Officials in Rio Grande do Sul state say more than 80,000 have been displaced by record water levels
Seventy-five people are now known to have died in the flooding in Brazil’s southern Rio Grande do Sul state, while more than 100 people remain missing, local authorities said on Sunday.
The state’s civil defence authority said 101 people were unaccounted for and more than 80,000 had been displaced after record-breaking floods swept across the state, which borders Uruguay and Argentina.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
05/05/2024 - 11:11
05/05/2024 - 10:00
Audio collected with underwater microphones suggests numbers at least stable after centuries of industrial whaling left only a few hundred alive
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Centuries of industrial whaling left only a few hundred Antarctic blue whales alive, making it almost impossible to find them in the wild.
Now new research suggests the population may be recovering. Australian scientists and international colleagues spent two decades listening for their distinctive songs and calls, and found the whales – the largest animals ever to have lived – swimming across the Southern Ocean with growing regularity.
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05/05/2024 - 09:22
About 6,000 have been installed this year, a quarter of them rapid chargers that can power up a car in under an hour
The UK has installed a record number of public electric car chargers this year, as companies race to keep up with the growing number of battery vehicles on British roads.
Nearly 6,000 new chargers were installed during the first three months of 2024, according to quarterly figures from data company Zapmap published by the Department for Transport. About 1,500 of those were rapid chargers, capable of charging a car in less than an hour.
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05/05/2024 - 09:00
Greg Abbott’s strategy to deter immigration isn’t just harming people and costing billions – it’s ruining the Rio Grande’s ecosystem
Strong-arm strategies by Texas along the US-Mexico border have eroded more than human rights for migrants seeking asylum in the US; they have degraded the environment – and now the destruction is escalating.
In the hotspot of Eagle Pass, environmental damage from years of expansion of anti-migration security measures can be seen everywhere.
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05/05/2024 - 01:00
Organisers of this year’s environmental conference hope cooperation on green issues could help ease global tensions
This year’s Cop29 UN climate summit will be the first “Cop of peace”, focusing on the prevention of future climate-fuelled conflicts and using international cooperation on green issues to help heal existing tensions, according to plans being drawn up by organisers.
Nations may be asked to observe a “Cop truce”, suspending hostilities for the fortnight-long duration of the conference, modelled on the Olympic truce, which is observed by most governments during the summer and winter Olympic Games.
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05/04/2024 - 15:00
‘Some negative projects will get up, but we have to keep our eyes on the broader goals’, says WWF Australia
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A map of operating windfarms in Queensland does not take too long to survey – of the 100 or so across Australia, only six of them are in the sunshine state.
But this is about to change in a very big way. According to state government data, there are 46 separate proposals for windfarms in Queensland with four more already under construction.
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05/04/2024 - 08:00
Court hears effects of 2021 leak, in which thousand of gallons of fuel seeped into drinking water supply from US navy storage tank
Military and civilian families told a federal judge this week they continue to be sickened, more than two years after a US navy underground fuel storage facility leaked thousands of gallons of jet fuel into Pearl Harbor’s main drinking water and caused a water crisis in the Pacific.
United States district court judge Leslie Kobayashi heard testimony from nearly a dozen impacted families suing the US government over the leak from the second world war era storage tanks that has resulted in vomiting, diarrhea, rashes and other ailments. Plaintiffs said the illnesses are connected to the tainted water serving the nearly 93,000 residents in and around Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
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05/04/2024 - 08:00
Effects of heat are expected to worsen after bill prohibiting municipalities from enacting shade and water protection is passed
For Javier Torres and other workers whose jobs are conducted outdoors in south Florida, the heat is unavoidable. A new law recently signed by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, that prohibits any municipalities in the state from passing heat protections for workers ensures that it is likely to stay that way.
Torres has seen a co-worker die from heatstroke and another rushed to the emergency room in his years of working in construction in south Florida. He has also fallen and injured himself due to heat exhaustion.
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05/04/2024 - 05:00
The emergence of trillions of cicadas is under way in parts of the US – what should you do when they’re around, and what on earth are ‘zombie’ cicadas?
The cicadas are arriving. The periodic emergence of trillions of cicadas, on a scale not seen in several hundred years, is under way in parts of the US, with several states reporting the orange-eyed insects are bursting from their underground dormancy.
Cicadas have started arriving earlier than expected in Illinois, a cicada hotspot this year, while there are reports of swarms emerging in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee, along with some other states.
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05/04/2024 - 04:33
Water bottle stations set up in St Leonards-on-Sea and part of Hastings as Southern Water customers face days without service
Southern Water was criticised this weekend for overseeing a “debacle” after a mains pipe burst, leaving 31,000 properties in Hastings and St Leonards without water.
There were long traffic queues leading to just four bottled water stations after supplies were cut off on Thursday. Businesses are expected to lose thousands of pounds, with the firm likely to face compensation claims.
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