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In Pakistan’s Punjab province, the Chief Minister and Prime Minister recently inaugurated the Punjab Agriculture, Food and Drug Authority (PAFDA). The new agency is designed to bring food, agriculture, and drug testing under a single regulatory framework to strengthen food safety and export compliance.

One in five people in Pakistan suffer from foodborne illnesses every year, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This is twice the global average and leads to an estimated productivity loss of US$1.7 billion annually. A paper published in Legal Research & Analysis points to fragmented regulatory authority as one major barrier to an effective food safety system in Pakistan. In Punjab, officials hope coordinated action under the new agency will make the food supply safer.

PAFDA is currently working to merge 23 laboratories, including food, agriculture, and health departments. They plan to collaborate closely with farmers, industry, and regulators to ensure services are practical and responsive. This includes expanding food and drug testing in areas where capabilities have been limited.

“Our focus will continue to remain on investing in our people,” Talat Naseer Pasha, Director General of PAFDA, tells Food Tank. “Our aim is to support compliance, not simply enforce standards.”

PAFDA aims to separate testing from enforcement, and to bring scientific analysis and conformance functions under one independent institution equipped with modern technology, says Pasha. They hope this transition will help them build regulatory credibility, improve compliance with international accreditation standards, and create shared infrastructure that supports exports and public health.

Pasha says that most exporters currently rely on advanced food, agriculture, and pharmaceutical testing outside of Pakistan. By making accredited testing available domestically, the agency aims to help businesses verify compliance with international standards more quickly and affordably. Local testing may also contribute to more effective policy. He believes the agency’s move towards an integrated regulatory framework can serve as a model for other regions in Pakistan.

For food safety and agricultural regulation, “PAFDA represents an important step towards an evidence-based system that can strengthen public health protection, improve regulatory enforcement, and promote confidence in trade,” Aleena Kokab, Senior Microbiology Scientist at at the agency, tells Food Tank.

The Food Testing Lab will analyze food products for safety, quality, and nutritional content to support accurate labeling and regulatory compliance. The Agriculture Testing Lab will assess agricultural inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, and water quality. It will also conduct pesticide residue testing in food and water to strengthen food safety and support compliance with export standards.

A study in the journal Water finds that pesticide residues were detected in nearly all water samples collected from 15 of Punjab’s districts. The labs will examine pesticides and other contamination risks at various points in the food system, from farm inputs to end products.

As PAFDA builds its scientific workforce in Lahore, the agency is investing in a hostel for women scientists who are relocating or commuting from outside the city. “This is an important step in improving diversity and inclusion and in building the next generation of scientific leadership,” Pasha says.

Women make up around 70 percent of the agency’s scientists, and the hostel is intended to reduce barriers related to travel and housing.

“In localities like mine, talented women often step back from science due to safety concerns, long commutes, and lack of supportive living facilities,” PAFDA Food Scientist Manahil Zafar, who lives in a small district 350 kilometers outside of Lahore, tells Food Tank. “PAFDA’s women scientists’ hostel breaks these barriers by providing a secure environment where women can focus on their careers without compromise.”

Alongside the establishment of PAFDA comes the launch of Punjab’s Agriculture Lab on Wheels initiative, which will deploy mobile labs across 15 districts to provide real-time soil and water analyses. The Agriculture Department of the Government of Punjab hopes that bringing testing closer to farmers will allow them to quickly assess soil fertility and water quality, receive more timely guidance to inform crop-planning, and improve agricultural productivity.

The program will be supported by a central monitoring control room and 100 container-based facilitation centers staffed with advisers and equipped with digital tools for farmers. Mobile units will provide initial screening in rural areas, while PAFDA conducts confirmatory testing.

“PAFDA is still a young institution, but it represents a long-term investment in strengthening Punjab’s food and agriculture systems,” Pasha says. “Our hope is that it will contribute to safer food, stronger farmer livelihoods, and greater confidence in the quality of what Punjab produces.”

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Photo courtesy of PAFDA

The post Pakistan’s Punjab Province Advances Food, Agriculture, and Drug Testing Under New Regulatory Authority appeared first on Food Tank.

We’re excited to announce that applications are now open for our November 16-21, 2026 National Native Community Organizing Training.

Apply Now

Our national trainings are for Native organizers and Tribal leaders committed to engaging our communities with organizing strategies guided by Inter-Tribal Indigenous values. The week-long gathering focuses on sharpening community organizing skills to build effective grassroots campaigns and movements to build power in our Native Nations and Native Communities. We will also focus on the changing political landscape and how we meet the challenges and opportunities before us.

The training will be held in Federal Way, Washington State. The cost of housing, transportation, and most meals will be covered by Native Organizers Alliance.

We are now accepting applications.

Apply Now

Participants spend time together envisioning how to mobilize community action to make change possible and strengthen sovereignty and self-determination.

• We explore how we have traditionally and historically used our traditional values to organize in our communities and how we continue to do so today.
• We discuss building political power for change and how Tribal and urban communities can challenge the power that denies our peoples’ inherent and sovereign rights.
• We share organizing tools and share knowledge gained from our teachings and life experiences.
• We learn from our rich history of Inter-Tribal cultural values of building community by using interactive sessions that are grounded in collective learning. And folks go home energized with a shared theory of change rooted in traditional Inter-Tribal Indigenous community building.

Our week-long, in-person Native Organizing Trainings are a part of our year-round efforts of growing a powerful ecosystem of Native leaders who will continue to build our collective community power.

We encourage Tribal and Native community leaders in rural, reservation, or urban communities — and the staff of Native nonprofits, service agencies, and Tribal entities — to apply.

Native Organizers Alliance is pleased to cover the cost of housing, transportation, and most meals. Participants are responsible for additional costs. Organizations, Tribal governments, groups, or individuals who can contribute to defraying the costs of this training will provide the opportunity to go beyond 30 participants.

The post Apply Now: National Organizing Training appeared first on Native Organizers Alliance.

Western Watersheds Project, represented by the Western Environmental Law Center, on Wednesday filed a complaint in Montana Federal District Court against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for revoking American Prairie’s permits to graze bison on public lands in Montana. Revoking the permits conflicts with the plain language of controlling laws, and contradicts BLM’s own prior decisions.

In 2022, after completing a multi-year review finding that bison grazing is permissible on public lands and in fact would likely be better for prairie grasslands than cattle, BLM authorized American Prairie to graze bison on allotments. However, in a politically motivated reversal, over the course of just five months in 2026, BLM rescinded the bison permits under a brand new theory that a livestock owner must be a “production-oriented” entity, and did so without defining what that means.

“BLM’s new interpretation has no basis in law and contradicts its own findings,” said Pete Frost, attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. “BLM reversed itself due to politics, not the law, nor the need to restore prairie grasslands.”

In fact, BLM’s 2026 decision directly contradicts its position in 2022, that reading a “production” requirement into federal law “would read words and requirements” into the law that don’t exist. Instead, at that time, BLM stated it can “issue permits to any stock owner.”

The BLM’s 2022 decision found that privately-owned bison are domestic livestock under the Taylor Grazing Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act—a conclusion consistent with Montana state law, which treats American Prairie’s bison herd as “livestock,” by levying taxes and imposing disease testing requirements. Indeed, the U.S. Forest Service defines livestock under the Taylor Grazing Act as “…animals of any kind kept or raised for [any] use or pleasure.”

American Prairie has provided thousands of pounds of bison meat to area food banks and supplies bison to other entities for food, commercial, and cultural purposes.

