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“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

-- James Madison

News and Opinion

The Normalcy of US Wars

When President Donald Trump decided to begin bombing Iran in June 2025, he did not state a coherent or lawful reason for doing so. His director of national intelligence and his own C.I.A. had publicly told him that Iran did not possess a nuclear weapon and had ceased building one in 2003. His secretary of state told him that Iran and Israel had threatened each other, but he could not articulate how Iran imminently threatened the United States. Yet, since Israel planned to attack Iran, he wanted the U.S. to help Israel do so. This was not a lawful request as the U.S. has no treaty with Israel and, under treaties to which the U.S. is a party, the legal basis for all offensive wars can only be treaty compliance or prevention of an imminent attack.

When Trump addressed the nation, his helter-skelter rationale argued for replacing Iran’s government, destroying its civilian-use enriched uranium, destroying its ability to build a bomb it wasn’t building and neutralizing its offensive and defensive weaponry. None of these goals was lawful; nor was attacking a Minab school. There was no mention of an imminent attack on the U.S. or the economic effect of war on the vital international oil super-highway, the Strait of Hormuz. No one in Trump’s inner circle registered disagreement, except his vice president and his director of counterterrorism. They told him there was no legal or constitutional basis for his war.

The U.S. Constitution is remarkably clear on the question of war. Article I grants Congress — not the president — the power to declare war. The president, under Article II, wages war, but only after Congress has authorized it.

A genuinely constitutional foreign policy would look very different. Military force should be reserved for defending the United States against actual or truly imminent attacks, not speculative threats or ambitious nation-building projects, or favors for other countries. Congress should debate and vote openly before committing American forces to any combat. Strong national defense does not require perpetual war. A capable military can deter aggression. Diplomacy, commerce and peaceful engagement generally serve American interests more effectively than military intervention.

Alastair Crooke : US Middle East Dominance is Ended

Netanyahu rejects US-led 15-point Gaza peace plan in rare public break with Trump

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has rejected a US-backed 15-point peace plan for Gaza in a rare public break with Donald Trump. In a statement on Sunday, Netanyahu said that he was confronting a “wave of rumours about Israeli weakness and Israeli withdrawals on all fronts” and rebuked US pressure to end wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran without Israel’s buy-in.

On Gaza, he said: “Israel does not accept the 15-point document. The IDF will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed. And when I say the disarming of Hamas, it means heavy weaponry, lighter weaponry, all weaponry. And we are talking about genuine disarmament, not fictitious disarmament. Right now, we are talking with the Americans about this issue.”

Trump’s Board of Peace in July proposed the 15-point plan, which mandated that Hamas disarm in exchange for providing a full Israeli military withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and an eventual transition of power to an independent Palestinian National Committee. Trump had said that the agreement would be implemented in stages, but Netanyahu on Sunday said that he wanted a full disarmament first in order to implement the deal.

The Israeli leader’s main target in his remarks was the US. Israel has emerged as a key stumbling block in the Trump White House’s plans to broker peace in the region, in Israel’s conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon as well as in the war begun by joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran. And Netanyahu, who is facing tough elections in October and pressure from hardliners in his own government, appears ready to test his relationship with Trump in public in order to shore up his reputation as a defender of Israel at home.

Israel had already signalled that it would reject the US-led plan. Soon after Trump announced it last month, Israel stepped up its bombing campaign in the Palestinian territory – strikes killed 18 people last Sunday. Netanyahu’s office had previously indicated it would not back the plan, saying: “The version that has been made public does not reflect Israel’s positions.” But Sunday’s rejection was far more forceful and direct, and appeared targeted at the Trump White House, as Trump and Netanyahu both face difficult elections. “Unlike all those who lecture us, we do what needs to be done for Israel’s security, and we can and know how to stand our ground, even against our best friends when necessary,” Netanyahu said.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Trump and His War Destroying US Economy

Iran issues tough demands to reopen strait of Hormuz as deal still out of reach

Iran has issued tough new demands for reopening the strait of Hormuz, while the United Arab Emirates said one of its ships was targeted by an Iranian missile, as a deal to open the strategic waterway remained out of reach on Saturday. Iran’s politburo-like body known as the supreme national security council said the strait of Hormuz will not open until the United States “corrects its behaviour”, and its state broadcaster published a statement from the council’s secretary, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who is also a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The US must never threaten Iran again, the statement said, and must permanently end the war with Iran and its armed allies in the region. The US must lift the naval blockade of Iranian ports and withdraw its military from the area. It also must “completely compensate” Iran for war damage, lift sanctions and “unconditionally” release frozen assets.

