"They didn't even try to fly away. They just feebly made noise," a woman told the Santa Barbara Independent on Saturday after spotting over two dozen dead or dying cormorants near Goleta Beach. "A few were on their stomachs, wings spread [and] gasping for breath.... Heartbreaking."
In 2019, scientists found that balloons eaten by seabirds are more likely to kill them than other kinds of plastic yet they do not seem to have been earmarked in the same way as, for example, plastic straws.
Environmental campaign group Foxglove stated that the NSIP designation allows the project to sidestep local planning and democracy, raising concerns about its potential carbon emissions.
Covering the windows of public transit with advertisements turns a shared public resource into a mobile advertisement that is more concerned with achieving marketing and sales goals than it is with serving the local community effectively. Constant exposure to advertisements, which has become the norm for modern living, also encourages excessive consumption, which drives consumers to spend beyond their means, leading to growing consumer debt.
The open letter [PDF], sent to members of the US Congress by campaign group Food & Water Watch, complains that the AI-driven wave of datacenter expansion is stoking demand for more energy, which in turn leads to further greenhouse gas emissions, straining water resources, and higher electricity prices for ordinary consumers across the country. Organizations endorsing the letter collectively represent millions of citizens across all 50 US states, the group claims.
But now the anti-racism charity Hope Not Hate has asked 11,000 people who said they were going to vote for Reform why that is and the answers may surprise you. The Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty says the results suggest an unwieldy coalition of voters who could be won back by other parties. He tells Helen Pidd that a lot of Reform voters want quite fundamental things from the party in terms of workers' rights and the environment, for instance.
This year I couldn't narrow it down to 15, so you get 20 recommendations. Call it literary inflation. Also, after last year's list was published, I got an email from a reader who decried that I had so few titles by female authors on my list (fair enough). This time I made a special effort to include a majority of books written by women.
Some days, I wonder what sort of country we live in. A London woman is threatened with a 150 fine for pouring some coffee dregs down a drain, with the suggestion that this amounted to polluting the waterways (Report, 22 October), yet water companies regularly dump countless millions of gallons of raw sewage with impunity.
Donald Trump was not yet two minutes into his first speech to the UN General Assembly of his second term when he credited himself for having single-handedly forged a world "that was prosperous and at peace". He was, of course, referring to his first term, which led into a screed about how the president who both followed and preceded him, Joe Biden, squandered it all - largely by not being him.
To 2049 by American poet Jorie Graham is one of my favourite collections of recent times and rereading it recently was incredibly rewarding. Filled with slippery and existentially evocative lines such as Years pulled their / lengths through us like long wet strings, it had me pointing at some of the pages gasping: I wish I wrote this! (a condition I frequently suffer from, known as poem-envy).
Esteve Fernández, the region's health secretary, has made it clear he wants a national law that bans smoking on the beach, full stop. He's hoping Spain's new tobacco law will stamp out cigarettes on every stretch of sand as well.
The magnificent cedar tree from Lebanon, dating back to the 1720s, starred in The Beatles' 1966 music video for 'Rain', where the Fab Four filmed sitting on its branches.