“The Trump administration is kicking our national mammal off of public lands, and trying to replace bison—an ecological keystone of prairie ecosystems—with cattle which causes a huge amount of ecological damage,” said Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Project. “We’re heading to court to support the replacement of unnatural herds of cattle with the natural large herbivore of the Plains, the American bison. While we prefer bison to be managed as wild, free-ranging conservation herds, like American Prairie’s bison, if you’re going to raise an animal as livestock, bison are so much more ecologically appropriate than cattle that it would be a beneficial idea to convert all cattle grazing permits West-wide to bison.”

The political origins of the agency’s reversal are clear. As reported by Public Domain, the 2022 bison grazing decision was appealed by ranching groups represented by Karen Budd-Falen—now one of the highest ranking officials at the Department of Interior. Further, Sec. Burgum personally intervened to direct BLM to reconsider, ultimately producing the outcome Budd-Falen’s former clients sought.

Western Environmental Law Center and Western Watersheds Project pursued all available administrative remedies, and filed suit as a last resort to prevent the unlawful eviction of bison from these public lands.

Contacts:
Pete Frost, Western Environmental Law Center, 541-543-0018, frost@westernlaw.org
Erik Molvar, Western Watersheds Project, 307-399-7910, emolvar@westernwatersheds.org

The post Conservation groups to challenge Trump administration’s move to banish bison from public lands appeared first on Western Environmental Law Center.

Across the American West, working lands sit at the center of some of conservation’s greatest challenges. Grasslands face drought, floods, fragmented habitat, invasive species, wildfire, and...

Climate change is an extremely politically polarized topic in the United States, with Democrats generally concerned about human-caused climate change and Republicans more skeptical. But these familiar broad strokes hide both differences within parties and bipartisan agreement—as well as a broad, messy middle, according to a new analysis based on two decades of polling data.

“Americans are deeply divided on climate change, but the real story is much deeper than a simple Democrat-Republican split,” says Mayank Kejriwal of the Information Science Institute at the University of Southern California.

Past studies have provided hints that other socio-demographic factors such as income, age, and education may also shape climate attitudes. But the new study employs a methodology that enabled researchers to assess a comprehensive set of factors at the same time to see where the fault lines truly lie.

Kejriwal and USC engineering graduate student Yidan Sun analyzed responses to an annual Gallup Poll survey that queried U.S. adults on various environmental topics from 2000 to 2020. They assessed climate attitudes and looked at how support for 14 different climate-related policy proposals varies both within and across parties.

As expected, party identification is the strongest factor influencing climate beliefs, the researchers found. The partisan divide on climate has long existed, but it deepened after Donald Trump was first elected to the presidency in 2016.  In the 2017 poll, climate concern jumped among Democrats and Independents like a collective eyebrow raise, while remaining at a flat, relatively low level among Republicans.

But people aren’t just blue or red, they’re individuals. And their opinions are shaped by more than just their political party, the researchers discovered when they dug into the influence of age, income, ethnicity, and education.

 

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“Climate opinion is polarized, but it is not uniform, and understanding those internal differences matters if we want to understand where public support for climate policy may grow,” says Kejriwal.

The biggest divide within the Republican party is by age. Republicans under age 35 are more likely than older Republicans to support renewable energy and oppose fossil fuel development.

Yet the devil is still in the details: Young Republicans might support renewable energy development, but they tend to oppose a carbon tax right along with their elder partisans. Meanwhile, young Democrats show high support for both policies.

In general, Republicans tend to be more open to technology- and market-oriented climate policies, suggesting that future climate communication efforts could frame policies in these terms rather than emphasizing regulations that are unpopular among conservatives.

Among Democrats, education is the most important factor shaping climate attitudes, with higher levels of education linked to greater support for various climate policies. Education moves Republican beliefs to a much lesser degree.

“One striking result was how consistently policy support depended on the design of the policy, not just on general concern about climate change,” says Kejriwal.

For example, policies to limit household energy use are unpopular across the political spectrum, in line with people’s general preference for climate carrots over sticks. And some policies like government investment in solar energy and development of alternative fuels enjoy broad support regardless of political party.

Another pattern seen across the political spectrum is inconsistency: a substantial proportion of Democrats (26.8%), Independents (42.6%), and Republicans (36.3%) alike fall into what the researchers call the “mixed middle”—people with complicated, sometimes contradictory views on climate, rather than pure skepticism or concern. Messages that link climate policies to economic or public health benefits could help sway this group, the researchers suggest.

Source: Sun Y. and M. Kejriwal. “Modeling complex associations between socio-demographic factors and climate policies using Conditional Inference Trees.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 2026.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine (based on Adobe Stock/Julia)

The Cobbs Creek Park Ambassadors are a grassroots and volunteer-run West Philadelphia organization dedicated to transforming our local green spaces. Founded in 2018 by neighbors Rich Guffanti and Andrew Wheeler, the initiative grew from weekly cleanups into a dedicated network of volunteers who adopt and maintain specific sections of Cobbs Creek Park.

We’re proud to say that in 2026 alone, we’ve hosted 50+ cleanups, removed over 6,000 pounds of trash, and engaged hundreds of volunteers. Beyond picking up litter, we work to cultivate community pride and environmental stewardship. Through events like our annual Summer Festival, we bring hundreds of neighbors together to celebrate the park.

We invite you to join us in keeping Cobbs Creek Park beautiful because our park thrives when our community steps up to care for it. Ambassadors host cleanups every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, and volunteers are welcome to attend whenever they can.

Upcoming cleanups:

*please use the registration form found on our website and monitor your inbox in case of a cancellation

• Wednesday, August 5, 8-9 a.m. at S 61st and Baltimore Ave.
• Sunday, August 9, 2-4 p.m. at Little Whitby Meadow
• Wednesday, August 12, 8-9 a.m. at S. 61st and Baltimore
• Sunday, August 16, 2-4 p.m. at Woodland Ave. and Cobbs Creek Parkway
• Wednesday, August 19, 8-9 a.m. at S. 61st & Baltimore
• Saturday, August 22, 9-11 a.m. at Mt. Moriah Cemetery and Cobbs Creek Parkway
• Sunday, August 23, 2-4 p.m. at Catharine St. and S. 63rd St.
• Wednesday, August 26, 8-9 a.m. at S. 61st and Baltimore

Please use the registration form found on our website and monitor your inbox in case of a cancellation

Additionally, our 4th annual Summer Festival is coming up on September 12 at Whitby Park from 11a.m. – 3 p.m. Join us for a bounce house, horseback riding, fishing lessons, a birding walk, free watermelon, and more! Thank you to Clean Air Council and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for financial support of this work. 

Email cobbscreekparkambassadors@gmail.com with questions or to join our listserv. Find us at cobbscreekparkambassadors.org and @cobbscreekambassadors.

The transition away from diesel in remote communities is widely supported and becoming increasingly more urgent in the face of growing energy needs, climate change, and volatile and rising costs. In recognition of these challenges, considerable...

In March, the world passed a major energy milestone, adding its third terawatt of solar power. Increasingly, poorer countries are leading the shift to solar, analysts say.

Read more on E360 →

As governments at the UN seek ways to prevent the US from unilaterally mining the deep ocean floor for critical minerals, the latest UN seabed talks launched “long” processes that would seek to challenge Washington’s approach.

The International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body regulating the deep ocean floor, held annual three-week talks ending on Friday. The discussions come as the US – which is not a member country – moved forward in its unilateral deep-sea mining push, and as mining companies applying for American permits fought back a UN inquiry into their behaviour.

The Trump administration and mining frontrunners, among them Canadian firm The Metals Company (TMC), want to mine a huge area of the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Although it holds deposits of mangenese, nickel and rare earths – key for military use and clean energy components – it is also an unexplored ecosystem with thousands of unnamed species.