There was no immediate comment from the US, which has wanted an acceptable deal on the strait before ending the blockade. According to the interim deal signed in June, a schedule to end sanctions and a plan for compensation would be part of the final deal, and negotiations would address frozen assets. The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said on Saturday that they were close to reaching an agreement on navigation, “specifically the determination of a transit route”. But the waterway’s reopening is contingent on other conditions, he said, in remarks shared on social media, and blamed the situation on what he called the US violation of the interim deal.

Oman, which is mediating and has made relatively few comments on the talks, said in a statement on Saturday that the discussions were continuing “in a positive and constructive atmosphere”, and condemned attacks on ships on the strait.

Scott Ritter: America’s Empty Arsenal: Are Nukes Next?

Trump Says US Is Only ‘Semi-Negotiating’ With Iran

President Trump said on Sunday that the US was “low-keying it” with Iran and only “semi-negotiating” with the country, comments that come after a senior Iranian official laid out multiple conditions for the opening of the Strait of Hormuz.

“We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” Trump told Axios reporter Barak Ravid, comments that were taken as a signal that the US will continue the blockade and economic pressure against Iran but won’t launch a major military escalation.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Trump was laying the groundwork to declare victory if the Strait of Hormuz was fully opened and suggested to aides that he would be willing to walk away without a nuclear deal. The report said Iran’s demands have complicated that idea, and the plan now seems to be to continue the status quo for the time being.

Will "Sunni NATO' Respond To Yemen's Attacks On Saudi Forces?

Iran-aligned Houthis claim they attacked oil refinery in Saudi Arabia

Yemen’s Tehran-aligned Houthis have claimed responsibility for an attack on a refinery in Saudi Arabia, two days after the kingdom signed ⁠a defence pact with Turkey ⁠and Pakistan in response to ​growing regional instability caused by the US-Israel war on Iran.

With Iran and the US still arguing over the parameters for peace, the Houthis last month declared a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea, citing what they said was a Saudi siege on them, an allegation Riyadh denies.

The Saudi energy ministry said a fire had broken out at Aramco’s Jazan refinery early on Sunday but was later extinguished with no injuries and authorities were dealing with the ⁠incident, without giving a cause.

The Houthis used a drone to target the refinery in south-west Saudi Arabia, Yahya Saree, a military spokesperson for the rebel group, said in a post on X. They had struck Aramco sites before in ​Jazan, which processes 400,000 barrels of crude oil a day. They had also hit Yanbu, an oil export hub ‌on the Red Sea.

In a separate statement, Saree said the Houthis had carried out missile and drone strikes on the Yemeni Red Sea port city of Mocha, which is controlled by the country’s internationally recognised, Saudi-backed governing body in Aden.

Israel ATTACKS Iran? War Now IMMINENT as Trump FOLDS | Seyed M. Marandi

Genocide Deniers Call Gaza Starvation a ‘Hoax’ by Citing UNICEF—Which Reported Famine

For nearly three years, Israeli officials and their US backers have denounced United Nations agencies reporting the facts of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza as lies, but now many of them are citing the latest global hunger study by the United Nations Children’s Fund as proof that last year’s famine that killed at least hundreds of Palestinians in the coastal exclave was a “hoax.”

The UNICEF-led State of Palestine Nutrition Cluster Coordination Meeting report, published on July 22, shows decreased hunger rates in areas of Gaza accessible to those conducting the survey. With Israeli forces controlling the majority of Gaza’s territory and much of the strip flattened and inaccessible, the report’s authors warned that “the survey findings should therefore be interpreted as representative.”

