NGOs say agreement held back by tenuous human health commitments and lobbying from plastic industry
The latest version of the long overdue plastic treaty is even less ambitious than the previous one, according to experts.
A year after UN plastics treaty negotiations collapsed in Geneva in 2025, diplomats met informally in Nairobi between 30 June and 3 July, aiming to flesh out a new “no surprises” document.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
08/13/2026 - 13:00
Study of 56m-year-old leaves counters claims from Trump administration members of ‘benefits’ of fossil fuel pollution
Adding huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is set to cause the Earth’s forests to wither and die rather than flourish, according to a new study that counters erroneous claims that fossil fuel pollution will green the planet.
An analysis of fossilized leaf cells from a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (or PETM), which occurred about 56m years ago, has helped reconstruct how the world’s forests responded when planet-heating gases were previously being released at a rapid rate.
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08/13/2026 - 10:48
Kew Gardens in London hits 38.1C and 40C-plus recorded in parts of Europe with continent trapped under heat dome
Europe heatwave – latest updates
The UK has recorded its hottest day of the year so far with a provisional temperature of 38.1C in southern England as Europe sweltered under a major heat dome.
As temperatures on the continent surpassed 40C at the peak of the summer’s fifth heatwave, the thermometer at Kew Gardens in west London on Thursday surpassed the previous high of 38C on 28 June, the Met Office said.
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08/13/2026 - 08:34
South American fish with razor-toothed jaws was probably released by someone who owned it as a pet, officials say
An eight-year-old boy fishing for bass in Pennsylvania was stunned to catch something more associated with the Amazon – and countless horror movies – than the rolling landscape of the eastern US.
Seamus Coffey, who was fishing with his father Michael in a lake near Philadelphia, hauled in a large red-bellied piranha, complete with the razor-toothed jaws that the fearsome breed is so famous for.
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08/13/2026 - 07:00
Bat experts were shocked at how fast white-nose syndrome had spread to Canada’s northernmost colonies from the US. Now, the race is on to find a cure before species disappear
Crawling through a narrow passage in a cave beneath a boreal forest near Fort Smith in Canada’s Northwest Territories in May, two biologists spotted a lifeless bat on a limestone ledge, its body covered in a spindly white fungus.
When they shone their headlamps to get a closer look, they saw another bat with the fungus on its forearms. “It hissed at us and crawled back into a crack,” Jesika Reimer says.
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08/13/2026 - 07:00
State is US’s largest user of pesticide that is virtually proven to cause Parkinson’s disease
California is banning paraquat, a highly toxic, controversial herbicide used across millions of acres of American cropland.
Public health advocates characterize it as a deadly substance that is virtually proven to cause Parkinson’s disease. It is already outlawed in more than 70 countries, including China, the UK and the EU. Yet in the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reapproved it for use in 2021 and 2024.
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08/13/2026 - 06:49
Indiana faced most outages at 267,000, about 8% of its customers, with severe thunderstorms and wind ahead
Power supply was cut on Thursday to about 540,000 homes and businesses across the US midwest as severe storms battered the region, data from PowerOutage.us showed.
Indiana was the hardest-hit state, with more than 267,000 outages, representing about 8% of its roughly 3.3 million customers, the data showed.
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08/13/2026 - 05:00
The dangers of AI become clearer every day. Why are we still acting as if we have no choice about our future?
Rather than producing jobs, the US economy actually lost 23,000 jobs in July, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released on Friday. In addition, May and June’s job numbers were revised downward, showing a combined 103,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.
As if this weren’t bad enough, wage growth has also slowed. Average hourly earnings rose by just 0.1% from June.
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08/13/2026 - 03:13
Biological factors mean a child’s core temperature rises faster than an adult’s – and that can result in a medical emergency
Children and babies are more vulnerable in heatwaves than healthy adults. As temperatures rise again, how do we keep children safe?
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08/13/2026 - 03:10
Companies in England and Wales get green light for extra spending that will add billions to bills
Andy Burnham has said he is angry with water companies for treating their customers as a “bottomless source of funding” after more than a dozen firms were given the green light to raise bills even higher.
The prime minister said the companies must not be allowed to treat bill payers like a “blank cheque”, after Ofwat, the regulator, approved proposals for billions of pounds of spending on repairs and infrastructure.
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