The meeting, held at ISA headquarters in Jamaica’s capital Kingston, ended with no immediate breakthroughs. Instead, it started long processes that seeks to hold mining firms and the US accountable, according to ocean governance expert Pradeep Singh, from the Oceano Azul Foundation.

“It shows some level of maturity as well as understanding from member states that this is a long process that requires policy discussions that might not be resolved by acting right away without considerate thought” he said.

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Countries have begun consultations on whether to request an advisory opinion from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), which would seek to clarify the legality of the US-issued permits in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and whether other states should recognise them.

The ISA will also move forward with an inquiry into its contractors, including The Metals Company (TMC). The company tried to prevent this inquiry by suing the ISA at the ITLOS for allegedly acting in bad faith, an argument that the world’s top maritime court rejected.

ISA secretary-general Letícia Carvalho said in her closing remarks that the past year “presented both significant challenges and noteworthy achievements”. Earlier in the talks, she said the agency’s role is “more important than ever” and that resources in the deep seabed are “the common heritage of humankind”.

Advisory opinion on legality of US mining push

Towards the end of the ISA assembly, Carvalho submitted a draft text to countries proposing they request an advisory opinion from the ITLOS, clarifying the legality of the US deep-sea mining push.

Brazilian oceanographer Letícia Carvalho is secretary-general of the ISA (Photo: IISD ENB/Andrés Felipe Carvajal Gómez)

The initiative proposed questions to the court, including whether international law backs the principle that the deep seafloor cannot be appropriated by any single country, and whether other governments should avoid recognising any similar effort.

Several nations including the African group, New Zealand, Norway, France, Singapore, Jamaica and Canada argued that while they could back such a proposal, it required careful legal consideration. Some regretted that the note was not sent earlier in the talks.

Russia and China backed the request for an advisory opinion. The Chinese delegation suggested asking whether unilateral actions by non-member states – such as the US – would break international law, and what the consequences of such actions would be.

Egypt seeks to unlock renewable potential to power regional clean energy hub

By the end of the talks there was no consensus on this proposal. The assembly decided instead to hold consultations led by Malta, and decide on whether to request an advisory opinion by next year’s meeting.

“They are not rushing into this,” Singh explained. “It also seems that they are not feeling immediately threatened at this stage, and that there are still some things that could be done to find a way forward and perhaps persuading the US from acting unilaterally.”

Growing call for deep-sea mining moratorium

Activists were also critical of the ISA deciding to renew one of TMC’s exploration licenses in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which expired last month. Haldis Helle, ocean campaigner at Greenpeace, said this was a “reward” for TMC despite “their clear disregard for international law”.

But Singh argued that the renewal was “not an endorsement to act unilaterally” but an effort from countries to make the “whole decision-making including the inquiry process robust”, without showing signs of any bias.

Instead, campaigners highlighted a growing call for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, which seeks to halt all activity until enough scientific evidence can show that it is not harmful for marine wildlife. The initiative is now backed by 46 governments, with Mauritius, Mozamboque and the Republic of Congo becoming the latest supporters.

“The lesson from the past three weeks is clear: only a pause on exploitation, now backed by over a quarter of ISA member states, can deliver the legal certainty this moment demands and rein in a situation being driven out of control by a handful of reckless companies“, said Sofia Tsenikli, global campaign director at the Deep-Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC).

The post Governments weigh response to US going alone on deep-sea mining appeared first on Climate Home News.

Headline News:

• “Tiger Shark Caught Off Massachusetts Could Be Sign Of Warming Waters” • Two brothers from Massachusetts caught a juvenile tiger shark from a beach on Cape Cod. The five-foot shark is far more common in such waters as the Caribbean. Scientists said its appearance off Cape Cod is an indicator that climate change is warming the sea. [ABC News]

Tiger shark (Albert kok, CC BY-SA 3.0, cropped)

• “Extreme Heat Grips Southern Europe As France Shuts Nuclear Reactors” • Emergency services in Southern Europe are operating at peak capacity as severe heat and environmental hazards continue to trigger crises in Spain, France, and Greece. Extreme high temperatures in France forced nuclear operator EDF to take major reactors offline. [Euronews]
• “RWE Signs Google Oklahoma Solar PPA” • RWE and Google have signed a 15-year power purchase agreement covering the full output from the 155-MW Crooked Creek Solar project in McCurtain County, Oklahoma. RWE said that construction is scheduled to begin later this year, with commercial operation expected in 2028. [reNews]
• “England And Wales Record Driest July On Record, Met Office Says” • England and Wales recorded their driest July on record this year, according to the UK’s national weather agency. England had 10% of its usual rainfall. Southern England experienced its “driest month ever recorded” in July, the Met Office said, noting that records date back to 1836. [Euronews]
• “China Sets Green Power Usage Benchmarks” • China took a landmark step in its green transition with its first mandatory minimum usage target for renewable energy. Experts say the move represents a paradigm shift from supply-driven expansion to demand-led integration in the country’s pursuit of its carbon peak and neutrality goals. [China Daily Global Edition]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

What to know about the new wave of biotech beauty Anthony Lacey August 4, 2026

Cosmetics ingredients once discussed mostly in dermatology clinics, research labs or professional spas are now widely available. And biotechnology, or biotech, for personal care products is a rapidly growing part of the industry.

Biotech beauty is fueled by consumer demand for products that promise effective, “clinical,” “regenerative” and “science backed” results at home. These ingredients usually promise to be “anti-aging” or to provide “cellular repair” or “barrier strength.” 

But biotech ingredients do not automatically make a product safe, effective or well studied. For most products, premarket tests aren’t required and claims may be backed by very little data. Consumers should look beyond marketing claims and ask what evidence supports claims about an ingredient’s safety and benefits. 

Biotech in personal care products refers to ingredients inspired by biology, medicine or lab-based innovation. It’s not a single category and can include familiar skincare ingredients like hyaluronic acid and newer ingredients like polydeoxyribonucleotide, or PDRN, and spicules. 

Cosmetics using PDRN

You may have heard of “salmon facials” and skincare using “salmon sperm.” These treatments use DNA fragments from salmon sperm to help boost collagen and reduce signs of aging. 

The ingredient behind the buzz is PDRN, which activates tissue repair. Botanical versions are also emerging in the market. 

PDRN is not entirely new. For decades, it has been approved for medical use in Italy and South Korea, including as a treatment for wounds and ulcers. 

Cosmetics that contain PDRN are available in the U.S. too. But since the Food and Drug Administration does not require pre-marketing tests of ingredients, PDRN's presence on store shelves doesn’t indicate it’s been reviewed for safety or efficacy.

In lab studies, injected PDRN has been shown to increase collagen production, which helps smooth and firm the skin. 

Topical PDRN has been shown to support skin regeneration for skin ulcers. The data about undamaged skin is limited, but topical PDRN may not penetrate deeply enough for meaningful results. 

PDRN is believed to be a lower hazard ingredient, though there is no data on carcinogenicity or reproductive harm. An animal study showed no acute toxicity and no effects to major organs, even at high doses. 

PDRN from salmon sperm can be a concern for people allergic to salmon. If you have a fish allergy and want to try products with PDRN, look for plant-based instead.  

PDRN’s pathway is also used by certain types of tumors to grow and evade immune responses. So anyone with cancer or a history of cancer should consult their doctor before use, even though no evidence currently links topical PDRN to cancer.

It can be difficult to tell whether a product contains PDRN. Product marketing may highlight PDRN, but you won't find it on ingredient labels. Instead, look for the term “sodium DNA.” 

Cosmetics using spicules

“Liquid microneedling” is also gaining popularity. 