This did not stop the Israeli government and media, and Israel’s supporters and sympathetic media abroad, from citing UNICEF—which on Thursday said that Israel is killing about one child a day in Gaza despite a so-called ceasefire—and the broader UN, which they formerly accused of “lies,” “antisemitism,” “blood libels,” and “hoaxes” throughout a war that a UN commission of inquiry called a genocide.

“Once again, facts prevail over fiction,” Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon said. “UN bodies are acknowledging that the false narrative against Israel is falling apart.”

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee may have forgotten his acknowledgement last year—along with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance—that Palestinians were “starving” in Gaza, aspersing the media for reporting on the starvation.

For 3 yrs since Hamas butchered over 1200 ppl including at least 46 Americans the media has said @Israel has starved children. But UNICEF, no friend to Israel shows that focus should have been on the rest of the region where the real tragedy lives unnoticed. https://t.co/GxvhMWSzzB

— Ambassador Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) August 7, 2026

Eylon Levy—the British-Israeli former spokesperson for Israel known for purveying disinformation like the infamous October 7 “beheaded babies” lie—also ran with the narrative, posting on X that “the ‘Gaza Famine’ was always a hoax.”

Except it wasn’t.

UN agencies and other humanitarian groups started sounding the alarm on looming starvation in Gaza in the weeks after Israel began annihilating the strip in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. By February 2024, UNICEF warned that “famine is imminent” in Gaza as the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs cited the deaths of six infants from malnutrition and dehydration.

As Gaza’s hunger crisis worsened under Israel’s “complete siege,” UN agencies, including UNICEF, regularly warned about starvation in the strip. In February 2024, UN officials were accusing Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war—one of the alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, are wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Michael Fakhri, the top UN expert on the right to food, accused Israel of genocidal forced starvation of Gazans.

In August 2025, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—the UN-aided top global authority on hunger crises—declared a Phase 5, or “catastrophic,” famine in Gaza as at least hundreds of Palestinians perished from malnutrition and related causes.

“Famine is now a grim reality for children in Gaza,” UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell said at the time. “As we have repeatedly warned, the signs were unmistakable: children with wasted bodies, too weak to cry or eat; babies dying from hunger and preventable disease; parents arriving at clinics with nothing left to feed their children.”

The IPC lifted Gaza’s famine designation in December 2025, citing improved—but still highly restricted—access of humanitarian aid into Gaza following a nominal ceasefire agreement reached two months earlier. However, last month the IPC published an analysis showing that from mid-April to the end of June, more than 1.2 million people, or 59% of Gaza’s population, were experiencing Phase 3 (crisis) or worse levels of food insecurity. This included about 212,000 people in Phase 4 (emergency).

“The situation remains fragile,” IPC warned.

Many of the people who deny that Israeli forces have killed or wounded a quarter million Palestinians in Gaza or that Israel is committing genocide there—a conclusion reached by numerous UN officials, scholars, jurists, rights groups, and the approximately 20 nations that formally joined South Africa’s pending genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice—are the same ones who have denied not only the Gaza famine, but that anyone was ever starving there.

They asked to see photos of starving Palestinians, and when shown them, they, and corporate media outlets including The New York Times, attempted to explain or even dismiss the evidence by claiming the emaciated—or often dead—children suffered from preexisting conditions, as if that somehow absolved Israel for their deaths. Others posted images of a Gaza market stocked with food or overweight Palestinians in a bid to debunk the fact of starvation in Gaza.

Still others dismissed images of starving Gazans as Hamas propaganda, with US media personality Megyn Kelly opining that Palestinians are “fine having their own children starve just as long as they can put them on camera.”

Pentagon Drafting New Nuclear Strategy To Expand Options for Tactical Nuclear Weapons Use

The Pentagon is reportedly drafting a new nuclear strategy that’s expected to emphasize the use of tactical nuclear weapons to give the president more “options” in a potential nuclear conflict.

The strategy, first reported by NBC News, is being drafted by the Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby, who has for more than a decade called for the US to develop additional capabilities to fight a “limited nuclear war.”

