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by Glenn CHAPMAN Agence France-Presse CALISTOGA, California (AFP) — The Silverado Trail has long been a place of dreams for Napa Valley wine lovers as it winds gently through vineyards and on to Calistoga. California’s Glass Fire turned much of that dream to ash, destroying a 3-star restaurant at Meadowood resort, torching wineries such as Chateau Boswell, and tainting precious grapes with smoke. The United States’s west coast is experiencing a record-breaking fire season, with […]
by Blaise GAUQUELIN Agence France-Presse PERTISAU, Austria (AFP) — With tender care, Sepp Rieser adorns the bulky heads of his reluctant cows with flower wreaths, adds some more fir twigs, and adjusts the large bells around their necks. “I’ve been doing this since I was a little boy,” Rieser says of the ancestral tradition in which cattle are decorated for their journey from the high Alpine Gramai pasture in Austria’s western Tyrol state, where they graze […]
by Benoît PELEGRIN Agence France-Presse The coronavirus pandemic that has slammed oil demand and prices is forcing energy majors to tighten their belts on exploration, even if finding new deposits remain essential to their existence. While the sector is increasingly diversifying into greener energies such as electricity and wind power, its core business remains oil and gas. “Questions abound over whether it is still profitable to look for oil given subdued demand growth prospects and […]
SANTIAGO Chile (AFP) — The year 2020 is the hottest in the Antarctic Peninsula in the past three decades, a study by the University of Santiago de Chile out Friday found. Between January and August, temperatures reached between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius (35.6 and 37.4 degrees Fahrenheit) on the peninsula, which is the northernmost part of mainland Antarctica, according to researchers at the Chilean Air Force’s Frei Base on King George Island. Those temperatures are […]
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AFP) — The number of forest fires in Brazil’s Amazon increased sharply in September, figures released Thursday show, fueling growing criticism of President Jair Bolsonaro’s environmental policies. The National Institute of Space Research (INPE) said satellite imagery showed an increase of 61 percent in the number of fires in September, compared to the same period last year. Satellites used by the institute detected 32,017 outbreaks last month in the Amazon, compared […]
LONDON, United Kingdom (AFP) — Environmental campaigners demonstrated on the London streets and in tree-tops in the English countryside on Thursday against the construction of a new high-speed train line. Police removed 15 activists who had climbed trees in woodland in Buckinghamshire, north of London, which are said to have inspired the fantasy world of Roald Dahl’s children’s books, while another group marched on parliament. The HS2 project, which could cost up to £100 billion […]
KIEV, Ukraine (AFP) — At least nine people have died and 14 others have been injured in forest fires in eastern Ukraine near the front line of Kiev’s conflict with Moscow-backed separatists, the emergency services said Thursday. Ukraine has sent 1,200 firefighters to battle the blaze which officials in one village near the frontline said was detonating unexploded shells previously fired over by pro-Russian separatists. Investigators were trying to determine the cause of the fire […]
LONDON, United Kingdom (AFP) — Britain’s Cambridge University on Thursday pledged to stop investing in fossil fuels by 2030, bowing to pressure from environmentalists including its own students. The world-renowned seat of learning in eastern England said the pledge is part of its overall goal to slash carbon emissions to zero by 2038 — well ahead of the UK government’s 2050 target. The institution will now switch its £3.5-billion ($4.5-billion, 3.8-billion-euro) endowment fund — one […]
by Marlowe HOOD Agence France-Presse Ice loss from Greenland’s massive ice sheet will cause sea levels to rise more during the 21st century than they have during any 100-year period in the last 12,000 years, even if global warming is held in check, scientists said Wednesday. The study — based on ice core data and models and published in the journal Nature — is the first to painstakingly reconstruct Greenland’s ice loss record over the […]
by Martin Abbugao SINGAPORE, Singapore (AFP) — On the rooftop of a Singapore shopping mall, a sprawling patch of eggplants, rosemary, bananas and papayas stand in colourful contrast to the grey skyscrapers of the city-state’s business district. The 10,000 square-foot (930 square-meter) site is among a growing number of rooftop farms in the space-starved country, part of a drive to produce more food locally and reduce heavy reliance on imports. The government has championed the […]
by Marlowe HOOD Agence France-Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — More than 300 million people in low-lying river deltas, mostly in poorer nations, are exposed to flooding from tropical storms made more deadly and destructive by global warming, researchers said Tuesday. One in ten live on floodplains hit by once-a-century cyclones that can generate 350-kilometre (200-mile) per hour winds and up to a metre (40 inches) of rain per day, they reported in Nature Communications. Warmer […]
TAEZ, Yemen (AFP) — Heavy rains have triggered the collapse of parts of the newly restored National Museum in Yemen’s third city Taez, in the latest loss to the country’s cultural heritage after years of war. Established as an Ottoman palace, then a residence for one of Yemen’s last kings, the building became a museum in 1967 but has since been bombed and its collections pilfered. It was partially restored in 2019, but a recent […]