It’s a technology based on another biotech ingredient: spicules. These are tiny, needle-like structures from marine sponges or synthetically produced using silica. Liquid microneedling is a topical treatment that creates tiny openings in the skin, triggering collagen production and helping skincare penetrate more deeply. 

Spicules are promoted as a way to help other beauty product ingredients penetrate the skin, rather than the main active ingredient. They are often paired with ingredients like PDRN, peptides and hyaluronic acid.

The data is limited, but spicules are believed to be lower hazard ingredients. A bigger concern is the other ingredients in the same product.

Spicules can help some ingredients pass through the skin barrier, making some formulas more effective but also increasing risk of exposure to potentially harmful chemicals, like certain fragrance ingredients.  

If you’re reaching for a product with spicules, consider the safety of its other ingredients. By design, spicules affect the skin barrier and can cause redness, stinging or irritation, so they’re best avoided by people with sensitive skin, rosacea, eczema, active acne or a compromised skin barrier.

But it can be difficult to tell whether a product has spicules. Marketing may call out spicules, but ingredient labels won’t. Instead look for the term “hydrolyzed sponge” on the label. 

Tips for consumers

If you’re thinking about buying a biotech-inspired beauty product, consider these tips:

• Consult resources like EWG’s free searchable database of personal care products, Skin Deep®, to make more informed choices. Skin Deep considers increased absorption when scoring products.
• When you’re out shopping for cosmetics, you can also use EWG’s Healthy Living™ app to learn more about a product, its ingredients and safety.
• Look for products bearing the EWG Verified® mark, which means it is free from EWG's ingredients of concern and meets our strictest standards for your health. 
• If you have sensitive skin, talk to a dermatologist or patch-test the product before applying it more extensively.
• If you want to avoid animal-derived ingredients, beware vegan marketing claims and check ingredients carefully, since animal-derived ingredients may not always be obvious on the label. Look for full disclosure about ingredients. 

Areas of Focus Personal Care Products Cosmetics Family Health Women's Health Toxic Chemicals Guest Authors Lilianna Gross (EWG Verified® intern) August 4, 2026

When torrential rain doused the Texas Hill Country last month, Paul Welch stayed up past his bedtime checking radar and rain gauges on RiverHub, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority’s new tracking website. At midnight, comforted by what he saw, he went to bed. 

Four hours later, his phone rang. It was a neighbor, the same fellow who had awakened him the previous July, just before floodwaters swamped Welch’s riverfront cabin near Comfort. “Get up. Get out. Quick,” he said, speaking calmly into the phone. The water at Center Point, 4 miles upstream, had risen 25 feet as Welch slept. A wall of water was heading his way.

Welch and his partner, Elizabeth Hastings, could hardly believe it was happening again. This time, they knew what to do: Hastings tossed the guns, jewelry, paperwork, and medication into the Sprinter van and drove through the downpour to a gas station already crowded with vehicles. Welch moved his tractor, golf cart, and other essentials to higher ground, then joined his neighbors on the same high spot near the highway where they’d gathered the last time this happened. For the second time in 12 months, they watched water tear through the valley, roiling and churning with more power than Welch had ever seen.  

Water floods a street after heavy rain in Comfort, Texas, in July. Aaron E. Martinez / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

The next morning, as Welch and Hastings picked their way through the muck, his phone rang. It was Huntly Dantzler,  a volunteer who had helped them through last year’s catastrophe. “Paul, give me some good news,” he said. “I’ve got none to give,” Welch replied.

Gone was the $130,000 RV they’d lived in as they awaited construction of their dream house — into which Welch had already sunk $80,000. Gone were the new appliances that sat in his shop, still in bubble wrap. Gone were the 200-year-old cypress trees that had survived so much. “We cried and prayed over the phone,” Dantzler said.

Read Next One year after the Texas floods, home feels further away than ever Laura Mallonee

One year after several rivers and creeks in central Texas killed 139 people and spurred a statewide push to improve flood warnings, another historic storm tested those changes. This year’s disaster brought at least 12 inches of rain — and as much as 28 — to one dozen counties north and west of San Antonio and destroyed or damaged hundreds of buildings. Yet just three people died.

“Here we are a year later, but under incredibly different circumstances,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly said at a July 20 press conference. “Last year when we were here, we were grieving. We were in a pall of human loss.”

Earlier forecasts, new warning systems, and a public primed by last year’s tragedies saved lives. But the catastrophe also exposed how much work remains, leaving many Texans counting on vigilance and neighbors when the water rises. 

A law enforcement officer prays during a joint hearing from the Texas Senate and Texas House on disaster preparedness and flooding following the natural disaster in the Texas Hill Country on July 4th. Scott Stephen Ball / The Washington Post via Getty Images

Many of those caught in this year’s flood were still mourning those who died in last year’s. The torrents that swept across the Hill Country then came with such speed and ferocity that many people were still asleep as the water crashed into their homes. The scale of the devastation, which included the deaths of 25 girls at Camp Mystic in Kerr County, shocked the nation. 

It also spurred action.

Legislative hearings and investigations revealed failures by Kerr County and the Upper Guadalupe River Authority that exemplified weaknesses in the state’s flood-warning and emergency management systems. Among them, the county lacked outdoor sirens, even along the most vulnerable stretch of the Guadalupe, and the authority had deferred building the warning system it knew it needed after the state denied funding. The county never activated a federal emergency alert system capable of reaching nearly every cellphone in the area and delayed some local alerts while dispatchers sought supervisory approval. 

Those shortcomings became central to lawmakers’ push for a more robust warning system across flood-prone communities. During a special late-summer session, lawmakers passed four flood-response bills. Two strengthened safety and licensing requirements at youth camps. Another launched an effort to expand flood-warning systems in 30 counties by identifying flash flood–prone areas that need warning siren systems, including sensors and gauges. The last bill provided $50 million to buy them and another $24 million for a two-year project to dot the Hill Country with more rain gauges, radar, and forecasting tools. 

Twenty-nine of the 30 eligible counties had joined the warning-system program by early July. But much of it remained under development when the flooding started.

A flood gauge marks over 4 feet of water near downtown Comfort, Texas after heavy rain caused flooding in July. Aaron E. Martinez / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

The Upper Guadalupe River Authority was the first to act. Using $1 million drawn from its reserves, it placed six sirens on 50-foot poles in western Kerr County, home to many of the region’s youth camps and RV parks. It also added a weather station and river gauge at the Guadalupe’s headwaters to give earlier notice of rising water. The agency shares that data through RiverHub — the website Welch checked hours before the flood came.

Kerr County officials sent 59 local emergency text alerts and triggered three sirens before and during the storm. A company called River Sentry said a few of the 104 sirens it had installed for landowners along the river sounded automatically, as they were designed to. Local authorities also helped dozens of people evacuate ahead of the deluge.

At the July 20 press conference, Governor Greg Abbott and Kelly cited several reasons for the lower death toll, including a storm that moved more slowly, a community and public officials with greater vigilance after the previous year’s disaster, and warning systems installed in the months since.

The first two of those things may have mattered most. 

Unlike last year’s storm, this one was larger and easier to track. That gave forecasters a much clearer signal that dangerous flooding was possible, said Robert Mace, who leads the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University. 

The National Weather Service used the same models and warning procedures it used in 2025, said Jason Runyen, warning coordination meteorologist at the agency’s Austin/San Antonio office. It simply began briefing emergency officials four days before the river peaked; last year, it did so less than 24 hours ahead of the disaster.

But it was the storm’s intensity that might have played the biggest role in minimizing fatalities, said state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon. Rain fell at a rate of 2 to 5 inches per hour, versus the 4 to 6 that fell last year, according to Weather Service data. That meant it took longer for the floodwaters to build up, giving people more time to evacuate, Nielsen-Gammon said.