The idea would be to shift the US nuclear strategy away from the focus on using strategic nuclear weapons to wipe out an adversary’s nuclear capabilities and focus more on the possibility of using smaller, tactical nuclear weapons in a “regional” conflict.

While the potential strategy would be carried out in the name of deterrence and preventing war, arms control advocates have strongly warned against the idea of developing more tactical nuclear weapons to prepare for a potential limited nuclear conflict over concerns that it would make nuclear war much more likely and that any nuclear exchange would likely lead to a global catastrophe.

“Without a firm rejection of the option to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict, by building and fielding more tactical nuclear weapons the administration is signaling its intention to use them against enemy forces and industrial infrastructure in a conflict,” the Arms Control Association said in response to the NBC report.

Greenland issues ‘strong warning’ as Trump-linked oil firm prepares to drill

An American oil company connected to Donald Trump is preparing to sink wells in remote Greenland despite not having received permission from the local authorities. As the US president renews his threats to claim the vast Arctic territory, materials to prepare for drilling were brought ashore in recent days on Greenland’s eastern coast.

That has prompted Greenland’s government to issue a “strong warning” that no approval had been granted to land the kit. “All future logistical matters must be advised and approved by the mineral resources authority – before they are carried out,” the government said in a statement.

Two days later, Trump made his latest menacing post on Truth Social, showing himself looming over a Greenlandic village.

Executives of Greenland Energy, a Texas company set up last year, have claimed that $1tn of crude may lie beneath the Jameson Land region. They announced plans to spend $60m drilling two wells to find out. Although Greenland stopped issuing new oil licences in 2021 on environmental grounds, a UK company called 80 Mile had secured exploration rights in Jameson Land. Greenland Energy’s corporate filings say it will take a majority stake in the project in exchange for funding the exploration, though it still needs government permission to proceed.

As a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, decisions about Greenland’s natural resources rest with its local elected leaders, who now face a delicate decision. They could grant permission for oil drilling, even though the planned wells appear to fall within a conservation area protected by the Ramsar convention on wetlands. Or they could refuse and, some worry, give Trump a pretext to advance his imperialist agenda.

‘Each President Is a Temporary Tenant’: DC Appeals Court Orders Halt to Trump Ballroom Construction

A federal court on Friday ruled that President Donald Trump must halt most construction of his $400 million White House ballroom project, siding with a lower court that said it must be authorized by Congress.

“Each president is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its executive residence,” wrote judges Patricia Millett and Bradley Garcia in a 2-1 decision for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. “The president has no—and claims no—constitutionally assigned authority over that property.”

Friday’s ruling only affects the above-ground portions of the project. The construction of a fortified underground bunker and other “national security facilities” beneath the site is allowed to continue.

Trump has already demolished the East Wing of the White House to make room for the project, which he has said will be entirely privately funded, mostly by corporate donors, many of whom had business before the executive branch. However, reporting from The Washington Post in June revealed that he had secretly planned to dip into $300 million worth of taxpayer dollars for the project.

At Trump’s urging, Republicans have attempted to add $1 billion in taxpayer money to the federal budget to pay for the project’s security features, but the proposal to pass it through budget reconciliation without approval from Democrats was rejected by the Senate parliamentarian.

The court’s majority said it’s ruling “has nothing at all to do with whether the proposed ballroom is desirable, or not, as a matter of policy… What it does mean is that the defendants may not do so during the district court’s expeditious litigation without securing Congress’s authorization, as the Constitution and laws require.”

"Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence. The President has no—and claims no—constitutionally assigned authority over that property"

In sweeping, 136-page ruling, DC appeals court blocks construction of Trump ballroom pic.twitter.com/cNST4NtDql

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) August 7, 2026

Brent Leggs, the CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which sued to block the ballroom’s construction in December, said Friday was “a great day for our country and for the American people’s right to voice their opinions about the historic places they cherish, including the White House.”

“The White House, a global landmark that symbolizes American identity and the ideals of democracy, belongs to the American people,” he said.

Trump reacted with predictable fury on Truth Social.

