Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Some European leaders have criticised the organisation’s murky funding and political mandate – key US politics stories from Wednesday 18 February at a glance Dozens of world leaders and national delegations will meet in Washington DC on Thursday for the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, as major European allies declined to join the group and criticised the organisation’s murky funding and political mandate. The White House has indicated that the summit for his new ad hoc council at the renamed Donald J Trump Institute of Peace will heavily function as a fundraising round, with Trump announcing on social media that countries have pledged more than $5bn toward rebuilding Gaza, which has been devastated in the war with Israel and remains in a humanitarian crisis. Continue reading...

A fried snack sustained protesters, and the aid continues amid fear and promises that ICE will leave the city The images coming out of Minneapolis over the past two months have looked like something from a Hollywood dystopian horror film: masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents armed with guns, pepper spray, and teargas coming to blows with everyday citizens bearing phones, whistles, signs and, perhaps most surprisingly, food to feed their fellow protesters. For Fatoun Ali and other Somali community members, sambusa was the weapon of choice. Last December, before prejudiced threats turned to bloodshed in the streets, they deployed this tasty east African staple – a fried, flaky, triangular-shaped pastry typically filled with ground meat, vegetables and spices (similar to south Asian samosas) – to combat the xenophobic rhetoric rapidly spreading across the Twin Cities. She estimates they bought and handed out hundreds of the simple snacks near community hubs, all in hopes of introducing others to the largest Somali diaspora community outside Africa. Continue reading...

By repealing the EPA’s determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health, the president is denying reality itself The climate crisis is killing people. These deaths are measurable, documented and ongoing. Concluding otherwise is just playing pretend. Studies explain the mechanics, but lived experience supplies the truth. The people who suffer the consequences see the fire rising and water closing in. They need their government’s help. Despite that, the president of the United States stood at a microphone last Thursday and abdicated his duty to them. “It has nothing to do with public health,” he claimed about the climate crisis while announcing that the federal government would repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding”, a determination that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare. “This is all a scam, a giant scam.” Jamil Smith is a Guardian US columnist Continue reading...

Lawsuit from health and environmental justice groups challenges the EPA’s rollback of the ‘endangerment finding’ More than a dozen health and environmental justice non-profits have sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its revocation of the legal determination that underpins US federal climate regulations. Filed in Washington DC circuit court, the lawsuit challenges the EPA’s rollback of the “endangerment finding”, which states that the buildup of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare and has allowed the EPA to limit those emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources since 2009. The rollback was widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis. Continue reading...