A dog looks out the window of her a trailer on North Camp Street as floodwaters rise in Uvalde, Texas, in July. Sam Owens / San Antonio Express-News via Getty Images

Ryan J. Rock Logue, a Kerrville resident who led the United Cajun Navy’s relief efforts there last year, credits public awareness for minimizing fatalities. People checked on neighbors. They didn’t try driving through floodwaters. And they heeded calls to evacuate. “We were all on hypervigilant PTSD mode with this flood, so everyone was kind of hyperaware,” he said. 

Mark Rose is a former general manager of the Lower Colorado River Authority, which oversees the lower Colorado River basin just north of the Guadalupe. He cautioned against drawing quick conclusions from the lower death toll. “Did we really do better because we know better and we’ve made institutional changes?” he said. “Or, did we just do better because last year we had a horrible flood that killed a bunch of people, and it’s now more on our mind? Those are the hard questions that all of the authorities should be asking and answering.”

The storm highlighted just how much of the state’s flood-warning network remains unfinished. Many counties included in last year’s disaster declaration still lack sirens, adequate stream gauges and other infrastructure. In eastern Kerr County, where Paul Welch and Elizabeth Hastings live, no sirens sounded even though their part of the Guadalupe flooded catastrophically last year. Kerr County plans to install 26 more sirens by next summer, but officials in Kerrville have estimated that a more thorough system with additional sirens, river gauges, and the like would cost at least $14 million — far more than the state’s $1 million allotment.

Tom Moser, a former NASA engineer, former Kerr County commissioner and leader of the team that’s establishing requirements for the county’s flood-warning system, said the state should fully fund such hardware up front. “There’s no reason, in my judgment, why a system like this couldn’t be put in place in probably less than six months,” he said. “We’ve seen enough emergencies and the impact of floods in the area that it ought to be full speed ahead.”

Kerr County officials did not respond to requests for comment. The governor has said the conversation is not over. 

“The systems we put in place last year proved to be successful and helpful,” Abbot said when asked during a press conference if the Legislature might provide more money for sirens. “We want to make sure we are equally successful and helpful in every region across the state of Texas. And those are the kinds of issues that we will take up in the next session.” 

Texas Governor Greg Abbott shows a signed major disaster declaration that he says he will send to President Donald Trump following a news conference about the state’s flood response in July. Sara Diggins / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

It’s unclear how the system that officials have assembled so far would have stood up in a disaster more like last year’s storm and whether they would have resulted in a similar death toll. Too many homes, vacation rentals, and campgrounds remain in floodplains inundated both times.  “Not to be too macabre about it, but it’s possible that some of the people who died last year in their homes would have died in the flooding this year,” Nielsen-Gammon said.

But even the most expansive network of sirens won’t fully eliminate fatalities because they are reactive, Rose said. “With all due respect to those who think they have solved the problem by putting up a siren, in my opinion that’s total bullshit. And the reason is, [are] you going to hear a siren at 3 o’clock in the morning in a pounding rain, dead sleep, when you have an hour to respond? No.”

Rose believes effective flood warning begins as soon as the rain starts falling. In the Hill Country, where rivers are fed by runoff that can be difficult to track, that means monitoring the entire watershed with rain and stream gauges in creeks and tributaries, as the Lower Colorado River Authority has done. Because the Guadalupe has little flood control infrastructure, information is the first line of defense, he said, and it is only as good as the speed with which it arrives.

The fact that Welch felt safe enough to go to bed after checking RiverHub “tells you that we’re in the fledgling stages of data gathering on the Guadalupe River,” Rose said. He suspects the system probably does not yet provide enough timely, real-time information to keep a rapid rise in the water level coming as such a surprise.

“If anybody thinks that they’re done, that the job is done, it’s not,” Rose said. “It’s just starting.” 

A man stands in mud washed into his RV near Goat Creek, Texas, after the recent July floods. Sara Diggins / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images

In the end, what saved Welch and Hastings was a phone call from a neighbor — who had himself been tipped off by a friend in the fire department hearing the first emergency calls. “He saved our lives twice,” Hastings said.

The two of them fled to an Airbnb they found in downtown Comfort. Two weeks later, they had given up on the idea of living along the river and closed on a house 20 miles west, in Kerrville. It sits on a hilltop. “For the first time in a couple years, I’m going to feel safe,” Hastings said.

She has always known the Hill Country was dangerous. As a child in 1978, she watched television footage of cabins floating down the Guadalupe after 48 inches of rain fell in two days. But she never imagined the river would produce two catastrophic floods just 12 months apart.

That could grow more common. Warmer sea-surface temperatures are loading the atmosphere with more moisture, increasing the risk of extreme rainfall along the Gulf Coast, Mace said.

Still, Welch and Hastings can’t let go of their spot on the river. They love the waterfalls, the swimming hole, and the birds too much. They’ll keep coming back, but only in the van so they’re ready to get out quickly. Just in case. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What another Texas flood revealed about the state’s warning system on Aug 4, 2026.

I’ll never forget it. My family and I had just arrived in San Francisco in 2024 to begin a long tour with my podcast. I immediately reached out to Richard and was welcomed with the kindness that characterised him as much as his work.

How can one truly grasp the experience of war – “the omnipresent, everyday, tangible, arbitrary possibility of a battlefield, of a destroyed house, of flight, of famine, of abduction, of a violent death” – without witnessing first-hand its violence and devastation? Through memories, recollections, and speaking to the families of Israeli victims of the 7 October attacks and Palestinians trapped under Israel’s bombs in Gaza, Tel Aviv-based musician and writer Ofer Waldman searches for help in words. An edited excerpt from the book Verkämpftes Land (2025).

Here I end my days, helpless, and nothing, nothing I could have done or not done, willed or thought, could have led me to a different goal.

– Christa Wolf, Cassandra

I would much rather tell you something else. To write something down – something proper – and then search out the life that matches the written words.

Poet Lea Goldberg believed that in times of war, it is the poet’s duty, above all else, to write about flowers and children’s laughter. She wrote that in Tel Aviv in September 1939, just after World War II had broken out. Tanja Maljartschuk, the Ukrainian poet-in-exile, says that she no longer trusts language: language that is suited both to writing down poems and writing out orders for war and murder. Somewhere between these two extremes, I would have liked to tell you something else.

What story, then, am I to tell you?

I have not been on any battlefield. My house has not been destroyed. I did not have to starve, I did not have to flee, and I was not abducted. And yet life here knows an intimacy with the thoughts of war. And it is not because one spent countless hours in a shelter, surrounded by children, family, friends, even complete strangers, thinking of the people in Gaza who have neither houses nor shelters, or of the Israelis in the Kibbutzim whose shelters on 7 October could not protect them and rather became gateways to hell. All of us here will, as Serhij Zhadan once said, never again be able to look at the sky as we did before. For war – that is, the omnipresent, everyday, tangible, arbitrary possibility of a battlefield, of a destroyed house, of flight, of famine, of abduction, of a violent death – leaves behind certain traces. It is of these traces that I want to tell you. To search for them through words.

These are not words of courage, nor are they words of self-torment. Had I been in Gaza, I might not have written a sentence such as: “One cannot distinguish the smoke of the intercepted rockets from the autumn clouds.” Instead, my eyes – had I raised them to the sky – would have brimmed over with concrete dust, with ashes, and become blind. I would have written about undrinkable water and the stench of death. But I am not in Gaza. I direct my gaze there – not to please you, or to please myself, but because I know that all other gazes, including the gaze turned inward, are conditioned by one another. That is, also by this gaze toward Gaza. But I am not in Gaza. No more than you are.