“We will be immediately appealing to the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote. “The Military and Secret Service are viewing this horrendous, politically motivated, and unlawful ruling as a National Security threat to our Nation in that the entire Complex is being built for the protection of our Country and, additionally, all future Presidents.”

The ruling is the second blow to one of Trump’s vanity projects this week. A report by the National Park Service recently found that his planned “Arc de Trump” near the National Mall could compromise the historical significance and “integrity” of dozens of other historic landmarks.

OpenAI to pause some work on AI model Astra due to security concerns

OpenAI will pause some work on an artificial intelligence model because of security concerns, the company stated on Friday, following a series of incidents in which AI agents have escaped containment. The company had evaluated the agent, Astra, and found “significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity”, which had moved to a “critical” threshold where it can find and exploit vulnerabilities without human intervention, or devise and execute cyber-attacks when given only a “high level desired goal”.

OpenAI stated that the model was not involved in an incident in which one of its AI agents went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a startup, Hugging Face. The company discovered other instances in which autonomous agents had escaped containment, Reuters reported in July.

The reports have increased concerns about advancements in AI models and humans’ ability to control them. Still, critics of the AI industry have warned that such disclosures from OpenAI and its competitors Anthropic and Meta could be designed to generate hype about the technology’s power and thus spur additional interest from investors.

Meta also disclosed this week that one of its models hacked another company during cybersecurity testing. And the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) announced on 4 August that agents powered by OpenAI and Anthropic had sent targeted emails to software developers in an attempt to pass a cyber challenge. “These attempts were unsuccessful, and our investigations have not evidenced any resulting real-world harm. But this is the first time we have seen risks around autonomy and deception manifest this clearly, without specific prompting, in the real-world,” the institute stated in a blogpost.

US police officer accused of killing three people in Mexico arrested at border

A Texas police officer has been arrested in Mexico after authorities there accused him of killing three people and critically injuring the mother of his child in what investigators say stemmed from a dispute over the custody of the minor. The Coahuila attorney general’s office said 35-year-old Chad Eberle was arrested on Wednesday at the border on a warrant accusing him of femicide and qualified homicide, according to La Razon de Mexico, a newspaper based in Mexico City. Under Mexican law, femicide refers to the intentional killing of a woman or girl because of her gender.

According to La Razon, the deadly shooting happened in July in Saltillo, Mexico, after an argument over Eberle allegedly not having permission to take his three-year-old son. Two women and one man were killed in the attack. The victims were identified by La Razon with the first names and ages of Ana Laura, 44; Laura Jaquelín, 22; and Emanuel, 44. The child’s 26-year-old mother was also shot in the head and remained in critical condition, officials said.

Investigators said Eberle was arrested while attempting to cross from Mexico into Texas through the international bridge at Piedras Negras, across from Eagle Pass, KTXS reported. Eberle had left the residence with his son in a gray Chevrolet Silverado, prompting investigators to launch a manhunt as they tracked the vehicle toward the Texas border, the US Sun reported. He was then intercepted before he could re-enter the US with the child. The three-year-old was unharmed and was later placed in the care of Coahuila’s child welfare agency.

The San Antonio Express identified Eberle as a police officer in the central Texas town of Santa Anna. Before that, he worked as a deputy constable with Bexar county – which includes San Antonio – and also served as a police officer for the Northside independent school district. The Express reported that Eberle also held law enforcement positions in the Texas communities of Somerset, Marble Falls, Gregory, near Corpus Christi, Lockney in the state’s panhandle, and Bangs in the west. According to the newspaper, a 2022 Facebook post from the Lockney police department described Eberle as an army veteran.

Abdul El-Sayed embraces Trump claim he represents ‘very different’ America

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Michigan, embraced Donald Trump’s suggestion that the two represent “VERY DIFFERENT” versions of the US, pledging to fight inequality while the president is “making billions of dollars off of you”. In a Saturday night post on his Truth Social platform, Trump shared an image of himself and the first lady, Melania Trump, beside a photo of El-Sayed, who is Muslim, and his wife, Sarah Jukaku, wearing a hijab. “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s [sic],” read the caption.

