Breaking Waves: Ocean News

npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 24 June 2024; doi:10.1038/s44183-024-00067-5 Operationalizing climate risk in a global warming hotspot

This blog is now closed. Medicinal vapes to be sold over the counter at pharmacies after Labor and Greens reach deal Watch: Shadow minister Ted O’Brien ejected from parliament during energy debate Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast David Pocock also spoke to the ABC about his private member’s bill that would see housing treated as a human right. He said it was needed because: There’s no overarching national plan and this would legislate that these are the objectives, we want to see housing affordable, we want to reduce homelessness and then it would be up to the government to actually work out – how are we going to do that? What are the policies that we think will address this? One of my heroes Desmond Tutu used to say ‘don’t raise your voice, improve your argument’. It’s pretty tragic the major parties tear the opposition down rather than improving their argument and making their plans stand on their own two feet. Continue reading...

Rachel Cooke traces the long history of the UK’s resorts through nostalgia, deprivation and revival Read more in this series Anyone who has read him will know that the historian Nikolas Pevsner was not a man much given to excessive praise. But even he was inclined to sigh at the sight of the Grand Hotel in Scarborough. In his series of architectural guides, The Buildings of England, he describes the hotel, which was completed in 1867, as wondrous, a “High Victorian gesture of assertion and confidence”. Believing no other building in Britain had as much to say about a certain kind of 19th-century ambition, in his perambulation of the Yorkshire town, he instructed readers on no account to miss the magnificent view of the hotel from the harbour. And it’s true. Stand on the beach below and look up – perhaps while eating a choc ice – and the Grand really does look marvellous: a gigantic confection of towers and balconies that recalls a French chateau. From this vantage point, it isn’t hard to imagine the poet Edith Sitwell drinking cocktails in its ballroom (the Sitwells owned a holiday villa in Scarborough); to picture Winston Churchill, who once stayed in one of its suites, lighting a cigar at the bar. Continue reading...

Water companies have logged five sewage spills a day, every day, for a decade, analysis by the Observer shows Water companies in England and Wales have averaged five serious sewage spills into rivers or seas every day over the past decade, the Observer can reveal. Analysis of Environment Agency data has found that the 10 firms recorded 19,484 category 1-3 pollution incidents between 2013 and 2022, the most recent year recorded, an average of one every four and a half hours. Continue reading...