In Terry Gilliam’s film Twelve Monkeys, which is based on Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée, a time traveller is sent into the past to prevent an apocalyptic pandemic. The entire plot revolves around one key scene: the moment when the protagonist, James Cole (played by Bruce Willis), and his partner, who are trying to find the source of the pandemic, run into a boy, who is in fact Cole’s younger self. At the very moment they meet the boy, they realise that they have been following the wrong lead all along. But before Cole manages to warn his younger self of what is to come, the police, who have been pursuing them, shoot him.

The climax of the scene is the moment when Cole’s partner, a young, bewildered woman, holding Cole in her arms, stares at the boy with pleading terror as she grasps what is happening: Cole is bleeding to death, and it is too late to warn the boy – the young Cole, who will later be sent back into the past and will fail again and again to avert the dystopia – about his future.

(Time travel, anyhow: the drift into the surreal, a pause in the presumed logic of reality, the escape into an imaginary world to shut oneself off from the real one. To confront the insane through insanity itself, to name it. That too – and of that as well – I want to tell you.)

We all constantly try to trace the seeds of dystopia through poems, plays, essays, novels, and history books; and then, once we have found them (too late), we try to call them out. Our frequent failures make us no less secure; quite the contrary, we are sometimes bowled over by an omnipresent, almost brazen self-assurance as the sky around us darkens. These words are not self-assured. They are the gaze of the woman who knows she is doomed to fail. They are the gaze of the boy peering into his own future, fated to grasp it too late.

And yet these words are also the brief lingering over the gaze between the woman and the child. A lingering ascribed with the possibility – also arbitrary, painfully arbitrary – of recognition. Thus, along with every stratum of war laid upon this land, clinging to its people, the layer of this arbitrary possibility is laid. Lingering. Creating space, sometimes almost surreal, but nameable. Visualisable. Describable.

Stuttering

I start over again.

“I’d like to hear my new work read aloud,” says S. from Berlin, and asks me to read it together. I’m in Israel, so we start a video call. Before we begin, S. asks if it might be too much for me right now –  that is, if I can read, write, think at all about literature at this time.

“Why would it be too much?” I ask. “I thought the play was about the war in Ukraine, about family history, about your grandfather.”

“It is about my grandfather, too,” S. says. “But it’s also about 7 October. About Israel. About Gaza.”

I wave it off. When is it a good time, anyway?

“Let’s read.”

I start over again.

It’s a beautiful spring day. My brother sits in front of me on a rickety garden swing, rolling a cigarette. I hold his lighter, hand it to him.

“I thought Y. wasn’t in Gaza,” I say. Y. is my brother’s eldest son. “I thought he was at a base near the border. He’s not a combat soldier.”

“He’s a medic, serving the battalion commander. When the commander goes in to assess the situation, he has to go in too.”

The things he saw in Gaza. The air there. The sounds.

My brother looks at his hands, as if searching for words. He spreads his fingers, and the cigarette falls on the ground.

I start over again.

The moderator has just introduced me. I’m on stage in Frankfurt and am supposed to read from letters I wrote to a friend in the first weeks of the war. I take the microphone and look out at the hall again, at the expectant faces, at the tense faces.

Pronouncing the words becomes more difficult with every sentence. I draw in breath, shape my lips to speak the sounds I see before me: “child,” “air,” “sound,” “ashes”. But hardly anything comes out. I have to thrust the words out between my lips with increasing force. I have to tense my diaphragm with a direct command from my head, to push the air out through my mouth. At some point, it doesn’t matter whether it comes out as words, or as barking, or a scream.

I recognise this feeling from my time as an orchestral musician. Among brass players, it’s called “airlock”. Breathing in and out in time with the music, you place the mouthpiece on your tensed lips, position your tongue just behind your front teeth, and wait to play the note. As you’re about to play it, the tongue must retract to make way for the flow of air generated by your breathing muscles. But sometimes the tongue baulks at the command from your head and sticks, creating an airlock that leads to a kind of stutter when you start playing. Or the tongue does not move at all, and you have to skip the passage in whole or in part because the orchestra does not wait, it cannot wait, it must play on. Your eyes track the unsounded notes on the paper, your ears register the void of your own missing notes amidst the orchestra’s onward playing. In your mind, the world shrinks to the tip of your rebellious tongue, to the pressure building in your lungs and throat, to the blood flooding into your face. To the onrushing feeling of failure.

You want to join in the music, to fall into its rhythm. But sometimes you have to pull the instrument away from your lips. Breathe out. Try anew.

Start over again.

So I start over again.

* * *

“The music – the music helps,” says A. from Kibbutz Kfar-Aza. “The singing.”

Three of us – A., her husband, and I – are sitting in the lobby of a Tel Aviv hotel. She’s about to tell her story from 7 October to a group from Germany, but we still have a little time before she starts. For now, A. sits across from me, a glass of cold water in her hand, and repeats a few times that music helps.

“I have been asked,” she says – and now her eyes, her faint smile, try to break free from her face, pressing themselves as if through crusted earth  – “I have been asked,” – that crusted earth around her eyes and mouth begins to show cracks and long, deep wrinkles – “I have been asked how I felt at my son’s funeral, my mother-in-law’s funeral, my brother-in-law’s funeral, the funeral of…”

Her husband gently interrupts her, placing one hand on the back of his other hand and rubbing them: “At the funerals,” he says. “Just say: ‘At the funerals’.”

Her objectivity lies in counting off; his lies in reducing to the essential. One feels their connection, their love.

“Yes.” The encrusted earth around her mouth cracks open. “At the funerals.”

Speaking was difficult for her, A. said, but singing came more easily. And so they went from one funeral to the next, her daughter playing guitar, A. singing. I did not dare ask what she sang.

“I played music myself for a long time,” I tell her.

“What instrument did you play?”

“The French horn,” I say.

“Netta, our son, played the violin,” says A. “He loved Peter and the Wolf, and always wanted to hear it again and again as a child.” The torn, crusted earth wrinkles and cracks; the backs of the hands rub together. “He wanted to be Peter, and that’s why he chose the violin.”

I search for words in my head, what to say now. “It’s interesting,” I say (stupid word). “It’s interesting, which instrument people choose – that is, what character from the fairy tale: Peter, or the wolf, the hunters, the grandfather, the duck, the cat, the bird. What these characters say about us.”

“So you’re the wolf?” A.’s husband repeats the word again, “wolf”. I want to utter my standard line: that, as the wolf (a character whose music is played by three French horns), I have frightened many children already. Thankfully I remain silent and risk a smile.

“Netta was definitely Peter,” says A. “The hero of the story. He didn’t always follow the rules either.”

Embarrassed, I hum Peter’s melody: tam-tam-ta-ta-tim-tam. Hebrew has only one word for “protagonist,” “main character,” and “hero” – gibor. A. uses this word for her son only when she refers to him as Peter from the fairy tale. She does not use it when she is recounting the moment he threw himself on a hand grenade to save his fiancée, as she will soon tell the group from Germany in the same gentle, matter-of-fact voice. The cracks in the encrusted earth close, leaving delicate cobweb-like patterns around her mouth and eyes, trapping the sounds within them, tam-tam-ta-ta-tim-tam.

* * *

I experienced for the first time what is called an “airlock” while speaking at a solidarity event in Berlin. I was joining remotely from Israel and was supposed to say something, read something aloud. My reading included a poem by Yehuda Amichai: El male Rachamim (“God Full of Mercy”).

El male Rachamim, 

ilmale HaEl male Rachamim 

haju HaRachamim BaOlam WeLo rak bo.

God full of mercy,

were God not full of mercy,

there would be mercy in the world, not only in him.