“Yeah, he’s right,” El-Sayed told CNN, when asked about the post on Sunday. “One in which your overlords are two people who don’t like each other, but join in the interest of making billions of dollars off of you – or two people who genuinely love each other, enjoyed some pancakes together, want to come together to build the kind of America where they can raise a family and know that that family is going to have the good things.”

“Yes, you’ve got two different visions of America,” said El-Sayed. “Donald Trump’s vision is the one you’re living in right now. Can you afford your gas? Can you afford your groceries?”

El-Sayed, an epidemiologist, won the Democratic primary for US Senate in Michigan this week, setting up a bruising general election campaign against former US representative Mike Rogers, a Republican, in the swing state. During a speech on Thursday, Trump called El-Sayed a communist and said he was “full of shit”, which was met with loud cheers. Asked about the president’s expletive remark, El-Sayed told Sky News: “At least I don’t let mine go in the middle of the Oval Office.”

Unlike some other new Democratic candidates, El-Sayed, who ran to the left of his primary opponent, is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and has said he is a capitalist who wants capitalism to work better. Former US president Barack Obama spoke with El-Sayed after his primary win, in what is deemed an early sign of support for his campaign. “It was a really good conversation about what we need to do to be able to win, and obviously this is somebody who knows a lot about winning Michigan,” El-Sayed told NBC News.

Abdul El-Sayed TOUTS ENDORSEMENT From Kamala Harris

Lake Mead plummets to historic low water level as Colorado River struggles

Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, has plummeted to its lowest water level since it was filled some 90 years ago, the latest sign of a deepening water crisis in the American west. Water levels at the reservoir, which straddles the Arizona-Nevada border outside Las Vegas, hit 1,040.4ft (317.1 meters) above sea level on Friday, according to federal data. That’s just below the record set on 28 July 2022, according to the US Bureau of Reclamation.

The reservoir is a critical storage system on Colorado River, a massive waterway that supplies roughly 40 million people across seven US states, tribal nations and Mexico, and irrigates millions of acres of farmland. But the Colorado River basin is facing enormous pressure due to a combination of overuse, prolonged drought and extreme heat, and a lack of snowmelt to replenish the river. Lake Powell, the second major reservoir on the Colorado River, is also at historic low levels.

“It’s extremely significant and extremely concerning. You have three-quarters of the population of the Colorado River basin, some 30 million people, who are directly impacted by risks to Lake Mead,” said JB Hamby, the chair of the Colorado River board of California and a board member of the Imperial Irrigation District, the largest user of the river’s water. Hamby said it is vital for states that use Colorado River water to reduce water use.

Drought and dry conditions have stretched along the length of the Colorado and are particularly intense at its source in the Rocky Mountains.Melting snow provides important water for the river. This past winter, however, saw the worst snowpack on record for the Colorado River basin, adding more stress on farmers, industry, wildlife and hydropower producers, as well as the cities and towns that rely on the waterway. Years of overuse combined with drought and rising temperatures have been depleting Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the country’s second-largest reservoir. Both are the lowest they have been in nearly seven decades.

Plastics contamination an ‘overlooked’ concern in food waste schemes

Plastic contamination should be a central concern in efforts to deal with food waste, which campaigners call one of the most overlooked problems of the climate crisis, researchers have said. This is despite the fact that, as the chef, author and activist Max La Manna puts it, food waste management is “one of the few climate problems where everyone wins”. About one-third of all food produced worldwide is wasted each year, according to UN data. In the US, 40% of food waste goes to landfill, where it creates 30m metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year – more than Cuba’s total annual CO2 emissions in 2024, which amounted to 24.4m tonnes.

A new study, published in Nature Food, used life-cycle analysis modelling to compare the impacts – in terms of climate, nutrient pollution and plastic contamination – of different food-waste management scenarios. The authors, based at the University of Vermont, compared the annual climate impacts of landfilled food waste with the climate impact of alternative recycling pathways and found that diverting food waste from landfill would reduce climate impacts by between 89% and 99%. These non-landfill scenarios could also reduce nutrient pollution in water bodies – a process called eutrophication that occurs when excess nutrients result in algal blooms.

