barcelona – it translates from Catalan as “the dry village” – where she cared for her 85-year-old mother and sang in a local choir. For three years, she had worked as a city street cleaner for an outsourcing company, wearing a lime-green uniform – made, her family later said, from “100% polyester … a material used to make coats”. On 28 June, her shift in the city’s Gothic Quarter began at 2.30pm and ended seven hours later. The temperature that day had reached more than 35C, which left workers like her exposed: Spain has a clearer system of regulations covering heat and work than a lot of other countries, but it is still full of gaps. John Harris is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...