Breaking Waves: Ocean News

As delegates prepare for the global gathering, the president is caught between opposing sides in a row over bottom trawling in France’s marine protected areas On his trawler in Saint-Malo, one of France’s most important ports for scallops and crabs, Laurent Mevel is fixing his nets. “We really want to protect the seas,” says the 60-year-old fisher. “But we’ve got crews, we’ve got employees. “If you don’t fish any more, the fish will come from Ireland, from Scotland. Now the fish you buy from shops comes by plane. And costs less.” Continue reading...

Call me a middle-class ‘bobo’, but inspired street art has nothing in common with sprayed-on assertions of ‘me, me, me’ Among the layers of life in Paris that energise me, I might list: peeling back the city’s music scene all the way to figuring out where, and when, the musicians go to jam together; the unassuming flair of even a basic brasserie; the way one can pivot, in the span of a week, from an art gallery opening to a friend’s concert to another friend’s restaurant to discover his Corsican-influenced menu, and end it by lingering on a terrace, “remaking the world” with others who challenge you – calmly – to see something a different way. Among the things about this city that exhaust me are the people who cram their way into the Métro without letting you step out first (seriously, what neurons are misfiring in the heads of these people?), and the sheer prevalence of tags. It’s when you leave Paris for a bit and come back that you realise how many tags there are. How swaths of a city that is otherwise arrestingly beautiful look as if a giant toddler high on methamphetamines stumbled through them, scribbling on everything in sight with a giant Sharpie. Continue reading...

Sanctions, including for Thames Water CEO, announced as part of new government powers under Water Act Bonuses for 10 water company executives in England, including the boss of Thames Water, will be banned with immediate effect over serious sewage pollution, as part of new powers brought in by the Labour government. The top executives of six water companies who have overseen the most serious pollution events will not receive performance rewards this year, the environment secretary, Steve Reed, said. Continue reading...

Parliament backs scheme for relatives of 123 men who died in worst disaster in Norway’s waters since second world war Forty-five years after the Alexander L Kielland oil rig capsized in the North Sea, Norway’s parliament has voted to set up a compensation scheme for relatives of the 123 men who died in the worst disaster in Norwegian waters since the second world war. “This is a historic day, the end of more than four decades of fighting for justice,” said Mímir Kristjánsson, an MP from the leftwing Red party. The chair of the victims’ committee, Anders Helliksen, said the state had “finally accepted its responsibility”. Continue reading...