But the researchers also said that microplastics can persist in compost, which could lead to 20,000 tonnes contaminating US agricultural soils each year. To date, no study has looked at the “plastic pollution footprint” of different food-waste management strategies at national scale. Kate Porterfield, the lead author, said the method was comparable to working out a “carbon footprint of a product or process”. Essentially, the researchers looked at the process of managing food waste and “tall[ied] up what the carbon emissions are across all of those life-cycle stages”, she said.

Porterfield said the large proportion of wasted food still in packaging “goes bad before it even reaches the consumer”. One approach to recycling food waste is using a mechanical “depacker”; the packaging then goes to landfill, while food waste goes to “beneficial reuse, like composting or anaerobic digestion”. However, they found that even if plastic separation technologies were 99% efficient, diverting food waste from landfill could still increase microplastic pollution in soil by an order of magnitude. “Any time where you’re diverting food waste, there is a risk of microplastic pollution” because “people aren’t perfect, machines aren’t perfect, and all of our food these days is packaged in plastic”.

The US state of Vermont has “one of the most ambitious” state organics-diversion mandates in the US, according to the co-author Eric Roy. The state’s Universal Recycling Law has been fully effective from 2020 and requires food waste to be diverted from landfill. This applies to all households and means food scraps are banned from bins. The authors said their findings provided an effective evaluation of the possible countrywide scale-up of such regulations and pointed to the need for “more attention to the plastics issue” from the outset of creating these policies.

‘Panda of the insect world’: the moscardón bumblebee creates buzz for invertebrate of the year

We all love bumblebees. Not only are they beautiful, busy and social, they perform pollination services that are crucial for plants, crops and human civilisation. There are about 250 species of bumblebee and Bombus dahlbomii is the largest. The gloriously furry females can measure 4cm in length. These unusually heavy-bodied bumbles, weighing up to 1.5g, are found flying in the temperate forest-clad mountains of Patagonia, in Argentina and Chile.

As a Patagonian endemic, the bumblebee is an important pollinator of native plants such as the Peruvian lily (Alstroemeria aurea) and the Chilean bellflower (Lapageria rosea). The latter is red, which most bees cannot see, so they typically avoid red flowers. But the moscardón visits them because it uses a special receptor system to detect and distinguish the colour red. Its furry appearance is due to long bristles that cover the thorax and abdomen.

Unfortunately, the magnificent moscardón is threatened by human actions that go beyond the usual habitat loss and destruction. Populations have rapidly declined since the introduction of two non-native invasive European bumblebees, the ruderal bumblebee (Bombus ruderatus) and the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris), which have been imported to Chile since the 1980s to assist commercial agricultural pollination. These species may be much loved in their natural environments, but in Chile and Argentina they have rapidly spread, not only outcompeting Bombus dahlbomii but bringing in novel pathogens and diseases that are decimating populations of the native bumble.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some of which defied fair-use abstraction.

Patrick Lawrence: A Certain Schizophrenia

India to Israel and back: How a fake IRGC quote on nuclear weapons reached Netanyahu’s speech

When a President Promises a Massacre

The Odd Defense Agreement Between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan And Turkey

‘They kidnapped a hard-working kid off our streets’: the gardener seized by ICE – and the New York town fighting back

Press access spat adds to fears of circus around Luigi Mangione murder trial

Perseid meteor shower set to dazzle northern hemisphere this week

A Little Night Music

Little Johnny Taylor – Part Time Love

Little Johnny Taylor – A Thousand Miles Away

Little Johnny Taylor – Since I Found A New Love

Little Johnny Taylor – Somewhere Down The Line

Little Johnny Taylor - I Smell Trouble

Little Johnny Taylor – I Ask Myself A Question

Little Johnny Taylor – She's Yours, She's Mine (She's Somebody Else's, Too)

Little Johnny Taylor – If You Love Me (Like You Say)

Little Johnny Taylor - Zig Zag Lightning