I drew breath, shaped the first sound – “E” – and stalled. The words caught in my throat. I tried to clear it to get the air flowing again. It did not help. The audience in Berlin flickered on the screen in front of me. Had they noticed anything? Were they already irritated? I was slipping out of the rhythm of the words. Trying to counteract, to fall back into the rhythm, I started tapping my foot, an old musician’s exercise.

1, 2, 3, 4.

1, 2, 3 (breathe out), 4 (breathe in), “E”.

“E”

“E”.

El male Rachamim. God full of mercy.

1. 2. 3. (Breathe out). 4. (Breathe in).

* * *

Scarcely to be found in the Israeli newspapers are accounts of what life is now like for the people in Gaza. I know the figures – the number of dead, wounded, starving; the number of destroyed houses. I see the images of endless landscapes of ruins and dust. Yet everything feels secondhand, far away. I search for a voice behind the images and numbers; I want to hear such a voice, within my own four walls, to face it.

The few people I know from Gaza now live in Germany. So I ask a Palestinian friend from Nazareth to connect me with M., an acquaintance of his from the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza that he has spoken about many times.

M. is an English teacher. He and his family are now sheltering in Khan Younis – their fifth stop since the outbreak of the war. Each time the bomb strikes draw closer, he tells me later in conversation, they flee further. But the Gaza Strip is narrow. There is no real escape and no safety.

M. sounds like someone describing what it is like to be trapped in a cage with a predator. It is about constantly trying to anticipate which corner the predator will move toward next. But beyond pressing oneself against the bars of the cage (pulling one’s own children close), there is nothing one can do.

My first attempt to arrange a conversation with him fails.

“We’ll talk tomorrow, Wednesday,” he writes.

“Tomorrow is Thursday,” I write.

“What time?” he asks. “What time is it where you are right now?”

And I think: But we should be in the same time zone – he’s only 170 kilometres away from me in Tel Aviv (I wanted to know exactly how far away he was. At first, the app responded: “Route cannot be calculated.” I switched to the straight-line function, which gave me 170 kilometres).

Later, during our call, fighter jets fly over my head, and I wonder: how long does a fighter jet take to cover a straight-line distance of 170 kilometres? How long before the thunder stops over me and starts roaring over him?

I write to him: “Same time as Gaza.”

He does not reply.

When we do finally talk, I first ask him about the sense of time. He thinks for a moment.

“It took me 15 years to build my house. It took only a few seconds to almost completely destroy it with a single artillery shell.” 1, 2, 3, 4.

I scroll through my messaging apps. Every day, dozens of appeals pile up there – for donations and acts of solidarity, for Jewish-Arab gatherings, for wounded Israeli soldiers, for protecting aid convoys to Gaza from attacks by radical settlers, for the families of the hostages, for dispossessed Palestinian communities, for internally displaced Israelis, for the bereaved, for children, widows, for lonely elderly parents.

In the evening comes a call for a rally in the north of Israel to end the war and release the hostages. It’s not too far from where I live. I put on a black shirt that says “De-Mo-Kra-Tia” (a relic from earlier times) and drive there. Since the outbreak of the war, GPS jammers have been deployed across the entire region to make it harder for enemy rockets to locate their targets, and I find the place with difficulty.

The last kilometre I cover on foot. The closer I get to the demonstration, the more people I see heading for the same place. Some wave flags, some carry banners with anti-government slogans, and others wear shirts with anti-war messages. There aren’t many of us. Onlookers in cars and on street corners follow us with tired eyes; some curse us, insult us as traitors, wish us death – but they do so with weary gazes and hollow voices. They receive no response and expect none; everything feels like a compulsory exercise, like a ritual worn thin and emptied out.

Later, at the rally, an elderly man stands at the edge of the crowd, leaning on a cane to which a limp Israeli flag is tied. He is weeping to himself, silently. He cries throughout the entire demonstration, never once looking toward the stage or at the angry speakers. Instead, his eyes, reddened by tears, gaze into the crowd without fixing on any particular point. Only when the mother of a hostage begins to speak does he briefly straighten up and turn his face toward the stage. He listens to her speak, in short sentences, of her days and nights. The demonstrators at the rally fall silent almost at once and stand as if frozen. The only sound to be heard is the flapping of flags in the light wind. The mother’s voice, carried by loudspeakers, is scattered and absorbed by the low walls enclosing the square, breaks against shop windows, police cars, and the huge billboards. She reaches the end of her speech. Around me, people open their mouths to shout. I open my mouth too, again and again, not knowing myself whether I am trying to shout or gasping for air.

* * *

Mohammed Al-Rimlawi was one of the students in the English club that M. had founded in the Jabalia refugee camp. A few weeks ago, Mohammed’s mother went with his youngest sister in search of one of the increasingly scarce power sources to charge her phone. When they returned, their house was no longer standing. Mohammed, his father, one sister, and two brothers lay buried under the rubble.

Once more a factual, objective listing. Again I search for words.

I enquire about the English club. The students in the club (boys only) are between 10 and 14 years old.

“There are hardly any foreigners here in Gaza,” M. says. So, to offer them a window onto the world, he has built an international network of mentors who practice English with the students over video calls.

“All they know is Gaza,” he says about his students. “I don’t want that. That’s not good.”

In the meantime, the school has been partly destroyed, and the students have fled with their families to sites throughout the Gaza Strip. He keeps coming across them, by chance.

“What questions are they asking right now?”

“They are not asking any questions,” he says at first. The sunburned faces of the children – the majority live in tents run by aid organisations and spend most of their time outside – remain expressionless, their mouths closed. I press him. This cannot be; after all, children ask questions; that’s what children do: they ask questions. (What questions do my children ask.)

M. thinks for a moment. Then he says:

“When.”

That is what they are asking.

When.

Exhale. Inhale.

1,2,3,4.

This text is an edited excerpt from Ofer Waldman’s book Verkämpftes Land (Wallstein Verlag, 2025). Translated from the German by Anton Baer | Voxeurop.  

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Hal inilah yang sering kali menjadi sumber berbagai cerita menarik. Ada pemain yang memperoleh simbol scatter dalam waktu singkat, sementara pemain lain harus menunggu jauh lebih lama. Perbedaan pengalaman tersebut menciptakan beragam diskusi, mulai dari strategi bermain hingga berbagi momen keberuntungan. Dari sisi psikologi pengguna, pengalaman yang unik cenderung lebih mudah dibagikan sehingga akhirnya memperkuat popularitas permainan tersebut di media sosial.

Banyak konten yang menampilkan kemenangan besar juga turut memengaruhi persepsi publik. Video pendek, siaran langsung, maupun unggahan komunitas sering kali hanya menampilkan momen ketika hasil yang diperoleh terlihat sangat mengesankan. Padahal, proses permainan secara keseluruhan jauh lebih panjang daripada potongan video yang beredar. Karena itu, penting bagi pembaca untuk melihat informasi secara lebih utuh dan tidak hanya berfokus pada hasil akhir yang ditampilkan.

Pengalaman para pemain menunjukkan bahwa setiap sesi permainan dapat memberikan hasil yang berbeda. Ada yang merasa permainan berlangsung cukup stabil, sementara yang lain mengalami perubahan hasil yang sangat bervariasi. Variasi tersebut merupakan karakteristik umum permainan yang menggunakan sistem acak, sehingga tidak ada pola tertentu yang dapat menjamin hasil yang sama pada setiap percobaan.

Dalam komunitas digital, muncul pula berbagai teori mengenai waktu bermain, pola putaran, maupun kombinasi tertentu yang dianggap meningkatkan peluang memperoleh scatter. Meski teori tersebut sering menjadi bahan diskusi menarik, hingga kini tidak terdapat bukti yang dapat memastikan bahwa metode tertentu mampu mengubah mekanisme acak permainan. Oleh sebab itu, informasi seperti ini lebih tepat dipandang sebagai pengalaman pribadi daripada fakta yang berlaku secara universal.

Fenomena Mahjong Ways scatter 1000xxx juga memperlihatkan bagaimana kekuatan komunitas mampu membentuk tren digital. Ketika satu unggahan memperoleh perhatian besar, pengguna lain terdorong untuk mencoba permainan yang sama atau membagikan pengalaman mereka sendiri. Akibatnya, percakapan terus berkembang dan menciptakan efek berantai yang membuat topik tersebut semakin populer.

Dari perspektif pengalaman pengguna, daya tarik permainan bukan hanya berasal dari kemungkinan memperoleh hasil besar. Desain antarmuka yang nyaman, animasi yang responsif, serta ritme permainan yang cepat juga menjadi faktor penting yang membuat banyak orang bertahan memainkan permainan tersebut. Kombinasi aspek visual dan mekanisme permainan inilah yang akhirnya membangun pengalaman yang dianggap menyenangkan oleh sebagian pemain.

Meskipun demikian, penting untuk memahami bahwa permainan berbasis peluang tetap memiliki unsur ketidakpastian. Setiap putaran berdiri sendiri dan hasil sebelumnya tidak menentukan hasil berikutnya. Dengan memahami prinsip tersebut, pemain dapat memiliki ekspektasi yang lebih realistis serta menikmati permainan sebagai bentuk hiburan, bukan sebagai sesuatu yang dapat diprediksi secara pasti.

Pada akhirnya, alasan mengapa Mahjong Ways scatter 1000xxx menjadi perbincangan bukan semata-mata karena angka atau istilah yang digunakan, melainkan karena perpaduan antara pengalaman pemain, penyebaran informasi melalui media sosial, serta rasa penasaran yang terus berkembang di dalam komunitas. Fenomena ini menunjukkan bagaimana sebuah permainan digital dapat menjadi topik yang menarik ketika pengalaman individu bertemu dengan kekuatan komunikasi di era digital. Dengan menyikapi setiap informasi secara objektif dan memahami mekanisme permainan secara menyeluruh, pembaca dapat melihat tren ini dari sudut pandang yang lebih seimbang dan informatif.

• A new Gallup poll found that Americans’ No. 1 fear is car crashes. When asked about the greatest risk to their safety, 34 percent of respondents said car crashes — almost twice as many as the second-most popular response, violent crime. (Jalopnik)
• Beth Osborne blasted Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for implying that people who ride bikes or live in apartments are unworthy of safe streets.
• Cities are using robots to evaluate sidewalk conditions and find out where improvements are needed to meet ADA requirements. (Government Technology)
• The new book “Transportation and the Shape of Cities” examines the spatial needs of various modes of transportation. (Forbes)
• Florida wants to use $198 million the federal government earmarked for electric vehicle chargers to build helipads for flying taxis instead. (The Next Web)
• The Federal Highway Traffic Safety Administration is letting robotaxi company Zoox deploy up to 5,000 vehicles in San Francisco. (The Verge)
• A Wayne County, Michigan transit funding referendum would no longer let communities opt out of the tax. (Detroit Free Press)
• Idaho’s Valley Regional Transit is shutting down a program that takes people to medical appointments due to lack of funding. (Capital Sun)
• Leaders in Philadelphia’s Chinatown neighborhood are fighting to restore federal funding for an expressway cap. (Inside Climate News)
• A Nashville city council member is considering restricting cars on Broadway after a driver hit four pedestrians. (WSMV)
• The Portland city council is considering banning right turns on red on more streets. (KGW)
• Volunteer docents on a Pacific Coast Amtrak line are getting passengers to look up from their phones and check out the scenery. (Oregonian)

In our latest, Scott and guest co-host Laurel Sutherlin (@laurelsutherlin) talk with author and environmentalist Jason Mark (@jasondovemark) about his new book “The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive…

A public consultation opened today on the Environment Agency’s (EA) draft decision to grant consent for gas drilling and lower-volume fracking at Burniston in North Yorkshire.

The consultation runs for six weeks until Wednesday 23 September 2026. It gives people a chance to have their say before the final decision is made.

Equipment proposed during lower-volume fracking stage at Burniston. Source: planning application

This is the second EA consultation on the proposals by Europa Oil & Gas in the village on the edge of the North York Moors National Park.

The first consultation, on the initial environmental permit application, was held a year ago. The deadline for comments in that consultation was extended after complaints by the local campaign group, Frack Free Coastal Communities, that key information was missing.

Today’s new consultation seeks views on a draft environmental permit.

This is separate from the decision by North Yorkshire Council on 24 April 2026 to refuse planning permission, later confirmed in May.

The Burniston development can go ahead only with both planning permission and the environmental permit.

The EA said it was minded to issue a permit for the proposed wellsite, known by Europa as Cloughton-2, as well as drilling and testing a borehole and the lower-volume fracking process called proppant squeeze.

Proppant squeeze is one of several lower-volume fracking operations that remain legal in the UK, despite the moratorium on high-volume fracking. The process aims to improve the flow of gas and involves injecting fluid into the well under pressure to open fractures in the surrounding rocks.

The EA said it was legally required to issue a permit where an application met requirements under environmental legislation. It can refuse an application only where one or more of these requirements are not met, including where the proposed activity would pose an unacceptable risk to people or the environment.

Ian Foster, EA area manager for Yorkshire, said today:

“We recognise there is significant public interest in this application, particularly following the local planning authority’s decision to refuse planning permission.

“The Environment Agency has a different legal role. Our responsibility is to independently assess whether the application meets the requirements of environmental legislation and whether the proposed activities can be carried out without unacceptable risks to people or the environment.

“Our assessment is evidence-based and we have published the reasons for our draft decision. We encourage anyone with an interest in the application to read the consultation documents and provide their views before we make our final decision.”

The local MP, Alison Hume, who opposed the Burniston proposal, said today:

“I will be submitting my comments on the EA’s draft permit decision and highlighting my concerns about Europa’s plans to carry out small-scale fracking … on the edge of the North York Moors.

“Given the level of concern that many local residents have expressed about this proposal, I have also written to the relevant minister to make them aware of these developments and the strength of feeling among constituents. I will continue to monitor the situation closely and keep in contact with the relevant authorities as the process moves forward.”

The consultation comprises 31 documents, including the EA’s draft decision.

All the documents can be viewed online. Comments can also be made online or by phoning the EA on 03708 506 506.

The EA can take into account:

• Relevant environmental regulations and technical standards
• Information on the local population and sensitive sites
• Whether the right process or technology is proposed by the developer
• The impact of the proposal on the use of land around the site, whether the impact is acceptable and what pollution control may be required
• The impact of noise and smell from traffic on site
• Correcting incorrect information in the application
• Information the EA has not been made aware of in the application

The EA cannot take into account

• Issues outside the remit of the environmental permitting regulations
• Whether a site should have a formal ecological designation
• Whether the activity should or should not be allowed
• Land use issues
• Impact of noise and smell from traffic travelling to and from the site
• The process followed by the EA to determine a permit

The deadline for comments has been extended because the consultation is during the summer holiday.

DrillOrDrop will report on comments submitted to the consultation.

RNs delivered a petition to their employer opposing CommonSpirit Health’s planned layoffs of more than 175 frontline health care workers signed by more than 5,000 nurses. The nurses held a rally and press conference to protest the proposed layoffs at 17 hospitals in California and their impact on patient safety. The nurses are demanding that CommonSpirit Health immediately rescind the layoffs.